Author: Andrew Sullivan

by Patrick Appel

Conor opposes diamond engagement rings, calling them "the ultimate sucker's purchase." I've advocated this same position in the past, but here's a passage, from Paul Bloom's excellent How Pleasure Works, that made me think twice:

[Psychologist Geoffrey Miller's first insight about costly signaling is the idea] that displays of personal quality are only taken seriously if they involve some cost, some level of difficulty or sacrifice. If anyone can easily do the display, then it is worthless, because it is trivially easy to fake. Costly signaling shows up in the gifts we give to one another, particularly during courtship. Miller asks, rhetorically, "Why should a man give a woman a useless diamond, when he could buy her a nice big potato, which she could at least eat?" His answer is that the expense and uselessness of the gift is its very point. A diamond is understood as a sign of love in a way a potato isn't, because most people would only give on to someone they care about, and so the giving signal some combination of wealth and commitment. 

This argument is unlikely to convince those dead-set against diamond engagement rings, but given that some sort of costly signaling is unavoidable when proposing marriage, I'd be curious to hear about other actions or gifts that would as effectively signal commitment. Keep in mind this subsequent paragraph when making suggestions:

Financial value is not the only signal of commitment. The economist Tyler Cowen points out that the best gifts for someone you live with are those that you, yourself, wouldn't want. He points out that even if his wife would enjoy the complete DVD set of Battlestar Galactica, it would be a lousy gift, because he would also get pleasure from it, and so the giving doesn't signal any particular love for her.

Most expensive objects (cars, houses, flat-screen TVs) wouldn't work very well as engagement gifts because the giver would receive equal benefit. Diamonds are typically only desired by women, which, using Cowen's formula, makes them excellent engagement gifts for women.

by Conor Friedersdorf

A male reader writes:

I'm a professional dating coach (a la the movie "Hitch). I try not to associate with the "Pick Up Artist" moniker, but some refer to it as that as well.

This is what people don't get about the whole recent men's pick-up-chicks advice going on the last five years or so: it's basically self-help in disguise. Most of the time and effort is dedicated getting socially maladjusted and frustrated men some basic social skills, more in-touch with their emotions, and some semblance of confidence going, not to mention a much-needed hobby or two. The whole movement is often demonized as a bunch of sex-crazed predators lying their way into women's panties all over the country. First of all, let's give women a little more credit — pick up lines never work. And second of all, we're talking 30-year-old virgins and 40-year-olds who still live with mom here. They couldn't be predators even if they wanted to.

I've been doing it for three years and unfortunately, for the last year, I've started to avoid the whole, "what do you do for a living?" question with most people. It always creates a tedious 20-minute conversation/explanation/defense depending on who I'm talking to.

And seriously, what the hell is the big deal? There has been women's dating advice for decades — some of which is pretty toxic in its own right. There's been marriage counseling and relationship advice for decades as well. But a significant amount of the population, when confronted with the idea of a male dating coach or a men's community with the purpose to get better with women, they recoil in horror… calling it manipulative, misogynistic, exploitative, dishonest, etc., etc.

Why? Because men want to have sex? Because it encourages men to want to have sex with women? Since when was that immoral? I'll admit there are some bad apples in the industry, but what industry doesn't have a few bad apples? Still, the amount of judgment that's rendered is totally unnecessary.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

I happened to be looking at the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment Statistics Survey just now on an unrelated topic, and found some national data on firefighters and police officers.  According to BLS, the 305,500 firefighters in the country earned an average of $47,270 (this is from a May 2009 survey, so it probably refers to 2008 wages).  The 641,590 "police and sheriff's patrol officers" earned an average of $55,180, and the 110,380 detectives and criminal investigators earned an average of $65,860.  In other words, solid, unexceptional middle-class incomes.

Point taken, but pensions also need to factored in. Yglesias focuses on crime control rather than cost control.

by Patrick Appel

Tim Lee seconds Massie:

Multi-party electoral systems like those in the UK and Germany leave room for parties that are (relative to the altnernatives, at least) socially liberal and fiscally conservative. And what ends up happening is exactly what Brink Lindsey describes in his excellent book The Age of Abundance: libertarians (or liberals, as they’re known in Europe) occupy a kind of “centrist” position, acting as junior coalition partners and moderating the big-government tendencies of both the left and the right. At a minimum, the Britian and German experiences show that there’s nothing inherently contradictory about a left-libertarian movement.

He goes on to argue that a "credible threat to walk away from the Republican Party and support Democrats will give both major parties an incentive to take libertarian voters."

Today on the Dish, we had reactions to the Glenn Beck rally here, here, and here. We examined the profit bias behind Beck, analyzed his reach, and awarded him our Hewitt award. We had more Mosque fear-mongering here while Conor condemned recent incitements to violence.

We measured Obama's record on torture and the lack of progress on trying detainees in the US. We compared liberalism in Europe and the US and a very generous maternity leave in Germany; and the expat travelogue got an infusion of Americana. There was an insider's call to arms over Afghanistan; Conor weighed the pros and cons of Jane Mayer's profile of the Koch brothers and Jay Rosen doled out advice to journalists.

We remembered Katrina; took a tour of the housing market; and Joyce scored a point on Jest. Plastic bags puzzled us; the Paris Review revealed its methods; and the Atlantic's archives offered a different vision of WWII, long-form style. The web embraced print; we asked for your stories about professionals and the atmosphere around elites; and small towns produced good athletes. We tallied up the record of a girlie man on gay rights; Jesse Bering dissected a gay man's jealousy an evolutionary perspective; and Jay Bakker, son of Tammy and Jim, apologized way before Marin did and meant it.

Cannabis continued getting censored; some men hired assistants to date for them; and we all wanted to have a beer on the beach without getting arrested. We admired notes from bathroom stalls; studied the list of 12 things to get high on that you've never heard of and probably never want to try; and jammed out to a MHB from someone who was probably on at least one. VFYW here; FOTD here; and cool ad watch here. McDonald's hamburgers stayed "fresh" for 137 days; circumcision took the form of self-loathing; lap dances helped some women make the grade and Bill O'Reilly used to review porn for a living.

–Z.P.

by Conor Friedersdorf

The details of how elite law and business consulting firms recruit astonish me every time I hear them. Even getting an interview often requires attending an Ivy League professional school or a very few top tier equivalents. Folks who succeed in that round are invited to spend a summer working at the firm, the most sane aspect of the process.

But subsequently, they participate in sell events where they're plied with food and alcohol in the most lavish settings imaginable: five star resort hotels, fine cigar bars, the priciest restaurants. A fancy dinner will be scheduled in a faraway city. Summer associates will fly there that evening, spend several hundred dollars on the meal, spend the night in a hotel, and fly back the next morning in time for a 10 am client meeting. They'll expense steak dinners or $150 cab rides without a second thought. The whole process is designed to appeal to their status conscious side, to accustom them to a kind of luxury that requires them to retain highly paying jobs, and to keep them busy enough during their summer tryout that anyone unable to commit their whole lives to the firm won't stick around.

The prize firms are after: talented people, to be sure, but also the ability to tell clients, "We can put together a team for your company that is entirely made up of Ivy League graduates." Apparently this is enormously appealing to companies, which makes sense, given that law firms and especially consulting firms are often used as a kind of responsibility deferral system, allowing managers to fall back on some variation on, Yes, technically I approved this consequential decision that didn't actually work out for the company, but as you can see we hired the most prestigious consulting firm in America — a whole room full of Harvard graduates! — who affirmed that this was the best option.

As they used to say, nobody gets fired for going with IBM.

Though it isn't defensible, it is unsurprising that a lot of people who eschew offers to work at these firms, favoring public sector work instead,  imagine that they are making an enormous personal sacrifice by taking government work. The palpable sense of entitlement some of these public sector folks exude is owed partly to how few of "our best and brightest" do eschew the big firm route (due partly to increasing debt levels among today's graduates, no doubt).

Being outside this culture, I'd be quite curious to hear stories, and/or analysis of what I've gotten right or wrong, whether in defense of the status quo or otherwise. Needless to say, any e-mails I publish from that batch will be anonymous unless you specifically tell me to use your name. (Use conor.friedersdorf@gmail.com with "Professionals" in the subject line). What I do know is that this is one place where the American divide between elites and non-elites is most starkly illustrated, though given the tasks performed and hours worked by the business and legal elites I know, it isn't at all clear that their side of the divide is the desirable one.

by Zoe Pollock

The graveyard for plastic bags in the Pacific which may the "size of Texas to the size of the United States" is pretty well popularized. It's lesser known equivalent in the Atlantic ocean seems to be getting smaller does not appear to be getting any bigger, despite all evidence that should point to the contrary:

The amount of plastic produced around the world increased fivefold between 1976 and 2008, and the amount thrown away by Americans went up fourfold between 1980 and 2008. It is a reasonable assumption that, as the amount of discarded plastic increases, so will the problem of oceanic pollution. Reasonable but, as it turns out, wrong. For a 22-year-long study of the North Atlantic and the Caribbean, just published in Science, suggests things are not getting worse. Kara Law from the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and her colleagues have found that between 1986 and 2008 there was no increase in the concentration of plastic in the areas they looked at.

(Updated 8/31/10 thanks to a reader who pointed out how my sloppy speed-reading had mixed up most of the facts.)

by Patrick Appel

Col. Lawrence Sellin was made to leave Afghanistan for speaking plainly about military bureaucracy. He has a follow-up guest post over at Tom Ricks's place:

I think it is time for the American people to hold the senior military leaderships' (colonels and up) feet to the fire. When they make their reports to Congress, one can be sure that it is the best possible scenario that they can justify without lying. The phrase "progress is being made" should not be accepted as an answer. It is like saying "the check is in the mail."

Everyone should remember that these are military careerists. War provides the opportunity for testing their skills, getting medals and promotions. A compromise peace without their definition of "victory" might be considered a failure. They all want to march down Pennsylvania Avenue like General Norman Schwarzkopf. Likewise, the contractors want to continue making their huge profits. It is the common soldiers, however, who are providing the sweat and shedding the blood.

by Patrick Appel

Jonah Lehrer finds a correlation:

While approximately 52 percent of the United States population resides in metropolitan areas with more than 500,000 people, such cities only produce 13% of the players in the NHL, 29% of the players in the NBA, 15% of the players in MLB, and 13% of players in the PGA.

He provides several theories for why this is the case.