Sandel 7: Was the Social Contract Ever Meant to be Taken Literally?

In Michael Sandel's Justice, he gives a wonderfully clear account of Kant's and Rawls' social philosophy. In placing Kant's views of the social order Sandel reviews the whole tradition of social contract theories. Sandel then shows how Rawls ingeniously solves the problem of the historical implausibility of an actual social contract by turning the whole metaphor into a thought experiment. We do not have to believe that there ever was an actual social contract, Rawls argues - we can imagine ourselves in an "original position" as generic human beings without particular qualities to see what kind of social contract we would make in such circumstances.

I was surprised at how much space Sandel gave to the argument about whether there was an historical social contract, and if so whether a contract made by our social predecessors could really bind us. This book grows out of his long and rich experience teaching about justice to Harvard undergraduates. Do those smart kids really think that Hobbes, or Rousseau, or Mill thought that society was born in an actual gathering in the woods?

I assume from the fact that Sandel takes the time to explain how the idea of a social contract works without entailing an historical contract-making that this is an important issue to his students. My best guess is that what they are concerned about is not the historicity of the event. Rather, they believe that if they or their predecessors did not consent to society, then they are not bound by it. No agreement, no contract.

Sandel 6: Libertarianism is About Allodialism

My Theory Camp worked through Michael Sandel's Democracy's Discontent last week. This week we are reading his Justice.

Sandel's chapter on libertarianism is entitled "Do we own ourselves?" I have long thought that libertarians have a very restricted and peculiar idea of liberty. Sandel helps me see that what is really wrong is with their conception of the self. Libertarianism is a distinctively modern idea of the self because it is based on a distinctively modern idea of property.

Pre-modern property was based on shared ownership, rather than a sole right to do anything to your property. This is the difference between feudal property - the basic idea behind feudalism - and modern allodial property. Allodialism is the idea that if you own something, you own all the rights to it and can do anything you want to your property, including destroy it.

We can kind of accept the allodial idea when we are talking about replaceable objects. Allodialism gets to be iffy when we apply it to unique objects, like art or land. Allodialism shows itself to be a completely inadequate idea of what property is when we apply it to non-objects - slaves, babies, and ourselves. The core problem with libertarian ethics is that it makes people reduce their notion of their self to that of an object that they own, with no meaning or destiny of its own.

More on Denominations

Last Sunday I wrote about how denominationalism and civil religion are complements.

My friend Barry Ensign-George asked, quite reasonably, for some elaboration. He particularly wanted some explication of my claim that denominationalism "really can only be fully embraced by people who do not think the differences between denominations matter." Fair enough.

My focus was on religion as a basis of social integration. This is why I contended that civil religion is the necessary complement of denominationalism. To be a denomination is, of necessity, to be part of a larger whole, and to accept the equal legitimacy of the other parts. This is most clearly so when talking about different denominations of the same religion, as with the Presbyterian Church and the Catholic Church. We have also extended this idea to include the equal legitimacy of different religions, as among Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist religious institutions.

To accept that other denominations are legitimate religious institutions does not mean that we think all denominations teach the same thing, or that the differences are not significant to some extent. But to be a denominationalist - to be a citizen in a denominational society - is to accept that the differences among the denominations are less important than their common embrace of the concept or doctrine of denominationalism. Denominations are tolerant; they tolerate other denominations. Religious institutions that do not accept the principle of denominationalism put themselves at odds with the whole culture. If they act upon that rejection against other religious institutions in a physical way by, say, burning heretics or blowing up infidels, they put themselves outside the civil order religiously.

The main argument I was making in the previous post is that a mere belief in denominationalism is not enough of a religious faith to hold a society together. Therefore, civil societies also need some kind of positive cult (in the Durkheimian sense) - some active beliefs and rituals shared with other citizens as citizens. This is where the civil religion comes in, and why it is necessary.

Presbyterians, such as Barry and myself, can be good Presbyterians and good citizens because we accept denominationalism. We can hold that the Presbyterian understanding of the faith is correct - as long as we also accept the legitimacy of other denominations in our society.

Sound Historical Reasoning about Marco Polo

My sister, in an exchange with my inventive nephew, who is eight:

Da Neice asked why the call and response game was called "Marco Polo." I
was about to answer ("I don't know,") when Da Nephew jumped in.

"It's because when they were exploring North America -- "

"China!" I said.

"I mean, Africa -- "

"China!!" I said.

"They had an Indian guide -- "

"Seriously, you're thinking of Lewis and Clark!" I said.

"They would get separated and Polo would yell 'Marco' and Marco would
yell 'Polo,' and then they could find each other," he finished
confidently.

"You make me crazy," I said.

Sandel 5: We Need Enchanted Political Life

Michael Sandel concludes Democracy's Discontent with the claim that “A politics that brackets morality and religion too completely soon generates its own disenchantment.” If public life has no higher purpose, we lose heart in it. It becomes a tool for corruption.

Conservatives have tried to fight this disenchantment by promoting individual virtue. This would have a social effect in two ways: we would all benefit if there were no corrupt individuals, and the project of promoting virtues is shared. The problem of today's theory of government is that the state is trying to be neutral about citizen's ideas of what makes for virtuous individuals.

Liberals have tried to fight this disenchantment by fighting the economic inequalities that stand in the way of solidarity among all citizens. Making people less unequal is clearly a social project, but it is negative, in the sense that it is removing an obstacle to solidarity without providing a common goal to be solidary about.

The early American republic did have enchanted - that is, purpose-driven - public life. We had the project of creating a democratic society out of people who had been trained to be subjects rather than citizens. That was a great project. But it has largely run its course in the world. Most states, even the most brutal tyrannies, at least pretend to be democratic.

Sandel says that when we got too diverse to ignore our different moral and religious values, we switched the goal of public life to trying to create a voluntary state that was neutral about all other goals. Sandel is right that this is not a goal big enough and positive enough to enchant our public life.

Sandel 4: Common Consumption is a Lame National Identity

Michael Sandel, in Democracy's Discontent, says that the Progressives, faced with the problem of creating common identity in an America that had become too massive for civic participation, proposed to focus on Americans as consumers.

While I am grateful for federal laws ensuring clean food, I don't think making a national identity out of our common consumption is enough. In Theory Camp this morning we talked about how common it is for young people to wear brand names on the outside of their clothes as a way of making a common identity. But consumption, even very common consumption, is too thin to make a national identity. Brand loyalty just does not replace democratic participation.

Sandel 3: Employees Are Also Free Citizens

Michael Sandel, in Democracy's Discontent, reviews the argument among the Founding Fathers over political economy. The New Englanders wanted to develop American manufacturing and merchant capacity. The Virginians wanted farmers, and feared cities. Both thought that free, democratic citizens needed to stand on their own feet economically.

Both classes of Founders were imagining the owners of these enterprises as the true citizens. The irony is that factories and stores depend on employees, and the farms that the Virginians actually ran depended on slaves, as well as employed farm hands. Employees were not seen as truly free; they were like slaves because they depended on another to live.

When slavery was abolished, and the great mass of Americans became employees, this eighteenth century argument became totally outdated. Yet we have not really resolved the question of what economic assets you need to be a free participating citizen.

Instead, Sandel usefully points out, we have redefined freedom from participating in government to choosing how to live. In other words, we have re-imagined freedom from a kind of production to a kind of consumption.

Sandel 2: The Altered Marriage Contract

Michael Sandel, in Democracy's Discontent, describes the Supreme Court's change of philosophy from the state trying to form individuals into a particular kind of good citizen, to the state trying to uphold neutral procedures by which all kinds of citizens could do what they want.

Sandel then outlines the way in which this procedural view spread from Court judgments to other government actions, and then to how private citizens treat one another. A crucial moment in this spread was the invention of no-fault divorce laws. Prior to no-fault, the state had an explicit interest in marriage and therefore supported the party who wanted to keep the marriage together. No-fault law changed from a right to stay married if you upheld your part of the marriage bargain, to a right to divorce if you no longer wished to uphold your part of the marriage bargain.

Sandel 1: Amoral Politics Breeds Disenchantment

My annual Theory Camp has begun. This year we are studying two books by Michael Sandel. This week we will work through Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy.

Sandel says America was built on a republican tradition that understood freedom to mean the ability to participate in governing a democratic society. However, as America grew and became more diverse, we lost a sense of common values that we wanted all citizens to share. Since the Second World War, therefore, we developed a new public philosophy, "procedural liberalism," which taught that freedom was the right to do what we wanted, free from participating in democratic governance. We avoid conflict over different moral and religious views by bracketing them out of state action.

Sandel says the problem with this merely procedural view is that it is too thin to make citizenship out of. When politics brackets out morals it breeds disenchantment.

Sociology normally sees disenchantment as a religious problem. Sandel rightly sees that when we keep moral and religious meaning out of political life, we disenchant more than just the state. We sap the sense of meaning out of public life as a whole.

Denominationalism and Civil Religion Are the Complementary Halves of Modern Social Theology

The idea of a denomination is a brilliant achievement of American society. It is a distinctively modern idea - that varieties of the same religion, and even different religions, can freely compete within society.

There are two problems with this competition.

One is that it is not really a neutral standard, but really can only be fully embraced by people who do not think the differences between denominations matter. In other words, the denominational theory of religion works best for people who don't really believe in any denomination's religion.

The other problem is that the doctrine of denominational competition is not enough of a religious view to hold society together.

Modern societies have developed another distinctive religious view: civil religion. Civil religion was, originally, a religion of the (anti-Christian) state. The idea has broadened to mean the shared faith and symbols of the nation. Still, civil religion is most coherent as a cult that venerates the nation through the state, through patriotic myths, practices, and doctrines.

I had not fully appreciated before how much the ideas of denominationalism and civil religion go together. Really, they are two sides of the same coin. Denominationalism allows the old religions to live together in mutual toleration, if not respect. The price they pay is that each must accept an equal place within the new religion of the nation and its state.

This is an ingenious solution to the problem of religion in modern society. But it does require important modifications to all pre-modern faiths.

God and Milk

‎"God has a sense of humor. Trust me, every day you will do something to make Him snort milk out His nose."

(Attributed to John McManny)

What, Exactly, Are Schools For in the Good Society?

I have been working on a grant proposal to create a course on "The Good Society." I want to build up from the small institutions to the large, focusing on the process of making well-ordered and virtuous lives, institutions, and societies. Yes, I know, there are many arguments to be had about what constitutes good. That is a somewhat interesting part of the making process.

My subject today, though, is the unexpected puzzle I ran in to in making up the core ladder of institutions came in the middle. At the starting point, we have families and religious institutions. At the end we have the economy and the state.

In the middle my first instinct was to put schools. This, I think, is the keystone of the arch of the liberal view of society. But I am following Tocqueville as my guide, and he would put something else at the keystone: voluntary associations. And that is what I am inclined to go with, a theoretical and empirical consideration of Tocqueville and Robert Putnam on the state of voluntary associations in civil society.

Which leaves me with a puzzle: how to think about schools? On the left, they are agents of the state or, more cynically, of the market. On the right, they are expressions of the family and the religious institution. I can't, at this moment, see what independent foundation schools rest on, what distinctive good they serve. And I say this as a teacher, married to an education reformer, with three kids in school.

Schumpeter Tweaks Intellectuals

Joseph Schumpeter keeps up a running critique of intellectuals in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. One of my favorites is this one:

Syndicalism “really appeals to the workman’s instincts – and not, like Marxism, to the intellectual’s idea of what the workman’s instincts ought to be – by promising what he can understand, viz., the conquest of the shop he works in, conquest by physical violence, ultimately by the general strike.”

Schumpeter's Social Molecules are Families

Joseph Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, offers a rich idea of both social mobility and the place of family lineages in social structure:

it can be shown in all cases, first, that human molecules rise and fall within the class into which they are born, in a manner which fits the hypothesis that they do so because of their relative aptitudes; and it can also be shown, second, that they rise and fall across the boundary lines of their class in the same manner. This rise and fall into higher and lower classes as a rule takes more than one generation. These molecules are therefore families rather than individuals.

Schumpeter's Profound Point: The Bourgeois Family is What Profit Was For

Joseph Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, argues that capitalism is undermining the bourgeois home and the bourgeois family. Many others have argued the same.

He further notes something important that I had not noticed before: the bourgeois home and family were a mainspring of the profit motive. The capitalist worked hard for a profit. And what did he do with that profit? He used it to support his home, his family, and his posterity.

If we stop having homes and families, as many "new girl order" women and "child-man" men have done, we stop having a deep reason to save, invest, or even to pursue profit in the first place.

Reproduction of Mothering, End

I got halfway through Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering, and gave up.

Reading the metaphysics of Freudian psychoanalysis is like reading the witch lore of the Trobriand Islanders. I respect it as a rich and intricate culture, but I don't think it actually describes the world I live in.

In my Macrosociological Theory syllabus, I am going to swap it out for The Feminine Mystique.

Reproduction of Mothering 1

I am working through Nancy Chodorow's feminist classic The Reproduction of Mothering for my social theory class. She is trying to come up with an account of how girls learn to be mothers from the way they are mothered. She is trying to discover a psychoanalytic cause for girls wanting to mother.

To get there, she rejects a social-learning account as too simplistic, and a biological account as inconclusive.

Chodorow is trying to establish that women do not have to be mothers, and mothering - the primary nurturing of children - does not have to be done by women. I think she, and the brand of feminism she represents, has won this argument.

However, I was puzzled by the way that she dismissed the biological basis for connecting mothers and mothering. She allowed that there was a strong connection between female hormones and nurturing, and male hormones and aggression. This does not entail that only mothers can mother, but it seems to me to support that argument that women as a group are more prepared by their biology for nurturing, especially nurturing little ones. I believe biological research has moved on quite a bit since this book was published in 1978, supporting the idea that men and women do differ in profound ways that affect how they rear children.

I will read the rest of her argument with an open mind. I think her premise, though, that mothering is not much rooted in biology, is shaky.

Not Built for Vacations

Mrs. G. and I have been taking a vacation. This is only the fourth time since child #1 was born more than two decades ago that we have tried a just-the-two-of-us vacation.

Last Sunday we dropped child #3 off at camp. We have spent much of a week since then visiting Annapolis, dipping our toes in the ocean, traipsing Williamsburg, enjoying Charlottesville. We have visited lovely places, talked to locals, eaten good food, and, of course, enjoyed an array of independent coffee houses.

We have also fit in some visits with relatives, some professional conversations, and spent some hours each day reading and writing, assisted by the internet. This morning we sit in a fine local coffee house, Calvino's, in Charlottesville. I like Charlottesville. I realize, though, that I really appreciate it because, amidst the lovely, I have some work to do here. Just sitting in Charlottesville, or any place, would be enervating to me.

Mrs. G and I work every day. But I don't think we are workaholics. I think we do not need to draw a big distinction between work and the rest of life - especially not between work and play - because our work is not alienated - we do not simply sell it to another. We are very blessed in having such work. We also made a choice not to take the path where more of our work would be alienated, even if it paid more. Mrs. G is a Yale lawyer - she could have taken the path to quite high-paying, but alienated, work.

We are doubly blessed that our family life and our work are well integrated. This is also partly choice, and partly providence.

Work/life balance and alienated labor are two of the most important personal issues that sociologists have worked on in the past two generations. We are blessed to suffer from neither.

Which means that for the Gruntleds, the concept of a vacation does not really work.

Nationalizing Williamsburg

Mrs. G and I have been visiting Colonial Williamsburg and its neighbor, the College of William and Mary.

I think of the Old Dominion, home of the First Families of Virginia, as worshiping all of its ancestors. I now see, though, that much of the retrieval of colonial Virginia has been a twentieth-century project to give Virginia a usable past that is not confined to the Confederacy. Doing so required re-envisioning early Virginia as part of national history - and getting nationalists from the Empire State involved in paying for it.

The capital of the Virginia colony had a Governor's Palace at the center, with an approaching green. On the street perpendicular to this axis grew up a place for representatives of the citizens to meet, and a school for gentlemen. When the seat of government was moved to Richmond in 1780, Williamsburg became a backwater. The College of William and Mary, after a brave beginning, foundered. By the end of the Civil War the notable colonial buildings of Williamsburg were ruins. The town grew over the old stuff. The Lost Cause became the only history that mattered.

For Williamsburg the change began with Rev. W.A.R. Goodwin, rector of Bruton Parish Church at the end of the 19th century. Bruton Parish Church is the Episcopal - and before that, Anglican - church that served the colonial capital. It is located at the corner where the long axis from legislature to school intersects the short axis from the governor's palace. Goodwin was a Virginian and the son of a Confederate veteran. But he also was the priest of a national church. In his first stint at Bruton Parish, and as a teacher at William and Mary, he rebuilt the church. Then he served a church in New York. When he came back to Bruton Parish and to William and Mary, he saw the further decay of the old historical structures of the Old Dominion, the history before the Confederacy. This moved him to undertake a more ambitious plan of restoration.

To rebuild colonial Williamsburg, Goodwin did not get help from Virginia money, from the tobacco magnates and government contractors. He turned to John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller with a vision of reviving Williamsburg as a national treasure. The William and Mary professor also cleverly got the "Christopher Wren building," the shell of the founding building of the college, included in Rockefeller's vision of "Colonial Williamsburg." The Rockefellers quietly bought up most of the old part of town. When they announced their intention to restore the colonial city in 1928, there was more consternation than delight. More than 700 buildings were demolished. The three major public buildings were largely gone - they had to be rebuilt from drawings and verbal descriptions. Colonial Williamsburg was not so much restored as re-invented.

A key moment in the drama came when the Yankees wanted to move the Confederate monument from the Palace Green in front of the colonial Governor's Palace. That led the locals to sue. This incident, it seems to me, reveals the core dynamic of what was at stake in reclaiming colonial Williamsburg for the nation.

Corporate Style Is Reassuring

Do you find brand names reassuring, or oppressive?

I have been thinking about the cultural difference between the two ends of the educated middle class, which I call for short-hand the corporate class and the knowledge class.

Like other members of the knowledge class, I favor independent over corporate in most things. I write this from an independent coffee house, which I would always pick over, say, Starbucks. As I travel and see the same national and international brands everywhere, I often think of the quip "Man is born free, but is everywhere in chain stores."

And yet most people like corporate brands - otherwise they wouldn't be the dominant form.

I was thinking of this as I toured the U.S. Naval Academy. The military needs to be uniform and highly organized for good functional reasons. Yet the U.S. Navy is also a brand. It is a brand that is reassuring - as the very best militarily, of course, but also as reliable and orderly.

As I came out of the Naval Academy I saw a bumper sticker for a large state university. I realized the appeal is similar - Large State U is a well-known, reliable brand. If you go there, you get a decent education. Beyond that, though, you get to belong to the alumni association. You are part of a reliable brand.

I have a hypothesis, which I have not yet tested empirically. I think the core of the corporate class style appeals to the average white collar employees of large corporations, who are also alumni of large name universities, and patrons of large consumer brands. What they have in common is that they are likely to be new to the middle class. The brand name everything is reassuring of your middle-class status.

The knowledge class style, by contrast, appeals to groups who are more senior in the middle class, who have an unshakable, unreflective security in their own middle-class status.

I do not offer either as superior. I do notice that the two styles seem to appeal to different kinds of people. I am trying to figure out what makes the two groups different.

City Dock Coffee

The City Dock Coffee House is a treasure of a third place in Annapolis, MD.

This morning I enjoyed talking to the regulars, gathered around the bench marked "Sen. John Astle's 'down the hill office.'" The coffee house, on the dock in Annapolis, is a few blocks from the state capitol. The regulars told me of the long-standing group, gathered around the local state senator and noted storyteller. They get together daily to solve the world's problems. The old guys, led by Chuck, were jolly and joshing. Unusually, the regulars also included some women, who the men introduced as the brains of the group.

The owner, Grover Gedney, sat on the high stools with me for a time. He helpfully described the business, which has grown into a local institution. They supply coffee to the Naval Academy and the Governor's Office, as well as many local restaurants. And as coffeemen and coffeewomen have done for centuries, he paused to greet the regulars as they came in, and welcome the arriving staff.

City Dock Coffee is a classic third place that keeps its identity in the middle of a heavy tourist destination. May it thrive.

Presbyterian Losses and Gay Ordination

The General Assembly confirmed that after 43 straight years of declining membership, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is now less than half the size it was at its peak in 1967. The pace of losses has actually picked up in the last few years, as entire conservative congregations have left, in addition to the normal negative ratio of new members to deaths.

This General Assembly also passed another attempt to change church rules to say that, contrary to what the Bible appears to say, homosexual practice is not a sin, or at least not enough of a sin to prevent ordination. The last three times such a proposal was passed by the General Assembly and sent to the church as a whole for a vote, it failed.

I do not know whether the liberalizing measure will pass this time. I do know that each time the General Assembly attempts to liberalize the constitution this way, more conservatives give up on the PC(USA) and leave.

At some point, so many conservatives will have left that the liberal constitutional amendment will pass.

I don't think this victory will stabilize the denomination, though. Liberals are pretty bad and having and holding kids in the church, and even worse at evangelizing. Whichever way this particular fight turns out, the Presbyterian Church (USA) is likely to keep dwindling.

Busboys and Poets

I previously posted on a story about Busboys and Poets, a coffee house and café in Washington, D.C. that was, I had read, a genuinely racially and ethnically mixed third place.

I am writing from there now, and can testify that it is as lively as I had read. Visually, it is clearly very mixed. I can't tell how much of a third place it is - I can't tell the regulars from the visitors. It is, though, very cosmopolitan. The spirit of Langston Hughes presides. Indeed, the shop takes its name from a title given to Hughes by Vachel Lindsay.

The Gruntleds are using it as a base for visiting with our DC friends all afternoon. This should be good.

Who Likes McMansions?

Whole subdivisions of McMansions - starter castles, Hummer houses, garage Mahals - have been built over the last generation.

One of the side effects of my research on the "knowledge class" is that they seem allergic to this kind of house. Indeed, it is undoubtedly knowledge class types who invented the the term McMansion, and mostly use it pejoratively.

Yet clearly, they must be popular with a significant section of the upper middle class, or they wouldn't have been built or bought in large enough numbers to need such a pop sociology name.

So I ask readers, from your experience, what are the social characteristics of people who prefer and enjoy living in neighborhoods of houses with "a floor area over 3,000 square feet (280 m²), ceilings 9-10 feet high, a two-story portico, a front door hall with a chandelier hanging from 16-20 feet, two or more garages, several bedrooms and bathrooms, and lavish interiors." I would particularly value first-hand accounts from such happy homeowners; if you know such, please pass this query on.

Marriage is the Best Fatherhood Initiative

The Obama administration has given high profile to programs to promote active fatherhood. I applaud these efforts.

Marriage proponents, like me, are distressed, though, that the administration has taken a step back from parallel programs to support marriage that had a high profile in the Bush administration.

Active fatherhood is good for kids, fathers, and mothers. Active married fatherhood is even better for kids, fathers, and, especially, mothers.

Grown-Up Party of the Center

Michael Gerson has an op-ed in the Washington Post contrasting the Ugly Party - from both ends of the political spectrum - with the Grown-Up Party. He does not place the Grown-Up Party, but from his examples it seems to me to be clearly in the center.

In his criticism of the Ugly Party way of talking he has a lovely quote from John Avlon:

If you only take offense when the president of your party is compared to Hitler, you are part of the problem.

Freedom Isn't Free - So Pay Your Taxes

On the Fourth of July the Gruntleds celebrate Independence Day along with other patriotic Americans. We will hear often today that "freedom isn't free." What most people who I hear use this phrase mean is that we have to be willing to go to war to defend our freedom, and sometimes other people's freedom. This is true.

I was surprised when some of these same people mocked Vice-President Biden for saying that paying taxes is patriotic.

Freedom Isn't Free in the most obvious financial sense, too. We honor our military for defending us. Most of what we pay federal taxes for is to pay for our military expenses. Taxes pay for our freedom in the most direct way. And the thousand and one other things that we expect the government to do also cost money. Of course some tax money is badly spent. But nearly all of it is spent on what we the people elected our representatives to spend it on - serving the common good. Many government programs do not benefit me directly, but they benefit some citizens. Paying for programs that benefit other people is what good citizenship requires.

Freedom isn't free. Paying taxes is patriotic.

Chastened Has the Right Message About Sex

Hephzibah Anderson, a British journalist, came to think at 30 that the quick march to sex with the men she knew in her 20s had short-circuited her emotional connections with them. So she swore off sex for a year. In a new book, Chastened, she talks about what she learned. Her interview with Aylin Zafar in the Atlantic concludes thus:

"There's been a lot less sex, but more romance. And a lot more emotional closeness."

The Low-Libido Middle Class is Not Really a Problem

Camille Paglia has another catchy title in her latest New York Times op-ed: "No Sex, Please, We're Middle Class." She thinks that the United States' middle class is in a sexual doldrums. No chemicals, no female Viagra or its male counterpart, can make up for the boringness of our cerebral work and lives. She wants a revitalization of lust.

I think she is right that the sexual appetites of the dominant class are not overwhelming. Popular sociology has invented the concept of DINS - Double Income, No Sex - for couples who would rather work than couple. This is a new circumstance.

I do not think a low libido in the dominant class is a problem. The sexualization of everything in popular culture, and the ubiquity of porn, has, I think, put so much overemphasis on sex that it loses its cultural power. Sexual stimulation still works on our bodies, as it always has an always will. But too much sex in the culture means that ordinary people don't have to spend much time thinking about it.

I think we can see low libido among married couples as a healthy, proportionate estimation of the modest good that is sex.

As Women Take Over the World, Men Need Marriage Even More

Hanna Rosin has a fine piece in the Atlantic on how women are taking over the world.

OK, she doesn't quite put it that way. But she does note that the developing economy favors women's skills and training. The current recession has put men out of work more than usual. Things are looking up for girls in most of the world, and they are taking advantage of their opportunities.

The saddest group of guys in her article are in court-ordered "fatherhood training." These guys are mostly behind on child support and make less than their wives. Rosin's point is that women making more than their men is a growing reality. This is true.

I draw an additional conclusion from this illustration. In general, women benefit the most from marriage financially. This is still true, and given the realities of who has babies, is likely to always be true. Moreover, men are more likely to be employed in risky jobs, whereas women trade off pay and other perks for job security. Thus, there should be an increasing number of couples in which she makes the steady paycheck. During good times, he will make more; during recessions, she keeps them afloat.

One main effect, then, of women's growing economic success is that the economic benefits of marriage increase - and increasingly benefit men as much as women.

The "Boyfriend Story" Never Went Away

Caitlin Flanagan argues in the Atlantic that girls are resisting the ubiquitous hook-up culture with a revival of what she calls "the Boyfriend Story," an over-romanticized view of how men can really relate to women. I am sure that teenage girls are prone to over-romanticize many things. But their desire for boyfriends who turn into husbands has never gone away. Nor are they wrong or unrealistic.

Hook-ups are real, but they are a minority practice, and most are not quite as decadent as many fear. Moreover, even the minority of girls who do hook up get over that phase pretty quickly. They find that it works as a way to get boys to pay attention to them and to feel attractive. But then they find out that ancient wisdom that boys have two different lists, and two different kinds of attention, when it comes to girls. Girls, on the other hand, pretty much only have the "boyfriend" list. Hooking up will get a girl on a boy's list (and probably all of his friends' lists, too), but not on the "girlfriend" list.

The marriage story is still the main story that most people want and get. The boyfriend story, like the girlfriend story, is how teenagers practice for the real thing.

Elena Kagan: Another Triumph of WASP Values

Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor, has a fine op-ed in the New York Times today about the Elena Kagan nomination to the Supreme Court. Others have noted that if, as expected, she is confirmed, the Court will have no Protestants for the first time ever. Feldman takes this as the jumping off point for an interesting and up-building claim:

Unlike almost every other dominant ethnic, racial or religious group in world history, white Protestants have ceded their socioeconomic power by hewing voluntarily to the values of merit and inclusion, values now shared broadly by Americans of different backgrounds. The decline of the Protestant elite is actually its greatest triumph.

E. Digby Baltzell, a great sociologist about whom I have written before, argued that every society needs a leadership class that assimilates talented individuals who rise from outside the old ruling class. This is hard for the top class to stick to, because it is easier and more comfortable to only promote their own. However, that way lies a caste society and increasing injustice to the talented but excluded. If, though, the leadership class can continue to include talented outsiders, it truly deserves the name of "aristocracy" in the literal sense - the rule of the best.

Baltzell goes beyond other theorists of aristocracy to see that even greater benefit comes to society if these new men (and now women) are included not just in the powerful public institutions, but also in the private world of the leadership class. The acid test of this private inclusion is if the rising individuals marry into the old top class families. If the aristocracies of individuals can solidify into a stable, but porous, network of families, then the leadership class can produce a true Establishment. Their children then are members of the top class by birth and (normally) shared breeding.

I believe Elena Kagan will be a fine Supreme Court justice. I do regret, as a Baltzellian sociologist, that she will not have descendants who can complete the assimilation of this very talented woman into the American Establishment.

Girl and Boy Hierarchies.

I am reading John Levi Martin's stimulating Social Structures. He considers how hierarchies arise among girls and boys. I paraphrase one of his points thus:

Girl hierarchies organize from the outcast up; boy hierarchies organize from the leader down.

Nerdy Dolphins

I used to teach 13th Gen, a good book written by two Baby Boomers about Generation X, which came out when Gen X was still in college. One innovation of the book was that the authors, Neil Howe and William Strauss, posted their developing thoughts on the younger generation on an electronic bulletin board, inviting comment. One persistent respondent, then a college student, eventually provided such useful feedback that his comments were included in the published book, under the name "Crasher."

Crasher's first response, though, was highly skeptical. He wrote:

Pardon me for interrupting, but this has to be one of the silliest things I've ever seen on this network. Don't you know that categorizing and defining stuff that you have no clue about is one of the fatal flaws of being a baby boomer? You guys sound like nerdy dolphins talking about hang gliding.

I have found the category of "nerdy dolphins" to be very useful when someone who knows one thing is pronouncing confidently on another - grossly missing some elementary points. I am no doubt guilty of being a nerdy dolphin more often than I know.

I have been immersed in family sociology, which obsesses on the subject of the balancing the obligations, as well as the great pleasures, of work and family. There is a large scholarly community in sociology, family studies, economics, and beyond, studying this subject. Beyond the academics, there is an immense popular literature, much of it based on research, aimed at working parents who are trying to rightly juggle their several competing duties. So I could only react with wonder today when I read a noted scholar of leisure write this:

"Obligation outside that experienced while pursuing a livelihood is terribly understudied (much of it falls under the heading of family and/or domestic life …)”

Nerdy dolphin.

Educated People Think They Are More Left-Wing Than They Really Are

As a centrist I think the left-right political spectrum does as much mischief as good, because it encourages a false polarization of what we think the political options are. Nonetheless, it is very useful. Most people can readily place themselves on the spectrum, and choose their friends and enemies based on whether those others call themselves left or right.

James Rockey, an economist at the University of Leicester, has an interesting analysis based on the World Values Survey called "Who is left, and who just thinks they are?" He compared where people places themselves on a ten-point left/right spectrum with where they place themselves on two other questions to get some objective measure of their actual position. One of the objective questions is familiar:

“Incomes should be made more equal vs We need larger income differences as incentives. How would you place your views on this scale?"

The second question sounds unusual, at least to American ears:

"Imagine two secretaries, of the same age, doing practically the same job. One finds out that the other earns considerably more than she does. The better paid secretary, however, is quicker, more efficient and more reliable at her job. In your opinion, is it fair or not fair that one secretary is paid more than the other?"

Rockey's headline finding: the more educated on average believe themselves to be more left wing than their actual beliefs on a substantive issue might suggest.

Pruetts Don't Quite Deliver on How Men and Women Parent Differently

Kyle and Marsha Pruett, well-known family researchers, have a popular new book aimed at parents. Partnership Parenting: How Men and Women Parent Differently - Why It Helps Your Kids and Can Strengthen Your Marriage begins with some promising research-based accounts of how fathers and mothers tend to approach raising children differently. The chapter called "Cuddling vs. the Football Hold," on how mothers and fathers hold babies, is particularly interesting. In later chapters, though, they pay less and less attention to complementary differences between fathers and mothers, and more and more on general, sensible parenting advice.

At the heart of the book is the Pruetts' contention that children have a relationship with their parents as a team, as well as with each parent. This is sound and important. They return often to the theme that the couple needs to work out a common plan in raising children, even while preserving their differences. This is also quite sound. They hint that research shows a pattern to these differences - fathers tending one way, mothers another. They offer even more tantalizing hints that these differences tend to be complementary. But the message that the parents need to present a united front overwhelms what is more interesting to me - just how men and women tend to differ in raising kids.

Scanzoni's Family View Goes Another Giant Step to the Left

John Scanzoni, a well-known family sociologist, has a new book, Healthy American Families: A Progressive Alternative to the Religious Right. Most of the book is the familiar liberal argument that all close relationships are equally good, marriage is an outdated institution, and children shouldn't interfere with adult autonomy.

Lately this argument has been putting more emphasis on these autonomous adults partnering with their soul mates - for as long as they feel like soul mates. Scanzoni praises Abigail Adams, John Adams' "remarkable soul mate (who also happened to be his wife and the manager of their farm)."

Likewise, divorce is nothing to lament. Rather, he offers as one his ten guidelines for progressive family life that "love and autonomy govern the transitions between being partnered and partner-free."

Scanzoni also says that it more environmentally responsible not to have children, or at least to have a "child-minimum" one-child family.

Scanzoni was raised an evangelical Christian, and went to Moody Bible Institute in the 1950s. He writes here as a "recovering evangelical" who is now against "christianists" who would impose their view of the divine on others. I don't think the religious theme is actually essential to his argument - he would be equally imposed to secular family scholars who emphasize the benefits to adults and, especially, to children of marriage.

The culture wars live, as shown by this salvo.

Expecting Fidelity Probably Does Yield a Higher Divorce Rate - But is Still Worth It

Catherine Hakim, a British sociologist, offered up to a conference of mostly American scholars the theory that U.S. divorce rates were so high because we expect marital fidelity. If we just accepted, as continental Europeans do, that some discrete affairs are inevitable in a marriage, we could have lower divorce rates, like the Italians.

As a sociological observation I have to admit that she is probably right.

Every possible social arrangement has its costs and benefits, which require trade-offs. Still, I think the greater benefits, both socially and personally, come from trying to reach the higher standard.

I do think that it is unreasonable to expect your spouse to feel like your soulmate at every moment of a long marriage. But sexual fidelity does seem possible for most people who make a public commitment to try it. And there are things we can do to improve their odds.

Babies Don't Make Your Marriage Go Sour - If You Are Religious

This week I will blog on a fine family sociology conference I am attending at Princeton.

In general, couples report that their satisfaction with their marriage goes down when their first child is born. Brad Wilcox and Jeffrey Dew found, though, that this is mostly true for secular women. For religious women who share a faith and a religious community with their husbands, having a baby does not make them less happy with their marriage.

I think this is because religious couples can see having a baby as a meaningful, even sacred act, which they are doing for others as well as for their own little family.

Is the Idea of Pre-Marital Sex Obsolescent?

This week I will blog on a fine family sociology conference I am attending at Princeton.

Mark Regnerus suggests that with the rising age of marriage, widespread cohabitation, even cohabitation with children, and the general separation of sex from reproduction, in fifteen years the term "pre-marital sex" will seem archaic.

Gifted Givers

This week I will blog on a fine family sociology conference I am attending at Princeton.

Many programs aimed at preventing unmarried motherhood try to convince women, especially poor women with little education, that they could maximize their individual profits if they just prevented babies. This is an argument that works with many richer, more educated women and men, such as those who make up such policies.

Helen Alvare argues that such policies fail because they fail to understand what these women want. They are not trying to be individual profit maximizers. They are trying to be "gifted givers." The love and care they give to their children are a gift to the children themselves, and to the community as a whole. Giving that love is something these moms are good at. Being good mothers, according to the standards of their community, is something that any mother can understand. Facing up to the responsibilities of motherhood, even without a husband, is an honorable way to face their community.

Donor Kids Want to Know Who Their Fathers Are - But Also Support Sperm Donation

This week I will blog on a fine family sociology conference I am attending at Princeton.

Elizabeth Marquardt and colleagues have produced a fascinating new report, "My Daddy's Name is Donor" on the lives and views of adults conceived by sperm donation.

She found that about half of them were bothered about the circumstances of their conception, especially that money changed hands. At the same time, almost two thirds support the existence of sperm donation, and a fifth of them have donated sperm or eggs themselves - a much higher rate than the general population.

The donor-conceived children have serious questions about their own identity. They do worse on a number of behavioral measures than either natural or adopted children. Yet most also embrace the idea that "parents have a right to a child" and think just about all methods to achieve that end should be allowed.

I believe the public discussion of donor-conceived children is just beginning. The ideas of donor offspring, which are not entirely coherent, will, I believe, shift and solidify - and polarize - as the discourse develops. I commend Marquardt for getting the ball rolling.

Authentic Happiness 2: The Main Point

Positive Psychology has made an elaborate effort to identify the different strengths that people can have. They have set out to create a positive alternative to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the summary text of psychology. Martin Seligman's Authentic Happiness makes an interesting claim: don't try to have all strengths possible to people, but concentrate on your signature strengths. The main point of the book, I believe, is this:

“the good life is using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification. This is something you can do in each of the main realms of your life: work, love, and raising children.”

This raises a further question for a sociologist: do groups of people have distinctive signature strengths?

And beyond that, what kind of society would emerge if each person pursued his or her signature strengths?

Communion Technology

Danville hosted its big event of the year, the Great American Brass Band Festival. This morning saw the traditional community church service on the college lawn. The Canadian Salvation Army band supplied the music, and most of the downtown churches participated in the service. This is practical ecumenism at its best.

We had a new piece of communion technology this year. We each received a little plastic cup of grape juice. It was sealed at the top. Above the seal was another layer with the text "This is my body, which is broken for you. Take, eat: do this in remembrance of me."

The most amazing part was that in between the top layer printed with the text, and the second layer which sealed the cup, was a little tiny communion wafer.

A Centrist Looks at the Parties 3: Third Parties

Third parties only hurt the party closest to them. They are a gift to their enemies. Ross Perot took enough votes away from George H.W. Bush for Bill Clinton to get elected. Ralph Nader took enough votes away from Al Gore for George W. Bush to get elected.

The third parties are drawn from the angry wings. Centrists tend not to go in for the kind of institution destroying that you would have to do to make a third party.

I see an asymmetry, though, between the two kinds of third parties. There are angry extremes on both ends of the political spectrum. Aside from tiny socialist sects, though, the left extremes hardly ever split from the Democratic Party to mount a third party challenge. The Nader campaign was unusual because he persisted in a vanity campaign into the general election, even when it was clearly hurting his own side. Contrary to the usual stereotype, it is Democrats who are more disciplined about working within the party. This is the advantage of a being a "big tent." On the right end of the spectrum, though, short-lived parties come and go all the time. Whether organized around a rich guy or grass-roots anger, libertarian and nativist "parties" keep splitting the right and undermining the Republican Party.

I believe there are more significant third parties on the right than the left because the right wing of American politics was born of the marriage of Protestant sectarianism and "you can't tell me what to do" individualism. Both sides of this family are good for creating motivating passion. But they are bad for sustaining political parties.

A Centrist Looks at the Parties 2: Democrats

The Democratic Party is a center-left party. At this time, it is the biggest tent. The Democratic Party is not a centrist party, but it has the greatest room and tolerance for centrists.

The left wing of the Democratic Party was been disappointed with President Obama. They have mounted primary challenges to several centrist Democrats.

I believe the big advantage that centrists have in the Democratic Party, as opposed to the Republican Party, is that these attempted purges have not, for the most part, succeeded. Several establishment Republicans have been knocked off by the Tea Party wing. No establishment Democrats have been knocked off by leftists in the Democratic Party this cycle. (I don't think anyone could count Senator Spector as an establishment Democrat.)

After President Reagan's defeat of President Carter in 1980, the Democratic Party was torn apart for a season by ideological fights and recriminations. The metaphor of a circular firing squad was appropriate. The party was brought back by a rising generation of centrists who were willing to horse trade with the other side. The country, and the world, enjoyed a moment of peace and prosperity.

The Republican Party is having its circular firing squad moment now. The emotional energy is on the right wing. But the future of the party lies, I believe, with a rising generation of centrists who will be willing to horse trade with the other side.

This is a great moment for the Democratic Party. I believe the Obama administration has done about as good a job as could be done in cleaning up the massive destruction they inherited, of which the Gulf oil spill is only the latest legacy. At the same time, they have had a few significant legislative and diplomatic achievements, with more to come before the mid-term elections. The party in power will, no doubt, lose seats in the mid-term, as usually happens. But eventually there will be centrists Republicans to work with, who will strengthen the centrist Democrats. Together they can use America's moment as the world's super power for the good of all.

A Centrist Looks at the Parties 1: Republicans

I am a centrist. I pick the party that has the most viable place for centrists. I have voted for and registered as a Republican in the past. Lately, though, I find the Democratic Party is the only viable home for a centrist. The Democratic Party is a bigger tent. The Republican Party is prone to purges designed to drive out the ideologically impure, including centrists who want to work with the other party to govern.

The Republican Party was born of establishment white Protestantism, which remains the core Republican constituency today. I am an establishment white Protestant. Most members of my church, the mainline Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), are Republicans. The great strength of the historic core of the Republican Party has been fiscal responsibility and a strong military to build up good order in society. I believe American politics works best when one party holds up this side of government, in constant dialogue with the party of helping people in need and defending the weak for the compassionate order of society.

Sometimes, though these Republican virtues get pulled, by anger and fear, to a bad extreme. Fiscal responsibility becomes "only spend money on me"; a strong military becomes "use any force on anyone who might threaten me"; build up the good order of society becomes "prevent government". Worse, establishment white Protestantism has a tendency, when fearful, to become an angry nativism that turns harshly against immigrants and imagined conspiracies by foreign ideologies.

The precursor to the Republican Party was the Whig Party. It had the same core and, at its best, the same strengths. The Know Nothing movement tore apart the Whig Party. The Know Nothings lasted only a few years, and produced no legislative achievements. Today the Tea Party movement occupies the same position in relation to the Republican Party. I do not think the Republican Party will be torn apart, as the Whigs were. But I do think that the current nativist tempest will subside, the fear and anger will recede to the wings.

I look forward to the return of the traditional Republican Party as a partner with the Democratic Party in good government.

Authentic Happiness 1: The Pillars

I have previously blogged on Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism, the starting point of his trilogy on positive psychology. This week I will be considering the conclusion of his trilogy, Authentic Happiness.

Positive Psychology has three pillars:

Positive emotion

Positive traits – especially strengths and virtues, but also abilities

Positive institutions – democracy, strong families, free inquiry

Positive psychology has to make a case for positive emotions because they are arguing with Freudians, who say that our achievements and creativity are driven by channeling negative emotions. Seligman argues, probably too emphatically, that "there is not a shred of evidence that strength and virtue are derived from negative motivation." This is mostly an intra-psych squabble about how important and fleeting emotions are.

The strength of positive psychology, in my view, is its attempt to reconnect the psychologists' "traits" with the philosophers' and religious leaders' "virtues." The empirical work that positive psychology builds on is best when it shows how habits of action produce our long-term gratifications and troubles. My favorite sentence on the ambition of Seligman's movement is this: "we need a psychology of rising to the occasion."

The part I am most interested, as I try to construct a positive sociology, is his claim that the third pillar is positive institutions. I think he makes a suggestive beginning in this book in connecting positive character with positive institutions. Most of this work, though, remains to be done. And nearly all of it, I think, is beyond the tools of psychology.

Blockades Hurt Potential Friends

I have long thought the blockade of Cuba was a bad idea. If we had had vigorous trade relations with Cuba from the outset of the Castro regime, they would be turned into a democratic market society no later than 1989, and probably long before. Isolating Cuba from the strong appeal of freedom and freely available stuff just pushed them into the arms of the Soviets and strengthened the Communist regime. I look forward to visiting democratic Cuba soon after we end this foolish policy. Aid and trade wins friends among ordinary people, even if the regime never likes us. In the long run, even in the medium run, that friendship and ordinary intercourse matters more.

The blockade by the Israeli government of Palestine is a bad idea. If they had vigorous trade relations with one another, and all the other kinds of intercourse normal between two intertwined nations, Palestine could turn fully into the democratic market society that it almost is already. Isolation pushes ordinary Palestinians into the arms of Hamas and the violent extremists. Fomenting permanent fear has a similar effect on ordinary Israelis and their equivalent extremists. Aid and trade wins friends among ordinary people, even if the regimes never like one another. In the long run, even in the medium run, that friendship and ordinary intercourse matters more.

Lean Green Beef

What Mrs. G. asked me to get at the grocery store. Inadvertent, but too funny. A keeper.

Learned Optimism 3: What is Pessimism For?

In Learned Optimism, Martin Seligman makes a good case for the many benefits of optimism. So, he asks, what is pessimism for? Why did it get selected for in evolution?

The answer is that pessimists are more accurate about what was and is than optimists are.

In any organization, Seligman argues, you need the optimists to pursue a vision of the future in the face of adversity. And you need some pessimistic bean counters to keep accurate tabs on what resources you actually have and what actions are actually happening now.

I like this balance, even dialectic, of complementary types.

As I argued yesterday, though, I think Seligman is wrong about what optimism is. He conflates optimism and cheerfulness. He sees optimism as the ability to persist in doing in the face of obstacles. He does not have a place for cheerful realism, the ability to accurately see the good and bad in the world, and remain cheerful. His account of optimism tends to reduce virtues to psychological traits that help us achieve the end of getting what we seek. He does not really have a place for virtues as habits of action that let us live in a good way, whether that achieves the ends we seek or not.

Learned Optimism 2: Is Seligman Right About Optimism?

In Learned Optimism, Martin Seligman says that if you have a pessimistic explanatory style, when something bad happens to you, you blame yourself. I think he is right.

Seligman then goes on to say that if you have an optimistic explanatory style, when something bad happens to you, you blame it on others.

I do not think this is right. I do not think this is what optimism means. And I don't think these are the only choices. The bad effect on you could be the effect of social structure - of the unintended consequences of other people's actions, which were not bad in themselves or aimed at you. The bad effect could be due to nature, or even higher forces.

This individual focus - either it is my fault or it is your fault - may be an occupational hazard of psychology. Or it may be that he had found some test items that correlate with the opposite of pessimism, some of which are related to optimism, and some of which are not.

I think Seligman is right about pessimism, but wrong about optimism.

Learned Optimism 1: What is a Pessimistic Explanatory Style?

This week I will be blogging on Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism, one of the fundamental books of positive psychology.

I think Seligman's starting point is true and powerful. If, when faced with adversity, you habitually believe that:

a) it is your fault;
b) it is due to a pervasive fault of yours; and
c) that this fault ruins your life; then

many things in your life, and the lives of others you interact with, will be made worse as a result.

In Seligman's terms, a pessimistic explanatory style will produce worse results than an alternative, more optimistic explanation of adversity will.

Commencement Closes a Loop

We went back to alma mater, Swarthmore College, for the eldest Gruntled child's happy graduation.

The entire ceremony was great. When the streaming video (which was broadcast live) is available I will post the link.

I asked in a post some years ago "Does Swarthmore Reproduce My Family, Or Does My Family Reproduce Swarthmore?" The answer is "yes."

A loop has been closed.

Completing a Grand Loop in the Life Cycle

Today our eldest child graduates from college.

In our specific era and class, this is her real graduation into independent adulthood. We will, of course, continue to love and help her all of our days. But from now on she will not be temporarily away from our home, but a person with her own center of gravity elsewhere, who pays us welcome visits.

Adding to this sense of completion of a loop is the fact that she is graduating from our alma mater.

And for a further dash of sweetness, yesterday we walked by the Meeting House on campus where we were married, 28 years before that moment.

The Dangers of Iced Coffee

Thaler and Sunstein, in Nudge, talk about how the initial conditions are so important in priming a group to react one way or another. They cite an experiment which went one way if the group was given hot coffee first, and a different way if they were given iced coffee.

“Those given iced coffee are more likely to see other people as more selfish, less sociable, and, well, colder than those who are given hot coffee.”

Don't Nudge Marriage

The one thing I thought Thaler and Sunstein were most wrong about in Nudge was the idea of privatizing marriage. They propose that the state "get out of the marriage business," offering only legal civil unions. Marriage would be left entirely to religious institutions.

Their account of marriage misses the fact that marriage as a social institution is not primarily about the feelings of the married couple, but about the best arrangement for raising children. Marriage works best for kids, and produces many of its benefits for married people, because it is a permanent, socially recognized and supported institution.

Marriage is not a nudge, but a permanent choice to change yourself into a part of something larger than yourself.

Save More Tomorrow

The best-known example of a nudge from Thaler and Sunstein is "Save More Tomorrow."

Most Americans say they want to put more money away in savings accounts, but few do it. If you offer employees an option to select automatic savings from their paychecks, most will say they are for it, but only about a fifth will actually get around to setting it up. However, if the default is that they are all signed up for an automatic savings deduction of, say, 2%, unless they opt out, 90% will start savings.

And what has happened two years later, when the workers have had a chance to see that 2% flow out of their paycheck and into a savings account? 98% have joined the automatic savings plan.

That is a pretty good nudge.

The further nudge of Save More Tomorrow is that every time you get a raise, a hunk of it is added to your savings deduction, before you ever see it in a paycheck. Then your savings starts to really build up - and you never miss it.

Conformity, Proportion, and the Wisdom of Crowds

Thaler and Sunstein note that many people tend to follow the crowd, even when at their reflective best they know better. When Solomon Asch's conformity experiments are tried around the world, 20 - 40% of people will go along with the crowd of the experimenter's secret collaborators even when they can see that the crowd is wrong.

Thaler and Sunstein conclude that this fact means we should adjust our choice architecture to help people resist being improperly swayed by the crowd. One way to do this is to show that when people think "everyone is doing it" the real proportions are quite different. Knowing that a number of others go their own way - even if only a minority - gives courage to those who want to follow their instincts or values, but don't want to be too deviant. And showing the true proportions of anything in a whole population is beyond what anyone can know from just looking around. For true proportions you need sociology.

Choice Architecture

Thaler and Sunstein make the case for libertarian paternalism, as I noted yesterday.

Some might object that nudging is not libertarian, but statism disguising itself as liberty.

Thaler and Sunstein have a good answer for that. Any situation that requires choice has an implicit "choice architecture." Doing nothing is also a choice.

A big finding of the psychological research and behavioral economics that lies behind the book Nudge, though, is that many times most people don't get around to making a choice, or implementing the choice they made in their minds, or find too many choices paralyzing. None of these conditions are the same as reflectively choosing not to act. The implicit choice architecture of many choices we face tends to produce thoughtless inertia.

What a thoughtful choice architect would do about that situation, therefore, is try to structure the choices such that it is easier to assess the choices, and put our choice into effect. Moreover, there are many situations in which we can know what most people are likely to want to choose. Straight-up paternalism (whether exercised by the state or any other institution) would lead the choice architect to make that choice for other people. What libertarian paternalism does instead is to make it easy to take the most likely choice as a default, but allow an easy and clear opt-out if the chooser wishes too.

Choice architecture is inevitable - it is implicit in any array of choices. Nudging people to choose, and choose wisely, is a social good without social force.

Libertarian Paternalism

This week I will be blogging Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness.

Libertarian Paternalism is the wonderful name that Thaler and Sunstein give to their approach to social organization.

Their approach is paternalistic, in that it helps people make choices that will improve their lives - as the people themselves see it. Sometimes, though, we make choices automatically or in the heat of the moment that we would not make if we thought about it. Thus, the paternalism is in setting up our choices to get us to pick what our reflective selves would want - even when we are not being reflective.

Their approach is libertarian, though, in that you can opt out of choosing what the system urges you to choose. You are free to have a different opinion. You are free to make foolish choices. You are free to reject what you know is good for you out of sheer cussedness.

Thaler and Sunstein don't force you to choose what it good for you. But they do nudge.

Libertarian Paternalism, by its seeming union of opposites, ends up centrist.

Commencement 2010: You are Not Special

Centre College held Commencement today.

The unexpected element of the address by Wayne Meisel, head of the Bonner Foundation, was "you are not special." Evidently he had been running across some young people who had been told they were special so often that they didn't think they had to work hard, pay their dues, or pitch in unasked.

His illustration was "wash the dishes in the office sink without an attitude."

Sage advice. Unusual in a commencement address. A corollary, I think, of the Protestant work ethic, from a self-described preacher's kid.

My New Foundation

My wife has been doing some work with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

I was thinking that I should have a foundation, too. I could have it jointly with my children. I could be the bull in charge, and my kids, or "little goats" in the more formal parlance of foundations, could be my partners.

The Bull and My Little Goats Foundation.

Paternal Postpartum Depression

A new meta-analysis of many others studies suggests that 10% of new fathers feel depressed after the birth of their children. Equally interesting, dad's depression seemed to correlate with mom's depression.

As a guest couple said to my family life class this term, "having a baby is like dropping a bomb in your relationship."

Why The Fear Wave Now?

David Brooks notes that "if you grew up in a big city in the '70s, then life is better for you now in every respect." But this also means that if you grew up in a big city in the '70s, you came of age in a time of crime, drugs, riots, a lost war, and family collapse. If you grew up near a big city in the '70s, as David Brooks did, as I did, the spectacle of the terrible things happening nearby and Coming For You Next was, if anything, even scarier than if you lived within it and learned how to cope with real dangers.

Your worldview is shaped by what was going on when you first started noticing the world. Even if the actual world gets much better - as it has for young Boomers and old Xers - your adolescent worldview tends to stick with you. The generation that came of age in the 1970s, what Doonesbury rightly called "a kidney stone of a decade," are now coming to power.

I think the fear that drives much of American politics now is not driven by real threats of today. They are driven by the scary conditions that prevailed in the childhood and early adolescence of today's rising ruling cohort.

It Really is Important for Government to Make People Happy - With Government

One more interesting idea from David Halpern's The Hidden Wealth of Nations:

"the growing use of subjective satisfaction measures may prove to be the single most important innovation in public services of the last decade."

Subjective satisfaction measures means asking people if they are happy with the services they are getting from government. By looking at the details of what citizens do and not like about their interactions with the state, the government can get a reality check about how it is doing, and which things it needs to improve.

The Canadian government did detailed studies of citizens' satisfaction with the service they were getting. The government was often surprised that the things that bothered and pleased people were not what the government workers providing the service thought it would be. For example, people were much more upset about the police not showing up when they said they would than about whether the police solved the crime. The Canadian government then set targets to improve consumers' satisfaction with government services, starting from this baseline. They evaluate agency heads on whether people are actually more satisfied with the service they are getting, not on whether the agency was satisfied that it followed its own procedures.

The State Should Not Let Fear Be the Declarative Norm

More thoughts inspired by David Halpern's The Hidden Wealth of Nations.

The "declarative norm" is what we perceive others to be doing. We are much more likely to do something if we think that "everyone is doing it."

I have always thought that one of the distinctive functions of sociology is to show people the true proportions of every practice - everyone is not doing it (whatever it is); X percent are doing it, but you could choose to be in the Y percent who are not.

The government often makes the big mistake of inflating a problem to get more attention. However, this strategy makes it more likely that people with think that problematic behavior is the declarative norm, which makes them more likely to do it.

I believe that of all the big mistakes government can make, promoting the culture of fear as the declarative norm is the biggest mistake of all.

Babies Prefer Helpers to Hinderers.

Paul Bloom, a Yale psychologist, has done some nifty studies in which babies watched puppets and toys in little stories in which some characters helped others, while other characters hindered others.

The babies overwhelmingly preferred the helpers.

When toddlers where shown similar stories, they punished the hinderers.

Morality is built in. It is not merely a social construct.

Donut Prince Commercial

This is a great pro-marriage ad.

Inequality With Respect and Equal Access is OK

David Halpern, in The Hidden Wealth of Nations, reported on the Blair administration's attempts to improve the lot of the worst off in Britain by removing barriers to achievement. To the discomfort of the left, they discovered that removing barriers didn't do much to reduce inequality because many people at the bottom didn't want to seize more opportunities (and more work).

He also reports that most nations are not opposed to inequality, if they think the process that produced it is basically fair. This is true regardless of how unequal that nation's economic condition actually is.

So Halpern suggests a sensible centrist aim for government. The state should focus on fostering decency, mutual respect, and access to basic services, especially on the part of the state itself. The government should not put its main effort into eliminating inequality or poverty.

Monetizing Good Behavior Cheapens It

This is a point that I have been noticing from other studies of paying people for gifts, but was clarified for me by David Halpern in The Hidden Wealth of Nations.

The economy of regard is a vast gift exchange of labor, respect, and love. If we tried to reduce the many gifts that we give to family, friends, and fellow citizens to the cash economy, we would stop doing those good acts. The economy of regard runs on trust - the trust that in the not-too-long run, what you give will come back to you, and probably several-fold. The cash economy exists for those situations with low trust.

Yet trust is the foundation on which functional social life runs. We try to turn mere cash relations into personal relations all the time - which makes the cash relations work better. The hidden wealth of happy nations is trust. Reducing social relations to cash economies reduces the very social wealth that makes nations happy.

Fear of Crime Shows Our Weak Social Ties

David Halpern, in The Hidden Wealth of Nations, directly addresses the culture of fear, which I think is what makes our politics irrational. He reports that Britons fear crime, immigration, and terrorism, even though crime is down, immigration is overwhelmingly positive, and terrorism is extremely rare. Americans share these fears. What these fears have in common is a fear of the Other all out of proportion to the actual threat. Halpern writes

“Fear of crime is … showing a mirror to ourselves – a glimpse into the hidden wealth or poverty of a nation.”

Nations that promote social connections and social trust are happier, calmer, less fearful. They also have less crime. And their discussion about crime, immigration, and terrorism can be conducted in a calmer, more proportionate way.

Fighting fear is not just rational, it actually makes the social order better.

Nations Unite on Social Values, The World Remains Diverse

I am continuing with David Halpern's The Hidden Wealth of Nations today.

Some globalization writers worry that countries are becoming all the same. Some writers on immigration worry that diversity will tear countries apart.

The opposite is happening, says Halpern. Using World Values Survey data, he says that, outside of a small globalized sector in many countries, nations are actually becoming more different from one another. And they are doing so by coming together around their common values - allaying the fears of those alarmed by immigration.

The hidden wealth of nations is the trust and connections that our social relations and shared standards of regard build up.

The Economy of Regard

I am working through David Halpern's The Hidden Wealth of Nations. Halpern was a chief policy analyst for Tony Blair. He is starting from a problem I have written about several times recently - the disjunction between high levels of happiness and high levels of income in nations. His argument is that what really makes a nation happy, once its basic needs are met, are the giant web of relationships that we have with family, friends, and fellow citizens. These relations usually take the form of long circles of gift-giving, which more or less even out in the end. We do these things for others not for money, but for regard - our regard for them, and theirs for us.

The economy of regard, Halpern argues, is much larger than the economy of monetary exchange. Indeed, quite a bit of what we work for and buy is to give to others out of regard. Happy nations have a healthy economy of regard. Since we work much harder and better at measuring the economy of monetary exchange than we do at measuring the economy of regard, the major wealth of nations is hidden.

Inequality Makes Rich Liberals Unhappy

The Easterlin paradox, as we noted yesterday, finds that above the midpoint, more money does not make people happier.

The complementary macrosocial finding is that inequality in society is not closely correlated with overall happiness. Nor are poor people normally unhappy in unequal societies. Indeed, some of the happiest people in the world, according to Carol Graham's studies in Happiness Around the World, are in sub-Saharan Africa, which are very unequal societies.

Yet happiness studies at the macrosocial level almost always have a big concern with opposing inequality. Where does this concern come from, if not from the actual data on happiness?

From the guilt of rich liberals, especially in rich societies, Graham concludes.

The Easterlin Paradox - The Foundation of Macro Happiness Studies

I am working my way through the mountain of research in the past generation on happiness. Half of it is micro work done by psychologists. The other half are macro studies done by economists. We sociologists have some catching up to do.

The foundation of macro happiness studies is Richard Easterlin's finding that richer nations are happier, but the richer people in them are not.

When you plot income against happiness, the curve goes up steeply to about the mid-point, then flattens out, kind of like a small r. This curve is the same for individuals within a nation, and for nations as a whole.

Some researchers I respect say that there isn't really a paradox, because the curve does not flatten (as much) if you measure percentage change in income, instead of absolute increases. I will ponder over those claims hereafter.

The basic finding of the Easterlin paradox makes sense to me. From poor to average, more money really does make your life easier and opens other options. From middle to the Gatesian stratosphere of income, though, more money does not add big increments of happiness. Richer nations are happier because the people who are relatively poor live decent lives, materially, whereas the poorest people in desperately poor nations are really badly off.

Happiness Correlates Hold in Non-Rich Countries, Too

Getting richer doesn't make you happier above the average income. Chronic health problems make you unhappy. Unemployment makes you unhappy. Divorce makes you unhappy. These are strong findings from across the rich countries of the world.

Carol Graham, in Happiness Around the World, added her own study of Latin America, Russia, and Afghanistan, and collected other studies of sub-Saharan Africa. The result: the same relationships hold in middle-income and poor countries, too.

The happiest people were sub-Saharan Africans, among the poorest people on earth. Their absolute wealth is low, but personal happiness is tied more to having enough to live, and then having good family and friend relationships.

Obesity as a Poverty Marker - for White People

Many Americans are fat, including many poor Americans. Carol Graham, in Happiness Around the World, reports that poor white Americans feel worse about being fat than poor black or Hispanic Americans do. Her reading of this fact: poor white Americans think other people see their being fat as marking them off as poor, whereas being fat is spread among all classes of black and Hispanic Americans enough that obesity is not taken as a poverty marker.

Blocked Ascendants and Frustrated Achievers

Carol Graham, in Happiness Around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Unhappy Millionaires, found that the poor people who stay poor are often happier than people who are rising out of poverty. She notes, as many happiness researchers have found, that happiness rises as income rises up to a midpoint, then flattens out at the higher levels of income. In her surveys of many developing countries, Graham found that the least happy were those she called "frustrated achievers." These are people who are rising educationally and economically, but are stymied. In developing economies there are many people with more education and ambition than the economy can absorb. They have a broader view of the possibilities of advancement than the peasants, so it bothers them more than they can't reach their (new) goals.

I was reminded of one of the interesting ideas that came of the massive studies of worldwide religious fundamentalism that Martin Marty and his associates conducted in the 1990s. They found that a fertile field from which to recruit fundamentalists was among people with modern education who were nonetheless unable to find a place in the modern sector of the economy. The Marty team called such people "blocked ascendants."

It makes sense to me that frustrated achievers and blocked ascendants - who appear to be the same people - are both unhappy with the way their society is organized, and open to a suggestion that things would be better if society were restored to a previous, God-given order. I don't know if fundamentalism makes people any happier, but it would make their lives feel more meaningful.

The New Form of Government for the PC(USA) is Still a Good Idea

A new Form of Government was proposed for the Presbyterian Church (USA) at the General Assembly in 2008. Predictably, it was sent back to the church for study until the next assembly, which meets in July. I think the great majority of Presbyterians have no idea that a new Form of Government has been proposed, nor that there is a consequential debate going on. This is pure polity wonk material. As a polity wonk, I feel a duty to weigh in.

The Presbyterian Church, like every big Christian denomination, has always had a range of theological views and religious practices under the big tent of the Bible and traditional theology. Presbyterians takes a specifically Reformed approach, which has some particular consequences, but this picture is true of every large denomination.

For the past long generation in the PC(USA) we have had a continuous theological and cultural struggle. One important front in this struggle has been over the precise wording of the Form of Government (FOG), the portion of the church's constitution that regulates who does what in the church. We don't usually have fights over the part of the constitution about how worship services are to be conducted. While we have a few large disagreements about what we confess theologically, the church made the portion of the constitution that is full of theological confessions merely advisory in the 1960s. So, ever since then, nearly all fights have been about the Form of Government. As a result, the FOG has grown from a short, practical set of regs that commissioners brought to presbytery meetings in their breast pocket, to a fat rulebook.

The idea behind the new Form of Government was to make the denomination-wide FOG a slimmer set of general operating principles. The governing bodies of the church - the local sessions, the presbyteries, the synods, and the General Assembly - would create their own manuals of operations within the general constitution. The different governing bodies could be a little different from one another. The big principles of the church would apply to all. That way, the church would not have to spend every single assembly fighting over amending the by-laws to suit one side of the culture war or the other.

In the upcoming assembly there are a few overtures to shelve the nFOG. The ground of their objection is that, in the words of Central Washington Presbytery,

the proposed changes to the Constitution of the PC(USA) are so vast and foundational, that they are not simply changes to our current communion, but would go so far as to functionally constitute the creation of a new denomination. As such, we believe that many who have taken ordination vows to a vastly different constitution would no longer believe that their vows were still in force. We believe the potential chaos of both intentional changes and unintended, unforeseen consequences will not serve to advance the mission of the church and will only escalate the level of strife and distrust that already exists.

They object to nFOG because it might have unforeseen consequences. That is true. That is true of every change to the constitution.

They object to nFOG because it would let presbyteries have somewhat different rules from one another. That is also true. But that has always been true of the Presbyterian Church, and every large denomination that has ever existed.

The great gain of adopting the new Form of Government is that the inevitable diversity within the Presbyterian Church could be contained within the overall order of the church, while allowing some variation at the local level. The attempt made by both extremes in the church's culture war to force everyone to comply exactly with the views of one wing or the other damages the church unnecessarily. They force the other extreme out. Worse, the endless skirmishing so disheartens the vast loyalist center that they just withdraw from the denomination altogether.

End the war. Allow local variation. Pass the FOG.

Derby Day!

Today is the central ritual of Kentucky's civil religion, the Kentucky Derby.

My favorite part of the whole ritual pageant is the parade of Derby hats. An excellent array can be found here.

I favor the comparatively constrained classics.

I understand that there is also a horse race involved.

Surrogates Beat Imagination to Predict How Something Will Make Us Feel

I have been reading Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness. This is not really about happiness, but about the many ways in which memory and imagination mislead us. If we want to know how some choice might make us feel, we are not likely to get it right if we go by either how we remember it made us feel in the past, nor how we imagine it might make us feel in the future. Instead, our best source of how something would make us feel is how it is making someone else feel in the present. We are better off, in other words, treating other people's feelings as a surrogate for what our own would be.

However, we resist relying on stranger's feelings to predict our own because they are not us. The best line in the book, I think, is this: “if you are like most people, then like most people, you don’t know you’re like most people.” We tend to think ourselves more unusual than we really are - both better and worse.

Each year I find that this is a hard lesson to teach students who are trying to develop a sociological imagination. Most people are average and normal. That means most of my students are average and normal. That means I am average and normal in most things. Of course there are exceptional points. But not as many as we think. The belief that we are unusually unusual is an average and normal belief.

As I often tell Mrs. G., I am a regular guy. She and the kids deny it. That is normal.

The Daily Sex Challenge

A British couple, seven years married, set themselves a challenge of daily sex for a month. They were returning to the practice of their first years of marriage, which they had drifted away from. However, they found that the daily sex experiment was harder to stick to than they thought it would be - normal life raised many hurdles. Still, they also found that it brought them closer together, made them more attentive to one another, and they looked and felt better.

What struck me about this experiment was that they found it so challenging without children. One weekend they babysat their small nieces, who wished to stay up and be entertained. When she fussed to her sister that the kids would cramp their challenge, the mother of the small girls simply said "welcome to my world."

The Kavanaghs ended the account of their experiment in the Daily Mail by saying they were glad they did it, never felt closer, and wanted to start a family.

Feeling That Your Spouse Supports You and Is Pulling In the Same Direction Keeps You Healthier

There is a fascinating article in the New York Times Magazine by Tara Parker-Pope about how a happy marriage helps you stay healthy.

One of the several findings she reports is that women, especially, benefit from the sense that their spouse is present and feeling emotionally supportive. For men the cue is a little different: they like to feel that their spouse is working with them on the same project, not fighting to control them or the relationship.

When Babies Cry it Out, Are They Really Learning Helplessness?

When our eldest was a baby we tried the advice in some parenting books to let her "cry it out" and learn to just go to sleep without being held. I was able to stand her crying for about 15 minutes, uttered an expletive that became famous in the family, and picked her up. End of experiment.

Now Penelope Leach, the favorite parenting advice source of the knowledge class, argues that crying it out is so stressful to babies that they can be scarred, even brain-damaged, by the high cortisol levels this experience induces.

I will be interested in how the scientific argument develops. As for me and my house, we will hold the baby to sleep. More fun for us, too, in the long run.

Proud to be "Trustworthy"

My kind of science. Ish.