Author: ken

“Moral Injury”

Piloting drones in Afghanistan while sitting in a dark room in Arizona can seem a lot like playing a video game. Looking at a screen, the operator focuses in on a target, stalks him, presses a button, and a missile hones in – and the “target” disappears in a cloud of smoke.

But such pilots and “sensors” (those who watch the targets and press the triggers) are not immune to danger. In fact, it is getting more and more clear that they often suffer from PTSD. Yes, the victims they target are over seven thousand miles away, seen only on a screen, and no sound penetrates their air-conditioned boxes, but often they are tormented with nightmares, haunted with guilt. It’s not a game.

Video games don’t show the blown up bodies spurting blood, the prolonged agony of the dismembered writhing on the ground. Games neatly vaporize the enemy. And they don’t include such “mistakes,” as killing kids who happen to appear at the last minute from around the corner. Such details make the experience vivid, wrenching, and unforgettable.

GQ recently profiled Airman First Class Brandon Bryant who described in detail his first strike: “The smoke clears, and there’s pieces of the two guys around the crater. And there’s this guy over here, and he’s missing his right leg above his knee. He’s holding it, and he’s rolling around, and the blood is squirting out of his leg, and it’s hitting the ground, and it’s hot . . . . It took him a long time to die. I just watched him. I watched him become the same color as the ground he was lying on.”

“Over time he found that the job made him numb,” he reported, “a ‘zombie mode’ he slipped into as easily as his flight suit.” (See, “Confessions of a Drone Warrior.”)

As the GQ reporter noted, it used to be thought you had to be subject to overwhelming fear to become vulnerable to PTSD, such as having a bomb explode next to you. (For that reason, in WWI they called it ‘shell shock.’) Then it was thought you had to be in combat. But more recent studies “found that drone operators suffered from the same levels of depression, anxiety, PTSD, alcohol abuse, and suicidal ideation as traditional combat aircrews.”

The GQ reporter noted that the “term now gaining wider acceptance is ‘moral injury’.” In other words, it doesn’t have to be a physical shock. It can be an injury to your fundamental values or your sense of the kind of a person you believe yourself to be.

“For Bryant, talking . . . has become a sort of confessional catharsis, a means of processing the things he saw and did during his six years in the Air Force as an experimental test subject in an utterly new form of warfare.” At first, when he left the Air Force, he spoke out critically of the drone program, but the “backlash from the drone community was immediate and fierce. Within days, 157 people on Bryant’s Facebook page had de-friended him. ‘You are a piece of shit liar. Rot in hell,’ wrote a former Air Force comrade. In a sort of exercise in digital self-flagellation, Bryant read thousands of Reddit comments about himself, many filled with blistering vitriol and recrimination.

Now he plans to study to be an EMT, maybe get work on an ambulance, finally be able to save people like he always wanted. He no longer has infrared dreams, no longer closes his eyes and sees those strange polarized shadows flit across them.

Hope for the Semi-Skilled?

At one time there was a reliable supply of undemanding, simple jobs — but that was before computers. As The New York Times noted recently: “The multi-trillionfold decline in the cost of computing since the 1970s has created enormous incentives for employers to substitute increasingly cheap and capable computers for expensive labor.”

Bank tellers, retail clerks, gas station attendants, airline receptionists, etc. etc – most of them have disappeared along with the jobs that once filled out the economy and offered opportunity to those less educated. And as computers continue to get better at voice recognition and deciphering questions, one has to wonder if any such jobs will remain?

As The Times put it: “computerization is . . . degrading the quality of jobs for a significant subset of workers. Demand for highly educated workers who excel in abstract tasks is robust, but the middle of the labor market, where the routine task-intensive jobs lie, is sagging.”
As a result workers without college educations “concentrate in manual task-intensive jobs — like food services, cleaning and security — which are numerous but offer low wages, precarious job security and few prospects for upward mobility. This bifurcation of job opportunities has contributed to the historic rise in income inequality.”

But a labor economist at Harvard, Lawrence F. Katz, suggests that there remains a niche for what he calls “new artisans.” As traditional low skill jobs disappear, he claims, there will be job opportunities in middle-skill jobs. He expects to see growing employment for “licensed practical nurses and medical assistants; teachers, tutors and learning guides at all educational levels; kitchen designers, construction supervisors and skilled tradespeople of every variety; expert repair and support technicians; and the many people who offer personal training and assistance, like physical therapists, personal trainers, coaches and guides. These workers will adeptly combine technical skills with interpersonal interaction, flexibility and adaptability to offer services that are uniquely human.” (See, “How Technology Wrecks the Middle Class.”)

These are the jobs that require skills but also interpersonal know-how. As Professor Katz put it: “These middle-skill jobs will persist, and potentially grow, because they involve tasks that cannot readily be unbundled without a substantial drop in quality.” So, he concluded, those without college degrees are “not devoid of hope.”

That is an odd note to strike, “not devoid of hope.” Not hopeless, but not exactly hopeful.

Perhaps Professor Katz’s ambivalence reflects his concern about what will happen to the wages of such workers once their ranks swell, or the social status they will enjoy. Perhaps he is troubled by what society will feel like with armies of such semi-skilled servants attending to the one percent. Will such workers further divide up according to levels of skill, the really good kitchen designers out-classing and out-earning the mediocre? Or will technology in the form of robotics and nano-devices catch up with the need and displace them just as they are gaining a measure of security?

No one knows for sure, of course. But it is hard to be certain or, even, enthusiastic. Professor Katz himself seems torn.

Who Can We Trust to Tell?

Common sense tells us that during periods of economic hardship there will be more victims of child abuse. People will take out their pain and frustration on those more helpless than themselves. But, surprisingly, during the Great Recession, the number of reported incidents dropped. Can that be?

Back then, a child-welfare expert at the University of Pennsylvania, commented: “The doom-and-gloom predictions haven’t come true.” That assessment relied on traditional sources of information. But according to a recent account in The New York Times, new research suggests that the “real story about child maltreatment during the recession is a grim one.”

Using Google to track searches for such topics as “My dad hit me” or “Why did my father beat me?” or more common searches that include the words “child abuse” or “child neglect,” Seth Stephen-Davidwitz found “the Great Recession caused a significant increase in child abuse and neglect. The Times concluded: “far fewer of these cases were reported to authorities, with much of the drop due to slashed budgets for teachers, nurses, doctors and child protective service workers.” (See, “How Googling Unmasks Child Abuse.”)

After years of declining reports of abuse in the United States, “the searches that seem to have come from abuse victims themselves rose as soon as the Great Recession began. On weeks that unemployment claims rose, these searches rose as well.”

Official statistics seem to be like consciousness, a sanitized and simplified account of the truth. They are what we can tolerate knowing. The Times went on to note: “According to government surveys, between 2006 and 2010, throughout the United States, 52 percent of violent crimes, 60 percent of property crimes and 65 percent of rapes and sexual assaults were never reported to the police.”

Unconscious knowledge is not easy to detect, and not just because the facts are unreported. There are also false leads. Most searches for “rape,” it turns out, come from people looking for pornography.

But, as The Times went on to note, “the contrast between the search data and the reported data tells a sad story about social services in this country. Just when more children are searching for help, we decimate the budgets of the very people who might actually do something to protect them.” Is that further evidence for our not wanting to know? As The Times commented, it is a “sad story,” but how can we make sense of it?

It looks like triage on a massive scale. As unemployment continues, food stamps are cut, violent crimes increase, health care is increasingly unavailable in the cities and Medicare denied to millions, we turn away from those who cannot themselves make the case for our attention, and we take comfort in misleading statistics even when we know they must be wrong.

But perhaps underlying this triage might be a resurgent, underlying sense that abuse is the prerogative of parents. This is common in tribal societies where fathers can beat their children with impunity, send them away, or mutilate them. But perhaps among us now there are more and more who feel what happens to their children is not the business of the state.

I am not suggesting that this is a conscious conviction. But I am suggesting that in our current climate of distrust and resentment of government, people witnessing abuse may well increasingly tend to shrug it off and turn the other way. There is no one to trust with the information.

When Is Punishment Real?

When the government fines banks hundreds of millions of dollars, it looks like it is getting really tough with them. But as Andrew Ross Sorkin pointed out recently in The New York Times, it’s a bark with no bite: He quotes a professor of securities law at Columbia Law School, on JPMorgan’s “record fine” of $920 million: “This is a case where the victims are the shareholders.”

It’s the illusion of justice, a form of theatre. Government lawyers look as if they are pursuing and punishing wrong-doers. The banks look as if they are acknowledging their wrongs. The public gets to feel that something is being done, while the fines pile up in the Treasury Department to fund further investigations. But there is little incentive in the unfolding drama to actually change anything.

Worse, according to Sorkin: the settlement begins to look a lot like bribery — to some degree, on both sides. The Columbia law professor noted that without a strong case against any individuals, the S.E.C. looks as if it held the firm for ransom. And on the other side, the firm’s senior management appears to have bribed the S.E.C., using shareholder money, not to bring cases against individuals. (See “As JPMorgan Settles Up, Shareholders Are Hit Anew.”)

Not a pretty picture – or a clear one. This makes it more difficult to imagine where the support is going to come from for meaningful reform. The theatrical performances obscure the real sources of blame.

To be sure, it would be a lot harder to convict bank officials of malfeasance, as the standard of evidence would be much higher in a criminal case. The banks must reason that it is easier and cheaper for them to plead guilty to prosecutors’ allegations, especially when it’s just money. They have plenty of that, and as Sorkin pointed out they can easily pass on the cost.

One might argue that in exacting such fines, the S.E.C. is leaving it up to the banks themselves to punish those responsible by firing them, reassigning them, cutting bonuses, or in other ways removing them from responsible positions where they could continue their bad behavior.

But as Slate recently pointed out that does not seem to be happening. JPMorgan’s legal woes under Jamie Dimon’s leadership “includes a total of $3.68 billion in cases already settled for foreclosure irregularities, illegal manipulation of electricity markets, ripping off credit card customers, and compliance failures at four different regulatory agencies relating to the billions in losses on the London Whale trade. [And] those fines are small compared to the $11 billion settlement the bank could be facing related to mortgage abuses during the crisis years. And then there’s a Libor manipulation investigation, violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, manipulation of a corporate bond index, an obstruction of justice investigation, and even potentially some involvement with the Madoff ponzi scheme.” And yet recent shareholder efforts to limit Dimon’s control at Chase have failed. (See, “How Jamie Dimon’s Getting Away With It.”)

Chase is making just too much money. They are being slapped on the wrists, while real reform of the banking industry languishes.

The underlying issues are being discussed on the back pages of The Times and elsewhere, but is not likely to reach enough people or generate the outrage required for significant action. Wall Street understands it well enough, but they are the last ones to want reform.

And Are They Really Failing?

According to current conventional wisdom, our educational system is a disaster. The truth, of course, is more complex. It’s the poor who are failing. The rich are thriving — and learning.

The issue was recently raised by Diane Ravitch’s new book, Reign of Error, in which she not only attacked the obsessive reliance on test scores as an inadequate way to measure real learning but also debunked the myth of failing schools. It’s not about the schools: “On nearly every measure of academic performance, poor kids fare poorly.”

According to Politico: “To Ravitch and her supporters, the solution is obvious — schools in poor communities need more money and more resources to support families struggling with hunger, unemployment and unmet medical needs.” (See, “Do American Public Schools Really Stink? Maybe Not.”)

So why is the myth of failing schools spreading?

One reason she offers is that investors see education as a vast untapped market and source of potential profit. They like technologies such as on-line learning, standardized tests, computerized curriculums – all of which displace teachers and provided new opportunities for profit. They also like the opportunity to build new schools outside community control and without unions. By trashing the existing public school system they encourage expensive investments in approaches that promise financial returns for investors if not better learning for students.

But there are deeper motives. Despite the fact that the U.S. saw early on that a robust public school system was essential to democracy, school was never popular. It was always seen as an instrument of acculturation, separating children from their culturally backward, immigrant parents, and also a means to inculcate discipline and conformity. In our hearts we may see the importance of schooling, but we still fear and resent it. Huck Finn fled the “school marms” and the Aunt Sally’s who wanted “to sivilize him,” and he set a powerful example.

Finally, we have a deeply held anti-intellectual strain in our culture. It’s OK for schools to teach the basics or, even, vocational skills that lead directly to jobs. But studying history, literature or philosophy has always been suspect. Why would anyone want to study such subjects, goes this unconscious logic, if not just to feel superior. They are not practical, not good for anything other than providing a sense of entitlement and elevation above the mob – except when the actually do train students to take places in the finance industry or advanced technology or any other area that promises immense financial gain.

Schools are the inevitable targets for our cultural anxiety. It’s how we sort ourselves out in the newly emergent class system, where the very bright get to go to good schools, get good jobs and go on to good lives. On the other hand, there are those who are contemned to fill jobs with little future or, worse, jobs destined to be replaced by robots or computers – that is, if they are lucky enough to get jobs at all.

It is not so much that schools are failing to educate us as that they are the means by which we are increasingly embedded in our unequal social system and driven further and further apart.