Good afternoon.
It has been difficult to watch the
news (for a multitude of reasons), but in this instance I'm thinking about the
widespread coverage of the sexual harassment of women. I confess that I am surprised at the apparent
prevalence of sexual harassment, especially in the workplace. I can only conclude that I'm really
naïve. I am sure many of my women
friends will assure me that I have rarely written such an accurate sentence.
However, in all my years of work, I
never once thought about doing anything that might even faintly be considered
harassment. I don't write that to brag;
I think that most of my male friends feel the same way (saying that, I have no
knowledge about whether any of them have ever engaged in sexual harassment—but
I would be shocked if they had because doing so would be so out of character
for people I've known for decades). It
seems that a lot of our male peers don't share my/their attitude. (I generally believe the women;
interpretation can get a little sticky when it comes to drawing the line
between flirting and harassment, but much of the stuff I've been reading about
falls well over that line.) That a lot
of guys think they can pressure women in the workplace to engage in sexual
activity, or something close to it, and that it's OK to do that (or that they'll
get away with it), leaves me shaking my head.
I obviously live on a different planet.
I'd like to be able to claim that
women in higher education don't suffer from quite the prevalence of harassment
that they may face in other lines of work—but I couldn't back up the claim and
I doubt that it's true. There are too
many reports of sexual harassment coming from colleges and
universities—including my own and including such august institutions as
Harvard—to credibly argue that women are safer in higher education than
elsewhere.
I'd like to say that at least harassers
are less likely to get away with it now, but I'm not sure that's true in a
large number of cases. Yet.
* * *
Elliott
sent me this. Considerable hyperbole but a grain of truth, given what we read
in some places. (We did do a little more
than "feed them sometimes," even back in the dark ages of the late 20th
century.) I don't understand the
reference to coconut oil.
* * *
I have come to realize that I have
a very short list of people I know for whom I have almost unbounded admiration
and respect. I was prompted to think
about this when I learned of the resignation of Regent (Dr.) Patricia Simmons
from the University's Board of Regents.
While there have been any number of very good regents, Simmons stands
out in my estimation because of her thorough understanding of what a university
is about. She brought a rare wisdom to
the governing board that will be sorely missed.
(There have also been any number of regents who are/were mediocre or
worse, some of whom currently serve on the board.)
* * *
Elliott has
been using match (dot) com. I certainly
encouraged him. He sees Kathy and me as
one example of the potential benefit. He
has had the same difficulty that I and many of my friends had several decades
ago: where do you meet women? A couple of the most obvious social settings
are out for him: he doesn't belong to a
church, kids his age don't generally join clubs, his workplace isn't a place
where he's meeting female peers, and he's not in school any longer. But he's interested in getting married and
having children.
One
surprising turn of events—although it probably shouldn't be a surprise, given
the data about Millennials—is that he has encountered several women whose
profile seems compatible with his, and then learns that she does not want to
have children. For Elliott's that's a
deal-breaker, because he does. I agree
with his decision not to pursue a relationship with a woman taking that
position in the hope that she'll change her mind later. Some or even many of them might—but that's a
gamble he's not prepared to take. I
think that's absolutely right. I know of
a couple of cases where the guy did take that gamble, the woman didn't change
her mind, and the marriage fell apart as a result.
I'm wishing
him luck.
* * *
I'm
awaiting more information to accumulate over time, but the idea of a universal
basic income is becoming attractive to me.
Yes, for many and even for me, it goes against the "Protestant"
work ethic, but those of us who were raised with it—and obviously it's not
limited to Protestants, even though it somehow acquired that label—came from
socio-economic-cultural-educational backgrounds where our work led us to
something better in life—and we were pretty sure that it would. The argument against a guaranteed basic
income is that it will make people lazy and they'll just rely on government
handouts. It's part of lore handed down
and it's certainly part of conservative and libertarian economic
philosophy. (So cut Medicaid and all
kinds of assistance programs.) The
problem with that position is that it isn't supported by the data. Or by many except conservative economists,
for that matter.
Derek
Thompson, writing in the Atlantic, looked at recent studies, including a review
and research out of the University of Michigan and UCLA, and reports that they
found "no systematic evidence
that cash transfer programs discourage work" in seven different countries:
Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras, the
Philippines, Indonesia, or Morocco. Other
studies of cash-grant experiments in Uganda and Nigeria have found that such
programs can increase working hours and earnings, particularly when the
beneficiaries are required to attend classes that teach specific trades or
general business skills.
It's true
that the U.S. isn't very similar to Nicaragua or the Philippines or Nigeria,
but there are no small number of locations in this country that face poverty just
as bad as in poorer nations of the planet.
Among the biggest beneficiaries of
such programs are children: they get
more education and they're more likely to be employed when they reach
adulthood.
This finding has direct
implications for the United States, where a core mission of the Republican
Party is to reduce government aid to the poor, on the assumption that it makes
them lazy. This attitude is supported by
many conservative economists, who argue that government benefits implicitly
reward poverty and thus encourage families to remain poor—the idea being that
some adults might reject certain jobs or longer work hours because doing so
would eliminate their eligibility for programs like Medicaid.
But this concern has little basis
in reality. One of the latest studies on
the subject found that Medicaid has "little if any" impact on
employment or work hours. In research
based in Canada and the U.S., the economist Ioana Marinescu at the University of
Pennsylvania has found that even when basic-income programs do reduce working
hours, adults don't typically stay home to, say, play video games; instead,
they often use the extra cash to go back to school or hold out for a more
desirable job.
There are also data for the
U.S. Medicaid-covered families with
pre-natal care lead to adults who graduate from school at higher rates, earn
more money, are less dependent on welfare, and aren't as overweight, compared
to adults who came from similar backgrounds in states that didn't provide such
coverage.
I can't do
better than quote more. Thompson is
eloquent.
"Welfare helps people work"
may sound like a strange and counterintuitive claim to some. But it is perfectly obvious when the word
people in that sentence refers to low-income children in poor households. Poverty and lack of access to health care is a
physical, psychological, and vocational burden for children. Poverty is a slow-motion trauma, and
impoverished children are more likely than their middle-class peers to suffer
from chronic physiological stress and exhibit antisocial behavior. It's axiomatic that relieving children of an
ambient trauma improves their lives and, indeed, relieved of these burdens,
children from poorer households are more likely to follow the path from
high-school graduation to college and then full-time employment.
"Poverty is a slow-motion
trauma, and impoverished children are more likely than their middle-class peers
to suffer from chronic physiological stress and exhibit antisocial behavior." It's hard for the work ethic to be ingrained
when the daily worry is about food and health and money. Conservatives like to talk about hard work
and getting ahead, but then take an axe to the very programs that would led
kids grow up to work hard and get ahead.
"Welfare is so much more than a substitute for a paycheck. It is a remedy for the myriad burdens of
childhood poverty, which give children the opportunity to become exactly the
sort of healthy and striving adults celebrated by both political parties."
What opponents will do is identify
a few cases where people are just lazy.
So what? People forget, with
amazing regularity, that the plural of anecdote is not data and that "for
example" is not proof.
There's a parallel that comes to my
mind. I was talking with a University
friend recently and observed that if the state and federal governments were
willing to accept the fact that with every expenditure of public funds on
research (or cash subsidies or roads or health care or whatever) there will be
a small percentage of cheats and fraudsters, the enormous amount of money spent
on accountability could mostly be eliminated.
In worrying that every last nickel be spend legitimately, government
agencies require organizations to spend huge amounts of money on accounting and
forms and information technology and lawyers and staff. The University—and a huge number of its peers
as well as other organizations—could substantially reduce its expenditures on "administration"
and redirect the money to research and teaching if we'd just admit some people
will always break the rules. It's human
nature. Instead of these massive
bureaucracies to track every dollar, the feds and the state could have a
lightweight inspector general system, and when fraud or theft is
uncovered—which it inevitably is—then come down hard on the cheaters. Right now faculty researchers report
(nationally) that they spend over 40% of their time on administrative tasks
associated with research! Can you
imagine how much more productive they could be if that number could be reduced
to 10%?
So with cash benefit/guaranteed
basic income programs. Yes, a few will
abuse it and make nothing of themselves.
So? The enormous benefits,
especially to the children, should overwhelm any indignation that some people
are getting a free ride. (None of the
schemes I've read about, by the way, will make anyone rich; all they do is keep
the wolves at bay.)
Perhaps someday we'll make a move
in the right direction. FDR started
movement in the 1930s with the New Deal, LBJ continued it in the 1960s with the
War on Poverty. Maybe 60 years later we
can pick up the reins and move further forward.
* * *
Elliott has
the thought that I could be good at painting.
He is, so why not his dad? The
evidence for that proposition is extremely thin—a couple of works I did when in
junior high school. Kathy hasn't
contested Elliott's claim—although I don't know that she accepts it, either—but
in furtherance of it (or not), she bought me a paint-by-number set for
Christmas (which arrived in early January).
I was ambivalent about tackling it—it's not exactly the exercise of
talent nor are modern paint-by-number sets like the ones my grandmother did 40
years ago. I haven't counted, but my
guess is that there are at least 1000 spots to paint, some no larger than half
the size of pencil eraser. The painting
is large, 18x20 or so.
The one Kathy got (she got two, one
for me and one for her, but I picked the one she had thought she'd do) is a
Parisian street scene, in part looking at Notre Dame from the back. I decided I would paint it, and only that
one, largely because it's a place where Elliott and I have actually
walked. I have been working on it since
early January, a couple of hours per day, and when it's done in another week or
so, I'm going to frame it and foist it on Elliott. I gave him the two that I had from my
grandmother; he might as well have a third one from his father.
When Elliott saw what I was doing,
he refrained from derogatory remarks and simply commented that a
paint-by-number won't contribute anything to my learning to paint. He is correct; there is no originality at all
to a paint-by-number, but it is a marvelous test for Parkinson's (the shakiness
aspect, anyway) and for eyesight. I pass
the shakiness test (except when I try to paint right after I've had a cup of
coffee) and I've had to use a magnifying glass for the entire painting.
At one point I was emailing Elliott
about something and wrote that I was working on my "painting." He responded:
"You also don't need to put painting in quotes. Whether or not it's an artistic achievement is
up for debate but it is still inarguably a painting at the end of the day."
That
exchange had been preceded, the day before, by one about cubism. I read an article about Picasso having
painted four large paintings in six days in the early 1930s and exclaimed to
Elliott about the speed at which Picasso had painted them. He wrote that "to be honest I still don't
really get Picasso. Or cubism at all for
that matter. It always strikes me as
what would happen if a good artist tried to make a copy of a poor artist's
interpretation of a scene without being able to see the original scene itself. The proportions and scale are all wrong, as
they would be from an amateur, but the color and brush control is expert. It
just doesn't make sense to me. His blue
period on the other hand is actually good artwork. Wish he'd spent more than a couple years doing
that." I told Elliott that I wasn't
a big Picasso fan, either, although I've come to like at least a couple of his
paintings.
I related
that "our tour guide in Montmartre told us that cubism added another
dimension to painting: time. Supposedly the passage of time is represented
by the shapes in the paintings."
This lesson came from someone who studied art as an undergraduate and
then earned a master's degree at the Sorbonne in Contemporary Art. Theoretically at least she knew what she was
talking about.
Elliott
wasn't sure he bought the description. "The
thing is, there's no way to objectively quantify or demonstrate that sort of
claim, so I always take it as an explanation after the fact by art critics who
want to extrapolate some sort of meaning or symbolism or depth out of literally
everything that is painted. Sometimes I just make random freeform doodles in a
notebook that look something like cubism. They're meaningless. Or maybe I just have too much of a
scientifically oriented mind to 'get' advanced art theory and criticism." In his own painting he prefers realism, and I
guess I prefer it as well when I'm looking at art. Obviously, however, there's no legitimate
claim that his or my preference in art is superior to that of someone who likes
modern or abstract art.
And by the
way, perhaps they're out there, but I've not seen a paint-by-number kit for a
cubist painting.
(In case
you're wondering, yes, I do have Elliott's permission when I quote him and when
I write about exchanges he and I may have.
He gets to preview a draft.)
Warmly—
Gary
