normblog

The happiness of parents

This post is based on assuming the truth of a certain hypothesis concerning the attitudes of parents to their children. If the hypothesis is false, then my argument collapses. You'll have to read on, however, if you want to see what's what. The post is prompted by the following observation from Helen Rumbelow:

Although they could not ask directly, the statisticians were left wondering if increasing numbers of people are actively opting out of parenthood.

If so, they would be doing it for profoundly rational reasons. Study after study on happiness levels shows that while marriage is excellent for mental wellbeing, having children is not. Happiness levels dip after the first born, and are not restored until the last child leaves home.

OK, now here's my hypothesis: if, late on in their lives, you were to ask the parents of children whether they would prefer not to have had any, most of them would assert a preference for the choice they in fact made by having them. How to square this with the research showing that people become less happy after having children?

One (reconciling) possibility is that having children only diminishes happiness temporarily, and that over a lifetime the happiness levels of people with children show a net gain from their having had children. This would seem to be a permissible inference from the conclusions of the books referred to here. Or, secondly, if having children diminishes the happiness of parents even when this is assessed over their (the parents') lifespan, and yet my hypothesis about their late-on preference is true, then it may be that these people value something else more highly than happiness. A subsidiary suggestion, in this connection, could be that most people having children may start out, before they have them, by thinking it will make them happier to do so, find that it doesn't, but decide that their children are more important to them than their level of happiness is. Finally, it's hard to measure the counterfactuals. Even if people with children are less happy after having them than they were before, it doesn't follow either that they would have remained as happy without them over the long term as for a while they were, or that they will be as happy as people without any children but who never wanted children in the first place. Not every person without children will be as happy in that state, and on account of being in that state, as everyone else. To put the same thing otherwise, some will be made unhappy by the fact of not having children where others won't. And, irrespective of happiness, some may feel that, through not having had children, they've not lived the kind of life they had hoped to.

If my hypothesis is true, therefore - and I'd be willing to bet on its being true - Rumbelow is wrong to suggest that not having children is rational and, by implication, that having children is not.

I end by saying, though this is merely anecdotal rather than the product of research, that I've come across a lot of people who appear to have been made happy by having children, and that from the word go.

McCarthyism?

Cormac McCarthy is interviewed on his use of punctuation:

I believe in periods and capitals, and the occasional comma and that's it. Or you can use a... colon if you're getting ready to give a list of something that follows from what you just said.

I was tempted to put a semicolon after 'that's it', but decided it would go against the spirit of what he was saying. No discontinuities 'greater than that indicated by a comma but less than that indicated by a full stop' for Cormac.

The normblog profile 302: Peter McBurney

Peter McBurney grew up in Australia, and was torn between studying pure mathematics and English literature. Eventually mathematics won out, and he has since been a statistician, a marketing consultant, and an academic in business studies and in computer science. He has lived and worked for extended periods in Southern Africa, Europe, North America and East Asia, as well as in Australia. Peter has worked in government, for large multi-nationals, for hi-tech start-ups, and in universities. He blogs at Vukutu.

Why do you blog? > To think (since writing is a form of thinking), to record (since blog-posts are souvenirs sent from the present to the future), and to connect (since blogging is a form of conversation).

What has been your best blogging experience? > Meeting in person an author and blogger, Grant McCracken, whose books I had enjoyed for years previously.

What would be your main blogging advice to a novice blogger? > Do not blog while driving or operating heavy machinery.

What are your favourite blogs? > This Blog Sits At (the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics); Alex Goodall; PostClassic; and normblog.

Who are your intellectual heroes? > Matteo Ricci, Thomas Harriott, Robert Southwell, Josiah Wedgewood, William Blake, Charles Babbage, Henry David Thoreau, David Hilbert, Frank Lloyd Wright, Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Henry Cowell, Andrei Kolmogorov, Gregory Bateson, Dick Bissell, John Cage, Sam Eilenberg, Weldon Keys, Herman Kahn, Stephen Toulmin, Iannis Xenakis, Charles Hamblin, Florence Skelly, Stafford Beer, Seymour Hersh.

What are you reading at the moment? > Tristram Hunt's new life of Engels, The Frock-Coated Communist.

Who are your cultural heroes? > English writers of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras (Shakespeare, Southwell, Donne, etc.); the landscape painters Richard Wilson, Thomas Jones, Caspar David Friedrich and Richard Parkes Bonington; too many musicians to list, especially jazz, classical, world music, downtown, and no-wave; the actor Monty Clift; the various people of 1950s and early 1960s New York: beat writers, abstract expressionist painters, minimalist composers, jazz musicians, category theorists, and fluxus artists.

What is the best novel you've ever read? > Thomas Mann's Dr Faustus. The best novels of our time, however, are TV series – for example, most anything written by Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip), or by David Simon and Ed Burns (The Wire, Generation Kill), or by Matthew Weiner (The Sopranos, Mad Men).

What is your favourite poem? > Shakespeare's Sonnets.

What is your favourite song? > 'Autumn Leaves' (music: Joseph Kosma, English lyrics: Jonny Mercer).

What is your favourite movie? > A tie between: The Player (director: Robert Altman), Hamlet (Michael Almereyda) and Brick (Rian Johnson).

Who is your favourite composer? > A tie between: J.S. Bach, Felix Mendelssohn and Morton Feldman.

What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time? > Card-playing. ('Mind-numbing and soul-destroying,' Yevtushenko called it.)

Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you've ever changed your mind? > Nuclear power, Robert Mugabe, minimalist music, the Clintons.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate? > That all knowledge is contingent and contestable; that much of it is socially constructed; and that some is even performative, creating the very reality it purports to describe (e.g., economics).

Can you name a work of non-fiction which has had a major and lasting influence on how you think about the world? > Stephen Toulmin's Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, which deconstructs the adherence that Western intellectuals have had these last 350 years to formalist, mathematical, universalist, decontextualized, ahistorical and atemporal theories.

Who are your political heroes? > A partial list: Edmund Campion, Tom Paine, Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Sol Plaatje, Franklin Roosevelt, Ted Theodore, John Curtin, Doc Evatt, Richard Sorge, Imre Nagy, Zhou Enlai, Milada Horakova, Bram Fischer, Salvador Allende, Lyndon Johnson, Donal Lamont, Rudolf Margolius, Gough Whitlam, Helen Suzman, Alexander Dubcek, Nelson Mandela, Zhao Ziyang, Martin Luther King Jr, Zdenek Mlynar, Mikhail Gorbachev, Vaclav Havel, Paul Keating, and Barack Obama.

What is your favourite piece of political wisdom? > 'Never make a firm enemy.'

If you could effect one major policy change in the governing of your country, what would it be? > For Australia: replace the States with about 20 smaller Regions.

Do you think the world (human civilization) has already passed its best point, or is that yet to come? > Oh, the best is surely yet to come. We ain't seen nothing yet!

What would be your most important piece of advice about life? > Do whatever you can, with what you have, where you are. Bloom where you are planted. Or carp will die!

What do you consider the most important personal quality? > Politeness and civility.

What personal fault do you most dislike? > Self-centredness.

In what circumstances would you be willing to lie? > In profiles such as this.

What is your favourite proverb? > 'Do not speak of secret matters in a field full of little hills.'

If you were to relive your life to this point, is there anything you'd do differently? > I'd invent my time-travel machine much earlier in my life, and definitely before now.

Where would you most like to live (other than where you do)? > London in the 1590s, Berlin in the 1830s, Manchester in the 1850s, Barcelona in the 1890s, Paris and Moscow and Berlin in the 1920s, New York in the 1950s and the 1980s, Chicago and San Francisco and Paris in the 1960s, Tokyo in the 1970s, Prague in the 1990s, Barcelona and Jakarta in the 2000s...

What would be your ideal choice of alternative profession or job? > I always wanted to be an architect, or at least to pretend to be one.

Who is your favourite comedian or humorist? > That comedian of manners, Jerry Seinfeld.

If you could have any three guests, past or present, to dinner who would they be? > Three poets: Robert Southwell, Kit Marlowe and Jim J. Angleton.

[The normblog profile is a weekly Friday morning feature. A list of all the profiles to date, and the links to them, can be found here.]

Israel's security

Has Obama turned on Israel? The question is put by Alan Dershowitz and his answer is a conditional no. Were there to be a softening by the administration on the question of Israel's security, he argues, that would be a reason to worry, but there hasn't been.

One of the issues raised by Dershowitz is the attitude to Jewish settlements in the West Bank, on which see also this column. (Via.)

To bide his time

Back to an issue I've covered in some earlier posts - Obama's stance towards Iran after the election. I draw your attention to three separate pieces with a similar message: Obama should bide his time, put off any move to engage. Here's Trudy Rubin:

In fact, the engagement policy must of necessity be put in the deep freeze for the foreseeable future. The events in Iran have left the administration with no other choice.
.....

[A]ny U.S. engagement with Iranian leaders at present would legitimize election results that are still disputed, despite official claims. It would imply endorsement of leaders whose legitimacy is now at issue among their own people.

"At this stage, to talk with any side can give the impression that the United States has accepted that side's victory, even though the dust has not settled," said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council.

Despite the killings, beatings, and arrests, the Green revolt has widened divisions within Iran's power elite, including the clergy, that have yet to play out in internal battles, whose outcome is unpredictable.

Then, referring to economic trends in Iran since the election, the writer here says, 'the White House should keep in mind an old quote from Napoleon: "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."' And Roger Cohen in the New York Times concludes: 'Obama must leave them dangling for the foreseeable future. He should refrain indefinitely from talk of engagement. To do otherwise would be to betray millions of Iranians who have been defrauded and have risked their lives to have their votes count.'

Philosopher president

In the aftermath of his Cairo speech, the text of what Obama said has been much scrutinized in order to assess its accuracy, its balance or lack of it, its aptness to US interests, and more. Carlin Romano reads it differently - as the performance of a philosopher statesman. An excerpt:

Obama balanced almost every point in favor of Israel as a Jewish state with one that favored Palestinian Arabs. That his audience didn't immediately absorb the lesson in evenhandedness was apparent. The audience applauded only points directly in Islam's or the Arab world's self-interest. Though Obama observed that "the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied," he chose not to add that "the day this audience applauds such a point, made in the interest of others, is the day peace will come." That might have driven home his point far more strongly. But it would not have been Obama - cool, polite, generous, cosmo.

All the same, he imparted rules for philosophical discourse: "We must say openly the things we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors. There must be sustained effort to listen to each other, to learn from each other, to respect one another, and to seek common ground." At its core, his teaching was ethical and political, using the intellectual tools of logic to illuminate hypocrisy and contradiction: "None of us should tolerate these extremists," he said. "They have killed in many countries. They have killed people of different faiths - but more than any other, they have killed Muslims. Their actions are irreconcilable with the right of human beings, the progress of nations, and with Islam. The holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind."
.....
Over all, though, Obama's most singular philosophical breakthrough was to artfully project the cosmopolitan idea that the U.S. president must care about non-Americans. True, Obama observed months ago that he's the president of the United States, not the president of China, and understandably must put the needs and safety of Americans first. But to an extraordinary extent, Obama effectively announced that the U.S. president, because of the United States' effect on and involvement with the rest of the world, must think of other global citizens as constituents.

The rest is here.

Karl Malden 1912-2009

Karl Malden has died at the age of 97. Credits from a long movie career included A Streetcar Named Desire, I Confess, On the Waterfront and One-Eyed Jacks. There are notices here and here; and here's a YouTube clip from On the Waterfront - Malden doing truth and righteousness - though I've not been able to find his 'Gimme a beer!' scene. As he showed in One-Eyed Jacks, Malden could do villainy as well as righteousness. And how.

Zimbabwe two-step

Threats by Zimbabwe's Movement for Democratic Change to disengage from the unity government formed with Zanu-PF do not sit well beside Morgan Tsvangirai's assurances, when trying to raise support abroad, that the transition towards democracy in his country is now irreversible. That's why Tsvangirai is unsaying the threat which was said. It's a matter of addressing different audiences. Potential foreign donors need to be encouraged to strengthen the MDC's hand and the prospects of the so-called irreversible transition; but Mugabe is an obstacle to democratic transition and the threat of disengagement recognizes this.

Following events

Sometimes, one finds it hard as a blogger to keep up with the densely crowded news agenda. Take the single topic of Ireland's weather.

In some parts of the country, last month was the sunniest June in more than 50 years. However, one day - 6 June - was the coldest day in Dublin in more than a century. Another thing: on 23 June 50mm of rain fell on Derrybeg, Co Donegal, causing flooding; so much rain in so short a time would be expected only once every 100 years. And on 12 June there was a tornado near Castlerea, Co Roscommon.

It's enough to occupy a whole team of reporters possessed of meteorological skills much more developed than my own.

A nature better than that

There's a longish article in Newsweek setting out the case for concluding that human beings are not 'preprogrammed to rape, to kill unfaithful girlfriends and the like'. I think that that can be established more quickly: most people don't rape and don't kill. So, whatever there is of this tendency within the nature of human beings, it's either not universal or not ungovernable, or neither universal nor ungovernable.

Too many ''''s

You know that there are zillion's of blog's. Here are 'two' to 'divert' you: Apostrophe Abuse and the "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks. (Via.)

Misdirected worry

Committing the same oversight as his Guardian colleague, Jonathan Freedland uses it to introduce other business: the articulation of a concern lest Barack Obama should follow the path of George Bush and contemplate a regime-change war against Iran. He lines up some arguments against this. I think he could have saved himself the trouble. Whatever the probabilities might be of a US or Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear facilities - and I'm not bold enough to estimate these - the chances of a war by America to topple the Iranian regime I would reckon to be close to zero.

(1) Some argued that the Iraq war was illegal, though that issue is moot; a regime-change war against Iran would certainly be illegal. (2) As things presently stand, there is not the remotest case for an intervention on humanitarian grounds. (3) The present posture of the US president doesn't point in this direction. (4) Public opinion in America doesn't favour military intervention in Iran.

There are bigger worries.

The elephant in Iraq

He's adding his voice to the celebration of a return of Iraqi sovereignty. He even speaks of 'the joy of liberation' that is bursting out now. He is evidently glad of the US withdrawal from Iraq's towns and cities. He only contrives not to notice the non-presence in all this of a certain Saddam Hussein and what the celebration of sovereignty and joy of liberation owe to its having been brought about - by the US-led intervention. For or against the war, as conscious as may be of all that went wrong, but that is some oversight.

Set you free

You may or may not have heard of the about-to-be-realeased album The Duckworth Lewis Method. You can read about it here and, for the the next few days, listen to it here. I recommend 'Jiggery Pokery'. Also 'Test Match Special', which speaks a profound truth.

An academic version of Durban

Here are two accounts of the same event, a conference at York University in Canada under the title 'Israel/Palestine: Mapping Models of Statehood and Paths to Peace'. In one of these accounts, it is reported that 'the dialogue was civil' there. That wasn't the experience of Israeli participant Na'ama Carmi. She took part in the conference because she didn't want to 'surrender to attempts to silence debate and curb academic freedom', and also so as not 'to leave the floor only to the most extreme and one-sided views, [but] to try to bring a different voice, one that attempts to display the complexity of the situation and presents a perspective that would not be presented if one were to stay away.' However:

[N]ot in my worst dreams did I imagine an atmosphere that was totally incompatible with academic discourse. The university rightly resisted outside pressures aimed at silencing the conference. But there were attempts at the conference itself to silence unpopular views.

A hostile atmosphere toward people with different views generally, and Jewish-Zionist Israelis in particular, was created. Anyone who challenged the Palestinian perspective was intimidated or even labelled a racist. The audience vocally applauded those whose views it approved. At times, those presenting a different view were subject to abuse and ridicule.

For me, this reached an extreme when one interlocutor, rather than debating the substantive arguments I presented, questioned my psychological state. And all of this without any apparent attempt by the organizers to stop it. Never before in my whole academic career have I encountered the rudeness that I experienced at this conference.

Academic discourse implies in-depth analysis of issues, even loaded ones, theorizing and making well-based arguments. Reasoned criticism is a first-degree instrument for the advancement of academic knowledge. Ad-hominem offence and the silencing of unpopular views are its antithesis. If one has good arguments, one doesn't need to resort to such tactics...

After my presentation, people approached me to thank me for presenting an alternative view. They admitted that in the prevailing atmosphere they were deterred from stepping forward and expressing a different voice. This is a disgrace for the academic host of this conference. I'd very much want to believe that the organizers were only naive. It's more difficult to accept that there was no agenda, explicit or hidden, to this conference.
.....

The universities that sponsored this conference should give themselves an accounting. While the JDL demonstrated outside the campus, a pro-Palestinian demonstration took place inside the conference itself, from the floor, under an academic disguise.

This was not an academic conference, but an "academic" version of Durban.

(Thanks: NP.)

Not beyond politics

The New 7 Wonders of Nature is a global Internet contest under the slogan: "If we want to save anything, we first need to truly appreciate it." In 2007 it chose the new seven man-made wonders of the world.

Its rules state that if a nominee site is located in more than one country, all countries in which it is located must form an Official Supporting Committee (OSC) by July 7.

It looks like this is going to sink the candidacy of the Dead Sea.

More than one kind of cake

Here we go again. It doesn't matter how obviously silly an argument is, once it gets going in the public domain it will keep going. It's as if when you need something to say, you'll just say it because somebody else has. On this occasion, it's Janet Napolitano, Obama's secretary for homeland security, and she's explaining why the phrase 'global war on terror' has been discarded:

One of the reasons the nomenclature is not used is that 'war' carries with it a relationship to nation states in conflict with each other and of course terrorism is not necessarily derived from the nation state relationship... In some respects 'war' is too limiting.

The word 'war' is sometimes about nation states in conflict with each other, and other times it isn't - as with civil war, guerilla war (some cases of), war on crime, drugs war, and a war on greed, tax havens and blame. It's about as sensible as explaining that henceforth you won't be eating cake because you're staying off chocolate.

Iran x 4

> '[I]t is not surprising to see waves of women protesting a fraudulent election. There is so much at stake for Iranian women.' - Women at the forefront of the struggle in Iran.

> 'I have developed my strong support for the struggle of the Iranian women based on three distinct events the first of which goes back to 1979.'

> '[T]he truth is that the high turnout was the result of many years of organizational work carried out by small groups of civil rights activists and, above all, women's groups, working largely unnoticed and without much outside help.'

> 'As Iran's theocracy appears on the verge of silencing the biggest challenge to its authority since it was established in 1979, female activists in the region say they are inspired by the prominent role women are playing in the country's opposition movement. Many hope it will have a crossover effect on the struggle for women's rights in their own countries and help shatter Western perceptions of Middle Eastern women as subjugated in a male-dominated culture.'

Whose side are they on?

Following up on James Petras, Seumas Milne and assorted co-thinkers, I point you to a piece by Reese Erlich on 'Iran and Leftist Confusion'. You'll have to read your way past an opening reference to the US as 'the Empire' and one or two other things, but Erlich takes on three central theses of those 'progressive authors, academics and bloggers bending themselves into knots about the current crisis in Iran': (1) that there's nothing to indicate that the election was stolen; (2) that the US is behind the recent unrest; and (3) that Ahmadinejad is an anti-imperialist with progressive credentials. He responds to each one and concludes by asking the leftist critics, 'Whose side are you on?'

One thing that is striking here is that the answer to his question is already provided by what has gone before. They are against what America is for; and therefore they are for those trying to put down the democratic movement in Iran. Digest that who can. Why are they not against Ahmadinejad and for Iranian democrats? Search me. It beggars belief. It's part of the long, slow downward road of the verkrappt. (Thanks: DP.)

Not so quiet

Were American Jews reticent in talking about the Holocaust in the early years after World War II and until the 1960s? So it is often claimed, and the claim is sometimes inflected to suggest that subsequent Holocaust memorialization has been politically motivated, to bolster support for Israel. Adam Kirsch reviews a new book by Hasia Diner that assembles evidence to confute the 'myth of silence'.