Tag Archives: Current Affairs

New Paleolithic Mating

By Robin Hanson · February 14, 2010 6:00 am · Comments (36)

Two women on modern mating.  Lori Gottlieb:

A couple of years ago, I wrote an essay for the Atlantic titled “Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough,” in which I said that having found myself still single at 40 … had I known when I was younger what would make me happy when it came to marriage and family, I would have made very different choices in my dating life. … The majority of single women who responded to a survey I sent out said that getting 80 percent of what they wanted in a mate would be “settling.” The majority of single men said finding a woman with 80 percent of what they wanted would be “a catch.” …

Many single women — mostly those in their 20s — went wild with rage and disdain for my confession: … I’d happily take the 80 percent, if only it was as available to me as it had been when I was 30. …  Suddenly I was “ageist,” “sexist” and “anti-feminist.” … I’ll admit, just a few years earlier, I might have been one of the women bashing this Lori Gottlieb chick for saying the unthinkable. I, too, felt that women should “have it all” (whatever unrealistic ideal I took that to be) and that anyone who suggested otherwise was out of touch, offensive or just plain off her rocker. Compromise? No way. That would mean not being true to myself.  A lot of women my age and younger grew up thinking this way. … We’re supposed to have high standards, and if a guy doesn’t meet them, we should be gloriously fulfilled on our own. … According to some readers, I was an affront to the entire women’s movement … I remember watching a group of young women on the “Today” show discussing my article and the fact that they’d rather be single than with Mr. Good Enough. …

It’s probably no accident that once women adopted this “I don’t need a man” attitude, many were left without men. According to the Census Bureau, the percentage of never-married women ages 25 to 44 more than doubled between 1970 and 2006. …  Another woman proudly said she could easily get her sexual needs taken care of without marriage. So what? … 4 percent of women said what they wanted most from marriage was sex, while 75 percent said it was companionship.

Charlotte Allen:

The very day, March 17, 2005, that Scott Peterson—sentenced to death in California for killing his wife and unborn son and throwing their remains into San Francisco Bay—took up residence on San Quentin’s death row, he received three-dozen phone calls from smitten women, including an 18-year-old who wanted to become his second wife. According to an April story in People, Peterson is still being flooded with letters from female admirers almost five years later, many of the mash notes containing checks to pay for his commissary charges. That’s par for the course on death row, where the rule is: The more notorious the killer, the more fan mail and marriage proposals. The most fan-mail-saturated killer in San Quentin is Richard Allen Davis, who in 1993 kidnapped 12-year-old Polly Klaas at knifepoint from her home in Petaluma, Calif., killed her, and buried her in a shallow grave. … Continue Reading "New Paleolithic Mating" »

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Dreamtime Drama

By Robin Hanson · February 8, 2010 8:00 pm · Comments (24)

After a record two feet of snow this weekend, my area (DC) has another 5-9 inches coming tomorrow.  My street hasn’t been plowed, and likely won’t be until next week.  So this might seem one of those “stories to tell your grandkids.”  Except, well, we have water, power, heat, tv, internet, plenty of food, and no more than the usual work to do.  Not exactly a disaster story for the ages.

This is of course one of the prices we pay for being dreamtime richies – stories about our suffering just aren’t going to elicit much sympathy from our distant descendants.  We can hardly get worked up about them ourselves.  The far future may, however, be fascinated to gawk at our freaky facades, ginormous growth, strange scenarios, and bizarre beliefs.  We are history’s circus; which circus wonder are you?

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Uppity China

By Robin Hanson · January 31, 2010 11:35 am · Comments (19)

He started it!  I was just minding my own business when out of the blue he looked at me funny.  So I had to clock him. (bullies everywhere)

A month ago I reported:

I hear a lot of China bashing these days.  To check, I surveyed the last ten China new articles in the Post and NYT. … Yup, top US newspapers are in full fledged China bashing mode.

Today’s top article at WashingtonPost.com is “China’s strident tone raises concerns”:

China’s indignant reaction to the announcement of U.S. plans to sell weapons to Taiwan appears to be in keeping with a new triumphalist attitude from Beijing that is worrying governments and analysts across the globe.  From the Copenhagen climate change conference to Internet freedom to China’s border with India, China observers have noticed a tough tone emanating from its government. …

“The Chinese find with startling speed that people have come to view them as a major global player. And that has fed a sense of confidence.”  Lieberthal said another factor in China’s new tone is a sense that after two centuries of exploitation by the West, China is resuming its role as one of the great nations of the world.

This new posture has befuddled Western officials and analysts. … Analysts say a combination of hubris and insecurity appears to be driving China’s mood. … What happens next will be crucial. China quietly sanctioned several U.S. companies for participating in such weapons sales in the past. However, it would mark a major change if China makes the list public.

So Western analysts are befuddled that China is surprising uppity – analyst explanations and remedies center on Chinese psychology and actions; surely nothing the West has done could be part of the explanation.  “We were just standing here minding our own business when they just went all crazy …”

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Food Not Med

By Robin Hanson · January 22, 2010 5:20 pm · Comments (15)

Listening to the radio this morning to reporters visiting the epicenter of the Haitian quake, I heard locals complaining that no one had come to help them.  Locals said they need food, water, and shelter; when rains come they will get cold.  The reporters, however, seemed obsessed with noting that locals need medicine.  They also focused on local efforts to dig out and bury their dead.

Given their desperate need for food, water, and shelter, it seems unlikely to me that medicine is such a priority.  Furthermore, experts say, dead bodies are just not a problem:

Corpses do not represent a public health threat. When death is due to the initial impact of the event and not because of disease, dead bodies have not been associated with outbreaks.

I’m not sure to what extent we are seeing a bias in Haitians, in the reporters, or in their US audience.  But surely epicenter Haitians have more important worries than medicine and dead bodies.

Added:  The contrast between the oh so visible US concern and US planes flying around Haiti with loudspeakers warning locals not to try to boat it to the US is quite striking.  Clearly at some level US folks realize they could help Haitians most by letting them immigrate.  If we (thought we) cared less and were instead eager to gain migrant farm workers and household servants, we might end up helping Haitians more.

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So Much Good News

By Robin Hanson · January 21, 2010 10:50 pm · Comments (57)

In the US, Med Reform seems dead and the Supreme Court upholds free speech big-time.  World wide, the modal (log) income, i.e., the most common income level world-wide, has increased by a factor of ten in just 40 years!

worldincome2aworldincome2bHT Rob Wiblin.

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Celebrating Compromise

By Robin Hanson · January 12, 2010 4:00 pm · Comments (17)

Crapgame:  Then make a DEAL!
Big Joe:  What kind of deal?
Crapgame:  A DEAL, deal! Maybe the guy’s a Republican. “Business is business,” right?   [Famous scene from 1970 movie Kelly's Heroes]

Invictus is a decent movie – at 80 years old Clint Eastwood is still in top form.  More interesting is that Invictus, like Kelly’s Heroes, is a rare movie celebrating compromise, the key virtue of “dealism,” or economic efficiency.

The movie shows Nelson Mandela, new black leader of previously white-run South Africa, trying to unite suspicious whites with blacks eager for revenge.  Of course Mandela achieves this not by touting the advantages of peace and prosperity, but via pride in beating a common enemy: the South African rugby team wins the world cup.  The title of the movie comes from a poem that inspired Mandella in prison, a poem all about defiance, self-respect, and not a whiff of compromise.

All of which shows just how hard it is to inspire passion for compromise; sadly, no one goes to the barricades for efficiency.  The best this movie can offer is that peace and compromise can help you crush your enemies into smoldering ruins.  Whee.

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This Isn’t News

By Robin Hanson · January 3, 2010 10:05 am · Comments (6)

To those with a good basic econ education, it isn’t news that the world economy continues to grow.  Nevertheless, it is worth remembering and repeating from time to time.  Tyler Cowen:

It may not feel that way right now, but the last 10 years may go down in world history as a big success. … Steady economic growth is an underreported news story — and to our own detriment. As human beings, we are prone to focus on very dramatic, visible events, such as confrontations with political enemies or the personal qualities of leaders, whether good or bad. We turn information about politics and economics into stories of good guys versus bad guys and identify progress with the triumph of the good guys. In the process, it’s easy to neglect the underlying forces that improve life in small, hard-to-observe ways, culminating in important changes.

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Santa: Naughty Or Nice?

By Robin Hanson · December 21, 2009 3:10 pm · Comments (33)

Imagine you managed an organization that could:

  • Deliver several pounds of goods undetected and unstoppable, into several hundred million homes worldwide all on the same night, and to select which among thousands of possible goods go to which homes.
  • Manufacture many tens of dollars worth of state of the art goods, distributed among thousands of types of goods, for each of those homes.
  • Revamp your manufacturing line yearly, to keep up with changing conditions.
  • Track the behavior of billions of people in detail, and know their parents standards for “naughty” or “nice”, enough to classify as naughty or nice.
  • Estimate what goods people want, as accurately as could their parents.
  • Do all this year after year, always on the same day, whether others liked it or not.
  • Do all this completely “off the grid,” at an undisclosed location in complete secrecy, with unidentified members who never talk to anyone about their activities, who use no noticeable inputs from elsewhere, and who have no noticeable waste emissions.

Now consider what you could accomplish with such capabilities.  Toward the naughty side, you could achieve a military takeover of most of the world, and maintain totalitarian control thereafter.  Cooperative homes get good stuff; uncooperative homes get bombs; pretty soon they’d fall in line.

On the nice side, you could deliver food, medicine, tools, and self-defense weapons to a bottom billion of the world’s poor, sick, or oppressed.  You could also identify and punish the world’s corrupt and criminal, and reward the innovative and generous.  You could take a huge bite out of poverty, crime, corruption, and oppression.

Clearly Santa is one very powerful dude; the whole world pretty much hangs on his choice.  So what does Santa actually do? He gives toys to billions of children, mostly ignoring adults. He gives far more to rich kids than to poor kids, and he greatly favors cultures that celebrate his name over others. He mostly ignores his ability to sort people into naughty and nice; they are pretty much all labeled nice.  (Have you ever even heard of a kid who got coal? Wouldn’t that make the news?)

So where does this put Santa on the naughty vs. nice spectrum?  I’d say “mildly positive eccentric.”  Yes he is clearly far less naughty than he could be, but he is also far less nice than possible. He uses his abilities to help others, and his attention is admirably global. But he helps far less than he could, he chooses his own rather odd way to help, and he prefers to help high status folks who celebrate his eccentric contribution. Apparently even in our dreams this is about as much as we dare hope for from a human, no matter how powerful. Deep down we know human charity is not about help, even if it does sometimes help.

Added 7:30p:  Why, over the last century, do parents lie more about Santa to make kids happy, with kids more dissappointed to learn the truth, and yet finding out more often from those same parents?  Source:

A study from 1896 involving 1,500 children aged 7 to 13, which was repeated in 1979. …  More than 22 percent in the 1896 study admitted to being disappointed compared with 39 percent in the 1979 study. But only 2 percent and 6 percent, respectively, felt betrayed. … Close to 25 percent of children in the 1896 study learned the truth about Santa from their parents, compared with 40 per cent in 1979. … In 1896, 54 percent of parents said they perpetuated the myth of Santa since it made their children happy; compared with 73 percent in 1979 and 80 percent in 2000.

Added 23Dec: Adam Ozimek riffs wittily.

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Doubling Down On US Status

By Robin Hanson · December 16, 2009 2:35 pm · Comments (44)

We humans are designed to not to notice how much we want and work to achieve status; we often misunderstand our behavior by ignoring underlying status drives.  Similarly, discussions of national politics too often ignore status explanations for national policies.

I recently heard an Iranian democracy activist explain that more democracy would be good for Iran because democracy is more respected by the world.  I’ve heard Russia indulges inefficient industries over exploiting its vast natural resources because resource selling nations are low status.  And I recall a famous explanation for missteps by declining empires like Spain and England is their refusing to acknowledge falling relative capabilities.

Such status stories help explain recent events here in the US:

1. We think we have the world’s largest homes and biggest homeowner fraction.  So we subsidized more folks to have more bigger homes.  Even though that went terribly wrong, we refuse to admit we went too far and are still trying hard to subsidize home ownership.

2. We think we have the world center of finance and banking.  When that badly stumbled and threatened to greatly shrink, we instead saved it at enormous expense.  When those banks and their execs then quickly bounced back, we needed to show them who’s boss.  To show we run them, they don’t run us, we are passing finance reform to “protect consumers,” though unprotected consumers had little to do with the crash.

3. We think we gave cheap cars to the world, and so can’t stand to see US auto companies collapse and be replaced by foreign ones.  So we bought and are subsidizing our still-bleeding car companies.

4. We are proud of being the only folks to send men to the Moon, and so still spend billions on a manned space program even though we have little interest in whatever it is they are doing.

5. We think we saved the world from both Nazism and Communism, and are now saving it from radical Islamists.  Even though our Iraq venture has not gone well, we are staying there, and greatly increasing our presence in Afghanistan.  We are expanding a military larger than the rest of the world’s military combined.  We are proud of our elderly, especially veterans, for helping us to save the world, and borrow to ensure they retire in comfort.

6. Many in the US are ashamed that Europe seems greener than us, and want to fix that by taxing carbon more to get closer to European green levels.  But many of us are proud of having bigger homes, cars, TVs, etc, and so aren’t actually willing to go that green.  Unstoppable force meets immovable object, here we come.

7.  We think we brought modern med to the world and lead the world in med innovation and med tech.  So we spend far more on med than anywhere else, and let others free ride on our innovation.  But many of us are ashamed that we seem less caring of our own than Europeans, who make sure everyone gets med.  So we are trying to add more regulation to ensure more med use here.  While in most nations regulation reduces medical spending, we won’t cut back on med use since we are so proud of being med leaders.

8. We are proud of being world leaders in music and movies.  Since those industries are threatened by tech induced loss of copyright, we are willing to give up lots behind the scenes to get others to help save copyright.  My guess: we will give away meaningful protections for free speech; we are proud of having the most free speech, and so don’t really mind others having less, or even us having less, as long as we still have the most.

9. We are proud that we constrain our police via civil rights, we don’t use torture as punishment, we aren’t so nosy as to care if neighbors are criminals, and yet we are “tough” on drug crimes.  We manage this via unparalleled rates of (and cost of) prison.

The pattern: each time we fail in something where we see (or want to see) ourselves as a world leader, we double down, borrowing money to gamble that we can win it all back and stay ahead in everything.  But that extra spending stresses the rest of our systems, making them more likely to fail.  It is hard to see how this ends well; pride, indeed, goeth before a fall.

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Two Faces of Dreamtime

By Robin Hanson · December 12, 2009 11:50 am · Comments (23)

In the US:

moremystic

In China:

More than 30 years after China’s one-child policy was introduced, creating two generations of notoriously chubby, spoiled only children affectionately nicknamed “little emperors,” a population crisis is looming. … The average birthrate has plummeted to 1.8 children per couple. …  The imbalance is worse in wealthy coastal cities with highly educated populations, such as Shanghai. Last year, … [its] birthrate was less than one child per couple. …

Officials have gradually softened their stance on the one-child policy. … In July, Shanghai became the first Chinese city to launch an aggressive campaign to encourage more births, … [but its] more urban districts report no change. …

Financial considerations are probably the main reason. … “We were at the center of our families and used to everyone taking care of us. We are not used to taking care of and don’t really want to take care of others.” … It’s about being successful enough to be selfish. … “A mother has to give up at least two years of her social life. … You have to remodel your apartment … You have to have a résumé ready by the time the child is 9 months old for the best preschools.” Most of his friends are willing to deal with this once, Chen said, but not twice.

Try to see such events via the eyes of our distant descendants in a few centuries or millennia, with a vast powerful civilization of folks who, like our distant ancestors, are happy but poor, achieving personal goals via behaviors well adapted to a larger civilization’s preservation and growth.  They will truly marvel at our dreamtime, when folks were so individually rich and self-indulgent that they mainly believed whatever it seemed pleasant to believe, and did whatever it seemed pleasant to do.  Compared to our descendants:

Our lives [today] are far more dominated by consequential delusions: wildly false beliefs and non-adaptive values that matter.

Added: Since 1990, US folks who have felt in touch with dead folks is up 17 to 29%, and those who have been in the presence of a ghost is up 9 to 18%.

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