Education bubbles and rising inequality

Below are a series of comments I left on a post at Steve Sailer's. They look at the history of the relationship between rising inequality and education bubbles, as well as discussing some of the mechanistic links through which more and more schooling (and a more and more academic focus within schools) breeds widening inequality. Hence, all of these elite liberal plans to cure inequality by expanding education will make the problem worse. A populist liberal plan would scale back pointless education, and give it a more practical focus for most folks.

In Peter Turchin's model, status-striving drives inequality, and one of the most reliable signs of striving is a higher ed bubble. It turns out that, at least in America over the last 200 years, this bubble spread more broadly to pre-college schooling. Now it's extending toward a pre-K schooling bubble.

Once upon a time, not only did few people go to college, they didn't even bother with high school. My hillbilly grandfather spent most of his school days roaming around backwoods Appalachia hunting whatever little animals he could scrounge up for meals, and generally enjoying himself. He grew up to get good union jobs, mostly as a carpenter but also as a coal miner. That was during the Great Compression (he was born in 1914), when folks weren't going to harass him for not showing up to class -- he was already getting the education he needed.

I saw the same attitude in my aunt's senior yearbook from 1963 -- shop class for guys and home ec for girls. That reflects a practical rather than academic orientation, even for those who did continue through senior year of high school (and only about half of the freshmen would bother, when they could begin working instead).

However, this isn't just "the past" vs. "the present," as such scenes would have struck a Gilded Age observer as disturbingly backwards. Surely our great nation was headed down the sewer now that the proliferation of colleges was grinding to a halt and school kids weren't expected to be familiar with Greek or Latin.

Thus the changes with the status-striving phase of the cycle are both quantitative (more students enrolled, more colleges founded, more graduates competing against each other) and qualitative (more academic rather than practical).

Anyway, here are the comments, unedited, hence more off-the-cuff and probably agitated than if I re-wrote them into a post.

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Not only a "liberal" issue -- conservative morons have been in hysterics about mediocre schools dragging down our prosperity and international competitiveness since 1983, A Nation at Risk, which recommended the requirement of 3 years of high school math. No Child Left Behind built on that foundation.

Conservatives are not challenging the silly notion that Americans need more education -- a greater share of a given age group, a greater range of age groups, and for a longer duration of the school day and school year.

Nor do they challenge the elitist agenda of making the content all academic. Show me the thriving grassroots conservative movement that wants to bring back home ec for girls, shop class for boys, and vocational training more broadly.

Nope, all that they argue over is what academic topics and instructional techniques will be used in service of the unchallenged goal of more ed, and more academics.

E.g., focus on rote memorization rather than self-discovery of principles -- not asking whether the thing they're learning is worth everybody learning, or whether it'll be a huge waste of time, no matter how they learn it. The quadratic formula, for instance.

A Nation at Risk complained about how few high schoolers could write a persuasive essay. Why does a plumber need to know how to write a 5-paragraph essay? All that time, effort, and money to achieve the goal is pure waste.

Also, what kind of goal is it to have all Americans be able to BS their way through a half-baked argument? Might that turn us into a national of BS-ers?

As for inequality, expanding education leads to wider inequality. A brief overview of the history of American education:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_the_United_States

There was rising inequality from circa 1820 to 1920, falling inequality from then until sometime in the '70s, and rising again after then through today.

Compulsory education for youngish children was absent in the early days of the Republic, and only began spreading during the rising-inequality period, beginning in 1852 and ending in 1917. The high school movement was a little later, but also a Gilded Age / Turn-of-the-Century phenomenon.

Then, as now, the emphasis was on academics and classics, a waste of time for almost everybody passing through.

The rising-inequality period also saw an explosion of higher ed, both number of colleges and student populations. Sound familiar? Peter Turchin looked through data on law school enrollments, and found an explosion of law school attendance during that time as well. Again, ring a bell?

The Great Compression, when inequality was falling, saw the society putting a lid on the older status-striving pursuit of more and more education. The proliferation of colleges wound down, lots of kids skipped school and weren't punished, and vocational and practical classes started to develop. That was the heyday of home ec for girls and shop class for guys.

Pursuit of more ed, and more academic ed, is nothing more than status-striving. Hence, status-striving had to decline before inequality did, and it had to re-emerge before inequality could rise again.

The Progressive movement around the 1910s were pushing for vocational training, and inequality fell shortly afterwards. The Great Society programs began the "excellence for all" discontent and return to status-striving, and inequality began rising by the later '70s.

The grassroots change has to target the spiral of status-striving in this country, not inequality itself, which is an effect. I don't see that turning around any time soon, though, even with conservatives or lower-status folks. They take it as an insult, like "Oh, so you don't think my kids would benefit from high school, or an academically focused curriculum? My kids deserve more than you think, and I'll show you."

Less schooling, and a more practical focus in school -- that's what we need.

What's the mechanistic link between the expansion of education and widening inequality? It equips the aspiring elite with the skills and knowledge necessary to crush other people's skulls in order to climb to the top, and to BS your way through a self-advancing argument. So, the ceiling on incomes will rise.

It also wastes the formative years of the lower majority of the population, training them for a way of life that they'll never ever make a living in. It's worse than just sitting around doing nothing -- it's *mis*-direction of their efforts. They could have been learning a trade, apprenticing, or by middle and high school, working in wage labor. Earn early, save early, and retire early.

If they also get trapped in the expansion of higher ed, they're also mired in debt for life, while the successful elite will be able to pay of their student loans.

Establishing and continuing to run an expanding public school system requires public funding, i.e. taxes. Except for those too poor to pay taxes, the middle 70% (or whatever) of the population is paying regularly to have their children be misdirected. Schooling isn't exactly cheap.

Eventually, the elite's goal is to privatize schooling in order to mire the majority in debt for K-12 schooling, not just for college. And then pre-K -- $20,000 in student loans by the time you're 5 years old!

Human-scale vs. Earth-shattering stakes in movies

Here is an article about how movie audiences these days require the entire universe to be at stake, or else BORRRING. The counter-trend is for banal or saccharine kiddie flicks to take up more and more market share, catering to those viewers who don't feel like yet another cataclysmic war this weekend, yet who still feel that personal + sincere = awkward. The optimal middle level of sincere human-scale stories has been squeezed out. They still appear in serial television dramas, but I mean a format with a dramatic beginning, middle, and end.

To figure out what's gone wrong, we need to trace this trend back to its origins. It turns out to track the rising or falling trend in the crime rate -- more personal and local during rising-crime times, and over-blown and remote during falling-crime times. When violence and crime are rising in the real world, everyday settings, characters, and events are interesting enough. When the world around us keeps getting safer and safer, we have to overload our senses with the threat of danger in order to shock our sleeping security cameras into operation.

If it's a recent loathsome cultural trend, it must have started in the '90s. Well, the top-grossing movies of 1992 don't have any where the entire race, nation, world, universe, etc. is at stake. In 1993, there was the historical epic Schindler's List where the entire Jewish race is at stake. In '94, the epic and Earth-shattering becomes more popular still -- The Lion King, Forrest Gump, Stargate, Star Trek: Generations all landed in the top 20 at the box office.

Click on the 1992 link above to navigate around other "years in film" entries at Wikipedia, and you'll see how non-existent these kinds of movies were as recently as the late '80s and early '90s.

Even when the stakes were large, the sheer size of the existential threat did not dominate the storytelling -- like, "Yeah, we get it -- after 90 minutes, world still at stake." In Ghostbusters, you don't see the gigantic threat materialize until the end of the movie, when the Gozer babe opens up the portal of evil on top of the apartment building. Most of the movie is about the seemingly mismatched characters forming a team, and tackling smaller threats in order to gradually convince skeptics and gradually become experienced enough for any large threat that may come. And that large threat is only hinted at before the end -- when Dana opens her fridge and sees the other dimension and its hellhounds -- not foretold as a prophecy that stops everything in its tracks and re-directs them toward The Final Battle that's still two hours away.

When the Stay Puft marshmallow man does come striding down crowded streets, his damage is still limited in scope -- it's not like he's wrecking skyscrapers across all of Manhattan. So it doesn't even feel like, at that moment, all of New York City is at stake. Damage to the rest of the borough, city, and nation are off in the future, and we sense that trajectory without having to see it take place. We're familiar with the idea that much broader destruction may follow if the heroes don't win this smaller battle. For audiences in 1984, a crucial battle, not the entire war, was important enough to hold their attention.

Go through the other hit movies of '84 and you see the same thing:

Beverly Hills Cop -- a circumscribed series of crimes are the threat. The main motivation for the protagonist is revenge against one or a few enemies who killed his best friend.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom -- like Ghostbusters, the threat is local, although it could possibly spread if the heroes don't stop it here and now. Ditto for Gremlins.

The Karate Kid -- a single individual is threatened by bullies. He strives to improve himself in order to restore his honor and get the girl.

Police Academy -- urban crime broadly is the threat, but it wasn't over-blown. Crime was higher in the '80s, but it wasn't apocalyptic. And just one group of new officers are the heroes, not the entire police department.

Footloose -- the majority of young people in a single town are the target of repressive laws against music and dancing. Mostly, though, the struggle is between individual representatives of both sides (the newcomer rebel and the fiery preacher), who share much common ground. It's not one of those bratty movies about Youth vs. Fogies. The audience understands that these events could take place "in a town like yours," but only by extension and through inference. The movie doesn't actually show the same events playing out across different towns across the country. The threat to young people in general is tacit, not explicit and over-blown.

Splash -- rom-coms are never epic in scale, but these days they try to push them as far as possible. Splash tells a tale about an unlikely couple who had been down on their luck before they met each other, and who may get broken up by a non-apocalyptic group of antagonists. Today, "down on their luck" would have to be the most pathetic sob story ever, and they wouldn't just have fun and click as a couple -- they would have to be spinning head over heels in love, blocking out the rest of the world. Any threat to their being together would be ruinous to their very well-being.

Etc.

Movies from the '70s are also more personal in scale and sincere in tone. Even in the paranoid political thriller genre, they don't directly show the entire world (or free world) being at stake. Folks understood that if the conspirators can get away with some smaller feat, they can probably do a little better. And if they can get away with it in some local, circumscribed part of the world, they are probably at work elsewhere. We're witnessing the tip of the iceberg -- we don't need to see the whole damn iceberg to appreciate that.

Movies from the '60s are emerging from the most recent peak of epic-scale narratives, during the mid-century. As late as 1963, the top three movies were still all epics -- Cleopatra, How the West Was Won, and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Already by '68, movies that could have been overblown epics are more personal and local in scale, with the broader implications left as inferences for the audience to draw -- 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rosemary's Baby, Planet of the Apes, Night of the Living Dead.

Here are the top movies from 1953, many of which are gigantic-scale, epic, "the fate of the world hangs in the balance" kind of movies. The Robe, Salome, Julius Caesar, The War of the Worlds. At least back then, helicopter parents had their children watching kiddie TV shows or listening to corny radio programs, rather than demanding Hollywood provide as many kiddie as grown-up movies to choose from every weekend. That left open a niche for the occasional small-scale rom-com like Roman Holiday or thriller like Rear Window (from '54).

Jazz Age movies were like those of the '80s, more personal in scale, lots of comedies, and a couple of larger-scale epics that were nevertheless told mostly through interpersonal relationships among the characters (like the Star Wars movies). Here are the top 14 from 1927, for example, and only The King of Kings and Metropolis can be considered large-scale. I haven't seen the former, but Metropolis does not have an oppressively large scope at any given moment -- not like the two endless battle lines in the Lord of the Rings movies, all racing toward each other at the same time. The large scope of Metropolis is achieved by a nested series of human-scale relationships that have links between them (again like the Star Wars movies). It shifts from this sub-group of characters in this location to that sub-group in that location, without overwhelming us by focusing on the entire Good Side for a long stretch, then the entire Bad Side, etc., until the epic showdown where both entire sides duke it out.

Horror and monster movies make a good case study, because all of them have a clear villain or threat and a clear group of targeted victims. What changes is the size of the monster and his pool of victims. Starting at the beginning, classic horror movies of the '20s and early '30s are all local and personal in scope -- Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and so on. The last great example is King Kong from 1933, where the monster is like the Stay Puft marshmallow man, only threatening the stretch of streets and cars along his path toward a single target building, where his girl is hiding. Perhaps he could wreak havoc across all of New York, but they don't even hint at that, let alone show it.

Mid-century monster movies go so over-the-top that they become desperate and cheesy. Returning to 1953, the #10 movie at the box office was The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms -- I guess "from a Thousand Fathoms" didn't sound epic enough. The next year saw a movie version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as the #2 movie, and the novel was from the Victorian era (1870). Back to the first 20,000-named movie, Wikipedia summarizes the plot like this: "The film is about an atomic bomb test in the Arctic Circle that unfreezes a hibernating dinosaur, the fictional Rhedosaurus, which begins to wreak havoc in New York City."

By the '70s, '80s, and early '90s, they've returned to human-scale and local threats -- Halloween (and all in the slasher genre), Alien, Predator, The Silence of the Lambs. Either the threat could expand beyond the setting of the movie, or there could be others like it already in other places. We don't need to zoom out in order to appreciate that something big is at stake, beyond what is seen.

Starting in the mid-'90s, the Earth-shattering monster / alien movies were back by popular demand, starting with Stargate and Independence Day and continuing through War of the Worlds and Cloverfield in the 2000s. Most of the genre, however, has been absorbed by the comic book movies, such as the X-Men and Transformers franchises.

Horror / monster / alien movies show the link to the crime rate more clearly than movies in general. When the Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th series dominated the genre, viewers felt like evil was lurking in their own neck of the woods, and that it would only take a single enemy to do them in, not an army of them. The crime rate was rising toward its peak at the time, making audiences more aware of the reality of violence. As crime rates have fallen so dramatically, to where you no longer read about murders, kidnappings, and Satanic cults on the front page of every newspaper, viewers wouldn't buy the "killer next door" premise of the slasher movies. It has to be legions of zombies threatening to wipe out the entire planet, or at any rate a threat that comes so far outside of the audience's own community that they'd only see the threat in a movie: the stalker weirdo from Saw, the Central European torturers preying on tourists in Hostel, and so on.

Is nostalgia narcissistic? Or only for Boomers?

Here is a WSJ column by Terry Teachout arguing that Baby Boomers' nostalgia is narcissistic. He also argues that they are Peter Pans, and that they value popular rather than high culture, which tie back into their narcissistic nostalgia -- meant to keep them forever young, even if it means focusing on TV shows rather than opera, since you weren't a fan of opera as a child.

I'm just going to explore the question of how nostalgia can take self-centered vs. other-centered forms, and which generations develop which type.

I agree that Boomer nostalgia is self-centered, though only for the early Boomers, exempting those born after the mid-'50s. How did it get that way?

First, folks are only going to feel strong nostalgia about an exciting, outgoing, and fun-filled period. Cocooning periods are too dull and uneventful to evoke much longing once they're over. By "nostalgia," I mean the direct kind -- by the people who actually have vivid, living memories of the period. Not the vicarious kind, where you enjoy a time period that you have few or no such memories of.

Consider how few pop culture examples there are of a longing look back at the mid-century, by actual participants. Whereas folks were already pining for the Roaring Twenties right after they'd ended. See, e.g., Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s, published in 1931, as well as many of the scenes in Sunset Boulevard, later still in 1950, regardless of the black humor that's mixed in with the nostalgia.

Hence, the Silent Generation generally doesn't show much nostalgia for their formative years, by comparative standards -- everyone remembers at least some things fondly about the time when they were growing up. Cocooning began coming undone in the later half of the '50s, so some of the latest Silents show strong nostalgia for the early days of rock 'n' roll, '57 Chevrolets, and so on. As do some of the early Boomers who remember that period, albeit from the vantage point of a child rather than a teenager.

To the extent that some Silents do actually feel strong nostalgia, then, it is primarily self-centered -- focused on the period as lived by themselves, and not so much by younger or older generations. They can remember some details about what life was like for 30 and 40-somethings back then -- skinny black ties on a short-sleeved white dress shirt, browline eyeglasses, etc. -- but they don't spontaneously arise as part of the feeling of "Oh, everything was so much better back then!" Their nostalgia is almost entirely focused on the teenage or youth culture, and they don't seem very aware of what life was like for the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit generations.

The outgoing and fun-loving zeitgeist only picked up steam during the '60s and early '70s, which is the period of early Boomer nostalgia. And again, they themselves are still at the center of "what was so great about the old days," with the older generations either out of sight and out of mind, or perceived with disdain -- representing the old order that needed to be transformed. The greatest example of this is the TV show The Wonder Years, where almost no nostalgia is shown for the way that the parents' generation lived during the late '60s and early '70s. For the most part, the older generations were simply invisible, and what the Boomers saw (or believed that they saw), they didn't like -- gruff, taciturn fathers and self-doubting, domestic mothers.

From what I can tell, though, that's mostly a Boomer fabrication to rationalize their ignorance or dismissal of other generations during the '60s and early '70s. They see it as though everyone over 30 was stodgy, gruff, sexist, racist, bla bla bla -- and that maybe that was understandable given the environment the old order had grown up in, but we Boomers are going to change all of that. In reality, every generation became more outgoing and fun-loving during the '60s and early '70s. Somebody was making and starring in all those movies, composing and performing all that music, hosting or starring in all those hit TV shows. And it wasn't Boomers -- they were too damn young. It was everybody else. And everybody else was not just producing but consuming that culture too.

This brings up an important point that deserves its own post, but I keep working it into other posts or comments. That is that the Boomers were too young to have caused anything that went on in the 1960s, other than determining who was at the top of the Billboard charts as consumers (not makers) of pop music. The earliest cohort of Boomers, born in 1946, were between 14 and 24 years old during the decade of the 1960s -- hence, they did not affect the course of history, however much they like to think so, and however much other generations like to blame them so. Most of the major players and grassroots participants were Silents, and depending on the area of society, the later part of the Greatest Gen. Civil Rights, second wave feminism, electing Johnson -- all had nothing to do with Boomers.

In 1970, a 30 year-old career woman complaining about the pattern of unfair treatment in every office and company she's worked for -- was born in 1940. The idea that Boomers were behind it all in the turbulent period circa 1970 is so deeply ingrained in the received wisdom, that you may have to check the birth years of second wave feminists to convince yourself that they were not high schoolers or college sophomores. Campus protesters against the War in Vietnam or against the college administration? Sure, that was them. But that was it.

That's another way in which Boomer nostalgia is narcissistic -- it's self-aggrandizing, given how minimal their participation and influence was on Civil Rights, putting a man on the moon, and anything except for the consumer side of pop music (and related events like Woodstock). There's nothing wrong with recalling those events with longing, but they keep saying "we did this" and "we accomplished that" -- no you didn't, you were still an adolescent. You know that they aren't giving proper credit to the mostly Silent, partly Greatest Gen members who really did accomplish all those things, from their credo "Don't trust anyone over 30," from their portrayal of their parents' generation on The Wonder Years, Back to the Future, and so on. They truly believe, deep down, that a bunch of starry-eyed teenagers altered the course of history by tuning in to it on TV.

Again, I think the late Silents give themselves too much credit for the shaking-up of the later '50s. The charge was led by the Greatest Gen, who were becoming fed up with how stultifying the Company Man way of life had become. And they were certainly in a greater position of societal influence compared to awkward teenagers. Sloan Wilson and Betty Friedan were both late members of the Greatest Gen.

The cause of narcissistic nostalgia? I blame helicopter parenting, or "smothering mothers" as it was known during its most recent peak before the Millennial era. Especially after Dr. Spock's Baby & Child Care was published in 1946, children became smothered in attention, praise, self-esteem boosters, and so on. Plus there were just so many of them after fertility rates started shooting up. That's more of a compounding factor, though -- just think if the zeitgeist had been one of "children should be seen and not heard." Then they would've really torn into the brats, who they would've seen as a plague of pests. It took a Dr. Spock mindset among the adult population to give the children that feeling of "everyone's looking at me!" and "I did that!" (No you didn't.)

Is there a generation that feels strong nostalgia, but in a more other-centered way? Perhaps you can tell from the title of a post here from 2012, "Going beyond personal nostalgia in admiring the past," that members of Generation X took in a far greater expanse of social-cultural goings-on back in the '80s. Even for superficial stuff like what clothing and hairstyles were popular, nostalgia isn't restricted entirely to youth culture. You definitely see that -- feathered hair, Jordache jeans, mullets, etc. -- but you also see large shoulder pads on career women, station wagons (driven by a father, not a teenager), old ladies with caked-on blue eyeshadow and sky-high perms, Magnum P.I. mustaches, and so on.

I clearly remember what TV shows were a hit with my parents' generation (and often their parents'), even if I never watched them myself -- Dallas, Matlock, nature documentaries, and Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!

Ditto for pop music. Gen X not only has a soft spot for New Wave that was a hit with young people, but also adult contemporary of the time -- Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon, Sade, Kate Bush, Phil Collins, just to name a few. When the Boomers reminisce about the sound of 1967, are they including Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, and Dean Martin, all of whom had #1 songs on Billboard's adult contemporary / easy listening chart? See here for the hits from '67, almost none of which would show up on a Sixties compilation or playlist.

Compare to the adult contemporary hits of '87, more than half of which could show up on an Eighties compilation. True, they sound a little poppier, but then that's because the average industry-wide had been lifted to a more mature and developed sound -- not the bubblegummy standard to which grown folks music was compared in the '60s. "Didn't We Almost Have It All" and "Little Lies" are for people with plenty of life experience, and if teenagers had grown up faster during the '80s than they had in the '60s, then these songs would be a hit on the pop charts too (and they were: #1 and #4 on the Hot 100).

Some of my sharpest memories from the '80s involve much older folks, whether they were the elderly people who lived at the mall -- the largest group aside from teenagers -- the customers who packed the diner across from my elementary school during lunch hours, or those we interacted with during regular visits to and from the nearby senior center. And of course the Golden Girls on TV.

It's not as though it was an elderly culture -- there were plenty of teen-themed movies and sit-coms, youth-oriented pop music, and hang-out spots for teenagers only. But every age group's lives come into view with '80s nostalgia, from young to old.

What accounts for the more other-centered nostalgia of Gen X? Well, it was the reverse of the Dr. Spock cause of narcissistic Boomer nostalgia. Starting in the '60s, but particularly during the '70s and '80s, all that feel-good bullcrap went up in a puff of smoke. Parents, neighbors, grown-ups, and the public came first -- not children. We didn't get that feeling of being so special, the center of constant attention, or having our egos inflated with undeserved praise. If you just saw Anchorman 2, it does a good job of exaggerating the basic parenting style of circa 1980, with the father leaning on the side of harsh, hands-off, and teaching his kid to sink or swim.

That orients the child toward the larger community that he is being prepared to join, causing him to survey a greater expanse of the social-cultural landscape to see what's going on and how he'll need to adapt in order to fit in. If he's already awesome the way he is, he doesn't need to change, and doesn't need to survey the landscape. The grown-up world will need to change itself to adapt to his own awesomeness.

The late Boomers underwent a similar upbringing as the X-ers, though it wasn't quite so pronounced in the '60s. And they too lie more toward the other-centered end of the nostalgia spectrum. I don't get the impression that they really liked any of what the older generations were into during the '70s -- Barry Manilow, Barbra Streisand -- but they were at least more aware of them, and they spring immediately to mind when they get nostalgic for the '70s. Sleazy older men, playboys, swingers, disco queens, Archie Bunker, working stiffs stuck in long lines at the gas station, grown-ups being fed up with Carter, talking heads soberly discussing the way out of stagflation...

I don't see the Millennials getting nostalgic about their formative years, one way or another. An earlier post looked at how the only thing they feel nostalgia for is not having a life as kids. If things start shaking up again by the later part of this decade, as I predict they will based on the timing of the last period of cocooning, then there will be another version of the early Boomers. These kids will have been raised during the height of helicopter parenting, but they'll go through adolescence in a more wild and unsupervised time, which because of their upbringing, they will attribute entirely to their own awesomeness.

These kids are already born, but are only in elementary school or younger right now. They will probably prove to be different from Millennials, only they're not old enough to give us that impression yet. If generations tend to last around 20 years, then Millennials we be around 1985 to 2004 births. Kids born in 2005 or after we can call the neo-Boomers for now, until something more distinctive suggests itself.

Another case of subversive children's culture disappearing

Kids these days don't sing subversive schoolyard songs anymore, something that is bizarre to the generations who grew up learning "Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts" and "Joy to the World, the Teacher's Dead." This is part of a broader pattern of the disappearance of folk culture in an age of cocooning. Folk culture requires face-to-face transmission, whether through language (songs) or gesture and body movement (games).

My mother and I just got done talking on video chat with my brother and his nearly 6 year-old son. Like most kindergarteners, he finds potty humor funny -- very funny. Yet his repertoire of fart noise techniques was surprisingly lacking. I thought that's just one of those things that everybody learns in grade school, but then I remembered the face-to-face nature of its transmission ("learning"). He knows the most basic one, blowing a raspberry with your tongue and lips, but that was it.

Let me emphasize how much he enjoys fart humor, so it's not for lack of appeal. This also shows how little the other boys at school know -- it would have spread like wildfire by now.

He didn't use the one where you bite your lower lip and push air up and out of one side of your mouth. Or cupping both palms over your mouth, with your fingertips near your earlobes, and blowing really hard. I showed him a hands-only one, where you have your two palms pressed together, with one row of inner knuckles in the palm of the other, and that row of fingertips under the other. It's like the praying gesture, only with one hand sliding down somewhat. You press really hard and pull away hard, and there you go. My brother showed him the more common one where your palms are perpendicular to each other, and your fingers are wrapped around the other hand, like shaking your own hand, and you push toward and apart.

Do you remember the one where you cup your palm under your armpit and begin flapping that arm? Or the variant on the "palms over mouth" one, where you use the inner elbow instead of your palms? These are only the handful that I can think of off the top of my head.

He had trouble with the hands-only ones, which might be a little hard to pull off at that age. But the striking thing from a folk culture perspective is that he wasn't even familiar with it, as though he were just biding time until his dexterity or grip strength or whatever would allow him to finally start doing it. Like most Millennials, he nearly went into a nuclear meltdown when he couldn't immediately master something that had been demonstrated for him to learn.

He had a little easier time with the hands-over-mouth one -- that pissed off my brother a little bit. I'd gotten around his over-parenting shield, and once you learn something like that, you don't forget it. That's why parents these days prevent any peer socialization while their kids are developing -- all those years of precision sculpting, ruined. Once their minds are more solidified and Bad Influences aren't so influential, then they can play together unsupervised in college.

Is my nephew going to keep using that technique to make fart noises for the rest of his life? Nope. That started to get old during middle school, when boys become more sensitive to how girls perceive them. This natural negative feedback, or damping mechanism, makes parental programming superfluous. In fact, I can't remember the last time I used any of those fart noise techniques spontaneously before demonstrating them today. And it wasn't because my parents began punishing me, because the schools initiated a Zero Tolerance policy on fart noises, or whatever. It just got old, and embarrassing when there were girls around.

But, in the minds of helicopter parents, children are blank slates and will just keep on doing something bad forever once they're exposed, as though they would have no internal changes that would correct it when it's time to, and as though there were no social dampening effects either. This example shows both forces at work: negative social feedback from girls, though only once boys' internal nature changes to value approval from girls.

Simple examples like this, no matter how mundane and profane, disprove the hysterical worldviews that most parents operate on these days. But worldviews come more from the zeitgeist than from reasoning or observation, and a cocooning period has a thing-oriented rather than people-oriented zeitgeist, as folks have less and less experience interacting with others. People-as-things leads to parenting-as-programming, which in turn leads to the isolation of children from anyone outside the nuclear family, who might un-program or re-program all the tireless labor of the parents. Social isolation then unravels the folk culture of children, which must be learned face-to-face.

And all of this just to assuage parental paranoia (which never gets assuaged, but would be even worse if their kids got to develop as autonomously as they did when they were growing up). Who cares if you've stunted the social lobe of your kid's brain, and wiped out a thriving folk culture that used to belong to children themselves? Once more we see how thoroughly hostile helicopter parenting is to communal cohesion and cultural continuity, as everyone and everything beyond the private nuclear household becomes an Outside Threat To Our Parenting.

The class of '63: History through yearbook impressions

Tonight we had a lot of fun looking over my aunt's yearbook from the year she graduated, 1963. This was an interesting time because it was after the cocooning trend of the mid-century had begun to reverse, and people were loosening up and shaking things up. And the violent crime rate was beginning its upward climb of the following decades.

But it wasn't yet The Sixties. It was post-Elvis but pre-Beatles, and post-Cuban Missile Crisis but pre-Vietnam (in the popular mind). Kennedy had been elected but not assassinated. And the graduating seniors were born in 1945, at the very end of the Silent Generation. Suddenly they weren't so silent.

If you remember the '70s, '80s, or early '90s, the signs of people coming out of their shells will look fairly familiar, such as girls kicking off the rise of Big Hair and shorter skirts.

However, other aspects of the climate look far more foreign to us because the turning point came much earlier than 1992 -- the cycle of status-striving and inequality. Most folks were still self-effacing, and income inequality was nearing a low point, through the middle of the 1970s. After that, things began to slowly creep toward the other end of the spectrum. It seemed dampened in the '80s because rising-crime and an outgoing disposition both push you toward getting along with and looking after others, rather than striving to advance yourself by screwing others. Only the yuppie fringe were thinking and behaving the way that everyone is in today's dog-eat-dog world.

Still, there were other very clear signs of the rise of status striving during the late '70s and '80s: the higher education bubble took off, income inequality began rising, children become more and more likely to grow up in broken homes, and so on.

Back in 1963, though, none of those things were on the rise. Nor were people at the turning-around point where they've started to take hard-won progress for granted. There was still a very conscious credo of egalitarianism, not complacency.

With those overview points in mind, here are some impressions drawn from concrete examples:

- As I said, girls were starting to wear Big Hair. They wanted boys to notice them. Flatter hair means don't look at me. Also, the hair started to be pulled away from the face, again saying "look at me," rather than the hair curtains hiding the face that had been more popular in the '40s and part of the '50s.

- Guys still look pretty geeky, in my aunt's own words, after I was thinking it but not saying it out loud. The flat tops, the thick-rimmed glasses, and just the general vacant and unassertive expressions on their faces. When the "birds and the bees" climate changes direction, girls change first, and then guys. After living through the emotionally disconnected and physically restrained mid-century, it's the less-willing side that has to make the first sign of interest in turning things around. As that mindset spreads, guys start to notice and begin high-fiving each other about how interested the girls suddenly appear to be. I think Beatlemania and girls shrieking out loud in polite company was another major part of this pattern of "girls change first."

- About 2 out of 40 guys in each high school class (or 5%) had severely receding hairlines, where the center was pretty high on the forehead, and the sides had made deep V-lines across the temples and top of the head. Where they did have hair, it was pretty thin in density. It was so strange because they had high school faces and middle-aged hair!

Have you noticed a similar pattern among youngish guys these days? I've seen guys in their early 20s who are more or less bald. And I haven't seen that in all the '80s yearbooks I've flipped through. This would support my theory that baldness signals current and future monogamous behavior because bald guys tend to be low down on the pyramid of desirability. Hence, whether they wanted to cheat or not, they wouldn't find many takers. During periods of cocooning and greater monogamy, men will be balder, while during periods of outgoing-ness and greater promiscuity, they'll have fuller hair. I think these balding high school guys were a window into the "good dad" pattern of the '50s, while guys' hair in the '80s was part of the "bad boy" pattern of the time. Now that we're back toward the "good dad" ideal, guys are balding more.

- The senior class was about one-half the size of the freshman class -- not because some of them had gotten bumped off by sabotaging striver students, but because they realized that extra years of high school weren't going to do anything for them, so they started working. Imagine that: earning money rather than going into debt.

- Pictures show guys having a blast in the Industrial Arts class (AKA shop), which used to include mechanical drawing. Learning how to do something in school -- such an exotic notion these days. It would be the "soft bigotry of low expectations" in today's higher ed bubble.

- No girls sports. That is pure status striving by girls looking to pad their college application -- and by their parents. Only a handful of cheerleaders and majorettes, not squads of several dozen cheerleaders, poms, color guard, etc., which again is just status striving -- way more securing a spot than there needs to be.

- Kids were given nicknames like Fats and Bucky because they were fat or had buck teeth. Part of hunter-gatherer egalitarianism is giving people nicknames that remind them of their all-too-human status, the opposite of the bombastic dictator who heaps one honorific after another onto his official title. I don't remember this being common with schoolchildren in the '80s, an early sign of the weakening of cultural pressures that kept relations more egalitarian. At least it was not yet the hostile climate of political correctness that exploded during the '90s.

- Perhaps 50 to 75% of the school was of recent Southern and Eastern European immigration. Their parents or grandparents were the last wave to come over when immigration was at its peak before being cut off during the '20s. It was in the same neck of the woods where Dean Martin grew up in eastern Ohio, the closest big city being Pittsburgh. My mother's family lived up in the hills with the other Scotch-Irish, while the European ethnics were concentrated in the little towns nearby, where the hillbillies trekked in during the school day.

She said, "You'll notice that there isn't a single Mexican or Latino face in the yearbook," but all of the Italians and Polaks were the original huddled masses who drove down wages for the "jobs Americans won't do," or however the original Robber Barons described it. My aunt's generation seemed to get along fine with them, and my grandparents' generation (Greatest Gen) seemed iffy on whether they were a blessing a curse. I couldn't get too much of a feel for it, but my impression was that my great-grandparents' generation was more hostile toward newly arrived groups -- they were the ones competing with immigrants for jobs at the height of immigration, inequality, strikebreaking, and labor violence.

- High school kids were not yet trusted to eat lunch outside the school building or off campus, or they didn't have the inclination. My mother said that was normal when she was a senior at the same school 10 years later, in '72-'73. In the early '60s, students ate in the cafeteria or classrooms. I remember high schoolers having more freedom during the '80s and early '90s ("open lunch"), but that got rolled back pretty quickly during the '90s, and today schools are in lockdown mode once again.

- The class motto: "Build for character and not for fame." How did society ever function before our governing mindset became "If you got it, flaunt it" and "I love haters"?

Probably more stuff that I can't think of right now. Ask in the comments, and I'll try to remember.

Smaller family gatherings at Christmas during nuclear family-centric times (pictures)

After visiting my brother and his wife last week, we're flying out again tomorrow to see more family members who we normally would have been spent Christmas with back in the '80s. It seems like folks these days don't want to pile in for a major holiday. We're all just supposed to stay wherever we are, which means at most a single nuclear family will be together. If you want to see the whole family, you have to keep zipping around to different households. It's antithetical to feeling settled in for the holidays.

When I was growing up, everybody would make a single trip to whoever was hosting that year. This both brought everyone together and kept traveling to a minimum. Every day you're traveling is a day you're not settled in and bonding with the family.

The Scotch-Irish hillbilly side of my family would always include three generations and multiple siblings at my mother's level (e.g., my aunt or uncles), though not always multiple groups at my own level (my cousins). If a blood member were dating or married, it was common for them to bring their in-law (or in-law-to-be) to the clan gathering.

As I recall, the three main households that took turns hosting were my mother, her sister, and her parents. Perhaps there needed to be a female blood member to organize the meals -- it was domestic work, i.e. women's work, but it was too big of a duty to be entrusted to outsiders, I guess. I assume that's the way it is with other pastoralist folk such as Italians, with the (domestic) matriarch bossing everyone around the kitchen or telling them to butt out, while the men are off doing men stuff in another room or outside the home.

I remember these huge convergences lasting into the early '90s, and then almost grinding to a halt during the middle of that decade. Sometimes my two cousins and their children will drop by my aunt's place, though it's generally a day trip, and they aren't both there at the same time. Christmas has become such a low-key holiday for family that I insisted on us all getting together in 2011. Finally, a Christmas gathering with a dozen people again!

We'd grown to four generations by that point. But it struck me how my two cousins (through my mother's sister) have their own nuclear families that I've hardly ever seen, even on Christmas. One was born around 1970, and the other I believe in '67. I used to see them all the time around major holidays in the '80s and early '90s, including when they had begun dating their now-wives, who were also in attendance way back then. However, when they started their families in the '90s and 2000s, I don't recall seeing them more than once or twice until that time in 2011.

Cocooning is unnatural and requires a rationalization in order for the whole society to start behaving so weird on an ongoing basis. The main reason that folks give is Being Together With Family. What they really mean is the nuclear family. Cocooning is therefore a fractal phenomenon, where at every scale people are more closed off from the other people in that sphere. Not only do we close ourselves off from non-family members ("strangers," "crowds"), but within the family sphere itself, we close off non-nuclear members and remain entirely within our private households.

I find it bizarre how weak the relationships are these days between cousins, aunts / uncles and nieces / nephews, and grandparents and grandchildren. During summers growing up, my brothers and I used to spend weeks at a time at my mother's parents' home, aside from all the other weekends here and there during the school year. The Sunday School teachers knew who I was, and so did the barber in the nearest little town, that's how integrated we were into a home outside our home. Kids these days, perhaps starting with the Millennials, just don't fit in anywhere outside of their nuclear family household.

To check on this hunch, I searched Google Images for Christmas pictures across the decades. (You get better luck when you enter a specific year, e.g. 1954 instead of 1950s.) It's common to find a nuclear family together, so what you're looking for is how common the extended family pictures are. There needs to be at least three generations present for me to count it as a "whole family" kind of gathering, and even better if there are multiple groups across a given age level.

The results were more or less what I expected -- large gatherings were more common in outgoing times, such as the '20s and early '30s, as well as the '80s, while smaller ones were more common in cocooning times, particularly the early-to-mid 1950s and the last 5 to 10 years. The pictures below are my rough attempt to capture each of the outgoing and cocooning periods, across two cycles of up-and-down.

I did notice an apparent exception during the '40s, where gatherings were larger than I would've expected for the cocooning environment of the mid-century. There was an anomalous spike in homicide during the '40s (which reflects people being more outgoing, and subject to predation by criminals). And the War might have made people value their family members who they would've otherwise taken for granted and not gathered together with.

1927

1931

1948

1954

1977

1989

2007

2012

Southern girl sexuality

For Christmas this week we went to visit my brother and his wife, both transplants living outside of Fort Hood, itself outside of Austin. On the way over we had two connecting flights, and walking around the Memphis airport, it really stood out to me -- Southern girls have some pretty plump rumps. It was the same once we got into Austin, and when we left from there today.

I had a hunch about this when I visited them over the summer, but now it was hard to ignore because everyone's wearing leggings as pants for the winter. Southern girls are definitely packin' more heat in the seat.

Don't take my word for it, though:

If you search Google Images for the catch phrase, most of them have just the phrase itself. This is the only one that brands it with regional / ethnic pride (not "California Girl..."). And when you search for Southern girl shirts, this is the only one referring to female architecture that comes up, many times. There's no shirt that says "Southern girl. Who needs a butt when you got boobs like mine."

So they seem to think so. Here is some random guy chiming in about why he likes Southern girls better, just stating it as a fact that they have bigger butts. And here is an article about how Southern women are going for plastic surgery to beef up their booty. Most women who would even think about going under the knife to look better would want the opposite done -- liposuction.

In a country that has so much racial diversity, we tend to be blind to or overlook the differences within major groups of a single race. We expect Puerto Ricans to have some junk in their trunk, but Southern belles -- who knew? I have no idea if this is a genetic difference from other white groups. Celts do have more going on around back than Saxons or Scandinavians do, but they're not so well represented among the lowland former plantation areas of the South.

Perhaps there's an environmental influence of heat and humidity -- or local pathogen load? Gangestad & Buss wrote an article showing that pathogen prevalence was strongly linked to emphasis on good looks in a mate. The bug belt of the South would lead men there to pay more attention to a girl's looks than in other parts of the country (especially the colder and drier places). And guys who are focused mostly on looks tend to be drawn more toward the butt than the boobs. Hence, female development goes off on that course in "anticipation" of demand from local males.

Beats me. Probably a mixture of genetic and environmental differences down there.

What behavior might it be linked to? I haven't spent much time in the South, aside from living in Charleston from about 3 to 5 years old. Yet it doesn't take an extended tour to notice how playful Southern women are. And headstrong, like all women. Add those two together, and you've got yourself some pretty frisky females.* It's my observation that girls with larger butts tend to have a higher sex drive. One quick reality check: porno girls generally do not need booty enhancement, while most of them have fake boobs.

As for regional differences, we want to make sure we aren't looking at transplants, and that the resolution is fine enough to look state by state. The Youth Risk Behavior Survey is a large, nationally representative survey done every other years since 1991 in American high schools, asking them about all sorts of behaviors that would make their parents worry. One group of questions has to do with sexual behavior, such as have you ever, are you currently active, have you ever before age 13, and have you had 4 or more partners. Here is their online interactive thing. I restricted my searches to female whites in all four grades, using all years available.

No matter which question you look at, you see the same picture of which states are noticeably above the national average, and which are noticeably below. Far and away the most sexually active region of the country is the Greater South, including the southern stretches of Appalachia, the Ozarks, and Texas. I didn't copy the numbers down, but I recall Arkansas, South Carolina, Missouri, and Mississippi standing out, with West Virginia, Kentucky, and to a lesser extent Tennessee rounding things out. Indiana and South Dakota weren't so bad for the average-to-cold Midwest. And Nevada, Wyoming, and Montana are no slouches either, keeping the Wild West legend alive.

It's not like we needed data to tell us what part of the country is the most frigid -- Puritanical New England and the smug and snarky Mid-Atlantic, with Delaware being the only exception. Forget having a sex life if you're a teenager in the New York metro area. (No, it wasn't any better for New York state outside of the City.) I guess being so self-satisfied means never wanting to be other-satisfied.

However, constantly monitoring how men are responding to you sets up its own stream of drama. Although we were out in the middle of nowhere for most of the trip, when we were milling around crowds of people, I could feel girls looking at me more openly than you'd experience in most of the country. Not slutty or obvious, just open. If you give them a quick look and think to yourself "Nice, but I'm not too interested," they can hear your thoughts and read your face. After they've taken two hours to put themselves together, and opening themselves up enough to give you the hint that they've noticed you, it feels disrespectful to just brush them aside. You have to engage in longer fleeting eye-contact and smile more, otherwise they put off this palpable vibe of "Don't y'all forget: Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."

I wouldn't describe it as them being needy or clingy, but more like insisting on the moral code of "one good turn deserves another." And they weren't only after a quick look to validate their ego ("thank gosh, boy looked at me = i'm not ugly"). They're more frisky than that -- they at least want to stop and flirt a little bit.

How much does the Southern culture of honor have to do with men competing over, and struggling to control frisky females? Nisbett and Cohen wrote an excellent book looking at it from a purely male-male competition point of view. They traced it back to the pastoralist ways of the early settlers in the hillier and more mountainous areas of the South. Their wealth -- livestock -- can move off on its own if driven, so they get very territorial and retaliatory about trespasses. Presumably they don't punish the sheep or cattle, though.

I wonder how much that same dynamic plays out where females are the resource under control (or not, as the case may be). Women who never respond to the advances of strange men, and who don't have even an inkling of desire to be with another man, are like unmovable wealth -- difficult to steal, hence not worth worrying too much over. But frisky females set up a whole 'nother ball game -- not only do you have to establish a reputation among would-be trespasser males that "nobody talks to my girl," but you also have to motivate the girl herself not to stray, and to correct her if she does, unlike with the cow or sheep, who you'd totally forgive if someone rustled them from you.

...Lots more to speculate about, but that'll do for now. This is what fascinates non-Southerners, such as the majority of the audience for Southern Gothic novels. There's plenty of intrigue to go around in our country. Still, in the North, intrigue is political; in the South, it's personal.

* Like pussycats, though, it has to be on their terms -- they either like you, and will chase after you, or they don't and they won't. They don't strike me as the type that could be easily manipulated using standard Pickup Artist games, which are more for liberal women with abstract and rational minds, who lack the guidance of intuition and passion and could therefore fall prey to verbally persuasive word games. Southern women are more savvy: "She said, 'Don't feed me no lines and keep yo' hands to yo'self.' "

Toys most popular with today's less empathetic children

Here is a review of the hottest-selling toys this Christmas season at major retailers, for both boys and girls.

I checked it out on a hunch after watching my 5 year-old nephew opening up some Christmas presents (via Facetime). He liked Beyblades (spinning tops that battle each other), a pirate pistol that shoots rubber suction darts, and a large Iron Man that shoots some kind of projectiles from one of his arms. When it came to some of the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, he didn't immediately jump all over them. In fact, he asked my brother, "....What does it do?" I could tell he found action figures boring.

And sure enough, none of the items on the best-selling list is an action figure. There are a couple of toys that are meant to activate the kid's empathy centers, and get them interacting with another creature that has a mind and personality -- the Elmo and Furby dolls that made me think I was looking at a list of best-sellers from 1998. I wonder how well those go over with boys, though. Only one "baby" doll for girls, and it's a baby monkey that needs to be fed and have its diaper changed. I guess wanting to care for a baby person would be promoting teenage pregnancy to impressionable kindergarten minds, or teaching them to put aside their future career just to breed.

Growing up in the '80s, we had all sorts of guns, including ones that shot projectiles, we had vehicles, and we had building toys (not just Legos, but the entirely new Construx). The Speak N Spell was as close as we got to today's best-selling "educational" tablet for tikes. Toys just were not that thing-oriented back then. When my nephew asked, "What does it do?" he was construing the action figure as a thing or tool rather than a person.

The '80s and early '90s was the heyday of action figures, which had gotten started with the large G.I. Joe dolls in the '60s. It was the Star Wars figures that really took the phenomenon over the top, making action figures the go-to toy for capturing the market of 4 to 12 year-old boys. G.I. Joe (the small ones), Transformers, He-Man, etc. etc. etc. It seemed like there were at least a dozen different action figure lines in toy stores at any given week in the '80s.

And those iconic toys were not things, tools, or gadgets, but characters. I don't remember any of us re-enacting the scenes from the Star Wars movies involving this or that character. Most of them we couldn't even remember who they were from the movies, and just made that up -- their skills, their motives, their relationships to the others (whose back did they have, who did they have beef with), and so on. That was certainly what we did when we didn't recognize who these characters were, as when they did not come from a major movie or cartoon. That's fine -- we just made it up ourselves.

Now, the ongoing stories and battles among our action figures was about as sophisticated as the plot lines on professional wrastlin' or in comic books, because we weren't that into drama. We needed it to set up the fun part -- having them battle it out -- because we knew that people don't just randomly get into heated or epic battles. They need alliances, grudges, emotions, and with enough variety to put them at cross purposes with one another, sowing the seeds for some major shit to go down.

At the very least, you need Good Guys and Bad Guys. That basic social tension doesn't arise when you're operating tools, however fun it may otherwise be. The rubber dart gun is hard to personify, and kids aren't allowed to play with other kids, where they could choose their own role to play in a mock battle.

To Generation X, it's weird how depersonalized the popular children's toys are today. Even Barbie's best-selling toy is a "dream house" filled with things rather than people and relationships -- so much for girls being so empathetic. (At least parents aren't buying their daughters pre-phones to help them make the transition to swiping a screen while ignoring their surroundings.)

Those battles also needed basic dialog, as well as any narration, spoken aloud in distinct voices in order to bring all of that out for the audience. I know I wasn't the only kid who talked to himself in different voices while playing with his action figures...

You can't make kids, especially boys, play with junk that doesn't resonate with them. So this change is not the result of toy companies trying to push this or that type of toy -- they'll push whatever earns the highest profit -- nor even of parents trying to mold their kids (since parents cave in to whatever kids want, in order to avoid damaging their self-esteem). Rather it reflects how children these days have swung toward the systemizing end of the spectrum, away from empathizing. They're more thing-oriented than people-oriented, even the girls.

The larger context is cocooning, which gives people less experience with people, interactions, relationships, emotions, and the social world generally, but does allow them to cultivate a deeper interest in the things around them. Helicopter parents are only too happy to accommodate this -- kids who are people-oriented are susceptible to External Influences, while those who want to shoot rubber darts at the fridge or fill up Barbie's dream house with more stuff will feel more content to stay locked inside the private domestic sphere during their formative years.

It's also important for reminding ourselves that empathizing does not mean interest in girly gossip -- that's a geek reaction. Following along with a revenge tragedy is also empathizing -- more so, in fact, since you meet a wider range of characters there than in garden-variety gossip. It's disturbing to see kids get so little practice developing the empathizing lobes of their brain, not only in real life but even in their play time. Some day they're going to have to interact with non-family members, and it isn't going to turn out well.

Observations on gift-giving in the 21st century

Here is a WSJ article about online shoppers getting left high and dry this week, as their orders had not arrived according to the "get it by Christmas" promise. Demand was quite a bit higher than they'd predicted, the "get it by Christmas" deadline keeps moving later (making crunch time more overloaded), not to mention delays from bad weather. These troubles affected both the online retailers and the shipping companies.

The worst part of getting left out in the cold by Christmas Eve is that it's too late to order something else online and receive the replacement gift by Christmas day.

I never order gifts "in advance," i.e. during the Black Friday melee weekend or even the first half of December. That whole way of doing it is part of the broader trend toward getting Christmas out of the way as soon as possible, and just quickly going through the bare minimum of motions on Christmas day.

They start selling decorations the day after Halloween, and then try to get us to complete our shopping around Black Friday. You may even wrap the suckers up, or if you're having them shipped directly to their recipients, you let them know not to open until Christmas. What is there left to do during the Twelve Days of Christmas? Nothing, really. Just biding your time, wishing the stupid holiday would hurry up so you can exchange the packages that have been sitting around for several weeks.

As with any element of a ritual that gets displayed too early, this deflates the power from what used to be a more intense season. When Christmas trees and other decorations go up a month ahead of time, they become taken for granted by Christmas day. When Christmas music starts regularly playing on Black Friday, we're too accustomed to the songs for them to sound special in the days before Christmas. Ditto the flavor of Christmas-y food like candy canes (peppermint mocha, peppermint bark, peppermint bacon cheeseburgers). And when those presents have been sitting out for weeks, whether wrapped or not, we no longer feel exciting anticipation by Christmas day -- that lasts for a little bit, but then turns to annoyance after our curiosity has become frustrated for more than 10 or 15 days in a row.

Now we see another great advantage of waiting until the proper time for gift shopping, rather than doing it early and treating it like something you've crossed off a list, like Christmas is a series of items in a checklist that you can't wait to be done with soon enough and get to the New Year's party already. By procrastinating until the week before Christmas, I wasn't left gift-less yesterday.

When you shop at a store, and they don't have an item that they'd promised would be there, you can immediately go to a backup plan and buy something else at that same store, or go to a nearby store and get the intended gift or something different. Whatever happens, you're coming home with something, rather than hoping that the stuff you ordered online will make it by the promised date, with no buffer zone in case something goes wrong.

In fact, I'd been looking for a certain book to get my brother, which I saw on the Urban Outfitters website. I stopped by the store before coming home for Christmas vacation, and they didn't have it. No big deal, I'll just hit up Barnes & Noble when I get home. The computer inside the store said they had a copy of it, in Humor, but it was neither in Humor nor in the special promotional tables where Customer Service said it would be. Dang, looks like I might strike out. But we were going to travel to meet my brother the day before Christmas, so I'd try a bookstore on the way to his house from the airport. The first B&N didn't have it, but they told me which nearby branches did. And son-of-a-bitch, the next one on the way home had a copy -- bought at 4:30pm Christmas Eve. But still, in my hands, and wrapped and ready for Christmas, not stuck in shipping limbo with no backup plan.

Not to mention that I didn't have to pay shipping costs -- and not because I bought $75 or $100 or whatever the limit is for decently fast free shipping to kick in. Or have to pay an annual membership fee to get "free" shipping.

It blows my mind how much people want to inconvenience themselves simply to satisfy their cocooning desire to not have to visit a store, be around other shoppers, and interact with the sales staff. You have to waste too much time figuring out what to get because the inventory is so vast online, you have to order several weeks in advance, pay for shipping, and then pray that you aren't in the 15-20% who won't get their Christmas order by Christmas, and have no backup plan.

Plus there's no hustle-bustle and Christmas spirit when you're clicking around online and receiving a package at your doorstep.

The only advantage of online shopping is that the vast inventory makes it possible to find rare things that might not show up in stores. But if it's something that rare and specific, they can order it themselves. We were perfectly happy to receive store-bought gifts back before online shopping, none of which would be head-spinningly rare.

Indeed, I think aiming for gifts that are that rare and micro-tailored to the recipient are a not-so-subtle form of showing off on the part of the giver. It's competitive gift-giving. When you're trying to brag about how thoughtful you are, you're thinking primarily of yourself. It adulterates the other-minded spirit of gift-giving.

That ties back in to buying gifts super early -- bragging about how early you ordered them, to signal how much more thoughtful you are than everybody else. It's self-aggrandizing, not sacrificing.