Loss of connectedness among children of divorce -- Time to look beyond individualistic traits

In the comments of the post below, there's a discussion of behavior genetics. This research program tries to figure out how our current status has been influenced by genetic and a variety of environmental influences, and their interactions. As far as I know, the traits they study are all from the field of "individual differences" or "differential psychology" -- the things that make you, you and me, me. Personality, intelligence, attitudes, beliefs, habits, and so on.

Necessarily, they cannot study the things that make us, us and them, them. "We" do not share a genome, and "we" are not raised in the same house by the same parents; and ditto for "they" who do not share an entire genome or a common set of parents, which would contrast with our own. Now we're getting into sociology, anthropology, and so on.

There's nothing wrong with the behavior genetics approach, but it misses all of those group-defined traits that give us our cultural identity and our sense of belonging to something larger than ourselves. The things that give greater meaning to our lives, beyond noticing how smart, attractive, or extraverted we may be. So, we ought to supplement behavior genetics with group-ier social sciences to get the full picture of how we develop and turn out the way we do.

One of the major weaknesses of using behavior genetics to study the effects of divorce on children is that the main thing that marriage and family are about is group-level stuff. It's interesting to study how marital strife does and does not affect a child's individual characteristics -- mood, behavior problems, drug use, and so on -- but that's not where we should look for the effects of divorce.

Fundamentally, divorce represents a permanent rupture in the social connectedness among nuclear family members, not only between husband and wife but critically between the children and the absent parent ("non-custodial," "non-residential"). Your parents are not getting back together. And if you were raised by a single parent, without the other having been there for long, your parent is not ever going to bring the absent parent into the home to give you both parents.

Divorce typically results in a change of residence, since one parent (the custodial parent) will not be able to afford payments and maintenance of a house that had been a joint investment of two parents, while also raising the kids. Thus divorce also robs children of the "sense of place" of the home that they had attached themselves to so far during development. Houses, yards, sidewalks, blocks, and neighborhoods are not interchangeable, any more than parenting adults are to the kid. A stepmother is not the child's true mother, and the new place of residence will feel more alien -- more "not meant for us" -- than the marital home.

Moving one level up, the change in location will usually sever the children's social and cultural ties to the group of kids their age, whether at school or in the neighborhood broadly. They have to start all over again with new kids, and again -- kids are not interchangeable. Children of divorce have permanently lost their old friends who they'd grown close to, and now must do the best they can with a different set of kids -- and often not as able to get as close to them as they are able to get to each other, since they have grown up together, while the child of divorce is late to the party.

Finally, not only have they lost the connection to their home, but of their community environment in general. The neighbors' houses, the parks, the libraries, the malls, and the churches will all be different. So will the secret hiding places, the writings carved into the sidewalk, and all of those places where some meaningful experience took place. All those places, anchoring all those experiences, give you a sense of belonging to a particular, special world -- and you must now leave all of them behind for the rest of your formative years.

Whether children are resilient is not the question. Of course nature has programmed us to adapt to changing circumstances -- to roll with the punches. But again, resilience, adjustment, etc., are individual traits: however well the child of divorce adjusts to his new set of parents, new home, new social circle, and new community, he has lost much of his sense of belonging to a particular nested set of groups, and he won't ever get those back. (And to make things worse, resilience is only a tendency back toward normality, not a full recovery.)

We can ignore the predictable glib rejoinders about how any set of parents and peers will do, how a house is nothing more than a memory-free building on a featureless lot of dirt, and how all the streets and parks and malls in this country are all so similar that the kids will never be able to tell the difference. Of course they're not -- particular pieces of social and cultural life are not fungible stuff like dollars and cents.

Divorce is not the only way that children may be uprooted and transplanted willy-nilly into an alien place, but it sure is one of the more common and most reliable ways. And no matter how much the autistics may wish to insist on the fungibility of home, peer group, and community, none will say so for the parents. The children used to have both parents, now they only have one; if a new one moves in, everybody is always aware of their alien status within the family, and behave accordingly. The vastly higher rates of child abuse coming from step-parents rather than parents provides a dark example of what happens when we play down how particular the social-cultural arrangement should be once the ball gets rolling.

Little disruptions here and there are inevitable, and our minds are designed to handle that in the way that we can handle taking a hard fall or getting slugged in the gut. But ripping the children right out from their existing network of support and belonging is far too severe for them to bounce right back from. And treating the world as though it worked that simply is the height of arrogance and heartlessness on the part of the adults.

Children of divorce, an unseen historical trend: Is it related to status-striving?

Typically when you look up information on divorce rates over time, you'll see divorces per capita and divorces per marriage, within a given year. Graphing them produces the following:

No matter which rate you choose, there's been a secular increase since the mid-19th C. Apart from that, there's an apparent burst from the early '20s through the mid-'40s, a dramatic recovery through the late '50s, another surge during the '60s and '70s, and another dramatic decline since then.

This cycling allows for a half-full or half-empty debate about the state of things recently and into the future. "Sure, that surge during the '60s and '70s was bad, but it's gotten much better since. Maybe it'll surge again, but who can say?"

No such debate can take place, though, when it comes to a more important statistic -- how likely is a child to grow up without both biological parents? All those stats you read about divorces, marriages, risk of divorce for a given marriage cohort, etc., ignore the main worry that the public has about the topic of divorce -- namely, children of divorce.

The General Social Survey asks a question about who you were living with at age 16. I'll look only at whites to make the point stronger. In the graph below, I've recoded responses into living with both parents (red), living with mother with or without a stepfather (blue), living with father with or without a stepmother (green), and other responses (yellow). I've grouped people into 4-year birth cohorts starting with 1900, which you probably won't be able to read without clicking to make the image larger.

There's a tiny rise in children growing up in intact families, going from those born around 1900 to those born around 1950, but it's only going from 77% to 80%. But it's basically flat at a high level for that entire period. And remember, the question asks about their lives at age 16, so 16 year-olds were still highly likely to be living in intact families into the early '70s (the '56-'59 cohort is barely distinguishable from '40s births).

Then there's a sharp drop with those born in the early '60s, who would've been 16 in the late '70s, and keeps dropping after that, although it may have stalled out at the bottom with Millennials. (Ignore the last cohort, though, since the sample size is tiny.)

So, unlike the picture of divorce rates, which showed a dramatic reversal around 1980 and lasting through today, rates of children of divorce have only gotten worse since those born in the early '60s.

When people argue about whether the divorce problem is getting better or worse, they would seem to be talking past each other. The people who point to the first graph are talking primarily about the fragility vs. stability of the marriage bond, whereas the folks who respond with, I don't care what that graph says, it's getting way worse, probably have in mind the disruption to family cohesiveness.

I put myself in the latter -- marriage is important, but kids growing up in intact families is more. Marriage vs. divorce is about whether two egocentric adults, the husband and wife, can reconcile their differences and stay together. Once kids come into the picture, the egocentric adults are no longer simply husband and wife but father and mother. They have even more other people to take into consideration, and these new ones are defenseless and impressionable to boot. Time to stop thinking only of your own goals.

What's behind these changes? I'm tempted to point to the status-striving / inequality cycle. If some problem started to get bad by the mid-to-late 1970s, and has only gotten worse since, that's a likely culprit. (It's clearly not the cocooning / crime cycle.) We should then see rates of intact families rise during the Great Compression of roughly 1920 to 1970. Or, going from births around 1900 to around 1955. It's there, but very slight. The pattern is a little stronger by adding the red and blue bars together -- that's growing up with at least your mother (both parents, mother alone, or mother and stepfather).

You'd think rising inequality would make mothers and fathers stick together more for the benefit of their children, if they were worried about their offspring doing well in the future. And falling inequality should relax that, with one parent saying, "Meh, it's hard not to earn a decent standard of living these days -- they'll manage."

Therefore, it must have to do with the status-striving that produces inequality to begin with (a la Peter Turchin). One parent starts to feel like they could do better for themselves by splitting off from the other parent, regardless of who gets the kids. This constant monitoring of your prospects for trading up smells a lot more like status-striving. Or, it may not have to do with wanting to leave in order to re-marry or date someone with greater economic resources than your current spouse, but with the drive toward conspicuous consumption and leisure -- both far easier when you aren't held back by the old ball and chain, nor those darn kids who need your time, effort, and money. Whatever the causes, they all seem to stem from status-striving rather than inequality.

Historical research even farther back would be tough because divorce was a much more serious economic disruption before the welfare state. You might look at how common orphans and abandoned children were, though. Those could always reflect parents who just didn't have enough money to raise them -- but then that's always relative to how much the parents feel they need to spend on themselves. "I just wouldn't have enough to buy diapers every month and still shop for groceries at Whole Foods," or whatever the equivalent was in the Gilded Age. And then again, maybe the children were abandoned because one of their parents was too obsessesed with status-striving to rear their own offspring.

Our vague impression of Victorian England and the Gilded Age in America is full of children who don't live with both mommy and daddy --  all those orphaned and abandoned characters from Dickens, and Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. But some numerical data would be nice to confirm that impression.

I'm becoming more convinced that conservatives who apologize or cheerlead for the Victorian era don't have a clue what kind of society they're defending, except for the cynical rats among the elite who want another Gilded Age where they're on top of a steep pyramid. Below are a few signs that the Gilded Age didn't care hardly as much as the Fifties did about keeping families together. The scenes are of New York in the 1880s, from How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis.

GSS variables: family16, cohort, race

Abandoned building chic during the heyday of latchkey children

Our neo-Pre-Raphaelite culture is fascinated by ruins that have become reclaimed by nature. See, among many others, this photo essay on The Ruins of Detroit. The prevailing atmosphere is one of desolation and isolation, finality and futility. The human race is gone, and it's never coming back. Nature itself is not lush, thriving, colorful, or expressive -- but a cold and impersonal crust blindly accreting and advancing to block out all traces of human existence.

Before this era of bleak chic, abandoned buildings were considered cool not because of their wasteland atmosphere, but because they opened up possibilities for sanctuary, a public place that could be reclaimed by real-life people rather than impersonal nature. Folks whose home life wasn't always secure and stable, i.e. the generation of latchkey children and children of divorce.

Odd as it may seem at first, abandoned buildings were thus a sign of the hopefulness, resilience, and can-do spirit of those who were given the label of "troubled teenagers," "disadvantaged youth," etc. They were places meant to be lived in, taken care of, and enjoyed -- not visited by gawking, clinical tourists who wouldn't touch or move or improve anything for fear of disturbing authentic decay.

With adolescents as the target audience, squatting chic appeared most commonly in music videos. Here's a notable exception for children in movie form, the musty attic above the school where Bastian connects with characters from another world in The NeverEnding Story:

The atmosphere in music videos wasn't always so Gothic, though. The life of squatters is shown as lighthearted and fun-loving, despite their surroundings. Here's the video for "Catch My Fall" by Billy Idol, where the tone is playful in contrast to his earlier video for "Dancing with Myself," which is more toward alienation:

The video for "Nothing at All" by Heart was filmed in the Bradbury Building, a location used in Blade Runner to establish the grungy Gothic mood of the coming dystopia:

In the Heart video, the lighting is still Gothic, but the surface is a little glossier, and the characters are upbeat and happy-go-lucky -- like, "Well, we've got this empty space all to ourselves, might as well make the best of it and have fun together."

Similar scenes from real life can be seen in the documentary Streetwise (see my review here), where one of the teenage runaways is squatting an apartment in an abandoned high-rise, along with his somewhat older hippie housemate. There's a fun shot of the 13 year-old dude roller-skating around the empty, dingy hallways that makes you chuckle at how resilient the kid is, more than feel sorry for the crappy living conditions that he's making do with (which you also feel, of course).

The goal here isn't to catalog every piece of popular culture where fun-loving folks reclaim such a place and make it their own sanctuary, although in the comments I might include other examples that come to mind later. And I figure you all will know of other examples already. The main point to take away is that in a time of social connectedness, even abandoned youth and abandoned buildings could be transformed into a halfway wholesome ecology, whereas in cocooning times, total isolation reigns.

Re-capping the 20th anniversary of the JFK assassination

Twenty years to the hour after President John F. Kennedy was gunned down, 1,500 people gathered Tuesday for a memorial service a block away from the assassination site...

"This city has never blamed the city of Washington for the death of Abraham Lincoln so it is unfair to blame the city of Dallas for this criminal act," declared former U.S. Sen. Ralph Yarborough, who rode in the motorcade with Kennedy two decades ago...

"The future did not die here -- it never dies; it goes on. Here died one spirit," added U.S. Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez of San Antonio, who also rode in the motorcade...

Shortly before the ceremony began, a column of vans and cars taking part in a motorcade sponsored by "The Texas Coalition for Freedom" circled the block where the Kennedy Memorial is located, displaying signs supporting President Reagan and opposing communism. The group later rallied at the memorial.

Another group of protesters silently stood to the side during the service, holding a banner protesting U.S. arms in El Salvador.

From "Dallas Remembers Assassination" (AP, 11 / 22 / 1983).

That was another world, wasn't it? I can't imagine today seeing a caravan of right-wingers trolling a major anniversary of JFK's assassination, nor a group of left-wingers using it to protest militarism. Folks back then had a healthy lack of respect for celebrity worship and the sanctification of high authority.

Steve Sailer's been covering the coverage of the 50th anniversary in the mainstream media, most of which pushes the theme of "Dallas, a city of hate in need of redemption, has it atoned enough to be forgiven of its sins?" They gloss over the name of the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the fact that he was a Marxist wacko who tried to defect to the Soviet Union, that he was not from Dallas, and so on.

E.g., this article from the NYT that mentions Oswald's name just twice, and only includes half of a sentence about his background and motives: "...even though the killer was a Marxist outsider." Sooo back to how Dallas was like literally the most racist and bigoted city in, seriously, the entire country, I'm not even kidding.

Not like there weren't any retards back in the '80s who tried to frame the story as though the political climate of Dallas had assassinated the president, but I was surprised to read how much truth broke through in the NYT. By '83, political naivete was considered an embarrassment, no longer enshrined as "idealism," and the public was way too savvy to swallow a bunch of over-stretched apologies on behalf of a Supreme Leader who didn't even get to accomplish much in his less than three years in office.

The Left was still hanging around, but remember from this post, they were populist, not power-seekers and corporate cocksuckers. That began to change during the '90s; with respect to Camelot hagiography, especially after the 1991 movie JFK. This shift in the popular view so disturbed Noam Chomsky, a mainstay of radical politics, that in 1993 he wrote a short book detailing how Kennedy was not about to end the War in Vietnam or otherwise save us from the turbulence of the later '60s, and that there was no grand conspiracy to assassinate him or cover it up.

Well, you can imagine what the gist of the 1983 NYT article was -- "Dallas, Dallas, You can't hide, We charge you with regicide!" So let's take a look instead at the parts that you couldn't sneak past the thought police in our Millennial era. For ease of reading, I'll put my comments in brackets within a single long block quote. It mentions Oswald's name six times.

From "Dallas Still Wondering: Did It Help Pull Trigger?" (NYT, 11 / 22 / 1983):

Many demurred at the time, among them Price Daniel, a former Governor. He maintained that Oswald ''spent more time in Russia than in Texas'' and ''was not a product of Dallas, having lived there less than two months, a far shorter time than in New York, New Orleans, San Diego, Moscow and Minsk.''

[Details of the killer's background and motives – something that might give us insight. But detective work is so boring when you can just fantasize instead.]

Most horrific, the minister said, was ''the cheer that came from the crowd across from the City Hall when word came that Oswald had been murdered in the basement of the police station.''

[If there was a crowd cheering the death of Oswald, and no such cheering when Kennedy was shot... what do we conclude about how much Oswald's act resonated with the people of Dallas?]

The moral indictment of Dallas as an accessory to assassination strikes some here as strange, especially as there was scant mention of civic culpability in 1968 when other dreams were slain: those attending Senator Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis.

[Entirely obvious back in '83, mind-boggling today.]

Mr. Greene, like most others here, still sees the situation that evolved in the 1960's as a failure of the city's leadership, not as any fundamental flaw in its people.

''The real crime,'' he said in an interview this week, ''was in the leadership. They should have announced that this town was not run by these kooks. But the leadership didn't make things plain until just before the assassination, right after the Stevenson episode.''

''The police told everybody before the motorcade, 'You're not going come down here and embarrass us.' And they didn't. Ninety-nine percent of the people along the motorcade route were deliriously supportive.

[So, wait, in a city of hate directed toward Kennedy and all he stood for, there was no counter-crowd to heckle, jeer, and throw shit at his motorcade? I saw worse heckling during George W. Bush's first inauguration, where the “stole the election” thing was still in the air, and his car sped by with the tinted windows rolled up for a good stretch of the route.]

''Then the totally unexpected happened. It wasn't a right-wing kook, it was a left-wing kook, a publicly pronounced left-wing kook. It was a sudden paradox.

[Oswald's leftist background isn't glossed over as one of those “oh yeah, btw” kind of factoids. In '83, the writer drew attention to the fact that everybody in 1963 who thought they had it right, had it wrong, completely backwards in fact. Take-home message: show some humility, liberal witch-hunters.]

Indeed, the reception the handsome young President and his elegant wife received that day was tumultuous, so much so that Nellie Connally, the wife of Gov. John B. Connally, leaned over and exulted, ''No one can say Dallas doesn't love and respect you, Mr. President.''

''You sure can't,'' the President replied...

[Reminder: Kennedy was welcomed in Dallas as though he were one of the Beatles, to use a slight anachronism. Did the City of Hate forget to set their alarm clocks that day?]

Although critical, Mr. Marcus [of the Nieman-Marcus stores] and others here who will discuss the city's shortcomings of the 1960's nonetheless view a blanket condemnation as unfair.

''A lot of journalists and book writers and others hit Dallas with their stories already written,'' Mr. Greene said. ''At the time, I was generally considered a liberal editor in Dallas, but I found myself defending Dallas against pointless charges, against things the city wasn't guilty of.

''We had a lot of semipolitical kooks who had a lot of lung power but not much real power. They depended on their actions' substituting for their numbers.''

[The current NYT reporter who hit Dallas with his story already written was nevertheless willing to allow that quote in, to open up the possibility that maybe his close-mindedness is not a desirable trait for a reporter, and that he's repeating the mistakes of outside reporters from 20 years earlier. Today's writers don't allow the other side to call the writer's pre-fab fantasies “pointless charges.”]

The Washington Post ran a similar article at the time on the theme of, Should we burn Dallas at the stake or forgive its sins? Forgive -- thumbs up. Burn -- thumbs down. ("20 Years Later, Dallas Remembers -- Minus Its Shame and Guilt," WP, 11 / 22 / 1983.)

It too allowed some inconvenient truths to get past the censors, though not as much as in the NYT (the WP is more liberal). But in a sign of the levity and black humor of the Eighties, particularly on topics of Dire Consequences To Liberals, the reporter closes the article with this quote:

"For years and years, the first thing people said when they heard you were from Dallas was, 'Oh, you're the ones who killed Kennedy,' " said Shannon Wynne, a native who owns a string of nightspots. "Now they want to know who killed J.R." Down here, that's progress.

Does one clique rule the whole school these days?

Before, I looked at how there seem to be very few distinct and cohesive cultural groups among young people nowadays, as compared to the United Nations of crowds and scenes back in the '80s.

Now, your group membership is mostly based on similarity in tastes and appearance, like attracting like. In the '80s, the group you wanted to join didn't care so much about whether you were the identical twin of an existing group member for tastes and appearance, but whether you were going to pay your dues, get the back of whoever needed it, and contribute to the fun atmosphere of group activities.

Membership was more "costly," hence an honest signal of your loyalty to the team. Whereas now, you don't need to pitch in anything since like attracts like -- once they can tell you have similar tastes and appearance, they let you get close, not because you've expressed any interest in joining and contributing. Groups were thus more cohesive back then, and more superficial and prone to dissolving now (once you start digging a different type of music or sporting a different haircut you're no longer like us).

Something I didn't touch on before, but that is no less striking of a difference between then and now, is how hierarchical and hegemonic the relationship is among cliques these days. With so few distinct groups to throw their weight around, those that do exist have a corner on the fitting-in market. In some schools, they may be the only game in town -- you're either in that one group, or you're part of the atomized majority. Crucially, not an anti-establishment majority that is taking on the monopoly clique, but just a great wide sea of atomized bitter individuals.

Since groups today are mainly defined by tastes and appearance, this monopoly clique will be the ones who are the best looking and the most extraverted (compared to other Millennials, at any rate). So then, there's the popular crowd and everybody else, who would like to move up and fit in.

My strong impression is that crowds were not very hierarchically ranked in the '80s, where you might start out with low-ranking group A, then climb your way up into B, and if you were lucky, reach the peak with C. The goal was not status striving, but fitting in -- it didn't particularly matter which group, as long as you found one. The stoners were perfectly happy in their group, the metalheads in theirs, the jocks and preps and nerds in theirs. That suggests that they were all of roughly equal ranking (with some dominance, say of jocks over nerds), each could stick up for itself in a potential confrontation with any of the others, and changing membership was more of a lateral than a vertical movement.

One of those groups were the good-looking and extraverted clique, but folks in the other cliques saw them as just another clique. Perhaps they wanted to bone the girls in that clique, but they didn't bow down to them. And girls in other cliques may have wanted to be their friends, but only the truly insecure wanted to abandon their current group in order to "trade up."

Being good-looking and having good people skills allowed this group to socialize easily with any of the other groups, but they couldn't apply much peer pressure or cultural influence to out-group members. They didn't wield much power, and were not a gouging monopoly. If anything, they were often the target of potshots by the other groups -- not sustained campaigns to cut them down, but more like regular reminders that they weren't royalty, and not to get too big for their breeches.

I think this explains why Generation X chafes the most at the two prevailing modes of inter-group relations over the past 20 years -- multiculturalism, which forces groups to interact with and worship one another, rather than leaving groups to do their own thing; and authority worship, where us peons are supposed to drop everything we're interested in and get on board with whatever the fashionable people are liking -- Apple products, Instagram, Panera Bread, etc. Their formative experiences with social organization lead them to expect and demand the opposite.

And it also explains why Millennials are so gung-ho with these prevailing modes -- forced interaction between groups is like, "Omigosh, finally a group has been created for me to belong to, and I get to interact with other groups too!" And fashion/authority worship is all to familiar from their middle and high school days -- you either do what the popular crowd does, or you remain part of the atomized masses. The bustling pluralism of the '80s would feel disturbing -- like, how do you even know which group to join? Why can't someone else just create a group for you, like parents setting up a regular group for play dates?

People think that the form of social organization in primary and secondary school is of no great importance, but if it leaves enduring effects on the students' mindset and behavior, as they internalize one set of norms vs. another, then it's nothing to brush off. And these two types of organization stem from a more sheltered vs. a less supervised environment while they're growing up, as I detailed in the earlier post. (Sheltered = hegemonic monopoly group, unsupervised = organic pluralism.)

These ideas were in the back of my mind from watching teen movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Breakfast Club, and Heathers. But I've started to read more of that memoir on promiscuity that I talked about last week, Loose Girl, which is set mostly in the '80s. Maybe it's the non-fiction nature of the narrative, or maybe all the extra detail that comes from a book-length treatment, but it really struck me how flatter the social group hierarchies used to be back then, allowing for more fluid movement between groups. Fitting in and falling out was not primarily about status striving and downward mobility.

Speculations on the coming race riots

For the last several years, the media have been ignoring the racially motivated attacks by blacks against whites. But now that Jews are being targeted in Brooklyn, it's time to take the matter seriously (e.g., this article).

Clueless conservatives might try to find a silver lining here:

"Well, at least some good is coming from the never-ending paranoia and obsession that Jews have about anti-Semitism -- it gives the mainstream media a politically correct veneer to finally get out the message about dark thugs knocking out random whities."

Guess again -- the fact that only Jewish victims get press is a symptom of the underlying disease, whereby white victims of black crime get no sympathy, and the race of the attackers is scrupulously kept secret by the media. Only if it's another minority group do we hear anything, and even then it has to be a verbally combative minority group.

Although violent crime has been falling for the past 20 years, there has been a rise in a certain qualitative type of violence, namely where the victim is a stand-in for the entire group that they come from, and the attacker is bitter at and lashing out against that group -- any representative of the group will serve as a target for their anger. It's part of the broader trend toward polarization and political instability; see Peter Turchin's series of posts under the heading of "Indiscriminate Mass Murder as a Form of Political Violence" in this review post.

He's talking more about spree shootings, but blacks punching out randomly chosen whites is an equally good example of the general pattern.

Based on the rise-and-fall pattern of such violence over the past 200 years, he predicts that a peak or spike is headed our way sometime during the 2020s. (Looking historically at homicide rates, I predict a rise in violent crime around the same time. The two cycles are separate, so sometimes they'll be in phase and sometimes out of phase.)

Blacks are therefore already getting a running start, antagonizing whites as long as they feel they can get away with a slap on the wrist. Tempting fate like that will make it hard to feel sorry for them when whites eventually start fighting back, perhaps igniting a wave of lynchings and race riots not seen since the explosion of the late 1910s and early '20s.

Aside from predicting what time things will get out of control, can we also predict what geographical regions will be hit hardest? Definitely -- look at where all of these "knockout" games are taking place. They're mostly in a band from the Midwest eastward through the Bos-Wash corridor. Not in the Deep South, not in the Mountain West, and as far as I know not yet on the West Coast (though it wouldn't be hard for them to spread there).

Those are the areas that have the strongest roots in the culture of settled farmers, primarily the culture of law. Some punk knocks out a perfect stranger in a hate crime -- how do you respond there? Feel sorry for the legacy of slavery, the culture of poverty, and the absence of parents that led this wayward black to indiscriminate assault. Send him to juvie for awhile, then let him out when he promises that he's really sorry.

Blacks aren't stupid, they know they can get away with so much more disrespect and confrontation in those places. Those were also the main places in the 1960s and '70s that were shaken by race riots (i.e. by blacks).

In an earlier post, I showed that what keeps blacks in line is not the Saxon-Scandinavians and their culture of law (which only encourages blacks to fuck around with strangers), but hell-raisin' Celts and their culture of honor. When you're surrounded by hawk-nosed hillbillies who aren't afraid to go to jail in order to defend the community, it makes you think twice about starting shit with strangers in the first place.

And after the whole thing blows over, the namby-pambys will say, "Welp, guess that's the occasional price we have to pay in order to enjoy a civilized law-abiding culture, and not end up like those poor hicks in Kentucky and West Virginia." Right, there's too much atomization in the legalistic areas for anyone to feel an altruistic drive to break the silly little law if it means keeping or restoring harmony in the broader community.

As Turchin's writings on these topics show, political / indiscriminate violence is linked to rising inequality. So for the long term, it's better to keep inequality from rising. But that is mostly a function of a change in the mindset and behavior of the elites, not of those at the grassroots. The elites are the ones over-producing themselves, socializing costs while privatizing benefits, and locked in internecine status contests. What can the hicks in Kentucky do about that?

In the short term, the correct response is not to wring our hands about "addressing the root causes that lie in economic inequality," but to strike back at those who are spreading disorder. Reducing inequality, while desirable and helpful over the long term, won't be achieved overnight. Meanwhile the legacy of slavery is at your door -- tonight -- trying to break in and "rightfully take back what the white man stole from my ancestors."

I wouldn't stress the importance of being armed in the unlikely event of self-defense either. It's too late by the time you face that choice. The hordes are already roaming your neighborhood at that point, and you're shivering alone in your cocoon. You want to make sure they don't even think about setting foot in your community. That requires social organization with your fellow community members, and sending clear warning symbols that would-be hate criminals will be overwhelmed by a bloodthirsty mob before they can escape back to wherever they came from.

It's the same thing that keeps skinheads from going into the Bronx if they felt like messing around with blacks. "Shit, if those honky-ass skinheads came in here, we'd woop they ass all the way back to the suburbs."

Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.

In the digital age, will we have memorable pictures fit for an album?

I remember as a kid looking through boxes and albums of pictures when the scenes captured on film were scarcely in "the past." Say, the summer vacation, birthday party, or Christmas morning from a few years back. Whenever my family meets up where those pictures are being kept, we still look over them. Aside from those being better times -- mostly the '80s, and when my mom and dad were dating and got married in the '70s -- they are just more enjoyable to look at, out of context.

You can't say that about the gigabytes of digital pictures that you have. You hardly ever browse through them in the short term after taking them, and you aren't ever going to huddle around the laptop with your family and click through image files. Aside from those coming from less eventful times, they just look flat, harsh, and drained-out.

Here is one of the first results that came up for "family picture 2009" on Google Images, and sadly is not unrepresentative of what our pictures look like these days, albeit in exaggerated form to make the points clear. (Click to enlarge.)

Most notably, the light that should be shimmering on the surface of the lake in the background is blown out, near pure white. Worse, it's bleeding into the white clothing and blond hair of the portrait subjects -- you can't make out the contours of the girl's head who's wearing the blue shirt. This harsh area must take up about one-quarter of the entire picture, too. Nothing like a bigass spotlight shining in your face to make you want to continue looking at the scene.

There's not much range in the brightness levels either, which would have given it a more striking presentation. The lighting is more or less the same intensity, aside from that overexposed lake. Where are the dramatic shadows to counterbalance all that brightness?

The colors don't really jump out at you either. They're not Matrix-level bland, but they aren't vivid.

And everything looks realistically smooth, without the kind of grain that you see on projected film when you go to the movies. The atmosphere looks totally ordinary, hence will not tickle your senses or stick in your mind.

Now for a picture that belongs in a photo album. Here's one of the first Google Image results for "girls 1985" --

What a world of difference! The whites look pretty bright in the sunlight, but they're nowhere close to being blown out. If you click the larger version, you can make out the details of folds in the fabric of the tank tops, which would be wiped out into harsh, flat white space if this were shot in digital. And look at how much shadow there is at the same time, not just around where they're standing, but the darker cast of the trees way in the back, and the "inner" areas of the trees nearby that aren't at the outer edge catching sunlight. The lighting spans a wider range here, and it gives it a theatrical look.

Colors are lush, warm, and saturated -- welcoming -- and they don't look like something you could just pull up on MS Paint. It looks like there's a red or pinkish cast to the whole picture, too -- probably by accident, but what the hell, it makes it look special.

And there's enough grain to make the atmosphere somewhat hazy and dreamy. It just looks like a memory. Contrast this with the "you are there" photorealism of the first picture, which looks like it was shot for a news item in the local paper (who's going to remember that?).

I didn't say the second picture was going to be hanging in a museum, that's an irrelevant standard. It is the kind of picture that we'd all be happy to keep in an album and enjoy refreshing our memory by pulling it out and huddling around it.

In general, our film pictures look like a stylized portrayal of a reality that we're familiar with, while our digital pictures are more uncanny the more you look at them -- like strange robots coated with passable human skin, changelings of the people and places we thought we had recognized.

I plan to do a longer, mostly image-filled post on film vs. digital photos, as they really exist in our albums and on our hard drives, not hypothetically. In the meantime, here's some further reading on how the two media differ in ways that matter to real-life viewers:

120 Studio has a bunch of informative and lively essay-ramblings, such as this one on the incredible range of brightness that film can capture compared to digital, which easily blows out bright areas. It sounds analogous to the dynamic range in volume that's been lost during the "loudness wars" in the recording industry. He has two broader reviews of the divide here and here.

Here is an even briefer but information-packed guide to the differences from eBay.

And here is a photographer who experimented around with both media using the same subjects and environments. The film shots don't look quite as lush and slightly surreal as the '80s girls track team above, showing that film has changed quite a bit since then. But the differences with digital are still there.

Millennials don't knock

When students drop by the office for help, whether during scheduled office hours or not, I've noticed that they almost never knock.

Our door swings shut, so it's not as though it's open and I'm expecting a courtesy knock. I just hear the handle turn and then there they are, walking right in. And usually they don't make much small talk first -- just launching right into "So I don't know what to do on #5 here..."

Everyone born before the Millennials always knocks, whether they're other grad students, tenured professors, or secretaries. We haven't had too many early Millennial grad students come by, so the lack of knocking may belong more to those born around 1992 and after. As bratty and socially awkward as the early ones are, the later ones are noticeably worse.

Where did they learn his habit? Or rather fail to learn the normal habit? They certainly didn't enter the teachers' lounge at school before college, and most of them have never worked, let alone barge into their manager's office. And they generally don't sleep over at each other's houses when young, or even hang out much in their "friend's" houses as teenagers.

So they must've picked this up at home, more or less the only place where they've ever had to interact with others socially, and certainly when it's in an environment where there might be closed doors. But why didn't they at least pick it up at home?

Do helicopter parents maintain an entirely open-door home environment? That would help them constantly monitor their kids, and allow the kids to come complaining no matter when. Floor plans are a lot more open these days than in the '80s, typified by the new "great room" in the McMansions of the past 20 years. Or do they have closed doors, but just give their socially clueless kids a pass whenever they interrupt someone else's activity unannounced, rather than prepare them for the real world?

Beats me. Whatever the cause, though, it's yet another telling sign of how unsocialized this generation is. Each of these things is small in itself, but piled all together, you understand why their co-workers have been complaining about how entitled the Millennials are in the workplace and at school.

Diet quality and inequality

In the post on the return of old diseases and pests with rising inequality, someone in the comments asked about the obesity epidemic, which also began around the time that inequality began rising -- the late '70s and early '80s.

That definitely is one of the most striking class divisions nowadays -- poorer people are fat, while wealthier people are thin. It certainly wasn't like that in the '50s when the classes were much closer to each other in material terms.

Rather than look at obesity, which is affected by several factors, I'd rather go straight to the diet itself. We also have data going back much further on food availability than for obesity. Here is a post reviewing historical data on the availability (per capita) of different food types in America from 1910 to 2007 (the source is the USDA). We infer amount consumed from amount available; changes in availability track changes in consumption.

If we want to look at a single measure of nutritional well-being, we look at red meat. In the Peter Turchin review of the longer history of cycles in inequality, he too looks at meat consumption as an indicator of how well-off folks were. Here's how it changed over the last 100 years:

It does show a steady decline during the recent widening of inequality, whereas it had been rising throughout the mid-century as inequality was narrowing. Meat consumption had fallen earlier as inequality was rising toward its peak circa 1920. That fall lasts a little longer than expected, not turning up until the late '30s, noticeably after inequality had begun to narrow. (Some but not all of that could be related to the Great Depression.) Overall, though, the fit is pretty close.

Since the top levels of the income pyramid had enough to buy red meat, the large swings up and down reflect the dietary changes of the middle and bottom levels. Meat is not a far-out-there luxury item that only sells more when there are more millionaires. Its sales depend on how well the average family is doing. Is the son going to have steak several nights a week, or will he be nuking a bowl of Ramen noodles and washing it down with a Mountain Dew?

I won't re-post all the graphs here, but going through the rest of them...

- Dairy shows a positive link with inequality, as though middle and lower-income folks are substituting dairy for red meat when times are harder for them. That's what cattle-herding people do around the world -- if you come into a windfall, feast on meat, and otherwise drink milk.

- Eggs don't seem to be related one way or the other.

- Poultry and fish were flat until around 1940 and began increasing steadily afterward. However, this did not make up for the decline in red meat over the past 40 years. Around 1970, there was about 145 lbs of red meat, 35 lbs of poultry, and 10 lbs of fish, or 190 lbs total for animal meat. By 2007, there was closer to 115 lbs of red meat, 75 lbs of poultry, and 15 lbs of fish, or 205 lbs total.

That may sound better, but remember that most of that increase is due to a soaring amount of it being poultry -- i.e., 99% fat-free boneless skinless chicken breasts -- and less coming from beef. Lean chicken won't provide much of the essential fatty acids, or allow your body to absorb the fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, and K). Fat also has more than twice the calories per weight as protein, so switching from red meat to chicken reduces caloric intake. Chicken also has lower concentrations of vitamins (like B-12) and minerals (like iron) compared to beef. In all, the shift away from red meat and toward white meat has been for the worse.

- Fruit and vegetable consumption has gone up since 1970, but you don't get much out of those foods.

- Grain and potato consumption looks directly related to inequality as well, rising since about 1970, and falling during the Great Compression. However, that decline began at least as early as 1910, when there was still a good 10 years left in the rising-inequality period. Still, a very close fit. As with fruits and vegetables, you don't get too much out of these foods, other than sheer calories and a mega-dose of glucose, and all the metabolic problems that brings.

Taking all of that into account, it does look like diet quality takes a turn for the worse (i.e., toward vegetarianism) when inequality is widening, and becomes more wholesome when inequality begins narrowing. As always there are other factors that help to explain why those food availability graphs look the way they do -- but it's striking how much you can capture just by pointing to the rising or falling trend in inequality.

Wide variation in basic physical appearance is one of the most alienating forces -- "those people just don't look like us," and sheer size is hard to miss or dismiss. You may not feel the alienation from seeing luxury shoppers pass by homeless pan-handlers unless you live in a city, but everyone is surrounded by disparities in weight, so it's hard to ignore how far apart the classes are separating. As Robert Putnam's work showed in a multi-ethnic context, wider diversity means lower feeling of community.

That point is either under-appreciated, ignored, or outright denied by mainstream conservatives -- that inequality leads to a breakdown in community, through a similar process as ethnic diversity weakening communal bonds. But that's for another post.

We should ask how deliberate the elites have been in fattening up the middle and lower classes of our society. They were the ones who pushed this meat-phobic, fat-phobic, low-cal, grain-fruit-veggie dogma on everyone else, right as inequality began rising. Sure, the elites themselves drink their own organic kool-aid, but they still eat a lot of red meat, cheese, eggs, and so on. Whereas the lower classes take the anti-meat message seriously, and load up on processed carbohydrates instead.

There's likely a class difference in preferring meat over starch-and-sugar, but even allowing for that weakness among poorer people, the elites should then be even more careful about preaching a carbo-holic diet and demonizing meat. Wittingly or not, this boneheaded vegetarian crusade has become a tool of class warfare.

And part of the increasing junkiness of lower-class diets reflects a drop-out mentality when they perceive the deck to be stacked against them as inequality widens. Fuck it -- why try and be healthy when nothing matters at the end of the day, when we're going to be even worse off next year? Maybe to try and keep up appearances, to keep ourselves presentable to others? Screw that, too, if our superiors are going to act antagonistic and snotty toward us in the first place. I don't care who sees me looking fat and disheveled in public, when none of them give a damn about me anyway.

I don't really agree with or resonate with those sentiments, but it's not hard to see where they come from, and how they would abate if we all ate better, instead of income inequality polarizing the distribution of fat across the classes.