If We Really Want to Reduce the Abortion Rate, We Should Provide Reliable Contraception for Free

An exciting study from Washington University School of Medicine provided reliable birth control - intrauterine devices and hormone implants - for free to 9000 women, aged 14 - 45 for three years. The researchers tracked the effects on their abortion rate, and also on their teen pregnancy rate.

Nationally, women in this age range have about 19.6 abortions per 1000 - a huge number.

The women in this study: 4.4 to 7.5 abortions per 1000.  That is a huge improvement.

Moreover, teen girls (15 - 19) have a staggering 34.4 births per 1000 every year.

The girls in this study: 6.3 per 1000 annually.

Moreover, IUDs and hormone implants such as Norplant are cheaper than birth control pills.  They are also more reliable, since many women, especially the poorer and younger ones, don't usually take the pill every day - a problem that is solved by implanted methods. 

The implants, though, have a higher up-front cost, which tends to put off those same younger and poorer women from using them.  This is why providing them free was a crucial element of this study.

As someone who would like to dramatically reduce the abortion and teen pregnancy rates, I find this study to be very good news.

Thrift Was a Greater Virtue When We Were a More Modest People

David Brooks gave an excellent lecture at Centre College last night on how our politics today reflects a change in our culture.

During World War II, he argued, we placed more value on modesty, self-control, and limiting our self-assertion.  The cultural revolution since then produced many good things, especially in overcoming the oppression and self-suppression of African-Americans and women.

But some things have been lost, which has contributed to the polarization and mistrust of the current moment.

This talk led me to make a connection that I had not seen before.  People who are personally modest are more likely to be thrifty.  If it seems wrong to spend lavishly on yourself, you are less likely to go into debt for things.  If you think that your present comfort and status are not more worthy than your children's and their children's, you are more likely to save.

Thrift is not only a good personal virtue and family virtue. Thrift is a humble virtue.

The Privileged Have a Greater Duty to Initiate Positive Reciprocity

Jonathan Haidt, in The Happiness Hypothesis, says that reciprocity is the currency of society. Giving and getting help bind our group together. Some of this reciprocity comes in direct tit-for-tat,  contract-like exchanges.  More comes from longer term gift exchanges - I give a gift to you or the group now, you give a gift to me or the group later. 

Economists and others who emphasize self-interested choices as the measure of rational action note that it is hard to explain why anyone would initiate a cycle of reciprocal trust and gift giving - even though all can see the benefits of being in such a social group.

As part of our "Happy Society" class, I assigned students to perform random acts of kindness for other people each day for a time, recording and reflecting on the results.  All students found the assignment interesting and nearly all reported that it increased their happiness (as happiness research predicts).

I have been thinking about a hidden element of this assignment: it was easy for my students, and me, to initiate a beneficial cycle of gift giving because we are privileged relative to nearly everyone else we interact with. 

This leads me to a general insight: the privileged risk less by giving the gift of trust and service.  Therefore, it is more incumbent on the privileged to take that risk and start the virtuous cycle of reciprocity.

Which Candidate Do Small Business Owners Think Would Be Better?

What do actual job creators (not just rich people) think about the presidential candidates?

George Washington University and Thumbtack.com survey small business owners and entrepreneurs, who create 2/3rds of new jobs in the average year.  They were asked which candidate is most supportive of small business.  The results:


39% President Obama
31% Governor Romney
28% Not sure

This result is particularly interesting, since small business owners have traditionally been one of the most conservative and Republican constituencies.

Moving Out of a Poor Neighborhood Makes You Happier Like a $13,000 Raise

In the 1990s a major experiment was done to improve the lives of some of the poorest city people.  They were given subsidies to move out of the slums of concentrated poverty into neighborhoods that were a little better off and better mixed economically.  The policy makers hoped that the people who moved would get more education and better jobs.

They didn't.

What they did get, though, was much happier.  Moving their families to safer, less stressful neighborhoods increased their happiness the equivalent of a $13,000 raise.

A parallel experiment that moved poor non-white people into equally poor white neighborhoods had no such positive effect.

This report does not tell what happened to the children of these relocated families.  My guess is that they grew up safer, with better chances, and happier.

Baby Boom Among Women Ph.D.s

A decade ago, one third of women Ph.D.s past 40 were childless.

Today that fraction has dropped to a quarter.

(Thank you Pew Center for another nifty study.)

In my own little faculty at Centre College, six female colleagues have had babies in the past three years.  One was born yesterday.  Her birth announcement was the first I had seen with a full account of the classical derivation of her name, with footnotes and web links.

Why Religious Belongers Are Happier

I am teaching a Sunday School class on "Happiness and Faith."  Reviewing the research on this subject, I have come to this partial insight.

Happiness comes more from the process of doing something worthwhile with other people we care about than it does from any specific outcome of that process.  This is a common finding of happiness research.

Religious people are, on the whole, happier, than non-religious people.  This is also a standard finding of happiness research.

Happiness correlates more with religious belonging than with believing - that is, people who are active in religious communities report higher happiness, whereas people with strong religious beliefs who are not part of religious communities do not report higher levels of happiness.

I believe what religious institutions do that adds to happiness is to give structure and permanence to the process of doing good things together with other people.  One-off group projects are good, and an interest in civic betterment can produce such projects.  But for sheer persistence and long-term effect, nothing can compete with religious institutions for getting a group of people to work together for the common good week after week, year after year, decade after decade.

New alumni-driven college ranking rates Centre graduates “Happiest in the Nation”

Sometimes, the world writes my blog for me.

I am a Centre College professor, teaching and writing about happiness.

This story is the lead on the Centre College website. 

The story is a based on a new form of ranking from The Alumni Factor, which uses, as the name suggests, on surveys of alumni.

Rubin's Happiness Project Enacts Aristotle's Conclusion

In my "Happy Society" class we started with Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, as most studies of happiness do.  Aristotle says happiness is the highest end of life, the only end that is not a means to some other end.  And happiness is a thing we do more than a condition we have. Happiness is an action of the soul, in accordance with virtue.

In other words, happiness is a project.

Which is why the second book we studied is Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project. Rubin read the wisdom and empirical literature of happiness and tried to put it into practice over the course of a year.  She, too, started with Aristotle.  She was not overtly implementing Aristotle, but the similarity in conclusions is striking.

The puzzling thing for many about Aristotle's argument is that he spend 9/10ths of the book talking about happiness coming from practical virtues, and then in the final chapter says that true happiness comes from contemplation.

Rubin, too, spends nearly all of her project on things that she did to increase her happiness - but the final chapters are about mindfulness, attitude, and reflection.  And what she concludes is that what most increased her happiness was not what she did, but what she stopped doing - namely, thinking and saying criticisms of herself and others. A cheerful and contented attitude did more to make her happy than any particular thing she did, even things she did with her children and husband, the loves of her life.

That is, the greatest fruit of Rubin's happiness project came from contemplation of the attempt to act virtuously, more than from the virtuous acts themselves.  The virtuous acts were still virtuous, and worth turning into habits, and also happy-making. And I believe that Rubin could not have fruitfully contemplated the attempt to become happy by acting in accordance with virtue if she had not, in fact, wholeheartedly done all that virtuous acting.

But the greatest happiness comes from the contemplation of the action of the soul in accordance with virtue.

Do Old Fathers and Defeated Fathers Produce Biological Problems in Their Offspring?

Judith Shulevitz has a fascinating roundup of several bad biological effects in kids that are correlated with traumas or sheer age in their fathers.

Children of traumatized fathers (shown more clearly in mice than humans) are more likely to be timid.  Stranger still, so are their grandchildren.

Children of older fathers are more likely to be autistic or schizophrenic. The increasing number of older fathers may explain the otherwise puzzling rise in autistic children.

This research is just beginning, especially on the human side.  But it is fascinating, and promises to provide some balance to the large body of evidence that older mothers risk biologically damaged children.

The Last Tea Party Election

David Brooks laments that

The country that exists is not on the right track. It has a completely dysfunctional political system. What was there in this speech [of Obama's at the Democratic Convention] that will make us think the next few years will be any different? America will only be governable again if there is a leader who breaks the mold and reframes the debate. Romney is unlikely to do that, and Obama’s speech didn’t offer much either.

I am more optimistic than David Brooks that our political system will soon recover some balance.

There are many legitimate interests in a complex society, some of which are in conflict. Working out these conflicts requires compromise.  These compromises will, of necessity, not please most people in every detail.  But most people can see that compromise is necessary. Politics requires the ability to compromise. If you are not willing to compromise, if you see compromise as weakness or treason, then you should not get involved in politics.

The main reason our political system is so dysfunctional right now is the Tea Party movement. They reject compromise on principal.  They want contradictory things - smaller government for people they disapprove of, without any reduction of government for themselves. They attack their political enemies, and they attack their political allies - that is, normal Republican politicians - even harder if they don't toe the line.

The Tea Party is a Know-Nothing movement, of a kind that periodically appears in American politics. And the history of Know-Nothing movements convinces me that they are self-limiting.  They typically last about three electoral cycles.  2012 is the third Tea Party cycle. If the Democrats win, the Tea Party will start to get disheartened with politics - their normal attitude - and return to their previous grudging support of the establishment Republicans or political quietude. If the Republicans win, the Tea Party will turn on them even greater disillusionment for not being able to deliver big government for good people, no government for bad people, and all at no cost.

And when the Tea Party is gone, the regular politicians of both parties will be able to work with one another.  They will not completely end partisan politics and some mutual obstruction.  But the Party of NO will be able to become, once again, the party of Let's Make a Deal.  And the normal, fairly functional politics of American government can resume.

Republicans and Democrats on the Immigrant Story

Both the Republican and Democratic conventions have been full of immigrant stories, or "up-from-nothing" stories.

I have noticed, though, an important difference in what they emphasize.

The Republican versions emphasize how hard the immigrant (family, usually) worked to build up their business on their own. This is in keeping with the convention's theme, "We Built It."

The Democratic versions emphasize how hard the immigrant (family, usually) worked to succeed in this country, with the help of the public schools, college loans, GI Bill, small business loans, and now health insurance - not to mention the larger structure of honest government that did not take arbitrarily in the first place.  The "land of opportunity" has that opportunity because it is guaranteed by the people's institutions, and the entire infrastructure of opportunity to which we all contribute. This version is in keeping the less formal convention theme of equal opportunity "for all."

"You Didn't Build That" - On Your Own

The theme of the Republican National Convention is "We Built This."  This is a critique of an off-the-cuff remark the President Obama made:  "If you've got a business, you didn't build that." They have repeated the audio clip several times during the convention.

President Obama's phrasing is unfortunate.  If he had completed the thought - "If you've got a business, you didn't build that on your own" - this whole kerfuffle would never have arisen.  The rest of the president's statement makes clear his intent.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

 I believe this is obviously true.

In watching the convention, it is clear that both sides perceive the world differently.  One side sees the achievements of your life as almost entirely your own work.  The other side sees the mountain of work done by other people - including other people working through the government, but also much, much more - that makes my achievement possible.  The president gave a few examples, which could be multiplied almost infinitely.  And if you believe, as I and most Americans do, that God created the entire universe and still actively superintends it, then the realm of "I built this on my own" shrinks to a tiny fraction of my achievements, indeed.

The major insight that sociology brings to this problem is that privilege creates a whole ladder of unearned benefits that help us "build it."  And the greatest privilege is not realizing that you are privileged.  If you are, for example, a white man in America, from a rich, powerful family, who went to a leading prep school and the fanciest graduate school, you have a huge leg up - even if you then use that privilege to build up a successful business.

Hard work and responsibility are good things which we should honor and assist. But few indeed build anything, no matter how smart and hardworking they are, by themselves.

Merit and Privilege Among our Presidents and Candidates

George W. Bush, Andover '64, was a prep school slacker.
He is the heir to every privilege this country has to offer.
As a result, he does not admit when he is wrong.
He stuck with his decisions, even when they led to growing disaster.

Mitt Romney, Cranbrook '65, was a prep school bully.
He is the heir to just about every privilege this country has to offer, save his religion.
As a result, he does not admit when he is wrong.
He sticks with his decisions, even when they lead to growing pain for others.

Bill Clinton was the child of poverty and family disaster.
He made his way by intellectual merit and hard work through the best meritocratic institutions this country has to offer.
As a result, he readily admits when he is wrong, sometimes very embarrassingly.
He tried to reach out to those who differ from him and to compromise with them for the larger good.

Barack Obama, Punahou '79, was the child of family disorder and ethnic-identity confusion, but also of a supportive extended family.
He made his way by intellectual merit and, eventually, hard work, through the best meritocratic institutions this country has to offer.
As a result, he does not readily admit he is wrong.
He does try to reach out to those who differ from him and compromise with them for the larger good.

Capon Springs - the Pivot of My Year

My family has reunited at Capon Springs and Farms in the West Virginia mountains since the 1960s. We do this the same week in late August.  Many other families have come for years during that same week. The kids I grew up with now bring their kids.

For an academic, the end of August is the end of the year; September is when the year really begins.

Thus, for me, this week of vacation in the mountains, and in the cold, spring-fed pool, is the pivot of my whole annual cycle.

See you in the new year.

Happiness in the High-Trust Society

(Today we conclude our annual Theory Camp.  I apologize for a long entry, but I wanted to pull together my thoughts on both books, and on how they can help us think about the happy society.)

Francis Fukuyama argues in Trust that high-trust societies are generally richer than low-trust societies. This is because trust reduces transaction costs.  I think this is true.  Moreover, I think that high-trust societies are happier societies.  This is not only because they are richer, but because trust itself is a happy-making public good.

Adam Seligman, in The Problem of Trust, argues that Fukuyama does not really mean “trust,” but rather “confidence.”  Trust, he contends, is what an individual can extend to another individual on insufficient evidence.  By contrast, in a well-functioning social system we can have sufficient evidence to be confident that it will function well in our case, too.

I can accept revising Fukuyama to say that high-confidence societies are richer and happier.  At least, I can accept saying that this is a viable alternative expression. As a practical matter, I think Fukuyama is right that we should still refer to “high-trust” societies.  But Seligman’s main point – social trust rests on confidence in social systems – is correct and powerful.

There remains, though, the question of whether Fukuyama’s society needs trust in the sense that Seligman means.  Seligman believes that there is a realm beyond the limits of social structures, beyond where we can have confidence or even where we can make educated guesses about people based on familiarity. Here agentic individuals, in the full measure of their freedom, may meet other agentic individuals.  Neither have enough structures or cultural clues to be confident.  Here, the individual must make a leap of faith to trust, or a protective calculation to mistrust.

Is Seligman right?  My gut reaction is “no.”  I think human beings are so deeply cultured that we will read any presentation of self as providing some familiar clues about how the other will act. We could be wrong, of course, in reading those supposed clues. But we could be just as wrong in more familiar situations (such as Seligman’s man on the subway who looks like he played stickball). But I think it takes an ideological commitment to the complete otherness of the other to read another person as being completely unfamiliar.  The main ideological commitment to the complete otherness of the other that I can think of is racism, but there could be more.

Seligman defines trust as a rare event occurring at the limits of social structure.  And he argues that the differentiation of the self has gone so far today that our remaining “selves” are too removed from social roles to be true selves in any socially meaningful way.  Therefore, civilization will collapse and we all die.  Or something like that.  He is a little vague about actual consequences.

If, however, there are not really many cases of people beyond institutional confidence and social familiarity, then Seligman’s project may not apply to reality.  And if there are not really many cases of people so removed from their abundance of social roles that they have no true selves, then Seligman’s worry may not apply to reality, either.

Fukuyama, on the other hand, is clearly on to something real when he says that high-trust societies yield a valuable economic benefit from their institutions of trust, compared to low-trust societies.

In thinking about what all this has to do with the happy society, therefore, I think Fukuyama has the more fruitful empirical approach.  However, I do find one part of Seligman’s argument to be helpful for the happy society.  If what Fukuyama calls trust is best thought of as confidence in the social system, then I see a line of action we can take to make society happier: promote confidence in the social system.  Or more exactly, show the ways in which many social systems (the sub-systems of society as a whole) are working well and getting better. Show that confidence in social systems is well-placed.  Show, further, that developing the habit of confiding in social systems promotes the better functioning of those systems, and encourages others to be more confident, as well. 

One finding of happiness research is that happy people tend to see bad events as temporary and unusual, and good events as permanent and common.  Unhappy people tend to see the same events in the opposite way.  Everyone has some bad experiences with social systems.  However, happy people are likely to remain confident in the basic good order of the system, and attribute that particular bad experience to temporary, non-systemic qualities. Unhappy people, by contrast, are likely to blame the whole system any time they have a bad experience.

If most people are confident in their social systems, the society will be happier; if the society is happier, most people will be confident in their social systems. 

This suggests two lines of action to make society happier.  First, fix any actual problems in social systems.  Second, persuade the persuadable to re-interpret their bad experiences, or (more likely) what they have heard about other people’s bad experiences. Some people are, of course, determined to be unhappy. This will be true in the happiest society.  But there is a middle group who can be moved, by example, emotion, and reason, to read the social systems in a positive, confidence-building way.

To persuade people that the bad experiences they have had, or, more likely, just heard about, are unusual, it may be helpful to show that “the news is a freak show.”  That is, the news is designed to present the unusual, and has a bias toward the unusually bad rather than the unusually good.  This is not a flaw in the news.  The unusually bad can be fixed.  We know this is true, in the main, because the bad thing is unusual. The usual practice is better.  So if we can fix or prevent this deviant case, the usual working of the system is good. In any case, even if the bad case can’t be fixed, it is helpful to remember that the case is presented on the news because it is unusual.

Yet many people – most people, I expect – treat the news as a picture of what is normal and usual, because that is all they normally hear and see about that kind of social system. This is not a flaw in the news.  This is a flaw in the audience for news. The main audience for news falls victim to bad stereotyping.  The cure is not to do away with stereotyping – in this case, doing away with the news.  The cure is to teach the audience the difference between the rule, which is not reported, and the exception, which is.  This is why sophisticated people usually have a deeper grasp of what is going on. Not only do they know the latest news, they also know the larger context of the normal that does not make the news.

So, we can promote the happy society by teaching people that they have good reason to be confident in the social system.

Seligman's "Trust" is Only in the Social Gaps

(Continuing the discussion of Adam Seligman's The Problem of Trust from our annual Theory Camp.)

Seligman's most distinctive idea is that trust is rarely needed.  Most of the theorists he is arguing with, especially Francis Fukuyama and Anthony Giddens, treat trust as a common and necessary feature of modern societies.  They think that modern people have to trust that millions of faceless strangers have done their jobs correctly in making our food, building our buildings, driving cars in the opposite lane, and so forth.  But Seligman says that that should not be called trust in other people, but confidence in the social system.

Trust, Seligman thinks, is needed when we confront other people beyond any reliable role in the social system, and beyond any signs of familiarity that they give off that they are people we can predict. Trust in other people is like the faith that people had in God in premodern times before, as he claims, we all became atheists.

Having defined trust as beyond social roles and beyond experienced familiarity, he then draws his grim conclusions.  Our roles are becoming so differentiated that we can't connect any of them to a real self - neither in ourselves nor in others. The globalized world brings us into contact with so many people with different experiences than our own that we cannot assume familiarity. We are forced to trust, or led to mistrust, in more and more encounters.  We are in danger, he thinks, of "re-enchanting" the world.  But the new world would not be enchanted by God, but something "more brutal and more Hobbesian."

[I disagree with Seligman's conclusion, a matter I will take up in the next post.]

Trust in Civil Society vs. Civic Virtue

In Theory Camp this year we are working through books on trust.  This week we are considering Adam Seligman's The Problem of Trust.

Seligman contrasts the "civil society" version of how citizenship works with the "civic virtue" approach. The former is more congenial to Americans and other English-speaking theorists, while the latter is found more among continental European thinkers.

The civil society approach, since Adam Smith, has seen society as an association of individuals pursuing different ends, within a social order that has enough even-handed institutions to help them live together fairly and pursue their ends without stepping on each other too much.  Tocqueville's great insight was that these free individuals realize that their self interest can be best served if they create civic associations to address many problems of social order.  These associations work for the common good.  Seligman sees that these associations working for the common good engender trust.  I see that, beyond trust, they contribute to the happy society.

The civic virtue approach sees the whole society as having an end toward which it is working, not just the ends of the many different individuals in it.  This is an appealing, Durkheimian vision of a society unified in one collective conscience and one collective consciousness. In the tiny hunting and gathering bands that Durkheim used as his examples of the elementary forms of social life, this degree of unity seems possible.

In modern societies, though, which are huge and highly differentiated, the idea that there is one collective conscience and consciousness is harder to see.  Durkheim offered an ingenious solution, through the collective cult of the sacred individual.  Seligman, though, doesn't think it can really happen. He argues that we cannot know that we share a social conscience with others, nor even, have confidence that our shared social institutions make others predictable.  There, and there only, in the place beyond the limits of the collective sacred or the social institution, is the realm where trust is needed.

Trust - Masculine and Feminine Evaluations

In Theory Camp this year we are reading about trust.  Specifically, we are starting with Francis Fukuyama's Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity.

One of the men in the group remarked that trust seemed like such an emotional idea, and therefore not something one could reason about.  However, when we understood Tocqueville's argument (transmitted, in this case, by Fukuyama) that our self-interest is best served by serving our community and building a trusting society, then trust was rescued from irrationality. Trust, on this view, is not self-justifying; however, if trust is a means to a material end, then it is shown to be secretly rational.

For the women in the group, the value of trust did not have to be demonstrated.  They started from the view that trust is a good thing, and an obvious goal of a happy society.

I think these two approaches to social trust - justified as a means to self-interested ends, vs. a social good in itself - are characteristically masculine and feminine responses to the value of trust.

Turkey 6: Atatürk

Kemal Mustafa was given the name Atatürk, "Father of the Turks", by a grateful nation. He is not just the father of modern Turkey, he is the object of an ongoing national cult.  His mausoleum, erected on the most visible hill in the capital, is a massive pilgrimage site for Turks, and an obligatory stop for foreign dignitaries. Since Muslims must be buried in the earth, his body is not in this tomb cover, but sixty feet below it.

The ceiling of the great, open-air hall is a mosaic in the form of a Turkish kilim rug.

Directly above Atatürk's tomb marker is another mosaic, in the form of a Turkish carpet.

The exterior faces a large ceremonial plaza. We went to many ruins of Greek temples in Turkey. At Atatürk's tomb, I got a sense of what it would have been like to see a civic temple in its prime.