Good morning!
I would
like to open this message by posing a speculative question and I'd be delighted
if you'd write back. Here's the question
(with preface), that started out as a brief dinner table conversation last week:
One set of my maternal great-grandparents
immigrated from Denmark in 1880 and began farming in far western Minnesota,
close to the South Dakota border. Fast
forward to the year 2010 (to make it a round 130 years later). Will the changes in daily life between 2010 and 2140 be as great as they were between
1880 and 2010? (There is emphasis on daily.)
A few
examples of things one can think about.
-- There
had been tinkering with horseless carriages, but no significant breakthroughs
came until late in the 19th century, and cars didn't become commonplace
for a couple of decades after that. In 1880,
you still got from one place to another on foot or on a horse. The one technological advance over the middle
ages was the train. (My grandmother used
to tell of being put in the sleigh when a child, with rocks heated in the stove
to keep their feet warm, and the horses pulled the sleigh to town in the winter.)
-- There
was no electrification in 1880. The
world was lit by candles or gas lamps and there were certainly no vacuum
cleaners or washing machines.
-- There
was little indoor plumbing, and what did exist was limited to large cities.
-- Heavier-than-air
flight was only dreamt of in 1880. The
idea of a human being going to the moon, or sending a satellite to Mars, was science
fiction, a genre that didn't exist.
-- Computers
and the Internet were not on the horizon in 1880.
What do you
think? Will daily life for the majority
of us (let us limit it to the industrialized countries) be as different in 2140
from now as it was from 1880 to 1910?
(I learned something new about my university, from Wikipedia: Despite
widespread electricity in cities, by the 1920s electricity was not delivered by
power companies to rural areas because of the general belief that the
infrastructure costs would not be recouped. In sparsely-populated farmland,
there were far fewer houses per mile of installed electric lines. A Minnesota
state committee was organized to carry out a study of the costs and benefits of
rural electrification. The University of
Minnesota Department of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering, working
jointly with Northern States Power Company (NSP, now Xcel Energy), conducted an
experiment, providing electricity to nine farms in the Red Wing area.
Electricity was first delivered on December 24, 1923. The "Red Wing
Project" was successful—the power company and the University concluded
that rural electrification was economically feasible. The results of the report
were influential in the National government's decision to support rural
electrification. I had no idea that
the U of Minnesota played such a significant role in rural electrification.)
* * *
On reading
the piece about the four most significant actions people can take to reduce
their CO2 emissions, a friend wrote a thoughtful response.
I agree that their top four actions
would be either difficult or impossible to adopt for most of us, unless we've
already adopted a lifestyle of eco-inspired voluntary poverty. I don't know if the authors of the research
really intended these as recommendations for individuals, so much as tangible
markers of the sorts of things that are actually effective at carbon reduction,
versus "feel-good" sorts of things that are less effective.
Also, as recommendations, their
four actions could still be useful if they were not each framed in
all-or-nothing terms.
1. Instead of a new version of
China's One-child Rule, how about supporting all manner of birth control and
family planning services?
2. Instead of being car-free, how
about going from two cars to one, or advocating for better public transport?
3. Instead of eschewing air travel,
how about choosing carefully, considering Amtrak instead, and (again)
advocating for better pubic transport?
4. Instead of becoming vegan, how
about one or two meatless meals a week?
My other take-away was this quote
from the MPR article:
Overall, giant companies are
responsible for most carbon emission — not individuals. Last year's Carbon Majors Report found that
100 companies are behind over 70 percent of international greenhouse gas
emissions since 1988.
So, a vote for candidates who would
support carbon-reducing policies is another effective action individuals can
take. . . . Rather than worry too much
about your next hamburger or car trip across town, I'd say put your time and
energy into bringing climate into conversations with candidates, and support
those with the right answers!
I agree
with my friend's reaction. My only minor
disagreement is that Amtrak doesn't go enough places and for longer-distance
travel (e.g., Minnesota to California), it's much more expensive than airfare. So unless you want to sharply limit your
travel distances, and never go overseas, you have to fly. We would have gotten rid of one of our two
cars a long time ago if the difference in commute times (between driving and
public transit) for Kathy weren't so large. I hate spending money on cars anyway; it's
just tearing up $1000 bills and throwing them out the window.
* * *
The University
librarian sent my biologist friend and me a follow-up message about the
questionable journal I had inquired about a few weeks ago. "I've asked that the International
Journal of Environmental Sciences be pulled out of MNCAT so that we aren't the
cause of someone mistaking it for a respectable journal. Thanks for being the instigators of a good
deed."
* * *
As all of
you know, I'm an avid supporter of research of all kinds, including along
avenues that have no apparent application in life right now. (I am told that one classic case of research
with no foreseeable application at the time was Michael Faraday poking around
with electricity.) Even I, however,
sometime have my doubts.
Researchers
at the University of Adelaide determined that taking large amounts of vitamin
B6 increases the lucidity and recollection of dreams (with no effect on the
dreams themselves, supposedly). They
claim that
Lucid dreaming, where you know that
you are dreaming while the dream is still happening, has many potential
benefits. For example, it may be
possible to use lucid dreaming for overcoming nightmares, treating phobias,
creative problem solving, refining motor skills and even helping with
rehabilitation from physical trauma.
I'll wait
for the clinicians to try this out before I use B6 to try to enhance my
creative problem-solving. I don't have
nightmares or phobias or physical trauma and I don't know that at this point in
life I need to refine my motor skills.
Except maybe for taking up painting for a week. I also don't want any more lucidity in my
dreams; many of them in recent years are soooo boring (like adding up long
columns of numbers or wandering in large hotels looking for a room number,
dreams that go on and on and on and even in sleep I wonder when I can wake up
and get out of this tedious, monotonous situation.)
* * *
We have observed
("we" = higher education) for some time that there are more women than
men enrolled and completing degrees at American colleges and universities—and the
gap is not small. In fall 2015 (the most
recent year for which there are data rather than projections), there were 17,036,778 people enrolled in post-secondary
institutions (junior/community college, college/university, all levels). Of those, 7,499,837 were males and 9,536,941
were females—or 44% males and 56% females.
Ten years earlier, there were 6,408,871 males and 8,555,093 females. Ten years before that (1995) there were 5,401,130
males and 6,830,589 females. So this is
not a new trend. (For medical schools in
2017-18, there were 43,571 women and 46,315 men. For law schools, fall 2017, first-year
enrollments, there were 19,589 men and 21,523 women.)
The focus
of these comments, however, is on marriage, not enrollment in college. Research out of the University of Kansas
finds that the opportunities for "marrying up" (in terms of
education) have increased a lot for men and declined for women. All you have to do is look at those enrollment
numbers: with more educated women and
fewer educated men, women increasingly marry men with less education than they
have.
One
byproduct of this trend is that marriage is worth less to women (financially)
than it used to be, given that education and income are highly correlated—even with
the gap between pay for men and women.
Women's "return in the marriage market was high," but the
advantage has declined by about 13% in the two decades 1990-2010. Simultaneously,
women's personal earnings have grown
faster than men's earnings during this time as women have increased their
education and experienced a greater return on education. . . . Because of the
combined facts that husbands are less educated than their wives than before,
and the return on earnings for men has stagnated, a husband's contribution to
family income has decreased. On the
other hand, wives' contribution to family income has substantially increased.
Also hardly
surprising is the observation that quality of life (in a household) "is
determined more likely by family income rather than by personal earnings."
The obverse
of the coin, however, is not positive.
For women who are less educated, even though their earnings have
increased, their partner's (assuming a heterosexual relationship) has not. This phenomenon, in turn, suggests an
increasing wealth gap between more-educated and less-educated couples.
On balance,
one study author concluded, "when we consider family dynamics, men are
getting the benefit from women's progress." How many men are there in this country, and
around the world, who are utterly oblivious to the benefits women bring? Or, worse (from my point of view), don't care
because they don't believe women should be entering the workforce and the
professions. Or who are jealous that the
woman makes more than he does?
--Gary
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