The other 33 percent*

Last month, the New York Times article that looked at the cost of junk food as compared with healthy food - pointed out the difference between the two dining options was more often time and convenience than money. The conclusion was dangerous close to "poor fat people are fat because they are lazy."
As Ezra Klein pointed out yesterday, there is a very recent study that amends this slightly. The new study concludes "fat people are lazy because they have poor impulse control and are worse at delaying gratification." It essentially found that the heavyset set has gotten heavier but many of the 67% of Americans that are not obese have stayed trim. This is because the obese crowd relies on foods that can be eaten quickly rather than making meals from scratch.
What struck me about these findings was how a culture so laden with cooking shows was not producing even more at-home cooking. Perhaps we should abandon the "Ace of Cakes" or Paula Dean for a 21st century Julia Child who's focus is more on frugality and DIY meals rather then peddling pre-made foods or indulging in the rich foods for everyday occasions.
Still, as a social worker friend of mine pointed out, often extreme eating problems are related to emotional eating. I think rather then pointing to low self-esteem, our culture's current food problems point to a culture of entitlement. The belief that we each deserve everything we want and we deserve to get it in the quickest, easiest way possible is rampant. It's effected our waistlines, our personal debt and deeply impacted achievement in our school (see: give every child a blue ribbon, since mine deserves to feel like a winner rather than competing for an actual rank).

*According to the CDC in 2011 33.8 % of adult Americans are obese.

In the Heights of NYC culture

Just in time for the end of its Broadway run, I saw Tony-winning musical In the Heights, last evening. It was fantastic - if you haven't seen it or even if you have corre, don't walk, to catch it before it closes January 9.

What struck me most was how the "NYC-ness" of the show goes beyond merely being set in Washington Heights. Unlike Rent or West Side Story, the show does not hesitate to get very inside baseball with its references to the GWB, the 9 train and ConEdison's ineptitude. Three overarching themes in particular:

• A textured city. Whether it's lead and lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda's urban wordsmithing, the ethnic diversity of cast and characters, the bilingual songs and dialogue, the gritty set or the cacophonous medley of musical genres, the chaos, depth and multiculturalism scream through each minute of the show.

• You hate it but its home. Main character Usnavi is not enamored with New York. In fact no one in the play is. But it is comfortable, and when you consider leaving you begin to realize what and who you will miss. This has also been my experience over the last 4 years that I've lived here. We all live here because there are jobs and things to do - but we deride the noise, the smell and the crowds. When I leave these are the very things I notice are missing.

• "If I can make it there…" Things in NYC do not often come easy. With more jobs, come more job applicants and the standard of long workdays. With more cultural experiences, come the crowds, the prices and the burden of choice. And with more neighborhoods come the multi-lingual street signs and maze of train and bus routes. While good things happen in the play and you do leave with a warm and fuzzy feeling - there's something very gratifying about the fact that not every major conflict has been wrapped up neatly in a bow.

Good art is always a cultural signifier and in an increasingly global community it becomes even more important that communities get as specific as possible with their depictions in order to capture the idiosyncrasies of a society that's becoming increasing homogenous.

Some Unhelpful Advice for Haiti

New York Times columnist David Brooks has an uncanny ability for sounding so reasonable in one column and sounding so crazy in the next. Last week, he managed to do both in the same piece.

Brooks began by correctly observing that the devastation from Haiti's earthquake was so great because the country is so poor. Disasters of similar scales in richer countries come with vastly smaller death tolls. However, while growth is the key to mitigating such tragedies, Brooks also (correctly) points out some unfortunate shortcomings in development knowledge:

"In the recent anthology 'What Works in Development?,' a group of economists try to sort out what we've learned. The picture is grim. There are no policy levers that consistently correlate to increased growth. There is nearly zero correlation between how a developing economy does one decade and how it does the next. There is no consistently proven way to reduce corruption. Even improving governing institutions doesn't seem to produce the expected results.

The chastened tone of these essays is captured by the economist Abhijit Banerjee: 'It is not clear to us that the best way to get growth is to do growth policy of any form. Perhaps making growth happen is ultimately beyond our control.'"

At this point, however, the wheels come off the bus. He argues that there are some uncomfortable truths that we must acknowledge about Haiti:

"...it is time to put the thorny issue of culture at the center of efforts to tackle global poverty. Why is Haiti so poor? Well, it has a history of oppression, slavery and colonialism. But so does Barbados, and Barbados is doing pretty well. Haiti has endured ruthless dictators, corruption and foreign invasions. But so has the Dominican Republic, and the D.R. is in much better shape. Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the same island and the same basic environment, yet the border between the two societies offers one of the starkest contrasts on earth — with trees and progress on one side, and deforestation and poverty and early death on the other.

As Lawrence E. Harrison explained in his book "The Central Liberal Truth," Haiti, like most of the world's poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized. Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10.

We're all supposed to politely respect each other's cultures. But some cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them."

As I've written before, I'm skeptical of these types of cultural explanations of poverty. While they can be excellent rationalizations of current facts, they seem to have little predictive value. As the previous link highlights, German, Japanese and Korean cultures were all viewed as hostile to capitalism and progress... that is, until each of these countries rapidly developed, at which point their cultures were viewed as promoting hard work and innovation.

Further, while Brooks highlights the aspects of Voodoo culture that stifle economic progress, he neglects to mention that certain aspects of Christianity (at least on paper) similarly discourage investment and growth. Many Americans believe in the Rapture. They believe that at any moment, they will be brought up to Heaven to observe the Tribulation and Apocalypse on Earth. Seems like that sort of mindset might impede a small business owner deciding on whether or not to expand. And yet, America is the richest country in the world.

Worse still, is Brooks' suggestion for changing the undesirable aspects of Haitian culture:

"...it's time to promote locally led paternalism. In this country, we first tried to tackle poverty by throwing money at it, just as we did abroad. Then we tried microcommunity efforts, just as we did abroad. But the programs that really work involve intrusive paternalism.

These programs, like the Harlem Children's Zone and the No Excuses schools, are led by people who figure they don't understand all the factors that have contributed to poverty, but they don't care. They are going to replace parts of the local culture with a highly demanding, highly intensive culture of achievement — involving everything from new child-rearing practices to stricter schools to better job performance.

It's time to take that approach abroad, too. It's time to find self-confident local leaders who will create No Excuses countercultures in places like Haiti, surrounding people — maybe just in a neighborhood or a school — with middle-class assumptions, an achievement ethos and tough, measurable demands."

I'm not really sure what this even means. There are many complex reasons for Haiti's poverty, but I'm not sure how creating the international development version of "Kitchen Nightmares" is going to solve it. Unlike with the Harlem Children's Zone, we don't have the authority to install "no-nonsense" leaders in another country. And when we've tried it, it hasn't worked out so well.

In the short-run, Haiti will need a lot of humanitarian relief to recover from this disaster, something even aid skeptics agree on. The long-run question of how to help Haiti (and other poor countries) develop is a more complicated one and we don't have a complete answer. I don't think, however, that naive appeals to "no excuses" paternalism is going to help.

(for a vastly snarkier critique of Brook's argument, read this piece)

Ha Joon Chang on Culture and Economic Development

Ha-Joon Chang, Cambridge University Professor of Economics makes an eloquent argument for why differences in culture don't explain differences in income:

"...in the early days of capitalism when most economically successful countries happened to be Protestant Christian, many people argued that Protestantism was uniquely suited to economic development. When Catholic France, Italy, Austria, and Southern Germany developed rapidly, particularly after the Second World War, Christianity, rather than Protestantism, became the magic culture. Until Japan became rich, many people thought East Asia had not develop because of Confucianism. But when Japan succeeded, this thesis was revised to say that Japan was developing so fast because its unique form of Confucianism emphasised cooperation over individual edification, which the Chinese and Korean versions allegedly valued more highly. And then Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Korea also started doing well, so this judgment about the different varieties of Confucianism was forgotten. Indeed Confucianism as a whole suddenly became the best culture for development because it emphasised hard work, saving, education, and submission to authority. Today, when we now see Muslim Malaysia and Indonesia, Buddhist Thailand, and even Hindu India doing economically well, we can soon expect to encounter new theories that will trumpet how uniquely all these cultures are suited for economic development (and how their authors have known about it all along)."

Culture has a certain appeal on both the left and the right as a determinant of a country's politics and economics. But cultural arguments are often subject to a winner's bias: since rich countries will typically have high levels of education and entrepreneurial spirit, we can look for teachings within a given culture that promote those values. But we're looking the wrong way. As Chang argues:

Culture is the result, as well as the cause, of economic development. It would be far more accurate to say that countries become “hardworking” and “disciplined” (and acquire other “good” cultural traits) because of economic development, rather than the other way around.

This is from a chapter in Chang's book "Bad Samaritans", a critical look at global trade. It's definitely worth a look.

Turning a blind eye to science

Andrew Revkin writes about the decline in science coverage by major news outlets:

"Newspaper coverage of science outside of health and wellness is steadily eroding. Even here at The Times, where the Science Times section celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2003 and management has always supported strong science coverage, we (like everyone in print media) are doing ever more with less. At CNN, among those leaving will be Peter Dykstra, a seasoned producer focused on science and the environment, and Miles O’Brien, a longtime CNN reporter and former morning news anchor, who I got to know when he turned to climate coverage in a big way several years ago. (See his spicy interview with Senator James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who challenges dire climate projections.)"

This is an important time for science in America. More and more we are facing an ideological struggle over the role of science and rationalism in society. In this clip from the "Big Think", Princeton geneticist Bonnie Bassler laments the fact that our culture has become weary, or even fearful of science:



We cannot forget that science is more than simply a collection of facts and figures. Science is a framework for understanding our world, for expanding knowledge and understanding. Science is what allows us to move forward. As Olivia Judson notes, science also provides a level-playing field for sharing ideas:

"...the beauty of the scientific approach is that even when individuals do succumb to bias or partiality, others can correct them using a framework of evidence that everyone broadly agrees on. (Admittedly, this can sometimes be a slow process.) But arguing over data is different from suppressing it. Or changing it. Or ignoring it. For these activities debase the whole enterprise and threaten its credibility. When data can’t be accessed or trusted, when “facts” are actually illusions — well, this threatens the nature of knowledge itself. And a society without knowledge is steering blind. The rubbishing of science is far more serious than any particular decision over whether to fund research into stem cells, the sexual behavior of fruit flies or the quarks and quirks of particle physics. Undoing the damage of the past eight years may take another eight. But it must be done. We are probably one of the last generations that will be able to use our knowledge and methods to guide human civilization to a sustainable future. This is our time."

Thomas Sowell is wrong on gay marriage

You would never guess from reading this piece, but Thomas Sowell is an articulate and thoughtful economist and commentator. While he discusses both affirmative action and gay marriage in the same article, I wish to focus on the latter.

Sowell's defines the terms of the debate as such:

"Marriage is not a right but a set of legal obligations imposed because the government has a vested interest in unions that, among other things, have the potential to produce children, which is to say, the future population of the nation.

Gays were on their strongest ground when they said that what they did was nobody else's business. Now they are asserting a right to other people's approval, which is wholly different.

None of us has a right to other people's approval."

The obvious (and ludicrous) implication of this argument is that heterosexual couples who cannot have children, or who choose not to, similarly have no business marrying. But the more interesting implication is that government should directly intervene into people's lives in order to advance collective goals. This is a bizarre position for a conservative economist to take, and at least one noted libertarian, Don Boudreaux, has taken notice:

"It's true that marriage laws emerged largely to deal with fact that heterosexual couples have children. But this fact does not imply - contrary to Mr. Sowell's careless claim - that "the government has a vested interest in unions that, among other things, have the potential to produce children, which is to say, the future population of the nation." Certainly in a free country, the state has no business governing in any way or for any purpose people's decisions on having children."

Sowell goes further, making a cruel and ironic argument on the rights of gays:

"While people may be treated the same, all their behaviors are not. Laws that forbid bicycles from being ridden on freeways obviously have a different effect on people who have bicycles but no cars.

But this is not discrimination against a person. The cyclist who gets into a car is just as free to drive on the freeway as anybody else.

The question is not whether gays should be permitted to marry. Many gays have already married people of the opposite sex. Conversely, heterosexuals who might want to marry someone of the same sex in order to make some point will be forbidden to do so, just as gays are."

I don't know how someone can say this and still be considered a serious part of the debate.

Gay marriage is not about "asserting a right to other people's approval" or imposing a way of life on anyone else. It is quite the opposite. Extending marriage rights to gays means removing government-sponsored opposition to sexual preference. It's about letting people choose their own path towards happiness, without needless interference from a nosy state. For anyone interested in the cause of liberty, the choice is clear.

But I can't say it any more eloquently than Keith Olberman:

Dude, where's my catharsis?

I've just had the privilege of returning from an early screening of Choke, a movie based on one of my favorite novels of the same name. It opens September 26 and I don't want to spoil any of the film, but just urge everyone who likes laughing and does not have what they call a "sensitive constitution" to see it. 

But I'm not blogging just to make a shameless plug. Part of the preview tonight was a Q&A session with actor Sam Rockwell, director Clark Gregg and - the guy I went to see - author of the adapted book, Chuck Palahniuk. Anyone familiar with Palahniuk's work (Fight Club, Survivor, Haunted) will know that he writes about unconventional- and often taboo - communities. During the post-movie talk he explained some of his interest in these groups. 

He said that church used to be a place for open confession, "where you could be forgiven and loved for the worst part of yourself." He pointed out that often today church-going is about maintaining reputation for being good, rather than coming clean with ones sins. He argued this public bad behavior has been pushed further to the fringe to collectives such as support groups, addiction recovery 12-step programs and sex or suicide hotlines. And when it isn't expressed at all it can escalate to bouts of violence.

What he neglected to mention was the outpouring of these kind of activities online - forums and chat rooms that lend credibility and support for behavior that mainstream society, for example  cyber pranking or pro-ana Web sites. 

But the underlying point that these communities, which recognize human nature's dark side, are truly timeless. Think Roman gladiators or Mayan sacrifices. Is it true that we need to be bad? I would argue that much of what these activities accomplish in "blowing off steam" can be captured through art or athletic expression. One of my favorite examples is called flarf - deliberately offensive poetry which is particularly culled from hate speech published online. What a fantastic way to recycle harmful words and re-examine them!

Of course, Palahniuk's writing also imitates the very same underground community taboos that it satires. It's healthy to remember that every era of history has had its light and dark sides. And while Olympic competition may never replace international military conflict, attempting to master ones own demons may result in some pretty incredible art/writing/interpretive dance/gold medal record-breaking .... the possibilities are endless.