Child Discipline: Part Two

Note: This post is part of a series I’m writing on Child Discipline. 

Part Two – Good Kids Are Voluntarily Good

It’s nice to have an obedient, well-behaved child – it sure is convenient – but we as parents should agree that our efforts to raise a well-behaved child are about more than mere convenience or expedience. We have a loftier goal in mind, and that goal is to raise a socially functional, emotionally well-adjusted person. A child who behaves well isn’t merely a pleasure for us to be around. We at least operate under the assumption that a child who exhibits good behavior is a child who will grow up to be a good human being. As parents, we all hold his assumption, whether or not we ever formally articulate it. This raises the question: What is a good human being?

Well, that’s a very broad question, and out of scope of the present discussion, but one thing is clear at least: A good person chooses to do good things, and does so voluntarily. In light of that fact, and our three conditions above, a corollary condition starts to emerge. A successful disciplinary philosophy will produce a child who voluntarily chooses to engage in good behavior. This fourth condition is a natural extension of the previous three. A child who voluntarily chooses to behave minimizes punishment for himself or herself, minimizes contentiousness (by maximizing cooperativeness), and is actively engaged in exhibiting more good behaviors and fewer bad behaviors.

In short, we want doing the right thing to be a voluntary choice, such that it doesn’t have to be a question of discipline at all.

People have all manner of motives for making voluntary choices, from rational self-interest, to punishment avoidance, to social signaling, and more. In order for someone to voluntarily choose good, ethical behavior, he or she must have motives in place for doing so. 

This brings me to my next big point, which I'll discuss in the next post.

Child Discipline: Part One

Note: This post is part of a series I’m writing on Child Discipline.

Part One – Measuring Success: The Three Conditions of a Successful Disciplinary Philosophy

Let me begin by establishing three conditions that define a successful approach to discipline:

1. Punishment should be minimized.
2. Feelings of contentiousness, or competitiveness, or of a power-struggle between parents and children, should also be minimized.
3. Applying the disciplinary approach should result in less misbehavior, and more good behavior, over time.

Many people only consider condition #3, since that is the ultimate goal of any approach to discipline. We want our children to behave. But that’s not enough for me, since after all, terrorizing children into never doing anything wrong would satisfy condition #3, but make the child miserable (and probably also the parents). So, we need the first two conditions to act as binding constraints on the over-arching goal. We should not go out of our way to punish our children, and in fact it shouldn’t even be the most-ready tool in our disciplinary tool kit. A well-adjusted and successfully reared child should want to behave well, and not merely wish to avoid punishment. Home life should also not be a constant competition between parents and children, where each party attempts to get as close to breaking the rules as possible without actually doing so. Life shouldn’t be a matter of maximizing “cans” and minimizing “can’ts.” Life at home should be cooperative, supportive, and happy.

As of this writing, it appears that my disciplinary philosophy minimizes punishment. I have thus far avoided having to punish my daughter at all – ever. I’ve been raising my daughter for four years now, and four years is a pretty good winning streak. I realize that perhaps the more challenging disciplinary scenarios are yet to come, but even so, I have a good track record so far. Moreover, my child and I, along with my wife, never feel as though we’re in contention with one another. We don’t argue with each other. We’re never trying to finagle good behavior from my daughter, and she’s never trying to finagle bad behavior or extra rewards from us. In other words, we feel mutually cooperative and loving, as a family should feel. That may not seem like much of an accomplishment to those of you who were raised in families that never or seldom experienced pervasive feelings of contentiousness. If you come from such a family, good for you! I really mean that. Not everyone has the benefit of coming from such a family, so the fact that my approach to disciplining my child avoids what seems almost inevitable to me is a marked success. And, of course, my approach to discipline seems to reduce misbehavior and promote good behavior.

Is it perfect? Have I worked out all the kinks? Am I perfect in applying my philosophy? No, of course not. None of that is ever possible. But so far, my experience gives me confidence in the future. I’ll continue to fine-tune my philosophy in coming years, but I seem to be on the right track.

In our next installment, we'll discuss what that track is.

The Two Key Rules For Moral Behavior

Inspired by a comment I left at Slate Star Codex, I’d like to present two rules that a robust moral system must satisfy. Let me begin by stating that I am under no illusion that these rules are original to me. The philosophical literature has already dealt with both of these rules in depth. Unfortunately, basic moral philosophy appears to be a set of narratives that human beings need to reinvent and re-state again and again across each generation. This probably serves a good purpose, namely that “no one ought to deprive you of your right to life” sounds a lot better to modern ears than “thou shalt not kill,” even though they articulate the same basic moral theory. Humanity thrives on the stories we tell ourselves, especially the moral stories we tell ourselves, and so it is our destiny to repeat our moral tenets over and over again, in evolving contemporary language, throughout time unto infinity.

But back to what I was saying. Every robust moral system must satisfy two rules: (1) Be a better person, and (2) Don’t be an evil person.

It’s easy to see how these two rules differ from each other. While (1) is primarily about elevating your moral standards and holding yourself to a higher sense of purpose, (2) is primarily above avoiding acts and behaviors that are almost universally understood to be terrible. Thus, a good example of (1) might be “spend more time with your kids,” while a good example of (2) might be “don’t ever physically hurt your children, neither intentionally nor through neglect.” We can see how spending more time with your kids would help us avoid hurting them through neglect, but neither statement on its own is enough to get us to a moral relationship with our children. By contrast, living both statements to the greatest extent possible gets us a lot closer to having a moral parent-child relationship.

I could provide additional examples, but I won’t.

Some moralists are very off-putting people. They scorn everyone who fails to live up to their moral preferences. I believe that people like this have a tendency to turn every moral guideline into some version of rule (2). Instead of advising caution and modesty in romantic relationships, they decry fornication. Rather than advocating for a reduced carbon footprint, they criticize anyone who drives an SUV. For such people, no one is moral unless they avoid the major prohibitions. It’s not about being honest, it’s about not lying; it’s not about being generous, it’s about not being greedy. Wherever such people go, shame and damnation follows them. No wonder we find such people off-putting.

But there are some people who have the opposite problem: they never apply rule (2) to their moral system, and thus everything becomes some version of rule (1). For them “I did the best that I could” shall be the whole of the law. These are the folks who are always rationalizing their clearly moral behavior. If they cut someone off in traffic, they figure that they either had no choice, or that everyone else was doing it, too. If they tell a lie, it’s always because they had a very good reason to do it. If they fail to save a drowning baby, it’s because they didn’t want to put themselves at risk since they have children of their own to worry about. Without any definite moral wrongs to avoid, they are free to engage in any behavior and, as long as someone out there is doing worse, they can reason that they never went too far.

A robust moral system – one that consistently guides you toward doing the right thing – will have a good blend of recommendations for being a better person, and recommendations for not being an evil person. A robust moral system will command you not to engage in that which is clearly harmful, and you will obey; but it will also inspire you to make small moral improvements every day throughout your life. In this way, it sets out the limits of moral behavior, and then asks us to improve our average behavior.

Living by a system that incorporates both rules will make you a moral person indeed.

Threatin Seems Alright By Me. What's The Problem Here?

Jered Threatin, real name Jered Eames, has earned himself the reputation of being a con artist. I myself, however, am conflicted.

For those of you who don’t have exposure to this world, let’s bring you up to speed.

Threatin is a “band” based out of Los Angeles. In truth, it is more of a musical project conceived, written, produced, and performed by Jered Eames under the stage name Jered Threatin. I have absolutely no problem with Threatin’s use of a stage name. That is a very common practice among both amateur and professional musicians. I also have no bones about the fact that Threatin the band is really just a creative entity that exists as more or less the solo project of Threatin the man. We’ve all heard Nine Inch Nails, and we all know that it is really just a Trent Reznor solo project. None of us care about that. Reznor is Nine Inch Nails, just as Threatin is Threatin. So, once again, the cast of characters in this story is really just a cast of amateur or semi-pro musicians doing things that are quite common for amateur or semi-pro musicians to do.

Threatin is not distinguished from the rest of us amateurs by the fact that he used bots and apps to gain fake likes on Facebook and Instagram – after all, tons of people do this, even people you know and like, and while we might roll our eyes about it once in a while, no one really thinks it’s that big a deal.

Threatin is also not distinguished by the fact that he invented record labels, promo, and management companies to help legitimize his act. After all, Devin Townsend created “Hevy Devy Records” way back in the nineties solely as a vehicle to promote Devin Townsend. Hevy Devy Records, you will remember, used to have its own separate website from Devin Townsend’s own artist website, and HDR used to list all of Townsend’s acts as separate artists on the HDR roster. At the time, must of us considered that clever. We knew all those artists were really just various flavors of Devin Townsend, but it all seemed fair enough. In fact, nowadays it is quite common for artists to self-publish their albums and invent a record label name. It’s so common that the fact that Threatin did this didn’t even strike me as being even a little odd. It’s just, you know, using the language of record promotions to self-publish your work. Big deal.

Nor, for that matter, is Threatin distinguished by the fact that he created YouTube videos that make it look as though he’s performing in front of a massive audience. Even the very earliest music videos from the 70s show well-known artists rocking out on stage in full regalia, as though they are putting on a big concert. In reality, most of those videos were filmed in studios designed to look like legitimate concert stages, and there was no real audience. I’m also aware of at least one major-label song – King’s X’s “live” cover of “Manic Depression” by Jimi Hendrix – of an artist’s being recorded in the studio with studio tricks being used to make the listener believe that it was recorded in front of a massive, arena-sized audience. To my knowledge, no one has ever accused King’s X of being frauds or phonies for having done this – nor should anyone accuse them of this, in my opinion. This is all pretty blasé music industry practice, as far as I can tell.

Threatin does, however, appear to have done some things that artists before him have not done, or at least not successfully. He tried to create his own Wikipedia page about himself. He listed non-existent artists on his record label’s website, and that of his promotions company. He invented a fake music award and claimed to have won it.

And, most importantly, he leveraged the power of his manufactured social media presence to hire a pickup band, book a European tour, and actually play. From what I can tell, Threatin legitimately paid the booking fees for these venues. So we cannot say that he defrauded these venues, since he paid them fair and square. The only apparent problem here is that the venues were expecting a packed house along with venue booking fees, and Threatin merely paid the booking fees. The audience never showed up, because there was no audience in the first place. Because Threatin is not a famous band with enough clout or commercial appeal to justify a European tour.

But so what?

The metal music press is all a-twitter about this allegedly “fake” band and “fake” tour, but I’m left scratching my head. Threatin appears to be an artist who makes good on his contracts, even despite having very little popularity and a mostly manufactured media presence. First of all, good for him for making good on his legal and business obligations – not every artist does that. Second of all, being unpopular is not a crime. Third of all, point me in the direction of the “legitimate” music act that does not exaggerate its own credibility.

VH-1 used to broadcast a program called “Behind the Music,” which would tell the story behind the rise and success of a famous band. One episode I vividly remember was about the band Oasis. In it, Noel Gallagher is quoted saying, “Look, if you go around telling people you’re the best band in the world, fifty percent of them are going to believe it!” Perhaps Jered Threatin saw the same episode I saw.

In the end, Threatin’s rise to infamy-if-not-fame is certainly unorthodox in its whole, but no one thing that he did looks particularly unethical or screwy to me. Much of what he did has been standard practice in the music industry for decades. No one yet has remarked that Threatin’s music lacks credibility.

So what really is the controvery here? One of the richest and most famous celebrities in the world today is a woman who rose to fame by having her sex tape stolen. She has managed to leverage that fame into multi-million-dollar business deals for herself, along with multi-million-dollar business deals for each one of her siblings, and her parents. Sure, it’s certainly en vogue to hate the Kardashians, but their expert use of social media and self-promotion reveals a business acumen that many “Instagram Models” have attempted to replicate – some with greater success than others. Beyond that, I think he’s demonstrated a fair amount of social media savvy, and had some fun along the way. None of this strikes me as being wrong, or even lame.

I certainly admire his ability to have created a media circus. Perhaps his only misstep here was aiming too high. Rather than a European tour, perhaps he should have merely attempted to sell out the Viper Room, and then the House of Blues, and then perhaps leverage those appearances to gain an opening slot on someone else’s tour.

Or perhaps he really just wanted to have some fun playing some gigs in Europe while on vacation. I’ve certainly entertained similar ideas myself. Wouldn’t it be cool to book a week at a resort in Cabo, with my friends and bandmates, and while I’m down there, play a couple of shows in local venues? I’d jokingly call it a “tour,” and why not? It kind of would be. Some ten years ago, I even tried to book a few shows around town in a city a few states over, just so that I could play music with a friend of mine. We only managed to book one appearance at an open mic, but again: big deal. It was fun! I bet Threatin is also having fun playing gigs here and there while seeing the sights in Europe. More power to him, I say.

I haven’t heard any of Threatin’s music. Maybe I’ll go listen to some now. I hope I enjoy what I hear, because I hope a guy with that kind of creative streak has at least a little success.

ADDENDUM: I listened to his music, and while it's not the kind of thing I usually listen to, it's actually pretty good. He plays all the instruments, and plays them well. He sings, and his voice is just fine. His lyrics won't change your life, but they're good. To be sure, he's an above-average musician, in my opinion, and easily deserving of some success. Good for him.

Is There Anything About Manliness Worth Saving?

I came across this long essay about a man who wonders what it means to be a man. The piece is quite sad, overall. The poor guy hasn’t figured it out.

To wit, it never seems to occur to him that the actions of a man does need not impugn women, or comment on them in any way at all, really. The author criticizes the slaying of dragons or the fighting-off of purse-snatchers. But if I slay a dragon or fight off a purse-snatcher, I'm doing that because that’s what I think ought to be done by me, not because I don’t think women should do any of those things. If I save a drowning baby, it’s not because I think other people are weak and incapable, it’s simply because there is a baby that needs saving, and I’m an able-bodied potential savior.

This modern pathos has infected absolutely everything. People are petrified of declaring their morals or their beliefs, for fear of accidentally implying that this sets them asunder. It’s not true, of course. That we all agree that lying is wrong does not imply that “people who aren’t like us lie all the time.” If I tell my sister that I enjoyed the apple pie she baked me, I’m not insulting my wife’s apple pie. If I spend $20 on a new book, I’m not implying that anyone who spends their $20 any other way is somehow less of a person.

My values are not declarations about your values. This is pefectly obvious to everyone with a brain.

All we really learned from the piece is that its writer isn't any good at being a man, and so he has begun to wonder whether there is anything about "being a man" that is worth salvaging. The correct answer -- "Of course there is, you dolt!" -- never seems to occur to him.

All you have to do to find out what's great about manliness is to ask men what they admire most about other men. It's that simple. If you ask women what they admire most about women, you know what answer you'll get: They love that their friends are cute, witty, charming, and sociable; they love that their sisters are big-hearted and conscientious, and they love that their mothers and grandmothers could suffer through great emotional hardship even across generations that diminished women's abilities. I’m not saying that these are the qualities I think make a woman great. I’m saying that these are the qualities that women tell me are great about women. I can only conclude that they see these qualities as womanly ideals.

But, maybe not. It’s not for me to say. What defines a woman is a conversation to be had among women. I know what I like in a woman, but I make no claim that this set of attributes should be extended to all women as an ideal type. It’s just, you know, my type.

Well, what do men admire about other men, anyway? We admire when men can endure physical pain and hardship nonchalantly. We admire when men can win a contest. We admire when a man can best his fellows when we’re all telling jokes. We admire when a man assumes an important responsibility and carries it through. We admire when a man completes great feats of strength or ability. We admire when men humbly accept their lifelong responsibilities without complaint.

Thus manliness, according to men who admire other men, is physical strength and endurance, humility, merriment, responsibility, skill, and a reluctance to complain. None of this indicates that women can’t or shouldn’t do any of these things. This isn’t an implication about women. This has nothing whatsoever to do with women. Remember, this is what men appreciate about other men.

IRL

Ultimately, an increasingly narcissistic culture will stop being narcissistic all by itself. We should have realized this long ago; after all, the more obsessed we all are with our own image, the less important to us other people’s images become, the less narcissistic supply there is to be given. The narcissists will turn elsewhere for their narcissistic supply, but where will they turn? None of the other narcissists are interested in doling it out, and those that are are paradoxically less narcissistic since they seem to recognize the reciprocal and mutually beneficial nature of giving people respect.

Lately, I have seen small communities pop up that seem to be inhabited by small groups of narcissists. They take turns reaffirming the same set of principles, and thus any compliment they provide to others is, in effect, a way to gain narcissistic supply out of them. “You said what I said previously. This validates me.” “Oh, you said it, too? I knew I was right all along.” But this sort of thing will be short-lived and mostly self-contained. The more we are all interested mainly in ourselves, the less supply there is to go around, the less validating it is to be a narcissist.

This doesn’t suggest, however, that such a society is “out of the woods.” It is beginning to alarm an increasing number of people that human beings are turning inward for things that a social life used to provide. The Atlantic has a very remarkable recent article about that (H/T Tyler Cowen). Ostensibly, the article explores the mystery of why young people are less interested in sex. I think the author is asking the wrong question. Skin-on-skin is the ultimate social interaction. There is arguably no other thing that human beings do together that requires more communication – assuming they are doing it well. The article gives ample evidence, of course, that young people aren’t doing it well. In example after example, the author reports on many young people who find real-world (“meatspace”) personal interaction to be creepy at worst and awkward at best. Meanwhile, in example after example, these same young people engage in occasional romantic encounters only to be choked, jackhammered, genitally injured, and so on. (Yes. And so on.) What the author, and subsequently Tyler Cowen, focus on is the question of why young people are doing it less, but of course they would be doing it less if everyone were collectively getting worse at doing it at all. No one shies away from an encounter with an expert lover with whom they have already united. Toward the end of the article, the author explores how women are decided en masse to avoid painful and injurious intercourse, in favor of pretty much any other way of passing the time, and one can hardly blame them. Still, throughout time immemorial, human beings have always thought that marriage and family is worth it. Today’s young people are increasingly unaware of what they’re fighting for when it comes to romantic relationships, because they don’t know what romance is, they don’t know what the benefits of a healthy and self-affirming intimate relationship are, and they can’t seem to communicate with each other well enough to find anything that even approximates what they should be looking for.

Elsewhere on the web, you can find the blog of a widely read libertarian woman who uses her romantic life as a metaphor for state oppression. I’m not entirely sure if it’s meant to be taken seriously or humorously, but when I occasionally read it, it only makes me sad. Nearly one-hundred years ago, Franz Kafka made a name for himself describing the horrors of mankind’s relationship to the state, which is both impenetrable (The Castle) and suffocatingly omnipresent (The Trial). Bureaucracy, when you must make a request of it, is thoroughly and impossibly inaccessible. When it wants something of you, however, nothing you say or do can stop it. Imagine how a person must feel whose romantic encounters serve as plausible analogues for, not only either of those interactions with the state, but both of them.

A concerned onlooker might conclude that the woman has been hurt, terribly and often. However, another possibility exists. It could simply be that she is no more capable of communicating with a romantic partner than she is with a faceless bureaucracy. That is, the fault might well be hers. I’m not suggesting that it is her fault, because I have no insight into that. I’m merely a reader weighing all the possibilities.

I’ve written before about society’s transition in art, away from being a performance intended for community consumption, and toward and inward-looking expression of self. That is, when musicians take the stage today (and I’m talking about amateurs learning how to create art), they’re mostly focused on playing their parts. To the extent that they’re interested in the audience at all, it’s mostly for attention-getting reasons. They want adulation and applause. Well, performers have always wanted adulation and applause, but in the past it was more participatory. You played to the audience, and you fed off the audience’s energy. You didn’t just want them to think you were neat, you wanted to be the one who was capable of showing them a good time. You might have been in it for the chicks, but being in it for the chicks meant being the guy who was capable of pleasing the chicks. The metric of success was still very much external to the artist: the chicks decided if you were cool or not. You relied on their assessment, and to the extent that you could do so, you attempted to influence their opinion by tailoring your performance to them.

Today, though, you’re a rock star if you feel like one. You can buy Facebook likes and Instagram followers, and you can even leverage that into a world tour. In the end, nobody cares that he was never famous, because he’s famous now. Mission accomplished. He didn’t become famous by showing people a good time, he became famous by tricking people into believing that he was already famous. The metric of success is no longer the audience. The metric of success is your phone. If your phone says you have tens of thousands of fans, then you do. And let’s be clear about it: This is true even if you’re just using bots and AI apps to force your phone into displaying the numbers. The very idea that you would spend years honing your craft in front of a bunch of chicks (or, more generally, music fans who listen to you and provide you with actual “meatspace” feedback) when you can simply hire “The Russians” to boost your Spotify plays seems so old-fashioned.

This is not a narcissism problem. This is not something borne from the fact that we think too highly of ourselves or are too obsessed with presenting a false image of ourselves. This is rather a short-circuit in the basic wiring of human society. Each of us is supposed to be a node in a several-billion-strong network called the human race. We are supposed to be bound to each other by our interactions, by our participation in a common experience. More and more, our society is not bound by a common experience because people do not share experiences in common. We eat lone, make love alone, perform art alone. We are lonely and alone. We are increasingly incapable of having positive social interaction with each other.

Take close note of who it is that is writing this today. I’m the individualist, the guy who claims that being a strong and well-expressed individual is the key to happiness. When I’m the guy telling you that your society is so uninterested in being a society that it’s starting to crack and crumble, you know it might be time to go make some new friends and do something with them. In meatspace. You don’t have to make love to them, but judging by current trends, it might not be a terrible idea. Just make sure to look them in the eyes while you’re doing it.

Stan Lee And The Set Of All Possible Comic Books

Like so many people, I too am saddened to hear that Stan Lee has passed away. While the Marvel Comics characters and artwork have long captivated my imagination, I was never as big a fan of comic books as others. Since I’m not really a part of that world, I’ll leave the more important eulogizing to those from whom it would be more genuine.

There is one aspect of Stan Lee’s professional work, however, that resonates with me more than all the others, and it’s something that I haven’t seen others really discuss in depth; at least not from a conceptual standpoint. I’m talking about Lee’s greatest innovation, the concept of a “Marvel Universe,” in which all characters existed and played roughly by the same set of rules. This development enabled characters to interact with each other as the storylines demanded, without the writers’ having to create elaborate sub-plots to introduce, say, Spiderman into the Swamp Thing storyboard. This created “one big Marvel Comics story,” and any particular comic book you may have read was a part of that over-arching story. It’s something that has been copied throughout the sci-fi and fantasy genres. Both Star Wars and Star Trek have pulled off something similar, enabling them to merchandise books, video games, and other off-shoot media that contain wholly original stories that nonetheless hold equal appeal to the fanbase as “canonical” stories. From a business standpoint, it’s a shrewd move that means selling more stuff to more hungry fans. From an artistic standpoint, though, it’s nothing short of incredible.

Why? Because writing one great story is an amazing thing that most of us never accomplish; but creating a world in which every imaginable story can exist simultaneously is a stroke of genius. That’s what Stan Lee accomplished.

Lee wasn’t of course, the first one to do this. I first became aware of this notion years ago, while reading the Wikipedia page for Conan the Barbarian. It’s a fascinating entry in its own right, if you’re into that sort of thing. But this in particular struck a chord with me:

In February 1932, Howard vacationed at a border town on the lower Rio Grande. During this trip, he further conceived the character of Conan and also wrote the poem "Cimmeria", much of which echoes specific passages in Plutarch's Lives.[3][4] According to some scholars, Howard's conception of Conan and the Hyborian Age may have originated in Thomas Bulfinch's The Outline of Mythology (1913) which inspired Howard to "coalesce into a coherent whole his literary aspirations and the strong physical, autobiographical elements underlying the creation of Conan".

And later:

"The Phoenix on the Sword" appeared in Weird Tales cover-dated December 1932. Editor Farnsworth Wright subsequently prompted Howard to write an 8,000-word essay for personal use detailing "the Hyborian Age", the fictional setting for Conan. Using this essay as his guideline, Howard began plotting "The Tower of the Elephant", a new Conan story that was the first to truly integrate his new conception of the Hyborian world.

Conan the Barbarian has endured across generations for going on 100 years, from the pulp fiction age, to the comic book age, to the movie age, and beyond. To some, he seems a silly character, but the reason a character like that would prove so enduring is thanks to the comprehensive conceptual effort that was put into creating him. Robert E. Howard didn’t just write some good stories, he “coalesced into a coherent whole his literary aspirations,” and established a fictional setting that would form the basis for all Conan stories ever written and published. Howard invented a history, a geography, a religious mythology, and so on, all in service of his Conan character.

To be as clear about this as possible: First, Howard conceived of a world, then he wrote just one story inhabiting that world, then he established an entire universe for his future work, then he created a body of literary world that has endured for generations. It’s not just that Howard wrote some good stories or created a good character, it’s that he put in the effort in advance to create a literary universe that formed the conceptual basis of all his stories, and stories that additional authors would write in the future, as well. That’s the innovation.

Nor was Howard the first to ever do such a thing. One of his contemporaries, a favorite of mine named Edgar Rice Burroughs, did something similar many times over with his Mars series, his Venus series, his Pellucidar series, and his Tarzan series. J.R.R. Tolkien did it. C.S. Lewis did it. And so on.

I think one of the reasons the death of Stan Lee is going to hit our culture so hard is because there are so few artists today who are interested in creating a conceptual world for their work to inhabit. Lee was ninety-five years old. He was one of the last artists of our time to have built such a world. The only modern author I can think of who has even come close to this is J.K. Rowling, who is also not coincidentally lauded for her complex storytelling. There are few others.

Certainly, this sort of thing has long since fallen out of vogue in the music world. A great pop artist, it is said, will evolve with the times. The notion that a composer of music gets to invent his or her own rules, and compose a musical universe according to those rules, went out of fashion with the modern composers of the mid-Twentieth Century. Many painters have a style in which they work, but how many of them have a consistent set of conceptual rules that unifies their entire body of work? Not since, again, the mid-Twentieth Century have we seen anything like that.

Conceptually complex art is a thing of the past, and Stan Lee was a part of that tradition. There was once a time when creative artists would aspire to that complexity, would infuse future works with elements from their past works in the name of conceptual continuity. These efforts elevated the artist’s work from being a one-off pretty picture or nice story to serving an over-arching universe that the consumer could enter and exit as they saw fit. Maybe you only really liked Frank Zappa’s Hot Rats, and not his London Symphony Orchestra. But those with a greater hunger for what Zappa did can explore both albums and more. That’s why they call it “Zappa’s Universe.”

So the death of Stan Lee takes us one step further away from a world in which artists create the set of all possible things, rather than just one single thing. Our artistic consumption will flatten out a little bit. The range of our artistic consumption will get a little shallower. We’ll miss him, but we won’t realize it until a few more Marvel movies come out without his input and introduce things to the Marvel Universe that don’t seem quite right. We’ll wonder why they don’t fit. We’ll grow bored and move on.

Silicon Valley Is Weird, A Continuing Series

The other day, I clicked through to the profile of a friend-of-a-friend on Facebook. This individual is a Silicon Valley dweller, and arguably a stereotypical one. At least, that’s how it appeared to me.


This individual had cast an early ballot in the mid-term election, and had posted a status update that revealed and invited discussion about everything he had voted on. Every senator, ballot initiative, judge, etc. This behavior – revealing in a public forum exactly how he voted and attempting to discuss it publicly with all comers – struck me as being incredibly odd. For one thing, I’m a big fan of the anonymous ballot. It’s a privilege that protects us from suffering any number of negative consequences for voting our beliefs. (Clearly, this guy wasn’t worried about the negative consequences.)


But the other thing about it is that it’s a socially awkward way to have a discussion about politics. If you get to know me (or read my blog), you’ll soon discover what my politics are. That’s mostly a function of the fact that I talk about the things I believe, I try to learn more about the issues, I try to share what I’ve learned, and I hope to learn from others. Announcing where I stand on every ballot issue on a particular election doesn’t provide a format for conversation. It’s a declaration: Look at me, look how I vote. I’m not typically very warm to the “signaling” theory of human behavior, but what else could such a thing be? Especially since, I should note, this person voted precisely along party lines.


Well, it looked like really weird behavior to me, but I just set it aside in my mind under the belief that this just happened to be a weird guy.


But then this morning I happened to be reading through the first few posts of Slate Star Codex and noticed that “Scott Alexander” had done precisely the same thing. Okay, Alexander’s blog post was a little better, since he actually provided reasoning for each one of his votes, and critical discussion in the comments section of his blog is a well-established norm. That makes this behavior much more conversant, but it doesn’t make it any less weird. I’ll happily discuss the issues with anyone; but I don’t want to go point-by-point through your ballot. WTF. It’s self-absorbed.


There are, of course, many weird things about Slate Star Codex. The most recent post is about ketamine, why the literature thinks it works to treat depression, and reasons we once thought it worked but now know to be wrong. The post itself is actually fine and even a little interesting, if you have a pharmaceutical or medical background. The comments section, though, turned into a shit-show of self-reporting on how people felt when they recreationally tried ketamine, heroin, etc., themselves.


That’s Silicon Valley culture for you, though. They do a lot of drugs and they post their election ballots on social media. If it were just some odd sub-culture, we could scratch our chin anthropologically for a moment and then go back to our lives. But this is a sub-culture with deep pockets, who have the collective ear of politicians, and who have a stated objective of nudging society toward their beliefs. We all have our own view of what we want society to be like; I don’t happen to think that making society more like an odd collection of drug-abusing swingers is a step in the right direction.


I have a lot more to say about Silicon Valley culture, but I’ll save it for future posts, as I continue to report on the trend.

Unmet Needs

A lot of the questions I encounter on Quora involve relationship advice, often from married couples or people who have been in a relationship for a number of years.

It seems to me that one of the primary sources of relationship discord is a mismatch between what a person receives from their partner, and what they think they ought to receive instead. This sentiment expresses itself variously. Sometimes the issue is sex, sometimes it’s housework, sometimes it feeling special or feeling loved. “He never _________.” “She never _________.”

It’s a surreal mental exercise to compare such complaints to any couple’s wedding photos. Pay close attention to the way the couple looks at each other in their wedding photos (especially the candid shots). You’ll be amazed by how much tenderness there is between them, how much mutual concern, how much love. If you have children or have spent much time around those who do, the facial expressions will seem very familiar to you, because they’re nearly identical to the way people look at their children. Seldom will you see such pure love expressed between two people as you will in their wedding photos.

This got me thinking: What happens in a relationship that two people so utterly dedicated to caring for each other (in both senses of the term) would end up feeling as though their partners no longer care enough to _________ [whatever]?

Surely, in some cases, children play a major role here. It’s a lot of work to look after somebody’s needs. When children arrive, their needs become the first priority within the family. It’s natural that some of our own needs fall by the wayside as we prioritize the needs of our children. It’s also natural to be caught off-guard by which of our own needs our partner has decided to de-prioritize. Our partners were so good at looking after that need, whatever it was, that we accustomed ourselves to the notion that it was a need that wouldn’t ever be taken for granted again. One day, a baby arrived, and it was. Or so it feels to us, anyway.

Even if you don’t have children, though, life events progress such that the meeting of some of our partner’s needs takes a back seat to the meeting of some other pressing concern: our career, our housework, our outside obligations, and so on.

When we’re in the earlier phases of a relationship, one of the great strengths of our situation is our willingness to meet the other person’s needs to the greatest extent possible. When things in a relationship start to get frustrating, it seems a lot of us are missing an unmet need that was previously met. It seems relatively straightforward to suggest that the path forward here is to double-down on meeting your partner’s needs. Remember how much fun it was to care for them like that, to live as though your partner was the most important thing in the world?

Maybe he or she still is.

Against Running Clowns

A recent video published by Runner’s World magazine shows ordinary people attempting to keep Eliud Kipchoge’s world-record marathon pace for just two hundred meters. When you click through to watch the video, you will see people stumbling and falling, collapsing beside the treadmill, flailing their arms in a futile attempt to keep the pace. You’ll see people lumbering and bounding with all of their might. Only a couple of people show even a hint of the grace and style that Kipchoge himself exhibits while running.


While most people interviewed in the video talk about the fact that the world-record pace is amazing because it is impossible, a high-school 800m runner near the end of the video has quite a different perspective. He says he thinks anyone can run that fast, if they put their mind to it. He says he can run that pace for eight-hundred meters, although he couldn’t run that pace for a full mile.


The difference between these two perspectives – wow, it’s impossible on the one hand, and anyone can do this if they try on the other hand – couldn’t be more stark, and it exemplifies the two different kinds of runners there are in the world. (More broadly, it highlights the two different kinds of people there are in the world, but I guess that’s another story.) Some people run like clowns, with goofy smiles on their faces because, hey, running is craaaazy! Look at me, folks, I’m crazy! I’m a runner! WOO!!! The other kind of person sees running as a challenge, a vehicle through which we can test and overcome our limits. It can be a little masochistic at times, but it’s nothing to clown around about. It’s just like any other individual sport.


As I’ve surely written before, the clown-runners have slowly overtaken the other runners in number and in influence in the sport of long-distance running. Who wins a race, and how fast they ran in order to win it, is information fit for an appendix or an epilogue. The real story, nowadays, is that we’re all trying our best! WOO!!!


You can easily see the corrosive influence of this attitude on the sport. It’s instructive to see the difference between the people in the photos of this retrospective of Atlanta’s Peachtree Road Race and these goofballs:

Is it any wonder that people today flail and stumble futilely while trying to run a 35-second 200? Maybe, just maybe, running is about more than participation. Maybe running is also about learning how to move your body quickly and safely.


When I see people struggling so hard to run a 200 meter dash, I’m not filled with awe over Kipchoge’s world record. (That fills me with awe all on its own.) Instead, I’m overcome with pity and with bewilderment that so many people who call themselves runners can’t sprint for 200 meters without flailing wildly. None of these people will ever set a world-record, of course, but after a couple of years of running, they should at least mastered the basics of a respectable runner’s gait. Flailing is what toddlers do when they try to run. Adults should have enough agility to be able to sprint without flailing. Whatever a person’s top speed is, and however slow it might be, it should be attained without the risk of falling flat on the ground and bouncing.


To some extent, this ties into the obesity epidemic. Most people are so overweight these days that it has become difficult to perceive healthy-weighted people as anything other than “too skinny.” Fat has become the norm. That’s a burgeoning health crisis that needs to be addressed, and so far, the best the running community has come up with has been to gently pad newcomers’ egos with proclamations about how the one and only thing that matters about running is participation. Never mind the fact that the average runner risks an injury or a fall simply by attempting a two-hundred meter sprint!


Imagine if other sports worked the same way. Imagine that your tennis coach told you not to worry so much about getting the ball inside the lines, that as long as you got out there and swung your racquet, you’re a winner. Imagine if a rock-climbing instructor downplayed the impact of unsafe climbing habits since, after all, the number one thing is to just get “out there.” Imagine if a football coach didn’t instruct his offensive line on how to take a hit safely, because those kids aren’t necessarily trying to make it to the Super Bowl, anyway. If any such people were your coaches, or coaches to your children, you’d understandably try to get them fired, either for being lousy coaches or for failing to teach their players about the basics of sports safety!


And so it is with running. The running community – coaches, friends, group run leaders, and so on – owe newcomers to the sport more than these people are getting. We owe our fellow runners a serious discussion about safe and efficient running form. We owe our fellows an introduction to sprint intervals, how to do it safely, how to do it effectively, how to ensure that your sprint looks different than your long-distance form, and in which ways they should be similar. We owe other runners our attention when they step to the awards podium, and we owe them applause when they win – not just when or because they cross the finish line, but when they win. We owe it to ourselves to recognize that fast running is praiseworthy, and that it is possible, if you set your mind to it. We owe it to future generations of runners that when they look at old photos of our road races, they see normal-looking people running as fast as they could, rather than clowns in silly costumes whooping and cheering for being craaaazy. WOO!!!


We owe it to our sport to keep it a sport. I hope you will join me.

The Labyrinthine World Of "Fairness"

I was reading David Henderson's recent blog post about the extent to which a tax cut is "regressive." I was also reading a rather thoughtful comment left beneath that post by one "Vivian Darkbloom," which reads in part:

[T]he problem with these sorts of analyses of the progressivity of tax *cuts* is they fail to account for the status quo baseline which was (and is) very highly progressive. It is difficult to make a “tax cut” progressive in the above-referenced sense when a very large percentage of lower quintile groups pay zero tax. On average, the reduction of zero from zero is zero. One would need to introduce (more) refundable tax credits to achieve [sic] a different result. […] By their very nature, given the existing system, tax *cuts* (taken logically as a reduction of tax otherwise paid under existing law) will almost always to some extent be “regressive”[.]

Let's think about fairness. One view of fairness is that those who earn lower incomes ought to pay a smaller share of taxes, and this is called "progressive taxation," because as a person makes more money, they pay progressively more in taxes. Another view of fairness is that existing taxes are too burdensome on everyone, rich and poor alike, and that those taxes ought to be reduced. A third view of fairness is that if taxes are to be reduced, lower-income people ought to enjoy an equal share of that tax reduction as higher-income people, ie., we should reduce taxes for everyone, not just the wealthy. A final (for now) view of fairness, as "Vivian Darkbloom" points out, is that in an already-progressive taxation regime, it is not possible to offer the same rate of tax reduction to people of all income levels, since those at the lower end of the spectrum are already paying little to no taxes.


Tax policy is a complicated world. Suppose we wanted to target $1 million as the value of our total tax reductions. One way we could do that would be to simply reduce the highest income tax rate by an amount that corresponds to a $1 million reduction in tax revenue. Another, more complicated, way to accomplish this would be to reduce the rates on all tax brackets by some amount, such that the total reduction in tax revenue is $1 million. In that case, we'd have to reduce each bracket's tax rate by a slightly different amount, in order to end up at $1 million. The reason we have to do that is because, under a progressive tax regime, all brackets pay different rates. It's like trying to figure out how to make $7.39 using only coins: you can't just draw an equal number each of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and dollars. You need an unequal amount of each kind of coin to get to $7.39, and so it is with tax rates.


But then again, we encounter the problem of fairness. If we do what we have to do to the tax rates in order to arrive at $1 million, one bracket's rate might be reduced more than another bracket's rate, and this leaves us open to the criticism that our tax cut wasn't "fair."


One could avoid this criticism if one simply decided to reduce all tax rates by the same amount - say, one percent - without any regard to the resulting bottom line reduction in tax revenue. This might help address concerns about the fairness of the tax cut, but it creates a new problem. Typically, a government decides how much of a tax cut it can afford, based on its budget, and then cuts taxes accordingly. Putting the tax cut first forces us to review the budget second, eg., "Here's how much of a tax cut I want to give people, what impact will that have on the budget?" Giving a one-percent tax cut to all brackets equally may not be affordable; then the government may decide to give no one a tax cut, since it can't afford to give everyone a tax cut. Is that "fair?"


We complicate things even further when we consider marginal tax rates. In general, we tend to think of low marginal tax rates as being more fair than high marginal tax rates. We don't want to punish people for earning an extra dollar, we just want them to pay a particular tax rate based on their income level. If a person is lower-income, we might even prefer that they have lower marginal tax rates than a person who has a higher income, since we definitely do not want to punish the poor for improving their lot.


In that situation, if we want to give everyone an "equal" or "fair" tax cut, not only do we have to cut the individual bracket rates equally, we also have to ensure that the marginal tax rates either remain the same as they were before, or are reduced equally across all tax brackets. Mathematically, though, there are only two situations in which we can make a tax cut equal across total rates and marginal rates for all tax brackets: (1) a flat tax, in which everyone pays the same rate, and (2) a linearly progressive tax, where bracket 1 pays 1%, bracket 2 pays 2%, bracket 3 pays 3%, and so on.


Flat taxes are often seen as unfair to the poor. Because they're not explicitly progressive, they are often seen as regressive "as a percentage of disposable income." As for linear tax rates, I don't know that they've ever been tried, and at any rate, we certainly don't live in a linear tax rate regime today, so it's really only a hypothetical consideration at this point.


How are you doing? Are you lost yet?


When we set out to discuss tax rate changes and "fairness," starting with the tax regime and reasoning through what might be the "fairest," we quickly get bogged down by purely mathematical considerations. No one's even interested in having that kind of a conversation, not really. No one wants to optimize the tax regime, they just want to either raise more money for government spending, or reduce taxes on ordinary people. How they ultimately get there is less a function of their mathematical treatment of the various tax rate possibilities, and more a function of their preexisting sense of "fairness."


Now, at last, I've gotten to the point. When we talk of fairness or justice, we usually have our preferred outcome in mind, and we engage in reasoning in order to justify the outcome we've already settled on. We know we don't want to raise taxes on just the poor, that wouldn't be fair, so we figure out how to raise taxes in a way that doesn't disproportionately hurt the poor. We know we want to give everyone a tax break, so we figure out how to do that, or at least to appear to do that. In any event, our preexisting sense of fairness is driving our thinking. We don't start by asking "What is fair?" as Plato did. Instead, we start out knowing what fairness is and engage in a series of arguments for why what we want to do is the best example of "fair."


It's like a child who doesn't want to clean up her toys. First, she says she can't because she's busy with something else. Then she says she can't pick up those toys because she wants to play with them. Then she says she can't pick them up because she's tired. Then, hungry. Then, she has to go to the bathroom. Anything is a valid reason, because she's not really considering whether it's right to pick the toys up. She knows only that she doesn't want to pick them up, and constructs reasoning that is consistent with that preexisting goal.


The psychologists call this "motivated cognition." One person describes it as "the act of deciding what you want to believe and using your reasoning power, with all its might, to get you there." He said so in an article arguing against motivated cognition and in favor of… a tax! Now there is some irony for you.


Well, anyway, where does this leave us all? In the end, it's helpful to remember your tendency toward motivated cognition when you're thinking about fairness, not because it might be leading you astray, but because you'll find it more helpful to know what your prior beliefs are before you undertake to solve a problem. If your priors tell you that rich people are greedy opportunists who use their undue influence to skew government in their favor, then your discussions of tax policy will reflect those priors. Far better to simply start by announcing your prior in the beginning, and hammering out the details. Otherwise, we risk having some meta-argument about tax policy, which is really an argument about how we view rich and poor. Or whatever.


Way back, two thousand years or more ago, when Plato wrote The Republic, he concluded that justice (or fairness) was doing good to your friends and doing bad to your enemies. This seemingly brutal description of fairness actually makes more sense, the more you think about it. When we aim at fairness, we start with some sense of who we favor and who we disfavor, and then we engage in motivated reasoning to dole out unequal shares of reward and punishment accordingly. Wouldn't it be nice if we all kept this in mind in advance, before we started talking about what's "fair?"

The Pink Premium

A well-worn social media trope is the concept of the “pink tax,” which is purported to be the higher price women pay for products geared toward women, relative to the male equivalents of the same products.


One classic example of the pink tax is the disposable razor. I checked a well-known online retailer for prices just now and confirmed that a 12-pack of “lady shavers” currently costs $17.16, while a 12-pack of ostensibly gender-neutral but probably male-oriented razors is $8.92. That amounts to a quite significant difference of over eight dollars.


An obvious question to ask at this point, though, is why would any woman pay almost twice as much to use a pink razor, especially considering that the alternative razor is a gender-neutral yellow color? To the extent that women choose to use the higher-priced pink razors, we’d be forced to conclude that the color of the razor really is valuable to them on some level. I’m not here to question women’s collective color preferences. If this is so, then this hardly amounts to being a “pink tax.” Instead, this is an example of how the market economy is capable of discovering preferences that are more valuable to consumers than even the consumers themselves realize.


However, my suspicion is that the majority of women do not prefer the pink razors to the yellow ones. I’d guess a sizable segment of the female, razor-buying population – perhaps even a comfortable majority of that population – just buys the yellow razors at the lower cost and rolls their eyes at the pink ones. (Still, someone must be buying the pink razors, since they’re still being sold.) If my intuition is correct here, then straightforward economic theory can account for the price difference without having to rely on the concept of a pink tax.


One need only reason that there is a lower supply of the pink razors than of the yellow ones. Assuming homogeneous demand for all razors (ie., that the pink and yellow razors really are interchangeable substitutes), then the razors with the lesser supply will intersect the demand curve at a point corresponding to a lesser quantity sold and at a higher price, which is exactly what we observe on the razor market.


This implies that if manufacturers decided to produce more pink razors than yellow razors, the reverse would be true: yellow razors would be more expensive than pink razors. But since pink razors only appeal to a subset of the female, razor-buying population, and since yellow razors appeal to the remainder of the female population, plus the entire male population, yellow razors enjoy greater supply than pink razors, and thus also have a lower price.


In short, the “pink tax” is nothing more than an artifact of the fact that not all women prefer pink, and that those who do prefer pink so much that they are willing to pay for it.

Buy-In

On some level, most people understand how hollow the principle of “buy-in” is in a corporate environment. Leaders don’t want “buy-in.” What they want is to avoid uncomfortable conversations with people who disagree with a change to corporate policy. So, to avoid these uncomfortable conversations, corporate managers and their ilk have developed techniques “to solicit buy-in,” or in other words to preempt uncomfortable conversations with people who disagree and replace them with a controlled narrative.


One common example of this occurs during the annual employee review process. The most efficient way to go through this process would be to simply give the employee a pat on the back if he or she has delivered on his or her responsibilities that year; and if not, to have a frank conversation about how that employee might improve. But few companies actually opt for this simple and efficient employee review format. Instead, this conversation is preemptively managed through a complicated process by which an employee sets his or her own goals, the manager signs off on them, and then the employee is subsequently assessed to his or her own goals once a year. This is, of course, utter nonsense. The only goal any employee really sets for himself or herself is “Do what my manager says and get all my work done.”


Naturally, the employer has every incentive to set the bar ever-higher year after year. “You made 17 widgets last year; I’d like to see you try for 20 this year! I think you can do it!” It sounds like a pep talk. It sounds like something that will get you promoted. But it is a ruse. The manager’s manager is asking for increased productivity “to show value-added.” So this becomes a pass-through goal that has nothing to do with the employee’s own goals and desires. The difference of 3 widgets does not often impact the employee’s life much; for that matter, it doesn’t impact the manager’s life much. It certainly doesn’t impact the company much. But it is a S.M.A.R.T. goal, and represents a percentage increase over previous goals, and so down the rabbit hole we go. Before you know it, you’re on the hook for more widgets than you produced last year, and your manager tells you with a smile that it was all your idea. And if you only manage to make 17 widgets this year – same as last year – you’ll be treated as a failure for not reaching your annual career objectives, rather than an employee with consistent and reliable productivity.


Most insidious of all, you cannot blame your manager or even the annual assessment process for creating a situation in which steady output is considered failure. After all, you set those goals.


I realized recently that the electoral process serves much the same purpose as corporate buy-in solicitation. This is political buy-in.


The government’s goals and objectives have nothing whatsoever to do with you and your life. All you want is to put food on the table, keep a roof over your family’s heads, and maybe have a little fun over the course of a life that ends far too quickly. Most of us want nothing whatsoever to do with a newly proposed light rail system or a minor change to the zoning of a neighborhood across town. Even many of us who claim to be affected by such things are mostly only psychically affected. The few major policies that do make tangible impacts on our lives – changes to tax structures, trade policies, and reductions in government spending on unnecessary things – are not generally policies that drive elections, due to a combination of voter ignorance on the economics of such issues and the fact that politicians do not really want to comply with their constituents wishes on such things, anyway. (So they make us argue about abortion instead.)


So, the politicians set their own agenda, which is most commonly self-interested, and use the democratic process to solicit “buy-in” from the rest of us. Think about it, though. What are the odds that out of everything that could ever happen by anyone’s wildest imagination, the only feasible policies boil down to two: one from the Democrats, and one from the Republicans? What are the odds that the only viable path for any government at any level is one of just two options? The notion itself is absurd. But we are handed two options and asked to choose between them. If you favor neither option, your position is not made available on the ballot and your interests will not be represented by anyone’s democracy. Just as you were forced to complete the annual review process at work, so you must vote to declare which lackluster policy you abhor least.


And if you do not vote, you become a pariah. You have no right to complain. You have no respect for our fallen soldiers. You are part of the problem! If something bad happens due to some horrible politician, it’s all your fault, because you didn’t declare your buy-in for the politician who wasn’t elected to do some equally horrible, albeit different, thing.


I don’t oppose voting, and I think people ought to do it if the choices on the ballot are genuinely meaningful to them. Similarly, sometimes the annual review process at work can be very constructive and leave everyone feeling a little better than before it started. But I think it’s important to recognize that both situations alienate a lot of us by boxing us into commitments we’d rather not make. One need not break one’s back to produce and ever-increasing number of widgets just because an annual review process requires some principle of “buy-in.” One need not spend time at the polling station declaring buy-in for some politician’s agenda. Sometimes “No thanks, I’ll just stay home and play with my daughter tonight” is a legitimate way to cast one’s ballot. Sometimes we don’t give our buy-in.

The Dream Machine

As a young boy, I used to daydream about the future. Often, I daydreamed about my own future, but equally as often, I daydreamed about the world’s future. I’ll give you an example of what I mean. This daydream was vivid for me, I remember it clearly, and it stuck with me all these years, perhaps thirty whole years. The daydream was rather simple.


It occurred to me that automobiles had undergone an incredible evolution since their inception, especially with respect to mechanical efficiency. My father’s 1969 Chevrolet Camaro – truly a classic car if ever there was one – had only four gears, plus reverse. My car today has seven gears, plus reverse. This year’s Rolls-Royce Phantom has, if I remember correctly, twelve gears. These gears make the driving experience smoother and less noisy. They create mechanical efficiency such that the car is able to go faster and smoother with less effort.


With that in mind, my boyhood imagination thought, it stands to reason that bicycles can be made far more efficient than they currently are. Why not increase a bicycle’s mechanical efficiency such that it is capable of driving speeds, with very little effort on the rider’s part? This was an exciting prospect to me. I imagined a network of bicycle highways, full of bicycle riders who could traverse the full length of their morning commutes without breaking a sweat. The highways would be virtually noiseless. Accidents might still occur, but they would tend to be less frequently fatal or maiming; after all, a bike-on-bike accident is far less destructive than bike-on-car accident. Parking would be much improved, too. Not only do bicycles take up less space, but they can generally be parked in more convenient places. Even when they can’t, it’s not completely unreasonable to simply carry them into your destination with you. We’d all save money, since we wouldn’t have to spend so much on gas. The environment would be cleaner, as air pollution and greenhouse gases would be reduced, and oil spills would become very infrequent. Even communing with nature on a daily commute might inspire people to take better care of the environment. There would be virtually no need for speeding tickets, and most stoplights could be replaced with simple roundabouts. Perhaps obesity rates would decline.


My young imagination ran wild with thoughts like these. I’d dream about this alternate universe at night. I imagined riding my bicycle far, far away on clean, empty, silent roads. Not being mechanically inclined, however, I relegated this idea to the world of my imagination. It was something to dream about, but it was not a world I could help create. I had no talent or interest in mechanical engineering or bicycle building.


Today, however, my thoughts turned back to this old dream of mine. Why? Because I discovered the e-bike, ie., the electric bicycle. Electric bicycles are not a new technology, but they are a technology that has advanced quite a bit recently. Battery technologies have improved greatly over my lifetime. Chinese engineering, combined with Chinese demand for low-cost transportation and a local enthusiasm for bicycles, has produced a new line of electric motors that stretch into 1000-watt territory, and beyond. Hydraulic brakes have become commonplace in the biking world. And new materials have enabled manufacturers to explore lightweight bicycle components whose strength is on par with all the traditional bike materials. And, miracle of miracles, free trade has spread far and wide, enabling the efficient and ingenious technological solutions of a Chinese bicycling community to touch the lives of the modern American every-man (to say the least).


These e-bikes are capable of driving at modest automobile speeds without much rider effort, just as it was in my dreams. Most major cities have bike path and bike lane networks, which serve a similar purpose to the bicycle highways of my boyhood dreams. They consume a miniscule amount of electricity and emit no greenhouse gases or air pollution directly.


Well, you get the picture. The pie-in-the-sky wonder-world of my boyhood dreams is practically here. Technology has enabled society to achieve something that was literally only a dream of mine a few decades ago. It’s nothing short of a miracle, the miracle of human ingenuity and economic freedom.


Human progress is a Dream Machine.