Driverless cars and my screwed up phone

Anything perfect in your life?

Do you have anything in your life that is both complex and works perfectly?  Any piece of equipment or software?  Or any social organization, like at work or in your community? 

I don’t.  I have a lot of things that work well in my life, some things that work very well.  But nothing is perfect.  And the more complex, the less likely to be perfect.

Here is why I am asking.  Google is involved in two things that are deeply inconsistent, and at least one of which asks us to trust our lives to their ability to develop something that is highly complex and is perfect, or near perfect.  I am referring to the “driverless car.” 

At the same time that they are asking us to rely upon their ability to turn out this perfectly safe product, they have just screwed up my smart phone.

Screwing up my phone

I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 3, which I have had for more than a year, and which I like a lot.  Recently, I was required to download the next version of the Android operating system that the Note 3 runs on.  This is Android 5.0 or “Lollipop.” 

Immediately, I started having problems with the phone.  My email wouldn’t send sometimes.  It took forever for my email list to come up.  My battery life has diminished substantially.  Random apps start when I was doing something else entirely, like disengaging from my calendar, and the phone would pop up.  Some apps simply didn’t work.  Apps would not remember their default status, like my calendar remembering that I like it in “week” mode.  Widgets would disappear, only to reappear after I had restarted the phone. 

When I called my service, AT&T, the nice woman heard my complaint, and asked me what kind of phone I had.  When I said “A Note 3,” she said, “Yeah, I thought so.”  Is there anything I can do about this, I asked.  “No.  There will probably be a fix come out soon.”  Do you have any information on how long “soon” will be?  “No.  There does not seem to be anything planned.”

Great!  So, you make me upgrade (a misnomer) and then the “upgrade” is a pain in the butt, and then you tell me, well, you may just have to live with that.

Sure, in the grand scheme of things, this is a minor irritation.  And the quintessential rich white person problem.  I have, in fact, checked my privilege.
 
From the same people who brought you a screwed up phone. . .
 
But at the same time that Google’s imperfection has screwed up my phone, they want us to buy a car that drives itself.  Really?  You can’t get my phone to work well, and you want me to trust your car will work just fine?  Because, if the driverless car works as well as my phone, we are in for some huge problems. 

Yes, I know that I am not a perfect driver.  Nor are the rest of you, who insist upon using the same roads as I.  But moving to driverless cars will probably not be an improvement, just a transition from the screw-ups human drivers make to the screw-ups that computer coders make.

When I first heard that people were going to start selling driverless cars, my reaction was one of incredulity.  Doesn’t everybody have as many examples of imperfection in their lives as I do in mine?  (See my posting on imperfectibility, http://tinyurl.com/n79d6os, and the two-part posting on the limits of measurement, http://tinyurl.com/mku4cnv and http://tinyurl.com/kf4dywp.)  Who really believes that a bunch of geeky, socially isolated twenty-somethings living in the unreality of Silicon Valley are, no matter how smart they might be, likely to produce something, like a driverless car, which by its nature has got to be really, really close to perfect?

Sooner or later, I am sure that the Google guys will figure out how to make my phone work better.  They’re not incompetent.  But neither are they perfect. 

So, I ask you again.  Am I the only one with abundant evidence in my life that things that human beings do are never going to be perfect, and that the more complex they are, the less close to perfect they will be?  And, if I am not, then why are we even thinking about letting Google and others put driverless cars on our roads?

My "next chapter"

In case you are wondering why I seem so happy these days, allow me to explain.

I am pleased to announce that I have been offered an appointment on the faculty in the Department of Health Systems, Leadership and Policy at Loyola’s Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing.  I will be teaching in the undergraduate program in Health Systems Management (US healthcare, management, law and policy, ethics) as well as working with other faculty on a variety of projects.  I will also maintain an appointment in the Department of Public Health Sciences of the Stritch School of Medicine, where I will teach health policy in the MPH program, help develop the JD/MPH program and a 4+1 MPH degree, and work on curriculum development and community engagement.  You can contact me at dswartzman@luc.edu, which I am now using as my main email.

I couldn’t be more excited about this new phase in my career.  I will be part of terrific faculties focused on health policy, quality of healthcare, and social justice.  It will be an opportunity to continue my teaching and writing (on ethics and policy through my blog at danswartzman.blogspot.com and on management of health organizations through preparation of a textbook in that area).  And it will provide an excellent “home base” for the project many of us are working on to investigate the impact of the Affordable Care Act in the Chicago area.

I will, however, have to figure out how what it will be like to teach undergraduates.  Suggestions are welcome!

Plus, this Fall, I will become the Chair of the Ethics Section of APHA.  We are working on four ambitious projects: revising the Ethics Code for APHA, assuring the teaching of public health ethics in all accredited institutions, working with journal editors to increase the quality of scholarship in the field, and becoming an important part of APHA’s policy development processes.

And my thanks to all of you who have given me so much support over the last few years, as I begin this “next chapter” in my work. 

Decades, Part 2

The Eighties 

John Lennon was shot in 1980, which might be a convenient dividing point for the beginning of the next decade.  A personal turning point for me was the night of the Carter/Reagan debate and the day after.  That evening, my wife and I saw Carter embarrass Reagan.  The President wasn’t as glib as his challenger, but his understanding of the complexity of the problems we faced were highlighted by the simplistic worldview with which Ronald Reagan saw or, at least, portrayed the world.   We both felt a bit sorry for Reagan.  How odd, then, to find out in the newspapers and on TV the next day that most people thought that Reagan had won the debate rather handily.  

For its on-going impact on the future of U.S. policy making, our decision to elect Ronald Reagan as President is the clear beginning of the Eighties.  And here, finally, is the key thesis of this brief historical review: 

The Eighties began in November of 1980, and they haven’t ended!

As I write this, we are in the middle of the 35th  year of the Eighties.  I had real hope that the Eighties had ended when we elected the first black man as President.  He promised to be a transformative leader.  But he has not delivered on that promise.  While I am happier with Obama as President than the alternatives, he has shown himself to be a complete creature of the Eighties.  I believe the general attitude that makes up this horrible decade was not pushed aside.  For now, the Eighties continue on.
   
It is still a minority position to criticize Ronald Reagan.  A few years ago, the television viewing public selected Reagan as “The Greatest American,” over Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.  (Other top ten nominees were Elvis Presley and Oprah Winfrey, underlining the need to not take these results too seriously.)  Reagan is given credit (inappropriately) for “ending the Cold War.”  He supposedly “revolutionized” our view of the role of government in our lives.  If he is the cardinal figure of the Eighties, how bad could they be?
   
But Reagan, his entourage and his disciples have left the country with an intellectual legacy that is highly problematic.  As a result, we have raised a generation of Americans who think that life is perfectible and we don’t have to make any tough choices, that all problems start and end with the actions of individuals, that the measure of our country’s success is how much money is left in each individual’s pocket, that our complex problems don’t require serious choices, but can be fixed with simple-minded solutions. 

Their absurd and disingenuous promises to balance the budget, lower taxes and triple defense spending pandered to the desire of citizens to “have it all.”  Their over-reliance on the marketplace as the solely acceptable mechanism for the distribution of goods and services fostered an unseemly measure of selfishness and greed.  Their decrying government as “the problem,” never “the solution,” defined all social ills as arising from individual behavior and subject only to individual corrections.  If the world was a dangerous place, it only needed to be threatened into submission, and peace would simply follow.

The “ambient” ideology of the Eighties

Ronald Reagan’s legacy is the “ambient” ideology of the Eighties, a legacy which remains largely unquestioned in policy debate today.  That ideology is based upon:

    1.  An extreme individualism
    2.  Uncontrolled selfishness or greed
    3.  Unquestioned glorification of the private sector
    4.  Demonization of collective action
    5.  Unquestioned faith in the perfectability of human endeavors
    6.  Simple-mindedness in proposed solutions
    7.  Disingenuousness in policy proposals

In the last 35 years of the Eighties, this ideology has become, in Daniel Quinn’s language, “ambient”; that is, it has been stated so often and by so many, that it is very difficult to notice its pervasiveness.  Poverty will be eliminated by poor individuals working harder to get jobs.  The economy will flourish only if we all pursue our own self-interests.  “Greed is good,” says the slick-haired, expensively tailored corporate raider, Gordon Gecco, in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. 

Our image of a hero is someone who “survives” made-up contests, set in a primordial locale, through deceit and dirty-dealing.   All problems have complete solutions, and no choices are difficult, as long as we maintain our faith in God, country and the marketplace.  You want to lower the federal deficits?  Cut taxes for wealthy shareholders.  You want to stimulate employment?  Cut taxes for corporations.  You want to clean up the environment?  Cut taxes for corporate polluters.

But isn’t this exactly what I was looking for in my youth?  Isn’t this a “good guy/bad guy” world that the Eighties is defining?  To a sad extent, that is true.  Sad, because it is a worldview that shares its lack of complexity with the simple, half-hour situation comedies and black and white horse operas that made such entertaining television in the Fifties.  But it is wholly uneducated by the lessons that we should have learned in the Sixties and the Seventies, that all of our big social problems are complex, that they are going to require shared sacrifice to address, that progress is achievable but slow, that, since these challenges are “group level” problems, we are all going to have to work together, as a community, to make that progress, and to make things better.  And that government is the legitimate agent of the community in addressing those problems.

One of the subtle and most pernicious messages of the Eighties is that “Doing Good” is somehow misguided.  If Gecco is right and “Greed is Good,” because it drives the engine of commerce, then altruism is suspect.  The dominant ideology of the Eighties teaches that we can care for our families, and maybe for our neighbors, but that caring for “the other” is just misplaced psychological need.  And when called upon to help, we rely upon voluntarism.  Calling upon the community to meet these “group level” challenges, through its agent, government, is very passé, so Sixties. 

One of the most pernicious consequences of Eighties thinking is how we react to those for whom the system has not worked.  If we are all running a race on an un-biased race course, to use the cliche, then whomever wins deserves to win.  The dangerous corollary, which we see expressed so often today, is that those who didn’t win are not deserving. 

Giving up or embarrassed silence

Ask a child of the Eighties why they want to get a graduate degree in public health or social work or education.  They will hem and haw, look down at their shoes, stumble through a half-hearted defense of “career advancement.” 

Don’t you want to do something Good for other people, you might ask.  Well, yes, they will say, but it is too hokey to put it that way.  Wanting to integrate into your professional life the doing of Good for others is now a source of embarrassment.  Welcome to the Eighties!

For us children of the Sixties, the seemingly endless Eighties make an almost convincing case for giving up.  For caring children of the Eighties with the moral imagination to see beyond the ambient ideology, the only worldview they have known embarrasses them into silence. 

One of the theses of these blogs is that there is a rich and powerful intellectual foundation for caring for “the Other,” for pursuing “the Public Good.”  Rather than give up or shrink in mortification, we should embrace these ideas and recognize the nobility of the calling to which we are responding.  Doing Good is a good thing to do, and I intend these postings to make clear why that has always been and why it continues to be true.  Rather than moving to the back of the bus, those of us who wish to be champions of moral priorities must demand that our leaders make the choices necessary to address the community’s needs.

But, I will argue, the public policy making institutions of our country have pulled back from the willingness to make moral choices, and that the consequences of that are severe and pervasive.

Rejecting the pervasive ideology that says Doing Good should be left only to individual behavior, to “a thousand points of light,” to enlightened self-interest as expressed in the marketplace, is a struggle to many of us.  But it is a struggle worth facing.  If there is an intellectual foundation for not giving up, for not being embarrassed, then finding it will empower that urge so many of us feel, the urge to care for the other.  The urge to choose the public good.
   
But this won’t happen without leadership.  The task of transformative leaders is to pull us out of the Eighties, and to establish a progressive center of policy debate that is respectful of community and governmental action.

Do you think that is do-able?  Is leadership powerful enough to get us to that point?  We will talk about that in the next posting.

Decades, Part 1

Sometimes you wonder if it is possible for a progressive agenda to be argued for and implemented in the US at this time.  The central tendency of the public debate is so far to the right, and there seems to be so little room for moving things leftward.  Some bright spots appear on the national scene, like Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown, and Mayor Bill DeBlasio, but it is hard to work up much hope for their success.  There is a consistent voice for progressive policies from MSNBC, albeit one not listened to by all that many people.  And Barach Obama, circa 2007, gave us all some hope for transformative leadership.  But that seems like a long time ago.

For decades, I have been telling my students that we are stuck in a timewarp, a skewed and corrupted decade from which exit seems difficult.  Let me explain.

The Fifties

I grew up in the Fifties.  In the Fifties, I grew up thinking that there were good guys and bad guys.   The child of a Holocaust survivor, I knew that Hitler was a bad guy.  So were Stalin and Khrushchev.  The Communists were the biggest bad guys we faced.  Television provided me with a long list of good guys, fathers who knew best, masked cowboys who captured outlaws, superheros who fought for truth, justice and the American way.  The science fiction books I read non-stop had good buy/bad guy plots; you rooted for the good guys and were happy when the bad guys lost, as they always did.   The President of the United States was one of the chief good guys.  Over the next few decades, this easy understanding of “good” and “bad” became more complicated.

Decades are not numerical.  They are cultural.  So, the Fifties probably didn’t start in 1951, the year of my birth.  I believe they probably started in August of 1945, when we used the atomic bomb on Japan.  We ended the war, but we began the Cold War.  With that explosion, America became a dominant force on the world scene. 

The Sixties

I grew up in the Fifties, but I came of age in the Sixties.  You can get a lot of discussion on when the Fifties ended and the Sixties began.  Maybe when President Eisenhower warned us of the “military-industrial complex.”  Or when we elected Kennedy.  A good argument could be made for the unheralded moment in 1962 when U.S. troops first accompanied Vietnamese forces on a raid.  We might choose November of 1963, when Kennedy is shot.

But the cultural tone that enlivened the Sixties can’t have started without the music.  I think the best date for the beginning of the Sixties was February 9, 1964, when the Beatles first performed on the Ed Sullivan show.

The Sixties turned out to be quite a challenge for those of us who believed in the potential triumph of the good guys, but ultimately the lesson was that “doing Good” was still a worthy goal, and that struggles for justice and reason could prevail.  As the Sixties started, the country was already deeply and, apparently, inextricably involved in the Viet Nam War, but most of us didn’t know it, as the Good Guy in Chief had not shared this information. 

Of course, good guys wouldn’t have pursued a war they knew was unwinnable, at extraordinary cost to our treasury and the inexcusable loss of life on all sides.  Good guys would have told us the truth about our interests and our prospects.  When the total bill of that misadventure is calculated, it would be a grave mistake to underestimate the cost to American policy-making of the cynicism that arose as a result of those lies.     

While the Sixties were a time of social conflict, they were also a time of great idealism.  We learned that a struggle for civil rights could move a powerful and, at times, deeply prejudiced majority to cede rights to a minority.  We declared a war on poverty, recognized that women were a minority group, turned the nation away from an ill-conceived war.  We virtually eliminated poverty among the elderly by paying for their healthcare through Medicare.  We promised healthcare for some of the poor, with Medicaid.  And the early successes of the fledgling environmental movement demonstrated that caring for the future of our ecological niche might have broad appeal. 

Even the War provided some hope, as a generation learned that sometimes being a good guy meant you had to “take it to the streets” and, if you did, others would listen.  It was a generation that learned two important lessons: if you aren’t cynical enough, you will be a victim of those in power, but if you are too cynical, you will be paralyzed to work for change.  Changing the world was a valid and admirable ambition, and many young adults decided to try to blend this calling into their professional plans.  Some of us decided that we needed to “do Good” as our life’s work.  Being an efficacious good guy seemed a noble and an obtainable goal.  We went to the Moon in the Sixties, and, after all, if we can go to the Moon. . . . 

The Seventies tried to change that view.

The Seventies

There is some reasonable debate on when the Sixties ended and the Seventies began.  Arguable candidates are the early 1968 Tet Offensive, when the notion that the War was winnable became hard for almost everybody to hold onto.  Later that year, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy did great damage to our hope, but their messages continued to inspire us.

Maybe the Sixties ended the day we first elected Richard Nixon.  After all, good guys wouldn’t have appealed to our North Vietnamese enemies to delay peace talks until after the Presidential election, or secretly bombed Cambodia,  or broken into the offices of their political opponents and then covered up their involvement.  But in that first election, Nixon did promise to extract us from Viet Nam, and in his first term he did establish, by executive order, the U.S. Environmental Protection. 

A compelling case could be made that the Kent State killings in May of 1970 should mark the end of the Sixties.  Many of us still can’t see the picture of the student wailing over the body of her fallen friend without an urge to cry along with her. 

Maybe the Sixties ended when the Beatles split up.  That would provide some sense of balance. But by then, their catalog of music was voluminous and so much an unquestioned part of our lives that their break-up didn’t seem to end anything with finality.  Forty years later, that catalog is well-known by kids the age we were when the group called it quits.  Nothing really seemed to end with their decision. 

My best guess is that the Sixties ended in November of 1972, when we re-elected Richard Nixon in an overwhelming landslide over an opponent, George McGovern, who was widely ridiculed at the time, but whose proposed policies have almost all been adopted by future administrations. 

My, but the Seventies tried to grind out of us our faith in the potential achievement of “the Good,” but they couldn’t quite do it.  The Watergate scandal gave us an uncomfortable look into the unseemliness of presidential behavior, but it also showed that the bad guys still lose, or at least resign in disgrace. 

A whirlwind of inflation buffeted us and the gas lines of the energy crisis reduced our sense of exceptionalism.   We started the Seventies with that most cynical of foreign policies, Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik, where it didn’t matter how bad a country or its leader was behaving, they would get our support if our interests demanded it.  And no matter how much an international good guy might struggle, if their struggle did not advance our global interests, they were irrelevant. 

That foreign policy has played out to America’s horrible disadvantage over the intervening decades, as the rest of the world has come to see us as cynical and self-centered and greedy, hardly the archetype good guy.  But the Seventies also brought us a catalog of federal environmental laws, Supreme Court decisions that recognized reproductive rights, and Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy, where the central organizing principle was human rights. 

For a brief moment in the latter part of that decade, we stood for something noble on the world stage.  Yes, there were a lot of bad guys around the world. And, yes, sometimes we had to associate with them, and at other times we had to fight them.  But our eyes would be focused in the long run on supporting the birthrights of all humans to food, shelter, education, healthcare, meaningful work. 

The values embedded in the Carter domestic and foreign agendas gave many of us children of the Sixties hope, even as we were daunted by the problems we faced: stagflation, interest rates that made home ownership difficult, energy costs, environmental degradation, competition with the Soviets, and the early foreshadowing of Islamicist violence in the Iranian embassy takeover.  We were daunted, but we also had a sense that we were led by people who were doing their best to be good guys.  When the Seventies ended, our hope was bruised, but we were still ready for a fight.\

Then came the Eighties.

Chocolate Mint Cake

Chocolate Mint Cake
by Dan Swartzman

My mother used to make this for every birthday celebration in our house.  It was my father’s favorite.  I think she got the recipe from a Pillsbury Bake-Off in the 1950's.  The interesting part of the recipe is that you make the frosting, and then you convert half of the frosting into the rest of the cake.  Plus, anything with a brick of cream cheese in it can’t be all bad!

I didn’t make this case for 25 years, just kind of forgetting about it.  When I finally made it again, it was so popular with my family that Arlene was angry with me for withholding it from them for so many years.  This recipe makes a layer cake, but I have also done it as a sheet cake.  Sami usually makes it as cupcakes.  Never tried that, but I bet they would be great.

Ingredients

1 package (8 oz) of cream cheese
½ lb of butter, room temperature
½ t of vanilla
½ t of peppermint flavoring
6 cups (about 1.5 lbs) of powdered sugar
1/4 c hot water
4 squares (4 oz) of unsweetened chocolate
1/4 c of butter, room temperature
3 eggs
2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1½ t baking soda
pinch of table salt
3/4 c milk

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Cream the cream cheese, ½ lb of butter, vanilla and peppermint flavoring in a mixer.  (Don’t be tempted to add “just a bit more” of the mint extract.  A little goes a long way.  I tried the recipe using spearmint flavoring once.  Don’t do that.)  Set aside.

Put the chocolate in a double boiler and melt completely.  Cool slightly.

While the chocolate is melting, sift the powdered sugar into a large bowl.  Add half of the sugar to the cheese mixture and mix gently.  Then add the rest of the powdered sugar and the hot water into the mixer bowl, alternating between the two (using the standard approach: 1/3 dry, ½ of wet, 1/3 dry, ½ of wet, 1/3 dry).

After the chocolate has cooled a bit, add it into the mixing bowl and mix until the chocolate and the rest of the mixture is homogenized, scraping the side of the bowl when needed.

The result is the frosting for the cake.

However, you now take half of this mixture and put it into a bowl and set it aside.  (I usually eyeball this, but it causes some anxiety to do so, and I keep promising myself I will divide it by weight or by volume.  I recommend that, but I haven’t ever done it.  If you leave too much as frosting, the cake will be small.  If you take to much for the cake, there will not be enough frosting.  Either measure or do what I do – live on the edge!)

Into the half of the mixture that is left in the mixer bowl, add in the 1/4 cup of butter.  Then beat in each egg, one at a time until it is thoroughly mixed in.  (About a minute.) 

Whisk together the flour, baking soda and salt.  Add into the blender, alternating with the milk.  (Follow the standard approach, above.)  Do this on low speed. 

Mix until everything is combined, scraping the sides as necessary.  You have now made the batter.

Put the batter into two 9" cake pans.  Bake in center of the oven for about 25 to 35 minutes.  Use the toothpick method to see if it is done.

Let cool for 10 minutes, then take out of the pans and put on a cooling rack.  When completely cooled, ice as a layer cake.  (Don’t try to ice it before it is cooled, or the frosting will break into a terrible mess.)  Keep it in the refrigerator if it is going to be a while before you serve it or if it is especially hot out.

This cake freezes very well.  Cut into slices and place on a sheet pan.  Freeze solid.  Wrap loosely with wax paper, and then place in a freezer bag.  Defrosts in seconds. 

The whole house will smell of chocolate and mint.  One of the side benefits of this recipe!

Telling my parents' stories, in portrait and in landscape, Part Two

A Second Telling, In Landscape

After my classes had heard the first telling of my family’s stories, I suggested that I wanted to tell the stories again.  Only this time, I want to make clear how much of the outcome was due to the intervention in my family’s lives of other people.  The first time the stories were told in “portrait.”  Now I want to tell them in “landscape.”

There were the Russian soldiers who stopped Josef and Rosa as they fled Odessa, and who exhibited sufficient humanity to be charmed by three-year-old Alex’s bravura.  Yes, they robbed my family, but they let them live.  So many other fleeing Jews were not so “well treated.” 

My grandmother Rosa was staying with gentile friends in Warsaw, waiting for my father to come get her.  Those friends were risking their lives housing a Jew, as were the Polish farmer and his wife who took my feverish father in and cared for him and lied to the soldiers for him.  If any of them had been found out, they would have been killed, summarily.  They and their entire families
When my father and grandparents made it to Lithuania, they were welcomed into a community of Jewish refugees funded largely by the Joint Distribution Committee, an international coordinating body of Jewish philanthropy.  Jews from around the world and throughout recent decades had given money that “the Joint” might be able to help my father and his parents.  

Zwartendijk and Sugihara

The Curacao visa came by way of Jan Zwartendijk, a Dutch diplomat in Lithuania.  Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese official whom many consider “the Japanese Schindler,” had asked his superiors in Japan for permission to help the Jews.  They refused.  But he did it anyway.  He saved as many as 10,000 Eastern European Jews by granting them the “paper” with which to travel across the Soviet Union to possible freedom.

I had long suspected that my father was someone that was helped by Sugihara.  Many years ago, on a trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., while entering the names of my great uncles Adam, Henrik, and Leon Szwarcman into the database of Holocaust victims and Solomon Szwarcman’s name into the list of survivors, I casually asked the man at the desk if he knew how I could find a list of names of those who got Sugihara’s visas.  “Well, we have the list right here,” he said. 

He handed me the twenty or so pages bound unceremoniously in a black cardboard folder.  There I found the names: Josef Szwarcman, Aleksandr Szwarcman and Golda Szwarcman.  He made copies for me, and I walked with eyes brimming with tears towards the quiet “Hall of Remembrance.”  I sat and wept uncontrollably, for more than 20 minutes, holding the photocopied pages, sobbing over them.

Sugihara appears to have been a man of character.  He was part of the consular team representing Japan in Manchukuo (at the time my mother was growing up in Harbin), and ended up in Europe because he asked to be reassigned, in response to the atrocities he witnessed during that occupation.  He had nothing to gain by helping the Jews of Eastern Europe, and reportedly his career suffered when the truth came out. 

This man, who couldn’t have anticipated my existence, was in every way responsible for it.  He had sufficient moral imagination to care for “the other,” these Jewish farmers, oddly clothed, marching with their scrolls, praying in their dead language.  Tribal people from the American West or Sub-Saharan Africa might have been more foreign to him, but even they might fit better with Japanese feudal mythology.

And yet, as different as they might be, he cared about them.  One estimate is that there are 40,000 descendants of the Jews that Sugihara cared about.  And all of my father’s story and mine, all of the successes of the grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and now the great-great-grandchildren of Josef and Rosa, are made possible because of that caring, because of Chiune Sugihara’s moral imagination.

Shanghai’s Jews

When my father got to Shanghai, he and his parents were given food and shelter by the Jews who were already there.  At the end of the 19th Century, hundreds of Jews, mostly from Iraq, seeking business opportunities, ended up in Shanghai and prospered.  They were of a different branch of the religion and a very different social class than their co-religionists from Eastern Europe and might have looked down their noses on their apparently ignorant, mostly rural cousins. 

Instead, they donated money and goods and time to assure that the newly arrived had a chance to start fresh.  Also helping with the relocation was HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.  Decades of contributions to HIAS by anonymous Jews were now used to feed, clothe and shelter my father and his parents.

And there was the Henkin family, who were willing to overlook the brashness and over-confidence of this young man and who offered him a job and a career as a salesman.  It was Mr. Henkin who advised my father to take hair-nets, not currency.  (I have always suspected that he might have been the source of the $700, too.)  

A lifelong community

My mother had similar encounters with helping communities.  She fled Siberia for the unknown in Harbin.  She arrived as a toddler, but on the first day of class, she was adopted by her desk mate, Luba Patent, Luba’s loud brother Joe and their friends Vera and Nura.  All members of Harbin’s resident Jewish population, they took in this little hick shiksa and made her part of their extended family.  She became a sister, a full-fledged member of their community.  I grew up with the children of these friends as my cousins.  Friendships that were made when my mother was four lasted for almost 80 years across two continents, until only death ended them.

America

In the “ambient” American mythology, Alex and Tamara and Eric and Alice would cross the Pacific and arrive penniless, knowing no one, but, spirited and plucky and talented, would persevere from hard work alone.  In fact, without trying to take anything away from my parents’ talents or pluckiness, I know that, when they arrived in San Francisco, they were met by representatives of HIAS and by “the Joint.” Both organizations made sure that they had a place to stay, food to eat, clothing and medicine for their children, a sense of security.  Someone from the Joint found two possible jobs for my father, one in Seattle and one in Houston. 

And aren’t these provisions, available to my parents without request,  the birthrights we ought to promise to every human being: shelter, food, clothing, healthcare, safety, work?

Once my father was established as a salesman, his customers became a community, too.  They looked forward to his visits, opened their homes to him, invited him to their children’s weddings.  One child of a former customer visited my elderly father in a suburb of Chicago, 2,000 miles away from this son’s home, because “Alec” was an important part of their “family.” 

Of course, much of my father’s success was due to his knowledge of his products, his understanding of his customer’s business and his ability to communicate this to them.  But thinking he was successful on individual achievement alone is to ignore the community of good will and caring in which his work was embedded.

Communities for Eric and Alice

I could go on.  My brother benefitted from the insight and good management at NCR, who looked past his lack of education and saw the talent in him.  He married into a warm and loving clan that took and still takes very seriously the notion of “family.”  If anyone ever wanted to find a group to capture in a documentary on the role of family in the stability and prosperity of its members, Janie’s family would be the perfect focus. 

My loud and “foreign” parents were always welcomed with warmth and grace by Jane’s parents.  When Jane’s mother insisted on staying at the family farm in Minnesota, in spite of her blindness and the lack of any family members near by, the entire family, children and grand-children, scattered across the western half of the country, re-arranged their lives so that there was always some one who could stay at the farm with Mrs. Wiggert. 

My sister, so deserving of help, got the assistance she needed, because generations of people who had contributed to Brown University made possible a fully paid scholarship for the education of this quiet, talented immigrant girl from 3,000 miles away.   And those same funds paid for the fledgling computers from which she found her profession.

Communities for me and my children

My children, too, benefitted from the thousands of alumni of their elite colleges whose contributions helped us afford their tuition.  I could name, as could you, a dozen teachers and mentors who paid special attention to my development.  There is a legion of friends, mentors, teachers, communities that are, in part, responsible for my success and that of my brother and sister and our children and grandchildren.

As I have hinted above, I imagine that working closely with my father could, at times, be a bit thorny.  But Ray and Jeanette Wachter, the owners of the business for whom he worked for 25 years, supported him and his work.  And his family.  It wasn’t until about 15 years ago that I learned that it was the Wachters who actually sent me to law school.  Every semester when the tuition bill came due, my father found a bonus waiting in his paycheck.  They never let me know that they did this; they never made themselves available for my thanks.  They died before I knew.  But my schooling, my career, are made possible by, are built upon their decency and caring.  Upon their moral imagination.

We, all of us, stand on the shoulders of historical and geographical communities.  Yes, our success is ours.  But it is also, always, an expression of the caring of these communities in which we are inevitably embedded.  When we only tell our stories in portrait, we miss this contribution.

By telling family stories twice, once in portrait and once in landscape, we can all regain contact with the moral imagination of those communities in which we are embedded.  After all, to the unnamed and unknown people who helped my parents survive and whose compassion is responsible for my existence, I am “the truly other.”  But for the moral imagination of generations of caring people, none of us would prosper. 

We should all tell our family's stories.  Twice.  Maybe your stories are not quite as dramatic as my father's and mother's, but the same thing will happen.  You will connect with the people and the communities that were the foundations upon which your family succeeded.

In a way, my father was right.  The American Dream isn’t a myth.  It is the illusion of solely individual achievement that is the fairy tale.  We have been telling the myth solely as portraiture, while ignoring the landscape.  Of late, Americans seem to have forgotten that there is no success without community, that embeddedness in community is our common and universal experience, that when someone fails, it is quite likely, in part, a failure of his or her community, and that we forget this basic truth at our peril, for people who don’t understand the debt they owe to community are bound to neglect it.

Telling my parents' stories, in portrait and in landscape, Part One

I just gave a talk at the Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing, at Loyola University, about this disparity between the rich and those that are getting by.  What does this say about the American Dream?  In order to provide some perspective, I asked that they listen to me tell my family’s stories.  And, in fact, I asked them to listen to the stories, twice.  Once in portrait, once in landscape.

The First Telling, In Portrait

Every semester, I try to show my students the limits of the common understanding of the American Dream.  There isn’t nearly the upward mobility that the current mythology suggests, where anyone can rise to the top, and that each generation can always be better off than the one before it.  As we have seen in the last two postings, we live in a society where the rich are unfathomably wealthy, and most of our families are struggling to just “get by.”

But try telling my father that the American Dream was a myth!  As far as he was concerned, he and his family had lived the American Dream.  They had first hand experience.  They were living proof.  They came to this country with two young children and $700 worth of hair-nets, and look what a success their family had become!

My father was born Aleksandr Szwarcman in Odessa, Russia, a month after the Czar abdicated in response to the Russian Revolution.  His father, Josef Szwarcman, a well to do Polish accountant and businessman working for a Russian company, and a keen observer of his political environment, sensed that the family might do well to move back to Warsaw.  He and his wife (Golda at birth, later Rosa) and their two children, 3 and 5 years old, returned to Poland by train.  On the way, they were stopped and questioned by the Red Army.  My Aunt Mura, the five year old, says that my father, the three year old, wagged his finger at the soldiers and indignantly stated to the soldiers, “You should not kill my father!”  The soldiers responded with humor, and let them pass, after taking all of their valuables.

In spite of this loss, Papa grew up in Warsaw in comfort, with servants in a big house.  The family was ethnically Jewish, and Josef hired an Orthodox tutor to help his son through a bar mitzvah, but religion was never a big part of their lives.  As he became an adult, Papa didn’t have a profession; he was probably a bit of a dilettante. 

But, as Hitler came to power in neighboring Germany, and as the Nuremberg laws were passed, my grandfather decided that things might get very bad for the Jews of Poland, and he quietly began liquidating the family’s assets.  My Aunt Mura by this point had married and moved away, but my grandparents and my father were still in Warsaw when Hitler’s Blitzkrieg entered Poland on September 1, 1939.

September 1939

My father heard the news and immediately started walking east, out of town.  (South was towards Czechoslovakia, which the Germans had invaded earlier.  North was the Baltic Sea.  East meant the Soviet Union and its notoriously anti-Semitic Red Army, but East was the only direction available.)  On the road from Warsaw, my father came upon Josef, also walking east.  Neither was accompanied by Rosa, who apparently was still in Warsaw.  My father agreed to go back into the city to get her, in spite the Nazi occupation.

My father and my grandmother were both blond and blue-eyed, and could pass for Catholic Poles.  Papa found Rosa at a neighbor’s house.  He urged her to go with him immediately, but she insisted on going home and taking some of their belongings.  That first attempt to flee didn’t work, and by the time they were able to set off again, conditions had deteriorated sufficiently that my father insisted that they leave their belongings and travel as quickly as possible. 

Walking through the Polish countryside, my father noticed that he had a toothache.  The tooth swelled, and it was clear that it was infected.  By the time they stopped at a farmhouse for help, my father was feverish.  The Polish farm family took them in. 

The woman of the couple heated prunes in milk to boiling, and applied them directly onto my father’s gums.  Although extraordinarily painful, this succeeded in drawing out the infection.  As my father lay in bed, recovering, German soldiers knocked on the door, looking for fleeing Jews.  The farm woman said that there were no Jews there, that they were free to look, but that they should be careful, since one of the cousins (pointing to my father) had typhus.  The soldiers left in haste.

Papa and Rosa finally made it to Lithuania, where thousands of Jews from Eastern Europe had gathered.  They were reunited with Josef.  Josef’s brothers were less fortunate.  Adam and Henrik were lost in the Holocaust.  Leon was able to move to Paris, but when the Germans overran France, he, too, was engulfed by the Shoah.  Solomon, the youngest, survived the camps and ultimately moved to the States.  I met him only once, when I was a child.  I vaguely remember an elderly man with no teeth and a blue tattoo on his forearm. 

Pearl Harbor Day
   
Josef secured visas ostensibly to emigrate to Dutch-owned Curaçao, and transit visas to get there, through Japan.  The only way to get out would be to travel by train across the entire Soviet Union.  It took them until December of 1941 before they finally made it to Kobe, Japan.  The exact date was December 8, 1941.  Given the International Dateline, this is more remembered in the U.S. as December 7th, the day Pearl Harbor was attacked.  They were hoping to secure visas to come to the U.S., but the U.S. consulate was closed and the Japanese, now involved in a world war, were not accommodating.  Their only choice was to fall back to Shanghai, China, an international city which required no “papers” to enter or leave.  They became part of the Jewish Ghetto in Shanghai. 
   
Permission to leave the Ghetto was tightly controlled by the Japanese who had invaded China.  Curfews were rigidly kept.  Papa told me a story about how he and a large group of friends had had to sneak back into the Ghetto one evening after curfew.  Someone (probably Jewish) told the authorities.  The Japanese reacted violently.  They lined the violators against a wall and started executing them, one by one, left to right.  My father was third from the end and, miraculously, the Japanese officer got tired of this sport and stopped the killing before he reached my father.

In Shanghai, Papa found a job and a profession.  Always a friendly person, with a “gift for gab,” my father was hired by Mr. Henkin to work as a salesman at his department store, and Mr. Henkin taught him how to sell.  Around the corner from the store was a little café, owned by Alexandra and Tamara Alexeyeva, mother and daughter.  Papa said that Tamara thought he was cute, so always gave him free cream puffs when he came in.  Tamara, my mother, denied ever doing this.

Tamarachka from Bodaibo

Mama was born in Bodaibo, Russia, a small mining town in Siberia, on the eve of the Russian Revolution.  Her father was an Estonian Jewish businessman who had ended up in Siberia either because of a pogrom or because he was seeking business opportunities, both stories told by my mother. 

My grandmother Alexandra was a poor Russian Orthodox seamstress of Byelorussian descent.  When the Revolution heated up, it became unsafe to stay in Russia, and Tamara and Alexandra joined many émigrés in moving to Harbin, Manchuria. 

Mama was four when she got to Harbin, just ready to begin school.  She was a bright student, learning English and some French, ending up at graduation as the class valedictorian.  She made life-long friends in Harbin.  But when China was invaded by Japan and Manchuria became the Japanese protectorate of Manchukuo, it was again time to leave. 

I never got the story straight about how they arrived in Shanghai (somehow with a stop at Tien Tsin, now Tianjin) nor how they could afford to own a restaurant, the “Malyenkiy (Little) Café.”  At some point in the thirties, Tamara married Josef Sacher, an official of the German government and, perforce, a Nazi.  In 1939 my brother, Eric Sacher, was born in Shanghai.  A divorce followed, maybe because Joe Sacher wanted Eric to be a Hitler-jungen, and Tamara did not.  Eric remembers our grandmother Alexandra, but she died sometime in the early forties of complications from hypertension. 

Cream puffs or not, my parents met and married and, in August of 1946, had a little girl, my sister Alice.  Right after the war, Josef and Rosa Szwarcman were able to emigrate to the U.S., moving to New York to live with my Aunt Mura and the remnants of Rosa’s family, most of whom had left Europe before the war. 

Visas to the US

It wasn’t until 1947 that my family got visas to come to the U.S.  Papa, the family story goes, spent the crossing chasing after 13 month old Alice, who had decided to learn to walk on the boat coming over. 

They landed in San Francisco.  Papa, who had become an excellent salesman in Shanghai, spoke no English, so other work had to be found.  He was told of a job as a longshoreman in a place called Seattle.  He moved there and then sent for the rest of the family after he was settled.

The Swartzman family (as they now spelled the name) was never destitute, but they started those early years in the new country with very little money.  Papa loaded ships while he learned English (well enough that, years later, he routinely beat his college educated son at Scrabble).

Eric and Jane

My brother spent his teen years as the son of a working class family.  He worked as a bagger at the Safeway, spent time fixing up his 1939 Pontiac, and didn’t think much about going to college.  But, boy, could he take things apart and put them back together again, particularly if they were electronic.  The basement was always stuffed with amplifiers and speakers in various stages of construction or repair.  Eric fell in love with Jane, the first woman he ever dated.  In order to be ready to ask her to marry him, he got a steady job right out of high school, repairing cash registers for the National Cash Register Company. 

He was a quiet young man, shy, but reliable and clearly talented.  The Company promoted him to supervisor.  And, when, in the early sixties, the Company became NCR and was investing heavily in computers, Eric was tagged as someone worth training.  They sent him and his young family to Dayton, Ohio, to train as a computer repairman.  From Dayton he traveled around the country taking apart and putting back together that generation of mainframe computers.  And they always worked better after he did.

More training and more promotions followed.  Someone at NCR recognized the advantage of having testing equipment that could find where amongst the circuitry of a mainframe computer the problem most likely lay.  Eric headed up that research project, and NCR and he have a number of patents to show for the innovations he and his team brought to the field.  Leaving NCR, Eric founded his own company, the modestly named “Serendipity Systems,” to develop and capitalize on his ideas and expertise. 
   
Through the ups and downs of the computer industry over the last 20 years, Eric’s expertise and talents have been rewarded.  And the family of this working class kid from the “greaser” side of Seattle is well established in the upper middle class.  A son and a daughter went to college, and another daughter has spent 30 years as a successful businesswoman and entrepreneur.  Eric’s grandkids are in college and on their way up the economic ladder.

Alice and Bill

Alice was fairly young during the working class period of my parents’ early years.  Papa had learned enough English to become a salesman again, and his natural talent and out-going personality carried him far.  People simply liked him.

By the time Alice was in junior high school, Papa was employed as a successful salesman for a family-owned regional wholesaler of yardage goods.  Papa would travel around the Pacific Northwest and later up to Alaska and down to California, telling customers what they should stock.  That extraordinary self-assurance was sometimes irritating if you were his son or his co-worker, but it went over well with the customers, and they made money listening to him. 

Alice, intelligent, thoughtful and extraordinarily hard-working, skipped a grade in elementary school, graduated from one of the largest high schools in the city as valedictorian, and was awarded a National Merit Scholarship, which she took with her to study at Pembroke College within Brown University.  She was given a full scholarship.  Not only the first person to go to college in her family, but to an Ivy League college at that! 

The year she left for college, we moved out of rental property and into a one and half story bungalow that my parents managed to buy.  Things were going well, and the family was solidly middle class
.
Alice was not sure what she wanted to do after college, but she knew that she enjoyed working with the computers at the school’s language lab, and she was very good at it.  By her senior year, 1967, the computer industry was hot, and she decided to be part of it.  She had her pick of job offers, but took one in San Francisco, working as a systems analyst for Bank of America. 

Her boss, Bill, became her boyfriend and then her husband.  They left Bank of America to start their own extremely successful computer consulting business, which they ran for 30 years.  She and Bill have traveled the world many times over and have retired to a quiet life, living well off of their earlier success. 

Papa is promoted to salesmanager

Papa was made salesmanager at the company, promoted by the owners, Ray and Jeanette Wachter, over their own sons.  While he didn’t always get along with the sons,  he “made a nice living.”  Mama put aside her interest in further education and worked, first as a seamstress, her mother’s occupation, and then as a retail saleswoman.  The family was crossing the border into the lower reaches of the upper-middle class. 

Just before I entered high school, my parents bought a beautiful, newly built, four-bedroom, three bath home in one of the nicer areas of the city, with a balcony that Alex and Tamara spent hours on, gazing at their view of Lake Washington, and with doctors and lawyers and businesspeople as their neighbors.  

In my teen years, we were able to afford a good life, never luxurious, but never wanting.  There was no question that this last child of this immigrant family would go to college.  No one doubted his ability to achieve his goal of going to law school.  When I got into an elite and very expensive school, how to afford it was never discussed with me. 

My family

Today, I am a professor teaching health systems management to undergraduates, an emeritus faculty member of a well-ranked school of public health, a former dean, partner in a law firm, and married to a woman with a Ph.D.  My children have gone to elite “Northeastern” colleges and are launched towards successful careers in medicine, clinical psychology and social justice advocacy.

The 20th Century certainly threw a lot at my parents.  My father was repeatedly threatened with death, but managed to survive on talent and charm and, of course, a bit of luck.  My mother, with great intelligence and strong character, rose from Siberian peasantry to become the matriarch of a successful family.  Their children are financially secure, with five college and post-graduate degrees and a handful of patents among them.  Their grand-children are solidly upper-middle class, just two generations away from the boat. 

My parents’ stories are the script of the American Dream.  Come with nothing, but be talented and work hard, and the sky is the limit on how much you can achieve.  This is the ambient mythology propagated in late 20th Century America.  This country is the land of opportunity, and if you are the right individual, you can capitalize on that opportunity for your own and your family’s gain.

When I tell these stories to people, there is usually a strong emotional response.  They feel my pride in my parents’ accomplishments, and they are pleased by a story with a happy ending.  In addition, the stories, as told above, reinforce their own acceptance of the ambient mythology.  They have been told and they believe that the difference between success and failure in 21st Century America is individual talent and individual hard work.  My father believed that, too.  Wasn’t he living proof?

But the data are compelling that this ambient myth is not accurate.  How do we reconcile the data and the story? 

By telling the story a second time.  But this time, instead of focusing on the individuals involved, telling the story “in portrait,” we should emphasize all of the people, organizations and communities that made my families survival and success possible, telling the story this time “in landscape.”

How much does it take to "get by?"

Getting by

In Baltimore, as in so many places in America, people are struggling to get by.  At a time when millions of Americans are millionaires, how many are just getting by? 

The rising level of wealth inequality in the US has received a lot of press coverage in the last few years.  We certainly have our share of rich people.  But what is it like to “get by” in the US?

For years, I have had this conversation with my classes.  What is the monthly budget of a family of four, living in Chicago, two working parents, neither with college degrees, but with steady jobs, and two children, maybe 8 and 10?  We have had fun arguing about what it really takes to house, feed, clothe and educate a working class family.  Not a poor family, but one that is “getting by.”

Most of my students were upper-middle class, privileged.  That is the dominant group that makes it to grad school, even in something as “anti-investment” as getting a public health degree.  But a sizable number of our students were from less privileged backgrounds.  And these students were often surprised at the figures that their classmates threw out during the discussions. 

How much rent would this family pay?  The most common guess was around $2,000, a figure that is way too high.  How much would they pay for food?  To clothe two growing kids?  Would they be able to afford two cars?  Do you get smart phones for 8 and 10 year olds?

Remember, we are not asking what it means to be “poor.”  We are trying to figure out how much money it takes to get by in America.

Try this

Here is a list of possible budget items.  What would you estimate as the monthly needs for this family?  If you want to duplicate the experience from my class discussions, ask a group of friends to participate.

When you add up your estimates, multiple the monthly bills by 12, to get a year’s expenses.  Then multiple that yearly number by 133% (to account for tax and Social Security withholding).  The number you get is the gross income that the family needs to “get by.” 

Try this exercise before you read on.

Almost every year, the class arrives at a yearly gross income of about $75,000.  (Of course, I usually had to intervene to keep down the more outlandish estimates.)  Is that close to what you got?

The problem is that the median income in Chicago for a family of four in 2013 was only $64,000.  That means that a good deal less then half of the families in Chicago are “getting by.”  And the median in Baltimore was just a touch over $60,000, so even fewer families in Baltimore are “getting by.”

At a time when the rich of America enjoy wealth so fabulous that they can’t possibly spend the $50,000 they are handed every day, the majority of our families are not even getting by.  Something is very, very wrong with that reality.

Nothing new

But this is not a new phenomenon.  Since we started keeping figures on the distribution of wealth in this country, back in the early part of the last century, the bottom quintile (20%) of Americans have had almost none of the wealth, and the top quintile have had almost all of the wealth.  And from the start until around 1980, this didn’t move all that much.  The entire wealth of the population went “up” (it was better to be near the bottom in 1980 then it was in 1920), but the distribution was resolutely uneven for decades.

If “progress” in equity would be measured by the lower quintiles getting a larger share of the wealth, for the almost 100 years that we have been keeping these data, there has been no progress of note.  The rich have, for decades, been very rich, the upper-middle class live comfortably, and the rest are struggling to get by, or worse. 

These gaps worsened in the early 1980's (under the Reagan administration), got a bit better in the 1990's (under the Clinton administration), and have been slowly getting worse since then.   

It is simply beyond the everyday experiences of too many Americans to understand what it means to be “rich,” and how many of us can’t even “get by.” 

But it is completely within the experience of the residents of Baltimore to know how few are getting by.  And the residents of Oakland.  And Watts.  And Detroit.  And the Englewood neighborhood, in my home town.  As many have pointed out, even though the Baltimore Orioles play their home games in the neighborhood where Freddy Grey grew up and died, few of his neighbors ever go to Camden Yards, the Orioles’ stadium.  Paying more than $200 to take a family of four for “fun at the old ball park” isn’t in the budget of people struggling to get by.

Leading a meaningful life

What is the message we give to a young African-American boy living in these neighborhoods about what is meaningful in life?  I think the main message he gets, from the signs he sees and the commercials he watches and the songs he listens to, is that life is meaningful in American if you have “stuff.”  Your life is meaningful if you have lots of stuff. 

And yet, we give that kid no hope to get stuff.  He sees little chance of getting a job.  (Unemployment for black males in his area is 60%.)  And even if he does get a job someday, he knows that it will be a struggle to get by, with no reason to expect that he can accumulate “stuff.”  How hard is it to understand his depression?  His hopelessness?  His anger? 

And if a group of slightly older kids comes along and offers him a chance to “be somebody,” to belong to something, to get stuff, and all he has to do to get this is to be a part of the gang, why wouldn’t he join?  A chance to lead a meaningful life, albeit one purchased by violence.

And, at some point, if that violence and anger bursts out, and overflows into the community, isn’t that predictable, too? 

What is most noteworthy about the Baltimore experience of the last few days is not the small amount of violence caused by strangled hope, but the huge number of its residents who have taken to the streets to renounce violence, to condemn destructive behavior.  Imagine how difficult it might be for you and me to find the strength and composure that it would take to maintain that poise and dignity in the face of anger and an affront to the meaningfulness of our lives.  That behavior demands our respect.  But it also demands our action.

The rich have unimaginably too much of the country’s wealth.  And too few of us are able to get by.  More pressingly, too few of us have hope of ever getting by.  Yes, the problem in Baltimore is police misconduct.  And, yes, racism is or should be impossible to ignore.  But without all of us having an understanding of the extreme economic inequality of our country, problems like this are not going away.

It must be time to change.

Economic inequality and Baltimore

We will be getting back to “throwing out 400 years of Western thought” in future posts.  Right now, I want to say something about what is happening in Baltimore.  And almost every place else in America.

Of course, the precipitating event in Baltimore was the abuse of Freddie Grey by Baltimore police, who, as I write, are under indictment for their actions.  But I agree with the many commentators who have said that this is not the whole story, not even the biggest part of the story.  As Ta-Nehisi Coates said earlier today, this is like telling the history of World War II by starting at the D-Day invasion.

Racism is a huge part of the story.  But so is class differential and economic inequality.  We live in a country of extraordinary inequity.  That is what I want to comment on. 

Let me ask you, “Are you rich?”
       
What is Rich?  A thought experiment

Most of you would answer immediately, “No.”  Some of you might ask what I meant by “rich.”  So, OK, what is Rich?

Most of us know that we are not “rich.”  We see in the media stories about people who are rich.  They have lots of things that we don’t.  They can do lots of things that we can’t.  But what does it mean to be really, really rich?  Let’s see.

If one has a net worth of a mere $500 million, that does not get you on the Forbes list of the richest 400 people in America.  (In 2014, you would have had to have a net worth of $1.55 billion.)  But having a half a billion dollars in net worth is definitely “rich” by anyone’s definition.  So, how rich is this?

Well, let’s assume that you had such a net worth.  (We will pause as you enjoy that fantasy.)  And you decided that you didn’t want to work anymore, and you didn’t want to manage your wealth anymore.  You wanted to cash it all in and live off of the income from the funds.  So, you go to a large bank, and you offer to place your fortune in their bank, as long as they give you a good interest rate as a return.

If I deposited my cashed-in net worth at a bank, I would get an interest rate of about 0.25%.  But you are depositing a half a billion dollars, and you are promising to never touch the principle.  Forever.  That would be a significant percentage of the total assets of most big banks.  And they will be able to make a 10% to 20% return on investing that capital.  But times are rough, so let’s assume that you were able to get a paltry 6% on your deposit.

(Yes, I know that rich people can’t just cash in their net worth like this, and take a wheel-barrow, or maybe a couple of thousand wheel-barrows, full of money to the bank.  It’s a thought experiment, so relax.)

Then, you will take your interest and pay all of your taxes on it.  No gimmicks, no hiding behind the vagaries of the tax code, no putting the money in a foreign bank to lower your tax rate.  You will pay your complete and fair share of funding America.

What is left is your investment income, the amount you have to live off of.  How much does this amount to per year?  Or maybe per day?

Let’s see: 6% of $500,000,000 is $30,000,000.  And the income tax on that is about roughly 39.6%.  This is the highest “marginal tax rate” we charge in the US today. 

Marginal tax rates

A marginal tax rate is the amount of tax you pay on the last dollars you earn in a year.  If you earn $200,000 in 2014, you will not be paying the 39.6% rate, because it doesn’t kick in until you make more money than that.  Having a very high “top marginal rate” means that the people who make the most money have to pay a much larger portion of the money they earn in order to make the country work well.  Having a low “top marginal rate” means that the people who make lots and lots of money aren’t paying their share.

When I was born, in 1951, the top marginal rate was 91%.  Around when I got to high school, the rate started to fall.  It was 70% for many years (1965 to 1982).  Right about the start of “the Eighties” (but that’s another posting). 

Why did it go down?  If you are a supply-side economist, you would say that letting rich people keep more of their money is good for everyone, since they will invest that money, and we will all get jobs from that spending.  Trickle-down economics.  Voodoo economics.  How’s that been workin’ for ya?

I think it went down because politicians caved in to rich people to lower the rate so that rich people could keep more of their money.  Simple explanations are often the best.

$49,644 per day

Back to how much money these rich people have to live on, after taxes.  So, every year you will pay 39.6% of your income in taxes and keep, after taxes, 60.4% of your interest.  If you gave the bank your $500,000,000, your investment income is $18,120,000 per year.

In other words, every day, a person will arrive at your door, and hand you a bag containing $49,644 and change.  Every day, Saturday and Sunday.  For doing no work and for paying all of your taxes. 

Stunning, isn’t it?  To be rich is to have access to money that is beyond the imagination of the average person.  Could you live on roughly $50 thousand a day?  Keep in mind, that if you don’t spend it all, some of it will go back into your capital in the bank, and you will start getting even bigger bags of cash every day.

And having a net worth of “only” $500,000,000 doesn’t make you one of the super-rich in the US.  Bill Gates, the richest man in America according to Forbes, has almost a trillion dollars in net worth ($818,000,000,000).  That would work out to more than $81 million dollars a day in income!  We should praise Bill and Melinda Gates contributions to charity, but if he gives a billion dollars to charity, that is only 12 days worth of income (assuming the rather paltry 6% interest of our thought experiment).

The least rich person on Forbes’ list has a net worth of $1.55 billion.  That is over $150,000 per day, every day, Saturday and Sunday, after taxes, with no work and not touching the principal.

Being rich is unimaginable to most of us.  Could you manage to live on $150,000 per day?  Or on the $49,000 earned by our first hypothetical rich person? 

What could you live on?

Could you live on $5,000 per day?  That is what you would get from a net worth of only $50 million.  There are 45,000 Americans with this net worth.
   
I am guessing that you are like me – the idea of living off of $500 per day, doing no work and after taxes, sounds great.  That net worth, of $5 million, doesn’t get you into the top 1 percent in America ($8.4 million).  But I am confident that most of us would be very, very comfortable living off of a net annual income of $180,000.

To be rich in the US is unimaginably beyond the dreams of most Americans.  No wonder that, in 2000, when Al Gore was saying that George W. Bush’s tax cuts would only benefit the top 1%, 39% of the American public got excited, because they thought they would benefit directly from Bush’s plans.  (Bush jokingly referred to his base as “the Haves.”  Very funny.) 

Half of that excited group, 20% of Americans, thought they were already in the top 1%, and the rest thought that they were very close to being in that lofty group.  Not even close! 

In my opinion, if someone has a net worth of $20,000,000 (a daily income of about $2,000) and believes they need more money, I think that qualifies as an illness. 

So, part of the story in Baltimore is about extreme disparities in wealth.  But most of us don’t really understand what it means to be rich in the US.  And how many of us actually understand what it takes to “get by?”  Not to be poor, but to just “get by.”  We will look at that next.