Things I have been reading
"JERUSALEM, April 13 - The Vatican’s ambassador to Israel has said he will skip the official Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at a national museum here on Sunday to protest the museum’s depiction of Pope Pius XII as a largely passive bystander to the murder of Jews during World War II." -NYTimes. Priorities=straight.
"The Valencians, sensibly but without firm proof, claim that Arabs brought rice to Spain before it appeared elsewhere in Europe. They also maintain that paella is the only “real” rice dish in Europe, that everything else, including risotto, is “arroz con cosas” (“rice with things”)." --NYTimes. haha, everything else is just rice with things. Spaniards.
The Way I See It #223
The greatest difficulty of travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
-- Alain de Botton
Author of Essays in Love and The Architecture of Happiness.
Responses to a marginalrevolution.com post about incentives for women to date jerks:
"And even Hitler had a girlfriend,
Who he could always call,
That would always be there for him
In spite of all his faults
He was the worst guy ever.
reviled and despised,
Even Hitler had a girlfriend
So why can't I?
Why can't I?
-(Dr.) Frank Portman"
"...Nice guys are often (not always, but often) no less interested in getting laid than cads, and even no more inclined to long-term pair-bonding.
They've just been egregiously misinformed, thanks to political correctness and female-marketed mass culture, about what women actually want and will actually respond to (as opposed to what they say they want and say they will respond to)."
"under a surprisingly broad set of conditions, women are more attracted to men who treat them poorly
This is misogynistic nerd folklore. "
Nope, climate change is not yet a problem. Mountaintop snow melting, sea rising. No prob.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/11/world/asia/11india.html?bl&ex=1176696000&en=20671306b77b0561&ei=5087%0A
Here is the conclusion of a just-released paper evaluating all the recent research on the connection between happiness and income or GDP or material wealth, etc. I read something recently that quoted a statistic saying that before a nation reaches a per capita income of $10,000, happiness IS correlated positively with income. After $10,000, marginal gains in happiness do NOT result from marginal increases in income. Lots of people find this to be a reason why we should even out income distribution so that everyone earns around the same amount, and there's less friction from income inequality and less pressure to materialize contentment. This paper says that we don't need to do this to increase happiness. It's interesting, although I don't think I'm libertarian enough to buy it.
Conclusion
The United States is not failing the
Founders’ test. The happiness-based evidence
points unambiguously to the conclusion that
those of us lucky enough to live in the United
States in 2007 are succeeding fairly well in the
pursuit of happiness. Whether or not our
Founders would recognize-or even like-their
country, Americans are indeed living up to the
promise of our founding.
So, we are left with a puzzle. If we’re so
happy, then why are we so ready to be persuaded
by claims that we are suffering from a
world-historical spiritual malaise, despite all
the evidence to the contrary?
In his bestselling 2004 book The Paradox of
Choice, Schwartz argues that capitalist consumer
culture gets us down by offering too
many choices. It’s not just that the onslaught
of new brands of toothpaste, breakfast cereal,
chocolate bars, and books about happiness
taxes our frail deliberative capacities, but when
our set of options explodes, each new choice
requires not choosing so many other things.129
The perceived cost of making any choice and
sticking with it seems higher and higher the
more alternatives there are to forgo. On this
score, Schwartz points us to Robert Lane’s
claim in The Loss of Happiness in Market
Democracies:
There are too many life choices . . .
without concern for the resulting overload;
and the lack of constraint by custom,
[and] demands for self-actualization,
that is, demands to discover or
create rather than accept a given identity
. . . all adds to the stress.”130
To be sure, it is a hassle to have to discover
or create our identities instead of being
“given” one-or having one forced upon us.
But this is, in essence, what it means to be
postmaterialist in Inglehart’s sense. Instead of
slipping into pre-assigned, traditional social
roles, we are able to sit atop mountains of
wealth and survey the vast horizon of possibility,
with a heretofore unthinkable independence
from custom, wondering what kind of
person we would like to be. And then we
become agoraphobic.
Our problem is that there are both too
many and too few choices. There are particular
goods that would specially benefit and
satisfy each of us, but which don’t exist. Yet it
is hard to identify the specially fitting goods
that already do exist in the panoply of choice.
If we weren’t so diverse, we wouldn’t require
so much diversity. One kind of shoe, one
kind of bread, one kind of antacid would be
universally satisfactory. But we are diverse,
and, for the first time in history, we are liberated
from ancient demands of conformity,
because, for the first time in history, we now
come into the world at a sufficiently safe distance
from scarcity to permit us to express
and experiment with our singular natures. In
fine post-materialist fashion, we demand
that our consumption express our self-conceptions-
in-progress, and so we need diversity.
But we also don’t know exactly who we want
to be before we get to the store. So we can easily
feel lost in the consumer cornucopia, as
though we are sorting through a landfill for
a diamond etched with just our name.
As John Maynard Keynes wrote in his startlingly
prescient essay “Economic Possibilities
for Our Grandchildren,” there may be a sense
in which we have already solved (we lucky few
in the advanced liberal democracies, that is)
the economic problem of scarcity. But then
what?
Thus for the first time since his creation
man will be faced with his real, his permanent
problem, how to use his freedom
from pressing economic cares,
how to occupy the leisure, which science
and compound interest will have won
for him, to live wisely and agreeably and
well.131
And this, our permanent problem, we have yet
to solve, and it weighs on us. Our culture has
not yet caught up to the new, happier world of
science and compound interest, and we do not
35
In fine postmaterialist
fashion, we
demand that our
consumption
express our
self-conceptionsin-
progress, and
so we need
diversity.
yet see how our inherited visions of the good
life fit into it. So it seems plausible to most of
us that something is wrong, even if so much is
right. If happiness research is going to be good
for anything, it is not going to be for guiding
well-meaning technocrats who seek to make
us happier by pulling this policy lever or pushing
that policy button. Rather it is going to be
good for providing insight in how “to live
wisely and agreeably and well.” This is insight
we all badly need, and it is not the government’s
to give.
"The Valencians, sensibly but without firm proof, claim that Arabs brought rice to Spain before it appeared elsewhere in Europe. They also maintain that paella is the only “real” rice dish in Europe, that everything else, including risotto, is “arroz con cosas” (“rice with things”)." --NYTimes. haha, everything else is just rice with things. Spaniards.
The Way I See It #223
The greatest difficulty of travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
-- Alain de Botton
Author of Essays in Love and The Architecture of Happiness.
Responses to a marginalrevolution.com post about incentives for women to date jerks:
"And even Hitler had a girlfriend,
Who he could always call,
That would always be there for him
In spite of all his faults
He was the worst guy ever.
reviled and despised,
Even Hitler had a girlfriend
So why can't I?
Why can't I?
-(Dr.) Frank Portman"
"...Nice guys are often (not always, but often) no less interested in getting laid than cads, and even no more inclined to long-term pair-bonding.
They've just been egregiously misinformed, thanks to political correctness and female-marketed mass culture, about what women actually want and will actually respond to (as opposed to what they say they want and say they will respond to)."
"under a surprisingly broad set of conditions, women are more attracted to men who treat them poorly
This is misogynistic nerd folklore. "
Nope, climate change is not yet a problem. Mountaintop snow melting, sea rising. No prob.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/11/world/asia/11india.html?bl&ex=1176696000&en=20671306b77b0561&ei=5087%0A
Here is the conclusion of a just-released paper evaluating all the recent research on the connection between happiness and income or GDP or material wealth, etc. I read something recently that quoted a statistic saying that before a nation reaches a per capita income of $10,000, happiness IS correlated positively with income. After $10,000, marginal gains in happiness do NOT result from marginal increases in income. Lots of people find this to be a reason why we should even out income distribution so that everyone earns around the same amount, and there's less friction from income inequality and less pressure to materialize contentment. This paper says that we don't need to do this to increase happiness. It's interesting, although I don't think I'm libertarian enough to buy it.
Conclusion
The United States is not failing the
Founders’ test. The happiness-based evidence
points unambiguously to the conclusion that
those of us lucky enough to live in the United
States in 2007 are succeeding fairly well in the
pursuit of happiness. Whether or not our
Founders would recognize-or even like-their
country, Americans are indeed living up to the
promise of our founding.
So, we are left with a puzzle. If we’re so
happy, then why are we so ready to be persuaded
by claims that we are suffering from a
world-historical spiritual malaise, despite all
the evidence to the contrary?
In his bestselling 2004 book The Paradox of
Choice, Schwartz argues that capitalist consumer
culture gets us down by offering too
many choices. It’s not just that the onslaught
of new brands of toothpaste, breakfast cereal,
chocolate bars, and books about happiness
taxes our frail deliberative capacities, but when
our set of options explodes, each new choice
requires not choosing so many other things.129
The perceived cost of making any choice and
sticking with it seems higher and higher the
more alternatives there are to forgo. On this
score, Schwartz points us to Robert Lane’s
claim in The Loss of Happiness in Market
Democracies:
There are too many life choices . . .
without concern for the resulting overload;
and the lack of constraint by custom,
[and] demands for self-actualization,
that is, demands to discover or
create rather than accept a given identity
. . . all adds to the stress.”130
To be sure, it is a hassle to have to discover
or create our identities instead of being
“given” one-or having one forced upon us.
But this is, in essence, what it means to be
postmaterialist in Inglehart’s sense. Instead of
slipping into pre-assigned, traditional social
roles, we are able to sit atop mountains of
wealth and survey the vast horizon of possibility,
with a heretofore unthinkable independence
from custom, wondering what kind of
person we would like to be. And then we
become agoraphobic.
Our problem is that there are both too
many and too few choices. There are particular
goods that would specially benefit and
satisfy each of us, but which don’t exist. Yet it
is hard to identify the specially fitting goods
that already do exist in the panoply of choice.
If we weren’t so diverse, we wouldn’t require
so much diversity. One kind of shoe, one
kind of bread, one kind of antacid would be
universally satisfactory. But we are diverse,
and, for the first time in history, we are liberated
from ancient demands of conformity,
because, for the first time in history, we now
come into the world at a sufficiently safe distance
from scarcity to permit us to express
and experiment with our singular natures. In
fine post-materialist fashion, we demand
that our consumption express our self-conceptions-
in-progress, and so we need diversity.
But we also don’t know exactly who we want
to be before we get to the store. So we can easily
feel lost in the consumer cornucopia, as
though we are sorting through a landfill for
a diamond etched with just our name.
As John Maynard Keynes wrote in his startlingly
prescient essay “Economic Possibilities
for Our Grandchildren,” there may be a sense
in which we have already solved (we lucky few
in the advanced liberal democracies, that is)
the economic problem of scarcity. But then
what?
Thus for the first time since his creation
man will be faced with his real, his permanent
problem, how to use his freedom
from pressing economic cares,
how to occupy the leisure, which science
and compound interest will have won
for him, to live wisely and agreeably and
well.131
And this, our permanent problem, we have yet
to solve, and it weighs on us. Our culture has
not yet caught up to the new, happier world of
science and compound interest, and we do not
35
In fine postmaterialist
fashion, we
demand that our
consumption
express our
self-conceptionsin-
progress, and
so we need
diversity.
yet see how our inherited visions of the good
life fit into it. So it seems plausible to most of
us that something is wrong, even if so much is
right. If happiness research is going to be good
for anything, it is not going to be for guiding
well-meaning technocrats who seek to make
us happier by pulling this policy lever or pushing
that policy button. Rather it is going to be
good for providing insight in how “to live
wisely and agreeably and well.” This is insight
we all badly need, and it is not the government’s
to give.