School Motivation, '70s-Style

I love it when bloggers resurrect printed materials from my youth, like these school posters from the early '70s on Denver's Westword. First they posted a series in this style, with the original captions intact:


That's probably one of the worst concepts anyone could come up with to illustrate the idea of thinking for yourself. What, is the girl thinking to herself, "Hmmm, I think a foot should equal 11 inches"?

More recently, Westword put up a second set of posters with the original wording removed, replacing it with their own interpretations:



It's so much easier to make fun of the past than it is to see the absurdities of the present.

Camels on the Table, Plus Oats

If you haven't visited the Vintage Ads archive over at livejournal, your life is not complete.

Two not to miss are this Quaker Oats ad:


Here's just some of the text, which reports on a company canvass of oat consumption in 40 states, over four months, employing 130 men:

• Among the tenements: No oats, of course. "The average child is wan, anemic and nervous. The school teachers say that it lacks concentration."
• On [fashionable] the boulevards: "Boston consumes 22 times as much oatmeal per capita as do two certain states with low average intelligence."
• In the colleges: "Four-fifths of all college students were shown by this canvass to have come from oatmeal homes."
• Among the hotels: "The finest hotels...serve an average of one pound of oatmeal daily to each 18 guests... But the servants in hotels consume very little. Among the workers in lowly vocations very few are oatmeal bred."
• In the poorhouses: "We made a canvass of 61 poorhouses in 31 states, for types of the unsuccessful. We found that 93 percent of the inmates were not brought up on oatmeal."
• In the prisons: Less than two percent of the inmates in four state penitentiaries had oats in childhood. "But there, as in all institutions where the State directs the diet, oatmeal is a staple food." (And upon release, are they all now fine, upstanding overachievers?)

And this one from 1936 for Camel cigarettes, which includes an incredible quote from "food editor" Miss Dorothy Malone: "It's smart to have Camels on the table. My own personal experience is that smoking Camels with my meals and afterwards builds up a sense of digestive well-being."

Occupying My Tabs Lately

Steven Pinker Week caused quite a pile-up of unrelated clippings and tabs all over Daughter Number Three's desk and desktop. My browser is threatening to stop running because of all the tabs strewn about, so here's a list just to get them off my computer!

Photos from the 1970s U.S., documenting what life and the environment were like then.


A super-fun whirlwind video (about 11 minutes) on how the English language developed.

A call for more hypocrites.

Did you know there's a young guy in Des Moines, Iowa, who's figured out a way to make online payments work without going through the credit card system, which lowers the cost to everyone? Let's make Dwolla a reality!

Every Child Is a Scientist by Jonah Lehrer. But you can't tell them that, or it doesn't work.

Let's Stop Teaching Writing (by a writing teacher, of course). 

A really long Columbia Journalism Review story deconstructing new media thinkers like Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen. (By the way, if you've been seeing the abbreviation tl;dr as much as I have lately, you may be wondering what it mean. Well, mystery solved: It stands for too long; didn't read.)

Mother Jones magazine's original 1984 story on Newt Gingrich.

The Star Tribune reports on the decline in both birth rates and abortion rate statewide, with two graphs I want to keep handy since the Strib never seems to load infographics to its website. Both births and abortions are down, meaning there are fewer pregnancies. (Click to see them larger):

Economist Dean Baker points out that NPR misreported the failure of the deficit supercommittee.

A tech writer comes up with a plausible explanation why men of color and all kinds of women are under-represented in tech startup land.

A quick critique of the Khan Academy approach to "flipping" school classrooms.

Jonah Lehrer gives the 411 on psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who has a new book out I'll have to read.

Why is it that the Huffington Post is the only media outlet I see covering stories like this one, reporting on a recent survey that found Fox News viewers were less likely to know factual information about international and domestic affairs? (For instance, Fox viewers were 18 points less likely than people who watch no news at all to know that Hosni Mubarak had been overthrown by the Egyptian people.)

The story of a case of police stun-gun abuse that killed a 61-year-old man who was riding his bicycle. Incredible. (From local news channels in North Carolina, via Boing Boing.)

And speaking of police and the overuse of "nonlethal" weapons...

Occupy in the News

The very best piece I read on the UC Davis pepper spray travesty. By a Davis prof who discusses the militarization of campus police. There were a lot of other great articles, like this one by Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic.

A Scientific American guest blogger and medical researcher examines whether pepper spray should be in use without more clinical trials on its effects. Meanwhile, Mother Jones shares the marketing materials for pepper sprays, tasers and other weapons used in the crowd control and "area denial" efforts of police.

If you know what the acronym API means in the web development world, check out this article that analogizes the Occupy movement as an API. I thought it was right on the money.

Everyone from Michael Moore to individual Occupy locations is coming up with lists of strategies for the movement. Here's what Robert Jensen had to say.

Steven Pinker Week Table of Contents

Here's the list of the seven posts from Steven Pinker Week here at Daughter Number Three:

James Reston 1968, Steven Pinker 2010

Documenting the Decline of Violence

The Worst Atrocities

Asking the Angels "Why?"

Laughing Violence Out of Existence

Making the World Better Without Utopia

The Quotable Pinker

The Quotable Pinker

For the final post of Steven Pinker week, I've compiled all the quotes from The Better Angels of Our Nature that didn't fit within the more structured pieces I've posted. It's a lot, I know, but every one of these is an explosion of thought.

Even with the decline in homicides, killings of relatives stayed about the same. That's because "…family members get on each other's nerves at similar rates in all times and places" (p. 64).

"Is it your conviction that small-town life, centered on church, tradition, and fear of God, is our best bulwark against murder and mayhem? Well, think again. As Europe became more urban, cosmopolitan, commercial, industrialized, and secular, it got safer and safer" (p. 64).

"A Leviathan can civilize a society only when the citizens feel that its laws, law enforcement, and other social arrangements are legitimate, so that they don't fall back on their worst impulses as soon as Leviathan's back is turned" (p. 79).

Violence among the lower classes and people in isolated areas continues to exceed the newer norms for violence levels. Why? "…elites and the middle class pursue justice with the legal system while the lower classes resort to what scholars of violence call 'self-help.' … another name for vigilantism, frontier justice, taking the law into your own hands…" (p. 83). "Most homicides…are really instances of capital punishment, with a private citizen as the judge, jury, and executioner" (as opposed to as a means to a practical end, such as during a robbery).

"Herders all over the world cultivate a hair trigger for violent retaliation" because their wealth has feet and is highly stealable. Herding and mountainous/hilly areas go together because you can't grow other crops there. (Pinker was discussing Ireland and Scotland, as well as parts of the American South, but this also made me think of Afghanistan and Pakistan, p. 101.)

Pinker refutes the Freakonomics hypothesis that U.S. crime declined as a result of legalized abortion  in the early 1970s. "...in the years since 1973, the proportion of children born to women in the most vulnerable categories -- poor, single, teenage, and African American -- did not decrease, as the freakonomics theory would predict. It increased, and by a lot" (p. 120). He also points out that women who have abortions are more likely to be the ones who would have made good mothers, while the ones who bear their babies are more likely to be disorganized, immature, and fatalistic. Parenting isn't what causes criminals (as Pinker demonstrated in The Blank Slate, it's genes and possibly peer environment -- growing up in a high crime area, perhaps, but not bad parenting.

One chapter opens with this quote from Voltaire: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

"Something about mature, literate states eventually leads them to think the better of human sacrifice" (p. 136).

"In most of the world, institutionalized superstitious killing, whether human sacrifice, blood libel, or witch persecution, has succumbed to two pressures. One is intellectual: the realization that some events, even those with profound personal significance, must be attributed to impersonal physical forces and raw chance rather than the designs of other other conscious beings. A great principle of moral advancement, on a par with 'Love thy neighbor' and 'All men are created equal' is the one on the bumper sticker: 'Shit happens'" (page 139).

"Other than at times of existential threat, the extent of [military] conscription is a barometer of a country's willingness to sanction the use of force" (p. 255).

"no two countries with a McDonald's have ever fought in a war" (p. 285)

"Countries with an abundance of nonrenewable, easily monopolized resources have slower economic growth, crappier governments, and more violence" (p. 311) Resources concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the monopolizer. Civil wars are more likely in countries with large populations, mountainous terrain, new or unstable governments, oil exports and large proportions of young males.

"No one found much romance in the frumpy institutions of the Civilizing Process, namely a competent government and police force and a dependable infrastructure for trade and commerce. Yet history suggests that these institutions are necessary for the reduction of chronic violence, which is a prerequisite to every other social good" (p. 313).

"Each of the pathways to nuclear terrorism, when examined carefully, turns out to have a gantlet of improbabilities" (pp. 371-372). One expert counted 20 obstacles to executing a nuclear attack; even with a 50-50 chance at each one, the aggregate odds are 1 in a million.

"In 1924, 91 percent of the students in a middle-American high school agreed with the statement 'Christianity is the one true religion and all peoples should be converted to it.' By 1980, only 38 percent agreed" (p. 392). Still 38 percent! But quite a decline.

The crime decline of the 1990s may have been "as much a product of the feminist antirape campaign as the other way around… it was the feminist campaign against assaults on women that helped to deromanticize street violence, make public safety a right, and spur the recivilizing process of the 1990s" (p. 403).

Infanticide was common. "Until recently, between 10 and 15 percent of all babies were killed shortly after they were born, and in some societies the rate has been as high as 50 percent" (p. 415). In Europe in the Middle Ages, there were an average of 5.1 births among wealthy families, 2.9 among the middle class, and 1.8 among the poor. Then Pinker quotes an expert who followed those stats with this dry conclusion: "There was no evidence that the number of pregnancies followed similar lines" (p. 425).

Startlingly to me, Pinker presents hypotheses from biologists and anthropologists that postpartum depression and "baby blues" may be an evolutionary advantage rather than a malfunction. Mild depression makes people more realistic, decreasing human's innate optimism bias. Depression is more common in women who lack social support, had a complicated delivery or a sick baby, are unemployed, or whose men are unemployed (p. 418).

The risk of a child being abducted by a stranger in the U.S. is 100 per year out of 50 million children. "The writer Warwick Cairns calculated that if you wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, you'd have to leave the child outside and unattended for 750,000 years" (p. 446). "...more than twice as many kids are hit by cars driven by parents taking kids to school as by other kinds of traffic, so when more parents drive their children to school to prevent them from getting killed by kidnappers, more children get killed" (p. 446).

"A connected and educated populace, at least in aggregate and over the long run, is bound to be disabused of poisonous beliefs" (p. 477).

"There is a reason that the literal meaning of cosmopolitan is 'citizen of the world' and the literal meaning of insular is 'of an island.' Societies that are marooned on islands or in impassable highlands tend to be technologically backward. And morally backward too" (p. 478).

"The victims of a conflict are assiduous historians and cultivators of memory. The perpetrators are pragmatists, firmly planted in the present. Ordinarily we tend to think of historical memory as a good thing, but when the events being remembered are lingering wounds that call for redress, it can be a call to violence." The Alamo, Lusitania, Maine, Pearl Harbor, 9/11… we're urged to remember them all, right? "...the Balkans are a region that is cursed with too much history per square mile" (p. 493).

"...in the attempt to understand harm-doing, the viewpoint of the scientist or scholar overlaps with the viewpoint of the perpetrator. Both take a detached, amoral stance toward the harmful act. Both are contextualizers, always attentive to the complexities of the situation and how they contributed to the causation of the harm. And both believe the harm is ultimately explicable. The viewpoint of the moralist, in contrast, is the the viewpoint of the victim. The harm is treated with reverence and awe. It continues to evoke sadness and anger long after it was perpetrated" (pp. 495-496).

Psychologist R.F. Baumeister calls this the myth of pure evil. "The mindset that we adopt when we don moral spectacles is the mindset of the victim. Evil is the intentional and gratuitous infliction of harm for its own sake, perpetrated by a villain who is malevolent to the bone, inflicted on a victim who is innocent and good" (p. 496).

Scientists are "bound to be seen as 'making excuses' or 'blaming the victim'" (p. 496).

"We read of an atrocity…, shake our heads, and ask, "How could people do these things?' We refuse to accept obvious answers, like boredom, lust, or sport, because the suffering of the victim is so obscenely disproportionate to the benefit to the perpetrator. We take the victim's point of view and advert to a conception of pure evil. Yet to understand these outrages, we might be better off asking not why they happen but why they don't happen more often" (p. 510).

"Violence is a problem not of too little self-esteem but of too much, particularly when it is unearned. Self-esteem can be measured, and surveys show that it is the psychopaths, street toughs, bullies, abusive husbands, serial rapists, and hate-crime perpetrators who are off the scale" (p. 520).

"Dominance is an adaptation to anarchy, and it serves no purpose in a society that has undergone a civilizing process" (p. 528). "Feuding and anarchy go together" (p. 538).

"...empathy is too parochial to serve as a force for a universal consideration of people's interests… Its head is turned by cuteness, good looks, kinship, friendship, similarity and communal solidarity" (p. 591). It can be spread by taking other perspectives, but that change is small and may be ephemeral. "To hope that the human empathy gradient can be flattened so much that strangers would mean as much to us as family and friends is utopian in the worst 20th-century sense, requiring an unattainable and dubiously desirable quashing of human nature" (p. 591).

"The elevation of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is a license to dismiss other people's interests, and an imperative to reject the possibility of compromise" (pp. 676-677).

"When cosmopolitan currents bring diverse people into discussion, when freedom of speech allows the discussion to go where it pleases, and when history's failed experiments are held up to the light, the evidence suggests that value systems evolve in the direction of liberal humanism" (p. 691).

_____

Part 7 of Steven Pinker Week at Daughter Number Three.

Making the World Better Without Utopia

When I was young, the conflict in Northern Ireland was in the news all the time. As I got old enough to understand it a little, I began to wonder if it could ever be resolved because the eye-for-an-eye nature of it was obvious even to a child. How could the people on one side ever learn to live with those on the other, let alone begin to forgive them?

But somehow it has. One of my favorite parts of Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature is his discussion of the dissolution of apartheid in South Africa, a situation that seemed just as intractable as the one in Northern Ireland.

The key is restorative rather than retributive justice. In South Africa, it entailed the following:

1. Truth telling and acknowledgment of harm.
2. Rewriting of people's identities, their groups, so that victims can take responsibility for running the country. Rebels become politicians; the military demotes themselves.
3. Most importantly, it requires incomplete justice. Not every score can be settled. "In other words, peel off the bumper sticker that says 'If you want peace, work for justice.' Replace it with one recommended by Joshua Goldstein: 'If you want peace, work for peace'" (p. 546).
4. Both sides have to signal commitment to a new relationship with verbal and nonverbal gestures. Peace accords, constitutions, monuments, textbooks, all are key.

None of this can work without at least a minimum of rationality on both sides, and that's very hard for our human brains to come by. But clearly, it can work, since it has worked in several notorious cases of recent decades.

But the one thing that can stop peace in its tracks is ideology, and that's Pinker's bugbear. This guy can't stand utopianism and the moralism that accompanies it, whether from the Left or from religion. Killing, even murder, is often not amoral at all, he writes: "…observations [of murderers] overturn many dogmas about violence. One is that violence is caused by a deficit of morality and justice. On the contrary, violence is often caused by a surfeit of morality and justice, at least they are conceived in the minds of their perpetrators" (p. 84).

At a later point in the book, he writes, "The world has far too much morality. If you added up all the homicides committed in pursuit of self-help justice, the casualties of religious and revolutionary wars, the people executed for victimless crimes and misdemeanors, and the targets of ideological genocides, they would surely outnumber the fatalities from amoral predation and conquest" (p. 622).

Pinker's Analysis of Religion

The violence of the Old Testament tells a story about how people treated each other then; medieval Christianity in practice is better documented in all its torture and crusading mayhem. Believing that you have the one truth is key to this violence.

Institutionalized torture in Christendom was not just an unthinking habit; it had a moral rationale. If you really believe that failing to accept Jesus as one's savior is a ticket to fiery damnation, then torturing a person until he acknowledges this truth is doing him the biggest favor of his life…. And silencing a person before he can corrupt others…is a responsible public health measure…. The method of choice has been specified by Jesus himself: "If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the firs, and they are burned."

Beliefs based on faith and not knowledge are fragile and inherently dangerous to others. "Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful" (p. 140).

Estimates are given for the number of heretics and nonbelievers killed by holy slaughter:

• The Crusades: 1 million out of 400 million on Earth (equivalent to the Jewish holocaust numbers).
• The French Cathars, wiped out: 200,000.
• The Spanish Inquisition: 350,000.
• The Thirty Years' War, which ended in 1648, killed 5.75 million, double the rate of World War I, relative to world population, and coming close to World War II's relative carnage.

And hey, remember those 18th-century novels that began to help people see the world through others' eyes? The Catholic Church denounced them, just as Islam in the past few centuries has lagged in the translation of drama, history and poetry -- and even in adoption of the printing press. The Iranian Ayatollah Khameini declared in 2010 that study of the humanities "promotes skepticism and doubt in religious principles and beliefs" (p. 365). I guess he's on to something there.

And Then There's Nonreligious Utopianism

Pinker also condemns romanticism and its offshoots:

• militant nationalism ("blood and soil")
• romantic militarism
• Marxist socialism
• National Socialism

"Utopian ideologies invite genocide for two reasons. One is that they set up a pernicious utilitarian calculus. In a utopia, everyone is happy forever, so its moral value is infinite…. How many people would it be permissible to sacrifice to attain that infinite good? A few million seems like a pretty good bargain" (p. 328).

Under an all-encompassing ideology with a utopian vision, the end can't help but justify the means. Opponents are infinitely evil, and therefore deserve infinite punishment (p. 556).

Social experiments like Zimbardo's Stanford prison work and Milgram's shock lab are discussed, along with group think and Arendt's spiral of silence. Some of the people who perpetuate violence in the name of ideology are true believers, but most just go along with it because of a perceived social consensus or because they are intimidated. Clustering the true believers within a limited area enforces the norm in that area, and allows it to work its way outward. In Italy, Germany and Japan in the lead-up to World War II, for instance, a "a small group of fanatics embraced a 'naive, vigorous ideology that justifies extreme measures, including violence,' recruited gangs of thugs willing to carry out the violence, and intimidated growing segments of the rest of the populations into acquiescence" (p. 563, with Pinker quoting political scientist James Payne in part of that text).

The psychology of genocide is explored, particularly how it spirals upward from tit-for-tat violence (p. 323 - 325). Revenge and the cycle of violence leads to the moralization of disgust again the opponent. The language of genocide is full of the imagery of disgust: vermin, ethnic cleansing, parasites, bloodsuckers, rats, cockroaches.

Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot all are equally examined and condemned as utopianist ideologues who led to massive death and destruction. Pinker reserves a special place in his low esteem for Marxist socialism, I have to say.

Incrementalism, the Antidote to Utopianism

For Pinker, the way forward is classical liberalism with its base in skepticism, reason, and observation. Classical liberals believe:

• Knowledge of the universe is possible
• There is a universal human nature (more on that in The Blank Slate)
• Morality is grounded in equality and fairness of treatment.

Liberalism arose in the Enlightenment with the accelerating exchange of ideas among 18th-century intellectuals, brought on by improved transportation and cities with their social gathering places, such as coffeehouses. As in Newton's saying about standing on the shoulders of giants, the interaction among intellectuals led to the beginning of the scientific method. "The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment were also the age of urbanization" (p. 179). Economist Edward Glaeser is cited as one who thinks that cities led to the rise of liberal democracy.

Oppressive autocrats can remain in power even when their citizens despise them because of a conundrum that economists call the social dilemma or free-rider problem. In a dictatorship, the autocrat and his henchmen have a strong incentive to stay in power, but no individual citizen has an incentive to depose him, because the rebel would assume all the risks of the dictator's reprisals while the benefits of democracy would flow diffusely to everyone in the country. The crucible of a city, however, can bring together financiers, lawyers, writers, publishers, and well-connected merchants who can collude in pubs and guild halls to challenge the current leadership, dividing the labor and diffusing the risk" (p. 179).

Democracies are best able to be at peace with each other because "two democracies can recognize the validity of the principles that govern the other. That sets them apart from theocracies, which are based on parochial faiths, and from autocracies, which are based on clans, dynasties, or charismatic leaders" (p. 167). Thus, change for the better happens over time, slowly, rather than all at once in a revolutionary spasm, and that type of incremental change is the best we have to offer.

Modernity -- defined as a combination of reason, science, humanism, individual rights -- is good, despite our usual nostalgia for a simpler past. The facts "show that nostalgia for a peaceable past is the biggest delusion of all" (p. 693). "Genocide and war crimes were absent from the historical record only because no one at the time thought they were a big deal" (p. 694).

Pinker ends the book with an emphasis on humanism. "Defenders of religion have long claimed that in the absence of divine edicts, morality can never be grounded outside ourselves. People can pursue only selfish interests, perhaps tweaked by taste or fashion, and are sentenced to lives of relativism and nihilism. We can now appreciate why this line of argument is mistaken. Discovering earthly ways in which human beings can flourish...should be purpose enough for anyone" (p. 695).

The better angels are within us, after all.

________

Part 6 of Steven Pinker Week at Daughter Number Three.

Laughing Violence Out of Existence

A somewhat minor point in Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature is that humor and satire can undermine the propensity to violence, whether by defusing a specific tense situation or taking on national policy.

He gives examples from Shakespeare, Swift, Voltaire, Tom Lehrer, Charlie Chaplin, and the Marx Brothers, including a longish description of a scene from Duck Soup:

...an outlandish production number breaks out in which the Marx Brothers play xylophone on the pickelhauben of the assembled soldiers and then dodge bullets and bombs while their uniforms keep changing, from Civil War soldier to Boy Scout to British palace guard to frontiersman with coonskin cap. War has been likened to dueling, and recall that dueling was eventually laughed into extinction. Warn was now undergoing a similar deflation, perhaps fulfilling Oscar Wilde's prophecy that "as long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular" (p. 248)

Later in the book, Pinker sums up an aspect of humor I've always wanted to be able to explain: "Humor works by confronting an audience with an incongruity, which may be resolved by switching to another frame of reference. And in that alternative frame of reference, the butt of the joke occupies a lowly or undignified status" (p. 633).

The current pepper-spraying cop meme running around the interweb is a great example of how humor can help change the frame of reference.


As if the real-time photos and video of the UC Davis incident weren't enough, the doctored images of Lt. John Pike pepper-spraying the Declaration of Independence, baby seal pups, and the Last Supper (among many others) clearly point out how unacceptable his behavior was. And the audience participation nature of the Photoshop meme makes it all the more transformative a moment.

Pinker again: "Humor with a political or moral agenda can stealthily challenge a relational model that is second nature to an audience by forcing them to see that it leads to consequences that the rest of their minds recognize as absurd" (p. 633).



_______

Part 5 of Steven Pinker Week at Daughter Number Three.

Asking the Angels "Why?"

I dislike the fact that my presentation of Steven Pinker's The Angels of Our Better Nature so far has focused only on deaths (from war, atrocities, and homicides). It's important to note that he also discusses declines in rape and domestic assault.

Rape in the U.S. declined by 80 percent from 1973 to 2008, despite increased reporting and the relatively recent recognition of date rape. For comparison, homicide is at 57% of its 1973 level; rape is at 20% of its 1973 level. Domestic assaults also decreased more than 50 percent from 1993 to 2005 (although the number is still quite high, about 400 per 100,000 women and about 100 per 100,000 men). Between 1975 and 2005, homicides of intimate partners decreased almost 50 percent for women victims and nearly 80 percent for men; both were under 1 per 100,000 in 2005.

Why has all of this violence declined? You'll have to read the book to get the full answer to that question, but I'll do my best to convey a summary.

The Pacifist's Dilemma: A Way of Organizing Strategies

In the final chapter, Pinker introduces what he calls the Pacifist's Dilemma. It's a twist on the classic Prisoner's Dilemma from Game Theory, in which two prisoners are set up to either compete or cooperate. If Prisoner A sells out Prisoner B, A goes free while B serves a year (and vice versa). If both confess, they each serve three months. If both stay silent, they each only serve one month. So clearly, they would be best off if both stayed silent, but the temptation to defect is strong. The dilemma is usually shown as a four-quadrant table like this.



In the Pacifist's Dilemma, the four comparable quadrants are labeled as follows:




As you can see, the penalty for pacifism in the face of aggression is extreme (-100), much less than the one for meeting aggression with aggression (-50). And the "costs to the victim (-100) are vastly disproportionate to the benefits to the aggressor (10)" (p. 679).

The question is, How can the basic assumptions of the Pacifist's Dilemma be changed or reweighted to make peace a more likely outcome? This is what Pinker argues has been happening over the course of history, resulting in the decline in violence.

Causes of the Decline of Violence

Government -- Starting from Hobbes's Leviathan, it has been theorized that government, with its monopoly on force, is key to reducing violence. "If a government imposes a cost on an aggressor that is large enough to cancel out his gains -- say, a penalty that is three times the advantage of aggressing over being peaceful -- it flips the appeal of the two choices of the potential aggressor, making peace more attractive than war" (p. 680). So if you add penalties into the three nonpeaceful quadrants, suddenly Victory and War no longer look so attractive.

Pinker describes different phases of the Leviathan effect, which he calls Pacification and the Civilizing Process. Pacification involves a ruler (not necessarily a benevolent one) using a whip to get order out of chaos to protect his investment. As Pinker puts it, "…early states were more like protection rackets… Any ensuing reduction in violence benefited the overlords as much as the protectees. Just as a farmer tries to prevent his animals from killing one another, so a ruler will try to keep his subjects from cycles of raiding and feuding that just shuffle resources or settle scores among them but from his point of view are a dead loss" (p. 42).

The Civilizing Process followed Pacification as fiefdoms consolidated into countries. In Europe, for instance, 5,000 political units in the 1400s gave way to 500 in the early 1600s, then 200 in the early 1800s, to fewer than 30 in 1953. Justice was nationalized, as when Henry I of England "redefined homicide as an offense against the state" (p. 74) so that the wergild payments "went to the king instead of to the family of the victim" (p. 75, which includes one of my favorite unrealized facts: The word coroner comes from the Latin corona, crown!). As the rulers consolidated power, the way to become a winner was to curry favor with the king, not by being a knave who killed and took what he wanted. "The nobles had to change their marketing." Hence the rise of learning manners and courtesy.

Gentle Commerce -- The exchange of goods in trade turns "zero-sum warfare into positive-sum mutual profit" (p. 682). If you want wealth and land is the only wealth, all you can do is fight to take the land; but when goods are exchanged, wealth is not limited in the same way. Gentle Commerce affects the Pacifist's Dilemma by vastly improving the outcome of the peaceable upper left quadrant with mutual gains. Governments supported increasing trade by developing infrastructure, such as currency and legal systems for enforcing contracts. Throw in a few roads and other social changes like the beginnings of division of labor "and as a result merchants, craftsmen, and bureaucrats displaced knightly warriors" (page 683).

In the post-World War II era, which Pinker calls the Long Peace, and the most recent years of the New Peace, international trade has increased incredibly, and countries that trade heavily are unlikely to go to war. "If you're trading favors or surpluses with someone, your trading partner suddenly becomes more valuable to you alive than dead" (p. 76) and you have an incentive to anticipate what they want so you can supply it (which leads to empathy).

Feminization -- Essentially, this is victory without glory, defeat without humiliation, which again changes the weighting of the Pacifist's Dilemma quadrants. "Societies in which women get a better deal, both traditional and modern, tend to be societies that have less organized violence" (p. 686). This can be from external forces unrelated to violence: "In traditional societies, one of these forces is living arrangements: women are better off in societies in which they stay with their birth family under the wing of their fathers and brothers, and their husbands are visitors, than in societies in which they move in with their husband's clan and are dominated by their husband and his kin…. In modern societies, the exogenous forces include technological and economic advances that freed women from chronic child-rearing and domestic duties, such as store-bought food, labor-saving devices, contraception, longer life spans, and the shift to an information economy" (p. 686).

Key to the values of feminization is its move away from manly honor. Honor is way overrated, as Pinker demonstrates in his discussions of honor cultures. "A world that is less invigorated by honor, glory, and ideology and more tempted by the pleasures of bourgeois life is a world in which fewer people are killed" (p. 309).

Monogamous marriage is part of this; as in the American Wild West, the scarcity of women was one major reason why violence was so pronounced as men fell into what biologists call the "cads vs. dads" phenomenon. "The ecosystem that selects for the 'dad' setting is one with an equal number of men and women and monogamous matchups between them. In those circumstances, violent competition offers the men no reproductive advantages, but it does threaten them with a big disadvantage: a man cannot support his children if he is dead" (p. 105).

The Expanding Circle -- Probably my favorite concept, since it serves my biases so well. Cosmopolitanism, literacy, mobility, mass media -- all these were essential to decreasing violence. Cities are safer than rural areas, historically. The rise of literacy, and especially the spread of fiction with its ability to put the reader in the shoes of someone entirely different, was important.

"Adopting other people's vantage points can alter one's convictions in other ways. Exposure to worlds that can be seen only through the eyes of a foreigner, an explorer, or a historian can turn an unquestioned norm ('That's the way it's done') into an explicit observation ('That's what our tribe happens to do now'). This self-consciousness is the first step toward asking whether the practice could be done some other way" (p. 175). When novels like Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748) spread among the reading public, "Grown men burst into tears while experiencing the forbidden loves, intolerable arranged marriages, and cruel twists of fate in the lives of undistinguished women (including servants) with whom they had nothing in common" (p. 176).

Increasing mobility over the past few centuries has only added to that exposure, and the mass media of the past hundred years even more so.

The Escalator of Reason This is probably Pinker's favorite concept. He is a child of the Enlightenment, and believes that improved abstract thinking abilities (as demonstrated in IQ tests over the past century) and a humanistic, rational world view that privileges objective facts over ideology together lead to a positive outcome for the Pacifist's Dilemma.

"A humanistic value system, which privileges human flourishing as the ultimate good, is a product of reason because it can be justified: it can be mutually agreed upon by any community of thinkers who value their own interests and are engaged in reasoned negotiation, whereas communal and authoritarian values are parochial to a tribe or a hierarchy" (p. 692).

That's a lot to absorb, and I know I've glossed over topics that covered whole chapters in the book. But I think I've done some justice to the main points. Somehow I forgot to include the part about the role of democracies and Immanuel Kant....kind of like that joke about putting a motorcycle engine back together only to find yourself left with a bunch of parts that don't go on the outside.

Oh, well. Happy Thanksgiving in this, one of the least violent years in history.

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Part 4 of Steven Pinker Week at Daughter Number Three.

The Worst Atrocities

Are you surprised there's a researcher who considers himself an "atrocitologist"? His name is Matthew White, and he's made a list of the 21 worst things people have done to each other. (There are 21 because of a tie for 20th place. I don't mean to be flip about it.)

White plays an important part in the early sections of Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature. Because White has documented and quantified atrocities through the ages, he helps Pinker prove his point that historical myopia is responsible for the common belief that the 20th century was the most violent of all, and that things are going to hell in a hand basket.

Another name for this historical myopia is the availability heuristic, as described by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Basically, if you can think of it, it must be important. In terms of violence, Pinker says, "When we are judging the density of killing in different countries, anyone who doesn't consult the numbers is apt to overweight the conflicts that are most recent, most studied, or most sermonized."

To demonstrate, Pinker asked 100 interweb users to list as many wars as they could remember in five minutes. I tried it myself, and asked my family to do it also. Not surprisingly, he (and I) found the resulting lists weighted to world wars, U.S. wars, and 20th century wars. "Though the earlier centuries had far more wars, people remembered more wars from the recent centuries" (p. 194).

Page 195 of Angels contains White's table of death tolls from atrocities. In absolute numbers, 7 of the 21 are from the 20th century. But scaled for world population at the time of the atrocity (in essence, putting it at a rate per 100,000), only one atrocity from the 20th century makes the top 10 (World War II, coming in at number 9).

World War II killed the most people in absolute numbers, to be sure (55 million). But scaled for world population, the worst atrocity killed eight times as many and the second worst killed more than five times as many. I'm chagrined to admit I had never heard of the worst atrocity. These numbers are adjusted to equate with population in the 20th century:

1. An Lushan Revolt, 8th century
   429 million (absolute number: 36 million)
2. Mongol Conquests, 13th century
   278 million (absolute number: 40 million)
3. Mideast Slave Trade, 7th-19th century
   132 million (absolute number: 19 million)
4. Fall of the Ming Dynasty, 17th century
   112 million (absolute number: 25 million)
5. Fall of Rome, 3rd-5th century
   105 million (absolute number: 8 million)
6. Tamerlane, 14th-15th century
   100 million (absolute number: 17 million)
7. Annihilation of American Indians, 15th-19th century
   92 million (absolute number: 20 million)
8. Atlantic Slave Trade, 15th-19th century
   83 million (absolute number: 18 million)
9. World War II, 20th century
   55 million (absolute number: 36 million)
10. Taiping Revolution, 19th century
    40 million (absolute number: 20 million)

Stalin comes in 15th with 20 million, and World War I at 16th with 15 million.

It's an odd thing, ranking actions that resulted in millions of deaths. I don't think Matthew White or Steven Pinker mean to make light of it in any way. But they are interested in quantifying historical inhumanity so that we can be prepared with the best information when we make pronouncements about what's happening today.

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Part 3 of Steven Pinker Week at Daughter Number Three.

Documenting the Decline of Violence

Steven Pinker spends the first few chapters of The Better Angels of Our Nature proving that violence has declined, knowing that just about no one will believe him.

To accomplish this, he first forces the reader to realize just how violent our past was. It's hard to read parts of the book that describe torture or executions in detail, and to be reminded of just how common they were. Because Pinker is a linguist, he often gives examples of idioms that came from our violent past. Phrases don't get into common usage unless they were common activities, right? Think about the meaning of these phrases:

• Burn at the stake
• Hold his feet to the fire
• Racked with pain
• Drawn and quartered
• Cut off your nose to spite your face

How often do we use those words without thinking about where they came from?

Even our hallowed belief in the violence of modern media is overshadowed: In a recent study of genres in children's entertainment, "Television programs have 4.8 violent scenes per hour; the nursery rhymes had 52.2" (page 21).

Government: Part of the Solution

Pre-state people were the most violent, with territorial defense and raids on neighboring people as a way of life. Pre-agricultural, pre-state people may have had healthier diets than their farming descendants, as Jared Diamond argues, but they were much more likely to die from violence instead.

Pinker emphasizes the importance of looking at the relative numbers of deaths from violence. In an absolute sense, the most deaths have occurred in the 20th century because there were so many more people then. But it's most important to look at a person's likelihood of dying a violent death at any point in time, so numbers such as the percentage or rate per 100,000 are a lot more meaningful. "If I were one of the people who were alive in a particular era," he asks, "what would be the chances that I would be a victim of violence?" (page 47).

Using data from ethnographers studying more recent stateless people plus the prehistoric skeleton record, Pinker comes up with stunning graphs showing the decline of violence after the creation of governments. One graph on page 49 gives a visual overview of the percentage of deaths in warfare. Here are some highlights:

• The archaeological record of war deaths at two dozen prehistoric sites ranges from 60 percent to about 4 percent, with an average of about 15 percent
• In eight recent hunter-gatherer societies, the percentage of war deaths ranges from 32 down to about 4, with an average of about 14
• In 10 contemporary hunter-horticulturalist and other tribal groups, the range is 60 to 12 percent; the average is about 25 percent
• In pre-Cortés Mexico (before 1500 C.E.), under the Aztec and other governments, the rate was about 5 percent. Even comparing pre-Colombian remains of hunter-gatherers with city dwellers like the Inca, where both the time period and part of the world are held constant, the percentages are hunter-gatherers 13.4 percent vs city-dwellers 2.7 percent
• The entire world in the 20th century (including the world wars, genocides, and everything else we believe makes our recent past the most violent of all time): the average is about 3 percent
• The 21st century so far has worldwide percentages more like 3 one-hundredths of a percent (that's 0.0003)

The war deaths graph on page 53 shifts the rates from percentages of the dead to focus on the living, listing the rates per 100,000 people. Expressed that way, wars account for an average of 524 per 100,000 of nonstate peoples. It's much lower for states, even in the 20th century:

• Germany: 144
• Japan: 27
• Russia: 135
• United States: 3.7

Okay, so fewer people, relatively, are killed in wars and war-related violence. But what about homicide? There must be more homicide, right?

No.

Homicide rates per 100,000

• Western Europe in 2000: 1 per 100,000
• U.S. at its highest rates in the 1970s and 80s: 10 per 100,000
• Detroit at its worst: 45 per 100,000
• The Semai, called the "nonviolent people of Malaysia": 30 per 100,000
• The !Kung, called the "harmless people": 41 per 100,000
• The Inuit, who were said to act "never in anger": almost 100 per 100,000

At the Detroit rate, Pinker writes, "you would notice danger in everyday life, and as the rate climbed to 100 per 100,000, the violence would start to affect you personally: assuming you have a hundred relatives, friends, and close acquaintances, then over the course of a decade one of them would probably be killed" (page 52). At a rate of 1,000 per 100,000, you'd lose one person per year, and would have a better than even chance of being killed yourself in your lifetime.

Even the least violent nonstate societies studied by anthropologists in the 20th century -- the Semai and !Kung -- have rates per 100,000 much higher than Europe and as high as the most dangerous cities in the U.S. at its worst point in recent history. (The graph on page 55 compares the average of the 10 U.S. cities that had the highest homicide rates in 1990 with the two pre-state peoples with the lowest homicide rates. In other words, the absolute worst that recent civilization has to offer is compared with the best from precivilization. Their rates are about the same, between 30 and 40 deaths per 100,000.)

How did Europe get to that 1 per 100,000 death rate from homicide? Were Europeans always less violent?

For this, Pinker relies on Ted Gurr, whose ground-breaking work plotted homicides in England from 1200–2000 C.E. , based on records kept in various cities. He found an incredible drop from 110 per 100,000 in 1300s Oxford to less than 1 per 100,000 in London in the 1950s. Pinker writes, "This discovery confounds every stereotype about the idyllic past and the degenerate present. When I surveyed perceptions of violence in an Internet questionnaire, people guessed that 20th-century England was about 14 percent more violent than 14th-century England. In fact it was 95 percent less violent" (page 61). Another historian compiled data from a town in Kent and found a similar trend. Rates in other western European countries also dove from around 100 per 100,000 in the 13th century to 1 per 100,000 in 2000.

Why Is the U.S. More Violent than Europe?

It's hard not to ask why U.S. rates are so much higher than European rates.

First Pinker points out that some U.S. states are indeed more like Europe in their homicide rates (New England, Minnesota, Iowa, the Northern Plains, and the Pacific Northwest). The highest rates in the U.S. are in the South and Southwest.

Pinker argues that government never penetrated in these parts of the country as deeply as it did in New England, for instance. They "never fully signed on to a social contract that would vest the government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. In much of American history, legitimate force was also wielded by posses, vigilantes, lynch mobs, company police, detective agencies, and Pinkertons…" (page 99).

He has more to say about geography, ethnic roots, economic foundations, and gender and religious differences that fed the varying outcomes in what have become our red and blue states. But the upshot is that "The North is the extension of Europe and continued the court- and commerce-driven Civilizing Process that had been gathering momentum since the Middle Ages. The South and West preserved the culture of honor that sprang up in the anarchic parts of the growing country, balanced by their own civilizing forces of churches, families, and temperance" (p. 106).

Most notably, to me, though, is this: "Southerners do not outkill northerners in homicides carried out during robberies…only those sparked by quarrels" (page 99). It's that culture of honor (think dueling, feuds, revenge killings, and women killed to maintain family honor) that is different in the South, as well as other parts of the world that have higher rates of homicide.

There'll be more to come on the culture of honor later this week, when I summarize Pinker's explanation of the reasons for the decline of violence.

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Part 2 of Steven Pinker Week at Daughter Number Three.

James Reston 1968, Steven Pinker 2010

At the end of a visit to the Minnesota History Center's 1968 exhibit (worth a trip, by the way), I saw a pile of Minneapolis Tribunes, reprinted from the December 24, 1968, edition. Old newspapers -- my favorite! So of course, I grabbed one.



After I got used to the jumbo page size (3" wider than today's papers) and appreciated the photo of Earth taken from the first Apollo mission to orbit the moon, my eye fell on an article by New York Times' James Reston. It was titled "As '68 Fades, Optimism Overshadows Gloom."

Keep in mind, Reston wrote this in the year that saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, riots in urban neighborhoods, the Chicago police attacks at the Democratic National Convention, Soviet tanks rolling into Prague, Lyndon Johnson announcing he wouldn't run again and later signing the Civil Rights Act, Richard Nixon winning the presidency, the famous "bra burning" in Atlantic City, the North Korean seizure of the U.S. ship Pueblo, and the Tet offensive and My Lai massacre in the Vietnam war. (Not to mention the premiere of Laugh-In, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, and 2001: A Space Odyssey; the winter and summer Olympics, with fists raised; a demonstration of the first computer mouse; and Valerie Solanas shooting Andy Warhol.)

Reston wrote:

Edgartown, Mass.—Where do we stand at the end of this agonizing year? The pessimists see the nation standing at the twilight of night. The optimists see it standing at the twilight of morning. But what is the outlook for the children, singing the lovely Christmas anthems of peace and reconciliation here in this lovely sea-girt town?

The facts for the moment seem to be with the pessimists, but the tendencies of history for the longer future are probably with the optimists.

The young men die in Vietnam while the old men wrangle in Paris -- that is the depressing fact -- but the turn away from violence has been made. It will take a long time to roll up the barbed wire, but the tendency is toward peace.

It is, of course, a matter of opinion, but even at home we may have made the turn -- without quite knowing it -- toward reconciliation. The evidence is not yet in the headlines, but the American people have drifted just far enough out into dangerous waters in this last year to glimpse the terrible consequences of division, and have, I believe, begun at least to pause and turn back.

There is some hope at the end of the year for progress in the control of arms -- which is the key to the domestic budgets in all the major states. There is movement toward unification of Western Europe, despite President de Gaulle. There is progress toward world monetary reform after the alarms of 1968. And even in the Middle East -- probably the most dangerous spot in the world today -- there is a balance of power and a realization in both Moscow and Washington that the situation must be controlled.

The news of contention, dissent, and violence in the world does not tell the whole story. There is still in this country a vast reservoir of tolerance, good temper, and sympathy among the people. It is seldom in the headlines, but it is there, and in the end it may very well prevail over the forces on the extremes shouting for blood.

Nobody could accuse Gunnar Myrdal. the Swedish scholar, of being a Polyanna about America. He has been studying our racial tensions for two generations and is certainly one of our most severe critics about the problems of Vietnam and the American cities.

Yet, on balance, he comes down on the side of the optimists. "There is no country on earth," he told J. Robert Moskin, the foreign editor of Look Magazine, "which has more of a common, explicit ideology -- more of a common, explicit morality, I might say. This is the old enlightenment ideal: dignity of the human individual, justice between people, liberty, equality of opportunity and brotherhood.

"You could write an American history which was just a history of violence, corruption, of evilness. That type of American history is now becoming quite popular in the rest of the world because of the Vietnam war and other things. But American history, as I see it, is that, in spite of serious setbacks, the trend is toward a gradual, ever better fulfillment of these ideals."

Jean Monnet, another thoughtful European, has been in this country recently, talking to the leaders of the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and he, too, has gone home believing, not that we are going into a tranquil period, not even that we are going to master our problems, but that we are going to control war and inflation and racial tensions and gradually make our way toward a more decent and unified world.

This may not be right, but Monnet, like Myrdal, sees the conflict between facts and tendencies and believes the latter are more important. Myrdal puts it this way:

"Americans, for the time being, are moving to the right, which means away from the American ideals. You might say America is a conservative country but what you have conserved very often are liberal ideals, and now you have been moving away from them. You are dissatisfied, frustrated. This is what I see in the American nation now. I believe this is temporary. This is the reason I am not pessimistic about America.”

I read Reston's words out loud to my family in the car on the way home from the museum because they so closely mirrored overall sense of Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

Near the beginning of the book, Pinker creates an imagined commencement speech from his own college graduation in 1976. The speaker, "an expert on the state of the world in the mid-1970s," offers a list of predictions about the state of the world in 2010, including the end of the Cold War, the rise of China as a major trading partner, no wars between major nations at all, the rise of democracies in many countries in many parts of the world, the end of apartheid without violent recrimination, and even relative peace between Israel and most of its closest neighbors.

"How would the audience have reacted to this outburst of optimism? Those who were listening would have broken out in snickers.... Yet in every case the optimist would have been right" (pages 28-29)

A provocative beginning to a book with a lot to say about the long-term nature of our world. I've spent over a month reading it; I imagine Pinker spent years writing it. So it seems appropriate to dedicate a week of the blog to discussing it.
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This is Part 1 of Steven Pinker Week at Daughter Number Three.

Sunday Pioneer Press Goodness

Today's Sunday paper comparison was won, hands down, by the Pioneer Press with three notable stories plus an excellent Kirk Lyttle illustration (right).

Payouts for Unused Sick Time Spike did a good job of discussing a complicated issue. It included both facts that will outrage some (one former MNSCU president got over $120,000 in unused sick time when he retired) and others that provide balance (the money is put into a Health Savings Account and used to cover the fact that most workers don't get any post-retirement health insurance). Also this: "the payments make up less than 1 percent of what the state spends on salaries and benefits..."

Obviously, having a policy like this discourages abuse of sick days, which is all to the good. It's also arguable that it offsets wages that are generally lower than the private sector, at least in many job categories.

Since the payments are based on the wages of each employee, the people with the biggest payouts were the more highly paid managers, administrators and faculty who worked for decades and took little sick time. The average AFSCME member (which represents snow plow drivers, University department clerks and all the folks at the DMV) retired with just $3,587, which won't cover anyone's health care cost for very long.

In "More for Less" to Prevent Crime? Ruben Rosario showed that he has been reading the studies that come across his desk again. This time it's an economists' look at crime and imprisonment in the U.S.

No one wants to return to the crime rates we had before the 1990s, but our current incarceration rate is higher than acceptable for a democratic republic, and financially unsustainable to boot. The researchers propose rolling the average prison sentence length back to 1984 levels. This would reduce the prison population by 400,000, saving $12 billion (out of a total $70 billion).

They would reallocate that money into three areas:

• More police on the streets
• More funding for Head Start and other early childhood education
• More intervention with young offenders

The cost-benefit ratio of each of those is described. The most impressive, to me, was the idea to provide "functional family therapy" to 300,000 young people on juvenile probation. "FFT costs approximately $2,500 per youth, with a benefit-to-cost ratio that may be as high as 25 to 1 from crime reductions alone."

Finally, Ed Lotterman gives his usual nuanced economic analysis, this time saying Defense, Corporate Spending Can't Be Compared. Defense spending in real dollars is up, way up -- but as a percent of GDP, it's lower than it was during almost all of the Cold War, let alone World War II.


But it's also notable that defense spending bottomed out 1998-2001 and has on an upward track until recently. Some of Lotterman's words:

At some $750 billion, inflation-adjusted spending in fiscal 2011 for military programs of the Department of Defense is at its highest in the past 50 years.

It is more than twice as much as in any fiscal year from 1996 through 2001 and is up $70 billion, or 11 percent, from FY 2009, the last Bush administration budget....

...[the proposed] cuts are from projected levels of outlays that would take place if force levels stayed near current and all scheduled hardware purchases went ahead. Such "cuts" are not the same as actual reductions from this year's spending levels.

This is all background to Lotterman's main point, which is that the Pentagon doesn't operate like a normal business. It has no balance sheet, and doesn't use accrual accounting. This means that equipment purchased in a given year is an expense in that year only, even if the equipment lasts for 30 years, or the bombs aren't used for a decade.

Defense outlays from 2003–2009 understated the true cost of defense because we were using up stocks of ammunition and other expendables and wearing out tanks, Humvees and other Army and Marine Corps machinery much faster than we were replacing them. Even ships and planes not heavily engaged in the war aged. We are catching up by rebuilding war stocks.

He ends by saying he would be willing to maintain current military spending levels if we also went back to the tax levels of the '80s and '90s.

I would also point out another way that the Defense Department is unlike a normal business: It is unauditable. So there's no way to know what happens with any of the money we spend there.

Don't Think Too Much

At lunch today I read the chapter about introspection from Dave McRaney's You Are Not So Smart. The upshot is that we don't know why we like the things we like, but when asked, we'll come up with reasons that have little to do with anything -- but that our brains think sound plausible. The real reasons, which are subconscious, are not accessible to our rational minds.

The archetypal research on this phenomenon asked two sets of college students to select a free poster for their bedroom. The people in one group just took the poster and left; the others had to give a written explanation of why they had made a particular selection. Six months later, the subjects were asked to assess their posters, and the thoughtless people loved theirs, while the analyzers disliked theirs. "The first group, the grab-and-go people, usually picked a nice, fancy painting. The second group...usually picked an inspirational poster with a cat clinging to a rope" (page 65). Essentially, deliberating and verbalizing led to a bad decision.

This, of course, implies that the entire field of criticism is questionable. Writing up what you think of a movie or book may not describe what you like about it in any helpful way. But for me, more importantly, it also calls into question marketing research.

I've always hated marketing research and its effects on product and brand development. I participated in a food focus group once, and remember thinking it was kind of silly. As McRaney puts it, that type of market analysis is "less about the intrinsic quality of the things being judged and more about what the people doing the judging find to be plausible explanations of their own feelings" (page 66).

Taste tests are also called out for a bit of ridicule. Researcher Tim Wilson gave subjects

five varieties of jam which had previously been ranked by Consumer Reports as the first, eleventh, twenty-fourth, thirty-second, and forty-fourth best jams on the market. One group tasted and ranked how good they thought the jams were. The other group had to write out what they did and did not like about each one as they tasted it.... the people who didn't have to explain themselves gravitated toward the ones Consumer Reports said were best. The people forced to introspect rated the jams inconsistently [and] focused on aspects [other than taste] like texture or color of viscosity.

Reading that section made me think of all the taste-test articles I've read in newspaper and magazines. Who has the best ice cream in town? Which tomato tastes best? They're always full of rationalizations from the judges about texture or other details, when it sounds like the only reliable method would be to rank the products but not think about why.

I'll have to remember not too think to hard the next time I'm picking out a poster.

The Toilet of Tomorrow

I am obsessed with toilets, clean drinking water, and the infrastructure needed to make it all work. (Search the word "toilet" on my blog or read this earlier post about the Lifesaver bottle, if you don't believe me.)

So today's Science Friday on NPR was perfect. I only caught part of it while in the car, but I can see they've already got three short videos posted, and I imagine the audio will follow.

The guests were Frank Rijsberma from the Gates Foundation, which since July has been funding research on toilets and their infrastructure; Rose George, who wrote the book The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters; South Florida University engineering professor Daniel Yeh; and Jim McHale, head of engineering for American Standard.

Here are some facts:

• Two-thirds of humanity uses latrines or less (ahem) formal methods. Why?
• Because it costs $1,000 per person to install and maintain the types of sewers used today in the West. (The toilets are less of a cost problem than the sewer and treatment systems.)
• 80 percent of human waste currently goes into rivers and streams, resulting in disease -- causing half of the hospitalizations in developing countries.

The challenge isn't just to remove human waste safely and with as few resources as possible -- it's also to stop thinking of it as waste in the first place and turn it into something useful, like fuel or fertilizer. Westerners could use some help with that, too! Yeh's process, which is shown in one of the videos on the Science Friday site, looks pretty interesting.

The Gates Foundation tomorrow will announce another $48 million in grants to fund research. So far their Reinvent the Toilet challenge has furthered work on anaerobic micro-digesters (turn the waste into methane fuel), algae-based treatment, a range of other small-scale treatment technologies, and a bunch of ways to collect waste safely and cheaply for more centralized processing. The PDF Fact Sheets describing the projects underway are super-fun to read, with lots of references to "fecal sludge stabilization" and "conversion of human excreta to energy and biochar."

It's a fertile area of research (sorry about that) and the SciFri segment is definitely worth a listen.

All Hail the Logarithmic Scale

Logarithmic scales -- best known to me in the Richter Scale, used to measure earthquakes -- seem to be cropping up a lot lately.

Today kottke.org listed a chart from the Minnesota Dental Association of candies that are acidic enough to cause loss of tooth enamel. On the pH sale, where 7 is neutral and 1 is battery acid, anything rated 4 or lower will deteriorate your tooth enamel.

I'm not surprised to see my old favorite, Sweetarts, listed as a 3, and I'm sure the candies listed with lower numbers (the lowest one is 1.6!) are even more sour. My gums (and teeth) quiver at the very thought.

But in reading about the evils of acidic candies, I realized I had completely forgotten my high school science teacher's efforts. pH is logarithmic, so a 3 is 10 times more acidic than a 4; a 2 is 100 times more acidic. As with all my posts tagged Facts I Never Knew, I'm revealing my lack of knowledge, or memory, or attention from some point earlier in my life. I'm sure I learned that fact, but later it slipped out of my head.

Logarithmic scales are used to describe or display information that has a huge range of variation, so much so that if it were displayed arithmetically, there would be no detail visible on the low end. In Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature (lots more info coming on that book here very soon!), he uses logarithmic scales for the graphs showing the decline of violence over the centuries. If he didn't, the recent years would appear to be just about zero.

Some of the best known logarithmic scales:

• sound (bels and decibels)
• f-stops in photographic exposures
• the brightness of stars

Logarithmic scales are particularly useful when visualizing details within a power law distribution, which would otherwise look like a steep drop followed by a long, mostly flat tail:


On an arithmetic scale like the one above, there's not much visual difference between the numbers at the right.


In contrast, a logarithmic scale (note the numbers along the left side go from 1 to 10 to 100, 1,000, etc.), shows plenty of detail on the right side, even though that section of the graph is describing tiny numbers like 100, compared to the top left, which is in the tens of thousands.

Very useful!

But I admit I have to keep reminding myself about the type of scale this is, since my doofy brain wants to assume all graphs are arithmetic. Which fools me momentarily into thinking the power law distribution is a gradual decline instead of the huge drop-off that it is.

What Would David Halberstam Do?

From today's Huffington Post:


Clearly, the best and the brightest are not proofreading the headlines for the publishing house that Arianna built.

Snow and Trash

MinnPost's recent story on snow removal in Minneapolis and St. Paul had some enlightening information:

• Minneapolis has 1,097 miles of streets and parkways; St. Paul has 1,874 lane miles. I was going to proclaim my amazement that St. Paul has so many more miles of streets than Minneapolis, but in writing this I realized that "lane miles" probably doesn't equal what Minneapolis calls "streets," so never mind.
• Minneapolis spends $7 million on snow removal; St. Paul only $550,000 on snow emergencies. For that amount, Minneapolis also plows 400 miles of alleys (while St. Paul residents are on their own for alley plowing) but that doesn't seem like enough to account for the difference.
• The two cities have similar numbers of snow-clearing machines on the street. So again, why is the Minneapolis budget so much larger? Is it an artifact of bookkeeping or budget categories?

As a St. Paul resident, I'm all too aware that we're on our own for alley plowing, as well as trash pickup. The plowing isn't too bad; together with all the neighbors who share the alley, we contract with a private company to plow for everyone. It costs about $25 per household per winter; kind of a deal, really.

Trash pickup is another story. Each household hires its own hauler, which results in five or six different 18-ton trucks going down our alley every week, not to mention driving on our streets, burning more gas than they would have to if there were only one truck in the neighborhood.

I haven't managed to organize my block or nearby neighbors into using the same service, despite a vow to do so. People are attached to their haulers, it seems.

So I guess I'll have to start harassing my city council member to bring it up as a city project to coordinate contracting within areas of the city. They don't have to change over to collection by public workers: just apportion contracts to different areas for each of the contractors that is already providing service. Only get it done more efficiently with less wear and tear on the streets, please!

Banks: Bad for the Blood Pressure

Two stories from the news in just the past few days about banks screwing over regular people:

Today on All Things Considered, the story of the King family of Wisconsin. They applied for a loan modification on their $130,000 house after one wage-earner's hours were cut. Their original loan was at 10 percent (10 percent!) through Countrywide, but the modification to 4 percent was through Bank of America. BoA lost paperwork, said the Kings hadn't paid when they had, and eventually took their house. They're now living in a church basement (with their eight children).

Recently (I wonder if it was after NPR called?), the Kings got a letter from BoA apologizing and saying they were entitled to the loan modification after all, and that they could have their house back. But -- and this is where my blood pressure really spiked -- their house had sat vacant and unheated through the winter, and now has 6 feet of water in the basement and other water and sewage damage upstairs.

So BoA is going to pay to repair the house to its previous condition. Rightly so, but what does that cost? How incredibly STUPID is that? If you know anything about contracting prices, you'd probably agree with me that the cost could easily exceed the value of the house.

And even if this works out for the Kings, there's no guarantee that all of the other people who've been messed up by the banks and their lost paperwork will get their problems straightened out. The NPR story said that tens of thousands of people are in the same situation.

Such as Nancy Gosselin of St. Louis Park, a Minneapolis suburb. She had a second mortgage of just $84,000, originally with a local Bremer Bank, but which was sold to CitiMortgage. Citi failed to properly record a single payment of $584 in 2009. Despite the fact that Gosselin attempted to prove she had made the payment and Bremer even confirmed she had (!), Citi added on a bunch of late fees (up to $2,500), and then began to refuse her subsequent monthly payments because her account was "in arrears." Suddenly she "owed" them $6,000. Citi has put the house up for a sheriff's sale on December 2.

Does that make any sense at all?

The Star Tribune's Whistleblower column has brought media attention to the case, plus the state attorney general's office is involved, so Citi will probably start rectifying Gosselin's situation soon.

But again, is media attention what it takes to get a bank to deal with regular people in a business-like way? That's not a system that people can trust. I hate to make a blanket statement that banks are evil -- in Gosselin's case, locally owned Bremer Bank stood by her -- but there is something very wrong here. Obviously, it's big banks that have lost touch with communities and gotten more concerned with their paperwork and hierarchy than their customers

At the same time, as an NPR follow-up piece to the King story discussed, mortgage interest rates are now at an all-time low, while availability of mortgages is beyond tight. This defies the logic of economics -- if interest is low, it's supposed to loosen the money supply, right?

These same banks are sitting on money that could be leant because they've increased the underwriting requirements until almost no one qualifies.

Where Is the Nanny State When You Need It?

Regular readers may remember that I've received numerous cash offers in the mail from companies who think I've won the lottery, and want to lend me money or buy out my winnings. Their offers usually appear with hand-written envelopes and notes, and contain checks for amounts like $25,000.

Since I've never won a lottery, I write "void" on the checks, tear them up, and toss them in the recycling.

Yesterday's Star Tribune told about that very business of buying up long-term payouts in exchange for short-term money. A young Twin Cities woman, who was awarded about $800,000 in a personal injury settlement because of lead poisoning as a child, has signed away most of her settlement money to two of these companies.

Tasheeka Griffith is legally a vulnerable adult, yet after she turned 18 a few years ago, a court allowed her to sell most of her future income from the settlement. (She had been guaranteed about $1,200 a month for life, with an additional $70,000 payment periodically.)

The Strib story brings out the sorry details:

• Griffith says "a family member initiated most of the transfers and took much of the money."
• She first sold $352,000 for $77,000 (22 cents on the dollar) to Seneca One, one of Daughter Number Three's lottery correspondents.
• Then she signed over $269,000 for $46,500 (17 cents on the dollar) to RSL Funding.
• Both of these transactions were at first rejected by judges, but were permitted later by other judges. Sounds like judge shopping, in my opinion.
• In 2010, she was trying to sell the remaining $299,000 for just $19,000 (a bit over 6 cents on the dollar) to RSL Funding, when Hennepin County judge Mel Dickstein stopped the sale, and appointed a guardian to investigate all of the sales.
• RSL Funding responded by suing Griffith for interference.

Minnesota, along with 46 other states, requires judges to approve these types of buyouts, and the state also requires the sellers to get "independent professional advice." In Griffith's case, the attorney who advised her was paid for by RSL Funding, but even so, told her not to take the deal. Griffith (possibly because of the relative who was involved?) ignored that advice and took the deal anyway.

In the most recent case, the Strib summarizes Griffith's statement to the judge like this: "Griffith told the judge she knew the latest transfer wouldn't be in her best interests, but she needed the $19,000 for an apartment and a car."

This is a classic example of a person who has trouble delaying gratification, a type of executive decision. It's similar to the famous marshmallow experiments by researcher Walter Mischel: 4-year-olds left alone in a room with a marshmallow are told they can have two treats if they just wait 20 minutes. About a third managed to wait. Mischel then gathered data on the kids for decades afterward, and found that those who ate the marshmallow early had SAT scores 200 points lower, on average, than those who didn't, had significantly more behavioral problems, and had trouble maintaining friendships. By their 30s, they were more likely to have higher body mass indexes and problems with addictions.

Getting the car now was more important to Griffith than having financial security in the future. As Dave McRaney's You Are Not So Smart and Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide make very clear, our brains are designed to work against us when it comes to making long-term decisions.

An apartment and a car are arguably more important than a marshmallow, and Griffith's case is further complicated by the possibility of pressure from her relative, that she had brain-damaging lead poisoning as a child, and the fact that she has been declared a vulnerable adult.

But where is our so-called nanny state when you need it?
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Postscript: There are about 20 companies in the business of buying out settlements, and I guess that's enough to require a national association to represent their interests in Washington: The National Association of Settlement Purchasers. I kid you not.

Double Lucky Duckies

Today's Star Tribune op-ed by former reporter Mike Meyers reminded me of Ed Lotterman's recent column that's been sitting on my desk, waiting for me to write about it.

Both articles are about the Right's reviled "Lucky Duckies" -- people who don't pay federal income tax. (The term has been used by both Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.)

Meyers' piece, Soak the Poor, pointed out that the duckies pay plenty of taxes (payroll, state, sales), and that it was radical lefties like Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush who signed into law the tax code changes that created the situation.

The Earned Income Tax Credit, passed on Ford's watch, aims to promote what once was a Republican ideal -- rewarding work. The idea is to encourage people to leave welfare for jobs. If the work pays too little to support a family, the credit aims to help fill the hole in the household budget.

Reagan trumpeted how millions of additional working poor left the tax rolls with the reforms he pushed through Congress in 1986. For once in his life, Reagan was right.

He also makes the point that the wealthy benefit more from government than the poor, albeit in indirect ways that may be hard for them to grasp:

After all, the most prosperous obtain more than most people from a federal government that enforces copyrights and patents, maintains courts that officiate over property-rights disputes and (when the government does its job right) regulates markets to ensure their fairness.

One reason Bill Gates became a billionaire was that the FBI dragged off Windows bootleggers in chains. Great fortunes grow with government cooperation.

Lotterman reminds us that most of those who don't pay federal income tax in a given year either have paid in for years already or are too young to be making enough to reach the taxation threshold:

...a high proportion of nonpayers simply have incomes less than the threshold levels at which any tax is due. These are largely people 25 and under or 65 and older. Virtually all of them either will pay income tax for many years later in life or already have done so for decades. The idea that because they are temporarily in a low-income phase of their lives they will take a cavalier attitude toward the nation's economic health stretches credulity.

He follows that with this: "...available data strongly indicate that well over 90 percent of all individuals spend most of their adult lives in households that pay federal income tax."

And finally, Lotterman's historical coup de grace:

...the federal income tax originally was designed to be paid by only a fraction of all households. When implemented in 1913, only 358,000 returns were filed out of more than 20 million households. In 1940, even as taxes were being ramped up for World War II, only 7.5 million returns owing tax were filed from 35 million households. Yet, there was little thought that these low payment rates somehow undermined the economy or the political system.

Yes, this was due almost entirely to high thresholds for taxable income rather than special credits for education, child care or low earned incomes. Even though the fiscal pressures of World War II dramatically increased taxes, the 1945 personal exemption of $600, when adjusted for inflation, would equal $7,467 today. That is more than twice the $3,700 allowed for 2011 returns. (emphasis added)

How do the flat taxers argue with the historical reality that income tax wasn't designed to be paid by everyone, but only by the better-off among us? They don't.

If the standard personal exemption had kept up with inflation, the Earned Income Tax Credit and other credits aimed at the working poor may not have been necessary. But that would have cost even more in revenue, since better-off Americans would also have been exempt from paying the difference.

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My earlier posts on the "lucky duckies":

Who Are the 1,400?

Is Your Grandma a Welfare Queen?