Gallup LGBT numbers

Interesting results from a new Gallup survey of 121,000 Americans on sexual preference.  The overall number: 3.4% identify as lesbian, gay, bi, or transgender.  (The poll specifically asked about identification, rather than experience.)

But the bigger news is further on in the story: people under 30 identified as LGBT at a rate nearly twice as high: 6.4%.  (Less than 2% of seniors do.)  This surely relates to society’s increasing acceptance, and suggests that the number could be higher yet in a completely accepting society.

By a small margin, more women than men identify that way (which is opposite what some earlier surveys found).  But this effect is far stronger for under-30′s: women 8.3%, men 4.6%.

4.4% didn’t know or wouldn’t say.  We shouldn’t overinterpret that, but I’d say if you don’t know your sexual orientation, you’re probably not a Kinsey 0.

Intriguingly, there are also strong correlations by race: the overall number is 4.6% for blacks, 4.5% for Latinos, and 4.3% for Asians.  I would have expected the opposite.  The rate also goes down with income level.

 

A holiday on Elliðaey

If you found this place in a video game you’d say “That’s pretty, but it sure doesn’t look realistic.”

Time to mow the lawn again?

This is the island of Elliðaey off Iceland.  It’s uninhabited– the house is used for puffin hunting.

It seems like a great place to weather the zombie apocalypse.

 

The importance of ‘although’

Here’s a fascinating article on how an NY high school turned itself around by teaching writing– intensively, and in every course except math.  The graduation rate went up from 63% to 80%; the pass rates for the English Regents test went from 67% to 80% in just two years.

The heart of the article is the discovery process, where the teachers kept analyzing why their students were unable to write simple paragraphs in English.  They discovered, among other things, that the kids didn’t understand words like although and despite.  Asked to write a sentence begining Although… many wrote something like Although George and Lenny were friends.

And that in turn meant they couldn’t write (or follow) complex sentences, and didn’t know the protocols for writing persuasively.

The article complains that many teachers had been following a method where writing was supposed to be “caught, not taught”.  The interesting discussion at MeFi suggests that this is a bit of a mischaracterization.  The creative writing approach, as one commenter put it, wasn’t invented by “hippie idiots”; it was based on empirical observation.  The problem was that the obervation was too narrow; it was based on independent-minded kids who came from reading-intensive households.

That would describe me.  I had some great English teachers, but I always loved reading, and I taught myself as much as I ever learned in school.  I probably wouldn’t have liked the method described in the article… too time-consuming when I’d rather be writing my own stuff.

Another commenter worries that this will spark one more fad… one problem with education is that methods and evaluations change seemingly capriciously every year or two.  Perhaps the real lesson is that this school and its teachers were allowed to figure out for themselves what was necessary and what would work. Motivated teachers really paying attention to what the kids are doing… that works.  It doesn’t mean it’d work if you packaged it up and sold it to or forced it on schools nationwide.

 

De Soto and property

In 1989 the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto published a remarkable book, The Other Path, a detailed exploration of the extralegal economy, mostly based on his research in Peru.  He pointed out that the informales controlled 60% of the Peruvian economy, and his group painstakingly documented the barriers to full legality.  To open a tiny garment factory, for instance, took nearly a year as well as fees totalling five times the monthly minimum wage.  (And none of this red tape had any actual social utility: not a single bureaucrat actually asked to see the factory.)

In 2000 he published a follow-up, The Mystery of Capital, which presents research in more countries (Egypt, Haiti, the Philippines, and Mexico) and makes a bolder thesis: that extralegality is itself an oppressive situation that results in the underdevelopment of the Third World.  In the Philippines, for instance, he estimates that extralegal property alone is worth $132 billion– four times the value of all the firms on the country’s stock market.

As he documents, the informals have their own property arrangements among themselves for recognizing ownership.  So why is legalization important?  Mostly because titles allow mortgages.  He points out that 70% of new businesses in the US raise capital by mortgaging property.   There are other benefits as well, from the use of the court system to access to insurance to better relations with law enforcement.  Informal companies can do a lot but they can’t expand into major companies or take advantage of economies of scale.

Just recording titles isn’t enough, and he criticizes governments who think high-tech computer mapping is all they need.  People will only use systems that seem fair to them, and that means recognizing and regularizing the informal systems they’ve developed themselves.  To make it all work requires work by politicians, lawyers, banks, and the residents themselves.

Intriguingly, he shows that the same problems hit the US, Europe, and Japan.  In the US, for instance, in theory the government managed the westward expansion, selling land to settlers.  In practice much of the settlement was started by squatters.  There were big fights in the 1800s over this, and a slow turn from fighting the squatters to recognizing them as valuable agents who were creating national wealth.

De Soto has been highly praised on the right, though I have a sense his friends haven’t read him very carefully.  He’s taken as praising capitalism, supporting property rights, and lauding small businessmen… stuff the right thinks it’s doing.  But he’s actually a severe critic of capitalism, and warns that globalization and capitalism are largely failures in the Third World, because nothing has been done to address the systems that exclude the poor.  “Capitalism” in the Third World all too often is limited to little bubbles in the capital where First World rules apply, and the elites aren’t even aware of the obstacles that prevent the bubbles from expanding to serve the whole nation.

On the left I think he’s largely ignored, or else assumed to be an apologist for the elites or for globalizing capitalism, which he certainly is not.  His main point is that the poor have enormous energy and want to be part of the system, and the system should make reforms to let them in.  Third World legal systems largely assume that the legal sector is a tiny, urban phenomenon; it did not anticipate and can’t handle the flood of millions of people who prefer the opportunities of urban life.

If you’ve never read him, I recommend either book– I really don’t think development in the Third World can be understood without confronting his ideas.  They’re not a program for utopia– we have property rights here and that doesn’t prevent us from being pretty messed up.  But much of the world would love to advance to our organizational level.  It’s just absurd to maintain the levels of corruption and red tape that he describes; they are certainly real obstacles to people building prosperous economies and should be fixed pronto.

On the whole, I think the first book was stronger.  The second adds more cases, plus some salutary lessons from US history, but it’s often repetitive and relies a little too much on exhortation and cutesy metaphors.  He’s been involved with actual legalization programs, and I wish there were more details on how those have gone and what lessons have been learned.

(The last ten years have maybe not been kind to the idea of building wealth through mortgaging.  So his estimations of the value of informal property may be exaggerated.  But again, his basic point about the informals being excluded from the financial and legal sector is hard to refute.)

 

Getting laid on tour

Some time ago there was a posting from a female rock musician noting, or complaining, that it’s surprisingly hard for female rockers to get laid, and here’s another one, from Ellen Campesinos.

She talks about the poor logistics (e.g. when you’re touring and you’re not in a top band, you really have no private space to bring someone to, and very little time anyway), but this is perhaps the key bit.  Why not sleep with a groupie?

This is a really unappealing prospect. There’s something about the power imbalance of that situation that makes me feel sad. I wouldn’t want to sleep with someone whose lust is solely driven by the fact I’m in a band they like. In that scenario, I’m up on a pedestal; there’s no room for me to impress them. Where’s the fun in that? I like the chase. If I don’t need to put any effort into seducing someone, there’s no tension. They don’t like me for my witty quips and knowledge of Sweet Valley High books; they like me for being in a band.

In the comments section some people object to this– what’s wrong with liking the band??– but others zero in on the status discrepancy that Ellen refers to.  Male rockers will get it on with female groupies because both sides are comfortable with male dominance.   And for whatever reason, Ellen obviously doesn’t care for the opposite situation, one where she has an automatic high status. 

It’s just an interesting sociological observation.  Of course my instinct as a conworlder is to subvert it, to wonder what a society would be like if things were different.

 

Why you want to be a hunter-gatherer

At some period we were all taught that there was an orderly progression from the amoeba to the amphibian to the anthropoid to the agnostic.  Every stage was better than the last, and life was nasty, brutish and short up till the reign of Victoria, not to mention outside her domain.

This framework started to be questioned at about the same time the “primitives” were studied in detail, by researchers such as Max Muller in linguistics, and Frank Boas in anthropology.  We’ve made great strides in repudiating the racism of the earlier view– the idea that some ethnicities are Just Better– but the chronological snobbery doesn’t look so good these days either.

A lot of people never got the memo, however.  I was rather surprised to get into a discussion recently with someone who was convinced that the life of “savages” was “awful”, to use his terms.  So for conworlding purposes if nothing else, I thought it’d be useful to review the case for the hunter/gatherer lifestyle.  (Also see the Planet Construction Kit, p 92.)

I should add that these are by no means my own cranky observations; they’re pretty much standard among modern anthropologists.  Here’s the way Tim Flannery puts it:

And therein lies a paradox– one which is shared with the ants– that while agricultural societies are powerful, they are composed almost entirely of incompetent individuals.

To gain the meaning of this in full measure, just compare a day in your life with that of a hunter-gatherer such as an Australian Aborigine.  On rising each morning Aborigines must find and catch their own food, make or repair their tools and shelter, and defend and educate their families.  They are thus their own provider, manufacturer and protector.  Put in an Aborigine’s place, we’d be as lost as white rabbits in the wilderness; our tenure in the world most likely counted in days rather than months.

The reverse, however, is not true.  History shows that hunter-gatherers can learn to do any of the jobs our society offers.  I’ve flown in a helicopter piloted by a  New Guinean who was born into a traditional society all but innocent of metal.  And history is replete with examples of acaemically gifted Native Americans and Aborigines– like John Bungaree, who topped the class in mathematics, geography and writing in early-nineteenth-century Sydney.  There are even a few examples of hunter-gatherers giving farming a try.  But regardless of their accomplishments, almost all of these went back to their own culture.  The truth is that hunter-gatherers find the loss of liberty we routinely endure to be insufferable.

Some of the advantages of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle:

• It’s far healhier than farming.  People live longer and eat better than people in any premodern agricultural civilization.
• It’s almost absurdly egalitarian.  Leaders can’t tyrannize people who can easily wander off on their own.  You don’t have social classes, there is generally an ethic of sharing, and the status of women is better than among agriculturalists.
• Women were not overburdened with children.  Agriculturalist women have children every year or two; children are spaced out by about 4 years among hunter-gatherers.
• Most of our most virulent disesases come from our animals, so hunter-gatherers have less disease.
• The work week was short.  Daniel Everett reports that the Piraha work only 15 to 20 hours a week. 
• They enjoyed a physical fitness most of us can only envy, not only because they got plenty of exercise, but because their diet was precisely what we’ve evolved to thrive on.
• Their lifestyle is sustainable over enormous time periods.  We or similar species have been hunting for two million years, without coming near destroying the planet or running out of key resources.  The modern world, with its world wars and oil addiction and global warming, might be a giddy, enormously destructive bubble.
• Civilization may make us dumber.  Maciej Henneberg reports that humans seem to have lost 10% of their brain mass since the Ice Age.

Of course hunter-gatherers don’t have Shakespeare, Team Fortress 2, calculus, candy corn, or the Beatles.   So I’d hate to switch places with them, and probably you would too.  But this preference is largely parochialism.  Of course we’re used to the things we have, the people we know, everything that goes with our lifestyle.  Hunter-gatherers often understand agriculture quite well, but don’t see the point of living like that.

Once agriculture took over, it wasn’t possible to go back– the hunter-gatherer lifestyle can’t support a high-density population.  But the simple truth is that till roughly 1800, the lifestyle of the majority didn’t improve and was measurably worse in many ways than that of the hunter-gatherers.  The nicer bits of preindustrial civilizations were largely restricted to the top 10 or 20%.  (And even the elite lived really unhealthily.  Premodern cities were mortality sinks: more people died in them than were born; they only increased in size because of immigration.)

Now, industrialization changed everything.  Living standards have gone up for everyone, and the benefits of civilization can be widely enjoyed.  We’re almost as healthy as hunter-gatherers, though we have only a fraction of the leisure time.  But to borrow a line from Zhou Enlai, it’s too early to tell if civilization is a good idea.  There’s no technical reason we can’t extend this bubble of prosperity and productivity, but there’s little political will.  “Had a nice run for 300 years, RIP” would be a pathetic epitaph for civilization, and the two million years of hunting/gathering would look pretty good in comparison.

The hunter-gatherer era wasn’t utopia, of course– especially if you import modern standards.  It’s been suggested that there was a lot of violence– though we really don’t have much evidence.  But, well, there’s a lot of violence in agricultural states and their cities; there’s a lot of violence in industrial states; there’s a lot of violence in the animal kingdom.  As Gregory Clark points out, violence was an important check on population growth.  It’s usually a bad idea to take some aspect of a ‘primitive’ lifestyle that offends us and try to eliminate it.  Cultures live in a balance with their environment, and sometimes those offensive bits are key parts of the system. 

Now, what do you do with this information?  Well, for one thing, knowledge is good.  It’s good to learn the facts in place of the smug pieties we learned in school.  For another, getting past our parochialism is also good.  There’s nothing with preferring our own environment, but it’s all too easy to construct ideologies or conworlds that are simply projections of our own surroundings. 

Sometimes we might actually imitate others.  The all-around fitness of the hunter-gatherer is admirable and can inspire athleticism today– parkour is partly inspired by African societies.  Some people try diets inspired by those of hunter-gatherers.  Maybe you just need to walk more.

In my sf future, the Incatena, there are planets which try to incorporate some of the best features of the ancestral environment: small settlements, the use of materials from the ecosphere, a structured reliance on frequent and varied physical exercise.  (Of course, others say the hell with it and adapt their bodies and minds to live in deep space habitats.)

 

 

 

 

Juan Cole breezes over the Muslim world

One of the books I picked up at the Borders sale was Juan Cole’s Engaging the Muslim World.  I was looking forward to it, as Cole’s blog is an essential resource on the Middle East.  But I can’t really recommend it, unless perhaps you’ve never read another book on Islam or the Middle East— and if that’s the case there’s plenty of other books that would do better— George Packer’s The Assassin’s Gate, for instance.

The basic problem is breeziness.  He covers oil dependence, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Israel and Lebanon in a little more than 200 pages.  He covers the basics, tells you how to disentangle the radicals from the nationalists, the various Islamic sects from each other, explains the craziness of the US’s “Islam Anxiety” and where Bush went wrong.  But there just isn’t room for much in each chapter.

I also get the impression that he wrote the book in exasperation at George Bush’s endless incompetence, and the half-cynical half-stupid attempt by Republicans to goose up an undifferentiated Islamic threat as a replacement for the Cold War.  Well, if you can’t see why it was unlikely that a nationalist secular Iraqi state would cooperate with al-Qaeda, or why Shi`ite Iran won’t be contained by (but also won’t dominate) a democratic Iraq, or Afghanistan is so disunited, then Cole will carefully explain it to you. But in the meantime Obama got elected, and then the Arab Spring happened, and we really have a whole new set of concerns and opportunities.

Anyway, bottom line: blog still good, book is so-so.  (I’d give a link, but WordPress has cleverly redesigned its interface so none of the buttons work on the Mac.)

 

Solveable problems: Poverty

An article in Foreign Affairs suggests that the cost of ending ‘absolute poverty’– defined as an income of less than $1.25 a day– is dropping, and it’s a bargain.  Six years ago it would have cost about $96 billion; today it’d be just $40 billion.  That’s the amount Paul Ryan shaves off millionaires’ taxes before breakfast.

There are a few caveats, such as the hassle of actually identifying the abysmally poor, but it’s doable.  Double the price if you like, it’s still a bargain.

Also see the amazing chart here.  In the last few years, thanks to the increasing prosperity of India and China, as well as successful anti-poverty programs in Brazil, global poverty is now mainly concentrated in Africa.

Now we’re talking here about poverty by global standards, not by US standards.  Still, it’s a remarkable thing, and we should go for it.

 

IRA wins, al-Qaeda loses?

Fascinating article by Gary Brecher arguing that the IRA had a near-perfect guerrilla strategy, while al-Qaeda is a bunch of losers.

The nub of the argument: according to Brecher, the IRA avoided attacks on civilians in Ireland and took the fight to England, mastering the skills of causing massive property damage with minimal civilian casualties.  This, he argues, was the most effective way to stay active and erode British support for the Protestants.  Al-Qaeda, by contrast, provoked enormous attacks on itself and thus jeopardized its existence as a movement.

And then read the comments, where various people rip Brecher a new one.  A few are loons, but there’s plenty of room to doubt whether the IRA was as smart, as non-violent, or as single-minded as Brecher has it, and above all whether it ‘won’ or not.   Certainly it didn’t achieve union with Ireland.  It made a place for its peaceful political side, but arguably it could have achieved the same end earlier without the violence, and the whole dispute looks slightly pointless anyway now that both countries are EU members.

Al-Qaeda looks like a success or failure depending on what you consider its “real goals” to be.  It’s certainly no closer to establishing a caliphate, but it certainly was able to recruit followers for a long time.   At the moment it looks blindsided by the Arab Spring, which gave the initiative back to the moderates; none of the long-term players, including al-Qaeda, saw that coming.

 

Osama gone

I’ve been in news junkie mode since last night.  All the Internet blowhards are busy doing what they do best, so me too!

In such circumstances there should probably be a 24-hour free zone for basic emotional expression.  In other words, don’t be a prig and lecture people that they shouldn’t be happy or use the occasion to pursue your favorite hobbyhorse. 

What will change because of Osama’s death?  You can make a case for “nothing”, that both terrorism and counter-terrorism will continue, and nothing really changed when Saddam was captured.  But being cynical isn’t a guarantee of being right.  This could have many effects.

• In many ways Osama was past his sell-by date, who looks more out of touch than ever given the Arab Spring; but he was an active and charismatic terrorist leader (unlike Saddam, who was obviously not organizing the Iraqi resistance).  There’s a cachet to successfully thumbing one’s nose at the infidel; getting shot instead is just not as romantic. 
• Some terrorists may attempt reprisals… but if Osama wasn’t able to hit the US hard since 9/11, he’s not going to be more successful at it when he’s dead.  (Guzman’s capture didn’t lead to any huge counter-attack in Peru.)  Large-scale attacks require very careful planning, and if people rush them into operation they’re likely to flub them.
• This is a huge victory for the special forces– and more broadly, for the view that the best response to terrorism is intel and highly focused military missions, not generalized war aiming at occupying entire rogue states. 
• Osama was living in a comfortable town less than a mile from the Pakistan Military Academy.   We needn’t jump to the conclusion that the Pakistani government was aware he was there… but if it wasn’t, it was instead spectacularly incompetent.  Whatever game Pakistan is playing suddenly looks a little dumber.
• We’re slowly leaving Iraq, and now we have a good reason to shut down the war in Afghanistan too.  Karzai has hinted as much already; instead of reactively attempting to beat him into being the able ruler he obviously doesn’t want to be, why not take him at his word, declare victory, and leave? 
• It’s not going to win Obama the election– it’s too far away– but it may help him win the next few months.  You’ve probably seen the pic of Obama in sunglasses with the label “Sorry I took so long on the birth certificate… I was too busy killing Osama bin Laden.”  A bunch of shameless demagogues, starting with The Combover, suddenly look even more frivolous and petty. 

In short, this could provide some closure to the overreaction that was the “War on Terror”.  Some folks depicted 9/11 as an existential threat that justified endless war and a vastly increased security apparatus; we’ll be living with some of their mistakes for years, but Osama’s death is a good time to dial back the anxiety.  Counter-terrorism is important, but it is not the Cold War all over again.