PUBLIC HEALTH

For many years, mortality rates in the developed world have dropped while life expectancy has increased. These changes probably have a lot more to do with improvements in public health--things like sanitation, clean water, sewers--than with advances in medicine, as important as the latter have been.

The differences between the public health and medical approach are pretty clear. With the medical model, you treat the person with the disease; with a public health approach, you try to remove conditions that cause the disease to spread. Obviously, we need both, but the promise of the public health is vast.

Aside from these two approaches, there is another one, which is pretty popular these days but totally useless. It's the moralistic approach, which condemns things as bad and tells people not to do them. You can find the moralistic approach across the political spectrum, from the religious right's abstinence only approach to sex education to peace activists who condemn violence and war without making any effort to understand the conditions that contribute to them.

It is El Cabrero's opinion that the public health approach promises the best way to understand and reduce violence, whether at the personal, collective or structural (economic) level.

More on that to come...

SPEAKING OF PUBLIC HEALTH, check out this fascinating NY Times Magazine article on suicide and its prevention.

JOBS DECLINE. Here's economist Dean Baker on the job scene. On the bright side, Congress finally extended unemployment benefits, something some of us have been advocating for months.

CARVED IN STONE. An ancient tablet is sparking debates on Christian origins.

A PESSIMISTIC MOOD pervades the country, according to this AP piece.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

HOPE IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS

Caption: This one's for Emily Dickinson.

Along with links and comments on current events, the theme for this week's Goat Rope is optimism and pessimism. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier entries.

A while back, I worked on a project about hope. This was kind of ironic since at the time I didn't have a whole lot on hand.

It wasn't a huge problem for me--I can run pretty well on grim determination and Appalachian fatalism. In fact, the main thing that got me through the Bush years was the story of the hopeless struggle of Leonidas and the Spartans against impossible odds at Thermopylae (this was way before the movie came out).

Moulon labe, baby!

Back to the hope thing...To start with, I tried to look at the literature and research on the subject and found quite a bit. One book that caught my eye was an older study by Ezra Stotland called The Psychology of Hope. His definition of hope spoke to me:

an expectation greater than zero of achieving a goal.

Short and pithy. Spartan even.

It occurred to me that despite my tragic existential streak, I might not be that much of a pessimist after all. Especially if you define hope or optimism in limited and practical rather than cosmic terms.

Pessimism notwithstanding, I've generally found it to be true that if you want to accomplish something that's doable and are willing to put in the effort, then with skill, technique, allies, strategy, intuition, determination and luck you can sometimes do it--even if it's really hard.

(Note: this may require interval training or similar distasteful efforts.)

Even in a universe that often appears indifferent and drifting towards entropy. Go figure.

I especially liked some quotes on the subject of hope by Erich Fromm:

Hope is paradoxical. It is neither passive waiting nor is it unrealistic forcing of circumstances that cannot occur. It is like the crouched tiger, which will jump only when the moment for jumping has come….To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime...

There is no sense in hoping for that which already exists or for that which cannot be. Those whose hope is weak settle down for comfort or for violence; those whose hope is strong see and cherish all signs of new life and are ready every moment to help the birth of that which is ready to be born.

As pessimistic as I sometimes am, from my own experience I can't escape the truth of William James' statement that "Belief creates the actual fact." In other words, the belief or faith that something is possible often leads to the actions that demonstrate for all the world to see that this is indeed the case.

I may be an optimist in spite of myself...

SURVEY SHOWS SKEPTICISM. More working Americans are doubting the attainability of the American Dream.

GOVERNMENT BY CONTRACT. Imagine a whole government provided by private military contractors...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

LEARNED AND UNLEARNED HELPLESSNESS

Caption: She's not learned but is kind of helpless.

Aside from links and comments about current events, the theme for this week's Goat Rope is optimism and pessimism. The first three posts tilted towards the pessimistic end of the spectrum. In the interests of fairness, I'm trying to work the other side of the street today.

If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

In 1965, the psychologist Martin Seligman preformed a classical experiment which probably did not endear him with dog lovers and which, if the Buddhists are right, racked up a good deal of bad karma.

The short version was that he put a caged dog in a situation where it seemed that no matter what it did it would receive an electrical shock. Eventually, the dog gave up on even trying to escape it when it was really possible. He called this phenomenon "learned helplessness," which has since been used as a model to explain some types of depression and has been applied to many different situations.

In variations on this experiment, it took many efforts and much intervention for the dog to unlearn the helplessness.

Most of us have probably been in situations where it seemed like we were *&^%-ed no matter what we did. If it happens enough, people tend to give up too.

Since then, in a move probably cheered by dog lovers, Seligman became one of the leaders in the positive psychology movement and developed the theory of learned optimism.

To use the short version once again, he found that the way people think about experiences can make all the difference. As he put it in his book Authentic Happiness:

Pessimists have a particularly pernicious way of construing their setbacks and frustrations. They automatically think that the cause is permanent, pervasive, and personal: "It's going to last forever, it's going to undermine everything, and it's my fault."

By contrast, optimists

have a strength that allows them to interpret their setbacks as surmountable, particular to a single problem, and resulting from temporary circumstances or other people.

In other words, pessimists (the term is not used in its philosophical sense here) tend to come up with global explanations when things go badly. When things go well, they attribute it to accident and unique conditions. With optimists, the reverse is true. The kind of thinking we engage in can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies and has wide ranging effects. According to Seligman, people stuck in the pessimistic groove can learn new ways of thinking that can lead to different results.

There are some who criticize positive psychology as don't worry/be happy feel good fluff. Here's an example of that point of view. Point taken. But on the other hand, if you think changing anything is impossible, you probably won't try very hard to do it.

BEYOND THE CULTURE WARS. A new paper by Third Way looks at ways Evangelicals and progressives can meet in the middle over the common good. This was also the subject of a recent column by E. J. Dionne.

PRIORITIES. This Economic Policy Institute snapshot highlights the Bush administration's spending priorities on war and domestic needs.

IRAQI CIVILIAN CASUALTIES. These are the opening lines from a piece in the Baltimore Sun by two public health professors:

Not wanting to think about civilian deaths in Iraq has become almost universal. But ignorance of the Iraqi death toll is no longer an option.

An Associated Press poll in February found that the average American believed about 9,900 Iraqis had been killed since the end of major combat operations in 2003. Recent evidence suggests that things in Iraq may be 100 times worse than Americans realize.

News report tallies suggest that about 75,000 Iraqis have died since the U.S.-led invasion. But a study of 13 war-affected countries presented at a recent Harvard conference found that more than 80 percent of violent deaths in conflicts go unreported by the press and governments.

DEMAND SIDE ECONOMICS. Supply side economics has become orthodoxy in far too many circles these days. Here's an item by Jeff Madrick in The Nation about the other end of the spectrum.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED