Whence Yellow Pages?

A friend mentioned the "yellow pages" to me today, and it occurred to me that I haven't used "The Yellow Pages" for at least five years. I can't remember when I last even saw a copy of the Yellow Pages (until today when I dug out a copy from under a desk). For many years, whenever I've needed a phone number or other information regarding a business, I've used Internet tools. It didn't happen all at once that I stopped relying on Yellow Pages, so I didn't notice any particular date when when it happened. Imagine that the phone companies announced five years ago that there wouldn't be any more Yellow Pages--we might have noticed our discontinued use. But human cognition is often blind to incremental changes. I posted on this topic earlier, using the example of tigers. There are very few tigers living in the wild. Almost all of the tigers of the world are now living in captivity. Very few people were conscious of this change, because it was gradual, but it undeniably happened. If it had happened all at once (with a headline screaming "95% of the wild tigers are gone!") we would have noticed and perhaps reacted. This reminds me of a book by Howard Kurtz (Media Circus), where he suggested that the biggest story of the 20th Century was that millions of African Americans were moving from the rural South to the Urban North, but no one noticed because no one faxed a press release to the news media. In fact, studies show that we are not even able to notice relatively fast moving gradual changes. Because of this human cognitive limitation, important things constantly fall beneath our human attentional radar. Yes, we do notice when an airplane crashes and kills 100 people because headlines are blasted at us and we can perceive the crash site from a single vantage point. But we don't react to drawn out disasters of much greater magnitude. For instance, where are the headlines announcing that 40,000 Americans needlessly die of colon cancer every year because they don't get colonoscopies? That's 110 people who die every day. But they don't die at the same place and there is no crash site to provide dramatic video for news shows. How much else of importance gets entirely ignored because there aren't dramatic photos? Trends are often invisible, whether they are good trends or bad trends. Whether there is a decrease in the standard of living or whether many of us dramatically increase the amounts of corn fructose we eat, many trends are difficult to notice without mathematics and graphs. Most important trends are invisible unless we are vigilant and comfortable with mathematics. Perhaps this should be a word of caution for a society that is heavily afflicted with innumeracy; bad things can happen on our watch yet we might be oblivious. Things like the deterioration of our education system, the increase in xenophobia, the fact that many of us seem to operate burdened with attention deficits, the skyrocketing rate of diabetes, stagnation of wages for several decades, and who knows what else. We face many huge challenges as individuals and as a society. Are we trying to shake a bad personal habit such as overeating? Are we trying to lessen our dependence on oil? Being cognizant of our obliviousness to incremental change can help us by reminding us that we shouldn't be discouraged with tiny sporadic steps of progress when that is all we can muster. It doesn't necessarily take a sprinter to make significant progress. as long as we're going in the right direction. We should keep up our efforts even when it seems like we're not getting much of anywhere, because small steps in the right direction always eventually prevail, even though our progress is often invisible until we've almost arrived.

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Afghanistan jackpot

I've often written about my frustration with the U.S. occupation in Afghanistan. I don't see any real progress. What business would be willing to keep spending huge amounts of money without seeing any progress? Yet our government continues to do this. And I have yet to see any meaningful government benchmarks regarding Afghanistan, probably because there aren't actually any benchmarks. We have also kept our troops in Afghanistan because of the sunk costs fallacy; we are there shedding blood and inconceivable numbers of tax dollars because we've been there. It is circular and insane. I can think of yet another reason that we are still there. All you need to do is follow the money. An acquaintance of mine recently informed me that a close relative of hers, formerly a career military man, quit the military but stayed in Afghanistan. For the past few years he's been making $250,000 per year in Afghanistan doing essentially the same job that he had been doing with the military. She told me that there are large numbers of these private soldiers in Afghanistan making similar obscene amounts of money. If our mission in Afghanistan were really vital to national security, then we should be allowing our government military handle the situation. You know, the same guys who prevailed in Iwo Jima. But no. The private contractors are swarming all over Afghanistan:

According to a report last week from the Congressional Research Service, there were about 64,000 uniformed U.S. troops in Afghanistan in September and 104,101 military contractors . . . The Obama administration's planned deployment of 30,000 more troops in the coming months could require as many as 56,000 more contractors, the report estimated. Xe, the Moyock, N.C.-based private military company, is already on the ground in Afghanistan despite its controversial history in Iraq, and is in the running for additional contracts.
It's also becoming clear that economically powerful companies are convincing our politicians that we need to be there, whether or not there is actually a well-defined mission. Even Blackwater (now renamed "Xe") is in the thick of it. Charles Lewis reports:
Fascinated and alarmed by the Tammany Hall feeling of political favoritism or cronyism I was getting, we launched into another epic investigation and published "Outsourcing the Pentagon: Who's Winning the Big Contracts" in the fall of 2004. We examined 2.2 million contract actions over six fiscal years, totaling $900 billion in authorized expenditures, and discovered that no-bid contracts had accounted for more than 40 percent of Pentagon contracting, $362 billion in taxpayer money to companies without competitive bidding. In other words, the multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts Halliburton had received actually weren't such an aberration, unfortunately. Indeed, we found contractors had written the Department of Defense budget, were guarding our soldiers in the Green Zone in Iraq, had participated in the Abu Ghraib interrogations and when the Secretary of Army wanted to find out just how many contractors were being employed, he naturally hired a company to find it out.
That was back in 2004. It's much worse now, which you can see by examining these links at Citizens for Legitimate Government. Check out this chart demonstrating that the high-priced private contractors far outnumber U.S. soldiers. Oh, and read the advertisements to see what kind of people are signing up to "fighting for our freedom" overseas:

Thousands of men and women have said goodbye to the 9-5 dead-end hometown job lock-down and are happily hopping from one country to the next. With nothing to worry about but where to spend their 3 months vacation or what to do with all the money they have made 99.9% of the population doesn’t have this luxury – because they don’t know about it. They have never even heard of High Paying International Civilian Contractor Jobs. Your career doesn’t have to be connected to just one country; you can work wherever you want! If it’s the Big Bucks that you’re looking for, then places like Iraq and Afghanistan are paying 6 figs.

What is the historical context of the ratio of contractors to soldiers?

According to a Congressional Research Service report obtained by the Federation of American Scientists blog Secrecy News, the ratio of contractors to troops is higher "than in any conflict in the history of the United States."

The phenomenon Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex is alive and well. There are so very many better ways to spend these tax dollars. Actually, we are spending tax dollars that we don't actually have in Afghanistan. And we're spending and fighting regarding "terrorists" who are almost non-existent in Afghanistan.

U.S. intelligence officials have concluded there are only about 100 al Qaeda fighters in the entire country. With 100,000 troops in Afghanistan at an estimated yearly cost of $30 billion, it means that for every one al Qaeda fighter, the U.S. will commit 1,000 troops and $300 million a year. It's time to pull the plug on this "war," in which our main accomplishment seems to be protecting the opium trade.

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Wall Street Journal commentator: Greed is not good.

Princeton economist Alan S. Blinder recently wrote a notable op-ed at the Wall Street Journal. It was notable because Blinder's theme runs counter to the mantra of the many free market fundamentalists who got us into the big mess we are in. In his hard-hitting piece, Blinder argues that greed is not necessarily good:

When economists first heard Gekko's now-famous dictum, "Greed is good," they thought it a crude expression of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand"—which is one of history's great ideas. But in Smith's vision, greed is socially beneficial only when properly harnessed and channeled. The necessary conditions include, among other things: appropriate incentives (for risk taking, etc.), effective competition, safeguards against exploitation of what economists call "asymmetric information" (as when a deceitful seller unloads junk on an unsuspecting buyer), regulators to enforce the rules and keep participants honest, and—when relevant—protection of taxpayers against pilferage or malfeasance by others. When these conditions fail to hold, greed is not good.
Blinder's article is not optimistic that we will be able to seize the moment by "slamming the door on the lobbyists" and enacting strong financial reform.

Continue ReadingWall Street Journal commentator: Greed is not good.