Good News for Justina Pelletier, Sorta

Good news on the Justina Pelletier front.

Shaming works.

The public exposure of the appalling treatment Justina and her family have received from Massachusetts bureaucrats has had an effect.

Credit goes to Megyn Kelly of Fox News, the Boston Globe reporters and the Massachusetts legislators who finally intervened in this case. See my earlier post here.

Now, the Massachusetts Department of  Children and Families is getting ready to send Justina to Connecticut. It will allow physicians at Tufts to resume treating her mitochondrial disease.

CBS Boston reports this morning:

The Massachusetts Department of Children and Families confirmed Friday it’s working to send a teenager at the center of a bitter state custody dispute back to her home state of Connecticut.

The agency also announced that Tufts Medical Center will soon begin overseeing the treatment of 15-year-old Justina Pelletier, an apparent victory for her parents.

Pelletier has spent the past year in Massachusetts state custody undergoing psychiatric treatment as her parents and doctors at Children’s Hospital clashed over her diagnosis and treatment.

Pelletier had been a patient at Tufts undergoing treatment for mitochondrial disease — a rare and controversial disorder where the body’s cells can’t produce energy, triggering chronic fatigue and severe digestive problems.

But when the Pelletiers brought Justina into the Children’s Hospital emergency room last February, doctors quickly diagnosed her problems as psychiatric.

When the Pelletiers objected, Children’s brought in DCF and the state took custody of Justina, essentially ruling her parents were committing medical child abuse by pursuing medical rather than psychological treatment.

Even though the DCF is going to allow Justina to resume treatment at Tufts, it will not yet release her to her family’s custody or allow her to go home.

Therein, we see an appalling attempt to save bureaucratic face.

A Feckless Foreign Policy

Most of this Washington Post editorial is not new. What stands out is the source. I do not normally follow the Post editorial page, so I might just be behind the times, but still, the Post’s brutal critique of the Obama foreign policy reads like a wake-up call.

The first sentence lays down the predicates:

FOR FIVE YEARS, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality. It was a world in which “the tide of war is receding” and the United States could, without much risk, radically reduce the size of its armed forces. Other leaders, in this vision, would behave rationally and in the interest of their people and the world.

The paper heaps scorn on our naïve Secretary of State and his musings about how power games, invasions and shifting alliances are things of the past:

That’s a nice thought, and we all know what he means. A country’s standing is no longer measured in throw-weight or battalions. The world is too interconnected to break into blocs. A small country that plugs into cyberspace can deliver more prosperity to its people (think Singapore or Estonia) than a giant with natural resources and standing armies.

It’s time, the Post continues, for the Obama administration to wake up from its somnolent blindness. Reality is calling:

Unfortunately, Russian President Vladimir Putin has not received the memo on 21st-century behavior. Neither has China’s president, Xi Jinping, who is engaging in gunboat diplomacy against Japan and the weaker nations of Southeast Asia. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is waging a very 20th-century war against his own people, sending helicopters to drop exploding barrels full of screws, nails and other shrapnel onto apartment buildings where families cower in basements. These men will not be deterred by the disapproval of their peers, the weight of world opinion or even disinvestment by Silicon Valley companies. They are concerned primarily with maintaining their holds on power.

Of course, members of both parties are more than happy with an American retrenchment, but, as the old saying goes, the buck stops with the president:

Today Mr. Obama has plenty of company in his impulse, within both parties and as reflected by public opinion. But he’s also in part responsible for the national mood: If a president doesn’t make the case for global engagement, no one else effectively can.

And finally:

…  as long as some leaders play by what Mr. Kerry dismisses as 19th-century rules, the United States can’t pretend that the only game is in another arena altogether. Military strength, trustworthiness as an ally, staying power in difficult corners of the world such as Afghanistan — these still matter, much as we might wish they did not. While the United States has been retrenching, the tide of democracy in the world, which once seemed inexorable, has been receding. In the long run, that’s harmful to U.S. national security, too.

As Mr. Putin ponders whether to advance further — into eastern Ukraine, say — he will measure the seriousness of U.S. and allied actions, not their statements. China, pondering its next steps in the East China Sea, will do the same. Sadly, that’s the nature of the century we’re living in.

It’s a harsh indictment of the feckless Obama-Clinton-Kerry foreign policy team. Given the source, it will surely have an impact.

An Unequal Recovery

Mort Zuckerman explains the Obama administration record on income inequality in one sentence:

The wealthiest 1% has captured 95% of the growth of wealth between 2009 and 2013, while the bottom 90% has become poorer in real terms.

To call the Obama recovery jobless is the least we can do. One ought to muster a grin to see that that the Obama administration is now railing about an income inequality that its policies have helped produce.

As for the recover itself, Zuckerman offers the sobering statistics:

The unemployment rate is about 13% if you take into account people "marginally attached" to the workforce. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that at the end of 2013 there were about 27.3 million part-time jobs, making up about 18% of the workforce. Youth unemployment is a stunning 14%. It is particularly distressing that the labor participation rate has hit a 35-year low of 63.2%. This rate has dropped most noticeably for men and women in their prime earning years between the ages of 25 and 54 and is up only slightly for those 55 and over.

What is stifling economic growth? Zuckerman says that it’s the government, aka the Obama administration:

Government has diminished animal spirits by displaying a hostile attitude toward business.

That attitude is evident in everything from excessive corporate taxes to the incompetence and dishonesty of the ObamaCare rollout. Government is perpetually establishing economic policies and rules that business perceives as overregulation, dampening the willingness to invest—as witnessed by the slowest rate of capital investment in decades on corporate plant equipment and machinery.

Zuckerman does not see manufacturing jobs returning to the country. He is more concerned about the high tech jobs that are being outsourced because the American educational system seems incapable of turning out enough qualified applicants.

Apparently, all of that self-esteem and politically correct thinking does not prepare you to get a good job in today’s economy. Who knew?

Zuckerman explains his point of view:

Silicon Valley companies and others across the country report that many tech jobs go unfilled because they can't find knowledgeable workers. Firms are offshoring their science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) jobs given the lack of qualified technical workers at home. There is a shortage of skilled labor generally: Nearly one in four small businesses, according to a February 2014 National Federation of Independent Business survey, have at least one position open because they have few or no qualified applicants.

It is good that Zuckerman proposes some policy solutions to these problems. Surely, the government ought to try to help our ailing and inadequate educational system.

Unfortunately, when put into practice, we find—see Bill de Blasio’s New York-- that more spending on education means shutting down successful charter schools in order to curry political favor with the teachers’ unions.

One would be thrilled to see Zuckerman’s policy solutions put to work. One would be even more thrilled if they helped solve the problem.

I suspect that the problem lies in the hearts and minds of the educational establishment and that they will require nothing less than radical change.

Home Pre-Schooling

Politically, Head Start is a winning issue. Last year, New York’s new mayor ran on a platform of taxing the rich to provide better pre-kindergarten programs for the city’s poorer children.

The government has long since established that Head Start does next-to-nothing for children in the long run. It doesn’t matter. Which politician wants to be attacked for being insensitive to early childhood education?

Now, the Economist explains what really helps a child’s mental development. The answer: more conversation with his or her parents. One should add, with caregivers, too.

The Economist reports:

THE more parents talk to their children, the faster those children’s vocabularies grow and the better their intelligence develops. That might seem blindingly obvious, but it took until 1995 for science to show just how early in life the difference begins to matter. In that year Betty Hart and Todd Risley of the University of Kansas published the results of a decade-long study in which they had looked at how, and how much, 42 families in Kansas City conversed at home. Dr Hart and Dr Risley found a close correlation between the number of words a child’s parents had spoken to him by the time he was three and his academic success at the age of nine. At three, children born into professional families had heard 30m more words than those from a poorer background.

The difference between professional families and poorer families can be quantified: 30,000,000 more words by the time a child is three. 

People who note that women tend to talk more than men might now understand female garrulousness as a maternal instinct.

What does this tell us about pre-school programs?

This observation … suggests that sending children to “pre-school” (nurseries or kindergartens) at the age of four—a favoured step among policymakers—comes too late to compensate for educational shortcomings at home.

Keep it in mind when someone tries to sell you on the remedial powers of Head Start.

Of course, pre-school programs do have a value:

Pre-school programmes are known to develop children’s numeracy, social skills and (as the term “pre-school” suggests) readiness for school. But they do not deal with the gap in much earlier development that Dr Fernald, Dr Noble, Dr Suskind and others have identified. And it is this gap, more than a year’s pre-schooling at the age of four, which seems to determine a child’s chances for the rest of his life.

The difference between the groups is evident before a child is two years old:

The problem seems to be cumulative. By the time children are two, there is a six-month disparity in the language-processing skills and vocabulary of the two groups. It is easy to see how this might happen. Toddlers learn new words from their context, so the faster a child understands the words he already knows, the easier it is for him to attend to those he does not.

But, the formula only works when parents or caregiver speak directly to a child:

It is also now clear from Dr Fernald’s work that words spoken directly to a child, rather than those simply heard in the home, are what builds vocabulary. Plonking children in front of the television does not have the same effect. Neither does letting them sit at the feet of academic parents while the grown-ups converse about Plato.

But, you might ask yourself, what happens when a baby’s parents do not have the time to sit around and chat with him? What happens when they place him in a day care facility where he will have far less conversation than he would in a one-on-one interaction with a parent? What happens when they hire a nanny who comes from a poorer segment of the population and who tends to speak far fewer words less often than would the child’s professional parents?

Crisis in the Crimea

Today’s background briefing on the crisis in the Ukraine comes to us from Spengler, aka David Goldman.

When the Arab Spring was washing over North Africa Spengler offered down-to-earth analysis that turned out to be far more accurate than most. He has a refreshing way of cutting through the bull.

Spengler opens with a prediction of what will most likely happen in the Ukraine:

There isn’t going to be a war over Ukraine. There isn’t even going to be a crisis over Ukraine. We will perform our ritual war-dance and excoriate the Evil Emperor, and the result would be the same if we had sung “100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” on a road trip to Kalamazoo. Worry about something really scary, like Iran.

For those who have not been following the crisis closely, Spengler also offers a quick sketch of that troubled nation:

Ukraine isn’t a country: it’s a Frankenstein monster composed of pieces of dead empires, stitched together by Stalin. It has never had a government in the Western sense of the term after the collapse of the Soviet Union gave it independence, just the equivalent of the family offices for one predatory oligarch after another–including the “Gas Princess,” Yulia Tymoshenko. It has a per capital income of $3,300 per year, about the same as Egypt and Syria, and less than a tenth of the European average. The whole market capitalization of its stock exchange is worth less than the Disney Company. It’s a basket case that claims to need $35 billion to survive the next two years. Money talks and bullshit walks. Who wants to ask the American taxpayer for $35 billion for Ukraine, one of the most corrupt economies on earth? How about $5 billion? Secretary of State Kerry is talking about $1 billion in loan guarantees, and the Europeans are talking a similar amount. That’s not diplomacy. It’s a clown show.

Not very encouraging.

Spengler is not very impressed by the leadership shown by any of the political leaders:

Putin bungled things badly: he thought a bailout would solve the problem. That blew up in his face. The West bungled things badly: it has a $35 billion bill on its desk and no intention of paying it. John McCain went to Maidan in December and said the American people were with the Ukrainian demonstrators. He meant in spirit, not in their capacity as taxpayers. The Ukrainian opposition didn’t bungle so much as take a collective bungee jump without a cord. Just what do they propose to do now?

As for the events unfolding in the Crimea, Spengler writes:

As for the Crimea: Did anyone seriously think that Vladimir Putin would let the main port of Russia’s Black Sea fleet fall into unfriendly hands? Russia will take the Crimea, and the strategic consequences will be nil. We couldn’t have a strategic confrontation if we wanted it. How would we get troops or ships into the Black Sea area in the first place in order to have a confrontation? Perhaps the Belgiums will send in their army instead. I suppose we need to denounce the Russians for violating Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

"Entitled, Egomaniacal Narcissists"

The self-esteem movement must count as a pillar of the American therapy culture.

Allow one of its important theorists, Carl Rogers to define the term:

Every human being, with no exception, for the mere fact to be it, is worthy of unconditional respect of everybody else; he deserves to esteem himself and to be esteemed.

This sounds like a definitive assertion of human self-worth. Perhaps it is symptomatic of the movement itself, but this sentence is also a poorly written syntactical jumble.

Be that as it may, Rogers is not just saying that you need to feel good about yourself, no matter what. He is also dictating how other people must treat you. If you believe that you are great and special, regardless of what you have or have not done, everyone else is enjoined to feed your illusions.

By all appearances, the theory leaves no place for competition. It certainly rejects status hierarchies. If everyone, by the mere fact of being, is just as good as everyone else, why bother to compete for status or success.

If you respect the thief or the beggar as much as you respect the physician or the musician, what does that say about your capacity to form judgments?

If you respect the man who is rude to you as much as you respect the man who is polite to you, how good are you going to feel about yourself?

If you respect the scoundrel as much as you respect the person who is responsible, reliable, loyal and trustworthy, how will you make your way through life?

Has the self-esteem movement abolished your right to choose your friends by the “content of their character?”

Self-esteemists will reply that Nathaniel Branden and Abraham Maslow, two major gurus of the movement, believe that your goal in life should be total self-actualization.

But, must we then offer more esteem to those who are perfectly self-actualized? If we do, does that contradict the non-judgmental predicate in Rogers’ thought?

With all the emphasis on being, what about doing? You are an ethical individual because of what you do, not because you have actualized your being. You function in society because you follow rules and get along with other people, not because you have actualized your full potential. 

When all is said and done, self-esteemism is making a virtue of anomie.

Strangely enough, that most competitive of organizations, the United States Army has been using, as a slogan: “Be all that you can be.” Apparently, the Army knows its constituency. Surely, it’s strange to imagine that the purpose of military service is self-actualization.

Imagine a military officer saying to his troops: Win or lose, no matter what, we want you to be all that you can be.

Recently, Will Storr offered a valuable overview of the self-esteem movement in an essay on its primary detractor, Prof. Roy Baumeister.

Storr recalled that when self-esteem was all the rage, its proponents claimed that a mere boost of self-esteem could solve all of the nation’s problems. It sounds a bit like hubris, don’t you think?

In Storr’s words:

The idea of self-esteem as a social panacea was too good to question. It spread through the country and much of the Western world. Heads big and small were systematically stuffed full of their own wondrousness. As the 1980s became the 1990s, schools and kindergartens began boosting self-esteem in classes, encouraging children to write letters to themselves, telling themselves how special they are. Five-year-olds in a Texas nursery were made to wear T-shirts that said ‘I’m loveable and capable’ and to recite the mantra daily. High school awards were dropped by the thousands, and grades were inflated to protect the esteem of low achievers. (One teacher argued, “I don’t think it’s grade inflation. It’s grade encouragement.”)

Baumeister decided to evaluate the claims of the self-esteem movement. As I have reported in other posts, he created a study that would show whether students with high self-esteem outperformed those with low self-esteem. It seems like a fair enough question.

Storr reported on the shocking results:

So, the logic went, if you boosted self-esteem you’d also boost grades. But the authors had made one of the most elementary mistakes in science. “When they tracked people over time,” says Baumeister, “the grades came first, and then the self-esteem. High self-esteem was a result of good grades, not a cause.”

Baumeister realized that efforts to boost self-esteem hadn’t improved school performance. Nor did self-esteem help in the successful performance of various tasks. It didn’t make people more likeable in the long term, or increase the quality or duration of their relationships. It didn’t prevent children smoking, taking drugs, or engaging in “early sex.” His report made the claims of the self-esteem movement look like those of a street-corner wizard.

Some self-esteem gurus did pay lip service to competition. When their theories were put into practice, a different truth emerged. Policies promoted by the movement made children less competitive, thus, less likely to fulfill their human potential.

Since the movement tends to believe in the intrinsic value of offering up empty praise, it can be also judged by what happens to the human brain when it is fed quantities of empty praise.

Baumeister and his colleagues discovered that overloading a child with empty praise produces an state that resembles the effect produced by certain drugs, like cocaine.

Storr explained:

In A 2000 paper in the journal Advances in Experimental Psychology, Baumeister and colleagues proposed a new way of thinking about the problem. In their “sociometer” theory, self-esteem is a system for monitoring how well we’re doing in our quest for social acceptance. Assaults on our self-esteem trigger a form of pain signal that alerts us to the fact that damage is occurring to the opinions that others hold of us. “Self-esteem,” they wrote, “is one’s subjective appraisal of how one is faring with regard to being a valuable, viable and sought-after member of the groups and relationships to which one belongs and aspires to belong.”

The paper also contained a warning. It compared the pleasure of hollow self-esteem boosting to cocaine abuse.

“Drugs take advantage of natural pleasure mechanisms in the human body that exist to register the accomplishment of desirable goals,” they wrote. “A drug such as cocaine may create a euphoric feeling without one’s having to actually experience events that normally bring pleasure, fooling the nervous system into responding as if circumstances were good. In the same way, cognitively inflating one’s self-image is a way of fooling the natural sociometer mechanism into thinking one is a valued relational partner.”

If this is true, children are being primed to believe that drugs are the solution to all problems. And they are trained to become addicted, if not to drugs, then to something else.

In Storr’s words:

Narcissism, then, is a kind of addiction to self-esteem. So what would happen if you took an entire generation of young people and systematically and repeatedly masturbated their self-esteem mechanisms? Could it be true that the children raised in the school of Rogers, Branden, and Vasconcellos were growing up to be entitled, egomaniacal narcissists?

The End of Democracy?

Two decades ago Francis Fukuyama pronounced the end of history. By his semi-Hegelian thinking, history will end with the triumph of liberal democracy and free market capitalism.

One should laud Fukuyama for proclaiming the victory of free enterprise, but, when it comes to liberal democracy, his prophecy seems less prescient.

Perhaps, he took it for granted that liberal democracy must walk hand in hand with capitalism, but history, strangely enough, has had another idea.

As the Economist argues this week in a lead essay, democracy now seems less and less triumphant. Many countries that flirted with it have veered toward autocracy. The great beacon of democracy, the United States of America has been looking more and more dysfunctional by the day.

Of course, Benjamin Franklin declared that the Constitutional Convention had created a “republic.” And a republic is not quite the same as a democracy. It is fair to emphasize that in the early days of the American Republic, very few people had the right to vote. Since only property-owning males could vote, in the first elections between 3% and 4% of the population participated.

To call the results democratic stretches the meaning of the term.

In principle, a republican or representative form of government is designed to resist the will of the people, the special interests of factions and the vagaries of public mood.

In a republican government representatives are supposed to exercise their own good judgment, regardless of the latest polls. Such a system balances power between the different branches of government, and even within the branches themselves.

It used to allow Senate filibusters to rein in the power of the majority. Now it has a Senate leader who suspends the filibuster to get his way.

It used to have presidents who worked with Congress to pass legislation. Now it has a president who does not know how to compromise or negotiate and who feels that he must, in the name of justice, impose his will on those who disagree.

The will to demonize the opposition is contrary to the spirit of republican governance.

It used to try to balance special interests, but now it is owned by special interests, like public sector labor unions. The Economist does not mention the political power and influence of unions, many of which are more concerned with their own special interest than in the interest of those they serve.

While pursing noble ideals, too many of our politicians have forgotten that a democratic republic only functions when people follow rules, negotiate compromise and respect the outcome.

Nations that want the world to be more democratic must make democracy work at home.

Moreover, the Economist suggests, America has done democracy no favors by trying to force its culture on other nations. The Bush administration effort to export democracy has been a black eye for democracy. Elections in Egypt produced an aspiring autocrat and have led to a military takeover.

It may well be the case, though no one seems to want to say so, that liberal democracy is consonant with Judeo-Christian values. It might not find such a welcoming culture in other nations.

And the Economist adds that Western democracies have damaged their reputations by failing to deal effectively with the financial crisis of 2008.

It explains:

It [the financial crisis] revealed fundamental weaknesses in the West’s political systems, undermining the self-confidence that had been one of their great assets. Governments had steadily extended entitlements over decades, allowing dangerous levels of debt to develop, and politicians came to believe that they had abolished boom-bust cycles and tamed risk. 

Given the explosion of unaffordable entitlement spending and the failure to display fiscal discipline, the financial crisis made Western democracies look as though they were for sale.

Most significantly, a culture of entitlement has overwhelmed what remained of the Protestant ethic. If you can vote yourself a living, why work for it. If you can vote yourself health care and a higher wage, why work harder to earn them.

Perhaps the most important reason why the reputation of democracy has been declining around the world is, as the Economist points out: China.

The Economist reports:

Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party has broken the democratic world’s monopoly on economic progress. Larry Summers, of Harvard University, observes that when America was growing fastest, it doubled living standards roughly every 30 years. China has been doubling living standards roughly every decade for the past 30 years. The Chinese elite argue that their model—tight control by the Communist Party, coupled with a relentless effort to recruit talented people into its upper ranks—is more efficient than democracy and less susceptible to gridlock. The political leadership changes every decade or so, and there is a constant supply of fresh talent as party cadres are promoted based on their ability to hit targets.

In some ways the Chinese invented meritocracy, so this should not surprise us. Has the American system done as well in finding fresh talent?

It is worth underscoring that while America is hard at work instilling empty self-esteem in its children China is educating its children to the most rigorous standards.

Worse yet, where Chinese children are taught to take pride in their nation and its history, American children are taught to criticize and complain about theirs.

Of course, China does not have the first amendment, but it also does not have first amendment absolutists who seem to want to turn the Bill of rights into a suicide pact.

As Justice Robert Jackson wrote:

The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.

American democracy is a pragmatic solution to the problem of governance. Forcing it to conform to ideals seems to make it less efficient.

But, the Economist suggests that the Chinese government is less autocratic than it appears. It does respond to some aspects of public opinion. It does not, however, countenance the first amendment freedoms that Americans pride themselves on:

China’s critics rightly condemn the government for controlling public opinion in all sorts of ways, from imprisoning dissidents to censoring internet discussions. Yet the regime’s obsession with control paradoxically means it pays close attention to public opinion. At the same time China’s leaders have been able to tackle some of the big problems of state-building that can take decades to deal with in a democracy. In just two years China has extended pension coverage to an extra 240m rural dwellers, for example—far more than the total number of people covered by America’s public-pension system.

Of course, the whole world is watching the great competition between Chinese-style free enterprise and American-style liberal democracy. Here are the views from India:

 Indian business moguls constantly complain that India’s chaotic democracy produces rotten infrastructure while China’s authoritarian system produces highways, gleaming airports and high-speed trains.

It is fair to mention that China is also producing monstrous amounts of pollution. If China does not clean up the air and water, its grand experiment will start looking far less appealing. Then again, what is the air and water quality in India?

Nations around the world seem to be trying to emulate Chinese autocracy rather than American democracy. But, it is not clear that they are willing to emulate Chinese free market capitalism. Many countries that are shunning democracy prefer economic stagnation to economic vitality. Time will tell whether they embrace free enterprise or continue to fall behind the world.

Perhaps culture counts. In the absence of Judeo-Christian values China can ground itself in Confucian values. These seem fully congenial to free enterprise, but also to social harmony. Certain other cultures, not so much.