I just finished reading a terrifically clear and concise article on measuring “the economy” by Jonathan Rowe, published by Harpers. It is entitled “Our Phony Economy.”

Please allow me to set the scene. Haven’t you wondered why politicians and the news media so often obsess about the rising and falling of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)? After all, this simple-looking number measure rises with sad expenses, such as the need to put ailing Grandma into a nursing home and useless expenses, such as your neighbor recently getting addicted to gambling. When such sad or useless events occur, the GDP goes up and the media and the politicians react by applauding as though a good thing happened when, really, a bad thing happened.

Further, when we learn to save money by gardening in our own back yard or by making our homes more energy efficient, the GDP goes down–it looks like a bad thing happened when, really, a very good thing happened.

Bottom line is that the media and politicians have this fetish for an economic measure (the GDP) that is always misleading and often nonsensical. How is it that our media and government leaders ever started touting the GDP as a meaningful measure of anything? I’ve often wondered this. Why do our leaders continue to rely on the GPD? Jonathan Rowe wonders about this.

If you only read one article on economics this year, make Rowe’s article the one. Reading it will only take you about 10 minutes. If you’re like me, Rowe’s revelations will be make you wonder how so many economic “experts” can be so ignorant and misguided. It will make you wonder about the other fundamental ways in which politicians and economists have totally mischaracterized the basics regarding this country’s financial health (actually here are some). Here’s a sample of Rowe’s writing, but really, go read the whole thing. You’ll find yourself nodding in agreement the whole way through:

That term “the economy”: what it means, in practice, is the Gross Domestic Product–a big statistical pot that includes all the money spent in a given period of time. If the pot is bigger than it was the previous quarter, or year, then you cheer. If it isn’t bigger, or bigger enough, then you call Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke up here and ask him to do some explaining. The what of the economy makes no difference in these councils. It never seems to come up. The money in the big pot could be going to cancer treatments or casinos, violent video games or usurious credit-card rates. It could go toward the $9 billion or so that Americans spend on gas they burn while they sit in traffic, or the billion plus that goes to such drugs as Ritalin and Prozac that schools are stuffing into kids to keep them quiet in class. The money could be the $20 billion or so that Americans spend on divorce lawyers each year, or the $41 billion on pets, or the $5 billion on identity theft, or the billions more spent to repair property damage caused by environmental pollution. The money in the pot could betoken social and environmental breakdown–misery and distress of all kinds. It makes no difference. You don’t ask. All you want to know is the total amount, which is the GDP. So long as it is growing then everything is fine.

I am not talking about an obscure technical measure. This is not stuff for the folks in the back room. I am talking about what you mean when you use that term “the economy.” Few words induce such a reverential hush in these halls.

Apply Rowe’s wisdom to the use of fossil fuels for a big eye-opener:

It sounds incredible, but when this nation drills its oil and mines its coal, the national accounts treat this as an addition to the national wealth rather than a subtraction from it. The result is like a car with a gas gauge that goes up as the fuel tank empties.

After reading even this much, are you now confident that an increasing GDP is highly ambiguous? So am I.

Thinking of people who insist on relying on the GDP reminds me about the old joke about the drunk who is looking for his lost keys under the streetlight, even though he lost them elsewhere.   When asked why he persisted in looking under the streetlight, he replied, “because it’s easier to see over here.”

GDP gives us an easy number, but it’s far from meaningful.  It would make much more sense to rely on an economic indicated that measured progress, not merely money exchanging hands.   One of those measures is the GPI, the Genuine Progress Indicator. Another measure is the subjective well-being indicator (SWB).

What if we measured the economy accurately?  What would it do for us.   According to Democracy Cell Project, “If as Americans we could measure well-being as a basis for success, rather than just size of the economy, there would be more support for reforms that we really desperately need.”

Have things changed since 1966? Those of us alive back then (I was ten in 1966) might need to think back before answering yes. Things must have changed since then, but in what ways? Let’s see . . . there were no personal computers. Color TV was a luxury. No astronaut had yet walked on the moon. People lived in much smaller houses closer to city centers.

I was at a courthouse in St. Clair County, Illinois, today when it hit home in another way. Take a look at this photo of the membership of the St. Clair Bar Association in 1966 (I took a photo of a big photo). Notice the total lack of women. Notice the almost total lack of any lawyers other than those who were Caucasian males.

It is so incredibly different now. Now, approximately half of all law school students are women and more than ¼ of all practicing lawyers are women. Currently, about one law student in five is non-white.

I’m not trying to pick on St. Clair County. I’m certain that the demographics of lawyers were similar in many other places back in 1966. Back then, no matter where you lived, being a lawyer almost guaranteed that you were a white male.

I’m 52 now, yet 1966 doesn’t seem like a long time ago. By the time I entered law school in 1978, it was no longer unusual to see women and minorities in law school classes. Things have changed dramatically, but it wasn’t an obvious change while it happened. In the case of the demographics of lawyers, it is all for the better.

Incremental change can be statistically dramatic, yet invisible.

It is awkward for me to argue that adults have the right to smoke marijuana. Whenever I make this argument, I suspect that people think that my arguments constitute a thin and self-serving façade for my own personal desire to smoke marijuana.

I have never smoked marijuana, though, and have never desired to do so, even though I worked as a rock musician in the 70’s. I don’t know why I have never desired to use marijuana or any other street drug. Maybe it’s because I fear the loss of “control”—life is already a bit out of control, it seems. Perhaps I have been cowed by the existence of criminal laws prohibiting possession of even possession of small amounts. Nor do I smoke or drink. I try to find my personal high through things like talking with friends, exercising and by exploring ideas.

When discussing the potential legalization of drugs, personal prejudice and flimsy anecdotes have a way of driving the conversation. That’s why I wanted to say a few things about my own attitudes toward marijuana before preceding.

This topic of the illegality of marijuana arose at a gathering of acquaintances yesterday. For those opposed to legalizing marijuana I suspect that their main argument was that marijuana use is morally wrong. In “mixed company” (involving people for and against criminalization of marijuana), this moralistic argument is left unarticulated, however, because it is a rare day when a simple claim that something is “immoral” convinces anyone of anything. In such gatherings, then, “health” arguments often serve as proxies for this unspoken bigger battle. For instance, in my experience, conservatives embellish the health risks of marijuana to justify their moral concerns in the same way that they embellish the health risks of abortion (the claim is that “abortion increases the risk of cancer”) to justify their moral concerns in that area.

What’s ironic is that so many people who oppose the legalization of marijuana based on “health” arguments would NEVER refer to the much more serious health concerns pertaining to tobacco and alcohol to argue for criminalization of tobacco or alcohol. So it’s not really about heath issues, right? In fact, many of the people who want to keep marijuana criminalized personally use, if not abuse, tobacco and alcohol (including using alcohol to an excess) as do many of their friends and family members. We wouldn’t want to make criminals out of my good friend Bob or my Aunt Mary, would we?

Conservatives hammer the “health” issues in an attempt to drive a clear wedge between marijuana and those legal mind-altering drugs. They argue that marijuana is dramatically different than legal drugs and that this difference justifies turning marijuana users into criminals. I find it interesting that conservatives use this same tactic to concoct a wedge between human animals and all of the other animals in an effort to find a special place for humans, in an effort to lambaste scientific findings based on biological evolution.

I do want to engage in one more digression . . . . It is astounding to me that conservative churches raise huge alarms regarding the use of illegal drugs but often say nothing about legal mind-altering drugs. Consider this quote by Tim Wu:

Over the last two decades, the pharmaceutical industry has developed a full set of substitutes for just about every illegal narcotic we have.

It would seem, then that obedience to authority is a big factor in why many conservatives oppose drugs. Obedience is one of the well-documented pillars of conservative morality. Haidt’s approach dovetails with George Lakoff’s conclusions that the government metaphorically serves as a “strict father” to conservatives. This invites a chicken and egg issue. Is marijuana “bad” because the government says that it’s bad, or is it just “bad” and the government just recognizes this “truth?” The bottom line is that the government is certainly on board that marijuana is “bad,” and Wu/Haidt/Lakoff have given us reason to suspect that conservatives latch onto that government position to justify their own moral views. I suspect that this is exactly what is happening with regard to marijuana. The anti-marijuana folks are holding themselves up by their own bootstraps.

Now, back to my gathering of acquaintances. During our conversation, I heard from a proud conservative that marijuana should remain illegal because it is a gateway drug. However, tobacco has been well documented as a far superior gateway drug. I didn’t hear any of the anti-marijuana folks say anything about criminalizing that famous gateway drug, tobacco, so I was not convinced that this gateway “reason” to keep marijuana criminalized was genuine.

At the gathering, I also heard an argument that was new to me. I heard that people shouldn’t smoke because smoking marijuana “causes cancer.” (more…)

Should you live in the suburbs or in the city to keep your housing and transportation costs in check?  According to this interactive site developed by CNT and its collaborative partners, the Center for Transit Oriented Development, the answer is clear–live in the city.

The bright red color-codings you’ll find when you check the 2008 costs of transportation (versus the 2001 costs) will shock you.  None of it is surprising, really.  If you choose to own (and cool and heat) a big house 20 miles from from the city center, you’ll pay out of your nose for it.  You will likely have to pay more than 48% of your income for this privilege.  Unless you want to grow your own crops and weave your own clothes out there, rarely commuting to the city.

Thanks to Salon’s “Triumph of the Low-Carbon City Dweller” for this link.

Americans are increasingly complaining that the cost of food is going up. Two recent articles demonstrate that Americans are profligate wasters of food in at least two major ways:

1) Obese people consume 18% more food energy than lean people and more than sixty million Americans are obese. Simply put, it takes more calories to maintain an obese body than a slimmer body, assuming both of them engage in similar amounts of activity.

2) Americans throw away an incredible 27% of their food. According to this article in the NYT:

Americans waste an astounding amount of food — an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption, according to a government study — and it happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out to about a pound of food every day for every American.

These two problems suggest two solutions. To save money on one’s food bill: A) Bring your body down to its appropriate and healthy size and B) Stop wasting good food by throwing it away.

How bad is the economy?  In the May issue of Harpers Magazine, Kevin Phillips cuts through the numbers in an article entitled “Numbers Racket:  Why the economy is worse than we know.” The revelations Phillips makes are shocking.  The U.S. government has been consciously cooking the books for decades.

How do you make inflation look lower than it is?  Just remove some items from consideration and create value out of thin air (e.g., “product substitution,” “geometric weighting” and “hedonic adjustments”).   Truly, you’ve GOT to read the details to believe what has been going on.  If you think that inflation is running between 2% - 4%, think again.  Using honest accounting methods, it’s more like 12%.  If CPI had been honestly reported for the past couple of decades, Social Security checks would be 70% greater than they currently are.

We have an official unemployment rate of 5%.  The government arrives at that nice low number by simply not counting all of the people who want jobs.  If you really counted those people, the U.S. has an employment rate of about 9%.

Who profits from these fake number of low inflation and low unemployment?

Might it be Washington politicos and affluent elites, anxious to mislead voters, coddle the financial markets, and tamp down expensive cost-of-living increases for wages and pensions?

Don’t forget the utterly ridiculous concept of “imputed income,” one of several forms of phantom income, which constitutes 15% of GDP.

Phillips see nothing but trouble resulting from the use of these methods of cooking the national books. An honest accounting “would reveal a nation in deep difficulty not just domestically but globally.”

The undermeasuring of inflation is especially insidious:

[I]t hangs over out heads like a guillotine.  To acknowledge it would send interest rates climbing, and thereby would endanger the viability of the massive buildup of public and private debt(from less than $11 trillion in 1987 to $49 trillion last year) that props up the American economy . . . The U.S. dollar, off more than 40 percent against the euro since 2002, could slip down an even rockier slope.

I’ve sometimes wondered this, and this article in Discover Magazine presents the answer.  Four percent of men are raising another man’s child:

From the clinics to the courts, routine DNA tests uncover genetic identities—and even family secrets. British public-health researchers examined nearly 50 years of medical data from around the world and came to a startling conclusion: One in 25 men unwittingly raises another man’s child.

The researchers found evidence of mismatched paternity in each of 14 countries studied—from the United States to South Africa. Few socioeconomic groups seem immune, but the probability of parental discrepancy seems higher among unmarried couples, the poor, and women under 35 (who are more likely to have more than one sexual partner).

4% might not seem like a large number, but every big classroom probably has a student who is being raised by a man who falsely believes that child to be his child. 

It’s hard to know what to do with such numbers.   For instance, I am the father of two adopted girls.  To me, the fact that I am not their biological father is of no importance whatsoever when evaluating my relationship with them.   Then again, that’s how my wife and I planned it.   There weren’t any surprises sprung on us.

I would fear for those children involved, were it to become known to the man who is raising them and loves them that he is not there biological father, where he currently believes that he is.   I would hope that that relelationship wouldn’t change anything at all between the father and the children, but it would be naive to expect this.  

How important is it to people that they are raising children who are their biological children?  Just consider the vast amounts of money many couples spend on extraordinary medical treatment so that they can have their “own” children.

I understand that impulse, but it is clear that the great majority of our genome is exactly the same as that of every other person on Earth.   Rather than worrying about whose child is whose, it would be far healthier to acknowledge that we are all related to every child on the planet–they are all our children. 

“The free market–the invisible hand–will take care of everything.”

I’ve addressed this topic of the free market as alleged panacea several times before.  I’ve referred to this blind faith in the market as unsubstantiated.  I’ve mockingly referred to the common belief in the wisdom of the invisible hand as a belief in the Fouth Person in the Holy Quartet.  Why mock?  Because stark shortages of critically important natural resources loom in every direction.   And yet we’re in denial. You deny the denial?  Then how is it that we tolerate, this year, big U.S. metropolitan areas like Raleigh-Durham and Atlanta had only a few weeks left of their municipal water supplies?  We tolerate that we are drawing down unreplenishable water sources throughout the desert southwest.  Intelligent civilizations don’t deny such dangers.  They consciously deal with their problems.

I’ve just read a well-phrased description of why the modern version of the free market can’t save us from our problems regarding impending shortages of essential natural resources.  The following quote is from a new book available free on-line from Population Connection: PLAN B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, by environmental analyist, Lester R. Brown (2008).

Now with the economy as large as it is, the indirect costs of burning coal—the costs of air pollution, acid rain, devastated ecosystems, and climate change—can exceed the direct costs, those of mining the coal and transporting it to the power plant. As a result of neglecting to account for these indirect costs, the market is undervaluing many goods and services, creating economic distortions.

As economic decision-makers—whether consumers, corporate planners, government policymakers, or investment bankers—we all depend on the market for information to guide us. In order for markets to work and economic actors to make sound decisions, the markets must give us good information, including the full cost of the products we buy. But the market is giving us bad information, and as a result we are making bad decisions—so bad that they are threatening civilization.

The market is in many ways an incredible institution. It allocates resources with an efficiency that no central planning body can match and it easily balances supply and demand. The market has some fundamental weaknesses, however. It does not incorporate into prices the indirect costs of producing goods. It does not value nature’s services properly. And it does not respect the sustainable yield thresholds of natural systems. It also favors the near term over the long term, showing little concern for future generations.

Dick Cavett once said: “It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.”  Plan B 3.0 is the kind of information that those rare people ambivalently clamor to hear.    It’s clearly written and well documented.  There’s nothing shrill in Lester Brown’s book; just the facts—lots of facts that paint a dire picture.  Over and over, humans are overexploiting precious resources, and the situation is getting dangerous in many ways.  What’s at stake?  You name it.  Oil, food, water, forests, health, fisheries.   On the topic of fisheries, did you know that there are essentially no cod to be caught in the North Atlantic Ocean any more?   Gee, how did that happen?  Why didn’t the “free market” protect the North Atlantic Ocean?

Brown argues that we need to dramatically change the way we live and consume.   He argues that the “free market” is not a cure, unless we first make the true costs of over-exploitation visible and force purchasers to pay the full price.   We need to “Get the market to tell the ecological truth.” For example, the true cost of a gallon of gas is not $3/gallon, but more like $12/gallon. (more…)

In the January 31, 2008 edition of Nature, author Dan Jones reviews what evolution indicates about human killing humans.  As with many human behaviors, the evolutionists divide on whether killing of other humans is an adaptation (a change in organisms that allows them to live more successfully in an environment) or a “byproduct of urges toward some other goal.”  There are intriguing arguments for both sides. 

Some have suggested that individual murder is more likely a byproduct, whereas organized violence (such as the type we see in wars) is more often an adaptation.  What is the biological evidence pointing to something other than byproduct?  A 1997 study found that “the average volume of the orbitofrontal cortex between men and women accounts for about half of the variation in antisocial behavior between the sexes.” Combine this with Jane Goodall’s observations of gang violence in chimpanzees, where “the adult males of one community systematically attacked and killed the males of another group over a period of years, with the victorious group eventually absorbing the remaining victims.” 

It is incredibly hard to weed out the cultural factors from the biological, of course.  Here’s something I found interesting.  Interpersonal attacks leading to death have declined dramatically over the past few centuries.

After rising from an average of 32 homicides per 100,000 people per year in the 13th and 14th centuries to 41 in the 15th, the murder rate has steadily dropped in every subsequent century, 21.9, 11, 3.2, 2.6 and finally 1.4 in the 20th century.

Not that anyone is suggesting that human biological evolution could account for this decline in human killings.  This period of eight centuries is much too short a time period for evolution to have had any meaningful effect.  (more…)

This fellow claims to have lots of important statistics displayed on a big real-time dashboard.   Assuming his data to be accurate (I don’t have any reason to dispute it), it’s especially interesting to hit the “Now” button to reset this “World Clock,” then to watch the numbers grow from zero.  

Though I’ve often discussed world oil depletion, I’m amazed to see the number of barrels of oil pumped every minute.  

Ralph Nader recently sent a pointed letter to President Bush.   The letter concerned a annual national tragedy of 58,000 of needless workplace deaths.  Here is an excerpt (from Common Dreams):

Dear President Bush:

I was listening to your address before the self-described Conservative Political Action Committee gathering in Washington, D.C. last week, while reviewing materials on occupational hazards in the workplace. The contrast between your declarations and the ongoing annual tragedy of 58,000 Americans losing their lives due to workplace diseases and traumas (OSHA figures) was astonishing and deplorable.

Your remarks included such phrases as “You and I believe in accountability;” “People should be responsible for their actions;” “Maintaining a culture of life;” and that “My number one priority is to protect you;” “All human life is precious and deserves to be protected.”

These are words and phrases that you have been using year after year in your capacity as a judicially-selected President who has sworn to uphold the Constitution and the laws of the land.

Therefore, let us apply your verbal sensitivities about accountability, responsibility and the safety of working Americans, to your sworn duty to uphold the job safety laws of your Administration.

Is the United States doing everything it can to protect its citizens from deaths and injuries from exposure to chemicals?  Not at all.  In fact, the U.S. is working hard to keep its citizens in the dark, according to this disturbing article from Harpers.  The Harpers article concerns the E.U. chemical regulation called REACH—Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals:

Europe is now compelling other nations’ manufacturers to conform to regulations that are far more protective of people’s health than those in the United States. Europe has emerged not only as the world’s leading economic power but also as one of its moral leaders. Those roles were once filled by the United States.

The U.S. media needs to focus harder.  A death is a death, but we get distracted in this time of our “war” on “terrorism.”   For our news media, a death at the hands of a “terrorist” is 1,000 times more newsworthy than most other deaths (including most other preventable deaths).  There is no good reason for this disparity.

For more on deaths and statistics, “mere statistics.”visit this article regarding some of the many ways 3,000 people could die.  And see this post for many examples of mere statistics that should deeply move us.  Real life spiders make us jump and the cancellation of a TV show makes us visibly angry, while most real life deaths bore us. 

John Paulos, well-known for his writings on mathematics (he is a professor of mathematics at Temple University), has now published a book on the topic of God. In Irreligion he asks whether there are any logical or mathematically substantiated reasons to believe in God. He concludes that the answer is a resounding no.

Irreligion is a short book (only 150 pages) and it is written cleanly, with lots of humor stirred in.

Paulos gets off to a good start when he insists that you can’t really argue whether God exists unless you define what you mean by “God.” He recognizes, for example, that some people use the term God to refer to the laws of physics or nature itself. This book, however, is addressed to those who believe in a more traditional version of God:

Most conventional monotheistic characterizations of God (Yahweh, Allah) take Him to be an entity or Being that is, if not omnipotent, at least extraordinarily powerful; if not omniscient, at least surpassingly wise; if not the Creator of the universe, at least intimately connected with its origin; if not completely and absolutely perfect, at least possessor of all manner of positive characteristics. This formulation will, on the whole, be my definition of God and the many flawed arguments for this entity’s existence will be my primary focus.

By this definition, an atheist is “someone who believes that such an entity does not exist.” An agnostic is “someone who believes that whether God exists or not is unknown, unknowable, or a meaningless question. Paulos goes on to point out, however, that “it’s certainly possible to be both an atheist and an agnostic.” I found this to be an interesting intellectual move, since many nonbelievers spend considerable energy trying to figure out whether they are atheistic or agnostic. Here’s Paulos view:

Think, for example, of the innumerable historical figures or events and whose existence or occurrence we don’t believe, but about whose existence and occurrence we’re not absolutely sure. The definitions of these terms are, of course, sensitive to the definition of God to which one subscribes. Define God in a sufficiently nebulous way as beauty, love, mysterious complexity, or the ethereal taste of strawberry shortcake, and most atheists become theists. Still, although one can pose as Humpty Dumpty and aver, “When I use the word it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less,” others needn’t play along.

(p. xiv). On this question of definitions, Paulos offers a possible “proto-religion” for atheists and agnostics:

By this I mean a “religion” that has no dogma, no narratives, and no existence claims and yet still acknowledges the essential awe and wonder of the world and perhaps affords as well an iota of serenity. The best I’ve been able to come up with is the “Yeah-ist” religion, whose response to the intricacy, beauty, and mystery of the world is a simple affirmation and acceptance, “Yeah,” and whose only prayer is the one word “Yeah.”

(more…)

A few months ago the English alternative rock band Radiohead released their long awaited album “In Rainbows” as a free download, leaving it up to the fans to decide what they would pay, if anything at all.

As someone who has had the difficult and expensive experience of distributing physical copies of my documentaries on DVD I can tell you that it was with great anticipation that I viewed this experiment. I was surprised and a little disappointed to find that only 40% of those downloading actually paid for it.

I recall as a young man buying vinyl records for about $5 a piece and watching as the price slowly went up and up, hitting about $12 before giving way to CDs which eventually topped out at around $16 to $18 a pop. These days, with iTunes selling individual songs for $.99 and most albums for about $9.99, I feel like I am getting a bargain. Of course, I still have the expense of having to burn my own CDs to play them in my car, not being hip enough to own an MP3 player.

Still, I find myself wondering what I would pay for some of my favorite music if given the opportunity to decide on my own. The temptation to take it for free would be strong but I am smart enough to know that if enough people do that the ability to place our own value on music would disappear, as it has done with Radiohead. The band has since retracted its “free or whatever” offer, prompting some to accuse the band of chickening out as they saw potential revenue slip through their fingers.

In the band’s defense, Radiohead’s leader Thom Yorke contends that it was always an experiment, not a business model for themselves or anyone else, and that it had run its course. (As of December 31st “In Rainbows” has become available on iTunes and the CD can be purchased through the usual outlets.)

However, a nagging question still remains. Now that music is being freed from the cost of being physically reproduced on disk, how much should we pay for it?

What is music worth to you?

I’ve just read a good book about genetics. The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution by Sean B. Carroll. There is much food for thought in this book. One reviewer called it “A Primer of Evolutionary Theory for Beginners”, and this is accurate. One doesn’t need to know chemistry or physics to follow his reasoning, because he teaches the most necessary pieces.

Basically, this book examines what has turned up in studying the genomes of various species over the last couple of decades, as well as tracing genes from generation to generation in the same family line. It starts with a simple introduction to what DNA is, how it works, and how we know this. Then it gradually leads one to understand how genes transform from one generation to the next, and how this leads to speciation.

Basically, ever-present radiation, random chemistry, and aggressive biology cause frequent single-letter changes in DNA. Also RNA copy-and-paste errors regularly drop or duplicate entire gene sequences. After this see Darwin for how some mutations are explicitly preserved, some are inevitably removed, and most simply languish in or become fossil genes because there is no preference one way or the other. Carroll covers all this in many examples.

Carroll presents the simple probability and large numbers theory to illustrate the surprising speed at which populations can change, and then shows functioning (or no longer functioning) genes that have in fact visibly changed populations so rapidly.

This book gives plenty of ammo to those arguing against Creationists whose understanding of biological evolution might be along the lines of the Creationist apology: Evolution: The Fossils Say No! That book seriously misrepresents what fossils are, how many there are, where they are found, and what they’ve been discovered to mean, when, and by whom. But its main claim is that evolution is a theory based only on fossils. The Making of the Fittest barely mentions fossils (outside of those within the genome) and completely supports and explains evolutionary theory.

What about “new” traits being spontaneously created where they weren’t before? (more…)

I’m sure you’ve seen the photos of many of those many delighted lottery winners! Yes, they do exist. 

As we all know, though, winning the Powerball requires a lot of luck. For every smiling winner there are millions of people with nothing to show for their money. 

How much luck does it take to win the lottery?  According to this Powerball site, the odds of picking all six two-digit numbers correctly is one chance in 146,107,962. This is bleak, but how bleak?  Some state lotteries show you how to do the mathematics, but I doubt that this complicated math can counteract the heavy advertising done by the lotteries–advertising that takes advantage of widespread innumeracy. How can the small chance of winning the lottery be conveyed in a visual and understandable way? 

I decided to use plain M&M’s (not peanut) and a football field for my thought experiment.  I didn’t really do this demonstration, but you could.  If you’d like to do it, just go out and buy 146,107,962 M&M’s.  Instead of actually buying the M&M’s, I used mathematics.

I decided to allow all six lottery numbers to serve as the coordinates for ONE M&M in a big pile of M&M’s.  I started by wondering whether 146,107,962 M&M’s might cover a football field (the field between the goal lines, not including the end zones).  A football field, between the goal lines measure 300 ft long x 160 feet wide = 48,000 square feet.  That equals 6,912,000 square inches.  Based on my experiments with M&M’s at home, I found that 17 M&M’s will cover about 3 square inches. 146,107,962 M&M’s would thus completely cover three football fields, from goal line to goal line.  

So . . . here’s the proposition.   Assume that ONE M&M was painted silver and mixed into the M&M’s that covered 3 adjacent football fields that had been completely covered with M&M’s. Then assume that a lottery company allowed you to pay $1 to walk out into those 3 huge fields blindfolded to pick up only one M&M with a tweezer–the silver one.  Would you do it, or would you rather keep your dollar?  Or how about this option:  would you scoop up one liter of M&M’s (enough to fill about one quart, which you could do by scooping up a bit more than a square foot) for $549?

BTW, I refered to this site to determine how many M&M’s there are in a specific volume.  It turns out that one liter (which is a little more than a quart) of M&M’s is about 1098 M&M’s.

This thought experiment helped me to understand the low odds of winning the lottery, but I’m curious.  Would this visual have the power to cure anyone else of the urge to spend their hard-earned money on the lottery? Could this serve as an “anti-lottery ad”?

If none of this cures you of the urge to play the lottery, consider this: coming into large sums of money will only temporarily change your happiness level. 

According to this article in Alternet, a British polling firm has concluded that “1.2 million Iraqis have met violent deaths since the 2003 invasion.”  More disturbing, Americans have no idea that their invasion has caused such misery and, for the most part, the American media doesn’t care about reporting these tragic numbers.

Field workers asked residents how many members of their own household had been killed since the invasion. More than one in five respondents said that at least one person in their home had been murdered since March of 2003. . .  In Baghdad, almost half of those interviewed reported at least one violent death in their household.

Americans have no idea about the amount of bloodshed in Iraq:

Here’s the troubling thing, and one reason why opposition to the war isn’t even more intense than it is: Americans were asked in an AP poll conducted earlier this year how many Iraqi civilians they thought had been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation, and the median answer they gave was 9,890. . . .  Most of that disconnect is probably a result of American exceptionalism — the United States is, by definition, the good guy, and good guys don’t launch wars of choice that result in over a million people being massacred.

As indicated, the American media has no interest in communicating an accurate picture of the Iraqi disaster to Americans, and the plan is working:

While the stunning figures should play a major role in the debate over continuing the occupation, they probably won’t. That’s because there are three distinct versions of events in Iraq — the bloody criminal nightmare that the “reality-based community” has to grapple with, the picture the commercial media portrays and the war that the occupation’s last supporters have conjured up out of thin air. Similarly, American discourse has also developed three different levels of Iraqi casualties. There’s the approximately 1 million killed according to the best epidemiological research conducted by one of the world’s most prestigious scientific institutions, there’s the 75,000-80,000 (based on news reports) the Washington Post and other commercial media allow, and there’s the clean and antiseptic blood-free war the administration claims to have fought (recall that they dismissed the Lancet findings out of hand and yet offered no numbers of their own).

In a recent poll, reading in America is revealed to be, well, less than appreciated by large swaths of the population. This ought come as no surprise. We live in a time of stupendous ignorance, which allows for the expression of epic stupidity. The Founding Fathers were suspicious of democracy (I learned this by reading several books on the subject of the early republic), believing that the vast majority of people were incapable of the kind of intellectual comprehension necessary for an informed plebiscite. In short, they knew people were ill-educated and believed this meant they could not parse abstraction. By the mid-19th century, though, reading was probably the most common form of home entertainment.

America has championed the idea of public education. Our publishing companies have been at the forefront of issuing special editions of “Great Books”, and we have turned our economy into a college degree-driven dynamo. Yet the most basic reasons to read seem ignored by most, along with the habit of reading after leaving school.

A few quotes:

“Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.” Mortimer Adler

“By reading, we enjoy the dead; by conversation, the living; and by contemplation, ourselves. Reading enriches the memory; conversation polishes wit; and contemplation improves the judgment. Of these, reading is the most important, as it furnishes both the others.” Charels Caleb Colton

“The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.” Oliver Goldsmith

“Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year.” Horace Mann

And finally, a lengthier quote from someone who knows a thing or two about the subject.

“There is no single way to read well, though these is a prime reason why we should read. Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found? If you are fortunate, you encounter a particular teacher who can help, yet finally you are alone, going on without further mediation. Reading well is one of the great pleasures solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.” Harold Bloom

I have been an avid reader virtually all my life. I caught what is known as the Reading Bug around age 10, and ever since there has rarely been a year when I did not read at least thirty books cover to cover, averaging sixty to seventy a year. My senior year of high school I cut most days and spent them in the local public library, where I achieved an enviable (and now inconceivable) rate of a book a day, and tore through most of the so-called Classics that year.

“Why do you always have your face in a book?”

This question was never asked by my parents. My parents, when early on they realized I was reading so much, increased my allowance so I could buy more books (a paperback then was sixty cents). No, this came from “friends” who rarely read, who equated reading with school, which they disliked, and for whom reading had unfortunately become a chore.

I blame the educational system for that. English, as taught in the schools then, had the unfortunate effect of beating a love of reading out of most kids. They could never just have fun with a book, they had to analyze it and “find meaning.” The fact is, meaning is such a individualized thing, it must be discovered individually. Telling someone that what they thought was important about a book is wrong because they do not pick up on the “deeper meanings” of the text is a sure way to turn them off unless they are already dedicated readers. And ridiculing the literature of choice of a student will put the nail in the coffin.

“Why should I learn how to jump through those hoops? This reading stuff is a pain.”

Add to that the simple fact that reading is Not Social, and you have the makings of a functionality illiterate society.

Not illiterate in the sense that they cannot read a sentence, but in the sense that so many people do not know how to access literature.

It takes practice. Learning how to decode the words on the page and make the images in your mind the author hopes you do takes learning. It’s an acquired skill that improves over time and repeated exposure, and those who figure it out become those people who are content to sit alone somewhere with a book.

Is this really important?

Reading enlarges the capacity of the imagination. No other medium does that, with the possible exception of music (but only in certain limited respects). How else does one get to a point where empathy becomes so developed that we can literally understand a person from another culture without having gone through their experiences?

I do not mean understand them as if we had lived their life, but understand the differences and the depth of similarities that hang on those differences.

Movies do the work of the imagination for us. Video games as well.

When asked whether I believe violent movies and television feed violence in society, I have to admit that, yes, I do. But only because there’s nothing between the raw, unformed pysche of the young and the insistent imagery, nothing to mediate, to give context, to offer viable alternatives, and nothing that has aided the development of skeptical buffers. Reading does that. It does it by forcing the mind to do the work of contextualizing, of comprehending meaning. When you read, you are an active participant, engaged in the process of judging, of analyzing, of making sense of the text—and the text itself offers context that is often missing from a visual experience.

I hasten to add here that this is true of all reading, but more true of broad reading. People who basically read the same book over and over again may begin the process of enlarging their imaginations, but then it falters, ill-fed and poorly exercised.

People who read a lot are often more interesting—mainly because they start off by being more interested, by virtue of the worlds they’ve encountered on the page.

Lastly, though, books are the connective tissue of our civilization, past to future. You cannot talk to Ben Franklin in the flesh, but he’s there, in print. Likewise Aristotle, Plato, Cyrano de Bergerac, Twain, Tolkein, all worthy minds who left their vision behind to talk to us. Books are the avatars of their creators, and once opened are fully interactive.

I have no idea how to turn this trend around. Many things conspire to rob us of a literate culture, not least of which is a sheer lack of time. We work longer hours, necessities cost more, there are people around us demanding attention. But it’s a mistake not to see reading as a necessary thing.

Those who are parents might consider easing up on the team sports and the implicit ridicule of always forcing the child to go play with friends. Books are friends. Spending all the time with a book is no better, though, than spending no time with one at all.

I grew up in a house in which it was ordinary to see everyone quietly reading. I’ve been in houses where there wasn’t a single book to be found.

But most importantly, we need to stop asking that reading be defended. “What’ good is it? What use is it?” The use and good of it is self-evident over time, but just reading, at any given moment, should be no more odd than having a conversation with someone—which no one really questions.

Given the recent stupidity expressed in much of our public life these past several years, I think it’s time to advocate reading a bit more. And not just “prescribed” reading. I have a poster on my wall, a picture of Mary Harris “Mother” Jones—yes, the one the magazine was named for—and the quote says “Sit down and read. Prepare yourself for the coming conflict.”

In an article from the Washington Post we learn that the United States has slipped in the ranking for life expectancy in the world to number 42. Douglas Adams aside, this is not a good thing.

The article lists a good many factors contributing to this fact, which seems paradoxical since, as stated, we spend more on health care than any other nation. I’m not surprised. Americas in general live as though built like Abrams tanks. We work hard, we party hard, and we loaf hard. We eat badly, pay no attention to our personal health, assuming that if anything really goes wrong “the doctor can fix it.” We believe, innately, that we’re indestructible and can do anything. This leads to careless habits. One factor cited is that 45 million of us lack health insurance. Which brings me to the peeve of this post.

There is a talk show mouth named Mark Christopher.  His show is out of Nashville, but you can hear him (in St. Louis) on KTRS 550. This guy is a Rush Limbaugh wannabe. And one of his horses to ride hobbyistically is an ongoing rant against national health care. He’s phobic about this. Every other day he has some little tidbit about how bad health care is in other countries that have a state health care system. He commented yesterday on this report in the Washington Post. Now, aside from the fact that he cherry picked the article, which cited factors he then went on to name as if the Washington Post had not, he displayed a profound case of Innumeracy.

He said (I paraphrase) that in a country of 300 million, 45 million people is a “drop in the bucket.” Meaning that we ought not overturn our wonderful private health care system (which is going to bankrupt us eventually) for so few who just fall out of the system. 45 million out of 300 million is 15%. That is hardly a drop in the bucket. To put that in perspective, that would be one and half out of ten, or three out of twenty. Fifteen of every hundred people. Which means that on an average city block (which I determined by standing on my street and counting) of roughly 35 houses with an average of four people per house, there are around 21 people with no reliable health care. On one block.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that among those 21 we have 2 or 3 cases of tuberculosis (which is a rising problem in this country). Tuberculosis is highly infectious. How fast might that spread among the various blocks around us? Another way to look at it. The worst battlefield casualties the United States ever experienced were in the Civil War, which sometimes reached 30%. They averaged between 12 and 18%. A modern army–-ours—regards 5% heavy and anything approaching 10% unacceptable. And fighting a war is by far more expensive than average health care costs. The unbelievable inability—or, more likely, carelessness—of someone with a national talk show to understand the most basic arithmetic in this way verges on criminal.

If 15% of our population dropped dead tomorrow, I assure you we would notice. It would not be “a drop in the bucket.” We are nationally anxious about 6 coal miners in Utah who may be dead and if they are, we will demand an investigation. We can’t 6 people dying in a mining accident. But in the sphere of health care, 45 million people become a drop in the bucket. The phobia that has taken root over this issue has become one of those insurmountable arguments that has run headlong into panic.

We Americans—I think all of us, it just depends on what aspect of our lives is under discussion—our suspicious of government. If it’s not national health care, then it’s Big Brother. Liberals, conservatives, and combination thereof, Americans can find something we don’t want the government to run. We have always been like this, it’s nothing new. And we are often stupid about it. But the world is shrinking and in so doing making it less and less possible for us to escape the consequences of ill-considered, knee-jerk prejudice. I don’t care how this issue gets resolved. Even if we do end up with some kind of federalized health care system, we will abuse it, it will cost too much, and it will still be bent to the service of a nation of people who act like they can do anything they want—play, eat, party, work, or loaf—too much and think nothing bad will come of it.

Which means that the most cost-effective health care system—prophylaxis—will not be the one that gets the priority. Insurance companies must be made to offer things like well baby care and prenatal coverage now. Taking care of a problem before it becomes something that lands us in the emergency room costs far less, but we don’t, for the most part, do that now. And we have a absurd and irrational devotion to extending Life far past any possibility of meaningful living, which is still where the bulk of our expense here falls (though obesity related health issues are rapidly catching up).

Whatever we do, the basic tenets of good health care will probably still be ignored by a people who think they don’t have to pay attention personally to their own health care. Which is reflected in the Washington Post article as well. But I am profoundly tired of the misinformation spread by both sides of the debate, and the incredible lack of grasp people who ought to know better have on the most basic aspects of problem-solving.

End of rant. You may now return to your regularly scheduled panic.

Three months ago.  I went to my kids’ school to have lunch with them and sat at a “peanut-free” table. I had seen the signs around school outside various classrooms. I had been made aware of kids’ peanut allergies in school fliers and letters and e-mails when someone in one of the kids’ classes had an allergy. Each class member has a day to bring treats and it is most important to not harm others. We all were made aware and we took daily precautions to protect the kids.
 
Three weeks ago. My wife was traveling eastbound on Manchester in Des Peres towards work, and out of the blue a white-tailed doe leaped over the road divider and fell upon the car next to hers, crushing the front of vehicle. The car’s driver was unhurt. The deer stumbled off the front of the car and disappeared, apparently also unhurt. Later, a sign went up to alert the daily commuters to the “deer crossing” which occurs more and more frequently in my West St. Louis County neighborhood.

Last week. As we were flying southeastward, lightning hit the plane. No biggie, it happens all the time, my frequent-flying executive wife says to the kids, the planes are designed to take it.

These occurrences and incidents in my family’s life were all taken in stride by all of us. We didn’t know of the frequency of such occurrences nationally because we didn’t have any Homeland Security alerts in advance. Neither President Bush nor the plethora of candidates frowned and gesticulate at the threat of peanut allergies, deer hits on vehicles and lightning strikes. There have been no clarion calls for wiretaps or imprisonments of peanut farmers without trials, no wars or bombs or rewards for the capture of perpetrator deer. We haven’t had any new federal departments (that prohibit unions) created to hand out lightning rods or arrestors and to fight the threats of potential deaths from peanut allergies, strikes by errant deer, or strikes by lightning.  

But, according to the Cato Institute, since the 1960’s when we first started keeping track of the numbers of US citizens deaths from terrorism, more US citizens die each year from peanut allergies than have died from terrorist attacks (and see here).  More US citizens die each year from hits by deer than have died from terrorist attacks. More US citizens die each year from lightning strikes than die from terrorist attacks. The statistics include domestic sponsored terrorism (e.g., McVeigh) as well as apparent foreign sponsored terrorism (9/11).

Thus, as US citizens wander through life, they don’t know that they stand a statistically larger chance of death from peanut allergies, leaping deer and lightning strikes than from foreign or domestic terrorist attacks. 

Blissful ignorance? 

[Admin's note: See also here and here and here.]

A significant difference between humans and most other animals is that we have the innate ability to abstract ideas. That is, we can manipulate symbols as though they were things. We do this so well that most people are unaware that the symbols aren’t actually the things they represent.

If a map is wrong, we get angry at the roads for daring to deviate! I’m using the word “map” as both a representation of a literal road map, and as the semantic entity of a symbol used to abstract information about an object into a more manageable form.

What, you might well wonder, is “abstract”? There are many definitions, but I am using it as the verb meaning to construct a semantic entity (idea) that represents certain aspects of a concrete object. This latter phrase simply means “something”. The drawing of an apple in a book of A-B-C’s is an abstraction of an apple. It represents the idea of apple, and is used as a bridge to try to teach children to further abstract the sound sequence they learned (”apple”) to the written symbol loosely representing the first sound in that sequence (”a”).

Enough of a primer. Fundamentalist Christianity is trying hard to teach people that only one higher-level abstraction is needed: All things come from God. To these thinkers, Man invents arbitrary abstractions such as “atom” and “electron” and “gravity” and “evolution” and other theories based on evidence to explain things that are all obviously given by God.

The Bible” is a collection of abstractions (stories) collected at various times in history (different for each book), edited and translated through a series of languages, and viewed through the prejudices instilled into the reader or listener by a particular community. In other words, the unadulterated, pure Word of God. Poe-tay-toe, Poh-tah-toh.

But, I wander from my point. Man loses sight of the id