A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

A good column at Strike! Magazine for your Labor Day entitled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” (h/t Tipsy) The author considers the phenomenon of our continued toil despite our technological ability to probably do what needs to be done with 3-4 hour work days. Instead, most of us, particularly in the West, spend endless hours doing work that is essentially bullshit. He sees this system as benefiting the people who control most of the resources and as being effective in keeping civil unrest to a minimum in a system from which those people benefit.

The author points out that the “market” has a relatively limited demand for poet-artists; and a seemingly endless demand for corporate law specialists. He would doubtless include my job in the list of bullshit jobs and, depending on the day, I might agree. Certainly, I can’t claim that what I do is productive; but, when I am doing my job well, it is at least preservative in nature from the perspective of my clients.

I think a lot of the non-productive jobs the author sees are devoted to administering resource allocation. Some times these jobs aren’t bullshit since the efficient allocation of resources minimizes waste and allows the productive jobs to produce more and better things. Other times, these jobs are devoted to addressing disputes about who gets what stuff. That’s often what my job is — when I’m working on defense litigation, reviewing endless boxes of paper for evidence or potential evidence; the heart of it is that someone has gone to court and demanded an order that my client give them money. My client wants to keep its money. And, so, they pay me money with the hopes that I can make it so they won’t have to pay out even more to someone else.

In those cases, I’m not creating value; but maybe I’m preserving value from destruction. I get paid reasonably well for that. Arguably, I produce more value from something like this blog where I get paid nothing. One difference is that, when I’m getting paid, I’m generally preserving value for specific persons with resources to defend. Whereas, when I’m creating value (to the extent what I do here is valuable), the utility is abstract and it is for an amorphous group of people who can get similar value elsewhere for free.

In any event, a lot of the bullshit jobs probably have something to do with what Marx was talking about with his ideas concerning abstraction of labor that I never really understood.

Ball State scholars, Michael Hicks, Srikant Devaraj, Dagney Faulk, Dick Heupel, and Sharon Canaday recently released a paper entitled The Causes of State Differences in Per Capita Income: How Does Indiana Fare? (pdf) Yesterday, Brian Howey offered the opinion that Indiana’s jobs problems are perhaps the result of challenges and limitations at the local government level rather than state economic policy.

The Ball State Report noted that per capita income for Hoosiers ranked 21st in the nation in 1950, 30th in 1980, and 40th as of 2010. There is a verse in the Bible (Mark 4:25) which says “For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath.” Howard Bloom likes to use that verse as a way of describing the algorithm by which groups allocate their resources. The group devotes its resources to those parts of the group that appear to be having success as a way of ostensibly maximizing success. You don’t waste your scarce resources on losing strategies.

Hicks and Howey offer the following (from the Howey column):

Hicks explains: “This is a really a local, not state problem. Almost all our local economic policies target business investment, and masquerade as job creation efforts. We abate taxes, apply TIFs and woo businesses all over the state, but then the employees who receive middle-class wages (say $18 an hour or more) choose the nicest place to live within a 40-mile radius. So, we bring a nice factory to Muncie, and the employees all commute from Noblesville.”
. . .
[The General Assembly has] passed tax caps that have crimped city budgets. The hope was that municipalities would consolidate, but what’s happened has been cuts in parks budgets and a curtailing of school bus service. So when cities compete for that new corporation, and the executives survey a city with shabby parks and kids walking to school in 10 degree weather, they go elsewhere.

Hicks said, “As Americans became richer, schooling and community amenities matter more. This is an iron law of economics, that the share of income we spend on some goods rises as we get richer. Education and amenities (like health care and recreation) are two of these things. So, the Midwest built its small towns long before the quality of a place made much difference in migration or incomes. Today, quality of place matters deeply, and we are, in many places, unprepared to deal with it.”

(emphasis added). The highlighted portions brought to my mind Bloom’s biblical algorithm. The employees with money go to communities that are not deteriorating. The executives choosing new business locations choose communities with parks and schools that are not in disarray. People with resources and choices want to allocate those resources in places that appear to have winning strategies.

This is why Indiana’s relative per capita income matters. The authors of the Ball State study are quick to point out that Indiana’s absolute standard of living has improved. The problem, however, is that we have put ourselves on the wrong side of the economic snowball. Those who have are going to put their resources in places that have. We’re putting ourselves on the “hath not” side of the equation; and, if we’re not careful, even what we have will be taken from us. If our economic policies appeal to low end employers, our people will get low end jobs where the value of our production is taken from us and distributed to the people and places on the “hath” side of the equation. The Ball State study shows that there is a large gap in household incomes for those who migrate out of the state versus those who migrate into the state; with poorer families moving in and wealthier families moving out.

The Ball State study also took a look at county level differences; comparing the per capita income in 2010 to the national average over time. The average LaGrange County per capita income in 2010 was the same as the national per capita income in 1964: lagging behind by nearly half a century. Only Hamilton and Boone Counties were ahead of the curve; with per capita incomes at the estimated national average for 2019 and 2018 respectively. Indiana as a whole is at 1996 levels.

Government power is fairly centralized in Indiana, with the General Assembly meddling significantly in local affairs. At some point, there will likely be a renewed battle for local control; with the areas having better prospects seeking to limit their connection to State mandated policies that yoke them to the areas with poorer prospects.

Aaron Carroll has a follow up post about Singapore’s health care system. Typically, Singapore’s health care system would be too obscure even for me to mention; but, as some may recall, Singapore (see, e.g., here) was a go-to example for opponents of Obamacare when asked to point to a market based health care system. But, it was never really all that market-based in the first place.

That’s how you get conservatives advocating for Singapore’s health care system without any real understanding of it. Singapore’s system has massive subsidies for nursing homes, rehabilitation care, and home-based care. It requires mandatory savings – 36% of wages spread over various accounts. The government also provides a basic level of care that’s heavily, heavily subsidized. And here’s the kicker – it relies on tons of government intervention in the market to keep costs down. They use centrally planned and fixed budgets, they control the acquisition of new technology, they regulate the number of students and physicians, they use purchasing power to buy drugs more cheaply, they have an employer mandate for foreign workers,and they have a national EHR. They’re also not the most open society in the world.

But, now, even that seems to be insufficient in Singapore. Carroll’s new post notes that Singapore is adjusting its system to include even more government involvement.

I understand being skeptical of Obamacare. I even have fears of my own that it won’t work very well. But the system we have is just awful – much, much more expensive for the same or worse results than the rest of the world. And health care is not some unique problem for the U.S. We’re all nations composed of deteriorating human bodies. So the refusal to educate ourselves about systems that work and don’t work in other places is maddening. Historically, we’ve been a nation of pragmatists. Our redesign of our health care system has been hobbled by ideologues. Although, I guess I have to wonder how much is ideology and how much of the ideology is just pretext camouflaging the interests of those getting wealthy off the inefficiencies of the current system.

History has always been among my favorite subjects. The stories are fascinating. The good, the bad, the complexity, and the simplicity of human nature are all on display. This has come at a cost of some cherished narratives, I suppose. Turns out Americans aren’t always the good guys, and like as not, we’re not exceptional.

For a guy like me, one book more isn’t going to make much difference. Another book will be yet another voice in the cacophony. But, when we are talking about the educational system, it’s a different story. A lot of the people consuming these texts are going to get maybe one or two passes at most periods in history. The narratives in those texts are going to be locked in. That’s why you have such political concern over history texts. Tom LoBianco has another installment in Gov. Daniels’ dabbling with the history curriculum. We know that he vehemently disapproved of Howard Zinn’s take on history. Now we learn that he was embracing the history stylings of Bill Bennett.

Emails obtained by The Associated Press through a public records request show Bill Bennett had much more favor among Daniels and his advisers. In January 2010, when Daniels discovered the board of education had changed the state’s textbook rules to allow Bennett’s book, he quickly asked how soon his advisers could get copies of “The Last Best Hope” in classrooms.

“This is excellent to hear … now someone make my day and tell me that his book is becoming the textbook of choice in our state and I’ll buy beers for everyone,” he wrote in a Jan. 27, 2010, email to then-schools chief Tony Bennett, Bennett’s former chief of staff, Todd Huston, and David Shane, a longtime Daniels colleague, Republican donor and school board member.

I suppose, in addition to ideology, there is also more than a small element of directing public funds to favored recipients; but, in the case of history, the cherished narratives are more interesting to me. I sympathize with the desire to teach our kids a cartoon version of history where we are always the good guys and the good guys always win. But that potentially leads to some harsh disillusionment later. And for those who aren’t white guys, I imagine there is some confusion about the scope of “we.”

Somewhat related to this discussion, Dan Carlin’s most recent podcast, entitled The American Peril, looks at the late 19th / early 20th century as a way of examining a dichotomy in the American psyche. On one hand, you have the usual sort of venal impulse toward material goods and power; on the other hand, you have the impulse to honor the mythology surrounding the country’s Founding. This has created problems on a number of occasions; one of which was our experience in the Phillipines.

I don’t know about you, but my history classes mostly skipped directly over America’s involvement in the Philipines. I had never heard use of the term “Philippine-American War.” There was a passing reference to the U.S. destroying the Spanish presence there in conjunction with our invasion of Cuba following the explosion of the Maine. But, then, very little. Turns out, we had to use some very brutal tactics in service of the side of the American psyche that craved material goods and imperialism; tactics that did not comport well with our national mythology at all.

I don’t know, but I suspect that Zinn’s writings have a good bit more on this subject than do Bennett’s. And I further suspect that a kid with knowledge of this stuff who grows up to be an adult is less likely to want to engage in military adventures like the one in Iraq than a kid who only knows about the splendid little war in Cuba and Teddy Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill.

Kyle Stokes at Impact Indiana has a post reporting that Gov. Pence wants to keep issuing the A-F grades that former Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tony Bennett tampered with.

The problem is that these grades lack all credibility. There was always skepticism about the metrics behind those grades. Now that there is a history of rigging the system to make sure favored schools get good grades; that skepticism has proven justified. Before continuing with the charade of “accountability,” the State should announce just what it is they intend to measure, announce the metrics, and collect data for a period of time to determine whether the measurements, in fact, reliably reflect whatever it is they are supposed to reflect. You know, hypotheses, repeatability, peer review; all that good stuff.