Here’s Klein with an anecdote that captures Oregon’s drive to invest in preventing health problems, rather than just continuing to treat costly disease episodes:

Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber (D) loves to tell the air-conditioner story. He loves to tell it so much, in fact, that it has become something of a running joke in Oregon health-policy circles. At this point, even Kitzhaber is in on it. Before he repeats it to me, he says, “I probably shouldn’t bore you with my air conditioner story.”

Here’s the air conditioner story: There’s a 90-year-old woman with well-managed congestive heart failure who lives in an apartment without air conditioning. That’s actually the whole story.

Kitzhaber, a former emergency room physician, sees this as the perfect example of what’s wrong with our health-care system. “A hot day could send the temperature in her apartment high enough that it strains her cardiovascular system and kicks her into full-blown congestive heart failure,” he said. “Under the current system, Medicare will pay for the ambulance and $50,000 to stabilize her. It will not pay for a $200 window air conditioner, which is all she needs to stay in her home and out of the hospital. The difference to the health-care system is $49,800. And we could save that $49,800 without reducing her benefits or her quality of life.”

…“The fundamental problem with our health-care system is the growing discrepancy between the cost of care, the resources available to pay for it and the tenuous connection between that expenditure and actual health,” Kitzhaber said. “What we’re doing is instead of putting our budget into the ER and paying for congestive heart failure after congestive heart failure, we’re putting it into care coordination and community health workers. We’re investing in health. It’s just a paradigm shift.”

Oregon is getting $1.9 billion from the federal government to overhaul its Medicaid program, in exchange for a commitment by the state to keep its Medicaid cost growth below the rate in the rest of the country, saving a total of $11 billion over the next decade. (Sarah Kliff has more details on Oregon’s plan.) The state may find that giving free air conditioners — and, I’d hope, vouchers to help with related electric bills — to residents with congestive heart failure reduces medical costs.

Oregon’s 15 coordinated care organizations (CCOs) will likely come up with many such prevention projects, and see which ones are worthy of continued investment. In addition to interventions that deliver an immediate benefit, like air conditioners, the state and individual CCOs could invest in programs and infrastructure that increase physical activity and improve access to healthy food, which can reduce disease occurrence and severity years into the future. In fact, these are the kinds of interventions that the Prevention and Public Health Fund — one of the less-noticed pieces of the Affordable Care Act — was designed to support. Congress and the Obama Administration have repeatedly diverted money from this fund, however, so it can’t do all that Congress envisioned when it first included the Fund in the ACA.

Oregon is betting that investing in prevention will save money over the long run. It’s important to note, though, that prevention investments are worthwhile if they improve people’s quality of life, whether or not there are savings. But governments have limited amounts of money to spend, and they have to prioritize. Here’s Bill Gates giving Ezra Klein an example of a problematic spending tradeoff:

My deep interest in this came somewhat because it’s fascinating but also because our big cause in the U.S. is education, and if you look at state budgets, they are moving money from education to health. They have to because the health costs are just exploding. So very quickly say to yourself, gosh, if there’s going to be any money left for university education and adequate money for K-12, even to stay flat, you have to figure out health-care costs.

Unfortunately, in rich-world health, innovation is both your friend and your enemy. Innovation is inventing organ replacement, joint replacement. We’re inventing ways of doing new things that cost $300,000 and take people in their 70s and, on average, give them an extra, say, two or three years of life. And then you have to say, given finite resources, should we fire two or three teachers to do this operation? And with chemotherapies, we’ve got things where we’ll spend our dollars on treatments where you’re valuing a life here at over $10 to $20 million. Really big, big numbers, which if you were infinitely rich, of course that would be fine.

So most innovations, unfortunately, actually increase the net costs of the healthcare system. There’s a few, particularly having to do with chronic diseases, that are an exception. If you could cure Alzheimer’s, if you could avoid diabetes — those are gigantic in terms of saving money. But the incentive regime doesn’t favor them.

The reason we’re worried about the rate of healthcare-cost increase (which has generally outpaced GDP growth over the past decades) is that ever-growing healthcare spending will crowd out spending in other areas, like education. Given that better-educated populations tend to have better health, reducing education spending to pour ever-greater shares of federal and state budgets into Medicare and Medicaid could itself contribute to higher healthcare costs in the future. Governments will need to prioritize spending on the most worthwhile interventions. We should be paying close attention to Oregon’s experiment to see what they learn about getting the most bang for their healthcare bucks.

The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have opposed the administration. The Journal’s Kim Strassel reported an Idaho businessman named Frank VanderSloot, who’d donated more than a million dollars to groups supporting Mitt Romney. He found himself last June, for the first time in 30 years, the target of IRS auditors. His wife and his business were also soon audited. Hal Scherz, a Georgia physician, also came to the government’s attention. He told ABC News: “It is odd that nothing changed on my tax return and I was never audited until I publicly criticized ObamaCare.”

Franklin Graham, son of Billy, told Politico he believes his father was targeted. A conservative Catholic academic who has written for these pages faced questions about her meager freelance writing income. Many of these stories will come out, but not as many as there are. People are not only afraid of being audited, they’re afraid of saying they were audited.

Anecdotes. Powerful stuff. But Silver brings the bucket of cold water:

Ms. Noonan is surely correct that many conservative taxpayers were audited. In fact, based on some simple math that I’ll present in a moment, it’s likely that hundreds of thousands of Mitt Romney voters were selected for an audit in 2012.

However, it’s also likely that hundreds of thousands of Mr. Obama’s supporters were audited. Although the percentage of taxpayers who are audited is relatively low — about 1 percent — the number of taxpayers in the United States is so large that this still yields well more than a million audits every year, across the political spectrum.

That’s just the beginning. The details come later.

Many property owners in Istanbul fit their buildings with horizontal metal-grille shelves sticking out from the facade above the first floor. This keeps bits of a building from falling onto the tourists frequenting the street-level shops that pay the rent. The grilles and their installation must cost a pretty penny. Still owners prefer them to putting the money into renovation.

Again, I wonder about the economics of this. Is the dilapidation a result of some poorly worded rule intended to protect historic buildings? Are the property owners waiting for the old buildings to collapse so they can legitimately tear the remains down and build higher and more profitable structures?

Or is there insufficient demand for housing and office space in central Istanbul, so that the only parts of the buildings that actually pay for themselves are the ones catering to tourists?

Then I thought maybe the problem with getting property owners to pay for upkeep isn’t insufficient carrot, but insufficient whip. Perhaps the reason no Stockholm property owner behaves like this is that if she does, she will get her ass kicked by the authorities. So I asked the city planning office of Stockholm municipality, stadsbyggnadskontoret. And they kindly explained that there are two levels of whip on these issues in Stockholm. The Planning Code demands that you keep your property in good shape: if you don’t, the city planning office will tell you to either get the problem fixed or pay a fine. And if, as is common in Istanbul, your building becomes so decrepit that it’s dangerous to people in or near it, you will no longer be allowed to use your building, for instance by letting out shop space in it.

Or maybe it’s neither carrot nor whip, but a culturally established readiness to see buildings in severe disrepair, combined with a unwillingness or inability to invest now for long-term profit.

SteelyKid and The Pip, both reading.

So, clearly, they take after me and Kate…

(We ended up buying the “How to Make Paper Airplanes” book SteelyKid is looking at, because paper airplanes are awesome. The music-playing book about an orchestra that The Pip is looking at went back on the shelf over his protests, though, because we don’t really need any more noisy toys in the house.)

“I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.” -Frederick Douglass

I thought we were past this, I really did. Having grown up in New York, having lived in eight different states and traveled to 39 others — as well as maybe a dozen different countries — I truly thought there were a few things that were obvious. One of them, of course, is that you’ve got to give something a shot to know whether you like it or not. Hopefully, no matter who, where, or what you are, you’ll enjoy this upbeat song by Bob Schneider as much as I do, so have a listen to

Mudhouse.

Another, even more fundamentally simple and obvious one, is that people are individuals, and ought to be judged solely on their merits as individuals. You might be tempted to make generalizations about someone based on your preconceptions about their race, their gender, their country-of-origin, their sexual orientation, etc., but at the end of the day, each one of us is an individual.

And in no way — to me, at least — is that more obvious than when it comes to studying the Universe.

Image credit: Tanja Sund of http://astrotanja.com/.

Which brings up my point: do you think race, gender, or ancestry determines who can or cannot succeed in a given career?

If the answer isn’t a swift and immediate “of course not” for you, congratulations, you might be a scientific racist! I would’ve thought this had gone out of fashion after World War II, and I certainly didn’t think I’d encounter it ever in my lifetime. In a famous statement all the way back in 1950, UNESCO had the following to say:

The biological fact of race and the myth of ‘race’ should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth of ‘race’ has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years, it has taken a heavy toll in human lives, and caused untold suffering.

And yet, here we are, studying things like gender-and-math-aptitude or IQ-and-race like these are actual sciences.

Image credit: Wikimedia commons user Quizkajer.

There are some of you out there who have no idea why this is offensive, why this isn’t science, and why this is racist.

Let me try to put this in perspective for you.

How do you feel when you see unequal treatment, based on race, in situations such as this?

Image credit: Alexandra Dal of http://alexandradal.tumblr.com/.

Do I need to explain to you why this is offensive, why this is racist, or why this is grossly unfair treatment? Do I need to explain to you that the person on the left and the person on the right in each case deserve to be treated equally, regardless of what any test, statistic or study has said about outcomes?

Here’s why, for those of you who need the explanation: Every person in this world deserves to be treated with the dignity and respect that we, ourselves, would like to be treated with.

The idea that tests like an “IQ Test,” the “SATs” or the “GREs” are somehow indicators of what races or genders are better suited to certain types of careers are meritless, not borne out by evidence, and also incredibly offensive. And yet, you can apparently get a Ph.D. in this from Harvard.

Image credit: screenshot from Jon Wiener’s blog at http://www.thenation.com/.

This. Is. Not. Okay.

People have been using studies like this to argue about genetic inferiority for centuries, contending that some races are genetically inferior, the female gender is inferior at math, and that this makes them ill-suited to careers that involve heavy amounts of math/science/detail-oriented work.

And yet, if you’ve ever gone to school or met a substantial number of human beings of any race, gender, or ancestry, that notion seems like utter lunacy. It’s as plain to me as it was to Charles Sumner nearly 200 years ago.

Image credit: Theoretical Particle Physics at SISSA, via http://www.sissa.it/tpp/.

Everyone should be not only allowed but encouraged to pursue their interests and passions, and should be granted the opportunity to develop their skills and do their best. We have a terrible track record of denying women their deserved place in scientific history, and despite the incredible successes of women and people of color in all sorts of arenas of life, we still stereotype that somehow, white (and maybe asian, too) men are simply innately better-suited to becoming scientists.

After all, you’ve probably heard the story of Carl Sagan’s first encounter with science when he was a boy, when he received a toy robot:

But the most fascinating things about this, was a panel you could take off the side of it, and you could actually see inside, all the gears and all the workings inside. After that, I was hooked. I had to see how all these things worked. I was always in competition with my… brother, to find out who could be the smartest, who knows the most about how everything worked.

Except I lied to you. That’s not Carl Sagan’s story; it’s Vincent Rodgers’ story!

Image credit: University of Iowa, via http://siena.cs.uiowa.edu/~vrodgers/.

The idea that someone would be denied the opportunity to pursue their dream career for any reason other than their own individual merits is absolutely bigoted, and always wrong.

So this week, I was heartened to come across something simple and straightforward being done to fight this evil, but almost no one has heard about it. Let’s change that together; allow me to introduce to you Scholars Against Scientific Racism.

Image credit: Scholars Against Scientific Racism.

Rather than focus on the latest egregious offense in this vein, let’s focus on ending this garbage once and for all. There’s a simple google document (I tested it, there’s no malware or anything) that you can sign your name to to say that this line of thinking has no scientific merits when it comes to crafting public or social policy, and does not deserve to be studied as though it does. Let’s get the racism, sexism and bigotry out of science once and for all, and we can start by fighting against this garbage:

Dean Ellwood at Harvard Kennedy School takes the position that this dissertation is part of an academic debate. We are not against academic freedom. However, there is no academic debate on whether or not Hispanics as a group are less intelligent than native-born whites. There are debates on whether or not Hispanic is a pan-ethnic, ethnic, or racialized category. There are debates on how and whether or why we should measure intelligence. There are debates on the extent to which intelligence is a heritable trait. But, there are no debates on whether or not Latino immigrants have the intellectual caliber to be part of the United States. Those kinds of debates happen in nativist and white supremacist circles, which have no place in academia, which prizes arguments and debates based on valid constructs and scientific evidence.

It’s not science, and it’s not right. Let’s do our part to make sure that people are judged on their merits as people, nothing less and nothing more.

Degradational is when the science or the scientists are depicted as evil or as the cause of problems – you know the type: Jurassic Park and such. Inspirational (which might need some subcategories) – is when there is science in a piece of art, but the science is just there as set decoration, or because a main character is a scientist, or because some minor plot points hinge on some sciencey-sounding mumbo-jumbo-speak that (supposedly) makes the audience feel that serious science has saved the day (or at least moved the plot forward incrementally). Inspirational SciArt is the bulk of what is out there – pushing 98% in my opinion (mostly because of a significant decrease in degradational SciArt, which used to occupy a sizable portion of what was out there).

In the minority, however, is informational SciArt. I am not talking about documentaries here – or Nova specials – they are clearly informational and have a lot of artistry to them, but in my opinion are in a different genre than SciArt. So what is informational SciArt: it is a play or a movie that stands on its own in terms of plot or character but at the same time has a LOT of real and accurate science in it (or culture of science – how scientists act and such). Can you think of many of these? Not many out there, eh. And many of the ones that are out there are medically oriented (because people can relate better to something medical – as opposed to say, something about neutrinos or identifying a new species of frog).  Movies like Contagion or Contact or Gorillas in the Mist or Awakenings, or October Sky, or And the Band Played On, or the classic 2001 – these are at least moving in the direction of informational SciArt – and they are definitely more than inspirational.  What sets these movies apart from “inspirational” ones?  The fact that you can walk away from these movies and actually have learned some real science (or science culture) – even among these, however, the amount of science information is wildly variant (and mostly on the lower side).  Think of “A Beautiful Mind” – is it informational because there is a 30 second recap of one of John Nash’s therories?  Or is it really more suitable for the “inspirational” category?

Why bring this up?  I feel that the informational SciArt category has long been in the minority and largely because the commercial side of the SciArt couple is afraid that audiences don’t want to see things with lots of real information in them – movies or plays.  Yet in day to day conversations, with scientists and non-scientists alike – I continually hear people say that they really enjoy learning new science through movies or television shows or even plays (although the fraction of informational SciArt plays is even lower than that for movies and television).  So why not trust that people want to pack some of their entertainment with science and let’s start seeing more informational SciArt – or at least information heavy SciArt.  When you see something labelled as SciArt – something funded by the Sloan Foundation or something in the Imagine Science Film Festival – both fantastic programs, but both of which support 98% inspirational SciArt – when you see SciArt – talk it up – did you learn any science from it?  If not – ask: would it have been improved or more interesting if there had been more hard science in it?  There is certainly a place for inspirational SciArt – art that intrigues and excites us about science – but there also needs to be more of a place for informational SciArt out there – at least more than 2%, which, in my opinion, is even an optimistic estimate of what is out there right now.

It’s not surprising that more DC commuters are biking, because over the past few years the city has made substantial investments in bicycling infrastructure. Our Capital Bikeshare system keeps expanding, and our District Department of Transportation has created 56 miles of marked bike lanes and installed 2,300 bike parking racks in recent years.

Investing in making bicycling safer and easier gets results: The League of American Bicyclists identified Bicycle Friendly Communities and found that the bike commuting rate has risen 80% in the largest of these communities, compared to 47% nationwide. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s County by County blog draws an even clearer line between cycling and pedestrian infrastructure improvements and public health, noting, “Research shows that cycling and pedestrian infrastructure improvements such as bicycle lanes, bicycle racks, bicycle/walking trails, and shared bicycle programs promote physical activity.

Riding a bike is a great way to get some exercise while saving money on transportation. Still, cycling isn’t as safe as it could be. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that in 2011, 677 cyclists were killed and another 48,000 injured in traffic crashes. Drivers and cyclists both need to be aware of one another and follow the rules, and infrastructure that physically separates bike lanes from traffic lanes can also be helpful. Enforcement is also essential, as many cyclists frustrated by U-turning drivers on DC’s Pennsylvania Avenue bike lanes can attest.

The Department of Transportation’s Share the Road Safely website has tips for drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Keep your fellow road users in mind as you make your way home tonight!

I had just arrived at the research camp in the Ituri Forest, then Zaire and now the Congo, after a rather long and harrowing journey that took me from Boston to New York to London to Lagos to Kinshasa to Kisingani to Isiro, all by plane, then over 250 kilometers of increasingly less road-like road, to the world’s most “remote” research site to be found among human settlements anywhere on the planet. Jack’s research involved looking at what happened to Efe Pygmy “camps” after they were abandoned. The Efe hunter-gatherers were known to move camp an average of once every two weeks or so. An archaeologist would want to know what happens to a camp once it is abandoned because many of the ancient sites we excavate are exactly that, abandoned settlements. Jack had been tracking Efe movement and camp abandonment patterns for one year, and the expectation was that I would continue his data collection for another year, as he and his wife returned to Montana to write up their results.

A typical Efe forest camp.

“Oh, excuse, me have you moved yet? No? OK, see you tomorrow.”

When we arrived at the camp, which was located very near the Lese villages … the Lese are the farming people who with an overlapping culture and economy with the Efe … there were a lot of people there. This was a camp with several adult couples and a number of kids of all ages from baby up to nearly teenage. Since this was Jack and Helen’s last visit, they brought gifts to give to the people who had helped them out for the previous year. Project regulations and ethics required that any gifts be irrelevant to diet or economics, not usable as tools of poaching, not likely to change people’s status, and be likely to be used up or worn out quickly. So, everybody got plastic green sunglasses, the really cheap kind you buy by the dozen at a party store to use as favors.

A typical Lese village.

It was a party, a good time, lots of conversation, some weeping over the fact that the much beloved Jack and Helen would be moving back to the States, lots of fun with the green sunglasses, lots of data collected. Then, we left, and the next day we returned to map in the locations of the small dome shaped leaf-covered huts and other structures, fire hearths, stick chairs, drying racks, midden piles, trampled central-use areas, and so on and so forth. This is what the abandoned camp of a people known in the literature, and generally to outsiders, as “nomads” looked like. There was lots of stuff there, but all of it was made from materials available on the spot, transformed from wild growing plants to architecture and kitchen furniture, but eventually thrown out or left behind. Everything else was carried by the Efe, in one trip, to the next camp they would build from natural materials. Or almost everything.

Saying goodbye to Jack and Helen.

Collecting data from an abandoned camp.

And the forest had it’s seasonal cycle as well. During the dry season, which lasted several weeks around November and December, certain animals were easier to hunt because the streams they hid in, or that would impair hunter’s movement through the forest, were very low. Staring in late June and running into August, the famous African Killer Honey Bees (the wild version of our own domesticated honey bee) produced copious honey in nests about 100 feet up in the forest canopy. The Efe men were very dedicated to harvesting this honey.

If you think about that information for a bit you’ll notice possible conflict. For example, the Efe are drawn to the deep forest for Honey Season, but this overlaps with the mid-year harvest and planting. The November harvest and planting overlapped and conflicted with the dry season hunting. You might guess that men and women would have different opinions about where to reside during these periods of conflicts. The women would never stay overnight in a farm village during harvest; they moved each day by foot from the Efe camp to the gardens and back. But as it became more desirable to camp farther and farther into the forest, that commute became longer and longer. We say (usually tongue in cheek) that Western couples fight over certain things, like money or how to raise the kids or what channel to watch on TV. Efe couples argue over where to put the camp in relation to the horticultural villages vs. the deep forest.

I ended up never continuing Jack and Helen’s data collection project. That I would spend a year doing Part II of another graduate student’s thesis was an idea cooked up by our shared advisor, but neither Jack nor I saw the benefit in doing that. He had enough data, I had other things to do. So, instead, I studied the larger scale structure of Efe nomadism, of their movements across the landscape and their use of forest resources.

I discovered that each Efe group possessed (and that is a carefully chosen word) rights to a trail, usually one single trail but sometimes something a bit more complicated, that ran from the villages out into the forest. Along this trail, at intervals of almost exactly 1.5 kilometers, was a potential camp site. Of these camp sites, a handful were used again and again as the Efe moved through their seasonal cycle. Some of the other camps were used only occasionally. This was interesting, because it meant that even though the efe might move over 20 times a year, the part of their movement in the deep forest had them return to the same exact four or five camps again and again for years. They would also repeatedly use the same camps near the villages, but since village farmers often moved their swidden gardens, wiping out grown-over sections of the forest in one area and abandoning a garden elsewhere, the Efe “village camps” … the camps used during planting and harvest seasons … were often destroyed or otherwise became inconvenient.

Efe hunter. As a general rule, if you don’t know at least approximately where something is in the forest before you go looking for it, you’re not likely to find it.

And now we come to the interesting anthropological lesson that emerges when we look at other cultures, in this case, the Efe and Lese. In books and articles about the Pygmies of the Central African rain forest, the Pygmies (including the Efe as well as other groups with different names) are often called “nomads.” Nomads, we all know, are people who move a lot. The term also invokes, for many, a certain amount of randomness, or at least, uncertainty in where one might be moving next. There is indeed uncertainty, of a sort, among the Efe as to when they are going to move and where to. But this is simply because one does not need to decide when or where until it is time to do so. There is a constant negotiation happening between members of a particular group as to when to move, and which camp to move to. If there is a big enough difference between different families in a camp, they can easily move to two different locations for a while, or one group can stay and others leave. But these differences never lead to the men going one place while the women go elsewhere, even though the biggest conflict is usually between men and women. The point is, their movement is not random, but well considered and systematic, yet in at the scale of days or weeks in advance, not very predictable at any level of detail.

Yet, at the same time, the Efe are the opposite of nomadic. Consider their Lese village farmer neighbors. They live in permanent villages. But, over time, the Lese use up garden space and firewood in the vicinity of their village. Also, a mini-epidemic of disease in a given village will cause people to not want to live there any more. So, over the course of a person’s life, say a person who lives to 70 years old, one might move seven or eight times from one village to another just in service to the agricultural cycle.

But wait, there’s more. Among the villagers, men and women, when they are married, move to one parent’s village or another for a while, then try to start their own village, and that sometimes does not work out, so they move again. So, around the age of marriage, a person may move three or four times in two or three years. A young man might spend two or three years working at a plantation far from their village, or spend some time in the army. A woman and her children might move to near a chief’s village if her husband is caught doing something wrong and forced into indentured service for a few months. Every now and then the government comes along and moves any village that is too far out in the forest closer to the road so it is easier to tax them. Then later, the government disappears (remember, this is a remote area) and everyone moves back. If grandma gets really sick part of the family might move far away to a mission hospital, because the family is required to supply food and labor to support grandma’s stay in what amounts to a hospice. And so on and so forth.

Betweeen all of these factors, Lese farmers might move 20 times in their life.

Let’s view “nomadism” among the Efe hunter gatherers and the Lese villagers from a slightly different perspective. Let’s ask the question: How many different places have you slept a total of 100 nights or more? That eliminates short forays, fishing trips, very short marriages, etc. Or, putting it a slightly different way, let’s look at the list of places one lives ranked by how many nights one has slept there in a lifetime. Nomads, given our usual conception of them, should have a very long list with a small number of nights at each place, while settled people should have a list with a short number of localities each associated with hundreds or thousands of nights, even if there is a tail of several places with a small number of nights each down hear the bottom of the list.

If we look at the “nomadic” hunter gatherers of the Ituri Forest, the Efe, their list will have five or six places that account for 80% or more of their nights, if we adjust for the frequently destroyed camps in or near the gardens. The Lese farmers, on the other hand, will have over a dozen localities with a several hundred nights in each. By that reckoning, the Lese are more nomadic over a lifetime, even if the Efe are constantly moving.

Minnesotans who go away for college and whose families have a cabin (maybe a series of cabins over time) up north and who spend part of their lives moving opportunistically from apartment to apartment in South Minneapolis are pretty nomadic too. I myself moved once before the age of 16, then about every six months for the next 15 years, chasing relationships, jobs, schools, and doing field work.

Finally, let’s look at nomadism in one more way. If you move every several years, occasionally more often such as around the time of marriage, then at any given time the landscape you know is the landscape you live in, and the memories of details of the landscape of your childhood or other times gone by both fades and becomes obsolete. But if you move constantly, but over the same exact landscape all the time like the Efe do, then your knowledge of every bit of the landscape is detailed an intense and constantly updated and renewed. The Efe know every root that ever tripped them and every rocky pile that ever harbored a small forest animal procurable for dinner and every mature fruit tree and every patch of tasty forest yams in the place they live. The other part of my research, looking at Efe diet, came to this conclusion: There is a fair amount of food in the rain forest, but the only way to find any of it is to know in advance where it is located. Otherwise, the costs in time and energy to discover it excede its caloric value.

The Efe are not nomadic. They are, rather, constant inspectors of their rather large home, centered on their traditionally used trail, consisting of a half dozen venues to sleep and live.

_________________________________
More stuff about the Congo

A while back I wrote a Novella, as a fundraising effort for the Secular Student Alliance, set in the eastern Congo. A cleaned up version of it is available here: Sungudogo

You can read the harrowing real life story of a season of field research in the same region, in a series of blog posts, by clicking HERE (then click through to the next blog post, and the next, and the next, until you’ve read them all!).

And, THIS LINK will get you to a selection of other stories set in the region.

Jack’s research was written up here:

Ethnoarchaeology Among the Efe Pygmies, Zaire: Spatial Organization of Campsites, by J. W. Fisher, Jr. and H. C. Strickland. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 78:473–484.

Earlier this month, Florida lawmakers wrapped up their latest legislative session. And nearly 500 miles south of Tallahassee in Miami-Dade County, workers’ rights advocates breathed yet another sigh of relief.

Ever since Miami-Dade adopted the nation’s first countywide wage theft ordinance in 2010, it’s been under attack. For the first two years after its passage, state legislators tried to pass legislation to pre-empt local communities from passing their own wage theft laws; this last legislative session, they tried again but included a carve out for Miami-Dade and for Broward County, which passed its own wage theft measure in 2012. All three tries have died in the state Senate, but worker advocates aren’t optimistic that the fight is over.

Still, in a state that decided to dismantle its department of labor a decade ago, Miami’s wage theft ordinance is a milestone for Florida workers and one that’s slowly spreading throughout the Sunshine State. Just last month, the northern county of Alachua passed a wage theft measure, and north of Miami in Palm Beach County, the local Legal Aid Society runs a wage theft pilot program that could pave the way for a legal ordinance.

“Wage theft is a huge problem in South Florida — it’s absolutely huge,” said Jeanette Smith, executive director of South Florida Interfaith Worker Justice, one of the groups that led the passage of Miami-Dade’s ordinance. “As individual organizations we couldn’t solve this problem on our own. Cases just kept coming and coming and we needed something systematic, a more institutionalized solution.”

Since Miami-Dade’s wage theft ordinance went into effect, hundreds of thousands of dollars in stolen wages have been recovered and more workers are filing wage theft complaints. Much of the progress to date is credited to the broad and diverse coalition that came together to tackle the problem — the South Florida Wage Theft Task Force (today, it’s known as just the Florida Wage Theft Task Force). Its members include faith-based groups, immigrant rights organizations, unions, women’s groups, researchers, legal aid and many more.

The groups originally came together about seven years ago to help a group of day laborers in Cutler Bay just southwest of Miami. At the time, a local developer had begun harassing the workers and their potential employers. At one point, the developer was arrested for physically attacking workers. In response, advocates came together in defense of the day laborers and quickly began talking about other issues facing workers in South Florida. Wage theft was at the top of the list. It was the first step on the road to a countywide ordinance.

“Today, people are talking about wage theft, workers are speaking up,” Smith told me. “The success has been so much broader than just the ordinance itself.”

Sun, surf and wage theft

In the span of just two-and-a-half years, more than $28 million in unpaid wages has been recovered by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division in Florida, county staff enforcing Miami-Dade’s wage theft ordinance and by advocacy groups throughout the state, according to a 2012 report from the Research Institute on Social & Economic Policy at Florida International University (FIU). But even though it’s clear that Florida has a serious wage theft problem, as of late 2011, Florida’s attorney general hadn’t taken a single civil action to enforce the state’s minimum wage law, and there is no state agency charged with enforcing wage and hour laws. Miami-Dade County leads the state in wage theft cases.

Cynthia Hernandez, a co-author of the report and a senior research associate at the institute, estimates that the South Florida economy is losing between $2 million and $6 million every year to wage theft. And that, by no means, reflects the larger impact of wage theft on families, neighborhoods and local economies, Hernandez told me. Hernandez and her colleagues first began investigating wage theft in 2006, interviewing immigrant workers and employers in the region’s plant nursery industry. Many of the employers interviewed said they pay below minimum wage because they can get away with it, while others said it was the only way to compete.

“We were definitely surprised,” Hernandez said. “I think everyone at the table was surprised they would just admit to it.”

From there the researchers began digging deeper. While immigrants and agricultural workers were certainly among the most vulnerable to wage theft and more likely to experience it, they weren’t the only ones. Wage theft complaints were coming in from the tourist, retail, hospitality and constructions sectors, but also from workers not typically associated with wage theft problems, such as teachers, attorneys and accountants.

“Unfortunately, it’s just become the way of doing business in South Florida,” Hernandez said.

At South Florida Interfaith Worker Justice, staff had spent years helping workers on a case-by-case basis to recover their wages. Their approach was similar to worker centers throughout the country — approach the employer and let him or her know that this worker is not alone. Ask for the owed wages or negotiate a payment plan. If that doesn’t work, it’s time for direct action, such as protects and attracting media attention. (See past stories on worker centers addressing wage theft and other employer abuses in Austin, El Paso, Houston, and the Rio Grande Valley.) The cases, however, just kept coming and there was no systematic incentive for employers to stop practicing wage theft in the first place. That’s where the South Florida Wage Theft Task Force came in.

After first coming together to help the day laborers in Cutler Bay, task force members spent two years meeting with officials and stakeholders, looking for any measure or authority already in existence that could address wage theft. But other than taking cases to federal labor investigators or to court — an option very much out of reach for low-wage and immigrant workers — there was nothing that could effectively stem the rising tide of wage theft in South Florida. Having sought and found no other alternatives, when task force members went to their local elected officials to call for a wage theft ordinance they could truly say that a local ordinance was the best chance for a solution.

State Rep. Jose Rodriguez, who at the time was working with Florida Legal Services, developed most of the ordinance language, and task force members found a champion in County Commissioner Natacha Seijas (she’s no longer on the commission). On Feb. 18, 2010, county commissioners voted 10-0 to pass the nation’s first countywide wage theft measure — it was technically a unanimous vote, though some commissioners left the room instead of voting.

Throughout the process, advocates didn’t call a lot of attention to their work. It turned out to be a great advantage, Smith said, as the business community didn’t catch wind of the wage theft proposal until the last minute. Eventually, the Florida Retail Federation did catch on, but it was too late to stop a vote. The federation did end up filing a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the ordinance (a judge threw it out last year) and is behind the statewide attempts to pre-empt local wage theft measures.

With passage of the ordinance, the county’s Small Business Development division was responsible for dealing with wage theft complaints (the task has now been shifted to the county’s Consumer Services Department). The process works like this: County staff directly contacts employers engaged in wage theft and leads negotiations between workers and employers. If employers don’t respond, the case goes to an administrative hearing, where both sides present their cases before a hearing officer. If the officer determines that wage theft has occurred, he or she can order the employer to pay up to three times the amount of wages owed as well as administrative costs.

Within the first year-and-a-half of the ordinance’s passage, hundreds of thousands in owed wages was collected simply by having county officials pick up the phone, said Francesca Menes, policy and advocacy coordinator at the Florida Immigrant Coalition, a member of the South Florida Wage Theft Task Force.

“As a local organization we can call an employer, but it doesn’t come with the power of the government,” Menes told me. “We’ve made so much progress. Not everything is perfect, but we’re learning as we go along.”

Progress and protection

According to a September 2012 report from the Research Institute on Social & Economic Policy, Miami-Dade County staff had recovered more than $500,000 in owed wages and received nearly 2,000 wage complaints. It took an average of 103 days to recover wages. Still, more than $2 million in owed wages has yet to be collected, and wage theft complaints have doubled every year since the ordinance went into effect. At the time of the report, only 1.5 county staff were responsible for addressing wage theft cases, and hundreds of workers were still waiting to be helped.

While there have been some hiccups along the way, Menes said that task force members regularly meet with county officials to monitor the program’s effectiveness.

“If these wages aren’t going into workers’ pockets, it’s not going into the local economy and that’s detrimental to all of us in the end,” she said.

Jonathan Fried, executive director of We Count!, an immigrant workers advocacy group and a member of the wage theft task force, said the ordinance hasn’t been as effective as he’d hoped. He said he’s concerned that many workers are being misclassified as independent contractors and that “there’s a bias creeping in in favor of employers.” He noted that with such a backlog of cases and limited county resources, many cases never got heard and the workers involved have already left the area. We Count! also has a history of combating wage theft cases on an individual basis via employer-employee negotiations and direct action.

“We’re concerned that workers aren’t getting a fair hearing and the process is disadvantageous to workers who don’t have an attorney,” Fried told me. “It’s been a big step forward, but there’s some small changes that could be made to really improve it. Ultimately, my belief is that in addition to a state department of labor, we need some changes in federal law and federal enforcement. You shouldn’t be able to get away with not paying a worker.”

Hernandez at FIU said she’ll be spending the summer studying the ordinance’s effectiveness and how it can be improved, including the issue of having an attorney present at an administrative hearing (both sides can bring an attorney if they want, though it’s not required). In the long run, Hernandez said Florida “needs a statewide strategy so we’re not just on the defense.”

Beyond just wage theft, Hernandez noted that employers that break wage and hour laws also seem more likely to ignore workplace health and safety regulations. Smith agreed — “wage theft and health safety violations go hand in hand,” she said.

“As we’ve been working on wage theft, we’ve been looking at workplace health and safety…and now a few of us are working together to be more mindful and deliberate about workplace safety,” Smith said. “It’s complicated to get people to focus on safety because a first concern is getting their wages and keeping their jobs. We’ve been looking at it as an offshoot, but we need to pay it more attention.”

To learn more about Miami-Dade County’s wage theft progress, visit www.stopwagetheft.org or www.risep-fiu.org/tag/florida-wage-theft-task-force.

Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for more than a decade.