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?

Stick with me on this one…

Politically, I’m a believer in what I’d call Bernoullian politics. Bernoulli’s principle, oversimplified, says that if air passes over two sides of an object at different speeds, the pressure exerted on those sides is uneven. It’s part of why planes fly: the curved upper half of the wing disturbs the the circulation of airflow, while less so on the flatter bottom half. That is, pressure at the top and bottom are different. Increase that difference enough (get the plane going fast enough), and a sixty-four-ton 747 can fly.

So, I like to apply that metaphor to politics and economics, with issues, events, and time standing in for wings, pressure, and velocity. Let’s put it like this. When things are steady over time on one side of an issue and convoluted over time on the other, the steady side will always push the issue the direction it wants to go. Likewise, when things seem certain on one side of an economic decision and unsettled on the other, a person’s decision will tend to have a bias toward the certain-seeming side, whether that’s a good thing or not.

On economic issues, here’s real-world example from today’s New York Times: “Rising College Costs Pose Test for Obama on Education Policies”.

Americans believe college degrees are a prerequisite for personal and national success, and over time, that becomes more and more strongly believed, almost as if time is accelerating because the belief is more and more self-reinforced. The issue (access to a college degree) now has pro-college policies on one side (for example, gov’t subsidized loans) that are way more fixed than swirly arguments about whether college is worth the total cost. So, the issue — the wing in our metaphor — moves in the pro-college direction.

Problem is, always moving in a pro-college direction leaves colleges themselves with little incentive to lower costs. If college is a prerequisite for success, then all the things that make college “better” — newer dorms, star faculty, wired classrooms, football teams with national TV exposure, academic scholarships — are believed to be necessarily good things, no matter the cost. Students and their families will pay anything.

It’s essentially a ruinous version of supply and demand. Price is set at the intersection of supply and demand. But when demand is absolute, somehow someone will provide the supply, in this case colleges providing every feature asked for and lenders+government providing the financing. Supply will keep trying to reach that non-negotiable demand, meaning price keeps going up.

The President’s policies — indeed, our financing-education policies going back to the G.I. Bill — are focused on making college more affordable, for more people, with the goal of getting everyone a college degree, because an educated population is good for the country. Here’s where Bernoulli comes in. Colleges don’t set out to raise tuition. But why wouldn’t they raise tuition when there’s so much less pressure on the low-cost side of the airplane wing? If a family used to be able to afford $10,000/year tuition with no government help, and the government says, “Good news, with our new grant program, we’ll give you $10,000″, what motivation does a school have to not raise tuition to $20,000?

(This is the same debate with the mortgage interest deduction. Being able to subtract your mortgage interest from your taxes is supposed to mean it’s easier to afford a house. But it makes it easier to afford a house. All it does is give a clear incentive for sellers to raise the price of their property, because the buyer can afford more.)

And just like health care costs, each effort to make it more affordable lessens the pressure on one side of the issue, giving the steady, stronger pressure (cost) the chance to move the issue.

That’s on the economics side. Bernoullian politics, meanwhile, are why I’ll be voting for President Obama on November 6. Like others, I have little idea what his priorities actually are for a second term — and even less of what Mitt Romney’s are. But when it comes to issues I care about — especially that we’re delusional about intergenerational, George Jeffersonian economic mobility and equality of opportunity…that the American Dream happens in Denmark three times as often as in America, that it happens twice as often in Canada — the current President is more likely to push Congress to support policies that, in turn, lift the plane toward the American Dream than Governor Romney is. The President won’t (and can’t) do it in a too-fast way, but he also won’t allow a stall.

But back on the economics side, I’m glad Paul Ryan has made it easier to discuss entitlements. The quality of the discussion isn’t any good, but the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, and we’re closer to that than we were four years ago, or even four months ago. What concerns me, taking the Bernoulli’s principle-as-flight metaphor to its conclusion, is that at some point, flying faster and faster — in our case, time passing as we do nothing — eventually either puts so much pressure on the wing that it snaps or so disturbs the airflow that the entire aerodynamic system breaks down, the plane’s belly flips to the front, and the whole thing disintegrates. It’s what will happen in higher education without a controlled deceleration that takes upward pressure off costs: at some point, and suddenly, the wings snap as parents of 17-year-olds share the conclusion that a four-year degree isn’t worth the cost, or all of higher ed stalls as a quorum of employers share the conclusion that colleges aren’t delivering them qualified employees who aren’t already saddled with debt, that it will be cheaper to train employees themselves.

I admit it’s a messy metaphor. But I always think of it when I ask myself why I still support the President. I feel there’s just the right balance of pressure there to keep our plane rising, if slowly. A Romney presidency doesn’t seem like it could resist the pressure coming from the far right, even if Romney in his heart is a moderate (but, again, how are we to know?). Bernoulli’s principle tells me Romney would snap our wings.

Today I switched fungibleconvictions.com from Go Daddy to a new registrar and host.

I was willing to give the company a chance to come out against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). It did, slightly. But it’s much too little too late.

I’m not all that interested in patronizing a company that equivocates on such ill-conceived legislation. The option to remain anonymous to governments, the need for the internet’s structural integrity, and the non-negotiability of freedom of speech must be defended — most of all by the intermediaries between content-creators and end-users, intermediaries like Go Daddy who, as much as any government, are in the technical and moral position to protect speech and due process.

Two profiles came out this week about soon-to-be House Speaker John Boehner, one in the New Yorker and another earlier tonight on 60 Minutes.

Generally, I like Boehner. But he and other conservatives—but many powerful liberals as well—apply the American Dream in a way that drives me nuts: they apply it tautologically, that is, in such a way that its logic (and the government policies intended to ensure it) can’t be disproved.

They do this by using their own success as proof that the American Dream is real.

Conservatives do tautology especially well using their own life stories. Take Boehner for example. He tells of mopping the floors of his family’s business as a teenager, of needing seven years to finish college because he had to spread out the cost, of sharing a tiny house with nearly a dozen brothers and sisters. And now he’s set to be Speaker of the House. It’s the American Dream: a sparse upbringing instilling a determined work ethic leading to financial, social, and political success.

In the context of Congress, the American Dream is a tautology. Why? Because everyone in Congress is, by definition, a success. “I’m living the American Dream,” every congressperson says. “I took over my father’s business, I rolled up my sleeves, and I made it thrive.” But when half of Congress are millionaires, how could they not say the American Dream is real? It’s all they’ve known. It’s all they see around them.

I don’t begrudge them their success. But I want to put forth the premise, and insert it into American Dream-logic, that our leaders have a sampling bias: failures don’t make it to Congress. There are thousands of Americans who worked even harder than Boehner, started off with even less, but didn’t have the breaks go their way and are now underwater on their mortgage because they bought at the peak of the market, or are out of work because their industry withered in the face of international competition. There are so many ways the world can fail people. Not achieving the American Dream is as often everyone’s fault, as a body politic, as it is any one individual’s.

There’s no way to disprove the American Dream when you ask a current congressman about it. But ask those people who are struggling with their mortgage, or who’ve been out of work for 99 weeks, or who do have jobs but work twelve hour days, seven days a week just for the sake of health insurance for their sick child—ask them if the American Dream is real, and you might get a more nuanced answer.

Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to Be an American” could well serve as the dividing line for two Americas: one that places patriotism above reason and another that places reason above patriotism. Each has its place, its purpose, and its good and bad.

For all the noise about Tea Partiers, the best-intentioned of them fall squarely in the first camp, for whom the lyrics of “Proud to Be an American” make intuitive sense. They would argue—I would say illogically but sincerely—that freedom from overbearing government is paramount, even if it means dying a young, miserable, painful death from lung cancer because the free market couldn’t offer you the affordable health insurance necessary for an early, actionable diagnosis. The line “Where at least I know I’m free” frustrates that second camp (for example, the city government of Washington, D.C., ) to no end, because it’s a way of saying, “I don’t care that our bad health care and prevalence of guns means we die sooner than everyone in western Europe, because at least my life is more free from government control than theirs.” It frustrates the second camp because it’s illogical: how can you enjoy freedom if you’re dead?

But to the reason-above-patriotism camp, the line “who gave that right to me” is even more vexing. Rights can’t be given by man. Certainly not by “the men who died”. Rights are natural; you’re born with them. They come from God. It’s right there in the Declaration of Independence: “…that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Dying on the beaches of Normandy or on Lexington Green did nothing to “give” rights. Certainly they were defended, but not given.

It’s an important distinction, because it’s what gives the patriotism-above-reason camp a peg on which to hang accusations of being unpatriotic, the classic “If you question the mission our soldiers are engaged in, you must therefore be unpatriotic.” The reason-above-patriotism camp retorts, “But what’s the point of sacrifice if what soldiers are dying for is meaningless or counterproductive?”

The irony is that both camps believe they are both fully patriotic and reasonable. Yet neither are. And sometimes it takes a thoroughly loved and hated song by Lee Greenwood to illustrate it.

I’m currently enjoying some rare downtime, lying in bed with the dog and watching the Wake/UVA game. It’s been a ridiculous month, filled with:

• My Center’s response to the Haiti earthquake, which has resulted, mainly through Chris’s work, in coverage from BoingBoing, the New York Times, and lots of other outlets.
• A Project Management course at Harvard University’s Extension School, a class that ate up 2pm-5pm most days the last three weeks, plus hours of group work each night.
• The demoralizing loss of Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat to Republican Scott Brown, seriously curtailing what’s possible in health care reform
• Unexpected interest from my neurologist in the lightheadedness I sometimes have, requiring me to do a four-day EEG next weekend, which means I’ll be stuck at home looking like this:



• Needing to throw together some presentations—with great help from MIT colleagues—for a group of high school honors students on a tour through Boston
• Packing my office for our move from 14N to the old Media Lab building
• And planning my IAP course, materials for which are now posted at http://fungibleconvictions.com/web-typography.

But I have to say, this crazy month has been pretty fun. It’s the first time I’ve been reminded of my favorite, exhausted days from high school, when having little spare time meant I stayed mentally engaged, and being among colleagues who also had little spare time meant we stayed engaged with each other. We all end up doing things we’re not exactly prepared or qualified to do but find fun in it and end up doing it well. (One more dorky highlight: I got in touch with Robin Kelley, author of the Thelonious Monk book I’ve been praising, and one of the profs in my department was a researcher with him and wants to get him to MIT for a talk.)

All the same, it’s a quiet afternoon, watching basketball, half-reclined as I count down the next hour before leaving for the North End for good food with my wife, dad, and step-mom. Things are good.

Dear Massachusetts friends,

Tuesday is the special election for Ted Kennedy’s open U.S. Senate seat, and with it rides the fate of health care reform: the 60th vote.

I urge you to book an extra 30 minutes Tuesday morning to go to your polling place and vote for Democrat Martha Coakley:

Your voting location:

http://www.wheredoivotema.com/bal/myelectioninfo.php

Tons of my friends have the dreaded “pre-existing condition”. I have one. Someone in your family has one. If Coakley loses and health reform fails, it may be decades before discrimination based on pre-existing conditions can be fixed.

The bill isn’t perfect. But it lowers costs in the long-run, cares for the most vulnerable, and ensures coverage for millions of Americans.

Vote Coakley on Tuesday to pass these needed reforms.

Andrew

PS Forward this note to your friends throughout Massachusetts.

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.

“…and that is that health care is a moral issue.”

I spent a good deal of this weekend suddenly sad, and in trying to explain it to my wife, one of the things I lingered on was a dissatisfaction with how well I do things I know I should do.

The quote above is from Ted Kennedy’s memoir, written as he thinks back on his time spent in a Boston hospital convalescing from a broken back, when he realizes that the average person is an illness or accident away from utter ruin. I cite the quote because it exemplifies Kennedy’s ability to do what he should do. He sees a moral issue to address, and he therefore spends the next forty years addressing it.

Most of us though are like me. If we’re not lazy, then we’re at least in search of comfort to displace discomfort, driven not by a roaring fire but by warm gray coals, ones we stoke every so often, the kind of fuel that gets us through the day and the years but can’t power our souls to do all the things we should do.

It’s always troubled me. Most of us do just enough to get by, but why don’t I do more? Why is my capacity for personal comfort larger than my capacity for moral action? I have little to lose by working a bit harder, reading more books again, getting up early on a Saturday to volunteer, calling old friends more often. Why does that simple motivation fail me and most of us?

It’s a related issue that permeates Kennedy’s memoir, in the words of his father Joseph: you’re either going to live a serious and productive life, or you’re not, and if it’s the latter, know that I’ll love you all the same but I won’t have much time for you. Ted Kennedy had many opportunities to live a comfortable life but always ran up against his father’s—let’s face it—threat that if he’s not going to choose to face the harder things life has to offer, then he’s out of his father’s life.

Is that what it takes before people always do what they should do?

I’m fundamentally in agreement with professed ACLU aims, but my view of it as an organization is a bit more negative, particularly after going to a Mass. ACLU meeting a while back and leaving early with another person with whom I shared the glazed over reaction that wordlessly says “Wow, what nuts!” It didn’t help that one of the attendees was a guy that we ban from MIT events because he habitually asks 20 minute questions during Q&A.

ACLU lawyers—and libertarian lawyers along with them—have a particular panache I love, though, and I’ll support them so long as they use it. Namely, they’re able to identify and eviscerate legal absurdities. One that they laid low today was the U.S. government’s argument that it should be allowed to withhold evidence of prisoner abuse on the grounds, in part, that that evidence’s release would embolden America’s enemies. From the Washington Independent’s story on the ACLU’s argument:

“No court has ever upheld the suppression of descriptions of government misconduct on the ground that those descriptions would inflame the nation’s enemies,” writes the ACLU lawyers in their brief filed today. “To do so would enshrine into the [Freedom of Information Act] the fundamentally antidemocratic principle that the more egregious the government misconduct at issue, the more protected it would be from public disclosure.” A law enacted “to ensure an informed citizenry, vital to the functioning of a democratic society, needed to check against corruption and to hold the governors accountable to the governed,” writes the ACLU, citing the Supreme Court, would thus be “transformed into an instrument of cover-up.”

And with that, any federal judge hearing this and similar future cases should have no doubt that the law’s letter and spirit demands releasing evidence of abuse, no matter how damaging to the government. For if we’re not a nation of laws, what are we even protecting through torture? Life, you might respond. We torture to protect lives. Our government-sanctioned torturers were thinking of protecting their fellow citizens and their families when they did what they certainly didn’t want to do, you might say. Be that as it may, the law tops it all. Why, after all, did we fight the Revolution or the Civil War or the two World Wars—to demand and defend laws. Our countrymen laid down lives because we believed in laws and their equal, just application. Closet totalitarians in this country like to point out that “life” comes before “liberty” in the Declaration of Independence. But the thriving of both presupposes law.

So, really, it’s time to release those transcripts.