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RAW Potpourri
R. Alex Whitlock
Affluence and Its Discontents (Robert Samuelson, Washington Post)
You hear the refrain all the time: The economy looks good statistically (4.7 percent unemployment), but it doesn't feel good. Although the United States is the wealthiest nation in history, our quarrels and quibbles with our prosperity are unending. Why doesn't ever-greater wealth promote ever-greater happiness? It is a question that dates at least to the appearance in 1958 of "The Affluent Society" by John Kenneth Galbraith, the former Harvard University economist who died recently at 97.
"The Affluent Society" is a modern classic because it helped define a new moment in the human condition. For most of history, "hunger, sickness, and cold" threatened nearly everyone, Galbraith wrote. "Poverty was the all-pervasive fact of that world. Obviously it is not of ours." No, indeed. After World War II, the dread of another Great Depression gave way to an economic boom. In the 1930s unemployment had averaged 18.2 percent; in the 1950s it was 4.5 percent. In 1946 only 8,000 households had TVs; by 1960 about 90 percent did. [...]
It's often said that only the rich are getting ahead; everyone else is standing still or falling behind. Well, there are many undeserving rich -- overpaid chief executives, for instance. But over any meaningful period, most people's incomes are increasing. From 1995 to 2004, inflation-adjusted median family income -- for families precisely in the middle -- rose 14.3 percent, to $43,200, the Federal Reserve says. People feel "squeezed" because their rising incomes often don't satisfy their rising wants -- for bigger homes, more health care, more education, faster Internet connections.
One of the rules of budget rhetoric is that cutting into the growth of a government program is actually "cutting the program." It's the same sort of thing here: our condition is not improving as fast as we would like, so things are getting worse.
Worshipping at the church of Tim Hortons (Mark Steyn, Macleans)
"Americans aspire to independence," he told the Star's man. "Their model is to drive out of town, Gary Cooper with Grace Kelly, and get on their ranch and she's in the kitchen and having babies and he's standing at the ranch gate with a gun, saying, 'no trespassing.' "
I don't know if, in the course of their research, Messrs. Kidd and Adams ever visited any "communities" -- in, say, New England, or old England, or Belgium, or Slovenia, or even Canada. But, if they did, they might have noticed that you drive through the outskirts of the "community," past the various "dwelling units," and arrive at the centre of the "community" -- often called a "village green" or a "town square" -- and smack dab at the centre of the centre you'll see a big building with a cross on it, and perhaps a sign saying "St. George's Parish Church. Consecrated 1352." Nonetheless, undaunted, two grown men are willing to argue in the Toronto Star that Americans have to make do with going to church because they've lost all sense of community.
Liberals and conservatives alike bemoan the death of community, but liberals stake out the peculiar position of expressing concern that individuality often trumps community while generally setting themselves up as opponents or religion, community standards, and the very things that have historically made community bonds.
Study Finds English Are Healthier than Americans (Joanne Silberner, NPR)
A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association comes to a conclusion that has surprised even the researchers who conducted it. Middle-aged whites in England are significantly healthier than middle-aged whites in the United States. That's despite the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person on health care. [...]
Michael Marmot of University College in London said the results astonished him and the other researchers.
"Americans have more diabetes. Americans have more heart disease. Americans have more respiratory disease and other diseases, as well," Marmot says.
That's twice as much diabetes in the United States. And nearly twice as many people in the United States reported cancer.
"It was a bit of a big shock," Marmot says. "I just didn't imagine we'd find it consistently across the board, with worse health in the United States compared with England." [...]
It's not the different health systems. With its higher health-care expenditures and greater availability of technology, the United States should score better, not worse.
It's also not the distribution of healthcare towards the wealthy: the richest third of Americans score comparably to the poorest third of Britons. Stress seems a sufficiently pervasive suspect. Funny that as harried and insecure as we are, we remain some of the happier people on the planet -- happier than
the British, even.
Observations
Having babies in the kitchen sounds sort of unhygienic...
And, I saw that thing on British vs American health earlier this week and didn't buy the "stress" explanation, either. Though, I would be interested in what actually caused the difference.
I'll tell you what I think probably makes a MAJOR difference in the health of a nation, whether it be the US or the UK: obesity, and the cultural trends that drive that. Increase weight, and you increase your chances of diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and the leading cause of death in this country, heart disease. Add smoking to that, and wow, you've really got some problems. I see this multiple times every day in my clinical practice. It's bad.
Aldahlia, you know how dirty we Americans are. I think stress levels affect our health in enough ways for it to be a pretty major culprit. State of mind seems to have an overwhelming affect on our bodies.
Eel, the article mentioned both. Obesity rates are higher here, but not nearly enough to account for the difference. Smoking levels here and there are about the same.
EEL-
I could have swore I just read a report that said that Cancer has overtaken heart disease as the #1 cause of death. Maybe I misread it.
I though we were supposed to be dirty in the Christina Aguilera way, but that it was Europe that was supposed to be dirty in the bathing way. Or, maybe just France. I lose track.
I guess what I'm asking, is "What are we so damned stressed about?" Supposedly we work, like, 5 more hours a week than the British. I hate to think that those 5 hours are really making the difference.
1) Your comment after the first excerpt isn't quite fair. In federal budgeting, the complaint is when budgets increase slower than inflation. The dollars just don't go as far when the cost of things is almost always increasing. It really has nothing to do with expectations or "what we'd like."
The Park Service also has the added problem that the administration has added requirements (security background checks on all employees, for example) without adding the funding to pay for them. They're called "unfunded mandates," and they really hurt the bottom line without adding any real benefit at the park level.
2) I also don't think it's fair to label liberals as opponents of religion. Opponents of religion in government maybe, but not in any way that would affect community (could anyone seriously argue that putting the 10 commandments up in a courthouse has any effect on the community?). I also happen to disagree that "community standards make community bonds". NEIGHBORS make community bonds.
3) Consider that Britain is part of the EU, and they've banned ~20x more chemical compounds than the U.S. Their exposure to carcinogenic chemicals could be much lower than ours.
1. I wasn't thinking of the Park Service on that comment, or any real "department" as much as I was entitlements, usually in regards to an ongoing debate. The House proposes a 10% increase in funding for Medicaid, for instance, but the Senate only approves 5%. Newspaper coverage is often that it was "cut" by 5%.
To put a more liberal spin on the rhetorical trick, Republicans warned that if Democrats were to have taken the senate in 2002 or 2004 that they would "raise taxes" by halting or not renewing Bush's tax cuts. That's the same sort of thing.
I'm not talking about changes that fall within annual inflation.
2a) Neighbors only make community bonds if they are allowed to and if there is a degree of conformity. Otherwise community bonds are made in Hollywood or New York publishing houses or a number of other external sources. Otherwise neighbors are not so much a community but at best merely a cell of a larger organ.
2b) You're right that I was wrong to say that liberals are "opponents o[f] religion" as though it were a uniform thing. I should say something like "resistence to the public expression of religion usually comes from the left" or something to that effect.
The whole Ten Commandments fight is pretty stupid, in my book, though I think both sides are kind of being stupid for pushing what is such a meaningless thing. But the fight rages on because it's part of a larger war.
A fight that I am more likely to see as significant is prayer in school. A decade or so ago I attended a Sam Rayburn High School football game in Pasadena. Before the game there was a prayer. Football is a community-bonding event. Keeping religion out in a city that is so overwhelmingly Christian is to an extent anti-community, requiring that 90% retire a community-unifying expression for the sake of the remaining 10%. The same is true, to an extent, of non-Mormons in Utah and eastern Idaho spitting in the wind. Whether we like it or not, we live in a Mormon part of the country. To the extent that we fight against that, we're fighting against the cohesiveness of the community.
But beyond that, there are many that are outright hostile to religion. Some oppose moments-of-silence because it affords students the time to pray. Christian extracurricular groups are opposed by some.
It is not necessarily the sentiment of the left that religion ought to be a don't-ask-don't-tell issue, but it's a sentiment that does not extend much beyond the left.
3) You're right, carcinogens could play a role.
The Brits walk more than we do. Much more. Maybe that plays a role. *shrug*
>>>You're right that I was wrong to say that liberals are "opponents o[f] religion" as though it were a uniform thing. I should say something like "resistence to the public expression of religion usually comes from the left" or something to that effect.<<<
The sweeping generalization may have been off, but there is a significant group among the American Left that is hostile to religion, which comes through loud and clear. Your first characterization captured that more succinctly than your second.
Fascinating article on the comparitive study on the health of British and American men here:
http://www.slate.com/id/214...
The short of it? The difference is socioeconomics.
Interesting article, thanks for bringing it to my attention.
My main criticism is that it overlooks what is (to me) the most surprising part of the study: Wealthy Americans did roughly as well as poor Brits. If what he says is true, then wealthy (as defined by the top third) Americans should be in overwhelmingly better shape because they have more control over their destiny.
I think there is something to it, through. Even wealthier Americans tend to straddle the debt line and therefore could feel "less" secure financially, but that is not particularly attributable to "poverty and inequality in the provision of health services." It brings us back to stress - in the case of the wealthiest 1/3, largely self-induced.
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