I Think Jeff Bezos May Be Planning to Run for President

Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon, the richest man in the world, might be considering a run for president.

He bought The Washington Post.

He bought a house in Washington, DC.

The most likely place for the highly sought-after second Amazon headquarters is the DC area.

I have little idea what his politics are.

I have no doubt that he would be better than the incumbent billionaire.

That could be an amazing race.

Are Conservatives More Nostalgic Because They Weren't Paying Attention to Others the First Time?

I often find as a teacher that adults who believe "things were simpler when I was young" forget to factor in that, when they were young, they were not responsible for the complexity of the world -- that is what adults did.

Moreover, as parents of teenagers (and teachers of young adults) need to remind themselves constantly, "they aren't selfish, they are just self-absorbed."  Adolescence is the time of caring deeply about how we look to our peers and how they look to us, without realizing all the other people and the great wide world that is also affected by our actions.  Maturity helps us get a proportionate sense of our place in the world.

The greatest privilege is not having to realize that you are privileged. If my world is good, then the world is good.  Caring for others who have been harmed, even when we ourselves have not been harmed, bursts that bubble.  "Caring for the harmed" is also what Jonathan Haidt says is the defining feature of liberals.

So if today we find people in privileged groups - white men, in particular -- finding that "political correctness" forces them to notice harms to others, they might feel a desire not to think about it.  And if they cast back on their youth, they may grow nostalgic for a time when they did not think about harm to others.  Restoring that time would make their America "great again."

Baby Boomers Will Be the Last Generation to Live Their Whole Lives in Majority-White America

I am on the cusp between the Baby Boom and Gen X.  I am unusually aware of the dynamic of change at that cusp.

Somewhere around 2040 nearly all of the Boomers will be extinct.  And somewhere around 2040 the U.S. is projected to have a "minority majority."

I do not think we will, in fact, think of our population in the same terms by then.  We will always have a majority majority.

BUT we will no longer take it for granted that that majority is what we now think of as "white."

Whites Are Now a Minority Among All U.S. Children

A few years ago, non-Hispanic whites were a (bare) minority among all babies born.

Because whites have a lower fertility rate than all minorities, and especially than immigrant minorities, this trend accelerates quickly.

William Frey, a demographer at the University of Michigan and the Brookings Institution, estimated in his 2015 book Diversity Explosion that the year when we would have a 'minority majority" among all U.S. children under 18 is now - 2018.

The future has arrived.

Racists Hate the "Uppity"

Racists do not hate minorities as such.  This is why they do not think they are racists.

Racists hate rising minorities, who they fear will overtake and surpass them.

They hate and fear the "uppity."

For those who love E Pluribus Unum America, on the other hand, the ambition and hard work of minorities is our greatest hope for the future of the American experiment.

Fear of Scarcity is No More Natural Than Trust in Abundance. Both Are Learned

Economists and libertarians often believe that scarcity is natural, and therefore selfishness is rational.

However, the fear of scarcity is a premise, not a fact, nor a conclusion of dispassionate research.

Christian ethics helps us overcome the fear which leads to selfishness, through the hope we have in the inexhaustible and trustworthy source of abundance.

And the only proof we can offer that there will be enough is our own generous example.

Most Christians No Longer Support Trump

A year ago, most American Christians supported Donald Trump.

Now, most do not.

Best Social Movement of 2017: Sexual Predators are Pariahs

Of the many good things that happened in 2017, I have the most hope that the movement against sexual predators will have long-term effects.

In many fields, men known for years to have been gropers, sexual blackmailers, and even rapists were driven out and rendered pariahs.  Liberal organizations were more consistent than conservative ones in removing the offenders, but that is often what happens at the beginning of a social movement.

This movement was made by tipping public opinion, not by a change in law.  This suggests to me that it will have real staying power.

Permanent Life, Happy Wife

Brad Wilcox, one of the leading researchers on marriage, reports that husbands who are committed to marriage for life have happier wives.

What husbands believe about gender roles does not predict their wives' happiness.

Social Stability is as Important as Social Change; Not Thinking About Social Stability is a Mark of Privilege

Conservatives Think Race is Irrelevant to Identity, But Wealth Is Vital; Liberals Think the Reverse.

Who Will Win the Election? The Party That Governs Better

Allan Lichtman, the historian who has successfully predicted all the presidential elections since 1984, reminds us that that the main theme of such an election is a referendum on how well the party in power governed.

This is good news - the candidate horse race is really secondary to the years of achievement, or non-achievement, which lie before the race.  This is as it should be.

The Republican Party has had total control of government for a year.  They have done almost nothing with it.

On the basis of Lichtman's findings, I think they are building toward a disastrous 2020.

Conservatives Want a "Strict Father" To Make Everyone Personally Responsible - Except Corporations

George Lakoff has argued persuasively that an underlying cause of the deep conservative/liberal divide is that, while both tend to view government as like a family, they have different theories of what kind of parent is best to lead a family.  He calls these two views "strict father" and "nurturant parent," respectively.

This helps make sense of why conservative policy is so hard on welfare recipients.  They believe a strict father should make children become responsible and self-supporting.

This also explains why they want "fathers" of all kinds to have a free hand.  Theirs is a patriarchal theory in the most literal sense.

Which brings us to the mystery of "trickle-down economics."  As an economic theory it has failed repeatedly.  However, conservatives doggedly stick to it as the solution to all problems.  Give the rich more money and give corporations a free hand, and they will do what is best for their dependents.

Liberals regard corporations as economic institutions, which respond to incentives.  If you want them to create more jobs, then tie their tax breaks to actually producing more jobs.

Good News: India Outlaws Sex With Child Brides

The Indian Supreme Court closed a loophole which allowed sex with a young teen by her husband.

Now, 18 is the age of consent across the board, even for married girls.

I Don't Care About Sports Unless It Touches Me Personally. This is Like How Many Conservatives Feel About Social Problems.

Liberals have long lamented that conservatives seem to care about social problems only if the problem affects them personally.

Since "care for the harmed" is the heart of liberal ideology, this approach seems unjust to liberals.

I had a "shower thought" about this question this morning:  I feel the same way about sports.  I only care about a team or a game or a sport if it affects me personally.  I don't really care about sports as such, and only have a vague notion of what it going on with professional and semi-professional (Division I) sports.  Very occasionally a local kid will have a notable sports career, and I will want to have some idea of how that person, and that person's team, are doing.

I feel the same way about the sports team in my town and my college.  I care because I know some of the players, or their families.  And I care a bit because it matters to my neighbors.

But I don't regard sports teams as marking my "tribe."

We Need the State to Maintain Free Elections, Because They Are Not Self-Organizing. The Same is True of the Free Market.

Online Dating Seems to Increase Racial Intermarriage

The researchers hypothesized that online dating would take people out of their social networks. Since our networks still tend to be mono-racial, expanding them by algorithm into a much broader world is likely to make them more diverse.

The rapid increase in racial intermarriage matches the predictions of the model.

Yes, some people specify that they only wants to see potential dates of their own race.  But most people do not.

This is from a correlation study, so take it with a grain of salt.

One interesting side note:  A steady ten percent of marriages seem to come from college connections. Since about a quarter of Americans go to college, this is an extraordinarily high proportion of marriages in the college class.

A Silver Lining of the Trump Election: Mobilizing Millennials to Civic Action

Millennials supported Clinton over Trump in the 2016 election by 20 points -- the biggest gap of any generation.

Moreover, the 35% who supported Trump "are less experienced in civic and community engagement ... and they are less likely to say that they would take up a formal civic opportunity (like regularly volunteering for a nonprofit organization)." 

Clinton supporters, by contrast, were more engaged in civic and political life to begin with.

The Tufts study, taken just after before and after the election, thought that the high level of civic mobilization of the Clinton voters would depend on whether the Trump administration attacked "individuals and organizations with diverse viewpoints, including those of young people largely oppose him."

Now that we are almost a year after the election, I think we can clearly answer that question in the affirmative.

General Kelly Gives a Clue About When They Imagine America Used to Be Great

General Kelly, President Trump's Chief of Staff, gave a speech in response to the controversy about the president calling the families of fallen service members.

In the course of this speech, he give this vision of the lost golden age:

And they [members of the military] volunteer to protect our country when there's nothing in our country anymore that seems to suggest that selfless service to the nation is not only appropriate, but required.
You know, when I was a kid growing up, a lot of things were sacred in our country. Women were sacred, looked upon with great honor. That's obviously not the case anymore, as we see from recent cases. Life, the dignity of life was sacred. That's gone. Religion, that seems to be gone as well. Gold Star families, I think that left in the convention over the summer.

President Trump's slogan is "Make America Great Again."  It has never been clear when they thought America was great, nor why they do not think America is great now.  This speech gives a clue.

It is also mostly wrong.

Volunteering is up.  Millennials have higher levels of community service than prior generations. 

Feminism has produced a greater level of equal honor for women than ever before.  

The dignity of soldiers' lives, the very subject of Gen. Kelly's lament, is more honored than it was a generation ago.

The United States is the most religious industrialized country.

Gold Star families were central to one of the conventions last summer, even if not treated with equal respect at the other one.

America is great now, and improving in many ways.  The MAGA lament is really nostalgia for a time when things were worse.

Trying to Empathize with My Enemies

The Hidden Brain podcast "Tribes and Traitors" has got me thinking about how to empathize with my  enemy, the angry white men who shoot people.

When I take angry white men as a group, I can kind of understand their view.  They are trying to defend themselves and their kind from what they regard as an invasion of dangerous aliens.  The impulse to protect is honorable.  Their reading of how to identify the dangerous people if grossly misplaced.

They err in taking every story of a non-white person doing a bad thing as typical of that group.  They treat similar stories of bad things done by white people as individual actions, not reflective of the group.

Their decision to act by shooting random non-white people draws in part on this sort-of-understandable-but-misplaced impulse to protect.  But it also draws on an impulse, which I think is buried in all of us, to wish to have a good reason to destroy things.

When I try to empathize with Dylann Roof, the Charleston church murderer, in particular, though, I have a harder time.  He is another of those angry white men.  But he did not just open fire on random black people.  He crossed state lines to go to a prominent church.  They welcomed him in to their Bible study.  He took part for an hour.  And then opened fire on these very non-random black people who were doing good.

Love your enemies is a commandment.  Empathize with your enemies is an empirical path to a better society.  But some particular individual enemies have, so far, defeated my attempts at empathy.