Purpose-driven life

An article:

Intelligence has large benefits, but it also incurs costs. Out of the pressure to develop social intelligence, humans have grown in self-awareness, so that we can imagine ourselves as others see us in competitive and cooperative scenarios. That ability offers real benefits in anticipating others’ actions and reactions, but among its costs is the fact that we can also envisage our own death and absence from the ongoing world. For humans this has raised the question of our purpose in the face of our ultimate lifelessness, one we have answered most frequently by concluding that we continue in some form after death. To judge by grave rituals dating back at least 70,000 years, and the evidence of the fear of death and the hope of immortality in the records of early civilizations, preoccupation with death has loomed large ever since the appearance of a distinctly human culture.
...
New evolutionary solutions themselves often spawn new problems. When our brains allowed us to become superpredators, to dominate our environments and earn the food we needed in much less time than our waking hours, we did not solve the “problem” of spare time, as did other top predators, such as lions, tigers, or bears, by sleeping the extra hours away to conserve energy. Even at rest our large brains consume a high proportion of our energy, and since they offer us most of our advantages against other species and other individuals, we benefit not from resting them as much as possible but from developing them in times of security and leisure. Art as cognitive play, appealing to our appetite for potentially meaningful patterned information, engages our attention in a self-rewarding way and therefore encourages us to strengthen the processing power of our minds in the kinds of information that matter most to us.
...
Art could evolve as an adaptation because it appealed to our deep-grained species preferences. Science could not. It appeals to one strong species preference, our curiosity, but it otherwise goes against the grain of our intuitive understanding. Until Galileo, people assumed, with Aristotle, that a heavier object fell more rapidly than a lighter one. Information gathering, invaluable for all kinds of animals and even for plants, has mattered especially for humans, but the knowledge gained has mostly been in the form of heuristics, partly right, but not necessarily so, like our hunches about falling objects or the sun’s motion around the earth. And although accurate information is invaluable, indecision is fatal, and no organism can afford the time to search for correct information at a moment when immediate responses are required. It was not possible to devote effort to a time-consuming, difficult-to-imagine, and increasingly resource-expensive process of testing ideas until in Renaissance Italy the right conditions happened to converge: a considerable buffer of security and overproduction; opportunities for intense specialization; and the availability of information and conflicting explanations that the printing press made possible.

Science still calls for qualities that are unnatural. Children are information sponges and soak up what they need to understand, like the basics of their world or their language. They need not be taught how to speak or to play. But they do need slow formal instruction to read, write, or calculate, and they need even more training and the help of externalized information (books, diagrams, models) to master the knowledge on which science builds. If they undergo the intensive training scientists require, they will still need imagination to find new ways of testing or re-explaining received knowledge. Even for those with training, looking for potential refutations of cherished ideas is both emotionally difficult and imaginatively draining. And whereas art appeals to human preferences, science has to account for a world not built to suit human tastes or talents.
...
Religious stories could also allay the unease that arose in us because of our awareness of false belief. The social intelligence out of which our grasp of false belief arose allowed us to imagine being dead and to foresee the world without us. It brought with it a new anxiety about the possible purposelessness of our lives, although this could be allayed to some extent by stories of spirits without bodies as a guarantor of purpose prior to human life or as a promise of continued existence afterward.
...
Only when science began to offer alternative, naturalistic explanations of the world did religion and art start to diverge widely again. When science offered a detailed explanation of natural design without the need for a designer—the theory of evolution by natural selection—that, more than any other single idea, stripped us of a world made comfortable by a sense of purpose, apparently guaranteed by beings greater than ourselves.

Nevertheless, if we develop Darwin’s insight, we can see the emergence of purpose, as of life itself, by small degrees, not from above, but by small increments, from below. The first purpose was the organization of matter in ways complex enough to sustain and replicate itself—the establishment, in other words, of life, or in still other terms, of problems and solutions. With life emerged the first purpose, the first problem, to preserve at least the improbable complexity already reached, and to find new ways of resisting damage and loss.

As life proliferated, variety offered new hedges against loss in the face of unpredictable circumstances, and even new ways of evolving variety, like sex. Still richer purposes emerged with emotions, intelligence, and cooperation, and most recently with creativity itself, pursued naturally, and unnaturally, through human invention, in art, and pursued unnaturally, through challenging what we have inherited, in science.

Art at its best offers us the durability that became life’s first purpose, the variety that became its second, the appeal to the intelligence and the cooperative emotions that took so much longer to evolve, and the creativity that keeps adding new possibilities, including religion and science. We do not know a purpose guaranteed from outside life, but we can add as much as we can to the creativity of life. We do not know what other purposes life may eventually generate, but creativity offers us our best chance of reaching them.

Given what I'm reading now, this seems an interesting thing to contemplate.

Maher's Op-ed in LAT

Hilarious. And a bulls-eye.:

If conservatives don't want to be seen as bitter people who cling to their guns and religion and anti-immigrant sentiments, they should stop being bitter and clinging to their guns, religion and anti-immigrant sentiments.

It's been a week now, and I still don't know what those "tea bag" protests were about. I saw signs protesting abortion, illegal immigrants, the bank bailout and that gay guy who's going to win "American Idol." But it wasn't tax day that made them crazy; it was election day. Because that's when Republicans became what they fear most: a minority.

The conservative base is absolutely apoplectic because, because ... well, nobody knows. They're mad as hell, and they're not going to take it anymore. Even though they're not quite sure what "it" is. But they know they're fed up with "it," and that "it" has got to stop.

Here are the big issues for normal people: the war, the economy, the environment, mending fences with our enemies and allies, and the rule of law.

And here's the list of Republican obsessions since President Obama took office: that his birth certificate is supposedly fake, he uses a teleprompter too much, he bowed to a Saudi guy, Europeans like him, he gives inappropriate gifts, his wife shamelessly flaunts her upper arms, and he shook hands with Hugo Chavez and slipped him the nuclear launch codes.

Do these sound like the concerns of a healthy, vibrant political party?

It's sad what's happened to the Republicans. They used to be the party of the big tent; now they're the party of the sideshow attraction, a socially awkward group of mostly white people who speak a language only they understand. Like Trekkies, but paranoid.

The GOP base is convinced that Obama is going to raise their taxes, which he just lowered. But, you say, "Bill, that's just the fringe of the Republican Party." No, it's not. The governor of Texas, Rick Perry, is not afraid to say publicly that thinking out loud about Texas seceding from the Union is appropriate considering that ... Obama wants to raise taxes 3% on 5% of the people? I'm not sure exactly what Perry's independent nation would look like, but I'm pretty sure it would be free of taxes and Planned Parenthood. And I would have to totally rethink my position on a border fence.

I know. It's not about what Obama's done. It's what he's planning. But you can't be sick and tired of something someone might do.

Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota recently said she fears that Obama will build "reeducation" camps to indoctrinate young people. But Obama hasn't made any moves toward taking anyone's guns, and with money as tight as it is, the last thing the president wants to do is run a camp where he has to shelter and feed a bunch of fat, angry white people.

Look, I get it, "real America." After an eight-year run of controlling the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court, this latest election has you feeling like a rejected husband. You've come home to find your things out on the front lawn -- or at least more things than you usually keep out on the front lawn. You're not ready to let go, but the country you love is moving on. And now you want to call it a whore and key its car.

That's what you are, the bitter divorced guy whose country has left him -- obsessing over it, haranguing it, blubbering one minute about how much you love it and vowing the next that if you cannot have it, nobody will.

But it's been almost 100 days, and your country is not coming back to you. She's found somebody new. And it's a black guy.

The healthy thing to do is to just get past it and learn to cherish the memories. You'll always have New Orleans and Abu Ghraib.

And if today's conservatives are insulted by this, because they feel they're better than the people who have the microphone in their party, then I say to them what I would say to moderate Muslims: Denounce your radicals. To paraphrase George W. Bush, either you're with them or you're embarrassed by them.

The thing that you people out of power have to remember is that the people in power are not secretly plotting against you. They don't need to. They already beat you in public.

Torture, economics and animals

First, I've mentioned before that I went through a vegetarian/pescatarian phase. We now eat white meat and fish, simply due to losing the will/interest in maintaining the diet. Also, I gained quite a bit of weight (and muscle mass) when I gave up chicken. Here's an animation that might make one reconsider:


Next, a few points on taxes and economics:

• Pearlstein writes convincingly that, "The old Republican fantasy was that tax cuts were the magic elixir that would solve every problem. Now that the public has finally rejected it, it's disappointing to see Democrats offering up the equally fantastic notion that Americans can have all the government they want while getting someone else to pay for it." He goes through the numbers and shows that all of us are going to have to pony up some more to get the budget in good shape.
• Dean Baker writes, "Too-often ignored, the basic economic principles of marginal-cost pricing and gains from trade have much to offer in the area of health care. They need to be brought into the discussion." Why does running a medical scan that requires a few dollars of electricity and a few hundred dollars of technician and doctor time to run and read (respectively) get billed at thousands upon thousands of dollars?
• Simon Johnson believes politics, rather than pure economics, lay at the foundation of our country's financial woes. "His argument, in a nutshell, is that the last 25 years have seen deregulatory policies driven by the banking interests, leading to an over-large financial sector that has captured the political process. Financiers promoted free-market ideals, served in government, and funneled millions into the political process. Now, the risky behavior of major financial institutions, combined with the public policy they promoted, has created a major crisis. But the bankers' political power hasn't waned, and they are preventing the government from acting aggressively to start recovery." Sounds reasonable to me -- the people with their hands on the levers of power before Obama's inauguration haven't disappeared overnight, and they tend to be disproportionately connected to Wall Street.
  
• Of course, Johnson has his critics (Scheiber), " The logical chain is typically something like: 1.) I've seen corrupt elites prevent governments from resolving financial crises in emerging markets. 2.) The finanical crisis dogging the United States shares some features with emerging-market crises--for example, overleveraged institutions enjoyed an outsize share of corporate profits prior to imploding. 3.) Ergo, it must be the case that corrupt elites are preventing the U.S. government from resolving the crisis. Problem is, the third point doesn't necessarily follow from the second. Logically, it's like saying: 1.) Cancer patients don't get well when they're treated by witch doctors. 2.) The top oncologist at Mass General has lost a few patients lately--some of them inexplicably, under mysterious circumstances. 3.) Ergo, the top oncologist at Mass General was practicing witchcraft. Maybe, but it would be much more persuasive if you could establish causality."
  

Finally, one of my favorite blogs to read for political commentary has an excellent summary of the ineffectiveness and immorality of torture.

The origin of myths

From a smart guy:

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.
- Bertrand Russell

This explains why stories like the Garden of Eden are so easily accepted: we all understand the concept of temptation by the "forbidden fruit" and project onto God our own natures and characteristics. From the same smart guy, a warning not to fall on one's own sword with global, self-refuting skepticism:

When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others. It is much more nearly certain that we are assembled here tonight than it is that this or that political party is in the right. Certainly there are degrees of certainty, and one should be very careful to emphasize that fact, because otherwise one is landed in an utter skepticism, and complete skepticism would, of course, be totally barren and completely useless. -- Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970), "Am I An Atheist Or An Agnostic?", 1947

Quite right. As a friend of mine says, "Should you be skeptical of being skeptical?" The simple way to avoid this dilemma is to say that skepticism is a simple way to filter unreliable information from your own beliefs. Require more evidence to believe claims that are further removed from your own experience, instincts and contradict scientific thinking. Require less evidence to believe claims that line up with your own experience, instincts and follow scientific laws. These two presuppositions are not defended a priori, but after seeing the empirical result of forming more reliable beliefs (knowledge).

What would Jesus do (or not do)?

Love it. (H/T: Pharyngula)

Environmentalism as religion: analysis

Someone recently referred to my concern for our environment as quasi-religious in nature. In my recent reading, I found two interesting remarks on this:

For the environmentalist, the choice between paper or plastic is a moral issue, fraught with meaning. The attractiveness of the environmental movement is that, in a neutral universe without any inherent value or purpose, it provides universal values and meaning. The teleological end is human survival. That is a goal about which we can all agree. Along with faith in progress, environmentalism is perhaps the faith most expressive of a scientific mind. Regardless of our cultural, social, or economic backgrounds, we all have a stake in the survival of the single planet that sustains us all. And like the older faiths, our task is to humble our assertive egos and conform to the authority of the true and the good, in this case to the objective, universal reality of nature and its imperatives as they are increasingly revealed to us by science.

We achieve truth to the extent that our ideas more closely correspond, not with the stories of myth or the Forms of philosophy, but with what is the case. Ironically and ambiguously, with science, we seek control in order to conform. What is defines what we ought to do. Facts triumph over our subjective, private desires, provide an authoritative guide to our actions, and inform our connection with a universal human community. --Dennis Ford, The Search for Meaning: A Short History, 2007, pp. 102-103

And this:

To the environmentalist a day can be as full of religious observance as a monk's. He can choose his food to avoid chemicals, factory farming, and blighted origin. He can reject over-elaborate packaging, conscientiously reuse plastic bags and walk or cycle rather than drive. He can proselytize, campaign and demonstrate...For to the environmentalist, the world is suffused with baleful portents; it is enriched with meaning as in the vision of a saint. It is, above all, a world, a unity as opposed to the fragmentary, incomprehensible mass of facts provided by the scientist, or the modernist artist. --Bryan Appleyard, Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man, 1994, p. 126

There is a major difference between the science-based views of environmentalists and the mythical views of religious people: stubborn fact. Environmentalists (like me) would refer to concentrations of carbon dioxide, ice core drilling, surface ice area in Antarctica, etc., to establish the need for their "religion" while Christians would refer to a man dying and coming back from the dead. Pretty substantial differences in the worlds these two refer to: one is magical/mythical and the other empirical/scientific.

While I would disagree that religion is the same as environmentalism, I understand the parallels. As I was writing this very post (typing up the quotes above), I stumbled upon this article by Jeff Schweitzer at HuffPo about the fact that religion and morality don't mix well, which contained in it the very link between religion and environmentalism that the quotes explicate:

Faith has triumphed over reason, and we have suffered terribly as a result. In much of the world, humanity endures crowded poverty, taught that contraception is an affront to god. We rape our environment, told in Genesis that the earth's resources were put here for our exploitation and pleasure...Tearing down religion is useful only if a viable alternative is offered. We need to take the next step of suggesting solutions to humanity's most pressing problems in a world absent any god. We can do so by returning to core values based on our own evolutionary history, derived from our biological legacy free from myth and fable. We can move beyond faith and god to a life more complete...With freedom of course comes the obligation to act wisely and responsibly. We fulfill this duty first by taking a more modest view of our place in the world. When we see that humans are a natural part of the ecosystem, not above or separate from the environment, we will protect the resources that sustain us. When we reject the hubris and conceit of religion, we will redefine our relationship with each other without calling upon god to smite our enemies. When we understand that true morality is independent of religious doctrine, we will create a path toward a just society. We each have the power to create a life in which we no longer accept the arbitrary and destructive constraints of divine interference. The need to move beyond religion has never been more urgent. Our Earth is in crisis.

It seems clear from this article that Schweitzer sees a conflict between being religious and being an environmentalist, and he sees a natural (logical) relationship between being non-religious and being an environmentalist. Both logically and empirically, I think he's wrong about the former, as lots of religious people (albeit not many US religious white conservative Southerners) are environmentally-conscious and activists. But the latter relationship -- that non-religious people must wrap their heads around the reality of this world and this life -- is probably sound.

Income Inequality in America

Following up on an earlier comment on taxes and teabaggers, I wanted to pass along two charts showing how the historical drop in tax rates on the wealthy has contributed to growing inequality. First, notice the median after-tax income growth in real (2006, inflation-adjusted) dollars for that 27-year span:

As percentage growth:

Paul Krugman wrote in Rolling Stone in 2003,

According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, the hourly wage of the average American non-supervisory worker is actually lower, adjusted for inflation, than it was in 1970. Meanwhile, CEO pay has soared — from less than thirty times the average wage to almost 300 times the typical worker's pay.

The widening gulf between workers and executives is part of a stunning increase in inequality throughout the U.S. economy during the past thirty years. To get a sense of just how dramatic that shift has been, imagine a line of 1,000 people who represent the entire population of America. They are standing in ascending order of income, with the poorest person on the left and the richest person on the right. And their height is proportional to their income — the richer they are, the taller they are.

Start with 1973. If you assume that a height of six feet represents the average income in that year, the person on the far left side of the line — representing those Americans living in extreme poverty — is only sixteen inches tall. By the time you get to the guy at the extreme right, he towers over the line at more than 113 feet.

Now take 2005. The average height has grown from six feet to eight feet, reflecting the modest growth in average incomes over the past generation. And the poorest people on the left side of the line have grown at about the same rate as those near the middle — the gap between the middle class and the poor, in other words, hasn't changed. But people to the right must have been taking some kind of extreme steroids: The guy at the end of the line is now 560 feet tall, almost five times taller than his 1973 counterpart.

Just for s's and g's, I decided to plot Krugman's numbers and make two charts. He didn't give a specific number for the growth in the poor income, so I used the exact same percentage growth to calculate its change as for the median income -- 33% -- because he said "the gap between the middle class and the poor, in other words, hasn't changed":


And in percentage terms:

The takeaway lesson? Rich people's incomes quadrupled during that period in real terms while the rest of us nudged up by a third of their original amount. The old saying, "A rising tide lifts all boats," is true, but a yacht gets lifted about 13 times the amount that a dinghy or life raft does.

Both tax cuts and tax increases represent a "redistribution of wealth" for all earners. The former increases income inequality -- making the rich richer and the poor poorer -- the latter increases employment and opportunity for 99% of us -- decreasing inequality.

IQ stuff

Kristof writes an interesting piece in the NYT on IQ:

If intelligence were deeply encoded in our genes, that would lead to the depressing conclusion that neither schooling nor antipoverty programs can accomplish much. Yet while this view of I.Q. as overwhelmingly inherited has been widely held, the evidence is growing that it is, at a practical level, profoundly wrong. Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, has just demolished this view in a superb new book, “Intelligence and How to Get It,” which also offers terrific advice for addressing poverty and inequality in America.

Professor Nisbett provides suggestions for transforming your own urchins into geniuses — praise effort more than achievement, teach delayed gratification, limit reprimands and use praise to stimulate curiosity — but focuses on how to raise America’s collective I.Q. That’s important, because while I.Q. doesn’t measure pure intellect — we’re not certain exactly what it does measure — differences do matter, and a higher I.Q. correlates to greater success in life.

Intelligence does seem to be highly inherited in middle-class households, and that’s the reason for the findings of the twins studies: very few impoverished kids were included in those studies. But Eric Turkheimer of the University of Virginia has conducted further research demonstrating that in poor and chaotic households, I.Q. is minimally the result of genetics — because everybody is held back.

“Bad environments suppress children’s I.Q.’s,” Professor Turkheimer said.

One gauge of that is that when poor children are adopted into upper-middle-class households, their I.Q.’s rise by 12 to 18 points, depending on the study. For example, a French study showed that children from poor households adopted into upper-middle-class homes averaged an I.Q. of 107 by one test and 111 by another. Their siblings who were not adopted averaged 95 on both tests.

Another indication of malleability is that I.Q. has risen sharply over time. Indeed, the average I.Q. of a person in 1917 would amount to only 73 on today’s I.Q. test. Half the population of 1917 would be considered mentally retarded by today’s measurements, Professor Nisbett says.

Good schooling correlates particularly closely to higher I.Q.’s. One indication of the importance of school is that children’s I.Q.’s drop or stagnate over the summer months when they are on vacation (particularly for kids whose parents don’t inflict books or summer programs on them).

Professor Nisbett strongly advocates intensive early childhood education because of its proven ability to raise I.Q. and improve long-term outcomes. The Milwaukee Project, for example, took African-American children considered at risk for mental retardation and assigned them randomly either to a control group that received no help or to a group that enjoyed intensive day care and education from 6 months of age until they left to enter first grade.

By age 5, the children in the program averaged an I.Q. of 110, compared with 83 for children in the control group. Even years later in adolescence, those children were still 10 points ahead in I.Q.

Professor Nisbett suggests putting less money into Head Start, which has a mixed record, and more into these intensive childhood programs. He also notes that schools in the Knowledge Is Power Program (better known as KIPP) have tested exceptionally well and favors experiments to see if they can be scaled up.

Another proven intervention is to tell junior-high-school students that I.Q. is expandable, and that their intelligence is something they can help shape. Students exposed to that idea work harder and get better grades. That’s particularly true of girls and math, apparently because some girls assume that they are genetically disadvantaged at numbers; deprived of an excuse for failure, they excel.

“Some of the things that work are very cheap,” Professor Nisbett noted. “Convincing junior-high kids that intelligence is under their control — you could argue that that should be in the junior-high curriculum right now.”

The implication of this new research on intelligence is that the economic-stimulus package should also be an intellectual-stimulus program. By my calculation, if we were to push early childhood education and bolster schools in poor neighborhoods, we just might be able to raise the United States collective I.Q. by as much as one billion points.

That should be a no-brainer.

As I've said before, I don't put much stock in basic IQ tests if the results are anywhere between -1.5 to +1.5 standard deviations from the mean. Outside of that, you can probably roughly correlate an IQ test to basic intellectual ability by labeling someone as "bright" or "dim" I guess. My interest in the genetic basis for intelligence is especially acute in these "outliers" as I figure they have the most to show us about differences in brain development and structure. It would be fantastic to learn that a simple drug or developmental program could raise IQ, but my hopes for such genius will probably remain unallayed.

Taxes and conservative economics

Following up on my catalog of a few useful links that I have found to be integral to arguing with conservatives about economics, check out this helpful concise set of talking points against conservative rhetoric on taxes from TPM.

Ezra Klein has been on a rampage lately with graphs of taxes and tax burdens, probably due to the approach of April 15 and the (laughable) T.E.A. baggers...

Here are a few great recent posts of his on taxes and economics:

1. America vs. OCED countries on tax share vs. income share
2. State and local taxes
3. Graph of income share / overall tax burden
4. Explication of the "tax share" vs. "tax burden" problem
5. Graph of income share and tax burden with after-tax data
6. Effective federal tax rate versus income bracket graph
   

Also see Leonhardt on marginal tax rates in the NYT:

It’s well known that tax rates on top incomes used to be far higher than they are today. The top marginal rate hovered around 90 percent in the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s. Reagan ultimately reduced it to 28 percent, and it is now 35 percent. Obama would raise it to 39.6 percent, where it was under Bill Clinton.

What’s much less known is that those old confiscatory rates were not as sweeping as they sound. They applied to only the richest of the rich, because yesterday’s tax code, unlike today’s, had separate marginal tax rates for the truly wealthy and the merely affluent. For a married couple in 1960, for example, the 38 percent tax bracket started at $20,000, which is about $145,000 in today’s terms. The top bracket of 91 percent began at $400,000, which is the equivalent of nearly $3 million now. Some of the old brackets are truly stunning: in 1935, Franklin D. Roosevelt raised the top rate to 79 percent, from 63 percent, and raised the income level that qualified for that rate to $5 million (about $75 million today) from $1 million. As the economist Bruce Bartlett has noted, that 79 percent rate apparently applied to only one person in the entire country, John D. Rockefeller.

Today, by contrast, the very well off and the superwealthy are lumped together. The top bracket last year started at $357,700. Any income above that — whether it was the 400,000th dollar earned by a surgeon or the 40 millionth earned by a Wall Street titan — was taxed the same, at 35 percent. This change is especially striking, because there is so much more income at the top of the distribution now than there was in the past. Today a tax rate for the very top earners would apply to a far larger portion of the nation’s income than it would have years ago.

Here's the catalog of a few useful links:

update: 12/18

Although federal income taxes are progressive (get larger as income gets higher), all taxes do not, and as a share of one's income, the overall amount of taxes paid is fairly flat across all incomes. It literally comes down to a few points difference in total tax burden for people in the 2nd-5th quintiles of income.

Ezra Klein on the changes over time in overall tax burden (graph 1 source, graph 2 source)
Chart showing overall tax burden (CSM)
State and local tax burdens (NSN)
Washington Monthly on overall tax burden
NYT graph on overall tax burden (NYT article)
NYT graph on tax code changes and beneficiaries (NYT article)

11/1

Income inequality under Dems v. GOP (Bartels)
Income inequality under Dems v. GOP (chart, Krugman)
Income inequality under Dems v. GOP (Rolling Stone, Krugman)
Explanation of the causes of the financial crisis (Stiglitz)
The $3T War (Stiglitz)
Overall economic comparison of Dems v. GOP (Slate)
Overall economic comparison of Dems v. GOP (NYT, Alan Blinder)
How the GOP went from a $5.6T surplus to a $3.8T deficit (CBO)

More on guns

Following up on Sunday's item, Bob Herbert writes on Tuesday in the NYT:

This is the American way. Since Sept. 11, 2001, when the country’s attention understandably turned to terrorism, nearly 120,000 Americans have been killed in nonterror homicides, most of them committed with guns. Think about it — 120,000 dead. That’s nearly 25 times the number of Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For the most part, we pay no attention to this relentless carnage. The idea of doing something meaningful about the insane number of guns in circulation is a nonstarter. So what if eight kids are shot to death every day in America. So what if someone is killed by a gun every 17 minutes.

The goal of the National Rifle Association and a host of so-called conservative lawmakers is to get ever more guns into the hands of ever more people. Texas is one of a number of states considering bills to allow concealed guns on college campuses.

Supporters argue, among other things, that it will enable students and professors to defend themselves against mass murderers, like the deranged gunman who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech two years ago.

They’d like guns to be as ubiquitous as laptops or cellphones. One Texas lawmaker referred to unarmed people on campuses as “sitting ducks.”

...

Murderous gunfire claims many more victims than those who are actually felled by the bullets. But all the expressions of horror at the violence and pity for the dead and those who loved them ring hollow in a society that is neither mature nor civilized enough to do anything about it.

Well put.

"If I Only Had a Gun" ABCNews 20/20

First: I have two loaded shotguns within reach of my bed for home defense. Consider that before labeling me the new epithet: hoplophobe. I think it is wise to have a loaded shotgun in your home for this reason, but I obviously think it should be kept completely safe from children and teenagers. This was one of the main focal points of the program -- the statistics involving gun violence are staggering.

One of the major thrusts of the news piece was to inform viewers about the ridiculous gun show loophole that allows criminals and crazy people to buy guns, no questions asked, with no tracking records. It's fuc*ing insane. A young man whose sister was killed at VT went in and bought 15 guns in an hour, including handguns and shotguns and an assault rifle, no questions asked. No ID needed. And lawmakers have zero balls to do anything about it because they are beholden to gun nuts in this country.

All a sane citizen can hope for is a common sense common ground between allowing assault weapons to be sold to criminals and banning all guns outright. And that sort of middle ground does exist. In England, handguns are illegal and their murder rate is one-third of ours. Handguns are used in 8 of 10 murders by firearms. That still gives law-abiding citizens the right to bear arms, just not a certain kind of them. Obviously, that's already the case! We already can't legally own Stinger missiles either, but is that an infringement of our 2nd Amendment rights? No. Ditto for many other kinds of "arms" that are illegal.

I watched the 20/20 piece and came away semi-informed as to the general difficulty of responding with force when a shooter is causing carnage all around you. Basically, your adrenaline counteracts your ability to think clearly and aim effectively, and likely your gun is stowed in an inconvenient place so that you will have to be exposed to pull it out and use it. I don't want to carry concealed, mainly due to the fact that I don't think we need to return to the Wild West where everyone is out there with a gun fending for themselves. The probability of needing to have a gun to defend yourself is basically very unlikely compared to the risk involved in carrying one.

I have often argued with gun nuts that while there were 134 "justifiable homicides" with a handgun in 1999, there were 866 (6.5 times that many) accidental fatal shootings, 314 deaths where intent was unclear, 12,102 murders and 17,424 suicides in 1998. There were 336 deaths of children by accidental shootings in 1998. This basically shows you that the idea that you'll likely need to defend yourself with lethal force is a poor excuse for carrying a gun. It is 3 times likelier a child will be killed by your gun, 6.5 times likelier that someone will be accidentally killed with your gun, 120 times likelier someone will be murdered with it and 170 times likelier someone will use it to commit suicide. And, the 134 justifiables include police shootings! Probably less than a third of that number comes from citizens defending themselves and/or their homes. I will do some research this summer, rather than a few quick Google searches, and compile more relevant statistics and correlations.

Critics of the 20/20 program say the show was unrealistic, but I think they are distorting the facts. They claim the instructor immediately went for the kid with the gun, but as you can see from the clip, that is blatantly untrue. The instructor killed the lecturer first, then went right-to-left sweeping through the room, shooting everyone along the way. The students with the gun were often hit early because they stood erect, trying to unholster the weapon, rather than taking cover first. The other people in the room ran wildly in all directions, ducking.

he is not risen!

How could I call myself a good god-disbelieving atheist without poking a stick in every Christian's eye today? Here's the real connection between the Easter Bunny and Jesus...


Re-post:

Glorious Ishtar! Isn't it lovely how the Christians co-opted all the fun pagan festivals for boring prudish commemorations? Have a wonderful myth day!

1. Did Jesus Really Rise From The Dead?
2. Easter: Did Jesus Arise? The Choice is Obvious
3. Why Wasn't There any Veneration of Jesus' Empty Tomb?
4. Is There Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus?
5. Carrier-O'Connell debate part 1
6. Matthew Green on the Resurrection of Christ
   
7. The Martyrdom Argument
8. Why I Don't Buy the Resurrection Story
9. The Historicity of Jesus' Resurrection: The Debate between Christians and Skeptics
10. Misc. others

Since Dan Barker has already invented the wheel, why should I reinvent it? From his article, "Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead?" we see the parallel passages from the gospels (and Acts) laid out so as to show us the impossible task of harmonization of the resurrection stories.

What time did the women visit the tomb?

1. Matthew: "as it began to dawn" (28:1)


2. Mark "very early in the morning . . . at the rising of the sun" (16:2, KJV); "when the sun had risen" (NRSV); "just after sunrise" (NIV)


3. Luke: "very early in the morning" (24:1, KJV) "at early dawn" (NRSV)


4. John: "when it was yet dark" (20:1)

Who were the women?

1. Matthew: Mary Magdalene and the other Mary (28:1)


2. Mark: Mary Magdalene, the mother of James, and Salome (16:1)


3. Luke: Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and other women (24:10)


4. John: Mary Magdalene (20:1)

What was their purpose?

1. Matthew: to see the tomb (28:1)


2. Mark: had already seen the tomb (15:47), brought spices (16:1)


3. Luke: had already seen the tomb (23:55), brought spices (24:1)


4. John: the body had already been spiced before they arrived (19:39,40)

Was the tomb open when they arrived?

1. Matthew: No (28:2)


2. Mark: Yes (16:4)


3. Luke: Yes (24:2)


4. John: Yes (20:1)

Who was at the tomb when they arrived?

1. Matthew: One angel (28:2-7)


2. Mark: One young man (16:5)


3. Luke: Two men (24:4)


4. John: Two angels (20:12)

Where were these messengers situated?

1. Matthew: Angel sitting on the stone (28:2)


2. Mark: Young man sitting inside, on the right (16:5)


3. Luke: Two men standing inside (24:4)


4. John: Two angels sitting on each end of the bed (20:12)

What did the messenger(s) say?

1. Matthew: "Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified. He is not here for he is risen, as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay. And go quickly, and tell his disciples that he is risen from the dead: and, behold, he goeth before you into Galilee; there shall ye see him: lo, I have told you." (28:5-7)


2. Mark: "Be not afrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him. But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you." (16:6-7)


3. Luke: "Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen: remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee, Saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again." (24:5-7)


4. John: "Woman, why weepest thou?" (20:13)

Did the women tell what happened?

1. Matthew: Yes (28:8)


2. Mark: No. "Neither said they any thing to any man." (16:8)


3. Luke: Yes. "And they returned from the tomb and told all these things to the eleven, and to all the rest." (24:9, 22-24)


4. John: Yes (20:18)

When Mary returned from the tomb, did she know Jesus had been resurrected?

1. Matthew: Yes (28:7-8)


2. Mark: Yes (16:10,11[23])


3. Luke: Yes (24:6-9,23)


4. John: No (20:2)

When did Mary first see Jesus?

1. Matthew: Before she returned to the disciples (28:9)


2. Mark: Before she returned to the disciples (16:9,10[23])


3. John: After she returned to the disciples (20:2,14)

Could Jesus be touched after the resurrection?

1. Matthew: Yes (28:9)


2. John: No (20:17), Yes (20:27)

After the women, to whom did Jesus first appear?

1. Matthew: Eleven disciples (28:16)


2. Mark: Two disciples in the country, later to eleven (16:12,14[23])


3. Luke: Two disciples in Emmaus, later to eleven (24:13,36)


4. John: Ten disciples (Judas and Thomas were absent) (20:19, 24)


5. Paul: First to Cephas (Peter), then to the twelve. (Twelve? Judas was dead). (I Corinthians 15:5)

Where did Jesus first appear to the disciples?

1. Matthew: On a mountain in Galilee (60-100 miles away) (28:16-17)


2. Mark: To two in the country, to eleven "as they sat at meat" (16:12,14[23])


3. Luke: In Emmaus (about seven miles away) at evening, to the rest in a room in Jerusalem later that night. (24:31, 36)


4. John: In a room, at evening (20:19)

Did the disciples believe the two men?

1. Mark: No (16:13[23])


2. Luke: Yes (24:34--it is the group speaking here, not the two)

What happened at that first appearance?

1. Matthew: Disciples worshipped, some doubted, "Go preach." (28:17-20)


2. Mark: Jesus reprimanded them, said "Go preach" (16:14-19[23])


3. Luke: Christ incognito, vanishing act, materialized out of thin air, reprimand, supper (24:13-51)


4. John: Passed through solid door, disciples happy, Jesus blesses them, no reprimand (21:19-23)

Did Jesus stay on earth for more than a day?

1. Mark: No (16:19[23]) Compare 16:14 with John 20:19 to show that this was all done on Sunday


2. Luke: No (24:50-52) It all happened on Sunday


3. John: Yes, at least eight days (20:26, 21:1-22)


4. Acts: Yes, at least forty days (1:3)

Where did the ascension take place?

1. Matthew: No ascension. Book ends on mountain in Galilee


2. Mark: In or near Jerusalem, after supper (16:19[23])


3. Luke: In Bethany, very close to Jerusalem, after supper (24:50-51)


4. John: No ascension


5. Paul: No ascension


6. Acts: Ascended from Mount of Olives (1:9-12)

He is risen! Not.

Culture wars comment

As I mentioned the other day, some are declaring a hasty victory in the culture wars. Dedicated religious fundamentalists will not give up so long as they feel they have "God on their side", so we ought not let down our guard. Creationists are still trying to remove scientific fact from textbooks. People who don't like women's right to plan their family are still trying to remove choice from law. Modern-day Puritans still don't like porn being available to adults (perhaps because they themselves sample it so heavily).

If we can't get them out, we'll breed them out

Longshanks' famous Braveheart quote leaves me depressed at times, as I consider the fact that the people who I know that have 3+ kids are all ridiculously religious and ridiculously conservative. It's obvious that religion's built-in self-preservation device is a strong Darwinian competitor, even in areas where children starve to death because their parents' religion denies them the right to plan their families and control birth.

The good news is, as I've analyzed before, the picture may not be as gloomy for my generation of young liberals as it was for the prior ones. Basically we just have to decide to use the inexorable math involved to push for policy changes in "socialized day care, family leave, and other dreamy Scandinavian-style policies," to pump up birthrates among liberals, according to Michelle Goldberg.

Hilzoy on Brooks' view of morality

A writer at one of my favorite political blogs is a professor of ethics, and she writes a trenchant analysis of Brooks' column that I mentioned the other day:

Consider an analogy: if you're a good tennis player, you make a lot of judgments about the future trajectories of tennis balls. You are probably not aware of making them: you see your opponent hit the ball, and start running to meet it without thinking. Moreover, it's very lucky that we have the ability to do this: if we did have to stop and work out the trajectory of each shot our opponents took, we would never manage to hit them at all, and there would be no more tennis.

Suppose that someone took note of this fairly obvious fact, and wrote

"The rise and now dominance of this perceptual approach to mechanics is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way physics is conceived by most people. It challenges the Einsteinian tradition, with its hyper-rational formulae and equations. It challenges those scientists who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning."

That would be pretty dumb, right? Just because we do not work out the future path of the ball using equations when we are playing tennis does not mean that those equations are pointless, or that there is no role for physics. It just means something we already knew: that whatever the point of physics is, it is not: being used by Venus Williams while she is playing.

The same is true of moral reasoning. It's one thing (and a very interesting thing) to ask: how, exactly, do we make moral decisions on the fly? But while that's useful to moral philosophy in a number of ways, it is not directed at the questions moral philosophy tries to answer. Those questions include: which actions should we perform? What kinds of people should we try to be? What principles should we try to live by?

One reason to try to answer those questions is if you find yourself wondering: what, exactly, should I make of all those moral judgments I make every day? Are they just expressions of taste, or artifacts of my upbringing? Or could they be right or wrong? If they can, how exactly would one go about showing that they were? -- You don't have to be in doubt about your ordinary moral judgments to be interested in these questions; you just have to be curious about whether or not it's possible to say more about them than: they're the judgments I make.

Exactly.

Wilkins ice shelf note

Quote:

Anyway, it's the same story in Antarctica as you see pretty much anywhere else—the changes are happening more quickly than most scientists had expected...Turns out the skeptics were right. The models and forecasts were mistaken. They were just off in the wrong direction...[bold mine]

Indeed.

Morality's value generator

David Brooks writes today criticizing the view that all of morality is based upon reason, or that our judgments of value and proceeding actions can be harnessed by or driven by pure reason.

Think of what happens when you put a new food into your mouth. You don’t have to decide if it’s disgusting. You just know. You don’t have to decide if a landscape is beautiful. You just know.

Moral judgments are like that. They are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain. Most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. We start doing this when we are babies, before we have language. And even as adults, we often can’t explain to ourselves why something feels wrong.

In other words, reasoning comes later and is often guided by the emotions that preceded it. Or as Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia memorably wrote, “The emotions are, in fact, in charge of the temple of morality, and ... moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as a high priest.”

While I certainly understand his point, and have used the phrase post hoc a few times in my writing on debates, I don't think that there is any mutual exclusion by claiming that: 1) the basis of morality is about harm and fairness, and 2) humans are intuitively guided to recognize this by their evolution.

The idea is that we don't make the rules of morality, we discover them, which makes morality objective. But at the same time, most of us are not philosophically-trained, so we can't adequately argue with others about that fact, leaving us looking like we're just running on emotion/intuition. I would argue that we are usually running on emotion/intution when we add small numbers too, but so long as our "adding mechanism" is well-trained, it doesn't matter.

The snap judgments we make in morality are probably accurate because they are the result of evolutionary "training" to hone them in on accuracy. Just because moral judgments may be based on feelings doesn't mean the underlying moral statements are not factual: "burning a baby alive is wrong." See some related posts.

Religious Right articles

Two mainstream articles today look at the political failures of the Religious Right:

1. Washington Post's Kathleen Parker: "Political Pullback for the Christian Right."
2. Newsweek's Jon Meacham: "The End of Christian America."

Despite Meacham's hasty title, he notes,

Let's be clear: while the percentage of Christians may be shrinking, rumors of the death of Christianity are greatly exaggerated. Being less Christian does not necessarily mean that America is post-Christian. A third of Americans say they are born again; this figure, along with the decline of politically moderate-to liberal mainline Protestants, led the ARIS authors to note that "these trends … suggest a movement towards more conservative beliefs and particularly to a more 'evangelical' outlook among Christians." With rising numbers of Hispanic immigrants bolstering the Roman Catholic Church in America, and given the popularity of Pentecostalism, a rapidly growing Christian milieu in the United States and globally, there is no doubt that the nation remains vibrantly religious—far more so, for instance, than Europe.

Both are worth reading in their entirety.

Explain this to me

A victory today for freedom.

Now, I have a "traditional family": one woman, one man, a biological child by us.

Explain to me how allowing gay people to have the same right to marry whomever they choose as I have "threatens" my family?

Quote:

The ruling is viewed as a victory for the gay rights movement in Iowa and elsewhere, and a setback for social conservatives who wanted to protect traditional families.

Religious Right troglodytes don't want to "protect" me from the "threat" of gay marriage. They want to enforce their particular interpretation of one ancient religion's view of gay people on everyone else as law. They want our secular country turned into a theocratic state.

Please protect us from them.

Keep in mind how we're told that the media is completely biased the next time you read a newspaper that reports that Religious Right thugs want to "protect" us rather than the truth: that they want to make us into a Christian version of Iran.

Authorizing the Iraq War

Just as a reference, and partially as a bookmark for me:

1. The vote for authorization to use force in Iraq took place on 10-10-02 [roll call]
2. The "yes" vote by party: House - Dem 39% GOP 97% Senate - Dem 42% GOP 98% [graphs]
   
3. The Republicans expanded their majority in the House and gained a new majority in the Senate with the Nov 2002 elections [CNN]

I blame Bush for the Iraq War, but I also blame enabling Democrats who didn't have the spines to collectively stop it.

Interesting miscellany

Andrew Sullivan posts some write-ins by "closet" marijuana users.

Colbert destroys Beck.

Red Staters (the website, not Republicans generally) really are fuc*ing insane.