A Failure of Imagination

We finally seem to have discovered, as a society, that generational dysfunction and poverty come from social breakdown and the raising of children therein.  But instead of attempting to compensate for these social inequities by allocating resources targeted towards areas in which we can have a real impact on kids' lives, we're doing little other than blaming teachers when the normative education model that seems to work OK in middle class neighborhoods doesn't seem to work in ghettos.  Instead, we should be reflecting on our collective inability to make the radical changes required to fundamentally confront this problem.

Many seem quick to voice an opinion on what is wrong with education today.  But few seem cognizant of what we are asking teachers in poor neighborhoods to do, and how they are being blamed when they are failing to do it.  The task is to take kids from incredibly dysfunctional neighborhoods, from households geographically concentrated by poverty, and to turn them out on par with kids from functional households geographically concentrated by higher-income... with less resources. 

The fact that some amazing teachers are able to get amazing results, or that some charters who ask their hand-picked, best-in-class teachers to make enormous sacrifices does not mean this is a way to reform education of poor children in America.  It doesn't follow from an economic, sociological, or moral standpoint.
Those who argue all that is needed is to replicate these rare results are fooling themselves if they think this is anything near possible. 

As we sit here dinking around, hundreds of thousands of kids are growing up without quality parenting, in shitty neighborhoods, spending their tedious days in schools that are over-crowded, underfunded factories staffed by over-worked teachers just trying to keep the kids afloat until they can hopefully all trickle out senior year into low-wage jobs, drug abuse, pregnancy, and the prison system.  These are the kids left behind, who make the charter schools look good when they either don't get picked or get kicked out for bad behavior. 

The fact is that today there are thousands of parents living in ghettos who, by the good fortune of knowing proper parenting strategies and possessing the minimum resources required to deliver a child into the educational system who is capable of engaging in a high level of successful academic behavior, are forced to send their children to schools filled with severely at-risk and disadvantaged youth.  The learning environment is then forced down to the the lowest common-denominator, joyless trudgery through remediational content delivery formats.  If they are lucky, they might get into the rare gate class, which is itself a further segregation within the ghetto.

For these parents, it is argued that charters are at least an emergency way "out".  This was the same case made for vouchers.  While I sympathize with this argument, the fact that they possess the parenting fortitude their ghetto-peers do not is for me no greater emergency than that of the "left behind".  There is certainly no moral difference in privileging one child over another. 

We live in an unequal society and children will not be raised in equal environments.  Although public education is a socialist enterprise - designed to allow for a minimum level of social equity among future citizens - it is not currently equipped to take on the monumental task of truly distributing human capital, at least in so far as effective performance, equally among the young.  While I'm all for the project, and find it morally logical, I cannot accept playing favorites in a half-hearted endeavor.  While a great benefit to the few, this in effect furthers the disparity between what is already a disadvantaged class.

The Question of Free Will and its Bearing Upon Governance

Governments can be, and are, defined in many ways. I think the modern world is pretty well discovering that, while not perfect, a capitalist social democracy is generally best. We enjoy electing our leaders, starting businesses, and the provision of public education. I think it’s safe to say that neither extreme communism nor libertarianism are sensible options.

At its most basic level, government is formed to provide for individual security and freedom. How these come to be defined, and then achieved, present a formidable philosophical and practical challenge. Yet I believe a key insight into where we must begin on this matter, is the question of Contra-Causal Free Will (CCFW). In order to define what government ought to be, you need to determine whether CCFW exists. A large enough subject in its own right (although one I firmly believe has been settled, due in no small part to the discoveries of modern scientific research), for the purposes of this discussion, I will avoid much of the arguments for and against the question of CCFW, and concentrate mainly on the implications of its resolution.

Because I don't believe in CCFW and the processes underlying what makes us who we are, I don't believe it is fair for a child born to a family poor in social capital to have to compete with a child born to a family rich in social capital. Therefore, any government system that does not actively seek to redress this inequity of means not only does not guarantee freedom, but through inaction actively promotes the continuation of a status quo that is anti-freedom.

For instance, in our modern economic system, if one man is able to live richly off the low wages of thousands of others, whose freedom are we talking about? Should his wealth be relative to the stability and basic fairness of the larger society upon which his market is based, or is it simply relative to what he can buy with it?

These are certainly not easy questions. And we see them being labored over intensely in current debates over healthcare - does our modern society owe it to each individual to guarantee a minimum of health services?

Conservatives know exactly where they stand on the issue of free will and why it is so central to their concept of government. They come back to it again and again as a justification for their interest in maintaining the status quo. They see a socially activist government as entirely unethical: not only does it seek to unfairly redistribute income through progressive taxation, but it seeks to fritter it away on services that would be unnecessary if people would only choose correctly (drugs, parenting, education, hard work, crime, etc.).

Liberals are the ones I always find oddly oblivious to the inconsistency in both holding that society has a responsibility to promote fairness, and that free will does indeed exist. I think the reason has more to do with free will having an entrenched philosophical advantage in being the incumbent world view, well, for most of recorded history.

But I think the paramount example of why CCFW matters is in constructing a criminal justice system. Currently, we inflict terrible punishment upon convicted criminals – a prison sentence is certainly cruel, if not unusual. Yet if CCFW does not exist, then what business do we have in exacting revenge upon people who could not have chosen any differently? Going back to my point regarding children: we treat them with forgiveness to the degree we attribute to them a lack of CCFW. The reason we treat them with the full harshness of the justice system when they reach 18 years of age is precisely because we deem them as suddenly possessing full CCFW: they could have made better choices.

Were we to instead deny CCFW, we would then have to treat adult criminals with the same sort of understanding that we do children: that they were not really responsible for their behavior: that society and genetic chance was. While acknowledging any continued threat they may pose society, as well as providing a message of deterrence, we should certainly still hold them accountable and protect society from them. But we ought to treat them with dignity, at least attempt rehabilitation, and certainly not subject them to the sort of violence and abuse rampant in today’s prisons.

On the flip side, neither does rejecting CCFW allow us to treat the millionaire as if he is responsible for his own success, rather than society and genes – at least in so far as he enjoys a level of power and privilege due to simple circumstance. This is why we no longer tolerate kings and aristocracy. What right does the wealthy man have to his wealth when it was obtained through no doing of his own? A civilized society is based in the concept that every man ought to be free to “pursue their own happiness at minimal detriment to everyone else's”. Implicit in this assumption is that we all ought to begin that pursuit at a reasonable level of equality of social capital.

So it would appear to me that not only does the question of free will have great bearing upon our personal values, but it must be dealt with if we are to structure a government that is able to best deliver freedom of opportunity to society. Fittingly, just as whether or not CCFW exists we must act as though it does, we must also structure our society according to whether or not we believe in CCFW. The consequences for either belief or disbelief could not have more dramatically different political implications.

Health Care Is Not A Right

I've thought about this occasionally, but only recently have I come upon what I believe is a truer expression of a liberal philosophy of health care.

The political argument is obvious: by calling health care a "right", you automatically justify guaranteeing coverage to everyone. By evoking a natural principle, you are fundamentally answering opponents by claiming that health care is a moral, not economic issue.

But this is not generally how we think of rights. We usually think of them as simple freedoms that require little in the way of effort on the part of others. Freedom of speech, movement, worship, or privacy all require little other than being left alone. Of course, the definition of a social contract includes the quality of living with others. Thus it implies a level of engagement with one's fellow man.

It is within this expansion into the social realm that the liberal inserts an added clause: duties. Duties are all the things we must do for one another to maintain our individual freedoms, or "rights". They are of course more difficult to define, much less to achieve. But they are as elemental to the provision of man's rights as the established state itself.

Throughout our nation's history we have defined them differently, as have other modern democracies: We reserve the right to draft men into military service to protect from foreign threats. We reserve the right to declare martial law. We reserve the right to tax income and commerce. We reserve the right to guarantee things like education or legal defense. Though at times they may be defined differently, they are the same in that they represent an expression of duty towards the common good. Each requires a level of sacrifice - often different depending on the individual - to the idea of the "common good".

Universal access to health care is now being called for by liberals. It is being argued that, by virtue of being a citizen (for many like myself, simply a human being) one should be guaranteed a minimum standard of free health care. Or to put it another way, it is the DUTY of every citizen of this country to contribute in some way to ensuring universal health care coverage to every man, woman & child.

Health care is a duty.

Understanding the Town Hollerers

I'm going to start off with a few assumptions: A) Most of these people are not idiots, B) Most of them are well-meaning and compassionate, C) Most are probably even politically moderate & D) My ideas are better than theirs.

OK - come on, who doesn't agree with that last one.

So, the question then becomes - why do they feel the way they so passionately do? On the basis of much of what I have heard, my hunch is that most of this isn't even specifically about health care. It is an amalgam of very high levels of federal spending, much of which has gone either to bank or auto bailouts, or nebulous future government projects. I think they have had no real problem with education, or war, or medicare, or moderate social spending in the past.

But they look at the dire straights the economy is in, and then see the government borrowing large amounts of money at a time when common sense tells you you need to cut back. They see Democrat health care "reform" as an added, luxury expense that at best we can't afford, and at worst will actually make their health care worse.

If they are neither dumb, mean, or even radical, then where are they coming from? Why can't they connect the dots they way that I do and end up agreeing with me? It all seems so obvious!

Well, except that I don't quite think it is. I think my ideas, while logical and sound, are actually quite radical. Well, let me rephrase that. I think they have potentially radical implications. Yet oddly enough, they are really no more radical than the ideas undergirding over a century of American political, social and economic thought. It is as if they have slowly, quietly been working away behind the scenes, providing the secure foundation from which popular American thought has flowered, yet through a sustained lack of analysis is now so forgotten as if to be unrecognizable.

The essence of this popular rage is simply a fear that government has gone too far. Those on the far right have always felt this. They have never believed in government. They would love to see its over-reach stripped bare. Their position is highly principled and logically very consistent.

But these town hall folks are not the radical right. They would hate to see government all but removed from public life. And yet much of their rhetoric matches exactly what the right has been shouting for years. Socialism! Fascism! Don't distribute my hard-earned wealth! This apparent oxymoron is best summed up by (as I have noted before) the purported words at a recent protest: Don't let the government get its hands on my medicare. One could add to this list schools, social security, roads, parks, clinics, etc.

They do indeed believe in the good that government can do, and has been doing, all their lives. But they have somehow been living in a fantasy world where the government actually doesn't exist. Elderly people magically don't starve to death alone in their apartments. Children are magically offered an education though 12th grade. Bridges repair themselves. Parks are tended to and medication for the mentally ill appears out of thin air.

Then suddenly the economy is on the brink of collapse, and the government roars in (supported mind you, by very well-developed and reasoned rationale) to help. I think for many this was a total shock. They had been living under all these assumptions about the modern world that are actually philosophically quite radical. When forced to make decisions based upon these views, they realized how radical they had become. Or better said, how radical the political mainstream had appeared to have become.

Because if government sponsored health care is socialism, then many more things are. If progressive taxation and social spending are fascist, well then our tax code has been very fascist for a very long time. I assume the radical (economic) right has indeed thought out the logical conclusion of their positions on a truly free market economy. That no one ever describes this future world is evidence of how removed it is from the mainstream.

For if we truly believed that each man was entitled to his own earnings, and was constitutionally (or by whatever higher-power you so presume) subject to only a minimum level of taxation, then America would be a radically different place. I've read amusing libertarian proposals for how things might look similar, owing to fabulous constructs involving great feats of heroics on the part of businesses who have somehow chanced upon perfect alignment of the public good with the private.

But in general no one is seriously proposing anything but minor policy adjustments. To listen to the rhetoric now being trumpeted from the town halls, one would think that Democratic representatives are the only things separating America from communist... err, USSR. Yet were any politician to campaign on a platform espousing policy positions in line with true free-market libertarianism, they would be laughed off the campaign trail.

Or would they? Maybe we have indeed, in the words of another recent town hall protester, "awakened a sleeping giant." Of course, this sleeping giant has truly been sleeping a very, very long time. In fact, I'm not sure it was every quite awake. At least not after accounting for the great social and technological transformations of the past 150 years which have enabled us to enjoy a level of common prosperity only dreamed of by the founders, and basic social safety nets have become not only possible but intrinsic to a modern, civilized ethos.

But it may possibly be that American politics is in for a dramatic swing to the extreme right, with the resulting dismantling of every state and federal social or common good program we have known and depended upon in our lifetime. I almost wonder, by the degree to which this sentiment is borne in stubborn hostility, that only such a transformation may be what it takes to show these people the world they intend to promote.

But, ever the optimist, I doubt it. I think the economy has people scared out of their wits. And they are being forced to digest in a matter of months political ideas which have been brewing in the Western world for centuries. It may have been wrong to try and push health care reform now. It may have been wrong to have relied on the ability of the American public to grasp all the philosophical and policy issues involved to the degree that that they would be able to fully appreciate the sensibility of the proposal's logical coherence.

We are, after all, Americans. What we lack in contemplation we make up for in feeling. I just worry that this all may be catching up with us. And that before we know it we will be forced to remove so much of what so many have worked so hard to build.

Efficacy Software, P. 1: The Context

Something occurred to me while reading an article recently on Autism Spectrum Disorders - specifically the characteristic difficulty in interpreting body language (the article was discussing the discovery that ASD was also correlated with low levels of oxytocin, a chemical linked with emotion and communication). I wondered whether or not there had been much in the way of software development using a computer interface as a form of ASD rehabilitation . It seems that as body language has to do with visual processing, there could be much to gain from developing software that allows the ASD user to interact with visual stimulus. The goal would be to address specific skills that could then be transferred to real world situations.

But it then occurred to me that this format could have much broader applications. I recalled a previous blog entry in which I tried to quantify individual modes of personal efficacy, the degree to which one possessed each would contribute to positive personal and inter-personal outcomes. I called them Human Capital (HC). We are all familiar with computer-based learning systems. Their development in early childhood education has been remarkable, especially with the advent of relatively cheap, flash-based applications widely available online. But so far much of the content has been driven by classic, knowledge-based content standards. Yet personal efficacy requires much more, for instance looking at interpersonal skills like communication & listening skills, situational awareness, social norms and psychological refection.

We know that individual success is largely dependent on the skill set of the individual, and in the event of misfortune, certain skills are key to resiliency. These skills are not always taught to the degree that they could be in the home, peer circle or neighborhood. Some individuals will come to them spontaneously via innate inheritance, others by good fortune or chance. Others will never learn them at all, but having come into good fortune in other areas, will never be forced to rely upon their attainment.

Social statistics tell us that behind the conviction that everyone can succeed lies a fatal caveat: those who possess the skills to succeed, will succeed. Implicit in this statement is the necessity for one to possess something. Things can either be known innately, or learned. The skills we are referring to here are not what are commonly thought of as skills, per say, but the personal traits, or Human Capital, that lead one to success. In my previous post on this topic I outlined them thus:

Emotional: happiness, satisfaction, compassion, generosity, self-control, ethics, integrity, confidence, courage, self-awareness

Knowledge Skills: reading, writing, math, music, art, dance, technology, mechanics, athletics, discipline, diet, hygiene, exercise

Knowledge Information: humanities, sciences, traditions, institutions, "perspective" Social: language, protocols, empathy, self-awareness (perception of self by others)

Monetary: family income, family resources, neighborhood resources, Biological: mental, physical, health

These are rough draft estimations, and in need of revision. But the fundamental premise is the quantification of those assets which reward the individual both external and internal success and fulfillment. Some skills will be unattainable for purely physical or logistical reasons, and no one will likely ever fulfill all of them. But if HC is what success is made of, then if one is to be free to succeed in life one must be free to attain it. If our society is to truly desire freedom for each of its citizens, then it must seek to enable for them access to this capital.

Some of this is already acknowledged by the presence of our public education system. But it was never tasked with what social research has told us its purpose now serves: to provide a level playing field of personal skill-development that guarantees freedom of success for all citizens. Public schooling was thought of as a healthy benefit to a modern society - a project supplemental to the family and other social forces conspiring to shape a person's full expression, not the least of which was supposed to be the individual's own "free will" and judgment of action. Yet now, as social trends have been studied and successful outcomes have been tied to reliable indicators, education has become ever-more the final frontier of humankind's goal of social justice and freedom.

And of course it is failing. Those students who succeed do so because of two things: either good fortune or because they have at some point (including before birth) acquired sufficient levels of HC. Many children are fortunate in that they are able to acquire it outside of school. But for many children, school has become society's sole means to provide this HC. Yet the time spent at school is simply not enough to provide sufficient supply. For a variety of reasons, including funding & resources, socio-economic geographic logistics, and degree of parent HC, schools are forced to watch asthmatically as generation after generation of students is respired through their doors.

If that HC is required is not in dispute, then the problem simply becomes how to best ensure that every American achieves their maximum, and at the very least a guaranteed minimum. A corollary structure to this argument is the implication that those who have succeeded have done so due to a relative privilege of HC, and thus hold moral claim to the fruits of such success only to a degree over and above what society deems a base equitable distribution of HC resources. That is to say, only once sufficient policies have been put into place that guarantee a reasonable distribution of Human Capital may individuals be allowed to enjoy greater HC privilege benefits, being as they are circumstantially derived.

There is of course great leeway in how strictly this would be implemented. As comprehensive metrics on both how to measure individual HC attainment as well as its impact on success becomes more and more difficult moving from macro to micro level. Depending on the degree to which one is comfortable establishing arbitrary policy determinations based on certain metrics, a redistributive structure could be arranged via various progressive taxation structures, or some other methods of equitabilitization.

This has been the incision point for traditional arguments against any sort of interventionist, progressive economic policy. These have fundamentally revolved around an appeal to the concept of individual freedom of will, and that its existence renders unjust any attempt to limit the individual's right to enjoy the benefits of one's success, based as it is not on the HC model, but on the assumption of a theoretically infinite capacity for creative control over one's destiny, unencumbered by biological or social privilege. In addition - according to these arguments - any attempt to rectify an imbalance in HC by the government would only make matters worse, due to the inefficiency inherent in government action. Far better be it to allow the invisible hand of the free market to provide sufficient lubrication for individual success.

But the HC model denies such claims. Its inherent assumption is that success is created solely from HC, as is any possible definition of something one could call free will. So any society interested in the promotion of freedom must answer first to how it promotes HC. Second, many elements of HC acquisition are not only not commodities, and thus untradeable on a free market, but in cases where they might be, like any market items their purchase requires capital to begin with. And due to the nature of HC's relationship with wealth creation and success, the degree to which one lacks HC will limit one's ability to bargain! And so while government action, with its guarantee of access, may not necessarily enjoy the benefits in efficiency and innovation that come from a competitive free market, if one considers the principle of individual freedom paramount, and human freedom predicated upon the equitable attainment of HC, then it must have a significant role in its provision.