Category: General Thoughts

Posted on

Drop the Donut, Fatboy

Much of the growth in health care costs comes from lifestyle choices.   Being fat, not exercising, smoking, drinking too much taking drugs and lots of other choices make people sick or sicker.  The debate is whether or not lifestyle should affect health premiums. 

You get a familiar breakdown.  Believers in individual responsibility say that people should try harder.  Just say no to the donuts and yes to the walk.   Others respond that it is not their fault.  That some people cannot afford to eat right or don’t have the time to exercise. (IMO, if you can afford to be fat, you can afford not to be, since it tends to cost less not to eat as much.)

Let’s stipulate that we are not talking perfection.   Few people can be in top-shape for extended periods, even if we could define what top-shape means.  But most people can indeed eat reasonably well and exercise moderately.  If we could just bring the rate of obesity down to 1980 levels, we would be a lot better off.  This is not perfection.  It should be attainable by all or most.   It is also true that no matter what you do sometimes you will get sick, maybe seriously sick.  We need protection from that. Reasonable.

Another stipulation is that I hate the use of the passive voice in health care and the language of victimization.  When I hear someone say that he wasn’t “offered the opportunity” of a good lifestyle or – worse – when they say “it’s is not my fault” or “I was denied the chance,” I know I am talking to a loser.   

That is my prejudice.   Not everyone can be perfect but everyone can change their lifestyles to improve. 

So let’s strip down the debate.   We don’t have the personal responsibility crowd v the caring people.  What we really have is the incentive folks v the determinists.  If you believe that incentives can change behaviors, you tend to fall on the side of responsibility.  If you believe that large forces determine your behavior, you are a determinist.

A false moral argument is that we need to take care of each other and help to the “least fortunate among us” (another phrase I dislike). This argument is usually made with a cry in the voice and it is meant to stop debate. Don’t let it. It is not really wrong, but it is incomplete.

I think we DO indeed have responsibilities to each other, but it should not be unconditional.  If you fall through the ice on a frozen lake, I should help pull you out.  But you should have shown reasonable care in not getting out on that lake and risking both our lives, and if you fall through too much, maybe we should let you make an ice cube of yourself.  We have a duty to help the sick and downtrodden, but if the sick and downtrodden have fallen into that position because of their foreseeable bad behavior, THEY have let down the team.  A person who becomes sick because of something like drug abuse, obesity or heavy smoking is probably more a perpetrator than a victim since he demands resources that could be used in better ways but for his misbehavior.

It is clear to me that big forces do determine many general directions.   But within those big directions, we have a lot of choice and we can and do respond to incentives.   Sometimes you have to “blame the victim” because the victim consistently puts himself in positions or places were bad things happen.  We do have to be judgmental and have the duty to stigmatize bad behavior and reward good behavior.  It does nobody any good to pretend that the obese person is a victim of society or that his/her behavior will not increase the chances of premature death and higher health care costs.

So we should all do our parts.  As in a good team, we don’t demand everybody make equal contributions, but we do demand that everybody do what they can.   There is no virtue in letting yourself become a victim through indolence, ignorance or lack of discipline.  Those people are stealing from those who get sick because of true bad luck or forces beyond their control.  

Posted on

Good Polish Friends

I think it is more important to stand with your proven friend than try to curry favor with adversaries who have shown little inclination to cooperate in the past.  America has few friends as steadfast as Poland.   Polish support for our country goes back before the revolution, when Kosciuszko and Pulaski came to fight along with George Washington just because they loved liberty.  

Yet Poland was devoured by its neighbors, Austria, Prussia and Russia, and it remained an imprisoned nation for 123 years.  Rebirth came in 1918, at the end of World War I, but it was not an easy time.  About two decades later, Nazi armies invaded Poland from the west and the Soviets stabbed them in the back from the east. This happened on September 17, 1939. Remember that date. 

Although Poland was conquered again devoured, partitioned by the two extremes of revolutionary socialism, Poles fought back.   The Nazis lost more troops invading Poland than they did conquering France in the next year and the Poles never gave up. Great heroes like Jan Karski and Jan Nowak-Jeziorański (I had the privilege of meeting both these heroes) warned Franklin Roosevelt about the holocaust and what the Nazis were doing in their conquered territories.  Although Poland was under the Nazi jackboot, Polish soldiers fought in all the allied armies.  Polish pilots were crucial during the Battle of Britain.  Poles served with Americans at Monte Casino and Arnhem.  They always took heavy casualties, fighting bravely and – frankly – being used more freely as cannon fodder. Had Polish soldiers been counted, they would have made up the fourth largest army in the Allied camp.

In September 1944, the Polish home army rose against the Nazi occupiers. Stalin halted his advance, hoping to allow the Nazis to kill off Polish patriots.  He thought it would slow him down for a couple of days.   The Poles held out for months. The Nazis completely destroyed Warsaw and murdered hundreds of thousands.  But the Red Army was halted on the Vistula long enough to lose the campaigning season. This had the unexpected effect of holding Stalin back, allowing American and British troops to advance to the Elbe. Had Stalin not slowed, he may have reached the Rhine, making the post war Soviet tyranny much more powerful and dangerous.

After World War II, Poland fell into the Soviet sphere and they suffered in that communist purgatory until 1989.   The iron curtain cracked in Poland. Solidarity pushed the communist to the wall and then the Poles elected a non-communist government. But they still didn’t feel secure in their new freedom. They wanted to have friends and allies. They became NATO allies in 1999 and proved their worth. Polish troops served in the Balkans and they fought and died along side us in Iraq.  They also agreed to support us with missile defense on their land. I suppose not everyone is as grateful to them as I am. Maybe some actually hold it against them.    It is a fault in our system that we sometimes identify America’s friends as connected with particular American leaders or their policies.

Remember that September 17, 1939 date? On September 17, 2009 we decided to pull out of an agreement to deploy missile defense in Poland.  

We made a big effort to help secure Central Europe. It was a success of both the Clinton and Bush administrations. Security is as often about perceptions as it is about capabilities. If an adversary believes the cost of aggression will be great and he refrains from aggression you win w/o spending the blood and treasure needed to fight the real war. 

We sometimes think the age of aggression is over. The Poles have a more tragic history than we do and they are not as certain as some of us might be. 

As I wrote at the beginning, it is better to stand with proven friends. You cannot make friend with everybody.  Some people and some regimes are just playing a zero sum game with us. If we give; they take and ask for more.  They are “satisfied” only when they reach the limits of what they can grab. If you give you can be asked to give again. It is not impossible to reach agreements or to live together in peace and mutual respect. But that respect must be mutual. One-way respect is just for chumps.

I recommend a good article by Ron Asmus, one of President Clinton’s smartest advisers in the Washington Post. 

Posted on

Pseudo-Experts Protect their Phony-Baloney Jobs

It is hard to overestimate the value of precise, current information and the understanding of local conditions when talking about almost anything, but especially concerned with persuasion and public affairs. Remember that when hearing from experts who purport to know a lot about really big and widely dispersed cultures or countries.  Even Coca-Cola tastes different in different places. There is no such thing as a global brand.

I was reminded of that during an unpleasant conversation I had with a woman who implied that she spoke for or at least understood Muslims.  She didn’t really specify, but she left the strong impression that she was talking about ALL the Muslims. Last I heard, there were about a billion and a third of them. I don’t doubt that she had important insights, but it is clearly not possible for anybody to be an expert on that many people, living as they do in such diverse circumstances.   Nor is it possible to craft any message or campaign that will appeal to all of them. It is just stupid to lump a billion people together. Yet stupid is rampant. 

I goggled that transparently stupid phrase, “what do a billion Muslims really think” and to my chagrin found lots of people who claimed they could tell me the answer.  There is a whole book with that in the title, hundreds of articles, scores of opinion polls and lots of activity by think tanks. I guess I should not have been surprised.  It has long been a profitable racket for experts to set themselves up as spokespeople for large unknowable masses. I have met those who “speak for” the workers, the business owners, the blacks, the whites, the poor, the rich, the famous, the unknown … I even met people who claim to speak for the animals, trees, rocks and for the earth itself.   I have even met people I did not know who claimed to speak for people like me. You just have to call them on this. 

One of the most important roles for a non-expert who is assigned to do something with experts is to keep them in their places.  This is hard, since they do indeed know more than you do in their area of expertise.  They can make you look silly for questioning them and most experts think their own field of endeavors is the most important or at least the indispensable link in the chain of effectiveness.   

But they do not know everything.  Developing real expertise is necessarily a narrowing process.   It is attractive to be THE expert and that means digging deep into something nobody knows, or maybe nobody cares, much about.  These kinds of experts may not have much grasp of the bigger picture, re how their part fits into the bigger whole.  They are so accustomed to intensifying the parts of their expertise that they forget to ask what their expertise is part of. The tricky tasks of the expert master is  to develop enough specific knowledge to ask the right questions,  enough humility to let the experts operate autonomously when appropriate and enough confidence and courage to stand up to them when necessary. Actually, a true subject matter expert rarely is a big problem for an experienced leader. They are like craftsmen, who do their job according to specifications. If you keep in mind that to a man with a hammer, every job looks like a nail, and you are sure that hammering is what you need, the main challenge is choosing the right people for the job in the first place.    

The problem people are the uber-experts, who extrapolate from what they legitimately know to claim all sorts of Gnostic knowledge that they claim to know but cannot explain to you because you can just never know it.  They tend to slither into places they don’t belong and develop a type of exclusive pseudo-expertise power that cows the timid, impresses the credulous and generally creates a pain in the rear for everybody else.  Anybody who claims to be an expert on Muslims w/o narrowing the category to something more specific is such an expert.   This goes for anybody who claims to represent any large group or have mastered any broad and complicated subject.  Little good can come from associating with them, apart from some passing entertainment value.  But the costs can be high in lost opportunities and misallocated resources.

Socrates warned us about people like that almost 2500 years ago. It is not a new predicament and it will not go away because it is too profitable for those doing it.  They struggle hard to protect their phony-baloney jobs and they are usually smart enough to put up a good fight.  The key to nullifying their power  is just to identify it for what it is and expose it to the light. Of course, that is easier said than done and sometimes even harder to explain to others.

Posted on

Presidents/Politicians CANNOT Fix the Economy

Render onto Caesar … but don’t expect government to perform miracles.  You can’t always get what you want, even if everybody votes for it.  No government has been able to repeal the principles of physics, the march of time or the law of supply and demand.

It doesn’t matter if it is President Obama, Bush, Carter or Reagan.   I am sick of hearing the question on the Sunday morning news programs, “How is President ___ going to fix the economy.”   It just doesn’t make sense to think that any political decisions can fine tune or even quickly move something as massive and diverse as the economy.   What politics can do is create conditions that ALLOW the people to create and maintain prosperity and this is always a very long term proposition, and when we are talking about long term, it might mean decades or even generations. 

Beyond the obvious fact that presidents simply lack the power to command most of the factors in the economy, and it is a good thing, BTW, think about the time it takes to do almost anything.  To make it simple, let’s just go with an example of something government actually does control.   The roads we drive on and over which our commerce flows were laid out decades or centuries ago.  The decisions on whether to expand or maintain them, or not, were made by thousands of local jurisdictions over many years.  Quick changes are just not possible.  If you need a road in a particular place where you don’t currently have one, the president’s decision makes no difference.  If President Obama had the power to order a road built and he gave that order today, how long before you could drive on it.  Besides buying the land, laying out the plans, bringing the resources, you would have to contend with the NIMBY opposition and scores of lawyers. At best, there can be a road in five or ten years. So why do you think he can “fix” the economy with things not even in government’s legitimate control?

Yesterday I wrote a post mentioning a new process for hardening wood.   This small process could create new markets for sustainably grown softwoods and maybe go a great distance in curbing deforestation in tropical forests.   This small technology improvement might have a bigger positive effect on environmental protection, specifically CO2,  than all the government rules and posturing of the past year, which still have accomplished nothing. But most people have not heard of it.  If/when it starts to work, many people will falsely associate the improvements with that climate bill that disappointingly has so far gone nowhere in the Congress.  How many other things like this are running the economy? It reminds me of that old saying in medicine, “God cures; the doctor collects the fee.” 

America is much more than its government and no government can keep up with the innovations and imaginations of the people.  I am not a no-government guy.  I work for government.  I love government.  Government has an indispensable role in creating conditions for prosperity. There can be no free market w/o the rule of law.  Government creates infrastructure and sets the tone for society.  Government’s must have a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence and right to wage war.  Governments can produce fine monuments.  But everything belongs in its place and there are lots of things government cannot do.

What government cannot do is manage the particulars of economics or business.  Unfortunately, it is much more fun and politically profitable for politicians to wade into management and take credit for what is happening around them largely beyond their control, than it is to do the hard work needed to create the conditions for prosperity that will only pay off years in the future.   The incentive system is just all wrong.  

I think we have a profound pro-government bias built into our study of history and into our very understanding of how things work.  It is hard to get out of the intellectual trap of thinking that political leaders actually lead in all aspects of life because it is such an ancient formula.   A leader in a small tribe makes decisions that truly do affect the daily lives of their people.  The kings in the fairy tales do too.   In the old days political leaders were also economic leaders to a much greater extent than they are today.   The state was usually the big investor that handed out patents and monopolies necessary for anybody to do business.    This changed as economies got more and more complicated and the free market made it possible for most people to do business without day to day permission from the authorities, but our thinking is way behind the times. 

Today there are so many people making so many decisions that leaders can no longer understand, let alone command, the economy, but we are remain comfortable thinking that someone is responsible, both for good and bad effects. We like heroes and villains, and we imagine them if we cannot find them in real life.

IMO, we should take inspiration from the Biblical verse – we should render onto Caesar (the government) that which is Caesar’s; render unto God that which is God and let the people themselves sand the free market take care of everything else.   Everything has its proper role.

Presidents cannot fix the economy.  We wisely have not given them this power, which they clearly cannot handle and would lead to tyranny if they seriously tried. They can only create conditions that allow the people to make prosperity.  But they do have the power to mess things up if they over reach.  It is easier to wreck than to build, easier to promise than to deliver and easier to create the appearance of success in the short term that to create a sustainable prosperity. That is why we should be very careful what we ask of politicians, since they might try to give it to us or at least might try to make it look like they have.

Posted on

Found in Translation

Meaning often lost is translation but you can sometimes find even greater significance in different interpretations if you look hard enough. I have long been interested in Taoism (the philosophy not the religion) and have been fascinated by the great variety of translations of the words of Lao Tzu.  Some of them directly contradict the others, so I have given up on the “true meaning” and rather go with the meaning useful for me. In other words, I take inspiration rather than direction.

I was talking to a Chinese translator who told me that Lao Tzu was not nearly so mystical in Chinese.  The translations had enhanced the mystic feel and may have created some where none was implied.  Lao Tzu, he said, was actually a lot like “Poor Richard’s Almanack.”  Consider the old saying, “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” Here is my reformulation, “He who is present at the dawn will come to know the robustness of fortune on the path of ancient wisdom.” 

I still go with the ancient wisdom, but I understand that a lot might be what the translator put there and what I am reading into it. This is really a good thing.  We improve it and make it more applicable to our circumstances. That is why it is impossible for something written just a few years ago to be a “classic”.  

To be a classic, a work has to have been interpreted and reinterpreted by at least a couple of generations, each accreting its own perspective and wisdom.   In other words, the wisdom of Socrates or Lao Tzu wasn’t as potent when it was first bottled as it became after being properly aged and filtered by subsequent generations.

Philosophy & literature, like fine wine, good cheese or even decent beer, require time to ripen.

Writing good literature in translation takes a good writer in the target language, since it is much more than just substituting words. Nobel-Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney’s translation of “Beowulf” is probably better than the original in many ways and we cannot say how much of its beauty is from the original and how much from the poet’s skill.   We have our pick of translations of the Iliad, the Odyssey and the great philosophers of the world.

I don’t remember much of the classical Greek I once knew, but I do recall the many possible interpretations of even simple texts and that some things couldn’t be rendered elegantly into English.  The most common challenge was a kind of framing (µεν …. δε), which we translated as “on the one hand … on the other hand” but it didn’t really mean that in most cases.  It was just a kind of notice that a comparison was on the way.  Sometimes it was used ironically, i.e. in the sense of saying no comparison was possible.   If you translated it faithfully, you might create the false impression that a comparison was made when none was implied.   If you were merely inspired by the meaning, i.e. did not try to be too literal, you could be accused of putting too much of your own personality into the translation.   If you read Plato or Aristotle, the translations are full of decisions and compromises made by translators, so never tether yourself too closely to any particular turn of phrase. 

My job has often involved foreign languages, supervising translators and/or using translations.   I am not sure that most people are aware of the types of considerations I mention above.    More and more I am going with the inspirational rather than the literal idea.  I know the pitfalls.  Whenever you lard anything with your own judgment, you change it.  But every choice is a judgment.  Should we leave a literal translation that we think be interpreted incorrectly by the listeners or do we go with something that might change the meaning? 

I recall hearing about a Russian who complained that the translator got it wrong.   He asked the rhetorical question, “Can a hunchback change his hump?” which was translated as, “Can a leopard change his spots?” There is clearly a difference.   A hunchback, in spite of the nobility of the hunchback of Notre Dame and the lovable subsequent Disney character, is vaguely creepy and menacing and the condition is usually the result of an accident.   A leopard is sleek and wild and his spots are a natural condition.  We don’t have that hunchback metaphor is English but the translator should have stuck with the clumsier literal translation.

The best translated speech I ever heard was when President Clinton announced support for Polish NATO membership in Warsaw in 1997.   But Clinton’s speech was not really very good.  The Polish translation was much better and delivered better (with sequential translation) by Victor Lipinski, who had a knack for the dramatic perfectly tuned to Polish sentiments, which Clinton lacked as an outsider.   Even though English is my language and I understood all the words (something I cannot always do in Polish) I could appreciate that the Polish was better.  But then it had the advantage of being enhanced by the emotion and the symbolic lifting of generations of oppression by Czars, Nazis and Communists.  That meaning was FOUND in translation floating on the aspirations of millions of people.

BTW – If I may digress on a spectacular memory involving a beautiful translation, I still remember that day in Warsaw in July 1997.  It had been rainy and overcast with black clouds all day.  The sun came out as if on schedule when Presidents Clinton and Kwasniewski came out in front of the Royal Palace to make speeches.  As President Clinton (and Victor) reached the crescendo, promising that Poland would never again be conquered, they released thousands of red and white (Polish national flag colors) into the sky.  They rose into sunlight and danced against the ominous dark clouds now receding into eastern sky.  No special effects artist could have planned it better.

BTW 2 – The pictures above are St. Peter and St. Paul from the Church at Chora in Istanbul.  They actually require significant translation & explanation.  Although I am not expert enough to give the whole story, let me do the basics of what I remember the guide telling us.   The images of these two saints were more or less set in the first centuries AD and these two representations are typical.  Paul is balding and intellectual; Peter a big burly guy.  Since there are no contemporary pictures of the two men, the representations developed and scholars study how they changed over time as artists learned from each other.  They also draw on older, even pre-Christian models and the depictions are also dependent on the technology, i.e. mosaic used to create them. 

Notice the symbolism.  Peter is holding the keys to the kingdom of heaven.  The Popes in Rome made a big deal about being the successors of Peter and so the holders of the keys.  The Greek Church was less interested in that particular, but kept the same symbolism. From these mosaics and others around town, you can also see how the ethnic mix changed.  Presumably, the artist made portrayed people as he knew them around him. All of what is now Turkey was part of Greco-Roman-Christian world ethnically, linguistically and culturally.  To the extent that the native people living in Istanbul (then Constantinople) looked like Peter as depicted before the Turkish conquest, they were significantly different from the people living there today.  A guy looking like Peter might be mistaken for a German tourist in today’s Istanbul, although Paul could probably pass unnoticed on the streets.  So in these mosaics, we see tracks of the changing religion, culure, ethnicity and interpretations of history.  There is a lot of meaning beyond the pretty pictures.

Anyway, these mosaics are true classics, since they incorporate ideas and personality of generations long past.  They need explanation.  We may never get the meaning “right” but we can find the meaning nevertheless.

Posted on

New Media’s Reach Exceeds Its Grasp

Measuring success in public affairs is hard because we don’t control all, or even most of the key factors. Beyond that, we are essentially trying to measure a cascading set of conditional probabilities, each more fuzzy than the one before.  First we are trying to measure attitudes that nobody really understands.   Then we are asking where those attitudes come from.  After that we want to know the strength of the conviction and how attitude make practical differences.   Do they change behaviors or outcomes?    Complicating analysis is that effects may be significantly separated from the causes in both time and space and you have to account for the effects of temporary circumstances and random chance. 

You begin to see the problem?  All we really need to care about is what people do, but to explain that adequately, we have to consider all the things mentioned above.    

Does the Rooster Make the Sun Rise?

It only gets worse. Public affairs can be a little like peeing in the Pacific Ocean saying it caused the rising tide and practitioners, me included, can sometimes strut like roosters taking credit for the sunrise.  In other words, we are not sure how the attitudes affected behavior, nor are we sure where those attitudes came from or the strength of conviction.  On top of that we are trying to figure out how our small input created a big output.  

Not that we are always merely mendacious when taking credit, BTW.  Public affairs is indeed all about leverage.   Very small input can often create monumental outputs using leverage of the public affairs environment as it pulls in outside resources.   Even this good thing, however, is just another problem for measurement.  The equation would look like this. 

Our input + lots of other resources we don’t control + luck + time = output, which MAY grow into a useful outgrowth.   We cannot control most of the factors in this equation and often cannot even know what they are, so instead we measure the reach (not the effectiveness) of OUR own inputs. Let me illustrate with one of my usual examples, not surprisingly an oak tree 

Mighty Oaks From Tiny Acorns Grow – But a Bushel of Acorns is Not an Oak Forest

If I plant an acorn, it may grow into a mighty oak.  How much credit do I deserve?  Maybe a squirrel would have planted an acorn if I didn’t.  Maybe one would just grow by itself.  Besides that,  I didn’t make the acorn.  I didn’t create the soil.   I cannot control the rain nor can I anticipate every destructive storm nor control all the bugs.  The oak tree will grow according to its form and DNA.   I cannot demand that it become a pine tree. In fact there is little I can do expect remove obstacles to it becoming the best it can be.   But if you come back 100 years later, maybe some kid will say, “My grandfather planted that tree.” 

In public affairs we are not dealing with acorns.  Our analogous measure is reach.   We can get a reasonably good measure of the number of people who COULD have received our message.   It doesn’t mean they DID receive our message or that they paid any attention.   So reach is a problematic measure. 

Don’t Count the Same Guys too Many Times

A look at Facebook shows examples of opportunity, challenge & problems associated with this kind of measurement. You might have a thousand friends or a big rock star might have a million fans.  But how much are they getting the messages?  We also habitually overestimate the connections.  If you have 100 Facebook friends and each of them has 100 friends, you do not have 100 x 100 or 10,000 friends because the sets overlap.  If your friends are also each other’s friends you may have only 100 in total. Overlap is usually not 100% and the real number is probably more than just 100, but it is far less than 10,000.   

Reach is not a very useful measure, but we like it because it is a relatively easy number to find or estimate AND it tends to be the largest number we are can get, especially if we engage in some willful ignorance about human attention spans and math 101 concepts of overlapping sets, as above.    

Reach Exceeds Grasp

And reach is relatively easy to astro-turf, especially in the new media.  There is an interesting article talking about how you can BUY Facebook friends and fans for as little as $.076 and $.085 respectively.  What reach!  If you have big bucks you can reach the all the world in theory.  Who can you blame if your reach exceeds your grasp, if you have a million fans who cannot remember your name or hear your message? 

Hey, the numbers are good, even if they probably overlap and may represent meaningless relationships.  We might become a little suspicious if our extrapolated fan bases (i.e. our estimate of our own fans to the exponent of their fans & friends) exceeded the total population of the earth, but achieving that might take a couple of months anyway.   

I am not saying we should not rejoice at successful numbers, but let’s not try to fool others and let’s not fool ourselves.  Reach provides ONLY the opportunity to engage and engagement provides only the opportunity to communicate and communication provides only to opportunity to make a difference.  You need to start with the acorns, but that doesn’t mean you automatically have a grove of big oak trees.

Posted on

Continuous Improvement Makes Everything Look Bad Looking Back

Here we are again in the spasms of self-flagellation about how we treat (or mistreat) people who have planned and sometimes carried out the murder of many of our citizens. We worry that revelations about harsh tactics used to get information from some of them may have damaged our international reputation and there are calls for a full scale investigation to uncover and reveal additional details. As long as we do such things – the argument goes – we cannot hold the moral high ground nor expect cooperation from others.  The ends don’t justify the means.  Actions speak louder than words. 

But actions must be framed and interpreted, and that requires words and analysis. Sometimes the reason something is done does make a difference and the some ends can justify some means. I believe we make a big error in framing our actions by demanding, and letting others demand, a measure of perfection not attainable among humans.   In those terrible times after 9/11, I think the U.S. showed amazing restraint, even after we captured some of those who planned the attacks that killed thousands of Americans.  Under passionate circumstances, and even under normal ones, mistakes are made.   Humans overreact, over respond and overreach, and things done in the passion of one situation may seem stupid or even evil after those circumstances have passed.  We go over and over our mistakes, often very publicly, and say that it is a sign of strength to do so.  We allow a successful program to be “ruined” by one mistake or even one insensitive action or even one remark that could be interpreted as insensitive. We may be acting honorably or we may be overlooking the fundamental nature of error and improvement. Maybe we are doing both.  

You have to refine and re-refine what you do to minimize the scope of errors and also – of you really want improvement – you have to minimize the finding of blame.  Even a very rigorous system cannot eliminate all error.  And we have an additional caveat. While this total quality approach is great for physical processes and assembly operations, it still doesn’t work as well in emotion or politically sodden human affairs and it especially doesn’t work when you have adversaries.  Focus on your errors gets to be like trying to understand a contact sport from only from one perspective.  Every contestant is going to make mistakes, get hurt and inflict pain.  If you fail to look at the whole picture, even the champion will look like the loser by those criteria taken in isolation.

We justifiably complain that we don’t live up to our own high standards.   But that is in the nature of complicated systems, especially human systems.  An after-action analysis will always find flaws.    Mistakes should be identified and corrected and then we need to move on, avoiding the twin errors of glossing over mistakes or being blinded by them.  Learning and improving only takes place in that middle ground between treating errors as terrible sins and ignoring them as inconsequential.

I want to be very careful to underscore that I am not advocating lowering our standards.   America should and does hold to the highest standards and we can only improve setting the bar higher than we can presently achieve.  But I think we open the door too far for criticism when we allow some of the nastiest despots and terrorist to assume the high ground of victimhood.  It is the old problem of moral equivalence.  A man who takes a pencil from his office and the one who embezzles a million dollars are both stealing from their employers. But they are not really the same.

Every judgment needs to include the “compared to what?” question. If we allow the frame to be a comparison to some theoretical perfection, we will always come up short. We can always imagine something better than we can achieve.  And ironically the more we work to improve – i.e. the higher the standards we set – the worse we look in relation to our own every rising goals.  The more positive achievement you make, the worse everything else looks.

Posted on

The World at War

World War II began on this day seventy years ago when the Nazis invaded Poland.  The fate of Poland was actually set a few days before when Hitler and Stalin agreed to divide the country between them.  Communism and fascism are variations of the same totalitarian idea.  It really wasn’t as surprising that they could get together as it seemed at the time.  

But the roots of the war go back much deeper.  We can start with the Treaty of Versailles, which was really unworkable. But nothing is inevitable in history. Had the economies not stagnated and the depression not hit, maybe Germany could have worked out its problems.   

Another root of the war was Germany itself.   The constitution of the Wiemar Republic was a model of democracy in theory, but its proportional representation, among other things, made it unstable and allowed demagogues like Hitler to leverage power.

A world at war still was not inevitable. During the 1930s, craven politicians in the great democracies appeased Hitler.   They feared war so much that they made war more likely and made the devastation more terrible when it came.  The simple argument against appeasement is that you just cannot appease dictators.  They always demand more.  But there is a more deeper one that is implicit but sometimes overlooked.  Let’s use the Hitler example. 

He was “appeased” several times.  Each time it made him hungry for more AND gave him more power to demand more.   Germany could not have launched an aggressive war unless it secured its flanks.  Imagine if there had been no Anschluss with Austria. Could Hitler have counted on security there?  Or what is Czechoslovakia had remained intact?  Czechoslovakia had formidable industry and the Sudety Mountains provided defensible terrain. The great democracies just gave that away. First they gave away the mountains (the Sudetenland) in the ostensible name of minority rights.  Then they gave away the rest to buy peace.   In all these cases, Hitler not only eliminated a threat; he also absorbed the power and got stronger.

The Nazi Germany that launched the war in 1939 was a country on steroids.   It had gobbled up Austria and Czechoslovakia, secured Memel, rebuilt and remilitarized.

Critics say the democracies could not have gone to war with Germany earlier, but then they were forced to go to war with a more powerful Germany later, a Germany they had accepted and passively helped build.  Had they resisted earlier they would have faced a weaker Germany. Hitler might have backed down short of war and he might have fallen from power if prevented from expanding.  We judge the power muscular Germany of 1939 and forget that this monster was transformed from a weakling of only six years earlier with the collaboration of peace-loving leaders in the great democracies.   

History is the sum of choices.  It is not inevitable and it is not over.   We cannot do experiments.  We never know what would have happened in different situations.   Maybe if the British and French had acted early, maybe it would have meant war earlier, which they probably could have won easier, but then we would be talking about how their belligerence provoked a needless war of choice.  More likely,  their courage and resolve would have prevented or at least mitigated the conflict.

We Americans were largely out of the equation – by choice.  We thought we could just ignore the rest of the world and mind our own business.  We were not active appeasers, but we were certainly appeaser enablers. 

It has been seventy years since the war began and  sixty three years since it ended.  We like to gnash our teeth about how bad the world is today, but it is a lot better than it was back in 1939.  We have avoided another worldwide conflagration since that time. The depression did not return. The world became more prosperous, tolerant, democratic and connected.  

Maybe we did learn something from history and a post-war group of wise men build alliances like NATO and various institutions that preserved the peace, or at least prevented the big war, not through wishful thinking, such as espoused by the League of Nations, but through strength and sometimes blood.

The lesson that history teaches over and over is that peace does not preserve itself.   Peace is not the natural state of mankind and freedom has been rare thorough human history.   War cannot be banished from the earth.  It can be managed and controlled for long periods of time, but only if we recognize its reality and we are willing to pay the price.  Freedom can be enjoyed ultimately only by those strong and resolute enough to defend it. The price of liberty truly is eternal vigilance. This is not a pleasant thought, but it is one to keep in mind.

Other approaches are not as successful.  Experience shows that excessive search for peace ironically lead to war and those able to defend themselves often do not need to.  On July 24, 1929, the world outlawed war. This was the Kellogg-Briand Pact. It passed the U.S. Senate by a margin of 85-1. On September 30, 1938, Neville Chamberlain declared that the Munich Treaty with Hitler was “peace for our time.”  Less than a year later … well it didn’t work out the way they hoped. 

Posted on

Katrina plus 4: Move to Higher Ground

The news carries reports that some people are still living in FEMA trailers and many homes are not rebuilt four years after Hurricane Katrina.  

When a big tragedy hits, we feel the natural human desire to reach out and help the victims.   We certainly should.  But after the “first aid” and the flood waters have receded, it is time for everybody to get back to work as usual.  After four years, it is past time for the victims to be on the other side, i.e. willing and able to help others.  And it is not the government’s duty to offer indefinite help.  It starts to get abusive.   If my house burns down tonight, I don’t expect to be living in a FEMA trailer at all, much less still be there four years later. Beyond that, I learned that many of the victims were renters.  If you lose your rental home, you move and pay rent somewhere else.  The landlord takes the loss. 

I like to watch nature and science programs on TV. Going back many years, I have seen programs about the Mississippi River, New Orleans, global warming, sea level rises or all of the above.  They all said the same sorts of things.   Much of New Orleans is below sea level. Everybody knew that it was only a matter of time before a big hurricane would come and do what Katrina did.   And everybody knows it will happen again.  It is not “if” it is “when”.  And there is nothing we can do about it no matter how much we spend.  Those low-lying parts of the city should not be inhabited at all today or tomorrow and they should not have been occupied yesterday.  It was a mistake. The destruction of the wetlands to build these areas was a slow motion tragedy. The clock was set ticking a century ago.  We just didn’t see it until the big one hit.  Actually, we did see it, as all the nature show programs said; we just didn’t care, sort of like today. It gets worse. Global warming will cause sea levels to rise. Those lands currently below sea level will be even further below sea level.  Building/rebuilding is just a waste of time and a cruel hoax on anybody living there.

Let’s say it plainly. Start with the good news.  Those parts of New Orleans that are above sea level (including many of the historical areas) can and should be preserved. The port areas can be rebuilt and enhanced.    BUT New Orleans must become a smaller city. The parts of the city that are at or below sea level should not be rebuilt. 

The best use would be to make some of these erstwhile flooded neighborhoods, such as the 9th Ward, into wet forest or “walking” wet land used for agriculture. Letting these places return to a more natural state will serve to protect the salvageable and more valuable real estate.  There is really no other practical or ethical course. 

We should stop promising or implying that people will be returning to their homes on these once and future swamps, bayous and lakes.   It makes absolutely no sense from either the ecological or the economic point of view.   This goes beyond New Orleans, BTW.  

Decisions about where to build should be local decisions.   In most cases, I would not deny someone the right to build on his own property, even if I thought the choice was stupid.  But we should not help.  Much stupid development comes down to subsidized insurance.   If no private company will insure your new home, maybe there is a reason. The risk is too high. We certainly should not subsidize your bad decision.   W/o the unnatural public subsidy for  insurance to live on unstable places, most people would not build on barrier islands, flood plains, loose slopes … or below sea level in New Orleans.

We need to be realistic.   Some places are just not suited to some uses.   It is a tragedy if your house is destroyed by a flood … once.   If it starts to become a habit maybe you are just stupid.  Stupidity is not against the law and maybe you have a good reason to keep moving back, but stupidity shouldn’t receive government subsidies. 

The U.S has a lot of land.  We are not like Holland.  We don’t need to build billion dollar levees to protect hundred dollar real estate, nor should we sacrifice nature to our hubris.   We should help our fellow citizens in such situations, but we should help them move to higher ground.

There is an old joke about a preacher and a flood.   During a big flood, a preacher was trapped on the roof of his church.    A boat came by.   They said, “Reverend, get in.  It is still raining in the hills and the whole town will be covered.”  The preacher said, “I trust in the Lord.  He will save me.”  A second boat comes and it is the same.   Then comes a third boat.  The guy in the third boat tells the preacher, “Listen, this is the last boat.  Everybody else is out.  It is still raining.  Get in!”   The preacher just responds, “I trust the Lord.  He will save me.”    The last boat leaves.  Finally the preacher is up to his neck in water.   He looks toward heaven and says, “I trusted you to save me.  Why have you forsaken me?”   The Lord answers, “I sent three boats; why didn’t you get into one of them?”

Victims cannot always dictate the terms of their salvation.   Sometimes there are more important considerations.