I've written before about the virtues of coconut milk and oil: they're one of the most concentrated sources of life-sustaining saturated fat, and most of it comes from medium-chain fatty acids that your body burns right away, giving you an energy boost without the crash. Also, the predominant fat is lauric acid, which fights and prevents disease through several pathways, and is very hard to find at such high levels in any other food. It is very low in carbs, none of which is lactose, and for me that's the clincher since I'm mildly lactose-intolerant.
Dairy products also have some proteins that the human body doesn't process perfectly, some of which can lead to acne breakouts. Loren Cordain has a paper on his website detailing the mechanism as well as citing the empirical studies that show milk consumption leads to acne. I'd started to eat a lot more butter recently and noticed that, so coconut milk will make your life better on that score too.
The trouble is finding ways to work it into your meals, mainly because most of us have never cooked with it before and have no intuition for where it should go and what job it should do. Here are two incredibly simple ways I've found to work a good amount into my daily meals:
- As a base for a sauce to go with grilled meat. Throw some meat on the grill, and a couple minutes before it's done, put about 1/2 to 1 tsp of green curry paste onto the plate, pour 4 tbsp (or 2 oz.) of coconut milk over that, and mix it all around so that the paste is thoroughly distributed in the milk. Place the grilled meat on top, grind a bunch of sea salt on top of it, then flip it over to coat the other side in the sauce. As the juices from the meat run off into the sauce, stir it up a little to get them distributed too.
It takes almost no time, involves no extra cleanup (once you can eyeball how much curry paste and coconut milk are needed), and tastes fantastic. Much better than what I'd been using before -- pasture butter, salt, pepper, and cardamom. Plus it's cheaper. I've used the Thai Kitchen coconut milk, unsweetened, premium, first pressing variety (don't get anything with sweetener or reduced fat), and the Thai Kitchen green curry paste. Their recipe for the sauce also has you add sugar and fish sauce (which itself has sugar), so ignore that and just use these two ingredients.
- As a base for egg nog, custard, etc. I've done this without eggs and it's great, so it'll only be better once I add eggs in. Pour some coconut milk in a bowl (probably no more than a couple ounces), add a drop or two of vanilla extract, and shake in some pumpkin pie spice to taste (the type I got has cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and cloves). Stir it up and drizzle it over some halved or slivered almonds. In the future I think I'll skip the almonds and just make it a drink by adding a raw egg yolk or two -- that'll make some great wake-up juice -- perhaps chilling it overnight to enjoy as a custard for breakfast. No sweeteners! If you drink, though, you might mix in some egg nog liquor. Like before, this takes no time and no extra cleanup.
July 12, 2010
July 11, 2010
July 10, 2010
The pastoral and small-town romance flourish during dangerous times
When the world becomes more dangerous, some places that started fairly frightening will become intolerably scary to most people, and they will seek an escape to some safer place. Urban areas have been more ridden with crime, so it would be no surprise if during upswings in violence people began wanting to live in more suburban or rural areas, perhaps returning to the city after the violence level drops down again. Combine this with the overall carpe diem mindset that prevails during dangerous times, when you may be done in at any moment, and this preference for outside-of-urban living becomes colored by a longing or romance for unspoiled natural sanctuaries. When the society recovers from the surge in violence, people will return to their contempt for hicks in the sticks and glorify the metropolis once more.
Indeed, the history of the pastoral confirms this. It was popular during the rising-crime times of the 14th C., the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, the Romantic era, and in a modified form during the recent wild times of the 1960s through the 1980s. Not surprisingly, the pastoral was mocked once these dangerous times came to an end, as the culture shifted back to petty status contests among those seeking urban sophistication.
While there are no good data for homicide rates before 1200, it looks like the periods of literature that focus on The Big Themes accompany rises in violence rates. More, they seem to go through a 200-year cycle: late 20th C., ca. 1800, ca. 1600, and late 14th C. If we extrapolate this cycle backwards, we would hit the troubadours of the 12th C., Virgil's Eclogues of the 1st C. B.C., and Theocritus' Bucolics of the 3rd C. B.C. Although speculative, it would fit the larger pattern.
During the most recent widespread wave of violence, the '60s through the '80s, the shepherd's way of life had all but vanished in Western societies. So how did people meet their need for pastoral romance? The closest place they had was small-town America, and whether it was more rural or suburban didn't matter as long as it wasn't the crime-crusted cesspool of the city. The modern descendant of the shepherd is a flying-solo, nomadic sweet-talker who preaches the carpe diem philosophy. The modern milkmaid is the All-American girl next door from the heartland, initially reluctant to trust the tongue of the shepherd but ultimately powerless to resist his fun-loving charm.
Probably the most well known modern writer of bucolic songs is John Cougar Mellencamp, who named one of his songs "Small Town," although just about all could have been so titled. His 1982 hit "Jack & Diane" is the most recent reincarnation of Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd to His Love." The music video has plenty of pastoral pictures, in case you didn't get it. When was the last time you heard a song like that? I couldn't say, but I'd predict no later than 1991 or '92 -- "suckin' on a chili dog" would clash horribly with imitating the gals from Sex and the City or striking your best metrosexual pose. The last image of this genre that sticks in my mind is not Jack and Diane but Zack and Kelly aspiring to a pastoral prom night (notice the simplicity of their clothing, considering the occasion):
The triumph of the New Urbanist movement in community planning shows how dead our earlier romance for suburbia is, for it could not have succeeded unless the public was willing to tolerate it or actively seek it out. Now communities are going to devolve back to the dense mixed-use towns of the 1950s where there's little room for escape and no sense of the great outdoors in your own back yard. (And earlier I showed that park visits have been falling since the early-mid 1990s.) No locus amoenus in the form of a stream that runs through the woods behind your high school where teenagers would run off to for a make-out session. And you have to admit that "the girl in the next apartment over" doesn't sound very romantic.
Ever since the gentrification craze began during the 1990s, there has been much revisionist history of suburbia -- that it was boring, alienating, bla bla bla. In reality, suburban life during wild times was filled with exciting things to do, and people -- especially young people -- were outside socializing and playing all the time. Even iconic Gen X-ers like Smashing Pumpkins show sincere nostalgia for that time and place in the lyrics and video for their song "1979," one of the few good songs in the alternative genre (a good number of the others are by them too).
Despite this recent poo-poo-ing of suburbia, history will have the last laugh. After all, human beings evolved mostly in hunter-gatherer or rural agrarian and pastoral societies, not dense urban ones, so we have a natural love of the former settings, what the sociobiologist E.O. Wilson calls "biophilia." Stories and pictures about that way of life have and will continue to endure throughout the centuries, while the accounts of sophisticated cityfolk like Samuel Pepys and Doctor Johnson will be judged trivial in comparison.
Indeed, the history of the pastoral confirms this. It was popular during the rising-crime times of the 14th C., the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, the Romantic era, and in a modified form during the recent wild times of the 1960s through the 1980s. Not surprisingly, the pastoral was mocked once these dangerous times came to an end, as the culture shifted back to petty status contests among those seeking urban sophistication.
While there are no good data for homicide rates before 1200, it looks like the periods of literature that focus on The Big Themes accompany rises in violence rates. More, they seem to go through a 200-year cycle: late 20th C., ca. 1800, ca. 1600, and late 14th C. If we extrapolate this cycle backwards, we would hit the troubadours of the 12th C., Virgil's Eclogues of the 1st C. B.C., and Theocritus' Bucolics of the 3rd C. B.C. Although speculative, it would fit the larger pattern.
During the most recent widespread wave of violence, the '60s through the '80s, the shepherd's way of life had all but vanished in Western societies. So how did people meet their need for pastoral romance? The closest place they had was small-town America, and whether it was more rural or suburban didn't matter as long as it wasn't the crime-crusted cesspool of the city. The modern descendant of the shepherd is a flying-solo, nomadic sweet-talker who preaches the carpe diem philosophy. The modern milkmaid is the All-American girl next door from the heartland, initially reluctant to trust the tongue of the shepherd but ultimately powerless to resist his fun-loving charm.
Probably the most well known modern writer of bucolic songs is John Cougar Mellencamp, who named one of his songs "Small Town," although just about all could have been so titled. His 1982 hit "Jack & Diane" is the most recent reincarnation of Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd to His Love." The music video has plenty of pastoral pictures, in case you didn't get it. When was the last time you heard a song like that? I couldn't say, but I'd predict no later than 1991 or '92 -- "suckin' on a chili dog" would clash horribly with imitating the gals from Sex and the City or striking your best metrosexual pose. The last image of this genre that sticks in my mind is not Jack and Diane but Zack and Kelly aspiring to a pastoral prom night (notice the simplicity of their clothing, considering the occasion):
The triumph of the New Urbanist movement in community planning shows how dead our earlier romance for suburbia is, for it could not have succeeded unless the public was willing to tolerate it or actively seek it out. Now communities are going to devolve back to the dense mixed-use towns of the 1950s where there's little room for escape and no sense of the great outdoors in your own back yard. (And earlier I showed that park visits have been falling since the early-mid 1990s.) No locus amoenus in the form of a stream that runs through the woods behind your high school where teenagers would run off to for a make-out session. And you have to admit that "the girl in the next apartment over" doesn't sound very romantic.
Ever since the gentrification craze began during the 1990s, there has been much revisionist history of suburbia -- that it was boring, alienating, bla bla bla. In reality, suburban life during wild times was filled with exciting things to do, and people -- especially young people -- were outside socializing and playing all the time. Even iconic Gen X-ers like Smashing Pumpkins show sincere nostalgia for that time and place in the lyrics and video for their song "1979," one of the few good songs in the alternative genre (a good number of the others are by them too).
Despite this recent poo-poo-ing of suburbia, history will have the last laugh. After all, human beings evolved mostly in hunter-gatherer or rural agrarian and pastoral societies, not dense urban ones, so we have a natural love of the former settings, what the sociobiologist E.O. Wilson calls "biophilia." Stories and pictures about that way of life have and will continue to endure throughout the centuries, while the accounts of sophisticated cityfolk like Samuel Pepys and Doctor Johnson will be judged trivial in comparison.
July 9, 2010
The Peltzman Effect in junk food
Briefly the Peltzman Effect is that regulations to improve safety may cause unintended greater harm because people now feel safer and thus will take greater risks that could affect others. His classic example is laws requiring people to wear seatbelts did not lower traffic harm but increased it. You feel more invincible with a seatbelt and an airbag, so why pay as much attention as you used to without these devices? Imagine how much harder you'd charge someone in football if you were both wearing helmets than if neither wore one. (Here is an EconTalk podcast with him on the topic.)
But this is not limited to government regulations, as mandatory seatbelts and airbags could have arisen purely through consumer demand, if they were truly that crazy about safety features. The same greater degree of recklessness would follow.
I think we see this in consumption of junk food by children. Here the ones demanding safer food are the parents, all part of the health food craze that began in the 1980s but got crazy over the past 20 years. Surprisingly -- or not -- this matches the timing of the obesity epidemic (and of all other diseases within Metabolic Syndrome, like diabetes). It struck young people somewhat later, beginning around the late '70s and early '80s for adults and by the late '80s to mid-'90s for young people.
The main culprit is the switch away from animal products to a carb-heavy diet, especially loaded up with grains, starches, and sugars. Now where would kids get that kind of food from? Breakfast cereal, which is almost all grains and sugars. This is the time when bacon and fried eggs started vanishing from little kids' breakfasts and were replaced with cereal. Kids eat way more sugar than they did before the late '80s / mid-'90s onset of the youth obesity epidemic, and how much junky cereal parents allow their kids to eat plays a big part.
Back in the '80s, cereal was frank about what it contained -- lots of sugar. (See here and here for a reminder.) Aside from all the cereals whose names had "sugar" in them, there were those with "chocolate," "cocoa," or "chocula," as well as ones that boasted their likeness to candy and dessert -- Reese's Puffs, Rocky Road, Ice Cream Cones, Cookie Crisp, etc. It was often vibrantly multi-colored like candy, sometimes even having brightly colored marshmallows.
No parent can look at those cereals and think, "Gee, the commercial says it's 'part of a complete breakfast,' so why not let Tommy gorge himself on Sugar Smacks?" As the health food foot soldier consumers stormed the supermarket, one of the first aisles that they razed to the ground was the cereals. I remember that aisle stretching into infinity, sometimes spilling over into an adjacent aisle, and with such a wide variety to choose from. Not that I eat processed carbs anymore, but I've checked my local supermarket's cereal aisle from time to time, and 1) there's not as much space devoted to it as before, and 2) nearly all of the candy-and-dessert types of cereals are gone, with so-called healthier alternatives in their place. You know, those 500 variations on granola and primitive cereals like Chex or Frosted Flakes.
When the parent sees Frosted Flakes, Frosted Mini-Wheats, Honey Nut Cheerios, etc., they recognize that there's some sweetness there ("frosted," "honey"), but it doesn't sound so bad. At least it's not called S'Mores and doesn't have marshmallows. Because the new cereals adopted during the health food craze appear less junky, parents will let their kids eat more of them. By contrast, when the cereals that parents bought for their kids were such flagrant sugar bombs, they would think twice about letting their kids pig out on them.
If the new cereals were made out of spinach, then eating more of the stuff wouldn't fatten up the children. But just look at the label and see how much carbs and especially sugars there are. The difference is cosmetic only -- like grade inflation. The advertizing about how natural, organic, bla bla bla it is with its fiber, whole grains, and yadda yadda yadda, is just there to assuage the parents' guilt. "I want to let my kid have some sugar, but don't make me feel bad doing it -- sell me a believable story about how it's somewhat healthy." The unintended consequence of this grade inflation is that kids eat more junk (with inflation, now perceived as not-so-junky), get diabetes, and grow obese.
Before the health food craze, parents used their own judgment about what was obviously harmful food -- they did not demand that the food producers wipe out the candy-like cereals and give them "healthier" alternatives. During that period, there was no grade inflation of junk foods, therefore parents had no illusions about its nutritional quality, limited their kids' consumption, and kept them from getting really wrecked.
It's just an impression, but this seems to apply to sugary junk food in general. Hostess used to sell snack pies with pudding filling but now only sells ones with fruit / syrup filling. Pudding is obviously a dessert, while fruit sounds healthy, so it's OK if my kid eats 150 g of sugar in one sitting. I looked through the cookie section of my supermarket and again found much less of the not-even-trying-to-hide-it sweetness. Like the cereals, the cookie selection looked so boring, the sugar waiting behind a disguise of bland-colored primitive-sounding snacks that boast of having so many grams of fiber or whole grains -- like your kid gives a shit. That's obviously to assuage the parents' guilt, which again causes them let their guard down and allow their kid to eat way too much sugar. Back when most of these snacks had sugar in the form of chocolate, cream, and icing or frosting, parents could tell that their kids shouldn't be eating much of them.
It's like at Starbucks or the Whole Foods bakery section, where shoppers allow themselves to be deceived that their blueberry scone or banana nut muffin isn't simply 5 lbs of sugar and a bit of flour. I mean, it's not like those tacky candy bars that poor people stuff their unsophisticated faces with: it's healthier. Right, that's why the skin is falling off your face and you have a beer belly.
Everyone wants practical dieting advice, especially during the summer. Most people would benefit by just cutting their carbs down to 40-60 g a day, but then most people would not be able to withstand the peer pressure to gorge on grains all day -- "What, do you think you're better than us 'cause we eat bread?" So if you're going to include a larger amount of carbs than you should, you might as well make it more obviously dangerous carby foods. That way you won't lull yourself into a false sense of security and blimp out and get diabetes from eating granola bars, pasta, and fruit juice all day. I don't mean eat a cake instead of bread. I mean, given a certain amount of carbs that you're going to eat, take that amount from a source that's more likely to sound your alarm.
But this is not limited to government regulations, as mandatory seatbelts and airbags could have arisen purely through consumer demand, if they were truly that crazy about safety features. The same greater degree of recklessness would follow.
I think we see this in consumption of junk food by children. Here the ones demanding safer food are the parents, all part of the health food craze that began in the 1980s but got crazy over the past 20 years. Surprisingly -- or not -- this matches the timing of the obesity epidemic (and of all other diseases within Metabolic Syndrome, like diabetes). It struck young people somewhat later, beginning around the late '70s and early '80s for adults and by the late '80s to mid-'90s for young people.
The main culprit is the switch away from animal products to a carb-heavy diet, especially loaded up with grains, starches, and sugars. Now where would kids get that kind of food from? Breakfast cereal, which is almost all grains and sugars. This is the time when bacon and fried eggs started vanishing from little kids' breakfasts and were replaced with cereal. Kids eat way more sugar than they did before the late '80s / mid-'90s onset of the youth obesity epidemic, and how much junky cereal parents allow their kids to eat plays a big part.
Back in the '80s, cereal was frank about what it contained -- lots of sugar. (See here and here for a reminder.) Aside from all the cereals whose names had "sugar" in them, there were those with "chocolate," "cocoa," or "chocula," as well as ones that boasted their likeness to candy and dessert -- Reese's Puffs, Rocky Road, Ice Cream Cones, Cookie Crisp, etc. It was often vibrantly multi-colored like candy, sometimes even having brightly colored marshmallows.
No parent can look at those cereals and think, "Gee, the commercial says it's 'part of a complete breakfast,' so why not let Tommy gorge himself on Sugar Smacks?" As the health food foot soldier consumers stormed the supermarket, one of the first aisles that they razed to the ground was the cereals. I remember that aisle stretching into infinity, sometimes spilling over into an adjacent aisle, and with such a wide variety to choose from. Not that I eat processed carbs anymore, but I've checked my local supermarket's cereal aisle from time to time, and 1) there's not as much space devoted to it as before, and 2) nearly all of the candy-and-dessert types of cereals are gone, with so-called healthier alternatives in their place. You know, those 500 variations on granola and primitive cereals like Chex or Frosted Flakes.
When the parent sees Frosted Flakes, Frosted Mini-Wheats, Honey Nut Cheerios, etc., they recognize that there's some sweetness there ("frosted," "honey"), but it doesn't sound so bad. At least it's not called S'Mores and doesn't have marshmallows. Because the new cereals adopted during the health food craze appear less junky, parents will let their kids eat more of them. By contrast, when the cereals that parents bought for their kids were such flagrant sugar bombs, they would think twice about letting their kids pig out on them.
If the new cereals were made out of spinach, then eating more of the stuff wouldn't fatten up the children. But just look at the label and see how much carbs and especially sugars there are. The difference is cosmetic only -- like grade inflation. The advertizing about how natural, organic, bla bla bla it is with its fiber, whole grains, and yadda yadda yadda, is just there to assuage the parents' guilt. "I want to let my kid have some sugar, but don't make me feel bad doing it -- sell me a believable story about how it's somewhat healthy." The unintended consequence of this grade inflation is that kids eat more junk (with inflation, now perceived as not-so-junky), get diabetes, and grow obese.
Before the health food craze, parents used their own judgment about what was obviously harmful food -- they did not demand that the food producers wipe out the candy-like cereals and give them "healthier" alternatives. During that period, there was no grade inflation of junk foods, therefore parents had no illusions about its nutritional quality, limited their kids' consumption, and kept them from getting really wrecked.
It's just an impression, but this seems to apply to sugary junk food in general. Hostess used to sell snack pies with pudding filling but now only sells ones with fruit / syrup filling. Pudding is obviously a dessert, while fruit sounds healthy, so it's OK if my kid eats 150 g of sugar in one sitting. I looked through the cookie section of my supermarket and again found much less of the not-even-trying-to-hide-it sweetness. Like the cereals, the cookie selection looked so boring, the sugar waiting behind a disguise of bland-colored primitive-sounding snacks that boast of having so many grams of fiber or whole grains -- like your kid gives a shit. That's obviously to assuage the parents' guilt, which again causes them let their guard down and allow their kid to eat way too much sugar. Back when most of these snacks had sugar in the form of chocolate, cream, and icing or frosting, parents could tell that their kids shouldn't be eating much of them.
It's like at Starbucks or the Whole Foods bakery section, where shoppers allow themselves to be deceived that their blueberry scone or banana nut muffin isn't simply 5 lbs of sugar and a bit of flour. I mean, it's not like those tacky candy bars that poor people stuff their unsophisticated faces with: it's healthier. Right, that's why the skin is falling off your face and you have a beer belly.
Everyone wants practical dieting advice, especially during the summer. Most people would benefit by just cutting their carbs down to 40-60 g a day, but then most people would not be able to withstand the peer pressure to gorge on grains all day -- "What, do you think you're better than us 'cause we eat bread?" So if you're going to include a larger amount of carbs than you should, you might as well make it more obviously dangerous carby foods. That way you won't lull yourself into a false sense of security and blimp out and get diabetes from eating granola bars, pasta, and fruit juice all day. I don't mean eat a cake instead of bread. I mean, given a certain amount of carbs that you're going to eat, take that amount from a source that's more likely to sound your alarm.
July 7, 2010
Contemporary Malthusian impressions 1: Crime, housing, and nutrition
Preface for the series here. The basic idea is to take an honest look at how much the American standard of living has improved over the past 30 years, rather than to cherry-pick the cases where vast improvements have been made and stipulate post hoc that these are the domains that matter most for our well-being, as though we were miserable when we only had the Walkman and not the glorious iPod. We also want to focus on whether the improvements in some key area have already hit diminishing marginal returns, so that we're plateauing rather than skyrocketing upward.
To try to keep things objective, I said I'd stick with a pre-existing framework for what matters regarding human welfare, and why not pick the familiar Maslow's hierarchy of needs? I'll start with three of the most basic concerns, not only because they are so important to us but because free-market cheerleaders ignore them and tend to focus on how dazzling today's gadgets are compared to yesterday's.
Let's start with food and nutrition. Starvation is more or less non-existent in capitalist countries, and that is largely due to the falling prices to the consumer thanks to the specialization and competition among food producers. However, this fact has been true for quite awhile, the largest gains coming at the start when malnourished peasants got jobs that allowed them to feast on animal products for once rather than subsist on grains and starches. No real progress could've been made in the past 30 years there.
When we turn to the composition of the diet, though, we see a lower standard of living over the past 30 years, due to the government, academic experts, and the diet industry converging on the backwards view that animal products are poison and that grains are life-saving. People generally trust experts and government warnings, and they indeed followed this advice and switched to a carb-intensive diet starting in the late 1970s or early 1980s. That is also when the obesity epidemic shows up in official statistics, although it is worth mentioning that this epidemic includes not just obesity but all other diseases of Metabolic Syndrome -- diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, insulin resistance, etc. I summarized the data on the change in the diet and change in health outcomes here.
It's true that people can expect to live a few years longer than 30 years ago, but I think the average person finds that improvement of lesser value than the gains we should have seen by continuing the capitalist trend away from an agricultural diet and toward one of lower carbs and more animals. If the average lifespan had increased from 30 to 33, people would be truly grateful, but 3 more years of elderly life, while still positive, don't affect us as much. Given the myriad diseases that a carb-heavy diet causes, the average lifespan would've improved even more. And freedom from those diseases -- which affect adults far earlier than their golden years, and now even small children -- is what most people would consider being in good health. That is, being full of vim and vigor, able to be physically active without passing out, having good muscle and skin tone, no cavities, and so on.
The other major component of health for modern populations is freedom from infectious diseases. Again it is plain to see that, encumbered though it may be by government regulations, the drug industry has delivered us from lots of crowd-killers from earlier times, thanks to division of labor and economies of scale, and at low prices thanks to competition. Still, most of those gains came early with Penicillin and engineering safe drinking water to prevent cholera, dysentery, and other water-borne diseases. Perhaps the last major success of eradicating nasty diseases was the Measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, although as the graphs in that article show, that was a success of the '60s and '70s, with no real change in the past 30 years.
About the only new vaccine developed since then has been the one against chicken pox, adopted here in 1995. Given that it's only good against one disease, and a very mild one at that -- although it could still spoil a summer road trip like when I caught it as a little kid -- it's not possible to rank this with the earlier triumphs over infection. In this area, we have very clearly hit diminishing marginal returns. (This is not because there are no more infectious diseases: Greg Cochran and Paul Ewald emphasize that many other modern diseases likely have an infectious component, but that most medical researchers are ignorantly uninterested in pursuing this.)
So, for overall health we're either going nowhere or perhaps somewhat backwards since 1980. Because large swings in the standard of living must be obvious to the average person -- otherwise the researcher has included things in the list that don't really matter much -- there should be a popular awareness of how unhealthy we've become. And indeed everyone recognizes that big change over the past 30 years. I just watched Death Wish, made in 1974 when Charles Bronson was 52, and although he shows basic signs of aging, the initial scene of him and his wife at the beach show that he had good muscle tone and hardly any body fat. You'd be hard pressed to find average 52 year-olds today -- that is, ones who weren't bodybuilders earlier in life -- who look like that. My grandparents could name all sorts of infectious diseases that "everyone got" as children; my parents a couple; and I can only name chicken pox.
Aside from having enough -- and enough quality food -- to eat, you'd better have a roof over your head if you want to survive. The economist Robert Shiller has a very clear chart of housing prices since 1890 at his webpage (3rd paragraph from the bottom). Not that you need to see it, but Americans have seen a lower standard of living here, too, over the past 30 years. The housing price index rises throughout the '80s, dips back a bit during the first half of the '90s, takes off during the recent housing bubble, and has dropped since the bubble burst, although it is still currently above the previous two peaks before the housing bubble (one in the late '70s and the other in the late '80s). In fact, the only period during which the index fell steadily was from roughly 1895 to 1920 (then it remained flat until about 1940). And since the quality of housing hasn't reached Jetsons-like levels over the past 30 years, we're not getting stunningly higher-quality housing as we're paying more for it, and so this major component of the average person's standard of living has declined.
This is not simply due to population growth, as Shiller's chart shows: population has increased steadily since 1890, but only since about 1940 have housing prices started to shoot up. Again the basic economic concepts of diminishing marginal returns and rivalrous goods should have led economists to expect a decline in the standard of living in recent times. If you own a piece of land, no one else gets to. When land is abundant, population can increase and instead of getting crowded and competitive, people can head off for uncolonized territory. After awhile, the space fills up and that's it. Further population increases will make the place more crowded, which increases the demand for land and housing, which in turn drives up the price.
Given how simple this dynamic is to understand, and given that economists were among the first to elucidate how the dynamic worked, you'd think that economists would pay more attention to it and heed its warning when discussing how great our standard of living is supposed to be compared to the recent past. But they are afraid that if they admit one large piece of the standard of living has sunken over the past generation or two, the public will take that as confirmation of their fears and get pessimistic about the economy as a whole, not just housing. Still, maybe the public isn't so irrational -- this embarrassing example should make us think twice about whether our standard of living hasn't been in something of a plateau stage for the past 30 years. This should shock us out of looking only at memory chips and internet access, and focus instead on what truly matters for our well-being.
Finally, what good is having a nice home and a healthy body if they can't be protected from property crimes and physical violence? Criminology statistics show that property and violent crimes move together over time -- when rape rates go up, so do the rates for homicide and burglary. Because homicide data are more reliable and go back further in time, I'll focus just on those. Here is the homicide rate since 1900. There is no trend steadily upward or downward, only cycles up and down. Our standard of living got worse during the 1980s, but much better during the '90s and 2000s. Of course, we can't expect that to last too long given the clear cyclical pattern over decades. But that is some good news in the larger picture.
As for longer-term trends, here are homicide rates from Western Europe over the past 700 or so years. We've seen plummeting rates of violence since about 1500 or 1600, and not so much change in recent times. Again this reflects diminishing marginal returns: when the centralized government starts rounding up trouble-makers, and when police and military functions are consolidated into central and neutral third-party forces -- rather than being practiced by clans and factions -- the most heinous criminals will be the first to go since they are the easiest to spot and the least likely to merit any compassion.
No one would argue that these three domains are fundamental to human well-being, and there is pretty good data on all of them for the past 30 years. Overall the picture is that the American standard of living has stagnated or declined during this time at the most basic of Maslow's levels. Obviously we have not fallen off a cliff back into Europe in the Dark Ages, and even the declines judged against the vast gains that were made from roughly 1800 to 1930 or so might seem like a barely perceptible dip. Nevertheless, it's clear that in these basic areas we're no longer improving at the dazzling rate of capitalism's bustling infancy and hyperactive adolescence.
Indeed, we seem to have stalled out -- at a pretty nice level, mind you (I know I'd be happy living in the '80s forever), but this should give free-market enthusiasts pause when trying to persuade the public of capitalism's virtues. They should focus on the enormous gains that were made from the start up through the point when, let's admit it, diminishing marginal returns seem to have set in several decades ago. That may seem more remote, but at least the audience would buy it -- slaving away on a farm with only corn and potatoes to eat vs. living in a decent house with no backbreaking labor and plenty of meat, eggs, and dairy in the ice box (as my grandmother still calls it). Trying to convince the public that life in 2010 is like The Jetsons compared to life in 1980 will only get laughs about how clueless the economist is, and rightly so, as such a change would be impossible to miss. The take-home message to the audience should be: "Look, we realize things aren't that much greater than 30 years ago, but it's a lot better than 100 or 200 years ago, and if we don't screw things up, we can continue enjoying what we've already got, nice and steady. But if we get too crazy with attacks on the free market, we could actually slide backwards."
To try to keep things objective, I said I'd stick with a pre-existing framework for what matters regarding human welfare, and why not pick the familiar Maslow's hierarchy of needs? I'll start with three of the most basic concerns, not only because they are so important to us but because free-market cheerleaders ignore them and tend to focus on how dazzling today's gadgets are compared to yesterday's.
Let's start with food and nutrition. Starvation is more or less non-existent in capitalist countries, and that is largely due to the falling prices to the consumer thanks to the specialization and competition among food producers. However, this fact has been true for quite awhile, the largest gains coming at the start when malnourished peasants got jobs that allowed them to feast on animal products for once rather than subsist on grains and starches. No real progress could've been made in the past 30 years there.
When we turn to the composition of the diet, though, we see a lower standard of living over the past 30 years, due to the government, academic experts, and the diet industry converging on the backwards view that animal products are poison and that grains are life-saving. People generally trust experts and government warnings, and they indeed followed this advice and switched to a carb-intensive diet starting in the late 1970s or early 1980s. That is also when the obesity epidemic shows up in official statistics, although it is worth mentioning that this epidemic includes not just obesity but all other diseases of Metabolic Syndrome -- diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, insulin resistance, etc. I summarized the data on the change in the diet and change in health outcomes here.
It's true that people can expect to live a few years longer than 30 years ago, but I think the average person finds that improvement of lesser value than the gains we should have seen by continuing the capitalist trend away from an agricultural diet and toward one of lower carbs and more animals. If the average lifespan had increased from 30 to 33, people would be truly grateful, but 3 more years of elderly life, while still positive, don't affect us as much. Given the myriad diseases that a carb-heavy diet causes, the average lifespan would've improved even more. And freedom from those diseases -- which affect adults far earlier than their golden years, and now even small children -- is what most people would consider being in good health. That is, being full of vim and vigor, able to be physically active without passing out, having good muscle and skin tone, no cavities, and so on.
The other major component of health for modern populations is freedom from infectious diseases. Again it is plain to see that, encumbered though it may be by government regulations, the drug industry has delivered us from lots of crowd-killers from earlier times, thanks to division of labor and economies of scale, and at low prices thanks to competition. Still, most of those gains came early with Penicillin and engineering safe drinking water to prevent cholera, dysentery, and other water-borne diseases. Perhaps the last major success of eradicating nasty diseases was the Measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, although as the graphs in that article show, that was a success of the '60s and '70s, with no real change in the past 30 years.
About the only new vaccine developed since then has been the one against chicken pox, adopted here in 1995. Given that it's only good against one disease, and a very mild one at that -- although it could still spoil a summer road trip like when I caught it as a little kid -- it's not possible to rank this with the earlier triumphs over infection. In this area, we have very clearly hit diminishing marginal returns. (This is not because there are no more infectious diseases: Greg Cochran and Paul Ewald emphasize that many other modern diseases likely have an infectious component, but that most medical researchers are ignorantly uninterested in pursuing this.)
So, for overall health we're either going nowhere or perhaps somewhat backwards since 1980. Because large swings in the standard of living must be obvious to the average person -- otherwise the researcher has included things in the list that don't really matter much -- there should be a popular awareness of how unhealthy we've become. And indeed everyone recognizes that big change over the past 30 years. I just watched Death Wish, made in 1974 when Charles Bronson was 52, and although he shows basic signs of aging, the initial scene of him and his wife at the beach show that he had good muscle tone and hardly any body fat. You'd be hard pressed to find average 52 year-olds today -- that is, ones who weren't bodybuilders earlier in life -- who look like that. My grandparents could name all sorts of infectious diseases that "everyone got" as children; my parents a couple; and I can only name chicken pox.
Aside from having enough -- and enough quality food -- to eat, you'd better have a roof over your head if you want to survive. The economist Robert Shiller has a very clear chart of housing prices since 1890 at his webpage (3rd paragraph from the bottom). Not that you need to see it, but Americans have seen a lower standard of living here, too, over the past 30 years. The housing price index rises throughout the '80s, dips back a bit during the first half of the '90s, takes off during the recent housing bubble, and has dropped since the bubble burst, although it is still currently above the previous two peaks before the housing bubble (one in the late '70s and the other in the late '80s). In fact, the only period during which the index fell steadily was from roughly 1895 to 1920 (then it remained flat until about 1940). And since the quality of housing hasn't reached Jetsons-like levels over the past 30 years, we're not getting stunningly higher-quality housing as we're paying more for it, and so this major component of the average person's standard of living has declined.
This is not simply due to population growth, as Shiller's chart shows: population has increased steadily since 1890, but only since about 1940 have housing prices started to shoot up. Again the basic economic concepts of diminishing marginal returns and rivalrous goods should have led economists to expect a decline in the standard of living in recent times. If you own a piece of land, no one else gets to. When land is abundant, population can increase and instead of getting crowded and competitive, people can head off for uncolonized territory. After awhile, the space fills up and that's it. Further population increases will make the place more crowded, which increases the demand for land and housing, which in turn drives up the price.
Given how simple this dynamic is to understand, and given that economists were among the first to elucidate how the dynamic worked, you'd think that economists would pay more attention to it and heed its warning when discussing how great our standard of living is supposed to be compared to the recent past. But they are afraid that if they admit one large piece of the standard of living has sunken over the past generation or two, the public will take that as confirmation of their fears and get pessimistic about the economy as a whole, not just housing. Still, maybe the public isn't so irrational -- this embarrassing example should make us think twice about whether our standard of living hasn't been in something of a plateau stage for the past 30 years. This should shock us out of looking only at memory chips and internet access, and focus instead on what truly matters for our well-being.
Finally, what good is having a nice home and a healthy body if they can't be protected from property crimes and physical violence? Criminology statistics show that property and violent crimes move together over time -- when rape rates go up, so do the rates for homicide and burglary. Because homicide data are more reliable and go back further in time, I'll focus just on those. Here is the homicide rate since 1900. There is no trend steadily upward or downward, only cycles up and down. Our standard of living got worse during the 1980s, but much better during the '90s and 2000s. Of course, we can't expect that to last too long given the clear cyclical pattern over decades. But that is some good news in the larger picture.
As for longer-term trends, here are homicide rates from Western Europe over the past 700 or so years. We've seen plummeting rates of violence since about 1500 or 1600, and not so much change in recent times. Again this reflects diminishing marginal returns: when the centralized government starts rounding up trouble-makers, and when police and military functions are consolidated into central and neutral third-party forces -- rather than being practiced by clans and factions -- the most heinous criminals will be the first to go since they are the easiest to spot and the least likely to merit any compassion.
No one would argue that these three domains are fundamental to human well-being, and there is pretty good data on all of them for the past 30 years. Overall the picture is that the American standard of living has stagnated or declined during this time at the most basic of Maslow's levels. Obviously we have not fallen off a cliff back into Europe in the Dark Ages, and even the declines judged against the vast gains that were made from roughly 1800 to 1930 or so might seem like a barely perceptible dip. Nevertheless, it's clear that in these basic areas we're no longer improving at the dazzling rate of capitalism's bustling infancy and hyperactive adolescence.
Indeed, we seem to have stalled out -- at a pretty nice level, mind you (I know I'd be happy living in the '80s forever), but this should give free-market enthusiasts pause when trying to persuade the public of capitalism's virtues. They should focus on the enormous gains that were made from the start up through the point when, let's admit it, diminishing marginal returns seem to have set in several decades ago. That may seem more remote, but at least the audience would buy it -- slaving away on a farm with only corn and potatoes to eat vs. living in a decent house with no backbreaking labor and plenty of meat, eggs, and dairy in the ice box (as my grandmother still calls it). Trying to convince the public that life in 2010 is like The Jetsons compared to life in 1980 will only get laughs about how clueless the economist is, and rightly so, as such a change would be impossible to miss. The take-home message to the audience should be: "Look, we realize things aren't that much greater than 30 years ago, but it's a lot better than 100 or 200 years ago, and if we don't screw things up, we can continue enjoying what we've already got, nice and steady. But if we get too crazy with attacks on the free market, we could actually slide backwards."
July 5, 2010
Safe times are tough times for heroes
In the comments to the wicked step-parents post below, Dahlia says:
For there to be heroes, there need to be bad guys. When violence rates started plummeting in 1992 (continuing through today), people felt safer walking around their neighborhood at night because they saw far fewer muggings, broken car windows, dangerous young males loitering, and so on. So they felt less of a need for someone to protect or rescue them. And on the heroes' side, they had fewer opportunities to prove their heroism.
It didn't take more than a few years of this decline in heroism for it to show up in popular culture, as in the 1997 hit song "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?" My hunch is that a lot of what people call the decline of the American male (starting in the '90s and lasting through today) has little to do with shrinking manufacturing employment, third wave feminism, being raised without a father, women earning their own income, or growing income inequality. Lugging shit around a factory, not having to hear from feminist wackos, having a dad around, and earning the same income as everyone else would not tend to make you feel very manly -- a little, but not much. And anyway, most of those trends started at least back in the 1970s, yet the '70s and '80s were the peak era of the popular demand for maverick male heroes.
Rather, masculine accomplishment involves some kind of heroism, protecting the greater community from danger. We live in such an incredibly safe society that men have almost no chance to get their buddy's back when some thug tries to pick a fight in a nightclub, or to chase away some creeper who makes lewd remarks at his sister or his chick friends. We tend to focus only on extreme feats of heroism, but it's the sum of all of these smaller acts of rescue that make men feel like they've earned their balls in a dangerous society. So it's not the lack of extreme heroic acts that makes the average man feel adrift without purpose, but rather the lack of everyday community protection.
This is what other accounts like Fight Club get wrong -- they believe there's some primitive blood-lust that men must satisfy in order to feel male. Of course, only losers are complete nihilists, so establishing a Fight Club would only remind them how pathetic their lives are. Rather, violence has to be put to some righteous end in order for it to feel good, like kicking the shit out of a bully or shooting a mugger in the back as he runs away.
The human mind was fashioned mostly during our hunter-gatherer stage of existence, and to a lesser extent during the agricultural stage. In both stages, protecting against violence was one of a man's basic duties, as well as hunting animals for food for H-Gs. The capitalist stage of our existence has only lasted about 200 years, and we don't seem to have adapted mentally to what gets one ahead in such a society. Merely filling a slot in the labor market, or even making a boatload of money at it, does not satisfy our craving for meaning in life, and others who judge our worth don't really care about these things.
Our minds reflect a way of life where you had to put yourself in danger by hunting fierce animals or fending off the bad guys in order to earn your credentials as a man. The only time we get the chance to do so in a modern society is when the violence rate swings up for awhile before returning to its long-term downward trend. Not even being a good father has this power. After all, it's mostly your wife and close kin who care about you sticking around and investing in your children. The rest of the tribe respects you based on what you've done for them. Being a good dad may benefit them somewhat, but nowhere near the benefit they'd enjoy if you hunted down a giraffe and gave them some meat, or if you helped to chase off an invading tribe that would've raped and killed everyone.
Following this logic, which groups have suffered the most and the least since the death of the hero? Well, those who are most genetically adapted to a warlike society will be harmed the most -- they'll feel alienated and even obsolete when they can't take on the hero role. And those who are most adapted to a peaceful modern society will feel the greatest -- finally, no more pressure to lift weights or throw yourself into harm's way! In America, the Scotch-Irish are probably the best example of the former, being descended from a quasi-lawless clan society. They are vastly over-represented in the military. (And again, I think this is a big part of the talk about the recent decline of Appalachia and the Rust Belt.) Only one group is fairly well adapted to a peaceful capitalist society, namely Ashkenazi Jews, so I'd expect them to be the least troubled by the vanishing of the heroic culture. War is bad for business, so they feel more at home when there isn't a lot of violent disturbance on the horizon, and where Enlightenment values reign. (Dionysian or Romantic values burst forth in response to the threat of high levels of violence.)
As I pointed out before, during safe times the only sort of hero that we find is the mock hero. With all sincerity having evaporated, people don't hesitate to denigrate, parody, or insult the heroes who came before or even the very idea of heroism. At best we get attempts to celebrate heroes but that nevertheless fail to strike us in the guts because the product is too removed from reality and overly stylized. Even a self-doubting tragic hero like Hamlet moves us more with his righteous bravery than does a description of a more iconic hero if it's written in safe times, e.g. Tennyson's poem about Ulysses.
More recently, look at the movies based on comic book superheroes: the villains in Superman or Batman remind us of the roving packs of young thugs when crime is high, whereas those in the Spiderman movies do not appear to menace an entire community. So when Superman wipes the floor with General Zod's crew, or when Batman wipes out the Joker (both times), we want to cheer -- "Thank god he's here to protect us!" You never get that feeling watching Spiderman, Gladiator, the new Batman movies, etc. Sure, the bad guys get their comeuppance, but you don't breathe a sigh of relief that Tobey Maguire is out there to protect you.
This extends even to children's culture. Little boys and girls who grew up during the '90s and 2000s had no heroes to look up to on TV or in movies. For the past 20 years kids' culture has been so... well, juvenile. Barney, Pokemon, SpongeBob, Dora the Explorer, etc. When violence was rampant in the '80s, the typical character that little kids worshiped was a crime-fighter, whether here and now, in a Medieval setting, or perhaps in the future. He-Man, G.I. Joe, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, C.O.P.S., hell even Jem was styled as a heroine who battled the villainous Misfits.
Video games too reflect the change: the beat 'em up genre was at its peak at home and in the arcades, and these all featured bold crime-fighters who were going to flush the hordes of urban hoodlums down the sewer where they belong. Final Fight, Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, Double Dragon, Splatterhouse, N.A.R.C., and a million others fascinated little boys -- it was like training for your eventual rite of passage into manhood. Now there are few heroes like this, and even worse young males fantasize about being a petty criminal as in the blockbuster Grand Theft Auto series. How manly.
As for popular music, a wide variety of songs from the 1970s and especially the '80s sought to pump you up in preparation for giving the bad guys what they deserve. "Eye of the Tiger" from Rocky III, "You're the Best" from The Karate Kid, "Holding Out for a Hero" from Footloose, and just about all of the Top Gun soundtrack address a common man who hasn't yet convinced himself that he's strong enough to take on his protector role, to motivate him to give it his all. This genre didn't survive the pacification of the early 1990s. As an aside, this is the perfect music to lift weights to, coming as it does from a time when weightlifting carried a powerful motivation -- to keep you and others safe from the bad guys -- compared to now, where the only motive is merely "to look good naked." No wonder guys half-ass it these days.
Is there any refuge from the harms of security? You could always move to a more dangerous neighborhood, but that still won't take you to a place like New York in the mid-'70s. Plus you probably wouldn't fit in and thus wouldn't have many people close to you who you'd feel compelled to protect. It would only work if your own neighborhood got scarier. Without having intended it, I have noticed one thing that works -- hanging around teenagers. Violent and property crime is overwhelmingly the practice of young loser males.
When I ate meals in the campus dining hall with a then 18 year-old friend, she would occasionally mention that some sketchy guys behind me were leering at her and weirding her out. It felt great just to be able to slowly turn over my shoulder and stare them down until they turned their eyes away, embarrassed at getting caught and dealt with (even slightly) in public.
Teenage boys, being more desperate, are also more likely to harass girls in clubs or start fights. So if there's a good 18+ club nearby, that'll give you more chances to step in to break up a fight or to expel an unwanted loser male from the space near a group of girls who are too timid to stand up for themselves yet are clearly creeped out by him. And they just might well try something with you. Last week at '80s night, some high school dork repeatedly bumped into me behind my back with his butt to try to push me off-balance. Bitter boys often try to attack the guy who's getting attention; it's a sign that you're doing things right.
Unlike his cowardly ass, I turned around and approached him head-on, locked my hands onto his shoulders and said calmly but firmly to his face, "Don't ever do that again." If he tries to wiggle out of it, just squeeze harder. He tried to blow it off like "yeah ok, whatever dude," but I humbled him. Within a few moments, he was led away in shame by his chick friend to another part of the room. He was muscular, by the way, could have even been a jock -- but given how safe times are, he'd probably never gotten into a fight before and shut down mentally when someone actually put their foot down on his smart alec bullshit.
And of course, insulating yourself from the mocking of heroism in popular culture will help you survive these safe times. For the next DVD you rent or buy, make it Ghostbusters instead of a Will Ferrell movie. Download the soundtrack for Top Gun rather than Juno. If you have small relatives, entertain them with Thundercats or Jem, and not that Go Diego Go. It won't transport you to an earlier place, but it'll make here and now bearable.
Finally, my experiences [with having had a wicked step-mother] make me completely immune to the romanticisation of the beta male (and denigration of the alpha as synonymous with the thug-cad) that I sometimes see go on in the Steveosphere. Many of these guys are probably not that weak to allow such evil to be visited upon their own children, but it is still a very harsh world and strong men are still needed.
For there to be heroes, there need to be bad guys. When violence rates started plummeting in 1992 (continuing through today), people felt safer walking around their neighborhood at night because they saw far fewer muggings, broken car windows, dangerous young males loitering, and so on. So they felt less of a need for someone to protect or rescue them. And on the heroes' side, they had fewer opportunities to prove their heroism.
It didn't take more than a few years of this decline in heroism for it to show up in popular culture, as in the 1997 hit song "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?" My hunch is that a lot of what people call the decline of the American male (starting in the '90s and lasting through today) has little to do with shrinking manufacturing employment, third wave feminism, being raised without a father, women earning their own income, or growing income inequality. Lugging shit around a factory, not having to hear from feminist wackos, having a dad around, and earning the same income as everyone else would not tend to make you feel very manly -- a little, but not much. And anyway, most of those trends started at least back in the 1970s, yet the '70s and '80s were the peak era of the popular demand for maverick male heroes.
Rather, masculine accomplishment involves some kind of heroism, protecting the greater community from danger. We live in such an incredibly safe society that men have almost no chance to get their buddy's back when some thug tries to pick a fight in a nightclub, or to chase away some creeper who makes lewd remarks at his sister or his chick friends. We tend to focus only on extreme feats of heroism, but it's the sum of all of these smaller acts of rescue that make men feel like they've earned their balls in a dangerous society. So it's not the lack of extreme heroic acts that makes the average man feel adrift without purpose, but rather the lack of everyday community protection.
This is what other accounts like Fight Club get wrong -- they believe there's some primitive blood-lust that men must satisfy in order to feel male. Of course, only losers are complete nihilists, so establishing a Fight Club would only remind them how pathetic their lives are. Rather, violence has to be put to some righteous end in order for it to feel good, like kicking the shit out of a bully or shooting a mugger in the back as he runs away.
The human mind was fashioned mostly during our hunter-gatherer stage of existence, and to a lesser extent during the agricultural stage. In both stages, protecting against violence was one of a man's basic duties, as well as hunting animals for food for H-Gs. The capitalist stage of our existence has only lasted about 200 years, and we don't seem to have adapted mentally to what gets one ahead in such a society. Merely filling a slot in the labor market, or even making a boatload of money at it, does not satisfy our craving for meaning in life, and others who judge our worth don't really care about these things.
Our minds reflect a way of life where you had to put yourself in danger by hunting fierce animals or fending off the bad guys in order to earn your credentials as a man. The only time we get the chance to do so in a modern society is when the violence rate swings up for awhile before returning to its long-term downward trend. Not even being a good father has this power. After all, it's mostly your wife and close kin who care about you sticking around and investing in your children. The rest of the tribe respects you based on what you've done for them. Being a good dad may benefit them somewhat, but nowhere near the benefit they'd enjoy if you hunted down a giraffe and gave them some meat, or if you helped to chase off an invading tribe that would've raped and killed everyone.
Following this logic, which groups have suffered the most and the least since the death of the hero? Well, those who are most genetically adapted to a warlike society will be harmed the most -- they'll feel alienated and even obsolete when they can't take on the hero role. And those who are most adapted to a peaceful modern society will feel the greatest -- finally, no more pressure to lift weights or throw yourself into harm's way! In America, the Scotch-Irish are probably the best example of the former, being descended from a quasi-lawless clan society. They are vastly over-represented in the military. (And again, I think this is a big part of the talk about the recent decline of Appalachia and the Rust Belt.) Only one group is fairly well adapted to a peaceful capitalist society, namely Ashkenazi Jews, so I'd expect them to be the least troubled by the vanishing of the heroic culture. War is bad for business, so they feel more at home when there isn't a lot of violent disturbance on the horizon, and where Enlightenment values reign. (Dionysian or Romantic values burst forth in response to the threat of high levels of violence.)
As I pointed out before, during safe times the only sort of hero that we find is the mock hero. With all sincerity having evaporated, people don't hesitate to denigrate, parody, or insult the heroes who came before or even the very idea of heroism. At best we get attempts to celebrate heroes but that nevertheless fail to strike us in the guts because the product is too removed from reality and overly stylized. Even a self-doubting tragic hero like Hamlet moves us more with his righteous bravery than does a description of a more iconic hero if it's written in safe times, e.g. Tennyson's poem about Ulysses.
More recently, look at the movies based on comic book superheroes: the villains in Superman or Batman remind us of the roving packs of young thugs when crime is high, whereas those in the Spiderman movies do not appear to menace an entire community. So when Superman wipes the floor with General Zod's crew, or when Batman wipes out the Joker (both times), we want to cheer -- "Thank god he's here to protect us!" You never get that feeling watching Spiderman, Gladiator, the new Batman movies, etc. Sure, the bad guys get their comeuppance, but you don't breathe a sigh of relief that Tobey Maguire is out there to protect you.
This extends even to children's culture. Little boys and girls who grew up during the '90s and 2000s had no heroes to look up to on TV or in movies. For the past 20 years kids' culture has been so... well, juvenile. Barney, Pokemon, SpongeBob, Dora the Explorer, etc. When violence was rampant in the '80s, the typical character that little kids worshiped was a crime-fighter, whether here and now, in a Medieval setting, or perhaps in the future. He-Man, G.I. Joe, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, C.O.P.S., hell even Jem was styled as a heroine who battled the villainous Misfits.
Video games too reflect the change: the beat 'em up genre was at its peak at home and in the arcades, and these all featured bold crime-fighters who were going to flush the hordes of urban hoodlums down the sewer where they belong. Final Fight, Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, Double Dragon, Splatterhouse, N.A.R.C., and a million others fascinated little boys -- it was like training for your eventual rite of passage into manhood. Now there are few heroes like this, and even worse young males fantasize about being a petty criminal as in the blockbuster Grand Theft Auto series. How manly.
As for popular music, a wide variety of songs from the 1970s and especially the '80s sought to pump you up in preparation for giving the bad guys what they deserve. "Eye of the Tiger" from Rocky III, "You're the Best" from The Karate Kid, "Holding Out for a Hero" from Footloose, and just about all of the Top Gun soundtrack address a common man who hasn't yet convinced himself that he's strong enough to take on his protector role, to motivate him to give it his all. This genre didn't survive the pacification of the early 1990s. As an aside, this is the perfect music to lift weights to, coming as it does from a time when weightlifting carried a powerful motivation -- to keep you and others safe from the bad guys -- compared to now, where the only motive is merely "to look good naked." No wonder guys half-ass it these days.
Is there any refuge from the harms of security? You could always move to a more dangerous neighborhood, but that still won't take you to a place like New York in the mid-'70s. Plus you probably wouldn't fit in and thus wouldn't have many people close to you who you'd feel compelled to protect. It would only work if your own neighborhood got scarier. Without having intended it, I have noticed one thing that works -- hanging around teenagers. Violent and property crime is overwhelmingly the practice of young loser males.
When I ate meals in the campus dining hall with a then 18 year-old friend, she would occasionally mention that some sketchy guys behind me were leering at her and weirding her out. It felt great just to be able to slowly turn over my shoulder and stare them down until they turned their eyes away, embarrassed at getting caught and dealt with (even slightly) in public.
Teenage boys, being more desperate, are also more likely to harass girls in clubs or start fights. So if there's a good 18+ club nearby, that'll give you more chances to step in to break up a fight or to expel an unwanted loser male from the space near a group of girls who are too timid to stand up for themselves yet are clearly creeped out by him. And they just might well try something with you. Last week at '80s night, some high school dork repeatedly bumped into me behind my back with his butt to try to push me off-balance. Bitter boys often try to attack the guy who's getting attention; it's a sign that you're doing things right.
Unlike his cowardly ass, I turned around and approached him head-on, locked my hands onto his shoulders and said calmly but firmly to his face, "Don't ever do that again." If he tries to wiggle out of it, just squeeze harder. He tried to blow it off like "yeah ok, whatever dude," but I humbled him. Within a few moments, he was led away in shame by his chick friend to another part of the room. He was muscular, by the way, could have even been a jock -- but given how safe times are, he'd probably never gotten into a fight before and shut down mentally when someone actually put their foot down on his smart alec bullshit.
And of course, insulating yourself from the mocking of heroism in popular culture will help you survive these safe times. For the next DVD you rent or buy, make it Ghostbusters instead of a Will Ferrell movie. Download the soundtrack for Top Gun rather than Juno. If you have small relatives, entertain them with Thundercats or Jem, and not that Go Diego Go. It won't transport you to an earlier place, but it'll make here and now bearable.
July 4, 2010
Is a plastic surgery dystopia possible?
Many dystopian tales involve commonplace plastic surgery, and one teen lit series -- Uglies -- even makes it the central plot device. I will never read any of those books, but the reviews note that the price that young people pay when they get crowned with artificial good looks in adolescence is that they also get lobotomized -- how subtle.
In real life, there would already be a heavy price to pay -- namely, all that money! Dystopians rarely have good foresight or imagination; typically they're just railing against whatever policies their enemies favor, not honestly predicting the outcomes of such policies. Plastic surgery is never going to be cheap, not anytime soon, because the supply of people who can do it is tiny. Even if there were no barriers to entry, such as the AMA keeping the number of doctors low in order to boost their salaries, there would still be few plastic surgeons, and they would only have so many hours in a day to practice.
For one thing, you have to be pretty smart, have a decent sense of aesthetics, have good fine motor coordination, and be up for grueling and stressful work, having someone's life in your hands. Most smart people are going to do other things than medicine -- law, banking (maybe not so much anymore, but we'll see), business, academia, etc. -- and even most doctors aren't going to want to be plastic surgeons because they'd get a bigger kick out of some other field.
So the number of hours that all plastic surgeons will devote to making people look better will stay small for a very long time -- it's just not something you can automate and have a machine do. Each patient is unique, you need to adjust your plan as the process is unfolding rather than go through a fixed set of instructions, and most importantly you need to have a human being's sense of what looks good. Thus, if plastic surgery becomes commonplace, the vastly larger demand will swamp the supply, and the price of it will shoot through the roof. It would be like the price of housing if people flooded into a tiny area like San Francisco, or the price of higher ed if a ton more people want to get into college than there are available spots.
I think that outrageous price would wake most people up, and plastic surgery would plummet as people decided to spend their money on better things. Still, let's grant the dystopians the premise that in the future plastic surgery is incredibly common because people really are that desperate to look good and will shell out big bucks, possibly at the expense of other things we consider sacred like housing and education. Even then, is there no other way that people could free themselves of the plastic surgery burden?
Yes -- through evolution by natural selection. Think about it: in a world where plastic surgery is common, and therefore where the price of it is crippling, people who are good-looking because of their genes rather than the doctor's hands will be more sought after as mates. Such a person could say, "Look, you're so anxious about how good your kids will look that you're going to break the bank to make them that way -- why not just have kids by me and save yourself the money?" That would be even more persuasive because a plastic surgeon only has so much control over the human form, unlike the genes that build you up to begin with. For example, you can't radically change the shape of your skull through surgery, although what your kids' skulls looked like could be strongly altered if you chose a different father or mother.
In a world where everyone pays an arm and a leg to ensure that the next generation looks good, a genetically good-looking person would be like someone who could almost costlessly conjure up unsettled land in San Francisco or a new prestigious university. They could give you what you want for hardly anything, although admittedly you would have to suffer the costs of sleeping with a stunner.
Gradually as people began flocking to the good-looking people rather than the plastic surgeons in order to prettify the next generation, much of the demand for plastic surgery would die out because people would look better from birth. The society would still be as obsessed with outward appearance as it was during the heyday of plastic surgery, only now parents would be meeting their goal not through man's attempt to rationally plan nature's development, but through the good old fashioned way of just letting nature take its course.
This overestimation of the strength of technological change compared to the strength of evolution runs through most dystopian stories. It betrays the level of hubris that such writers have: they may express dread about how powerful man's control over nature is, but they don't deny that man is capable of besting nature in all sorts of ways. But evolution by natural selection would win -- it is so much smarter than any group of human beings. The only way that we could continue to be held captive by some technological change is if the technology could also evolve on its own, in which case we'd find ourselves caught in an evolutionary arms race.
The handful of great dystopian stories have this feature, for it's really the only plausible way for technological doom to fall upon us. We either fumbled our way into creating evolvable machines, or deliberately decided to play god this way, and we set off an arms race against the machines that threatens to wipe us out. The first Terminator movie is probably the best known example of a good dystopian story. Unfortunately most others just assume that mankind will be preyed upon by society or culture forever, with no evolutionary way around it. The message is then to vote for the author's party so that this bleak future never arrives.
Most people recognize the author's petty attempt to grab power that underlies the average dystopian story, so that these don't get very much attention. The small number that the genre appeals to are rabid, partisan evangelists who want to keep the wrong party from planning things. They're like the loser guy whose laboring rants try to persuade his cute friend not to date that cocky, exciting, handsome devil -- "I mean, just think about all the" bla bla bla. Dude, we know whose interests you're really trying to serve. Now stop whining and get a life.
In real life, there would already be a heavy price to pay -- namely, all that money! Dystopians rarely have good foresight or imagination; typically they're just railing against whatever policies their enemies favor, not honestly predicting the outcomes of such policies. Plastic surgery is never going to be cheap, not anytime soon, because the supply of people who can do it is tiny. Even if there were no barriers to entry, such as the AMA keeping the number of doctors low in order to boost their salaries, there would still be few plastic surgeons, and they would only have so many hours in a day to practice.
For one thing, you have to be pretty smart, have a decent sense of aesthetics, have good fine motor coordination, and be up for grueling and stressful work, having someone's life in your hands. Most smart people are going to do other things than medicine -- law, banking (maybe not so much anymore, but we'll see), business, academia, etc. -- and even most doctors aren't going to want to be plastic surgeons because they'd get a bigger kick out of some other field.
So the number of hours that all plastic surgeons will devote to making people look better will stay small for a very long time -- it's just not something you can automate and have a machine do. Each patient is unique, you need to adjust your plan as the process is unfolding rather than go through a fixed set of instructions, and most importantly you need to have a human being's sense of what looks good. Thus, if plastic surgery becomes commonplace, the vastly larger demand will swamp the supply, and the price of it will shoot through the roof. It would be like the price of housing if people flooded into a tiny area like San Francisco, or the price of higher ed if a ton more people want to get into college than there are available spots.
I think that outrageous price would wake most people up, and plastic surgery would plummet as people decided to spend their money on better things. Still, let's grant the dystopians the premise that in the future plastic surgery is incredibly common because people really are that desperate to look good and will shell out big bucks, possibly at the expense of other things we consider sacred like housing and education. Even then, is there no other way that people could free themselves of the plastic surgery burden?
Yes -- through evolution by natural selection. Think about it: in a world where plastic surgery is common, and therefore where the price of it is crippling, people who are good-looking because of their genes rather than the doctor's hands will be more sought after as mates. Such a person could say, "Look, you're so anxious about how good your kids will look that you're going to break the bank to make them that way -- why not just have kids by me and save yourself the money?" That would be even more persuasive because a plastic surgeon only has so much control over the human form, unlike the genes that build you up to begin with. For example, you can't radically change the shape of your skull through surgery, although what your kids' skulls looked like could be strongly altered if you chose a different father or mother.
In a world where everyone pays an arm and a leg to ensure that the next generation looks good, a genetically good-looking person would be like someone who could almost costlessly conjure up unsettled land in San Francisco or a new prestigious university. They could give you what you want for hardly anything, although admittedly you would have to suffer the costs of sleeping with a stunner.
Gradually as people began flocking to the good-looking people rather than the plastic surgeons in order to prettify the next generation, much of the demand for plastic surgery would die out because people would look better from birth. The society would still be as obsessed with outward appearance as it was during the heyday of plastic surgery, only now parents would be meeting their goal not through man's attempt to rationally plan nature's development, but through the good old fashioned way of just letting nature take its course.
This overestimation of the strength of technological change compared to the strength of evolution runs through most dystopian stories. It betrays the level of hubris that such writers have: they may express dread about how powerful man's control over nature is, but they don't deny that man is capable of besting nature in all sorts of ways. But evolution by natural selection would win -- it is so much smarter than any group of human beings. The only way that we could continue to be held captive by some technological change is if the technology could also evolve on its own, in which case we'd find ourselves caught in an evolutionary arms race.
The handful of great dystopian stories have this feature, for it's really the only plausible way for technological doom to fall upon us. We either fumbled our way into creating evolvable machines, or deliberately decided to play god this way, and we set off an arms race against the machines that threatens to wipe us out. The first Terminator movie is probably the best known example of a good dystopian story. Unfortunately most others just assume that mankind will be preyed upon by society or culture forever, with no evolutionary way around it. The message is then to vote for the author's party so that this bleak future never arrives.
Most people recognize the author's petty attempt to grab power that underlies the average dystopian story, so that these don't get very much attention. The small number that the genre appeals to are rabid, partisan evangelists who want to keep the wrong party from planning things. They're like the loser guy whose laboring rants try to persuade his cute friend not to date that cocky, exciting, handsome devil -- "I mean, just think about all the" bla bla bla. Dude, we know whose interests you're really trying to serve. Now stop whining and get a life.
July 2, 2010
A Malthusian look at the past generation, preface
Propagandists for the free market understandably feel besieged, given how anti-market the public is, and seek to boldly drive home how wondrous the free market is. I don't disagree with that basic outlook, but in their efforts to really sell the market, a lot of its advocates commit what Bruce Charlton calls the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. That is, you fire off a bunch of shots in who knows what direction, and then draw targets over the resulting bullet-holes -- look at what a great shot I am!
To really wow the public, such economists look for whatever shows the largest gains within recent history and point out how wonderful that is. There is little a priori or independent motivation that these areas really matter to human beings; the sheer gains themselves are supposed to dazzle us. Even if the area is one that obviously matters to people, they never argue that the large gains within the area translate into similarly large gains to human well-being -- or whether, as you might expect economists to propose, the gains to human well-being show diminishing marginal returns.
To take an example, free market advocates love to point out how much more memory the average personal computer has today compared to 1980, and how much cheaper it is. No reason is given for why computer memory matters to human well-being, probably because that would expose the argument to a pretty obvious criticism -- namely, that the average person cares more about other things than how much memory their computer has, so that this improvement should carry a lot less weight than, say, the change up or down in the cost of housing, food, energy, etc.
Even if we accept that computer memory were a big deal to people, no evidence is given that the gains to human well-being are an unbounded function of computer memory size. Presumably, as with much else in economics, there are diminishing marginal returns. When you go from a computer that only has 1 MB to one with 100 MB, you'll notice how much more you can do. It will seem like a "computer from the future." But going from 100 MB to 10 GB, you may still notice a difference, but it won't be much. Aside from shut-ins with obsessively large porn collections, there's just not that much that people use their computer for that will show astronomical improvements to their well-being -- certainly it will be less amazing than going from 1 MB to 100 MB. Going from a 10 GB hard drive to a 1 TB will seem even less impressive to the average person.
To take a more objective look at how the American standard-of-living has changed over the past 20 to 30 years, I'll go with some pre-existing scale of the important things to people -- why not Maslow's hierarchy of needs? It could be any other serious attempt to rank what matters in life, but this one is familiar enough to most people, and more importantly we cannot be accused of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy by using it. Maslow has already set up a list of targets that people should aim for if they want to improve human well-being, and now we'll see how much or little improvement there has been in those areas. Again, I have no interest in the history of the American diet or of computer memory per se -- it's how those changes translate into better or worse lives for real people. This means I'll focus a lot on whether diminishing marginal returns to human well-being seem to have set in during the past generation in these key areas.
In entries to come, I'll look at these areas in detail, but at the outset my impression is that the past 20 to 30 years show little improvement in the standard of living. Remember, we are never interested in the absolute changes -- clearly we have more and cheaper and more varied stuff than 30 years ago, but to judge whether diminishing marginal returns have set in or not, we have to judge this change against the change between, say, 1840 and 1870, or 1870 to 1900, etc. Both non-fiction and fiction alike from those periods remarked on how dizzying the transition was from a pre-capitalist agrarian economy to a free-market capitalist economy. Indeed, they were obsessed with it.
Yet in real life, no one remarks on how the America of 2010 could not have even been dreamt of in 1980 -- yeah right. We're only 5 years away from the setting of Back to the Future Part II, and I still don't have a damn hoverboard! Let alone flying cars or instantly self-drying clothes. The reason that all of that mid-20th C. fantasizing about "the future," such as The Jetsons, got it wrong is that they were extrapolating the exponential increase in the standard of living from the early part of the transition to industrial capitalism. They didn't imagine that this growth would increase but at a slower and slower rate, so that the standard of living would more or less plateau.
This is the essence of Malthusian population growth -- some new niche opens up, and while the population starts to fill it, resources seem infinite and the population shoots up at a faster and faster rate. However, they start to impinge on one another, or their ability to extract resources from what they've got shows diminishing marginal returns, or whatever -- but after some point the former apparent infinitude of resources is revealed to be an illusion, and it turns out that the environment will only support so many people. If it is much lower than this carrying capacity, that leaves some of the niche to still be exploited, which will drive population up. If it is much higher, not everyone will be able to make it, which will drive population down.
Crucially, there is some plateau or steady state or carrying capacity that the population reaches (fast at first, then more slowly). Overly optimistic people see unbounded improvements to human well-being, at least for some unspecified "near term," while overly pessimistic people see a forthcoming bust in the standard of living, as though we might return to how people lived in the 1400s in Europe, or worse. Malthusian thinking, modeled mathematically by logistic growth, is a mix of both: in this model, growth never turns down for long periods of time, but it is not unbounded either, as diminishing marginal returns set in when the growth is halfway between 0 and the carrying capacity.
In the Malthusian view, the good news is that the hardcore doom-sayers -- people who think capitalism will collapse back into feudalism, hunting and gathering, etc. -- are wrong. Growth only increases. Still, the bad news is that after awhile the increases will be barely perceptible to the human mind, or more importantly that these changes will not boost our well-being by very much. We will have filled up the once-virgin niche of capitalism, and things won't get much more exciting until an entirely new social order opens up that's even better than what we've had for the past 200 years or so.
Also, the faster the rate of growth, the sooner this nausea will set in. Imagine a movie theater that holds 100 people -- if patrons come in at a rate of 1 per second, it won't even take two minutes for the place to fill up; while if they come in at a rate of 1 per minute, it will take an hour and 40 minutes to fill it up. Again it's just an impression, but it seems like the transition from agriculture to capitalism proceeded much more swiftly than did the change from hunting and gathering to farming.
The switch from hunting and gathering to agriculture let populations go from around 100 members to around 1 million members, and the switch from agriculture to capitalism, let us go from there to about 1 billion members. Thus the new niche opened up by capitalism looks about as great compared to the starting point as was the new niche that farming opened up. So, if we're traveling roughly the same distance from when the niche opens up to when it's filled up, but moving at a faster speed, we should expect the period of really dazzling change to be relatively shorter than it was during the H-G to agriculture shift.
I'm not worried about precisely locating the point where growth changed to a leveling-off shape compared to a sharper-and-sharper-upward shape. Probably no earlier than 1930, but no later than 1990; eye-balling the picture, it looks like we came close enough to the plateau during the 1970s or '80s. I'm picking the past, let's say, 30 years just to see if diminishing marginal returns have already set in, whether that began right then or earlier in the '40s, I don't care. Partly this is so I can gripe about how "oh please, we had that when I was a kid," but also because the examples should still be fresh in people's memories and the discussion won't seem too arcane.
To really wow the public, such economists look for whatever shows the largest gains within recent history and point out how wonderful that is. There is little a priori or independent motivation that these areas really matter to human beings; the sheer gains themselves are supposed to dazzle us. Even if the area is one that obviously matters to people, they never argue that the large gains within the area translate into similarly large gains to human well-being -- or whether, as you might expect economists to propose, the gains to human well-being show diminishing marginal returns.
To take an example, free market advocates love to point out how much more memory the average personal computer has today compared to 1980, and how much cheaper it is. No reason is given for why computer memory matters to human well-being, probably because that would expose the argument to a pretty obvious criticism -- namely, that the average person cares more about other things than how much memory their computer has, so that this improvement should carry a lot less weight than, say, the change up or down in the cost of housing, food, energy, etc.
Even if we accept that computer memory were a big deal to people, no evidence is given that the gains to human well-being are an unbounded function of computer memory size. Presumably, as with much else in economics, there are diminishing marginal returns. When you go from a computer that only has 1 MB to one with 100 MB, you'll notice how much more you can do. It will seem like a "computer from the future." But going from 100 MB to 10 GB, you may still notice a difference, but it won't be much. Aside from shut-ins with obsessively large porn collections, there's just not that much that people use their computer for that will show astronomical improvements to their well-being -- certainly it will be less amazing than going from 1 MB to 100 MB. Going from a 10 GB hard drive to a 1 TB will seem even less impressive to the average person.
To take a more objective look at how the American standard-of-living has changed over the past 20 to 30 years, I'll go with some pre-existing scale of the important things to people -- why not Maslow's hierarchy of needs? It could be any other serious attempt to rank what matters in life, but this one is familiar enough to most people, and more importantly we cannot be accused of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy by using it. Maslow has already set up a list of targets that people should aim for if they want to improve human well-being, and now we'll see how much or little improvement there has been in those areas. Again, I have no interest in the history of the American diet or of computer memory per se -- it's how those changes translate into better or worse lives for real people. This means I'll focus a lot on whether diminishing marginal returns to human well-being seem to have set in during the past generation in these key areas.
In entries to come, I'll look at these areas in detail, but at the outset my impression is that the past 20 to 30 years show little improvement in the standard of living. Remember, we are never interested in the absolute changes -- clearly we have more and cheaper and more varied stuff than 30 years ago, but to judge whether diminishing marginal returns have set in or not, we have to judge this change against the change between, say, 1840 and 1870, or 1870 to 1900, etc. Both non-fiction and fiction alike from those periods remarked on how dizzying the transition was from a pre-capitalist agrarian economy to a free-market capitalist economy. Indeed, they were obsessed with it.
Yet in real life, no one remarks on how the America of 2010 could not have even been dreamt of in 1980 -- yeah right. We're only 5 years away from the setting of Back to the Future Part II, and I still don't have a damn hoverboard! Let alone flying cars or instantly self-drying clothes. The reason that all of that mid-20th C. fantasizing about "the future," such as The Jetsons, got it wrong is that they were extrapolating the exponential increase in the standard of living from the early part of the transition to industrial capitalism. They didn't imagine that this growth would increase but at a slower and slower rate, so that the standard of living would more or less plateau.
This is the essence of Malthusian population growth -- some new niche opens up, and while the population starts to fill it, resources seem infinite and the population shoots up at a faster and faster rate. However, they start to impinge on one another, or their ability to extract resources from what they've got shows diminishing marginal returns, or whatever -- but after some point the former apparent infinitude of resources is revealed to be an illusion, and it turns out that the environment will only support so many people. If it is much lower than this carrying capacity, that leaves some of the niche to still be exploited, which will drive population up. If it is much higher, not everyone will be able to make it, which will drive population down.
Crucially, there is some plateau or steady state or carrying capacity that the population reaches (fast at first, then more slowly). Overly optimistic people see unbounded improvements to human well-being, at least for some unspecified "near term," while overly pessimistic people see a forthcoming bust in the standard of living, as though we might return to how people lived in the 1400s in Europe, or worse. Malthusian thinking, modeled mathematically by logistic growth, is a mix of both: in this model, growth never turns down for long periods of time, but it is not unbounded either, as diminishing marginal returns set in when the growth is halfway between 0 and the carrying capacity.
In the Malthusian view, the good news is that the hardcore doom-sayers -- people who think capitalism will collapse back into feudalism, hunting and gathering, etc. -- are wrong. Growth only increases. Still, the bad news is that after awhile the increases will be barely perceptible to the human mind, or more importantly that these changes will not boost our well-being by very much. We will have filled up the once-virgin niche of capitalism, and things won't get much more exciting until an entirely new social order opens up that's even better than what we've had for the past 200 years or so.
Also, the faster the rate of growth, the sooner this nausea will set in. Imagine a movie theater that holds 100 people -- if patrons come in at a rate of 1 per second, it won't even take two minutes for the place to fill up; while if they come in at a rate of 1 per minute, it will take an hour and 40 minutes to fill it up. Again it's just an impression, but it seems like the transition from agriculture to capitalism proceeded much more swiftly than did the change from hunting and gathering to farming.
The switch from hunting and gathering to agriculture let populations go from around 100 members to around 1 million members, and the switch from agriculture to capitalism, let us go from there to about 1 billion members. Thus the new niche opened up by capitalism looks about as great compared to the starting point as was the new niche that farming opened up. So, if we're traveling roughly the same distance from when the niche opens up to when it's filled up, but moving at a faster speed, we should expect the period of really dazzling change to be relatively shorter than it was during the H-G to agriculture shift.
I'm not worried about precisely locating the point where growth changed to a leveling-off shape compared to a sharper-and-sharper-upward shape. Probably no earlier than 1930, but no later than 1990; eye-balling the picture, it looks like we came close enough to the plateau during the 1970s or '80s. I'm picking the past, let's say, 30 years just to see if diminishing marginal returns have already set in, whether that began right then or earlier in the '40s, I don't care. Partly this is so I can gripe about how "oh please, we had that when I was a kid," but also because the examples should still be fresh in people's memories and the discussion won't seem too arcane.
July 1, 2010
Trust your instincts about wicked stepparents
Stepparents are far more likely to harm their stepchildren than a genetic parent is to harm their genetic children. This fact shows up in the various "wicked stepparent" narratives throughout world literature and is the reason why most homicide detectives, upon finding a murdered child, immediately look at mommy's new boyfriend.
Today in Starbucks, about 10 feet in front of me, a middle-aged woman and a teenage girl met and hugged each other, then sat down at a table, quietly chatting until a middle-aged man arrived, exchanged greetings, and sat down too with his back to me and the rest of the very crowded room. After some normal conversation, the man raises his voice about not being able to trust the girl and giving up on her or something like that, leaning his chair back and making an "I just give up" gesture with his arms wide apart. He says it all matter-of-factly, no affect other than minor annoyance, like he's a manager firing a tardy employee. The woman is still throughout most of the episode, but at this point the girl starts audibly crying through her defense.
At first I assumed it was just a father meting out some tough love to a daughter who's just putting on a show to embarrass him in public as her revenge for being punished. No big deal there -- I wish parents were more strict and less indulgent with their kids. Still, as things unfolded, I noticed several things that made me suspect this guy as a potentially, and even likely, abusive stepfather (or live-in boyfriend, etc.):
- From what I heard the girl say -- again it was audible even over the house music because she was pretty worked up -- there was nothing of the typical bratty protesting and pouting. You always hear the words "it's not fair" or similar, plus a lot of impudent questioning like "Why can't I just...?!" I did hear her complain about how other teenagers get to go out and do stuff while she can't -- which means she probably is something of a problem child. Still, most of what I heard her say were not complaints but that she was scared or afraid. Something about being afraid to stay in some location for a decent length of time.
- When the guy got up to walk off his anger, she immediately seized the opportunity to rush out of the building, which sent him into a rage as he pursued her. Nothing strange there, except that when he shouted, "You march your ass back here RIGHT FUCKING NOW!" he didn't sound stern at all. I got yelled at plenty, whipped too, but behind the thunder there's something lecturing and cool-headedly disciplinary about the tone that genetic parents use when yelling at their children. He instead was screaming like he'd lost control over his emotions and was about to get into a fistfight with some stranger who flipped him off on the street. (I once tutored a kid who had a stepfather, and the way he yelled at his stepson was very different from what I was used to. I was reminded of this during the episode.) After 30 or 60 seconds, she did return with him to the table.
- Even though I couldn't make out all of his words, I could still discern the tone and inflection of his voice, and he sounded like he was bitter and resentful towards her, like he'd upheld his end of some bargain and she wasn't giving him what she should have in return. Genetic parents never use that tone because they don't see their relationship with their children as a thought-out transaction -- I'll treat you this way, you do this in return. In specific cases, maybe (I'll give you an allowance if you do the dishes), but not about the relationship as a whole. And again he made some kind of bitchy, annoyed gesture with his hands like "I give up!" or "I'm done with this!"
The stepfather is going to talk this way to his stepdaughter because she reminds him of all the girls who rejected him back in high school. The girl was kind of cute. A fair amount of teachers and professors who have adolescent students are like this, in fact. Usually they single the better-looking ones out and insinuate how vapid and stupid they must be just because they took time to look nice before leaving for class. When I worked at a tutoring center, the bitter tutors always turned power-hungry and petty when working with the cuter students, like "Finally now that I'm older, I get to put those stuck-up little princesses in their place!" These guys were typically no taller than 5'4, and the man in the Starbucks was not either. They (and he) were normally dressed like schlubs, so he must have an emasculating job where appearance doesn't matter at all. He also had a shaved head, meaning he was more or less bald by nature.
Adding all this up, he fit the profile perfectly of a bitter beta-male who's going to use whatever puny power he has to make a young girl's life hell, in order to balance the cosmic scales that delivered him so many rejections when he was her age.
So was my hunch right? After she came back in from rushing out, they let her stand outside nearby where they could see her, and talked amongst themselves. As I walked to the restroom, I distinctly heard the woman say apologetically, "... both of my daughters are like this ..." Bingo: she would've said "our" daughters if he were the genetic father.
By that time, much of the earlier explosiveness had fizzled out since they let her stand outside, and when I came back from the restroom a minute later they were all gone. I really do wonder what's going to happen to that poor girl. While it was happening, I felt the urge to go over, pat him firmly on the shoulder, and tell him to keep calm. I've approached or called out to misbehaving people in public before, but here it wasn't perfectly clear that he was some wicked stepfather. It took awhile for all the pieces to fit together, and by then it was too late.
Also, the guy was a complete coward and sat with his back to everyone else when he knew he was going to fly off the hook. If any of the other patrons could have made eye contact, that alone would've made him simmer down. Especially if he could have seen the whole room staring in annoyance and disgust at him. That's the downside of not living in a tiny community where everyone knows everyone else -- then we would've known who he was and where he lived. Then the rest of us could have formed a posse, trailed him to where no one would see anything, and smacked him around before his uncontrollable bitterness escalated into assault, rape, or murder of his stepdaughter. After all, it's going to be hard for the police to learn of whatever she was tearfully afraid of, given that her mother has dual loyalties (to her vs. the stepfather) and will tend to apologize to the authorities, as she did to the guy himself.
This tumult caused by wicked stepparents -- which is not occasional but always boiling where they are found -- remains unseen by most people who have permissive attitudes toward divorce. My parents divorced but remained friendly and I saw my dad very often, so it's only natural that I should have had fairly liberal views about divorce -- I saw first-hand that it wasn't so bad, and isn't that better than the fighting that may result if they'd stayed together? Except in my case I never had a stepparent or live-in boyfriend to deal with. (Given my nature at the time, or now, that man would be dead.) I'd much rather have two genetic parents stick it out, even if they no longer loved each other and even if they were fairly hostile towards each other, than to split up and risk bringing stepparent barbarity into the picture.
If a divorce-considering parent worries that, if they stayed together, the child might have to endure the sight of her parents fighting, just wait until she has a wicked stepparent mercilessly chewing her out and ready to strike her without pity.
Today in Starbucks, about 10 feet in front of me, a middle-aged woman and a teenage girl met and hugged each other, then sat down at a table, quietly chatting until a middle-aged man arrived, exchanged greetings, and sat down too with his back to me and the rest of the very crowded room. After some normal conversation, the man raises his voice about not being able to trust the girl and giving up on her or something like that, leaning his chair back and making an "I just give up" gesture with his arms wide apart. He says it all matter-of-factly, no affect other than minor annoyance, like he's a manager firing a tardy employee. The woman is still throughout most of the episode, but at this point the girl starts audibly crying through her defense.
At first I assumed it was just a father meting out some tough love to a daughter who's just putting on a show to embarrass him in public as her revenge for being punished. No big deal there -- I wish parents were more strict and less indulgent with their kids. Still, as things unfolded, I noticed several things that made me suspect this guy as a potentially, and even likely, abusive stepfather (or live-in boyfriend, etc.):
- From what I heard the girl say -- again it was audible even over the house music because she was pretty worked up -- there was nothing of the typical bratty protesting and pouting. You always hear the words "it's not fair" or similar, plus a lot of impudent questioning like "Why can't I just...?!" I did hear her complain about how other teenagers get to go out and do stuff while she can't -- which means she probably is something of a problem child. Still, most of what I heard her say were not complaints but that she was scared or afraid. Something about being afraid to stay in some location for a decent length of time.
- When the guy got up to walk off his anger, she immediately seized the opportunity to rush out of the building, which sent him into a rage as he pursued her. Nothing strange there, except that when he shouted, "You march your ass back here RIGHT FUCKING NOW!" he didn't sound stern at all. I got yelled at plenty, whipped too, but behind the thunder there's something lecturing and cool-headedly disciplinary about the tone that genetic parents use when yelling at their children. He instead was screaming like he'd lost control over his emotions and was about to get into a fistfight with some stranger who flipped him off on the street. (I once tutored a kid who had a stepfather, and the way he yelled at his stepson was very different from what I was used to. I was reminded of this during the episode.) After 30 or 60 seconds, she did return with him to the table.
- Even though I couldn't make out all of his words, I could still discern the tone and inflection of his voice, and he sounded like he was bitter and resentful towards her, like he'd upheld his end of some bargain and she wasn't giving him what she should have in return. Genetic parents never use that tone because they don't see their relationship with their children as a thought-out transaction -- I'll treat you this way, you do this in return. In specific cases, maybe (I'll give you an allowance if you do the dishes), but not about the relationship as a whole. And again he made some kind of bitchy, annoyed gesture with his hands like "I give up!" or "I'm done with this!"
The stepfather is going to talk this way to his stepdaughter because she reminds him of all the girls who rejected him back in high school. The girl was kind of cute. A fair amount of teachers and professors who have adolescent students are like this, in fact. Usually they single the better-looking ones out and insinuate how vapid and stupid they must be just because they took time to look nice before leaving for class. When I worked at a tutoring center, the bitter tutors always turned power-hungry and petty when working with the cuter students, like "Finally now that I'm older, I get to put those stuck-up little princesses in their place!" These guys were typically no taller than 5'4, and the man in the Starbucks was not either. They (and he) were normally dressed like schlubs, so he must have an emasculating job where appearance doesn't matter at all. He also had a shaved head, meaning he was more or less bald by nature.
Adding all this up, he fit the profile perfectly of a bitter beta-male who's going to use whatever puny power he has to make a young girl's life hell, in order to balance the cosmic scales that delivered him so many rejections when he was her age.
So was my hunch right? After she came back in from rushing out, they let her stand outside nearby where they could see her, and talked amongst themselves. As I walked to the restroom, I distinctly heard the woman say apologetically, "... both of my daughters are like this ..." Bingo: she would've said "our" daughters if he were the genetic father.
By that time, much of the earlier explosiveness had fizzled out since they let her stand outside, and when I came back from the restroom a minute later they were all gone. I really do wonder what's going to happen to that poor girl. While it was happening, I felt the urge to go over, pat him firmly on the shoulder, and tell him to keep calm. I've approached or called out to misbehaving people in public before, but here it wasn't perfectly clear that he was some wicked stepfather. It took awhile for all the pieces to fit together, and by then it was too late.
Also, the guy was a complete coward and sat with his back to everyone else when he knew he was going to fly off the hook. If any of the other patrons could have made eye contact, that alone would've made him simmer down. Especially if he could have seen the whole room staring in annoyance and disgust at him. That's the downside of not living in a tiny community where everyone knows everyone else -- then we would've known who he was and where he lived. Then the rest of us could have formed a posse, trailed him to where no one would see anything, and smacked him around before his uncontrollable bitterness escalated into assault, rape, or murder of his stepdaughter. After all, it's going to be hard for the police to learn of whatever she was tearfully afraid of, given that her mother has dual loyalties (to her vs. the stepfather) and will tend to apologize to the authorities, as she did to the guy himself.
This tumult caused by wicked stepparents -- which is not occasional but always boiling where they are found -- remains unseen by most people who have permissive attitudes toward divorce. My parents divorced but remained friendly and I saw my dad very often, so it's only natural that I should have had fairly liberal views about divorce -- I saw first-hand that it wasn't so bad, and isn't that better than the fighting that may result if they'd stayed together? Except in my case I never had a stepparent or live-in boyfriend to deal with. (Given my nature at the time, or now, that man would be dead.) I'd much rather have two genetic parents stick it out, even if they no longer loved each other and even if they were fairly hostile towards each other, than to split up and risk bringing stepparent barbarity into the picture.
If a divorce-considering parent worries that, if they stayed together, the child might have to endure the sight of her parents fighting, just wait until she has a wicked stepparent mercilessly chewing her out and ready to strike her without pity.
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