Encouraging Fertility

Rob Henderson at City Journal on having babies and having friends. It is his take on the Stone and Brooks study and recommendations I linked to a week ago. 

 The researchers asked respondents how many kids their three closest friends had, and how those friends would react if the respondent had another baby. Would they offer to help? Cook meals after the birth? Or would they worry about their career stalling or stop inviting them out?

The answers were associated, to a startling degree, with the desire to have children. For Americans under 30 with the least supportive friends, desired family size was about 1.7 children. For those with the most supportive friends, it was 2.8. That is a full extra child, associated with nothing more than having trusted friends who show up.

Whether we copy our friends or choose them because of similarity,* our closest friends have 4, 2, 2, 4, and 3 children.  Our college friends had 0, 2, 3, 0, 8, and 2.  Our (barely) remaining high school friends have 3, 0, 2, 2, 0, 2, and 2. We had two originally and then adopted 3 more. 

*Some of both.  Must be.  Peer pressure is more powerful as an adult because we have chosen those peers rather than just being stuck next to them in homeroom or the neighborhood when we were teenagers.

Violent Crime

There is a reason why we focus on homicide when we discuss violent crime.  There is a body that the police and the statistics have to do something with. With other crimes, people might not report it because they don't think the police will do anything. This is a complicating factor for reports of rape, certainly. There is an interplay of female reluctance to report, police willingness to prosecute, and legal system sympathy for quick and neat solutions for fair ones. Maybe the police won't care if Blacks get into fights, or maybe they'll care more and prosecute, telling the white boys to just go home and cool off. 

Still, those other crimes are there, and there are other statistics that capture some of it. Even though the numbers may vary by county, there are victimisation reports that are consistent across counties. These numbers are softer, but they ain't nothin'. 

John Lott, who draws eye-rolls* from gun-control advocates who claim he has been debunked even though said debunkings only pay off at 30 cents on the dollar, has an interesting and controversial claim that Canada and Australia have much more violent crime than America. America's high homicide rate is important, but it is a small percentage of overall crime and is most related to drug turf. Also, suicide is a large part of the "gun-death" numbers and presumably requires separate discussion and interventions. 

While the United States still leads in some categories, on the whole it has significantly less violent crime per capita than those two nations.   

I might have expected that the numbers were closer to America's than people think.  I didn't think there was any world where those countries exceeded our violent crime rate. In round numbers, victimisation reports yield estimates that 60% of violent crimes in the US makes it to a police report, while less than 40% make it to the official statistics in Australia and Canada.  Look for yourself and see if you think he deals with the data fairly.

*And Lott, the much-despised, he tore the cover off the ball..." 

SuperPlatner

I mentioned over at Grim's that the Democrats seemed to be going for an outlaw image to fit their "take from the rich to give to the poor" model. I notice that Graham has already done the "take from the rich part," starting with his parents, but the "give to the poor" part was always rather theoretical and in the future. This is similar to the original Robin Hood, or one of them, who is not on record as giving to the poor, but was beloved because he refused to rob them. And at least he robbed the rich.

Which put me in mind of this, which might be a better fit.

 "Let's rob from the rich...and KEEP IT!"

Introducing Plan A

Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten Introducing Plan A, a proposal for AI safety built on agreements that recognise the principals do not trust each other. It is offered as an overall plan, but also as a stand-up comparison model 

... it’s supposed to be a floor. When some politician proposes a data center ban, or says that we have to gut safety regulation to compete with China, or promises a job retraining program, think to yourself: does this person have a vision for where all of this ends up? If so, is it as good as Plan A? If not, consider demanding that they do better. 

The full plan comes from AI Futures, which had an uncannily good prediction in 2021 of what would happen from then to now. It includes a link to the actual Plan A. The ACX essay linked above is Scott's sales pitch for it. 

I don't know enough to have a credible opinion beyond the observation that these people are much smarter than I am, have good credentials that they are well-meaning, and have spent a lot of time on what could go wrong and how we prevent/fix that. 

Recent Links

 Men, We Love You.  Please Holler Back. Dating apps were originally designed to help you find a date.  They are now "optimised" to keep your eyeballs on the site. This feeds bad attitudes in both men and women, about themselves and about each other. Update explanation of my statement: The imbalance in swipe left/swipe right numbers creates automatic evidence for the theory among women that "a lot of guys are coming onto to me and lots of them are creepy," while men have the impression that "I could like lots of women and think I'm a decent guy, but even women who aren't that great are rejecting me from even a chance." 

The Weird history of "Weird."  Wyrd, which I wrote about in 2010 and reposted a few times, is only half the story.

Just Plain Rivka (sidebar) sends this along from  Anthony DiGiorgio at Off Label Ideas 

 The commenter pushing back makes some valid points, but not as strong as he is pretending. 

What do women want? 

A legislative work-around to the EU opposition to GMO foods. Approval of "lightly edited" genes. 

Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone

 Summer of '71

 

Platner

People will vote for him anyway. Spite voters are foxhole voters, who will stick with you as long as you are shooting outward, however bad you are.  People want to show how much they hate Trump by voting out Susan Collins, which is about as indirect as you can get. In the late 1800s many doubters did not consider it wise to go after Jesus, who retained popularity even among some nonbelievers, so they went after Paul, claiming that he took a gentle doctrine of Jesus and made it harsh. (I don't think Trump qualifies well as Jesus, but he is the hated president. Attacking Collins to get to him seems a proper analogy of inappropriate spite.) I have CS Lewis to thank for pointing out that the harshest words in the NT come from the lips of the Savior, while Paul talks more about Grace. 

With spite, facts don't matter. Platner is still a way of sticking it to The Man, even though he is The Man, a child of privilege who survives by crony capitalism. My own CS Lewis reference reminds me of the scene in "The Great Divorce" in which visitors to the edge of heaven do not think they have any intention of coming in.  The Lewis character remembers...

 The voyage seemed to them a small price to pay if once, only once, within sight of that eternal dawn, they could tell the prigs, the toffs, the sanctimonious humbugs, the snobs, the 'haves,' what they thought of them.

The George MacDonald character answers

"I have seen that kind converted," said he, "when those ye would think less deeply damned have gone back. Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it already."

 

 

Baby Mega-Bonus

 We Should Have a Mega Baby Bonus. The Institute for Family Studies, Lyman Stone and Peter Foreshaw Brookes say they have spent a long time on this, and it shows.  The idea is a prefunded account that a current baby can eventually draw from when they have children of their own. The fund has time to grow, and not everyone will have the children that will enable them to withdraw the fund in their account.

 But not everybody has babies (and certainly not everyone has the 3 babies you’d have to have to claim the full benefit value). In our vision, once people turn 50, any fund value not yet claimed due to not having had kids (or early mortality) would be yielded back into a fund, which would be continually reinvested and used to pay for the next generation of seed funding for American Birthday Accounts. By our math, it is extremely unlikely that the American Birthday Accounts raise fertility enough to make unclaimed funds too small to pay for the next round of baby bonuses, because unclaimed funds have had fifty years to accrue value.

It takes a while to pay for itself but is eventually self-sustaining. 

Fun to contemplate. But like anything else, how do we sell a radical idea? 

Diabolically Evil

Is a New Report About the Humanities ‘Diabolically Evil’? at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

 We invited four of the report’s authors — Kwame Anthony Appiah and Paul Boghossian, both philosophers at New York University; Katherine E. Fleming, a historian and former NYU provost who now serves as head of the J. Paul Getty Trust; and the Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz — to respond to their critics. We discussed their findings, the risks of outside interference, and what they hope happens next.

Anthropology was especially singled out for deteriorating standards of scholarship because of homage to political narratives. I recall there being excitement in the anthropology department when one professor was to give an address at a major conference - this would be in 1975 - about how voices from within cultures were not being heard often enough in the field. Notably, he was a Filipino anthropologist and thus positioned to notice, but also had a direct career stake in the issue. Even at the time, I recall thinking something along the lines that this wasn't about anthropology, but about anthropologists.

Time In Palestine

 I Actually Spent Time in Palestine - Here's what I saw about their society 

An American college student notices the prejudice of extremist Israelis...

...and a complete denial of reality by the Palestinians.

 Looking back, my conversation with the two Palestinians who denied the existence of the Second Temple foreshadowed something that I gradually came to recognize: while I was more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause when I first traveled to the West Bank, I came to realize that facts are largely irrelevant for the vast majority of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian activists.

Erling Haaland

 My son in Tromso is very excited, calls him Superman

 

Not only the accent, but the gestures remind me of Maria, my Norwegian DIL. I don't think I know any other Norwegians well enough to know their accents.  I used to know a few, but I wasn't paying attention then.

Surprising Allies

The Knowlton Trial in England in 1877 had an immediate effect on family formation.  It was about the criminalising of publishing information on contraception, or artificial limitation of the family, as it was called then. Immediately after, age of marriage began increasing in English-speaking countries. What is surprising is that Charles Darwin, despite being an anti-Churchman did not approve of this development. Darwin and the Knowlton Trial, Peter Foreshaw Brooks over at "Persistent Ruminator."

[Darwin] would prefer not to be a witness in court. In any case CD’s opinion is strongly opposed to that [of Bradlaugh and Besant]. [Darwin] believes artificial checks to the natural rate of human increase are very undesirable and that the use of artificial means to prevent conception would soon destroy chastity and, ultimately, the family.

So also Francis William Newman, the agnostic younger brother of Cardinal John Henry Newman. 

 Newman, also writing entirely from a foundation void of orthodox religion, felt this was misguided. He argued that a large amount of poverty can be attributed to vice and social problems, not the mere size of population. He then laid out how he thought the neo-Malthusian view would exacerbate these problems. He worried that an expansion in birth control would result in an increase in men’s demands of women’s sexual access (an argument Louise Perry and others make today) and would lead to more behaviour focusing on achieving short term pleasures over long run fulfillment.

Charles Darwin, pro-natalist. 

*********** 

Dave Barry is perhaps a less-surprising pro-natalist. Sex

Links From 2015

 Obviously 

36 Righteous Men 

 Girl Books. If you really want to go down the rabbit hole with this, I also did a 2007 post on Female Characters in Heroic Fantasy which linked in turn to my son's post Books for Girls, Books for Boys. Almost half his life ago now... 

A bad play is evocative of marvelous nostalgia The Old Homestead, Swanzey, NH 

Bad Doctrine about being a Christian Nation.  Lots of comments

School Cell-phone Bans

 Research on banning cell-phones in schools.  Interesting way to test a variety of measures. 

 National Evidence From Lockable Pouches National Bureau of Economic Research

The short version is that in the first year there were increased disciplinary incidents and decreased student subjective well-being. This was attributed to the disruption of the change. In further years the disciplinary incidents returned to baseline and the student subjective well-being improved to measurably above the previous baseline.  Test scores were not significantly affected.

Magic solutions are seldom magic, especially in education.  It all looks so easy from the outside.  Remember Daviess County KY and its 13-year (1997-2010) intensive experiment to build better brains? I really though that one was going to work.

Are you part of...a chain?

A visitor to our church this Sunday asked this, hesitating and laughing at herself, as she knew that wasn't quite the word she was looking for.

"A denomination?" I smiled, filling in the word she was looking for. "Actually, that's not a bad word.  Maybe we should switch to that so that people know what we mean." 

Two Out of Six Myths

 Another Six Myths About Gender, Race, and Inequality. These two are free, the other four are for paid subscribers only. These are short summaries, but don't skim, as at first glance we might think they are saying something else. The first is about what Democrats and Republicans think that other people would do, not what they themselves would.  For the second, most of the funding is not specific to either males or females, only to humans. The graph shows the research amount dedicated to one sex.