James E Hartley

Extreme Economies

For obvious reasons, I am frequently asked for recommendations of good economics books for non-economists. There are not nearly as many options as one would hope. There are lots of interesting books on particular topics, but not that many that I can just recommend to anyone.

There is a new book that fits this category perfectly which I am happy to recommend to one and all. Richard Davies: Extreme Economies: What Life at the World’s Margins Can Teach Us About Our Own Future.

Davies travels the world to visit nine places which are indeed examples of economies at the extreme edge of things. It’s a clever idea. Instead of looking for average locales to see how things work, find places where some event or other has pushed the economy far from the norm. Go there and see how things work. Or, in some cases, don’t work. He splits his nine cases into three categories: Survival (where things work), Failure (where things don’t), and Future (where we get a glimpse of what is to come for all of us).

What sets this book so far ahead of the pack is that both the economics and the writing are quite good. Davies can write like a journalist. Each chapter could easily have been published in something like The Atlantic, Wired, or The New Yorker. These are all fascinating stories which are extremely well-told. You will actually enjoy reading this book. Good journalism is one thing, but good journalism in which the economics doesn’t make me cringe? Well, that is a rare beast.

The punchline of the book? Adam Smith was right in The Wealth of Nations: man is a trading animal.

This division of labor, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature, which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.

Whether this propensity be one of those original principles in human nature, of which no further account can be given, or whether, as seems more probable, it be the necessary consequence of the faculties of reason and speech, it belongs not to our present subject to inquire. It is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals, which seem to know neither this nor any other species of contracts.

People like to trade with one another. The act of trading is what creates economies. How does this work? Well, here Davies beautifully illustrates Hayek’s notion of spontaneous order. Set up the rules of the game and next thing you know an ordered social system spontaneously arises.

Spontaneous order is perfectly illustrated in Davies three success stories. First we have Aceh, Indonesia, which was completely devastated, as in razed to the ground, by a tsunami in 2004. There was literally nothing left standing. The second is Zaatari, Jordan, which is the largest refugee camp in the world. The third is a prison in Louisiana, which has the largest per capita incarceration rate in the US.

All three locations provide stunning stories of human ingenuity. None of these locations seem like promising place to find economies functioning well. And yet, in all three cases, Davies finds a very vibrant economic order. Aceh is now a nice booming town, much more vibrant than it was before the devastation. The refugee camp in Jordan has a massive, well-organized black market where you can get whatever you need at competitive prices. The prisoners in Louisiana developed an entire monetary system which can be used to purchase goods which are smuggled into the prisons. The monetary system described in this last chapter is so clever, I’ll be assigning this chapter in my future money and banking courses.

OK, I’ll tell you what they do in the Louisiana prison. Normal currency is banned in the prisons, so you don’t want to be caught using it. Instead, they use the technology of prepaid debit cards. There are single use scratch cards (MoneyPak) that have a 14 digit number (the “dots”) which the owner can use to load funds onto a debit card. You can buy these scratch cards with cash, so there is no record of who bought them.

To make a large cash payment a prisoner asks a friend on the outside to buy a MoneyPak and to pass on the dots once they have done so. These 14 digits, as good as hard cash, can then be exchanged with a guard or another prisoner for something in the prison, including drugs. By exchanging dots instead of cash, the prisoners keep their hands clean. The free people on the outside—one buying the MoneyPak, the other receiving its value on a Green Dot card—do not need to meet each other, know each other or link bank accounts. Using pre-paid cards in this way creates an informal currency that is durable, divisible into payments as small as the MoneyPak minimum of $20 and is accepted everywhere. It fits precisely the standards for a good currency that Jevons and Menger set out centuries ago

People are very clever.

But, sometimes being clever is not enough, which leads to Davies’ Failures. The Darien Gap in Panama, should be a vibrant economic hub linking South America to North America. Kinshasa, DR Congo is sitting on a wealth of natural resources and is one of the poorest countries in the world. Glasgow, UK used to be the second most prosperous and vibrant city in the UK and is now one of the poorest.

What happened in each of these failures? Markets didn’t develop. In all three cases there is an external force that prevents the sort of spontaneous creation of markets that allow people to take advantage of the resources which are there. The result is a hopeless poverty. People hunker down, don’t interact much with others, and the society just decays into collapse.

Those six chapters alone would make this book well worth reading. But, then comes the discussions about the future. This is where you get to find to if you are an optimist or a pessimist. After reading these three chapters you will either think that humans are clever enough to solve these problems (like in the first three chapters of the book) or we aren’t clever enough (like in the second three chapters of the book). But, there is no doubt Davies has identified three things which will shape the next century.

He begins with Akita, Japan, a city of no particular note in Japan. Well, one particular note: it is an old city. A very old city. It’s not the buildings or landmarks that are old, though. It is the population. The average age in Japan as a whole is rapidly rising. Japan is not alone in this. As Davies notes, by 2050 in both South Korea and Japan the average age will be 53, and more than a third of the population will be over 65. How does a society function when a third of the people are retired? Well, if Akita is an example of what it is to come: it doesn’t. China, Europe and the US are facing similar demographic changes in the next 50 years. There simply are not enough young people to balance out all the people who will be retiring.

Next up we have Tallinn, Estonia. This is a place that has gone to the extreme in becoming a digital paradise. Just about every aspect of government is digitized. Even citizenship. No matter where you live in the world, you can become a digital citizen of Estonia. You want to know what it is like when everything about you is all sitting on a computer server somewhere? You want to know what it is like to live where the government can potentially look up everything about you? Where robots and AI are rapidly reshaping the whole economy? You want to see the digital future? Visit Tallinn.

And finally, Davies goes to Santiago, Chile to look at income inequality. It was a brilliant choice. Chile is the most prosperous country in South America. The poor in Chile are richer than the poor in other places on the continent. And yet, you can visually see the income divide in Santiago. When both the rich and the poor get richer, that does not mean the gap between the rich and the poor gets narrower. What happens if the gap gets large, very large? Is it enough to say the poor are richer than they used to be and richer than they would be in other places? Will that be enough to keep the poor happy? In other words, is it absolute or relative income that matters to people? That is the question facing Santiago.

Like I said, this book is really good. If you are stuck at home thinking about the future, this is a perfect book to read. You can buy a copy by clicking on the picture of the book cover above. Highly recommended.

The Moral of the Story

I finally read Little Women.

This is one of those books I heard about a lot as a kid, but never read. It looked long. Very long. And it was, after all, about girls.

When I was young, I did, however, read Little House on the Prairie. The whole series! Combined, Little House is an even longer book about girls. So, why the difference? I suspect it was partly due to the fact that the Little House books are shorter individual volumes and partly that there was an enormously popular TV series about the books.

I think I would have liked Little Women when I was a kid. I enjoyed it as an adult. It’s not the greatest book of all time or anything, but it was a very pleasant read. One way of describing it: when I finished it, I did not immediately plunge into the sequels, Little Men and Jo’s Boys, but I did think I’ll probably read them on one of those lazy days when it feels like the world has ground to a halt.

I read the book with one of my reading groups where the students picked the books. Talking with them about it was illuminating. A couple of reactions are well worth pondering.

First, one of the students noted the oddity of Laurie’s relationships with the sisters. Laurie grows up next door to the sisters. When he gets to of marriageable age, he decides he wants to marry Jo. But, when Jo refuses, he moves on…to Jo’s younger sister, Amy. It all seems so natural in the book itself. But, the student noted it only seems sweet and natural when you imagine that Laurie’s interest in the sisters is totally Platonic.

An early 20s Laurie interested in an early 20s Jo on a purely Platonic level? That is, to put it mildly, completely foreign to the experience of most college-age women. Imagine a real boy interested in a real girl at that age and you do not immediately think there is precisely zero erotic interest. OK, so Little Women was written in an age before the erotic overtones would need to be put on display. In a way that is nice. We all know why young men are interested in marrying young women, so leaving that all to the side is not really a bad thing.

But, if you allow for the fact that there is an unstated erotic attachment here, when Jo turns Laurie down and he immediately takes up with Jo’s little sister, suddenly it is, well, creepy. Imagine that in real life with some teenagers you know. Insert shudder.

Another interesting note on love. Jo’s interest in Professor Bhaer struck me as the oddest thinking in the whole book. This older German guy shows up and Jo is enamored with him, eventually marrying him. I could not for the life of me figure out why this German Professor was so interesting. One of my students told me the answer. Professor Bhaer is modeled after…Ralph Waldo Emerson! Louisa May Alcott grew up quite near Emerson and was fascinated by him. So, the character in the novel who is obviously Alcott’s avatar gets to marry the character in the novel modeled after Emerson. I guess that is one of the advantages of writing your own book.

The second curious observation made by one of the students was how much she loved the book when she was a kid and how disappointed she was with it now. The difference? When she was a kid, these were all just great stories about growing up. Now? Every story was so obviously designed to have a cute moral lesson at the end.

What fascinated me about that remark was that the transparently obvious cute moral lessons are part of the charm of the book. The girls all get tired of doing chores and start complaining. The always wise mother tells them one week that they don’t have to do any chores at all. A few days later, the house is a total wreck, nobody has clean clothes, and their pet bird died. Sadness ensues. The girls learn it is important to do your chores. Wise mom smiles. End of tale. Charming. It’s the kind of experiment every parent dreams of doing, but honestly, adults’ tolerance of absolute household chaos is much lower than kids’ tolerance of the same. But, maybe a story like this would alarm kids enough that they would be scared straight! If you don’t do your chores, your pet will die!

My student’s comment got me wondering. Can real life be turned into a series of moral tales? Could you take the episodes of your own life and spin them out as short chapters, each of which will end with a nice little moral? As I started to imagine doing that, it was surprisingly easy. Maybe Little Women isn’t so artificial after all. Maybe life really is a series of morality plays and Alcott just noticed that.

Alcott is certainly aware of what she is doing. Towards the very end of the book, we get this marvelous passage about Jo:

Now, if she had been the heroine of a moral storybook, she ought at this period of her life to have become quite saintly, renounced the world, and gone about doing good in a mortified bonnet, with tracts in her pocket. But, you see, Jo wasn’t a heroine, she was only a struggling human girl like hundreds of others, and she just acted out her nature, being sad, cross, listless, or energetic, as the mood suggested. It’s highly virtuous to say we’ll be good, but we can’t do it all at once, and it takes a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull all together before some of us even get our feet set in the right way.

Starting out denying that Jo is the heroine of a moral storybook, Alcott then proceeds to draw a moral from the fact that she is not one. That is, let’s be honest, incredibly brilliant.

The question I am still pondering: is it worthwhile finding moral lessons in all the stories of your life? Would it be a good use of my time to think back over my life and mentally construe it as a whole bunch of morality tales? Should we all do that? Would it do us any good?

I can’t help wondering if Alcott was doing a bit more than just writing a kid’s book to teach some moral lessons. Maybe she was providing a model for how to think about your own life.

Dickens in America

In 1842, C. Dickens sailed the ocean blue and landed in America.

Then he wrote a book about his journeys, cleverly titled American Notes.

This is not a well-read Dickens’ volume. For good reason.

Charitably, it is an uneven book. Uncharitably, it is a pointless ramble punctuated with some interesting things here and there. Dickens lands in Boston, heads south to Washington, then west to Cincinnati and the Great Plains, northeast by the Great Lakes into Canada, and then back down to Boston.

Without a doubt, the most curious feature of his journey is what he visits in each town in the first part of the trip. The whole first part of the book reads like a tour of…prisons. Yep. Roll into town and visit the prison (cf. Lady Malvern!). Dickens starts out liking American prisons. Boston has a great prison! Who knew? Boston is also home to a marvelous state hospital for the insane! Dickens loves these places. He devotes page after page to extolling their glories.

But, sadly, prison quality is not uniform. Philadelphia has an awful prison; truly awful. Everyone is in solitary confinement; never allowed to leave their cell; zero human interaction. Imagine being trapped in one place, never to leave, barely seeing another human being. Year after year after year for the rest of your life. Honestly, what were they thinking?

By the time Dickens gets to Washington, he is obviously getting really tired of his prison tour. (Truth be told, so are his readers.) Originally, Dickens had planned to go south from Washington, but he just can’t bring himself to do it. As he travels south, he is increasingly viscerally disgusted by slavery. The prisoners in Boston have it better than the slaves in the South.

So, he heads west instead, and book changes tone. Gone are the lengthy description of prisons. Insert sigh of relief. Now, we get a fairly lifeless travel narrative. Reinsert sigh of disappointment. Every now and then, you get a nice line:

Pittsburgh is like Birmingham in England; at least its townspeople say so. Setting aside the streets, the shops, the houses, wagons, factories, public buildings, and population, perhaps it may be. It certainly has a great quantity of smoke hanging about it, and is famous for its iron-works.

But, for the most part, the rest of the book is just a blur of anodyne descriptions of towns. The mood is captured perfectly when he takes a day trip out to see The Great Plains. He is underwhelmed.

It would be difficult to say why, or how—though it was possibly from having heard and read so much about it—but the effect on me was disappointment. Looking towards the setting sun, there lay, stretched out before my view, a vast expanse of level ground; unbroken, save by one thin line of trees, which scarcely amounted to a scratch upon the great blank; until it met the glowing sky, wherein it seemed to dip: mingling with its rich colours, and mellowing in its distant blue. There it lay, a tranquil sea or lake without water, if such a simile be admissible, with the day going down upon it: a few birds wheeling here and there: and solitude and silence reigning paramount around. But the grass was not yet high; there were bare black patches on the ground; and the few wild flowers that the eye could see, were poor and scanty. Great as the picture was, its very flatness and extent, which left nothing to the imagination, tamed it down and cramped its interest. I felt little of that sense of freedom and exhilaration which a Scottish heath inspires, or even our English downs awaken. It was lonely and wild, but oppressive in its barren monotony. I felt that in traversing the Prairies, I could never abandon myself to the scene, forgetful of all else; as I should do instinctively, were the heather underneath my feet, or an iron-bound coast beyond; but should often glance towards the distant and frequently-receding line of the horizon, and wish it gained and passed. It is not a scene to be forgotten, but it is scarcely one, I think (at all events, as I saw it), to remember with much pleasure, or to covet the looking-on again, in after-life.

It’s odd. Here we have Charles Dickens, that masterful creator of caricatures who come to life in vivid descriptions of English cities, and he cannot muster any energy to capture the American West or the people of the American West. He has just run out of steam.

After his travels, what does Dickens conclude about America? As he has made abundantly clear throughout the book, even devoting the penultimate chapter solely to the topic, he detests slavery. But even here there is nothing in the book that really conveys that disgust in a Dickensonian fashion. The fate of the isolated prisoners in Philadelphia is conveyed with more pathos than the plight of the slaves. Again, Dickens has missed an opportunity. There is no moment akin to Oliver Twist holding out his bowl and asking for more.

But, it isn’t just slavery that bothers Dickens about Americans. He has a list of other complaints. But, first the good news. Americans aren’t all bad!

They are, by nature, frank, brave, cordial, hospitable, and affectionate. Cultivation and refinement seem but to enhance their warmth of heart and ardent enthusiasm; and it is the possession of these latter qualities in a most remarkable degree, which renders an educated American one of the most endearing and most generous of friends.

He likes us! He really likes us! But, before we get too excited about Dickens being positive, he immediately starts explaining what is wrong with Americans. He starts with three character flaws. Americans suffer from universal distrust, a love of “smart” dealing, and an undue love of trade. But these are nothing compared to the worst problem; “the foul growth of America has a more tangled root than this.” (Yes, that is an actual quotation!)

What is the root of this foul growth, that thing which is the ultimate blemish on the entire nation? You will be excused for thinking the answer must be slavery. After all, Dickens did devote the previous chapter to that very problem. But, you would be wrong. Slavery is not the tangled root of the foul growth of America. There is something even more pernicious than slavery.

What is this thing? “But, the foul growth of America has a more tangled root than this; and it strikes its fibres, deep in its licentious Press.” Yep, the Press.

Schools may be erected, East, West, North, and South; pupils be taught, and masters reared, by scores upon scores of thousands; colleges may thrive, churches may be crammed, temperance may be diffused, and advancing knowledge in all other forms walk through the land with giant strides: but while the newspaper press of America is in, or near, its present abject state, high moral improvement in that country is hopeless. Year by year, it must and will go back; year by year, the tone of public feeling must sink lower down; year by year, the Congress and the Senate must become of less account before all decent men; and year by year, the memory of the Great Fathers of the Revolution must be outraged more and more, in the bad life of their degenerate child.

Some things never change…

There is at least one thing that is much better than in the mid-19^th century:

As Washington may be called the head-quarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva, the time is come when I must confess, without any disguise, that the prevalence of those two odious practices of chewing and expectorating began about this time to be anything but agreeable, and soon became most offensive and sickening. In all the public places of America, this filthy custom is recognised. In the courts of law, the judge has his spittoon, the crier his, the witness his, and the prisoner his; while the jurymen and spectators are provided for, as so many men who in the course of nature must desire to spit incessantly. In the hospitals, the students of medicine are requested, by notices upon the wall, to eject their tobacco juice into the boxes provided for that purpose, and not to discolour the stairs. In public buildings, visitors are implored, through the same agency, to squirt the essence of their quids, or ‘plugs,’ as I have heard them called by gentlemen learned in this kind of sweetmeat, into the national spittoons, and not about the bases of the marble columns. But in some parts, this custom is inseparably mixed up with every meal and morning call, and with all the transactions of social life. The stranger, who follows in the track I took myself, will find it in its full bloom and glory, luxuriant in all its alarming recklessness, at Washington. And let him not persuade himself (as I once did, to my shame) that previous tourists have exaggerated its extent. The thing itself is an exaggeration of nastiness, which cannot be outdone.

So, next time you are feeling bad about the world, just remember—at least there are no more spittoons!

Green Lantern’s Light

Imagine you had a ring which would allow you to instantly create anything you could imagine.

What would you make?

Pretty obvious, right? You would instantly put on a goofy uniform and run around the universe fighting bad guys.

Green Lantern: A Celebration of 75 Years is a strange book. Like this whole series of celebrations from DC, it is a fabulous way to see the development of a superhero. That is not the same thing as seeing a “best of” series, though. In an overview like this, you see the character at both high and low points in development. And, wow, does Green Lantern have some low points. It’s not his fault though; he was a poorly conceived character from the start.

First, the bit of trivia known only to the aficionados: Green Lantern is not a person, it is a power charging unit for a ring that allows you to wear a Green Uniform. There have been five (yes, 5!) different people who took on the title of Green Lantern. Five on Earth, that is. There are a zillion Green Lanterns scattered across the universe. Well, not a zillion. Just something more than 7200.

You thought there was only one Green Lantern because the one who is best known is Hal Jordan, ace test pilot who is given the Green Lantern Ring. There was a movie about this Green Lantern…a movie that if you saw, you are trying desperately to forget. But, Hal wasn’t the first Green Lantern. That would be Alan Scott.

Scott was created in 1940. A meteor fell to earth “many years ago in old China” and someone turned the metal into a lamp (like the one a genie is trapped in), and then many years later for no apparent reason someone else turned it into an old-fashioned train lantern, and then later than that the lantern finds Alan Scott and gives him the power to create anything he wants with his mind. There are two limitations, though. First, the only color “anything he wants” comes in is green. And second, the power does not affect wood things…which makes zero sense, but whatever. Alan Scott was a total bore. The comic book is canceled. End of Green Lantern.

Then in 1959, seeking new comic book heroes, the Green Lantern is reborn, but in a slightly better way. Now there is a whole intergalactic Green Lantern Corps, who run around the Universe doing good things with Green Power Lamps and Rings. Hal Jordan is selected to be the Green Lantern of Earth because he is such a noble guy. He can create anything he wants and now he can even affect wood! Hooray! Ah, but he can’t affect anything that is yellow. Because…well, just go with it.

But, the Green Lantern stories run into an obvious problem. If you can create anything you want, what can you create? Suppose you meet Villain (who is obviously Bad). You want to stop Villain. How do you stop Villain? Pick your favorite way of crushing or immobilizing Villain. Problem solved. Next issue, repeat. You like crushing Villain under a massively heavy boulder? Well, just do that over and over. You like Encasing Villain in a solid block of impenetrable metal. Done. You like picking up villain with a giant hand and hurling him into outer space. Go ahead. No need to think about it, just pick one and use it every time.

Now, that would be very boring to read month after month. So, what do you do instead? Think of corny puns and create something that visualizes the corny pun. Sweep away the problem…with a Giant Broom and Dustpan! Get it?

After a few decades, you can tell the writers realized the character was stale, so suddenly a couple of other characters are born who can also be a Green Lantern whenever the writer needs something else to do.

Even that doesn’t work for too long. So then Hal Jordan, Mr. Green Lantern Himself, goes crazy and destroys the whole Green Lantern Universe! Don’t worry, the Green Lantern Corps is not completely destroyed. (Insert sigh of relief.) A new Green Lantern emerges. And most importantly, the new guy has a hot girlfriend who wears Oakland Raiders apparel! (I love her.) Then she dies. (How do you kill off the girlfriend who like the Raiders? How? Obviusly DC Comics has been infiltrated by Chiefs fans. I demand an investigation.)

And, so what do we learn from 75 years of Green Lantern comics? Quite a bit, actually. A character this strangely overpowered should never have lasted so long and become such a central part of the DC Universe. The thing that keeps him interesting is the fact that he is not an individual with superpowers. Alone among the Superheroes, he is important and powerful because he is a member of a Corps. It is only membership in the group that gives him power.

That idea that the group is what gives us the ability to do something obviously strikes a deep chord. We tend to think of superheroes as lone individuals fighting evil. Sometimes the lone individuals team up (see: The Justice League, the Avengers), but these are collections of individuals; the interactions of those individuals is what makes the team-ups so interesting.

The Green Lantern, on the other hand, does not exist without the Green Lantern Corps. He has a code he has to follow. He has a mantra he has to repeat every single day. The mantra is key:

In Brightest Day, In Blackest Night,
No Evil Shall Escape My Sight!
Let those who Worship Evil’s Might
Beware My Power—Green Lantern’s Light.

That is an interesting idea. Imagine a group of people fighting against the Dark Forces of Evil. Imagine that the people fighting against that evil have no power of their own. Imagine they can only derive their power by tapping into a power source of Light. And imagine the power of that Light cannot actually be used to do whatever you want; it can only be used to advance the Light against the Forces of Darkness and Evil.

Would that be a powerful narrative? Would lots of people be attracted to the idea that they too could tap into the Light and fight against Evil? The Green Lantern mythos wasn’t created in 1940 after all. It showed up about 2000 years earlier:

[The] light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.

What Economic Models Can and Can’t Tell Us

It has been obvious from the coverage of the coronavirus pandemic that most people simply do not understand the nature of models.

This is not surprising. Models are messy things, and few people have spent much time thinking about how they work.

There are two parts to a model. First, there is the structure of the model, which is a bunch of mathematical equations that show how one thing is connected to another. The number of equations and the mathematical complexity of the equations can both be quite high, but fundamentally the structure of a model is just like those two-equation, two-unknown problems you learned to solve in your algebra class. Second, there are the data you use in the model. If you have bad data, then the model will not be useful, no matter how carefully it is constructed. Again, your algebra class gives an example: if you know that Y is twice as large as X, but you don’t know the size of X, then the model is not terribly useful in telling you the size of Y.

The epidemiological models that are garnering so much attention in the coronavirus pandemic are not fundamentally different from economic models or weather forecasting models. They have a mathematical structure, and they use existing data to make predictions. Different epidemiological models give different results because they are built differently. Not surprisingly, modelers generally think their particular model is the best. Unfortunately, as of this date, the details of many of the models that are informing policy decisions have not been released to the public, so there is no way for others to evaluate the structures of the models themselves.

Perhaps even more importantly, the data that are being used are woefully incomplete. Consider the fatality rate numbers. To know the fatality rate, you have to know both the number of deaths and the number of infections. We have decent, but not perfect, data on the number of deaths. We do not have anywhere near enough data to know the number of infections. Without widespread, random samples of the population, there is no way to know that number. You can get the same number of deaths with high levels of infections and a low death rate or with low numbers of infections and a high death rate. Which of those scenarios is accurate? The answer has enormous implications for how easy it is to spread the disease in daily interaction.

A model that uses messy data will not give a precise answer. Instead, it will give a range—possibly quite large—of potential outcomes. There is an instinctive reaction in the press to latch onto the most alarmist numbers. We saw this with the Imperial College model, which has been the most influential model in this crisis. Headlines blared that the model predicted that, if nothing was done, there would be half a million deaths in the UK and over two million deaths in the US. A short time later, there was a follow-up announcement that the same model was predicting the number of deaths in the UK would be around 20,000. Much hand-wringing ensued. The real problem here is not that a model gave a different answer as we acquired better data and people’s behavior changed. The real problem was the media’s sensationalism about the upper end of predictions from a model built over thirteen years ago to predict flu pandemics.

Read the rest at Public Discourse

Marriage is What Brings Us Together

Here is a controversial statement: Marriage is an important source of happiness for most people.

Once upon a time, that statement would have elicited a yawn. It is akin to a “people need food to live” variety of comment.

Nowadays, however, them’s fightin’ words on a college campus and many other places beyond the gates. Hold that thought.

That Jane Austen is wildly popular is a truth universally acknowledged. Why? I have been puzzling about devotion to Austen for years. After all, she is not the only person who wrote romantic novels in the era. Sir Walter Scott was, once upon a time, vastly more popular. He also writes ridiculously well and his novels are set in that bygone era full of romance, fancy balls, and evening outdoor strolls.

Reading Mansfield Park, it became obvious that there is a huge difference between Scott and Austen. Indeed it is so obvious I wondered why I never noticed it before. Scott’s novels are about all sorts of things; politics and love and freedom loom large. Austen’s novels? Well, it turns out they all revolve around precisely one topic: marriage.

A plot summary of Mansfield Park would simply be a list of engagements and marriages, both desired and actual. Our heroine, Fanny, spends the whole novel waiting for the love of her life to shake off his infatuation with the beautiful, witty, mean girl and discover the wonders of his quiet, pleasant, devoted cousin. Along the way, Fanny must ward off the advances of the callow, scheming bad boy.

“My dear aunt, you cannot wish me to do differently from what I have done, I am sure. You cannot wish me to marry; for you would miss me, should not you? Yes, I am sure you would miss me too much for that.”
“No, my dear, I should not think of missing you, when such an offer as this comes in your way. I could do very well without you, if you were married to a man of such good estate as Mr. Crawford. And you must be aware, Fanny, that it is every young woman’s duty to accept such a very unexceptionable offer as this.”
This was almost the only rule of conduct, the only piece of advice, which Fanny had ever received from her aunt in the course of eight years and a half. It silenced her.

Fortunately in the end, the match made in Austen happens, just like it should in any fairytale. This is of course exactly the same ending as in every other Austen novel.

He was my epiphany…well assuming the definition of epiphany includes a new question. What if the popularity of Austen these days is simply a longing for a day when the importance of marriage was indeed a truth universally acknowledged?

Talking with college students about marriage is a curious thing. Most of my students do indeed want to get married, but they know better than to say that in public. On a college campus, marriage is, of course, a heteronormative institution reinforcing the patriarchy. Students know that the only goals they can discuss in public are their career plans. If a student were to say “You know…getting married and having kids is actually going to be a greater source of happiness in my life than my career will be,” I am pretty sure the sky would fall.

Even in private when a student talks about marriage the preferred form is universal: “First, I need to establish my career. Then I can marry someone and have kids.” When I ask the optimal age to get married, the answer is almost always “27 or 28.” It’s like they are all in the same social circle.

Then, when I ask how they are going to meet the person they want to marry when they are 27 or 28, there is an instant look of terror. No idea. If I ask what makes a good marriage, again no idea. We have an entire generation which has never contemplated the nature of love and marriage. We talk all the time about careers, and nothing about marriage.

As one of my insightful students recently remarked:

There are no cultural or societal models to explain how couples should structure expectations into their relationships. The old model that has the man that goes to work and is the head of the household and the woman as the person who watches the children, cleans and largely follows the man’s lead is something most people reject. Heterosexual couples especially struggle because they feel compelled by both traditional dynamics but also feel the need to reject them because they do not work today and leave most people unhappy. However, there is no new model for people to use so most couples fail because they cannot figure it out. No one teaches you in any part of your life how to structure a long term relationship or how to gain fulfillment from a marriage. We are just kind of expected to figure it out.

Now this student is every bit as clever and poised as Jane Bennet, but it is inconceivable that Jane would ever say something like that. Everyone in an Austen novel knows what marriage is and they all spend an enormous amount of time dreaming about and planning their married lives.

What happens when an entire generation grows up having absolutely no idea how to think about marriage? One thing that seems to happen is a fascination with Austen (and, truth be told, the Brontes). I am beginning to suspect that there is an inchoate yearning for a society in which marriage is not treated as that thing you might do when you are old, but rather that thing you desire when you are young. Few of my students will agree with that statement…in public.