Finding Hope

 Living in the USA, sometimes it is hard to be hopeful about the future of humanity. This week has seen an outpouring of grief over an especially horrific school shooting. That grief will pass soon enough, and similar death tolls on the streets of Chicago or Baltimore will scarcely register in people’s consciousness. In a similar way, we all notice when a Goldman Sachs employee is shot by a mentally sick guy on the subway here in New York, but not really when a black kid is caught in crossfire in the Bronx.

 

Common theme themes in all of this are sick, angry people and guns. Everywhere in the world has sick, angry people, and the number of them seems to have increased since the start of the pandemic. In many societies those sick people are kept somewhat in check by a suffocating family or community culture. Only in the US do many of them wander around with lethal guns.

 

There are many aspects of US society that I struggle with, but most of them I can come to accept as a weird compromise or as a legacy of a different time. This is a rich society where you must think twice about calling for an ambulance in case it bankrupts you, and where that same ambulance will be chased by parasitic lawyers. The squalor of deprived areas, so close to districts of showy opulence, is hard to accept. Why can nobody seem to get rid of the potholes? Why is the TV so bad, especially anything trying to be funny?

 

I can come to terms with all of these. But not about guns. Why would anybody ever want to go anywhere near a gun, except deep in the forest for hunting? Lives are precious, and all guns achieve is to waste them. The idea that if I had a gun, I could somehow be safer is plainly preposterous. So a bad guy enters my house and threatens me. By a miracle my gun is handy, and loaded, and I can remember how to use it and I can shoot the bad guy before he shoots me? Seriously? I am far more likely to shoot myself or my child or goad the bad guy to be reckless, and statistics indeed back up this more realistic hypothesis.

 

This week’s shooter became eighteen last week and rewarded himself by buying a semi-automatic lethal weapon, entirely legally and without need for license, registration or training. He would have had to wait three more years before legally enjoying a beer. This is madness, yet so broken is the society that nothing will change; indeed the Supreme Court is about to rule that my own state cannot prevent people from wandering the streets with their guns.

 

Sadly, it is not just a stray bullet that could kill me. On the highway today I will very likely encounter a couple of idiots racing each other, dodging between lanes of traffic. A headline recently pointed out that being shot has overtaken traffic accidents as the leading cause of death among young here. We might conclude that part of the reason was that traffic deaths have decreased. They have a little as car safety standards have improved, but not because of safer driving or safer roads. Road traffic death rates here are about three times those in Europe.

 

Ah, Europe, the land of milk and honey. Of course things are not perfect there. Racism in the east is endemic. Italy’s economic management is a disaster. Grinding poverty remains in rural Iberia. The Irish nuns still ruin the lives of unmarried pregnant girls. Modern day fascists proliferate in many places. Even the poster children of the north have their issues. Business corruption is endemic in Sweden, Norway produced Brevik, and the Finns are near the top of the table for alcoholic suicide as well as the tables for happiness and educational attainment. Then there is the UK. And then there is Russia.

 

Yet, despite its frustrating failings, and certainly excluding Russia and perhaps also the UK, I do get a strong sense that Europe is still improving as a place to live, step by gradual step. During the ten years when I lived in the Netherlands, the cities became more liveable in series of small ways that added up to big change. There was a relentless focus on housing and on mental health, and on infrastructure improvements.

 

In Portugal, I know a small town in the Algarve called Loulé quite well. In 2005, it was a bit of a dump, with many dilapidated houses and streets and obvious poverty. Year by year, the town has found ways to improve for its citizens. With its tourism and expatriation incomes and its access to EU funds, perhaps Loulé is slightly exceptional, but I believe most places in the EU have seen some improvements. This has occurred across many fields, including education of all ages, health provision, hygiene, nutrition, nightlife, the police, housing, civic amenities, elderly care, roads, and culture. In place like Bucharest or Loulé, the difference is stark, but I believe nearly everywhere has found some way to become more liveable.

 

I can only imagine the sense of improvement that must exist in Asia, and especially in China. That land seems to have crammed a century of development into a decade. Again, the flaws are clear

 

I simply do not see the same positive trends in the US, though of course there are bright spots, for example pre-school provision in New York. The city is still filthy, and many people seem determined to make that worse. The roads are still terrible, and the standard of driving has deteriorated. Public schools are depressing, more like jails than places for joy and development. More people are getting fatter and lazier, even in New York. Homelessness and housing are major problems. The police are rude and seem to ignore most issues. All sorts of anti-social and destructive behaviour is justified by a concept of liberty that seems to mean doing whatever one damn well likes irrespective of the impact on others.

 

Reading the US section of The Economist each week, it is easy to diagnose the root causes of the problems and hard to avoid the conclusion that nothing will improve any time soon. Congress is broken, and the public discourse is more about abortion or historical racism or critical race theory or ludicrous conspiracies or religious cults than about anything that might improve the lives of citizens. Speaking to Americans, a culture of complacent insularity still pertains, full of claims of superiority and a lack of curiosity about other societies that might have something to teach.

 

On the many days when this depressing picture comes to the fore in my mind, I conclude that it is time for me to move back to Europe. But that feels like running away and as an insult to the many Americans striving to make lives better, including mine. Furthermore, one of our children has chosen to build a life here. So I try to counteract despair and an urge to flee with feelings of hope. Luckily, these are always possible to find, and usually by looking to the young.

 

Last week I attended a pair of graduations. The US does this type of ceremony very well, replete with English and Scottish music and plenty of pomp. But my overriding impression of the occasion came from the young people who were graduating. They were incredibly diverse, yet fully respectful of each other, society and even the planet. They were humble, curious, and full of smart ideas. Then on Saturday I performed with the group I call my Broadway choir, full of energy and youth as well as social awareness.

 

Now I am keenly aware that these privileged subsets do not represent the full picture. But they fill me with hope, nonetheless. Surely that generation will find ways through the political impasse and use its diversity to reduce the damaging insularity that pervades America. The sooner the baton is passed to these people, the better for all of us.

 

And here is an even more hopeful thought. The youth of the USA, albeit the elite youth, have become an impressive generation despite the many societal failings holding them back. So what about the youth of the EU, who have surely benefited from the many positive improvements that are so evident to me. How impressive will I find these young people be, once I have a chance to interact with more of them after next year?  

The Economist Leader Game

 I have always been blessed with the ability to sleep. I rarely toss and turn and somehow relish my time asleep. Nowadays I do often wake during the night owing to the need to pee, and sometimes find that I don’t feel ready to go straight back to sleep afterwards. Then I get up, make myself a cup of hot water, and spend half an hour reading The Economist, after which I am invariably able to get back to sleep quickly.

 

This is how I often end up reading the six leaders in an Economist issue in one sitting, along with the news in brief and briefing sections. The leaders are always insightful, tightly argued, courageous and balanced. I find that The Economist journalism just gets better and better, in contrast to almost everything else that crosses my path.

 

I find it especially valuable now in the time of war, where emotion and sentiment tend to drown cold logic. We are quick to condemn the propaganda of the other side, but we should be especially alert at these times to groupthink and propaganda from our own side. Some of it may indeed be state sponsored, but even where it is not, journalists can become emotional and pander to the need to give their readers what they yearn to hear. So we are fed a constant diet of blather about plucky Ukrainians and evil Russians and we can easily lose our sense of balance and the bigger picture. There is no doubt of the primary blame for this war, but real life is always more complex than a marvel movie.

 

The Economist rises above this in war, and that reminds me that its same logical approach avoids similar traps over less fraught topics too. The magazine does have its blind spots. It is written by intelligent, educated, globally aware journalists who mix in circles or similar people. Most of these are somewhat wealthy and anxious to protect their advantages and pass some of them to their children. So maintaining legal rights and relative stability of capital and property always ranks number one among the values of the magazine. That leads to a strong bias towards free markets and by extension to the established Western model of democracy. That devotion can drift into tribalism at times, and I also believe that there is a secret deal with MI5 that leads to occasional articles that are little more than NATO propaganda.

 

Sometimes I play a game with myself after reading the six Economist leaders. In that game I take the six articles as a group and seek connections and inconsistencies. This technique is documented as effective in business innovation and in culture: you take two or three seemingly unconnected topics at random and force yourself to merge them somehow. That is a great way to create breakthroughs.

 

I played my game this week. The six leader articles were generally excellent, and as usual they covered economics, politics and social issues and many regions of the world.

 

The first leader was about saving the US Supreme Court, and that was also the topic of the briefing that followed. It was a depressing read. The key argument is that Congress broke several decades ago, and that is the root cause of the presidency, the Supreme Court and even aspects of civil society starting to break in turn. The problem is that, while plentiful solutions are evident, none is remotely likely to happen. Indeed, the disease seems almost certain to worsen and to spread. The best The Economist could offer as something useful to advocate for that might conceivably happen is an improved code of ethics for judges.

 

Next came a lovely optimistic leader about wearables, also the topic of the Technology Quarterly later in the issue. Technology has reached a tipping point whereby personalised medicine can become ubiquitous and life-changing, thanks in part to devices we can keep on our bodies providing constant data. Much of this innovation is being led in the US, and slowly the inertia of the medical profession is being overcome, and such devices are moving from the hipster fringes into truly useful areas. So far I have avoided devices that tell me that I am anxious because my sleep patterns are unhealthy, thereby making it harder to sleep and adding anxiety. Perhaps it is time to be rather less cynical.

 

The third leader was an Economist classic about short-term global economic prospects. It continued the gloomy recent drumbeat of such articles and predicted more trouble ahead, with the Ukraine war, covid in China and overheating in the US as factors indicating pessimism. The mindset of this article was clearly one of an investor with existing assets to protect. Implications for inequality, climate change or anything else were nowhere to be seen.

 

The fourth leader was the weakest, and MI5 may have had a hand in it. The topic was how the West should react to China’s policy of developing coastal military bases around the world. To be fair, there was some credence given to China’s opinions on the topic, but the dominant attitude was one of controlling China rather than envisioning a world where China would not need to be controlled. The grudging conclusion was that little could be done beyond the ugly policy of bribing (or blackmailing) nations to favour the West. Surely that leads us straight into a new cold war?

 

The fifth leader was about the precipitous decline of journalistic freedom around the globe. Powerfully, it started by asking if the war in Ukraine could have started if Russia had an effective free press, and whether Covid could have been stifled at its onset if China had one. This was an excellent article, but I found a flaw. Autocratic and faux democratic regimes do indeed do enormous damage by manipulating the press, but for me the press is stifled in democracies too when moneyed interests come to dominate. Mention of Rupert Murdoch (or the spectre of Elon Musk owning Twitter) would have improved the leader.

 

The final leader was about Russian wealth in London, how it was cynically welcomed and has become difficult to escape from. It argued for increasing budgets and profile of monitoring agencies and for regulating law firms more stringently, correctly asserting that such measures would probably be too little and too late.

 

So where are the connections within this disparate set of articles? I think the starting point is an accommodation between the West and China. Leader four shows where blind ideological confrontation leads, while leader three shows how painful a full economic decoupling would be. We should accept that there are strengths in both the Western and the Chinese models. In conflict, both will end up restricting press freedom (leader five) on their own ways, and leader six demonstrates clearly that the West has no monopoly on laudable values. We like to claim that the sort of innovation highlighted in leader two, innovation which indeed is the key to driving humanity forward, is more likely in the Western system, but that claim is starting to wear rather hollow, and I suspect that the execution of value from wearables for all citizens may occur more quickly in China, and that as America polarises and stagnates politically (leader one) it will lead in fewer and fewer fields.

 

If the West had a working accommodation with China, then power could be transferred safely to international institutions both militarily (leader four) and economically (leader three), and everything could benefit, including open dialogue (leader five) and innovation (leader two). Excluded rogue states would be treated as they warrant rather than hypocritically (leader one).

 

Sadly, this intellectual flight of fancy finishes exactly where it starts, with leader one. A stymied America has no chance whatsoever of reaching such an accommodation, even as it progressively loses battle after battle in the new cold war it has so foolishly declared. Is there a way out of the maze? I fear the solution is only available to America, and I am not holding my breath.    

The Failure of Homelessness

Visible homelessness is on the rise in New York City, and I see it every evening on the subway on my journey home from choir rehearsal. It is crushingly sad to see, and an indictment of all of us.

 

The proximate cause of visible homelessness is a failure of the emergency response of the city. It appears that there are homeless shelters available (despite every neighbourhood trying to push them elsewhere), but the homeless people resist them for some reason.

 

The next level of failure is within the housing market. Plainly there are not enough homes available at low rents and where desperate people can rebuild their lives without constant threat of eviction or incarceration or sinking deeper into debt. The pandemic went some way to cover up these problems for a time, with temporary bans on eviction and plentiful handouts. Now, as these provisions unwind, it is no surprise that a crisis has exploded in ways we can all witness.

 

As Matthew Desmond researched in the brilliant book Eviction, there are a series of failures with how US cities regulate housing and how they execute those regulations. Notably, budgets to support struggling families are woefully underfunded, an imbalance that is long standing and well-known to officials at all levels, yet never addressed, probably because politically it is too risky.

 

It is not necessary to copy the impressive policies of Northern European countries, where a lot of taxpayer money is spent on upgrading and growing public housing stock, though that does seem to be a good use of public funds, considering the likely spin off benefits. More imaginative fixes may be available, perhaps including starting to nudge those families away from subsidised accommodation after a few years.

 

None of this is likely to be popular. I saw an interview with a Democrat running for state governor yesterday. He represents moderately wealthy areas with the space to grow a housing stock, but he campaigns against it to please his constituents, who of course want to retain their low-rise leafy feel and perhaps to keep poorer people away from their schools. His argument was that such matters should remain local: if there is one problem where that is sure to fail, then housing must surely be it.

 

Housing policy can surely improve, but there must also be deeper causes of mass homelessness. It is hard to imagine the depths of despair that these people must have reached. They must surely have passed through so much anger and rejection and pride and shame and hopelessness on their depressing journeys that end in the indignity of subway carriages. How can this become the awful fate of so many people?

 

One place to start looking is within families. Years ago, kids or even adults who were struggling made their way back to their parents or to others within communities where they were brought up. If that became untenable because of mental illness, many people were locked up in institutions. It many parts of the world such formal and informal arrangements still prevail. We should not wish for society to back to this way of functioning. The institutions were cruel and few managed to be healed. Families became insular rather than face the stigma of mental illness. And some family members, almost invariably women, became full time carers at the expense of their own development.

 

Even if we desired such an outcome, greater mobility would make it tough to replicate nowadays. Young people flood to cities while their parents stay in the suburbs or rural parts. When those young people face struggles, the parents may not notice until it is too late, and the kids will be too prideful to be able to ask for help or return home.

 

Even so, it is hard to imagine that there are not opportunities to break the negative cycle. Parents will surely try to intervene. Most people are generally kind and generous, and there is plenty of goodwill available. Churches all have help groups and volunteers are ready to help. In the case of somebody sinking as far as homelessness, all of this must have failed along the way. Why?

 

Addiction must lay at the heart of the challenge. Once somebody has an addiction, it becomes difficult for them to recover, for many reasons. By its nature, addiction requires a massive effort to escape from. People who are addicts are very hard to help, quite unlike the saccharine picture painted by Hollywood. And on the road to recovery, an addict will have many legacy issues to deal with, including broken relationships and stubborn debt. The road to addiction is full of temptations, but the road out is tough indeed. Twelve-step programs remain the bedrock of most interventions, yet these feel somehow old-fashioned and have a mixed track record. I spent a year in a twelve-step program myself, witnessing both the wonderful humanity of the people involved and the uphill struggle faced by addicts.

 

Given the appalling human and economic cost of homelessness, it follows that a smart society would invest in two areas regarding addiction. The first is to try to provide better means of escape. In the case of opioid addiction, there is emerging good practice is the area of medication. Surely this warrants much more research and programs to enable earlier intervention. There are implications in areas of community structures, incentives for addicts and their families, education to spot warning signs earlier, developing effective pharmaceuticals, treatment programs and campaigns to reduce the stigma associated with mental illness and addiction. When I see Eric Adams focusing effort and resources to these areas, I’ll have more confidence in him.

 

But the second opportunity must be to reduce the odds of people becoming addicts in the first place. In the US, it sometimes feels as though society conspires to drive people to addiction. We are all told, by Hollywood and elsewhere, that we can be whatever we want to be. Our social media feeds are full of smiling, successful faces, generally exaggerated. Yet in truth we cannot all become NBA stars or millionaire influencers, and many take reckless gambles trying to succeed along highly risky paths, with addiction becoming a likely outcome after failure, especially for those with less education or family support. 

 

Then there are the excesses of capitalism. The consumer business model of banks in the US is explicitly to drive us into debt so great that we struggle to service it. Alcohol is scarcely regulated despite its dominant role in creating addicts. The incentives in the medical world often point in the wrong direction. And I cringe every time I see an advert encourage people to gamble recklessly (despite the unreadable small print at the bottom of the screen). I do a lot of cringing: during sports broadcasts nowadays, such ads seem to constitute 50% or more of the material.

 

Homeless is a failure of all of us. Each time we are inconvenienced by a lingering odour of urine in the subway or by feeling less safe, we should remind ourselves of the many root causes, and of how a humane society would be able to address many of them.