Author Archives: admin

May 27 2017

Healthcare — the Fundamental Choices

One of our fundamental choices about health care has moral and practical dimensions.  The other is purely practical.

Let’s first address the practical issue.  Our  appruoach to health care puts our businesses at a serious and growing competitive disadvantage.  US corporations currently spend $12,591 on average for coverage of a family of four, up 54% since 2005.

Our national health care spending, which was 5% of GDP fifty years ago, is now 17 % of GDP.  It has more than tripled.  Meanwhile, Germany’s spending is two thirds of ours and is growing much less rapidly.

We spend half again as much or more on health care as other advanced economies.  And the gap is growing.  Germany now spends 11% of GDP on health care, only increased from 9% half a century ago.  Japan spends 10%,  Britain 9%.

It’s no coincidence that our health care system is fundamentally different from our competitors’.

Our business leaders say their competitiveness is hobbled by corporate taxes, but while our health care spending has more than tripled in the last half century, corporate taxes that were then 4% of GDP are now half that at about 2%.

It’s true we have industrialized nations’ highest corporate tax rate but many of our great multinational corporations pay little or none.  It’s also true that our high tax rate hurts smaller domestic corporations but that’s much less important than our health care system’s costs.

To remain competitive, we must restructure our health care system.  

The choice with both moral and practical dimensions is whether everyone will have health care, or only those who can pay?  

If only those get health care who can pay, the others will suffer and die.  If we favor this approach we should consider, are we okay with that fact?

If everyone will get health care, there must be some rationing.   If we favor this approach, do we recognize that fact?

It’s misleading to think of health care as a human right.  Nations choose what rights their citizens will have and embody them in laws.  Those laws can and do change.

Our current legal system specifies that, with an exception I’ll get to in a minute, those of us who cannot pay for health care do not get it.  Why is that, and could it change?

It is an article of faith with us that we are rugged individuals who take responsibility for ourselves.  We resist anything we think could make us less responsible.

Another of our articles of faith is that competing organizations motivated by profit always get the best results.

But that could be about to change.  The Medicare for All act has 108 sponsors as of May 13, 2017: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/676

We would get better results from a unified approach to health care.  We do not, after all, provide for our defense with autonomous, competing armies.  We know that kind of service can only be supplied effectively by our central government.  And we know our government has encouraged, not stifled innovation in that field.

Here are links to what I’ve written before about some important aspects of our approach to health care but if you’re out of time, just skip past them to the conclusion — a single payer system works best.

In http://martinsidwell.com/socially-acceptable-healthcare/ I pointed out that we do currently provide not health care but at least medical treatment to all via the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) passed under President Reagan.  That approach means: “We have in the USA universal access to medical treatment via the most costly system possible.”

Data I posted at:  https://usaturnaround.wordpress.com/2011/09/21/healthcare-from-85000-feet/ show that:  “US health care delivers poorer results at higher cost because it is based on the flawed assumption that market based systems always deliver the best results. While in most cases they do, for health care they do not. The incentives are perverse”.

Exploring our Federal deficit at: https://usaturnaround.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/drivers-of-the-deficit/ I noted that: “more important even than getting rising Federal healthcare spending under control is to get rising health care cost under control.  As noted in previous posts, we spend double what other advanced economies do on healthcare without getting better results.”

Examining national spending and results at: https://usaturnaround.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/overall-us-healthcare/ I pointed out some contributors to our abnormally high costs:  “our obesity rate, the highest of all OECD countries and more than twice as high as the 15% OECD average …  The percentage of our adult population considered obese rose from 13% in 1965 to […] 34% in 2007.  Obesity-related medical spending in the USA doubled […] between 1998 and 2008.”  

Focusing at: https://usaturnaround.wordpress.com/2011/04/17/medicare-and-medicaid/ on Medicare and Medicaid I pointed out that: “The primary cause of increased Medicaid spending is that it now services 16% of all Americans, up from 2% at its inception [while] Medicare now serves 15% of the population, up from 10% in 1966 and the percentage will continue to increase as our population ages … The key fact about Medicare is that an aging population, unhealthy lifestyles and technology advances are driving its costs up 8% annually, much higher than Medicaid.”

The conclusion?  Our need to remain competitive means we must restructure our health care.  Our competitors did that long ago.  They all established a unified system for all their people, they all have much lower costs than ours, and they all get the same or better results.

Our current approach to health care is not exceptional in a good way.

When the government acts as the one health care buyer it has the market power to negotiate the lowest price that is profitable for suppliers.

A competitive health care market benefits consumers only for procedures like breast enhancement where they have enough time to make an informed choice.

To remain competitive we must change our health care system.  We must either stop providing care to many millions more of those who can’t afford it or establish a single buyer to negotiate the lowest profitable price for providing care to the largest pool of consumers, which is both the currently healthy and the sick.

May 6 2017

Words and Reality

Language is the decisive difference between us and other chimpanzees with whom we share 98% of our genes.  We can articulate and review our thoughts.  We can listen to and reflect on what others say.  This enormously amplifies our ability to learn.

But we ought to be much more wary of words.  They only point to things.  Too often we confuse the name we give a thing with what it points toward.  I’ll get to that in a moment.

First, something an empathetic friend helped me see.  She responded to my post about recognizing that I don’t exist: “What you have written about your life is intriguing […] and a little heartbreaking”.  What I saw is a new level of how blessed I’ve been.

My life has never, since I started work, anyway, felt “a little heartbreaking” to me.  I’ve encountered a mix of circumstances, some quite difficult, but I was blessed to accept them and take action, not suffer.

My aim in my no-self post was to show a series of paths I took that were misguided.  My experience along that route to nowhere was a sense of adventure, though.  It was like being on a long trek through different lands.

So I’ve been reflecting on why I was blessed to feel that way.  Two powerful forces were at work.  I’ve mentioned the one known as Florence, my mother who felt there was no challenge she could not surmount.  I’ll say a little more about her, then some about the force in my father, Leonard, that I had to oppose.

Florence grew up in a Catholic orphanage.  She loved children, trained as a nanny and worked first for a wealthy English couple then in Italy for a marquess.  She loved Italy and would have stayed longer but the marquess had to replace her when he was sent on a diplomatic posting to Hitler’s Berlin.

She never said much about that time but it was evidently happy.  She explored with enthusiasm and one of her very few possessions, a picture of a chalet in the mountains on my bedroom wall, likely sparked my own Himalayan treks.

Leonard’s mother died before he was a year old and his father, Whalley, was jailed for refusing to fight in WW1, so he was raised by his beloved grandmother until he was eight.  When Whalley remarried, the three of them joined one of his younger brothers in Akron, Ohio.  Whalley, who hated the cold, was happy when he was offered the chance to operate a citrus farm in extreme SW Texas.  He knew nothing about farming and not a single citrus tree was there but he loved it.  So did Leonard but his step-mother Edith hated the heat even more than Whalley hated the cold, so after a few years they returned to Ohio.

When Whalley was unable to get a job in the Great Depression, he and Edith returned to England.  Leonard stayed to graduate from High School and the friend with the farm offered to fund his college education but Whalley sent him a ticket back to England where, not knowing British history, he did not qualify for the Civil Service as Whalley hoped.  That was when he began giving film shows for the Peace Pledge Union.

The lesson Leonard drew from all these upheavals was, the best he could do was endure.  His happy memories of the farm in Texas and of High School predisposed me to be happy in America but they compounded his yearning for stability.  He was apprehensive about new upheavals anyone with power over him might create.

What my friend’s comment about “heartrending” showed me is, I always understood more than I recognized about acceptance and suffering.

Now a more dramatic example of the power of words.  The Zen master who was my first Buddhist teacher told us one morning:  “If you really want to end suffering, stop creating it”.

Hearing that in a receptive moment, I got a glimpse of what acceptance means and that I had been blessed to practice it much of the time even though I hadn’t understood the word before.  I’ve mostly done as my mother did and my father did not, recognized negative circumstances, not felt sorry for myself and taken action for change.

Here’s a second set of thoughts provoked by a response to my post.  Richard wrote:  “The intersection of physics and psychology gets pretty strange doesn’t it? I’ve done a lot of thinking about the implications of quantum physics, and our worldview. Mostly, it’s been a bunch of circular waffling. The only thing I’m fairly certain of is that our model of reality is flawed, probably because of some version of the “you can’t see the true reality from within the system” problem.”

I circled, too, until I saw that although I have no self, I do exist.  We can discern the structure of reality from within the system even though we can’t quite see how it operates.

We manifest from an ever changing force field, as does everything we perceive, so from that perspective, we don’t “really” exist.  But  our actions change the force field, so in fact we do exist.  How to think about that?

Nothing that is perceptible to us sentient beings can be found in the force field, yet every sentient being is a point of consciousness with the capacity to act.  That means we exist in more than one way, only one of which, the form that takes action, is a form in the way we imagine.

Consciousness is the great puzzle to brain scientists.  Is it a product of the brain, or somehow separate?  I sense it’s separate but what has made all the difference for me is recognizing that we exist in a form that, because it has no intrinsic nature and is utterly imperceptible to our senses, to our way of thinking does not exist.

The reality of sentient beings takes threefold or twofold form in Buddhist metaphysics.  The form that acts is the nirmanakaya, the conscious form is the sambhogakaya, and the imperceptible one is the dharmakaya.  The first two are also thought of as one, the rupakaya, to highlight that the form with no properties is the ultimate level of reality.

There’s a vast mass of logic about why and how reality is multi-fold but it remains in the end a mystery to our intellect.

What we can be certain about is that matter manifests from energy.  We can start by thinking of matter as congealed energy and energy as liberated matter, but when we use quantum physics to examine what’s going on we see that you and I, for example, exist in both forms simultaneously.

Or perhaps we exist in three forms, the three kayas, which we could rename Tom, Dick and Harry if that feels less foreign, or Romeo and Juliet if we’re thinking about the two forms.  It’s only what the words point toward that matters.

I’ve noticed some changes since I began getting glimpses of what all these words are pointing toward, that what seem to be separate beings are not separate, that we are all manifestations from one ocean whose currents flow without boundaries, that we are all eddies in a maelstrom of pure energy.

The less separate I feel, the less indifferent I become.  My impulses are more kind, I’m more prone to compassion than anger, and I’m less grasping.

The energy flows that manifest as Martin are changing because I’m watching them, and the longer I watch, the more sensitive I become to the eddies that manifest as other beings.

Yes, the way this multi-fold reality works is a mystery but now I know how to proceed, acting that way is deeply happy-making.

Apr 20 2017

Happy Birthday in Every Moment

My body was already sixty years old when I began to see with some clarity that I don’t exist as I’d always imagined.  I’ll try to explain what I experienced.

What I noticed first is there had been at different times a different person in my body.  I’ve given them Nordic patronymics.  Leon Leonardsson came first.

Leon came to life in England during WW2 in an isolated farm-worker’s cottage with no utilities.  He was the only child of Leonard and Florence Sidwell, a happy kid fascinated by farm machinery.  Because his parents had no friends, Leon’s social skills were weak but he was highly intelligent.  Florence made him study every day and he got the best results of all students in the exam that determined which school he would go to when he was eleven.

Leonard’s work since WW2 driving an excavator to maintain waterways paid very little but Florence found him a better paying job at this time selling insurance door to door.  They were now able to buy a house with a tiny garden in the neighboring town.  But Leonard hated his new job and that he now had so little room to grow vegetables.  And Leon had nowhere to play and nobody to play with.  As Leonard’s passivity evolved into depression, Leon fell prey to the same disease.

Leon’s new school, a bus-ride away in the county town, was an undistinguished private establishment founded in 1608 that had been recast as a State school ten years before Leon arrived.  Life continued there almost as if the British Empire remained triumphant.  Leon studied and remained top of his class but he was disoriented in this new world.  Told after a couple of years to take the exam for a scholarship to Eton College, he passed but then read about life there and, horrified by the prospect of the even more foreign culture of the aristocracy, he failed the oral interview.

During that first year or two as Leon floundered in his new environment, a less passive new person, Sid Leonsson, began taking over.  He told himself he was justifiably alienated from an antiquated culture, started building the personality of an intellectual and began reading philosophy.  He labeled himself an existentialist.

The secondary school curriculum in England in those days channeled students into either the sciences or the arts but Sid insisted on continuing to study both Physics and English literature.  Then, impatient with a curriculum that still felt too narrow, he drifted ever further from both subjects, roaming far afield into theories about the human condition.

He was delivered a great shock by “Three Faces of Eve”, a psychologist’s account of a patient whose body hosted three entirely different people vying for control.  What if he was not the only one in his body?  His current identity felt inauthentic.  Maybe other personalities would spring forth, and none would be authentic?  A friend whose psychologist father specialized in schizophrenia introduced him to much unsettling literature on this topic.

Sid was also deeply moved by Wilfred Owen and other WW1 poets who expressed the horror and insanity of war.  His grandfather, Whalley Sidwell, had faced execution for treason by refusing to join that war and was jailed for two and a half years.  Whalley’s five younger brothers also refused .  One explained: “What if I kill a German boy then I meet his mother and she asks me why I did that?”

Whalley was a powerful presence.  His son, Leonard, drove a van with a film projector all over England during the 1930s for the Peace Pledge Movement.  Their idea was to make war impossible because everyone would have pledged not to participate.  When WW2 broke out, Leonard did refuse to participate and he was jailed.  On his release he was assigned to agricultural work.  Sid did not yet notice that Whalley was occupying his body, too.

Further study felt useless to Sid by the time college was due to start and he decided he must get a job. Having no other idea how to get one, he went to the government office where jobs are posted and was given one picking apples.  When all the apples were picked, someone told him jobs are also listed in newspapers and showed him one as an inventory clerk.  A couple of years later someone told him the computer department would be better so he went there as a computer operator.

A year later, married and living in London, Sid for the first time searched for a job.  He found one as a programmer at a Dickensian insurance company.  A year or two later someone encouraged him to apply to IBM where for three years he for the first time worked alongside thinking people.  He liked that but disliked the culture.  Asked “What is the purpose of business?” he realized he didn’t know.  The answer was: “To make a profit”.  That can’t be right, he thought.  It’s like saying the purpose of life is to breathe.

So, when Sid saw a small American company’s advertisement about opening for business in England, he joined them.  A couple of weeks later they decided not to enter England but gave him a job in America.  It was 1970, and that was when Martin Sidsson, the third person to do so, took the reins of what was by now a 26 year old body.

Sidsson made a determined effort to fit into the entrepreneurial technology startup and the local culture.  It was not hard because everyone he worked with was smart and interesting.  He also made a determined effort to take the initiative and he was soon assigned to manage development of a precursor to the Internet.  Over the next few years he eagerly took on additional responsibilities and made a determined effort to manage according to his belief that the chief purposes of business are to delight customers and provide opportunity for employees.

He eventually remedied his utter ignorance of business operations, established a management consultancy and learned how to market and sell.  That led him to study why businesses fail and how to set effective strategies.  His last decade of work was in leadership positions in a long established global business followed by an Internet-based startup.

Sidsson’s career was not entirely a smooth progression, however.  In the same way that Whalley and Leonard Sidwell had played an important role in Leonardsson’s life, Leonardsson resurfaced a few years into Sidsson’s.  Sidsson always started out ignorant about new responsibilities he took on and he enjoyed the necessarily fast learning, but because his responsibilities grew rapidly, it was stressful.  Also, everything took extra effort because of the depression he had inherited from Leon, Sid, Leonard and Whalley.

As Sidsson’s stress built up, Leonardsson saw an opportunity to regain control.  Believing farming to be the only truly satisfying occupation and unhampered by understanding the unending work required or why small scale farming was no longer viable where Sidsson lived, he got Sidsson to establish a sheep farm.

Some years later, Sidsson recognized another presence in “himself”.  His mother, Florence Sidwell,  had believed there was no problem she could not fix and no challenge she could not overcome.  Without her presence Sidsson could never even have attempted what he had achieved.

By the time he retired, Sidsson was aware not only of his immediate predecessors, Leon and Sid, who were still vying for control of his body, he also saw his parents, Leonard and Florence, taking action with his body.  He no longer had a strong sense of self and was not surprised when a new person, Martin Martinsson, emerged and took control.

Martinsson went trekking in the Himalayas and experienced there a culture that attracted him greatly.  People were cheerful, as if that was their policy, and they were respectful of each other.  What was the cause?  It seemed to be their Buddhist practice.  A few years later, after many more long treks, much reading, and closer study of the reality, he realized the truth is much more complicated.  The people he thought were Buddhist were mostly animist, Nepal’s traditions come to a great extent from its Hindu aristocracy, and it is a caste society with much domestic violence.

But by the time Martinsson saw that more complex picture, he was acting on what he had first sensed.  He was practicing Tibetan Buddhism.  He had received teachings from Anam Thubten whose book, “No Self, No Problem”, makes clear that we do not have an intrinsic self and whose magnetizing presence shows that one really can he happy in all circumstances and can always be spontaneously kind.

He then met a second teacher, Phakchok Rinpoche, who insists his students follow a disciplined program to reach the state Anam Thubten and others exemplify.  We can’t think our way to that state, he insists, we must slowly, slowly retrain our mind by observing how it works, studying teachings, and reflecting.  Now Martinsson had something to work at, which felt good because it exercised the discipline his first incarnation, Leonardsson, had inherited from his parents, Leonard and Florence.

“What is Buddhism?” Rinpoche asked.  The answer: “Selflessness!”  When you experience not having a self that is intrinsically separate from others, your behavior naturally is selfless.  But gaining and sustaining that experience takes practice.  Having “no self” is not how we ordinarily feel.  Instead, we feel we are in a body that actually is separate from others.

Struggling to understand this, Martinsson returned to physics.  The butterfly effect and more in James Gleick’s “Chaos” got him reflecting on the weather, which manifests in different ways in different places, calm, windy, hot, cold, clear, foggy, sunny, raining, snowing, and always changing.  He came to see that what we call weather is the product of a giant energy field of swirling currents which constantly interact with and change each other, that have no fixed boundaries, and that are always different from moment to moment but which recur in broad form from season to season.

Martinsson recognized that just as weather manifests in the Earth’s environment, what we think of as selves manifest in the environment of bodies.

He continued deeper into quantum physics.  Einstein recognized decades before even Leonardsson was born that matter and energy are different manifestations of the same thing.  Sid had not felt that truth in High School physics classes but Martinsson now began to feel the reality that atoms are not solid things, and nor are solar systems.  Studying Lee Smolin’s explanations of theoretical physics in “The Trouble with Physics”, he began to see that what we experience as things like the Earth, our own body, atoms and everything else do not in fact have fixed boundaries or any intrinsic nature.

Matter is congealed energy; energy is liberated matter.  It only appears to us sentient beings that matter and space are different.  The boundary between them is simply a product of our mind.

The configuration of energy that manifests as a human body is sentient, but with limitations.  Every human body is uniquely configured — the high intelligence of Leon, Sid, and the Martins results from the configuration of the body they share, for example – and every body is constantly changing.

Martinsson began to see not just that everything is in flux, but everything is a manifestation of an energy field whose flows constantly interact producing results that propagate endlessly.

There is no real beginning or end of anything, only of appearances in our minds that manifest from flowing energy.

Catching up on quantum physics made the Tibetan Buddhist teachings real.  Martinsson could now to a growing extent feel the two levels of reality, an underlying energy field and what manifests from that energy to our senses and concept generators as, for example, things and personalities.  Leon Leonardsson, Sid Leonsson, Martin Sidsson and Martin Martinsson all exist on both levels, manifestations of an ever-changing energy field that has also manifested Leonard Sidwell, Florence Sidwell, Anam Thubten, Phakchok Rinpoche and so many more who we think of as “others”.

Well now, am I saying that Leonardsson, Leonsson and Sidsson were real people?  Yes and no.  The more I told you about them, the more real they would seem, but that’s also true of Martinsson.  All of them manifested as real in a situation which made that possible.  They were real in the same way as a rainbow when sunlight is separated by raindrops into colors that we usually perceive as one.   We think of a person as having an intrinsic nature in the same way we think of a rainbow as a thing.

Is a rainbow made of matter?  Is it energy in the form of light?  We don’t ordinarily ask such questions.  We do speculate about people and their nature, but with the wrong perspective.  We think of behaviors that manifest as a person as something with an intrinsic nature although those behaviors are in fact manifestations of an ever changing interaction of energy flows with no fixed boundaries and which, although ever changing, never end.

What does all this imply?  The body labelled Martin Sidwell was conceived at a specific time, was born at a specific later one, and will die at a specific future moment, but the sentient being who manifests in that body had no fixed beginning, it has no fixed nature, and it will have no definite end.

Our every act takes place within and is part of an unimaginably complex energy field.  Our every act changes that flowing energy, just as the tiny force of the butterfly’s flapping wing interacts with the results of other acts and eventually manifests a tornado.

Buddhists refer to how the system operates as karma.  To a great extent our actions are shaped by our concepts and emotional habits.  We rarely respond directly to what we see because what appears in our mind is something that fits an existing pattern there.  We see what we expect to see.  We don’t experience each new moment as unique.  We don’t experience it as it really is.   Karma means we keep reacting as we always do until we shed our fixed ideas and emotional habits.

So everything we do matters, and everything we do out of habit instead of what is actually present is flawed.

Pattern recognition and autopilot enable us to navigate what appears — we must, after all, stop automatically for red lights.  Feeling the energy behind what appears — that results in compassion and brings happiness.

Apr 14 2017

Civic Duty in the World of Social Media

My parents didn’t but most men went to the pub every evening and most women went to the Women’s Institute everye day seventy years ago in the farming village in England where I was a kid.

They went to talk about the news.  Much of it was local gossip but there was also a lot of national and international news on the radio that provoked debate.

Most people just enjoyed the entertainment but some of them very much wanted their neighbors to see sense.  The same sense they saw, of course…

That was how opinions about current events were formed.

Then came TV and the start of a new culture where men and women no longer so rigidly segregated themselves socially.

And then came social media.  Now we can have neighbors we never see but with whom we can chat or just listen to every day.

One way I’m different from my parents is I can’t stop myself from trying to get everyone, myself included, to see sense.  Social media gives me that opportunity and it also offers a fascinating challenge.

We all learn, with varying success, how to persuade others face to face and how to recognize when we’re the one who is mistaken.  But how to do that when we’re not face to face?

This is my first post in many months.  While renovating the house and surroundings of our new home outside Gettysburg, PA over the past year and moving our stuff from Maine I had no time for carefully researched posts.  Instead, I began posting links to the work of others on Facebook.

Now, I’ve dealt with the huge backlog of comments here (10,188 of them spam from bots) and I’m working on a piece about my current understanding of reality.

I have more building and yard work still to do but it’s less urgent so I’m starting to aim now for a new balance between that work along with my ongoing attempt to make sense of events, creating original content here about domestic and foreign policy here, and curating the work of others on Facebook.

But because I have to think about things before I speak, I won’t be on Twitter.

Feb 21 2016

The Tyranny of Continual Warfare

Our Founding Fathers considered standing armies “instruments of tyranny.”  So, to defend us “against foreign danger” they drafted the 2nd Amendment.

The 2nd is the only Amendment that states its purpose: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

Two hundred and more years later, we have a standing army and there is no connection between a “well regulated militia being necessary” and “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.”  But, as I discussed here, the downside of a standing army is greater than ever.  As James Madison explained:

In time of actual war, great discretionary powers are constantly given to the Executive Magistrate.  Constant apprehension of War, has the same tendency … Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other … No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

Yet we are now in the midst of a “war on terror” that can by definition never end and, in our fear of terror, we are abandoning our freedom.

Comforting Lies

We have no Madison among this year’s Presidential candidates and never will get one if we don’t heed what he and more recently Eisenhower warned:

“Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Now, Presidential candidates and our media have, as this Gallup poll reveals, persuaded 24% of Republicans, 9% of Democrats and 15% of independents that terrorism is our most important problem.

But an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” would know car accidents kill far more of us.  Twice as many Americans die every year from texting or talking on the phone while driving as died even on 9/11.

An average of just 32 Americans per year died in terrorist attacks in the next twelve years, fewer of them killed by Islamic terrorists than by disgruntled workplace and school shooters.  Meanwhile, over 30,000 of us are killed by firearms every year, one thousand times as many as are killed by terrorists.

President Eisenhower spoke of the need for balance, for a sense of proportion.  He would be gravely disappointed in us.

We plan to spend $70B-$90B a year, over $1,100B in total, on new weapons in the next 15 years (see Defense Modernization Plans Through the 2020s) “59% of [it on] just 10 programs–all of which are … primarily intended to support high-end conventional and nuclear conflict.”

Defense Modernization Plans

Nuclear weapons are not usually considered appropriate against terrorists although one of our Presidential candidates did joke about nuking the Islamic State.

Our Unmanned Systems Roadmap FY2011-2036 to reduce American casualties will make warfare less troubling and more exciting for voters.

There will be few complaints about spending $1,100B+ on new weapons.  It is, after all, little more than our overall military spending every year.

So here we go.  We provoke hatred by killing innocents — of 2,500-4,000 people killed in drone strikes in Pakistan, 400-1,000 were civilians.  Some were “collateral damage,” some the result of a flawed algorithm that analyzes cellphone usage to assess likelihood of being a terrorist.

And we are provoking our only nuclear rival by building a new generation of nuclear weapons and quadrupling our forces on Russia’s border.

We’ve not just lost all sense of proportion — we’ve lost our senses altogether.

Feb 15 2016

Excuse Me, My Car’s On Fire

Spring had come at last.  It wasn’t cold outside and it was good driving my convertible again, but it wasn’t really warm so after a while I turned on the heater.

A mile or two down the road I noticed wisps of steam.  I drove on.  The steam grew thicker.  “It would be good to get an oil change, anyway,” I thought.  “I’ll take it to the shop now in case this is smoke.”

The cabin was full of smoke as I turned into the lot so I shifted into neutral, turned off the ignition and cruised the rest of the way.  No flames were to be seen but as I opened the door I said to the mechanic standing outside the office, “Excuse me.  I think my car’s on fire.”

There never were any visible flames, perhaps because the fire truck came quickly, but sadly, the wiring harness was destroyed and the car was totaled.  Thinking about it all later, I decided not to get into such a situation again, and to get out of the car and call 911 if I ever did.

President Kennedy came to a similar conclusion soon after he succeeded President Eisenhower who in his January 17, 1961 farewell address warned (see page 15 of his annotated reading copy or watch him deliver the speech), “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

In President Kennedy’s September 25, 1961 address to the UN he said:  “Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable.  Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.”  (See the full speech here)

Then came the October 16–28, 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.  One thing had led to another until, very soon, the missiles would have been on their way.  Hundred of millions would have been killed outright.  Life of any kind could have become impossible.

A year earlier Kennedy had said at the UN, “a nuclear disaster, spread by wind and water and fear, could well engulf the great and the small, the rich and the poor, the committed and the uncommitted alike.  Mankind must put an end to war–or war will put an end to mankind.”

jfk war quote

Perhaps the prospect of nuclear disaster still seemed theoretical in 1961.  It became utter conviction after October 1962.  The situation in which he found himself haunted Kennedy from then on.  He strove, in secret dialog with Soviet premier Khrushchev, to wind down the arms race and end the Cold War.

Those of us who lived through the 1960s have not forgotten that lesson.  Well, many of us at least have not.  So it is bewildering and piercingly sad that presidential candidates saying things like the following could now be applauded:

Candidate Cruz: “We will carpet bomb [ISIS] into oblivion.  I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out.”

Candidate Rubio “will destroy terrorists overseas by authorizing whatever tools our commanders need.”

Candidate Trump:  “ISIS is making a tremendous amount of money because of the oil that they took away …  I would bomb the shit out of them.”

That’s why we cannot ignore such things as President Obama’s approval of a plan to deploy a new generation of nuclear weapons, over a trillion dollars worth of them.

Perhaps we will not elect a President this year who is eager to launch such weapons.  But the way to bet is, one day we will.

I want my grandchildren and every other child to live long and happily.  That will not happen if we continue to manufacture and distribute weapons of mass destruction.

Feb 14 2016

Pros and Cons of Income Inequality

 

Income inequality is a good thing but, as is proverbial, one can have too much.

We like having more and because working makes that possible, we’re motivated to work.  That’s a good thing because, although having more won’t necessarily make us happy, the way our society works requires us to work.

When there’s too much income inequality, however, when a tiny minority has most of the money, the others can’t keep buying enough and consumption drops.  Businesses start shedding workers, and money that would have been invested in production moves to secondary assets like stocks whose prices increase because of the new demand.

But enterprises underlying those secondary assets depend on the economy and because that is shrinking, those assets become increasingly over-valued.  When the discrepancy is recognized, the speculative bubble bursts.  Then all but the very rich are in trouble.

That happened in the Great Depression 80-odd years ago and, starting 8-ish years ago, it is happening again.  Our government contained the collapse more effectively this time although its effects continue, but we are now also experiencing a worsening systemic problem.

Our society depends on jobs to supply income, but jobs are disappearing.

What revived our economy from the Great Depression were economic policies that redistributed some of the wealth from the top.  Restoring buying power restored consumption, that restored investing in production, and that created more jobs — a virtuous spiral.   Those policies included Social Security, Medicare, high minimum wages, high marginal tax rates, and strong enforcement of financial regulations.  Eisenhower and Nixon supported and even extended parts of the system Roosevelt initiated that kept investment and consumption in balance.

Then economic policy reversed direction in the 1970s following dramatic cuts in the supply and corresponding increases in the price of oil.  The economy was wounded, according to the new theory, because there was not enough investment and too much consumption.  The indicated new policies included cutting the real value of the minimum wage, cutting welfare spending, cutting taxes on the wealthy, and deregulating the financial sector.  Inequality began to rise again.

That new policy direction was and still is embraced by both Democrats and Republican.  The political shift is detailed in this post but my aim here is to point not to a political but a fundamental change.

I included the leftmost chart below in my 2013 Economic Consequences of Inequality post.  We must also consider the one beside it from the World Wealth and Income Database.  Today’s income inequality and under-employment was brought to us by leaders of both political parties, none of which see that we are experiencing a second industrial revolution as momentous as the first.

Extreme Inequality

change-in-top-1-income-share-us-presidentsWhat has already happened is jobs previously done in America went where wages are lower.  What is happening at an increasing rate now is jobs done by humans are going to machines.

Economics researchers studying US Census Bureau data say half of current jobs (47%) can soon be done by machines and this study suggests 81% in the next few decades.  The schedule is arguable but the future of routine jobs is clear — they’re going away.

Routine vs Non-routine jobs

RobotsResearchers employing the quadrant chart tool I wrote about here assure us that non-routine jobs will remain beyond the reach of machines.

Watching our washing machine being repaired just now, I thought: “That’s something no machine could do. “  But the problem was diagnosed by phone, the part to be replaced was mailed here and washers could be designed to be serviced by robots.  In Japan where many are old enough to need assisted living, much of the care is already provided by smart machines.  Our physical, cognitive and emotional health care needs will increasingly be served by machines.  Robot waiters will attend us and security guards will protect us.  And so on.

Robots could even replace the guys on the freezing mud flats outside my window harvesting clams but it will probably not be worth the investment.  And there will always be jobs for thinking folks like us, right?  In fact, our lives will become ever easier as machines take over all our routine and physical tasks.

Work Sphere

Er… why do we imagine we can continue to out-think robots?   Could we not have told sagacious horses looking forward to similar benefits from the first industrial revolution that they never would learn to drive tractors?

Before that revolution 90% of Americans’ jobs were in agriculture, 3% now.  It didn’t happen suddenly.  Engines were used the same way as horses for fifty years before methods of farming changed at an increasing pace to exploit the new potential of engines.

We’re now in the second half of the second industrial revolution.  Computers began to be used for routine tasks more than seventy years ago and I was managing development of a communications grid based on the same technology as the Internet 45 years ago.  The great majority of jobs presently done by humans will again disappear.

What will happen when there are only jobs for a very few?  There must be a new foundation for the economy if there are too few new jobs for humans.  There will be no choice but to redistribute part of the profits from owners of machines to others so they can pay for the machines’ products and services.  There would otherwise be no profits.

Inevitable as it may be in the longer term, redistribution like that would, with good reason, be feared by the wealthy.  It could go too far.  The interim step, if the system dominated by “too big to fail” financial enterprises continues to collapse, will likely be a repeat of the Great Depression work programs.

We may at long last restore our transportation and other infrastructure on the way to an economic future whose structure we cannot yet discern.

Feb 9 2016

Maslow Misapplied to Nations

I was excited 35 years ago to see the rewards for structuring data into quadrant charts.  That was for me!  And management consulting with those charts was fun, but I saw how misleading they can be and at last returned to product and business development.

The chart tool began as a guide for business and product strategy, the idea being that you’re in trouble in the bottom left where your competitive advantages are few and small.  You must develop more and stronger advantages to soar to the profitable heavens on the top right.

BCG Advantage Matrix

Learning how to use and not abuse that tool has continued to be useful.  What provoked this post is research from 1981 to 2014 that is well illustrated by this animation but misleadingly presented in chart in the Findings & Insights summary linked to on this page.

The religion-based labeling is accurate but, in the two-dimensional chart context where the goal is to move from bottom left to top right, it is misleading.

And in this article by a different researcher the data is naively misinterpreted to suggest that capitalism transforms national values toward the political left.

So this is an example of tool abuse.  The data points are real, the research is valuable and the animation of changes over time is meaningful.  But the complex underlying reality is distorted by a static chart labeled in this way.

Nations' Survival vs Self-espression

The World Values Survey (WVS) researchers describe the two dimensions as follows:

  • Traditional values emphasize religion, parent-child ties, deference to authority, traditional family values and national pride
  • Secular-rational values place less emphasis on religion, traditional family values and authority
  • Survival values emphasize economic and physical security, are relatively ethnocentric and feature low levels of trust and tolerance
  • Self-expression values emphasize environmental protection, tolerance, and participation in economic and political decisions

The researchers say the data show that as a country moves from poor to rich, it also tends to move from traditional to secular-rational.  The move is a tendency not inevitable because values are also highly correlated with long-established cultures.

And there is movement in both directions over time.  The USA, for example, is in 1989 a little toward the traditional end and quite far toward self-expression, then it grows more traditional over the next decade, less so in the next, then steadily less traditional and less concerned with self-expression.

The writer claiming that capitalism transforms national values so nations labeled Islamic will, if they embrace capitalism, naturally move toward Protestant heaven, confuses correlation with causation.

His explicit blunder is conceptualizing nations as people to which Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” apply.

Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

Maslow illustrates how, if we have no food, all we care about is getting our next meal, but once we have that, we start caring about how to get the next meal and the one after that, and if we secure a reasonably dependable supply of basic needs we put effort into friendships, then start working for the respect of others, and finally devote effort to self-actualization.

Here’s a simpler way to see what Maslow was driving at (hat tip to Lexy):

Lexys-Version-of-Maslow

What Maslow’s hierarchy does not show is how circumstances impact the motivation of nations.  It can’t because nations are not people.  They are made up of people whose situations can be very diverse.

This comment on the naive article (click on the link and wait for it to scroll down) summarizes what the research actually illuminates:  “Economic and political systems, and culture/psychology interact with each other in both directions … autonomous individuals create capitalism, safety creates capitalism, peace creates capitalism.”

The top left is not unalloyed heaven because “increasing empathy and mutual respect [and] the breakdown in social capital go hand in hand with secularization and the domination of the market.”

And good governance is a prerequisite: “the state monopoly of coercion helped create the safety required for the large social networks of trust, and individual autonomy.”

According to the US Census Bureau, 15%, i.e., 47 million Americans are living in poverty meaning “a lack of those goods and services commonly taken for granted by members of mainstream society.”  That includes more than one in five of all chil­dren under age 18.

The WVS research, excellent as it is, can tell us nothing about the value those 47 million Americans place on traditional vs secular-rational values.

And we would be utterly mistaken to imagine they over-value self-expression relative to survival.

Feb 7 2016

How We Choose Political Candidates

Why do we have such bewilderingly diverse presidential candidates this year, and why are they arguing so passionately for such different kinds of change?

The passion is because while every President must now declaim as each year begins, “The state of our union is strong” many believe instead that, as candidate Reagan said in 1980 and candidate Trump says now, it is urgently necessary to “Make America Great again.”

But why do we have such different ideas about who can make America great again?  The recently developed Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) offers an explanation.

The direction we want our nation to take is governed by the relative value we place on half a dozen different “moral foundations,” i.e., intuitive ethical values:

  • Care: We feel compassion for those who are vulnerable or suffering
  • Proportionality: We feel people should get what they deserve, good or bad
  • Liberty: We resent restrictions on our choices
  • Loyalty: We keep track of who is “us” and and hate traitors
  • Authority: We dislike those who undermine authority and sow chaos
  • Sanctity: We feel some things must be protected from degradation

The relative importance of the values differs from individual to individual and can change with experience but the pattern is set to a large extent by the society in which we live, and each society’s value system evolves over the long haul depending on its circumstances.

Traditional societies that are vulnerable to attack place high value on loyalty, authority, and sanctity to defend themselves.  Trading societies place higher value on liberty and fairness and tend to be more open.  And so on.

But it’s important to remember that nations are in many cases made up of diverse groups — the USA, for example, is better understood as eleven nations.  And those groups are made up of diverse families.  That’s why there are diverse value systems within nations.

So how does MFT shed light on the support for this year’s diverse presidential candidates?

The following charts show how a representative sample of supporters of each candidate over- or under-valued each of the moral foundations relative to the average American.  Since people tend to place similar values on loyalty, authority and sanctity, they are lumped together as a single category.

Among supporters of the leading candidates we see the strongest difference is on proportionality, the belief that people should get what they deserve, good or bad, with an inverse relationship to the feeling that we should care for those who are suffering.

The major difference for Sanders and Clinton is the value their supporters place on liberty vs authority.  The major difference between supporters of Carson and the other Republican candidates is that Carson supporters under-value liberty and do not under-value caring.

Candidate Supporter Moral Foundations - Tier 1

Supporters of Trump have a more traditional Republican value profile, somewhat over-valuing proportionality and authority while somewhat under-valuing caring relative to Americans as a whole.

Among supporters of the second tier candidates, the consistent difference is the value placed on proportionality.  There is no pattern to the other differences.

The stark difference between supporters of Huckabee and Paul confirms the validity of the theory — Huckabee supporters over-value loyalty-authority-sanctity and under-value liberty while Paul supporters are the reverse.  Paul supporters also under-value caring.

The weight supporters of Bush and Fiorina place on each moral foundation is much closer to that of the average American.  They are in the second tier because they have not energized passionate support.

Candidate Supporter Moral Foundations - Tier 2

This research does not tell us who will be our next President, nor even which pair (or more?) will be candidates in the election.  It could help us make a guess if we knew how many voters have which value-weighting profile, and we could estimate that using the Eleven Nations map since the population of each “nation” presumably has a relatively homogeneous moral profile.

But my aim is not to predict the outcome of elections.  What struck me when I saw the MFT research was a form of deja vu.

Early in my career, when I was doing product development, I sometimes wondered how people who wanted what we sold could be so stupid as to buy others’ offerings when ours were so much better.  It was only later, doing market research, that I realized the issue is not what customers want to buy, but why.  The deja vu was when I realized it’s the same with supporters of political candidates.

Those who don’t support our favored candidate are not necessarily stupid — although they may be that, too.  They have a different sense of what’s most important, of how things should be.   Their morality and ours are different.  That’s why democracy was invented .

Feb 4 2016

All We Need is — War?

President Obama’s $583B final military budget is being sold on the premise that we are in a “new strategic era” challenged by Russia, China, North Korea, “Iran’s malign influence” and Islamic State terrorism.

We will therefore increase our military spending in Europe from $789M to $3.4B with “more rotational US forces,” “pre-positioned” weaponry and “infrastructure improvements” in response to “Russian aggression” in Ukraine and Syria, and our $71B research budget will establish “arsenal planes” to overwhelm air defenses, swarming micro-drones to be deployed from high-altitude aircraft, and much, much more.  We will also spend $40B over five years to enhance our submarine fleet.

What?  We are the ones who provoked “Russian aggression in Ukraine”, we are deeply complicit in the Syrian nightmare and we are fighting alongside “malign Iran” against the Islamic State.

Quadrupling our forces near Russia’s borders will restart the Cold War.  Western military power has not been so close to Russia since Germany’s 1941 invasion that left 10 or 20 million Russians dead.  Russia must avert any risk of that happening again.  What will they do?  Move forces near their borders.  And presumably increase spending on nuclear arms to match our plan to spend $1,000B+ on them over the next three decades.

So why are we doing all this?  Because restarting the Cold War, perpetuating violence in the Middle East and fomenting it in the Far East will continue to grow the weapons market.

International Transfers of Major Weapons

And why are “we the people” willing to spend so much to counter threats whose reality we do not question?  Because the mainstream media swamps us in fear, politicians keep telling us to be afraid, and the economy of local communities like mine depends on military spending.

How much do we spend?  Our fiscal year 2015 federal budget totaled $3.8T or $12,000 per person.  Social Security and Medicare, which are funded by dedicated taxes, are each around 23% of the total.  Around 29% or $1.11T is for “discretionary” programs that are authorized by Congress each year.

New military spending of $598B accounted for 54% of the discretionary 2015 programs, a further $160B of the overall budget was for veterans benefits, half or more of the  $229B in payments on debt resulted from wars on Iraq and Afghanistan whose cost we borrowed, and it is estimated there is another $50B+ of covert action and surveillance spending hidden in other areas.

That’s almost $1T of military spending or $3,100+ per person every year.

discretionary spending 2015

I’m not saying we should eliminate military spending — we should spend less.  We would spend much less if we thought realistically about the threats we’re told necessitate this year’s spending.

We’ve been led to believe something very odd.  The Dalai Lama puts it well:  “Since armies are legal, we feel that war is acceptable; in general, nobody feels that war is criminal …  In fact, we have been brainwashed.  War is … tragedy and suffering.”  He continues:  “although I am deeply opposed to war … it is often necessary to take a strong stand to counter unjust aggression.”

How much less would you spend on our military, and how would you use those savings to make the world happier?