Carroll County sang this in 1972. We were on the cutting edge of 60s retro. Got in on the ground floor.
Also "Walk Away Renee"
Wednesday, March 05, 2025
It's a Marriage Crisis, Not a Fertility Crisis
Rob Henderson at City Journal writes another summary article about a shift in thinking about what is driving fertility down, Want Higher Birthrates? Promote Marriage. I've been seeing a run on this idea lately, with what look like good numbers to back it up.
The real drivers of falling fertility rates in wealthy countries, it turns out, aren’t professional women but younger, poorer women, who are delaying childbirth and ultimately having fewer children. In the U.S., more than half of the fertility drop since 1990 comes from a sharp decline in births among teenagers, partly because more of them are attending college. Even among those not going to college, birthrates are down. In 1994, the average first-time mother without a college degree was 20. Today, about two-thirds of women without degrees in their twenties still haven’t had a first child.
Yes, I just mentioned urbanism and housing verticality as causes, but I think those are related. It has long been easier for a single person to live in an urban area than a rural or suburban one.
Tuesday, March 04, 2025
Imagine A Mystical Limpet
From Miracles, by CS Lewis
Why are many people prepared in advance to maintain that, whatever else God may be, He is not the concrete, living, willing, and acting God of Christian theology? I think the reason is as follows. Let us suppose a mystical limpet, a sage among limpets, who (rapt in vision) catches a glimpse of what Man is like. In reporting it to his disciples, who have some vision themselves (though less than he) he will have to use many negatives. He will have to tell them that Man has no shell, is not attached to a rock, is not surrounded by water. And his disciples, having a little vision of their own to help them, do get some idea of Man. But then there come erudite limpets, limpets who write histories of philosophy and give lectures on comparative religion, and who have never had any vision of their own. What they get out of the prophetic limpet's words is simply and solely the negatives. From these, uncorrected by any positive insight, they build up a picture of Man as a sort of amorphous jelly (he has no shell) existing nowhere in particular (he is not attached to a rock) and never taking nourishment (there is no water to drift it towards him). And having a traditional reverence for Man they conclude that to be a famished jelly in a dimensionless void is the supreme mode of existence, and reject as crude, materialistic superstition any doctrine which would attribute to Man a definite shape, a structure, and organs.
2010 Links That Are Surprisingly Timely
Make Bureaucrats Justify Their Spending
Government Budget Discussions. If the people in charge of agencies do not make cuts with a scalpel, someone else will come in and do it with an axe.
Change Is Difficult means "Things aren't better because some people won't get in line."
Food for Thought
By replacing your morning coffee with green tea, you can lose...
up to 89% of what little joy you still have in your life.
Monday, March 03, 2025
Love Is A Fallacy
For some reason, this story has stuck with me since 8th grade. It shows the limits of logic.
Max Shulman: Love is a Fallacy
Cool was I and logical. Keen, calculating, perspicacious, acute and astute—I was all of these.
My brain was as powerful as a dynamo, precise as a chemist’s scales, as penetrating as a
scalpel. And—think of it!—I only eighteen.It is not often that one so young has such a giant intellect. Take, for example, Petey Bellows,
my roommate at the university. Same age, same background, but dumb as an ox. A nice
enough fellow, you understand, but nothing upstairs. Emotional type. Unstable.
Impressionable...
Grok 3 and Wokeness
Via Scott Alexander at ACX
If you ask Grok 3 “who is the worst spreader of misinformation”, it will say Elon; if you ask it who deserves the death penalty, it will say Trump (with Elon close behind). I think this helpfully illustrates what the smart people have been saying all along: aside from the topics it explicitly refuses to talk about (like race/IQ), AI’s “woke” opinions aren’t because companies trained it to be “woke”, they’re because liberals are more likely to get their opinions out in long online text, and AI is trained on long online text.
I admit I feel better that Grok doesn't do this because it is nefariously trained to, but as a byproduct of something else.
Or do I? Dangerous statements that have an understandable origin are easier to detect and ferret out, aren't they?
Steven Pinker Resigns from APA
Steven Pinker resigns from the American Psychological Association after 43 years for "virulent Jew hate."
Housing and Fertility
A study on housing and fertility. I should mention that this is in Brazil.
We find that obtaining housing increases the average probability of having a child by 3.8% and the number of children by 3.2%. For 20-25-year-olds, the corresponding effects are 32% and 33%, with no increase in fertility for people above age 40. The lifetime fertility increase for a 20-year old is twice as large from obtaining housing immediately relative to obtaining it at age 30. The increase in fertility is stronger for households in areas with lower quality housing, greater rental expenses relative to income, and those with lower household income and lower female income share. These results suggest that alleviating housing credit and physical space constraints can significantly increase fertility.
Housing for family formation has frequently been put forward as a key item, and verticality is supposed to depress birthrates in cities worldwide. Cities themselves depress birthrates anyway, and have for centuries.
Gondolas in Sugarland
Sugarland TX, in response to rapid growth, is trying ski-lift gondolas for public transport. Roads, tunnels, and elevated trains are expensive. These are cheaper.
Not sure how you do that in Boston in winter, but hey, skiers are used to it and may adapt quickly.
ABBA Reposting
I've been putting up music that I posted fifteen years ago, but nothing from ABBA, which was a staple then. Notice a Swedish group, singing on German television, is choosing to not only sing in translation, but compsing entirely in English in 1975.
Sunday, March 02, 2025
The Maxims of La Rochefoucauld
We Confess Our Small Faults Only To Convince People We Have No Greater Ones
Rob Henderson extracts some of his favorite maxims from the collection.
And you thought I was cynical about human motivations?
5 More Short Links from 2010
She Ain't Heavy, She's My Dachshund
As The Backs Go Tearing By. My mother sang this at Central in the 40s, I sang it in the 60s & 70s.
Tourist Site - Budapest. click to enlarge
Tourist Site - Zurich click
Remember to comment here and not at the 2010 link.
Saturday, March 01, 2025
(Post 2500 -) The Free Market
Reposted From 2010
Conservatives, not just progressives, often fail to remember that free market principles are not something one applies to a society. They are like gravity, always present. Adam Smith's invisible hand was a description of how things work, not advocacy for how things should work. Market principles continued within communist regimes. Governments may ignore them or try to counteract them, but they remain. Ignore or fight against them too much, as in communism, and gravity eventually brings you to earth.
The free market is not the only operating force, of course. As with gravity, other forces can be brought to bear to harness it or hold it at bay for some purpose, such as throwing a stone or building an airplane. Affection, vengeance, drive for power, moral principles - all these can work to channel or oppose the self-interest mechanisms of the market. These are in fact necessary countervailing forces, as they are often the basis of long term "self-interest" in a broader sense. We like to have family and friends, we like to believe our lives have meaning, we give up resources to build systems of law and fairness to inhabit. Corruption - a type of self-interest that does not have regard for these other forces - can harness the free market to benefit the few, leaving only scraps of value outside the centers of power. The free market will continue to work in both places, whether on the scraps or among the cronies, but these circles will then operate independently.
Surprise After Surprise
Another podcast from someone smarter than me, being interviewed by someone who is also smarter than me. My sidebar is full of such folks. (Not all. Some just have topic specialties I enjoy.)
Steve Hsu has a Manifold episode which records his being interviewed by...someone. An anonymous tech person on the Informtion Theory podcast: Adventures in Physics, Trump, and More. Steve is or was a liberal and was dean of research at Michigan State but has surprisingly good things to say about Trump and surprisingly negative ones to say about gov't research, especially NIH. I didn't see either of those coming.
Also AI, Miltech, and Balance of Power. Deepseek is a game-changer because it uses so much less energy; 6th generation Chinese fighter planes; America's chip advantage via Taiwan and Netherlands is not only narrowing, but the Chinese just smuggle in those chips if they really need to. Not in quantity, but still very useful.
From the book club that David Foster and I are in one of the Silicon Valley guys passes along an article about AI coding, The 70% problem. Recommended. By him, I mean. Most of it is beyond me, but some of you like that stuff. Have at it.
Evangelicals and Ukraine...And AVI's Three Year Rule
There is widespread support for Trump's "rudeness and arrogance" to Zelenskiy, including some liberals who would rather not admit it. But I think this will be less popular with evangelicals than his other moves. You will find some fringe fundies who approve of Putin because he is against gay marriage, but as a whole, evangelicals have had far more success evangelising in other places in Eastern Europe. Russia had a strong tradition of underground Baptists during the Soviet era (see One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich), but when the Iron Curtain fell, a lot of the religious revival went straight to the Orthodox Church. Evangelical missionaries had great success in Romania, Ukraine, Slovak Republic, and Hungary. Rather less in former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and the Baltic nations, and not well at all in Belarus and points east.
Many evangelical congregations have Romanians or Ukranians in them, have people who have gone on short term missions there, and support charities there. They have become very tied to the people of these nations, essentially ignoring their corrupt governments as a work in progress that will sort itself into western values...Someday.
It has been 35 years since the Romanian revolution, and early on, Americans rooted for all the formerly communist nations to not fall prey to Russian expansionism. If Iliescu was actually no better than Ceausescu, that was ignored because the danger was that it would go back. That is still not outside the realm of possibility, and Moldova and the Baltic nations are on edge with what has happened in Ukraine. Yet it is progressively less likely that the Russians could do any such thing for the next decade or so.
I have some parallels. We resettled Laotian refugees in the 80s, and I boned up on that country's politics and people left behind, because I knew that the Syha's still cared about it. I haven't got a clue what is happening in Laos now, and frankly, I don't care. We worked with (South) Sudanese refugees not so many years ago and still have some connection. We were excited that South Sudan became independent in 2011 after horrifying persecution and oppression.
But of course, the South Sudanese were still capable of getting into wars between Dinka and Nuer over cattle. What is up now? I don't know. Maybe I should care, but I don't. As with Hungary, Romania, Turkey, Kosovo, etc, I don't even know who to pretend are the good guys. There have been Americans since the beginning who have insisted that the various factions in Ukraine are all so corrupt that we should have nothing to do with any of them, and they have receipts. Some liberals and libertarians, but a fair number of conservatives of paleo stripe have been beating out that rhythm on the drum for a few years, Putin or no.
For evangelicals who have to mix with liberals every day it has been something of a respite as well. They finally have something they can hold in common, rooting for Ukraine. Trump and Vance have seemed obnoxious, and most modern Christians of all sorts have a lot of the Gospel of Nice under the hood. Jeez, can't you guys take a hard line more quietly, without having to be rude about it?
But now the full question is on the table, whether we like it or not: regardless of what happened before, What are we willing to do now? Russia invaded almost exactly three years ago, and I have long noted that Americans don't even like their own wars to go longer than three years, never mind anyone else's with our money. We will tolerate endless low-intensity warfare it seems, but not sharp hostilities. Billions, not millions of dollars have gone unaccounted for. My feelings are quite mixed at this point. As far as any war can be said to have started at a particular point, this one started in 2014. Two mostly-Russian provinces of Ukraine attempted to break away, and the Russians poured resources into them. The Ukrainians tried to prevent them. That still looks like Russian aggression, but you could stretch a point...
Feb 2022 invasion is unarguably Russian.
So what are my possible bad reasons for this uncertainty of position? Am I being a typical American who just gets tired of hearing about a war and wants it to go away, whether we are winning, losing, or treading water? Am I seeing Ukraine as a Romanian equivalent and wanting them to prevail against Russians because I just always will? Have I become increasingly isolationist because president after president has punched tar babies of countries? Do I just not want to hurt my wife's very pro-Ukraine feelings? Am I becoming a MAGAhead, or reflexively disliking something because liberals like it? Does Zelenskiy being an obvious arrogant prick about this sway me more than it should? I harp on all of us having buried and unattractive motives for our mostly-performative politics. Shouldn't I be especially alert to that here?
Accuse me of anything. I might cop to it.
Friday, February 28, 2025
Thursday, February 27, 2025
There Shall Be No Poor Among You
Reposted from 2010. Good comments
There is a new book by this title - I know nothing about it - and several interesting commentaries online concerning subtleties that might be missed at first reading. If you're interested in that sort of thing. But I think this is the sort of Bible passage you can have a go at even without a lot of background.
Discuss.
Deuteronomy 15 (New International Version)
The Year for Canceling Debts
1 At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts. 2 This is how it is to be done: Every creditor shall cancel the loan he has made to his fellow Israelite. He shall not require payment from his fellow Israelite or brother, because the LORD's time for canceling debts has been proclaimed. 3 You may require payment from a foreigner, but you must cancel any debt your brother owes you. 4 However, there should be no poor among you, for in the land the LORD your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, he will richly bless you, 5 if only you fully obey the LORD your God and are careful to follow all these commands I am giving you today. 6 For the LORD your God will bless you as he has promised, and you will lend to many nations but will borrow from none. You will rule over many nations but none will rule over you.
7 If there is a poor man among your brothers in any of the towns of the land that the LORD your God is giving you, do not be hardhearted or tightfisted toward your poor brother. 8 Rather be openhanded and freely lend him whatever he needs. 9 Be careful not to harbor this wicked thought: "The seventh year, the year for canceling debts, is near," so that you do not show ill will toward your needy brother and give him nothing. He may then appeal to the LORD against you, and you will be found guilty of sin. 10 Give generously to him and do so without a grudging heart; then because of this the LORD your God will bless you in all your work and in everything you put your hand to. 11 There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land.
Freeing Servants
12 If a fellow Hebrew, a man or a woman, sells himself to you and serves you six years, in the seventh year you must let him go free. 13 And when you release him, do not send him away empty-handed. 14 Supply him liberally from your flock, your threshing floor and your winepress. Give to him as the LORD your God has blessed you. 15 Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the LORD your God redeemed you. That is why I give you this command today.
16 But if your servant says to you, "I do not want to leave you," because he loves you and your family and is well off with you, 17 then take an awl and push it through his ear lobe into the door, and he will become your servant for life. Do the same for your maidservant.
18 Do not consider it a hardship to set your servant free, because his service to you these six years has been worth twice as much as that of a hired hand. And the LORD your God will bless you in everything you do.
Fiskebackskil, Sweden
The town my great grandfather left in 1881 at the age of 14 to go to sea, eventually coming to America after seeing Hong Kong and Rio
Kid Sports
Reposted from 2010
Neo had a post, touched off by yet another story of a town that wanted to switch entirely to cooperative games, about the lessons learned through competitive sports. I commented there, but thoughts do rattle around in my head whenever the subject comes up. There has certainly been a change over the decades in American culture, but I don’t know if it is as thorough as claimed. In our common mythology, boys used to play pick-up games without much adult supervision and would play for hours, especially in summer. Presently, they play sports highly-supervised by adults, who ruin things somehow. Girls were unwelcome and rare in the old days, while co-ed games until puberty are more encouraged now.
As we can always find data to support a theory already believed, this view has become the common wisdom. I’d like to revisit it and would appreciate your collective knowledge. And - if you have any friends form other sites who might be interested, then - Red Rover, Red Rover, send Tommy right over. All conclusions are tentative, so theories are welcome even if the initial evidence for your idea is scant.
The first great exception to the myth is playground basketball, especially in cities. It is unsupervised, self-organising, and goes on for hours, just as we imagine happened in the old days.
OTOH, game equipment is certainly more standardised now, so even pickup games have more regularity than the games I recall playing in the 60’s and hearing about prior to that. An official size and weight ball in any sport was not a given in my youth, and was regarded as a treasure. Rich kids had sewn, intact footballs, basketballs, and baseballs. We often made due with worn tennis balls or cheap plastic items. (Tug of War with a cheap garden hose is a really bad idea, BTW.) These often required rule adjustments. Fields of play were oddly shaped and required adaptation as well: slopes, streets, bushes. These lend themselves more to informal games of catch and individual tricks.
My sons played both school sports and town sports, more than I did. But in my era we had church leagues, boy scouts, and day camps; the first two of those were even more common in earlier eras than mine.
Girls didn’t play in the defined sports much, but certainly played often in the competitive games of Eggs (Spud), Kick the Can, Red Rover, a dozen versions of Tag, Hide and Go Seek, Giant Steps, Red Light – I’m sure there were others. They rode bikes with us, though any boy and girl who rode out of sight together were subject to immediate teasing. It was these games, more than the sports, which were spontaneous and self-organising. Sports with any group larger than the usual half-dozen from your immediate area were spent in endless arguments about rules and infractions. Not a lot of actual running and throwing got done. The rules of games were more generally agreed upon. Or perhaps the whole dynamic of arguing about it was different with girls present. I seem to recall the girls being the arbiters and setting the rules more authoritatively, though age was an even more powerful vehicle of authority. I suppose there are important adult lessons to be learned from that as well.
My Dad talked about playing for hours when young. But he also talked about having lots of work to do and being isolated from other boys except the Greenwoods on the next farm. I suspect there were Saturday games occasionally allowed to go on for hours, rather than sports every afternoon, and these were well-remembered, taking up increasing memory space as he aged. Kids went swimming – I doubt think that racing was more than an occasional part of that anywhere. Wrestling, breath-holding, and swinging were more likely. In Manchester there was The Ledge, where boys jumped off cliffs into the water of an old granite quarry. The only competition was how high you dared jump from. Oh, and macho posturing and bragging, but that’s a given.
In our town, by the way, the intensity of competition increases with age. In T-ball, everyone bats every inning and runs to first base - no further. It doesn't matter what the rule is about throwing kids out on the basepaths, because it never happens. By minor leagues (up to age 12) however, the game is fully competitive.
Budget Cuts
A new worry occurred to me today. I an confident that a thousand or a million other people have also had it in the last few weeks, but I like this new theory because (ahem! ahem!) it is mine. The totals of b illions saved have been amazing. Thrilling to those supporting them, ghastly to those opposint them, but certainly bigger than anything we have seen.
What if we reach a really big number and pat ourselves on the backs and say job well done and move on to some new focus, but it's still just a drop in the bucket. What if ten years from now, if the Sweet Meteor of Death doesn't take us out in 2032, there are graphs all over the internet showing that there was a slight downturn in growth of government starting in 2025, but the overall trend is not much changed. Barely dented. While we are still toasting each other about how wise we are.
I know we don't really believe in the deficit. We have been told for years that it is going to consume us - any day now, just you wait - but it hasn't. We know from so many other things that things change slowly, slowly, then all at once. You and your girlfriend argue for months and grind your teeth over more and more little things and nothing changes, until one day you have no girlfriend. It is the reasoning that those worrying about climate change or species extinction use. Slowly, slowly, then overnight, and somewhere in that slowly was a point of no return that we missed on the way by.
Yet the numbers really have grown over the last few years. We resist the cuts: the children need shoes, honey! And they do need shoes, but now even shoes are on the table. Er, family budget cut menu. Shoes on the table, shoes on the menu, this metaphor isn't holding up well, but you take my point.
Conflict Theory Vs. Mistake Theory
From the continuing series of People Smarter Than Me.
Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten (ACX): Why I Am Not a Conflict Theorist .
I had not heard the phrases conflict theory and mistake theory before, but we have been over similar territory many times here.
Conflict theory is the belief that political disagreements come from material conflict. So for example, if rich people support capitalism, and poor people support socialism, this isn’t because one side doesn’t understand economics. It’s because rich people correctly believe capitalism is good for the rich, and poor people correctly believe socialism is good for the poor. Or if white people are racist, it’s not because they have some kind of mistaken stereotypes that need to be corrected - it’s because they correctly believe racism is good for white people...I think simple versions of conflict theory are clearly wrong. This doesn’t mean that simple versions of mistake theory (the idea that people disagree because of reasoning errors, like not understanding Economics 101) are automatically right. But it gives some leeway for thinking harder about how reasoning errors and other kinds of error interact.
As usual, I do find myself wishing there were someone smart enough to serve as an editor for Dr. Alexander, but he is thorough. He goes issue by issue that our beliefs cannot stem only from self-interest - not on either side, whatever we accuse our opponents of - nor can they be solely attributed to being uniformed or untrained. SALT taxes, vaccinations, climate, immigration, Ukraine, lockdowns, Gaza, the deficit - the self interest is there for a few, and for many of us to a small degree. But in general, no. He does identify a few issues that might be more a product of self-interest.
It is related to CS Lewis's Bulverism, focusing on some status of the speaker rather than the reasonableness of the argument. Alexander finds that where we stand on issues is more related to psychological factors. I said in the 80s that 50% of all political positions are performative. By the 90s I had upped that to 75%, and by the 00s I said more than half seriously that I now believed that 90% of our political beliefs are performative, to fit in, or show off, or belittle others. Human beings are not that unreasonable. In pure situations where they are motivated for real results they can strategise. But we take shortcuts, because our real purpose is not to arrive at the right answer.
At this point I just hope that some residue of my beliefs, when subjected to consuming fire, turn out to have their origin in desire to find the truth.
Planned Parenthood
PJ Media has a response to a NYT article about Planned Parenthood clinics being less able to provide services other than abortion because of tight budgets - but abortion services are thriving. PJM frames this as the NYT inadvertently admitting what pro-lifers have said all along: that PP is primarily about abortions, while the other services are for cover.
I don't go to PJ Media that much. Not because I find it inaccurate, but because it tends to tell you only one side of the story, and it is unnecessarily inflammatory. Sometimes it exaggerates and leaves out important details. But on this one, I think they hit the mark about right. The NYT, in an effort to show how beleaguered Planned Parenthood's other services have become, has let the cat out of the bag that providing abortions is still the main priority.
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