For some strange reason the distribution of great articles to read (and recommend) tend not to occur uniformly. They often come in bunches. I just finished reading two recent articles that I thought were exceptional.
The first is an article on Healthcare in the current issue of The Atlantic. It is entitled “How American Health Care Killed My Father” by David Goldhill. It is available here. Goldhill is socially responsible, a business executive and a Democrat. His thesis is on the need to positively change health care in the US by primarily focusing on the manner in which health care policy and practice reduces costs and drives the improvement of quality. While lower costs yielding higher quality may seem to be counter-intuitive, he makes a convincing argument that the policies and practices that drive run-away costs are the very same policies and practices that suppress options for improving quality. While I don’t necessarily agree with all of his assertions, recommendations or conclusions I find much of what he says to be worthy of serious consideration and, actually, consistent with my own health care experiences. Most importantly, Goldhill points out that these issues are not only under accounted for in the proposed health care legislation but that the current health care legislation may actually exacerbate high costs and low quality.
The second article is a piece in the New York Times magazine (Sept. 6, 2009) by economist Paul Krugman entitled, “How did Economists Get It So Wrong”. It is available here. Krugman’s article is a very readable overview of Macroeconomics and the historic 20th Century debates between Keynesians and Neoclassicists and how their debates did little to predict, avoid or even moderate our current economic crisis. He points out that both of what were once polarized sides in the macroeconomic debate actually came too close together to keep the dialog honest and both sides gave too little credence to the more contemporary, applied and pragmatic perspective of the Behaviorial Economists like Robert Schiller (he of “Irrational Exuberance” fame). You have to read it if for no other reason than to hear some economists talk of job losses as “employees choosing not to work”. That is what comes of economists who are employed and only have eyes for their computer models.
This piece in the current issue of the New Yorker is Malcolm Gladwell (Blink, The Tipping Point) at his very best. In a nutshell, Gladwell discusses the many cases of winning by not playing by the rules … and he doesn’t mean cheating. Gladwell points out that contests, be they sports, economics, war … , are engaged through strategies or tactics that are set as norms by the strongest players. Weaker players usually have no chance of winning if they follow these norms because those norms are set by the powerful to play into the strengths of the powerful. Weaker players do, however, have a chance if they deviate from the norms and force the powerful to “play” to other strategies. David was not “lucky” as he hurled his stone against Goliath … he simply did not choose to play Goliath’s game where Goliath was sure to win.
The Gladwell article provides as much food for thought about how we might conduct our personal and professional lives as anything I have read in a long time. And, like all of Gladwell’s writings, it is fun to read.
Phillip Mayer’s new book, American Rust, shows us the lives of two young men who grew up in a small southwestern Pennsylvania town after the steel mills closed. It’s a pretty good book, with some perspectives on how deindustrialization has affected people. But I also think that Mayer’s novel is part of an emerging genre of fiction that focuses on life after shutdowns. Tawni O’Dell has written three similar books, including Back Roads and Sister Mine, set in a Pennsylvania coal town. O’Dell and Mayer both focus on not only on how people survive and struggle in communities without work but also on how family dysfunctions get passed on from one generation to the next. That makes these novels difficult in some ways, but powerful, and it’s clear in the work of both writers that family problems are deeply rooted in economic struggle.
Judith Warner has an excellent piece in the (online) New York Times about the grave outcomes of a resurgence of bullying in schools that focuses on singling out those who are different in any way with accusations of “gay”
or “fag”. It has ever been thus, even while we strongly believe that we live in more tolerant times. Ms. Warner also points out that girls work very hard today to push the limits of sexual preening as far as possible without crossing the border that might lable them “slut”.
Last night I read an article from the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly that is getting a TON of mentions in the print and on-line news and opinion communities. It is entitled The Quiet Coup and is written by Simon Johnson. One reason that the article is getting so much attention is that Johnson was once the chief economist for the International Monetary Fund and in the article he makes a case for a populist approach to our current economic situation. Because of how traditionally harsh restrictions required to receive IMF support have negatively affected the poor in those countries receiving IMF support, one usually does not say “IMF” and “populist” in the same breath. But Johnson makes the argument that if the US were an annonymous case for insolvency presented to the IMF for their assistance the IMF would not hesitate to urge that banks be nationalized and a taxpayer-centric approach for restructuring the banks be taken.
David Pogue, the New York Times technology writer seems to have just discovered what librarians and archivists have known for a long time. In a recent interview with Dag Spicer, the Curator of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, he finds out that digital storage devices have a remarkably short lifetime and that data can be lost if simply dumped on to a magnetic or optical digital storage medium. He should have talked to an archivist. Data Rot, as he terms it, is why we still put essential information on microfilm and store it in salt mines or why we print things off on to acid free paper and store the paper in environmentally sound conditions … and on and on. Or, it is why we spend a lot of time migrating digital data from one storage medium to another with multiple back-ups. Still … he did serve to popularize the problem.
A recent essay by noted environmentalist Bill McKibben
points out that global warming is such a serious and immediate problem that we have to stop quibbling about whether any single alternative energy project is perfect or perfectly ready for implementation and start to implement as many as we can now. Even if you don’t fully believe in global climate change … consider what might happen to the lives of your grandchildren if you are wrong and the problem is immediate. Seems like the smart thing to do is act like it is real, act now, and then figure out the fine points from a safer perspective.
Two recent articles about student expectations in higher education seem to fit together and are highly recommended.
The first appeared in the NY Times on February 17, 2009 and was entitled: “Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes.” In essence, it reports that over the course of their pre-higher education lives, students have been led to believe that hard work is the goal and that actual learning is not as important. Whether students actually have a good idea of what hard work IS relative to learning is another issue. The article seems to draw the point that to many students, not “easy” defines “hard work” and should equate to a good grade.
Related to this article is a piece in the Christian Science Monitor on Grade Inflation ( “Grade Inflation Gone Wild“, March 24, 2009). It points out that without a very strong and conscious effort to keep them from inflating, grades in higher education have significantly inflated. The author attributes easy high grades to a lack of effort on the part of students and, by extension to an abundance of free time contributing to the alcohol problem on campuses.