Recently in Society & Culture Category

Apparently I am the perfect man. I always suspected it.

Most women claim to be attracted to tall, dark and handsome men, but a new study has revealed that facial stubble and a geeky personality are their biggest secret turn-ons.

Despite complaining that it looks unkempt and feels rough to touch, the unshaven look on a man is actually a turn-on for 41 per cent of women.

A slightly geeky personality came second, proving that women really do like a guy who knows their stuff when it comes to technology. ...

The poll of 2,500 women also revealed that 91 per cent would actually prefer a guy who had a few flaws over someone who is perfect.

And more than half would rather a guy who was soft and cuddly instead of toned and muscly.

Sorry ladies, I'm taken!

Many people unfortunate enough to have been born in third world countries (and I know quite a few) would give their left arm to live in America. Since we can't take everyone who would want to come, the next best option is to bring slices of America to the third world. A couple of hundred years ago that would have been accomplished by British/Roman-like colonization, but these days that's just too uncouth: some third-worlders may prefer their present form of government to ours. Fine! Enter charter cities.

The deeper problem, widely recognised but seldom addressed, is how to free people from bad rules. I floated a provocative idea. Instead of focusing on poor nations and how to change their rules, we should focus on poor people and how they can move somewhere with better rules. One way to do this is with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of new “charter cities,” where developed countries frame the rules and hundreds of millions of poor families could become residents.

How would such a city work? Imagine that a government in a poor country set aside a piece of uninhabited land. It invites a developed country to enter into a new type of partnership, in which the developed country sets up and enforces rules specified in a charter. Citizens from the poorer country, and the rest of the world, would be free to live and work in the city that emerges. It could create economic opportunities and encourage foreign investment, and by using uninhabited land it would ensure everyone living there would have chosen to do so with full knowledge of the rules. Roughly 3bn people, mostly the working poor, will move to cities over the next few decades. To my mind the choice is not whether the world will urbanise, but where and under which rules. Instead of expanding the slums in existing urban centres, new charter cities could provide safe, low-income housing and jobs that the world will need to accommodate this shift. Even more important, these cities could give poor people a chance to choose the rules they want to live and work under. ...

There are large swathes of uninhabited land on the coast of sub-Saharan Africa that are too dry for agriculture. But a city can develop in even the driest locations, supported if necessary by desalinated and recycled water. And the new zone created need not be ruled directly from the developed partner country—residents of the charter city can administer the rules specified by their partner as long as the developed country retains the final say. This is what happens today in Mauritius, where the British Privy Council is still the court of final appeal in a judicial system staffed by Mauritians. Different cities could start with charters that differ in many ways. The common element would be that all residents would be there by choice—a Gallup survey found that 700m people around the world would be willing to move permanently to another country that offers safety and economic opportunity.

Author Paul Romer cites Hong Kong as the archetype and compares its success under British rules to the decades of failure experienced by mainland China.

Why won't this happen? Despite the billions of average people who would benefit, consider the long list of powerful interests who would end up losers if charter cities took off: existing despots and their inner circles; the United Nations; zillions of Non-Governmental Organizations who parasitically exploit aid streams; socialists; nationalists; and probably many more. These loser groups would all band together to prevent the average people of the world from moving en masse into charter cities with better rules.

The inevitable collapse of Social Security has always been a problem for "the future" that "someone else" could deal with, but apparently the future of Social Security is now.

No one has officially announced that Social Security will be cash-negative this year. But you can figure it out for yourself, as I did, by comparing two numbers in the recent federal budget update that the nonpartisan CBO issued last week.

The first number is $120 billion, the interest that Social Security will earn on its trust fund in fiscal 2010 (see page 74 of the CBO report). The second is $92 billion, the overall Social Security surplus for fiscal 2010 (see page 116).

This means that without the interest income, Social Security will be $28 billion in the hole this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.

Why disregard the interest? Because as people like me have said repeatedly over the years, the interest, which consists of Treasury IOUs that the Social Security trust fund gets on its holdings of government securities, doesn't provide Social Security with any cash that it can use to pay its bills. The interest is merely an accounting entry with no economic significance.

To elaborate on the last sentence, the Social Security fund has been earning huge amounts of interest for decades, but that interest hasn't been put back into the fund, it has been spent by Congress to pay for other things. Instead of that cash being put into the fund, Congress has put IOUs into the fund, and when Social Security goes cash-negative those IOUs will have to be repaid out of current taxes.

The net effect of this is that not only is my generation paying the payroll tax to fund Social Security for current retirees, we're also paying BACK the interest those retirees spent on themselves decades ago. It's a double-whammy of generational theft, and the retiree generation should be ashamed by the debt they're imposing on their children and grandchildren.

Focus on the Family is going airing a pro-life ad during the Super Bowl and some pro-abortion groups aren't happy about it. Well, they can pay for their own counter-ad if they want, so I don't see a problem. What's most interesting to me is Reuters' concluding characterization of the political climate surrounding abortion.

Abortion is one of the most divisive issues in America and a spate of recent opinion polls have suggested growing opposition to women's right to terminate pregnancy.

That sentence betrays an obvious bias in favor of legalized abortion on the part of the news agency. If Reuters had written "... and a spate of recent opinion polls have suggested growing support for the right of babies to not be murdered by their mothers in utero" the reverse bias would have been equally obvious.

The question over whether or not abortion is a "right" is the heart of the division over abortion, and a large majority of Americans disagree with Reuters' editorial position on the matter. Reuters would be wise to stick to hard news rather than injecting their opinions into their reporting.

The highest South Korean court has ruled that "virtual" money can be exchanged for "real" money (as long as the "virtual" money isn't the result of gambling).

(I use quotes because the distinction between "virtual" and "real" money is a psychological artifact and has no substantial meaning. Isk issued by Eve Online developer CCP are no different in character from gift certificates issued by Wal-Mart or dollar bills issued by the Federal Reserve.)

As reported in the Korea Times, the ruling came when the court acquitted two gamers who had been indicted for selling 234 million Won (around US$206000) worth of “Aden”, the cyber money used in the online game Lineage. Aden can be used to buy in-game accessories, weapons, and so on to enhance a player’s character in the game. The newspaper reports that the two gamers traded the money at an exchange rate of about 1 million Aden for 8000 Won. ...

The ruling only applies in South Korea, but its effects may be felt well beyond that country’s borders. Industry observers are expecting the decision to stimulate the online gaming market – as well as the associated markets that surround the gaming market. And cyber money is big business. The Korea Game Development and Promotion Institute says that more than 830 billion Won (US$732 million) worth of cyber money was exchanged online in South Korea in 2006, and that amount might have exceeded 1 trillion Won (US$882 million)in 2008. With so much currency flying around, it is no wonder that South Korean courts have also ruled that the proceeds from trading cyber money are subject to a 10 percent value added tax (VAT).

I see no reason why virtual earnings shouldn't be taxed at some point, and I'd rather that point be when/if it is exchanged for "real" money than when it is earned or spent in-game.

(HT: RB.)

Eric Schmidt believes that in the future work will look like play.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt made news at the recent G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh, suggesting that multiplayer video games provide good career training — particularly in technology — where workplace collaboration stimulates innovation. “The game world is good training for a career in tech,” he said. “It teaches players to build a network, to use interactive skills and thinking.”

“Everything in the future online is going to look like a multiplayer game,” said Schmidt to this international audience. “If I were 15 years old, that’s what I would be doing right now.”

What is it about online games that makes leaders? For one thing, there are many opportunities to lead. “Online games are very iterative,” states a recent IBM report entitled “Virtual Worlds, Real Leaders.” “Leadership happens quickly and easily in online games, often undertaken by otherwise reserved players, who surprise even themselves with their capabilities.” Online games such as World of Warcraft can involve an overriding goal for a team of players — there are a series of raids or missions that make up the journey, each of which requires leadership of player groups of varying size. This gives many players the opportunity to “try on” leadership roles. The study asserts that there is no reason to think that the same cannot be done in corporate settings of various sizes, missions, and markets.

Related: The person who will be elected President in 2036 is probably in their teens or twenties right now, probably has a blog, and is probably a gamer.

Thanks to Google's auto-complete functionality we can glean all sorts of insight into human psychology.

You know how Google sometimes “predicts” what you might be searching for by giving you a little drop down menu of suggested search queries? These suggestions, of course, are based on what other users frequently search. So I tried teasing out some gender differences. Look at the pictures below.

Got any suggestions for more searches to try?

Here's a fun video of Al Sharpton and Ann Coulter going head-to-head over Harry Reid's racial bungling.

And Saturday Night Live with a prescient (and hilarious) MacGruber video:

(HT: Jammie Wearing Fool.)

The Wall Street Journal describes the fall in violent crime in major US cities between 2008 and 2009.

Violent crime in Los Angeles hit its lowest level in more than half a century last year, one of a growing number of U.S. cities reporting its streets were remarkably safe in 2009.

Washington, D.C., finished the year with 143 killings, the lowest tally in the nation's capital since 1966. San Francisco reported 45 homicides last year, its lowest in 48 years. New York, Chicago, Boston and Dallas also reported dramatic year-over-year declines in 2009 compared with 2008.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced Wednesday there had been 314 homicides in 2009 -- the lowest number of killings since 1967, when there were 281. In 2005, 489 people were killed in the city. Los Angeles also saw declines in rapes, robberies and assaults in 2009, compared with the previous year.

The Cato Institute says that these drops in crime are in spite of illegal immigration.

One of the more common complaints I hear about illegal immigration is that low-skilled workers from Mexico and Central America allegedly bring with them a wave of crime and incarceration expenses, especially to southern California.

Those complaints are hard to square with the mounting evidence that immigrants, even low-skilled, illegal immigrants, are no more prone to commit crimes than native-born Americans. The latest data point comes from Los Angeles, where the Wall Street Journal reports this morning: “Violent crime in Los Angeles hit its lowest level in more than half a century last year, one of a growing number of U.S. cities reporting its streets were remarkably safe in 2009.”

More on the benefits of immigration. There's no doubt that immigration in general is a great boon for America. I've only got two objections to the status quo:

1. The majority of immigration is now completely unmonitored and uncontrolled. People who immigrate illegally undermine the democratic institutions that make our country great. We need to reform our immigration system so that we encourage immigration by the world's best and brightest, rather than turning them away and tacitly allowing in a random assortment of people who just happen to live close to our borders.

2. Those of us who are Americans now need to cultivate a culture of assimilation and self-sufficiency for those who aspire to become Americans. Our massive welfare state distorts our economy and demotivates the hardest workers among us, many of whom are immigrants. Our infatuation with multiculturalism weakens our American fabric and perniciously robs immigrants of what they came to America for in the first place. The last thing we need is a "guest worker" program -- anyone who comes to America should be encouraged to become a citizen and to assimilate with our culture.

In case I wasn't clear enough yesterday, I believe that the most profound effect of the leaked climate change emails will be that the anthropogenic global warming movement will begin to lose the adherence of generally liberal geeks.

Up to this point, it was difficult to challenge the conclusions of AGW-believing climate scientists because most geeks don't have much expertise in climatology. We tend to consider ourselves scientists and to give other scientists in other areas of expertise the benefit of the doubt. Without a great deal of experience in climatology, it's hard for a geek to justify spending much time questioning the modes and methods of professional climate researchers.

However, the email leak has changed all this. Along with a hoard of emails, some source code for the computer climate models was also hacked and released to the public -- and the source code is an unusable mess. It doesn't take expertise in climatology to look at source code and determine that the code is garbage. There are many more geeks with software expertise than with climate expertise, and the geek community will go through every line of code and likely conclude that the computer models are so flawed that any conclusions drawn on them are without merit.

Despite the liberal tendencies of many geeks, I believe that the source code evidence will be insurmountable for most. Some will continue to cling to AGW because of a devotion to left-wing politics, but the majority of geeks will abandon their belief, and that abandonment by geeks will truly spell the end for AGW.

Here's a list of five successful social engineering techniques. And how about a social engineering FAQ?

Got any tricks of your own?

I've been trying to push towards an idea like this at my company: "Facebook" for scientists.

Unlike users of the regular Facebook, scientists won’t need to regularly update their profiles.

Instead, research details such as the name, title and publication record will be automatically culled from scientific journals and university Web sites.

“This new network will help researchers find one another and explore potential avenues of collaboration that they might not have considered before,” says Kristi Holmes, bioinformaticist at Washington University’s Bernard Becker Medical Library.

(HT: RB.)

This is the kind of stupidity that illustrates exactly why the "free" services promised by socialism never end up working: idiot hikers use distress beacons to abuse search and rescue teams.

The Grand Canyon's Royal Arch loop, the National Park Service warns, "has a million ways to get into serious trouble" for those lacking skill and good judgment. One evening the fathers-and-sons team activated their beacon when they ran out of water.

Rescuers, who did not know the nature of the call, could not launch the helicopter until morning. When the rescuers arrived, the group had found a stream and declined help.

That night, they activated the emergency beacon again. This time the Arizona Department of Public Safety helicopter, which has night vision capabilities, launched into emergency mode.

When rescuers found them, the hikers were worried they might become dehydrated because the water they found tasted salty. They declined an evacuation, and the crew left water.

The following morning the group called for help again. This time, according to a park service report, rescuers took them out and cited the leader for "creating a hazardous condition" for the rescue teams.

If you call for a rescue, at the very least you should be forced to evacuate. The rescuers should also be less hesitant to issue citations, and abusers should be sent to jail.

I previously explained how, contrary to popular belief, men benefit more than women from monogamy. Similarly unknown to most people is that women benefit more than men from polygamy.

Humphrey specialises in the anthropology of communities on the edges of the former Soviet Union, and has spent much of her career studying the Buyrat people who live north of the Mongolian border in Siberia. Humphrey says that anthropologists slowly build a deep knowledge and understanding of a place and culture, but nevertheless, her discovery that there is a polygamy lobby was a surprise.

"Friends of mine in Siberia told me that their friends were lobbying parliament to legalise polygamy," she says. "I always knew that there were men who like the idea of polygamy, but what I found fascinating was that women were also in support."

Apparently even professional anthropologists think that men would favor polygamy because they want to have sex with multiple women... even though it should be obvious that for every man with two wives there is one man with zero wives.

When poverty is widespread -- or men are scarce -- polygamy becomes very attractive for women.

"A lot of women live on what were collective farms, which are often deep in the forest and miles away from the nearest town," Humphrey says. "You live very close to nature, and life can be very hard – your heating is entirely through log stoves, there's no running water and inside sanitation is rare. If you are lucky enough to keep animals, you must care for and butcher them yourself. So if you are looking after children as well, life can be near impossible for a woman on her own."

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, Humphrey's investigations have uncovered women who believe that "half a good man is better than none at all". "There are still some men around – they might be running things, with a job as an official, for example, or they might be doing an ordinary labouring job, but either way, there aren't very many of them," she says. "Women say that the legalisation of polygamy would be a godsend: it would give them rights to a man's financial and physical support, legitimacy for their children, and rights to state benefits."

A simple understanding of economics leads to this conclusion, but most people are still surprised to learn that women can benefit greatly from polygamy. A woman is generally concerned for her physical security and provision and for that of her children. If her husband is wealthy enough, those needs are not threatened by the existence of other wives. On the other hand, a man is generally interested in mating with as many women as possible and fathering as many children as possible, which is why polyandry (one woman with multiple husbands) is essentially unheard of (even in countries like China with a huge shortage of women).

An interesting graphical depiction of "left" vs. "right". Fun trivia: America and Switzerland are the only countries where the left is depicted as blue and the right is depicted as red; in most places the colors are reversed. This seems logical, given the predilection by communists for red.

(HT: RC.)

Here's a fascinating statistic: 10 out of the past 10 presidents have had daughters. I'm not sure I like how they frame the data: "Americans prefer presidents with daughters". There could be a whole host of causes for this statistic other than that Americans preferentially vote for men with daughters. Still, very interesting.

In a blog post, Auren Hoffman wondered if politicians with daughters are more successful than those without. It's an intriguing thought, and there may be some truth to the suggestion. We focused on American presidents and discovered that each of the last 10 presidents had at least one daughter, but only five had sons.

Why would daughters have an impact? Perhaps voters think that presidents with daughters will be more empathetic to women's issues, or perhaps the following anonymous comment on the Marginal Revolution blog offers some insight:

ALL of my male friends who had children were changed for the better by having at least one daughter. It is not a wife who socializes a husband, it is a daughter.

My wife will be happy to hear that our daughter will help her socialize me!

(HT: Jerry.)

I've pointed out before and Thursday agrees: average males benefit from monogamy more than anyone else. Despite widespread bravado, middling men would be hurt the most by polygamy. Regarding the "sexual revolution":

Beta males are the one's getting the biggest shaft here. They are forced to compete with Alpha males, meaning that they are often left out of the mating game as the Alphas monopolize more than one woman at a time. Should they actually find someone to mate with, chances are it will be with one of the Alpha's leftovers. More than just the psychological unpleasantness of having other men "break in" their woman, this means that Betas are often left to deal with the bitterness towards men that repeatedly being pumped and dumped by Alphas often bequeaths to women. Not to mention having to measure up unfavorably to the Alpha's sexual performance, and fact that the women is unlikely to bond as strongly with him after having fallen in love with an Alpha.

Alpha males have, of course, made out like bandits. They frequently get the benefit of multiple consecutive or concurrent relationships with various women. If they want to settle down, they rarely have much difficulty in finding a long term mate. Of course, if they try to hang on too long, they do risk ending up alone or with some lesser female in the end, but if they are smart they can end up with the benefits of both easy sex and commitment.

It took centuries for beta males to build a society that valued monogamy and marital fidelity and punished promiscuity, and the end result was quite beneficial for most women at the same time. Unfortunately the alpha males formed a coalition with the beta females to overthrow the order in the name of sexual freedom, and it's the alpha males who reaped the biggest benefits.

Thanks to economic and political liberalization from almost 30 years ago, Chile is poised to be South America's first "developed" nation.

The role and achievements of Chile’s team of classical liberal economists is well known. They were the ones who in 1975, once the quasi-civil war was over, decided to carry out a principled, “friendly takeover” of the military government that had arisen from the breakdown of democracy in 1973 (here is my essay, published in “Society”, on that drama). Much less well-known, however, is that they were also the foremost proponents of a gradual and constitutional return to a limited democracy.

In fact, on August 8, 1980, a new Constitution, containing both a bill of rights and a timeline for the restoration of full political freedom, was proposed and approved in a referendum. In the period 1981-1989, what Fareed Zakaria has called the “institutions of liberty” were created—an independent Central Bank, a Constitutional Court, private television and universities, voting registration laws, etc—since they were crucial for having not only elections but a democracy at the service of freedom. Then on March 11, 1990, an extraordinary event happened: the governing military Junta surrendered its power to a democratically elected government in strict accordance to the 1980 Constitution (here is my note on the restoration of democracy in Chile).

Sounds like a nice place to retire.

(HT: LM.)

The new Mississippi River Bridge is being delayed due to conflicts over whether the contracting process is too sexist but not racist enough.

The Missouri Department of Transportation will delay awarding a contract to build the new Mississippi River bridge until it determines whether minority contractors are being fully utilized in the St. Louis region, the department announced Tuesday.

The delay comes after minority contractors raised concerns this summer that the state hasn't been involving them in projects to the same level as it has women contractors. MoDOT is studying whether women and minority-owned businesses are being used to their fullest potential in transportation work. If the study shows that they are not, the state plans to ask the federal government for permission to have separate hiring goals for both groups in the $640 million bridge project.

Normally "women- and minority-owned businesses" are lumped together for preferential treatment, but minorities are complaining that sexism and racism should be separated because sexism is crowding out racism.

As a member of the group that these "goals" are specifically designed to exclude -- a white male -- I can't help but be amused. Here's an idea: hire the company that does the best work for the best value!

Beautiful women make men dumb. Unfortunately, I married the most beautiful woman in the world; fortunately, I've got plenty of extra brain power to devote to her.