Things I'm tired of hearing about the coronavirus

🦠 "More people die in car crashes!”* (But car crashes have been decreasing for years, while Covid-19 is doubling every few days.)

🦠 "Why are people hoarding toilet paper? They must have some irrational bias!" (Right, because it's not like people have a good reason for buying more toilet paper than usual when they and their family members have to be at home all the time, and governments are announcing increasingly strict lockdowns.)

🦠 "Look, it's not that hard, just wash your hands and don't touch your face!” (Actually, it's pretty hard to wash your hands often enough and never touch your face.)

🦠 "Quit whining, other people have had to go to war, while you're just sitting around on the couch!" (That's a little tone-deaf when many people are sitting at home worried about how they're going to pay the rent or feed their families because they lost their jobs as a result of the virus.)

🦠 "China has almost no coronavirus cases anymore, so let's figure out what they're doing right and copy that!" (Yes, let's trust official reports from an authoritarian government known for secrecy and censorship. Also, China has admitted it isn't counting asymptomatic cases, unlike other countries.)

* These aren't exact quotes; I'm summing up what I've been hearing a lot, and linking to relevant sources.

Are you more likely to be killed by a gun or a car?

The New Republic tells us it's "no longer true" that "you’re more likely to die in a car accident" than by being shot (in the United States). TNR's evidence is that the number of gun-related fatalities has just barely exceeded the number of deaths in car accidents.

But that conclusion is at odds with the evidence. TNR follows the standard practice of those who support stricter gun control in focusing on gun-related deaths in general, without pointing out that many of those deaths are suicides or killings in self-defense.

TNR links to a Washington Post blog post that says that about two-thirds of gun deaths are suicides. So if you, like most people, are confident you're not going to intentionally kill yourself with a gun, then it's safe to say you're more likely to die in a car crash than by being shot.

I don't know how many of the gun deaths were killings in self-defense — I imagine it's difficult to come up with reliable statistics on that. But of course being fatally shot in self-defense is a serious concern only for those who attempt to commit serious crimes.

TNR also says that "gun deaths have inched up" (while fatal car crashes have declined), which gives the impression that you should be alarmed at your increasing likelihood of being fatally shot. After all, the TNR post is largely written in the second person, talking about "you." But the WaPo post clarifies that the increase in "gun deaths" has been driven by increasing gun-related suicides — not gun-related homicides, which have been decreasing.

Car passengers: never put your feet on the dashboard

After a 22-year-old woman fell asleep on a long car trip with her feet on the dashboard, the car crashed, and the airbag caused her knees to hit her head, causing brain damage. Her mom comments:

“I got back a different daughter. I lost a sweet 22-year-old who worked full-time and put herself through university. She was on a great path. I got a 13-year-old with anger issues.”

Observations in the aftermath of Sandy

1. The traffic in the blackout areas of Manhattan is lawless in the most literal sense: the traffic lights aren't working, so the law cannot be applied as usual. But "lawless" doesn't seem to be a fitting description; the driving seems better-behaved than usual. We're so used to seeing people act under a system of government rules that it's easy to assume that without the rules, everything would descend into chaos. But perhaps free people are generally capable of acting decently on their own. Of course, that's never going to be universal; but then, people break the law too. In fact, a dense set of rules tempts people to see how close to (or how far across) the borderline of legality they can go without being penalized. In the absence of governmental laws, people might focus more on other kinds of laws: social norms and ethics.

[Added: There actually is a law that applies when the traffic lights aren't working, but people probably don't know about that law, and they definitely aren't following it. We never get the chance to do a pure experiment on how people would act in the absence of any government, but this is closer to such an experiment than we usually get.]

2. Whenever there's a high-profile disaster, whether it's a storm or a mass murder or terrorism, so many people's instinct is to declare that their political ideology has been vindicated.

3. I like Adele, but the people who work at Starbucks must get tired of listening to nothing but Adele.

Women will get the rights to vote and run for office in Saudi Arabia.

Women in one of the most repressive countries in the world will have rights that women in the United States were denied less than 100 years ago. That's an extraordinary rate of global progress. (via)

ADDED: I originally wrote that this would happen "soon," but I've omitted that word since it won't happen till after the upcoming municipal elections, and the next ones happen 4 years from now. (Municipal elections are the only elections in Saudi Arabia.)

Women can't legally drive in Saudi Arabia, which obviously limits their freedom to vote. In many cases, a man's decision about whether to drive a woman to the polls will determine whether she can actually exercise the right. No one would claim that Saudi Arabia is anywhere close to a paragon of feminist enlightenment, but even a reform that might be considered weak on its own can lead to more progress down the road.

Texas would have the highest speed limit in the United States, under legislation just passed by the Texas House.

85 miles per hour.

The link is from Metafilter, where one commenter points out that Texas seems to be inspired by "Europe." The article quotes the bill's sponsor:

"They have high-speed roadways in Europe, and there could be some merit in having some of those highways in Texas," said Rep. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, who introduced the bill. "Given the right engineering, we should consider it."

As Bruce Bartlett has said in a different context (transcribed in this old post):

We're traveling down the route of Europe. And many Americans just hate that idea. If you're in any group of conservatives, and you say, "Oh, that will take us down the route of Europe," they will say, "Oh no, we don't want to do that! That's awful!" Nobody ever explains what's so terrible about Europe.

Do laws against texting while driving reduce or increase car crashes?

You might think: of course those laws make the roads safer. But that's far from obvious (via):

Researchers at the Highway Loss Data Institute compared rates of collision insurance claims in four states — California, Louisiana, Minnesota and Washington — before and after they enacted texting bans. Crash rates rose in three of the states after bans were enacted.

The Highway Loss group theorizes that drivers try to evade police by lowering their phones when texting, increasing the risk by taking their eyes even further from the road and for a longer time.

The findings "call into question the way policymakers are trying to address the problem of distracted-driving crashes," Lund says, calling for a strategy that goes beyond cellphones to hit other behaviors such as eating and putting on makeup. "They're focusing on a single manifestation of distracted driving and banning it," he says.

But I'm skeptical of these conclusions as the article presents them. Look again at that sentence: "Crash rates rose in three of the states after bans were enacted." It doesn't tell us how much the rates rose. When journalists report on research that shows an increase or decrease in anything, I wish they'd tell us how big the increase or decrease was.

I've been noticing this a lot lately. For instance, this article tells us that religious people give "more" donations to charity and do "more" volunteer work; this one says religious people have "higher levels of 'life satisfaction.'" But they don't tell us how much more (or higher). If anything, I'd guess that the difference was fairly small; otherwise, the reporter probably would have wanted to quantify it in order to impress us with the finding.


Short URL for this post: goo.gl/Vm0m

More things gotten wrong

Last week I culled some language-related answers from the huge AskMetafilter thread responding to this question:

What in life did it take you a surprisingly long time to realize you've been doing wrong all along?

Here are my other favorites from the thread:

I'm 41. Last year I learned that pimentos are in fact NOT the red center of an olive. We saw some olives stuffed with bleu cheese at the grocery store, so I asked a friend how they got the pimento out in order to stuff in the cheese.

Said friend just stared at me. (link)


[I]t took me a while to figure out that other people can't actually read my mind, and that it's unfair to expect them to. It takes a bit of effort, but I'm a lot better off actually starting a conversation about some perceived issue than waiting and hoping someone will notice that my brain is wildly waving its hand in the air. (link)


[T]he point of small talk, and why people engage in it.

I used to think small talk was the most boring, pointless thing ever, until I realized it's often a way for people to feel more comfortable with one another before continuing the conversation. It's like handing someone a small familiar appetizer before bringing out one's personal plate of weirdness. Makes things go down a little more smoothly. (link)


Goals are now just placeholders. General aims. I've been much happier since transitioning to being more about the journey or process than reaching some arbitrary memoir building bullet point that I think I want, but don't really. (link)

That one's been important for me to realize; in fact, I'm still in the process of internalizing it. I keep imagining that my life is supposed to build up to this great biography and that it's important for me to stay on track to reach that goal. Aside from the obvious flaws with this mindset (that you probably won't be famous enough to be the subject of a major biography; that even if you were, it would still be more valuable to enjoy life as it happens), one knock-down argument against it, in my own case, is that I don't even like reading biographies of anyone!

Back to the thread:

I learned less than a year ago how to figure out which glass is mine when sitting with a big group at a round table: curl your middle, ring, and pinky fingers on each hand down to touch your thumb while leaving your pointer finger straight up. One hand will be it the shape of a lower-case b, and that is the side with your bread plate; the other hand will be in the shape of a lower-case d, and that is the side with your drink.

Before, I had to wait until someone sitting next to me claimed a glass and bread plate before I could start enjoying anything, and half the time they were wrong anyway. Making letters in my lap is a much, much better way to do it. (link)


One thing I've only recently realized is that it's stupid to "save things for best." Dishes, sheets, expensive bath products, etc... - use them on a regular basis, or they're worthless. (link)


That life has no meaning. Liberating. (link)


I didn't realize until my early twenties that if a man would have sex with me, all it meant was that he wanted to have sex with me, not that he liked me as a person or found me attractive. This is the one thing that was left out of the sex talk that my mom had with me that really would have been helpful to include. (link)


When I was little I asked my father about turn signals on a car. I wanted to know how he told the car which way he wanted to turn. He would never give me a straight answer. He kept saying, "it just knows." I figured he was jiggling the steering wheel in some way, I never saw him deliberately switch anything on. Granted, I was always in the backseat, so I didn't really have a good view.

Cut to many years later, when I was 17. I had never learned to drive (still haven't), so I hadn't had any first hand experience. I was in a pick up truck with someone I was fairly desperate to impress. I don't know why it occurred to me to ask just then, sitting in the passenger side, all cool and adult.

"So," I ask. "How does the car know which way you want to turn?"

You can imagine the look I got. Whose fault? My dad's. (link)


If you try foods enough times you might eventually get to liking them. . . . How could I have hated mushrooms!?

If you don't ask you'll never know. - Girls, employment, raises, resources.
(link)


When I was in (private, fundie Christian) elementary school, my teacher told me that dinosaurs weren't real, that their bones had been put in the ground by Satan to lead us from The Light. Around the same time there was a scandal at a nearby history museum that one of the dinosaurs on display was actually made from the bones of two different species.

I got the two incidents mixed up in my mind and didn't believe in dinosaurs until COLLEGE.

I still have a hard time believing in them, honestly . . . (link)


I was well into my teens before I figured out that the phrase "Any Time" on "No Parking" signs meant that you couldn't park there, ever. I thought for years that it was the sign's way of saying "You're welcome," as in an imagined dialogue:

Car: I'd like to park here.
Sign: No parking.
Car: Oh, OK. Thanks.
Sign: Any time.
(link)

Oblivious anti-consumerism

My dad spotted these:

Left rear bumper: "Consumption Will Not Fill the Void."

Right rear bumper: "Black Star Pub Brewery"

And that's not the only thing that makes the left bumper sticker ironic. What's that thing attached to the bumper sticker? Oh yes, a car. You would think that such a vocal critic of consumerism would think twice about having one -- or at least about decorating it with unnecessary plastic.

I'm reminded of the New York Times article that reported, with a straight face, on the family (a married couple with kids) that was purporting to give away its possessions. (Coincidentally, or maybe not so coincidentally, both the family and the car with the bumper stickers were in Austin.) I blogged the story and said:

They're also going to give away their current cars ... and get new cars ... and drive all the way from their current home in Texas to Vermont (where they've never been) to start a new life. I'm not sure how driving across the country -- which is to say, using up the world's resources and unnecessarily contributing to carbon emissions, just to give a partial list of the evils of driving -- is part of simplifying your life and returning to nature. Americans are so obsessed with our car culture that using a car doesn't even register as something that goes against the ideals of simplicity, counterculture, anti-consumerism. Thus, the Times write-up never mentions their car situation, and I doubt that the writers had a second thought about this. Or if they did, it was quickly dismissed: "Come on, you have to have a car!"

I don't mean to attack people who feel that they need a car. Maybe they do. But if so, they should think twice about whether to hold themselves out to the world as paragons of monastic counterculturism.

"'We’re looking at a problem that could be as bad as drunk driving, and the government has covered it up.'"

Congress suppressed a federal agency's empirical study that warned of the high risk of driving while talking on a cell phone, including hands-free. The apparent reason: Congress didn't want the agency to lobby states based on the research, especially on the issue of hands-free phones.

"The highway safety researchers estimated that cellphone use by drivers caused around 955 fatalities and 240,000 accidents over all in 2002."

If the New York Times' report is accurate down to each and every insinuation, then Congress has, in effect, chosen to injure and kill innocent Americans in order to keep voters happy.

Worst car ad ever

This one, clipped from Craigslist.


UPDATE: There are comments over here. I wish I had used one of the comments as the heading of this post: "Apparently it was one sweet ride."

Why conservatives should want less car dependence and more mass transit in America

This whole article from Public Discourse is worth reading, but here's a sample:

A common misperception is that the current American state of auto-dependency is a result of the free market doing its work. In fact, a variety of government interventions ensure that the transportation “market” is skewed towards car-ownership. These policy biases are too numerous to list exhaustively, but a few merit special recognition:

- If a state is interested in building a new highway, the only major regulatory obstacle is completing an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). After this, the federal government will typically pay for a large portion of the project, and leave the details of its planning and construction to the state’s Department of Transportation. If a state or municipality is interested in a transit project like a subway, a streetcar, or a bus system, however, not only must it complete an EIS, it must also clear a barrage of regulatory hurdles, including a cost-effectiveness analysis, a land-use impact analysis, and a comparison with other transit systems. None of these requirements is necessarily bad in itself (though many of these regulations were designed only to make it harder to build transit systems), but highways aren’t subject to any of them. Naturally, states therefore find it easier to channel transportation dollars into highways....

- Zoning requirements in most municipalities mandate that shops and houses must be separated. It is widely illegal to build the old small-town main street with the mix of shops, houses, and apartments that many find charming (so charming that some of these towns have been turned into tourist attractions). Furthermore, in most states it is mandatory for new schools to be built next to hundreds of acres playing fields, and thus far away from residential neighborhoods (see this report and this paper for a fuller discussion of policies that affect travel to school). These and similar regulations ensure that there are no shops or schools—that is, major household destinations—within walking distance of the average American’s home, which in turn requires the average American to own and use a car, not merely to commute to work but to perform basic tasks like picking up a gallon of milk or sending the kids off to school in the morning....

Consider how small businesses are affected by Americans’ dependency on cars. Since businesses are obliged by zoning restrictions to locate far away from residential areas, most Americans drive to every store they visit. This means that store visits are often discrete trips that must be undertaken consciously and planned out ahead of time. As a consequence, shoppers will want to visit stores that carry the most diverse inventory—Wal-Mart, Costco, et al.—and avoid shops that specialize in one particular kind of good—the local paint store or flower shop, for instance. Moreover, since small shops cannot afford to spend large sums on advertising, they can’t buy the enormous signs and billboards that direct shoppers to large retail outlets, nor gin up hype for their products with coordinated television spots. Perhaps if their potential customers could walk by their storefronts they would have a chance to notice window-displays and similar kinds of small, careful advertising....

As the market diminishes for these specialized stores, so too does opportunity for small-scale entrepreneurship. If opening a small business were a viable option in more markets, more Americans would be interested in starting them. The current situation, where only very large stores can compete in most retail environments, makes starting a business impossible for the vast majority of Americans.

RELATED: Random thing about me #14.

A car chase is coming to my town, Albany, NY!

Cool!

How should the law treat parents who fatally leave their children in cars?

That seems to be the question everyone on the blogosphere is talking about, due to this Washington Post article, which is based on 13 interviews with parents who killed their children in the same way: driving to the parent's destination, forgetting to drop the kid off somewhere, and leaving the kid in the hot car for a long time. (There should really be a warning on that article for the benefit of those who don't feel like running into a graphic description of a child slowly dying.)

More details:

"Death by hyperthermia" is the official designation. When it happens to young children, the facts are often the same: An otherwise loving and attentive parent one day gets busy, or distracted, or upset, or confused by a change in his or her daily routine, and just... forgets a child is in the car. It happens that way somewhere in the United States 15 to 25 times a year, parceled out through the spring, summer and early fall.

Here's Matthew Yglesias's take, and here's Megan McArdle's. There’s some heated debate on both of those posts. [Update: more reactions at Metafilter and Nudge.]

So, should this be a crime? The Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post writer, Gene Weingarten, says:

There may be no act of human failing that more fundamentally challenges our society's views about crime, punishment, justice and mercy. According to statistics compiled by a national childs' safety advocacy group, in about 40 percent of cases authorities examine the evidence, determine that the child's death was a terrible accident -- a mistake of memory that delivers a lifelong sentence of guilt far greater than any a judge or jury could mete out -- and file no charges. In the other 60 percent of the cases, parsing essentially identical facts and applying them to essentially identical laws, authorities decide that the negligence was so great and the injury so grievous that it must be called a felony, and it must be aggressively pursued.

There's a lot of talk about how these things aren't "intentional"; they're "accidents." One parent told Weingarten:

"I don't feel I need to forgive myself, because what I did was not intentional."

But that doesn't mean the act isn't illegal. Not all crimes are intentional. There are crimes based on "recklessness" or "negligence."

A lot of people have a strong emotional reaction that parents who do this shouldn't be prosecuted. Emotion can be a useful guide to what's right, but it's also important to step back and analyze it. Why do people have that reaction? Is it because the article starts out describing the agony of a particular father who did this, with a touching photo of the man holding his lost child's stuffed animal and looking overwhelmed with sadness?

Well, what if you were the parent ... and your babysitter did this to your child? Would you want the babysitter to be charged with a crime (assuming they're over 18)? It would hardly seem principled to have a rule that parents are legally allowed to do this to their children but babysitters aren't allowed to do it to other people's children.

To me, the decisive factor is the "lifelong sentence of guilt far greater than any a judge or jury could mete out." No matter what technical argument might be made about how prosecutors could legally charge the parent with a crime, that doesn't mean they have to do so. Living with the guilt is punishment enough; it seems like a waste of resources to make the parent also serve a prison sentence, even a light one.

Another problem, though: this is a well-crafted article that describes the parents as sympathetic and loving. But there are parents who neglect their children because they routinely get drunk or high. I haven't seen any evidence to show that any such parents have caused their children to die by leaving them in cars, but it's possible. Should prosecutors treat those parents differently from "normal" parents?

Many people are outraged at the parents: "How could you possibly forget your child in the car?!" I actually think it's disturbingly easy to imagine this. Can't you think of a time when you told yourself, "I have to do tasks A, B, C, and D in the next hour," then felt assured that you did everything you were supposed to, only to realize hours later that you never did task B? Well, imagine doing that, but task B is dropping your kid off at day care.

Megan McArdle has a good retort to the people who have that outraged reaction:

[T]he belief that you cannot possibly leave your kids in a car seat on a warm day is very dangerous to your kids. It is a virtual certainty that someone who read that article, and said to himself "That's BS--I could never leave my kid in a parked car"--will leave their kid in a parked car. It is the people who are afraid of it, who think that they could do the unthinkable, who are most likely to avoid that fate.

The Washington Post article quotes Ed Hickling, an Albany, NY psychologist, explaining why people have this reaction:

"We are vulnerable, but we don't want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters."

Interestingly, the author admitted after publishing the piece that he had a blatant bias in writing the article. No, he didn't kill his child. But by his own admission (published in this Q&A published shortly after the article), he almost did. He would have left his infant in a locked car -- in the summer, in Miami -- but his daughter Molly happened to say something right before he was going to get out. Before then, he had no idea she was still there. He adds:

I did not tell my wife about that moment in the parking lot, not for years, not until half a year ago when I began working on this story and needed to explain why it was keeping me awake nights. And I didn't tell Molly about it until just a couple of months ago; oddly, I found that 25 years after the day no harm was done, I couldn't look her in the eye.

So, can this be stopped? Some people suggest car alarms. Well ...

there is the Chattanooga, Tenn., business executive who must live with this: His motion-detector car alarm went off, three separate times, out there in the broiling sun. But when he looked out, he couldn't see anyone tampering with the car. So he remotely deactivated the alarm and went calmly back to work.

The author (again, in the Q&A) has a suggestion that seems more useful:

[Make] sure that daycare centers ALWAYS call the parent if the child doesn't arrive one day.

Bertrand Russell's thoughts on money, extroverts, and helping people

Continuing the list from last week's blogging of Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness (1930):

6. What to spend your money on - "[A]ny man who can obviously afford a car but genuinely prefers travel or a good library will in the end be much more respected than if he behaved exactly like every one else." (108)

7. Why extroverts are better than introverts (?) - "The man ... whose attention is turned within finds nothing worthy of his notice, whereas the man whose attention is turned outward can find within, in those rare moments when he examines his soul, the most varied and interesting assortment of ingredients being dissected and recombined into beautiful or instructive patterns." (126-7)

8. Helping people - "If you feed an infant who is already capable of feeding himself, you are putting love of power before the child's welfare, although it seems to you that you are only being kind in saving him trouble. If you make him too vividly aware of dangers, you are probably actuated by a desire to keep him dependent upon you." (157)

Why do we drive more than necessary even though it harms the planet?

It all has to do with the fundamental evil of human nature.

Or, to be more specific, the urge for power regardless of the costs.

Achenblog (Joel Achenbach) explains:

If I could change one thing about myself it's the way I'm the embodiment of all that is wrong with America and the human species more broadly. Don't get me wrong - my self-esteem is in the normal range, but if I could tinker with my existence it would be to make myself something other than a detestable, oozing, suppurating lesion on the body of civilization.

Time constraints prevent a full accounting of what I'm talking about here, but let's take a look at just one example: I am a self-indulgent motorist.

On weekends I engage in countryside motoring as if it's a form of exercise. Worse, during the week, despite the availability of mass transit, I almost always drive to work, a five-mile jaunt on surface streets past one bus stop after another.

Why do I drive? Power. Raw, unbridled power, at my fingertips and toetips.

My Honda Accord is an empowerment device. It gives me the option of going anywhere on the spur of the moment without heed of bus schedules or fear of Metro delays. I could just start driving, and head West, across the continent, and then veer down through Mexico, and onward to Patagonia. Having a car is like sitting in a restaurant near the door. ...

Now, you might declare that global warming and energy insecurity, not to mention urban sprawl and pollution, have intensified the sin of indulging one's motoring desires. And I would not argue with that point. You're right. I am a bad man. And let us note that advertising campaign (I've seen it all over the place -- from some fossil fuel company I think) in which smiling people are seen thinking to themselves, "I will leave the car at home" or "I will take the bus more often" and whatnot. All this is good. But over the long term, if you want to develop a new transportation and energy policy, you'd probably want to err on the side of assuming that people won't change much. And it is human nature to like to be empowered.

Something to be thankful for: the looming prospect of an economic meltdown.

The law-and-economics jurist Richard Posner sees plenty of good in the impending depression:

The longer the world economy went without a depression, the worse the collapse would be when it finally, inevitably, came. The saving grace of catastrophes is averting worse catastrophes....

The fall in [oil prices] seems to have been due primarily to a worldwide reduction in demand for oil caused by the global depression. The combination of low prices with low demand is optimal from the standpoint of U.S. (and probably world) welfare. The low demand reduces the amount of carbon emissions, thus alleviating (though only to a slight extent) the problem of global warming. The fall in the price of oil has reduced the wealth of the oil-producing nations—a goal that should be central to U.S. foreign policy because of the hostility to us (Russia, Iran, Venezuela), or the political instability (Iraq, Nigeria, Algeria), of so many major oil-producing nations.

By undermining faith in free markets, the depression opens the door to more government intervention in the economy and eventually to higher taxes (though probably not until the economy improves). These are not necessarily bad things. Obviously neither the optimal amount of government intervention nor the optimal level of taxation is zero. There are compelling arguments for greater government intervention to deal with the threat of global warming, to improve transportation and other infrastructure, to reduce traffic congestion, and to protect biodiversity. Though in principle the money needed for such programs could be obtained from cutting wasteful government programs, that is politically infeasible.

So taxes will have to rise. Federal taxes as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product are no higher today than they were in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s—periods of healthy economic growth. The marginal income tax rate reached 94 percent in 1945 and did not decline to 70 percent until 1964 (it is 35 percent today). A modest increase in marginal rates from their present low level would increase tax revenues substantially, probably with little offset due to the distortions that any tax increase is bound to produce. Taxes should not be increased during a depression, but as we come out of it they can be raised modestly to finance infrastructure investments and other investments in public goods, such as reducing carbon emissions.*

The anxiety, reduced consumption, and reduced incomes during a depression are real costs and very heavy ones, but on the other hand the excessive borrowing that precipitated the depression enabled, for a period of years, higher consumption than the nation could actually afford. Thus the current drop in consumption is in part an offset to the abnormal level of consumption earlier. Indeed, since people loaded up with cars, fancy dresses, etc., while times were good (illusorily good because the nation was living beyond its means), the current reduction in the purchase of durables, while hard on sellers, may not be a great hardship to consumers. (Nevertheless, people quickly get habituated to a high level of consumption, and a decline from that level is very painful.)

And there's more...


* For the sake of transparency, I should point out that I fiddled with some of the paragraph breaks here to make it more readable.

"Do you see what's happening?"

There's only been one day in my life when I could get a phone call, hear "Do you see what's happening?" as the first sentence from the person calling me, and, without having any context aside from being in America, know exactly what it was about.

I'm sure there have been other events in United States history when that would have also been understood — the assassination of JFK or MLK. But those were before my time.

And those were deaths of single individuals. As sad as it is for a sitting president to die, it's bound to happen sometimes. People die, and we need to have a way of dealing with it. But we should never have needed to deal with our greatest city being torn down.

Commentators on the right and left (William Safire, Matthew Yglesias) have compared the deaths in those attacks to car accident statistics. More people die in car accidents each month in the United States than died in the attacks.

Well, I think that's wrong on a lot of levels:

1. It's easy to focus on the deaths you know about; it's harder, but equally important, to focus on the hidden deaths that you can't see or that haven't even happened. The terrorists didn't go to all that effort "just" to kill 3,000 people. The fact that such a relatively small number died while so many more escaped is amazing. Tens of thousands of people escaped the World Trade Center. The terrorists foolishly attacked shortly before 9 a.m., when many people hadn't gotten to work yet. One of the four planes didn't even strike its target. They were trying, and are still trying, to do a lot more damage than they did on September 11.

It's common to use "3,000 deaths" as a shorthand for "the extreme consequences that can result from terrorism." But this number is (understandably) used for its emotional resonance, not because of any genuine numerical exactitude. The September 11 attacks have already happened; we can't change that. We need to be worrying about the number of people killed in the next terrorist attack, and there's no telling what that number will be. It could be 3, or 300, or 30,000, or 300,000.


2. Yes, only a tiny proportion of deaths are due to terrorism, but it doesn't follow that terrorism should be a negligible concern. As impolitic as it may be to point this out in our "culture of life," some deaths are more worth accepting than others.

We've spent a century getting used to cars. Over time, we've collectively decided that having the widespread benefit of cars is worth the tradeoff of resulting deaths — which are a tiny percentage of the beneficiaries even though the absolute numbers are huge.

Cars can kill people; they can also make life more comfortable. They can even save lives if, say, you need to be rushed to the hospital for life-saving treatment, or you need to leave town to escape a natural disaster. Most people basically accept this calculus, and those who don't like it have a lot of power to minimize the role of cars in their lives by not driving, being extra careful when crossing the street, and so on.

You can't say the same thing about terrorism. We haven't gradually gotten used to its presence in our life and systematically worked on minimizing the damage in a way that's broadly acceptable to most people.

I also find it really odd when people argue, in effect, that "we don't take car accidents seriously, so we shouldn't other deaths seriously either." The fact is, we do take car accidents very seriously, as well we should. We've taken all sorts of measures to try to reduce the harm they cause: speed limits, drunk-driving laws, airbags, etc. If one of the premises of your argument is that cars aren't a very morally serious issue, then you simply have a false premise.

Above all, there is no real cost-benefit tradeoff with terrorism because there's no benefit! Terrorists don't offer us a mix of good and bad that we look at and say, "Well, we'll accept that, on balance."

Al Qaeda-style terrorists offer an obsession with death and a dehumanizing ideology, and that's it.


3. The death toll alone doesn't capture the enormity of the destruction caused by terrorism.

Again, people use "3,000 deaths" as a synonym for "the harm caused by the attacks" -- understandably so, as it would seem crass to focus on some of the other harms. But if reality is a little crass, then so be it.

There was enormous economic loss. For some estimates, look at this list and scroll down to the dollar figures. (New York magazine link.) One that stands out: the cost to NYC in the month after the attacks was over $100 billion. That's a million dollars, multiplied by 1,000, multiplied by 100, for just one city, in one month.

There were the toxic environmental effects in Manhattan.

There was a deep psychic wound left on our country's soul.

And there were people who didn't just die, but had to live their last moments hanging out of skyscraper windows and deciding to plummet to their deaths.

That's what I try to remember every year this day. But it's so unfathomable that I can't imagine it.

I don't know how you factor that into a cost-benefit analysis. I don't know how you balance that against the costs of annoying airline security measures, or library records being given an extra look beyond just checking for late fees.

Maybe you can't. You just keep trying to do whatever you can, whatever tiny amount that might be, to stop this from ever happening again.

(Photo of September 11 memorial by Denise Gould. I got this photo from pingnews, which got it from the U.S. Department of Defense photo collection.)

Elevator environmentalism

"Get ready to rethink what it means to be green."

If you go to that link, you'll see a list of "10 green heresies," with 10 links to very short essays, each one about some supposed environmental heresy.

Some of them are, indeed, blatantly heretical for your standard environmentalist: don't go organic, for instance.

Oh, and Ronald Reagan might not have been that far off: trees cause global warming.

But what really gets me is this one: "urban living is kinder to the environment than the suburban lifestyle."

That one stands out not because it's so heretical, but because it's hard for me to fathom how it can be controversial.

Would anyone seriously take issue with the article's claim that New York City is one of the greenest cities in America?

From the link: "A Manhattanite's carbon footprint is 30 percent smaller than the average American's." To make it more vivid:

[G]uess what high-speed means of transportation emits less atmospheric carbon than trains, planes, and automobiles? The humble counterweight elevator put into service in 1857, which has made vertical density possible from Dubai to Taipei.

And does anyone seriously think that going camping or hiking to "get in touch with nature" is doing anything other than creating fun for human beings but actually depleting the planet overall? That is, if you have to drive your car to get there. Which is pretty likely.

(Photo of woman standing by elevator in the New Museum by Anne Helmond. Photo of Manhattan viewed from Brooklyn by Ann Althouse.)

Imagine relatively few possessions

The New York Times recently published a human-interest story about an Austin family — Aimee and Jeff Harris and their two kids — who are professing to get rid of most of their possessions.


I'm not sure how a family in Texas gets a long article in a New York newspaper devoted to their lifestyle change. But whatever. Let's see what exactly they're doing.

They say on their blog:

We have no need of a 12 piece, breakable set of dishes and will replace them with enamel coated metal dishes, cups, bowls for traveling and camping with. I have no need of high heeled shoes and purses and will replace them with some sturdy Goodwill boots and a back pack. Things of that nature.

I certainly can't fault them for giving away so much to charity. But for a family who's pitching themselves as abandoning possessions, they sure sound like they have a lot of shopping to do.

They're also going to give away their current cars ... and get new cars (again, not exactly monastic behavior) ... and drive all the way from their current home in Texas to Vermont (where they've never been) to start a new life. I'm not sure how driving across the country — which is to say, using up the world's resources and unnecessarily contributing to carbon emissions, just to give a partial list of the evils of driving — is part of simplifying your life and returning to nature. Americans are so obsessed with our car culture that using a car doesn't even register as something that goes against the ideals of simplicity, counterculture, anti-consumerism. Thus, the Times write-up never mentions their car situation, and I doubt that the writers had a second thought about this. Or if they did, it was quickly dismissed: "Come on, you have to have a car!"

I'm not sure exactly what their financial situation is, but it's probably pretty cushy in the first place for them to even consider doing this. Aimee says that part of what's making their project feasible is that Jeff will be able to keep his full-time job because he can do it from anywhere with high-speed internet access. How much are they really vouching for the idea of leading an ascetic life if it's powered by technology in a way that would have been unthinkable just a couple decades ago? You know, it took a lot of people, using a lot of money and possessions, to get to this point.

The family also reminds me of Jason, who's described in the book Your Money or Your Life (blogged previously). He had a countercultural, anti-money life philosophy.* He deliberately avoided getting a "real job." The result was that the lack of income caught up with him, forcing him to flail away looking for any odd jobs he could come up with since he was so desperate to have enough money to get by. His radical ethos caused him to be all the more tied down by material things:

Jason's "money isn't important" attitude was just as limiting as [his girlfriend] Nedra's search for happiness in tangible possessions. Because he refused to participate in the standard cultural job-and-money game, his choices in life were severely limited. He found that he spent more time in making do and making trades than he would have in working at a steady job.

I of course wish the Harrises the best — particularly the 1- and 5-year-old children, who, like all children, aren't consenting to be confined by their parents' values. But who's to say that the ultra-austere focus on minimizing possessions won't just lead this family to become all the more fixated on possessions? After all, you need some things to survive, and this project seems to emphasize and even glorify those relatively few (but surely still numerous) possessions.

If that ends up happening with this family, or if they just plain don't go through with it, I'm guessing that won't get written up in the New York Times.

* In case you have the book, the character appears throughout Chapter 2.