About Chris Dick

Chris rides on his digital sway-backed donkey tilting his lance, quixotically at all sorts of causes -- some hopeless, some perhaps -- not. I enjoy your feedback. Long live rational debate.
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Free & Fair Trade

By |2020-06-24T17:09:51-04:00May 1st, 2017|Categories: Society|Tags: , , |

Free trade and the global movement of goods and services have been under political attack from the left for quite a while.  Now these ‘socialists’ have been joined by America-Firsters and other ‘My Country, Everyone Else Be Damned’ groups on the Right.  These people, who agree on little else, sing from the same hymn book on free trade and the song they sing most often is the one about the flight of manufacturing jobs  from Frank in Toledo to Pedro in Mexico City or Pho Bang in Vietnam.  This refrain, conjuring up as it does an image [...]

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Good Arguments

By |2020-04-28T21:34:55-04:00November 14th, 2016|Categories: Ourselves|Tags: , , |

Most of us don’t argue very well. I’m not talking about the “…so’s your mother” type of argument — most of us do just fine there; I’m talking about debating points of disagreement in politics, economics, or anything where facts are in dispute and abstract reasoning has to come into play. Now, I should declare my biases here. Unlike Aristotle, I do not believe that man is, in his deepest depths, a rational animal. Nor do I believe that most people, much of the time, will change their most deeply held convictions on the basis of even [...]

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Healthcare Metrics

By |2020-04-25T13:44:29-04:00November 29th, 2014|Categories: Society|Tags: , |

How does one measure the effectiveness of a healthcare system? (I have stated objections to the term healthcare system in a previous post; but we are stuck with it as the accepted label in policy circles.) Some measures seem fairly obvious, life expectancy, infant mortality, timely access to care, number of healthcare workers per thousand of the national population, etc. The number of metrics appears to be limited only by the ingenuity of statisticians. Harder to measure is the opportunity cost of doing option A rather than option B within the system because if B is never [...]

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Healthcare Myths

By |2020-04-25T19:26:14-04:00November 27th, 2014|Categories: Society|Tags: , |

Some months ago, I posted a short item about healthcare policy, and promised more to come. I have been dancing around this commitment like a bare-foot shaman around a nest of vipers. Healthcare policy in North America is a disheartening and daunting subject for analysis. As Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry puts it, “…debate often floats in a realm of fantasies, myths, and half-truths — more like a dream or a nightmare about a thing than the thing itself.” However, I return to this subject, putting fear and trembling aside, because it is a hugely important policy tangle and even [...]

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Young Muslims in Prison

By |2020-07-22T20:35:17-04:00October 31st, 2014|Categories: Culture|Tags: , , |

Learning from Young Muslims in Prison A Recommended Essay The essay is a truly admirable literary form. Great essayists tend to be writers who range widely through literature, ideas and social mores, and distill the essence of their observations into powerfully cogent and concise prose. Great essayists have never been common on the ground, (George Orwell died in 1948) and there aren’t many around today that I know of. Theodore Dalrymple is such a one. A well travelled, magnificently well-read physician who spent many years as a consulting psychiatrist in English prisons, his often [...]

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Brillig and Slithy Toves

By |2020-07-22T20:38:52-04:00August 13th, 2014|Categories: Culture|Tags: , |

I have a friend who writes poetry. I find this admirable. Poetry is not exactly the signature art form of this young millennium. There are reasons for this, of course — most of them reflecting rather large gaps in the modern cultural curriculum. Most of us did not attend a hoighty-toighty Ivy League prep school and have not had, in our formative years, the good fortune to come across a Peter Keating  (the character played by the much lamented Robin Williams in Dead Poets’ Society). By the time we get to college, many of our literary habits [...]

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