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Javier E

Dating Study: At What Age Are Men, Women Most Desirable? - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • “Three-quarters, or more, of people are dating aspirationally,” she says. And according to a new study, users of online-dating sites spend most of their time trying to contact people “out of their league.”In fact, most online-dating users tend to message people exactly 25 percent more desirable than they are.
  • “There’s so much folk wisdom about dating and courtship, and very little scientific evidence,” she told me recently. “My research comes out of realizing that with these large-scale data sets, we can shed light on a lot of these old dating aphorisms
  • Bruch and her colleagues analyzed thousands of messages exchanged on a “popular, free online-dating service” between more than 186,000 straight men and women. They looked only at four metro areas—New York, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle—and only at messages from January 2014.
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  • imagine that you are a very desirable user. Your specific desirability rank would have been generated by two figures: whether other desirable people contacted you, and whether other desirable people responded when you contacted them. If you contacted a much less desirable person, their desirability score would rise; if they contacted you and you replied, then your score would fall.
  • The team had to analyze both first messages and first replies, because, well, men usually make the first move. “A defining feature of heterosexual online dating is that, in the vast majority of cases, it is men who establish the first contact—more than 80 percent of first messages are from men in our data set,” the study says. But “women reply very selectively to the messages they receive from men—their average reply rate is less than 20 percent—so women’s replies … can give us significant insight about who they are interested in.”
  • It found that—insofar as dating “leagues” are not different tiers of hotness, but a single ascending hierarchy of desirability—then they do seem to exist in the data. But people do not seem universally locked into them—and they can occasionally find success escaping from theirs.
  • “I mean, everybody knows—and as a sociologist, it’s been shown—that older women have a harder time in the dating market. But I hadn’t expected to see their desirability drop off from the time they’re 18 to the time they’re 65,”
  • Across the four cities and the thousands of users, consistent patterns around age, race, and education level emerge. White men and Asian women are consistently more desired than other users, while black women rank anomalously lower.
  • “what we are seeing is overwhelmingly the effect of white preferences,” she cautioned. “This site is predominantly white, 70 percent white. If this was a site that was 20 percent white, we may see a totally different desirability hierarchy.”
  • And Bruch emphasized that the hierarchy did not just depend on race, age, and education level: Because it is derived from user behavior, it “captures whatever traits people are responding to when they pursue partners. This will include traits like wittiness, genetic factors, or whatever else drives people to message,” she said.
  • Here are seven other not entirely happy takeaways from Bruch’s study:- In the study, men’s desirability peaks at age 50. But women’s desirability starts high at age 18 and falls throughout their lifespan.
  • The key, Bruch said, is that “persistence pays off.”“Reply rates [to the average message] are between zero percent and 10 percent,” she told me. Her advice: People should note those extremely low reply rates and send out more greetings.
  • I was also surprised to see how flat men’s desirability was over the age distribution,” she said. “For men, it peaks around age 40 or 50. Especially in New York.”
  • “New York is a special case for men,” Bruch told me. “It’s the market with the highest fraction of women. But it’s also about it being an incredibly dense market.”
  • “Seattle presents the most unfavorable dating climate for men, with as many as two men for every woman in some segments,” the study says
  • Across all four cities, men and women generally tended to send longer messages to people who were more desirable than them. Women, especially, deployed this strategy.
  • But the only place it paid off—and the only people for whom it worked with statistically significant success—were men in Seattle. The longest messages in the study were sent by Seattle men, the study says,“and only Seattle men experience a payoff to writing longer messages.”
  • A more educated man is almost always more desirable, on average: Men with postgraduate degrees outperform men with bachelor’s degrees; men with bachelor’s degrees beat high-school graduates.
  • “But for women, an undergraduate degree is most desirable,” the study says. “Postgraduate education is associated with decreased desirability among women.
  • men tended to use less positive language when messaging more desirable women. They may have stumbled upon this strategy through trial and error because “in all four cities, men experience slightly lower reply rates when they write more positively worded messages.”
  • “The most common behavior for both men and women is to contact members of the opposite sex who on average have roughly the same ranking as themselves,
  • “The most popular individual in our four cities, a 30-year-old woman living in New York, received 1504 messages during the period of observation,” the study says. This is “equivalent to one message every 30 min, day and night, for the entire month.”
Javier E

Jordan Peterson Comes to Aspen - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Peterson is traveling the English-speaking world in order to spread the message of this core conviction: that the way to fix what ails Western societies is a psychological project, targeted at helping individuals to get their lives in order, not a sociological project that seeks to improve society through politics, or popular culture, or by focusing on class, racial, or gender identity.
  • the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-sponsored by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, was an anomaly in this series of public appearances: a gathering largely populated by people—Democrats and centrist Republicans, corporate leaders, academics, millionaire philanthropists, journalists—invested in the contrary proposition, that the way to fix what ails society is a sociological project, one that effects change by focusing on politics, or changing popular culture, or spurring technological advances, or investing more in diversity and inclusiveness.
  • Many of its attendees, like many journalists, are most interested in Peterson as a political figure at the center of controversies
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  • Peterson deserves a full, appropriately complex accounting of his best and worst arguments; I intend to give him one soon. For now, I can only tell you how the Peterson phenomenon manifested one night in Aspen
  • “For the first time in human history the spoken word has the same reach as the written word, and there are no barriers to entry. That’s a Gutenberg revolution,” he said. “That’s a big deal. This is a game changer. The podcast world is also a Gutenberg moment but it’s even more extensive. The problem with books is that you can’t do anything else while you’re reading. But if you’re listening to a podcast you can be driving a tractor or a long haul truck or doing the dishes. So podcasts free up two hours a day for people to engage in educational activity they otherwise wouldn’t be able to engage in. That’s one-eighth of people’s lives. You’re handing people a lot of time back to engage in high-level intellectual education.
  • that technological revolution has revealed something good that we didn’t know before: “The narrow bandwidth of TV has made us think that we are stupider than we are. And people have a real hunger for deep intellectual dialogue.”
  • I’ve known for years that the university underserved the community, because we assumed that university education is for 18- to 22-year-olds, which is a proposition that’s so absurd it is absolutely mind-boggling that anyone ever conceptualized it. Why wouldn’t you take university courses throughout your entire life? What, you stop searching for wisdom when you’re 22? I don’t think so. You don’t even start until you’re like in your mid 20s. So I knew universities were underserving the broader community a long time ago. But there wasn’t a mechanism whereby that could be rectified.
  • Universities are beyond forgiveness, he argued, because due to the growing ranks of administrators, there’s been a radical increase in tuition. “Unsuspecting students are given free access to student loans that will cripple them through their 30s and their 40s, and the universities are enticing them to extend their carefree adolescence for a four year period at the cost of mortgaging their future in a deal that does not allow for escape through bankruptcy,” he complained. “So it’s essentially a form of indentured servitude. There’s no excuse for that … That cripples the economy because the students become overlaid with debt that they’ll never pay off at the time when they should be at the peak of their ability to take entrepreneurial risks. That’s absolutely appalling.”
  • A critique I frequently hear from Peterson’s critics is that everything he says is either obvious or wrong. I think that critique fails insofar as I sometimes see some critics calling one of his statements obvious even as others insist it is obviously wrong.
  • a reliable difference among men and women cross-culturally is that men are more aggressive than women. Now what's the evidence for that? Here's one piece of evidence: There are 10 times as many men in prison. Now is that a sociocultural construct? It's like, no, it's not a sociocultural construct. Okay?
  • Here's another piece of data. Women try to commit suicide more than men by a lot, and that's because women are more prone to depression and anxiety than men are. And there are reasons for that, and that's cross-cultural as well. Now men are way more likely to actually commit suicide. Why? Because they're more aggressive so they use lethal means. So now the question is how much more aggressive are men than women? The answer is not very much. So the claim that men and women are more the same than different is actually true. This is where you have to know something about statistics to understand the way the world works, instead of just applying your a priori ideological presuppositions to things that are too complex to fit in that rubric.
  • So if you draw two people out of a crowd, one man and one woman, and you had to lay a bet on who was more aggressive, and you bet on the woman, you'd win 40 percent of the time. That's quite a lot. It isn't 50 percent of the time which would be no differences. But it’s a lot. There are lots of women who are more aggressive than lots of men. So the curves overlap a lot. There's way more similarity than difference. And this is along the dimension where there's the most difference. But here's the problem. You can take small differences at the average of a distribution. Then the distributions move off to the side. And then all the action is at the tail. So here's the situation. You don't care about how aggressive the average person is. It's not that relevant. What people care about is who is the most aggressive person out of 100, because that's the person you'd better watch out for.
  • And what's the gender? Men. Because if you go two standard deviations out from the mean on two curves that overlap but are disjointed, then you derive an overwhelming preponderance of the overrepresented group. That's why men are about 10 times more likely to be in prison.  
  • In a New York Times article titled, “Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy,” the writer Nellie Bowles quoted her subject as follows:
  • Violent attacks are what happens when men do not have partners, Mr. Peterson says, and society needs to work to make sure those men are married. “He was angry at God because women were rejecting him,” Mr. Peterson says of the Toronto killer. “The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.” Mr. Peterson does not pause when he says this. Enforced monogamy is, to him, simply a rational solution. Otherwise women will all only go for the most high-status men, he explains, and that couldn’t make either gender happy in the end.
  • Ever since, some Peterson critics have claimed that Peterson wants to force women to have sex with male incels, or something similarly dystopian.
  • ...it's an anthropological truism generated primarily through scholars on the left, just so everybody is clear about it, that societies that use monogamy as a social norm, which by the way is virtually every human society that ever existed, do that in an attempt to control the aggression that goes along with polygamy. It's like ‘Oh my God, how contentious can you get.’ Well, how many of you are in monogamous relationships? A majority. How is that enforced?...
  • If everyone you talk to is boring it’s not them! And so if you're rejected by the opposite sex, if you’re heterosexual, then you're wrong, they're not wrong, and you've got some work to do, man. You've got some difficult work to do. And there isn't anything I've been telling young men that's clearer than that … What I've been telling people is take the responsibility for failure onto yourself. That's a hint that you've got work to do. It could also be a hint that you're young and useless and why the hell would anybody have anything to do with you because you don't have anything to offer. And that's rectifiable. Maturity helps to rectify that.
  • Whenever I'm interviewed by journalists who have the scent of blood in their nose, let's say, they're very willing and able to characterize the situation I find myself in as political. But that's because they can't see the world in any other manner. The political is a tiny fraction of the world. And what I'm doing isn't political. It's psychological or theological. The political element is peripheral. And if people come to the live lectures, let's say, that's absolutely self-evident
  • Weiss: You are often characterized, at least in the mainstream press, as being transphobic. If you had a student come to you and say, I was born female, I now identify as male, I want you to call me by male pronouns. Would you say yes to that?
  • Peterson: Well, it would depend on the student and the context and why I thought they were asking me and what I believe their demand actually characterized, and all of that. Because that can be done in a way that is genuine and acceptable, and a way that is manipulative and unacceptable. And if it was genuine and acceptable then I would have no problem with it. And if it was manipulative and unacceptable then not a chance. And you might think, ‘Well, who am I to judge?’ Well, first of all, I am a clinical psychologist, I've talked to people for about 25,000 hours. And I'm responsible for judging how I am going to use my words. I'd judge the same way I judge all my interactions with people, which is to the best of my ability, and characterized by all the errors that I'm prone to. I'm not saying that my judgment would be unerring. I live with the consequences and I'm willing to accept the responsibility.
  • But also to be clear about this, it never happened––I never refused to call anyone by anything they had asked me to call them by, although that's been reported multiple times. It's a complete falsehood. And it had nothing to do with the transgender issue as far as I'm concerned.
  • type one and type two error problem
  • note what his avowed position is: that he has never refused to call a transgender person by their preferred pronoun, that he has done so many times, that he would always try to err on the side of believing a request to be earnest, and that he reserves the right to decline a request he believes to be in bad faith. Whether one finds that to be reasonable or needlessly difficult, it seems irresponsible to tell trans people that a prominent intellectual hates them or is deeply antagonistic to them when the only seeming conflict is utterly hypothetical and ostensibly not even directed against people that Peterson believes to be trans, but only against people whom he does not believe to be trans
Javier E

Darwin Was Wrong About Dating - NYTimes.com - 2 views

  • no fossilized record can really tell us how people behaved or thought back then, much less why they behaved or thought as they did. Nonetheless, something funny happens when social scientists claim that a behavior is rooted in our evolutionary past. Assumptions about that behavior take on the immutability of a physical trait — they come to seem as biologically rooted as opposable thumbs or ejaculation.
  • a new batch of scientists began applying Darwinian doctrine to the conduct of mating, and specifically to three assumptions that endure to this day: men are less selective about whom they’ll sleep with; men like casual sex more than women; and men have more sexual partners over a lifetime.
  • In 1972, Robert L. Trivers, a graduate student at Harvard, addressed that first assumption in one of evolutionary psychology’s landmark studies, “Parental Investment and Sexual Selection.” He argued that women are more selective about whom they mate with because they’re biologically obliged to invest more in offspring. Given the relative paucity of ova and plenitude of sperm, as well as the unequal feeding duties that fall to women, men invest less in children. Therefore, men should be expected to be less discriminating and more aggressive in competing for females.
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  • if evolution didn’t determine human behavior, what did? The most common explanation is the effect of cultural norms. That, for instance, society tends to view promiscuous men as normal and promiscuous women as troubled outliers, or that our “social script” requires men to approach women while the pickier women do the selecting. Over the past decade, sociocultural explanations have gained steam.
  • In her study, when men and women considered offers of casual sex from famous people, or offers from close friends whom they were told were good in bed, the gender differences in acceptance of casual-sex proposals evaporated nearly to zero.
  • Everyone has always assumed — and early research had shown — that women desired fewer sexual partners over a lifetime than men.
  • In 2009, another long-assumed gender difference in mating — that women are choosier than men — also came under siege
  • in 2003, two behavioral psychologists, Michele G. Alexander and Terri D. Fisher, published the results of a study that used a “bogus pipeline” — a fake lie detector. When asked about actual sexual partners, rather than just theoretical desires, the participants who were not attached to the fake lie detector displayed typical gender differences. Men reported having had more sexual partners than women. But when participants believed that lies about their sexual history would be revealed by the fake lie detector, gender differences in reported sexual partners vanished. In fact, women reported slightly more sexual partners (a mean of 4.4) than did men (a mean of 4.0).
  • the fact that some gender differences can be manipulated, if not eliminated, by controlling for cultural norms suggests that the explanatory power of evolution can’t sustain itself when applied to mating behavior.
  • “Some sexual features are deeply rooted in evolutionary heritage, such as the sex response and how quickly it takes men and women to become aroused,” said Paul Eastwick, a co-author of the speed-dating study. “However, if you’re looking at features such as how men and women regulate themselves in society to achieve specific goals, I believe those features are unlikely to have evolved sex differences. I consider myself an evolutionary psychologist. But many evolutionary psychologists don’t think this way. They think these features are getting shaped and honed by natural selection all the time.” How far does Darwin go in explaining human behavior?
sissij

The Increasing Significance of the Decline of Men - The New York Times - 0 views

  • At one end of the scale, men continue to dominate.
  • But at the other end of the scale, men of all races and ethnicities are dropping out of the work force, abusing opioids and falling behind women in both college attendance and graduation rates.
  • From 1979 to 2007, seven percent of men and 16 percent of women with middle-skill jobs lost their positions, according to the Dallas Fed study. Four percent of these men moved to low-skill work, and 3 percent moved to high-skill jobs. Almost all the women, 15 percent, moved into high-skill jobs, with only 1 percent moving to low-skill work.
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  • For boys and girls raised in two-parent households, there were only modest differences between the sexes in terms of success at school, and boys tended to earn more than their sisters in early adulthood.
  • At the same time, the divorce rate for college graduates has declined from 34.8 percent among those born between 1950 and 1955 to 29.9 percent among those born between 1957 and 1964. In contrast, the divorce rate for those without college degrees increased over the same period from 44.3 percent to 50.6 percent.
  • First, there are irreversible changes in the workplace, particularly the rise of jobs requiring social skills (even STEM jobs) that will continue to make it hard for men who lack those skills.
  • Men are really going to have to change their act or have big problems. I think of big guys from the cave days, guys who were good at lifting stuff and hunting and the things we got genetically selected out for. During the industrial revolution that wasn’t so bad, but it’s not going to be there anymore.
  • This vulnerability, in turn, makes boys more susceptible toattention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and conduct disorders as well as the epigenetic mechanisms that can account for the recent widespread increase of these disorders in U.S. culture.
  • Schore argues that a major factor in rising dysfunction among boys and men in this country is the failure of the United States to provide longer periods of paid parental leave, with the result that many infants are placed in day care when they are six weeks old.
  • Females consistently score higher on tests of emotional and social intelligence. Sex differences in sociability and social perceptiveness have been shown to have biological origins, with differences appearing in infancy and higher levels of fetal testosterone associated with lower scores on tests of social intelligence.
  • Second, male children suffer more from restricted or nonexistent parental leave policies and contemporary child care arrangements, as well as from growing up in single-parent households. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • It has been a longstanding objective of right-wing regimes to push women back into traditional gender roles. Is that what’s going on here? Or could it be something less pernicious and more important?
  •  
    I think this research is very interesting. It takes a different perspective when discussing gender issues. It notices that there are actually a decline of men in the society. Although there are still wage inequality and other gender problems that women are usually in disadvantages, men are having more and more disadvantages now as the the society shift from physical work to mental work. As the society evolved, the social structure also evolves. Gender equality means we should put equal attention to all genders (there are more than two). --Sissi (3/16/2017)
Javier E

Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Stree... - 1 views

  • Instead of self-confident and self-centered answers, the author humbly asks fundamental questions: What is economics? What is its meaning? Where does this new religion, as it is sometimes called, come from? What are its possibilities and its limitations and borders, if there are any? Why are we so dependent on permanent growing of growth and growth of growing of growth? Where did the idea of progress come from, and where is it leading us? Why are so many economic debates accompanied by obsession and fanaticism?
  • The majority of our political parties act with a narrow materialistic focus when, in their programs, they present the economy and finance first; only then, somewhere at the end, do we find culture as something pasted on or as a libation for a couple of madmen.
  • most of them—consciously or unconsciously—accept and spread the Marxist thesis of the economic base and the spiritual superstructure.
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  • He tries to break free of narrow specialization and cross the boundaries between scientific disciplines. Expeditions beyond economics’ borders and its connection to history, philosophy, psychology, and ancient myths are not only refreshing, but necessary for understanding the world of the twenty-first century.
  • Reality is spun from stories, not from material. Zdeněk Neubauer
  • Before it was emancipated as a field, economics lived happily within subsets of philosophy—ethics, for example—miles away from today’s concept of economics as a mathematical-allocative science that views “soft sciences” with a scorn born from positivistic arrogance. But our thousand-year “education” is built on a deeper, broader, and oftentimes more solid base. It is worth knowing about.
  • Outside of our history, we have nothing more.
  • The study of the history of a certain field is not, as is commonly held, a useless display of its blind alleys or a collection of the field’s trials and errors (until we got it right), but history is the fullest possible scope of study of a menu that the given field can offer.
  • History of thought helps us to get rid of the intellectual brainwashing of the age, to see through the intellectual fashion of the day, and to take a couple of steps back.
  • “The separation between the history of a science, its philosophy, and the science itself dissolves into thin air, and so does the separation between science and non-science; differences between the scientific and unscientific are vanishing.”
  • we seek to chart the development of the economic ethos. We ask questions that come before any economic thinking can begin—both philosophically and, to a degree, historically. The area here lies at the very borders of economics—and often beyond. We may refer to this as protoeconomics (to borrow a term from protosociology) or, perhaps more fittingly, metaeconomics (to borrow a term from metaphysics).
  • stories; Adam Smith believed. As he puts it in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “the desire of being believed, or the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires.”
  • “The human mind is built to think in terms of narratives … in turn, much of human motivation comes from living through a story of our lives, a story that we tell to ourselves and that creates a framework of our motivation. Life could be just ‘one damn thing after another’ if it weren’t for such stories. The same is true for confidence in a nation, a company, or an institution. Great leaders are foremost creators of stories.”
  • contrary to what our textbooks say, economics is predominantly a normative field. Economics not only describes the world but is frequently about how the world should be (it should be effective, we have an ideal of perfect competition, an ideal of high-GDP growth in low inflation, the effort to achieve high competitiveness …). To this end, we create models, modern parables,
  • I will try to show that mathematics, models, equations, and statistics are just the tip of the iceberg of economics; that the biggest part of the iceberg of economic knowledge consists of everything else; and that disputes in economics are rather a battle of stories and various metanarratives than anything else.
  • That is the reason for this book: to look for economic thought in ancient myths and, vice versa, to look for myths in today’s economics.
  • is a paradox that a field that primarily studies values wants to be value-free. One more paradox is this: A field that believes in the invisible hand of the market wants to be without mysteries.
  • Almost all of the key concepts by which economics operates, both consciously and unconsciously, have a long history, and their roots extend predominantly outside the range of economics, and often completely beyond that of science.
  • The History of Animal Spirits: Dreams Never Sleep
  • In this sense, “the study of economics is too narrow and too fragmentary to lead to valid insight, unless complemented and completed by a study of metaeconomics.”17
  • The more important elements of a culture or field of inquiry such as economics are found in fundamental assumptions that adherents of all the various systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming, because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them, as the philosopher Alfred Whitehead notes in Adventures of Ideas.
  • I argue that economic questions were with mankind long before Adam Smith. I argue that the search for values in economics did not start with Adam Smith but culminated with him.
  • We should go beyond economics and study what beliefs are “behind the scenes,” ideas that have often become the dominant yet unspoken assumptions in our theories. Economics is surprisingly full of tautologies that economists are predominantly unaware of. I
  • argue that economics should seek, discover, and talk about its own values, although we have been taught that economics is a value-free science. I argue that none of this is true and that there is more religion, myth, and archetype in economics than there is mathematics.
  • In a way, this is a study of the evolution of both homo economicus and, more importantly, the history of the animal spirits within him. This book tries to study the evolution of the rational as well as the emotional and irrational side of human beings.
  • I argue that his most influential contribution to economics was ethical. His other thoughts had been clearly expressed long before him, whether on specialization, or on the principle of the invisible hand of the market. I try to show that the principle of the invisible hand of the market is much more ancient and developed long before Adam Smith. Traces of it appear even in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Hebrew thought, and in Christianity, and it is expressly stated by Aristophanes and Thomas Aquinas.
  • This is not a book on the thorough history of economic thought. The author aims instead to supplement certain chapters on the history of economic thought with a broader perspective and analysis of the influences that often escape the notice of economists and the wider public.
  • Progress (Naturalness and Civilization)
  • The Economy of Good and Evil
  • from his beginnings, man has been marked as a naturally unnatural creature, who for unique reasons surrounds himself with external possessions. Insatiability, both material and spiritual, are basic human metacharacteristics, which appear as early as the oldest myths and stories.
  • the Hebrews, with linear time, and later the Christians gave us the ideal (or amplified the Hebrew ideal) we now embrace. Then the classical economists secularized progress. How did we come to today’s progression of progress, and growth for growth’s sake?
  • The Need for Greed: The History of Consumption and Labor
  • Metamathematics From where did economics get the concept of numbers as the very foundation of the world?
  • mathematics at the core of economics, or is it just the icing of the cake, the tip of the iceberg of our field’s inquiry?
  • idea that we can manage to utilize our natural egoism, and that this evil is good for something, is an ancient philosophical and mythical concept. We will also look into the development of the ethos of homo economicus, the birth of “economic man.”
  • All of economics is, in the end, economics of good and evil. It is the telling of stories by people of people to people. Even the most sophisticated mathematical model is, de facto, a story, a parable, our effort to (rationally) grasp the world around us.
  • Masters of the Truth
  • Originally, truth was a domain of poems and stories, but today we perceive truth as something much more scientific, mathematical. Where does one go (to shop) for the truth? And who “has the truth” in our epoch?
  • Our animal spirits (something of a counterpart to rationality) are influenced by the archetype of the hero and our concept of what is good.
  • The entire history of ethics has been ruled by an effort to create a formula for the ethical rules of behavior. In the final chapter we will show the tautology of Max Utility, and we will discuss the concept of Max Good.
  • The History of the Invisible Hand of the Market and Homo Economicus
  • We understand “economics” to mean a broader field than just the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. We consider economics to be the study of human relations that are sometimes expressible in numbers, a study that deals with tradables, but one that also deals with nontradables (friendship, freedom, efficiency, growth).
  • When we mention economics in this book, we mean the mainstream perception of it, perhaps as best represented by Paul Samuelson.
  • By the term homo economicus, we mean the primary concept of economic anthropology. It comes from the concept of a rational individual, who, led by narrowly egotistical motives, sets out to maximize his benefit.
  • the Epic of Gilgamesh bears witness to the opposite—despite the fact that the first written clay fragments (such as notes and bookkeeping) of our ancestors may have been about business and war, the first written story is mainly about great friendship and adventure.
  • there is no mention of either money or war; for example, not once does anyone in the whole epic sell or purchase something.5 No nation conquers another, and we do not encounter a mention even of the threat of violence.
  • is a story of nature and civilization, of heroism, defiance, and the battle against the gods, and evil; an epic about wisdom, immortality, and also futility.
  • Gilgamesh becomes a hero not only due to his strength, but also due to discoveries and deeds whose importance were in large part economic—direct gaining of construction materials in the case of felling the cedar forest, stopping Enkidu from devastating Uruk’s economy, and discovering new desert routes during his expeditions.
  • Even today, we often consider the domain of humanity (human relations, love, friendship, beauty, art, etc.) to be unproductive;
  • Even today we live in Gilgamesh’s vision that human relations—and therefore humanity itself—are a disturbance to work and efficiency; that people would perform better if they did not “waste” their time and energy on nonproductive things.
  • But it is in friendship where—often by-the-way, as a side product, an externality—ideas and deeds are frequently performed or created that together can altogether change the face of society.19 Friendship can go against an ingrained system in places where an individual does not have the courage to do so himself or herself.
  • As Joseph Stiglitz says, One of the great “tricks” (some say “insights”) of neoclassical economics is to treat labour like any other factor of production. Output is written as a function of inputs—steel, machines, and labour. The mathematics treats labour like any other commodity, lulling one into thinking of labour like an ordinary commodity, such as steel or plastic.
  • Even the earliest cultures were aware of the value of cooperation on the working level—today we call this collegiality, fellowship, or, if you want to use a desecrated term, comradeship. These “lesser relationships” are useful and necessary for society and for companies because work can be done much faster and more effectively if people get along with each other on a human level
  • But true friendship, which becomes one of the central themes of the Epic of Gilgamesh, comes from completely different material than teamwork. Friendship, as C. S. Lewis accurately describes it, is completely uneconomical, unbiological, unnecessary for civilization, and an unneeded relationship
  • Here we have a beautiful example of the power of friendship, one that knows how to transform (or break down) a system and change a person. Enkidu, sent to Gilgamesh as a punishment from the gods, in the end becomes his faithful friend, and together they set out against the gods. Gilgamesh would never have gathered the courage to do something like that on his own—nor would Enkidu.
  • Due to their friendship, Gilgamesh and Enkidu then intend to stand up to the gods themselves and turn a holy tree into mere (construction) material they can handle almost freely, thereby making it a part of the city-construct, part of the building material of civilization, thus “enslaving” that which originally was part of wild nature. This is a beautiful proto-example of the shifting of the borders between the sacred and profane (secular)—and to a certain extent also an early illustration of the idea that nature is there to provide cities and people with raw material and production resources.
  • started with Babylonians—rural nature becomes just a supplier of raw materials, resources (and humans the source of human resources). Nature is not the garden in which humans were created and placed, which they should care for and which they should reside in, but becomes a mere reservoir for natural (re)sources.
  • But labour is unlike any other commodity. The work environment is of no concern for steel; we do not care about steel’s well-being.16
  • Both heroes change—each from opposite poles—into humans. In this context, a psychological dimension to the story may be useful: “Enkidu (…) is Gilgamesh’s alter ego, the dark, animal side of his soul, the complement to his restless heart. When Gilgamesh found Enkidu, he changed from a hated tyrant into the protector of his city. (…)
  • To be human seems to be somewhere in between, or both of these two. We
  • this moment of rebirth from an animal to a human state, the world’s oldest preserved epic implicitly hints at something highly important. Here we see what early cultures considered the beginning of civilization. Here is depicted the difference between people and animals or, better, savages. Here the epic quietly describes birth, the awakening of a conscious, civilized human. We are witnesses to the emancipation of humanity from animals,
  • The entire history of culture is dominated by an effort to become as independent as possible from the whims of nature.39 The more developed a civilization is, the more an individual is protected from nature and natural influences and knows how to create around him a constant or controllable environment to his liking.
  • The price we pay for independence from the whims of nature is dependence on our societies and civilizations. The more sophisticated a given society is as a whole, the less its members are able to survive on their own as individuals, without society.
  • The epic captures one of the greatest leaps in the development of the division of labor. Uruk itself is one of the oldest cities of all, and in the epic it reflects a historic step forward in specialization—in the direction of a new social city arrangement. Because of the city wall, people in the city can devote themselves to things other than worrying about their own safety, and they can continue to specialize more deeply.
  • Human life in the city gains a new dimension and suddenly it seems more natural to take up issues going beyond the life span of an individual. “The city wall symbolizes as well as founds the permanence of the city as an institution which will remain forever and give its inhabitants the certainty of unlimited safety, allowing them to start investing with an outlook reaching far beyond the borders of individual life.
  • The wall around the city of Uruk is, among other things, a symbol of an internal distancing from nature, a symbol of revolts against submission to laws that do not come under the control of man and that man can at most discover and use to his benefit.
  • “The chief thing which the common-sense individual wants is not satisfactions for the wants he had, but more, and better wants.”47
  • If a consumer buys something, theoretically it should rid him of one of his needs—and the aggregate of things they need should be decreased by one item. In reality, though, the aggregate of “I want to have” expands together with the growing aggregate of “I have.”
  • can be said that Enkidu was therefore happy in his natural state, because all of his needs were satiated. On the other hand, with people, it appears that the more a person has, the more developed and richer, the greater the number of his needs (including the unsaturated ones).
  • the Old Testament, this relationship is perceived completely differently. Man (humanity) is created in nature, in a garden. Man was supposed to care for the Garden of Eden and live in harmony with nature and the animals. Soon after creation, man walks naked and is not ashamed, de facto the same as the animals. What is characteristic is that man dresses (the natural state of creation itself is not enough for him), and he (literally and figuratively) covers52 himself—in shame after the fall.53
  • Nature is where one goes to hunt, collect crops, or gather the harvest. It is perceived as the saturator of our needs and nothing more. One goes back to the city to sleep and be “human.” On the contrary, evil resides in nature. Humbaba lives in the cedar forest, which also happens to be the reason to completely eradicate it.
  • Symbolically, then, we can view the entire issue from the standpoint of the epic in the following way: Our nature is insufficient, bad, evil, and good (humane) occurs only after emancipation from nature (from naturalness), through culturing and education. Humanity is considered as being in civilization.
  • The city was frequently (at least in older Jewish writings) a symbol of sin, degeneration, and decadence—nonhumanity. The Hebrews were originally a nomadic nation, one that avoided cities. It is no accident that the first important city57 mentioned in the Bible is proud Babylon,58 which God later turns to dust.
  • is enough, for example, to read the Book of Revelation to see how the vision of paradise developed from the deep Old Testament period, when paradise was a garden. John describes his vision of heaven as a city—paradise is in New Jerusalem, a city where the dimensions of the walls(!) are described in detail, as are the golden streets and gates of pearl.
  • Hebrews later also chose a king (despite the unanimous opposition of God’s prophets) and settled in cities, where they eventually founded the Lord’s Tabernacle and built a temple for Him. The city of Jerusalem later gained an illustrious position in all of religion.
  • this time Christianity (as well as the influence of the Greeks) does not consider human naturalness to be an unambiguous good, and it does not have such an idyllic relationship to nature as the Old Testament prophets.
  • If a tendency toward good is not naturally endowed in people, it must be imputed from above through violence or at least the threat of violence.
  • If we were to look at human naturalness as a good, then collective social actions need a much weaker ruling hand. If people themselves have a natural tendency (propensity) toward good, this role does not have to be supplied by the state, ruler, or, if you wish, Leviathan.
  • How does this affect economics?
  • us return for the last time to the humanization of the wild Enkidu, which is a process we can perceive with a bit of imagination as the first seed of the principle of the market’s invisible hand, and therefore the parallels with one of the central schematics of economic thinking.
  • Sometimes it is better to “harness the devil to the plow” than to fight with him. Instead of summoning up enormous energy in the fight against evil, it is better to use its own energy to reach a goal we desire; setting up a mill on the turbulent river instead of futile efforts to remove the current. This is also how Saint Prokop approached it in one of the oldest Czech legends.
  • Enkidu caused damage and it was impossible to fight against him. But with the help of a trap, trick, this evil was transformed into something that greatly benefited civilization.
  • By culturing and “domesticating” Enkidu, humanity tamed the uncontrollable wild and chaotic evil
  • Enkidu devastated the doings (the external, outside-the-walls) of the city. But he was later harnessed and fights at the side of civilization against nature, naturalness, the natural state of things.
  • A similar motif appears a thousand years after the reversal, which is well known even to noneconomists as the central idea of economics: the invisible hand of the market.
  • A similar story (reforming something animally wild and uncultivated in civilizational achievement) is used by Thomas Aquinas in his teachings. Several centuries later, this idea is fully emancipated in the hands of Bernard Mandeville and his Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. The economic and political aspects of this idea are—often incorrectly—ascribed to Adam Smith.
  • Here the individual does not try anymore to maximize his goods or profits, but what is important is writing his name in human memory in the form of heroic acts or deeds.
  • immortality, one connected with letters and the cult of the word: A name and especially a written name survives the body.”77
  • After this disappointment, he comes to the edge of the sea, where the innkeeper Siduri lives. As tonic for his sorrow, she offers him the garden of bliss, a sort of hedonistic fortress of carpe diem, where a person comes to terms with his mortality and at least in the course of the end of his life maximizes earthly pleasures, or earthly utility.
  • In the second stage, after finding his friend Enkidu, Gilgamesh abandons the wall and sets out beyond the city to maximalize heroism. “In his (…) search of immortal life, Gilgamesh
  • The hero refuses hedonism in the sense of maximizing terrestrial pleasure and throws himself into things that will exceed his life. In the blink of an eye, the epic turns on its head the entire utility maximization role that mainstream economics has tirelessly tried to sew on people as a part of their nature.81
  • It is simpler to observe the main features of our civilization at a time when the picture was more readable—at a time when our civilization was just being born and was still “half-naked.” In other words, we have tried to dig down to the bedrock of our written civilization;
  • today remember Gilgamesh for his story of heroic friendship with Enkidu, not for his wall, which no longer reaches monumental heights.
  • the eleventh and final tablet, Gilgamesh again loses what he sought. Like Sisyphus, he misses his goal just before the climax
  • is there something from it that is valid today? Have we found in Gilgamesh certain archetypes that are in us to this day?
  • The very existence of questions similar to today’s economic ones can be considered as the first observation. The first written considerations of the people of that time were not so different from those today. In other words: The epic is understandable for us, and we can identify with it.
  • We have also been witnesses to the very beginnings of man’s culturing—a great drama based on a liberation and then a distancing from the natural state.
  • Let us take this as a memento in the direction of our restlessness, our inherited dissatisfaction and the volatility connected to it. Considering that they have lasted five thousand years and to this day we find ourselves in harmony with a certain feeling of futility, perhaps these characteristics are inherent in man.
  • Gilgamesh had a wall built that divided the city from wild nature and created a space for the first human culture. Nevertheless, “not even far-reaching works of civilization could satisfy human desire.”
  • Friendship shows us new, unsuspected adventures, gives us the opportunity to leave the wall and to become neither its builder nor its part—to not be another brick in the wall.
  • with the phenomenon of the creation of the city, we have seen how specialization and the accumulation of wealth was born, how holy nature was transformed into a secular supplier of resources, and also how humans’ individualistic ego was emancipated.
  • to change the system, to break down that which is standing and go on an expedition against the gods (to awaken, from naïveté to awakening) requires friendship.
  • For small acts (hunting together, work in a factory), small love is enough: Camaraderie. For great acts, however, great love is necessary, real love: Friendship. Friendship that eludes the economic understanding of quid pro quo. Friendship gives. One friend gives (fully) for the other. That is friendship for life and death,
  • The thought that humanity comes at the expense of efficiency is just as old as humanity itself—as we have shown, subjects without emotion are the ideal of many tyrants.
  • The epic later crashes this idea through the friendship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Friendship—the biologically least essential love, which at first sight appears to be unnecessary
  • less a civilized, city person is dependent on nature, the more he or she is dependent on the rest of society. Like Enkidu, we have exchanged nature for society; harmony with (incalculable) nature for harmony with (incalculable) man.
  • human nature good or evil? To this day these questions are key for economic policy: If we believe that man is evil in his nature, therefore that a person himself is dog eat dog (animal), then the hard hand of a ruler is called for. If we believe that people in and of themselves, in their nature, gravitate toward good, then it is possible to loosen up the reins and live in a society that is more laissez-faire.
  • For a concept of historical progress, for the undeification of heroes, rulers, and nature, mankind had to wait for the Hebrews.
  • Because nature is not undeified, it is beyond consideration to explore it, let alone intervene in it (unless a person was a two-thirds god like Gilgamesh). It
  • They practiced money lending, traded in many assets (…) and especially were engaged in the trading of shares on capital markets, worked in currency exchange and frequently figured as mediators in financial transactions (…), they functioned as bankers and participated in emissions of all possible forms.
  • As regards modern capitalism (as opposed to the ancient and medieval periods) … there are activities in it which are, in certain forms, inherently (and completely necessarily) present—both from an economic and legal standpoint.7
  • As early as the “dark” ages, the Jews commonly used economic tools that were in many ways ahead of their time and that later became key elements of the modern economy:
  • Gilgamesh’s story ends where it began. There is a consistency in this with Greek myths and fables: At the end of the story, no progress occurs, no essential historic change; the story is set in indefinite time, something of a temporal limbo.
  • Jews believe in historical progress, and that progress is in this world.
  • For a nation originally based on nomadism, where did this Jewish business ethos come from? And can the Hebrews truly be considered as the architects of the values that set the direction of our civilization’s economic thought?
  • Hebrew religiosity is therefore strongly connected with this world, not with any abstract world, and those who take pleasure in worldly possessions are not a priori doing anything wrong.
  • PROGRESS: A SECULARIZED RELIGION One of the things the writers of the Old Testament gave to mankind is the idea and notion of progress. The Old Testament stories have their development; they change the history of the Jewish nation and tie in to each other. The Jewish understanding of time is linear—it has a beginning and an end.
  • The observance of God’s Commandments in Judaism leads not to some ethereal other world, but to an abundance of material goods (Genesis 49:25–26, Leviticus 26:3–13, Deuteronomy 28:1–13) (…) There are no accusing fingers pointed at
  • There are no echoes of asceticism nor for the cleansing and spiritual effect of poverty. It is fitting therefore, that the founders of Judaism, the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, were all wealthy men.12
  • about due to a linear understanding of history. If history has a beginning as well as an end, and they are not the same point, then exploration suddenly makes sense in areas where the fruits are borne only in the next generation.
  • What’s more, economic progress has almost become an assumption of modern functional societies. We expect growth. We take it automatically. Today, if nothing “new” happens, if GDP does not grow (we say it stagnates) for several quarters, we consider it an anomaly.
  • however, the idea of progress itself underwent major changes, and today we perceive it very differently. As opposed to the original spiritual conceptions, today we perceive progress almost exclusively in an economic or scientific-technological sense.
  • Because care for the soul has today been replaced by care for external things,
  • This is why we must constantly grow, because we (deep down and often implicitly) believe that we are headed toward an (economic) paradise on Earth.
  • Only since the period of scientific-technological revolution (and at a time when economics was born as an independent field) is material progress automatically assumed.
  • Jewish thought is the most grounded, most realistic school of thought of all those that have influenced our culture.17 An abstract world of ideas was unknown to the Jews. To this day it is still forbidden to even depict God, people, and animals in symbols, paintings, statues, and drawings.
  • economists have become key figures of great importance in our time (Kacířské eseje o filosofii dějin [Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History]). They are expected to perform interpretations of reality, give prophetic services (macroeconomic forecasts), reshape reality (mitigate the impacts of the crisis, speed up growth), and, in the long run, provide leadership on the way to the Promised Land—paradise on Earth.
  • REALISM AND ANTIASCETICISM Aside from ideas of progress, the Hebrews brought another very fundamental contribution to our culture: The desacralization of heroes, nature, and rulers.
  • Voltaire writes: “It certain fact is, that in his public laws he [Moses] never so much as once made mention of a life to come, limiting all punishments and all rewards to the present life.”21
  • As opposed to Christianity, the concept of an extraterrestrial paradise or heaven was not developed much in Hebrew thought.19 The paradise of the Israelites—Eden—was originally placed on Earth at a given place in Mesopotamia20 and at a given time,
  • The Hebrews consider the world to be real—not just a shadow reflection of a better world somewhere in the cloud of ideas, something the usual interpretation of history ascribes to Plato. The soul does not struggle against the body and is not its prisoner, as Augustine would write later.
  • The land, the world, the body, and material reality are for Jews the paramount setting for divine history, the pinnacle of creation. This idea is the conditio sine qua non of the development of economics, something of an utterly earthly making,
  • The mythology of the hero-king was strongly developed in that period, which Claire Lalouette summarizes into these basic characteristics: Beauty (a perfect face, on which it is “pleasant to look upon,” but also “beauty,” expressed in the Egyptian word nefer, not only means aesthetics, but contains moral qualities as well),
  • THE HERO AND HIS UNDEIFICATION: THE DREAM NEVER SLEEPS The concept of the hero is more important than it might appear. It may be the remote origin of Keynes’s animal spirits, or the desire to follow a kind of internal archetype that a given individual accepts as his own and that society values.
  • This internal animator of ours, our internal mover, this dream, never sleeps and it influences our behavior—including economic behavior—more than we want to realize.
  • manliness and strength,28 knowledge and intelligence,29 wisdom and understanding, vigilance and performance, fame and renown (fame which overcomes enemies because “a thousand men would not be able to stand firmly in his presence”);30 the hero is a good shepherd (who takes care of his subordinates), is a copper-clad rampart, the shield of the land, and the defender of heroes.
  • Each of us probably has a sort of “hero within”—a kind of internal role-model, template, an example that we (knowingly or not) follow. It is very important what kind of archetype it is, because its role is dominantly irrational and changes depending on time and the given civilization.
  • The oldest was the so-called Trickster—a fraudster; then the culture bearer—Rabbit; the musclebound hero called Redhorn; and finally the most developed form of hero: the Twins.
  • the Egyptian ruler, just as the Sumerian, was partly a god, or the son of a god.31
  • Jacob defrauds his father Isaac and steals his brother Esau’s blessing of the firstborn. Moses murders an Egyptian. King David seduces the wife of his military commander and then has him killed. In his old age, King Solomon turns to pagan idols, and so on.
  • Anthropology knows several archetypes of heroes. The Polish-born American anthropologist Paul Radin examined the myths of North American Indians and, for example, in his most influential book, The Trickster, he describes their four basic archetypes of heroes.
  • The Torah’s heroes (if that term can be used at all) frequently make mistakes and their mistakes are carefully recorded in the Bible—maybe precisely so that none of them could be deified.32
  • We do not have to go far for examples. Noah gets so drunk he becomes a disgrace; Lot lets his own daughters seduce him in a similar state of drunkenness. Abraham lies and (repeatedly) tries to sell his wife as a concubine.
  • the Hebrew heroes correspond most to the Tricksters, the Culture Bearers, and the Twins. The divine muscleman, that dominant symbol we think of when we say hero, is absent here.
  • To a certain extent it can be said that the Hebrews—and later Christianity—added another archetype, the archetype of the heroic Sufferer.35 Job
  • Undeification, however, does not mean a call to pillage or desecration; man was put here to take care of nature (see the story of the Garden of Eden or the symbolism of the naming of the animals). This protection and care of nature is also related to the idea of progress
  • For the heroes who moved our civilization to where it is today, the heroic archetypes of the cunning trickster, culture bearer, and sufferer are rather more appropriate.
  • the Old Testament strongly emphasizes the undeification of nature.37 Nature is God’s creation, which speaks of divinity but is not the domain of moody gods
  • This is very important for democratic capitalism, because the Jewish heroic archetype lays the groundwork much better for the development of the later phenomenon of the hero, which better suits life as we know it today. “The heroes laid down their arms and set about trading to become wealthy.”
  • in an Old Testament context, the pharaoh was a mere man (whom one could disagree with, and who could be resisted!).
  • RULERS ARE MERE MEN In a similar historical context, the Old Testament teachings carried out a similar desacralization of rulers, the so-called bearers of economic policy.
  • Ultimately the entire idea of a political ruler stood against the Lord’s will, which is explicitly presented in the Torah. The Lord unequivocally preferred the judge as the highest form of rule—an
  • The needs of future generations will have to be considered; after all humankind are the guardians of God’s world. Waste of natural resources, whether privately owned or nationally owned is forbidden.”39
  • Politics lost its character of divine infallibility, and political issues were subject to questioning. Economic policy could become a subject of examination.
  • 44 God first creates with the word and then on individual days He divides light from darkness, water from dry land, day from night, and so forth—and He gives order to things.45 The world is created orderly— it is wisely, reasonably put together. The way of the world is put together at least partially46 decipherably by any other wise and reasonable being who honors rational rules.
  • which for the methodology of science and economics is very important because disorder and chaos are difficult to examine scientifically.43 Faith in some kind of rational and logical order in a system (society, the economy) is a silent assumption of any (economic) examination.
  • THE PRAISE OF ORDER AND WISDOM: MAN AS A PERFECTER OF CREATION The created world has an order of sorts, an order recognizable by us as people,
  • From the very beginning, when God distances Himself from the entire idea, there is an anticipation that there is nothing holy, let alone divine, in politics. Rulers make mistakes, and it is possible to subject them to tough criticism—which frequently occurs indiscriminately through the prophets in the Old Testament.
  • Hebrew culture laid the foundations for the scientific examination of the world.
  • Examining the world is therefore an absolutely legitimate activity, and one that is even requested by God—it is a kind of participation in the Creator’s work.51 Man is called on to understand himself and his surroundings and to use his knowledge for good.
  • I was there when he set heavens in place, when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep (…) Then I was the craftsman at his side.47
  • There are more urgings to gain wisdom in the Old Testament. “Wisdom calls aloud in the street (…): ‘How long will you simple ones love your simple ways?’”49 Or several chapters later: “Wisdom is supreme; therefore get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding.”50
  • examination is not forbidden. The fact that order can be grasped by human reason is another unspoken assumption that serves as a cornerstone of any scientific examination.
  • then, my sons, listen to me; blessed are those who keep my ways (…) Blessed is the man who listens to me, watching daily at my doors, waiting at my doorway. For whoever finds me finds life and receives favor from the Lord.
  • the rational examination of nature has its roots, surprisingly, in religion.
  • The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old. I was appointed from eternity, from the beginning, before the world began. When there were no oceans, I was given birth, when there were no springs abounding with water, before the mountains were settled in place,
  • The Book of Proverbs emphasizes specifically several times that it was wisdom that was present at the creation of the world. Wisdom personified calls out:
  • The last act, final stroke of the brush of creation, naming of the animals—this act is given to a human, it is not done by God, as one would expect. Man was given the task of completing the act of creation that the Lord began:
  • MAN AS A FINISHER OF CREATION The creation of the world, as it is explained in Jewish teachings, is described in the Book of Genesis. Here God (i) creates, (ii) separates, and (iii) names [my emphasis]:
  • Naming is a symbolic expression. In Jewish culture (and also in our culture to this day), the right to name meant sovereign rights and belonged, for example, to explorers (new places), inventors (new principles), or parents (children)—that is, to those who were there at the genesis, at the origin. This right was handed over by God to mankind.
  • The Naming itself (the capital N is appropriate) traditionally belongs to the crowning act of the Creator and represents a kind of grand finale of creation, the last move of the brush to complete the picture—a signature of the master.
  • Without naming, reality does not exist; it is created together with language. Wittgenstein tightly names this in his tractatus—the limits of our language are the limits of our world.53
  • He invented (fictitiously and completely abstractly!) a framework that was generally accepted and soon “made into” reality. Marx invented similarly; he created the notion of class exploitation. Through his idea, the perception of history and reality was changed for a large part of the world for nearly an entire century.
  • Reality is not a given; it is not passive. Perceiving reality and “facts” requires man’s active participation. It is man who must take the last step, an act (and we
  • How does this relate to economics? Reality itself, our “objective” world, is cocreated, man himself participates in the creation; creation, which is somewhat constantly being re-created.
  • Our scientific models put the finishing touches on reality, because (1) they interpret, (2) they give phenomena a name, (3) they enable us to classify the world and phenomena according to logical forms, and (4) through these models we de facto perceive reality.
  • When man finds a new linguistic framework or analytical model, or stops using the old one, he molds or remolds reality. Models are only in our heads; they are not “in objective reality.” In this sense, Newton invented (not merely discovered!) gravity.
  • A real-ization act on our part represents the creation of a construct, the imputation of sense and order (which is beautifully expressed by the biblical act of naming, or categorization, sorting, ordering).
  • Keynes enters into the history of economic thought from the same intellectual cadence; his greatest contribution to economics was precisely the resurrection of the imperceptible—for example in the form of animal spirits or uncertainty. The economist Piero Mini even ascribes Keynes’s doubting and rebellious approach to his almost Talmudic education.63
  • God connects man with the task of guarding and protecting the Garden of Eden, and thus man actually cocreates the cultural landscape. The Czech philosopher Zdeněk Neubauer also describes this: “Such is reality, and it is so deep that it willingly crystallizes into worlds. Therefore I profess that reality is a creation and not a place of occurrence for objectively given phenomena.”61
  • in this viewpoint it is possible to see how Jewish thought is mystical—it admits the role of the incomprehensible. Therefore, through its groundedness, Jewish thought indulges mystery and defends itself against a mechanistic-causal explanation of the world: “The Jewish way of thinking, according to Veblen, emphasizes the spiritual, the miraculous, the intangible.
  • The Jews believed the exact opposite. The world is created by a good God, and evil appears in it as a result of immoral human acts. Evil, therefore, is induced by man.66 History unwinds according to the morality of human acts.
  • What’s more, history seems to be based on morals; morals seem to be the key determining factors of history. For the Hebrews, history proceeds according to how morally its actors behave.
  • The Sumerians believed in dualism—good and evil deities exist, and the earth of people becomes their passive battlefield.
  • GOOD AND EVIL IN US: A MORAL EXPLANATION OF WELL-BEING We have seen that in the Epic of Gilgamesh, good and evil are not yet addressed systematically on a moral level.
  • This was not about moral-human evil, but rather a kind of natural evil. It is as if good and evil were not touched by morality at all. Evil simply occurred. Period.
  • the epic, good and evil are not envisaged morally—they are not the result of an (a)moral act. Evil was not associated with free moral action or individual will.
  • Hebrew thought, on the other hand, deals intensively with moral good and evil. A moral dimension touches the core of its stories.65
  • discrepancy between savings and investment, and others are convinced of the monetary essence
  • The entire history of the Jewish nation is interpreted and perceived in terms of morality. Morality has become, so to speak, a mover and shaker of Hebrew history.
  • sunspots. The Hebrews came up with the idea that morals were behind good and bad years, behind the economic cycle. But we would be getting ahead of ourselves. Pharaoh’s Dream: Joseph and the First Business Cycle To
  • It is the Pharaoh’s well-known dream of seven fat and seven lean cows, which he told to Joseph, the son of Jacob. Joseph interpreted the dream as a macroeconomic prediction of sorts: Seven years of abundance were to be followed by seven years of poverty, famine, and misery.
  • Self-Contradicting Prophecy Here, let’s make several observations on this: Through taxation74 on the level of one-fifth of a crop75 in good years to save the crop and then open granaries in bad years, the prophecy was de facto prevented (prosperous years were limited and hunger averted—through a predecessor of fiscal stabilization).
  • The Old Testament prophesies therefore were not any deterministic look into the future, but warnings and strategic variations of the possible, which demanded some kind of reaction. If the reaction was adequate, what was prophesied would frequently not occur at all.
  • This principle stands directly against the self-fulfilling prophecy,80 the well-known concept of social science. Certain prophecies become self-fulfilling when expressed (and believed) while others become self-contradicting prophecies when pronounced (and believed).
  • If the threat is anticipated, it is possible to totally or at least partially avoid it. Neither Joseph nor the pharaoh had the power to avoid bounty or crop failure (in this the dream interpretation was true and the appearance of the future mystical), but they avoided the impacts and implications of the prophecy (in this the interpretation of the dream was “false”)—famine did not ultimately occur in Egypt, and this was due to the application of reasonable and very intuitive economic policy.
  • Let us further note that the first “macroeconomic forecast” appears in a dream.
  • back to Torah: Later in this story we will notice that there is no reason offered as to why the cycle occurs (that will come later). Fat years will simply come, and then lean years after them.
  • Moral Explanation of a Business Cycle That is fundamentally different from later Hebrew interpretations, when the Jewish nation tries to offer reasons why the nation fared well or poorly. And those reasons are moral.
  • If you pay attention to these laws and are careful to follow them, then the Lord your God will keep his covenant of love with you, as he swore to your forefathers. He will love you and bless you and increase your numbers.
  • Only in recent times have some currents of economics again become aware of the importance of morals and trust in the form of measuring the quality of institutions, the level of justice, business ethics, corruption, and so forth, and examining their influence on the economy,
  • From today’s perspective, we can state that the moral dimension entirely disappeared from economic thought for a long time, especially due to the implementation of Mandeville’s concept of private vices that contrarily support the public welfare
  • Without being timid, we can say this is the first documented attempt to explain the economic cycle. The economic cycle, the explanation of which is to this day a mystery to economists, is explained morally in the Old Testament.
  • But how do we consolidate these two conflicting interpretations of the economic cycle: Can ethics be responsible for it or not? Can we influence reality around us through our acts?
  • it is not within the scope of this book to answer that question; justice has been done to the question if it manages to sketch out the main contours of possible searches for answers.
  • THE ECONOMICS OF GOOD AND EVIL: DOES GOOD PAY OFF? This is probably the most difficult moral problem we could ask.
  • Kant, the most important modern thinker in the area of ethics, answers on the contrary that if we carry out a “moral” act on the basis of economic calculus (therefore we carry out an hedonistic consideration; see below) in the expectation of later recompense, its morality is lost. Recompense, according to the strict Kant, annuls ethics.
  • Inquiring about the economics of good and evil, however, is not that easy. Where would Kant’s “moral dimension of ethics” go if ethics paid? If we do good for profit, the question of ethics becomes a mere question of rationality.
  • Job’s friends try to show that he must have sinned in some way and, in doing so, deserved God’s punishment. They are absolutely unable to imagine a situation in which Job, as a righteous man, would suffer without (moral) cause. Nevertheless, Job insists that he deserves no punishment because he has committed no offense: “God has wronged me and drawn his net around me.”94
  • But Job remains righteous, even though it does not pay to do so: Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him.95 And till I die, I will not deny my integrity I will maintain my righteousness and never let go of it; my conscience will not reproach me as long as I live.96
  • He remains righteous, even if his only reward is death. What economic advantage could he have from that?
  • morals cannot be considered in the economic dimension of productivity and calculus. The role of the Hebrews was to do good, whether it paid off or not. If good (outgoing) is rewarded by incoming goodness, it is a bonus,99 not a reason to do outgoing good. Good and reward do not correlate to each other.
  • This reasoning takes on a dimension of its own in the Old Testament. Good (incoming) has already happened to us. We must do good (outgoing) out of gratitude for the good (incoming) shown to us in the past.
  • So why do good? After all, suffering is the fate of many biblical figures. The answer can only be: For good itself. Good has the power to be its own reward. In this sense, goodness gets its reward, which may or may not take on a material dimension.
  • the Hebrews offered an interesting compromise between the teachings of the Stoics and Epicureans. We will go into it in detail later, so only briefly
  • constraint. It calls for bounded optimalization (with limits). A kind of symbiosis existed between the legitimate search for one’s own utility (or enjoyment of life) and maintaining rules, which are not negotiable and which are not subject to optimalization.
  • In other words, clear (exogenously given) rules exist that must be observed and cannot be contravened. But within these borders it is absolutely possible, and even recommended, to increase utility.
  • the mining of enjoyment must not come at the expense of exogenously given rules. “Judaism comes therefore to train or educate the unbounded desire … for wealth, so that market activities and patterns of consumption operate within a God-given morality.”102
  • The Epicureans acted with the goal of maximizing utility without regard for rules (rules developed endogenously, from within the system, computed from that which increased utility—this was one of the main trumps of the Epicurean school; they did not need exogenously given norms, and argued that they could “calculate” ethics (what to do) for every given situation from the situation itself).
  • The Stoics could not seek their enjoyment—or, by another name, utility. They could not in any way look back on it, and in no way could they count on it. They could only live according to rules (the greatest weakness of this school was to defend where exogenously the given rules came from and whether they are universal) and take a indifferent stand to the results of their actions.
  • To Love the Law The Jews not only had to observe the law (perhaps the word covenant would be more appropriate), but they were to love it because it was good.
  • Their relationship to the law was not supposed to be one of duty,105 but one of gratitude, love. Hebrews were to do good (outgoing), because goodness (incoming) has already been done to them.
  • This is in stark contrast with today’s legal system, where, naturally, no mention of love or gratefulness exists. But God expects a full internalization of the commandments and their fulfillment with love, not as much duty. By no means was this on the basis of the cost-benefit analyses so widespread in economics today, which determines when it pays to break the law and when not to (calculated on the basis of probability of being caught and the amount of punishment vis-à-vis the possible gain).
  • And now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to observe the Lord’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good? To the Lord your God belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it. Yet the Lord set his affection on your forefathers and loved them….
  • the principle of doing good (outgoing) on the basis of a priori demonstrated good (incoming) was also taken over by the New Testament. Atonement itself is based on an a priori principle; all our acts are preceded by good.
  • The Hebrews, originally a nomadic tribe, preferred to be unrestrained and grew up in constant freedom of motion.
  • Human laws, if they are in conflict with the responsibilities given by God, are subordinate to personal responsibility, and a Jew cannot simply join the majority, even if it is legally allowed. Ethics, the concept of good, is therefore always superior to all local laws, rules, and customs:
  • THE SHACKLES OF THE CITY Owing to the Hebrew’s liberation from Egyptian slavery, freedom and responsibility become the key values of Jewish thought.
  • Laws given by God are binding for Jews, and God is the absolute source of all values,
  • The Hebrew ideal is represented by the paradise of the Garden of Eden, not a city.116 The despised city civilization or the tendency to see in it a sinful and shackling way of life appears in glimpses and allusions in many places in the Old Testament.
  • The nomadic Jewish ethos is frequently derived from Abraham, who left the Chaldean city of Ur on the basis of a command:
  • In addition, they were aware of a thin two-way line between owner and owned. We own material assets, but—to a certain extent—they own us and tie us down. Once we become used to a certain material
  • This way of life had understandably immense economic impacts. First, such a society lived in much more connected relationships, where there was no doubt that everyone mutually depended on each other. Second, their frequent wanderings meant the inability to own more than they could carry; the gathering up of material assets did not have great weight—precisely because the physical weight (mass) of things was tied to one place.
  • One of Moses’s greatest deeds was that he managed to explain to his nation once and for all that it is better to remain hungry and liberated than to be a slave with food “at no cost.”
  • SOCIAL WELFARE: NOT TO ACT IN THE MANNER OF SODOM
  • regulations is developed in the Old Testament, one we hardly find in any other nation of the time. In Hebrew teachings, aside from individual utility, indications of the concept of maximalizing utility societywide appear for the first time as embodied in the Talmudic principle of Kofin al midat S´dom, which can be translated as “one is compelled not to act in the manner of Sodom” and to take care of the weaker members of society.
  • In a jubilee year, debts were to be forgiven,125 and Israelites who fell into slavery due to their indebtedness were to be set free.126
  • Such provisions can be seen as the antimonopoly and social measures of the time. The economic system even then had a clear tendency to converge toward asset concentration, and therefore power as well. It would appear that these provisions were supposed to prevent this process
  • Land at the time could be “sold,” and it was not sale, but rent. The price (rent) of real estate depended on how long there was until a forgiveness year. It was about the awareness that we may work the land, but in the last instance we are merely “aliens and strangers,” who have the land only rented to us for a fixed time. All land and riches came from the Lord.
  • These provisions express a conviction that freedom and inheritance should not be permanently taken away from any Israelite. Last but not least, this system reminds us that no ownership lasts forever and that the fields we plow are not ours but the Lord’s.
  • Glean Another social provision was the right to glean, which in Old Testament times ensured at least basic sustenance for the poorest. Anyone who owned a field had the responsibility not to harvest it to the last grain but to leave the remains in the field for the poor.
  • Tithes and Early Social Net Every Israelite also had the responsibility of levying a tithe from their entire crop. They had to be aware from whom all ownership comes and, by doing so, express their thanks.
  • “Since the community has an obligation to provide food, shelter, and basic economic goods for the needy, it has a moral right and duty to tax its members for this purpose. In line with this duty, it may have to regulate markets, prices and competition, to protect the interests of its weakest members.”135
  • In Judaism, charity is not perceived as a sign of goodness; it is more of a responsibility. Such a society then has the right to regulate its economy in such a way that the responsibility of charity is carried out to its satisfaction.
  • With a number of responsibilities, however, comes the difficulty of getting them into practice. Their fulfillment, then, in cases when it can be done, takes place gradually “in layers.” Charitable activities are classified in the Talmud according to several target groups with various priorities, classified according to, it could be said, rules of subsidiarity.
  • Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt.140 As one can see, aside from widows and orphans, the Old Testament also includes immigrants in its area of social protection.141 The Israelites had to have the same rules apply for them as for themselves—they could not discriminate on the basis of their origin.
  • ABSTRACT MONEY, FORBIDDEN INTEREST, AND OUR DEBT AGE If it appears to us that today’s era is based on money and debt, and our time will be written into history as the “Debt age,” then it will certainly be interesting to follow how this development occurred.
  • Money is a social abstractum. It is a social agreement, an unwritten contract.
  • The first money came in the form of clay tablets from Mesopotamia, on which debts were written. These debts were transferable, so the debts became currency. In the end, “It is no coincidence that in English the root of ‘credit’ is ‘credo,’ the Latin for ‘I believe.’”
  • To a certain extent it could be said that credit, or trust, was the first currency. It can materialize, it can be embodied in coins, but what is certain is that “money is not metal,” even the rarest metal, “it is trust inscribed,”
  • Inseparably, with the original credit (money) goes interest. For the Hebrews, the problem of interest was a social issue: “If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not be like a moneylender; charge him no interest.”
  • there were also clearly set rules setting how far one could go in setting guarantees and the nonpayment of debts. No one should become indebted to the extent that they could lose the source of their livelihood:
  • In the end, the term “bank” comes from the Italian banci, or the benches that Jewish lenders sat on.157
  • Money is playing not only its classical roles (as a means of exchange, a holder of value, etc.) but also a much greater, stronger role: It can stimulate, drive (or slow down) the whole economy. Money plays a national economic role.
  • In the course of history, however, the role of loans changed, and the rich borrowed especially for investment purposes,
  • Today the position and significance of money and debt has gone so far and reached such a dominant position in society that operating with debts (fiscal policy) or interest or money supply (monetary policy) means that these can, to a certain extent, direct (or at least strongly influence) the whole economy and society.
  • In such a case a ban on interest did not have great ethical significance. Thomas Aquinas, a medieval scholar (1225-1274), also considers similarly; in his time, the strict ban on lending with usurious interest was loosened, possibly due to him.
  • As a form of energy, money can travel in three dimensions, vertically (those who have capital lend to those who do not) and horizontally (speed and freedom in horizontal or geographic motion has become the by-product—or driving force?—of globalization). But money (as opposed to people) can also travel through time.
  • money is something like energy that can travel through time. And it is a very useful energy, but at the same time very dangerous as well. Wherever
  • Aristotle condemned interest162 not only from a moral standpoint, but also for metaphysical reasons. Thomas Aquinas shared the same fear of interest and he too argued that time does not belong to us, and that is why we must not require interest.
  • MONEY AS ENERGY: TIME TRAVEL AND GROSS DEBT PRODUCT (GDP)
  • Due to this characteristic, we can energy-strip the future to the benefit of the present. Debt can transfer energy from the future to the present.163 On the other hand, saving can accumulate energy from the past and send it to the present.
  • labor was not considered degrading in the Old Testament. On the contrary, the subjugation of nature is even a mission from God that originally belonged to man’s very first blessings.
  • LABOR AND REST: THE SABBATH ECONOMY
  • The Jews as well as Aristotle behaved very guardedly toward loans. The issue of interest/usury became one of the first economic debates. Without having an inkling of the future role of economic policy (fiscal and monetary), the ancient Hebrews may have unwittingly felt that they were discovering in interest a very powerful weapon, one that can be a good servant, but (literally) an enslaving master as well.
  • It’s something like a dam. When we build one, we are preventing periods of drought and flooding in the valley; we are limiting nature’s whims and, to a large extent, avoiding its incalculable cycles. Using dams, we can regulate the flow of water to nearly a constant. With it we tame the river (and we can also gain
  • But if we do not regulate the water wisely, it may happen that we would overfill the dam and it would break. For the cities lying in the valley, their end would be worse than if a dam were never there.
  • If man lived in harmony with nature before, now, after the fall, he must fight; nature stands against him and he against it and the animals. From the Garden we have moved unto a (battle)field.
  • Only after man’s fall does labor turn into a curse.168 It could even be said that this is actually the only curse, the curse of the unpleasantness of labor, that the Lord places on Adam.
  • Both Plato and Aristotle consider labor to be necessary for survival, but that only the lower classes should devote themselves to it so that the elites would not have to be bothered with it and so that they could devote themselves to “purely spiritual matters—art, philosophy, and politics.”
  • Work is also not only a source of pleasure but a social standing; It is considered an honor. “Do you see a man skilled in his work? He will serve before kings.”170 None of the surrounding cultures appreciate work as much. The idea of the dignity of labor is unique in the Hebrew tradition.
  • Hebrew thinking is characterized by a strict separation of the sacred from the profane. In life, there are simply areas that are holy, and in which it is not allowed to economize, rationalize, or maximize efficiency.
  • good example is the commandment on the Sabbath. No one at all could work on this day, not even the ones who were subordinate to an observant Jew:
  • the message of the commandment on Saturday communicated that people were not primarily created for labor.
  • Paradoxically, it is precisely this commandment out of all ten that is probably the most violated today.
  • Aristotle even considers labor to be “a corrupted waste of time which only burdens people’s path to true honour.”
  • we have days when we must not toil connected (at least lexically) with the word meaning emptiness: the English term “vacation” (or emptying), as with the French term, les vacances, or German die Freizeit, meaning open time, free time, but also…
  • Translated into economic language: The meaning of utility is not to increase it permanently but to rest among existing gains. Why do we learn how to constantly increase gains but not how to…
  • This dimension has disappeared from today’s economics. Economic effort has no goal at which it would be possible to rest. Today we only know growth for growth’s sake, and if our company or country prospers, that does not…
  • Six-sevenths of time either be dissatisfied and reshape the world into your own image, man, but one-seventh you will rest and not change the creation. On the seventh day, enjoy creation and enjoy the work of your hands.
  • the purpose of creation was not just creating but that it had an end, a goal. The process was just a process, not a purpose. The whole of Being was created so…
  • Saturday was not established to increase efficiency. It was a real ontological break that followed the example of the Lord’s seventh day of creation. Just as the Lord did not rest due to tiredness or to regenerate strength; but because He was done. He was done with His work, so that He could enjoy it, to cherish in His creation.
  • If we believe in rest at all today, it is for different reasons. It is the rest of the exhausted machine, the rest of the weak, and the rest of those who can’t handle the tempo. It’s no wonder that the word “rest…
  • Related to this, we have studied the first mention of a business cycle with the pharaoh’s dream as well as seen a first attempt (that we may call…
  • We have tried to show that the quest for a heaven on Earth (similar to the Jewish one) has, in its desacralized form, actually also been the same quest for many of the…
  • We have also seen that the Hebrews tried to explain the business cycle with morality and ethics. For the Hebrews,…
  • ancient Greek economic ethos, we will examine two extreme approaches to laws and rules. While the Stoics considered laws to be absolutely valid, and utility had infinitesimal meaning in their philosophy, the Epicureans, at least in the usual historical explanation, placed utility and pleasure in first place—rules were to be made based on the principle of utility.
  • CONCLUSION: BETWEEN UTILITY AND PRINCIPLE The influence of Jewish thought on the development of market democracy cannot be overestimated. The key heritage for us was the lack of ascetic perception of the world, respect to law and private…
  • We have tried to show how the Torah desacralized three important areas in our lives: the earthly ruler, nature,…
  • What is the relationship between the good and evil that we do (outgoing) and the utility of disutility that we (expect to) get as a reward (incoming)? We have seen…
  • The Hebrews never despised material wealth; on contrary, the Jewish faith puts great responsibility on property management. Also the idea of progress and the linear perception of time gives our (economic)…
  • the Hebrews managed to find something of a happy compromise between both of these principles.
  • will not be able to completely understand the development of the modern notion of economics without understanding the disputes between the Epicureans and the Stoics;
  • poets actually went even further, and with their speech they shaped and established reality and truth. Honor, adventure, great deeds, and the acclaim connected with them played an important role in the establishment of the true, the real.
  • those who are famous will be remembered by people. They become more real, part of the story, and they start to be “realized,” “made real” in the lives of other people. That which is stored in memory is real; that which is forgotten is as if it never existed.
  • Today’s scientific truth is founded on the notion of exact and objective facts, but poetic truth stands on an interior (emotional) consonance with the story or poem. “It is not addressed first to the brain … [myth] talks directly to the feeling system.”
  • “epic and tragic poets were widely assumed to be the central ethical thinkers and teachers of Greece; nobody thought of their work as less serious, less aimed at truth, than the speculative prose treatises of historians and philosophers.”5 Truth and reality were hidden in speech, stories, and narration.
  • Ancient philosophy, just as science would later, tries to find constancy, constants, quantities, inalterabilities. Science seeks (creates?) order and neglects everything else as much as it can. In their own experiences, everyone knows that life is not like that,
  • Just as scientists do today, artists drew images of the world that were representative, and therefore symbolic, picturelike, and simplifying (but thus also misleading), just like scientific models, which often do not strive to be “realistic.”
  • general? In the end, poetry could be more sensitive to the truth than the philosophical method or, later, the scientific method. “Tragic poems, in virtue of their subject matter and their social function, are likely to confront and explore problems about human beings and luck that a philosophical text might be able to omit or avoid.”8
sissij

Manterruption is a Thing, and Now There is an App to Detect it in Daily Conversation | ... - 0 views

  • Introducing our word of the day – “manterruption”. It’s a pretty self-explanatory term, describing a behavior when men interrupt women unnecessarily, which leads to a pretty serious imbalance in the amount of female vs. male contributions in a conversation.
  • A 2004 study on gender issues at Harvard Law School found that men were 50% more likely than women to volunteer at least one comment during class and 144% more likely to volunteer three or more comments. 
  • which as a consequence leaves decision-making mostly to men.
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  • Meaning, women’s voices bring a different and valuable perspective in a conversation and should be heard more.
  • Here's the thing, though: while fighting for the cause of hearing the female perspective equally in all matters of business, government, and life is definitely worthwhile, blaming it all on interrupting men doesn’t seem fair. Because it is not just men who interrupt women, women do it too. As a matter of fact, a study done in a tech company showed that 87% of the time that women interrupt, they are interrupting other women.
  • There are also other dynamics at play, for example, seniority. It is still more likely that men will hold a more senior position in a professional environment and, generally, people with a higher rank tend to interrupt more and be interrupted less.
  • Hearing the voices and perspectives of both genders equally is incredibly important, but we should make sure we are addressing the right root causes and are not antagonizing those who need to be on the same side for progress to be made. 
  •  
    I think this app is very interesting. There are obviously gender inequality in the society that men are often more used to take the leadership than women. I think by counting how many times a woman is interrupted by a man is a very interesting aspect to show how the society is still dominated by men. I also really like that the author discusses about other possible factors of why women are more likely to be interrupted by men. Only arguing about one side wouldn't make a strong argument. Gender inequality is a big and heavy label that we should give it more thinking before we apply it to any phenomenon. --Sissi (3/14/2017)
Javier E

How Social Status Affects Your Health - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • If you want to see how status affects health, you have to isolate status from material wealth. How to do that? The easiest way is to observe a society in which there is minimal material wealth to contest and where there are limited avenues for status competition.
  • For several years, we studied the Tsimane forager-horticulturalists of Amazonian Bolivia, a small, preindustrial, politically egalitarian society in which status confers no formal privileges (such as coercive authority).
  • we found that even among the Tsimane, higher status was associated with lower levels of stress and better health.
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  • Along the banks of the Maniqui River and in adjacent forests, the Tsimane people hunt, fish and plant plantains, rice and sweet manioc. They live in villages that range in size from 30 to 700 people. During village meetings, decision making is consensus-based. No individual has the right to coerce anyone else.
  • that doesn’t mean there are no status distinctions. When you attend a Tsimane village meeting, you soon notice that the opinions of certain men are more influential during the consensus-building process. These same men are often solicited to mediate disputes or to represent villagers’ interests with outsiders.
  • My colleagues and I measured the social status of all the men from four Tsimane villages (nearly 200 men between the ages of 18 and 83), by asking them to evaluate one another on their informal political influence. The men also provided urine samples and received medical examinations from physicians
  • We found that Tsimane men with less political influence had higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which has many important physiological functions. This result persisted after controlling for other factors that might affect stress levels, including age, body size and personality.
  • Those living just above the poverty line may resent welfare for those living just below it, and a millionaire may envy a multimillionaire more than he envies a billionaire.
  • Studying the same individuals over a four-year period, we also found that for men whose influence declined over time, greater declines were correlated with higher levels of cortisol and respiratory illness. Downward mobility is harmful, it seems, even in an egalitarian society.
  • Why might low status cause such stress for the Tsimane? One possibility is that status offers a greater sense of control.
  • Another is that status acts as a form of social insurance. Influential Tsimane men have more allies and food-production partners, who can be helpful in mitigating conflict, sickness and food shortage. The relative lack of such support may cause psychosocial stress.
  • It is interesting that even in industrialized societies, the status comparisons most consequential for psychosocial stress are often among individuals who live near one another or occupy the same social network, not individuals at opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum.
  • In addition, we found that the less influential Tsimane men had a higher risk of respiratory infection, the most common cause of sickness and death in their society. Stress may contribute to this disparity in infection risk; when chronic, stress can dampen immune function.
  • The importance of relative status perceptions may have its roots in the small-scale societies of our ancestors, which were similar to that of the Tsimane. In such societies, both our political competitors and our cooperative partners were likely individuals with whom we interacted regularly.
  • As our society debates the effects of wealth inequality, the Tsimane help us understand why we care so deeply about relative social position — and why our health depends on it.
Javier E

Don't Ask Your Doctor About 'Low T' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • A FUNNY thing has happened in the United States over the last few decades. Men’s average testosterone levels have been dropping by at least 1 percent a year
  • Testosterone appears to decline naturally with aging, but internal belly fat depresses the hormone further, especially in obese men. Drugs like steroids and opiates also lower testosterone, and it’s suspected that chemicals like bisphenol A (or BPA, commonly found in plastic food containers) and diseases like Type 2 diabetes play a role as well.
  • Clinical testosterone deficiency, which is variously defined as lower than 220 to 350 nanograms of testosterone per deciliter of blood serum, can cause men to lose sex drive and fertility. Their bone density often declines, and they may feel tired and experience hot flashes and sweats.
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  • prescription testosterone doesn’t just give your T level a boost: it may also increase your risk of heart attack. It can add huge numbers of red blood cells to your bloodstream and shrink your testes. In some men, it increases aggression and irritability.
  • In addition to the cardiac risks, prescription T can mean a permanent shut-off in men’s own, albeit diminished, testosterone production. In other words, once you start, you may well be hooked for life.
  • Used clinically since 1937 and approved by the F.D.A. since 1953, testosterone is now administered in at least five forms, including patches, gels and injections
  • a large study published in the journal PLoS ONE found that, within three months, taking the hormone doubled the rate of heart attacks in men 65 and older, as well as in younger men who had heart disease. The Food and Drug Administration has begun an investigation.
  • men should address the leading cause of the problem. Losing weight is a tried and true way to naturally boost testosterone levels. According to findings presented at the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society in 2012, obese men who lost an average of 17 pounds saw their testosterone levels increase by 15 percent. In general, a man’s waist should be half his height.
  • At the end of the day, eating more of the right foods and fewer junk foods improves mood and energy — which may be the only fix many men need.
Javier E

The Jordan Peterson Moment - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Jordan Peterson is the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now, and he has a point. Peterson, a University of Toronto psychologist, has found his real home on YouTube, where his videos have attracted something like 40 million views.
  • In his videos, he analyzes classic and biblical texts, he eviscerates identity politics and political correctness and, most important, he delivers stern fatherly lectures to young men on how to be honorable, upright and self-disciplined — how to grow up and take responsibility for their own lives.
  • Parents, universities and the elders of society have utterly failed to give many young men realistic and demanding practical wisdom on how to live. Peterson has filled the gap.
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  • The implied readers of his work are men who feel fatherless, solitary, floating in a chaotic moral vacuum, constantly outperformed and humiliated by women, haunted by pain and self-contempt. At some level Peterson is offering assertiveness training to men whom society is trying to turn into emasculated snowflakes.
  • Peterson gives them a chance to be strong. He inspires their idealism by telling them that life is hard. His worldview begins with the belief that life is essentially a series of ruthless dominance competitions.
  • For much of Western history, he argues, Christianity restrained the human tendency toward barbarism. But God died in the 19th century, and Christian dogma and discipline died with him
  • That gave us the age of ideology, the age of fascism and communism — and with it, Auschwitz, Dachau and the gulag.
  • Since then we’ve tried another way to pacify the race. Since most conflict is over values, we’ve decided to not have any values. We’ll celebrate relativism and tolerance
  • We deny the true nature of humanity and naïvely pretend everyone is nice. The upside is we haven’t blown ourselves up; the downside is we live in a world of normlessness, meaninglessness and chaos.
  • All of life is perched, Peterson continues, on the point between order and chaos
  • Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection. Women are choosy maters. … Most men do not meet female human standards.”
  • Don’t be fooled by the naïve optimism of progressive ideology. Life is about remorseless struggle and pain. Your instinct is to whine, to play the victim, to seek vengeance.
  • Peterson tells young men to never do that. Rise above the culture of victimization you see all around you
  • “The individual must conduct his or her life in a manner that requires the rejection of immediate gratification, of natural and perverse desires alike.”
  • Instead, choose discipline, courage and self-sacrifice. “To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life.” Never lie. Tell your boss what you really think. Be strict with your children.
  • His recipe for self-improvement is solitary, nonrelational, unemotional. I’d say the lives of young men can be improved more through loving attachment than through Peterson’s joyless and graceless calls to self-sacrifice.
  • But the emphasis on strength of will, the bootstrap, the calls to toughness and self-respect — all of this touches some need in his audience. He doesn’t comfort
  • And Peterson personifies the strong, courageous virtues he champions. His most recent viral video, with over four million views, is an interview he did with Cathy Newman of Britain’s Channel 4 News.
  • , as Conor Friedersdorf noted in The Atlantic, she did what a lot of people do in argument these days. Instead of actually listening to Peterson, she just distorted, simplified and restated his views to make them appear offensive and cartoonish.
  • Peterson calmly and comprehensibly corrected and rebutted her. It is the most devastatingly one-sided media confrontation you will ever see. He reminded me of a young William F. Buckley.
  • The Peterson way is a harsh way, but it is an idealistic way — and for millions of young men, it turns out to be the perfect antidote to the cocktail of coddling and accusation in which they are raised
Javier E

'Messages of Shame Are Organized Around Gender' - The Atlantic - 3 views

  • Brown is a bestselling author and research professor who studies "vulnerability, courage, worthiness, and shame,
  • I recognized the culture she described in which institutionalized, nagging shame can cause people to put on so much emotional armor that they can't connect with others or access their authentic selves. I might have called those repressive forces "fear," or "self-doubt," or "insecurity," but, yeah, "shame" kind of covers all the bases.
  • the antidote to crippling shame is vulnerability. We tend to think of vulnerability as weakness; but in fact, she argues, it is the highest form of courage. To admit fear and pain, to reach out to others for help, to quiet the "gremlins" that tell us to keep our mouths shut and soldier on: this is how we become engaged, make human connections, and live "wholeheartedly."
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  • "messages of shame are organized around gender." For women, she said, there are whole constellations of often contradictory expectations that, if not met, are sources of shame.
  • But for men, the overarching message is that any weakness is shameful. And since vulnerability is often perceived as weakness, it is especially risky for men to practice vulnerability.
  • men's shame is not primarily inflicted by other men. Instead, it is the women in their lives who tend to be repelled when men show the chinks in their armor.
  • Ironically, she explained, men are often pressured to open up and talk about their feelings, and they are criticized for being emotionally walled-off; but if they get too real, they are met with revulsion. She recalled the first time she realized that she had been complicit in the shaming: "Holy Shit!" she said. "I am the patriarchy!"
  • there are three main practices men, in particular, need to engage in. The first is asking for help. The second is setting boundaries; for example, not taking on work or activities that you don't want to do. And the third is apologizing and "owning it" when you are wrong.
jlessner

Straight Talk for White Men - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • SUPERMARKET shoppers are more likely to buy French wine when French music is playing, and to buy German wine when they hear German music. That’s true even though only 14 percent of shoppers say they noticed the music, a study finds.
  • Researchers discovered that candidates for medical school interviewed on sunny days received much higher ratings than those interviewed on rainy days. Being interviewed on a rainy day was a setback equivalent to having an MCAT score 10 percent lower, according to a new book called “Everyday Bias,” by Howard J. Ross.
  • Those studies are a reminder that we humans are perhaps less rational than we would like to think, and more prone to the buffeting of unconscious influences. That’s something for those of us who are white men to reflect on when we’re accused of “privilege.”
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  • When I wrote a series last year, “When Whites Just Don’t Get It,” the reaction from white men was often indignant: It’s an equal playing field now! Get off our case!
  • Yet the evidence is overwhelming that unconscious bias remains widespread in ways that systematically benefit both whites and men. So white men get a double dividend, a payoff from both racial and gender biases.
  • male professors are disproportionately likely to be described as a “star” or “genius.” Female professors are disproportionately described as “nasty,” “ugly,” “bossy” or “disorganized.”
  • When students were taking the class from someone they believed to be male, they rated the teacher more highly. The very same teacher, when believed to be female, was rated significantly lower.
  • The study found that a résumé with a name like Emily or Greg received 50 percent more callbacks than the same résumé with a name like Lakisha or Jamal. Having a white-sounding name was as beneficial as eight years’ work experience.
  • Then there was the study in which researchers asked professors to evaluate the summary of a supposed applicant for a post as laboratory manager, but, in some cases, the applicant was named John and in others Jennifer. Everything else was the same.“John” was rated an average of 4.0 on a 7-point scale for competence, “Jennifer” a 3.3. When asked to propose an annual starting salary for the applicant, the professors suggested on average a salary for “John” almost $4,000 higher than for “Jennifer.”Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
  • While we don’t notice systematic unfairness, we do observe specific efforts to redress it — such as affirmative action, which often strikes white men as profoundly unjust. Thus a majority of white Americans surveyed in a 2011 study said that there is now more racism against whites than against blacks.
Javier E

The Myth of Wealthy Men and Beautiful Women - The Atlantic - 1 views

  • Experiments that don’t rely on self-reporting regularly show that physical attractiveness is exquisitely, at times incomparably, important to both men and women. Status (however you want to measure it: income, formal education, et cetera) is often not far behind
  • In real-life dating studies, which get closer to genuine intentions, physical attractiveness and earning potential strongly predict romantic attraction.
  • when it comes to beauty and income, more is almost always seen as better. On these “consensually-ranked” traits, people seem to aspire to partners who rank more highly than themselves. They don’t want a match so much as a jackpot.
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  • McClintock found that outside of ailing tycoons and Donald Trump, in the practical world it basically doesn’t exist. Where it does, it doesn’t last. The dominant force in mating is matching.
  • What appears to be an exchange of beauty for socioeconomic status is often actually not an exchange, McClintock wrote, but a series of matched virtues
  • Economically successful women partner with economically successful men, and physically attractive women partner with physically attractive men.
  • Because people of high socioeconomic status are, on average, rated as more physically attractive than people of lower status, many correlations between one partner's appearance and the other partner's status are spurious and misconstrued.
  • “Women spend a lot more time trying to look good than men do,” McClintock said. “That creates a lot of mess in this data. If you don’t take that into account then you actually see there’s a lot of these guys who are partnered with women who are better looking than them, which is just because, on average, women are better looking. Men are partnering 'up' in attractiveness.
  • And men earn more than women—we’ve got that 70-percent wage gap—so women marry 'up' in income. You’ve got to take these things into account before concluding that women are trading beauty for money.”
  • “It would be very hard to separate out class and attractiveness,” McClintock said, “because they’re just so fundamentally linked. I can’t control for that—but I don’t see how anybody could.”
  • “Controlling for both partners’ physical attractiveness may not eliminate the relationship between female beauty and male status,” McClintock wrote, “but it should at least reduce this relationship substantially.”
cvanderloo

Why Nearly All Mass Shooters Are Men : NPR - 1 views

  • As with almost every mass shooter in recorded U.S. history, both of the suspects in the recent attacks are men.
  • "Men just are generally more violent," said the group's president, Jillian Peterson, a forensic psychologist and professor of criminology and criminal justice at Hamline University. "There are many theories as to why that is."
  • And when women do choose violence, guns are not typically their weapon of choice.
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  • If men vastly outnumber women as mass shooters, those perpetrators are often a model for the next male shooters who "see themselves in them," Peterson said, a phenomenon she noted is particularly true in young, white men.
  • "Many school shooters study Columbine, for example; other university shooters study the Virginia Tech shooting. And they really are kind of using those previous shootings as a blueprint for their own."
  • But at the same time, as a psychologist, I've been worried about all the risk factors that we know of for mass shootings that have been exacerbated in the pandemic. So, trauma, experiencing a mental health crisis, suicidality, time online and access to firearms have all increased.
  • . We can kind of work our way backwards and say, these are individuals who are in crisis, who have very easy access to firearms. And are there simple things we can do like universal background checks or safe storage that prevent that ease of access?
  • But we can also go further back and talk about things like, how do we make sure everybody's trained in crisis intervention and suicide prevention? How do we build trauma-informed schools, and go even further back?
  • I would say, in particular, the media coverage seems to have shifted. I'm not seeing as much of the perpetrator in the news cycle. I'm not seeing the perpetrator's name and face everywhere, which we know is what contributes to the social contagion.
Emily Horwitz

Long Prison Terms Eyed as Contributing to Poverty - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  •  
    A very eye-opening (albeit very long) article about the devastating effects that a stint in prison can have on a family. The article noted that many men who are sent to jail are often given sentences that are too long, so that, by the time they are released, they are way past the average age for committing crimes, and have missed out on valuable life experiences that could have aided them in getting a job. As a result, many of these men find it difficult to get a job, falling into a cycle of poverty, and perhaps, again, to crime. Additionally, for those who have spouses and/or children, time in prison can drastically harm the economic status of a man's family; without the extra income, these families may become homeless, as did the woman, Ms. Hamilton, in the article. Especially intriguing to me was the racial implications of the article; the author pointed out that African-American men are more likely to be incarcerated than they are to have a job, if they did not receive a high school diploma. In terms of TOK, this article showed that all the facets of the human sciences are related - from social problems to economic problems, times in prison can have a devastating effect on not only the jailed man, but his family as well.
sissij

Woman Drivers: Worse Than Men? Yes... and No | Reader's Digest - 0 views

  • In studies, men as a whole display less cautious behavior than women, such as driving at higher speeds and closer to other cars, not wearing seat belts, and driving while intoxicated more often.
  • However, this slight edge in ability doesn’t translate into better driving records.
  • According to one study, men are more than three times as likely to be ticketed for “aggressive driving” than women, and more than 25 percent as likely to be at fault in an accident.
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  • Similarly, the stereotype that women are weaker drivers may negatively affect their performance behind the wheel.
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    I found it very interesting that although there is a stereotype that women drive poorly, men actually cause more accidents in researches. I very agree with the author because he make the term "better" clear in the passage, which most other claims mentioned vaguely. In his writing, "better" has two meanings: how safe one drives and how well one drives. I think looking at the problem through the two very different meaning of "better" can lead to very different conclusions. I think that's why different article held opposite views on this issue. They don't speak in the same language; they are speaking of different "better"s. --Sissi (11/10/2016)
Javier E

What 'White Privilege' Really Means - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • This week’s conversation is with Naomi Zack, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon and the author of “The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality After the History of Philosophy.”
  • My first book, “Race and Mixed Race” (1991) was an analysis of the incoherence of U.S. black/white racial categories in their failure to allow for mixed race. In “Philosophy of Science and Race,” I examined the lack of a scientific foundation for biological notions of human races, and in “The Ethics and Mores of Race,” I turned to the absence of ideas of universal human equality in the Western philosophical tradition.
  • Critical philosophy of race, like critical race theory in legal studies, seeks to understand the disadvantages of nonwhite racial groups in society (blacks especially) by understanding social customs, laws, and legal practices.
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  • What’s happening in Ferguson is the result of several recent historical factors and deeply entrenched racial attitudes, as well as a breakdown in participatory democracy.
  • In Ferguson, the American public has awakened to images of local police, fully decked out in surplus military gear from our recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who are deploying all that in accordance with a now widespread “broken windows” policy, which was established on the hypothesis that if small crimes and misdemeanors are checked in certain neighborhoods, more serious crimes will be deterred. But this policy quickly intersected with police racial profiling already in existence to result in what has recently become evident as a propensity to shoot first.
  • How does this “broken windows” policy relate to the tragic deaths of young black men/boys? N.Z.:People are now stopped by the police for suspicion of misdemeanor offenses and those encounters quickly escalate.
  • Young black men are the convenient target of choice in the tragic intersection of the broken windows policy, the domestic effects of the war on terror and police racial profiling.
  • Why do you think that young black men are disproportionately targeted? N.Z.: Exactly why unarmed young black men are the target of choice, as opposed to unarmed young white women, or unarmed old black women, or even unarmed middle-aged college professors, is an expression of a long American tradition of suspicion and terrorization of members of those groups who have the lowest status in our society and have suffered the most extreme forms of oppression, for centuries.
  • Police in the United States are mostly white and mostly male. Some confuse their work roles with their own characters. As young males, they naturally pick out other young male opponents. They have to win, because they are the law, and they have the moral charge of protecting.
  • So young black males, who have less status than they do, and are already more likely to be imprisoned than young white males, are natural suspects.
  • Besides the police, a large segment of the white American public believes they are in danger from blacks, especially young black men, who they think want to rape young white women. This is an old piece of American mythology that has been invoked to justify crimes against black men, going back to lynching. The perceived danger of blacks becomes very intense when blacks are harmed.
  • The term “white privilege” is misleading. A privilege is special treatment that goes beyond a right. It’s not so much that being white confers privilege but that not being white means being without rights in many cases. Not fearing that the police will kill your child for no reason isn’t a privilege. It’s a right. 
  • that is what “white privilege” is meant to convey, that whites don’t have many of the worries nonwhites, especially blacks, do.
  • Other examples of white privilege include all of the ways that whites are unlikely to end up in prison for some of the same things blacks do, not having to worry about skin-color bias, not having to worry about being pulled over by the police while driving or stopped and frisked while walking in predominantly white neighborhoods, having more family wealth because your parents and other forebears were not subject to Jim Crow and slavery.
  • Probably all of the ways in which whites are better off than blacks in our society are forms of white privilege.
  • Over half a century later, it hasn’t changed much in the United States. Black people are still imagined to have a hyper-physicality in sports, entertainment, crime, sex, politics, and on the street. Black people are not seen as people with hearts and minds and hopes and skills but as cyphers that can stand in for anything whites themselves don’t want to be or think they can’t be.
  • race is through and through a social construct, previously constructed by science, now by society, including its most extreme victims. But, we cannot abandon race, because people would still discriminate and there would be no nonwhite identities from which to resist. Also, many people just don’t want to abandon race and they have a fundamental right to their beliefs. So race remains with us as something that needs to be put right.
Javier E

In modern mating, sex isn't the only thing that's cheap - The Washington Post - 1 views

  • Regnerus relies on the concept of sexual economics, in which mating is seen as a marketplace. In this view, women are gatekeepers to a limited, highly desired product: sex. In exchange for access to this product, men proffer commitment, fidelity and resources.
  • Regnerus believes that the sharp drop in the value of sex has shifted the market, even its more conservative parts, leading to a massive overall slowdown in the creation of committed relationships like marriage, in large part because men see less of a need to make themselves into appealing long-term partners.
  • among younger women, especially those who want that sort of traditional relationship, there increasingly seems to be a vague dissatisfaction with the state of things. Why, when women have gained so much power, are we so often at impasse in our romantic relationships? Why do men our age seem so unmotivated to grow up and so ambivalent about committing? As uncomfortable as it may be to contemplate, the shifts this book describes may provide an inkling of an explanation.
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  • When it comes to commonly held modern ideals — of gender egalitarianism, individualism, the assumption that men might seek to improve themselves even without outside prodding — his response is skepticism bordering on exasperation. “In the domain of sex and relationships, men will act as nobly as women collectively demand,” he writes. “This is an aggravating statement for women to read, no doubt. They do not want to be responsible for ‘raising’ men. But it is realistic.”
  • Throughout his book, Regnerus prods the reader to be skeptical of utopianism and see the world as it is. It’s a useful, if unpleasant, reminder for an era in which our goals seem both loftier and further out of reach than ever
Javier E

Skeptics read Jordan Peterson's '12 Rules for Life' - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • I do think that women tend to spend more time thinking about their lives, planning for the future, sort of sorting themselves out — and know how to do so. So they don’t need Peterson’s basic life advice as much as men do.
  • Emba: These days, young men seem far more lost than young women. And we’re seeing the results of that all over the place — men disappearing into video games, or pornography, or dropping out of the workforce, or succumbing to depression and despair. So maybe they need this more.
  • Rubin made it sound as though Peterson held some *hidden knowledge,* but there’s no secret to “stand up straight and make sure the people you keep around you pull you up rather than drag you down.”
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  • I actually think Peterson was right to observe that it’s remarkable how many students at the universities where they tested some of his theories hadn’t been told these things. Though I thought it was interesting that he seemed to think that teaching this kind of thing was a job for the educational system rather than the parents
  • I think perhaps we’re both lucky in that though our backgrounds are different, we both come from relatively stable families with parents and surrounding adults who inculcated these “rules” intrinsically, from our youth on. So the Peterson gospel doesn’t feel new to us.
  • The fact that there are whole swaths of our generation who are advantaged by already knowing this information about how to make your life better, and another whole swath who is being left behind, character and life-formation wise, because they don’t. And they are left to rely on Jordan Peterson.
  • He is convinced of the importance and significance of these stories, these words — and religion, and its significance. At one point he stated that he didn’t have a materialist view of the world, but actually a “deeply religious” one.
  • Just in the week or so I was reading “12 Rules,” I had several men my age come up to me on buses or in coffee shops and strike up conversations with me about Peterson — the one thing they all talked about right away was how the book had a lot of “hard truths” that they needed to hear
  • largely the message you come away with is that if you don’t like the way things are going, it’s your fault and your fault alone. And that’s an easier message to believe when you’re a white male and systemic obstacles aren’t really a thing you run into.
  • Jordan Peterson professes not to be religious, but he is. His book is built on what he describes as archetypal myths from different cultures, but leans *very* heavily on Judeo-Christian ones especially — Cain and Abel and the stories of Jesus’s life, from his temptation in the desert to his death and resurrection.
  • This tendency was even more pronounced in his live lecture. Basically every line, every piece of advice he gave, was supported by a Bible verse. At one point, he quoted the gospel of Matthew: “Knock and the door will be opened to you” — and said, “This is how life works, ACTUALLY” — basically glaring at the crowd and daring them to disagree.
  • One thing that’s definitely central to the book is telling people (particularly men) that life is hard, and you need to get it together.
  • He’s not keeping great company. But I think his personal work and statements are generally benign, in many cases actually helpful, in that they urge young people to seek out a better-structured and more meaningful life.
  • I agree it’s inaccurate to label him as alt-right, though that is a low bar to clear. Frankly I see him more as a mainstream conservative. I think part of the reason people get this wrong is that there’s a big gap between what boosted his fame and what the central thrust of his book is
  • I think “traditionalist” is probably the best label for him — both because his views are traditionalist and because his worldview is so dependent on traditions (or at least what he sees as traditions.)
sissij

Gloria Steinem: Women Have 'Chick Flicks.' What About Men? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • As the flight attendant read the choices aloud, a young man across the aisle said, “I don’t watch chick flicks!”
  • I wasn’t challenging his preference, but I did question the logic of his term.
  • especially if it had been written by women.
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  • Think about it: If “Anna Karenina" had been by Leah Tolstoy, or “The Scarlet Letter” by Nancy Hawthorne or “A Doll’s House” by Henrietta Ibsen — if “The Invisible Man” had been “The Invisible Woman” — would they have been hailed as classics?
  • Indeed, as long as men are taken seriously when they write about the female half of the world — and women are not taken seriously when writing about ourselves, much less about men and public affairs
  • His “chick flick” label might help him avoid certain movies, but shouldn’t he have a label to guide him toward movies he actually liked?
  • Bias is, as always, unfair to everyone.
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    I think this is gender stereotyping. People tend to make the assumption that women are more limited than men because they appear so emotional and irrational. However, in brain science, there is no real difference between male and female. The logic fallacies and flaws in reasoning stay true for everybody, not a specific gender. We also tends to label things to simplify. However, there are always exceptions to labels, as we learned in science. Labeling may filter out some really good stuff just based on our imprecise impression. -Sissi (3/4/2017)
cvanderloo

3 ways companies could offer more father-friendly policies that will help women - 1 views

  • Family-friendly policies such as flextime, telecommuting and a compressed workweek have been seen as supporting women’s traditional roles and hence as more needed for women to take advantage of.
  • some studies show men’s usage has been stigmatized and discouraged – and may even hurt their careers.
  • Companies could overcome these stereotypes and fears by encouraging men to take advantage of these types of family-friendly policies and by proclaiming that there’s no penalty if the reason is to take on more domestic responsibilities.
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  • Yet research shows that men who take parental leave become equal partners in raising their children, beyond the time they take off before or after a baby is born.
  • In many countries where parental leave is mandated, such as Canada and across Europe, leave can be shared between men and women any way parents like. Data show that mothers typically take the majority of that leave, while fathers take very little.
  • Research shows that in nations that foster a culture that rewards overtime work, men do less housework and women do more.
  • Employers need to encourage men to use them, without fear of repercussions, for the policies to be successful.
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