Motor vehicle accidents used to be the leading cause of death in this country. But not in Missouri —
Firearms proved more deadly, and by a wide margin — 880 to 781 — according to the most recent federal data available. And Missouri appears to be a harbinger of things to come.
Some experts predict that for the first time in decades, firearms will kill more people nationwide this year than motor vehicles.
And the reason why traffic deaths have decreased dramatically?
Advocates credit seat belts, padded dashboards, airbags, highway median guard cables and road-edge rumble strips, among other things.
But God forbid that we talk about putting better safety mechanisms on guns! Because FREEDOM!
Reading this, I couldn’t help recalling a memorable interview with the late, irrepressible Molly Ivins, during which she noted that the Texas legislature had successfully addressed a similar problem. Gun deaths in Texas had exceeded fatalities from automobile accidents. “But our lawmakers took care of that problem.” Molly reported.
During Bill Clinton’s campaign for President, James Carville famously insisted “It’s the Economy, Stupid,” and it is certainly true that economic conditions have a huge effect on political attitudes. What that catchy slogan misses, however, is the extent to which the economy, in turn, depends upon a country’s infrastructure.
Societies require systems—both physical and social. Those systems provide us with important, albeit largely taken-for-granted webs of support. When those systems don’t work—or when they have been corrupted or neglected so that they only work for some groups and individuals—a society fails to function as it should.
A colleague of mine once made an observation that has stayed with me: in poor, third-world countries, people are no less entrepreneurial or hard working than those who live in the developed West. The relative lack of economic activity—especially more sophisticated enterprises– can be traced to the lack of basic infrastructure.
Businesses need multiple kinds of infrastructure in order to have a chance of succeeding (beginning with enough people with the wherewithal to buy their goods—i.e. markets). Undeveloped countries lack roads, trucks and railroads to transport necessary raw materials and to ship finished goods. They often lack reliable electricity and potable water. Even more importantly, many countries can’t even provide entrepreneurs with the security and social stability businesses require, the sort of social order we take for granted.
Infrastructure is much more than roads and sewers, important as those are. Infrastructure—in its most expansive sense—includes important social supports like the rule of law. In most western democratic countries (although not in the U.S.), health care is considered part of a country’s essential social infrastructure.
Needless to say, equal access to a robust social and physical infrastructure plays a huge role in mitigating economic inequality.
Elizabeth Warren is one of the few elected officials who seems to understand the essential role played by infrastructure. As she recently reiterated,
“people who built great businesses worked hard. Most successful entrepreneurs worked their tails off. But those businesses needed good soil to grow – and that meant they need roads and bridges to get their goods to market, dependable and affordable power grids, access to clean water and safe sewers, up-to-date communications – the kind of basic infrastructure that we build together.
Coming out of the Great Depression, we built those roads and bridges and power grids that helped businesses grow right here in America. We plowed money into our future, and as those businesses grew, they created great jobs here at home.
But by the 1980s, our country sharply cut back on making those investments in our future, and now we’re getting left behind. Today China spends 9% of its GDP on infrastructure. Europe spends about 5% of its GDP on infrastructure. They are building a future for their businesses – and better jobs for their people. But the United States is investing only 2.4% and looking for more ways to make cuts. Today, the American Society of Civil Engineers says we have about $3.6 trillion worth of deferred maintenance, repairs and upgrading – and every day we’re falling behind.
Disinvestment is worst, of course, in the poorer precincts of our nation—in areas where it is most needed.
America’s failure to attend to our basic infrastructure is one of the most serious policy issues we face. It is maddening to watch members of Congress in both parties posture for interest groups and play petty politics while our bridges and sewers crumble, our power grid degrades, and other countries’ wireless service exceeds ours in reliability and speed.
I think it was Eric Hoffer–the longshoreman/philosopher–who said we cannot judge the greatness of a civilization by the roads and buildings it constructs, but by how well it maintains what it builds.
On the one hand, there is high regard and wide support for investments in scientific research: Fully 79% of adults say that science has made life easier for most people, and a majority is positive about science’s impact on the quality of health care, food and the environment. More than half of adults (54%) consider U.S. scientific achievements to be either the best in the world or above average compared with other industrial countries; 92% of AAAS scientists hold similarly praiseworthy views.
When the questions got down into “the weeds,” however, the results were much like surveys about the Constitution (in the words of one report, “Americans Revere Constitution, Have No Idea What’s In It.”)
So we find stark differences between what scientists believe, based upon careful empirical research and the scientific method, and what Americans think scientists believe.
The differences in beliefs about the nature of reality are wide. For example, 88% of scientists think GMO foods are safe; 37% of Americans think they are safe. There are less dramatic, but still substantial, gaps between scientists and the public about the Big Bang, evolution, and climate change.
What is even more interesting, however, is Pew’s finding that Americans who hold beliefs at odds with settled science believe that scientists are “split” on these issues. So Americans who reject the science of climate change tell survey researchers that scientific opinion is divided on the matter. As Pew delicately puts it, “Perceptions of where the scientific community stands on both climate change and evolution tend to be associated with individual views on the issue.”
More evidence–as if we needed it–that we humans see the reality we choose to see.
Pew’s Research Center recently noted that financial insecurity has a range of what it called “secondary effects” for communities, including diminished participation in civic and political life.
The question that immediately occurred to me was: is this a feature, or a bug?
Ever since Ronald Reagan identified government as the problem rather than the solution, the ascendant radical right has worked tirelessly (and successfully) to remove or reduce the social supports available to poor Americans through government. At the same time, the GOP has worked to discourage or suppress the votes of those same Americans.
In today’s America, the financially secure have what political scientists call “voice.” Even before Citizens United and its progeny, the well-to-do could and did donate huge sums to favored politicians. The corporations that are “people”(!) can and do hire well-connected lobbyists to ensure that their interests are represented in the halls of power. As Pew has now pointed out, the financially secure are also much more likely to vote.
Voting is the only way financially insecure folks have voice. If enough poor people voted, it would be much more difficult to fashion a government protective of privilege. Keeping poor folks from the polls is thus in the (short term) interest of the well-off.
As Pete, who frequently comments here has pointed out, these aspects of our civic landscape are not the hallmarks of a democracy; they are the attributes of oligarchy.
One problem with oligarchy is that its goals tend to be both short-term and short-sighted.
If we don’t reverse course soon, if we don’t take the boots of the advantaged off the necks of the impoverished and give disheartened Americans a reason to participate in their own self-government, that short-sighted focus on the next quarterly statement and disregard of the long-term good will take us all down.
In my long nomadic life, I’ve had the good fortune to live, work, or travel in all but a handful of countries on this planet. I’ve been to both poles and a great many places in between, and nosy as I am, I’ve talked with people all along the way. I still remember a time when to be an American was to be envied. The country where I grew up after World War II seemed to be respected and admired around the world for way too many reasons to go into here….
In the early fall of 2014, I traveled from my home in Oslo, Norway, through much of Eastern and Central Europe. Everywhere I went in those two months, moments after locals realized I was an American the questions started and, polite as they usually were, most of them had a single underlying theme: Have Americans gone over the edge? Are you crazy? Please explain.
The author goes on to detail the issues that make America a “puzzlement” to the rest of the world, and I encourage you to click through and read the whole depressing thing.
The takeaway–at least for me–was that this question isn’t just being posed to the six million Americans who live abroad. Increasingly, it is a question that the dwindling numbers of reasonable Americans are asking each other here at home.
How do we explain the various buffoons and zealots holding public office, and the widespread disengagement from the democratic process that placed them there? How do we explain the contempt for poor Americans that characterizes debates about healthcare, poverty and the growth of inequality? How do we explain widespread rejection of science, the backlash against women’s rights, the refusal to do anything about mounting student debt, or even to recognize that education is a public good? How can we possibly defend letting our infrastructure crumble? Or explain the respectful attention generated by chickenhawks intent upon taking us into war after war? (Yes, Lindsay Graham, I’m looking at you and John McCain and the other “heirs” of Dick Cheney.)
If all of this isn’t crazy–if Americans aren’t in the grip of national psychosis– what is it?
