#37 guns, relationships and health & happiness (men), economics & politics, amazing photo, remembering, rules for life, obits

Good morning.

            Those who are my Facebook friends saw this post of mine:

Having just lost an adult child to illness rather than gun violence, I think I can only barely comprehend the agony and grief that the parents of the victims at Parkland are feeling (as well as the parents of the children who have died in earlier school shootings). Their children died because some kid could get a gun. I know profound sorrow; I'll never be the same after Krystin's death. I am sure these parents (and friends) feel the same way, but their pain is multiplied enormously because it is combined with an anger I didn't have to deal with, anger at a political system that will not take the obvious steps necessary to halt these murders.

            The only place *I* can direct anger is to Krystin herself, for not taking care of her medical needs for a dozen years.  I could try to be mad at the medical establishment for not developing a cure for diabetes sooner, but that anger is directed to George W. Bush, who held up much stem cell research for eight years (and there wouldn't be a cure even now, I'm pretty sure).  I really don't have much anger at all, just grief.

            I hope those kids in Florida are able to start an effective national campaign against politicians who refuse to vote for gun control laws.  If they set up some kind of non-profit organization, I'm going to contribute.

            I wonder if Mr. LaPierre of the National Rifle Association has any idea how history will treat him.  There is a strong case to be made that he is an accomplice to mass murder, and that is how I suspect he will be judged.  Even though I don't believe anyone ever really stands before a gate facing St. Peter, it's still satisfying to imagine the scene, when Mr. LaPierre tries to defend himself of charges that he aided and abetted the killing of hundreds of school children (and thousands of other people).  St. Peter will be unimpressed with the arguments about the sanctity of the Second Amendment.  There should be a special circle of hell in Dante's Inferno for Mr. LaPierre and his associates.

* * *

There is a fascinating study by the Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, the "Harvard Study of Adult Development."  It joins together the thoughts about long-term friendships and cortisol levels. Composed of two different studies, both have looked at men (only, unfortunately) for 75 years; they "tracked the physical and emotional well-being of two populations:  456 poor men growing up in Boston from 1939 to 2014 and 268 male graduates from Harvard's classes of 1939-1944.  Needless to say, these studies have required different research teams over the decades.

            The primary finding?  "According to Robert Waldinger, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, one thing surpasses all the rest in terms of importance:  'The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier.  Period.'"  Not your jobs, house, car, power, money.  "No, the biggest predictor of your happiness and fulfillment overall in life is, basically, love."  More specifically, "the study demonstrates that having someone to rely on helps your nervous system relax, helps your brain stay healthier for longer, and reduces both emotional as well as physical pain."

            And, unsurprisingly, the converse is true as well:  "those who feel lonely are more likely to see their physical health decline earlier and die younger."

            Waldinger also emphasizes that it's quality, not quantity, both in emotional relationships as well as friendships.  Having 300 Facebook friends means nothing unless you are close personally to at least a few of them, unless you can share information with them, unless you can relax with them and be yourself.

            Given what is known about women and close relationships—they're better at them and have more of them—I would bet that these findings would be equally true for women.  Women, one might suggest, have understood these findings for ages and didn't need a Harvard study to tell them what they already knew.

* * *

            I have revised my view about voters who supported Trump.  One reason for doing so was the astonishing statistics about the "mortality crisis" among middle-aged whites who are lower-income and blue-collar workers.  ["Mortality Crisis Redux: The Economics of Despair"].  One aspect of the data that is surprising is that the same phenomenon has not been observed with similarly-situated Blacks and Hispanics.

Epidemiologists are not used to considering 'despair' as a leading cause of death.  Yet, just as 'stress' transitioned with better diagnostics from colloquial psychological annoyance to full fledged physiological affliction, economic 'despair' may be poised to make a similar transition.

            The change in perspective is due primarily to a 2015 report by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton.  They updated their report in 2016:  "Deaths by Despair."  What they concluded about the increased mortality in their 2015 report was that "the proximate causes of death driving this increase [were] suicide, drug and alcohol poisoning, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis."  The 2016 update looked more carefully at what had happened.  What they found later was that the uptick "can be traced to a 'cumulative disadvantage over life', where declining labor market opportunities have led to declining outcomes not just in the labor market but also in health, marriage, and child rearing.  In other words, the stress accompanying the shock of downward mobility is likely driving this health crisis."

In addition to dying at a higher rate than the rest of us, and than around the rest of the industrialized world, the people in that situation also voted in overwhelming numbers for a dramatic change in American politics.  It is hard to blame them.  We can review all the factors that played into Trump's victory/Clinton's loss, including Russian meddling and FBI Director Comey and other things, and we can argue long that a Clinton victory would have helped these people much more than Trump's, but the fact is the status quo wasn't working for them and they voted for a reset.

What's happening to this subset of the American population is similar to what happened to the same group of people in the Soviet Union and its puppet states after the collapse in 1989. 

In the early 1990s, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, life expectancy in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe fell dramatically. In Russia alone, it was estimated that between 1989 and 1995 there were 1.3 to 1.7 million premature deaths as life expectancy fell from 70 in 1989 to 64 in 1995. . . .  [It was] suicides and drug and alcohol abuse, leading to an increase in cardiovascular and liver diseases. . . .  It was not direct deprivation, nor collapse of the health system that were driving these deaths.  Rather they could be traced to the psychological stress likely brought on by the shock of the severe economic transition.

"We ignore the social and political impacts of economic hopelessness among working class Americans at our own peril."  Not only because any sense of humanity demands that the country take steps to remediate their predicament, but also because such circumstances predictably lead to an increase in xenophobia and support for far-right political parties.

The second reason I changed my mind is because the Trump voters, surely in at least some cases, recognized that they were probably voting against their own best (economic) interests.  Those on the progressive side of the spectrum often bemoan the fact that lower-income voters seem to support political positions that will do them harm. 

At the same time, progressive/liberal voters (at least among those I know) consistently vote against THEIR own economic interests (because, for example, they favor higher taxes on themselves).  They do so because they believe such policies are in the best interests of the country. 

It finally occurred to me that lower-income, sometimes less well educated, voters do the same thing.  They don't think gay marriage is a good idea for the country, they are not thrilled about the advances that women and people of color are making (however modest those advances are in reality), they are fervent nationalists, and so on, and vote as they do because they think it best for the country.  There have been plenty of articles in the media reporting that Trump voters were still supportive of him even though they realized his policies might hurt them personally.

* * *

            A friend wrote back apropos both of Epicurus & death as well as of complimenting people.  Eliot puts the two together.

Silence before being born, silence after death:  life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences.  (Isabel Allende)

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved.  I am not sure that you are of the same mind.  But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave.  This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.  (George Eliot)

* * *

            This is an amazing picture.  A single strontium atom.  "Using long exposure, PhD candidate David Nadlinger took a photo of a glowing atom in an intricate web of laboratory machinery.  In it, the single strontium atom is illuminated by a laser while suspended in the air by two electrodes.  For a sense of scale, those two electrodes on each side of the tiny dot are only two millimeters apart."  My guess, however, is that we're seeing the glow, much larger than the atom itself by many orders of magnitude.

* * *

            Elliott came over for dinner on a recent Sunday.  When I was taking him back home—he doesn't have a car—I asked him if he ever thought about Krystin.  He said he did, usually when he comes across something on the web that he would have sent to her.  I told him I hoped he continued to remember her for the rest of his life, and reiterated my thought that he'd probably be the last one who had more than a passing memory of her (assuming Elliott lives out his predicted lifespan). 

            That led me to revisit, once again, my mom, which I do several times per year--I will of course remember her to the end of *my* days.  (Now more with happiness than sadness, although I'm still sad she died so young—at age 62 in 1989—and never knew Elliott.)

That string of thoughts led me to an epiphany of sorts.  Of Elliott's four grandparents, his personality is most like that of my mother—the one grandparent he never met (she died the year before he was born).  She was always the lively one at social gatherings, but in a good way.  She wasn't a chatterbox but she always kept the conversations alive--and kept the gatherings interesting.  My dad was more quiet, although he certainly contributed more to social discourse when he was younger (e.g., in his 40s - 60s).  Elliott's grandfathers were similar in a number of ways, including their social reserve.  (Elliott's grandmother on Pat's side was reclusive.)

So, I told Elliott, now I think even more that it's too bad my mom didn't live to see him grow up.  She'd almost certainly not be alive now--she'd be 90, turning 91 in August--but she certainly could have seen him into your late teens at least.  My mom would have liked him as much as any of her other grandchildren--and I think he would have liked her.

* * *

            A friend took issue with one of my comments on the "12 Rules for Life." 

I must disagree with your commentary on being grateful.  We all have things to be grateful for.  I can't think of anyone who has nothing to be thankful for.  It is all a matter of perspective.  When I was little, we had very few material things . . . one Christmas gift each . . . etc., which by today's standards is poverty, unfair, all those nasty things.  But we were always grateful for the gift and for the celebration made around opening it.  You don't need to be wealthy or middle class to be grateful.  It is an attitude . . . and that attitude makes you want to work harder to have more to be grateful for.

I told my friend that didn't make it very clear that I was thinking about extreme circumstances when I said there are some who don't have anything to be grateful for.  Like being in a concentration camp in Germany in 1944.  But I would say that while she is right in the absolute sense, there are plenty of people, both in this country and around the world, who have far more to be angry about than grateful about--and are in circumstances where they can't do much (e.g., Bangladesh, Syria).  I would *not* have put her when young in the category of having nothing to be grateful for because life was safe and happy in a close family, even if they didn't have the mounds of material goods that we do now.

* * *

            Most of us know of the myth of deaths coming in threes.  They don't.  That aside, there have been three Engstrand obituaries in the last five months.  Krystin in October and then two very elderly cousins of mine, the children of my dad's older brother.  My dad's brother Allen was born in 1901; my dad was born in 1922.  Allen married and had two children, in 1923 and 1924, Ralph and Doris.  (So my dad had a nephew who was five months younger than he was and a niece who was a year and a half younger.  Allen died of smallpox in 1924, leaving behind his widow and two very young children.)  Ralph died in November, Doris died in February.  That is enough Engstrand obituaries.  And if they do come in threes, I think I'm safe for awhile.  Too bad they don't.

On that happy note,

Gary

#36 the average and reasonable person

Good morning.

            Two concepts that have interested me for a long time are the "average man" and the "man on the Clapham omnibus," a.k.a. the "reasonable man."  (Both phrases evolved in the 19^th century and of course began as "man," not "person," but that solecism has been remedied in more recent scientific and legal literature.  I will use the 19^th-century phrasing where appropriate.  I trust that those who read my messages will understand that I would not otherwise use those terms.)  I want to be clear that my meanderings on average and reasonable people doesn't really go anywhere.  You may also find it a snoozer.

The average man is the product of the work of Adolphe Quetelet, starting in 1835; the reasonable man is a fictional person used by the courts in tort law beginning in 1903. 

            In English law, the "prudent man" appeared in 1837 in Vaughan v. Menlove:

The care taken by a prudent man has always been the rule laid down; and as to the supposed difficulty of applying it, a jury has always been able to say, whether, taking that rule as their guide, there has been negligence on the occasion in question.  Instead, therefore, of saying that the liability for negligence should be co-extensive with the judgment of each individual, which would be as variable as the length of the foot of each individual, we ought rather to adhere to the rule which requires in all cases a regard to caution such as a man of ordinary prudence would observe.

            In 1856 the prudent man became the reasonable man, in Blyth v. Company Proprietors of the Birmingham Water Works.

Negligence is the omission to do something which a reasonable man, guided upon those considerations which ordinarily regulate the conduct of human affairs, would do, or doing something which a prudent and reasonable man would not do.

            Later in the 19^th century, the reasonable man became "the man on the Clapham omnibus":  "a hypothetical ordinary and reasonable person, used by the courts in English law where it is necessary to decide whether a party has acted as a reasonable person would. . . .  The man on the Clapham omnibus is a reasonably educated, intelligent but nondescript person, against whom the defendant's conduct can be measured."  The phrase formally entered English law in 1903, in an opinion in which the jurist, Sir Richard Henn Collins, in a libel case, cited a judge in an 1871 case.  Lord Bowen in 1871 apparently wrote or said that "'We must ask ourselves what the man on the Clapham omnibus would think.'  Quite why he singled out that particular route we shall never know."  A commentator on the phrase explained Clapham:

When it was first used, Clapham was a lower middle class (in modern terms) area of London in commuting distance to the city (financial district) so users of the omnibus would mainly be clerks, junior office workers, etc.  So the test was actually pretty specific to somebody who was somewhat educated, could read and write but wasn't a professional lawyer/accountant/stockbroker.

A lawyer/historian friend concurred.  "A nondescript commuter suburb seen to represent 'ordinary' London."

The phrase itself is scattered through English literature beginning early in the 19^th century.

            The man in the Clapham omnibus remains in English law up to the present.  In a 2014 opinion from the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, Justice Reed wrote that

1.  The Clapham omnibus has many passengers.  The most venerable is the reasonable man, who was born during the reign of Victoria but remains in vigorous health.  Amongst the other passengers are the right-thinking member of society, familiar from the law of defamation, the officious bystander, the reasonable parent, the reasonable landlord, and the fair-minded and informed observer, all of whom have had season tickets for many years.

2. The horse-drawn bus between Knightsbridge and Clapham, which Lord Bowen is thought to have had in mind, was real enough.  But its most famous passenger, and the others I have mentioned, are legal fictions.  They belong to an intellectual tradition of defining a legal standard by reference to a hypothetical person. . . .

3. It follows from the nature of the reasonable man, as a means of describing a standard applied by the court, that it would be misconceived for a party to seek to lead evidence from actual passengers on the Clapham omnibus as to how they would have acted in a given situation or what they would have foreseen, in order to establish how the reasonable man would have acted or what he would have foreseen. . . .  The behaviour of the reasonable man is not established by the evidence of witnesses, but by the application of a legal standard by the court.

4. In recent times, some additional passengers from the European Union have boarded the Clapham omnibus.  (Given the Brexit vote, those passengers may be getting off the bus in the near future.)

            Wikipedia summarizes the modern-day version of the chap on the Clapham omnibus:

[Per Judge Learned Hand in 1932] The reasonable person standard is by no means democratic in its scope; it is, contrary to popular conception, intentionally distinct from that of the "average person," who is not necessarily guaranteed to always be reasonable.  The reasonable person will weigh all of the following factors before acting:

•          the foreseeable risk of harm his actions create versus the utility of his actions;

•          the extent of the risk so created;

•          the likelihood such risk will actually cause harm to others;

•          any alternatives of lesser risk, and the costs of those alternatives.

Taking such actions requires the reasonable person to be appropriately informed, capable, aware of the law, and fair-minded.  Such a person might do something extraordinary in certain circumstances, but whatever that person does or thinks, it is always reasonable.

From A. P. Herbert (1932), "Misleading Cases in the Common Law":

He is an ideal, a standard, the embodiment of all those qualities which we demand of the good citizen. . . .  [He] invariably looks where he is going, . . .  is careful to examine the immediate foreground before he executes a leap or bound; . . . neither stargazes nor is lost in meditation when approaching trapdoors or the margins of a dock; . . . never mounts a moving [bus] and does not alight from any car while the train is in motion, . . . uses nothing except in moderation, and even flogs his child in meditating only on the golden mean.

English legal scholar Percy Henry Winfield summarized much of the literature by observing that:

[H]e has not the courage of Achilles, the wisdom of Ulysses or the strength of Hercules, nor has he the prophetic vision of a clairvoyant.  He will not anticipate folly in all its forms but he never puts out of consideration the teachings of experience and so will guard against negligence of others when experience shows such negligence to be common.  He is a reasonable man but not a perfect citizen, nor a "paragon of circumspection. . . ."

The point of using the man on the Clapham omnibus is that "individual, personal quirks inadvertently injuring the persons or property of others are no less damaging than intentional acts.  For society to function, [wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes] 'a certain average of conduct, a sacrifice of individual peculiarities going beyond a certain point, is necessary to the general welfare.'"

The reasonable person has been called an "excellent but odious character."  The reasonable person can be the reasonable woman, the reasonable disabled person, the reasonable something, in the context of a case.  (The late Justice Scalia dismissed the use of the reasonable woman in cases of sexual harassment, but at least some courts have adopted it.)

            I could be a man on the Clapham omnibus, certainly!  I don't want to be considered odious, although I otherwise qualify because I don't have Achilles' courage, Ulysses' strength, nor am I clairvoyant.  I can't tell to what extent I might be a "paragon of introspection."  Probably more than is healthy.

            Let me turn now to the "average man."  The true "average person" must be bi-gendered, inasmuch as we need to "average" men and women together to get the "average" human being.  Or perhaps, in the term now being used, "non-binary."  (http://gender.wikia.com/wiki/Bigender:  "Bigender is a gender identity which can be literally translated as 'two genders' or 'double gender'.  Bigender people experience exactly two gender identities, either simultaneously or varying between the two.  These two gender identities could be male and female but could also include non-binary identities.")

            As I noted earlier, the idea of the average man was first articulated by Adolphe Quetelet in 1835 ("l'homme moyen").  This guy was clearly a "Renaissance man," a doctorate in mathematics, he produced original and noteworthy work in multiple fields (including "meteorology, astronomy, mathematics, statistics, demography, sociology, criminology and history of science"); he was also an artist and a musician.  Most of us would know him through the body-mass index, which he developed (originally the "Quetelet Index," it was given the name body mass index by Ancel Keyes, a world-famous University of Minnesota physiologist).  Quetelet was, however, primarily a statistician—after he realized he could bring the methods of astronomy to data on human beings.  He was one of the first to make use of data on larger populations to make generalized statements about humans and he's considered the—or certainly one of the—founders of the social sciences (which did not split into different fields—sociology, political science, psychology, etc., until the early 20^th century).

            Quetelet began his statistical observations with physical characteristics such as height and weight (hence the development of the body mass index).  He later went on to consider the motivation of behavior in society.  "His principal work, 'A Treatise of Man and the development of his faculties' published in 1835 is considered 'one of the greatest books of the 19th century.'" 

The moral regularities, the aggregates of individual choice, which Quetelet himself investigated included age-specific crime rates for men and (separately) for women.  [The 1835 work was] on the development of human faculties. . . .  Also arousing lively reaction was a term used in the book:  l'homme moyen, the demographically average man, the human being with his individual wishes and peculiarities canceled out, and thus entitled to represent the nation. . . .  [In the 1869 second edition] Quetelet added observed regularities in the number of suicides from year to year, and in the rate of marriage for each sex and age group. This "moral statistics" of Quetelet is the distant progenitor of the modern science of sociology.

Where Quetelet aroused controversy was in his conclusions about the statistics he had compiled.  "Quetelet did not find in these observed social regularities evidence of divine will, as some had done.  He attributed them to social conditions, which were themselves liable to change or be changed."  He identified two types of causes of behavior.  One is the usual package of constant factors that every researcher looks at:  age, sex, education, income, religion, etc.  (He looked at them in combinations, an approach that was forerunner to multivariate analysis now used widely in statistical analyses.)  The other was "free will," which Quetelet largely dismissed and said it was a random cause of behavior that tended to cancel out across large populations.  (Like flipping a coin:  "unpredictable, but tending to average out in the long run.")

Among the philosophical issues raised by Quetelet's theory of social regularity . . . are questions of individual free will, and, ultimately, of individual responsibility for crime.  In Quetelet's own formulation, "Society prepares the crime, and the guilty person is only the instrument by which it is executed." . . .  Equally controversial are questions of the effect, and the desirability, of legislation intended to improve social conditions.

            A few years after Quetelet published his 1835 volume, he followed up with the observation that physical characteristics of humans (such as height, weight, chest circumference) fell into a normal distribution, a bell curve.  There are extreme cases (people really short and really tall) but most of us cluster around the average.

This has philosophical import:  it assigns the human ideal not (say) to the most evolved extreme, the highest end of the distribution, as cultured persons had invariably done up to that time, but rather to the term in the middle, the least extreme, the value with the most examples in that population.

            Todd Rose, in the Atlantic, described what he believed Quetelet's perspective to be.

for Quetelet, the Average Man was perfection itself, an ideal that Nature aspired to, free from error.  He declared that the greatest men in history were closest to the Average Man of their place and time.

Eager to unmask the secret face of the Average Man, Quetelet began to compute the average of every human attribute he could get data on.  He calculated average stature, average weight, and average complexion.  He calculated the average age couples got married and the average age people died.  He calculated average annual births, average number of people in poverty, average annual incidents of crime, average types of crimes, the average amount of education, and even average annual suicide rates. . . . Each of these average values, claimed Quetelet, represented the hidden qualities of the Average Man.

As much as Quetelet admired the Average Man, he held an equal amount of antipathy toward those unfortunate individuals who deviated from the average.  "Everything differing from the Average Man's proportions and condition, would constitute deformity and disease," Quetelet asserted.  "Everything found dissimilar, not only as regarded proportion or form, but as exceeding the observed limits, would constitute a Monstrosity."  He also pronounced, "If an individual at any given epoch of society possessed all the qualities of the Average Man he would represent all that is great, good, or beautiful."

There really cannot be an "average" person, given the physical differences between men and women (that is, born male or female, irrespective of choices they may later make about their gender).   As we all know, the averages of such things as proportion of body fat, height, endurance, strength, and so on, differ between men and women.  The "average" person is thus an impossibility.  It's possible that a male somewhere might, on many measures, approximate the average male; the same is true for a female somewhere.  But the average person can't exist.

(From "Uplift Connect, a feed to my Facebook page)

Nor can the "reasonable" person, the man on the Clapham omnibus (or one of its many passengers), exist.  The courts have pointed out repeatedly that for legal purposes, whether the reasonable person actually exists in a community is irrelevant, because the concept is a legal fiction.

There you have it.  Two of the most widely-used avatars of human beings are imaginary.  How do you compare to the two?