Daniel Parecki

An interesting portion of the Islamic faith prohibits the use of interest on loans. Instead of attaching an interest rate to loans, Islamic banks charge their customers a set fee for borrowing money and set penalties if the borrower cannot pay back in time. Given the proper fee (say 100% of the initial loan for a 30 year mortgage), this seems to cost the borrower the same amount as charging an interest rate. However, I can see three potential benefits for the borrower. 1. The borrow is presented up front a definitive cost of the loan, instead of a vague interest rate. 2. The bank cannot arbitrarily change the interest rate, which could drastically alter the long term cost of the loan. 3. If the borrower is only able to muster a smaller payment than previously determined, the borrower is not stuck simply servicing the interest with no hope of paying off the actual loan.

Here’s something a little counter-intuitive: One of the reasons scholars cite for Japan’s and Germany’s strong economy and low unemployment is the strength of their worker’s unions. In America, Unions are often perceived to weaken the economy since they put pressures on businesses to be less efficient by providing better conditions and high pay for their workers. Now I’m curious, could strengthening America’s worker’s Unions actually strengthen the economy?

“According to several studies, one of the conditions of strong economies like Germany’s is not increased degree attainment but strong unions and worker protections.”

http://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2011/05/30/how-to-build-a-strong-economy-education-or-unions/

And this is the reason that art is an important part of education:

Art and music develops the will, the ability to enact change in the world. At birth, children are unable to create what they want from the world. By moving through the world children begin to discover that their actions can change their environment. If they step on soft earth the earth moves and is different from what it was before they touched it. By piling leafs and twigs on top of each other they create a structure that could not exist without their presence. In a similar fashion, by dipping a paint brush and sweeping it across a canvas they create something that was not there before. Every brush stroke, every sound played on the violin, every gesture that molds clay into a new form develops the ability to mold people’s environment to their inspiration. People learn to take an idea that arises in their minds and change the environment that creates order and a pattern that was not there before. The act of doing these things gradually enables them to produce more complex forms that existed only in their minds. It is only by doing that they develop this ability. Lessons learned from teachers exists only in their minds. The lesson remains only in their mind until they perform an action that transfers the idea into a physical manifestation in the world. The idea now exists in a physical form in the world. By doing, children develop the capacity to do things with the need for external support. Before, children needed an authoritative figure to instruct them what to do. Now their prompt exists only from within. Their will develops through doing. Doing should be an integral part of children’s education because doing develops their will, and through their will, children can bring change and new form into the world

Preventive medicine is becoming more popular in today’s media, but western doctors approach preventive medicine in an odd way. Take breast cancer for instance. A national agenda led to the recommendation to increase screenings for breast tumors. Studies showed that such a proposal would increase the detection rate for breast tumors, and thus they would get treated at an earlier stage leading to lower mortality. This works, but tackles the problem half-way through. The women who would potentially be saved would have already had a breast tumor. Ideally, preventive medicine would stop this tumor from developing in the first place.

Prevention for cancer should involve analysis into the causes of cancer. It is clear from history that cancer is not a natural means of death, and that it is a man-made disease. The chemicals we have added and other changes we have made to our environment cause our cells to mutate eventually leading to cancer. For example, smoking tobacco mutates the cells in our lungs. Once the mutations build up over a long enough period of time. One cell will develop the combination of mutations that lead to the inability for the cell to stop itself from growing. The cell then multiplies exponentially leading to a tumor that eventually spreads to the rest of the body severely compromising the normal function of the body. Here we have a known cause of a mutagen (tobacco smoke) that leads to cancer. Eliminating tobacco smoke would result in fewer deaths from lung cancer. Therefore, good preventive medicine includes advice to stop smoking.

Research should look for other mutagens in our environment that are under our control. Many western medicines are known mutagens. Hormone replacement therapy led to numerous cases of breast cancer. Thus, good preventive medicine would remove hormone replacement therapy from people’s environments. There are so many mutagens in our environment that it is small wonder that cancer rates are so high. What are the most common mutagens that lead to cancer? This would be a good first step to good preventive medicine.

In the broader sense, ask the question: What causes disease? and What can we do to remove the causes of disease? These two questions should be the basis for national plans to develop preventive medicine.

Regarding my last post:

http://cdn.svcs.c2.uclick.com/c2/a57e22a0790e012ee3c400163e41dd5b

While running through a park the other day I came across a not alarming, but mildly depressing scene. The play structure was empty save for a 4 year old girl and her mother. The child was climbing up and down the poles and ladders and her mother hovered close to her watching her every move. What happened to the saying: “It takes a village to run a family?” While it is not necessary to ramble and complain about the way parents can be over protective of the children, or about the way that kids do not seem to play in large groups together while not in school, it does seem practical to propose a novel solution to the idea.

It would be an interesting experiment to build a community of homes organized with the intention of child rearing. Developers constantly throw up homes of such density that the inhabitants could walk around the entire block on the second floor using only open windows as a means of transport. A little rearrangement of these houses could open up stretches of land between houses that kids could play on. Communal areas could be planned in these areas so that kids have more than black asphalt to run on. In addition, a neighborhood agreement could be made to help facilitate communal child rearing. If kids could be given a safe area to play in they would need little parent supervision. Parents could foster a cultural norm in the area that in their free time children go outside to play with the neighborhood kids. If families with young children moved to these areas with the intention of collective child rearing higher quality playtime might develop to contrast with what I saw that day at the park.

I get tired of hearing the same news on tv day after day. A fire erupted in multnomah county this morning, two men attempted a burglary at the state bank last night. The images and stories fill my eyes and ears with tragedy and the suffering of other people. Just once I want to hear of people working together to better the community.  I see a wide gaping need: a tv program or web based news source that reports only the positive efforts of human kind.  How wonderful it would be to turn on cable tv and hear that a coomunity effort successfully started a youth soccer league to encourage kids to stay active.

Not only could health information infrastructure help coordinate care and minimize repetitive treatments, it could also serve as a vast pool of knowledge.  Imagine an anonymous database full of cases of treatments.  We could know that out of 200,000 people who received drug X, 20,000 people saw a marked reduction in symptoms.  Health information technology would allow us to run large numbers of randomized controlled trials at strikingly little cost.  With this, I’m sure we would uncover that of the millions of people on statin drugs only a very small number experienced a reduction in heart attacks.

I forgot. All this talk about profit maximizing and increasing our productivity has crowded out another important measure: happiness-maximizing. Economics sees humans as one-dimensional beings, that we exists to increase our matierial wealth. But why produce excess when you are happy producing enough to live comfortably? Oh Bhutan, I adore thee.