Where Has The Time Gone?

I looked at my blog today and was shocked to see that my last post was on September 17th! We have been happily busy over here in the "No Idle Bread" household and I must say that God is good. Here is a bit of an update . . .



My children have been working diligently at their school work and chores around the house. They are really reading everything they get their hands on! LOL I usually try to read a few chapters ahead of them if it's a book I even read yet. But I can barely stay ahead of them! According to the kids, they are having fun and I am blessed by that. Here are some books we've been reading. . .

 

 

 

 

 

My little baby boy is a few days shy of 10 months old and WOW has time flown by! He is trying so desperately to walk. My 3 older children didn't walk until after their 1st birthdays, and none of them crawled. This little guy, on the other hand, is crawling EVERYWHERE, pulling up on EVERYTHING and is even climbing the stairs!!! He definitely keeps me on my toes. :o)

The weather has changed and fall is certainly in the air. I've decorated my home for the season--I love fall! It is my favorite season--pumpkin spice, candles, apples, baking, orange/red leaves, my favorite tea. . .just a few things I usually enjoy about this season. Some things I haven't yet delved into like I've wanted (such as baking and apple picking), but hopefully I will soon.



I've been crocheting a fall wrap to wear this year and I'm just about finished with it (see below). I also hope to soon crochet a few toys for my girls as Christmas presents (teacups, pastries, dolls, etc.).







My dear Husband is also doing well. Often us Moms talk alot about home and children, but hubby is special, too! ;o) He's been working so hard and I am encouraging him to take a vacation. I am so blessed to have a man who works hard to provide for his family. But, I have to remind him that God approves of rest when we need it, and that taking a break isn't being lazy. My sweetheart, he knows that and he's working on it! (LOL)



Well, I hope to have more to share in the coming days. . .





Linked with:

READ MORE - Where Has The Time Gone?

Book Review: Big Book of History

This review has been a LONG time coming, but finally it's here!!!

Click HERE to take a peek inside!

My children and I have thoroughly enjoyed using this book in our history lessons. This book is actually a timeline that folds out to the length of 15 feet!! Or, if it's not exactly convenient to have all 15 feet of its goodness open at one time, you can flip through it page by page.

This timeline incorporates biblical history, world events, inventions/technology, and civilizations/empires, showing that history unfolds as one big story. It begins with Creation and ends with the election of President Obama. The timeline is color coded, indicating Christian events versus secular. In addition to the timeline, there are charts, fun facts, maps and lots and lots of color pictures. Although my children and I have been piecing together a timeline of our own, this has been great as a reference to reinforce and review information.

Any time your child pulls out a "school" book to read it on their own, you know that it's definitely a keeper, and one I would recommend.

***Bonus: There's a Teacher's Guide available that offers activities and questions to help you utilize the Big Book of History with your children. Click HERE for a free download of the Teacher's Guide, or of course you can purchase a copy as well.***

READ MORE - Book Review: Big Book of History

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Activity

Today we celebrate the life of a great man, a visionary, a gift from God!



To remember Dr. King, my children and I (and my mom, too!) talked about the principles for which Dr. King stood. We listened to one of his most famous speeches, "I Have a Dream," which is below.







While we listened to the speech, I wrote down different words or phrases to help spark discussion after the speech was over.

We talked about many of the words and phrases I wrote down, about the cruelty and injustices African Americans suffered. My mom shared a piece of her experience with us, as she was raised in the deep south, in the state of Arkansas, during the time of the Civil Rights Movement. She spoke about going to visit the doctor as a little girl. She said she and her mother had to enter through the "colored door" and spoke of the differences between the "colored waiting room" and the "white only waiting room." It made me sad; I could hear the emotion in her voice. . .



I told my children that this day reminds us that we are all human, prone to many failures and that we all make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes are horrific. The beauty is that God forgives, even the worst offenses, God forgives. I reminded my children that all people are created in the image of God Himself (Genesis 1:27) and that we are to uphold the command of Jesus to "love your neighbor as yourself." (Mark 12:31) This is the message that Dr. King wanted us all to understand.

We made these at the end of our discussion.

The heart says, "peace, hope, and love" over and over.

The idea for this craft (and many others for MLK day)

can be found HERE!

READ MORE - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Activity

Making Clay Tablets

Need clay?

We did! So I wanted to share with you the recipe I used. I looked at several different ones online. Some ingredients I had, some I didn't, so I decided to improvise. Here is what I used to make our clay.

2C Flour

2C Water

1/2C Salt

2TBS Oil

(we used baby oil for the scent,

but cooking oil works, too)

1TBS Baking soda

1TBS Baking powder

A few drops of food coloring

Add food coloring to the water and boil. Remove from heat and mix in the oil. Mix dry ingredients in a separate bowl and slowly add in the water/oil liquid. Mix well and let cool. Once cool, knead until it feels like clay. If you want to keep your clay creations, bake them at 300-350 degrees for an hour or so to harden. You can also use the clay as Play-Doh if you like--my kids got a kick out of it!



So why did we need clay, you ask . . .



Well, in our study of Ancient History, we learned that the Sumerians wrote on clay tablets in a script called cuneiform. So, as a history project, we decided to make our own tablets. Once the kids wrote their word or message, I put the tablets in the oven to harden; the Sumerians would've let their tables dry in the sun, of course. :) Here are some pics!

Young scribes at work. . .

Girls using the end of paint brushes

to "write" on their tablets.

His didn't remain a tablet; it went back to a ball of clay!

Clay Tablets

"Dog"

"I love Dad and Mom"

READ MORE - Making Clay Tablets

Wealth and Reproduction

Until about a decade ago, the recent trend was for the poor to have more children than the rich, both domestically and internationally. But, this trend has since reversed in the U.S., largely due to the impact of fertility treatments and factors surpressing fertility in the poor like a reduction in teenage pregnancy rates. But, this was a historical anomaly for the century or so that the trend of the poor having more children persisted. Prior to that point, the well to do in places as different as early modern England and China consistently had more surviving children than the poor.

It isn't unreasonable to infer that the rich had more children in part because mothers and children were less likely to die prematurely, for example, due to malnutrition, and that the reversal in the number of surviving children per family was due substantially to the fact that improved medical care caused almost every mother to survive childbirth and almost every child to live to adulthood.

READ MORE - Wealth and Reproduction

Economic Inequality In USA At 43 Year High

The gap between the rich and poor, and between the rich and the middle class, is today wider than at any other time in the past four decades. . . . From 1947 to 1968, the U.S. experienced increasing equality in the distribution of incomes. Since 1968, however, inequality has steadily and inexorably grown.

From here.

READ MORE - Economic Inequality In USA At 43 Year High

Keep The 19th Century Journalist Style Alive

Who knew that the writing habits of 19th century newspaper writers would resurface on the Internet today at a blog called Wonkette. Consider this headline and lede:

WAR FOREVER

Wisconsin Becomes Orgy of Chaos As Recall Elections Begin

by Kirsten Boyd Johnson

1:41 pm July 12, 2011

The forces of good and evil resume their bilious clouded swirl over the state of Wisconsin today as primary voters go to cast votes in the state’s recall elections against six of Scott Walker’s senate puppets, and it is already just an orgy of dead fetuses and robots.

The last time I read such stirring words was in a progressive Denver rag's obituary for Colorado Supreme Court Justice Steele, on display in my child's school, from the turn of the century.

READ MORE - Keep The 19th Century Journalist Style Alive

Government Spending Stimulates The Economy

Econometric analysis over a wide range of circumstances shows that government spending and investment generally produce somewhat more economic benefits to the economy than the amount of the spending itself (which is called a "multiplier effect"), although the benefits are fairly modest and rarely as much of a full dollar of economic gain in addition to the government spent dollar.

Critics of government spending restraint during bad economic times, of the kind prevailing at the moment, compare this policy to the policies of Herbert Hoover, whose lack of leadership contributed to the Great Depression and compare this approach unfavorably to the Keynesian economic policies of FDR. They note, for example, that weak job growth at the moment is substantially due to government layoffs.

READ MORE - Government Spending Stimulates The Economy

Gains From Economic Growth No Longer Shared. Why?

The U.S. economy, and European economies as well, have seen a massive increase in the extent to which the gains from economic growth are concentrated in a few, rather than shared widely by all in the economy.  This is mitigated in Europe, and to a much lesser extent in the United States, by a combination of tax policy and social welfare benefit systems.  But, the fact that the new trend has endured for a generation across dozens of countries suggests that it is not simply a matter of policies of particular administrations. 

The folks behind the poster at the top of this post probably have roots in the union movement, and more widely shared gains from growth were found in an era when unions were rather strong.  But, there is room to question the cause and effect relationship in that era.  Were unions strong because workers were in a good bargaining position, or were workers in a good bargaining position because they were unionized?  There is good reason to thikn that the later was true, at least to some extent.

One interpretation is that the technological foundations of our economy have made work traditionally done by less skilled workers more efficient and hence reduced demand for these workers.  For example, e-filing of legal pleadings has gutted the demand for copy room workers and couriers for law firms and reduced postal service volume.  Any one of these changes individually may be insignificant, but one change after the other for decades could have this kind of effect.  Meanwhile, more skilled jobs that are not succeptible to automation have not been eliminated but benefit from the greater productivity that technology has imparted to less skilled workers.  More productive low skilled workers have not been able to reap the full value of their labor in this scenario because the number of people who can do the work greatly outnumbers the number of people needed to do the work.  This hypothesis is behind the characterization of the past few decades as an "information economy" or as an economy where gains are concentrated among "knowledge workers" or a "creative class."

A close variant of this theory suggests that much of the post-war boom was a matter of retooling a wartime economy to meet long unmet domestic demand and shortfalls in the productive capacity of the rest of the war ravaged world, so that not much innovation was required to see record growth at first, but that this situation was exceptional and vanished as routes to greater productivity had to be invented rather than simply being restored or imitated.

Another, somewhat similar analysis would suggest that capital has become a more important factor, relative to labor, in producing economic value.  Physical and monetary capital is much more unequally distributed than human capital, and hence those who have it have benefited greatly, while those who do not have not shared in the wealth.  This fits with the fact that the end of the 1979-2008 time period identified is one where the financial sector had huge profits and much higher compensation levels relative to the "real economy."  But, it also challenges that assumption that efficient markets allocate capital through lending and equity investment transaction to people whose ability to put those assets to work is greatest; an analysis that would seem to mitigate inherited wealth biases.

Of course, it certainly isn't impossible that elite levels of knowledge and skill and great amounts of capital are both necessary for growth and hence share in it, while the relative economic importance of those who are not exceptionally smart or skilled or rich has declined.  Thus, we might have a bifurcated ruling class split between the capable and the wealthy, that leaves out everyone else.

These theories, because they are rooted in economic fundamentals, have the unfortunate tendency to be rather fatalist.  Without further elaboration about what exactly the economy needs in terms of skill sets and how we can broaden the base of people who have those skills, it suggests that there are not any good short to medium term policy fixes to these inequalities in initial market allocations of wealth and that even long term policy fixes rely on assumptions about returns to education and training and other economic policy fixes that are at best unproven and may not work.  If economic value has more to do with IQ and personality than with the value added by education which serves as much as a sorting device as an activity that makes someone more useful economically, public policy may have little capacity to redress gaps in human capital value between the bright and the less bright except through redistributive policies.  Policy may be able to have more impact on the availability of capital, but Americans have historically been skeptical, frequently with good reason, of the returns that result from investment decisions made by government investments in the private sector relative to results produced by the private financial markets.  Government investors tend to be more forgiving of failure than the private sector to a fault.

A third interpretation is rooted in terms of competition both with foreign firms and domestic immigrants.  In this theory, foreign firms in less developed economies have lower labor costs and less costly regulations and taxes, giving them comparative advantage in markets where it is practical for work to be offshored and their less skilled workforces to compete with workers in the U.S., for example, in labor intensive manufacturing enterprises.  Similarly, immigrants to the U.S. from less developed countries, many undocumented, may be willing to work for lower wages on less favorable terms because they are still favorable relative to the labor markets in their homelands, and this competition drives down the market price for all workers, native and immigrant, who compete in the same markets.

A fourth interpretation sees union busting facilitated by weaker labor laws, and pro-big business economic policies as important in this trend.

Both these theories argue that economic policices have promoted cheap labor.  These theories are intuitively attractive, not least of which because their roots in government policy rather than economic fundamentals suggest straight forward solutions to our woes: restrict free trade, limit immigration, and strengthen protections for unions.

But, I am not very comfortable that the cheap labor theories are correct.  Growth in pre-tax, pre-social welfare benefit incomes have not been much more equal in heavily unionized France and Germany than they are in the United States which is much less labor friendly.  Countries like Germany and Japan have continued to have heavily manufacturing oriented economies despite compensation levels of manufacturing workers that far exceed their foreign competitors without having profoundly different international trade regimes than those of the United States.  Econometric studies of the impact of immigration on the wages earned by native born workers have shown the effects to be surprisingly modest and limited to fairly narrow subsets of the workforce.  Economic immigration has been drive to a great extent by the existence of opportunities that native born workers are not filling well for whatever reason.

Economists widely share the view that freer trade in goods and services tends to increase economic output, suggesting that restrictions on free trade and strict immigration laws may do more harm than good.  Unions clearly have some impact on the distribution of profits from enterprises, but it isn't obvious that they have much of an impact for better or for worse on overall economic growth rates.

Japan seemed to be following more of a shared growth model than its competitors, but has been so hard hit by deep recessions that there hasn't been much growth to share in recent decades, so it is hard to confirm that hypothesis.  But, this too could be a product of an economy that, at first, was thriving on imitation rather than invention of more productive technologies and economic institutions, much like the U.S. in the post-war, post-Great Depression era.

Whatever the cause of rising inequality in incomes, there is also the question of what to do about it.  We could follow the European model of redistributing income to make up for the underlying economic trends, or could continue on our current track of treating the market allocation of wealth as presumptively legitimate.  Neither approach seems to be particularly favored empirically in determining the productivity or economic output of a society.  The wealth of nations is indifferent to even significant redistribution of wealth if done well and gradually.

Our future may be that of Japan, a "great stagnation" in which economic growth declines dramatically as all of the low hanging fruit of ideas that could improve productivity are picked, and innovations become more scarce.  The seemingly inevitable end of a global economy based on "cheap oil" is also not very encouraging.  We could move from a regime of unequally shared growth to one in which there is no growth to share.

Is it any wonder that economics is called "the dismal science?"

READ MORE - Gains From Economic Growth No Longer Shared. Why?

Middle Class Income Tax Rates At Roughly 40 Year Lows

Average and marginal income taxes for those making the median income and twice the median income are mostly at forty year lows.  Taxpayers making half the median income have never paid less in income taxes (the average income tax rate is a negative percentage of income), but have the highest marginal income tax rates of all taxpayers, due to the effects of various refundable tax credits, the standard deduction and personal exemptions.

The bottom line, here, and across the board in the area of federal taxation, is that in a time period where we have federal budget deficits, it has never made less sense to close those deficits entirely or mostly through spending cuts.  We have large budget deficits, at the federal level, and have almost overconstrained state budgets in Colorado that have forced painful cuts, mostly because we made deep tax cuts during an economic boom while fighting two regional wars, without paying for them.

From the perspective of overall economic growth and the employment situation, we should be spending more in the public sector, at a time when private sector demand is anemic and investment activity is tepid.  Instead, we are cutting back on public services at a time when our economy has massive amounts of slack resources and above average demand for public services.

Also, our current extremely generous tax code is full of special interest tax breaks that constitutes autopilot meddling with private economic decisions that picks winners and losers in the business world, rather than letting the marketplace carry out that function, continues to be a force driving increasing systemic risk in our economy, and dramatically increases the dead weight transaction costs associated with tax code compliance and tax planning that its one of the regulatory costs of government that truly does hit small businesses the hardest.

Accumulated tax code crud is inevitable.  A tax code will never be ideal once and for all.  Revenue needs change, new kinds of transactions are invented, politicians are compelled to respond to urgent cries from the public for tax tweaks great and small to be responsive.  But, like a garden, the tax code requires continuous weeding of provisions that damage the whole and planting of improved provisions if it is to satisfy the public need for revenue in a way that doesn't do unnecessary harm to the economy.  Congress has put off that unpleasant task for too long, and the result has been ugly.

But, the solution is not to shut down the IRS, to hire private collectors, to pass further special interest tax break, to pass a consumption tax, or to mimic sometimes lower foreign corporate tax rates without expanding the tax base as countries with lower corporate tax rate do.  Instead, it is to take on the unpleasant business of repealing a great many tax breaks, in a way that increases the amount of revenue produced by the income tax, makes the tax code more economically neutral, and reduces the complexity and tax planning opportunities that great dead weight drags on the economy.

READ MORE - Middle Class Income Tax Rates At Roughly 40 Year Lows

Is Colorado Revised Statutes Section 14-2-205 Still Good Law?

Wife's land subject to judgment. When any woman against whom liability exists marries and has or acquires lands, judgment on such liability may be rendered against her and her husband jointly, to be levied on such lands only.

- Section 14-2-205, Colorado Revised Statutes.

The statute above, part of the Married Women's Property Act passed very early on in Colorado's history (actually a few years before its admission to statehood when it was under the territorial legislature rather than the state legislature), remains on the books exactly as it read when it was enacted in the late 1800s as part of a general package of legislation that reformed the common law rule that a married woman was subsumed as one person with her husband who was vested with all of her property, upon marrying and ceased to have an of the legal rights of an adult person. Most of the sections of the act had that effect.

But, this section, by its terms (despite the fact that the heading for the section doesn't give a clue that this is the case), this section would suggest that if a woman had an unpaid debt from before the marriage, married, and then, for example, acquired a home which she and her husband co-owned, that both the half of the home owned by her, and the half of the home owned by him would be subject to liquidation for payment of the debt, despite the fact that it was her sole pre-marital debt that he wouldn't otherwise have any personal liability upon, and that the reverse (in the case of a man with premarital debts) would not be true. This gives creditors access to more assets than they would otherwise have available to them from which to collect debts of recently married women.

While some debts contracted for "necessities" by a married person in a single spouse's name may be the responsibility of the other spouse, and a spouse may be responsible for the other spouse's automobile accident liability under the "family car doctrine," the general rule is that a spouse is never legally responsible for the other spouse's sole debts and that one spouse's interest in land cannot be seized for the other spouse's debts in the absence of a fraudulent transfer.

The statute surely violates the intermediate scrutiny test for gender distinctions under the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause, but normally the remedy would be simply to say that wives who co-own real estate with their husbands have responsibility for their husbands' pre-marital debts just as husbands do for their wives under this statute.

This is the standard way that statutes that use masculine language only are interpreted and the reverse ought to be true, even though this is a case where the original intent of the statute (enacted when the 14th Amendment didn't apply, interestingly) was probably not to do so, because it was enacted in response to previously unequal treatment of the pre-marital debts of husbands and wives.

The law in Colorado's case, however, probably due to wholesale copying from the laws of some other state, corrected a problem that Colorado didn't have. Unlike some states in the Eastern United States, Colorado has never had the doctrine of tenancies by the entireties that prohibited judgment liens against a single spouse from attaching to a single spouse's interest in real property co-owned by a husband and wife. So, a husband and wife purchasing real property as co-owners does not impair the ability of a wife's pre-marital creditors to collect from her as it would, for example, in Boston where the tenancies by the entireties doctrines survives.

But, there is no obvious constitutional principle that would prohibit the law from making all of real estate jointly owned by spouses subject to the pre-marital claims of one of the spouses, and the general rule is that statutes are given effect according to their plain language. In order to escape the claim of a creditor that this expands their collection rights, a debtor husband would have to argue that the law doesn't really mean what it seems to say on its face, given the larger intent of the Married Women's Property Acts to simply treat married women the same way that unmarried women are treated in private law. This argument could be made, and its disuse suggests that there are widespread assumptions that creditors don't have this right, but such an argument would hardly be a slam dunk. Moreover, most individual consumer debt collection defendants (and some of the lawyers who represent them) aren't legally sophisticated enough to make that kind of argument.

Interestingly, there is not a single reported case that has ever discussed this statute in the entire history of Colorado, despite the fact that this would be a rule that would seem to favor creditors in debt-collection actions that could benefit that class of creditors thousands of times per year. The leading treatise on debt collection law in Colorado, by Stephen W. Siefert, "Colorado Creditors' Remedies - Debtors' Relief," doesn't ever mention the statute once. Neither does the treatise, "Colorado Family Law and Practice," by Frank L. McGuane, Jr. and Kathleen A. Hogan. While this could simply be a function of the law being unambiguous, the more likely reality is that it is forgotten and not utilized because it doesn't make logical sense in the context of the contemporary was that we think about the property rights of married people. Most lawyers don't expect it to be there and therefore don't look for it, and don't expect it to work, in the rare cases where they do know about it and it does apply by its terms to a case.

READ MORE - Is Colorado Revised Statutes Section 14-2-205 Still Good Law?

Hancock Elected Mayor, Johnson Elected Clerk & Recorder

As a result of the Denver's municipal runoff election, Denver's new mayor is Michael Hancock, in a landslide, and its new clerk and recorder is Debra Johnson, by a nose. In both races, the winner of the runoff was the second place finisher in the first round.

Hancock brings a neighborhood oriented investment agenda and a commitment to ending abuses by the City's police force that have cost the city millions in settlements. He inherits a tight city budget and decades of wise municipal leadership that left Denver less hard hit in the financial crisis than many of its peers.

His personal biography is one of a man who has risen from humble circumstances as a black man in a poor Denver neighborhood from a family whose other members have not always stuck to the straight and narrow who has risen to lead his city, more or less the opposite of the life story of Chris Romer, his runoff opponent. He is also the second black Mayor of a mostly white and Hispanic city that had a KKK supported Mayor in the 1920s (Mayor Stapleton). Mayor Wellington Webb, Denver's first black Mayor, was a critical advisor in his campaign.

Most recently Hancock has served as the President of Denver's City Council, and endorsement from city council members who withdrew from the race or failed to make it to the second round of the election were key to his runoff round victory.

Voter turnout in the second round was about five thousand more (about 40% of ballots mailed were returned and considered valid) than in the first round, but runoff voters tended to return their ballots sooner than the first round voters who had more decisions to make and more candidates to choose from than in the runoff.

READ MORE - Hancock Elected Mayor, Johnson Elected Clerk & Recorder

The Mass Migration Of The Late 19th Century

On average, 5 percent of the populations of Britain, Ireland, and Norway emigrated every decade between 1850 and 1910, which increased to 14 percent of the Irish population emigrating between 1890 and 1910. By the turn of the century, Italy, Portugal, and Spain recorded similar emigration levels... The Swedish population fell by 44 percent in the twenty-year period from 1871-1890.

Massive immigration dramatically impacted the economies of countries in the New World, which had relatively small populations. Between 1880 and 1910, Argentina received the equivalent of 20 percent of its population per decade; the United States between 5 and 10 percent per decade; and Canada between 5 and 15 percent per decade. Immigration in this age of mass migration accounted for around 50 percent of Argentina's population increase, and about a 30 percent increase for the United States and Australia.

From here quoting this book. A comment to the linked post references regarding immigration politics of the time: Goldin, C, “The Political Economy of Immigration Restriction in the United States, 1890 to 1921.” In The Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political Economy, ed. C. Goldin and G.D. Libecap, 223-258. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

What was so awful in Europe that everyone wanted to get the heck out of there? Stories of misery and poverty driving people to leave Ireland after the potato famine and Southern Italy are familiar from immigrant narratives. But, I'm not familiar with any similar narrative for late 19th century Sweden. Yet, surely you wouldn't see a 44% exodus of Swedes from their homeland in twenty years if everything was fine and dandy in Sweden. Sure, the northern Midwest is full of Swedish Lutherans, but it had never occured to me that they would have emigrated in such large numbers relative to the population of Sweden. I'd always imagined that event as something more like a small subculture young people who set out to seek their fortune because the grass was reputed to be greener across the Atlantic, answering a call that most people ignored.

My own family history recounts the looming war of 1848 as a push factor in the migration of my patrilineal ancestor to the United States from Germany.

But, the story of my maternal Swede-Finn ancestors' migratration from Finland to the Upper Pennisula of Michigan a few decades later as teenagers isn't accompanied by a narrative that would suggest any push factor that dramatic. (Finland was a Grand Dutchy within Russia from 1809 to 1917, having been acquired in resolution of a war between tsarist Russia and Sweden, and was previously a part of the Swedish empire; Finnish emigration peaked around 1900, a bit later than than Swedish neighbors, perhaps because it industrialized a little later.)

According to Wikipedia:

Sweden—much like Japan at the same time—transformed from a stagnant rural society to a vibrant industrial society between the 1860s and 1910. The agricultural economy shifted gradually from communal village to a more efficient private farm-based agriculture. There was less need for manual labor on the farm so many went to the cities; and about 1 million Swedes emigrated to the United States between 1850 and 1890. Many returned and brought word of the higher productivity of American industry, thus stimulating faster modernization.

The late 19th century saw the emergence of an opposition press, the abolition of guild monopolies on craftsmen, and the reform of taxation. Two years of military service was made compulsory for young men, though there was no warfare.

Health

The steady decline of death rates in Sweden began about 1810. For men and women of working age the death rate trend diverged, however, leading to increased excess male mortality during the first half of the century. There were very high rates of infant and child mortality before 1800, Among infants and children between the ages of one and four smallpox peaked as a cause of death in the 1770s-1780s and declined afterward. Mortality also peaked . . . due to other air-, food-, and waterborne diseases, but these declined as well during the early 19th century. The decline of several diseases during this time created a more favorable environment that increased children's resistance to disease and dramatically lowered child mortality.

Thus, rather than war or disease, the push factor appears to have been an increased supply of young people as mortality fell with modernity accompanied by a declining job market due to the mechanization of the economy. There are parallels to the enclosure movement in Britain as well as to the mass displacement of tenant-farmers in Japan referenced in Wikipedia. The coincidence of the imposition of compulsory military service and the mass migration is also notable.

This example also suggests give the very large percentages involved relative to the populations involved on both ends of the journey that there was a strong potential for population genetic selection in the New World for any trait that would predispose someone to make a migration and in the Old World for any trait that would predispose someone to not making a migration.

READ MORE - The Mass Migration Of The Late 19th Century

Is The Debt Ceiling Constitutional?

Congress enacts our tax laws.  Congress appropriates funds by law.  Congress passes a statute called the debt ceiling.  The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the enumerated power to tax, to spend, and to incur debt.  The U.S. Constitution also forbids Congress from passing laws that impair rights under government contracts.  The Constitution calls upon the President to faithfully execute the laws and constitution of the United States and the President has long been understood to have the authority to resolve based upon legal advice from the executive branch situations in which one law seems to be contradicted by another law or the United States Constitution.  The judicial branch is also understood to have that authority.

When the United States government bumps up against a debt ceiling passed by Congress, we are overconstrained and the way to faithfully executed the law and the United States Constitution becomes non-obvious.  No one suggests that the President or the Courts may increase revenues by imposing new taxes without Congressional approval.  But, faced with laws enacted by Congress appropriating discretionary funds, earlier passed legislation by Congress establishing a debt ceiling, legislation passed before the debt ceiling was enacted providing for non-discretionary spending, and the constitutional obligation of the United States government not to default on its contracts, either by failing to pay its national debt obligations or failing to honor contracts it has entered into with its employees and government contractors, what is a President who has a Congressional mandate to spend funds and a Congressional mandate not to borrow enough money to spend the funds appropriated to do?

According to current predictions from the United States Treasury Secretary, if legislative gridlock persists, we will have a constitutional crisis that will force the President to resolve this issue some time around August 2 of this year.

At least since President Nixon, there have been some who have argued that the mere fact that Congress has authorized the President to spend money in an appropriation doesn't mean that the President doesn't have to spend those funds, in a sort of back door line item veto that is not subject to legislative review (despite clear U.S. Supreme Court authority that Congress cannot create a line item veto by statute).  But, the President's freedom of action is less obvious once government contracts (particularly multi-year appropriations for navy purchases expressly authorized by the constitution) have been inked, in cases of non-discretionary spending, and in cases where the language of a specific appropriate classified as "discretionary spending" does not on its face have language that is susceptible to being read as giving the President the option not to spend it.

Looking at the issue politically, it also isn't obvious why the constitution, which is at its heart a political document, should be interpreted in a way that allows Congress to demand the impossible in an overconstrained budget by forcing the President to make politically painful choices on what to cut from Congressionally authorized appropriations by providing the President with neither the tax revenues nor the borrowing power to spend the funds appropriated.

In the absence of a debt ceiling statute, the President would almost surely have the inherent authority, implied from the appropriations and the lack of tax revenues sufficient to fund all of the appropriations made by Congress to borrow money on the full faith and credit of the United States in order to carry out the appropriations authorized by Congress.  So, one of the easier options for a court faced with resolving a situation in which the President is presented with a choice of evils that leaves it mathematically impossible for him to faithfully execute all of the laws that Congress has deemed fit to adopt would be to declare that the debt ceiling is unconstitutional, or at least, that the President may lawfully resolve the overconstrained situation by ignoring it until the nation's budget ceases to be overconstrained.  This has the virtue of keeping the courts out of the policy laden minefield of figuring out which spending programs should be cut and which should not be cut and how much each program should be cut.

The alternative would be for a court to determine that the President has the power to resolve the situation by not spending appropriated funds, or indeed, a court could even hold the that President is not allowed to spend even appropriated funds if tax revenues and the amount of spending available to the President as a result of the debt ceiling are insufficient to pay for the appropriated spending.

 But, here, the devils are in the details.  Since spending is authorized by myriad different pieces of legislation and government revenue is organized into many dedicated funds from which spending for particular programs flows, the analysis for each little bit of appropriated spending is not so simple.  In each case it is necessary to determine what legislation authorizes the spending, whether the spending comes from the general fund or from a trust fund that is still solvent, whether the spending is discretionary given the language of the appropriation, and how the general law of resolving conflicts between statutes such as interpretive provisions based upon specificity, connection to larger statutory schemes and the preference to be given to the later enacted statute (a rule that leaves unclear what weight to be given to the non-binding budget passed by Congress in advance of binding appropriation and tax bills should be given in terms of prioritizing statutes that conflict with each other) should be given.  The constitution is not a suicide pact, and the President cannot ignore in an overconstrained budget situation the fact that some appropriations are for essential government operations that have irrevocable life and death consequences if suspended even briefly while the President and Congress work out deals on spending cuts and the debt  ceiling.

Congressionally appropriated funds as he deems fit, and does not have any constitutional obligation to make the cuts from appropriations that are determined to yield in a conflict of statutes to the debt ceiling equally across the board or according to any other predetermined formula.

Similarly, even if it is determined that there are some appropriations that can be cut by the President that yield in a conflict of statutes to the debt ceiling, if all of these potential cuts in appropriations combined still make it necessary to exceed the debt ceiling in the budget year, it isn't legally obvious whether those cuts must all be made, extending the collision with the debt ceiling until the latest possible date before which Congress might act to increase the debt ceiling legislatively, or if the President may take note of the inevitable and abrogate the debt ceiling immediately upon determining factually that the debt ceiling can't be reconciled with the funding that has been appropriated by Congress and prevails in a conflicts of statutes with the debt ceiling.

But, if the President does not exercise his discretion to refrain from spending appropriated funds in an amount sufficient to avoid exceeding the debt ceiling, and if a court has the authority to look at spending statutes on a case by case basis to determine which may and which may not yield to a debt ceiling law when the aggregate amount of spending appropriated by Congress conflicts with the debt ceiling that it has enacted (something that is arguable a non-justiciable political question), these matters generally come to the courts when the clock is ticking and complying with all of the budget related laws enacted by Congress has already become impossible or will become impossible imminently. So, a court may lack the time to conduct the analysis necessary to come to a legally principled resolution of the question of when appropriated spending is not required by law before an immediate resolution of the conflict is required. Faces with a choice of evils, a determination that the debt ceiling is unconstitutional may be the only practicable resolution available to a court if it is called upon the resolve the crisis as a matter of law, because elected officials have failed to do so.

After all, a court determination that the United States government has a legal obligation to pay for appropriated spending, even if that means that the United States government has to incur a debt liability as a result, isn't really all that different from the routine practice of courts that under judgments against the United States government in a legal case that are by their very nature debts of the United States government that are not authorized by Congress in advance.

UPDATE:  Some have argued that the "no debt shall be questioned" language of the 14th Amendment makes the debt ceiling unconstitutional.  I'd argue the opposite.  The duty to pay the government's obligations comes from the contracts clause of the original constitution.  It applies to everything from contracts to build roads to Treasury bonds.  The 14th Amendment, by limiting its validation of the national debt (and with a current focus on the Civil War debt obligation of the Union which was validated in contrast to that of the Confederacy which was not) limits that validation to debts authorized by law.  But, the debt ceiling arguably makes the point that debts in excess of that amount are not authorized by law, buttressing the argument that Congress, in general, is the branch that authorizes debt to be incurred under Article II, Section 8.  Debts in excess of the ceiling, which are not authorized by law, are arguably subject to question under the 14th Amendment in a way that debts under the ceiling are not.

But, the 14th Amendment language still doesn't elucidate one way or the other the way we must proceed when we have multiple laws, one group authorizing spending, another authorizing the collection of federal reveneus from sources other than debt, and a third limiting the amount of the debt that may be incurred.  When they can't be reconciled, something has to give.  If it is not an imposition of executive order imposed taxes, it must be legislatively authorized spending or the legislatively imposed debt ceiling.

In practice, so much of the spending, like Social Security, Medicare, unemployment benefits, etc. is non-discretionary, and tax revenues are so low, that once the debt-ceiling is reached, truly draconian cuts on that portion of discretionary spending that the government is not already obligated to pay as a result of government contracts with private parties may be impossible, at least as a practical matter.  For example, we can't simply put the entire U.S. military on furlough, and the Department of Defense is the singled largest discretionary spending line item.

So, faced with a choice of evils, it may simply be impossible to do anything but to ignore the debt ceiling, which in one piece of legislation, in favor of the appropriations legislation for the nation's spending, which is another piece of legislation.

READ MORE - Is The Debt Ceiling Constitutional?

Father of the Nation

If you are asked on an immigration exam who the father of the nation is in the United States, the answer iis George Washington.  But, a better choice might be John Lothropp.

An ordained minister of the Church of England, Lothropp quickly found himself in the Crown's disfavor. In 1623, at age 39, he renounced his affiliation with the Church and instead affiliated with the Independents, a group which advocated for separation between church and state and for religious freedom for non-Catholics. For this, Lothropp and his followers were jailed, when in 1632, local authorities became aware of their secret meetings. Lothropp was released just over two years later, on the condition that he'd leave England and emigrate to the New World. He agreed and arrived in Boston that fall. He'd later found the Cape Cod town of Barnstable, Masachusetts.

He is an ancestor of all of a great many prominent Americans including:

President George W. Bush
President George H.W. Bush
President Millard Fillmore
President James A. Garfield
President Franklin D. Roosevelt
President Ulysses S. Grant
Mormon prophet Joseph Smith
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
Revolutionary war era traitor Benedict Arnold.
Vice Presidental candidate Sarah Palin
Governor Mitt Romney
Industrialist J.P. Morgan
Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Author Laura Ingalls Wilder
Actress Shirley Temple
Actress Brooke Shields

READ MORE - Father of the Nation

The Making Of West Virginia

A hundred and fifty years ago, a single map based on information from the 1860 census that showed the percentage of the population consisting of slaves by county, was the primary basis of the boundary between Virginia and West Virgina. The original proposed name for the breakaway states, “Kanawha” didn't stick, however.

The story of western Virginia is complex, and the map itself disguises this somewhat. Areas with relatively small slave populations generally sided against secession when the vote was taken on April 4, when it failed, then again on April 17, when it succeeded. However, this opposition to secession did not necessarily translate into abolition, or even resistance to slavery. When West Virginia finally became a state in June 1863, it passed rigid manumission laws that would have protected slavery for decades were it not for the 13th Amendment. And in several counties the opposition to secession constituted a slim rather than a decisive majority; in other words, the map is not a transparent reflection of political sentiment. Yet it captured the imagination of the nation’s leaders and the public, and it circulated widely through Washington.

By August, the Army had secured the western counties to the point that the residents could begin to organize themselves into a new state. At this moment of victory, the Coast Survey issued a second edition of the map that boldly colored the proposed state of “Kanawha” in western Virginia. This edition also reinforced the initial message of the map with statistics showing that the vast majority of slaves had remained in Virginia.

Slaves made up 31.1% of pre-division Virginia, while post-division 37.2% of Virigina's population consisted of slaves, while 2.5% of West Virginia's population did. The geographic cline in slave ownership from the hills to the coast in Viriginia was largely a product of the viability of plantation style agriculture in different parts of the state.

It isn't entirely clear to me why McDowell, Buchanan, Wise and Pendelton Counties in Viriginia, which were contiguous to West Virginia and also had few slaves did not join their neighbors in leaving the state of Virginia.

READ MORE - The Making Of West Virginia

Combined U.S. Tax Burden Lowest Since 1958

Americans are paying the smallest share of their income for taxes since 1958, a reflection of tax cuts and a weak economy. . . . The total tax burden — for all federal, state and local taxes — dropped to 23.6% of income in the first quarter, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data. By contrast, individuals spent roughly 27% of income on taxes in the 1970s, 1980s and the 1990s — a rate that would mean $500 billion of extra taxes annually today, one-third of the estimated $1.5 trillion federal deficit this year. . . . Individuals paid taxes at an annual rate of $10,549 per person in the first quarter — about the same as individuals have paid since 1990 when adjusted for inflation. Incomes have grown; tax payments haven't.

From USA Today via the Tax Profs Blog.

The top income tax rate in 1958 was 91% (where it remained from shortly after World War II until 1964). At the time, the nation was running under the recently overhauled Internal Revenue Code of 1954, which was revised, in part, because of budget surpluses run by the federal government in 1948, 1949 and 1950 (the Korean War soaked up surpluses in the following years). There was also a gift and estate tax regime in place in 1958 which was less generous (and more complicated) than the one in place as of 2011.

In contrast, the top federal income tax rate in 2011 is 35%, and for most long term capital gains and qualified dividends the top federal income tax rate is 15%. Thus, in addition to a low aggregate tax burden by historical standards, top marginal tax rates are also low by historical standards. It is also easier given the state of transportation and telecommunications technologies to relocate to a low tax state now to minimize state and local tax burdens than it was to do so in 1958.

READ MORE - Combined U.S. Tax Burden Lowest Since 1958

Will The Oil Age Be A Brief Historical Blip?

You don't have to be a die hard Peak Oil purist to agree with the gist of the implications of the graph above, posted at an NPR blog and based on an original presentation slide by Stephen Mayfield.

As noted by Wikipedia on Peak Oil:

Optimistic estimations of peak production forecast the global decline will begin by 2020 or later, and assume major investments in alternatives will occur before a crisis, without requiring major changes in the lifestyle of heavily oil-consuming nations. . . . Pessimistic predictions of future oil production operate on the thesis that either the peak has already occurred, that oil production is on the cusp of the peak, or that it will occur shortly. The International Energy Agency (IEA) says production of conventional crude oil peaked in 2006.

Peak oil production in the United States hit in 1970, but was pretty much irrelevant because oil trades in a world market. The U.S. has been a net oil importer since the early 1990s.

The United States isn't the only country in the world that has hit a localized peak in oil production as the illustration below from Wikipedia illustrates:

Some localized peak oil predictions are right around the corner: Iraq: 2018, Kuwait: 2013, and Saudi Arabia: 2014. In my grandchildren's world, most of the Middle Eastern oil powers will have greatly diminished oil wealth.

Whether peak oil is almost upon us or is, very optimistically (e.g. in the opinion of the most optimistic oil industry experts), a century out, in the big picture, the message is basically the same viewed through a long historical lens (and one could reasonably extend the chart above all the way back to 8,000 BCE when agriculture was begun for an even longer run historical perspective).

Most of the optimistic predictions assume that much of the new high cost oil production will come from "unconventional sources such as heavy crude oil, oil sands, and oil shale" that are made more attractive at higher oil prices. Even the optimists aren't predicting a sustained return to an era of oil prices of less than $40 per barrel (in 2008 dollars), and often half that, seen from roughly 1877 to 1972 and again from about 1986 to 2003. Instead, they predict a continued flow of increasingly expensive oil for a very long time. The current price for barrel of oil is about $100 which translates into gasoline prices of a bit under $4 a gallon at the pump in Colorado.

We learned how to make oil powered machines and oil based materials, we drilled and extracted vast amounts of easily available petroleum, and we very rapidly have burned through much of this non-renewable resource and continue to do so without seriously reducing our consumption of it. This use pattern has lasted about a century, and maybe it can last another, but it isn't sustainable.

For an oil economy to be sustainable, it needs to use biofuels or oil obtained from converting coal to a petroleum-like liquid fuel (such as the fuel produced in the Fischer–Tropsch process used by Germany and Japan during World War II). Rentech, Inc. has a proto-type plant in Commerce City, Colorado that produces about 10 barrels of fuels per day using the process from natural gas, and half a dozen other operations produce liquid fuels from natural gas or biomass using the process as well. There are a few small operations in the U.S., including one in Pennsylvania, that do small scale conversions from "waste coal" but only one Sasol plant in South Africa (which is coal rich, but oil poor) currently makes petroleum-like fuels from a combination of coal and natural gas on a large scale commercial basis using the technique.

You can extract more petroleum from deep wells, oil shale and the like, but this approach inevitably is still going to produce diminishing oil reserve growth and higher extraction costs. These options can bend the peak oil curve forward a little, but once the cost of extraction exceeds the cost of producing biofuels or converting coal or using other alternatives to oil (like fuel cell and battery powered vehicles), the technological capacity to extract more petroleum becomes irrelevant. The bottom line is that they aren't making any more new oil, so sooner or later, we're going to run out if we keep consuming it at a high rate as a core basis of our technological culture. Moreover, there is no more oil anywhere else in the solar system, since no place but Earth has ever had the biomass that broke down to produce petroleum.

The good news is that this imposes a natural limit on the amount of global warming inducing pollutants that combustion of petroleum can produce. And, petroleum consumption is the harder fossil fuel to refrain from using without being forced by resource constraints to do so, because it has fewer good substitutes. Our demand for coal is currently almost exclusively for electricity production, and that has easier substitutes that require innovation only by large, sophisticated electrical utilities, not by average people whose electricity consumption experience is unchanged by the fuel used to produce it.

The bad news is that to the extent that our standard of living is a product of cheap energy from petroleum, the future could bring real hardship as this one time economic boost is no longer available. Economists have attempted to estimate that impact, but given the uncertainties of technological developments and the inseparability of oil from our current economy's functioning, the efforts are speculative at best.

An economy based on cheap oil may be as transient as the brief period in the history of the Americas and of Australia when there was a brief burst of abundance arising from megafauna hunting until those fauna went extinct.

READ MORE - Will The Oil Age Be A Brief Historical Blip?

Seeking the Yayoi

The conventional pre-history of Japan involves horseback riding soldiers called the Yayoi entering Japan around the area where it comes closest to Korea around sometime in the middle of the first millenium before the current era, where the indigeneous people, who had lived there for 30,000 years, called the Jomon, a fishing oriented pottery making people who were linguistic and ethnic close relatives of the modern Ainu minority of Northern Japan were assimilated into the Yayoi superstrate in a process of ethnogenesis that gave rise to the modern Japanese people.

Until around 1000 CE, the northern Honshū island was inhabited by the Emishi to whom we can be quite definitive in attaching an Ainu ethnicity and language affiliation, and Ainu related people also inhabited the region known as Ezo, consisting of the island of Hokkaidō; and were formerly spoken in southern and central Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands. So, for the first 1300 years, the Yayoi were pretty much confined to Southern Japan.

The Yayoi may have been some manner of Korean people, although which of the ancient Korean kingdoms they (and the modern Korean language) have the strongest affinity to is disputed.

As I noted in a wikipedia article on the origin of the Japanese language that is linked above: "Current estimates are that "wago" (i.e. words attributable to the original Yaoyi language) make up 33.8% of the Japanese lexicon, that "knago" (i.e. words with roots borrowed from Chinese since the 5th century CE) make up 49.1% of Japanese words (and in addition, the Chinese ideograms used in the Japanese written language), that foreign words called gairaigo make up 8.8% of Japanese words, and that 8.3% of Japanese words are konshugo that draw upon multiple languages. This account attributes only a small number of words in modern Japanese to Ainu roots." Almost all of the various characters used to write down Japanese are also borrowed from Chinese.

I'd instinctively favor an account that suggests that the Ainu linguistic contribution is undercounted, but because Ainu is a living language that is well attested, as is Chinese, and given that Japanese and Chinese have been a literary language for most of the time period in question, I suspect that an identification of wago words with the original Yayoi language is probably pretty accurate.

There are strongly suggestive indications that the Yayoi language was Altaic, a language family that also has as core members, the Turkic languages, the Mongolian languages, and the Tungusic languages of Manchuria. The geographic scope of the proposed Altaic language family members is considerable as this map from Wikipedia indicates:

But, historically, this spread was quite recent.

The Turkic languages reached Central Asia, Europe and Turkey within the last seventeen hundred years or so. Their ethnogenesis is associated with the arrival of the Bronze Age and horses in the Northeastern Asian region sometime in the vincinity of 1500 BCE to 700 BCE.

The traditional date for the Yayoi arrival in Japan is 2700 years ago, and most evidence to date suggest an actual arrival a few hundred years later. This would be consistent with the Yayoi as a cultural offshoot of the proto-Turkic peoples.

While the empire of Ghengis Khan was the largest on land known to man, in the late middle ages, until a eight or nine hundred years ago, it was confined to Mongolia, Northern China and perhaps Eastern Siberia where it is found today (the only linguistic legacy of its expansion is the Oirat language spoken by peoples on the Caspian plains of Russia. The Mongolians first entire recorded history in the 4th century CE in Manchuria and Mongolia as a nomadic people called the Khitan people.

The Tungusic languages have remains at all times largely confined to Manchuria.

Japanese and Korean are clearly not Tibet-Burmese languages, despite their heavy borrowing from Chinese, and the linguistic case of the an Altaic affiliation for Japanese and Korean (presumably via its Yayoi roots) is not trivial. The Altaic languages, Old Japanese and Korean all have a linguistic feature called vowel harmony that is rarely, if ever, found in other languages. Similarities have also been found in verb conjugation classes, and there has been some success in matching tonal aspects of Japanese to consonants found in other Altaic languages. Vovin has suggested that as many as 15 to 23 core Old Japanese words have Altaic proto-language counterparts, far more than chance would suggest, and almost all of the Altaic-Japanese correspondences are wago words. The Altaic languages, Japanese, and Korean are also notable for a lack of noun classes and lack of grammatic gender.

So far, so good. There is a problem, however. While Japanese population genetics do parse rather neatly into East Asian and Jomon components, the East Asian genetic component looks far more like the Chinese than it does like the Altaic populations of Northeastern Eurasia.

It isn't so hard to imagine how this could happen. In the same vein, Turkic peoples of Northeast Eurasia don't have a very strong genetic link to the Turkish language speaking people of Anatolia. One imagines that an ethnically Chinese population in and around Korea may have been a subject people of a Altaic language speaking elite leading to a language shift in the population (at least among the elites that would go on to conquer Japan as the Yayoi), with little Altaic genetic admiture from the ruling elite to the soldiers who went on to conquer Japan.

This pushes the genetic forebears of the Yayoi to the Southwest, and the linguistic and cultural forebears of the Yayoi to the North, probably North of Korea entirely.

Given that Japanese appears to have more lexical similarity to Proto-Turkic than to other Altaic language family languages, that Proto-Turkic was the first of the Alataic languages to experience an expansion out of Asia, and that Japanese lexical links to Altaic languages appear to be mediated through Proto-Turkic, one imagines the linguistic forebears of the Japanese to be Proto-Turkic peoples of Northeast Eurasia.

This would have been some time after the 4th millenium before the current era, when the horse appears to have been domesticated (probably reaching the Turks as a cultural transmission from Indo-European language speakers such as the Tocharians or their immediately predecessors in Central Asia), but no later than the 3rd millenium before the current era when the Yayoi arrive in Japan, which is strongly consistent with Proto-Turkic ethnogenesis.

The Proto-Turkic expansion would presumably start a little later than the Indo-European expansions, given the direction of horse domestication transmission and Bronze Age technology transmission across the Russian Steppe, and Finno-Urgic a.k.a. Uralic languages of that region appear to be older still than Indo-European languages. In addition, some of the region, prior to the expansions of Indo-European languages and Altaic languages with the horse would have spoken Paleo-Siberian languages such as Yenesian which has linguistic links to the Na-Dene languages of North America.

READ MORE - Seeking the Yayoi

Bernstein's Mass

The CU-Boulder Opera will be performing Bernstein's Mass on Tuesday at 7:30 at Denver's Performing Arts Complex. I was part of a chorus performing it when I was a high school student in New Zealand (although I missed the actual performance due to an illness after months of practicing), I listened to Oberlin College's recording of it many times during college, and it remains one of the gems of my small personal music collection.  Background on the piece is available here.

It is a bit of an odd piece: a theater piece based on the Roman Catholic Mass written by one of the nation's leading Jewish composers of classical music.  It was composed for the September 8, 1971 opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. and dedicated "To the beloved memory of John F. Kennedy" at the request of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. 

It was written at a time when the nation and the Roman Catholic church were in turmoil over its values and beliefs, before the religious currents of American life that have defined the last few decades had taken hold. Evangelical Christianity hadn't assumed national prominence in American politics. Gay rights was not yet on the radar screen. The use of jazz and rock musical genres in the work preceded its widespread use in mainline Christian and Catholic religious music.  It is roughly contemporary with the composition of the Chicago Folk Service and precedes the charismatic movement's penetration beyond Pentecostal and black churches.

It addresses important themes that got sidelined in latter debates in the United States about the role of religion in our life. Bernstein's Mass, at its heart, is about a crisis of faith and belief. It addressed most centrally the issue that had already started to become dominant in Europe, the erosion of faith by secularism.

The most famous lyric in the piece is a contribution from Paul Simon:

Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction.

It is also a profoundly personal, rather than political work, although its dona nobis pacem was political in the context of the brewing anti-Vietnam War movement afoot during the Nixon Presidency as it premiered. It talks about what faith means to real ordinary people in their daily lives. It talks about the conflicts of guilt over one's own sin and licentiousness fostered by the possibility of forgiveness. It acknowledges that even the clergy face struggles of belief. It strips away complex church doctrine to reveal a vision of faith as something simple, profound and natural, part of our humanity, with its central theme song:

Sing God a Simple Song . . . Make it up as you go along . . .  Sing like you like to sing, God loves all simple things, for God is the simplest of all.

As much with its musical choices as its libretto, it creates a cultural space in which someone can be both religiously faithful and deeply manly, so rare in the context of religious ideals that are either neutering (e.g. in the case of a celebate clergy) or a feminizing force that is at odds with a masculine archetype.

It conjures up a vision of faith that can be pious without being arrogant, that cares about the lives of the little people, that acknowledges a people adrift, that focuses on what is important in people's spiritual and emotional lives both melancholy and joyous, both fearful and glavanized to action.  It describes a faith that is about helping people to get on with their lives, rather than one focused on creating a City of God.  It is a last hurrah of a humanistic mainline way of looking at Christian faith that has greatly diminished in adherents and vitality in the decades that followed.  It offered up a vision of what believers could be that no one took up the flag to advance.

I don't know if I'll be able to attend, but the tickets aren't expensive and it is a remarkable work of music that makes you think in a way that transcends the boundaries of today's often stale and impersonal debate about the role of faith in our lives.

READ MORE - Bernstein's Mass