The Obama Years: Novelists Assess His Legacy

Tobias Wolff: ‘The coolness of his style has led to a lack of praise for what he has achieved’

Tobias Wolff is best known for his memoir This Boy’s Life, which won the Los Angeles Times book award for biography. His 1984 novella, The Barracks Thief, won the Pen/Faulkner award for fiction. He was the director of creative writing at Stanford from 2000 to 2002 and received a National Medal of Arts from the president in 2015.

Our candidates for president campaign as if they’re running for king, and not just any king – no quaint, hospital-touring symbol of national unity, no mere figurehead answerable to a constitution and a popular assembly. Congress? What’s that? If elected, our American candidate will, like an absolute monarch, resolve the thorniest problems of state simply by exerting his (or her!) will. Is the domestic economy on fire, and about to spread to our neighbours? He will “fix” it, because he “knows how”. Students drowning in debt? He’ll make college free! Islamic jihadists taking over cities in Syria and Iraq? He’ll carpet bomb them until we find out “if sand [and innocent civilians] can glow”.

Do suspected terrorists know more than they’re telling? He’ll have them tortured till they sing like Pavarotti, and kill their families into the bargain, and the military will just have to suck it up and do what he says, even if they say they won’t, and have the law to back them up. Law? What’s that? She’ll ban assault weapons; he’ll make sure you can take them to church.

The promise of immediate and radical change is a campaign fiction presented with such bald-faced effrontery that we hardly question it any more, unless it’s coming from the other side. Indeed, the performance can’t be sustained unless we support it with our credulity, like a tentful of rubes gaping at the tricks of a carnival magician, even offering ourselves up as subjects.

The wishful thinking that is the source of this credulity is, of course, a prelude to disappointment if our candidate actually gets elected. Take the case of candidate Barack Obama. He was going to get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and close Guantánamo. He would save our failing economy, mend our broken healthcare system, and enact sensible gun control legislation. He would overhaul our immigration system, address climate change with meaningful policies, and change the bilious tone of our political discourse. We weren’t a nation of red states and blue states, he reminded us: we were the United States. Despite my years, I believed – believed not only that he meant what he said, but that he could get it done.

My wife and I gathered several friends on a November night in 2008, and watched with joy and disbelief as this young, literary, ironical man with a Kenyan father was elected to the presidency. Some of us had tears in our eyes. I was one. But as time went on those tears began to burn. He wasn’t getting it done, or so it seemed to me. Guantánamo was still in business. The planet kept heating up, and the wars dragged on, though increasingly waged by special forces. As before, just about anybody was free to walk into a gun store and come out armed, and each year some 30,000 Americans continued to pay for that freedom with their lives.

And the tone of political life had become even more toxic than before the election. During President Obama’s first State of the Union address, a congressman from South Carolina shouted: “You lie!” and became a Republican hero, even as the leaders of that party dedicated themselves to obstructing President Obama’s legislative initiatives and judicial appointments, effectively disabling the government in order, as the senate majority leader shamelessly admitted, to make Obama a one-term president. The birthers continued to question his legitimacy, and, further, to imply that he was a secret Muslim and supporter of Isis. He was Hitler. He was Lenin.

None of this of this was Obama’s fault. Indeed, he reacted to the unrelenting stream of slander and congressional malfeasance with unflappable calm and an air of faintly amused detachment. And for that I did blame him. The coolness I had admired during his campaign became an irritant. In fact, it drove me sort of crazy. Why didn’t he fight back? Show some rage at what was truly outrageous, the obstruction, the name-calling, the attacks on Michelle Obama for encouraging schools to serve healthy food, even for occasionally wearing dresses that showed her arms? Call these liars and bullies out, damn it! Politics is mud wrestling, did he not understand that? And if he really didn’t feel anger, then why not take some acting lessons, and fake it?

Well, I was wrong. As Barack Obama prepares to leave office, I think about what he managed to do in the face of implacable resistance. No, he didn’t close Guantánamo; the Republican congress wouldn’t let him, nor would they let him bring sanity to our gun laws, or to our immigration policies. But as most economists agree, his financial initiatives, narrowly approved, did save us from a profound recession, possibly even a depression. His successful auto industry bailout, fiercely contested at the time, saved countless jobs at virtually no expense to the taxpayer. If Obama couldn’t entirely extricate us from the wars he inherited, he has refrained from entangling us in new wars, despite being constantly urged to do so by congressmen and senators who otherwise refuse to spend tax dollars – on, say, education, or roads, or environmental safeguards.

Finally, 20 million Americans who did not have health insurance when Barack Obama took office have it now; and in spite of dire Republican predictions, and umpteen votes for repeal, it has actually lowered the healthcare cost inflation rate. No one in this country, however poor, or sick, need be without insurance. This achievement eluded Theodore Roosevelt and Bill Clinton, among others.

So why has Obama not been celebrated for what he’s done? Why did so many of us so often feel a sense of impatience, even disappointment? I believe it comes down to immaturity – in us, not him. At least part of the reason for our failure to recognise and praise what he’s accomplished has to do with his style – that coolness. He doesn’t brag, or gloat. He doesn’t call attention to himself, or proclaim his deeds in the thoroughfares, or ridicule those who oppose him. But we wanted him to. We wanted heat. We wanted anger, slashing rhetoric, mockery. We wanted him to call liars liars, idiots idiots. We wanted him to bully the bullies. We wanted him to wage war, and crow over his fallen enemies. And because we did not get the melodrama we demanded, we lost the plot.

But now we have a candidate who will give us all the sound and fury we could ask for, or imagine. Let’s see how we like it. Me, I’m already nostalgic for Obama.

by Tobias Wolff, Akhil Sharma, Attica Locke, Hari Kunzru, Jayne Anne Phillips, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: John Moore/Getty Images

Soaring Ocean Temperature is 'Greatest Hidden Challenge of Our Generation'

The soaring temperature of the oceans is the “greatest hidden challenge of our generation” that is altering the make-up of marine species, shrinking fishing areas and starting to spread disease to humans, according to the most comprehensive analysis yet of ocean warming.

The oceans have already sucked up an enormous amount of heat due to escalating greenhouse gas emissions, affecting marine species from microbes to whales, according to an International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) report involving the work of 80 scientists from a dozen countries.

The profound changes underway in the oceans are starting to impact people, the report states. “Due to a domino effect, key human sectors are at threat, especially fisheries, aquaculture, coastal risk management, health and coastal tourism.”

Dan Laffoley, IUCN marine adviser and one of the report’s lead authors, said: “What we are seeing now is running well ahead of what we can cope with. The overall outlook is pretty gloomy.

“We perhaps haven’t realised the gross effect we are having on the oceans, we don’t appreciate what they do for us. We are locking ourselves into a future where a lot of the poorer people in the world will miss out.”

The scale of warming in the ocean, which covers around 70% of the planet, is “truly staggering”, the report states. The upper few metres of ocean have warmed by around 0.13C a decade since the start of the 20th century, with a 1-4C increase in global ocean warming by the end of this century.

The ocean has absorbed more than 90% of the extra heat created by human activity. If the same amount of heat that has been buried in the upper 2km of the ocean had gone into the atmosphere, the surface of the Earth would have warmed by a devastating 36C, rather than 1C, over the past century.

At some point, the report says, warming waters could unlock billions of tonnes of frozen methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, from the seabed and cook the surface of the planet. This could occur even if emissions are drastically cut, due to the lag time between emitting greenhouse gases and their visible consequences.

Warming is already causing fish, seabirds, sea turtles, jellyfish and other species to change their behaviour and habitat, it says. Species are fleeing to the cooler poles, away from the equator, at a rate that is up to five times faster than the shifts seen by species on land.

With more than 550 types of marine fishes and invertebrates already considered threatened, ocean warming will exacerbate the declines of some species, the report also found.

The movement of fish will create winners and losers among the 4.3 billion people in the world who rely heavily upon fish for sustenance. In south-east Asia, harvests from fisheries could drop by nearly a third by 2050 if emissions are not severely curtailed. Global production from capture fisheries has already levelled off at 90m tonnes a year, mainly due to overfishing, at a time when millions more tonnes will need to be caught to feed a human population expected to grow to 9 billion by 2050.

Humans are also set to suffer from the spread of disease as the ocean continues to heat up. The IUCN report found there is growing evidence of vibrio bacterial disease, which can cause cholera, and harmful algal bloom species that can cause food poisoning. People are also being affected by more severe, if not more numerous, hurricanes due to the extra energy in the ocean and atmosphere.

by Oliver Milman, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Ralph Lee Hopkins/Alamy

Utagawa Hiroshige, Tōkaidō Road.
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Homo Deus – How Data Will Destroy Human Freedom

At the heart of this spellbinding book is a simple but chilling idea: human nature will be transformed in the 21st century because intelligence is uncoupling from consciousness. We are not going to build machines any time soon that have feelings like we have feelings: that’s consciousness. Robots won’t be falling in love with each other (which doesn’t mean we are incapable of falling in love with robots). But we have already built machines – vast data-processing networks – that can know our feelings better than we know them ourselves: that’s intelligence. Google– the search engine, not the company – doesn’t have beliefs and desires of its own. It doesn’t care what we search for and it won’t feel hurt by our behaviour. But it can process our behaviour to know what we want before we know it ourselves. That fact has the potential to change what it means to be human.

Yuval Noah Harari’s previous book, the global bestseller Sapiens, laid out the last 75,000 years of human history to remind us that there is nothing special or essential about who we are. We are an accident. Homo sapiens is just one possible way of being human, an evolutionary contingency like every other creature on the planet. That book ended with the thought that the story of homo sapiens could be coming to an end. We are at the height of our power but we may also have reached its limit. Homo Deus makes good on this thought to explain how our unparalleled ability to control the world around us is turning us into something new.

The evidence of our power is everywhere: we have not simply conquered nature but have also begun to defeat humanity’s own worst enemies. War is increasingly obsolete; famine is rare; disease is on the retreat around the world. We have achieved these triumphs by building ever more complex networks that treat human beings as units of information. Evolutionary science teaches us that, in one sense, we are nothing but data-processing machines: we too are algorithms. By manipulating the data we can exercise mastery over our fate. The trouble is that other algorithms – the ones that we have built – can do it far more efficiently than we can. That’s what Harari means by the “uncoupling” of intelligence and consciousness. The project of modernity was built on the idea that individual human beings are the source of meaning as well as power. We are meant to be the ones who decide what happens to us: as voters, as consumers, as lovers. But that’s not true any more. We are what gives networks their power: they use our ideas of meaning to determine what will happen to us.

Not all of this is new. The modern state, which has been around for about 400 years, is really just another data-processing machine. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes, writing in 1651, called it an “automaton” (or what we would call a robot). Its robotic quality is the source of its power and also its heartlessness: states don’t have a conscience, which is what allows them sometimes to do the most fearful things. What’s changed is that there are now processing machines that are far more efficient than states: as Harari points out, governments find it almost impossible to keep up with the pace of technological advance. It has also become much harder to sustain the belief – shared by Hobbes – that behind every state there are real flesh-and-blood human beings. The modern insistence on the autonomy of the individual goes along with a view that it should be possible to find the heart of this heartless world. Keep scratching at a faceless bureaucracy and you’ll eventually uncover a civil servant with real feelings. But keep scratching at a search engine and all you’ll find are data points.

We are just at the start of this process of data-driven transformation and Harari says there is little we can do to stop it. Homo Deus is an “end of history” book, but not in the crude sense that he believes things have come to a stop. Rather the opposite: things are moving so fast that it’s impossible to imagine what the future might hold. In 1800 it was possible to think meaningfully about what the world of 1900 would be like and how we might fit in. That’s history: a sequence of events in which human beings play the leading part. But the world of 2100 is at present almost unimaginable. We have no idea where we’ll fit in, if at all. We may have built a world that has no place for us.

Given what an alarming thought this is, and since we aren’t there yet, why can’t we do more to stop it from happening? Harari thinks the modern belief that individuals are in charge of their fate was never much more than a leap of faith. Real power always resided with networks. Individual human beings are relatively powerless creatures, no match for lions or bears. It’s what they can do as groups that has enabled them to take over the planet. These groupings – corporations, religions, states – are now part of a vast network of interconnected information flows. Finding points of resistance, where smaller units can stand up to the waves of information washing around the globe, is becoming harder all the time.

Some people have given up the fight. In place of the founding tenets of modernity – liberalism, democracy and personal autonomy – there is a new religion: Dataism. Its followers – many of whom reside in the Bay Area of California – put their faith in information by encouraging us to see it as the only true source of value. We are what we contribute to data processing. There is potentially a huge upside to this: it means we will face fewer and fewer obstacles to getting what we want, because the information needed to supply us will be instantly accessible. Our likes and our experiences will merge. Our lifespans could also be hugely extended: Dataists believe that immortality is the next frontier to be crossed. But the downside is obvious, too. Who will “we” be any more? Nothing more than an accumulation of information points. Twentieth-century political dystopias sought to stamp on individuals with the power of the state. That won’t be necessary in the coming century. As Harari says: “The individual will not be crushed by Big Brother; it will disintegrate from within.”

by David Runciman, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Alarmy

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Am I a Good Person?

The beginning of being a good person is the knowledge that you may not be, or that you have acted as a bad one would. After that it gets complicated.

The most obvious complication, perhaps, is that there is no agreement on what constitutes a good person. In fact there’s no agreement on whether we should even agree who a good person is. In some extreme forms of theoretical individualism, the only judge of whether you are good is you yourself: cheating on your taxes, being Donald Trump, writing comments on news sites – whatever’s right for you. In practice, however, no one ever really believes this. Even the sociopath cares for the opinion of others. It’s just that the tribute he wants from them is awe and devotion rather than love and respect.

But before we even get to the question of what would make a good person, there is a basic difficulty with our inquiry: if we ask ourselves, the answer we get will probably be tainted with lies. Even when we know we have done wrong, our minds set at work to scrub the knowledge out. A rather elegant study recently published in PNAS showed that we have difficulties even forming memories of the times we have behaved unethically, and if they ever are formed, they disintegrate faster than other ones. And this is a truth that was known long before lab science, by anyone who studies human nature, from St Augustine to Jane Austen.

This isn’t an insurmountable obstacle, but any project of self-knowledge has to take into account what a hard and largely unrewarding prospect it is. The alternatives, however, are worse. And it is always possible that at the end of our explorations we discover that we were not, after all, wholly intolerable and disgusting but just possibly good enough.

What would it mean to be good enough? Good enough at what?

Very roughly speaking there are three big ideas about how we could measure goodness: it could be a matter of following the right rules; it could be a matter of cultivating the right virtues; it might be something that was judged by success: did I leave the world a better place? All of these have been held to be self-evident in some cultures, and ludicrous in others. In practice, any judgment will have elements of all three, but one of them will be treated as predominant.

Our own culture now mostly takes consequentialism for granted. In that scheme, being a good person means that you had a good effect on the world. So you can answer the question by totting up all the good you did, balancing it against the bad things you have such a hard time remembering, and seeing how the register comes out. This is problematic for two reasons. The first is the element of luck. People with power seem more morally significant, and capable of being better, under these rules because they can change the world more. Conversely, the wholly powerless – babies, very old people, or severely disabled people – would seem morally insignificant because they can’t do anything. There’s also the problem of how you measure the good done in the world. Socrates thought that it was part of virtue to harm your enemies and other bad people. Jesus disagreed. Which scale do you want to measure yourself against?

by Andrew Brown, The Guardian |  Read more:

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I Wish My Teacher Knew

When Kyle Schwartz started teaching third grade at Doull Elementary School in Denver, she wanted to get to know her students better. She asked them to finish the sentence “I wish my teacher knew.”

What Kids Wish Their Teachers Knew

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Will Amazon Kill FedEx?

Last fall, when he was running for mayor of Wilmington, Ohio, John Stanforth heard a rumor. A big company was testing an airfreight operation at the local airport, Wilmington Air Park. Whoever it was wanted to keep the project quiet. People who frequented the airport said the company was wrapping its packages in black plastic to obscure any lettering and referred to its experiment as Project Amelia. He wasn’t sure which company it was, though some people were whispering it was Amazon.com.

Stanforth, 71, owns a storage business and looks a bit like the actor Jeffrey Tambor. In November he easily won the mayoral election. But even then he didn’t ask too many questions about what was going on at the airport. He didn’t want to jeopardize anything by being too nosy. “Guys, just bring me the jobs,” he recalls thinking.

Wilmington is about 35 miles southeast of Dayton and has a population of about 12,000. Jobs used to be plentiful. The air park was a hub for Airborne Express and then DHL, the German shipping company, which bought Airborne Express in 2003. Thousands of people toiled at the airport, sorting packages that arrived and loading them onto outbound planes. It wasn’t the most spiritually rewarding work, but it paid well, enabling package handlers to patronize the shops on Wilmington’s Main Street, to get haircuts in the barbershop and body illustrations at the tattoo parlor. Even the local bookstore did great business, especially when Harry Potter novels came out. “They shut down the main street,” Stanforth says wistfully, about the release party the store threw in 2007 for the seventh book in the Potter series. “There were people everywhere. Our Rotary Club made $1,000 selling shaved ice. A thousand bucks!”

In 2008, DHL shuttered its Wilmington operation, and almost everybody at the air park lost their jobs. “It was devastating,” Stanforth says. “You can’t lose that kind of an industry in a small community and not be hurt.” The following year, the city was featured on a 60 Minutes segment as a symbol of recessionary America. “When President Obama spoke of ‘the winter of our hardship’ in his inaugural address, no one in America understood that better than the folks we met in Wilmington, Ohio,” correspondent Scott Pelley said.

Starting in September 2015, people in the city noticed more planes flying in and out of the airport, loading and unloading those black-wrapped boxes. This March, Amazon announced that it was leasing 20 Boeing 767s from Air Transport Services Group, a cargo company that operates out of the air park. Amazon had also negotiated an option to buy nearly 20 percent of the company. “We’re excited to supplement our existing delivery network with a great new provider, ATSG, by adding 20 planes to ensure air cargo capacity to support one- and two-day delivery,” Dave Clark, Amazon’s senior vice president for worldwide operations, said in a statement at the time. Amazon denies wrapping its boxes in black during the trial period.

Two weeks after Amazon’s announcement, I meet with Stanforth in a conference room outside his office at the municipal building. He’s joined by Marian Miller, his lively executive assistant, and Bret Dixon, Clinton County’s economic development director. Amazon still hasn’t said much about its plans for the air park, but Stanforth is hopeful there will be some jobs soon.

The mayor, who wears a green fleece jacket and confesses to being a little hard of hearing, lets his younger colleagues do most of the talking. “We don’t know what it’s going to do yet,” Miller says, “but we’re crossing our fingers. We have people that like slinging packages.”

It’s hard to tell who’s more pro-Amazon, Miller or Dixon. “They’re changing the face of e-commerce,” Dixon says.

“They are a feel-good company,” says Miller. “Who wouldn’t want a feel-good company like Amazon? Look at the way they treat their customers and their employees!”

The conversation turns to those Harry Potter events. Stanforth perks up. “Well, we had a local bookstore that really promoted it and took the initiative,” he says. “Sad to say, it’s closed up. Wonder who closed them up?”

Miller gives him a look. “Don’t say it.”

“Where does everybody get their books now?” Stanforth says, grinning.

“Don’t say that,” Miller warns him again.

“Amazon,” Stanforth says.

“I knew you were going to say it,” Dixon says, shaking his head.

Two months after the Ohio announcement, Amazon leased 20 more jets from Atlas Air, an air cargo company based in Purchase, N.Y. Amazon has also purchased 4,000 truck trailers. Meanwhile, a company subsidiary in China has obtained a freight-forwarding license that analysts say enables it to sell space on container ships traveling between Asia and the U.S. and Europe. In short, Amazon is becoming a kind of e-commerce Walmart with a FedEx attached.

With any other company, an expansion like this would be preposterous. But Amazon’s growth has been preposterous. In 2010 its annual revenue was $34 billion; last year, $107 billion. In 2010 the company employed 33,700 workers. By this June, it had 268,900. To have enough office space for its swelling headquarters staff, Amazon has swallowed Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, and it’s building three tree-filled biospheres in the city that will allow workers to take contemplative breaks, like so many Ralph Waldo Emersons in Jetsonian luxury. The company is the fifth-most valuable in the world: Its market capitalization is about $366 billion, which is roughly equal to the combined worth of Walmart, FedEx, and Boeing.

Amazon’s ambitions depend on the continued success of its Prime service. For $99 a year, Amazon Prime customers get two-day delivery at no extra charge. Those who sign up tend to spend almost three times as much as their non-Prime peers. The company zealously guards its numbers, but Consumer Intelligence Research Partners estimates that Amazon had 63 million Prime members as of late June—19 million more than the year before. Amazon keeps subscribers in the fold by lavishing them with perks such as free access to Amazon Video, the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, and trial subscriptions to the Washington Post, which Bezos, a billionaire many times over, purchased for $250 million in cash three years ago. But more than anything, Prime members sign up for that fast shipping, which keeps getting faster. In many large cities, subscribers can now get free two-hour delivery on more than 25,000 items they might otherwise have bought at Walgreens or 7-Eleven. For an additional $7.99, orders arrive within an hour. Some company executives joked that the service should be called Amazon Magic; they went with Prime Now.

Providing near-instant gratification on Amazon’s scale isn’t cheap. Last year the company spent $11.5 billion on shipping—nearly twice what it did two years ago. Along with leasing jets and buying trailers, Amazon has opened more than 28 sorting centers, 59 delivery stations that feed packages to local couriers, and more than 65 Prime Now hubs stocked with best-selling items that can be rushed to customers around the world, according to MWPVL International, a Montreal-based supply chain consultant. “This year we estimate Amazon is going to sell 7.2 billion items,” says Gene Munster, an internet industry analyst at Piper Jaffray. “In 2020, which is only four years away, we expect them to sell 12.6 billion items.”

In June, Deutsche Bank released a report predicting that Amazon will eventually have a global shipping operation capable of moving goods directly from factories in China to customers in the U.S. and Europe, using not just 767s and container ships, but also self-driving trucks and drones. The report also said Amazon has a patent for “anticipatory package shipping” technology, which is just what it sounds like: When some Prime subscriber buys more deodorant, Amazon already has the box standing by, ready to label and ship. “It’s just one giant math exercise,” Deutsche Bank wrote, adding that Amazon has “hundreds of Ph.D. mathematicians” who spend their days optimizing logistics.

Others believe that Amazon will make a business out of its delivery network, as it did with Amazon Web Services, thereby challenging the world’s leading shipping companies. “I fully expect Amazon to build out a logistics supply chain that others can use,” says John Rossman, a former Amazon executive who’s now a managing director at the restructuring firm Alvarez & Marsal. “Over the next five years? I doubt it. Over 10 or 15 years? Oh yeah.”

by Devin Leonard, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Jake Stengel

Janette Beckman, Rhoyo Maravilla Gang girls, East LA, 1983
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Little Walter

Great Exploitations: The Poverty Industry

At least since the passage of California’s Proposition 13 in 1978—in which property owners voted to halve their property taxes—the United States has struggled with an anti-tax mentality revolving around the belief that government is ineffective. That sentiment is nowhere so clearly expressed as in wingnut Grover Norquist’s famous dictum that government should be small enough to drown in a bathtub. Indeed, the right’s efforts to starve government of the level of resources necessary for competent functioning have made a self-fulfilling prophecy of the claim that government is moribund.

Daniel L. Hatcher’s The Poverty Industry exposes one way that states have responded to the anti-tax climate and diminishing federal funds. Facing budget crises but reluctant to raise taxes, many state politicians treat federal dollars available for poverty-relief programs as an easy mark from which they can mine revenue without political consequence. They divert federal funding earmarked for social programs for children and the elderly, repurposing it for their general funds with the help of private companies that in effect launder money for them. A law professor at the University of Baltimore who has represented Maryland victims of such schemes, Hatcher presents a distressing picture of how states routinely defraud taxpayers of millions of federal dollars.

This is possible because there is a near-total absence of accountability for how states use federal money intended to fight poverty. Remarkably, states do not even have to pretend to have used all the funds for the stated purpose; they are only required to show that they are taking care of the populations for which the funds were intended. Medicaid, for example, operates as a matching program: states receive federal payments that match state spending on health care for low-income residents. The purpose of this “fiscal federalism” is to merge federal resources with states’ understandings of their own populations’ needs. But the grant system is rife with abuse. The more money that states claim they spend on qualifying Medicaid services, the more federal money they can receive. Hatcher demonstrates how states contract with companies to find ways to claim very high administrative costs for these social programs, which the federal government will reimburse, creating more money they can siphon off into the general fund.

Exacerbating states’ natural inclination toward grift, private companies have taken power at all stages of the welfare system and have done so with an eye on states’ and their own bottom lines. States almost universally contract with private corporations to administer their welfare programs. Welfare providers, such as hospitals, also hire private companies to help them maximize payment claims. States then hire additional private companies to help them reduce their payouts to providers and increase their claims from the federal government. The federal government hires the same or similar companies to audit Medicaid and other industries and to review state actions. These companies lobby heavily at the state and national levels for their own interests and with little public scrutiny brought to bear on how they conduct their business. Hatcher details how often conflicts of interest and pay-to-play arrangements influence the votes of state politicians, for example. At each step, the companies profit off a system designed to provide a safety net for our most vulnerable citizens. They are, quite literally, stealing from the poor. And although it has the authority to do so, the federal government rarely pursues prosecution against revenue maximization schemes.

Agency confidentiality statutes mean that it is very difficult to prove misallocation claims against state agencies, which regularly rebuff efforts to collect evidence by saying that opening records would violate recipients’ privacy. In 2004 Alabama spent enough money on child welfare to pay each child $3750 a month, but it only paid its foster care providers between $400 and $450 per month. The state claims the rest of the money is spent on providing services for the children, but accounting for nearly 90 percent of that money remains nearly impossible. And while Hatcher notes that some of it did go toward the intended services, much of it almost certainly found its way into poverty industry hands.

• • •

A leading corporate perpetrator of the poverty industry, in Hatcher’s telling, is MAXIMUS. Founded in 1975, the company works with governments around the globe as a private contractor for government aid programs. The company was found guilty of intentionally creating incorrect Medicaid claims while in a revenue maximization contract with the District of Columbia, and had to pay a $30 million federal fine in 2007. Yet its methods are so intensely profitable—for both states and itself—that it continues to win more state contracts. Hatcher uncovered MAXIMUS emails to Maryland officials in which it warned that the state was losing out by not pocketing more money intended for poor children; in the same email, it offered to help in that process.

Companies that arose in the military-industrial complex, including Northrup Grumman and Lockheed Martin, are now helping to create the poverty-industrial complex by going into this profitable revenue maximization business themselves. These companies make money if they can remove children from welfare rolls. A whistleblower lawsuit revealed that WellCare—a company that had already paid a $10 million fine for defrauding Florida’s Medicaid and Healthy Kids programs, and that has acknowledged illegal campaign finance contributions—held a celebratory dinner after removing 425 babies from state welfare rolls, lessening its financial responsibility and increasing corporate profits. WellCare had to pay a $137.5 million settlement to the Justice Department to settle that lawsuit.

As Hatcher explains, there are a number of ways for states to make money off of foster children. For example, the state can declare them disabled and therefore eligible for Social Security benefits. The state then names itself their trustees and gets to keep the money. Hatcher argues that the same is true for children receiving veterans’ benefits. For example, a guardian state can manufacture ways to increase the administrative costs of managing and dispersing benefits so that it can add those charges to the federal government’s tab. It may also seek to place children in its care with foster families rather than find a relative who can care for the child because it then profits from continuing to administer benefits for the child. It might put children in its care on prescription drugs to sedate their behavior so it can reduce staffing costs and charge for the medicines, even if their behavior can be managed without sedation. Tragically, states often treat vulnerable children in their care as cash machines.

by Erik Loomis, Boston Review |  Read more:

Image: Mother And Child (1908) by Egon Schiele

Suillus, hogfish (Lachnolaimus maximus) from Catesby's The natural history of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama island

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History of Computer Design: Macintosh

The physical design of the Macintosh has signs of this self-consciously revolutionary atmosphere. The members of the team each signed the cast of the inside of the case - though mainly technicians would see it, they put their signature on their work like the radical artists they felt they were. In a durable case of carefully selected ABS plastic and with a very fine texture that could make scratches less apparent, it was meant to last. This concern for detail and endurance included even the colour of the plastic, a tawny brown called PMS 453 that Jerry Manock thought would age well, unlike the lighter plastic of the Lisa which shifted with prolonged exposure to sunlight to a bright orange (Kunkel, 25).

Jobs encouraged the Macintosh team to learn from mistakes made by the large team designing the Lisa. The thick band of plastic over the Lisa's screen reminded Jobs of a Cro-Magnon forehead, and he guided the physical appearance of the Mac to make it seem more cheerful (Sculley, 160). Since the Macintosh was to be easy to use, it should have a friendly appearance. Like the Lisa, the Macintosh has its circuitry, disk drive and display in a single unit with a keyboard and mouse, a self-contained design requiring only three cables, including the power cord, and contributing to a far easier assembly for the user than the increasingly established PCs. However, its disk drive is below the display, making it taller, narrower, more symmetrical, and far more suggestive of a face. Rather than looking cantilevered, the display has only a small recess below to elevate it and give some room for the keyboard, but this also enhances the impression of a chin. The simple anthropomorphic quality of the case and the few cables contribute to the Macintosh's identity as a computer that ordinary people could understand.

The design of the case was closely guided by Steve Jobs, and his name appears on its design patent along with its producers, Terry Oyama with Jerry Manock. Oyama later said, "Even though Steve didn't draw any of the lines, his ideas and inspiration made the design what it is. To be honest, we didn't know what it meant for a computer to be 'friendly' until Steve told us" (Kunkel, 26). (...)

The way in which the Macintosh can be used is also strongly guided by physical design. The keyboard is like that of a typewriter except for the option and command keys, the latter sporting the Apple logo, that are on either side to accommodate both left and right-handed typists. It does not have the numerous function keys or even the cursor keys found on other computer keyboards. The lack of these keys is what Donald Norman calls a forcing device; without them, the user is forced to use the mouse. This was a very intentional strategy used by Jobs to ensure that the Macintosh would be used in the way designed, with a mouse rather than with the then-familiar key commands. This strategy also forced software developers to create applications that take advantage of the mouse-driven graphical interface, rather than reproduce existing software for the new platform (Levy, 194-5).

The ports on the back of the Macintosh are recessed to prevent users from trying to plug in non-compatible peripherals. Each of these ports is labeled with an easily understood icon developed by Apple according to the Deutsche Industrie Norman standard. These icons, on a clear plastic label applied by hand, help prevent injury to the computer and confusion for the user. To further simplify use, the power switch (the only switch on the computer; even ejecting a disk is controlled through the graphical interface) is located on the back where it cannot be hit accidentally, but has a smooth area around it in the otherwise textured plastic to guide the user's hand. Manock was proud to fine-tune his design in this way, and said, "That's the kind of detail that turns an ordinary product into an artifact." A similarly subtle detail is found on the underside of the handle at the top of the machine: ribs in the plastic there make it easier to grip the case (Kunkel, 24). (...)

The concern for details on the Macintosh was unprecedented for a computer and gave it a sense of personality. Many Macintosh owners feel a relationship with their computer that extends far beyond its functions. Upon its release, it was frequently described, not in terms of its technology, but as an art object. One early article advises caring for the machine as if signs of its normal use as a tool were unfortunate blemishes - it suggests users "clean the Macintosh's exterior with a soft sable paintbrush, which you can buy at any art store" (MacWorld, Dec. 1984, p. 45).

The Macintosh is clearly shaped to provide as much uniformity in user experience as possible. However, the limitations of the machine were sometimes resented. The Macintosh initially sold to technophiles, early adopters of innovations who tolerated an unrefined product in favour of novelty. These early Mac users were immediately passionate, but Douglas Adams typifies them by saying, "What I . . . fell in love with was not the machine itself, which was ridiculously slow and underpowered, but a romantic idea of the machine" (Levy, 187).

Ed Tracy, Landsnail |  Read more:
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At long last, a presidential candidate we can all agree on.
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Google Takes on Uber With New Ride-Share Service

Google is moving onto Uber Technologies Inc.’s turf with its own ride-sharing service in San Francisco that would help commuters carpool at far cheaper rates, according to a person familiar with the matter, jumping into a booming but fiercely competitive market.

Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., began a pilot program around its California headquarters in May that enables several thousand area workers at specific firms to use the Waze navigation app to connect with fellow commuters. It now plans to open the program to all San Francisco-area Waze users this fall, the person said, with hopes of expanding the service if successful. Waze, which Google acquired in 2013, offers real-time driving directions based on information from other drivers.

Unlike Uber and its crosstown rival Lyft Inc., both of which largely operate as on-demand taxi businesses, Waze wants to connect riders with drivers who are already headed in the same direction. The company has said it aims to make fares low enough to discourage drivers from operating as taxi drivers. Waze’s current pilot charges riders at most 54 cents a mile—far less than most Uber and Lyft rides—and, for now, Google doesn’t take a cut.

Still, Google’s push into ride-sharing could portend a clash with Uber, a seven-year-old firm valued at roughly $68 billion that largely invented the concept of summoning a car with a smartphone app.

Google and Uber were once allies—Google invested $258 million in Uber in 2013—but increasingly see each other as rivals. Alphabet executive David Drummond said Monday that he resigned from Uber’s board because of the increasing competition between the companies. Uber, which has long used Google’s mapping software for its ride-hailing service, recently began developing its own maps.

by Jack Nicas, WSJ |  Read more:

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We Are Nowhere Close to the Limits of Athletic Performance

[ed. See also: Born to Rest.]

For many years I lived in Eugene, Oregon, also known as “track-town USA” for its long tradition in track and field. Each summer high-profile meets like the United States National Championships or Olympic Trials would bring world-class competitors to the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field. It was exciting to bump into great athletes at the local cafe or ice cream shop, or even find myself lifting weights or running on a track next to them. One morning I was shocked to be passed as if standing still by a woman running 400-meter repeats. Her training pace was as fast as I could run a flat out sprint over a much shorter distance.

The simple fact was that she was an extreme outlier, and I wasn’t. Athletic performance follows a normal distribution, like many other quantities in nature. That means that the number of people capable of exceptional performance falls off exponentially as performance levels increase. While an 11-second 100-meter can win a high school student the league or district championship, a good state champion runs sub-11, and among 100 state champions only a few have any hope of running near 10 seconds.

Keep going along this curve, and you get to the freaks among freaks—competitors who shatter records and push limits beyond imagination. When Carl Lewis dominated sprinting in the late 1980s, sub-10 second 100m times were rare, and anything in the 10-second flat range guaranteed a high finish, even at the Olympics. Lewis was a graceful 6 feet 2 inches, considered tall for a sprinter. Heights much greater than his were supposed to be a disadvantage for a sprinter, forcing a slower cadence and reduced speeds—at least that was the conventional wisdom.

So no one anticipated the coming of a Usain Bolt. At a muscular 6 feet 5 inches, and finishing almost half a second faster than the best of the previous generation, he seemed to come from another species entirely. His stride length can reach a remarkable 9.3 feet,1 and, in the words of a 2013 study in the European Journal of Physics, demonstrated performance that “is of physical interest since he can achieve, until now, accelerations and speeds that no other runner can.”

Bolt’s times weren’t just faster than anyone else in the world. They were considerably faster even than those of a world-class runner from the previous generation that was using performance-enhancing drugs. The Jamaican-born Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson achieved a world-record time of 9.79 seconds at the 1988 Olympic Games, beating Lewis and boasting that he’d have been faster if he hadn’t raised his hand in victory just ahead of the finish line. It would later be found out that he’d been using steroids.

Even the combination of an elite runner and anabolic steroids, though, was not enough to outcompete a genetic outlier. Bolt achieved a time of 9.58 seconds at the 2009 World Athletics Championship, setting a world record and beating his own previous record by a full tenth of a second.

We find a similar story in the NBA with Shaquille O’Neal. O’Neal was the first 7-footer in the league who retained the power and agility of a much smaller man. Neither a beanpole nor a plodding hulk, he would have been an athletic 200-pounder if scaled down to 6 feet in height. When Shaq got the ball near the hoop, no man (or sometimes even two men) could stop him from dunking it. Soon after his entry into the league, basket frames had to be reinforced to prevent being destroyed by his dunks. After the Lakers won three championships in a row, the NBA was forced to change their rules drastically—allowing zone defenses—in order to reduce Shaq’s domination of the game. Here was a genetic outlier whose performance was unequalled by anyone else in a league that has long been criticized for its soft anti-doping policy; for example, it only added blood testing for human growth hormone to its program last year. Whatever doping may have been going on, it wasn’t enough to get anyone to Shaq’s level.

By comparison, the potential improvements achievable by doping effort are relatively modest. In weightlifting, for example, Mike Israetel, a professor of exercise science at Temple University, has estimated that doping increases weightlifting scores by about 5 to 10 percent. Compare that to the progression in world record bench press weights: 361 pounds in 1898, 363 pounds in 1916, 500 pounds in 1953, 600 pounds in 1967, 667 pounds in 1984, and 730 pounds in 2015. Doping is enough to win any given competition, but it does not stand up against the long-term trend of improving performance that is driven, in part, by genetic outliers. As the population base of weightlifting competitors has increased, outliers further and further out on the tail of the distribution have appeared, driving up world records.

Similarly, Lance Armstrong’s drug-fuelled victory of the 1999 Tour de France gave him a margin of victory over second-place finisher Alex Zulle of 7 minutes, 37 seconds, or about 0.1 percent. That pales in comparison to the dramatic secular increase in speeds the Tour has seen over the past half century: Eddy Merckx won the 1971 tour, which was about the same distance as the 1999 tour, in a time 5 percent worse than Zulle’s. Certainly, some of this improvement is due to training methods and better equipment. But much of it is simply due to the sport’s ability to find competitors of ever more exceptional natural ability, further and further out along the tail of what’s possible.

We’re just scratching the surface of what genetic outliers can do. The normal distribution we see in athletic capabilities is a telltale signature of many small additive effects that are all independent from each other. Ultimately, these additive effects come from gene variants, or alleles, with small positive and negative consequences on traits such as height, muscularity, and coordination. It is now understood, for example, that great height is due to the combination of an unusually large number of positive variants, and possibly some very rare mutations that have a large effect on their own.

The genomics researcher George Church maintains a list of some of these single mutations. They include a variant of LRP5 that leads to extra-strong bones, a variant of MSTN that produces extra lean muscle, and a variant of SCN9A that is associated with pain insensitivity.

Church has also been involved in one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of recent decades: the development of a highly efficient gene editing tool called CRISPR, which has been approved for clinical trials for medical applications. If CRISPR-related technologies develop as anticipated, designer humans are at most a few decades away. Editing is most easily done soon after conception, when the embryo consists of only a small number of cells, but it is also possible in adults. Clinical trials of CRISPR, when they start this year, will edit existing cells in adults using an injection of a viral vector. It seems likely that CRISPR, or some improved version of it, will be established to be both safe and effective in the near future.

by Stephen Hsu, Nautilus |  Read more:

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A Brief History of the College Textbook Pricing Racket

When I recently wrote about airport stores, one of the most interesting (albeit minor) facets of the piece was the fact that airport travelers are generally considered a captive audience, making it easy for shops to jack up prices.

Airports, though, are amateur hour compared to the college textbook industry.

Any industry that can increase its prices by 1,041 percent over a 38-year period—as the textbook industry did between 1977 and 2015, according to an NBC News analysis—is one that knows how to keep, and hold, an audience. (It's almost like they're selling EpiPens.)

And, as students across the country return to school, this is probably the perfect time of year to ask: Was it always this way? The answer: no, and you can blame a big shift in the '70s. (...)

What happened in the '70s? Let's ask someone from the '70s: In a 1975 piece for the The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, journalist Phillip Whitten, who spent time running his own publishing firms, said that shifts in the uptake in textbooks, driven by a desire to standardize curriculum as well as to make things easier for students, led to a significant increase in the use of textbooks during this period.

But textbook companies of the era didn't have it easy. In his piece, Whitten crunched the numbers of a hypothetical textbook, one sold for $12.50 but generally offered to college stores at a wholesale price of $10. (In today's dollars, the book would have sold for $44.73 before markup by the bookstore—not a bad price, actually.)

In Whitten's example, the book sold 50,000 copies, netting half a million dollars in sales, but was offset by a variety of costs, including royalties, marketing, and manufacturing. Still though, the book made $79,000 in pre-tax profit, a solid 15.8 percent margin. But he noted that the game for publishers was generally not that easy, due to the existence of both fixed and variable costs.

"If Sociology in Modern World had sold 20,000 copies, we would have lost $75,000; had it sold 10,000 copies—and there are many texts that do not do even that well—our loss would have been greater than $126,000," Whitten wrote.

(How does that compare to the modern day? Priceonomics writer Zachary Crockett, who spent time working for a textbook publisher, breaks down the math similarly to Whitten, though these days, publishers tend to make $40 in pure profit on a $180 book—a 22 percent margin.) (...)

Last year, two separate incidents occurred that raised the ire of textbook critics. In some ways, they kind of dovetail into one another.

The good professor, punished: Last October, Alain Bourget, an associate math professor at the California State University at Fullerton, received a formal reprimand after choosing not to give his students the $180 textbook recommended to him by the school, instead offering a cheaper $80 option, supplemented by online offerings. The school said this broke the rules, because he veered from the book every other introductory linear algebra course was using at the school. He fought the reprimand, but failed. (His hometown paper treated him like a hero.)

The economist who's made bank from a single book: Harvard University Economist Gregory Mankiw was raked over the coals by The Oregonian last year for the high cost of his tome Principles of Economics, an introductory book that sells on Amazon for $333.35 and can be rented on Chegg for $49.99. The absurdity of Mankiw's book, which exemplifies many of the economic disparities covered in the book, was further highlighted by writer Richard Read's story. When asked if he'd ever write an open-source textbook, Mankiw had this to say: "Let me fix that for you: Would you keep doing your job if you stopped being paid? Why or why not?" A fair point—until you realize that Mankiw has, by some estimates, made $42 million in royalties from this book alone.

by Ernie Smith, Pricenomics |  Read more:

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Reverse Voxsplaining: Drugs Vs. Chairs

EpiPens, useful medical devices which reverse potentially fatal allergic reactions, have recently quadrupled in price, putting pressure on allergy sufferers and those who care for them. Vox writes that this “tells us a lot about what’s wrong with American health care” – namely that we don’t regulate it enough:

The story of Mylan’s giant EpiPen price increase is, more fundamentally, a story about America’s unique drug pricing policies. We are the only developed nation that lets drugmakers set their own prices, maximizing profits the same way sellers of chairs, mugs, shoes, or any other manufactured goods would.

Let me ask Vox a question: when was the last time that America’s chair industry hiked the price of chairs 400% and suddenly nobody in the country could afford to sit down? When was the last time that the mug industry decided to charge $300 per cup, and everyone had to drink coffee straight from the pot or face bankruptcy? When was the last time greedy shoe executives forced most Americans to go barefoot? And why do you think that is?

The problem with the pharmaceutical industry isn’t that they’re unregulated just like chairs and mugs. The problem with the pharmaceutical industry is that they’re part of a highly-regulated cronyist system that works completely differently from chairs and mugs.

If a chair company decided to charge $300 for their chairs, somebody else would set up a woodshop, sell their chairs for $250, and make a killing – and so on until chairs cost normal-chair-prices again. When Mylan decided to sell EpiPens for $300, in any normal system somebody would have made their own EpiPens and sold them for less. It wouldn’t have been hard. Its active ingredient, epinephrine, is off-patent, was being synthesized as early as 1906, and costs about ten cents per EpiPen-load.

Why don’t they? They keep trying, and the FDA keeps refusing to approve them for human use. For example, in 2009, a group called Teva Pharmaceuticals announced a plan to sell their own EpiPens in the US. The makers of the original EpiPen sued them, saying that they had patented the idea epinephrine-injecting devices. Teva successfully fended off the challenge and brought its product to the FDA, which rejected it because of “certain major deficiencies”. As far as I know, nobody has ever publicly said what the problem was – we can only hope they at least told Teva.

In 2010, another group, Sandoz, asked for permission to sell a generic EpiPen. Once again, the original manufacturers sued for patent infringement. According to Wikipedia, “as of July 2016 this litigation was ongoing”.

In 2011, Sanoji asked for permission to sell a generic EpiPen called e-cue. This got held up for a while because the FDA didn’t like the name (really!), but eventually was approved under the name Auvi-Q, (which if I were a giant government agency that rejected things for having dumb names, would be going straight into the wastebasket). But after unconfirmed reports of incorrect dosage delivery, they recalled all their products off the market.

This year, a company called Adamis decided that in order to get around the patent on devices that inject epinephrine, they would just sell pre-filled epinephrine syringes and let patients inject themselves. The FDA rejected it, noting that the company involved had done several studies but demanding that they do some more.

Also, throughout all of this a bunch of companies are merging and getting bought out by other companies and making secret deals with each other to retract their products and it’s all really complicated.

None of this is because EpiPens are just too hard to make correctly. Europe has eight competing versions. But aside from the EpiPen itself, only one competitor has ever made it past the FDA and onto the pharmacy shelf – a system called Adrenaclick.

And of course there’s a catch. With ordinary medications, pharmacists are allowed to interpret prescriptions for a brand name as prescriptions for the generic unless doctors ask them not to. For example, if I write a prescription for “Prozac”, a pharmacist knows that I mean anything containing fluoxetine, the chemical ingredient sold under the Prozac brand. They don’t have to buy it directly from Prozac trademark-holder Eli Lilly. It’s like if someone asks for a Kleenex and you give them a regular tissue, or if you suggest putting something in a Tupperware but actually use a plastic container made by someone other than the Tupperware Corporation.

EpiPens are protected from this substitution. If a doctor writes a prescription for “EpiPen”, the pharmacist must give an EpiPen-brand EpiPen, not an Adrenaclick-brand EpiPen. This is apparently so that children who have learned how to use an EpiPen don’t have to relearn how to use an entirely different device (hint: jam the pointy end into your body).

If you know anything at all about doctors, you know that they have way too much institutional inertia to change from writing one word on a prescription pad to writing a totally different word on a prescription pad, especially if the second word is almost twice as long, and especially especially if it’s just to do something silly like save a patient money. I have an attending who, whenever we are dealing with anything other than a life-or-death matter, just dismisses it with “Nobody ever died from X”, and I can totally hear him saying “Nobody ever died from paying extra for an adrenaline injector”. So Adrenaclick continues to languish in obscurity.

So why is the government having so much trouble permitting a usable form of a common medication?

There are a lot of different factors, but let me focus on the most annoying one. EpiPen manufacturer Mylan Inc spends about a million dollars on lobbying per year. OpenSecrets.org tells us what bills got all that money. They seem to have given the most to defeat S.214, the “Preserve Access to Affordable Generics Act”. The bill would ban pharmaceutical companies from bribing generic companies not to create generic drugs.

Did they win? Yup. In fact, various versions of this bill have apparently failed so many times that FDA Law Blog notes that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different result”.

So let me try to make this easier to understand.

Imagine that the government creates the Furniture and Desk Association, an agency which declares that only IKEA is allowed to sell chairs. IKEA responds by charging $300 per chair. Other companies try to sell stools or sofas, but get bogged down for years in litigation over whether these technically count as “chairs”. When a few of them win their court cases, the FDA shoots them down anyway for vague reasons it refuses to share, or because they haven’t done studies showing that their chairs will not break, or because the studies that showed their chairs will not break didn’t include a high enough number of morbidly obese people so we can’t be sure they won’t break. Finally, Target spends tens of millions of dollars on lawyers and gets the okay to compete with IKEA, but people can only get Target chairs if they have a note signed by a professional interior designer saying that their room needs a “comfort-producing seating implement” and which absolutely definitely does not mention “chairs” anywhere, because otherwise a child who was used to sitting on IKEA chairs might sit down on a Target chair the wrong way, get confused, fall off, and break her head.

(You’re going to say this is an unfair comparison because drugs are potentially dangerous and chairs aren’t –but 50 people die each year from falling off chairs in Britain alone and as far as I know nobody has ever died from an EpiPen malfunction.)

Imagine that this whole system is going on at the same time that IKEA donates millions of dollars lobbying senators about chair-related issues, and that these same senators vote down a bill preventing IKEA from paying off other companies to stay out of the chair industry. Also, suppose that a bunch of people are dying each year of exhaustion from having to stand up all the time because chairs are too expensive unless you have really good furniture insurance, which is totally a thing and which everybody is legally required to have.

And now imagine that a news site responds with an article saying the government doesn’t regulate chairs enough.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Image: Jim Bourg/Reuters