Alone again ... unnaturally!

I clearly recall the perplexed, confused expressions on my students' faces in what seems like centuries ago, when I told them what social distancing will require each of us to do.  I told them that while we might want to seek solace in the company of fellow humans, especially our close friends and families, we will have to stay apart.

The forced isolation in response to COVID-19 is harsh.  Even in our regular lives we don't like living alone, as Jill Lepore writes recalling her own experience:

I tried living alone when I was twenty-five, because it seemed important to me, the way owning a piece of furniture that I did not find on the street seemed important to me, as a sign that I had come of age, could pay rent without subletting a sublet. I could afford to buy privacy, I might say now, but then I’m sure I would have said that I had become “my own person.” I lasted only two months. I didn’t like watching television alone, and also I didn’t have a television, and this, if not the golden age of television, was the golden age of “The Simpsons,” so I started watching television with the person who lived in the apartment next door. I moved in with him, and then I married him.

At least that was her wanting to be alone.  By herself.  Our isolation in the time of the coronavirus is not from a willingness.  It is from a fear of an invisible pathogen.  A villain so tiny that we can't even see what we are holed up against.  Loneliness in this context is different from loneliness that my grandfather might have felt in Varanasi.

As Lepore writes, we are not wired for being sealed in, especially during a crisis:

Then the great, global confinement began: enforced isolation, social distancing, shutdowns, lockdowns, a human but inhuman zoological garden. Zoom is better than nothing. But for how long? And what about the moment your connection crashes: the panic, the last tie severed? It is a terrible, frightful experiment, a test of the human capacity to bear loneliness. Do you pull out your hair? Do you dash yourself against the walls of your cage? Do you, locked inside, thrash and cry and moan? Sometimes, rarely, or never? More today than yesterday?

One.Day.At.A.Time!

If only we had understood that Wuhan is in our neighborhood!

In the classes that I teach, all of which relating to global aspects in one way or another, I have often remarked to students that we absolutely need to understand the world even if it is only out of a selfish interest.  After all, the major happenings somewhere eventually gets to us too.  We are all in it together, I remind them.  And sometimes I have even played in class Carl Sagan's "pale blue dot."

COVID-19 is a slap-in-the-face reminder of that.  What happened in a Chinese province, whose name was unknown to most of us, did not merely stay in that province.

I have always advocated for such a broad and inclusive understanding of the world and caring for others.  I find it strange when people casually ignore anything that is not within their neighborhood.  I have tried my best to advocate for vastly enlarging the radius of our mental neighborhoods.  In this post in October 2016, I asked "where does the neighborhood end?"

I noted in that post that we need to look at what is happening far away "for us to be reminded that there are real people all around with real problems that are far more compelling than our problems with the overcast skies and crappy cellphone coverage."

The real problems of real people in Wuhan began in December 2019.  We just assumed, as we always do, that a place far away is not in our neighborhood.

The following is an edited version of that October 2016 post.
***************************************************

Usually when I call my parents, thanks to life on opposite sides of the world, I end up calling them when they have just about wrapped up a hot breakfast, and when they are contemplating what to prepare for lunch.  Usually.

Not that one day.  Their lunch prep was on hold.

The preparations had to wait because the neighbor had died and they did not want to get the kitchen operations going until the body was taken away.  Whatever be the religious reasons, there is a basic humanitarian reason for such a delay, which you may have already figured out.  Indian cooking releases a gazillion mouth-watering aromas (or, strong odors, if you don't care for them) and such an act while the neighbor's family is sitting with the dead person is simply an awfully discourteous behavior.

In the old days, in my grandmothers' villages, one of the reasons for a quick disposal of the body was to also make sure that the neighbors were not put to a great inconvenience--after all, when tragedy strikes in our life, it is not a tragedy for everybody, right?

Which is what I want to get to in this post.  Where does that neighborhood boundary end?

Tragedies happen every minute of every day all around the world.  But, that does not stop us from cooking delicious meals, traveling, having sex, ... whatever.  While it is a wonderful survival mechanism to make sure that we don't involved with the tragedies all around, my objective in this post is a much simpler one: For us to be reminded that there are real people all around with real problems that are far more compelling than our problems with the overcast skies and crappy cellphone coverage.

One of those tragedies was this image that appeared in my Twitter feed:

The tweet noted:

it's a kid arm holding to his bag after today's bombing

Yet another tragic day in Syria :(

I started following that Twitter feed after reading a Nick Kristof column, in which he had included details about a kid and her mother in Aleppo.  Now, thanks to that, I am reminded every day that life is not normal in Syria.  The image of a kid's severed arm lying on the ground with the fingers wrapped around a school bag is, sadly, only the latest of the horrific images that we have seen over the past couple of years.

Later, news reports provided a complete picture related to that image:

A school compound in a rebel-held part of northern Syria was repeatedly hit by airstrikes on Wednesday in an assault that monitoring groups and rescuers said had left dozens of people dead, including many children.
Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund, said the assault in Idlib Province may have been the deadliest on a school since the Syrian war began more than five years ago.
Twenty-two children and six teachers were killed in the strikes, Unicef said. 

Neither my parents nor I stop our lunch and dinner preparations in order to honor and respect the dead in Aleppo. Or in Mosul. Or in wherever.  Because ... they aren't our neighbors?!

Who will live and who will die

That was literally the title of my post on September 19, 2018.

Now, in the COVID-19 context, we are tragically witnessing that question being played out in real time in the ICUs.  Who will live and who will die is, unfortunately, not a mere philosophical or religious construct; if only we as people and as humanity had always been thoughtful about the important questions in life!

Like how we survived the 1918 pandemic, humans will survive this one too.  I hope we will learn our lessons from this crisis.

The following is a slightly edited post from September 2018.
*******************

“How many will pass away and how many will be born? |
Who will live and who will die?”

I had no idea of that couplet until I read this opinion piece in the NY Times.  It is a part of Yom Kippur prayers.  A day in which we remind ourselves that "No one makes it out alive."

There’s the obvious — the plastic surgery and the digital surgery and the obsession with achieving perfect quantities of tautness and plumpness and dewiness. But look through the death lens, and you’ll see our fixation on wellness and workouts in a new way. Look through the death lens, and Silicon Valley’s project to extend life indefinitely looks as foolish as Gilgamesh’s efforts to do the same. Look through the death lens, and Instagram and Twitter look like nothing more than numbing agents.

I am not Jewish. I am not religious either. Yet, my suspicion is that I think a lot more about my mortality and, therefore, what I want to do with my limited time, more than most religious do.

Such an atheist life should really not surprise anybody; as the Huguenot philosopher and historian, Pierre Bayle wrote, way back in 1682:

It is no stranger for an atheist to live virtuously than it is strange for a Christian to live criminally. We see the latter sort of monster all the time, so why should we think the former is impossible? 

Whether it is Ramadan, or Vaikunta Ekadasi; or any religious high holy day--and I don't really observe any of those days--those are all timely, regular, reminders that no one makes it out alive and, therefore, we better figure out our priorities before it is way late.

One of the biggest advantages with facing up to the reality of my coming expiration is that I am less and less interested in people whose words and actions seem to miss that perspective.  I have encountered one too many "god-fearing" people who refuse to feel the pain of others, and who refuse to help those in misery.   Of course, their behaviors bother me, but once they reveal who they are, I keep away from them.  They are not worth my limited time here on this pale blue dot!

The author of that opinion piece quotes a Manhattan rabbi, Angela Buchdahl:

thinking about your death can bring you much closer to experiencing true joy. It “compels us to squeeze out every bit of life out of every day that we have”

That has been my experience too.  As I have blogged in plenty here, thinking about my mortality makes me appreciate the good people around me; the blue sky with puffy white clouds; the sparkling waters in the river and the ocean; the giggles of a child; ... it is an endless list of miracles.

Finally, even though I am far from religions, I sincerely appreciate the "atonement" that Yom Kippur reminds.  After all, both the religious and the irreligious err.  We humans make plenty of mistakes, big and small, which add up to a lot over the years that we live.

I apologize for all my misdeeds and to all those I have wronged.

All at sea

International travel has been upended in this COVID-19 context.  The Indian government has even suspended all visas for foreigners, which means that I cannot even go to the old country for a while.  In reality, we have no idea when countries might open up for international travel.

A worry that the son might not be able to come back in time is why my great-grandmother forbid my grandfather from taking up a job in Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was then called.  (My own interpretation is this is also the larger logic behind the old Hindu tradition's belief that it is a sin to travel over the seas.)

We take for granted that life as we know it will continue forever.  Operating in that framework, we even put off visiting with parents.  I blogged about this in July 2013.  I wrote there: "I spend money to go to India because, probabilistically speaking, while I have quite a few more years to live, my parents face a much more limited horizon. ... As a confirmed atheist, all I have to figure out is whether I am at peace with the decisions I make.  I know I won't be at peace if I didn't make that trip to India"

Over the last 18 years, by my mental count, I have made 19 trips to India.  Two of those trips coincided with my sabbaticals, which meant that I spent three months there during each of those sabbaticals, instead of the usual three weeks.

I have no idea when the next trip might be, and who might or might not be around when I get there.  Or if there will be another trip at all.  Am at peace within, supported by the evidence that I went when I could.  As for the future, que sera sera.

The following is an edited version of that July 2013 post:

************************************
I had a good night sleep after an enjoyable and eventful weekend. I woke up with a clear head, and had coffee and breakfast.  I read and blogged. I had a lovely walk by the river before it warmed up.  Lunch tasted awesome--the leftovers from the Saturday cooking.

And then I read this piece at Slate: It is "a calculator to to tell you how many times you'll see your parents before they die."

Of course I had to read it the moment that kind of a lead popped up.  After all, the annual trips to India over the last decade have been exactly for this reason, even though, this travel-dreaming blogger on a limited budget could easily divert that expense in order to go somewhere else.  And, boy do I have some travel plans in mind!

I spend money to go to India because, probabilistically speaking, while I have quite a few more years to live, my parents face a much more limited horizon. In fact, it is even probable that they are into overtime.

Death is guaranteed right at conception.  It is only a matter of when.  My first lesson on my own mortality was when I was way young.  It is not that I sit around waiting for my own death or anybody else's; it is merely a realization that one day it will happen.

As an atheist, I am not buying my ticket to heaven by visiting with parents, nor do I have to worry about spending eternity in hell if don't spend that time with them.

As a confirmed atheist, all I have to figure out is whether I am at peace with the decisions I make.  I know I won't be at peace if I didn't make that trip to India and, instead, if I spent those weeks in, say, Argentina that I have been drooling to go for years.  Further, it is not that visiting with the parents is a pain--it is always a pleasure. And I will get to meet with a few friends and relatives.

Hence, I go. And, yes, I am all set with the air tickets for the upcoming annual trip, later this year.

So, I did click on the link to the site that does the calculation.  A site whose address says it all: seeyourfolks.com

As the Slate article pointed out, the site's simple interface was inviting. I punched in the data. The site had this to report:

Not a surprise to me--it matches my understanding of life expectancy at birth.

So, why create such a site?

We believe that increasing awareness of death can help us to make the most of our lives. The right kind of reminders can help us to focus on what matters, and perhaps make us better people.

Exactly!  This has always been my understanding of life, and death too.

When we realize there is only a limited amount of time, we are then able to easily rank some as important and others are not worth even a tiny second of our lives.

If the latter, we stop caring for sports in which people get paid gazillions to entertain us. We stop caring for movies that are formulaic.  We don't care for unprofessional colleagues. We end marriages and we divorce. Life is way too short for these.

I would rather spend time, and money, on what truly matters. I prefer humans who are genuinely happy to give me a minute or more of their lives. I travel to visit with my love. I visit with my parents. I read. I think. I help students think. I share ideas with people. I walk by the timeless river.

I blog about all these.

This is all that matters.

Source

Oxygen

My paternal grandmother lived with us for the last decade of her life.  As kids, we thought she was old,  But, she was only in her early 60s at that time.  Well, back then it was a big deal if one lived until 60, and an even bigger deal if they completed 80.  So, yes, she was "old" in that context.

In the final third of that decade that she spent with us, grandmother started having breathing problems.  The heart and lung expert at the local hospital ran a few tests and zeroed in on the problem: An enlarged heart.

He concluded that it was not a new thing, but was perhaps congenital.  It was, therefore, up to the heart to keep working as long as it would before it stopped.

To relieve her of temporary breathing problems, we got her a portable oxygen tank at home.  If memory serves me well, that was rarely used.  But, it was there, nonetheless, in a corner in her bedroom.  I suppose it provided psychological comfort than anything else.

A couple of decades ago, a friend was diagnosed with lung cancer.  A middle-aged man who had never smoked in his life, nor had he spent time in the company of smokers.  In his final months, he too needed oxygen from an external device.

This was now in a new country and more than three decades after my grandmother's experience. Technology had vastly advanced.  A small machine in a corner of the house operated 24x7, and the long tubing delivered oxygen to wherever he was at home.  While the oxygen tank for grandmother was mostly for psychological support, this machine was literally keeping the friend alive and comfortable enough.

When healthy, we don't think about the breathing and oxygen.  It is only when things are not working well do we seem to understand, appreciate, and respect the things and people that make for a regular life.  How often do we pause to think about the phenomenal job that the heart and lungs and plasma and oxygen and ....?

COVID-19 compels us to separate out the fundamentals of life from all the fluff that otherwise preoccupies us.  The forced physical distancing is making us rethink the ways in which we have been distancing ourselves from friends, family, colleagues, neighbors, ... We are humbled by a virus that is invisible.  A virus that goes straight to the lungs, and makes it difficult to breathe.

If only we paused, even in the absence of any pandemic, to thank the cosmos for the miraculously normal lives that we are lucky to live!

Breathe!

For a few months in mid-1986, I might have come across to people as one of those young men who was nothing but a loser who was wasting his time and his parents' money.

I did not care about what others thought.

Those were the precious months when I was rapidly zooming into what I wanted to study in graduate school, and the universities that might offer such programs. 

It was a different time then--the prehistoric days before the internet.  I had to do things the old-fashioned way: I logged hours at the library in the US consulate, looking through university catalogs, and reading American newspapers and magazines.

But, good-hearted relatives worried about me.  One of them suggested that I apply for an opening at the company where he worked--Indian Oxygen, Limited (IOL.)

I told him that I had a game plan, which was to start applying to universities in the US, and that by April 1987 I would have a clear idea of where I would be going.

He perhaps worried that mine was one of those youthful and wishful-thinking dreams.  I am sure that my parents had also conveyed to him their worries, even though they never shared anything with me.

This uncle wouldn't give up.  He said it would be no problem even if I quite a few months after joining the company.  And he arranged for an interview too.

I interviewed.  They offered me the job. I accepted it.  All thanks to Uncle L.

IOL had a reason for hiring engineering grads like me--the company was moving into medical electronic equipment, like neonatal incubators and ventilators.  Yes, ventilators that are in the news now, though the current models are infinitely more advanced than the ones from 35 years ago.

In my training period, along with my supervisor, I visited with anesthesiologists and surgeons.  My supervisor (Parthasarathy?) explained to them why the IOL product (I recall they were actually British manufacture) was good and--even more important--the service dependability.

A few months later, it came down to choosing between the University of Iowa and the University of Southern California.  Iowa offered more money for me to study in a low-cost location, and USC's offer was lower along with a much higher cost of living in Los Angeles.

I opted for Los Angeles.  I quit my job.

I never saw a ventilator again, until a few years ago.

I hope that I will not have to use a ventilator because of COVID-19.

And I hope there are enough ventilators for all those who will need them.

The incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence

"I alone can fix it," he said.  And 63 million adults applauded and made him the leader.

He described himself as a "stable genius" and his supporters were thrilled with his reptilian cunning.

He is no physician, and yet he freely advises people, including experts, on what they should do.  During these COVID-19 times, he is practicing what he campaigned on--that he alone can fix it.

We have always known about confident idiots like him.  I blogged about the Dunning-Kruger effect more than 5 years ago--in November 2014.

[In] many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize—scratch that, cannot recognize—just how incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Logic itself almost demands this lack of self-insight: For poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack. To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent. Poor performers—and we are all poor performers at some things—fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack.
What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.

"I alone can fix it."

Confident idiots spew bullshit all the time.

It is not an accident that I was drawn to Harry Franfurt's On Bullshit as soon as the tiny book was published.  Which is also why I loved Montaigne's Que sais-je?  Which is also why I developed a course that I offered only once, on intellectual humility.

A couple of years ago, I decided to offer a seminar on this subject.  I titled the course as "Intellectual boldness through intellectual humility."  In that, I essentially channeled my philosophy on education and life--to admit that I don't know.  The key, however, is to rise beyond that "I don't know."

But, 63 million loved the man who claimed to know it all!  And now we are all paying the price for his ignorance and incompetence.

This miraculous life!

The anti-vaccination, climate-change-denying, anti-evolution nutcases in the Republican Party teamed up with white supremacists and misogynists and collectively delivered tRump as the President.  And now, we--yes, including all of them who cheered "alternative facts"--are compelled to deal with the reality of the science behind a global pandemic.

If only the candidate who spoke about science, facts, and policies had won in November 2016!

Instead, we have a President who forces upon us a reality horror show in which he is the ultimate villain.  “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear," he declared just over three weeks ago, on February 27th.

There is a world of a difference between the sociopath who masquerades as the President when he talks about "a miracle" versus the truly and sincerely faithful when they refer to divine interventions.

Like my father, who truly believes in miracles, and who often quotes Tennyson's "More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of."  

I remember all too well how as a faithful young boy everyday I waited for miracles to happen.  The older I got, and the more I understood science, I figured that there are plenty of things wrong in interpreting the happenings via miracles. 

As the polymath physicist Alan Lightman writes in this essay,

Miracles, by definition, lie outside science. Miracles are incompatible with a rational picture of the physical world. Nevertheless, even in our highly scientific and technological society, with most of us profiting enormously from cell phones and automobiles and other products of science—indeed depending on the consistent workings of science—a large fraction of the public believes in miracles. Most of us do not ponder that contradiction. One of my aunts was certain that her dead father visited her house and spoke to her every few months, and she got a tape recorder—a device of science—to document his voice. (Thereupon, the ghostly visits ceased.)
Miracles come from the world of imagination, of dreams, of desire; science from the world of practicality, of logic, of orderly control. I’ve always been fascinated by our ability to live simultaneously in these two apparently opposing worlds. Each in its own way, they reflect something deep and essential inside of us.

That excerpt gives away why I was drawn to that essay.  Through a number of posts in this blog, I have been trying to understand the simultaneous existence of people, like my father, in "two apparently opposing worlds."  For a number of years now, I have asked quite a few science-educated people, including one who has a doctorate in astronomy--about their "faith" and how they reconcile the two. 

I have also come to understand via this maniacal inquiry that people believe in their gods because it gives them that concise narrative of why we are here.  Without that clear narrative, we will be forced to think about questions like: who am I? What does life mean? What happens to this "life" after death?  Why is there death?  How did all these come about?  Those are all troubling questions.  Religious narratives, whether it is Buddhism or Catholicism or Scientology, provide answers to those questions. 

And that is exactly what Alan Lightman also says:

Belief in a spiritual universe, I would suggest, arises to a large extent from a human desire for meaning, meaning both in our individual lives and in the cosmos as a whole. While science provides the psychological comfort of order, rationality, and control, it does not provide meaning. Such deep philosophical questions as “Why am I here?” “What is the purpose of my life?” “What is the meaning of this strange cosmos I find myself in?”, and such moral questions as “Is it right to kill an enemy soldier in time of war?” “Is it right to steal in order to feed my family?”, cannot be answered by science. Yet these questions are vital to our mental and emotional lives. We turn for answers to the spiritual universe, the realm that contains eternal truths and guidance, the realm that has some kind of permanent existence, in contrast to the fleeting moment of our mortal lives. In such a realm, logic, rationality, and regularity are not even part of the vocabulary.

I believe that father has also understood my profound appreciation for this universe that is awesome, beautiful, and mysterious. Which is why sometimes he even says things like "you refer to that as the cosmos."  To me, a wonderfully sunny day in fall is a miracle. So is the sparkling river, a rainbow, the blue waters of Sahalie Falls, the loving lick of a playful puppy, the unadulterated joyous laughter of a three-year old,  ... Which is why I so easily agree with Lightman's concluding comments:

My wife and I spend summers on a small island in Maine, far from any town. At night, the skies are quite dark. Sometimes, when there is no wind blowing and the tidal flow is small and the ocean is very still, I can see the reflection of the stars in the water near our dock. At such moments, the water looks like a dark carpet with a million tiny sparkles of light, which gently bob and ripple with each passing wave. Even though I know all the science, I am totally mesmerized and awed. For me, that is miracle enough.

Have yourself a miraculous week, especially during these extraordinarily challenging times!

The un-empathetic sociopath

I will wrap up the empathy series by making it political.

As long as I live, I will never ever understand how tRump was elected President despite all his sociopath behavior that he made explicit.

It continues to shock me that his mocking of a disabled reporter alone did not send him into political wilderness but, instead, got him more support!  What a disgusting turn of events!

More than ever, it is during a crisis that we expect empathetic leadership.  We want leaders to feel our pain, our angst.  We want leaders to tell us that the problem is for real, and that all the machinery of the government is working overtime to get us through this.  However, the leader chosen by 63 million people "tests negative for empathy," as the satirical Andy Borowitz phrased it.

A reporter tosses him a softball question that any other President would have crushed to a towering home run.  Not this sociopath in the Oval Office.  He had a meltdown.  Instead of reassuring Americans, and the rest of the world too, he proved yet again that he "is simply incapable of offering the kind of emotional support the country needs at a time like this."

You may say that this is a less important part of the job of president than actually running the government and making good decisions. But every president is called upon to reflect and tend to the country’s psyche, sometimes over limited traumas and sometimes over larger ones. And when they do it well, we remember it for years, even decades.

We will remember this sociopath for decades, yes, but for all the horrible reasons!

There is no empathy from tRump and his godawful toadies.  Not "a word of sympathy or compassion for the thousands of Americans getting sick and dying on this president’s watch, as a result of this president’s neglect of his duties"

Trump and his party-line media do not do that. They cannot do that. That would take empathy—and empathy might dangerously remind Americans of the tragic cost of Trump’s mismanagement and absent leadership. Rage is all they feel, so rage is all they can express. Hatred fills their hearts, so hatred fills their mouths. The government and the government-line television network are, for the time being, in the charge of broken souls. Those broken souls are breaking a nation.

63 million Americans are guilty forever!

Source

If only we had more empathy

Not only is the COVID-19 a public health crisis, it is one awful economic crisis too.  This is the kind of a situation when people need the safety net.  But, here in the US, we have been systematically tearing apart the safety net ever since Reagan assumed the presidency.  My fellow citizens are finding out that the safety net has plenty of holes.  As if this is not horrible enough, Reagan's "heirs" want to tear up the safety net even more :(

I have blogged a lot about the safety net, and called for a new social contract.  The following is a post from October 2016, in which I worried that we don't have a good safety net because there is little empathy for the other.
*********************

First, read the following excerpt:

It is impossible to imagine Bill Gates’s wealth without Bill Gates’s ingenuity and effort. But it is far easier to imagine Bill Gates’s wealth being produced by someone other than Bill Gates within the institutions of modern American economic society than it is to imagine Bill Gates generating Bill Gates’s wealth in a different time and place – in France in the 1700s, or in the Central African Republic today – in which society was or is less tolerant of entrepreneurial capitalism and the accumulation of personal billions, and where the community of engineers that gave rise to and became America’s tech sector is absent. Indeed, at some point in Microsoft’s history it was Microsoft the information-processing organism that was more critical to Bill Gates’s wealth accumulation than Bill Gates himself. People, essentially, do not create their own fortunes. They inherit them, come to them through the occupation of some state-protected niche, or, if they are very brilliant and very lucky, through infusing a particular group of men and women with the germ of an idea, which, in time and with just the right environment, allows that group to evolve into an organism suited to the creation of economic value, a very large chunk of which the founder can then capture for himself.

That paragraph can easily be used as some kind of an ideological  Rorschach test.  Upon reading that, one can get pissed off and defend Gates's gazillions, or one might applaud in agreement that Gates has been unfairly hogging it all, or ... whatever.

To me, what makes that paragraph standout is this: The author, Ryan Avent, is senior editor and economics columnist at The Economist.  You might remember him from one of my earlier posts?  One of the many reasons why I have been a long-time reader of the Economist is this: It is not an ideological outfit.  It is not like the Nation or the Wall Street Journal.  There is a sensibility that reflects a much broader understanding, which Avent also displays in his essay.

In the essay from which I had excerpted that paragraph, Avent makes an argument that will certainly make one sit up:

The wealth of humans is societal. But the distribution of that wealth doesn’t rest on markets or on social perceptions of who deserves what but on the ability of the powerful to use their power to retain whatever of the value society generates that they can.

His follow-up sentence?  "That is not a radical statement."

After quoting Adam Smith and the wonderful advantages of trade and specialization, Avent writes:

Secure in the knowledge that societal growth would not reduce redistribution (and could indeed increase the value available for redistribution by increasing global output) the incentive to draw the borders of society tightly would be curtailed. The challenge, of course, is to create the broad social interest in an encompassing redistribution. How to do that?

Isn't that the challenge that I have been struggling with all my adult life!  How do we create the broad social interest in redistribution that is needed along with the open borders, trade, and specialization?  How do we develop a social contract that will include redistribution, which the ideologues from the right hate, while also allowing for free trade that the ideologues from the left hate?

Avent writes that Adam Smith the philosopher wrote about that too.  "The force of human empathy can be made to serve either openness or societal mercantilism."  Here again the problem is that we are far more empathetic to people like us, but not towards people completely unlike us.  We conveniently forget that deep down we are all humans, but only view each other through nationalistic or religious or ethnic, or whatever divisive lens we want to use.

There is a better answer available: that to be ‘like us’ is to be human. That to be human is to earn the right to share in the wealth generated by the productive social institutions that have evolved and the knowledge that has been generated, to which someone born in a slum in Dhaka is every bit the rightful heir as someone born to great wealth in Palo Alto or Belgravia. ...
Rich societies can find ways to justify their great wealth relative to others: their members can tell themselves stories about the great things they did that others could not have done that made them wealthy beyond imagination. Alternatively, they could recognize the wild contingency of their wealth, cultivate human empathy, and do what they can to extend the wealth of humans to everyone.

If only we had more empathy.  If only we spent at least as much time thinking about what it means to be human as we spend on entertaining ourselves.  If only ...

Does empathy really have a downside to it?

We humans are strange that in our daily lives it takes a disaster to wake us up and draw us out of ourselves and our narrow perspective.  More on the empathy series in the time of Covid-19.

The following is an edited version of a post from December 2015.
********************

I did not stir out of my home in California for two days after the fateful events on September 11th, 2001.  I even skipped attending the back-to-school events, including the president's address in which he referred to a research project in which I was the lead researcher.  I was exhausted from thinking about the families whose loved ones had jumped to death out of the flaming buildings, the ones who were trapped inside, the ones in the planes, the fire and rescue personnel, ... the losses were acutely personal to me, even though I had not known even one of the dead or injured.

It was a replay of similar emotions after the Christmas tsunami. The Fukushima earthquake and the tsunami. The mass shooting in Oregon.  The recent rains and floods in Chennai. And a lot more.

I feel for the people at such events.  And then I worry that my empathy levels could become unhealthy--or worse, that it already is.

Compared to those events around the world, my troubles seem so trivial.  I have to remind myself my daughter's pragmatic suggestion years ago, of which she perhaps has no memory.  She matter-of-factly told me that a person's problems were important and huge to that person.  Whatever the problems might be.  End of story.

The psychotherapy column in the NY Times has that same bottom-line as well: "Got First-World Problems? Don’t Feel Guilty."

Focusing on your hurt feelings because a cousin didn’t invite you to her bridal shower can easily appear shallow if you place it in the context of African genocide or refugees drowning in the Aegean Sea.

The therapist advises not to feel guilty that your hurt feelings take priority over those catastrophic global issues.

If we allowed every mass tragedy to affect us deeply, we would soon suffer from empathy overload. Most of us would agree that having empathy for other people is a good thing, a core human capacity that supports morality and civilization. But it’s also possible to have too much of a good thing. Empathy has a downside when it makes you ashamed of what matters to you, or when it distracts you from other important emotions of your own.

If we didn't feel hurt and angry and frustrated in our daily lives that are peaceful and rich, then I suppose we would not be truly human experiencing the emotions that make us human.  But, of course, we do not want to live a selfish life that is shut off from all those problems either.  A fine balance between empathy and selfishness is what we need.

A similar issue pops up in a column about life after the catastrophic rains and floods in Chennai.  The author, a Chennai resident, writes:

There was a family celebration recently, a zero-number birthday, and we went out, had dinner at a nice place. The money I spent, I didn’t feel... guilty about it, exactly. After all, some of my money has found its way to relief organisations. And we can’t stop living, right? Life goes on, right? But when I handed over my credit card, I felt weird. I think I understood — rather, felt — for the first time what Siddhartha must have felt when he stepped out of the palace and saw people who did not have the privileges he did. Again, I’m trying not to make too big a deal about this — but these are big thoughts, big emotions. About, through some freakishly random accident, being born into a certain kind of family, having all kinds of opportunities, having the freedom to chuck a phenomenally well-paying job and pursue a maybe-it’ll-work career in another field, now living in a flat in a high-lying area that floodwaters couldn’t reach — all of which led to this evening where I’m taking a casual look at the bill and handing out my credit card.

All a part of the human condition on this pale blue dot.

By changing places in fancy with the sufferer

Continuing with the empathy series in this Covid-19 context.  The following is an edited version of this post from October 2018.
***********************************

Over the years, I have come to appreciate John Rawls's "veil of ignorance" a lot.  I mean, a lot.  (Click here if you need a ninety-second briefing.)

Unlike Rawls's theoretical structure of an original position, we have the real world to deal with.  It is this world, not a hypothetical scenario, that we have to work with.  Which means, we need to figure out how to understand what it might mean to be a person of the type that we are not.  The "other" could be a different gender from us.  A different religion.  Different skin color.  Different upbringing.  Different whatever.

If we begin to understand the circumstances in which the others might find themselves, then, well, we are beginning to have that wonderful aspect of what it means to be human: Empathy.

As Roman Krznaric explains in the video that I have embedded in this post (or you can watch here) it is cognitive empathy.

We imagine what the people in Aleppo are going through.  We imagine what the homeless in the nation's capital experience when they are only a few blocks away from the President's palace.  We imagine what the hijab-wearing Muslim is worried about as a result of the elections.

Krznaric referred to Adam Smith, which, of course, intrigued me.  Smith, is often hailed by the free market and the pro-business people.  (Pro-business is not the same as being pro-market.)  However, that is cherry-picking from what Smith had to say.

Smith not only wrote about the invisible hand and the power of self-interest, but was a moral philosopher.  Krznaric quotes Smith about empathy.  The think-tanks and the business lobbies conveniently forget that Smith was quite a philosopher.  Either they forget, or they are not even informed about it--perhaps the latter!

Krznaric quotes from Smith's other book, A theory of moral sentiments: " ... by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels."

By changing places with the sufferer ... in our imagination, not literally.  We then imagine what it might mean to be that other person.

Their suffering is mine and ours

There are many incidents that people narrate about Sri Ramana Maharshi.  Even if they are not true, they have immense lessons on humanity itself.  One is this: In some context, Ramana Maharshi was asked, "what about others?"  To which he had the simplest of responses ever that says it all: There is no other.

The other is what empathy is about.

We are living through some extraordinarily difficult times all over the world, and the pain of the other is everywhere we turn to--the newspapers, television, Twitter, Facebook ... If we are lucky enough as of now, as I am, we are able to talk and write about it, fully aware that the virus could get to us too at some time.  If that happens, then we hope that others would empathize with us.

I have blogged in plenty about empathy.  Over the next few days, I will draw from them and re-post them.  Most of them had political messages that were often explicit.  When re-posting, I will edit out the political in order to stay focused on empathy during these challenging times.

Here's one from June 2017:
**********************************

As I pulled into the parking spot, I noticed her.

About thirty years old.  She was in the driver seat, with nobody else in her car.  The left hand held the smartphone to her ear, and the right hand was gesticulating, a lot.

And then I saw her face.

She was crying.

She then wiped away the tears that were flowing down.

What can this man do?  What can anyone do?

The world is a messy place.

While we can philosophize that our consciousness about ourselves and this world is nothing but a “user-illusion,” everyday life is not easy.  Our bodies ache.  Our minds ache.  She cries in the public, with her vehicle giving her a private space.  Most cry at home. Or even on Facebook.

I imagined walking up to her car and knocking on the window.  "Are you alright?"  She would probably say that she was fine.  "I'm ok, thank you."

Instead, I slowly got out of my car, and stole a glance at her.  She was gesticulating and crying.

"If she is there even when I return, I will check on her," I told myself.

I considered picking up a chocolate bar for the distraught one.  I decided against.

Her vehicle was gone when I returned.

I started driving back home.  The light turned red, and I stopped.

The homeless man held up his cardboard sign.  I acknowledged his presence with a nod.

Is my job an essential service?

Relaxation, hobbies, raising children or reading a book are dismissed as laziness. That’s how powerful the mythology of work is.

It is strange world in which we live; "the nine-to-five feels like a relic of a bygone era."

Life has become so much about work that I feel I have to defend myself when not working.  I feel guilty when I play bridge.  Guilty at this middle age!

Yet, despite all the busyness, what most of us do is darn useless. Pointless.  Bullshit jobs.  Which is why we refer to some jobs as "essential services" while most of the rest are, ahem, dispensable to varying degrees.

During crises, like the one that is unfolding all over the world, "essential services" are becoming self-evident.  Doctors. Nurses. Hospital staff. EMT. Police. Garbage truck drivers. Food truck drivers. Supermarket employees. Farmers. ...

Meanwhile, the entire sport-entertainment industry has been shut down.  No basketball. No soccer. No March Madness! ...

With school closures, parents are also beginning to understand the value of teachers. Parents are already feeling tired and frustrated after a day homeschooling their kids.

If only we remembered these valuable lessons learned during a crisis.  If we did, then we will correspondingly reward the essential services versus the completely discretionary and luxury services.  We will pay nurses and teachers and hospital custodial staff a lot more than what we pay them now.  And we will not pay sports and movie people multiples of millions of dollars either.

I know we won't.  We will take for granted teachers and nurses, and shower ball players our adoration and hard-earned money!

There is also another lesson that we are learning: Society will not function if people do not have any money to spend.  Even Mitt Romney is proposing that we pay every American: "Every American adult should immediately receive a one-time check for $1,000 to help ensure families and workers can meet their short-term obligations and increase spending in the economy."  And Romney is no socialist, remember?

If only we will remember this after the crisis abates, and do more to improve the social safety net and, perhaps, even talk about universal basic income.

But, we won't.

Because ... we are who we are!

I, for one, thank all those making sure that the essential services are provided especially during these difficult times.

We owe a profound debt of gratitude to all our health professionals and everybody who’ll be on the front lines of this pandemic for a long while. They’re giving everything. May we all model our own behavior on their selflessness and sacrifice as we help each other through this. https://t.co/F3tsJTqd4c

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) March 17, 2020

Isolation. Quarantine. Loneliness.

There are some who are social butterflies because they simply cannot handle being by themselves.  And then there are some who prefer being alone because to them, well, L'enfer, c'est les autres.

I have never been in either camps.  I could even come across as being one camp or another.  But, neither a social butterfly nor an anti-social being am I.

I think and read a lot about solitude, loneliness, and empathy.  As I have often noted here with thoughts borrowed from experts, there is a world of a difference between solitude and loneliness.

Take this post, for instance.  "loneliness is widespread in America, with nearly 50 percent of respondents reporting that they feel alone or left out always or sometimes."  These are people who don't want to feel like they are alone in this vast universe.  Ironically, most of them have plenty of "friends"--but they are in the social media.  Loneliness and social media are highly correlated!  Even worse, “It’s only a matter of time before loneliness turns into depression. And that’s where it gets dangerous.”

Solitude is different.

Solitude is intentional.  It is activity even when being inactive, or inactive even when being active.  It is that wonderful combination of actively doing nothing while being all by oneself.

It is important to cultivate within us a positive taste for solitude.

You end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we're not able to appreciate who they are. It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we're at risk, because actually it's the opposite that's true. If we're not able to be alone, we're going to be more lonely.

Tragically, we are all going to be subjects in an extensive study on how we deal with loneliness and solitude.  The novel coronavirus, Covid-19, is requiring us all to learn about social distancing.  And to quarantine oneself if the situation arises.  Bill McKibben writes that "social distancing, quarantine, and isolation go hard against the gregarious instinct that makes us who we are" during a collective crisis.  I hope we will learn from this forced isolation and social distancing, and truly understand that we are in this together.

As McKibben writes:

We should use the quiet of these suddenly uncrowded days to think a little about how much we’ve allowed social isolation to grow in our society, even without illness as an excuse. ...
If we pay attention, we may value more fully the moment we’re released from our detention, and we may even make some changes in our lives as a result. It will be a relief, above all, when we’re allowed to get back to caring for one another, which is what socially evolved primates do best.

Stay healthy--physically and mentally.

Don't ever say we didn't see this coming!

In a Thanksgiving post/column in 2014, I wrote:

While we in the US might feel sheltered from such an listing—however incomplete it is—of less than pleasant developments around the planet, the Ebola virus was a nasty reminder that we live in an interconnected world and that what happens in a remote part of West Africa will not necessarily stay in West Africa. The military conflicts around the world will force the US to act—a burden that comes with being the sole global superpower. Economic slowdown in Europe will affect us, given the highly interdependent economic web that links us to countries that we might not even be able to identify on a world map.
An old idea that is often mentioned, especially in academia, is that “war is God's way of teaching Americans geography.” We need to update that for the contemporary contexts. Now, any crisis is apparently how we Americans learn geography. Thus, thanks to Boko Haram, we were forced to look up Nigeria on a map. With Ebola in the news, there is a good chance that a few Americans were suddenly thrust with narratives about the historical connection between Liberia and slavery in the US. But then, if history provides any guidance, we perhaps passed on all the chances to learn geography.

That was in 2014.

In a post in 2015, I wrote:

In the NY Times, Gates had authored an op-ed:

The Ebola epidemic in West Africa has killed more than 10,000 people. If anything good can come from this continuing tragedy, it is that Ebola can awaken the world to a sobering fact: We are simply not prepared to deal with a global epidemic.

More than 10,000 dead.  From a disease. Caused by a virus. Yet, we--in the US and the rest of the world as well--pretty much don't care.  Which is all the more why Gates reminds us even if we care not about the 10,000 dead, and the epidemic that continues to infect people, well, perhaps we will at least take notice if we think that we too might get affected by some global epidemic.

Of all the things that could kill more than 10 million people around the world in the coming years, by far the most likely is an epidemic. But it almost certainly won’t be Ebola. As awful as it is, Ebola spreads only through physical contact, and by the time patients can infect other people, they are already showing symptoms of the disease, which makes them relatively easy to identify.
Other diseases — flu, for example — spread through the air, and people can be infectious before they feel sick, which means that one person can infect many strangers just by going to a public place.

Are you listening now?

I believe that we can solve this problem, just as we’ve solved many others — with ingenuity and innovation.

As committed as he is to the cause, it requires more than well-funded nonprofit organizations and foundations.

That was in 2015.

The global pandemic has arrived now in the form of COVID-19.

If even I from a small town in a valley far away from the places of power and fortune could have been worried about a strange disease that can quickly spread all over the world and, therefore, contemplated about the urgency for a global structure to deal with it when it arrives ... well, shame on the US for being so under-prepared for this Coronavirus!

One more thing that 63 million Americans need to be think about for having elected as their Dear Leader a sociopath who is nothing but a narcissist with an orange face paint! 

An organic way of life

We didn't have a refrigerator at home when we were kids.  In the near-equatorial conditions, and in a vegetarian household, that meant buying vegetables practically every other day.  Because potatoes are more tolerant than most other vegetables, they were stored in a dark corner and were often the option if a guest showed up un-announced--after all, those were also the days before emails and telephones, and relatives did knock on the door without a heads-up.

For whatever reason, I liked involving myself in the kitchen affairs.  Not that I cooked back then.  But, I think I had far more interest than the typical boy did in how the food preparation happened. Perhaps my mother has forgotten me asking her questions like why we needed half-a-kilo of the vegetable and not more.  Like my grandmother, I too was always impressed with how my mother seemed to cook the exact quantity for a meal; rare was a day when we ended up with more food.

In that kind of an old lifestyle, only the needed fruits and vegetables and milk were purchased, and they were all consumed.  Food was never wasted.  Never.

I wonder if my interested involvement with those household affairs is also why I continue with some of those old practices.  Even in my life on the other side of the planet from the old country, I seem to do grocery shopping every other day.  But, hey, I rarely ever have to throw food into the trash can!

But, of course, I have the organic waste to deal with.  Everything from banana and orange peels to coffee grinds and more.  A few months ago, our garbage collection service introduced collecting food waste for recycling.  M bought me a stainless steel compost bin for the kitchen.  Into that bin goes the banana and orange peels and coffee grinds.  Thanks to all that, the regular trash bag rarely gets filled anymore even for the biweekly service!

So, of course, I was immediately drawn to this essay in The New Yorker.  It is all about recycling organics.  You know, like the food stuff and more that affluent societies casually throw out.  "South Korea recycles ninety-five per cent of its food waste."  That.Is.Amazing!!!  At the other end is New York City, for instance:

recycling of organics—food waste, yard waste, pretty much anything that rots—remains voluntary, even though such material makes up about a third of New York’s trash. All but five per cent of the city’s organic waste goes to landfills.

There is a reason that we worry about the organics that go to landfills:

Organic waste doesn’t just stink when it’s sent to landfills; it becomes a climate poison. Yes, we’ve been schooled again and again in the importance of recycling—by friends, by pious enemies, even by “Wall-E.” But the recycling of organics is arguably more important than that of plastics, metal, or paper. Composting transforms raw organic waste into a humus-like substance that enriches soil and enhances carbon capture. In landfills, starved of oxygen, decomposing organics release methane, a greenhouse gas whose warming effects, in the long run, are fifty-six times those of CO₂. The United States has greater landfill emissions than any other country, the equivalent of thirty-seven million cars on the road each year.

USA! USA! USA!

The thirteen thousand tons of food waste produced daily in South Korea now become one of three things: compost (thirty per cent), animal feed (sixty per cent), or biofuel (ten per cent). “People from other countries ask me very often, ‘How did South Korea achieve this success?’ ”

Read the essay to find out how South Korea managed to do this.  And what every one of us can do about this important issue, irrespective of where we live on this pale blue dot.

PS: The essay ends with a wonderful note on the globalized lives that we lead.  The South Korean interpreter, Lucia Lee, laments about her boyfriend's problem that there's not much that he can eat in South Korea because ...  He is a Jain.  Yes, a Jain. From India.  Isn't life beautiful!

I hate losing time

All of us do, I know.  I am not referring to the one-directional time that all of us live through.  Not at all.

I am pissed off at the loss of an hour tomorrow, when we will be forced to switch to daylight savings time.

Pissed am I!

I am not the only one.  Here in Oregon we passed a damn bill that the governor signed off as well, and it was to have only clock all through the year.  No bloody "fall back" and "spring forward" crap.

But, we have to wait for those neighbors south of us to also agree to a year-round clock:

But to take effect, all three West Coast states have to make the same decision and get approval from Congress. Washington legislators approved the change this year. In California, voters have approved year-round daylight saving time, but legislators have not signed off yet.

After the ok from Californians, the Feds have to approve as well.

Why go through this rigmarole of resetting the clock twice a year?  Because we are stupid!  As simple as that.  If anybody believes that this is somehow an energy efficiency approach, they surely are smoking something awesome for them to overlook the facts, or they are like tRump who creates his own alternative facts:

Despite the fact that daylight saving time was introduced to save fuel, there isn’t strong evidence that the current system actually reduces energy use — or that making it year-round would do so, either. Studies that evaluate the energy impact of DST are mixed. It seems to reduce lighting use (and thus electricity consumption) slightly but may increase heating and AC use, as well as gas consumption. It’s probably fair to say that energy-wise, it’s a wash.

We can try whatever tricks we want, but the reality is that the tilt of the earth means that the farther one is from the equator, the more the days get longer after Christmas--in the northern hemisphere--and vice versa.  Straightening the tilt is the only real thing to do ;)

Let's suppose that our reasonable preference is for the sun rising, according to the clocks that we keep, at 7 am or earlier or setting after 5 pm.  (Keep in mind that this is all an accounting game--the sun is gonna do what the sun is gonna do!)  If Daylight Saving Time were abolished, then this is what we will look at:

Source

Abolish the damn DST already!

On Berber and Pariah

The carpet in the condo unit looked different from other carpets that I had seen.  The agent said it was a Berber carpet.

Berber?

That was more than two decades ago, when Wikipedia hadn't been invented.  Those were the dark ancient history years.  In the absence of Google and Wiki, we men freely bullshitted and mansplained even when we didn't know a damn thing.  But, Berber carpet?

Fast forward a few years.  It is now a different geography, and life is in an era in which Google is not merely a brand name but when "go google yourself" is even the name of a racehorse!

We came to know a woman from Morocco.  An Amazigh, she said.

Amazigh?

We know her and her people by the other name--Berbers.  She explained that "Berbers" is an awful name that means "barbarians."

Wiki offers more on this:

The term Berber is a variation of the Greek original word barbaros ("barbarian"), earlier in history applied by Romans specifically to their northern hostile neighbors from Germania (modern Germany) and Celts, Iberians, Gauls, Goths and Thracians. The variation is a French one when spelled Berbère and English when spelled Berber. The term appeared first in the 4th century in the religious conflicts between Saint Augustine, a Numidian Berber-Roman bishop of the Catholic faith, and the Berber Donatists who were allies of the Barbarian Vandals. The Vandals migrated from Iberia (modern Spain and Portugal) where they were assailed by the Gauls allied to the Romans, and settled west of the Roman city of Carthage (in modern Tunisia) in the highlands (in modern Algeria).

Hence, the self-designation of Amazigh.

We thanked the visiting Moroccan for the explanation and the education.

A few months ago, I emailed her after reading this essay.  I wrote:

Until I met you, I hadn't known the word Amazigh.  And today I understand that "the name usually comes with the fanciful but evocative explanation that it is a translation of ‘free men’."  What a profound idea of "free men."  (Though, I suppose the traditional "men" literally meant only men?)
The essay introduces me to so many new names and ideas that it is tough for me to keep track of everything there.  But, one thing is clear: It is yet another piece of evidence on how European colonization messed up so many aspects of life all over the world!  Oh well ...

The white man went to India, too, and the world now uses the word pariah.  As a Tamil, it bothers me every single time I hear or read that word.  I have referred to this in a few posts in the past.  I wrote in this post:

The word "pariah" of course coming from the Subcontinent.  A word that in its usage in the old country that is as awful as the "n"-word in this culture.

But, the widespread usage means that one cannot expect that word to be withdrawn from circulation.  Which is why I thought that maybe we simply ought to own that word and celebrate how a word that was uttered in the old caste system has been internationally mainstreamed with users not even knowing anything about the origin of the word.

Such is life in this modern world that the white man has remade in his own image!

Source

In sickness and in health

A few Decembers ago, when I was visiting with my folks in India, the maid came a tad later than usual and set about her tasks.  She started coughing.  My father told her that it was ok not to show up for work as long as she called and gave them a heads up.

But, there is a reason that maids and other workers report to work even when they are not well, or well enough: In most cases, they will suffer a cut in their earnings if they don't show up for work.  It is only a fraction of the labor force in India that has the benefits of sick leave and paid vacations.

Now, superimpose on such a framework the possibility of a viral disease. An epidemic, like COVID-19.  The scenario easily unfolds in your minds too, eh.

The US is only marginally better.

Service industry workers, like those in restaurants, retail, child care and the gig economy, are much less likely to have paid sick days, the ability to work remotely or employer-provided health insurance.
The disparity could make the new coronavirus, which causes a respiratory illness known as Covid-19, harder to contain in the United States than in other rich countries that have universal benefits like health care and sick leave, experts say. A large segment of workers are not able to stay home, and many of them work in jobs that include high contact with other people. It could also mean that low-income workers are hit harder by the virus.

It is a large labor force without sick leave:

For many workers, being sick means choosing between staying home and getting paid. One-quarter of workers have no access to paid sick days, according to Labor Department data: two-thirds of the lowest earners but just 6 percent of the highest earners. Just a handful of states and local governments have passed sick leave laws.
Only 60 percent of workers in service occupations can take paid time off when they are ill — and they are also more likely than white-collar workers to come in contact with other people’s bodies or food.

And, yes, they are the ones who interact a lot with other humans, unlike the app-developing software engineer who tries his best to not deal with fellow human beings!  The low-wage and part-time workers in the US are, thus, in a situation similar to that of the maid at my parents' home:

for the average worker without paid sick-leave access, the lost wages associated with staying home for about three days would amount to their household’s entire monthly grocery budget or monthly utilities budget.
The outlook can be similarly bleak for gig workers for, say, a rideshare company or food-delivery service — many of whom aren’t eligible for benefits that would allow them to stay home and receive health care when they’re sick,

It is not difficult to understand how the virus has already spread far and wide, right?

Can anything be done?

Expanding the law to include pandemics as major disasters – as some lawmakers have urged – would make it possible for the president to make sure individuals affected by an outbreak have the support they need.
It would only take small changes like these to make the unemployment insurance program more useful to those sick, quarantined or temporarily idled during a pandemic.
While this will not solve all the economic problems caused by COVID-19, or the next pandemic disease, it would give American workers and the broader economy a lot more breathing room.

Giving workers a lot more breathing room is what I have often argued as the urgent need to rework the social contract and implement a stronger safety net.  If only 63 million Americans cared!

Source

Coronavirus and civic duty

During the H1N1 scare, when I was visiting India, one of the relatives simply pooh-poohed the global worries by declaring that the virus is not new and that it has always been there.  Having learnt my lessons well, I decided that I would not argue with fools like him.  I smiled.  He then launched into a rant about how the controversy was manufactured by the pharmaceuticals industry.

More than a decade later, as I recall those interactions, I am now amazed at how much conspiracy theories have always been there even in medical contexts.  With every real threat, there are always nutcases that spout crazy theories.  Now it is COVID19.  The most recent Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree said this: “The coronavirus is the common cold, folks”.  He continued on: “It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump”.

As public health experts warn that the spread of the coronavirus is inevitable and urge Americans to take precautions, the pro-Trump media world has presented the subject as more fodder for partisan debate.

And then there are the rest of us who don't care about crazy conspiracies, but instead focus on the science and the evidence.  We understand the importance of this: "Getting ready for the possibility of major disruptions is not only smart; it’s also our civic duty."

It is a civic duty.  Indeed.

We should prepare, not because we may feel personally at risk, but so that we can help lessen the risk for everyone. We should prepare not because we are facing a doomsday scenario out of our control, but because we can alter every aspect of this risk we face as a society.
That’s right, you should prepare because your neighbors need you to prepare—especially your elderly neighbors, your neighbors who work at hospitals, your neighbors with chronic illnesses, and your neighbors who may not have the means or the time to prepare because of lack of resources or time.

I might be healthy enough that the virus might just about make me sneeze a few times.  But, I could also be spreading the virus through the sneeze. Or by carrying it in my fingers.  We need to play our part to flatten the curve of how it spreads:

Epidemiologists often talk about two important numbers: R0 or how infectious a disease might be, expressed as the number of people that are infected by each person who’s been infected; and the case fatality ratio (CFR): the number of people who die as a result of being infected. For example, an R0 of two means each infected person infects two people on average, while a number less than one means the disease is likely dying out in the population.

The CFR is out of my individual control--that is the task of the government machinery and hospitals and various organizations.  But, I can personally address the R0.

The infectiousness of a virus, for example, depends on how much we encounter one another; how well we quarantine individuals who are ill; how often we wash our hands; whether those treating the ill have proper protective equipment; how healthy we are to begin with—and such factors are all under our control. After active measures were implemented, the R0 for the 2003 SARS epidemic, for example, went from around three, meaning each person infected three others, to 0.04. It was our response to SARS in 2003 that made sure the disease died out from earth, with less than a thousand victims globally.

So, what are the estimates of R0 in the case of COVID19?  It is a wide range at this point, as epidemiologists try to make sense of the data.

Meanwhile, an epidemiologist cautions: “things are going to get shut down. And this virus is probably going to be with us for some time to come. It might become endemic, like measles.”

Who you gonna believe?  This President and the likes of his Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree on Faux News, or public health experts?  Oh, of course, if you are reading this, it means you are not one of the 63 million here in the US.  Good for you for being a responsible citizen!