A Nation of Heaps

We are a nation of heaps.  We live in heaps.  We respond only to issues when they become heaps - and then rarely.  So, what’s a heap?

The heap paradox comes from rather vague predicates.  You’ve often heard of a heap of sand or a heap of trouble.  What this means is roughly we cannot distinguish individuals (such as grains of sand from a pile) from the others.  In fact, it is more complicated.  The ancient interpretation of this paradox (also called the sorites paradox) is to resolve the question as to when, by removal of individual grains of sand, it is no longer a heap?  In this note, we look at heaps from the reverse perspective.  For example, when we add grains of sand to a collection, when does the collection cease being a collection and becomes a heap?  Of course, this paradox has no real resolution, but the word “heap” does seem to apply to many issues of the day.

The (reverse) heap paradox is a key social and political situation in the USA.  At what point does the government or the people respond to a collection of similar events, anecdotes, or instances as they build up?  It is simplistic but accurate to say that we do not until it becomes a heap.   Even still, heaps come in categories, the mega, the meso and the mini versions.  Let’s look at a few of these heap of heaps through examples.

Mega-Heaps.   These are the overarching issues that have encompassed and are currently suffocating the life’s blood and treasure from our society.  Such are the crises of our day. 

• Illegal Immigration.  This is the mega-heap du-jour.  It is the only one with ongoing active consideration.  But here we have by various estimates eleven million foreign nationals living within our borders with no visas, and with no intention to return to their homeland.  Indeed, a large fraction of this population believes it to be their new homeland.  What is to be done?  I’m unconvinced of any solutions.  This problem has clearly made the mega-heap status.  Too big to solve, too big to ignore, too big to hope it will evaporate.   The latest effort by the “gang of eight” was to generate an 867 page bill containing nearly 1000 thousand exemptions.  At this point, after two huge efforts, even the Democrats should be suspicious of a bill of this many pages and with this many exceptions.  Even if the bill passes in some form, doubtful to many, it will require a brand new and dedicated army of regulators and administrators simply to monitor the program.
• Health problems.  It is one thing for a person to be overweight and not living healthy, and another for even many thousands to be so, but there is no response until the numbers are in the millions.  Only then are solutions suggested, and often they are grandiose.  School lunches go vegan; health insurance benefits depend on your weight; fitness centers become multi-billion dollar enterprises; foods become organic (on the labels).  Years ago, there was regular and vigorous exercise programs in the schools.  There were classes on health.  We may have lost sight of their strategic value when we intellectualized the need for academics, thereby deprecating their current need.  We have a nation of overweight, unhealthy, and generally physically unfit citizens.
• Infrastructure.  I live in Houston where the city roads are mostly terrible.  They are so terrible and so encompassing that repairing them all is a task gone beyond the point of no return.  Only those roads in the most gross disrepair gain attention.  Road repair, even for our super highways is a national problem.  Nationally, we have serious problems with our neglected bridges, now also almost at the point of no return - again.    Notwithstanding the roads, there are calls to fix the bridges, fix the dams, fix the canals and waterways, but the costs at this point preclude any universal AND affordable solution.  Only those in the most  gross disrepair gain attention.  To wait for a bridge to collapse or a dam to burst is not the way to resolve problems.
• Welfare.  Originally, we hope that those in need, those without employment, those in trouble should be given assistance.  While the numbers remained manageable, this was the “right thing to do.”  Americans help out; Americans care.  Now the problem is universal.  With about 50% of the nation on some sort of Federal assistance, the problem (aka heap) has become a national problem and national disgrace.   Moreover, many cities have simply accepted and have not discouraged their large populations of beggars, simply everywhere.  In a pitiful and meager consolation, we can at least say the beggars are “working” for a living.
• Drugs.  This heap of trouble has been on the horizon for years, but it has exponentiated to gang violence (now even imported), to legal acceptance, to fashionable usage, to rampant prescription applications, but mostly to the resignation of drugs an unsolvable problem.
• Public debt.  Some years back, it was considered in the public good to give excellent security, retirement, and health benefits to public employees.  Example: give the teachers excellent benefits and students will gain excellent teachers and thus students will be given an excellent education.   No one considered the long term encumbrance of expense.  It has now come home to us in the form of bankrupting cities and states alike.  On the Federal level, the national debt now in the “teens” of trillions, seems to be bankrupting the Treasury.  There is little effort to address any of this heap of fiscal problems.  Indeed, what do people do when faced with such a heap?  Denial, Realization, Despair.  While one group realizes and wish to address this, another group has taken the tack of denial altogether.  Probably, although there is no number,  a very large group of American live in despair over whatever can be done, even with all parties in agreement. Digging out of this debt may cost younger Americans their future.
• Waste, Fraud and Abuse.  The bigger our government becomes, the more waste and fraud is uncovered.  It is not limited to government.  Long ago, it reached mega-heap status.  Carefully constructed estimates in Medicare for 2010 reveals a $48 billion in overpayments alone (nearly 10% of the total Medicare budget).  The fact is that Medicaid program has become so huge, so complex and so lightly policed that it is easily exploited. The Waste, fraud and abuse commonplace in Iraq reconstruction effort is already legend – this time with the Pentagon to shoulder much of the blame.  In fact, in every Federal agency, possibly owing to their essentially unmanageable magnitudes, waste and fraud, together with their close cousin abuse, are rampant.  No improvement is in sight, though politicians continually promise to crack down.   Waste, fraud, and abuse are in the DNA of every large governmental organism, and most specifically this one.

Meso-heaps.  Such problems, classified as meso-heaps, have not yet met the “crisis” criterion.  They are there; they are looming; they are increasing. Only small emotional tokens of resolution are suggested.   Some of the examples given measure up as mega to some but not so on the scale above.

• School performance.  Virtually every measure, American school performance is poor, substantially out of proportion to the amount of resources our country dedicates to the issue.   One solution, always the solution by some, is to throw even more money at the problem while continuing to do the same.  Another is the rewrite the school curriculum – hoping against hope that merely changing the order of topics and some change of emphases can cure the problem.  Other hopes abound, all to solve the same poor performance problem. For example, a popular solution is to revise the pedagogy making the class inquiry-based.  Another is flipping the class. So desparate are some institutions that they are rushing into the “flipping” bandwagon before there definitive and long term research is undertaken.  Just as new, and a part of the flipping madness is offering online resources, and this is suggested on the basis of specious or incomplete research, and almost always on the basis of the “one size fits all” concepts, remains rampant in education.  The consequences of poor education particularly in science and math will become apparent in the decades ahead when it is discovered there is no one to replace those retiring.  Even now, the USA is hanging on by a slender thread in innovation.  A steep, probably irreversible, downgrade is a comin’.
• Data Identity Mining.   This meso-heap involves only a few million citizens right now.  Yet it has already destroyed many thousands of lives.  When one of the newest innovative businesses in the country is to protect personal identities, it implies something of a market, something of a problem – a heap of them. With Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, with the ready submission of important personal data to questionable sources, with the multifarious websites requesting personal information (e.g phishing), Americans have been yielding their identities to almost any entity so requesting.   Just a decade ago, most of us were pummeled by requests, now call the Nigerian scam, to submit valuable information and money to gain vast fortunes stashed in foreign accounts.  This caught a few.  It has now been generalized in scores of ways to do the same.  It we can’t get your cash directly, we will do it via your information.  So goes current methodologies.
• Hacking is the preferred method of privacy invasion for those with the consummate skills to do it.  Hacking into industrial sites to gain proprietary information is now everyday.  Hacking into banks for account numbers and personal information occurs weekly.   Hacking by one government upon another to gain strategic information occurs monthly.   What we don’t know is the depth of hacking and how it affects our security and economy.  More than a few nations have dedicated teams of hackers poaching on the information of others.  For centuries or more, hacking the currency system was achieved by counterfeiting. Yet, even it remains with us.  Simply offer to pay a bill with a fifty or hundred dollar bill and you’ll see the clerk at work doing a quick visual or pen-type check.
• High Stakes Testing.  Education, a multibillion dollar industry, gets two mentions on this nefarious meso-heaps list.  It is a fact that school performance for admission to a college or for a job is often dependent on a single number, the student’s GPR (grade point ratio) or high stakes testing score.   What happens when a single number separates success from failure, admission from rejection, an open door from one closed, people cheat.  There is nothing new here, but with high stakes testing impacting teachers (i.e. possible annual raises), principals (i.e. continued tenure), and superintendents (i.e. sustaining their position), there becomes the irresistible temptation to cheat.  Why not when the chance of detection remains small.  Sure, there have been a number of cases exposed, notably in Georgia, but how many more have escaped detection?  We will never know.   Happily, so far, colleges seem to be exempt, partly because faculty are so unruly as not to be maneuvered down this path. 
• Global Warming.  It is a fact, and you cannot deny it, that global warming seems to be an important issue of the day, and there is striking evidence global warming may be occurring.  It is in the circle of heaps, partly because of its prominence, because of the attention given it by some governments, because we don’t know what is happening or will happen, and because its origin. The latter is probably what gives it such prominence.   Many claim it is man-made; many contend it is a natural geo-cycle, of which there have been many over the millennia.  The “it-is-manmade-global-warming” contingent is the noisiest.  They want to use math, and have.  Make no doubt: Use math and you legitimize your case or cause.  There are models, rather sophisticated world models, that global warming is a consequence of mankind’s expense of fuels and thus pollution.  They are models, and only that, but notwithstanding the models have not been proven scientifically to any reasonable measure.  Mostly they are models having proponents with highly emotional arguments that in consequence have determined the need for green energy solutions.  The greatest and green-ist adherents of these man made global warming arguments are political types.  For whatever reasons, they want to believe mankind is at fault.  Their influence is felt in many governments, and they wish redress of the matter usually in the form of regulations and international treaties – that few of our competitor nations will even consider.

Mini heaps.  These lesser heaps involve issues, still not at the individual level, and therefore still heaps of upcoming serious issues for Americans to address.   In fact, for some, individuals can still be counted.   Stories of these little heaps are merely sidebars in the daily news reporting.  They are at once known, accepted, reviled, and discouraged, but they have not yet risen to the meso-level.

• Domestic Terrorism.  Never mind that some simply refer to this terrorism as extremism.  This is not as important as the perpetrators take lives, and rejoice in so doing.  Never mind that when a Jihadist is captured or killed is counted as a one-off event.  The fact is that Americans are totally concerned by this phenomenon.  They are concerned that some (even US citizens) are dedicated and devoted to expressing their hatred of this country by committing such murderous acts.  Even though the actions are still enumerable individually, they are worried that more such events will happen.  They wonder when the hammer of frequent-multiple events may fall.   One result may be massive relegation of Islamic Americans into an un-bricked ghetto of shadowed suspicion.  This cannot be good.
• Taxes.  With increased taxes of any type, there comes the thought to cheat. This is not new. Currently France has generated this problem to the absolute max with a 75% tax rate for the rich.  Tax liquor more, and you will find the product with illicit tax seals.  Tax individuals more, and you will find a greater willingness to fudge on the truth.  Tax anything more, and someone will determine ways around honest reporting – and paying.  Raise the taxes on those with extra cash (as determined by the taxers) and they will find ways to avoid them.  Off shore accounts are used by those in the know from almost all high-taxation nations in the world.  Then, there are business deductions not quite for business. Many others view that high tax rates may discourage further business investment – concomitant with its effects.  Lurking in the background is another problems of economic philosophy, Kenysian or free market,  in the USA.  These may never form a heap itself, but will certainly contribute to heaps of various kinds.
• Political Discourse.  Discourse in politics has become abjectly parochial.  People in one party, seeming the need to remain loyal to whatever their leaders suggest, and seem compelled to go along with any policy no matter how far from common sense it may be.  We see this in both political parties.   Political discourse, while now only a small blip on our “heap radar” may be the underpinning of many issues forthcoming.
• MOOCs.  Massive Open Online Courses are the latest rage in higher education, now creeping into K-12.  Suddenly they are here.  Do they work?  Are they effective?  How do they compare with the traditional classroom format?  There are no substantial long-term studies.  Yet, there is a headlong rush to the MOOC as some sort of financial savior for the soaring high costs of education.  One can be hopeful that the administrators of MOOC’s keep a tight monitor on efficacy.  Yet, we can also assume those invested in the MOOC will support it no matter what.  Human nature and self-interest is at work.
• Clean Air and Water.   This, a previous meso-heap, has been downgraded at least in this piece.  It is still there, but the “heap” crisis has been averted, possibly not because it has gone away but because more and larger problems have pushed it back. 
• World Opinion of the USA.  To even the most casual observer, world opinion of the USA  is diminishing.  Though unimportant to many Americans, it is a powerful point when Americans wish to transact business abroad, to negotiate international agreements, or even secure the safety of its citizens.  The current administration has tried hard to apologize for past American transgressions.  Yet, this seems only to have precipitated a further decline in world opinion of Americans, its values and contributions.   These days, US citizens can be murdered and maligned with impunity anywhere in the world.

Many more mini- meso- and mega-heaps could be listed.  For example, one’s sights could be leveled at the Federal budget, oil imports, health care, fracking, unemployment, underemployment, opting out of the work force, balance of payments, abortion rights, student debt, gay marriage, invasion of privacy by cameras and drones, human trafficking, and religious affiliation.

Conclusion.  In total, all these give the appearance of a Nation in a heap of trouble.  It is.  This Nation simply is unable anticipate and address pre-heaps, little heaps, and mini-heaps when solutions could be offered and effected.  The government is completely concerned with mega-heaps, about which it can do nearly nothing – will do nearly nothing. 

What has happened to the daily business of Congress, to anticipate and solve problems?  It is lost, completely, incontrovertibly, irredeemably, and totally lost.

For example:  It was considered landmark legislation when a bill was passed and signed to allow the FAA to move around money to avert serious airport delays owing to traffic controller furloughs.  While Congress was giving itself high-fives on a job well done, the United States citizenry was unimpressed.  Indeed, this achievement is something like telling your parents that while you couldn’t tidy up the house after school you did manage to put the cap back on the toothpaste.

Each of these heaps would require the dedicated concentration of teams of Congressmen months to address, with serious compromise by both sides, and with the good will to do something regardless of ideology.  That may not and probably will not happen. 

Post Script. Rarely, except in anecdotes, do we hear of the shining lights of our country or its amazing achievements.  We never hear of its exceptionalism, its world leadership in ending slavery, its countless millions spend in reducing AIDS in Africa and other countries, its shattering expense in preserving the world from militaristic marauders, and its leadership in space exploration and preventing nuclear war.   How often do we hear that the US is first in something these days?