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.