Comments on The Public Imperative

Picture the world of a busy city emergency room with a steady stream of gunshot victims arriving and an overwhelmed staff. What could you do to improve this situation?

Most of the "health care" system in the US, the part not swept up in keeping track of who is paying, is consumed with finding every faster and better ways to deal with gunshot victims.

The focus of "public health" on the other hand is to walk outside and ask, "Why are so many people getting shot, and what can we do to stop that from happening in the first place?"

The "health care debate" in the US today seems to be focused on heated debate about which insurance scheme will be used to pay for better gunshot treatment centers, what order will the victims be treated in, and whether some gunshot victims should simply be refused treatment.

We need to stand further back and go, "Wait. Why do we need ANY gunshot treatment centers at all? " Stop arguing over WHO is going to pay for them and whether that should be public, private, third-party or other mumbo-jumbo.

Something is seriously wrong further back in the picture, further upstream, that should be on the table here if we want to "reduce costs" and "improve health" and maintain a healthy workforce for corporations to draw on for workers or for the military to draw on for soldiers, or for any of us to select from when looking for a healthy mate.

This approach of going back further upstream for solutions has worked well in the past. Rather than treating so many people with Cholera, we invested in making sanitary sewers and clean water supplies. Much better.

Rather than developing clinics that could replace a lung in under 30 minutes for under $100,000, we removed smoking cigarettes from the American mainstream. Much better solution.

Today, we have similar problems with cancer, diabetes, obesity, need for coronary bypass surgery, etc. Stop getting "better" at "solutions" that simply institutionalize the problem, and go back to solve the original problem. The best amount to spend on treatment is ZERO. Why do we have so many people who need coronary bypass surgery at all so that this becomes a matter of national policy debate? Something is seriously wrong further upstream.

Small and large business owners have missed their strongest leverage point when they focus on the question of WHO is going to pay for all the expensive treatment of their sick employees instead of on WHY are all these people getting sick in the first place?

It is not natural that so many people should be obese and diabetic, for example. We should stop arguing about who will pay for this and spend a lot more energy on the question - why is this suddenly happening?

This whole debate over "health care" is meaningless unless we stop talking about who pays and start talking about why so many people need so many repairs in the first place.

It's not a "given" that people just "are" that sick. In countries with better health care systems than the USA, people in general never even need these repairs in the first place, because they don't break.

Roger Cohen, today's New York Times, in The Public Imperative today says in part

A reader, John Dowd, sent me this comment: “In Europe generally the populace in the various countries feels enough sense of social connectedness to enforce a social contract that benefits all, albeit at a fairly high cost. In America it is not like that. There is endless worry that one’s neighbor may be getting more than his or her “fair” share.”

Post-heroic European societies, having paid in blood for violent political movements born of inequality and class struggle, see greater risk in unfettered individualism than in social solidarity. Americans, born in revolt against Europe and so ever defining themselves against the old Continent’s models, mythologize their rugged (always rugged) individualism as the bulwark against initiative-sapping entitlements. We’re not talking about health here. We’re talking about national narratives and mythologies — as well as money. These are things not much susceptible to logic. But in matters of life and death, mythology must cede to reality, profit to wellbeing.

I can see the conservative argument that welfare undermines the work ethic and dampens moral fiber. Provide sufficient unemployment benefits and people will opt to chill rather than labor. But it’s preposterous to extend this argument to health care. Guaranteeing health coverage doesn’t incentivize anybody to get meningitis.

Don't get me started on noting that the debate about "health care" in the US seems to have nothing to do with health, or even with care, but with some prostituted meaning of the term that has to do with which insurance middle-man company will profit from people's medical treatment, and who ultimately ends up paying for whose far-too-expensive treatments. It is an argument about money, not a discussion of what comprises health and what set of interventions in a person's life supports health.

So, let me at least make what seems an obvious point, yet one that is completely absent from this discussion in the national media. It is far cheaper to change the oil in your car than it is to replace the engine. Isn't this fact obvious to people?

It is cheaper, by a factor of about 100, to provide "primary care" (think "oil change") to people than it is to try to provide heroic repairs (engine replacements) after they have become seriously ill.

It is also CLEARLY to everyone's benefit that ANYONE who shows signs of infectious disease get some kind of treatment early, rather than continue to walk around infecting other people.

It is incomprehensible to me why one option of the public debate is not an insistence that EVERY PERSON in the country, legal or not, should receive primary health care (oil changes). This is not an entitlement to an open-ended credit card for expensive drugs and surgery -- it is a practical provision of expertise and advise and a little bit of medicine to keep the population from becoming sick and becoming an expensive burden.

Health is contagious. So is ill-health and many diseases. In fact, healthy life styles are contagious, and so are unhealthy life-styles. The reality is that, if we surround ourselves with sick people, we really increase the odds that we will become sick ourselves.

Almost all the increases in life-span in the last 100 years have come from public health, not from expensive hospital care. They have included such items as providing clean, safe, drinkable water, and requiring that restaurants and food-handlers follow rules that reduce the odds of massive food-poisoning episodes. These are provided on a social basis, to everyone, and make no sense to provide these to a few people and not to others.

It is in everyone's interest that everyone be able to go somewhere and get an education medical evaluation of why they do not feel well and what steps they might take to fix that. This does not require that we agree to pay $450,000 for open heart surgery for them. It is much more likely that the assessment will show that the person eats too much high-fructose-corn-syrup and needs to exercise more. Most of the ill health in the USA today is due to poor life-style choices, not germs.

It is not easy for a single human being to live a healthy life-style when surrounded by friends and coworkers who live unhealthy life styles. It's hard to quit smoking when everyone around you continues to smoke and offer you cigarettes every time you meet. It is easy to resolve that "I will exercise more" but it is hard to carry through with this, especially alone.

What can really help everyone be stronger is to live within a culture where the correct desired behavior, the one our bodies need and expect, such as exercise, is part of the cultural norm. If everyone exercises, and the world is set up to make that easy, it is far more likely that I will exercise too. There is a very strong "go with the flow" lemming-type effect here. People need that.

If it is very hard, on the other hand, and expensive, to go see someone at the first signs of illness, the odds that this will happen, let alone become standard practice, head towards zero. We will not go see the doctor for primary care if a doctor's appointment takes 2 weeks to schedule, or longer, and costs $100, and requires taking the day off from work and an insane wait of four to eight hours, with kids in tow, sitting in an "urgent care" center with 15 other people who clearly ARE sick.

The debate over "health care" in the US would do well to be subdivided into two parts -- one part dealing with the wretched stated of "basic family and primary health care" and the other part dealing with the far more expensive open-ended part of health care.

For example, why have we let the legal and financial system make it essentially impossible to have a first-layer of health care for people that consists of nurses and others who can deal with inexpensive situations in an inexpensive and very rapid way, including advice over the telephone? Yes, such a system will miss some subtle issues that expensive MD's would have caught; on the other hand, it will just as definitely CATCH many situations that MD's would have missed, particularly if the lower-paid staff can develop a more frequent contact with the patient, learn their names, become familiar with their family situation, and understand at a glance what's up with Sid today, again.

There are a very limited set of things that expensive MD's, in expensive offices, can detect in a 12 minute appointment where the doctor must spend 7 minutes typing on their computer during the "visit", and every visit you see a different doctor who doesn't even know your name. That system, is, in fact, BROKEN AND DEFECTIVE. It makes no logical sense in terms of actual physical health care, only in terms of the logistics of setting up a chain of "visits" that are easy to record and bill for the "health care system".

In other words, the actions, buildings, equipment, and personnel in our doctor's offices and hospitals are essentially working all day to support the health care system itself.

Treatment, and actual improvement in the health of the patient has become a secondary objective, often forgotten and lost in the mix.

Meanwhile, as is obvious walking through any crowded space, elevator, station, or office in the late autumn, many people are busy coughing and sneezing and barely remaining upright, because they didn't have primary care, let alone a social environment of care in which, when they are sick, they can actually stay home and rest as they should. We accept it as "normal" that people who have "exhausted their sick days" (if they ever had any) will simply come to work sick and infect the rest of us.

The whole method of dealing with primary care is broken. That's a totally different problem than who is going to pay for elective heart surgery for Mr. Jones.

Job source, in simpler terms

Let me rephrase the gist of the last post regarding jobs.

The reason we don't have jobs for everyone is because our corporate management is
(a) out of touch with what the world actually needs, and would buy if we could supply it, and
(b) unable to figure out how to make that kind of product cheaply.

In turn, the reason behind both of those failings is that management is attempting to solve these problems without the use of the non-management part of the company, namely, the rest of the staff, and the customers.

That, in turn, is due to an unconscious arrogance, a belief that the staff is generally incompetent and surely can't solve any problem that the manager can't solve, and a legacy tradition of feeling that asking for help is a bad thing to do, a weak thing, and will "lose control" of the employees.

Figuring out what the customers really need requires sincere listening skills and strong empathy, even for people from different cultures, which is definitely NOT something that is taught in Business school. MBA's are, in anything, trained to ignore and order staff around, not to listen to them, nor to ask their help listening to the world of potential customers out there.

Similarly, adapting to changed circumstances and cleverly solving how to deliver goods and services cheaply is something that employees are prevented from doing, because it would involve them acting like "management." What if, gasp, they came up with such a good solution that their manager's prior solution looked bad?!!! Can't have that! What if they became self-directing and didn't even need the manager any more -- can't have that!

It is management's tendency to cling to legacy models of evoking the best in people that blinds and paralyzes the employees, so that they are unable, because of management, to solve the problems the company needs to solve in order to stay in business.

NO additional number of jobs "like that" is going to make this country thrive.

Don't get me wrong -- in most companies employees are asked repeatedly for their comments on what the company should do differently. It's just that management doesn't want to hear the replies, doesn't listen to them, and punishes anyone who suggests that management IS the problem. For example, managers typically evaluate employees performance in operating within the limits and directions set, but it is rare for employees, in turn, to evaluate their management's performance in providing decent limits and directions or in listening to adjustments suggested by employees.

IN any case, after the first few employees who offer actual suggestions have their hands cut off or are fired, the rest become curiously silent when asked for new ideas.

So, in sort, we are squandering 280, 000,000 people's insights and feedback, while a few arrogant people at the top try to "decide" how to "lead".

Step one would be, engage the other 279,999,998 people in solving this problem.

Wanted - Leadership on jobs? Ok, here you go!

The New York Times has an editorial today titled "Leadership on jobs".

In part that article says:

September was ... the longest unbroken stretch of losses since record-keeping began in 1939 — ... And that understates the damage. ..

The unemployment rate for September ... also understates the damage. It would have been higher but for the fact that 571,000 people dropped out of the work force last month — in general, it’s assumed, because they’ve despaired of finding work. If they had kept looking, they would have been counted as unemployed.

The combination of a rising unemployment rate and a quickening pace of labor-force dropouts is especially worrisome. ... For adult men, who have been particularly hard hit by job loss in this recession, the employment rate fell to ... its lowest level since the government began keeping track ....

===
And for adult African American men, the odds of finding a job that justifies staying in school are now effectively zero.

The Times continues

====

A shrinking labor force represents a tremendous waste of talent and potential, a loss of value that will not be entirely retrievable. Widespread joblessness among men is particularly devastating for the economy and many families, because men tend to earn more than women and to have jobs offering health insurance.

To make matters worse, unemployment among men and women is proving relentless. ...over a third have been out of work for ..., the highest percentage of long-term unemployment on record. By the end of the year, benefits will expire for more than one million unemployed workers. ...

===

and finally

====

The real work, however, lies ahead. Economic recovery will not automatically replace the jobs that have been lost so far in this recession. Nor will higher levels of learning and skill — necessary as they are — magically create jobs, especially in the numbers that are needed.

... Congress and the administration also have not done enough to directly create jobs.

==

OK. I agree that a lack of jobs is a serious problem, and finding a way for the unemployed to continue to eat and pay the rent without resorting to a life of crime is an urgent need and a moral imperative.

BUT, at the same time, we also need to look at the problem that most of the "jobs" that ARE out there are walking disasters that justify their own Dilbert cartoon strip. People show up for "work", mess around all day, have depressing and incredibly hostile "meetings", get paid and go home. During the day they sort of "follow orders" that make no sense, working on projects or products that have no future, in a sort of simulation of actual productive work. Everyone knows its just a matter of time until the company folds and the new pink slip arrives, and most of their energy is spent either trying to figure out what their next job will be, or doing their best to destroy the work of those around them so maybe those people will get laid off FIRST as times get rough and there is more and more "work" for fewer and fewer people to do. Meanwhile, upper management appears to have lost all contact with reality, as well as their own imperative to actually "show up" for "work". There seems to be no relationship between ultimate survival of the firm, or actually delivering quality goods and services to actual paying customers that meet actual needs, and the tasks that fill each day.

How bad is it? In white collar offices, the phrase "I'm going home so I can get some work done" is commonplace and makes perfect sense -- because the American "workplace" is the LAST place on earth where actually useful, productive work can be carried out.

Tragically, this is NOT a cartoon strip. Here's the truth -- if the government expends huge resources to create MORE "jobs" like these, it will only complete the task of destroying the entire American productive engine. In the long run, unless we are actually creatively producing goods and services that meet important needs, we will all go out of business.

The shattered dreams of those without jobs only masks the shattered dreams of those WITH jobs, that they might do something meaningful with their lives, not just claw and fight to survive one more day on a sinking ship that everyone keeps on pretending is floating.

The workplace continues to be a haven for "workplace abuse", a parallel to domestic abuse. It is not unusual for a boss to feel he has the right, if not the obligation, to yell at, cut down, and humiliate the "workers". It is not unusual for a boss to demand over and over that people "work harder" while having no accountability for the work making any sense or being efficient or effective. And, as the staff is cut even more to make it more "lean", it is not unusual to demand that workers give up evenings and weekends to deal with crises that could have been avoided if management had done its job and planned better or even with compassion.

So the workplace is depressing, and worse than simply non-productive -- it is as one person described it to me, a "life-sucking" world that produces sham goods and services at a tremendous cost in human suffering, depression, anxiety, and associated illnesses such as obesity and diabetes. It's only a miracle that there is as little visible workplace blow-back violence as there is, and I suspect that is largely due to the fact that the most psychologically abused workers are in such a state of hopeless helplessness that they can't even get organized to fight back. They are told to stop complaining and "be glad you HAVE a job!"

At the same time, there are now some great examples of what human beings can do together in totally different contexts. Highly productive, energizing, creative work can be done, with an actual joy in doing it. Some people look forward to "going to work" and spending the day slaying dragons with their co-workers in victory after victory.

This is not simply "icing" on a cake. In my own reading of things, the whole reason "the economy" is in trouble, and shedding "jobs" and entire companies if not entire industries, is that that pruning of dead wood is a healthy response of the national body to this disgusting and useless pretense of work. Also, it seems to me, that if THIS problem of pretend creation of wealth is not addressed, it's not just companies, but entire COUNTRIES, that will be pruned from the global body.

This is, at the core, an economic downstream effect of a spiritual problem -- we've lost our bearings as to why we are here, and what we should be doing while we are alive.

There is no way, in my reading of this, that people can simply create "more jobs" or "better paying jobs with better benefits" unless the question is addressed of what the heck kind of task all those "person-hours" are dedicated to accomplishing. More, better paying jobs is a downstream effect that will arrive AFTER we focus our collective national person-hours on the RIGHT tasks, not this collection of socially meaningless, and valueless, goals and objectives.''

The efforts the collective national workforce are putting out are not valued, precisely because they don't justify a high value, and are, in face valueless.

The erosion of jobs, companies, and at the rate we're going, entire cultures and countries, only reflects this loss of direction and lack of an uplifting focus on a long-term spiritual level.

We need jobs, yes, but we need jobs that produce, as output, sustainable improvements in our society, and, that are produced by creating vital environments, full of life and vitality and mutual support and encouragement, where people help each other focus on and be caught up in the immense joy of working productively on important issues, and succeeding at overcoming obstacles in getting there.

We are essentially attempting to power our "economy" by running on our starter engines, instead of utilizing our true capacity for enormously productive work that we are born with -- our capacity to plug into a community of others and find ourselves mobilized, motivated, energized, and empowered as the full creative life-generating power of the universe finds a channel through us to others and flows through that channel.

We have it entirely backwards. Humans can't build an economy, and then, when that is in place, move up Maslow's Hierarchy to start working on a community. We need the community first and the purpose and empowering engine to float the economy.

That is not something that will come "later", in some way, "after we get jobs at all." Where there is no spirit, there shall be no life, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, paraphrasing the Bible. What we HAVE is dry, lifeless bones, where the wind blows across empty fields, with the plow abandoned across the furrow, to further paraphrase TSE, "our lives unwelcome, our deaths unmentioned in the Times."

Eliot saw exactly this during the last great world-wide depression. Here's a section from his poem "Choruses from the Rock." What's crucial is not that he saw the problem, but that he also saw, through the symptoms, what the actual underlying problem was, and therefore how to address it and fix it.

After 50 years or so of pondering this question, I agree with him. Here's a few snippets of that poem, slightly rearranged. This was written in 1934.

But you, have you built well,
that you now sit helpless in a ruined house?
Where many are born to idleness,
to frittered lives and squalid deaths,
embittered scorn in honey-less hives?
What life have you if you have not life together?
There is no life that is not in community,
And no community not lived in praise of GOD.

And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads,
And no man knows or cares who is his neighbor,
Unless his neighbor makes too much disturbance.

Will you leave my people forgetful and forgotten
To idleness, labor, and delirious stupor?
In a street of scattered brick where the goat climbs,
Where My Word is unspoken.

And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.

We build in vain unless the LORD build with us.
Can you keep the City that the LORD keeps not with you?
A thousand policemen directing the traffic
Cannot tell you why you come or where you go.

When the Stranger says: 'What is the meaning of this city?'
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?'
What will you answer? 'We all dwell together
To make money from each other'? or 'This is a community'?

O weariness of men who turn from GOD
To the grandeur of your mind and the glory of your action...
Engaged in devising the perfect refrigerator.

Though you forget the way to the Temple,
There is one who remembers the way to your door:
Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.

A larger section of that poem, which I posted in October, 2007 when the Michigan state government shut down briefly, being unable to come up with a budget, is here.

The entire poem is difficult to find on-line, and there are many postings of small portions of it which give no indication that there are parts missing. But, I did find it in images so you can read it. The whole poem can be found here, along with most of the rest of Eliot's poems.

Eliot carries his thoughts into a Christian reverie, but don't be put off by that if you are not Christian -- there is nothing in the core thought that is not really universal, and could equally well be a Moslem or Jewish or Hindu reconnection with the spirit of life that animates this planet, and is willing to animate us, if we only turn to it and let that happen.

(Side-bar: I'm not sure that atheists, regardless how well intended or well educated, can connect with this type of wireless broadcast power to make it through the day. Looking at how "collegial" most university campuses tend to be among educated, atheistic faculty and scientists, there is little evidence that "community" is a driving value, or a sufficient reason to rise above petty squabbles or let go of long-standing bitter grudges. The drive to compete and noticeable sag in energy and increase in green envy when someone ELSE succeeds or looks good is not a strong sign of an academic "community". )

This poem is worth reading and rereading. The "new bricks" reference is what inspired the name of this weblog, by the way, and is in the hopeful section of the poem,

Yet nothing is impossible, nothing,
to men of faith and conviction.
Let us therefore make perfect our will.
O GOD, help us.

The soul of Man must quicken to creation.
Out of the formless stone,
when the artist united himself with stone,
Spring always new forms of life.

The LORD who created must wish us to create
And employ our creation again in His service.

The lights fade; in the semi-darkness
the voices of the WORKMEN
are heard chanting.

In the vacant places
We will build with new bricks
There are hands and machines
and clay for new brick
and lime for new mortar.

Where the bricks are fallen
We will build with new stone

Where the beams are rotten
We will build with new timbers

Where the Word is unspoken
We will build with new speech

There is work together
A Church for all
And a job for each
Every man to his work.

THIS is ultimately what "learning organizations" and "positive deviance" are about -- envisioning meaning and plugging into the resultant power to build new life, if we can break our eyes away from death and open our hearts to the joyous creation of life in the face of all odds.

Wade

Comment to NYTimes on China's consumer spending

A New York Times discussion piece is titled "China's next stage - spreading the wealth", available a this link for the next few weeks.
Here's a reply I wrote, which may or may not end up being posted.

==========

This discussion highlights some unstated assumptions which need to be made explicit and re-examined.

One is that raising a "standard of living" is equal to, or even requires inclusion of "going shopping" for "consumer goods." Good schools, good libraries, good health care, good roads, decent rail systems and schedules are equally valuable. Civility, strong and safe neighborhoods, and a culture that succeeds at helping people get even better and stronger at caring for each other's basic needs -- these are values money does not buy directly, and in fact, focusing attention on consumer purchases may undermine in both the short and long term.

A second unstated assumption / assertion which needs to be challenged is that anyone besides economists should care about "the economy", and, even if they did, that the sacred "Gross Domestic Product" is any kind of valid measure of same. Frankly, if the country is strong, economic growth can go to zero, or negative, or to imaginary values, and who cares? A superb must-read timeless 1995 Atlantic Monthly article on how bad the GDP is at capturing anything that actually matters to real people (not economists) is "If the GDP is Up, why is America down?" (available on-line here http://www.economischegroei.net/file/14 )

A case in point of that assumption is the current state in the USA, where there seems to be a belief by those on top that "the economy" is recovering, despite the fact that the job, debt, housing, and health-care situation of the average American is demonstrably getting worse while consumer prices are rising. Don't even start on the bad and visibly deteriorating condition of roads, transportation options, schools, or any social service provided by state government budgets. Or on the barbaric level of discourse that has replaced reasoned discussion in our "governing bodies."

Besides, "standards of living" assume that, for starters, the country continues to exist at all, and has not been invaded, bombed out of existence, torn apart by domestic unrest, destroyed by a series of plagues and public health disasters, consumed by internal corruption, etc. Again, this argues that there are crucial values to which the GDP and "economy" are completely blind.

Steering a country based on the GDP's short-term behavior is a recipe for disaster. Discarding filial piety and love for family, neighbors, community, and country in favor of more Walmart's seems a questionable road upwards to a sustainable and desirable future for China.

"What else could we be doing to help those who don't even have their basic needs met?" seems a better question to be asking, or "Are we growing healthier and wiser and more civil and more civilized as a country and a people?"

In that light "Are we consuming enough consumer goods to keep the economy growing?" seems to be completely off base as a guide to policy.

=========

Comments, criticisms, additional thoughts are welcome!

Where is the bathroom?!

Watch as CCTV's Aurora teaches a new arrival in Beijing how to say "Where is the bathroom?".


卫生间在哪里？
(wèi shēng jiān zài nǎ lǐ)
Where is the bathroom?

China welcomes foreign experts for Social and Economic Development

CCTV has a short video on the welcoming of foreign experts in Social and Economic Development.

CCTV online for learning about China and Chinese

China TV (CCTV)'s on-line web side has a continuing supply of short videos on the language and culture of China.

One example today was this young lady who exchanged money and taught us the few words we needed to do that (exchange money, here's my passport, sign here.).


To me, there is tremendous power in a video of a real person actually carrying out a real transaction in a real setting in China. It's easy to see the value of those phrases, and to believe that, on a good day, those few phrases will be all you need to accomplish this task of exchanging money.

It makes the whole concept of going to China seem more feasible and realistic. It says "Hey! I could do THAT!"

(This video is here, although I'm not sure how long that link will be valid.)

Educational gap, math, science and social studies

Bob Herbert has an op Ed piece in the NY Times this morning on education and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

I posted a comment (see further below) but want to give a very short additional example to illustrate my point -- namely, that true social studies is more important than math and science.

Suppose Apple, Jones and Smith are heads of households living in poor neighborhoods with high crime rates and low literacy. They both want to move to better neighborhoods.

Apple, with neither math nor social studies, sees an ad for house mortgage too good to be true, moves there, and discovers it is, in fact, too good to be true. His life is pretty well ruined by this error.

Jones, with extensive math and science, is able to compute Net Present Value, Annual Percentage Rates, etc. with ease. He understands that a jump in interest rates from 3% to 6% is a doubling of his monthly payment, not a "small percentage increase." He figures out he cannot move to the suburbs and becomes depressed. He avoids a tragic error but is stuck in the ghetto.

Smith, with true social knowledge, finds a wise person in his community who does understand math and science, and asks this person about the great mortgage deals. He finds out they are a trap for the unaway and avoids them. But he still wants to move to the suburbs so his kids can grow up in a better life. He searches around and finds two other families with similar problems, and despite their individual low income, collectively can afford a nice place in the suburbs. They move out there together, sharing a large house, able to resolve and reconcile problems because they understand how to deal with social relationships.

Quiz question - Who has the better solution?
Extra credit - if that's the better solution, why isn't it taught in school?

Wade
=========================
My post to the NY Times under my pseudonym "Raymond"

Ann Arbor, MI

September 29th, 2009

6:16 am

Amen. Still, it might be good to have our educational system learn, and then teach basic skills of leadership, mediation, social interaction, and relationship building and repair. This is not really covered by the dreaded "group work" unit lesson where students learn to divide up a task into pieces they can all go work on separately without needing to get along with each other, let alone inspire each other to greatness.

I realize it's playing devil's advocate, but, as a former physics grad, I'll argue strongly AGAINST more math and science in this new world, and much more in the way of applied reasoning and social skills. And, no, I have seen no signs that an education in science trains people to be rational or to be able to parse an argument or make a case, thank you.

More serious discussion of alternatives on my weblog:
http://newbricks.blogspot.com...

The old man and the apple

Once there was an old man in a village who lived alone. One day there was a storm and a big tree fell and blocked the gate to his garden. He only had enough food left for a week, if he couldn't get to his garden. He thought about what to do, and got his small savings out of a can and went to a gymnasium.

"Can you make me strong in a week?" He asked? "I can pay my life savings!" They just laughed at him and said "No. Go away old man." He was very sad. If he couldn't eat he would surely die. All he had left was one apple, in his pocket.

As he walked home, and pulled out the apple, he passed an old monk who was begging. He told the monk about the tree and the gym.

"Oh, I can move the tree for you!" said the old monk, if you let me have that apple. The old man just laughed but thought that he only had one day left to live, so what difference did it make?! He gave the apple to the monk.

"Can you help me get up?" asked the monk. "Of course!" said the man, now laughing out loud at this frail man who thought he was going to move the heavy tree.

As they walked back through the village, the monk greeted everyone they met. He asked each one if they wanted to come learn how to move a heavy tree with an apple. More and more people joined the crowd, each wanting to see this.

Finally the large crowd arrived at the old man's garden, and saw the large tree. The monk blessed the apple, and told everyone it now had special powers. He asked to borrow a knife, and carefully sliced the apple into many small slices. He offered each person a tiny slice of the apple.

Then went over to the fallen tree and started trying to lift it, but it did not budge. Then he asked politely if people could come help him lift, now that they shared the magic apple's power. Everyone joined in and lifted the tree easily and moved it out of the way.

"And that is how you lift a tree with an apple!" said the monk. "There are no obstacles you cannot move, if you just learn the lesson of the apple and tree!"

Guanxi, social capital, relationships, and health, wealth

INTRODUCTION

If we don't understand the nature of life, we can't possibly reason correctly about the "health" property of it, let alone reason about finding cost-effective interventions to improve or sustain it.

The nature of life is not obvious. I believe we have it all wrong, and as a direct consequence of this we have flawed personal behaviors, corporate behaviors, and a flawed national policy and system of "health care." Until this error is fixed, our efforts to improve "health" will simply fail in baffling ways.

Where did we go wrong?

THE OLD MODEL OF LIFE

Biology 101 teaches us, and we absorb deeply, this model:

1. LIMIT: All life is made of one or more biological cells.
2. LIMIT: Cells are blobs of protoplasm surrounded by distinct walls that clearly separate the inside from the outside. Only cells that touch each other in a more-or-less fixed shape can form "higher" life forms.
3. LIMIT: Although humans and "higher" organisms are both made of cells and have an independent life of their own, even larger colonies or collections of higher life forms cannot and do not form even "higher" life forms with a life of its own.
4. LIMIT: Life can only arise from other life and be "passed on".
   
5. LIMIT: The algebra of living things only includes division -- one living thing can divide to form two living things, but two or more living things don't re-assemble into one living thing. (A notable exception is sperm and egg, which are each separately alive and yet reassemble into a single life form.)
   
6. LIMIT: all life forms die.
   

Although every one of these rules or limits or statements has "exceptions", the model is treated as if it is "essentially correct" and not questioned very much. I will challenge it much more strongly right now, stepping on the toes of tradition and religious faith in the process.

I will propose a much more general model of life that reduces to the above model in the the special case of looking at biological life on the surface of the earth today.


MY NEW MODEL OF LIFE

1. All life is based on processes that have at least one closed feedback loop which is self-aware and self-protective. There is not limit to the special case of biology. A computer network, a family, a corporation, a culture, a nation all are "life-forms" with such loops. One very important class of living entity is called a "relationship" between people. Another class of living entity is the relationship between cells in "an organ" or "a body system", such as the heart or the circulatory system or the digestive system. These are independently alive.
2. A living entity has fuzzy edges which extend outwards, possibly across great distances with gaps in between, to anything else that forms part of its closed regulatory feedback loops.
3. Essentially all living entities are in the middle of a hierarchy of life, encompassing smaller life-forms below, and comprising parts of higher life-forms above, simultaneously. Each "level" has a "life" (closed feedback regulatory loop) of its own, and there are also some loops (lives) which span multiple levels.
4. Life can be created on-the-fly, systematically, on purpose. It is not that hard to create new life. We do it all the time. Various aspects of life can also be extinguished on the fly. It is not that hard to damage or kill life forms. A Life-form becomes "dead" when its primary closed loop no longer functions.
5. Any number of living things can combine, and often are already weekly combined, into larger life-forms with separate independent lives of their own.
6. There is no reason a life form has to die.

So what? WHAT DOES THAT CHANGE?

First, if we recognize that people, corporations, and nations are all linked together into a huge multi-level life form, then we realize that it is not possible to have one part of this "healthy" while another part of it is "unhealthy." We are, basically, all chained to each other and our fates our linked.

Corporations are life-forms, as are nations, but they are not "separate" entities from "people."

It is true, for example that there is a "personal economy" and a "corporate economy" that have separate lives and interests in the very short run, but it is also true but unrecognized that there is a longer-time-span linkage between the two so that destruction of the personal economy in an effort to improve the corporate economy is simply self-defeating and self-destructive.

This means that it is nonsensical for "Public Health" to see corporations as "an enemy". Any solution that deals with personal or family health will collapse if the local economy collapses. Jobs are as important as medicine for personal sustainable health.

Similarly, it makes no sense for corporations to try to build a vibrant economy on the backs of and at the expense of people and the environment -- because, ultimately, they ARE people and if the people or environment are destroyed, the corporate entities and economies will die off as well. It won't work for corporations to try to become computer-based and get rid of all people, for reasons I'll get to later.

Similarly, people do not have "clean edges" where there is "my" health and "your" health. Every day scientists find deeper ways in which the health of "your neighbors" and "your friends" and "your friends' friends" contribute to and often even determine "your" health and "your" behavior. A cell with damaged DNA can go on functioning if it is surrounded by healthy cells that it interacts with strongly. The same is true for people.

"Our" health is not somehow contained within the boundaries of our skin. Things can go wrong with our health that are outside that boundary, and things can go right with our health that are outside that boundary. This is a cruicial fact!

It has been shown that, for an 60 year old American, making a new friend has a stronger impact on their survival rate and than dealing with smoking, drinking, exercise, and nutrition. This should not come as a surprise, with the new model of biology and life.


WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS FOR NATIONAL HEALTH CARE POLICY?


I think it is evident that a set of interventions that improved interpersonal relationships ( life forms) would have more of a beneficial effect on our lives, morale, and "physical health" than most other interventions we can imagine (such as reduced drug costs or new insurance mechanisms.)

In other words, humans are part of a meta-biologicial ecosystem where the health of the relationship-entities sea that we swim in determines, effectively, the health of the protoplasm units we wear (our bodies.)

Similarly, in the business world, the sea of relationship-entities ("guanxi" or "social capital") is as important, or more important, than the individual roles and positions people have in determining the "health" of corporations and the regional and national economy.

Even on the departmental or work-team level, the relationship-sea, the ecology of life forms that occur "between" people is as important, or more important, than individual "skills and experience" in determining successful perception of direction and accomplishment of objectives.


CONCLUSIONS / RECOMMENDATIONS

Any strategy for personal health, corporate success, or a thriving national economy is doomed to failure unless it attends to the needs of the inter-entity life-form community as well.

"Relationships" are not just something that people "are" or "do" -- they are independent living entities that must be nurtured and which have their own "health care" needs and interests.

This is a much stronger mental model that can direct the attention and focus of policy in ways that will be much more successful at building a sustainable world than the old model.

Wade

Comment on Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life

Evolving since John Holland's "genetic algorithms" in 1975, there is a solid literature in "Artificial Life" which goes well beyond "artificial intelligence". Search on "Chris Langton", "Symposium on Artificial Life", and "Santa Fe Institute." The work stirs deep anxiety and overt hostility from many and tends to remain low visibility.

Treading on heresy, I discount those who discount the idea that the internet and electronically mediated corporations could become "alive" or might as well be alive, because skeptics have no proven, calibrated tools which to detect e-life, or a-life, looking from the bottom up. What does it look like to a cell to be part of a human body? How does it change the cell's life? Not very much on a moment by moment basis, for sure.

You'd think those same skeptics would argue that a human body is "just cells" and there is no larger animating life (such as us) that emerges from or inhabits that active system of cells. Given that single example of multilevel-multicellularism, what possible basis is there for arguing it does NOT exist on other scales? Pure human vanity and remnants of the desire for humans to be the center of the universe and the greatest creation of God or nature are emotion not reasons.

I think the burden of proof should be the other way. What shows that we are NOT already part of a larger effectively-alive structure?

Science, please, not legend, should guide the exploration of "life". This is a rather critical question with very profound implications that most people find uncomfortable and inconvenient. We need to look at it more deeply. It is far more important than global warming.

Gaia's evil twin

(This is a repost of comments I recently made in New Scientist online.)

Life Finds A Way

Tue Jun 23 23:52:42 BST 2009 by Wade Schuette

I read with interest Peter Ward's article "Gaia's evil twin" (New Scientist, 20 June 2009, p28-31), but perhaps rather than pursuing its own demise, life is on a hard path to survival.

Life forms collectively pool forces to create larger life forms with a type of life of their own -- cells comprising "humans", or humans (and computers) comprising corporations.

The elimination of an entire species could be simply refocusing energy on a stronger direction - good for the whole but rather hard on the parts.

If that process is to continue indefinitely, meta-life must expand off the Earth. At that point, loss of the Earth is akin to leaving behind the cocoon as higher life emerges and departs.

Indeed, we see today the destruction of our human habitat by the indifferent actions of today's meta-life forms: corporations and governments. As many in the artificial life community have warned, we may be the first species to actively create our replacement.

Incidentally, this model incorporates the three variants of the Gaia hypothesis if the negative feedback episodes are seen as part of optimizing the habitat -- but optimizing it for the evolution of new meta-life, not for the survival of the legacy actors.

=====

Incidentally, whether the Earth is a super-organism or not, I'd say it's "unscientific" to assert that it could not ever become so, based on the fact that said design pattern works for the super-organism of cells we call "humans".

Is there some physical law I'm unaware of that would prohibit a super-organism from reaching that scale?

Or is it that scientists cannot bear the thought of super-organisms far above the scale of humans, because that is getting dangerously close to the core assertion of religions?

It took a long time for the concept of "microbes" to be accepted, and "macrobes" may be similarly disdained because they make us feel less important, despite the fact that there is increasing evidence that humans are, psychologically and therefore physiologically, far more tied into each other than "we" thought.

I can't accept the idea that "science" must be restricted to only looking "down" on things, which seems more like a definition of "ego".

Indeed, if we want things to look up, perhaps we should be calibrating scientific tools for looking upwards with more seriousness. The current tool-set for detecting "culture" or "social capital" or interlocking feedback control loops is far to primitive. Besides, science should not have taboo subjects.

============================

Interesting speculations along this line are at:

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/10/evidence_of_a_g.php

Since the term "life" is so overwhelmed with meanings, I prefer the term "MAWBA", which I define as something that "May As Well Be Alive", in that it consumes energy, is goal-seeking, can replicate itself, etc. This avoids a linguistic and religious battle over what constitutes "life" and "when" it begins, etc.

We are totally short of words to even describe diffuse intelligence, let alone diffuse interlocking control loops necessary for MAWBA.

Do a Blogger Search in this weblog above on the term "mawba" to find my other posts along these lines.

Where did they go?

Where did all of 2009's posts go?

No man is an island

December 5, 2008
New York Times

Strangers May Cheer You Up, Study Says

By PAM BELLUCK

How happy you are may depend on how happy your friends’ friends’ friends are, even if you don’t know them at all.

And a cheery next-door neighbor has more effect on your happiness than your spouse’s mood.

So says a new study that followed a large group of people for 20 years — happiness is more contagious than previously thought.

“Your happiness depends not just on your choices and actions, but also on the choices and actions of people you don’t even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from you,” said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study, to be published Friday in BMJ, a British journal. “There’s kind of an emotional quiet riot that occurs and takes on a life of its own, that people themselves may be unaware of. Emotions have a collective existence — they are not just an individual phenomenon.”

In fact, said his co-author, James H. Fowler, an associate professor of political science at University of California, San Diego, their research found that “if your friend’s friend’s friend becomes happy, that has a bigger impact on you being happy than putting an extra $5,000 in your pocket.”

The researchers analyzed information on the happiness of 4,739 people and their connections with several thousand others — spouses, relatives, close friends, neighbors and co-workers — from 1983 to 2003.

“It’s extremely important and interesting work,” said Daniel Kahneman, an emeritus psychologist and Nobel laureate at Princeton, who was not involved in the study. Several social scientists and economists praised the data and analysis, but raised possible limitations.

Publish Post

... (see NYT or BMJ for the rest)

yep. Humans are not solitary animals, and our spirits are not contained within our one body, at least effectively not so, however this is managed. For practical purposes we ARE each other.

This is not just arguing about words. If we are so interconnected that a change in your life produces a change in my body's hormone levels, how is that different from your heart and your own adrenal gland? Connected is connected, if they influence each other, whether our puny math can easily "see" how that connection operates or not. Heck, we can't see how gravity operates either, but we accept that gravity is real.

And so is the fact that we are not really many bodies -- we are one spirit sort of distributed out across many bodies, like a TV image and pixels. The image is not the pixels, but it is, but it isn't.

We lack good words for these simpler concepts, and so discussion of the actual nature of composite and hierarchical, diffusely coupled life is difficult.

And that thing that seems to "take on a life of its own" ?? Why don't we stop pretending and just admit that it does exist and it does have a life of its own, even though we so often kill it?

Life is not contained just within each living "thing", but fills the spaces between us as well, on every scale, letting us effectively become "one", while staying apart, at the same time.

"Love" is not a fantasy - it is science that has the catching up to do here on the very nature of life itself, especially the connectionist, diffuse forms of life.

If you think about it you realize that an image is not "just a collection of pixels", because a heap of those colored dots would have no image at all. It is the arrangement with respect to each other, the inter-relationships, that stores the image, not the pixels.

It is the same with the nature of life, or a tornado. Life is a transient, a set of relationships, briefly, between smaller living things and larger living things, at the same time. Our entire educational system focuses on the pixels, not on the image, and we've carefully been graduating bigger and brighter pixels and wondering why things are still falling apart. It's the working together thing that we've neglected that turns out to be the "baby", and the rest of it, including individuals, is the "bath water".

This is a hugely unpopular and inconvenient notion, instantly attacked by the wealthy as some scheme to remove their money. It has nothing to do with money. It has to do with realizing that our personal and national wealth consists of relationships, of "social capital". We've neglected this, and no amount of cash bailout of institutions will make up for it until we wake up and fix the actual problem.

Quoting the song Suzanne, sung by Judy Collins, from memory:

But when He saw that only drowning men could see Him, He said "All men shall be sailors then, until the sea shall free them!"

See also my prior post "Are you my mommy? What shape am I anyway?"

For Whom the Bell Tolls

by John Donne

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

The end of our exploring (T. S. Eliot)
T.S. Eliot, in the Four Quartets , said

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

This also has very strong implications for policy. If we are all effectively one body, then the idea that the "rich" can get sufficiently far "above" the "poor" to be free of their plight is bogus. It can never work. The US can't operate with 20% of the population of the US totally neglected, or with 5.7 billion people in the world starving. This has "National Security" and "Homeland Security" and long-term strategic direction implications for all nations, if true.

We best put more energy into finding out if it is true, and stop wishing gravity would just "go away" because the political and social structures we've built, and the stories we tell ourselves about "how things are" have a serious built-in fatal flaw the way they stand, idolizing the individual and ignoring "all of us", and thinking that could ever possibly end well. For anyone.

Wade

OK, seriously, WHY didn't we see it coming?

"OK, enough! This tree has got to go!"

My comment in response to Paul Krugman's NY Times column today, "Lest We Forget".
========================================

Your question is superb - How did those at the top not see this coming, or take it seriously, despite many stifled voices below pointing at it in alarm?

Yes, if financial things broke on this shoal, fix the financial things.

But, at the same time, this shoal has got to go, or it will just demolish the repair effort in a never-ending cycle of "How did that happen? Fix and forget."

This exact problem is well known and well documented by everyone, across industries, government agencies, auto companies, universities, etc. This process is ALSO broken, and needs to be addressed, by as many billion dollars as spent repairing the damage it caused.

Social decision making processes are no more abstract than financial markets, but get no respect, being in a higher leverage, further upstream, less visible place in the chain of events.

High-reliability human systems have been studied extensively, from Chernobyl to The Bay of Pigs to Challenger to aircraft cockpit teams to hospital surgical teams to the US Army Leadership Field Manual. The answer always comes down to the same thing -- dissenting views need to be heard, and dissenters need what Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson calls "Psychological Safety" or they will wilt and become ineffective. This is how humans always behave and unless steps are taken it always breaks along this fault line.

The right question then should be, who is going to take charge of seeing that those steps are taken and that level of social literacy achieved?

I can't emphasize enough how much more important this is than more math and science, in the absence of this. As T.S. Eliot said, we repeatedly get burned "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good, but the man that is will shadow the man that pretends to be."

Much of my weblog is about what we really need to do to avoid such errors in judgment. I can only hope the right person wakes up and reads it and the links to sources such as MIT's papers or John Sterman's work on how poorly we can see systems that involve feedback.

"Why we have so much trouble seeing" (and what to do about it.)
http://newbricks.blogspot.com...

(photo by myself - "Fixed at last!" )

Medical Tourism - Insurers accept, (Time)

Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2008
Medical Tourism
By Kate Pickert

Time (magazine)

Earlier this month, the insurance company WellPoint announced a program that will allow employees of a Wisconsin printing
company to get coverage for non-emergency surgeries in India. It's a first for
WellPoint, but puts the insurer in good company.

Over the past
few years, U.S. insurance companies — dismayed at losing income
from uninsured Americans who get cheap surergies abroad or clients who choose to
pay out of pocket for discount foreign surgeries rather than expensive
in-network co-pays — have announced plans to include foreign medical
procedures among those covered by health plans.

It's no wonder. The medical tourism industry has experienced massive growth over the past decade. Experts in the
field say as many as 150,000 U.S. citizens underwent medical treatment abroad in
2006 — the majority in Asia and Latin America. That number grew to an estimated
750,000 in 2007 and could reach as high as 6 million by 2010. .... (See TIME's A-Z Health Guide.)

... But surgery abroad is a fairly modern phenomenon. .... (A large percentage of today's medical tourism is for dental work, as much as 40% by some estimates.)

...Thailand is now a destination spot for all types of plastic
surgery as well as a host of routine medical procedures. Bumrungrad
International Hospital in Bangkok is probably Thailand's best-known
mecca for medical tourists, boasting patients from "over 190 countries" and an
"International Patient Center" with interpreters and an airline ticket counter.

In recent years, companies all over the U.S. have sprung up to guide
Americans through the insurance and logistical hurdles of surgery abroad,...

For those who wrinkle their noses at the thought of going under the knife in a foreign, let alone still-developing, country, the American Medical Association introduced a set of guidelines in June for medical tourism.



The AMA advocates that insurance companies, employers and others involved in the medical tourism field provide proper follow-up care, tell patients of their rights and legal recourse, use only accredited facilities, and inform patients of "the potential risks of combining surgical procedures with long flights and vacation activities," among other recommendations.

Joint Commission International, a non-profit that certifies the safety and record of hospitals, has accredited some 200 foreign medical facilities, many in Spain, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

Domestic Violence at Home and Abroad

Two excerpts of articles from today's New York Times:

Nicholas Kristof on Pakistan:

One new cabinet member, Israr Ullah Zehri, defended the torture-murder of five women and girls who were buried alive (three girls wanted to choose their own husbands, and two women tried to protect them). “These are centuries-old traditions, and I will continue to defend them,” Mr. Zehri said of the practice of burying independent-minded girls alive.

November 23, 2008
New York Times
Despite Army’s Assurances, Violence at Home

By Lizette Alvarez

On Christmas Day two years ago, Sgt. Carlos Renteria, recently back from his first tour in Iraq, got drunk and, during an argument, began to choke his wife, Adriana. He body-slammed her. He threw her onto the couch, grabbed a cushion and smothered her, again and again — until, finally, he stopped, she told the police in San Angelo, Tex.

He was arrested and charged with assault, and she went to the hospital for her injuries, which included bruises and a severely swollen knee. It was his second domestic violence arrest. Assured by an Army officer that the military would pursue the case, the Texas prosecutor bowed out.

Yet Sergeant Renteria has faced no consequences. Instead, since his arrest, he has been redeployed to Iraq and promoted to staff sergeant.

“I was told it would be taken care of, in more than one instance, by the Army,” said Ms. Renteria, 30, referring to the assault charges. “That they would help me. And I believed them.”

Ms. Renteria’s story illustrates the serious gaps in the way the Army handles domestic violence cases and the way it treats victims, despite promises to take such crimes more seriously.

More than five years ago, after a series of wife-killings by soldiers, a Pentagon task force investigation concluded that the military was doing a better job of shielding service members from punishment than protecting their wives from harm. The Department of Defense began to make noticeable improvements, including expanding protections and services for victims. But problems clearly remain.

The Army’s handling of such cases is especially important in a time of war, when the number of soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder escalates. Studies show a link between the disorder and increased violence in the home.

The Army says that the measures it has taken have been effective in curbing domestic violence. But advocates of victims of domestic violence say that among combat troops the violence has spiked in the past two years and that women are often disinclined to report violence for fear of angering their partners and hurting their careers.

These advocates point to the gruesome murders of three female soldiers based at Fort Bragg in North Carolina within the last four months. One woman’s body was dismembered and dumped in the woods. Another woman, seven months pregnant, was found dead in a motel bathtub. The third was stabbed to death.

In each case, the victim’s boyfriend or husband, a soldier or marine, has been charged in the killing. All three suspects were deployed in Iraq at some point.

The recent killings, which echo a series of wife-killings by soldiers at the fort in 2002, have captured the attention of the Pentagon again. During a visit last month to Fort Bragg, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said he was “very concerned” about the stress on combat troops. “We obviously want to stop all kinds of violence among our soldiers and families,” he said.

Yet an examination of Ms. Renteria’s case shows she had sought help from an array of people for behavior by her husband that the Army could trace to 2004.

“She has really tried to pursue this to make sure he gets the appropriate intervention,” said Jacquelyn Campbell, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing and a member of the Pentagon’s task force on domestic violence, who was told about the case by The Times. “We had hoped with the military’s new awareness of the issues of domestic violence in the military, and with its new policies and procedures around addressing it, that this kind of thing wouldn’t be happening still.”

Sergeant Renteria was ordered to take anger management classes on base. He attended one class. “ ‘I can’t be touched, can’t you see?’ ” Ms. Renteria said her husband told her. “ ‘They aren’t going to do anything to me.’ ”

Thoughts on multi-level life

I've discussed before observations, such as Marsden Boise, many years ago, about the "curiously laminated" structure of life. In other words, living things seem to be composite entities, made up of smaller living things -- at least humans are made up of cells, or maybe we are made up of systems and organs which are made up of cells.

So, this is a familiar concept. Corporations are made up of divisions which are made up of departments which may be made up of teams which are made up of people ... which are made up of cells.

So are corporations alive, then? Probably, but "life" has a nuanced meaning. Corporations certainly satisfy all the descriptions of life in Biology 101 -- they consume energy, adapt to their environments (perhaps poorly), can reproduce, and are ultimately made up of cells. They are capable of dying and growing. They are also capable of merging of course, something humans don't do, but slime molds do.

So what? Is this just fancy definitions?

So what is that the different levels of "one" living thing, modeling the same way Ken Wilbur does, are inter-related and yet, locally, appear to have a significant independence from each other. They certainly operate in different worlds, with different "operations".

The world seen by the US President is different from that seen by a CEO is different from that seen by a worker on the factory floor is different from that seen by a cell. They care about different things, worry about different things, almost completely disjoint so long as everything remains healthy.

It's when things get not healthy that the inter-actions become vivid.

For humans, we do seem to have, looking downward, an animal level with a life of its own, that goes on pretty much independently of "us" and only occasionally appears to exert 'animal urges' on us. ("appears" is a key word here, as they affect us 100% of the time, but we don't see it.)

There is much written about people "getting in touch with" their own bodies. This seems to make sense to people without further explanation or theology. There are techniques, from Yoga to biofeedback to dance to Transcendental Meditation to make that process work faster or better.

Similarly, looking upwards, we belong to a whole nested hierarchy of higher-level living things, from potentially a family to a tribe or neighborhood or culture or country or corporation, or many of those all at the same time.

We can only speculate about how high the pyramid of Life goes. Just as communication and peace with our lower selves seems necessary for peace and health, communication and peace with our upper selves seems necessary for peace and health.

Not too surprisingly by this model, talking upwards ("to God") is about as perplexing and difficult as talking downwards ("to our body as a whole, or to our cells").

For one thing, we are used to thinking about "objects" and "events", but to our cells, if experienced at all, these are "contexts", not objects within the cell's context or events it could possibly have a name for. Cells do not fret about their children getting into Harvard or their 401k's.

Similar, the things even CEO's spend their days worrying about -- mergers, long-term strategy and product placement, etc -- mean very little to individual humans, except as contexts.

So, even more so with God, or whatever one calls all of the levels, going upwards above us, to whatever limit or infinity they rise to. As the levels get higher, the timescales get longer, and the geographic scales get larger. Fish in the open ocean don't notice the tide, it's too big to notice,
and takes too long. Our cells probably don't care much about "next year". Surviving the next few milliseconds is their focus.

So, can we generalize here? Is there anything we can say about communicating up or down the chain of life, aside from that it's hard, and the higher you go, the slower and larger the events of interest become?

It's a good question. I suspect that as one moves up the scale, the math and biophysics shifts from obession with contents, as with isolated billiard balls, to obsession with context and relationships. This happens in both General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, looking very far up and very far down.

That said, the Search For Extraterrestrial Life is probably looking in the wrong place, looking for rapid changes in contents, (electromagnetic wavaes) for messages, when it might be looking for changes in the contexts, such as a broadcast of "grace" or "healing".

The nouns and verbs may be off a bit, but the point is, up or down, they won't use the same nouns and verbs that "we" do.

We need to adjust for that fact, and look in entirely different places for different kinds of "messages".

A different model of what's wrong

Mental concepts or models of life are ways of throwing out most information to focus on a few bits that seem more important to insight than all the others. Different models give different answers to questions such as

• What's wrong?
• Why doesn't this work?
• Where is it broken?
• Where should we intervene?
• If we intervene there, should we push or pull?
• If we did that, what effect would we expect to see and when?

It's miserably cold and rainy out, with snow coming this way, so I'm staying inside this morning and working on something more abstract, while I eat breakfast -- such as what a model of the nature of Life and Evolution would suggest is "the problem" in our economy.

Might as well, nothing else seems to be working, and the models used by the government seem to change daily. Meanwhile, they argue over what it will take to stop GM going bankrupt, which again depends on what you think is wrong. Different camps point to:

• too many government regulations
• too few government regulations
• health care costs
• unions -who make unreasonable demands
• management - which makes unreasonable demands
• consumers - who make unreasonable demands
  
• "the economy"
• Housing and mortgage defaults
• Nuclear above-ground testing
• Ozone
• Godzilla
• Unfair competition from larger companies
• Unfair competition from smaller companies
• Hedge funds and banks
• tree-huggers
• commies and socialists
• liberals or conservatives
• lawyers
• dentists
• side-effects of anti-depression meds
• Not enough team collaboration and consultation
• Too much team collaboration and consultation
• Too much decentralization
• Too little decentralization
• Alien invasions, UFO's, and demon possession
• breakdown in the moral fiber of our nation
• God's punishment for [ pick your sin and sinner ]
  

Given that range of diverse opinions about what is "obviously" "the cause" of the current problems in the industry, it seems there is room for one more.

You don't have to "buy" this - just consider it as yet one more possible model, and see where it leads. In particular, see if it leads to an idea we haven't tried yet that seems affordable and that won't interfere with other initiatives underway.

So, my new model of the day looks at the nature of Life - which is clearly and unambiguously organized in a kind of hierarchical and overlapping fashion. Cells are alive, but cells form multicellular thingies that are themselves alive in a whole different way, such as cats and dogs and people and you.

Individual instances of any type of thing collectively form "a species", which itself has many properties of living things, including being the abstract object that really evolves over time. (Individuals don't evolve, at least very much in terms of DNA arrangement, once they are born.)

There is a running argument in biology as to whether genes evolve, and animals are a side effect, or animals evolve, and genes are a side effect, or species evolve, and both genes and individual animals are side-effects.

In my model, they are all evolving, in inter-related but partly independent fashions.

The key feature of this particular multi-level model of life is that each level of Life has its own, largely independent, existence and rules of life and Life. Each level can forget, most of the time (but not all the time) that the other levels exist at all.

You can forget that your body is made of cells, unless your behavior, such as consuming some chemical, affects how the cells work, and then suddenly it matters and un-becomes invisible.

Similarly, management of a company, say GM, or of a country, say the US, lives in its own world with its own rules, and can easily forget that the cell-equivalent (workers / citizens / "consumers") matter -- until some behavior suddenly damages them (or bankrupts them) and they become un-invisible to "the economy".

These actors,however, are all still "people". Just as there are living structures smaller than "people" (such as cells), there seem to be (by this model) living structures that are larger than people, namely corporations and nations.

Smaller, in this sense, means things that make up something, and larger means, things made up of something.

But, our bodies are not "just" a pile of chemicals, or ten trillion cells - they have unique features that only make sense at a person level - such as going to the dentist. Much of "our" lives we spend dealing with issues "mortgage refinancing" that simply have no equivalent at the cellular or atomic level. If we could talk to our cells, it would be a very short and frustrating conversation, pretty much what one gets when management and labor sit down together.

So, let's assume for the moment that Corporations (with a capital C) are themselves life-forms that are dimly aware of their environment, dimly aware of the people who make them up, and yet exist independently (mostly) doing their own things that are similarly unintelligible to us.

We have, in other words, created a new level of multicellular life, called Corporations, which have their own life of struggling with each other, their own rules, and their own economy that is often entirely decoupled from the economy individual humans live in.

What has changed, in a baffling way to these corporations then, is that the health of "the consumer" has suddenly changed. Before this level was a reliable source of income or labor and as invisible as illegal immigrants to our food-processing company stockholders, and now, suddenly, the problems of individual humans have intersected the problems of the corporate world.

The US government is struggling to fix the problems of corporate life forms, because, at their scale, these are the only ones that matter or are even visible. Corporate life forms are trying to stay afloat by laying off 20% or more of their workers, because that always used to work, but it doesn't any more, not once EVERYONE is doing the same thing at once.

Intersecting all this is the confusion and confounding of "management" of a company and the company or industry itself. If there is no such thing as a corporate life form, other than an extension and echo of the top manager, then the company and the leader are the same thing.

However, most of our corporations and industries exist and continue to function even though the top management may be dysfunctional or absent entirely, or entirely engaged in internal power struggles. The plane continues, for a while to fly, even though the crew is having a huge fistfight.

So one thing we need to distinguish, when possible, is the survival of the current pilot and crew, versus the survival of the airplane. In many cases, the two seem to have diverged, and the crew is more interested in stripping the plane and bailing out than in saving the plane.

But the question here is where "the problem" is. Where is this whole multi-level system of cells, humans, corporations, and government breaking down?

This gets to the crux of the matter. Is it the humans at the top who are blind to any world except their own, a fact that is obvious from below but invisible from up there? Or is it that the higher life form, the corporation or nation, is insufficiently well formed to understand how important its constituent people are to its own existence?

In other words, assuming that most of what we see at a national level is a struggle of corporations and Corporate life forms, do they grasp that trying to survive at 'the expense of" their own cells is a losing strategy?

There is a lot of evidence that this fact is not evident. Congress is obsessed with trying to bail out or save the Corporate life forms, at the expense of the individual composite cells (ie, us.)

It is not surprising that humans at the top of such corporations or government become blind to the realities of cellular-level life. This is no longer where they operate.

If corporations are an independent living species, then the problem we face is that this level entity is too stupid to realize what it depends on.

And the solution that suggests is to make corporations more, not less, capable -- if that can be done in such a way that they don't destroy the entire planet that they also rely on in the process.

In other words, imagine that Corporations are "mostly alive", and "dimly aware" of what depends on what, and what part of individual humans and the earth's ecosphere they rely on to survive, which used to be invisible before there were so many Corporations sucking so much out of us and the planet.

Then, an intervention point, in that model, if we could find it, would be to make the Corporation brighter at perceiving long-range, long-term consequences of decisions IT makes, where the humans in it are mostly just there for show, acting as if they are making the decisions, kind of the way humans think they are making decisions that their bodies and brains made minutes earlier, as MRI studies now show.

This gets to the core question of how emergent, synthetic, multi-level life forms perceive the world, and learn about it, including what is connected to what.

Surely the basic laws of cybernetics apply to such learning. Things that have immediate consequences are easier to learn. Things with distant or delayed consequences take longer to learn.

The model says we're struggling with the wrong thing, trying to figure out WHO should be the humans at "the top" of meta-organisms that don't really rely on "the top" for leadership or guidance any more. The thinly veiled secret of those at the top is that they are also clueless and not in control of what's going on, despite their massive marketing effort to persuade everyone that they are just crucial and should be paid massive sums for their invaluable contributions.

We should take some time, remove the individual humans from the equation, and look at how the overall system is organized, and self-organizing to perceive the world around it and to improve its own ability to perceive and act and make alliances and adapt. Such seeing has to extend downward to humans and cells and plants and the ecosystem, as well as upwards to nations and planetary composite life forms that Corporations are themselves cells within.

This seems abstract, but it may be very real. It is certainly outside the normal box!

A few points in closing.

One is the key assumption that collections of things do not just have 'emergent properties", but that the emergent properties themselves take on a persistent, self-perpetuating "life of their own" that no longer depends directly on the collection of things that initially made it. Life has, in some sense, like an electromagnetic wave, been radiated outwards and no longer depends on the existence of the broadcast antenna. In fact, the corporate entity may turn on its founding fathers and expel them and go off its own direction, and often does.

The huge mental barrier to this concept is the idea we have of "life" being a property of collections of cells that are touching in a more or less fixed arrangement, although even that breaks down if one includes blood and white blood cells, etc.

To "see" or visualize the type of "life" I'm talking about, you may need to just follow the feedback loops and see what aspects of things are self-regulating, self-perpetuation, self-repairing, self-defending, DESPITE the efforts to go a different way by the employees ,management, stockholders, regulators, etc.

It is, ultimately, not DNA or proteins or genes, but the existence of these abstract "feedback control loops" that seem to be the universal property that defines something that behaves as if it were "alive". If we look at it from that point of view, this includes all biological life, but now includes as well ecosystems, the planet, corporations, major religions, etc. as living things.

This would also suggest that the key aspects of information transfer, the web and Google, for example, are at the core of the thinking neurons of this meta-being that has taken shape, or is taking shape around us even now.

That in turn suggests that the place to look for successful new product innovations for Google or Web-3 systems is beyond collaboration into synthesis of smaller-scale living units, something akin to "teams" but way beyond them, as well as synthesis of dyads of people that have a life beyond that of each of the two separately.

What structure, system, framework, boost, database, service, etc. would catalyze the emergence of such multi-human life forms, detect them, make a space that nourishes them and makes them bright enough to surround us safely instead of destructively?

That may be the question some people should be asking. That may be the gap. It's not just a question of groupware and collaboration and working-together, or of fixing 'broken" relationships or marriages. It's a question of what the positive side is, what levels of emergent life we can make with and out of our interactions with each other.

What kind of network service would detect and facilitate the closure and stability of such closed, feedback loops between individual agents -- the substrate of Life itself?

NOW you're talking "market share" and pent-up demand.

Wade

What about GM?

Toyota has a track record of taking over totally dysfunctional GM plants and making them functional by just changing management, with same unions, same facilities, same labor, same equipment. See history of NUMMI in Fremont, CA, going from GM's worst plant to the best in one year.

references:

Becoming Lean , Jeffrey Liker, page 62-63
http://books.google.com...

Stop Rising Healthcare Costs Using Toyota Lean Production Methods

By Robert Chalice (page 53)

http://books.google.com...

There may be no reason to lose the jobs, plants, or contracts.

Actually, what changed was not just management, but the whole underlying philosophy on which the plant was managed, which is the crucial change.

Chalice cites these factors as the new "five core values: teamwork, equity, involvement, mutual trust and respect, and safety."

In short, workers were treated as first class partners in the plant, not as some kind of "asset" to be "managed" and "controlled." They were listened to. They were respected.

Yes, that does make all the difference, in automobiles, as Liker points out, or in hospitals, as Chalice points out, supported by the Keystone study of John's Hopkins Dr. Peter Pronovost in Michigan, showing that when nurses were actually listened to by doctors, patients were significantly better off and had better outcomes.

Gasp. I took Dr. Pronovost's class in Patient Safety last year, and, yes, it really is that "simple." Culture drives safety and productivity. Culture drives the bottom line, not technology.

If you want things to work, you have to learn about human beings, and culture, and work within the constraints that puts on you. Humans are not machines and work way better than machines if allowed to (McGreggor's Theory Y), or way worse than machines if forced to (Theory X).

It's the job of the stockholders and stakeholders to realize that, and put management in place that will support the work force instead of trying to exploit it.

Period.

Domestic violence against men

=====================================================

http://menshealth.about.com/od/relationships/a/Battered_Men.htm

http://www.batteredmen.com/

http://home.comcast.net/~philip.cook/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence

http://domesticviolenceresourcesformen.blogspot.com/

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-05/ghcc-med051508.php

http://menweb.org/battered/batsacks2way.htm

http://www.gmdvp.org/gmdvp/index.htm

http://www.dahmw.info/resources.html

http://www.dvmen.org/

http://news.mensactivism.org/files/research_flyer.pdf

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvGicpwAl-0

http://leehopkins.net/2008/09/22/domestic-violence-against-men-i-never-knew/

http://www.themenscenter.com/National/national01.htm

http://www.batteredmen.com/gjdvdata.htm

http://www.law.fsu.edu/Journals/lawreview/downloads/304/kelly.pdf

=================================================
American Medical Association - JAMA special issue on violence
http://www.dv911.com/articleabusedmen.htm

=========================================
African American:
http://www.dvinstitute.org/index.htm

=========================================
GBLT Domestic Violence in specific (many excellent links)
http://www.aardvarc.org/dv/gay.shtml
============================================

comment on Obama and Intellectualism

While I admire those who command many facts and can stand complexity and ambiguity, what I hope for Obama is that he has the wisdom and humility or insight that other people know things too, and see true and important things that he doesn’t.

The greatness we need is someone who can rally us to pitch in and who will listen to our voice and wisdom and insight, not just his own voice and small group of males with a false consensus.

I read with alarm that his aides are trying to pick the few most important issues to start on. I’d suggest the single most important issue is that, with 200 holes in the bottom of the boat, fixing the “most important 3″ while everyone else watches will not be the winning strategy.

We need someone who can decentralize power and get 200 different centers of action working on all 200 problems at once. Any one of them can sink us. There is no “most important problem” any more, aside from the meta-problem of how to get more people independently working to help, and welcoming their help.

And he just might do that.