The Death of Stupid?

Are you in favor of eugenics? Of course not, right? The idea that the human population should be cultivated to encourage certain traits and skills to flourish, by weeding out the undesirable strains of mankind, has been thoroughly discredited by its past history of association with forced sterilizations and Nazi horrors. But there is something about the notion that we'd all be better off if we could just get rid of the 'wrong sort' that the idea keeps popping up in different guises.

So I suppose I should give Julien Savulescu credit for honesty, then: he doesn't deny that what he's talking about is eugenics. Instead, he tries to rip the term away from its evil, 20th century practitioners. See, for example, this quote from an interview he did recently with the Guardian:

"It depends what you mean by eugenics," he says. "In point of fact, we practise eugenics when we screen for Down's syndrome, and other chromosomal or genetic abnormalities. The reason we don't define that sort of thing as 'eugenics', as the Nazis did, is because it's based on choice. It's about enhancing people's freedom rather than reducing it."

Let me back up. Julien Savulescu is a prominent bioethicist at Oxford, and he is arguing that eugenics is alright as long as it is a personal choice (of the parents, of course, not of the fetus) and not forced by the state. He is pro-cloning, pro-gene enhancement, and definitely in favor of selecting embryos to be implanted for intelligence. He's been quoted as saying that embryos that do not have the right genes for high intelligence should be destroyed to ensure, "the economic and social benefits of higher cognition."

Despite my disgust at the notion of throwing away human life--even embryonic life--as if it was an insignificant bit of garbage, I'd like to focus more on the end result of Savulescu's proposal: should we be in favor of a world where people are designed to be smarter?

In an earlier post, I wrote that our society might be evolving into one where a few people have exceptionally meaningful, creative work, but the majority have little to do at all. But perhaps that problem would be solved if everyone was what we would today call a genius, if they had the mental gifts to do meaningful work in the increasingly complex scientific and intellectual areas that define modern life.

So lets say we could eliminate unintelligent people not by killing them before they're born, but by altering their genes to increase their intellectual capacity. Should we have any objection to this? I can see several: that we're messing with the essence of who we are as people, that it will favor those who can afford it over those who can't, that we will make one generation "obsolete" with the enhancements given to the next. But I can't say I find any of those arguments convincing: humanity is either endowed by God with intelligence (as I believe) and therefore we should use that intelligence to improve our lot in life, or else we are here as a product of blind evolution, in which case we should do all we can to advance the species and our own quality of life. Either way, the issue is not whether we should enhance our intelligence or not, but whether we take unethical shortcuts in our effort to do so.

There is, I have to admit, a nagging voice in the back of my head that says this is the path to creating a class of amoral Ubermenschen. And when I first conceived of this post, my intention was to bash the idea of artificially enhancing intelligence. But isn't this hypothetical concern about the perils of evil, rogue geniuses a bit of a red herring? It seems a much more practical worry that we are going to leave behind millions of good, hardworking people who simply don't have the gifts to contribute all they would want to an ever-more knowledge-based society. The person with a below-average IQ doing manual labor is not less valuable than a smarter person, and it is dangerous that we might see them as such if most people had enhanced intelligence. But wouldn't most, if not all, of those people appreciate the chance to add to their intellectual capacity?

Clearly, I'm still struggling with this issue. (Thus all the question marks.) So I'll leave it here: Julien Savulescu's casual disregard of human life is appalling, but high intelligence is a great gift that would be worth spreading more widely through the human family if we could do so safely and ethically. Someday, we'll be able to do so, and the burden of proof will be on the naysayers to argue why we shouldn't.

Candy Versus Vegetables

People like to believe that society can be made perfect. Sure, they probably wouldn't admit that they think this way. Most people think they are realistic types, who can make tradeoffs and rationally evaluate a wise path forward. But then those people vote.

I'm coming to believe that, rather than being to uninformed to make smart political choices, most Americans believe in their hearts that their 'team' (as I described it in my last post) has the key to fixing the ills of society, and if it could just be swept into power, all would be well. Most people I know have a hard time even acknowledging that their political opponents are intellectually honest and might be trying to act in what they think is the common good.

Which, finally, brings me to my point: both Democrats and Republicans engage in magical thinking that lets them offer goodies to voters without dealing with our big problems. And no one has figured out a way to fight against this without losing elections. The Democrats want people to believe lavish social services are possible if we just 'tax the rich'. Republicans argue that tax cuts will generate enough growth to pay for themselves. And when members of either party challenge these lies, they are denounced as traitors.

An example: recently, Tom Coburn, no one's idea of a squishy moderate, has been negotiating with Democrats to try to find common cause and attack our deficit problem in a meaningful way. He has expressed willingness to consider some tax increases as part of a compromise deal, though he obviously would prefer not to have them. This has been enough to cause Grover Norquist, a man who has made a nice living for himself by simplifying our fiscal debates to "no new taxes, ever", has said, "[Democrats] are playing Coburn like a Stradivarius." Now, no deal even exists yet. But Norquist wants to hold Coburn to a pledge he (like almost every other Republican politician) has signed at some point: a pledge to never raise taxes. And so political action is made almost impossible.

People also talk about politicians offering 'candy' to constituents, because you can't get elected by telling the electorate to eat its vegetables. But the analogy goes deeper than just contrasting something tasty but ultimately bad for you with something unpleasant but healthful. Candy, unlike vegetables, comes packaged and branded. It's ready to consume. The simple slogans of political absolutism, like "no new taxes", are equally easy. But we've been sucking them down for so long we're going to get sick.

Three Cups of Tea, Branding and Our Desire to Believe

Why are we so quick to believe liars and fabricators? We are plagued by journalists who invent facts and sources, by politicians scurrying to bury scandal, and by memoirists who find their lives are best seasoned by liberal doses of fiction. Into this last bucket place Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea, founder of a charity intended to build schools in central Asia, and--as 60 Minutes revealed in a recent expose--a fabulist and a crook.

What is amazing, as this post by Bruce Bawer makes clear, is that the improbability of his story should have been apparent to even a casual observer:

[Mortenson] was the star of his own story. The whole point of his talk was how much one brave, selfless individual can accomplish in this world even against the most formidable of odds. And that individual was him. The premise of his spiel was that he’s a miracle worker, pacifying belligerent jihadist types by sitting down with them over three cups of tea and listening to their concerns. Yet the egomaniac I saw that day was somebody you couldn’t picture listening to anybody else for more than thirty seconds. Mortenson’s shameless self-celebration in Three Cups of Tea left me speechless. As Oscar Wilde observed of Little Nell’s death in The Old Curiosity Shop, how could any sensitive reader react to such nonsense with anything but derisive laughter?

Bawer continues by showing how callously Mortenson turned on those who had been kind to him to bolster his own reputation:

Then there’s Mortenson’s lie about having been kidnapped by the Taliban. He stuck a picture in his book of him and some Afghani acquaintances — who had treated him kindly — and identified them in the caption as his kidnappers

When we hear stories of people using others this way to bolster their own stories, we are rightfully disgusted. When we hear, as in Mortenson's case, that he was doing it in large part to enrich himself, and use his charity to support a lavish lifestyle, we howl for blood. But why do we buy in to begin with? It is easy to say, "We want to believe," but why? Wouldn't it make more sense for us to be exceptionally skeptical, and to disbelieve even true stories to protect ourselves from fraud and disappointment? Why, in other words, are humans so quick to trust?

Part of the answer, as David Brooks and Mark Earls and many others have pointed out, is that we are social creatures. We essentially outsource some of our decision-making to others. So if enough people tell you Greg Mortenson is a hero, you may not evaluate that claim very critically yourself before you, too, are singing his praises.

But I think it goes beyond that. People don't just have their small social groups, they love to organize themselves into big, abstract teams, teams that are defined by a series of positions its members are either for or against. Successfully aligning with these positions is the key to popularity for both brands and people.

Look, for example, at how Microsoft and Apple fostered opposing tribes of believers on the basis of different operating systems and technical specs. Mortenson did the same thing by aligning with deep-held beliefs in non-violence, in the power of the individual to make a difference, in multiculturalism. He pushes against the idea of cynicism (or what some would call realism or humility) and an us-versus-them mentality.

This places him squarely on the liberal-idealist team, which has many players in academia, in government, and in Western urban culture more generally. Many of these people struggle to solve the seemingly intractable problems in society, and are understandably inspired by someone who seems to be taking on big challenges with verve and success. Mortenson's story reflects their beliefs and aspirations so perfectly, they were desperate for it to be true. (Similarly, eight years ago who took what was commonly called the 'neocon' worldview really wanted to believe the Iraqi people were going to "greet us as liberators.")

We should remember that people (and brands) are not perfect. So if their stories are perfect, it should set off our BS warning sirens. The lesson is that we can't just investigate our enemies and be skeptical about those we don't agree with. To avoid our natural tendency to believe, to accept social decisions, and to take sides, we need to bring a critical eye even to those we want to love.

Patients ARE Consumers...Except When They Aren't

Do you shop the health care the way you shop for, say, a new mattress? Well, in the case of the unfortunate patient to the left, probably not. There are plenty of situations where medical care is an urgent case of life-and-death, not a consumer choice. But there are also many situations where our purchasing decisions are made with the same cognitive tools that we use to choose any other service or object.

Paul Krugman disagrees. In a column last week, Krugman resoundingly declared that patients are not consumers...that was even the headline if his point was in doubt. Let's look at his argument in a bit more detail:

Here’s my question: How did it become normal, or for that matter even acceptable, to refer to medical patients as “consumers”? The relationship between patient and doctor used to be considered something special, almost sacred. Now politicians and supposed reformers talk about the act of receiving care as if it were no different from a commercial transaction, like buying a car — and their only complaint is that it isn’t commercial enough.

Certainly that vision of the medical experience as somehow removed from the normal way we buy is appealing: it's nice to think we will be taken care of without any consideration of our wealth or even our personal decision-making: just put yourself in the hands of your physician and all will be well.

But Krugman acknowledges, a few paragraphs later, that we're only having this conversation because of the current political moment, where people on both sides of the aisle are trying to figure out how we can afford our entitlement programs without bankrupting the country. So, at some point, money is going to come into the picture as a factor. And that's where the idea of talking about patients as consumers comes into play. The conservative theory is that bringing consumer-like behavior to health care (in other words, letting individuals try to go out and get the best value for their dollar) will slow the exploding health care costs that are hamstringing our economy. Referring to patients as consumers is not to minimize the emotional, human aspects of medical care, but to describe a certain rational, value-seeking behavior that conservatives hope to bring to the industry.

Krugman doesn't think patients can be wise consumers of health care. But he is dramatically oversimplifying. The trauma patient in the picture up top is not a consumer: he's not going to come back to consciousness to demand the ambulance drive him over to Memorial Hospital, where they charge 10% less for blood transfusions. But a patient with diabetes, dealing with a chronic condition, is going to make dozens, if not hundreds, of consumer-ish decisions about what drugs to take, what physicians to see, and which diet plans to attempt. If they were more personally responsible for those economic decisions, they would (in the aggregate) make better decisions about how to balance cost and care quality.

That's why it makes sense to move towards a system where the costs of catastrophic care (like traumatic injuries or heart attacks) are socialized to some degree, but to expect individuals (either on their own or through private insurance) to cover the costs of chronic care, physicals, and the like.

We want to believe there's a way to treat everyone "fairly", but what we really mean is that we don't want to hear tragic tales of system failure that make us sad for the victim and nervous for ourselves. We want to believe we and our loved ones and, perhaps, "the deserving" will always be cared for. And that we don't have to make tradeoffs between how good our care is and how much it costs. But we do. We can either wash our hands of the decision and ask the government to decide, for all except for the most wealthy, who gets what care, or we can embrace our role as consumers and make the best decisions we can for ourselves and our families.

Greed, Sex and Public Morality

Republicans, according to stereotype, are overly concerned with what other people do with their bodies, while Democrats are overly concerned with what other people do with their money. So it was interesting, and unexpected, to read an article encouraging a renewed aversion to greed in the latest issue of First Things magazine, which decidedly falls on the conservative side of the spectrum. It forced me to reconsider some basic assumptions I have made about wealth, capitalism, and morality.

The author of the piece, Edward Skidelsky, argues that our elites have lost the traditional, still-popular view that there is something wrong with being greedy, that it is an essentially disordered, wicked activity. This notion, which your average modern economist might dismiss as juvenile, has a rich heritage. As Skidelsky puts it:

Explanation of this point requires a brief excursus into Aquinas’ theory of acts and ends. An act, for Aquinas, has two ends: one “proximate,” which is what makes it the kind of act it is, the other “ultimate,” which is what the agent aims at in acting. If either end is bad, the act as a whole is bad. A good ultimate end cannot redeem a bad proximate end; thieving to help the poor is still thieving.

He goes on to say that most thinkers in western history, up until the Enlightenment, took it as a given that trying to accumulate more money or things than you needed is wrong, no matter if it leads to good things happening. But one of the views of the Enlightenment was the economic view of man, the belief that our wealth-building activities enhance human progress as a whole. Skidelsky notes:

This transformation of attitudes to wealth creation cleared the ground for the new science of political economy. Having been demoralized, so to speak, economic acts became open to analysis and assessment in terms of their effects, intended or otherwise. They could enter into a calculus. It now made sense to ask, for instance, whether it might not be more beneficial in the long run to let corn prices fluctuate freely, even in a famine, than to regulate them—a question that could not have been decently posed when the duty to feed the poor was regarded as absolute. Without this prior demoralization of economic activity, [Adam] Smith’s enterprise would have been unthinkable. Aquinas, for instance, would have regarded it as akin to an earnest discussion of the benefits of cutting up a hospital patient and distributing his organs among others.

Now, I have accepted uncritically that the best way to improve the well-being of all is to allow individuals to pursue their own self-interest. And I don't see how you can renounce that principle without setting some group (whether the command-and-control planners of the Soviet Union or the divine-rights kings of old Europe or some body of clerics) as the arbiters of what is allowed and what is forbidden. But do we need to promote the idea of material success as a complete good? is there room for guilt about greed in a capitalistic society?

I struggled with these thoughts for a little while, but then was absorbed in another First Things article, I began another, this time "Religion, Reason and Same-Sex Marriage" by Matthew J Franck. In this piece, Franck expands on an earlier article where he argued that anti-gay marriage arguments are not based solely on irrational bias and have a place in the public debate. I have outlined my position on gay marriage on the blog in the past: namely, that we have gone so far away from the traditional sense of marriage already, and it makes so little sense for the state to license romantic companionship, that we ought to eliminate civil marriage entirely. Franck, as you might imagine, takes a different view:

Yet another danger may await us in the event that traditional views of sexual morality are overthrown and same-sex marriage is established. We see a sign of it in the driving of Catholic Charities out of adoption services in Massachusetts. The freedom to participate fully in civic life, to offer oneself to others in civil society, conscientiously on one’s own terms as a religious person professing one’s beliefs, may be jeopardized by this new dispensation.

Franck, along with many other observers, thinks the adoption of gay marriage and the host of cultural assumptions that go along with it will push Christians out of public life. This may be possible in the long term, though it is unlikely to happen any time soon in a majority-Christian nation.

So, to recap: we have two articles. One is about the ubiquity of greed in our society and of the need to curtail it, and one is a reaction to the legal advance of gay marriage. What do they have in common? In my view, both authors commit the fallacy of equating laws and government action with public morality as a whole. Look at this quote from Skidelsky:

Democratic states use economic incentives all the time to encourage motives and ways of life considered to be civilized. They limit hours of work, restrict or forbid Sunday trading, regulate where and how advertisers may operate. In a utilitarian political culture, such legislation is usually justified on grounds of economic efficiency or “health and safety,” but its unacknowledged motive is ethical. These states wish to erect safeguards against the powerful human tendency to rapacity.

If we acknowledged the legitimacy of such motives, we might think of many further ways in which the power of the state could be harnessed to discourage avarice. Of course, such proposals will encounter the objection of “paternalism,” but there is nothing inherently paternalistic about a citizen body collectively deciding to encourage certain forms of life and discourage others.

It's true that society's laws are an important benchmark of what is acceptable and what isn't, but they are far from the only ones. The culture of a society can be an equally powerful force in shaping behavior, and yet both Skidelsky and Franck are primarily concerned with whether the law advances or challenges their beliefs about the well-ordered life.

It is probably easier to change the laws to reflect the kind of society you want than to change the culture, but I would argue that a truly Christian response to the problems of materialistic greed and sexual amorality are to build up a virtuous alternative in Christian communities, prove the superiority of that way of life and then share it with others. This may be a libertarian point of view that borders on the naive, but the law that supports our beliefs on Monday may change to oppose them by Friday. (This is, in fact, what is happening with marriage laws.) If we can encourage a truly neutral state in matters of morality and culture (which I admit is a high challenge itself) than Christians should be confident that living out their beliefs will show others a better way. Public morality should be built (and renewed) from the ground up by moral individuals, not imposed from the top down by the state.

Building Authorial Brands

After a few years on the outside looking in at the publishing industry, I have to admit I am flummoxed: why does it seem so hard for authors to take advantage of the new technologies out there to build their careers? Why does the publishing industry view digital technology as a threat instead of an opportunity? And how come books are more like wine and less like whiskey?

Ok, let me start with the last one, first. I drink both wine and whiskey. (I'm surprised my wife doesn't come out of her dead sleep right now to shout, "and too much of both!") I have been enjoying wine since a trip to Italy in 2004. Whiskey is a more recent hobby, something I've only been trying for the last two years. And yet I feel much more comfortable picking out a bottle of unfamiliar whiskey than a wine I've never tried before. Why?

It's simply because whiskey operates under a few relatively simple rules that help me to categorize it and find what I like: it could be scotch or bourbon or rye. If I want a scotch, I could go for a single malt or a blend, and know exactly what I'm getting. There are a few simple descriptors that give me a good sense of what I'm getting. Wine, on the other hand, seems endlessly complex, and thus remains intimidating. Books are the same way: other than the broad categories like 'romance' or 'fantasy', what guide is there to help me try a new author on a whim? No, you have to do research: read reviews, ask friends, what have you. One would think modern technology would help with this, but not really. (I will say that Amazon's recommendations are a step in the right direction, but unless you buy a lot they seem wildly speculative.)

Let me offer one example relevant to my efforts as a struggling writer of science fiction. The magazine I spend the most time with is Asimov's, which I'd say has a 50% 'hit rate' for me: 50% of what they publish, I like. I consider that pretty good. And yet I have not bought a book on the basis of those stories, though many of the authors have books out, and many are published repeatedly so I have a good sample of their work. And that's mostly because the magazine makes no effort to encourage that behavior, and neither do the writers, other than putting a bio at the beginning of their stories. Why isn't Asimov's looking to actively promote some writers, and have a stake in their success? Why don't they seem much interested in promoting a specific "Asimov's Style" that would reliably please readers and build a more consistent brand experience? As it exists, the magazine (and all the others I've found in the fiction world) seem to exist as a checkpoint for writers looking to get along to a book contract, where they will start from scratch in building their audience.

There is an opportunity for writers, magazines and book publishers to form an alliance that would serve all parties. But each group should be looking to build a more reliable, recognizable brand that consumers can trust. If they do, the electronic world we are entering will offer rich opportunities and many satisfied (and paying) readers for all sides. If not, we'll continue to hear whining about the decline of publishing.

Reflections on the iPad

I'm writing this on my sad old desktop computer because I haven't found just the right blogging app on my iPad yet. But I'm sure I will, and then happily abandon this annoying large screen and convenient full-sized keyboard. No, I'll be able to peck out these ramblings from anywhere!

For the last two weeks or so, I have in fact been glued to my new iPad. In fact, I'll probably be reading on it as soon as I'm done here. So obviously I love the darn thing. But why? 90% of the time I use it, I'm within 30 feet of a computer. Typing is undoubtedly slower, although I do have a wireless keyboard I can use with it. The games are good, but I have more advanced games on my Wii and the desktop. It doesn't add any major capability that some other device in my life doesn't have.

But, unless I'm completely irrational (no comments, please), there must be something that has driven me to spend hours a day with the darn thing. So here are three bits of speculation on why the iPad has wormed its way so deeply into my life, and the psychological drivers that have made it so popular.

1) Casualness: Nothing about the iPad feels like work, even when I'm doing something like capturing notes. The ability to pick it up and put it down, to switch to some other task, to close its cover like a book, all give it a less formal feel than plunking away at a laptop. Its weight and size also allow me to take it more places, allowing me to spontaneously use it when I have a need (or a free moment).

2) Bite-sized-ness: Everything feels stripped down and simple, and that translates in part to making it feel like you're not making a big time commitment when you start using any particular application. I can waste hours on a game, but it is not some elaborate epic that requires my whole engagement for long stretches. The successful games offer relatively quick levels or challenges that are almost endlessly repeatable, so each "five minutes" leads into the next, and soon you've lost an hour.

3) Utilitarianism: The iPad is a newspaper, a web browser, a video game console, a camera, an video phone, a notepad, a GPS, a TV, and a bunch of other things besides. People, and men in particular, like feeling that they have s tool for every need. The iPad is an electronic Swiss Army knife.

I'm sure there are other reasons people fall for the iPad, but those are the three that are most important to me. It is a transformative technology that sits at the intersections of productivity and entertainment, of simplicity and power, and of phone and computer. As these devices continue to advance, we will see more and more people experiencing the virtues of having so much of your life always at hand.

Follow Up on the Impact of Church Buildings

Earlier this week, I wrote on the difficulty the Catholic Church has in both spreading the Gospel and maintaining its aging, underutilized buildings. I contend that this is a major problem for the Church in the 21st Century. It needs to adapt to new circumstances, not continue to operate under the assumption that its buildings are the central gathering places of its communities.

Well, count on Walter Russell Mead, my favorite blogger, to point out a useful and instructive contrast:

Historically, the Pentecostal churches in the United States as elsewhere are strongly rooted among the poor. In the favelas of Brazil, the “informal settlements” of South Africa and in the squalid slums surrounding emerging megacities like Nairobi and Lagos, as well as in America’s inner cities, Pentecostal churches, many in storefronts, are often the most active, the fastest growing, and the most connected to the aspirations and the needs of the communities they serve.

Mead is making a larger point that populations afflicted by multi-generational poverty need more than government-subsidized welfare, they need faith (or something equally as powerful and motivational) to change the essence of their lives. In passing, he mentions the effectiveness of Pentecostal churches in accomplishing this mission, noting that they often set themselves up in humble storefronts.

But think about the flexibility and persuasive power that approach entails. First, a Pentecostal church can spring up wherever there is demand, because it will not wait for a formal building to be constructed. It could be sandwiched between the corner deli and the laundromat, but it is there and can have a presence. Second, this church will have low overhead, allowing it to spend the donations it gets towards good works and outreach, not maintenance and utilities. Finally, the humble surroundings likely resonate better with the community and the times than an elaborate structure. The ostentation of a Catholic church, meant to inspire and attract, can seem quite out of touch.

No one knows where the faithful will live in a decade or a century. Mobile populations call for churches that go where the believers (and the needy) are.

A Brief Bit of Self-Promotion

I'm proud to announce the first step has been taken on a path that will undoubtedly have me joining the ranks of the Bard himself as a colossus of English letters. That step comes courtesy of Necon E-Books, which has seen fit to publish one of my (very) short stories as a winner of their March flash fiction contest, and will also include it in their end-of-year anthology.

If you have a second, definitely go check them out. My story took its inspiration from the idea that some of the large computing networks we are creating are for shockingly trivial, and even anti-social, activities. Readers of this blog may also enjoy another story featured: "HEALTH CARE 2016", by Jan Kozlowski. It offers a humorous yet vivid take on where our desire to cut costs in the health system could take us.

Enjoy, and any feedback on the piece is welcome in the comment section.

How Churches Kill the Church

This is my church, St. Agnes. I love it. If I move away from Brooklyn, it will be one of the things I miss most. However, I also know that it is an albatross around the neck of the Church, that is the Roman Catholic faith to which it is such a beautiful monument.

This past week was the kickoff of the annual appeal that the Diocese of Brooklyn conducts to raise funds. After the homily, the lights went down and we saw a video outlining all the good things the diocese will do with our money if we give it to them. Then, after the video was concluded, our priest reminded us that the majority of what we give will come back to the parish and go towards maintaining the building.

In that moment, it occurred to me why the Catholic Church feels so weak and passive: parish priests have been turned into caretakers for massive, under-peopled buildings like St. Agnes. Their minds are full of the latest contractor's estimates, fundraising plans, worries about the state of the roof, and heating bills. This seems to leave remarkably little time for instruction and evangelization. Heck, we're lucky they still have the time and energy to say mass.

And what about the parishioners? Their plight is summed up by the annual appeal: asked to sit back and watch as folks from a diocesan office provide things like 'immigration services' that they will never see. Told to send money, to fix a building built to hold the thousands of immigrants who built the neighborhood, but now hosts only the few families who have hung on, and the chance newcomer who keeps the faith. Their priest doesn't ask much of them, may not even know them (although, I will say, my parish priest is making a real effort to change that), but constantly reminds them that more funds are needed.It starts to feel a lot more transactional than inspirational, and the faithful become slowly discouraged, and even more drift away.

The Church must either renew or wither, and if the buildings it constructed in earlier days are now holding it back, they should not fear letting them go. After all, Jesus himself said, "If your eye betrays you, pluck it out." It would be painful to see the great built heritage of Catholicism pass away, but the Church is greater than the sum of its churches.

Heroes or Hegemons?

President Obama has brought an important question to the forefront of the national consciousness: when should we go to war to stop a massacre? And what does it mean if the US enters into military conflicts with nations that don't directly threaten us?

Of course, we've done this before, in Vietnam, Kosovo, and Iraq, to name a few. But in all those cases an attempt was made to justify our intervention on the grounds of national interest. (Whether you choose to accept those arguments is of course a different thing.) But Libya, as the President's speech last night made clear, is another story: while Obama noted the importance of the Middle East as a whole to our national security, the thrust of his argument for bombing Libya was, "Gaddafi was going to kill a lot of people, and we had the means to stop it."

I am naturally predisposed to this argument: I was in favor of invading Iraq because I felt our country's actions in the previous two decades had left the people of that nation in deplorable conditions, not because there might be WMDs hidden somewhere. But, again as the President himself pointed out, the ensuing eight years have made the costs of this type of intervention abundantly clear, and they are high. Which is why Obama is now trying to thread the needle: do enough to get rid of a murdering bastard without committing our nation to dealing with what is likely to be an unstable situation for the long term.

Peggy Noonan, in a column written before Obama's speech, does a nice job of going over the many fumbles the President made to get to this point, and all the ongoing risks we face. I am particularly concerned that we might do just enough to create a bloody, ongoing stalemate that causes much more suffering than even a Gaddafi victory would have.

But a bigger, more critical issue is brought up by Mickey Kaus: is this third war in the Muslim world an indication that we are becoming some sort of 'humanitarian empire'? He writes:

In a true empire–in this case, the empire of UN approved human rights enforcement–war never really ends. Always someone to protect somewhere. Imagine living in imperial Britain in the mid-19th century. There would almost always be a war or police action–actual shooting and killing–going on.** For a true empire to work– even, or perhaps especially, a humanitarian empire–war has to be routinized. You’ve got two wars going already? No need to change the president’s schedule to start a third.

From where I sit, an unselfish attempt to save innocent lives in distant lands seems noble, even heroic. But, as Kaus points out, the British probably gave themselves kudos for shedding English blood to bring civilization to the world, but they were no less an empire for that. To much of the rest of the world (as I have heard from more than one cab driver in my travels) this sort of thing just looks like the toughest kid on the block flexing his muscles.

I'd like to think that if there were good solutions to the problems of evil and human suffering, we would have already implemented them. Which means we're choosing from a bunch of poor choices. Yet I think, with so much of the world skeptical of our motives and our methods, America's efforts to wage war for humanitarian ends will never work out as neatly and as happily as we hope.

"I Like Paper": What's Holding Back Healthcare

So I was in the hospital, accompanying my wife for an emergency appointment that ended with the all-clear being sounded. As we were sitting in the triage room at Beth Israel, my wife's doctor, a woman that I would place at between 35 and 40, was inputting some information into the in-room computer system. She stopped, momentarily stymied by some piece of data the program was prompting her to collect. Turning to us, she said, "I hate this thing. I like paper. Don't you like paper?"

We all had a good laugh at that, but a day later that phrase is still running through my head: "I like paper." That sums up a huge problem with our healthcare system in three simple words. Having spent about thirty minutes watching this particular physician work, and seeing her whip out her Blackberry at one point, I can vouch that she was intelligent and reasonably comfortable with technology. Yet she would prefer paper, and by her own account, avoids the computer system as often as possible.

Now, maybe that bit of data the computer wanted to collect was meaningless in the situation. Maybe, in that instance, collecting the information in a paper chart would have been both quicker and more customized to the issue at hand. But one of the great things about computers is that they enable a level of standardization otherwise impossible. Perhaps my wife's next doctor will need that particular data point as part of making a care decision, or at least want to know it was collected to rule out some possibility he's considering. By computerizing medical records, we make it much more likely the right information is going to be collected and made accessible when needed.

As Walter Russell Mead notes yet again in a recent blog post, one of the areas where we have the most to gain economically is healthcare, where there are still great efficiencies to be found. But that can't happen as long as otherwise talented and intelligent professionals resist tools that, once a part of their daily lives, will enable those improvements. Progress on digitizing medical data continues, but it will be resisted until leaders in the field figure out better ways to have physicians embrace these technologies instead of fighting them.

The Future of...Me

I have it damned good. I try to remind myself of that as often as possible, because I find it remarkably easy to slip into pessimism, or even outright cynicism. And since so many good, exciting, transformative things are happening right to me right now, I thought I could risk your indulgence in writing a more personal post than is normal. (I will strive to ensure it is less than completely irrelevant to people who aren't me.)

First, my wife and I are expecting our first child this summer. This has triggered an instant change in every parent we know from trumpeting the glory of child-rearing to cackling about the lack of sleep we'll be getting for the foreseeable future (estimates range from 6 months to 18 years of sleeplessness, depending on the parent, or perhaps on the child). I am hesitant to say anything back to people who have already run the gauntlet, but can I say in general that our society's attitude towards parenthood is completely screwed up, and is based on the notion that every moment of life should be the best it possibly can be? I don't look at my child as a moment-to-moment affirmation of my life choices and how great I am, but as an investment. I'm not particularly thrilled at the notion of a baby (it's exciting, but I know it'll have plenty of pain), but I'm increasingly ecstatic as I think about that child being 3, or 10, or 18, or 25. The point is that you're investing yourself in the future of humanity and, in particular, in expanding your family to include another member who will be loved, and love back. Sure, a baby loves in its basic way (and that way is damned hard to resist), but that love matures and grows and becomes more worthwhile with time, and THAT'S why I wanted to get married and have children, dammit! (Ok, rant over.)

The next (potential) big change is buying a house. Is it any surprise that the first change triggered the second? As many flaws as there are in the system of home purchasing as there are, I have to say that it's extraordinary that our society fosters the purchasing of property by new families, even as the country (or many parts of it) get more crowded. We still have this cultural commitment to family and individuality that I think is, for the most part, a very healthy and even critical thing. We still allow and encourage people to chart their own course, and making a decision to buy a bit of land and a house to call home is a big part of that, both practically and symbolically. I wonder if, between a rising population and increased governmental and social pressure to live a green lifestyle, if this institution can be preserved in the future.

With all this change, the most stable aspect of my life is work. But is that stability only an inch deep? I don't mean that I won't be working at Cline Davis & Mann in a year, but that the whole industry might be on the cusp of transforming in ways that will make my actual work very different than it is today. Right now healthcare marketing is all centered around personal one-on-one relationships between the physician and the sales rep. No one entirely likes this state of affairs, but it has persisted because reps do provide a needed service (quickly disseminating information about new drugs) and because the physician is a relatively small market not efficiently reached by mass mediums like television. (There are exceptions, but I'll leave that aside.) But both of the above assumptions no longer entirely true. Reps increasingly don't have time or access enough to share meaningful information, and there are other ways to effectively target small markets. Everyone in the pharma advertising industry, just like the consumer advertising industry, acknowledges that digital relationships are somehow going to supplant or and the very least supplement traditional communications. But no one knows how. My contention is that the 'creative' aspect of advertising will primarily provide inducement for an audience member to enter into, or deepen, a digital relationship. The business end of advertising will be making use of this relationship in a way that doesn't turn the audience off. It's going to be a delicate dance, and we're so far from figuring it out the way that rep brochures and journal ads are figured out that everyone who thinks about it gets intimidated.

So my future doesn't look to hold a lot of stability. But it does hold adventure, and excitement, and possibility. And I have a great wife and family as the base to build on. And so, onward!

Brand Clarity, Profit, and Facebook

Amazon was founded to sell us books, and eventually expanded into selling us other things we didn't want to search through a store to get. It makes a ton of money. Google was founded to make search easier and better, and eventually expanded into providing other tools that make content gathering easier and better. It makes a ton of money. The two most successful Internet firms may now do lots of things, but the vast majority of their profits come from finding new places to apply the same basic template that has made them successful. (And, as an aside, when Google tries to do things like set up a social network, it hasn't been nearly so successful.)

Facebook was founded to connect college students to each other. (When I was in college, the "Face Book" was a picture book of the people in your class that everyone looked through to figure out who they wanted to, well...let's say meet.) It eventually expanded to let anyone use the service and connect to other people. And they have made some pretty good money doing this. Although they do it by selling ads that have a remarkably poor click-through rate, which has started making people wonder if that type of promotion is really worthwhile or just chasing buzz.

But Facebook has a problem: it is the most hyped company in the world right now, and is valued at many, many times its earnings. It has to figure out a way to turn 'social' into 'revenue' without turning off its users. If the ads don't really work, how do they do this? Well, they could try to give marketers more information about their users. That information is very valuable. But if they do that, a lot of people (who don't want Procter and Gamble sending them a toothpaste coupon if their status says they have coffee breath) will leave the site.

Another option is to sell other services through the site. To this end, they have developed a virtual currency called a Facebook Credit (which reminds me a bit of a SchruteBuck), which can be used to buy upgrades on games like Mafia Wars and Farmville, and now can also be used to rent movies through the site.

Then there is the option of snatching bits of other companies' business models and aggregating them in Facebook. After all, Facebook has a huge built in user base. Their first target, Groupon, which gives daily discounts off of local services like restaurants if you buy in advance. Facebook plans to expand its existing Deals program to get in on the action.

Here's the thing: none of these initiatives (with the possible exception of buying a new Tommy Gun on Mafia Wars) has anything to do with staying connected to friends. And in some cases, it may actually get in the way of that core mission. If your Facebook page starts filling up with Deals based on what you and your friends are doing and discussing, are you going to be happy, annoyed, or creeped out?

But the bigger issue is that the Facebook brand isn't about shopping, or renting movies. It's about sharing a bit of your life with people you know, and staying in touch with them in return. Groupon was designed to sell me stuff, and so I don't mind when it does. With Facebook, I'll mind. Modern Internet users have gotten very good at compartmentalizing the brands that they use for different online tasks, and it may just be Facebook's fate that it is the place to waste time and joke with friends, not the place to spend money.

Me Thinking About Others Thinking About Krugman

I know, in this day and age, writing a post about two posts about a column written a week ago is probably a little silly and self-indulgent. But I had a very similar reaction to the two writers who I am about to quote: I read Paul Krugman's piece on higher education, "Degrees and Dollars", and found myself nodding (a rare sensation for me when reading Krugman) right up until the last paragraph. After noting that society and families invest massive sums in higher education with an increasingly small likelihood of a strong return, he concludes:

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.

WHAT? So society continues to count on old models and fading industries as the path to wealth instead of innovating, and the solution is to dig in our heels, unionize, and demand money and healthcare whether we can afford it or not? Take it away, Walter Russell Mead:

This is blindness so brilliant it would dazzle a bat. If, as Krugman posits, demand for US workers will be falling in both manufacturing and the professions, how exactly will labor unions get higher wages for their members? Factories will be closing in Krugman’s world and law firms will be turning more and more work over to computers or shipping it overseas. Perhaps stronger unions could make it harder for companies to do this for a while, but ultimately facts speak. Stronger unions making tougher wage demands will not exactly persuade American (and foreign) investors to create new jobs in this country — or to slow down their efforts to reduce their US workforce by outsourcing and automation.

The scary part of our present is that what the future economy will look like is increasingly unclear. I am reasonably confident that ad agencies like the one I work at will be around 5-10 more years, but I'm not convinced that the model is sustainable with a fragmented audience that is increasingly savvy at dodging 'promotion'. I don't like the prospect that my career might go through the ringer a decade from now, but it could well happen, and all I can do is be prepared to adapt, and try to cultivate skills (like critical thinking and writing, I hope) that are transferable to new lines of work. And what might we all be doing? I will refer to Reihan Salam for a possible answer:

The most successful and productive digital organizations will never employ large numbers of people, but they will throw off large amounts of money that will be spent on personal services, etc. That’s why we shouldn’t squelch innovation in this space through overregulation and overtaxation, and it’s why we should work on improving the quality of public services and other amenities that will help us attract and retain the footloose workers who create the most wealth.

So maybe we have a future where a smaller number of people are in the 'making stuff' (whether content or physical things) business, and more of us are in the 'making life better' business of providing services. It wouldn't be the first time we made that kind of a shift: more productive agriculture moved many off the land and into cities doing more service-oriented work, and so did mass production that allows a few people to make a lot of identical objects (ask the Luddites.)

We can't stop tomorrow from coming, and if tomorrow casts off a lot of the jobs that lead to middle-class respectability in the 20th century, we are going to have to adapt. That process may be painful, but bankrupting society by denying that reality for as long as possible will just make it worse. Krugman is right that we need to build the society we want, but hopefully we can want something better than borrowing more and more money to prop up a social and economic order whose time has past.

Is Tokyo the City of the Future, or of the Past?

Tokyo, famously, feels like a city out of the future, as lampooned by this Onion article. But despite the rapid urbanization of the developing world, is the model of giant, tightly packed city still a glimpse of the future?

Certainly, there are factors that would seem to point towards an ever-greater concentration of humanity in cities. Around the world, people are having fewer children, making it more possible to invest in smaller urban spaces. Rising fuel costs and global warming concerns make areas close to business cores more attractive and efficient, as mass transit needs dense concentrations of people to pay off. And, as David Brooks points out in this column, cities serve as creative incubators, as people seem to think better when they are physically connected.

As a New Yorker (although one who will soon decamp to the nearby New Jersey suburbs), I see all the benefits of city life. But I still think cities like Tokyo are not likely to represent the future of humanity, at least not as presently conceived, for one reason: transportation technology is likely to improve again, and grant humans much more flexibility to craft the lifestyle they want.

Imagine you could get from, say, the Hamptons to New York City in 30 minutes. Or from the Sierra Nevadas to LA in 45. Wouldn't those places become attractive mini-clusters for the talented and the wealthy, instead of where those folks have summer homes or ski cabins? There would be a number of people around you who you could network and create with live, while still accessing the full value of the city when needed. Large cities would still have their place, but they would, to some degree, be transactional: the places where everyone comes together before they go apart again. Young people would probably still swarm there, to meet romantic partners and drink too much.

Cities were small when transportation was problematic. They grew, and sprouted suburbs, when the rail and then the automobile allowed greater movement in and out of the core. But if a transportation technology enabled convenient, not too expensive movement between our current big cities and the nicest outlying areas, the attractions of space, scenery and exclusivity might overwhelm the advantages of city living.

If that technology doesn't emerge, though, then the foreseeable future will be dominated by ever-denser, larger and higher cities, and Tokyo will remain the city of tomorrow.

Exponential Growth at Sketches of Tomorrow

I just took a brief gander at the stats for this humble blog, and was gratified to see that readership has doubled each of the past three months. I started writing this blog as a way to sharpen my thinking on where the future (both short and long-term) might be heading, and never thought too much about what type of audience I would have. So thank you for reading, and for coming back!

I'd like to keep it going, and introduce the blog to new readers. So please keep sharing the links when you find something you enjoy reading, and feel free to suggest topics for future posts if there's anything on your mind.

Thanks again!

Dan

What Are Cell Phones Doing to Us?

The big study that got a lot of media attention this week was one that showed extended cell phone use causes changes in brain activity, presumably due to the proximity of its electromagnetic field. Here's the key bit:

"Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (part of the National Institutes of Health), reports Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that a cell phone's electromagnetic field can cause changes in brain activity. Specifically, she and her team found that the regions nearest to the antenna of closely held mobile devices showed higher rates of energy (or glucose) consumption."

Glucose consumption essentially means that that part of the body is working harder, and using more energy. Is that because we are stimulating the cells in such a way as they could become cancerous? Or is the brain just more active in the area near a signal? No one knows, although those who believe wireless signals cause cancer will not wait for definitive proof to validate their fears.

I highlight the study not because I think we're all about to grow iPhone shaped tumors in our brains, but because it shows how unclear we still are about how the changes we make to our environment impact the human body. When someone wants to build a dam, they have to do detailed studies and show exactly how that the development will impact the river. But if someone wants to sell us transmitting devices that we'll hold up to our ear or keep next to our reproductive organs all day, they go ahead and we figure out later if it is a problem. I think we ask too much in the case of the dam, and too little in the case of the cell phone.

And maybe we should be a bit more humble about pursuing advances in genetic engineering, bio-enhancements, and brain-computer interfaces when we can't even figure out if our phones are doing something nasty to our brains.

The USA's Rebuilding Year

I was working in Boston during the glory years of Boston sports: the Patriots won three titles, the Red Sox broke the 'curse', and the Celtics finally got back on track after a two-decade detour. While I felt happiest about the Red Sox winning it all, I was probably most invested in the Celtics' turnaround and win. I had been attending a lot of games for a few years, and in the two years before their championship they were terrible. The turnaround was dramatic, a result of GM Danny Ainge having a vision for how to turn the team around and fearlessly executing it.

For a lot of sports fans, the term 'rebuilding year' has a bad connotation: it is usually uttered when a team has no chance of winning and so is under-spending on cheap young talent. Often, the rebuilding goes nowhere, and the team stays terrible. But sometimes, a smart leader like Ainge actually does use a rebuilding year (or a few) to make dramatic changes for the better, changes which would have been impossible if they had tried to compromise in those off-years and have a decent, but not great, team.

I allowed myself to reminisce about my glory days as a Boston sports fan because I believe Barack Obama was elected in part because people sensed the need for a rebuilding year (or maybe rebuilding decade) for the country as a whole. What are "Hope and Change" but promises to change direction and do something dramatically different to move us forward? Yet I think he was incapable of truly instituting a rebuilding plan for the USA, because he's too tied to some of the old players that need to go. (One analogy driven into the ground? Check.)

Those 'players' include the public unions that are currently protesting in Wisconsin (more on that in a moment), but also the big, bulky, expensive programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security that are threatening to bankrupt the country. E.J. Dionne makes the case that these programs aren't really the problem, arguing that there's plenty of money to fund the existing safety net if only we have the will to take it:

Only a body dominated by millionaires could define "shared sacrifice" as telling nurses' aides and coal miners they have to work until age 69 while sharply cutting tax rates on wealthy people. I see why conservative Republicans like this. I honestly don't get why Democrats - "the party of the people," I've heard - would come near such an idea.

I agree that cutting tax rates is a risky proposition when the deficit is so high, but raising the retirement age--for workers nowhere near retirement--is a simple acknowledgment that people now routinely live into their eighties, and we simply can't afford to have the government on the hook for providing an income and healthcare to citizens for a fifth of their lives or more. Especially if we continue to insist on inefficient government-run programs as the way to deliver those benefits.

Walter Russell Mead, my favorite blogger, has been advocating the 'rebuilding year' approach (though he's way to smart to call it that) for some time, deftly depicting the 'Blue Social Model' that has defined American government and politics for most of the last century, and why it now has to give way to a new model. He looks at the clashes in Wisconsin and sees that new model struggling to be born, while the reactionary forces of the public employee unions try to beat it back:

In the heart of Blue State America, we are seeing a challenge to some of the fundamental assumptions behind the progressive state, and we could conceivably be watching both the birth pangs of a new social model and the first big step in America’s transformation into a true 21st century economy. And ironically, while Democrats are not, to put it mildly, happy with Governor Walker’s anti-public union bill, in the medium term the Democratic Party (and others who want to see government taking on more responsibilities) will be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the bill.

Why will getting rid of public employee unions ultimately help those who want a more active government? Because a more flexible, streamlined government will be able to take on the new challenges we face today, rather than repeatedly trying the same approaches that defined 'big government' in the 20th Century, and which have largely either served their purpose or failed.

I agree with Mead that the current events in Wisconsin could help usher in a new, better model, but I believe we need a leader who will boldly call for some shared sacrifice from all Americans as we construct that new model, and deal with the damage that dismantling the old model will cause. Rebuilding years are never fun while they're happening, but when they lead to victory you can look back and see that it was worth it.

Obama, the Budget, and Political Calculation

After the State of the Union, I wrote that Michele Bachmann will get Obama re-elected. That bit of poorly informed speculation was based on my impression that Obama was going to attempt to make a meaningful compromise with the Republicans, which would satisfy most Americans but would be insufficient to the Tea Party, causing them to blow a gasket and split the Republican party. (I wish I had written it that succinctly at the time.)

My readers will be shocked to know that either Obama's team doesn't read this blog, or else values the advice at the price I charge for it. The budget he released recently is a defiant declaration of his intention to do nothing about our fiscal problems. By doing so, he seems to be daring the Republicans to put their neck out and suggest unpopular cuts, which means his calculation is that people don't really believe there is a budget problem, and he can win reelection by pandering to the interest groups that form the core of the Democratic Party.

Aside from my dismay at my inability to set the agenda in Washington, I have a few thoughts:

1) The politics of this situation are interesting. Yuval Levin suggests that people are not as short-sighted as Obama's approach seems to expect. I would guess that Obama's team has a lot of polling showing that we are, as a country, short-sighted and incapable of focusing on a debate as abstract and impersonal as the one over our budget. But I think his strategy fails to take into account the passion levels within the electorate. This budget, and the approach to governing it represents, will unite the factions within the Republican party, and give energy (and a larger voice) to the Tea Party. Meanwhile, his supporters will be lukewarm: yes, he didn't cut much, but he did offer to cut programs they hold dear, and the liberal blogs have been calling on him to stand and fight the Republican enemy. He had all the passion on his side last time: can he win without it?

2) Liberals like Paul Krugman are already attacking proposed cuts by the Republicans, so are some Republicans. But even Krugman is now acknowledging that something has to be done. He says:

In a better world, politicians would talk to voters as if they were adults. They would explain that discretionary spending has little to do with the long-run imbalance between spending and revenues. They would then explain that solving that long-run problem requires two main things: reining in health-care costs and, realistically, increasing taxes to pay for the programs that Americans really want.

I think his solutions ('reining in health-care costs' I would guess means further nationalizing care) are not going to be popular ones. But if both sides of the debate start saying there's a problem, and only the Republicans offer a solution, it might help them, even if the solution isn't entirely popular. If Obama's do-nothing strategy wins over voters even when every expert and pundit on both sides is saying something needs to be done, it means we've become essentially an ungovernable nation.

3) People tend to see meaning when it isn't there. And people tend to believe their opponents have a well-thought-out long term plan. But often, politicians are swept up by events, or carried along by their desire to stay popular and get re-elected, and aren't thinking more than one move ahead. Stanley Kurtz thinks Obama is a socialist, has written a book about it, and views this budget as a step closer to his imposition of socialism on the United States. Obama's definitely far to the left, and probably wishes the US functioned more like Europe. His beliefs are no doubt reflected in the budget. But I don't think he has some devious plan to manipulate the US into a socialist position: I just think he's trying to get reelected and thinks this is the way to do it.

I think it is possible, even likely, that Obama is not as smart as either his supporters or opponents think. Sure, he's very intelligent, but his reaction to the increasing budget crisis and the last election is essentially more of the same. Perhaps he just isn't visionary enough to come up with any good alternatives.