There’s an interesting review of Susan Greenfield’s book, How Digital Technologies Are Leaving Their Mark on Our Brains at the Washington Post you might want to take a look at. Here’s it’s kernel:

Greenfield asserts that the digital revolution exploits our biological propensity for mindlessness. She cites laboratory studies finding that social networking and video gaming trigger dopamine in the same manner as junk food and Ecstasy. Moreover, she contends, because cyberspace lacks causal sequence, is devoid of immediate consequences and gives instant access to information without guidance, our attention spans shrink, deeper thinking declines and interpersonal bonds wither. Hardest hit are “Digital Natives,” whose “impressionable, plastic brains” are born into an environment that upends thousands of years of evolution.

I don’t think that things are quite that bleak. I recall nearly 50 years ago when I was taking a psycholinguistics class the class broke to watch a brand new television program, Sesame Street. After the program we reconvened to discuss what we’d seen. The consensus was that Sesame Street would facilitate something that was already happening, a progressive loss of attention span.

That the new modes of communication will have cognitive, behavioral, and social effects can hardly be denied at this point. My nieces and nephews find the movies of 70 years ago very difficult to follow. It isn’t the social differences but that the approach to storytelling used is just too leisurely for them. IMO the high speed, high reward, and non-linear approaches to communication will change what makes sense to people in ways that are hard to predict. My suspicion is that the people of the future won’t “lose their minds” but those minds will be less like our than ours are like the minds of people who lived 300 years ago with the exception of memory. Memory will be nearly forgotten. Why remember anything when you can just google it?

There’s an interesting article (mostly tables) at zerohedge on debt to GDP ratios by country. Here’s the conclusion:

We have written on this topic on countless occasions in the past, so we will be brief: either the Fed inflates this debt away, or one can kiss any hope of economic growth goodbye, even if that means even more central bank rate cuts, more QEs everywhere, and stock markets trading at +? while the middle class around the globe disappears and only the 0.001% is left standing.

The only two observations I can contribute are that a) the major economies aren’t buying a lot of economic growth with all that debt and b) in this regard our trajectory isn’t as bad as some other countries, e.g. China.

There’s an interesting article on economic segregation at City Journal. Here’s the conclusion:

A decade or so ago, Bill Bishop noted how talented and educated people were concentrating more in some places than others, a tendency he dubbed “the big sort.” The big sort has now become an even bigger sort. America’s cities and metropolitan areas have cleaved into clusters of wealth, college education and highly-paid knowledge-based occupations that are strikingly different from its concentrations of poverty, low levels of education, and poorly-paid service occupations.

Where cities and neighborhoods once mixed different kinds of people together, they are now becoming more homogeneous and segregated by income, education, and occupation. In separating metro-dwelling Americans across these three key dimensions of socio-economic class, this bigger sort threatens to undermine the essential role that cities have played as incubators of innovation, creativity, and economic progress.

It is not just that the economic divide in America has grown wider; it’s that the rich and poor effectively occupy different worlds, even when they live in the same cities and metros.

Thank you, Interstate Highway System.

Andrew Biggs seems to share a problem endemic among the writers of op-eds. He is much better at stating the problem than at proposing solutions. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal he does a good job of outlining the problem faced by the Social Security Disability Insurance Trust Fund:

Sometime next year Social Security’s $150 billion disability-insurance program will become insolvent. The program, which offers income supplements to those who cannot work full time due to physical or mental disabilities, has buckled as the number of beneficiaries has soared to more than 11 million in 2014, from 3.8 million in 1984. The bipartisan Social Security Advisory Board has urged reforms.

Yet the Obama administration’s 2016 budget proposes the opposite of reform: an unconditional transfer of revenues from Social Security’s retirement program. The president’s proposal will likely be blocked thanks to a House budget rule that forbids unconditional revenue transfers. The question now is: Will serious reform be a reality under President Obama?

The Administration’s approach is to kick the can down the road past the 2016 election when it will be someone else’s problem, temporarily transferring the problem to the Social Security Retirement Income Trust Fund which has problems of its own the transfer will only exacerbate. Here’s his solution:

If the House sticks to the rule it passed in January—which allows revenue transfers only when coupled with other measures—the administration might be forced to accept substantive reforms. The administration’s budget proposes trial policies such as rehabilitative services for the disabled before they can claim benefits, along with incentives for employers to retain workers with disabilities. Turning those limited trial programs into broader requirements could form the foundations of lasting reform.

Using similar policies, countries such as the Netherlands—once a disability basket-case—reduced the inflow of disability beneficiaries by 60% in six years. The Netherlands lowered taxes for employers who can keep the disabled on the job. The Dutch reforms also required that all workers considering applying for disability first construct a rehabilitation plan with their employer and be able to show that they have followed through on it.

The U.S. should explore similar options. The country can’t afford to paper over the need for reform once again.

That might be a workable solution under conditions of full employment and rising incomes. Those are not the conditions we see today. The great question unaddressed and unanswered by the op-ed is how long were new applicants for disability benefits unemployed prior to applying? Here’s the story I would tell, very different from Mr. Biggs’s.

Disability is the unemployment insurance of last resort. People would rather work than go on disability but there just aren’t enough jobs available today. The real solution to the problems of the disability insurance trust fund is a robust economy that’s producing more jobs faster than people are coming into the workforce. That will either require reforms to our trade, fiscal, financial, transportation, healthcare, and/or immigration policies or a jobs program beyond anything that’s been dreamed of to date.

No wonder people are proposing short-sighted and unworkable patches to a serious problem.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm outlines his idea of freedom in healthcare:

Republicans need a strategy that is easy to understand, broadly popular and difficult to oppose. It must unite Republicans and divide congressional Democrats, while empowering Republican governors and legislators to resist administration pressure. I believe that strategy is what I would call “the freedom option.” Every American should have the right to decide not to participate in ObamaCare: If you like ObamaCare and its subsidies, you can keep it. If you don’t, you are free to buy the health insurance that fits your needs.

The freedom option would fulfill the commitment the president made over and over again about ObamaCare: If you like your health insurance you can keep it. If Republicans crafted a simple bill that guarantees the right of individuals and businesses to opt out of ObamaCare, buy the health insurance they choose from any willing seller (with risk pools completely separate from ObamaCare), millions of Americans would rejoice and exercise this freedom. Such a proposal would be easy for Republicans to articulate and defend. And it would be very difficult for Democrats to attack.

The dictionary definition of “freedom” is “the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action”. Does Sen. Gramm’s usage conform to that definition or does it seem oddly one-dimensional to you as it does to me? His “freedom option” would be broadly constrained by the myriad of laws governing insurance not to mention by financial necessity. It also does not seem to include those who don’t care to purchase insurance at all.

There is an inevitable and inherent problem when you attempt to apply the concept of liberty interests to goods or services that are intrinsically rivalrous (one person can consume the good or service without reducing its availability to another) and exclusive (people can be excluded). They operate within the requirements of supply and demand and someone must pay for them.

In a true “freedom option” there would be no restrictions of any kind over who could provide healthcare insurance, goods, or services or over what you could purchase or from whom if you had the money. We used to have such a system and our present system evolved over the period of the last century because of the serious problems posed by it. I don’t think that very many people really want to return to such a system.

What I think they want is to be able to consume as much as they care to without paying for it on the consumer end of the equation and to be able to maintain a high and ever-rising standard of living on the producer side. That would be free not only from coercion but from the constraints of the laws of economics, mathematics, and physics. It is a fantasy.

I touch on this subject every once in a while. As a general rule in the English-speaking world, we tend not to call countries by the names their inhabitants do. If we did we’d call Italy “Italia”, Spain “España”, and Germany “Deutschland”. Sverige. Suomen. Zhong guo (with high level tone and rising tone on the first and second syllables, respectively).

Calling Lebanon “the Levant”, Ukraine “the Ukraine”, and Crimea “the Crimea” are old, established usages and there’s nothing wrong with any of them. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were literal translations from French. In French the article is mandatory, therefore l’Ukraine. Does anyone complain about that? Insisting that the definite article not be used when referring to Ukraine is either an affectation or a political statement and I’m wary about getting into other people’s political squabbles. “The Ukraine” is a usage that goes back at least three hundred years in English. Calling the country “Ukraine” isn’t calling it what its inhabitants do (that would be something like “Ukraina”). It’s a political statement.

I think the last time I got into this was over “Burma”. Myanmar is what the present government calls the country. As I understand it “Burma” (or, more accurately, the British pronunciation “Buhmuh”) is pretty close to what some of the inhabitants used to call it and is still well-established in English. Why abandon the established usage to take sides with the present governemnt?

John Robb has a pair of intriguing posts today (a high output for him) on the war against DAESH in the Middle East. The first, about the increasing irrelevance to U. S. diplomacy of the Middle East, concludes:

• If the US does get involved in Middle East conflicts it’s due to outdated policy and doctrine.
• Nobody in the West will do anything to stop the spread of ISIS (as a humanitarian crisis it rates well below Rwanda).
• Saudi Arabia is going to get desperate to get the US to intervene. It sees ISIS as an existential threat. How will it do that? I’ve got some ideas…

In the second he expands on what the Saud family’s options actually are:

1. Build a wall
2. Get Al Qaeda to fight on their side by attacking the U. S. which would force the U. S. hand against DAESH.
3. Hire Western mercenaries

They’re already building their wall, I’m skeptical of the efficacy of the second, and I think the U. S. is being prepped as the best candidate for “Western mercenary”.

Interesting stuff.

BTW, the documentary about Edward Snowden, Citizen Four, won an Academy Award last night. Is that the first time a blogger has been up on the stage holding the gold statuette?

Ann Althouse complains about the Washington Post’s going after prospective Republican presidential candidates for what are pretty flimsy reasons:

The attack on Walker is low, because it uses the terms “union” and “labor” without specifying what I think must always be specified to be fair: Walker’s reforms were about public employee unions. The Walker article is absurdly emotive and sentimental, larded with quotes from nice people who are bewildered and sad. You have to read to paragraph 5 to get the first indication that Walker’s law only had to do with the special problem of public unions, whose collective bargaining is not with private management, but with the government, the representatives of the people, not any commercial operation.

and

The low blow for Jeb is a shot at his wife.

In 1999, Columba Bush… was detained and fined by federal customs officials for misrepresenting the amount of clothing and jewelry she had bought while on a solo five-day shopping spree in Paris…. Jeb Bush said the first lady had misled customs officials because she did not want him to know that she had spent about $19,000 on the trip….

What’s wrong with a rich woman spending $19,000 shopping when she’s gone to Paris by herself?

I know battlespace preparation when I see it. The WaPo isn’t sure who the Republican candidate will be in 2016 so they’re going after all of them just in case.

It seems to me that complaining about how much designer women’s clothing costs (when they’re spending their own money) is pretty feeble. Who cares?