Lift yourself by your bootstraps?

How do you lift yourself by your bootstraps when somebody else has cut your bootstraps off?

Inspired by Nicholas Kristoff, "Too Small to Fail", New York Times, 2016-06-02, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/opinion/building-childrens-brains.html.

He mentioned a study in which one-fifth of the children in West Virginia are born with alcohol or drugs in their system.

Or put another way, how can you win a race barefoot against those who have the latest high-tech shoes?  Sure, some Kenyans practice barefoot and win a lot of long distance races, but they have lots of opportunity to practice.  And they have lots of role models. How much practice in study can a child get in a house without books where the TV is on constantly? 

Why snail research is important

On a Bill Maher show, "Stephen Moore, libertarian economist and Wall Street Journal columnist" kept pounding away that we must reduce the debt and one way to do that is to cut funding for science grants, like $2 million for snail mating research.  "19-year-old Zack Kopplin, science advocate and history student" retorted that government-sponsored science often gives far better returns than many investments.  He gave as an example that the government investment in genome research paid back 140 times the investment.  See "College Kid Forced To Remind Know-It-All Economist That He's Actually Not A Scientist".

Warning: this segment deteriorates into a shouting match!

I might add, would we be reading these stories if the government hadn't invested in the Internet decades ago?  Would we have had Google if the government hadn't given a California university a grant to study search algorithms?

About the snail mating research, "it's to prevent children in developing countries from getting parasitic worms…"  Why should we protect these children from parasitic worms?  Parasites increase poverty.  Poverty leads to corruption.  Corruption leads to terrorism.  Two million dollars is a much better investment to prevent terrorism than two hundred million dollars and rising per F-35, a plane that still has many problems.

The party of pluck and luck versus the parties of cluck

I started to read a tribute to Andrew Breitbart, ("Andrew Breitbart's final message to the left" by Star Parker, Scripps Howard News Service, 2012-03-02) a severe critic of the "left", and couldn't read any further.  Like so much writing nowadays, no matter the source, it gives sweeping praise to "our side" and sweeping castigation to "the other side".

We have those who have financial resources claiming that they earned their wealth, and those who feel that many have been left behind have been put there through no fault of their own by those with excessive wealth.

Parker claims that the wealthy have more stable families, et cetera, et cetera; and that the poor have out-of-wedlock births and single parent families, et cetera, et cetera.  Could it be that the more wealthy have more resources to hide their dysfunctional families?  Could it be that the less wealthy have these problems because they are less wealthy?

Parker blames the left for creating all these problems, including the sexual revolution which increased poverty.

I got news for Parker and others who blame those who are trying to solve certain problems for creating those problems.  They have been around for centuries.

I was born in March 1938, supposedly six weeks premature at 8+ pounds.  My parents were divorced in 1943.  When I was in college, my mother showed me her marriage certificate; she was married in September 1937.  You do the math.

Many years later I found out that my great-grandfather left his family in 1904 because he loved women and wine.  Even later I found out that his likely father, born in 1818, probably had a "girl in every port" - one in Brooklyn, New York, one in Baltimore, Maryland, and one in Liverpool, England.  The person with my surname married in Liverpool gave his father's name as Vincent Magree.  Vincent Magree was listed in the 1840 census in Baltimore with a male between 10 and 15 years old.

Well, some of the descendants became college-educated and well-paid, some continued to struggle, and some just muddled.

I can't speak for all my relatives as to how they arrived where they did, but I know my own life has been a crazy stew of pluck and luck.  I had a family that expected me to do well in school.  But many were the times I could have blown it with some stupid act.  I had a teacher who encouraged us to go to a highly-rated engineering school.  I had an assistant principal who found a full-scholarship for me to that school.  I blew that by being unsure of what I wanted to do.  I had a registrar in another college accept me and encourage me to study mathematics.  That got me into graduate school in the school I flunked out of.  That school happened to be buying a new computer.  The manufacturer of that computer was hiring and hired me.  And on and on with ups and downs.  Some of these because I kept trying, some because somebody helped me, some because I kept screwing up.  Pluck and luck, over and over again.

Right now we have two parties of "cluck".  One claims that the wealthy are solely responsible for their wealth without recognizing all the clerks, laborers, and government institutions that supported them.  The other claims that the wealthy are solely responsible for the problems of the poor without recognizing that that some of those problems (not all) are self-inflicted.  These are the factions that James Madison warned about in Federalist No. 10

We really need a party of "pluck and luck".  One that recognizes that problems go beyond blame, that many of these problems have been with our country since before the Revolution, and that we have to keep trying to provide some means of increasing the opportunities for both pluck and luck.  We need a party that truly recognizes the problem of balancing "public good and private rights" - James Madison, Federalist No. 10.

More on the changing economy

David Brooks wrote an interesting column on how we are changing from making stuff to creating ideas or protocols, ways of doing things. See "The Protocol Society", New York Times, 2009-12-22.

I checked on the local availability of the books Brooks recommended: "From Poverty to Prosperity" and "Smart World". Neither the Duluth Public Library nor the UMD Library has either book.

Are we changing fast enough? Are we too concerned about jobs for doing the same old things few want to pay for? Shouldn't we be more concerned about opportunities to bring forth new ideas? Is "No Child Left Behind" more about training kids to make stuff rather than to create ideas? Are our politicians more interested about protecting companies and industries that make stuff rather than encouraging companies and industries that make protocols?

Sometimes I think we have more of the prerequisites than any other country to move to a protocol society, and sometimes I think by we are going to let other countries get there first.