China’s Demographic Timebomb

An aging population, rapid urbanization, and a skewed sex ratio could spell trouble down the line for the world’s largest country:

China is different from the other aging countries of the world in that a) it is not yet fully developed, b) most of its population is still poor, and c) it has the highest sex ratio in the world.

By 2055, China’s elderly population will exceed the elderly population of all of North America, Europe and Japan combined, and this is exacerbated by the now declining working-age population. China’s impressive economic growth has been facilitated by its expanding working-age population: The population ages 15-64 increased by 55 percent between 1980 and 2005, but this age cohort is now in decline due to the declining fertility rate. In 2012, the working age population declined by 3.5 million and is expected to continue to decline unless there is a dramatic shift in China’s fertility rate.

Aging will have a negative effect on economic growth through higher pension and healthcare costs, fewer low-income jobs, increased wage depression, slowing economic growth and job creation, declining interest from foreign investors, lower entrepreneurship, and higher budget deficits. Labor force declines also translate into lower tax revenues for governments, and if these governments are tempted by deficit financing, global financial stability may be compromised, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Commission on Global Aging.

Only A Fraction Of College Men Are Rapists

Marcotte stresses that the high rates of sexual assault on college campuses don’t mean there are as many assailants as you might assume:

Let’s be clear: No one is saying that the high rates of victimization among college women mean that all men are rapists. That 1 in 5 college women have been assaulted doesn’t mean that 1 in 5 men are assailants. Far from it.

A study published in 2002 by David Lisak and Paul Miller, for which they interviewed college men about their sexual histories, found that only about 6 percent of the men surveyed had attempted or successfully raped someone. While some of them only tried once, most of the rapists were repeat offenders, with each committing an average of 5.8 rapes apiece. The 6 percent of men who were rapists were generally violent men, as well. “The 120 rapists were responsible for 1,225 separate acts of interpersonal violence, including rape, battery, and child physical and sexual abuse,” the researchers write. A single rapist can leave a wake of victims, racking up the numbers rapidly, as the victim surveys are clearly showing.

Update from a reader:

Can I possibly be the only one just flabbergasted by the line in this post that “only about 6 percent of the men surveyed had attempted or successfully raped someone”? The idea that 6 guys out of a group of 100 being rapists is a small number shocks the hell out of me. I am a straight white male with a college fraternity background I am not particularly proud of, but even with that life experience, had you asked me to guess the percentage of guys who had actually raped or attempted to rape a woman, I would have suggested some tiny fraction less than 1%. I mean, who the hell RAPES someone? I accept the positive aspect of the larger point – that the number of rapists is smaller than the number of victims – but that seems obvious to me, and way less shocking (and frankly depressing) than the “good” news that “only” 6/100 guys is a rapist.

Recent Dish on campus rape here and here.

Testosterone Ad Absurdum

It still amuses me to read blank-slate lefties insisting that gender difference is a function of culture alone. To me, it’s the same kind of scientific know-nothingism that you find on the right with respect to evolution. Note I’m not saying that culture has nothing to do with it – that would be know-nothingness of a reverse kind. But the power of testosterone as a hormone should never be under-estimated.

And the funny thing is: testosterone exists across the entire animal kingdom and correlates very highly with what we think of as culturally masculine attributes: physical strength, risk-taking, competitiveness, ego and the constant desire to fuck. So when I came across this fascinating article on the marsupial, antechinus, I had to chuckle. During the mating season, the males’ testosterone levels go through the roof. The result is sexual mayhem:

Males relentlessly bound from partner to partner, as massive hormone releases in their bodies cause their immune systems to crash and their fur to fall out. They bleed internally. Some males even go blind, yet still stumble around the leaf litter hoping for one last tryst. In a few short weeks, every single male lies dead, leaving the females to raise their offspring …

While [testosterone] mobilizes all the sugars in the antechinus’ body so it doesn’t need to feed for the three-week orgy, it also glitches the mechanism responsible for regulating the production of cortisol, a stress hormone that in small amounts results in bursts of energy and higher pain tolerances. With runaway levels of cortisol, though, the males’ bodies literally begin to fall apart. Bone density plummets and blood-sugar levels go nuts. Their immune systems essentially degrade to worthlessness, as open sores form and never heal.

That’s a dystopian vision of untrammeled maleness if ever there was one. It reveals what we cannot deny about our nature almost as baldly as it wants us to keep it under control.

Escalation In Ukraine

The Ukrainian military has launched its first offensive against pro-Russian separatists, conducting operations around the eastern city of Slavyansk:

The Ukrainian Defence Ministry said two Mi-24 attack helicopters had been shot down by shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles while on patrol overnight around Slaviansk. Two airmen were killed and others wounded. Other Ukrainian officials and the separatist leader in Slaviansk said earlier that one airman was taken prisoner. A third helicopter, an Mi-8 transport aircraft, was also hit and a serviceman wounded, the Defence Ministry said. The SBU security service said this helicopter was carrying medics. …

The SBU said the deadly use by the separatists of shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles was evidence that “trained, highly qualified foreign military specialists” were operating in the area “and not local civilians, as the Russian government says, armed only with guns taken from hunting stores”. Ukrainian officials said their troops overran rebel checkpoints and Slaviansk was now “tightly encircled”.

Kevin Rothrock thinks through what might happen next:

Irregular militia marching on Slaviansk and other southeastern cities in Ukraine could present Kiev with a tricky legal situation. Though Moscow exercises de facto control over Crimea, the national government refuses to recognize Russia’s annexation, complicating Kiev’s classification of any combatants marching into the Ukrainian mainland from Crimea, which formally remains a part of Ukraine. Would these soldiers be Russian troops? Or are they more Ukrainian “terrorists,” as Kiev now identifies combatants throughout the southeast?

In other words, the Kremlin might project its power into Ukraine’s mainland by encouraging, and perhaps arming, Crimean militia, who in turn would advance on Slaviansk. In theory, Moscow might succeed, if only semantically, in “laundering” an armed intervention in this way.

Meanwhile, as the following video, photos, and tweets illustrate, clashes have erupted in the city of Odessa, with at least seven 38 people reported dead and many more injured:

https://twitter.com/MaximEristavi/status/462243274808627201

https://twitter.com/PaulSonne/status/462282086729383937

The Ground Game Only Goes So Far

Voter Turnout

Nate Cohn drives that point home:

Much of the optimism on Democratic turnout stems from Mr. Obama’s successful turnout operation in 2012, or from experiments showing large increases in turnout when voters receive targeted mailers or contacts. But political scientists and campaign operatives found that even Mr. Obama’s impressive ground operation was worth less than one point in his presidential elections. And those experiments are usually conducted in extremely low turnout elections, like a local mayoral race, in which there are many more marginal voters. Finding people who are potential voters but not existing voters in a national election is harder.

Even Democratic operatives know the limits of the ground game. In a New Republic cover article that otherwise suggested that a strong turnout operation could solve Democratic problems, Guy Cecil, executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, conceded that field operations would “only solve our problem if the election is a close one.”

Charlie Cook expects Democrats to have a rough election:

[A]n array of new polling from a variety of sources suggests that Democrats have no reason to be encouraged at this point. Things still look pretty awful for the party. Especially meaningful to consider is that—no matter how bad the national poll numbers appear for Democrats—eight of their nine most vulnerable Senate seats this year are in states that Mitt Romney carried in 2012. Further, nine of the most competitive 11 Senate seats in both parties are in Romney states; the numbers in these states will likely be considerably worse than the national numbers.

Liberals vs Affordable Housing

Noting that the slumlord Donald Sterling “has profited enormously from the tendency of liberal cities in California to limit housing permits,” Reihan asks why the left sees a higher minimum wage as more important than expanding the housing supply:

Even if you believe that a higher wage floor will have absolutely no impact on employment levels or on net job growth, it seems sensible to first focus on limits on housing supply. If you believe that a higher wage floor might lead to the exclusion of some non-trivial number of less-skilled workers from the formal labor market, the case for focusing on limits on housing supply is even stronger, as it’s not at all clear that relaxing these limits will hurt anyone at all … Some homeowners might have to sacrifice spectacular views as they are surrounded by new housing developments. Yet this hardly seems like a compelling reason to force low-income households to pay much higher rents to be within easy commuting distance of employment opportunities. It turns out that for affluent liberal voters living in picturesque cities, it is cheap to back minimum wage hikes that might reduce employment levels for the less-skilled or raise prices for the kind of people who frequent quick-service restaurants and other establishments that employ low-wage workers while it is very dear to back policies that will increase housing supply.

Douthat sees this issue as a rare opportunity for some left-right convergence:

Reasonable people can disagree, but on the merits, if you care about working class opportunity and mobility, there is at least some public policy justification for policies (like a minimum wage set at $7.25 rather than $10.10) that try to maximize low-wage hiring even if it means some of those workers will rely on safety-net programs. Where the policies that protect and enrich the petits rentiers class are concerned, however – and seriously enrich literal rent-collectors like Donald Sterling – no such opportunity-enhancing justification exists. So when the urban left organizes around an agenda that targets low-wage employers and leaves the petits rentiers alone, it’s both embracing policies whose costs might exceed their benefits and leaving more deserving targets untouched.

This is why the anti-cronyist, anti-rentier, libertarian-populist idea that many conservatives have raised of late, both in response to all the Piketty excitement and as a reformist case in its own right, deserves more than just a dismissive sneer from egalitarian liberals.

Book Club: Can Christianity Survive Modernity? Ctd

Readers take stock of the conversation:

Your original question, “Can Christianity survive modernity?” has two dimensions to it, only one of which is addressed in Ehrman’s book. That’s the question of how modern scholarship sees the scriptural and historical record of Jesus and his age. But another, how-jesus-became-godoverlapping issue is also brought to bear by modernity. The Christian tradition about who Jesus was, and how his Divinity can be defined, is bounded by a very particular set of notions about God that in an earlier era were either forcibly isolated from the rest of the world’s religious cultures, or only passively separated by the limits of those times.

But in the modern age, when vast amounts of historical knowledge of not just Christianity, but the rest of the world is readily available, we now know what multiple branches of Hinduism thinks, what the various sects of Buddhism understand, what Bahai believes, what Taosim grasps about the nature of the cosmos, what shamanism discovers, even what secular mystical and hallucinogenic experience has to offer, and and so on. The modern mind isn’t just confronted with scholarly knowledge of Christianity’s real past; it’s also confronted by a whole range of experiential and conceptual knowledge about God, Divinity, and ultimate reality, including of course modern science itself. And the two can’t be separated anymore. That’s the dilemma of Christianity’s confrontation with modernism in a nutshell.

Another:

In arguing that Ehrman’s book does not “effectively debunk Christianity’s core claims in modernity,” I am struck by how elastic and indefinite the responses of you and your readers of faith are as to the notions of truth and Christian doctrine generally.   That is not meant as criticism, just an observation. One reader valued “the messiness and contradictions in the gospel accounts” as a virtue itself.  Another reader said the “literal truth or untruth [of the story of Christ] is of little to no interest,” and the practicing Catholic reader believes that the foundational doctrines of his church are “of course” not accurate because the truth of Jesus’s life and message can’t be known.  An earlier reader explicitly bookclub-beagle-tradvised you “to consider steering clear of words like ‘truth.'”

Is it then the better question to ask “whether postmodernism can save Christianity?”  And does the new historical research require a postmodern religious approach?  If so, what are the implications of that? It could strengthen and deepen Christianity’s core message and appeal.  But maybe not.  It seems certain to be consequential though.  Will this approach favor liberal Protestant faiths but pose a greater challenge to the more institutional Catholic Church?  If Christian doctrinal truths are admittedly unknowable and subjective to both Gospel writers and readers, does that mean that choosing between different Christian denominations is ultimately only a matter of personal comfort and/or inertia?  Or might this approach – as fundamentalists would argue – logically and inevitably weaken Christianity’s claim against competing faiths?

Another:

I’m an engineer and a recent convert to Catholicism (although I was always careful to say that I followed Dorothy Day, not Paul Ryan).  I know that my conversion process was not rational.  My overwhelming experience of something I can only call Grace has shattered every conviction I had about who I was, who/what God was, and my place in this universe.

I get impatient with those, on both sides, who try to use evidence to prove or disprove religious concepts. A scientist used modern tissue analysis as proof that a Eucharistic Miracle happened.  I felt that same impatience reading Ehrman’s book. None of these investigations have any relevance in comparison to my lived experience of Christ.

It’s not that I don’t think such investigations have value. I just see them as belonging to a realm of inquiry that is disconnected from my relationship with God.  If the Eucharistic Miracle turns out to be pig blood or the disciples had hallucinations of Jesus brought on by grief, it just doesn’t change anything about what happens when I pray.  It seems to me that a faith resting on such proofs is disconnected from the Source of faith.  For myself, I am better off learning how to tap into that Source more deeply and regularly.

I recently went on a pilgrimage to Assisi, the home of St. Francis and St. Claire.  They were declared saints soon after their deaths. Many artifacts of their lives were preserved within the lifetimes of those who knew them, and the town itself has been a place of pilgrimage ever since.  Pilgrims can be assured that the artifacts are real. When you walk the streets of Assisi, you are walking in the paths of the millions of pilgrims who came there to worship, contemplate and pray.  Even my agnostic husband felt the presence of so many souls seeking peace.

On the same trip, we saw a piece of wood that St. Helena claimed to be part of the table from the Last Supper, now preserved in the papal basilica of St. John Lateran.  She found it in the early 300s.  Who knows if it’s real?  For 1700 years, the faithful have venerated it as a connection back to the last peaceful moments Jesus had with his community of disciples, moments we recall every time we celebrate the Eucharist.

That veneration makes it holy.  The pilgrims make Assisi holy.  We make Christ holy. First the disciples and then the 2,000-year-old Christian community of the faithful experienced Jesus as someone extraordinary.  Jesus brought a powerful message that has come down through the ages and drawn millions of souls towards a stronger connection with the Source of faith, and more just, loving and care-taking relationships with each other.  How could the manifestation of such a person not be celebrated as miraculous?

Another:

You wrote, “I cannot rationally reconcile the divine and the human as single concept. But my faith, my personal experience of Jesus, forces me to accept it.”

And in so doing you are essentially recapitulating the experience of the disciples and the church. They tried every other explanation for what they had seen and heard, and none of them captured the length and breadth and depth and height of this man’s life.  So they were forced to come up with a formulation that made no sense, because it was the only thing that MADE sense.  Like the scientists who have to hold the absurd formulation that light is BOTH a particle and a ray, because only under those circumstances can they actually use their mathematics to make the equations correspond with the observed facts.

Credo quia absurdum. 

A Poem For Friday

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“Metamorphosis” by Nina Cassian:

How long is it since
deer antlers grew on my forehead
and, on my behind, a salamander’s tail?

Today,
I am neutered,
or become a domestic fowl.
I submit to conventions,
I eat regularly—
and I sleep—
my beak in my feathers.

(From Continuum: Poems © 2008 by Nina Cassian. Used by permission of W.W.Norton & Company. Photo by Crista Rowe)

Will Reefer Rock The Vote?

Alexandra Gutierrez argues that ballot initiatives, including one on marijuana legalization, could hand Democrats an Alaskan Senate seat:

Three initiatives that were supposed to appear in the August primary have been bumped to the general election. So now, on top of deciding whether they want reelect a Democrat in a year where Republicans could seize control of Congress, Alaskans will be voting on initiatives to increase the minimum wage, to allow the sale of marijuana, and to make it harder to build an unpopular open-pit mine near the world’s largest salmon run.

Any one of those initiatives could be seen as a gift to Democrats. Together, they could boost turnout by up to 5 percent, according to political scientist Caroline Tolbert.

But Harry Enten doubts the marijuana initiative will play a big role:

[A] closer look at the evidence suggests Begich might not stand to benefit. Overall, past marijuana ballot measures haven’t meant that more young people come out to vote. This year’s senate race in Alaska would likely have to be very close for the marijuana ballot measure to make a difference.

Lastly, Bernstein points out that, if “there’s one thing certain about public policy issues, public opinion and vote choice, it’s that we don’t know why we vote the way we do”:

Issues may matter on the margins, and it’s possible that an issue will push marginal voters to show up at the polls (though we should be careful, it may be that whatever issue one’s party focuses on will do the trick). But the relationship isn’t straightforward. And just asking people about it won’t help us understand.