Dial 911 for health care?

The House of Representatives has passed its version of a health care reform bill, and it’s starting to look as if before too long we’ll get some kind of legislation that will transform the U.S. health care system.

I wish I had more confidence in the ability of the Congress to produce good policy, but I don’t. Given the way the legislative process operates, we are guaranteed to come up with something that, while it may increase the number of people insured, will almost certainly make the system more cumbersome and expensive. That may be better than the status quo, but then again it might not be.

The legislation will be cumbersome and expensive for two reasons: the Democrats’ preference for bureaucratic micro-management over sensible calibration of incentives, and the way legislation is produced, in which horse-trading and marker-calling play a larger role than sober policy analysis. Whatever comes out of Congress, it’s going to be ugly.

Will it solve the problem? That depends on what problem you’re talking about. We’ll probably wind up with more people covered by insurance. But I see nothing in the summaries I’ve read (not even our Congressional leaders have read the whole 2,000-page monstrosity) that will reduce the burdensome administrative costs of the system, which are the main reason we spend 16% of GDP on health care. We’ll continue to have a complex, jury-rigged mixed health-care system, and it will only get more expensive.

Maybe in a few years, when the staggering costs begin to focus minds, we’ll be ready for a new attempt at reform. Let’s hope at that point we’ll also be ready for some fresh thinking and a new approach.

The best discussion I’ve seen recently of the health care crisis was in
David Goldhill’s article on health care in the September issue of the Atlantic, together with readers’ reactions and Goldhill’s responses to them published in the November issue. Goldhill’s article analyzes the underlying reasons for the health care crisis, and suggests meaningful reforms.

The crux of his argument is that when patients do not directly bear the costs of medical care (because even routine care is covered by insurance), moral hazard is created, providers are insensitive to patient (i.e. consumer) concerns, and cost containment becomes impossible. Goldhill compares the current situation in health care to “paying for gas with our auto-insurance policy, or for our electric bills with our homeowners insurance” and details the distortions that follow from that. I don’t know of a better analysis of the real problems with the current system, which the currently debated legislation in Congress would do nothing to fix.

Of course, not everybody buys Goldhill’s argument. Among those who wrote responses to his article was Mike Mahoney of Sandpoint, Idaho, who said, “Throughout history, when societies have found that a service was needed for the common good, that service was created, and people chose to tax themselves to provide it. Armies, fire departments, water systems, police departments—all were created and paid for as the need arose. It makes no more sense to expect only those who can afford health care to have it than it would to make sure you have a valid credit card before dialing the fire department.”

That’s a pretty good statement of the case for state-provided health care. And proponents of a system like Britain’s National Health Service are right in saying that such a system would be administratively much simpler, reducing the amount of resources wasted on paperwork. Of course, there are other problems with government-provided health care, such as waiting lists and constant budget pressures. Any system has to ration care somehow, and in a single-provider or single-payer system it’s politicians and bureaucrats who decide how much gets spent on health care. And that brings a whole new set of problems.

But Mahoney’s letter got me to thinking: why do we accept without question government provision of police and fire services, while the thought of government-provided health care sends half the electorate into a Don’t Tread On Me frenzy?

Maybe it’s because the term health care covers a highly disparate variety of things, some of which are more suited to government provision than others. The reason why it makes no sense to make sure you have a valid credit card before dialing the fire department is because when your house is on fire, it’s an emergency: you need help right now, and your ability to pay is, or ought to be, irrelevant. The same goes for police protection and any other emergency service. We have recognized in our society that in an emergency it’s appropriate to help now and ask questions later.

Maybe it’s appropriate to make the same distinction in health care as we grope toward the right balance of public and private financing. Some medical needs are emergencies: you get hit by a bus, shot by a gang-banger or ambushed by your failing heart, and it’s inhuman to pester you with questions about payment as you bleed out on the gurney. Maybe in this realm government-provided (or paid-for) medical care makes sense, and Mahoney is right in saying that we ought to join other advanced nations in just providing it, no questions asked.

But other medical needs are more predictable and more subject to things under your control, such as diet and lifestyle, and are probably not best handled by third-party payment, for the reasons Goldhill discusses. Maybe you ought to pay for routine checkups the way you pay for an oil change on your car or maintenance on your furnace. Maybe even antibiotics for your fever ought to come out of your pocket, (or your privately financed insurance policy) the way body work after the fender bender does. Maybe the proper approach for most health care needs is to budget and save and carry private insurance for unexpected expenses. And for people who can’t afford that, there can always be a government-provided safety net.

In short, maybe there’s not a single best answer for all our health care problems, and a government role is appropriate for some medical needs and not for others. It’s worth considering as we wait for the latest spasm of tinkering from Congress to complicate the system, because the next round of reform is going to require some outside-the-box thinking.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Don't just stand there...

Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan were in Chicago yesterday, doing what politicians do best: making earnest promises to solve a problem they can’t do anything about.

The visit was prompted by something that wasn’t really unusual except that it happened to be caught on video and seen around the world: a Chicago teenager being killed by other Chicago teenagers.

That happens all the time. Last school year, thirty-six students in the Chicago school system were murdered; this year so far three have been killed. The overwhelming majority were African-American or Hispanic, and were killed by kids just like them. This has been going on for years, of course, but the toll has finally gotten so high that it has caught a level of attention that makes politicians uncomfortable.

So President Obama dispatched two cabinet members to make promises. To prove they were serious, they brought cash: they promised a grant of half a million bucks to the local school system to be used to combat violence.

This is pure theater, of course; nobody really thinks half a million bucks or some new Federal laws or a spate of committees and initiatives will stop poor kids from killing each other. But Obama has to do it, because most people’s first response in any social crisis is to scream for the government to not just stand there but do something.

Most people are reluctant to say out loud what they must know at some level: the government can’t solve this problem. It’s a social and cultural problem, and only social and cultural change can ameliorate it. This may come as a shock, but the government is mostly irrelevant to problems like this.

There are many elements involved in a crisis like endemic child homicide, and of course poverty plays a role, as does easy access to firearms. (As if embarrassed that the victim in this latest case was beaten to death, an op-ed writer in the Chicago Tribune hastened today to remind us that most of these killings use guns.) But if poverty was the main cause of this, Calcutta and Cairo would have astronomical homicide rates, and they don’t. And if firearms were the main cause, farm kids in Iowa would be capping each other as much as kids on the South Side of Chicago, and they’re not.

What it’s hard to come out and say is that poor black and Hispanic kids in American cities kill each other because too many of them are not being raised with the scruples, inhibitions and self-imposed restraints that keep people from resorting to violence as a first reflex.

Where do those restraints come from? They come from parents. And the great unmentionable factor in the moral collapse of the urban poor is the disintegration of the two-parent family. Around seventy percent of black children are now born out of wedlock, as are an increasing percentage of Hispanic children, now around forty-five. Most of them are being raised by their mothers, more or less alone. While fathers are present in the lives of many of these children to some degree, in most cases they are not there on a day-to-day basis.

I don’t want to single out the mothers: let’s call this the Absent Father problem. But let’s stop pretending it’s not a problem. The correlation between single parenthood and all manner of social, educational and economic disadvantages is well established. Now, correlation is not causation, but correlation is certainly information. And when you look at the demands children make on two parents, let alone one, it’s easy to see how a poor woman trying to make a living while raising children is going to struggle to be successful at either. Don’t take my word for it; ask them.

There are many reasons why a woman might wind up raising a child on her own: widowhood, divorce and abandonment are the classics. But increasingly, women are explicitly choosing to have children outside of a stable relationship. Some of them do a heroic job of it and raise happy, successful children. (It helps to be a well-off middle-class single mother with lots of family support and professional child care.) I don't want to demonize single mothers. But when that choice becomes the default option, you have to ask if that’s a good thing for the community.

It will be pointed out that out-of-wedlock birth rates are going up in a lot of countries, including prosperous European ones, without a corresponding spike in the types of problems poor black kids in the U.S. have. But we need to consider that a phenomenon like family disintegration hits vulnerable, economically weak communities harder than it hits stable, prosperous ones. If your community’s hold on economic success is precarious to begin with, adverse social phenomena pose a greater threat to it.

Of course there are lots of two-parent households that neglect, abuse and otherwise harm their children. And I’m sure you can give me any number of examples of successful single parents. I can give you some. But at some point you have to pay attention to the sociological evidence and admit that for a fragile community, single parenthood might not be the best model.

It’s easy to say that the government should just make it easier for that struggling single mother to make a living, but we’ve been down that road before: Bill Clinton even got a lot of liberals on board for welfare reform when it became evident that subsidizing single motherhood tended to produce more of it, with all the attendant problems. At some point we’ve got to revive the stable two-parent home. It has to become the norm again.

Eric Holder can’t fix this. Barack Obama can’t fix it. Only the people in the community can fix it. How can we get people to start valuing marriage, or at least permanent in-home fathering, once again? The conservatives have an answer: re-stigmatize single motherhood. Sometimes they’re quite explicit about that, as in Ross Douthat’s New York Times op-ed. Predictably, he took a lot of flak for that piece. (One measured response ended with a simple “F*** you.”) But that’s what moral codes have always done: they’ve tried to make people ashamed of behavior that hurts the community.

If that seems harsh and mean-spirited to you, then it’s up to you to come up with a better way. Be as positive as you want. But you have to find a way to make girls determined to delay child bearing until they are in a stable and economically viable situation, and, more importantly, you have to get boys to invest in codes of conduct that exalt restraint and responsibility.

This is one the government can't fix. It’s up to you.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Why Bill James is Like Karl Popper

I’ve been a Bill James fan since some time in the early eighties. Actually I’m a fan of two guys named Bill James, but this is not about the British crime writer. I’ll write about him some other time. This is about the American baseball analyst, or as he prefers to call himself, “sabermetrician”. (The term is derived from an organization devoted to statistical analysis of baseball, the SABR or Society for American Baseball Research.) I’ve been an admirer of James ever since I first ran across his Baseball Abstract twenty-five years or so ago.

If you’re not especially interested in baseball, you might think Bill James is beneath your notice, but then my wife is not especially interested in baseball, and she thinks what James does is very interesting. That’s because she works in data analysis; she’s interested in what collected numerical data can tell us about the world. And anyone who has an interest in that topic can admire James’s work.

As anyone even slightly familiar with baseball knows, numbers have always been a big part of baseball: what’s he hitting, what’s his won-lost record, how many runs has he driven in? What Bill James did, starting back in the seventies, was to think seriously about what baseball numbers really mean with regard to winning and losing ball games. He brought a trained statistician’s mind to the endeavor, along with a predilection to think outside the box, to look at what was actually happening instead of what the conventional wisdom said must be happening.

This coincided with the computerization of statistical data, which greatly facilitated the compilation and analysis of the numbers. SABR promoted the careful gathering of data by armies of amateur statisticians, and it all went into the computer, providing a vastly expanded pool of baseball data.

From looking at the data Bill James decided that a lot of what we were told about baseball was wrong. In particular, our evaluations of players and teams were faulty because we were looking at the wrong things. Batting average was not really the best measure of what a hitter was contributing to the offense; a pitcher’s won-lost record was practically useless in evaluating his actual effectiveness, a team’s home ball park distorted its overall statistics, misleading observers as to its true strengths and weaknesses.

James asked the question: what individual actions on a baseball field actually contribute to a team’s winning or losing games? His answers led him to buck conventional wisdom, claiming for example that bunting and stealing bases were high-risk strategies that often hurt the team because they squandered outs, which he called a team’s most precious commodity. He claimed that walks were an underrated offensive weapon and that on-base percentage and slugging percentage were better indicators of offensive performance than batting average.

James’s insights were not accepted by everyone. Michael Lewis’s 2003 book Moneyball tells how Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane struggled against conventional wisdom and baseball old-timers in applying James’s insights to his running of the team. But Beane made believers of a lot of people by using those insights to build a small-market, low-payroll team into a perennial contender by acquiring players who were undervalued by other teams but had the skills James insisted were crucial to baseball success.

It took a couple of decades, but Bill James changed the way people understand baseball. Today newspaper sports sections publish players’ OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage) alongside their batting averages, and other James-originated concepts like range factor are routinely used in evaluating players. And James himself has now been hired as a consultant by the Boston Red Sox (who have won two World Series since adopting a Jamesian approach to player evalution), a supreme concession of respect.

So what does Bill James have to do with Karl Popper, or anything serious, for that matter? Listen to James in his essay “Intro to Sabermetrics” in The Bill James Gold Mine 2009: “[The entire difference between sabermetrics and traditional sportswriting] is merely the habit of beginning with a question, rather than beginning with an answer... The person who begins with the question itself naturally focuses not on what he does know, but on what he does not know.”

Now listen to Karl Popper: “...we do not start from observations but always from problems—either from practical problems or from a theory which has run into difficulties.”

James goes on: “Forced to confront his ignorance, [the researcher] is forced to find ways to figure out the information that he is missing... Through this process, he winds up contributing things that were not known before... We are never certain... We are just doing the best we can. Our methods are always flawed, and our answers are usually tentative and muddled... But the difference between knowledge and BS is that knowledge moves forward, whereas BS moves in circles... We wind up with methods that get better over time.”

Sound familiar? Here’s how Popper put it: “Scientific theories, if they are not falsified, for ever remain hypotheses or conjectures... The growth of knowledge proceeds from old problems to new problems, by means of conjectures and refutations.”

I don’t know if Bill James has ever read Karl Popper, but he’s a textbook example of the Popperian thinker at work, and his success in increasing our understanding of baseball is testimony to the power of Popper’s supremely rational approach to the accumulation of knowledge. He's only a baseball writer, but Bill James has a lot to teach any number of supposedly serious social scientists.

So give Bill James the Karl Popper Award for the Advancement of Knowledge, and take one last Bill James quote to heart: “... there will never be a shortage of ignorance... The things that we do not know are inexhaustible.”

Which echoes, of course, my favorite Karl Popper quote: “Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.”

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Capturing the low ground

In my last post I defended Whole Foods CEO John Mackey from the less temperate responses to his Wall Street Journal editorial on health care and suggested that a call to boycott is not exactly a constructive contribution to the health care debate.

Of course, there are intemperate reactions on both sides of the political divide. Over on the right there are people who are carrying out their own campaign to stifle rational debate by resorting to invective, distortion and intimidation.

First there’s the fellow who showed up at the health care rally with the gun on his hip and the sign quoting Jefferson’s remark about the tree of liberty and the blood of patriots. This made a lot of people’s hair stand on end, and for good reason.

It’s not the gun per se I have a problem with; in New Hampshire he wasn’t violating any law. It’s the implication that a federal role in health care poses a threat to our liberty so urgent and so draconian as to justify violent revolution that makes me wonder what this gentleman has been ingesting besides that good mountain spring water. Taken together with the gun, I think we have to say that this disqualifies this particular citizen from a seat at the roundtable. Intimidation has no role in the discussion of public policy problems.

Then there are all the Obama-Hitler comparisons popping up in various venues, from the fringes of rally crowds to Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. If there’s one thing guaranteed to transform a debate instantly from a rational discussion to a shouting match, it’s an implication of fascism. As tokens, Hitler and his Nazis remain the polemical equivalent of tossing a match into a pool of gasoline.

Liberals, of course have been blithely comparing conservatives to Nazis for a long time, so perhaps a backlash was inevitable. The comparison of Democrats to Nazis is currently fashionable in some conservative circles partly because of a book by Jonah Goldberg called Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, which reminds readers of the ‘Socialist’ part of National Socialism and points out similar elements in the history of the American left. But the point of Goldberg’s book is to attack careless use of the term ‘fascist’ by the left, and Goldberg himself says, in the current issue of the National Review, “...I don’t think it is remotely right or fair to call Obama a crypto-Nazi.”

Doing so may be merely hysterical, or it may be a dishonest attempt to preempt debate. That was true when the left was comparing Bush to Hitler, and it’s true now. It’s an attempt to make people’s minds snap shut instead of remaining open for the long slog of evaluating evidence and arguments. It’s an attempt to avoid doing your homework on the issues.

I don’t know who’s ahead in the dishonesty sweepstakes; at this point there are lots of people on both the left and the right who would rather caricature and demonize their opponents than tackle the hard work of calm, rational analysis and persuasion. So when people start trading accusations about whether the right or the left is more dishonest, I lose interest.

I’ll listen to anyone who is genuinely interested in the truth. But if you’re more interested in scoring points than in advancing the debate, don’t pester me. I’m too busy doing my homework.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Is Health Care a Right?

John Mackey, founder of the upscale Whole Foods supermarket chain, has raised howls of protest by saying, in a guest editorial in the Wall Street Journal, that “a careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter... because there isn't any.”

Outraged, an array of left-leaning pundits and organizations is calling for a boycott of Whole Foods. Mackey has become a hate figure for daring to publish a reasoned, temperate opinion on the health care debate that challenges a basic assumption of the left.

It should be noted that a call to boycott is not an argument. It is an attempt to punish dissent. If the left wants to advance the health care debate, it should attempt to refute Mackey’s argument, not simply demonize him. Sadly, a quick scan of responses to Mackey’s article shows a heavy preponderance of invective over argument.

The unexamined assumption that people have a right to health care needs to be debated because so many people share it so unquestioningly. And if you start with that as an assumption, much of the opposition to government-provided health care will seem malicious and obtuse. This is a systemic problem: the left, working on assumptions the right does not share, proposes something; the right, not bothering to elucidate the difference in assumptions, opposes it and is accused of mean-spiritedness and other moral failings. This lack of philosophical curiosity poisons the debate.

I’ve said before that calling health care a right is problematic; maybe it’s time to discuss it a little further. Saying that health care (or decent housing, or any other goods or services) is a fundamental right is problematic because it is tantamount to declaring that you have a claim on somebody else’s labor or time or possessions. The amount of philosophical justification accompanying this declaration is usually approximately zero.

The best discussion of the philosophical grounding of rights that I know of is a book called Persons, Rights and the Moral Community by Loren Lomasky. In this book Lomasky tries to get at the heart of what rights are and why they are generally held to be “untrumpable”—that is, how they are different from mere preferences, which can be thwarted without the perception that a violation has occurred.

The entire argument is beyond the scope of a blog post, but Lomasky does take on the question of positive versus negative rights. Negative rights are those which boil down to saying that you have the right not to be messed with. Positive rights are those which express a claim to something concrete—goods or services. Classical liberalism, roughly speaking the philosophical tradition of our Founding Fathers, held negative rights to be very important but did not recognize positive rights. (Take a look at the Bill of Rights for examples of negative rights.) The line of thinking that goes from Marx through European social democracy to modern American liberalism tends to stress positive rights (while being a touch more selective about negative rights).

Lomasky points out that the fact that something is needed does not imply that one has a right to it. Our list of potential needs includes things which cannot be provided by others, like intelligence. There is no logical correspondence between needs and rights.

Any attempt to define a list of things crucial enough to be regarded as positive rights is necessarily arbitrary. (Just a house? Why not a car, if you live far from where the jobs are?) Philosophical clarity gets lost pretty quickly.

But more importantly, need on your part does not imply a duty of sacrifice on mine—if I have two good corneas and you have none, does your pressing need create a right to one of my (or anyone else’s) corneas? It may be praiseworthy of me to provide you with a good by my sacrifice, but that does not make it your right.

Asserting a right to housing asserts a claim on the labor of carpenters, masons, etc. What gives rise to this claim? A right, remember, is something that cannot be trumped. When a right to a good is legitimately asserted, it must provided. Do those whose labor provides the good deserve compensation? If so, how are they to be compensated? Questions of payment are inescapable, and a positive right is economically indistinguishable from any other good.

Health care goods and services obey the laws of economics even if you don’t think they should. Ask the British National Health Service. An asserted right proves to be inextricable from the grubby reality of overworked doctors and long waiting lists. When doctors in a public health service go on strike, are they violating the rights of the patients who are not served? Philosophical clarity gets lost here, too.

And philosophical clarity is at a premium. As Lomasky points out, an escalation in claims of rights makes public problems more intractable, since when perceived rights come into conflict, a judgment against one party leaves the loser with a sense of grievance. It is an advantage to have a clear criterion for rights and make sure that our legal system guarantees them.

As Lomasky says, an important aspect of the classical liberal position on rights is its modesty: since the costs to others of conceding these negative rights is lower, they are less likely to opt out of the system. A regime of rights will not be respected if it is too costly.

So I think John Mackey is right. Now, none of this means that we should not place a high priority on the provision of health care, education and any number of other socially useful goods to all members of the population. That’s just good government. Urgency in providing desirable social goods ought to be way up there on our scale of public policy values.

But calling real-world goods “rights” complicates their provision by obscuring the very real costs of providing them. Call a good or a service a right, and you still have to figure out how to pay for it. It doesn’t appear out of thin air.

If you’re outraged by this position, so be it. But the burden of proof is on you to show how you’re going to pay for all the good things you think we are entitled to. John Mackey presented a list of reasonable proposals for doing that in his widely vilified op-ed. Before you join the boycott, you might just want to run an eye over them.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Dangerous Ideas, Part 2

Continuing to delve into What is Your Dangerous Idea?, edited by John Brockman (see my last post), I’ve been finding more things that challenge my thinking, which is of course what we should all be doing all the time but don’t—it’s a lot more comfortable to read only things we know in advance we’re going to agree with.

With my libertarian inclinations, I had to take a look at Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s piece entitled "The Free Market". Coming just after Matt Ridley’s "Government Is the Problem, Not the Solution", which was of course right in my comfort zone, this essay takes the opposite tack, challenging the value of the free market.

Csikszentmihalyi is bothered by what he sees as the triumph of free-market ideology, to the point where "it is embraced as a final solution to the ills of humankind". He claims that this overreach "risks destroying both the material resources and the cultural achievements our species has so painstakingly developed" and says that things like health, education, infrastructure, environment, human rights, and public safety "need to become part of our social and political agenda".

Well. I had somehow received a vague impression that health, education, infrastructure, environment, human rights, and public safety were on the social and political agenda, but I could be wrong. Let’s take a look at Csikszentmihalyi’s charges and see if they hold up. To begin with, we should ask whether his claim that the free market reins supreme is accurate. A key tactic in political polemics is to exaggerate the gains of one’s opponents, as when the Dittohead right fumes that President Obama is dragging us down the road to socialism. Get people alarmed about the apocalypse and they’ll be ripe for your pitch.

Csikszentmihalyi’s claims seem a little fevered: who exactly is embracing the free market "as a final solution to the ills of humankind?" (Note the use of the inflammatory phrase "the final solution".) Certainly not the Republican Party, which is enthusiastically behind any number of market-thwarting measures, from agricultural subsidies to windfall taxes on oil companies any time the price rises. If Csikszentmihalyi is aiming at genuine free-market ideologues like, say, Milton Friedman, he should be aware that Friedman’s prescriptions have never been more than imperfectly implemented anywhere. (Even in Chile, where free-market ideology was adopted with reasonable enthusiasm, there were always exceptions, such as limitations on capital flows.) And Csikszentmihalyi should actually go and read Friedman, whose temperate (and genuinely liberal) views were a very long way from considering anything to be a "final solution" to our problems.

Such caricatures, of course, are a favorite tool of the polemicist. Csikszentmihalyi’s statement of the free-market position is that it "must take precedence over any other value." Any other value? Who believes this? Who opposes efforts to disrupt human trafficking networks on the grounds that the market must be allowed to operate? Not me, at any rate, or any free-market advocate that I know of. Basic human rights take precedence over the pimp’s right to buy and sell Romanian orphan girls. And it is the proper role of political powers to ensure this. I don’t know of any responsible figure, not even in the darkest heart of the Republican Party, who really thinks that the free market ought to be "the ultimate arbiter of political decisions".

The whole point about the free market is that economic decisions and political decisions are two different animals. Economics is about the distribution of wealth, while politics is about the distribution of power. When politicians try to make economic decisions, they often get them wrong. That’s why people stood in line for toilet paper in the Soviet Union. The proper role of politics is to take care of the things that are more important than economics, such as the legal and institutional framework of society and collective defense against force and fraud. Those things really are important, and they ought to be enough to keep the politicians busy. But they keep losing sight of the distinction.

Adam Smith’s insight was that an economy, like an ecology, is too complicated for politicians to try to micro-manage it. Smith’s "invisible hand" refers to the self-adjusting mechanism of supply and demand. This mechanism is, at this point, time-tested and widely recognized. Even Csikszentmihalyi admits that it is "based on reasonable empirical foundations." Free market ideology simply means the claim that for the most part, as far as any generalization holds water in the real world, in the long run the supply/demand mechanism will do a better job of providing for people’s material needs than any number of government planning commissions. Of course, we have other needs besides the material ones. Those are what politicians, religious leaders and your mom and dad are properly in charge of.

I don’t think Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is entirely clear on the distinction between politics and economics, as shown by his list of desirable social goods above. Some of them, like human rights and public safety, are not goods that lend themselves to an economic market. They’re things that require the exertion or the threat of force to safeguard. They’re political goods. But other things on that list, like health, education and infrastructure, involve goods and services that obey the laws of economics even if Csikszentmihalyi doesn’t think they should. The free market may help to provide them, and inept political interventions may impede their provision. To make that claim is very far from claiming that the free market is the ultimate value.

So I think, on one hand, that Csikszentmihalyi is more alarmed about the triumph of the free market than he needs to be. We’re a long way from seeing the free market hold sway everywhere. And on the other hand I think that Csikszentmihalyi ought to consider that the free market is not inimical to the things he values. The proper mix of public and private provision of things like health care and education will always be a legitimate topic of debate. And rigid absolutism about the free market is no more justifiable than rigid absolutism about the state. But I think it’s equally rare. Hysteria about the dire effects of free-market ideology only muddies the waters.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com

Dangerous Ideas

Ask most people what philosophy is and they won’t be able to tell you. I was a little unclear on the concept myself as an undergraduate philosophy major. It took me a few years of adult vicissitudes and political peregrinations to begin to understand how ideas shape the society we live in.

If you need a jump-start to your philosophical program you might take a look at a book called What is Your Dangerous Idea?, edited by John Brockman, the publisher and editor of Edge, a website dedicated to pushing the intellectual envelope. At the suggestion of psychologist Steven Pinker, who provides an introduction, Brockman asked a range of thinkers in a variety of disciplines to discuss ideas they felt were dangerous in the sense that they threatened current conventional wisdom or, in Pinker’s phrase, “corrode the prevailing moral order”.

In his introduction, Pinker gives a long list of provocative questions: Did the crime rate go down in the nineties because of the advent of widespread abortion in the seventies? Does allowing security services to use torture make us safer? Do black men have higher levels of testosterone? Are Ashkenazi Jews smarter? Has religion precipitated more genocide than Nazism? Would functioning markets, i.e. auctions, in organs and adoption rights improve outcomes for transplant recipients and unwanted babies? Do women and men have different aptitudes?

Whatever your ideological orientation, you’re likely to find some of these questions unsettling. Pinker discusses the argument for limiting discussion of dangerous ideas but comes down on the side of rational discussion of even the most provocative notions. And then the fun starts, with contributors throwing out ideas like, “We Have No Souls”, “Everything Is Pointless”, “Groups of People May Differ Genetically in Their Average Talents and Temperaments”, “Science Must Destroy Religion” and “Science Will Never Silence God”. You may have noted that there is no particular partisan slant, which is a refreshing feature. Pinker adduces the lynch-mob response to Lawrence Summers’s suggestion that discrimination is not the only reason for women’s underrepresentation in science as an example of how even academia, supposedly the citadel of rational discussion, behaves like the Spanish Inquisition when received ideas are threatened. The book’s agenda is to open minds.

I’ve just started dipping into the book, but already I’ve found ideas I endorse whole-heartedly and others that challenge me. One essay that caught my eye was “The Evolution of Evil” by psychologist David Buss. Buss suggests that killing can be a perfectly rational response to any number of circumstances and that we have an evolutionarily hard-wired predilection to violence, particularly with regard to “outgroups”, members of another tribe. My reaction was, “Well, of course.” Why anyone should find this surprising is beyond me. But apparently there are still people who, as Buss says, “refuse to recognize that there are dark sides of human nature that cannot be wished away by attributing them to the modern ills of culture, poverty, pathology or exposure to media violence.”

I’ve never had a problem with Buss’s dangerous idea: the religion I was raised with calls hard-wired evil Original Sin. But you don’t have to be a Christian to recognize it. What’s important is to recognize that we need moral codes to set limits to our violent predilections. And if you toss religion out the window, you’d better come up with some other way of encouraging people to set limits on their own behavior, and fast.

But other ideas here do unsettle me, particularly Eric R. Kandel’s “Free Will Is Exercised Unconsciously” and Clay Shirky’s “Free Will Is Going Away”, both of which call into question our traditional notion that people are capable of making choices and bear the responsibility for those choices. I’m a big fan of the idea of responsibility: if you fail to hold people responsible for their behavior you find pretty quickly that there are few limits on their behavior. I think the idea of free will has crucial social utility even if the neural scientists can’t quite pin it down. But truth is important, so we have to consider the possibility that free will is an illusion.

I’m not ready to write it off. I’d throw out the hypothesis that free will is in a sense optional: if you believe you have it you probably do exercise it at least occasionally, while if you don’t believe in it you really are allowing yourself to be buffeted by the deterministic winds. Does that mean you have an excuse for misbehavior?

That’s a philosophical question, and there are lots of them we need to be thinking about, because they determine how we arrange our institutions to handle the messiness of human life. Philosophy needs to be more than just an academic refuge for the inarticulate, and this provocative book puts it back where it belongs, smack in the middle of our public debate.

Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com