The Economist summarizes the work of Gregory Clark, an economist who tracks social mobility over long periods of time:
Mr Clark reckons that even in famously mobile Sweden, some 70-80% of a family’s social status is transmitted from generation to generation across a span of centuries. Other economists use similar techniques to reveal comparable immobility in societies from 19th-century Spain to post-Qing-dynasty China. Inherited advantage is detectable for a very long time.
As the show enters its 25th season, Kelley Vlahos sighs:
For teenagers, voyeurs, and red-blooded law-and-order types who’ve made this show one of the longest running in American history, the pioneer cinéma vérité format ratifies the correct order of things—beginning smartly with heroes and villains, and ending with the crank of handcuffs and the door of a squad car slamming on another case, closed.
In between, the raw humiliation of both “perp” and victim on display punctuates a well-worn routine, good for a sanctimonious chuckle at someone else’s expense, inevitably explained away as the price of being morally weak, and stupid. Caricatures abound, and must seem reassuring to some: cornrows and gang tats, toothy wild-eyed white trash, skinny hookers with tracks running up and down their arms. Life’s generic losers. …
For serious viewers, hearing actual police officers like Russ Martin say things like, “just a normal day, you get to tase a man,” and watching one resigned black youth after another being pig-piled and hauled off by a disproportionate number of jacked-up white cops for a couple of teeny plastic-wrapped bundles of marijuana, is not entertainment, it’s a cringe-fest.
Sarah Kliff recently claimed that the USPS is “the very best internationally at its most crucial task: Delivering mail.” Adam Ozimek finds a problem with the study Kliff cites:
[T]he letters in the study were sent from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Is it really surprising that letters sent from one U.S. address to another U.S. address and back were returned faster than letters sent to from a U.S. address to New Zealand and back?
Ojai, California, 3.30 pm
Robert Lane Greene asks, why “did previous waves of immigration not threaten English, while today’s does?” He cites a study focused on Hustisford, a town in Wisconsin that was representative of many German immigrant communities in the US:
Almost a quarter of Hustisford’s population (over ten years old) was monolingual in German in 1910. Of that share, a third were born in America. Of the German monolinguals born abroad, a majority had been in America for more than 30 years, having immigrated during the height of the German wave. In other words, in small-town America a century ago, it was perfectly possible to grow up, or to live there for decades after immigrating, without learning English.
He thinks today’s immigrants are more, not less, proficient in English:
[I]t is nearly impossible today to grow up in America without learning English. One study of more than 5,000 children in the Miami and San Diego areas (thick with Spanish-speakers) found that 94.7% of Latino middle-schoolers who had been born in America spoke English well. The authors concluded that “knowledge of English is near universal, and preference for that language is dominant among most immigrant nationalities. On the other hand, only a minority remain fluent in the parental languages.”
My thoughts on language and culture in America here.
Ross today worried about the theological consequences of a papal resignation. It does subtly shift the theology of the office – for the better, I’d say. The way in which the papacy and the clerical state as a whole had begun to assume almost super-human capacities in the heretical mind of some undoubtedly contributed to the child-rape conspiracy over which Benedict presided. Underscoring a possibility the Dish noted yesterday, Alexander Still holds out the hope that, whatever conspiracy theories are proffered, “the Pope is making a clear-eyed decision based on a desire to spare the Church, and himself, the full cost of what may be a long, slow decline toward death”:
Predictably, for an institution in which one is expected to die in office, there is a long tradition of electing elderly Popes. Ambitious younger cardinals have sometimes pushed the candidacy of this or that septuagenarian in the hopes of occupying the throne of Saint Peter in a few years’ time. Electing a young and vigorous Pope who governs for an entire generation—as in the case of Karol Wojtyla, who was fifty-eight when he became John Paul II—carries a considerable risk: that of allowing a hugely important and highly diverse planetary institution to gradually bear the personal stamp of one man. The election of Benedict XVI, then Joseph Ratzinger, at age seventy-eight expressed a desire for continuing the Wojtyla legacy (since Ratzinger had been one of John Paul II’s key advisers) as well as a wish to avoid another twenty-eight-year papacy. And yet his brief and often controversial reign shows the risks of electing an elderly man more than ten years past the normal age of retirement as Pope.
Seen in this light, Benedict’s decision to step down may suggest an effort at finding a third way. By setting a precedent for papal resignation, it offers the possibility of choosing someone closer to the prime of life who may not need to reign into full senescence.
Similarly, in a really helpful primer on the historical backdrop to Benedict’s abdication, Kevin White emphasizes that the Pope consciously may be trying to revolutionize the future of the office:
The better frame for today’s events is that they are precedent-setting. It remains to be seen, in future years, if Benedict’s successors will follow his example. But Benedict may have just established a new, and revolutionary, norm for holding the papal office. It affirms that the pope is not primarily a personality, or a gifted human being, but an officeholder who serves for the good of the Roman Catholic Church.
Potentially, this could serve to reduce the personality-driven, almost celebrity-like attitude towards the papacy that developed among many under John Paul II. The office remains the same, but this practice could emphasize that the man holding it is simply the recipient of a sacred, but temporary, trust.
John Paul II’s legacy as a super-star was not, in my view, good for the institution as a whole. David Gibson adds:
[A] graceful exit could also be Benedict’s lasting legacy precisely because this most traditional of churchmen has, with his simple decision, effectively altered the meaning of the papacy.
“Benedict’s resignation helps refine the notion of the papacy and, thanks be to God, distinguishes the person from the office,” Terence Tilley, a theologian at Fordham University and past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, wrote in a discussion of Benedict’s resignation at the blog of Commonweal, a leading Catholic magazine…
There is still the potential for this move to become another left-right battle in the church. Liberals could welcome this reimagining of the papacy as a way of demystifying the job and perhaps pointing toward a less papal, more collegial form of church governance. Conservatives could fear the same thing.
And perhaps especially telling on this front is what the fate of Benedict’s Twitter account might confirm about the above speculations:
[W]hen the Vatican was choosing a handle for the pope, @benedictusppxvi was considered and rejected in favor of the more general, less personal @pontifex. This would seem to indicate the Twitter handle is attached to the office, not the man. Additionally, though Benedict personally composed his first tweet on an iPad on Dec. 12 (not without technical difficulty), most of the tweets from his account have been composed by aides. Therefore, it’s likely that control of the Twitter account will remain with the Vatican rather than with Benedict.
What you see above is the first week of the meter. We got a big bump on Day One as readers subscribed on seeing the new site. Since then, it’s probably too early to say much with any certainty. Most of you (96 percent) have not reached your meter limit yet to be prodded to subscribe. But nevertheless, we’ve raised $60,000 in February so far. Our goal for the full year is around $900,000 so we have a ways to go – but the pace is steady and these things, we are told, take time. Next month we may adjust the meter to nudge more of you to keep this experiment barreling along. But if you’d like to avoid ever seeing a meter, and you like the new Dish but haven’t yet subscribed, you can still join us as a founding member for just $19.99 a year by clicking [tinypass_offer text=”here”]. That’s a [tinypass_offer text=”nickel a day”]. Join us. And the full conversation.
The Christianist extremist, James Inhofe, is now trying to block the Hagel nomination by a war of attrition:
“Hagel may be passed out of the committee, but it’s going to be a long, long time before he hits the floor,” Inhofe says. “We’re going to need as much time as possible, and there are going to be several of us who will have holds.”
Butters has also gone nutters on the same theme, although he is the last Republican Senator who seems to think Benghazi is somehow Watergate. But one wonders exactly what is really behind this truly unprecedented hostility to a Republican former Senator war hero. Inhofe is admirably frank:
“Each day that goes by will make it more difficult for Democrats who say they are pro-Israel to hold out,” Inhofe explains. “I want everyone to be very clear about his past statements and his positions.” … Inhofe’s main concern remains Hagel’s position on Israel. “The anti-Israel history of Chuck Hagel is real,” he says. “We can’t have someone at the Pentagon who has made these kind of statements.” Hagel’s financial-disclosure issues, he adds, are not central to why he’s working to postpone the nomination. “That doesn’t bother me,” he says. “To me, that’s minor.”
To understand where he is coming from, you have to understand Christian fundamentalism. Here’s an extract from a 2002 speech when Inhofe explained why Greater Israel deserves to expand:
I believe very strongly that we ought to support Israel; that it has a right to the land. This is the most important reason: Because God said so. As I said a minute ago, look it up in the Book of Genesis. It is right up there on the desk. In Genesis 13:14–17, the Bible says:
The Lord said to Abraham, “Lift up now your eyes, and look from the place where you are northward, and southward, and eastward and westward: for all the land which you see, to you will I give it, and to your seed forever. . . . Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it to thee.” That is God talking.
The Bible says that Abraham removed his tent and came and dwelt in the plain of Mamre, which is in Hebron, and built there an altar before the Lord. Hebron is in the West Bank. It is at this place where God appeared to Abram and said, “I am giving you this land — the West Bank”. This is not a political battle at all. It is a contest over whether or not the word of God is true.
When I’m told I exaggerate the influence of fundamentalism in American politics, it’s worth remembering that quote. This is not the foreign policy of a nation state; it’s the religious dictates of a religion. And it is currently preventing this country from having a secretary of defense.
For their research at Yale, Oriana Aragón and Rebecca Dyer are exploring our response to adorable animals and children:
The most important point that I would like to make is that I do not believe, nor do I have evidence, that people actually want to hurt cute things. My research was spurred on when I witnessed very playful responses to cute things. I saw how people seemed to want to squeeze and pinch cute things (i.e. Grandma pinching cheeks), and I thought—if you take that out of context, if you look at it at face value—it is a bit odd to want to pinch or squeeze something that is very cute. I was curious “why” someone would, for instance, want to squeeze cute kittens.
A summary of the experiment:
For part two the researchers brought 90 participants into the lab, provided them with bubble wrap and showed them pictures of cute, funny or neutral animals. The metric in this part was the number of bubbles popped while watching. Viewers of funny animals popped an average of 80 bubbles during a session and members of the neutral group popped about 100 each. But the people who saw cute animals popped a whopping 120 bubbles!
So the researchers have verified that cute aggression exists, but they are still in the dark about why we do it. They suggest it may be the result of an unfulfilled desire to care for the cute animals, since they are only images. Or maybe it’s a negative expression for a positive emotion. Or maybe our brains are just being ironic.
The Dish 