Author Archives: Chris Johnson

About Chris Johnson

Chris Johnson is a long-time software engineer, architectural hobbyist, and urban-planning avocationist.

Past time for coronavirus inconvenience

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Are American government institutions, businesses, schools and private organizations doing enough – soon enough – to protect American citizens from coronavirus?  Are the measures currently taken adequate to prevent a nationwide medical care disaster and large numbers of resulting deaths?  Quite probably not, and hence this posting.

First, a contrasting look at what the cities of St. Louis and Philadelphia experienced in the 1918 influenza pandemic.  The graph below shows the number of deaths per 100,000 people for the two cities.

St. Louis versus Philadelphia during 1918 flu epidemic, show how social distancing saved St. Louis from the disaster Philly had

St. Louis vs. Philadelphia death rates in 1918 flu epidemic

What was the difference?  It was how each city responded to the first cases of influenza showing up in their cities.  The difference makes a good case showing that social distancing does work.  In Philadelphia, the first case was reported on September 17 and authorities downplayed the significance of the case.  They even allowed a city-wide parade to happen on September 28.  School closures and bans on public gatherings did not happen until October 3, sixteen days since the first case. Meanwhile, St. Louis had its first case on October 5 and the city implemented social distancing measures two days later.

Protective measures, such as self-isolation and canceling large gatherings, will delay and decrease the outbreak peak, reduce the burden on hospitals at a given time, and decrease the overall number of cases.

Animated Flatten the curve

Without efforts to slow the spread, COVID-19 will likely infect a lot more people than can be handled in the short term by hospitals.  But if we slow the spread, and there are fewer people in need of care at the same time, there would be fewer medical shortages.

A study conducted last month from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention provides statistics about the lethality of COVID-19.  Those statistics were analyzed by Business Insider.You can see those statistics in the graph above. Younger people have a one in 10,000 (0.01%) chance of dying from the flu and a one in 500 (0.2%) chance of dying from COVID-19. So, COVID-19 is twenty times more lethal for a 15-year old than the flu. That mortality rate rises quickly as the victims get older.

For 55-year olds who contract COVID-19, between one and two of 100 will die of the disease. That’s twenty-two times the mortality rate of the flu.  However, the real jump occurs in those who are 60 and above. Almost 15% (1 in 7) of those aged 80+ will die if they contract the coronavirus.

There is yet no vaccine against COVID-19. There is no cure. The only way for a 60+ year old to avoid a 3.6% – 14.8% chance of dying is to avoid the disease. The real odds of dying are the infection rate multiplied by the mortality rate. But once you contract the disease, you are far more likely to die than if you contracted the flu.

Is there any activity on Earth that a rational person would undertake with a 3.6% – 14.8% chance of dying?  For comparison purposes, an American sent to fight in Vietnam had about a 0.5% chance of dying.

Given those odds, is it really hysteria to cancel fan participation at sporting events, close schools and implement other containment measures?  Our only defense is distance and containment and those come with a fair amount of inconvenience. What is the alternative? Hope is not a strategy.

In Favor of Small Farms

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Small farms are economic engines for the countryside. Large corporate farms are generally extractive industries.  The latter are employers of labor, such as machine drivers. They provide fewer jobs both on the farm, and in supporting small towns than the more numerous small farms they replace.

I’m undoubtedly biased, having seen the changes where my mom grew up in Wisconsin. It was on a small farm, on a county road lined by many small farms. All of the former parcels of land along the county road has been converted into one gigantic soybean field. There are two employees who live in town, and who commute to the machine shed each day they’re needed. They drive giant automated tractors all day long, and then go home.  There is no farm there.

Soybean field

Soybean field

The land is owned by, and the tractor drivers are employed by, some corporation that may not even pay income taxes in the state, since their corporate HQ is elsewhere. As a result of this kind of agricultural consolidation, small Wisconsin towns, near my mom grew up on the farm, as well as the small town father grew up in, are now almost ghost towns. They used to be busy with stores, churches, bars and schools providing for the now absent hundreds of small farms around them.

This isn’t simple pining for a life style that’s changed, or a time that’s gone.  I’ve never lived on a farm or in the country.  Instead, I believe there are significant benefits to society, the environment, the economy and the security of the nation in having numerous small farms, supporting numerous small towns, much like American of the early 20th century.

Aerial view of old farm

Family farm circa 1950

These changes were not necessarily inevitable, but were instead the result of government policies and unfettered capitalistic profit over everything behavior.  But it only works that way in the short term.  Long term, society suffers and then the economy suffers.

In addition to being economic engines, small farms – especially family-owned small farms – provide numerous other benefits.  When you know you will likely pass your farm onto your children, you’re inclined to take better care of the soil, preventing erosion and depletion and contamination.  When there are numerous prosperous small towns, there are more small business economic opportunities.

Those same towns also make community – the knowing and supporting the people around you – generally easier to achieve.  It’s not impossible in large cities, but it’s a lot easier to become a lost and isolated.  Not everyone is cut out for living in a big city, just as not everyone is cut out for living in a remote area.  More farms and more small towns provide a much larger variety of opportunities to fit the varying dispositions and habits of the humans making up society.

The extractive, end-stage capitalism of huge industrialized agriculture produces mostly negatives for society.  We should encourage a return to the more human-scale, more resilient, more anti-fragile benefits of small farms.

Tim Pawlenty

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It’s primary election day here in Minnesota, and the field is full of choices for both Republicans and Democrats.  One Republican choice for governor is unsurprisingly former governor Tim Pawlenty, who is running against the Republican Party endorsed candidate.

I recently received some campaign literature from the Pawlenty campaign.  In it, Pawlenty claims to have balanced the Minnesota budget as governor, after being handed a budget deficit.  Apparently Pawlenty thinks only kids who were not around then or old folks with poor memories will be reading his campaign literature, because the rest of us know the claim to be a complete lie.

Let me quote from a 2009 editorial† from the Timberjay, a newspaper published in northern Minnesota:

The budget plan that the governor has proposed includes a deficit of approximately $1 billion, even after nearly $2 billion in federal stimulus funding is included. The governor proposes to address that deficit by issuing bonds, which will supposedly be repaid through future proceeds from the state’s tobacco settlement. With interest, the bonds will require payment of a total of $1.7 billion over 20 years.

…

There is, of course, a very simple reason behind the governor’s deficit spending. His reckless “no-new-taxes” pledge in conjunction with tax policy changes he backed as House Majority Leader, have left the state with an essentially permanent budget deficit.

…

Pawlenty now proposes to deal with the situation he helped create by longterm borrowing that will only exacerbate the problem for future state leaders by stealing future revenues to pay for operational spending today. What we have is a governor who claims the mantle of fiscal conservatism while proposing the most fiscally damaging solution to a state budget crisis since the founding of the state.

And he has the guts to call Washington irresponsible?

That’s pretty damning, in my book.  Even more so when one realizes the region in which the Timberjay is published is generally conservative, and not a Democrat stronghold.

The Timberjay editorial staff hasn’t gotten to like Pawlenty much more over the years.  On July 18 of this year, they wrote another scathing article, saying:

A former governor with an abysmal record seeks an encore. Voters should say, “No thanks.”

You can read it online here:  http://timberjay.com/stories/pawlenty-weve-had-plenty,14225?

There’s endless evidence that Pawlenty was a dishonest, double-talking and generally bad governor.  I may be motivated to dig up more of it, if he makes it past the primary.

 

†The Timberjay site no longer has a copy of this editorial, but the quoted portions can be found on this blog post from 2009:  http://middlebrow_mn.blogspot.com/2009/04/who-supports-pawlenty-these-days.html

A Cautionary Tale

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On January 15, 2018, Carillion, a general contractor for an amazing array of work for the United Kingdom’s government sector, collapsed into compulsory liquidation.  The collapse calls into question the prospects of its 43,000 employees and 30,000 subcontractors, as well as the fulfillment of government contracts spanning three decades into the future.

Carillion’s fall also calls into question the entire political philosophy that it and other companies now operate under around the world.  It exemplified a way of privatizing government functions pioneered by Britain’s former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and was then copied widely by other nations, especially America beginning under the Reagan administration.  Where once governments provided public services, they now contract them from private companies.  The argument is that doing so will subject moribund state monopolies to the competition and innovation of the market.

Carillion shows just how wrong-headed this argument is.  Not only are there the moral hazard[1] and rent-seeking[2] behaviors, but it is aggravated by the market’s unhealthy concentration.  It’s a similar situation in other privatization industries.  Only three companies operate private prisons in American and Britain.  Governments frequently contract for massive, long-term projects based on fewer bids than the average voter would use to renovate their kitchens.

The corruption, inefficiencies and lack of innovation blamed on government is even worse within these large companies providing government services.  There is also greed.  Carillion’s board ensured that the bonuses of its managers cannot be clawed back, even while the company was losing billions of dollars.  Carillion ‘wriggled out’ of payments into its company pension schemes as its troubles grew, while it carried on paying shareholder dividends and bosses’ bonuses.

Does this sound like a political model that is good for society and its citizens?

 

 

1. Moral hazard is the risk that a party to a transaction has not entered into the contract in good faith, has provided misleading information about its assets, liabilities or credit capacity, or has an incentive to take unusual risks in a desperate attempt to earn a profit before the contract settles.

2. Rent-seeking is the use of the resources of a company, an organization or an individual to obtain economic gain from others without reciprocating any benefits to society through wealth creation. An example of rent-seeking is when a company lobbies the government for loan subsidies, grants or tariff protection.

How Politics as Usual Failed

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Vote HereHow did America, the “Shining City upon a Hill”† manage to elect a thin-skinned, sexist, racist cretin as a president?  It just seems crazy — until one begins to analyze the depths of despair some large segments of American society have experienced over the past few decades.  And realize how far a desperate people will go.

American journalist and author Glenn Greenwald describes the large reasons why Clinton and the Democratic Party failed to prevail over Trump in his essay in The Intercept today (Nov. 9).  Titled “Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit” it outlines three major points last night’s election results illustrate.  They are:

  1. Democrats have already begun flailing around trying to blame anyone and everyone they can find — everyone except themselves — for last night’s crushing defeat of their party.
  2. That racism, misogyny, and xenophobia are pervasive in all sectors of America is indisputable from even a casual glance at its history, both distant and recent.
  3. Over the last six decades, and particularly over the last 15 years of the endless war on terror, both political parties have joined to construct a frightening and unprecedentedly invasive and destructive system of authoritarian power, accompanied by the unbridled authority vested in the executive branch to use it.

While the entire article is worth reading, the reasons why Democrats blame everyone but themselves (#1 above) and what needs to change most interests me here.  As Greenwald write in July about Brexit, so is true here (emphasis mine):

Instead of acknowledging and addressing the fundamental flaws within themselves, [elites] are devoting their energies to demonizing the victims of their corruption, all in order to delegitimize those grievances and thus relieve themselves of responsibility to meaningfully address them. That reaction only serves to bolster, if not vindicate, the animating perceptions that these elite institutions are hopelessly self-interested, toxic, and destructive and thus cannot be reformed but rather must be destroyed. That, in turn, only ensures there will be many more Brexits, and Trumps, in our collective future.

The elites in this case are the economic elite (the 1%, in both parties), the political elite and the most influential members of the press (journalists).  They collectively caused or ignored or denigrated the plight of many Americans who would go on to vote for Trump.  Greenwald again:

The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. While elite circles gorged themselves on globalism, free trade, Wall Street casino gambling, and endless wars (wars that enriched the perpetrators and sent the poorest and most marginalized to bear all their burdens), they completely ignored the victims of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit too much — when they caused a ruckus — and were then scornfully condemned as troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious, global game of meritocracy.

That message was heard loud and clear. The institutions and elite factions that have spent years mocking, maligning, and pillaging large portions of the population — all while compiling their own long record of failure and corruption and destruction — are now shocked that their dictates and decrees go unheeded. But human beings are not going to follow and obey the exact people they most blame for their suffering. They’re going to do exactly the opposite: purposely defy them and try to impose punishment in retaliation. Their instruments for retaliation are Brexit and Trump. Those are their agents, dispatched on a mission of destruction: aimed at a system and culture they regard — not without reason — as rife with corruption and, above all else, contempt for them and their welfare.

That dam was eventually going to burst.  And it did, in this election where against odds and expectations and prognostications and common decency, they elected Trump.

This oppressive system absolutely needs destruction.  But who could do it?  Who could clean up the mess?  Surely there are decent men and women out there who can see it and could do something about it, if they were President.  Except.  In this country, in this day, only the most connected, most egotistical and most wealthy have any chance at all at winning such an election.

Trump was, in a perverse way, just the right man for the job.  He was wealthy enough and ego-driven enough, and had enough fame, that he could get elected and upset the apple cart.  Will he, not through good intentions and moral character, but rather via outraged supporters and simple chaos be enough to provoke the needed change?  Can he cause the Democratic Party or even the Republican Party to throw off their institutional, elitist self-serving policies and behaviors?

Let’s hope so.

 

†From the 1630 sermon “A Model of Christian Charity” preached by Puritan John Winthrop while still aboard the ship Arbella with future Massachusetts Bay colonists.

 

Photo credit:  @nodigio on Flickr, CC by attribution.

Fuzzy Math: Assailing Baby Boomers

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In a recent article by Melissa Healy of the Los Angeles Times (and syndicated to other newspapers like the Minneapolis Star Tribune), she lays out a horror story about Alzheimer’s.  She writes:

Over the next 35 years, about 28 million baby boomers will likely develop Alzheimer’s disease, and the annual bill for their care will balloon from $11.9 billion in 2020 to more than $328 billion in 2040, says an analysis released last week.

Those numbers do not pass the smell test — at all.  I’ll show you why in a moment.  Clearly one of two things happened.  Either reporter Healy paraphrased what the analysis really said, and distorted the accuracy of the data in the process (possibly by attributing all Alzheimer’s cases to baby boomers, and not to the entire population).  Or Healy didn’t do adequate fact checking, and the analysis itself is completely bogus.

Why?  Let’s look into the numbers a bit.

Baby boomers are those Americans born between 1946 and 1964.  According to the Census Bureau, there were a total of 76 million births during those years.  (Strangely, when I add up the births per year for each of those years, I get about 74 million when rounding to the nearest ten-thousand.)

A first “smell test” or “do the numbers even make sense” question would be to ask, could there really be 28 million out of 76 million people getting Alzheimer’s disease?  That’s an astonishing 36.8%, more than one in three, people will develop Alzheimer’s over the next 35 years!  It’s an epidemic!  Or is it?

The same organization that provided the numbers used by journalist Healy also says this (PDF):

  • 11 percent of people age 65 and older have Alzheimer’s.
  • 32 percent of people age 85 and older have Alzheimer’s.

Even if you believe those above numbers, there’s no way to get to 36.8% of 76 million baby boomers.  First, 11 million of those 76 million boomers had already died by the year 2012.

Inconveniently, we also had just over 11 million immigrants of the same age, so we were at about 76 million (76.4 to be more exact) baby boomer aged people living in the USA — in 2012.  Do all immigrant baby boomers get Alzheimer’s?  Something is needed to pull the average up.

The average lifespan for baby boomers ranges from 62.9 years to 69.7.  Over those coming 35 years when this Alzheimer’s epidemic among baby boomers is supposed to occur, what age will boomers be?

In 2015, the oldest were 2015 minus 1946 equals 69.  Already the oldest were at the average age of death.  The youngest were 2015 minus 1964 equals 51.  Most of the youngest can be presumed to be still alive.  Since it’s an average age of death, not a median, we cannot literally say half of the oldest are already dead, but certainly a significant number are.

In 35 years, in 2050, when we will allegedly have had 28 million baby boomers develop Alzheimer’s, the oldest boomers will be 2050 minus 1946 equals 104.  Oh hey, I’m sure there will be lots of those!  And the youngest boomers will be only 2050 minus 1964 equals 86 — for a group of people who on average die at age 66.9 for men and 73.7 for women.

So how many baby boomers will even be alive in 2050?  Some estimates put that number at about 18 million.  There’s only about 75 million alive today in 2015.  By 2028, the number is estimated to fall to 65 million.

Clearly there cannot be 28 million baby boomers with Alzheimer’s in 35 years (2050), since there will be far less than that number even alive.

The only ways to get to 28 million baby boomers with Alzheimer’s disease over the next 35 years is to assume nearly all of the boomers alive today in 2015 will live to be 85 years of age, far exceeding all the actuarial table estimates.  Or that Alzheimer’s will actually cause the death of more than a third of those alive.

All the numbers say that heart disease, lung cancer, lung disease, diabetes and strokes lead that hit parade, though.  For adults over 65, Alzheimer’s comes in number 10 behind 9 other deadly causes.

Clearly that 28 million baby boomers with Alzheimer’s number is bogus.

How did it get that way?  Maybe it was meant to be 28 million newly diagnosed cases of Alzheimer’s over the next 35 years in US residents of all ages, not just boomers?  Or even adult residents, since over 35 years, a lot of Generation X will become senior citizens, and even Millennials will be hitting late middle age.  Or maybe the Alzheimer’s Association’s math is a bit fuzzy, and in calculating that number, they mixed apples and oranges because it looked so impressive.  Likely it’s to the Association’s advantage to have bigger numbers.

Regardless, even without doing all the math above, 28 million out of 76 million adults alive today are not all going to develop Alzheimer’s.  It’s that simple.  It fails the smell test.

National Automobile Slum

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What many people probably call suburban sprawl, James Howard Kunstler likes to call the “national automobile slum.” He also thinks it’s appropriate to call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. Kunstler’s TED Talk titled “The ghastly tragedy of the suburbs” is worthy of watching.

Despite the sometimes flamboyant language used by Kunstler, he has done some deep thinking about what makes America worth preserving and defending. Kunstler starts by talking about what makes any place worth caring about. The major characteristic about them is a sense of place. He describes sense of place like this:

“[Y]our ability to create places that are meaningful and places of quality and character depends entirely on your ability to define space with buildings, and to employ the vocabularies, grammars, syntaxes, rhythms and patterns of architecture in order to inform us who we are.”

Importantly, this sense of place is highly connected to who we are as Americans, how our particular form of civilization is maintained and understood by its citizens in a common way. Quoting Kunstler again, as he describes this so well:

“The public realm in America has two roles: it is the dwelling place of our civilization and our civic life, and it is the physical manifestation of the common good. And when you degrade the public realm, you will automatically degrade the quality of your civic life and the character of all the enactments of your public life and communal life that take place there. The public realm comes mostly in the form of the street in America because we don’t have the 1,000-year-old cathedral plazas and market squares of older cultures. And your ability to define space and to create places that are worth caring about all comes from a body of culture that we call the culture of civic design.”

2502675002_ce2eb6e7eb_oSo what’s wrong? How did we end up here? After World War II, we collectively threw that body of historical knowledge about how the public realm worked into the garbage. We thought we knew better, or could create something better from whole cloth. It was the jet age! The space age! Cheap money (low-interest, subsidized loans) and massive highway expansion fueled sprawling new housing tracts and a blurring of the lines between city and country. And consequently, we can now see the result all around us.

 

GeographyofNowhere

All too soon we will also see how this post-war style of building and civic-hostile public spaces is not just bad for our psyche and our civic life, but economically untenable. We simply cannot afford this kind of built environment, and the loans from the past 70 years since World War II are going to come due.

Do we want to save our places from decay? I’ll let Kunstler have the last word:

“We have about, you know, 38,000 places that are not worth caring about in the United States today. When we have enough of them, we’re going to have a nation that’s not worth defending.”

The Highway System is Going to Shrink

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Recently, the director of the Iowa Department of Transportation Paul Trombino made these remarks about the highways his department is responsible for in Iowa:

I said the numbers before. 114,000 lane miles, 25,000 bridges, 4,000 miles of rail. I said this a lot in my conversation when we were talking about fuel tax increases. It’s not affordable. Nobody’s going to pay.

… And so the reality is, the system is going to shrink.

There’s nothing I have to do. Bridges close themselves. Roads deteriorate and go away. That’s what happens.

And reality is, for us, let’s not let the system degrade and then we’re left with sorta whatever’s left. Let’s try to make a conscious choice – it’s not going to be perfect, I would agree it’s going to be complex and messy – but let’s figure out which ones we really want to keep.

And quite honestly, it’s not everything that we have, which means some changes.

Many DOT directors around the country privately admit to a similar kind of thinking, but Mr. Trombino is the first to say it aloud to the public, for which he should be lauded — and emulated.  Because the cold, financial truth is, we have way overbuilt our national roadway system compared to what we can afford or be willing to pay to maintain.  We’ve done this because as a result of a 60-year experiment with auto-oriented infrastructure, cheap money (borrowing) and faulty government policies and incentives that have aided and abetted this flawed idea.

For the last few decades, I have been become increasingly thoughtful about auto-centric planning and its profound impact on our nation’s infrastructure and urban development.  Many people never really think about our country’s decaying infrastructure until they blow a tire when their auto runs over a neglected pothole, but even the densest politician realizes our transportation infrastructure is broken.  Conventional wisdom suggests we should throw a lot of money at our decaying road, bridge and rail system to fix it.

I insist that no new roads should be built until the nation’s existing road infrastructure is fixed.  This may seem a little draconian given the fact politicians love to name new roads after themselves, but it’s become obvious that infrastructure planning over the past 60 years has revolved around the automobile rather than people.   Some would even suggest transportation planning was more of a social experiment than any real attempt to develop a limited but effective transportation system.

Regardless of one’s point of view, our current infrastructure planning requires quite a bit of rethinking.  Especially at the city level, we lost sight of what the infrastructure is there for — the people.

The indicator species of a successful city is not the automobile, it’s people.

The Withering Middle Class

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The Economic Policy Institute has estimated if the middle class had increased their incomes at the same rate the last several decades as the top 1% have, the average middle class family would be making $156,000 a year.  Instead, the average is currently $72,036.

(EPI defines the middle class as those in the nation’s 20% to 80% income range, and used data through 2011. It uses Congressional Budget Office data, which includes gains from investments, as well as certain public assistance and employer health insurance.)

This probably comes as no surprise to people who have been paying attention, even if the Economic Policy Institute is somewhat left-leaning.  There’s no doubt most middle class workers’ salaries have remained mostly flat for the past 20 years or so.  Meanwhile, the 1% have seen gains like few times in history.

150630192042-chart-middle-class-keeping-up-780x439

 

If you’re in the 1%, you might not see a problem, other than perhaps having to listen to lots of whining from the middle class.  But when productivity increases tremendously as it has, but the middle class don’t enjoy any additional benefits from the improved results of their labor, problems ensue.  And those problems are bad for the 1% as well.

There’s somewhat obvious problems.  One is that the demand for social support nets become greater.  If you’re a 1% right-wing voter, you might be inclined to attempt to cut government support for those social programs, so that at least you don’t have to pay more taxes to support them.

A crashing middle class also means a crashing market for goods and services sold to the middle class.  While multi-national corporations may weather such a problem in one country such as the USA, with an economy as large as ours, these problems tend to spread.  And not every business can be a large multi-national.

Similarly with other problems.  There may be no immediate repercussions to your feudally wealthy lifestyle.  But some day the bill always comes due.  Violent ends and insurrections result.  “Let them eat cake” has never been a successful policy.

Instead, I posit, as have many others, that what’s good for the middle class is good for the country and is good for the 1% as well.