I’m old enough to recall when one of the fads sweeping the country was “paint-by-the-numbers” kits, where anyone could produce a reproduction, at least of sorts, of a famous artist by simply matching the number on a tiny jar of paint with the number printed on a cheap canvas stretched across cardboard and dabbing each number with the correspondingly numbered paint.

The older I get, the more I’m seeing our society structure itself along similar lines. It seems like everything is analyzed “by the numbers” and then either quantified, evaluated, or replicated… according to the numbers. Vital services — such as medical care, road and highway maintenance, public safety, and education — are evaluated in terms of their cost-effectiveness for populations as a whole. The problem is that all too many people and situations don’t fit the numerical models. And numerical models seldom result in excellence, any more than paint-by-number kits resulted in great paintings.

In education, students’ futures are effectively being determined more and more by standardized tests, and teachers’ effectiveness is being measured more and more by the performance of their students on those tests. Besides the problem that there are students who test well beyond their real-life abilities and those who test below their potential, and the corruption of the system into teaching to the tests, there’s the even larger problem that the tests are designed to measure the ability to succeed in “intellectual” settings and occupations, and there’s also a tacit assumption that the abilities measured by those tests are the only ones that count. Now… I confess. I’m one of those who did well on tests, and to the test-designers and analyzers, I’m proof that the tests “work.” At what? Such tests are excellent at identifying a set of skills useful for perhaps ten percent of the population. twenty percent at most. And what about all the others?

I’m sorry, but, as well as I may test, you don’t want me trying to repair your leaky faucet, or your home wiring. I’m a good painter and a barely passable wood-worker, but keep me away from the mechanical side of your automobile or almost anything else. Yet the numerical, test-taking educational experts are acting as though it only takes people like me to run everything in society, because, by acting as though their tests measure all that is important, they effectively ignore those who don’t fit in a narrow numerical model.

I’m more than happy to pay experts in fields other than those I know… but experts like that are getting harder and harder to find. The problem is that, in our zeal to evaluate education “by the numbers,” we’re not steering those students who aren’t “intellectually” inclined to fields in which they could be both successful occupationally and financially. We’re treating every one of them as either intellectual successes or failures, because that’s what the numbers say.

In medicine, the numbers pressure for cost-effectiveness by the government and by insurers has resulted in fewer and fewer doctors who going into “general” or family practice, and those who do end up being pressured into seeing more and more patients for shorter and shorter visits… just to pay the costs of modern high-technology medicine. Reports are coming in showing that, in community after community, doctors are limiting the number of Medicare patients because the combination of excessive paperwork and low-mandated reimbursement results in their losing money on such patients… and in fact the inflation-adjusted real earnings of “family doctors” are declining, largely as a result of cost-effectiveness measures developed by the numbers and imposed on medical general practitioners.

On the other side, as I’ve noted in a different light in earlier blogs, the emphasis on financial success, by the numbers, has played a significant role in the housing/credit/mortgage melt-down, because almost everyone in the financial sector was focused on maximizing short-term yields and returns. Call it high finance by the numbers.

From the media to elite institutions, more and more, those lauded publicly are those who have been financially successful or who have been so and donated large sums of money, not necessarily those whose contributions to society cannot be easily quantified. Bill Gates is a figure known-world wide, because of the staggering “numerical success” of MicroSoft, but I can’t even recall the names of the men whose pioneering work in transistors at Texas Instruments made that success possible, and I doubt most Americans could.

All this emphasis on the numerical and quantifiable neglects some very basis aspects of life and society.

No student was ever touched — or inspired — by a number. No patient was ever healed by a number. No criminal was ever physically apprehended by a number. No fire was ever extinguished by a number. But excessive emphasis on numbers — from the stock mania of the 1920s that led to the Great Depression, to the body counts in Vietnam, to the dotcom and housing booms and busts of the last decade — has always led to one form of disaster or another.

Long years ago, when I was first involved in politics, my mentor was a courtly political operative named, believe it or not, Robert Lee. Bob Lee had an impressive record of masterminding unlikely political success stories, but he understood the basics of practical politics better than anyone I ever knew. He provided two basic insights about politics, among others, that have stuck with me and seem particularly apropos to the current situation. The first was, “Don’t mistake money for results.” By that he meant that too many politicians and political operatives concentrated on fund-raising when the goal wasn’t to raise money, but to get more people to vote for your candidate. In the end, what counted was not how much money you raised, but how many votes you got. The second point was that to win any political race, “you have to give people something to vote for.”

The current bailout effort in Washington, D.C., failed Bob Lee’s tests on both counts. The question isn’t how much money you pour into the bailout effort, but how you get the people and their representatives to support it and vote for it, because without support, all the money isn’t going anywhere. The second point is even more important. The way the issue was formulated, it didn’t give anyone much to vote for, but it gave them a considerable number of things to vote against. The administration failed to make the point that our entire credit/banking system is at risk and why it is. Because it did not, those who opposed the bailout weren’t voting against a solution. They were voting against excessive executive compensation and Wall Street extravagance, against using tax dollars to bail out Wall Street at a time when Wall Street’s mistakes have pulled down the entire economy, against a finance system that requires poor or middle-class borrowers to pay escalating mortgage costs while rewarding financiers, against a system that is perceived as destroying American jobs while granting multimillion dollar bonuses to those behind that destruction, and against a system that rewards crooked financiers while underpaying teachers, police officers, firefighters, and hundreds of other vital and underpaid occupations.

If the current Congress and Administration really want to stop the crisis, they need to give people something to vote for, and a reason to support their “reform package.”

Here are a few suggestions. First, cap total executive compensation for any company being bailed out at a mere 100 times the pay of an average worker in the company[as opposed to the thousand plus multiple in some cases], and also make any compensation paid above that amount in any other company in the USA non-deductible for tax purposes. Second, not only continue the existing prohibition on naked short-selling [the principal contributing factor to a number of corporate failures], but require any brokerage firm which does so to be closed for violating the law and [in case future administrations decide to turn a blind eye, as has the present administration] make any violation a cause for civil recompense and quintuple damages. This will get the attorneys working for the public good instead of against it. Third, limit the amount of mortgage payment escalations in adjustable rate mortgages to something approximately realistic [perhaps no more than a 10% increase in payments annually] and eliminate excessive prepayment penalties. Fourth, eliminate the securitization/bundling of sub-prime mortgages with other classes of mortgages. If the bankers and lenders want to bundle mortgages, let them do so, but make them bundle like with like. That way the risks are out in the open. Fifth, enact specific reserve requirements for all classes of debt, including CDOs and other collateralized obligations. Sixth, make violations of these provisions criminal offenses.

I’m sure other thinking individuals could come up with proposals that both make sense and which would garner public support, but these are a few that should be considered. There are other approaches, including a government-backed restructuring of debt markets with more private investment that might work as well… but whatever solution is next proposed must explain the positive benefits.

As for the argument that the financial community won’t like these… well, aren’t you the ones asking for rescue? Shouldn’t the taxpayers who are underwriting the rescue be the ones setting a few terms, particularly since the financial community hasn’t shown much fiscal or moral responsibility lately?

When I was writing an earlier blog, I ran it through the spell and grammar checker, and the grammar checker came up with three errors that weren’t, and suggested three very ungrammatical fixes. At first, I couldn’t figure out why, until I realized that I’d used a complex sentence structure with parallel subordinate clauses. Now, I obviously have nothing against technology per se, but this incident got me to thinking about the implications… and to a writer like me, those implications are between annoying and frightening.

It’s clear that the software doesn’t work nearly so well with complex phrases. Is that because it’s not worth while to design it to that level of complexity? Or that it can’t be? Either way, the end result isn’t good, because it’s applying simple rules to complex phrases, and that’s one of the biggest problems with most technology, especially when the user understands neither the entire field in question nor the limits of the technology. But, as in the case of word-processing software, technology often allows the marginally competent to look like the competent — until something really goes wrong.

These days, more and more young writers are relying on software to clean up their work, and every time I read manuscripts for a contest [which I do upon occasion] I’m reminded of this… and the fact that very few of them truly understand their native language.

Another problem that plagues me is the autoformatting feature of Word, especially when I have to go back three lines and put in a hard return so that I don’t end up with an after-the-fact indented paragraph. I mean, after all, I didn’t indent that paragraph when I typed it out. The software all of a sudden undid — or redid — what I did because I didn’t conform to its programming. This is a recurring problem with all computer-based systems. They do what you tell them to do, not what you intended to do, and, sometimes, they even do something that you had no idea they could do, and that you certainly didn’t plan on. The problems begin when there are features you don’t know are incorporated in the system. You think you’ve told the system to do one thing, but your instructions are reformulated by the system. This is an annoyance in word-processing, but it can be a disaster, as in the case of the Mars probe that crashed because there were conflicting measurement systems programmed into the navigation systems, systems of which some of the scientists programming the deceleration were unaware.

And, of course, just about the time I’ve finally worked through and understand most of the glitches in a system, some hot-shot programmers and profit-motivated executives re-design the software… and before all that long I’ll be forced to learn another new and improved system with unknown quirks or glitches, whether I want to or not, because sooner or later, things like the latest printers don’t have printer-drivers for the old software, and because I tend to burn through printers, that limits my choices. And that irritates me, especially since “new” is often not better. I can count on it to be more complex, but not necessarily better, and certainly not simpler… and that’s unfortunately true of most technology.

Why does Tor always put “The New Novel in The Saga of Recluce” on the front of each new Recluce book that comes out in hardcover? I understand the idea of getting this across to the readers, but it must look rather silly to someone who has many Recluce books in hardcover to line them up with ten or so volumes, each proclaiming that it is the “new” one.

Why is good practical judgment called “common sense” when it’s anything but common, especially among politicians?

Why is it that the United States, which is one of the oldest continuous forms of government and which prides itself on equality and opportunity, is only one of two major western powers that has never had a female head of state?

In the United States, according to various polls, over 90% of the people believe in God, and the majority of those believers are Christians. Although one of the tenets of Christianity is theoretically charity and another is judging people by their acts, 60% of those good souls would refuse to vote for an atheist. Why? It’s not as though good religious folk haven’t been the ones who’ve done most of the evils in societies over history.

Why is it that liberals — usually Democrats — are so ready to spend tax dollars to make sure that those who are less advantaged can attain the “American dream” and so ready to condemn and tax those who have actually achieved it?

Why is it that so many conservatives — usually Republicans — are so fond of the Bill of Rights when it comes to the first amendment [freedom of religion] and the second amendment [owning guns] and want to ignore it so much when it comes to matters such as the fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments [freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, warrants, trial by jury, due process], especially when they apply to the poor and less advantaged, who are the ones who need those rights most?

Why is it that some political candidates declare that the answer to the pay-gender gap is that women should get more education when women have been getting more collegiate degrees than men for at least a decade? Or is what they mean that women have to have more education to get the same — or less — pay than men?

When government gives money to individuals who can’t make ends meet, it’s called welfare, but when it gives money to corporations, it’s called an incentive or a credit [or an absolutely necessary financial system reform]. Why the difference?

Why is it that when a man with small children runs for public office, he’s hailed as a good family man while a female candidate for the same office is asked how she can handle the job and her family? Is this because we expect the job to be so taxing that the office-holder must neglect family and because no man is expected to take on family responsibilities? Isn’t that just chauvinism one step removed?

And why is it that, when one asks questions like these, they’re either ignored or addressed with platitudes or simplistic answers… or result in attacks?

As many Americans have been, I’ve been following the current housing credit/financial meltdown, and, as someone who was once a practicing economist, I have more of a professional interest than many. But in reading all the business and financial journals I receive, I’ve noticed something startling: almost no one talks about the moral dimensions of the mess. It’s as though the “business model” has subsumed all sense of ethics and morality.

Now… let’s put this in a simplified perspective. Builders were building too many houses for those who could qualify for housing under the “more traditional” standards. So more “innovative” ways of mortgage financing were developed, many of which required no money down and minimal, if any, detailed credit checking. In turn, these marginal and sub-prime loans were bundled into larger mortgage tranches, if you will, which were then securitized and sold to various institutions. In many cases, the “leverage” was close to 65 to 1. In plain English, that meant for every $65 loaned, only one dollar of reserves, or cash on hand backing the loan, was available. Now, leverage works both ways, and when the housing market slowed, and when home-owners began to default on loans, each dollar of default theoretically required the institution holding the securities to come up with an additional $65. That meant that less than a five percent default rate could wipe out the value of the other 95% of the mortgage package. Most financial institutions could not come up with anywhere close to the additional reserves required… and… the rest, as they say, is history, if aided, by another illegal but tolerated practice of the brokerage business — naked short-selling, which the SEC just belatedly announced would no longer be accepted.

Where does morality come in? At all levels.

First, it’s been estimated that something like 30% of the subprime loans were written with terms that effectively made refinancing impossible if the price of the house did not increase dramatically. Not only was this financially unwise, but locking a gullible buyer into such a situation is unethical, to say the least. Then, the higher level junior executives who sold these mortgages to the institutions that securitized them dramatically understated the risks, also not exactly the most ethical of behaviors. The institutions that bought the securitized loans didn’t exactly perform the greatest due diligence, and there are stories, if currently unverified, that some analysts who tried to raise the question were quashed… because, after all, this quarter’s yield is far more important than what will happen a year or two from now. The CEOs of the institutions involved certainly didn’t look beyond the immediate balance sheet, and they were paid and took enormous salaries and other compensation while insisting that their firms were solvent and would remain so, which is a form of either naivete [and one shouldn’t be a CEO with that level of naivete] or misrepresentation, which is a form of fraud. And it doesn’t appear that all the brokers who decided to profit from the market decline by short-selling the stock of companies like AIG, Lehman, and Merrill Lynch, without having the stock to cover the short-sales, were even behaving legally, let alone ethically. Now, because of the intertwined nature of the world financial markets, in some form or another, U.S. and other taxpayers will have to come up with the cash reserves to keep the whole system from crashing, and that cash requirement is nothing more than an enormous theft from the public — an elaborate variation on the Ponzi or pyramid schemes of the past, which have resulted, if only in the past, with their perpetrators going to prison. Here, the executives at all levels of these public companies raked in enormous salaries and bonuses as a result of these unethical and sometimes even illegal practices, and I sincerely doubt that any of them will face criminal charges.

Didn’t anyone of importance say, “These kinds of mortgages are wrong.”? “These appraisals are inflated.”? Didn’t any executive observe that the leverage requirements were so far out of line with banking and securities reserve requirements that they were in effect dangerous and fraudulent? Didn’t any brokerage firm or executive crack down on naked short-selling?

So far as I can tell, none, or very few, did. Instead, they followed the “business model” of “the highest level of short-term profit possible by any means allowable under the law.”

The problem that no one seems willing to face here is that brilliant men can always find a way around the law. Always! Our saving grace as a society in the past has been that there has been a preponderance of men and women who also asked, “Is it honest? Is it right?… instead of asking, “Is it legal and how much can we make?”

And it’s also sad that, so far, very few, if any, of our vaunted media, self-anointed guardians of liberty and discoverers of wrong-doing, have asked the questions posed here.

All the new rules and regulations will mean nothing until we, as a society, stop insisting on “more” at any cost and start asking, “Is it right?”