May 21, 2013

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Obama and Elizabeth Warren Feed the College Beast

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College students may see their debt rise sharply overnight, as the interest rate for Stafford Loans is set to double to 6.8 percent on July 1st. Fortunately, students have some friends in high places: The Obama administration, House Republicans, and various senators have each proposed plans that would forestall the rate jump. (Inside Higher Ed has a more detailed account of these policies.)

The proposals put forward by Obama, House Republicans, and Senators Jack Reed (D-RI) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) would tie student loans to the market rate (either the 10-year or the 91-day Treasury rate), though each with its own variation. The boldest plan, from new Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), would reduce student loan rates to .75 percent (the rate at which banks borrow from the Federal Reserve) for one year.

These proposals would offer students some relief, but none of them address the core problem that rising college tuition rates are closely linked to the increased availability of government loans. Stafford loans have been around for just over forty years, and over the past thirty, college tuition and fees surged 1,120 percent—four times faster than the consumer price index, more than medical or food prices. And this isn’t all due to a rising cost of teaching: Colleges have used their newfound wealth to bloat their administrative ranks and spend lavishly on construction projects.

These new student loan proposals, particularly Warren’s, will only feed the higher education beast. Perhaps lawmakers should give more thought to policies that would increase price competition among universities and drive down costs.

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Surprise! Another California Green Policy Flop

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California’s “Hydrogen Highway” is a road to nowhere. About a decade ago, then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger called for the state to invest more than $50 million in the program, which was to lead to the creation of 100 hydrogen fuel stations capable of serving 2,000 fuel-cell vehicles. Today, the state has a whopping total of nine hydrogen stations serving about 200 fuel cell cars.

If you’re wondering what went wrong, don’t think too hard. Reuters reports:

“The general economic thesis of the renewable energy sector hasn’t changed,” said Karl Miller, chairman of Newco Energy Acquisition Holdings, LLC, which acquires energy-related assets. “It’s still a heavily subsidized industry. It requires a major federal tax credit to make it work.” It still doesn’t appeal as “a capital market investment,” he said.

The usual green assumptions, projections, and policy-errors are on full display here. The companies involved in this program were poorly managed, too reliant on government subsidies, and thrown completely for a loop by the US shale boom and the rise of cheap green technology imports from China.

[Green California image courtesy of Shutterstock]

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An Early Sign of Obamacare’s Impending Collapse?

obamacare

In March, we reported that the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP), a program created to provide coverage to sick Americans who have been uninsured for at least six months, was in serious trouble. Only a fraction of the expected 400,000 people had signed up, but the program was burning through the cash allotted to the program too quickly. The administration capped further enrollments, but even that wasn’t enough to save the program. The New York Times has more:

Payments to health care providers will be capped at Medicare rates, which are substantially less than the commercial insurance rates they have been receiving. The new policy generally prohibits doctors and hospitals from increasing charges to consumers to make up the difference.

Michael T. Keough, the executive director of the North Carolina Health Insurance Risk Pool, said the new policy was one of several steps taken recently by federal officials to control spending.

“They are trying to stanch the hemorrhaging,” Mr. Keough said.

The PCIP is a temporary program, ending on January 1, 2014, at which point all the people in it will be shifted onto the new exchanges the law creates or onto some other kind of insurance.

The PCIP may therefore seem like an inconsequential piece of a gargantuan health care law, but the failures of this small piece go to the heart of the challenges the ACA as a whole will face in coming years. In effect, beginning on January 1, 2014, all insurance plans will be like the PCIP. The Obama administration is doing everything it can to convince young, healthy Americans to buy insurance through the exchanges. Only with their participation can American insurance plans avoid the cash-flow crisis currently driving the PCIP into bankruptcy. Whether enough young people will sign up is anyone’s guess.

[Ball and chain image courtesy of Shutterstock]

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Here Comes The Asian Naval Arms Race

philippine-navy

The President of the Philippines announced today that his country is embarking on an ambitious military upgrade to protect itself from “bullies”—namely, China.

“In thinly veiled comments referring to China, [President Beningo] Aquino yesterday vowed in a speech marking the navy’s 115th anniversary that the armed forces would be given the resources necessary to protect Philippine sovereignty,” reports the South China Morning Post.

The upgrade will be huge for the Philippines—$1.8 billion. “[B]y 2017,” Aquino vowed, “Manila would acquire two new frigates, two helicopters capable of anti-submarine warfare, three fast vessels for coastal patrols and eight amphibious assault vehicles.”

The Philippines is adjacent to the most hotly contested islets and shoals in the South China Sea (click map below), much of which are claimed by China. China’s bullying on territorial and other issues has pushed almost all neighboring countries into more nationalist, more antagonistic, more resistant stances, and many of them have formed closer relationships in order to counterbalance China’s rising power. So the Chinese have only themselves to blame for convincing neighbors to arm themselves to the teeth and to defend contested patches of territory by all means necessary.

The Philippines isn’t the first Asian country to push for an upgraded, stronger military, nor will it be the last.

 

[Image of Philippine Navy ship courtesy Getty]

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Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and the Middle East in Flames

maliki

Two stories tell us that things in the Middle East may have just taken a dark and dangerous turn.

First, Hezbollah fighters played a vital role in Butcher Assad’s assault on rebel-held Qusayr, a strategically positioned town in Syria. Dozens of Hezbollah men were reportedly killed in some of the heaviest fighting yet in the civil war. The battle brought Hezbollah into direct conflict with al-Qaeda-aligned rebel brigades.

Second, a stunning series of car bombs exploded across Iraq yesterday, killing at least 95 people. Ten bombs exploded in Baghdad alone. Another exploded in Balad, north of Baghdad, killing more than a dozen pilgrims from Iran, which strongly supports the Shiite regime of Iraqi President Nouri al-Maliki. Another bomb targeted a Sunni militia aligned with the government. Gunmen in Anbar, a nerve center of Sunni extremism, killed eight government policemen; another eight policemen kidnapped last week were found dead in the desert, with bullet wounds in their heads.

“Al-Maliki believes this is the time to be tough and show he is in control of the country…. What we are seeing is the backlash to that,” Patrick Clawson, the director of research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told the AP. ”How long do we have to continue living like this, with all the lies from the government?” wondered a 23-year-old Baghdad resident. April was Iraq’s bloodiest month since 2008; 240 people have been killed in the past week.

Maliki’s increasingly authoritarian regime is governing a country that is slowly slipping into sectarian war, with Sunni and Shiite militias once again fighting each other and the government, and with each attack bigger and more horrific than the last. In Syria, Alawite militias massacre Sunni civilians in a prelude to ethnic cleansing operations. And Lebanon is reeling as Hezbollah draws it deeper into the Syrian black hole.

Maliki, whatever his faults, is at least partly right about this: ”The most dangerous thing in this process is that if the [Syrian] opposition is victorious, there will be a civil war in Lebanon, divisions in Jordan, and a sectarian war in Iraq.” The same could be said of a number of different outcomes of the Syrian war. The Middle East, from Basra to Beirut, is turning into one big Sunni versus Shi’a milita war, egged on by international players like Iran and Saudi Arabia.

[Image of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki courtesy Getty Images]

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Interns: Starting Young

As college grads increasingly cling to any jobs they can get, high school students are being pushed into the internship market for their first encounters with the world of work. The Chicago Tribune reports:

“Part-time jobs have become scarcer and scarcer for high school students,” said Alison Cooper Chisolm, CEO of Massachusetts-based Ivey College Consulting Inc. “The job at McDonald’s is now being taken by an adult because the adult needs the work.”

Instead, more high school students—at least the ones who can afford to work without pay—are looking for new ways to better themselves and their college prospects, said Chisolm, who worked for more than 10 years in secondary schools and university admissions before entering independent college admissions consulting.

On the one hand, it’s distressing to see that high-school students have so few options when it comes to the low-wage hourly jobs on which they could once cut their teeth as adult workers. On the other, we see an opportunity here to fill an educational gap left open by the typical primary school experience in America. Internships have the capacity to let high-school students peer into the inner-workings of an industry before they’re ready to commit to a career path (as well as whatever high-priced college degrees lie along that path). If internships were more like apprenticeships, as we believe they should be, some students might even discover that it’s in their best interests to skip college entirely.

[Copier image courtesy of Shutterstock]

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US Hospitals: Pay More, Get Less

Glove

Meet Bayonne Medical Center in New Jersey, the most expensive hospital in the country. In an analysis of Medicare data from 2001, the NYT found that Bayonne charged more per treatment than any other US hospital for almost a quarter of common procedures. The data is eye-popping:

Bayonne Medical typically charged $99,689 for treating each case of chronic lung disease, 5.5 times as much as other hospitals and 17.5 times as much as Medicare paid in reimbursement. The hospital also charged on average of $120,040 to treat transient ischemia, a type of small stroke that has no lasting effect. That was 5.6 times the national average and 23.6 times what Medicare paid.

The most surprising thing about these rates becomes clear when you see them in light of two other facts about Bayonne. First, the hospital doesn’t serve some ritzy, star-studded town where you would expect high prices, but a “faded blue-collar town 11 miles from Midtown Manhattan.” Second, these high prices don’t translate into higher quality care. A 2011 report about the quality of care across New Jersey ranked Bayonne only in the 50th percentile of hospitals.

Bayonne is one more piece of evidence pointing to a health care system that is fundamentally broken. In few other sectors of the economy can a service provider get away with repeatedly charging significantly higher prices for a service that is no better, and in some cases worse, than those offered by competitors. The system is also profoundly regressive, foisting the highest bills on the communities that can least afford them.

The key lesson here is that health care is not, and has not been for a very a long time, a true market. That observation has to be at the heart of any health care reform going forward.

[Glove image courtesy of Shutterstock]

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Nature and Nature’s God

[Our hearts and prayers are with all those affected by the tornado in Oklahoma and their families. In light of this tragedy, here are some comments we made on the eve of Hurricane Sandy on natural disasters and our relationship to the higher powers around us. The disaster is different, but the message is just as pertinent today as it was then.]

While the lights went out across Manhattan tonight, and the city that calls itself the capital of the world was cut off from the mainland as flood waters thundered through its streets, many people around the world watched the spectacle and were reminded just how fragile the busy world we humans build around us really is.

Manhattan is one of those places where nature seems mostly held at bay. Except for the parks, oases of carefully preserved nature deliberately shaped by the hand of man, every inch of the city’s surface has been covered by something manmade. The valleys have been exalted, the mountains laid low and the rough places plain.

Those who live and do their business there pay very little attention to the natural world most of the time. It can be hard to get a taxi in the rain, and the occasional winter snowstorm forces a brief halt to the city’s routine, but the average New Yorker’s attention is on the social world, not the world of nature. What’s happening to your career, your bank account, your friendships and loved ones, the political scene and the financial markets: those are the concerns that occupy the minds of busy urbanites on their daily rounds.

Into this busy, self involved world Hurricane Sandy has burst. Sharks have been photographed (or at least photo shopped) swimming in the streets of New Jersey towns; waves sweep across the Lower East Side; transformers explode on both sides of the Hudson as salt water surges into the tunnels and subways. For a little while at least, New Yorkers are reminded that we live in a world shaped by forces that are bigger than we are; tonight it is easy to identify with the sentiments in John Milton’s paraphrase of Psalm 114:

Shake earth, and at the presence be aghast
Of him that ever was, and aye shall last,
That glassy floods from rugged rocks can crush,
And make soft rills from the fiery flint-stones gush.

Soon, though, the winds will die down and the waters recede. The bridges will open, the roads will be repaired, the water will be pumped from the subways and service restored. New Yorkers will go back to their normal pursuits and Hurricane Sandy will fade into lore.

But events like this don’t come out of nowhere. Sandy isn’t an irruption of abnormality into a sane and sensible world; it is a reminder of what the world really is like. Human beings want to build lives that exclude what we can’t control — but we can’t.

Hurricane Sandy is many things; one of those things is a symbol. The day is coming for all of us when a storm enters our happy, busy lives and throws them into utter disarray. The job on which everything depends can disappear. That relationship that holds everything together can fall apart. The doctor can call and say the test results are not good. All of these things can happen to anybody; something like this will happen to us all.

Somewhere in the future, each of us has an inescapable appointment with irresistible force. For each one of us, the waters will someday rise, the winds spin out of control, the roof will come off the house and the power will go out for good.

We can protect ourselves from a storm like Sandy by taking proper precautions; at the Mead manor we have candles, firewood and food stocked against the possibility that our power will go out. But one day, dear reader, a storm is coming which neither you nor we can survive. The strongest walls, the sturdiest retirement plans stuffed with stocks and CDs, the best doctors cannot protect us from that final encounter with the force that made and will someday unmake us.

Coming to terms with that reality is the most important thing that any of us can do. A storm like this one is an opportunity to do exactly that. It reminds us that what we like to call ‘normal life’ is fragile and must someday break apart. If we are wise, we will take advantage of this smaller, passing storm to think seriously about the greater storm that is coming for us all.

A grand and powerful woman I once knew died after two encounters with cancer and a devastating stroke took her from the realm of normal life into the storm tossed waters that surround us all on every side. She’d never been a religious woman and, growing up in a segregated South where so many churches and churchgoers defended a brutal system of institutionalized injustice and cruelty, she was always a rebel against the conventional piety and ritualized religious life she saw around her.

But late in her life when the winds around her howled and the dark waters were rising, she was driven to face the truth behind the illusions and the pretense, and told the person she loved best in all the world that “I’ve made my peace with God.”

That is something we all need to do. It involves a recognition of our helplessness and insufficiency before the mysteries and limits of life. Like the First Step in the Twelve Step programs, it begins with an acknowledgment of failure and defeat. We each try to build a self-sufficient world, a sturdy little life that is proof against storms and disasters — but none of us can really get that done.

Strangely, that admission of weakness opens the door to a new kind of strength. To acknowledge and accept weakness is to ground our lives more firmly in truth, and it turns out that to be grounded in reality is to become more able and more alive. Denial is hard work; those who try to stifle their awareness of the limits of human life and ambition in the busy rounds of daily life never reach their full potential.

To open your eyes to the fragility of life and to our dependence on that which is infinitely greater than ourselves is to enter more deeply into life. To come to terms with the radical insecurity in which we all live is to find a different and more reliable kind of security. The joys and occupations of ordinary life aren’t all there is to existence, but neither are the great and all-destroying storms. There is a calm beyond the storm, and the same force that sends these storms into our lives offers a peace and security that no storm can destroy. As another one of the psalms puts it, “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” Accepting your limits and your dependence on things you can’t control is the first step on the road toward finding that joy.

Via Meadia hopes that all our readers survived Hurricane Sandy with their lives intact and their property whole. And more than that, we hope that our readers will take the opportunity that a storm like this offers, step back from their daily lives, and reach out to the Power who plants his footsteps in the sea and rides upon the storm. Getting the right connection with the highest power of all not only gives you a place of refuge when the big storm finally comes; it transforms daily life and infuses ordinary occupations with greater meaning and wonder than you ever understood.

The world needs people who have that kind of strength and confidence. Storms much greater than Sandy are moving through our lives these days: the storms shaking the Middle East, recasting the economy, transforming the political horizons of Asia. It will take strong and grounded people to ride these mighty storms; paradoxically, it is only by coming to terms with our limits and weakness that we can find the strength and the serenity to face what lies ahead.

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Some People Don’t Need to Go to School

By now you’ve probably heard about Yahoo’s purchase of the social networking/publishing platform Tumblr for an eye-popping $1.1 billion, which made its founder David Karp about $265 million richer overnight.

The 26 year old, whom Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer characterized as “one of the most perceptive, capable entrepreneurs I’ve worked with,” is cut from the same cloth as the late Steve Jobs, according to Marco Arment, Karp’s early collaborator and Tumblr co-founder:

David always obsessed over his newest ideas, features, and designs until they were completely polished and ready to go. He’s a workaholic—he truly lives and breathes Tumblr. I’ve never even seen him show any desire to work on a side project. David is all Tumblr, all the time.

He expects people around him to be similarly into work and Tumblr, and often drove me hard with seemingly impossible demands. But David has a lot of Steve Jobs-like qualities, and like many people who worked for Steve, I look back on Tumblr’s crunch times with mixed feelings: I don’t want to return to that stress level, but David pushed me to do amazing work that I didn’t think was possible.

He sounds like a remarkable young man.

He’s also a high school dropout who never got a GED or went to college—even though he was admitted to the Bronx High School of Science. As we’re fond of pointing out here on VM, more brains does not automatically mean you should spend more years in school. In some cases, it means you should spend less.

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Obama’s “Reset” with Muslims: A Policy in Ruins

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Prime Minister Thein Sein of Myanmar yesterday became the first leader from his country to make an official visit to the United States in nearly fifty years. In talks in the Oval Office, Sein sought to assure the President Obama that his country would continue to move forward on political reforms; the President, for his part, brought up the violence against Muslims, especially in Burma’s western Rakhine state. The seething cauldron of ethnic violence in that state and in other parts of the country has become a major complicating factor for US policy.

A hallmark of Barack Obama’s presidency was to be a reconciliation of the US and the Islamic world. It’s now clear that those hopes have been pretty comprehensively wrecked. The first blow was the administration’s failure to help the Palestinians in the first term. The  second was tepid support for the Arab spring, which many saw as too little, too late. The third was the administration’s idle hand-wringing as tens of thousands were killed in the Syrian war. And finally, the administration has lavished aid on a government in Burma that has done little to stop (and whose officials on the ground may actually have connived at) massacres of Muslims.

Americans who do not spend time in Islamic countries overseas may not realize just how powerfully the plight of the Rohingyas has gripped public opinion in countries like Turkey, Pakistan and many more. After earlier violence against Muslims in northeastern India, there is great interest in and concern about what is going on in that part of the world.

Working to improve opinions about the US across the Muslim world was and is a good idea. Given the threat of terrorism, it is a no-brainer for people who care about US foreign policy and national security. But getting this done isn’t as easy as either the Bush or the Obama administrations seem to have thought.

The policy needs to be carefully considered and managed at the very top—and not just as a warm and fuzzy Kumbaya songfest in which we all hold hands. Clarity of vision, strength of purpose, coordination of policy, and a reasonable degree of consistency are what’s needed. We aren’t there yet.

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May 20, 2013

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Middle East Mess: When Dems and GOPers Agree, Be Afraid

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Have the Bush-era neocons and Obama liberals made all the same mistakes in the Middle East? David P. Goldman argues convincingly in Tablet that the past five years of Middle East policy have been marked not by a Democratic departure from the previous administration’s policies but by a complete failure by consensus: with regard to Egypt, Libya, and beyond, liberals and conservatives have been making many of the same mistakes for many of the same reasons:

Republicans vied with the Obama Administration in their zeal for the ouster of Egypt’s dictator Hosni Mubarak and in championing the subsequent NATO intervention against Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. Both parties saw themselves as having been vindicated by events. The Obama Administration saw its actions as proof that soft power in pursuit of humanitarian goals offered a new paradigm for foreign-policy success. And the Republican establishment saw a vindication of the Bush freedom agenda.…

They were all wrong. Just two years later, the foreign-policy establishment has fractured in the face of a Syrian civil war that threatens to metastasize into neighboring Iraq and Lebanon and an economic collapse in Egypt that has brought the largest Arab country to the brink of state failure.…

As Goldman explains, as much as the Obama liberals and Bush neocons love to hate each other’s Middle East policies, they’re very similar in an important way: both are based on the flawed and distinctly American expectation of a happy ending. A little prudence would have done the neocons a world of good in Iraq, and a bit more of this underrated virtue would have helped both parties during the Libya fiasco and larger Arab Spring.

Wonks in both political parties in America need to take a long, hard look at the assumptions and expectations informing their policy decisions in the Middle East. It’s looking like terrorism and Islamic extremism aren’t going to disappear in this century any faster than Communism disappeared in the last one. And it’s clear that commentators and decision-makers on both sides of the aisle still haven’t figured out what to do about it.

Our suggestion: American wonk wannabes spend too much time in school studying IR and economic theory, leading them to think about the world in ideological ways. Less theory, more history would make for a smarter and more cautious wonkocracy. We especially recommend the study of the long effort to spread liberal governance and cultural ideals, an effort that began in the early 19th century and that has had many successes, failures and hard-to-categorize surprises since. Today’s democracy promoters, whether liberal or conservative, are almost always illiterate about the rich and complex history of the endeavor they usually cluelessly seek to push forward.

Read Goldman’s whole piece here.

[Obama and Bush image courtesy of Getty Images]

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A DUI for Marijuana?

Cop

Colorado and Washington made headlines last year when majorities in both states voted to legalize the sale and use of mairjuana within their states. Six months later, both states are trying to figure out what a legal pot regime actually looks like, and it’s a tricky business.

Naturally, the core issues stem from the regulation of the marijuana trade. Who should be allow to sell marijuana? Who should be allowed to grow it? To buy it? Should pot be regulated differently for recreational and medical users? How can we ensure that these drugs stay out of the hands of children? How high should the taxes be?

These are all important questions, but as we’ve argued before, one of the key provisions will be strict punishments for driving or operating machinery while high, similar to current rules for drunk driving. In Colorado and Washington (as in many other states) driving under the influence of marijuana is currently illegal, but it’s difficult to determine whether or not a driver is high. The WSJ reports on their predicament:

In part because of the ambiguities in detecting pot-DUI situations, states like Colorado say they need an analog to the blood-alcohol test. “Without a test a lot turns on everything at the roadside and roadside tests related to marijuana impairment are not as clear-cut as the alcohol tests are,” said Tom Raynes, executive director at the Colorado District Attorneys Council….

Meanwhile, states are still sorting out punishments for drivers who are found to be high. In Washington, drivers arrested or convicted of DUI offenses, for alcohol or drugs, must install a device that prevents the car from starting if it detects alcohol on the driver’s breath. But the ignition-interlock device doesn’t detect marijuana or any other drug.

New technologies may eventually solve the problem. Still, it illustrates the point that wide-scale legalization has effects that go far beyond the much-discussed issues of addiction and incarceration. At TAI, we ran an excellent piece exploring a number of the potential challenges and pitfalls of legalization, but even this could only scratch the surface.

Before other states rush to join Colorado and Washington, it would be good to see them think through these issues first.

[Traffic Stop image courtesy of Shutterstock]

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Poll: Indians Love America, View China as Major Threat

likeqiang

In a recent poll of Indian citizens by the Lowy Institute in Australia, 83 percent of respondents said they view China as a major national security threat. Just slightly more (87 percent) said the same of Pakistan. Despite China being India’s number one trading partner, fewer than a third of poll respondents said China’s rise has been good for India.

Contrast these results with Indians’ impressions of the United States: 83 percent said India-US relations are strong, and 75 percent want those relations to improve over the next decade.

China’s Prime Minister, Li Keqiang, is in India on his first trip abroad since taking office, and you would think he’d be trying hard to improve the relationship with Delhi. Just a few weeks ago this trip was nearly canceled because of the Great Himalayan Standoff of 2013, when Chinese troops set up camp several miles inside India and refused to withdraw. Relations between the two countries soured over the intrusion.

Yet, strangely, Li’s to-do list while in India is full of non-prickly items: buffalo meat, book translation, sister cities, pilgrims, sewage. Neither country, it seems, wants to deal with the serious issues: border disputes, huge dams that China is constructing that will deprive millions of farmers and fishermen in India (and elsewhere) of their most important resource, the Dalai Lama, and much else.

Instead, officials from both countries sought to put a shiny gloss on Li’s trip and avoid discussing these darker disagreements. ”My visit to India is meant to tell the world that mutual political confidence between China and India is growing, that our practical cooperation is expanding, and that our common interests far outweigh our disagreements,” Li told Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

And yet, no one should fault Li and his Indian counterparts for trying. Together, India and China account for over a third of the global human population. Both countries have nuclear weapons. Though the relationship between Beijing and Delhi has been rocky for much of the past few decades, there is some hope on the horizon: according to that Lowy poll, almost two thirds of Indians want ties with China to improve in the future.

[Image of China's Premier Li Keqiang speaking to the Indian Youth Delegation during a meeting on May 15, 2013 in Beijing; courtesy of Getty images]

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30,000 Metro-North Commuters Wish They Could Telework This Week

Two Amtrak trains collided this weekend after a derailment in western Connecticut, injuring 72 people and destroying almost half a mile of track. Now the focus is on commuters on the affected Metro North line—all 30,000 of them—who won’t be able to take the train into work this week. The AP reports on the delays riders are facing:

“Residents should plan for a week’s worth of disruptions,” Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said Sunday at a news conference in Hartford….

David Cox, a 52-year-old human resources manager from Waterbury, said his bus ride from Bridgeport to Stamford took 1 1/2 hours, making his entire trip about 3 1/2 hours, an hour longer than normal.

Our sympathies go out to those injured in Friday’s accident, but also to those commuting along the affected corridor. Many of those who normally take the train into work have switched to cars or on buses, adding to congestion and making commuting—already a stressful, unhealthy process—even longer.

Fortunately, with 21st century technology, commuting is no longer an inevitable part of everyone’s daily lives. We sing the praises of telework often on this blog, and disasters like these make it clear why this trend is so important. Rather than waste hours a day on crowded buses and trains, employees at telework-friendly offices can work through the delays from home. Those not so lucky have no choice but to soldier through the dreaded rush hour.

[Derailed train photo courtesy of Getty Images]

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Another Explanation for Male Suicide

When we highlighted the disturbing uptick in male suicides in a post last week, we noted that a weaker economic outlook for adult men may play a significant role in driving this trend. As the thinking goes, men are finding it more difficult to find work, which makes it harder to find partners and build a family in a stable community, which contributes to the social isolation that puts one at a greater risk for suicide.

But in a recent column at the New York Times, Ross Douthat takes a look at the same data and draws a slightly different conclusion. He thinks that it’s not just the economy, but broader cultural forces that are making it more difficult for ordinary Americans to form the stable, tight-knit communities that have acted as a social safety net for generations:

For many people, the strongest forms of community are still the traditional ones—the kind forged by shared genes, shared memory, shared geography. And neither Facebook nor a life coach nor a well-meaning bureaucracy is likely to compensate for these forms’ attenuation and decline….

Our society is often kinder to differences and eccentricities than past eras, and our economy rewards extraordinary talent more richly than ever before.

The problem is that as it’s grown easier to be remarkable and unusual, it’s arguably grown harder to be ordinary. To be the kind of person who doesn’t want to write his own life script, or invent her own idiosyncratic career path. To enjoy the stability and comfort of inherited obligations and expectations, rather than constantly having to strike out on your own….

Too often, and probably increasingly, not enough Americans will have…a place that knew them intimately, a community to lean on, a strong network in a time of trial.

Douthat’s argument is thought-provoking and well worth reading in full. Read the whole thing.

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