The Agony and the Apostasy

The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo Buonaroti

The construction of the Sistine Chapel (Capella Sistina) was completed in 1481. Its construction was commissioned by Pope Sixtus IV for whom it was named. One hundred thirty four feet long and 44 feet wide, the huge chapel is a towering 68 feet high. The ceiling, originally painted in a field of blue with gold stars, was covered in beautiful frescoes by Michelangelo at the behest of Pope Julius II.

Michelangelo labored for four years, from 1508 to 1512. He painted over 5,000 square feet of frescoes containing over 300 figures. Some of the most beautiful art ever created, such as The Creation of Adam, embellish the chapel’s ceiling. In addition to being one of the world’s most talented sculptors and painters, Michelangelo proved to be a highly competent engineer, designing a clever scaffolding system that allowed services to be held in the chapel below as he painted above. Four years of talent, genius, and backbreaking labor resulted in one of the world’s most breathtaking works of art.

And at the end of these four year, Michelangelo approached Pope Julius and, on bended knee, kissed his ring and asked for payment. “No,” the Pope responded, “you did not do that. The chapel was funded by the Church. The paints were purchased by the Church. The laborers who erected your scaffolding were paid by the Church. You did not do that.”

A small fiction, of course, but of a spirit with the narrative presented by the Democratic left. Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama, and, most recently, Hillary Clinton assert that entrepreneurs do not create businesses and corporations do not create jobs.

Those to the political right, Senator Cruz and friends, are aghast at such apostasy, believing that no one but entrepreneurs and corporations create businesses and jobs.

How to explain this chasm?

First, let’s try to understand what each side is actually saying. The Warren camp means to say that public spending, public infrastructures, public services, are all essential to the entrepreneur and corporations. That businesses and jobs couldn’t be created without reliance on government.

Those on the right recognize that government creates a public infrastructure. And, more importantly, it creates a system of laws that protects each citizen’s liberty and property rights. But they are just as adamant that, government or no, businesses and jobs wouldn’t exist without those who create them.

Both positions are a bit more sympathetic when viewed in a larger context. But which is right? This seems a bit of a standoff, a chicken or the egg puzzle. What came first, the jobs or the highways?

To answer this, we must delve into the tangle of Aristotelian logic and the concept of necessity and sufficiency. While logic can be quite complex (after all, it underlies all computers, the internet, Facebook, and silly cat videos), in this case it is quite straightforward.

This is something you already know. Think of the components of a grilled cheese sandwich: bread and cheese. Is it necessary to have cheese to make a grilled cheese sandwich? Obviously, yes. But is it sufficient to make a grilled cheese sandwich with only cheese? Equally obviously, no.

The cheese is necessary but not sufficient. The bread is also necessary but not sufficient. One needs both cheese and bread to prepare the grilled cheese sandwich. But to make simple toast, the bread is both necessary and sufficient.

Apply to the Sistine Chapel. The Pope is correct, Michelangelo could not have painted the ceiling if the Church had not built the chapel. But the ceiling would not have been painted so beautifully without Michelangelo (or someone of equal talent). Both conditions are necessary for the result. 

Fast forward 1,500 years. Senator Warren is correct that jobs and businesses could not (easily) be created without the infrastructure provided by government. But Senator Cruz is equally correct that jobs and businesses would not exist without entrepreneurs and corporations to create them. Just like a grilled cheese sandwich, we need both government and business. One cannot thrive without the other.

One way to view it is that government creates a canvas upon which the creative, risk-taking entrepreneur paints her vision, creating businesses and jobs as a result.

Which is a tale of caution, for those who would strangle government in the extreme risk the ability of entrepreneurs to create. But those who would smother business risk government as well. It is, after all, the taxes and fees paid by businesses and corporations and taxes paid by wage employees that support government. Without a healthy, bustling economy, from where will government funding be obtained?

Food for thought next time you see corporations and businesses taking it on the chin.  

Of hungry ducks and private property

Diving duck (scaup)

Consider the scaup (diving duck). On an early February day at low tide, upper Narragansett Bay, the duck is diving for clams, oysters, and mussels. Each time spending fifteen seconds or more under water, swimming and foraging vigorously, he often comes up empty. Only to take a deep breath and go down again into the icy depths.

This is an application of search theory. Search theory is claimed by several fiefdoms of bright scientists. Economists think it has to do with buyers or sellers who can’t immediately engage a trading partner and are thereby obligated to search for one. Military strategists are certain that search theory pertains to locating enemy submarines or finding the black box from a downed aircraft. Biologists use it as a tool to describe foraging behavior in species as disparate as early humans, wolf packs, and herds of elephants.

They are all right. Search theory has to do with optimizing success while minimizing time and energy spent in the search. And searching for food is fundamental to all living organisms.

Diving ducks employ search theory to locate mollusks, their primary sustenance. Honed by millions of years of evolution, their search techniques are polished to maximize results while minimizing time and energy expenditures. The outcome is mortal. If they expend more energy in searching than they gain in prey, they will perish.

This particular scaup, on his fifth dive, is successful and surfaces with an oyster in his beak. And is immediately accosted by a marauding seagull who steals the oyster and flaps off to enjoy his purloined meal. The scaup, its energy expended and wasted, must initiate a new search. This could be deadly, as each unsuccessful search in the frigid water drains his vital life force.

Which underscores the importance of private property. In early human times, weaker tribes were plundered by stronger and had their livestock and stored grains stolen. The result was often a gruesome death by starvation, especially if this occurred in the depths of winter. 

In the Middle Ages, the hard life of peasant farmers was one of overwork and difficult survival as they were forced to give up most of their production to feudal lords. This was a long, dark era with much poverty and little to recommend it. It all began to change with the Magna Carta in 1215, when the rights of the king's subjects began to be recognized.

The evolution of individual rights brought stability and countered these lawless expropriations. Individuals and families and traders were able to benefit from their labor, storing the fruits thereof and building a strong community capable of withstanding severe winters and occasional droughts. Governments began to enshrine the concept that producers owned the product of their labor, motivating them to produce more.

As technology developed and surpluses increased, protected by private property laws, society was able to spin off musicians and artists and sculptors, as not every individual was required to produce food for everyday survival. Private property encouraged the production of surpluses, and protected them. But it also required that consumers must purchase foodstuffs from the producers.

A bad bargain? No, unless you’d prefer that each individual spend all their waking hours producing food for survival. That would be turning the clock back 10,000 years.

The next time you hear the concept of private property vilified, imagine competing with your neighbors to pick the local apple trees bare and hunt down every rabbit and deer in the nearby woods and fields. Bare knuckle brawls and all, as you struggled for your family’s survival.

The anarchist movement, such as  Occupy Wall Street who eschew private property, want to take you for a trip in the way-back machine. Might not be as delightful as you think. At least the scaup doesn’t think so. If only he could get a restraining order on that seagull.

First, do no harm

Belisarius begging for alms

“Primum non nocere,” (first, do no harm) is a fundamental law drilled into medical practitioners and emergency medical technicians around the world. The principle dictates that, when faced with an existing issue, one must carefully select an action that does not cause more harm than good, even if that means doing nothing. It is intended to make the practitioner consciously consider the harm that any given action might cause.

A core principle of medical ethics, this dictum is equally applicable to a wide range of governmental policies and husbandry (the management and conservation of resources). A prime example: for many years we had a zero-tolerance policy regarding wildfires. Smokey Bear warned us to be careful and all fires were fought to a standstill. As a result, the natural process of undergrowth thinning was thwarted resulting in larger and more dangerous “crowning” fires. Further, certain species require fire as part of their lifecycle, the Giant Sequoia being a case in point. When it was observed in the 1960s that no new Sequoias were germinating due to fire suppression, it was determined that our fire suppression policies were causing harm. A more open-minded view now has us allow fires to proceed as a natural ecological process except where human lives or property are threatened.

In the political arena, we are not nearly as enlightened. Many government policies have been shown to inflict harm on the very constituencies they were intended to help. Some famous examples include housing policy which fueled the Great Recession of 2009, college grants and subsidies which fund a roaring inflation rate of tuitions, and generous welfare benefits which have led to a spectacular breakdown of the nuclear family, especially within the urban poor. These programs were all well intentioned; it is simply that the negative consequences were not adequately factored into the political calculus.

Why might this be? In a thought-provoking paper published earlier this year (“Concepts and implications of altruism bias and pathological altruism,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, April 9, 2013), researcher Barbara Oakley describes the concept of pathological altruism, that is, behavior that is intended to help but results in foreseeable harm. At root, as should be no surprise, is our very human desire to help combined with an almost innocent neglect of potentially harmful side effects.

We are wired to be empathetic, altruistic; the desire to help is in our DNA (with the exception of a relatively rare number of sociopaths amongst us). Early human clans survived more readily when they assisted each other. Altruism, therefore, is a natural tendency reinforced by evolution and subsequently enshrined in religious values. (Christianity, as one example, extols philanthropy and is well-known for its many charities).

But when it comes to the political process, when programs to help the poor or subsidize this group or that are debated, we tend to be overtaken by the emotional need to help and neglect the cold, scientific analysis of the reverberations our actions will actually create. Further, this altruism bias causes us to demonize anyone who dares suggest such an analysis. But in the end, it is the greatest good with the least harm that must be our goal, and reasoned analysis, without recourse to ad hominem attacks, is the only way to achieve that end.

Pathological altruism can be very dangerous. Dr. Oakley refers to the tens of millions of deaths caused in the twentieth century by appeals to altruism (Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot all cynically garnered support for their policies in that manner). She closes by proposing that pathological altruism is of such import that it should be the subject of focused scientific research. It is hard to disagree with that.

Dreams of the sovereign

We’re an odd bunch, we Americans. We prize our individuality, our liberty; we compete, we like to win. But when the situation demands, we coalesce and pull together, then separate again as the crisis passes. World War II was a great example – individual liberty was sacrificed to the greater good of protecting and perpetuating our country, our values, our way of life. We willingly bought War Bonds, submitted to rationing, hung blackout curtains, and joined the services in droves. But after the war, sailors and soldiers and Marines shed their uniforms and returned to the bustling, unruly competition of civilian life.

The key to this collectivization is its voluntary and temporary nature. When we recognize a threat to “us,” we willingly take up the traces. But when subservience is tyrannically imposed, we bristle, resist, and subvert. It's human nature. Note the Arab Spring, the French Revolution, and our own Revolutionary War.

Societies vary in the degree of individualism permitted. For instance, under Islamist rule, thou darest not be Christian. In China, you must not speak your mind unless you are in alignment with the Party. Even in England and Canada, you may be prosecuted for the offense of “offending” another. And many countries on Earth demand that their citizens be disarmed (hint – subservient).

Much to the dismay of the United Nations, we in the United States come from a much different mindset. Our Founding Fathers, reacting to the strictures of the English sovereign, turned that paradigm on its head and declared that “all men are created equal.” Gasp – a concept unknown in the world at that time, and still unknown to vast reaches of the Earth today.

We have something special, folks. Think about it. You are the boss of your life. If you want to be Christian, so be it. If you want to be Muslim, that’s cool. “None of the above” is a perfectly acceptable alternative as well. The government is subordinate to you – you are the sovereign!

So how does a nation of over 300 million individual sovereigns accomplish anything? In spite of the protestations of those of the liberal bent, our system rewards individual effort and risk taking, and the sum of those parts is enormously powerful in giving us all the benefit of a brisk, growing, and munificent engine of wealth. Oh, to be poor in America – the reason that our borders are overrun.

Financial dislocations, depressions, recessions are wholly due to foolish governmental interventions. There are no exceptions. If we were free to each pursue our individual dreams, the sum of our efforts would provide increasing wealth and employment and security. It is government policies, distorting market forces, which cause us pain. Social engineering, the holy grail of progressives, is our bane. With the exception of equal rights for all humans (black, white, female, male, gay, or Episcopalian), they are wrong on all other counts.

Leave us our individual dreams; have faith that the collective result will be excellent. We are each, after all, sovereign.

Lies, damned lies, and the financial meltdown

Luther Burbank, visionary, namesake.

A recent article in the Attleboro Sun Chronicle welcomes three new principals to our local school system (“Class Acts”, 9/3/2012). It is a heartwarming article and we all share in the excitement and promise of these promotions. But then, almost an afterthought, we notice something – the three new principals are all female.

There is a little known statistic that approximately half of our population is male. So when three executive positions are filled in the district, mightn’t we expect that at least one would be male?

Curious, we check the district’s website. Of the ten executive positions (nine principals and the superintendent), two are male and eight female. It looks pretty grim for the local guys.

On its face, just based on the numbers, this is highly discriminatory.

But there are lots of good reasons for the disparity. There are cultural and social forces at work that make the pool of female educators much larger than that of males. Females enter the profession at a much higher rate than males. The federal government (National Center for Education Statistics) reports that as of 2008, 76% of all public school teachers were female. So the fact that 80% of Attleboro’s school executives are female is not far off the mark.

It just goes to show that sometimes prima facie (“on its face”) discrimination can be explained by a deeper understanding of background facts.

Meanwhile, there is a small California savings and loan institution named after Luther Burbank, the famed botanist. Luther Burbank Savings was founded in 1983, committed to serving and retaining its customers rather than profiting public stockholders.

The bank is financially conservative and handily survived the financial meltdown of 2008. It did so by avoiding exotic financial vehicles such as sub-prime mortgages and collateralized mortgage obligations. It held the mortgages it issued for its own portfolio and did not sell them off. The funds released to mortgage borrowers came from the bank’s own depositors to whom it owed a fiduciary duty of care. It was successful because it required borrowers to qualify for the mortgage commitments they were about to undertake.

It would seem that this behavior should be congratulated and emulated. If more banks had behaved like this, there would have been no housing bubble and no financial meltdown.

So to honor Luther Burbank, your Department of Justice sued them for maintaining loan policies that had a “disparate impact” on African-Americans and Hispanics. The government observed that loans were made to the minority community at a statistically lower rate than their population.

The bank, admitting no guilt, settled the suit to avoid ruinously expensive litigation. It has loosened its lending standards and its depositors money is now at much greater risk. This is all due to the government’s “disparate impact” theory which says, regardless of fundamental causes, that if statistical variances exist, they must be discriminatory. No analysis of underlying causes is permitted.

If the problem is that minorities fail to qualify for standard mortgages, then we need to address those core issues. Holding a figurative gun to the head of a small community bank and forcing it to take greater risks runs counter to the lessons learned since 2008. And basing this on superficial statistics seems nonsensical at best.

If similar reasoning were applied to the Attleboro School district’s hiring policies, heads would roll.