The proper role of insurance in healthcare

After reading the two part healthcare articles by L. Randall Wray over at Economic Perspectives from Kansas City, I found that my squishy brains was churning with thoughts regarding his argument that we are utilizing insurance too much in the provision of healthcare. What is the proper role of insurance in healthcare?

1. Healthcare and Insurance

The issue can be elucidated by taking two analytical steps. First, pretend that healthcare services are classical or "typical" services and posit what properties they have that differentiate them from the norm. From these properties comes the justification to treat healthcare services as being different from other services. Of course, the degree of regulation that a person expects to exist for the economy in general can muddle this analysis, and it is likely that many important properties of healthcare services will actually be present in other classes of service. The second step is then to determine how well insurance provide various functions of healthcare.

In the past I have asserted that the healthcare problem is a public contracting problem. This is true because healthcare services are much like services provided by private contractors to the government. Public contract services are paid for by a public agency but provided by private entities. Often, these companies are one of a few firms that can fill the contract, and so the contracting agency may have few options. Similarly with healthcare. For people who actually receive healthcare through the government or paid for by the government, their healthcare really is a public contract. Although healthcare is not always paid for by the government in the United States, the public pays into health insurance pools which are then administered by insurance companies. A person is often limited in his/her healthcare options by where he/she works. Even where healthcare is purchased on the market by private citizens, few have the understanding or sophistication to see how the policy will actually play out for them, and so competitive regulation is absent and the decision is essentially arbitrary. For people who develop medical conditions and are unable to switch providers, these folks are locked into a public contract situation where their insurer can often make arbitrary changes to the contract. In public-private contracting, the government, and therefore the public, is in danger of being harmed by companies that use manipulative business and accounting techniques to undermine the level of service that they provide for their own profit. Similarly, a person or group of people entering an agreement with an insurance company are in danger of being harmed by the fine print of their contract, negotiations made by their employer on their behalf, and "pre-existing conditions". In order to ensure that private entities are providing efficient and quality services, the key questions and the place that most of the work must be done is in the oversight of the private contractors.

But healthcare through an insurance model is really a question of double contracting. First, insurance companies enter into contracts with the general public. Then, these companies turn around and enter into contracts with health service providers. For government provided healthcare, there are services provided through the Veterans Administration or Military, where the government actually provides the service, and there are services like medicaid that contract with healthcare providers, just as insurance companies do.

But healthcare is not really a uniform service. It is often tacitly assumed that people have no real preference beyond "the best quality available" in choosing their healthcare service provider. This, however, isn't true. Some people will prefer a more friendly doctor or one with a more professional demeanor. Some people believe in alternative medicines. One healthcare economist has compared this to people's taste in restaurants, though this may be a stretch. People primarily want consistency and accuracy from their doctors. Data compiled in hospital mortality rates clearly show that some surgical teams are much better than others. The public is not allowed to know which hospital they are more likely to die at, or which doctors are most likely to misdiagnose their condition at the clinic. Faith is placed in the doctors that they are all trying their best, and that is enough for even the most free-market voices in the public debate on the issue.

It is not clear that the public would do the right thing with hospital quality of care information, were it aggregated by a nonprofit or government agency and made available to them, but a good argument can be made that it would. At the very least, it might cause services at better rated hospitals to be bid up in price, and services at not-so-good hospitals to fall in price. Very rarely, this would create a situation where those who couldn't afford to go to the nicer hospital instead go to the alternative hospital and experience a reduced health outcome or even death as a result. This is only a very small harm. Hospitals, however, would experience a much stronger incentive to provide quality care, because the prestige of the institution and its management would be at stake. Here there would actually be a rarity in business: an accepted philosophy for what a quality service actually is combined with public concern sufficient to motivate action. It might happen that hospitals that serve poorer communities would suffer an even greater reduction in health outcomes than what currently exists, but how do we separate our new knowledge from the effect of knowing? There is also a deeper, philosophic argument for why this information should be available. Public disclosure is a necessity in free societies.

Enter the insurance company. The insurance company will not insure patient care. Though it does have the sophistication and means to determine, to some degree, the quality of service provided by each medical provider, even while keeping the general public from knowing. However, they only have a limited interest in preserving patient health, insofar as preserving the health of the patient will maximize the future difference between premiums collected and costs of services paid out. This makes them unlikely to act on such knowledge. The insurance company also has no interest in limiting costs that it can pass directly to patients. As an actuarial institution, the insurer has an incentive to limit payouts on the patient's behalf, passing as many costs to the patient as possible. The insurer that is unable to do this will instead seek to negotiate for lower costs of service from the provider, but the items of negotiation do not necessarily correspond to the profit margin of the service, and hence can lead to strange gamesmanship between providers and insurers that undermines quality of service. In short, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to create a system where insurance companies act on behalf of their patients. The relationship is naturally one of adversarial negotiation. The insurance company is really meant to address the financial aspect of the situation, specifically providing large short term payments that individuals cannot afford.

One can expect the average individual to pay much more to insurance companies than he receives in benefits. Theoretically, this is the only way such companies can exist, as they must pay for their own employees as well as turn a profit for their investors with an income stream that is only premiums. In practice, however, insurers negotiate steep discounts on service costs from health providers. Therefore, insurance can lead to reduced costs for the average consumer. This is at least partially a result of information availability to consumers, specifically the nondisclosure of provider quality. This factor seems to be a source of abuse as well, as insurers do not necessarily act as agents of their policy holders. To complicate matters, these contracts are not subject to uniform standards of disclosure. Even so, the insurer maintains some level of negotiating leverage with health providers by being able to route its policy holders toward less expensive hospitals. It is not quality of care that matters so much as price, but the downward pressure this exerts on healthcare costs is probably significant.

Here it is worth noting that the presence of strategically placed regulations and oversight requirements can be very powerful in forcing insurance companies into the proper negotiations with providers instead of allowing them to gouge consumers. This seems to be a significant part of the current Democrats' healthcare reform strategy. As is usual in politics, the people who proposed a solution were criticized harshly and in ways that had little to do with the facts. Where insurance is providing services it reasonably should, the addition of sensible regulations will lead to a very efficient outcome that can be called a "solution". In cases where insurance really has no business, this change is not really going to solve problems so much as suppress bad outcomes, requiring constant regulatory adjustment and fixes to cover loopholes and tricks, and a high degree of efficiency will not be achieved.

It is also worth asking, if only for theoretical reasons, what criteria a person can use to select an insurance company. Often times a person will pick insurer based on cost alone. In other situations the individual will know that they are more likely to use one or another service, and pick an insurer that has good coverage of that particular health service. Distance also becomes a factor, and sometimes people will ask their friends about quality as well. All of these are valid criteria, and so long as free markets work in general, there is no reason to believe that individuals cannot pick insurance plans that work for them, so long as there is some minimal quality of contract that insurers provide, i.e. so long as the government pursues reasonable regulation of the insurance business practices.

2. Where health insurance works

The types of health service paid for by insurance companies are nicely described by Professor Wray, and I will briefly summarize them, then assess whether they are best provided by insurance companies, the government, or individuals.

Insurance companies cover random, catastrophic health events. These include physical accidents and injuries caused by others, outbreaks of disease, and some other non-chronic conditions. As long as these health events conform to solid actuarial standards, and there are proper government regulations to constitute a "second best equilibrium" where insurers compete for quality of service and financially incentivize people against risky behavior, this type of healthcare is well provided by the insurers. These catastrophic events will, of course, visit individuals more or less frequently and at greater or lesser cost along demographic factors which a person does not have control over - age, gender, geographic location, occupation, specific health conditions, etc. Here, regulations requiring insurers to offer the same rates to all these different demographics would only lead insurers to compete to control the "choicest" demographics. In fact, they will do this anyway, but much less desperately. To a certain degree, risky behavior cannot be separated from the demographics, because insurers are limited in the information that they can obtain. If the question is one of equality, there is no reason that the burden of equalization should fall on the insurance company (For instance, if the cost of being female is just higher in our society than it is for being male, a subsidy could be used to ensure that women are not made poorer than men on average as a result). Health insurance works in this case, and it is very similar to what one sees in car insurance or any other type of insurance.

Insurance companies cover routine care. Here, the individual will express the greatest preference for variety of care. Some individuals are best served through home visits. Others seek alternative medicines. Still others will not be bothered to take any steps toward routine care whatsoever. Though the majority may still come to regular check-ups with traditional doctors, individuals will express a variety of preferences in this regard. In this market, it really doesn't make sense for insurance companies to be involved. What is really needed is consumer advocate groups who can rate care providers along the lines of price, quality of service, sanitary standards, etc. Insurance companies cannot be trusted to do this consistently, as they are not agents of their policy holders and don't really care about quality of service. However, in this situation, insurers who provide catastrophic coverage can look to personal health records and give lower premiums to those who show evidence of actively working to preserve their own health. Because of its low price, routine care is not well provided by insurers, and the price-negotiating effect is less likely to reduce costs for consumers. If the goal is to make it affordable for all people to receive routine care, subsidies should be introduced to make it affordable for everyone, or perhaps the issue of poverty should simply be addressed separately.

Insurance companies cover the cost of chronic conditions. Here, the unlucky insurer ends up trapped in a situation where they are paying large sums of money for a long and indeterminate period. The money is spent on expensive medical techniques, drugs, and hospital stays that would be much more expensive if paid out of pocket. This is probably the porkiest part of the entire system. Here, the power of insurance companies to negotiate prices down is probably the strongest, but also where the greatest tension arises between insured and insurer. Here is where people are denied coverage because of preexisting conditions, where fine print costs families their savings, where secret deals fleece the consumer, and where the vast majority of healthcare costs are incurred. The problem with this is that here there is no actuarial element - a person has a condition and there is no risk against which the person is insured. Here, a person needs a health advocate who gets people together in groups and negotiates with the healthcare provider on their behalf. This really shouldn't be an insurance company.

To summarize: Health Insurance should cover only actuarially appropriate health risks and should not be used to pay for routine checkups or long term care.

3. Solutions

The issues that most critically need to be addressed are the costs associated with chronic conditions, the transition from catastrophic event to chronic payment, workplace-funded healthcare, general regulation, and standards of disclosure. These are really issues in healthcare and not insurance. Where insurance should not be involved, the structure of a system that does not utilize it is sketched out.

A. Chronic conditions

Because of the great disparity in costs associated with the cost of chronic conditions, the way that this aspect of the healthcare problem is managed will essentially determine the success of the entire system. There are really three groups of chronic conditions: those associated with old age, those associated with poor health choices, and those that the individual is not at fault for.

Chronic conditions associated with old age for the most part fall under medicare in our current system, so I won't dwell on these issues much longer, except to say that medicare should probably phase in sooner for most people. The effects of aging become pretty clear by the time someone is 55. From now on, my discussion will focus on chronic conditions caused by poor health choices and events outside of a person's control.

Medicaid and other programs that provide medical services to the poorest of the poor should also be expanded to provide these services in a complete and consistent manner. Unless a person is in such a group, there is no reason to expect their healthcare to be free, and so everyone else will have to pay, even if only a little bit.

In order to control costs and ensure quality of service, people with chronic conditions need a union, not an insurer. A "Health Union" would be an organization that geniunely represents the interests of its members. Those who don't have chronic conditions don't have a reason to pay dues or be members, and they shouldn't. Those who do have chronic conditions would pay to hire a collective bargaining team to lower costs for them. Unions, as fundamentally democratic and not-for-profit entities, have the potential to maximize both the cost savings and the quality of care for their members, and they won't hesitate to fight for their members in court. If conservatives get all pissed off about the term "health union", they could be called "health advocacy associations" or even "HMO"s.

If costs are still too high after bargaining, which they most certainly will be, these costs would need to be subsidized. The best way to structure this subsidy would be to preserve a portion of the individual incentive to shop for lower costs while covering the bulk of the expense from the supply side. Something like 60-99% of the cost of procedures would be paid by the subsidy. Individuals who cannot afford to purchase their medicine even under these conditions would ideally also qualify for medicaid. Where there are cases of individuals not being able to afford care, it is really a case for expanding medicaid, not a case for universal coverage.

Funding for subsidies related to poor health choices would come from taxes on products that contribute to those choices. This is already the standard for cigarettes and lung cancer. This philosophy should be expanded to include all products in the proportional degree of their contribution. For instance, soda contributes to type II diabetes, and therefore it and other sugar sources should be taxed appropriately. Motorcycles and Automobiles lead to traumatic brain injuries, and therefore they should pay a tax to help cover the cost of these injuries. Alcohol, of course, would be taxed heavily. Individuals should pay for their own health choices, but I can think of no other way to bring this about. Making individuals pay for their own chronic care only at the time of providing the health service is impossible. If these taxes are not levied, most people will not be paying the "real cost" of the products they consume. This is the most fair alternative I could think of, and it will reduce costs in the long term as well.

Funding for subsidies stemming from no fault on the part of the individual must come from the government. We have a long and compassionate tradition in this country of providing for people who have disabilities. We believe in a level playing field from which everyone has the same opportunities for success. If this creed is more than words, it must be put into action in a way that allows those with chronic conditions to live without crippling medical debts. This is a general fund issue, just as education, human services, and national defense are. Any one of us could wake up tomorrow and find that something has gone horribly wrong with our body. Just as the government protects us from Al-Quaida, it should protect us from the financial ruin associated with such a situation. If the cost is high, we should accept a higher deficit or raise taxes in whatever way is fair.

B. From catastrophic to chronic

The transition between catastrophic care and chronic care is worth addressing here because I have assigned one function - catastrophic health coverage - to insurers while reserving chronic care price negotiations to health unions and government agencies that set subsidies. Insurers will want to reclassify people as receiving chronic care at an early stage, while the legislatures crafting budgets will want to keep individuals in the catastrophic coverage stage as long as possible so that they can then reroute general fund dollars to their own pet programs.

There is no simple argument for when the transition should occur. Insurers may be able to set this threshold in a reasonable manner, preventing any formal legal definition from stipulating an exact time frame. There are reasonable bounds: post operative care should be covered as part of the definition of covering the cost of an operation; catastrophic coverage that pays for an emergency surgery to battle an invasive tumor should not be required to cover a person's chemotherapy for the rest of their life.

Whenever the transition happens, it will be crucial to prevent any disruption of care. For this reason, a person should receive both advanced notice and expert counseling that informs them of the financial effects of the transition and their options. Because chronic care is directly subsidized, even if disruptions do occur, a person who pays out of pocket rather than through a health union would not usually pay significantly more. When (s)he does pay significantly more, it is an incentive for both the individual to join the health union and the government to improve the transition, because the government would pay more in subsidy as well.

C. Workplace funded healthcare

Workplace funded healthcare is not so much of a horrible mistake as Professor Wray contends. Because workers spend a disproportionate part of their lives at work, and because occupational hazards can lead to many catastrophic events and chronic conditions, it is really a prudent public policy to make businesses financially responsible for the health of their workers. The problem is that businesses must pay for a huge variety of events that they aren't responsible for at all. Many businesses cover the entire family of the worker, even though the worker's family never sets foot on the factory floor.

There is a specific class of care that businesses should be responsible for. Though the majority of businesses these days aren't the dangerous factories of yore, safety hazards still exist at all businesses. When a person is injured on the job, the company should be required to pay for the catastrophic treatment and subsequent chronic care. This does not necessitate an insurance policy unless the business is small, but it is possible that businesses will purchase policies to cover financial costs merely to outsource the administration details. In this situation, the worker is made more remote from the insurer. For this reason, a strict and narrow standard should be used: individuals should purchase their own catastrophic coverage which covers all non-workplace related health calamities; businesses purchase coverage which covers their cost of paying for medical expenses that result from workplace accidents or chronic ailments.

If a business has a practice that results in 20% of its workers developing back injuries due to repetitive strain, the business should pay the cost of this care. Even if this means that the business has to charge more for its products, society isn't paying the real cost of production unless it pays this extra. If this contributes to other countries outcompeting the United States, one must ask if tariffs really don't make sense. After all, these foreign countries dotted with sweat shops aren't making their own businesses pay the real cost of production, and so they don't deserve this competitive advantage. Businesses, of course, will have an incentive to treat their workers well when they have to pay for injuries. When they don't, they won't.

As a final note on this issue, the practice of using temporary employees and independent contractors must be regulated and disincentivized. A company that contracts with a third party to bring workers into its own factory or production process should be required to treat these individuals as its own employees. There are far too many abuses that manifest under the alternatives.

D. General Regulations

Regulations take the form of rules that determine what is acceptable and allowed. They also form the groundwork from which individuals make decisions in the context of market competition. Regulations can improve health outcomes mainly through information sharing requirements and intercompatibility rules.

Healthcare, being a complex process of coordination, negotiation, and expertise-dependent decision making, is prone to the development of proprietary architectures. The role of the government in this situation is to spare the consumer from the horrors of learning a separate system for each different clinic or hospital that (s)he visits. Because of the way that businesses operate, often they will not see an individual incentive to change their system to conform to those of other businesses, but massive improvements in efficiency can be realized through standardizations. The creation of standard forms and intercompatibility rules should have very strong positive impacts on efficiency.

Many things that need to be required or regulated may already be so. A person's health record should be available to be transferred in total from one provider to another. Privacy rules should be uniform and strict.

Insurance must be prevented from worming out of commitments. Customers need a credible belief that they are actually buying something. This is especially true if the government plans to force individuals to purchase catastrophic coverage.

E. Disclosure and Oversight

I return now to the topic of disclosure, as it was mentioned at the beginning of this essay.

Disclosure is the keystone of any effective partnership between public and private. The necessity of disclosure is absolute. Without knowing what all health companies are doing with the money they earn, it is not possible to know if services are being provided efficiently. Similarly, insurance companies can conspire to gouge consumers if their profit margin is not public knowledge. The main obstacle to disclosure requirements are several arguments against them, which I must now turn to.

Some will argue that disclosure requirements harm firms by forcing them to share proprietary information or trade secrets. However, there shouldn't be these kind of things in healthcare. If a company has a way to do something better or more efficiently, it is that company's duty to share it.

Others will argue that there is a high cost associated with creating and maintaining the records needed for disclosure requirements to be met. However, these records should be kept by the company even in the absence of them being required to publicly disclose them. Should a hospital keep track of the success rate of its operations? Probably. If there is any credible argument to be made that businesses strive to provide quality of service, these same businesses should be measuring the quality of the services they provide.

4. In conclusion

So long as healthcare is provided entirely through an insurance system or a centralized "single payer", incentives to select for true quality of service at an affordable price will be muted. Real savings are best realized through a sober dissection of the healthcare question. Insurance has its role in catastrophic care. Markets and consumer choice are key to routine and preventive care. Chronic care must be treated as a different beast entirely. The government's role in Medicare and Medicaid should be expanded.

There are many many details behind each and every generalization I have made here. Much of what can be realized will depend on the work that is done to craft accurate payment schedules, savvy negotiation of prices, and work through the details. These details must equal the whole: I am writing with the expectation that good faith is followed. This is always the case, with any statement of what must be done. Arguments that what I have imagined cannot be done are welcome.

After writing most of this, I noticed that a soda tax has been proposed. This is an excellent idea.

The definition of 'work'

I would like to construct a better definition of work that is broad enough to engage a more general philosophic view.

Work is the object of labor - workers labor only because there is work to do. In the market setting, whenever there is work to do, this implies an expectation of profit. Even in the short term case of unprofitable firms, labor is only contracted under expectations that losses are thereby reduced. Thus, profit as used in this essay is only a relative quantity, a "net gain". In short: labor implies work; work implies profit. Throughout the essay, work and labor will be used almost interchangeably: work IS labor in the sense that there is always much work to be done but we tend to be oblivious to the vast majority of it because we do not perceive anyone actually intending to do it.

If work is to be a well defined aspect of our economic life, then it cannot be defined such that the same action taken by two different people is work for one of them and not work for the other. Although this distinction - the subjective division between work and leisure - underpins much of the early philosophy of economics, it suffers from several flaws. The first is that meaningless service exchanges look better from the perspective of common metrics such as "unemployment". For example, suppose two unemployed people decide to work for each other by buying each others' groceries. In this way, they are each performing a service for someone else and getting paid for it. Thus, one might suppose that this is work, but that buying groceries for oneself is not. Secondly, a person might enjoy doing something that others consider to be work, or a person might not enjoy doing some action that he or she is in some way compelled to do without pay because it is considered to not be work. Therefore, the idea of the desirability of any activity is a hidden, subjective, and informally classified determinant of economic variables - it is a source of error.

Accepting the above gives a very broad definition of work: work becomes virtually all human activity. The distinction between voluntary action and pecuniary actions, which was never well adhered to in economic theory anyway, disappears. Work can be defined as all human activity except those functions that another person literally cannot do for a person. For example, although I may feed you, I may not eat for you; although I may change channels for you I cannot watch TV for you. In certain cases the distinction is subtle - a person may gather information for themselves or have it reported to them, but the act of learning and internalizing is not delegable, and therefore not work. One can make distinctions in work based on telos: Is it work for oneself, for "pleasure", etc. or for an organization or for society in general? The problematic aspect of this type of distinction making is that it is not always clear what constitutes what, nor does the individual always have a clear idea of their own causes of action. The substitute person need not be a real and identified other who will step forth to act - (s)he is a theoretical person who could step into one's role and complete the task. Additionally, work is a separation of action from authorship. Workers do literally sign away their rights to their own creations when they work in a creative capacity for a corporation. More fundamentally, anything that one can conceive of as being an activity someone else could do is an activity of which a person cannot also claim himself author, and so anything truly authentic or unique is not definable as work. Here, the distinction is between general action and details.

If economics is to be a predictive discipline, it must make every effort to maximize the degree to which it predicts future economic activity. Continuing with the assumption that work is any human activity that another person could complete in your stead, the basic premise that work implies profit must either be abandoned or profit must be defined to include nonpecuniary goals. The latter assumption seems to be more straightforward and elegant, and for purposes of descriptive brevity, this is how it will be defined throughout the essay. More precisely, profit is the direct achievement of personal ends or the achievement of ends on which some personal goal is contingent. The theory is not violated when a person's goal in life is to make as much money as possible, nor is it violated when a person's goal in life is to smoke as much weed as possible. Here I note again that in practice individuals act on expectations of profit.

That offers of work are often treated as implying profit on the part of the firm is a particularly troubling assertion. In this, the "firm" is created as a mystical entity, where in fact it is a collection of individuals. Furthermore, the profits of the firm are collectively the property of the investors and creditors. The balance sheet shows this to be true. To say that a firm owns property is to assign total ownership to one group - the investors and creditors - and then to assign some other level of ownership to the firm itself. Therefore, the firm does not own itself, and cannot claim its own profits; it becomes nonsensical then to assume it is interested in achieving profit. A person who takes an offer of work receives money in exchange for some activity. This is labor in the classical sense, and it work in time and effort. A person who spends money in exchange for some goods or services has been offered work as well - it is work in selecting and exchanging. Even a person who is watching television is working by viewing advertisements. An author depends on the work of his or her readers. All of these are work in the broader sense, and all of them are acts of labor. One might object that these are different kinds of transactions, one being a spending of wages for goods and the other being the production of goods for wages. Here, though, one must ask what the significance of this distinction is: limiting work to work for money forces us to treat volunteering as not being work, or the work of a student as not being work.

The appeal to a framework of division between needs and wants does not help the matter. When a teenager goes to the mall to buy designer clothes, we do not treat this as work, even if the teenager feels that he needs these clothes in order to fit in with his peers. When a person takes on a second job simply because he wants to save up money, we do treat this as work, with or without appealing to a theory of necessity. Furthermore, we encounter many difficulties if we attempt to make more formal definitions. Does a person need to be literate? Does a person need adequate nutrition or is malnourishment simply an unpleasant part of life, like boredom? The first instinct is to introduce a rights framework, but then one has effectively abandoned wants and needs. Rights, of course, suffer similarly: to introduce the individual right to be nourished is too weak of a demand to actually ensure nourishment.

Returning now to the idea itself - that work is any human activity that another person could complete in a person's stead - the benefits of this definition are numerous. Many problems are clarified.

1. Ensuring that there is enough work becomes a meaningless endeavor. The real objective becomes to ensure that social goals are achieved.

Economists use measures like "unemployment" to gauge the health of the economic system. This definition and its common use strongly imply work to be a good thing. Although intuitively we often feel that work is a bad thing (just as we might curse when we spill a glass of milk rather than saying "hurray! Some work to do!") we just as often enjoy work: we may enjoy shopping, cooking a meal, or even arguing on the internet. As outlined above, it is silly to distinguish between work and play on the basis of some subjective sense of enjoyment or dread because work is the path to the achievement of personal goals, not the actual goals themselves.

The real problem with people not working is that they may be unable to provide for themselves in the long run. Their quality of life is compromised. This is an ethical judgment, just as any preference for some level of employment is ultimately ethical, whether based on Pareto optimums or some other economic pseudoethics or on a philosophic theory of ethics.

When society decides that it wants to address unemployment, it is a mistake to try to create work. In reality, everyone is always employed, and so the question is whether to change their actions so that they are more profitable. This may require a mix of mandates, training, subsidies, and assistance programs. What the society should do is find work that is not being done and entice people to do it. Here, individual goals are scrutinized on the basis of their importance. Avoiding starvation is relatively more important than buying another toy. In our present society, there is no shortage of work to be done that is very valuable to everyone. Our goal of preventing climate change could motivate us to build more wind power generators. Our goal of preventing homelessness could motivate us to produce low cost housing. Our goal of westernizing the world could motivate us to teach or volunteer in impoverished countries.

When there is no work that is not being done that that society feels is worth doing, the alternative is to either change the division of labor between individuals or to create a class of people who do not work. America has categorically rejected the second option - we do not want to create a dole. The goal, however, is to ensure that everyone has a minimum quality of life, and this means they must have the income to support that quality of life or receive services as a charity.

2. Individuals will tend to minimize work along profit isoquants.

In a more technical sense, work is a collection of activities to the achievement of profit. I have not yet created a metric for measuring quantity of work, but any such definition will feature a balance of criteria such as time, effort, physical hardship, etc. that detract from an individual's profit. There will be situations where optimizations exist, and it is reasonable to expect individuals to take actions to optimize work (i.e. do less work per unit time, but still be considered "working" throughout that time). Nobody wants to be Sisyphus, rolling a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down over and over again. A person who is working is always accomplishing something in his own mind.

3. People are always working. Consumer behavior is explained in the same way that worker behavior is.

A person who is doing an "enjoyable" activity that is not classically categorized as work is engaged in a profit-seeking process just as a worker or manager is. Take, for instance, the person shopping at the mall for new clothes. The profits come from ideas of achievements of fashion. The person is directly experiencing joy through social pressures that tell them this is how to behave and through the experience of feeling closer to the goals of looking good. Perhaps the person is achieving the direct goal of simply going out and shopping, possibly with friends.

Even a person who is loitering on the street or sitting around bored is working toward goals. The person is "killing time" or "hanging out" or one of many descriptors that indicate that this is the way by which they are looking forward to future profit. Such a person is not choosing against any better thing he or she could be doing, he is valuing these as less valuable than simply waiting. There is no room in this model for people to choose against what they value - a person chooses by valuing.

4. Work is locked into the political world - denying that some work is work is political disempowerment of some workers.

That some functions in our society are prestigious, there is no doubt. That this makes others shameful is a proposition that positive thinkers might decry. Nevertheless, it is true. An unemployed person is not engaged in a prestigious function, and most people are ashamed to be unemployed. In fact, the first question a person asks upon meeting someone else is usually "What do you do for a living?"

Without taking a broad definition of work, the prestige system becomes locked into the economic theory. It is a dangerous politicization to define things along the lines of pecuniary profit. Economies get distorted by economics, particularly when the economic theory ends up arguing that those who participate in certain ways are not merely "more valuable" than others, but not producing value at all! This type of result must be avoided, even if it is an abuse of the economic theory. It is reflected in the treatment of homemakers as not part of the economy and the deligitimization of this profession has had ripple effects - it seems that the basic skills of parenting are no longer passed on and exchanged to the necessary degree. However, when various types of excluded work are compared to included work, it becomes clear that many sources of pecuniary profit have questionable social value. Does the world need car salesmen more than it needs good parents?

Work is connected to the fundamental expression of the human as a social animal. As thinkers and as competitors, we create a variety of illusions by which we attempt to monopolize resources for ourselves. Much of our political activity is a part of this competition. The social sciences are plagued by the problems that this introduces. I have summarized the attitude toward work as "prestige based" but it is probably more complex.

In conclusion, the concept of work can be broadly defined in a way that reduces the complexity and theoretical difficulties of economic work. In so doing, economics comes to a different understanding of the value of work that individuals do rather than the tacit and abused conclusions that are reached through a classical approach.

Economics is wrong to incorporate what are really engineering concerns (limiting data input in order to achieve a result through simplified calculations) into the foundational theory. The nature of the data containment structure must be broad enough to contain all possible data. From there, theories can be tested through the development of engineered applications. This proper course will require a stern reevaluation of much of economic philosophy. This essay is really only the tip of the iceberg.

The causes of war, intervention, and nonproliferation

After hearing some outrage from western countries following the discovery of a secret uranium enrichment facility in Iran, I wanted to add my own brief comments on the topic. This issue is really an aspect of the larger question of how best to regulate the domestic affairs of foreign countries. The stakes, however, are higher -- because the severe threat that nuclear weapons pose is not a danger to peace but to human life and the Earth's environment. The problem with the debate as it has progressed is that when we focus on answering the question at hand, we forget the way our previous decisions have restricted us, and we forget that the question should not merely be answered for expediency today, but considered as a permanent change that charts the course of our intellectual life as well as our future history. In this essay, I offer a mix of multilateralism, development assistance, and military force retraining to chart a path toward constructive techniques of intervention as a viable alternative to the wanton destruction that marks almost all of America's interventions over the past 60 years.

Wars develop through a process of escalation. Countries' leaders do not wake up in the morning and say "I would like to invade our neighbors today". Rather, the situation develops over time, and a history of animosity must exist to justify the conflict. In Democratic states, there is a dynamic tension between the Leaders and the People that conditions leaders not to start unnecessary wars, even though in practice they may not need explicit authorization. Even the Second Gulf War was not completely arbitrary or capricious, because Bush invented a context of preventive war, a context that Congressional Republicans quickly parroted and which Democrats generally acquiesced to. Had Bush simply issued secret orders, he would have betrayed his own party and violated traditions of the political process in an embarrassing fashion. In totalitarian states, where dictators lack the popular strength and justification of action that a democratically elected leader would have, an arbitrary order to commence military action is much more likely to meet with mutiny. Regardless of whether the order is followed, the reputation and power of the dictator is damaged by such capricious behavior. Thus, in every case, while it is possible for a war to begin for no reason, it is really never in the interest of the leaders to pursue such a war, even if they were to have some private reason for doing so. Wars of manifest aggression are exceedingly rare and possibly nonexistent. There is always some context that both sides will provide to argue that they were acting defensively.

Escalation is required. Politically it takes the form of threats and demands that go unmet, diplomatic failures, disputes over treaty and trade terms, and other general failures of normal relations. Military mobilization and planning is also usually required prior to any actual fighting. Logistical efforts are made in an attempt to reorient forces toward the possible threat, with both sides arguing that they are acting defensively.

During this time, the coordination between the media and the Government is necessarily increased. Part of the very definition of journalistic professional conduct, as it is defined in America and most other countries that have developed schools of journalism, is that Leaders should be portrayed in a certain light at the time of crisis. Since "crisis" is a subjective framing of events, the media must defer to the government's framing. For the individual journalist, it is not really an issue of being a traitor, but rather of being perceived as deluded, incompetent, or wrong. As such, large, image conscious media organizations cannot afford to enter into an argument in which they may be proven wrong or seen a unpatriotic because there is little to gain in terms of ratings and advertisements while at the same time there is much to lose.

In any event, the entire scale of escalation and conflict can vary dramatically, but the character of the dispute is different from that of the conflict. Conflicts can resolve quickly or become quagmires that last through decades, but once they are started there tends to be political pressures to continue. Disputes between nations are more complex and may go on for long periods, but require intermittent political investment. Political leaders must constantly search for new content to inject into the debate, to portray either progress toward resolution or escalation toward conflict. Absent a conflict, the dispute is usually settled on the basis of possession - however things currently are becomes the starting point of negotiations, and the political conditions at home mean that neither party can give concessions beyond a certain threshold. In direct representation, where the two parties are simply negotiating with each other, this threshold precludes concessions that would be politically embarrassing for either party (absent the situation where one nation is poised to annihilate the other without retaliation, such as the gobbling up of Indian satellite states...) As a matter of historical example, Chamberlain's acts of appeasement toward Hitler were only political possibilities for him because the territory under negotiation was not part of England. As a second example, the development of the State of Israel has progressed over the decades to the point that there is severe, appalling apartheid. Any negotiations to create two states are at this point empty of content that the two parties can agree on.

Proliferation really has two components. From the strategic perspective, nuclear weapons pose the threat of devastating retaliation, and from the tactical perspective they are capable of inflicting particularly high casualty rates. The context of Nuclear conflict, as I have previously alluded to, is not really much different from conventional conflict. The only distinguishing feature is that the level of destruction is much higher, thereby practically eliminating the likelihood of any conflict happening at all. If all that this ensured was that western countries become less likely to engage in spurious conflicts, there would be no meaningful argument against countries developing nuclear weapons.

From the western perspective there arises the complaint that nations acquiring nuclear technology are now a greater threat than they once were, and that the rise of nuclear states undermines the ability of western nations to be the "global police". Although this perspective can be criticized as self-centered, the statement is essentially true. The question of whether the United States and NATO really should be the world's primary police force is really a separate question from whether individual nations should take actions that amount to a resistance of this somewhat self-declared world order. To bridge the gap requires a separate argument on rights of resistance. Allowing western powers the privilege of taking direct intervention actions into the domestic affairs of foreign countries is really a part of the global police role as it is defined, particularly by the United States.

This aspect of the global police role is defensible on the basis of analogy to interpersonal relations. The argument proceeds from the proposition that individual faults should be corrected, and at times the source of those faults can be confronted in cultural attitudes and what has been described as "backwardness". The crimes of nations are the result of decisions taken by leaders who either have defects in their own moral character or are spurned on by other political forces, all of which have individual personalities behind them who outwardly espouse certain cultural perspectives. Most faults in individuals come from personal absorption of collective attitudes, and from the perspective of the individual these forces are as immutable as stone, even more so when indefinite, inexpressible in common or expert language, or logically inconsistent. The mind does not usually allow the individual to sink deep enough within himself to reach the essence of such forces, and so he does not believe that his options are restricted or his perspective transformed.

It is a great folly of thought for a person to believe that there is virtue in not correcting the faults of others. A cruel or manipulative person is not designated as such merely because he chooses to interact in a certain way, but by his intention. The intention, of course, restricts the means of interaction. Thus the action taken often reveals the intention in practice; it is an error of oversimplification to confuse the two. The impression that one should not inform others of their faults comes from man's political instinct, not his moral one. It is a quirk of our culture and possibly humans in general that they do not like to be corrected. Indeed, there are far too many cruel or ignorant people dispensing mean or false advice, meaning that earnestly offered advice can sometimes be taken as an insult. Furthermore, people stake their pride in their beliefs and always prefer to change them privately, or not at all. Among the ethical duties of pluralism is the obligation to separate the activities of every culture into virtues and vices, and to encourage the virtues in others in accordance with their culture, while discouraging the vices. To not do so is to draw arbitrary lines between cultures, when in truth no two people have the same culture. Without having a means of judging other cultures, one can apply morality to nobody else, and possibly not to oneself (I could continue, for there is much to say about cultural life and substantive discourse between cultures, but I must return to the topic at hand).

The nation, as a collection of people, displays these same characteristics in aggregate. The laws and institutions of the state can furthermore be judged by their own systematic standards, usually in a much more thorough fashion than any person or action. Therefore it is possible to identify nations caught up in corruption, without equality for minorities, with economic engines that stratify wealth and destroy the environment, and with generally backwards views. Here, I have identified the entire world, and rightly so, because every nation in the world is as of yet still at the stage where it deserves to be intervened with and not yet at the stage of becoming a nation that does the intervening. Certainly, there are prescriptions for change, but we need not describe these yet; the surgery is only necessary for the wound that will not heal on its own. Let us be sure of our diagnosis.

The role that the Western Powers have assumed is not one that results from moral superiority but merely from military superiority. Some of the aspects of this statement are well understood: there is the providential belief in might makes right, the profiteering by business in its many terrible incarnations, and the many nagging questions about the way the global police image is used politically. Other aspects have been neglected in the all-too disingenuous foreign policy debate: the duty to intervene that comes from having power in the first place, the nuances of action that reveal the intentions of leaders, and most importantly the combined effect of the many little things of life that are so different for the global police nations than they are for the nations that usually experience interventions. There are many problems that come directly from the imagining of action as simple moral choices when nothing can be further from the truth.

There are two primary obstacles to the improvement of conditions in any nation. The first obstacle is the isometric force of the political sphere. There is an idea that world leaders have a great variety of different views of things, that there is a great debate about what we should have and how we should live. In truth, this is an illusion. World leaders never speak in sufficient specifics to allow such a debate to actually occur. There is no one voice or force of a nation or even of the state. In truth, the political forces of a state engage in a complex and constant struggle, of which any state policy or action is the result. These forces, through the desire to condemn one another for immediate gains, hold each other in stasis. The state is unable to change its values or its emphasis, it is unable to enact meaningful changes because the marginal effect of doing so is negative for each individual politician. Such is the case in the most functional democracy or the most abhorrent tyranny. Tyrants who are not bothered by political concerns either have no true power or are quickly deposed. In reference to this effect, the idea of isometric force describes how the removal of one corrupt group catapults other corrupt interests into power.

Here, the perception of corruption should be carefully examined. In nations where corrupt individuals rise to power, there must be some function or force in place that encourages and promotes corruption. The typical member of society, from whom all great men are drawn up and transformed, is exposed to the attitudes of political corruption and is usually caught up in it tacitly, directly, or in futile resistance as he rises in power. Since we have all gained power between birth and adulthood, we have all experienced corruption. It is a defining part of western political life, to the point that taking corruption into account in one's plans is nearly identical to taking the politics of the situation into account. Political corruption's motive forces are greed, guilty pleasure, threat, and intellectual corruption. In the intellectual sphere, corruption is the harmful altering of intellectual discourse. It shares its motive force with political corruption, but the arguments that corrupt the discourse have their dual origin in deliberate argument for purposes other than the furthering of the truth and the incidental argument made by the intellectual whose strength of thought exceeds his clarity of thought. In every day life corruption expresses itself in the way that individuals evaluate the prospects of each other, the perception of kindness and benefit, and the degree to which desires and tendencies are either embraced or shamed.

The second obstacle is the lack of technical knowledge, and it is brought about specifically through intellectual corruption. Here in America, there is far too little consensus in the specific sphere of economics, and few things have more benefited the brokers of power. Discord expresses itself through an economic timidity that borders on ideological stasis. It leads to many bad policies, and of course muddles entirely the debate on how we should assist the developing world. Generally, peoples around the world have far too much of a selfish ideology -- they feel, though the message is cloaked in other terms, that the measure of their life should be how much better they are than average, and of course we see the corrupt source of this ideology so much better in others than in ourselves. Ironically, this view does not make its posessors any happier; all evidence indicates it is strictly less rewarding than an altruistic attitude toward life. People are forced by political concerns to exemplify the cultural archetypes. "A man who acts successful is more likely to succeed". There are, of course, many many bad practices of all types, from genital mutilation and arranged marriage to traditional medicine and astrology, that occupy a spectrum on which many of our cherished traditions also fall. Many wouldn't dare tell those who are close to them, those who they have shared memories with, that the very context of these memories is caught up in practices rooted in corruption. It is a political concern that confines us to criticism of strangers. The root of this very perspective is the continued assault on the coherence of philosophy, social science, and economics. The distillation of common strands shows a radical divergence between action and theory, but this is brushed over and obscured by a few strategically placed misperceptions.

The only way to help the vast majority of people on the globe is to give them the tools to improve their own lives -- and these tools are, in my view, the following: modern science, engineering, technology and tools; access to birth control; an enlightened teaching of economics, history, and philosophy (I say enlightened because these disciplines in particular are plagued by meritless perspectives); land and resource control reform to correct initial disparities; and transitional assistance to help nations develop their own robust institutions of justice, welfare, and information exchange. It is no wonder, looking at this, that our interventions have so often failed. Our militaries were never equipped to do these things, and we have so often selected politicians who are proudly ignorant of philosophy and history.

Returning now to the escalation of dispute model, let us synthesize this with the political concerns and psychology as I have described it. The greatest force of persuasion comes from allies. The western nations must be willing to diversify their public images, so that some of them are allies with every nation, so that all nations have western interests that they hold dear. During this process, technology and resources as described above must be combined with trading status and prestige for cooperative leaders. This is a strictly positive process -- there is no meaningful concept of punishment for a sovereign nation. Here we have faltered too often by punishing, but we have also confused pro-business with pro-west, a sad and novel example of regulatory capture. The positive alliance method is the most important means not only of effecting change but of diffusing conflict, because a western power is less likely to attack the ally of an ally.

If this mechanism fails, a process of non-military deterrence must be in force. In this situation, the image of a world government is a critical component of the legitimacy of the entire deterrence mechanism. For this reason, the United Nations is an important force, but it must be conservative in its acts of censure, and should pursue different types of actions than it currently employs. But before discussing these measures, some minor details of international law should be cleared up.

The first thing to note is that the right to emigrate is meaningless for those who are most in need of it. A wealthy person can escape any country with ease while a poor person will likely have no other country that will take them. To add to the problem with this disparity, the wealthy members of a society exacerbate the failure of a state by fleeing it. Measures should be in place to force these individuals to contribute to the security and prosperity of their own country; i.e. we should generally not allow individuals to emigrate, and when we do allow it, they should forfeit any excess wealth. Now, nations should happily engage in emigration and exchange policies, and these should not disrupt the justified flow of economies. However, we should not allow individuals to leave countries whose regimes they disagree with for political reasons, and take their wealth with them, and in fact from time to time the only way to save a country at all is to force the educated class to stay there. The right to emigrate should not exist as a human right; requiring nations to allow emigration seems to be a strange nominalism in the first place.

Another point to be made is that economic sanctions are an abomination. These should not be used. They harden a subject people against the international community. I hardly need to say more.

Lastly, all nations that enter the United Nations should be required to meet certain basic requirements or be expelled. One of these should be to allow a constant UN presence of civilian observers. These observers will oversee the process of the courts, media, elections, and other indicators of the vitality of a country. The United States should allow these as well, and I believe they could be used to ensure that more police officers who are involved in cases of police brutality or excessive force are jailed. Another basic requirement should be an environmental commitment, since nonhuman life matters too.

The means of deterrence should be to pursue several soft forces against the isometric balance in the target country. Positive results are not expected. The only goal is to hurt ones political opponents without in any way overstepping the bounds of sovereignty. Famous people and world leaders should speak out in favor of specific positive reforms that may be on the table in the domestic sphere and speak out against opponents. The principal consumer nations should impose tariffs that specifically target the income sources of those who are responsible for crimes. Though it might also be possible to pursue internal political manipulations through espionage, this option is both unpopular among the populace and prone to failures where a pro-business leader is elected rather than a pro-democracy one. It is risky, because it may tarnish the all-important image of the progressive world leader.

Here, carefully selected rhetoric can prevent countries from being able to start down the path of escalation. This is crucial, because political forces can sometimes push countries toward unnecessary conflict. Even so, virtually any action taken can be spun by the language of national pride and sovereignty. The purpose of deterrence is really to prevent further cases, not to convince leaders to backtrack, because they will rarely do this. Politics is too public a sphere, there is too much shame in making mistakes, and there is no way to return to a state of privacy where the leader can rethink his actions objectively. It is also important to be patient. Simply because a leader can spin things in the immediate aftermath does not mean that his strength will not be undermined in the long run.

Unfortunately, in some cases escalation occurs or there is immediate action is necessary to stop a grave crime or some other compelling reason. In this case, intervention is justified, but only by nations that meet certain criteria, and only for specific purposes. Although a nation may have good intentions in intervening, it is not always properly equipped to do so. Especially in cases where the society itself will be remade, the task cannot fall to a regime that shows clear signs of intellectual depravity (George W. Bush is a case in point). The intervention is an injection, an exposure to cultural attitudes. When the power structure of a country is changed, the culture will change with it, and so it is no wonder then that America in particular has spread its own brand of corruption around the globe.

The nation that has earned its right to intervene is one designated as such by the international community. It must have a military with a specific training, philosophy, and equipment. It must enter special treaties with the international community to have any war crimes investigated and acted upon by the international body. It must be a nation of exemplary development itself. Finally, it must draft up a specific resolution of action that lists the objectives of intervention and clear goals. This document must also stipulate an action and withdrawal timetable; reparations to the host country if it is left in worse shape after the intervention; and it must carefully define the means by which such assessments are made. This document will be approved by the international community before military action can commence and be subject to revision only through that body in a process of formal amendment.

The military force of a nation interested in domestic interventions must be constituted such that it is capable of responding to humanitarian crises. Rather than emphasizing destructive technologies, it should be a military with the capability to rapidly rebuild and restore order in secured conflict areas. The philosophy should be less oriented toward protecting each individual soldier as toward demonstrating the commitment of the invading country toward the welfare of the conquered. As such, every effort should be made to capture and try insurrectionists, to preserve civilian lives, and to protect economic life. This means that large, expensive weapons systems will have little to no use after the initial invasion.

If we do not accept these changes and imperatives, I cannot see how we can carry the moral high ground in our actions. We will be nothing but imperialist plunderers, wearing the robes of providence. We will indeed be pursuing a "crusade" as Bush so eloquently stated about Iraq. We have long been greater fools than we believed.

The essence of nonproliferation is international stability. This essence is rooted in the realities of leadership. The dominant character of the third world dictator is a mild isolationism and a desire to obtain security for his own county while amassing personal wealth. Even as world leaders take the moral high ground against these individuals, they must accept the reality that these "petty dictators" represent peoples who have suffered much greater hardships and injustice through the historical events of colonialism and the cold war than they have from their own leader. There are a few notable exceptions (Consider North Korea - the conventional wisdom is that Kim Jong Il is responsible for starving his own people, however food aid from the US was scaled down from 700,000 tons annually in 1999 to just 40,000 tons in 2004. It is really unclear whether the lack of agricultural self-sufficiency is intentional or the result of incompetence and poor environmental policy).

The isolationism of leaders can often be interrupted by disputes that escalate to international conflicts. In these situations, the probable winner is likely to condemn U.N. intervention much more vocally than the expected loser. This is all the more reason for the U.N to have a presence in all countries and to function as a central body that connects the world to itself. Internationalism must have a track record of success, it must become something that the people believe in, but once it is, even despots will come to believe in its decisions. If the international courts functioned properly, they would make all nations equal, and this is a powerful draw for these despots. However, bringing such a world about often feels like hubris against hubris (or exception to exceptionalism?).

Among neighbors, the concensus seems to be that we would rather not point cannons at each other through our windows. When nations arm, it is often a symmetric response to the actions of others. Similarly with nuclear weapons. This is why any sane leader makes disarmament the cornerstone of the nuclear strategy. Certainly, though, some leaders are a bit erratic, and we fear their rash orders. What could they do in times of crisis?

For the west, the very problem with the development of Nuclear Weapons on the part of Iran has more to do with our history of escalation against them than their relative depravity or backwardness. Just as Bush handed Obama a wrecked economy and two unwinnable wars, so also did he hand him a poorly developed policy of saber rattling toward Iran. Even a talented statesman such as him will not be able to approach the burdens I have outlined here. I wish him luck.

A brief roadmap toward a better economy

The general consensus in economic circles is that as the economy becomes more technologically sophisticated, the productivity of each worker will increase. Therefore, the aggregate level of demand must also increase if it is to absorb these increases in production without decreases in employment. This is understood, and the erstwhile politically expedient approach is to manipulate currency and allow the free promotion of corporatist advertisements and consumer ideologies in an effort to stimulate demand further.

However, stimulating the tastes of the individual may not be possible or desirable. Evidence suggests that individual consumption is not truly unlimited - we reach a bliss point beyond which our total consumption does not increase our happiness and beyond which we will not consume unless in a mental state of derangement. Furthermore, theoretical limits begin to come into play: the budget of actual time to consume is limited - production of increasingly luxury goods and trivial services also cannot meaningfully absorb the excess production; the marginal value of public goods and shared services begins to skyrocket after a certain point; wealth concentrations may run ahead of wealth creation, preventing demand from being able to keep up, thereby causing a failure of self-correction due to market withdrawal of firms rather than selling at a loss; and the spurious nature of fashion undermines the ability of producers to consistently serve at a level of adequate efficiency. The desirability of even pursuing such a strategy is really rather questionable: do we want to exhaust the earth's resources, work our people to the bone, and critically pollute ecosystems simply to avoid a paradigm shift? Are we setting the economy up for cruel boom-bust cycles, and are we critically undermining the opportunities available for young people to meaningfully interact with their society? If so, we should admit that we are forced to the paradigm shift option, that we should move away from a free-market dominated model and start to see markets as nothing more than essential efficiency seeking and accountability preserving components of a modern system of governance (in truth, this is what they always were, and we have simply been participating in an economic cult of sorts).

I begin with the economy of modern woes: excessive consumerism and persistent high unemployment; anomie and a public sphere in which the average citizen is either not at all engaged or marginalized. Assume that for the sake of environmental preservation that we desire to limit the rate of resource extraction with a goal of eventually living in a more-or-less sustainable fashion. Then it follows that there are only two options at the policy level to address this disparity:

1. Decrease the amount of work done by each worker
2. Sustain the employment levels through public works programs

Obviously the latter of these options is the more politically palatable. Quixotically, this is the option that is the most expensive and should therefore in theory be the most difficult to implement politically. However, the idea that Americans should share work is so foreign to their consciousness and so counter factual to their perceived universe, model of ethics, and workaholic habits that it seems that there is no hope of ever actually reducing our level of production per worker in a controlled way - the only politically palatable option seems to be to allow the economic busts to occur.

Fortunately, we do not have to launch into the first option until the second has become well enshrined in our consciousness. Given the horrific pattern of American urban and suburban development, institutional erosion, and neglect of scientific programs over the past 64 years, there are more than enough Government jobs waiting to be funded:

1. Jobs in civil engineering, urban studies and design, sustainable practices research, and infrastructure planning to help turn our cities and suburban areas into livable spaces in which individuals no longer require cars to do basic tasks like buy groceries and get to work. Everyone agrees that we cannot achieve sustainability without actually reorganizing the structure of our cities. This is such a mammoth undertaking that planning for it must begin now, and in fact new channels of action should be created because the processes for approval and change are just too slow to accommodate real progress.
2. Jobs in our neglected institutions, particularly the judicial and legislative branches of government, the revenue service (because there are so many tax cheats that each new revenue employee actually earns money for the state), government policy advisors and researchers, Human Services, education, and so many other little places where we are letting our society fall apart. These services increase the quality of life of the citizens and also reduce the unemployment level, making them win-win political propositions. The only way they lose is when the lies of business people are believed by the general public. The business people should be confronted when their credibility is weakest - when we are in economic crisis.
3. Jobs in the academic world and the arts, where we should have rotating positions for every Ph.D to spend time without curricula or research requirements, simply to allow them time to think and develop philosophy or reflect on current events. Everyone who wishes to obtain a Ph.D should have the chance to attend graduate school and write a thesis - and these should be judged by blind panels of visiting scholars on their merits, transforming them into something other than the political products that they so often are today. Higher education should not limit itself to being a servant of politics and business, it should be a vibrant and politically influential institution, and we should stop pretending that some of us are "not smart enough to have good ideas". Musicians and artists should receive support from the state, and programs like Concerts in the Park should become national standards.
   

As these jobs gradually expand to absorb the excess demand, we will have a period that is remarkably similar to the economic boom of the 90's. At the end of this period, projects of public works and development will complete. We will then be living in a very functional society with sustainable, livable communities and a much higher standard of living for the masses than they experience today. Even the wealthiest will have a higher standard of living because there will be many more opportunities to become popular in their community and participate in events, philanthropy and a great many things that simply cannot be provided by the free market alone.

This is the point when we must execute the most radical paradigm shift. We must begin to curtail the large bureaucracy of urban development and design (job group 1) and bring it to a maintenance level regime. This will help to ensure, among other things, that useless and wasteful projects do not occur. As we dismantle the large bureaucracy, we must absorb these employees into (2), (3), and the private sector. This will necessitate a modest decrease in the work week and possibly a lowering of the retirement age so that companies will hire these workers.

The economic development pattern, as evidenced by history and surely what we shall also see in the future, is one where technology and fashion work hand in hand to supplant existing regimes. The technological aspects of changes are of increasing complexity and therefore require greater and greater commitments by government to plan these changes. Our current economy is mired in its state because of the unwillingness of Democracies the world over to engage in the coordinated planning effort within their own legislative bodies, ie. they cannot work together.

We should either elect leaders who have a vision of a sustainable future, are not petty or prone to infighting, and who are not beholden to corrupt business interests who oppose change, or resign ourselves to the strife, environmental destruction, and the needless human suffering that is the mark of all ideological backwardness. I fear the thought of bequeathing to my grandchildren a world where many beautiful plants and animals are extinct, where we kill indiscriminately, and where we all work ourselves to the bone only to receive the pittance that will pay our debts and buy meaningless trinkets at Christmas time.

My vision of what is possible is not Utopian - I do not declare it the best or perfect. But the escape from ideology that this vision requires makes it less susceptible to catastrophic failures or the rise of totalitarianism when compared to our current system and where its probable trajectory would take us. It is, really, common sense: when there is unemployment, create jobs doing what needs to be done. When there is nothing to be done, do not work. These are subtle truths of economics that none can deny. They are self-evident, and we should act sensibly, starting today.

A brief critique of property rights

Each and every one of us was born into this world where every bit of property, every grain of sand, every sheaf of wheat, is already claimed as the property of another person. We are literally dependent on their good will to survive. Following the logic of rights to its conclusion means that these "original owners" are collectively entitled to determine who lives and who dies among all who come after them.

Comments on the proposed PPS High School System Redesign

This is my response to the Thinkoutloud program on the proposed High School System Redesign. I don't believe the case for abolishing the transfer system has been made adequately.

You can read about it here:
http://www.pps.k12.or.us/depts/communications/hs_system/
http://www.opb.org/thinkoutloud/shows/school-equity/

First - As a caller has already pointed out, it is impossible for every school to offer every opportunity. Attempting to provide "every opportunity at every school" will lead to situations where multiple schools each have a few students interested in a particular program but that program exists at none of them, where under the current system that could be provided at one school and those students could attend there.

Thinking a bit deeper, one sees the self-motivation behind the Education System's desire to end transfers and provide every opportunity at every school. Because we lose the comparative advantage of varied curriculae from school to school, the entire system loses efficiency. The resulting shortages will help to make a case for diverting more funding to Education.

Secondly - It is not difficult to make school funding work under a transfer system - even with the current system of funding. Even as this show's guest speaker talks about how the current system doesn't work, the truth is that no realistic attempt was ever made to make the transfer system work.

All that needs to be done is for more of each school's (proportional) funding to be fixed based on the facility size, meaning less money moves from one school to another when a student transfers.

This will have two benefits: First, this increases the per student funding at a school that has students moving away from it, thereby allowing the quality of programs to increase at that school. Similarly, the quality of programs at schools that become packed with students will decrease. An equilibrium is created from this shifting, and we will have achieved a natural equalization mechanism that is not subject to political manipulation by the ambitions of State Agencies. Secondly, the transfer between schools provides important, direct evidence of the relative quality of one or another school. This will force the very good schools to admit that they are overfunded. If we want equalization in education it means the nicest schools will have to get crappier, or more money will have to be injected into the system. There is no other alternative. How about decreasing funding for Lincoln and Lake Oswego in order to increase funding for Jefferson and Grant? Already I can hear the rich (oh, I'm sorry, "middle class") kids moaning. Only a quasi-market approach like what I have suggested here will overcome the rhetorical trump card of liberal urban wealth.

Finally, just to comment on some random things:

* The idea that bussing kids around the city is wasteful to the environment is really an unfair argument. When we are talking about the inner city schools, they aren't really that far away from each other in the first place, high school students can take the public busses, and most kids are within biking distance of their school. Plus, schools have a lot of incredibly environmentally wasteful practices, such as the emphasis on paper handouts instead of textbooks, the use of pre-made foods for the lunch program, the locating of new schools on the edges of town, etc. Picking one of them out like this is dubious at best.

* In order to implement this no-transfer system, a political battle will take place over where permanent funding is allocated. This battle will be political, and I have no doubt that the worst schools will come out of it underfunded. These schools don't have parents who are rich lawyers giving $1000 political contributions.

* What the system really needs is a move toward much more localized schools. The education system needs to become more adaptable to situations and more vigilant, with the resources to snap up choice real estate and have compromise building designs so that space can be utilized even when it is not ideal. This is a ways off, but most people I have spoken to agree we should move away from the large high-school model and toward smaller, more local schools that are anchors in the community. But moving toward a uniform curriculum will mean that schools can't be shrunk down, effectively blocking Oregon from moving in that direction.

* We should not sacrifice a few white students as the crucible to ethnic diversity in schools. From everything I have read, the black student body at schools that have a very small population of white students subject these students to the most horriffic racism. These white students are subjected to violence or the threat of violence on a daily basis, and they face constant harassment. White girls are even accused of being racist when theydecline the many dates and propositions they recieve from the black males at those schools.

In conclusion, I feel that we should give the transfer system a fair chance by making realistic attempts to get it to work. This will mean some schools have funding reduced, and that is simply how it needs to be. Sometimes in politics, it is bad to give the people what they want, but here there seems to be very little reason to proceed with this plan to end school transfers. Thank you for reading.

Nerd Rage

Growing up, I never thought of myself as a nerd. This is mostly because I am tall, didn't have severe acne, and never was into any of those godawful sci-fi television shows. But I did like reading philosophy, Kurt Vonnegut, and leftist literature. I also got into gaming. I played Counterstrike, Starcraft, DOTA, World of Warcraft, etc. In college, I got into Anime and Manga, which I still read for enjoyment today. Now, I do a lot of board gaming. Perhaps the nerd meter is rising. Perhaps I was always a nerd because I taught myself how to do computer programming in 7th grade?

I guess that even though I never called myself a nerd, other people might have called me a nerd. Maybe I'm a nerd just because I don't watch or play any sports. Somewhere during my time growing up, I think a new definition of nerd kicked in and now everyone is a nerd, nerds are cool, and people with genuine interests in esoteric things are part of some nameless class of uncool people.

Well, I've got news for you: those people are nerds. A nerd is not a fashionably dressed, tall person who has good interpersonal skills and just happens to wear glasses. That's a hipster. The class president, outside of blockbuster hollywood moves, is not a nerd no matter how bookish she looks.

Maybe at its very core, nerdiness is a fascination with the real and imaginary workings of objects outside of the bounds of the social - the social world being our duties and obligations to each other and society, and the resulting system we use to judge each other on so many levels.

Ok, so that's a nerd, and you know a nerd because he tells you all about something that you perceive as being completely irrelevant. Before this whole new definition came around, nerds didn't call each other nerds, and popular kids called plenty of people who weren't nerds.. nerds! This is the same thing that happens when people call me a fag when they see me riding my bike. We are not about to change the definition of what a "fag" is so that I can be a proud faggot riding my bike around to save the Earth (and for your information I support gay rights without being gay myself).

So how did this happen to the nerds? It was a coup d' etat by the popular kids. A change in the winds of fashion blew them into the world of Firefly, Harry Potter, Twilight, and other shamefully marketed shit. But unfortunately, when the popular kids arrived in the world of the nerds, they usurped them. They didn't try to learn from them - instead they defined them out of existence.That's why I won't call myself a nerd. The word doesn't mean anything anymore.