Gun Insurance as Gun Control

I have a some more substantive posts on guns and gun control brewing, but this struck me as an interesting quick topic. Megan McArdle has an interesting post up where she discusses the merits (and demerits) of the idea being bandied about that gun owners be required to pay for liability insurance on their guns. The idea is that this would allow insurance companies to effectively price the deadliness of various types of guns into the price of the insurance, and that people would thus be deterred from buying more deadly guns without having to actually ban any guns.

Megan is highly skeptical of the idea. She points out a number of practical problems, notable the question of how you would get people most likely to misuse guns (criminals) to pay insurance premiums in the first place. Even if you could extract one premium at the time that a gun was first legally purchased, the owner could then stop paying.

I'm not sure this is actually the biggest practical obstacle (let me just say now I'm against the proposal, but I'm looking at it's plausibility because I think that it helps dissect some of the illusions that gun control advocates are under.) You could require that any time a gun is sold that the buyer undergo an insurance check and pay a one time insurance fee which would cover liability if that gun were used to kill anyone any time in the next 10 years. Sure, guns can sit around a long time, but it would take a lot of pre-planning to buy a gun more than ten years before committing a crime. This would probably the cover the majority of guns that undergo a legal sale prior to being used in a crime.

Of course, a lot of guns used in crimes aren't purchased legally or are never traced. If not traced, there's obviously no way to assign liability. If it was bought legally by one or more people within the last ten years, then you could make the most recent insurance company pay out.

There are currently about 300 million guns in private hands in the US. There are about 12,000 people who are killed with guns each year (obviously it wouldn't make sense to pay out for suicides as it would allow one to provide for one's family by committing suicide.) That means the chance that any one gun will be used to kill someone in a given year is 1 in 25,000. In ten years, that's a 1 in 2,500 chance. If we assume a payout of $1million to anyone killed with a gun, the average cost of ten years of liability insurance would be $400. Once you take into account the fact that often murder weapons aren't recovered, insurance companies would come up with a (probably lower) figure based on the characteristics of the buyer and the gun which would quantify the actual chance of liability with any given gun.

Now, $400 is a fair amount of money, but for ten years coverage it's honestly not very much. Moreover, I suspect that the result of applying actuarial probabilities would not be what the advocates of this idea expect.

Proponent John Wasic writes:

When you buy a car, your insurer underwrites the risk according to your age, driving/arrest/ticket record, type of car, amount of use and other factors. A teenage driver behind the wheel of a Porsche is going to pay a lot more than a 50-year-old house wife. A driver with DUI convictions may not get insurance at all. Like vehicles, you should be required to have a policy before you even applied for a gun permit. Every seller would have to follow this rule before making a transaction.

This is where social economics goes beyond theory. Those most at risk to commit a gun crime would be known to the actuaries doing the research for insurers. They would be underwritten according to age, mental health, place of residence, credit/bankruptcy record and marital status. Keep in mind that insurance companies have mountains of data and know how to use it to price policies, or in industry parlance, to reduce the risk/loss ratio.

Who pays the least for gun insurance would be least likely to commit a crime with it. An 80-year-old married woman in Fort Lauderdale would get a great rate. A 20-year-old in inner-city Chicago wouldn’t be able to afford it. A 32-year-old man with a record of drunk driving and domestic violence would have a similar problem.
...
Want to buy a single-shot World War II rifle? You’d pay much less than a semi-automatic handgun with a multi-round clip.

I'm certainly willing to bet that my bolt action WW2 rifles would have a very low statistical chance of being used in a crime. (Come to that, so would my semi-automatic WW2 era M1 Garand.) But here's the thing: The AR-15 "assault weapon" which was used at Newton is also a gun that is very seldom used in crimes. Sure, they're occasionally used in very spectacular crimes, but given that AR platform rifles are some of the highest selling rifles in the US, the ratio of people killed to number available is actually quite low. Further, the upper middle class middle aged woman who bought the AR-15 used at Newton would probably show as a very low risk profile. I'd be surprised if such a law would have tacked on more than one or two hundred dollar to the price of the gun -- and that's on a gun that already costs $700+.

The guns that would be most impacted by a law like this would be relatively inexpensive handguns. The last data I saw listed .38 Special revolvers as the most frequently used for crimes in the US. Also, cheap models are far more often used than expensive ones. The result of such a law would simply be to raise the price of less expensive (often, less "scary" from the point of view of gun control advocates) guns while leaving many of the ones that scare people most (so called "assault weapons") untouched. Cheap semi-auto pistols would become more expensive while the much derided Glock would not be impacted as much. As when it comes to profiling gun owners as opposed to weapons, let's be clear: The main thing would would be done by such a regime would be making it much harder for young male minorities living in poor neighborhoods to buy guns. That might be effective in a certain sense, but if advocates of such a law want to ban gun ownership by Black and Hispanic men, maybe they should just admit it.

When Your Taxes Go Up

With it looking increasingly likely that we will "go over the fiscal cliff" at least temporarily (once everyone's tax rates have already gone up, a whole different set of factors may come into play and make Congress want to reduce some people's taxes back down again) it's not a bad time to think about what effect we feel when our taxes go up. The obvious answer is "pain". As Megan McArdle points out, the best way to quantify this is not how much your taxes go up, but rather how much your take home income goes down:

[W]hen we're talking about policy, we tend to look at tax increases as a fraction of total taxable income, or as a fraction of the current tax rate. To see what I mean, think about two cases: one where the tax rate is going from 5% to 10%, and one where it is going from 50% to 55%.

If you look at this as a percentage of total income, these two tax increases are the same.

If you look at it as a percentage of the tax rate, then the first increase is much larger: it is doubling your taxes! While the second increase is only upping them by 10%.

But in terms of behavior, the percentage increase in the rate, or the percentage decrease in total income, is much less important than a third figure: the percentage decrease in your after-tax dollar. Most people think less about their nominal annual salary than about how much they bring home in each paycheck. And if you look at it this way, the second tax increase is much, much larger than the first.

Taking your tax rate from 5% to 10% decreases your after tax income by 5.26%. But by the time your tax rate is 50%, you're only keeping half of your income. So increasing the tax rate by 5% decreases your after-tax income by 10%: you used to take home 50 cents out of every dollar, but now you only take home 45 cents.

If you were surprised that Gerard Depardieu decided to leave France rather than pay the new 70% top rate, think of it this way: the rate increase was only 30%, but it was going to cut his income in half. Yes, that would still leave him with more money than you and I live on. But people don't think this way: if the government came and took half your after-tax income away, that would still leave you with more money than a middle-class family in Bangalore lives on, and you would still be hopping mad, not to mention panicking about how the mortgage was going to get paid.

On the Third Day of Christmas

I'm back in the office today, getting in some much needed time on a couple of big projects and saving my vacation days for later. However, the household is still pretty much on a holiday footing. Yesterday we had Erin of Bearing Blog and her family over for dinner and to stay the night. This brought the household total up to nine children and with six inches of fresh snow having just fallen the kids had a blast building snow men and sledding. MrsDarwin and I had a great time with Erin and Mark: we sampled beer, we managed to get all the kids down with relative peace, and we talked by candle light for an hour when the power inexplicably when out.

Things are likely to continue rather low key around here for the new couple days, as we have family visiting. However, more posting and more Stillwater are coming. We hope you are all having a happy and blessed Christmas.

The Fantasy Lives of Wives with Beehives

Just when you think trends, and the television shows about them, couldn't get any more vapid, here we have Wives with Beehives, a program about women who want to party like it's always 1959.

One place this breezy portrait of such women doesn't lead is to the sight of hair done in a beehive. There are other stand-out hairdos, to be sure, some clearly the product of fevered fantasies about the '50s, but nothing approaching the style the title mentions. That should have been the first sign that this TLC production about a group of Los Angeles housewives who pride themselves on adherence to the manners, morals and dress of the 1950s might be a bit short in the authenticity department. There would be others in regular succession.  

...That clothing plays a central role in the concerns of the four women introduced here, whose reasons for their choice of lifestyle are all roughly similar. Dollie, who had a difficult childhood, wants order, and also a world like the one she connects with the '50s, when men were men and women were women. Unlike today—when, she charges, men have surrendered their masculinity. As she speaks a scene unfolds in her living room by way of illustration, showing her husband striding purposefully to a table lamp to change the bulb—presumably an example of male assertiveness. How many manly husbands does it take to screw in a light bulb?... 

Amber, who also wants a stable and peaceful life, wants no children and may, it's suggested, be trying to overcome memories of her strict religious upbringing. Fifties fashion of all kinds is central to her life, if this report is to be believed. She prides herself on her cocktail parties featuring appropriate taste treats of the era: deviled eggs and cheese puffs. The dressing room that holds her huge vintage wardrobe is the largest room in the house—a fact that would likely have been incomprehensible to an American homemaker of the '50s. 

Shelby, married to a U.S. Navy man, is proud to feed her husband what she considers 1950s meals when he's home on leave. Potato-chip casserole, freezer-box pie and blue Jello, etc. She believes, as does the elegant Leslie, that the values of the '50s will keep her family intact.

As it happens, I know some women who were housewives in the Fifties -- my grandmothers and Darwin's. Strangely enough, what they've told me of their lives has very little to do with girdles and bullet bras, and more do to with raising children and trying to manage a household. By 1959, the total fertility rate in the United States was 3.7 children per women. At the end of the decade, my paternal grandmother had four; my maternal grandmother had 11. Of course these were times before easy, reliable birth control (that part of the morals of the 50s seems to be lost), but my grandmothers -- and Darwin's grandmothers too -- were all faithful Catholics, a demographic that transcends passing fashion and architectural trends.

Darwin and I lived for eight months in his grandmother's home, built in 1952. It had the formica table and the tile countertops and the vintage stove and ancient carpet. It also had a microwave, from a later period -- an innovation that Grandma H loved, because contrary to TLC's stereotype of the 50s housewife, she didn't love to cook. She also spent a great deal of time caring for a disabled child in an era in which many criticized her for not institutionalizing the little girl.

His other grandmother, Grandma R, was a Navy wife and moved seven children around the country. When her children put together a cookbook for Grandma and Grandpa's 50th anniversary, what they remembered were not her potato-chip casseroles and freezer-box pie but her meatball soup, her beans, her mole, her fideo, her tamales, her salsa, her pork and green chiles.

My Grandma D didn't spend her days crafting jello molds or bundt cakes for her husband; she had eleven children to raise, and, living in Baton Rouge, the family had a black cook who made great regional dishes like red beans and rice. She stayed petite and slim and elegant into her eighties, and though she is lovely in the old family photos, it has less to do with the styles of the time than with her own ladylike grace.

Grandma E was a thrifty Irish homemaker who raised her family near first Boston and then Philadelphia, who battled a hereditary blood disease before the advent of modern medicines that could keep it under control. She had no extra room in her house for a "huge vintage wardrobe", and she never threw cocktail parties. She still brooks no nonsense, and would find the idea of living a fantasy life based on the accoutrements of a certain decade ridiculous.

And this doesn't take into account the lives of other women in the period -- single working girls, WWII widows, women who crammed large families into small apartments, women who didn't have husbands who would keep them safely insulated from the cares of the world. Women who couldn't afford the latest styles, and didn't have the time or servants to wash and drip dry huge wardrobes. Women who knew that magazines such as Vogue and Good Housekeeping and Mademoiselle and TV shows such as I Love Lucy and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet crafted just as whitewashed and unrealistic an image of contemporary life as Martha Stewart Living and The Real Housewives of Orange County do now.

Do you want to know who lives the life of a stereotypical 1950s housewife? I do. I raise lots of children, keep a welcoming (if not always neat) home for my husband, go to church every Sunday, and have the occasional cocktail. I also, like my grandmothers before me, wear what's current because that's what I can find without going out of my way. Like my grandmothers before me, I'd give my eyeteeth for a some better household technology (although for me, "having eyeteeth pulled" is just an expression -- it was far more literal for them and their children).  Like my grandmothers before me, I don't have time to carefully build up a pretty fantasy life in order to have a stable family -- I'm too busy actually living and caring for the real thing.

Anyone who's interested in a reality show depicting a family life that would have been more familiar to women of the 1950s should check out Jennifer Fulwiler's new show, Minor Revisions.

Apocalyptic Counter-Indications

People, please. You knew the world wasn't going to end yesterday when this didn't happen.

Stillwater - 26

Refreshed and completely meditated out, Esther roared back into Stillwater like a gathering hurricane, ready to whisk up everything in her path and spit it out transformed into a complete Stillwater Fellowship Ball. The scheduling of the Ball was left to Esther, and for a number of years she had chosen to hold it in late August — a miserable time of the year to dress up in voluminous layers of antebellum costume in Louisiana, but also a time when few other big society events competed for attention. 

Her big concern this year was vacant role of Queen of the Fellowship Ball. The eldest Spencer daughter at home usually filled the post, and for a number of years Sophia had reigned uncontested. Now that she was married, Olivia should have acceded to the throne, and indeed, Olivia had long dreamed of the day when she would supplant Sophia in the spotlight and descend the curved staircase in a rustling gown to greet her subjects gathered in the grand rooms below. 

Now that the great occasion was at hand, however, Olivia was strangely recalcitrant. She’d signed up to be an exchange student in Brazil this semester. She wasn’t going to fly home just for the Stillwater Ball. She had better things to do than worry about who would be Queen of the Fellowship Ball — Esther could do it for all she cared. This was exactly what Esther wanted to hear. Technically the naming of the Queen fell to Richard Spencer, but he had always paid little attention to the finer details of the Ball, preferring to let Esther manage the whole thing as long as she didn’t bother Cheryl to make any decisions, which suited them both admirably. It was certain that Cheryl had no desire to be the Queen — she could barely stay up for the entire length of the Ball. There was only one obvious contender, and that was Esther herself. Her seamstress friend in Plaquemine was making her a lavish dress, and she had secretly commissioned Alys to design a new tiara for this year’s Queen, “whoever that may be”.

As Alys had been invited to this year’s Ball, she had, in turn, given Melly a commission to alter one of the old dresses for her. Together they climbed up the tightly spiraling attic stairs, nestled against a tall window in a back service corridor, and emerged into a hot, dusty, cavernous space. Even in the middle of the day, the low windows barely illuminated all the way to the high rafters. Melly pulled the chain of the light fixture near the neat racks of garment bags, but the naked bulb made little impact on the dimness. 

“I can think of a few that might fit you fairly well,” she said, sorting through the bags and holding the tags to the light to read the labels. “My mother made these for Sophia when she was younger, so maybe they’ll fit you now.”

“Because I have a figure like a little girl?” 

“No!” Melly protested. “I didn’t mean that… It’s just that Sophia is taller than you, and has more… It’s just that she’s bigger,” she finished lamely.

“I know I’m not busty,” Alys laughed. “You won’t hurt my feelings by saying so. You pick the one you think will be best for me.”

Melly considered for a moment. There was no question that Alys would be attractive in anything short of a burlap sack, but it was hard to have to pick the dress in which she would captivate Malcolm at the Ball. Yet she knew exactly which dress would suit Alys perfectly, and with a small sigh, she lifted it carefully from its bag and held it up for her to inspect. It was an off-the-shoulder gown of ice blue taffeta, trimmed with pointed lace along the low neckline and the waist of the bodice. A ruched overskirt of a slightly deeper blue fitted trimly over the hips, and the full underskirt had three tiers of gathered pleats at the hem. The whole effect of the dress was one of alluring innocence. Alys was delighted. 

“Oh, this is so authentic!” she gushed, holding the dress to herself and admiring the effect.

“Well, not exactly,” said Melly. “These aren’t exact reproductions, and this dress is a melange of different styles. This overskirt is a look from the 1870s, but it’s not as snug as dresses then would have been. Ladies used to wear pretty tight corsets — even though you’re supposed to wear a corset under this dress, the modern ones won’t squeeze you nearly as much as an authentic corset would. But if you want something truly historical, there are some much older dresses in the way back.”

“I’m not even going to look at another one,” Alys declared.  “I wonder what shoes I should wear?”

“The next question is actually what you should wear under it,” said Melly, pawing through the racks in search of the right bustles, corsets, and hoopskirts. “Let’s find that, and then we’re done up here.”

“But what about you? Do you already have a dress?”

“Well…” The truth was that Melly had been avoiding the very thought of the Fellowship Ball. Ordinarily it was a joyful occasion for her, since it brought her beloved brother Reńe, the current Stillwater Fellow, back to her for a whole weekend. However, this year the prospect of Malcolm and Alys whirling gracefully around the floor, gazing soulfully into one another’s eyes (or sardonically, as the case might be) had been weighing heavily on her, and she’d considered just skipping the whole thing. Her hesitation was answer enough for Alys.

“Oh no, we are not leaving this attic until we find you a dress,” she said, taking charge. “And since I find it totally creepy up here, we’re going to do it pronto. Come on.”

Alys threw herself into the racks with purpose, gathering up whatever garment bags were in reach preparatory to examining each one.

“Stop! Stop!” cried Melly, unable to countenance the havoc being wrought on her carefully constructed organizational scheme. “You’re looking in the wrong area. Even Sophia’s old dresses are too big for me.”

“Then you show me where to look.”

Melly carefully hung up all the bags while Alys, on Melly’s advice, looked through a far rack, repository of an older selection of ball gowns made for a some more petite woman than the current crop of Spencer girls. Melly had always selected the most basic dresses for her costumes on the theory that the attention of the ball should be directed toward Sophia and Olivia, and away from herself, as much as possible. Alys had no such qualms. She emerged grinning and victorious, waving a half-zipped bag.

“Okay, I think this should be it. At least, it seemed ideal in the dark back there — let’s see it in the light.”

By the window, Alys displayed a gown of ivory silk woven with subtle stripes.

“I think you’re tiny enough to pull this off. I’m betting on you having pretty shoulders, though.”

Melly fingered the beautiful fabric. The wide neckline stretched to short tight sleeves of lace, and the tiny waist tapered down to a narrow point above the full skirt. Cascading bands of trim and silk dipped in a V across the bodice and swept close along the shoulders. Would Malcolm notice her shoulders? Would he think they were pretty?

“Oh, check it out!” Alys was examining the other side. “The back laces up. I call that sexy.”

“Do you know, I… I think this was someone’s wedding dress,” Melly murmured, blushing at her thoughts of Malcolm and putting him resolutely from her mind.

“Well, the bride is hardly going to ask for it back now, is she?” asked Alys reasonably. “Let’s grab our unmentionables and go try these things on.”

 The Ball was fast approaching when Melly received an unwelcome surprise. 

She and Malcolm had barely been driving together during the summer — the heat added an extra layer of discomfort to the whole awkward process for Melly, so Malcolm took Alys out instead. With her natural adaptability, Alys made the car her own when she drove, and her gleefully conspiratorial grins at Malcolm as she roared down River Road made that gentleman feel more reckless and liberated than his naturally serious nature had allowed before. Anything seemed possible when she was driving. They might tear up the miles to New Orleans and buy a suit of armor or an elephant’s foot in one of the venerable antique emporiums off Bourbon Street. They might head out at twilight across the endless bridge over the Atchafalaya Basin and find themselves in Mexico by sunrise. They might trace the Mississippi north and wind up in godforsaken Minnesota. None of these wild whims had indulged as yet, but with her, it seemed like excitement was just around the corner.

However, one afternoon a few weeks before the Fellowship Ball, Alys wasn’t in, and as Malcolm entered the basement door to head upstairs, he saw Melly in the family room, her head bent over Alys’s dress. She looked tired and pale, and he reflected guiltily that he had not even tried to get her out of the house in some time. She was always so quiet and patient and uncomplaining that he hadn’t kept as much of an eye on her health as he should have done. Surely it wasn’t good even for her to spend all day shut up in the house sewing.

“Hey, Melly,” he called. At the sound of his voice she immediately looked up, and her welcoming smile banished some of the wanness from her face.

“You’re always in here sewing,” he said, sitting on the arm of the couch.

“I have to finish this before the ball.”

“No, I mean you’re always in the family room. You have to carry everything downstairs to work on your projects. Do you like it better down here than in your room?”

She looked back at her work. “It’s warm up there sometimes.”

Somehow he didn’t like to see her shrinking back to her sewing. “Come on,” he said, taking the dress and putting it aside, “you need to get out. It’s not good for your eyes to spend so long staring at tiny stitches. Let’s go driving. It’s time to get you on bigger roads. We’re going to go up the highway instead of River Road.”

“Just let me get my hat and sunglasses.” Ordinarily she might have protested this new route, but now she was galvanized by the thought that perhaps it was because she was so resistant to stepping out of her comfort zone that he now turned to Alys for companionship. And she was tired of sitting alone in the house without him, and today his concern for her health, fraternal though it might be, was enough to make the dread prospect of driving less onerous. 

Her technical driving skills in the big Morgan had improved, and she was able to start the car without stalling now. But she still did not enjoy being behind the wheel. There was no affection between her and the Morgan, nor even the respect one has for a worthy adversary. She still feared that the car had yet another trick hidden away, and she felt deeply its treachery in purring like a kitten for Alys while balking under her command.

“There’s nothing wrong with your driving, Melly, except that you’re not confident behind the wheel,” said Malcolm, confidently. “You know what you have to do, but you’re tentative.”

“Yes,” said Melly tightly. “I’m tentative because I’m steering a huge pile of metal down a road toward other huge piles of metal, and if we collide, there will be one super-huge metal pile and no more me and you.”

“At the speed you’re going, the only metal we’d damage in a collision is our fender, maybe.” He regarded her from the front seat. “You could go faster, Melly. You know how to drive now. You could probably even get your license if you wanted to.”

“I don’t want to.”

“But you could. Think of all the things you could do if you could drive yourself.”

“If someone would lend me a car, you mean.”

“You could get your own car.”

“My own car?” Melly took her eyes off the road for a moment to see if he was teasing, but his face wasn’t twisted in amusement. “How would I get a car?”

“Buy it. How many dresses have you sewn or altered over the years? People pay good money for that. Start charging for the work you do — you deserve it. Then save up for a used car.” This time he did smile. “An automatic if you’re tired of dealing with the clutch.” 

The possibility of making money from sewing had never seriously occurred to Melly. She thought of her mother and the years she’d spent at various bridal shops. Of course she must have been paid, but it had always seemed like the family had barely scraped by on that money. Come to that, her mother had been paid for sewing at Stillwater — five years’ worth of Stillwater Fellowship Ball gowns in the attic were testaments to her skill. Had Esther been in charge of paying her? Yet Esther had never offered Melly any money for any of the gowns she’d sewn or altered for the Fellowship Ball. And Sophia’s wedding dress had cost her hours upon hours of wearisome work, yet neither Sophia nor Esther had seemed to think her time was worth very much. But perhaps she had owed them that work; perhaps that was the price of staying at Stillwater.

“At least Alys is paying me,” she murmured.

“Is she?” Malcolm’s eyes glowed, and Melly realized that she’d spoken aloud. “I’m not surprised. She has a lot of respect for your talents, Melly — she’s told me so several times. And she really believes that talent should be recognized and developed. Goodness knows she’s told me that often enough when we talk about the school.” He settled confidentially, and Melly tried to look as encouraging as two-way traffic would allow. “I can’t always understand her, though. I’m really starting to believe that she likes me. She practically told me the other day that the reason she took a second six-month lease was because she liked being near me.”

“She seriously said that?”

“Well, as seriously as she says anything. And that’s the issue. She’s so…” Malcolm surveyed the humid landscape, searching the levee, the cane fields, and the wisps of cloud drifting in the blue sky for words to describe Alys’s ineffable qualities. Melly waited patiently for inspiration to strike.

“We’re so… different, almost completely opposite. She’s so funny and bright and she sees everything so sharply. When I’m with her I feel free, and all my worries and obligations come off my shoulders for a while. But that’s the thing — it’s so easy to laugh at everything when I’m with her that I don’t know how seriously she takes our relationship, or if she even thinks we have a relationship. I feel like I weigh things down enough as it is — the last thing I want to do is ruin everything like always because I just can’t lighten up.”

Melly seethed at the unjustness of this self-assessment. “You don’t ruin anything by being sincere and responsible, Malcolm. That’s called being mature. You shouldn’t ever let anyone make you feel ashamed of it.”

He gave her shoulder a grateful squeeze. “You’re such a good friend, Melly. I’m so glad I have you to talk to. You always say the kindest things, and you’re always right.”

Melly was torn between exhilaration at his words and despondency at his intentions, and her conflicting emotions might have brought tears to her eyes if at that moment the car behind them had not honked with lengthy insistence. She jumped and looked at the speedometer — sure enough, she had let her foot slip while listening to Malcolm, and was tooling along at a leisurely 40 miles an hour. Her pulse began to race as she took her eyes from the road long enough to glimpse at the rearview mirror and saw that the car behind her was right up on her back bumper. Clutching the wheel, she jabbed at the accelerator. The Morgan, glad of this chance to roar, leapt ahead with a speed that alarmed her. Again the horn blared, still immediately behind her. Panic twisted her stomach. Should she go faster? She was driving the speed limit now. 

“Why won’t they pass me?” she hissed.

Malcolm squeezed her shoulder again, and his voice was oddly light. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it. They’re just teasing you.”

The car had pulled up alongside the Morgan, and the driver leaned on the horn. Melly risked a sidewise glance and saw Alys waving at her from the passenger seat of her own car. The driver gave her a comic salute, and much to her dismay, she recognized Ian. She glared at him for a moment before remembering that between the sunglasses and hat, he was hardly likely to discern the nuances of her disapproval. Staring straight ahead, she held the Morgan exactly at the speed limit. Ian charged ahead and maneuvered in front of her, and settled down to exactly the limit as well. With a sigh, she realized that she was going to have to follow him all the way home.

“So she was picking up Ian at the airport today!” Malcolm said. “I didn’t know he was coming in. That’s like her to want to surprise us all. Now we will have some fun.”

Melly’s reaction to this development was so exactly opposite his that she felt it hardly worthwhile to say anything. Was there no way to rid themselves of Winters for good?

Ian, in his turn, glanced in the mirror at the sedate Morgan and its primly upright driver. “How on earth does Malcolm Spencer end up in a classic roadster driven by Audrey Hepburn? I didn’t know he had it in him.”

Alys rolled her eyes. “You know it’s his own car, and of course that’s Melly, idiot.”

“Melly?” Ian scrutinized the face in the mirror more intensely. There was indeed a resemblance to the quiet little girl who had always seemed to be underfoot whenever he’d tried to sneak off with Sophia, but now he noticed her finely modeled face and the pretty mouth pursed with irritated concentration. “When did she grow up?”

“She looks the same as she always did, only now you notice it because you didn’t expect to see any good-looking girls this time around,” scoffed Alys.

“But how can she be old enough to drive?”

“I think she’s almost twenty, dumbass.”

“Sweet nineteen and never been kissed.” 

Alys looked at him sharply. “You leave her alone. I like her. She’s a good kid.”

“But she doesn’t like me. And I want her to like me. I want everyone to like me.”

“You’re so vain,” said Alys indulgently. “You have to be loved by everyone. I guess she could use a little something to bring her out of herself, but don’t you dare break her heart, or I’ll be mad at you. She’s not Sophia, you know. She’s a nice girl, not that you’d know the type.”

“I wouldn’t break her heart,” he protested, grinning. “I just want to soften it up a little. Make her smile at me, see her light up when I come into the room, have her cry a little when I go away again. That sort of thing.”

“Oh, that’s all, is it? You must be developing some restraint in your old age.”

“See? I’m already working hard on my nice guy cred.” 

Alys shrugged. “I wash my hands of you. With this big ball coming up, you’ll probably have a chance or two to make a good impression if you behave yourself.”

Ian’s boyish face could hardly have been more compliant. “That’s all I ask.”

An Angry Note

Found on the floor while I was cleaning up the front bedroom

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Who Is The Hobbesian?

In the wake of the Newtown school shooting, anti-gun advocates came out quickly and loudly arguing that new gun control measures were necessary. Gun rights organizations such as the NRA wisely kept their mouths shut for a while, having learned (correctly) that no one wants to hear from them in the wake of a mass shooting, but given the plentiful and often strident anti-gun rhetorical coursing through the media and social media, pro-gun advocates started answering back and provided their own solution: If some trained and armed person had been present, the attack could have been stopped.

This seems to be one of the basic divisions of thinking that inevitably comes up in the gun control debate. Gun control advocates argue that killing could be avoided if the availability of guns were reduced. Gun advocates argue that violence can be reduced by making sure that there is someone nearby to respond to violence (and that the knowledge that there are likely armed citizens or off duty law enforcement around will deter crimes.)

Occasionally this "more guns" argument even comes from somewhat surprising quarters. Left-leaning writer Jeffrey Goldberg writing at The Atlantic this month argued that since the US has so many guns in circulation (and a sufficient cultural attachment to them) that it would never be possible to make the US gun free, it would be better to make sure that there are significantly more well trained citizens with concealed carry licenses.

Alan Jacobs over at The American Conservative states a common objection to the "more guns could prevent violence" point of view:

But what troubles me most about this suggestion — and the general More Guns approach to social ills — is the absolute abandonment of civil society it represents. It gives up on the rule of law in favor of a Hobbesian “war of every man against every man” in which we no longer have genuine neighbors, only potential enemies. You may trust your neighbor for now — but you have high-powered recourse if he ever acts wrongly.

Whatever lack of open violence may be procured by this method is not peace or civil order, but rather a standoff, a Cold War maintained by the threat of mutually assured destruction. Moreover, the person who wishes to live this way, to maintain order at universal gunpoint, has an absolute trust in his own ability to use weapons wisely and well: he never for a moment asks whether he can be trusted with a gun. Of course he can! (But in literature we call this hubris.)

It seems to me that in many ways this reaction underlines a divide in how people think about society and order -- one that generally falls along the left/right axis, though since Jacobs is writing for TAC I would assume that in some sense he calls himself a "conservative".

Jacobs says that the "more guns" approach to dealing with crime implies a “war of every man against every man”. In keeping with this view, he instead advocates reducing the availability of guns in order to make sure that however much every man way want to make war against every other man, he can't do so as lethally.

However, it seems to me that the "more guns" solution does not in fact assume a Hobbesian reality, it assumes that the vast majority of people do support and wish to enforce an orderly society, and thus that members of that society can and should be allowed to have the power to protect society against those who seek to disrupt with it violence.

Jacobs believes that guns should be restricted precisely because he believes in a Hobbesian war of all against all. The "more guns" suggestion, on the other hand, seems to imply a basic social solidarity -- that most people are and desire to be law abiding. The more Hobbesian view holds that the tools of force should, as much as possible, be restricted only to those who represent state authority -- an authority which externally imposes order on a society which would otherwise be violently anarchic. The "more guns" partisans believe that an orderly society is fairly natural, and that members of it simply need to be given the tools to enforce that order against a small minority who would disrupt that order.

Or course, if the disagreement on guns boils down, among other things, to a fundamental disagreement about human nature, it's obvious that agreement and resolution would be very difficult.

ADDENDUM: Since the recent surge in discussion of gun control has touched off by the mass murder at Newtown, it's probably worth stating as a side note that although in general I'm sympathetic to allowing more citizens to get concealed carry permits (given some appropriate level of background check and proficiency) it seems to me that those suggesting that this is the clear solution to schools shootings are probably over-reaching. Schools shootings are incredibly rare (statistically, an average US school will be hit with a mass shooting every 12,000 years) and I don't think it's necessarily reasonable to form a lot of school policies around such an unusual event. Plus, I suspect that not many school teachers are the sort who want to carry weapons.

Miau!

We are improving our addled minds by watching trained singers yowl at each other. It's very edifying.

This is the Duetto Buffo di Due Gatti by Rossini. "Miau" translates, roughly, as "Meow".



Note to fans of the Betsy-Tacy books: this is the Cat Duet that Betsy and Tacy sang every year.

And because we can't let well enough alone, here are two other versions we particularly enjoyed.

Sick Daze

We are struck with the revolving cold, which is slowing going around the family. Darwin has remained (and will remain, I hope) immune, but so far everyone else is in some stage or other of invalidism. I spent yesterday in bed, sleeping as much as possible, while the kids either slept off their own colds or sat rapt in front of the computer. Thank goodness that Netflix streams entire seasons of Tintin and Phineas and Ferb.

Today different people are in different stages -- some more energetic, some laid quite low. All I've done today is sleep, break up the occasional fight, and address Christmas cards. It's not a bad life, actually, when my sinuses aren't either too blocked or too drippy.

I'm grateful, actually, that this didn't hit us in November, or I never would have reached my 50,000 words. Stillwater fans, I'm still writing, but the past week with this cold creeping upon me has been very unproductive. I'd find myself staring stupidly at the screen, wondering how to construct this difficult sentence: "She raised her head to look at him." Then I'd check Facebook, because surely someone there would know. Then I'd go to bed.

***

For your listening pleasure: Must The Winter Come So Soon, from the opera Vanessa by Samuel Barber, sung by Susan Graham:



Anna Egan and I are going to try to record this over the Christmas holidays. If it's passable (more a comment on my playing than her singing), I'll post it.

Distortions of Dignity

Leah at Unequally Yoked has a post about various feminists responding to the way some comic artists distort the feminine form to amp up sexual attributes, generally at the expense of anatomical realities. Whether or not you want to follow all her links, I'm in favor of people casting a critical eye on any medium which glorifies pornification: the exaggeration of one trait or characteristic for the purpose of sexualizing it.

Leah applauds these initiatives, not just because they encourage objectification, but because

I’m glad that people like Albers, Girl in Four Colors, and Escher Girls are speaking up and making it easier for guys who intend to be nice guys to notice when the culture is leading them astray.

I think there's a lot to admire about the work of calling attention to the ways in which the culture encourages an overtly sexualized view of women, but the phrasing here, "making it easier for guys who intend to be nice guys to notice when the culture is leading them astray", troubles me. I've noticed this formulation in several discussions lately: "I know you think you're good guys, and you want to be nice, but you just need to be set straight". It seems to me to be, in attitude, very much related to the equally problematic assertions I've seen men make in discussions of modesty: "I know that even nice girls don't realize how much they distract men by their clothing/body language/etc., so let me set you straight." Both of these are not only really patronizing statements, but also set up relationships between men and women that either set the sexes in opposition, or put repentant offenders into the position of being useful idiots trying to placate an offended constituency: "Oh gosh, I'm so sorry I didn't realize how the culture was making me sexualize these poor women! Gee, I didn't know that the way I dressed was making these poor men sin! You're so right!"

A man shouldn't not sexualize women because he wants someone to think of him as a "nice guy"; he shouldn't do it because it's wrong and degrading. A woman shouldn't dress modestly because men are too weak to control themselves; she should dress modestly because she is inherently worthy of respect. I cannot force you to think virtuously, but I can behave virtuously myself.

This is an important moral distinction because choices not based on what is right and good often just channel bad behaviors into other areas. Simply eliminating unrealistically sexy drawings of women won't automatically mean that illustrators believe that women have an inherent dignity and deserve to be depicted as more than a collection of variously shaped attributes and a sultry glance. It doesn't mean that suddenly men who had been consuming these images will begin to treat their wives or girlfriends or co-workers or internet interlocutors as the image of God. The images are a symptom of the problem, not the cause -- people don't have less regard for the dignity of others because they are inundated with sexy images; they create and consume sexy images because they already lack that regard.

Of the comic illustrations, Leah says

What these illustrations are eroticizing is the absence of a woman’s consent to be interacted with sexually. They’re promoting her own interest and pleasure as irrelevant to the man’s enjoyment, instead of amplifying it as lover and beloved both will the other’s good.  

I would actually take this a step farther. The problem with with pornifying women in any context is not that the woman does not consent. "Consent" does not equal "good". Women and men consent daily to affairs, to make or watch pornography, to degrade themselves for money or the enjoyment of others. And these things are wrong -- no consent ameliorates that. For that matter, the harm done by a sexualized comic image is not that the image can't consent -- that's ludicrous -- but that the illustrator, in creating, and viewer, in partaking, are making harmful moral choices which have consequences in how they then think about and treat other people.

Hobbit Thoughts

No Darwins have seen The Hobbit yet. There are various reasons for this. One of the main ones is:

But also, although I was mostly a fan of Jackson's LotR movies when they came out (though even then I took exception to moments in FotR such as the deeply silly wizard-break-dancing-fight, Arwen Warrior Princess and The Momentary Possession of Galadriel by the Special Effects Demon) in the years since the sheer visual thrill of seeing Jackson's often stunning visuals on the screen wore off, and I've come to cringe at much of the dialogue and plot/character changes in the LotR movies. While I'm eager to see The Hobbit (and will be starting a lightning re-read of the book with the older kids this weekend in preparation for perhaps taking them to see the movie during the Christmas-thru-New-Years break) one of the things that concerns me is that it sounds like The Hobbit has, to a great extent, been turned into a mini-LotR Jackson style.

This worries me a little as The Hobbit is a rather different book than The Lord of the Rings. In LotR, the War of the Ring is one of the two major plot lines of the book (the other being the related quest to take the ring to Mount Doom.) Thus, while in some ways Jackson sought to make the book more focused on big battle set pieces, the book itself is heavily focused on war and that which surrounds it. The Hobbit, on the other hand, is a journey and adventure story. The dwarves do not set off expecting war, and even at the end they don't really expect it to come upon them in their stand-off over the rights over Smaug's treasure. The Battle of Five Armies comes upon all of the characters (save Gandalf) unawares, and Biblo himself is such a small part of it that we have to hear an account of the battle after the fact since his witness to it is fairly useless in knowing what's going on.

From all I've read and seen, Jackson decides to structure the Hobbit movies much like he did with LotR, starting them off with a historical background section in which we see epic battles that set up the current situation, and creating ongoing rivalries and tensions that make the various events of the story more warlike and build expectation for the final battle. This strikes me as a potential problem in that "journey" is a story worth telling in and of itself, and I think that The Hobbit gains rather from the fact that actual war is something which comes about rather unexpectedly at the end. That, after all, is like life. Rather more so, indeed, than big epic struggles leading up to a final showdown. And while I don't object to the latter, that too is a good story, I do object to the recent tendency to turn every fantasy or historical story possible into a Titanic Showdown Between Sides plotline.

Sh*! Chesterton Says

Elliot Milco has stirred the pot over at First Things with a brief post entitled Against Chesterton Quotations:

I was wandering through Facebook and noticed a quote by G.K. Chesterton at the top of someone’s profile. The quote was exceptionally stupid. And I thought to myself, So many people repeat these little quips, and so many of them are awful. So I decided to start a collection. I made it through the first two pages (of sixteen) devoted to Chesterton on a popular quotation website. Here are a few of the stupidities I found...

Milco then proceeds to highlight a number of Chesterton quotes and voice objections against them. Some of these are, I will admit, a bit of a stretch. For instance:

“Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.”

Love means to love what is worthy of love; everything else is vice.

It strikes me that both Chesterton and Milco are, arguably, saying something quite valid in their opposing quips. And while it's possible to take Chesterton wrong -- taking "unlovable" in a more literal sense to mean something which really ought not to be loved (say: cruelty) -- I think it's moderately clear that his quip is meant to be taken more or less as a brief restatement of what Christ says in the Sermon on the Mount:

But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same?

Nonetheless, I think he scores some fairly direct hits on Chestertonian tropes. Some of these are evocative but poorly reasoned on Chesterton's part. For example:

“People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.”

By this logic, the works of E.L. James must be extremely true.

Certainly, fiction can convey truth in a very compelling way. However, let's be honest, the fact that something sells a lot is not proof that it is more true (as Milco points out in his response) and furthermore I don't think it's really the case that people read novels because they are "more true" than non-fiction. When people choose novels over non-fiction, I think they usually do so because novels are more fun than non-fiction. (These days non-fiction actually sells more than fiction does, but I don't know if Chesterton's factual claim was correct then or not.)

“Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.”

Poets go mad quite often, and they seem much more frequently to end up totally absorbed in their own creative “genius” and independence than chess players. Maybe the fault is in imagination and not in logic. Or maybe the idea of ascribing some intrinsic danger to either of these faculties is idiotic.

Chesterton's little fantasy that it is ordered thinkers who go mad and fantasists who are sane is one that comes up frequently in The Man Who Was Thursday, a novel which I enjoy for unrelated reasons. However, although it is, like many of Chesterton's ideas, evocative in a way, it's also a deeply unrealistic conceit. Order is not something that leads one away from truth and from God. God is ordered. From these quotes one could almost imagine Chesterton is endorsing the clearly foolish idea that God and reason are opposed, were it not that one knows Chesterton elsewhere attacks that idea with equal charm, as in the Father Brown story in which Father Brown immediately detects the thief dressed as a bishop because the thief denounces reason. Moreover, the conceit rests on something to which Chesterton quotes too often seem to owe their being: a completely made up fact. The one thing that makes this forgivable is that I rather doubt Chesterton himself thought it was clearly known and true that mathematicians and chess players go mad more often than poets and artists -- he just said it because he thought it illustrated an interesting idea regardless of its factual accuracy. The problem is, I'm not sure that the many people who throw this quote and ones like it around realize this.

Chesterton is a good writer, and I enjoy some of his works very much (mostly his fiction.) He is also very skilled at forming memorably paradoxical quips which contain a certain degree of truth. This is great, so long as one values Chesterton for what he is rather than what he is not. The problem is when his quips and paradoxes are imbued with a nearly scriptural authority, a weight they were never designed to bear. While he can be very good and thought provoking light reading, Chesterton was not a rigorous philosopher or theologian, and since his specialty was paradox there is the difficulty that many of his most memorable sayings are, while surprisingly true, also (by the nature of paradox) half wrong.

Because Chesterton quotes are so memorably clever, they are too often are taken out of context and thrown around as if one need merely quote something clever Chesterton said and the issue has been settled. If only to combat this frequent misuse (though also to underline some of Homer's more awkward nods) Milco's exercise, however cheeky, strikes me as a needed corrective.

To indulge in a bit of Chestertonian paradox: The problem with too many internet Chestertonians they take Chesterton too seriously -- becoming like his madly logical clerk or chess player in rigorously applying some superficially applicable Chesterton quote to each situation. Milco's tilt at the Chestertonian windmill is, perhaps, the more Chestertonian exercise.

More Educated People Don't Have As Many Children As They Want

Razib has an interesting post up inspired by the TNR article discussing the problems of older parenting which everyone is talking about at the moment. The most interesting element in Razib's piece, to my mind, is when he does some quick original research into the fact that more educated people tend to have fewer children:

[T]he General Social Survey asks people about the ideal number of children they’d like to have, versus the actually number of children they do have (CHLDIDEL and CHILDS). To remove demographic confounds I limited the sample below to non-Hispanic white women age 45 and up between the year 2006 and 2010, and compared across educational attainment.

It struck me as very interesting that the desired number of children reported by women of different education levels was very consistent, it was only the number of children actually had that varies.

The Road Goes On, And On

Anthony Lane reviews The Hobbit in The New Yorker:

In “The Lord of the Rings,” the errand of Frodo, though epic in execution, was plain enough: to destroy what would, in the wrong hands, cause irreversible harm. It was like stopping the Nazis from building an atomic bomb. But what the dwarves want, in the pages of “The Hobbit,” is gold, and their lust for it corrodes the quest and tarnishes its valor. That is what lusts do. Tolkien, a devout Catholic, who deplored the vanishing of the Latin Mass, believed in the existence of evil and in the struggle to be delivered from its claws. It is there in every shimmering scale of Smaug, the dragon; deprived by a mouse-quiet Bilbo of a single precious cup, he falls, Tolkien writes, into “the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but never used or wanted.” Ouch. The dwarves, in their small way, are no less possessed, and the joke is that a hobbit, who wishes nobody ill, should help to lead them into temptation. So many twists of the spirit, in such little space. In my old paperback, Tolkien gets the whole thing done in two hundred and eighty pages, nineteen chapters in all. And how far has Jackson travelled, after almost three hours of cinema? The end of Chapter 6. The corrosion has yet to bite.

***

For pathos, though, we still have Gollum, the damned and slimy soul (voiced again by Andy Serkis), who lurks in the dark and loses what he loves. Bilbo finds it: “His hand met what felt like a tiny ring of cold metal lying on the floor of the tunnel.” That is the account given by Tolkien, who knew that turning points were all the more momentous for being unadorned, but Jackson, with so much room to spare, cannot dare to underplay the crux. Instead, before Bilbo stumbles upon the ring, we see it slip from Gollum’s safekeeping, tumble in refulgent slow motion, and, on impact, give a resounding clang. (If Jackson ever films “Othello,” wait for Desdemona’s handkerchief to hit the ground like a sheet of tin.) “All good stories deserve embellishment,” Gandalf says to Bilbo before they set off, and one has to ask whether the weight of embellishment, on this occasion, makes the journey drag, and why it leaves us more astounded than moved. And yet, on balance, honor has been done to Tolkien, not least in the famous riddle game between Bilbo and Gollum, and some of the exploits to come—dwarf-wrapping spiders, a battle of five armies, and the man who turns into a bear—will surely lighten the load. As Bilbo says, nearing the end of the book, “Roads go ever ever on.” Tell me about it. 

La Guadalupana

Today is the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Only 13 years after the Conquistadors marched into Mexico, less than 40 years after Columbus sailed the ocean blue, the Virgin Mary appeared to Juan Diego, an Aztec convert to Catholicism, and requested that he ask the Spanish bishop that a temple be built to her there on Tepeyac Hill. When the bishop asked for a sign, Mary asked Juan to pick the roses on the hill, which were blooming despite it being December, and arranged them in his tilma with her own hands. When Juan returned to the bishop and let the roses fall from his cloak, they revealed an image of Mary, rich in Aztec and Catholic symbolism. The bishop had the chapel built. The Franciscan missionaries who had sailed with the Conquistadors had made little headway into the Aztec culture in the decade of their ministry; within ten years of the apparition, nearly nine million Mexicans -- practically the entire population of the country -- had converted to Catholicism.

Our Lady of Guadalupe is the patroness of the Americas, but Mexicans, understandably, have a great devotion to her. One of the reasons I love watching this rendition of La Guadalupana is the incongruity of seeing two huge pop stars singing a Marian hymn with actual conviction. Perhaps the closest equivalent we'd get to that in America is seeing country singers belt out Amazing Grace, and even then it would be more of a personal statement of faith than a national expression. There's something so compelling about the Mexican devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe that it almost makes me wish I had some of that heritage, so she would belong to me in some more visceral way than the universal Catholic appeal. (I felt the same traveling through Italy, envying my Italian friends their link to the land that I couldn't share.



Also -- and as I've come to depend less on artificial cynicism, I'm not ashamed to admit it -- Juan Diego here always makes me a bit misty-eyed.

A Single Rant

It's Tuesday, and you need a good rant. Brandon's got you covered in his response to the inane Atlantic article positing that Single People Should Get Weddings, Too:

What irritates me about the whining is that I did not sign up to be in the Kiddy League of Life. We do not all get consolation prizes whenever things do not go our way, and we do not all get trophies whether we win or not. The world does not exist to validate us. Moreover, we are all perfectly capable of handling this fact. And even to suggest that single people need to be treated in such infantile ways, spoon-fed through a state of life that by definition can be handled by anyone and which, considered in itself, has no standards of excellence that have to be met, is an insult to all single people everywhere. I don't care how lonely you feel. Get over yourself and do something important, and then maybe you'll get a pat on the back.

Of course, it's possible that the only weddings the unmarried Atlantic authoress has attended have been overwrought, overfinanced occasions that serve as self-aggrandizing gift grubbing for couples who make enough money to buy their own toasters and have been living together anyway. But that doesn't negate the fact that marriage itself is more significant that a made-up celebration of singleness called "La Quinceañera Doble." (This event, partially financed by the author's parents, leads the reader to wonder: if she ever does get married, will Mom and Pop be expected to shell out again, or have they already coughed up enough for life events?)

Weddings are also not celebrations of individuals, but of new family units, formed from existing family units, which is why, although every couple at some point dreams of eloping, it's actually really selfish and offensive to do so. Yes, even if you, like everyone else, think your family is crazy.

Existential Toilet

Watch it again, if you can bear the existential strain.



Exactement.

Also Not Stillwater

Not writing good stuff yet, but I've started drinking, so that's a step in the right direction.

In the meantime, for your listening pleasure, I present: I Will Survive, interpreted a la The Andrews Sisters.



When I hear this sort of thing, I wonder what I've done with my life that my own sisters and I are not internet tight-harmony sensations.

The version of I Will Survive that I know best is not Gloria Gaynor's original, but Cake's cover from their Fashion Nugget album.



Although this video is censored, be aware that he chooses a different descriptor for his "stupid lock".

Writing now. Really.

Not Stillwater

There will be more Stillwater, I promise. Events called me away from writing this week, but I am once again slogging it out at the computer. Unfortunately, what's currently on the page is about as coherent as the Hungry Birds Twitter account, but I know you all will be too kind to mention it.

Speaking of incoherence:

The neighbor gave us a big stuffed Pikachu a while back. I hate this thing. It's larger than life and twice as ugly, and it kicks around the floor collecting dust until someone uses it to whomp her siblings. The six-year-old loves it because it's soft and gaudy and a link to all the Japanimation she never sees at home. The other week, she was sent to the office for insisting to her religion teacher that I read to her from a Pikachu Bible.

"Oh?" says the teacher. "Your mom's upstairs. I'm going to ask her about it. I want to see this Pikachu bible."

"She didn't bring it," says Miss Six. "She only reads it at home."

In the car on the way home, she was utterly unrepentant, and indeed, kept digging herself in deeper.

"What on earth possessed you to tell your teacher that I read you a Pikachu Bible?" I asked.

"I said: 'It is the Nab of Pikachu translation'," she declared proudly.

"Oh, the Nab, huh?" At least she's reading, right?

The moment we arrived home, she was bursting through the kitchen door yelling, "Dad! Did you hear I got sent to the office for saying that Mommy read the Nab Pikachu Bible?"

At least I'm pretty sure that this is a first in the "Sent to the Office" files.

Here is Pikachu and the Nab Bible

Sudden Compassion for the top 1.5%

[UPDATE: Here's what I get for writing a post fast without checking my memory of long-ago read books -- I went and attributed a book to Susan Estrich which she didn't actually write. Post corrected and thanks to Catholic Bibliophagist!]

Susan Estrich, a liberal commentator, is proud of the fact that she supported Obama's re-election, but she hopes that Obama won't take that re-election as a sign that he should, you know, support the tax policy which he campaigned on so hard when running:

Within days of winning the election, President Obama announced that his victory gave him a mandate to raise taxes on the "rich."

Come again? This was a two-and-a-half-point election. It reflected a painfully divided electorate. The only mandate I saw was to unite a divided country.
...
I did not vote for Obama because I think I am paying too little in taxes.

Like many people I know, I am "rich" by Obama's standards. I pay more taxes, percentage wise, than Mitt Romney and Warren Buffett, because I earn virtually every penny of my income.

I work. And yes, all those deductions that allow the truly rich to not work, or at least to not work all the jobs I do, make me angry.

I am all for closing loopholes. I am all for ending deductions for things I don't even understand. But I am not for putting a low cap on deductions that would make it all but impossible for the charities I support to raise funds. I am not for putting a limit on the mortgage deduction that would mean, as a practical matter, that "middle class" (not rich) people in California would be priced out of the housing market, and the charities I support would not be able to raise what they need to survive.

And frankly, I don't think I'm alone. As a matter of fact, on this one, I don't think 51 percent of all Americans are to my "left" — if that's how you define the higher tax constituency.

It may be that 51% of Americans are not to Estrich's left on tax policy (though if so, it's no thanks to her) but what she seems blissfully unaware of is that although most of her acquaintance may fall in the $250k+ income range, this is a very, very rarified income strata for most Americans. High incomes have taken a hit during the recession, so the recent figures jump around a bit, but to be hit by Obama's proposed tax increase on those making $250k/yr or more, Ms. Estrich is certainly within the top 5% of households and may be within the top 1.5% of households. (Wikipedia claims 1.5%. This fun little tool at the NY Times suggests 3%.)

House Republicans are in a pretty weak position trying to negotiate with Obama and the Senate in order to avoid going over the Fiscal Cliff. I'd been starting to wonder if it was necessary for Republicans to cave to Obama's desire to let the "Bush tax cuts" expire on those making over $250k in order to avoid even worse concessions. I continue to think that might not be the best thing for the economy, but after reading Estrich's column I will at least feel a certain satisfaction if rates do go up.

I Remember MrsDarwin 8: Family Reunion Fun

It's not my age that makes me feel old. It's the fact that this is the eighth birthday installment of I Remember MrsDarwin! To celebrate eight years of mendacity from our fine family of readers and in honor of the finest, least mendacious group of siblings anyone could have, the theme this year is Family Reunion.

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, even if we don't speak often, please post a comment with a COMPLETELY MADE UP AND FICTIONAL MEMORY OF YOU AND ME. 

It can be anything you want--good or bad--BUT IT HAS TO BE FAKE. 

When you're finished, post this paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people DON'T ACTUALLY remember about you.

Tell me about a time you and I made waves at our family reunion. And don't worry, Aunt Bertha isn't reading.

Brush up on egregious falsehoods from the past seven years.

How World War Two Helped the Economy

There's a fairly common belief out there that World War II ended the great depression. Suddenly millions of men had jobs as soldiers and millions of men and women on the home front had jobs building war materials. What this line of thinking has a harder time with is why the economy didn't crash again when "the boys came home" and there was no longer a need for millions of soldiers and the bombs, airplanes, tanks and rifles they had used. There was a brief and sharp downturn in the GDP in 1945 as the war (and war spending) ended, but unemployment never really went up much (it peaked at 5%) and the economy quickly took off. Why?

One explanation points out that the US was the only major developed nation which hadn't been bombed to pieces during the war, and thus as the intact victor it was in an excellent position to become an export powerhouse. That seems like it definitely was a factor.

Another factor which may have contributed is one which Arnold Kling alludes to here:

After the second World War, the U.S. economy easily created new patterns of specialization and trade. I think that one reason is that the war increased mobility, as soldiers met others from different parts of the country. Instead of remaining in their communities of birth, men moved in order to take advantage of new opportunities.

It strikes me that the effect would go beyond shaking people up geographically. The war provided a distinct break in many people's lives, during which many went places and did things that they never would have otherwise. With the war over, there was a clear sense of starting over. It seems like this would have made both workers and employers more open to trying new things. Soldiers coming back from the war and workers who had been employed in war industries new that they needed to look for jobs wholly different than they had had during the war, and as such there was really no reason they needed to look for jobs the same as they'd had (or been looking for) before the war started. Employers knew that after four years during which everyone had been focused on the war, they were going to have to hire and train workers who might not have directly relevant experience.

In an economic sense, the war may have served in some ways as a giant "reset", clearing away structures, expectations, and "stickiness" in a host of ways which allowed things to head off in new directions.

What Does The Church Need To Do For You?

I really liked this Elizabeth Duffy post, responding to some proposals that since Church teachings on birth control can result in larger families, the Church needs to "follow through" by providing more services to overwhelmed young moms. This section sums things up nicely, but the entire post is very much worth reading:

I think we fall into the same trap when we make demands of the Church, holding that wherever I have a vested interested, the Church must meet my needs. I’m being chaste, therefore the Church must be my matchmaker. I’m not using birth control, so the Church must be my nanny. I’m fighting a culture war, so the Church must provide me with beautiful liturgy, better music, and fine art.

The Church is Christ’s body on earth, and as such, it doesn’t really owe any of us anything.

On the contrary, we owe Christ and his body on earth good marriages strengthened over time by our individual and gradual perfection in virtue; we owe him fidelity even at the times when being faithful causes us suffering; we owe him the best music, art and liturgy we can provide because it’s balm for a suffering body, not necessarily because bad art is an affront to me, personally.

When Losers Write History

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been joining in on the critiques of Spielberg's Lincoln, concerned that the movie, by it's narrow scope, shows the abolition of slavery as being too much a white man's thing. The critiques themselves don't much interest me, as it strikes me they mostly amount to saying that people wish Spielberg had made a different movie. However, the history being discussed does. Coates is responding to a quote from screenwriter Tony Kushner who said:

"I think that what Lincoln was doing at the end of war was a very, very smart thing. And it is maybe one of the great tragedies of American history that people didn't take him literally after he was murdered. The inability to forgive and to reconcile with the South in a really decent and humane way, without any question, was one of the causes of the kind of resentment and perpetuation of alienation and bitterness that led to the quote-unquote 'noble cause,' and the rise of the Klan and Southern self-protection societies.

Coates says:

This is quite wrong. Lincoln was the first president killed in American history. He was not killed by some wide-eyed crazy, but a man advocating exactly the same cause as the white Southerners whom Kushner believes were so inhumanely brutalized.... There is no daylight between John Wilkes Booth and Jefferson Davis, save that Booth, in the name of white supremacy, was willingness to countenance the killing of one man, and Davis the killing of 600,000. What followed the murder of Abraham Lincoln was not repression and inhumanity. Andrew Johnson offered terms more generous, not less.... When Kushner says the Ku Klux Klan came out of an unwillingness to forgive the South, I don't know what he means. The Klan was founded in 1865. Johnson was still president. There was nothing "unforgiving" about his posture to the South.

Coates links to Corey Robin who reacts to the same quote saying:

I have to confess, I was truly shocked by this comment. Though it points to events after the Civil War, it reveals a point of view that I had thought we abandoned long ago: the Dunning School of American historiography, which essentially holds that Reconstruction was a “tragic era”—and error—in which a cruel and unforgiving North decided to wreak havoc on a victimized (white) South, thereby producing Jim Crow and a century of southern backwardness. When I was in high school—in 1985!—we were taught the Dunning School as an example of how not to do history, a way of thinking about the past that was so benighted no one could possibly believe it anymore.

Yet here we have one of our most esteemed playwrights—a Marxist no less (and whose effort to reclaim an honorary degree from CUNY, which he had been denied, I steadfastly organized for)—essentially peddling the same tropes.

If one steps back from the question of Reconstruction in particular, however, one sees that this approach to history (these people were treated badly and so they were forced to go do something we don't approve by their outrage at their mistreatment) is fairly common. One of my own particular bugbears is the list of three things which everyone thinks they know about World War One:

1) It happened by accident. No one wanted war.
2) It was utterly pointless
3) The cruel peace terms imposed on Germany were the cause of Nazism and the second world war.

None of these are true, but particularly frustrating to me is the third. The peace terms imposed on Germany were not all that draconian, and the allies quickly lost the will to enforce them. The large sum of reparations which Germany was ordered to pay was reduced repeatedly by the Allies, and even at the reduced rate Germany never paid much of it. In 1932 the Allies voted to cancel the reparations entirely, but the implementation of this resolution was contingent on American agreement and before the US could make up its mind Hitler rose to power and announced that he refused to pay any more reparations regardless.

However, the claim that German bad behavior was all the fault of the harsh peace had become a commonplace of anti-war sentiment in France, Britain and the US during the 20s (spurred in part by John Maynard Keynes' 1919 book The Economic Consequences of the Peace) and it has remained one of the trite pieties of pop history to this day.

The more realistic, though less comforting truth which perhaps the Reconstruction and WW1 tropes both mask is that it is often easier to win a war than to win a peace. The greater military power can generally be successful in reducing its foe to the point where organized military resistance is no longer possible. However, almost no degree of military force can make an entire population behave in ways they don't want to. This is what the Northern states ran into after the Civil War. It was well within their power keep the South from splitting off and setting up an independent country. However, the amount of energy necessary to keep Southerners on the ground from behaving mostly the way they wanted to after the war was over was something the North was not willing (perhaps was not able) to expend for long.

Traditional With Benefits

Having been feeding on a steady diet of Victorian novels of late, and running into the occasional set of thoughts about how we need to get back to a more traditional approach to dating and courtship, it has been striking me to what extent I had the benefit of having things both ways. Going to a small, orthodox Catholic college, I had the benefit of living among a congenial group of people in which living according to the Church's teachings on marriage and sexuality was generally taken as a matter of course. Not to say that people never violated these rules, but the rules were, at least, seen as the rules. In this sense, it had something of the feel of the image people have of the "good old days" in regards to dating and courtship.

On the other hand, it was still very much the modern world of the turn of the millennium that I was living in, and with this, in the broader culture, came many freedoms. Even in Stuebenville culture, most of these carried through -- one could avail oneself of flexible modern cultural standards so long as one clearly adhered to Catholic moral standards as well.

Thus, for instance, MrsDarwin and I, in our quiet way, had a lot more leeway during our years of dating and engagement than would have been the case in 1950s, much less the 1850s. During the semester that we both spent studying in Europe, we traveled together every weekend -- sometimes with other students, but usually alone -- and suffered nary a raised eyebrow. Our senior year, seeking both to save money and escape the at times over-close paternal embrace of Steubenville dorm administration, I rented a three bedroom house off campus. A guy I knew shared the one large bedroom with me while MrsD (then my fiance) and a female grad student took the other two rooms. It was by far the most congenial living situation I had during college, and although I'm sure someone or other in Student Life would have had a case of the vapors had they known about it, it was actually an easier environment to maintain virtue in than the more highly supervised dorm life on campus. Because privacy on campus was at such a premium, when a couple did manage to find a little time together it seemed like they had better get some serious kissing and cuddling in before the moment of privacy passed. In the house, we had plenty of time together and so it was usually spent in comfortingly domestic activities like making dinner or talking over morning coffee.

Indeed, thinking back over my relationship with the college, what I liked about Steubenville most was as a social clime was that it provided a culture which clearly shared my moral standards. What I often found most frustrating was the rules it put in place in order to try to enforce those standards. Having and living by those standards, I still very much valued the more modern freedom to organize my life as I saw fit without people seeing the necessity of policing it.

While many look to a return to the more rigidly enforced social standards of the past (or imagined past) as a way to guard traditional morality, the freedom that comes from the mores of the mainstream culture in some ways served, in our case, to make it easier to live according to our own moral strictures. The freedom to be so close made it easier to wait out three and a half years between when we started dating and when we were able to get married.

Vincero!

...Aaand, this is the end of staying up until 3 am. I'm not nearly done with the story, and I shall post the next installment soon, but tonight I'm going to bed. The End.

Are These Folks Really Concerned About Walmart Workers?

Perhaps because it's the Christmas shopping season, everyone is suddenly in a tizzy about Walmart's wages. Mark Shea, known as one of those shy recluses who always tries to state things in the calmest method possible compares Walmart's pay practices to sodomy.

I'd like to dig into the various business and economic issues at play when I've got more time, but one of the things that's particularly struck me about this conversation is the following interchange which seems to invariably result when Walmart comes up:

A: Walmart pays poverty level wages. The company makes huge profits and should pay more.

B: Walmart pays low wages because they employ low skilled workers to do low productivity work. The work isn't worth much more than they're paying for it.

A: But if Walmart paid higher wages, they'd get a higher quality of worker and those higher quality workers would be more productive and they'd make even more money. Look at Costco and Trader Joe's!

Now, I like Costco and Trader Joe's, both as business models and as places to shop, and I'm not fond of shopping at Walmart (indeed, we basically never do these days, though back when we were financially really hard up, we did.) But the thing that strikes me about this line of reasoning is that it purports to be really worried about workers at Walmart, yet then immediately jumps to the idea that if only Walmart paid more, it could not hire the kind of people it currently hires.

Now, maybe it would be nice if Walmart paid higher wages, but if instead of 2.1 million low paid low skilled workers it had 1.4 million better paid more skilled workers, that kind of leaves all the low skilled workers who currently work there out in the cold, doesn't it? Making $8.80/hr to stand by the door and greet people doesn't sound to me like a fun and rewarding way to make a living. (Indeed, back when I went to Walmart fairly often the greeters always kind of bugged me because it seemed like a job I'd hate having.) But if Walmart went to a business model in which they paid twice as much as they currently do and hired more productive workers, a lot of the folks who are currently doing that kind of work at Walmart would simply be out of a job, or else doing something worse. That seems an odd way of doing them a favor.

Went With The Wind

Perhaps some of you are tired of Gone With The Wind parodies, but for those who aren't, I present Went With The Wind from the Carol Burnett show:

Virtue Happens Moment by Moment

Sometimes taking the long view gives perspective, but other times it becomes a way to build for ourselves a seemingly impossible obstacle. We all know how this goes: "Things are bad at the moment. I can get through this moment somehow, yet when I think of the next moment, and the next, and the next it becomes impossible. If things are hard now, how am I going to deal with this for years and years and years?"

This sort of long view is not only unhelpful, but inaccurate. Virtue is not some big project that we can sit down and accomplish (or fail at) in one herculean effort. Virtue is the habit of doing the good, and so, necessarily, virtue is accomplished (or failed at) one moment at a time. We do not need, at once, to deal with the impossible mountain of right choices stretching from here out. We just need to get it right this moment. And the next moment. And the moment after that.

When A Middling Amount of Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing

In a long post which is mostly a review of Jim Manzi's Uncontrolled and Nate Silver's Signal and the Noise (of the two, he recommends Uncontrolled, and being three quarters of the way through it I'd certainly recommend it) Razib makes an interesting side point about the much discussed questions on polling and forecasting the recent election:

But after soft-pedaling my confidence in polling averages, why did I think the pro-Romney people were delusional? The simple answer is 2004 and 2008. When the polling runs against you consistently and persistently motivated reasoning comes out of the wood-work. There’s a particularly desperate stink to it, and I smelled it with the “polls-are-skewed” promoters of 2012. In 2004 there were many plausible arguments for why the polls underestimated John F. Kerry’s final tally. And in 2008 there were even weirder arguments for why McCain might win. In 2012 it went up to a whole new level, with a lot of the politically conservative pundit class signing on board because of desperation.
...
After the election was over I actually started reading some of the arguments about why the polls were skewed, and I find that they are extremely plausible to me. And not just me, John Hawks owes me a drink because he simply didn’t believe the turnout models which suggested a demographic more like 2008. The reality is that my instinct was to go with John. I too was very skeptical of the proposition that Obama could turnout the same voters as he did in 2008. And yet he did turnout those voters!

What struck me as interesting here is that Razib essentially made a choice to stick with one basic but fairly well established thing that he knew (averages of large numbers of polls are pretty good at predicting elections) and knowing that he wasn't going to be a true expert in all the mitigating factors which might cause one to question that rule, chose simply not to look at all the argumentation and to stick with his one basic piece of knowledge. Looking at the situation after the fact, he found that indeed the arguments put forward against the basic rule were in fact fairly convincing, but this just served to reinforce his judgement that he had not been in a position to correctly weigh the merits of counterarguments to the basic rule.

This is really interesting from a more general point of view, and I think it underscores some of the pitfalls of having a middling amount of knowledge about a subject. If our knowledge of a topic is basic, and we know it's basic, and so all we do is apply and well agreed upon rules, it's likely that at the very least we won't embarrass ourselves by coming up with something way outside the mainstream. The point when we often get into trouble is when we study a topic a bit more and start to think we know enough to get creative and know when things won't behave in the way that the most basic rules would suggest. It's at this middling stage of knowledge that we're likely to make big mistakes and make them with excessive confidence.