(This is where it would be really helpful to have more readers, say, by an order of magnitude or two, to initiate an extended discussion.  But anyway:)

This whole bit with the Bergdahl swap had me thinking about a book I read a while ago, about North Korea, and the fact that it’s now been proven that North Korea held onto a great many South Korean POWs after the war ended, in prison camps and later released, but unable to return home.  South Korea for many years denied their existence because it would imperil their “sunshine policy” of making nice with the NORKs, but now there are organization which actively try to rescue aging POWs through their underground networks, with some success.

And this book — sorry, I can’t recall the title and would have to make a trip to the library to flip through the various books on the topic — also says that there are, or were, at least, American POWs in the same situation, either in North Korea or shipped off to Siberian gulags.

We also continue to fly the POW/MIA flag.  Quite some time ago now, I mentioned to my dad that it struck me as odd to still fly it, long after POWs have been released, and he said that he believes that North Vietnam didn’t release all their prisoners, and may still have some — and he’s not usually one to buy into conspiracy theories.

(* Mind you, I’m too young to have experienced the “Vietnam Era” first-hand.)

The Wikipedia article on Vietnam POWs paints their searchers as loons and con artists.  But it seems to me to be entirely possible for the U.S. to have, indeed, left men behind when we moved from wars where we were the unquestioned victor to ones in which we didn’t have control over enemy territory afterwards.

As usual, I’ll add:  what do you think?

(Trying my hand at something different tonight.)

No, he’s not the kind of car guy that rebuilds a hot rod with his buddies in his garage.  He’s more of a suburban middle-class kind of car guy.

My dad grew up on a farm outside of Denver — more of a hobby farm, with livestock.  His parents grew up on farms in Nebraska but came to Denver during the depression, and his dad worked at the Gates Rubber Company, and they saved up enough money to be able to afford to buy some land.  They raised chickens, mostly, and my dad (who’s known for telling the same stories over and over again) has told us multiple times the problem with cage-free chickens is that then they’ll nest in some hidden spot and the eggs’ go bad.  Last Thanksgiving, looking at an old photo album, we asked about the picture of him as a preteen standing next to a dead dog, expecting to hear a story about the beloved family pet.  It turned out that this was the neighbor’s dog, which my dad shot after the dog got into their henhouse and killed all the hens, putting a major dent in the family’s finances because of the loss of the egg money — the neighbor was angry enough to threaten to kill my dad, though he survived the incident.

They weren’t particularly well off growing up in the 40s.  My dad tells the story of being sent to the store, losing the ration book and causing much unhappiness (which of course is an indicator of how children were given responsibility and independence at a much younger age than now — since he was 6 when the war ended).  And the house was small.  One of early memories is of being sick as a child, which merited the privilege of sleeping in the heated living room rather than the unheated bedroom, and watching the Christmas lights and worrying that the broken light bulb would cause a fire.

Later on, his family built a new house — yes, I mean literally that they built the house, out of cinder block, not that they engaged a builder to build it for them.  And later still they sold the land profitably enough that my grandparents had a pretty comfortable retirement.  But in the meantime, dad gained a lot of skills working with his hands.

One of his stories was also to recount the cars he bought as a teenager, old cars in poor condition that he repaired.  And his knowledge paid off:  he joined ROTC in college, was commissioned as a second lieutenant, was sent to Germany (post-Korea and pre-Vietnam), and at the age of 24 (he took five years to complete his engineering program and spent another year stateside before being shipped overseas), he was in charge of a vehicle repair facility, supervising soldiers and German civilians and competent enough at auto repair to evaluate their repairs.

Every year, the fifth graders at the kids’ school have the assignment to interview a veteran.  I’m sure this is envisioned as a way to learn about the great sacrifices they made and the hardships they endured.  Instead, my dad said, “I had a great time in the army” — and, let’s face it, a young, handsome American officer with plenty of money to burn travelling around the country when the economy, while improved, was still weak enough that living, and travelling, costs were low.  For many years, he said that he wouldn’t want to go back because he has such great memories that he wouldn’t want them to be tainted by the real-world changes in Germany, but when my family had our own stay in Germany, he and mom came to visit and did go back to “K-town” and visited the base.

So he came back to the U.S., joined his army buddy in St. Louis, got a job as a foreman at the GM shell plant, met my mom, a company nurse at the factory, and after a couple years, after my sister made her appearance and just before I was born, was transferred to the Detroit area and the Tech Center, where he spent the next 35 years.  And we grew up in the suburbs, in a fairly nondescript colonial in a nondescript subdivision.

But my dad — and cars:  he acquired a corvette, a 1966 stingray, somewhere along the way, used.  I don’t remember exactly when, but this was in the days before safety was so paramount; we kids would ride in the “back” of the corvette, a sort of platform behind the seats that doesn’t exist any longer.  My dad even gave me stick-shift driving lessons, once when I was home from college, though we didn’t make it out of the subdivision.  At some later point, he stopped driving it and ultimately sold it — I don’t know if it needed repairs, or if he just couldn’t get in and out of it any longer.

And then we kids were old enough to have our own cars — and dad picked them out for us from the classifieds, tested them out, did the repairs. After I totalled the ’78 Malibu that was a hand-me-down from my mother headed into senior year of high school in 1986 (the car was old enough that it didn’t take too much to total it, OK?  And no one was hurt, besides, and Michigan has no-fault insurance), he bought an ’80 Malibu, and then another ’78 and my sister and I basically drove matching Malibus for a while — but they were aging, and, even though he did a lot of work on them, including rebuilding the engine, they didn’t last that long, so, when, in my sophomore year of college, I was allowed to have a car on campus, he found an ’83 Pontiac Phoenix for me, and again rebuilt the engine when it turned out to have problems.

And at around this point — I suppose this is what you do when you become an empty nester — he started taking the ASE certification exams, just to validate his skills in car repair.  But by then I’d moved away from home, and my dad was no longer my on-call mechanic.  And eventually dad was no longer able to do the repair work on his own car, either.

But here’s the clincher, how you know that someone is a true car guy:

I had mentioned in an earlier post that dad had a fall and hit his head.  He’s now in a rehab facility, where three different therapists work with him to help him regain physical strength and mental focus.  And mom described a test the speech therapist gave him the other day, naming objects in various categories.  Fruits?  He was stuck after apples.  Vegetables?  Didn’t make much headway there either.  Types of transportation?  Dad came up with “cow” and then started talking about riding a cow as a child.  It was only after she asked him to name types of cars that he was able to list one after the next.

So that’s my story for the day.  What are your stories?

Putin is massing troops on the Ukrainian border??? I don’t understand this. What happened to Crimea voting for secession and trying to mollify everyone by in fact planning to remain independent? After all, the graphics I saw not long ago indicated that Crimea was the only province with a Russian majority, rather than a substantial minority. (Unless, within those Russia-bordering provinces, the frontier portion of those provinces is where the Russians are concentrated?) Is this just a show of force to get the West to back down from its threats of sanctions? (Funny, I don’t remember sanctions being an issue during the Cold War; I suppose in the days when Russia just didn’t have hard currency in the first place, there was little we could do in the way of economic penalties.)

A while back, the Economist had an article pointing to similarities between the present geopolitical situation and the powder keg before World War I. If I remember right, they had the situation with Japan and China in mind, but the situation in the Ukraine still spooks me. The problem is that there is no right answer.

I’m all for the U.S. intervening when it can make a difference, and for protecting our allies, that is, those we have given our word to via treaties and longstanding pledges (even if they fall short of a formal treaty). Go Estonia! Go Latvia! Go Lithuania! Why did these pieces of the former USSR succeed (flourishing democracies with per capita PPP GDP of $19 – 23K) where Belarus (dictatorship, $16K) and the Ukraine ($7K) didn’t? Was it because of their prewar history as independent countries, which Belarus and the Ukraine never had (from memory)? Was it their privileged location on the Baltic Sea? But is this a case where we can make a difference anyway? I don’t know.

And I’d link to the article I read the other day that said that the Syrian civil war is basically over, and the rebels lost, but I don’t remember where I read it. Should the U.S. have intervened? I don’t know. Sometimes the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy.

And now there’s the Malaysian airliner. Really? Flew 4 hours after disappearing from radar? Speculation that hijackers secretly landed the plane in a secret location? (Where? North Korea?) This is just getting bizarre.

Far easier to talk about banning bossy, or any of the other fluff floating around. Because I just don’t understand this, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Trouble is, I don’t think our elected leaders do, either.

So I started out thinking it would be a nice bloggy exercise to write out predictions for 2014, but I look ahead to 2014 with too much uncertainty.  So here’s what I’m thinking are my “areas of concern and/or hope” for 2014:

Healthcare:

Yes, I’ve said repeatedly that ObamaCare isn’t going to implode.  It’ll limp along for the foreseeable future, with the Obama administration waiving and deferring and executively ordering as much as needed to keep it going without changing the core components (which, at this point, basically amount to being wedded to the modified-community-rating cross-subsidies and the discontinuous direct subsidies).  And right now we’re just poll-watching, when the final measure won’t be known until March 31st. 

Immigration:

Will the GOP cave?   Or, to the contrary, will they push Democrats to support or reject a mini-Dream Act?  Will they propose legislation with hard, non-waivable triggers, and stand firm on it?  (Of course, the trick is how you make a trigger non-waivable, since you’d really need to create a condition in which a private citizen has standing to sue to build in some tangible consequence for waiving.  My pet — though admittedly unrealistic — solution is to build a requirement that if the administration waives or defers or does a sucky job at enforcing an e-verify provision and grants amnesty nonetheless, all parents shall be entitled to claim 75% of their children’s K-12 private/parochial school tuition as a refundable tax credit.  The progressives would have a heart attack at that!)

The elections:

Nationally, I’ve not really read much on what the GOP’s chances are of taking the Senate, though we know that Obama and the Dems are going to do as much maneuvering as possible to try to prevent this.  Locally, Illinois is looking at a wealthy businessman spending his own money to win the GOP primary, then losing in the general election.  (His claim is the usual “I’ll run Illinois like a business” but business-management skills are not what’s needed — the problems Illinois faces are the control of Mike Madigan, the unions, and historical corruption.)  And, for the Senate, our challenge to Dick Durbin will be one of two self-financed businessmen, the wealthier of the two being Jim Oberweis, who’s lost election after election, and is now partway through a term of State Senator. 

The economy:

Who isn’t worried that the stock market is bubbly rather than genuinely stable?  I do wish I had more of an economics background, since my feeling is that the stock market is so high due to the very low interest rates in bonds, CDs, etc., pushing investors into stocks who would otherwise steer clear.  But I don’t have the data to back up or disprove this feeling.

In any case, the stock market is treating my family well, personally, but the overall labor market is still very worrisome, and I don’t see any changes here.

The Eurozone:

Yeah, this has been quiet lately, but the PIIGS are still struggling, and Merkel was forced to compromise substantially in building her Grand Coalition, with a very uncertain outcome.

North Korea:

A time bomb.  Un is showing that he sees himself as the third in a ruling dynasty, and is attempting to consolidate his power in the same way as an emperor would have centuries ago.  A popular revolution is highly unlikely, but a power struggle between Un and the military could easily happen.  Best case, he’s toppled and we have military dictatorship as in Myanmar; worst case, there’s open fighting.  Actually, the worst case is the Un attacks the South in some fashion in order to keep his grip.  At the same time, there’s an equally good chance that they limp along in the status quo for some time yet. 

Syria/the Middle East:

This one worries me greatly.  Al Qaida/Islamism is gaining strength, and the West is too worried about political correctness to acknowledge it.  (Or too delusional, to the extent that the Obama administration believes that they can skillfully help the “right” Syrian rebels.)   I don’t see a good outcome here.

So that’s my list.  What’s yours?

So I’m going to summarize this book by memory rather than paging through it for details. Here goes:

When we think of adoption, we think of infertile couples, waiting to welcome a newborn home from a years-long waiting list for American children, or going abroad to a dingy, desparate orphanage. But there’s a new kind of adopting family: evangelical Christians, for whom adopting as many Third-World (generally African) children as possible has become a sort of Biblical mandate. The great demand, and the vast profits to be made from the adoption fees, have corrupted the process, with parents being deceived into believing that their children are being temporarily taken to America to be educated, rather than permanently being lost to them, and other children being taken without the knowledge of parents who have brought them to an orphange only temporarily during a time of financial hardships, or in any case, without efforts to find extended family. Often, the adoption agencies are more than willing to bribe officials to get the children out of the country and to their intended adoptive parents.

And when those children arrive in the United States, they mourn the loss of their African families, and struggle to adapt even when the adoptive family is well-intentioned. Even worse, the adoptive families are far from appropriate parents, either in over their heads or just bad people, using the children as unpaid labor, “homeschooling” them without ever providing a proper education, and sometimes being just plain abusive. And they’re adopting far more children than they could ever reasonably parent. One outcome of this is the practice of “re-homing” in which the adoptive parent hands a child over to another party, as a new, unofficial adoptive parent, often repeatedly. In extreme cases, children have been returned to their home countries and dumped — and the adoptive parents have often not even taken the steps of getting the children American citizenship, so they truly have no recourse.

There are churches which have been aggressively promoting adoption. Church members fundraise among themselves to be able to afford the adoption fees. Recently, however, some churches have begun to recognize that they can more effectively help “orphans” in their own countries, essentially providing aid for dozens in-country for the cost of a single adoption. And various countries are clamping down on foreign adoptions — but this produces a cycle, as one country shuts down its foreign adoptions, another experiences a war or natural disaster and becomes the next destination for foreign adoptions.

South Korea is an except to the above — they’ve been a substantial sending country for international adoptions ever since the Korean War, because the country is so hostile to single mothers (but not premarital sex) and there is little practice of adoption in the country. What’s more, single women are heavily pressured to give the child up for adoption, and international adoption is seen as preferable because there is the potential for continued contact with the adoptive family, where, for domestic adoptions, everything is very secretive, with the adoptive family doing everything they can (even moving to another city) to hide the fact that their new child is adopted.

She discusses the situation among American women, too: about 1% of white single mothers surrender their children for adoption, and the percentage of black women is, basically, zero. But for those women who do head down that path, either because they’ve been receiving help from a Crisis Pregnancy Center or for another reason, the adoption agency deploys fraud and deception to pressure the woman to make her decision, and lead her to believe that an initial decision is irrevokable. Fathers, too, are deceived, and, here, the state of Utah is the worst, with a father’s right to claim his child blocked in multiple ways. And despite the growth of “open adoption” in most cases, the adoptive parents are under no legal requirement to maintain contact, and this is generally not disclosed to the birth mothers.

So that’s what she says. What do I think of it?

Of course, she’s highlighted many abuses. Bringing over large numbers of African children, with a goal of converting them to (born-again) Christianity, taking them away from their own families, and placing them into inappropriate family situations, is clearly wrong. No one should take on a child who’s experienced the trauma of war without having the ability to help that child. But it seems improbable that a fringe group of extremist evangelicals are actually more than a minority of adoptive parents. Does the infertile couple longing for a child really not exist?

And it seems like at some point we go too far in how high we elevate the mother-child bond, and the goal of keeping children with genetic relations. Where in the past, having a child while unmarried was shameful, now American women perceive surrending a child for adoption as shameful, with abortion being somehow more moral than adoption.

And at the same time, there’s another form of “child trafficking” that’s been growing due to our American belief in the primacy of genetic relationships and, let’s face it, the low supply of adoptable children: surrogacy. It’s not legal to buy a child, but in most states it’s A-OK to buy a vial of sperm, buy some eggs, and buy the services of a gestational surrogate. And if the $100,000 cost in the U.S. is too much, an Indian surrogacy clinic will be happy to provide services at a much lower cost. And if the kid turns out to have a genetic defect, the contract gives the purchasing parents the right to demand an abortion.

The blurb on the front cover says this:  “Overdressed does for T-shirts and leggings what Fast Food Nation did for burgers and fries.” — Katha Pollitt, The Nation.

Well, look, Fast Food Nation didn’t trouble me all that much, though I don’t remember many of the details any longer.  But Overdressed does raise multiple points of concern.

Before I talk content, I will say that if you’re looking for a tightly argued, data-dense sort of book, you won’t find it here.  This is, again, the sort of book that could have been a really long article instead (we need “long journal articles” to be a type of publication that exists outside the scholarly world, as there are large numbers of books where the author has stretched the main thesis with repetition and wandering tangents in order to make the basic point book-length).

The author is also young.  Now, that’s not to say that a thirty-something categorically can’t write well — and maybe I’m getting old, for her statement that she was in middle school in the 90s to seem jarringly recent.  (She seems to be about 35 or so.) 

And whenever she moves from the third person to first person narratives about herself, she seems to be more than a little flighty, and her personal discoveries and too-long discussions of her personal fashion taste are not as interesting as she thinks they are.  She says as a teen and a college student, she was heavily into thrift store shopping, but then discovered H&M; and other cheap brands and didn’t look back, until an epiphany a couple years ago.  She also reportedly had no idea how to do even the most basic sewing task until a recent class, and enthuses about her discovery that she could remake a find that wasn’t quite right and her future plans to take an “intermediate sewing class.” 

But her main point is that, as recently as the past two decades, fashion has changed dramatically in the US and, really, the world.  In very short order, China came to dominate clothing production; then, more recently, China began to specialize in relatively more value-added production, and more basics (undies, t-shirts, and other very simple designs) began to be produced in even lower-cost countries such as Bangladesh.  Clothing retailing is ever more dominated by a few large chains, giving them ever-more power to demand lower prices from producers.  And “fast fashion” retailers such as Forever 21 and Zara emphasize constant inflow of new styles.

The bottom line is that prices for clothing have declined dramatically, but so too has quality.  Clothing has become disposable, with purchasers thinking of their purchases as good for wearing a couple times, then sitting in a closet or being donated to Goodwill.  (This is where she gets too anecdotal — she describes her former tendency to purchase clothes constantly and get excited by 50% off “deals”, and profiles several young women with a youtube following, and concludes that this is the norm, rather than a minority.)  Even the thrift stores are overwhelmed with the quantity of poor-quality clothing donated — much of it gets shipped to Africa or gets recycled into rags or reprocessed into such items as insulation or carpet padding — and the environmental cost of producing fundamentally useless clothing (manmade fibers coming from oil, others requiring toxic chemicals to process, and, in any case, requiring energy to manufacture) are substantial.

Now, to be sure, I’ve bought plenty of cheap clothing — it’s hard to avoid it — and I think she goes too far when she says that these clothes fall apart after two or three washes (unless there’s a whole world of clothing that’s even cheaper than what they sell at Kohls and Meijers).  And there are plenty of families who buy cheap clothing not in endless quantities to follow fashion trends, but to clothe their families.  And a lot of what makes clothing cheaper now than it was is not durability but simplicity of design, which could be beneficial to struggling families.

But it is absolutely true that clothes have gotten flimsier.  The fabric for many cheap blouses is so thin that it becomes necessary to layer.  “Denim” pants at H&M; (I stopped in while running an errand today) are not anything I would recognize as denim, but more a thin denim-colored twill.  And I likewise stepped into Forever 21, and was shocked at their clothing — very thin fabric, dresses that consisted of two long shapeless knit panels sewn together.  In my own shopping, I find that it’s hit-or-miss as to whether a top or sweater I buy will hold up in the wash, or shrink or lose its shape.  (I keep telling myself that, if I can just get back down a size, I’ll stop shopping so cheaply. But, on the other hand, I worry that if I don’t, I’ll just pay twice as much for a sweater that loses its shape quickly.)

(Forever 21 was a store that I was quite unfamiliar with until reading this book.  Founded by a Korean immigrant in the 80s in LA, it’s now worldwide, and some of its clothing definitely has a Japanese/Korean look to it.  I was also surprised to see a disproportionate number of older Koreans while running my lunchtime errand (maybe shopping for daughters?), though the store was mostly empty, given the time of day.  But much of the stock looked like something I’d find languishing at the thrift store, rejected by customers.  Or just looked bizarre, as if their clothing designs were generated by a computer program set to randomly combine cut, fabric, and pattern.)

She also profiles a woman who’s trying to revive sewing one’s own clothes.  She claims that no one under the age of 30 knows how to sew, or even sew a button or hem a pair of pants, so they discard clothing, or wear it unmended, or leave it at the back of the closet abandoned — if that’s true, it is appalling, though I don’t know if she has more than anecdotal evidence.  (My sister can’t sew – or won’t sew, at least, having gotten my mom to do this for her, for most of her adult life.)  But, even if seamstresses at clothing factories were paid more generously than now, the economies of scale mean it’s unlikely that sewing clothes will ever return to being a way of saving money, though it’s a handy skill for things you can’t find at the store (just the right costume for your kid, or for the school play or Christmas pageant, or a unique outfit for a fashionista) and basic mending is certainly a life skill.

The second theme in her book is the race to the bottom in terms of wages, with retailers such as Wal-Mart pushing their suppliers to keep prices low or even reduce them.  Part of the low-prices demand is met by skimping on fit, construction, and fabric quality, but part is due to the global search for low-price factories, and it seems that only when retailers have exhausted the global supply of cheap labor will supply-and-demand increase wages.  She doesn’t really have much of an answer here, though, except to say that everyone should buy American (without really recognizing the fact that the gulf between the 99.9% of clothing produced abroad and American-made clothing is great enough that it’s a tall order to ask this of her readers).

You know what would really change the equation?  Robotics.  My clothing + robot + production  google search had as its top hit this article from livescience.com from 2012 describing plans to develop robot-sewing technology, to bring jobs back to the U.S.  This set of articles was the only substantial hit, though — nothing more recent. (Or would the Chinese just buy the robots for use in their own factories?)  Of course, that brings up all the unsolved issues of what happens when the jobs disappear due to mechanization, but it still feels overdue.

This is a great article on government healthcare spending by Avik Roy at the National Review.  Bottom line:  even without regard to ObamaCare’s new subsidies, the federal government already spends more on healthcare than Germany, Canada, and the UK, on a per-capita and purchasing power parity basis.

This is stunning.  Now, I don’t know if this is purely Medicare and Medicaid, or if it also includes community health clinics, the VA, or even spending for federal government employees in its role as employee benefits provider.  Does it include funding for residencies, or loan forgiveness for doctors working in underserved areas?  Of course, regardless of how comprehensive this number is, we’re up against systems that provide healthcare for their entire population (though individuals in Germany and the UK can opt out and elect private health insurance instead or in addition).

This is actually not dissimilar from a similar chart on education spending, which I couldn’t find just now but here’s the data I was looking for, anyway — from the OECD report, Education at a Glance, 2012.  (The particular table below is at this URL.)

Germany’s government spends 1.1% of GDP on tertiary education.  We spend 1.0% (public spending).  But Germany provides virtually tuition-free universities, and our students have to pony up 2.6% of GDP more in private spending.  Are we getting our money’s worth?

Will Obama’s approach of differentiating financial aid based on how a college fares in a government-devised ranking make any difference?  Unlikely.

Will MOOCs and other innovations revolutionize higher education?  Not in isolation.

The fundamental reason why tuition has been galloping forward is the same reason that medical costs have been.  No, not the third-party payer problem.  The fact that the product seems indispensable.

If you’ve been told by your doctor that you need a triple-bypass operation, are you going to hunt for alternatives?  Probably not.  Your only question is going to be, “when can you schedule me?”  Because paying the coinsurance is a secondary concern to, well, living.

And if you’ve been told that college is your ticket to a successful career, and the better the college’s ranking, the better your chances of future employment, and if all around you, you see recent grads from not-so-prestigious colleges struggling to get out of the unpaid-intern trap, then the choice is clear, regardless of the tuition dollars.

This means that the only way out of the trap is for the job market to improve to a point where students can take chances, can gain skills in some other route than a 4-year college education at the most prestigious college they can gain admission to, and still feel that they have a future ahead of them, on the one hand, and for employers looking to hire at the entry level to find that the job market is tight enough that expanding their search outside university job placement offices gives them a better choice of candidates who may be willing to work at a lower salary or with fewer demands. 

(I had once thought that colleges would be forced to drop their tuition rates upon struggling to fill their classes, until an article in the Trib described the skyrocketing popularity of ordinary colleges with Chinese and Korean students, who were willing to pay full tuition rates and fill the slots that would have been filled by local students in years past.)