Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

April 3, 2015 By Fausta

From Bratz to Tree Change

On this Easter weekend, while we pray about the big things, let’s be glad about the little things.

Read about A happy thing for Easter weekend

TreeChangeDolls

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Filed Under: business, society Tagged With: Bratz, Da Tech Guy Blog, Fausta' blog, toys, Tree Change Dolls

August 1, 2010 By Fausta

What the federal government should do and should not do

A lecture by Milton Friedman,

“The great threat to freedom is the concentration of power.” Listen to it all:

“Life is an underpaid occupation.”

Brought to you via Mr. Bingley

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Filed Under: economics, economy, government, society Tagged With: Milton Friedman

May 1, 2010 By Fausta

Decadence, and a shameful painting

ShrinkWrapped writes on Decadence:

Anthropologists have pointed to evidence of the reverential treatment of the deceased as one of the first signs of humanity’s advance from the primitive to a nascent civilized state.
…
At one time it was universally accepted in the heirs to Judeo-Christian Civilization that each life was precious; for most, the idea that a Creator had endowed each of us with “certain inalienable rights” was a baseline; all else followed. Now, the sanctity of life and of the body has been eroded in this most post-modern of post-modern times. The body has become commodified, that is, it is no longer a holy vessel but merely an hedonic avatar.

Which is hardly surprising, considering how the bodies of living people have become commoditized in so many ways. But it’s still appalling and shameful to see that commodifying rewarded by an institution:

‘Devotional’ painting of artist’s dead mother shortlisted for award
Jonathan Brown reveals the three BP portrait prize finalists
The so-called “devotional” painting portrays

The emaciated and lifeless body of 100-year-old Annie Mary Todd lies propped up in the refrigerated room of the undertaker’s funeral parlour.

Poor Annie Mary Todd was not spared indignity even after death. As ShrinkWrapped said,

The “artist” used her mother’s body for her own purposes, to help herself feel better. In our idiotically therapeutic age, such an excuse allows anything, no matter how foolish or misguided. This is the use of a body as a commodity.

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
To have a thankless child
, even in death.

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Filed Under: art, ShrinkWrapped, society Tagged With: death, Fausta's blog

May 1, 2010 By Fausta

Decadence, and a shameful painting

ShrinkWrapped writes on Decadence:

Anthropologists have pointed to evidence of the reverential treatment of the deceased as one of the first signs of humanity’s advance from the primitive to a nascent civilized state.
…
At one time it was universally accepted in the heirs to Judeo-Christian Civilization that each life was precious; for most, the idea that a Creator had endowed each of us with “certain inalienable rights” was a baseline; all else followed. Now, the sanctity of life and of the body has been eroded in this most post-modern of post-modern times. The body has become commodified, that is, it is no longer a holy vessel but merely an hedonic avatar.

Which is hardly surprising, considering how the bodies of living people have become commoditized in so many ways. But it’s still appalling and shameful to see that commodifying rewarded by an institution:

‘Devotional’ painting of artist’s dead mother shortlisted for award
Jonathan Brown reveals the three BP portrait prize finalists
The so-called “devotional” painting portrays

The emaciated and lifeless body of 100-year-old Annie Mary Todd lies propped up in the refrigerated room of the undertaker’s funeral parlour.

Poor Annie Mary Todd was not spared indignity even after death. As ShrinkWrapped said,

The “artist” used her mother’s body for her own purposes, to help herself feel better. In our idiotically therapeutic age, such an excuse allows anything, no matter how foolish or misguided. This is the use of a body as a commodity.

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
To have a thankless child
, even in death.

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Filed Under: art, ShrinkWrapped, society Tagged With: death, Fausta's blog

April 11, 2010 By Fausta

Behavioral economics hooey for better living

Andrew Ferguson explains the ruling phylosphy of the governing class:
Nudge Nudge, Wink Wink
Behavioral economics—the governing theory of Obama’s nanny state.

The premise of behavioral economics is “predictable irrationality.” (Another catchphrase—you have to get used to them.) We all know we do dumb things. But the behavioralists say they’ve discovered that we do dumb things systematically; we act against our own best interest (eating pie, failing to save for the future) with a consistency that smart people can observe, catalogue, anticipate, and exploit. If you as choice architect, for example, know about the “status quo bias”—people are disinclined to alter their immediate circumstances even in the face of a clear long-term benefit—you’ll switch the default option on the 401(k). A list of the irrational quirks, or cognitive biases, that behavioral science claims to have uncovered would be endless. In addition to status quo bias, there’s delusional optimism, loss aversion, the representativeness heuristic, the law of small numbers, disaster myopia, the availability heuristic, the planning fallacy, the mere-measurement effect, the mere-exposure effect, even the “yeah, whatever heuristic,” so named by Sunstein and Thaler, who have a bias for whimsy, often fatal.

This grounding in the real world, confirmed by social science, is supposed to make behavioral economics superior to traditional economics as a guide to regulating human activity. Traditional economics—rational choice economics, or neoclassical economics—gets a rough going over from behavioral economists. By their reading, its gravest error is to accept homo economicus, the notion that man is a rational economic actor who is acting always and everywhere in his own best interest, however conceived. Traditional economists don’t really believe this, at least not with the dogmatic insistence they’re accused of, but pretending that they do allows behavioral economists to position themselves as hard-headed realists trying to correct the airy abstractions of out-of-touch dreamers—a clever reversal of the cliché that usually makes liberals out to be the softies and right-wingers the no-nonsense types. Behavioral economics, wrote a smitten correspondent for the New York Times, “is the study of everyday life as it actually happens, not as some textbook says it should.”

It’s been 15 months now since behavioral economics was enthroned as the administration’s reigning regulatory philosophy. If it does indeed break with a century of conventional wisdom in economics, as its partisans claim, then we should be seeing its effects already.

“It’s all over the place,” Thaler told me. “It’s hard to find a domain where you don’t see aspects of this way of doing things.” He mentioned a recent proposal to require all employers to enroll their employees automatically in retirement accounts, drawing on the opt-out model championed in Nudge. The nudge given to employees, however, comes only after Congress levels an unnudgey mandate on employers. Thaler also pointed to Michelle Obama’s public campaign against obesity, in which she has delivered stern lectures to grocers, food processors, parents, and schools about how fat their customers, kids, and students are. Yet Mrs. Obama’s pestering is just an example of the bully pulpit—government officials and first ladies have never required behavioral science to pound the podium.

But they do, because they know what’s best for you.

And they know, even when clearly they don’t. Take a look at Michelle Obama’s Mirror’s Blog – a perfectly-named blog for this era where we’re jumping through the looking glass while hearing terms such as ““libertarian paternalism,” which makes me grind my teeth. MOMB shows you the people at the First Lady’s child obesity task force:

I’m not quite clear on what the purpose of the meeting was, but Lady M kicked it off and it sounded really important. Next, Petey O showed off his knowledge of behavioral economics (the fact that everyone there knew what behavioral economics is tells you about everything you need to know.) Then Surgeon General Regina B noted that corporations should provide female employees with a clean and private place to breast-feed because, she said, research has shown that children who are breast-fed for the first six months of their lives are less likely to become obese.Who knew! And here’s good news: someone on some Congressman’s staff was totally up to speed on this critical research (that I’m certain is backed up by a first rate epidemiological study) because someone already stuck that requirement in the Obamacare Bill.

Forgive me for being crass about it, but who gives the right to these people (and don’t get me started on the Constitution; let’s just stick with “practice what you preach” for the moment) to rule your life and tell you how to behave/feed your children when the Surgeon General herself is at least sixty pounds overweight and doesn’t even have enough sense to find a tailor to properly hem her trousers?

Maybe it’s because liberals are irony-poor people. Not only do we have an obese Surgeon General attending child obesity prevention planning meetings, we also have a “behavioral economics” expert spout off these pearls of wisdom:

“If there’s a regulatory philosophy in behavioral economics, it’s that we should recognize that people in the economy are human and that there are people out there trying to take advantage of them.”

Yes – the administration. Your elected officials and their political appointees are the people out there trying to take advantage of you, mostly in the form of separating you from your hard-earned money, and telling you should be happy about it. All because they know what’s best for you, and you don’t.

Ferguson continues,

In this sense, behavioral economics is just conventional 1960s liberalism—and conventional 1960s economics, too—that assumes the free market itself is a kind of unending con game, with the smart guys exploiting the saps. As an advocate for the market’s hapless victims, the government has the responsibility to undo the con, a task that will require only the smartest administrators operating according to only the latest scientific research and making the most exquisite moral judgments.

“Behavioral economics” is like the old arguments you would have with your mom when you were a child (and yes, once you become the parent):

It is the same move that Ferguson’s article describes because it presumes to know what you don’t — viz., the set of rational outcomes. As an exercise in paternalism, it reminds me of conversations as a child with my mother — viz., it wasn’t a conversation in which we had come to reason together to conclusions that we each might reach, even to agree to disagree. No, the conversation wasn’t over until I had come to agree with her. That’s deliberative democracy in a nutshell — and Ferguson describes the same move recapitulated as social science, in the form of behavioral economics.

Welcome to the 21st Century, America. The Obama century.

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Filed Under: Barack Obama, economics, economy, society Tagged With: behavioral economics, Fausta's blog, sociology

June 25, 2009 By Fausta

SCOTUS: Strip search was illegal

Following up on the Safford Middle School strip search case, an 8-1 decision:

Supreme Court Rules School’s Strip Search of Girl Was Illegal

The Supreme Court ruled today that Arizona school officials violated the constitutional rights of a 13-year-old girl when they subjected her to a strip search on the suspicion she might be hiding ibuprofen in her underwear.

The court ruled 8-1 that such an intrusive search without the threat of a clear danger to other students violated the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable search or seizure.

Lyle Denniston, writing at SCOTUS blog points out that :

The new rule is that searching students’ inner clothing, with exposure of their bodies, will be extremely difficult — though not impossible — to justify.
…
The other constitutional rule — searches of public school students’ backpacks, notebooks, other belongings, outer clothing, and pockets are generally allowed if they are based on “reasonable suspicion” — remains as it has for a quarter-century, but with a small amount of refinement, the exact scope of which is not quite clear.

And,

Thursday’s decision only applies to future searches, so the Constitution does not provide them a remedy.

And, hopefully, this will prevent cavity searches, too.

You can read the decision here (h/t Reason).

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Filed Under: education, SCOTUS, society Tagged With: Fausta's blog, Safford Middle School, Savana Redding, Supreme Court

April 27, 2009 By Fausta

When to marry?

I married The Husband when I had just turned 21, and have been amazed all these years at my good fortune.

Back then a lot of people wondered if that was a good decision. The answer, decades later, is yes.

Sociologist Mark Regnerus writes in the Washington Post today, Say Yes. What Are You Waiting For?

Of course, there’s at least one good statistical reason to urge people to wait on the wedding. Getting married at a young age remains the No. 1 predictor of divorce. So why on earth would I want to promote such a disastrous idea? For three good reasons:

First, what is considered “early marriage” by social scientists is commonly misunderstood by the public. The best evaluations of early marriage — conducted by researchers at the University of Texas and Penn State University — note that the age-divorce link is most prominent among teenagers (those who marry before age 20). Marriages that begin at age 20, 21 or 22 are not nearly so likely to end in divorce as many presume.

Second, good social science pays attention to gender differences. Most young women are mature enough to handle marriage. According to data from the government’s National Survey of Family Growth, women who marry at 18 have a better shot at making a marriage work than men who marry at 21. There is wisdom in having an age gap between spouses. For women, age is (unfortunately) a debit, decreasing fertility. For men, age can be a credit, increasing their access to resources and improving their maturity, thus making them more attractive to women. We may all dislike this scenario, but we can’t will it away.

Third, the age at which a person marries never actually causes a divorce. Rather, a young age at marriage can be an indicator of an underlying immaturity and impatience with marital challenges — the kind that many of us eventually figure out how to avoid or to solve without parting. Unfortunately, well-educated people resist this, convinced that there actually is a recipe for guaranteed marital success that goes something like this: Add a postgraduate education to a college degree, toss in a visible amount of career success and a healthy helping of wealth, let simmer in a pan of sexual variety for several years, allow to cool and settle, then serve. Presto: a marriage with math on its side.

Regnerus hits the bulls-eye next:

Too bad real life isn’t like that. Marriage actually works best as a formative institution, not an institution you enter once you think you’re fully formed. We learn marriage, just as we learn language, and to the teachable, some lessons just come easier earlier in life. “Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth,” added Tennyson to his lines about springtime and love.

Go read the rest.

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Filed Under: marriage, men and women, relationships, society Tagged With: Fausta's blog

January 13, 2009 By Fausta

The whore of Mensa*

She saved herself for graduate school… in “family and marriage therapy”. I kid you not:
Student auctions off virginity for offers of more than £2.5 million
A student who is auctioning her virginity to pay for a masters degree in Family and Marriage therapy has seen bidding hit £2.5million ($3.7m)

Natalie Dylan, 22, claims her offer of a one-night stand has persuaded 10,000 men to bid for sex with her.

Last September, when her auction came to light, she had received bids up to £162,000 ($243,000) but since then interest in her has rocketed.

And she has a degree in women’ studies, too. Prostitution for academy’s sake runs in the family:

Miss Dylan, from San Diego, California, USA, said she was persuaded to offer herself to the highest bidder after her sister Avia, 23, paid for her own degree after working as a prostitute for three weeks.

Once Natalie’s transaction is completed and she gets her “degree”, I imagine she’ll make a bundle as a “family and marriage therapist,” too.

But let’s hear what the guys have to say:
James:

The ironies here abound. She’s been admitted into a graduate program for women’s studies and yet seems not to have a grasp of even the introductory literature. Further, what she’s proposing is exactly what her sister engaged in; she’s merely done a better job of haggling over the price. More amusingly, the joke’s on her if she thinks these bids are legit and will actually result in payment.

Jules:

Anyway, she’s pretty close to endowing a seat at Harvard with that dough.

Paul:

In base economic terms, this woman is selling herself short. Her virginity, her purity, her chastity is worth much more than 3 or 4 million dollars. Ten times that amount would probably fall short. And the puzzle is how exactly it came to be that the modern age convinced so many women to throw away their most prized asset, all the while calling it a grand liberation.

Robert:

Has the [feminist] sisterhood suddenly converted en masse to free-market economics? Is the auctioning of sex viewed as some sort of “liberation”? (Bob Dole: “Where’s the outrage?”)

Alan Colmes asks,

Is one roll in the hay really worth millions of dollars?

To which Ron replies,

She does find it surprising that men will pay so much saying, “It’s shocking that men will pay so much for someone’s virginity, which isn’t even prized so highly anymore.” What she might not realize is that the majority of bids are being placed under assumed names by Eliot Spitzer.

(*) Post title borrowed from Woody Allen.

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