Rational Action

I read a pretty awful column in the Columbia Spectator the other day, so I decided to write a response. Lo’ and behold, they printed it without any cuts!

To the Editor:

While I am open to arguments against Jeffrey Sachs’ plans to save the world, I would not trust Chris Kulawik to make them. In his latest column (“The Cult of Sachs,� Oct. 19), Mr. Kulawik claims that the Great Society failed to help the poor, and so anything resembling it would fail in foreign countries, too. If he had reached these conclusions through responsible analysis, then perhaps he would have a point.

The statistics that Mr. Kulawik cites against the Great Society have little to do with the program he criticizes. He claims that “the poverty level, 10.1 percent in 1970, would fall a meager .1 percent to 10 percent in 1998.� Why does he choose this time period? The Great Society was a program proposed and implemented by President Lyndon Johnson. We ought to at least begin our analysis in 1964 and end it in 1969, lest we confuse the effects of the Great Society with those of dismantling it.

The official U.S. census poverty statistics—Mr. Kulawik cites the numbers for American families, not for all Americans—show that the poverty rate fell more than seven percentage points between 1963 and 1969. By that time, about 12 percent of Americans were living at or below the poverty level. More than thirty years later, roughly the same fraction of our citizens subsists at this level of real income.

Mr. Kulawik owes his readers an explanation as to how the Great Society prevented the poor from sharing in America’s economic growth in the 1960s, and he ought to explain to his editors why he backed up his claims with the wrong statistics. Perhaps once he has acknowledged these failures of logic we will listen to his suggestions on alleviating world poverty.

Adam Sacarny CC ’07

From here.

When my sleeping patterns are irregular, I experience sleep paralysis. When people ask me what that is, I explain that it’s basically when you wake up before your body does. You’re conscious, but your body is stuck in the dream state. The body does a nifty thing during dream sleep: it disables voluntary control of your muscles, making you paralyzed. Hence sleep paralysis. As long as you know what’s happening, it’s actually not scary.

As time has gone on, I have begun to experience sleep paralysis in a more advanced way. Sometimes, the feeling of being conscious occurs before my dream even ends. I think this is called lucid dreaming, but I don’t think what I experience quite fits the definition. Instead, I dream about falling asleep and waking up. I wake up within the dream, and I am often paralyzed in the dream. And so, last night:

I had gone to sleep fantastically early… 11:30 maybe? 12? I must have dropped quickly into the dream phase. In my dream I was basically lying on my back, but in class. I was fighting to stay awake, but I kept on losing… my eyes would shut and I would drift off into sleep. Then I would become somewhat awake again, and I would try valiantly to open up my eyes. But they were practically welded shut, and only with great effort could I open them.

My body of course was in an even worse state. My motion was limited. I recall finally getting up after so much effort, only to lose the ability to move once again. My standing body frozen, I expected to tip over and fall to the ground. But the rules of gravity were suspended and instead I floated to the floor, returning more or less to my old position, my head resting against the frame of a bed.

The whole dream I had a great sense of guilt, since I was in class but could not stay awake. I have this guilty feeling whenever I am sleepy in small classes, so this dream was really an interesting intersection between real life memories and sleep paralysis.

At some point I woke up; I believe that it came as I successfully forced open my eyes. I did not feel like I had been asleep… instead, what I had been dreaming felt more like an unpleasant experience from moments ago. And indeed it had been unpleasant. I remember feeling uncomfortable during the dream, and when I finally escaped from it, I continued to feel physically uncomfortable. This is a feeling I often have after experiencing sleep paralysis.

It is interesting how in the dream I was trying to open my eyes to keep awake in class. Often in sleep paralysis I am trying to open my eyes to wake up. Finally I succeed and wake up… in the dream I succeeded several times in opening my eyes, but the dream also ended with my eyes opening, I think.