Downtown Bunny

Yesterday, I saw a small white bunny hopping through a parking lot at 1660 Sherman Street, half a block from the tallest building in downtown Denver.

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Post-Long Weekend Observations

* Denver's Mayor-Elect Hancock will be sworn in on the 18th of July. Bill Vidal, the outgoing interim Mayor has done a better than expected job in the interim since outgoing Mayor Hickenlooper took the Governor's office, in terms of the budget and police discipline. He's benefited from not owing anything to anyone and not having to run for re-election.
* Byers School, which has sat vacant since the Denver School of the Arts left for the old University of Denver music campus near Stapleton has a new tenant lined up, a new Denver School of Science and Technology charter school set to open, if I understand the matter correctly, in the 2013-2014 school year. This fills a huge hole in the West Washington Park neighborhood with a wonderful bit of infill, adds a good new educational choice to the Denver Public Schools, and makes a large number of people, my family included, who lobbied for it happy.
* My Fourth of July weekend found me at the Renaissance Festival in Larkspur, Colorado. A certain number of paid models and Renaissance Festival enthusiasts dress in costume - not strictly of any one historical period and often veering into fantasy. Among the most striking, because they come across as quite natural at first glance, were the little devil horns that some people wore, and the furry tails that a number of people (mostly women) affixed to their outfit as if they were natural. Also eye catching in general are other forms of headgear like garlands and fairy antenna, full back angel wing tattoos, and crows masks which are surprisingly frightening.  Genuine wings of angelic, fairy, and birdlike varieties were also in evidence, but rather less effective.  Opponents of weapons control will note that there are few other events where so many people openly bear arms (some fake, but a significant number of the genuine stainless steel and deadly variety).

* The Greeley Stampede, which I also made my way to this weekend, was more notable for the very strong presence of the National Guard, a lot of cliche Western Art, fried twinkies, alligator wrestling, and mutton busting.

* Aurora, Colorado is proposing major tax breaks and zoning accomodations for a Gaylord entertainment sponsored convention center project that, IMHO, is the last thing that the metro area needs right now.

* I don't recall if I mentioned the major new water compact reached this spring under Governor Hickenloopers guidance.  It diverts water from the Western Slope to the Front Range in exchange for giving the Western Slope more control of future diversion plans and other compensation.  The diversion plans include new hydropower for the state.

* Disney already has a radio station, a television station, multiple international destination amusement parks, a movie studio and a major line of characters.  How long will it be before they have a newspaper and sports leagues as well?

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There's A Prophet In The House, But Maybe Not Me

I like flowers, a lot. I'm not very knowledgeable about them, but ever since I spent about four months living with a florist as an exchange student in high school, I've been hooked. Every time I drive to work, or take the kids to soccer, or drive to the grocery store this time of year, I can't help but to ooh and ahh at the summer flowers that have come into their seasons peak, now that the bulbs and annuals of earlier in the spring have receded into the background a little. In particular, I am awestruck by the amazing rose bushes that dot the landscape of Denver's urban residential neighborhoods.

Indeed, roses are one of the few truly unifying themes of Denver's flora. The presence or absence of trees in a neighborhood turns out to be as accurate a measure of a neighborhood's prosperity in this city as payday loan shop frequency. New developments sport fancy, water efficient grasses and wildflowers as part of xeriscaping efforts. Institutional office building owners tend to have a thing for geraniums and mums. But, roses are ubiquitous, from West to East, North to South, almost all of Denver's neighborhoods have them, dotted irregularly in select houses placed prominent in front of houses, on boundary lines and climbing up back fences. Pink ones, red once, orange ones and yellow ones. Compact bushes and sprawling abundant vines. The rose bushes at the Byers-Evans house next to the Denver Art Museum are more than a century old.

Rose are to flowers what jazz is to music. Growing them isn't necessarily trendy, just as jazz isn't necessarily cutting edge, but it has appeal with every ethnicity and with people from 11 to 101. They are enjoyed by conservatives and liberals, but modernists and traditionalists, and just about anyone else.

The trouble is that in addition to not being very knowledgeable about them, I also don't have much of a green thumb.  More often than not, my gardening efforts are epic fails, despite the encouragement and help I receive from my more talented neighbors.

My dear wife is a better gardener than I am, but has different preferences. Practical woman that she is, she prefers herbs and vegetables to flowers. Flowers just aren't her thing and she isn't inclined to devote much effort to my frivolous decorations.

So, once or twice every year, I am the one who makes an effort to plant some flowers with varying degrees of success. Some years it is pansies and marigolds. On two previous occasions it has been rose bushes which promptly died. Every once and a while I have a little success that keeps me going. Last fall, I planted bulbs and all but one of them actually bloomed this spring.

This year we'd been preoccupied earlier in this spring. Our lawn was eventually fertilized and mowed a few weeks behind schedule. Our vegetables and herbs had finally gone in the week before. And, this year, for father's day, I figured that instead of going on a hike in the mountains, or watching a movie with the kids, we'd plant rose bushes. Planting rose bushes that might still be their when they have kids of their own would certainly be more memorable and would also be a better quality way to spent time with them.

So, we spent the morning traipsing across town to find our treasures. But, my daughter, ever the prophet of doom, having not forgotten the debacle of last year's effort in which our dainty new collection of freshly planted flowers was destroyed by the first bad hail storm of the year informed me:

"Dad, it's going to hail and tear all the petals off your roses. It's karma."

The weather, while clouded, wasn't that foreboding in the morning, I'm not that superstitious, and I was more worried about whether our BBQ plans would be rained out than a hail storm. So, I ignored her dire warning, and by early afternoon our two beautiful rose bushes were nicely settled in the garden plot in front of the front picture window in our living room.

Needless to say, four hours later, the hail came down with a vengeance in raisin to almost acorn sized lumps for a good half an hour or so, followed by about twenty-eight hours of rain (notwithstanding the protestations of our newspaper of record which claims that there was no measurable precipitation on Sunday).

The rose bushes survived, badly battered, and perhaps the rain will allow them to recover and last in the long run. But, given the circumstances, maybe I'm wrong about who in our household is the real "Wash Park Prophet."

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The Mass Migration Of The Late 19th Century

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to Wikipedia:

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

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

Health

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

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

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

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Reflections On Parenting As School Is Out For The Year

Today is the last day of school for my children in the Denver Public Schools (a few schools affiliated with the district have alternative calendars).

Honestly, as inconvenient as it can be to cobble together everyone's new schedules for the summer, it is a joy for the sense of rhythm it adds to life. I spend the majority of of my daylight hours in climate controlled office buildings, and Denver's weather is quirky enough that the conditions when I do venture out don't always give me a clear take on the season.

Like most jobs, my work is amorphous. I have many cases going at any given time and they almost never all stop at once. While I'm often very aware of the date, one month can blur into the next, and one year slides into another. Everything that I do except tax planning has rolling deadlines, not annual ones. I'm not the exception. A colleague of mine I had lunch with this week could figure out what year he started his current employment only in reference to the year that someone in the firm had a child.

Children ground you and give you bearings. Their schools years make your place in the seasons relevant to your life. Their well defined march from year to year is full of landmarks - entering elementary school, hitting double digits in age, entering middle school, and soon enough for me, the teen years, and high school. Life with one or two preschoolers is so very different from having children in school. Life before one of the kids is old enough to babysit has immense logistical differences from life after that point. Their school vacations, their school performances and awards ceremonies, their sports seasons, their report cards and their fund raisers add predictable highlights to the year. Without them to ground us, life might seem to go by in a fugue.

The end of the school year is also one of the dates, along with my birthday, my anniversary, New Year's Day, Valentine's Day, and the anniversary of my first admission to the practice of law that I step back and reflect on what I've accomplished in the past years.

The end of the school year, even more than my children's birthdays, is a day that I treat a bit like those signs that say "X days without accidents." I have gotten the kids this many years into their lives with parents who have stayed married, a stable home and school, and the kind of academic and social progress that they should have at this point. I'm someone who spends a lot of time reminding people of their mortality in connection with estate planning and probate work, and when I'm not doing that I'm often planning for worst case financial scenarios in asset protection planning. I also monitor the nature v. nurture debate on the context of the latest findings of psychologists and psychiatrists and neuroscientists and geneticists. So, I help but to ponder at the end of each school year, "what if I got hit by a bus right now?", how much of doing everything we've done to raise our children so far would stick and what might fall apart? How irrevocable are the benefits we've conferred upon them this year? How set are they on the courses of their lives?

The academic literature on this isn't terribly rigorous, mostly because people who have critical experiences tend to be undersampled.  Basket case parents usually don't adopt and thus, don't end up in adoption studies. Very few twins are separated at birth, because its cruel. Flakes on the brink of survival tend to not volunteer for longitudinal research studies.

There is a lot of literature on on the extent to which traits are hereditary and the point in time when academic achievement gaps start to manifest. This literature offers reassurance to the anxious parent. Statistically speaking, a much larger share of variance between people in a wide variety of traits than people who are not familiar with the literature would expect can be attributed either to hereditary effects, or to "non-shared environment" between siblings which mostly involves things other than the choices that parents can control in raising their children.

But, to be a pessimist and cast a necessary dollop of doubt upon these findings, a great many traits involve gene x environment interactions, and the vast majority of people whose experiences give rise to the estimates of heredity don't experience many major upheavals in their lives. Studies that select subjects based on shared experiences of major upheavals and traumas tend to see bigger environmental effects than studies of the general population that capture people who have experienced these things only sporadically.

For example, the research seems to indicate that the genetic component of IQ is basically a ceiling on a person's intellectual ability in the absence of negative environmental factors that drag someone down. For people in middle class or upper middle class environments that have few of these drags on learning, the genetic component of IQ is quite large. For people who grow up in poverty, the shared environment impact of poverty on family members which varies a lot depending upon the parenting present that can mitigate or aggravate these environmental drags on learning are far more important as a source of variation from one person to the next, than a person's peak genetic potential IQ which is very hard to achieve when one is in poverty.

Not all traits in a child's development are in formative periods at the same time either. The genetic and environmental influences of IQ have pretty much run their course by the time a child heads to middle school, if not sooner.  Most children have clearly left the path that includes anger management problems and disruptive behavior by then as well.  A tendency towards anxiety manifests extremely early, as does gender identity (i.e. viewing oneself as male or female, regardless of one's body or sexual orientation).  A child's capacity to delay gratification also appears to manifest quite early.

There is some psychological literature that indicates that middle school and high school are critical ages in terms of how a person will function later in life in intimate relationships. A nasty divorce or betrayal of trust by an adults through sexual relationships with a kid at that point in life can undermine a kid's willingness to make the commitments and have the trust needed to avoid stumbling blocks later in life in those relationships.  But, few people end up spending their lives with their middle school, or even high school, sweethearts.  Some people are more resilient than others in the face of trauma.  Some young people who are made into child soldiers or gang members will be forever stone cold, while others can be restored to some semblance of normalcy if intervention happens soon enough and their reentry to society is managed well.

There is anecdotal evidence that people tend to keep whatever hairstyle and fashion preferences they adopt in their early twenties for the rest of their adult lives.

For parents the goal posts keep moving. Just when you can be confident that you have finally cleared the hurdle of getting your kids on the right track in life in one thing no matter how much you screw up later, there is some new critical developmental hurdle to clear.

Of course, this isn't exclusively a parent's responsibility. Kids make good and bad choices in their own lives that start when parents no longer have effective absolute veto power over what they eat for lunches and snacks and continue well into adulthood. Academics and opera singers have critical developments they need to make in their career specialties that will influence the rest of their lives greatly, well into their thirties, long after most have left the nest. For political staffers and lawyers and management consultants and investment bankers and doctors, one's first few years on the job are typically when you develop your professional specialty, which can be very hard to predict based upon your generalized education before that point. Some people who move to a new country as adults will adapt fairly gracefully, even if they never entirely lose their accents, while others fail to thrive or "crack" psychologically at that point. A choice of a life partner can change who you become.

For better or for worse, my own tendency is not to second guess what I've already done very much - it is what it is, but to fret over how secure what has already been accomplished will be in the future and one what developmental issues are not yet set strongly for children of the same age and gender as mine. I'm sure that there are other ways of looking at it, and some are probably better than mine. But, these are the kind of yardsticks that come to mind almost involuntarily.

Similarly, it is hard for me to stay focused on what my children do well and could perhaps advance further doing, as opposed to focusing on the issues that they struggle with but need to master. Focusing on the negative can be discouraging to them, but every time I see an issue come up for one of my children that is a struggle, I hear a clock silently ticking away in my head. Is it too late to make real progress in dealing with this? And, of course, there is joy in simply seeing children cease to become abstract possibilities and become their own distinctive individuals on their own paths in life. Each time that they take one fork instead of another in life you can develop a better feel for the kinds of paths they will take in life as adults and who they are becoming. Is he outgoing or introspective? Will she be a tomboy or a girl who is all sugar and spice? How tall will they grow? What are their academic strong and weak points? How do they treat their friends?  What lessons are they learning from me by example?

Sometimes you can get ahead of yourself. My dear wife has been obsessing about where our children will go to college since they were in pre-school, although this urge has been tamed a little over time. I'm less like a "tiger dad" and more like someone reading all of the Harry Potter books from start to finish and impatiently driven by pure curiosity to see what ends up in the epilogue, perhaps at the expense of the joy of the journey, without as much emphasis on having any particular ending.  We each only have one shot for each child and we can only do our best and strive to improve.

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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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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.

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The New American Work Force

[I]n 1954, about 96 percent of American men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked. Today that number is around 80 percent. One-fifth of all men in their prime working ages are not getting up and going to work. According to figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has a smaller share of prime age men in the work force than any other G-7 nation. The number of Americans on the permanent disability rolls, meanwhile, has steadily increased. Ten years ago, 5 million Americans collected a federal disability benefit. Now 8.2 million do.…There are probably more idle men now than at any time since the Great Depression, and this time the problem is mostly structural, not cyclical.

From Tyler Cohen at the Marginal Revolution citing David Brooks at the New York Times.

In parallel with the shift Cohen notes, the percentage of adult women in the work force has almost doubled from about 32% to about 65%.  About one in five American women will never have children, and the vast majority of those who do have children will also work for many years while they have children, sometimes even when the children are infants.  Also, both men and women are entering the work force later because they are more likely to finish high school and attend college, and a much larger number of working age adults are incarcerated now than were in 1954.

Finally, of course, unemployment rates are just under the double digits as we creep out of the recession caused by the financial crisis, and men have taken more of a hit in the current recession than women.  In contrast, 1954 was a point of relatively low unemployment, driven by a manufacturing economy that was serving a world market whose own capacity had not yet recovered from the capital destruction of World War II and the millions of men permanently removed from the work force by that war.

I'm not ready to jump to the "loser men" interpretation  that Cohen, citing David Brooks, does.  An increased number of permanent disability claims is to be expected as a generation of blue collar baby boomers ages.  Total labor force participation relative to the working aged population as a whole is at all time highs, unrivaled anywhere else in the world, and Americans work longer hours that workers in any other country.

The working aged men who are withdrawing from the labor force, in addition to growing ranks of graduate students and inmates and disabled blue collar workers, are mostly early retirees who have played by the rules, worked hard, saved money, raised children, sent them to college and are retiring early because they are prosperous, not because they are lazy.  Many young retirees use their years of early retirement to give back to the community and their families, contributions that were often slighted during the hectic years when they built up their nest eggs.  Early retirement is the American answer to the fact that we have so much less work-life balance, longer work weeks, and less vacation time than our developed world counterparts.  For my druthers, I'd prefer an economy where the average American works fewer hours per year, unemployment is lower, early retirement is rare because most people love their jobs, and men and women balance work and family in more similar ways to each other than we do today.  But, until we reach that day, I am not going to grudge the time that working age men who toiled intensely for a few decades and accrued a nest eggs take to retire early and smell the roses.

My father was anything but an early retiree, but what he spends his time doing in retirement is typical of retirees in reasonably good health of all ages.  He visits grandchildren and stepgrandchildren.  He helps an urban Cincinnati church reimagine itself and develop a plan for raising funds and turning itself around.  He directs a youth choir, commissioned the composition of one hymn and wrote another hymn himself.  He is civically active, writing letters to the editor and op-ed columns relevant to his professional experience.  He participates in a gourmet group and a community choir.  He keeps his home in good repair.  He keeps a watchful eye on the good health and well being of his neighbors and the neighborhood's esprit de corps.  He takes steps to move forward efforts to convert smelly feedlot manure into a renewable energy source.  He set up a volunteer training program for people in his small town and established a lecture series in his old department.  He stays connected to the people he has spent a lifetime building ties to across the nation and the world.  Of necessity, he spends a lot more time than he once did tending to his own good health, and as a consequence of his age, spends more time reading obituaries and attending funerals than he once did.  He spends more time on vacation travel than he once did, but no more than a typical French or German bureaucrat in the prime of his career does.  Just as we strive to find meaningful work in our lives working for pay, and some of us achieve that, we strive to find meaningful leisure in our lives when we are not working for pay and some of us achieve that as well.

What my father does in his retirement is not the same as work, admittedly.  He no longer has to fight pitched bureaucratic battles with the university facilities department over furniture acquisitions for his department.  He longer spends hours grading papers from students in his classes.  He no longer bears primary responsibility for finding internship opportunities for three dozen graduate students a year.  He doesn't have to deal with office politics or admissions decisions.  His days of pouring over long technical reports and attending endless meetings while serving as an advisor to a federal nuclear waste disposal project have come to an end.  But, like most retirees, early and late, he is not an "idle man."  The kind of person who works hard enough to retire early, even more so than the usual retiree, usually is constitutionally incapable of being idle even if they tried.  Early retirement may leave our nation with more really good golfers than we really need, but if one takes it as a given that economic production is a means to an end, rather than an end in and of itself, something economists sometimes forget, this shouldn't be terribly troubling.

One can argue that an economic system that compensates some of our most skilled physicians, executives, lawyers and engineers so well that a large fraction of them withdraw their valuable skills from the monetary economy early is out of kilter.  Surely, my inlaws, who are both medical doctors and both retired early, would have probably done so a little bit later if medical doctors were paid less than they are in our economy and they needs to work longer to be economically self-sufficient.  In that world, they would have spend a few more years treating patients and a little less time playing golf in their golden years.

But, I can hardly fault them. They were cogs in the machine and did what made sense at the time.  The way that the profession was designed when they were actively participating in it, medical doctors had to work exceedingly long hours and carry pagers whereever they went missing children's birthday parties and family time after school, foregoing extended vacations, and generally giving extremely intensely of themselves to serve large numbers of people in medical need with cutting edge skills and technology that provided great benefit to those patients.  They didn't have the option of living more balanced lives while they were working, and that system had built into it the incentive of an early retirement as a reward for that very intense work using skills so scarce that the United States established an immigration visa to secure people with these skills that it was unable to produce in sufficient numbers at home.  If the hope of early retirement hadn't been available in the long run, lots of doctors in their generation would probably have decided that their toil simply wasn't worth it and would have deprived the health care system of their skills far sooner.

The economy at large is experiencing basically the opposite of what most of academia is experiencing.  While old academics are lingering in their tenure track positions long past the traditional retirement age, leaving little room for the ranks of new professors seeking to fill their shoes, in hot parts of the private sector, the millionaire entrepreneurs and executives and physicians of the last long economic boom are making way for their ambitious, young, tech savvy successors.

Indeed, one of the many reasons that upper middle class managerial and professional workers experience low rates of structural unemployment than less skilled workers is that upper middle class workers can afford to retire early and free up jobs for younger workers.  In contrast, many blue collar workers often can't hope to save enough too retire early and continue to fill jobs that reduce the opportunities available for their younger successors.  Still, many middle class, as opposed to upper middle class retirees are workers who have been laid off from long, physically demanding careers as soldiers, as cops, as firemen, and factory workers whose unions, aware that large numbers of them would experience permanent disabilities anyway if they didn't retire early, worked with management to desire jobs that allow for early retirement.

Getting up and going to a paying job is something that people do because they need to support themselves and their families, and because the economy needs certain jobs to get done.  There is no shame in working and no one wants to be unable to support themselves.  But, it is a mistake to assume that getting up and going to a paying job has intrinsic moral value.  There is nothing morally wrong with an early retiree in his early 50s lingering over the newspaper while having breakfast, and spending the rest of his day doing what he thinks is the most valuable use of his time when money is not an object.

Economists tend to think that rational actors want nothing more than more money.  But, most people simply want to have enough money to allow them to be secure in their ability to meet their comfortable but modest economic needs.  Once that goal is accomplished, increasingly sooner for much of the nation's upper middle class in this more prosperous age, earning more money becomes a much lower priority goal.  Sometimes these activities will produce money anyway, but money is no longer the point.

I'm sure that a reporter with a little gumption could find men who don't fit the narrative that I've outlined and fall into the stereotype that David Brooks is trying to conjure. 

I know of several men with good educations and/or professional experience in Denver who spent time as homemaker husbands and/or returned to school for more education, when their own careers hit bumps during bad job markets and their wives had jobs.  Yet, isn't this something that the feminist revolution has been bracing us for, and encourging us to welcome, over the last several decades?  And, at any rate, this remains a statistically minor blip that only accentuates a larger trend of more people seeking graduate educations, blue collar boomers wearing their bodies out, more people spending long years in prison, more people retiring early, and a bad economy driving up unemployment rates.

I'm sure that a not insignificant number of working aged men, particularly men with criminal records or substance abuse problems have simply given up after long, fruitless job hunts, are dependent upon family or friends or lovers, and do little but drink too much and watch television.  In earlier days, when our economy needed lots of unskilled labor for mindless jobs because we hadn't yet mastered automation, people like that would have worked at abundant assembly lines all work and gotten drunk and wasted time after hours and on the weekends.  Now, a lot of that work has been offshored or automated.  There are still unskilled mindless jobs in our economy, but there aren't nearly as many as their used to be, while there are almost as many people chasing after them.

But, for the most part, America's meager safety net doesn't afford men who are not financially secure early retirees the option of leaving the labor force whether they want to or not.  More so than any other developed nation in the world, Americans must work or starve and die.  Leaving the work force is a very expensive luxury purchase for most Americans not to be made lightly, and men and women alike do so in our economy at their peril.

Like any other nation, we have "loser men."  We also have "loser women," "loser children" and "loser seniors."  But, for the most part, those loser men are the men who have no choice but to continue working at unfulfilling, dead end, low paying jobs because they have no other choice and didn't manage to save anything for their futures, not the early retirees who have left the work force entirely.

READ MORE - The New American Work Force

Denver's Election Results

In Tuesday's non-partisan election, Denver voters re-elected their incumbent auditor, chose two city council members for "at large" seats, and elected eight of eleven city council people from single member districts (five in uncontested elections). Turnout was 38% of the ballots distributed, with ballots going out to all active registered voters in the City, slightly below the norm in the last couple of municipal elections, but not horrible either.

There will be runoffs between the top two finishers in the first round in City Council Districts 1, 5 and 8, and in the races for Mayor and Clerk and Recorder. All of the races with runoffs happen, not coincidentally, to be open seats. As my own city council district race was uncontested, the ballot that I will receive and return by June 7 will have only four names for two offices on it, and I've given those names at least some consideratioon already in the first round.

The Case For Non-Instant Runoffs

Proponents of a system once called the "single transferable vote" and now called "instant runoff voting" would favor a system where you get to vote a first and second and perhaps higher order choice, allowing the election to be decided all in one go, even when no candidate receives a majority.

The case for considering the preferences of voters who didn't vote for the plurality candidate when no candidate receives a majority is a good one. Denver voters, for example, have not infrequently backed a runner up in a runoff election, suggesting that a combination of more information and the preferences of candidates who supported someone who was not one of the two finalists don't, as a reliable general rule, strongly favor the plurality winnner in this kind of non-partisan race.

I prefer the system used by Denver, Louisiana and France, where there is a runoff election, because it allows me as a voter to have more time to research viable candidates and consider my options before making a decision in the second round, even when the candidate that I favored in the first round is not eliminated. Any decision that causes decisions upon which there is not a clear popular preference to be made based on more information and deliberation than would otherwise be devoted to the decision is probably a good thing.

I also have little confidence that my fellow citizens would make second choice decisions that are as good if they didn't have this extra time. I've written wills and trusts for people for a decade and a half, and most of my clients, even when they are well educated, find it a strain to think about "what if" hypotheticals beyond the situation that would exist if they died today. Most people are better at making decisions in a "what now" context than in a "what if" context. Frequently, I have to spend a long time talking people through the ideas by telling little stories at length "what if you and your partner and your children all died in a car crash today, the people you've mentioned who are still alive are . . . . who would you want to inherit from you now?"

There is also more of an incentive to do good media coverage of a runoff election between two candidates proven to be viable and reasonably close in electoral strength which may reveal new critical data than there is in the waning days of a nine or more way race.

In an election with many candidates there is a tendency to engage in satisficing decision making, i.e. researching until you find an acceptable choice rather than trying to research carefully enough to find the best choice. If most people make their decisions that way, and no one candidate receives a majority of the vote, the likelihood that the first round winner was not the optimal choice is pretty good. So, the chances that additional information before the runoff election is held will improve the quality of the decision making process is pretty good.

This is particularly true in a case like City Council District 8, which was entirely a write in election due to the death of incumbent Carla Madison shoertly before the election. The very short schedule for that race meant that there was very little time for the thirty-nine candidates in the race to run full fledged campaigns that could have afforded the general public the information they needed to make an optimizing decision. About 28% of voters in that district didn't cast a vote for the office at all, and each of the candidates that made the runoff from the 5,361 write in votes cast captured only about 1/7th of the votes cast. Eleven candidates received at least one hundred votes (including the two candidates making it to the runoff), and five candidates received more than three hundred votes (the number of signatures needed to petition onto the ballot in ordinary circumstances).

The Benefits Of Ballot Access

It is also a good moment to observe the benefits that accrue to being on the ballot, even in an election like this one, where voters could complete their ballot at their leisure "open book" at their kitchen table, rather than without access to pertinent information in a voting booth under time pressures, a relatively ideal environment for write in candidates.

The practical ability of voters to cast a write in vote if they are determiend to do so is illustrated by the fact that in City Council District 8 almost four-fifths of voters managed to cast a valid write in ballot. Also, no city council race in the city, with or without names on the ballot had an undervote of less than 5% and the average undervote was considerably higher. Thus, no more than 18% of voters were discouraged by the all write in character of the race from casting a vote, and the average undervote percentage in contested city council races was closer to 10%, suggesting that perhaps only one in seven voters was discouraged by the write in character of the District 8 vote from casting a vote.

In the Mayoral race, every candidate who appeared on the ballot received at least 0.46% of the vote (519 votes). Marcus Giavanni, the most successful of the three write in candidates for Mayor, who mounted an active campaign with at least as many signs up around town as some of the other candidates whose names appeared on the ballot, nonetheless garnered just 21 votes. The cutoff to make the second round in the Mayoral race based on the unofficial results was 30,314 votes (27% of the total). The third place candidate in the Mayoral race, after conferring with campaign legal counsel, has announced that he will not challenge the unofficial vote count. None of the races in the first round were close enough to trigger an automatic recount.

In the Council Member At Large race, in which the one of the five candidates appearing on the ballot with the least votes received 8,437 votes (6% of the total cast in a race where each voter could vote for up to two candidates), none of the three write in candidates received more than 121 votes. The cutoff to win a seat, according to the unofficial results, was 31,603 votes (22% of the total number of votes cast in a race where each voter may vote up to two times).

Unless no one is who appears on the ballot is running for an office, it is almost impossible to win a write in campaign, in an ordinary electoral environment where the barriers to ballot access for credible candidates who have their acts together is not overwhelming. But, this isn't necessarily deeply troubling from a democratic perspective, because the practical reality is that the candidates who did not receive access to the ballot probably had a very dim chance of winning office even if they had been granted access to the ballot. No write in candidate outside Council District 8, which had no candidate on the ballot, received more than 121 write in votes in an election where three hundred signatures on a petition are required to gain access to the ballot - a requirement that is less than 1% of the votes that were actually required to win or advance to a second round in a citywide race this year.

No candidate outside Council District 8 in a city council race received more than 70 write in votes, less than 1% of the votes received by the winner in that city council district, an otherwise uncontested incumbent.

An Expensive Mayoral Race

Campaign spending in this election was considerable.

Romer, through last Thursday, spent about $1.4 million on his successful campaign, which turns out to be about $43 a vote. Hancock spent about $711,489, which equals about $23 per vote.

Theresa Spahn spent $108,288 but got only 3,332 votes, roughly $32.50 a vote. Councilman Doug Linkhart had spent $152,199 through last Thursday on his campaign that received a total of 10,557 votes, about $14.41 per vote. Viewed this way, the biggest winner was probably Thomas Wolf, who dubbed himself the "free candidate" because he accepted no money and spent only $250. He got 2,106 votes, about 12 cents a vote.

Running the election, of course, also wasn't free, although the city of Denver, as is typical in mail in elections in Colorado, didn't provide postage to voters, which cost voters who didn't hand deliver their ballots 61 cents each, a barrier that probably had a measurable effect on turnout.

READ MORE - Denver's Election Results

First Bank of Cherry Creek Has Friendly Employees

I've done business with a number of banks over the years. One of them is First Bank of Cherry Creek. They don't always have the best interest rates or easiest loan underwriting terms. Alpine Bank, in Western Colorado, is the hands down winner in Colorado for beautiful branch bank office architecture (and when I lived in Grand Junction, Colorado they also had awesome donuts on Saturday morning). But, one place that First Bank really excels is courtesy and customer service. Time and time again, even when I come to them cranky, the people who work there are friendly, stay cool, take the time to listen to my questions and concerns, and address them.

For example, yesterday, the ATM machine ate my First Bank ATM card. I had even taken a detour on the way to where I was going there to go to the ATM machine so that I could do my business before I started work. A day that starts like this is like the beginning of some mediocre independent film comedy. Needless to say, I was pretty cranky, and I was also more than a bit worried that some case of personalized identity theft had struck me - something I've seen more than enough of second hand representing clients trying to sort out resulting bad check prosecutions, inaccurate credit reports, and muddled bank balances.

But, when I got to my office, I had a letter on my desk from the previous day explaining that there had been a security breach at the bank, which I hadn't realized applied to me, and when I called a customer service representative (I spoke to "Rhonda," a real human being from Colorado!) for clarification, she calmly explained to me that indeed, someone had gotten my ATM card number making it necessary to replace it, reviewed my account to make sure that there wasn't anything else amiss, told me when to expect a new card (it arrived later the same day) and explained why I couldn't have received a replacement any sooner given the steps that the bank had to take first and the fact that the breach took place on a weekend. I wasn't exactly happy afterwards, but I was a lot less grumpy than I'd been when the ATM machine ate my ATM card, and I was comfortable that a criminal, rather than bad management at the bank, was responsible for my inconvenience.

In an ideal world, the letter I'd received telling me what was going on could have been more clear, and the ATM machine could have been more specific about the reason it was eating my card, rather than giving me an ominous "please contact your bank" message with no other explanation. But, a chance to speak to a human being who was nice and actually able to answer my questions and was able to explain what was going on made the difference between a mild "shit happens" annoyance and a fury that could easily have led me to change banks. Given how routine it is for customer service line service to be almost as bad as the events that inspired you to call in the first place, this is a real achievement. At least half the time, to get the help you need, even if you can get it, you need to ask for a manager. But, not this time.

I often tag instances of bad business management (the Burger King next door to its Cherry Creek branch office has earned at least couple of those for its parking nazi tactics, nasty bathrooms and notoriously slow front counter service), but excellence deserves recognition now and then as well.

Full disclosure: I am a First Bank of Cherry Creek customer, but receive no special deals and wasn't asked to prepare or compensated in any way for this blog post.

READ MORE - First Bank of Cherry Creek Has Friendly Employees

Policy Beliefs Can Change

When you get immersed in the toil of electoral politics, it is easy to get into the rut of assuming that politics is all about getting people who agree with you to the polls at a higher rate that the people who don't agree with you, and that people's opinions, to the extent that they are based on more than trivial amounts of information, almost never change.

But, in the longer run, that isn't true. While an individual, and even a whole geographic community's place on the political spectrum is very stable over time, in the case of communities, even over more than a century, the location of specific policy stances on that political spectrum can shift dramatically in a couple of a decades or less.

A poll from CNN this week is the latest to show a majority of Americans in favor of same-sex marriage, with 51 percent saying that marriages between gay and lesbian couples “should be recognized by the law as valid” and 47 percent opposed.

This is the fourth credible poll in the past eight months to show an outright majority of Americans in favor of gay marriage. . . Prior to last year, there had been just one survey — a Washington Post poll conducted in April 2009 — to show support for gay marriage as the plurality position, and none had shown it with a majority. . . . opponents of gay marriage almost certainly no longer constitute a majority; just one of the last nine polls has shown opposition to gay marriage above 50 percent.

From here.

In New York State, likely voters polled earlier this year supported gay marriage by a 56-37 margin. In New York City suburbs support for legalizing gay marriage is 61-33. Roman Catholics are more likely to support gay marriage than members of the population at large, notwithstanding church doctrine to the contrary.

If you told me when I started high school in small town Ohio in the mid-1980s that a majority of Americans would support gay marriage two and a half decades later, I would have thought that you were crazy. When I graduated from high school, only about 11% of those polled thought gay marriage should be legal, while about 72% oppose it. Frankly, I'm surprised that support for gay marriage back then was that high, I would have guessed that it was in the single digits, and maybe in small town Ohio it was. It is also possibly that the single pre-1994 poll's number was high and was made public at all only because it was a statistical outlier on the high end.

The AIDS epidemic had started to make most people aware that there were actually people who had intimate relationships with members of the same sex voluntarily, but even the notion that someone could actually identify as "gay" or "lesbian" in real life, as opposed to merely as an insulting and inaccurate description of someone, wasn't real clear to me at the time. I had never met anyone who had come out. I hadn't even seen or heard of anyone who had come out on TV, in a movie, on the radio, or in anything that I'd read in print. There were no organizations for gays, lesbians, transgender individuals that I was aware of in my town, and the only one that I was aware of nationally was ACT-UP. I was aware of a couple of same sex adult couples who lived together as a household, one of which involved an extended family member, but it had never occurred to me that a household like that would be anything other than platonic, and nobody in those households ever said a thing that suggested that more legal rights were necessary for them.

Since then, the trendline has been more or less steady and shows no sign of reversing. Nate Silver notes in the linked article that "If support for gay marriage were to continue accelerating as fast as it has in the past two years, supporters would outnumber opponents roughly 56-40 in the general population by November 2012." Even if the growth in support reverts to the overall trend line, there will be a pretty safe majority that favors legalizing gay marriage by then, and some states will be ahead of that trend while others will be behind it.

Popular understanding of sexual orientation and gender identification has expanded dramatically in a quarter of a century. By the time I finished high school, I learned that there were at least a few people in my community who self-identified as gay or lesbian (I would not meet anyone who had a transgender identity until after I finished college). Oberlin, where I went to college, was a mecca for gay and lesbian students, who were often active in campus politics, were deeply involved in running one of the major social events of the year on campus (the drag ball), and made it a point to be out of the closet in daily life in class and around campus. A large share of our student body came from New York City and some students personally knew people who had participated in the Stonewall Riots.

But, while college changed my views, this took much longer for the rest of the nation. More than one book has recounted what happened in the years that followed, but my point is not to illustrate how this happened. My point is to note that it did.

Even a decade ago, even among liberal minded people and many people in the gay and lesbian community, some form of civil unions seemed possible and desirable, but gay marriage seemed like a remote possibility that might never happen anywhere in anything but the distant future (where author Kate Elliott, who I whose science fiction Jaran novels I was reading in the late 1990s had put a society that had gay marriage). It was a little hard to determine at that point what gay marriage would even mean at a practical level, because not a lot of attention had been given to the question by people in a position to know the answers.

Now, there are thousands of same sex legally marriage couples in the United States and more in Europe. Colorado doesn't legally recognize same sex marriage and doesn't even have a civil unions law (one was narrowly defeated in this year's session of the Colorado General Assembly). But, it does have a lot of same sex couples who view each other as spouses, who hold themselves out to the public as spouses, who live as a household and who raise children together. They are parents of children who go to school with my children. They are teachers. They are nurses. Their families are my neighbors. Those couples are my clients in large numbers.

It has become obvious to a large share of the population through countless examples that someone can be gay or lesbian as a matter of personal identity, and that a person's sexual orientation is a stable part of who someone is as a person that someone is generally aware of to some extent, even if they may not fully understand their feelings in some social contexts or may be confused at times, for most, if not all, of their lives. (And, who doesn't, at some point in life, find their potential romantic relationships to be confusing?)

It has become clear as well that gay marriage doesn't have negative externalities. It doesn't weaken the institution of marriage for opposite sex couples. It helps many children and harms none. It imparts dignity without taking it away from anyone.

There are still plenty of people in the world who still insist that same sex loves are sinful based on epistles written by John the Gospel writer a couple of thousand years ago, and stories and laws written by Jewish priests centuries before then. But, those scripturally motivated views don't last long in the face of encounters with real life friends, neighbors and colleagues. They don't have much credibility with young people, even those who are evangelical Christians who have grown up in a world that has allowed them to see gays and lesbians and transgender individuals living ordinary (and extraordinary) lives like anyone else.

Decisions from courts and politicians, like the recent Congressional repeal of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy in the military and the President's decision not to defend in court the part of the Defense of Marriage Act applicable to the federal government have provided the leadership that has changed the views of the majority, and willingness to hire a gay man as the White House social secretary. Once you abandon the sin theory of sexual orientation the rest flows pretty naturally, and the leadership that our nation's leaders have shown has pretty well discredited that understanding of sexual orientation.

The sin theory of sexual orientation is rapidly going the way of the equally scripturally supported and equally empirically inaccurate demon possession theory of mental illness. Despite the fact that the words in the Bible haven't changed, very few people walking the streets believe in an internalized way that mental illness is caused by demon possession, and likewise, the Biblically based defenses for the institutions of slavery are also now heart felt for only a tiny minority of American Christians.

Lots of people believe that faith healing (which the Gospels devote a great deal of time to) is possible, or at least once was possible, but very few people resort to a clergyman laying on hands as their sole means or even primary means for dealing with poor physical health.

The Pope's official position, reduced to writing ever since 1968 in "Humanae Vitae," is that using contraceptives is a sin. But:

A survey just one year later . . . found that 44% of Catholic women (who were regular churchgoers) were currently using artificial contraception. In 1974, 83% of Catholics said they disagreed with the Pope’s stance on birth control. By 1999, nearly 80 percent of Catholics believed that a person could be a good Catholic without obeying the church hierarchy’s teaching on birth control. A 2005 nationwide poll by Harris Interactive showed that 90% of Catholics supported the use of birth control. The Center of Disease Control and Prevention 2002 National Survey of Family Growth revealed that 97% of American Catholic women over age 18 have used a banned form of contraception, which is the same percentage as the general population.

The sea change in public opinion on gay rights isn't the only recent example.

While he was living, Martin Luther King, Jr., our nation's pre-eminent hero was the civil rights movement, was wary of pressing to strike down miscegenation laws and emphasized civil rights in the public sphere of work and commerce instead. Yet, in the wake of Loving v. Virginia, even prominent segregationist politicians like Strom Thurmond eventually came around to the view (and I genuinely believe that at least that far it was sincere) that miscegenation laws were wrong and that there was nothing wrong with interracial marriage. Large percentages of white, usual Republican primary voters in Mississippi still haven't come around, and we are not a nation of color blind people. But, Jim Crow era laws to enforce segregation and discriminate on the basis of race have been utterly morally discredited for the vast majority of Americans today.

We haven't reached a comfortable answer that tells us how to balance work and family in a world where both men and women are part of almost all parts of the workforce. But, almost nobody wants to return to the status quo that was in place when I was born when the percentage of women in law school student bodies was in the single digits, and there were only a handful of jobs that were open to women, especially to married women. Likewise, almost nobody advocates a return to a legal regime in which women cannot own property, bring lawsuits or enter into contracts in their own name, as was the case when the Founders wrote the United States Constitution.

Similarly, nobody is advocating that the franchise be limited to white male property owners over the age of twenty-one as it was when the Founders wrote the United States constitution. Indeed, while non-whites can no longer constitutionally be denied the right to vote based on race, women can no longer constitutionally be denied the right to vote based on gender, and eighteen to twenty year olds can no longer constitutionally be denied the right to vote based on age, laws restricting the franchise to property owners would quite possibly not violate the federal constitution, although such laws would be politically impossible to pass at the moment.

Abortion remains controversial, but popular opinion today would never support the laws struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 that made it illegal to use "any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception."

Support for legalizing marijuana is at about the same point that support for legalizing gay marriage was two years ago. The year that I graduated from high school, about 74% opposed that and 24% supported it. Now, about 50% oppose legalizing it, while 46% support legalizing it, and support for legalization has grown more or less steadily for the last fifteen years. According to the executive director of NORML:

Thirteen states have decriminalized marijuana, and that covers 130 million Americans. We now have fifteen states and the District of Columbia that have legal protections for qualified medical-marijuana patients, and that covers 90 to 95 million Americans.

The President has taken the position of not using federal law to punish people who use marijuana in compliance with state medical marijuana laws, and has paid essentially no price (and perhaps gains support) for taking this position.

In aspects of life where people have real experience and are affected in their daily lives, religious texts and doctrines and even community traditions are all but irrelevant to people's opinions. The previous generation's unthinkable possibilities can become the current generation's moral norms.

READ MORE - Policy Beliefs Can Change

Fuzzy Descriptions Of What Should Be

Sometimes ideas about how to solve the problems in our society are fuzzy.  You have an intuitive notion about what they should look like before you have a rigorous argument for why they should be that way or how we will get there.  The intuition may be accurate, may be nostalgia for a past that may never have even been, or may be inaccurate products of cognitive biases.  But, it doesn't hurt to articulate and examine them in incomplete form.  This is what I'm doing today.

* We need to develop more middle ground in our economy and social class system between winner-take-all successes and those who are just getting by; to invigorate the middle class.

For example, lawyer income is bimodal.  The high end is a cluster of lawyers making very high earnings working at big firms (or sometimes botiques) for big businesses and their senior managers; it also has a modest number of plaintiff's lawyers who have been very successful at taking them on in big dollar case.  The low end has lawyers in small and medium sized firms and government agencies dealing with the issues presented by small businesses and individuals.  There is very little middle ground.

The absence of middle ground is surprising, because there is an obvious niche to fill.  In theory, it makes sense to have lawyers making in between incomes, with credentials that are good but not top ten law school honors and law review and Supreme Court clerkship class, working less insane hours than large firms, doing what they call in the trade "commodity work" (i.e. recurring, predictable, moderate stakes matters, as opposed to "bet the company" disputes and deals that big firms want) , doing competent work in an assembly line fashion, and charging less for it.  There are some specific areas where this happens: foreclosure practice, a few tax dispute resolution shops and insurance defense law firms.  But, there are lots of kinds of practice where one would expect it, but you don't see it: employment cases and a lot of business planning work.

We also have a lot of valueable legal work that isn't done, or is done by overworked and underpaid idealists, because it is hard to make pay.  This includes a lot of family law in low asset/low income households, a lot of termination of parental rights litigation, a lot of criminal defense work for moderate to low income individuals, representation of consumer defendants in debt collection and eviction and foreclosure cases, a fair amount of probate litigation in low asset estates, and immigration law work in areas other than employer visas.  Lawyers with seven years of post-high school education are very expensive ways to meet the public need to counsel and advocacy in these areas, but many individuals who are involved in these kinds of disputes aren't qualified to represent themselves competently.  If independent specialized paraprofessionals who could just hand child custody cases, or just handle criminal defense work, or just handle immigration work could do these kind of cases with an associates or undergraduate pre-professional degree, rather than a law degree, unmet legal needs could be filled in an affordable way that is more competent than the status quo without really impacting the market for existing lawyers much, and a lot of middle class jobs would be created in the process.  In some cases, the most sensible way to handle these cases would be the way we handle most criminal cases - with their services provided by a government agency with professional employees on payroll, but this wouldn't have to be the case.

This has happened somewhat in the area of tax law, where certified financial planners and certified public accountants, tax preparers, and enrolled agents before the IRS fill the gap between what people need and what they can afford that lawyers cannot bridge.  In the area of bankruptcy, in theory, independent paraprofessionals are mere scrivners, but in practice, they subtly provide more guidance to bankruptcy petitioners than their formal duties suggest.  There is also a very small niche conceirge/personal assistant niche of people who help people with personal consumer disputes sometimes formalized as a "health care advocate" when it involves medical bills.

Another example is in the mental health field.  We have psychiatrists, whose investment in becoming an M.D. makes them very expensive and gives them an immense amount of training that is irrelevant to what they actually do, who can prescribe mental health medications but are too expensive to take a more wholistic view, and a lot of psychologists, counselors, and the like who have some relevant education and credentials, but can't prescribe the medications that would be necessary to best address some of the cases that they encounter.  Some states are experimenting with empowering lower paid mental health professionals to write some prescriptions.  Colorado has a provision that allows some non-medical doctors to do this, but the rules are very restrictive. 

It would also be good if mental health could move to a less transaction/fee for service/medical model, to something closer to a pastoral care kind of model where anyone in the appropriate group, however defined, would receive care as needed, despite the tendency (often desirable) toward commodification in other parts of professional practice.  Some mental health issues are episodic and succeptible to being "cured" but many are life long conditions that are fundamentally a part of who someone is and always will be.  An injury/disease model of care is a poor way to address those cases.

We are seeing the development of middle ground to some extent with the establishment of urgent care centers as middle ground between family practice and the ER, and the establishment of retail location based clinics staffed mostly by RNs at places like Walgreens, Wal-Mart and King Soopers that handle not-so-urgent primary care needs like vaccinations and well child checkups and minor infectious diseases and pregancy testing.  We are also seeing the resurgence of the midwife who is not an M.D. as a middle ground health care provider.  Indeed, to some extent, the evolving health care industry model of having many different professions dealing with specialized parts of the total problem, after receiving intermediate levels of training and receiving intermediate levels of pay, is a model that would make sense in other.

* We need a more healthy environment for medium sized businesses.

Another area where a gap has emerged, not unrelated to the gap in legal services, is the gap between the truly small business and the large publicly held business.  There aren't mid-range lawyers because there aren't mid-range enterprises for them to represent in the numbers that there used to be. 

The United States is particularly deficient in the ranks of its medium sized businesses - small restaurant and retail chains, manufacturing ventures that employ a few hundred people, and so on.  We have some really impressive very national and multinational firms that account for an increasing share of our economy, and we have a large sector of not very economically important proprietorships or very small businesses, but surprising few that involve dozens to hundreds of employees, that involve single or double digit millions of dollars of revenues, that involve dozens to hundreds of equity investors.  Venture capitalist and angel investors can funnel small businesses to the big time, and consolidators come along and turn industries dominanted by small firms into industries dominated by big business now and then, but somehow, medium sized businesses seem to lack staying power.

Some of the areas where small and medium sized businesses thrive are dying out or on borrowed time.  Liquor stores in Colorado fiercely defend their perogatives, because they know that if grocery stores can sell their goods that they will die.  Wal-Marts have shuttered thousands of small town independent businesses because they are more competitive on price.  Better quality control and marketing have led franchises to squeeze a large share of the independent fast food businesses out of the market.  Blockbuster pretty much wiped out the independent videostore industry through consolidation and competition before it collapsed itself.  Small evangelical churches are losing ground to megachurches.

There are exceptions.  Craft brewing of beer and spirits and small vinyards seem to be holding their own.  Medium sized venture charter schools seem to be springing up left and right.  Urgent care centers and ambulatory surgery centers are cutting into the near monpology that large hospitals used to have on those kinds of medical services.  There are a host of new medium sized medical marijuana ventures.  Farming seems to be shifting from proprietorships to medium sized operations.

But, we need to better understand what leads medium sized ventures to be optimal from an economy of scale perspective, and look at the possibility that modest policy changes that don't do undue damage to consumer prices can make the economy more attractive to medium sized businesses in parts of the economy. 

We also need to get a better philsophical grasp on what medium sized ventures can offer the economy that big businesses and small businesses do not so that we can promote medium sized ventures in parts of the economy where they add value that the current economic system may not be adequately capturing.  For example, one of the lessons of the financial crisis has been that there are systemic risks involved in having "too big to fail" enterprises in the economy.  It is also becoming increasingly clear that the existing model of management dominated publicly held corporations that are highly insultated from shareholders is an ineffective way of keeping senior management performing well, making prudent judgments for the long term, and keeping senior management from self-dealing in its own compensation.

Some of the gap is less monetary.  We need to have more institutions where it is easier to reach someone in the organization with real authority.  We need to have more firms that have humanity and individuality.  We need to break up centers of wealth and power so that our society is not dominated by plutocrats.  We need the "warm glow" that comes from dealing with something other than a massive impersonal bureaucracy.  We need institutions that recognize that consumers would prefer not to deal entirely with robots and powerless bureacrats on the other side of the phone in who knows where when you have a problem.

Put another way, what benefits to big businesses have over medium sized businesses and why?  Is the problem that our securities laws and tax laws don't facilitate the financing of these businesses well?  Is the problem that big businesses have better economies of scale in regulatory compliance?  Is it a matter of marketing?  Is it a shortage of executive leadership?

In the legal industry, this is central to the discussion about the "death of big law".  Big law firms seem to be offering increasingly little value added simply by being big.  There seem to be few common assets and synergies.  Whole departments routinely jump ship to form their own firms or join other firms.

The approach to regulating unnecessarily large firm size in all industries, through anti-trust laws has largely been a bust.  So, we need to throw out that model and look for different ways to create the right incentives for these businesses to thrive when it is appropriate.

* We need to find better options for members of the less educated working class.

One of President Clinton's iconic stances was his plea that working people who played by the rules should get a fair deal in life.  If you graduate from high school, marry before having children, stay married even when times are tough, make your best efforts to find work when you are not disabled, don't commit crimes, and do your job reasonably competently, you ought to be able to expect a decent, if modest life for your family like a decent place to live in a safe neighborhood, access to the health care you need, an ability to send your kids to college if they are academically up to it, a safety net when you can't find work for no fault of your own, a chance to retire when you are old.  Few developed countries in the world do a worse job of fulfilling that promise.

In truth, we need an even broader promise.  We need to have an economy that makes playing by the rules going forward a good option, even if you aren't married to the other parent of your children, even if you somehow or other failed to get a high school diploma in your late teens, even if you have committed a crime in the past, even if you really screwed up on your job in the past and were fired for good cause, or if you incurred more debts than you could pay destroying your credit, or what have you.

We need to have a system in which somebody feels responsible for finding the most productive and meaningful thing that we can put each person who is able and ready to work to do, to insure that people who take that path get what they need to have a decent life, and to subsidize the difference between the value that they create and what it costs to provide a decent life if necessary.

We should find something for people to do that adds value to society first and figure out how to turn that value into money second.  Better to have someone doing work that has a market value of $5 an hour and to subsdize the rest of the cost of having them live a decent life, than having that person sit idle and trying to deal with the costs that are created when that person's family can't get by.

There are some people whose lives are screwed up because they are simply dysfunctional people.  But, most of the people in the United States whose lives are screwed up are willing to work, would place a lot fewer burdens on the public if they had the resources to meet their basic needs, but can't manage to earn enough to meet their basic needs.

For example, there are some hard core homeless people who are just incapable of functioning in normal society, often due to severe untreated mental health issues or disabilities or disagreeable personalities.  But, there are far more for whom the problem is simply not having enough money to afford a modest apartment.

A lot of child abuse and neglect, a lot of families that have trouble staying together, a lot of crime, a lot of failure in the education system, is driven by poverty pure and simple, and would go away with a steady job that pays enough to support a family.

Sometimes a little skill training or further education will allow the person to find employment and provide for their family without further assistance, but often it won't.  Some people will need help finding decent work only in periods of high unemployment, others will be persistently hard to employ.  In a minority of cases, it may be easier simply to let someone have a pension and not trying to find anything for them to do, as we do in the case of people who are classified as having total disabilities or are retired.

* We probably devote too many resources to selling things.

Economics suggests that the amount of a particular good or service that is sold and the number of people involved in selling it, are only dimly related.  Supply, demand and price are the key factors in sales volume.  If labor was more scarce, we could sell just as many cars and refrigerators and annuities and nails and houses with fewer people.  Commission sales have Malthusian tendencies.  The sales force expands until everyone involved in selling is barely making it, instead of staying at a size just large enough to sell what the market wants with a minimum of staff making maximal compensation.  Big box stores have made their fortune, in part, by recognizing this fact and having smaller sales staffs per dollar of revenue so they can offer lower prices.

In part, this is a good thing.  Selling stuff is often a mid-level job that lots of people can do that seems to create demonstrable value, so it has picked up a lot of the slack as farming, fishing, forestry, mining, manufacturing, utilities, and so on have become more efficient and no longer require such a large share of the labor force.  But, the ratio of people who actually make the stuff we need in the economy, to the people who are selling and administering and financing the distribution of that stuff once it has been made seems like it has gotten out of hand.  It takes nine administrators to send out bills for the work of two and a half doctors.  Marketing costs have become a substantial share of the costs of all sorts of goods and services compared to the cost of the goods itself.

It isn't that marketing and administration aren't important.  We don't want to end up like the Soviet's with factories churning out goods that nobody wants to buy because marketing isn't given the importance that it deserves.  But, is our economy really better off with an Aurora Mall that has a third or more of its retail space devoted to selling cell phones and associated accessories, with large number of locations at the same mall often all competing to sell goods made at the same factory and services provided by the same operations company?

* Our society is goods rich and service poor.

People who would often really benefit from services don't receive them because they can't afford them from their own earnings.  Our nursing homes and hospitals are frequently understaffed.  Our probationers and parolees are frequently undersupervised.  Our classrooms could benefit from having more teacher's aides in them.  Our kids could use more mentoring and tutoring.  Our neighorhoods would be nicer is our sidewalks were professionally clearned every time it snowed and our sidestreets were professionally cleared by people with the right equipment, rather than waiting for snow to melt off roads and for individual households to clear these sidewalks.  Our jobless could use more career guidance and training.  Our ailing bridges and road could use more repairs.  Our addicts could use more counselers.  Our criminal defendants could use more public defenders and investigators to manage the crushing case loads.  Our old houses could use more maintenance and rennovations.  Our call centers could use shorter waits and better quality service.  We would benefit from a society with more art and more performing artists.  Lawn care professionals would probably do a better job that the do it yourselfer homeowners usually do.

Efficiency is a good thing.  But, when it comes to providing services it is harder to sever the amount of labor provided and the amount of benfit confered by the services.  The quality of a refrigerator is an objective thing, and is no worse if it can be achieved with fewer man hours.  Fifteen minutes of therapy can rarely be as helpful as two hours of therapy, even with an extremely qualified therapist.

We need some better way to turn idle labor into beneficial services, and to turn beneficial services into money for the people who provide those services, so that we can increase the size of the pie and as a result, make our society more affluent.  But, for some reason, the market economy is failing to do that, in part, because the people who need services often have trouble affording them when they need those services.

We seem close to the point where we are producing all the goods that our society needs.  But, we need to find a way to redirect effort that goes towards selling goods and services and administrating their provision and potential work that goes idle because no one has found an economic way to utilize it, into efforts to create additional services that have value. 

The mismatch between ability to pay, and need for goods and services is reducing our society's productivity. 

* We need more authoritative attention to complicated problems.

No court system in the world has as few judges per lawyer, or per case, as the United States.  As a result, our court procedures tend to focus on reducing judicial effort even when more judicial effort would create value.  There are some classes of cases where this is not a problem, because they are largely pro forma, or where this merely shifts work from the public sector judiciary to the litigants who really care about the outcome.  But, there are lots of cases where taking the time to understand and deal meaningfully with the merits of a dispute early on would make a huge difference in the maount of private sector time devoted to resolving it.

The tendency isn't limited to the courts.  Public policies that are clearly failing, like the crack-powder cocaine differential in the criminal justice system, persisted for a couple of decades before legislators did something about the problem.  Judicial calls for legislative reform of an issue that comes up in a case producing a bad result frequently go unheeded.  Prison administrators who know that abuses are taking place under their watch don't have the inclination or the authority to solve those problems.  Failing schools fester for decades, for want to guidance and leadership from someone with authority on what to do about them.

One of the bigger problems in a democracy is that the need for an electoral or legislative mandate denies people on the ground the authority to deal with problems that they understand better than anyone else and solve them, even if they know of a solution that would work.

* We work too much.

Americans work more hours per year than any other country in the world.  We take few vacations.  We have very little maternity leave.  We rely heavily on day care.  We retire late.  We have few holidays and little personal time.  Part-time jobs are often not viable alternatives even for those who would prefer to work fewer hours for less money.  We need to find a way to negotiate more balanced alternatives.

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