Ferocious

A couple of days ago, my neighbor brought to my attention that our mail was no longer being delivered. It turns out that it hadn't been delivered for over a week, but I hadn't even noticed - almost nothing of importance ever comes through the mail anymore: bills are paid on line, taxes are filed electronically, notices come via email, etc.

To me the Post Office is just a bit player in the giant circle of junk-mail life. They deliver it, I put it in the recycling, new paper is made from it, new junk mail gets printed, and the Post Office redelivers it to keep the circle going. Other than that, they have little use from what I can tell.

So they just stopped delivering my mail - no notice, no explanation, no nothing.

Why?

The ferocious furball pictured below approached and barked at the mailman. There was no contact between them and our dog didn't even get particularly close to the mailman. The dog is well trained and my wife was present and verbally in control of the dog (for example, she told it to stop barking and it did). Nonetheless, the barking is still considered an "attack" and enough of an incident to get mail delivery to stop without notice. The Post Office claims 6,000 dog attacks on mail carriers in a year. However, given that barking is an attack, I'm surprised the number isn't far higher. What dog doesn't bark (other than the one in the Sherlock Holmes story)?

When I first learned the reason for non-delivery, I did a google search. There're a gazillion stories of non-delivery where it was really onerous to get it started again and I started to worry. For example, an 11-pound furball caused an entire condo complex to lose mail delivery forever (or until the owner agreed to put the dog to sleep). So I was wondering what hoops I would have to jump through to get my mail started again. If it was just me, I wouldn't've even bothered since mail isn't useful to me. Unfortunately, my neighbor was unpleased at his lack of delivery so I was worried the whole thing would become a giant nightmare.

But it wasn't bad. The Post Office just made me sign something that said that I agreed to keep the dog under control during mail delivery times and that the mailman would not deliver mail on days when any dogs were visible. Works for me and it was only a little bit annoying.

Don't get me wrong - I am sympathetic to being afraid of dogs. Our 25 pound furball does have a ferocious bark for something so small and fluffy. I do wonder though: if a mailman is so afraid of dogs that merely being barked at is traumatic enough to be considered an attack, perhaps he's chosen the wrong career?

Is That Sexist?

My younger daughter just got her driving learner's permit. In California, after receiving one's permit, the first two hours of driving has to be with a professional driving instructor in a special car where the instructor has a brake and steering wheel as well.

My daughter wanted her instructor to be a woman. She asked me, "Is that sexist?"

The snarky comment that almost escaped my mouth was, "No, because only white males can be sexist." Fortunately, I choked that one back.

Instead, I said, "Well, I don't know, but if so, it would be an illustration of just how meaningless negative words like that can be at times. I wouldn't worry about it."

Was that the right answer?

Criminal Parenting

A number years back, I was sitting on the grass in a park by the boardwalk along Mission Bay in San Diego. I noticed this guy sprinting past me with panic in his eyes.  He abruptly changed direction and sprinted the other way.  I began wondering what was going on so I observed the scene and began laughing my ass off.

He had two children: one, roughly four years old, was on a big-wheel tricycle and that little boy was riding as fast as he could away from dad in one direction; the other, an approximately six-year-old girl, was clearly just starting to learn how to ride a bicycle and was heading for the water screaming, "help, I don't know how to stop!!!!"  I was laughing because there was clearly no real danger in the situation, yet if I was in the dad's shoes, I probably would've been a bit panicked too.

The girl, as was easily predictable, encountered the sand before the water which gently slowed her down and she fell over into the soft sand without a scratch. The mischievous boy kept riding, but was not even a hundred yards away when the girl was safely on the ground, and visibility was probably 5 times that.  The dad easily retrieved him and everyone was safe and sound, the dad a little worse off for the wear and tear, and much of the rest of us in the park quite entertained.

That was roughly the same era as when my daughters were two and five years old.  I was at a different park with them and was right next to my two-year-old.  My five-year-old had somewhat different age-appropriate playground interests and was maybe 30 feet away on the other side of the park.  A mother came up to me and scolded me for allowing my five-year-old to be "so far away."  She said, "somebody could snatch her, it's very irresponsible of you!" Yes, that's me - Mr. Irresponsible.  I apparently should've forced both my children to play within a 3 foot radius of me at all times.  And probably bubble wrapped them while I was at it.

It was then that I became increasingly aware of how bizarrely overly concerned with safety society was and is. Unfortunately, it's become far worse in the intervening years and perfectly adequate parenting (in my opinion), is now being criminalized.  You know that it's gotten really bad when even the NY Times starts to take notice:

For instance, they might have ended up like the Connecticut mother who earned a misdemeanor for letting her 11-year-old stay in the car while she ran into a store. Or the mother charged with “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” after a bystander snapped a photo of her leaving her 4-year-old in a locked, windows-cracked car for five minutes on a 50 degree day. Or the Ohio father arrested in front of his family for “child endangerment” because — unbeknown to him — his 8-year-old had slipped away from a church service and ended up in a nearby Family Dollar. 

Or (I’m just getting warmed up) like the mother of four, recently widowed, who left her children — the oldest 10, the youngest 5 — at home together while she went to a community-college class; her neighbor called the police, protective services took the kids, and it took a two-year legal fight to pry them back from foster care. Or like the parents from two families who were arrested after their girls, two friends who were 5 and 7, cut through a parking lot near their houses — again without the parents’ knowledge — and were spotted by a stranger who immediately called the police. 

Or — arriving at this week’s high-profile story — like Debra Harrell, an African-American single mother in Georgia, who let her 9-year-old daughter play in a nearby park while she worked a shift at McDonald’s, and who ended up shamed on local news and jailed.

I'm going to focus on this last one a little bit as I actually sent money to a legal fund for Ms. Harrell because I'm so unhappy with her treatment:

Here are the facts: Debra Harrell works at McDonald’s in North Augusta, South Carolina. For most of the summer, her daughter had stayed there with her, playing on a laptop that Harrell had scrounged up the money to purchase. (McDonald’s has free WiFi.) Sadly, the Harrell home was robbed and the laptop stolen, so the girl asked her mother if she could be dropped off at the park to play instead. 

Harrell said yes. She gave her daughter a cell phone. The girl went to the park—a place so popular that at any given time there are about 40 kids frolicking—two days in a row. There were swings, a “splash pad,” and shade. On her third day at the park, an adult asked the girl where her mother was. At work, the daughter replied. 

The shocked adult called the cops. Authorities declared the girl “abandoned” and proceeded to arrest the mother.

I think it was pretty cool of McDonald's to let the daughter hang out and use the WiFi.  It was also, I might've thought, pretty cool that there happened to be a park less than half-a-mile from where Ms. Harrell was working that her daughter could hang out at. I might've guessed that that was what parks with playgrounds were for.  I, of course, was wrong. I don't know what they're for, but apparently not for children to hang out at.

The "shocked adult" who called the cops explained her reason for contacting the authorities: "this day and time, you never know who's around. Good, bad, it's just not safe."  Not quite true.  You do indeed know that the government is around. And that they will snatch your kid and arrest you if you let your child go to the park by herself! From Ms. Harrell's point of view, is it really better that the child was basically abducted by the government and is on her way to the foster care system where abuses of all kinds are continually documented, rather than the extraordinarily small chance that someone not from the government might take her instead?

Who's better off here?  Certainly not the daughter who now doesn't have access to her mother.  Certainly not Ms. Harrell who now has an arrest record and needs to fight felony charges in court.  Certainly not society who has to foot the bill now for jail, court costs, foster care costs, and will probably end up with a basket case to deal with when the daughter gets through the foster care system.

Nobody's saying that leaving a nine-year-old at a park every day is the best possible situation.  However, given that Ms. Harrell was a low-wage McDonald's worker with limited day care choices, it may not have been a terrible choice, and almost certainly better than the government's choice:

You needn’t approve of the parents’ actions in any of these cases to understand that dumping them into the criminal justice system is a terribly counterproductive way of addressing their mistakes. ... The mere fact that state officials were essentially micromanaging these parents’ decisions is creepy enough. That the consequences for the “wrong” decision are criminal is downright scary.

I think that the Ms. Harrell might likely agree with Ronald Reagan that:

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

She's certainly in a terrifying situation dealing with the government now.

Breaking: Mankind Won't Go Extinct For Lack of Children

Many people worry about dropping birthrates and are concerned that one day mankind will become extinct for lack of children. For example, Hey Skipper recently wrote in the comments, "Self extinction is about 400 years off."

I've been meaning to do a population simulation for a long time. The simulation is fairly simple. Start with a population of 1,000,000,000 people. There are two types of "genes" in this population. The most common and also dominant gene is the "barren gene" and compels its individual to produce one child on average. Given that it takes two parents to produce a child, if this were the only "gene," the population would halve every generation and mankind would indeed go extinct in only a few hundred years.

The second "gene" is the "fruitful gene" and potentially compels its individual to have three children on average. However, since this "gene" is recessive, the individual is only compelled to have three children if he or she has two of these "genes." At the start of the simulation, only five-percent of the genes are of this type. So not only is it recessive, it's also rare.  If a double "fruitful" mates with a someone with at least one "barren gene", they split the difference and have two children.

The graph above shows the results of one run of the simulation (since it randomly combines each generation, the results are slightly different each time).  The population drops for 15 to 20 generations before turning the corner and recovering fully somewhere around the 40th generation. (If anybody wants the matlab code, let me know, I'll be happy to send it to you).

I think that this simulation is very pessimistic (i.e. the population will never drop that far).  I don't think the "fruitful gene" is fully recessive, I think it's more prevalent than five-percent, I think that "fruitful" people would seek each other out instead of mating randomly, and I think that the "fruitful gene" is probably more fruitful than just three kids.  For example: if the "fruitful" folk seek each other out instead of mating randomly, the population typically drops less than a factor of ten over 4 or 5 generations before recovering fully within 10; or when starting the simulation with 10% "fruitful genes" and having two fruitful parents produce four children, the population for only around 10 generations before recovering fully after 20.

The point of this is not to convince anybody, but rather to show why I'm highly skeptical of the claim that mankind will go extinct due to low birthrates.  I know too many highly educated, non-religious couples with access to birth control who have three or more children by choice.

The barren will go extinct, but not the fruitful.

Thank You

In a recent Ed Driscoll post It's a Wonderful Fountainhead he stated:

Of course, atheism doesn’t necessarily mean socialism — even if that’s how it invariably works out...


 And to bring this post back to 2013, to understand why atheism actually does lead to socialism in real life, and as the Salon critic posited, “We all live in Pottersville now,” don’t miss National Review editor-at-large John O’Sullivan’s essay on “Our Post-Christian Society”:

John O'Sullivan in that column Our Post-Christian Society made the following points:

It is often said that we live in a post-Christian society. That is true, but its meaning is generally misunderstood. A post-Christian society is not merely a society in which agnosticism or atheism is the prevailing fundamental belief. It is a society rooted in the history, culture, and practices of Christianity but in which the religious beliefs of Christianity have been either rejected or, worse, forgotten. In other words a post-Christian society is a particular sort of Christian society. It is quite different, for instance, from a post-Muslim or a post-Buddhist society (if we can imagine such things). At an emotional level, its Christian character explains why many agnostics and atheists nonetheless find Christian hymns suitable and comforting at occasions such as funerals and weddings. Intellectually, its dormant Christian beliefs — notably those about the nature of Man — underpin our ideas on politics and foreign policy, as for instance on human rights. Even the Enlightenment — which strong secularists like to cite as the foundation of Western liberal polities — is an extension of Christianity as much as a rejection of it. In short, though much of what Christianity taught is forgotten, even unknown, by modern Europeans and Americans, they nonetheless act on its teachings every day.

But there are consequences to forgetting truths. One consequence is that while we instinctively want to preserve the morals and manners of the Christian tradition, we cannot quite explain or defend them intellectually. So we find ourselves seeking more contemporary (i.e., in practice, secular) reasons for preserving them or, when they decay completely, inventing regulations to mimic them. When courtesy is abandoned, we invent speech codes, which are blunter in their impact and repress legitimate disagreement along with insults. When female sexual modesty and male sexual restraint are discredited as puritanical, we draw up contractual arrangements to ensure that any sexual contact is voluntary on both sides. This means that sexual relationships (and their consequences) may occur more often but that they do so in an atmosphere of mutual suspicion and legal wariness that poisons relations between men and women over the long run. Above all, when we no longer protect and strengthen the family on the grounds that it is a patriarchal institution harmful to the life chances of women, we encourage the family breakdown that leaves women worse off financially, pushes men into an irresponsible life, and damages their children socially and psychologically.

Family breakdown is in fact the largest single social disaster plaguing the post-Christian society. The family is a natural way of regulating and disciplining us and our ambitions in the activities of everyday life. It makes us frugal; it encourages saving, wealth creation, and the deferment of gratification; it compels us to provide for the future; above all it ensures that children are brought up and taught to become self-reliant, and that the weak, the sick, and the elderly have others to succor them. When the family breaks down, we get crime, drug-taking, impoverishment, psychological problems, and much else at the personal level; and we get a cycle of deprivation, the growth of an underclass, spiraling social-welfare costs, over-government, and severe budgetary problems at a national level. The result of family breakdown is that we have to replace the family with regulation after regulation. Our remedies — easier divorce, better financial arrangements for women after divorce, increased welfare for single mothers, bureaucratic agencies to compel men to make child-support payments, laws and regulations that disadvantage natural family relationships in court decisions on child care and adoption, and much else — never work as well as the stable families they replace. Indeed, very often they make the situation worse.

As someone interested in maintaining a free and prosperous society, this Irving Kristol lecture titled The Capitalist Future touched on several interrelated facets of society:

It is not, then, the economics of capitalism that is our fundamental, unmanageable problem. That problem today is located in the culture of our society, which is in the process of outflanking our relatively successful economy. While the society is bourgeois, the culture is increasingly, and belligerently, not.

Bourgeois society is a society in which certain virtues are accepted as a matter of course by the majority of the people. These virtues—today we defensively call them "values"—include a willingness to work hard to improve one’s condition, a respect for law, an appreciation of the merits of deferred gratification, a deference toward traditional religions, a concern for family and community, and so on. It is a commitment to such beliefs that creates a middle class, which then sustains a market economy. Today the old-fashioned animus against a market economy is being sublimated into an aggressive animus against the bourgeois society that is organically associated with our market economy. If you de-legitimize this bourgeois society, the market economy—almost incidentally, as it were—is also de-legitimized.
...

We have, then, been living through a cultural revolution which at one point threatened to become a political revolution—that flash point was experienced during the student revolution of the 1960s—one of those failed revolutions that was nevertheless enormously influential. In the United States it pretty much forced us to withdraw from Vietnam. It also led quickly and decisively to the capture of the Democratic party by its left wing in 1972, thereby importing a kind of permanent polarization into American politics. And in the cultural world its energies were channeled into what is now called post-modernism, whose basic theme was expressed in Paris, during the student rebellion of the 1960s, by one of the graffiti painted on the walls of the Sorbonne: "All Power to the Imagination." This academic irrationalism is the dominant intellectual mode, not only in the arts today, but in the study of the humanities in our institutions of higher learning.

From a dissenting culture, to a counterculture, we have finally arrived at a nihilistic anti-culture. This anti-culture permits the post-modernists to abolish the distinction between what used to be called "highbrow" art—it also used to be called "culture" without equivocation—and "popular" culture.

 ...

Whereas modernism had calmly accepted Nietzsche’s dictum that "God is dead," it generally interpreted this to mean simply that institutional religion was moribund. But only a handful of modernists jumped to the Nietzschean conclusion that "if God is dead, everything is now permitted": That was implicit in modernism, and more than implicit for those who believed themselves to be the avant-garde of modernism. But only with post-modernism has it become belligerently explicit, and a dominant motif in the culture at large.

For centuries, as the focus on religion as a central human experience continued to dim, the intellectual world remained remarkably complacent. The satisfying rituals of religion, it was thought, could be replaced by an esthetic experience of the arts. In truth, the aura of the sacred has largely been transferred from religion to the arts, so that the burning or even censorship of books is regarded as a greater sacrilege than the vandalization of churches or synagogues. As for the moral code traditionally provided by religion, it was assumed that, since modern individuals were rational moral agents, rational philosophy could be relied on to come up with a code that, if not identical with religion’s, was sufficiently congruent with it so that the practical moral effect was the same. From Immanuel Kant to John Dewey, that has been the basic assumption of secular rationalism and gives rise to the modern quasi-religion of secular humanism. Such a philosophical enterprise, it was believed, would converge on what John Dewey called "a common faith"—a faith in the ability of reason to solve all our human problems, including our human need for moral guidance.

But this is a faith that has failed. Secular rationalism has been unable to produce a compelling, self-justifying moral code. Philosophical analysis can analyze moral codes in interesting ways, but it cannot create them. And with this failure, the whole enterprise of secular humanism—the idea that man can define his humanity and shape the human future by reason and will alone—begins to lose its legitimacy. Over the past thirty years, all the major philosophical as well as cultural trends began to repudiate secular rationalism and secular humanism in favor of an intellectual and moral relativism and/or nihilism.

Bourgeois capitalism began with a kind of benign toleration of religion but a firm commitment to Judaeo-Christian morality. In this respect, Adam Smith and our Founding Fathers were of one mind, one sensibility. Their fundamental error, doubtless attributable to their rationalism, was a complacency about the relation of this morality to its religious roots.
...


The bourgeois capitalist revolution of the 18th century was successful precisely because it did incorporate the older Judaeo-Christian moral tradition into its basically secular, rationalist outlook. But its error was to scissor out this moral tradition from the religious context that nourished it. And so, in the nineteenth century, in all Western nations, we had what was called a "crisis of faith" among writers and philosophers. It was not yet a crisis in moral beliefs. George Eliot wrote that God was "inconceivable," immortality "unbelievable," but Duty nonetheless "peremptory." A few years later, Nietzsche came along to proclaim that Duty was an illusion fostered by the Judaeo-Christian "slave morality." Nietzsche was not taken seriously until the period after World War II—a war that Hitler lost but that German philosophy won.

Today, in our academic and intellectual circles, Nietzsche and his disciple, the Nazi sympathizer, Martin Heidegger, are almost unanimously regarded as the two philosophical giants of the modern era. It is important to understand that their teachings are subversive, not only of bourgeois society and the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but also of secular humanism, secular rationalism, bourgeois morality—and, in the end, of Western Civilization itself.

...

 But a society needs more than sensible men and women if it is to prosper. It needs the energies of the creative imagination as expressed in religion and the arts. It is crucial to the lives of all our citizens, as of all human beings at all times, that they encounter a world that possesses a transcendent meaning, in which the human experience makes sense. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is more de-humanizing, more certain to generate a crisis, than experiencing one’s life as a meaningless event in a meaningless world.

Maintaining a connection to the religious roots of the foundational principals that have made America exceptional probably depends upon traditional religious observance by a meaningful portion of the population.  Those of us who hold dear similar traditional morals and beliefs but are not regular participants in such observance are acting as free riders.  To those for whom it applies, I simply say, 'Thank you."

Might Makes Right: Monopoly on Compassion

The wealthy actor Gérard Depardieu gave up his French citizenship in order to avoid France's seemingly ever increasing taxes.  The French socialists have been howling about the injustice of the huge and hugely wealthy man avoiding his obligation to help the French poor.

Theodore Dalrymple wonders if the socialists are really concerned with injustice and proposes the following thought experiment:

"Suppose that Gérard Depardieu were to undergo a conversion experience and see that his wealth was not unjust but unseemly in view of the difficulties or hardships of others, and that as a consequence he decided to give it away to those most in need (as determined by him) in exactly the same proportion as he would have been taxed. Would that be acceptable to all those who criticized him for refusing to pay his tax? 

"I suspect not: for in the modern world, the state claims the monopoly not only of force, but increasingly of compassion as well."

I find that the state's monopoly of compassion is an interesting concept.  Charity is one of the components of compassion, at least at the individual level.  The Jewish philosopher Maimonides lists 8 levels of charity (in ascending order of "goodness"):

1. Giving unwillingly.
2. Giving willingly, but inadequately.
3. Giving adequately after being asked.
4. Giving before being asked.
5. Giving publicly to an unknown recipient.
6. Giving anonymously to a known recipient.
7. Giving anonymously to an unknown recipient.
8. Giving that results in a person no longer living by relying upon others.

Giving anonymously is considered a preferred form of giving.  It has the advantage of not advertising the goodness of the giver but rather helps ensure that the giver is giving because of compassion with few other benefits to self.  The second advantage is that the person receiving the charity can't feel beholden to any individual since he has no idea from where the charity originated.  If anything, the recipient will feel beholden to the community, to humanity, and since this is a religious philosophy, the recipient will possibly feel beholden to God as well.  This all adds to social cohesion and harmony.

With the state having a monopoly on giving, in some sense the giving is anonymous.  Unfortunately, the benefits of that anonymity is preempted by the fact that the giver is often doing so unwillingly (many resent paying taxes).  On the other side, while the "givers" or taxpayers are unknown to him, the recipient can be sure that the vast majority of the charity comes from outside his community and therefore feels no sense of obligation to that community.  Government replaces God as well.

And that's probably the point.  Reduce the capacity for societal cohesion at the family and community level and replace that with worship at the altar of government.  It's not about injustice, but power.

Might Makes Right.

Assimilation Anecdote

My ancestors all came from Eastern Europe from what is now Poland, Belarus/Lithuania, and western Russia.  English was not the first language for three out of four of my grandparents.

By the time I came along, none of them had any foreign accent at all.  It was very important to them to adopt the language and culture of their new home when they immigrated here and they worked very hard at speaking English with perfect fluency and no accent.  They felt that opportunity, success and perhaps even survival were dependent on it.

I never once heard any of my grandparents speak anything but English (except for Hebrew during religious services).  In fact, it never occurred to me that they even knew another language.

Apparently, that they might know other languages never occurred to my sister either.  My sister is nine years younger than I am and when she was around four years old she was staying for a few days at our grandmother's house.  My grandmother received a call (extremely rare) from family back in Lithuania, and since the other party didn't speak any English, she began speaking Lithuanian (her native tongue).

My sister completely freaked out.  She had only ever heard grandma speak English and all of the sudden grandma was spewing forth what sounded like bizarre gibberish to my little sister.  My sister got really scared that something was seriously wrong with grandma and started crying and it took a while to get her to calm down.

That shows the extent to which my grandparents completely rejected their heritage and completely adopted as many aspects as they could of the United States.  You would never guess that they were immigrants.

The melting pot worked.

Now, the emphasis is on multiculturalism.  Immigrants and children of immigrants are encouraged to keep their language and culture.  They're not encouraged to assimilate.  Member of their group, sorted by culture, first; citizen of the United States second (or possibly third behind religious affiliation).

We'll see where that takes us, but as we seem to become ever more polarized and fractured, I wonder if that's part of the reason.

Internal Alien

Two hikers in the woods encounter a grizzly bear.  The first hiker starts putting on his running shoes.  The second hiker says, "Don't be silly, you can't outrun a grizzly bear."  The first hiker replies, "I don't have to outrun the grizzly, I only have to outrun YOU!"

I used to tell that joke moderately often.

My wife and I were riding our mountain bikes on a country road a few years back.  The ride had been scenic and uneventful when suddenly, this enormous and ferocious looking dog with red eyes, huge teeth dripping saliva, and malice emanating from head to tail came charging at us.  My wife is perfect in many ways, but being a fast bike rider is not one of them.  It was clear that there was no way she could go fast enough to get away from the dog.  She said the first thing to come to her mind was the above joke about the bear and knew that I could easily ride faster than her.

My experience was quite odd and I've never experienced anything like it before or since.  Something farther down my brain stem, something instinctive and primal, took complete control of my body.  My conscious self was suddenly along for the ride, not only having no control, but not even having any input.  I heard my voice yell, "Go! Go!" to my wife and watched myself position my bike directly between her and the dog in what was clearly a protective maneuver.  I was quite surprised and remember thinking, "I wonder what my body is going to do next?" as the dog closed in.

Fortunately, my wife under these particular circumstances is actually quite a fast bicyclist.  She accelerated her bicycle through the speed of sound nearly instantaneously and the resulting sonic boom left broken windows in three counties.  Her superhuman effort left me in the dust, but fortunately I was able to go fast enough to get out of the dog's range as well.

I don't tell the bear joke very often anymore.  That experience made it too close to home.

My wife thought I was pretty chivalrous.  I haven't bothered to mention that it wasn't "me" that was chivalrous, at least not the "me" that's writing this post or the "me" that she usually interacts with.  It was some internal alien that was chivalrous, a "Mr. Hyde"-like creature who is apparently encoded in my genes to emerge when my wife and perhaps other loved ones are in imminent danger.  We live pretty safe lives and that was the most danger in which I've ever seen any of my loved ones, so the alien has always been dormant except this one time.

One thing I read about the Aurora shooting that brought tears to my eyes was the following:

In final acts of valor, Jon Blunk, Matt McQuinn and Alex Teves used their bodies to shield their girlfriends as accused madman James Holmes turned the Aurora cineplex into a shooting gallery.

Out of the 12 people who died, (at least) three did so for altruistic reasons.  Amazing!

I've always wondered if I would have the courage to do something like that.  If the emergent alien comes through, for sure.  If not, who knows?

Whether their actions were conscious or instinctual, they were heroes either way.

Drat! Foiled Again!

I think that focus, tenacity, and perseverance are the three most human qualities most correlated with success. While I think that these are mostly innate qualities, I think they can be nurtured and significantly strengthened.

I got my electric guitar out of the attic for my older daughter who takes guitar classes at school. They do classical guitar the first half of the year and electric the second half.

My guitar has been calling to me. I don't mean that I've been having hallucinations, it's just that I feel a strong attraction to it.

When my younger daughter was 9, she and I were listening to "Johnny Winter And... Live" and we started talking about the music. She really dislikes his voice, especially when he hits the high notes using a sort of gargling falsetto scream. I told her I rather like that style of singing but could understand why she didn't like it.

I then went on to say the he was (is) a truly great guitarist. I wanted to then continue by turning that statement into a lecture about focus and tenacity so I pointed out that one of the reasons he's great is that he basically plays guitar or listens to music every waking second. I do believe that's one of life's most important lessons: success is more due to focus, tenacity, and perseverance than any other quality.

However, I was thwarted in delivering the rest of the lesson because the conversation went something like this:

Daughter: But you're a great guitarist and you don't play guitar all the time.

Me: No. I'm an okay guitar player[1], Johnny Winter is a great guitarist[2].

Daughter: Well, I think you're a great guitarist, daddy!

So she melted me then and there, rendering me incapable of continuing the lesson, even though my first thought was, "I'd better get her ears checked."

Unfortunately, the flip side of the focus, tenacity, and perseverance coin is obsession. Obsession is unhealthy in and of itself, but also seems to be closely related to drug addiction and alcohol dependence. That certainly was true for Johnny Winters and who knows how many other dead or ruined rock guitarists.

It's a fine balance between being obsessed enough to achieve success (how ever one wishes to define it) and staying healthy and reasonably balanced. I think it might be mostly genetic though.

Notes:
[1] I feel that there are three levels of guitar virtuosity: guitar owner, guitar player, and guitarist. I'm somewhere in the guitar player range - on a good day.
[2] Great guitarists seem to have three qualities: (1) obsession, (2) huge hands, and (3) steel belted fingertips (mine blister quite easily).

Wages and Standard of Living

One constant refrain from socialists and statists is that capitalism is unfair because the rich are getting richer and the poor and getting poorer. Often cited in support of this statement is that wages of the middle and lower classes have been stagnant for decades, the implication being that the standard of living for those classes has also been stagnant. The obvious flaw in this reasoning is that stagnant (i.e., not getting richer) is not the same as getting poorer.

However, the more important flaw is subtle; stagnant wages do not necessarily imply a stagnant standard of living for the lower classes. There are several reasons that there is not a direct link between wages and standard of living.

First, nominal wages have not been stagnant at all - they're much higher than they were a few decades ago. What's meant when referring to stagnant wages is that they have been relatively stagnant when converted from nominal wages to real wages by comparing them to the inflation rate. The inflation rate is an average inflation rate across all goods and services. However, [T]he rich have faced a higher effective rate of inflation than the poor have. Examples:

• The price of fish eggs (caviar) has increased much more than the price of chicken eggs (not to mention chickens).
• The price of high end wines have gone through the roof, while two-buck chuck (Charles Shaw wines) provide far more value per real dollar (in my opinion) than has ever been available.
• Ferraris have really gotten expensive, but my Hyundai Elantra was amazingly cheap and good and there are even less expensive cars.

The inflation rate for the poor is lower than the official (average) inflation rate and therefore the poors' wages have not been stagnant with regards to purchases that poor people typically make. In other words, the poor can buy more than they used to. That's not stagnation, that's improvement in their standard of living.

Second, wages aren't the same thing as compensation. Compensation includes vacation, sick leave, health care, perks such as cars or meals, and other benefits in addition to wages. As Daniel Griswold elaborates, measures of real wages only are misleading:

A more accurate measure of earnings is “real hourly compensation,” which includes not only wages but benefits. The Bureau of Labor Statistics data on wages and benefits combined tell a more accurate and encouraging story about the well-being of the average American worker. Since 1973, average real hourly compensation for American workers has increased 45 percent, for an average annual growth rate of more than 1.1 percent. Figure 2 shows that real hourly compensation has not only climbed since 1973, but its rise has accelerated in the past decade along with America’s growing economic openness. The average American worker has not suffered from “stagnant” earnings in the past three decades but in fact has enjoyed real gains.

Third, while it should be obvious, many pundits seem to overlook that fact that the wage data from decades ago are for different people than the current wage data. The people who were in the bottom quintile of income back then have generally moved up to higher quintiles (see here and here for more information). Those are then replaced in the lowest quintile by immigrants, students, etc. who will then also attain higher incomes over time.

Next, standard of living is not directly dependent on income. That might seem like a surprising statement, but if you think about it, standard of living is mostly dependent on "outgo". It's your ability to spend, not your income that determines how well you can live. These days, many more of the poor get substantial assistance that's not considered income. For example, the vast majority of students have low incomes, but because of financial aid and parental help, they mostly live far better than their incomes would otherwise indicate. Other programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit and Food Stamps also help lower income families have higher outgo and therefore a better standard of living.

Also, median family size has fallen by about 3% per decade over the last few decades. So even a stagnant household wage would still mean that the typical person in the median family is better off.

The bottom line is that the poor from the past are, in general, significantly better off now and this is corroborated by the fact that poor households typically have numerous amenities that their counterparts from decades past did not have. If the current Administration and Congress don't blow it too badly, the trend of the poor having an ever better standard of living will probably continue.

Everyday Economics - The Children's Laundry

This story is one of incremental policy change and evolutionary optimization of the extended order. This is the story of unintended and unforeseen consequences. This is the story of capitalism versus socialism. This is the story of incentives, both conscious and unconscious.

This is the story of my children's laundry.

We have two daughters who, in the past, generated a truly impressive amount of dirty laundry. As an example, on a not untypical day, the younger daughter would change from pajamas to an outfit after waking up and getting out of bed, then change into soccer clothes for soccer practice. After soccer, she would come home, take a shower and then lounge about in another pair of pajamas for a while, and then change into yet another outfit to go out to dinner in. Finally, she would change back to another fresh pair of pajamas for bed. Our daughters would manage to sneak all of these clothes into the dirty laundry hamper, usually after being worn just once.

Oh, and did I mention towels? It sure is nice to have a fresh towel for every bath, isn't it? Especially if the towels magically appear clean, dry, and folded whenever they're needed. After all, there was no cost of generating dirty clothes or towels for the children.

Up until about six months ago, my wife did the vast majority of the laundry, including washing, drying, folding, and putting away. My wife implored the children to generate less dirty laundry, trying to appeal to their noble natures that they should help her, even trying to get them to be good world citizens by not wasting energy and water for cleaning more dirty clothes than necessary. However, the amount of laundry kept increasing. The washer and dryer were operating several hours per day. It was driving my wife crazy and I was beginning to fear for her mental health.

You may wonder, in this age of gender equality, why was my wife was doing the laundry instead of me? That's because my wife has a plethora of incredibly complex and non-obvious (to me) rules about how laundry ought to be done that I can never seem to remember and/or get right. Certain clothes aren't supposed to be washed with other clothes. Certain clothes are to be pulled out of the dryer after certain numbers of hours (or was that minutes?). All clothes are to be removed from the dryer as soon as the dryer cycle is finished. Things like that.

I, on the other hand, just stuff any old pile of dirty clothes into the washer and then the dryer, wait until they are all completely done drying, and then, usually within a day or two, remove the clothes from the dryer and work towards getting them folded. Granted, the clothes are a little more wrinkly than when my wife does the laundry and my shirts and underwear that used to be white now have a pinkish, bluish, greenish, brownish, grayish tinge, but it doesn't bother me and I don't understand why it bothers my wife. But it did bother her so she wouldn't let me touch the laundry. Heck, she wouldn't even let the maids touch the laundry!

However, I insisted on taking over the laundry. I decided to exert my authority and I said, "I'm the man of the house and I'm going to do the laundry!" Or something like that.

So I started doing laundry.

Last century saw socialism versus capitalism experiments on a massive scale and at least the extreme versions of socialism did quite poorly. However, there are typically gazillions of tiny socialism versus capitalism experiments happening across the world each and every moment. These experiments take shape in the realm of family dynamics.

My wife's approach to laundry was basically socialism. From each according to her abilities, to each according to their needs. My wife was, according to her, the only person with the ability to wash the clothes and my children feigned incompetence for all aspects of the laundry process - especially the folding and putting away part of the process. So therefore, under the rules of socialism, my wife ended up doing it all.

Just as my wife's approach was basically socialism, my approach to the whole problem is more like capitalism. I wash and dry my children's clothes, but I don't fold them. Instead, I leave them in the basket and tell the children to fold and put away their own clothes. They were a little slow at first to get to it, but once they realized that their clothes were going to just sit there forever, and as they started to consistently run out of stuff to wear, they started folding their clothes when asked.

And lo and behold - the number of loads of dirty laundry per week plummeted! Amazingly, the children, of their own volition, started avoiding changing clothes multiple times per day, started re-using outfits and pajamas, and kept clothes off of the floor so they'd stay clean longer. Just because they don't like folding clothes!

Incentives are an amazing thing!

I doubt the change in behavior was conscious on their part. I'm confident that they never really thought it through. I think that over time they subconsciously made the association that every bit of laundry they put in the hamper became a bit of laundry they had to fold. And that every time they pulled out a new outfit instead of wearing the one they left draped on a chair became a bit of laundry that ended up in the hamper. It was all an incremental, evolutionary and unconscious optimization.

This result was also completely unforeseen by me. I was surprised as could be. Indeed, it was only because of the stunningly obvious reduction in laundry that I even noticed.

Remember, my only goal was to relieve my wife of a hassle. It takes me almost no time to load the washer and dryer. I really don't care how many loads I do. So my wife was freed from laundry slavery and I didn't mind my part so I didn't think it through beyond that point.

Unintended and unforeseen consequences are often negative, but not always. In this case, they were extremely positive. Not only did we help save the planet (and some hard earned money) by reducing the number of loads of laundry and the resources required to do them, but my children have learned to be responsible citizens of the household and have developed good habits.

This is yet another example of incremental improvements that are being continuously made by people everywhere when not hampered by outside interference that move civilization forward.

Everyday is Father's Day

When I was a kid and wondered why there was a Mother's Day and a Father's Day but no Children's Day, my mother would always quip, "because every day is Children's Day." And while intellectually I could understand that I was lucky as a child to be me, it never actually felt that way since I'd always just been me and didn't know how it might feel if I'd been born into some other situation. So I never really felt as though every day really was Children's Day.

This particular Father's Day was a somewhat typical Sunday for me. I had to go into the office in the morning to catch up on a few things. The afternoon was filled with honey doos (my wife points out that I'm not her father so she doesn't need to cut me any slack on Father's Day and she needed me to get some things done). The evening was filled with cooking dinner and getting the kids to bed. The one bit of specialness was that I was served tea and chocolate truffles in bed this morning complete with hand made Father's Day cards. Tea and chocolate truffles are always a good thing. Very nice!

Fortunately, my inability to appreciate being a lucky child has not precluded me from appreciating being a lucky father. My daughters bring me such overwhelming joy, day in, day out, year in, year out, that on Father's Day, I usually reflect just how lucky I am to be their father.

For me, every day is Father's Day, and I love it.