Real Progress

Colin Beavan ("No Impact Man") discusses progress:

2009 had cooler cell phones than 2008. 2010 has cooler cell phones than 2009. 2011 will have even cooler cell phones than 2010.

That won't be progress. Year in, year out, we have cooler cell phones. If it's the same year in, year out, how can it be progress? Because it's not actually progress. It's more of the same . . .

Far away from us, one billion people in the world have no access to clean drinking water. Because of this, far away from us, a child dies of diarrhea every 15 seconds . . .

Ask the average person: Do you want to watch TV on your cell phone or save the world's children from dying of diarrhea? I know what they'd say. People are good . . .

What would be real progress? . . .

When we find a way to concentrate on bringing clean drinking water to the billion people who don't have it instead of looking for a way to bring better TV reception to our cell phones.

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About good hair

Tonight, the parents of my children's school were given a chance to view and discuss the 2009 Chris Rock movie: "Good Hair." As you can see from the following YouTube trailer, the film is characterized as a "comedy," and there were certainly many lighthearted moments throughout the film. On the other hand, the subject of the film is also tragic, in that it is the story of millions of African-American women who have been convinced that their natural hair is not beautiful. Chris Rock documents the extreme lengths that many African-American women go to to cover up their African-American hair. The story starts when one of Rock's young daughters asked him, "Daddy, why don't I have good hair?" What can an African-American woman do when she wants to have "good hair"? The options include the use of highly caustic sodium hydroxide for straightening the hair (with its potential for painfully scalding the skin). I knew about that particular practice, but I had no idea that so many African-American women have actually covered up their own hair with "weaves," straight dark human hair grown by women from other cultures. Rock traces some of the most sought-after weave hair to India. Many Indian women periodically give up their hair (having their heads shaved completely bald) in religious ceremonies called "tonsure." From those temple rituals, that hair somehow ends up in the United States, where it is purchased by African-American women at prices ranging from $1,000 on up. It's even more amazing to consider that so many women of modest means work so hard to cover up their hair with weaves. Several of the women stated that an African-American woman simply cannot succeed in the business world without hair that has been straightened or covered with a weave. Many of the women featured in the film indicated that taking care of a weave is extraordinarily difficult--no swimming for these women, and many of them wouldn't dream of ever letting a man touch their delicate fake hair, even their lover. I had no idea that so many women would go to such extraordinary lengths to have "proper" hair, or that so many women consider it to be more "natural" to display hair that is not their own natural hair. Watching this film was a wonderful anthropological journey for me; this story is thoroughly about people and in the lengths to which they will go to display themselves in what they see to be culturally appropriate ways; it's not just about hair. I truly enjoyed viewing the delightful interviews of the many people Chris Rock artfully stirred into his vivid mosaic. The broader lesson is not about hair, or even about African-Americans. It seems to be about consumerism and the deep need of humans to display their traits to each other in expensive ways.

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Measuring subjective happiness

In the January 29, 2010 issue of Science (available online only to subscribers), Richard Layard considers whether subjective reports are valid ways of measuring the well-being of a population. After all, we've been hearing some rather extraordinary findings of studies over the years based upon subjective happiness. For instance, studies consistently show that higher national income does not increase "quality of life," (defined by subjective happiness). In fact, based on studies relying on subjective judgment, there has been no increase in happiness over the past 50 years in the United States. Layard asks a fundamental question: "Can subjective well-being really be measured well enough to be used in policy analyses?" Even though the science of measuring happiness is "very young," Layard indicates that subjective measures of happiness are well correlated with at least five relevant sets of variables:

The reports of friends; the possible causes of well-being; some possible effects of well-being; physical functioning, such as levels of cortisol; and measures of brain activity.

There is good reason to be optimistic that we will get better at measuring happiness. "Fifty years ago, there was considerable debate on how to measure depression, but by now this has become much less controversial in all likelihood, the measurement of happiness will become similarly less controversial." As we fine-tune our methods of measuring of subjective happiness, Layard believes we will be better able to monitor trends of happiness, we will deal to identify problem groups within populations and we will be better able to determine why some people are happy and others are not. Better measurements will certainly allow us determine quality of life better than the many efforts to do so in terms of money. What's at stake according to Layard? As we leave behind our crude financial measurements of the quality of life and continue to develop better methods of measuring subjective happiness, "it will produce very different priorities for our society."

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