Fathering is a Cultural Issue Well Under the Radar

The NYT ran a good story about the issue of father’s role in parenting: Fathers Gain Respect From Experts (and Mothers)

Full-on sexism is alive and well when it comes to parenting. I was completely oblivious to this until I had a baby.

The NYT article brings up excellent points regarding fathers’ role. The very language of fathers being “involved” highlights the sexism. You would never ask how involved a mother is. It’s expected she is more than “involved”. If a father is “involved”, it’s seen as a virtue.

Here are a few points I would add to this article:

• It used to irk Melissa Calapini when her 3-year-old daughter, Haley, hung around her father while he fixed his cars. Wow. I’m guessing it would have been okay if it had been a boy.
• Because mothering is their realm, some women micromanage fathers and expect them to do things their way. It is easy to fall into this trap. No one person is to blame when it happens.
• The article said low-income families benefited more from parenting classes with both parents attending than with father-only classes. This is interesting. The sexism of parenting is often less in low-income families because they often have no alternative to having one parent work while the other watches the children. In the future they should study more affluent parents who have a greater ability to separate parenting roles than poor families.

I am glad to see articles like this in the New York Times. These are huge issues that are barely talked about when a couple is having a baby. There’s a lot of talk about baby shower products and decorating the baby’s room. Regardless of what the couple wants each parent’s role to be, they should work out a detailed plan so that the rigors of parenting don’t lead them roles by default.

Florida Criminal Justice Problem Is Symptom of a Cultural Problem

From the NYT: Justices Weigh Life in Prison for Youths Who Never Killed
There are just over 100 people in the world serving sentences of life without parole for crimes they committed as juveniles in which no one was killed; 77 of them are in Florida.

I spent 22 years living in Florida, so Florida weirdness, which comes up on a regular basis in news stories always catches my eye.

I don’t know the best approach to dealing with young teenagers who commit heinous crimes. If we’re going to treat them as adults when they commit crimes, though, it seems like they should get all the other rights and responsibilities of adulthood without committing a crime. People naturally want to break away from their nuclear family at that age and find their own way. The very best thing about US culture IMHO is that we view people finding their own way as a fundamentally virtuous thing. The trouble is breaking away from the nuclear family at 13 years old is compatible with modern society.

I don’t have a program in mind to apply this idea to the goal of reducing juvenile crime. People knowledgeable about criminology should work on it though.

What advice do I have for Florida regarding this problem? Foment feelings of community. Florida is full of people who left places where generations of their families lived in the Midewest and East Coast. The void left by family is filled with the mass media, which largely are funded to promote products. So consumerism replaces family culture. Florida needs to work on making people feel part of something, especially the poor. People need to feel like citizens and neighbors, not just consumers. People need to feel that there are few laws, enforced vigorously and fairly by a criminal justice system that they have some role in managing.

Why Engineering Past Achievements and Future Goals Seem Different

I saw an article in IEEE Spectrum magazine (a magazine for electrical engineers) today that reminded me vaguely of recent partly tongue-in-cheek post asking why liberal politicians don’t have bigger dreams. Engineering Achievements: The Two Lists

The National Academy of Engineering put together lists of 20th century’s greatest engineering achievements and greatest engineering challenges for the 21st century. (I blogged about the energy-related items on the list two years ago.) The 20th century achievements include things like airplane and telephone. The challenges for this century include items like prevent nuclear terror and develop carbon sequestration methods.

The article asks why the old list involves discrete thing-like inventions that ushered in sweeping cultural changes while the new list involves social/cultural goals we’d like to see some sort of technology to address. The reason, IMHO, is the difference between hindsight and foresight. Looking forward we see a list of problems and risks we’d like to see addressed. The technologies of the future may solve those problems in ways we can’t foresee. For example, instead of finding ways to sequester carbon from burning fuel, we may find ways to adjust other areas of the environment to compensate for higher levels of CO2. The list of 21st century accomplishments, I suspect, will include discrete product-like technologies just as the our 20th century list does. “Carbon sequestration” and “Prevent nuclear terror” might be replaced by “nuclear fuel cell” and “subatomic particle scanner”.

When I consider our ability to produce things now that were unheard of 100 years ago, it makes me wonder how reasonable it is to compare GDP now with then. We are immeasurably wealthier now than then. The same thing will happen over the next 100 years. So we shouldn’t fret over GDP being flat for a few quarters, medicine getting a little more expensive, or houses getting a little less expensive. We need to keep teaching people math and science and to work hard, and in a century our great grand children will not even be able to measure how much wealthier they are.

Liberal Dreams

The Democrats are doing well politically partly because they offer to have government manage parts of people’s financial lives at a time when people feel like they cannot manage their lives on their own. This will end when the media start reporting positive stories about the economy and people feel like they’re more on top of their lives.

I would love to see Democrats take on something truly big and fund it as if it were a war. We have a war about every ten years, so this isn’t such a big deal. Here are ideas in rough order of decreasing merit:

• Massive anti-poverty program focused on nutrition (decreasing the death rate), housing, and educating girls (decreasing the birth rate)
• An alternative energy program aimed at helping the entire world, including the developing world, move to getting more than half its energy from renewable non- polluting energy sources.
• A network of high-speed trains
• Grants to any local government or private organization who can teach kids to be #1 in math, science, history, and language compared to all other countries
  
• An Apollo-style space program focused on sending people to Mars and beyond and/or putting a decent-sized permanent research facility and business incubator in low earth orbit.
• A program to end the drug war and all that comes with it by researching medications for addiction and more innocuous recreational drugs for those who insist on using them.
• Research into technology to incubate fetuses in vitro as an alternative to abortion – If successful, this would put an end to a contentious issue.

I know the government can’t do any of these things well, but they’re just potential alternatives to: We must spend $100 billion per year on fighting loosely-defined enemies who hate us because we’re so good/free/beautiful/etc. The answer would be, We’ll they’re really gonna hate us now because we’re striving to be even better. (It should go without saying, BTW, if you think people hate you because you're so good, you probably have some kind of psychological problem.)

I know this is just liberal dreaming, but it doesn’t seem that much worse than Democratic goals:

• Manage your healthcare spending
• Help people stay in $400,000 houses they can’t afford
• Help you out with a few bucks if fuel costs rise
• Manage part of your retirement savings
• Even out the economic cycle a bit through government borrowing and spending

Those are lame. If politicians are going to sell something, I want them to sell giving every human being access to food, water, education, right to own lands they’ve squatted on for decades, and contraception. I want a nano-tech project focused on materials strong enough to build an elevator literally to outer space. I thought liberals wanted to save the world. Why are we selling a plan for the government to borrow money to save us a few hundred bucks on insurance? Politicians should leave that to Geico and, if they refuse to offer simply to leave us alone, they should focus on some really momentous dreams.

Posts from Rortybomb on Libertarianism and Personal Spending Priorities

I am more efficient at circuit design than commentary, so I’ve been slow to post lately. Here are links to two excellent posts on Rortybomb.

Libertarianism and Culture: If libertarians could accept cultural values playing a role in public policy and be generally less radical, they would be the majority.

Spending and Inequality: We often hear about people saving money by going to the coffee shop less and worrying about spending a few dollars more for fuel, but oftentimes the real problem is in a few large budget items: housing and transportation. People irrationally spend large amounts on these and then scrimp on everything else they buy.

These are not directly related apart from the idea that if people took more charge of their personal/family budgets, they would be more inclined to libertarianism.

Lower Rents Due to Falling CPI Will Not Lead to Deflationary Psychology

Calculated Risk has been pointing out that the housing tax credit encourages renters to buy a house, which pushes rents down. This causes the CPI to appear lower.

In a post last week, CR wonders if this will lead to a deflationary psychology in which consumers delay purchases waiting for lower prices. I believe this will not happen and that the primary risk is inflation. The housing issue results in one part of the economy getting cheaper due to excess supply. It does not mean other things will get cheaper. The risk, IMHO, is that lower rent prices will mask inflation in the rest of the economy caused by loose monetary policy.

Although I don't see it causing deflation, the credit doesn't do much good. It just moves the problem around. The problem is banks and individuals entered loan agreements that would only work if houses prices rose. The only way to make houses expensive is to limit building them and to destroy some housing units. (Other ways are immigration and getting people who live together to form separate households.) All of this is crazy. The government should stay out of this for two reasons: a) it’s wrong to bail out failed business deals and b) it won’t work. If they succeed it making houses expensive suppliers find some way to come in and produce more, making the excess supply problem worse.

Spam That Claims to Be "Legit"

I wonder if people who sent out spam (not just unwanted e-mails, but out-and-out spam) ever get any replies. This one managed to get through a spam filter:

I am Mr Merlin Arthur a legit loan lender, I give the loan in various species, any body interested should contact me and if you want the loan, then the application must be filled out and returned.

I don’t know how many people reply, but I doubt saying you’re a legit lender helps. Do they think some readers are going to say, “This sounds like a scam! Wait, though, it says he’s a legit lender. I'll go ahead and fill out this application and e-mail it to Bulgaria.” (The country code on the e-mail really was Bulgarian.)