A School for People

A friend sent me a piece of memetic folk wisdom called "The Animal School":

Once upon a time the animals decided they must do something decisive to meet the increasing complexity of their society. They held a meeting and finally decided to organize a school.

The curriculum consisted of running, climbing, swimming and flying. Since these were the basic behaviours of most animals, they decided that all the students should take all the subjects.

The duck proved to be excellent at swimming, better in fact, than his teacher. He also did well in flying. But he proved to be very poor in running. Since he was poor in this subject, he was made to stay after school to practice it and even had to drop swimming in order to get more time in which to practice running. He was kept at this poorest subject until his webbed feet were so badly damaged that he became only average at swimming. But average was acceptable in the school, so no body worried about that – except the duck.

The rabbit started at the top of her class in running, but finally had a nervous breakdown because of so much make-up time in swimming – a subject she hated.

The squirrel was excellent at climbing until he developed a psychological block in flying class, when the teacher insisted he start from the ground instead of from the tops of trees. He was kept at attempting to fly until he became muscle-bound – and received a C in climbing and a D in running.

The eagle was the school’s worst discipline problem; in climbing class, she beat all of the others to the top of the tree used for examination purposes in this subject, but she insisted on using her own method of getting there.

The gophers, of course, stayed out of school and fought the tax levied for education because digging was not included in the curriculum. They apprenticed their children to the badger and later joined the groundhogs and eventually started a private school offering alternative education.

I'd like to criticise the parable on its assumptions.  The idea that we all have different natural abilities as differentiated as flight to an eagle and a rabbit's swiftness suggests a reductivist genetic determinism that eventually leads us down the slippery slope to social Darwinism.  The other extreme that people are blank slates to mold and fashion doesn't hold up either.  

Really, people are like web pages: that is, they are plastic templates onto which nearly anything can be pasted (with a few exceptions, like some aspects of math for instance).  For the purposes of our education system, the ability to compose sentences and paragraphs (English), an understanding of numbers as a language (math: something that I have argued is of utmost importance to societal well-being), a thorough grounding in the scientific method and what we have learned from it (science), a firm grasp of who we are and where we came from as a species, civilization, culture, country, region, or ethnic group (social studies) have all been widely agreed as being important enough for every citizen to learn.  That all citizens may be given access to this important knowledge was a battle hard-fought by progressives at the turn of the century, and the result was the national, standardized, public school system that has provided millions of American citizens with the basic suite of knowledge required to determine their own paths.  The result has been the most technologically skilled workforce in the history of the world.  

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Cash Rules Everything Around Me

I've written before that it's very important for America to learn to count past "one, two, many".  Case in point: BP's $25,000,000 fine for DPing Alaska's North Slope back in 2006.  From the New York Times:

BP will pay $25 million in civil fines to settle charges arising from two spills from its network of pipelines in Alaska in 2006 and from a willful failure to comply with a government order to properly maintain the pipelines to prevent corrosion, federal officials announced on Tuesday.

The fine is the largest per-barrel assessment ever levied against an oil company in a spill case and represents a new blow to BP’s corporate treasury and reputation.

The aggressive approach of federal prosecutors in this case could portend huge fines and penalties from BP’s much larger spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year.

I will eat my own arm if $25,000,000 dollars "represents a new blow to BP's corporate treasury and reputation".  BP's 2010 revenue was $309,000,000,000.  $25,000,000 represents 1/12360 (0.008%) of BP's 2010 revenue.

To put this figure in terms the average person can understand, the median annual household income in the United States in 2010 was just under $50,000.  0.008% of $50,000 is four dollars.  BP paying a $25,000,000 fine is like you or me paying four dollars.  (For comparison purposes, a typical bounced check fee represents a six to ten times greater economic burden on the individual than a $25,000,000 fine represents for BP.)  Surely a $25,000,000 fine is not "a new blow to BPs corporate treasury"; hence, I do not have to eat my own arm.

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On Talking Past Each Other and World Trade

The League of Ordinary Gentlemen has been hosting a labor roundtable, which has emerged as a combination of spontaneity and directed planning in the way that the blogosphere especially tends to foster.  Participants have included many of my favorite bloggers: E.D. Kain, Jason Kuznicki, Kevin Carson, Mark Thompson, Freddie deBoer, and James Hanley, among others.  At stake is the entire system of American capitalism.  For anyone with a spare afternoon or so, it's worth visiting that London coffee house.

I’ve read through all the articles and comment threads in this labor roundtable thus far, and it seems to me that there are three general issues which have been largely or systematically taken for granted or underserved in the discussion.  I've brought these issues up in comments, but few people seem interested in exploring them, which (being a libertarian) I can't really fault anyone for.  These issues are: (1) libertarianism’s historical relationship to the labor movement; (2) distortions in the ways we usually measure wealth that confuse the debate; and (3) the role of American corporations in globalization.

As for topic (1) - libertarianism’s historical relationship to the labor movement - no one has acknowledged that libertarianism more or less grew out of the union movement in Europe as that faction which proposed a return to the principles of classical liberalism (Adam Smith) in opposition to the coercively entrenched interests of state/capital at the turn of the twentieth century.  Many libertarians shifted focus after the New Deal because the Roosevelt government seemed to represent a greater threat to liberty at that time than corporate regulatory capture; but the base of the movement remains as principally an opposition to the pernicious cartel of that two-headed monster of the wealthy and powerful.

If libertarianism has been effectively subverted to corporate interests in the United States, which is the contention of Noam Chomsky and other anarchist theorists whose intellectual roots lie in the Gilded Age milieu of thoughtful bourgeois discussion, this must be because either: (a) self-described libertarian institutions have been captured by corporate special interests; (b) echoes of the New Deal excesses of central government still seem like a more serious threat to liberty than corporate power; or (c) having strong, collective labor counterbalance strong, unitary capital is no longer considered a necessary evil (due perhaps to the existence of a strong middle class).

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The U.S. Healthcare System is Going to Hell

It's no secret to anybody that the U.S. healthcare system is bad, but it's important to point out from time to time just how bad it is.  I am an asthmatic and have had asthma since I was five or six years old.  Around age ten, I began taking regular medicine, which I have taken daily since then and will likely have to take for the rest of my life.

Part of my motivation in deciding to become a doctor is to work on seemingly "intractable" problems like asthma, because every time I really think about it, it pisses me off.  Despite the genetic reductionism gripping our society (in stark contrast to the scientific community), asthma is a disease having near entire environmental causality.  There was recently a study conducted in China where the rate of asthma decreased in predictable fashion the farther one was from an urban center.  People who lived near factories and cars had mathmatically modelable high rates of asthma correlated with ppm of various pollutants, while people who were farmers and lived in the countryside had near zero incidence of asthma.  The patterns produced matched the patterns produced by of infectious diseases, suggesting strong environmental correlation.  

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They Were Never Planning on Televising the Revolution

art by Jack Jerz. Click on photo for link.Fake Steve Jobs and blogosphere hater Dan Lyons speculates that the latest FCC net neutrality ruling ushers in the age of consolidation for the Internet:

No matter what you think about the new rules, however, they signal an important turning point in the development of the Internet. We are going from Phase One, where everything is free and open and untamed, into Phase Two, which is all about centralization, consolidation, control—and money.

Because don’t kid yourself. Money is driving all of this. As in: Hey, we’ve created this marvelous new platform for communicating with each other. We’ve demonstrated that very large sums of money can be generated by sending stuff over these wires. Now let’s figure out who gets what.

Tuesday’s new FCC rules grant two big concessions to carriers. First, the rules will apply to wired broadband connections, but they will pretty much leave wireless alone. Second, carriers remain free to create “fast lanes” on the Internet. They can charge Internet companies to ride on the faster pipes, and perhaps also charge consumers more money to get access to those speedy services.

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Minipost: the Table of the Worthy

I commented at LoOG:

It seems to me like there is always a Table of the Worthy of sorts that gets to weigh in on national industry policies. Instead of coming up with policies that are beneficial for everybody, we work on ways to throw bones to all the relevent parties. How can we switch to a system with more central control without destroying private enterprise? I know, let’s just nest a layer of corporations between consumers and legislators. How can we improve food safety while keeping costs low? Let’s put it all under the umbrella of FDA control, but we can compensate with more farm subsidies and restrictions on foreign competitors.

What you wind up getting with such a system is a kind of mercantilist, privatized oligarchy that can only really leverage its own clout against other rival mercantilist, privatized oligarchies to succeed. The constitution sets down and elaborates on a specific set of principles designed to avoid this intractable situation, yet we’ve stretched and gerrymandered it to the point where it provides the putative justification for the exact opposite of its intentions.

I'm going to call this kind of special interest unfreedom club the Table of the Worthy from now on.  Look for it in our archives.