Proud Men Die Young

People who most believe in a culture of honor -- who agree that "A real man doesn't let other people push him around" or that aggression is a reasonable response to being insulted -- told the researchers they were quite willing to engage in risky behaviors, such as bungee jumping or gambling away a week's wages. This willingness to take risks might well translate into an early death[.] . . .

Honor cultures are more powerful in rural areas, where the influence of personal reputation is higher than it is in cities. Although honor states had a 14% higher accidental death rate in the cities, they had a 19% higher rate of accidental death in more rural areas, compared to non-honor states. More than 7,000 deaths a year can be attributed to risk-taking associated with the culture of honor in the USA.

From here.

FWIW, it could also have something to do with the fact that "cultures of honor" also have disproportionate shares of blue collar workers whose jobs are more dangerous. But, the urban-rural comparison casts some doubt on that economic as opposed to cultural interpretation.

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Pop Culture Esoterica

Monopoly has an official rule that almost nobody actually uses (I knew that and have actually used said rule but can't say I that prefer doing so) (h/t to Enik Rising).

The Star Wars saga owes less of its literary inspiration to mythic universals of Joseph Campbell, and more to its pulp fiction antecedents in the genre, particular the Lensman series by E.E. "Doc" Smith which is now out of copyright (the first episode of the series, at least, is available for a legal free download), than is commonly recognized (h/t to Razib at Gene Expression).

FWIW, Smith's prose is just about as dreadful as the dialog in Star Wars, if not worse, as it has the corny smaltz of self-mockery popular in the 1930s and 1940s when it was written that Star Wars, which generally takes itself much more seriously, lacks.

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Evangelical Christianity's Ugly Side Is Inseparable From Its Virtues

Nicholas Kristoff, in a column this past Saturday, summed up what liberals don't like about Evangelical Christianity, in the course of arguing that the negative stereotype isn't universal since there are nice evangelical Christians out there (like the late Reverend John Stott of Britain, and liberal evangelicals like Jim Wallis of Sojourners fame and Richard Cizik) who don't make headlines the way that the hellfire and brimstone, or prosperity gospel TV evangelists do.

This may be true, but his spot on summary of liberal distaste of the Evangelical Christian movement deserves restating for future reference:

In these polarized times, few words conjure as much distaste in liberal circles as “evangelical Christian.”

That’s partly because evangelicals came to be associated over the last 25 years with blowhard scolds. When the Rev. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson discussed on television whether the 9/11 attacks were God’s punishment on feminists, gays and secularists, God should have sued them for defamation.

Earlier, Mr. Falwell opined that AIDS was “God’s judgment on promiscuity.” That kind of religious smugness allowed the AIDS virus to spread and constituted a greater immorality than anything that occurred in gay bathhouses.

Partly because of such self-righteousness, the entire evangelical movement often has been pilloried among progressives as reactionary, myopic, anti-intellectual and, if anything, immoral. . . .

Centuries ago, serious religious study was extraordinarily demanding and rigorous; in contrast, anyone could declare himself a scientist and go in the business of, say, alchemy. These days, it’s the reverse. A Ph.D. in chemistry is a rigorous degree, while a preacher can explain the Bible on television without mastering Hebrew or Greek — or even showing interest in the nuances of the original texts.

Those self-appointed evangelical leaders come across as hypocrites, monetizing Jesus rather than emulating him. Some seem homophobic, and many who claim to be “pro-life” seem little concerned with human life post-uterus. Those are the preachers who won headlines and disdain.

While I am more than willing to acknowledge that there are social gospel preaching intellectuals like Stott, a British theological writer, who are simultaneously humanistic and Christian, it is inaccurate to call him an "evangelical Christian" in the sense of the term that describes the movement within American Christianity that took off in the American South during the Second Great Awakening, with its "distinctives" having only remote and cryptic connections to earlier movements in Christianity that has spread and mutated from there, as opposed to its generic meaning of someone who is a Christian and actively engages in the business of trying to convert others to the faith.

There is a case to be made that this narrow sense of Evangelical Christianity makes positive contributions to society and doesn't deserve the wholehearted distaste which Kristoff explains that the movement has worked hard to earn. But, attacking it from the point of figures like Stott, Wallis and Cizik, who are either not a part of that movement at all, even if religious people in that movement do read what they have to say at times, or who are on its fringes trying to reform it from its flaws from a position of underdog movement insurgents, is not a credible way to redeem this movement.

If one is to redeem (or at least understand the moral basis of) narrow sense Evangelical Christianity, one needs to look at the positive or at least culturally important contributions of core followers of the very same people, at that core of that movement, who generate such liberal outrage, not the critics at its fringe.

Evangelical Christianity does have upsides: their willingness to engage in prison ministries, their willingness to acknowledge that their communities are broken and need fixing, their willingness to include the poor and working class as a part of their community rather than objectifying them as outsiders, their commitment to trying to reform people, their ability to unify a Southern ethnic identity that doesn't show up on census forms in the face of a dominant Northern national elite culture, their ability to devote private sector charitable effort to addressing the problems of the Third World, and their commitment to the possibility of a hopeful future even in moments when individuals think that their lives have reached dead ends.

This movement is fundamentally reactionary, myopic, anti-intellectual and immoral. For this movement these are features, not flaws. This movement is also inherently and centrally willing to include and support those who are down on their luck if those people submit to their broader cultural agenda. The two sides of the movement's agenda are mutually reinforcing and inseparable parts of what it means to be an Evangelical Christian in the narrow sense of that term.

Their stubborn, fact-blind righteousness is part and parcel of their unwavering attitude of hopefulness and acceptance of the inevitability of divine providence. Their anti-intellectual orientation is part of what puts this religious movement in a comfort zone for those who are themselves ill educated. One can't unify a cohort of people who as a matter of core ethnic identity refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the North's victory in the Civil War if you are aren't reactionary.

Evangelical Christianity offers a port in the storm for losers of many shades and stripes that more mainstream Christianity does not. Mainstream Christianity is more open to letting a depressing (for the core constituency of Evangelical Christianity) reality in, mainstream Christianity accepts the authority of intellectuals who necessarily have profound cultural distance from working class flocks as their leaders, and mainstream Christianity is more insistent upon the importance of not sinning in the first place relativite to the importance of never ending forgiveness without regard to culpability than the average self-identified Evangelical Christian knows how to manage. In a world of ugly people, a taboo against mirrors can seem attractive; Evangelical Christianity offers such a world.

If liberals want to make inroads into the people who make up the core of the Evangelical Christian movement, which is closely identified with, although not 100% identical to, the core of the American political conservative movement exemplified in the Tea Party movement and core of the Republican party, it will not suffice to embrace and encourage people who self-identify as Evangelical Christians but operate from outside or at the fringes of that movement.

Instead, liberals have to offer an alternative that can provide an authentic core identity and belief system that works for people who are uneducated and regularly down on their luck who need abundant forgiveness for their psychological well being because they can't figure out how to keep from sinning on a regular basis. They need an alternative that can maintain an unrelenting campaign of calling attention to the failures in their community that need fixing without raising the hackles that outside criticism does, who keep trying even though there is no source of relief in sight. They need to provide people with a worldview that can give them hope in the face of a lack of possibility. They need to offer some filter that can allow these people to make sense of a world that confuses them because they have their feet planted firmly in the past. These people have deep spiritual needs and neither mainstream Christianity nor secular philosophy are doing a good job of serving their needs.

If liberals can solve that riddle to meet those needs, or can change the world in a way so that a critical mass of people no longer need these things, Evangelical Christianity will wither away. Until then, liberals are fighting fire with paper. Every now and then it can smoother a hot spot that is getting out of control, but their own efforts to fight it also fuel the fire.

I suspect that if an alternative is found, it is as likely as not to be something other than mainstream Christianity. For example, Americanized Islam came close to leaping into that role under the leadership of Malcolm X for African-Americans. Mormons, while in many respects a part of the Evangelical Christian movement, similarly offer a different enough community and theological model to offer a genuine alternative to the traditional Evangelical Christian model, even though they do not completely break from that mold. It would likewise be unsurprising to seem some sort of innovation along these lines emerge from the non-denominational megachurch movement. Or, it could be something entirely different. But, until an alternative comes along, Evangelical Christianity, as pernicious as it is, will have staying power because it addresses needs that other movements do not for tens of millions of Americans.

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Do Governments Matter In Economic Development?

Does government policy drive economic development? Or, does ethnic culture matter more (in a Protestant work-ethic sense)?

A new study with a clever methodology favors ethnic culture over government policy as a driver of economic development in Africa (emphasis added).

Divide and Rule or the Rule of the Divided? Evidence from Africa

Stelios Michalopoulos, Elias Papaioannou

NBER Working Paper No. 17184 Issued in June 2011

We investigate jointly the importance of contemporary country-level institutional structures and local ethnic-specific pre-colonial institutions in shaping comparative regional development in Africa. We utilize information on the spatial distribution of African ethnicities before colonization and regional variation in contemporary economic performance, as proxied by satellite light density at night. We exploit the fact that political boundaries across the African landscape partitioned ethnic groups in different countries subjecting identical cultures to different country-level institutions. Our regression discontinuity estimates reveal that differences in countrywide institutional arrangements across the border do not explain differences in economic performance within ethnic groups. In contrast, we document a strong association between pre-colonial ethnic institutional traits and contemporary regional development. While this correlation does not necessarily identify a causal relationship, this result obtains conditional on country fixed-effects, controlling for other ethnic traits and when we focus on pairs of contiguous ethnic homelands.

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Parenting, Privacy, Porn and the Internet

If you're tired about talking about the real estate market and soccer leagues, and you want to liven up discussion at a party with people with children of a certain age, talk about how you manage your children's Internet access.

Some parents long for every opportunity to monitor and control their children's access to the Internet. Others take a more lassiez-faire attitude. My wife and I are certainly more relaxed than some, although we do have limits.

The Internet and the Death of Childhood Privacy

From a child's perspective, one of the important implications of the Internet is that it makes it possible for parents to know what they are doing at a level of detail that was previously impracticable.

The Denver Public Schools has a system that allows you to see your older child's every quiz grade, every absence and tardy notation, every homework assignment and pretty much everything else that the system has noted regarding your child in something approximating real time.

While they have the power to put passwords on their library cards, they don't, so that I can manage online book renewals and fill my household role a book return heavy, thereby minimizing library fines which is an area where we have imposed early personal financial responsibility. So, I know what they check out for the library. I can also monitor the e-books and e-audio books that they enjoy.

Netflix keeps track of which streaming media are watched for how long on which days, and which DVDs are mailed and returned. It doesn't take much in the way of investigative skills to figure out who is watching what when. If I wished, I could also impose parental controls on that account.

I could impose parental controls on my children's Internet usage, audit their web browsing histories, and more, if I was so inclined. For the moment, at least, I have the log in information to my children's e-mail accounts (all pseudonymous), so I can see how they write to, how often, what they write and when. It is also child's play to look at my daughter's cell phone and see who she has called and texted when and what was said in the texts.

Since they don't have cars yet and don't have license to wander our urban residential neighborhood very far without an accompanying adult, they can't really come and go from the house without us knowing where they are going.

The old school days when you insisted on looking at your child's report card and snooped in their diary and under their beds now and then look positively hands off compared to what is possible these days. Children roamed small town streets on bikes, food and skateboards with all the freedom of outdoor cats so long as they were home in time for dinner or called from a friend's house to say that they were having dinner there.  Local phone calls on landlines and notes passed on scraps of paper in class were not logged and hard to intercept. Nobody's television kept a record of what was being watched when that parents could review later. Library records weren't available for parents to review at the touch of a key while they were on lunch break. A child who was the first to the mailbox in the afternoon even had a plausible shot at intercepting letters directed to them through the postal service.

Bad Stuff It Is Out There

The Internet is not a rated PG forum. There is hard core pornography easily available for free to anyone savvy enough to write a Google search; some of it could even land someone in prison. This is far different from the days when you have to find someone to buy it for you, brave an inquiring neighborhood shop clerk, or engage in petty theft to see it, and even it wasn't nearly so vivid.

Cyber bullying and sexting are not unheard of phenomena, although they seem to be mostly outgrowths of real life interactions.

Phishing scams rolling in constantly to every web address and cause real financial harm.

A public embarrassment on line has the ultimate global audience and can't be erased by any reasonable means.

One of the biggest differences between controlling parents and those who are more relaxed is an assessment of how much of a risk, in terms of likelihood, seriousness and preventability is involved in these things.

Total Control Isn't Easy

We encourage them to use their computers in public view but they have laptops, they not infrequently have homework that requires computer use (my daughter had an insane amount of educational computer games for a math class last year in addition to the demands of other classes like social studies report and essay writing), and it is frequently best for family harmony if they do their work in their own rooms.

If my children were of a mind to keep secrets, they could in a variety of ways that they have the technical know how to manage if they were so inclined. If they were of a mind to use family credit cards to make online purchases, they could (although we'd know that someone made them when the statements came in each month if we paid enough attention and the purchases weren't sufficiently bland).

Having some sense of what your children are up to much of the time doesn't take much effort. Perfectly reliable monitoring and control is nearly impossible without becoming a real tyrant and consuming vast amounts of everyone's time in the process.

Why We Don't Fear Forbidden Fruit

Honestly, the best weapon in the fight against inappropriate Internet use is boredom. They simply are not interested in pushing the envelope. They'd rather watch the latest Disney drek than media aimed at older viewers. Long minutes of teenagers snogging, or worse, rates as seriously boring so far. Stop action you tube flicks of dancing Barbies to the latest tune from the radio, or cute kittens has more appeal than subversive political or religious messages. My working assumption is that adult material won't be interesting until they are ready, or almost ready for it.

We aren't terribly afraid of knowledge, even when it is a bit off color. Secrets can be corrosive, and are hard to hide within a family, and maintaining and preserving an inaccurate air brushed view of the world is even harder. We try not to put off questions, and instead to provide the answers to the questions that are really being asked without adding the undue adult emotional baggage than avoiding questions in the interests of the taboos of polite society can. We try to be truthful, factual and bland when the question and the person asking it don't indicate that it is asked, for example, "why are we learning about AIDS and HIV in a 4th grade Family Life class, the required a special permission slip?", indicate that a bare bones answer will satisfy curiosity without a full fledged birds and the bees talk.

If anything, mystery can call attention and interest to subject that tweens and even teen would otherwise find boring and uninteresting. We don't fetishize wine and liquor as forbidden fruits, and talk about the consequences of drinking too much without undue moralizing and without touting a prohibitionists line we don't adhere to. The same applies to material on the Internet that they don't need but don't necessarily want either, if we don't call attention to it.

Google holds the keys to lots of accurate information, as well as lots of mischief, work with them in research related homework projects has helped us to teach them how to distinguish trustworthy and not so trustworthy sources, and there will no doubt be queries in their lives at some point that would be mutually embarrassing for them to ask us that they can get authoritative, accurate answers to over the Internet, just as my generation did from the reference section and non-fiction books in the library. I'd rather that they have the means to get accurate information without asking an adult or letting us know that they are even asking, than not have information that they need at all. Sometimes a question about chlamydia asked because of a concern about a friend really is a question asked because of a concern about a friend. But what adult can help but to leap to suspicions? And, what smart kid doesn't know that they will?

Our main worry is not inappropriate media, or Internet predators. It is Internet and media overload. The limits that we impose have more to do with "how much" than they do with "what" online and media exposure they receive. So long as the number of hours they spend in front of a screen isn't excess, and we do impose limits in that regard, we don't worry much. If they are still reading books, getting outdoor activity, spending time with friends, keeping on top of their homework and so on, a little indulgence is accepted.

Most serious online trouble involves overindulgence. A kid who watches 3 minutes of porn once is not going to be scared for life. A kid who watches hours of it on a regular basis for weeks may get pretty messed up and not realize that this is adult fantasy and not reality. Obsession is more often a problem that knowledge.

In our privacy free online world (so far), sometimes they get caught exceeding the boundaries. Minor transgressions, like a quick check in with an age appropriate online world they have a character in, or a check of an e-mail account, between bouts of homework, are overlooked, although we don't leave them with the illusion that they are putting one over on us. A parental reputation for omniscience can discourage a multitude of sins. Major transgressions are usually punished in kind; watching a movie or playing a video game when you weren't permitted to on Tuesday night may mean forfeiting the chance to do so on Friday after school.

Strategic Reasons For a Light Touch

We try not to be disproportionate in our reactions to a great extent for strategic reasons. We'd like parental discovery of their activities to loom as a lesser tragedy than the alternatives if they get over their head. For example, we wouldn't want them to avoid letting us know about a cyber bully or someone communicating with them inappropriately out of excessive fear of punishment for using the Internet when they weren't supposed to be doing so.

We know perfectly well that we can't hope to be fully informed about what our children do with their friends and their romantic travails as teenagers. But we'd like to think that if the risks of talking to us aren't too high, and questions about their social lives remain as routine and inevitable as our questions about what kind of cake there was at the birthday party and whether it was home made, that we might at least have some sense of who most of the more important people in their lives are these days, and of what those people are like.

Let's face it. Hosting parties for your kids is not simply something that you do out of the goodness of your heart. It is also a part of a comprehensive intelligence strategy to figure out what kind of kids your children choose as company.

At some point, you can no longer choose your children's friends (or eventually, their lovers). But if you keep the door open while remaining basically honest, you can hope to provide some feedback to your child about the people in their lives, for what it is worth, that will be considered as they make their own decisions for themselves. If you acknowledge that sooner or later you will lose control, maintaining credibility becomes more important than bolstering your authority. If you can maintain credibility and stay well enough informed to know when there are opinions to be offered, you don't need hard authority over your children.

Kids have been defying their parents in matters of friendship and love since long before Romeo and Juliet became a classic. The ancient Greeks developed a whole literary genre based upon people ignoring what their betters told them was in their best interests and called it tragedy. But a lot of bridges have to burned before a child ceases to have some preference for parental approval if it is within the realm of the possible, and I'd like to believe that if this card is not overplayed that it can produce beneficial results for all involved.

Who Knows What Approach Works Best?

These observations don't come stamped with a double blind longitudinal study, or the after the fact certificate of approval that comes with kids who somehow managed to do well in the end once they grew up.

Of course, not even couples fully agree how to approach these matters.  My wife is fond of very specific rules that contain the word "never," ideally presented long before the situations to which they apply come up.  Despite, or perhaps because, of the fact that I'm a lawyer, I'm more inclined to generalized character building, talking about situations we encounter in our life, developing a way of thinking about problems, being a role model when I can, and honestly admitting my own shortcomings when I can't.  I don't like to borrow worry and I prefer to take life's challenges as they come.  She sees a parent as more like a law giver dispensing the Ten Commandments of life, while I see a parent as more like a teacher in a liberal arts curriculum or a socratic method law professor trying to get the students to draw their own conclusions from a case.

The combined effect may sometimes be incoherent on the receiving end.  When they do children can arbitrage the approaches to some extent by seeking to be regulated by the preferred parental regime, or can simply do what they wish instead of what they have been told.  What couples (and children) don't face these issues to some extent?  But, because our values aren't that far from each other on the main objectives, we manage.  Maybe we really suck at parenting, but have been blessed with children who were born predisposed to have half decent judgment anyway.  There is really no way to know for sure. But fools rush in where angels fear to tread and in the absence of definitive data you do your best because you have to do make real choices every single day and live with them.

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Does Law Have Insufficient Visual Drama?

Once upon a time, where you wanted to sell real estate, you handed some soil or twig for the property to the buyer in what was called livery of seizen. Couples kiss, wear traditional costumes, and exchange rings when they marry in front of a crowd. One of the traditional ways to revoke a will (recently litigated in Colorado) is to destroy or deface the physical document (which leads to a number of peculiarities of probate law). Traditionally, wills were read aloud after a death, although that rarely happens these days. Even though it no longer legally matters, it is traditional to seal a contract with a handshake. When sports teams finish a game, win or lose, the players each slap hands saying "good game", emotionally putting an end to disputes over the details that led to the final result. Churches acknowledge affiliations to their faith with dramatic baptisms in the Christian church and a vividly memorable circumcision ceremony for infant Jewish and (at least in traditional societies) adolescent Muslim boys. Basic trainees in the military, men entering monastic orders, and prison inmates have their hair shorn, and are stripped of almost all of their personal possessions.

The current story arc in the webcomic Red String's (set in Japan but written by Gina Biggs of Georgia) features Hanae Niijima, a lesbian whose mother will not accept the fact that she has come out or acknowledge Hanae's true love Fuuko Akimoto. The set up to the scene is in this dialog:

Hanae: Why can't you be happy for me? This is who I am. This is ME.

Mother: It's NOT you. You were my sweet little girl who liked flowers and unicorns; who loved to be dressed up in frilly clothes and have me curl your hair. You were never a tomboy!

Hanae: That's STILL me. You think you have to be boyish to like a girl? That's . . .you can't believe that.

Hanae decides the overcome the conceptual block that seems to be getting in the way of her mother by making a visual statement:

Hanae: Fine. [Grabbing scissors with one hand and her long flowing curly hair with the other.]

Mother: What are you doing?!

Hanae: If its frills and curls keeping you from accepting this then I'll get rid of them. Will that work?

Hanae then hands a long pony tail of crudely cut off hair into the hands of her shocked mother who sits, holding it, staring off into space.

Obviously, I'm not recommending that this become a ritualized part of the process of coming out that is mandated in any way. But, powerful visual dramas can often convey meanings about abstract concepts, particularly emotionally charged ones, that some people have a hard time grasping from mere words.  Hanae's mother might be able to understand from the hair in her lap what she couldn't when her daughter merely spoke to her.

For example, one of the classic problems that one sees in modern family law litigation is that one or both of the people who once were married, or at least a loving couple, can't let go of that relationship. The service of the divorce petition, the signing of the papers, the dryly worded court order ending a marriage and providing for the sharing of the children and property of the marriage, and often a restraining order as well, don't communicate to the former member of that relationship with adequate emotional force that the relationship is really, once and for all, over.  Some people are simply beyond reaching by any means of communications, but a large number of people who go through family law proceedings simply don't really understand at an emotional and subconscious level what has happened until much later, even if they can parrot the court's ruling.

Perhaps if that message could be conveyed with more visual drama in some universally accepted new ritual, more people who move on, and there would be, as a result, less senseless fighting driven by old emotions instead of new practicalities. The demise of fault based divorce has made the process much more antiseptic for all involved in the process, but have we overdone it to the point of failing to really acknowledge in an emotionally valid way that not just the legal construct of the marriage, but also the emotional reality of the relationship that it approximates, has ended. Shouldn't the symbolism and ritual that ends of marriage need to be even more powerful and less subtle than the symbolism and ritual that starts one?

Adoptions tend to be even more understated, for fear of spooking the relinquishing parents, and not surprisingly, the main complaint that gets litigated in adoptions is that of relinquishing parents who claim they were properly appraised of the gravity of their actions.

A classic problem in consumer litigation of all kinds is the not infrequent failure of a debtor or consumer, already overwhelmed by paper and having trouble determining what is most important, to realize that a summons and complaint in a lawsuit is a once and for all speak now or forever hold your peace notice that has profound legal consequences if ignored.  This lack of understanding is one of the driver's of the almost ubiquitous paranoia about ulterior motives and about being cheated by one's betters found among unsophisticated people who have frequently been on the receiving side of litigation.

Perhaps we would do well to imitate the litigation practices of the protocol agents of the advanced civilization in the science fiction book "Jaran" by Kate Elliott, where legal disputes are announced by delivery of a physical baton in person by a courier, and one responds to the allegations at a mandatory in person appearance at the designated place and time, as inefficient as that may be, rather than simply enforcing the duty to appear by entering a default judgment against a party who does not appear (one that is often forgotten until property is seized pursuant to the judgment).

I have no empirically evidence to support the theory that more dramatic visual drama in the legal system would make any difference at all. The modern trend has been to strip away formalities, arcane language, pompous court room surroundings, wax seals, fancy ribbons and the like from legal matters. Instead, modern legal proceedings and legal facilities, favor plain English, the bare minimum of in person appearances, contemporary but understated and inoffensive surroundings suited for efficient, processing of business matters, dispenses with wigs and obtuse morning suits, and use very simple seals and acknowledgements - relying on the ability to confirm orders with third party repositories rather than lack of counterfeitability for reliability. Many documents that used to have to be notarized are now simply signed under penalty of perjury with no third party verification of identity or intent.

For lots of purposes this trend may be a good one. It demystifies the legal system and makes it more accessible to pro se parties. Much of what courts do is as much administrative business as it is emotionally meaningful decision making. For the most part, people prefer an inexpensive, quick, form driven informal probate process to the traditional succession proceedings of courts of equity will all their pomp and circumstance. And, some parts of the court process, like the delivery of jury verdicts finding someone guilty or not guilty, have managed to hold onto some of the drama that gives them emotional power. But, maybe some of the time, particularly in civil matters that don't involve business people and may have consequences for people who do not have the same cultural heritage as the lawyers and judges who are running the system, a higher touch, lower tech approach is in order and would make courts more effective. It is certainly a hunch that would be worth exploring with more systematic research.

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Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter

Some concepts are just so awesome and absurd that you can't help but to be attracted to them. Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, which is set for release June of 2012, based on the book of the same name, is such a film.

The idea of Lincoln as supernatural savior was born in 2008, when Mr. Grahame-Smith, who is based in Los Angeles, had just finished the manuscript for his successful Jane Austen sendup, “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.” He found himself in bookstores between tables full of “Twilight” novels and those piled high with Lincolniana. “Sort of shrewdly, from a cynical standpoint, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could combine these two things,’ ” Mr. Grahame-Smith said. That was the impulse behind his “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” novel, which was published last year by Grand Central Publishing.

Despite the supernatural premise, the book and film both make high claims to historical accuracy, and the timing won't be bad, as much of the South's recollection of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War return to popular consciousness the events of the Civil War.

It also doesn't hurt that one of the main characters in the Twilight series that brought the modern vampire craze to its climax, as well as one of the main characters in HBO's series "True Blood" that has also been a notable example of the 21st century vampire craze in fiction are both vampires who were bitten during the Civil War.

Then again, if the world comes to an end on May 21, 2011, as one billboard campaign in Denver predicts that it will, we will never find out if the concept works.

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College Graduates Usually Live With Parents After Graduating

When I graduated from college, I went straight to law school, and from law school, straight to a home that my wife and I shared with no one else but our cat.  I've never moved back in with my parents and neither did my brother after he graduated from college, nor did either of our spouses.  But, this pattern is increasingly rare. 

A new survey discussed by Time Magazine finds that 85% of college graduates move back in with their parents after graduating from college.  The iconic modern American twentysomething is comic strip character Dustin, who spends days looking for jobs and nights at home with his parents, and his undead television comedy counterpart "George" (played by Ellen Muth) in the series "Dead Like Me," both of which presciently debuted before the current economy made their protagonists' experiences so routine.  What is driving the trend?

Times are undeniably tough. Reports have placed the unemployment rate for the under-25 group as high as 54%. Many of these unemployed graduates are choosing to go into higher education in an attempt to wait out the job market, while others are going anywhere — and doing anything — for work. Meanwhile, moving back home helps with expenses and paying off student loans.

Failure to launch, is no longer the exception.  It is the norm in the current economy.  This also helps to explain why more and more young twenty-somethings are deferring getting married and having kids.  Household formation rates are at record lows.  We are experience the baby boom in reverse.

The particularly troubling part is that missteps at the beginning of a career often have a disproportionate impact on a person's entire work life.  If this is really just a temporary bump in the road, it isn't that big a deal in the greater scheme of things, but this may be a far more serious case of a nascent lost generation.  When the economy picks up again, that big businesses and professional firms that would have hired people from the last few crops of college graduates to entry level jobs that put those hires on a path to high end careers are likely to hire almost entirely from the most recent crop of new graduates, rather than trying to locate promising talent that was missed in the prior years when hiring was stopped or slowed.  Even for those new graduates who wash out of their plum first jobs a few years later as firms winow out all but the most talented prospects whom they promote, not starting off at a plum job may make the difference between being able to pay off students loans in five years and being able to pay off student loans in twenty years.

For bright new college graduates, their prospects are not totally crushed.  The current bought of unemployment is probably cyclic.  When the economy comes back, there will be jobs and it is always better to be in the job market with a college degree than to be without one.  But, jobless new graduates are left in a particularly frustrating position.  While commentators like David Brooks wants to call them lazy, what can they do?

It’s difficult to argue that they need to go to college, because they did. It’s difficult to argue that they can’t move to new jobs (unlikely to be homeowners) or suffer high health care costs (doesn’t health care reform allow employers to push their health costs onto their parents’ employer?). Unless we think that the graduating class of 2008 is fundamentally worse than the graduate class of 2006 I don’t see a technology problem.

Also for fun, the graduating classes post-Recession have increasingly large student debt loans, which should lower the reservation wage they’ll accept due to liquidity pressures. So the idea that everyone 20-24 is on vacation is harder to accept compared to earlier years.

New college graduates emerging out into the world this year are no more, and no less than unlucky.  They should have been born a few years earlier or later than the year that I graduated from high school, but they weren't.

We can hope, at least, that this will be merely a temporary circumstance.  But, it isn't impossible that this trend will endure.  For example, one of the major forces driving Islamic terrorism in the world is the existence of an immense class of unemployed college graduates across the oil rich states of the Middle East and North Africa.  Indeed, the suicide of a once too often discouraged college graduate in Tunisia was the spark the set off the wave of revolutions that have dislodged or tried to remove authoritarian regimes across tthe regime.  Similarly, this phenomena has been the norm in Japan ever since it experienced its housing bubble collapse triggered lost decade, long before the financial crisis, and it has defined a whole generation since then.  There is not obvious end to that trend on the horizon in Japan.

READ MORE - College Graduates Usually Live With Parents After Graduating

Trust Declining

The General Social Survey has documented a great decline in support for the proposition that you can generally trust people. In 1984, equal numbers agreed and disagreed with that statement. In 2010, there was a thirty percentage point gap, with those who felt that you couldn't trust people outnumbering those who felt that you could by about 62% to 32%. It is a long term trend, with minor bumps along the way, whose causes aren't manifestly obvious.

Indeed, it is counter to what you would expect in some respects. For example, having more education is strongly tied to having more trust in others. But, the decline in trust has taken place despite modestly rising education levels in that time period.

READ MORE - Trust Declining

Kate, Dutchess of Cambridge

William Prince of Wales and Kate Middleton were married earlier today.  Kate was given the title Dutchess of Cambridge.  Despite the fact that the Cambridge in question is clearly Cambridge, England, home of one of England's two most esteemed universities, I imagine that my brother who works in Cambridge, Massachusetts will see this as a positive omen, while my father, who lives in Oxford, Ohio may be less impressed. ;)

The U.S. Constitution has a fair amount to say about titles on nobility, none of it positive:

Article I, Section 9 provides, in the pertinent part, that "No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States, and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them shall, without the consent of congress, accept any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state."

Article I, Section 10 provides, in the pertinent part, that "No state shall . . . grant any title of nobility."

Article IV, Section 4 provides, in the pertinent part, that "The United States shall guarantee to every state in this Union a republican form of government[.]"

READ MORE - Kate, Dutchess of Cambridge

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

The Rise of Television Due To Its Demise

I don't watch much broadcast television or cable television.  Indeed, I haven't since I was in high school and for a little while after I graduated from law school and before I had a sustained full time job working for a law firm, with a small handful of exceptions.  Most television is and always was crap.

But, as broadcast TV has mostly gone down market looking for the lowest common denominator, there has also been a notable strata of really quality TV series on non-free TV stations like Showtime and HBO, and to a lesser extent on other stations.  The multiplicity of channels has made it more attractive to dominate the niche of intelligent (and often affluent) TV watchers in the context of an advertising environment where no one channel commands much of the total market share, rather trying to win high ratings by maximizing the number of demographics to which a show will appeal at the cost of dumbing it down.

The true revolution in TV, however, has come with the availablility of whole series of TV programs on DVD, Tivo, or via live streaming from netflix.  This is, for TV, what the transition from serial magazine publishing a la Dickens, to novel publishing was when it happened a hundred and fifty years ago or so.  It is now possible to sit down and watch a ten hours season of a television series the same way that you can sit down and read a novel for ten hours -- uninterrupted by commercials, when you want to, in sequential order, for as long as it retains your interest.  The knowledge that this is possible also makes it less important for television episodes to have stand alone plots - longer story arcs are now feasible since the lion's share of the audience will no longer be seeing the episodes as re-runs in more or less random order.

There had been attempts to achieve this effect with mini-series, but the production values were still low due to low budgets,  the total duration, while longer than a movie wasn't that long, and they still needed to appeal to broad audiences with undiscriminating fare.

Movies, which tend to hover at an hour and forty-five minutes, plus or minus about twenty minutes, almost aways had higher production values than television for the entire period during the 20th century during which they co-existed and were the only mass produced theater form that could count on keeping the bulk of its audience for the entire work.  But, the 21st century has brought us movie quality productions in a television format that are seven or more times as long as a movie and far more involved.  An entire TV series will have a novel length script.  A movie has a script a bit longer than a typical short story, but shorter than a typical novella.

As blogger Amber Taylor, writing in the Atlantic, accurately describes the current state of affairs:  "television, not motion pictures, is now where truly sweeping, complex stories are being told."

Movies and television still aren't plays and novels, whose authors we revere.  In both of these visual media, the director and producers are kings and the script writer, or often, a whole team of scriptwriters turning out episodes faster than any one writer can churn them out, are often secondary players, whose initial drafts are mere suggestions to be freely modified and ad libbed around in the course of filming.  But, we do finally seem to be giving quality script writing a little more respect.

The revolution isn't really in the production values; it is in the story telling.  Japanese anime and manga have far lower production values than American comic books and animated features.  But, American comic books tend to have never ending rambling story lines with a narrow scope of issues that they address by comparison to the superior story telling and broad reach of their Asian counterparts.  Latin and Asian telenovellas, despite low production costs, have carefully crafted, thoughtful season length story lines that earn them their name, rather than the multi-decade abominations that are American soap operas, or the plotless meanderings that are American sitcoms and run of the mill dramas. 

Yet, somewhere along the line, mostly in the last decade or two, somebody in New York and Hollywood decided that a minority of well paying prime time viewers deserved to be told stories with some real wit and coherence.  Somebody finally figured out that it makes no sense to spend multi-millions on A list actors and special effects and scenery and costumes, if all they are going to do is act out mediocre scripts in performances filmed with mediocre cinematography.

After a generation in which American writers were convinced that good writing was about everything but plot (a sentiment widely shared by all of my high school and college english teachers), plot has regained its rightful place as the foundational skeleton upon which everything else must be built, and it is again legitimate to discuss the issues posed by the story itself, as opposed to the metastory of its authorship and technique.

READ MORE - The Rise of Television Due To Its Demise

What Are The Causes of Phonemic Diversity?

Atkinson's Serial Founder Effect Hypothesis

Quentin Atkinson ("Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa", Science 4/15/2011) has made headlines with his bold assertion that "the number of phonemes used in a global sample of 504 languages is also clinal and fits a serial founder–effect model of expansion from an inferred origin in Africa. This result, which is not explained by more recent demographic history, local language diversity, or statistical non-independence within language families, points to parallel mechanisms shaping genetic and linguistic diversity and supports an African origin of modern human languages."

The Underlying Data

He reaches this conclusion by massaging data from three maps prepared by Ian Maddieson from secondary sources in the World Atlas of Language Structure.  The maps clearly show that phonemic diversity isn't random, but don't necessarily support Atkinson's hypothesis either.

The maps show the number of consonants, with bins of

Small 6-14 (91 languages) 
Moderately small 15-18 (121 languages)
Average 19-25 (182 languages)
Moderately large 26-33 (116 languages)
Large 33+ (53 languages),

vowels, with bins of

Small (2-4) (93 languages)
Average (5-6) (288 languages)
Large (7-14) (183 languages),

and tone systems, with bins of

No tones (307 languages)
Simple tone system (132 languages) 
Complex tone system (88 languages),

in 504 languages around the world.

The Problems With Aktinson's Hypothesis

Atkinson's hypothesizes about the time-depth of these relationships and their mechanism aren't very persuasive. 

Regional Trends Are Present

Clearly, each of these features exhibit strong regional trends. 

The Amazon is vowel rich, consonant poor and often has a tone system.  The Caucasian languages are short on vowels, rich in consonants and usually lack of tone system.  Indigenous Australian languages without exception are vowel poor, lack tone, and have few to a moderately large number of consonants.  Papuan languages tend to be tonal and consonant poor.

Many West African and East African and Southeast Asian languages have complex tone systems, large numbers of vowels, and moderately large inventories of consonants.  Many indigenous languages of the Pacific Coast in the Americas are vowel poor, have simple tone systems and and tend to have high numbers of consonants.

Europe, South Asia, and North Asia tend to lack tone, have moderate numbers of consonants, and have moderate to high numbers of vowels.

The Data Are Too Noisy To Represent A Serial Founder Effect

Gleaning a relatively clear serial founder effect from these relationships seems far fetched.  The data sets are simply too noisy for that.  One can see clusters where the phonemic features seem to coincide.  One can fairly infer that regional clusters of similar phonemic features have a common origin.  One can even fairly infer that some common reason may account for the fact that non-adjacent regional clusters are phonemically similar.

The Data Don't Closely Track Language Families

Certainly it is true that the features don't seem to track language families. 

For example, Uralic Saami language is consonant rich, while the nearby Uralic Finnish language is consonant poor.

The only New World languages definitively tied to the Old World are the Na-Dene languages and the Yenesian Ket language.  Central Siberian Ket is vowel rich, consonant poor, and lacks a tone system; Na-Dene languages tend to be vowel poor and consonant rich, and some of the Na-Dene languages have a tone system.  Whatever the total number of phonemes is in these related languages, the case that Na-Dene's phoneme set arose from phoneme loss from its parent language is implausible.  Its phoneme losses and gains seem to have counterbalanced each other.

Some Niger-Congo languages have complex tone systems, other than no tone systems at all.  Some Niger-Congo languages (particularly toward Nigeria) are consonant rich, others (particularly towards Ivory Coast and Liberia) are consonant poor.

Areal Effects Are Inconsistent

Indeed, a linguistic trait that follows strong regional patterns while not closely tracking language family relationships is pretty much the definition of an areal effect in linguistics. 

But the source of these areal effects is obscure and inconstant.

Sometimes, the areal effects cross immense linguistic relationship divides.  The phoneme set of Basque, which is more distant from the other languages of Europe than any other for many hundreds of miles, is quite similar to that of many nearby Indo-European languages.  Yet, the phoneme set of the Caucasian languages is dramatically different from those of any of its neighbors, although languages of the Caucasus mountains do seem to have phoneme set sizes similar to each other in some cases despite not being very closely related linguistically and together they are very different from that of neighboring languages.

The Data Aren't A Close Fit To Pre-Historic Migration Patterns

The regions of phonemic similarity don't obviously track paths of deep pre-historic migration.  For example, if they did, we would expect continuity of phonemic trends from Africa to South Asia to Southeast Asia reflecting a Southern route migration.  Instead, we see similarities between Africa and Southeast Asia that are interrupted in South Asia.

Most Papuan languages have few consonants, but a couple of them which are not particularly closely related to each other, at odds with very nearby members of their respective language Trans-Papuan language genuses, have large inventories of consonants, and no Trans-Papuan languages have an intermediate number of consonants.  One imagines a scenario here in which one group intentionally develops a different phoneme set from their close linguistic neighbors in Papua New Guinea for no reason other than to make their language harder for their neighbors to acquire, thereby cementing group identity.

The Data Don't, and Shouldn't Reflect Deep Time Depth

Nor do they seem to obviously reflect linguistic time depth on the scale of tens of thousands of years.  All languages of the New World should have similar linguistic time depth, but show very distinct intra-American regional clusters in phonemic diversity.  Papua New Guinea and Australia were settled by modern humans at about the same time, but have dramatically different phonemic profiles. 

Semitic Hebrew is consonant poor, while Ethio-Semitic Tigre is moderately consonant rich, despite the fact that the languages diverged from each other within the last four thousand years.  The Semitic Arabic dialects spoken closest Israel, which are some of the closest linguistic relatives of Hebrew, are in between.

Irish and Hindi have large numbers of consonants and average numbers of vowels, while most Indo-European languages have average numbers of consonants and large numbers of vowels.  Yet, Irish and Hindi each probably branched off the related Indo-European languages with more typical Indo-European phoneme sets within the last four thousand years.  The Indo-European Hittite language had a particularly low number of vowels (just four) despite being attested at about the same time that Hindi and Irish diverged from their most closely related, but phonemically distinct Indo-European languages, possibly as a substrate influence from vowel poor non-Indo-European languages in Anatolia.

The number of phonemes in English has changed between Old English and contemporary spoken English, and isn't the same even for all dialects of American English, which started to diverge from British English and from each other only in the last few hundred years.

Overall, the evidence seems to indicate that phoneme change can take place in time frames of several centuries, while language family relationships can be pretty clear for periods of several millennia, at least.

The Overall Patterns Couldn't Have Been Produced By Serial Founder Effects

Serial founder effects are hard pressed to explain why the Amazon is consonant poor and vowel rich, by the North Pacific Coast of North America has languages that are rich in consonants and short in vowels, while both have a mix of simple tone systems and languages without tone systems.  Both groups of languages, presumably, have similar time depth and derive from populations that would have been close in space to each other and genetically similar about 17,000 years ago.

The trends also have an immense amount of noise in them.  The Tibeto-Burman Naxi language of Southwest China, for example, is consonant rich, vowel rich and has a complex tone system, giving it the greatest amount of phonemic diversity possible in the data set.  So does the Yulu language of Sudan (a Nilo-Saharan language), and the Nilo-Saharan Ngiti language of the Congo.   A serial founder effect shouldn't put any languages with maximal phoneme sets so distant from each other.

Simply put, the cline that Atkinson proposes isn't the kind of cline one would associate with a serial founder effect.  It is a vague general trend with tenuous foundations that is inconsistent with a serial founder effect.   Whatever accounts for variation between languages in phonemic diversity, it is not a serial founder effect.

There Are Patterns To Phonemic Diversity

The problem is a fascinating puzzle, but Atkinson seems to be largely barking up the wrong tree to explain it. 

Climate Zone And Phoneme Mix

For example, without going into the matter with any particular preconceptions, one would notice that tropical areas tend to have high levels of tonality and rich vowel sets, while temperate and desert areas have low levels of tonality.  One might explain that by concluding that tropical areas have a rich array of bird sounds that locals have an evolutionary fitness reason to learn (culturally) or have a genetic ability to distinguish (or both), and that a well developed capacity to distinguish sounds of these kinds for non-linguistic purposes makes it more natural for these societies to use these kinds of sounds linguistically among themselves.  Consonant frequency might be a factor that allows a language to have a sufficient number of words by compensating for a lack of ability to make different tones and vowel sounds.

Is this the correct hypothesis?  I surely don't know.  But, it is a better statistical match to the data than Atkinson's hypothesis and is plausible enough to make sense.

Contact and Isolation

Unusually high phoneme inventories might be a marker of high levels of inter-linguistic contact.  The Nilo-Saharans who have the highest phoneme inventories in Africa are situated betwixt Afro-Asiatic and Niger-Congo language speakers and may be borrowing phonemes from the areal influences of both.  The Naxi who have the highest phoneme inventories in Asia are situated between Tibeto-Burmese speakers who have one set of phonemes and Southeast Asian language speakers who have another one.  Likewise, the presence of click consonants in some Bantu languages, presumably because the population previously spoke a Khoisan language before shifting to a Bantu superstrate language, reflects the kind of phoneme gain that can take place from linguistic contact.

Unusually low phoneme inventories might be a market of prolonged population isolation with low population densities in places like Australia.  Phoneme inventories can also occur when language learners in a new superstrate language can't accurately reproduce all of the sounds in the superstrate language.  This may be what happened in the case of Hittite and other Indo-European Anatolian languages.  One also sees it when the Japanese borrow words from languages with more phonemes than its own language has into Japanese.

The number of phonemes in a language is really a matrix of a smaller number of options for sound making. One might, for example, appropriately think of tone systems as multipliers of the number of phonemes in a language, rather than mere additional phonemes. Perhaps the appropriate way to count is to look at the number of combined tone-vowel/consonant sounds in a language (also perhaps modulated by rhythm or otherwise), rather than examining phoneme differences in isolation. Perhaps there is a phoneme set size towards which languages trend when not artificially reduced by small isolated populations (Hawaiian is another famous example phoneme loss in addition to Australia, for possibly similar reasons) and when not artificially increased by phoneme sharing at the boundaries of phoneme regions.

Classes of Phonemes May Be The Most Suitable Level Of Analysis

Consonant and vowel count may be a poor measure in any case.  Many of the outlier cases in consonant number involve an entire classes of consonants or vowels found in one area, but not another, rather than individual phonemes. 

A lack of frictive consonants is a major factor in the low number of consonants found in Australia, Papuan languages, and low consonant languages of the Americas. 

High consonant count African languages are often notable for including labial-velar consonants (found elsewhere only in a small number of Papuan languages), and high vowel count in African languages are often notable for including a distinction between nasalized and non-nasalized vowels (otherwise found mostly in the Americas and sporadically elsewhere). The high consonant count in the Caucasian languages is largely attributable to the pharyngeal consonants used there, in some Afro-Asiatic languages, and in few other places.  Click consonants are also found only in one small, regional subset of Africans.

In contrast, distribution of the "th" sound is sporadic (and a poor fit for a serial founder effect).

Most of the cases of the losses of click sounds, labial-velar consonants, frictive consonants and perhaps even pharyngeal consonants and nasalized vowels, from parent languages that included them, might very well fit a serial founder effect model, since the distribution of these phonemic divergences are consistent with that model, while the distribution of the presence or absence of a "th" sound, linguistic tone systems and some kinds of vowel number variation may not. 

But, at any rate, the analysis probably needs to be conducted on a class of phoneme by class of phoneme basis, rather than on a total consonant set basis to make much sense as a phylogenetic tree.  Clearly, there were at least as many cases of independent phonemic invention in particular regions as there were cases of independent invention of plant and animal domestication complexes, and some kinds of phonemic invention (and linguistic invention generally) seem more prone to independent invention than others.

READ MORE - What Are The Causes of Phonemic Diversity?

Libya As A Blood Sport

Gaddafi and the rebels are gladiators in a blood contest confined to a Libyan arena whose terms are controlled by the international community. In this contest Gaddafi has already received the thumbs down from a modern Casear.

Four months ago, Gaddafi was the unquestioned absolute ruler of his country, as he had been for forty years, and there was not even an organized political opposition. Now, the writing is on the wall.

With that kind of reality to face, perhaps it isn't surprising that most of the assertions that Gaddafi's regime have been lies so bald faced that they appear delusional.

The inevitabilty of the outcome boils down to one key fact: Libya is not a viable autarky.

Libya runs on oil wealth (with imports make up more than 28% of its domestic consumption) and without export revenues, mostly oil, it would swiftly collapse. It is not food self-sufficient. It does not have a significant domestic arms industry. It can't make its own cars or medicines, and certainly can't do so with domestic materials. It can only use its $60 billion in international financial reserves and 4.62 million troy ounces of gold reserves if the international financial community recognizes the authority of someone to use those resources, which Gaddafi's regime is not at the moment. A brief NATO intervention has already rendered its air force, its navy, its tanks and its heavy artillery useless.

Until now, the international community has respect Gaddafi's legitimacy and Libya's sovereignty, allowing the nation to keep oil wealth that the outside world was perfectly capable of taking by force. With international recognition of his legitimate authority as head of state lost, his days are numbered.

Libya has already lost the support of the international community. The UN authorized international coalitions to impose a no-fly zone, embargo it from arms, and freeze the nations assets (and the assets of Gaddafi and his inner circle). New regimes in Tunisia and Egypt are no longer allies. Convoys of resources brought across the Sahara from Algeria, Niger, Chad or Sudan would be obvious to spy satellites and reconnaisance aircraft, and could be stopped by NATO airplanes if they wished.

Chad is not friend, it had to drive out Libya forces in an international war that just ended in 1987. Italy, whose prime minister Berlusconi had pleaded $5 billion in aid a reparations for Italy's 32 years of colonial rule in 2008 is not going to honor its promise through a Gaddafi lead regime. Sudan has its own discontented masses, international sanctions (including a war crimes indictment for its sitting head of state), the loss of its Southern provinces in an independence referrendum, and ongoing insurgency in Darfur, and more to worry about. Niger's totalitarian dictator has to worry about escaping the North African revolutionary trend, is one of the poorest nations in the world, and has a Tuareg insurgency (one that probably draws considerable succor from Libyan benefactors as Saharan tribal groups are at the heart of the Libyan state apparatus) to try to keep from reinvigorating itself. Gaddafi has always bought himself friends in the past, but the only country still willing to stick its neck out for him now is Uganda, which is ill suited to be a capable ally. Moreover, strong reliance on predominantly Christian Ugandan support would turn Islamist forces against Gaddafi in a way that might impair his own coalition.

Most of Libya's oil comes from oil fields in the East and leaves via ports near rebel controlled Benghazi, and the international community has a special military interest in preventing Gaddafi from gaining control of those resources.

International forces aren't getting their hands dirty by putting troops on the ground in Libya, where rebels and forces loyal to Gaddafi fight each other. But, Libya is so dependent upon resources that they control and is so weak itself, that NATO can control the terms of the battle. If NATO decides that it is unhappy with the way that the battle is playing out in this arena, it has the power to change the rules.

Realistically, there is no easy to visualize face saving way that the international community could restore access to the resources they control to Gaddafi in the absence of a treaty concluded with the rebels. Gaddafi direct role in the Locherbie, Scotland aircraft bombing has been established by defectors. He will likely be linked to other terorist acts against Western interests by defectors. His conduct of the civil war and his delusional statements during it have forever proven him to be a violent madman. If he managed to crush the rebels militarily, despite NATO involvement, he would be viewed in the international community as an illegitimate butcher and denied access to international trade, military resources and the country's foreign assets apart from some sort of oil for food arrangement.

Without a treaty and if he fails to crush the rebel regime based in Benghazi, the rebels will probably be granted exclusive use of the oil resources they control and Libya's sovereign wealth, the arms embargo and no-fly zone and NATO coalition efforts to stop the use of heavy weapons by Gaddafi will continue, foreign oil companies will not send workers back to Gaddafi controlled oil fields and pipelines, rebels will manage to destroy the pipelines necessary to bring that oil to market, and Libya-Tripoli will lose a war of attrition. The mercenaries loyal to Gaddafi critical to keeping him in power will mutiny sooner or later when it becomes clear that they will not be paid. The standard of living will collapse. The oasis farmers and herders who are loyal to Gaddafi won't be able to produce enough food to feed the Eastern part of the country without outside support. Western rebels, even if forced to go underground, will fester as a resistance force striking whenever the Gaddafi regime can't catch them. Gaddafi has lost the option of transitioning to a constitutional regime that democratizes and liberalizes while leaving him a role as head of state in some capacity.

The exact way that the end game will play out isn't clear, so the spectators can still watch with baited breath. Will the rebels rally and seize the rest of the country? Will international forces increase their involvement and end it? Will covert CIA and other international covert assistance give the rebels a decisive edge? Will Egypt or Tunisia or France intervene more directly to topple Gaddafi? Will Gaddafi's mercenaries, loyal military officers and inner circle stage a coup or defect? Will a stable stalemate be reached and produce a treaty or armistice or enduring cease fire that splits Libya into two or three different countries? Will Gaddafi be killed or die or flee leaving his forces leaderless to surrender? Will Gaddafi crush the rebels and control the entire country, but hold onto only an internationally isolated shambles of a nation until he dies in a prolonged seige? Will pretenders to a monarchy mobilize the rebels with the promise of a constitutional monarchy regime?

In an age where targeted killing is U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan and in the global war on terror, can we doubt that CIA operatives in Libya are authorized to assassinate Gaddafi and his top aides?

The civil war in Libya is still young. The ability of internationally supported forces in Ivory Coast to forcibly remove the incumbent president who lost the Presidential election with French military support offers hope that this struggle need not be a long one. Libya is not a huge country. Gaddafi controls no more than 4 million or so of the country's 6.3 million people, and only a fraction of the 76,000 soldiers the nation had before the civil war began. While Libya's territory is vast, almost of the people the combatants are fighting for control over live close to the coast. There isn't any obvious way that the Gaddafi regime will be decisively ended, but there is no obvious way that it can restore its prior tranquility, wealth and international stature either.

The lesson of post-Cold War conflicts in Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbajain, Bahrain, Bosnia, Georgia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Moldova, and now Libya has been that in a post-Cold War world, international powers often can and will intervene decisively to determine the outcome of military conflicts according to their interests and international norms, and that Third World dictators can't count on not facing consequences for their actions. A new generation of leaders watched Star War I and decided that real world Naboos don't deserve to suffer in the face of international indifference. The world order that the League of Nations tried to bring into being after World War I, and that the United Nations tried to bring into being after World War II has finally arrived.

We aren't all of the way there yet. Letting local forces engage in blood sports to determine who will win control while providing decisively outside influence, as the United States did when it intervened on behalf of the Northern Coalition that was losing a war for control of Afghanistan with the Taliban in 2001 has become a model, while the model of the Iraq War, in which foreign forces occupy and rule a country with their own troops to effect regime change, viewed through the lens of previous failure in Vietnam, has been determined in hindsight to be a model not to be repeated if at all possible. Decisive large scale military intervention not limited in scope would probably end the fighting sooner, but the widespread fear is that local forces who aren't capable of securing territory on the ground by themselves won't be capable of holding onto it either. So, the international community has decided that it can manage to set the rules of engagement, but not to fight the battles within the arena itself.

Western powers aren't the only superpowers in these cases. Bahrain has established that small Arab monarchies can't survive an uprising without ceding power to the masses or relying on Saudi Arabian military support. The Saudi military could put up a fight with the military resources that the United States has provided it for year after year in the arrangements designed to earn Arab acceptance of Israel reached in the Camp David Accords, but Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman would be finished without Saudi Arabian support in the face of foreign or domestic military opposition. Yemen, which as a no monarchy has ceded Saudi backing has proved that to be the case. Morocco and Jordan, while still absolute monarchies, have learned that they must heed public opinion if their regimes wants to remain in power. The King of Swaziland must know that a serious offense to either South Africa or other international parties that make his regime possible could snuff out his regime in a matter of days without serious repurcussions if a genuine domestic uprising took hold. Lesotho's regime is similarly situated.

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Class, Culture, Toilets and Time

I heard two recent stories about toilets in Asia in the last twenty-four hours.

HADENYA, Japan — The colossal wave that swept away this tiny fishing hamlet also washed out nearby bridges, phone lines and cellphone service, leaving survivors shivering and dazed and completely cut off at a hilltop community center. . . . With no time to mourn for their missing loved ones, they were immediately thrust into the struggle to stay alive in the frigid winter cold, amid a hushed, apocalyptic landscape of wrecked homes, crushed vehicles and stranded boats. They had scant food and fuel and no news from the outside world — not even the scope of the devastation.

On Wednesday, after the Japanese military finally reached them for the first time since the tsunami struck 12 days ago, by erecting makeshift bridges and cutting roads through the debris, they told a remarkable tale of survival that drew uniquely on the tight bonds of their once-tidy village, having quickly reorganized themselves roughly along the lines of their original community: choosing leaders, assigning tasks and helping the young and the weak. . . .

Almost as soon as the waters receded, those rescued here said, they began dividing tasks along gender lines, with women boiling water and preparing food, while men went scavenging for firewood and gasoline. Within days, they said, they had re-established a complex community, with a hierarchy and division of labor, in which members were assigned daily tasks. . . .

Refugee centers like this one in Hadenya exhibit a proud cooperative spirit, and also a keen desire to maintain Japan’s tidy perfectionism. Along the hallways, boxes of supplies lie stacked in orderly rows. The toilets are immaculate, with cups and soap neatly lined up. At the entrance, sheets of paper list names and assigned tasks for the day, like chopping firewood, carrying supplies and cooking.

From here.

How can you not admire a society that is organized enough to keep its toilets immaculate and its people well organized, even in the most dire circumstances?

Yesterday, I heard a story on the radio about the state of rail infrastructure in India (probably NPR or the BBC although I can't find a link to the story), where construction surges ahead in places like Mumbai, while the existing infrastructure is aging and underfunded. Particularly striking was an account of a train called the "Super" which was anything but. It's toilets, typical of passenger rail in India, were noxious. As another recent story on the subject sums it up:

For most visitors, rail travel in India is an indispensable part of any holiday, although an ability to overlook the often filthy toilets and deal with basic comfort and crowded carriages is required.

India has no shortage of cheap labor. Indeed, it has a government program that guarantees every person in India who shows up wanting to work a minimum wage job a certain number of days per year, usually on infrastructure projects. It also has trains full of people who could volunteer to do the work if organized properly. But, it doesn't. It has nausea inducing cesspools used only by the most desperate instead that make life miserable for train passengers and present a poor image of the country to every traveler domestic and foreign.

Meanwhile, Japan manages to keep its toilets pristine, even an isolated village devastated by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and a tsunami that hasn't had contact with the outside world for a week and a half.

It is hard to chalk this difference to religion. Both Hindu and Islamic religious precepts give considerable attention to ritual purity and cleanliness; at least as much as the Shinto, Buddhist and Confucian syncretism found in Japan. Nor can one look to differences in climate - if anything, toilet cleanliness is more important from a public health perspective in sultry India than it is in frigid Northern Japan. Nor, must toilets on conveyances necessarily be putrid. Amtrak and most commercial airlines manage to have at least marginally clean toilets most of the time. Back in the era when trains were a leading means of intercity transportation in the United States, toilets on trains were cleaner than they are on Amtrak today.

Instead, it is a product of culture, and perhaps, in a not unrelated way, of economic development. Japanese communities place a premium on having decently clean toilets and are willing and able to organize themselves to secure them. India's rail culture continually drifts on the edge of mayhem and chaos, and the communities that use and manage it lack the will to decide that nasty toilets on trains don't have to be tolerated.

It isn't that South Asians don't prefer clean toilets to dirty ones. An ability to provide indoor plumbing and running water are now central to a young man's hopes of securing a good marriage match in India these days, very much as they were in the Reconstruction Era American South. But, for whatever reason, today's India is having trouble organizing itself as a society to secure this desirable thing.

American culture is somewhere in between. There are places - upper floors of office buildings, university classroom buildings, McDonald's restaurants, airports, the Cherry Creek Mall in Denver, and country clubs, where toilets are routinely tidy. There are other places - small rural gas stations, the Burger King restaurant at Cherry Creek North in Denver, public parks, the first floor of inner city libraries, outhouses at construction sites, and bus stations, where nasty bathrooms are the norm.

In America, toilet cleanliness is a pretty reliable social class marker. The higher the social class of the people who usually use it, the cleaner they tend to be, although this is also strongly a function in the institutional culture of the toilet operator. Toilet cleanliness is also something that is typically greater in private settings than in public ones in the United States, although there isn't a firm general rule.

There are other fascinating things one can learn from toilet culture as well. Americans, despite their strong ideological commitment to market approaches to economics, very rarely charge directly for using a toilet, although many establishments try to limit them to customers only, especially in areas with large numbers of transients. The decidedly socialist leaning French, by comparison, routinely charge a small fee to use a toilet, or at least expect users to tip an attendant. French fee for service toilets tend to be quite clean.

Toilets are interesting as a cultural indicator because they are impossible not to observe if you spend any amount of time someplace, because it is a universal indicator since every society has to have some way of handling the issue, and because it is pretty much impossible to hide their condition.

To the extent that toilet conditions reflect some version of economic development and social class, how "civilized" a culture is to use an out of fashion term and way of thinking, and there seems to be reason to think that this is something of a general trend, one also has to ask how much this is an effect of affluence, and how much it is a result of some attitude about how communal affairs are managed that gives rise to affluence. Are clean toilets a result of a shared high value afforded to a tidy and well ordered public sphere? Of shared social norms? Of minimal civic obligation? And, these these same values translate into affluence in the economy?

People like Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the modern Turkish State, were convinced that this kind of thing was crucial to economic development. His agenda for reform included not just changes to the legal system and political system, but such cultural level reforms as the adoption of a national, Western style dress code designed to root out social and religious markers of the Ottoman era, despite the lack of an obvious connection between wearing suits and ties and conducting the affairs of a modern society. After all, as a former employer of mine enjoyed observing, the British conquered the world in shorts. But, it also seems that there really is something cultural that has to transform in the course of economic development.

One of the fascinating examples comes from British history in the early Industrial Era, one of the first places in the world anywhere that was organized socially and technologically on an industrial basis (continental Europe followed later, often heavily driven by government action as opposed to private investment). At that time and place was a cultural upheaval that included a greatly increased attention to punctuality and uniform time measurements. Clock towers went up all over England to keep communities synchronized. Many farm workers in the first waves converting to the industrial regime had great difficulty getting used to ideas like showing up on time and getting paid by the hour. While not many economists study international toilet cleanliness levels, there is an entire subfield of studies on the link between punctuality and time consciousness and economic development (see e.g. here and here and here and here and here and here and here). Economists study how fast people walk, how fast people talk, how timely trains are, and more. The aphorism about the Italian fascists is that at least they managed to get the trains to run on time. Standardized time zones have their origins in the efforts of train operators to coordinate their time tables.

Certainly, suits and ties are any more necessary to economic development than kimonos. Likewise, toilet cleanliness is not a cause of the rise and fall of great empires. But, one doesn't have to believe such absurdities to conclude that economic development and cultural transformation are inextricably intertwined, and that the development of some set of social virtues is as a critical a technology as the railroad or the internal combustion engine to attaining the economic scale and social coordination that is necessary for an affluent society.

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The Economics of Operatic Geography

Like Italy, Germany was a loose collection of independent fiefs until the middle of the 19th century. Music was a weapon in the aristocrats’ fierce competition for prestige, helping to account for the disproportionate number of Baroque operas from German and Italian composers as compared with France, which was more centralized.

From here.

The pre-industrial revolution investments made in a Baroque opera houses was shown in a recent study to continue to be a factor in attracting top talent to European cities.

Will the relatively unified United States, European Union, China and India suffer relatively to places like Africa, Arabia, Southeast Asia and Latin America in terms of cultural innovation in the century to come for similar reasons?

READ MORE - The Economics of Operatic Geography

Daylight savings time and other annoyances

* So, we're back on daylight savings time, which takes more of the year than standard time. Daylight savings time is like the ultimate popular kid stunt: "I can make the entire country pretend its an hour ealier than it really is, just because I can get everyone to agree with me." And, of course, once it takes off, you really have no choice but to go along. Still, losing an hour in the spring is brutal.

* Washington Park in Denver has a special magical glow that keeps it attractive regardless of what is going on in the outside world. But, I'm beginning to think that it may be a force field instead. I've been trying to stop paying $17 a month for free TV by setting up an antenna. Before I started getting basic cable, I'd tried it from a powered antenna inside my living room and get one or two channels. This weekend, after going to the trouble of setting a powered antenna up on the highest point on my roof, I got absolutely zero reception. Needless to say, I am not very impressed with the digital broadcast TV revolution, although it may simply be that Wash Park is as much of a TV dead zone as it has a reputation for being a cell phone dead zone.

* Another of the great mysteries of life is why old computers accumulate problems. They produce stray, seemingly meaningless error messages. They slow down. Virus scans and disk defragmentation stops helping. It might be possible to remove accumulated programs, but who knows what it is safe to remove. It reaches the point where you'd like to just run the restore disks and start over, but of course, by that point you've invested money in programs and misplaced the restore disks and the original programs with their access codes.

* Then, of course, there are the dreaded smart phones. I held out for the longest time. But, finally, about three years ago, I had to give in because it was expected that you have access to e-mail at all times for work. But, every now and then, you have to change phones, and the switch is painful. It takes weeks to get it back to the unsteady compromise that you have with the machine before you switched, when you knew how to work what you needed and it all worked smoothly.

* My daughter embarks on the brave new world of Home Economics (or whatever they call it these days), today. Rumor has it that the cooking agenda is full of things that we would never actually cook in our own house for want of nutritional value, but such is life. Hello Hamburger Helper(R)!

* The 8.9 magnitude Earthquake which initially seems to have spared Japan too much damage, now seems to have actually inflicted a Katrina class blow as more news reaches the world.

* The situation in Libya is getting ugly, as Kaddafi and the rebels civil war. (On the bright side, the monarch of Oman appears to be ready to convert from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy in the next thirty days.)

* Japanese manga and anime make frequent use of images and scenes that draw on the characters of the real story, but rather than being blubs are just riffs on the concepts that aren't part of the story itself, something quite rare in American media (as is the habit of having the author reserving space to directly address the audience). Is there a general name for these extraneous sketches?

* Why do the Denver Assessor's office have a nice online interface for its records, while the Denver Clerk and Recorder's office, which is just as automated, does not have its grantor-grantee index and file images available online? Both are public records. I suspect it is so that the clerk's office can make us pay 25 cents a page for copies and make title companies pay for bulk downloads to escape that problem. But, I'd surely favor any candidate in the current clerk and recorder's race who would promise to put the grantor-grantee index online.

* Some days, you think humanity is on the right track. Some days, you read the news from Cleveland, Texas (mass child molestation of eleven year old in a small town capture on cell phone video), and you are rather less hopeful. Ironically, the crime of taking the video will probably garner stiffer sentences than the underlying crime itself.

* For reasons mysterious to me, a wave of male enhancement product spam is deluging this blog at the moment, I am trying to review new comments an delete the bad ones a rapidly as I can. I still don't see why it is so hard for regulators to determine who the vendors being advertised are, trace them with sample transactions, and use the vendor records to shut these people down. It really is just a handful of industries that leave the bulk of them, and apparently there are not that many spam purveyors out there comprising the bulk of the traffic. They money trail ought to be auditable. Maybe all those SEC employees who were using government computers to watch porn could do it as a form of community service.

* We are about to celebrate Saint Patrick's Day (indeed, many people did this past weekend), after the man famous for converting the pagans of Ireland to Catholicism. Garrison Keillor's show this weekend (part of the show, apparently originally from 1997 are here) explained why this makes quite a bit more sense than celebrating Saint Olaf's day, something riotously funny to a fellow ex-Lutheran. But, in an era of anti-imperialism and distrust of institutions, why not celebrate Saint Francis of Assisi Day instead? (He has a Saint's Day on October 4, but it isn't all that big a deal.) Perhaps Saint Francis Day could be substituted for ever more controversial Columbus Day (October 12), as a day of Italian-American pride.

* The newspaper comics this weekend also posed the ultimate elementary school boy query for March: In a battle between ancient Romans (associated with the Ides of March) and Lepricauns (associated with Saint Patrick's Day) who would win? The particularly frightening aspect of this query is that there is apparently now a television show devoted to such questions, asking in a recent episode with quasi-scientific rigor, who would win in a fight between the Musketeers and the Manchu warriors (whose ancestors apparently have formed an immigrant community to the north of Denver).

* Also, in hopeful news, the Denver Post has reiterated its support for abolishing or narrowing the scope of the death penalty in Colorado. Narrowing the scope of first degree murder to exclude neo-natal homicide by women in the throes of childbirth and felony murder that does not involve triggermen or people who have solicited a murder would be a good start, and if applied retroactively, would improve the state of the state budget and greatly reduce the ranks of juveniles serving life without parole in the state.

READ MORE - Daylight savings time and other annoyances