doctors get paid too darn much, whitman versus poe

 Seamstresses. Oil on canvas, 1925. By Massimo Campigli (1885-1971).

 

Seriously—The Evidence is Overwhelming That Americans Pay Too Much To Go See The Doctor

Amidst many hundreds of words of discussion of the subject he totally buries the lede:

Standard economic theory suggests that over all, American doctors are overpaid, although perhaps not the primary-care specialties. This position leans on the fact that at existing incomes there is still considerable excess demand for places in medical schools among bright American youngsters – not to mention a huge pool of highly qualified foreign applicants. This suggests that the lamented doctor shortage in the United States is the result of an artificially constrained supply of medical school places and residency slots, which serves to inflate physician incomes above what they would be in a better functioning market without supply constraints.

That’s really what you need to know about the subject. At current wages, the supply of qualified doctors could easily be increased. Alternatively, if doctors’ wages were reduced there would be no decline in the supply of qualified doctors. That’s because the supply of qualified doctors is being doubly restricted, first by regulations that make it exceedingly difficult to import qualified doctors from abroad and second by cartelization that prevents medical schools from training more doctors.

Towards he end of last year a survey of doctor income showed that general practitioners with a few years experience were averaging $200k. Specialists – heart and brain mostly – with a few years experiencing were averaging $300k. That does seem a little high. I think I more or less accepted it at the time because CEO salaries ( Mr 47% Romney) was on my mind. Campbell CEO had a total compensation package of $9.6 million in 2007. I bet we could find someone with a near genius IQ who could manage the company as well or better for a $125k a year. Throw in a $25k bonus if she meets certain standards – a living wage for employees, good environmental record, fair profit and so forth. CEOs just don’t have that kind of value. Most of them are not where they are because they have remarkable skill sets, they’re there just because. They navigated the in and outs of the business world, talked a good game. The real numbers people, the analysis, who are usually well paid, work at a lower level. The first thing any CEO does before they make a decision is consult the number crunchers. They do not provide enough value to society to justify making more than overpaid doctors.

Edgar Poe’s Significance by Walt Whitman.

Edgar Poe’s Significance , last page. These are the hand written manuscript pages from Walt Whitman’s (1819–1892) essay on Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849). Pages three and five respectively, which contain the bulk of his argument against Poe. I’m just going to post what I consider the major portion of his analysis of Poe, you can read the rest here.

By common consent there is nothing better for man or woman than a perfect and noble life, morally without flaw, happily balanced in activity, physically sound and pure, giving its due proportion, and no more, to the sympathetic, the human emotional element—a life, in all these, unhasting, unresting, untiring to the end. And yet there is another shape of personality dearer far to the artist-sense, (which likes the play of strongest lights and shades,) where the perfect character, the good, the heroic, although never attain’d, is never lost sight of, but through failures, sorrows, temporary downfalls, is return’d to again and again, and while often violated, is passionately adhered to as long as mind, muscles, voice, obey the power we call volition. This sort of personality we see more or less in Burns, Byron, Schiller, and George Sand. But we do not see it in Edgar Poe. (All this is the result of reading at intervals the last three days a new volume of his poems—I took it on my rambles down by the pond, and by degrees read it all through there.) While to the character first outlined the service Poe renders is certainly that entire contrast and contradiction which is next best to fully exemplifying it.

[  ]… Almost without the first sign of moral principle, or of the concrete or its heroisms, or the simpler affections of the heart, Poe’s verses illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess, an incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes, a demoniac undertone behind every page—and, by final judgment, probably belong among the electric lights of imaginative literature, brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat.

spring tree leaves wallpaper, the conservative triangle of propaganda

spring tree leaves wallpaper

 

Does anyone have the impression that the IRS singled out or “targeted” conservative groups seeking special tax status (501(c)4. If so, how did you get that impression. Did you read the New York Times or the Washington Post, watch ABC or the other networks. If you read this The Latest Lie: IRS Targeted Conservatives - it may change your mind. That article does have links to primary sources, including the report from the IG that everyone is using as absolute proof conservatives groups were targeted or denied the status they were seeking unfairly. Not one, not even one tea party group was denied the (501(c)4 status that deserved to have it. In fact some of the groups granted (501(c)4 status should have been denied because they were funneling more than 51% of their donations directly to advertising that advocated the election of certain candidates or the disposition of certain clearly partisan legislation. Why do we find ourselves in this bubble of misinformation. These major media outlets do not seem to have a liberal bias, according the well-known myth. On the contrary. The IG’s report (pdf), which many people have not bothered to read, trusting that the media would not get such a big story wrong. In the report it says that “For the 296 total political campaign intervention applications TIGTA reviewed as of
December 17, 2012, 108 had been approved, Final Report issued on May 14, 2013 28 were withdrawn by the applicant, none had been denied, and 160 were open from 206 to calendar days (some for more than to the Internal Revenue Service Acting three years and crossing two election cycles).” I’m not claiming the IRS is completely innocent ( the time delays seem unfair). Only that conservative groups were not signaled out. That perhaps some of the groups that gave up seeking 501 were conservative, but that is not that same as targeting. Some of them were liberal groups. Why are we not hearing from the media about liberal groups being subjected to the same basic litmus tests as conservative groups. Why are we not hearing that more liberal groups were denied 501 status than tea stain groups. This tsunami wave of sound bites has happened before. It is not a coincidence and no tin foil is required, it is not an especially secret conspiracy. Like the IG report on the IRS. People could read that. It does take some reading comprehension and analysis skills, but nothing a high school grad couldn’t handle. Yet we’re not reading the report, we’re hearing or participating in the echo of the media’s interpretation of the report,  Background: Democrats & The Netroots

The Triangle

Looking at the political landscape, one proposition seems unambiguous: blog power on both the right and left is a function of the relationship of the netroots to the media and the political establishment. Forming a triangle of blogs, media, and the political establishment is an essential step in creating the kind of sea change we’ve seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

[  ]…With a well-developed echo chamber and superior top-down discipline, the right has a much easier time forming the triangle. Fox News, talk radio, Drudge, a well-trained and highly visible punditocracy, and a lily-livered press corps takes care of the media side of the triangle. Iron-clad party loyalty – with rare exceptions – and a willingness of Republican officials to jump on the Limbaugh-Hannity bandwagon du jour takes care of the party establishment side of the triangle. The rightwing netroots, therefore, is already working within the triangle on most issues. Their primary strategic aim is to prevent the left from forming its own triangle, as occurred with Katrina. It’s a defensive posture, with the goal being the preservation of the status quo. Which explains why the right is profoundly hostile to dissent and why the pretense to libertarianism is common: “independent thinkers” don’t like to be seen as defending the powers that be.

The triangle construct also explains rightwing bloggers’ relentless attacks on the “MSM” and on anyone who contends that the media is conservative. In a nation dominated by shrill rightwing voices, with all branches of government in the hands of Republicans, and an ineffectual press corps, the “liberal media” myth is so absurd that it requires no rebuttal. But the right desperately needs to keep the media from doing what they did in the aftermath of Katrina: tell the unvarnished truth. They need to block the left from building the kind of triangle that Katrina generated, where outspoken left-leaning bloggers are joined by leading Democrats and reporters who have no choice but to describe the catastrophic results of Bush’s dismal leadership. The result in Katrina’s case is a major political crisis and a dramatic shift in public perceptions, a body blow to the long-standing conventional wisdom of Bush as a “resolute leader” and a protector.

Whereas rightwing bloggers can rely on their leadership and the rightwing noise machine to build the triangle, left-leaning bloggers face the challenge of a mass media consumed by the shop-worn narrative of Bush the popular, plain-spoken leader, and a Democratic Party incapacitated (for the most part) by the focus-grouped fear of turning off “swing voters” by attacking Bush. For the progressive netroots, the past half-decade has been a Sisyphean loop of scandal after scandal melting away as the media and party establishment remain disengaged.

Some people will dismiss conservative bloggers because of how unhinged they sound. Not just on any particular day or topic, but everyday they post. With Drudge at the top of that pyramid. At the level of Drudge and the next level down, his echo, new realities are created. So it goes with the IRS controversy, where tea stain group were not targeted and were not asked questions anymore silly than they asked liberal groups. Besides the conservative love of victim-hood this controversy serves their agenda. They get to funnel more money from more anonymous donors to groups getting special tax treatment, and in return they get more control over elections.

fury of the french at antwerp, poltical scandals and shameless hypocrisy

Fury of the French in Antwerp by Ferdinand de Braekeleer. Oil on canvas. Belgium, Between 1827 and 1846. I’m not an expert on Antwerp history, but I am fairly certain this is a depiction of one night in the Belgian Revolution. Many in North America should be able to relate to this frustration by an early liberal movement for freedom to worship as one wished, and freedom of the press, among other issues. The Netherlands are still a stellar world examples of liberalism to this day.

Double standards. That might be part of what is fueling the foaming at the mouth hysteria of the radical Right over two non-scandals, the current IRS screw-ups (IRS Audited Democratic Groups Under Bush, No Outrage from Conservatives) and the tragedy of Benghazi. Though since conservatives have an infamously low regard for ethics and genuineness, their shrill cries are mostly theater. A public display feigned outrage more in need of smelling salts and cold compresses than yet more expensive congressional kabuki. Why Obama Is Not Nixon

In order to stoke the conspiracy theories, Republican congressional aides leaked false versions of the interagency emails and ABC ran with them without checking. Republicans focused the controversy on Hillary Clinton rather than David Petraeus, the CIA director at the time, though Petraeus also agreed to the talking points and was responsible for hiring the local defenders who melted away at the first shot, and the misinformed intelligence on what happened that night was a failure by the CIA. (But Petraeus was most unlikely to run for president in 2016.) That the US presence in Benghazi was essentially a CIA operation was kept quiet. The inability to adequately protect our foreign missions has been a bipartisan failure and Congress’s stinginess with funds for the protection of our assets in foreign countries also bears some responsibility. In any case, the Republicans might be well advised to tread carefully on the matter of ignored warnings. So far, the George W. Bush administration has got by amazingly with their obvious failure to act on indications months before September 11, 2001, that a major terrorist plot was in the works.

Not just Bush, but the arrogance and incompetence of the conservative mindset was responsible for one of the biggest national security failures in our history. Then told a pack of lies connecting Iraq to 9-11, are now engaged in a deranged campaign to turn a tragedy, that they are also partly responsible for, into a scandal. The shamelessness of conservative hypocrisy alone is blinding. Maybe instead of Obama’s preschool initiative we have a national educational initiative to educate the conservative movement on ethics.

Science humor, Cells must use their brakes moderately for effective speed control

All living cells have a regulatory system similar to what can be found in today’s smartphones. Just like our phones process a large amount of information that we feed them, cells continuously process information about their outer and inner environment. Inside the cells, information is sent and processed via a large network of interactions between signalling molecules.

In electronic circuits it is common with negative feedback, inhibiting functions, to make signals clearer and to reduce noise that can obscure important information. Cells also use this technique for reducing unwanted noise. Almost half of all signalling molecules that regulate which genes should be on or off, regulate their own genetic expression through biochemical reactions acting as inhibitors.

“If the number of signalling molecules is more than necessary, they shut down their own production for a short while, to later resume it. The difference between feedback in electronic systems and biological systems is that biological systems are much more imprecise and slow”, explains Andreas Grönlund, lead author, currently active at Umeå University.

Together with professors Per Lötstedt and Johan Elf, both at Uppsala University, he has used new data and mathematical models to calculate how long the molecules must remain in their binding sites to make the feedback exactly strong enough to reduce noise as much as possible.

I have always been amazed at the billions of reactions the body carries out without conscience input from the thinking part of the brain. If life seems complicated now – work, family, bills, plans, relationships – imagine having to think through every biochemical reaction required to stay alive.

an obsession with color, banks still stealing homes

Notes on painting from Oscar Bluemner’s Theory Diary, 1920 Jan. 12. Bluemner’s notes in German regarding color theory, supplemented with watercolor samples. Oscar Bluemner papers, Archives of American Art.

 Bluemner’s notes in German regarding color theory, supplemented with watercolor samples. These papers are interesting in the context of obsessions. We’re told not to have them. The daily news is filled with the tragic results of unhealthy obsessions. Which may leave the impressions that there are no healthy ones. Bluemner’s obsession was  being the Proust of color. Nothing wrong with that. Though since I wasn’t there it wouldn’t surprise me if he drove his friends crazy on occasion.

 Turns out much-hyped settlement still allows banks to steal homes

The absolute least Americans can hope for from a major government settlement with a large industry over well-documented crimes is that the industry wouldn’t, after signing the settlement, just continue to commit the same crimes day after day. After all, following the tobacco industry settlement, cigarette makers did manage to stop advertising to teenagers that their product had no medical side effects.

But new evidence reveals the nation’s largest banks have apparently continued to fabricate documents, rip off customers and illegally kick people out of their homes, even after inking a series of settlements over the same abuses. And the worst part of it all is that the main settlement over foreclosure fraud was so weakly written that it actually allows such criminal conduct to occur, at least up to a certain threshold. Potentially hundreds of thousands of homes could be effectively stolen by the big banks without any sanctions.

One of the things state and federal officials agreed to was an error level below five percent. And they would not go storming in for another round of legal sanctions, with more fines. Now, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight officials and public interest groups who are keeping an eye on the banks have noted that even under five percent that could add up, and probably is, to hundreds of thousands of people being forced out of their homes with fraudulent paperwork. Homeowners themselves could sue, but despite all we hear about how easy it is to sue someone, it can take years and a lot of expense before a homeowners gets a settlement.

hindenburg anniversary, evil has priorities, mind body anxiety

The LZ 129 Hindenburg. Obviously from Life Magazine. While I deeply appreciate their making many of their older photos available to the public, they did not give a date or other details. It appears to be the Hindenburg under construction in its hangar on the shores of Lake Constance in Friedrichshafen. Today in 1937 the airship “Hindenburg” crashed. The Postal Museum has a good on-line exhibit about the Hindenburg and the Titanic here.

I could not do this. It is even difficult to read, but knowing about the thoughts of people who commit evil acts might help find solutions, James Dawes’s interviews with people who committed acts of atrocity were like “a guided tour of hell.”

IDEAS: Both the bombers and the war criminals you interviewed were able to set aside basic moral impulses in order to do what they did. Is that the first step to committing evil?

DAWES: In some ways working with these war criminals was hopeful, because it was clear the more I talked to them that it took a lot of work to make them into who they became. This idea that we are wolves just waiting to be unleashed upon each other just isn’t true. It just doesn’t ring true when you see what people like this have been through. Cultures have to do a lot of work beforehand.

[  ]…IDEAS: Some of the men you spoke to do seem to have had their own ethical guidelines. Even as they are committing atrocities, they have red lines they will not cross, like killing children.

DAWES: That was again both hopeful and despairing. For most of the men I spoke with, it was the story of killing children that was the hardest, the hardest to remember, the hardest to get them to talk about. So that was hopeful, that there did seem to be red lines. What was depressing was that it was the opposite when it came to women. Violence against women would come very quickly.

I can understand in the case of war criminals the following orders rationale, up to a point. Refusal to follow orders in many of those circumstances probably meant signing your own death warrant. Though there must be some point at which enough people can refuse, that it creates a moral epiphany for the worse of the perpetrators. They than have to decide to kill those they consider what the Nazis called Untermensch the subhuman, and murder their friends and comrades as well.

Rear Window, Italian movie poster. You might want to be on the look out for an original at garage sales and flea markets, printed on linen, they’re supposed to be worth several thousand dollars.

I Am Not This Body

Besides being squeamish about physicality, I resent how matter lords it over mind. Plato says in one of his dialogues, “Soul is the master, and matter its natural subject.” I agree that it ought to be so, but the facts are opposite. Whenever I get sick or injured, I am dismayed to discover how little control I have of my life. Because someone sneezed a germ too small to see into my bloodstream, my universe shrinks to a pillow and sheets. The mere calcium of my ankle, by breaking inopportunely, can cancel a carefully planned and paid-for vacation. My relation to my body resembles a privy council’s relation to an adolescent king. I am thoughtful and wise and know best what to do, but my capricious body possesses the power and final authority, and I must tiptoe round its whims.

I’ve posted a little in the past about the mind-body connection. I think most people have those moments when they look in the mirror and ask themselves, is that me, the physical me. While it is was interesting to read Mr. Stanley’s writing on the subject, it is something I have not so much worked through philosophically, as much as mentally wore the subject out. It is so tired it doesn’t have the energy to bother me much anymore. Once it a while it gives me a nudge just to let me know it is still there.

berence abbott city photographs, the modern day grapes of wrath

Oyster Houses Apr. 1, 1937. By Berence Abbott. Even has her autograph at the bottom.

Harlem Street II, June 14, 1938. by Berence Abbott (July 17, 1898 – December 9, 1991). Abbott got what we would call her big break when Man Rayhired her as a darkroom assistant at his portrait studio in Montparnasse. She later worked for the Federal Art Project (FAP) as a project supervisor.

As Common As Dirt

“As Common as Dirt” by Tracie McMillan has won the 2013 James Beard Award in the Politics/Policy/Environment category. The award is the highest honor for food journalism.

Compared with other recent tales of American farmworkers, Villalobos and Gomez might consider themselves lucky. In Florida, tomato pickers have been locked in box trucks under the watch of armed guards; in North Carolina, pregnant workers have been exposed to pesticides during harvest and birthed babies with missing limbs; in Michigan, children as young as six have been found laboring in blueberry groves. Those are marquee cases that garner national media, shining the spotlight on the most egregious abuses. In relative terms, suits like Villalobos are mundane, but they are also ubiquitous, filed with a frequency that suggests the most pervasive and insidious abuse faced by farmworkers is the kind Villalobos encountered: the blatant disregard of labor laws governing wages, safety, and health. This type of abuse is most typically seen in fields managed not by farmers but by farm-labor contractors, many of whom started out as farmworkers themselves.

I wrote a post just recently about John Steinbeck. Many consider his novel The Grapes of Wrath, about a poor farm family during the Depression, his greatest work. Though probably some people read it or watch the very good movie version, and think those battles for decent working conditions and fair pay for a day’s work are a thing of the past. We just keep fighting the same battles over and over again because greed and cruelty are monsters with insatiable appetites.

coral cherry blossoms wallpaper, austerity is worse than zombies, buffalo soldiers

coral cherry blossoms wallpaper

Myths are hard to kill. I don’t keep up with all the zombie news, but it is my understanding that a well placed shotgun blast to the head will kill a zombie. No such luck with the belief in austerity, which is pretty much the same as believing in warlocks and tooth fairies. This is yet another, well written and documented look at the failures of austerity, Why a Bad Idea Won Over the West

Unable to take constructive action toward any common end, the U.S. Congress has recently been reduced to playing an ongoing game of chicken with the American economy. The debt-ceiling debacle gave way to the “fiscal cliff,” which morphed into the across-the-board cuts in military and discretionary spending known as “sequestration.” Whatever happens next on the tax front, further cuts in spending seem likely. And so a modified form of the austerity that has characterized policymaking in Europe since 2010 is coming to the United States as well; the only questions are how big the hit will end up being and who will bear the brunt. What makes all this so absurd is that the European experience has shown yet again why joining the austerity club is exactly the wrong thing for a struggling economy to do.

The eurozone countries, the United Kingdom, and the Baltic states have volunteered as subjects in a grand experiment that aims to find out if it is possible for an economically stagnant country to cut its way to prosperity. Austerity — the deliberate deflation of domestic wages and prices through cuts to public spending — is designed to reduce a state’s debts and deficits, increase its economic competitiveness, and restore what is vaguely referred to as “business confidence.” The last point is key: advocates of austerity believe that slashing spending spurs private investment, since it signals that the government will neither be crowding out the market for investment with its own stimulus efforts nor be adding to its debt burden. Consumers and producers, the argument goes, will feel confident about the future and will spend more, allowing the economy to grow again.

In line with such thinking, and following the shock of the recent financial crisis, which caused public debt to balloon, much of Europe has been pursuing austerity consistently for the past four years. The results of the experiment are now in, and they are equally consistent: austerity doesn’t work.

Mr. Blyth is playing by the strict rules of golf, or what philosophers refer to as taking your opponents argument and the basis for that argument at face value. One assumes that said opponent is being both honest and genuine. There are people within the austerity club who probably believe what they say just as there are witches who believe they can whip up the perfect love potion. I know enough neuroscience, psychology and have enough real world experience to know that trying to convince a true believer in unjustified beliefs that they are wrong is a Sisyphean struggle. Though Mr. Blyth may not be aware of the lack of genuineness of U.S. conservatives. To paraphrase the gigolo senator from Arizona, John McCain, from 2000 to 2008 conservatives spent money like a “drunken sailor”. Now, having entered a recession in which conservative economic polices combined with a stunning lack of oversight of the financial industry, suddenly spending like said sailor ( sailors are generally nice people who have been dragged into this conversation via history, sorry about that) is something only the anti-Christ or Stalin or Hitler would do. On a historic scale this is the conservative clusterfu*k version of do as I say not as I do. One of the biggest reasons for this sudden change of their many faces, is that conservatives see the national debt as an opportunity to undo the safety net that started with The New Deal. That is why they did not care about spending and debt for eight years. They consider programs like Medicare and Social Security a form of political and cultural blaspheme. When the crony corporatists, that run America screw up, with an odd exception or two, the wealthy stay wealthy. Who pays for the recession – we have them regularly – the middle-class and working poor. The deal went like this. We have this meager safety net so that the powers that be can continue to screw up yet again, and again and again, but at least most Americans will have some kind of shelter, food and some medical care. According the dogma set forth in the holy book of conservatism this meager safety net makes everyone into a weak, morally lose, lazy moocher. By taking away the safety net they’re setting everyone free to let out their inner John Galt. Cheer-leading austerity is just a way for the conservatives and libertarians to literally let everyone know the real freedom of being old and poor, disabled and poor, and sick and poor. Anyone who thinks that sounds goofy is not reading enough conservative and libertarian articles and punditry. One of the neatest tricks ever pulled in politics is making millions of people believe that buying some candy with food stamps is the ruination of America, but turning the country into a wage slave plantation is pure patriotism.

This is just one example of how the game is rigged ( more at the link),

In 2006, hedge fund manager John Paulson realized millions of Americans had signed up for mortgages they couldn’t afford and would soon start defaulting on their payments, causing the housing bubble to burst. So he took out “insurance” on stocks made up of bundled-together mortgages, which had been sold to investors. Paulson even teamed up with Goldman Sachs to create new stocks — in which he helped select the mortgages, ensuring there’d be lots of faulty ones – and then took out “insurance” on them. This was like taking out insurance on someone else’s car, after arranging with the car manufacturer to put in faulty brakes. When the housing market collapsed, triggering the Wall Street meltdown, Paulson collected $3.7 billion, giving him the all-time record for profiting from the misery of others.

Two unidentified buffalo soldiers with musical instruments, ca. 1860-1880. Photographer unknown. Not all Buffalo Soldiers were musicians. They started out as  members of the U.S. 10th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army, formed on September 21, 1866 at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Though the name spread to describe all of the black soldiers in the Army which eventually included the 9th Cavalry Regiment,10th Cavalry Regiment, 24th Infantry Regiment and the 25th Infantry Regiment.

Cops in pink flip flops tackle crime (Picture: Hampshire Constabulary).

Sgt Richard Holland and PCSO Rebecca Williams exposed their toes as they patrolled in Winchester, Hampshire – where critics said the footwear was ‘casual and impractical’.

The officers were showing support for the city’s Street Pastors, who give the flat footwear to drunk revellers struggling home in heels.