Is Everything Really Broken? If So, How Do We Cope, Let Alone How Do We Fix It All?

This post is something of a follow up to my previous post as well as a reaction to Everything Is Broken by Alana Newhouse, published in Tablet Magazine almost a year ago.  I found this essay from The Sidney Awards, that David Brooks publishes annually in the New York times.  I wasn't aware of Newhouse or of Tablet Magazine before that.  Via a simple Google search I learned that Newhouse is editor-in-chief of Tablet magazine.  After reading her essay, I wondered if that mattered because I found the piece wanting in several ways, as I will elaborate below.  I also wondered about Brooks selection of the piece.  Perhaps to him the theme as conveyed by the title is more important than the analysis, or maybe he reads essays like this in quite a different way than I do.  In any event, after the fact I was somewhat disappointed.  This post is my way of expressing what I would have liked to see.  Perhaps a sequel can be written to deliver on just that.  

Ahead of time, I was positively disposed to the hypothesis in the title of Newhouse's article.  Of course, it was written well into the pandemic, but before the introduction of vaccines.  Things seemed rather hopeless then.  With first Delta and then Omicron, that feeling has persisted.  But, in addition, even before the pandemic we were suffering from a variety of big-deal evils: global warming, a dysfunctional and highly irritating national politics, severe income inequality and the societal ills that engenders are among the more obvious of these.  Then there are those background things that matter a lot as well: people have their heads in their phones much of the time and have lost the art of face-to-face conversation; long form reading is on the outs; and there is a seeming brittleness of younger generations with at least one cause of that being over protection by their parents as they were growing up. In addition, right around when Newhouse's article appeared, I began to post my ideas about the Non-Course, which argued that undergraduate education was broken and proposed a certain type of program driven by the students themselves to rectify matters.  (I want to note here that to date the Non-Course is a concept only.  No student has tried it, as far as I know.)

Let me turn to my criticisms of Newhouse's piece.  I'm going to go somewhat out of order in terms of how they are presented in her article.  I hope that will actually clarify a few of the issues. 

• Newhouse doesn't consider some of the important historical antecedents that have destabilized the economy and our national politics.  Prior to that it seemed the system was more robust and could rebound from substantial external shocks.  That became less so because of these factors. 
  
  The two main factors I have in mind were the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1965 and the Vietnam War.  Both factors drove White blue-collar types, hardhats if you will, from the Democratic party to the Republican party.  This happened when these folks were still strong union guys.   Likewise, the Civil Rights Act, in particular, drove Dixiecrats into the Republican party.  Where before there were moderates in both parties, with considerable overlap in governing philosophy, afterward there was hardly any of that.  Further, many Americans of all stripes lost their faith in government.  (Watergate, a third factor, contributed to that as well.)  The system was less robust as a consequence.
  
  
• Newhouse looks for one big cause to explain the dysfunction.  For her that is Flatness.  If the economy is compromised winners and losers, flatness focuses on the losers.  I think it is useful to consider the winners as well.  There is an economic theory of dual labor markets.  In higher education, faculty with tenure or those who are on the tenure track are the winners.  Adjunct faculty are the losers.  Likewise, in product markets there may be second degree price discrimination.  When I used to teach that I'd use airline ticket pricing as the example, contrasting first class and coach pricing.  Here the theory enlightens in that it explains why coach quality is crappy.  If it were halfway decent, some of those who now fly first class would opt for coach instead.  This sort of phenomenon is happening big time with regard to housing in urban areas, to the extent that one can't find housing for moderate income people in the inner city.  This is buttressed by zoning restrictions, so it becomes government regulation rather than market provision that creates the price discrimination.
  
  
• Newhouse also ignores the possibility of sector specific causes of the dysfunction.  But if one is going to find solutions to these issues, good answers might very well depend on those specific causes. 
  
  To illustrate and as Newhouse began her piece with a medical issue that arose when her baby was born, let me likewise illustrate a specific issue with my own medical story.  Back in 2018, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer.  Initially, the system worked reasonably well.  I went to my primary care doctor for my annual physical.  They do blood tests before the visit.  He asked if they should do a PSA test as part of the blood work.  Since I hadn't had one in a while, I said yes.  The result showed a high number for my PSA.  The next step was to repeat the blood test, to make sure the result was accurate and not an anomaly.  The re-test result came back essentially the same.  This triggered a referral to the urologist.  I vaguely knew him from a kidney stone I had more than a decade earlier.  We discussed the different methods of diagnosis.  I wanted the one that was most informative, so we ended up doing an MRI.  It showed two tumors in my prostate.  So far, the system worked as it should.
  
  But the MRI also took pictures of the surrounding areas and some active spots showed up outside the prostate; possibly they were in a bone.  This is where the trouble began.  I'm a rational guy most of the time and my brother is an MD-PhD, so I have a family member to consult with who can give me an informed medical opinion.  The radiologist who interpreted the MRI couldn't determine whether those other spots were comparatively benign or also cancer, but cautioned that they should be monitored further.  My brother urged me to follow up on this.  Also, I knew then that prostate cancer itself is eminently treatable, especially if it is caught fairly early.  But cancer in the bone is a different matter. It can be gruesome and possibly fatal.  At this point my head started to play tricks on me.  For the first time in my life I contemplated my own mortality.  I really wanted an answer as to what those spots in the MRI were.  In the absence of knowing I took a Murphy's Law approach to my own health.
  
  The urologist and I needed to chart a path for further diagnosis of the MRI results, as well as to identify treatment for the tumors that had shown in the first MRI.  For the latter, I was referred to an oncologist and we agreed on radiation treatment.  For the former, some other diagnostics were ordered, but my insurance company disallowed the tests.  The urologist appeared frustrated by this and I began to feel frustrated by the entire process.  I subsequently learned that many doctors at Carle, my healthcare provider, are intimidated by the insurance companies, who seemingly have more control over diagnosis and treatment than they do.  During the same time period I had a stress fracture in my foot (unrelated to the prostate issues) and saw a podiatrist for it.  He said essentially the same thing about the insurance companies.
  
  And here's the thing.  The relationship between patient and doctor should be a trust relationship, especially if it is ongoing.  The patient should be forthcoming about the health issues when talking with the doctor; the doctor may make a set of recommendations knowing the patient and the patient's history; and together they should agree on how to proceed.  If things have worked reasonably well in the past, trust builds over time.  There really can't be a trust relationship of this sort between the patient and the insurance company.  The interactions are not personal in this way.  Yet the insurance company has the power, presumably justified by cost-containment reasons.  There is something quite wrong with this, yet it is not an issue that gets discussed in news outlets when considering healthcare.
  
  Now let me briefly switch to journalism, to identify a sector specific factor of importance there, though now I'm discussing an issue which has gotten ample attention.  Revenues for news organizations are roughly proportional the number of their readers/viewers/listeners. If those numbers can be boosted substantially at little incremental cost, that is more profit.  We know that the bulk of the audience are repeat customers, so the issue for the provider becomes how to increase the frequency with which they come back and the duration when they are connected.  One might think that the answer is to offer high quality content.  Yet a different answer is to offer highly addictive content.  The market might sustain both answers with different providers concentrating on one or the other.
  
  I want to note that the addictive content answer has a long history.  I learned about Yellow Journalism in regard to the Spanish-American War while I was in grade school, where an additional goal the content provider was to move public opinion in a certain direction.  What is different between now and then is the 7 x 24 news cycle and the increased competition for eyeballs, not just with other news providers but with other forms of entertainment.  This has clearly shifted the balance toward the addictive form of content.  I also want to note that what counts as additive depends on audience demographics.  That said, I would argue that MSNBC produces addictive content, though of a different form, than Fox News. 
  
  I believe a credible argument can be made that this addictive content is dividing us as a nation and therefore should be contained if not eliminated outright.  In my opinion, most of the news should be boring and presented in an even handed but unexciting way.  The question is how to get that as the outcome.  It's not possible under the current funding model.
  
  
• If things are broken, individuals will get beaten up emotionally by dealing with the consequences.  Before the pandemic, there was piece after piece in both the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed about student mental health issues and the scarcity of mental health professionals on campus.  No doubt, those same issues exist for many working people as well.  They could use tips about coping from more experienced people and perhaps help with their own self-reflection on these issues.  I wrote such a post several months after experiencing many of my students openly admitting to their own depression.  I would like to see others who are experienced in their own fields do likewise.  Newhouse might very well have done some of this in her essay or made reference to some other piece that does this.  I felt that something like this should be there.  Even if everything that is broken can be fixed, it won't happen overnight. We should care about those who suffer in the interim.
  
  
• Newhouse wants to have it both ways. Towards the end of her essay she writes:
  
  

  I’m not looking to rewind the clock back to a time before we all had email and cellphones. What I want is to be inspired by the last generation that made a new life-world—the postwar American abstract expressionist painters, jazz musicians, and writers and poets who created an alternate American modernism that directly challenged the ascendant Communist modernism: a blend of forms and techniques with an emphasis not on the facelessness of mass production, but on individual creativity and excellence.

  
  A bit earlier in the piece she writes:
  
  

  So, instead of reflecting the diversity of a large country, these institutions have now been repurposed as instruments to instill and enforce the narrow and rigid agenda of one cohort of people, forbidding exploration or deviation—a regime that has ironically left homeless many, if not most, of the country’s best thinkers and creators. Anyone actually concerned with solving deep-rooted social and economic problems, or God forbid with creating something unique or beautiful—a process that is inevitably messy and often involves exploring heresies and making mistakes—will hit a wall. If they are young and remotely ambitious they will simply snuff out that part of themselves early on, strangling the voice that they know will get them in trouble before they’ve ever had the chance to really hear it sing.

  
  
  Yet on a topic she views as very important, regarding the biological differences between the sexes, she holds that inviolate and hence she can't stomach Trans people asserting that this leaves no room for them in society.  Might it be that claiming it bigoted to assert gender is binary is itself part of that messy process which will inevitably generate errors.  I wondered why Newhouse doesn't see it that way. 
  
  If I might give a different example here that is not in Newhouse's essay, consider Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the National Anthem before an NFL game.  This went ignored for a couple of weeks before it drew substantial attention.  Then much of the reaction was negative, with many fans viewing it as unpatriotic, something akin to flag burning.  However, not quite 4 years later, the video of the George Floyd murder somehow connected with people, and the taking a knee protest was seen in a different light. Might something like that happen with the rights of Trans people as well?
  
  

Let me wrap this up with one further thought.  Newhouse wants to champion individual creativity as one way to fix the problems.  I'm all in favor of that.  But then among her various exhortations is this one: "Go back to a house of worship—every week." This is offered without explanation.  I don't know where Newhouse stands on abortion or a host of other social issues, but I for one can't accept this particular exhortation without an extended argument to support it.  Further, in my view no such argument can be given for worship that breed rigidity in viewpoint and intolerance of others.  So instead, I will offer up my own exhortation.  Read Maslow.  If Towards a Psychology of Being is too daunting at first, read Maslow's essay on The Creative Attitude, a link to which can be found in this post.