Month: April 2012

by Zack Beauchamp

Michael Arthur breaks down the conventions of "K-pop," South Korea's heavily exported musical genre:

Much of K-pop today is performed by large prefabricated groups of sometimes more than a dozen fussily styled members. Often one of them is designated to contribute various rap breakdowns scattered throughout each song. Difficult choreographed dancing is a really, really, big deal. Music videos always look very expensive and involve rapid costume changes in a weird empty white room, or rapid costume changes in a multi-colored Missy Elliot-style nightmarish puzzle dimension. Not every member is chosen for their singing ability, and people are refreshingly candid about this.

Like I said, this all sounds like a twisted throwback to the boy and girl groups no one in their heart of hearts truly misses. The thing is, Kpop is blowing up.

(Video: "Nobody" by the Wonder Girls, the first Korean song to break the American Billboard Top 100.)

by Maisie Allison

Matt Welch dissects reporting on journalism's demise: 

We should not expect anything like impartial analysis from people whose very livelihoods—and those of their close friends—are directly threatened by their subject matter. This goes a long way toward explaining a persistent media-criticism dissonance that has been puzzling observers since at least the mid-1990s: Successful, established journalism insiders tend to be the most dour about the future of the craft, while marginalized and even unpaid aspirants are almost giddy about what might come next.

US President Barack Obama gnashes his teeth and growls as he reads "Where the Wild Things Are" during the 2012 White House Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn of the White House on April 9, 2012. By Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images.

— C.B.

by Patrick Appel

Frum asks everyone to "recognize the magnitude of the social distress we still face." His economic proposal would be tough for either party to swallow:

To do better, we'll need a program to stimulate employment for the long-term unemployed — including potentially a New Deal-style requirement that nobody receive benefits without working. It's no good to anybody — the unemployed least of all — to allow the unemployed to collect two years' worth of benefits while waiting at home, their skills atrophying, their resumes going stale.

To do better, we may need to induce employers to create jobs, not only through tax cuts but through direct subsidies, including subsidies of the cost of health coverage. (Especially for older workers, health costs can be more of a deterrent to hiring even than the cost of wages.)

We will need to curtail the generosity of Medicare to open fiscal room for government programs to support opportunities for the young.

Also on the the economic distress front, Brad Plumer studies labour force dropouts:

About 35 percent of the people who have dropped out of the labor force since the recession began in 2007 do want a job, but they’ve become too discouraged to fire off resumes. That’s not good. The other 65 percent are people who have left the labor force and don’t want a job. Some of them are young and perhaps decided to go back to school. But the biggest chunk, by far, seems to be composed of Baby Boomers who have decided to retire early.

by Zoë Pollock

Elizabeth Kolbert reviews a series of books on the question:

Consider the claim that having a child benefits the child. This might seem self-evident. After all, a child deprived, through some Knowltonian means, of coming into existence, loses everything. She can never experience any of the pleasures life has to offer—eating ice cream, say, or riding a bike, or, for the more forward-thinking parents among us, having sex. [Christine Overall, author of “Why Have Children?: The Ethical Debate”] rejects this argument on two grounds. First of all, nonexistent people have no moral standing. (There are an infinite number of nonexistent people out there, and you don’t notice them complaining, do you?) Second, once you accept that you should have a baby in order to increase the world’s total happiness, how do you know when to stop?

Let’s say one kid eating ice cream represents x amount of added pleasure. In that case, two kids eating ice cream represents 2x, four kids 4x, and so on. The family with eight kids could perhaps afford to buy ice cream only half as often as the one with four. Still, provided the parents were able to throw in a bag of M&M’s, they (or, at least, the world) would fare better, total-happiness-wise, with the larger brood.

Douthat counters:

[I]f you’ve conceded that the future has a moral claim on us, then you’ve implicitly conceded that there’s a moral case for someone, somewhere having children — and indeed quite a lot of someones, since the prospect of a world with fewer and fewer children is easily as dystopic as any Paul Ehrlich fever dream. And once you’ve conceded that much, it’s not a particularly long leap to suggesting that our hypothetical A’s — “young, healthy, and rich,” with a lot to offer to their hypothetical offspring — are pretty good candidates to accept the obligation.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry goes a step farther and defends the reproductive rights of the "genetically diseased." Earlier discussions on the morality of having children here and here. 

by Zoë Pollock

Robert Provine pioneered the field of laugh science:

In his lab, Provine feeds the laughter into a sound spectrograph, analyzing the frequency, amplitude, and length of each sample. In more than 30 years of fieldwork he’s collected an astounding amount of data. He knows that “laugh notes” (such as “ha,” “ho,” or “heh”) have a duration of 75 milliseconds, separated at regular intervals of 210 milliseconds. He’s found that babies laugh 300 times a day, while adults laugh only 20 times. And he knows that laughter peaks at around five years of age.

The most important discovery may be the most obvious, that laughter creates social bonds: 

It explained why people laugh 30 times more often in the presence of others than they do when they’re alone. It also explained why nitrous oxide (a.k.a. laughing gas) won’t crack you up when inhaled in solitude.

by Chris Bodenner

Not a tea party fan:

by Maisie Allison

A reminder: 

[D]ocumented civilian deaths in Iraq since Bush’s 2003 invasion—noncombatants killed by military or paramilitary acts or because of the breakdown in civil society—have numbered nearly 120,000. According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, some 4.7 million Iraqis have been displaced by the chaos unleashed by Bush’s war. This number includes 2.4 million internal refugees, some half a million of them living as squatters in slums. Another 2.3 million have fled the country altogether and have not returned. This is a civic catastrophe that gets little attention in America. By way of illustration, a proportional civilian death toll in the United States would be nearly 1.2 million. The proportional refugee total would be 45 million.

by Zack Beauchamp

Will Wilkinson, following Tyler Cowen, nods:

Politics makes us stupid. This is one of my recurring themes. This is the principal reason I refuse to be a partisan or ideological team player. People call me libertarian but I don't in part because I'm not one, but mostly because I suspect that accepting any such label dings my IQ about 15 points. 

Bryan Caplan counters:

Will and Tyler might protest that the average effect of labels and good-versus-evil stories is to reduce effective IQ.  But they'd be wrong to do so.  Agnostic, neutral thinkers have little to say and less to teach.  Yes, it's better to suspend judgment rather than embrace error.  But intellectual progress only occurs after someone discovers and publicizes good reasons to adopt an ism.

Aren't there intellectual risks of accepting labels and good-versus-evil stories?  Sure.  Labels can blind us to counter-evidence.  Good-versus-evil stories give us an excuse to damn the messenger instead of considering his message.  But the wise response is to strive to compensate for these specific risks – not to salute the intellectual equivalent of the Swiss flag.

I'd go even further. Cowen's blanket dismissal of "good versus evil" – which, as Caplan notes, is itself a variant of the morality tale it attempts to dispatch – can serve to blind us to conflicts when there really is a morally right side and a morally wrong side. In a sense, moral thinking itself depends on leaving open the possibility that one party in a conflict is, on balance, more in the right than its antagonist. While this isn't the sort of Tolkienian perfect binary that Cowen is targeting, it's easy to see how rules as categorical as Cowen's "good versus evil lowers your IQ" can bleed into a rubbishing of moral thinking altogether. Better, as Caplan suggests, to take any individual dispute on its own terms rather than constructing any sort of system about how to think about labels.