Archive for July, 2009

On June 8th, USA Today ran a story about Internet access in rural areas, titled Rural Americans long to be linked (digital version here). That story contains these quotes:

“Just because we live in rural America doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have broadband,” says Roper, a third-generation peanut farmer. “We’re all Americans. We shouldn’t be treated less than anyone else.”

I wonder if these people support or oppose government-sponsored health care. I wonder whether the same principle that motivates them to ask the government to subsidize their Internet connectivity would motivate them to ask the government to subsidize health care for other “Americans who shouldn’t be treated less than anyone else.”

Currently, about 57% of urban households and 60% of suburban households subscribe to broadband. In rural areas, only 38% do, according to a report by the Communications Workers of America.

“As a country, we’re basically punishing people for living where they want to live,” says Vince Jordan, CEO of Ridgeview Telephone, a small Colorado-based carrier that caters to rural customers.

But of course it’s not a “punishment”. As the article later states, it’s a simple matter of economics. Or, maybe it is a “punishment,” if you expand the definition of that word just a bit. But if it’s a “punishment” when broadband providers won’t connect you to DSL at a price you’re happy with, what is it when you can’t get medical treatment?

The article closes with this quote:

“Every time you put a bite of beef in your mouth or a cotton T-shirt on your back, it came from rural America,” Schooler says, her voice welling with pride. “We are one country. We feed you; you take care of us.”

Where is this, “We are one country” sentiment when the question of paying to keep people healthy and alive comes up? It’s legitimately confusing to me. When it comes to broadband, apparently the socialist/communist ethic is okay. When it comes to health-care, it’s anathema.

All technologies solve a problem. Government is a technology, in a broad sense of the word. Among other things, government solves the problem of mediating distance and size.

You don’t need a government to relate to a single other person. You don’t need a government to relate to your lawn. You wouldn’t need a government to relate to a close circle of friends or family. You wouldn’t need a government to relate to the land in which you could walk in a few hours. As social networks get larger, a point is reached where humans are not mentally capable of storing information about and maintaining relationships with every person in the network. In addition to mental constraints, there are physical constraints. The more people with whom you have to maintain relationships, the more time you have to spend maintaining the relationships. At a certain point, you just don’t have any time left. This is where the concept of Dunbar’s Number comes in.

Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.^[1] Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150.

When you run out of mental and physical capacity to maintain relationships, the concept of “strangers” is manifested. Strangers are a problem in a social network. Maybe they will steal your food. Maybe they will kill you. Maybe they will be nice to you. Maybe they won’t. At the very least, you are free to attribute bad motivations to them, because you do not have a built-up bank of trusting interactions with them. At the very worst, you are free to kill them, because they’re nobody to you anyway.

One way of solving the problem of strangers is to limit the size of your social network. In this solution, interactions between those of different social networks is limited or eliminated. Building networks of hierarchical relationships is another solution. In a hierarchical structure, the person at the top of the layer maintains relationships with everyone at that layer, plus one: a person in the next layer up. This allows much larger social networks to be built without exceeding the capabilities of an individual to maintain relationships.

It’s my belief that one purpose of government is to provide the upper tiers of the hierarchical structure that is our social network. The government mediates between those who are not part of each others’ personal social network. Laws are codifications of the ways in which the government will act as it seeks to resolve conflicts. The further that we get from individuals interacting directly, the more “one-size-fits-all” solutions become, so the ways that the government resolves conflicts are inherently a less-than-perfect fit for most people, but this is a necessary tradeoff for having a government and the enormous social network that it enables.