Solutions

It is hard to find a voice among today’s economists advocating anything other than market-led solutions to problems. “The market can solve problems better than government can,” they will say with a conviction as stalwart as if they were decrying racism, or proclaiming the world is round, or stating a preference for either David Lee Roth or Sammy Hagar as the lead singer for Van Halen.

The issue becomes, when the market realizes profits by *not* solving a problem, and the problem needs to be solved, who does the responsibility fall to? The answer is government, and the specific problem in question is something that every human being ever to walk the earth has suffered from at one time or another.

The common cold.

Pharmaceutical companies sell billions of dollars of cold medicine and other sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, stuffy-head, fever necessities per year. The common cold virus is a cash cow the likes of which mankind has never seen: unlimited and unending demand, almost no cost of production, cheap and universal distribution, and high profit margin. For the market, i.e. the businesses that profit from this, they would be stupid to even consider finding a cure.

But it is in the interest of every person and business (other than the drug companies) to find a cure. American businesses lose billions of dollars per year in worker productivity and absenteeism due to the common cold. And the public is the unwitting accomplice in a massive scheme to funnel wealth from our pockets into the bank accounts of drug companies. We have to put an end to it.

Because the pharmaceutical industry, who has the power to find a cure, profits from *not* finding a cure, they will never attempt to find one. The market has failed at solving this problem, and without intervention it will never succeed.

So why doesn’t industry band together and pool their resources to fund research? It costs them incalculable losses every year, it would seem logical that they invest in finding a means to avoid such losses. Industry will never band together because of the cheater effect. If there was a way to ensure that *every* business contributed in a manner consistent with their resources, that would be great. But greed turns people into cheaters, and many businesses will refuse to participate, figuring that others will pick up the slack, and allowing them to reap the benefits while incurring none of the costs. That, in turn, causes businesses that were originally on board to back out, not willing to make up the difference for the cheaters. In the end, nobody contributes, and the problem persists.

But there is a way to ensure that everybody contributes in a way consistent with their resources: it’s called ‘taxes’. The government collects taxes from every business in the country. It can collect a special add-on tax in the amount of (for instance) one dollar per employee. Even for the largest employers in the country this is a paltry sum. Add on a fifty-cent tax on individuals for each member of their family. Again, even for the lowest wage-earners, this is nothing. But in total the government would now have close to $250 million dollars each year to put towards funding a cure.

The question then becomes, how do you do it? How do you motivate researchers to develop a safe, effective, and low-cost cold vaccine? Offer the whole sum as a bounty. Collect the tax every year, the pot keeps growing until somebody puts a vaccine into human trials. If it turns out to get FDA approval, the whole pot goes to the winner.

This concept has been used in the private sector already, with great success. The X Prize Foundation offered the sum of $10 million to the first group to develop their own “space shuttle”. The rules were a little more detailed of course, but what is curious is the winner ended up spending almost ten times the amount of the prize on R&D. That alone should show that motivation exists to solve these types of problems regardless of the financial reward. There’s a new contest just underway as a matter of fact: put a rover on the moon, move it 500 feet, and return data, photos, and e-mail to the earth. The contest was just announced, and there are 13 teams already registered. That’s how to motivate people. Make it a race, turn it into something that the winner can boast about, and you’ll find you have many more contestants than you ever thought could exist. It’s the maverick American spirit: bigger, faster, better than the next guy.

The same thing needs to be done here. Savings to the consumer (from not buying $100 in cold medicine each year) and to the business community (in having more workers on the job more often) will run into the billions per year in perpetuity. You know as well as I do that the drug companies will scream bloody murder, but hey: they probably have the best chance of anybody of finding a vaccine. They can take a shot at winning the prize just like anybody. It’s about time we held their feet to the fire and got them moving on a solution to this problem.

Bounty of Womanhood

Earlier this year a 17-year old girl collapsed in the middle of drill team practice at one of our local high schools. She was pronounced dead at the local hospital an hour later, victim of a heart attack. The underlying cause for somebody so young and in such good shape dropping dead at the snap of a finger was something call mitral valve prolapse, a genetic abnormality.

The autopsy results hit the local papers within the week, and it was revealed that the family had known about this condition since she was a little girl. And I was reminded that we have a ticking time bomb of our own at our house. One that has similarly difficult decisions to make about the direction her life takes, and how long it lasts.

This girl’s parents obviously looked at the risk of their daughter dropping dead, which even doctors admit with the mild and surprisingly common condition in question is absurdly low, and decided not to limit her activity. A risk we look at now as foolish, but given the commonplace nature of the condition it is not just possible but likely that one or more of this young lady’s drill team-mates has the exact same condition. 5 to 15% of us may have this abnormality, and it may linger completely unnoticed for the rest of our natural lives, never affecting us in the slightest or contributing in any way to our death.

But these parents did know. And the question becomes, if there is a 1 in 1000 chance that your child will have a traumatic heart episode as a result of this condition, do you let that child participate in vigorous exercise like drill team?

For us the question is slightly different, but the stakes are just as high, arguably higher. Our daughter has a severe disability called Osteogenesis Imperfecta, but known commonly as brittle bone disorder. She is only the size of a 5-year-old, despite being 14. She has just begun enjoying the bounty of womanhood, as I am wont to say, meaning she has “gotten her period.” Nothing scares me more on the face of this earth.

Our daughter will not grow much more. She weighs about 50 pounds, she’s less than four feet tall, and to give you a bit of perspective, her legs are just now strong enough to bear her weight. She walks with a walker for exercise, but her primary mode of transportation is a wheelchair. Plus, go to the kitchen and get a clutch of dry spaghetti about as big around as your thumb. Now take it in both hands and snap it in the middle. The amount of force you used to break that spaghetti would break any bone in my daughter’s body.

Now put a baby in her womb, wait four months, and make sure you have all of the funeral arrangements in place. If she gets pregnant, she will most likely die before the baby can go to term, and on the off chance that the two of them do survive until delivery, childbirth will kill her just as sure as if she put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.

I have to admit, I wanted my wife to sit down and talk with a doctor about removing her ovaries, or tying her tubes, or doing whatever would surgically prevent her from becoming pregnant no matter what she wanted. 51% of me says that’s not my place, and how dare I: the other 49% says it can still be done. And it’s a tough fight trying to keep it from getting that extra percentage point.

So what do you do, as a parent? How do you tell your little girl that she will most likely die if she ever tries to have kids of her own? And what do you do to instill the fear of God in her, hopefully taking away any to-hell-with-you-guys-I’ll-do-what-I-want urges she gets as a rebellious newlywed?

I tell you what I did. Made her watch “Steel Magnolias”, didn’t tell her what it was about before she watched it, then drew some not-so-subtle parallels between her and Julia Roberts’ character. Next words we heard from her on the subject were, “I think I’m going to adopt.” Hot damn.

Now, there is also the surrogate route. And in fact, my wife being as young as she is, and as easy as both her pregnancies were, there is a strong possibility that if our daughter ever wants an actual biological child, her and her husband could do the IVF thing with her mom as a surrogate to carry the baby. Grandma gives birth to grandchild, the frequency with which that happens these days it isn’t even news anymore. Plus, there’s no debate that my wife will spoil her other grandchildren. But if she carried it for 9 months — Lord, that kid would never be without gum in its mouth and a dollar in its pocket.

These are the things that keep me up at night. Or more to the point, they are the things that are repressed in my subconscious, eating away at my soul as I sleep — each morning a day closer to when this decision is staring all of us in the face, with a tiny, helpless, immature and impulsive girl calling the shots. For the moment she’s on the right path. Let’s hope she doesn’t stray.

For The Kids

We deal with school-related issues a lot around our house. Our daughter has a disability, so when it comes to the average kids’ rules and regulations, classes and schedules, all bets are off. We have “team” meetings at least six times a year discussing everything from which set of teachers she will have next year, to what to do about gym class, to how she is going to go on the bus to a field trip. Long and short, we’re well-versed in the process for navigating the school administration maze.

Today I heard about a worsening situation across the country with respect to the handling of twins in the classroom. At a certain point in the history of child development research somebody determined that the best way to deal with twins in the classroom was to split them up. This, they argued, would help them establish their individuality, assert themselves as autonomous beings, and grow through the same kind of outside-the-comfort-zone experience as the other kids in their class. The educational community adopted this theory as gospel en masse, and so in most districts around the country this is now an inflexible policy.

The problem with this, obviously, is that there are sets of twins out there who will react severely to this separation. Right or wrong, certain sets of twins are physically and emotionally dependent upon each other. To separate the children from one another not only imparts a completely unnecessary stressor on the children, but serves as a substantial impediment to their education: the very thing these educators were trying to improve.

The use of fertility drugs and the success of in-vitro fertilization has caused a multiple-baby boom in the U.S., and the rate of twin births is exponentially higher than it was when the study of twins in the classroom was done. Subsequently, this problem has multiplied to the point where four states now have legislation on the books giving parents the right to veto the school district’s classroom assignment of their children, and other states have legislation pending.

The opposite side of this argument is that public schools’ resources are limited, and despite the laughable “No Child Left Behind” edict from the experienced educators in Washington D.C., there is no way the average school can even attempt to accommodate the needs of every single student on an individual basis. Administrators and teachers would spend the first three months of school attending meetings and making adjustments to everything from classroom assignments to lunchroom menus to ambient temperature. It’s simply not possible. So why should the schools make accommodations for one group of students and not the rest?

Additionally, the argument goes, if the public school experience isn’t right for your child, you have the option of private school or home schooling. Don’t stretch the school’s resources (and the staff’s patience) by trying to mold the school into something it isn’t.

Who’s right?

In this case, the parents. The school should be in the business of educating, not molding the psyche of a given student or group of students. If it spent as much time focusing on the three R’s as it did on this type of thing, we probably wouldn’t be dropping behind the rest of the world on standardized test scores. “Free and public” education applies to every student, not just the ones who fit into the cookie-cutter mold the school district has carved out as their target audience. This reasonable accommodation of keeping twin siblings in the same classroom at the request of the parents doesn’t cost a cent (beyond the time the administrators waste arguing with parents) and is absolutely the least they can do.

Oh, but is that the solution all the time? Can every issue with respect to a child’s education be resolved by adhering to the “customer is always right” philosophy? Methinks not so much.

Why *is* the US falling behind every industrialized nation in nearly every subject you can mention? Lack of standards. Unlike every other country, the America puts the matter of curriculum in the hands of the individual school districts, who are free to teach nothing but animal husbandry and Lithuanian if they choose to. Everywhere else, above a certain age (roughly middle-school) if you can’t pass your end-of-year exams, you don’t move on to the next grade — period.

Here we pass out diplomas like candy at Halloween. The rest of the world puts a priority on making sure that the diploma *means* something. The result? Students in other countries perform steadily better on standardized tests than our students do. This is a case where parental involvement in our children’s education is actually hurting them. Having standards for curricula set by seasoned educators instead of Joe-Bob Goober down the street is an absolute necessity if our children are to compete in what is already a global economy.