Good morning.
No coronavirus
here, just research tidbits from all over the place. (Well, except at the end,
which I added after that initial promise of "no coronavirus.")
Misery in
life peaks at 47. David Blanchflower, professor of labor economics at Dartmouth
University, CBE, former member of a Bank of England policy committee, recently
published a 67-page highly technical National Bureau of Economic Research paper
titled "Is Happiness U-shaped Everywhere? Age and Subjective Well-being in
132 Countries." It seems that happiness, over the lifespan, is a U-shaped
curve: we're happier when we're young, happiness drops off as we head into
middle age, and then we get happy again later in life. In developed countries,
the "worst" or most unhappy age is 47.2 years; in developing
countries, it's age 48.2. Whether or not there's a "happiness curve"
has been contested terrain among those who've studied it, but Blanchflower
declares, "The happiness curve is everywhere. . . . No ifs, no buts,
well-being is U-shaped in age." (I suspect he should have written the last
sentence as "perception of well-being" or maybe even "happiness."
The research didn't look at "well-being" per se.
One interesting
finding buried in the study is a citation from another study.
Graham and Pozuelo (2017) also
found marked differences for the married and unmarried . . . for the US, in
sharp contrast to Europe. They found that there were U-shapes for both groups
in Europe and argued that there is a major difference in the levels of happiness
across married and unmarried cohorts in the US, with those of the married
significantly
higher than those of the unmarried.
In addition, they found that "the unmarried experience a much steeper
dip than do the married as beginning in the late 20s and then closing the gap
with the married in the late 50s. The married, meanwhile, have a slight upward
bump in the U curve in the late 20s to the mid-40s and then a drop again at that
point."
The authors note rightly that it is
hard to explain why there are such large differences in the happiness of the
married versus unmarried in the USA and not in Europe. They go on to argue, which
seems right, that "in theory, selection bias could be an issue, as
happier people are more likely to marry each other. Yet this is not the whole
story and does not explain the differences between these two contexts, which
are otherwise very similar in terms of per capita income, education levels, and
other traits.". . . One issue is that marriage versus cohabiting is
much more the norm in the US than it is in the UK which may impact the
happiness of those who are unmarried by middle age.
Obviously
these are averages across a huge population. I've tried to figure out if age
47.2 was the low point in my life. That would have been fall, 1998. I thought
1998 was a reasonably good year! Gary says that, having no recollection
whatever of any particular events that year. So I checked: my former wife and I
assembled photo albums for every year from 1980 (the year we met) up to 2005. The
photos from later 1998 suggest that it was remarkable in its ordinariness.
Let's say
there's a variation (for statistics people, 1 standard deviation) of 3 years
either side of 47.2 years, so most people will have their peak misery year
somewhere between 44.2 and 50.2 years of age. (I made up 3 years as 1 SD; it's
purely for hypothesis.) What's going on in many people's lives at that age?
-- If married
(or not) with children, they're likely in high school or college (if the kids
go to college). Are high schoolers trying kids? Mine weren't; they're probably
all over the place in behavior. If single, are they depressed because they
wanted not to be single?
-- In work, if
in a career (as opposed to simply a job), people are probably approaching their
peak years. If that workload demands excessive time, that could lead to
unhappiness—unless you are like many of the people I knew/know, for whom work
was great fun, so how can there be too much of it? If in a job that continues
to retirement, it may be increasingly unsatisfying. I know nothing about labor
psychology, so I am talking through my hat.
-- Perhaps
this is a time in life when marriages/relationships fall apart.
-- At a more
esoteric level, perhaps that's the age when we all realize we won't be
president of the U.S., we won't make a gazillion dollars, and so on—the period
when aspirations collide with the realities of one's life. Then, as more time
passes, people become comfortable with where they are in life. That, again, is
idle speculation.
Some of us
may have never had more or less unhappy years. Frankly, I'm not sure my mid-40s
to early 50s were more or less happy than the years that preceded and followed
them. As with everyone, I can identify periods when happiness took a hit (e.g.,
late 1988 to late 1989 was a horrible year: Krystin was diagnosed with
diabetes, my great-aunt died, my mother died), but those were event-specific,
not a generalized unhappiness associated with age.
For those
who happen to think about it—and are beyond 47.2 years—what's your take about
your own life?
* * *
Friends of
Facebook friends (not *my* Facebook friends) often make dismissive remarks
about all of the media as propaganda or slanted in some way, with the result
that they don't believe anything they read. I read some of those comments lately,
and then I read a book review today.
Perhaps
like some of you, I often read book reviews of books I have no intention of
reading; today's piece was about a biography of P. T. Barnum. I have too little
interest in Barnum to want to read an entire book about him, but Robert Wilson's
review was lively and worth my time (as are most of the reviews in the New York
Review of Books). The last two
paragraphs of the review:
The most disturbing line of the
book comes not from anything Barnum did but from a lesson he learned. The
success of General Tom Thumb's act—a precocious young "dwarf,"
dressed in military attire and paraded about on a carriage pulled by Shetland
ponies and attended by a liveried footman—yielded several successors. The first
of these was George Washington Morrison Nutt, whom Barnum renamed Commodore
Nutt. He debuted twenty years after his predecessor, who was no longer a
reliable draw, having grown taller, fatter, and altogether less charming. Still
the resemblance between Thumb and Nutt led crowds to question whether the two
were the same person. Barnum, always quick to capitalize on his audience's
skepticism—"to turn all doubts into hard cash," as he put it—brought
the two men together on stage. To his surprise, this only deepened the audience's
suspicion. The more he tried to convince customers of their error, he wrote, "the
more they winked and looked wise, and said, 'It's pretty well done, but you can't
take me in.'" He had trained his audiences in the art of the humbug too
well. "It is very amusing," Barnum concludes, to see how easily
people "deceive themselves by being too incredulous."
Wilson notes this episode only
in passing, but to an American reader in 2020, it barks from the page. The
great danger to democracy today comes not from marks slow to spot a humbug but
from a public made cynical to the point of believing that everything, and
everyone, is a humbug, especially the humorless class of credentialed experts
whom Barnum took such joy in ridiculing. In the end, though, it's a distinction
without a difference. Too credulous or too incredulous—you're a sucker either
way.
It is
perhaps apparent why I linked the Facebook comments and the book review.
The question
I have for those who dismiss all the media (or, I fear, in many cases all the
media except Fox News): where is it you expect to learn the "truth"
about the world you live in? By osmosis from the atmosphere? As I've repeatedly
suggested to many people over the years, what's important is where you get your
news. Some sources are largely trustworthy, others are humbug (to put it
charitably). But not everything is
humbug.
* * *
Something
that most of probably know: "Money
can't buy love -- or friendship." Researchers from the State University of New
York at Buffalo (a school that has dramatically improved its research capacity
and ranking in the last 15-20 years), Harvard, and the University of Western
Australia looked at five different studies with over 2,500 subjects to examine
the implications of basing assessment of one's own worth on financial success. (The
fact that the research team comes from Buffalo, Harvard, and Western Australia
speaks to the internationalization of research!)
Psychologists
have identified a state of mind they named "Financial Contingency of
Self-Worth." The gist is, obviously, that "when people's self-worth
is contingent on money, they view their financial success as being tied to the
core of who they are as a person. The degree to which they succeed financially
relates to how they feel about themselves -- feeling good when they think they're
doing well financially, but feeling worthless if they're feeling financially
insecure." That, in turn, "creates pressures that hurt important
social connections." When you're driven to reach financial goals, you
often sacrifice spending time with family and friends because you work so much—and
thus you can become "lonely and disconnected." The authors "emphasize
the role of social networks and personal relationships in maintaining good
mental health and why people should preserve those connections, even in the
face of obstacles or pursuing challenging goals."
These
findings may be irrelevant for the millions of people who have to work two or
three jobs in order to generate enough income to buy groceries and pay the
rent. Folks in that position aren't thinking about self-worth so much as their
kids eating. Social connections may indeed fray when you're working 60-70 hours
per week, maybe seven days per week, but it's not as if you can step back and
assess your self worth.
* * *
I vaguely knew, from somewhere,
that copper kills bugs. I couldn't have answered a question about what kind of
bugs. Because of Purdue engineering, I know now that it's bacteria (and not,
alas, viruses, so this is not pertinent to the coronavirus). Like viruses,
however, "bacterial pathogens can live on surfaces for days. What if
frequently touched surfaces such as doorknobs could instantly kill them off?"
It seems that copper has been known
to be an antibacterial agent for a very long time, at least back through the 19th
century. Water that came through copper pipes had less slime and gook in it. Using
it more widely, however, wasn't especially useful because "it typically
takes hours for native copper surfaces to kill off bacteria," commented
one of the engineers involved in the Purdue research.
What the Purdue folks discovered is
"a laser treatment method that could potentially turn any metal surface into
a rapid bacteria killer -- just by giving the metal's surface a different
texture. . . . Metals such as copper normally have a really smooth surface,
which makes it difficult for the metal to kill bacteria by contact." What
they did was use the laser "to create nanoscale patterns on the metal's
surface. The patterns produce a rugged texture that increases surface area,
allowing more opportunity for bacteria to hit the surface and rupture on the
spot." They hope to be able to expand the work to other kinds of surfaces
that have widespread medical uses. They also concluded that "due to the
simplicity and scalability of the technique, the researchers believe that it
could easily be translated into existing medical device manufacturing processes."
The article didn't say this, but
one would hope that making surfaces in hospitals more anti-bacterial, the risk
of hospital infections would decrease—and thus the need for antibiotics that
lead to superbugs would also decrease.
* * *
I said no
coronavirus, but I want to put in one thought, with apologies for returning to
a topic that consumes many of us. I find it unnerving and annoying to wonder,
every day, if I'll suddenly start showing symptoms (mostly the dry cough and
the fever, and maybe loss of smell). With an incubation period of up to 14 days
(something I read once again just this morning), I could have acquired the
infection a long time ago from a source I could not possibly identify. Every
innocent trip out of the house (what few of them I've made) means two weeks
have to go by before I can be sure I'm not infected. And that's no guarantee, because
in the meantime Kathy runs an errand, acquires the coronavirus but is asymptomatic,
and so I don't even know I'm exposed. Argh. Elliott wrote to me a few days ago:
This virus seems hell-bent on
infecting everyone on Earth and is well designed to do so. I don't buy into
conspiracy theories but the extreme survival times on surfaces, the
asymptomatic transmission, and this, it does seem like the sort of thing you'd
engineer if you wanted to create a bioweapon. The one upside is it's not
especially lethal. [The "this" he refers to is from a research link I
sent to him: "In a new study,
researchers found that half of the patients they treated for mild COVID-19
infection still had coronavirus for up to eight days after symptoms
disappeared."]
Let's be glad we're heading into
spring, despite the fact that some of us are looking out the window at six
inches of snow on the ground.
With warm regards—
Gary
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