Society

Drive and Prudence

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The Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution released a new report titled The Character Factor: Measures and Impact of Drive and Prudence. Using the Behavior Problems Index (BPI) hyperactivity scale in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the researchers found that character traits such as drive[ref]Defined as “the ability to apply oneself to a task and stick with it” (pg. 6).[/ref] and prudence[ref]Defined as “the ability to defer gratification and look to the future” (pg. 6).[/ref] are related to educational attainment in similar fashion to that of cognitive skills. Or, as the graph below demonstrates, character matters as much as book smarts.

 

Check out the entire report and see why economic historian Deirdre McCloskey praises prudence as a virtue:

…Prudence is a virtue. We have been inclined for some centuries now in the West to relegate prudence to an amoral world of “mere” self-interest. This has been a catastrophe for our dear economics. Only a disposition to take care of others is construed as “virtue,” and then for its intentions rather than for its practical effect. Having good intentions in one’s heart is said to be virtuous, even if the intentions when carried out (such as high-rise public housing along the Dan Ryan Expressway or the war on drugs brought onto the streets of Watts and East LA) do not quite deliver as intended. And surely, as we in European culture have been saying for a long while, knowing how to take care of oneself is hardly a virtue?

Yes, it is. And so is the correlated carefulness in “helping” others: the Love or Justice moving us to help others is a vice, not a virtue, when unalloyed with Prudence. Knowing that one must put out a candle before leaving the house is a good thing, even if you didn’t mean to burn the place down, even if your intentions were pure, even if it was your own house to dispose of.

Imagine a community filled with imprudent people, Mary Tudors in bulk, and you’ll see the virtuousness of prudence. Such a community is not difficult to imagine-a community of small children would fit the bill, as in The Lord of the Flies…We labor to teach our children and adolescents and our dogs and, yes, ourselves the practical wisdom that keeps them and us from injuring or impoverishing themselves and others and ourselves. An imprudent person, someone who does not know the value of money and how to keep accounts, for example, is a menace to his friends and family, and to his fuller self. He may be chivalrous in some sense, courageous and temperate and just, even great-souled, as Aristotle wished, or loving, as did St. Paul, yet a fool, and not virtuous as a whole, tragically-or comically-flawed, as most of us are, short of King Arthur or Cardinal Pole. Thus for example Don Quixote.

Easy Internet Privacy is a Snipe Hunt

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2014-10-28 Anonabox

Earlier this month there were all kinds of stories about an infamous new product on Kickstarter: Anonabox. As Wired related, Anonabox was supposed to be a simple-to-use router that would let anyone easily use the Tor anonymity network. According to Wikipedia, “Tor directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer network consisting of more than five thousand relays[6] to conceal a user’s location and usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis.” The problem is that Tor–like a lot of techniques for anonymizing your Internet usage–requires a little bit of know-how to set up. The Anonabox was supposed to make it ultra-simple, and as a result it quickly raised hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Controversy quickly followed, however, starting with skepticism that Anonabox was built on a custom board and case; it turned out that the hardware was basically off-the-shelf. Even more serious criticisms soon followed, however:

But as the security community has taken notice of Anonabox over the last week, its analysts and penetration testers have found that the router’s software also has serious problems, ones that could punch holes in its Tor protections or even allow a user to be more easily tracked than if they were connecting to the unprotected Internet. “I’m seeing these really strange smells and poor practices in their pilot beta code,” says Justin Steven, a computer security analyst based in Brisbane, Australia. “It scares me if anyone is relying on this for their security.”

Eventually, Kickstarter decided to suspend the campaign. So the Anonabox itself is (at least for the time being) a non-issue. But here’s the bigger picture. Only three types of people are likely to create a new technology (hardware or software) to help people retain greater privacy online:

  1. Scammers
  2. The NSA
  3. Genuine privacy advocates

Scammers aren’t going to bother building serious, robust anonymity into their products and services. The NSA (or similar entities) probably would do a decent job, but obviously with a backdoor to allow them to have access when they wanted. Only genuine privacy advocates are even going to make an attempt to create a legitimately anonymous product or service, and there’s no guarantee that they would succeed. There are no shortcuts and there are no guarantees to online privacy and security.

In some ways, this isn’t news. Security (online or offline) is never actually about preventing loss, tampering, or theft. Whether it’s data or diamonds you’re trying to protect, the reality is that you can’t deny access to someone with the means and the motive to get at your stuff. All you can do is make it more expensive and hope that the expense turns out to be not worth the bother.

Still, it’s probably good to give people a dash of reality when it comes to security and privacy. Looking for easy and effective security solutions is a snipe hunt. They don’t exist. In the end you’re just gonna have to trust some software that you can’t read (because it’s closed source) or don’t have time to understand (if it’s open source). Remember Heartbleed? It was discovered in April 2014. It had been present since December 2011 and in widespread use since March 2012. That’s open-source software: anyone could read the code. For over two years, however, no one did. And this is code that was running on nearly 20% of the secure web servers on the Internet!

And Heartbleed isn’t the exception. It is, in many ways, the rule. Snapchat gained widespread fame and use because it was supposed to delete messages after they were read instead of keeping a permanent record. Great for privacy, right? Not so fast:

Snapchat has long marketed itself as a private and more secure alternative to services like Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram. The app lets users send photo and video messages that disappear once they are viewed. That self-destruct feature initially gave the app a reputation as a favorite tool for so-called sexters, or those who send sexually suggestive photos of themselves, but eventually it went mainstream…

But security researchers have long criticized Snapchat, saying it provides a false sense of security. They say the app’s disappearing act is illusory. Behind the scenes, Snapchat stores information about its users in a database, similar to data storage at other big Internet companies.

I’m not saying that you should just give up on securing your data online. But once you’ve taken the normal steps–strong passwords, 2-factor authentication, etc.–you should keep in mind that your security is not perfect. To the extent that your data remains secure it’s because you’re too boring and insignificant to attract anyone’s attention. Not because your security is so effective.

Drug War’s Impact on Black America

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As the arrest data above shows (provided by Jonathan Rothwell at the Brookings Institution), arrests of blacks for violent and property crimes have dropped since 1980. However, arrests for drug related crimes have spiked dramatically. Yet,

whites are actually more likely than blacks to sell drugs and about as likely to consume them.

Whites were about 45 percent more likely than blacks to sell drugs in 1980, according to an analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth by economist Robert Fairlie. This was consistent with a 1989 survey of youth in Boston. My own analysis of data from the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that 6.6 percent of white adolescents and young adults (aged 12 to 25) sold drugs, compared to just 5.0 percent of blacks (a 32 percent difference).

As for drug use, just 10 percent of blacks report using illegal drugs within the last month, which is not statistically different than the rate for whites. Among college students, 25 percent of whites reported illegal drug use within the last month but just 20 percent of black students.

Incarcerations wreak havoc on family stability, employment prospects, and future income. While there are other important factors that negatively impact black social mobility, an unnecessary War on Drugs is one we can easily address.

The Racist History of Disease, Africa, and Immigrants

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I tend to react to the Ebola scare with the following:

A recent article from The Washington Post provides further reasons to react in such a way:

The long history of associating immigrants and disease in America and the problematic impact that has on attitudes toward immigrants should make us sensitive to the impact of “othering” African immigrants to the United States in the midst of the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Scare-mongering about infinitesimally small risks in one context serves no purpose to the greater good of trying to curb disease transmission and relieve people’s suffering in another context.

The article is full of links to various studies on colonial history, political history of immigration, Ebola breakouts, etc.

An excellent read. Check it out.

Do Muslim Women Need to be Saved?

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upper egypt

Ironically, even feminism can become a form of imperialism, colonialism, and oppression­­- the very constructs that figure so prominently in academic and popular feminist discourse.

In 2010, the anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod visited a friend in an Egyptian village.

“I said I was now writing a book about how people in the West believe Muslim women are oppressed.

She objected: “But many women are oppressed! They don’t get their rights in so many ways – in work, in schooling, in …”

I interrupted her, surprised by her vehemence. “But is the reason Islam? They believe that these women are oppressed by Islam.”

It was her turn to be shocked. “What? Of course not! It’s the government,” she said. “The government oppresses women. The government doesn’t care about the people. It doesn’t care that they don’t have jobs; that prices are so high that no one can afford anything. Poverty is hard. Men suffer it too.”

It was just three weeks from the day that Egyptians would take to the streets and the world would watch, riveted, as they demanded rights, dignity and the end of the regime that had ruled for 30 years.”

Abu-Lughod describes her friend as a traditional, observant Muslim villager covered from head-to-foot in black, the mother of seven children. However, she was also deeply involved in community affairs and politics, and had even started her own business. She knew what her rights should be, and she cared about providing opportunities for her village and family. From Abu-Lughod’s brief description, her friend emerges not as a hapless victim of patriarchal and religious oppression, but as an intelligent, savvy, and committed individual working to better her community. It can be argued that it is precisely her traditional and religious outlooks that inspired her to fight injustice. “Her shock at my suggestion that anyone would think Islam was oppressive was telling. Her faith in God and her identity as a Muslim are deeply meaningful to her.” This, in fact, is why Abu-Lughod insists that indiscriminately applying the ideas and ideals of western feminism to women in Muslim societies can, in fact, do more harm than good. At the very least, it shows insensitivity to them as human beings, and marginalizes their voices.

“So why are conservatives, progressives, liberals and radical feminists in the West convinced that Muslim women – everywhere and in all time periods – are oppressed and in need of rescue? Why can’t other voices be heard? Even more troubling, why does it seem so hard for them to focus on the connections between worlds instead of imagining Muslim women as distant and unconnected to themselves?”

This in no way is meant to bash western feminism. There really is no need to stress the obvious good that it has done, and still does. What I find so compelling about Abu-Lughod’s perspective is that it doesn’t dismiss the plight of women, but asks that we see them first and foremost as human beings with individual views and voices.

We can learn from Muslim women no less than they can learn from us.

Economic Freedom of the World Report 2014

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The Economic Freedom of the World: 2014 Annual Report has been published by the Fraser Institute. I blogged about the 2013 report last September and Nathaniel and I made use of its data in our SquareTwo article earlier this year. The following can be considered an update of what I deem to be some of the most important graphs in the whole report (descriptions are at the bottom of the graphs):

 

Economic Growth

 

 Per Capita Income

Income of Poorest 10%

Life Expectancy at Birth

 

Paglia Weighs In On Campus Sex Crimes

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I like Camille Paglia a lot in no small part because the world clearly has no idea what to do with her. I mean, just look at the intro she gets to this piece for Time: Paglia is the author of Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars. I mean, that’s true, she did write that book, but it has nothing to do with who she is, what she thinks, or why so many people find her fascinating (or infuriating). Anyway, here’s her take on sex crimes on collage campuses: “Young women today do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.”

She calls the warning cries about levels of sexual violence on college campuses “wildly overblown” and–in direct contradiction of conventional wisdom from all the experts–declares that it really is forcible rape by strangers that should be every woman’s concern. She writes:

Despite hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,” the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides.

I’d be inclined to write her off as being a bit over-confident in her own anecdotal experiences over hard facts if it were for the fact that I also recently read an NRO piece on the same topic: The Rape Epidemic Is a Fiction:

Much of the scholarly literature estimates that the actual rate is more like a tenth of that one-in-five rate, 2.16 percent, or 21.6 per 1,000 to use the conventional formulation. But that number is problematic, too, as are most of the numbers related to sexual assault, as the National Institute of Justice, the DoJ’s research arm, documents. For example, two surveys conducted practically in tandem produced victimization rates of 0.16 percent and 1.7 percent, respectively – i.e., the latter estimate was eleven times the former. The NIJ blames defective wording on survey questions.

So the numbers are really in dispute after all, and Paglia may have some legitimate backup. Setting that contention aside for a moment, however, I think there’s no real arguing with these paragraphs from her piece:

Colleges should stick to academics and stop their infantilizing supervision of students’ dating lives, an authoritarian intrusion that borders on violation of civil liberties. Real crimes should be reported to the police, not to haphazard and ill-trained campus grievance committees.

Too many young middleclass women, raised far from the urban streets, seem to expect adult life to be an extension of their comfortable, overprotected homes. But the world remains a wilderness. The price of women’s modern freedoms is personal responsibility for vigilance and self-defense.

And that dark vision of human nature and the reality we inhabit really explains Paglia’s appeal to conservatives despite her radical left-wing politics. I can’t resist quoting just a bit more:

Current educational codes, tracking liberal-Left, are perpetuating illusions about sex and gender. The basic Leftist premise, descending from Marxism, is that all problems in human life stem from an unjust society and that corrections and fine-tunings of that social mechanism will eventually bring utopia. Progressives have unquestioned faith in the perfectibility of mankind.

The horrors and atrocities of history have been edited out of primary and secondary education except where they can be blamed on racism, sexism, and imperialism — toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be smashed and remade. But the real problem resides in human nature, which religion as well as great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the forces of darkness and light.

You should just read the whole post. It is, like so much of what she writes, well worth the time.

Medieval Knights: Surprisingly Agile

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2014-10-14 Knights

Gizmodo points out this excellent YouTube video showcasing the surprisingly agility of knights in full plate armor.[ref]Email subscribers will have to click to view the article because videos don’t embed in the emails.[/ref]

Running, climbing ladders, getting up unassisted, jumping jacks, rolling on the floor: the armor is definitely restrictive versus wearing none at all, but the range of mobility is really surprising given what I’d expect. Also, as a bonus, there are some reconstructions of sword fighting techniques at the end of the video based on ancient manuscripts. Very cool video.

TED: Economist on the Global Impact of Remittances

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Economist Dilip Ratha gave a fascinating TED talk this month on the global impact of money sent by migrants to their native countries. It is hard to imagine how this subject gets overlooked when Ratha points out that the amount of money sent home by migrants in 2013 was three times that of development aid. Or that remittances make up 42% of Tajikistan’s GDP. Or that monthly remittances to Somalia exceed the average per capita income of $250 per year. What especially struck me was the following line by Ratha in his discussion of Somalia:

“Remittances are the lifeblood of Somalia. And yet, this is an example of the right hand giving a lot of aid, while the left hand is cutting the lifeblood to that economy, through regulations.”

Sometimes the most conventional method of helping the poor isn’t the most effective.

The Atlantic on “The Illusion of the Natural”

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“What natural has come to mean to us in the context of medicine is pure and safe and benign. But the use of natural as a synonym for good is almost certainly a product of our profound alienation from the natural world.”

So says an article in The Atlantic titled “The Illusion of ‘Natural’.” It begins with the following:

It is difficult to read any historical account of smallpox without encountering the word filth. In the 19th century, smallpox was widely considered a disease of filth, which meant that it was largely understood to be a disease of the poor…Filth theory was eventually replaced by germ theory, a superior understanding of the nature of contagion, but filth theory was not entirely wrong or useless. Raw sewage running in the streets can certainly spread diseases, although smallpox is not one of them, and the sanitation reforms inspired by filth theory dramatically reduced the incidence of cholera, typhus, and plague.

The author draws a parallel between the 19th-century fear of filth with today’s fear of toxins:

In this context, fear of toxicity strikes me as an old anxiety with a new name. Where the word filth once suggested, with its moralist air, the evils of the flesh, the word toxic now condemns the chemical evils of our industrial world. This is not to say that concerns over environmental pollution are not justified—like filth theory, toxicity theory is anchored in legitimate dangers—but that the way we think about toxicity bears some resemblance to the way we once thought about filth. Both theories allow their subscribers to maintain a sense of control over their own health by pursuing personal purity. For the filth theorist, this means a retreat into the home, where heavy curtains and shutters might seal out the smell of the poor and their problems. Our version of this shuttering is now achieved through the purchase of purified water, air purifiers, and food produced with the promise of purity.

Purity, especially bodily purity, is the seemingly innocent concept behind a number of the most sinister social actions of the past century. A passion for bodily purity drove the eugenics movement that led to the sterilization of women who were blind, black, or poor. Concerns for bodily purity were behind miscegenation laws that persisted for more than a century after the abolition of slavery, and behind sodomy laws that were only recently declared unconstitutional. Quite a bit of human solidarity has been sacrificed in pursuit of preserving some kind of imagined purity.

This kind of thinking pervades anti-vaccine movements and alternative medicine.[ref]Also food puritans and some environmentalists.[/ref] I’m always taken back by the view of technology or medicine as somehow “unclean” and the nostalgic pining for the “natural” world. Because when people were left with all things “natural” in the past, their lives were cut short: