Hard Times Ahead

Pardon my gloom. We may not be facing apocalyptic earthquakes, but a clear-headed look at our nation's budget is enough to leave anyone spooked.

The country has lost control of its finances. Mandatory entitlement spending will be 70 percent of the federal budget by 2030 and the nation has decided to wait for a crisis rather than do something about it. The president attempted created a bipartisan commission to tackle the deficit, and then ignored its level-headed recommendations. A gang of six brave senators attempted to craft legislation to enact them, and now it's falling apart. The president proposed a budget that reformed almost nothing, and the Republican house responded with a budget that did a lot with little hope of passing (it was voted down last week). The one possible 2012 presidential candidate who has the experience and determination to bring folks together and seriously deal with the budget has decided not to run. For their part, voters have proclaimed yet again that messing with Medicare spells political death. And why wouldn't they? The average American with the median salary pays $150K into Medicare over their lifetime and gets back $400K in benefits. Much better to let your children foot the difference than accept less benefits and higher taxes yourself.

Their children will indeed be footing the bill (and if you consider the average age of the voting public, I'm one of those children). If this decades-old milieu of incompetency, denial, procrastination, selfishness, and irresponsibility continues the bill will come in the form of a debt crisis like we're seeing right now in Europe. Think real government shutdown. Think worse unemployment. Think bending to the will of other countries (who we may not like so much) because we need their help.

Does America like crisis? Perhaps so; we have weathered the second-worst economic disaster in our short history and have decided responsibility today is still worse than catastrophe tomorrow. See you at the Great Abdication.

Sources not linked: CBPP | NYT
Image: brownpau

Top 5 Things That Have Recently Blown My Mind

1. A first-person account of a would-be murderer.

2. The Resolution of the East Tennessee Convention of 1861 (printed in the New York Times and thus now available on their website with a publication date of July 3, 1861). Many areas of the South including East Tennessee, Northern Alabama, and West Virginia actively opposed secession during the run-up to the Civil War.

3. The history of the Pill. There is so much I didn't know about the history of sexuality in American culture: Margaret Sanger resolved to find an effective means for birth control when her mother died after 18 pregnancies (she accused her father over her mother's coffin). Bans on promoting and/or using birth control were common until the mid-60's. Around this time, some African-American leaders called the Pill "black genocide," urging black women not to take it on the premise that a high birth rate was necessary to change the balance of power in America. And that's just the beginning; reading this article was an eye-opening experience.

4. China will overtake the U.S. as the world's largest economy by 2020.

5. A couple in the U.K. has been denied the right to become foster parents because of their plan to teach their children that a "homosexual lifestyle" is unacceptable.

Quotes: Dollars, Sacrifices, and the Head Cheerleader

"Never take a dollar from a free citizen through the coercion of taxation without a legitimate purpose. We have a solemn duty to spend that dollar as carefully as possible, because when we took it we diminished that person's freedom." Mitch Daniels

"Americans are unwilling to support the sacrifices that will be required to avert fiscal catastrophe in part because they are less conscious of themselves as components of a national project." David Brooks

"If life is like high school, then today's educated, ambitious women are the student-council presidents and Sarah Palin is the head cheerleader." Lisa Belkin

The Wrong Math

XKCD: Conditional Risk

In case you're unfamiliar with math comedy (a field plagued by too much math and too little comedy), what's going on in the above comic is a failure to understand conditional probability. Yes, out of 300 million Americans, lightning only kills about 45 a year. However, among all the Americans who hike in an open field during a thunderstorm, the death rate is much higher. The comic's caption jokes that the death rate is also high among people who don't understand statistics.

And that's a lot of us. We live in a deluge of statistics. Technology has allowed us to gather, organize, and distribute data much faster and easier than ever before, and many of us are ill-equipped to handle the constant bombardment.

In a NYT editorial titled "Chances Are," author Steven Strogatz describes a study in which 25 doctors were presented the following problem:

The probability that one of these women has breast cancer is 0.8 percent. If a woman has breast cancer, the probability is 90 percent that she will have a positive mammogram. If a woman does not have breast cancer, the probability is 7 percent that she will still have a positive mammogram. Imagine a woman who has a positive mammogram. What is the probability that she actually has breast cancer?

The answers ranged from 1 percent to 90 percent; 8 doctors thought the chances were 10 percent or less, 9 said 90 percent or more, and the remaining 8 guessed somewhere between 50 and 80 percent.

The correct but unintuitive answer is 9 percent. Most of the doctors failed to grasp conditional probability.

Strogatz goes on to relate a similar misunderstanding in the O.J. Simpson trial. The prosecution argued that O.J. physically abusing his wife was evidence that he may have murdered her. The defense countered that only 1 out of 2,500 men who beat their wives go on to murder them, so the allegations of physical abuse were irrelevant. This reflects the same mistake made in the lightning comic. Few men who batter their wives also murder them. But if a woman who has a history of being physically abused by her husband is murdered, the probability that her husband is the murderer is 90 percent.

The problem of statistics fooling juries in this way is widespread. It was thoughtfully presented in the following TED talk by Oxford mathematician Pete Donnelly:

TED: Peter Donnelly shows how stats fool juries

Donnelly shares a story about a mother who was convicted of killing her two children, who she claimed had both been victims of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). A pediatrician at the trial stated that the chances of two children in a family similar to hers dying of SIDS was 1 in 73 million, which he calculated by squaring the chances of one such child dying. This is yet another failure of conditional probability: the pertinent statistic is if a child in a similar family dies, how likely is it that SIDS (and not filicide) is the cause, given that another child from the same family has already died from SIDS?

Just in case I sound too professorial explaining all this, here is an example in which I fell prey to statistics ignorance. A year or so ago I was telling a friend about how much more likely I am to die on the way to work considering I walk and do not drive, because I had read that the death rate for pedestrians is higher than for motorists. My friend asked me how this was calculated, and I responded that I assumed it was done by simply categorizing causes of death (for example, if out of 100 people who died in a year in a given area, 20 were killed walking down the street and 10 were killed in an automobile accident, your chances of being killed traveling in a car are 10 percent less than walking). He responded correctly that this was not a proper method of calculating my chances of surviving my commute. By the method I was proposing, I had a small chance of being killed in any of the many other ways people die in my area: old age, drug abuse, childbirth, operating heavy machinery... Which obviously I do not.

Absorbing all this information over the years, I have concluded that properly understanding statistics is so essential to our modern lives that it should be a more important component of our education.

In high school, I was required to take pre-calculus my junior year and then could choose either calculus or statistics as a senior. I don't think I should have been given this choice. I would estimate I have an above-average appreciation for calculus; my electrical engineering degree provided me four semesters of it at the college level. Even so (or perhaps as a result), I just don't think it's as important a subject as statistics to the average citizen. I left high school with little more understanding of statistics than the definition of mean, median, and mode, but I could take a derivative or integral with relative ease. Outside of my work, calculus has been of little use to me (at the moment I can't think of one time I've used it), while I have struggled to gain the knowledge needed to understand the statistics I'm confronted with in everyday life.

Our schools are teaching the wrong math, and this is having serious consequences in the jury box, the hospital, and nearly everywhere we live our lives. Here's to a better understanding of the data that surrounds us.

Note: In an effort to continue my education about statistics, I plan to read Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot's The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics, and in Life, recommended to me by a friend. I invite you to join me!

Quotes: Mystery, Funk, and "Sophisticated Lady"

"But knowledge does not vanquish mystery, or obscure its distant lights." Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, via Drew Norris

"Jazz is the teacher but funk is the preacher." James Blood Ulmer via Erik Pearson

"Racism planted that bomb, but racism ain't strong enough to kill this music. If I'm going to die, I'm ready. But I'm going out playing 'Sophisticated Lady.'" Charles Mingus, refusing to leave the stage after a bomb threat was called in at a performance to support an African-American music department at Yale University in 1972

Bin Laden

"U.S. military got bin Laden. Confirmed he's dead. Expecting retaliation in Afghanistan. Pres speaking now."

This message from my mom hit my phone at 11:30 last night, and by midnight Erin and I were on our way to the White House. This is why we live on Capitol Hill—to be there when history happens.

We immersed ourselves in the crowd quickly. Thousands of people, mostly college-aged, mostly male. Cheering, chanting, singing patriotic songs ("God Bless America," "My Country Tis of Thee," "The Star Spangled Banner"), waving American flags, smoking cigars, lighting sparklers, holding signs, climbing trees and statues and streetlamps, taking pictures and videos of each other. Police and Secret Service agents lining the White House lawn. Car horns blaring constantly, echoing off buildings as they whiz by with people holding flags hanging out the windows.

The crowd grew constantly for hours. We saw a decorated major general in full uniform and a young woman wearing a hijab being interviewed. A man holding a framed picture of a young soldier in one hand and an American flag folded in a triangle in the other, high above the sea of faces. Many were illuminated by the light of a cell phone, as people took part in what has become the central purpose of such events in the modern age: telling other people you're there (I was no exception). It struck me that most of the folks attending were in the 7th grade in 2001.

It felt exactly like the atmosphere after a win at a big college football game. Only instead of celebrating a win, people were celebrating a man being executed.

Which was... bizarre.

I awoke the next morning to people slinging Bible verses at each other on Facebook. Some folks felt very strongly that the moment should not be celebrated. That it was wrong for Christians to do so. Ezekial 18:23 was used a lot:

"Do I have any pleasure in the death of the wicked," declares the Lord God, "rather than that he should turn from his ways and live?"

This too was bizarre. My small group of church friends did a study of the minor prophets last year, and I knew this wasn't all the Bible had to say on God conquering evil. A quick internet search found what I knew was there: many verses on the topic which seem to say the opposite:

When it goes well with the righteous, the city rejoices,
And when the wicked perish, there is joyful shouting.
Proverbs 11:10

The righteous will be glad when they are avenged, when they bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked.
Psalm 58:10

I still haven't fully processed the social, political, and spiritual meaning of this event, I'm sure I won't for some time. These things are nuanced. They are not simple; they are complicated. But after working through the experiences I just described, here is a little of what I've come to.

As a Christian, as an American, as a human being, I do not celebrate that a man has died. I don't wish to extend that as a judgement on anyone else; I believe in my heart it is wrong for me to do so. I am not going to attempt to explain away the conflict between the verses I've posted above, clearly out of context. That's above my pay grade. I am not a pastor or a scholar. But from what I know of Jesus, it doesn't seem like his way.

(I also have to say I wish we could have captured bin Laden. Trying him, as difficult and dangerous as I'm sure it would have been, seems like the just thing to do.)

However, as a Christian, as an American, as a human being, I do not deny being excited, joyful, and hopeful about this moment. Osama bin Laden brazenly orchestrated the killing of thousands of innocent people. Whether he was motivated by radical religious hatred or unwise military actions of the United States or both does not matter, it does not justify the taking of innocent life. Osama bin Laden was the head of an organization that recruits children to be soldiers, gives them assault weapons, straps bombs to their bellies to and sends them into crowds to blow people to pieces in the name of almighty god. Today that organization, though still undefeated, is hurting. It is weakened, its reign of terror has been diminished. I refuse to say that I do not revere the actions that made this possible; that the brave men and women who accomplished them do not deserve our thanks and our praise. This is justice, and I'm not ashamed to honor it.

This is the not only thing I find worth celebrating. I also admit feeling a welcome sense of closure. I hope other Americans feel it too. I feel like a burden has been lifted; I realize now that as long as Osama bin Laden was free, I felt September 11th wasn't finished. We were still living under it. He was its face and its symbol. I work a few short miles away from one of the three buildings hit by airplanes full of innocents that day, and I wonder if the people of this city who experienced it will feel that it is past us now.

I know that even though yesterday was incidentally the anniversary of the announcement of Hitler's death, this is not such a moment. My life has changed very little as a result of September 11th and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, especially in comparison with what my grandparents sacrificed during WWII. Even so, I have a sense of relief, of calm, of hope that we can now put the horror of that day behind us. Certainly the wars rage on, Al Qaeda is not defeated. But I hope that September 11th, the day that lasted a decade, can end.

And this morning at 2am, somewhere beneath all the vengefulness and arrogance and revelry, I think I saw that. In the eyes of a soldier's wife, holding her husband's hand in the moonlight. In the gaze of a few older couples, watching over the crowd. A connection, a quiet acknowledgement we're afraid to say out loud...

It's over. It's really over.

Sources: The Bible verses presented were found in this post.
Image: Erin Scott Photography, from the freakin' PBS Newshour website. I am not kidding. She is awesome.