Today’s reading is “Artists as Experts in Visual Cognition,” by Aaron Kozbelt of the University of Chicago (Visual Cognition, 2001).

We need to incorporate many skills in order to make visual sense of the world. We must be able to discern objects even when we have incomplete visual information, pick out shapes from complex environments, and mentally rotate images to compare them with other images. All these phenomena have been measured by psychologists, and they have found that different individuals have varying degrees of skill at them.

What kind of people are best at these visual skills? Perhaps people who have had more practice with them, like artists. Kozbelt designed an experiment to answer this question. He sampled three populations of Carnegie-Mellon students: First-year art majors, fourth-year art majors, and first-year non-art majors. He then gave them several tests: vision tests that measured the tasks I describe above, and drawing tasks such as copying a photo, copying simple diagrams, or replicating a complicated drawing without lifting the pencil or making corrections.

Perhaps surprisingly, Kozbelt found that the first- and fourth-year art students were equally good at all the tasks, despite the expensive education the seniors had received. However, all the art students did better than non-artists in all the vision tasks, and they did better at all the drawing tasks except copying a photo (I’ll avoid the easy one-liners about “modern art”).

So apparently there is something to the idea of an “artist’s eye”: artists really are better at the visual tasks that all of us need to perform simply to get along in the world. Artists aren’t simply more manually dextrous than the rest of us, they’re actually more visually dextrous as well.

There are other examples of “experts” being better than novices at tasks related to their field. For example, Herbert Simon and William Chase found that Chess grandmasters can easily remember the positions of pieces on a chessboard after viewing it for just a few seconds. However, if the pieces are arranged randomly rather than in a position reflecting a real chess game, the experts are no better than novices. In these cases, experts have memorized a large set of possible cases, and can easily retrieve each one. However, Kozbelt argues that what artists are doing is different. Rather than a pattern, they have mastered a process.

Kevin Drum is advocating a means by which Social Security could be privatized in a meaningful way. As he points out, if reasonable leaders were seriously advocating such a plan, he could get behind it. The problem is, Drum admits his plan is a “fantasy” — Bush and his posse would never support it.

The plan is deceptively simple: In 2042, when Social Security is slated to run out of money, just move the retirement age back far enough to cover the gap in funding — probably from 67 back to 72. This gap is what would be covered by private accounts. Everyone slated to retire in 2042 or later would get an account they could use to cover this gap. The benefit of such a system is if the account fared poorly, the worst that could happen is the individual would postpone retirement a year or two.

Kevin suggests that the only reason his plan wouldn’t work is that Bush would never support it. Allow me to offer a few more. First off, let’s backtrack. Who’s going to be 67 in 2042? That would be workers born in 1975. So everyone born after 1975 would be subject to a new “tax” — the portion of Social Security devoted to their private accounts. This new tax would fall exclusively on workers from age 16 to 30. This is precisely the portion of the population that is already disproportionately funding social security because it’s a regressive tax that begins with dollar one of income and isn’t required of the rich.

Okay, so there’s a relatively easy answer to this dilemma: just give everyone the accounts. It’s slightly less unfair this way, because employers at least don’t have a disincentive to hire younger workers. Then if someone is slated to retire (as I am) in 2034, they might be able to clip an extra year or two off of that because of the money they’ve accumulated in their private accounts. Wonderful.

But this plan still doesn’t address some of the other problems with private accounts. For example, poorer workers will still have less money to invest in their accounts. So while worker A might have been investing 1 percent of $90K for 40 years, worker B would only have invested 1 percent of $25K over the same period. Who’s more likely to have to put off their retirement? We could simply ignore this problem, or address it by making the personal accounts even more regressive — make the tax fall only on the first $25K of income, for example. Yum.

Here’s my fantasyland solution to the Social Security problem. First of all, let’s take the “trust fund” out of the picture. It’s simply too tempting for the rest of the government to raid Social Security to pay for other programs. I suggest an immediate cut of the payroll tax so that it exactly covers what we spend on Social Security. The best way to do this is to exempt, say, the first $10,000 from payroll tax, thus cutting down on the tax’s regressivity.

Now we will see the *real* problem with the federal government: suddenly the deficit will baloon as all that money we’ve “borrowed” from Social Security emerges into realityland. But hey, we’ve just gotten a tax cut, so we can afford a revenue-neutral increase in the progressive income tax. That takes care of the problem for now.

In 8 or 9 years, when Social Security costs threaten to escalate, I’d suggest a gradual increase in the payroll tax back to 2004 levels — but added on the high end, not the low end — coupled with a gradual increase in the retirement age. I know I’m in the minority here, but I’d advocate rolling that age back as far as 72 or even 75. After all, people are going to save *something* for retirement, and better for them to have a point where they know Social Security will kick in, so that they have a finite time period to save money for. So this would be similar to Drum’s plan, only I wouldn’t force people to save. Yes, there will be a few people who are unable to save for retirement, but if they reach a point where they are unable to work before they reach age 75, they’ll be covered by Social Security disability.

Sounds a little harsh, I know — only covering retirement for those who are unable to work, but isn’t it just as harsh to ask struggling young families to pay for healthy, active seniors’ luxury golf club dues?