Sowell Food for Thought

Another Uncommon Knowledge interview with economist Thomas Sowell came out this week, coinciding with the updated version of his book Discrimination and Disparities. There’s always wisdom that comes from listening to this octogenarian (I hope he lives at least another 20 years). Some of the stories I’ve heard before. I’ve read his biography. But some of it is new, or clarifying because of current data. He’s big on finding evidence from the data.

Thomas Sowell, on Uncommon Knowledge
screen shot from here

He has added a new chapter to the book, and here’s an example quoted from that:

The poverty rate among black married couples has been less than 10% every year since 1994. As far back as 1969 young black males whose homes included newspapers, magazines, and library cards had similar incomes to those of their white counterparts. Academic outcomes show a pattern of disparities similar to the pattern of disparities in the amount of time devoted to schoolwork. Apparently, lifestyle choices have consequences.

Host Peter Robinson asks him about that:

PR: So this is the constrained vision once again. Welfare state, that’s government; we don’t rely on that. Affirmative action, government; we don’t rely on that. We rely on hard work. We rely on the institution of marriage. That’s correct?

TS: Yes. In other words, these things— I don’t think it’s the marriage as such or the library cards as such; it’s that there are lifestyle choices that have been made. And the comparison I made was between—if you look at the poverty rate among blacks, it was at 22%, and among whites it was 11%, but among black married couples, it was 7.5%. So they not only do better than blacks as a whole; they do better than whites as a whole. So it’s lifestyle choices.

That’s not something we hear in the news, or from mainstream opinion commentary.

new edition, with new chapter

Thomas Sowell talks some about minimum wages. That was a particular interest of his, back when he was working on his PhD, and was still a Marxist, but was academically committed to empirical data (which, of course, is what led him in the opposite direction of Marxism so many decades ago). When he tried to get data from one department of government to another, he couldn’t. There was a sense that people’s jobs—in the government—were at stake if evidence showed, as some believed, that higher minimum wages led to greater unemployment.

Of that experience he quips:

I worked in the US Department of Labor, and I began to realize—well, a number of things—that the government is not simply the personification of the general will, like Rousseau or others would say. The government institutions have their own institutional interests.

His own life example about the minimum wage was as a 16-year-old high school dropout, when he got a job as a Western Union messenger, delivering telegrams on a bicycle. The minimum wage for the job, as set by the US Fair Labor Standards in 1938 was 40¢/hour. But by 1948, when he got the job, he started at the bottom, getting paid 60¢/hour—the going rate to get the workers, rendering the minimum wage irrelevant.

But then “compassionate” government stepped in to “help” by raising the minimum wage. The result is that 20 years later a black kid (or for that matter a white kid) can’t get a job.

Sowell and Robinson spend some time discussing the difference between the “constrained vision” and the “unconstrained vision,” from an earlier book, A Conflict of Visions. Constrained means that you pay attention to reality. Unconstrained means there’s an assumption that good things happen all by themselves, but if bad things happen there’s some institution to blame—even maybe civilization itself. 

So, when there’s disparity, there’s one side that looks for data and evidence to compare one approach to another (the constrained side). And then there’s the side that assumes there’s racism or some other social ill at fault (the unconstrained side).

Most of the time, in our country today, disparities are not racially caused. He talks about another possible effect contributing to poverty:

TS: Wherever you look around the country, around the world, you find people that live up in the mountains poor and backwards. Even in the richest country, including the United States. I believe the poorest county in the United States was in a mountain community which was almost 100% white.

PR: Somewhere in Appalachia? West Virginia? Southern Ohio?

TS: Yeah. And men in that county had a life expectancy ten years less than men in a county in Virginia.

PR: And the unconstrained vision says, “Lets fix that. Surely we can pass a law that would improve that.” And the constrained vision says, “Well, now, wait a moment. If people who live in isolated pockets in mountains are poor and backwards all around the world, and we see this pattern over, and over, and over again, maybe there’s something very deeply rooted in reality about that that is hard for us to get at.” Correct?

TS: Yes.

Robinson reminds him of a recent column in which he challenged Nicholas Kristoff, a New York Times writer who thinks whites should pay reparations for the legacy of slavery.

PR: Kristoff had ascribed the gaps between African Americans and whites in America—gaps in wealth, gaps in educational achievement, the usual gaps—to, and this is a quotation from Kristoff: “to the lingering effects of slavery.” And here’s Tom Sowell:

“If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood 100 years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. In other words, we could compare hard evidence on the legacy of slavery with hard evidence on the legacy of liberals.”

And so there it is. Life is hard; you use the word hard. You use the word serious. You use evidence. Tom Sowell is a man of the constrained vision through and through and through. Correct?

TS: Yes. Part of a vanishing breed, I might add.

There are a couple of times in the conversation that charter schools come up. They’re educating better than children in privileged areas are being educated. And they’re not getting the cream of the crop; they’re allowing students in by lottery, without even looking at they’re academic history. But they do have high expectations, and they don’t tolerate nonsense.

Near the end they cover charter schools in more detail. Robinson points out that Democrats—and he can’t remain nonpartisan about it—prevent quality education for those that need it. And Dr. Sowell agrees:

TS: That really is one of the moral outrages, that for many kids who come from a very poor background, and whose parents might not have had much education, a decent education is the one thing they have to have to have a better life.

And these schools have been absolutely spectacular. The charter schools. The successful ones. Now there are some that weren’t, but— For example, a few years ago on the New York statewide math test, there was an elementary school, grade 4 I believe, in Harlem, whose students passed those tests at a higher rate than any 4^th grade kids anywhere in the state of New York. I mean, we’re talking Scarsdale, Radcliffe, places like that. The Success Academy schools as a whole, their students pass both the math and the English statewide tests at a higher rate than any school district in the entire state of New York.

The vast majority of the kids in the Success Academy schools are either black or Hispanic. If you look at the five highest scoring school districts in the state, in terms of the percentage of students who pass the math or the English tests, their average family income ranges from four times that of the kids in the Success Academy schools to more than nine times the family income of the kids in the Success Academy schools. And yet, the Mayor of New York is doing his darndest to put a stop to the expansion of these schools in general, but his special ire is aimed at the Success Academy schools. And this is happening all across the country.

PR: Because they make the teachers unions look bad, in the public schools? What’s the political motivation? Why would Mayor de Blasio have it out for the charter schools such as Success Academy?

TS: Well, the teachers unions are the major reason. And we talk about the money they contribute, the votes they contribute. What’s happening, again, not just in New York, but other parts of the country, including California, is there’s all kinds of chicanery to prevent the charter schools from expanding. That’s why you have tens of thousands on the waiting list. It’s not that the charter schools aren’t willing to expand, but every conceivable obstacle is put in their way. Because, if you let that go at the natural pace, it would be very hard for public schools to compete.

There it is again: something about that government institution having its own institutional interests—apart, and probably in conflict with the stated goal.

What’s missing is a search for—or even a valuing of—evidence, or truth. The current rise of socialism’s popularity is an example—51% approval from those in the 18-29 demographic, according to a recent Gallup poll. How can that be?

TS: Yes. Socialism is a great idea; that does not mean it’s a great reality. One of the things that disturbs me tremendously is about this enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders and socialism at a time when people are literally starving in Venezuela, an oil rich country. And they’re breaking into the grocery stores to try to get food. And they’re fleeing to neighboring countries, most of which are not all that prosperous themselves, but at least you don’t starve to death in them. And none of that makes a bit of difference. I don’t think most of the people that are out there cheering for Bernie Sanders have given a thought to Venezuela.

PR: To the evidence.

TS: That’s right. To the evidence, yeah.

So that’s one theme for this conversation: get the evidence, so you know what you’re talking about.

And this is another common Sowell theme:

TS: In the government you have surrogate decision makers, and they cannot possibly know as much as the individuals whose person decisions have been preempted.

The third would be about lifestyle choices:

PR: Tom Sowell’s view is, get an education, stay married, and do your job, roughly?

TS: Yeah.

It sounds like what we’ve been saying here for years. If Thomas Sowell agrees with us, I think that means we’re on the right track.

Mature Conversation

Image found here

To begin, I’ll just place here some story headlines from the news this week.

Planned Parenthood's Richards Details Secret Meeting With Ivanka And Jared About Funding And Abortion

Richards revealed details of the meeting in her book. Trump and Kushner offered full funding for Planned Parenthood, even increased funding—if Planned Parenthood completely stopped doing abortions. She refused. Because Planned Parenthood isn’t about “women’s health”; it’s about doing abortions.

Next, this:

Planned Parenthood CEO Finally Recommends Adoption, But For The Wrong Species 

She recommended adopting shelter dogs, rather than buying a dog. LifeNews had this response:

Planned Parenthood is so obsessed with making a buck that the idea of adoption rarely — if ever — comes up. Sure, the organization will take credit for a few moms choosing life to feed the lie that it does more than abortion, but the numbers are hardly flattering. In its latest annual report, Planned Parenthood could only claim one adoption referral for every 83 abortions. If Cecile wants to rescue dogs, she might want to show a little more concern for their prospective owners.

And a few days earlier was this:

Planned Parenthoodcalled for Disney princess 'who's had an abortion' in now-deleted tweet 

Of course, removing a tweet after it’s gotten a lot of attention means it’s not really gone.

The tweet, found here

It was discussed today on the Michael Knowles show, worth hearing (requires subscription, but audio is free).

From my viewpoint, I’m not surprised when I learn yet one more unfavorable thing about Planned Parenthood. I believe the people within Planned Parenthood are guilty of heinous wrongs of the worst savagery. Chances are you agree.

Abortion is one of the most polarized issues in our society. And yet, it’s horrifying to a huge majority. The Democrat platform position is restriction-free abortion. But only 12% of Americans agree with that position. Not even the majority of the so-called “pro-choice” position agree. Only 22% of women go along with the Democrat position.

Put another way, on this most polarized issue, 88% of Americans agree that there should be some restrictions on abortions. A hefty 76% favor limiting abortion to the first trimester, or limiting it to only certain very rare circumstances (rape, incest, or to save the mother's life), or barring abortion entirely. In fact, 78% of women favor limits.

That’s a lot of agreement.

During a class lecture last May, Dr. Jordan Peterson was asked his opinion on abortion. He’s a thinker, and his answer was careful and much deeper than for or against. But he started with this:

Abortion is clearly wrong. I don’t think anybody debates that. You wouldn’t recommend that someone that you love have one.

Jordon Peterson
screen shot from the video

He’s right. The data bears that out. And yet it seems a surprising thing to say. He gives a larger answer, to address why this wrong thing still presents a problem for society:

So, the discussion regarding the legality of abortion is nested inside a larger discussion about the morality of abortion, and that’s nested inside a larger discussion about the proper place of sexuality in human behavior. And, to me, that’s the level at which the problem needs to be addressed.

If that’s the level at which the problem needs to be addressed, why aren’t we addressing it at that level?

He goes on to touch on the importance of marriage quite beautifully:

It signifies a place where people can tie the ropes of their lives together so that they’re stronger. It signifies a place where people can tell the truth to one another. It signifies a place where sexuality can properly be integrated into life. That’s no easy task. It’s a place where children, at least in principle, can be put first and foremost, as they should be once they exist.

But he believes our culture isn’t mature enough to have this conversation on proper sexual behavior.

He’s hardly ever wrong, and probably isn’t now. But maybe we help the culture mature by having the conversation anyway. Think about having a conversation with children around. Sometimes you interact with the kids, but eventually you’re going to have a conversation with the grownups, and the kids will be bored and tune you out. Maybe leave the room, or find some other way to occupy their interest.

But if you have a long series of these conversations around your children, eventually they mature enough to get interested. Long before they're ready to contribute, they start to pay attention, and start to think about what the grownups are talking about. And eventually the listening children have matured enough to join in. By then they’ve been exposed to grownup ideas over and over, and have thought about them, and started to think through their own opinions.

We shouldn’t wait until the immature are matured before having a conversation among the grownups.

The growing awareness and agreement that abortion is wrong is evidence of some maturing among previously less mature listeners.

So, in hopes of more maturing to come, I will say, sex outside of marriage is always wrong.

Look, for example, at the formula for avoiding poverty in America. I’ve written about it before, had this data for more than 15 years. It shows up in Brookings Institute data in 2013. Ben Shapiro mentioned it in a speech last October. It’s essentially the theme of the Charles Murray book Coming Apart. It’s this:

1.       Don’t have sex before age 20.

2.       Don’t have sex until after marriage.

3.       Stay married.

4.       Obtain at least a high school diploma.

Regardless of race or economic level of the family-of-origin, 98% of people who follow this formula move up to the middle class.

If “planned parenthood” meant this formula, that would be a societal help. The euphemistically named Planned Parenthood doesn’t tell anyone this. They tell you that everyone has sex outside of marriage, and that the inevitable resulting pregnancy is an inconvenience to you and therefore you have a right to kill. Does that really make a contribution to a person’s life? Or to society’s?

So there are economic reasons for following the formula. Beyond that, the next part of the conversation has to do with reasons for confining sex to within marriage.

I jumped in to that side of the conversation back when I wrote the original Spherical Model material. It’s in the “Family Is the Basic Unit of Civilization” section. Absolute monogamy is a necessary feature of a thriving civilization. This isn’t new information. Giambattista Vico knew it in the mid-17th Century. Nearly a century ago Joseph Daniel Unwin demonstrated it with data about pretty much all the world’s civilizations.

And if that weren’t enough, Moses got that information straight from God about 2300 years ago (Exodus 20:14).

It’s a mature civilization that has figured out how to build on the wisdom of the past, rather than throw it out as old-fashioned. Not every tradition is worth keeping. But when the wisdom of the ages tells us something, maybe we ought to believe it until there’s incontrovertible evidence that it’s not true—instead of assuming it’s worthless regardless of mounds of evidence, which is what our immature culture has been doing the past several decades.

So, this is my effort to get that grownup conversation going. I'm sure we'll talk again.

What Makes You Think That?

There’s a question I’ve learned that can be helpful when someone is upset about something that you’re not ready to buy into—or maybe more likely, they’re upset about something you know is false. You have to be able to ask this without snark, without obvious skepticism. Ask to sincerely know where they are coming from:

“Really? What makes you think that?”

What I think is that most people want to be able to think of themselves as good. They’re trying to figure out what’s right and wrong, and they want to choose the better side, but maybe they have very little guidance about what that is. And that makes them vulnerable to manipulation. Sometimes what they think they know just isn’t true.

As Ronald Reagan used to say about his political opponents, “It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so.”

There’s a clear example of this type of error going on in recent news cycles. NFL players have decided to protest our flag and country during the national anthem before football games. The purported reason? Racist cops killing unarmed black men and getting away with murder.

That’s the narrative. As Kaepernick said, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.… There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

Colin Kaepernick
Image from here

As David French wrote yesterday, 

Standing for the National Anthem is meaningless if it’s mandated, and such a mandate undermines the essential liberty of free speech.

In order to have a country with peaceful liberty, we need people who love the country and respect and revere it willingly. Those “taking a knee” are doing a lot that’s wrong, and it isn’t really about their First Amendment right to protest. They’re accusing their fans, who are innocent of the wrongs being protested, in a nation that can never meet their approval, because their accusations have no connection to reality.

For me, it’s no sacrifice to tune them out. Deciding not to watch NFL football is no loss. I can hardly get myself to pay enough attention to know who’s playing in the Super Bowl every year. But there have been plenty of instances when I’ve had to decide whether some entertainment was worth suffering through the hateful accusations from some entertainer using his/her celebrity to spread “so many things that aren’t so.”

We may have come to a point where it isn’t enough just to have NFL owners tell them what they have to do under contract of employment. We want them to choose not to protest the country that gives them greater freedom and opportunity than any society in their race’s history.

The symptom that our culture is seriously ill comes from a youth football league (ages 8 and under) that decided to do the “cool” trend and “take a knee.” Their coach, botching a teaching moment, made sure they knew why they were doing it. One third-grade boy answered, “Because black people are getting killed, and nobody’s going to jail.” So the coach joined them in disrespecting our flag and country.

screen shot from here

Did it not even occur to that coach to ask a kid that age, “What makes you think that?” Or, “Who told you that? Because, you know, that’s just not true.”

Because, in fact, black men being murdered by non-black police officers is not a trend. It is not something on the rise. It is a rarity, and it's inconceivable that such a murderer would be protected from prosecution.

Larry Elder (a black commentator, so he gets to say things without the knee-jerk racist label) listed some of the facts on his radio show a couple of days ago—all from reliable research. I found the facts repeated today in an article he wrote. I’ll summarize:  

·        Unarmed black men killed by police are extremely rare. An estimated 21 black males get hit by lightning in a given year. In 2015 (latest statistics) 17 unarmed (not necessarily nonthreatening) black men were killed by police, including those killed by black police officers.

·        Blacks are not more likely to be pulled over by police than whites. Whites have nearly as many encounters with police in a typical year as blacks do: whites 1.2 encounters, blacks 1.5. Any racial disparity in traffic stops is due to “differences in offending” in addition to “differences in exposure to the police” and “differences in driving patterns.”

·        Blacks who encounter police are not treated more harshly than whites. Bureau of Labor studies show, “Only 0.6 percent of black men experience physical force by the police in any given year, while approximately 0.2 percent of white men do. … Moreover, keep in mind that these tallies of police violence include violence that is legally justified.” And an earlier study of the 75 largest counties in the nation concluded there is “no evidence that, in the places where blacks in the United States have most of their contacts with the justice system, that system treats them more harshly than whites.”

As Larry Elder says,

Any death that results from police misconduct is one death too many, but the point is that police killing of a suspect is rare, no matter the race of the suspect or the cop. And a police shooting of an unarmed black male is still more rare.

Where the rare uncalled-for police shooting happens, we’re all in favor of prosecuting the offending officer, and improved training—and maybe even more cameras—to keep such incidents from happening ever again. The few high-profile cases meant to show the problem end up exonerating the police, but those cases get referred to anyway, and when someone is brought to the truth on such a case, the response tends to be, “Well, it’s still happening all over the place where we don’t hear about it.”

But what if they could learn that that’s a lie?

Every time the media repeats the “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” lie, they are doing yeoman’s work as racial dividers. Any time an authority figure such as a football coach or manager doesn’t say, “That protest is for your own time; it’s bad for business if you disrespect the flag and country that the fans who pay our salary love and revere,” they’re countenancing the lies.

I’ve read To Kill a Mockingbird, the Emmett Till story, The Help, and others. I know those bad situations existed. But they’re decades in the past. Mostly before my lifetime, and certainly before my adulthood. The stories seem foreign to most Americans. There are 320 million of us; of course you can find a few outliers. But institutional racism is simply not an issue in this nation.

When blacks—particularly those who make millions of dollars playing a ball game—complain that this country is so bad, they need to be pinned down: “What makes you think that?”

If I were to guess, I think it might be some kind of leftover from their early life in a worse place—which they escaped from but not everyone else did. Something like survivor's guilt. I don’t know how we get a word in, when we’re not being listened to and the truth is substituted with some fabrication, but it would be good if the “oppressed” learned the secret formula for avoiding poverty in America:

1.       Don’t have sex before age 20.

2.       Don’t have sex until after marriage.

3.       Stay married.

4.       Obtain at least a high school diploma.

Only 3 out of 100 who follow this formula remain in poverty. Everyone else gets work with enough income for the family to eventually move up into the more comfortable middle class. This is true regardless of race.

That’s a pretty good guarantee. For those exceptional 3%, if that’s all we had to deal with, we could easily identify what more needed to be done to help them along. Unfortunately, we also have to deal with mounting numbers of people who don’t live the formula but then want to blame someone else for their unwise choices.

What we could use, as a people, is a way to identify what leads to the sense of oppression. Chances are it’s the untruths promulgated by people who gain power when they stir people up to anger. That’s a millennia-old tactic, tied to all those historic cultures living in tyranny.

If we want freedom, prosperity, and civilization, we could use a better combination of understanding and truth.

Upward Mobility

Here at the Spherical Model, we talk about the interrelationships of the political, economic, and social spheres. Freedom affects prosperity, and both are significantly affected by the civilization level of the people.

I came across a long piece by Megan McCardle for Bloomberg News (I’m estimating 25-30 pages, but online it’s a bit uncertain) about the state of Utah, where I grew up. And the interrelationships are evident.

Let’s start with some descriptions. The story begins with the population: 192,672. That’s the city proper. But that’s not really accurate. That puts it in the range of the Tri-Cities in Washington State (Kennewick, Richland, and Pasco together), which has a small town feel, and not even a 4-year college. The Salt Lake metropolitan area is actually well over a million. And if you extend the area north to Ogden and south to Provo, you’re up to nearly 2.5 million. It’s not as big as, say, Houston, but it’s significant in population size.

Salt Lake City, view from airplane, May 2014

Salt Lake City and surrounding areas have a high percentage of Mormons, since the valley was settled by Mormons after they had been driven from five previous homes by mobs burning and looting their property and killing them. (The Governor of Missouri had signed an extermination order, which made murdering Mormons legal.) So, it’s no wonder they wanted a place of their own, away from threats, where they could settle permanently.

Going back there, when daughter Social Sphere went to college, she commented, “I’ve never seen so many blonds.” I hadn’t noticed it growing up, but she was right. It’s a little startling after Texas. A lot of the Utah population comes from the northeastern US, plus many from England and Scandinavia (my heritage). So blonds are common.

But there are other notable demographics as well. Hispanics are around 22%. Then there are sizable populations of Pacific Islanders, and Asians (Nepal, Myanmar, Sri Lanka), and Bosnians.

There are only about 2.7% blacks. There has never been a migration of blacks to Utah. There has also never been slavery, and blacks (and women) had the vote all along, before statehood in the 1890s (statehood took away the women’s right to vote for a couple of decades). McArdle asserts that institutional racism is the reason blacks stay away—I have to say that’s an incorrect assessment of the people, and of the Mormons. But I’ll save that debate for another day.

Anyway, some of the comparisons between Utah and other places are like apples and oranges just because there isn’t an underlying racism issue. And another overriding question is, can the things that are working be transferred elsewhere, or is it because of the Mormons?

Upward Mobility

Upward mobility—the American Dream—is more likely in Utah than in the rest of the US. The main impetus of the article is to explore why there is this upward mobility gap:

A child born in the bottom quintile of incomes in Charlotte [North Carolina] has only a 4 percent chance of making it into the top quintile. A child in Salt Lake City, on the other hand, has more than a 10.8 percent chance—achingly close to the 11.7 percent found in Denmark and well on the way to the 20 percent chance you would expect in a perfectly just world.

Government Spending

Government spending isn’t the reason. Utah’s government seems to commit very limited funds for both fighting poverty and for education. “Utah is dead last in per-pupil education spending.” It’s not last in educational outcomes, however. For K-12 schools, it ranks 22nd, but in higher education it ranks 2^nd. For overall education it ranks 9^th.

They have a surprising solution for homelessness that seems to be working, called “Housing First.” It turns out, if you just outright pay for housing for the homeless, before dealing with the cause of that individual’s homelessness, it’s cheaper and more effective than the crisis-led practice of dealing with them once they show up in emergency rooms.

As McArdle summarizes:

That’s the thing about the government here. It is not big, but it’s also not … bad. The state’s compassionate conservatism goes hand-in-hand with an unusually functional bureaucracy.

Volunteer Help

Besides actually cheerful, helpful government workers, the biggest factor seems to be community involvement, with an army of volunteers.

The volunteering starts in the church wards, where bishops keep a close eye on what’s going on in the congregation, and tap members as needed to help each other. If you’re out of work, they may reach out to small business people to find out who’s hiring. If your marriage is in trouble, they’ll find a couple who went through a hard time themselves to offer advice.

Besides the very local, very personal volunteering, there’s also larger, more institutional helping. Welfare Square is visited by governments all over the country and the world, to see how it’s done, and to see what they can replicate. It’s not just a food pantry; it’s a production facility—actually a network of production facilities: bakeries, dairies, canneries, farms, orchards, and more.

Here in Houston we have a peanut butter cannery producing for Church welfare storehouses in Utah and all over. It’s run by volunteer labor. Additionally, the cannery is used by the Houston Food Bank to produce about 400,000 jars a year for local food pantries. The only jars actually sold are to Mormons buying a case or so for their personal family pantries. All the rest is donated to the poor.

LDS Peanut Butter Factory in Houston

Help from the Church is intended to be temporary. And recipients are expected to do volunteer work in exchange for the help, whenever physically possible. Usually help will be to tide a household over for a matter of a few months, all the while helping them find gainful employment, or head toward the training or education they need. There’s no life-long welfare help in the Church.

McArdle contrasts that with government programs:

This combination of financial help and the occasional verbal kick in the pants is something close to what the ideal of government help used to be. Social workers used to make individual judgments about what sort of help their clients needed or deserved. But such judgments always have an inherently subjective and arbitrary quality, which courts began to frown on in the middle of the 20th century, in part because they offered considerable discretion for racial discrimination.

Turning government welfare into an automatic entitlement based on simple rules undoubtedly made it fairer, and kept people from slipping through the cracks. But making it harder to remove benefits from people who stopped trying also made it easier for people to make understandable short-term decisions which turned into long-term dependence, leaving a significant number of people disconnected from work and mired in multi-generational poverty.

One of the factors in upward mobility is what BYU research David Sims calls “middle classness that’s so broad it’s almost infectious.” He means that young people are exposed to social differences beyond how they were raised. Moving up looks possible. And belief leads to efforts to succeed.

Lots of Marriage, Not Much Alcohol

Mormons contribute some additional social benefits. Mormons don’t drink alcohol, so poverty-related outcomes of alcohol addiction are a much smaller problem in Utah.

Also, Mormons are more likely to be married. We’ve talked about the formula for avoiding poverty in America at the Spherical Model from time to time. That comes up again here:

Economists Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins famously estimated that we could reduce poverty by 71 percent if the poor did just four things: finished high school, worked full time, got married and had no more than two children — and the number of children was the least important factor in that calculation.

Salt Lake Temple,
photo from the Conference Center
in the rain, January 2012, by Social Sphere

Marriage avoids poverty not only for the couple as individuals, but also for the children in the next generation. Marriage builds social capital. In areas of the US where it looks like upward mobility is racially caused, “once they controlled for the family structure of the community, that effect disappeared. Marriage seems to have more of a correlation with mobility than race does.”

And not just the families of married parents benefit; neighborhoods benefit:

If you live in a neighborhood full of single mothers who had a hard time finishing school, that’s probably the future you’ll expect for yourself and your own kids. If you live in a neighborhood full of thriving two-parent families, that’s probably the future you’ll envision, even if your own father disappeared when you were 2. Marriage matters at the individual level, but it also matters at the community level, because the community can strongly shape individual behavior.

That sounds just like something we’d come up with here at the Spherical Model. Families are the basic unit of civilization. You need a critical mass of families with intact married parents in order to get out of savagery and into civilization.

Results

So, here’s what you need, if you want Utah’s results of exiting poverty. You need married parents raising families with stability and caring. You need a volunteer force to care for the less fortunate. You need people willing to care for one another, rather than leaving that to government. And you need minimal government bureaucracy that, where necessary, is done with care and efficiency.

You might get that where there’s not a handy supply of Mormons. I’m even hopeful that it is possible. That’s what the Spherical Model shows. But if you need social capital to get underway, it sure is handy to start with a Mormon population.

The Doctors Thornton

This past week, for book club, we read a biography: The Ditchdigger’s Daughters: A Black Family’s Astonishing Success Story, by Yvonne S. Thornton, MD (as told to Jo Coudert). It’s not a new book; it was first published in 1995. But it’s at least as relevant today.

It’s an example of how a father in the home, doing his job well, makes all the difference. The five Thornton girls grew up in the 1960s, at a time when their friends were surprised to learn that their married parents lived in the home—the father hadn’t left.

Donald Thornton, whom the girls called Daddy, worked two jobs always. His wife Itasker (usually called Mommy) worked as a maid or laundress most of their growing up lives.

It was a loving and stable home. But Daddy was also blunt, as you might guess from the opening lines:

“You kids are black,” Daddy sometimes said to us. “You’re dark-skinned and ugly.”

“Daddy, don’t you love us? We wailed.

“I love you. I love you better than I love life,” he assured us. “But I’m not always gonna be around to look after you, and no man’s gonna come along and offer to take care of you because you ain’t light-skinned. That’s why you gotta be able to look after yourselves. And for that you gotta be smart.”

There’s a fair amount of frank talk about racism in the book, but never as an excuse. Daddy didn’t let them do that. Just face facts, and then do what it takes to overcome the odds.

I hadn’t realized how much racism based on skin tone existed (still does?) among blacks. Light skin is preferred, and given advantages within the culture. It was considered marrying down to marry someone more dark-skinned. But the book is never about how insurmountable racism is. Just the opposite.

To those who work so hard to inculcate a high self-esteem in children, separate from their accomplishments, Donald Thornton’s way was different. The way out of poverty was to work hard, be smart, do what it took to earn respect. He had specific goals for them: become doctors. That MD was inarguable; society had to respect you when you earned that degree.

Daddy and Mommy expected the girls to figure out how to get A’s in school. They taught them to look at someone who did well, use them as a pattern, pass them up, and then choose someone else to be a pattern.

Sometimes the girls would say it was just too hard; they weren’t cut out for college. But their Daddy wouldn’t accept that. He’d say it was just a matter of working hard enough.

One important development in the family was music. When they expressed a desire to learn, Daddy found a way to get them instruments and teachers. Good teachers. Usually male professional musicians. The girls got good, and eventually formed a band, which paid for the instruments and lessons, and eventually paid for college.

It took some tremendous energy for the girls to travel and play in the band—The Thornettes—on weekends, and keep up with their schoolwork, plus sometimes extra jobs. They continued all the way through med school, which had to be dizzying and relentless. It also kept them busy, and out of trouble, and always aware of how much effort it took to earn advantages.

In the afterward of the edition I got (ten years after the original printing), Yvonne gives an update:

My oldest Sister, Donna (tenor sax) never celebrated her fiftieth birthday. She lost her battle with lupus in 1993 and died at age forty-eight. Although Donna chose not to graduate from college, she still recognized the value of education. Her daughter, Heather, is an alumna of the University of Virginia and the University of Pennsylvania. She is a social worker now living in San Francisco with her husband and young son.

Betty [a cousin who was adopted into the Thornton family] and her husband still reside in “The House That Donald Built” in Long Branch, New Jersey. Betty will soon be retiring after almost forty years of being a geriatric nurse.

Jeanette (electric guitar) continues to practice psychiatry in Albany, New York, in her subspecialty of Addiction Psychiatry. She has been married for over twenty-five years to her husband, Emile, a gastroenterologist. Although they have no children, Jeanette remains involved in many civic activities.

Over the past twenty-five years, Linda (drums and percussion) has since retired from the United States Army as Lieutenant Colonel. She is now one of the very few female board-certified prosthodontic oral surgeons in the country and holds a Master’s degree in Healthcare Administration. Currently, Linda is an associate professor on the faculty of Temple University School of Dentistry in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she serves as the course director for removable prosthodontics.

Rita, my kid sister (piano and keyboards), has had a more circuitous route to her present career. After leaving her position as a science teacher, she enrolled in Seton Hall University School of Law and received her law degree at the age of forty. Not being satisfied in the legal profession, Rita hanged her path, entered the New Jersey Institute of Technology and, in 2006, at fifty-four years of age, became the first black woman at NJIT to receive a PhD in Environmental Science.

As for me, since 1983 (when the book ends), my life has been occupied with trying to balance my roles as a mother, wife, professor, obstetrician/gynecologist, and author. I am still married to my medical school sweetheart, Shearwood. It will soon be thirty-four years. Where does the time go?

I have been affiliated with several teaching hospitals and universities since the book was published in 1995. The academic achievement of which I am most proud is my climb to the faculty position of Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Cornell University Weill Medical College in New York, and my delivery of 5,542 babies. I am presently a consultant in High-Risk Obstetrics (Perinatology).

It was an impressive goal for Donald Thornton to want all his daughters to become doctors. You set a high goal, you might reach it—and if you only get close, you’ll have accomplished more than if you set a lower goal.

One thing their Daddy told them over and over was to keep away from young men who would have no respect for their goals and their futures. It was all too easy to try to please a man, get pregnant, see him up and leave, and find yourself stuck in poverty. In a time, place, and culture where that was the common outcome, the Thorntons all managed to avoid that outcome. A determined Daddy and dedicated mother were the main reason.

In the afterward, their one more part that I think is important when you’re looking at successful career women:

My mother always told us: “No amount of success in your profession can ever make up for being a failure at home.” With that said, my greatest life accomplishment has been (with my husband) rearing two exceptional children. Our daughter Kimberly, is a graduate of Stanford University and is now completing her graduate studies in socio-medical sciences in the Master of Public Health program at Columbia University.… 

Our son, Woody (Shearwood, III), is a Life Chess Master and has had a stellar career in the world of chess. He was the 1997 United States Junior Open Chess champion… and won the United States Chess Federation Scholar-Chessplayer Award before entering Harvard University. Woody graduated cum laude from Harvard and began his medical studies at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons (our alma mater). When he graduated from P&S, my husband and I ascended to the stage and presented him with the diploma of Doctor of Medicine. He is currently in his residency, training to be a neurosurgeon.

One more time, the way out of poverty in America is:

1.      Don’t have sex before age 20.

2.      Don’t have sex until after marriage.

3.      Stay married.

4.      Obtain at least a high school diploma.

Donald Thornton set the sites for his daughters even higher. This was a starting point (he was actually only 18 when he married), but with drive, energy, and consistent common sense, he made it possible for them to have a much better future than a ditchdigger and a maid could normally expect.

Plus, the book is a joy to read.

Gilmore Girls and Social Commentary

We’re having a discussion about civilization today. But it will look a lot like a TV show review. I can’t promise there won’t be spoilers ahead, but you’ve had a full couple of weeks to watch the four new episodes—one per season—of Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life.

The official Netflix poster;
I found it on Wikipedia

I watched all four on Netflix this past week. And then discussed them with daughter Social Sphere, because that is what mothers and daughters do with Gilmore Girls.

Social Sphere got me started on the original series about a year and a half ago. I hadn’t been interested during the original run. They talked unnaturally fast, and I just couldn’t tune in often enough to get acquainted with the characters. It worked better for me to binge watch the entire series over a three-month period.

Let me start with things I like. Except for one of the seasons, Lorelai and Rory Gilmore have a close, honest, delightful mother-daughter relationship. It felt familiar to Social Sphere and me.

Eventually I got used to the pace of the conversation. I don’t know if it’s even possible for people to banter that fast; there’s no time for thinking up the quick comebacks and shared references. It had to be scripted and memorized. But it was fun to imagine that minds and mouths could function that quickly.

I think the show did a good job of showing the variety of personality types. It’s all right to be different in style and personality. Sometimes it was portrayed as a difference between the wealthy upper class Gilmore parents down the road in Hartford, Connecticut—with cold stiffness, rules, and expectations—and the quirky small town Stars Hollow people, where Lorelai and Rory lived, independent and comfortable. There was that contrast. But I thought the more personal contrasts were more interesting.

If you’re aware of classical philosophy, there are four elemental types: air, fire, water, and earth, described in various ways, but my explanation will do for our purposes here. “Air” is high energy. Tends to be full of ideas and possibilities, quick thinking but not deep thinking, light-hearted, fun-loving, often impulsive. There are possibilities for good and bad in this type, as with them all. Lorelai is quintessential “air.”

“Fire” is also high energy, maybe a stronger whoosh of energy even than “air.” Tends to be pushy, results oriented, practical. Luke might be this, maybe also Paris, but this type wasn’t a major component of the show’s dynamic.

“Water” is a slower energy: flowing, smooth, connected, emotion-based, detail-oriented, tends toward worrying—especially about whether they personally measure up, or whether they have offended someone. Rory fits in here.

“Earth” is slow, even still, and certain, immovable, rule-oriented, and exacting. Emily Gilmore is here, possibly combined with fire.

So much of the series is about the dynamics of Lorelai’s somewhat flighty “air” being unacceptable to her unyielding “earth” mother. Rory’s “water” connects them, and connects to both of them.

In the first season Emily Gilmore seemed over-the-top unlikable. But as we saw more of her, we began to see that she just had a different way of dealing with hurt, and showing love (or refusing to show love) after being hurt. She isn’t a villain; she’s just different.

Lorelai, who left home, pregnant, at 15, eventually achieved her dream of owning and operating an inn. She is still young, in her mid-to-upper 30s in the original series, so we also see her go through a series of failed relationships. And we hope eventually she’ll figure out that Luke is the steady center meant for her.

We see Rory go through high school at a private prep school that her grandparents pay for (exacting the price of weekly family dinners). Then she goes to college at Yale, her grandfather’s alma mater. During all this time, she experiences boyfriends, teenage angst, and worry about what direction to take in her future.

There were some bad years for Rory—mostly once she’s in college. On an interview on Jimmy Fallon, actress Alexis Bledel described that the writers were worried Rory was too much of a good girl, but then they overcompensated. Her first sexual encounter was with former boyfriend Dean, married by then (way too young, and not happily). Even Lorelai was morally taken aback, because that was adultery, and her own promiscuity never included that.

They have no church, or belief system that they can rely on. No way out of errors except to stumble about in yet another direction. But they’re mostly good to other people, loving of each other, and likable by those around them.

In the original series finale, the whole town celebrates Lorelai. She gets back together with Luke (we hope permanently). And even her mother comments that someone who inspires this much love and respect must have earned it.

Rory, meanwhile, turns down a marriage proposal from longtime (two-year?) boyfriend Logan, and gets a journalist job on the campaign bus for Barack Obama, which if he were to do well (in real life we know how that turned out) could be a great career starter.

Then there’s a nine-year break.

In Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, we have Rory back in Stars Hollow for a visit, and everyone is congratulating her on her recent piece in, I think, the New Yorker. Lorelai is still with Luke—though not married yet. It is a few months after the death of Richard Gilmore, Lorelai’s father (this following the death of actor Edward Herrmann in December 2014).

Lorelai’s ability to find things to be anxious about continues. We’re expected to believe that, after nine years with Luke, it suddenly occurs to her he might want a child, and considers a surrogate, much to his puzzlement. That’s the winter season. By summer, she’s anxious about losing concierge Michel (a haughty attitude with French accent, but somehow lovable) to a big city hotel. She decides to do what the character in the book The Wild does—go backpacking out West. She does indeed find herself, even without the actual hiking. She decides to marry Luke, and also grow her business, successfully recruiting help from her mother, who has also found herself in surprising ways. Lorelai seems, at last, to have grown up.

So, then there’s Rory.

She doesn’t have any work after the New Yorker piece. Nothing lined up. Opportunities seem to beckon, but nothing she wants. Until she gets desperate enough, and then she finds those opportunities aren’t really there either.

She’s 32, unmarried, unemployed, and aimless.

She has a boyfriend of two years that we meet briefly, but he’s totally forgettable—and she does. She treats him as disposable, and then chastises herself for it, but procrastinates breaking up until, in the final episode, he ends it—by text.

She has an ongoing affair with old boyfriend Logan, who isn’t married either, but is engaged. He’s content to continue the affair with Rory, as long as they’re discreet enough not to alert the fiancée. Rory’s OK with that as long as the fiancée isn’t living with him. Once she moves in, Rory realizes Logan’s marriage plans are real, and she’s just a mistress. Maybe we could use the old word “concubine,” where the man gets all the sexual benefits he wants from the woman, but she has none of the social respect or legal advantages of marriage.

And then, while she’s ostensibly out seeking a story, Rory gets drunk with a bunch of people waiting in line for something, and has a one-night stand with a guy dressed as a Wookie. She doesn’t know his name, and certainly doesn’t want to see him again. Even her mother admits that’s pretty slutty; Lorelai had never had a one-night stand. They brush it off as just a minor mistake. Maybe even as progress toward learning how to fully live life, we are supposed to believe.

Old boyfriend Jess offers occasional wisdom. He suggests Rory write about the story of the Gilmore girls—“write what you know.” So she dives into that. But without a book proposal, without her mother’s approval (until eventually).

I’m wondering about a 30-something in this day and age, in a writing/journalism profession, who doesn’t have some kind of online presence, where she makes her writings available, and continues to add content, regardless of whether she’s getting paid. Because without that platform, what’s the likelihood that she’ll get a book published, let alone sell it to an audience? But, because we’ve been interested in their story, of course we’re supposed to believe that all will work out for her once she has a manuscript in hand.

I’m looking at her generation. Her friend Layne, who married early, is happy and lively as ever. Her husband has settled in to a more respectable (confining?) job, but they continue the band, Layne still as drummer. Her friend Paris is unhappily married—but she was always unhappy, so no surprise. Logan is unmarried. His friends are all unmarried. Jess is still unmarried (although at least he seems to be doing well enough in his career dreams). There’s a group of 30-somethings in Stars Hollow, whom Rory must have grown up with but does not recognize or befriend. They live in their parents’ homes after having failed in the larger world.

Social Sphere tells me this is a reality today for a lot of 30-somethings. I thought this was maybe true for mid-20-somethings. But the Great Recession that has been going on since the end of the original series has been a serious hindrance to getting launched for a lot of young people.

I would have considered it less economic and more social, but the spheres are possibly interrelated.

The one exception was old boyfriend Dean, who back in the day wasn’t heading toward college or much of a bright future. We don’t know if he got educated in the interim. But he’s now happily married, fourth child on the way, gainfully employed in another town, and just in Star’s Hollow to visit family. He has no regrets about leaving Rory in his past.

So I’m thinking back on the formula for avoiding poverty in America:

·         Don’t have sex before age 20.

·         Don’t have sex until after marriage.

·         Stay married.

·         Obtain at least a high school diploma.

Dean eventually found his way back to the formula. So did Layne. But Rory and pretty much every other 30-something in the show have failed in everything except getting a college degree—learning without wisdom.

Clearly the realities of a near-decade-long economic downturn affected this particular generation. They didn’t have the opportunities they had been led to expect.

But the failure—not just for these fictional people, but for this demographic in real life—seems to have more to do with resilience. They’d rather wait out the bad times with their lives on hold, in hopes that things get better someday. Or they give up hope entirely and limit their expectations to whatever parents will provide for perpetual children.

Rory, who seemed to have so much potential, took until age 32 to get where her mother was at 15.

In some ways she’s worse off. She doesn’t have as many years to recover. And she doesn’t know who the father is; we can guess either forgettable boyfriend who just broke up with her, Logan who is marrying someone else, or mystery Wookie guy. At least Rory knew her father all her life. Her child won’t have that.

Lorelai and Luke will be more comforting and demonstratively loving grandparents. Rory might figure things out; she used to know how to work hard and seize opportunities. Maybe she’ll get that back with a child as motivation. But the possibilities of successful career followed by love and marriage followed by children just got thrown away.

Those people who say single moms can do just as well as married parents, note this (albeit anecdotal and fictional) example. Lorelai really did sacrifice and work hard to give every opportunity to her daughter. Yet the circle of unwed mother raising fatherless child continues.

Our disappointment in Rory must be a hint of what Emily Gilmore felt when her hopes and plans for Lorelai got thrown away.

There was a piece in the Houston Chronicle Wednesday, November 30, by Maggie Gordon, who had enjoyed the original series during her late teens and with her mother. She ends with this:

Maybe the reboot is a critique on society’s idea of how entitled the millennial generation is. Maybe the character traits and decisions that seem endearing at 16 don’t hold up at 30. Maybe I was too self-absorbed to realize the character’s shortcomings the first time.

And maybe I outgrew her. That’s good, I guess. I just know that my mother would have wanted more for—no, make the from—Rory.

Maybe there wouldn’t have been an original story without Lorelai’s teenage mistake. But in real life a child raised like Rory probably wouldn’t have the advantages of a successful mother whom she is close to, and extraordinarily wealthy grandparents.

Maybe, in real life, odds are better for kids raised by their married parents and taken to church—even when the economy is bad.