I just saw the first episode of Carrier, a documentary series that looks at life on the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier. I was struck by how mundane most of the work is aboard the carrier: wiping windows, cooking food, wheeling around pallets. Except that the windows are at the top of a control tower, the food amounts to ten crates of chicken a day, and the pallets hold high-explosive weaponry. There are 5,000 people who make up the "city" of the carrier, and most of them aren’t zipping around in multimillion dollar jets, yet they work 16-hour shifts to keep the planes flying.

Most of the people who serve on the carrier are people from middle -class, lower middle-class, or poor families — as an officer points out, the graduates of Exeter Academy tend to have better options. These men and women tend to be in their late teens or early twenties, and so life on the carrier is akin to high school: with gossiping, hooking up, illicit booze, and occasional temper tantrums. But the appeal of carrier life also comes across clearly in the camaraderie among the crew and the opportunities that the military provides for discipline, responsibility, and a decent career. That’s what draws two women profiled in the documentary: one the daughter of a "pimp" and drug addict and the other who has lived all her life in a small town of only 3,000 people. In America, the WPA has been replaced by the military, a government-funded jobs program that both political parties support and that works for many young men and women, provided they don’t get killed.

This jobs program is all about waging war, which brings both a sense of urgency and importance and some moral qualms to the equation. A woman whose job is to load ordnance on fighter planes thinks about the fact that the bombs kill people, but she points out that her role is a small one and she’s just doing what people tell her. (It’s amazing how little the rank and file know about what the overall mission is.) A pilot says that no one who pulls a trigger can not think about whether this war is worth it. What comes across in the documentary is the crew’s range of political beliefs, which aren’t necessarily in lockstep with those of their president or superiors. It’s another way that this remarkable series pulls apart the civilian world’s myths about the military and helps us understand the men and women who choose to serve.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

This week’s edition of Frontline covered a topic that you’d think we’d be hearing more about, in this election year: what the United States could learn from other countries that are able to provide health coverage for all while respecting the power of markets. (You can watch the documentary here. Below is an interview with Frontline correspondent T.R. Reid.)

In our book The Missing Class, Katherine Newman and I talk about the financial hardships that families face when they don’t have health insurance — or their insurance offers substandard coverage. Hundreds of thousands (some say millions) of Americans go bankrupt every year at least in part because of medical bills. Whenever we talk about the need to reform the health care system in this country, the typical response is that Americans don’t want "socialized medicine." To critics of reform, it’s a sad, but inevitable, fact that a free-market healthcare system like America’s will leave some people out in the cold.

Yet in four of the five countries examined in the Frontline report, the private sector plays a major role in health care — which might come as a surprise to some Americans who have been told that the only options are our current Wild West free-market system and the bureaucratic nightmare of socialized medicine (which is actually not so much of a nightmare, according to the report). In fact, in Germany, Japan, and Switzerland, there are private insurers akin to the HMOs in our country.

The difference is that private insurers in these countries cannot, by law, make a profit — any profits they make have to be plowed back into the firm or used to lower healthcare premiums. Also, the insurers cannot reject anyone for already being sick, and they have to pay their members’ bills in full — behavior that goes hand in hand with their not-for-profit status, since for-profit HMOs inevitably face pressures to weed out unhealthy members and deny payment. 

Another good idea from abroad is allowing people to choose their insurer from among all HMOs. Germany, for example, gives people the option of more than 200 private insurers. This creates competition that drives down healthcare costs. Allowing people to choose the government as their insurer — for example, changing Medicare from an exclusive program for the elderly into an insurance option, alongside private HMOs, for all Americans — would immediately drive down costs as private firms slash their prices to compete with the government. (Surprisingly, even when private insurers can’t make profits, there is still a healthy competition between them, though the rivalry is over membership growth and company survival rather than shareholder dividends.)

Rampant malpractice lawsuits exact huge insurance fees from doctors practicing in the United States, while they are almost unheard of in many countries with comparable or superior healthcare systems. Reform is needed here, too, or else those exorbitant insurance costs will continue to pad the cost of care.

Finally, making insurance mandatory for all is crucial. Government can help the poor to pay premiums, but the important thing is making sure that everyone is covered, so that the insurance mechanism — which relies on having a large pool of healthy people to balance out the costs of the unhealthy — can work. In Britain, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, and Taiwan — in virtually all advanced industrialized nations except the U.S., for that matter — insurance is mandatory or health care for all is paid through taxes. (In America, people without coverage turn to emergency rooms, the costliest kind of care possible.)

The results of these policies are healthcare systems abroad that cost their countries much less — as little as six percent of Taiwan’s economy, compared to 16 percent of America’s — and insurers with administrative overheads in the range of 17 percent, rather than the 25 percent common among U.S. HMOs. Meanwhile, the quality of care is just as good, according to national surveys, and surgical procedures in some of these countries actually happen faster than they do in America — contrary to the myth of long lines at the socialized clinic. Bankruptcy because of medical bills is virtually unheard of.

One defense of America’s unfettered free-market system is that it promotes innovation. The belief is that pharmaceutical companies, for example, won’t invest in research without hefty profits to be made. But the large pharmaceutical industry in Switzerland did no such thing in spite of healthcare overhaul in the 1990s: They cut their marketing budgets and maintained their levels of R&D. (The irony is that America is in effect subsidizing innovation in other countries: Swiss pharmaceutical firms make a third of their profits in the less regulated U.S. market. Swiss patients benefit from the same state-of-the-art drugs, while American patients carry the financial burdens of coverage that the drug companies would rather not take on.)

According to Frontline, none of the three major party candidates for U.S. president have offered policies that wholeheartedly embrace the good ideas already tried and tested in our fellow capitalist democracies. John McCain has talked about allowing people to buy insurance across state lines. Hillary Clinton has called for making insurance mandatory for all, while Barack Obama wants a mandate that covers children. But overall their plans are tepid, says Reid, and won’t do much to dent rising healthcare costs or help the hundreds of thousands of Americans who go bankrupt every year because of medical bills.

It is baffling to our counterparts overseas that our citizens without jobs — the people most likely to get sick — go without health care, or that we provide education and legal counsel to all but not the right to see your own doctor. Surely we can learn something from what has worked elsewhere in the world. The recent experience of Switzerland, which had a healthcare system much like America’s until it underwent dramatic reform in 1994, is especially instructive. Today, both conservatives and liberals there support the reforms. With enough political will and imagination, we could fix our broken system, too.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Library Journal has named The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America one of the Best Business Books of 2007.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

In his column in today’s New York Times Bob Herbert mentions my book The Missing Class and highlights some of its key facts about the precarious status of today’s poor and near poor Americans. Herbert also quotes from the book’s foreword by former Senator John Edwards.

We have always gotten a distorted picture of how well Americans were doing from politicians and the media. The U.S. has a population of 300 million. Thirty-seven million, many of them children, live in poverty. Close to 60 million are just one notch above the official poverty line. These near-poor Americans live in households with annual incomes that range from $20,000 to $40,000 for a family of four.

It is disgraceful that in a nation as wealthy as the United States, nearly a third of the people are poor or near-poor.

Former Senator John Edwards touched on the quality of the lives of those perched precariously above the abyss of poverty in his foreword to the book, “The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near-Poor in America,” by Katherine S. Newman and Victor Tan Chen. Mr. Edwards wrote:

“When we set about fixing welfare in the 1990s, we said we were going to encourage work. Near-poor Americans do work, usually in jobs that the rest of us do not want — jobs with stagnant wages, no retirement funds, and inadequate health insurance, if they have it at all. While their wages stay the same, the cost of everything else — energy, housing, transportation, tuition — goes up.”

Herbert goes on to point out the effects that our current economic malaise will have on the future prospects of all Americans, as the desperation that the poor and near poor know well leaches into the ranks of a downsized and debt-ridden middle class. The growing amount of debt that families are taking on and the longer hours they work to make ends meet — topics discussed at length in The Missing Class — are ultimately unsustainable, Herbert notes, especially now that prices are rising and jobs are disappearing. The result is that for many hard-working families the American dream of upward mobility is fast becoming an illusion. (For some hard statistics on this last point, see this report by the Economic Mobility Project, which points out that the average male worker in his thirties today makes less than his father did at the same age.)

Herbert was kind enough to mention The Missing Class in a previous column as well.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

If there’s a lesson from the recent debacle over an economic stimulus package, it’s this: Republicans need to stop engaging in class warfare.

Class warfare, as the Republicans have pointed out time and time again, is when public policy is unduly influenced by the interests of one group at the expense of everyone else.

Unfortunately, the Republican leadership has been guilty of such hypocrisy in its negotiations over individual tax rebates in the economic stimulus package, which the Senate approved yesterday. First there was a talk of making any legislation contingent on extending President Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy. Then the Republicans sought to kill proposals to extend government checks to the poor, while demanding tax rebates for wealthy Americans. Now they’ve just stamped out an effort by Senate Democrats to lengthen unemployment benefits.

So, how is this class warfare? An effective stimulus package, according to economists ranging from Ben Bernanke to Martin Feldstein to Lawrence Summers, should be timely, temporary, and targeted. Targeting the stimulus means putting money in the hands of poor and middle-income households. They’re more likely to use that money to buy things rather than saving it or using it to pay down debt. (See these articles by economists Paul Krugman and Mark Zandi for more on this point. For some contrarian views, see this summary of recent research on tax rebates — though it’s axiomatic in social science that you shouldn’t put too much faith in surveys of what people say they will do in the future.)

The legislation that both houses of Congress approved will give some benefits to the poor — a $300 tax rebate check to individuals with at least $3,000 in income — but many will not receive the $600 maximum rebate for individuals or $1,200 maximum for couples, plus $300 per child, because they do not pay enough income tax. (This is also true for certain segments of the near poor, the group that Katherine Newman and I study in our book The Missing Class.) In passing their own version of the legislation yesterday, the Senate also extended tax rebates to Social Security retirees and veterans with disabilities, though as for the poor the benefit will be just $300.

Among the poorest Americans, those in the bottom income quintile, only 71 percent have savings or checking accounts. Among families one quintile above poor, 89 percent do. As for the rest of Americans, their rate is almost 100 percent.

In other words, poor people save less. Any money that finds its way to these households is more likely to go toward buying things that people need. And since consumption accounts for more than two-thirds of the nation’s economic activity, people — and the more people, the better — need to start buying things if the economy is going to pull out of its downward spiral.

Affluent families, on the other hand, tend to use a smaller portion of their incomes to make purchases — at a certain point, there’s not much more to buy — and so any windfall that comes their way ends up in a bank or stock portfolio. While good for their retirement prospects, this kind of asset-building won’t do as much to grow the economy as going out and buying food, clothing, electronics, and other goods that keep companies in the black and keep workers employed.

To be effective, economic stimulus also has to be timely. That means relief should begin today — not four or more months down the road, which is when the proposed legislation’s rebate checks are expected to go out. Yet temporary extensions of food stamps and unemployment insurance could have taken effect almost immediately. It’s a matter of instituting simple rule changes for pre-existing benefits, as opposed to putting in motion a bureaucratic juggernaut of one-time tax rebates.

What’s more, increases to food stamps and unemployment insurance would have been, by definition, targeted at the poor and unemployed, who again are the most reliable spenders and thus the key to raising levels of consumption and growing the economy. In fact, this analysis by economist Mark Zandi finds that jobless benefits and food stamps are even more effective than tax breaks in growing the economy.

Instead of following this economic logic, the Republicans in Congress have engaged in class warfare. They rebuffed any action on food stamps and now they’ve blocked an extension of unemployment benefits. They’ve consistently tried to steer the legislation toward the interests of the wealthy. (Here I’m talking specifically about the debate over individual tax rebates; the Senate proposals also included a variety of tax breaks for the coal industry and other businesses, so they had their fill of pork cooked up on the other side of the aisle, too.)

Economic stimulus is not about tax cuts for all, and especially not the wealthy. It’s about promoting consumer spending, and it should be seen for what it is: an investment, much the same way as we invest in roads and schools. By investing in working families who will head out to supermarkets and department stores with their rebate money, we can boost economic activity and pull the markets out of their doldrums. But that kind of investment should be made according to economic science, not the special interests of politicians.

Never mind that these families pay their share of sales taxes and Social Security and Medicare taxes — in fact, more than their share, considering that regressive sales taxes swallow a larger chunk of poor households’ incomes than they do for more affluent Americans, and Social Security taxes only apply to the first $100,000 of income. The stimulus money should go to these families who most need it and who are most likely to spend it.

Unfortunately, the Republicans held their ground in the class war. Poor and middle-class families will be shortchanged by the approved legislation, and the quickest-acting methods of stimulus — food stamps and jobless benefits — remain in legislative limbo. (Democrats say they’ll take up the cause later, but there’s no reason for Republicans to sign on now that they got their tax rebates.) So, while the economy continues to sour, struggling families will still be waiting by their mailboxes come summer for that all-too-light check in the mail.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

According to this article, the Julia Tuttle Causeway in Miami has become a modern-day land of exile.

Sex offenders have nowhere to live anymore because of a law that forces them to live 2,500 feet from schools or playgrounds, so they head out to places like the Julia Tuttle Causeway. In fact, some probation officers have ordered their charges to relocate there, and several of the residents have the overpass listed on their driver’s licenses: "Under the Julia Tuttle Causeway." It would sound like an address from a Harry Potter novel, except the reality is that these men — 15 to 30 of them — live in tents amid garbage and human waste.

They are free to go wherever they want during the day, but they have a government-imposed curfew at the causeway encampment — 10 p.m. — and "officers check nearly every day to make sure they are home on time." The local government says it has asked the men to leave, but can’t force them out, so it’s set up rules — sort of like a 21st-century Australia, minus the hard labor and transoceanic voyage.

According to the article, the laws that forced these men under the bridge are currently in place in "more than two dozen states and many more towns and cities." As an expecting parent, I can understand why people are so frightened of sexual predators: It’s terrifying to think your kids may be at risk of being picked up by a stranger. But as an expert quoted in the article points out, "most children who are abused are abused by someone who is well known to them."

If these sex offenders are so dangerous, why aren’t they being kept in prison longer? If they are being released, then given that America is supposed to be about second chances (just ask David and Victoria Beckham), they deserve a chance to reform themselves. Keeping them utterly exiled from the rest of the population will likely make their antisocial behavior worse.

Another troubling aspect of these so-called "buffer" laws is the sex offenders subject to them include not just rapists and pedophiles but also "youngsters convicted of illegal but consensual relationships with minors" — in effect, much of the high school population in this country, should they be tried for statutory rape. Forget STDs — sex ed classes should now include the message, "Have sex and you’ll end up living under the Julia Tuttle Causeway."

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

1:38 a.m. Oh, but Romney is a Mormon, so no wine for him. Poor man has to suffer through Not-So-Super Wednesday without the solace of sauce. 

12:55 a.m. Okay, I’m off to bed. I leave you where we began: utterly clueless. Clinton is the frontrunner? Obama ties in delegates? Huckabee is king of the South? McCain is a happy warrior? The only thing I know is that Romney is whining into a wine glass right now. To be continued.

12:54 a.m. Howard Fineman reminds us that Huckabee flies coach. 

12:48 a.m. They ran out of ballots in New Mexico. No idea when they’ll count that. Maybe the Supreme Court should weigh in.

Chuck Todd is doing some funny math on the screen again. He estimates 837 delegates to Clinton vs. 841 to Obama. Pretty amazing if it turns out to be true. Every delegate counts — apparently Clinton’s campaign was doing phonebanking in American Samoa to get more delegates there.

12:43 a.m. Obama wins Alaska!

12:41 a.m. Obama wins in Missouri by a nose.

12:37 a.m. The pundits on MSNBC are saying it’s a "tie" on the Democratic side. Now the minions of each candidate are saying how that "tie" is in their favor. I know they really believe in their cause, which is comforting, but it’s just hard to listen to the underlings root for their candidates, because the b.s. meter keeps going off. If they say "ready on day one" one more time I’ll throw my wine glass at the TV.

12:35 a.m. Back on the armchair. Is this over yet? Norah O’Donnell: "How many conservatives are going to bed popping Ambien" because of McCain’s victories tonight?

12:29 a.m. Sorry, have to take a break to clip my pregnant wife’s toenails. 

12:28 a.m. Off to ABC News. There’s a quote from a woman on Facebook who’s saying that she’s more excited about Super Tuesday than American Idol. Ah, the humanity!

12:21 a.m. Brokaw quoting McCain: "I’m a happy warrior." Sorry, the context escapes me, but it sounds nice, doesn’t it? He’s waging war, but he can be happy about that.

12:15 a.m. McCain wins California. Roundhouse kick to the face of Chuck Norris. But Romney is dead in the water, the pundits say. Have his supporters come out for him tonight? "They haven’t!"

12:12 a.m. Clinton wins California. Again, no one listens to Hollywood. Either that, or Jack Nicholson trumps Robert De Niro. 

12:11 a.m. Brokaw: "What we have in the Republican Party is the Humpty-Dumpty factor." Ah, where is Dan Rather when you need him? He’d be pulling these one-liners out three every six seconds. Remember that one about frogs having pockets and carrying firearms? Or something like that.

12:06 a.m. I was watching PBS but have switched back to MSNBC. Instantaneous election analysis is by its very nature fairly useless commentary, sort of like the news equivalent of Chinese food —  you watch six hours of it, and then the next day you’re still hungry for real information. So if I’m getting useless information, I guess should be watching Chris Matthews and waiting for another of his poetically random observations. ("No whine before its time!")

12:03 a.m. Ron Paul got a quarter of the vote in Montana. Not surprising, perhaps, in a state without a speed limit. Take that, big government!

12:01 a.m. Mark Shields of PBS’ Newshour points out that Clinton is the candidate of people collecting Social Security checks.

11:59 p.m. Okay, it’s not the networks, just PBS and some cable outlets. 

11:56 p.m. I have to say it’s nice that each of the candidates is actually getting some air time on the networks. When do you ever see candidates get to give stump speeches except when the election is over?

11:50 p.m. "Yes, we can!" "U-S-A!" "They haven’t!" (No, I haven’t even had any wine.)

11:48 p.m. Obama is speaking. I think both McCain and Clinton make a lot of sense in their speeches, but there’s something forced in their oratory. Obama is the best speechmaker, Huckabee is the quintessential guy who claps your back and tells a corny joke, which makes you laugh in spite of your better judgment.  

Obama is the inspirational speaker, but I have to say I’m getting a bit tired of this tired poetic imagery of Iowa cornfields and New Hampshire hills and Nevada deserts. What’s next, California strip malls?

11:40 p.m. I actually like the fact that Huckabee can fly coach. (I don’t know if he does: This is the kind of question you need a pundit to answer.) I also like that his wife (I assume it’s his wife, standing next to him when he speaks) is normal-looking. She looks like someone’s nice aunt. McCain and Romney are surely lucky men, but it is just me or do their wives look exactly alike? Blonde and smiling. Nice teeth. Okay, it’s just me.

Wow, McCain just said he’s the frontrunner. Is that the kiss of death? Keep your expectations in check, Mac.

11:32 p.m. Is it me, or is this whole pundit thing about regurgitating each candidate’s carefully calibrated expectations  and then saying he lost because he performed worse than expectations and she won because she performed better? The higher level of punditry then involves scoffing at the expectation management of the candidates and their spinning of who won and lost.

Tim Russert is saying that Huckabee is the kind of candidate who can fly coach.

11:21 p.m. MSNBC’s Chuck Todd is scrawling random figures on the Super Tuesday map in red (virtual) marker. The horserace has now turned into a football game. I’m waiting for someone to make a gratuitous Superbowl reference, invoking Eli Manning and fourth quarter comebacks. Wait, that was Tom Brokaw three hours ago. 

11:19 p.m. Romney spoke to his supporters. He says a line about how Washington won’t provide health care, how Washington won’t keep America safe, etc. etc., and then the audience yells, "They haven’t." I’m told that he’s done this more than once. It feels like a high school pep rally. I expect a guy in a cougar suit to start jumping around, maybe a few cheerleaders.

It hasn’t been a great night so far for the ex-governor. Everyone is piling on Mitt. The chickens came home to roost down South — first McCain and Paul supporters went for Huckabee to spite Romney in West Virginia, and now Huckabee is slaughtering him throughout the rest of the South. His rivals on the campaign trail seem to take special glee in bringing down Romney, even more so than McCain, probably because of Romney’s relentless negativity from early on in the race.

Huckabee says Romney is "whining" about his loss in West Virginia by alleging a deal between the other candidates to get him. "No whine before its time!" MSNBC’s Chris Matthews chimes in. Someone has had too much wine, methinks.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Nicholas Kristof writes that liberals don’t give conservative evangelicals enough credit for their efforts to end poverty, stop genocide, fight HIV/AIDS, and further a host of other causes conventionally seen as progressive. It’s a valid point: There’s plenty of disdain for Christian evangelicals in some urban Democratic bastions, not to mention in large swaths of academia and media, and yet even in big cities like New York the numbers of evangelicals are strong and growing, especially among immigrant communities.

In the nation as a whole about one in three Americans, or 100 million, can be described as evangelical, though that number is debated and includes substantial numbers of African Americans, who tend to be more liberal, as well as numerous other moderate and progressive evangelicals who don’t fit into the Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson mold.

In any case, Kristof notes that a recent CBS poll shows that the top issue that white evangelicals believe they should be involved in is fighting poverty. Restricting abortion was a distant second. Without question, evangelicals have been on the forefront of this crucial issue of poverty, both here and abroad, and more recently a number of courageous pastors have also been challenging the Republican Party’s orthodoxy denying climate change.

It seems that secular liberals could find common cause and also inspiration from these evangelical activists, if they’re willing to overcome their own prejudices. (Incidentally, I’m saying this as someone who isn’t religious.) When the lions lie down the lambs, we might see something done about the billion people who live on less than $1 a day, or the 37 million Americans who live under the poverty line.

On a somewhat related note, it’s interesting that all of the five remaining major candidates, Democratic and Republican, seem to be bring something new to the table, diversity-wise. Obviously, Clinton and Obama would be breaking down gender and racial barriers, but Romney would be the first Mormon president. McCain would be the first president entering the office at the age of 72 — breaking down a glass ceiling for the growing ranks of seniors in this country.

And Huckabee, the Southern Baptist minister, would be representing a kind of evangelicism that has been given short shrift during the Bush years, in spite of the younger Bush’s God talk: born-again Christians who care about social issues but also worry about growing economic inequality and factories and jobs moving overseas. We haven’t seen that kind of evangelical president since — dare I say it — Jimmy Carter.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

I finished reading Super Crunchers, a provocative book by Ian Ayres. He argues that improvements in statistical techniques are transforming the ways that we make decisions in fields ranging from business to medicine to government policy.

Nowadays we have access to much more data, thanks to technological enhancements such as cheaper data storage and online survey tools, and with all that data to "crunch," computers can often arrive at judgments faster and more accurately than human experts can. As a result, statistical models have recently been branching out into new, unfamiliar terrain. They’re diagnosing illnesses better than doctors and predicting the quality of wine better than wine critics, and in doing so, Ayres argues, they’re also diminishing the authority of experts and the reliability of intuition rooted in life experience.

A particularly bizarre example from the book is how one company is using the characteristics of Hollywood scripts — for example, how many production sites the film has, or how many big-name actors are in the cast — to predict which movies will be blockbusters. Apparently, their model is beating out the studios’ own predictions.

Another somewhat discomfiting trend is how companies are collecting data on individual customers — for instance, by tracking purchases made using those "reward" cards you carry on your keychain — and then using that information to figure out not only what sells and what doesn’t but also how profitable a customer you are. The company can then turn around and target promotions at the spendthrifts and not the coupon clippers.

My biggest problem with the book is that it doesn’t spend enough time talking about the limitations of these statistical models. It’s important to consider carefully how the data are collected and whether you can actually measure what you’re trying to measure. There’s plenty of debate in social science circles about these topics, but for an opposing, non-academic viewpoint you might turn to the third and fourth seasons of The Wire. The show’s creators, David Simon and Ed Burns, savage the growing popularity of using statistics to track the performance of schools (No Child Left Behind), police departments (CompStat), and other institutions. The people working for those institutions want to keep their jobs, they argue, so what happens is everyone starts juking the stats: downgrading aggravated assaults to lesser crimes, marking students down as proficient when they’re way below grade level.

As far as the war on drugs is concerned, jacking up up the arrest numbers will also not get at the root causes, Simon and Burns suggest, because the drug dealers just get better at operating outside the spotlight. Shutting down their networks requires a kind of police work that’s more subtle and involved than just rounding up bodies, but that strategy gets the short shrift in an environment that prizes quantity, not quality. In other words, the stats we’re using to evaluate success may not be the right ones to be measuring.

As "data-based decision making" becomes more popular, expect a sharp increase in the fudging of data and the political maneuvering on behalf of self-serving measurements of performance. Never underestimate people’s desire to cover their asses.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

It’s Friday! Here’s your moment of zen. Video courtesy of our friend Ken Lee at solargun.com…

Speaking of Ken, his wife Susan Pak worked on a documentary, A Walk to Beautiful, which opens at the Quad Cinemas in Manhattan next Friday, February 8. Here’s the synopsis:

The award-winning, feature-length documentary A Walk to Beautiful tells the stories of five Ethiopian women who suffer from devastating childbirth injuries and embark on a journey to reclaim their lost dignity. Rejected by their husbands and ostracized by their communities, these women are left to spend the rest of their lives in loneliness and shame. They make the choice to take the long and arduous journey to the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in search of a cure and a new life.

The documentary has already won awards at film festivals in Barcelona, Denver, San Francisco, and St. Louis. Please check it out. Here’s a link to their site.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Katherine Newman and I spoke at the Cambridge Forum in December about the book. Here is a link to the video, which appeared on C-SPAN, and here is a link to the audio, which was broadcast on WGBH.

Here are links to some book reviews:

Boston Globe  

All About Cities

OC Weekly

Sojourners

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Lost premiered its fourth season last night. Wow. I’ve given up trying to theorize about where this show is headed. It’s a fun ride, though, and they throw in all these seemingly random references to literature and mythology and political theory and physics that you think you must be learning something. (Yes, John Locke was a 17th-century English philosopher, Our Mutual Friend was Dickens’ last novel, B.F. Skinner was a 20th-century American psychologist … and, yes, treastises on free will and critiques of materialism and theories of operant conditioning … but did you notice what beautiful skin these people have?). I just hope that the writers know what they’re doing, and that all these disjointed plot points are leading us toward some fitting conclusion, and not down the rabbit hole of bizarre screenwriter logic, a la The Matrix or Twin Peaks.

I’m glad to see that Lance Reddick from The Wire showed up in last night’s episode, and that Ken Leung (who was terrific in The Sopranos‘ last season) will also be playing a recurring character this season. Just fly in James Gandolfini and the show will be perfect.

One thing I like about Lost is that it tries to be global and multicultural in its outlook — much more than other Hollywood fare, at least — and yet it doesn’t have everyone around a campfire singing "Kumbaya." There were cultural conflicts aplenty among the survivors in the early episodes, but the interesting thing is how those differences became somewhat muted once armed conflict with another group on the Island — "The Others" — took precedence. In the last season we started to understand what makes The Others tick, and suddenly they’re not (well, with one exception) the monsters they once were, but another group trying to survive, feeling threatened, and setting up in their minds that instinctual divide between us and them that is the root of all misunderstanding and conflict.

It’s a state of nature, in other words, with a social contract being cobbled together, and guys named Rousseau and Locke and Bakunin and Hume duking it out … yeah, I hope these writers know what they’re doing.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen