The World is a Better Place Than It Was

Bradley Wright has a nifty new book, Upside: Surprising Good News About the State of our World.

He points out that most Americans think there own lives are good and getting better. We think most things will be better in the future (except morals). We think things were good in the past.

What we can't admit is that things are getting better in the nation and the world now.

This leads me to propose a first step:

The simplest way to make the world a better place than it is now is to see that the world is a better place than it was before.

Do Mothers Suffer More Because They Anticipate Pains More?

At the International Positive Psychology Association congress, Richard Davidson gave a fascinating presentation on the many good effects that becoming an expert at meditation and generating compassionate feeling can have on your life.

One study he shared compared expert meditators - Buddhist monks sent by the Dalai Lama - with a matched control group of novices. Their brains were monitored as they went from a neutral state where they were just trying to be "in the moment," to a warning that they were about to be touched with something hot, to being touched with the hot thing.

The expert meditators had low brain activity in the pain and suffering parts of the brain until they were actually touched with the hot probe. The control group, by contrast, started firing up the pain and suffering parts of the brain when they were given the warning. That is, the novices increased their suffering by anticipating pain.

This made me wonder whether mothers suffer more than other people because they worry more than other people. That is, they are anticipating pain for themselves and those they love (whose pain causes the mother suffering, too). Mothers may even go out of their way to think of things to worry about - that is, to think of unlikely pains to suffer from - as a way of being loving.

A Timely Study About Integrating Immigrants.

John Berry, a Canadian researcher on acculturation of immigrants, gave a report to the World Congress on Positive Psychology that I am attending. He studied the different ways immigrant youth in Canada dealt with the tension between their old and new societies. He identified four ways this tension could be resolved.

The best way, for both the immigrants and the host society, is integration of the two cultures. Some immigrant groups encounter more discrimination, and are more inclined to keep their own culture, leading to separation. A few immigrants favor assimilation to the new society - mostly refugees who fled a bad situation in the old country. Most dangerous for both immigrants and natives is the marginalization of the immigrants, who feel no attachment to either their new or old culture.

The results for his survey of Canadian immigrant youth:
Integration 36%
Separation 23%
Assimilation 18%
Marginalization 23%

This seemed a very timely study to me in the light of the right-wing anti-immigrant terrorism in Norway that happened as the Congress is meeting. Berry reported that settler societies, such as Canada and the United States, promote integration of immigrants, which reduces tensions between the two groups. European nations, by contrast, fall into separation, or worse, which heightens tensions between the two groups - and sometimes leads to nativist terrorism against immigrants and those who welcome them.

Fighting Army Suicides With Positive Psychology

The most interesting thing I learned at the World Congress of Positive Psychology today was reported by the founder of the discipline, Martin Seligman. The Army has been working with several big names in the field, including Seligman, to test and train soldiers to make them more resilient, and to identify people needing help early.

A well-being test developed by Chris Peterson and colleagues was given to all soldiers last year. Two of the crucial measures of well-being ask people whether they think their life has meaning, and whether they think their work has meaning. Those soldiers who scored in the bottom one percent on both measures had the worst subjective well-being in the Army.

They then looked at the test results for the 84 soldiers who committed suicide during the year. Half the suicides were in the lowest one percent on both well-being measures.

The Army is training drill sergeants to teach soldiers to be more resilient. With results like these, the Army can know where to pinpoint its training so it will do the most good.

The Happy Society Needs a Fluid Economy and Stable Families

I am strongly attracted to the view, expressed by Matt Ridley in The Rational Optimist, that a fluid world benefits workers as workers, and benefits everyone as consumers.

At the same time, I know that families benefit from a stable world, especially when they are raising young children.

Families benefit from cheap goods reliably delivered. But families are hurt by unstably employed parents.

I do not know how to balance the exhilaration of the creative destruction of capitalism with the fulfillment of the creative nurture of families. But I think I have identified a central problem of the happy society.

The Rightly Ordered and Disciplined Happy Society

The other day I started what I think will become a major thread of "exploring the happy society," by arguing that

The quest for the happy society begins with the courage to proclaim that the world is better off now than it ever has been, and is getting better.

Regular reader ceemac asked this rich question: "I am curious how your concept of 'happy society' either meshes with or conflicts with the Calvinist quest for a society that is 'rightly ordered and disciplined.'"

My short answer is that a rightly ordered and disciplined society is one in which people are free to pursue what makes them happy.

I will go further to claim that most people, if free to choose, will get sick of the lower pleasures and work their way toward the higher ones.

I believe that there are lower and higher forms of happiness. I think Aristotle is right that contemplation is, or is the form of, the highest happiness. I think that Thomas Aquinas is right that what we contemplate in the highest happiness is the beatific vision.

Few people will reach that highest happiness in this life. But a rightly ordered and disciplined society can help people develop habits that lead toward virtues - and therefore happiness. How, exactly, people reach the contemplation of the divine is, I believe, beyond what any merely social theory can explain.

Millennials are Appealingly Conventional

Penelope Trunk held back from criticizing Gen Y, today's youth and young adults, when she was giving them career advice on Brazen Careerist. Now that she has moved on, she let fly with a few mostly just points.

The main point is that Gen Y like to fit in, be part of the team, do what is normal and conventional. Howe and Strauss, who called this generation Millennials, said they are like the '50s Silent Generation, their structural counterparts in the cycle of generations.

My students now are Millennials. I like them. Their distinctive qualities are about 90% beneficial. They are weak on critical thinking and innovation - but so are most people in most generations. They are nice and want to work together (unlike Gen X at the same age).

The mission of Gen X is to rebuild basic institutions after the Boomers' cultural revolution. The task of the Millennials will be to consolidate an appealing normal life within those renewed basic institutions.

The World Is Just Awesome

We Can Only See the Happy Society If We Accept That the World Is Better Off Now Than It Has Ever Been

My main project for this sabbatical and for the years to follow is to explore the idea of the happy society. I changed the subtitle of this blog to reflect that new quest.

I am reading Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist. He argues that life for the vast majority of people is better now than it has ever been, due to specialization and exchange.

The idea that this reading, and many others like it, has led me to is this:

The quest for the happy society begins with the courage to proclaim that the world is better off now than it ever has been, and is getting better.

I believe this is true no matter how materialist or spiritual your standard of happiness is.

Tiger Mom vs. Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids

Our Centre College alumni study group considered Amy Chua's The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and Bryan Caplan's Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. They are, in effect, arguing with each other.

I have given my overall assessment of each book here and here.

Chua is right that her children would not have been great child musicians if she had not pushed them to an extreme degree.

Caplan is right that upper-middle class children with competent, loving homes will not turn out very much differently as adults if they are pushed to achieve early, or not.

On the whole, I think Caplan has the better argument. I am all for helping your children to pursue their passion to get good at it. And everyone, at every age, needs to be held to high standards. But I don't think that pushing children to either be prodigies by sheer effort, or to spend their youth on something that the parents have the passion for, is worth it.

Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids

Bryan Caplan's Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids is a wonderfully gruntled book.

Based on twin and adoption studies, Caplan concludes that middle-class parents really don't need to overwhelm themselves and their children with a scheduled and directed childhood. In the long run, if you give your kids a vaguely normal childhood, they will turn out like you. The intense interventions have an effect in the short run, but tend to wash out in the long run.

Therefore, raising kids is easier than you probably thought. And kids are great fun for most parents. ERGO: have more than you were originally planning on.

The best advice he gives is that you should think long-term about your own parenthood. Sure, kids have lots of up-front costs in money, time, effort, and sleep, but the payoff later is huge. In fact, Caplan argues, you should pick the number of children you have based on the number of grandchildren you want to end up with.

Unnatural Selection 5: The Worst News, and the Best

This week I will be blogging Mara Hvistendahl's Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men.

The biggest danger of masses of men who will never marry is that they will be violent and commit crimes. It is possible they will be used for war, but that is not so predictable from the sheer demographic facts.

The best news is that Hvistendahl thinks the massive sex imbalance is a temporary stage in a country's economic development. As evidence she cites the fact that in 2007, South Korea had a natural sex ratio for the first time in twenty years. It is the first country to start to come back from a massive sex imbalance. They still have super low fertility - 1.22 children per woman - but South Korea seems to have turned a corner in both its sex ratio and its overall fertility. This gives hope that the other massively imbalanced countries can begin to walk back from the precipice.

Unnatural Selection 4: The Silver Lining

This week I will be blogging Mara Hvistendahl's Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men.

The shortage of women in many Asian and Eastern European countries does have some silver linings.

In India, the need for brides is leading to some cross-caste marriages that would have been unthinkable a generation or so ago.

In East Asia, "foreign brides" make up so large a percentage of new marriages that old national prejudices are being modified or even given up.

The poor women who marry out of poor countries, such as Vietnam, into developing countries can make a better life for their children than they could have at home.

Unnatural Selection 3: Why Republicans Promoted Abortion

This week I will be blogging Mara Hvistendahl's Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men.

Gen. William Draper was a friend of Eisenhower and a staunch conservative Republican. When he oversaw the occupation of Japan just after the war he became a big proponent of abortion – for Asians. He saw it as a way to prevent poverty, and therefore communism. First in Japan, and then in South Korea, he pushed abortion and supported eugenics.

The ruling classes in those countries also supported abortion, thinking only the poor would use it. However, it was the educated women of the urban middle class who were especially drawn to abortion as a part of their planned parenthood. Though abortion was contrary to Confucian and Buddhist ethics, the developing Asian economies, under pressure from the Western aid agencies to aggressively control their population growth in exchange for aid, normalized abortion.

The ruling class in this country, as in other countries, supported abortion in the '50s and '60s . They did so not as a feminist movement for women's control of themselves. They supported abortion as a eugenic movement to control the poor.

Unnatural Selection 2: Both Sexism and Feminism Support Sex-Selection Abortion

This week I will be blogging Mara Hvistendahl's Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men.

In the '60s, when men were in charge of population planning and sexism was the norm, Western public health agencies thought sex-selection abortions in developing countries were an uncontroversial and rational way to help families get the boy they wanted without producing unnecessary girls on the way. This seemed like a more ethical path to population control than the more coercive measures they considered because the families were doing the choosing.

By the '80s, when women were in charge of population planning and feminism was the norm, Western public health agencies thought sex-selection abortions in developing countries were an uncontroversial and rational way to help women control their bodies. Sex-selection was a small price to pay for securing the right to abortion.

Unnatural Selection 1: Sex Selection Begins With the Second Pregnancy

This week I will be blogging Mara Hvistendahl's Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men.

Hvistendahl is trying to figure out why, exactly, there have been so many fewer female births in some Asian countries over the past generation.

She thinks that smaller family size in developing countries means that the risks of having no boys by natural means goes up from about one in 10 if you have three children, to one in four if you have only two. Thus, richer, smaller families are going with nature in first births, but in each successive pregnancy are more likely to abort a girl, but keep a boy.

She cites as evidence the sex ratio of boys to girls at birth in South Korea in 1989. The natural ratio is about 105 boys for every 100 girls.

First birth: 104/100
Second birth: 113/100
Third birth: 185/100
Fourth birth: 206/100

The Reality of Two-Year-Old Octuplets

Nadya Suleman, the "Octomom," was on television with her eight famous children, with some help from her oldest daughter.

The images of eight infants was staggering enough when they were born. The reality of eight two year olds is wonderfully captured in this bit of film from the "Today" show.

Why I Like Cop Shows Better Than Murder Mysteries or Thrillers

I recently listened to a James North Patterson story while on a long car trip alone. I was dissatisfied with the experience. I discovered that I do not like stories in which the protagonist takes foolish risks, and acts alone. What I want is an intelligent team acting together to beat unreason and selfishness.

I put the question to my Facebook friends. I asked for police procedurals in which the cops act together and rationally. A friend pointed out that it is hard to have a novel about a team, because it is difficult to keep all the people straight. There are some such novels - my wife has been reading Louise Penny's "Inspector Gamache" stories to me, and my mother is a fan of Henning Mankell's "Kurt Wallandar" stories (though he often does crazy things alone).

Which led me to this insight: television and film can tell the stories of teams better than novels can, because the visuals, and the voices, help you keep the group members straight.

Which is why Mrs. G. and I have been particularly enjoying "The Wire," one of the best cop shows ever.

Practical Wisdom is Helpful to a Happy Life, But Not the Highest Happiness

Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe's Practical Wisdom is an excellent book. I find their argument that practical wisdom is superior to both rules and incentives as a way to organize social practices is compelling. They are right that Aristotle's case for practical wisdom is something that is in the grasp of all and very helpful to happiness. In this Schwartz and Sharpe align their argument with the positive psychology of Martin Seligman, with whom they say they have often talked, about what makes for authentic happiness.

But Aristotle goes on at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics to say that the greatest happiness does not come from practical wisdom or the exercise of the moral virtues - the subject of the first 9/10ths of the book. Instead, he concludes that the greatest happiness comes from contemplation. This has posed a puzzle for those trying to follow Aristotle for millennia, as he seems to negate in his conclusion the whole argument he had been building.

Aristotle says that contemplation is what the gods do. When we contemplate, we participate, as we are able, in the divine.

I think there is great wisdom in the idea that our highest happiness comes from participating in the divine. And this wisdom is something that even very smart secular approaches to happiness, and to wisdom, will miss.

The Class Use of Rules, Incentives, and Wisdom

I am reading Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe's excellent Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. They promote Aristotle's vision of doing things according to practical wisdom. They contrast practical wisdom with the two dominant ways that we try to motivate and regulate action today - rules and incentives.

So here is my half-developed thought from reading this contrast:

Rules regulate proles.

Incentives motivate managers.

Wisdom guides professionals.

Sheryl Sandberg as Model Top Executive

The New Yorker has a wonderful profile of Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook. Sandberg pushes women who want to have "C-level jobs" - CEO, COO, CFO, etc. - to lean in, to seek new assignments, new challenges, new problems, despite the fact that they feel unprepared. Sandberg and her husband, himself a CEO of Survey Monkey, have two children and what she calls a 50-50 marriage. Ken Auletta notes in the magazine profile that

Some critics, however, note that Sandberg is not exactly a typical working mother. She has a nanny at home and a staff at work. Google made her very rich; Facebook may make her a billionaire. If she and her husband are travelling or are stuck at their desks, there is someone else to feed their kids and read to them.

That is true. Sandberg is not a typical working mother. She is, though, a typical working top executive, male or female. She concentrates on her job. Someone else does the bulk of the work running her house and, especially, minding her children.

Male top executives have lived this way since there were top executives. Female top executives will, I believe, need to live the same way. This is not from sexism or the male norms in executive life. This is from the very demanding life of being a top executive. The organization has more demands than there are minutes in the day.

Men and women who want to primarily raise their own children cannot also be top executives of large organizations. They have to choose. I believe that there will always be some men and women willing to make that choice. But I also believe that men and women will never make that choice in the same proportion. Not voluntarily, anyway.

Sheryl Sandberg is an excellent role model for women who want to be top executives. Her advice to such women is excellent. But there will never be as many women like her as there are men.

One Cheer for Marriage Liberals

Mark Oppenheimer has a thoughtful piece in the New York Times Magazine on whether marriages would be stronger if we were not so absolute about fidelity. He is wrestling with the views of marriage liberals like Stephanie Coontz, Judith Stacey, and, especially, Dan Savage.

Marriage liberals argue that societies have always harbored a variety of practices about marriage. Savage, writing from a gay man's perspective, promotes a "monogamish" approach, expecting that some relationships would be more stable if they openly accepted straying. Savage argues that is some people have sexual desires that cannot be satisfied by their partners, they need to change the marriage in order to get them satisfied some other way.

I think the marriage liberals are certainly right that in practice every society does have within it a variety of approaches to marriage, not all of which are strictly monogamous. Men especially, find strict fidelity tough going. Gay men and rich men are more prone to find sexual outlets in addition to their spouses. As a description of reality, it is hard to disagree with this picture.

However, what the marriage liberals usually fudge is a clear sense of proportion about who is monogamous - and even more so about who can be monogamous. Most marriages are monogamous - even in societies in which that is not strictly required. Most people, and especially most women, do want and hold to a strong standard of fidelity. I think Savage goes wrong when he treats sexual desires as needs that must be met, within the marriage or not.

Savage holds that the marriage is more important than strict fidelity, especially if the couple has children. I agree with that. I think adultery would cause searing pain to most married people, and they would be right to feel painful betrayal. Nonetheless, I honor those couples who have been able to work back from an affair to a functioning marriage again. I do not think it is possible in all cases, but I honor the moral heroism of those who try.

Marriage as a Modest Home

When an unmarried couple with children gets married, it is like when Habitat for Humanity helps a family replace their shack with a modest house.

It doesn't solve all of their problems, but is sure makes a better structure to live in.

Marriage Means More Money, Even for the Poorest

Another dispatch from the Schreyer Seminar on Marriage, Family, and Social Sciences.

Jeffrey Dew, as sociologist at Utah State, shared some findings from his forthcoming paper, "The Relationship Between Family Structure and Economic Wellbeing."

It has been well established the married couples have more income and more wealth than unmarried couples, and married parents have much more wealth than single parents. It is also well known that few households in the lowest income quartile have any wealth at all. However, Dew found married couples in the lowest income quartile still have more wealth than other households in that bottom income group.

Women who grew up poor but got married were no more likely to be poor than other women are. But women who grew up poor and did not get married were a third more likely to end up poor than other women are.

Dew estimates that family structure change accounts for at least 10%, and perhaps 25%, of the growing inequality between the richest and poorest households.

Flexible Work Helps Families and Produces More Work

Another dispatch from the Schreyer Seminar on Marriage, Family, and Social Sciences.

Jeff Hill, now a Brigham Young professor after a career at IBM, had some of the most interesting detailed studies of the seminar, from his work on the effect of telecommuting at IBM.

The white collar professionals of IBM like to work. However, when they had to report to an office during specified hours, they had stresses from not being able to control when and where they worked, and from the rush-hour commute they had to endure. As the expected hours of work rose, Hill found a break point - the number of work hours per week at which half the workers felt the stress was too great to be worth it. With inflexible work space and time, that break point was, on average, 52 hours per week.

However, when IBM - out of dire economic necessity - instituted flexibility, they got more work out of their employees, with less stress.

For one thing, eliminating the commute removed what other researchers have found to be a chronic source of unhappiness that people do not adapt to. Hill found that when people no longer had to commute, they tended to add about half of that previously unproductive time to their work hours.

Second, the number of number of hours that IBMers could work rose until they hit a new break point of 60 hours per week.

Hill also found that women tended to make more use of flexibility in time, arranging work at home around their family schedules. Men, on the other hand, made more use of flexibility in space, working more from locations that were neither home nor office.

The U.S. Has Had Stable Replacement Fertility for Forty Years

Another dispatch from the Schreyer Seminar on Marriage, Family, and Social Sciences

So argues Philip Morgan, an eminent Duke sociologist.

He says that the big decline in fertility has come from the disappearance of the third and fourth children that parents had during the Baby Boomer. There has not been a huge increase in women having no children at all in this country.

There is also the appearance of a decline in fertility because women have been delaying having their first child by about a year per decade. This means that fertility so far of women in their twenties is much lower than it used to be. However, most women will have those delayed kids, eventually.

The United States also benefits from the somewhat higher fertility of immigrants, especially from Mexico and points south. This higher fertility only lasts a generation, and will probably decline as the fertility of the sending countries goes down. Morgan estimates that higher Hispanic fertility accounts for about 9% of total U.S. fertility.

These elements - most women eventually have a couple of kids, and some women have more - has, Morgan argued, actually kept U.S. fertility at about a steady replacement level of 2.1 children per women for more than a generation. Moreover, he believes, we can keep this level of fertility steady, to produce long-term population stability. This would be a new thing in the history of America. Morgan believes it would be a good thing.

Professionals Who Can Work Flexibly Around Their Families' Schedules Do More Work

Another dispatch from the Schreyer Seminar on Marriage, Family, and Social Sciences

Jeffrey Hill (BYU) reported on what happens when work demands so many hours that it interferes too much with most worker's family lives. In a study of a large white-collar corporation, he found that if workers have no flexibility about when and where they work - if they must be in the office during certain hours - then the break point is about 52 hours of work per week. Beyond that they are either so unhappy that their work suffers, or they leave.

If, however, workers have greater flexibility about when and where they work, they can and do work more - until they come to a new break point of about 60 hours per week.

Hill also found that women tended to want to work from home, but with flexible hours - especially flexing around their children's schedules. Men were more likely to work closer to standard hours, but they moved among various locations, flexing around their family's and their client's schedules.

A great savings from telecommuting came from eliminating physical commuting, which is a source of unhappiness for most people who have long drives to work. Hill found that workers who eliminated their commute through telecommuting tended to give half of the time saved to more work.

Workers Live Longer; Why Don't They Work Longer?

This post, and the next few, come from the excellent Shreyer Seminar on Marriage, Family, and the Social Sciences.

Some economists think that, since people live longer, they should work longer: work brings money and that is what matters most. In most countries the retirement age was set long ago, at what was then the average life expectancy. Today, most people who are working at middle age will be healthy long past that threshold. They could work and make more money. This would bring a personal benefit to them, and would help fend off the financial crisis of the retirement systems of all developed countries as the Baby Boom starts to exit the workforce.

Alicia Adsera, a Princeton economist, reviewed the actual retirement patterns of all the European countries. In almost none did the average person - male or female - retire at the official retirement age. In a couple of Baltic states they worked past the age when retirement benefits began. But in all the other countries, most people retired well before the official retirement age. Making more money was not enough to keep them working.

This makes sense to me. In societies with secure pension systems (which includes just about all developed societies), most people do not need to keep working in old age just to survive. So what do they work for? Primarily, for their families. And when most people get to the point where their children are grown and launched, the main motivation to keep working full time grows up and moves out, too.

The chance for old people to make more money will not solve the pension problem, because money-making is not the main thing that motivates most people. Family is.

Women's Doctoral Rate is a Huge Success Story

Women earn nearly half of all Ph.D.s in the United States. They vary from 3/4ths of Psychology and English Literature doctorates, to about 1/4th of Physics and Computer Science doctorates.

I believe this distribution reflects the distribution of women's interests.

The overall proportion of Ph.D.s earned by women is what I would expect. More women come out as top students in college, which should lead to women getting more than half of all doctorates. But the normal timing and duration of a doctoral program conflicts directly with having children, which affects women more than men. This combination of push and pull factors leads me to expect that slightly under half of all Ph.D.s would be earned by women.

This chart seems to me certify a huge success story.

Armies of Crippled Old People

Philip Longman has a fine piece in Foreign Policy about the graying of the world population. The drastic decline in the number of babies, and the growing proportion of the population that is old, is a story I have written about before.

It is also well known that Americans, and the world population in general, is growing dangerously fat.

Longman offers a new detail that I had not considered before.

The unprecedented rates of obesity means that middle-aged people are more disabled now than they were in the past. This, in turn, means that they will be even more disabled when they are old. Which will come very soon.

Father's Day is a Pretty Good Civil Religion Holiday

Even if it is blatantly commercial in origin, Father's Day has taken root as a genuinely popular family holiday. It is suitably low key. And it does encourage fathers to take their duties seriously. Everyone notices.

Responding to the Tiger Mom

Amy Chua, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

This is a hard book to analyze.
 
Chua is right that her daughters could not have achieved the level of excellence that they did if she had not pushed them very hard. What she does not offer any real account of is why she chose those things – piano, violin, and schoolwork (content never addressed) – as the kinds of excellences to insist on. She says her acid test that Chinese parenting is best is the reverence that Chinese adults have for their parents. But she admits that this only works when it does.

Chinese motherhood works best when motherhood is the mother’s only job. How she sustained her demanding career while investing in these insane levels of watching and pushing her kids is hard to understand. I don’t know how she had enough hours.


She says what she likes about the violin and classical music is that is hard, has clear high standards, and offers control. It is not clear why she disdains sports, which is what most demanding Western parents focus on. It is not clear to me why it does not occur to her to focus the same attention on the intellectual subjects that any member of her family – herself, her husband, or her father, most obviously – made a career of. Her sister appears to have approached her career with full attention, which is a counterpart of her father’s career.


I think Chua does not take her own intellectual work with the same seriousness that she takes her daughter’s music. She only mentions her books as an angle for a successful career that would have her at the same place as her husband. She never mentions her teaching, and only barely mentions her students.

I think the hidden critical edge of this book is that she thinks brilliant Western academics – her peers, teachers, and competitors – fail if they merely succeed in their careers, but do not have hugely successful and obedient children. She seems to assume that Western kids will be lame. She gives us tantalizing hints that her career is, in fact, successful – which she passes off with admirable Western casualness – around the edges of how hard she works on her children.

This is why I want the tiger mom to make a case for why this content – any content – is worth that level of insane intensity and unpleasant social relations.

Big-Spending Men Not Seen as Good Husband Material

Women view flashy spending men as good for a fling, but not for a husband.

This is not so surprising - I am glad to have the study, by Jill Sundie, confirming it.

What surprised me about the Live Science story on this study was that they thought the right question to ask was whether men view flashy spending women as good for a fling. They don't.

The right question, I think, is whether men view sexually displaying women as good for a fling, but not for a wife.

I think I know the answer to that question.

Teen Deflowering Doubles the Divorce Rate

Half the girls who have sex before they turn 18 are divorced within ten years.

Only a quarter of those who wait are divorced within ten years.

(From Anthony Pauk's study. The nuances are interesting, but the headline is really gripping.)

Exuberance Binds Us In Marriage

One of Kay Jamison's central ideas in Exuberance is that emotions are the glue of society, and the happy emotions bind us the most. She extends this idea down to the thickest and most important of cultural bonds, held together by the most powerful of happy emotions:

Exuberance attracts and then bonds animal to animal; in doing so, it helps create the emotional ties necessary not only for communities to thrive but for potential breeding pairs to commit genes and energy to mate, reproduce, and raise young together.

Why Do Males Fight the Dragon?

'Cause chicks dig it. [Fish version]

Guppies, even, show a range of intrepidness. Most, sensibly, will keep their distance when placed near larger fish. A fearless and curious few males, however, will swim toward a potential predator. Not surprisingly, they are more likely to be eaten, but those who are not prove to be more attractive mates to the surviving female guppies. Trepidation cuts both ways.

Kay Redfield Jamison, Exuberance: The Passion for Life

Gratitude as High Thought

I ran across this wonderful sentiment from G.K. Chesterton:

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

Powerful Women Rarely Have Sex Scandals

Why don't women politicians have nearly as many sex scandals as men?

A New York Times article on this subject offers two interesting points.

“The shorthand of it is that women run for office to do something, and men run for office to be somebody,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

Men are more likely to view the sexual opportunities that come from power as a fruit of the "somebody" they have become, rather than as an obstacle to the "something" they want to do.

Second, Dee Dee Meyers, who survived the Bill Clinton sex scandal when she was his press secretary, says that men in power feel invincible.

I connect this idea with Susan Pinker's contention that women, no matter how powerful, are more likely to feel like imposters.

This makes me expect that men ease up on their self-control as they become more powerful, whereas women increase their self-control as they become more powerful. This increased self-control would explain why women in power as so much less likely to engage in scandalous sex. And because power requires increasing vigilance for women, but not for men, that would contribute to why fewer women than men are willing to seek power in the first place.

Brass Band Day in Danville

Danville, Kentucky's, own contribution is the Great American Brass Band Festival. It runs all this weekend. You can still make the parade at 11 this morning. I'll be in the Hub.

The Freedom to Live Virtuously

Daniel Haybron, writing about philosophy in The Science of Subjective Well-Being, offered this helpful distinction:

The ancients apparently took it as a given that individuals are not, in general, authorities about their own welfare. ... The standard economic view of modernity - that well-being consists roughly in people getting whatever they happen to want - would have seemed childish if not insane to most ancient thinkers.

I find myself halfway between the ancients and the moderns on this one.

On the one hand, I do think human beings, as a group, are designed to flourish by living a distinctive way. This way is broadly defined and forgiving of missteps. It is not, though, simply whatever anyone happens to want. If we live the good life, we will flourish. If we do not, we will have a worse time, in the way that trying to run a car without oil means the car will not run well.

On the other hand, I don't see any psychological process that could make people live as they were designed to if they don't want to. And I don't see any just social structure that should try to constrain people so much that they could only live one way.

I think the great benefit of a free society is not that everyone is free to do what he or she wants. I think the great benefit of a free society is that those who want to flourish by living virtuously are free to do so, amidst other ways of living.

A Bipartisan Marriage Idea: End All Marriage Penalties

The Heritage Foundation has proposed a "Marshall Plan for Marriage." The first item is to end the marriage penalty in several tax or benefit programs of the federal government. The marriage penalty occurs when married couples pay more than the same couple would if cohabited without marriage because their combined incomes push them into a higher bracket than each of their incomes would be if taken separately.

For two of their three proposed improvements there is already bipartisan support. The marriage penalty was largely eliminated in the federal income tax and the Earned Income Tax Credit in the last decade. The budget compromise reached last fall extended those fixes until 2012. Heritage proposes making those fixes permanent. This seems to me a sensible move that majorities in both parties can support.

The third proposal is to eliminate a marriage penalty in the health reform act. There has not already been a bipartisan move to fix this problem. However, since this marriage penalty is like that in the income tax and the EITC, I think both sides could agree to work together to fix this problem, too.

Legislation that brings the parties together and supports marriage seems like a win-win.

My Thirty Years of "Presbyterian Pluralism" - Vindicated

In college I became very interested in the problem of pluralism. How can an organization both believe in truth, and believe that different understandings of truth can coexist in the same institution?

This led me to study the Presbyterian Church, which has both an official confession of what it believes, and an established practice of accepting a fairly broad range of views within the church. My dissertation was published as Presbyterian Pluralism: Competition in a Protestant House. I came to see that the one confession that all officers of the church adhere to was balanced by a practice of allowing the presbyteries - the regional governing bodies at the heart of the Presbyterian Church - some leeway in judging how strictly any given officer had to adhere to that one confession. Liberal presbyteries tolerated more diversity, conservative presbyteries tolerated less diversity. When ministers moved from one presbytery to another they could be in for some sharp questioning, and even be denied permission to "preach within the bounds" of the new presbytery.

Over time, this balanced system broke down. The authority of the one confession was watered down by adding many other confessions. Liberal political correctness limited leeway on some issues, which led to conservative political correctness limiting leeway on other issues. The fights in the denomination shifted from the confessional standards to the administrative rules of the church. The fights got bigger, more regular, and exhausting. The church started a decline that has only sped up in recent years.

A few years ago the wiser heads in the church proposed a new Form of Government (nFOG), which would restore the leeway that presbyteries used to have in judging their own officers. Instead of providing detailed rules on what all officers must and must not do, the church's constitution would lay out the general principles of the whole church. The presbyteries could follow model manuals and rules provided by the denomination, or adapt them to local circumstances.

This week the new Form of Government was adopted by a majority of presbyteries. As of July 10, 2011, it will become the constitutional rule of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

Now if we can get back to having one confession that we actually believe in, I will feel fully vindicated.

"I should be free to do what I want."

I am working through this thought, which came to me this morning while thinking about how to make a happy society.

"I should be free to do what I want."

The substantive moral argument is over whether the more important part of this claim is "free to do" or "what I want."

The substantive ethical argument is over whether the more important part is whether social structures ought to try to guarantee the "should be" or try to shape the "what I want."

I believe the ancients, including all three biblical faiths, take the latter position.
The moderns, including all kinds of Enlightenment thought, take the former.

Easterin's Conclusion About Happiness

This is the upshot of Richard Easterlin's decades of studying happiness.

People spend too much time working for money and status goods. We do not realize that this will not make us happy, because our aspirations will keep rising as our we achieve our material goals.

Instead, we should spend more time on family, relationships, and health. These things make us happy even when we attain them.

Happiness Most LIkely at Mid-Life

Richard Easterlin, a pioneer in the economic study of happiness, concludes this about happiness and age:

"Happiness is greatest at midlife, but not by very much."

From 18 to 51, about 7% of the population move up to “very happy”;

From 51 to 89, about 9% of the population move back down.

(Incidentally, I am 51. And very happy.)

You Can't See Beyond Divorce's Threshold

Eileen Ansel Wolpe, in trying to describe divorce to someone contemplating it, compares divorce to death in a way I had not heard before:

You cannot see what lies beyond the frame around the door that is the exit. It is not possible. It is a death. And just like life’s death, you are not permitted to see beyond the threshold. But I have been here for the past year and I can tell you it looks nothing like it does from inside the threshold.

Re-reading After Virtue

Thirty years ago, when I was a senior in college, a book came out that shaped my thinking profoundly: Alasdair McIntyre's After Virtue. My now-wife and I read it to one another as we made our evening cocoa. This week I re-read the book for the first time since those formative days.

McIntyre argues that modern moral language is so incoherent, because what we have today are the fragments of several contrasting moral cultures from the past. The virtues tradition, especially as understood by Aristotle and improved by Christianity, was concerned with how people could lead a fulfilling life within the roles and destiny of their community. Modern societies, by contrast, try to find a picture of how human beings can have a fulfilling life without specifying their roles or their community, or even what might be fulfilling.

McIntyre helped me understand why individualist theories of what human beings are seem so impoverished. This has been a great help to me as a sociologist.

His account of politics as a civil war among the virtues of different communities has been a help to me in understanding politics as a social enterprise, while not thinking that my community and my virtues are the only rational ones.

His account of how Christianity synthesized the virtues of the Greek polis with the broader and more inclusive history of the biblical story was crucial to my becoming a Christian.

One surprise of re-reading After Virtue is how little of it seemed new to me this time. I think it was just the right book at the right time for me when it first appeared. I absorbed its message so thoroughly that it shaped the architecture of my worldview. And its message is not a bit less timely now.

Evening the Sex Ratio Among Old People

One of the surprising findings of the new census is that the ratio of old men to old women is evening out. From middle age on there are always more women than men, with the gap widening to about two-to-one by the time people are 85. However, older men are surviving at a higher rate than they used to.

Since 2000, the number of women 60 - 74 has increased by 29.2%. The number of men in that age rage increased by 35.2%

There will probably never be an equal ratio of old men to old women, but things do seem to be evening a bit.

My nominee for the cause: the declining smoking rate.

Win The Future: Have Babies

David Brooks has a column that sensibly counters the thrust of most recent commencement addresses. He wrote

College grads are often sent out into the world amid rapturous talk of limitless possibilities. But this talk is of no help to the central business of adulthood, finding serious things to tie yourself down to.

What most people will make a good life out of are the central commitments they make to other people. Commitments are limits on the self. If you try to live your life having experiences for yourself, without ever committing to build this specific something with others, you will be a tourist all your life.

For the vast majority of people, the biggest commitment we make is who we marry and then have children with. The downside of spending your twenties and even thirties as an experience-seeking tourist is that you delay marriage so much, you may well end up without time for children, children you now really want to have and build something for.

So if anyone everyone wants me to give a commencement address, here is my counter-cultural topic:

Win the Future: Have Babies.

Recentering the Party Balance in the Officer Corps

A centrist trend to note on Memorial Day.

In the '70s, about half of U.S. military officers were Republican. Through the '80s and '90s they became increasingly Republican, reaching about two-thirds by the end of the decade.

During the George W. Bush administration, however, the trend started to reverse. Today, among newly commissioned officers, there is about an even split between the Republican and Democratic Parties.

Anti-Liberal Alliance Has a 50-point Gap on Accepting Homosexuality

The Pew Research Center documents increasing acceptance of homosexuality in a new study. The people who most oppose homosexuality, not surprisingly, are "staunch conservatives." In answer to the question "Should homosexuality be accepted or discouraged by society?" staunch conservatives say

Accepted 22% and Discouraged 68%.

What I find most interesting in this study is that "libertarians," who in most political issues are allied with the conservatives, differ dramatically on this issue. They answer

Accepted 71% and Discouraged 19%.

The anti-liberal voting bloc, which had such success in the last election, is an alliance of opposites. This is nowhere more clearly shown than on the issue of the social meaning of homosexuality.

Using Prenups to Fight No-Fault

Heather Mahar, a researcher at Harvard Law School, has been studying pre-nuptial agreements. She found, not surprisingly, that most people do not want to use them for fear of signaling (or causing) ambivalence about the marriage. Mahar thinks prenuptial agreements do comply with what economists think is rational, but not with the emotional commitments that most people value more highly.

Mahar does, though, think that premarital counseling should include a prenuptial checklist, so a couple can work through their common values about marriage, including what they think about divorce.

The most interesting part of Mahar's research to me was that some couples use prenups to establish higher standards for divorce than the low "no-fault" standards that most states use. Couples can specify the only grounds that they will allow for divorce, such as adultery, desertion, violence, or crime, and the distribution of assets that the guilty party must suffer as a result. Since many courts are unwilling to enforce the marriage contract itself, but instead allow unilateral divorce, strengthening the marriage contract through a personal pre-nuptial agreement might be worth doing.

Richer, Educated Women Have Fewer Abortions

The abortion rate overall has dropped 8% over from 2000 to 2008, according to a Guttmacher Institute study. However, the abortion rate for poor women rose 18%. This means that richer, better educated women are having fewer abortions.

Poor women now make up 42% of those who have abortions. If the present trend continues, within a decade I expect that poor women will have most of the one million plus annual abortions in this country.

Educated women are already marrying more and divorcing less than they did a decade ago. If they are also having fewer abortions, this bodes well for developing truly planned and sustained family life in the college class.

A Quarter of Moms with Two Kids Had Them by Different Men

Twenty-eight percent of mothers with two or more children had them by two or more different men.

Among black women, 59% had them by two or more men.

Christian Schools Produce Decent Citizens

Ray Pennings, in the Cardus Religion Survey, presents these interesting conclusions from a comprehensive study of Protestant Christian school graduates:

Compared to their public school, Catholic school, and non-religious private school peers, Protestant Christian school graduates have been found to be uniquely compliant, generous, outwardly focused individuals who stabilize their communities by their uncommon commitment to their families, their churches, and larger society.

He goes on to say that they marry more, divorce less, and have more kids. Christian school graduates are changing the world - from the bottom up, by living decent lives. They are not primarily aimed at changing large social structures.

Indeed, I think the Christian Right has been so vocal about turning family values and biblical values into business-oriented national political positions precisely because macro politics is so at odds with the lives and concerns of the core evangelical Protestant world.

Centre Commencement

Today was Centre College Commencement. It was lovely. And exhausting.

Sabbatical begins tomorrow. I will seek The Happy Society in earnest.

Ain't no Rapture like the VelociRapture

This my favorite of today's rapture jokes.

(Thanks to Jay Garmon)

Proportion of Marriages Making it to the Tenth Anniversary Is Rising

Traditionally there has been a spike in divorces from the "seven-year itch." If couples make it to their tenth anniversary, their odds of going all the way step up significantly.

The proportion of married couples making it to their tenth anniversary is rising.

75% of couples married in the early '90s made it to their tenth anniversary.

This is 3% higher than the success rate of couples married in the early '80s.

Costs of Married Parents?

I asked my "Introduction to Family Life" class to consider the costs and benefits of the most common type of family - a married couple and their children - and the several major variants that we studied. They did a good job considering the costs and benefits of the variants. On the most common type, though, several of them came to this considered judgment (I am quoting from one exam):

There are not real costs to marriage and a two parent household, there are only benefits.

I was taken aback by this. Not really because I disagree, but because I am used to thinking that all arrangements have costs as well as benefits.

I would be interested in your thoughts on this question and answer.

Presbyterian Church Votes to Tolerate Gay Ordination

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has just changed ordination standards to, in effect, allow practicing homosexuals to be ordained.   The exact language of the church's constitution that was dropped and replaced is written below.

Some have read this as a move by the church toward liberalism.  I do not think that is quite right.  Rather, I believe the loyalist middle of the church changed what it thinks can be tolerated.  It did not change its traditional view that the Bible calls homosexual practice a sin.  Instead, the loyalist center changed its traditional view that the sin of homosexual practice cannot be tolerated.

In other words, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) used to say that homosexual practice was a sin like child sacrifice - absolutely forbidden.  Now the church says homosexual practice is a sin like divorce - bad, but tolerable.

STRIKING: “Those who are called to office in the church are to lead a life in obedience to Scripture and in conformity to the historic confessional standards of the church. Among these standards is the requirement to live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman (W-4.9001), or chastity in singleness. Persons refusing to repent of any self-acknowledged practice which the confessions call sin shall not be ordained and/or installed as deacons, elders, or ministers of the Word and Sacrament.

AND INSERTING: Standards for ordained service reflect the church’s desire to submit joyfully to the Lordship of Jesus Christ in all aspects of life (G-1.0000). The governing body responsible for ordination and/or installation (G.14.0240; G-14.0450) shall examine each candidate’s calling, gifts, preparation, and suitability for the responsibilities of office. The examination shall include, but not be limited to, a determination of the candidate’s ability and commitment to fulfill all requirements as expressed in the constitutional questions for ordination and installation (W-4.4003). Governing bodies shall be guided by Scripture and the confessions in applying standards to individual candidates.”

Still No Rush to Gay Marriage, Even Among the Tolerant Dutch

In the ten years since the Netherlands legalized homosexual marriage, only 15,000 couples have actually married.  The Dutch national statistics agency estimates that that is only 20% of homosexual couples in the Netherlands, compared to a marriage rate of about 80% for heterosexual couples.

This confirms what I had estimated based on Eskridge and Spedale's pioneering study of gay marriage rates in Denmark, the first country to legalize homosexual marriage.

There is not a large demand for marriage among homosexuals.  There is a large demand for the right of homosexuals to marry among liberals.

As a practical matter, passing gay marriage laws does not change much in how very many people live. This says to me that those who are worried that gay marriage laws will lead to big changes in American life can rest easier.

A Fifth of American Women Never Have Kids

Almost a fifth of American women in their early 40s have not had a child.  Barring something very unusual, they will never have any.

The rule of thumb for all societies is that 90% of people marry, and 90% of them have children.  This yields an average of 87% of the people in most populations have children.

Immigrants to the U.S. reproduce at exactly that rate: 87%.  But the native population is down to 80%.  Were it not for immigration our population would be declining.

Religion-Income Link is Not Just From Education

A new Pew study of religion and class shows an almost direct line between education and income.  The denominations with the highest average income - Reform Jews, Hindus, and Conservative Jews - also have the highest level of education.  Two-thirds of Reform Jewish households make more than $75,000 per year.  The median income of a household of four is $50,000.

David Leonhardt, in the New York Times article on this study,  rightly notes the education/income link.  He wonders why the secularists and Unitarians, who have high levels of education, do not have household incomes to match. 

I have a hypothesis: secularists and Unitarians have a high unmarried rate.  Secularists tend to be younger than other religious groups, and less likely to have married yet.  Unitarians have a high fraction who changed religions, often after a divorce.  Both of these conditions reduce household income compared to other religious groups, which are more married.

"Intra-Conservative Marriage Fight" Post Also Deleted

Don't know why, either. This is all that remains:

Gruntled Center: Intra-Conservative Marriage Fight

May 12, 2011 ... Intra-Conservative Marriage Fight. Keith Ablow, the libertarian psychiatrist who comments on medical matters for Fox News, ...

Maggie Gallagher took Keith Ablow to task for saying that marriage is oppressive to most marriaed people and produces high rates of depression. Social conservative Gallagher is right, and libertarian Ablow is wrong. Showing again that social conservatives and libertarians are opposites on family issues, as they are on most issues.

"Pregnot" Post Deleted - I Don't Know Why

On May 11 I posted an entry that, for unknown reasons, was lost (deleted?) by Blogger. All that remains is this much of a web-memory:

Gruntled Center: "Pregnot" Experiment Doesn't Justify the Deception

May 11, 2011 ... "Pregnot" Experiment Doesn't Justify the Deception. Gaby Rodriguez, a student at Toppenish High School in Washington state, pretended to be ...

The gist of the post was that a high school student who pretended to be pregnant as an "experiment" is in the wrong, and would not have gotten by a college-level Institutional Review Board. The deception hurt others, and was not necessary - she could have worked with a real pregnant student to see how others reacted to her. This was not so much an experiment as a stunt, which gives sociology, her intended college interest, a bad name.

"Obama or Palin?" as a Mate Selection Standard

Church attendance and political ideology top the list of similarities in a study of 500o married couples conducted by Rice University political scientist John Alford and colleagues.

The news report in Science Daily humorously suggests a new pickup line: "Obama or Palin?"

This sounds to me like an excellent experiment. I hope a speed-dating venue suggests that as an opening question. For all but the least politically aware, this would be a very efficient sorting test.

Intra-Conservative Marriage Fight

Keith Ablow, the libertarian psychiatrist who comments on medical matters for Fox News, says that marriage is a major cause of depression and a source of suffering for "the vast majority" of married people. He wants to abolish marriage, leaving couples to simply choose each other every day.

Maggie Gallagher, the social conservative founder of The National Organization for Marriage takes Ablow to task for having his facts all wrong.

In this fight, Gallagher is right.

The larger issue, I think, is that libertarians and social conservatives are opposites. Nowhere is this more clear than on family issues.

"Pregnot" Experiment Doesn't Justify the Deception

Gaby Rodriguez, a student at Toppenish High School in Washington state, pretended to be pregnant all during her senior year as an experiment to gauge reaction. At a school assembly last week she revealed the deception, and read comments made to and about her.

I think the deception is not justified by the experiment. This is the kind of thing that gives sociology, her future planned major, a bad name. I don't think this experiment would have gotten by a college Institutional Review Board. There are plenty of actual pregnant girls like her in her high school and others like it that she could have enlisted for this experiment.

What is more remarkable is that almost no "results" of this experiment have been reported, though the incident has received wide publicity in marriage-studying circles.

The news reports suggest that her intention was to show that even smart girls get pregnant without marriage, and that other people should help them act as if this were no big deal. I think it is a big deal - proof of which is that she says she has no intention of actually getting pregnant until she is out of college. She did not mention anything about marriage.

Keeping Up With the Joneses

I tried a new assignment in my "Social Structure" class this year: a paper called "Keeping up with the Joneses."

Our aim was to explore the relationship between absolute class and relative status. I had students collect some markers of their own family's class - their parents' education, occupation, and income, and the family's major assets and expenses. With this information they could see where in the national class structure they fit.

Then I asked them to think about experiences they had that showed their status relative to peers and near-peers. One body of evidence came from times when they felt relatively poor or lower status, and times when they felt relatively rich or higher status, than those around them.

In class yesterday we compared experiences, and afterwards I read all the papers.

This turned out to be an eye-opening assignment. Many students had only the vaguest idea of their family's income, and had never asked before. Some parents - fathers, especially - were reluctant to give a specific answer, and not all did. A few students had a clear idea of their family's finances, especially if they were tight. In most cases, though, students thought of themselves as average, middle class people. And in most cases they were surprised to find that their families were significantly above the median income of American families.

They had no trouble remembering moments when they felt up or down relative to the status of someone near. Their stories from childhood turned on things they were not allowed to have, or had when a friend did not. If the parents did not supply an explanation of why some things were not to be had, the students as children had automatically supplied one explanation: we (they) can't afford it.

As they got older, though, students noticed status differences that turned on culture and learning, more than on objects and money. These status differences are more subtle, but more enduring. One excellent fruit of their education is that they gradually come to value understanding more than things.

The strongest emotion that came from most of my students' exploration of their family's class and status is gratitude for all that their families have made possible for them.

What Makes for Longevity

These are the two main conclusions that Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin reached in The Longevity Project:

Those who cared about others – who were agreeable but not necessarily sociable – often thrived even in the face of adversity. … they sought the best in others, which was key road to resilience.

And the summary of the whole book:

It was those who – through an often-complex pattern of persistence, prudence, hard work, and close involvement with friends and communities – headed down meaningful, interesting life paths and … found their way back to these healthy paths each time they were pushed off the road.

Religious Women Live Longer

Religious women are very likely to live long lives. “It was the least religious women who were least likely to live a very long life.”

So conclude Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin in The Longevity Project. Since this study followed their subjects from elementary school until death, we can also see what these long-lived religious women were like as children. Even at eleven, they were more prudent, unselfish, and generous than other children. As adults there were more socially involved and outgoing. They were outgoing, but concerned - very friendly, but worriers. This sounds like many of the church moms I have known.

The least religious women, by contrast, were less likely to get and stay married, to have kids, to be involved, or to be trusting.

For men, family and work effects overwhelmed religious effects. For men, religious effects on longevity may be mediated through their wives and the community they create.

Masculine Men and Masculine Women Die Sooner

Friedman and Martin use an ingenious measure of masculinity and femininity, which allows for some nuanced calculation of how these gendered styles relate to longevity.

To measure degrees of masculinity and femininity, they took the subjects’ preferences for specific occupations and preferred activities. Then they scored those occupations based on the actual ratio of men to women within them. Comparing preferences with actuality, the researchers could distinguish masculine men, masculine women, feminine men, and feminine women.

Which then led to this interesting finding:

The more masculine men and the more masculine women had an increased mortality risk, while the more feminine women and the more feminine men were relatively protected.

More masculine people do riskier things. More importantly, though, they make smaller and weaker social networks that might insulate them from life-shortening social risks.

Children of Divorce Die Sooner

Friedman and Martin's Longevity Project reached this somewhat surprising conclusion:

Children from divorced families died almost five years earlier on average than children from intact families. … In fact, parental divorce during childhood was the single strongest social predictor of early death.

Divorced kids die earlier of all causes. The sons of divorce were significantly more likely to die violently, by accident, suicide, or fighting.

One of the big factors in later life tied to earlier death is that the divorced kids were more likely to divorce themselves.

If the divorced kids made happy marriages and found work they liked, they lived longer than the other divorced kids, and almost as long as the children from intact families who also made happy marriages and found meaningful work.

Optimism Can't Fend Off Death

The cheerful do not live longer. So conclude Friedman and Martin in The Longevity Project.

The cheerful are more likely to have better health in the short run. They are more likely to follow through with medical treatments and therapy regimens because they believe that things will work out well. Pessimists are more likely to quit early, or not even try, because they do not expect a good result.

Friedman and Martin speculate that optimists may be disheartened if things do not work out quickly, and so suffer worse stress or depression which negates the health advantage of cheerfulness.

I am in favor of cheerfulness. I believe, and teach to my kids and my students, that everything will work out just fine. I think Friedman and Martin make a mistake in conflating cheerfulness with optimism (and at one point with a "happy-go-lucky" attitude).

Optimists expect things to work out well. Cheerful people deal with reality with good cheer. Both attitudes help you get through illness better. But optimism can't fend off death. However, cheerfulness helps you deal with death better. SO optimism (which I think is what Friedman and Martin are really measuring) can have a good health effect without having a longevity effect.

Why Conscientiousness Leads to Long Life

I previously noted the main point of Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin's The Longevity Project.

The fruit of an eight-decade longitudinal study of talented kids, begun in 1921 by Lewis Terman, the book comes to this conclusion:

"Conscientiousness … turned out to be the best personality predictor of long life … The young adults who were thrifty, persistent, detail oriented, and responsible lived the longest."

Friedman and Martin offer three reasonable guesses about why this is so.

First, the conscientious are usually prudent, taking only sensible risks.

Second, they may be healthier in general - not just healthy living, but healthy basic constitutions.

Third, they create healthy relationships with other people, which not only makes us healthier, but also happier.

Go persistent prudence!

We Killed Bin Laden the Right Way

The September 11 attacks were a surprise mass murder of civilians designed to create terror. Fighting and killing the people who did that is about the clearest case of justified war I can think of.

The United States mobilized to find Al Qaeda, especially its leader Osama bin Laden, and capture or kill them. We asked the government that was harboring Al Qaeda, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, to help us, or at least get out of the way. They considered it, but decided to continue sheltering our enemy. That made the Taliban an enemy too. We removed the Taliban regime in order to get at Al Qaeda.

When bin Laden fled to Pakistan, we made the same request of the Pakistani government. They decided to help us find Al Qaeda. We learned, the hard way, that some Al Qaeda sympathizers within the Pakistani government were tipping off the enemy, so we cut back on what information we shared with the Pakistani government. Finally, after a long search and excellent intelligence gathering, we found Osama bin Laden. We sent in a small team of Americans who captured and killed the enemy. They did not kill civilians, and none of our guys were lost. Bin Laden's corpse was identified, given Muslim funeral rites, and buried at sea to prevent anyone making a shrine of his grave.

That is doing war the right way.

The many distractions that were added by opportunists to this basic story were huge costly mistakes, designed to serve personal or venal interests. But those mistakes should not distract us from the clear narrative of the right war fought the right way.

Don't Rush to Sanctify Your Old Boss

Pope John Paul II was beatified yesterday by his successor and close ally, Benedict XVI. To do that Benedict had to suspend the normal five-year waiting period to begin the drawn-out beatification process. John Paul died six years ago, so the speed-up was not huge. Still, I think it imprudent.

I am a Presbyterian. The internal politics of the Catholic Church are their business. I think John Paul was a great man and a force for good, especially in the struggle against communism and other kinds of materialism. Nonetheless, I am not really commenting here on the whether John Paul II is worthy of religious veneration, and am not qualified to have an opinion on his qualifications for sainthood.

Rather, I think rushing to judgment for permanent honors is a bad idea for anyone. I think it is always good policy to wait some years for the passions of the moment to cool. I am particularly suspicious when those in power move to permanently honor their patrons and fellow partisans. That smacks of an attempt to sanctify current policies, not just former leaders. I think this is just as bad (and much more common) when practiced for secular political leaders. The Catholic Church's canonization process rarely involves people who were powerful in any ordinary sense. But in the case of John Paul II, it does.

I hope the church waits a long time, with much deliberation, and probably a new pope, before it decides whether to elevate the beatified pope to sainthood.