One of the functions that government performs best, in the sense that it is a function that can seldom be performed on a societal-wide basis by any other entity, is the one that citizens often have the least understanding of and/or the least willingness to support, with one or two notable exceptions.  That function?  To keep bad things from happening… or from getting worse once they happen.

Examples of such are police protection, trash collection, clean water, and effective sewer systems.  All of these are well-accepted government services with a large element of prevention embodied in their function. Other preventive government functions are not so well understood or accepted.

At one time, environment standards were fought tooth and nail by industry.  Now various industries fight new or tighter emission standards, but those standards are designed for one function – to prevent the emission of pollutants that harm people, and without those standards we had rivers where nothing could live, and some that even caught fire, air that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, water supplies containing virulent carcinogenic chemicals… and so forth.

More than a few people have complained about the massive federal government spending on counter-terrorism, now estimated at $150 billion annually, just in the United States.  In 2011, the most-recent year of the Global Terrorism Index, there were 4,564 terrorist incidents that led to 7,473 deaths.  In the United States, there were actually more terrorist attacks in the 1970s than in any decade since – although the 9/11 attack was the deadliest in U.S. history – but since 9/11 the overall numbers of successful terrorist attacks have continued to decline, almost certainly due to increased security measures and, some would say, a certain restriction on personal freedoms.  But consider this.  Since 9/11, only 37 people have died from terrorist attacks and assaults in the United States.  While this apparatus hasn’t prevented those deaths, how many others has it prevented?  How can anyone tell? 

Vaccination is another area of prevention, although some parents still don’t understand vaccination or the need for it, but that’s an area where some quantification does exist. For example, even today, according to the World Health Organization over 100,000 people die every year from measles, yet there have only been few hundred cases annually in the United States over the past several decades, all of which occurred in unvaccinated individuals.  Before the development of the vaccine, there were often close to a million cases a year in the U.S., and as many as 7,000 deaths.  More recently, nearly a million people died world-wide annually from measles in years before 1999, when more wide-spread use of vaccines became available.  Yet in recent years, there have been parents who insist that the vaccine is more deadly than the disease, despite long-standing figures that shown mortality from measles ranges from one death in a thousand cases in healthy and well-nourished individuals to as high as 300 in a thousand (30%) for weakened or malnourished individuals.  By comparison, severe side effects from the vaccine are less than one in a million, and fatal side effects so low that they cannot be quantified.  For all that, some parents still insist that their child is safer without being vaccinated.

Another area of successful prevention is that of automobile safety. The all-time high in automobile deaths was almost 55,000 in 1972, when the population was a third lower than it is now, but by 2011, that had dropped to 32,367, the lowest total in 60 years. Since 1960, the number of vehicles on the road has tripled and population has increased by 50%, yet automobile fatalities per 100,000 people have been halved.  The cost?  Adjusted for inflation, the cost of an average new car is roughly 140% higher than that of a 1973 new car, when the first significant mandated federal safety standards were imposed.   Assuming that no such standards were implemented, a conservative estimate suggests that we would have seen roughly a half-million more deaths than actually occurred, and most likely at least as many additional injuries. The problem with trying to quantify the costs is that it’s impossible to determine how much of the reduction in fatalities comes from improved design and how much from safety features and other factors, such as seatbelt laws.  That preventive measures have had a huge impact isn’t even in doubt, but we still have thousands of deaths a year because drivers don’t wear seatbelts, either because they don’t think it can happen to them or because they’re exercising a perverse form of civil disobedience.

Similar questions arise in healthcare.  Some critics have pointed out that the largest cause of death in the United States is heart disease, followed by cancer, strokes, and hospital infections.  Yet the most effective form of prevention is a healthy life-style, particularly avoiding obesity, tobacco use, and excessive consumption of alcohol while engaging in regular exercise. For all that knowledge, over forty million people still smoke, and over 30% of the population is obese, while excessive consumption of alcohol is a problem faced by at least 15% of the population. The cost of a single day’s treatment in a hospital for someone with a suspected heart attack can easily exceed $5,000 and the course of treatment for an actual heart attack can run many times that, and we – or our insurance carriers, or both – as a nation spend an estimated $500 billion in healthcare expenditures that could be greatly reduced if more people made, or were able to make, a greater effort toward a healthier lifestyle.

Some kinds of prevention, such as requiring vaccinations, drastically reduce death rates and costs for a tiny fraction of just what burial costs would be.  Others, such as automobile safety features, are still obviously cost-effective, but both are effective because the prevention is not only required, but it can be largely implemented.  Basic environmental standards are clearly cost-effective, but regulators and attorneys continue to argue about the need for tighter or additional environmental regulations and whether they improve health and the environment compared to the cost to those who must comply.  Nonetheless, some kinds of prevention can only be accomplished by government.  No individual, for practical purposes, can prevent air and water pollution or require automotive safety standards, or clean drinking water and safe sewage disposal.

In healthcare, the matter is even stickier.  Healthcare providers – or the government – cannot not only not require people to adopt a healthy lifestyle, but are greatly limited in requiring people who maintain unhealthy lifestyles to pay their full share of the additional healthcare costs required by such individuals. In fact, the current direction of U.S. healthcare is away from requiring individual responsibility, even as a host of government regulations require it in other areas.

Prevention — who pays for it?  Who should?  How much? And to what degree should people be made personally responsible for their own failures to prevent the preventable?

A recent Associated Press news story highlighted a fact that we all know – CEO pay has been going up again ever since a brief two year decline following the initial 2007 economic meltdown, and is now at its highest level ever.  In 2012, according to data from Equilar, an executive pay research firm, the “average” CEO made $9.7 million, up 6.5% in 2012 from 2011.  By comparison, the pay for all U.S. workers rose an average of 1.3% per year over the last three years.

Even more interesting is the fact that the two highest paid CEOs were from the entertainment and media industry, with the highest compensated CEO raking in just over $60 million [not including deferred stock compensation].  In fact, five out of the top ten were in entertainment and media.  Another interesting fact is that the area with the highest average CEO pay is health care, while the lowest is that of public utility CEOs, not that they’re exactly impoverished with an average pay packet of $7.5 million.

There are a number of conclusions one might draw from this, but the one that stands out, at least to me, is that the highest paid executives come from the field that provides the least tangible value to its consumers.  We need food, water, shelter, power, heat, and medical care.  We don’t physically need packaged entertainment.  While everyone complains about the costs of health care – and in most cases those costs are far too high – especially when one considers the pricing model of the pharmaceutical industry, where U.S. consumers foot the bill, and the rest of the world gets lower-cost prescription drugs – health care does provide a tangible benefit and has improved our lives.  I’m not sure we can say that about the U.S. entertainment industry.

But entertainment – and today’s media is in fact entertainment, including almost all so-called news – obviously fills a psychological need – and one for which people are willing to pay – and one that is extraordinarily profitable – just like the illegal drug industry.  Come to think of it, there’s a certain similarity.  Both have products that make their consumers feel good, and both have negative long-term effects… and the content of both is essentially unregulated… and both are highly profitable for those at the top.

And like it or not, how we as a culture spend our money and reward those who provide goods and services says more about us than we’d like to admit.

Last week the head of the Utah State Board of Regents proposed pay hikes for all of the college and university presidents in the state system, as much as by 24% in one case.  The reason cited was that the state has trouble keeping good university presidents.  The past two presidents of the University of Utah now make far more heading large universities elsewhere, and the president of Southern Utah University is leaving to take the head position at Eastern Kentucky University at double the salary he made in Utah.  Keeping Utah education “competitive” makes sense, so far as it goes.  The problem is that it stops with the upper administration.

Faculty salaries at state universities were frozen from 2008 to 2010, and faculty members have received raises of one percent per year for the past two years, with another one percent increase scheduled for the coming school year.  This wouldn’t be all that bad, given the current economic climate, except for the fact that the salaries of existing faculty members have been frozen for something like six of the last twenty years, and annual raises have exceeded 2% only in about three of those twenty years – and faculty salaries on average are in the lowest twenty percent nationwide.

A number of Utah universities have dealt with the salary cap by filling the positions of departing or retiring faculty, partly by hiring more adjuncts and partly by setting a much higher salaries for new faculty, so that longer term and more loyal faculty effectively get penalized… and so that good professors who don’t have to worry about spouses’  jobs or family connections have a tendency to depart for greener pastures, none of which helps improve faculty morale or higher education.  

Yet the Utah legislature, which continually touts education as a priority, spends so little per pupil on elementary and secondary education that even Idaho – the next lowest in the United States – spends nearly  20% more on each student than does Utah.   Utah’s public school spending per pupil is 43% below the national average, and the fact that it has the most crowded classrooms is just one reflection of that.  So is the amount of remedial help high school graduates need when they reach college.

The same sort of mentality applies to the legislature with regard to higher education as well. There’s a great deal of lip service, but a real reluctance to provide funding.  And when university presidents raise money from private donors for needed facilities, the legislature balks at providing the funding for operating and maintaining such facilities.  At the same time, part of the universities’ annual state funding is based on enrollment growth.  So… let’s get this in perspective.  They want more students with less funding for each student, and they require tuition increases, adding to the burden on students, while underpaying faculty, effectively forcing universities to court donors for funds to build needed facilities that the legislature doesn’t want to maintain  … but they want to reward the university presidents.

Does that sound familiar?  Of course.  It’s the current big business model.  As one critic suggested, Utah really shouldn’t be applying the “big business” model to education, not if it wants to improve education.

But then, does the legislature really want that… or just to create the impression that it cares about real educational improvement?  After all, it’s easy to pay the CEO more… and much, much harder and more costly to fix the larger problems.

Human beings have always been creatures of the present, as exemplified by the old saying, “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die.”  Admittedly, that was originally a soldiers’ mantra, but it is beginning to appear that it’s become almost a way of life now, especially in the United States.

The most obvious aspect of this is texting and tweeting, where people literally risk death to get largely meaningless messages right “now.”  Emails have replaced letters, and a plethora of text abbreviations have proliferated because so few want to spell out phrases – or can – and the result, regardless of protests to the contrary [which have also proliferated], is that language has been not only truncated but cheapened as more and more electronic communicators adopt simplistic abbreviations, rather than attempting to take the time to express their own feelings in their own words.  But then, it may be that they’re simply incapable of doing so.

But there’s another physical problem created by the “now” nature of the internet.  More and more, those who use it are turning from text to visual images, not to mention the various real-time streaming features, all of which consume enormous amounts of bandwidth.  In less than a decade, even with all the planned expansions, the entire internet/world-wide-web is likely to come to a screeching overload/traffic jam halt… unless tens of billions of dollars are invested in new and expanded infrastructure or some new compression or routing routines are adopted.  Even so, the speeds of today may soon be a thing of the past.

As I’ve noted a number of times, the business/corporate sector has been totally co-opted by the “now.”   Long-term planning is 18 months.  The value of a corporation is strictly based on current stock prices, revenues, and sales, and at the slightest whiff of news – good or bad – that value instantly changes. Corporations have spent hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, to gain an advantage of little more than nanoseconds in securities trading.  Yet, over the past few years, we’ve had several “flash crashes” in the stock market, the last one resulting from hacked phony information fed from an AP account.  And yet, for all these warnings, the need and desire for “profit now,” has resulted in even greater reliance on high-speed, algorithm-based computerized program trading… putting the global banking and financial system at even greater risk.

We have an national infrastructure crisis, with millions of bridges needing repair, a national power grid that has become increasingly overloaded and fragile, scores of cities with inadequate highway and public transportation systems, an air traffic control system that is already antiquated and susceptible to disruptions, a hundred nuclear power plants with nowhere to dispose of their spent nuclear fuel,  civic water systems losing billions of gallons annually to leaky pipes and conduits – and a political system that won’t deal with any of it because the politicians are too fearful of a public that opposes any tax increases now, regardless of the long-term costs and implications.

As more than a few readers have noted, we also have a parenting problem – because far too many parents don’t want to deal with the present “unpleasantness” of disciplining their children, and because we have too many those same parents not wanting anyone else to impose restrictions on those children, we have marginal, if that, discipline in far too many schools, and far too many young people growing up with little or no idea of the conduct requirements necessary to obtain and hold a job – such as showing up for work every day and on time.

Although everyone pays great attention and lip service to education, the emphasis in practice is almost totally on the present.  How do we raise test scores?  How do we get graduation and retention rates up now? Or at the collegiate level, how can we change education so graduates get jobs now?  Everywhere is the complaint that the cost of higher education falls too heavily on the students, but what is the reaction from state legislatures, who used to fund a significant share of the costs of state universities?  No one wants to raise taxes now; so we’ll hire more part-time adjuncts at near starvation wages and continue to raise tuition.

And what are the other proposed popular solutions to problems in education?  Let’s reward teachers for improvements in testing, graduation, and retention.  Just where is the emphasis on critical thinking?  Or the discussion of what kind of education is relevant for what types of learners?  Or what type of education will foster the ability to allow students to keep learning once they’re out of the education system, something that’s particularly relevant given that, according to an NCES study, 40% of  Americans are either functionally illiterate or are only able to read on the most basic level.  Other studies show that from 33% to 42% of all college graduates will never read another complete book after graduation.

Another aspect of the “now” culture is the inability or unwillingness to look at the implications of current “now” trends.  The other day my wife walked into one of the largest department stores in Salt Lake City, a store that is one of hundreds of a national chain, and walked out, unable to buy anything because “the computers are down.”  What happens when sales and inventory, and even climate control [the air conditioning was “down,” too] are tied into systems that, because of their increasing complexity, are more prone to fail?   Last month, I had to re-schedule a doctor’s appointment because, when I got to the office, I was informed that the doctor couldn’t see me – or anyone else – because the computers were down and no one could access my medical records.  That’s not a big problem for a routine check-up; it’s a huge problem if the emergency room’s access to records goes down.   Banks are trying to become more efficient by greater reliance on electronic banking and ATMs.  What happens when there’s a power failure or a computer failure?  Or a terrorist hacking of the financial system – especially when so many Americans, especially those under 30 or so, don’t even carry any cash and instead rely on their debit or credit card – or their IPhone – to pay for goods and services?

A recent article in the New Yorker featured an interview with the head of the FBI’s cyber-crime unit.  The upshot was that, with a literal handful of exceptions, essentially every single computerized system in the United States is vulnerable to current “spear-phishing” information piracy.  This includes power plants and power distribution systems, air traffic control, public utilities, and all corporate headquarters, including high tech and defense contractors. Even classified plans, such as those for the F-35, the advanced strike fighter, have been pirated, most likely by the Chinese government.  And yet, computer systems security is woefully underfunded at a time when everyone is using more and more computers for more and more information transfer.

Unless matters change, and quickly, I worry that the “now” generation may well end up having neither a “now” nor much of a future.  But then, the future’s not now… so almost no one seems to worry as much as I do.

Over the years, in the military, business, and government, I’ve watched those who’ve been successful, and, especially in larger organizations, or government and academia, an inordinate number of those who’ve been successful in getting advanced have been shameless self-promoters whose acts and accomplishments are far less than what they represent and almost invariably less than those of at least a few of their colleagues.  So why are such individuals so successful?

First, they deceive themselves into believing that they’re better than they are, and having done so, they have no doubts about themselves, unlike more honest and introspective colleagues.  This puts the more honest competitors for the same position at a significant disadvantage. Moreover, often those who might well do a better job, and often have in fact done so, are reluctant to be ruthlessly self-promoting because, first, that kind of self-promotion usually results in denigrating others [subtly, of course, in the case of highly skilled self-promoters] and involves a certain degree of intellectual dishonesty.

Now… there’s nothing wrong with blowing one’s own horn, because, all too often, if you don’t, no one else will. But all too many superiors tend to assume that if someone doesn’t blow their own horn, they have no accomplishments to tout… or that if they tout those accomplishments honestly or modestly, such accomplishments are less that those touted with the equivalent of a full brass band.  And, in all too many organizations, quiet and honest self-promotion gets lost in the din.

Shameless self-promoters are also usually masters at minimizing the accomplishments of others, and the best do it with praise, showing a certain “generosity” that suggests that maybe those accomplishments weren’t that great, but that the individuals are devoted and work hard.

The shameless self-promoters tend to offer simplistic and excessively optimistic solutions, and then blame others when the results don’t materialize, again with that “generous” deprecation, such as “the team tried hard, but…” or “the finance types are good people, but they just don’t understand.”  The combination of self-centeredness and simplicity appeals to many harried superiors, because far too many of those superiors don’t want to hear of difficulties, needs for more resources, etc.

The shameless self-promoters are extraordinarily adept at “sucking up” to those above them who can help them rise in the organization and politely ignoring those who cannot… but once they’ve reached a level where those who once helped them can no longer do so, the self-promoter will quickly and quietly move away and find others even higher up to whom he or she can address praise and interest.

Now… there’s no secret to this general pattern or formula of behavior.  It’s been noted for generations.  What I find so amazing is that it continues to work, generation after generation, in culture after culture.