The American Jerkocracy

Oregon recently held a special election to decide whether to impose new taxes on corporations and on individuals with upper-bracket incomes. In the midst of the debate preceding the vote, a letter to the editor appeared in our local paper, the gist of which was that increasing taxes on the wealthy was "unfair" because it took away their "hard-earned money." I have to disagree.

It seems to me that only a very small fraction of the wealthy in this country these days got there through honest hard work. The rags-to-riches, American Dream myth that an individual can become monetarily rich simply by "working hard" rings more and more false. On a personal level, I think I work pretty hard, and I'm not making enough to make ends meet. Granted, I'm a graduate student, so that sort of goes with the territory. But I don't see the situation changing drastically over the course of my career. If all goes according to plan, I will spend my career in academia working long hours, in what has to be considered a highly skilled profession, but I'm certainly never going to get rich.

On a more general level, where are the rich in America today? In banks, oil companies, pharmaceutical companies, health insurance companies, and various other less-than-noble professions. On the other hand, there are plenty of hard-working people who are not and will never be rich. As far as I can tell, the way to get rich is to simply care more about making money than about anything else, including, and perhaps especially, other people.

The problem is that money means power. The more money you make by not giving a crap about anything but money, the more power you can buy to make sure you can keep on raking in the cash and running over the little guy. This is the essence of jerkocracy - the bigger jerk you are, the more money you have, and therefore the more power you have.

The really disturbing thing is that the recent Supreme Court decision to treat corporations just like individuals in terms of political spending has taken this cycle and written it into law (or at least precedent). This decision effectively raises the cost of "free" speech, making it that much harder for us decent, hard-working folk to have our voices heard over the slick prime-time ads of corporations fending for their big-money interests.

It makes for a scary, scary world.

The Impossibility of Privatized Health Care

I've been meaning to write a post about why health care and the concept of a "free market" just don't mix. My economic expertise is, admittedly, limited (having taken all of one economic course, and that on environmental economics). But even with the level of understanding I do have, the situation seems pretty obvious to me. What I didn't understand is why nobody was discussing the issue in these terms.

Then I did a Google search on "free market assumptions" to make sure I was getting my story straight, and discovered at least one other person thinking along these lines. Since they've already said most of what I was going to say, I'll just add a few comments.

Re: "Perfect information." I would argue that, especially with respect to health care insurance, the producers often do as much as they can to obscure information as possible. They have discovered that they can make more money by confusing consumers and just getting them to agree to whatever is put in front of them, especially during times of crisis. They have turned exploiting this discovery into an art form.

Re: "Consumers create demand" and "Willing buyers, willing sellers." These concepts are tied in with the idea that the price point for a service settles at what the consumer is "willing to pay." In order for that to happen, said consumer must have a choice to not consume the service if the price is set above what they are "willing to pay." In the case of health care, that isn't usually an option. Or at least it shouldn't be in most cases.

Re: "Justice." The other thing that the economic concept of efficiency doesn't deal with is distribution. An economic system can be considered perfectly efficient if one guy ends up with all the benefit, so long as that is the maximum benefit available under the system. Efficiency says nothing about who realizes the benefits from the system. In the case of health care, I would hope we would consider just distribution an important part of the equation.

Finally, the referenced blog concludes that insurance is the logical solution to this problem. I don't think that goes far enough. The health care insurance industry suffers just as much from failing to meet the assumptions for a free market as the health care industry itself does. My conclusion from all of this is that health care should be considered a public good. (Call me a pinko commie if you will, but note that my reasoning is based on capitalist economic principles.)

It's not so elementary

I have a new theory for the realms of personality types and learning styles: some people are deductive thinkers, while others are inductive thinkers. I'm one of the latter. This is something I have been vaguely aware of for some time, but it just recently crystallized.

I've spent most of the past month studying for my prelims, which has mostly involved vast amounts of reading. Now, in the final stretches, I am in the process of organizing and condensing the information and ideas. This is a process I've done many times in the course of my academic career, and I have to admit I'm damned good at it.

On the other hand, in the breaks from studying, I'm currently reading a rather complex novel. For the present topic, the relevant aspect is that the narrative is woven between three characters who are somehow related to each other, but their relationship is not explained. There are a number of subtle (to me, anyway) clues, and I've been struggling to put the pieces together and make some sense of it. This is not my forte. My husband, on the other hand, would have had the whole thing figured out fifty pages ago without batting an eye.

It dawned on me last night that these two things are related. The studying process is a case of inductive reasoning. The assembling of clues is a case of deductive reasoning.

Now that I've put the pieces together, a lot of things fit into this framework. As an inductive reasoner, I am really good at sifting through vast amounts of information, identifying organizing principles, and boiling it all down. That's why I'm so good at both sides of the academic game. I can pick up just about anything by distilling it to a few basic ideas (in chem101, for example, I figured out that all I needed to know was that electrons are negative, everything else fell into place from there). I'm also really good at explaining things to other people for the same reason, which makes me a good teacher.

On the other hand, my relative weakness on the deductive side is in line with my inability to solve the mystery before Monk does. (And the accompanying frustration when Eric gives me that "I've got it!" look twenty minutes into the show.) It also explains my struggles with the research side of the PhD process. The standard scientific method is structured around deductive reasoning, using a few ideas to establish a hypothesis and designing a way to test it. That's just not my thing. So the project I'm actually working on is designed inductively. Fortunately, I happen to be in an interdisciplinary informatics program in which that sort of thing is allowed, even encouraged (or at least it should be).

Bathroom creativity

Why is it that bathrooms seem to be so conducive to thinking interesting thoughts? From the fabled "Eureka!" moment in the bathtub, to the common notion that showers are a good opportunity to contemplate life, to books designed to be read on the toilet, to the two times in recent memory I've had flashes of insight about my research while brushing my teeth, there seems to be something about the place that fosters creativity. Is it the reflective surfaces? The vulnerability and openness that comes with being naked (not so much for the teeth brushing)? The mere fact that it's a little bit of time when you aren't thinking about anything in particular? Something in the water, so to speak?

I did a quick search on Google Scholar to see if any psychologists had tackled the question, but didn't come up with anything. Does anybody know a psych major looking for a research topic?

The geographer's dog

It seems our dog, Othello, has rather acute spatial awareness. Several months ago, when he was just a puppy (not that he isn't still a puppy), he was playing with a toy in the kitchen. Before putting in a built-in pantry, we used to have a strange "hallway" from the kitchen into the main hallway of the house. The "hallway" was about 3 feet by 3 feet, and was little more than dead space behind the coat closet. At the time, we had a stand-alone cabinet in the space, which didn't quite fill it. His toy rolled behind the cabinet. He couldn't fit through to get at the toy, so he went out of the kitchen, around the other side of the coat closet, and to the other side of the "hallway" to look for it.

More recently, we were playing "tuggies." Essentially a mini tug-of-war between his mouth and my hand. I was letting him win the territorial part of the war, so he was going backward, with all of his visual attention focused forward on the toy and me. He backed out the door of a room, into the hallway, and knew exactly when to turn so his butt didn't run into the opposite wall of the hallway.

Othello is the first dog I've ever had, so I don't know how remarkable this ability is, but it seems pretty amazing to me.

Literally?

One of my pet peeves is the misuse of "literally." "Literally" has a very specific meaning, it indicates that, while an expression you have used is typically meant figuratively, in this case you mean exactly what the words say, the literal meaning. For example, when I say I literally have a ton of apples my backyard, I mean I have not just some unspecified large amount (a figurative "ton") but 2,000 pounds (a literal ton) of apples in my backyard. Unfortunately, it seems to have come to be used just to provide emphasis.

In his speech announcing his naming as Obama's running mate, Joe Biden said "literally" at least half a dozen times. In his case, it wasn't quite so grating because most of the time the expression he was referring to wasn't typically figurative. So, in the narrow sense, he was speaking literally.

What was worse was the NBC commentator on men's platform diving last night who stated that one of the divers "literally fell to pieces." Yucky! Was the man decomposing in the pool? Did he have severe leprosy, fingers and toes plunking into the water from the platform? Since they were still diving and not draining the pool for a thorough cleaning I somehow doubt that she actually meant it literally.