Justice, Justice….

“Justice, justice shalt thou pursue.”

Yesterday, I read two unrelated items that brought that Talmudic injunction rather forcefully to mind. The first was a line in an excellent review in the Atlantic of two books about Sholem Aleichem, sometimes called the “Jewish Mark Twain.” (Aleichem was the creator of Tevye, the inspiration for the central character in Fiddler on the Roof.) The sentence that struck me was this: Jewish humor arises in the gap between reality and dreams, reality and justice.”

The other item was a story from the Huffington Post. The headline says it all: For the First Time Ever, a Prosecutor Will Go to Jail for Wrongfully Convicting an Innocent Man.

The prosecutor in the case, Ken Anderson, possessed evidence that would have cleared the defendant, including a statement from the crime’s only eyewitness that the defendant wasn’t the perpetrator. Anderson sat on that evidence and obtained a conviction of the accused, who remained in prison for the next 25 years.  Meanwhile, Anderson’s career flourished, and he eventually became a judge.

As unjust as this situation was, as shocking to the conscience, what makes it newsworthy is the fact that Anderson actually was punished. As the story notes–and as most lawyers can attest– this is not an isolated case of malfeasance. Although most prosecutors and judges are ethical practitioners who take their obligations to the rule of law seriously, there are far too many who do not, and they are rarely, if ever, sanctioned. A recent study found prosecutorial misconduct in nearly a quarter of all capital cases in Arizona. Only two of those prosecutors have been reprimanded or punished in any way.

Evidence of gross misconduct leading to injustice isn’t limited to the legal system. It is increasingly impossible to ignore the corruption of our social and governing institutions. Over the past couple of decades, we’ve seen it everywhere–from rampant corporate misbehavior to major league sports doping to revelations of priestly child molestation to corrupt lobbyists to propagandists masquerading as journalists to Congressmen who cut food stamps for hungry children while fiercely protecting tax loopholes and corporate welfare for their patrons.

In this dismal ethical environment, justice isn’t the first word that comes to mind.

An unjust, unfair world invites–demands–political satire, and satire, at least, is thriving. You need only watch Jon Stewart for an example of Jewish humor that “arises in the gap between justice and reality.” It’s a big gap. The Sholem Aleichem reviewer suggests that the purpose of Jewish humor is to “give yourself some distance from your hopeless situation.” If that’s accurate, most humor these days is Jewish humor.

Gallows humor.

I enjoy a good laugh, but I’d prefer a more just world.

Connecting More Dots

I’ve often argued that universal healthcare–Medicare for All–would spark an outpouring of entrepreneurship. If you want to open a shop, or go into the widget-making business, one significant barrier to doing so is the need to offer (very expensive) health insurance to your employees. Of course, you could decide not to provide that benefit, but you wouldn’t be very competitive in the market for good workers.

I understand, dimly, the historical reasons why the U.S. linked employment to health care, but it has always seemed to be a bad idea. What about people who don’t/can’t work? What about independent contractors? Why should an employer have to assume the costs–and risks–of employees’ health? Other countries do not couple jobs and insurance in this way–health insurance is provided as part of the social safety net, and the costs are spread much more widely.

Yesterday, in a Facebook post, a friend of mine explained why medical insurance provided through government–decoupled from employment–would boost the economy and make American businesses more competitive.

As he noted in his post, when you buy a product, all the costs of creating that product are reflected in the price: production, workers’ wages and benefits, materials. Most of the nations with whom we trade big-ticket items have had government-sponsored health care for decades, and at far lower cost. As a result, Saab and Mercedes, among others, are able to compete unfairly with American-made autos whose prices include a hefty private-sector health care premium. (I’ve seen numbers suggesting that this was one of the reasons GM and Chrysler went bankrupt; healthcare coverage for current and retired employees added over 2000 to the average price of their cars.)

If we really cared about keeping U.S. businesses competitive–and the health insurance system comprehensible–we’d have Medicare for All, or at least for anyone who wanted it.  Given our political environment, and the lobbying clout of Big Insurance and Big Pharma, that was never in the cards.

Obamacare was (barely) politically feasible because it was originally the Republican alternative. With all its warts, it’s a step in the right direction, but if we want America to remain competitive,  we will eventually need to separate access to health insurance from the vagaries of employment.

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The American Dream is Moving

Ameica’s love affair with the suburbs began after World War II, and has thrived for most of my adult life. I’ve never really understood the desire for a tract house on a quarter-acre lot, or a McMansion set even farther away from the nearest neighbor. I’m a congenitally urban person–and I’ve always been a bit envious of European cities, where those who could afford it live in the center of well-maintained and loved cities, and those who are less fortunate are relegated to the suburbs.

Only in America does such an enormous percentage of the middle-class live in such low densities on so much land.

I have always chalked up this predilection for grass to the “to each his own” category, and assumed my own urban preferences would always mark me as a minority. But if two books I read last week are to be believed, we may be seeing a welcome shift–an increased appreciation for the many charms and conveniences of city living.

In The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream is Moving, the authors point to several significant signs that times are changing. The most recent census data suggests that–after 50 years of pretty constant growth–the suburbs have stalled. Recently, cities and high-density suburbs have grown twice as fast, with the largest cities growing faster than their suburbs for the first time in a hundred years.

Meanwhile, home values have inverted. During the Great Recession, housing values held up much better in urban centers than in suburban ones. And construction activity has reversed, with higher percentages of building permits being issued for “walkable, urbanized” locations and for multi-family developments than for traditional suburbia.

Poverty, too, has migrated. As of 2010, a record 15.3 million suburban residents were living below the poverty line, up 53% from 2000. Crime, of course, often follows poverty; new crime data shows that homicides have fallen sharply in cities while rising in the suburbs. (Indianapolis is an exception–as I’ve noted previously, our murder rate is substantially higher than New York’s.)

What’s driving the changes?

Household size has been steadily shrinking. People marry later, or not at all, and women wait longer to have fewer children. The suburbs were built for families with children, but Ozzie and Harriet have moved to an assisted living facility, and their grandchildren, according to the data, “hate the burbs.” Seventy-seven percent of Millennials express a preference for urban living.  They also don’t care about driving: in 1980, 66% of all seventeen-year-olds had a driver’s license. In 2010, the figure was 47%. According to the data, they don’t want cars and they don’t want cul-de-sacs. Meanwhile, the price of oil continues to rise, and concerns about the environment have sparked an “anti-stuff” revolution.

Finally, the authors note that suburbs were poorly designed. They spread people far from each other, from their routine destinations, and from their jobs, making residents totally dependent on cars that get more expensive to operate every year. The suburbs’ low density complicates efficient provision of services, and fails to generate enough tax revenue to pay for the infrastructure needed to support them.

This book, together with The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy, provided plenty of thought-provoking data, and I’ll continue to share some of it in subsequent posts. Perhaps the most compelling finding, highlighted in both books, was the importance of public transportation in attracting new residents, jobs, and young people–and enabling economic development.

Both books shared lots of success stories. The common threads running through those successes included visionary leadership, collaborations between governments,  nonprofits, universities and the business community, and good public transportation.

It won’t surprise you to find that Indianapolis wasn’t mentioned.

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Revealing Behaviors

My mother used to lecture my sister and me about the importance of treating other people well; her (very outdated) measure of other women’s character was how they treated their maids.

Maids are in very short supply these days, but the sentiment remains valid. You can tell a lot about people by the way they treat subordinates or strangers.

Or–as I was recently reminded–by the way they act behind the wheel of a car.

My husband and I were driving home from South Carolina a couple of days ago and encountered one of those construction sites requiring the merger of two lanes of interstate traffic into one. Most of the affected motorists dutifully “lined up” when they first saw the signs, but there were several who immediately sped up–passing the patient/obedient drivers who were inching along waiting their turns, in order to get to the head of the line where a courteous person would allow them to merge ahead of the rest of us suckers.

This behavior, of course, further slowed the progress of everyone else.

Drivers who do this are sending a pretty clear message: “I matter, other people don’t, and if some of the schmucks obeying the signs are inconvenienced, I couldn’t care less.”

I can think of few behaviors that are more revealing of essential “assholery.”

These are the people who go through life making everything harder for the rest of us. If they had maids, they’d treat them badly.

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About That Brain Drain…

Indiana has long suffered from “brain drain”–we have great universities that draw very bright students from around the country (and increasingly, the world), but we don’t keep many of them. In fact, the higher a student’s level of education, the more likely the student is to move away from the state after graduation.

Only about 16 percent of PhD recipients remain in Indiana’s workforce one year after graduation.

There are various reasons advanced for this situation; the nature of Indiana’s job market, the attractions of urban life (with few exceptions, Indiana is a pretty rural state), and the relative absence of other college graduates.

We aren’t the only state with this problem. Michigan, for example, is in a similar situation, and a Michigan legislator has proposed an interesting “fix.”

State Sen. Glenn Anderson, D-Westland, recently introduced SB 408, which offers a tax credit to recent college graduates who choose to stay and work in Michigan. This legislation will make it possible for talented young professionals to earn their livelihood in the state by easing the burden of student debt. The bill offers a tax credit to recent graduates who remain in state that lowers annual payments on student loans. 

Student loan debt is increasingly seen as a drag on economic growth, as well as a burden on the indebted individuals. A young person who has to divert a significant percentage of her disposable income to loan repayment isn’t buying a new stove or car or house.

I don’t know whether the numbers in Senator Anderson’s proposal are the right ones, and there may be downsides to his proposal that aren’t immediately apparent.

A tax credit might not be enough to keep graduates in Hoosier cornfields. But it’s an intriguing idea.

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