Evgeny Morozov on Tim O'Reilly

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I would like to commend to your favorable attention this Evgeny Morozov essay on Tim O’Reilly. If any essay ever owned the noun “takedown”, it is this one. O’Reilly, in this telling, is yet another popular Internet “philosopher” wearing his libertarian blinders. There’s no need for politics in this world — only more private actors’ economic bodies bouncing off one another inelastically like financial billiard balls. Once again (documenting this is a Baffler staple), what could have been a revolution in values and in the basic structure of our institutions (personified in this essay by Richard Stallman — and actually, the shoe fits) is transformed into this generation’s Tom Peters.

There’s a lot I could quote from in here. I’ll leave you with this:

Sorting through the six thousand or so academic papers that cite O’Reilly’s essay on Web 2.0 is no easy feat. It seems that anyone who wanted to claim that a revolution was under way in their own field did so simply by invoking the idea of Web 2.0 in their work: Development 2.0, Nursing 2.0, Humanities 2.0, Protest 2.0, Music 2.0, Research 2.0, Library 2.0, Disasters 2.0, Road Safety 2.0, Identity 2.0, Stress Management 2.0, Archeology 2.0, Crime 2.0, Pornography 2.0, Love 2.0, Wittgenstein 2.0. What unites most of these papers is a shared background assumption that, thanks to the coming of Web 2.0, we are living through unique historical circumstances. Except that there was no coming of Web 2.0—it was just a way to sell a technology conference to a public badly burned by the dotcom crash. Why anyone dealing with stress management or Wittgenstein would be moved by the logistics of conference organizing is a mystery.

(Thanks to an employee — an owner, I believe — at the Harvard Book Store for pointing me to the latest Baffler.)

Paul J. Nahin, Dr. Euler's Fabulous Formula: Cures Many Mathematical Ills

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On the basis of its title and cover art, you might believe that Dr. Euler's Fabulous Formula is a work of popular mathematics on the level of, say, How To Lie With Statistics or Innumeracy. Don’t get me wrong: both of those books are spectacular — must-reads, in fact. But you don’t read them in the expectation that they’ll contain interesting mathematical content. If you have a background in mathematics or statistics, you in fact don’t read them; you assume that you already know everything that’s in them. (Naked Statistics is like that for me, though the author’s recent appearance on Planet Money makes me think again about reading it.)

Dr. Euler's Fabulous Formula is not like that. It is accessible to anyone with a basic college calculus education, and its rewards are astonishing. Starting from the premise that the Euler formula “e^(i theta) = i sin theta + cos theta” is amazing — which is a correct premise — Nahin is off and running. He runs through Fourier series, Fourier transforms, proof that pi is irrational, how to design radio circuitry, whether a tailwind helps or harms a runner on a circular track, and a hundred other things besides.

But not only is the content remarkable; Nahin pulls off the trick — which is incredibly rare among mathematical writers — of being completely, 100%, crystal clear in his proofs. His book is filled with full-frontal integrals, but every step is spelled out so clearly, and so conversationally, that I never missed a single step in the argument. I love mathematics, but I’ve long wished that I were better at it. Nahin makes me wonder if the mathematicians are the problem, rather than me. (Though it doesn’t matter what the answer to that question is: if I want to learn more math, I need to learn to read mathematics as she is written [by people other than Nahin]. Sad but true.)

So Nahin’s book is both filled to the brim with extremely interesting mathematics, and written clearly enough that any college sophomore could understand it. It’s a trick that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen before. On this basis, I’m strongly inclined to read Nahin’s other work, starting with An Imaginary Tale: The Story of the Square Root of Minus One; apparently Nahin’s Euler book is best viewed as the second half of An Imaginary Tale.

Many thanks to Chris Young, of the long-defunct Explananda blog, for the pointer to this fabulous book.

Some thoughts on Adam Smith

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My memory of The Major Transitions in Evolution is a little hazy, but I believe the thesis is that there have been several important jumps in the history of life on earth, wherein life took a jump from a simpler form to a complex form in such a way that a movement back to the simpler form was impossible. (Synopsis on the wiki.) I seem to recall, for instance, a story going like this: a single-celled organism one day became parasitic on another, until they fused into a multicellular organism, and from that day forward the two organisms could only function in the presence of the other. Each of these transitions, as I recall the story going, involved a new mode of information transmission, which made the transition stick. (This synopsis is likely wrong. My knowledge of biology is even weaker than my knowledge of, well, everything else. “Symbiosis” is the keyword here; it’s associated with the late Lynn Margulis.)

I wonder whether complex market economies are a new transition, in the sense that we have simply ceased being able to function without a division of labor. None of us in Western capitalist democracies could even consider living as economic hermits, tending our solitary farms or whatnot, because all the components necessary to even start that farm presuppose so much from the society around us: a government to maintain the roads that bring our products to market; a state with a monopoly on violence so that we don’t need to pay off the Mafia every time we want to get on those roads; industrial corporations to manufacture the steel tools that we use to plow the land; miners to dig up the iron that the corporations convert into steel; other corporations to build the pickaxes that even primitive miners would use to extract the iron ore from the ground; and so forth.

All of which is just to say: Boston is shut down right now, and I’m out of food, and the restaurants are closed, and I’d really like to eat dinner. Thanks.

"Job creators"

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Maybe this is paying too much attention to a mere rhetorical trope, but I really dislike the phrase “job creator” as a synonym for “businessman”. Businessmen may or may not create jobs; if they do, it seems to me, it’s very often purely accidental. Word processors, for instance, are a great benefit to mankind, but they also take jobs away from secretaries. Everyone loves their smartphone, but that love is seemingly taking jobs away from supermarket-tabloid writers. Google Search, maybe the most magical technology of my life so far, may well radically decrease demand for librarians.

That’s just what Schumpeter called “creative destruction” (“celebrated everywhere that capitalism is actually believed in”). So on the one side, it’s not at all clear that businessmen create jobs; they may well destroy existing industries.

Then, of course, there’s the fact that a successful business very often drives out the incumbents from its own industry. Google may have created some jobs, but I assume that it also eliminated some jobs at Alta Vista.

Finally, there’s the obvious point that it’s considered a good thing when businesses squeeze more revenue out of each individual employee. This is called “increased productivity”, and historically it’s how nations increase their GDP, and thereby how living standards rise. The fraction of Americans working in agriculture is 1/3 of what it was in 1970, yet total output is 91% above what it was then. Agriculture may be the foundation of a healthy people, but it’s not because farmers are job creators. Quite the opposite, in fact.

The conceptual trouble may come from businessmen’s desire to be associated with people whom we universally admire, and whom we rightly view as advancing society — people like inventors. Not all businessmen are inventors; nor are all businessmen job creators. Today, for instance, I saw Rick Steves describe himself as “a hardworking business owner who creates jobs”. He may employ people; but if he wants to claim that he created jobs by writing travel guides, he needs to show that he didn’t take away jobs from other travel guides (Lonely Planet, say). If he’s just taking jobs away from other businesses, then he’s not a job creator. He may be an employer, but he’s not a job creator.

This was the trouble that Mitt Romney got into during the 2012 campaign. He wanted us to think that he knew something about how to run a country because he was a businessman. (Set aside everyone’s intuition that there’s a difference between a financier and an inventor, and that Romney was a financier.) But as a businessman, he would be happiest when his companies drove all of their competitors out of business and managed to produce the same output with half the workers. But inasmuch as his competitors were also American companies, the net effect on American employment is … well, it’s not obviously zero, but neither is the effect obviously to add American jobs. (Paul Krugman made the point more eloquently back in 1996, in “A Country Is Not a Company”.)

To the extent that businessmen know which policies encourage inventors to thrive, they may know how to create jobs; but even here, I think it’s really only safe to say that creating a fertile climate for inventors aids in increasing productivity; it doesn’t say anything about guaranteeing full employment, which is what “creating jobs” has to mean. It has to mean that there are more people working today than there were before you took charge.

Actually creating jobs may be the role of the Federal Reserve. The Fed is charged with maintaining stable prices consistent with maximum employment. There’s a story according to which allowing unemployment to drop too low means that inflation will start spiraling upward; that threshold level is called the Non-Accelerating-Inflation Rate of Unemployment, or NAIRU for short, and I’ve been convinced that the concept is bunk. But in any case, the question is how to ensure that everyone who wants a job has one. It’s romantic to think that a proud fellow called a “job creator” knows how to make this happen, but the true story may be that mechanically adjusting interest rates, and occasionally pushing stimulus when all else fails, is all that we need. Not surprising that the Romneys of the world would yearn for a more heroic story. Unfortunately, that story doesn’t withstand any scrutiny.

Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law

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Lest I develop a reputation as a Negative Nancy, I should note that I also recently read Feynman’s The Character of Physical Law, which has been sitting on my shelf for certainly more than a decade. Just a delightful book; I had forgotten how remarkable a teacher Feynman is. The whole book has the tone of Feynman’s little bit on uncertainty:

which is to say a certain extremely rehearsed casualness. The book’s casualness is in the teaching of things that are actually extremely complicated: symmetry laws (i.e., laws stating that certain quantities are unchanged when certain actions are performed), conservation laws (that the total amount of some quantity in the universe is constant), the relationship of mathematics to physics, etc. Just a delightful little gem, which ought to be read just before or just after Wilczek’s Longing for the Harmonies.

Two books to dis-recommend

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Siobhan Roberts, King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry. The problem with this genre — biographers of scientists, or maybe more broadly “science literature for everyone” — is that it needs to please two masters at once: those who know the subject reasonably well and want to know about the men and women behind it, and the general public that is concerned with quirky people first and the subject matter second. This is a very, very fine line to walk, and the number of books I’ve read that do manage to walk it can be counted on one hand. Or maybe zero hands.

Roberts, sadly, is not the person we want reporting on Donald Coxeter. She wants to convince us that he singlehandedly saved geometry, and she wants us to know a bit about the man. Coxeter’s whole life was geometry, though, so Roberts had better know the subject decently well. And if she knows it, she’d better present it to a nontechnical or semi-technical audience fairly well. It’s not at all clear to me that she knew the subject well. She tries her best to make Coxeter sound interesting on his own, but he sounds either extremely boring or just not a very nice person outside of mathematics; in particular, he seems to have lived a fairly loveless marriage, and to have been not very good to his kids.

So we end up not really liking the man, finding him desperately boring, and not understanding much of what makes him a great mathematician. Roberts protests too much about his greatness, telling us over and over again how important he was without really being able to prove it. It’s too bad, because he probably was a first-rate mathematician. I picked up Coxeter’s famous Introduction to Geometry while I was reading Roberts. Hopefully I’ll like Coxeter’s book more than I liked Roberts’s book about him.
Joshua Ferris, Then We Came To The End. I’m really disappointed to be dis-recommending Joshua Ferris’s first novel, given how much I loved his second. So the thing to say here is: go read the second and absolutely skip the first. Then We Came To The End is a boring story from a boring advertising office in Chicago toward the end of the dot-com boom, when everyone is getting laid off and the economy is in slow-motion deflation. People fill their empty lives spreading rumors about one another … and that alone would offer space for a little moral about the insanity of rumors, if it didn’t turn out that all the rumors are basically true.

I know what boring office jobs are like; I’ve worked in them. I don’t need to read a book about them, unless that book shines some sort of interesting light on the plight of office workers. It doesn’t, really at all. The office workers are either contemptible, pitiable, or noble, and I would gladly read a novel about the two noble characters. In the novel I actually read, though, there are 400 pages about bored, despicable people. There’s a bit of a redemptive love fest at the end for no good reason. The final sentence of this 400-page atrocity could have resolved a big question mark that the reader will have carried with himself or herself throughout. But that resolution would involve turning back a few pages and methodically checking off who’s at the love fest, so that we can see who’s not there; and By The Time I Came To The End, I was so desperate to put it down and do something enjoyable that I didn’t even care about a resolution.

So please, go read Ferris’s The Unnamed. It’s great. Let’s just pretend that that was his first novel, and speak no more about his real first one.

Alicia H. Munnell and Steven A. Sass, Working Longer: The Solution to the Retirement Income Challenge

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Here’s a quick bit about a book I despised. Munnell and Sass’s thesis is that since people are living longer, they logically have just 3 options: live on less per year of retirement, save more for every year they’re employed, or retire later. No problems up to here.

Living on less would be dangerous, say Munnell and Sass, and people aren’t saving enough (no arguments here, either); ergo, the only option (flashing DANGER lights) is working longer. So their first sin is one of omission: a better book would have looked at how to, e.g., shift more of society’s resources into providing a better retirement for everyone.

Their next sin is in acknowledging that life expectancies have risen the least for the poorest and least educated among us, and for African-Americans, without then proposing any solution that would actually solve their problem and while sticking to their retire-later guns. If you’re the sort of person whose basic moral alignment says to help the neediest first, this book will anger you. Indeed, I often thought that it should be retitled, Throwing It Against The Wall: The Solution To This Book.

The solutions that they do come to are small-ball ones, like beefing up little job-retraining programs that they admit don’t really work. And they leave the reader with no confidence that employers will actually want to employ older workers. (Even larger solutions, like committing on G.I. Bill scale to college education, aren’t obviously going to solve the problem: give everyone a college degree, and you’ll still find that some people are better educated than others. It’s not clear that a college degree for everyone will solve a macroeconomic problem like retirement security.)

Munnell and Sass rule most of the interesting parts of the problem out of scope, for reasons that elude me. The basic problem, it seems to me, is that employers have no incentive to do what society acknowledges needs to be done, namely provide for the well-being of those who’ve spent their lives toiling. Employers aren’t charities, naturally, so this isn’t necessarily a knock on them. It is, however, a knock on a society that has structured much of worker security (401(k)s, before them pensions, and health insurance for current workers) around employers whose incentives push in exactly the opposite direction. We know that companies won’t do what we need them to do; other societies have taken the next logical step here and looked to government to provide what companies will not. Yet Munnell and Sass rule this out of bounds early on: literally their only question is how to get workers to work longer.

Workers don’t want to work longer. They end up retiring at 62, even though they say they want to work to 65. Here Munnell and Sass have a point: changes in the provision of Social Security benefits have caused people to lower their retirement age from 66 to 62; policy changes could just as easily return the retirement age to where it would have “naturally” landed on its own.

That said, real per-capita GDP has more than tripled since 1950, back when the U.S. economy was the envy of the world; if Americans were prosperous then, we must be really prosperous now. When people earn more money, they naturally decide to convert some of that money into increased leisure. And if they had greater income security (through Social Security, say), they’d likely convert more of that income into leisure. Munnell and Sass ask, essentially, how to convince people who are wealthier than ever to work longer. It’s bizarre tunnel vision.

I anti-recommend this book wholeheartedly.

Facebook Graph Search is pointless, says Farhad Manjoo without meaning to

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Farhad Manjoo’s piece about Facebook Graph Search is the best possible case for why we should care about Facebook Graph Search, which leads ineluctably to the conclusion that we shouldn’t care about Facebook Graph Search. Here’s the sort of thing that Facebook Graph Search lets you do, according to Manjoo:

The most interesting searches weren’t necessarily the most complicated, but those that asked Facebook to combine its knowledge in ways that other sites can’t. In an effort to suss out authentic cuisine, I tried, “Mexican restaurants in New York liked by people from Mexico.”

Let’s pick apart what’s wrong about this. First, the problem for any search engine is that it has to be not only better than Google, but better than Google by enough of a margin to make switching worthwhile. So you have to ask yourself whether searching like this is going to get you better results than just Googling for [authentic Mexican New York]; and if it does get you better results, will it require a lot more effort to do so? How about if you, like many people, eventually find websites that you trust for food questions? (Me, I use Chowhound.) How easily can you answer this Mexican-restaurant question by narrowing your search to Yelp?

Much more fundamentally, though, the problem with Facebook Graph Search is that it’s for people who don’t want to interact with people. Look at Manjoo’s Mexican-food example: I’m supposed to ask Facebook to search among those people who are from Mexico. Why wouldn’t I, instead, just ask people from Mexico? It’s supposed to be a social network, right? Like, with people? So shouldn’t I ask people things? Manjoo wishes he could ask FGS about “running shoes liked by people who have run marathons”; I know what I’d do in that case: I’d post on my friend Laura’s wall (or better yet, email Laura), “Hey Laura: which shoes should I get?”

In its defense, maybe FGS will not just query what my friends like, but rather query what all Facebook users like. But if that’s true, FGS is even less valuable: I don’t care what all Facebook users like. I hardly care what’s outside my own network, contra Manjoo’s example of searching for “photos of friends of friends who like Girls who live in NYC who are single women between 20 and 34 and like Arcade Fire.” That is a question that no one has ever had or will ever have. Either you’re querying the tastes of people you know, or you’re querying the tastes of strangers. And if you’re querying the tastes of strangers, why not use a site that makes no pretense about being “social” — like Google or, in that Arcade Fire dating example, like OkCupid?

The useless use cases come thick and fast in Manjoo’s article. I’m thankful for that, because he’s trying as hard as he can to show why we should care about this thing; given that no one could possibly care about these examples, there must be no reason to care about FGS. Like this:

What captivated me was Facebook’s search interface. It’s unlike any search box you’ve ever used. Google’s search is based on keywords. If you type “restaurants chicago” into Google, it guesses that you’re looking for restaurants in the city even though you typed just two nouns. Facebook, by comparison, wants you to connect nouns with verbs. You can ask, “restaurants in Chicago,” or “restaurants liked by people who live in Chicago” or “restaurants liked by my friends who are from Chicago.” (The search box offers drop-down suggestions as you type, so you don’t usually have to finish writing these full queries.)

This method of searching is instantly intuitive. After just a few queries, I started asking the engine for more and more complicated things, just to see if it could keep up. I tried: “My friends of friends who work in Palo Alto, California and are from California and are male and who like Indian restaurants.”

Is natural-language searching something that anyone needs? Was it a problem that Google required you to search for [restaurants chicago] rather than “I would like to know where to eat a meal in Chicago”? This is a natural-language solution in search of a keyword problem.

If you want to know “restaurants liked by my friends who are from Chicago”, shouldn’t you ask your Chicago friends which restaurants they like?

The fact that Facebook and Manjoo think there’s a problem a computer can solve here is bottomlessly sad to me. It exposes a deep poverty of interpersonal relationships.

Help me learn how to read laws

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I wonder if my dear readers could educate me. Here’s where I got started: my employer’s payroll company, ADP, emailed me to say that as of this year, the mass-transit-pass employer fringe benefit reduces taxable income by as much as the parking-permit fringe benefit; it used to be that you got more for parking. I found this unjust, and was pleased when the injustice was corrected.

So now I want to go find the part of the law that rectifies the injustice. As per that earlier blog post, the relevant section of the tax law appears to be 26 USC 132.

First thing I seem to have discovered: you can’t understand any part of that law until you read all of it. Here’s the first relevant piece:

(f) Qualified transportation fringe
    (1) In general
    For purposes of this section, the term “qualified transportation fringe” means any of the following provided by an employer to an employee:
        (A) Transportation in a commuter highway vehicle if such transportation is in connection with travel between the employee’s residence and place of employment.
        (B) Any transit pass.
        (C) Qualified parking.
        (D) Any qualified bicycle commuting reimbursement.
    (2) Limitation on exclusion
        The amount of the fringe benefits which are provided by an employer to any employee and which may be excluded from gross income under subsection (a)(5) shall not exceed—
            (A) $100 per month in the case of the aggregate of the benefits described in subparagraphs (A) and (B) of paragraph (1),
            (B) $175 per month in the case of qualified parking, and
            […]
In the case of any month beginning on or after the date of the enactment of this sentence and before January 1, 2012, subparagraph (A) shall be applied as if the dollar amount therein were the same as the dollar amount in effect for such month under subparagraph (B).

That final paragraph says “equalize transit passes and parking”. Got it. But two things:

ADP says that the benefit is $240 per month, which disagrees with the $175 in (f)(2)(B).
The final paragraph says that this equality of benefits ends when 2011 ends, which disagrees with ADP.

So I look around some more and I find two things that address these problems:

Section 6(A) in this same law applies an inflation adjustment — hence my statement that you need to read the whole thing to understand the rest. It seems to say that you take the CPI from the preceding calendar year and divide by the CPI for 1992, then multiply by whatever (f)(2)(A) or (f)(2)(B) say.

All right, so we consult the CPI. First of all, I don’t know what ‘the CPI for 1992′ means: does it mean January of 1992? It probably doesn’t much matter which part of 1992 I pick (we’re not Zimbabwe), so I’ll just grab 140.3, the annual average for 1992. Then we get 2012′s CPI, which is about 230. So the multiplier is 1.64. Multiply by the $100 in (f)(2)(A), and I only get $164 — not the $240 that ADP reported.

But again recall that final paragraph, quoted above. It says that mass transit and parking are equal. So let’s assume the pre-inflation-correction benefit is $175 per month, and again apply the 1.64 multiplier. That brings the mass-transit benefit up to $287 — which is now too high. So now I’m confused where the $240 came from that ADP mentioned.
The American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 extended benefit parity until the beginning of 2014, specifically

SEC. 203. EXTENSION OF PARITY FOR EXCLUSION FROM INCOME FOR EMPLOYER-PROVIDED MASS TRANSIT AND PARKING BENEFITS.

(a) IN GENERAL.—Paragraph (2) of section 132(f) is amended by striking ‘‘January 1, 2012’’ and inserting ‘‘January 1, 2014’’.

(b) EFFECTIVE DATE.—The amendment made by this section shall apply to months after December 31, 2011.

The law as it’s archived at Cornell doesn’t seem to reflect this.

So I’m confused on three general points:

How do I know that I read all the parts of the bill that modify the particular paragraph I’m interested in? (John E. McDonough’s magisterial Inside National Health Reform explains very patiently the complicated way in which one needs to read the Affordable Care Act. Do I need a McDonough by my side to read any law? Do I need a Marion Nestle to walk me through the farm bill?)
How do I know that I’m looking at the most up-to-date version of a particular section of the law?
How do I know that there isn’t another section of the US Code that’s relevant to the particular policy — in this case, commuter fringe benefits — that I care about?

Social Security and Medicare are unjust: sure. So let everyone have them!

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There are at least two possible reactions to the realization that a lot of your Federal taxes transfer money from the young to the old (Medicare, Social Security, etc.). One is to argue that this is unjust and try to cut these programs. Another is argue that this is unjust, and therefore to expand them: eliminate the injustice by making the benefit available to everyone. Expand Medicare to everyone. Make Social Security available to people 50 and older. After all, we’re a more prosperous country than we were when Social Security was passed; shouldn’t we reward ourselves for our productivity by providing official support for greater leisure?

It seems like people (e.g., “the execrable Robert J. Samuelson”) only ever take the first option: we must cut Social Security. But why? We’re wealthier than we’ve ever been! (That’s disposable personal income per capita, where disposable personal income is defined as personal income minus taxes. Personal income, in turn, is what you’d expect.) Social Security is an unjust transfer? Sure it is! So make it more just and let more people have it; problem solved.

As it happens, the government has been keeping close watch over productivity statistics since after World War II. If I’m looking at the right data series, and I think I am, aggregate productivity — that is, output per hour of labor — is 4.6 times what it was just after the war. The miracle of compounding, brothers and sisters! Imagine if we as a society had made the decision to take half of that productivity and plow it into our own leisure at the end of a lifetime of hard work. We’d still have the standard of living of postwar America — the most prosperous time this country has ever known. We’d just be able to enjoy more of it.

I’m sure I’m missing important pieces here. For instance, maybe Social Security does now indeed consume twice as much of every person’s paycheck as it did back then; maybe we’ve quite kept up with the productivity gains. Chart A in a summary of the latest Trustees’ Report, for what it’s worth, says that even in their fevered dreams, the actuaries can’t conceive of Social Security consuming more than about 6.5% of GDP.

You could certainly continue working past age 50 under this idea. By all means! You can continue working under the current system. Some people will choose not to, however. And I’m sure the hardworking Social Security actuaries have plenty of good estimates of the benefit level that would induce x many millions of people to drop out of the workforce.

Not that Social Security is any kind of panacea. It pays out an average of $1,230 per month. Even with that meager payout, Social Security constitutes the majority of retirement income for the poorest 60% of retirees; retirees are poor. Social Security is a way to keep people out of poverty; it’s not a retirement with dignity.

Likewise with Medicare: despite liberals’ love for the program, and our desire that everyone be allowed to buy into it, it’s by no means salvation. Marilyn Moon goes into great and fascinating detail about this in her Medicare: A Policy Primer, of which I desperately need to write a review. Moon’s take, which is woefully rare, is to look at Medicare from the perspective of the beneficiaries; too often we look at it only from the perspective of the Federal budget. From the beneficiaries’ perspective, Medicare is a den of complexity. It’s not the single-payer health-care system of our dreams, and it leaves too many retieees (who are, again, by no means wealthy) paying a significant portion of their disposable income toward medical care. In the single-payer system that I think most liberals imagine, you’d pay some amount in taxes, and that would be that. No one expects me to pay a Department of Defense co-pay if the country gets invaded: my taxes are supposed to do the job on their own.

Decades of bludgeoning by the Republican Party has left us with the mistaken impression that we’re a poor country, and that the only thing we can do is cut cut cut. We’re not; we’re an astoundingly wealthy country. What is that wealth buying us? (Well, other than $1.121 trillion to fly money to the Middle East, drop it out of planes, and blow it up.) Wealthy societies should be willing to spend more on health care: a year of life is worth more to us than a year of life in a poorer country — indeed, worth more to us than a year of life to our relatively impoverished 1960s selves. (That’s the fundamental argument underneath David Cutler’s excellent Your Money Or Your Life, which I’ll review soon if I know what’s good for me.)

Wealthy societies should also, at some point, decide whether to convert some of their hard-won gains into leisure. We never seem to have had that discussion. Even opening up this discussion in “libertarian”-friendly ways — like allowing people to contribute money to their Social Security now to buy themselves extra retirement income — would be a worthwhile place to start.

Instead all our discussions are of a crabbed and nervous and desiccated sort. We act as though we’re a poor country. Every politician likes to say that he opposes the story of U.S. decline, but this incessant poverty drumbeat says quite the opposite.