Quotulatiousness

September 21, 2022

Pierre Poilievre’s (very modern) modern family

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Rahim Mohamed discusses how the Poilievre family makes it difficult for Liberal propagandists to portray Poilievre as some sort of ultra-nationalist white supremacist (as they clearly would if they could):

Pierre and Ana Poilievre at a Conservative leadership rally, 21 April, 2022.
Photo by Wikipageedittor099 via Wikimedia Commons.

This is a critical moment for any new party leader. Poilievre need only look at his most immediate predecessor, Erin O’Toole, for an example of how quickly it can go wrong. After tacking to the right of rival Peter MacKay to win the party’s 2020 leadership race, O’Toole pivoted sharply to the centre once Conservative party leader, courting labour unions, calling himself a “progressive conservative” and backtracking on a promise to protect the conscience rights of pro-life doctors and nurses. O’Toole’s “authenticity problem” remained a storyline throughout his rocky tenure at the helm of the Conservative party.

Poilievre executed, successfully, an uncommonly combative and partisan frontrunner campaign, making any notion of a centrist pivot a total non-starter. He has tacked even further to the right than O’Toole did as a leadership candidate: branding moderate rival Jean Charest “a Liberal”, sparring with Leslyn Lewis over who supported this winter’s convoy protests first, leading “defund the CBC” chants at his rallies; and, perhaps most brazenly, promising to bar federal ministers from attending the World Economic Forum (a bête noire of far-right conspiracy theorists).

So how will Poilievre (re-)introduce himself to Canadian voters? If his first week as Conservative party leader is any indication, his telegenic, multicultural and decidedly “modern” family will be central to his efforts to cast himself in a softer, more prime ministerial light.

After the results of the leadership vote were announced, the first person to address Conservative party members was not the party’s new leader himself, but his Venezuelan-born wife Ana. Ana Poilievre (née Anaida Galindo) delivered a confident and well-received set of introductory remarks, cycling effortlessly between English, French and Spanish throughout the five-minute-long address.

The most effective moments of Ana Poilievre’s speech centred on her family’s hardscrabble journey from a comfortable middle-class existence in pre-Chavez Venezuela to precariously living paycheque-to-paycheque in the East End of Montreal. “My father went from wearing business suits and managing a bank to jumping on the back of a truck to collect fruits and vegetables,” she reminisced with her family in attendance; adding, “there is no greater dignity than to provide for your own family” to one of the loudest rounds of applause of the evening. These words captured the Galindo family’s distinct immigrant story, yet undoubtedly resonated with thousands of immigrants and first-generation Canadians across the country. (My own parents, for what it’s worth, were forced to start from scratch after being exiled from their birth country of Uganda as young adults.)

Pierre Poilievre returned to this theme in the victory speech that followed: “my wife’s family not only raised this incredible woman, but they came to this country … with almost nothing; and they have since started businesses, raised kids, served in the military, and like so many immigrant families, built our country.” He went on to thank members of his own family, including his (adoptive) father’s same-sex partner Ross and his biological mother Jackie (who gave Poilievre up for adoption after having him as a teenager). “We’re a complicated and mixed-up bunch … like our country,” he later joked.

All kidding aside, no major federal party leader has ever had a family that looks more like Canada. Members of Poilievre’s extended family span multiple nationalities and speak English, French and Spanish as first languages. He has a South American wife, an adoptive father who is in a relationship with another man, and a biological mother who’s young enough to be his sister — Pierre Poilievre is basically a character from the hit sitcom Modern Family. The governing Liberals, who have made identity politics central to their party brand and spent the past seven months trying to connect Poilievre to white supremacism, should be worried.

September 5, 2022

We’ve somehow moved from “women who want to have it all” to “the servant problem” in less than a generation

Filed under: Economics, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Ed West’s weekly round-up post, he links to this article by Helen Andrews about the cultural shift for women since the sexual revolution:

People are always more likely to believe a lie if it’s plausible. The lie that women can have it all has as many adherents today as it does because it’s not obvious why it should be a lie. Have a career and a family: why not? There are enough hours in the day. The challenge of refuting the lie that women can have it all — that is, that they can prioritize career and family equally — lies in the fact that the trade-offs that make it impossible are hidden, not obvious, because mathematically it’s not something that should be impossible.

If only employers would do more to accommodate working women, if alternatives could be found to fulfill duties at home that mothers used to do for themselves, like childcare and housework. But the more you start thinking about those accommodations and thinking not just about what it means for any one woman to have it all, but for society to be restructured around women having it all, the more impossible those trade-offs start to seem.

Obviously there are women today in America who are trying to have it all, and many appear to be doing so successfully, at least insofar as they have both demanding careers and children. But look more closely at those households, and almost invariably you’ll see that behind every woman who is balancing work and family, there is an army of low-paid labor, immigrant cleaning ladies, nannies who are paid cash under the table, Door Dash delivery men who deliver the meals that mom never had time to cook. It’s no coincidence that the vast increase in female workforce participation has coincided with the reappearance of something that the more egalitarian America of the early 20th century did not have, and that is a servant class.

America today is more prosperous than it was 70 years ago, and yet it is no longer possible for an ordinary worker to support a middle-class family on a single income. The story of how that happened is bound up into a lie that has become gospel today, which is the lie that women can have it all. Undergirding that lie is a further lie that the Republican Party can have it all. The GOP has very much hitched itself to the idea that it can be the party of stay-at-home moms and girl bosses equally. Again, superficially this seems like it ought to be possible. Live and let live, it’s a free country. But this bargain is unsustainable in practice. We only have to look at the last 30 years to understand why.

The official position of the Republican Party today is that the government’s job is to make it possible for everyone to make the right choice for their family. This rhetoric of maximizing choice requires politicians to talk as if some women will choose to be moms and some will choose to be girl bosses, and it’s really 50/50 which one you end up being. You know, both are equally valid. Who’s to say one is better? But that’s just false, and it’s false according to women’s own preferences. The number of women who say they do not want to have children is very low, in the single digits, around 5% — and that’s just the number who will tell surveys that they predict they won’t have kids when their childbearing years are over. The number of women who actually reach old age and feel satisfied with their life, being just a girl boss with no children to keep them company, is even lower.

Squaring away all this family happiness is and ought to be a higher priority than maximizing women’s career success. It is also a more urgent priority. A woman cannot simply wake up at age 35 and decide she wants to have a family. Everyone says that the sexual revolution was brought about by the advent of the contraceptive pill, which was supposedly ushered in at an amazing new age of a new human experience thanks to science. But it actually changed a lot less than we think. We’ve gotten quite good at not having children when we don’t want to have them, but the science that gave us the pill has not made us very much better at making children arrive when we do.

July 22, 2022

Sexual liberation to sexual revolution to … today’s sexual desert

Filed under: Health, History, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray thinks that the sexual revolution “missed a turn, somewhere out in the desert”:

The discussion of what we didn’t mean to do is becoming an interesting one:

After decades of sexual liberation — Mattachine, Stonewall, Loving v. Virginia, Griswold v. Connecticut, Second Wave feminism and the Sexual Revolution, Lawrence v. Texas, Obergefell v. Hodges, and whatever else I’m missing in there (and I’m not sure Roe belongs on the list, but maybe) — we somehow arrive at a moment in which we merge a sexualized display of childhood and a relentless media-driven commodification of sexuality with the very clear reality that nobody’s having any sex:

    One of the most comprehensive sex studies to date — the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior — found evidence of declines in all types of partnered sexual activity in the U.S. Over the course of the study from 2009 to 2018, those surveyed reported declines in penile-vaginal intercourse, anal sex and partnered masturbation …

    Over the last 22 years, Herbenick has co-authored several studies about our sexual activity. Her most recent research finds that all of us, regardless of age, are having less sex, with the most dramatic decline among teenagers.

    At the start of the study in 2009, 79% of those ages 14 to 17, revealed they were not having sex. By 2018, that number rose to 89%.

Liberation stabbed pleasure in the heart; we emptied sex. Hypersexualization turns out to be desexualization. The unrelenting joylessness and death odor of contemporary sexual culture emerges from seventy years of growing openness and freedom. How?

There’s no way to fully cover a question of that scope in a single post — but I refer, as a start, to the earlier posts I wrote about the sexualization of childhood and the way Jim Jones used sex as a weapon. Breaking barriers and repressive anchors broke connections and reference points: Yes, some people were trapped in oppressive societal norms, and it’s not at all my view that all the sexual liberation in our past wasn’t really liberating. But we broke marriage to set people free, and whoops. Some people experienced bourgeois heteronormativity as a prison, and so set out to release everybody from their cages, which seem to have not been cages for a whole lot of people. Congratulations, we’ve freed you from being part of a family.

July 8, 2022

The Early Emperors – Part 7: The Imperial Women

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published 11 Jan 2022

The Roman Empire was the last and the greatest of the ancient empires. It is the origin from which springs the history of Western Europe and those nations that descend from Western Europe. It is the political entity within which the Christian Faith was born, and the growth of the Church within the Empire, and its eventual establishment as the sole faith of the Empire, have left an indelible impression on all modern denominations. Its history, together with that of the ancient Greeks and the Jews, is our history. To understand how the Empire emerged from a great though finally dysfunctional republic, and how it was consolidated by its early rulers, is partly how we understand ourselves.

Here is a series of lectures given by Sean Gabb in late 2021, in which he discusses and tries to explain the achievement of the early Emperors. For reasons of politeness and data protection, all student contributions have been removed.

More by Sean Gabb on the Ancient World: https://www.classicstuition.co.uk/

Learn Latin or Greek or both with him: https://www.udemy.com/user/sean-gabb/

His historical novels (under the pen name “Richard Blake”): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Richard-Blak…

June 28, 2022

QotD: The economic pie fallacy

Filed under: Economics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A surprising number of people retain from childhood the idea that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world. There is, in any normal family, a fixed amount of money at any moment. But that’s not the same thing.

When wealth is talked about in this context, it is often described as a pie. “You can’t make the pie larger,” say politicians. When you’re talking about the amount of money in one family’s bank account, or the amount available to a government from one year’s tax revenue, this is true. If one person gets more, someone else has to get less.

I can remember believing, as a child, that if a few rich people had all the money, it left less for everyone else. Many people seem to continue to believe something like this well into adulthood. This fallacy is usually there in the background when you hear someone talking about how x percent of the population have y percent of the wealth. If you plan to start a startup, then whether you realize it or not, you’re planning to disprove the Pie Fallacy.

What leads people astray here is the abstraction of money. Money is not wealth. It’s just something we use to move wealth around. So although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth. Wealth has been getting created and destroyed (but on balance, created) for all of human history.

Suppose you own a beat-up old car. Instead of sitting on your butt next summer, you could spend the time restoring your car to pristine condition. In doing so you create wealth. The world is — and you specifically are — one pristine old car the richer. And not just in some metaphorical way. If you sell your car, you’ll get more for it.

In restoring your old car you have made yourself richer. You haven’t made anyone else poorer. So there is obviously not a fixed pie. And in fact, when you look at it this way, you wonder why anyone would think there was. *

Kids know, without knowing they know, that they can create wealth. If you need to give someone a present and don’t have any money, you make one. But kids are so bad at making things that they consider home-made presents to be a distinct, inferior, sort of thing to store-bought ones — a mere expression of the proverbial thought that counts. And indeed, the lumpy ashtrays we made for our parents did not have much of a resale market.

    * In the average car restoration you probably do make everyone else microscopically poorer, by doing a small amount of damage to the environment. While environmental costs should be taken into account, they don’t make wealth a zero-sum game. For example, if you repair a machine that’s broken because a part has come unscrewed, you create wealth with no environmental cost.

Paul Graham, “How to Make Wealth”, Paul Graham, 2004-04.

April 9, 2022

“Woke Disney” is far from a new thing

Filed under: Books, Business, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Geoff Shullenberger points out that Disney’s reputation for family-friendly media rests rather uneasily on the corporation’s actual products:

“Disney is the worst enemy of family harmony.” You’d be forgiven for thinking those words were uttered yesterday, given the number of conservative politicians and pundits castigating Disney for “grooming children” following its criticism of the “Don’t say gay” bill.

In fact, the statement appeared just over 50 years ago, in a polemical analysis of Disney cartoons written by two Marxist militants, the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman and the Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic was published in Chile during the brief rule of Salvador Allende as part of an attempt by Allende’s leftist allies to push back against American cultural influence. The book became a bestseller, but after Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup, it was banned and publicly burned.

The Right’s current lament for the betrayal of “traditional families who want to hold onto innocent entertainment for their kids” proceeds from the premise that this “woke Disney” is a deviation from the company’s benevolent past. But Dorfman and Mattelart, all the way back in 1971, contested this assumption of innocence. Although their methodology is Marxian and their aims overtly anti-capitalist, their allegations foreshadow the American Right’s current concerns in surprising ways.

[…]

How to Read Donald Duck contains many of the expected Left-wing criticisms of patriarchy and gender roles, but it also includes observations that might be surprising to ideologues today. Notably, as one illustration of the propaganda functions taken on by Disney in the Global South, the authors remark that the US Agency for International Development has circulated films featuring Disney characters promoting contraception. They reinforce this association with the title of their chapter on Disney family dynamics: “Uncle, buy me a contraceptive …”

Like many radicals at the time, Dorfman and Mattelart saw the US state’s growing interest in controlling fertility in the developing world as consistent with a broader campaign to suppress the value placed on family in the subject nations of its economic empire; this was deemed to be in tension with values such as efficiency, productivity, individualism, and competition. Disney’s exclusion of references to reproductive sexuality, in this light, looks less like an attempt to protect childhood innocence, than part and parcel of the larger modern decoupling of sex from reproduction.

It all suggests that the supposed sexual innocence of Disney’s dreamscapes was never aligned with “family values” in the first place and the Right’s current war on Disney isn’t about family — it is simply the latest phase of its realisation that corporate America has now largely aligned itself with the values of the cultural Left.

For, in fact, Disney’s vast influence on the imaginations of children has been enabled by market society’s weakening of the authority of the family. With parents overburdened by the demands of work, important aspects of child-rearing are entrusted to the entertainment industry. Disney has capitalised on this exploding demand more than any other company. If we take “grooming” to simply mean instilling values alien to the family into children, Dorfman and Mattelart would suggest that Disney has never been innocent of this charge.

December 22, 2021

QotD: Sibling rivalry

Filed under: Food, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It’s only natural to feel competitive with your siblings. I recall all of those Christmas mornings, as my brother and sister and I compared gifts to figure out which one of us was the least beloved. This was important information because we adjusted our levels of misbehavior to match the rewards. There’s no point in being extra good if the presents are just okay.

Mealtime was competitive too. The winner was the one who moved the greatest percentage of my father’s income through his or her digestive system. I was in my thirties before someone told me that eating is not a speed sport.

Scott Adams, Dilbert Newsletter 61.0, 2005-10-25.

November 10, 2021

Wives – What Soldiers Left Behind – WW2 – On the Homefront 012

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 9 Nov 2021

With men away at the front, couples have to separate and manage the struggle of war on their own. For women who stay at home, this is not any easier than for the man: worry, longing, loneliness, meaningless sex, the temptation of falling in love with others – it is an emotional rollercoaster.
(more…)

September 4, 2021

QotD: Modern childhood

Filed under: Health, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

While it’s hard to argue against safer playgrounds, it’s also true that by design the transparent playground offers kids no privacy. “As [playgrounds] were childproofed to improve safety, they inadvertently reduced the opportunities for the young to take part in forms of fantasy, sensory, and exploratory play, and construction activities apart from adults,” writes historian Mintz. “Unstructured, unsupervised free play outside the home drastically declined for middle-class children. As more mothers joined the labor force, parents arranged more structured, supervised activities for their children. Unstructured play and outdoor activities for children 3 to 11 declined nearly 40 percent between the early 1980s and the late 1990s. Because of parental fear of criminals and bad drivers, middle-class children rarely got the freedom to investigate and master their home turf in ways that once proved a rehearsal for the real world.”

So much for the roving pack of kids each block boasted during Mintz’s childhood, and my own. “The empty lot has disappeared,” he quips. “And we are so concerned with legal liability that if kids do find one, you’d better be sure you’ll get a call from the police.”

Beth Hawkins, “Safe Child Syndrome: Protecting kids to death”, City Pages, Volume 26 – Issue 1267 (posted to the old blog, 2005-03-31).

August 14, 2021

QotD: Modern parenting

Filed under: Health, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I took an informal poll of parents I know. At what age or stage of development can Mom or Dad go ahead and sit down, reasonably assured their little darlings will survive a solo whirl on the jungle gym? Instead of a hard-and-fast answer, what I got was the sense that we hover for numerous and complicated reasons. We fear school buses, babysitters, and sometimes even Grandma and Grandpa, who may not know any better than to let the baby cry a little on her way to sleep. We’re scared adversity will scar our kids or, conversely, that they’ll be bored — a condition that, left untreated, might turn them into school shooters.

But we also fear their independence. We’re up there in the climber because we can’t afford to miss a minute of face time, you see. We believe our physical presence is the linchpin to the children’s emotional well-being and, although we never say so out loud, we want it that way — because it’s central to our well-being. We’re scared the kids will grow up to resent the fact that Mommy works, or — the biggest golem on the list — they just plain won’t like us. And in an age of high divorce rates and transient communities, kids who don’t like us suggest the possibility that we might really end up alone.

Beth Hawkins, “Safe Child Syndrome: Protecting kids to death”, City Pages, Volume 26 – Issue 1267 (posted to the old blog, 2005-04-01).

December 26, 2020

Repost – The market failure of Christmas

Filed under: Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Not to encourage miserliness and general miserability at Christmastime, but here’s a realistic take on the deadweight loss of Christmas gift-giving:

Christmas gifts under the tree.
Photo by Kelvin Kay via Wikimedia Commons.

In strict economic terms, the most efficient gift is cold, hard cash, but exchanging equivalent sums of money lacks festive spirit and so people take their chance on the high street. This is where the market fails. Buyers have sub-optimal information about your wants and less incentive than you to maximise utility. They cannot always be sure that you do not already have the gift they have in mind, nor do they know if someone else is planning to give you the same thing. And since the joy is in the giving, they might be more interested in eliciting a fleeting sense of amusement when the present is opened than in providing lasting satisfaction. This is where Billy Bass comes in.

But note the reason for this inefficient spending. Resources are misallocated because one person has to decide what someone else wants without having the knowledge or incentive to spend as carefully as they would if buying for themselves. The market failure of Christmas is therefore an example of what happens when other people spend money on our behalf. The best person to buy things for you is you. Your friends and family might make a decent stab at it. Distant bureaucrats who have never met us — and who are spending other people’s money — perhaps can’t.

So when you open your presents next week and find yourself with another garish tie or an awful bottle of perfume, consider this: If your loved ones don’t know you well enough to make spending choices for you, what chance does the government have?

May 15, 2020

Protecting the Innocent – Kids Evacuations – On the Homefront 003

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published 14 May 2020

The European powers may be at war but there’s now thing they can agree on: their young must be protected. So, before the first RAF or Luftwaffe bombs were even dropped on cities, countries are drawing up plans to save as many lives of their youth as they possibly can.

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Hosted by: Anna Deinhard
Written by: Isabel Wilson and Spartacus Olsson
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Isabel Wilson
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Sources:
USHMM
Bundesarchiv
IWM LN 6194, HU 36871, D 2238, D 10457, D 2592, D 5081, D 24903, IWM D 15530, D 2045, HU 3323, Art.IWM PST 3095, Art.IWM PST 13854, Art.IWM PST 15100, D 9211, D 824, D 257, D 5665, D 2224, D 1939A, F 4422
Portrait of John Anderson, courtesy Yousuf Karsh, Dutch National Archives
from the Noun Project: students by Piotrek Chuchla, mother by Mr. Minuvi, Pregnant by Wojciech Zasina, bag by Nabilauzwa, Gas Mask by Nico Ilk from the Noun Project, Underwear by The Icon Z, baby clothes by Llisole, espadrilles shoes by Edwin PM, socks by Анна Пасечная, Toothbrush by amantaka, Comb by Randall Barriga, towel by Pixelz Studio, handkerchief by Vectors Market, soap by Jae Deasigner, coat by Ilham Juliandi, Food by Atif Arshad

Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Reynard Seidel – “Deflection”
Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”
Johannes Bornlof – “Deviation In Time”
Farell Wooten – “Blunt Object”
Jo Wandrini – “Puzzle Of Complexity”
Gavin Luke – “Drifting Emotions 3”
Howard Harper-Barnes – “Prescient”
Fabien Tell – “Last Point of Safe Return”
Andreas Jamsheree – “Guilty Shadows 4”

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

World War Two
5 hours ago (edited)
Welcome back to another episode of On the Homefront! Researching this episode about evacuations was a fun one to dive to because in the UK, we learn about about children evacuees during the war but of course what we’re not taught is the mass scale of this operation. For each of the millions of children displaced during the war, they each came away with it with their own story and I hope I’ve captured that here. Looking forward to reading your comments! Be sure to follow us over on instagram at https://www.instagram.com/world_war_two_realtime/ and let us know what other aspects of life on the homefront you’d like to hear about!

Cheers,
Izzy

April 7, 2020

Cultural factors in the spread of the Wuhan Coronavirus

Filed under: Europe, Health, Italy, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sarah Hoyt explains why any computer model involving actual human beings might as well begin with “Assume a Spherical Cow of Uniform Density in a Frictionless Vacuum“:

Image from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/96644/plausibility-of-floating-whales

What I do know is that — are you ready? — human societies, involving multiple nations or even our own culturally diverse, geographically spread out nation, are not now nor will they ever be a spherical cow of uniform density in friction-less vacuum.

So … why is it that even now that they admit the scary Imperial model is insane, our authorities, from federal on down are treating the US as though it were just that mythical cow, and on top of that exactly the same as the cow in Italy, Spain or France.

[…] but here’s the thing: Italy has a completely different culture. Yes, it also has a sclerotic, understaffed and just impoverished healthcare system. (Yes, every time I post that I have to spam a million comments telling me how well the WHO ranked Italy — which is great, except the WHO ranks a single payer system above everything else, including outcomes — and how Lombardy is the envy of Italy or something, which leads me to say “Sucks to be you.”)

However, that’s just a factor in the debacle. The other factor is culture and no one is taking it into account. Multi-generational families live together (I should throw stones, yes) or in the same house which becomes a sort of compound. (This is common to all Mediterranean cultures. I grew up in such a compound until the age of six.) which means that while Grandma isn’t abandoned to the tender mercies of Haitian health workers, it’s also really hard to isolate her when little Guido gets the never-get-well at school and cheerfully brings it home. Even when they don’t live together, extended families have a level of closeness that freaks out even the closest American families. If you and your relatives live within driving distance of each other and don’t see each other every other day, there’s something wrong.

Every house is a continuous cacophony of visiting relatives and friends. In safer times, we just left the back door unlocked because it was easier than answering the doorbell every five minutes. When I first got married, I had the TV on all day, because otherwise the house was so silent, it freaked me out. (I left Disney channel on all day, because it was less likely to startle me with explosions or evil laughter. This led my inlaws to believe I only understood “English for children” (rolls eyes.) I wasn’t even in the room with it. I just needed that noise, or I freaked out, because of the habit of a lifetime.

The freakiest thing in my exchange student years was that my family never had people drop by, several times a week, just because.

On top of that, of course, a lot of the younger people live in stack-a-prole apartments with shared air, and most people commute by train or bus or something.

Now, in Portugal at least most trains and buses aren’t as full as they were in my youth. You are rarely packed in like sardines. But it’s still public transport, and at rush hour every seat is taken and there are people standing.

As much as I get sick here, I got sick way more often there, and had a few really close calls, starting at about thirteen. Because you live in each other’s pockets.

And I understand that in Italy, as in Portugal, as in, for instance, France, people kiss a lot more. Adult men might not, unless they’re close(ish) relatives, but women and children get kissed by everyone from close kin to total strangers.

All of those create conditions for the virus to explode. In Italy, in France, in Spain. I understand it’s not exploded nearly as much in Portugal, but I also wonder how much of that is Portuguese reluctance to go to the doctor or the hospital. Because “the hospital is where you die.” (Yes, sue me. Some cultural assumptions remain. Which is why my husband is the one who normally drags me to the hospital.) Because, you see, we DO know for at least one of the clusters, the hospital was making it worse. Go to the hospital for any other reason, catch Winnie the Flu.

February 24, 2020

QotD: Not the village, not the family … the individual

Filed under: Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Liberals say, “It takes a village” to make a society great and strong.

The conservatives reply, “No, it does not take a village; it takes a family.”

Both sides are wrong. It takes an individual. It takes an individual to accomplish even modest goals. It takes a special kind of individual to accomplish great things. More often than not, individuals accomplish what they do in spite of the family, or in spite of the village.

It takes an individual to think, conceptualize, plan, and create. It takes an individual to rise above mediocrity, fear, and toward new discoveries.

“Families” do not work, study, and make a living. Individuals do. “Villages” do not discover electricity, or cure terrible diseases. Individuals do. Families and villages are not mystical entities. The are comprised of individuals. It is the brightest, and most creative, of those individuals upon whom the family and village depend.

Michael J. Hurd, “It Takes An Individual”, Capitalism Magazine, 2005-08-11.

December 25, 2019

Repost – The market failure of Christmas

Filed under: Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Not to encourage miserliness and general miserability at Christmastime, but here’s a realistic take on the deadweight loss of Christmas gift-giving:

Christmas gifts under the tree.
Photo by Kelvin Kay via Wikimedia Commons.

In strict economic terms, the most efficient gift is cold, hard cash, but exchanging equivalent sums of money lacks festive spirit and so people take their chance on the high street. This is where the market fails. Buyers have sub-optimal information about your wants and less incentive than you to maximise utility. They cannot always be sure that you do not already have the gift they have in mind, nor do they know if someone else is planning to give you the same thing. And since the joy is in the giving, they might be more interested in eliciting a fleeting sense of amusement when the present is opened than in providing lasting satisfaction. This is where Billy Bass comes in.

But note the reason for this inefficient spending. Resources are misallocated because one person has to decide what someone else wants without having the knowledge or incentive to spend as carefully as they would if buying for themselves. The market failure of Christmas is therefore an example of what happens when other people spend money on our behalf. The best person to buy things for you is you. Your friends and family might make a decent stab at it. Distant bureaucrats who have never met us — and who are spending other people’s money — perhaps can’t.

So when you open your presents next week and find yourself with another garish tie or an awful bottle of perfume, consider this: If your loved ones don’t know you well enough to make spending choices for you, what chance does the government have?

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