Dangerous Intersection

Down with the GDP

Erich Vieth — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:41:40 +0000

In the November, 2009 edition of The Atlantic, Megan McArdle reminds us why we need to wean ourselves of using the GDP as an indicator of economic health. Here’s a sample:

GDP does not, and cannot, reflect the waste of enormous effort, and precious natural resources, that went into building something that suddenly no one wants. Moreover, it misses many other aspects of our existence. Strip-mining a picturesque mountaintop, or clear-cutting a primeval forest, shows up in GDP only as a boost to output. Meanwhile, in India’s national accounts, all of Mother Teresa’slabors among the poor would have had only the most minimal possible impact. GDP can record how much money we spend on health care or education; it cannot tell us whether the services we are buying are any good.

So how do you accurately measure a nation’s health? One alternative is the HDI.

On helicopter parenting

Erich Vieth — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:25:00 +0000

Many parents are starting to wake up to the insanity of “helicopter parenting,” always striving to hover over their children, even as they get to be teenagers, in order to protect them from largely-imagined evils and to push them to be hyper-competitive. Helicopter parenting takes many forms, including over-scheduling children with enrichment activities and classes and fretting at each and every indication that a child is less than perfect.

When I was a child, I was fortunate that my parents sent me off to take guitar lessons for a half-hour per week. I appreciated that opportunity. Other than that one activity, though, I was pretty much on my own. I played a bit of soccer in grade school, but my parents almost never went to the games or practices, nor did I expect them too. There were no such things as “select” leagues, where parents would convince themselves that their child was the next Pele, justifying three games every weekend in far flung locations, some of them out-of-state.

As a child, I was allowed considerable time to do whatever I wanted, or to do nothing at all. When I was in the mood to play sports, it was usually a pick-up game, where the children knocked on doors to round up other players, choose the teams, gather their own bats and balls, officiated their own disputes and tend to their own minor injuries. During the summer we sometimes played sports most of the day, yet there were no parents anywhere to be seen. We were allowed to make lots of mistakes, thus allowing us to really learn many things, including how to really understand other people.

This was a refreshingly wonderful way to handle things, when looking in retrospect. This was much better than having 20 parents each driving one-hour round trips to watch their 15 fourth graders play 50 minutes of officially refereed soccer. To be sure, I think that team sports can be a good thing. It’s all the hovering parents that seems creepy. If most of the parents had shown up and shouted constant encouragement at my games as a 10-year old, I wouldn’t have felt loved–I would have wondered what was wrong with all of them. After all, it’s only a game, especially for young children.

Whenever you find middle or upper class families these days, things are entirely different than they were for me. Many parents simply won’t leave their kids alone; they are too terrified that if left to their own, their children will lose their competitive edges and miss out on the best college, the best job, or the best spouse. The schools that are “good” are too often those that dump several hours of daily homework on small children. Children are too often deemed to need special camps and tutoring, instead of allowing them to explore such things as cooking and critters in the back yard or nearby creek on their own. And the whole sordid phenomenon of helicopter parenting is thoroughly permeated with rampant consumerism.

Image by Troon Lifeboat (creative commons)

This week, Time Magazine has taken on helicopter parents in an impressively detailed article titled “The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting.” One of the people featured in the Time article is Lenore Skenazy, who advocates “Free Range Kids.”:

[T]oo many parents, says Skenazy, have the math all wrong. Refusing to vaccinate your children, as millions now threaten to do in the case of the swine flu, is statistically reckless; on the other hand, there are no reports of a child ever being poisoned by a stranger handing out tainted Halloween candy, and the odds of being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are about 1 in 1.5 million. When parents confront you with “How can you let him go to the store alone?,” she suggests countering with “How can you let him visit your relatives?” (Some 80% of kids who are molested are victims of friends or relatives.) Or ride in the car with you? (More than 430,000 kids were injured in motor vehicles last year.) “I’m not saying that there is no danger in the world or that we shouldn’t be prepared,” she says. “But there is good and bad luck and fate and things beyond our ability to change. The way kids learn to be resourceful is by having to use their resources.” Besides, she says with a smile, “a 100%-safe world is not only impossible. It’s nowhere you’d want to be.”

In the Time article, you can read that there has been a 25% drop in playtime (for 6-to-8 year olds) from 1981 to1997, while the amount of homework has doubled.

As Sting sings, if you love them, you’ve got to set them free. Otherwise, they’ll never learn to think for themselves and they’ll never turn be allowed to turn into the persons they were destined to become. Because the central message of helicopter parenting is that you don’t trust your children, helicopter parenting is a better way to ruin your child than to help your child. It’s a way to prevent your children from learning by playing, failing and then playing and failing some more. It’s a way to stifle cognitive development, by stealing play time from them.

It too often seems that all of this attention is forced onto children by parents who are working long hours away from their children and trying to make it up by lavishing perfection on their children. Regardless, too many of those who engage in helicopter parenting are not really hovering about for the sake of their children, no matter how much they protest. Rather, as the Time article suggests, they are focused solely on melding trophy children as an attempted display of their own parenting prowess.

U.S. falling far behind on the green race

Erich Vieth — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:42:24 +0000

Robert F. Kennedy recites some startling facts demonstrating that if you want to see how to really invest in one’s economy, you should follow the lead of China, not the United States:

The Chamber has continued to argue, idiotically, that energy efficiency and independence will somehow put America at a competitive disadvantage with the Chinese. Meanwhile, the Chinese have shrewdly and strategically positioned themselves to steal America’s once substantial lead in renewable power. China will soon make us as dependent on Chinese green technology for the next century as we have been on Saudi oil during the last.

While the U.S. is busy using massive amounts of tax dollars to prop up corrupt Wall Street banks, China is weaning itself off of fossil fuels.

The Onion examines Obama’s overuse of teleprompters

Erich Vieth — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:32:19 +0000

The ever-vigilant Onion Network News examines President Obama’s apparent over-reliance on the use of teleprompters:

Obama’s Home Teleprompter Malfunctions During Family Dinner

Use nudity when potentially child-killing chemicals don’t garner enough attention

Erich Vieth — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:10:52 +0000

Back in September, Senator Al Franken and Rep. Steve Israel has introduced the “Household Product Labeling Act,” which will enable consumers to determine whether potentially harmful chemicals are present in the household cleaning products they use. Here’s the full text of the Senate version of the Act. Here’s the problem:

In many households across the country, the entire family pitches in on household cleaning chores. The effort is obviously intended to keep everyone healthy by cutting down on germs, bacteria, and mold. But unfortunately, many of the ingredients in commonly used cleaning products may be dangerous themselves. Current law requires that product labels list immediately hazardous ingredients, but there is no labeling requirement for ingredients that may cause harm over time.

Many chemicals contained in household products have been shown to produce harmful health effects. Consumers have a right to know which of these potentially harmful chemicals might be present in their kitchen and bathroom cupboards. This information is particularly important to families with small children, who as we all know have more direct contact with floors and household surfaces. This legislation simply makes that information readily available to consumers, giving them the opportunity to make an informed choice about the chemicals they bring into their homes.

This is an incredibly important bill, because consumers should have a right to know the chemicals to which they are exposing their families (see here for related post). How do you promote a bill when the “mere” sickness and death fail to attract enough attention? A private company called Method decided to shoot this clever (and somewhat provocative) video:

We’re another step closer to auditing the Federal Reserve

Erich Vieth — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 05:25:57 +0000

This has been a long time coming. The Federal Reserve has never been audited. Ever. The House has now moved us a step closer to shedding real light on all of the secret deals:

The measure, cosponsored by Reps. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), authorizes the Government Accountability Office to conduct a wide-ranging audit of the Fed’s opaque deals with foreign central banks and major U.S. financial institutions. The Fed has never had a real audit in its history and little is known of what it does with the trillions of dollars at its disposal.

When do the prosecutions begin?

Erich Vieth — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:38:24 +0000

In the St. Louis alternative newspaper, The Riverfront Times, James Lieber sizes up the prosecutions now underway for the economic collapse. Oh, wait. There aren’t any prosecutions:

As it stands now, there is only one federal prosecution related to the credit crash and bailout cycle, and it was begun by the Bush administration’s Justice Department in June 2008.

Not that there aren’t culprits. Bernie Madoff and other accused Ponzi schemers like Allen Stanford are mere pickpockets compared with Wall Street’s institutional buccaneers, who so far have carted off up to $12.7 trillion — that’s nearly equal to the entire gross domestic product. They’ve multiplied their booty with billions in subsidies and a flood of derivatives — some of them merely old soured wine in new bottles. Today’s pirates are sailing away from the light regulatory scrutiny that apparently will continue in our benighted, weakened, financially top-heavy and bubble-addicted economy. [Former regulator William] Black says Obama’s current efforts are doomed to fail — and, in a twist, it’s for lack of trying. “There is not a single successful regulator giving him advice,” Black notes.

I’ve posted about William Black previously. Lieber describes him as follows: “a Ph.D. criminologist and lead lawyer at the Office of Thrift Supervision, who helped steer the brilliant federal effort that cleaned up the S&L industry and won more than 1,000 felony convictions of senior insiders while recovering millions of their ill-gotten dollars.” Black is someone to whom Obama should be listening. He states that there are two reasons why there aren’t vigorous ongoing prosecutions resulting from this collapse

1) “It’s difficult to prosecute others for securities fraud if you condoned the deals to begin with,” and

2) Obama administration lacks the will. Obama was the candidate most preferred by Wall Street and he has surrounded himself with lackeys for big finance, including not only Lawrence Summers and Tim Geithner, but also Attorney General Eric Holder, who has made it clear that white collar crime is something which he’d rather not prosecute.

Keep in mind that “Wall Street’s institutional buccaneers [have] so far have carted off up to $12.7 trillion, and that in 2008, In 2008 American households lost 18 percent of their wealth. Why aren’t there more prosecutions? There’s no good reason. This is an excellent in-depth article. The title: “No Justice: We’ve bailed out the banks. When do we go after the crooks behind our financial collapse?”

What we should all wish for our children -

Mindy Carney — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:58:19 +0000

Friday evening, I was fortunate enough to attend the 40th anniversary Founder’s Dinner for the elementary school my daughters attended. My youngest, thankfully, is still there. She only has a year left after this one, and already I can feel the size of the hole left in my life when I no longer have the community behind its Big Red Doors to mingle with every day. This young woman, Brittany Packnett, was one of the speakers, an alumnus of the school who has gone on to make a difference in many more young lives as teacher in Washington D.C. I was in tears as I listened to her, knowing that my girls are being blessed with the same underpinnings of which she so eloquently speaks. This is what education for all children should be about.

[Admin note: See also this related post on Howard Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences]

Intelligently designed t-shirts

Erich Vieth — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:21:44 +0000

Teach the Controversy is still busy hawking its new line of intelligently designed t-shirts. I decided to buy the shirt with a triceratops pulling a plow.

The Charter for Compassion: simple kind-hearted affirmation of others

Erich Vieth — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 05:05:40 +0000

Karen Armstrong’s “Charter for Compassion” is a new and eloquent re-affirmation of the golden rule. Her Charter is not based upon any particular religious tradition. Rather, it is based on the recognition that compassion (the golden rule) is the centerpiece for all worthy moral systems. Armstrong, formerly a nun was recently interviewed by Bill Moyers, and had this to say:

[T]his is the beginning of something. We’re writing a charter which we hope will be sort of like the charter of human rights, two pages only. Saying that compassion is far more important than belief. That it is the essence of religion. All the traditions teach that it is the practice of compassion and honoring the sacred in the other that brings us into the presence of what we call God, Nirvana, Raman, or Tao. And people are remarkably uneducated about compassion these days. So we want to bring it back to the center of attention. But then, it’s got to be incarnated into practical action.

. . . Compassion doesn’t mean feeling sorry for people. It doesn’t mean pity. It means putting yourself in the position of the other, learning about the other. Learning what’s motivating the other, learning about their grievances. So the Charter of Compassion was to recall compassion from the sidelines, to which it’s often put in religious discourse and put it back there.

I do believe that this type of approach is sorely needed in the modern world. We need an approach that can be embraced by every good-hearted person, religious or not. This Charter is something simple enough and powerful enough to combat the egoism, arrogant intellectualism, arrogant religions, consumerism and xenophobia that are screwing up so many of us.