Fin Keegan

A recent report by UNICEF on child well-being in rich countries seems to vindicate our decision to raise the kids in Ireland.

Across “six dimensions” averaging measures such as “Health and Safety” and “Subjective Well-Being”, the United Nations agency arrives at the conclusion that kids are best off being brought up in either Scandinavia/Switzerland, the Benelux, Spain/Italy, or Ireland.

The US and UK, though scoring high in Education (US) or Health/Safety (UK), manage to come dead last in the 21 OECD nations under analysis.

However, a closer look (click on table image below) reveals that free-market countries tend to fare poorly on these measures. Why? Because the internal wealth disparity is wider than society permits in, say, more socialist-leaning countries such as Sweden or France. And freedom of expression tends to be more valued in the UK and US, leading to lower scores for child “Behaviour and Risks”.

One corollary of this is that if you are wealthy (and thus healthy, safe, and well-educated) in the UK or US, your children’s well-being moves up to par with the countries at the top off the UNICEF table.

(Or it does if your “family and peer relationships” are not fractured: interestingly, the US/UK tradition of self-actualization means that, on that score, the two largest free-traders again trail their wealthy cohorts in Europe.)

Click on images above to enlarge data tables.

Source [PDF]: UNICEF, Child poverty in perspective: An overview of child well-being in rich countries, Innocenti Report Card 7 (Florence: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, 2007)

Recent riots in the Dublin suburb of Finglas and a teenage double suicide in my own county underline the responsibility we all have to help our young people grow up to become responsible, productive, and happy citizens. (Meanwhile, in my old home of Las Vegas, the radio station where I worked was hit by bullets following a post-school fracas across the street.)

The kids are not alright. An essay by Paul Graham examines adolescent unhappiness: his thesis, in a nutshell, is that because of the way we organize Western societies now teenagers are denied the experience of real and meaningful work in their teens. Money quote:

If life seems awful to kids, it’s neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It’s because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do.

But the problem is not that we choose to institutionally educate our children: the problem is how we teach them.

The trick is to teach our young their subjects as meaningful tools to live a better life. Literacy, numeracy, history, geography, and creativity can all be taught in a practical and useful way that has (and is perceived by the children themselves to have) direct benefits for themselves and their community.

Would the children of Finglas be so quick to destroy their environment if they had actually worked, through school, to determine it, say by planting trees or contributing to planning decisions? I do not think they would.

Paul Graham: Why Nerds are Unpopular: paulgraham.com, Feb, 2003

Image: ‘Halt’ by New York Observer on Flickr

One of the best dramas ever produced by television has just ended in a hail of ambiguities.

The Sopranos‘ dialogue, acting, conceptual wit, and direction have all been praised to the skies elsewhere. Like HBO stablemate Big Love, it is at once both believable and unbelievable that such lives could be lived in our modern world.

But, the deepest appeal of this mobster clan may be their elemental likeness to us: wealthy, or comparatively so, both we and they alike live with a radically split consciousness: worrying over our children, vain about our waistlines, more or less slaves to our appetites, we remain wilfully ignorant of the pain of those (the victims; the poor; the powerless) upon whom our lifestyle is based.

If Chinese peasants-turned-factory-workers, to take but one example, were to successfully organize for fair working conditions tomorrow, our cheap clothing and footwear would be gone in a week.

For Tony Soprano there is “out there” and “in here”, with markedly different rules and moral imperatives at work in each context: aren’t we all a little like him?

It’s hard to think of another nation as principled as the United States: the system of government and values, as set out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, is a richly conceived philosophy, many of whose propositions and imperatives are not only known by rote but also profoundly grasped by her citizens.

The Enlightenment values upon which the American system rests are equally impeccable: Freedom, Equality, and the Dignity of the Individual. One cannot find fault with them.

But the massacres of Baghdad and Blacksburg alike illustrate the difficulty we face: our ideals confound human frailty: as time wears on, the gap between Principle and Reality grows wider.

In Iraq, the right thing to do was to depose Saddam Hussein–but we were patently the wrong people to do it: in fact, the only right people to do it were the Iraqis. Taking their history away from them proved catastrophic.

At home, meanwhile, the moral laxity of our response to the Virginia Tech massacre (i.e. the refusal to examine our gun culture) exposes the danger of attachment to principles that may seem eternal and necessary but are anything but. We need to outgrow our childish fascination with firearms, together with the delusions of power it embodies.

The principle is not the issue: we are.

Listening to Margaret Atwood recently, defining Canada’s identity solely in terms of its heavyweight neighbour, made me fear for the future of smaller, peripheral nations such as Canada and my own native country, Ireland.

With globalisation of culture and commerce rising around us as inexorably as the oceans, our Nation States are showing signs of disintegration: Anglo-Canada’s identity seems to be dwindling down to “NotAmerica.ca”, Ireland’s to “NotTheUK.ie”, and Francophone-Europe to “PasLaFrance.zut”.

Dubliners, when not gossipping into their cellphones or weeping over the tribulations of English celebrities and soccer teams (AKA corporations) , are forever telling us how confident and well-adjusted into Europeanness they are: so well-adjusted that if you describe them as British, which they largely are, they almost suffer a stroke.

But, if there is no positive identity behind the rhetoric, what is the point of carrying on, except out of an atavistic vanity? Dublin now has reverted to the quasi-English city it was when Queen Victoria visited, only with designer icons in place of Union Jacks; all one ever hears from Anglophone Canadians is how frightful it is to be mistaken for Americans.

The fact is that Mother Tongue more than Location or even History, mass trauma aside, defines groups most exactly and the foundational slogans of the New Exceptionalists (Ireland and Canada, e.g.) will quickly wear thin when actual sacrifice is called for (e.g. meeting the true costs of Defense, Counter-Terrorism, or Oil)

Margaret Atwood was speaking on ABC Radio Australia.

John C. Goodman and Laurence Kotlikoff have put together a modified version of Steve Forbes’ famous flat tax plan.

What I like about their plan (linked below) is the implicit distinction between “rich” and “poor” dollars, i.e. the acknowledgment that one’s ten-thousandth dollar has a different meaning, and hence value, from one’s ten-millionth dollar.

However, I think we should go further: continued progressivity to tax saturation. In other words: a universal salary cap.

Why? Because there is nothing, beyond single-handedly curing premature death, that any human being can do that merits earning on the current level of our billionaire class.

We’ve become so used to the endless pursuit of personal wealth that nobody thinks it odd anymore but, as any Martian will tell you, no mortal, American or otherwise, has any true need (or actual want, indeed) of their twenty-seventh million dollar wad.

Therefore I propose that the tax rate kicks in at the level suggested by Kotlikoff and Goodman ($46,000 for families) and thencefrom progresses at an evenly growing tax rate until, at $4.6 million, say, the rate terminates, necessarily, at 100%.

Granted, there will be a challenge to society (for one, how to re-allocate the money without bloating government) and the makers of fine shower curtains and umbrella stands might notice a dip in sales–but we would, on the up-side of my plan, be spared the obscene and ultimately damaging kink of our current system: wealth obesity.

Reference: John C. Goodman: A Kinder, Gentler Flat Tax Forbes, September 29th, 2005

We were newly-minted parents, living three miles from the World Trade Center. On September 11th, 2001 we saw, from our Brooklyn bedroom, the Twin Towers smoking black in strangely equal plumes and then, loudly, unbelievably, vanishing.

Before they fell, with the second plane having already hit, I went out to buy water and supplies. Our Polish neighbour, a refugee from the war, stood in a smock and hairnet on her stoop. Bewildered, she stared up, over the facing row of brownstones and trees, at the pair of now-chimneys and their pitch-black exhalation.
     She had been laundering in her basement all morning: her industry made of our respective yards a telling contrast. “What has happened?” she asked, both vowels and consonants still shaped by a long-swallowed-up Middle Europe.
     I told her that fires had broken out: nothing about the planes, the express intent connoted by a second strike. How to tell her, of all people, that a new and dreadful chapter of human history had just been opened before our eyes? But I should have–and also assured her of the supplies I was getting for ourselves and the baby.
     At the store Ling, the Malyasian shopkeeper, and I pooled our information. Behind me a child, standing with her mother and little brother, burst out crying: their father worked at the World Financial Center.
     We worked to persuade her that it was the adjacent World Trade Center that had been hit. We all knew, the child as much as the mother and wife, that he was, in any event, gravely endangered.
     A few days later, through smoke swirling in massive arc lights, I saw up close what the titanic forces of hatred had unleashed on our city: savage minds had twisted like pipecleaners the mighty steel and concrete–and confidence–of downtown Manhattan.
     And since? Only a poet could come closer than Peggy Noonan has:

For something like four years 9/11 was for me a bruise in my heart. Someone would refer to it or I’d see a picture in a newspaper and I’d experience it as a pressing on the bruise, and I’d hurt. My feelings were immediately accessible and immediately there. This year for the first time it is not a bruise but a scar–jagged, less open to remedy, comparatively numb. My heart has healed and is ever altered

Quote: Peggy Noonan The Storm Before the Balm Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2005

Mortimer Zuckerman draws a telling comparison between a natural disaster that befell a key swing state in an election year and one that, well, didn’t:

Contrast [the response to Katrina] with the hurricanes that struck Florida last year, when federal officials pulled off a tour de force, pouring billions of dollars to help distressed residents while tractor trailers with ice, water, and other supplies waited on the state’s borders until the storm passed. As soon as it did, help was rushed to the areas hardest hit, with National Guard troops on the scene quickly, directing traffic, and keeping looters out of damaged neighborhoods. President Bush was on the scene then within 48 hours. The suspicion now will not easily be eradicated that the difference was that it was an election year

Source: M. Zuckerman: Uncalm after the storm, US News and World Report, Sept 7th, 2005

It’s not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now

–Aaron Broussard, President of Jefferson Parish Council, Jefferson, Louisiana
Source: Meet The Press, NBC, Sept 4th, 2005

Feeling Quixotic, I sent the following letter to Pennsylvania Avenue on September 3rd:

Your performance, Mr President, and those of your appointees in Homeland Security/FEMA, has been a national disgrace, leading to needless suffering and death.

Since January 2000, you, your policies, and your administration, have failed to a degree that, as of this writing, imperils the well-being of the Nation. You are no longer fit to lead us. Once order has been restored–and not only dignity, but basic human rights, have been returned to the innocent victims of this artificially-compounded disaster–you and your cabinet should resign and make way for a restorative, cross-party government

Since resignation is unlikely, the onus falls on responsible Republicans and Democrats to act. And that means impeachment.