Wagers, Motivation and Public Humiliation

When I worked at a small agency in Boston, I found myself hanging out in a bar with a friend and colleague, getting a bit tipsy as we talked shop and played Golden Tee. Everything was pretty casual until we decided it would be fun to bet over the result. Eventually, we hit upon a unique wager: the loser would have to go up to our boss during a meeting, inhale deeply, and exclaim, "Wow, Jack, you smell AMAZING!" Suddenly the game took on a manic intensity: the stakes had focused our inebriated brains.

I bring this up, first, to embarrass the person who lost the bet and then backed out of doing it, and second to note the power of a wager to raise the stakes in any activity. If someone asks me whether I could run a 5k, I'd shrug my shoulders because I really could care less. But if someone bets me $100 that I couldn't finish one, I'm going to hit the road and be out training tomorrow. It isn't that I really, really need that money, but that I really, really like to win.

It is that insight, that people's desire to win (or to see their friends humiliated) that is driving a new approach from everything from weight loss to fundraising. And we are very creative about the types of wagers that we make. One interesting way to set up the competitive dynamic is actually to bet on yourself, and make that bet public. That's essentially what Stickk.com is doing: they pioneered the idea of a commitment contract. Here's how it works: you set a goal, for example to lose twenty pounds or run a marathon., and you set up a contractual penalty if you fail to reach the goal. One common approach is to donate some money to a charity you dislike, like an avid meat-eater sending $100 to PETA. The donation is placed on hold, and only made if you fail to reach your goal. Then you set up a referee who validates that you accomplished the challenge, and you can invite friends and family to watch your progress. 

How successful is it? According to Ogilvy PR's site: "StickK.com is doing well in helping people achieve their goals. For people who use the website to set and achieve weight loss goals, for example, there is a reported 85%-90% achievement rate." If validated, that is a far higher rate than programs like Weight Watchers and even prescription weight loss aids. It proves that people don't like losing money, but also that they don't want to be seen as losers once they've made the public bet with themselves.

More recently, a site called moolta.com has taken this idea and applied it to fundraising. The mechanism is a little different than Stickk: here, users raise money by being willing to take on absurd challenges. As nocamels.com explains:

Would you take a shower in a public fountain? What if your friends would donate $50 if you did it? A just-hatched startup called Moolta wants you to challenge your friends to do wildly crazy things, record their antics and post them to their platform. What’s in it for the dare accepters? The dare is a fundraiser — in most cases for charity.

The interesting thing about this model is that the donors are essentially paying to "win" a bet, but the daredevil who does (and records!) the act is really winning by proving his commitment to a cause and his personal fearlessness in public. And when you think about our social media-driven world, people are trying hard to be seen as creative, fearless and unconventional all the time. Moolta has combined a clever way of raising money for charity with a novel opportunity to create viral content.

Clearly, wagers and humiliation are motivating in at least two ways: in the Stickk model, avoiding humiliation and loss is meant to drive desired behavior change. In Moolta's approach, people can bet on their friends' willingness to humiliate themselves for charity, and those friends are liberated to act ridiculously by the fact that they're doing it for a good cause. We love betting on and against each other so much that there is plenty of room for both to thrive.

Mortality, Money and Other People

The data might not be this clear-cut, but clearly the US is an outlier.

How much is your life, or your health, actually worth? I'm sure you'd put a pretty big number on it. If, for example, you needed to borrow $100,000 to cure a chronic, life-altering disease, I would bet you would do so. Where you place your personal cutoff point when health care is no longer worth the money will vary, but at some point almost everyone will decide that it is better to accept your mortality than to expend your family's wealth in pursuit of life-extending care.

But what if I re-phrased the question? What if I asked how much your life and your health should be worth to some third party who is obligated to pay for your care? It is much less likely you would say, "you know, the government/insurance company has wasted enough money on me, it's time to let go." No, if you are entitled to care from someone else, you will want as much of it as you can get.

I think the above chart (which, in updates to the blog posts where I originally saw this now point out, is a display of GOVERNMENT spending, and may have other inaccuracies) is showing what happens when that psychological truth is given free reign. In the other countries shown, there is an understanding that the government will impose limits on what will be paid for in the interest of fairness and frugality. In the US, by contrast, there are very few limits. This leads Matthew Yglesias to argue that the much-maligned death panels are actually just what we need. As he puts it:

The "death panels" charge was a potent one for a reason. But not only is this health care spending on the elderly the key issue in the federal budget, our disproportionate allocation of health care dollars to old people surely accounts for the remarkable lack of apparent cost effectiveness of the American health care system. When the patient is already over 80, the simple fact of the matter is that no amount of treatment is going to work miracles in terms of life expectancy or quality of life.

To clarify, again, Yglesias was writing when he thought the chart captured ALL healthcare spending in each country, but surely adding in non-government spending on elderly patients would not invalidate his general point. Namely, that the decisions other countries make about what care is economically justifiable, which we would call "death panels", are the only way to constrain the growth in healthcare spending when the government is footing the bill.

But the reason the death panel argument is so potent is that we in the US understand healthcare as an entitlement, full stop. Politicians have sold Medicare, Medicaid and now Obamacare as a guarantee of full care. Think about this statement by President Obama: "I'm running because I believe that in America no one should go bankrupt because they get sick." That is a pretty remarkable statement, when you stop and think about it, because healthcare is enormously expensive. And as a practical matter, he doesn't mean it: someone who opts for experimental procedures, who tries a costly drug to tread a disease for which it is not indicated, or even someone who chooses a doctor outside of their insurance plan can all still go bankrupt. What he really means is that no one who follows the rules and limits the government imposes on healthcare will go bankrupt because they get sick, but that's not what most people hear. And so when the government tries to impose or extend those limits, people get very angry. And, as has been noted extensively in political commentary, older people vote.

There isn't a happy ending to this story, because people don't like giving up something they think they've been promised. But the only way out of the healthcare mess we're in is to make people feel they're making a financial tradeoff when they consume healthcare. One simple suggestion: the government could give tax credits (or even cash awards) to seniors who are among the lowest consumers of Medicare. Eventually, we could seek to establish a lifetime dollar target for an individual's government health benefits. People who die under that number would pass on some percentage of the difference to their estates. Or, we could provide an annual grant to seniors to buy coverage, and they pocket the difference if they find a cheaper option. (This is essentially Paul Ryan's Medicare reform proposal.) 

None of these changes would be painless, and there is a large contingency that wants to maintain the status quo no matter the costs. But a system that pretends there are no limits on what we can afford to cover, and implies there are no limits on how much care it is even rational to get, encourages people to seek out the maximum amount of care instead of the care that makes sense for them, their families, and their finances.

I know, in writing this, that I might be thought cruel. In other words, that I'm saying we should let people die if they're poor. But I'm not: what I'm saying is by creating a system that encourages the view that you should do everything possible to stave off death, no matter the financial or personal toll, we've driven people to disbelieve in their own mortality and have outsized expectations for what medicine can do. In contrast, I would recommend this piece on how doctors die: people who truly understand medicine, health and the human body are much less inclined to seek end-of-life care.

There is dignity in accepting when our life has run its course. One of the under-discussed benefits of giving more control of our health decisions back to us is that we will more clearly make our own decisions about when to keep fighting and when to let go. With no death panels required.

The Empire of the Elite

The most recent election gave me the nagging feeling that I, and most everyone I know, was being played for a fool. The so-called fiscal cliff debate has finally confirmed it for me. I was foolish to believe, against the evidence of my own experience, that our leaders care about us or are even particularly concerned with being our leaders. What we are witnessing right now is the latest round of a great, global game of Empire. The people we think of as our leaders should more properly be viewed as our rulers.

This is not, by the way, an Illuminati-like argument that there is a cabal secretly controlling the world. It is rather to say that the natural state of man is not participatory democracy, but leadership by an elite, and that natural state is reasserting itself. And the elite we have is, all things considered, considerably kinder and gentler than previous versions. But the fact remains that they are ruling us, and their goals are not our goals.

Now, this is a huge topic, and I am at risk of getting lost in it, so I'm going to quickly lay out my thesis and give you a couple of arguments in support of it. My basic theory is this: in the 1800's, the Europeans, and especially the British, created the first global system. People from those countries were the only ones who had a chance to be rulers, but the colonies created opportunity for many people who otherwise would have been trapped by their class to rise. This was one strand of the meritocratic model.

At the same time, the United States was neither ruled or ruler, but a democracy (although a far from perfect one) where people were free to pursue their own goals. This was a second strand of meritocracy. But after World War II, the European empires were destroyed and the US was ascendant, although facing an existential foe in the USSR. The US, then, adopted a modified form of empire: it didn't rule directly, but provided economic goodies and military protection for those who played along. It also allowed the most talented people from other nations to come here and join an elite that would either build wealth here or take their knowledge back home. The meritocracy was thus globalized, but at the same time our exposure to the first strand of meritocracy (which essentially held that the most powerful or talented should administer the world for the greater good) began to modify our own more individualistic conception of success.

The result is ably described in this quote from a 2011 article in The Atlantic Monthly:

[T]he rich of today are also different from the rich of yesterday. Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition—and many of them, as a result, have an ambivalent attitude toward those of us who didn’t succeed so spectacularly. Perhaps most noteworthy, they are becoming a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home.

The key word in that paragraph, by the way, is competition. Our elite are consumed with getting into a position of global prominence and then beating their fellows in the great game of wealth and power accumulation. They are not, with few exceptions, primarily concerned with building national or local prosperity. They are building a global empire of the elite, and we are its subjects.

The conversation around the fiscal cliff is a clear indicator that our national politicians, and the media and business leaders that surround them, are more concerned with power than outcomes. The entire conversation, from the President on down to David Gregory on Meet the Press this morning, is driven by who gains political advantage from a deal, or lack thereof. Only rarely do you hear anyone even mention the underlying issues of debt and spending that have gotten us to this point, and the conversation almost instantly breaks down over whose numbers are more important, and moments later we are back to looking at who is winning the polls.

The politicians on both sides work for, and want to be part of, the elite. That's why they're willing to raise taxes on income before they'll go after taxes on investment. Because the bankers and hedge fund managers who pay those low taxes on their earnings all went to the same elite schools as the politicians, attend Davos with those politicians, and go to costly fundraisers with (and often for) those politicians. The politicians know these people and care about them in ways they could never know or care about most of their constituents. Now, this isn't to say every politician is this way, but certainly enough are that it distorts our civic life profoundly.

Since this global elite is so focused on money (as a numeric indicator of power, if nothing else) it is not surprising that financiers would be at the heart of the matter. Many made the argument that a global financial system that is so complex and intertwined that the collapse of any large institution could destroy the worldwide economy should be dismantled. I have never heard a coherent argument against this position, I am sure it polls incredibly well around the world, and the banks go on more or less untouched, and they even manage to do things like help Iran launder money in the search for profits.

Again, I'm not saying we're being oppressed or horribly mistreated by these rulers, merely that they are making the decisions they think are best for "the people" without really caring about what the people want, and that they are increasingly adept at extracting wealth from us without giving much of value in return. This elite has managed to avoid a shooting war in and amongst the developed nations for over 70 years, and has, I think, done some good in reducing the impact of extreme poverty. Their record isn't all that bad compared with some other ruling classes we could look at.

It is just good to keep in mind that this global ruling class is ultimately running the show, that it neither feels connected to or much worries about the middle class in the countries it happens to inhabit, and that it feels no compunction about being very well-compensated for its efforts. If nothing else, it will help you make more sense of seemingly manufactured events like the fiscal cliff.

My Wife, Equality, and That Which Is Not Seen

NOTE: My wife in no way put me up to this post. Rumors that my busy travel schedule and an accidental trip down the Midtown Direct line to Mount Tabor have me in the doghouse are completely false. More seriously, these are my opinions, not hers, which should go without saying but often doesn't.

Economists, especially of the rightward-leaning variety, like to cite Frederic Bastiat's Parable of the Broken Window when they talk about the consequences of government spending, or how economic decision-making has invisible secondary effects, and lots of other things besides. (One of the nice things about parables, whether they come from Jesus or an economist, is that they can be applied pretty broadly.) This parable comes from an essay called, "That Which is Seen and That Which is Not Seen", and they show that a broken window, which some people might call an economic benefit because it forces the owner to spend for repairs, is actually a misallocation of resources because it diverts that spending away from a more productive channel. 

I'm now going to abuse that parable a little bit, and say that we most often observe the effect Bastiat is describing when it comes to well-meaning rules. So, here's where my wife comes in. She is "That Which Is Not Seen", the unnoticed victim of rules that are meant to protect women and in particular working mothers. In short, I believe that the rules and regulations meant to protect women in the workplace are in fact keeping her out of the workplace.

A bit of background. My wife, Kim Reed, is a very talented person who could be doing any number of things (check out her vastly more interesting blog if you want a sample) but has focused, career-wise, on product development. This is in essence the science of taking an idea from a designer or artist (or company bigshot, as the case may be) and figuring out how to get it made at commercial scale and at a cost the market will bear. She's done this for companies making curtain rods, dinnerware, watch bands and, most recently, high end jewelry. Kim felt like her job at Tiffany & Co. was a sign she had made it in New York, and that it would open up lots of options in her career. She felt that way when she got pregnant, even though she intended to return to work there after our son was born.

But she decided she wanted to take six months instead of three months, and Tiffany wasn't cool with that. They said they'd consider her for other roles when she was ready to come back, but somehow that hasn't worked out. My belief is that, in a company that is predominantly staffed by women of child-bearing age, they didn't want to set the "bad precedent" of allowing too much employee flexibility around maternity leave. And since the law says you are protected for 12 weeks, and then pretty much on your own, that makes 12 weeks the default, and woe be it if you feel like you need more time. 

Now, I don't begrudge Tiffany the right to make the best business decision for their company, and I suppose (although her reviews both there and everywhere else she's ever worked would make it seem unlikely) that they didn't consider her a particularly productive employee. But I do think that the laws that "protect" women treat them as a uniform group and define (and thus limit) what they can expect from a company. Twelve weeks is an arbitrary number, not some well-thought out limit on the needs of new mothers.

I wouldn't have thought much of what happened with Tiffany if it hadn't been for her subsequent experience in the job market. My wife has had a large number of interviews, and with a handful of companies has gone back multiple times, and left with the expectation of an offer. And a pattern has emerged. All of a sudden she stops hearing from the company, and either they completely ignore her (again, after multiple rounds of interviews taking significant chunks of her time) or give a non-answer as to why she is no longer being considered.

Here, I think, other rules that are meant to help women are actually hurting Kim. You are, as an employer, not allowed to discriminate against women with children. You aren't even allowed to ask about someone's family status or how it might effect their work. But you can't expect people not to think about it. What's more, once you hire someone, you risk an expensive and frustrating lawsuit if you let them go and there is a perception you might have done so because of their family issues. You might not be allowed to say any of this (and you're in it deep if you ever write it in an email or otherwise document it), but if you're hiring you can't help but think about it. And so I believe that a woman with a young child, who hasn't been working for a while, is now seen as a potential legal liability as much as a potential asset. And, if you decide not to take the chance, but can't articulate an approved reason to reject the person? Well, easier just to never call back and let the issue, as the said in Office Space, "work itself out naturally."

I normally try not to get into personal issues on this blog, but I think this is a great example of understanding how the mind works and how we react to incentives. The government, for understandable reasons, sets up rules that are meant to protect women in the workplace. But people don't necessarily respond to the intent of the law (which is to ensure women aren't treated worse because they have children) but rather to the effects of the law (which is to make it legally easier to deal with men or women without children). Women like Kim who have children have to behave within the strictures of the laws that have been created or else they are suspect, seen as a problem waiting to happen. 

I think that one of the greatest benefits to society in the last century has been the unlocking of women's potential to impact society for the better. We have, in essence, doubled our human capital. But a lot of what passes for "women's rights" is condescension that assumes all women want the same things or need the same protections. And I think, based on the evidence of Kim and many other women I've known, that if the genders competed on an entirely even playing field, us men are likely to get trounced.

The Crisis Slouching Towards Us

NOTE: This is third in a series of four planned posts about how we make decisions as a society, and where our political leadership might be taking us. It is meant to be non-partisan, but my conservative-ness might slip through. In the first post,I discussed the difference between team thinking and crisis thinking, and how we seem to be demonstrating a team mentality while saying we are in a crisis. The second post considered the possibility that things aren't all that bad, but political marketing is making us feel the world is falling apart. This post looks at whether we are waiting for a crisis we know must come, but is taking its sweet time to get here. The final post will consider the possibility that our society is in fact splitting in two.

I was in a small meeting with a group of a half dozen smart and experienced marketers here in New York City, when the conversation turned to the screwed up-ness of our society and our politics. In no time at all, about half the group was discussing the steps they were taking to prevent the government from seizing their retirement assets in the event of financial collapse, how much cash you should take out of the bank and keep hidden under the proverbial mattress, and whether a shotgun or a pistol is the better home defense alternative. And the half not participating all had a look on their face that said, not "look at the conservative nut jobs" but "geez, I probably should start thinking about this stuff." Doomsday preparedness has, it seems, achieved a sort of mainstream respectability it completely lacked not too long ago.

This failure of leadership has been widely noted by the public: consider how abysmally low are the approval ratings for Congress, who are after all directly elected by the people expressing their disapproval. We often explain this seeming inconsistency by saying that a lot of people like their congressman alright, but hate the results of the whole assortment of them. But what if people are voting for the party they find less objectionable, because they accept the narrative that the other guys are mostly to blame, without any real faith in the individual they are electing? (As a personal observation, I've never voted for anyone, for any office, feeling that that individual was worthy of support. I've voted against people I thought would be awful leaders, and I've voted for certain expressed positions without much confidence in the person expressing them.)

Is our doom hanging over our heads? The problem is that we can't be sure. Maybe this is just the extended darkness before the dawn. But the belief people seem to have, regardless of political affiliation, is not that things are going to get better, but that we pulled back from the precipice briefly, but the problems are only getting worse behind the emergency barriers we've erected.

Where that crisis comes from depends on your political affiliation. When I talk to liberals, they tell me that that this is a crisis caused by our business and financial elites. In their telling, the system is rigged to enhance their power and earnings, and their narrow-minded selfishness is wrecking the fairness and the shared prosperity of the American system. Conservatives will blame different elites: those in the government and the heights of culture who want to overspend other peoples' money and try to solve deep rooted societal problems through heavy-handed federal intervention that's doomed to fail. Interestingly, one side's hero is the other side's villain. Liberals think the government can constrain the greed of businessmen. Conservatives lament that by constraining businessmen, government has exacerbated our financial problems, keeping the 'job-creators' on the sidelines.

This public split may actually be a core reason why a future crisis seems inevitable. If we can't even agree on who is driving us to ruin, how can we stop it? And each side identifying a cohort of wrongdoers who align with their preexisting politics disguises another possible answer: our business, our political and our cultural elites have all failed us. Peggy Noonan has noted that we seem to have elites in all walks of life who want to be cool instead of being leaders.

What I guess I'm suggesting is that, if we take off the partisan blinders, we might find that our problems are in no small part due to an elite that has become self-perpetuating and self-serving. This elite shares certain assumptions (about the virtue of a meritocracy created by a flawed college admissions system, for example) but more importantly, certain relationships. The fact that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have four Ivy League degrees between them is often cited as an example of their talent and drive, but rarely as an indication that leaders from both parties tend to travel in the same rarified circles. Increasingly, the elites from all walks of life come from the same background, which means they are broadly more sympathetic to each other than to those left behind by the modern world. It also means they lack the necessary sense of urgency to hold off the crisis dragging towards us: everyone they know is probably doing fine.

The problems we face don't have painless fixes. But our elites gain power by telling their supporters that they don't need to bear the pain, that it is the responsibility of the other side. So as long as the crisis is held at bay, they can retain their power through these cheap arguments. Which perhaps explains why the crisis is slow in coming: if there are short term financial moves that can be made to forestall it, our elites will grasp it, no matter the long term consequences. Because every day that they are in power is a day they can enrich themselves, and be told how wonderful they are by their cronies and hangers-on.

If the gut feeling expressed by my work colleagues is right, the crisis is coming for us like a zombie: slowly, but relentlessly. Our elites aren't thinking of that eventuality, but are playing for their short term advantage no matter what might be looming on the horizon. And the bulk of citizens, who intuit that things are going off the rails, can't find anyone they trust to fix the problem when they can't even agree on who's to blame.

Why We Believe We Are Entitled to Health Care

I learned the Supreme Court voted to uphold Obamacare today while I was in a brainstorming session for a drug that will launch next year. I had the same thought I've had on other occasions when people define the "right" to health care: how can someone have a right to a product that has just been invented, or to a skill that certain individuals study for decades to acquire and perfect? Of course, if we want to be strict with our language, Obamacare doesn't give anyone a right to health care, it creates a new entitlement to health care.

I've always had a problem with the notion of a government entitlement. It implies, to my ears, that the State determines what people need to get by in life, and then sets out to give it to them. And that the people have to be vigilant in making sure that they get what's coming to them. I hear, in my head, a smart but whiny teenager, "If my sister is getting a new car, then I'm entitled to one, too!"

But leave aside my grumpy dislike of the word: should there be an entitlement to health care? And what would we include (and exclude) within that entitlement? A lot of people clearly believe there should be a very broad health care entitlement, including medicines like contraception that stretch that entitlement far beyond life-and-death issues. So, are we entitled to all pharmaceutical products? Even this one? Is every surgery part of that entitlement? Even this one? Suddenly it becomes hard to find the line.

I kept sitting in my meeting, thinking about these issues and (as it happens) eating a wonderful chipwich. My mind went to FDR's Four Freedoms, and specifically the Freedom from Want. That idea is largely defined as implying a right to adequate food, clothing and shelter, and sometimes to the right to a job that pays a living wage. It seems odd, first of all, that we would push for universal healthcare before we would push for universal access to those more basic elements of survival. But it also seems apparent, if we defined a food entitlement as broadly as we define the health care entitlement, that we would be enshrining universal access to chipwiches into law. Of course, people like me would love that, and I'm sure the chipwich people would love that (and clearly, the pharmaceutical industry was bullish on the notion of increasing their potential market with Obamacare), but that doesn't mean it makes economic or practical sense.

Forgive me for going on, but I'm trying to make the argument that we have very muddle-headed thinking about what a health care entitlement should actually do, and what it should (or shouldn't) cover. I'm going to assume that my chipwich analogy has you convinced that we can't give all people access to everything that falls under the header of health care. But why isn't this instantly apparent to people?

Well, I'd like to offer two completely speculative suggestions. The first is that health care consumption is much more passive for most people than is their consumption of food, clothing, shelter and other basic necessities. If you need food, you go out and buy what you think is best and what you can afford. Even if you are on food stamps, the choice of food and the act of getting it is still in your hands. But taking charge of your health in a similar way is almost impossible. You very rarely even know what you need until someone else tells you: if you feel "bad", you go to a doctor who pronounces what you need, and then hands you a piece of paper which you docilely take to a pharmacist, who hands you a bottle of nondescript pills that you assume will do what everyone told you to do. And most of this is paid for by your insurance, so you don't even really know what it costs. Essentially, your health is already basically someone else's problem, so taking the step of saying it is the government's responsibility isn't really that dramatic.

The second possibility is that improving our health through popping pills or invasive surgery is evolutionarily novel. The psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa has developed the theory that intelligence evolved to deal with evolutionarily novel problems, the type of things we wouldn't have to deal with every day. As he puts it:

We know what to do when it comes to mating.  We know what to do when it comes to parenting and learning a language associated with other people. All these things our ancestors did already have ready-made solutions in our brain, but occasionally there are novel problems that required our ancestors to think and that’s how intelligence evolves. Some people who could think and reason and solve these evolutionary novel problems did better occasionally, so my contention is that intelligence evolved to deal with novel problems and as a result more intelligent people are more likely to recognize evolutionarily novel entities and situations.

So, you'd expect that, faced with the proliferation of new treatments, intelligent people would be more comfortable dealing with them and coming up with ways to make them more accessible. But he continues:

The key part of the equation is that intelligence leads individuals to seek novel solutions and as a result they become more likely to adopt novel preferences and values, so intelligence makes people do unnatural things.

I read this to imply that, in the face of evolutionarily novel situations, people are willing to try something different, but we aren't automatically going to pick the right or most workable solution to the problem we face. People generally know what to do to get food, clothing and shelter, but the novelty of accessing health solutions might make us willing to consider "unnatural" alternatives.

To go back to food analogies: we would never say that everyone has the right to prime rib and lobster every day, because we all intuitively understand we'd go broke. But the novelty of health care makes us blind to that simple truth. Of course, eventually economic reality will overwhelm our confusion and the good intentions that have led us to this point.

Two Links and a Plug: 10/16

Sometimes you read a piece by a writer you really admire (and I do greatly admire Williamson's work) and are disheartened to discover you find his latest argument ridiculous. I don't know if we should tax Wall Street investment earnings as income, but to contend that this is going to lead to them all getting 70% raises is absurd. If the money was there for them to be paid 70% more, would they be leaving it on the table now out of goodwill? Are their clients not sensitive to any price increases that would support a 70% raise? To imply that raising taxes on finance guys will just cause those evil magicians to conjure up more income ascribes to them a level of power that would make leftist critiques of capitalism a lot more valid. Hell, if I thought these guys could collectively jack up their salaries like that, I'd be sitting in a drum circle with the hippies downtown right now.

Is your city Greece? Pennsylvania's capital city (Harrisburg, for those of you who have forgotten 4th grade geography) is going bankrupt, and it looks like many other cities in the Northeast, California and elsewhere could be right behind. So ask yourself: if you think debates in Congress are ugly, what is it going to look like when your town council announces they can't pay the police force? (Bonus link: Michael Lewis captured the despair of bankrupt cities magnificently in this piece for Vanity Fair.)

PLUG: Many of you probably saw Arcade Fire's customizable video for "The Wilderness Downtown". Now that same technology has been used by State Farm to blow up your house. Check it out here.

Two Links and a Plug

For months, I've been meaning to start directing people to some of the many interesting things I find myself reading. I've also wanted to share some of the cool stuff that's happening at Google. Thus, this format. As often as I have the time and material, I'm going to share two articles I think are worth your time, and one Google or YouTube creation you might enjoy experiencing. I won't be promoting these too often, so please check back if you're interested.

For stimulus to work, we must be stupid: I've been reading a lot about why we seem out of tools to fix the economy. I even wrote a piece about it about a month back. But I think this article on the limits of Keynesianism, and in particular how the theories of this year's Nobel Prize winners tell us that we should expect our traditional economic levers to fail as people start paying more attention.

An article I am too afraid to send to my wife: Is this finally proof that baby brain drain is real? (And does the same thing happen to men? Because it feels like it sometimes.)

PLUG: Spacelab channel launches on YouTube: This is a great use of the Internet's power to inspire and encourage people (in this case young people) to open their minds to new ideas and new possibilities. And how awesome would it be if some kid's experiment actually leads to a significant discovery?

Enjoy, and if you have any suggestions for stuff to feature, please send it my way.

Why Stimulus isn't Stimulating

Obama's jobs bill (so named, presumably, on the theory that no one could be against jobs) (and yes, I know the Republicans do the same sleazy thing, for example with the Patriot Act) has renewed the debate over stimulus: whether we need it, how much good it does, and how big it should be. Conservative writers I respect, like Ross Douthat have offered measured voices of approval, but generally reaction to the plan breaks along partisan lines. The Wall Street Journal offers the conventional conservative perspective:

With $4 trillion in debt in three years, it is hard to see how another $400 billion in debt will lead to more economic growth and job creation. We've already had the biggest Keynesian stimulus in 60 years, and the result has been more than a million job losses since January 2009.

That $4 trillion number really jumps out, but in this case the conservative desire to bash Obama is hiding the true scope of the problem. While borrowing has accelerated since Obama was elected, G.W. Bush was borrowing on a scale almost as extreme. By looking at Obama's decisions in isolation, we lack the context to ask a fundamental question: are these stimulus measures doomed to failure because our economy was already highly stimulated before the recession even started?

The chart above shows the annual level of borrowing from 1990 through 2010. During the early 1990's, we see the level of borrowing peak at the end of Bush the First's presidency, and decline until we actually had a small surplus at the end of Clinton's second term. And then things reverse, the line trending up almost as steeply as it does during Obama's time in office. Why? Because Bush the Second decided to 'give back' the surplus in the form of tax cuts, and then the 9/11 attacks both hurt the economy and led to unpaid-for wars.

If the essence of stimulus is that the government borrows to increase overall demand in the economy, than the 2002-2004 saw a massive, if unnamed, stimulus effort. And perhaps it worked. The economy didn't go into a severe recession after 9/11, so perhaps it had some sort of effect. Add to that the historically low interest rates and loose borrowing standards that led to a massive injection of private credit spending into the economy, and we had a truly massive "stealth stimulus."

Now, before those borrowing levels even had a chance to go down much, the crash of 2008 hit and government borrowing quickly spiked to the trillion-plus levels to which we've now sadly become accustomed. But why hasn't deficit spending, this time specifically structured to be 'stimulative', had the desired effect?

I think there are three potential explanations:

1) The fundamentals of the economy are so bad that much more deficit spending is needed to have an effect. (The Krugman thesis)
2) Stimulus doesn't really work, especially if the numbers we're borrowing are so high that lenders and investors doubt we can pay it back (The Republican thesis)
3) Stimulus has to be temporary to work, and we already had one last decade that we haven't even started to pay off. (My lonely theory)

Whether the first explanation is true or not is really academic: to borrow a significantly higher amount was never going to be politically feasible. (And could any recovery be strong enough to pay off the incurred debt in a reasonable period?)

But I think the second explanation, much loved by conservatives, risks positioning the Republican party as do-nothings who aren't trying to help the jobless. As Jacob Weisberg wrote recently on Slate.com, "Pick up any standard economics textbook, and it will explain how governments respond to cyclical downturns with temporary deficit spending." You can fight this argument, or you can concede it and point out that we have had a decade of unprecedented stimulus, and there is no longer anything temporary about our deficit spending. A simple question to ask your pro-stimulus friends (or for the eventual Republican nominee to ask Barack Obama), "In what year do you foresee the government taking in more money than it spends, and how will you get us there?"

Since 2002 (or maybe even since Reagan began large-scale peacetime borrowing in the 1980's) that we have been using government borrowing to mask weaknesses in our economy. The sad truth is that doing so made those weaknesses more severe, and now our problems are worse and the tools we have previously used to juice the economy have lost their effectiveness. Which should tell us that, just maybe, we should not act as if we know how to control something as complex and unpredictable as the nation's economy in the first place.

One Economy or Two?

Good writing can expose you to something new, or it can organize thoughts and facts you already have into a more coherent picture. That happened to me the other day when I read David Goldman (who often writes as "Spengler) explain that we have a 'winner' economy and a 'loser' economy.

The main thrust of his argument is that for a significant portion of the country, things are actually going quite well. But instead of success at the top pulling everyone along into economic revival, the successful are pulling away and leaving a significant group of Americans behind. So far this sounds like the standard liberal critique of the economy since the days of Reagan. But Goldman is no liberal, and he is making a more important and unusual point:

Perhaps we should think about America the way we think of an emerging market, except that America is submerging instead. The Chinese have warned for years that they are two countries, a First World country on the seacoast and a Fourth World country in the interior. We know that India has two economies, a small modern one and a vast backward one, and we are not particularly concerned with the GDP of impoverished rural people (if indeed we could measure it). We want to know what Tata Industries or Reliance Industries are up to.

China and India have become a dual economy because a portion of their population has clambered up into prosperity; America has become a dual economy because a portion of their population has tumbled into destitution. But the fact that larger American corporations have had a strong recovery should reassure us that America is capable of a broader recovery.

The suggestion here, I think, is that none of the typical efforts to get the economy as a whole moving again are likely to work as king as some people (and maybe some entire regions) lack the skills and resources to compete in the modern global economy.

We have enjoyed almost seven decades since the end of World War II where our country was the center of the economic universe, which allowed us to find something to do for nearly everyone who wanted to work. In the past few decades, though, as stiffer economic competition has emerged, our advantages have lessened. The acceleration of our borrowing in recent years can be seen in part as an effort to delay dealing with that fact by handing out benefits that the country hadn't earned. But now that game is up.

As a thought experiment, let's imagine 70% of people can partake of the modern 'winner' economy, while the other 30% bump along in the uncompetitive 'loser' economy. Will the 70% subsidize the others when doing so means higher taxes instead of just more borrowing? Or will the 30% be left to fend for themselves, making the divide that much more apparent?

The myth Democrats tell themselves is that they can find ways to subsidize the poor without bankrupting the country and disincentivizing work further. The myth Republicans tell themselves is that removing the support will encourage effort and individual initiative among the 'losers' and ultimately help them more than the subsidies. But the reality is that a large and growing number of Americans probably don't have the skills and talent to compete, and without some sort of assistance will live more miserable, unfulfilling and unhealthy lives. As will their children.

Our divided economy doesn't look to be going away any time soon. But what do we do about it?

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.

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.

"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.

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.

Why Michele Bachmann Will Get Obama Re-Elected

First, let me say my hope is that someone at Daily Kos or the Huffington Post will come across that headline, link to it, and drive my traffic through the roof. But my point is decidedly not that Michele Bachmann is some evil, despicable quasi-fascist who will drive Americans screaming back into the President's arms. In fact, I thought her speech tonight was a strong distillation of the problems we face, even though it was a bit selective in its argument that the economy and the deficit got much worse when Obama was elected.

But I did have a moment of clarity while watching Bachmann's speech, and realized that she (and the Tea Party more generally) will very likely create the conditions for Obama's reelection. And the way that will happen, ironically, is by pushing him closer to Republican positions. Let's say, for the sake of simplicity, that Obama represents the Standard Left position in American politics, and the Republicans, as ably represented this evening by Paul Ryan, represent the Standard Right position. Normally those two positions are the only two with any serious traction in our politics, and so voters and interests align with one of the two teams. Then the two teams fight and from time to time one team wins enough power to do some of the things it wants, though that inevitably generates a backlash. Or else a few moderates cut a deal, and pass some watered-down halfway measure.

Well, then, Bachmann and the Tea Party represent a distinct third position, related to the Republican side but not the same. Let's call it, not far-right (which people say when they're trying to call someone a Nazi) but Strict Right. The principles aren't THAT different from the Standard Right, but they're taken a little further and there is little room for compromise.

Now, President Obama just laid out a lot of things he would like to get done in his State of the Union, and acknowledged that he can't do those things with Democratic support alone. So he needs Republican partners, and the Paul Ryan/Standard Right team is going to be the only place he can go to do that. So there will undoubtedly be talks between the President and those folks. But the Strict Right group will be very skeptical of any proposed deal, and put a lot of pressure on the Standard Right to resist any compromises. So the Standard Right will have to consider these factors:

1) If they go too far to the center, they are vulnerable to primary challenges from the Tea Party, and these challenges were remarkably effective in the last cycle. That puts an upper bound on what compromises will be feasible (and Obama will know this, too.)

2) If they are completely unwilling to work with the President, the public is likely to blame Republicans for the resulting lack of progress, as they did in the Newt Gingrich era during the government shutdown fight. This will tell the Standard Right that they can't just sit on their hands for two years and try to pin the blame on Obama.

3) There is a real financial and budgetary problem that people like Paul Ryan are truly committed to solving, and a bipartisan deal helps them do that while spreading the blame for painful decisions across both parties.

4) Obama knows that it will be hard for Democrats to keep the Senate in 2012, so even if he is reelected, he's unlikely to be able to pass liberal legislation, so he might as well make the best deals he can now, because his second term will likely be about defending past liberal achievements, not getting new ones.

So the solution is for Obama and the Standard Right to make deals that give the Republicans 75% or more of what they want (to blunt the effectiveness of Tea Party primary challenges) while giving Obama some small victories he can present to the Standard Left. The Strict Right may complain that the Standard Right have betrayed their principles, but as long as the legislation is popular, generally conservative, and effective at cutting the deficit, these arguments will seem inflexible and overly partisan. And the far (Strict?) Left will complain, to the same effect.

So Obama will be able to run as a centrist, instead of just saying he is, and the Standard Right will be able to claim a victory for American principles, and that they made democracy work again. Independents will reward them both, giving us a Republican House and Senate and an Obama re-election.

And while I'm not exactly an Obama cheerleader, that'd be just fine with me.

A Healthy Dose of Fear

My good friend Ben blogs over at A Healthy Dose, with some interesting, and often very personal, observations on the interaction between healthcare and culture. He flashes up some interesting stats here, with a link to more here, that imply one of two possible futures:

1) Baby Boomers retire in droves, swamp the government and corporate systems designed to ensure their retirements, and suck up an increasing share of the nation's resources.

2) Baby Boomers 'work until they drop', stay in the labor market a decade or more longer than expected, and lock up positions that otherwise would have been freed up for younger workers. (James K. Gilbraith at Foreign Policy argues that we should lower the retirement age for this reason.)

Our best hope is for a Goldilocks outcome, where enough Boomers keep working to avoid overwhelming the safety net, but enough retire to open positions for the younger unemployed. But it is just as likely that, given the number of Boomers, there will be too many retirees and too many senior workers at the same time.

Unfortunately, while our society has finally woken up to the problem, we don't seem to have the first clue what the solution to our senior citizen boom might be.

Which Way, America?

I think I have been hearing some version of the phrase "this is America's decisive moment" since I was old enough to care about politics, certainly since I was old enough to vote (1998, for the record). So all of the people going on about how we need to make some huge changes right now, OR ELSE are probably feeding the hype monster just a little bit.

But it is hard not to agree that the country is trending the wrong way, and has been for about a decade. It seems most people are content to look to assign blame (which in and of itself is a symptom of the disease). And in this column, Peggy Noonan does a bit of that, pointing at Obama's seeming disconnect from the country both in terms of policy and tone. But I don't think she really blames him, but rather sees his ascent to power as a symptom of the disease. And that disease is one that the Tea Party succumbed to this year, looking for the quick fix, for voting for passing celebrities rather than proven leaders. Noonan takes Sarah Palin to task for her fundamental unseriousness, then goes on to say:

Reagan's career is a guide, not only for the tea party but for all in politics. He brought his fully mature, fully seasoned self into politics with him. He wasn't in search of a life when he ran for office, and he wasn't in search of fame; he'd already lived a life, he was already well known, he'd accomplished things in the world.

Here is an old tradition badly in need of return: You have to earn your way into politics. You should go have a life, build a string of accomplishments, then enter public service. And you need actual talent: You have to be able to bring people in and along. You can't just bully them, you can't just assert and taunt, you have to be able to persuade.

I completely agree that we have been following the political equivalent of false prophets for a while, but I think Noonan's invocation of those who "earn their way into politics" is another potentially dangerous shortcut to an answer. If, in 2012, we elect someone with a history of service, of accomplishment, does that guarantee anything? Couldn't that, for example, refer to Richard Nixon about as well as Ronald Reagan? Or Lyndon Johnson? The problem is not that the experienced leaders aren't popular, it is that they are correctly seen by many Americans as having put us in our current bind, and so rather than think coherently about the best way out of this mess, they look for fresh faces. And unfortunately, some of those faces are essentially reality TV stars who have learned to espouse some catch phrases that fire up a good chunk of one political faction or another.

Which is why, despite its lack of concrete policy proposals or political suggestions, I really liked this David Brooks column on America's potential to be "The Crossroads Nation". Brooks manages to avoid the tired terms of our current debate about whether we need more stimulus, or what the tax rates should be, or if ObamaCare should be repealed. He looks to principles, and tries to express a vision for what our nation should stand for. I personally find it a moving vision:

In fact, the U.S. is well situated to be the crossroads nation. It is well situated to be the center of global networks and to nurture the right kinds of networks. Building that America means doing everything possible to thicken connections: finance research to attract scientists; improve infrastructure to ease travel; fix immigration to funnel talent; reform taxes to attract superstars; make study abroad a rite of passage for college students; take advantage of the millions of veterans who have served overseas.

In other words, he wants the nation to serve as a welcoming hub for entrepreneurs, thinkers and inventors from around the world. That vision both identifies a key, hard to compete with strength that our country has, and suggests a series of policies that should be pursued to make it happen. Some would appeal more to the right, some to the left. That might make it harder (or impossible) to pass, but it also suggests that it offers a way to escape the dull political pendulum swings that are marking time in our nation's current decline.

The Expert Problem

I was listening to NPR the other day and heard some pundit complain about something I've heard in many venues: namely, that so little of the stimulus money has been spent. This article lays out some of the details, as do many others if you care to look. Why, you might ask, is it so hard to actually spend this money and get some stuff built? After all, there are no shortages of rundown or overcrowded highways, or congested rail corridors, or outdated airports. Let's get to work!

Not so fast. The reason you don't see new bridges and tunnels being built, as happened frequently in the Great Depression, is in large part because we now have experts to clutter up these projects. Nothing gets done by the people who make things without the people who think about things having their say first. In many ways, the white collar worker is the enemy of his blue collar brother, as the reports, analyses and meetings of the former slow up the building, creating and manufacturing of the latter.

Just take a look at this page updating on progress for the Second Avenue Subway line here in NYC: you see study after study, recommendation after recommendation, but words like, "dig" are barely to be found. A century ago, this city was criss-crossed with subway lines, built largely by private industry. But now it seems it takes decades just to study the possibility of a project. I work a half block away from where the proposed line will run, and strongly doubt I will ever ride it.

Obviously, there is merit in looking before you leap, and considering the best way to execute a project as well as its possible impact before starting. But projects like the Big Dig are beset by cost overruns and engineering failures even after the best minds study the problem endlessly, so how much value do all these reports really provide? The country aches for renewal, and improving our infrastructure is part of that. So lets stop the debating and get to work.