How Bad Are Things Really?

Another solid, numbers-and-logic based essay at ACX: Vibesession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know. I have seen a few people trying to sort this out, and this is as good or better than any.

Young people complain they’ve been permanently locked out of opportunity. They will never become homeowners, never be able to support a family, only keep treading water at precarious gig jobs forever. They got a 5.9 GPA and couldn’t get into college; they applied to 2,051 companies in the past week without so much as a politely-phrased rejection. Sometime in the 1990s, the Boomers ripped up the social contract where hard work leads to a pleasant middle-class life, replacing it with a hellworld where you will own nothing and numb the pain with algorithmic slop. The only live political question is whether to blame immigrants, blame billionaires, or just trade crypto in the hopes that some memecoin buys you a ticket out of the permanent underclass.

Meanwhile, economists say things have never been better.

Are the youth succumbing to a “negativity bias” where they see the past through “rose-colored glasses”? Are the economists looking at some ivory tower High Modernist metric that fails to capture real life? Or is there something more complicated going on? 

Alexander first assesses the vibes according to usual metrics of consumer confidence and optimism. Are people, especially young people that discouraged and pessimistic or is this just click-seekers on social media? Answer: It's overstated but real. Next he looks at economists assessment of how we are doing, over the last five months, five years, and five decades. The short answer: Things are unevenly better all the time, but a few key things are worse.

And in particular, housing costs were at historic lows 2010-2012 - mortgages, interest rates, rents - and have risen since then. So they aren't bad until the covid years, but if you are young, they sure look it. That could be your vibes right there. 

What looks like a throwaway line jumped off the page at me: Partly because the bill for ~50 years of NIMBYism has finally come due.  Maybe I am overreading that, but it rings true. Housing is expensive because we don't have enough of it. Contractors make more money on bigger houses on more acreage, so that's what they build.  Everyone knows we need to build more houses of less than 2500sf on 2 acres that cost half a million, but all the ways of getting there run into the roadblock of towns and neighborhoods not wanting that. 

I was going to guess that getting more people into affordable houses would solve both the wealth accumulation and the vibes, because once people are in a house they are more likely to give up their weekends and travel, stay married, and volunteer in the community. But that's the reasoning that got us into the housing bubble of 2008.  Maybe that would have not been as bad if we had regulated the mortgage market more tightly.  Rule of thumb: When a percentage of Republicans asks for tighter regulations while everyone else is opening the throttle, that counterintuitiveness is worth examining. 

Still, I have to think getting to the More Housing side of things would help. 

I draw your attention to the section "The Brooklyn Theory of Everything," for some additional surprising insights. 

Come Thou Long Expected Jesus

I mentioned our home Advent liturgy, which we use as a table grace. We have a responsive reading from Isaiah, a short reading around the themes of each week - light, lamb, king, hope - light the candles, and close with this.

The lyrics are Charles Wesley, the tune is Stuttgart.
 

Tallis Canon

It is also a round.  But it doesn't have to be, does it?

 

Testing the Limits

 Evolution is as lazy as it can possibly be without you dying. That's what efficiency means.

Nature Nurture Debate

 The Good News Is That One Side Has Definitively Won The Missing Heritability Debate A simply great summary of the recent controversy on heritability over at ACX.  

…the bad news is that they can’t agree which one 

 The hereditarians declared victory (Cremieux on X, Emil Kirkegaard on Substack) 

But the nurturists declared victory (Sasha Gusev on Substack) 

I have leaned toward the former view for years, but want to get this right.  Cremieux and Emil Kirkegaard claim that their opponents are wrong because of initial bias and not wanting to look at the data. Sasha Gusev claims that his opponents are wrong because they are pig-headed fools and generally stupid.  Longtime readers know where I am going to put my trust on that one.

But still, I want to get it right, and Scott Alexander explains it to me in terms I can understand. I commented there. 

Somalis

I don't object to making group immigration decisions on the basis of the best group information we have available of who will be most likely to adapt to American ideals.  These are people we don't know all that well, even after vetting, and we are asking current citizens - often our poorest citizens - to absorb the risks while the wealthy are separated from the problem.

But once you are here you are judged as an individual, and Trump is simply wrong to judge the group. 

The opposite argument, that "most Somalis are not criminals" is a mild version of the identity politics that conservatives and libertarians are supposed to reject. That is true.  90% of everyone is not criminals, and on the front side we are allowed to differentiate between 90 and 99% Not Criminals. But once they are here that goes out the door.  We don't accept that they should have more lenient rules because they are marginalised people; we should not accept that they have stricter rules because their countrymen have done poorly. Whether there should be heightened scrutiny is a bit different, and I think those things can be hard to separate, but we should strive to. 

The Sudanese came to America in two waves.  I know something about this personally.  The second wave was South Sudanese and did not have high criminality.  Many have had trouble academically, but that's another subject. The first wave of (North) Sudanese had a great deal of trouble adapting to cultural norms, especially as regards women. It is fine with me that discerning who was who in this informs our future decisions on which Sudanese are admitted. 

But once they are here, they are here and stand or fall on their own. We can't have this both ways. 

Substack

Because I am signed up for it I could put up my own articles very easily. I would just write them here and then copy them into the other form.  In light of the previous post, I wonder if that might go wrong in unexpected ways and I because a different writer, likely worse. I used to cross-post at Chicago Boyz as well and still could, but fell out of the habit.

Well, I have other things to think about at present, and this doesn't seem interesting or important enough to me. 

The Business of Outrage

 Karen Read and the Business of Outrage at the True Crime Times.

Like the author, I was not surprised that the mere mention of her name increased clicks, but I was surprised at the extent of it.  I do believe in rationality and choice.  But sometimes we are just pigeons hitting the bar for another pellet of food.

 He’s building his brand, finding it difficult to get traction, and every post has a couple hundred views and maybe a handful of likes. Then he tweets something innocuous about Karen Read, and suddenly the views are in the thousands. He does it again, this time with something more provocative. And the views grow. And he begins to learn that the quality of the reactions—good or bad, pro or con, supportive or troll—doesn’t matter. A view is a view. A hate retweet gooses the stats just as much, and sometimes more, than a supportive one. In the ancient days of social media—circa the year of our Lord 2008—the “ratio” was a thing to be dreaded. Now, it’s all engagement, whether good or bad.

Thank you to bsking for the link 

Hard Launch

 Let's do a hard launch for Advent.  It caught me by surprise this year until my wife brought out the Advent wreath and the nightly liturgy we have been doing for over forty years. But we can catch up with a suicide clutch on the music for you.

 

Ancient Humans and Empathy

Bringing Emotional Cognition to Deep Time, by archaeologist John Hawks. A recent paper looks at evidence of giving care to family or tribe members, both infants and mothers, and those who have been injured. Because of our recent discussions of empathy, I might be tempted to switch to the word compassion, but looking at it as piece of the social interaction of a connected band is different than a political use of the term, and I think appropriate.  Not that empathy cannot enlarge and might be the mark of a great soul, but I believe it has to expand naturally according to situation, not in forced imitation.* 

Why do we care for the sick? I don’t know how many times I’ve read previous writers suggesting that ancient people were sneakily rational: Sure, they cared for aging individuals, but their real motive was that the cultural knowledge of older people had great value. But I think it is short-sighted to see Pleistocene healthcare as a quid pro quo. Empathy is a building block of social cognition in hominins. I doubt that it’s possible to build a system of social collaboration without that empathy sometimes manifesting as care. 

Notice the context here.  This is empathy for those we know and can actually see. It developed over hundreds of thousands of years and is part of an overall social communication that binds people together.  

 It is fascinating that some ancient people and other hominins ventured far into caves to make marks on their walls. But the important bit is not the marks—which are, after all, found fairly widely across the Pleistocene world. What’s actually fascinating is the shared journey. 

*The theosis of putting on the mask of a god in order to become like it, or the mind of Christ, or the whole armor of God is real. Making someone else put the mask on has a different history in paganism, of preparing them to be a sacrifice. For those who have read Lewis's Till We Have Faces the painting and sacrifice of Psyche might come to mind. We are not bound by what pagans have done with their symbvols and enactments, for we see them as precursors.  But it pays to have a look at what the meaning was to those who believed in them.

Gluggaveður - Window Weather

 Window-weather a word that exists solely in Icelandic.  The pieces of it exist in other Scandinavian languages, glugga meaning "window," related to all those other Germanic gl- words glimpse, gleam, glass; and veður meaning "weather." 

It is weather best appreciated through a window, sunny but with cold and dangerous winds. A wonderful little essay by Bryndís Víglundsdóttir at the link.

Wexford Carol

The choir sang this Sunday.

Listen slowly. 

 

Tuesday Links

 Chesterton 's Fence 

Jesse Tree  One of the now-grown children of our weekly Bible study - Sponge-Headed Scienceman's daughter, in fact - wrote this up for her church community, what it was like living in such an informal cousinage growing up

Sumptuous Meals during austerity. Lewis later uses this as an analogy for sexual morality in Mere Christianity. In fact, it wasn't really later.  Mere Christianity was based on a radio series "Broadcast Talks" for the BBC during WWII, from 1941-44. 

What Changed in the Sexual Revolution?  Bsking identifies the two usual factors, abortion and birth control, but notes two more that had huge impact as well.  She mentioned it a few years ago to me and I have been waiting for this one.

The Therapy Elite Won't Like This "If nurses, hospital staff, and doulas with a handful of hours of structured training can perform as well as clinicians with graduate degrees, supervised practica, and years in the trenches, then the barrier to entry for providing effective therapy is clearly lower than we pretend." The non-clinicians were taught the basics and then put in a supervised internship for a particular type of short-term therapy. Internship matters in a lot of fields, including this one.

Academic Petitions and Open Letters

Noah Carl at Aporia has just put up a research article Academic Petitions and Open Letters. It is fairly brief, and I am appreciative that he is making an attempt to put them all in one place and look at what they have in common. I have seen a few over the years, and have had people throw them at me about someone I have quoted as if they proved something. 

 In 1931, a large group of German scholars published a book titled A Hundred Authors Against Einstein, criticising the theory of relativity.¹ This was an early example of academics getting together and leveraging sheer numbers to try to discredit a colleague’s work.² Einstein, for his part, was unfazed. Commenting on the book, he’s reported to have said, “Were I wrong, one professor would have been quite enough.”

Precisely. I am seldom well-versed in any of the topics covered - I am at best a talented amateur - but even I can notice on sight that "This has been disproven many times so the author must have terrible character" is not an intellectual argument unless the disproofs are identified.  It is a social argument, "We are the experts and we can exclude you just by saying so." Such statements undermine the concept of expertise even more than everyone being simply wrong. It is mere hand-waving to claim that "all the best people simply know" that something or other is true. The things that "everyone knows" are in fact a good source for identifying those things which need immediate examination. They are beliefs everyone wishes were true and doesn't want to discuss. They want only to dismiss you with a killer exit line and have done with you. 

At one level I sympathise with them.  Having been in mental health for decades, I am familiar with the usual myths people believe, and it is wearying to constantly re-explain to Townswoman #5 why her belief does not hold up. People assure me in the narthex some claim about the field I made my living in.  It is usually from some self-help book that was fashionable a few decades ago. Yet it is still unfair to dismiss the argument with the essentially social assertion that anyone who knows anything rejects the idea.  You have to give people something more. What I usually do is present some real research or discovery as if it is a refinement or recent improvement on that very idea, even if in reality it goes in another direction. 

There is a second level of this, a set of arguments that the hidebound have become fond of putting up when challenged that look at first to be an improvement but are not. I encounter them about the supposed egalitarianism and nonviolence of early man, or the association of language and thought, or anything that mentions standarised testing.

I have gone on too long and am keeping you from Carl's article which is much better than this.  

 

All My Lovin'

James's comment about Clyde Crashcup caused me to "research" whether there was any connection between Jay Ward and Ross Bagdasarian. They used overlapping voice actors and they were very much the same era - I didn't find anything else. 

But this was fun. Clyde is from the same shop as Alvin and The Chipmunks. There are lots more "Chipmunks Sing The Beatles" if you like the genre. 

 

2013 Links

 Paul Radulescu, Baritone

Re-review  of 1491

No links, but I had a small batch of posts about the countries that liberals want us to emulate all being very white and now having trouble with immigration.  Japan is something of an exception, but I still see as many posts "Japan is just weird" as I do "Japan does stuff way better than us." I would add now that most of these magical countries are not as socialist as advertised, having trade-offs for the stuff they provide. You will get free college in a lot of European countries, but only a small (by our standards) percentage qualify. Much health care is paid for but there are bottlenecks, and the diagnosis and prescription are worse. They aren't terrible people or incompetent, it's just an irony.

Glo::al Stop Since then I have learned that this is increasing, and yes, it is young women who are most often the leaders in language change.

One reason people believe the economy is static is because their part of it is. 1%, Quintiles, GDP

1950's Creed.  That optometrist has retired.  I don't think his son, his successor, kept it up. The ground shifts beneath us and we do not notice.

Celibacy  The internal link no longer works, but it's not necessary to the overall.

Sunday Links

 If you like paintings of the sea, there is William Trost Richards.

Beyond the Binary is a Sea of Nonsense  Philosophy Professor from MIT goes after this year's two big books on gender. 

We are in "crisis" because we now educate everyone 

Continental Philosophers Bentham's Bulldog signals his displeasure.  I gave up shortly after "writing considered as mediation of mediation..."

This week at the Free Press - Just the first couple of paragraphs of each, as usual, but intriguing. 

Nine fascinating findings from personality science. Only three here, but they are fascinating. We've been saying this for years here, which shows how smart we are.

 

London vs. Everywhere else

 Ed West: Visitor From a Dying Empire. I have been hearing for at least a decade that in discussing Britain, the division is not England, Scotland, Wales, and N. Ireland, but between London and Everything Else, with the everything else being divided into the four "countries," further subdivided into North, Midlands, and South England, Cornwall, East and West Scotland on down. I posted the 15 Real Nations of Great Britain twenty years ago, and while much of it remains valid, London is now only half-right.  Or so I hear. In keeping with my recent links to "I thought I knew about (South Africa, Japan) but I didn't," this is fascinating. West's substack is The Wrong Side of History 

In response to a question about the history of the housing problem. 

The 1977 Homeless Persons Act. It was partly a reaction to a TV show. So British elites, they watch a TV show which is fiction, and they think that's terrible, we have to change all our laws because of this TV show, okay? And they change the system.

On Immigration 

If you look at all the data on immigration most immigrant groups are a drain on society, even when you take away, like, the social issues, whatever. Especially true of Middle Eastern groups  ...Denmark is the noticing country. The Danes are kind of unusual in thst they make all this data, which is basically illegal elsewhere. The Swedes have just said, you can't ever make this, and the Germans also...the Danes just do it. They get crime, the surnames, they do ethnic background. They do it. And they're not just foreign born, but where your parents are from and they get all the data, and it's exactly as you imagine. You know, it's like, I think, like the Algerians have, compared to Japanese, are like 5000 times more likely to commit crime...So yeah, the Palestinians, the Danes let them in. A few of them. There's that famous quote,  Elon's mentioned it, and, like, a large portion them ended up -  and Britain's trying to let in loads of Palestinians right now. I mean, it's kind of funny watching it, because it's  like politicians saying, "Oh, this, this is really nice." We're gonna need, and, like no kind of concept of the second order effects that this is gonna lead to chain migration. And, you know, Palestine has had a massive brain drain, like the middle class. 

More things we are not supposed to know. 

Requiescat in Pace, Tom Stoppard

I consider him the greatest playwright of the last hundred years, likely more if I think about it. You will read much reminiscence about him in the next few weeks and I'll not add mine, except that we read "After Magritte" aloud when the boys were young. My father had played Inspector Foote in community theater. What I will give you is the best piece about his use of philosophy, physics, and especially mathematics in both comedy and drama. Order Versus Randomness: What Math Can Teach Us About the Stage. Chaos Theory, The Seven Bridges of Konigsburg, prime numbers, recursiveness, sensitive dependence - lovely stuff.

As I don't see movies, I don't know much except that he rescued several under pseudonyms.  

Two Lovely Black Eyes

Herman's Hermits liked doing old English Music Hall songs

 

State Birds

 New Hampshire's Purple Finch

CF Payne has a fascinating series of paintings:  Every state bird in the shape of the state it represents.

Decorations

 It's nice that people have their traditional Christmas Skeletons up so soon after Thanksgiving.

Post 11,000 - Just the Facts, Ma'am

In the arguments about whether young people have it easier or harder than Boomers financially, people rely on stories, either personal/family anecdotes, or statisticky claims.

In the 1950s you could support a family on a blue collar income, buy a house and a car and send the kids to college.  

People went on zero or one trip to Europe in a lifetime, and going anywhere else (unless you lived near Canada or Mexico) was unheard of.  

Here are the boring statistics you can play with yourself

This is how much people made at every level of society 1967-2022. It does not define poverty, middle class, or rich. 

This is the amount of inflation every year from 1967-2025 It includes purchasing power by sector. Medical is more expensive, apparel is cheaper.

I don't recommend you try and decipher how the Congressional Budget Office figures out poverty,  but it helps to know that the number is different before the county or the feds gave you any money or after. Were you poor before we helped you?  How about after?

They do not include the qualifiers, such as having only one car and no dryer, square footage of houses,  availability of varieties of food, women in the workplace, what taxes were, and whether kids these days even know how to shoe a horse. Those things are helpful in terms of understanding what lives were like then versus now, but I don't cover those here.

The Time Machine

 

Friday Links

High-status boys bully low-status boys; low-status boys bully high-status girls.  An interesting example of this from observing games of HALO.  Also of interest: none of the females spoke during any of the games.

Support for violence to prevent "harmful" speech  Witness the change over the age groups.  The lowest support comes from the oldest and next-oldest liberals.  The highest support comes from the youngest and next-youngest liberals, and even the younger moderates are higher than the others. Whether the generations are different or people change as they age is not measured.

 Gypsies and Jews by Cremieux.  The effects of stereotypes long term. In terms of gypsies passing as other ethnicities in Europe, my Romanian sons had a brother and sister that they were separated from and did not come to America.  They reestablished contact after they got here. They tried to help the sister who did not work and had a boyfriend, then husband who was not honest.  Not only did they not pick up that he was Roma, she did not pick it up until they had been married a few years and she went to a village wedding of his family. 

Also Cremieux The Making of an Elite: Japanese Christians. I had never heard even rumors of this.

Canada's top First Nations writer, Thomas King, reveals he isn't Cherokee after all.