Canadian Cincinnatus

If culture is upstream of politics, what is upstream of culture?

There has been a dawning realization among the more astute conservative thinkers like Mark Steyn that politics is not enough. To win the game from the liberals one must win the culture because culture is upstream of politics. Our movies, our TV shows, our magazines, our video games and our fashion tastes will shape our beliefs, which will be reflected in our preferences in the polling booth. The enemy of this brand of conservatism is the ‘fiscal conservative’ who wants to think only of ‘serious’ issues and leave all the arts and crafts fluff to the liberals. As people like Mark Steyn point out, they are fools.

But this has me thinking, what’s upstream of culture? Does culture just come into being like some deus ex machina?  

No. Culture is not the prime mover, the original, uncaused cause. There is something upstream of culture, and it is economics. For economics defines what we are and what we think even more effectively than culture. 

Take the English rioters. What impelled them to take to the streets looting and burning at the least provocation? It was the fact that a huge number of Britons don’t go to work. Something like 10 million Britons have not gone to work a day in their lives since Tony Blair came to power. If part of your daily ritual is to get up at 6 AM, get dressed and go to work, you simply won’t have time for such foolishness and you will despise those who try to get ahead without effort (i.e. looters). What allows people to live without working: welfare. Paying people to not work leads to a culture where work, savings and responsibility are less valued. Economics drives culture.

Take another example: feminism. What inspired the women’s movement was not the writings of people like the Stalinist Betty Freidan. It was the fact that by the time the 1950’s rolled around, rising living standards caused by automation had taken away a lot of the work women traditionally did. For you see, women have always worked. But by the 50’s their job had gotten fairly easy. The women’s movement was inspired by the fact that 50% of the adult population was underemployed. Again, economics driving culture.

And what’s upstream of culture? Answer: politics.

The economics of medicare in one easy lesson

Free marketers believe that one of the main reasons why medicare costs are through the roof is because there are no competitive free market mechanisms to control the costs. Take Canada, where the government pays all the medical bills and costs only go up. For instance, almost 50% of Ontario’s provincial budget goes to health care. Roads, schools, law enforcement, welfare, sweetheart deals to political cronies – all that must fit into the other 50% of the budget. This is way too much for one line item and is clearly unsustainable in the long term, especially as the population ages.

There is a problem, however, with the free market solution to health care that libertarians rarely acknowledge, and objectivists curtly dismiss as irrelevant. And that is that the health care market is unlike any other market because of the widely held moral principle that health care cannot be denied to the sick. Unlike most moral principles, this one isn’t a moral prohibition but an absolute economic responsibility for one party (in this case doctors) to provide an economic good to another (the sick). In the good ol’ days when health care consisted of little more than bandages and splints, the imposed costs were light enough that it didn’t create a serious burden on anybody. As a result, this moral rule wasn’t problematic. But these days - with designer drugs, organ transplants and new medical procedures being invented almost daily - this is no longer the case.

The imposed burden is a serious problem, but at the same time, the moral requirement to provide medical aid regardless of the ability to pay cannot be dismissed either. The only people I can think of who would disagree with it are objectivists (i.e. followers of Ayn Rand) who believe individualism trumps all collectivist good. The problem for objectivism is that the vast majority of the human race - across all countries, ideologies and religions - strongly affirms this principle. In the struggle between competing moral systems, an organic principle that develops slowly over a long period of time and therefore encompasses a great deal of practical experience, will have far more appeal (and hold more wisdom) than anything created ex nihilo by an intellectual. Therefore, like it or not, we are stuck with the principle that society is responsible for the care for the sick if they are unable to take care of themselves.

But popular or not, the huge fiscal problems this principal entails still are real. Economic history teaches us that the best way to balance the cost with quality is to push the purchasing decision down to the level of the consumer. Unfortunately, the principle we have just discussed doesn’t allow you to do that when most people can’t afford many treatments. Who can afford heart transplants and chemotherapy out of pocket? 

One solution is for society to pay everybody’s medical bills collectively. The problem is that centralized bureauocracies control costs poorly, if at all. There will be either rationing (which means waiting lists), price controls (which means poor quality, shortages, and therefore de facto rationing) or simply sky-high costs. Most of the western world has adopted the latter solution. The disastrous effect that this policy has had on government budgets has meant that governments have reluctantly adopted the first solution as well – rationing.

One compromise is to let people pay their own bills until they can’t, and then just cover only the problematic costs. In this way, the problems inherent in central control are at least minimized. The problem with this solution is that it creates a free rider problem. If a citizen knows that the nanny state has your back when the going gets tough, why save up for a medical emergency? And why buy heath insurance? Much more fun to spend the insurance premiums on flat screens and lap dances, and let the government bail you out when you get in real trouble. 

So what is the right answer? Personally, I don’t think there is one. But if you have some ideas, let everybody know so you can pick up your Nobel Prize in Economics. For what it’s worth, I think what will end up happening is that we will muddle on through with a mix of huge government spending combined with some free market reforms until the problem resolves itself. 

How will the problem resolve itself?

Right now we are at the maxima of the medical technology curve. What does that mean? Simple. In the good old days, we knew very little about medicine so when people got sick, they either got better or they died. Sad, simple and cheap. Right now our understanding about the human body is such that we are making many medical discoveries while understanding comparatively little about the human body. Every medical discovery can be categorized into one of two types: it can be a cure for a previously untreatable ailment, or it can be a more effective cure to replaces a less effective cure we already had. The first type adds to medicare costs, the second mitigates them. An example of the first type is chemotherapy. Before chemo, when you got cancer, you died. With chemotherapy, you might live, but the drugs cost a lot. An example of the second type is the employment of fibre optics technology in surgery. When fibre optics became prevalent, every surgical procedure was rewritten to make it much less invasive. Less invasion means faster recover, fewer side effects and lower costs. When we know very little about the human body but are discovering many things, statistics decrees that our breakthroughs tend to be of the first type. This is the underlying reason why health care cost are climbing.

But sometime in the future we will know a lot about the human body while still making many medical discoveries. At that point, it will be more statistically likely that each discovery will be an improvement on a previous discovery – cheaper, more reliable, and less invasive. At that happy time, all the cost pressures in medicare will be downwards until we get to the point where most people can afford most medical procedures without resorting to a third party to pick up the tab. At that point, medical care can go back to being an ordinary good or service. Medicare policy battles will become obsolete.

But before we feel too sorry for ourselves for living in the maxima of the medicare price curve, let us remember what all that money is buying us: less suffering, and a longer and healthier life. We should never forget that the state of medicine not that long ago – within living memory in fact - was truly primitive. For most of history, you had to pray that you would not get sick or injured, for your most likely fate was pain and death. We have it much better than we have ever had it.

Technological progress is not faltering

There is a meme currently making its rounds on the Internet that technological progress is slowing down, and even more, that we may be retrograding. For instance, award-winning sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson says this:

“My lifespan encompasses the era when the United States of America was capable of launching human beings into space. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on a braided rug before a hulking black-and-white television, watching the early Gemini missions. This summer, at the age of 51—not even old—I watched on a flatscreen as the last Space Shuttle lifted off the pad.  I have followed the dwindling of the space program with sadness, even bitterness.  Where’s my donut-shaped space station? Where’s my ticket to Mars?... 

Still, I worry that our inability to match the achievements of the 1960s space program might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done. My parents and grandparents witnessed the creation of the airplane, the automobile, nuclear energy, and the computer to name only a few. Scientists and engineers who came of age during the first half of the 20th century could look forward to building things that would solve age-old problems, transform the landscape, build the economy, and provide jobs for the burgeoning middle class that was the basis for our stable democracy.”

Peter Thiel, the founding CEO of PayPal, echoes these sentiments:

“When tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s and 1960s, technological progress has fallen short in many domains. Consider the most literal instance of non-acceleration: We are no longer moving faster. The centuries-long acceleration of travel speeds — from ever-faster sailing ships in the 16th through 18th centuries, to the advent of ever-faster railroads in the 19th century, and ever-faster cars and airplanes in the 20th century — reversed with the decommissioning of the Concorde in 2003, to say nothing of the nightmarish delays caused by strikingly low-tech post-9/11 airport-security systems. Today’s advocates of space jets, lunar vacations, and the manned exploration of the solar system appear to hail from another planet. A faded 1964 Popular Science cover story — “Who’ll Fly You at 2,000 m.p.h.?” — barely recalls the dreams of a bygone age.”

“One cannot in good conscience encourage an undergraduate in 2011 to study nuclear engineering as a career. ... Without dramatic breakthroughs, the alternative to more-expensive oil may turn out to be not cleaner and much-more-expensive wind, algae, or solar, but rather less-expensive and dirtier coal.” 

Both Stephenson and Thiel make interesting points and the reader is well advised to read both articles all the way through.

They are undoubtedly right in that overregulation and NIMBYism (Not In My back Yard) are choking off progress. For instance, the failure of the ramshackled 60’s era Fukashima reactor is taken as an excuse to block the construction of  state-of-the-art reactors around the world. For a second – and even more spectacular - example, consider Project Orion, the most ambition realistic program to explore the solar system that was being developed in the 60’s, and which was killed off because it was waaay to politically incorrect. Their slogan was, “Mars by 65, Saturn by 70.” That’s 1965 and 1970.

Another thing retarding progress is today’s extreme risk aversion. As Theil correctly points out, the past was an unbelievably reckless place. To keep moving ahead, we need to regain some of our forefathers’ élan. Space writer Rand Simberg recently pointed out that space cannot be developed without filling entire graveyards with astronauts – people who are our best and brightest. In speeches, America’s leaders are always pointing out the riskiness of space exploration, but judging by the paralysis every Shuttle mishap induces in NASA, I don’t think they really believe it.

And the fact that physicists, mathematicians and engineers can earn more as quants on Wall Street then they can in science and technology is a disturbing indicator of society’s misplaced priorities. But then again, one of the advantages of economic downturns like the crash of 2008 is that it tends to right misplaced priorities.

On the other hand Stephenson and Theil are too pessimistic about progress for a number of reasons:

First of all, a huge amount of scientific and technical progress is happening right now. Theil lamented that since the War on Cancer was declared in the 1970’s, the cure for cancer “remains elusive and appears much farther away.” Excuse me, but this is flat out wrong. While it undoubtedly remains true that modern medicine cannot cure every single cancer patient it sees, it is also true that the cure rate for cancer is much higher now than it was in the 1970’s and is climbing every year. Cancer treatments in the 1970’s were barbaric compared to now. Medicine, in general, is developing very fast. In 2005, an anesthesiologist told me that every drug he administers and every piece of equipment that he uses – everything! – has changed since he graduated medical school in 1985. That’s fast. With the cracking of the DNA code, there is no reason not to believe that the 21^st century won’t be the Century of Biotech. In my own field of study (which is not medicine or biology), I have witnessed a complete transformation since I started work in it 23 years ago.

The second is that much of what they are wistful over were big government projects. Things like Apollo and the Manhattan Project have produced spectacular results but the problem with them is that they are not in tune with the rest of our technological state. Rand Simberg once said, the problem with Apollo is that it took something that should have come about in the mid-21^st century and placed it into the mid-20th century. There is a time for everything and if you are too far ahead, your creation remains underutilized because we can’t employ it economically. We never went back to the moon because practicality was never a consideration when Apollo was developed.

And third, science and technology don’t advance in a straight line. One of the metrics used by people who believe progress has stalled is the maximum speed achieved by humans. From 1850 until 1970, the maximum speed of humans soared - from steam engines to the Saturn V. But since the 1970’s, it has actually gone backwards (with the end of Apollo and the retirements of the SR-71 and the Concorde). This is true, but it doesn’t paint the whole picture. The reason our ability to move quickly increased so much when it did was because that was the time period when we learned how to harness a new form of chemical energy (basically oil). The reason the top speed in so many different forms of transportation have stalled since then is that we haven’t found a new form of energy to replace oil. Project Orion aside, this won’t happen until a new form of energy is discovered and harnessed. But utilizing energy is just one aspect of technology. Harnessing information and the self-generating complexity of biology are just as legitimate, as far as technological advancements go. What has happened is that we are taking a breather in one branch of technology while advancing along other branches, branches that show more practical potential at present. As I said, the forward path of science is crooked.

Could we be moving ahead faster? Absolutely. I am glad that Stephenson and Thiel are shining a light on the ideal of scientific progress. We need more scientists, engineers and technologists and fewer lawyers, regulators and speculators. But we should also maintain our perspective. 

 

Why the left is out to get Herman Cain

The first and foremost reason is that having a black opponent will upset Barack Obama’s reelection strategy, which is to promiscuously play the race card against the Republican nominee: every time the GOP contender criticizes Obama, it can only be because he is raciiist. They can’t do that if Cain were the nominee. Or rather, they can and they will, but every time a white MSM reporter/Obama water carrier calls Herman Cain an anti-black racist, he look like an idiot.

The second, and more revealing, reason is that the existence of Herman Cain offends them - offends them personally. To many liberals, they measure their own virtue by how much they care about various designated victim groups, groups such as blacks, women, homosexuals, etc. So every time a member of one of these groups plays the victim card, it affirms their own saintliness: “See, look how bad society treats [member of victim group]. Good thing there are people like me to show compassion to the less fortunate.” And since compassion doesn’t require any effort on their part, the whole racket is very convenient.

But what if a member of a designated victim group refuses to play ball? Even worse, what if a victim group member tells the white liberals to stick their condescending paternalism where the sun don’t shine because it actually damages the interests of individual members of those groups? Now, a monkey wrench is thrown into the whole works. Their – their own personal – goodness is called into question. How dare they! 

That’s what conservative like Herman Cain and Allen West do to white liberals. And for that matter, what Margaret Thatcher and Sarah Palin do to feminists. For our emotionally crippled elites, it's personal regarding people like Herman Cain.

 

Herman Cain’s competitors lose by exposing Cain’s past indiscretions

According to National Review’s Jim Geraghty, Herman Cain isn’t exactly suffering from the sexual harassment controversy he finds himself embroiled in. After allegations of harassment surfaced by Politico earlier this week, Cain now leads polls nationally, in Iowa and in South Carolina. In addition, his campaign is also benefiting from a money bomb.

Why is this happening? Specifically, why isn’t this scandal hurting him?

I think it is because conservatives really hate the mainstream media for the hit jobs they perpetrate on good conservatives. They saw what the MSM did to Clarence Thomas, George W Bush, Dick Cheney and especially Sarah Palin, and they really, really don’t like it. Their natural (and proper) instinct is to sympathise with the victim and rally to their defence, which is what they are doing in this case – with gusto. 

So will it hurt Cain in the long run? I think that depends on how serious Herman Cain’s improprieties were 15 years ago when these things allegedly happened. If it turns out that he merely acted obnoxiously around some female employees, I don’t think very much at all. As well, any moral outrage that the scandal has stirred up will subside by the time New Hampshire votes. As well, I think many people realize that anti-sexual harassment statutes are intrusive, left-wing laws that criminalize bad manners and victimize good people.

(Incidentally, this is why I believe the Republicans made a strategic error by going after Bill Clinton for the Monica Lewinski affair. The public rallied to Clinton’s defence because the scandal illustrated the intrusive, big brother aspects to sexual harassment laws. If the Republican Congress had been smart, they would have demanded a repeal of these statutes, forcing Clinton to choose between hypocrisy and throwing his feminist allies under the bus.)

Of course, if it turns out Cain did have an affair - or worse, he had tried to leverage power for sexual favours - all bets are off. But fortunately, we will likely have a good idea of the truth by the time the Republican primaries begin.

Which is why I believe the source for the original Politico story was one of Cain’s fellow competitors and not the Democrats. The Obama campaign has nothing to gain by releasing such information now. How does stopping a damaged-goods contender from getting the GOP nomination help him? It is in Obama’s best interest to hope Cain gets nominated so that he can ambush him with the story two weeks before the general election, giving him no time to recover.   

In contrast, it is in the interest of Cain’s GOP adversaries to hit him with it now so as to halt his building momentum. This is why I think Romney, Perry or one of the others Republican candidates is responsible for this too-clever-by-a-half strategy. 

Which candidate leaked the story?

Here’s a hint: According to a follow-up Politico story, a GOP pollster from Texas, Chris Wilson, says he witnessed the harassment personally. Politico says this about Wilson:

“Wilson is a Rick Perry supporter and does polling for a Super PAC that supports the Texas governor's presidential bid.”

On the other hand, Free Republic says Wilson is closely connected to Karl Rove, who supports Romney.

If Romney and Perry were really smart, they would rally loudly and publicly to Cain’s defense. As a consequence they would look magnanimous and demonstrate that they stand against the mainstream media, because right now - among likely GOP primary voters - it is they who are under suspicion.