Funding Week: Thursday

This is the week I ask for money to pay the piper.  Please donate!  The button is on the left and you will feel so good afterwards!

I serve a unique niche in the blog marketplace:  The super-smart and super-nice individuals!  That's the honey to attract you.  The vinegar would be that I can't go on doing this without the expenses being paid.


Thank you!  Here's a bleeding heart for you:

This is the white form of Dicentra spectabilis, from my garden.  If you pick one of the flowers, turn it upside down and pull outwards from the little wings, you will see a little lady sitting in a bathtub!

Time To Prune Those Hedges. Not A Gardening Post.

The UK Guardian tells us that

The world’s top 25 hedge fund managers earned $13bn last year – more than the entire economies of Namibia, the Bahamas or Nicaragua.

And last year was a bad year for hedge funds!  What miraculous skills those 25 men (no women in the top 25 list)  must have to be worth more than whole countries!  And what on earth can you do with so much money?  Buy political influence?

Hedge fund managers are indeed blessed.  In the US they even get to pay income tax  at a lower rate:

Many hedge funds are structured to take advantage of carried interest. Under this structure, a fund is treated as a partnership. The founders and fund managers are the general partners, while the investors are the limited partners. The founders also own the management company that runs the hedge fund. The managers earn the 20% performance fee of the carried interest as the general partner of the fund. 

Hedge fund managers are compensated with this carried interest; their income from the fund is taxed as a return on investments as opposed to a salary or compensation for services rendered. The incentive fee is taxed at the long-term capital gains rate of 20% as opposed to ordinary income tax rates, where the top rate is 39.6%. This represents significant tax savings for hedge fund managers.

It also represents a significant hole in the government's tax revenue, compared to what those revenues would be if ordinary income tax rates were used, and that hole is patched up by taxing others more and/or by slashing various government projects.

This is wrong.

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But donating money to this blog is not wrong!  





  

Funding Week: Tuesday. On the Monster Spirea.

This is the week to fill my coffers with money.  You would smirk if you knew how little the total amount is that I need, how easily you could afford to help me reach it.

It is to you, my erudite and kind readers, that I turn to when I need my blogging expenses covered:  the need for a large-screen computer and an ergonomic keyboard, the fees I pay to get access to various data sources and the chocolate that fuels the work.

So please pay the piper.  If you are really low in money send praise instead.  Us divines like praise and prayer, right?  The PayPal button is in the left column.  My thanks!

In other news, I have been cleaning out the "gardens" I used to have before I became addicted to running this blog.  Here's a picture of how they once looked, with the bonus of two very loving dogs (Henrietta the Hound and Hank the Chocolate Lab, both now spirit dogs):

But this story is not about the dead gardens (for dead they are). 

It is a story about a small shrub, called Spirea japonica 'Shirobana'.  The shrub came with the house, so I didn't choose it.  But it never grew taller than three feet, never suffered from any pests of diseases, always bravely produced the ghastly combination of its flowers and in general behaved so well that I let it be despite those ghastly flowers.

And my reward for that?  Finding last summer that the shrub had sent suckers everywhere.  I had over one hundred baby Spireas (counted them while pulling them out) in what some might euphemistically call my lawn, and several fairly large teenager Spireas in the areas of the yard where the soil is good.

The time for a Spirea death sentence had arrived.  It shouldn't be too hard to dig up a shrub never reaching more than three feet in height, right?  Just get your spades and shovels and axes and root cutters all together and prepare for half an hour of arduous work.

Wrong.  The killing of the Spirea took almost a week and lots of helpers contributed.  That's because what was under the ground matched that sucker spread above the ground, not the size of the original parent bush. 

Some of the roots were thicker than my wrists, and however deep I dug I always found another layer of roots.   (You should have seen me work on it a few days ago, by the way, in a drizzling rain.  I had dirt smears all over my face and mud everywhere else because the shrub fought back so hard, making me fall on my butt several times.)

I still feel guilty about killing a perfectly healthy plant, indeed an energetic plant.  Maybe I should offer it to someone I dislike so that it can continue living?

Is this a metaphor about politics, you might ask, bored to the gills by this gardening lady story. 

Yup.  By the time you see some innocent-looking, well-groomed politician saying the most awful, ghastly things, the network supporting that person is already everywhere (school boards, local governments, think tanks).

 

This Is Quite Wonderful: Aristotle on Trolling

In the Journal of the American Philosophical Association Rachel Barney of the University of Toronto writes about Internet trolls.  You can download the whole short article on the linked page.

A few snippets:

That

That trolling is a shameful thing, and that no one of sense would accept to be called ‘troll’, all are agreed; but what trolling is, and how many its species are, and whether there is an excellence of the troll, is unclear.
...

And this is how the troll generates strife. For what he indicates is known to be false or harmful or ignorant; but he does not say that thing, but rather something close. In this way he retains the possibility of denial, and the skilled troll is always surprised and hurt, or seems to be, when the others take his comments up. And so he sets the community apart from each other, and introduces strife where before there was scarcely disagreement.

So lovely!   I haven't met many trolls of such excellence, though maybe the ones who do circular debating* qualify as examples.  Still, wouldn't it be quite wonderful if all trolls were so skilled, assuming that they, like death and taxes, are unavoidable.

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*  I used to get my exercise from circular debating with trolls.  The nature of those is of a perfect circle, starting and ending at the same place, and that place is the troll's first assertion (A) which pops right back after some minor Greek goddess has spent hours bringing up evidence first against A, then its mutated form B, then a sidestep argument (C) etc., all the way to assertion Z.

It took me a while to realize that this exercise was not a debate but just a bizarre form of trollish entertainment.

The picture is of a Scandinavian troll doll, probably having nothing to do with the etymology of Internet trolling.  But the hair is good, almost Trumpian!

PS:  Don't forget that it's my fund-raising week...

Funding Week: Monday

I traditionally extort money from my readers in May, and this is the week.  If you would like to support my research and writing costs (and provide me with chocolate, one of the necessary nutrients), you can click on the PayPal Donate-button in the left column.  The lump-sum donations give me a better net yield, but the monthly donations might be gentler with you.  As always, do not feel that you have to give if you are poor.  My sincere thanks go to all of you who read this blog and to all of you who help me run it.

About the book project*, because you deserve to know: 

I finished the first draft of the book two years ago.  Then I sat on it.  Well, not the book but the project, largely because life and several family deaths and illnesses intervened, but also because I was very very stupid and simply assumed that the rules for non-fiction books are the same as for fiction books, i.e., write the book first and then flog it. 

It turns out that this is not the case, that I should pretend I haven't yet written anything but a proposal. 

This proposal, together with about 10,000 pages of other stuff (how wonderful I am, how many readers I could provide with the flick of my fingers, why this particular book would beat all other books in a wild boxing match, why any thinking reader would ever wish to pay to read it,  what my great-great-grandmother's favorite dish was and so on and so on), should be sent to various university-linked** publishers, but only to one at a time.

The selected publisher would then sit on the package from several months to a year.  Should that publisher not like the proposal, it could be sent to a different publisher, only the different publisher wants a different set of those 10,000 pages (perhaps something about the great-uncle Ilmari's second name being Donatus and how often I floss my fangs), but the same several-months-to-a-year of musing time.  And so it goes.

Because this particular book will never provide me with retirement income and because I already have read it, the incentives to work on all that self-marketing just weren't there***.  But now I have printed out the first draft chapters and might update and polish them and perhaps make them available to those who are interested in the topic.

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* The topic is how psychological, sociological and some medical research about women, in particular,  and gender, in general,  is popularized, what biases are visible in those popularizations and how they affect what gets dragged out into the limelight and what gets hidden, as well as what we ultimately "learn." 

**  I began this search by looking for an agent (those individualized 10,000 page-long packages were required for that, too), and I was told by two of them that although they liked my proposal it would be better suited to a university press than the commercial marketplace.  Which was a lovely way of rejecting the proposal.

***  And also because I am weird.

Happy Mothers' Day. Echidne Thoughts.

1.  This video (in Finnish, but simple enough to follow without knowing the language) shows how one folds a bed sheet before putting it in a mangle.  The attached story notes that the tradition of the M-fold of the sheets is found only in some countries in Northern Europe.  The Finns have it, the Germans have it, but the Swedes do not have it.  I doubt that the custom is especially Lutheran, even though the article suggests that theory, because then the Swedes should have it, too.

My maternal grandmother taught me the M-fold.  When I moved abroad I assumed that any helper (the second person needed for the tugging) would know how to fold a sheet properly!  And none of them did. 

Cultural customs are odd.  People seem to believe that their cultural customs are the only natural way to do something!  Country-hopping of the kind I have done should kill that belief very quickly, and I thought it had done this for me.  But my assumptions about the M-fold tells me that I'm better at noticing some culture-dependent customs (about sexism, say) faster than other customs.

The point of this story is about knowledge, the way it is informally passed on by our parents, often by our mothers, and how we forget who passed the knowledge on.   Who taught you to cook?  Who taught you how to use the washing machine?  Who taught you to brush your teeth?

A Disqus Dilemma

That would be the comments section. I changed a Blogger setting yesterday to redirect all visitors to the HTTPS version of the blog address.  It is supposed to be safer.

That change messed up the Disqus comments.  They disappeared, probably because the Disqus widget for Blogger uses HTTP and this creates mixed contents errors.   I tested the blog for those and Disqus was found guilty as charged.

The obvious solution seems to be here, but it's for the universal code, not for the Blogger plugin.  In any case, I don't see how I could get inside the plugin to mess with it.




 So I canceled the redirecting, but that can't be a long-term solution.  Any advice?  Anyone?  Bueller?  Assuming the comments work.

On Meat And Wolves. O How Women Dress!

Via Eschaton, this news about a poster found in the library of an Arizona school:

You can click on the picture to read the text, but it begins like this:

so you think you come to school looking pretty hot
but what the boys see is meat and it's distracting
so they make lousy grades

A senior at the school, Alissa Adams got the poster removed.  It seems that nobody took responsibility for making it, although it was a librarian who put it up.

I love the comparison of girls to meat and the boys to wolves.  But if girls really were meat and boys really were wolves, shouldn't the wolves be kept away from the school?  Instead, the poster then argues that the "meat" gets the "wolves" to fail at school and also in life and ultimately the "meat" will have to support the "wolves."

It's the old story:  Eve did it!  For almost any value of "it" among certain religious fundamentalists.

Note how insulting the above poster is to boys, too.  It assumes they are pulled around by nothing but their penises.  It assumes they have no will power, no self-control, no responsibility for their own grades, even.

The above is a very tiny example of the traditional belief that men cannot (or don't have to) control their libidos, so women must do that controlling for them by, essentially, covering up.

To see the same principle work in a much wider context, spring in Tehran means an increase in the size of the  morality police which patrols the streets looking for women who are not dressed properly:

As the mercury rises in Iran, winter coats are back in the closet, flowers are popping up — and so are the so-called morality police. Despite objections from Iran's president, Hassan Rouhani, Tehran's police have announced up to 7,000 undercover officers will be on the lookout for those who don't follow conservative Islamic modes of dress and behavior.
They're called the Gashte Ershad, the "guidance patrol," and they have broad powers to chastise and even arrest people for failing to meet what might be called the modesty test.
Men are occasionally stopped — perhaps if their beards are too long, making them resemble jihadists — but usually, it's women who attract the attention of the Gashte Ershad.

A 2014 campaign by the conservatives in Iran compared improperly clad women not to meat but to

unwrapped candy bars preyed on by flies 

The similarity to the Arizona school library example is clear:  Women and girls are food (meat or candy bars), men and boys are animals (wolves or flies).

But that these two cases resemble each other at all is puzzling from a different angle:

Iranian women are already dressed in ways which would count as extremely modest, even the ones who show a little bit of hair under their head scarves.  So why is that not sufficient?

Is any amount of modesty ever sufficient?   If a woman wears a niqab leaving only her eyes visible, she might still be scolded for immodesty in Saudi Arabia.

Sigh.  It's an impossible task, that getting rid of tempting females.

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A post-script:  I'm not opposed to rules concerning appropriate dress in various circumstances (school, work, funerals, swimming pools etc), but such rules should be as gender-neutral as possible, and the rules shouldn't be made up by a few authoritarians but by some sort of a democratic process.

As an aside, it's fun to imagine what would happen if rules were, in fact, made gender-neutral in, say, Saudi Arabia, and men had to wear the abaya, too.  Right now men in Iran and Saudi Arabia can wear the same kind of clothing as men in the West.  But women cannot.  Yet it is presumably the western cultural onslaught that the morality police in Iran try to stop by harassing only women.


  
 

Big, Swaggering , Rascally He-Men. Or A Few Presidential Election Thoughts.

Some Echidne thoughts about the 2016 US presidential primaries:

1.  Ted Cruz, the forced-birth fundamentalist has aborted his run, and Donald Trump is now the winner in the Republican field,  even in the eyes of others than himself.

His run reminds me of the time when my sainted pointer, Henrietta the Hound, was chasing a squirrel in the woods (yes, I yelled various commands at her to stop) and realized that she was actually going to catch the critter, which she didn't want to do.  So she started running in place, to give the squirrel time to climb up a tree.  It was one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

I don't see how Trump could run in place that way, which means that we are in for a very interesting and vicious election campaign season.

Trump's Use Of The Woman Card. Brilliant, Says Scott Adams.

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal (yes, that James Taranto) loves Scott Adams, the cartoonist who created Dilbert.  That love is based on important values the two men share:  a general contempt for women, the belief that women are not that smart and that women are mostly just a very annoying necessity which should have been created with an off-switch*.  So it's natural that Taranto quotes Adams a lot.

Most recently he linked to Adams' brilliant explanation for why Trump was going to win not only the votes of most men** but also enough of those over-emotional and illogical women's votes (too bad about that female suffrage) to give him a good chance to be the new Lion King (president) of the United States. 

10. Trump rolled out the “woman card” attack on Clinton. Expect lots of backlash and hollering about sexism. Also expect that 100% of the voting public knows that the “woman card” accusation is a persuasion death blow to Clinton’s campaign. And Trump is the only candidate alive who would dare say it out loud.
Trump’s “woman card” strategy is weapons-grade persuasion. It is a “high ground” maneuver with an “identity” angle. Either one of those approaches can be a kill shot. But together?
Holy sh*t.
I’ve not seen anything like it. The engineering is superb.
Trump will probably win with men for all the obvious reasons. But winning with women has until lately seemed impossible. So the “woman card” kill shot is aimed at women voters, not men. And what it does is flip the framing, as Trump likes to do.
Clinton framing: It is time for a woman president.
Trump framing: Gender is not a job qualification
I remind you that this is the year 2016. Trump’s message recognizes that gender should not be a hiring criteria. That’s the high ground. You can’t get higher.

Wow!  That is sooo smart.  I would never have been able to create such an engineering miracle, being a girl goddess.

Whatever.  In this reality Hillary Clinton is still about a zillion times more qualified in actual political job experience and relevant knowledge than Donald Trump, who, I must admit, is a lot more experienced in bankrupting firms.  So if we leave gender (and Trump's sexism) out of this altogether, Clinton remains the more qualified candidate.

Why did these two gentlemen find Trump's "woman card" trick so awe-inspiring?  I have no idea, but if I had to make a guess it would be that they truly think female voters aren't that sharp.  So it goes.

Where was I?  Oh yes, more on Taranto's opinions:

Give Trump this: He is the one candidate you can count on to ignore feminist demands that he put Mrs. Clinton on a pedestal.

What rubbish!  Trump would put her up a pedestal in a minute, if he could then look up her skirt.***


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*  Want to learn more?  Check out these two posts (1) and (2) on Scott Adams' views on women, or that lions-are-men-zebras-are-women post.  This post has a bit more on James Taranto's views.

** Against Hillary Clinton.  She is assumed to be the Democratic candidate.    As Adams states, Trump is assumed to win enough men's votes "for all the obvious reasons."  That could be code for something very mysterious, having to do with men being lions and women being zebras.  Or he might just mean that white men tend to vote Republican.

I do love that lions-and-zebras story!  It's wonderful, even in the present setting:  Trump, the old lion with the bad mane, sets a trap at the watering hole (voting polls) for the almost equally old zebra, Clinton,  to gobble her up.

*** The bit about "feminist demands" is also mostly rubbish.  That is because the world of feminism is a dangerous jungle where boa constrictors hide behind every tree and where poisonous giant spiders glide down a vine and drill straight through insufficiently pure people's eyeballs, in order to lay eggs inside their cerebellums.

I made that last bit up, largely because a) manly men like Taranto always assume that feminists are like ladies in a church choir, all singing in harmony, but not really frightening at all,  and b) because many feminists are not Clinton-supporters and c) because there really is no central Kremlin office which coordinates Feminist Demands.  Rather the reverse, in fact. 

What Sells In Political Commentary. A Sarcastic Take.

1.  Giving political commentary while being famous for some totally different reason.  People will want to hear what you have to say, even if it makes very little sense:

Tim Robbins and his ex, Susan Sarandon, have certainly made news in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, with Robbins going to bat for Bernie Sanders on Twitter and Sarandon speaking out against Hillary Clinton and even appearing to suggest she might vote for Donald Trump instead.

Sarandon wouldn't go quite that far in an interview with Stephen Colbert on Wednesday, but she did suggest why she might do such a thing.
"I'm more afraid actually of Hillary Clinton's war record and her hawkishness than I am of building a wall," Sarandon said. "But that doesn't mean that I would vote for Trump."

Sarandon can vote for whomever she wishes, of course.  But comparing Clinton's hawkishness in foreign policy to Trump's immigration policy is comparing apples to oranges.  In reality Trump is hawkier than Clinton and wants to build a giant wall.  Is "hawkier" a word?

This category is overflowing with celebrities who get the microphone even though they haven't done their homework (coughClintEastwoodcough).  Sarandon's comment is just the most recent one.

2.  Have your writing posted under a really shocking title!  Exaggerate!  Promise the moon!  Be very very partisan.

That always works, even when the article itself is milquetoast or interprets data wrong, and it works because many of us just look at the headline (tl;dr)*, but that counts as a click for the advertisers.  And it is clicks which matter.

3.   Keep it short and emotional.  Don't confuse people with too many facts (tl;dr)*  Note that the term "emotional" covers anger.  Anger is the default emotion in politics, but recently fear might sell better.  Be very very afraid!

Indeed, any hind-brain emotion (anger, fear, sexual arousal) will make an article popular.

4.  Avoid everything I do on this here blog.





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* too long, did not read

Donald Trump And The Gender Card

So it has begun, Donald Trump's election campaign against Hillary Clinton.   The first shot:

While celebrating sweeping victories in five primaries Tuesday night, Donald Trump mocked the qualifications of Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and suggested she was playing "the women's card" to her advantage in the presidential race.
“Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don't think she'd get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she's got going is the women's card,” Trump said during a news conference at Trump Tower. “And the beautiful thing is, women don't like her."

Do women like the Donald, then?  Let's see.  A Gallup poll published on April 1, 2016 tells us this:

Donald Trump's image among U.S. women tilts strongly negative, with 70% of women holding an unfavorable opinion and 23% a favorable opinion of the Republican front-runner in March.

The percentage of men who held an unfavorable opinion on Trump in the same poll was 58%.  And what about the Hillary?  The same poll notes:

Hillary Clinton, like Trump and Cruz, is viewed more negatively than positively by both men and women, though of these two, women are far less negative. This likely reflects the basic female gender skew among Democrats and that Clinton is the only female candidate in the race. Clinton's stronger performance among women than among men has been a constant over the past nine months.

Bolds are mine.

Trump employs that old Republican tactic of attacking his opponent where her strength is. But he is abominably bad at that, and no wonder:  He seems to view women as walking racks for boobs, to be rated only for their looks.

To shift from that into seeing women as voters-with-some-power might be too big a leap for the Donald.  And the last thing he should do is what he did in that quote:  Played a gender card himself.

That's because he is a men's-locker-room type of guy when it comes to women.  He makes tits and butt jokes, he brags about being a playah, he even sexualizes his own daughters in his jokes as well as his wife:

A 1994 clip of Republican frontrunner Donald Trump describing his 1-year-old daughter left "Daily Show" host Trevor Noah speechless Tuesday night.

...

"Donald, what does Tiffany have of yours and what does she have of Marla's?" the show's host, Robin Leach, asked, referring to Trump's second wife Marla Maples.
Trump's answer to the "innocent question" left Noah speechless.
"I think she's got a lot of Marla, she's a beautiful baby. She's got beautiful legs. We don't know if she's got this part yet," Trump said, as he cupped his hands under his chest to signify breasts, "But time will tell."

And:
  

Stern once asked Trump what he would do if Melania were in a terrible car accident, God forbid, and lost the use of her left arm, developed an oozing red splotch near her eye, and mangled her left foot. Would Donald stay with her?
“How do the breasts look?” Trump asked.
“The breasts are okay,” Stern replied. Then, yeah, of course Trump stays. “Because that’s important.” 

I'm sure Trump was joking in those two (and other) examples, but the jokes were aimed at a particular locker-room audience (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) and that audience doesn't include women.  Women are the joke.

The link in that last quote is to a GQ interview with Melania Trump, Donald's current wife.  Check it out and see if you agree with the impression I got from it:  That marriage, to the Donald, is an employer-employee contract where the wife is the employee, the husband is the boss,  and all chores are strictly sex-segregated.

When we put all that together what do we get as one possible appeal of Trump among a certain group of Republican male voters? *

He objectifies women, and not in the men's locker-room but in a very public sphere.  That gives others the permission to do likewise (ah, the winds of freedom!).

He seems to wield the power in his own relationships with women, and that must appeal to those Republican men who pine for the power 1950s gender norms and roles gave middle-class men.

And it cannot hurt his attraction among that specific group of Republican male voters that his current wife is always beautiful and over time much younger than he is:  Like trading cars for a newer model!

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*  All Trump supporters, men and women, obviously have other reasons to vote for Trump than his open sexism.  Some of those supporters might not even like it, but still prefer a strong, bullying, protectionist,  pro-war and anti-immigration president who is clearly not part of the political establishment, even if he is equally clearly part of the ruling classes.



 

The Curious Case of The Dropping Life Expectancy At Birth For Non-Hispanic White Women. A Lesson in Interpretations.

I've been reading about the recent changes in life expectancy at birth* for various US demographic groups.  The main findings are summarized here:

Between 2013 and 2014, overall life expectancy at birth for the total US population held steady at 78.8 years, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).
For men, life expectancy was 76.4 years, and for women, it was 81.2 years, Elizabeth Arias, PhD, from the NCHS, Division of Vital Statistics, notes in a new NCHA data brief, published online April 20.
Life expectancy increased by 0.4 years for non-Hispanic black men (going from 71.8 to 72.2 years) and by 0.1 years for Hispanic men (going from 79.1 to 79.2 years). Life expectancy remained unchanged for non-Hispanic white men (76.5 years).
Among women, life expectancy increased by 0.2 years for Hispanic women (going from 83.8 to 84.0 years), remained unchanged for non-Hispanic black women (78.1 years), and declined by 0.1 years for non-Hispanic white women (going from 81.2 to 81.1 years).

I have bolded the sentences which describe changes in life expectancy at birth. Neither non-Hispanic black women nor non-Hispanic white men experienced a change in the life expectancy measures, but the other groups mentioned in that quote did. Life expectancy at birth rose for non-Hispanic black men and for both Hispanic men and women, but it fell for non-Hispanic white women.

When I started looking for the reasons behind that drop** (because this is the first recorded drop in a more general life expectancy measure in the US during a time period without major wars or epidemics)  I came across this, in the context of an interview with various experts:

WILLIAMS: It's important to realize that, although the life expectancy is declining for white women, that white women, nonetheless, are still living almost 10 years longer than African-American men. So there still is a large racial gap in health.
KODJAK: And that gap is even wider with Hispanic men and women. The CDC report shows they live longer than everyone else. Alison Kodjak, NPR News.

What these statements refer to is the following:  Arrange the life expectancy at birth figures for the six demographic groups mentioned in the above quote in an order from the longest life expectancy to the shortest and you get this list:

1.  Hispanic women (84)
2.  Non-Hispanic white women (81.1)
3.  Hispanic men (79.2)
4.  Non-Hispanic black women (78.1)
5.  Non-Hispanic white men (76.5)
6.  Non-Hispanic black men (72.2)

Williams' point is that non-Hispanic white women, as a group, still have a higher life expectancy at birth than non-Hispanic black men and most other groups mentioned in the quote.

Williams makes a mistake, however,  when he attributes the whole difference between the life expectancy figures of non-Hispanic white women and non-Hispanic black men to race, given that one group consists of women and the other group of men.  A more correct comparison would be to compare non-Hispanic white and black women to each other or non-Hispanic white and black men to each other.***

But never mind.  That's not the point I wish to make.

It's something more complicated, a reverse of the usual kind of statistical misunderstanding where people try to refute statistical information about the average, the most frequent or the modal value of some data by noting that it doesn't jive with their own personal experience or the personal experiences of those they know.  In short, personal anecdotes are used to argue against data about averages derived from large populations of people.

In this case even experts appear to interpret data about average life expectancy in some group as if it applied equally to all its sub-groups.  Thus, we get quotes like this:

Public health experts say the rising white death rate reflects a broader health crisis, one that has made the United States the least healthy affluent nation in the world over the past 20 years. The reason these early deaths are so conspicuous among white women, these experts say, is that in the past the members of this comparatively privileged group have been unlikely to die prematurely.

Well, if we go far back into the past we are going to find a lot of premature deaths among all women due to maternal deaths.  But it is indeed true that the life expectancy at birth in the US, on average, is high for  non-Hispanic white women, higher than for all other groups mentioned here except for Hispanic women.****

But not all non-Hispanic white women are equally "privileged" in having good physical and mental health.  Some are poor, lack education, are trapped (or see themselves trapped) in poor rural areas or small towns with few jobs.

It is that sub-group among the much larger category of non-Hispanic white women which is experiencing a rapidly shrinking life expectancy at birth.

The focus on the overall group of non-Hispanic white women in this example is like not seeing that some trees are stunted because much of the forest looks so healthy.

But it would be equally incorrect to use those stunted trees to demand more resources for the whole forest.  Some experts have expressed that fear:

Others have questioned the sudden focus on whites, pointing out that African Americans continue to have shorter life spans and face severe health challenges exacerbated by racial segregation and discrimination. Why, they ask, give so much attention to a group that remains statistically advantaged?

“The truth is that white death rates are still much, much lower than they are for African Americans,” said Bridget Catlin, senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin. “My concern is that people will think, ‘Oh, it’s whites that need to be helped.’ ”

It's the stunted trees which deserve attention.  Some forests have many more of them than others.  But they all deserve help.


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*  Life expectancy at birth in year x in a particular place refers to the number of years a child born in year x at that place can expect to live if current mortality patterns of year x prevail in the future.  When the measure is calculated for a demographic sub-group, the current mortality patterns that are assumed to prevail are those applying to that demographic sub-group in year x.

The bolded words are important.

Because of the way the measure is calculated it is more sensitive to deaths at younger ages than at older ages.


** Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain this change.  The more medical ones include increasing obesity and diabetes, increased misuse of opioids and heroin and the resulting overdoses, cigarette smoking among the poorer whites,  increased rates of suicide by middle-aged white women, increased rates of alcoholism by the same group and a rise in apparent accidents and accidental poisoning.

More sociological explanations suggest that economic expectations have changed for poorer whites, with more despair about the future.  Poor minorities are more accustomed not to expect a better economic future and so may not experience the same kind of loss of hope, having had little in the first place.

Some have proposed greater rates of divorce and single-parenthood among the poorer whites as one possible reason. Even the possibility that traditional gender roles, when combined with the new economic reality that most women need to work with money, might be at the root of the extra pressure poor white women experience in terms of the double shift.  On the other hand, one study found that employment seemed to have a protective effect on poorer white women's health.

Note that the crucial question all such explanations have to be able to answer is why they would explain a drop in white women's life expectancy but not in the life expectancy of otherwise identical (i.e., equally poor, equally likely not to have finished high school) white men or in the life expectancy of otherwise identical Hispanic women and men or of otherwise identical black men and women.  Some do better in that respect than others.

But what the data mostly agrees on is that this drop has its roots in the experience of one sub-group among white women:  Poor white women with little education who live in poor rural areas and small towns.  Poor white men in similar circumstances are also losing years of life expectancy, though not quite as many.  That the overall life expectancy for non-Hispanic white men has not declined could be because other improvements in men's longevity are large enough to have canceled out this particular effect.

All this is tentative.  I hope that future studies can tell us something more definitive not only about the life expectancy changes for poor white women but for all groups of the poor in the United States.


***  This article summarizes some of the issues which affect the life expectancy measures of black women and men in the US, compared to white women and men.  Some have a larger effect than others:  Neonatal deaths because of the years of life lost and the greater rates of violent deaths at early ages.  But note the general need for better access to medical care which the ACA might help to fix.

I couldn't find similar comparisons covering Hispanic men and women.

****  It is probably even higher for Asian-American women.  The available data doesn't address that question.







  







 

The Paperweight

Which Mother/Father Earth gave me one day after Earth Day looks like this:

Making Deals With God in Oklahoma: If Our Wimminz Behave, Will You Take Care Of Our Economy?

This would be hilarious if I read it in some movie about a goofy kind of theocracy on some other planet.  But sadly, Oklahoma is on this planet:

An Oklahoma bill that could revoke the license of any doctor who performs an abortion has headed to the governor, with opponents saying the measure in unconstitutional and promising a legal battle against the cash-strapped state if it is approved.
...

Under the bill, doctors who perform abortions would risk losing their medical licenses. Exemptions would be given for those who perform the procedure for reasons including protecting the mother or removing a miscarried fetus.

...

Supporters of the bill said it will help protect the sanctity of life.
"If we take care of morality,” bill supporter David Brumbaugh, a Republican, said during deliberations, "God will take care of the economy."

Emphasis is mine.

How did Mr. Brumbaugh make that deal with his version of the divine (cell phone conversation? voices inside his head?)?  What kind of morality is covered in the contract?  Is corruption in the government now on its way out?  Will all married male politicians now stop committing adultery? 

Such fun, to ponder that.  Here is a picture of of Mr. Brumbaugh:

Given the above story, it's surprising that many of the initiatives he has supported in the Oklahoma House are about right-wing economics, given that short-cut to fix all economics by making abortion unavailable for most women.

Hmm.  But of course we all know that Mr. Brumbaugh is just feeding the hungry fundamentalist lions in his zoo, the ones who vote on the basis of a Taliban-ish interpretation of the Christian Bible.

What might the real world consequences of revoking the licenses of all physicians who perform "unnecessary" abortions be?  Let me think. 

Could it be that physicians would become more reluctant to perform even those abortions which Oklahoma Republicans grudgingly accept as possibly necessary, because it might be difficult to prove that necessity afterwards?  So which way do you think borderline cases might go?

All this is political performance art, by the way.  What's sad is how very many people see nothing much wrong with it.  We don't have corporations canceling conferences and investments in Oklahoma because of what the theocrats there are planning for wimminz.

In Honor of Yesterday's Earth Day

Some of you may remember that I have always been at war with ivy at Snakepit Inc.  and until recently the ivy was winning.  This anecdote should be read in that context:

I spent two hours outside pulling ivy off plants and windows. As part of that, I had to go on all fours inside large shrubs. My neighbor heard the crackling sounds (me pulling ivy, making up new swear words) and feared that I was a coyote.

But luckily I wasn't.

Then I found a wonderful paperweight, all covered with dirt,  inside a shrub! After a bath it looks like a wintry night sky.

 It's not mine. I believe mother/father Earth brought it up from the soil to thank me for being such a wonderful warrior for her. Earth Day was yesterday, but I count this as a thank-you-present for having celebrated it.

Well, perhaps battling ivy is not quite the same thing as being a warrior for mother/father Earth.  On the other hand, a certain power balance is desirable both in international politics and inside our gardens.

This is funny

Donald Trump writes an academic paper:

How funny Trump is depends, naturally, on who you, the reader, might be.  He's not funny if you are an immigrant to the US or a Muslim, and he is certainly not funny if you happen to belong to that half of humanity which he judges by butt shape and tit size.  But for all of us laughing at his utterances is also tinged with that small frisson of fear, when one thinks of those famous fingers on the nuclear button.

Maybe this is just gallows humor.

News about Women, April 20, 2016: Harriet Tubman, Indian Housewives, Pulitzer Prizes and Female Refugees in Europe

1. Harriet Tubman will replace Andrew Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill.  As some on the wide and varied Internets have said about Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy, this, too,  is only symbolic. But more representative symbols looks like a fantastic idea to me!

2.  A BBC story  about the suicides of housewives in India makes a  point about the invisibility of some issues:

More than 20,000 housewives took their lives in India in 2014.

This was the year when 5,650 farmers killed themselves in the country.
So the number of suicides by housewives was about four times those by farmers. They also comprised 47% of the total female victims.
Yet the high number of homemakers killing themselves doesn't make front page news in the way farmer suicides do, year after year.
In fact, more than 20,000 housewives have been killing themselves in India every year since 1997, the earliest year for which we have information compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau based on occupation of the victim. In 2009, the grim statistic peaked at 25,092 deaths.

That quote has a statistical problem, by the way, because it does not relate the suicide numbers of farmers and housewives to their population bases, i.e., the total numbers of farmers and of housewives in India.  It's theoretically possible that 5650 farmer suicides is a higher percentage of all Indian farmers than 20,000 suicides is of all Indian housewives, though I doubt it.

The point of that article still stands:  Certain social problems are more visible than others.  New problems get more attention than old but continuing problems, problems affecting women tend to be slotted into the sub-group of "women's issues" and thereby become less visible as general problems, and such problems are less often named.  Naming is a type of power, because we cannot attend to a problem we cannot identify.

3. Women did well in this year's Pulitzer Prizes.  Another interesting aspect of the 2016 prizes is the slight relaxing of the idea that certain topics belong to male journalists to cover and other topics to female journalists:

4.  A new study of the labor market integration of refugees in Europe makes for fairly dismal reading, with a few points of light.

The study also notes that from January to September 2015 young men dominated the group of asylum seekers.  Seventy-four percent of them were male and 82% below the age of 35:

 

Women and older people are vastly under-represented in the group which manages to reach Europe.  That's one problem with the current European refugee problem:  it tends to reward the young and the male and those who have money to pay the people smugglers.  It leaves behind the women, the sick, the elderly and the truly poor, though obviously many of the men who arrived in 2015 plan to bring their families in later.

The study has a short section about the labor market integration of female refugees.  It notes that women integrate less well than men:

Female refugees have significantly worse labour market outcomes, especially in the short to medium run. This might be partly due to cultural patterns as participation rates of women in their home countries are usually lower. Survey results in main source countries (e.g. Syria) suggest that participation rates of refugee women remain also low in host countries, at least in the short to medium term.

Thus, cultural patterns may hinder female refugees' labor market participation rates in Europe.  That is a posh way of saying that the norm is for women to stay at home, and such norms have staying power*.  One of the consequences of that is likely to be higher poverty rates among the refugees, because single-earner families in general tend to have higher poverty rates.

All is not gloom and doom in that respect.  An earlier Swedish study found that refugee women's labor market participation rates do rise with time, as this table shows:

5.  Finally, a question:  Are you interested in these kinds of complications?  One reason I write them is simply because I don't see many others doing it, but there are days when I wonder if it matters at all.

-------------

*  Francine Blau has studied the effect of social norms and culture of source countries in this context using data from immigration to the United States:

Abstract: This paper examines evidence on the role of assimilation versus source country culture in influencing immigrant women’s behavior in the United States—looking both over time with immigrants’ residence in the United States and across immigrant generations. It focuses particularly on labor supply but, for the second generation, also examines fertility and education. We find considerable evidence that immigrant source country gender roles influence immigrant and second generation women’s behavior in the United States. This conclusion is robust to various efforts to rule out the effect of other unobservables and to distinguish the effect of culture from that of social capital. These results support a growing literature that suggests that culture matters for economic behavior. At the same time, the results suggest considerable evidence of assimilation of immigrants. Immigrant women narrow the labor supply gap with native-born women with time in the United States, and, while our results suggest an important role for intergenerational transmission, they also indicate considerable convergence of immigrants to native levels of schooling, fertility, and labor supply across generations.

These results probably mean that when refugee source countries (say, Afghanistan, the source country for 10% of the asylum applicants in Europe in 2015) have considerably more patriarchal beliefs than the average beliefs in the new host countries in Europe those stronger patriarchal beliefs will take a long time to change.

Meanwhile in Poland, the Catholic Church Works To Take Control Or Reproduction

Poland already had the strictest abortion laws in Europe, but now those might become even stricter:

But now a new bill, pushed by a pro-life foundation and the Ordo Iuris legal institute, would make abortion illegal in all circumstances. Doctors who performed an abortion could be punished with jail terms of up to five years. The only exception would be the “unintended” death of a fetus while saving a woman’s life.

I assume we should thank God for that exception, though in practice it might not necessarily save pregnant women's lives.

The linked Washington Post article argues that the Poles don't really mind such a draconian law, what with being devout Catholics and all (and possibly because illegal abortions and abortion-travel to neighboring countries are already "flourishing" alternatives).  I don't know if that assessment is correct, but it seems that a strong protest movement has finally been created:

Here’s what’s new: civil society’s unprecedented and immediate backlash. Within five days of the announcement, 85,000 people had signed up for the Facebook page of a protest group, Dziewuchy dziewuchom, which roughly translates as “Women for Women.” In an organized protest on April 4, hundreds of men and women walked out of Mass when priests read the Church’s official letter supporting an abortion ban.

But, argues Anna Grzymala-Busse, the writer of the WaPo article, this is not really about women's reproductive choice which most Poles don't support, but about the Catholic Church taking on the role of a political advocate and getting involved in partisan politics.  The Church would control reproduction better if it worked behind the stage, pulling strings here and there.  That way its religious authority would still be respected.

Okay, that last paragraph was my own mean-spirited interpretation.  But that doesn't mean it is necessarily a wrong interpretation.

To put all this into a wider framework, note the similar work done by right-wing religious groups in the United States.  Also note how Poland's Catholic Church, too, falls under the reign of the current Pope, much admired for his concern towards certain other ill-treated groups. 

-----
Added later:  The most extreme form of the anti-contraceptive, anti-abortion policy of the global Catholic Church amounts to a demand that women either stay celibate (including somehow avoiding getting raped) or accept a kind of Russian roulette for the sake of the Church's interests in maximizing the number of people in its pews, where the odds of surviving that roulette are continuously reduced by the Church. 

Non-Men

Here is an interesting story about the power of definitions of terms such as "men" or "women", about who gets to define us and then put us into those categories and on what grounds, and about the possibility that greater inclusiveness might mean that more and more people must share a cake of a constant size.  It is also a story about good intentions which, in my view, have some exceedingly bad outcomes.

A group inside the Green Party in the UK, Young Greens Women, sent this tweet out in late March:

“Women/non-men who are Young Greens can find and join our Facebook group 'Young Greens Women'”

The tweet made some waves (1) given that it could be interpreted as meaning that women are defined by being non-men, with men as the default position, and that has been Business As Usual for much of human history.

But that is not what Young Greens Women intended by their tweet:

And Young Greens Women responded to criticism in a series of tweets.
“We currently use 'non-male' because this is inclusive of other non-binary genders which have a place in our group”, the group wrote.
"However we understand why people may have issues with language that defines us in relation to men.
“We are currently discussing within the group if we can/should change the language we are using.
"Rest assured that we are always striving to practice correct intersectional feminism and to be as inclusive as we can."

Bolds are mine. 

The Green Party Equalities (Women) spokesperson Sarah Cope later explained:

"Language is all-important."
"It was never the intention of the Young Green Women to use the term "non-male" to describe women, and this has now been clarified."
"What Young Green Women were doing was being inclusive not just to women, but also to individuals in the party who perhaps identify as non-binary or gender queer, as befits a party with a proud history of inclusivity."
"The Green Party is a truly feminist party."

Bolds are mine.  For both of these two quotes and the bolded parts, in particular, note the group that is made more inclusive.  It is not the general Green Party, and it is not the men in the Green Party.


Finally the Facebook page of Green Party Women added to the explanation:

A recent issue, taken out of context of its intent, has arisen and caused quite a stir. As a result, the committee of Green Party Women would like to reassure our sisters that we by no means intend to erase women’s identities by forcing members to define relation to men. "Non-male" and "women" are not synonymous.
However, Green Party Women are happy with uses of the term “non-male" as an umbrella term when gender balance practices are conducted. This umbrella term groups together all who face gendered oppression; women, transgender women and individuals of non-binary or no genders. We all deserve to be recognised and included.
For too long, marginalised women have been excluded from most women's movements and circles. As a group we affirm that trans women are women, and that non-binary genders and other gender identities experience oppression and deserve respect. After all, we are part of a political party, The Green Party, which has a proud history of inclusivity.

The bolds are mine, once again, and it is especially that bolded paragraph I wish to understand better.  It is not much of an improvement from the first interpretation of women=non-men, because the term "non-male" still defines several groups of people by lumping them together and then calling the resulting wider group "non-male,"  compared to the default option which is "male."