Author: ken

It’s Getting Worse

Suicide rates have been rising dramatically. But of special concern, as reported in The New York Times is the number of middle-aged men killing themselves: “Suicide has typically been viewed as a problem of teenagers and the elderly, and the surge in suicide rates among middle-aged Americans is surprising.” (See, “Suicide Rates Rise Sharply in U.S.”)

“It is the baby boomer group where we see the highest rates of suicide,” said the C.D.C.’s deputy director, Ileana Arias. “The boomers had great expectations for what their life might look like, but I think perhaps it hasn’t panned out that way.” She added: “All these conditions the boomers are facing, future cohorts are going to be facing many of these conditions as well.” The conclusion is that “the risk for suicide is unlikely to abate for future generations.”

The University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox recently pointed out in The Atlantic that there’s a strong link between suicide and weakened social ties. Following the seminal research of Emile Durkheim, he added that people — and especially men — are more likely to kill themselves “when they get disconnected from society’s core institutions (e.g., marriage, religion) or when their economic prospects take a dive (e.g., unemployment).” (See, “What’s Driving Suicide Among Middle-Aged Men?”)

It has been getting tougher for men. Brought up to believe they are the stronger sex, expected to be the primary bread-winner for their families, with corporate leaders and entrepreneurs as role models, they have been finding it difficult to sustain their expected social roles. As a result, their self-esteem has been taking a beating.

Wilcox goes on: “And over the last two decades, it’s men without college degrees who have ended up most disconnected from the core institutions of work, marriage, and civil society. Guess who is most likely to kill themselves? Men without college degrees.”

“In fact, according to recent research by sociologist Julie Phillips and her colleagues, suicide has surged in recent years . . . among precisely this group of less-educated middle-aged men, even as suicide remained essentially stable among middle-aged men with college degrees over this period.”

Ross Douthat commenting on these trends in The Times noted: “The hard question facing 21st-century America is whether this retreat from community can reverse itself, or whether an aging society dealing with structural unemployment and declining birth and marriage rates is simply destined to leave more people disconnected, anxious and alone.”

Yes, Douthat is correct to note a “retreat from community,” but in generalizing the problem he moves away from the insight that it is typically middle-age men who are most at risk. They are the ones who suffer from disconnection and declining opportunity as a result of such trends as growing economic inequality and shrinking job markets.

And he moves away from seeing it as relevant to politics and social policy. At the very end of his piece, citing an article in The New Republic on “The Lethality of Loneliness,” he notes “one in three Americans over 45 identifies as chronically lonely.” In other words, he changes the subject: “There are public and private ways to manage this loneliness epidemic — through social workers, therapists, even pets. And the Internet, of course, promises endless forms of virtual community to replace or supplement the real.” (See, “All the Lonely People.”)

He reduces the problem to one of mental health and proposes various forms of supportive psychotherapy as a solution. Politics has become irrelevant.

As a therapist myself, I certainly am sympathetic to the call for more therapeutic services. Those who are suicidal need therapy, to be sure. But the loss of community is not a problem that can be dealt with through psychotherapy. That’s just passing the buck.

Religion and “Schismogenesis”

The escalation of religious intolerance has reached a point, according to the noted anthropologist T.M. Luhrman, that people are becoming reluctant to own up to being religious at all.

She notes that since the early 1990’s, the number of people without religious affiliations has “more than doubled to 20 percent from less than 10 percent.” For people under 30, it’s “close to a third.” She cites the political scientists Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell who found that “recent years have seen the sharpest points of disagreement between religious believers — of nearly all stripes — and those who denounce religious belief of all types.”

“The last few election cycles have made it clear that many evangelicals think that those without religion are dangerously wrong on many issues. A crop of equally committed atheists and agnostics have reciprocated, with vigor.” She calls this process of the growing divide “schismogenesis,” borrowing a term from Gregory Bateson to describe how positions diverge and harden.

Luhrman adds: “We know that most of these people still believe in God or a higher power, whatever they mean by that. It’s just that they are no longer willing to describe themselves as associated with a religion. They’ve seen that line in the sand, and they’re not willing to step over it.” (See, “How Skeptics and Believers Can Connect.”)

This is particularly interesting as Americans have tended in the past to emphasize – if not to actually lie about – the extent of their religious behavior. When asked about going to church, two out of five say they attend regularly. But observational data as well as the reports of ministers, priests and rabbis tell us that the actual figures are way less.

Slate covered that story over 2 years ago: “The results are surprising. Americans are hardly more religious than people living in other industrialized countries. Yet they consistently—and more or less uniquely—want others to believe they are more religious than they really are.” (See, “Walking Santa, Talking Christ.”)

So how to make sense of all these contradictions? Back then, when I wrote in my blog about that, I thought the American affirmation of religion was a disguised and indirect form of patriotism. There are so many cultural and ethnic differences among us that we may well feel that all we have in common is the affirmation of being “One Nation Under God” (See “Americans Go To Church.”) What politician would admit to being an atheist or, even, an agnostic?

Has it gotten worse? Have the tensions and conflicts among Americans reached the point that we no longer even have god in common? Or, have religious disagreements gotten so intense can we no longer use the fiction of religious belief to cover our disagreements? Either way, god has gone into the closet. “Religion” has become so politicized that it is almost entirely now about such social issues as abortion, marriage and sex education.

In the past, people fought and died over their different faiths. Was god a trinity? Was he strict or forgiving? Did he really live in heaven? Now he has become an ideologue, and an embarrassing one at that.

The Illusory Rights of Shareholders

Does shareholder democracy really matter? The ability to vote board members in or out of office doesn’t ignite the imagination of many, except possibly those trying to take over a business. Even then, voter apathy is considerable.

But inactive or complicit boards are real problem. Among those who follow corporations, it is an important index of their health and responsiveness. Just as CEO’s who lose money should not be rewarded with big bonuses, they argue, board members who repeatedly rubber stamp management choices shouldn’t get reelected.

James B. Stewart, writing in The New York Times, recently called attention to how surprisingly shareholder elections are thwarted by management: In “41 . . . publicly traded companies . . . directors actually lost their elections last year, meaning that more than 50 percent of the shareholders withheld their votes of approval. Yet despite these resounding votes of no confidence, they remained in their posts.”

Stewart continued: “A list of companies retaining directors who were rejected by shareholders in 2012 — so-called zombie directors — was compiled by the Council of Institutional Investors, which represents pension funds, endowments and other large investors. The list includes not just smaller, family-controlled companies, where disdain for shareholder views may be more ingrained, but also Loral Space & Communications, Mentor Graphics, Boston Beer Company, and Vornado Realty Trust.” (See, “When Shareholder Democracy Is Sham Democracy.”)

On the other hand, The Wall Street Journal, noted: “One of the highest-paid corporate executives in the country lost his job Friday, as investors at Occidental Petroleum made Executive Chairman Ray Irani the latest victim of a rising wave of shareholder activism.”
“It’s a pretty amazing thing,” said “the head of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware’s business school,” adding that it “happens very rarely, particularly for a company of this size and reputation.”

The Journal concluded: “Activist investors once seen as fringe players are winning the backing of mainstream shareholders such as mutual funds that had long deferred to companies’ managements. Investment bankers are busier than ever advising corporate boards on how to contend with activists or ward them off.”

Most investors have minor stakes and few votes in the businesses in which they invest, of course, but successful “activists” manage to engage retirement funds and mutual funds in their cause. With billions of dollars of investments they actually do have clout. (See, “Investors Push Out Oil Boss.”)

Some years ago, a similar movement protested corporations that did business in South Africa when arpartheid was in force. That movement worried banks and investment firms as it posed a serious conflict between profit and social conscience. In the end, South Africa was a small enough source of investments so that many activists could be appeased.

But this tide of activism represents no such conflict. Investors are getting more vigilant about getting good returns on their investments, curbing the excessive compensation of managers.

The entrenched and privileged old guard are trying to stave off new investors who now wave the flag of “democracy.” As a result stakeholder democracy may be an idea whose time has come.

The Boston Bombings and the “Total Noise” of the Internet

James Gleick, writing about the coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing, noted that we have reached a turning point in our embrace of new media: “We’re starting to sense what may happen when everything is seen and everyone is connected. Bits of intelligence amid the din,” he summed up, “and new forms of banality.”

Between the tsunami of tweets, the millions of photos, the panicky cell phone messages, full-time TV coverage, and a flock of journalists competing to scoop each other, how could anyone figure out what was actually happening? And indeed the established media, including CNN, made a number of very big mistakes, including claiming that arrests had been made.

Gleick continued: “The Boston bombings, shootings, car chase, and manhunt found the ecosystem of information in a strange and unstable state: Twitter on the rise, cable TV in disarray, Internet vigilantes bleeding into the FBI’s staggeringly complex (and triumphant) crash program of forensic video analysis.”

He concluded that the coverage amounted to “total noise,” borrowing a phrase from David Foster Wallace, so much noise that the signal can no longer be discerned. But in this case much of the noise was generated by increasingly desperate attempts to find the signal. (See, New York Magazine, “Total Noise,” Only Louder.)

This must be a particular problem for journalists, such as Gleick, distracted and led astray by all the information, as were some local police. But it did turn out that those in charge of the investigation were able to mine the data and hone in on the remaining suspect. Moreover, it looks like they were able to crowd source significant additional data. In the end, their staggeringly complex program was “triumphant,” as Gleick concedes.

One conclusion: In the new age of big data, we may be overwhelmed by information, but, on the other hand, it is no longer possible for suspects to get lost in the crowd. To be sure, Gleick has a point. We are subject to information overload, and we may well get lost in the data ourselves. It is confusing and problematic and banal, and it easily leads to manipulation and deceit. If everyone is speaking all the time, how can we tell what’s useful or true?

But there is another conclusion, as Timothy Egan put it in The New York Times: “Tireless culling of video images, apt use of tips and technology, and quick action by a fleet of cops showed both the risk and the range of good police work.” He cites several examples of how sloppy police work under pressure from tabloid journalists have led to egregious mistakes, most notable the “Central Park Five,” unjustly convicted of rape. (See, “Good Cops, Bad Cops.”)

Yes, there is a problem of endless chatter when people feel obliged to speak or tweet when they have nothing to say but can’t bear feeling left out. It is easy to be confused and jump to wrong conclusions. But so far it does not seem we have slipped over the edge where no one can think anymore amid the ambient noise.

How Politics Really Work

The recent defeat of all efforts at gun control is shocking, given the fact that 90 percent of Americans supported the measures. How could that happen?

The key is the power of self-interest. It didn’t matter so much what the senators actually thought about the bills. What mattered was the risk to their political careers. “The measure never really had a chance,” concluded The New York Times. It was not only the strength of Republican resistance and the opposition of the NRA. It was “the political anxiety of vulnerable Democrats from conservative states.” (See, “Gun Control Effort Had No Real Chance, Despite Pleas.”)

Most Americans will chalk this up to “politics,” of course, and fall back on their mistrust of “politicians.” That’s not wrong, but what does it actually mean? What is it about politicians that makes them, well, “politicians” – always looking over their shoulders, so often unable to do the right thing?

As Basil Smikle, an adjunct professor Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, put it: “the hard truth is that many legislators are concerned with re-election rather than building consensus around issues that preoccupy their constituents.” Their ostensible job is to serve the interests of those they represent, to pass laws that enhance the prosperity, safety, and essential needs of citizens. But their primary aim is actually their own re-election, the continuation of their own careers. That’s what their self-interest boils down to. (See, “When Senators Defy the Voters.”)

No doubt, then, they must have believed popular opinion in favor of enhanced gun control would not translate into votes — and they are probably right, as that is what they continually study. Moreover, they may well believe that the virulence and financial clout of the gun lobby would cost them votes had they approved any of these bills. Certainly it would make them targets in future campaigns. But it is almost certain that calculations of self-interest carried the day.

To be sure, there can be differences of opinion about the effectiveness of particular pieces of legislation, and how they will actually affect gun violence. But that is not what this is about.

We debate the issues as if the actual language of the bills matters. And senators talk that way, pretending that the issues really matter, that their votes are based on what they really thought, rather that calculations about re-election. And frankly, we go along with this most of the time because we would prefer to believe that there is rationality and logic in our system. We would like to believe that the course of public events can be influenced by thoughtful, well–intentioned people working together to arrive at a consensus.

But the real shock when the gun control bills went down to defeat was that the curtain of rationality that hides the workings of our system has been ripped away. We see our democracy in action.