Across the Great Divide

Focus on Happiness & Taxes "a Mistake."

Like swallows to Capistrano — they are still showing up aren't they? — people bearing Tax Foundation numbers return to the notion that everything is better in low-tax states because (you guessed it) taxes are low.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal mined this familiar territory with the help of  an article about testing the reliability of "happiness" studies. The Journal also tossed in a United Van Lines study of mobility that is a recurring, non-scientific, source of glee. (I wrote about a previous example here.)

Mitch Berg jumped on the Journal's pastiche with this:

We’ve always known that those “Happy To Pay For A Better Minnesota” signs and slogans were buncombe – but it was more of a gut feeling.

But now we have empirical, clinical proof it’s all bull-effluvia.  The unhappiest states are the ones with the highest taxes; the happiest ones, pretty much, have the lowest taxes (with occasional emphasis added by me):

Does living in a blue state make people blue? It seems so, according to a new study in Science magazine that ranks states according to their happiness. The study finds that New Yorkers are the unhappiest people in America and their neighbors in Connecticut come in a close second, followed by Michigan, Indiana, New Jersey, California, and Illinois. And the happiest states? Drum roll, please…Louisiana, Hawaii, Florida, Tennessee, and Arizona.

Actually, there's no empirical, clinical proof of a connection, of course, even though Mitch is impressed the name of the magazine is Science.

Here's what the study by two economists tested:  whether the subjective (and presumably unreliable) responses of individuals about their happiness correlated with objective estimates of life satisfaction based on economic theory. The study found that subjective responses aligned closely state-by-state with what economists might predict.

Put more plainly, for those who like research to correspond with their gut feelings, the study says: If you live in a place with warm weather, relatively open spaces, few services and no pressure, an economist says you're probably happy. Next time, if you say you're happy, the economists will believe you.

Bingo! Bubba is probably happier than an MIT professor, a Wall Street Banker, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, the the Connecticut-based CEO of $100-billion company. Fortunately for the happy states, they have the unhappy ones to keep the country from turning into Tobago.

The state rankings, however, attracted most of the attention. And the correlation with tax rankings had nothing to do with the Science article. Cue the Wall Street Journal with opinionators with the Tax Foundation crush.

To its credit, the Tax Foundation cautions in its Tax Policy Blog not to put much store in this sort of speculation and points to a Cato Institute article that questions the entire notion of happiness studies.

But while unhappiness is correlated with high tax burdens, high income is also kind of correlated with high tax burdens.  People in New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut might be taxed a lot, but they earn a lot too.  So it is unlikely that disposable income is a major cause of "happiness", or whatever this survey recorded, because people in those states would still have relatively high levels of disposable income. 

Also noteworthy is in a world wide happiness survey Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands (not thought of as low tax countries) came out on top.  Although citizens in those countries receive a lot of quality public services—a point the editorial makes. That is something one cannot say about living in New Jersey.

Focusing on one policy area, like tax policy, and happiness is a mistake.

So is looking for analysis from people happy to find preconceptions reinforced.

Seeing Her Ideas in a New Light.

Mina Bissell will never forget the reception she got from a prominent scientist visiting Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she worked. She gave him a paper she had just published on the genesis of cancer.

“He took the paper and held it over the wastebasket and said, ‘What do you want me to do with it?’ Then he dropped it in.”

– "Old ideas spur new approaches in cancer fight," New York Times

Interesting piece on new/old thinking about how cancer tumors spread, and how that spread might be arrested by addressing the healthy cells around the tumor.

“Think of it as this kid in a bad neighborhood,” said Dr. Susan Love, a breast cancer surgeon and president of the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation. “You can take the kid out of the neighborhood and put him in a different environment and he will behave totally differently.”

“It’s exciting,” Dr. Love added. “What it means, if all this environmental stuff is right, is that we should be able to reverse cancer without having to kill cells. This could open up a whole new way of thinking about cancer that would be much less assaultive.”

There's more research to be done, especially since this direction has been largely dismissed by the cancer establishment for decades.

I also can't help but notice that two of the key scientists, whose early papers are now seen a new light, are named Mina and Beatrice.

When They Criminalize Melatonin...

Should taxpayers underwrite research into bogus remedies?

If you believe that research should only advance scientific knowledge, then maybe not. After all, we already know the earth is flat.

But consumers spend billions of bucks on homepathic and alternative medicines that have no effect.

Ten years ago the government set out to test herbal and other alternative health remedies to find the ones that work. After spending $2.5 billion, the disappointing answer seems to be that almost none of them do.

Why should government research only benefit the non-gullible?

Number of the Day: Pledge! What Pledge?

A Johns Hopkins Study of youth abstinence programs found no significant difference in sexual activity between matched participants and non-participants — including the number of partners, incidence of sexually transmitted diseases or the age at which the teen lost his or her virginity.

It also found that teens who had taken a virginity pledge were less likely to use condoms or other birth control.

Five years after taking an abstinence pledge, 82% of pledgers denied having ever made such a pledge.

Enhancing Your Reading Comprehension Since 2004.

A month ago I had a follow-up eye exam as part of a study of a new surgical technique. My previous visit had been a year earlier.

The tech doing the testing asked, "Have you lost weight?"

Though I'd never been porky, it was true, the jowls were a bit less burgherian. But good as they were as this clinic, it was unlikely she remembered me that well.

I glanced over at the screen displaying my records, and there was a forgotten file photo that must've been taken when I signed up for surgery two years ago.

Including the mugshot undoubtedly improved the patient service experience — techs and nurses can recognize and greet patients instead of announcing their names in the waiting area, for example. But does the photo make any difference in the quality of care?

A new study out of Israel suggests it might.

Radiologists reviewing scans accompanied by a patient photo discovered incidental findings, such as when a search for kidney stones turns up a tumor, at a significantly higher rate compared to when they viewed the  same scans a month later, without the photo attached.

Now you know why this blog's masthead has my pic.

Gross National Happiness.

Happy people spend a lot of time socializing, going to church and reading newspapers — but they don’t spend a lot of time watching television, a new study finds.

That’s what unhappy people do.

— New York Times

For several decades, we owned a cabin in northern Minnesota. The man who built it was one of the happiest people I ever met.

He had gotten out of the construction trade in the city, moved to a lake, bought a country store he ran with his wife and on the side, built whatever needed building. 

After he and his wife sold the store, for many years the new owners were bedeviled by middle of the night knocks on their door. See, Don was the kind of guy who would throw on his coveralls at two in the morning, fire up the truck and haul a stranger out of the ditch, laughing all the way.

If researchers had followed him around and tried to account for his high happiness score, I'm not sure they would've gotten to the bottom of it by his documenting his activities. He did most of the things the study associated with happy people, plus the aforementioned ditch-clearing, taking pot shots at barn cats and talking louder than 98% of the population (which may have had something to do with using chainsaws and nail guns most of his life). 

It turns out there's a great deal of such happiness research. There's even a World Database of Happiness where you can drill down into all the correlations in various studies. Lots of work digs out correlations between political behavior and happiness; plain old love is not so well-represented.

These researchers looked at activities instead of demographics. Thanks to their work, we can now be more confident that the obvious is indeed obvious.

Watching television, I would suggest, is more an inactivity. It is not something you do. It represents the absence of something to do, of someone to talk to, of an interior life to indulge. In fact, according to the story, a "major predictor of how much time is spent watching television is whether someone works or not."

Besides getting a job and canceling cable, what else should Americans try to improve our pursuit of happiness?

For example, at least one country in the world has decided that cultural homogeneity is a vital part of its citizens’ happiness. The Kingdom of Bhutan, for example, is cited approvingly by leading
happiness advocates for being the first country in the world to use the concept of gross national happiness as the basis for policy. In this fortunate nation, national dress is compulsory and, until
recently, television was banned.

— Happiness, Economics and Public Policy [Download pdf]

[Leading happiness advocates? Why has Katherine Kersten not yet written about this?] The authors go on to note that genocide is an ever-popular strategy for ensuring national happiness, at least for the nationals who are not being eradicated.

For these and other economists, neither love nor television is a "socioeconomic variable of interest." But even for items of acute interest, like, say, the performance of the mortgage market, professional economists have a rotten record of connecting the dots.

Kersten in a Larger Context of Meaning and Beauty.

MEMORANDUM

To: All District Personnel

From: Ruskin Middle School Director of Curriculum

Subject: Sex Education Visual Aids

By now, you have heard about the unfortunate mishap at Ruskin Middle School in which two students were exposed to graphic information about sexual development and reproductive processes. A boy, who apparently has also not yet learned the function of eyelids, threw his shirt over his head to avoid seeing the educational materials. A girl went home in tears, much like other girls who come home in tears fearing they will bleed to death after experiencing their first period.

As a result, Ruskin has received unwanted publicity, and lost two students to home schooling for the coming academic year.

I am sorry to declare our experiment with post-1880s sex education a failure. We will revert to the wise principles of visual representation of sexuality as exemplified in the life of our school's name sake. (For those unfamiliar with the seminal role John Ruskin played in advancing young people toward loving and mature sexual relations, please see the attachment.)

Effective immediately, the following changes are to be implemented in visual aids used in the district's sex education curriculum. The proscribed visual images are listed below. Acceptable substitutes follow in parentheses.

• Naked males and females in various stages of development (clothed prepubescent males and females in various stages of development) NOT chimpanzees or other primates in any state of dress!
• A bra (gingham sun dress; basketball jersey over a sports bra; Brenda Starr comic strips (Dale Messick version only). Note: Realistic images featuring deep cleavage, even with a prominent crucifix, are not acceptable.
• A tampon (an out-of-focus shot of a personal hygiene products shelf; an out-of-focus shot of a rest room vending machine; a calendar with the date circled) Note: The Tampax web page How to use a tampon is now blocked from all district computers.
• An infra-red demonstration of an erection (Until further notice, there are no approved substitutes.)  Need I remind you of the Kielbasa Incident? And if you have information as to how the DVD of Boogie Nights got into the library's sleeve of "Conjugating Spanish Verbs," please notify the assistant principal.
• A live birth (bird's eggs hatching; still images from the State Fair's Miracle of Birth Center) Absolutely NO SHOW AND TELL home videos.
• Vaginas and those whatchamacallits (a halved peach; the flower paintings of Georgia O'Keefe)
• Condoms (At this time, the only accepted alternative is a Playtex Living Glove filled with water, while reciting condom failure rate statistics provided by the  Minnesota Family Council.) Our pilot program with Clyde the Condom Clown was not a success. Some parents failed to appreciate the balloons on bananas as a metaphor, and some boys went home in tears when the banana broke.

It has also been brought to our attention that the program materials have stripped sex of its larger context of meaning and beauty. Effectively immediately, you are instructed to:

• Remind students that, while reproduction is a biological process, sex has a larger context of meaning and beauty, provided you are a monogamous human being and not any other form of mammalian life.
• Play the cassette tape "Handel's Greatest Hits" during all Health Education classes
• Refrain from answering questions about the immaculate conception, the sexuality of Jesus or the relationship between Viagara, Bob Dole and Britny Spears, if any. Refer students who have questions not explicitly addressed in the curriculum to their parents and/or their minister/priest/rabbi/imam

While ignorance has not been proven 100-percent effective in preventing pregnancies among 11- and 12-year-olds, I know you share my goal of preventing teen pregnancies at least until 9th grade. Thanks for your cooperation.

Attachment

John Ruskin was a renowned British Art critic who pioneered the use of visual aids in sex education during the mid-1800s. His parents, of Scottish descent, were first cousins who were so concerned that he have a appropriate orientation toward the meaning and beauty of sex that they arranged his 1848 marriage with Euphemia Chalmers Gray and accompanied the couple on their honeymoon.

Six years later, the marriage was annulled on grounds of "incurable impotency," although Euphemia Ruskin had by then fallen in love with the painter John Everett Millais, whom she then married. There is scholarly disagreement over the precise reasons for Ruskin's marital non-consummation. As leading proponent of the idea that painting must convey "truth," Ruskin may have mistakenly believed that the idealized female forms painted by the masters were biologically accurate. He was therefore horrified on his wedding night to discover that Euphemia's nether regions sported hair instead of the widely painted, but ill-defined, bald mons venus. Some theories hold other natural feminine processes may have been involved.

Naturally, a little less parental supervision and more accurate information might have  avoided this unfortunate outcome. For the rest of his life, Ruskin tried to make up for this gap in his schooling.

Four years after the end of his marriage, Ruskin met and became enamored with Rose la Touche, an intensely religious 10-year-old who may have reminded him of his devout mother. He proposed when she was 17 and for years afterward, until he was finally rejected in 1872 and the young woman died.  

Ruskin also repeatedly asked children's book illustrator Kate Greenaway to draw her "girlies" without clothing:

Will you – (it’s all for your own good – !) make her stand up and then draw her for me without a cap – and, without her shoes, – (because of the heels) and without her mittens, and without her – frock and frills? And let me see exactly how tall she is – and – how – round. It will be so good of and for you – And to and for me.

That quest to share accurate but not-too-explicit information about the developing bodies of children continues to animate Ruskin Middle School. Go, Aesthetes!!

Hail Size Estimator.

The hail chasers were already in the neighborhood when the hail came again. A neighbor said she'd seen golf-ball-sized hailstones less than a mile away.

I'd say ours was no more than fingernail-sized.

Hail is always golf-ball-sized, I said. People expect hail to be golf-ball-sized, so that's what they see. Besides, they like to exaggerate how bad it was. Nobody will feel sorry for you if you were hit with pea-sized hail or popcorn-sized hail. But a golf ball, everybody knows how bad that would hurt.

Today she sent me reports from Spokane where the hail was penny- and marble-sized. Told you, she said.

I found Kansas and Nebraska bombarded with baseball- and softball-sized hail. Suuuure. It's not as if the New York Times is going to fly somebody out there to do a confirmation.

The National Weather Service says, "We encourage measurement, not estimation, of hail size," but what fun is that? I also think this hail monitoring device is kind of a party pooper, too.

There are some standard hail estimating charts, some non-standard ones, and even a compilation of various weather report size estimations. But how many kids today play marbles or know what a moth ball is? And suppose you'd like a more colorful alternative to ping pong ball-sized hail?

I've compiled a handy comparison chart for your next hail storm, based on comparisons someone has already used. Notice it has a glaring gap between baseball and grapefruit. I don't know if that means hail is rare within that 2.75- to 4-inch range, or we lack appropriate cultural references.

Lower Childhood Obesity in the Future? Fat Chance.

The New York Times has an article today saying:

Childhood obesity, rising for more than two decades, appears to have hit a plateau, a potentially significant milestone in the battle against excessive weight gain among children.

Its story has a graphic, but it's one of those boring bar charts.

It is not clear if the lull in childhood weight gain is permanent or even if it is the result of public anti-obesity efforts to limit junk food and increase physical activity in schools. Doctors noted that even if the trend held up, 32 percent of American schoolchildren remained overweight or obese, representing an entire generation that will be saddled with weight-related health problems as it ages.

Here's a more understandable infographic I came across somewhere awhile back.

   

Big Ideas in Little Pictures.

Mark Trail illustrates one reason you need a gun to protect yourself from intruders.

And Yossi Vardi catches the global warming naysayers with their pants down. [via The Mississippifarian]