Families and Culture

Man In Critical Condition After Hearing Slightly Differing Viewpoint--Babylon Bee 


Exciting game last night. Pittsburgh is a tough team.

Jews have been awarded 40% of the Nobel Prizes in economics, 30% of those in medicine, 25% in physics, 20% in chemistry, 15% in literature and 10% of the Nobel Peace Prizes. Since the beginning of the 20th century, there have been just over 900 Nobel Prizes awarded. Since Jews are only 2% of the world's population, instead of having 22% of Nobel Prizes, 206, they should have won only two, according to the proportionality vision of justice. There's an even greater domestic violation of the proportionality vision. Jews are less than 3% of the U.S. population but 35% of American Nobel Prize winners. Are reparations appropriate? Penalties?

Krugman, in a calm, reflective op-ed:
"The only way that either American democracy or a livable planet can survive is if the Republican Party as it now exists is effectively dismantled and replaced with something better — maybe with a party that has the same name, but completely different values. This may sound like an impossible dream. But it’s the only hope we have."

The American government secretly expelled two Chinese Embassy officials this fall after they drove on to a sensitive military base in Virginia, according to people with knowledge of the episode. The expulsions appear to be the first of Chinese diplomats suspected of espionage in more than 30 years.

Don writes on a BBC story: 
...[The clip]... features kids from Bewsey Lodge Primary School imagining themselves in the role of Prince Henry, who wants to profess his love for and gay marry his manservant ‘Thomas’.
“This school teaches children about LGBT relationships from an early age,” explains the BBC, “This class of 6-year-olds is learning about gay marriage…all ages take part in LGBT lessons.”
Teacher Sarah Hopson explains how the children, “going to go out into that world and find this diversity around them, and they’ll find that at a young age as well. And the more they can be accepting at this age, you’re not going to face it further on because the children will be accepting now and will be accepting this diversity around them.”
The school has received numerous awards for its stance against “homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying” and follows the Personal, Social, and Health Education (PSHE) program, which lists “Diversity and equality (in all its forms)” as one of its key goals.

In 1700 when there were only 12,000 slaves in the United States, there were more than half a million in the Caribbean (517,000) and the Spanish Americas (553,000). By the early 1800s when the number of slaves brought to the United States peaked and stabilized at about 361,000, there were more than 4 million slaves in the Caribbean and nearly 2 million in Brazil. Between 1810 and before the Civil War started in 1861, fewer than 5,000 African slaves arrived in the United States.

On this day in 1773,  in Boston Harbor, a group of Massachusetts colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians boarded three British tea ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into the harbor.



                           Families and Culture

Emmanuel Todd has a book called Lineages of Modernity that tries to generalize about the relationship between family structure and cultural adaptability. It is one of those sprawling books built on an interesting and plausible idea without any documentation or real provability. A true coffee-house book, reminiscent of Sapien.

Todd suggests that the United States has a fairly “backward” and un-evolved family structure — exogamy (the custom of marrying outside a community, clan, or tribe) and individualism — not too different from that of hunter-gatherer societies.  But that makes us very flexible and also well-suited to handle the changing conditions of modernity.  Much of the Arab world, in contrast, has a highly complex and evolved and in some ways “more advanced” family structure, involving multiple alliances, overlapping networks, and often cousin marriages.  Those types of structures cannot  “loosen up with prosperity,” and allow their respective countries to enter modernity.  Rather they are stuck in place, and they will interact with the more physical features of globalization and liberalization in interesting and not always pleasant ways.  Many of those societies will end up in untenable corners with no full liberalization anywhere in sight.   

Todd describes Germany as having a complex, multi-tiered, somewhat authoritarian family structure, and one that does not mesh well with the norms of feminism and individualism that have been entering the country.  That family structure is also part of why Germany was, relative to its size, militarily so strong in the earlier part of the twentieth century.  He also argues that the countries that stayed communist longer have some common features to their family structure, Cuba being the Latin American outlier in this regard.
(This view of Germany is not new, it appeared often in Freudian-tainted analysis o the rise of Nazi Germany.)

Interestingly, Todd makes a strong case for Russia.  He reports that TFR (Total Fertility Rate) is back up to 1.8 after an enormous post-communist plunge, migration into the country is strongly positive, and Russia is very good at producing strong, productive women (again due to family structure).  If you think human capital matters, the positives here are significant. (adapted from Cowen)