Quotes: Health Care, Social Order, and a Curious Confusion

"America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system." Walter Cronkite

"A good social order aligns self-interest with social interest." Alex Tabarrok via Harrison

"By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece." G. K. Chesterton

Nine Posts in One! A Brief Collection of Ideas

I was going over my list of "to blog" ideas a few nights ago and realized that much of what I had to say about a handful of them could be communicated in several short sentences. I decided that rather than drag them out into full posts, I would just post them as a concise list. So here you are, in no particular order:

1. The cell phone will be the defining invention of the first half of the 21st century. Today, 61 out of every 100 people on earth have a cell phone subscription. More people on earth have access to a cell phone than a toilet. It has changed, is changing, and will continue to change the world for decades to come. (Hat-tip to Dr. Buckley)

2. Streaming is the future of music. I've said it here before, but Apple's purchase of streaming music service Lala last year (and shutdown of the service in April) may indicate a move in this direction. Even if it doesn't, I still believe that in the future, no one will keep "a thousand songs in their pocket." Music companies will keep them on their servers, and we'll all access them on our phones, our computers, our entertainment centers, in our cars... because the internet will be everywhere.

3. You are racist, and I can prove it to you. I would encourage you to take the Implicit Association Race Test, which is the result of research at Harvard, UVA, and UW. The test is very short, and it reveals how closely the participant associates African Americans with "bad" things and European Americans with "good" things. If you live in America, chances are you associate African Americans with negative things without even knowing it. There are many other tests as well, covering other races, weight, disability, age, gender, and others.

4. Good marketing makes you say, "That's me!" This is part of Apple's marketing brilliance—when you see their iPhone ads, you think, "Wow, I could see myself using that." This is also part of Verizon's miserable failure—no one sees their DROID ads and thinks, "Wow, I wish I could turn into a robot like that guy." Ok, maybe a few of my engineering buddies do. But we're a small group.

5. Bickering newsmen/women are NOT news! Glenn Beck vs. Rachel Maddow, Bill O'Reilly vs. Keith Olberman... who the hell cares? These people are supposed to be enlightening us and contributing to our national conversation. Instead, they're clouding it with their worthless squabbles.

6. We will never know if the stimulus package worked. There is no control group; we will never know what the world would have been like without it. This lack of empiricism is one of the reasons the social sciences have a long way to go before they can be truly be called scientific. I highly recommend this excellent discussion of this idea from NPR's Planet Money.

7. Not every CEO is evil. I feel that almost everywhere I turn, particularly in the fallout of Wall Street's bailout-turned-bonuses, I hear more about the downright diabolical nature of CEOs. A welcome exception is CBS' little-known show Undercover Boss, in which wealthy CEOs go undercover in their own companies, are confronted by the inspiring personal stories of its hard-working employees, and are moved to make changes which will make employees' lives better (and rarely help the company's bottom line). I think this episode as well as this one are definitely worth your time.

8. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from criticism. Sarah Palin claimed that attacks from the "mainstream media" were infringing on her First Amendment rights and keeping her from doing her job as governor. Radio host Dr. Laura recently quit her show after using the n-word eleven times in a conversation with a black caller, claiming she wanted to "regain her First Amendment rights." Many folks claimed that the firing of Don Imus in 2007 violated his rights to free speech after he called the Rutger's University women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos" on air. This is all bull. The First Amendment limits the government from taking away your right to free speech; it does not require the government to prevent you from suffering the consequences when you exercise your right to be stupid. For what it's worth, I would also argue that no one's right to freedom of religion is being violated by the criticism of the Mosque near Ground Zero.

9. Liberating women liberates the world, or so argues this magnificent piece from the NYT, titled "The Women's Crusade." Nicholas Kristof and and Shery WuDunn argue that "the liberation of women could help solve many of the world’s problems, from poverty to child mortality to terrorism." I'm convinced.

Image: fensterbme

Protest Showdown

I forgot to include some of Erin's awesome pictures from the rally I shared about in my last post. Here they are!

Take it Down a Notch, for America

You may have heard that a few weeks ago Glenn Beck hosted a rally in DC to "Restore Honor." Around 90,000 Beck fans gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to hear Beck, Sarah Palin, and a few other characters extol America's virtues and proclaim America's need to return to its spiritual, constitutional, patriotic, honorable, virtuous roots.

The date of the event (accidentally, according to Beck) was the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. This incensed many civil rights activists, who find Beck's rhetoric (accusing President Obama of having a racist "deep-seated hatred for white people and white culture" and decrying social justice, which was a primary theme of Rev. King's ministry) to be antithetical to King's. Consequently, Al Sharpton led a counter march dubbed, "Reclaim the Dream," which featured Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Martin Luther King III. Incidentally, one of Beck's rally's primary speakers was Alveda King, MLK's niece—as if the two rallies were in competition over who was more MLKific. Both rallies also featured Gospel choirs.

As avid DC protest-watchers, my lovely wife and I couldn't miss this. We chose to attend Sharpton's rally, which was to end at the site of the future MLK memorial, just South of the Lincoln Memorial. We hoped that we could experience the controversy when the two rallies met firsthand, and then venture over to watch Beck's. We also generally agreed with the notion that Beck, despite his assertion that he is "reclaiming the civil rights movement," is about as similar to MLK as a wrench is to a tuna sandwich. Attending these types of events implies you support their cause, so given the choice we chose to "reclaim the dream."

The experience was remarkable. We marched for five miles at a distance of about five yards from Sharpton, King, and Duncan. There were thousands of marchers, and the crowd was easily 90% black. We marched with teenagers singing Gospel music in harmony. We marched with folks shouting Obama campaign slogans ("Yes we can!" "Fired up, ready to go!"). We marched with folks chanting "No justice, no peace!" and one man yelling back in anger, "They already got peace!" I wish I could have had a conversation with him; I wondered what he meant.

We were let down when we reached the Mall however, because Sharpton's march had started late (due to the tardiness of the majority of the crowd) and Beck's had ended long before. The few Tea Partiers we met along the way mostly looked on and grinned. A few clapped. One even ran towards us yelling, "We're all on the same side! We're all Americans!" A few protesters stopped to argue, but Erin and I didn't witness anything that could really be called controversy.

The overall feeling I gained from the march was discouragement. Both rallies were purely ideological, and concentrated on yelling across the wedge driven between "us" and "them." The Beck folks wanted to restore the honor that has supposedly been stolen by politicians like Obama, Pelosi, and Reid. Sharpton wanted to reclaim the dream that had supposedly been stolen by Beck, Palin, and the Tea Party. But what did any of this mean? The '63 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom had specific goals. Those honorable folks wanted Civil Rights legislation passed, they wanted Jim Crow laws ended, they wanted public institutions integrated, they wanted to be treated as people. What did Beck want? He wanted to honor the military, he wanted to praise America, and he wanted to present himself as some sort of pseudo-spiritual cheerleader, asking legions of folks who already agree with him to return to his version of values they already shared. What did Sharpton want? He wanted to express his outrage that a man like Beck would invoke anything about a man like King. The rallies were fun I guess, but they were meaningless. Completely meaningless. And more than a little divisive. I felt a twinge of jealousy towards my parents, who lived in a time when many rallies were about important issues, not who is more American.

My discouragement turned to joy this week however, when I learned about another meaningless DC rally Erin and I will be sure to attend. Jon Stewart is hosting the "Rally to Restore Sanity" on October 30th, where he will extol the virtues of honest public discourse and unite those who reject the fear-laden extremism that is highjacking our national conversation. Sure, it too will ultimately be meaningless. Sure, it won't accomplish a thing. But it will make the crucial point that we will never make lasting change or progress in this nation if we do not listen to each other, and reject the belligerent sensationalism our media broadcasts 24/7—and it will make this point using my favorite tool of all: satire. Speaking of satire, Stephen T. Colbert will also be hosting his own counter-rally, the "March to Keep Fear Alive."

Even if you have no desire to attend this rally, or any rally for that matter (I can understand that), I'd encourage you to watch the following video. It delivers some salient points and hilarious jokes while remaining admirably non-partisan.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Rally to Restore Sanity
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

The Daily Show: The Rally to Restore Sanity

Update: Here are some of our photos from the Reclaiming the Dream march!

Top 5 Things Which Have Recently Blown My Mind

1. According to this study, "an additional [Wal-Mart] Supercenter per 100,000 residents increases average BMI by 0.25 units and the obesity rate by 2.4 percentage points." (via Harrison)

2. Two thirds of the subjects in all U.S. psych studies are American undergrads who are hardly representative of anyone but their Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic selves. (via Evan)

3. Deportation of illegal immigrants has increased under the Obama Administration. Just in case you forgot this guy is center-left.

4. Local government officials in a Long Island town used Google Earth to find backyard pools that didn't have the proper permits, and then fine their owners. I believe, as do others, that this is a direct violation of the 4th Amendment, one that does not bode well for the future of this technology in the hands of law enforcement.

5. In 1984, an unemployed ice cream truck driver named Michael Larson discovered that the supposedly random game-board on a popular TV game show was not actually random. After recording hours of the show and studying them for months, he was able to memorize the order in which the squares lit up on the board. He flew to LA, appeared on the show, and won over $110,000. CBS, the show's network, was forced to award him the prize money because he had not explicitly violated the rules. They did not air the episode for almost 20 years after its appearance. Larson spent the money and the rest of his life trying to pull off other get-rich-quick schemes, all of which failed.

Bonus thing: Over the course of two years, a California teen swapped a cell phone for a Porsche on Craigslist.

Common Ground

More from NYTimes | Matt Davies

Exploring How Parents Matter

Recently I did some further exploration into an idea I've come across a few times over the last couple years. It's the idea that people overestimate the importance of the parent/child relationship to a child's development, and underestimate the impact of his/her peers. I dove further into this concept by reading Malcolm Gladwell's 1998 article about psychologist Judith Rich Harris's innovative book, The Nurture Assumption, which argues just that.

Gladwell's article states that about half of the personality differences among people come from genes (received from their parents, obviously), and half come from the environment. Harris argues that the latter half is dominated by a child's social network, and points to evidence that children tend to model their behavior after their peers, not their parents, particularly when outside the home.

This idea challenges a lot of how I think about family, particularly because I was brought up in a private school environment which placed a lot of emphasis on parents' role in raising and educating their children. If the nurture assumption is incorrect, and parents do not matter as much as peers in the development of a child (beyond providing a certain basic level of stability, love, and discipline), perhaps another aspect of private education is more important. When parents send their child to a private school, they exert a significant amount of influence over the nature of the peer group their child will inhabit. Perhaps the greatest influence my parents had on the external development of my personality was based not in how they approached our relationship but rather how they controlled who I became friends with at an early age. I entered school in first grade (at age 7—no preschool, no kindergarten) and for the most part spent my first eight years of school with 32 students who to this day remain some of my closest friends. Besides our church, this was the first time I entered a social group that was much larger than my immediate family, and many of its members are still like family to me. It is possible that my parents' choice to place me in this group was the most influential decision they made about my upbringing.

If all of this is true, it certainly brings greater weight to the discussion of private versus public education, or even one school versus another, when parents are making decisions about their children. Conversely, it makes other discussions less weighty. In a society where "proper parenting" is a lucrative industry, quick to provide parents with a million different ways they're screwing their kids up and a million different ways to fix them (involving more than a million different products), perhaps the fallacy of the Nurture Assumption can allow parents to breathe a sigh of relief and rest a little better knowing that chances are most of the influence they have over their child's personality took place in the bedroom 9 months before he/she was born. Parents may have good cause to worry a little more about where they send their kids to school, and a lot less about everything else.

P.S. Above is a picture of me and my elementary school classmates. See if you can spot me.

Quotes: Stupidity, Tourists, Justice, and the Way Men Behave

"I am patient with stupidity but not those who are proud of it." Edith Sitwell, I Live Under a Black Sun

"As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing." David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster

"The Law is a grim, unsmiling thing. Not Justice, though. Justice is witty and whimsical and kind and caring." Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance

"'Grown men,' he told himself, in flat contradiction of centuries of accumulated evidence about the way grown men behave, 'do not behave like this.'" Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

These are all from this brilliant blog.

The Twit Network

You've probably heard that a movie about Facebook is being released in October. It's called The Social Network. I'm kindof a sucker for biopics, especially ones about technology, so I'm pretty excited about it.

The movie was written by West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin, so as a West Wing fan I'm pretty excited about that too. But Sorkin's writing is undoubtedly a contributor to the over-the-top melodrama (unsurprisingly decried by the actual Facebook creators) in the following trailer:



This trailer just begs to be parodied. And it was, beautifully, in the following Twitter spoof, "The Twit Network."



Better stop this before I come up with a fully-formed idea...