“And Such Small Portions…”

Obama wants to lengthen the school year and the school day. Probably the school week is the next target. Like the educational experts who have been suggesting all this extra time for the last twenty years, he has several different rationales. First, of course, the original school year was set up for an agrarian society in which the kids had to be home during the summer to tend to the crops. That’s quite true, and makes the classic June-through-August vacation an anachronism. Moreover, the data are pretty clear that such a long time out between school terms really does cause most kids to lose some of the learning they had accomplished the previous spring by the time they come back in the fall. So the longer school year has some solid facts behind it.

But, as the AP article points out (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090927/ap_on_re_us/us_mor), a longer school year doesn’t have to mean a longer school day: “Kids in the U.S. spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the U.S. on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days).” And AP isn’t even looking at European nations that start kids in school later (in Denmark and Sweden, as late as age 7), or with shorter school days than ours (in France, 8:30 AM to 2:30 PM with a 2-hour lunch break until age 11), that still have better literacy and graduation rates than we do. Whatever it is that American schools are doing in the classroom, it is not at all clear that more of it would be helpful to the students. It sounds too much like the irate restaurant patron who complains that the food is terrible and the portions are too small.

In fact, anyone who has worked with adult literacy programs can verify that it shouldn’t and usually doesn’t take anywhere near 12 years—even with current summer vacation and school day schedules–to teach what most high school graduates come out knowing. Note also that summer vacation has already suffered considerable abbreviation in many school districts. The whole idea of Labor Day as the last long weekend of summer (meaning, presumably, children’s summer vacation) now makes no sense at all. Almost all public schools start up around the middle of August these days, and many don’t shut down for the summer until nearly the end of June. (Which is a good argument for moving Memorial Day into late June and Labor Day into early August, but I digress.)
Compressing the school year even more than we are already doing may make sense, but lengthening the school day really doesn’t.

In fact, the justifications for a longer school day are entirely different, and a lot less plausible, than those for a longer school year. Obama (and most of the other people one hears declaiming on the subject) are mostly concerned, not about education, but about safety. “Those hours from 3 o’clock to 7 o’clock are times of high anxiety for parents,” [Secretary of Education Arne] Duncan sa[ys]. “They want their children safe. Families are working one and two and three jobs now to make ends meet and to keep food on the table.”

Yes, those safety concerns are valid. But what do they have to do with school? Why should professionally-educated adults who should be home grading today’s papers and preparing tomorrow’s lessons have to function as baby-sitters to keep Johnny from getting shot? That’s the job of recreation directors and supervisors, or at worst, of cops. And even more to the point, why should kids have to be on task and programmed for 8 hours a day, just because their parents are? At that point, the arguments against child labor start to fade into insignificance. When do the kids get to just “chill with their friends”? Or have we already accepted the premise that an unsupervised, unprogrammed child is a child at risk of crime, sex, drugs, or obesity, and that the only way to save our children from these dread fates is to subject them to the same scheduling that has already shredded the emotional and physical health of their parents and destroyed the family life that used to keep the children safe?

But, now that we have decided that all more or less able-bodied adults must spend at least 40 hours a week being paid to work for somebody else, we have also decided that anybody who looks after children has to be paid. For more recent data, see:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5intayNnUex0u2p2aPfl95SZitE9QD9B15QLO0 and
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8277378.stm

And, no, none of this has anything to do with feminism. It is mainly connected to stagnant wages and rising fixed living costs such as housing, health care, transportation, and education. Most stay-at-home mothers don’t view themselves as having chosen to stay home. See: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-census-momsoct02,0,3742466.story for why most stay-at-home mothers are younger, less educated, and have more children than the rest of the female population, so that their prospective earnings are lower and their child care costs would be higher.

I mention these stories because they have all hit the Web in the last 24 hours. But they do a lot to prove my point that the main reason we really want our kids to spend more time in school is that it’s the cheapest way to free parents to put in 40+ hours a week earning money. Once cryogenics has been perfected, we can keep our kids in a deep freeze until a couple of years before they are old enough to work. We can spend the intervening time teaching them what today’s high school graduates know, and go on from there. O brave new world, that hath such people in it!

CynThesis

It All Started With the Witch Doctor

Since our Fearless Leader wants more stuff on health care, I’m contributing an abbreviated version of my first lecture in a course I occasionally teach, called “Professional Standards for Mental Health Workers.”  It has a heavily historical/anthropological slant, since my students, though highly competent and hard-working, generally have a lousy background in history, which I feel puts them at a serious disadvantage.

Let’s start with the premise that all professions are priesthoods, and all originate with healing the sick.  Terms like “witch doctor” and “medicine man” point clearly in this direction.”  “Medicine”, in Native American religious tradition is a synonym for “religious ritual/power.”  Like most pre-industrial medical traditions, it is based on the assumption that “sickness” can arise from or affect the body, the intellect, the emotions, and the spirit, in varying combinations.  Among the Navaho, for instance, many illnesses are believed to result from “sleeping with kinfolk,” contamination from proximity to corpses, or witchcraft–that is, the improper behavior of the patient or somebody else.

So the “medicine man” has to know things about the patient that the patient would  never want to become public knowledge. The patient will submit to treatment (and pay the doctor) only if the confidentiality of that information can be guaranteed.

Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer, says that any technology we don’t understand is for all practical purposes magic. Healing the sick has always been one of the major attributes of divinities and their priests/shamans—a much more useful form of miracle than making water flow uphill or rods flower or whatever.  The ability to heal implies POWER, which is scary to those who lack it.  It implies, specifically, four kinds of power:
 power to heal
 power to withhold healing (“I don’t like you, or your brother killed my brother, so I won’t set your broken leg, nyah nyah nyah”)
 power to kill (anybody familiar with herbs knows poisons and abortifacients as   well as healing herbs)
 power derived from knowledge (about the natural world and about the patient–unavoidable access to confidential info) (imagine a delirious patient raving about a passionate interlude with a person to whom s/he is not married, for starters.)

So most cultures generate some kind of code for their priests and healers, to restrain this power and keep it channeled in paths likely to be useful for the culture as a whole. In this lecture, I assign the students to ask any professional or skilled craft person they meet during the week about the professional ethics of that craft, and get written documentation if possible.  I have gotten some fascinating samples: taxi drivers, sexual surrogates, veterinarians, child care workers, chefs—a long way from the Hippocratic Oath, which I generally see as the Ur-Document of its kind.  But they all have pretty much the same restrictions in common:
 Restrictions on use of knowledge and information
 first, do no harm:  for instance
 no poisons;
 in some cultures, no abortifacients
 no exposure of patients’ secrets (no blackmail)
 No favoritism in use of skills and knowledge, which must be made available to all, regardless of personality, affiliation, or resources
 No “overreaching”–using rare and necessary skills to extort undue recompense (pecuniary, or, for instance, sexual favors) (The course, naturally, has a whole lecture devoted exclusively to the issue of sex with patients/clients, which seems to be a problem for every profession with the possible exception of accountants, engineers, and veterinarians.  We’ve been blogging about Fountainhead lately, so you know it’s an issue for architects.)

The lecture then goes into a wildly condensed and popularized history of medicine, which I figure the various docs here are perfectly capable of providing us far beyond my poor amateurish power to add or detract.  The point of it, however, is not what technology and information has become available at various points in our history, but how we use it. Thus, it’s important to keep in mind that there is a big difference between:
(1) what we can conceive  of doing
(2) what we can actually do
(3) what we are  actually doing
(4) what most people actually have done.

These days we pretty much presume that we can develop any technology we decide we want to develop. The areas of cosmetic medicine, infertility treatment  and organ transplantation seem to be where we have actually decided we want to develop technology.  Economics is probably the driving force behind these choices.  Doing things people want is almost always more profitable than doing things people need.  It took medicine a while to come up with serious work in the former area, but now medical science has clearly taken that ball and run with it.  More about this later.
At the same time, mental health issues, which seem to be more and more salient as a source of real social problems, are being offered less and less attention from everybody except the drug companies.  This is probably economically driven too.  Drug companies can make lots of money in large gobs, while the more labor-intensive methods of treating mental illness dribble out the money in tiny drips to lots of people. .  The things psychotherapy can do–usually over long periods with close attention–are miles away from what most psychiatric patients actually get.
All of the chapters of the history of medicine exist in the US today, side by side, like the rings on a tree.  There is a ring in which sickness is still believed to result from the patient’s improper behavior (these days, we have given up on policing health in the bedroom, and taken up jackbooted thuggery in the dining room instead, but the results are the same.)  There is another ring in which the most drastic intervention is the most highly regarded (especially in the treatment  of cancer, where chemotherapy does a lot of the same thing that purges and bleeding used to do–the Ben Tre “destroy the village to save it” theory of medicine.)   There is a ring in which the doctor’s job is to keep the patient comfortable until nature takes its course (that’s what hospice care is all about.)  There is a ring in which medicine actually works, like a well-run car repair shop.  And finally, the local “wise woman” is still around (herbal shops and healers in Chinatown, Hispanic neighborhoods, and New Age enclaves, etc.)

The economics of medicine work differently in each of these rings.  Undoubtedly, whatever finally comes out of Congress (if anything) will not be fine-tuned to these distinctions.  Probably we should be looking for a minimalist and mostly-preventive approach: make sure everybody, regardless of ability to pay, gets vaccinations, wellness counseling, treatment for infectious diseases, mental health care, and palliative end-of-life care, and let the Almighty Free Market do everything else. Mental health care, BTW, should be required to include some treatment for whatever DSM-V calls the compulsion to scream and shout disruptively at public meetings.  Without it, our democracy cannot survive.

CynThesis

Dear Sir or Madman

Yesterday’s Yahoo news carried a piece on avoiding typos in one’s resume and cover letter to prospective employers, pointing out that the recipient would probably dump the offending documents in the nearest recycle bin upon catching the first such typo.  As a former English teacher, I can certainly sympathize with that response.  On the other hand, I suspect that most prospective employers are themselves ignorant of alot of such typo’s, and mere HR staffers would be even moreso.  Indeed, between you and I, many such solecisms were originally the fault of misguided English teachers to begin with (such as my son-in-law’s 4th grade teacher, whom he swears taught him never to use “and me”) and are therefore much more likely to be committed by people who really care about proper usage.

Of course, the corrolary to this rule is that many job applications may land in the circular file, not because of they’re poor grasp of English usage, but because of the recipients.

Jane Grey

The More Things Change…

Mr. Wired and I are spending a lazy summer Sunday afternoon listening to NPR, while Krista Tippett interviews an expert on children’s play, who tells us, wonder of wonders, that play is good for children.  Mr. Wired finds it annoying that Stuart Brown, the expert in question, is claiming credit for this discovery, when it was a commonplace while we were growing up.

Actually, it was a commonplace long before that. Froebel, the first official child psychologist, coined the phrase “Play is the child’s work” in the early 1800s.  Two hundred years earlier, John Commenius said some of the same things.  And Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, which quotes both of them, was published when Mr. Wired and I were in grade school.

That bothers Mr. Wired more than it bothers me.  Yes, it’s true that academic scholarship is supposed to be dedicated to giving credit where credit is due, rather than claiming three-hundred-year-old ideas as one’s own.  The rabbinic tradition says, BTW, that teaching something in the name of the person from whom one learned it hastens the redemption of the world.  I take this seriously, to the point where I publish all my blogging under Talmudic copyright—use my stuff as much as you like, just mention my name (or at least one of my pseudonyms) when you do.

But these days, we don’t want to know where good ideas came from originally.  The people who promulgate good ideas now want to be able to claim credit for them, at least if the only other contenders are safely dead or in the public domain and therefore not likely to sue.  If a scholar can’t take credit for passing on somebody else’s good idea, s/he won’t bother publishing it in the first place.  [In the case of the value of children’s play, that means a lot of young first-time parents won’t have access to that useful information and their children will be stuck in preschool 8 hours a day, without recess, learning their letters and colors and shapes beginning at age 3 and then popped in front of a TV set for the rest of the day.]  Scholarly ego, in short, serves the same sort of evolutionary purpose as the peacock’s display plumage, or the self-interest of Adam Smith’s pin manufacturer.  By allowing the scholar to promote himself, we allow him to promote ideas we all need to hear about.  Okay, we have a copy of Homo Ludens somewhere on our shelves, left over from my grad school years.  Our neighbors upstairs, raising a four-year-old and a toddler, don’t.  They need to hear these ideas somewhere. Their kids need them to hear those ideas even more.  Feeding a pseudo-scholar’s fraudulent ego is a small price to pay for that.

Jane Grey

Space Control: a Thought Experiment

This is an exercise I like to think of as “womanthink,” even though I know there are men who do it very well, and lots of women who don’t do it at all.  It asks three questions: What do we have lots of?  What do we need more of? How do we turn what we have into what we need?

For instance, the foreclosure crisis.  What it actually means is that we now have lots of unoccupied houses. At the same time, there is a shortage of rental housing, especially affordable rental housing.  How do we turn unoccupied houses into affordable rental housing?

In fact, this one is easy compared to, say, spinning flax into gold, or turning dog manure into transportation fuel.  Why don’t the banks, who own these unoccupied houses, get together with realtors, who at the moment have almost nothing to do with their time and no way to make a living, and have them rent out the houses, preferably on one- or two-year leases, so the tenants would stick around a while and take care of the property?

Yes, of course, most of those houses will have to be rehabbed before they are rentable.  Unless, of course, you want to take the thought experiment a bit further and rent them to people who are willing to invest some sweat equity into making them livable in order to live in them.  Say, in exchange for a waiver of the first month’s rent.

Which brings us to the next question: why isn’t it already happening?  Mr. Wired thinks it is because the banks, having been conglomerated to within an inch of their lives (and sometimes beyond) have absolutely no sense of local demand, because they no longer have any location.  So they simply don’t see any relationship between their “toxic assets” and real houses in which real people could be living and paying rent, if only somebody had the wit to see it.

You heard it here first.

CynThesis

The Rising Price of Freedom

and Other Oddities

Just heard that Drew Peterson, alleged Bluebeard of the western Chicago suburbs, has been arrested and is being held on twenty million dollars bail.  I think that’s a record. At any rate, I googled “bail set at” and got nothing higher than a million.  Talk about inflation!

Re: language degeneration—the latest stage is the re-nouning of nouned verbs.  Like “de-accessioning,” which is what a lot of art museums are doing with stuff that’s worth more to some private collector than to the museum that owns it.  And one I just heard today—a “decisioning table.”  Many years ago, BTW, a friend of mine who worked in the IT section of some department store’s charge card division told us about doing “bonification runs,” presumably to ascertain whether charge card applications had been “bonified.” And now a major chicken perveyor (sorry, that’s purveyor) claims to be producing “bona fide” chicken tenders.  I’m just waiting for K*C to start advertising Bona Fried Chicken.

O tempura, o mori, as my favorite Asian restaurant would say.

Cynthesis

Where Does Superman Change?

In one of the more recent Superman films, there is a lovely scene in which Clark Kent becomes aware of a pressing emergency requiring the services of Superman. He looks around, sees a couple of the phones-on-a-stick, but nothing remotely resembling a booth, looks bewildered, and finally ducks into the far end of an alley, from which Superman almost immediately emerges.

For the last 20 years, phone companies have been trying to get rid of pay phones, on the premise that they are expensive to maintain and collect from. Often, the neighborhoods in which those phones are placed collude with them and actually demand that pay phones be removed, on the premise that pay phones are mostly used by, and therefore tend to attract, drug dealers and other criminals.

The first public phones, patented in 1891, were in actual walk-in closets, equipped with a desk, seat, paper, and pen. This was fairly quickly downgraded to a confessional-style bench and ledge, but still with a door and a flat surface suitable for taking notes on. More recently that was downgraded to a 3-sided, or 2-sided triangular, cubicle, with no door, in which privacy could be preserved only by facing into the corner. Flat horizontal surfaces were removed, leaving only the top of the telephone itself, which however was acutely slanted, apparently to discourage using it for taking notes. Now even the open-sided cubicle is gone, to be replaced, as noted above, by the phone-on-a-stick, or, more often, by absolutely nothing.

Well, not exactly nothing. First, there are still a few pay phones in public places, mostly for emergency use or calling a cab. They are mostly set up and maintained by small local companies, rather than any of the Baby Bells and their offspring, and they are virtually unregulated. As a result, a friend of mine, a couple of years back, had occasion to be stranded at her hair stylist’s in a bad storm, so she used the pay phone on the premises to call home to ask for a ride. Not having any quarters available, she charged the call to her home phone. Later that month, she got the bill: nine dollars for a two-minute phone call to her home, four blocks away. “It would have been cheaper to take a cab,” she wailed.

The public phone has now mostly been replaced by the mobile phone. We presume that everybody has one. Indeed, an increasing proportion of the population has only a cell phone. Some of the younger generation may never even have used a “land line,” as the regular home-and-office phone is now retronymically called. It has even been replaced, for the purposes of anonymous and untraceable criminal communications, by the disposable prepaid cell phone, often used once or twice and then discarded and replaced by yet another. Sooner or later, no doubt, someone will pass a law requiring photo identification for purchasers of all such phones, but it hasn’t happened yet. So closing down phone booths did not solve the crime problem, it only made it harder for impecunious citizens to call the police, and gave the police a different criminal communication problem.

Well, now I’m noticing yet another area in which a public sector benefit is being privatized, at the expense of poor people—water. It was inevitable. First the great fascist-capitalist conspiracy convinced people that tap water, since it is provided by government, can’t possibly be good for you. Then they started bottling water (often, BTW, tap water) and selling it. The bottles are mostly plastic, and non-biodegradable. The water often comes from places that really can’t afford to export it, and is often sold in places that have more than enough of their own. ( See Holy Hydration, Batman! Florida’s Exporting Water!)

We have moved on to step #4. Public water fountains, in most public places, are no longer being maintained, and are often being removed altogether. Many otherwise cheap eateries are no longer serving water with meals, except when purchased in the bottle. Often, the excuse is given that water fountains attract homeless people. That is, people who cannot afford to buy water often quench their thirst at a sanitary public fountain, rather than waiting until it rains and then drinking out of the gutter. The nerve of some people!

Once again, this is the sin of Sodom. (See Panhandlers and the Jewish Tradition.) It is also the sin of the unhygienic late 19^th century. Public water fountains were first installed around that time, to prevent the spread of disease from less sanitary water sources, such as mud puddles. We are likely to find out, fairly soon, why our ancestors made this decision, just as we are about to find out (due to the spread of antibiotic-resistant TB) why they made laws forbidding spitting on the sidewalk. Sometimes I think we should all just read a book about the Reformers of that period, since we are in the process of undoing most of their work.

What’s next? We have not yet figured out how to privatize air. And despite a great deal of work on the project, we have not yet made the Internet a completely pay-per-use resource. We haven’t figured out how to charge for the use of escalators and elevators, much less sidewalks. The Wired family welcomes any other bright ideas about public resources which can easily be privatized. Watch this space.

Red Emma

Sentence First, Verdict Afterward

Or, Crime Doesn’t Pay

(at least not like it used to)

Having a lawyer on your blog means occasionally being subjected to Long Lawyer Stories, or Long Lawyer Rants on the state of the system. Today, you get a rant on the state of the criminal law system.

First of all, real life is not Perry Mason. Back when I was an academic for a couple of years, I did a paper on Perry Mason. The research was fascinating. For one thing, the sun never sets on Perry Mason. Somewhere in the world, in some language, at any given moment, Perry Mason is being broadcast or cablecast. Among the results are some profound changes in other people’s legal systems, most notably that of the Italians.

The Italians, like most of continental Europe and Latin America and Japan, have what is known as a civil law system, rather than the common law system that rules in the English-speaking countries. In a civil law system, criminal cases are prosecutor-driven, but the judge does his own investigating, and the defense attorney is a minor player. In a common law system, cases are supposed to be judge-driven, but the prosecutor and the defense do their own investigating and use the results to try to persuade the judge of their respective accuracy. What Perry Mason did for the Italians was push the defense attorney into a position of greater prominence and activity.

But what reality, over the same period, has done to the American legal system is turn it into a marketplace, in which the leading role is taken by the prosecutor. You guys may already have known this, but most Americans don’t—90+% of all criminal cases are resolved by plea bargain. No trials, no Perry Mason. When a criminal case does go to trial, that’s usually a sign that the plea bargain market has broken down, often due to inadequate information on one or both sides.

The market metaphor is not meant to imply that anybody is taking money under the table. So far as I know, that’s rare, and certainly not a necessary component of the system. But plea bargaining is just that—a bargaining process. One side (usually the prosecutor) makes an offer, the other side makes a counter-offer. Each side may introduce bits and pieces of information to weight the bargain to one side or the other. Eventually, the parties meet somewhere in the middle.

Another parallel to the economic marketplace is the defendant’s position on all this. If the defendant is in jail pending trial (because of inability to post bail, either because the bail is too high, or because he simply has no money at all), he is not only enduring the discomforts and dangers of the jail system, he is also making metaphorical deposits into a virtual account. That is, from any sentence he ends up being given, the time he has already served in pretrial confinement will be subtracted. (The old hands know this from the start; the newbies find it out quickly from the old hands.)

Which brings us to the major insanity of the system, which is taken for granted by both defendants and attorneys on both sides: if you plead guilty, you go free (immediately or pretty soon.) If you maintain your innocence, you can stay locked up for a very long time. Got that? If you’re guilty, you get out. If you’re innocent, you stay in.

Apparently the movie “American Violet” (“now playing in selected theaters,” according to its website) talks about this issue in some detail, and is also supposed to be a good movie.

This insanity in turn is based on an assumption which is pretty much universal in the law enforcement system, among cops and lawyers alike: if a suspect didn’t do whatever he has been arrested for doing, he has probably gotten away with something as bad or worse. This is a statistical approach to law enforcement, which is still in its developing phases. Eventually, I suspect, it will turn into a calculation that, since 75% (or whatever) of all criminal suspects are in fact guilty of the offense in question or something just as bad, a Bayesian system of justice will convict all suspects and cut all maximum sentences by 25%. As I think I’ve said in previous comments, what matters to cops and prosecutors is not necessarily that the right person be punished, but that the right kind of person be locked up.

Anyway, the impact of this system on habitual offenders is probably not what those who set it up had in mind. The average defendant is overjoyed to plead guilty to something slightly less heinous than the original charge, and “get off” with “time served” plus a few months. He considers this a “good deal.” His lawyer has told him it was a good deal. So has the prosecutor.

The judge’s role in this scenario is minimal, but in some ways the most heinous element of the whole thing. Because the judge is the one who asks the defendant to assert on the record that “no one has promised you anything in exchange for this plea.”

Mr. Wired once went through a legal proceeding in another state in which he was advised by his attorney to assert something in the trial, on the record, under oath, which everybody involved knew to be untrue. He was barely 20 at the time, and under a lot of pressure, so he did it. He still feels like a perjurer for having done so. Okay, maybe his conscience is more acute than most people’s, but isn’t that what the legal system is supposed to want?

In fact, most people (certainly including most of my clients) at one time or another get advised by various functionaries of The System to lie about something significant, in order not to gum up the works. The criminal courts are not even the most egregious instance. What these coerced falsehoods accomplish, aside from smoothing out the administrative process, is leave The System in a position to renege on any deal based on such lies, just by blowing the whistle. “Uh, gee, we didn’t know that Recruiter Sergeant Slick was going to tell the recruit to lie about his flat feet. We’ll court-martial both of them for recruiter fraud.” In short, infinite possibilities for blackmail.

A couple of peripheral notes about Perry Mason: good trial lawyers don’t do Perry Mason, they do Colombo (“help me out here, I’m confused. How is it that….?”) A trial lawyer who did Perry Mason would probably get successfully sued for malpractice.

CynThesis

In the Kingdom of Darkness, the Blind Rule

(or, Recession?  What Recession?)

As I perused the Sunday paper business and career section this afternoon, I encountered a familiar-looking article.  It was addressed to novice job-hunters, and the subject was negotiating salary in the course of a job interview.  There were a lot of cautions about how employers probably don’t have as much wiggle room in setting salaries these days, so the job applicant shouldn’t make unrealistic demands, and shouldn’t talk about pay and benefits at all until everything else has been dealt with.

Nothing surprising, I suppose.  Similar to stuff I’ve read in the business and career sections before, except for the recession-linked cautions.

And I kept blinking and asking myself, “What planet does this writer live on?  Negotiate for salary?”

I found myself remembering stories my friends told me about their jobhunts.  One woman, who was switching career fields in her 30s or so, was asked by a prospective employer how much she had in mind for compensation.  She named a figure slightly lower than what she had been getting in her previous field.  The employer said quickly, “Oh no, we never pay our girls that much.”  Young feminist that she was, she was unable to keep herself from asking, “Yes, but what do you pay your women?”  Needless to say, she didn’t get the job.

Another friend of mine, who before becoming the stay-at-home mother of a child with a disability, had been a crackerjack executive secretary, interviewed for a part-time secretarial job with a nonprofit.  The ad she was responding to offered a pay range from $5.00 to $7.50 an hour (this was twenty-some years ago.)  After laying out her experience and skills, she asked about compensation, and the interviewer told her it would be six dollars an hour.  My friend reiterated her experience and skills, and pointed out that surely that ought to be worth $7.50.  (If it wasn’t, I told her later, then the $7.50 was reserved for Katherine Gibbs herself.) The interviewer drew herself up, in a huff, and said, “You can’t tell me how much money I’ll pay you.”  So much for negotiation.  My friend actually managed not to point out that she could, at least, decide how much it was worth her while to accept, when working would involve paying for commuting, work clothes, and child care, and that Lincoln had, after all, freed the slaves a while back.  She simply walked out and took her skills elsewhere.

Some years later, I worked in a law office that handled employment discrimination cases.  I interviewed at least three prospective clients with precisely the same story, all unknown to each other and working in entirely different fields, so these are independent cases.  All three of them had been fired after asking for a raise.  The employer’s rationale, in all three cases, was:
1. Asking for a raise = refusing to continue working at the current salary
2. Refusing to continue at the current salary = insubordination
3. Insubordination = valid grounds for firing.
Unfortunately, the law provided no remedy for any of these people, and I had to send two of them on their way. (The third had a reasonably decent case for discrimination aside from the immediate cause of her firing.)

In short, the job market in which my friends, my clients, and I have been operating since back in the ‘70s anyway was one in which the average job applicant or employee had no leverage and no ability whatever to negotiate salary, either before or after being hired—well before the current recession was a twinkle in George Bush’s eye.  And we are all well-educated, competent women with no serious self-esteem problems.

Well, okay, some things have changed. I got my first job in Chicago only after the nice lady from the employment agency I was working with was asked by the employer what method of birth control I used, and she told him I was on the Pill.  (Which in turn was only a couple of months after a phone call with the landlord of the apartment we were applying to rent at long distance, while we were still in Boston, in which he asked us what our “ethnic background” was, and we actually felt obliged to tell him.  And we weren’t even tempted to show up in blackface.  So yes, Virginia, the Civil Rights Act really did make a difference.)

Similarly, all the career articles one sees in business sections these days tell people it’s okay to have been fired or laid off, it’s happening to everybody, and nobody thinks it says anything about your competence or industriousness.  This is apparently something new, due to the Recession.

Mr. Wired was fired, sometimes very traumatically, at least 8 or 9 times in a total working life of 20 years.  I managed to get traumatically fired only 3 times over a somewhat longer period, but I suspect that’s because I was usually making a lot less money than he was.  Both of us have been characterized by most of our employers and co-workers as competent and energetic, but we were both a bit tone-deaf to office politics, I think.  If either of us had taken it personally or let it jam up our jobhunts, we would probably be living on the street by now.  But back then, nobody even talked about what to do after getting fired.  It just didn’t happen to Our Kind of People, apparently.  So we operated in the dark and managed to remain among the employed without any advice from the experts.

In short, we have apparently lived in our own private recession for the last 40 years, while the rest of the world was flourishing like the green bay tree.  Which no doubt gives us an advantage over a lot of other people who are just now getting dumped into the cold tub we have been swimming in for years.

Either that, or until very recently, everybody else has been lying.

Care to guess which?

Red Emma

Panhandlers and the Jewish Tradition

These are hard days for street beggars.  More and more municipalities have tried to ban their activities by law (the courts have held that merely asking somebody for money is free speech, protected by the First Amendment, but that “coercive” panhandling can legitimately be barred. So far there has been no binding precedent on the constitutionality of laws prohibiting camping in public parks, sleeping in public spaces, and searching for food in dumpsters and garbage cans.) Police conduct regular “sweeps” of places ordinarily frequented by homeless people, seizing and destroying their property, and packing the residents off to shelters or jails, or just “away.”  Dumpsters behind restaurants and multi-residential buildings are locked, or noxious or even poisonous substances sprayed on their contents.  Citizens approached by panhandlers are becoming less and less likely to be generous or even polite.  Municipal governments tend to see panhandlers as, at best, a blight on the landscape, and at worst, potential or actual criminals.

The liberal response to panhandling isn’t much better.  Community organizations which have traditionally thought of themselves as “do-gooders” are almost universally taking the position that panhandlers are either people with mental disabilities, who belong in some proper care facility, or substance abusers, who will use cash contributions only to degrade themselves further by feeding their habit.  The best response they can come up with from this perspective is voucher systems–would-be contributors buy vouchers for fifty or twenty-five cents each, and then hand them out to panhandlers.  The latter can redeem the vouchers at local food pantries, soup kitchens, grocery stores, restaurants, and sundry shops, but only for “legitimate” purchases, such as food, non-alcoholic beverages, and personal hygiene articles.  Not surprisingly, in some cities, a thriving black market for vouchers has already developed; the panhandlers sell them to “fences” at a discount, for cash, which they then presumably use for whatever anti-social purpose the vouchers were supposed to defeat, and the fences then use them for purchases of food etc. for which they would have otherwise paid cash, often twice as much. To the extent that they see any ethical quandary in this situation, the “do-gooders” define it as “How can I keep this person from starvation without helping him/her feed an addiction?”  The voucher system in fact does this job more or less adequately.  But it ignores a much older system of ethical priorities.

We Americans of the 1990s did not invent street beggars, or programs to repress and eliminate them, or voucher systems for that matter.  Third World countries take for granted the presence of swarms of beggars in any place likely to generate any surplus food or other resources.  Police may try to keep them from being too much of a nuisance to tourists and honest working people, but they rarely define the mere presence of any beggars as a “problem.”  Nor do the tourists and working people in question; “this is a Third World country,” they presume.  “The poor we have always with us.”  People give to them, or not, based on purely individual decisions.  Those decisions may in turn be motivated by religious tradition, emotion, or political commitment.  This is pretty much the traditional approach to beggary in such countries, dating back to the beginning of money economies.  It was also the accepted attitude in pre-industrial Europe.  Several religious orders, in their early years, supported themselves by begging.  The implicit bargain was that those who donated were freeing the friars to devote their time to prayer and good works, and in return would receive some of the merit therefrom.  This arrangement also existed on an individual basis–”give me a penny, kind sir, and I will pray for you.”  In addition, the medieval Catholic Church defined “feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and sheltering the homeless” as “corporal works of mercy”, meritorious in and of themselves, regardless of the deserts of the beneficiary. Many aristocrats and wealthy burghers retained “almoners” to take charge of giving out alms to people in need.

Islam and Judaism have similar traditions.  The giving of alms is one of the four pillars of Muslim practice.   “Tzedakah”–usually translated “charity”–is one of the obligations to which religious Jews are commanded.  In the Buddhist tradition, the monastic orders supported themselves by begging, and the laypeople who donated to them gained spiritual merit by doing so.

But the coming of industrialization to Europe, and especially the dissolution of the monasteries and religious orders in Britain and Northern (Protestant) Europe, changed this picture.  The presumption took hold that any able-bodied adult (and both terms were defined very loosely) could work, and anyone who could work should work, and deserved no support from anyone if s/he was not working.  “Sturdy [able-bodied] beggars” could be driven out of wherever they appeared, often with corporal punishment, or rounded up and imprisoned in “workhouses.” Substance abuse was not the issue–until quite late in the 19th century, almost everybody drank prodigious amounts of alcohol, and anyone who could afford it could legally obtain various kinds of opiates and cocaine derivatives over the counter for self-medication of various real and imagined ailments. Probably at least half of these people would today be classified as addicted to something.  That was not a major social concern, except among a few minority religious groups like the Methodists and their offshoot, the Salvation Army.

In industrialized Eastern Europe, especially in what is now called Poland, the Jewish community was called on to respond to several waves of increased indigency, often connected with the movement of refugees from the various wars which infested the area over the 17th through the early 20th century.  Community organizations, soup kitchens, food pantries, and other large-scale charitable organizations were set up, drawing on the financial support of wealthy Jewish entrepreneurs and the moral support of the rabbinic establishment.   And some of these organizations set up voucher programs, to discourage beggars from “bothering” working citizens and make sure that only “deserving” poor people received alms.  There is a story about one such campaign in Poland a hundred years or so ago; a meeting of the umbrella community organization was held, and one of the major items of “new business” on the agenda was a proposal for a voucher program, which would prohibit beggars from approaching individuals directly, and require them to apply to some authorized agency for help.  The Hafetz Hayyim, a very holy rabbi, who had been asked to attend the meeting to lend his moral support to its decisions, raised his hand. “Point of order,” he called out. “What is your point of order, rabbi?” asked the chair.  “You have called this proposal ‘new business.’  But in point of fact this is old business.  It is as old as Sodom and Gomorrah.”

This requires an explanation. In Genesis 18:20, the Holy One tells Abraham “The sins of Sodom and Gomorrah cry out to Me.  I am going to destroy them.”  After a charming interlude in which Abraham tries unsuccessfully to talk the Holy One out of His plan, the latter sends a couple of angels into Sodom to tell Abraham’s nephew Lot and his family to get out of town before the sulfur and brimstone hit.  The local citizens, on seeing these personable strangers enter Lot’s house, gather outside Lot’s door and demand “Send out these men, that we may know them.”  As we all learned in Sunday school, when the Bible says “know”, it means “have relations with.”  The angels and Lot’s family get out safely, and Sodom and Gomorrah get what’s coming to them.

Christians read this story as an indictment of the evils of deviant sexuality.   They presume that the sins that “cried out to heaven” and got the Holy One’s attention in the first place were also sexual sins.  But that is not how the Jewish tradition reads it.

To elaborate on this tradition, we need to understand the Jewish concept of midrash. Loosely translated, it means “story- telling.” In practice, it means that, unlike the Saturday Evening Post in its heyday, the rabbis have taken responsibility for what the characters in the biblical narrative do between installments. While the stories woven to account for how the dramatis personae got from here to there do not have the authority of scripture, and may often wildly contradict each other, they provide us with a world-view and a way of looking at scripture that is part and parcel of the Jewish mindset. Jews do not read the Bible raw and unaccompanied; it is always filtered through commentary and midrash.

So what does the midrash say about Sodom and Gomorrah? (My source, for the sake of convenience, is Louis Ginzberg’s  Legends of the Jews.) “If a stranger merchant passed through their territory, he was besieged by them all, big and little alike, and robbed of whatever he possessed. Each one appropriated a bagatelle, until the traveler was stripped bare. If the victim ventured to remonstrate with one or another, he would show him that he had taken a mere trifle, not worth talking about. [Anyone involved in consumer protection work knows that it is vastly easier to steal one dollar each from a million people than a million dollars from one person--and far less likely to be prosecuted and punished.] And the end was that they hounded him from the city….After a while travelers avoided these cities, but if some poor devil was betrayed occasionally into entering them, they would give him gold and silver, but never any bread, so that he was bound to die of starvation.  Once he was dead, the residents of the city came and took back the marked gold and silver which they had given him, and they would quarrel about the distribution of his clothes, for they would bury him naked….

“The cause of their cruelty was their exceeding great wealth.  Their soil was  gold, and in their miserliness and their greed for more and more gold, they wanted to prevent strangers from enjoying aught of their riches.  Accordingly, they flooded the highways with streams of water, so that the roads to their city were obliterated, and none could find the way thither.  They were as heartless towards beasts as towards men.  They begrudged the birds what they ate, and therefore extirpated them.  [Nowadays, in some place, people get arrested for feeding pigeons.]  They behaved impiously towards one another, too, not shrinking back from murder to gain possession of more gold….

“Their laws were calculated to do injury to the poor. The richer a man was, the more was he favored before the law. The owner of two oxen was obliged to render one day’s shepherd service, but if he had but one ox, he had to give two days’ service….For the use of the ferry, a traveler had to pay four zuz, but if he waded through the water, he had to pay eight zuz [one of the earliest examples of the now well-known fact that the poor pay more].” Ginzberg follows with a story of a outsider woman who had married a man of Sodom. “Once a beggar came to town, and the court issued a proclamation that none should give him anything to eat, in order that he might die of starvation. But [the woman] had pity upon the unfortunate wretch, and every day when she went to the well to draw water, she supplied him with a piece of bread, which she hid in her water pitcher.  The inhabitants of the two sinful cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, could not understand why the beggar did not perish, and they suspected that someone was giving him food in secret.  Three men concealed themselves near the beggar, and  caught [the woman] in the act of giving him something to eat. She had to pay for her humanity with death; she was burnt upon a pyre….

“The people of Admah [one of the other "cities of the plain" destroyed with Sodom and Gomorrah] were no better than those of Sodom.  Once a stranger came to Admah, intending to stay overnight and continue his journey the next morning.  The daughter of a rich man met the stranger, and gave him water to drink and bread to eat at his request.  When the people of Admah heard of this infraction of the law of the land, they seized the girl and arraigned her before the judges, who condemned her to death.  The people smeared her with honey from top to toe, and exposed her where bees would be attracted to her. The insects stung her to death, and the callous people paid no attention to her heart-rending cries.  Then it was that God resolved upon the destruction of these sinners.”

Which brings us to the visit of the angels to Sodom, and the locals’ demand to gang-rape them, that actually appears in the narrative in Genesis. Midrash explains it thus: “It was not the first time that the inhabitants of Sodom wanted to perpetrate a crime of this sort. They had made a law some time before that all strangers were to be treated in this horrible way.” In short, the midrashic tradition is that the cities of the plain were punished for their inhospitality to the poor and the stranger. Their proposed attack on the angels, like most rapes, was not a sexual act, but an act of violence. It was especially evil because it was directed against victims especially protected by Heaven–strangers and travelers, people with no other source of protection among the locals.

For the origin of this idea, we need to look at the book of Deuteronomy, for instance 24: 19, where “the widow, the orphan, the stranger, and the poor” are repeatedly described as being under the special protection of Heaven (one might even say that Heaven has placed them under an affirmative action program.)  This protection is necessary, in an agrarian society, because these people in particular have no link to the means of survival–ownership or share-cropping rights on agricultural land.  The Book of Ruth–in which the title character is a widow, an orphan, and a stranger, and is given what she needs to survive and feed her family–is the paradigm of the proper treatment of this protected class.  The Sodom and Gomorrah story, in the Jewish tradition, is the paradigm of the improper treatment of this same class.

So when a rabbi talks about Sodom and Gomorrah, chances are he is talking about mistreatment of  poor and helpless people.  Clearly, that was what the Hafetz Hayyim meant.  And that is the lens through which religious Jews have to decide what to do about panhandlers.  We have a divinely-imposed obligation to help those who cannot support themselves.  Anyone who has any resources whatever to spare (over and above the support of their own family) is subject to that obligation, even poor people–even, in fact, a beggar who has had a good day, vis-a-vis one who has not been so lucky.

Among the most important and best-known pronouncements on the obligation to give to the poor are those of Moses ben Maimon–Maimonides.  Most Jews and many non-Jews are familiar with his classification of the eight grades of charity, of which the highest is enabling a poor person to become self-supporting, and the next highest is the gift in total anonymity on both sides.  It should be noted that he did not intend the higher levels to replace the lower (the person-to-person face-to-face gift, with varying degrees of good grace on the part of the giver.) In his less well-known works, Maimonides, who is writing in the 1200s in highly-urbanized Spain and Northern Africa, is realistic, and perfectly willing to admit that there are phony beggars out there, people who claim needs they do not in fact have.  The Holy One has allowed these fakers to exist, he tells us, to create a benefit of the doubt for people who refuse to give to beggars (Maimonides was realistic about those people, too.)  If all the beggars out there were really destitute, he says, anyone who failed to give to one of them when s/he could afford to would be committing a grave sin.  Since some of them are fakes, those who refuse to give are guilty only in proportion to the ratio of real beggars to phonies.  Maimonides also says that anyone who cannot respond to a beggar’s request for alms by giving money or other physical goods has an obligation at least to give him/her a cheerful greeting.

“Tzedekah” is usually translated “charity.”  But in fact, its meaning is much closer to “justice” or “righteousness”–closely related to what Plato and Aristotle mean by “justice” as “giving to each person what s/he deserves.”  It is an individual obligation, and creates individual rights.  The passages in Exodus and Deuteronomy which impose it are mostly written in the second person singular (for example, Ex. 22: 20ff.; Deut. 15; 7ff.) The beggar who approaches a by-passer is not asking for a favor, s/he is invoking a right.  “Fiddler on the Roof” retells an old Jewish beggar joke–”Alms for the poor,” cries the beggar. “Not this week, business hasn’t been so good,” replies the by-passer.  “So because you had a bad week, I should suffer?” says the beggar.  Maimonides would utterly concur with him.

So we have three possible views of undeserving beggars: Maimonides in the 13th century says that Heaven allows them to exist to keep stingy people from incurring grave sin–and if we refuse to give to them, we are taking a calculated risk; the “Poor Law” administrators of newly-industrialized England say that these are people who are refusing to work despite being able to do so, and giving to them merely encourages their idleness; and today’s “liberal” organizations say they are crazy or addicted, and giving to them only encourages them in not getting the care they need to become sane, sober, self-supporting human beings.  The Poor Law administrators had no trouble distinguishing between deserving and undeserving beggars–any adult (loosely defined) with the usual number of limbs and organs who wasn’t working was undeserving. Period.  But both Maimonides and today’s do-gooders are willing to grant at least some ambiguity in this category–we can’t always tell by looking at or talking to a beggar whether s/he is for real.  Maimonides took the position that, morally, the safest way to deal with this ambiguity was to give; today’s liberals take precisely the opposite position, perhaps because they believe the proportion of really destitute people to fakes has shifted, and possibly even reversed, since the 13th century.  The various surveys and studies of homeless people, street people, and beggars have produced conflicting and admittedly inconclusive results.  We generally don’t know, and probably can’t know, which of the people who approaches us on the street is for real.

And that’s assuming that the currently respectable definitions of “deserving” and “undeserving” are valid.  Suppose every beggar, every homeless person, were to clean up, sober up, and apply for every job currently available.  Suppose–even less likely–that each of those jobs were actually filled with a homeless person or a beggar.  How many people would that leave?  Given the incomplete state of our statistics on homelessness and indigency, we can’t know–but it is hard to believe there really are jobs out there for every one of the people who “ought” to be seeking them.

Certainly it is morally, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, and physically better to be unemployed and sober than to be unemployed and drunk–but who are we to begrudge the unemployed alcoholic his daily ration of rotgut if we are not willing to help him sober up?

At any rate, the point of voucher programs is to benefit people who, although probably addicted or crazy, are at least genuinely in need and should not be ignored altogether.  There are, I think, three possible ways to deal with such people:
(1) You can assume the panhandler is a person like yourself, capable of making rational decisions about allocating his/her resources and just in need of some help in acquiring resources.  In which case, the appropriate course of action is to give her/him some money. [In this society, the way to acquire full human dignity is to earn or inherit a lot of money.  But one can have at least some dignity simply by virtue of having some money, regardless of how it was obtained, and being free to decide how to spend it.  We grant that much dignity to children over the age of 5 or so, to whom most parents give cash allowances.  Arguably, even the panhandler deserves no less.]

(2) Or you can assume that the panhandler is for some reason not capable of spending money on what s/he needs without degrading him/herself even more.  In that case, if you are genuinely concerned about the panhandler as a person, you will do what I have known both my husband and my father to do on various occasions–take him/her to a restaurant–or what I have, more timidly, done–bring him/her a sandwich from the nearest fast food joint.

(3) But if all you really want is to get the panhandler out of your face so you can go on about your business, you can give him/her a voucher.  This is not a symbol or an instrument of personal concern; it is a substitute for it.  Unlike real charity, it is not a means of bringing giver and recipient closer together, but of setting a distance between them which the giver considers appropriate.

Don’t get me wrong; vouchers aren’t as bad as using the police to sweep the “riffraff” off the “nicer” streets.  And they’re a lot better than shooting street people, as is done in Rio these days. But the program should not be dignified with the name of charity, when it is really nothing but a relatively humane method of crowd control.

A final question:  should our decisions on what to do about street beggars be guided by a general policy–that is, should we always give, or never give, based on some general principle?  Or should we make our decisions one day at a time and one beggar at a time, based on our circumstances and theirs at that particular moment?  I lean toward the latter position.  Can I afford it today?  Maybe my finances fluctuate more than most people’s, but that is often a valid question for me.  Assuming I can, am I obligated to give to every beggar who approaches me, or may I pick and choose?  Assuming I may, on what basis do I make those choices?  As a practical matter, I don’t give to people who scare me, or try to intimidate me, and I have no scruples about that.  And I don’t give to people who really do strike me as phonies.  (But I do try to remember the cheerful greeting when I’m not in a position to give.)

Ultimately I have to use my own judgment, bearing in mind what Maimonides says on the subject.  I believe that part of the obligation to give to those in need is an obligation to look at each person who asks as an individual, rather than merely a vehicle for my virtue.  The Hafetz Hayyim and many orthodox Jews today would probably disagree with that position, and might say instead that if your path today intersects a beggar’s, Heaven has made that happen, for the beggar’s benefit or yours, or both.  Some people find that a really appealing spiritual path. It is the source of many legends–not only in the Jewish tradition, by the way–about beggars turning out to be Elijah the prophet, or some other spiritual VIP, who rewards those who treat him kindly, with either spiritual blessings or, sometimes, material ones.  This may be another way of saying that a beggar who seems phony may turn out to be the real thing, for all we know–an important reminder even to those of us trained in the social sciences, about where we should be applying the benefit of the doubt.

In the abstract, of course, Maimonides is right–the best thing we could do for street beggars is put them in a position to support themselves.  But when clean, sober middle managers with MBAs are being “downsized,” that solution is obviously a long way off.  An economy in which even an unskilled person with episodic mental problems can get a job that pays enough to put a roof over his or her head is what we should be working for, in the long run* .  The long run ought not to be coterminous with the messianic age.  “In the long run,” as Winston Churchill says, “we are all dead.”  Street people, if not cared for decently, are likely to be dead in the short run–some statistics indicate that the average street person will last, at most, ten years or until age sixty, whichever comes sooner.  We now know that changing the political party in power, or its philosophy, does nothing whatever to reduce the number of beggars on the street.  Until we can figure out what will, we have an obligation to tend to the short-run welfare of the poor we have with us.

Jane Grey