Did we make things worse?

I am by no means an expert on anything, except a small branch of mathematics. However, I have spent my life watching people and animals, and have come to my own conclusions.

We in the US prize the individual over society (until they do something really bad), and so are not very accepting of the fact that humans, like wolves, elephants, and most other primates, are mostly pack animals.

In a pack of wolves or wild dogs with a calm, assertive leader, there are very few fights, and co-operation is the norm. The common role for the alpha females is the nurture and protection of the young. For the alpha male, it is protection of the pack from outside threats, and control of the aggressive adolescent males.

The liberalization of divorce laws in the 1960's shifted the balance of power in middle-class homes clearly to the woman of the house. One wrong move, and the man could lose his family, home, and most of his earnings. The pop psychology of the time told us that 'fathers were not needed to raise children', partly to assuage guilt.

Is it not possible that the removal of assertive leadership over teenage males has made some of our social problems worse?

Unintended Consequences?

The launch of Sputnik in 1957 led to a major reform in US mathematics and science education. Motivated by that fear, and aided by massive immigration of well-educated people from Britain and elsewhere, we led the world in science and technology until the mid-1970's.

There has been a gradual and unremitting decline ever since. Many fixes have been proposed, and each has worked, in its own way.

Administrators and pundits said that the answer was more parental involvement. We had band and athletic boosters, the PTA, bake sales and the like. Middle-class parents did the homework for their children. In return for this work, they expected rewards, which fueled grade inflation.

Sociologists told us that teachers needed to be less authoritarian, and more nurturing. Students are now friendly with them, so much so that several hundred have been arrested in the past few years for sleeping and partying with them.

Psychologists assured us that the answer was to enhance self-esteem. In a recent study of mathematics achievement, the top 10% of Americans ranked at the 50% mark for South Koreans. However, the Americans rated their own performance as A/B, while the South Koreans rated themselves as C.

Teachers told us that increased pay was the answer. In many local districts, the pay and benefits for teachers exceeds that of college professors.

Education professors told us that the answer was to change teaching methods and curricula. Future teachers now take far more education credits than in the subjects that they will teach, and the teaching has changed so much and so often that we can't even compare student performance with a few years ago.

Politicians tell us that the answer is to reward 'good' teachers, and punish 'bad' ones. This had led to even more grade inflation, and encourages many to either cheat, or leave the profession entirely.

Dysfunctional Nation?

Of the industrialized nations, the USA has some of the worst records when it comes to divorce, teen pregnancy, std infections, drug abuse, alcoholism, literacy, incarceration, violent crime, suicide, educational achievement, child mortality and life expectancy.

Our belief in free market capitalism led us to pour money into these problems, including prisons and the 'War on Drugs (TM)'. Per capita spending on education and healthcare is close to twice that of many other countries.

This investment has given us some of the highest paid teachers and doctors in the world, a bloated and inefficient managerial class, and legions of psychologists and lawyers to take care of the unhappiness and problems that result.

These problems are not new. Mark Twain wrote about the effects of over-nurturing parents in the 1870's, and Robert Heinlein discussed teen delinquency and bad mathematics education in the 1960's.

I used to visit my grandmother in Wiesbaden in the 1960's. She lived next to a lovely park. From four stories up and 1/2-mile away, we could tell which familes were US service personnel from the airbase. The German and African-American children stayed with their parents and behaved themselves. The other American children 'expressed themselves' by running into forbidden areas and making lots of noise.

That we have these problems in the poor urban areas is no surprise. That they occur as well in the suburbs is due, in my uneducated opinion, to an excess of wealth and free time, leading to a lack of competitive drive.

Consequences

Some rules for the parasitic management class:

Rule #1: Avoid decisions whose consequences can be traced back to you.

Rule #2: If you have to violate Rule #1, try to make decisions whose outcome cannot be classified as success or failure.

Rule #3: If you have to violate Rule #2, always make the choice which has failed somewhere else. If it succeeds for you, then you are a genius; if it fails, there is no blame.

This is why:

We encourage parents to be 'friends' to their children, then wonder why so many are self-centred lazy brats.

We put more and more responsibility for our children on teachers, but remove the authority to discipline them.

We put more emphasis on how people 'feel' about things than whether they contribute to society.

Companies lay off production workers to 'save money'.

We are measured by almost anything, except real productivity.

We are more concerned about 'effort' and 'hard work' than achievement.

Group-think and disaster

I've just been watching a Horizon programme, "How to Survive a Disaster". One part is about a 1960s experiment, where people were invited into a room and given paperwork to fill in, and then the experimenters started to force smoke under the door.

If alone, 75% of the guinea pigs left soon to report a possible fire; but if surrounded by actors who pretended nothing was wrong, only 10% raised the alarm, even though the smoke eventually got so bad that they could hardly see anything.

Rings bells for me.

By the way, I won't be surprised if the Dow rises above 9,000 points at some point, before the smoke gets too thick.

I see gold's under $900...

Could the City of London be facing long-term decline?

The UK has an unfortunate reputation for clasping vipers to its bosom, from Karl Marx to modern religious terrorists. But some might say the same goes for its financial sector - the lack of transparency here, of which I've complained more than once, allows problems to develop unchecked, as Brad Setser comments:

Had there been an international “early warning” system that was on the ball – and had the UK been willing to collect the data on flows through the UK in the face of inevitable complaints that such efforts would drive business abroad – it might well have picked up on some of these flows as a sign of brewing trouble in global financial markets.

At one of my old College's Gaudies (class reunion) a few years ago, a City financier complacently and cynically remarked that the UK was always going to have a strong financial community, since it has hundreds of years of experience in "shaving" its customers in subtle ways.

I don't think the Brits have a monopoly of greed, dishonesty and duplicity, and we see now the rotten fruits of their technical expertise. The UK National Defence Association may imagine we can concentrate on financial services and turn the rest of the country into a living museum; I say that just as we need to wean ourselves off coal and oil, so we must reduce our dependence on the old swindlers; no more fossil fuels, no more fossil fools.

Marc Faber: inflation, war, gold

It's not just about money. There will, thinks Faber, be graver consequences. Here.

Also, here, from which the following extract:

The best bet for investors may be to buy a farm and escape from the cities, as a prolonged recession could lead to war, as the Great Depression did, said the Swiss national, who now lives in Thailand.

“Buy a farm and let your girlfriend work on the farm,” he said, to the applause of investors. “If the global economy doesn’t recover, usually people go to war.”

For pictures of his elegant Chiang Mai home, possibly a clue to his personality, see here - and for local Thai comment on him, see here.