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.