I'm not a doctor. I don't know what symptoms may be a serious issue, and what might be minor issues. (E.g., the kind of pain the comes with gallstones. If you don't know about gallstones, you're probably too young to have a serious stake in this.)
$1000 would probably discourage me from getting it checked out until it was crippling me, and perhaps result in more problems. $20 a visit would discourage frivolous visits, but I might go get gallstone-pain checked out. And, in the long run, probably do much better.
You do not want a system that creates disincentives to sensible preventative care.
The "aging boomer" trend in Europe is more pronounced than it is in the US. In fact, this has been a major news story for a while. Start here and check the citations for more.
Anecdotally, the older populations of America seem less healthy than almost anywhere else I've been; I think the fact that we don't encourage walkable public spaces in a lot of our towns and cities may have something to do with it, but I'm sure that's a huge topic. The kind of obese aging people you find in much of the US are rarer in Western Europe, however, as are those scooters that carry them around.
I can show you people whose private investment schemes collapsed over the last year, but I guess they "deserved" it. Oh, I'm sure in the long run private investment works better, but, to paraphrase Keynes, in the long run we're all dead.
This is only true for management-position and high-level jobs. Most middle class folks use NHS, and while there are problems with some NHS hospitals, in general the health care system is working there. Where it has failed is in dental care, and indeed that is a widely-sought employment benefit; when I lived in England, I traveled to Hungary, of all places, for my dental care.
Schumpeter is the greatest of those economist who understand that economics is a social science, not a kind of applied mathematics. But though he was very Austrian, his relationship to the Austrian school was a complicated one, and in many ways he was an outlier.
On the other hand, did you have any serious medical problems during those 3 years? Did you have benefits? Just saying "I lived on minimum wage for 3 years." doesn't necessarily disprove the assertion that minimum wage is livable.
Not to mention a family, or an upcoming retirement... or an increase in rent, even.
I think you actually have it reversed somewhat. Until recently, the children of the poor didn't get much of an education at all. Literacy rates were lower, there was a great deal more employment available in agriculture and manufacturing, etc. The idea that the majority of the population needs a college degree to make a living is a recent one. And the domestic "culture of education" was never universal; what's happened is that even the poor now have aspirations for careers for their children in the middle class (and, more troublingly, fewer well-rewarded alternatives.)
If everyone were generally qualified for interesting jobs, then boring jobs would pay much, much better. And interesting jobs would pay poorly.
That already happens with academia: the salaries at research institutions are often less than those in community colleges, simply because the former are more interesting jobs.
What you learned about Saladin could have been better learned, with more accuracy and more quickly, in 5 minutes, by reading the Wikipedia page about Saladin.
That you pick up a couple bits of trivia about history (sans historical context or broader significance) doesn't turn AoE into a tool for learning, any more than an episode of a TV show that mentions Saladin would. I would actually prefer that you just enjoyed the game as a game, or maybe say it inspired you to research more about the Crusades, etc. Because what it actually directly teaches you is nearly worthless.
It's like people who insist that their junk food contains "all four food groups." Better to enjoy for enjoyment's sake than to fool yourself into thinking you're doing something good for you....
Um, I like AoE and Civ and all, but anyone who tries to draw any kind of foundation of human history from those games is due for a rude awakening when they actually start to study human history. They are horrible - horrible - models for history; that they create a single, static category ("the civilization") that evolves, unbroken, from prehistory to the future, unifying language, race, religion, economics and government into a single playable entity... I mean, really, was a prehistoric Abe Lincoln researching metallurgy with the stone-age Americans, who all adopted Monotheism by collective fiat some time before creating Feudalism?
Also, the opportunity cost is a big deal. In the time a teenager plays one full game of Civ, they could have read "Guns, Germs and Steel" - or seen a much more in-depth documentary. Civ is fun as a game, but as a pedagogical device, it's crap.
I think he correctly intuits that martial arts, scuba diving and piano are much better at cultivating a healthy mind and body than sitting around playing Halo is. The movie-actor bit, I grant you, is a little closer to a contradiction.
Videogames have some rewards (and I'm very interesting in videogames) but at an incredible opportunity cost in leisure time.
Nature and nurture get cut up to fit peoples' ideologies all the time, both on the right and on the left.
On the right, biology is an acceptable explanation for gender differences - but not an acceptable one for differences in sexuality; homosexuality is often characterized as a choice.
But on the left, it's reversed: biology is A-OK for sexuality (unless you've read your Foucault and Butler), but not OK to explain gender differences except as a very last resort.
One of the reasons I've become increasingly non-partisan is that I find rampant intellectual dishonesty all over the place, and the resistance among liberals and progressives to any biological or genetic explanations is one of the more glaring bits of intellectual irresponsibility.
You are using the word "value" without clarity. What is valuable to a person may not be valuable to the world as a whole.
I also don't know where this talk of traits comes in, either. Are you talking about some theory of inheritable genius? Or are you talking about eugenics?
The issue is the exhaustion of resources, the production of waste and pollution, and the loss of free space. Food isn't the only, or even the main issue. I want a citation for your "expected to crest soon," (the growth rate is declining, of course, but you know how trends work) and even so 10 billion is huge - the global population didn't even reach 1 billion until the 19th century and only reach 2 billion around the middle of the 20th, and we're looking at a 5-fold increase from the population our grandparents experienced? Can you quintuple the number of people living in your house?
I actually believe that I will contribute more to society through my work than through my child, but perhaps my career has a bigger impact than yours does. That's not meant to be judgmental. In any case, teaching a child not-to-be-a-leech isn't that hard. It's like congratulating yourself for not crapping in your pants.
Most culture is passed on unconsciously, and children learn what their parents model. The real "culture" most of us pass on in the West is consumerism: we are obliged to buy, and produce so we can buy, until we die. I would also remind you that some of the most horrid living conditions of recent memory - the mid-20th century totalitarian states - included the most "cultured," the most educated, the most "modern." (I think of the USSR as definitely being the product of modernity.)
This is the problem of a "local minima" - good for the parents, bad for the world.
Overpopulation isn't a very sexy problem right now. It conjures up scary pictures of draconian birth-control policies, of forced sterilizations, etc. But the world population has doubled twice in less than two generations. This is a big problem: you think global warming is bad now? Sprawl? The loss of biodiversity? It is only getting worse.
A one-child-per-couple policy, coupled with reasonable policies to help with an aging population (like doing things to aggressively encourage savings, instead of aggressively encouraging consumption to fuel economic growth) is the only responsible approach to take. And it can happen in the 3rd world, as well, when women are given greater political power, education, and opportunities: see the case of the (still very poor) Indian state of Kerala for an example of that at work.
I speak as a parent, as well. I very much want to rear a child with good values and judgement, but that is not the most important accomplishment either I or my spouse will be able to brag of, either. That kind of sentiment is pure treacle. Raising a responsible, ethical child is baseline, don't-shit-where-you-eat stuff.
There's no replacement for a few hours a week at the gym, and a bunch of minutes in the shower and front of the mirror in the morning. (OK, you did include "hygiene" as one of the malleable things.)
I agree with your point over-all, and moreover: attractiveness isn't a quality, it's a special-effect. A hack, if you will.
You're acting like things didn't go wrong back then.
Kids often died young. As it turns out, a lot of kids actually were molested (e.g., by priests) but couldn't tell anyone about it.
Kids weren't drugged (or rather, treated for treatable conditions) - and many may have failed at life because of it, for all we know. Just because people in general have survived, doesn't mean that one is better off following the protocols of the 19th century in raising one's own children.
A GPS tracker is hardly over-reacting. I actually broadcast my location on Google Latitude, and when my toddler is school-age, he'll get some sort of tracker, too. (I view getting lost a bigger danger than stranger abduction.) I don't think that being able to know the position of your family members is really a massive violation of privacy, and can actually be pretty damn cool.
When a stage is reached where the child is actively trying to go "off the grid" for a bit, I'll support him - unstructured play time and self-structured social time are very important. But pre-school? Kindergarten? Up to 4th grade or so, I think it's projecting a lot to think that they'd even be bothered by being trackable.
There's a way in which virtual collection may actually satisfy a "need to hoard" (I would correct your misspelling as "horde," but it works too well with the WoW reference) in a productive way.
Modern life has made a lot of once-healthy instincts unhealthy, and has taken away many of the opportunities to exercise them. Children once would learn by exploring open spaces without a lot of adult supervision; as those spaces diminish and our fears about children's safety increase, games provide an alternative space for exploration (Henry Jenkins wrote an article about games as "gendered spaces of play" for little boys in particular, since the change in the landscape has affected boys' play more dramatically than it has girls' play.)
Perhaps the need to accumulate has also long outlived its usefulness in the real world: excessive consumption, planned obsolescence, the creation of fashions that motivate people to replace perfectly usable clothes and other objects, the accumulation of goods that we really don't need and often don't use, "shopping" as the way we participate in the world at large and derive satisfaction, etc. have created a vicious cycle of waste and stress - economies that rely on growth even after the human needs of the people with money (those without money aren't important to our economies except as potential labor) take advantage of our instinct to accumulate to keep the cycle going.
"Virtual" accumulation lets us play that instinct out without creating waste, lets us devote more of the real world to things other than spaces to shop and accumulate.
I see that kind of environment creating superficially clever ideas at best, not deep rethinkings.
I can't imagine any of the great artists, authors, poets, or even engineers doing radical work, partially because of self-censorship and the performative nature of group ideation. It's good for sitcom writing and for creating a "product" - it is poor for revolutionary research, rigorous engineering, or profound insight. I can't imagine a Proust, a Joyce, a Beckett, an Ionesco - a Tarkovsky, a Fellini, a Godard - even a great industrial designer working that way.
There are some good applications of this kind of method, it's true - but those applications already have supporting technologies. This doesn't enable a whole new way of thinking, it just unites IM, email and blogging. The whiteboard-like elements are going to be the least used, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a problem with your plan.
I'm not a doctor. I don't know what symptoms may be a serious issue, and what might be minor issues. (E.g., the kind of pain the comes with gallstones. If you don't know about gallstones, you're probably too young to have a serious stake in this.)
$1000 would probably discourage me from getting it checked out until it was crippling me, and perhaps result in more problems. $20 a visit would discourage frivolous visits, but I might go get gallstone-pain checked out. And, in the long run, probably do much better.
You do not want a system that creates disincentives to sensible preventative care.
The "aging boomer" trend in Europe is more pronounced than it is in the US. In fact, this has been a major news story for a while. Start here and check the citations for more.
Anecdotally, the older populations of America seem less healthy than almost anywhere else I've been; I think the fact that we don't encourage walkable public spaces in a lot of our towns and cities may have something to do with it, but I'm sure that's a huge topic. The kind of obese aging people you find in much of the US are rarer in Western Europe, however, as are those scooters that carry them around.
I can show you people whose private investment schemes collapsed over the last year, but I guess they "deserved" it. Oh, I'm sure in the long run private investment works better, but, to paraphrase Keynes, in the long run we're all dead.
This is only true for management-position and high-level jobs. Most middle class folks use NHS, and while there are problems with some NHS hospitals, in general the health care system is working there. Where it has failed is in dental care, and indeed that is a widely-sought employment benefit; when I lived in England, I traveled to Hungary, of all places, for my dental care.
Schumpeter is the greatest of those economist who understand that economics is a social science, not a kind of applied mathematics. But though he was very Austrian, his relationship to the Austrian school was a complicated one, and in many ways he was an outlier.
When applied to education, this is called a "voucher system", and Republicans love it.
On the other hand, did you have any serious medical problems during those 3 years? Did you have benefits? Just saying "I lived on minimum wage for 3 years." doesn't necessarily disprove the assertion that minimum wage is livable.
Not to mention a family, or an upcoming retirement... or an increase in rent, even.
I think you actually have it reversed somewhat. Until recently, the children of the poor didn't get much of an education at all. Literacy rates were lower, there was a great deal more employment available in agriculture and manufacturing, etc. The idea that the majority of the population needs a college degree to make a living is a recent one. And the domestic "culture of education" was never universal; what's happened is that even the poor now have aspirations for careers for their children in the middle class (and, more troublingly, fewer well-rewarded alternatives.)
If everyone were generally qualified for interesting jobs, then boring jobs would pay much, much better. And interesting jobs would pay poorly.
That already happens with academia: the salaries at research institutions are often less than those in community colleges, simply because the former are more interesting jobs.
Much less than I could earn straight out of college.
I blind-dated a fossilized rubber chicken once. Not something I'd recommend.
What you learned about Saladin could have been better learned, with more accuracy and more quickly, in 5 minutes, by reading the Wikipedia page about Saladin.
That you pick up a couple bits of trivia about history (sans historical context or broader significance) doesn't turn AoE into a tool for learning, any more than an episode of a TV show that mentions Saladin would. I would actually prefer that you just enjoyed the game as a game, or maybe say it inspired you to research more about the Crusades, etc. Because what it actually directly teaches you is nearly worthless.
It's like people who insist that their junk food contains "all four food groups." Better to enjoy for enjoyment's sake than to fool yourself into thinking you're doing something good for you....
Um, I like AoE and Civ and all, but anyone who tries to draw any kind of foundation of human history from those games is due for a rude awakening when they actually start to study human history. They are horrible - horrible - models for history; that they create a single, static category ("the civilization") that evolves, unbroken, from prehistory to the future, unifying language, race, religion, economics and government into a single playable entity... I mean, really, was a prehistoric Abe Lincoln researching metallurgy with the stone-age Americans, who all adopted Monotheism by collective fiat some time before creating Feudalism?
Also, the opportunity cost is a big deal. In the time a teenager plays one full game of Civ, they could have read "Guns, Germs and Steel" - or seen a much more in-depth documentary. Civ is fun as a game, but as a pedagogical device, it's crap.
I think he correctly intuits that martial arts, scuba diving and piano are much better at cultivating a healthy mind and body than sitting around playing Halo is. The movie-actor bit, I grant you, is a little closer to a contradiction.
Videogames have some rewards (and I'm very interesting in videogames) but at an incredible opportunity cost in leisure time.
Nature and nurture get cut up to fit peoples' ideologies all the time, both on the right and on the left.
On the right, biology is an acceptable explanation for gender differences - but not an acceptable one for differences in sexuality; homosexuality is often characterized as a choice.
But on the left, it's reversed: biology is A-OK for sexuality (unless you've read your Foucault and Butler), but not OK to explain gender differences except as a very last resort.
One of the reasons I've become increasingly non-partisan is that I find rampant intellectual dishonesty all over the place, and the resistance among liberals and progressives to any biological or genetic explanations is one of the more glaring bits of intellectual irresponsibility.
You are using the word "value" without clarity. What is valuable to a person may not be valuable to the world as a whole.
I also don't know where this talk of traits comes in, either. Are you talking about some theory of inheritable genius? Or are you talking about eugenics?
The issue is the exhaustion of resources, the production of waste and pollution, and the loss of free space. Food isn't the only, or even the main issue. I want a citation for your "expected to crest soon," (the growth rate is declining, of course, but you know how trends work) and even so 10 billion is huge - the global population didn't even reach 1 billion until the 19th century and only reach 2 billion around the middle of the 20th, and we're looking at a 5-fold increase from the population our grandparents experienced? Can you quintuple the number of people living in your house?
I actually believe that I will contribute more to society through my work than through my child, but perhaps my career has a bigger impact than yours does. That's not meant to be judgmental. In any case, teaching a child not-to-be-a-leech isn't that hard. It's like congratulating yourself for not crapping in your pants.
Most culture is passed on unconsciously, and children learn what their parents model. The real "culture" most of us pass on in the West is consumerism: we are obliged to buy, and produce so we can buy, until we die. I would also remind you that some of the most horrid living conditions of recent memory - the mid-20th century totalitarian states - included the most "cultured," the most educated, the most "modern." (I think of the USSR as definitely being the product of modernity.)
This is the problem of a "local minima" - good for the parents, bad for the world.
Overpopulation isn't a very sexy problem right now. It conjures up scary pictures of draconian birth-control policies, of forced sterilizations, etc. But the world population has doubled twice in less than two generations. This is a big problem: you think global warming is bad now? Sprawl? The loss of biodiversity? It is only getting worse.
A one-child-per-couple policy, coupled with reasonable policies to help with an aging population (like doing things to aggressively encourage savings, instead of aggressively encouraging consumption to fuel economic growth) is the only responsible approach to take. And it can happen in the 3rd world, as well, when women are given greater political power, education, and opportunities: see the case of the (still very poor) Indian state of Kerala for an example of that at work.
I speak as a parent, as well. I very much want to rear a child with good values and judgement, but that is not the most important accomplishment either I or my spouse will be able to brag of, either. That kind of sentiment is pure treacle. Raising a responsible, ethical child is baseline, don't-shit-where-you-eat stuff.
Yes, but ...
There's no replacement for a few hours a week at the gym, and a bunch of minutes in the shower and front of the mirror in the morning. (OK, you did include "hygiene" as one of the malleable things.)
I agree with your point over-all, and moreover: attractiveness isn't a quality, it's a special-effect. A hack, if you will.
You're acting like things didn't go wrong back then.
Kids often died young. As it turns out, a lot of kids actually were molested (e.g., by priests) but couldn't tell anyone about it.
Kids weren't drugged (or rather, treated for treatable conditions) - and many may have failed at life because of it, for all we know. Just because people in general have survived, doesn't mean that one is better off following the protocols of the 19th century in raising one's own children.
Um, it's bad, but in this case, it's not as bad.
A GPS tracker is hardly over-reacting. I actually broadcast my location on Google Latitude, and when my toddler is school-age, he'll get some sort of tracker, too. (I view getting lost a bigger danger than stranger abduction.) I don't think that being able to know the position of your family members is really a massive violation of privacy, and can actually be pretty damn cool.
When a stage is reached where the child is actively trying to go "off the grid" for a bit, I'll support him - unstructured play time and self-structured social time are very important. But pre-school? Kindergarten? Up to 4th grade or so, I think it's projecting a lot to think that they'd even be bothered by being trackable.
Knowing my kid, we'll be able to find him urgently trying to talk to a statue.
There's a way in which virtual collection may actually satisfy a "need to hoard" (I would correct your misspelling as "horde," but it works too well with the WoW reference) in a productive way.
Modern life has made a lot of once-healthy instincts unhealthy, and has taken away many of the opportunities to exercise them. Children once would learn by exploring open spaces without a lot of adult supervision; as those spaces diminish and our fears about children's safety increase, games provide an alternative space for exploration (Henry Jenkins wrote an article about games as "gendered spaces of play" for little boys in particular, since the change in the landscape has affected boys' play more dramatically than it has girls' play.)
Perhaps the need to accumulate has also long outlived its usefulness in the real world: excessive consumption, planned obsolescence, the creation of fashions that motivate people to replace perfectly usable clothes and other objects, the accumulation of goods that we really don't need and often don't use, "shopping" as the way we participate in the world at large and derive satisfaction, etc. have created a vicious cycle of waste and stress - economies that rely on growth even after the human needs of the people with money (those without money aren't important to our economies except as potential labor) take advantage of our instinct to accumulate to keep the cycle going.
"Virtual" accumulation lets us play that instinct out without creating waste, lets us devote more of the real world to things other than spaces to shop and accumulate.
And I've collected all their newsletters.
I see that kind of environment creating superficially clever ideas at best, not deep rethinkings.
I can't imagine any of the great artists, authors, poets, or even engineers doing radical work, partially because of self-censorship and the performative nature of group ideation. It's good for sitcom writing and for creating a "product" - it is poor for revolutionary research, rigorous engineering, or profound insight. I can't imagine a Proust, a Joyce, a Beckett, an Ionesco - a Tarkovsky, a Fellini, a Godard - even a great industrial designer working that way.
There are some good applications of this kind of method, it's true - but those applications already have supporting technologies. This doesn't enable a whole new way of thinking, it just unites IM, email and blogging. The whiteboard-like elements are going to be the least used, I think.