We are a testing society. We use tests in schools and in the workplace and as a means to self-improvement. We like the scientific certainty that tests imply. In a funny way it’s comforting to “scientifically” know that we or others are of a certain personality type, have a certain IQ, that we or they have this or that aptitude, that we or they are dyslexic, have ADHD, are hyperactive or are high level functioning autistic.

It may be comforting to “know” these things about ourselves and others but all is not what it appears to be.

I wish people could see the problems with personality diagnostic tests, inventories, aptitude assessments, and the like. It’s not very difficult. These instruments are designed by someone or some committee, based on some theory they have adopted about characteristics that can be identified by means of counting and/or interpreting subject responses to the instrument. These responses are said by the designers to be indicative — to have predictive power.

The use of such instruments is fascinating. The principles of testing are predicated on the idea that by means of sampling, more general predictions can be made. The test is thought to be both “valid” predictively and “reliable” when administered repeatedly.
We can see how the methods we use to test “things” can be useful. It’s not too difficult to come up with criterion referenced indicators that can be said to be valid and reliable. But what happens when we apply this method to human beings? How well do we do when it comes to identifying valid and reliable indicators that predict human behavior going forward? By what method can we decide that our instruments actually predict outcomes going forward? Or is it possible that our instruments actually create outcomes going forward?

In point of fact, the predictive powers of testing used to classify and categorize individual aptitudes, styles and capabilities are built up as houses of cards, from the classification schemes employed to the methods used to sort individuals into bins.
Consider these tests, from IQ tests to personality inventories, and consider the methods used to determine that they are in fact, predictive. The conditions for assessing the predictive efficacy of these instruments over time are hopelessly complex.
Now think about the quacks who employ these instruments whose validity and reliability have no solid evidentiary basis. If the interpretations and predictions drawn from the use of such test are believed, then the future course of the person so reduced will be changed even if that person is the only one besides the measurer who is privy to the test outcomes and interpretations.

If I administer an instrument to you and you perform as required and then I make an interpretation, I am steering you forward based on the scheme I have concocted — based upon some theory for which I have no hard evidence.

I say this instrument tells us that you are artistic by nature. You are controlling by nature. You have an aptitude for math. (When they tested Einstein in the 8th grade he was deemed to have no aptitude for math!). Your IQ does not suit you for higher learning. You interpersonal skills need development. This control over what people become goes on and on, perpetuated by those who claim to be able to predict what others can or should become. Where do these tests and inventories and diagnostics really come from? Mostly nonsense sold to unwary subjects.

Now think deeply on this and consider the rites of passage that are virtually universal in human cultures. These are tests that mark the emergence of children into adulthood. Are these rites designed as tests that pass or fail people? Are they tests used to pigeon-hole individuals into certain bins? Or is it that by virtue of taking the test itself, the doorways to adulthood and the becoming that will follow are opened to the taker of the test? This is a very different notion of testing in which the taking of the test itself is enabling.

When it comes to predicting the future performance of individuals, our first principle should be “Do no harm”. If we want to use instruments to predict the future of individuals then we’d better have solid evidence that our instruments work and then solid evidence that the long term effects of our predictions make a better world.

The claims we make for the tests we create and administer shape the future of real human beings going forward. We’d better be damn sure we know what we are doing. In most cases we haven’t gat a clue.

Among the important questions addressed by recent economic research are whether socially responsible commitments lower profitability and, if not, how corporations distribute the costs among their stakeholders.

Folbre explains that the evidence that businesses that commit themselves to being socially responsible can prosper in competitive markets is equivocal. People don’t agree as to what is or is not socially responsible. Who actually ends up paying the added costs of socially responsible actions? What are the politics of games in which doing right things on one hand are traded off against doing wrong things on the other hand?

There is a cold logic to the business of business for profit called the bottom line. In a competitive marketplace an enterprise will only survive if it can deliver the goods and still realize a profit. A negative return won’t do. Breaking even won’t do. No matter how you look at it, the cost of doing right things is always passed along to the consumer. We the consumers must always pay the profiteer for doing right things.

In other words, the burden of added cost necessary to guarantee the profitability of the “socially responsible” business for profit is always passed along to society at large. At best it’s like a voluntary tax paid by those who are willing to pay, and can afford to pay, the added cost of acting “responsibly”, by whatever measure is fashionable in the marketplace on any given day.

Says, Folbre,

The fond hope that companies can “do well by doing good” sometimes extends to the assertion that they can even increase profitability. Skeptical economists tend to counter with “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

Even the idea that a high-minded business for profit might simply reduce its rate of profit taking runs into the bottom line wall, if only because in a competitive marketplace, the other guy who takes greater profit by whatever means, will prevail. In practice, the bottom line is the lowest common denominator by which business survival, “red tooth and claw” is ultimately decided.

Doing right things always entails doing them when they are most inconvenient and even unprofitable. Social responsibility and business profitability are fundamentally incompatible. Doing right things requires a collective commitment on the part of a nation, to pay the short term costs necessary in order to realize the long term overall profits of a better world. This collective commitment must include in part, a willingness to tell those who compete for profit by whatever means, when “enough is enough”.

The basic idea, and almost everyone seems to agree, is that that more years of schooling you receive, the more money you’ll earn over your lifetime. So, as the chart below makes clear, if everyone were to get a college degree, everyone would earn more money.

From today’s NYT, “The Politics of Going to College“:

The following chart, put together by the M.I.T. economists Daron Acemoglu and David Autor, shows what has happened to the wages of men with various levels of education working full time (high school dropout, high school graduate, some college, college graduate, greater than college).

Go to college = higher wages

You find this and similar charts everywhere you look. More education equals higher income. So why are the conclusions that increasing income differentials are caused by an undereducated population and if you want to get ahead, go to school longer, shear nonsense?

Here’s what you need to see to understand the whole story.

If you turn chart onto the horizontal, it looks pretty much like a standard distribution, with some skewing toward more years of education, but on the whole the number of people who occupy the status of well educated and well paid elites is tiny. This is, of course, exactly what we should expect.

Higher education it turns out, is largely a sorting function. More years of schooling does not make everyone richer, it simply sorts out the few who end up getting richer from the many others who struggle as the educational ante goes up.

The distribution of income remains roughly the same although, as the first chart shows, the differentials are actually increasing, so that fewer and fewer become richer and richer, while more and more sink into financial oblivion, unable to get well paid jobs for which their added years of schooling are “not quite right” and deeply in debt with student loans needed to pay for more year of school that costs more and more as people seeking to get certified smarter than averge and sorted toward the tails increases.

Can you see what’s going on here? Shifting the mean of educational attainment does not shift the mean of overall real income. Real income increases accrue only to those few and fewer, in the tails of distribution.

Do most jobs in American really require 4 years of college education? Nonsense! Most people in America don’t need more years of college education. Relatively speaking, our economy can only employ so many lawyers, brain surgeons and rocket scientists. Most of our economy relies on regular people doing regular jobs and those people need to be put to work and paid decent wages and benefits if we want to have a prosperous society.

Sure, education is a good thing, but having more people go to school for more years will not solve what ails our economy. By the “marketist” logic of educational attainment, if almost everyone had a Ph.D. then they would all get paid mediocre wages, and the big money would go only to those with PPPPPPh. D.s.

“THE Justice Department is building its case against Megaupload, the hugely popular file-sharing site that was indicted earlier this year on multiple counts of copyright infringement and related crimes. The company’s servers have been shut down, its assets seized and top employees arrested.”

The upshot of Green’s message is that we are living in a new economic age in which the zero-sum logic of market transactions — of value produced and then paid for by consumers, and if not paid for, then stolen — no longer works.

[W]e should stop trying to shoehorn the 21st-century problem of illegal downloading into a moral and legal regime that was developed with a pre- or mid-20th-century economy in mind. Second, we should recognize that the criminal law is least effective — and least legitimate — when it is at odds with widely held moral intuitions.

The false logic of a market society can to made to work — sort of — until the products and services created by the market society overwhelm the logic itself. Let’s take Green’s legal reasoning into a market domain with which we are all very familiar.

The creators of television shows invest a great deal of effort and money in creating compelling, entertaining content for people to watch.  The reason they do this, says our market society’s logic, is because they predict they will make more money than what they invested by charging marketeers wishing to display their ads in 30 second bits dispersed throughout a TV show that is watched by millions of enthralled viewers. The more viewers enthralled by the show and therefore willing to suffer the ads, the more the advertisers are willing to pay.

Since everyone in a market society pays a price in exchange for value received, watching the ads is the price — the toll — viewers pay for watching the enthralling TV.

So what about TV viewers who use DVRs to zap commercials?  Given the logic of markets legally regulated in terms of property rights, those viewers are as guilty of stealing content as those who “illegally” download music and movies from the internet. In fact, technically speaking, when a TV viewer turns down the sound during commercial breaks and steps to the kitchen for a snack, she too is guilty of the criminal act of running the toll gates of commercial television.

TV viewers who avoid watching ads and file downloaders who avoid paying for content produced by others are, by market society logic, all guilty of criminal behavior.

We are in a new economic age. Our model of market dynamics and the laws we create to try to keep our market society working, have long since become worse than nonsense. People are being caught up in a logical Catch 22 created by the illogic of our price-tag society.

According to a NYT Sunday Review piece, “Just the Facts. Yes, All of Them“, Gilad Elbaz wants…

“…to identify every fact in the world, and to hold them all in a company he calls Factual.”

He also wants to get rich and richer.

Elbaz is well on his way to getting rich because as a miner of “facts” he has found an inexhaustible source of raw material. As for getting ALL OF THE FACTS… Well that’s another matter.

I remember back in the day, how my friends and I thought that going to school seemed horribly inefficient. Instead of sitting in a classroom for endless hours, we thought, why not just sit down and read all of the world’s facts as recorded in the Encyclopedia Britannica? If we did this we figured we would know more than our teachers because we would know everything there was to know. We would have all of the facts.

Now we know that the encyclopedia was just not up to the facts. Says the NYT story…

“The digital world is expected to hold a collective 2.7 zettabytes of data by year-end, an amount roughly equivalent to 700 billion DVDs.”

The Encyclopedia Britannica can be held on one DVD. How could we have known how many facts there really are when I was a kid? We were so naive!

Gathering and storing all of the facts, says Elbaz, will require the number crunching power of millions of computers all churning data stored in “the cloud”. Once we have all the facts, says the Elbaz, world peace and prosperity will be at hand. Elbaz’s father recalls that when he tried to explain the Isreali-Palestinian conflict to his son, the son replied that “the hatred would end if the two sides could just agree on the facts.” Which is why he says, we need all the facts. He goes on to explain that telling everyone the true facts of the world is at least the work of a lifetime.

That may be the world’s greatest understatement.

Mr. Elbaz’s project should give us cause to ask ourselves, what is a fact? Are the words you are reading right now, facts? You are reading them right here. You can see them and count them. You can put your finger to each paragraph, a fact, each sentence a fact, each word a fact, each letter a fact. Here they are right in front of you. They are certainly facts in themselves, even if the meaning they convey appear to be lies in your mind’s eye.

It has been said that if you put a million monkeys to work pounding on a million typewriters for a million years, they will reproduce all the great literary works of mankind. They will also produce mega-zillions of facts — every letter a fact, every garbled word a fact, every inane sentence a fact, every incoherent paragraph still a fact. Here’s another fact to consider. They monkeys never stop typing!

Even without a million monkeys with typewriters making facts, we are stuck with 7 billion humans making facts every second, every minute, of everyday of every year until the end of humankind . Mr. Elbaz certainly has his work cut out for him.

”Lately, I’ve been thinking that we need to get more personal data,” Mr. Elbaz says. He doesn’t mean names and addresses, but their genetic information, what they ate, when and where they exercised — ideally, for everyone on the planet, now and forever.

To understand the problem Mr. Elbaz’s “know it all” project invites, read “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges.

“When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope.”

The great missing debate in contemporary politics is about the role and reach of markets. Do we want a market economy, or a market society? What role should markets play in public life and personal relations? How can we decide which goods should be bought and sold, and which should be governed by nonmarket values? Where should money’s writ not run?

M. J. Sandel, ”What isn’t for Sale?”,  The Atlantic, April 2012

Sandel argues that America needs to enjoin a national dialog about what things should not be subject to the machinations of market exchange. He suggests that we mostly agree that children and kidneys should not be traded to the highest bidder and wonders where we might draw the line? Should the quality of healthcare be allocated on the basis of price? How about education, justice under law, clean water, access to political favor and people’s honest labor?

In practice, we all know that differential access to all of these “goods and services” are routinely sold to the highest bidders. What has changed in America over the past 50 years is our attitude toward living in a society in which everything has a price. The sense of shared moral boundaries that tell us what money can and can’t buy have been demolished. The so-called “laws” of market economics have reduced us to billiard balls caroming off one another, each of seeking some advantage in a world in which everything has a price, our very selves included.

I have been making a similar argument for a long time but nobody seems to find it very interesting. Most people seem to believe that the logic of markets is simply a given, like the laws of physics. Few people seem to understand that the “logic” markets is not only immorally amoral but, as discussed in many entries on this blog, actually false.

Sandel calls for a dialog about what should or should not be for sale to the highest bidder and notes that in such a dialog, there will be things about which we will not agree.

“These are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones. To resolve them, we have to debate, case by case, the moral meaning of these goods, and the proper way of valuing them.”

I think Sandel is barking up the wrong tree. We will never be able to sort out on a case by case basis, the moral meaning of some “goods” vs. others. It is the morality of our society that needs sorting out. Who are we as a people? What do we believe constitutes right and wrong, good and bad, in general? And how should we apply our shared sense of right and wrong, good and bad, in our everyday affairs?

A nation of wheeler-dealers auctioning off everything to the highest bidder is no nation at all and such a nation will fall to those nations that have a reliable internal compass that tells them what cannot be bought and sold AT ANY PRICE!

“…we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Since then, weapons and war for profit have become a major feature of the American enterprise, most recently illustrated in the past decade of useless and wasted conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. What have we gained by way of Iraq and Afghanistan? Nothing. What have we lost? Beyond calculation.

U.S. Healthcare "industry" profits

In yesterday’s New York Times profiles in science article, “A Drumbeat on Profit Takers,“ Arnold Relman and Marcia Angell, elder states-persons of the medical establishment and former editors of The New England Journal of Medicine, warn that there’s another complex to be feared —  the “medical-industrial complex.”

”We should not allow the medical-industrial complex to distort our health care system to its own entrepreneurial ends,’ he [Relman] wrote; medicine must ‘serve patients first and stockholders second.’ Revisiting the subject in 1991, he deplored a ‘market-oriented health care system spinning out of control’ with commercial forces influencing doctors’ judgments and manipulating a credulous public.’”

So are Relman and Angell right to be warning us?

About 16.5%  of Americans are not covered by a healthcare plan. As much as 46% of all personal bankruptcies are related to healthcare costs. The U. S. spends 15.9% of GDP or $6,657 per capita on healthcare, twice that of the next most expensive national expenditure ranking, and U.S. costs are rising rapidly. Around 20% of U.S. healthcare dollars are lost to health insurance companies in the form of profits, and similar wastage numbers apply to big pharmaceutical companies. And yet Americans live in abject fear for their lives, have a life expectancy at birth that ranks 50th in the world and an overall level of health that ranks 72nd in the world.

You don’t have to be an expert to see why profits and healthcare don’t mix. Some things — the most important things — must not be relegated to greedy actors. As a nation, we cannot “promote the general welfare” and “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” on an “every man for himself” basis.

I think that we’ve been sold a bill of goods that says that killing each other is in our nature. And based upon this scientistic myth, we live our lives very afraid and perpetually girded for battle, a strong offense being, as they say, the best defense.

Given the myth that we humans are natural born killers, one thing leads to another.

Any truly evolved characteristic of human nature lies so deeply buried beneath our self-constructed socio-cultural reality, that should any such genetic predisposition toward killing each other actually exist, it could never be teased out from the whole of the human construction that we have wrought among ourselves.

Experiment:

To determine if humans are naturally evolved killers take one hundred human babies and lock them in a room with food, water and everything they need to survive. Observe what they do in their primally evolved state in order to  see just when and how they rise to begin killing each other.

Lab bablies

When the going gets tough will the bigger babies attack the littler ones? Will the babies draw territorial borders around themselves and defend them to the death? Will some babies develop a taste for meat and turn cannibalistic? Will the boy babies engage in mortal combat over the attentions of the girl babies or vice versa?

I predict that the babies will not rise at all. After a good deal of crying and thrashing about, they will all be dead of natural causes long before they can exhibit any naturally homicidal tendencies, because to get the ball rolling the babies would need some grown-up humans to show and tell them how they and the world works — to tell them for example, that they are or are not natural born killers.

PS – We are looking for 100 pregnant women who would be willing to allow us to perform this experiment using their newborn infants. If interested, dial 666 on your Iphone and ask for Dr. Beelzebub.

The subtitle of my blog is “surfing the brink of chaos” because I believe that even in the most mundane of our activity, this is exactly what we are doing.

We are confronted in our every INTENTIONALLY conscious moment with a chaotic and undeterminable world into which we are falling forward into the future. Given our intentions based in what we believe to be right — practically, aesthetically and morally == we construct and employ theoretic models by which to render our forward experiencing of the world predictable. and given our interests we have succeeded practically, as a whole, more or less.

Our falling forward, controlled as it is, more or less, by our symbolic modeling applied in skillful practice, is not readily apparent to us in everyday experience. We are so immersed in the process of collaborative modeling and using those models, that it is our first nature.

At any given time and place–our circumstance–the models we devise will work, more or less, or not work, and so we are constantly entrained in this model construction process. It seems that the models we have been using, mostly taken-for-granted, have been resulting in more crashes, with bigger calamities looming in the near future. It seems to me that we are sorely in need of some better models.

Speaking of falling forward and models that work, more or less, I find the following video very evocative.

Click here to view the embedded video.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Another two United States soldiers were killed in Afghanistan on Thursday when an Afghan soldier in league with a civilian Afghan literacy instructor killed a tower guard and attacked with gunfire and a rocket the barracks where American soldiers were sleeping at a joint base in the south of the country, officials said.

The report above is yet another in a series of killings and attacks perpetrated by allied Afghan soldiers supposedly fighting alongside American and European forces in Afghanistan, a place I visited some 35 years ago.

I find it entirely unsurprising that Afghan soldiers employed, trained and armed by us to fight against other Afghans, would turn their weapons upon the immensely powerful American and European invaders who trained them. As I have argued many times on this blog, the “primitive” tribal people of Afghanistan are governed, not by the threat of laws enforced by authorities residing in Kabul, but by a sense of relations of honor among themselves that have sustained them for thousands of years. Their suicidal attacks are not rational tactical initiatives measured in terms of military gains and losses. They are acts of honor specifically intended to redress their sense of shame for allowing outsiders to run amok in their homeland.

In America we do not think about honor very much. Mostly we think of it in terms of status recognition for special accomplishments, like getting onto some institution’s “honor roll”. But living an honorable life is something quite different. Relations of honor go back to the dawn of humankind. Honor is the feeling that resides inside of each of our selves about what it means to do RIGHT THINGS, irrespective of our personal interests. Only a person or people who have a sense of what it means to act honorably can know what it means feel shame. We might want to ask ourselves if a person or people are incapable of feeling shame, can truly be said to be civilized. Can a civilized poeple be shameless? Can civilization survive without honor?

I am currently devoting a good deal of thought to the ideas of honor and shame. There is not much written on this subject in contemporary social science, though our novels and movies are filled with characters we see as acting honorably or shamefully.

I have just ordered a book to read that might help me in my quest. It is called What Is Honor?: A Question of Moral Imperatives.

I also found my way to a relatively new academic blog called “Honor Ethics”. The founders say they want to develop a theory of honor. It will be interesting to follow this blog and see where the participants go. If you are brave you can read a comment I posted on the blog HERE. I wonder if anyone will respond?