Why don't economists promote marriage?

Megan McArdle has the answer:

College improves your earning prospects. So does marriage. Education makes you more likely to live longer. So does marriage. Yet while many economist [sic] vocally support initiatives to move more people into college, very few of them vocally favor initiatives to get more people married. Why is that ... ? ...

[A]ll economists are, definitionally, very good at college. Not all economists are good at marriage. Saying that more people should go to college will make 0% of your colleagues feel bad. Saying that more people should get married and stay married will make a significant fraction of your colleagues feel bad. And in general, most people have an aversion to topics which are likely to trigger a personal grudge in a coworker.

We're all hypocrites.

"Homo hypocritus" is a model of human behavior proposed by Robin Hanson (on his blog, Overcoming Bias, which often has thought-provoking observations about the quirks of human thought and behavior).

As Hanson puts it, a "large fraction of modern behavior is explained by our evolved capacities and tendencies to pretend to do X while really doing Y."

He gives this example: "Forager norms cut overt Y of dominance, bragging, sub-coalitions." This would explain why political candidates habitually declare, "This is not about me!" By definition, a political campaign is about the candidate, and they surely know this. But they also know that admitting this would be against their interests.

Hypocrisy is so fundamental to human nature that I would suggest it's not very productive to try to seek out, expose, and shame those who are guilty of it. The taboo against hypocrisy leads people to come up with convoluted and unconvincing rationales for why, for instance, there's no inconsistency in being a vegetarian without being a vegan. The more useful approach would be to admit that there is an inconsistency but explain why it's preferable to other ways of eating/living that are also inconsistent. I imagine that a lot of benefits would result if it were more socially acceptable to admit that we're all hypocrites.

UPDATE: This post was "featured" on Brazen Careerist. In the comments section over there, Jamie Nacht Farell makes an ironic confession:

[H]ypocrisy is probably the one constant in my personality as I've changed through the years.

"What are the simple concepts that have most helped you understand the world?"

That question on AskMetafilter yielded 100+ answers.

Samples:

Occam's Razor - the simplest explanation is usually correct.

We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't, it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.

When I realised that the vast majority of other people were too busy worrying about their own appearance/conversation topic/speaking voice to judge mine, and that random waiters, tellers or passers-by would forget me within a few minutes of seeing me, it was wonderfully liberating.

By the time you have paid enough attention to a work of art to know whether it was a waste of time to take seriously, it is already too late for the answer to be useful.

Here are mine:

Any seemingly objective statement of the facts is actually slanted by the speaker's bias.

The fact that a lot of people believe something isn't a sufficient reason for you to believe it.

The fact that you live in the country you live in, or have the parents you have, is arbitrary.

Think about what's so taboo that it isn't said even though it's true; those things are especially worth thinking of for yourself, since you probably won't hear them said out loud.

Someone with a confident demeanor is trying to persuade; their demeanor doesn't prove they're correct.

The chances are slim that a whole social movement has gotten everything right.

Money is fungible. [And so are many other things.]

If the easy solution you thought of has never been successfully tried, there's probably a good reason for that.

Ask yourself why an intelligent person would disagree with you.

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.

Sarah Palin and the Thanksgiving turkey slaughter

My mom has a perfectly apt post about Palin giving an interview with slaughtering going on in the background. Here's the post in its entirety:

HuffPo is aghast that turkey-killing doesn't faze Sarah Palin.

Deal with it, you candy-asses. If you eat meat, something like that is going on in the background for you too.

I followed her link to HuffingtonPost and noticed that the post has an amazing 4,000+ comments. And based on skimming through some of them, it looks like HuffPo's commenters are more intelligent than HuffPo's writers.

One good point from the comments section:

Newsflash: Farmers kill animals. Then they sell them. Grocery stores package them. Meat-eaters buy them and eat them. Apparently people in the Ivory Tower think meat just appears, much like manna from Heaven. This is odd, considering their general distaste for all things religious--especially Christian.

And here's one more (slightly edited):

You people don't understand Alaska.

If you've ever been there, it really is America's last frontier populated with rugged people.

Actually seeing the reality of the facts of life and death (whether human or animal) is NOT uncommon there as it is in the lower 48. I think this is mostly a good thing. Here in Brooklyn, there's lots of people who eat chicken every day, but have never seen a live chicken running around the yard. You just go buy it at the supermarket. Not good.

Sarah grew up in Alaska and is used to these things. I'll give her that. Alaskans probably laugh at the lower 48's squeamishness.

Would having children make me happier?

I don't know the answer to that, of course. But it'd be pretty useful to know!

So this is a welcome finding -- not because I necessarily agree with the conclusion, but because the question is so emotionally charged that it's refreshing to see someone even attempt to answer it objectively:

"Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers," says Florida State University's Robin Simon, a sociology professor who's conducted several recent parenting studies, the most thorough of which came out in 2005 and looked at data gathered from 13,000 Americans by the National Survey of Families and Households. "In fact, no group of parents—married, single, step or even empty nest—reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It's such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they're not."

Responding to Will Wilkinson's blog post on that study, Megan McArdle says: "I don't understand why Will Wilkinson finds this" -- that is, the study's findings -- "so surprising."

I don't understand why McArdle finds Wilkinson so surprised! I don't see the slightest expression of surprise in Wilkinson's post.

On the contrary, it seems like he has a pretty unflinchingly realistic take on the whole thing:

[T]he profundity of the experience of loving a child I think blinds many people to the very real costs of raising them. To accept that we have been made less happy in a real sense by our children threatens our sense of the profundity and the value of that bond. So people get upset when they hear this. But that’s not counter-evidence.

Those last two sentences are ones I had to re-read a few times to make sure I absorbed them. This is a key point that's often overlooked: your visceral aversion to an idea doesn't mean the idea is wrong.

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.)

What's happening to McCain's brain?

This article from Slate gives a detailed look at what's likely to happen to John McCain's brain over the next 8 years. (It's based on general trends for anyone his age, not on anything about McCain as an individual.)

It's not all bad — there's some good and some bad. For example:

• Bad: cognitive function is believed to peak around age 50 and declines after that.

• Good: "a greater appreciation for ambiguity."

• Could go either way: old people "are easily distracted," but "that inability to filter information efficiently often means they can take in more information."

But there's no question that it matters. The article points out the obvious fact that "a 72-year-old's brain is different from that of a 46-year-old."

The author of that article has an interesting theory about how McCain's aging brain could explain his ill-advised response to the American who asked him about the prospect that we'll be in Iraq for 50 years: "Maybe 100! That'd be fine with me."

Should we even be talking about this? Of course. The idea that we need to hold back from discussing McCain's age is ludicrous.

There are plenty of situations in life when the polite, proper thing to do is to avoid mentioning someone's age. But this isn't one of those situations. He's trying to become the most powerful person in the world! If you're an American citizen, you have a responsibility to participate in deciding whether he gets the job or not. It's not only acceptable to talk about the pros and cons of his old age; we'd be abdicating our civic duties if we didn't.

I'm in my 20s; I wouldn't want someone my age to be president, which can't happen since it'd be unconstitutional. The Constitution has only an age minimum, not an age maximum . . . but the "35 years old" rule still recognizes the idea that age can be a test of someone's fitness to be president. Just because the Constitution doesn't have a rule about who's too old to be president doesn't mean you, the voter, can't have such a rule.

If he wins, McCain will start out as a 72-year-old president, and he'll be an 80-year-old president if he's successful enough to serve a full two terms. (He considered making a one-term pledge but decided against it.)

And if it's true that the presidency has a dramatic aging effect, he might end up seeming even older than 80 by the end.

Do we want our president to be that old? That's a crucial question for Americans to answer. As with many things in life, it might be "not nice" to talk about, but we cannot simply decline to think about it.

(Photo of McCain from World Economic Forum.)

Why the silence about Tim Russert's weight problem?

Yesterday's Meet the Press was, of course, a tribute to Tim Russert. You can watch the whole show here.

As you can probably guess from my post about how shocked I was by Russert's death and how important the show was, I found it hard to watch at points. (I was talking to A____ yesterday, who told me: "I read your post on Tim Russert. Now I want to hug you and buy you a drink." Thanks! I'll take you up on that.)

If you watch starting just a few seconds before 46:00, you can see Tom Brokaw had a hard time getting through the show too.

The clip at the very end is just heart-breaking.

I thought the tribute was well-done overall, but I couldn't help but notice one omission.

When George Harrison or Peter Jennings died at a too-young-to-die age, every single reference to their death in the media was accompanied by "and he died because he was a smoker!"

Yet out of all the media coverage of Russert's death (and I've soaked up more than enough of it this past dreary weekend), I've seen only one reference to his weight problem:

Dr. Michael A. Newman, Mr. Russert’s internist, just told Andrea Mitchell that Mr. Russert had coronary artery disease, but no symptoms. He had done everything he was supposed to do to manage the disease, although his weight was a problem. The doctor said that such attacks can’t be anticipated, but a defibrillator can make a difference.

And that's not even akin to the statements that were made about Harrison or Jennings. The above quote about Russert's weight is safely couched in the words of a doctor, but when George Harrison died, everyone seemed to feel free to connect it to smoking.

Now, I do think it's slightly crass to use someone's death as a springboard for lecturing the public about health, but I can accept that that's going to happen. There shouldn't be a rule that you're not allowed to mention a few of someone's faults as you're eulogizing them. And there's something to be said for the idea that if it saves a single life by prompting someone to quit smoking (for instance), it's worth it.

But what seems inexplicable is a double standard in which a famous person who's obviously very overweight can drop dead of a heart attack in his 50s, and no one in the media points out that his weight problem killed him.

If I had to come up with some principled basis for this, the one distinction would be: eating right is complicated. It's hard to know how to stay fit, and it's harder for some people than others. And it's not just eating, but also exercise, and some of it could be genetic, and so on.

Weight is also complicated by the fact that being underweight can be worse than the opposite. I would love to see Americans loosen up their attitudes about weight if it would reduce the incidence of anorexia and bulimia ... or if it would help people who might prefer to lose 10 or 20 pounds feel good about themselves the way they are.

So America's weight problem is complicated even though it's serious. Our smoking problem isn't just serious; it's simple. You shouldn't smoke at all, end of story. It's correct to say "The less smoking, the better," but it'd be idiotic to say "The less eating, the better" — or even "The more exercise, the better."

But let's face it. Smoking doesn't guarantee you'll die of cancer (or another smoking-related illness), just as obesity doesn't guarantee you'll die of a heart attack (or another obesity-related illness). They're both bad simply because they raise the risk of death.

It's not that smoking always leads to death; it's that it specifically caused George Harrison's death. And it's not that being severely overweight always leads to death; it's that it specifically caused Tim Russert's death.

So, I don't see the distinction.

According to Russert's doctor (from the same article linked above), he was very conscious of his heart disease and was trying to do something about:

Mr. Russert was managing his risk factors well, through diet and exercise. He had a stress test April 29, got to a high level of exercise and was pleased with himself. This very morning [the day he died], he was on his tread mill and was always excited about how he pushed himself.

By all means, let's remember him and admire him as someone who was fighting against his problem. But let's not forget that it was a problem.

And another reason why it's worth bringing up: there are specific reasons to believe that Russert himself would have wanted us to talk about it.

What makes me think that? Well, a couple of instances:

1. I remember watching an episode of Meet the Press where the guest was Ralph Nader. Russert proactively brought up the fact that Nader had criticized Michael Moore for his weight problem. Nader — who, back in his pre-reprehensible days, was an impassioned advocate for consumer protection — put his criticism of Moore in the context of America's increasingly serious weight problem.

So, Russert himself was willing to have someone talk about the health consequences of someone's weight problem to his face. Granted, Nader didn't explicitly mention Russert's problem. But Russert was a smart guy — he knew what he was getting into by bringing up the subject.

2. On Russert's other show (The Tim Russert Show), he was showing clips of Johnny Carson, who had recently died. You could plainly see Carson smoking a cigarette in the clips. After each one, Russert would talk about how terrible it was: "He was addicted!" (He also mentioned that he, Russert, was never a smoker, and that his guest on the show, Mike Wallace, used to be a heavy smoker but had quit.)

So, Russert himself approved of the idea of using Carson's death as an opportunity to criticize his health practices.

As we've been hearing over and over since Friday, one of Russert's favorite things to do was exposing people's inconsistencies on important issues. Surely if Russert could see the coverage of his own death, he would point out — with his characteristic exuberance — the media's double standard.

What are the disadvantages of being male?

A few weeks ago, I made this point, which I want to get back to (isn't it great when you've been blogging long enough to quote yourself?):

Both genders face huge and distinct disadvantages. I'd be hard-pressed to say whether it's more unfortunate to be a man or a woman.

As a thought-experiment, you could imagine -- apologies to John Rawls and his veil of ignorance -- that you haven't been born yet and you get to choose which gender you want to live your life as. You get to be fully informed about what the world is like, but all you know about your future life is that you'll be a human being growing up in the United States. (Significantly, you don't know your race or sexual orientation.) Which gender would you choose to be? I think some people would choose to be a man, and others would choose to be a woman, and it's far from obvious what the wiser choice would be.

I want to focus on the male-disadvantages side of this question, which I find more interesting because it's not talked about as much.

I'm well aware that the person who suggests, at least in certain kinds of elite circles, that maybe there are some not-so-great things about being a man is likely not be heard. Civil discussion will end. You aren't allowed to talk about, or think about, the idea that while gender roles, norms, traditions, stereotypes, etc. have certainly been bad for women ... they might also be bad for men too.

It's odd: I would have thought that if that's true, then it would actually strengthen the case for feminism. If everyone is burdened by antiquated gender rules, isn't that twice as bad as if half the population were burdened?

But even if you honestly believed there were no disadvantages to being a man, what would be your motivation to silence those who suggest otherwise? Why wouldn't you want a completely free debate in which anyone is allowed to marshall whatever evidence they want and get a fair hearing? In a free debate, anyone who doesn't have the facts on their side will be revealed as wrong. You shouldn't need to decide in advance which are the correct views and which are the incorrect views and shout down anything that falls under the latter category.

It's hard for me to imagine a much clearer example of this phenomenon than a recent set of discussion threads on Metafilter. It's rare that you have such a clear-cut instance of taboo enforcement preserved for all to see, so I want to take a look at this. (I have first-hand experience with the same thing in the real world, but can't really blog about it.)

The other day, someone posted a question to AskMetafilter, essentially asking: What are the advantages of being a man? (For those who aren't familiar with it, Metafilter is a "community" website written by thousands of users; one section is called AskMetafilter, where people post questions on any topic for other users to answer. Anyone can read it, but you pay a nominal one-time fee to add content.)

So I decided to post the reverse: What are the disadvantages of being a man? Both questions immediately began drawing a variety of thoughtful answers.

Well, guess what happened. The website's moderators deleted my question, but allowed the first question to stay.

I asked them about this discrepancy and got conflicting answers from the three Metafilter moderators. One of them said the distinction was that the other person's question was inspired by a book and mine wasn't. Funny -- I wasn't aware that Metafilter had a rule that your question has to be inspired by a book. (There was only one passing reference to the book, and it didn't seem to have any effect on the question.) Another moderator said the difference was that I started out my question with a few suggested answers of my own. Well, even if you accept that that's a reason to delete a question, the other question did the same thing, so that can't explain it. The last moderator said there actually wasn't any difference between the two questions except that mine was asked after the first one; they would have deleted the other one if it had been reversed. Maybe an interesting theory (albeit inconsistent with what the other moderators said) ... but the site often allows two back-to-back related questions -- they never seemed to have a policy of rejecting these until I asked my question.

Bottom line: they couldn't offer any principled reason for allowing one question (What are some advantages of being a man?) while deleting mine (What are some disadvantages of being a man?).

Draw your own conclusion.

Of course, I wasn't happy with this. But there's nothing I can do, right? Well, all I can do is preserve some especially thoughtful answers my question received.

Just to be totally clear: none of this is an attempt to make some kind of "argument against feminism." It's just that no one, no matter what theories they subscribe to, has a legitimate reason to want to ignore a huge chunk of reality. If you're going to contemplate gender at all, you might as well take in all of it -- the good and bad of being a man or woman.

I'm not trying to cancel out feminism. I'm trying to add to it.

Anyway, I started my question by noting:

Men are more likely to be victims of violent crime, go to prison, be forced to fight for their country if there's a draft, be socially expected to hold down a steady job, lose their parental rights in the event of divorce, and die younger.

(Those all seem to be pretty clearly bad things about being a man, though some people contested this point.)

Here are some of the responses I got (each paragraph represents a different comment):

You will be seen as an aggressive person or a threat even when you aren't one.

You tend to be more and more frequently distracted by sexual cues and later at developing social poise. Females are generally better socialized than males - males tend to have a harder time in social situations.

It isn't safe for a man to be alone with unrelated children -- he could be accused of being a child molester. This is not a perception that exists for women.

You have external, sensitive genitalia and we have pointy shoes! ;P

You are likely to be socialized never to admit weakness, confusion or doubt, and struggle with loneliness because of it.

As a young man in the US, you get to pay more for car insurance.

It's hard to talk to girls without people automatically assuming that I want to sleep with them.

Sex drive, often higher in men, can be a double edged sword (see, look, phallic symbolism already...) leading to distraction and frustration that otherwise may not be an issue.

Physical aggression, ranging from military service to playground tussels, is a much greater part of male life.

Many psychiatric organizations seem to think men, on the whole, cope with anger and sadness poorly compared to women. Women seem more likely to seek the support of others, men seem to end up loners more often.

I've heard it's often difficult for single men to adopt, compared to single women.

Acting outside gender roles can result in social fallout. A man becoming an interior decorator, poet, or actor would, in many social circles in the West, be considered a sissy, or have their sexuality questioned (by both sexes). Women transgressing similar norms may (as things improve) be thought empowered (female construction worker). This ties in to the emotional lives of men as well -- showing "weakness" in a healthy way is likely to cause a great deal of ridicule.

Being a gay man seems to carry more trouble than being a gay woman.

Many disorders seem to afflict men more often -- Autism and ADD come to mind. [As a New York Times article put it: "from the moment of conception on, men are less likely to survive than women. It's not just that men take on greater risks and pursue more hazardous vocations than women. There are poorly understood — and underappreciated — vulnerabilities inherent in men's genetic and hormonal makeup."]

Widespread expectations of a greater male role in sexual activity -- a responsibility for its success or failure.

Men (at least in most places in the US) often pay much much more than women to get into clubs and bars. It is very usual to go to bars where women often enter for free while guys have to pay, I have never seen the opposite. There are clubs where men need to, regardless of their willingness to pay, have at least one (usually good looking) woman with them to get in.

In traditional cultures, there can be a great deal of pressure on male children to succeed -- whether it be carrying on the family business, producing heirs, or avenging the family name.

There is a stigma attached to a male expressing emotions.

The thread was only around for about an hour, but all these answers were deleted from the site (preserved only if you saved the URL, but not generally accessible from the website). I'm sure there would have been more items added to the list if the thread had stayed up. (Feel free to post some in the comments.)

Someone else made a valiant attempt to keep the conversation going by starting a new thread:

I enjoy being a guy, but one thing I have philosophized about is the stunted intimacy. I don't mean sexual intimacy, which is just one subset intimacy, but rather the unguarded closeness and surrender and trust and sharing that any two people can experience, such as a mother and child. Men have much less of this, at least in western culture.

It is culturally acceptable and natural for them to display and indulge in a level of intimacy and affection with each other that is simply not in the realm of possibilities between men. Can you imagine two straight men, who are friends, sitting on a couch together with their arms around each other, looking into each other's eyes, maybe one comforting the other, hand softly on his neck, or crying or something? Unless you're 6 and the other guy is your dad, that isn't going to happen, the obvious exception excluded. I know that regional cultures can make this more or less of a possibility for women too, but I think you know what I'm saying. To think of two men doing that kicks up a visceral gender-role police enforcement squad in one's lizard brain. What? WHAT?! It's so deeply ingrained that it's alarming when the sediment is disturbed. Or think about walking arm in arm down the street. No way. Guys have made a lot of strides in shedding machismo, but not to that degree. ...

And the thing is, I think I can speak for men when I say we don't want those things. It's not like we secretly want them but cruel society won't let us have them -- it's that we simply weren't trained that way, or maybe it's a combination of biology and culture. Because of my socialization and the way gender roles are mapped out in our culture, I was essentially programmed that this was not an option any more than flying is, or that there could be some primary color other than the ones we know of. It isn't something you think about or regret, it simply doesn't exist. ...

So then isn't it a deficit for me as a man that I don't have the same level of opportunity for intimacy as a woman? Shouldn't that be recognized as a pretty awful missing piece in the human journey?

Unlike my question, the moderators did leave this thread on the site ... but they immediately closed it to further discussion.

None of this is meant to minimize the oppression of women. It's not about pushing women away and saying, "Please don't bother us with your petty complaints." It's about drawing men in by saying, "Look, gender disparities hurt everyone -- it's not just a woman thing."

I understand that the response might be: it all comes down to rape and domestic violence. There's nothing men have to deal with that's on that level.

Well, it's not quite that simple. Not all rape victims are women. They can be men or women. It's well-known that this often happens to men in prison. Of course, this is usually just laughed at (as is female-against-male domestic violence) because -- to add one more item to the list -- society is more concerned about "protecting" women than men (which follows logically from the belief that women are weak).

By definition, we can't know about all the unreported rapes. But which gender do you think would be more hesitant to report it out of shame or a need to always appear tough?

That said, of course I take rape very seriously and recognize that it disproportionately harms women. I'm not even contending that anything from the above list is as serious as rape. Even if you're absolutely convinced that rape and domestic violence trump anything on the list of disadvantages of being a man, that's no reason to ignore those disadvantages. So it shouldn't be taboo to say, "Hey, there are some disadvantages to being a man, such as X, Y, and Z." This should always just be part of the equation, part of the conversation.

My message to liberal women: if you really want feminism to be a powerful force for changing people's minds, you need a message that will resonate with both sexes. The idea that men simply have it easy, and that women bear all the great burdens, won't -- more to the point, shouldn't -- convince men. Oh, there will be men who'll go along with this for the sake of political correctness. But any man who has thought seriously about gender and being a man in modern society will not buy into this.

Looking over the above list, I still feel like there's one big disadvantage for men that all of this is missing, maybe the biggest burden of all. But that will have to wait for another blog post, as this one is already ridiculously long.

The world is complicated. This may not be fashionable to point out, but it's reality.

UPDATE: Thanks for the link, Mom! And Glenn! And Reddit user ejp1082. And Dean. And Conservative Grapevine. And Villainous Company. And Church of Rationality.

UPDATE: Metapost.

Make yourself comfortable

If I'm completely comfortable saying, as I said the other day, that I didn't exist during the Carter administration, why shouldn't I also be comfortable saying that I also won't exist during the future _______ administration -- probably by 2080, and surely by 2100?

I don't understand the desire to have some kind of religious faith in order to comfort yourself about death, which seems to be one of the main motivations for believing in a religion. Maybe there's an afterlife -- I don't dismiss the possibility. But I don't see a very good reason for affirmatively believing in it.

Any belief of mine always has a hidden asterisk at the end, with a footnote that says: "This is what seems to be true ... but, of course, I might be wrong." You may not know anything with 100% certainty, but you can get pretty close. You just have to accept the residual uncertainty in order to get through life, so that you're not paralyzed by doubt.

Yes, there might be an afterlife, which would involve a soul that somehow survives the death of the body. But that doesn't match up very well with what we can observe in our lives. So, I'm going to go ahead and just assume it doesn't happen -- not because I'm 100% certain, but just for the sake of having some basic default beliefs about how the world works. The fact that I might be wrong about this is fine with me.

So I think the correct way to refer to dead people -- more so than how we're used to referring to them -- is that they don't exist. They haven't "passed on" to some new place, and they haven't transformed into some sort of different creature.

This is not at all to disparage the fact that we need to take various steps to remember them. But this is for our benefit, not theirs. Because we're the only ones who still exist.

If my family members or your family members were in heaven, doing whatever it is that people do there (singing? pontificating? carousing?), then there'd be little reason to be sad about their deaths. In fact, death would be something to be welcomed and sought after. (Of course, I know that religions get around this by having rules against homicide and suicide. Whether that's coherent is another question.) But in fact, there is very little chance -- I would say no more than 1% -- that these people are in heaven (or hell or purgatory). They're definitely on our family trees and in our memories; they're not very likely to be going on weird adventures in mystical alternate realities.

This is a lot more consistent with the fact that we mourn the deaths of our loved ones: (1) they are no longer in existence to enjoy life, and (2) we no longer get to be around them. Those are the basic facts, the inevitable starting point for both feeling bad about death but also getting over it. You don't need some extra layer of "facts" superimposed on what we can plainly see to be the case. I find the straightforward, reality-based, secular view to provide a lot more comfort and closure than the "Gee, I hope they went to heaven instead of hell" view.

I know this is supposed to be too upsetting; we're supposed to need to be comforted by something more dignified than the plain, observable facts. But I think this is a paradox in religion: you're told you need religion to comfort you, but before you can get to that point, you need to buy into an elaborate story about all the scary, horrible things in the world: sin, hell, etc. I prefer to skip all that drama and just approach whatever specific problem in my life happens to be facing me at the time. Life is hard enough when you're just dealing with the real problems. To those who offer a whole other set of made-up problems, I say: thanks, but I'll pass.



(Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris - photo by me. We Will Become Silhouettes - video by The Postal Service.)

Secret surface

Everyone's talking about this shot of Obama with Fareed Zakaria's new book, The Post-American World, in hand.

I was glad to see this, since I read this distillation of the book the other day, and it's the kind of thing I want my president to be reading.

I hope to do a post about Zakaria's geopolitical thesis soon, but first I have to point out that Obama looks so cool! He looks like his own Secret Service agent.

"Ah, yes, Obama's appeal is superficial. McCain might have less charisma, but he's the more serious candidate."

I wonder what percentage of the people who have that response supported Ronald Reagan, who would not have ended up being President if he hadn't started out as a dashing Hollywood actor.

I actually think McCain is decidedly less serious than Obama when it comes to domestic and foreign policy. But that's a whole other blog post.

There's a tendency to assume that if a candidate gets high marks in some superficial area, then surely this must be offset by deficiencies in more substantive areas. As Matthew Yglesias has observed, people seem to subconsciously adhere to the "Law of Conservation of Virtues." The supermodel must be dumb. The smartest kid in the class must wear dorky glasses and have no social skills. The candidate who gives inspiring speeches must be weak on policy.

Once you put it like that, it becomes transparently irrational: of course Obama's charisma is independent of his strengths and weaknesses on the merits.

But I would go further. The coolness factor matters. Coolness, likability, charisma, and even sex appeal are legitimate reasons to vote for someone for president.

A candidate who's more personally appealing will be more likely to hold onto popularity as president, which will tend to make them more effective at enacting their agenda. If the president is more appealing for admittedly superficial reasons, that should apply abroad too, and we should want the world to have a positive attitude toward us (all other things being equal). [UPDATE: Here's some statistical and anecdotal evidence that Obamamania is sweeping Europe. And he's "becoming an international phenomenon."] Whether the president is liked by a lot of people matters, and someone who's suave and attractive has an advantage when it comes to being well-liked.

We're not supposed to admit that this does matter. We're supposed to believe that "what the voters really care about are the issues." And so while the pundits are willing to analyze relatively clear-cut demographic factors (race, gender, age), you rarely hear them talk about the more nebulous quality of attractiveness, even when it's obviously important.

When Tommy Thompson (my former governor) ran for the Republican nomination, the few commentators who bothered to even talk about him would struggle to articulate what exactly was the problem with his foundering campaign. Based on sheer substance and experience, he could have been a very strong candidate. But all you had to do is watch him for 10 seconds in one of the debates, and you'd see -- and hear -- why he couldn't make it.

My mom has taken a lot of criticism for breaking this taboo and talking about the candidates' more superficial qualities. People can be surprisingly willing to vehemently insist that something doesn't matter at all, when it clearly does matter.

Here was her reaction while watching one of the Democratic debates (she hasn't endorsed any candidate):

You know, Obama can be a rather cool character. Midway through the debate, I found myself practicing an impersonation of him. Not his speech, but his clasped hands on the table, his head turned sideways, chin up, lips pursed in a grin, his eyes looking down onto the hapless soul who imagines she could unsettle him in the slightest degree.

It's become a cliche to lament that the media is obsessed with trivialities in the presidential race and should focus on the issues instead. But if they would talk more about the actual importance of appearance, this would have the twofold advantage of being more honest and more enticing to readers/viewers. If you can get more people to pay attention to a presidential election, that's a good thing for democracy.

I know there's a huge gender angle to this -- I plan to do a whole other post about Hillary Clinton in this context. [UPDATE: Here it is.] But, of course, most candidates are men, and most commentators are men, and men tend to be hesitant to talk about the attractiveness of other men. And female commentators have obvious reasons for not publicly gushing over attractive men.

But face it: the results of the democratic process over the years are clear. JFK, Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush -- each had his own distinctive sex appeal. Can anyone say with a straight face that these men were chosen for the job purely based on their resumes and policy positions?

Nixon, Carter, and George H.W. Bush were, of course, weaker in this regard. I wasn't in existence during the Nixon or Carter administrations, and I had pretty minimal political consciousness for the Bush administration, but I have to imagine that these presidents' relative unattractiveness -- not just in the physical sense, but also demeanor, particularly in Bush Sr.'s case -- played to their weaknesses. Notice that Carter and Bush were both defeated by more charismatic challengers.

As I write this, I almost feel embarrassed to be making an argument about something that should be so uncontroversial. But since even references to Hillary Clinton's voice and attire are routinely presented as evidence of sexism, I think it's worth pointing out that the candidates' looks, voice, style, and charisma always matter.

Everyone talks about Obama's skin color, but what about McCain's ghostly, albino-like skin?

My theory of this general election is that if you have one candidate who's 47, 6'1", and has a full head of dark hair, and another candidate who's 72, 5'7", and bald with thin white hair, it's predictable who will win. I wish this didn't matter at all and everyone just made perfectly rational decisions based on substantive issues. And we won't know if this factor ends up being decisive. But I think we'll know that it mattered.

UPDATE: My mom links to this post and looks at other presidential candidates who, like Obama holding The Post-American World, have worn sunglasses.

UPDATE: At least McCain is doing what he can in the sex appeal department.

The paternalistic-liberal gender double standard

I'm still in the middle of blogging Robert Wright's book The Moral Animal, but meanwhile, I have something to say about something he said in his latest diavlog with Mickey Kaus.

You can watch it here, or scroll down for the transcript:

Wright: There's any number of sentences you can begin with, "The trouble with men is...," and it's a little dicier, at least certainly in liberal circles, to begin with, "The trouble with women is..." And that's fine, I mean —

Kaus: You mean that in your PC, academic world, it's OK to do that. I'm saying: do you endorse this double standard?

Wright: Actually, I think it has a certain logic: that historically aggrieved and disempowered groups get a little more protection on the taboo front than historically empowered and privileged groups. Yeah, I actually kind of see that. Yeah.

Wright has illustrated this principle in the past by talking about "male answer syndrome" — "the tendency of men to assert things with great conviction when they have no idea what they're talking about." (The reference is about 1 minute into this clip; I've excerpted the rest just for context and because it happens to be an interesting discussion about suspected-terrorist detainees that has nothing to do with this blog post.)

I agree that men do this ... but so do women. Last year I was in a restaurant in Ithaca, NY, and a waitress was talking with a male customer who asked about another restaurant across the street with a sign that said "WINE AND TAPAS BAR." He wanted to know what "tapas" meant. She confidently replied, "Oh, that means they have wine and also beer on tap."

But unfortunately, you can often get more traction for your ideas by framing them as "I hate when men do this," rather than, "I hate when people do this." At least in the liberal enclaves of America in which I've spent most of my life, there's this unwritten rule that you can score social points by broadly ridiculing men, but you'd better not make any negative generalizations about women or you'll be ostracized. Few things are more disingenuous than men who do this men-are-terrible routine. (I remember Michael Moore doing this vehemently on Bill Maher's old show Politically Incorrect, for instance. If I recall correctly, Maher didn't let him get away with it.)

Back to Wright's rationale that we need to be extra cautious in judging women but we're allowed to freely criticize men. This baffles me. First of all, the fact that he would go out of his way to state this principle implies that he actually does have a bunch of not-so-flattering generalizations of women in his head -- he's just not going to say them out loud. Now, what exactly is the point of this? To protect people's feelings? Or, more precisely, to protect women's feelings? Why is that? Because they're, what, "the weaker sex"? And that's supposed to be the enlightened, feminist view?

To be clear, I'm not saying we should have carte blanche to throw around blatant stereotypes. But if we need to be hyper-cautious when doing it about women, then we should be equally cautious with men. The "Which gender has been the most disadvantaged?" standard is just irrelevant. The fact that your group has been disadvantaged or advantaged doesn't automatically make generalizations about that group any more or less valid.

And another thing — I've been presupposing that Wright is right that women are the ones who are disadvantaged while men are the ones who are advantaged. But it's not obvious to me that that's true. Both genders face huge and distinct disadvantages. I'd be hard-pressed to say whether it's more unfortunate to be a man or a woman. [UPDATE: See this later post for much more on this question.]

As a thought-experiment, you could imagine -- apologies to John Rawls and his veil of ignorance -- that you haven't been born yet and you get to choose which gender you want to live your life as. You get to be fully informed about what the world is like, but all you know about your future life is that you'll be a human being growing up in the United States. (Significantly, you don't know your race or sexual orientation.) Which gender would you choose to be? I think some people would choose to be a man, and others would choose to be a woman, and it's far from obvious what the wiser choice would be.

One last problem with Wright's double standard is that he wrote an influential book arguing that you can take your intuitive, common-sense gender stereotypes and use those as a starting point for genuine insights about human nature based on evolutionary psychology.* He published this book in 1994 to great acclaim and is only now, in 2008, announcing that he favors a policy of deliberately skewing gender generalizations in one specific direction (pro-woman, anti-man). Now, normally I wouldn't particularly care that some author has a bias against stating generalizations about women -- everyone has their biases, and most people have a bunch of sexist views. But Wright decided to build up an extended argument for a scientific theory on these generalizations! Of all people, I would have thought he would be willing to sacrifice political correctness for the sake of empirical accuracy.


* I don't know if he says this quite so explicitly in the book. He certainly backs up the generalizations with empirical research. But there's no denying, based on his examples, that he thinks it's legitimate to go from (a) off-hand observations of men vs. women in everyday life to (b) scientific claims that are, as he might put it, asserted with great conviction.

Two-sentence refutations of profoundly influential ideas

Continuing with Bertrand Russell's chapter on Descartes in The History of Western Philosophy, and also moving on to the other great rationalists Spinoza and Leibniz...

As the heading says, I've been looking for two-sentence refutations of profoundly influential ideas. This little project stems from my visceral revulsion at the debate trick in which people -- not in everyday conversation, but professors or other public experts -- respond to ideas they disagree with by saying, "Well, the problems with that are well-known, but there's no time to explain all that now." No! If you think that some position that's on the table is seriously mistaken, you should want to convince people of this as efficiently as possible. If you can't explain it right now, you can't expect anyone to believe you based on those mysterious arguments behind the curtain.

Russell is really good at avoiding this problem; here are three of his two-sentence refutations:

1. Refutation of Descartes's famous "I think; therefore, I am" argument:

The word 'I' is really illegitimate; he ought to state his ultimate premise in the form 'there are thoughts.' The word 'I' is grammatically convenient but does not describe a datum.

(This is a well-worn objection. Russell may have been cribbing from William James, who wrote that we should say, in the third person, "It's thinking," just as we say, "It's raining," so that we don't make Descartes's mistake!)

2. Refutation of Spinoza's theory* that your misfortunes only seem bad from your self-centered perspective, but cease to be problematic when seen as part of the universe as a whole:

I cannot accept this; I think that particular events are what they are, and do not become different by absorption into a whole. Each act of cruelty is eternally a part of the universe; nothing that happens later can make that act good rather than bad, or can confer perfection on the whole of which it is a part.

3. Refutation of Leibniz's we-live-in-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds argument based on free will:

A Manichaean might retort that this is the worst of all possible worlds, in which the good things that exist serve only to heighten the evils. The world, he might say, was created by a wicked demiurge, who allowed free will, which is good, in order to make sure of sin, which is bad, and of which the evil outweighs the good of free will.

Since those two sentences give you the gist of the argument, I don't think it'd be breaking my two-sentence limit to add his next sentence as elaboration:

The demiurge, he might continue, created some virtuous men, in order that they might be punished by the wicked; for the punishment of the virtuous is so great an evil that it makes the world worse than if no good men existed.

Back to refutation #2 (cruel acts aren't transformed into good by being absorbed into the whole universe): I absolutely agree with this, and I hope it shapes my worldview. It's probably a big part of why I'm so indifferent to religion.

I do not take the view, which many secularists take, that cruelty and suffering are just there and don't have any larger meaning in the grand scheme of things. I don't have any more interest in an "It's all meaningless" view than in an "It's all for the best" view. What I think is that even if there's some sort of cosmic significance to everything in the world, the suffering is still there, and you can't rationalize it away. The fact that X hurts someone is, on the face of it, a reason to conclude: X is bad.

This explains the overwhelming instinct, cutting across political lines, that torture is just wrong, period. Even those who argue for an exception to society's general "don't torture people" rule tend to rely on scenarios where the suffering caused by torture is far outweighed by preventing others from suffering. This still implies that suffering itself is the basic unit that we're looking at in making moral assessments: we want the least possible of it! So people are quibbling over a very narrow exception -- maybe an important exception, but not one that calls into question the fundamental "torture is bad" consensus.

And so, no one takes the position: "Hey, go ahead and torture as much as you like! What, does that make you queasy? Don't worry! It's sure to be a net plus in the end -- it'll be a learning experience, or it will be a ringing affirmation of our own free will, or something." Well ... no one applies this to human beings. But it's regularly applied to God. The fact that God is held to lower moral standards than humans are is ... interesting.

Turning to #3 from the list: It's a commonplace to ridicule Leibniz's theory that God has ensured that we live in "the best of all possible worlds." I mean, Voltaire made fun of it in his novel Candide, so it must be wrong. I have the sense that people will balk at the "best of all possible worlds" idea when phrased like that, but if you phrase it more gently, e.g. "Everything works out for the best," it's still hugely influential.

OK, so the above Leibniz and Spinoza theories are closely related. You could group both of them under "It's all for the best." That's the basic thrust. Well, there's one oddity about this kind of outlook that I don't understand:

If it is true that suffering is justified in the long run by our ability to learn from it, or because this follows from our having free will (since free will, which is a precondition for virtue, entails the freedom to hurt people) ... and if you don't believe that animals operate at such a sophisticated level ... then doesn't this mean that the uniquely human ability to remember and reflect on pain weighs in favor of treating animal pain as more of a cause for concern than human pain?

Sorry to cram so much into one sentence there. But you see what I'm getting at, right?

In just about any debate over the moral status of animals that I've ever seen, a key point is always: "Well, how about the capacity to feel pain? Isn't that morally significant, and don't we share it with animals?"

The response is then going to be: "Hold on, there's a big distinction between humans and animals. We might all -- humans and animals -- be able to feel the initial stabs of pain. But only humans can intellectually reflect on that experience later on."

Well, that really seems to mitigate the suffering of humans. Meanwhile, animals are left merely having suffered without gaining anything from it.

That's all disingenuous for me to say! Because I don't necessarily accept those premises. As I said, I don't believe in justifying human suffering through cosmic mitigating factors. I'm just saying that if you do, you should follow your view to its logical consequences.

At the risk of loading the issue: if Anne Frank's poignant conviction in the underlying goodness of humanity can somehow mitigate the horror of the Holocaust, then that should decrease our concern for the mass killing of humans relative to the mass killing of animals. Of course, other factors might still support caring more about humans than animals. But to the extent that you rely on Spinoza/Leibniz-style justifications of human suffering, this weighs on the other side of the scale.

As always, please explain in the comments if I've gone horribly wrong in my thinking here.

* In my "modern philosophy" course in college, we enjoyed the part where we got to Spinoza and all of the sudden it became like we were studying a self-help book. [back]

Commonplace blog: rebellious puppets

Before I got into the journaling that led to this blog, I thought about doing a blog-as-commonplace-book. Like the idea of a typed-up diary, though, I realized that a blog version of the underlining and marginalia in my books would be too cramped and fussy. But I still want the blog to have some of the marginalia concept. So…

I've been reading Robert Wright's The Moral Animal — about how evolution shapes human behavior. As with many books, I set it aside when I was midway through it, but I plan to finish it eventually.

And, well, it's changed how I think about people! One thought that especially made an impression on me: Explaining human behavior as the result of natural selection doesn't mean justifying the behavior. This seems so obvious to me now that it almost doesn't even seem worth pointing out, but I don't know if I had realized it before reading this book. And this is what really got me:

we're all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer.

He goes further:

Just because natural selection created us doesn't mean we have to slavishly follow its peculiar agenda. (If anything, we might be tempted to spite it for all the ridiculous baggage it's saddled us with.)

People tend to assume that if want to effect social change, you need to somehow show that nature is on your side. Thus, if you're for gay rights, you need to argue that homosexuality is inborn, not a choice.

But the problem is that we don't know that. To my knowledge, we haven't solved the mystery of homosexuality. It doesn't seem to fit very well with natural selection: why haven't gays died out as a result of their distaste for procreation? Wright (a liberal and a supporter of gay rights) raises that question and admits the answer is unclear.*

The reason we respect gays isn't that they have a well-defined place in the natural order of things. We simply respect them because they're not doing anything wrong.

I wish everyone could agree to stop equating "nature" with good, and instead adopt the view that, "Look, of course the world is a terrible place. There are huge problems intrinsic to the world itself. Some of them might be fundamental defects in human nature" — in this case, aversion to homosexuality, distrust of outside-the-mainstream behavior, etc. — "and we should try to solve them using human ingenuity. Those solutions might just as well come from rebelling against nature or tradition rather than returning to nature or tradition."

But it's hard to make this kind of argument and win over many people. One problem is religion: if you believe that God is good and is the creator of the natural order, then the natural order must be good. Maybe that's why we're going to keep getting sidetracked by "issues" that shouldn't be issues, like "Is homosexuality a choice?"

Speaking of human tendencies that are natural but evil, I also want to highlight what Wright says about rape on pages 52-53 — and, relatedly, what he says about tall men — but that will have to wait till later.

There is one point I don't see Wright addressing. He notes that male animals typically have bright colors or other features designed to attract women. This is because females are "choosier" than males when it comes to sex,*** so their preferences are more influential than males' on which traits get passed down to future generations.

But this is the opposite of what we observe in humans. Women are the ones who wear visible makeup, not men. Women have much more leeway to wear clothes with bright colors and ornate patterns. [UPDATE: This might have been too simplistic if we're talking about human beings in general rather than merely our own culture and era. See the comments. Also, this intro to one of Wright's diavlogs suggests that he himself may be an exception to the rule.] Throughout the book he explains how human traits and behavior parallel those observed in animals, but then there's this one discrepancy that seems to contradict how you'd expect the sexes to behave based on natural selection.

If men are the ones who want to have as much sex as possible (because that will maximize how many of their genes get passed on), then what's the point in women getting all dolled up?

If anyone knows the explanation for this, or has a guess, please let me know in the comments. I can't be the first person to notice this. (I tried Googling for it, but that didn't work.) Maybe it's just one of those "I'm not going to point this out because it would contradict the whole theory of this book" things. That's a big problem with books.

So, apparently this is going to be a blog with footnotes. I didn't plan that — it just happened. I'll try to cut down on them in the future.

- - -

* He wrote the book in 1994, so it's possible that more recent research provides the answer. But something like this 2007 study offering various highly speculative theories suggests that not a lot of progress has been made since then. For example, one theory -- mentioned by both Wright and the linked study -- is that gays contribute to the survival of their own genes by caring for their family members. As Wright points out, it follows from this theory that we should be able to observe gay people being extraordinarily devoted to their nephews and nieces, far more so than heterosexuals. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that that's the case. (384-6)

** This is a huge theme of the book, and he certainly thinks it applies to humans as well as other animals.