TAANSTAFL, or GETTING RICH BY PICKING MULTIPLE POCKETS

Mr. Dissociated and I are on Medicare. In addition, he has an HMO, and I have a state retiree supplemental policy. You'd think that would leave us pretty well-fixed on the medical front. Gee, all that insurance for nothing, and all that health care for nothing!
Uninsured friends of our are a bit envious, and I can't blame them.

But on the other hand....

Medicare is not "free." Part A is sort of free. It's built into the federal budget, and we pay for it with our taxes. Part B has a monthly premium, which goes up to $94.00 per month this year. For us, as for most people, it gets deducted from our Social Security benefits up front, so we never really see it and don't miss it. But it is nonetheless not free.

My husband's HMO isn't free either, though it comes with no separate premium. Instead, the HMO collects his medicare premium from medicare as their premium.

And my state retiree insurance, though it also has no separate premium, was also paid for, up front, in twenty-plus years of radically underpaid teaching as an adjunct in the state university and community college system.

Which is how a lot of people's "employer-paid" health insurance gets paid for--in lower wages for the employee. These days, "employer-paid" health insurance and related benefits comprise from 25% to 40% of the total wage-benefit package. Since there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, this means that the employee's actual paycheck is roughly 25 to 40% smaller than it would be without these benefits. (Well, not necessarily. Big Business is perfectly capable of pocketing some of the difference if it gets the chance.)

But, once the insurance policy or (more often) policies are purchased, that does not end the consumer's expenses. On the contrary, it's just the beginning.

In the early days of managed care and health insurance planning, policy makers worried that, if people didn't have to pay anything out of pocket for their health care, they might make frivolous decisions and waste precious health care resources. There are always, undoubtedly, people who figure that, if something appears to be "free", there is no reason not to throw it around with wild abandon. But nobody has ever established how many such wastrels there are, or how much they will actually waste. We just figure, perhaps as an outgrowth of our puritan heritage, that if we don't attach some kind of cost or unpleasantry to an apparently free good, it will be wasted and ultimately devoured completely. ("Give," as Ayn Rand so authoritatively pronounced, "is a four-letter word.") This was the origin of the co-pay. People who had already paid, directly or in the form of diminished wages, a monthly premium for managed care, were now required to pay an additional small but not insignificant sum out of pocket on every occasion on which they actually used what they had already paid for. In the beginning, it was often a dollar for doctor visits, or for filling a prescription. Not as a revenue-raising device, but just to make people conscious that their health care wasn't "free." These days, Mr. Dissociated's co-pays (for example) have risen to ten dollars for primary care visits, and thirty dollars for specialist visits. Co-pays for prescription medications can range from four dollars (Wal-Mart's current loss leader) to well above one hundred, based on various arcane formulas. These co-pays are now a significant revenue source for the health care provider.

Similarly, many health insurance policies carry a "deductible." That has nothing to do with income tax policy (more about that later.) It just means that the insurance you have already paid for doesn't cut in until you have spent a specified sum out of your own pocket for health care during a stated period, usually a year. The thinking behind the deductible is that people should expect to cover a certain amount of their own health care costs before dipping into the insurance benefits (which of course, they have already paid for. Forgive me for repeating this, but it's easy to forget.) The deductible was never calculated to be a nominal sum, unlike co-pays. It was intended to be what people should reasonably expect to pay out of pocket (on top of monthly premiums.)

An increasing number of people have started buying secondary insurance policies to cover the increasing out-of-pocket costs posed by deductibles and co-pays. This is especially true of people on Medicare, who buy "Medigap" policies for that purpose. Which is yet another set of premiums paid for up front by the consumer. Conceivably at some point a tertiary insurance market could open up to cover what the primary and secondary sources don't. And so on.

On top of all that, there are some other sources of payment for health care. The federal government pays 42% of all health care costs in the US, through Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Champus/Tricare (for active duty military personnel and their families) and various programs to provide capital funding for hospitals, nursing homes, and medical schools. State and local governments pay for some hospital and clinic programs. In addition, various churches and other charitable organizations support hospitals and clinics, usually in conjunction with one or more governmental organizations. Ultimately, all of that money comes from the taxpayer, the individual donor, and the individual member of a church or other religious body in his or her capacity as donor. Supposedly, the ability of the various government and charitable agencies to consolidate all of these individual payments and use them to run the system results in economies of scale, so that the individual gets far more for his or her dollars than would have been possible if the money had all come directly out of millions of individual pockets to health care providers.

How does the health care industry deal with this multiplicity of revenue sources, all ultimately coming out of my pocket and yours?

Well, imagine that you are running a service plan for consumers. Say, you provide school books and other basic reading materials for children. You start out just getting paid a monthly book club fee directly by the children's parents.

Since you are in business to make money, you raise the book club fee every so often, until people start dropping out of the club. You calculate the break-even point, where you are getting maximum revenue despite the dropouts, and that's your efficient market price. It may rise with inflation, or sink with lowered costs, but only within limits.

But the kids don't seem to value the books, and often tear them up or lose them. So you institute a 25-cent co-pay, so the kids will take the program more seriously. Maybe you even refund it when the book comes back in good shape.

As time goes on, you discover that most kids have their own allowances, and are actually willling to invest some of their own money in the program. So you stop refunding the co-pays. Then you raise them, bit by bit, until the kids start dropping out of the program, or borrow fewer books. You calculate that break-even point, and you have another efficient market price.

So now you're getting the monthly book club fee from the parents, and the co-pay from the kids, both at the maximum market price.

But you find out that there are families that can't afford the efficient market price, who would gladly become your customers if they could afford it. So you write a grant proposal for the US Department of Education, explaining how many more families you could serve if you only had some extra money. You luck out on your first try, and get your grant. Of course, that grant is paid for by the US taxpayer, including the families you are already serving, and the new ones you can now afford to serve. For those new families, you can offer a lower monthly book club fee, or maybe no fee at all at the start, and a lower, or refundable, co-pay for the children, or maybe none at all at the start. Over the years, however, you will try raising the "reduced"monthly fee, and the "reduced" co-pay a little at a time, until you run into more dropouts, telling you you have once again found the efficient market price for this particular segment of the market.

But next year, your costs have gone up a bit. So you re-apply for the grant, asking for a bit more money, both for the expenses and families already funded, and for some new aspect of the program or a new set of families or a new type of media. What you end up getting is more than you got last year but less than you asked for this year. Which tells you that you have tapped out the US Department of Education source--found another efficient market price--and need to look elsewhere for more funds.

So you write another grant application, this time to a private foundation, asking for funding to provide kids with educational computer software. Again you luck out, and get what you asked for. Next year, you re-apply, and get exactly what you got this year. Which tells you you need another source of revenue. Note that the private foundation gets a large portion of its revenue by virtue of being tax-exempt (see, I told you I'd get back to IRS.) The foundation pays no taxes, and the donors to it pay no taxes on their contributions to it. Which means that the rest of us taxpayers, including the families who benefit from the program, have to pay more taxes.

Anybody who has ever worked in the non-profit sector can tell you that this elegant choreography can and often does go on for years. The more sources of revenue you can find, and dip further into until you find the market limit for each in turn, the more money you make for providing more or less the same service to more or less the same people.

So that's how the health care system functions, and malfunctions. There are two possible ways out of it. One is to put all of the responsibility for finding, and paying for, health care directly on the shoulders of the consumer, and then subsidize him/her to the extent necessary to purchase an appropriate level of care. The consumer decides when a particular provider or course of treatment is "too expensive," given his or her total resources. A health care provider may not agree with the consumer's choice of when to stop. Indeed, the consumer may choose to avoid apparently expensive preventive care, and thereby incur even heavier treatment expenses later for a once-avoidable problem. The health care industry has brought these difficulties on itself by not giving the consumer a realistic cost-benefit analysis when asked for it.

But the real problem, from an economic point of view, is that the subsidy received by the consumer is likely to result in a price increase of at least the same size from the health care industry, leaving the consumer to pay almost exactly what s/he had been paying before the subsidy. The most stellar example is the fact that the average American Medicare recipient is now paying slightly more for medical care out of pocket, both in absolute dollars adjusted for inflation, and in the proportion of his/her total income, as the average senior paid out of pocket for medical care before Medicare was instituted. Essentially, we have poured large amounts of water into the sand, and it is as dry as ever. Even if we reduce the number of income streams for medical care to two (Medicare and patient out-of-pocket), each will still be maximized, and the patient will be no better off than before.

The other alternative is what its supporters call single payer. The taxpayer pays into the system, and government pays out what it defines as a reasonable sum for the various goods and services provided to the patient. There is only one stream of income. When the health care provider raises its prices beyond what the single payer deems reasonable, the single payer will take its business elsewhere. The provider will find its market-efficient price for that single payer, and get paid that much and no more. This minimizes the money spent on health care per unit of service, and thereby reduces the enormous burden health care currently imposes on the American economy. But....

Now we run into the problem common to all third-party payer systems: when the ultimate receiver of the goods and services in question does not decide what is to be paid for those goods and services, he has no incentive to minimize what is paid for them (much less to refuse to pay for really bad service), and no effective way to transmit his valuation of the goods and services received. At the same time, the provider of the goods and services has no incentive to please the receiver or keep its prices within his means. Third-party payment without price controls inevitably leads to hyper-inflation. It has, clearly, happened in health care, and it has happened in higher education. If the third party refuses to pay more than its means allow and forbids the provider to dun the recipient, the providers may drag their feet, or flee the system (or in some cases the profession or the country) rather than accept what they see as sub-market conditions. (They may define "sub-market" as either "less than the cost to me of providing the goods and services plus a profit sufficient to maintain an appropriate professional lifestyle", or "less than I could get from the same patients on the black market", that is, willing patients buying what willing providers will sell at a market-efficient price, off the books.) We see such scenarios in many countries with single-payer systems or price controls.

Steering between these two extreme problems, a health care economy can approach perfection, but can never achieve it. The best possible system would have to include:

1) the fewest possible income streams

2) maximum possible input from patients and providers, and

3)the fewest possible middle-people.

At the moment, of course, we seem to be heading in precisely the opposite direction on all three counts. Any bright ideas?

BRITNEY, OBAMA, AND PORN-SPAMMING IN IRAQ

I have been reliably informed that the above title should attract lots of hits. In fact, the only one of the above-listed items I'm going to be mentioning is Obama, because I have just for the fourth time seen Barack Obama compared to the late Adlai Stevenson. Most of the people making this comparison probably never even heard of Stevenson until last month. They're probably still pretty vague about when he lived or what he did. Which is partly, of course, because Stevenson is mainly famous for what he didn't do--namely, get elected President, despite running twice against Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. The comparison with Obama, apparently, arose because Obama has made the mistake of appearing to be a literate nice guy. The last presidential candidate anybody can even vaguely remember who fit that description was, evidently, Stevenson. He was also, with one exception, the last governor of Illinois who didn't leave office one step ahead of the sheriff.

So Obama needs to get himself some street cred. He needs to talk about America's self-interest, and advocate some kind of punitive or violent solution for some current problem, like capital punishment for at least a select group of illegal aliens. Or maybe he needs to invent a new problem, or a new group to hate. Martians, say. Real aliens--three heads, six purple tentacles, and no visa. You heard it here first.

Back to the Bell Curve

James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, has made the news recently by saying, and then trying to unsay, that the natives of Africa and their descendants are almost certainly less intelligent than Europeans and their descendants. I'm perfectly happy to leave that part of the argument to the experts in genetics, who seem to be doing a fine job on their own. But in the course of his unfortunate pronouncement, Watson also referred to The Bell Curve as a fine book. I don't know as much as I should about genetics, but I know a lot about The Bell Curve, which I taught in a couple of college courses and reviewed for a small newspaper. So following is that review, somewhat fine-tuned and updated:

The Bell Curve: an Idea Whose Time Has Come--and Gone

Premises: 1) There exists such a thing as “g” (or “general intelligence”), which is heritable in considerable part

2) g can be accurately measured by several tests, including some of the ones to which children and adults in this country are most commonly exposed

3) To a considerable degree, g is immutable

4) Which is to say that Head Start and similar programs designed to increase g are a waste of money

5) g correlates, not only with academic and occupational success, but with numerous character traits essential to the maintenance of a civil society

6) People with low cognitive ability are out-breeding people with high cognitive ability in the US

7) Both the “cognitive elite” and the “cognitive underclass” are isolating themselves from the rest of society

Conclusion: What society should do in response to these phenomena is to put the underclass on a relatively comfortable reservation, give them useful non-taxing work to do, and subject them to the discipline of a simplified legal system.

I think I’ve got all of that right. But I’m not altogether sure, because my cognitive ability may have been seriously eroded by reading the book. It can’t be good for the reasoning faculties to spend hours absorbing a book that repeatedly says things like “The evidence shows intelligence is most likely 40 - 60% heritable,” and then draws political conclusions based on a presumed 100% heritability. Again and again, the authors lay out the scientific data, explain it, and then ignore it. Again and again, they tell us that statistical data about the behavior and characteristics of populations tells us nothing about individuals--and then they draw political conclusions based entirely on the presumption of individual incompetence and depravity. They caution us repeatedly that the available data are partial and unclear--and then draw political conclusions that would be only barely acceptable based on 100% certainty. And they do all this in a writing style which (speaking of cognitive ability) would earn them (and their editors and proofreaders, if any) no better than a C+ from a competent English composition teacher. For instance, on p. 145, the authors state “...the first decades of the [twentieth] century saw American high school education mushroom in size without having to dip much deeper into the intellectual pool....”, and, on p. 157 “...the long-term employment trend of [young men’s] employment has been downhill....”

Arguably, this is really two books--a scientific treatise which (some scientists tell us) has serious faults in its collection and treatment of data, and a political treatise which purports to be based on the science, but in fact bears only the most tenuous relationship to it.

Aside from its flimsy scientific basis, the political treatise has serious logical problems of its own, mainly resulting from the authors’ unwillingness to follow their own argument to its ultimate conclusions. For instance: they admit that, whatever g is, East Asians have more of it than white Americans. Granting the premise that g correlates with various socially necessary character traits, would a Japanese reader not be justified in attributing various Western character traits of which the Japanese have always disapproved--our individualism, sloppiness, imprecision, poor manners, and tendency to violence--to our deficiency in g, and proposing to put us on a reservation where we can stay out of the way of the people most qualified to do the world’s brainwork, the East Asians? Obviously, despite their repeated references to East Asian cognitive superiority, the authors don’t really believe in it, or they would have raised such questions. On the contrary, the whole book is suffused with a “we happy few” tone of self-congratulation, extending from authors to readers, and presuming that both, being most likely white American, are and deserve to be, the “cognitive elite.” The East Asians are merely a statistical blip located in an interesting but minimally consequential place.

Secondly, if g is fundamentally genetic, why do the authors not confront the problem of cognitive sexual differentiation within ethnic groups? That is to say, the genetic endowment of the average woman of any given ethnic group is in most part identical to that of the average man in the same group. Black men are no blacker than black women. It would follow from that that the spread of measured g should be identical in men and women of the same ethnic group. In fact, it is not. The range is the same, but women cluster much more strongly in the center of that range. Genetics could not possibly account for that. The only genetic differences between men and women lie in the material on the sex chromosomes. We don’t, of course, know exactly what genes are to be found on those chromosomes, nor can we fully explain sexual differentiation in areas other than g. But if intelligence were mostly genetic, it would have to be sex-linked to account for the gender differences in g within ethnic groups. And those differences would then be much greater than in fact they are. If intelligence were sex-linked (assuming as usual that the male is the norm) women would barely be able to drool and breathe at the same time. Obviously this is not the case. The only hard data suggesting a major gender difference in intelligence is the well-established fact that women, generally speaking, marry men, whereas men, generally speaking, marry women. This can easily be accounted for by environmental factors.

But seriously, folks--looking at the book from a purely textual/editorial viewpoint, the fact that it is the acknowledged work of two authors is significant, particularly since one of the authors is now deceased. It is tempting to hypothesize that Herrnstein (may he rest in peace) did all the science and Murray did all the politics, and that the latter never seriously read the former’s work. It would certainly explain the non-sequiturs with which the book is littered.

But what concerns me most about the book is not the exiguous link between the scientific and political material, but the even scantier connection between the premises of the political argument and the concluding proposal supposedly drawn from them. If I seriously believed that the increasing isolation of the elite and the underclass from each other and the rest of society were a problem, I would not propose to remedy it by putting the underclass on a reservation. And Murray’s proposal that members of the underclass should be given some “valued place” in such a reservation means nothing at all without some concrete link to the real job market, which Murray never draws. This general shoddiness in the conclusory section suggests strongly that these are not Murray’s real conclusions at all, but only the ones he feels pressured to write to avoid being completely discredited by the sinister forces of political correctness. If Murray had the courage of his convictions, he would be advocating forced sterilization and genocide, which are in fact the only social policies that follow logically from his premises. Murray may intend his overt proposals to be taken seriously long enough to be tried and proved useless (the way General Motors first tried installing cumbersome and unworkable seatbelts after being mandated to by law), or he may have meant them as an in-group joke shared with the other members of the cognitive elite. But anyone as smart as Murray thinks he and his readers are should have no trouble figuring it out.

Finally, Murray is actually missing a much more factually substantial bet, if he is really serious about wanting to find a variable that correlates with occupational and academic success, high socio-economic status, and most of the pro-social character traits he talks about. There actually is one, and we can measure it with absolute validity, with a lot less controversy and at negligible cost--namely physical height. Which is heritable up to a point, but can be strongly influenced by well-known environmental factors. Of course, using it for the purposes for which Murray proposes to use intelligence testing would eliminate a lucrative service industry, whose lobbyists may have influenced Murray to leave them alone.

Intelligence, Merit, and Rank

But, assuming it is possible to get past the literary and editorial drawbacks of the book, what happens when we look more closely at the thinking behind it? Murray and Herrnstein talk not only about “g” but about a closely related phenomenon, merit. They, and most of us, have taken for granted, without seriously examining it, the notion that there is some real quality called “merit”, which we can and should usably define, accurately measure, and appropriately reward. Only by doing so, we believe, can we encourage the achievements necessary to the survival of our society.

This principle goes back at least as far as Plato’s Republic. Plato was willing to grant that merit might not be directly inherited and might even turn up among the children of the less meritorious. Nonetheless, once found out, the meritocrats should be encouraged to reproduce, preferably in conjunction with other meritocrats. Which suggests that Plato had already figured out most of the little we really know today about merit: that the children, and the parents, of meritorious people are more likely to possess similar merit, than those whose parents and children lack it. We still don’t know why. Which means we still don’t know how to increase the proportion of meritorious people in the population, should we choose to do so.

Let’s begin with definition--is merit equivalent to intelligence? Neither term is especially precise, but merit generally includes attributes of character as well as ability. On the other hand, many authorities, including the authors of the Bell Curve, presume that intelligence usually correlates with positive character traits such as sexual morality and law-abidingness. They also presume that “intelligence”, whatever it is, is something our society needs more of. If they defined intelligence only in terms of intellectual competence, the ability to perform certain cognitive tasks, then they might pay more attention to making better use of the intelligent people we know we already have. But they generally presume that society would be better off if everyone were “intelligent”--which suggests again that they are really concerned with the characterological dimensions of “intelligence.” So, for the moment, let’s stick with “merit”, and presume that it includes both cognitive and characterological dimensions, which are visibly related to each other in some as-yet-unclear way.

To the extent that we have elevated the testing of human abilities to a science, we are able to link certain test behavior in certain populations with certain other behavior patterns, including academic success and, in some cases, occupational competence. In larger populations, the same kinds of test performance may correlate with better socio-economic status and more conventional social behavior. As mentioned earlier, so does adult physical height, especially in males. (By the way, test performance in females is less closely linked to almost all other outcomes than it is in males.) If what we are looking for is a predictor of socio-economic success and lawful behavior, could we not save a lot of money and time (and eliminate a major service industry) by simply measuring and rewarding height, and doing everything we can to increase the height of the next generation? Since height correlates with good childhood nutrition and especially with high prenatal and childhood protein intake, we actually know how to achieve that end. Which gives us the opportunity to think about whether we want to. As Gilbert and Sullivan’s Duke of Barataria pointed out, when everybody is somebody, nobody is anybody. A society of people equally endowed with what we now define as merit would have no way to decide who takes out the garbage and who directs the fate of major corporations. In all likelihood, it would waste no time coming up with some other criterion--amount of melanin in the skin, for instance.

Face it, what Murray and Herrnstein actually want is not a society in which everyone is more or less equally intelligent, but one in which there are slightly fewer unintelligent people and slightly more intelligent people than we now have, and in which that ratio remains constant over the generations. They are aghast at what they seem to consider a recent development--that the underclass is out-breeding the intelligentsia. So was Caesar Augustus. So were the eugenicists and their predecessors beginning in the 17th century. All of them are dealing with a phenomenon only secondarily related to intelligence: people who have enough access to resources to have some control over their own lives are likely to exercise that control, inter alia, in the area of family life, and specifically how many children they will rear. If they perceive children, or more than a few children, as a liability for any reason, they will therefore have fewer of them. While the people with less access to resources, and less control over their own lives, will have all the children they can, and raise all of those that survive. The vagaries of history and geography may make poor people and peasants more fertile (this also correlates with diet, to some extent) and infant mortality lower in some places than in others, while making the birth and rearing of upper-class children more or less expensive. An additional factor in some cultures has been the amount of personal involvement in child-rearing required of the upper-class mother. In most pre-20th-century cultures, upper-class women could and usually did have their children reared by lower-class women, which considerably decreased the disincentives of large families for them. But once lower-class women found ready employment in factory and service work, they were less likely to be willing to spend their lives raising other women’s children. Upper-class women are now required to invest a lot more time and energy rearing their own children than their grandmothers ever did. Which makes them far less inclined to do so more than once or twice. Apparently, Murray and Herrnstein, without ever talking about it explicitly, have already accepted that fact (unlike the earlier eugenicists, who wasted a good deal of energy trying to persuade upper-class women to have more children.) Murray and Herrnstein are concentrating on the other side of the equation exclusively: there will never be any more of Us, so we must do something to reduce the number of Them.

On the other hand, how many fewer of Them do We really want? I suspect strongly that what Murray and Herrnstein really want isn’t a world full of Einsteins, but one in which it is possible to sign and send out one’s secretary’s letter without having to proofread it first, or in which one can hop in a cab and give the driver the address of one’s destination without having to instruct him on how to get there. And that, it seems to me, is a function not of the general level of intelligence in a society, but of where the market directs that intelligence. Just about all the really competent legal secretaries I have ever known were born before 1935. Younger women with the same interests and aptitudes went to law school instead--not because they were “too smart” to do secretarial work, but because they were smart enough to refuse to work for a secretary’s salary, and lucky enough to live in an era when they had other choices. Similarly, the omniscient and omnicompetent cabbie who could find any address in New York and deliver babies, was also either a full-time Yellow Cab employee with benefits, or an entrepreneur with a medallion of his own. Today, most cabbies are lessees who have to work the first 8 hours of their shift just to cover lease fees and insurance, and then make their own living in the next 5 hours or so. Anybody with the intelligence, the knowledge of English, and the citizenship or immigrant status to do anything else is doing it.

In short, before we complain about the lack of intelligent people in our society, we should pay closer attention to what the intelligent people we do have are doing. In far greater proportions than in other industrialized countries, they are practicing law; if they are doing scientific research or engineering, they are very likely to be doing it for the military; they may even be high school dropouts if they are African-American or Hispanic (yes, Virginia, smart people drop out too. They also commit crimes, engender children out of wedlock, and in general engage in antisocial behavior.) If they are female and their parents never went to college, they may be cashiers or waitresses. In general, if their parents never went to college, smart people may be virtually indistinguishable from the people they grew up with, except perhaps that they have an unusual grasp of sports statistics, or the Civil War, or model boat-building or some other quirky autodidactic fascination. Murray and Herrnstein presume that current social realities make it possible for more of the highly intelligent to achieve the rank they “deserve”--but accepting at face value their caveat that data about populations tells us nothing about individuals, we have to presume that there is still a lot of cream on the bottom, where it is either totally wasted or, worse still, put to antisocial uses. And if we really want a greater role for intelligence in our society, shaking up the bottle is still a faster and less expensive way to do it than either the solutions The Bell Curve overtly proposes, or the ones the authors probably really had in mind.

Nomads, Migrants, and People on the Move

The Jewish annual round of scripture led us, last Saturday, to the part of Genesis where the Holy One tells Abraham to "get yourself out...from the land of your birth and from your father's house." This comes out of the blue to Abraham, and his swift and unquestioning compliance is one of the things that makes him a biblical hero. And, yes, at least until the end of Deuteronomy, the bible is a history of nomadism and migration. And of course, anyone steeped in the history of Europe from the classical age through the Turkish conquest of Constantinople knows that it is all about the migration of one tribe after another out of someplace in Asia into Europe.

Migration is different from nomadism, though we tend to see them as identical. Nomadism is usually cyclical. Nomads usually go over the same track, often at the same times of year, and always with the same people, usually in the same order of march. There is nothing "rootless" about that kind of nomadism. The roots are just distributed over a wider area. Migration, on the other hand, means leaving a place forever, usually because it has suddenly become inhospitable, often because some other tribe has migrated into it, leading ultimately to a domino series of migrations, always straight out in one direction, rather than in the circular path of nomads. But, like nomadism, most migrations also involve a group of people who stay together on the march, rather than individuals.

I think what we are experiencing now is different from both nomadism and migration in their historical sense, and that the change was brought about by the birth of the nation-state with its non-porous borders. Nation-states deal with individual immigrants, with varying degrees of competence and organization; they never deal with mass migrations. And within any given nation-state, mass migrations happen one person or family at a time (we find out they were "mass" only in retrospect, as with the Okies, and the Great Migration of African-Americans out of the South.) The Roma (and the Tinkers and the Travelers) are the only exceptions to this pattern, and they have become pariahs as a result.

According to the Bureau of the Census, 40% of us do not live in the states where we were born. The median duration of residence (how long a person has lived at his/her current residence) was 4.7 years as of 1996 (the most recent data I could find in a hurry.) Older people, married people, people without children, people with a high school education or less, people with very little money, and people with lots of money tend to stay put longer than the rest of us. And people with lots of education tend to move around more than the rest of us. Hispanics moved more often than the rest of us, and 14% of us moved last year.

The stats don't tell us much about why people move. Common sense tells us that a move can result from good things, like making more money and therefore being able to get a bigger house in a better neighborhood, and from bad things, like losing a job and being evicted or even becoming homeless. It can result in being farther away from one's extended family, or in moving back in with them. It can cause stress, or alleviate it. It can result in accumulating more "stuff," or in losing a large proportion of it (an aunt of mine used to say that three moves were the equivalent of one fire in terms of loss of household goods.) It can create a "home base" for an extended family or constellation of friends, or destroy one.

We may be unduly nostalgic about "going home again." We Americans are, after all, a nation of runaways. We are the descendants of people who decided the Old Country was no longer a viable home for them. "Lighting out for the territories" is practically programmed into our genes. When the going gets tough, the tough get going--and they keep going until they are safely out of town. Recent DNA studies of human genetics only underline the fact that almost everybody belongs to a family that comes from someplace else, just as the earlier history of migrations only underlines the fact that almost every indigenous people gets to be indigenous only by displacing somebody else.

We don't usually think about these issues much until they hit us on either the personal or the political level. Until, that is, somebody's elderly parent 2000 miles away becomes unable to live alone any more. Or until a nation formed by a bloody and forced migration out of Europe suddenly becomes a target for indignation and violence from the "locals," and its denizens are urged to "go back where you came from."

A part of us yearns to do just that, to recover the places and people of our brightest memories, or maybe of the memories of our parents or grandparents. But another corollary to the harsh reality of life on the move is that if we do get a chance to go back, we are likely to find that those people and places have vanished, and only the vaguest outlines of the geography remain. The hospital I was born in closed down long since. The place I went to kindergarten has been paved over and turned into a shopping mall. The school building in which I attended first through seventh grade burned down, though a new school was erected on the same spot. My high school was torn down for condominiums. My college has been amalgamated into a larger university. The street on which I lived during my last year of college--not merely the building, the street--has disappeared. So far, all five of my graduate schools are still pretty much intact, but it is obviously only a matter of time before they too slide off into nothingness or radical transformation. After all, I spent most of my childhood in southern Florida, and there is a good chance that most of that state will be under water by the time I myself slide off into nothingness or radical transformation.

And I'm one of the holdouts, the exceptions. My husband and I have been married to each other for 43 years, and have lived in the same place for 38 of them--almost half the time our building has been in existence. While we stayed put, most of our contemporaries were moving into "starter homes" and then having kids and moving on to larger homes in better school districts, and maybe getting divorced and moving apart, or following jobs around the country a couple of times, and are just about now starting to think about "downsizing" or retiring to someplace in the Sunbelt.

The Buddhists may have the best handle on all this: Everything changes. Everything vanishes. Maybe nothing was really there in the first place. You may as well accept impermanence, because you yourself are impermanent too. Not only is there nothing to hold onto, you have no solid hand to hold onto it with.

Or maybe the physicists have it right. We are, all of us, made of the first matter that was ever created. Everything changes, but nothing vanishes. Everything moves around, but nothing moves out.

CREATIVE RUMOR-MONGERING 101

Things we'd like to get more people to believe:

The last three digits of Dick Cheney's Social Security Number are 666
It is possible to make a recreational drug out of broccoli, carrot peels, and dog manure
Watching Reality TV brings on premature Alzheimer's
Leonard Nimoy is the messiah
Wearing fur makes women look fat
It makes men look even fatter
AT&T and Wal-Mart are actually wholly-owned subsidiaries of Al Quaeda
Reading scientific reports causes cancer
The GPS satellites are programmed to navigate your car to a takeoff port for the Klingon slave camps
Wearing an aluminum foil hat makes your hair fall out
When people close their eyes and raise their arms at evangelical church services, an usher goes around stealing their rings and watches
Voting Republican causes erectile dysfunction and divorce
Driving an SUV causes obesity
Sexist men are lousy lovers
Under-tipping causes gastric reflux

Give Me Your Tired...

of arguing over immigration. Like me. I guess it's better than arguing about poor Terry Schiavo, may she rest in peace. Or late-term abortions, or gay marriage. Immigration is actually a substantive issue with implications for the lives of ordinary Americans. Given that we are a nation of immigrants, we probably need to talk about it every so often.

But it would be useful not to schedule that recurring debate in a presidential election bi-year (yes, let's admit it, the election campaign season now lasts two years.) Then we could actually talk about reality, rather than set up a field of straw men and take turns knocking them down.

Conservatives claim to worry about terrorists sneaking in from Tijuana and Vancouver, while liberals think anybody who wants to set any kind of limits on immigration is an anti-Latino racist.

Full disclosure: I'm a Latina, sort of. Both my parents were born in Cuba. Spanish was the language they told their secrets in. I'm more or less bilingual and bicultural. One of the great trials of my life is my current inability to find canned cascos de guayaba in any grocery store, even the ones in Latino neighborhoods. (I mention that here in hope that some reader can help me out with a well-placed comment.)

Does that give me any kind of license to talk about immigration? Dunno. Most of my ruminations on the issue arise out of (a) recurring arguments with Mr. Dissociated, an Anglo with four immigrant grandparents, and (b) a long-standing family feud with INS (now ICE), which screwed around with my mother's citizenship and has thereby become my least favorite federal bureaucracy, ahead of even Selective Service. I used to practice a bit of immigration law--the simple stuff, green card and citizenship applications, re-entry permits and so on. Now none of it is simple, the stakes are very high, and I refer all inquiries about it from my clients to experts who practice nothing else and are very very good and very very expensive.

And, as usual, I like to look at the history of the issue before coming down to current events. The history of immigration law is pretty short. There wasn't much of any immigration law before 1900 or so. People who found their current residence economically or politically uncomfortable just migrated. Wherever they migrated to, the locals might welcome them, or passively accept them, or ignore them, or riot against them, or massacre them. The quality of their reception, and the severity of the situation they had fled from in the first place, would determine whether the migrants would stay, go home, or move on to someplace else. But law had nothing to do with it.

That changed as the United States suddenly realized that its population was becoming ethnically different from the way it had been in the era of its founding. We looked around at ourselves and discovered "we" were no longer the "us" we had been in 1776, or even 1865. That led to the establishment of Ellis Island and other screening ports, where immigrants were checked out for criminal records, moral character, and physical and mental health. There were racial restrictions. You had to be "white," whatever that meant. Not African or Chinese, at any rate. It was a binary system--you either passed inspection and got to stay, or failed and had to leave. Whichever happened, happened fast, at most within weeks, usually within minutes.

When Mr. Dissociated, and many other who insist they aren't anti-Hispanic or even anti-immigrant, they're only anti-lawbreaking, talk about how their grandparents came here "legally," that's what they mean. Those grandparents were "white," more or less healthy, and unencumbered with criminal records. Bully for them.

It was World War I that changed all that, all over the world. Two generations later, INS was interrogating my mother about how many of her "formative years" she had spent in the States. This was still something of an improvement on what happened to my paternal grandmother, born and brought up in Marietta, Georgia, a generation earlier, who lost her US citizenship automatically for marrying a Brit. In between, anarchist Emma Goldman's husband was deprived of his naturalization after his death, so that she could lose her citizenship and be deported to Russia.

The legal system with which current would-be immigrants are expected to comply is cumbersome, complex, and arbitrarily and often abusively administered. It is underfunded and understaffed. Its personnel are badly undertrained in "people skills." Things that should take weeks take years. To add insult to injury, the process has now been made outrageously expensive by piling four- or five-figure processing fees on top of the costs of the high-powered legal representation that is now almost essential for most immigrants, and the usually-required trip back to the Old Country.

And, worse still, immigration is the one area of our national legal system in which the influence of high-ranking people is openly available and routinely applied for the benefit of those who know the right people. That is, if all of your attempts to immigrate legally into the US have failed, but you know the right people, you can get naturalized by a special bill passed in Congress by your influential buddies, all open and above board, without so much as a "wink-wink nudge-nudge."

But for the ordinary working immigrant trying to make a decent life in the US, compliance with the law is always difficult, usually expensive, and often impossible.

Nonetheless, many conservative opponents of illegal immigration insist that illegal immigrants, specifically because they are violating the law, belong in the same circle of Hell as Al Capone. Which is fairly remarkable, since most Americans, regardless of their political leanings, aren't all that crazy about legality, except where they can use it as a lock on the moral high ground against people they don't like anyway.

I found that out most recently when a dear friend of mine was killed by a truck that crashed into his van at an illegally high rate of speed, after running a red light, and with gravely defective brakes. Once it had been established that the trucker was not under the influence of alcohol or drugs, even the good sympathetic people we knew all said, "Speeding isn't a crime. Running a red light isn't a crime. Everybody does that. It was just an accident." So far, the State's Attorney of DuPage County, Illinois, seems to agree with them.

Is it fair to conclude that most of the opponents of illegal immigration are really opposed to immigration in general regardless of legality, or even to the presence of ethnic Hispanics on our soil, regardless of their legality? Dunno. It's hard to tell, sometimes. When the same people declaim against illegal immigration and allowing anybody to speak Spanish in public, that does make one wonder. When they deplore illegal immigration, or immigration in general, because immigrants will take the bad jobs that "Americans won't do" and thereby drive down wages and working conditions for native-born and legal-immigrant workers, and because they will take good jobs that Americans deserve, and because they will take no jobs, and sponge off the American taxpayer instead, it's hard not to suspect some kind of prejudice at work. The poor immigrant can't win.

And, on the other hand, the orthodox liberal position seems to be that anyone who comes to the US to improve his economic prospects has the right to do so, regardless of legality. Regardless of the effect on wages and working conditions? Dunno. The mostly-Hispanic United Farm Workers union used to oppose illegal immigration. Now, understandably, they are more worried about the general prejudice against illegal immigration/ immigration/Hispanic visibility. The newer labor unions (SEIU, UNITE HERE, and the American Federation of Teachers, for instance) seem to be heading in the same direction. The older, bread-and-butter unions have always opposed illegal immigration and been somewhat dubious even about legal immigration. But their influence is waning.

So much for the bad arguments on the subject. Are there any good ones? If, as seems obvious to almost everybody, the current system is broken and fixing it will cost a lot of time and money, should it just be shelved in the meantime? Or should the whole idea of immigration regulation be thrown back into the dustbin of recent history? After all, the nations of the world got along without it pretty well for several thousand years.

Broaching this argument, even tentatively, has gotten me some very strange bedfellows. Julian Simon, the conservative economist, for instance, who once wrote me a very flattering letter about an earlier article I wrote on the subject of immigration. He and his "let the market do everything" pals oppose regulating immigration because it prevents willing workers and willing employers from finding each other, and keeps wages "artificially" high for American workers.

Or at least they used to. Now, "small government" conservatives like Simon seem to be parting ways with "big gun" conservatives. Republican orthodoxy has trouble deciding whether it's more important to keep wages low, give American workers somebody to hate, or keep potential terrorists out. They haven't thought this through

At the same time, as mentioned earlier, Democratic orthodoxy isn't sure whether the rights of Hispanics not to be hassled are more important than maintaining the standard of living of American workers. They haven't thought this through either.

One of my favorite speculative fiction novels has a character who comes from a planet where "you have not thought this through" is a deadly insult.

We should be so lucky.

Odd Lots # omigod I can't remember

Jerry Ford, Gary Hart, and Vladimir Putin--what do they have in common that one wouldn't expect?

MAINTENANCE

Every ten years or so, some major public construction falls down or apart, and we spend a few weeks worrying about our decaying infrastructure. This time, it was the bridge in Minneapolis. One of the questions nobody seems to be asking is why so few people were killed--it would be nice to know that, so as to prevent loss of life in the next disaster. But the decaying infrastructure we have always with us.

I recently finished Cullen Murphy's book Are We Rome? in which he points to physical decay and lack of maintenance as among the reasons for the decline and fall of Rome. I'm not at all sure I agree with that. The Romans were big on maintenance. Mostly it was done by private wealth, for private glory. The Romans posted plaques to people who maintained things like bridges, aqueducts, and roads. And as a result, Roman bridges, aqueducts, and roads lasted a long time. Some of them lasted a lot longer than ours. Some of them are still useable today.

But we have very little respect for maintenance and the people who do it. Maintenance is what janitors do. And housewives. And ditch-diggers. We for sure don't post bronze plaques to them. We post bronze plaques to the people who build things, or have them built, in the first place.

It would be interesting to create a map of buildings and other human constructions with indications of when they were built--kind of like the rings on a tree. It would obviously be different in different places. Many of Chicago's public improvements, like sewers, water works, electric generating plants, libraries, and public schools, were built at the end of the 19th century and early in the 20th. A lot of the public and private buildings in Chicago were built in the 1920s (including the one Mr. Dissociated and I live in.)

There was another burst of residential building in the 1950s, and a spate of public buildings (universities and public office buildings, mostly) in the 1960s. The latter (mostly made of cast concrete with flat roofs, which I think is always a bad idea in cold wet northern climates) started falling apart within 15 years. I have taught in two of the schools in question and watched the process of decay close up, while regularly walking around the buckets catching the leaks whenever it rained. One of those schools rebuilt its entire front section, where the worst leakage was; the other moved a couple of blocks west and built an entire new campus (out of red brick, by the way) which just opened last month.

Here in Chicago, our sewer and water systems are dangerously leaky but still functioning. Considering they're more than a century old, that's pretty good, but still scary. Apparently New York City's major systems are about the same age and in even worse condition. Nonetheless, when pundits bewail the conditions of our "older" cities, I have trouble taking them seriously. Our oldest city is still a whole lot younger than Rome, Athens, Jerusalem, or Benares. All of those cities have had their declines, and their rebirths. At the moment, most of them have functioning sewer and water systems.

"Deferred maintenance" may be the curse of the modern world. It's less of a problem than it used to be for automobiles, now that warranties have become a lot longer. But proper maintenance of buildings is pretty rare. The condo the Dissociated family lives in (built sometime around 1920) is in surprisingly good condition except for the electrical system, which gets upgraded piecemeal from time to time, but has never been completely updated in at least 50 years. Our condo board does a good job; we have had repairs on the roof, the furnace, and the water heaters at regular intervals, and the windows were all replaced about 10 years ago. Amazingly, we have never had a special assessment--this all gets done out of our regular assessments. Which are, of course, a lot higher than those of most condo owners around here.

That's what it takes to keep an 85-year-old building in good shape. I mention all this because most people, including but not limited to condo residents, aren't willing to do it. They manage the cosmetic basics, like painting, but ignore the rest until something breaks down (at which point it's really expensive to fix.) They go on fixing things piecemeal for as long as they can afford it, and then they dump the place. This system works reasonably well for cars, but it can be a disaster for buildings. The only good thing about it is that, as buildings, and neighborhoods, and city systems, and for that matter cars, get older and more rickety, they also get cheaper. Which is the only reason poor people in America have anyplace to live or anything to drive.

This is the trickle-down theory of urban planning. No, I'm not being facetious. Some years ago, some local politician proposed an aggressive program of maintenance for buildings and systems in Chicago. He was immediately denounced by one of the alderman from a particularly down-and-dirty ward, for plotting to drive poor people out of the city. Similarly, I used to work for an organization called the Lawyers' Committee for Better Housing, representing local tenants. One of the landlord lawyers half-seriously suggested that we rename ourselves the Lawyers' Committee for More Expensive Housing, except that of course, we would lose our client population if we did. The market works. One of the ways in which it works is that poor people can afford only the housing etc. that nobody with more money would want. If we really did maintain our buildings properly, our cities would be surrounded by shantytowns.

As I am fond of telling my students, this requires more thought.

RAGING GRANNIES, GRAY PANTHERS, AND OTHER VANGUARD TROOPS

I turned 65 recently. It was an interesting experience. I now have Medicare, and Social Security, and a small state pension plus retiree health insurance from Illinois, and half-price passes for the bus and the train, and occasional cut-rate "senior special" meals at local eateries. It's not bad.

But what I find especially attractive is that I now have very little to lose. I'm still working, but I could live without the income if I had to. My days are numbered--I have started listing my relatives from my parents' generation and their ages at death, so I've got a pretty good idea how much time I have left, and how much of it is actually "good time," during which I can do something useful. Gruesome? I don't think so. Like any other deadline, it helps me get organized.

The generations after mine have all kinds of scary stuff hanging over them that I no longer have to worry about, or never did. Student loans, for instance. I'm a member of the last generation of lawyers to finish law school with no loans. My friends ten or twenty years younger are still paying theirs, and may well have to keep doing it long after they could otherwise have retired. The Supreme Court recently ruled that if you're getting Social Security and you've defaulted on your student loans, they can take the money from your benefits.

Or trying to keep a splendid-looking resume--once you're past 50, nothing else on your resume matters. To hell with it. Yes, there are laws against age discrimination. There are all kinds of legal rights working people supposedly have. Try to get them enforced.
Hoo ha.

Sex appeal--who needs it? I keep myself neat and clean and attired suitably for the pursuit in which I am engaged at the moment. My husband loves me, and other guys occasionally still hit on me.

Government wiretapping and eavesdropping--who cares? At the click of a google, the government can find out most of what it wants to know about me. As I prepare to settle into dignified obscurity, all they can accomplish by busting me is publicize the causes I have worked for. Sounds like a fair trade.

I have increasing respect for organizations of radical seniors, like Raging Grannies, the Gray Panthers, and local groups like Chicago's Metro Seniors in Action. They aren't just fighting for Social Security and Medicare, they're fighting for a decent world for the next generation, because the System keeps the next generation too busy and intimidated to fight for itself. We are the last group left that has any time for amateur politics, and has nothing to lose by engaging in them. Elders of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose.