Why East Asians are so unconscientious and disagreeable: Is it agriculture?

Big thanks to commenter Miguel Madeira who linked to an article on global differences in personality by Schmitt et al. (2007). These kinds of papers pop up now and again, and it doesn't conflict with the gist that I got from earlier ones. This paper has much better graphs and tables, though.

There's a lot that could be covered, but I'll stick to clearing up a major misconception about East Asian personalities. Westerners think the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans have a far stronger work ethic than we do, and are so much more agreeable -- they certainly don't seem as violent and confrontational as we are. Let's go straight to the data.

You can browse the free PDF linked above to see a clearer picture, but here is the Cliff's Notes version. The top graph shows Agreeableness scores by global region, with East Asia on the far right, and the bottom is Conscientiousness. For now don't try reading the other regions, just focus on how East Asia is in a league of its own.


Those are 95% confidence intervals, so there is almost no overlap between the East Asian distribution and the others for Agreeableness. For Conscientiousness, it is not even close -- they might as well come from Mars.

The countries in East Asia include Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Just about all countries are represented by college students. Given that college admissions is a proxy for IQ, and given that East Asians have the highest national IQs, the college student respondents there are closer to the average person, whereas in Africa they are totally unrepresentative (many of the African surveys weren't even given in the local language, suggesting they show what the educated elite is like). In the paper's Table 5 you can see scores by country rather than region, and all four East Asian countries are extremely low in both traits, so it's not like one of them is ruining it for the rest.

When I first saw results like these I was a bit puzzled too, but then I reflected on my extensive contact with East Asians over the years, and it didn't seem so odd. They aren't violent and don't get in your face, so we assume they're agreeable. In reality, they are autistic or misanthropic, they just don't let it show. But they have trouble making lots of friends in school, and the males either cannot relate to girls or have a bitter hatred of them, so that they remain virgins for life. I can't think of another group who showed such autism and misanthropy, and the graph above tells me I shouldn't bother looking.

As for their abysmal levels of conscientiousness, again we look at them and see them getting good grades and decent jobs, which you can't do without hard work. But that doesn't mean they have a solid work ethic or have learned the value of hard work. Those are values that you have internalized and that allow you to work independently toward achievement -- when tempted to cheat the rules or give up when the going gets tough, you feel compelled to play fair or keep slogging through it.

East Asians have evolved the opposite system -- they have outsourced all of that behavioral monitoring to some authority, such as their Tiger Mother parents, a council of elders, a bureaucracy, an emperor, or whatever. When they feel tempted to cheat or give up, they are not very capable of correcting themselves -- that authority monitor has to swoop in, shout in their face to play fair or persevere, and they do as they're told. They can still get things done, but not on their own, only by total deference to an authority with their interests in mind.

Here are some colorful real-world reminders of how lazy East Asians are when left to themselves:

There are millions of young Chinese boys that love video games and play them so much that the Chinese government enacted strict rules that limited playing time.

These rules impose penalties on players who spend more than three hours a day by reducing the abilities of their characters and any players that spend more than five hours simply are forced to take a five-hour break before they can return to a game.

Video gaming got so out of hand that the Chinese government opened video game addiction clinics and while it sounds extreme to me, these clinics used electro-shock treatments to zap players out of their addiction.

And

Asian countries, such as South Korea, are recognizing video game addiction as an urgent public health matter, with several deaths having occurred in internet cafes, apparently as a result of blood clots occurring during prolonged sitting at computers.

And

The IMRC found evidence that more than 27% of youth ages 12-18 in Japan were experiencing such medical problems as periodic headaches and fatigue, blurred vision, loss in appetite, and even clinical depression, all directly linked to extensive use of video games.

And

A South Korean couple who let their baby starve to death while raising a "virtual child" on the internet were given prison sentences on Friday.

The 41-year-old husband and his wife, 25, were arrested in March for leaving their daughter to die while they spent hours at internet cafes.

Not that Americans are immune to screwing around in pointless activities (like keeping a blog). Still, the total lack of personal drive in East Asians means they'll get sucked into zombifying activities to a far worse degree. Westerners will get restless sooner and feel like doing something more fun and productive.

It isn't just the lower tiers of Asian society that are like that. In his book Human Accomplishment, Charles Murray details and discusses how small of an impact East Asians have had in the arts, sciences, and applied fields like technology and medicine, compared to Western Eurasia. And remember they've got higher average IQs than other regions, so it is clearly more of a personality or temperament difference.

And not just openness or curiosity -- although that's bad enough there (see the paper, which shows East Asia in a league of its own in scoring low for Openness to Experience). To achieve something impressive, you can't rely on some external monitor to constantly browbeat you into thinking up new things, getting the small tasks done, and so on. You need an internal stick-to-it-iveness to blaze a trail.

All of this I see as an adaptation to intensive agriculture, the only thing that so strongly sets them apart from the rest of the world. According to the paper, the Ukraine actually resembles East Asia in personality. They were the breadbasket of Eastern Europe and had a heightened sense of themselves as agriculturalists, in stark contrast to the nomadic pastoralists from the Steppe who have regularly overrun their region.

Agriculture always leads to a hierarchical state, sometimes even a gigantic empire as in China. Part of this change is that there's now a stable class of bureaucrats who can monitor and enforce social norms. So people outsource morality -- that is, the regulation of social interactions -- to parents, experts, or whoever. This move toward amorality shows up in lowered Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. It doesn't mean they'll turn into violent hotheads, just that they've selected the moral lobe of their brain to shrink, since someone else will make them behave properly, not they themselves. That selects for an enlarged obedience lobe in the brain.

Pastoralists are the opposite, and indeed the Middle East and Balkans all score very highly on Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. It's not as crazy as it sounds, once we remember that Agreeableness and non-violence aren't the same thing. Persians do not have a free-floating level of misanthropy -- in fact, they are very hospitable, people-loving people. But if you get on their bad side, they feel the need to settle the score. It is the Culture of Honor, not the Culture of Autism and Misanthropy.

Lacking large, stable, hierarchical states, pastoralists have to rely on the Culture of Honor to settle disputes and the Culture of Hospitality to provide mutual aid. It also prevents them from outsourcing morality to bureaucrats -- animal herders are the prototypical rugged individualists, although they also rely on the hospitality of strangers when they get stranded. They have to monitor and motivate themselves. It is no accident that the major moral systems that have spread across the globe came from pastoralists -- those of the Proto-Indo-Europeans and their off-shoots (pagan Europe, Zoroastrianism, and Vedic Hinduism), and later and more successfully Christianity and Islam. Agriculturalists, whether the Northeast Asians, Ancient Egyptians, or Aztecs, never came close to exporting a moral system that broadly.

To wrap up with a thought from Nassim Taleb, I think this underscores how fragile a super-specialized system is, particularly one that involves so much outsourcing. It looks more stable and efficient in the short term, but it is much less robust to shocks. Again just look at video games -- people in the Balkans and Middle East have access to video games, internet cafes, and so on, just as the Chinese do, and the wealthier ones have at least as good access as the Koreans and Japanese do. Yet they aren't dropping like flies from video game addiction, porn addiction, etc.

Video games are like a new infectious disease that tests how truly robust the Asian system of behavioral monitoring is. If the Tiger Mother method were just as good as the self-motivating and self-monitoring method, then it should have resisted the infiltration of video games much better than it has. Instead it has unmasked the deplorable laziness of Asians when the Tiger Mother can't be breathing down their necks, or cut off their internet connection, etc. They sink into a mire of joyless addictions, whose depths the rest of the world cannot fathom.

Expressionism emerges during waves of violence, 2

In the first post on how the early 20th-C wave of violence gave birth to Expressionism, I went over its core traits and explained why artists would move that way during a period of rising crime, especially during the second half when the future looks more apocalyptic.

Now I'll show how the same basic styles emerged yet again during the later 20th-C wave of violence, particularly during the second half of roughly the mid-'70s through the very early '90s. In later posts, I'll look at works that turn more toward the redemptive, spiritual, pastoral, and so on. These ones are more about the anxiety and alienation that set up the urge to re-join a tightly knit community in greater touch with nature. I'll start with museum art and music videos; the third post will look just at movies, since there's a lot to see there.

Just as a reminder of what art looked like during the falling-crime era of the mid-century:


No figures or representation, low variety and intensity of colors (none by the end), and hardly any emotion, dynamism, or subjectivity (none by the end). This was hardly a 20th-century event, as every period of falling violence produces a much "cooler" art compared to the "hotter" art of the rising-crime periods before and after it. (But that is another story.)

Feel free to skip these quotes, but they give a vivid impression of the tumult that was shaking up the sterile art world by the mid-'70s. Here are some excerpts from Hilton Kramer's essay "Signs of Passion" for ZEITGEIST, a catalog for a Neo-Expressionist exhibition in 1982. By the 1960s,

All evidence of subjective emotion, every impulse toward improvisation and what Ruskin had called "impetuosity" and "incompletion", anything that suggested the role of the unconscious or of the irrational in art was suppressed in favor of clean surfaces and hard edges, of instant legibility, transparency, and order. The rising generation seemed to harbor a profound aversion to anything in art that smacked of mystery or interiority. There was a virtual ban on revelations of the soul. Incitements to feeling were looked upon as a kind of vulgarity. For the first time in the history of criticism, boredom in art was upheld as an exemplary emotion. We had entered the era of "cool" and impersonal styles.

Sounds strangely familiar, doesn't it? In fact during the falling-crime era after the early '90s, we've gone right back to this too-cool-to-care attitude. I don't think it's an affectation either -- people are just a lot less electrically conductive than they were in the '80s.

[Neo-Expressionism's] first task was to restore to painting its capacity to encompass the kind of poetry and fantasy that had long been denied to it, and toward that end it was obliged to mount an attack -- sometimes, it seemed, literally -- on the picture surface. What was discarded straightaway was the easy legibility and transparency that, in truth, had long ago degenerated into a facile convention. Instead of leaving everything out of painting and making a neat, clean, perfect form of what remained, the Neo-Expressionists were clearly determined to put everything in. Their paintings swamped the eye with vivid images and tactile effects, relying more on instinct and imagination than on careful design. The mystical, the erotic, and the hallucinatory were once again made welcome in painting, which was now made to shun the immaculate and the austere in favor of energy, physicality, and surfeit.

And of course they were hardly alone in this frontal assault, joined by the revivals of Fauvism and Art Deco.

It was this experience of surfeit, I think, that had the most unsettling effect on established taste. We had grown used to the idea that changes in pictorial style inevitably entailed depletion and purification. . . . [Neo-Expressionism] put into question the very practice of identifying the vitality of art with this process of progressive depletion.

This makes it sound like a theoretical debate that somebody won, but in reality the fun-lovers and the killjoys will never budge from their positions. It is instead a matter of what fraction of the population belongs to which group at some time. The fraction of fun-lovers rises with the violence rate, so by the later 1970s the death of abstract, minimal, Puritanical art was inevitable. Similarly once the violence rate began plummeting after 1992, it was unavoidable that the killjoys would take over the culture once more.

Here are some representative Neo-Expressionist paintings from the '80s, and one from 1992, by Enzo Cucchi, Mimmo Paladino, Rainer Fetting, and Helmut Middendorf (click to enlarge):


Saving movies for the next post, let's have a quick look at just a handful of music videos, a new medium that joined the visual culture during this time. They were never as absorbing and sublime as movies, but they still show how broad the Expressionist influence was.

Nobody pumped out this type of video more than Billy Idol, which was a perfect fit to his musical style -- putting modern alienation and hedonism on display, even having some fun with it for a bit, but ultimately yearning to forge a deep social bond with someone to help him through the urban jungle (as in "Catch My Fall"). The clearest example is the video for "Flesh For Fantasy," with its distorted-perspective buildings, exaggerated choreography, and uneasy voyeuristic look at sexuality.



Only somewhat less stylized, and focusing more on the sense of menace in urban streets and bars, is Pat Benatar's video for "Love Is A Battlefield". The video for "Planet Earth" by Duran Duran is pretty bare, but it still uses a stage that looks like it came from a German Expressionist horror movie. They were outdone there by (who else?) Billy Idol in the video for "Dancing With Myself", directed by Tobe Hooper of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame.

Is there anything new in Neo-Expressionism? I'll elaborate more in the post on movies, but even looking at the music videos you see a far greater anxiety about the more globalized and ethnically heterogeneous world of the 1980s compared to the 1910s. Since one of the core concerns of Expressionism was the sense of loss of belonging and community in the modern world, it was only natural that the Neo-Expressionists -- in the diverse countries anyway -- would uncover the anxiety over the melting pot ideology clashing with the reality of black pimps, inscrutable Orientals, and so on.

This was hardly their central focus, but it did show up fairly reliably, and was not so much a part of early 20th-C Expressionism, whose alienation was all about urban and modern effects, and not ethnic diversity effects.

Why some cultures have more touching, gesturing, eye contact, and closer space

Looking through some guidebooks for international businessmen who have to be hypersensitive to cultural differences in non-verbal communication, it seems like there's a single general factor, that some cultures are closer and others distant. This includes lots of separate things like touching others more, standing closer to others, making more prolonged eye contact, showing more facial expressions (especially smiling), and making more dramatic gestures, which, like facial expressions, "tip your hand" or reveal how you're feeling, instead of keeping your guard up by locking your arms at your sides.

At the closer end are cultures from the Mediterranean, Middle East, India / Pakistan, Latin America (whose international businessmen are Mediterranean), and Eastern Europe. At the distant end are China, Korea, and Japan. Northwestern Europeans and their off-shoots like America are in between.

So it looks like the main difference in how close or distant people are is the subsistence mode they're adapted to -- the intensive agriculturalists of East Asia are distant, the pastoralists of the Mediterranean through milk-drinking South Asia are close, and the mixed agro-pastoralists of Europe are in between.

If that's right, then we should see differences even within a continent. So most of the high-touch "Eastern Europeans" are probably from the Balkans or other hilly places like the Carpathian mountains, where herding but not farming pays off, and probably not so much from the stricter farming areas in the Ukraine. Also, among Northwestern Europeans, the Irish and Scottish should be closer than the English or Dutch. I've been to lots of clan reunions for the Scotch-Irish hillbilly side of my family, and they are very close and boisterous, just as much as Italian or Persian families would be. But I haven't had enough experience among, say, New England descendants of Puritans, who were mostly farmers, to compare first-hand.

There could be all kinds of gradients that are lowest in East Asia, highest in the Middle East, and intermediate in Europe. Why pastoralism? Well again because it seems to scale down to explain differences even within a continent, like Spain vs. Holland, and smaller regions still, like Ireland vs. England.

But also because pastoralism is what drives the culture of honor and the culture of hospitality, for reasons I might review later. When your honor and reputation are always at stake, you don't want to hide how you feel -- you let them know right away that they should back off. In a large, sedentary agricultural state, where a culture of law prevails, you should keep your feelings to yourself and let some bureaucracy or council or maybe just your elder kin determine who's right or wrong.

In a culture of hospitality, you try to cultivate an image of someone who hosts any guest, and more lavishly than you would treat yourself, as well as re-paying the hospitality that someone else has shown you. This obsession with benevolent reciprocity is just as strong in Italy, Lebanon, and Appalachia as is the machismo and vendetta mindset. This shows up in their body language too: they smile more and laugh harder in a friendly context, but in a confrontational context they contort their faces and gesticulate more wildly.

So assuming you're going to get anywhere near another person in the first place, in a pastoralist culture you'll go off into guest-host mode and strive to establish a tight social bond. Hence closer distances, more touching, and more eye contact. Where guest-host relations are less sacred, even weak, as among farmers, you'll keep all strangers at arm's length, and not give away what you're feeling or thinking.

Our immigration policy is idiotic beyond belief, so there are all sorts of things we should be screening potential immigrants for. But these kinds of differences don't show up much in the discussion. I'd rather live next door to proud Persians who would show some sign of real affection between neighbors, even inviting me over for dinner, and not inscrutable Oriental drones who only wanted to be left alone to plug into the hive.

Overall I'd much rather stay here than in Spain, but one thing I miss about living in Barcelona was how much closer their culture is. Maybe it's the hillbilly genes, but I'm more touchy-feely and kinesthetic than the average American, and my only outlet these days is socializing at dance clubs -- especially at '80s night, when the music puts everybody in that mood. I'm truly grateful for that, but still wish there were more everyday chances to enjoy it.

Relationships among guys over there did seem more buddy-buddy, not that we're aloof over here either. What really stood out was the between-sex physical closeness. Every babe I met gave me the cheek-to-cheek "kisses," stood close, often reached out to rub my shoulder when she asked how I was doing (always with a bright smile), and tracked every slight movement of my eyes with her own. Little things like that, accumulated over the day and across the years, go a long way toward making people feel more tightly integrated into a cohesive community.

Expressionism emerges during waves of violence, 1

From the turn of the 20th C. through the early 1930s, there was a crime wave that went against the centuries-long decline in violence. It was somewhat uneven, hitting some countries and not others, or some countries only for a portion of the period. (Here in America, the homicide rate rose steadily from at least 1900 to a peak in 1933.)

Times of rising violence rates produce visual art that is, for lack of a better catch-all word, more Dionysian. Specifically, it is more emotionally open, looks more dynamic, shows a greater variety and intensity of colors, and chooses subject matter that is more dramatic, beautiful, and sublime.

So, as violence rates cycle up and down, the dominant art styles will follow. I covered this before in the case of Art Deco and Fauvism both being born in the early 20th C. crime wave and seeing revivals during the more recent crime wave of ca. 1960 to 1990, in contrast to their polar opposites reigning during the falling-crime period of the mid-century (such as dumb ugly box architecture).

Expressionism shared most of the core traits of the art of its time, such as Deco and Fauvism. Its variation on them was to dial up the raw emotion (often with exaggerated poses), to heighten to subjective point-of-view by using unusual or distorted perspectives, and to focus more closely on the theme of social alienation and disintegration.

Typical of art from apocalyptic times, it doesn't convey a sense of nihilism or fatalism. Quite to the contrary, it shows a deep yearning to actively reach out and re-connect with our fellow group members and with nature. There's an anxiety about this, though -- having slid so far toward atomization, we may have to embarrassingly grope our way through this re-connection at first. Still, what else are we supposed to do when the end of the world looks so near? There's no hint of the whiny-emo complaint that "No one wants to be my friend, please play with me," but rather "Our society keeps getting more fucked up, so we'd better stick together and try to do something about it, or else we're goners."

Here are two representative paintings from Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Franz Marc, and two stills each from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Metropolis:


Before getting to the post-1960 period in part 2, let's close with a reminder of what direction the art world went in during the mid-'30s through the late '50s, when violence rates began plummeting once more. Painting and sculpture gradually became stripped of emotion, felt static, used fewer and more muted colors, and "portrayed" subject matter that was so abstract that it could not strike a dramatic chord in the viewer. Although this trend declined during the '60s with the rise of Pop Art and psychedelic art, it was still common enough in the form of Minimal and Conceptual Art. In all these respects it was not very different from the soulless mid-century architecture.

Here are some representative works by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Donald Judd.

The several births and deaths of the slumber party culture

Yes it would be silly to treat something like sleepovers so seriously in themselves that the terms "birth" and "death" would be appropriate. However, they're part of the larger family of guest-host relations, which are central to a cohesive community and a meaningful life. So, as with the case of trick-or-treating, we can use sleepovers as a window into broader social life. Because it's costly to host your kid's friend during a sleepover, it's an honest signal of healthy guest-host relations, not just lip service.

Since the early '90s, play dates have taken over the social lives of children, and babysitters have disappeared as parents have lost trust in the outside world to take care of their kids. I looked for NYT articles specifically about the decline in sleepovers, but only found scattered remarks. In general it looks like fewer kids get to experience them, and even those that do at later ages, to fewer kids' houses, and with greater parental supervision. When I mentioned this topic to a woman with 2 young kids, she too said that sleepovers seem to have dwindled during the age of helicopter parents.

That's their end, but when did they get started? This graph shows how common the phrase "sleepover" is in Google's digital library across the pre-'90s period:


It moves steadily upward in the late 1950s, which a search of the NYT supports, and kept going through the '80s. We're most familiar with that from movies showing teenage sleepovers, such as Weird Science or any of the slasher movies. But anyone who was a child then will tell you that even elementary school kids had frequent sleepovers, across a pretty wide range of hosts, and that the parents generally stayed out of their way for the night.

So far we see the typical pattern of greater independence for young people, and stronger guest-host relations, during rising-crime times, and the opposite during falling-crime times. To really be sure, we'd want to see if that was true for the earlier 20th-C crime wave. Unfortunately the phrase "sleepover" doesn't go back that far, but as it turns out "slumber party" does:


It gets going around 1900 and peaks in the early-mid-'30s, right as the homicide rate peaks. It then plunges until the mid-'60s (although in the NYT it starts going up by the late '50s), and increases after that. So even during the earlier wave up and down of violence, slumber parties were part of wilder times and died out during safer times. You don't see a strong sleepover culture in A Christmas Story (set circa 1940) or in Mad Men (set circa 1960). In one episode Sally does get invited to sleep over at a friend's, but it's rare and only involves two kids, whereas when they were popular they'd sometimes include over a dozen guests.

I browsed through the actual books and magazines that these graphs are based on, from 1900 through the '30s, and the term meant exactly the same thing then as now. Most of the writings are for sorority newsletters and union bulletings, letting readers know what activities they'd hosted recently. Still there were other references to adolescents throwing slumber parties (such as the Camp Fire Girls and the Boy Scouts), and even small children. One referred to an 8 year-old girl inviting some school friends over for a birthday slumber party. As during the recent peak of this activity, it was not just restricted to young adults.

The phrase "pajama party" shows the same movement up and down as "slumber party," although it does get a later start in the late 1910s. Looking into the contexts, though, I found out that it didn't mean a sleepover or slumber party. Pajamas included a much broader range of clothes during the Jazz Age craze for pajama parties, and since most of them were held in a beach setting, I assume they featured "beach pajamas," which just look like wide-legged pants. It sounds like a way for the well-to-do to throw a party with a casual but sporty dress code. I didn't pick up any hint that sleeping over was involved, and it seemed like no one younger than 20 participated.

The take-home message here is that we've found another example of guest-host relations becoming stronger when people face a more dangerous world, and weaker when it gets safer. The logic behind it is pretty simple, but I'll save a summary for a later post, after looking at more examples. I'll also put it into a broader context of what types of societies rely heavily on such relations, and what types don't.

The Fauvist mini-revival of the New Wave Age

Over the past couple years, I've looked enough at how the trend in the violence rate affects the narrative and verbal parts of the culture. After looking at the history of car shapes and the Art Deco revival of the later 1970s through the early '90s, I figure I might as well start focusing more on how visual culture responds to the trend in the violence rate.

Three obvious case studies like the Art Deco one are the Art Nouveau revival during the psychedelic '60s and early '70s, and the revivals of Expressionism and Surrealism during the second half of the recent crime wave. As with Art Deco, they showed up at more or less the same point in the violence rate cycle this time that they did the first time, Art Nouveau in the beginning and Deco and Surrealism toward the end. And during the falling-crime period of the mid-century and since the '90s, they've became marginal and their opposites mainstream.

There's a lot to say for each one of those, though, so for now I'll just take a quick look at a mini-revival of Fauvism circa the early 1980s. Unlike the original, it took place during the second rather than first half of the crime wave. Also it wasn't very extensive. I'm having trouble thinking of more than one iconic example off the top of my head, but vibrant and not necessarily naturalistic colors came back into style, so did an interest in boats, and exotic settings.

Here are some original Fauvist paintings from the 1900s by Matisse, Derain, and Kandinsky:



The iconic example of the revival is the music video for "Rio" by Duran Duran:



The use of color and exotic marine setting fit well with the Fauves. The girl's self-confident sensuality and the way she playfully teases and challenges the men remind me most of the women in Kees van Dongen's paintings:



If anyone can think of other perhaps less unforgettable examples, please say so in the comments.

Sub-generations within the Millennials?

Even long generations like Baby Boomers and Generation X tend to have sub-divisions within them. The earlier Boomers were the ones who took all the counter-culture stuff seriously, while those born from about 1958 to 1964 couldn't have cared less then or at any time since. The Gen X-ers born in the later '60s and early '70s didn't spend as much of their young adulthood during the fagged-out period from about 1992 and after, while those born in the mid-late '70s were more exposed to it.

Millennials seem to be another long generation, so there might be noticeable differences between earlier and later born ones. On some level, it's comparing the heights of pygmies, but you know what I mean. In my real-life experience and online, the cut-off for Generation Y feels like 1984 (and starting in '79). Those born in '85 and '86 are almost recognizably human, and after all they do have some memories of the culture before it went down the toilet during the '90s. But if forced to choose, they'd still side with '90s rather than the '80s nostalgia and revival, so I put them with Millennials, whose first clear birth year is 1987.

These sub-generations don't seem to span much more than 5 years, which suggests that the Millennials born since the mid-'90s should be different somehow. Almost all my experience has been with the earlier ones, born in the late '80s and early '90s. Not being a tutor anymore, I don't know how high school kids in 2011 are different from those in 2005.

Anyone reading this have a decent impression? Behavior, culture, beliefs, whatever.

My hunch is that the earlier Millennials won't turn out as dorky as the later ones because as adolescents they got to imprint on a period of exciting culture during the housing bubble euphoria of the mid-2000s. There was a revival of new wave music, colorful clothing, and an overall optimistic spirit. It was brief and highly anomalous for the post-'92 period, but it may have served as a shot in the arm (perhaps too little too late) for Millennials' social and cultural development.

The ones born in the mid-'90s and after didn't experience that period when their social antennae were hyper-sensitive and when they start to pay close attention to cultural trends (i.e. as teenagers).

Halloween, from communal rite of rebellion to egocentric business as usual

You couldn't pick a worse time to try to socialize in a night club, bar, house party, etc., than the Saturday around Halloween, when everyone goes out.

Before the great wimpification of the '90s, it used to be a "rite of rebellion," where the normal order of things is inverted for a little while, until everyone goes back to life as usual. We all recognize the need for the occasional break from our routine roles, and these rites allow us to all coordinate on the same time, place, theme, and so on, to make it a communal affair. Plus it helps to level ranks and distinctions, which makes for a closer feeling of community, though without greatly upsetting the social order, since it's only temporary and since the "rebels" are not directly accusing or confronting their superiors. Something just came over them, they couldn't help themselves, etc., but don't worry because now it's out of their system and they'll go back to their normal roles.

In the case of Halloween, it was mostly females and young people who indulged in a little rule-bending. Children and adolescents pursued greater independence than would normally be allowed to them, and girls behaved more sexually than usual -- meaning behavior that leads toward getting it on, not attention whoring.

Stepping outside the boundaries of their usual roles requires a loss of self-consciousness; otherwise their internal alarm will sound, reminding them what their proper role is. Today Halloween parties show the opposite: nobody is so self-conscious as during the implicit contest over whose costume is the most clever, meta-ironic, just plain kitschy, or slutty.

Guys are bad enough, laboring to signal how long the conception and execution took. They're more like salesmen making a pitch than revelers getting lost in the crowd-vibe. Girls, however, don't even show that level of extraversion. They're just there to soak up a lot of free attention without having to interact with anyone. Their costumes don't serve as a disguise in order to pursue what they normally could not, but instead as a "this is why I'm hot" broadcast. It only amplifies girls' basic tendency toward egocentrism and frigid attention-whoring.

As for young people, children hardly go trick-or-treating at all anymore, and adolescents (which now includes anyone through their mid-20s) have no impulse to seek out greater independence when opportunity knocks. They'd rather fart around someone's basement watching TV or playing beer pong, probably the most snore-inducing activity ever invented, and one that prevents anyone present from pairing off to make out, listen to music, or do anything else exciting. Why helicopter parents are so paranoid about their kids getting into trouble these days is beyond me -- this generation of passive, cocoon-loving dorks only knows how to rebel by whining on Facebook or pretending to be a girl in a video game.

I harp on these changes about Halloween every time it rolls around, mostly because it they were so fast and so great. Other things just kind of faded away, like cars with T-tops, but this holiday was turned into its polar opposite. I still go out to the parties because I can't resist a crowd around Halloween, but I don't expect much carnivalesque fun anymore. That's more for '80s night, which (at least here) is more of a standard rite of rebellion.

Still, there's usually at least one colorful episode at Halloween parties today. I never thought I'd get the chance, but tonight I got to dance to "Goodbye Horses," aka Buffalo Bill's theme song from Silence of the Lambs. Although hardly my favorite, it's a fun groovy song, especially played around Halloween, that I've never heard in a club before. It's also a treat to hear some of the very late New Wave songs, which got lost in the shuffle. The drag queen out on the dance floor only added to the slightly unsettling vibe that the song gives anyone who saw the movie.

Greatest actors came of age in rising-crime times (data)

Having gone over the motivation last week, let's look at when great actors were born, and so what kind of world they came of age in. I'm using AFI's nominations for their 100 stars list, which includes 250 men and 250 women. I don't care who ranked where, just whether or not they made the nominations. They're all classical Hollywood stars, so no one is born after 1950. Perhaps they didn't want to take a stand on more recent actors, whose achievements may not be clear yet. It's also nice because it allows us to look at the pre-1950 history of America, something we're pretty blind to.

Here is the distribution of their birth years, smoothed using the average within a 5-year window around a particular year. The top shows men and women combined, the bottom with men in blue and women in red.


The production of future great actors takes off around 1880, peaking around 1918 after a 10-year plateau, and falls off after. There is however a brief upward blip around 1925.

In the last post, I'll discuss and interpret these patterns. For now, I'll just note the near absence of the Silent and Greatest Generations. Since roughly 60 years separates two similar points in the zeitgeist cycle, the actors born during the peak period in the early 20th C. correspond to Generation X from later on.