The Self-Perception of Poor White Americans

The latest from the social science journals:

Poor White Americans report feeling “worse off” than poor Black Americans despite the persistent negative effects of racism on Black Americans. Additionally, some health issues are rising among White but not Black Americans. Across two representative samples, we test whether White = wealthy stereotypes lead White Americans to feel relatively worse off than their racial group and whether these perceptions have health consequences. Across both samples, White Americans perceived their own status to be significantly lower than the status of the majority of White Americans. In contrast, Black Americans perceived their own status to be significantly higher than the majority of Black Americans. Critically, status comparisons between the self and one’s racial group predicted the experience of fewer positive emotions among White, but not Black, Americans, which mediated reduced mental and physical health. We conclude that race/class stereotypes may shape how poverty subjectively feels.

I can't read the whole article, but I wonder about the role of shame in this. White Americans seem to feel more ashamed about losing a job or other setbacks then black or Hispanic Americans, so they are more likely for example to stop going to church after losing a job or getting divorced. This is usually interpreted as showing that white Americans believe more in the ideology of "standing on your own feet" etc., while minority Americans are more likely to believe that much of what happens is beyond your control. 

Cooites

Ah, childhood:

In a kid’s world, cooties and other similar contagions may not be real—but they’re deadly serious. The North American children’s lore of cooties is “a social contaminant that pass[es] from one child to another, a form of interpersonal pollution.” The term “cootie” might have been taken from a British colonial word for lice popularized by returning World War I soldiers, possibly derived from a Malay word, kutu, meaning “a parasitic biting insect.” It might be lice, it might be germs, but it’s invisible, and you may be in danger of catching it.

Folklorists Iona and Peter Opie describe a similar game from Britain called “The Dreaded Lurgi,” while in Japan children have developed their own prophylactic treatments for such a social contagion, called engacho. Similar medical methods, recorded terms such as cootie vaccination and cootie immunization, can also be found for cooties, involving special hand gestures or perhaps pretend injections. Children who play this game learn and absorb concepts familiar to a public health emergency, but on their own strange terms. Because cooties can be a serious problem. . . .

Though it may have a real impact on children’s social distancing, it’s hard to pin down what cooties is exactly, because conceptually, it needs to be many things. Children have vaguely described cooties as “They give you bad germs that can kill you” or “if you don’t like a person and you touch them, you can get cooties.” It’s not unlike an invisible virus, in that no one is safe. No kid knows whether they’ll get it, or whether they’ll be accused of giving someone cooties.

Yes, children are like adults in taking actual physical dangers and making them into a metaphor for social undesirables.

Re-Opening and Urban Life

Writing in the Times, David Rubin and Paul Offit describe a Pandemic model they have developed and applied to data from 46 US states. The exercise, they say

revealed that crowding and population density, whether in densely populated areas in New York City or a meatpacking plant in South Dakota, are the most important factor in determining the havoc the virus can wreak.

After accounting for age distribution and health issues it was clear that risk not only of infection but of death broke between two groups: those in densely crowded areas, and everyone else. Large, densely populated areas like New York and Chicago had nearly twice the rate of transmission in the first two weeks of their outbreaks than the least densely populated areas we are tracking, like Birmingham, Ala., or the metro area of Portland, Ore. Yes, we did find that warming spring temperatures in some areas are helping to reduce transmission, but that effect is dwarfed by the impact of population density in our largest cities, particularly in the North.

Re-opening Philadelphia, they argue, would be disastrous, but in Harrisburg the virus would probably "fizzle out" if some basic safety measures are retained.

This means that areas in the country that are less densely populated or are already benefiting from warmer spring temperatures will probably be able to reopen more quickly, as long as the number of cases in their area have sharply reduced — we can’t give an exact rate — and if they maintain workplace safety, moderate distancing, and test to identify and trace outbreaks early.

Large, densely populated cities are going to need a more cautious plan. This is not just because more crowded areas increase the risk of spread, but also because we’re learning that crowding itself may also affect the death rate. The relationship between the amount of virus to which one is initially exposed and the severity of the illness is found in most infectious diseases. Models assessing outcomes from the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic reveal that the likelihood of death was dependent upon the number of infected individuals with whom that person came into contact. When a family is infected by chickenpox, the second child to contract the virus often becomes more seriously ill, presumably because they have been exposed to more of the virus.

"Re-opening" is going to be a slow and partial thing no matter what governments decide; anybody out there really want to attend a movie in a crowded theater right now? My office is in Washington, DC, and whatever my bosses say I'm not going back until I've been vaccinated.

Americans Work Too Much Anyway

Business Insider:

If the US stayed completely shut down for two months, the typical US worker would work about the same number of hours this year as a pre-pandemic German worker.

The Mid-Life Dip in Well-Being

The latest on whether the 30-55 years are the hardest:

The Mid-Life Dip in Well-Being: Economists (Who Find It) Versus Psychologists (Who Don't)!David G. Blanchflower, Carol L. Graham
NBER Working Paper No. 26888
Issued in March 2020 

A number of studies – including our own – find a mid-life dip in well-being. We review a psychology literature that claims that the evidence of a U-shape is "overblown" and if there is such a decline it is "trivial". We find remarkably strong and consistent evidence across countries and US states that statistically significant U-shapes exist with and without socio-economic controls. The US is somewhat of an outlier with evidence of an early uptick in the raw data with some variables – but not in others – that disappears when controls are included. We show that two of the studies cited by psychologists suggesting there are no U-shapes are in error; we use their data and find the opposite. The effects of the mid-life dip are comparable to major life events like losing a spouse, losing a job or getting cancer. They are clearly not inconsequential.

Tired Spanish Dogs

Emails from a reader to Tyler Cowen:

4 people in Alicante were ticketed for violating the State of Alarm for walking the same dog. Seems there were trying to get out of their apartments to walk their dog, only it wasn’t theirs. I’d like to know if the owner of the dog was pimping it out for walks.

Update: People are pimping out their dogs for walks Going rate seems to be between 20 and 25 Euros per walk.

Panic and Complacency

From an interview with Ido Erev, Israeli professor of behavioral science:

When does precaution turn to panic in the midst of a threat?

What we find is that there are large differences between individuals in terms of how they respond to threats like this. Everyone tends to overreact somewhat at the beginning. But then, a little experience reverses that sense in most people, and they begin to believe that “it won’t happen to me.”

A minority of people — 10 to 30 percent, depending on the situation — continues to overestimate the risk and behave more hysterically, or overreact. These are the people who are causing much of the rush on supplies like toilet paper and emptying the shelves. This is a problem, of course, because it can prompt the same kind of behavior in others. But the important point is that this is a minority. Most people have the opposite problem.

So the overall effect, over time, is more complacency than panic?

Yes. I returned to Israel from sabbatical in the U.S. during the second Intifada, in 2002. Officials were saying that it was extremely dangerous to be in coffee shops, and my wife and I bought a fancy coffee maker and stayed inside. For a few days, the coffee shops were nearly empty, and the tourists certainly stopped coming. But the locals came out, and soon the places were full again. We knew it was still dangerous; we just began to underweight the risk, with time.

The same thing is likely to happen with the coronavirus. People will self-isolate for a time and then, when nothing happens, they don’t get sick, they’ll begin to go out again — taking more risks than they had planned to.

World Happiness Survey 2019

Just published World Happiness Rankings from surveys done in 2019. The top countries are all the ones in Northern Europe that always lead: Finland, Denmark, Norway, etc. The reason the US lags down in 18th place is basically that we are angry and distrustful and think our country is messed up. As the Times points out about Finland, "91 percent of survey respondents reported being satisfied with their president and 86 percent said they trust the police."

Post-Apocalypse and the 1964 Alaska Earthquake

How do people actually behave during a disaster? It varies, of course, but I am fed up with the notion, so widespread in our culture, that people turn into roving bands of vicious criminals. So I bring you Jon Mooallem on the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964:

The Great Alaska Earthquake had a magnitude of 9.2, and it whipped the city of Anchorage around for a full four and a half minutes. Buildings keeled off their foundations, slumped in on themselves or split in half. For two entire blocks, every storefront along one side of the city’s main thoroughfare simply dropped, plummeting into a long, ragged chasm that had ripped open underneath it; one theater marquee came to rest level with the street. Downtown looked “like the devil ground his heel into it,” one witness said.

We actually know quit a lot about how people reacted, because the Defense Department had recently created the Disaster Research Center to study exactly that question.

The Cold War was escalating. In the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, America’s Office of Civil Defense was desperate to prepare Americans for the possibility of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. One of the agency’s animating insights was that a bomb dropped on the United States wouldn’t just cause physical destruction, but pandemonium, desperation and barbarism among survivors. “The experts foretold a mass outbreak of hysterical neurosis among the civilian population,” the social scientist Richard M. Titmuss wrote in 1950. “They would behave like frightened and unsatisfied children.” . . .

But when the disaster researchers started touching down in Anchorage, a mere 28 hours after the earthquake, they almost immediately began discovering the opposite: The community was meeting the situation with a staggering amount of collaboration and compassion.

Right after the shaking stopped, ordinary citizens began crawling through the ruins downtown, searching for survivors, and using ropes to heave people out of the debris field under Turnagain. When Presbyterian Hospital started filling with gas after the quake, Boy Scouts who’d been distributing phone books in the neighborhood helped walk the hospital’s 22 patients down three or four flights of stairs, and an armada of taxis and other civilian drivers pulled up outside to evacuate everyone to a second hospital, across town. Outside the crumbling J.C. Penney, bystanders rushed to dig people out, and worked together to tow away a huge section of the fallen concrete facade with their vehicles, then extract a woman who’d been crushed beneath it in her station wagon. “Everybody jumped right in,” one man who’d been on the scene told the sociologists. “Everybody was trying to do a little bit of everything for everybody.”

By daybreak the following morning, hundreds of volunteers had spontaneously converged on the city’s combined police and fire station, similarly eager to pitch in. No one in the city government had anticipated this onrush or put any system in place to manage it. The conventional wisdom was that in a disaster, authorities had to worry about hordes of civilians chaotically fleeing the hardest-hit area. Here, everyone was piling in to help.

The police chief deputized dozens of citizens to prevent looting, but it turned out there wasn't much looting to prevent.

As I said, responses to disaster vary, but the response of the people of Anchorage is far from rare. Our obsession with social breakdown is the weird thing.

Billie Eilish Tries to Shock an Unshockable World

It amuses me that Billie Eilish tried to be dark musician who shocks people but found the world impossible to shock. In this Times piece, Eilish tells about how she once dreamed she committed suicide and wrote a song about it called "I had a dream I got everything I wanted":

Recounting this episode, Billie sat cross-legged on the living-room couch at Finneas’s house, mashing her mismatched Air Jordan 1s into the cushions. Her hair was dyed ink-black with a seepage of acid green at the scalp, and she wore an all-black outfit: an oversize bowling shirt printed with an image of two women, wearing crowns, covered in blood and kissing, and cargo pants that, in their stylized profusion of straps and pockets, struck a compromise between goth and SWAT. As she spoke, I could see her left eyebrow twitching — Billie has been given a diagnosis of Tourette’s syndrome, which manifests mainly in facial tics and muscle tensing. . . .

As today’s pop superstars go, Eilish is remarkable for her abiding interest in the grim and the upsetting. She has resuscitated an aesthetic of macabre transgression that has been almost entirely absent from the musical mainstream since the ’90s heyday of rock acts like Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson. In her lyrics, narrators murder their friends and liken lovers to hostages. In her music, bright singalong hooks are subsumed by bursts of distortion, and whisper-quiet verses are interrupted by shrieking samples of a dentist drill. In her videos, which she helps to devise and occasionally directs herself, she has cried black tears and released a large spider from her mouth. In one, faceless tormentors burn her with cigarette butts; in another, they jab her with syringes.

And for this we gave her half the Grammys and made her very, very rich.

It's really hard to be too dark for America these days.

Which reminds me that for a long time I've been thinking about a post pointing out that by far the most popular site for artists to post their work online is called DeviantArt.

Authentic Self and Cultural Self

Consider this:

Everyone wants to be authentic. You want to be true to yourself, not a slavish follower of social expectations. You want to “live your best life,” pursuing your particular desires, rather than falling in line with whatever everyone else thinks happiness requires. Studies have even shown that feelings of authenticity can go hand in hand with numerous psychological and social benefits: higher self-esteem, greater well-being, better romantic relationships and enhanced work performance.

But authenticity is a slippery thing. Although most people would define authenticity as acting in accordance with your idiosyncratic set of values and qualities, research has shown that people feel most authentic when they conform to a particular set of socially approved qualities, such as being extroverted, emotionally stable, conscientious, intellectual and agreeable.

I am not especially impressed by this research, which you can read about at the link if you like, but I am fascinated by the question of the authentic self. There is a notion, strong in the western tradition, that you have an authentic self separate from your community and your culture. There are the things that your society says you should want, and then there are the things that you really want.

I very much question whether this is real.

Consider a person who gives up an ordinary, somewhat boring middle class suburban existence married to the right sort of person, doing respectable work, to become a fishing guide in Alaska. He or she might say, "Now I'm being true to my authentic self." But really "running off to be a fishing guide in Alaska" is every bit as much of a cultural construct as "living comfortably as a middle class suburbanite." Conforming is a social role, but in our world, so is trying to break away and live "authentically."

I would say that "authenticity" itself is a cultural construct.

There is no such thing as a person without a culture. Everything we are and do is shaped by the world around us. Including rebelling against the constraints of our culture, which our particular culture very much encourages.

I think often of myself in light of this question, because there is a part of me that wants to be a writer; this somehow feels more authentic to me than sitting at my desk manipulating spreadsheets. But this dream is shared by many thousands and maybe millions of my contemporaries; how much of what I imagine is really me, and how much comes from a shared fantasy of a creative life? (Does that question mean anything?) Novels, the things I most want to write, are a highly contrived and artificial art form only a few centuries old, and fantasy novels are younger still. The stories I want to tell are built from pieces of other stories, telling about things I have been taught are important: love, friendship, struggle, triumph, defeat, acceptance, defiance.

I don't mean to argue that people have no differences. My children were born different from each other in ways that still shape them. But whatever they brought into the world takes form only in and through our particular world; whatever feelings spring from their hearts can only act on the options our culture presents to them.

We make choices, yes. Our world offers us many ways to live, and we have to pick one. But who knows which would be more authentic? I think some people do make bad choices and end up with lives that make them unhappy, and sometimes they do this from caution or submission to their families rather than "following their dreams." But maybe for some people caution and submission are authentic; maybe for some people breaking free and striking out on their own would be utterly false. And consider the feelings that picture arouses in us; despite my desire in writing this to be objective, the cautious, conventional path strikes some part of me as cowardly and weak. But that, I submit, is because my culture taught me to feel that way, and maybe real radicalism would be in recognizing that every choice is a mix of self and society, of will and submission.

What is us and what comes from outside us is an impossible questions to answer, because everything is both.

You Should Consider Fist Bumping

Worried about coronavirus? Stop shaking hands and use a quick fist bump instead. Obviously a mutual bow would be even better, but that's a hard sell in America.

Single Billionaire or Married on a Moderate Income?

YouGov asked Brits if they would rather be a single billionaire or married on a "moderate income." The results:

	Single	Married on a
	Billionaire	Moderate Income
Men	30%	55%
Women	16%	65%
Total	23%	60%

Interesting.

Support vs. Advice

This Times article argues that when teenagers come to their parent to talk about problems, the last thing they want is advice:

Parents of adolescents are often confronted by a puzzling sequence of events. First, teenagers bring us their problems; second, we earnestly offer suggestions and solutions; and third, teenagers dismiss our ideas as irritating, irrelevant or both.

These moments feel ripe for connection. Why do they so often turn sour? Almost always, it’s because we’re not giving teenagers what they’re really looking for. . . .

And what might that be?

Adolescents, just like adults, may find the best relief from simply articulating their worries and concerns. . . .

Much of what bothers teenagers cannot be solved. We can’t fix their broken hearts, prevent their social dramas, or do anything about the fact that they have three huge tests scheduled for the same day. But having a problem is not nearly so bad as feeling utterly alone with it. . . .

As hard as it is for parents to stop ourselves, rushing in with suggestions carries the risk that you’ll be communicating the idea, “You can’t fix this, but I can.” This might strike our teenagers as a vote of no confidence when they are mainly seeking our reassurance that they can handle whatever life throws at them. . . .

More often than not, offering our teenagers an ear, empathy and encouragement gives them what they came for.

We've all encountered these ideas before; it is a clichéd piece of advice for men on how to relate to women. Sometimes the idea is that giving advice is a male way to offer support, but I'm not sure contemporary men are much on being given advice, either. All of us seem to find advice, most of the time, at best useless and at worst cruelly undermining of our autonomy and competence.

This interests me because it is so contrary to what I have read about past societies. In every advice book I have ever read from medieval or Renaissance Europe, pre-Meiji Japan, or imperial China, the writer says, "when confronted with a problem, gather your friends and relations around you and ask for their advice." For a particularly delicate matter – say, whether your poems are too embarrassing to publish – you should consult only a few close friends. But you should never make any decision without soliciting advice.

These books were of course written for wealthy, prominent people who led large households or whole communities (or people who hoped to end up in such positions) and what such people decided might affect many lives. Obviously a great lord should seek advice from his councillors before making a retaliatory raid on an enemy, or in arranging a political marriage. But I do not have the impression that people of lower status acted any differently. Everywhere you encounter the basic rule: don't make decisions on your own. Ask for advice, and follow it.

I have the impression that this is a significant difference between us and our ancestors. But how significant?

Is it just a difference in the style of interactions, that is, medieval people supported each other by offering advice, while we offer "active listening," and the underlying psychological process is the same?

Maybe, but I think it is deeper than that. I think we see ourselves as much more unique, and our lives as more unique, than past people did. Moderns seem to respond to advice with "You don't understand me! No one else can possibly understand what I'm going through!" Whereas past people seemed to believe that our lives are similar enough that in fact others can understand our situations and therefore offer helpful advice.

This may be related to rapid technological and social change; my advice on how to find dates on Tinder would hardly be of any use to the young people in my house. Our world is more diverse, with more different kinds of people and interactions, so your situation may in fact be highly unusual.

But I think it is fundamentally about how we construct our egos. We are very into being unique. ("Everyone is special in their own way.") It is important to us that we navigate our own paths, rather than those marked out for us by "society." Advice feels to us like an attack on the autonomy we strive for.

Personally I think we are wrong in this, and most people would do better soliciting some advice before they act. Most of our lives are not really unique, and most of what we do has been done by millions of others. Other people do understand. It seems to be the modern condition that it hurts to acknowledge this, and thus that needing advice is a painful sort of failure.

Bootstraps

Nicholas Kristoff:

Back in the 1800s, the expression “pull oneself up by the bootstraps” meant the opposite of what it does now. Then it was used mockingly to describe an impossible act.

An 1834 publication ridiculed a claim to have built a perpetual-motion machine by saying that the inventor might next heave himself over a river “by the straps of his boots.” An 1840 citation scoffs that something is “as gross an absurdity as he who attempts to raise himself over a fence by the straps of his boots.”

Which got me thinking: if that's true, when did it become a metaphor for self help?

Fortunately other people have researched the question, giving us a good start. The long list of nineteenth-century uses presented here shows that the phrase was pretty quickly applied to social or moral uplift, but usually in a mocking way:

Madison City Express (Wisc.), 2 Feb.1843: His Excellency is certainly attempting to lift himself up by his boot-straps, or, what is much better, is "sitting in a wheel-barrow to wheel himself."

Southport Telegraph (Wisc.) 14 Feb. 1843: The Racine Advocate, in speaking of the subject, significantly remarks that 'the Governor must be trying to pull himself up the boot-straps.'

New Englander and Yale Review 6 July 1848: We have no great objection if teachers' conventions and associations pass resolutions of self-commendation; though this process of acquiring "due dignity" reminds us of the experiment sometimes made by boys, untaught in the natural laws of action and reaction, who try to elevate themselves to a more conspicuous position by means of their boot straps. 

This started to change in the 1920s:

The Oxford English Dictionary cites James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) as its earliest example of the phrase, and it appears to illustrate the contemporary meaning: “There were ... others who had forced their way to the top from the lowest rung by the aid of their bootstraps.”

A 1931 volume of Pattern Makers’ Journal notes, “Pull yourself up by the bootstraps; shake off your cloak of indifference and voluntary serfdom.” And in 1927, Britain’s Sunday Times published an editorial ridiculing the headstrong American belief in self-improvement as exemplified by “the American bootstrapper.”

I thought this would trace back to the British or American self-help movement, Samuel Smiles and all, but I can't find any evidence of that. The references above are the only ones I found in an hour of searching that date to before the 1950s. So I think the prominence of the phrase in a positive sense must date to the new conservatism of the Nixon/Reagan period, not so old at all.

Incidentally Robert Heinlein wrote a short story in 1941 titled "By His Bootstraps," but it concerns time travel and the resulting paradoxes, so I think we should make this another ironic use; it's easy enough to bootstrap yourself to success if you have a time machine.

Larry David and the MAGA Hat

Kyle Smith at The Corner:

David’s character “Larry David” is, famously, an inveterate curmudgeon who is constantly getting in brouhahas over minor questions of etiquette or misunderstandings. On the new episode, Larry finds himself unable to avoid having lunch with a disliked colleague in the comedy world (Phil Rosenthal, also playing himself). He knows that his usual tricks won’t work on Rosenthal, so he can’t escape by having a friend call during the lunch to say he’s needed back at the office. So Larry hits on a brilliant idea: He wears a red MAGA cap to the lunch. Rosenthal immediately blanches, looks around the restaurant, and discovers he’s getting dirty looks from black customers and other diners. Horrified that people might associate him with Trumpism, he hastily makes his excuses and exits. Larry is triumphant. He even finds other uses for the MAGA cap; sitting at a sushi bar in close quarters, he puts on the cap and finds that the people who were going to squeeze in next to him instead flee in horror. He brags that the hat is a useful “people repellent.” But in a potentially dicey traffic situation with an angry biker, Larry puts on the hat and defuses the situation because the hat signals to the biker that he’s a kindred spirit. . . .

The MAGA hat has many meanings, does it not? It doesn’t really mean “Make America Great Again.” It’s more like a badge of defiance, of apartness. It says, “You’re all annoying.” It says, “I want no part of this.” It says, “Things used to be better.” It says, “Buzz off.” It says, “I’m deplorable.”

I think this nails one major strain of Trumpism.

Cynicism and Disrespect

Via Marginal Revolutions, a new paper on cynicism and respect:

We tested how cynicism emerges and what maintains it. Cynicism is the tendency to believe that people are morally bankrupt and behave treacherously to maximize self-interest. Drawing on literatures on norms of respectful treatment, we proposed that being the target of disrespect gives rise to cynical views, which predisposes people to further disrespect. The end result is a vicious cycle: cynicism and disrespect fuel one another. Study 1’s nationally representative survey showed that disrespect and cynicism are positively related to each other in 28 of 29 countries studied, and that cynicism’s associations with disrespect were independent of (and stronger than) associations with lacking social support. Study 2 used a nationally representative longitudinal dataset, spanning 4 years. In line with the vicious cycle hypothesis, feeling disrespected and holding cynical views gave rise to each other over time. Five preregistered experiments (including 2 in the online supplemental materials) provided causal evidence. Study 3 showed that bringing to mind previous experiences of being disrespected heightened cynical beliefs subsequently. Studies 4 and 5 showed that to the extent that people endorsed cynical beliefs, others were inclined to treat them disrespectfully. Study 6’s weeklong daily diary study replicated the vicious cycle pattern. Everyday experiences of disrespect elevated cynical beliefs and vice versa. Moreover, cynical individuals tended to treat others with disrespect, which in turn predicted more disrespectful treatment by others. In short, experiencing disrespect gives rise to cynicism and cynicism elicits disrespect from others, thereby reinforcing the worldview that caused these negative reactions in the first place.

It seems obvious how being treated badly could fuel cynicism, but notice that the study also finds cynical people are treated more disrespectfully. This seems in line with Scott Alexander's essay on "nothing makes sense except in light of inter-individual variation" I linked to last month.

Thinking about Prohibition

It's the 100th anniversary of nationwide prohibition in the US, so I am seeing essays all over marking that peculiar event. Pause to consider this: Prohibition was one of the most widely supported, easiest to pass amendments to our constitution since the original ten. On the first vote it was supported by 68% of the House and 76% of the Senate and was then ratified by 46 of the 48 states. The tide of support overwhelmed the many huge obstacles our system throws up to block change, sweeping the opposition away. Support was equally strong in New England and the Deep South, among Democrats and Republicans. In fact in most of the country the Federal laws that followed the amendment had no effect, because 32 states had already enacted their own bans on the sale of alcohol. Note that most of the prohibition-era laws applied to selling alcohol, not drinking it, so making your own and drinking it or giving it away remained a gray area mostly ignored by law enforcement.

And then fifteen years later the amendment was quietly repealed without much more opposition than it had met being enacted, and it was soon remembered as nothing more than a failure and a joke. What was that about?

As to why people opposed the sale of liquor, that seems obvious to me: because it has killed millions of people and impoverished millions more. None of the other drugs that we have at various times tried to ban has ever come close to the level of harm inflicted by alcohol. Of course it has also led to a a great deal of happiness, fun, and so on, but that is true of any drug people take for pleasure. Why, then, does banning alcohol seem ridiculous? And what does that say about the whole enterprise of government, and of all our attempts at moral reform?

Historically the supporters of prohibition came from two camps: religious fundamentalists and progressives bent on bettering the lot of humanity. It was strongest where the two converged, that is, among the religious do-gooders who also created Abolitionism. Most of the leading abolitionists were in the Temperance camp: Lyman Beecher, William Lloyd Garrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Frederick Douglass, who once wrote, "if we could but make the world sober, we would have no slavery." Abraham Lincoln was for temperance. But so was Teddy Roosevelt, coming from a very different tradition of "muscular Christianity" and an obsession with good health.

My eldest son was puzzled by this list of prohibitionists and asked, "Are they for freedom or against it?" Well, both, in certain circumstances. Just as they opposed the freedom to own slaves, they also opposed the freedom to profit from exploiting the addiction of alcoholics and impoverishing working families. In the world today the most active temperance movement is in rural India, where groups of women have been smashing up the unlicensed saloons where their husbands get drunk. Which rights are more important, those of the men to get drunk and the saloon keepers to sell to them, or those of the women and children to food and shelter?

But while I very much understand the impulses that drive prohibition, I don't support and doubt it could ever be made to work.

This takes my thoughts toward what humans are and what we can and cannot do. We cannot, it seems to me, be all that good. Some level of sin is essential to us. For many people, happiness depends on some sort of chemical that changes what it feels like to be alive. If we try to take that way we will likely fail, and the costs of that attempt will be high.

That is what the US found during Prohibition. At first the nation's consumption of alcohol declined quite a bit, but it didn't take long for gangsters and speakeasys to fill the void left by legal saloons. By the time Prohibition was repealed, consumption was higher than ever, or at least that's what FDR and other advocates for repeal claimed. Moonshine and bathtub gin also poisoned many people, more than 10,000 fatally. Al Capone was only the most famous of a whole army of rum runners whose violence led to a rise in the murder rate and a spreading feeling of danger.

It just didn't work.

One of the greatest challenges we face in organizing our societies is finding the line between what we can try to ban and what we have to accept. Because any attempt to reform us beyond what our weak hearts can stand will only fail and probably leave things worse than before.

The Kids on the No. 6 Bus

In the 1970s, Nick Kristoff rode the bus to school with a bunch of working class neighbors in Yamhill, Oregon:

Chaos reigned daily on the No. 6 school bus, with working-class boys and girls flirting and gossiping and dreaming, brimming with mischief, bravado and optimism. Nick rode it every day in the 1970s with neighbors here in rural Oregon, neighbors like Farlan, Zealan, Rogena, Nathan and Keylan Knapp.

They were bright, rambunctious, upwardly mobile youngsters whose father had a good job installing pipes. The Knapps were thrilled to have just bought their own home, and everyone oohed and aahed when Farlan received a Ford Mustang for his 16th birthday.

Yet today about one-quarter of the children on that No. 6 bus are dead, mostly from drugs, suicide, alcohol or reckless accidents. Of the five Knapp kids who had once been so cheery, Farlan died of liver failure from drink and drugs, Zealan burned to death in a house fire while passed out drunk, Rogena died from hepatitis linked to drug use and Nathan blew himself up cooking meth. Keylan survived partly because he spent 13 years in a state penitentiary.

Among other kids on the bus, Mike died from suicide, Steve from the aftermath of a motorcycle accident, Cindy from depression and a heart attack, Jeff from a daredevil car crash, Billy from diabetes in prison, Kevin from obesity-related ailments, Tim from a construction accident, Sue from undetermined causes. And then there’s Chris, who is presumed dead after years of alcoholism and homelessness. At least one more is in prison, and another is homeless.

Nick Kristoff blames the disappearance of good working class jobs, and I agree that this is the immediate and maybe the most important cause. But I would extend that by saying that the cause was the disappearance of jobs in a culture where working and supporting yourself and your family was the supreme value -- "standing on your own two feet" -- leaving nothing on which people could rely when their jobs were gone.

Mental Illness in America

The news is full of crazy people. Grafton Thomas, the man who attacked a house full of Hasidic Jews with a machete, has been charged with “Hate Crimes,” but evidence is mounting that he is insane:

But on Sunday afternoon, a family friend, Taleea Collins, and Mr. Thomas’s pastor, the Rev. Wendy Paige, said that he had struggled with mental illness for two decades and had repeatedly sought help over the years. . . . Ms. Paige said Mr. Thomas had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

I have written before that the intersection of mental illness with extreme ideology is a major threat to our safety, and here is another example.

But what should we do about it? The Rev. Paige says she

had struggled for years to understand why Thomas wasn’t institutionalized. “There hasn’t been anyone who has given a real solution to deal with a grown man who is dealing with schizophrenia, other than ‘Go home and call us if something happens.’” 

Mitchell Silber, a former director of intelligence for the NYC police who has lately made himself an expert on antisemitic hate crimes, writes that

Failing to treat individuals with documented mental health issues is not an acceptable solution.

But what would an “acceptable solution” be? Our laws do not allow locking up mentally ill people unless they present a clear danger to themselves or others, and many people who knew Grafton Thomas thought he was mild-mannered and anything but violent; before this attack, could a case have been made that he was a danger to society? He did once have a tense confrontation with the police, which led to his being charged with “second-degree reckless endangerment and menacing a police or peace officer,” but those sorts of confrontations happen every day. Are we going to lock up all the homeless people who have ever had a run in with the cops?

Meanwhile there has been lots of news about the ongoing homelessness crisis in California, with everyone from Donald Trump to the NY Times weighing in. The problem of shit, needles and trash on the streets of San Francisco is so bad that big tech conferences that used to be held there are moving elsewhere.

The Times rather predictably takes the tone that this is an economic problem, and they explicitly address it under the heading of inequality:

The path to becoming homeless can start with a large medical bill that causes someone to fall behind on their rent payments, which leads to eventual eviction. More than half of the people surveyed in Los Angeles cited economic hardship as the primary reason that they fell into homelessness. In San Francisco, 26 percent of the homeless surveyed cited the loss of a job as the primary cause.

But really in California as everywhere else homelessness is very much enmeshed with mental illness. Statistics on homelessness are a mess because there are two kinds of homeless people: the kind who lose their homes through eviction or fleeing from abuse and then very quickly find new housing (the median length of stay in a US homeless shelter is one night), and the long-term homeless. The statistics above, from Kevin Drum at Mother Jones and therefore not likely to be a conservative hack job, show that most long-term homeless people have serious non-economic problems. Fully 78% have diagnosed mental health problems, and 75% have substance abuse problems; 50% have the trifecta of physical health problems, mental health problems, and substance abuse. Notice that alcoholics and drug abusers are especially unlikely to be found in shelters, because in a shelter they have a hard time getting high.

Take a look at the Times photo essay on a miserable homeless camp in Oakland; tell me that seems like a gathering of sane people.

This is not to say that economics does not play a role here; we have probably all known people with mental health or drug problems that might well have landed them on  the street if they did not have middle class families and other resources. I certainly have. It may well be true that some people end up homeless after losing a job; losing a job is traumatic for anyone, but for mentally ill people just holding it together it might be the shove that sends them over the edge. Housing costs and the shortage of subsidized housing may also be factors; again, struggles that people with good mental health might be able to manage might be too much for the mentally ill.

But to write about homelessness without mentioning mental health is just absurd.

That being said, what can we do about it? Better community health care is obviously thing one, and it might be enough to make a big dent in the problem. If you've ever tried to find good mental health providers who are taking new patients and your insurance, you know what a problem that can be even for middle class people. It must be ten times worse for poor people. California has spent billions over the past decade “fighting homelessness,” but I think they would have done better to invest in mental health care. My only hesitation is that since the need is so vast, it is hard to imagine how much money we might need to spend to provide decent mental health care for everyone.

And what about people who refuse care? Because this is a serious problem. “He was on medication for a while but didn't like it and stopped taking it” is a line in many mental health tragedies, including that of Grafton Thomas. Is there a solution to this beyond “Go home and call us if something happens”?

Some people have talked about re-opening state mental hospitals for long-term care, but that is very expensive and the last time we tried it the system was full of brutality and neglect. Several commentators have mentioned the number of mentally ill people in prison, with the idea, stated or not, that maybe they would be better off in mental hospitals. Maybe so, but most mentally ill people have not committed crimes that would get them long prison sentences, and we are a long way from being able to predict which ones are likely to. Scott Alexander, a psychiatrist, has written a long piece about why putting the mentally ill homeless in hospitals is a bad idea, and I recommend it for the curious.

So what is the answer? I honestly don't know. But it seems to me that if we want a world in which everyone who wants one has a home, we first need to invest in mental health care, and if we want to protect our public spaces from being overrun by crazy people who yell at us, we may need to violate a few rights.