Tag: Politics

Revisionist Histories and How We Remember Ourselves

Posted on by jabittan
“The declines of patriotism, tribalism, and trust in hierarchies are in part a legacy of the new historiography,” writes Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. Across the globe more accurate histories of the universe, of mankind, and of specific regions has made it clear that many belief systems are little more than myth. Stories of great heroes and gods are little more than exaggerated myths and glorified exaggerations of individual grandeur and tribal greatness. At worse, such stories are apologetic narratives explaining the domination of humans over nature, animals, and other humans. As better history uncovers these stories for what they are, societies and relationships within those societies change in ways that can create a lot of conflict.
 
 
Pinker writes, “[UCSB Anthropologist Donald] Brown looked at twenty-five civilizations in Asia and Europe and found that the ones that were stratified into hereditary classes favored myth, legend, and hagiography and discouraged history, social science, natural science, biography, realistic portraiture, and uniform education.” This quote demonstrates that societies with distinct inequalities are fearful of accurate histories. They use myth, legend, and heroic figures to justify the stratifications and inequalities within their society. At some level, their objection to science and education demonstrates a recognition that their social inequalities are not based on merit or anything other than historical privilege, stigma, and discrimination.
 
 
I find this a helpful frame for understanding modern American political divisions. In general, the Republican party in the United States is whiter and more religious than the Democrat party. White Christians have held dominant social status positions and have been more wealthy than other groups in society. Part of that dominance included slavery and Jim Crow laws which deliberately limited the prosperity and success of minorities. More accurate histories of the United States, revisionist histories that emphasize the role of racial and class discrimination for example, threaten the current status quo that has resulted in our country. It is not surprising that the Republican Party is more threatened by secular education, more resistant to science, and less tolerant of school curriculum that takes a critical examination of the history of racism and slavery in the country. Republicans also seem more willing to view our founding fathers as quasi saints, heroes who could do no wrong and should always be respected and viewed in a near worshipful manner. Pure self-interest and a desire to ignore the inconvenient truths that accurate historical narratives and science reveal fuel the current political zeal within the Republican party for many of its members and adherents. This is not just something that we currently see in the United States, but something that can be observed across time and place in human societies.
Liberal Moral Concerns Relative to Conservative Moral Concerns

Liberal Moral Concerns Relative to Conservative Moral Concerns

Posted on by jabittan
Social liberals in the United States and social conservatives have very different values. In terms of political views, they are not really that far from each other. However, in terms of what they would like to see reflected in our culture and how they think about people generally, social liberals and social conservatives are very different. The result, as I understand it, is a lot of anger at people who share different values and instances of iconoclasms that spill over into political realms beyond our social and cultural worlds.
 
 
In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature Steven Pinker wrote about the values differences between social liberals and social conservatives. This quote comes from his book which was published in 2011 and still holds true today. “In judging the importance of moral concerns,” Pinker writes, “recall, social liberals place little weight on In-group Loyalty and Purity/Sanctity …, and they place little weight on Authority/Respect. Instead they invest all their moral concern in Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity. Social conservatives spread their moral portfolio over all five. The trend toward social liberalism, then, is a trend away from communal and authoritarian values and toward values based on equality, fairness, autonomy, and legally enforced rights.”
 
 
Examining social liberals and social conservatives through this lens is helpful for understanding current political arguments. The landmark supreme court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is a great tool for examining the moral concerns that each group holds (and is also an example of political iconoclasm from social conservatives).
 
 
First, social liberals are not worried about Purity/Sanctity, which means they are not worried about whether a woman is a virgin before marriage. This means they are more likely to think about risky sexual behavior or teenage sexual activity and respond with programs and incentives that increase education and access to birth control relative to social conservatives. Social conservatives who are more likely to be religious conservatives (and in the United States that means Christians who believe that pre-marital sex is a sin), are more likely to believe in an all out taboo against pre-marital sex. Such sex destroys the sanctity of marriage and the purity of the woman in such views. The reaction against legal abortions is a reaction against sexual promiscuity and against behaviors that do not adhere to conservative moral values around purity and sanctity, moral values that social liberals generally don’t care about.
 
 
The second dimension of the overturning of Roe v. Wade has to do with Authority/Respect. Social liberals are more likely to question authorities who tell them to behave and act in certain ways. This means they are less likely to listen to leadership figures who tell them not to engage in pre-marital sex or higher risk sex behaviors such as having multiple partners. They are more likely to favor increased personal decision making capabilities and as a result are more likely to favor legal access to abortions. Social conservatives are more likely to value authority and respect as general principals and and are more likely to view strong figureheads and leaders positively (there is a reason why Donald Trump’s authoritarian tendencies were more accepted among the Republican party than the Democrat party). When religious leaders put taboos in place around women’s bodies and sexual behavior social conservatives are more likely to respect and adhere to those taboos.
 
 
Finally, In-Group Loyalty pushes social conservatives to adhere to the values of their religious groups and the political orientations of those around them. When support for a movement against abortions grows, social conservatives will find it hard to go against the movement, especially when they see their identity as tied to the movement or a group supporting the movement. It is not impossible for social liberals to feel the same on any of these scales, but they tend to display less strong ties to values within these areas.
 
 
Ultimately, the reality of our social and political system today is that we have very different values between social liberals and social conservatives. The battles over these values play out in our entertainment choices, in our political systems, and in all of our various social interactions. Better understanding where are values align and where they diverge can help us better understand the fights we see in our current social world.
False Conformity & the Big Lie

False Conformity & the Big Lie

Posted on by jabittan
“[Sociologist Michael] Macy and his colleagues speculate that false conformity and false enforcement can reinforce each other, creating a vicious circle that can entrap a population into an ideology that few of them accept individually,” writes Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature.
 
 
Pinker’s book was published in 2011, but the quote above seems to me like it could be describing the phenomenon we have been witnessing in the United States since the 2020 election. After Donald Trump lost the election, he pushed the false claim – now referred to as the Big Lie – that the election was rigged and stolen. Through the primary elections of 2022 we have seen that the Big Lie continues to have substantial signaling power among Republican voters and many Republican candidates for office have seemingly endorsed the Big Lie or shown themselves to be sympathetic to the Big Lie.
 
 
From the outside, this seems like a difficult thing to understand. But when you step into the shoes of a Republican candidate who wants to win an election and think about the quote from Pinker, the situation starts to make more sense.
 
 
It is likely that most of the candidates who are running for office do not truly believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and that it was stolen from him, but they believe that others do, or at least that enough of their voters do, for them to support the idea. I would suspect that many of them don’t want to have to go on record to support what is clearly ludicrous, but by fervently showing that they have bought into the Big Lie, they can win voters and protect themselves from those voters at the same time.
 
 
Pinker continues, “why would someone punish a heretic who disavows a belief that the person himself or herself rejects? … to show other enforcers that they … believe it in their hearts. That shields them from punishments by their fellows – who may, paradoxically, only be punishing heretics out of fear that they will be punished if they don’t.”
 
 
Republican candidates may fear that they will be punished for not supporting the Big Lie. So they buy in and begin punishing those who haven’t bought in. Their false conformity feeds into real enforcement of the Big Lie. It creates a cycle where no one can step out and disavow the Big Lie, even though many of them likely understand how absurd the Big Lie is.
Misperceptions of Violence

Misperceptions of Violence

Posted on by jabittan
In general, I am very interested in our misperceptions. We constantly go about making judgments of the world, making decisions, and developing a general sense of how the world operates based on what we pay close attention to, what we hear on a regular basis, and all the information that makes its way into our orbit. But there is only so much that we can pay close attention to and various factors will influence what information comes our way. This means that our perceptions of the world are subject to bias and noise. We may be very interested in one topic and become an expert in that narrow topic. A co-worker may constantly talk about a subject they are fascinated by, so we may pick up certain ideas from their conversations. Newspaper headlines may shape the way we think about certain topics, even if we never read the whole story.
 
 
Violence is one such area where we may have misperceptions of reality due to bias and noise. News stories are biased toward the exciting and unusual events that take place. No one wants to listen to a story about how an improved traffic calming near a school reduced car collisions and improved pedestrian safety. News outlets know this and instead cover the instances when there is a traffic accident in a school zone. Social media channels are similarly fueled by the surprising and emotional things that people have to share. Once again, people are likely to react more strongly to a story about a robbery at a shopping center near a school than a story about how improved lighting and a night time security guard at the shopping center reduced crime in the area by 10%. As Steven Pinker writes in The Better Angels of Our Nature, “no matter how small the percentage of violent deaths may be, in absolute numbers there will always be enough of them to fill the evening news, so people’s impressions of violence will be disconnected from the actual proportions.”
 
 
Misperceptions of violence, along with other misperceptions about the world, matter. People make decisions about public policy, make personal choices, and interact with each others in society in different based on their perceptions. Thinking of violence specifically, we make different decisions about where to invest government funds, how long to incarcerate criminals, and how many police officers to hire depending on our perceptions of crime. We chose which schools to send our kids to, where to go out for dinner, and where to live based whether we think violence is prevelent in a given area. We shop at certain businesses, smile at or look away from strangers, and exercise indoors our outside to some degree depending on our perceptions of violence relative to safety. Misperceptions in these areas can lead to discrimination, inequality, over- and under-policing, and over- and under-investment. Failing to accurately understand levels of violence can have real world consequences that can lead to wasted and misallocated resources and unfair treatment for some communities, particularly in societies with long histories of racial or economic injustice.
 
 
We pay attention to the flashing lights of police vehicles, remember news stories about gruesome murders, and react strongly to stories of violence on social media – thereby boosting the visibility of those stories – and as a result we feel like we are living in a dangerous world. We don’t remember all the times a family member went running at 6 in the morning and didn’t get mugged. We don’t remember all the daily commutes to work without seeing a police chase, we don’t remember the days where the national news and our social media channels were not dominated by stories of violent crime. We perceive that the world is getting less safe, that crimes are increasing, and that we must take steps to better secure ourselves and our property. However, this is a misperception. Despite fluctuations from year to year (I will note that crime rates have increased since 2020, however it is unclear if this is a new trend or random fluctuation) humanity world wide has become less violent and has been trending toward reduced violence for a very, very long time. In The Better Angels of Our Nature Pinker argues that we would experience a different world if our perceptions of violence matched reality.
Challenges with the Scientific Process: Setting Priorities & Managing Conclusions

Challenges with the Scientific Process: Setting Priorities & Managing Conclusions

Posted on by jabittan
Science provides objective answers to questions about the world, but that doesn’t mean that science is an entirely objective enterprise. Science exists within a world dominated by human needs, biases, and prejudices which means that science can be impacted by the same political, discriminatory, and mistaken judgements and decisions that any other human activity can be overwhelmed by. In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari shows how this happens when it comes to selecting scientific research topics, setting the priorities of science, and when objective conclusions flow into the world where they can be used by less than respectable actors.
 
 
Harari writes, “science is unable to set its own priorities. It is also incapable of determining what to do with its discoveries.” Part of the reason why science cannot set its own priorities because science is expensive. Especially as we continue to make new discoveries, the subsequent steps require more time, energy, and resources. To discover the next quantum particle will require an even more impressive supercollider. To discover the next secret of the Amazon river will require taking new technology further up river. The cost grows, and individuals conducting research need to be able to convince those with resources to commit those resources to their particular interests. This means that science doesn’t unfold uniformly or in equal ways. As Harari puts it, “to channel limited resources we must answer questions such as what is more important and what is good? And these are not scientific questions.”
 
 
But even when good science is done, and even when accurate and objective measurements are obtained with reasonable conclusions drawn from those measurements, the impact of science can be unpredictable. Many scientific studies and results are obscure, with very few people outside a select expert community ever hearing about the results. But other conclusions can be taken out of their original context and can become part of the cultural zeitgeist. How studies and their conclusions are understood can get away from the researchers, and can be used to further specific political or economic goals, even if those goals really don’t have a real relationship to the original conclusion that was drawn. Harari demonstrates how this happened with scientific conclusions being merged with racist ideas about the inferiority of non-white people. He writes, “racist theories enjoyed prominence and respectability for many generations, justifying the Western conquest of the world.” Whether researchers were explicitly racist or not, their research was adopted by people who were, and used to justify unsavory political ends. The science became wrapped up in a political culture that wanted to justify discriminatory and prejudiced behaviors and attitudes.
 
 
This doesn’t only happen with racist ideas, though those ideas can be the most prominent and dangerous. Small scientific findings can be taken up by militaries, by corporations, and by media organizations which may use the research and findings in ways the authors could not have predicted. Research on technology that helps improve light detection could find its way into a guided missile, into mass surveillance systems, or onto the grocery store shelves to be used by advertisers. The science itself cannot control the way that results end up being used in the real world, and that can be problematic.
Slippery Slopes

Slippery Slopes

Posted on by jabittan
In American Politics, it is common to hear arguments about slippery slopes. The Republican Party will argue that any new government policy or program places the nation on a slippery slope toward complete autocracy. Civil rights lawyers will argue that any change in policy or regulation could open the door for new policies, leading to a slippery slope where the nation regresses on civil rights legislation and equality. The party is afraid that one small change will lead to a cascade of larger changes. They fear that one policy they don’t like will build momentum for larger policies that go further in what they consider the wrong direction (to be fair, this isn’t limited to the Republican Party, but as the general “anti-government” party they are an easier example).
 
 
The rhetoric is often overblown, but the truth is that there are many examples of slippery slopes in politics and in human nature more broadly. Public policy research, as well as the history of the last several years in American politics, has demonstrated that it is harder to get rid of an existing policy than to implement a new policy. The fight to pass the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, was a drawn out legislative onslaught. The attempted repeal of large sections of the bill was booted from the realm of possibilities when a single senator gave a thumbs down on the Senate floor. Once a benefit is in place, once people have something, it is hard to go back.
 
 
Yuval Noah Harari shows that this isn’t just something that happens in modern politics, it is likely what happened when the very first human institutions and communities formed. The Agricultural Revolution in general helped support more people in a given space than foraging and hunting/gathering. However, it was barely a tradeoff that was worthwhile for the humans who made the first transition to cultivating crops. Their lives were less fun, their diets were worse, and while they had some protections from animals and weather, they were still vulnerable to a host of maladies that were in some instances worsened by farming and living in close proximity to other humans. But once a few generations had settled into farming, once ploughing fields had begun to increase crop yields, a slipper slope was in place, and there was no going back to foraging from farming.
 
 
Harari writes, “if the adoption of ploughing increased a village’s population from a hundred to 110, which ten people would have volunteered to starve so that the others could go back to the good old times?” Generally, it is hard to take away some sort of benefit (in the case of Harari’s quote the benefit is sufficient food for survival) even if it is for the good of most of the people to take the thing away. Getting rid of farming, ploughing fields, and agriculture would have returned the small human communities to foraging bands that roamed in smaller numbers but didn’t have to spend all day working to cultivate a single crop. The tradeoff may have been worth it for those who survived, but the foraging lifestyle would have supported fewer people in the tribe, and it would have been hard for everyone to abandon farming and accept that someone was going to die without enough food.
 
 
It’s worth noting that slippery slope arguments are shallow. They are often dependent on fixed or zero sum economies. They assume that people won’t make changes or adapt, and they generalize an entire population as behaving in a single way. The end point of a slippery slope is hardly ever as bad as it is made out to be at the beginning (we don’t have socialism in 2021 after all – 10 years past the passage of Obamacare). But it is true that slippery slopes do exist, and that policies and programs are harder to take back once they are in place. Slippery slopes have existed in the world of politics for a long time, and have existed within the history of humanity for even longer.
When to Stop Counting

When to Stop Counting

Posted on by jabittan
Yesterday I wrote about the idea of scientific versus political numbers. Scientific numbers are those that we rely on for decision-making. They are not always better and more accurate numbers than political numbers, but they are generally based on some sort of standardized methodology and have a concrete and agreed upon backing to them. Political numbers are more or less guestimates or are formed from sources that are not confirmed to be reliable. While they can end up being more accurate than scientific figures they are harder to accept and justify in decision-making processes. In the end, the default is scientific numbers, but scientific numbers do have a flaw that keeps them from ever becoming what they proport to be. How do we know when it is time to stop counting and when we are ready to move forward with a scientific number rather than fall back on a political number?
Christopher Jencks explores this idea in his book The Homeless by looking at a survey conducted by Martha Burt at the Urban Institute. Jencks writes, “Burt’s survey provides quite a good picture of the visible homeless. It does not tell us much about those who avoid shelters, soup kitchens, and the company of other homeless individuals. I doubt that such people are numerous, but I can see no way of proving this. It is hard enough finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. It is far harder to prove that a haystack contains no more needles.” The quote shows that Burt’s survey was good at identifying the visibly homeless people, but that at some point in the survey a decision was made to stop attempting to count the less visibly homeless. It is entirely reasonable to stop counting at a certain point, as Jencks mentions it is hard to prove there are no more needles left to count, but that always means there will be a measure of uncertainty with your counting and results. Your numbers will always come with a margin of error because there is almost no way to be certain that you didn’t miss something.
Where we chose to stop counting can influence whether we should consider our numbers to be scientific numbers or political numbers. I would argue that the decision for where to stop our count is both a scientific and a political decision itself. We can make political decisions to stop counting in a way that deliberately excludes hard to count populations. Alternatively, we can continue our search to expand the count and change the end results of our search. Choosing how scientifically accurate to be with our count is still a political decision at some level.
However, choosing to stop counting can also be a rational and economic decision. We may have limited funding and resources for our counting, and be forced to stop at a reasonable point that allows us to make scientifically appropriate estimates about the remaining uncounted population. Diminishing marginal returns to our counting efforts also means at a certain point we are putting in far more effort into counting relative to the benefit of counting one more item for any given survey. This demonstrates how our numbers can be based on  scientific or political motivations, or both. These are all important considerations for us whether we are the counter or studying the results of the counting. Where we chose to stop matters, and because we likely can’t prove we have found every needle in the haystack, and that no more needles exist. No matter what, we will have to face the reality that the numbers we get are not perfect, no matter how scientific we try to make them.
Political and Scientific Numbers

Political and Scientific Numbers

Posted on by jabittan
I am currently reading a book about the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and the author has recently been comparing the development of textile mills, steam engines, and chemical production in Britain in the 1800’s to the same developments on the European continent. It is clear that within Britain the developments of new technologies and the adoption of larger factories to produce more material was much quicker than on the continent, but exactly how much quicker is hard to determine. One of the biggest challenges is finding reliable and accurate information to compare the number of textile factories, the horse power of steam engines, or how many chemical products were exported in a given decade. In the 1850s getting good data and preserving that data for historians to sift through and analyze a couple of hundred years later was not an easy task. Many of the numbers that the author has referenced are generalized estimates and ranges, not well defined statistical figures. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean the data are not useful and cannot help us understand general trends of the industrial revolution in Britain and the European continent.
Our ability to obtain and store numbers, information, and data is much better today than in the 1800s, but that doesn’t mean that all of our numbers are now perfect and that we have everything figured out. Sometimes our data comes from pretty reliable sources, like the GPS map data on Strava that gives us an idea of where lots of people like to exercise and where very few people exercise. Other data is pulled from surveys which can be unreliable or influenced by word choice and response order. Some data comes from observational studies that might be flawed in one way or another. Other data may just be incomplete, from small sample sizes, or simply messy and hard to understand. Getting good information out of such data is almost impossible. As the saying goes, garbage in – garbage out.
Consequently we end up with political numbers and scientific numbers. Christopher Jencks wrote about the role that both have played in how we understand and think about homelessness in his book The Homeless. He writes, “one needs to distinguish between scientific and political numbers. This distinction has nothing to do with accuracy. Scientific numbers are often wrong, and political numbers are often right. But scientific numbers are accompanied by enough documentation so you can tell who counted what, whereas political numbers are not.”
It is interesting to think about the accuracy (or perhaps inaccuracy) of the numbers we use to understand our world. Jencks explains that censuses of homeless individuals need to be conducted early in the morning or late at night to capture the full number of people sleeping in parks or leaving from/returning to overnight shelters. He also notes the difficulty of contacting people to confirm their homeless status and the challenges of simply surveying people by asking if they have a home. People use different definitions of having a home, being homeless, or having a fixed address and those differences can influence the count of how many homeless people live within a city or state. The numbers are backed by a scientific process, but they may be inaccurate and not representative of reality. By contrast, political numbers could be based on a random advocate’s average count of meals provided at a homeless shelter or by other estimates. These estimates may end up being just as accurate, or more so, than the scientific numbers used, but how the numbers are used and understood can be very different.
Advocacy groups, politicians, and concerned citizens can use non-scientific numbers to advance their cause or their point of view. They can rely on general estimates to demonstrate that something is or is not a problem. But they can’t necessarily drive actual action by governments, charities, or private organizations with only political numbers. Decisions look bad when made based on rough guesses and estimates. They look much better when they are backed by scientific numbers, even if those numbers are flawed. When it is time to actually vote, when policies have to be written and enacted, and when a check needs to be signed, having some sort of scientific backing to a number is crucial for self-defense and for (at least an attempt at) rational thinking.
Today we are a long way off from the pen and paper (quill and scroll?) days of the 1800s. We have the ability to collect far more data than we could have ever imagined, but the numbers we end up with are not always that much better than rough estimates and guesses. We may use the data in a way that shows that we trust the science and numbers, but the information may ultimately be useless. These are some of the frustrations that so many people have today with the ways we talk about politics and policy. Political numbers may suggest we live in one reality, but scientific numbers may suggest another reality. Figuring out which is correct and which we should trust is almost impossible, and the end result is confusion and frustration. We probably solve this with time, but it will be a hard problem that will hang around and worsen as misinformation spreads online.
Why We Talk About Human Nature

Why We Talk About Human Nature

Posted on by jabittan
I entered a Master’s in Public Administration program at the University of Nevada in 2016. I started the same semester as the 2016 election of President Donald Trump. I was drawn toward public policy because I love science, because I have always wanted to better understand how people come to hold political beliefs, and because I thought that bringing my rational science-based mind to public policy would open doors and avenues for me that were desperately needed in the world of public administration and policy. What I learned, and what we have all learned since President Trump took office, is that politics is not about policy, public administration is not about the high minded ideals we say it is about, and rationality is not and cannot be at the heart of public policy. Instead, politics is about identity, public administration is about systems and structures that benefit those we decide to be deserving and punishing those who are deviant. Public policy isn’t rational, its about self-interest and individual and group preferences. And this connects to the title of this post. We talk about human nature, because how we can define, understand, and perceive human nature can help us rationalize why our self-interest is valuable in public policy, why one group should be favored over another, and why one system that rewards some people is preferable over another system that rewards other people.

 

In Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow, he writes, “policy is ultimately about people, what they want and what is best for them. Every policy question involves assumptions about human nature, in particular about the choices that people may make and the consequences of their choices for themselves and society.” The reason why we talk about human nature is because it serves as the foundation upon which all of our social systems and structures are built upon. All of our decisions are based in fundamental assumptions about what we want, what are inherently inclined to do, and how we will behave as individuals and as part of a collective. However, this discussion is complicated because what we consider to be human nature, is subject to bias, to misunderstandings, and motivated reasoning. Politics and public policy are not rational because we all live with narrow understandings of what we want human nature to mean.

 

Personally, I think our conceptions and ideas of human nature are generally too narrow and limiting. I am currently reading Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens, and he makes a substantial effort to show the diversity and seeming randomness in the stories that humans have created over tens of thousands of years, and how humans have lived in incredibly different circumstances, with different beliefs, different cultures, and different lifestyles throughout time. It is a picture of human nature which doesn’t quite make the jump to arguing that there is no human nature, but argues that human nature is a far more broad topic than what we typically focus on. I think Harari is correct, but someone who wants questions to religion to be central to human nature, someone who wants capitalistic competition to be central to human nature, or someone who wants altruism to be a deep facet of human nature might disagree with Harari.

 

Ultimately, we argue over human nature because how we define human nature can influence who is a winner and who is a loser in our society. It can shape who we see as deserving and who we see as deviant. The way we frame human nature can structure the political systems we adopt, the leaders we favor, and the economic systems that will run most of our lives. The discussions about human nature appear to be scientific, but they are often biased and flawed, and in the end what we really care about is our personal self-interest, and in seeing our group advance, even at the expense of others. Politics is not rational, we have all learned in nearly four years of a Donald Trump Presidency, because we have different views of what the people want and what is best for them, and flawed understandings of human nature influence those views and the downstream political decisions that we make.
Status Quo in Healthcare

Status Quo in Healthcare

Posted on by jabittan
How can we really make change to the United States healthcare system? Dave Chase, in his book The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call argues that changes to the system need to come from private businesses, because private businesses are responsible for the health insurance coverage for over 50% of American’s. If business don’t take action and demand changes, Chase argues, then the system will not have enough strength to push against the status quo of rising costs and stagnant productivity within healthcare.

 

A quote from Chase about changing the American healthcare system reveals something larger about public opinion and the status quo in American public policy in general. Chase writes, “This book focuses on non-legislative strategies since the politics of health care are fraught with pitfalls. As we know, the best way to perpetuate the status quo is to politicize a topic – and nothing is easier to politicize than health care.”

 

I think Chase is correct about politicization and the status quo in the United States. Our country has deeply internalized ideas of liberal and conservative and wedded those ideas to the Democratic and Republican parties. This means that if an idea is taken up by a party, if it is politicized and adopted by a party, then it instantly becomes an identity marker, and people who might not have had a strong reason to care about an issue, suddenly find it to be a maker of who they are and what groups they belong to. Politicizing an issue in this system virtually guarantees gridlock, preventing any legislative action on the issue.

 

Private businesses, however, can make changes without relying on a 50% majority vote (or 2/3rds majority vote in congress). Throughout the book Chase presents economic and moral arguments for businesses to take the nation’s opioid crisis seriously, and uses it as a wake-up call to show businesses how our healthcare system is failing individuals, and ultimately failing the companies that hire those individuals and provide for much of the healthcare that individuals receive (or fail to receive). Public action is hard, so in many arenas, private action is the best chance for making the changes we want to see in the world.