And In This Corner

Last year, SSM Health, a network of 23 hospitals, began using a points system to ration access to Regeneron. The drug would be given to patients only if they netted 20 points or higher. Being “non-White or Hispanic” counted for seven points, while obesity got you only one point—even though, according to the CDC, “obesity may triple the risk of hospitalization due to a COVID-19 infection.” Based on this scoring system, a 40-year-old Hispanic male in perfect health would receive priority over an obese, diabetic 40-year-old white woman with asthma and hypertension.
Shadi Hamid "Race-Based Rationing Is Real—And Dangerous"

The article is subtitled: "The cultural left’s worldview is beginning to distort health policy." I take exception to that because it implies that health policy is not already distorted.

And when patients had long bone fractures or acute pain from other types of traumatic injuries, black people were 41% less likely to get pain medication than white people.
Nonwhite patients get less pain relief in U.S. emergency rooms

I don't know about you, but a greater willingness to withhold pain medication from people with broken bones seems pretty distorted to me.

The problem, as I see it, with SSM Health's scoring system for access to Regeneron isn't that is privileges some hypothetical "40-year-old Hispanic male in perfect health" over an equally hypothetical "obese, diabetic 40-year-old white woman with asthma and hypertension." It's the implicit assumption that such a matchup would never occur, because any given 40-year-old Hispanic male who walks through the doors of one of their hospitals is presumed to be in such poor condition that an obese, diabetic, asthmatic and hypertensive white woman is still far likely to be in better overall health than he is.

Mr. Hamid makes the point that outrage is tempting. I think part of the reason for that is that outrage tends to be inward looking. Aaron Sibarium's articles struck a chord with many White readers because they justified a feeling of being unfairly devalued in the eyes of "the cultural Left." But there's another way of looking at it, namely, "Crap... how on Earth is it true that the medical establishment has come to see simply being Black as being correlated with so many health problems, that it's like being a White person of retirement age?"

Lost in all of the "outrage" about "wokeness" and "rationing" is the understanding that the collective health of Black and Hispanic people in the United States is an utter disaster; at least as far as the health care system is concerned. Because holding up some hypothetical Black teenager "in perfect health" to an ailing, middle-aged White person makes for a better conflict, and thus, magazine headlines.

One of my recurring themes on this blog has become the degree to which Americans see themselves as impoverished, and thus, released from any obligation to share resources with one another. This is just another example. It's also an example of how the past of the United States is conveniently forgotten. The factors that led to Black people, Hispanics, Native Americas and no doubt others having such poor collective health didn't all simply dry up and blow away once the Civil Rights Acts were all passed and signed into law. Their effects lingered, and, in some cases are still active and impacting people.

But the overall understanding is that, as a nation, we are too broke to fix these things. And so it makes sense to tell people that they should be able to work hard and find good-paying jobs to lift themselves out of poverty while sending as many jobs as can be managed overseas, specifically because people there will work for less that it costs to support oneself here. And the United States condemns to make-work jobs millions of people that society has spent between 10 and 15 thousand dollars a year to educate for 13 years. Over 160 thousand dollars spent, and the consensus is that they're good for flipping burgers, bagging groceries or preparing coffee. And given the general competition for low-skilled work, precisely because it doesn't require an expensive college degree, a number of people are doomed to long-term, if not perpetual, unemployment.

Outrage is easier than solutions. And likely more satisfying, too. And certainly a lot less expensive. At least for the individual.

The ironic thing about all of this is that if, as a nation, the United States weren't so good at pitting groups against one another to fight to be valued, there wouldn't be a need to continuously fight over who is worthy of being valued. Were the United States genuinely the wealthy nation it portrays itself as, there wouldn't be this pervasive sense that there aren't enough necessities to go around. And in a further irony, the United States doesn't see itself as being poor enough that it needs all of the human capital that it has. So much human potential is wasted, allowed to wither away and die, because putting it to work would mean sharing the benefits of that work.

But maybe it's all that, all of it, that drives the outrage. I don't find much value in anger, but I know a lot of people who see it as a valuable first step to greater change. And in that, the anger feels like doing something. And when people buckle under to the anger, editing out the targets of outrage, perhaps it seem like change. Even though tomorrow, the problem remains the same.

I Know This One

It's a simple enough headline, "It was a wild week for stocks. Should you worry? Here are 4 things to keep in mind."

It contains a simple enough question: "Should you worry?"

And it has a simple enough answer: "No."

Because I keep coming back to things that irritate me on Nobody In Particular, I'm going to make a point that I've made before: "Does it spark anxiety?" is not a good judge of a headline. "Is there anything you need to do?" is a much more useful question, because the answer is, more or less by definition, able to be acted upon. Sitting and fretting is always less useful than identifying what needs to be done, and doing it to the best extent possible.

What I think that headlines like NPR's tend to tap into is the sense that there is nothing to be done, because the forces at work are simply too large, and too impersonal, to be impacted by individual action. But if it would be helpful to reduce one's exposure to stocks, or to put more money into savings, those are actions that can have measurable effects; and they don't require anxiety to implement.

Worry headlines are, I think, a slice of the phenomenon of news consumption as a hobby. Something that people do as a diversion, or to understand themselves as more informed about the world, but that doesn't require any other time or effort. And I understand why, in matters of finance, NPR avoids giving definitive advice. And I doubt that the headline writers at NPR actually see themselves as contributing to their audience's sense of anxiety. (In fact, they'd likely tell me that their audience doesn't need them in order to feel anxious.) But there's wisdom in the saying that no single raindrop feels responsible for the flood. Still, if enough of them held off, there might not be a flood to feel responsible for.

Overabundance of Caution

I've heard, and read, from a number of sources at this point, that there's a weird disconnect in the United States. Namely that taking precautions against SARS-CoV-2 seems to be something of an all-or-nothing phenomenon. It was an interesting point, and it seemed logical, but I really didn't think much about it.

But recently someone made a point that stuck with me, because it suddenly connected some dots: Why are people so excised about vaccine uptake, when so many people in the areas with the highest vaccination rates still don't feel that it's "safe" to go about their daily lives. The company I work for has a vaccine requirement to go into the office. And due to a state rule, if one is going to eat in a restaurant, proof of vaccination is required. But an in-person lunch was cancelled recently, due to concerns about the pandemic. As one person had put it, why do people complain about others saying that the vaccines aren't effective, when they themselves don't appear to believe that they're effective?

I think that it's just a quirk of Blue America, but one would think that there was an elderly or immune-system compromised person around every corner, helplessly waiting to be struck dead by the merest hint of a breakthrough case in their neighborhood. It's an interesting inversion of the idea that liberals are more willing to experiment and take risks that conservatives. Part of it is, I suspect, the nature of how the pandemic is seen. Blue America is sometimes hypersensitive to threats to "the most vulnerable among us." (As an aside, aren't all threats more dangerous to "the most vulnerable?" After all, if they weren't susceptible to so many things that other people didn't consider threats, they wouldn't be "the most vulnerable.") And, as I understand it, this drives a fear that any act of carelessness is abdication of a duty to look out for the disadvantaged.

The recurring anxiety about potential breakthrough cases, and their potential consequences, however, does look an awful lot like a lack of confidence in the efficacy of the vaccines. Which makes sense, if the goal is absolutely zero infections; but I was pretty sure that it's far too late to board that ship before it sails. It's long gone, and, having struck an iceberg, is now resting comfortably at the bottom of the Atlantic.

I'm not recommending that people "loosen up." The uptight "neurotic liberal" stereotype exists for a reason, and part of that reason is that people find it less stressful to live that way. But maybe it's worth having a more accurate idea of what the risks and threats actually are. Overestimating them doesn't really do much to help, and it sends the message that people don't really believe that the precautions they so publicly take are actually doing anything to help, either.

Postscript: There's a sense in which it feels that people don't take the vaccine because it will prevent illness. Rather, they take it because it will prevent them from being labelled as "irresponsible" if they do become ill. Another sign of the partisanship that crept into the whole endeavor, I suppose.

Promises, Promises

Haitian-American activists in South Florida told Axios Today they feel like President Biden has gone back on campaign promises he made to the community to stand up for them.
"Advocates say Biden has let Haitian migrants down"

I've heard quite a bit about the supposed promises that President Biden is said to have made to the Haitian community, minus one important detail: what the promises actually were.

I admit that I don't pay much attention to promises made by candidates for President; mainly because so many of them are not things that can be simply done with an executive order from the Oval Office. And that means that many of them should likely be formulated as "if-then" statements, since they tend to rely on something other than the specific candidate being elected to the presidency before they can come to pass.

And that's what I suspect happened here; President Biden either needs some number of people in Congress to go along with a plan before a "promise" can be fulfilled, or it requires a higher level of political capital to enact than the beneficiaries will be able to replace on their own. The second can be viewed as more of a failing, since a sitting President is often expected to expend political capital to get things done, but it's often a resource in shorter supply that advocates presume, and it doesn't make generally sense to allow important domestic policy priorities to fall by the wayside, because the President has used a bunch of favors to benefit a constituency who can sing his praises, but can't ensure his reelection or effectively ensure the election of Representatives and Senators who will carry those other priorities forward.

In this, I'm usually somewhat surprised when people expect that the President will go out of his way for the benefit of non-citizens. People in Haiti may be desperate to be elsewhere, but without a sizable number of Americans equally desperate for them to come to the United States, expecting the Democratic Party to gear up for the fight in the Senate that any legislation would certainly provoke seems unrealistic. But then again, I don't need the President to do anything for me; I'm not in a situation where government action might be the only thing standing between me and being forced to live in a chaotic, devastated, environment. Perhaps if I were, I'd be prepared to put more stock in campaign promises.

As it is, I'd still like to know what the President is supposed to have promised. It's possible that it was nothing more than to "stand up" or "fight" for the rights of Haitian migrants to settle in the United States. But promising a conflict is one thing. Promising a public conflict is another and promising to win something else again. I wonder if what's at issue here is simply the famously opaque workings of government leaving people wondering where the fireworks they expected are.

Ain't that America?

I was listening to the Checks and Balance podcast from The Economist. Specifically, the most recent episode, "Left Side Story." Long story short, the episode deals with the phenomenon that American liberals tend to have a more pessimistic outlook on the United States and conservatives do. The spoke to a researcher who asked people a number of questions about the United States, and their results (backed up by other polling in the area) show that more liberal Americans feel that the nation comes off worse in comparison to other countries than more conservative Americans. There was the obligatory discussion of why that might be, and while it was interesting, I feel that it missed a couple of points.

I see two potentially overlooked factors in explaining how people rate the United States, vis-a-vis other nations that could be helpful in understanding the partisan differences that people point out.

The first is: Who is one comparing to? It's one thing to ask how the United States rates on certain factors versus "the rest of the world," but the rest of the world covers a lot of territory, and I think that people often have certain places in mind when they answer questions like this. When I talk to liberal acquaintances about the topic, they tend to make direct comparisons to other "advanced democracies," which tends to limit the discussion to Western Europe and maybe Australia and Japan. But when I have the comparison conversation with conservative acquaintances, the focus is more on the "Third World" and/or authoritarian/totalitarian regimes. One could look at it as one group comparing the United States to places they'd like to live, while the other compares to nations they're glad they don't live in. I suspect that if one were to ask how the United States ranked on income inequality to say, Denmark, or on LGBT rights when compared to Russia, there would be broad agreement. But when asking about the rest of the world more broadly, which nation comes to mind first is of some importance.

The second factor is: Who else does one talk to? As more and more people in the United States find themselves within "bubbles," "echo chambers" or however else one might refer to relatively homogeneous social groups and media environments, the information on how other people live changes. If a person wants to understand the experience of being Black in the United States and what solutions there might be to the problems facing that community, reading Juan Williams will wind up providing a very different outlook than reading Ibram Kendi. Likewise, speaking to well-off Black proponents of Respectability Politics will give a different viewpoint than interacting with Black Lives Matter boosters from a poorer urban area.

There is, of course, a potential third factor, but this is one that I think people generally understand is out there, even if it's not often spoken of; namely, how people approach the question. If one seeks to make the case that the United States still has (much) more to do when it comes to living up to its stated ideals, it stands to reason that one would immediately think of those places that seem to have done a better job, and those people who have been left behind, in one way or another, by the work that's already been done. Conversely, someone who is invested in understanding the United States as the best place on Earth is going to seek to make the comparison against those places that are far behind, and to point to those people who appear to be proof of the progress made.

In the end, it becomes another instance of people talking past one another because they aren't on the same page as to the point of comparison. To be sure, there likely is a certain amount of selective distortion going on, where people's perceptions are altered when they are challenged and attempting to hold on to a fallible point. But I think that it's more important than people give it credit for to understand that just because the questions are the same, that the thinking that goes into them may vary.

But Fear Itself

The headline is simple: "Moderates still don't understand why conservatives voted for Trump." What made the article stand out for me was the teaser on The Week's homepage:

"Moderates still don't get conservatives' fears."

My first thought was "Of course they don't." Understanding what people are afraid of, and why it frightens them, means actually taking the time to talk to them and understanding what they think may go wrong, and why they can neither change nor control it. And, as the kids these days like to say, "Ain't nobody got time for that."

Some of it is just an inability to take the things that people claim to be afraid of seriously. Mr. Goldman notes: "[A]nd some political scientists have found support for Trump and minimizing the importance of the Jan. 6 riot are correlated with the belief that whites don't enjoy social advantages or may even face discrimination in [sic] today." People who find the idea that it is now Whites who are discriminated against in the modern United States patently ludicrous are unlikely to dig deeply enough to find the economic (or other) anxiety that sits beneath the belief. And so it's chalked up to paranoid delusions or racist trolling.

Clay Shirky is credited with coining the phrase: "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression." And it's the sort of thing that's bandied around when someone wants to point out that someone else is allergic to fairness. But here's the thing: when privilege is legitimately earned, equality can absolutely be oppression. Not all advantages are the result of unethical behavior. And to the degree that people tend to cast themselves as the heroes of their own stories, they don't think of themselves as going around prying their benefits from the desperate grasp of the more deserving. The mythology of the United States may be just that, but it's often powerful nonetheless. People have been told that they made it to where they are because they worked hard and followed the rules. And they believe that because they understand that this is what makes them worthy people. Telling them that they're the beneficiaries of hundreds (if not many more) years of injustice is unlikely to simply ring true to them.

But it's likely easier than working to put people at ease. The United States is a culture of scarcity, and as a result, is often harsh in its judgments, as it looks for ways to sort the "deserving" from the "unworthy." And being found unworthy has consequences. American history is littered with the desolate tales of those it was decided were unworthy of important resources.

I'd always thought that the old Franklin Delano Roosevelt quote that "There is nothing to fear but fear itself," translated to "there is nothing to be afraid of, other than being afraid." But now that I'm an old man, I think that maybe he was referring to the fears of others. Maybe people are mostly afraid of each other's fears, and this is why they so often go unexamined, despite the benefits that such examination would bring.

Standard of Care

Chamath Palihapitiya sparked a teapot tempests by basically saying that the plight of the Uyghurs in China wasn't something that he actually cared about. More to the point, he said that "Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, okay?"

Of course, he didn't mean that "nobody" literally. He then after all, proceeded to note that the person who asked about it cared. The Internet was, of course, up in arms over the sacrilege of admitting that a foreign nation's persecution of an ethnic group within it's own borders didn't rise to the level of being one of the things that he spent his limited attention budget on.

The American Conservative's Rod Dreher chimed in with this:

I can console myself by saying that I’m not like Chamath, and would never say that I don’t care about the Uyghurs. I do care! I care in the sense that I wish the Uyghurs well, and hold the correct opinion about the Uyghurs. But honestly, so what? Am I morally that much better than Chamath? I don’t even pray for the Uyghurs, which would cost me nothing. They never cross my mind, except when I read a news story about them, and think, “Those poor people. China is ruled by monsters”—and then move on. Chamath is just saying the quiet part out loud about how the rest of the world really feels about the friendless Uyghurs.

I'm somewhere, I think in the middle. I, like Mr. Dreher feel that the Uyghurs have gotten a bum rap. I think this counts as holding the correct opinion about them. But unlike Mr. Dreher, I don't think that this counts as "caring." I'm with Mr. Palihapitiya in that there are things that I care about, things I prioritize; things that I understand cost me something, and I pay those costs. The Uyghurs are not among them.

And it's not because I agree that they should be treated badly by the government of China. It's because I have a budget of time and energy, and I stay within that budget, mostly because, like any other person, I'm not able to overdraw it indefinitely. And nations are the same way. The United States only has so many resources to throw at problems. And since the United States tends to have a poor track record of having anything to show for its investments (note the very expensive War on Terror) a lot of the time it's left with nothing more effective that shouting "Stop! Or I'll shout 'Stop!' again!"

Were it actually important enough to worth spending something on, the world could make China's treatment of the Uyghurs expensive enough to cause them to reconsider the policy. But it's not consider worth enough by enough people. And so people look for ways to tell themselves that they're the right kind of person, but in the end, cost them nothing.

Perhaps I've become too okay with the idea that I'm not the right kind of person. When someone challenges me by claiming that I'm callous or reprehensible, my immediate impulse is to answer "Guilty as charged." Because I don't believe that simply having the right opinions is any better than not having them, if that's the only difference.

Caring should be more than a sense of low-grade pity to be considered worth something. I understand that I care about something when I'm motivated to spend resources on it. And when I'm unwilling to spend resources, I admit to not caring. Maybe that's a higher standard than is warranted. But I find it a form of honesty about who I am that pushes me to do more than I think that I would otherwise.

Apples to Viruses

Some who won’t accept the vaccines or wear masks say they are simply asserting their rights over their own body. Morally, it’s more like choosing not to have routine safety maintenance done on your car. Refusing to wear a mask is less a matter of exercising a personal liberty than comparable to driving at 60 mph in a 40 mph zone. The point is that though it may be up to you what risks you run for yourself, it is not purely up to you what risks you impose on others. That has to be a matter of the social contract. We can no more accept personal choice about infectious-disease control than we can over speeding limits.
Jonathan Wolff, "The COVID-Risk Social Contract Is Under Negotiation"

For nearly the past two years, there has been a steady stream of articles that tackle the ethics of the choices that people make concerning the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. What trips most of them up is difficulty with the rather unique circumstances in play. Consider the analogy that Professor Wolff makes; that not masking is like driving 60 mph on a road where the speed limit is 40 mph. But if I happen to be driving down a road at 20 miles per hour over the speed limit, it's unlikely that I know neither my car's rate of speed (since cars have speedometers) or the speed limit (since it needs to be posted somewhere visible to drivers). It's also unlikely that any people who live along the road on which I'm driving are unfamiliar with automobiles. And unless I'm being particularly reckless, they're also likely acquainted with people driving down the road faster than the local speed limit allows.

Both of these factors create a distinction with SARS-CoV-2 in the fact that what has driven many of the public non-pharmaceutical interventions is the idea that it's not really possible to know whether or not one is infected. A lack of symptoms is not considered a good enough indicator of heath to be trustworthy. By the same token, if of less concern, is that SARS-CoV-2 has no universal and unique symptoms, so it's possible that someone could be showing symptoms that are similar but turn out to have a different pathogen. Likewise, many of the people who are still susceptible to the disease, and likely to become unwell enough to require hospital care, are in that position because their immune systems are relatively (or even completely) naïve to the disease.

This makes the comparison a very superficial one. And while one might reasonably expect that there are statistics on how many injuries and fatalities are caused by drivers who were in accidents while driving 60 mph in a 40 mph zone, there aren't really statistics on the risk of transmitting the virus due to being in proximity to others without taking certain precautions, because the level of surveillance that would required to determine that just isn't there.

As an aside, it's one of the things that I wonder about when people speak of the reproduction numbers of diseases more broadly.

The original strain of SARS-CoV-2 has an R0 of 2·5, while the delta variant (B.1.617.2) has an R0 of just under 7. Martin Hibberd, professor of emerging infectious diseases at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (London, UK), reckons omicron's R0 could be as high as 10.
Talha Khan Burki, "Omicron variant and booster COVID-19 vaccines"

It's one thing to understand that a single infected person may pass an infection on to 10 other people in a naïve population of a given size, but it's another thing to understand that it's 10 out of an actual number. In other words, how large is the presumed population of people that someone would need to come into contact with over the time that they're infectious such that those 10 infections materialize?

It's all well and good to tell people that some or another action on their part carries risks to third parties. But with no real way of quantifying that risk, how are people intended to weigh the risks against their personal tolerance? Or understand how to weight against the risk tolerance of those around them?

In this pandemic we’ve been making it up as we go: new public-health measures, new vaccines, new medicines. Lagging a bit behind is the new ethics for this new world, by which I mean a revised moral social contract dealing with risk for infectious disease.

Complicating the revisions to the social contract is the fact that "we" have also been making up the risk numbers as we go. This is, I suspect, what tends to push people towards absolutes; the idea that someone will definitely die if a person spends enough time in public unmasked and unvaccinated is definitely wrong, but it likely feels more solid than some nebulous probability that no-one seems to be able to actually articulate. And it's hard for contracts in general, let alone social contracts, to work when clauses are undefined. There shouldn't be an expectation that people will rush to sign on the dotted line when there's a whole section marked "to be figured out later."

Factuality

Can we claim there exists a universal moral code?

Okay... I'll bite. So what if we can? The primary argument for the utility of a universal moral code is that it would dictate how everyone should act. Okay. But there are already a plethora of ethical, legal and moral codes that people subscribe to, and don't do a particularly good job of getting the community of subscribers to all behave in the same way. Why would one supposedly objective code do any better a job?

Moral facts are basically no different than moral beliefs. The only change is the idea that they are somehow independent of human reason; they are true whether or not anyone believes they are true, in the same way the heliocentric model of the Solar System was accurate even when the conventional wisdom held that the Earth was the center of the Universe. The truth of the heliocentric model however, is not of universal utility; which is part of the reason why it took as long as it did to displace competing theories. While understanding the heliocentric model leads to a number of things, such as the retrograde motion of the superior planets, becoming easier to explain, the number of people for whom the idea is actually important is relatively small. In my day-to-day life, it honestly doesn't matter if the Earth orbits the Sun or the Sun has a remarkably rapid orbit around the Earth. The Sun will still rise in the morning and set in the evening, the seasons will still follow one after the other, I will still have to go to work and bills will continue to come due.

And it is, as I understand it, the same with moral facts. If it is suddenly discovered tomorrow that wearing the color blue violates some universal stricture on how I should live, whether or not I believe in the immorality of blue clothing will have no real effect on my day-to-day life. I understand that the idea that blue should somehow be a violation seems trivial, but that's kind of the point; there's no real reason why moral facts should be any more profound than physical ones. In any event, the question that I have about moral facts is: Whose life would suddenly change? What becomes easier to understand, explain or predict? Understanding that the Sun is at the center of the Solar System makes the motions of the planets easier to understand. Understanding how gravity works makes the communications infrastructure that allows for international communication faster and more resilient through enabling humans to place artificial satellites into orbit and keep them there. What would the transformation of morality from belief to fact do along those lines?

If the world is non-deterministic, moral facts are a lot like historical facts. They may be intensely interesting, but of limited practical utility. Sure, the fact that I owned something yesterday and did not give it away today leads to my ownership of it tomorrow, but that's a matter of social agreement. (And if American history teaches nothing else, it does teach that history is primarily important only as a social agreement.) And even moral facts are only true to the degree that people decide to build such an agreement around them. Again, if one understands that there are moral facts that are yet undiscovered, to the degree that people act in accordance with them, it is through having agreed to do so, in spite of such ignorance. If the world is deterministic, on the other hand, it's unclear of moral facts are as important as historical facts, as a deterministic universe posits that the future is determined by the action of natural laws on the state of the past.

If morality seeks to inform people of the choices they must make, then the point of moral facts would seem to be to eliminate disagreement about those choices. But no fact has shown itself capable of doing that without clear and present effects on the world as we currently know and understand it. And moral facts lack such effects, which is why even if they exist, they have yet to be conclusively discovered. So why not allow people to persist in their beliefs, making them into their own moral facts? Yes, there has been a judgment made that humanity is not particularly moral, but if the facts that they would be judged against are currently unknown, how can that judgment be sustained?

Enough To Share

This is the abundance agenda.
Derek Thompson "A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems"

One of the best things about reading what other people write is that sometimes, someone will articulate something that's been kicking around in my brain, but I'd never had quite the correct formulation for. Derek Thompson's Abundance Agenda is one of those things that I'd been thinking, but had yet to come across the right words for. It's one of those things that is, like so many, easier said than done, but it's about as easily understood as said. In a nutshell, the United States needs to stop manufacturing scarcity, and put that energy into creating abundance, instead.

As he points out in the article, many of the tools to do this are already there. Many people understand why certain items are scarce, and so it's understood what needs to happen to change that scarcity. Seattle city councilwoman Kshama Sawant has made a name for herself by being at the head of any parade that blames Seattle's housing costs on large companies like Amazon. This despite the fact that it's been understood since 2008 that a large part of what's been driving home prices upwards has been Washington State's Growth Management Act, which constrained the amount of buildable land when demand was rising. Add in NIMBYs who don't want high-density rental housing in their neighborhoods, and one can see how the prices for the limited local home stock keep rising.

But rather than embrace the idea that the area needs to look at its regulatory and political environment, Councilwoman Sawant tends to focus on the scarcity, as a way of prompting people to support her particular brand of redistributionist policies. And not that I have anything against redistribution, per se. I think there are often better ways of going about it is all.

That, however, means becoming less attached to scarcity as something that can provide the resources needed to transcend, well, scarcity. I look forward to what Mr. Thompson is going to propose as his series goes on, because I'm of the opinion that the United States is too attached to the idea of scarcity to really thrive. A lot of the current divide in the American political system is driven by people having the understanding that the country has too many people who are not like them, but who want what they have. An abundance agenda could help change that. Because however much it may be true that wealthy people are not above theft, as a general rule, someone who wants for little has fewer incentives to steal than someone who doesn't know where their next meal or safe night will come from.

American society doesn't need to be so aggressively efficient to sustain itself. The world won't end if people can manage to keep themselves from starving only working 32 or even 25 hours a week. American politics does really see a way to make that point. Let's see if opinion journalism can manage it, instead.

Raindrops

While the Seattle area is known for being rainy, it doesn't usually rain hard enough for it to be audible indoors. (It barely rains are enough to make any sound at all.) Rain heavy enough to drum on the rooftops is rare. And while listening to the rain can be pleasant, for some reason last night I spent quite a bit of time worrying about those people who were out in the rain, and out of doors more generally. While a fair amount of my concern was for the homeless, I also worried about those people whose jobs required them to be out in the cold, wet and dark. They are not in the same situation as the homeless, but an unusually heavy winter rain is still not pleasant weather to be outside, and in a society that operates day and night their contributions are important.

I suspect that part of it is that old canard of not having any confidence in my own ability to endure hardship. I can't imagine that I'd be anything but thoroughly miserable were I consigned to spend a night out in the rain, even with a raincoat, and this colors my understanding that everyone else must find it at least somewhat miserable themselves.

But I think that part of it is also a sense of nagging guilt. I feel that I should be more openly appreciative of the people who do the basic work that keeps the world turning, and doing more to assist those it's left behind, but I really don't think of them much until something or other reminds me of them. Like a heavy rain drumming on the rooftop.

A Familiar Place

If there is a faction of the modern American Right that sees itself as the inheritor of the mantle of the early American Patriots, I think there is also a faction of the American Left that doesn't think about the Patriots at all.

This isn't to say that the Pro-Trump Right are anything like the Patriots of the 1770s, but parallels may be drawn to the broader situation, I think. The mythology of the United States casts King George the 3rd as a clear villain; the sort of deliberate oppressor who was obviously an illegitimate ruler. But was the monarchy of Great Britain and Ireland so obviously illegitimate to anyone else? Was the Continental Congress and the army it raised anything more than yet another armed insurgency against lawful government until it suited others to recognize them?

The mythology of the United States tends to overlook the fact that colonial Americans were not singularly united in a desire to overthrow the British Crown and install a (somewhat) representative Republic in its place. There were plenty of Loyalists to the King around. Benedict Arnold was not a lone disenchanted soul.

I mention all of this, because the anniversary of last year's protest-turned-riot at the United States Capitol in Washington D.C. had brought out quite a bit of punditry, and a fair amount of hand-wringing over the idea of political violence. But the American Revolution was, basically, political violence. The United States of America did not come into being through a negotiated settlement between colonial luminaries and the British Crown/Parliament. Instead, it was an armed conflict, led by people who were among the wealthiest people on the continent at the time. The story of heroism that I learned in grade school tends to leave out the idea that the Founding Fathers were also looking after their own interests in the conflict, not simply those of the citizen farmers that made up most of the population.

The United States is a nation that came into existence through violence, aided by foreign powers that had an interest in seeing Great Britain lose territory and the resources and tax revenues that said territory represented. The Patriots saw their cause as just and their methods legitimate, and because they won, and the modern United States came from that conflict, it's seen today in the same way. There is no question of how the issue looked to people of the time, and how people saw themselves.

I would think that it's the same with every revolution. People choose sides, and those sides influence how they see the conflict brewing around them. Did supporters of the Patriot cause view British (and loyalist) institutions as untrustworthy? Did families split by the conflict see their opposite numbers as unreasonable? Did everyone involved see whatever position they arrived as the only one allowed by reasonable thought?

I don't know if the lens of the American Revolution is a good one to view the current state of the nation. I'm not a scholar of American history, for starters; I don't actually know much about the Revolution, or the social and political setting in which it took place. And I think that the simple and heroic story that is taught to schoolchildren glosses over too much of the difficult work (successful or futile) that was done at the time. But when I see people cloaking themselves in the mantle of Patriots, I am reminded that the idea that people of a single nation can be at odds over understandings of what constitutes good government is not new. There is a difference between the genuinely unprecedented and merely unfamiliar. I wonder how many societies have fractured for want of being reminded of that.

A Simple Answer

Purporting to explain "Why More Republicans Aren’t Outraged By Jan. 6" is a lot like purporting to explain why more colonial Americans weren't outraged by the Boston Tea Party back in 1774.

Interestingly enough, there's another FiveThirtyEight article that does a pretty good job of explaining why. In Maggie Koerth's "We’re Misunderstanding What Caused Jan. 6," she makes a really straightforward point, courtesy of University of Michigan political science professor Christian Davenport: “They’re interested in political reform and not in the fact that people are pissed.”

The protesters at the capitol a year ago today were angry. It can be decreed that their grievances, income inequality, racial resentment and declining trust in institutions, as Professor Davenport puts them, are illegitimate, but that doesn't make them any less real. Simply telling someone they have no right to be angry about the things that they're angry about has never worked, why would anyone expect it to now? So when Professor Julia Azari calls out a lack of feeling threatened and the growth of zero-sum politics as reasons why more Republicans aren't taking what happened on January 6th of 2021 "seriously," she shows the very interest in political reform that Professor Daveport mentions.

Americans are becoming, more and more, disconnected from what people who disagree with them think, as Ms. Koerth points out in her article, and thus they are becoming angry and afraid of the monstrous caricature of the other side that's being presented to them and that they mistake for their fellow countrymen. The habit of assuming good intentions has been lost (if it ever really existed) in American politics. When you understand yourself to be up against a group of people who are brainwashed, hateful and racist (and both Democrats and Republicans tend to believe this about the other) being ready to defend oneself seems rational. And if, as the adage goes, "the best defense is a good offense," going on the attack early is also a rational strategy. Why would someone be outraged about this, even if they saw it as an overreaction to present circumstances?

Sure, it's profitable, as a politician, to present the other side as monstrous to the point of inhumanity. But it's also difficult to do that without something to build on. Americans may not have an accurate picture of opposing partisans, but they're not as far off the mark, I suspect, when they presume that partisan policies tend to focus on the welfare of the people who voted the current partisan lawmakers into office. It's been long understood that the reason why so much legislation in the United States favors the elderly over the young is that older people are more likely to vote. And when people are insecure about their own position in life, they're not particularly receptive to benefits going to other people, especially those that they perceive as being advantaged in relation to themselves. If Democratic lawmakers are thought to vote for benefits solely for Democratic voters, why wouldn't Republicans, who feel they also need help, resent that?

People support governments, or any institution, for that matter, when they understand that the institution is supporting them. People may be forced into avoiding open criticism of a government, or even parroting its praises, by threats of sanction, but enthusiasm for government requires people understanding that it looks after their interests.

The protestors in Washington D.C. last year didn't feel that the Federal government was looking out for their interests. To the contrary, they believed (correctly or not doesn't really matter) that people in the government were actively working against them, for the benefit of brainwashed, hateful and racist others. (And child sex traffickers, because that's also a current stand-in for Evil.) And the reason other Republican voters aren't more outraged is that many of them believe the same, to some degree or another. And if you're a Republican lawmaker or candidate for office, you can either ride that wave or be swamped by it. Whether one believes it or not doesn't really matter because there's no effective gatekeeping that prevents people who are willing to go along from being elected. And so it goes.

I'd say that there's no point in pretending, but that would presume that people like Professor Azari actually understand what time it is, and are willfully maintaining a fiction, when they aren't. But they're not looking at the people they profess to be explaining. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that people are angry, or why they're angry. But it does require taking them, and their perception of themselves and their circumstances seriously, rather than simply chalking it up to delusion or a sense of entitlement. But this is one of the side effects of when people stop assuming good intent; the presumption of bad faith becomes contagious.

The Catch

Orange County Deputy District Attorney Kelly Ernby, who opposed mandating vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 was infected by the virus, became seriously ill, and died.

And this is national news why, precisely? I mean, I live in King County, Washington. That's nearly 1,200 miles away. It's not like a funeral procession of unvaccinated California Republicans is going to walk past my home or anything.

This smells of the news micro-genre that might be described as "The COVID Gotcha." The basic story is a simple one: Random person X, who opposed some, another or all anti-COVID measures, dies of the disease. Cue the schadenfreude.

But... so what? There's an assumption (okay, likely several assumptions) built into these short takes, and like many assumptions, since it's never stated, it can be neither examined nor refuted. And that assumption is basically that Deputy District Attorney Ernby either died regretting her foolishness or was even more foolish not to.

And okay, so Deputy District Attorney Ernby was on the record saying that "There's nothing that matters more than our freedoms right now," to a small anti-mandate rally in Irvine, California. That doesn't tell us what would actually be somewhat important, and enlightening, in a story like this: Did Deputy District Attorney Ernby oppose a vaccine mandate because she didn't understand the risks, because she felt that people should be allowed to take the risks, some combination of those or for a different reason (or reasons) entirely?

People oppose being prevented from doing things that have risks all the time. I, for instance, like to drive. I'll take a road trip at the drop of a hat, making the drive from the Seattle suburbs down to Tacoma for no better reason than to go to a bookstore or see friends on a whim. And I am fully aware of the fact that the more time I spend on the road, the greater my cumulative chance of dying in a traffic accident. And it's not like I have to drive - it's possible (although somewhat slow) to make the trip down to Tacoma on various forms of public transportation and be more or less assured that I won't be killed in a highway accident. But if someone were to seek to mandate using public transit, you could be sure that I'd sign the petition against it. Even though I'm fully aware of the risk that I'm taking every time I get in the car. And I understand that it's an unnecessary risk. I can shop bookstores and have things ordered in for delivery, after all. And I've already mentioned the availability of public transportation; which would also likely result in me obtaining more exercise than I do. But it would require me to adjust my life and give up something that I enjoy. And something that, perhaps more importantly, I consider worth risks involved. And okay, perhaps that risk isn't as high as the risk of dying from SARS-CoV-2 if unvaccinated. If the cost-benefit analysis is a personal one, however, people are free to come to their own determinations.

It's legitimate to believe that the freedom to determine whether or not to take a specific vaccine isn't worth dying for. And so an article making that case would itself be legitimate. But that's not what "The COVID Gotcha" is about. It simply posits a (partisan, in the United States) worldview that there's some newsworthy lesson to be taken from the simple fact that someone who chose to opposed forcing people to use a specific protection from the risk of SARS-CoV-2 succumbed to that same risk. But the idea that it wasn't worth the risk, or that the dead person would now agree with that sentiment, should be supported, rather than being an unstated assumption.

It's Everywhere

Choosing pets over kids is selfish, Pope says

"Selfish," I think, is one of the least effective ways to attempt to shame people, because it's one of the most commonly deployed. After all, this isn't the first time that the Pontiff has called out the voluntarily childless as selfish. And there are those who say that having children is selfish. Or that not adopting is selfish. And there are also people who are willing to criticize those who don't have enough children. Or have them too late in life.

It seems that pretty much whatever one does, there is someone waiting with the charge of selfishness. So why bother trying to avoid it? It's the epitome of you can't please all of the people, all of the time. So it makes sense to pick the people one wants to please, and ignore the remainder. Of course, Pope Francis may feel that his opinion carries greater weight than others. But I suspect that the people who agree with him are already parents or planning to be so. After all, it's not like there's a huge section of humanity who never considered having children until the Pope came along and called them out for owning German Shepherds instead.

Likewise, why bother being put out at a criticism that can't be escaped? I understand why people feel the need to hit back at Pope Francis, but it's not like he's suddenly going to join Team Collie because a bunch of people on Twitter are frustrated by his criticism of them. The Pope understands that people (outside of those called to celibacy, anyway) have a responsibility to be parents because that what God wants them to do and that it's the best thing for humanity writ large. That seems unlikely to change anytime soon.

So it starts to feel like dueling virtue signalling, with everyone wanting to make sure that others understand just which "correct" side of an issue that they are on. And to make sure that others understand the shameful position that their detractors have taken. But in my own life, a shrug, and "so what?" have served me pretty well. I have neither partner, children nor pets, and people have called me selfish for each of those. I used to challenge them to tell me what was so selfish about it, but now I've just learned to roll with it. I made the choices that seemed the most reasonable at the time that I made them, just as everyone else does. It took longer than it really should have, but I finally learned to stop judging my own choices by how popular (or not) they were. After all, humanity keeps growing and keeps advancing technologically (and perhaps socially) without everyone needing to move in lockstep. Sure, were everyone to decide to ditch the idea of parenting tomorrow, the future of humanity would be in jeopardy, but that time is coming eventually, no matter what people decide to do. Even if humanity manages to avoid some Earthly pressure that would otherwise result in extinction, the Universe won't be able to support life forever. There's only so much hydrogen to go around.

The fear that some minority position will suddenly become the mainstream is an interesting one, especially because it seems to speak to the idea that the willfully perverse is always lurking somewhere, waiting to strike. When Pope Francis speaks of a "Demographic Winter," does he honestly perceive a sharp contraction in the human population? China was unable to produce the same, even with a One-Child Policy that was widely regarded as a human-rights nightmare. In nations where populations are slowing due to a lack of children, the difference is commonly being made up by people from places where there are more people than opportunities. When humanity finally stops increasing its ranks, it's unlikely to be for lack of trying. And when children become too expensive to be everywhere, calling out people for owning Calicos is not going to remedy that. So while I understand the Pope's position, I don't think that his words will do much to change anything; or that they need to. The multi-directional shame game is unlikely to amount to much.

Take Control

But pervasive fear of crime changes you. It changed the United States from a nation that believed in second chances, to one that wanted to lock criminals up and throw away the key. We didn’t change our minds again until crime had fallen significantly.
Megan McArdle, Opinion: Street crime has distorted our politics before. If we don’t get it under control, it will do so again.

I wonder, if the United States had remained "a nation that believed in second chances," would there have been so much incentive for crime? Ms. McArdle's column struck me as having the moralistic view of crime that I suspect that many people in the United States share. Rather than being a rational response to the perception, if not always the reality, of limited legitimate opportunity to advance, crime is seen as a form of willful perversity, an easy way of getting ahead in life that comes with none of the work or effort that honest labor demands.

For my own part, I suspect that a program that seeks to reduce the incidence of crime by expecting people to quietly endure grinding poverty until such time as someone decides to throw them a bone is doomed to failure. But I think that the ethos of control that many people favor is an artifact of the moral distance that Americans tend to see between one another. With a little dash of the opinion that viable opportunities for success are free for the asking thrown in.

It's an interesting dichotomy, and the sort of thing that can only manifest itself across large bodies of people; American society comes across as simultaneously understanding material success to be rare and resources scarce, yet the opportunities for wealth and advancement to be boundless. (Although, I should note that the practice of "opportunity hoarding" is certainly a thing, so perhaps Americans don't believe that opportunities are as readily available as one might think...)

Also worth pointing out is that when people talk about "fear of crime" they often speak of in-person crimes, like assault, robbery or murder. Bernard Madoff used his Ponzi scheme to fleece investors for billions of dollars; despite such scams ruining lives on a daily basis, it's the young man who knocks over a 7-11 for a couple hundred dollars or breaks into a car that fuels the public's worries. And if people are more afraid of the sorts of crimes that the indigent are more likely to commit, perhaps one should expect an inclination to see it as indicative of the perpetrator's intrinsic moral decay.

It occurs to me that talk of getting "our streets back under control" is a plea to exercise power, and in a particular way. Forcing conformity to a set of social rules that people understand work to their disadvantage is only practical when a society has the ability to make the costs of breaking those rules even more of a disadvantage. This is where the perceived poverty of a society as a whole rears its head; the aggressive wielding of the stick seen as more cost effective than proffering carrots. Second chances are too expensive to be given freely, while long terms of incarceration, and the informal punishments that continue after release, are seen as cheap solutions.

I know that I harp on this conclusion; perhaps I should seek to do something substantial with it, or just let it go, but for all that the United States is constantly described as a rich nation, I don't see that reflected in the way people behave. And from that, I infer that Americans don't perceive themselves as being particularly well-off. Sure, they understand that Latin America is poor, and that's why migrants come North in the tens of thousands, but there is also an understanding that too many migrants will simply render the United States just as poverty-stricken as Mexico, despite the fact that the United States has 7 times the per-capita GDP of its southern neighbor.

I'm not a world traveler by any stretch, but I have been overseas a couple of times, and it surprises me that I've been to countries with substantially lower per-capita GDP than the United States, but they seemed to see themselves as better off than many Americans do. There may be something to be said for a nagging fear that the wolf is at the door to inspire hard work, but fear makes the wolf appear larger, too. At it's core, Ms. McArdle's thesis is a simple one. People can be controlled. Their fears cannot be.

Mastery

I encountered a homeless man yesterday who was, as they say, living his best life. And it occurred to me (likely much later that it should have) that a number of the homeless people that I've met seem a lot happier than one would expect, given their circumstances. I think that a lot of this is that I haven't encountered that many people who strike me as desperate to changer their circumstances. Their situations are less than ideal, and they'd say as much, but they'd managed to find a mastery of them that many other people haven't when it comes to their own lives.

The man I met yesterday was one such. When I asked him questions about how he dealt with the cold or if he was getting enough to eat, he had ready answers for me, because he knew these things. Rather than having rehearsed or practiced his answers, he laid out the mastery he had gained over his circumstances. And I think I envied him for that.

Of course, most of it is quite unenviable. Being homeless, even in a relatively clement environment like that here in the Seattle area requires a level of mastery that having a safe home and a warm bed does not. This was a man who understood that keeping his possessions safe meant keeping them with him. That being able to remain out of the elements required always being willing to move to a place where the elements could not reach him. The mastery that I so admired him for had been forced upon him, as a condition of his survival.

Still, it was a burden that he bore with a smile and a laugh and a sense of optimism that seems rare in the circles that I commonly move in. There are people who would say that it's due to a lack of the same responsibilities that hound the rest of us, and I suppose that I can't really argue with that. But I would contest the idea that the the homeless people that I've met are, or have been, irresponsible. Once, I was in Seattle's Pioneer Square neighborhood with a large bag of Arby's sandwiches that I was passing out, and the homeless people I handed them to would often call over a friend, asking "Hey! You ate?" They'd hand over their sandwich, and only then turn back to me to ask if I had another one. They took better care of one another than, I think, many of the rest of us do. They shoulder responsibilities that American culture more broadly seems to be wary of.

I think the thing about hardship is that it eventually erases the fear of hardship. When I worry about my future, it's because I worry about my ability to endure hardship greater than what limited amount I have already known. What I understood from speaking to a homeless man on the sidewalk in a strip mall was that he didn't fear the hardship that he knew was going to come the next day. And this granted him a freedom that made him seem happier and perhaps even freer than I understood myself to be.

And I think he understood what his life was, the way it was in the moment, and what is was going to be going forward, in a way that I couldn't, or at least didn't. He understood, much better than I, what he needed to master in order to manage his life. True, his circumstances where much more constrained than mine. But I don't think that he would have chosen that, if the choice had been entirely his. He was proving himself adaptable, and perhaps that's why I need to do as well.

Still Here

Hello!

This is Nobody In Particular, a weblog that I started back in late 2006. It came out of a nagging desire to be a writer of some sort, coupled with the understanding that I'm a terrible writer. Although this isn't an online diary, it's where I work on things that I've been mulling over in my head; I write them out because it's more organized than simply thinking about things.

The original goal was to be something of an Explainer about the United States, but penned by just another random American, rather than a political scientist or other professional commenter. I've had the opportunity to travel outside of the country on a couple of occasions, and been close to people from overseas, and fielding their questions on why things here work (and people here behave) in certain ways clued me into the fact that there were a lot of things about the United States that could do with some explaining. But instead of doing that, I seem to spend a lot of my time here grousing about things that irritate me. I know that I should likely lean into that, given how often I've tried, and failed, to take the blog in a different direction, but I have yet to be at ease with how much of a curmudgeon I can be in public.

Now that another new year is starting, I might try to do something different again. I suspect that the first thing I need to do is find new sources of information. I tend to go to the same sources, like The Atlantic or FiveThirtyEight for information, and I've become familiar with the takes that I'm going to find there. So it's time to broaden my horizons; maybe open a subscription to someplace like The Economist or another offshore news source. We'll see.

But in any event, for all that I don't know that this project is doing anything for me, I'm still invested in it. So I'm going to keep up with it a little longer. Who knows, maybe I'll get it to the twenty-year mark. If nothing else, it helps me to look back at things that I've written before, and see how my thinking as evolved. And there's no better way to understand how one has changed as a person than to have snapshots of the person one was.