February 2014 – Page 4

What’s The Best Use For Inheritance?

A recent study found that people are reluctant to spend money they inherit from relatives. Eric Horowitz argues that this finding strengthens the case for the estate tax:

Even if individuals draw some emotional benefit by saving inheritance money, from a social standpoint it’s better if people—and wealthy people in particular—spend their money on durable goods or semi-risky investments. Buying a blender or funding a start-up does more to stimulate the economy than leaving your money in a low-risk mutual fund.

It seems that the tendency to save inheritance money is another reason to support a higher estate tax. If mental accounting is preventing inheritance money from being spent in the most efficient way, that strengthens the case for raising estate tax revenues to fund welfare programs (and if you lean right and cringe at that word choice, just replace “welfare programs” with “other tax breaks for the wealthy that are more stimulative.”)

Juan Valdez Can’t Afford His Own Coffee

Colombians are drinking record amounts of coffee, but most of the growth comes from café instantáneo:

Coffee consumption has steadily increased since 2008 in Colombia, and instant coffee sales have jumped by over 150 percent, the second-largest growth rate in the world, according to Euromonitor. Instant is taking up a larger and larger portion of the local Colombian coffee market.

How come? Colombia has been producing and exporting heaps of fine coffee for over a century now, but Colombians haven’t historically been able to afford the quality beans they grow. Most of it has been exported to higher income markets, per Euromonitor.

The tale is not unlike quinoa’s in Peru and Bolivia, where farmers have worked to produce more and more of the newly hip grain, which their fellow countrymen can now scarcely afford. The difference, however, is that in Colombia’s case, the inability to afford strong coffee has stoked the appetite for cheaper and weaker stuff. Without the cash to buy the superior coffee being grown locally, Columbians have embraced milder blends.

(Graph of Colombian coffee consumption via Quartz)

Still Greasy After All These Years

Scientists are still finding oil from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill:

[Gail] Irvine, of the United States Geological Survey, has been monitoring the sound and the coastline of the Shelikof Strait, southwest of the spill, for 20 years, and has just recently discovered these pockets of oil that have persisted behind large boulders along the coastline. What’s more, the oil appears to have broken down very little and has the chemical makeup of oil that is just 11 days old, meaning it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

“Every chemist who has looked at this has been surprised,” Irvine said. ”These are at high wave-energy sites, it’s not the kinds of areas where oil would have been predicted to have persisted, especially because it has barely been weathered.”

The Morning After In Arizona

This embed is invalid

[Re-posted from earlier today]

Here’s the money quote from Jan Brewer’s veto statement last night:

Senate Bill 1062 does not address a specific and present concern related to religious liberty in Arizona. I have not heard of one example in Arizona where a business owner’s religious liberty has been violated … Religious liberty is a core American and Arizona value, so is non-discrimination.

As I’ve mulled this over and over, I have a few straggling thoughts. Against the bill: it had two terrible features. The first was the breadth of the religious liberty invoked. The real innovation in Arizona was the extension of religious liberty claims against other citizens, rather than against the government itself. That’s a big leap, and trivializes religious liberty in some ways. No individual can coerce, even with a lawsuit, the way the government can. The second is the environment in which this bill was introduced. In Arizona, gay citizens have no right to marry, and no legal protection against being fired simply for being gay. Indeed, a fundamentalist Christian or Muslim needs no new law to discriminate quite brutally against gay people under the rationale of religious liberty. To argue that the real problem here is the victimization of fundamentalists is therefore bizarre. In fact, it’s a grotesque inversion of reality.

As for the case for allowing fundamentalists to discriminate against anyone associated with what they regard as sin, I’m much more sympathetic. I favor maximal liberty in these cases. The idea that you should respond to a hurtful refusal to bake a wedding cake by suing the bakers is a real stretch to me.

Yes, they may simply be homophobic, rather than attached to a coherent religious worldview. But so what? There are plenty of non-homophobic bakers in Arizona. If we decide that our only response to discrimination is a lawsuit, we gays are ratcheting up a culture war we would do better to leave alone. We run the risk of becoming just as intolerant as the anti-gay bigots, if we seek to coerce people into tolerance. If we value our freedom as gay people in living our lives the way we wish, we should defend that same freedom to sincere religious believers and also, yes, to bigots and haters. You do not conquer intolerance with intolerance. As a gay Christian, I’m particularly horrified by the attempt to force anyone to do anything they really feel violates their conscience, sense of self, or even just comfort.

So I’m with Big Gay Al, and always have been. Let bigots be bigots. Let gays be gays. And when those values conflict, let’s do all we can not to force the issue. We’re living in a time of drastic change with respect to homosexuality. It is perfectly understandable that many traditional-minded people, especially in the older age brackets, are disconcerted, upset and confused. So give them some space; instead of suing them, talk to them. Try seeing things from their point of view. Appeal to their better nature as Christians. And start defusing by your tolerance the paranoia and hysteria Roger Ailes lives off.

“Charm It With The Beauty Of Love”

Another day, another breath of fresh air from Pope Francis:

In a nearly 3,000-word text to the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops, Francis tells the office they should not look for bishops based on any “preferences, likes, or trends” and likewise should not seek prelates who are mainly concerned with doctrinal matters.

The church, writes Francis, does not need “guardians of doctrine” but those who “appeal to the world to charm it with the beauty of love [and] to seduce it with the freedom bestowed by the Gospel … The church does not need apologists of its causes nor crusaders of its battles, but sowers humble and confident of the truth, who … trust of its power,” the pontiff continues.

Who did Francis succeed? A theologian who policed orthodoxy as meticulously as he chose his slippers.

(Photo: The hand of Pope Francis is pictured as he waves during his general audience in St Peter’s square at the Vatican on February 26, 2014 . By Vincenzo Pinto/AFP/Getty Images.)

Marathoners Anonymous?

James McWilliams, an avid long-distance runner, wonders whether he might be addicted to exercise:

Potentially addicted runners will cheat family time to run, sneak in runs without telling people, design vacations around exercise opportunities, will (if injured) count the days since their last run like an alcoholic counts the days since his last drink, and forgo sex to run (we often joke that nobody spends a Saturday morning running 20 miles because they have a great sex life). It seems certain that, if these symptoms are in any way common, running addiction will become an official disorder in due time.

The problem, from the perspective of these symptoms, seems quite real. But then what?

It’s hard to imagine how such “addicts” would be treated in a clinical setting. Would they be pushed to go cold turkey, as many drug and alcohol addicts are advised to do? That option would deny them the real benefits of a healthy activity they had merely taken too far. In the end, quitting could lead to a worse situation than the one the addict was already in. Scaling back, which is becoming an option for substance abusers, seems like it would be a more realistic option. But here, too, it’s hard to see how—given the tendency of the high to diminish for the exercise freak—the temptation to add one more mile could be resisted, especially when acute negative consequences do not result. It’s hard to imagine ever effectively treating this “disorder.”

Stanton Peele asserts that “people can become addicted to anything, whether drugs, alcohol, food, shopping, gambling, love, or sex, if it is the focus of an encapsulating experience that alleviates bad feelings and buttresses their self-esteem”:

Contrary to the common view of addiction as a choice-nullifying disease, this approach holds people accountable for their actions. Addicts are actively involved in building their attachments and can modify their behavior when they have an incentive to do so. Alcoholics drink moderately at home with their parents, for instance, and addicted smokers wait all morning during work until they can smoke outdoors. They might prefer to indulge their addictive impulses instantly, but those impulses can be resisted and ultimately eliminated.

Update from a reader, who happily calls herself an “enabler”:

My husband has to run/bike/swim/burn calories regularly, otherwise I don’t want to be around him. He gets grumpy and unpleasant. So is that the sign of an addiction? Possibly. Endorphins are powerful things. But so what? He’s healthier for it, and in a better mood. He doesn’t spend tons of money on equipment or a gym membership – or expensive cars, electronics, or pharmaceuticals (legal or not) to feel better. He, his sister, and father spend a lot of time bonding over triathlons, mountain bike wrecks, and equipment. He takes our kids out with him on their bicycles, and as soon as the baby is old enough, will take him in the jogging stroller, giving me time to sleep. I’ll happily enable this particular addiction! (And our sex life doesn’t suffer from his exercise. Quite the opposite, I’d argue.)

Some Rare Good News About War

Contrary to conventional wisdom, rape in conflict zones is far from universal:

A recent study by the Peace Research Institute of Oslo of all 48 conflicts and all 236 armed groups – including state, rebel groups, and pro-government militias – in Africa between 1989 and 2009 found that 64 percent of armed groups were not reported to have engaged in any form of sexual violence. Of course, in most contexts, especially war, sexual violence is underreported. But even after 2000, when wartime rape became a highly salient public issue actively investigated by NGOs, more than half of armed groups were not reported to have engaged in sexual violence.

Why does this matter? Instead of framing rape as an inevitable outcome of war, by understanding which groups engage in sexual violence – and which do not – and what accounts for the difference, advocates and policy makers will be far better positioned to limit – and perhaps even to end – this scourge of war.

The above video is the trailer for the Oscar-nominated live-action short film “Aquel No Era Yo” (That Wasn’t Me), which contains a brutal rape scene. Update from a reader:

While everyone can agree that raising awareness of the horrible physical and sexual abuse of child soldiers and women in civil wars, particularly in Africa over the past 30 years, is a good thing, my partner and I just had to write in to let you know that Aquel no era yo has major, major issues.

We attended a screening of all of the Oscar-nominated shorts a few weeks ago, and while four of them were very interesting and well-done (our pick for the winner is the French Avant que tout perdre, an amazingly tense snapshot of a woman and her children fleeing an abusive husband/father), Aquel left an extremely bad taste in our mouths.

Awareness is a good thing, but not this type of awareness. Not a film which – spoiler alerts – so crudely portrays African blacks as aggressors and European whites as victims; not one in which the white man screams “You have lost your humanity!” just before the black child shoots him; not one where the army storms in and shoots all the rebels, but, apparently to keep from offending an audience’s sensitivities, we see no bodies of children among the slain; and not one where the young black protagonist and narrator, a child “saved” by the courageous white woman who overcomes her rape to take him to safety, redeems himself only by telling his story, contrite and eventually understanding of the “wrong” he did, to an auditorium full of white/Spanish teenagers while his benevolent saviour looks on, smiles, and knows she did the right thing.

This story should not be about the white woman who gets raped by a black man in the Congo. It should be about the children. Though it would no doubt have been agonizing, in that movie theater at that moment, we would have far preferred to see documentary footage of the multiple recovery programs for child soldiers in Africa – or perhaps, yes, even footage of the horrible events themselves if such a thing existed.

Aquel is propaganda, pure and simple. At first we were very surprised to see from the credits that Save The Children and Amnesty International had attached their names and presumably their funding to it; in hindsight, it feels like the cynicism and scaremongering of Kony 2012 all over again. The victims deserve better.

Translating Emotion

Cristina Soriano researches how people describe feelings across different languages and cultures:

[W]e use a questionnaire and ask people around the world about the meaning of their emotion words. Questions are made about the various “components of emotion”, that is, the basic aspects of experience commonly believed to compose an emotional episode. These include, among others, the way we perceive events around us (was this intentional? is it controllable?), the way our body reacts (e.g. increased heart rate, shivers, blushing), or the way we express our feelings (e.g. frowning, smiling, crying). The responses allow us to compose a mean semantic profile for those words that we can then compare across languages and countries. So far we have investigated the meaning of 24 emotion terms in 23 languages and 27 countries.

She has found a lot of overlap, but the differences are fascinating:

For example, Spanish “despair” (“desesperación”) designates a more excited emotion than English “despair.” The latter means, for instance, that when I say I feel “despair,” I may be clenching my teeth and pulling my hair out. By contrast, when my husband says he feels “despair,” he is more likely to have bowed his head and covered his face with his hands.

Interestingly, differences can also be found between countries that speak the same language. For example, the meaning of French “serenité” (serenity) seems to be more positive in Canada than Gabon, and indeed the facial expression of “serenité” in Canada has been found to include a smile, whereas in the African country, “serenity” has more of a neutral face.

“Dictatorship By Cartography”

Matt Ford considers the relationship between city planning and social unrest:

In many ways, France pioneered the conscious use of urban design for political purposes. Paris in the early 19th century was essentially a medieval city, suffocating from overcrowding and poor infrastructure. Baron Haussmann’s urban renovations under Napoleon III in the 1850s and 1860s gave the City of Light a modern sewage system, beautiful suburban parks, and a network of train stations. He also took the opportunity to demolish unruly lower-class neighborhoods, banish their impoverished inhabitants to suburbs, and replace their cramped, narrow alleys with spacious, grand boulevards. In the event of an uprising, like those that took place in 1789, 1830, and 1848, French authorities hoped the wider streets would be both harder for revolutionary Parisians to barricade and easier for columns of French soldiers to march through to suppress revolts.

Similar calculations are still made today.

In 2005, Burma’s ruling junta moved the government from Yangon, a sprawling metropolis of 5 million people, to the new inland capital at Naypyidaw for security reasons. Isolated from other population centers, Naypyidaw is populated mostly by government functionaries and military officials who spend as little time as possible in the eerily desolate city. Burmese officials claim almost a million people live there, although the true population is likely far, far lower than that. When the Saffron Revolution erupted two years later, in 2007, the large-scale protests that rocked other Burmese cities never took hold in Naypyidaw, and the country’s military rulers remained in power after a brief but brutal crackdown.

Even if the city’s population had been large enough for demonstrations, where would they have taken place? Broad boulevards demarcate the specially designated neighborhoods where officials live, with no public square or central space for residents, unruly or otherwise, to congregate. A moat even surrounds the presidential palace. One journalist described the city as “dictatorship by cartography.”

Update from a reader:

Just a quick note from a working cartographer: this is dictatorship by geography, not cartography. While there are many instances of maps as tools for propaganda (Monmonier and de Blij is a good start for this), and as much as someone like me would be flattered by that type of power, dictatorship by cartography is a highly inaccurate turn of phrase.

(Photo: Aerial view of the purposefully-built capital city of Naypyidaw, Myanmar on May 23, 2008. By Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images)

Should AGs Ignore Laws They Don’t Like?

Eric Holder on Monday tossed some live bait to right-wing critics by telling state attorneys general that they don’t have to defend state laws they believe are discriminatory:

Comparing today’s gay rights fight to the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s, Holder said he would have challenged discriminatory laws on the books during the time of racial segregation. “If I were attorney general in Kansas in 1953, I would not have defended a Kansas statute that put in place separate-but-equal facilities,” Holder said.

While Holder later clarified that AGs should appoint independent counsel to represent the state in such cases, Byron York still finds fault with his argument:

So the full version of Holder’s position on one-man, one-woman marriage laws is: State attorneys general should not defend them, but they should hire private lawyers who will. It was a much more nuanced opinion than what was reported in the headlines. And it left some attorneys general pretty unhappy. They have sworn to uphold the laws and constitutions of their states, and there has been no Supreme Court decision invalidating those state laws and constitutions. So they should just make a judgment on their own not to defend?

“It’s troubling to have the attorney general advise you that you can ignore your oath to uphold and defend the constitution and laws of your state,” said Luther Strange, the attorney general of Alabama, who was at the meeting. “We certainly don’t advise him how to enforce federal laws, how to do his duty — so that was a little unusual, to say the least.”

Morrissey is also troubled:

It’s not necessarily unusual to bring in outside counsel, certainly for corporations (who don’t usually keep litigators on salary), and occasionally for public-sector agencies. It might be a little more unusual to see that in an AG office, which presumably has a plethora of capable litigators available for assignment. However, the retention of outside counsel for any legal effort usually comes in response to a gap in skills or specialties, not in a primary area such as defense of existing statutes for an AG. That’s a key part of the job, after all — what the clients (voters) hired the AG to do. Forcing a client to pay for additional counsel just because an attorney doesn’t particularly like the issue should raise significant ethical questions about lawyers who make that kind of choice. The ethical choice would be to resign from the case, or in this context, to resign from the office so that the client can hire an attorney that wants the job.