Fungible Convictions

About our epidemic of gun violence, I have a somewhat “actuarial” question: are life insurance companies a good pressure point for reducing gun violence? Here’s my logic.

Facts:

1. Cancer survivors have to wait five years after getting a clean bill of health before they can get a reasonably-priced life insurance policy. (My own five-year anniversary is Jan 31, at which point my quoted rate drops to normal instead of ~$800/month.)
2. In 2009, there were 9,146 homicides by firearm — in the top 50 causes of death in the U.S. that year, that puts homicides by firearm above 3 cancers and at least 5 other diseases that would disqualify a person for life insurance.
3. While I can’t find an exact number, there is a significant correlation between a person owning a firearm and that same person dying in a homicide by firearm. Anecdotally, I’ve heard it doubles your risk.

I spoke with an insurance company this morning, and they confirm they do not take firearm ownership into account when they determine the price of a life insurance policy. So questions:

• Why don’t they?
• If there’s a good actuarial reason for not taking gun ownership into account, could it be that those less-likely causes of death reinforce each other, that those with cervical cancer are significantly more likely to get oral cancer? In other words, do deaths by less-likely causes of death add up to something higher than the homicide of a gun owner?
• Conversely, are there causes of death correlated to gun ownership other than homicide (and suicide)? The likelihood one will develop alcoholism? That one will die by other kinds of violence?
• If so, are those absolute numbers too low to matter to insurers? 0.8% of Americans died in 2009. .003% of Americans died in homicides by firearms, so 0.37% of all American deaths in 2009 were by homicide by firearm.
• What percentage of those .37% (that original 9,146 homicides by firearm) were eligible for life insurance?
• Of that percentage, how many owned guns?
• Is that number too small for insurance companies to care?

Probably. Conclusion: Convincing life insurers to charge more of gun owners, with gun ownership as the sole factor in price, would have little effect on homicides by guns. Another factor might be that the U.S. has so many gun owners, the “gun homicide premium” is already socialized throughout the life insurance-holding population.

That leaves health insurance premiums as the remaining commercial, as opposed to legislative and cultural, deterrent to gun ownership. That’s especially true in that health insurance is triggered throughout one’s life, rather than just at death: health insurers would have a strong motivation to charge more of gun owners should gun ownership be strongly correlated with non-fatal injuries or illnesses.

Or are there other commercial deterrents?

I’ve been torn about Wikileaks, the group facilitating the distribution of leaked classified documents on Iraq, Afghanistan, and most recently the U.S. diplomatic corps. The transparency those document dumps afford has been radical insofar as it so radically exposes the fallibility of the people waging war—there are few surprises for anyone who pays attention to war, military history, diplomacy, etc. but the shock comes instead from people’s ability to make hubristic mistakes over and over and over again.

The leaks have been analogized to the Pentagon Papers. They’re not, except in the sense that both the Papers and these recent leaks transform governments and armies from machines into people…flawed, short-sighted, weak, greedy, impressionable, naive people, human beings like everyone else except in the amount of power entrusted to them.

But now we hear that the next Wikileaks document dump will be corporate documents from banks, pharmaceutical firms, and energy companies. Whereas the government documents split the public into two emotional camps–defenders of the imperative to have transparency and defenders of the imperative to have secrets–individual corporations have few constituent defenders during a scandal besides their own employees. Who will publicly defend a bank whose internal emails show its board of directors bragged of fleecing mortagees? Who will defend a pharma firm for fudging research on an ineffective but billion-dollar pill? Who will defend an energy company that didn’t report polluting a playground?

The upshot will be that Wikileaks will soon be viewed, by and large, as a legitimate outlet. Far more than it is now. Argue whether or not it was moral to distribute classified government documents, but Wikileaks is doing something p.r.-savvy by shifting at this stage to corporations.

Really remarkable interview between Chris Matthews and Bishop Thomas Tobin, who banned R.I. Congressman Patrick Kennedy from receiving communion because of Kennedy’s support of abortion rights.

Matthews, who is Catholic and indicates in the interview that he is pro-life, hammers the bishop on a single point: if you’re going to withhold communion from a legislator because of his undertanding of the law, what specific law would you have him make instead?

And even more to the point, Matthews asks, if abortion is to be illegal, what would the punishment be for performing one? Prison? For how long? Who would be punished? The woman? The doctor? Medical staff?

The Catholic church, as other ecclesiastical bodies do, has a persuasive moral argument against abortion. But as Chris Matthews says, once a church heaves legal arguments atop its moral ones—as the Catholic church has done in denying Kennedy communion for supporting something that is legal—it must start advocating for the specific punishment of criminal acts. In other words, to paraphrase Matthews, if you think abortion should be illegal, you need to start arguing that women and their doctors should be going to prison. Not many people go that far.

I want to be clear. I’m not making my own opinions known here, except to the extent that I think Matthews is right: if you think something should be illegal, you should plan for the consequences of its enforcement. And I don’t see the Catholic church, at least in the person of Bishop Tobin, doing that.

My three local Hyatt hotels laid off every housekeeper on August 31st. Citing tough economics, Hyatt said it was financially necessary to lay off the workers and replace them with temporary employees who will be paid half as much and will be offered no benefits.

I’m a capitalist. And I understand the necessity of lowering operating costs, even when it means layoffs.

But Hyatt in this case deserves a boycott because they lied to their workers. Hyatt told its workers it would be bringing in temporary staff to help cover shifts holidays and vacations. Hyatt had its $15/hr workers train these new $8/hr workers—and when the training was done, Hyatt fired the old housekeeping staff.

So I ask my family, most of whom are business people or travel for work, to insist that their companies not patronize Hyatt. Because it’s one thing to cut costs; it’s something else—it’s sadism—to lie to their employees, fire them with no warning, and help create hundreds of uninsured, both the temps and the newly unemployed:

Williams, a single mother of a 13-year-old with asthma, stocked up on medication before her insurance runs out at the end of the month. Last week, the former Hyatt Regency Boston housekeeper also had to cancel an airline ticket she’d bought the day before she was laid off to go see her father in Barbados. She hasn’t seen him since 2005, and isn’t sure when she’ll see him again.

I saw two coworkers cry at the news today that Senator Ted Kennedy had died.

Both grew up in New England, and both weren’t exactly sure why they reacted so. Kennedy had just always been there, they said.

I’m many years too young to remember Chappaquiddick, though my introduction to Ted Kennedy was ultimately through Joyce Carol Oates’ novella Black Water, a reimagining of that event. After living in Boston for seven years, though, I’ve found his presence is everywhere. Everywhere. This death is a loss in so many senses here—of suddenly not finding something that was always there, of there being a hole, of not knowing your way, and having no words. The whole place and its people are at a loss.

My sincere hope is that this focus on Kennedy, the long-time Senator and champion of the underprivileged—despite or because of his own privilege—enhances a clear focus on his last crusade, namely, health care. There would be no greater tribute to a conflicted man than to take the most conflicted issue of our time, one that he took on as his legacy, and sort it out.

Godspeed.

It’s tough to describe the awesomeness of the conference we just ran at MIT. It was exhausting, yes. But I designed/printed the conference program, helped set the schedule, managed 200 attendees, kept an eye on an intern, and got to work with some incredible colleagues.

Based on the syntax of that last sentence, you can tell I’m exhausted. But I got to meet some folks that I’ve admired for a long time, such as Dan Gillmor, and got to promote the 2009 Knight News Challenge winners.

I’m conflicted. This conference was the last big set of tasks from now until the fall, so I’m glad I can rest a bit. But it was why I wanted to work with MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media—a chance to rock out with media innovators and meet a few of my long-time heroes.

I’m glad there’s a full year until the next conference, but I hope I get to convince all of these folks to come hang out at MIT before then.

Via Dan Gillmor, I learn that not only was Nancy Giles’ report on Twitter just excruciatingly awful journalism, it also violated someone else’s copyright by featuring a large chunk of the video “Twitter in Plain English”: while the duration of the video’s use presumably fell within fair use, proper attribution was entirely lacking. In fact, the voiceover from the CBS report implicitly attributes “Twitter in Plain English” to Twitter itself, when in fact it was made by someone else.

So again, not only did Giles not bother to do research on how Twitter actually works and how it’s actually used, she and the rest of the production staff didn’t bother to do an acceptable job on the research they did do.

I have to admit I’m biased in favor of Google. I have friends who work in both the Cambridge and Mountain View offices. I’ve tried, and provided feedback on, every beta Google has produced. I worked for a group trying to get funding from its philanthropic arm, Google.org. And every time I hear CEO Eric Schmidt speak at a conference, he strikes me as one of the most intelligent, well-versed, sober, geektastic corporate leaders I can think of. (If you have an hour, this interview with the New Yorker’s Ken Auletta is definitely worth watching:

.)

So perhaps I’m biased when I don’t see a problem with Google archiving so-called orphan works, publications that have been abandoned by both author and publisher, are out of print, and are effectively if not technically out of copyright. I don’t see a problem with making available works that no one can easily see/acquire, that no one is promoting, and that no one is making money from—but that may, and often do, still have great value.

I’m also biased, however, in favor of one of the great archival minds of our age, Robert Darnton:

Critics say that without the orphan books, no competitor will ever be able to compile the comprehensive online library Google aims to create, giving the company more control than ever over the realm of digital information. And without competition, they say, Google will be able to charge universities and others high prices for access to its database.

The settlement, “takes the vast bulk of books that are in research libraries and makes them into a single database that is the property of Google,” said Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard University library system. “Google will be a monopoly.”

The question for Darnton and others, though, is: is this a bad thing? Google does not somehow become the exclusive copyright holder to orphan works. Other groups and companies are welcome to do the same thing and to also make money from it. And this particular monopoly is, contradictorily, limited and temporary. There will be well-funded competitors. There’s no indication that Google wishes to charge for access—it’s fair to assume Google will monetize the collection through targeted advertising as it does with search results and within Gmail. The original orphan works don’t disappear.

So I don’t begrudge Google its ambition. While experience shows that powerful groups try to control archives as a way of shaping history, experience also shows that seemingly dominant businesses, such as General Motors and Microsoft, are inevitably outflanked. And most important, as Schmidt explains in the Auletta interview, Google thrives only in so far as it is trusted. It’s a business that deals in user data, and that demands trust. Trust broken once is trust lost, so it’s in Google interest to welcome competing ideas, to accept criticism, and to be, above all, open.

Just a quick thought to make explicit from a New York Times op-ed about the pitfalls of large bonuses in banking.

Bonuses do indeed exist to keep executives loyal and hard-working, as the article says. Bonuses can and should get larger when companies have to compete for talented executives.

But bonuses also have the effect of making stars of those executives. Bonuses are often used as the measure of talent. In the abstract, they cause executives to lose humility—if I’m making a $50 million bonus, I must be seriously awesome. And in practical terms, bonuses signal to others that particular executives are worth inviting to be on boards, to speak at conferences, to represent business interests to foreign governments.

That is, by making stars of some executives, bonuses can take the focus off the actual goal: motivating people to do quality work for the company.

The Times article hints at all that. But it’s worth saying it explicitly: when it comes to loyalty and success, bonuses follow the law of diminishing returns.

The ‘Wonkette Part’ Of David Denby’s Book Really Just A Bunch Of Major, If Not Libelous, Errors

No one can get in the head of New Yorker writer David Denby, but to read this piece on Wonkette—one that eviscerates Denby’s criticism of blogs and exposes serious flaws in his own writing/research ability—is to understand perfectly the relationship between old-school and new-school writers.