July 2013 – Page 77

The Power Of Maps

Cartographer Denis Wood considers his craft:

I’ve seen maps that I find completing terrifying. Maps of uranium mining and of various illnesses in the Navajo reservations—they’re just insane. They just make you furious. Bill Bunge’s map—which I still think is one of the great maps, the map of where white commuters in Detroit killed black children while going home from work—that’s a terrifying map, and that’s an amazing map.

He knew that. They had to fight to get the data from the city. They had to use political pressure to get the time and the exact location of the accidents that killed these kids. They knew what they were looking for. I didn’t have anything to do with that project, so when I saw the map for the first time, it was like, “Oh my god.” It’s so powerful to see maps like that. That’s the power of maps, or one of the powers of maps: to make graphic—and at some level unarguable—some correlative truth. We all knew that people go to and from work. But to lay the two things together reveals something horrible.

Update from a reader:

The Curbed LA blog posted a map yesterday showing human life expectancy in the different communities in the Los Angeles area. Of note, residents of Watts live an average of 11.9 fewer years than residents of Bel Air.

Recent Dish on maps here, here, and here.

Health Insurance On The Honor System

At least until 2015, Obamacare’s healthcare exchanges won’t verify the income or health insurance status of individuals seeking health insurance subsidies. Suderman expects this to make the law more expensive:

[The exchanges will] rely on “self-reported” information. And then subsidies will be available to anyone who simply attests that they do not get qualifying, affordable health insurance from work, and that their household income is low enough to be eligible for subsidies.

As Ben Domenech writes in this morning’s Transom, what this means is that “the most significant entitlement increase since the Great Society will be operating on the honor system.” And as Yuval Levin says, it may turn out to be “an open invitation to fraud.” Even if outright fraud does not become a major issue, the combination of the delays may increase the cost of the law relative to what it would have been: No employer penalty, and no health status or income verification, means that more people will end up on the exchanges, receiving subsidies. And more subsidies means a more expensive law. The deficit reduction it was supposed to have achieved, already significantly reduced, is almost certainly reduced further—and perhaps gone entirely.

Ezra believes that Obamacare “just got easier to implement”:

Obamacare’s critics appear to be enjoying something of a Pyrrhic victory right now: They get to (rightly) criticize the administration for unilaterally delaying unpopular and ill-drafted elements of the law. But they seem to be assuming that the bad media coverage now can be extrapolated into bad implementation next year.

That misses the choice the White House actually made: Bad press now, and higher costs in 2014, in return for an easier roll out. Whether you think the White House is making the right policy call will depend on whether you prefer slightly lower costs to a smoother rollout. But so far as Obamacare’s implementation goes, it just got easier, not harder.

Reihan suggests an alternative to the exchange subsidies:

The most straightforward way to address the ACA’s growing pains is to abandon both the existing tax preference for employer-sponsored insurance and the sliding-scale exchange subsidies and replace them with a dead-simple fixed-sum tax credit. John Goodman of the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis has called for a refundable tax credit of $2500 for individuals and $8000 for a family of four to help finance insurance payments. The beauty of this approach is that it would level the playing field between employer-sponsored insurance and the exchanges, and it would be relatively easy for the federal government to implement. Moreover, it wouldn’t create a work disincentive, as working longer hours or for higher pay wouldn’t lead to a cut in your subsidy. Not everyone will embrace Goodman’s idea. Liberals might argue that it’s not generous enough and conservatives might argue that it costs too much. Yet it has a virtue that the ACA as currently conceived does not, namely that we actually have some hope of getting it up and running.

Worse Than Peak Oil?

Lester Brown warns that “peak water” could threaten the global food supply:

Tapping underground water resources, which got seriously underway in the mid-20th century, helped expand world food production, but as the demand for grain continued climbing the amount of water pumped continued to grow. Eventually the extraction of water began to exceed the recharge rate of aquifers from precipitation, and water tables began to fall. In effect, overpumping creates a water-based food bubble, one that will burst when the aquifer is depleted and the rate of pumping is necessarily reduced to the rate of recharge from precipitation. …

[I]n the Arab Middle East, the world is seeing the collision between population growth and water supply at the regional level. For the first time in history, grain production is dropping in a geographic region with nothing in sight to arrest the decline. Because of the failure of governments in the region to mesh population and water policies, each day now brings 10,000 more people to feed and less irrigation water with which to feed them.

The Higher Meaning Of Higher Education, Ctd

A reader writes:

I have a strong liberal arts background. In high school, I read Alexander Pope, Camus, and Sartre; I watched movies by Bergman and Kurosawa. In college I majored in philosophy at one of the best liberal arts colleges in the country. And if I hear another advocate of the liberal arts proclaim the glories of the humanities, and wax oh-so-eloquent about how enlightening and inspiring it is to read the Great Books, I am going to scream.

First, about those stereotypes about philosophy majors who can’t get jobs. Guess what, they’re true. I have spent many years trying to figure out what to do with my life, and treading water financially, to the detriment not only of my own bank account and well-being, but that of my family, as well. The faculty and administration at my college bent over backwards emphasizing the social justice aspect of the education we were receiving. But the first requirement for being a socially responsible member of this – or any – society is being able to support yourself.

Second, there is far too much emphasis in the liberal arts on teaching people to write.

I’m a very good writer. But, again, guess what – that’s irrelevant for most jobs. Very few jobs – even jobs that require an advanced degree – actually involve writing. What they do require is the ability to organize information and communicate well. Writing is a form of organizing information and communicating – but it’s just one form of either. It’s entirely possible for someone to be very good at organizing information and communicating, but not have to write anything more complicated than an email. Look at the credits of any movie. That’s a list of hundreds of well-paid, highly competent professionals. And at best a handful are being paid for their ability to write.

Third, I was told that getting into a great college was key to getting a good job: the better the college/university you attended, the better the chance you would land a solid, well-paying job. Um, no. I have had dozens of job interviews over the years. I don’t remember anyone ever mentioning the college where I got my Bachelor’s degree. I don’t see a dramatic difference between the people I know who went to elite colleges and those who went to good state universities. Actually, I don’t see much of a difference at all.

Fourth, I can define the “crisis” in the humanities in one four-letter word: Dish. The Dish represents the crisis in the humanities. Why? Because it epitomizes a problem for the humanities for which the humanities themselves are responsible: they have created their own competition. When I read the Dish (which I usually do several times a day), I read articles about a wide variety of topics, almost all of which fall under the traditional definition of the humanities/liberal arts. Reading the Dish is, in effect, a way of continuing my liberal arts education. And yet I do so without coming anywhere near a liberal arts faculty member. I don’t think you even quote professors all that often. There are myriad examples of this. I consider myself somewhat knowledgeable about art, but I never took an art history class in college. Instead, I have spent lots of time in museums and galleries, and have read lots of newspaper and magazine articles about artists I like. If you want to develop an appreciation for Shakespeare, you can take a class in the English department of some university. Or you can watch any of the hundreds of movies that have been made based on the Bard’s plays.

The humanities are alive and well. They’re just not necessarily alive and well in the humanities departments of American colleges and universities. THAT is the crisis of the humanities.

The Best Of The Dish Today

The video above (around 0:50) reveals what appears to be the horrible truth behind this morning’s massacre in Cairo. It seems to have been a largely unprovoked military massacre of Islamist protesters. Tweets in real time here. The best immediate analysis here.

Readers shared their stories of euthanizing their old dogs; Pope Francis spoke of a “globalization of indifference” toward the vulnerable, especially illegal immigrants; and Mos Def showed us how barbaric forced-feeding truly is.

The most popular post was the twelve-year-old Egyptian pundit; the second was The Last Lesson We Learn From Our Pets. The Dish’s top four countries for viewers today were the US, Canada, Britain and Australia, in that order. In the last seven days, the Dish got 65 pageviews in Mongolia.

See you tomorrow.

Leave No Troops Behind

Fed up with Karzai, Obama is leaning more toward the “zero option” in Afghanistan: no troops at all after next year. I sure hope that’s where we end up. Obama’s election in 2008 was a clear repudiation of the reckless interventionism of the recent past; his re-election in 2012 cemented the shift toward a global American role that is more attuned to our balance sheet and our actual security threats. Leaving remnants of empire behind in places like Iraq and Afghanistan undermines that shift, re-legitimizes the notion that the US must somehow control every nook and cranny of the globe (we can’t and it corrupts us when we try).

That’s the change Obama represented to the next generation: a pragmatic adjustment to a reality that has nothing to do with the neocon and boomer mindsets of the past.. He has delivered, by and large. But the clarity of the departures is what will help define the future: a future of limits.

Defining Dopamine

Bethany Brookshire gets technical about the neurotransmitter:

[M]any people like to describe a spike in dopamine as “motivation” or “pleasure.” But that’s not quite it. Really, dopamine is signaling feedback for predicted rewards. If you, say, have learned to associate a cue (like a crack pipe) with a hit of crack, you will start getting increases in dopamine in the nucleus accumbens in response to the sight of the pipe, as your brain predicts the reward. But if you then don’t get your hit, well, then dopamine can decrease, and that’s not a good feeling. So you’d think that maybe dopamine predicts reward. But again, it gets more complex. For example, dopamine can increase in the nucleus accumbens in people with post-traumatic stress disorder when they are experiencing heightened vigilance and paranoia. So you might say, in this brain area at least, dopamine isn’t addiction or reward or fear. Instead, it’s what we call salience. Salience is more than attention: It’s a sign of something that needs to be paid attention to, something that stands out. This may be part of the mesolimbic role in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and also a part of its role in addiction.

But dopamine itself?

It’s not salience. It has far more roles in the brain to play. For example, dopamine plays a big role in starting movement, and the destruction of dopamine neurons in an area of the brain called the substantia nigra is what produces the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. Dopamine also plays an important role as a hormone, inhibiting prolactin to stop the release of breast milk. Back in the mesolimbic pathway, dopamine can play a role in psychosis, and many antipsychotics for treatment of schizophrenia target dopamine. Dopamine is involved in the frontal cortex in executive functions like attention. In the rest of the body, dopamine is involved in nausea, in kidney function, and in heart function. With all of these wonderful, interesting things that dopamine does, it gets my goat to see dopamine simplified to things like “attention” or “addiction.”

The above trailer is from Awakenings, a film based on the true story of Oliver Sacks’ breakthrough with L-DOPA, a chemical used to increase dopamine concentrations in the treatment of ailments such as Parkinson’s disease and encephalitis lethargica – from which Sacks’ patients “awoke”. Watch the entire film below:

When Art Becomes Dated

Tom Vanderbilt tackles the topic:

“What makes a work of art seem dated is a sort of overdetermined reliance on the tropes, whether of subject or style, of the day—a kind of historical narcissism. … Datedness runs in all kinds of temporal directions. Science fiction, the genre that should seem the least dated, can often feel the most, because the future as depicted came to pass and looked nothing like that. In the same way that period films often commit the mistake of showing everyone driving shiny new period cars (as those are the only ones that have survived to the present), science-fiction films often assume that the future, to paraphrase William Gibson, will be “evenly distributed”—that everything, from computers to clothes, will represent a radical break from today. A film like “Blade Runner,” however, reminds us that periodicity can be messy. As Gibson has written, the best way to write about the future is to write about the present.

The Privilege Of Paris

In a dispatch from Paris, Ta-Nehisi contemplates privilege, writing that it “is like money–when you have none it is impossible to get and when you have more people offer it to you at every turn”:

We talk about a culture of poverty as a way of damnation, but not as a way of comprehension. America loves winners, and tells us that we can all be winners, and it says this at such a volume that when you do not win, you might believe that something deep in your bones condemns you to losing–and believing that you might take whatever is given to you. You might be thankful for your squalor. You might come to believe that it is a divine plan for you to be under and down. I don’t want to overstate this. I simply want to say that if I punch you in the face enough times, and you lack the power to stop me, you might come to believe that it is what you deserve. Rousseau says that strength must be transformed into right; likewise, weakness becomes destiny.

But the game is rigged. I know this because I loved my craft for many years and it meant nothing to anyone save my mother, my father, my siblings, my wife and a few close friends. At 25 my only noteworthy success was playing some part in the creation of my son. I stayed loyal to his mother. I think I stayed loyal because I could park myself there–perhaps I failed at all other things. But I was a good father and I was a loyal spouse. And then one day a man of some privilege (bearing his own struggles) spoke to another man of some privilege and I became a man of some privilege with a megaphone, which I now employ, across an ocean, to bring these thoughts to you.

Dreher, who spent last October in Paris, chimes in:

I don’t deserve Paris, I don’t deserve my writing career, I don’t deserve my wife and children — and that is reason to rejoice and be glad for having been given all these things by God. And not only given these things, as a divine favor, but given the wherewithal — morally, spiritually, materially — to help make our dreams come true. To believe that the game is entirely rigged, that the only reason anybody ever does well is because of pure chance or cheating, is to deny the active role we play in the creation of our lives, though of course some have more room to act than others. But to believe that we deserve all of it, that everything comes to us as the result of natural justice, is to be prideful, and to risk serious spiritual corruption.

Face Of The Day

Glen Doyle a member of the Wuriniri Dance Group performs during a public NAIDOC celebration at Hyde Park on July 8, 2013 in Sydney, Australia. NAIDOC is a celebration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and an opportunity to recognise the contributions of Indigenous Australians. By Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images.