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Can Democrats Change and chew gum at the same time?

By ottonomy on August 19, 2010

"I frickin hate gum" by Dave77459 (CC-BY-NC-SA)

When I first heard the kerfuffle about the “Ground Zero Mosque,” I figured it would blow right over. Lower Manhattan is a big place, and there are plenty of establishments within a half dozen stone’s throws from Ground Zero. But American intolerance for Islam always does seem to sneak up on me. The story just keeps grabbing headlines as more and more politicians pipe up about it, including Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and President Obama, who outlined support for freedom of religion in development. The Politico’s Roger Simon even typed up a piece diagnosing Obama’s freedom of religion principle-based reaction as a sign that Obama just doesn’t get it. His assertion that Obama might “pull a Palin” and bow out before the end of the term was tongue-completely-in-cheek, Simon’s main accusation was serious:

The problem for Obama is that he appears to have taken seriously all the “change” stuff he promised during his campaign. And he has been unable to make the transition from candidate to president

What a cynical point! That voters who elected a “hope and change” president who promised to stand on principles won’t actually support him if he does it? It’s worth noting that Democrats could lose ground in 2010 without their 2008 voters actively opposing them; they can lose just by failing to bring in the huge level of less engaged citizens they depended on in their last victory. It doesn’t surprise me to see people making Roger Simon’s calculation though, even though my diagnosis would point in the opposite direction. When you have a candidate who promises to change the game, he can be judged both by how the game is played and by how others would like it to be played. Maybe this makes it twice as hard for Obama. Until he actually changes the game, the old rules still apply, and I agree Obama has not been very effective in changing the game. (Perhaps it’s not surprising that Obama is judged by the standard Capitol Hill rulebook, because as the NYT noted this week, he has framed himself as a president defined by legislative success or failure.)

Democrats are going to have a hard time of it this November, though I can’t speculate on 2012 yet. In 2008, they rode a surge of grassroots desperation for change and won big, even in districts not traditionally Democrat. In 2010 they would need at least as much effort to hang on to what they achieved, and I don’t see the grassroots organizational structure coming together. Sure, many progressives are concerned about what Republican gains would mean, but from the perspective of those waiting for a change in the game, the Democrats have done little to show they’re worth the “change” votes, and that cuts enthusiasm right out from under a public. From Obama’s investment bank-infused economic advisory team to the continuation of defense secretary Robert Gates’s tenure to a health care plan that owed a lot to the Republican alternatives offered in the 90′s to the failure to close Guantanamo and end Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, Obama has articulated few strong principles that illustrate he can bring the change people got enthusiastic about in 2008.

So it’s not surprising to see commentary where Obama is judged by the rules of the game he promised to instate. On the Daily Beast, Peter Beinart calls out the Democrats for lack of balls, asking:

After all, what did Obama promise liberals when he ran against Hillary Clinton? He promised that if he won, Democrats would no longer consult polls to decide what they believed.

The Democrats put themselves in a tough position, to be judged according to two standards at once. There’s no way to be positively judged from both Simon’s and Beinart’s perspective. Elections from 2006-2008 have been about Democrats, from Pelosi to Obama, promising that with a few more legislative seats they could bring real change and then not delivering after getting a few more seats. Democrats have huge majorities in the House and Senate and don’t have a strong legislative program record. It’s true Republican opposition and cohesion have increased with each gain the Democrats made, but at some point voter confidence that another Democratic seat is going to make the difference will falter. 2010 will see the same Democratic promises from the last two election years, but I don’t see it as enough to increase voter enthusiasm yet again this year.

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The Liberal plan for economic growth

By ottonomy on July 18, 2010

I keep seeing Christopher Hayes’ “Deficits of Mass Destruction” article from The Nation pushed among my contacts. This isn’t a surprise, because I follow the magazine’s editor Katrina vandenHeuvel on Twitter. But now it also popped into my email from MoveOn, the progressive lobbying group. It’s an example to me of the failure of the Democrats and the Left to articulate a clear alternative to the unsustainable economic model that partially collapsed and had to be so recently bailed out.

What troubles me about the model we are operating under is that the economy is not healthy without growth. In fact, as Hayes notes, even slow growth counts as unhealthy:

right now we face a joblessness crisis that threatens to pitch us into a long, ugly period of low growth, the kind of lost decade that will cause tremendous misery, degrade the nation’s human capital, undermine an entire cohort of young workers for years and blow a hole in the government’s bank sheet.

Now if you ask the question abstractly, “can an economy grow forever?” I don’t think it is possible to answer in the positive. It is the opposite of sustainable, and this fact is completely ignored, even as people are worried about how the environment can support so many billions of people. Nowhere in the article, or in the Democrats’ ideal platform as this liberal commentator imagines it, is there room for sustainability, even as the concept is in vogue in the hearts of those on the Left. (It only shows up in policy as vague suggestions to devote more resources to developing “green energy” from wind, solar, etc.)

Growth is the primary metric for evaluating the economy, far more important than the fluctuations of the Dow. This is because the money supply comes as the principal of a loan from the Federal Reserve. That principal must be paid back with interest, so in order to achieve economic health, the system must grow faster than the interest rate on the loans. If it grows too slowly, some people are able to pay back their loans, and others fall under the bus. I think this is the mechanism that creates an unsustainable economy.

I think that Democrats will have a lot more trouble motivating their “base” to get out to the polls this November and in 2012 than they had in 2008, when they could run on a platform of “Change.” Now that they’ve been in power, it’s becoming clear that their economic strategy is really just a smidge different than the people they replaced, as critics of the Summers/Geithner team have been saying all along. Most people on the Left, like Christopher Hayes here, think the Democrats can be successful if only they execute the growth strategy better then the Republicans, who depended on tax cuts for the rich as their economic driver. I agree with Hayes that succumbing to anti-deficit pressure on stimulus spending would hurt Democrats’ chances to propel growth, but I wish they had a 50-year plan on the table instead, because then they would be forced to think about long-term sustainability.

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Is Old Spice Guy a success?

By ottonomy on July 16, 2010

Old Spice’s new advertising campaign has gotten Proctor & Gamble a lot of attention in the attention economy. But will the hype sell body wash?

One of the old rules of the Internet is that pageviews are currency. When trying to make money on the open Internet, money is scarce and thinly spread. The Internet is an attention economy with a huge glut of things to look at. Treating human attention as a resource is older than the Internet and has long been applied to advertising, but the Internet is the best medium to arise so far measure its effects. We can count pageviews. Chris Anderson’s book Free: The future of a radical price (NY Times review) is the biggest recent exploration of attention as currency on the Internet (as a side affect of the phenomenon of downward price pressure on idea goods). In my thesis at the U of O, I claimed that a good reputation gained by people enjoying free access to content (attention) enabled business models that could make people real money. (See section 4.8-4.9)

Advertising is the old school game of trying to get people to buy stuff by showing them free stuff. It evolved from a primarily informational medium to incorporate elements of entertainment, like character and story. Now the Old Spice Guy may represent the future of advertising. Old Spice and their ad agency developed a character, played by Isaiah Mustafa, and made a couple traditional, though somewhat stream-of-consciousness style TV commercials (youtube playlist). The revolutionary part of the campaign occurred over a few days this week, as Proctor & Gamble gave the advertising team freedom to respond live to comments coming in through a slate of social media channels. They produced over 180 short video responses in marathon reading/writing/filming sessions in Portland, OR. No advertising campaign has before responded live and in-character in real time like this. Continue reading “Is Old Spice Guy a success?”

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The Republican side of the Table

By ottonomy on June 19, 2010

I watched Bill Maher’s show and the “overtime” extended discussion from Friday (Guests: Bill Frist, Jon Meacham, Rachel Maddow, Queen Noor, Oliver Stone so you know it’ll be a heckuva debate). Bill Frist’s point on health reform that Republicans didn’t have a place at the table on reform and so they would be justified in not helping implement it over the next decade is pretty out there, especially as Maddow said, a lot of the ideas the GOP were filibustering were their own from 1996. The Democrats STARTED FROM the Republican side of the table.

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More on cost control in education reform

By ottonomy on June 10, 2010


Tuition protest at the U of Toronto (cc licensed)

After writing a review of Anya Kamenetz’s book on education reform, DIY U yesterday, in which I mentioned that I thought it was a larger issue than cost control, I woke up this morning to a BBC article specifically about reducing costs in higher ed. I don’t disagree when people say this is a huge issue, and I am sympathetic to arguments that the education “bubble” is on track to bursting [see also], much as the housing market did. Here are a couple follow up thoughts on cost control:

In the United States, education budgets largely fall under the states’ control, with federal assistance in loans and grants funneled to the students. State budgets are seriously crunched by falling tax revenue, and they have no way to print more in particularly needy times. (Here in Oregon, state lawmakers are struggling with a $577 million shortfall due to below-expected revenue). Around the world, governments are hard-pressed to come up with the funds to provide for their educational institutions just as banks are becoming less willing to loan to students, seeing them as riskier bets than in the last decade.

The cost of higher education, then, is a front burner issue. But I hoped schools would not focus solely on their budgets. That is because I believe the technological developments that Kamenetz celebrates in DIY U actually do provide the opportunity for learning that is far cheaper than the mechanisms currently employed for that purpose. What worries me about this possibility is that by focusing on the chances for cost-reduction, the chances the same technology allows for radically improving education may be ignored. And there are those who think moving to Internet courses for cost-reduction would hurt educational quality (see the ginandtacos quote from my previous review and my comment to it directly). It takes a conscious shift in pedagogy to use a student’s time in school for network- and knowledge-building.

I think the connectivist model of learning that Kamenetz mentions on pg 110 (From Stephen Downes and George Siemens) is a powerful model that is useful to students inside or outside of institutions. As a theory of learning, it applies whether or not a classroom is intentionally set up to recognize it. But an educational structure that focuses on helping students build a personal learning network and build knowledge together is especially powerful. You won’t get to this point if you’re just focusing on cutting costs, but it just so happens that a lot of free online tools, from microblogging (twitter) to wikis are especially suited to collaborative network-aware learning. These enable students to network with one another within a course and form connections with professionals outside the university. Add in the expertise of a well-read professor to curate content, and you can get a lot of learning done. Then you can follow Anya’s and others’ advice on cost reduction by streamlining, unbundling course content, liberally licensing and reusing content from many professors.

If there is a burst bubble in education, networked learning will still occur. There will be a lot of scrambling to find workable models outside institutions if they go bankrupt or price their product out of students’ hands. I think Stephen Downes, George Siemens and others in the open education movement are on a good track in this pursuit, and I will encourage students who want DIY learning to look into their model. Despite my worry for higher ed institutions, I believe in the model of a course, where important discussions in a field are curated up for a group of students to connect with and explore (as opposed to students browsing through search results and Wikipedia on their own). Someone will bring this model to tomorrow’s students without plunging them into unmanageable debt. It might be universities after all (see this hopeful example). I just worry that if they focus only on cutting costs (from their overall budget and those passed on to students), they will end up treading water in terms of educational quality instead of using the available tools to move ahead.

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Book review: DIY U by Anya Kamenetz

By ottonomy on June 9, 2010

DIY U by Anya Kamenetz (2010)

DIY U by Anya Kamenetz

Anya Kamenetz’s book on education reform, DIY U, was a worthwhile read. In the first half of the book, she discusses the problems confronting America’s higher ed infrastructure. Her perspective here is useful, bringing in information about spiraling student debt loads and increasing tuition. As a 2008 college graduate, I experienced many of these problems firsthand. I waded through this section as fast as I could, eager to dig into Kamenetz’s suggestions for do-it-yourself education. The second half of DIY U is dedicated to outlining possibilities for reforms that could solve these problems.

Unfortunately, while there is a useful guide that distills and frames some of the huge constellation of available educational resources now available on the Internet in chapter 7, the rest of part 2 was underdeveloped where I had hoped it would shine. Still, I should mention that I thought a few of the high school seniors I know would get a lot out of reading it. From my experience talking to the graduating members of the class of 2010, belief in the 4-year college as the ticket to a successful life remains strong, even among those who don’t really know what they want to do with their lives. When I was that age in 2003, I too gave no thought to other options. I’m glad I did complete my undergrad and took on the debt that enabled me to complete my degree because I think I learned a lot while studying there. By the time I got out, I didn’t expect my degree to do for me what I had thought it would do going in though. And I think it’s good I came to that realization.

In their joint review of DIY U for the open access journal in education, Jon Becker, Meredith Stewart and Jason Green mention that Kamenetz should have separated her analysis of institutional reform efforts from student-led DIY reform. I felt the same way about that. A university moving some classes to the Internet to save money is a separate issue from students trying to achieve the best education they can afford. (The fact that universities typically do not hand the cost reductions from online classes down to students makes this point especially clear.) Other reviews discussed in the #DIYU hashtag on Twitter mention the same shortcoming. For example, Zunguzungu’s post emphasizes that universities have steadily shifted costs to students, rather than the notion that students are paying more simply because costs have gone up. Ed from ginandtacos emphasized the parties getting “ground up” in the rush to bring education online in his fiery review of the book, (It’s mainly the students and adjuncts who are forced to teach the online options).

Philip Auerswald recently mentioned DIY U and summarized part of the universities’ dilemma like this:

The costs of a college education have risen more rapidly in the past quarter century than even the much-discussed cost of health care, yet over the same interval the quality of the service provided has–let’s be honest here–not improved.

And the ginandtacos review brought online courses specifically into the firing line, saying:

No one who has taken or taught one can claim in earnest to have learned more than they do in traditional courses. Few could honestly claim that they learned anything at all. … The adjuncting wave of the early 1990s was supposed to make education cheaper. It didn’t. Now online courses are supposed to be making education cheaper (price being conflated with accessibility in this line of argument).

It’s not enough to bring its cost back in line with what a student can reasonably afford. That is not the vision of education reform I hoped for in DIY U. As I mentioned in my preliminary comments on chapter 3, reform that reduces costs while keeping the quality of learning roughly stable is not a solution to the problems I sensed in my own undergrad study. Replacing the learning done in a traditional classroom is not what the Internet is for, I think. There are new tools for collaboration, for shared knowledge creation, for the persistence of learning networks beyond a 10 or 16 week term. I think the possibilities that connected education creates go a lot further than reducing transmission costs or increasing access. I wished to see a picture of how the best elements of the university (which I saw as the great potential energy created by a classroom full of minds engaged on a particular topic) could be strengthened and set free by collaborative tools now available online. Continue reading “Book review: DIY U by Anya Kamenetz”

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Oregon Republicans-No room for the environment?

By ottonomy on May 11, 2010

I watched the replay of KATU’s Republican gubernatorial debate recently. The stage was packed with nine candidates vying for the chance to challenge Kitzhaber or Bradbury in this fall’s general election.

Their answers to a question about what the governor’s role in climate change left me wondering: Several candidates’ main response to the global warming issue was in support of “energy independence” for the U.S. A couple candidates, including Bill Sizemore, announced disbelief  in global warming altogether, and a couple others stated they didn’t believe that it was human-caused. Leading Republican candidate Chris Dudley said he wasn’t sure of the cause, but jumped straight to energy independence. William Ames Cartwright emphasized that “harassing” big government’s environmental regulations main affect is to restrict business and kill jobs. If he were elected governor, he would “help” the loggers and the fishermen.

And to cap it off, Bill Sizemore used his 30-sec rebuttal at the end of the round to say he believed that ”if we lose our freedoms in this country, it’s going to be because of the environmental movement. The environmental movement is a tool that the government uses to actually increase its power and its control over the economy.”

I wonder if there isn’t room in the Oregon Republican party for somebody who wants to preserve Oregon’s environment and recognizes that environmental regulation isn’t accomplished very well by businesses sharing a resource, one who crafts policy in light of the tragedy of the commons effect. Why isn’t there somebody on the Republican side who can challenge the Democrats to refine Oregon’s vision of a sustainable future? Sustainability was a word left out of the KATU debate. I would think that in Oregon, a republican who treats sustainability as a goal would be welcome. Are the Republicans willing to leave all the voters interested in sustainable economics and environmental practices to the Democrats?

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Reputation Online

By ottonomy on April 8, 2010

Shame by marcandrelariviere on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcandrelariviere/3251428624/

'Shame' by marcandrelariviere on flickr (cc-by-nc-nd)

Recently, Michael Arrington posted on TechCrunch to suggest that as more and more details of our lives are discoverable online, “indiscretions” would become less damaging. His basic point was that

Trying to control, or even manage, your online reputation is becoming increasingly difficult. And much like the fight by big labels against the illegal sharing of music, it will soon become pointless to even try.

He called his article “Reputation is Dead.” That’s a strong statement by itself. The availability of information about people who are hardly celebrities is trending way up, but that doesn’t mean reputation is gone. People will respond to what is available and judge people as they always have, though Arrington may turn out to be right about college party photos becoming a less significant reputation factor when many of the reputation judges are pictured in some as well.

However, reputation in the abstract will remain an important part of identity online. How it is measured changes with the situation. For example, in the early days of Twitter, perhaps through Ashton Kutcher beating out CNN in a race to a million followers, you might legitimately measure somebody’s influence by how many people followed them. But as “fluff” accounts and services offering “guaranteed” methods to buy more followers proliferated, people stopped measuring one’s worth directly by follower count. Instead, now we look at who is on lists made by those we respect and find good people when they are retweeted or #followfriday’d into our timelines. These methods still rely on evaluating reputation, but they might not take college photos of that user into account. Respect is spread through others whom you already respect.

When trying to judge a stranger’s (or job candidate’s) reputation, today we might use a Google search on their name. Arrington suspects that in the future, such a search would turn up embarrassing images, gossip, and smears posted by others along with one’s website or blog, Facebook or LinkedIn profile. The picture of this person is made up of these elements, according to Google. But how does Google decide what to put on the first page of results? The algorithm attempts to sort out the most important and “relevant” links, and sorts them in front of pages that aren’t as “important.” While the PageRank algorithm is evolving, especially to include more real-time information, Google’s primary tool to judge relevance is the number of other pages in the index that linked to the first. Hence, when you search for somebody, you probably will first see the pages about them that other people think are important, and less likely to see those that were not worthy of a link or a retweet.

For transgressions of community standards that are not under the jurisdiction of law enforcement norms of society govern which “indiscretions” are important enough to gossip about. When people violate norms, one option available to the community is public exposure of the violation. Through embarrassment, the violator is encouraged not to do it again. But the traces of the shaming linger long after, scattered around the Internet. College party photos may get enough chatter and relinking to make them relevant in a search, depending on factors that include the values of the people who see them, what they think the significance is for the person photographed, and how funny it is. (Michael Phelps’ party photo scandal was a lot more significant than people who aren’t celebrities). Individuals decide when a photo is worthy of a retweet based on a gut reaction that takes into account the severity of the action and the reputation of the transgressor. I wrote about how norms are enforced on the Internet through this sort of gut check in my thesis (section 4.7) about reusing others ideas. My example there was that people have an innate sense of when an appropriation of somebody else’s work is simply a “rip-off.” When people sense that somebody has ripped off the work of somebody else, the Internet-connected response is to make a little noise about it, by reposting the evidence, by joining a Facebook group bringing attention to the issue, or simply echoing somebody else who did so. Whenever something like this happens, the transgression gets magnified and becomes more relevant in search results for that person. If a prominent figure is responsible, it might even find its way into a “controversy” section of his or her Wikipedia entry.

An example of norms in action online is the recent controversy over the Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton, MS denying a lesbian student from bringing her date to prom. Besides an ACLU court case, thousands of people posted about it online. The traces of the scandal now dominate the Google search record and will probably occupy a space in the Itawamba School District’s Wikipedia page for decades. The school’s actions went against the values of so many people on the Internet that they felt compelled to post about how outrageous they felt it was. This is the reaction to events that are seen as significant. Relatively minor incidents like the party photo of a non-celebrity in an age where there are increasingly findable party photos of anybody is unlikely to provoke such a widespread response. Arrington may be right that if it seems like “everybody is doing it,” the significance of minor indiscretions become less significant and less likely to be relinked and gain damaging prominence.

One prominent response to Michael Arrington’s post was Fred Wilson’s, which argued that building a reputation online through social media is the key to combating smears. One of his examples of this point is that people who know you will defend you if you are unreasonably attacked. While it becomes easier to slander somebody online and make that perspective visible, people who have a strong Internet presence that highlights their capabilities, experience, and knowledge, that information will remain the bulk of the relevant results on a Google search about you, because it is where most of the action is. As gossip about an old picture of you fades after a few days, your online career continues through all the posts, comments, tweets, and conversations you produce. At some point this outweighs minor “indiscretions.”

Perhaps on the Internet, the lesson is that you should be yourself, yet conscious of how you make the presentation. Your true value will shine through if you keep letting it shine, even if your online presence has a few blemishes. However, when you are posting or retweeting to shame someone or an institution, be intentional about the norms you want to build and try not to go crazy over what is insignificant in the long term.

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CCK09: On the difficulty of the Connectivist revolution.

By ottonomy on October 24, 2009

This post is for assignment #1 for Stephen Downes and George Siemens Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course, 2009.

Connectivism represents a new way of knowing. But if it is correct, it is the way we have been knowing all along, and may not require a leap across an enormous gap to adapt to the new theory. Stephen Downes summarizes connectivism as “the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections,” which means learning “consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks” (“What Connectivism Is”). This is a revolutionary thought, denying at once that a piece of knowledge is an object that may be transferred from one to another and that knowledge can be pinned down to representations of it in language.

In a world connected by the Internet, I think it is becoming increasingly clear that one facet of connectivism is true: knowledge is distributed across the network. This point by itself is easy to accept, but the broader point that knowledge does not rest in the heads of individuals is harder to, as we used to say, wrap one’s head around. In fact this metaphor of enclosing knowledge in an individual brain is not a connectivist metaphor. Instead, a knowledge-seeker must visualize connecting up with knowledge, or growing out into it. The edges of knowledge are not defined by the skull, but are rhizomatic and spread outwards to other nodes in the network (See“Rhizomatic Knowledge” article by Dave Cormier).

Some will make the transition to new connectivist metaphors, while others, especially those who are not deeply integrated into communities of practice with connectivists, will stick to traditional metaphors describing knowledge as a commodity they possess in their heads. Fortunately, I think it is possible to work and learn with people who do not subscribe to this theory. Even among those who do not believe in connectivism or have not become acquainted with it (including those who don’t think much about theories of knowledge), connectivist techniques may be applied in connection with them. What might appear to an uninitiated learner as a transfer of knowledge would be represented by connectivism as a new connection to a knowledge network. Certainly a teacher knowledgeable in connectivism will approach the task of teaching differently, but would a student unfamiliar with the theory recognize that their guide is more connecting them up to the nodes of their own learning network than transferring static knowledge? I think the experience would feel like “learning,” as the student has become familiar with. Not “learning” in the sense of getting drilled for recitation of “facts”, but authentic learning, complete with the feeling of connection to understanding and community.

Connectivism posits that knowledge is “subsymbolic,” below the level of language. Language is a system of reference to concepts in the network that allows users to communicate and build structures of that knowledge, but words do not refer to absolute objects of knowledge. Knowledge is personal, relative to one’s network connections and what one has become familiar with. The set of nodes they are connected to in a network graph determines their “perspective” and what knowledge is available for reference by language. The example, “Paris is the Capital of France,” only represents knowledge in that those who are connected to the concepts of states and their governments can use this referent to call up these structures that exist in the network between people. After all, even the borders of France are not things that exist in the physical world, but agreements between many who have connected to the concepts of sovereign states. Even without knowing connectivist theory, people are able to access this knowledge.

I’ll offer a final example to clarify why I think that while connectivism represents a large revolution in knowledge, but when classrooms and communities begin shifting to using connectivist theory consciously as they attempt to spread (grow rather than transfer) knowledge will not impose a difficult transition on those in the network who do not subscribe to the theory. It is the matter of the interpretation of artifacts of knowledge, such as a story in a book.

An author writes a text from his or her own perspective in the network, accessing concepts and referring to them with language that are shared in his or her community. It is inevitable that the text spreads beyond the author’s perspective, because even another node in the author’s network is connected to a different set of nodes than the author. As people with different perspectives access the text, they interpret its meaning into concepts they are familiar with (concepts in their network). When an author writes about learning, connectivists understand this reference differently than constructivists, applying the concepts of their own network to it. Thus, interpretation of a particular artifact is a shared phenomenon, but an individuals interpretation depends on their placement within the network. Familiarity with a particular set of perspectives colors an individuals interpretation of a knowledge artifact. When somebody who doesn’t believe connectivist theory applies their personal knowledge to a new artifact of knowledge, a connectivist would be able to read this as growth of knowledge (connections) in the network.

An example of this process occurred to me recently as I listened to a presentation on was the issue of queer identification with superheroes (University of Oregon Understanding Superheroes Conference, 23 October 2009). The presenter asked the question, “Is Batman gay?” She pointed out that there is no definite answer to this question. Many authors have approached the Batman character, portraying their own visions within the structure laid out by DC. Batman gets into some pretty hairy situations with Robin, but the question of the interpretation of his sexuality is typically outside the author’s conception and in the realm of interpretation by diverse networks of readers. The identification of “queer moments” in Batman depends on a reader’s connection to a network where that interpretation is familiar. Just as one would only be able to apply a Marxist analysis to an argument if one is familiar with Marxism and those who offer that perspective. Connecting is practice. By doing it, one grows connections (knowledge). Practicing connection enables pattern recognition, enabling wider variety of pattern recognition and interaction as learners expands their network. Adapting to connectivist theory doesn’t involve a drastically different form of practice than learners have engaged in already. For the most part, a connectivist understanding applies to the learning activity nonconnectivists do. Once people have adopted a connectivist understanding, however, they can tailor their practices to actively attempt to grow understanding in their network and expand their network toward people and perspectives that align with their interests and experience, reaping greater benefits.

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What is the effect of government competition on the health care market?

By ottonomy on October 9, 2009

I was recently asked to describe how the proposed government competition in the health care market (represented by the “public option” would affect health care costs. I wrote the following to illustrate that the issue is not a simple question of free market vs. government control.

Theoretically competition would encourage private insurers to reduce their profit margins (to spend more of their premiums on health care coverage), but you have to be careful to analyze why their profit margins are around 20%… and what mechanisms of competition you would introduce with a “public option”… Insurance companies try to assure those profits now by recission and cherrypicking customers to avoid those with highest risk and by preventing those who buy insurance independently from buying into group pools. (There’s also the issue of insurance companies getting huge discounts on medical bills from hospitals– read this for one account of how they game the system: http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/134353/fainting_in_this_country_can_carry_a_$10,000_price_tag/ )

For example, the way the “public option” is set up in some of the bills right now, people who get insurance through their employer would not be able to choose it, and in fact many uninsured people wouldn’t be able to choose it either. Here’s a flowchart explaining who would be eligible: http://www.donkeylicious.com/2009/08/flowchart.html

The effects of the changes the insurance industry will be able to force into the bill may make it so that the only people eligible for the public option are generally “high risk” customers, while the mandate in the bill that everybody must buy insurance forces most of the uninsured with low risk (generally young people) to buy private insurance that they are unlikely to use fully. The effect of a public option that gets only the most expensive customers will be to create huge cost overruns on the public side and greater profits on the private side. Then the private guys can say “look! the government can’t run health care! see what we’ve been saying?!?!?!” when the reality is that the program was just set up to fail.

Another change in regulation that has been proposed by some is to allow people to buy insurance across state lines to get a better deal. This seems like it would increase competition, but consider: a company currently offering insurance in many states could then offer it only in states with the weakest consumer protection laws, so the policy may be cheaper, but there may be changes that affect the available quality.

Another element is that medical insurance companies are exempt from federal antitrust laws (Peter DiFazio is trying to change this, but not getting listened to.) Only this industry and professional baseball are exempted. This exemption exists despite evidence of real collusion between the companies to establish this 20% profit margin. This is another factor to consider when trying to analyze the effects of the “free market” in health care, because idealized free market models rely on competition, not collusion.

So some reforms may introduce competition, but you have to be careful to look at what the competitive mechanism is and what might undermine the effect. You have to analyze how the “free market” would be competitive or uncompetitive in this instance… whether it would actually be a free market or not, in effect. I would argue that health care is not a very free market, and that is the reason behind the 20% profit margins. Reforms that further cartelize the industry would not be effective, but reforms that introduce real meaningful competition might reduce that 20% figure and improve quality. But the proposed legislation doesn’t exactly address the real mechanisms of why it is uncompetitive, and the “public option” as figured, doesn’t do a very good job of competing on a “free market model”, because few people can actually choose it.

So while it may “seem” like a “free market” could manage this system most efficiently, you have to look at why the current system is so inefficient and decide whether it is “free” or not, and then look at proposed reforms to see what the actual effects will be. They cannot be generalized to “increasing regulation” as a single linear variable, and their effects will not be something as simple as “drives prices up.”

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