Society « The Ramblings of An Eternal Student of Life

Thursday, August 12, 2010

◊ 8-9-10

Personal Reflections ... Society ...

On Monday afternoon I was working on another piece of bureaucratic paperwork, and I had to write a date next to a signature. For just a second, I noticed that it was 8-9-10. How ’bout that.

Hmmm, for the next four years we’re going to get sequential dates like that. That seems to me like something to be celebrated. I mean, why is January 1 any more sacred?

But no one else (that I know of) seemed to notice. I didn’t see or hear any comment about it in the paper, radio, internet nor TV. And that’s too bad. Nice little things like ascending date numbers are always overlooked. We all want the big thrills in life, and we live in on-going disappointment about how rare and unpredictable they are. So why not focus on the little things that you can count on?

Hey, 9-10-11 is coming! We all should start thinking now about how to celebrate it, as a part of the on-going celebration of our lives.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 6:20 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Monday, July 26, 2010

◊ Some Ironies

Economics/Business ... History ... Society ...

In the July 23 review of my life and economic times, found below, I speculated that the American economy was heading for “a new equilibrium” whereby the big corporations and maybe 80% of the population would do just fine, and the other 20% of America would be shut out. That other 20% would be permanently stuck in poverty, unemployment, or under-employment at best. It would scrape to stay alive thru “off the books” activity and whatever government support might still be available (which will obviously decline over the coming decade due to huge federal deficits).

Here’s an article I read today by economist Robert Samuelson that seemed to affirm what I am saying. Samuelson notes that most major American corporations are doing just fine with regard to profits; but they just aren’t hiring. They are learning how to maintain a sufficient return on their invested capital without needing to expand their business base beyond what the big recession of 2008 currently allows. They have adjusted just swell to the recession.

The recent gyrations of the stock market also seem to affirm this; » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 7:58 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Friday, July 23, 2010

◊ My Life, Economically

Economics/Business ... Society ...

I am what you might call an “economic determinist”, at least in part. I believe that economic factors such as the material wealth of a society and how that society distributes that wealth determines a lot about that society. Of course, the real world is a two-way street. Social factors effect economics just as much as economics effect social factors. But both social dynamics and economic realities ultimately respond to the environment that the society and its economy live in. And of the two, I believe that economics responds quickly when things change, e.g. war, climate change, new discoveries, depletion of resources; and that social change then follows the lead of economics.

So, I am going to tell the story here of my own life and times in terms of economics, as a way to help understand all the social change that I’ve seen in my 57+ years. When I was born, the USA was recovering from the effects of a major world war. Technology developed in the course of WW2 was being applied to make new products and services, and to make existing products and services more cheaply. Also, the GI bill gave the work force an injection of higher education, providing another boost for the economy. Energy supplies were cheap, especially since the USA now had unhindered access to oil, minerals and other resources throughout the globe. Things were good and getting better.

The rise of the Soviet Union in the 1950s put a burden on the USA, creating the need for large military forces ready to fight the Cold War. » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:45 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Thursday, June 10, 2010

◊ Wake Up Call

Society ... Socrates Cafe ...

The Socrates Café meeting last Tuesday seemed like a sleeper to me. The topic for the evening was, what is a corporation’s moral responsibility in our society? This was inspired by the on-going BP deepwater oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico near Louisiana. Oh, what a surprise; so original. For the first hour or so, I just couldn’t get interested. Montclair is a town for educated liberals, and most of the people at the meeting are . . . guess what? Educated liberals. Thus, the conversation was peppered with anti-business rants and “I heard on NPR today that . . .” If I wanted that, I could have stayed home and pulled up the Huffington Post. I listen to NPR on my drive home from work, and I had already heard most of what the local wanna-be revolutionaries were talking about.

But finally, finally, someone said something interesting and thoughtful. During the middle of a lecture on corporate greed, a woman stopped and reflected on how complex the world had become. About fifteen minutes later, after an anti-Tea Party speech, she ended with an observation on how frustrated everyone seems to be these days with our leaders. Well, I finally woke up and joined the discussion. The moderator graciously gave me the floor, and I suggested to the previous speaker that perhaps the quandary noted in her second comment stemmed from what she had identified in her first. I.e., perhaps everyone is frustrated with our leadership these days just because our leaders are being overwhelmed by complexity themselves. Our leaders aren’t pushing the right buttons, because no one really knows what buttons should be pushed anymore.

(It’s happened before; see The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter, 1988)

A scary thought. » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 7:07 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Monday, May 31, 2010

◊ LOVE, not quite

Current Affairs ... Society ...

There’s an interesting article in the June Atlantic Magazine by Caitlin Flanagan about the current state of teenage girl-dom. The article is titled “Love, Actually” (a twist on the 2003 British romantic comedy movie); Ms. Flanagan reports that teen girls are currently staging a social revolt of sorts, rejecting the notion that they should celebrate a culture of promiscuity (wherein girls usually don’t get as good as they give to the boys in their lives, in terms of basic human regard and respect; and in terms of physical pleasure, most likely), and go back to holding out for real love.

Ms. Flanagan cites a variety of signs, including the lyrics of the latest teen pop idol, Taylor Swift. I took a quick look at some of Ms. Swift’s lyrics, and yes, they do seem to envision something more than “love the one you’re with” (ah, the old Crosby Stills and Nash anthem of the late 60s). One quick example from Ms. Swift:

“Sometimes I wonder / How it’s gonna feel / Will my first love be true and real?”

(from Am I Ready for Love). OK, if this is what the teenybopper girls are listening to these days, perhaps that is a good sign. However naive the sentiment is (like a 17 year girl is going to find “true and real love” with a 17 year old boy; yea, right), it at least sets high standards and expectations; maybe even VALUES (ah, the conservative side of me is coming out here).

But the question remains: just what is LOVE? » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 11:57 am Read Comments (4) / Leave a Comment

Sunday, October 4, 2009

◊ Anomie

Current Affairs ... Society ...

Are we living in a time of “anomie”? Sociologist Emile Durkheim defined anomie as the time between the breakdown of one social order and the establishment of a new one. During times of anomie, people are often confused, as they lack clear rules on how to live and relate with each other.

I think that we are in such a time. I believe that until the 1970s there was a dominant social order in America built around the suburbs, the manufacturing economy, and advancing science and technology. Although we still have suburbs and advancing science and technology (the manufacturing economy was DOA by the mid 1980s), we aren’t quite as enthused about them as we once were; we are no longer willing to build a social narrative around them.

The modernist suburban-industrial social order started breaking down » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 4:48 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Monday, August 3, 2009

◊ THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2009: WHAT DID IT MEAN?

Politics ... Society ...

Yes, I know; another article about what the outcome of the 2009 Presidential race meant is not exactly what the pundit-universe needs today. There are hundreds and hundreds of articles out there about this.

But please allow me to air my belated thoughts on this subject, based upon six months of actual governing by the winner, Barack Obama. FIRST: in terms of long-term significance, the race wasn’t between Barack Obama and John McCain; it was between Obama and the previous President, George W. Bush. SECOND: Obama won! Not a big surprise, given that the economy under President Bush was visibly collapsing during most of the election campaign. THIRD: The Democrats also had big Congressional wins. This indicates that the public had given Obama a mandate to move away from Bush’s neo-conservative policies, especially regarding domestic and economic issues, allowing him to implement the more government-centered, welfare-focused programs favored by liberals; FOURTH: Obama is an extraordinarily talented orator, and many American voters feel good about such orators. FIFTH: What I believe, however, is that the biggest significance of the 2009 election is that the public had tired of Bush’s intellectual aridity and wanted a highly intelligent man in the White House.

President Obama appears to believe that the THIRD factor is most important. » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 7:17 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Sunday, June 21, 2009

◊ TSING LOH NOT HIGH on MEN or MARRIAGE

Society ...

I’m a regular reader of The Atlantic magazine and I enjoy the semi-regular pieces written by Sandra Tsing Loh regarding modern family life and relationship issues. Ms. Tsing Loh blends the subtle and the blunt quite nicely. She usually starts with the standard modern-female issues and viewpoints, but then mixes in drafts of earthy humor and ‘what the hell does that mean’ cynicism, even at her own expense. In a nutshell, she keeps it real.

Unfortunately, Loh is going through a marital breakup and divorce, and her thoughts about it in the July Atlantic (‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off’) are void of her usual insight and refreshing candor. I myself went through a divorce, and I remember that my own thoughts and writings about it were rambling, confused, contradictory and self-indulgent during the first year or two thereafter. The Atlantic was doing Ms. Tsing Loh a favor by publishing her recent piece, thinly disguised as a book review. Perhaps it will contribute to her healing process, and perhaps they owe it to her after all the other good stuff she’s provided them with.

I posted a fairly detailed reflection on Ms. Tsing Loh’s article on a nice little blog called She Started It. The “she” in question is a writer, wife and mother from the Atlanta area. “She” (Anjali E.S.) was gracious enough to accept my comments and acknowledge my thoughts. I was careful to thank Ms. E.S. for her insight regarding Ms. Tsing Loh’s blaming the world around her for what happened to her marriage. I amplified and developed Anjali’s insight; but as her blog title says, she indeed started it.

I want to further extend that line of thinking here, especially with regard to Ms. Tsing Loh’s reflections on her own husband and about various other husbands she knows. I hope this is not too unfair, but I read Loh as saying that post-feminist men don’t function anymore; their libidos are shot. Enlightened guys who went along with becoming sharing helpmeets weren’t robust enough to keep the fires of passion burning. Modern men just aren’t strong enough to meet the modern woman’s reasonable demands. As such, Ms. Tsing Loh tells us that some modern Euro women are turning to immigrant men from the Islamic lands. (Good luck with that!)

Again, as pointed out by her critics (many of whom are women), Ms. Tsing Loh admits to an affair, admits that she and her husband were spending more time apart with their careers, and claims that she “doesn’t have the strength” to work on reconciliation. She thus seems a bit unrealistic in her expectations regarding marriage and men. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that women are solely or primarily responsible for making marriages work. I realize that relationships are highly interactive phenomenon; Loh’s evident loss of enthusiasm regarding her marital relationship cannot, by definition, be all her doing. But I do think that a viable marriage takes a lot of work on both parties’ accounts; forget the romantic illusions, and forget the expectation that the emotional burdens will always be fairly and evenly split. Again, I’m not saying that women should be given the duty by society of making marriages work. However, for marriages that do work, there often are times when one party has to work more than the other to keep things from falling apart.

Yes, I know that I’m not exactly the best person to make that statement, given that I couldn’t make my own marriage work. I don’t want to go into the whole thing here. But I will say that I put a lot of effort into my own marriage before concluding that it was beyond repair. I will also admit to having done something much like what Sandra Tsing Loh is now doing; I blamed the Catholic Church, then my family, then my ex’s family, then myself, then her, then my boss, then the corporate world . . . Until I finally accepted the fact that this on this planet, irony and tragedy flourish alongside hope and fulfillment. In a number of years, as wisdom seeps in, Loh might well realize that blaming social institutions and one-half of the human race for what happened between her and her ex was perhaps a bit hasty.

But right now, Ms. Tsing Loh is hurt, and long-run views cannot be expected of her. However, she has issued a video on the Atlantic web site where she talks about her divorce from within a U Haul trailer. Her sense of humor thus hasn’t gone completely off-line. That’s a good sign. I think she’s going to be OK, in good time.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:32 am Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Thursday, June 11, 2009

◊ The Chaos of Fashion

Science ... Society ...

The NY Times had an interesting little article today on a fashion trend developing in the eyewear field. For the past 5 or 6 years, square and narrow glasses have been the accepted “thing to wear”. But now that’s shifting towards small round frames.

I myself, being a long-time wearer of glasses, liked the big oval frames that were once popular (and which are still a long way from making a comeback). They provided a wide, uninterrupted vision field, as well as maximum protection against stray objects flung in the direction of your face. And they were stable and comfortable on your nose. I kept wearing my old ovals until about 3 years ago, when I finally capitulated to the current style. Economist Robert Samuelson, who in my opinion says a lot of cogent things about the current economic situation (not the constant pessimism of Nouriel Roubini, but certainly realistic about the dangers and painful adjustments that we face), is brave enough to stick with the old style. Now there’s a guy I can admire.

Anyway, the Times article asked a question (but didn’t answer it) that I’ve often wondered about » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:25 pm Read Comments (4) / Leave a Comment

Friday, May 29, 2009

◊ THE MATHEMATICS OF LOVE

Psychology ... Science ... Society ...

Here’s my candidate for the most interesting article of the week: “Loves Me, Loves Me Not (Do the Math)” By Steven Strogatz, in the Wild Side blog on the NY Times.

Dr. Strogatz, a mathematician noted for his work in chaos theory and the dynamics of complex, non-linear systems, wrote about how certain math equations and concepts help to describe what he had experienced as a young man in love. Well, there’s a lot of overlap between love and chaos,and if any scientists are ever going to have anything to say about romantic love, it’s going to be the chaos experts. The psychologists have been trying for years, but without much luck; only the math people who search for (and find) hidden patterns within the crazy swirls of reality (e.g. stock prices, political campaigns, virus infections, insect colonies, etc.) can even get close to what courtship and romantic love involve.

Most people are still pretty cynical as to whether math and science can really tell us anything about love and relationships. And ultimately they’re right; love is ultimately an experiential thing. The realm of science, as broad and powerful as it is, stops just short of being able to fully explain an experience. This reality is at the heart of the “consciousness problem” in the field of “philosophy of mind”. You can look up the comments that were sent in response to Dr. Strogatz’s article, and more than half of them are rather dismissive about what the professor seems to be attempting. Many of these commentors try to pass him off with a bit of humor (the good doctor himself seemed to end the article on a tongue-in-cheek note). Emily Bobrow on The Economist’s “More Intelligent Life” blog does about the same.

As with the mind, science can only go so far in talking about love. But that still might be much fartherer than most people think. A few years ago, a book came out called “The Mathematics of Marriage”, based on a long-term study done of married couples led by Dr. John M. Gottman. Dr. Gottman and his team came up with a mathematical system to describe marital dynamics, based on chaos theory (and more specifically, “catastrophe theory”), and applied these equations across a sample of married couples over time. These couples were recorded talking to each other on video, and were then analyzed and classified based on the types of emotional responses being exchanged by man and wife during their conversations. The bottom line: if Dr. Gottman analyzed an hour of a husband and wife talking, he predicted with 95% accuracy whether a couple would be married 15 years later. And if he watched a couple for just 15 minutes, his success rate only dropped to 90%. Hmm, not bad if true (I didn’t read the book or the study, so I can’t really judge it).

SO, perhaps science will never tell us exactly why we exist in this universe as feeling beings. But it already can tell us a lot about how we obtain those feelings and what we do in response to them. And in the future it will be able to do this better and better (although it will never be able to predict any one individual’s course of actions in detail for long periods of time; there’s too much “chaos” and not enough information practically available about complex human relationships, just as the chaos in the atmosphere and limitations on weather data collection prevent us from accurately predicting the weather too far in advance). As with any scientific tool, it will be up to us whether we use this for good or for evil. As with most significant scientific tools from the past two or three centuries, the potential goodness will be VERY good, and the potential evil will be VERY evil.

PS, here’s another blog comment on the Strogatz column by Rick Nelson, a fellow engineering guy.

And here’s an article from 2003 in Slate about Dr. Gottman’s study and his book:
Love by the Numbers; Can a few differential equations describe the course of a marriage? by Jordan Ellenber.

PPS, On a different but familiar topic, i.e. General Motors; my favorite quote for the week is from Judge Richard Posner’s blog on The Atlantic web site: “We should be concerned lest GM become a kind of economic Vietnam”.

PPPS: I see that Obama is going to appoint a “Ciber Czar”, after recently appointing an “Auto Czar” (Ed Montgomery). OK, we know what a “czar” is (a.k.a. “tsar”, a Russian dictator from the 16th thru early 20th Century), but where did that word originate? In ancient Rome, of course; czar is just a Russian corruption of “Caesar”, reflecting the old Russian myth that it had inherited the legacy of the Roman Empire when Russia converted to Eastern Christianity (around 1000 AD), followed by the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Turks (pretty much done by 1350, but with Constantinople holding out until 1453). Hopefully, President Obama is not going to appoint himself “Casear of the Czars”.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:48 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

TOP PAGE - LATEST BLOG POSTS
« PREVIOUS PAGE -- NEXT PAGE (OLDER POSTS) »