Loudness and class

This morning, as I left my apartment, I paused at the sound of raised voices downstairs. Three of my neighbors were yelling at each other. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but they certainly seemed angry. I was afraid that they would get violent and the police would be called (as has happened before) and I didn’t want to get in the middle of things, so I lingered for a few seconds before going downstairs.

...Then, getting bored, I figured it would probably be okay and went downstairs anyway. As I got closer, I could hear what they were saying. The phrase “home fries and cheese eggs” was used. I realized that, far from arguing with each other, they were actually just making friendly small talk about breakfast foods and the weather and such. I had completely misinterpreted the feeling tone of their conversation–because the tone of voice they considered appropriate for friendly small talk was so loud that I would never use it unless in a state of extreme anger or fear.

Now, I am an unusually quiet person. It’s difficult for me to raise my voice even when I have a good reason to do so. So this is an introversion/extroversion thing, but I also think there’s a class difference here. In general, upper-class people perceive clearer differences between the private and public spheres; they can afford to buy a great deal of privacy. Lower-class people have less spacious and comfortable homes and are less able to afford third places such as bars, restaurants or coffee shops; their private conversations are forced out into the public sphere. Hence the hanging out on the street corner/front porch/sidewalk behavior that upper-class people find hard to understand. Hence also, I would hypothesize, louder voices, even when close proximity makes loudness unnecessary.
                                   
This must lead to lesser understanding between classes (or races). If I can misunderstand people of a different class without even hearing a word, what do I fail to understand in a real conversation? And they must be misunderstanding me too–for instance, I’ve known several people who assume that a confident person will naturally be loud, so a quiet person must be sad or intimidated. Every word an upper-class person says may come out as slightly less aggressive than intended.

Please don't pretend to care about school shootings

No one really cares when strangers die, right? Maybe a few super-empaths. But everyone else who pretends to be sad about the most recent school shooting is faking it. Why fake it? Peer pressure, I guess, because public hyper-emotionality is overvalued in our society, and empathy is perceived as a mandatory personality trait. Or am I just being autistic?

Non-conformity is suspicious and dangerous

This seems like a point Phoebe would make/has made: encouraging people to be suspicious of strange behavior stigmatizes strange people, who are generally not terrorists. This has the effect of making social life harder for the very people for whom it is already hard! Just as so-called "behavioral analysis" at airports has the effect of making security screening harder and more traumatizing for people who are already uncomfortable and anxious about it.

The video tells viewers not to ignore their “instincts.” But do we have an instinct for detecting “sketchy” people or behavior? Given what we know about stereotyping and selective perception, the reality is that people will view behavior through their pre-existing beliefs. Their interpretations of behavior as unusual or inappropriate will be influenced by how comfortable they otherwise are with the person engaging in it, which is impacted by race/ethnicity, class, and many other social categories. A guy leaving a backpack unattended is scary if that guy has a mohawk or, you know, looks scary and stuff, but when I do it, no one bats an eye. This video basically legitimizes turning anyone who makes you at all uncomfortable in public in to the police, on the argument that you are simply following your “instinct.” When you ask every citizen to become an intelligence agent, reporting every incident they perceive as odd, the result is the increasing stigmatization and semi-criminalization of those who can’t or won’t conform to pretty narrow standards of physical appearance, dress, and behavior.

Fat and class

The fact that the people at the gym are thin and the people at Walmart are fat does not show that going to the gym makes people thin or that Walmart makes people fat.

Poor people in America are fat and rich people are thin. The disgust the thin upper classes feel for the fat lower classes has nothing to do with mortality statistics, and everything to do with feelings of moral superiority engendered in thin people by the sight of fat people. Precisely because Americans are so repressed about class issues, the disgust the (relatively) poor engender in the (relatively) rich must be projected onto some other distinguishing characteristic. In 1853, an upper-class Englishman could be quite unself-conscious about the fact that the mere sight of the urban proletariat disgusted him. In 2003, any upper-class white American liberal would be horrified to imagine that the sight of, say, a lower-class Mexican-American woman going into a Walmart might somehow elicit feelings of disgust in his otherwise property sensitized soul. But the sight of a fat woman—make that an “obese” woman, better yet a “morbidly obese” woman going into Walmart, ah, that is something else again…the fact that this woman happens to be poor and non-white can be dismissed by those observers as an irrelevant coincidence.

--Paul Campos

The mother's fault

When a child dies, for whatever reason, people want to punish the mother.

In 1996, Kristin Bunch was 21, pregnant and living in a mobile home with her three year old. A sudden fire engulfed the trailer, killing her three year old. The police said it was arson and claimed she went into her son's bedroom, doused it with a liquid accelerant like kerosene or diesel fuel and set it on fire. She was charged and convicted of felony murder and arson and sentenced to 60 years in prison. Arson investigators testified at her trial that burn patterns indicated the fire was arson...There was no direct evidence at Bunch’s trial that she set multiple fires in the mobile home through use of an accelerant. No one saw her set the fire or heard her refer to setting the fire, there was no evidence she had purchased a liquid accelerant, and there was no motive offered for her to intentionally set a fire.

A similar example is the case of Hannah Overton. Her four-year-old foster son, who had physical and emotional problems and suffered from pica (according to the defense) died of salt poisoning after having consumed large amounts of salty seasoning from the pantry. But the prosecution decided that his foster mother had fed him the seasoning in order to punish him, despite the fact that there was no evidence that she had ever used such a bizarre punishment with her many other children, and that she had no record of child abuse or indeed any other criminal conduct. In this case, the prosecution practically admitted they were prosecuting her because of public feeling that when a child dies, someone has to be punished.

And this is only one of dozens of cases I've read about where mothers have been sent to prison for accidental fires, accidental poisonings, or medical conditions which caused the death of a child. Even when it is clear that a third party harmed a child, the mother is blamed. And yes, always the mother.

For instance, the disappearance of Madeline McCann, a small girl, from her English parents' room in Portugal. Still unsolved, but never any plausible theory that it was anything other than a stranger abduction. But the mother, Kate McCann, was vilified in the tabloids for having left her daughter alone in the room for a few minutes. The father did so too, but no one mentioned him. After the disappearance, the mother was stalked by paparazzi and stories were run criticizing her for such crimes as wearing earrings, brushing her hair or smiling. The fact that the mother had a prestigious job was used against her.

Or the Cleveland, Texas rape case, in which dozens of men raped an 11-year-old girl, and some of her neighbors suggested it was the mother's fault for letting her daughter out of the house.

But I think my point is clear. If your child dies, get a lawyer.

Questioning the conservative explanation for poverty

Bryan Caplan, the iconoclastic George Mason economist and author of Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, is planning a book on poverty. Working title: Poverty: Who to Blame. I’m excited, but judging from his blog, he has some big blind spots when talking about poverty.

The basic truth conservatives start with, when talking about poverty, is that people who finish high school, do not commit crimes, do not have children before marriage, and find and hold a full-time minimum-wage job are very unlikely to be poor. This is true. Charles Karelis makes this point in his book, The Persistence of Poverty:

One 2003 simulation estimates that if all nonelderly and nondisabled heads of families with children worked full-time at their present wages, or at the wages they could earn based on their education and other factors, the fraction of the US population living below the poverty line would fall from 13 percent to 7.5 percent.

 

Caplan’s advice for poor women in particular is to refrain from childbearing until they find an eligible (stably employed, marriage-minded, nonabusive) man to marry. It sounds very simple. So what's the problem?

Here are some complicating questions I would expect the book to address:

1) Is it true that having children out of marriage hurts women’s economic prospects? Evidence from Kathryn Edin for one suggests that women who start out in the same economic place end up in the same place whether they become single teenage mothers or not.

2) Is it true, as he asserts, that poor people drink more and use more drugs? Actually, no. The consensus seems to be that alcohol use and income are positively correlated; richer people are more likely to drink and to drink more. Use of illegal drugs is correlated with poverty, but if Caplan thinks that substance use is one of the causes of poverty, he needs to explain why drugs and alcohol are so different here. They both cost money, carry health risks, and increase the risk of getting in trouble with the law. If the poor have lower impulse control, why are they better at controlling the impulse to drink?

3) What if there aren’t enough eligible men?

For women like me, it’s a no-brainer to wait a decade or more after puberty before having children. We know that there will be eligible men out there for us. If anything, the supply of men increases and improves over time: a 25-year-old college graduate has access to a greater variety and higher quality of men than a 15-year-old high school student.

Is this true for poor women living in poor neighborhoods? Isn’t it possible that the opposite is true for them: that the number of 18-year-old men who are marriage-minded, childless, without a criminal record and out of jail  is actually greater than the number of 25- to 30-year-olds who meet those requirements?

This is something of a speculative tangent, though. But it is true that there is a very high ratio of marriage-age women to marriage-age men in poor neighborhoods. Factor in the very high unemployment rates for young black men with no college degree, and the number of eligible men goes down further. 

Caplan rightly thinks preaching abstinence is unrealistic for most, and suggests contraception instead. But suggesting that women delay childbearing until they find an eligible man, even when this might take decades and might mean giving up the possibility of motherhood altogether, is almost as unrealistic.

4) What about the dangers of marriage? Caplan says that marriage is a good economic decision: two people living together spend less than two living apart. But it's not just about the money: what about the risk that the seemingly eligible man might lose his job, become abusive, or steal the woman’s money? Not to speak of the loss of independence.

5) What if finding full-time employment is impossible? Many minimum-wage employers deliberately avoid hiring full-time staff, because after that 40-hour-a-week threshold, they will be forced to provide more benefits. Anyone can get a job at McDonald’s, but getting 40 hours a week is a lot harder.

The largest liberal objection, of course, is that it shouldn’t matter who we blame for poverty. No one denies that the poor exist and are generally worse off than the rich. That, to me, means that they are entitled to a few of my superfluous dollars (which I probably would have spent on liquor anyway.)

New DSM addiction disorder criteria

Among the millions of people who will be diagnosed with an addictive disorder in the new DSM are many whose lives will be derailed by their substance use, leading to car accidents, suicide, brain damage, sexual trauma...The new criteria will allow clinicians to intervene at an earlier stage in the addiction cycle, when relatively brief and inexpensive treatments can prevent more serious problems from escalating. Psycho-education, psychotherapy and group support should be available for people who seek treatment early on. Who would argue that it’s better to wait until the substance use escalates before treatment can be initiated?

Who would argue against early intervention? I would. There are costs to substance abuse treatment: big financial ones, the cost of limiting people's autonomy, and the risks of teaching someone who may never (yet) have experienced addiction that he probably will get addicted and will be powerless to stop it. Not to mention teaching that if a person continues to use drugs or alcohol, he's no longer responsible for his behavior.

I mean, imagine a bunch of typical 20-year-old drinkers sent into AA. They probably fit the diagnostic criteria (since the definitions of "binge drinking" and "heavy drinking" keep being revised downwards!), but does anyone think that such drinkers would benefit from a treatment program? In fact, we know that most young people who use drugs or alcohol heavily will age out of such heavy use naturally. In most cases, no intervention is necessary: and treatment programs have a terrible record of success. To call for early intervention drug and alcohol treatment is like calling for surgery to treat the common cold. We know it doesn't work for most people, it's expensive, and it does serious harm to the people subjected, in many cases involuntarily, to treatment.

Oh, and ignore the first sentence. As my astute readers will have noted, horror stories are totally irrelevant when talking about early intervention. For every person who will have serious problems with a substance, there are hundreds who fit the criteria for early intervention but will never have serious problems.

"Glamour" magazine

We all know Glamour as the magazine which led Americans to start misspelling “glamor.” But did you know it also teaches many terrible life lessons?

To the best of my recollection, all of these wonderful quotes were in the same magazine:

“Engagement eyeliner” worked for me!

(“Carrie’s” boyfriend complimented her electric blue eyeliner. Less than 24 hours later, he proposed. Glamour helpfully provides the brand name, but I will not. It sounds dangerous.)

Reading comprehension hint: when you see the word “hardwired”, know that whatever you are reading is probably bullshit.

Like most women, I’m hardwired to try to keep everybody who counts on me at the office and at home happy. There are weeks, not just days, when I feel like I’m cheating on him—with my work.

(Real women never displease others. Also, men need constant supervision. Whatever will he do if you go out and he doesn’t get sex for a whole eight hours? Probably stick forks into the electric outlets and pee on the floor.)

A dumb celebrity hopes her daughter will never develop sexual desire:

Jamie Lynn Spears says: “It’d be dumb to sit here and say that [my daughter] isn’t going to like a boy one day and she isn’t going to have a boyfriend. I’ll just have to handle that the best way that I can. Both her daddy and me will caution her about having sex, and I would hope that she would not want to do that at all, but I have to make sure that I’m realistic too.”

A woman who is boring in bed feels insecure about it:

Maybe everybody is kinkier than you are. So what? Having standard-issue sex in private is my fantasy, and that’s the last I’m going to say about it.

(Kinky sex is something other people do. Not Glamour readers, who are too busy with magic eyeliner and keeping everybody happy.)

Another dumb celebrity (Amanda Seyfried) says she doesn’t want to have sex when she doesn’t want to have sex, and also women never want to have sex:

I’m terrified of being promiscuous. I don’t like the feeling you get when it’s not something that you truly want to do, and I hate the emotional abuse you give yourself afterward.

I will spare you Glamour’s advice on yeast infections, but it is also bad.

You probably won’t get AIDS

"If you look at the data we have right now, it is very clear what is driving the AIDS epidemic in the United States. It's not sustained heterosexual transmission, it is not IV drug use, it's basically in African American men who have sex with men. HIV in heterosexuals persists only because you have inflow either from other countries, from high prevalence areas for example, or from other risk groups such as intravenous drug users or men who have sex with men."

Money vs. friendship

Money substitutes for friendship, but friendship cannot substitute for money.

If you're moving, you can track down a friend with a car and beg people to help you carry stuff. Or you can hire movers. Similarly, if you need a ride, a hairdo, a loan, childcare, a place to stay, entertainment, or someone to talk to; you can get what you need with friends, but you can pay for a perfect substitute. And then, of course, at a level a bit out of my price range, you can buy even social pleasures for money: the prostitute or trophy wife, the adopted children, the "personal assistant" or entourage, the therapist or personal physician, even the accommodating Congressman.

And, of course, with money you don't have to humiliate yourself by dancing attendance on others. There is no possibility of refusal. You can get what you want now, without waiting for another's schedule. And you know the people you hire to provide services will be (mostly) prompt, reliable and skilful. They won't disappear if you say the wrong thing.

In conclusion: you could spend the weekend spending money with friends, or you could get a second job. I know what I'll do.

On riches

From Megan McArdle:

Scientists now think that King Tut may have died of malaria. As the fellow who sent me the link dryly noted, King Tut did not have good comprehensive health insurance.

All kidding aside, this is a good excuse to meditate on just how rich we are. King Tut was probably the wealthiest man in the world during his time. He died of something that wouldn't kill the most abjectly immiserated welfare mother in the United States today, because of a combination of public health efforts, and cheap antimalarial drugs.

You always need to factor in things like this when you talk about changes in living standards over time. All the positive changes in society mean that the absolute difference between the income of Bill Gates and the man who valets his car is larger than it has ever been in history. But the actual difference in comfort between the two of them is probably much smaller than the difference between JP Morgan and his stableboy. And both Gates and the valet are almost immeasurably better off than their predecessors.

Muddled modern ideas of virtue

Jared Diamond, one of the most perfect exemplifications of modern liberal thinking, is writing about Montana's environmental problems:

I initially wondered whether Montana's environmental problems and polarizing disputes might involve selfish behavior on the part of individuals who advanced their own interests in full knowledge that they were simultaneously damaging the rest of Montana society. That may be true in some cases...[but] whenever I have actually been able to talk with Montanans, I have found their actions to be consistent with their values, even if those values clash with my own or those of other Montanans. That is, for the most part Montana's difficulties cannot be simplistically attributed to selfish[,] evil people knowingly and reprehensibly profiting at the expense of neighbors. Instead, they involve clashes between people whose own particular backgrounds and values cause them to favor policies differing from those favored by people with different backgrounds and values.

But what do you mean by the word 'evil', Mr. Diamond, if not acting according to values which clash with yours? And what do you mean by 'selfishness', if not a person's acting in accordance with his own values regardless of what others value?

This over-tolerant and muddled thinking would seem to deny the possibility of any true evil or selfishness. And there seems to be some vague idea here that not being a hypocrite, in other words, acting in accordance with one's values, equals virtue. Or even that having values at all guarantees that a person is not evil.

The standard is not that low--everyone has values, and I would even say everyone acts in accordance with them (those who seem hypocritical are acting in accordance with what they really value, rather than what they claim to value.) But very few are virtuous or even well-intentioned.

Also, has anyone else noticed how very badly edited all this guy's books are?

How odd to think that in Burke's time, 'professional' meant 'lower class' (as in a person who has a profession rather than living off his land), and, now, it means 'upper class' (a person who has a white-collar job, rather than working in retail or in a factory or being unemployed.) (You can see this latter use in Craigslist postings for roommates. Everyone describes himself as 'professional', since he is afraid of saying 'rich', 'educated' or 'white'.)

A note on the increasing democratization of society, and on the importance of a job to Americans.

In other news, I learned that I am technically a member of the middle quintile--the middle middle class. Better than I thought, but still unsatisfying. The paychecks come too slowly, and I still don't know how to dress.

Women and cooking

I have finished a book called Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century.

Fascinating to learn that in the last years of the nineteenth century, foods were thought healthy in proportion as they were easy to digest. Vegetables and fruits were thought to be near valueless, and when vegetables were served, they were boiled into submission; the authorities recommended that cucumbers be boiled for twenty minutes, celery for half an hour, green beans for one to three hours! and beets for twelve hours. After which, vegetables were nearly always served covered in a white sauce made of flour, milk, butter, and usually no other flavorings. This is the dainty, aspirational cuisine of Edith Wharton.

The female authorities on cooking were not exactly feminist rebels--although they tried to introduce scientific and businesslike methods into the kitchen, they showed no resistance to certain common prejudices--for instance, the belief that women don't really know what it's like to be hungry--if not reminded to eat by their husbands and children, they might go for days without nourishment. Even female cooks bragged about the smallness of their appetites.

Even today, although women would seem to be associated with food, too often they have kept themselves apart from culinary hedonism. Recipes in women's magazines are described as cheap, low in calories, and most importantly, simple and easy to prepare. Most often women are given snacks rather than full meals. Men's magazines, on the other hand, offer us flavorful, spicy dishes with exotic ingredients and generous amounts of meat. Men's cocktails are made of expensive whiskey and arcane kinds of bitters. Women's 'cocktails' are pomegranate-mango juice with--if you must--a 'splash' of vodka.

And, while articles on restaurants and bars are a staple of men's magazines, there is no suggestion in women's magazines that these establishments even exist--well, except the constant warnings that a woman who drinks will probably get herself killed. How annoying.

There is also classism to laugh at; for instance, the bizarre assertion that, when people have different tastes in food, it shows that they have "not enough other interests besides that in eating and drinking". If people were enlightened and exercised enough, all personal preferences would disappear, and the Southerners, Negroes, Irish and Italians would all adopt the diet of bourgeois Bostonians.

the Donner Party

Have you ever heard of the Donner Party? Everyone has, yet not many have read the real, fascinating story! Intellectually fascinating, I mean, because an intellect such as my own would never be attracted to the mere sensational story of cannibalism and death. The book I refer to, of course, is Ethan Rarick’s book Desperate Passage: The Donner Party’s Perilous Journey West. I kept a list of the fifty or sixty members of the party and crossed them off as they died!

The patterns of death are fascinating. The many children (some born along the way) died in droves--they were fed well, but were very susceptible to infectious disease. Married men did fairly well; single men, however, almost all died. I was surprised to learn that a young, unfettered single man at his physical peak actually had a worse chance of survival than a middle-aged widow with many young children to feed.

In general, the women (almost all married) fared better than men. Among those who were in their twenties, only one woman died, while only one man lived. Of course, women need fewer calories than men; moreover, once their bodies run out of calories, they have more body fat to draw upon. But I suppose that having the moral and practical support of a family made a big difference.

This story also illustrates one of my favorite maxims--that man can get used to anything. Take a look at this journal entry from a 12-year-old girl, describing her night spent on the salt plains in Utah, miles from shelter of any kind--it sounds like typical adolescent hyperbole, until you realize she is telling the literal truth.

It was the couldes night you ever saw. The wind blew and if it haden bin for the dogs we would have Frosen.

Now, what happened, to be clear, was that the Donner party got stuck in early winter a few miles below a pass in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The pass became impassable just before they got there, and they were forced to winter in the valley, in jury-rigged huts, sending up the occasional expedition to check on the pass. Ultimately one of these expeditions succeeded and brought back several different rescue parties--but before that, there were long months of waiting. So the cannibalism wasn’t a momentary act of desperation--it became a routine for them. They ate their cattle, sucked the marrow out of its bones, ate their pets, and drank soup made from their boiled shoes. But after all of those expediments failed, they started eating dead bodies. Again, after having to contemplate the possibility of cannibalism for weeks and months, they were capable of talking about it in blasé tones. Here is the first mention of cannibalism in their journals:

Mrs Murphy said here yesterday that thought she would Commence on Milt & eat him. I dont think that she has done so yet. It is distressing.

Yes. Distressing.

It might be relevant to point out here that, since the ground was frozen and snow-covered, and the gravediggers weak with starvation, no one who died in the valley of whatever cause received what used to be called a Christian burial. Instead, typically, a few of the stronger people dragged the corpse outside, only a few feet away from the huts, and covered it with a few shovelfuls of snow--if that. Naturally, the bodies never decomposed in the cold. Thus, as more and more died of starvation and disease, the pioneers were unintentionally creating a sort of meat locker outside their front doors. This makes it easier to explain how, almost on impulse, a person might eat human flesh.

When people turn to cannibalism, they follow a certain pattern. (There are studies, you see.) When a body is fresh, the warm blood of the jugular is most prized. The arms and legs provide meat, but the most nutrition comes from the inner organs. The hips are a good source of fat. The head and hands, being the most identifiably human and personal parts, are only rarely eaten. So you see, even in cases of cannibalism, there is an etiquette to be followed. The real distressing part came when this etiquette was violated--after the rescue.

After a few of the party (known as the Forlorn Hope) finally got through over the pass, they still hadn’t reached civilization. They reached only one farflung outpost--a fort almost a hundred miles from the nearest town. The men at the fort immediately got together all the supplies they could and all the men who willing to go, and set out to hike over the snow-covered pass. Three different rescue parties arrived, and brought out with them all the people they could; the younger children could be carried, but the adult survivors would have to hike out. But when the fourth (and last) rescue party arrived at the camp, they had to leave behind the few adults who were lame or too ill to hike--and only a minimal amount of supplies could be spared for them.

I can only imagine how wrenching it must have been to get through the entire winter, finally witness the arrival of the rescue party, and have to watch them hike away again. They promised to return in spring.

When spring came around, the men of the fort returned with ample supplies. They found the camp covered with blood and guts. A number of bodies were lying in the open, ribcages ripped open. Skulls were stewing in a cooking pot. Of the five pioneers left behind, four had died and been eaten. The one man left was a lame German named Louis Keseberg. He bragged about his cannibalism, talking about which parts of the body he considered most delicious, and sounding glad that he had so many bodies to choose from. When given beef and bread to eat, he rejected it, saying he preferred human meat to any other. One supposes he must have been a little deranged after his ordeal. Ultimately, unlike any of the other survivors, he was put on trial for his actions. (He had never been very sociable and, remember, this was during a period in American history when Germans were still considered dangerous foreigners.) However, since there was no firm evidence that he had killed in order to eat, he was acquitted.

In the end, it could have been a lot worse. Of the original 87 pioneers, 39 died and 48 survived. With the possible exception of Keseberg, there was only one incident in which the pioneers killed someone in order to eat him. This was during the passage over the mountains--and even then, they did not kill one of their one, but rather their Spanish-Indian guide. Here is the author on the remarkably law-abiding behavior of the early pioneers in general:

[People] quit the United States when they crossed the Continental Divide–the western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase–and so technically they were no longer subject to American law. Nevertheless, the developing credo of the western migration was one of remarkable commitment to legal procedure. When crime struck, emigrants typically formed courts to try the defendant, often with a rather elaborate legal structure that included a judge, jury, and lawyers for the prosecution and defense...Nor were these show courts. Emigrants took great pains to ensure some element of fairness, often recruiting people from other companies to act as judge or jury so as to gain greater impartiality. In some cases, even though the wagons were racing against time, parties halted their progress to find suitable jurors in other companies or spent precious hours tracking down suspects or investigating a crime scene.

The poor can't just eat oatmeal

It's finally happened--it's the rare conservative opinion which strikes me as too harsh on the poor.

The Agriculture Secretary was promoting his department’s new hunger (or, in contemporary parlance: “food insecurity”) survey on CSPAN this morning, and promising to expand the federal government’s role in feeding children. We do a good job with school lunches and breakfasts, Secretary Tom Vilsak said, but in the summer months, when kids are out of school, we need more centralized locations to give them their breakfasts and lunches.

Is it really the case that a minimally competent mother (we won’t even contemplate fathers here) in this fabulously wealthy country where food is so cheap cannot give her child a healthy breakfast in the morning? Granted, doing so at low cost entails shopping for food low on the processing chain and, horrors of horrors, actually cooking it. A portion of rolled oats in a large discount container costs pennies and takes five minutes to cook. Too onerous? I know that there is a shortage of decent supermarkets and fresh food in the inner city, a result of low demand and high crime. (Actually, there’s not a decent supermarket in all of New York City.) But a little planning should be able to overcome that shortage by occasional trips to someplace where you can buy in bulk. Here’s a test of whether someone is really suffering from hunger or even just “food insecurity”: Are you willing to cook legumes for a few hours? If not, you’re not starving and have no claim on the public purse.

If such minimal foresight and involvement is beyond the reach of a mother, she obviously shouldn’t have had a child in the first place, and now that it’s too late, maybe should not have custody. Of course the feds, ever eager to expand their reach, are not going to point that out. But the more that the government acts as a surrogate parent, the less parental responsibility we will get.

The author of this article writes from the perspective of a rich person; she asks herself what she would do if she suddenly had no bank account and a smaller income. But a rich person without money does not a poor person make. Instead of pursuing a rich person's lifestyle on a smaller scale, you have to pursue a whole new lifestyle. What is easy for a rich person becomes difficult, sometimes insuperably difficult. A special trip to a bulk store like Costco seems easy to the author--she has free time, money, transportation and social support. Without all of those, a store like that would seem impossibly far away.

What the author calls 'minimal foresight' may require more mental energy than a person living on a subsistence level can spare. You have to have the knowledge and strength of character needed to make plans, as well as the organization and free time needed to execute those plans. And keep in mind that the people we're talking about are not only poor, and in most cases congenitally poor, but also single mothers, often of many children. I can't imagine how stressful that would be. It's easy to say that people should be able to make plans and follow through, and should be able to put aside a small amount of money. They can't. It's harder for them.

It also seems unrealistic to expect the poor to spend as little money as possible in all situations. No other social class does that--how could they? People need to alleviate their feelings of deprivation sometimes--whether it's through buying a third car or through buying cereal rather than oatmeal. And poverty-alleviation programs, like everyone else, need to work with the realities of human nature.

I also love the fact that the author implies that the government should take away a mother's custody of her child--because the alternative is government "acting as a surrogate parent" and overreaching.

Landscape of Thorns

Check out this article on communicating the dangers of nuclear waste to humans 10,000 years in the future: my favorite is the "Landscape of Thorns." However, as the article basically concludes, if human beings in the future aren't smart enough to figure out that being around radioactivity is unhealthy, we probably can't help them, and they probably deserve to die out.

Out-of-wedlock births in the lower classes

A recent book I read provides an interesting portrait of what sociologists lately call 'the under class'–this is thought to be more PC than 'the lower class'. The book is Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage, by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas. It's an attempt to explain to middle-class readers (well, the authors only talk about the middle class, so I assume they mean middle and upper class) why poor women often have children out of wedlock, and at a very young age (a mean age of 21, including many women who gave birth at younger ages, even thirteen and fourteen).

The poor are different from us; they have less money. The personal touches in this book give us glimpses of a strange new world--one where a sixteen-year-old boy will tell his girlfriend, 'I want to have a baby by you'--and she takes it as a compliment! There are a few fascinating statistics–"the poor, the less-educated, those living in poor neighborhoods, and those raised in single-parent households tend to have far fewer friendships than their more advantaged counterparts." And, of white women who have never had a premarital birth, 89% will get married before they turn 40. We're all doooomed....

But, the authors say, poor women have many of the same beliefs about marriage as the rest of us. Most people today of whatever class believe that marriage is difficult and divorce is to be avoided, and that for that reason, people should wait to get married until they are older and until they know and trust their prospective partners very well. There is a perception that getting married means settling down--the end of travel, fun, career change and flexibility. With these beliefs, it makes sense that members of the lower classes don't marry early. So the question is not, 'Why don't they get married?', but rather, 'Why do they have babies?'

SImply put, because the perceived costs of having children are lower, and the perceived benefits higher. As for the benefits, what would you do if you had little or no higher education or career ambitions to look forward to? Having children might seem like the only really meaningful thing in your life–the only thing giving you hope for the future. When asked to imagine what their lives would be like without children, the women in the study typically said things like, 'I'd be dead.' 'I'd be in jail.' 'I'd be depressed.' 'I'd still be partying.' 'I'd be on drugs.' These seem to be the other options.

As for the costs, the out-of-pocket costs of having children are the same whether the mother is 30 or 13. But the opportunity costs of children are very different for different classes. Specifically, they're much lower for the lower classes.

The public often assumes that early childbearing is the main reason why so many girls from poor inner-city areas fail to complete high school, go on to college, gain valuable work skills, or earn decent wages, but there is virtually no evidence to support this idea. Any childbearing at all, and especially early childbearing, has huge opportunity costs for middle-class women. But disadvantaged girls who bear children have about the same long-term earnings trajectories as similarly disadvantaged youth who wait until their mid or late twenties to have a child...Early childbearing is highly selective of girls whose other characteristics–family background, cognitive ability, school performance, mental health status, and so on–have already diminished their life chances so much that an early birth does little to reduce them much further.

The authors focus on the agency of the women in their study, and it seems as though these women chose to become pregnant, rather than being coerced into it by their boyfriends or by a lack of access to birth control or abortion. This leads the authors to ignore some signs of lack of agency–a really amazing passivity, not just in some cases, but in most. For instance, only 17% of these women's pregnancies were planned. Some were 'accidents', but, bizarrely, the plurality were described as 'in between' an accident and a planned pregnancy. Typically, the woman will say that she didn't want to get pregnant, but that she wasn't using any birth control. It is almost impossible for me to understand how a person could leave such an important decision up to chance–but hey, it's the traditional way. The women studied say things like, 'The baby happened', 'God gave me this baby' and so forth.

I wonder if this lack of agency is related to their socioeconomic statuses. Making a decision is a skill like any other, and needs to be practiced. We read that children who have grown up under circumstances display 'learned helplessness'–they have learned that nothing they can do can make a positive difference in what happens to them, and that actively doing anything often brings punishment. So they take no action. They may express preferences, but they do not intervene in their own fate. Maybe for the lowest classes, something similar happens.

What not to name your children

Here is a list of the most popular baby names! It seems a little off to me because all the names are so damn upper crust. Ethan? Alexis? Isabella?