Sustainable Goverment

History has demonstrated, and is demonstrating that human instinct and emotion leads to behavior that is in the short term self interest of the actor, but undermines the long term interests of the broader society, including, often, the actor's descendents.

Over the long view of history we as a species are evolving into more cooperative and productive societies that allow us to all live longer, healthier and happier lives by learning to modify and control selfish and emotion based behaviors.  The concept of democracy was a big step forward toward moving societies away from from zero-sum battles between individuals that produce big winners and big losers toward more cooperative societies that multiply individual efforts to produce a better life for everyone.

But as democracies have evolved they have have developed a nasty tendency toward zero-sum battles between interest groups fighting to shape policies to their advantage.

It appears the next stage of human evolution is to fine tune our constitutional frameworks to develop a counterbalance for our tendency to just project our selfish short term emotions onto our organizational behavior.  But in the short term we have a growing body of data about how our emotions can control our logic.  We need to find a way to make more voters more aware that what feels good isn't necessarily good policy.  That means we have to focus more effort on teaching voters to distinguish between data and emotion, and to understand that their political opinions are usually rooted in emotion rather than deliberative consideration of facts and data.

Whats wrong with this picture

Corporate pension funds are massively underfunded in the United States, the workers for a number of corporations have lost big chunks or all of their pensions in the last decade as Corporations ran through bankruptcy.  On the other hand the Post Office is being put out of business because Congress has required them to stockpile the money to cover 70 years worth of pension obligations in 10 years.  Why is Congress so concerned about the pension obligations of the Post Office and so oblivious to Corporate pension obligations?

Corporate profits are near all time highs, and economic experts say the main reason (besides layoffs) is because the Fed has kept interest rates at essentially zero, so Corporations can borrow to fund their operations at historically low interest rates.  On the other hand student loan debt is at historically high levels, the interest rates on student loans are much higher than in decades past, and Congress is trying to push interest rates up further on many student loans.

Sometimes it seems like in the last decade this country has turned common sense good economics on its head.

IDP - Questions to those who support Government control over abortions

1.  Genesis 2:7 - states that God formed man and breathed in the breath of life and the man became a living soul.  Is there another bible verse that touches on when the soul is imparted?

2.  What words of Jesus support the idea we are delegated to enforce and punish God's law?

Big surprise - genetics is of little use in developing personalized medicine

A recent article (cite below) noted that studies attempting to start developing personalized medical treatment through genetics had disappointingly revealed very few diseases have a genetic components that correlate for risk of getting the disease.  This is a big disappointment in the scientific world.   For as long as I can remember Science has been committed to the nature v. nurture theory - the notion that everything we are is either the product of our DNA, or our upbringing.  Nature v. nurture never did a great job of explaining variations in human personality, but it provided a ready battle ground for the hard sciences to square off against social scientists.  Neither side was open to complicating the argument by adding another influence.


As a reasonably well informed spectator to the debate it has been apparent to me there is probably a third influence rooted in brain chemistry.  Science has known for decades that the chemicals the different systems in our brain use to communicate are not static.  The particular mix of chemicals changes constantly during the course of a day, a month and a year, and the changes are pretty predictable in many cases, as are behavioral changes that reflect the particular mix of chemicals.  The problem with this theory is a PR problem.  It sounds like Astrology - your personality is affected by the physical world around you, and in particular by when you were born.

My perception of why we have made no progress on the nature v. nurture issue in my adult lifetime is science has shied away from studying the issue first because they feared being associated with astrology, then, as "fear" of astrology receded, the chemical approach to brain science got pushed aside by new digital imaging technology that cannot measure different chemicals very well.  What is important is we are now  30 years down the road and science has run into another dead end in the decade long effort  to explain everything through DNA or nurture.

Responding to a comment to a blog I posted on this topic on  9/22/2011 I said:

I think, for example, medicine would be a huge beneficiary. Treating each person as different (instead of assuming we are all chemical carbon copies) is all the rage in medicine but they have no organizing principal to focus their research. Any good "serious" astrology book will discuss ailments characteristics of certain signs, and in my lifetime looking at myself and people I know those astrological traditions have a high degree of predictive accuracy.

I know the theory sounds wacky to people - particularly science folk - because in some ways it is a science based theory that in some ways sort of invites dipping into the data base in astrology - and the ancient folk that developed astrology know nothing about the brain, or chemistry.  But probably the first time someone said the earth revolved around the sun it sounded wacky, and the first person who drew the conclusion probably knew nothing about the solar system, or galaxy or  universe.  Conventional wisdom often closes our mind to possibilities.  


Now we can search the center of the universe billions of light years away with our telescopes, we can build computers that sit on our desks that can store, manage and process data far faster than we can - but we still can't come to grips with why we aren't all clones of one another.  Science needs to get over its simple notion that everything is based in either DNA or nurture and start investigating other options.


If you are reading this blog and know someone who is in, or thinking about being in, the brain or medical research fields, forward this blog.  Please.  I kept it short so it won't be to painful to read.  I'm getting old.  I want my doctors to be able to understand why I am different from the patient they saw before me.


1 - May 5 Science News, p.11 - reporting on papers presented at the American Association for Cancer Research meeting

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

This phrase from the Declaration of Independence has been widely cited in my lifetime as the essence of what freedom in the United States is all about.  It seems to me we all should contemplate this phrase from the declaration of independence when deciding on the proper role of Government.


There is an inherent tension in applying the phrase to an entire country  - what if my pursuit of happiness impinges on the life, liberty or happiness of some other person?  So a fundamental assumption that precedes all government action should be that Government has no power over individual behavior until individual behavior starts impinging on others.  The more direct the impact on others, the more power government has to control behavior.


Many of our current laws don't meet this standard.  Drug use is a primary example of conduct that is almost entirely personal.  If I decide I want to spend my life sitting on my porch smoking marijuana I raise in my backyard, my conduct has no direct impact on anyone else.  But as a society we seem to have great difficulty accepting that freedom must include the freedom to make dumb personal decisions.  So for nearly a century we have waged a war on marijuana consumption that has had little discernible impact on consumption but has taken an enormous toll in money and disruption of peoples lives. 


We tend to err in the other direction with economics and commerce.  Virtually no economic activity takes place that doesn't involve people interacting.  If you go up on the hillside and chop down some tree's there are fewer tree's available for the other residents of the community.   If you manufacture, you need workers, retail requires customers.  Economics should be an area of life where government is actively mediating between competing interests, but our history has been a long struggle between those seeking to find a proper balance of regulation and market anarchists who believe government should stay out of economic affairs.

Bain Capital

The Democrats are making Bain Capital a focus in their efforts to undermine Mitt Romney's credibility on his economic policy, and the Republican's are pushing back hard to distance Bain Capital from the discussion.  Here is a link to an excellent summary of what private equity companies do by Robert Reich.   http://robertreich.org/post/20930554256

Here is why I think Bain Capital is extremely pertinent.  Mitt Romneys economic plan is rooted in his claim he will create jobs by protecting the wealthy from new taxes and cutting the size of the Federal deficit by cutting government jobs.

It is a variation on the strategy that Romney employed very successfully at Bain Capital to make lots of money.  But success in the private sector is measured differently than success in government.  Businesses can lay off lots of people to improve their profitability, and the people they lay off are not their problem.  If the economy is good many of them will find a job with some business that is hiring, if the economy is not good - well - its not Bain Capitals problem if they made some peoples lifes incredibily hard.  For the broader economy allowing business to act callously in general works because the private sector is composed of lots of businesses, so even as some are laying people off, normally others are hiring.

But there is only one government.  Economic studies that looked at 70 + governments that have downsized in the last 40 years or so found they always experienced both a decline in GDP and a rise in unemployment (except in high interest rate environments when Government was sucking up all the capital - definitely not our current situation).  Is that really what we want to accomplish as we try to climb out of the economic collapse of a couple years ago.  We can't go on expanding government forever, but the time to trim is in a good economy (like during the Republican administrations early in the last decade that became famous for running up the deficit with earmarks and handouts to rich people).

But beyond the pragmatic economics, government shouldn't be about profitability for the select few rich and powerful - that is exactly the historical problem democracy's were created to address.  That was Ghadaffi's Libya, or now, Putin's Russian.  Governments primary justification is to protect people from one another by mediating to ensure everyone has a fair shot in life.  When government downsizes, particularly in an economic downturn, it is consigning a big group of it's citizens to a difficult period of life, and undermining social stability, to protect the well off from a little inconvenience.

Bain Capital is extremely instructive as the apparent reason an intelligent guy like Romney seems to truly believe cutting government will improve the economy in the face of history that says otherwise.  After all, downsizing companies by firing people worked very well for Bain.

Our obsession with 1/2 of Free market theory

The last decade or so the media is constantly talking about entrepreneurs, and how the free market rewards people who do things better or more efficiently.  The economists buzz word is competitive advantage.

But there are many other ways to succeed in a free market.  The South's competitive advantage in their cotton based economy in the first 80 years of our countries existence was slavery.  They had very low labor costs because they used slaves.

In manufacturing a companies competitive advantage could be skimping on public safety by dumping hazardous chemicals.  Or worker safety.  Or they may lie about the quality or nature of their products in their advertising.

Yet in our political dialogue anyone who addresses the negative ways to obtain competitive advantage is always accused of being anti-business.  It would be helpful if politicians talked more about the negative characteristics of free markets rather than celebrating the positives and painting the negatives as unrelated to free markets.