The Change We’ll Pay For (Next Year)
Many readers of this blog probably remember a time, a little over twenty years ago, when credit cards all charged annual fees with standardized 18% APRs and no silly little freebies. That all changed in the late eighties and early nineties, when Capital One pioneered the use of computerized risk models in the industry. This allowed their company to offer customized cards with terms based on the individual credit history of card owners. This in turn led to a widespread burgeoning of the US credit card industry, as other companies followed suit, and large numbers of consumers previously ignored by the industry became credit card users for the first time.
Well, it looks like that period of history may be over. The US Senate just overwhelmingly passed a number of new regulations limiting the ability of credit card companies to make money off of credit card users who carry a balance from one month to the next. Which means that to survive, the industry will have to find a way to instead make money off of credit card users who do pay their balances off each month. That means a return to annual fees, shorter grace periods, and probably less credit extended to consumers of lesser means.
I have mixed feelings about this development. On the one hand, by making the bulk of its money off of consumers who were either cash-strapped or financially undereducated, the credit card industry has always been dancing on the edge of a knife. People who don’t have a lot of liquid assets, and/or who struggle to manage them, are always going to be a higher risk for default. And “responsible” credit card users who pay off their balances every month are probably never going to be worth that much to the industry. They’ve gotten used to having their credit cards for free, and if the terms change too much for their liking, will just stop using the cards. They don’t need them enough.
On the other hand, for people of lesser means to have credit at all is a very meaningful development in the history of the human race. You can make a reasonable argument that the extension of consumer credit in the developed world is of a piece with the breakthrough of microfinance in the developing world. Credit cards do fund a lot of wasteful purchasing, but they aren’t just used to buy “stuff” in the United States; they also fund start-up businesses all the time. Used carefully, they can enable people to fend for themselves while trying to live out their dreams. What could be more American than that?
At the beginning of this blog Rod asked if we have changed. Perhaps not yet. But this strikes me as a genuine harbinger.
~ Maxwell
Abortion, Again.
A blogfriend sent me the link to a Chicago Sun-Times column by Neil Steinberg, titled “What’s Behind the Anti-Abortion Frenzy?”, which revives the old canard that pro-lifers are really anti-sex. More interestingly, it links to Beliefnet editor Steven Waldman’s essay “Safe, Legal, and Early,” which maintains that the legal question about abortion shouldn’t be “Yes or no?” but “When?” This was my response.
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Obviously, Waldman’s position (I read through the link) is the one the great majority of people hold, myself included. I’d like people to be a lot more conscious of the real stakes when they consider having an abortion at any stage (or, a significant step back, having unprotected sex risking an unintended pregnancy), but most traditions (the Jewish tradition certainly) have long recognized a continuum on which the woman’s (or family’s) decision prevails early in pregnancy and that shifts as the fetus develops.
I don’t know that it matters whether the abortion debate is a proxy for a desire to make sex safe, legal, and rare (LOL). I used to think that, but second-guessing and psychoanalyzing pro-lifers’ moral convictions has come to seem condescending and insulting to me. What matters is whether they can impose their own choices, noble as they may be, on everyone else, and whether, if they can’t, they view it as an utter defeat by a satanic society. (The rhetoric around Notre Dame’s invitation to Obama — from some of my own blogfriends, I might add — was so overblown, it was really depressing to me.)
Maybe no change happens without absolutist fervor (as a commenter says here, “Seriously, it’s nice to be civil, but Obama has to realize that it took a wild-eyed extremist (John Brown) and the death of 600,000 Americans to end slavery and make it possible for him to be President”), and without the feminist push for “abortion on demand” all abortion would have remained illegal and dangerous, and without the pro-life movement people would have blown off the moral momentousness of the decision and settled down in a very degraded place. To the extent that I’m getting my wish of people being more conscious of the stakes, the push-back by pro-lifers is largely — no, almost solely — responsible. Thanks to free speech they’ve done a beautiful job of dragging our attention back to the gravity of wishing away a unique human being. Thanks to that, we are within reach of finally getting the legal balance right. If the absolutists on both sides will let it happen. Which requires the vast middle to finally speak up.
Thanks, maybe I’ll even post this, although the whole topic hits me on my broken heart. I will repeat that I’m grateful for the change in the culture the pro-life movement has wrought, and that it is culture, not law, that could have tipped my own decision the other way. Just living in today’s culture, instead of on the condom-littered beach where the tide of the ’70s had just begun to creep out, would have been enough. I want us to continue moving, voluntarily, in that direction.
P.S. Steinberg coins a rather chilling term for abortion: “murder lite.” Here is what I think is the most literal and accurate description of what early abortion is and what it does: nipping a human life in the bud.
My Mom Writes a Book Review
My mother has always been a good writer, but now she’s at the top of her powers. She’s 85. So I guess there’s hope for the rest of us.
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It took me all these years since this book was published (2005) to get up the courage to read it. It is pretty remarkable. For those acquainted with grief–and who isn’t?–there is insight to be gained as you recognize the overwheming humanity of loss and the bewildered responses of the newly bereaved. We do negelct the mourning and grieving that has always been part of existence. Whether this book compensates for that or not, I can’t say.“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” In The Year of Magical Thinking, her account of a life upended by her husband John’s sudden death, Joan Didion chronicles the craziness, the jumble of events, emotions, memories she endures as she tries to make sense and order out of his death and her life. But what sets this book apart is Didion’s meticulous documenting of her mind’s twists and turns, her application of magical thinking to escape the inexorable rules of time and place and create a different ending for what has already happened. But all the king’s horses can’t repeal the law of the Democratic Republic of Death and alter an outcome. It is her straightforward narration, in all its dignity, complexity, and pathos that makes this such a riveting story. Not a “comfort book” in the conventional sense, it is a saga for explorers into the human heart and spirit, the Marco Polos, the Walter Raleighs, the Shackletons who enter unknown territory.
Maybe part of why I wanted first to make myself read that book and then to write something about it is that being old gives one a changing persepctive on death, maybe even on the act–or art–of dying, the part of the phenomenon of life that we don’t deal with very well. If being alive is a fulcrum, then life is one arm, death the other. I envision a seesaw. The death end is shrouded in fog and fear. Why?
~ Jean S. Gottlieb
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Roll Your Own.
(Wow!! You don’t know how I love this feeling of not being able to keep up with “my own” blog. What a luxury!*!*!*)
Via the Anchoress, John Podhoretz opines that mainstream, mass pop culture is dead. That sounds right. He and the Anchoress both speculate on the reasons. I’d like to throw in mine:
People are now making their culture instead of consuming it. All these new devices and venues have been nothing but empowering, liberating. We’re our own and one another’s pundits and publishers, storytellers and networks. The audience has rebelled, risen up, and thrown off its chains of passivity. The inmates are running the asylum. And the resultant anarchy is creating a rich, deep layer of life, as fertile and self-organizing as soil.
(oh — it’s me, amba.)
Paying with Attention
Over on Slate, Farhad Manjoo announces an interesting new update to the Firefox plug-in AdBlock Plus. Apparently, the newest version of the program will encourage users to selectively display non-intrusive (i.e., non pop-up) advertisements from websites they frequently visit. Manjoo goes on to describe this change as a potential ethical advancement for humanity, making in the process what I would describe as an interesting ethical argument:
I’ve heard many convoluted justifications for ad blocking—”it’s my browser and my computer, so I can choose what I want to download”—but it’s hard to make an honest claim that these programs are ethical. The Web is governed by an unwritten contract: You get nearly everything for free in exchange for the hassle of a few ads hovering on the periphery—and occasionally across the whole screen for a few seconds. Advertising probably supports a huge swath of the sites you regularly visit. It’s obvious how rampant ad blocking hurts the Web: If every passenger siphons off a bit of fuel from the tank before the plane takes off, it’s going to crash.
I’m a little perplexed by this argument. Manjoo seems to be claiming that the currency with which we pay for “free” content is by submitting our attention to the advertisers who subsidize the content. But it’s not our attention they actually want, it’s our money.
That doesn’t even get into the issue of whether, if I remove the ad-blocker software and go back to ignoring banners and swatting popups like flies (or for that matter, muting the TV during commercial breaks), I am simply committing an act of slower, less pleasurable theft. I’m still a free-rider on any particular corporation’s dime unless I actually allow its advertisements to change my purchasing habits.
Oh, I know to a lesser extent there’s the whole schtick about building brand equity, getting consumers to talk about the ads they’ve seen, and so forth. Moreover, I know that marketing experts will argue that the ads will affect purchasing behavior even if consumers refuse to acknowledge it. And that is probably true.
But here’s the thing: marketing campaigns have long been understood to reach supersaturation points beyond which markets no longer respond to additional advertising. Is it not possible that this is true for the advertising industry as a whole, and that internet advertising in particular is so supersaturated and ubiquitous that it no longer has any net positive effect on economic growth? It may be that at best it can convince consumers to change their purchasing habits rather than to increase their purchasing habits – especially in the midst of a large economic downturn.
In the end, it doesn’t matter that much if I pay that much attention to the sponsors of the web sites I browse. What ultimately sustains them will not be my attention, but the dollars in my wallet. And the ways I choose to spend that money are going to be influenced by many factors other than the banner ads AdBlock Plus conceals from my gaze.
~ Maxwell
Here it is
Via Tyler Cowen: Amazon is going into publishing. I’ve been wondering when this particular shoe would drop. Not surprisingly, they are focusing on unknown writers. And bloggers can apply!
This will be the first real test of whether the new media can come up with a viable business model. It’s about time.
~ Maxwell
“Nonetheless, the incremental cost-effectiveness did not exceed $136,000…per life saved.”
That’s from the abstract of this 2005 study of whether mandatory nurse-patient ratios, as recently implemented in California, are a cost-effective means of improving mortality rates in hospitals. I believe the methodology of the study is relatively sound, though I’m a layman and you can judge for yourself. But their conclusion – that increasing nurse-patient ratios up to 1:4 is cost-effective – is a good illustration of the tensions at the heart of the health care debate.
One such tension is whether a life saved is actually worth $136,000. Is that a no-brainer? It really depends on how we value a life – and how much life is really left in the person living it. It’s worth pointing out that the study only measures mortality in 30-day increments, and if a year of life is worth $129,000 as that article argues, it’s possible that’s often not as good a trade-off as it seems to be.
As Dave Schuler has often pointed out, the dramatic rise in health care costs over the last decade or three is a matter of supply and demand. Demand for health care services – especially towards the end of life – has grown dramatically. And if another 40 million or so Americans are added to national insurance rosters, it will grow dramatically again.
Meanwhile, the supply of doctors (especially general practitioners) has remained essentially static for years. Moreover at least until very recently there existed a well-publicized nursing shortage in the US, which could still reach 500,000 positions by 2025 (That estimate is based on a projection of advertised vacancies, not on an stated nurse-patient ratio; studies based on the latter often project up to 1 million positions by 2020).
The law of supply and demand suggests that, if supply remains static while demand continually increases, the per-capita costs of healthcare in the US will continue to rise dramatically. In my next post on this topic I’ll look at some of the phenomena that have led to the supply of doctors and nurses being as constrained as it is.
~ Maxwell
Created Woman
AP photo caption:
“Maria Malina, scientific employee, presents the photo of a carved ivory female figurine during its presentation in Tuebingen, southern Germany, Wednesday, May 13, 2009. The figurine, found in 2008 in a cave in Schelklingen, southern Germany is allegedly the world’s oldest reproduction of a human with an estimated age of at least 35,000 years.”
-Miles Lascaux
Ambiance 