Rich nations not doing enough...

...to make the poor hate children.

In my next life, I want to be a Spin Doctor for a living. It just seems like an incredibly fun job. And there are certain people who just make it so easy.

The United Nations recently put out a report that attempts to measure child welfare in developed nations. Ignoring for a moment the fact that the report grades all of the nations in it relative to each other, rather than against an objective standard (so someone's always going to be on the bottom, no matter how well they're actually doing), it's still likely to be fodder for people who think that the U.N. is stuffed to the rafters with crazy bleeding heart lefties who just can't bear to see anything go wrong for anyone.

But what surprised me was the number of ways that the report left itself open to being used in ways that I can't imagine the authors intended. Not that anyone is likely to do so, but if you really wanted to, you could make some very bizarre arguments based on the statements and conclusions in the report.

For example, to go back to the title of this post, according to the UNICEF report (and I quote):

"To a young person with little sense of current well-being - unhappy and perhaps mistreated at hime, miserable and under-achieving at school, and with only an unskilled and low-paid job to look forward to - having a baby to love and be loved by, with a small income from benefits and a home of her own, may seem a more attractive option and the alternatives. A teenager doing well at school and looking forward to an interesting and well-paid career, and who is surrounded by family and friends who have similarly high expectations, is likely to feel that giving birth would de-rail both present well-being and future hopes."

You can see how it's easy to spin this to say that: "According to the United Nations, rich countries should do a better job teaching young women that children are a threat to their present and future well-being." Because, after all, if poor people had the sense that children would be nothing but a burden, perhaps they wouldn't have as many...

Of course, that's not what they mean, but you get the point. But even their intended meaning misses the point somewhat. For any poor woman, having a child means another mouth to feed - and if you don't have the resources to care for yourself properly, how can you care for a small child? I mean, once the hypothetical unhappy teenager is an adult, and firmly ensconced in her low-paying dead-end job, is she really in a much better position to have a baby than she was as a teenager? Are miserable adults any less likely to have children based more on the percieved emotional benefits than miserable adolescents? (Personally, my experience says "no.")

What's really going on here is that this isn't really a report about the plight of children. The idea is to spur wealthy countries to do more to tackle poverty and income disparity - it's a "do it for the children" pitch. This is why I think they don't set an objective standard to reach - what they're looking for is a sort of perpetual "race to the top" where the various named nations are in constant competition with one another. And many of the standards deal more or less directly with either material affluence, or other factors that have been directly shown to correllate with poverty - such as teen pregnancy and single or divorced parents. But I think that this is another case where "say what you mean" may be the best way to go about it.

Bad News

One of my soapboxes is sloppy journalism. Ostensibly, the purpose of "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press," is so that people can be informed. After all, if people are going to participate in government, they need to have access to a certain level of information, so that they are capable of making informed policy decisions, and base their voting behavior accordingly. And the press howls whenever they feel that they're being cut out of information that they feel is important. But what good is the freedom to disseminate information without government interference, if you can't be bothered to verify that they information is correct?

Late last month, the splashy random-news-trivia story of the day was the fact that the Census Bureau had released a report showing that 51% of women over the age of 15 were not living with a spouse. Here is a commentary on the New York Times piece that broke the story. (Despite all of the hoopla surrounding this story, news articles that deal with the survey directly are hard to find.) This referred to women who were unmarried, AND those who's spouses were elsewhere - serving in the military overseas, incarcerated or working on a fishing boat somwhere. In the less than three weeks since the story had become big news, the interpretation has changed, and now 51% of adult women are SINGLE, as reported in this Associated Press story on the rise of "Anti-Valentines Day."

While I suppose that there are people who don't make a distinction between a woman who currently doesn't have a husband, and one whose husband is working on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico for six months, professional journalists shouldn't be in that category. Especially when the change in meaning leads people to question the accuracy and the agenda of the source material. Here conservative columnist Shaunti Feldhahn, acting on the misconception, takes aim at the New York Times, noting (correctly) that the idea that 51% of women are single is, in fact, false - and she goes on to attack marriage "naysayers" as disseminating false information. (It seems that she was following the lead of Michael Medved, who also attacked the article.)

To be fair, it turns out that it is warranted to attack, if not the accuracy, the overall relevance of the story. Even the New York Times (which reported it as a front-page story (subscription required)) itself isn't completely happy with the reporting. A more realistic look at the numbers, including only women aged 20 or older, brings the percentage down to 47 percent. (Note that the Census Bureau tracks marriage statistics starting at age 15 because this is a survey that they've been taking for decades, since when the average age of first marriage was significantly lower than it is now. At one time, the survey started at 14.) But 47% isn't newsworthy - 51%, with its implication of a new social paradigm amoung the majority of Americans, is. (By the way, you could make the point that since the average age of first marriage has climbed into the mid-twenties, even starting at age 20 may not be particularly warranted.)

So what we're left with is sloppy follow-on coverage of a story that was sloppily (and misleadingly) reported to begin with, because it created a splashier headline that way. Otherwise it would have been just another random bit of government trivia. Not that it doesn't point to a much greater social trend, over the long term. There WAS a time when a majority of women 15 and older were living with a spouse. But I suspect that most Americans today would be surprised to learn it extended into the 20th century. The idea that a noticable number of teenagers would be wives is something that makes most Americans think of the distant past, or some benighted third-world nation somewhere, where women are ranked as somewhat less valuable than goats or something, rather than the America of only a century ago. So some corners were cut to make the story worthy of attention. And while an entertaining public conversation was started, I don't think that you can say that it was useful - noone knew what they were talking about.

I'm going to hurt you, Father

...for I have sinned.

This is Old News. I felt the desire to post something today, but I couldn't think of anything interesting. So I went back into my "archive," as it were, and pulled out something that I didn't get around to posting when I'd actually written it. I added to it, and did some editing, and here it is.

I was reading "Vertigo," by Christopher Hitchens, on Slate when I came across the following confusing passage:

"But, as with Beirut, it is unlikely that anything will stop the confessional violence as long as either side thinks there is anything to be gained from it."

At first, I thought that the use of the word "confessional" was just a strange substitution for the term "sectarian." After all, both terms have religious connotations, and perhaps Slate's editors felt that "the s-word" is becoming a little long in the tooth, with all that Americans have been hearing and reading it recently. The definition of confessional that I was familiar with dealt with a weird little box that one finds in Catholic churches, and/or to the process of admission of wrongdoing (or wrongthinking) and the subsequent assignment of penance that takes place within. Clearly, there was a meaning to the term that I wasn't hip to. So, I looked it up.

Confessional: Adjective. 1) of, relating to, or being a confession - especially of faith. 2) of, relating to, or being intimately autobiographical.

Violence as autobiography wasn't particularly intuitive, either, so that wasn't much help. I still didn't understand the context. So I figured that I'd drop down a level, and looked up "confession." And found, in part, "a formal statement of religious beliefs." The light bulb flared into sudden brilliance.

To be honest, I wasn't completely enlightened by the realization. The idea that Shiites have undertaken a campaign of sectarian clensing in the capital of Iraq, not out of religious ambition or even obligation, but as a religious proclamation struck me as nothing short of utterly bizzare. But, I'm sure that we're all aware of the segment of Western society (many of them American evangelopatriots) that views Islam as a creed harboring (if not actively demanding) a bloodlust that would make a Tyrannasaur sick to its apex-predator stomach. For them, the idea that violence is how Moslems intentionally and formally express not only their religion, but their religiosity would make perfect sense. I haven't read enough of Christopher Hitchens to know if he is a member of said segment, but even if he isn't, what would otherwise simply be an odd turn of phrase becomes instead a very precise way of conveying the intended point.

The more I think about it, the more this new understanding makes sense to me. There are so many ways in which violence, in Iraq or here in the United States (or anywhere else, for that matter), can be understood to be both meduim AND message that the use of the term "confessional" becomes strikingly appropriate. It's hard for me to relate to, mainly because the idea of using violence simply to convey a message seems to at once go too far, and not far enough. Therefore, the idea that violence could actually BE the message is foreign to me. I can't even provide a sensible example, other than to say that the clichéd "random acts of violence and senseless brutality" - that is, the the violent episodes that we don't understand, may, in fact, be the very point that they're attempting to convey.

Al Jazeera

Until today, it had not occurred to me that one of the many news sources that one can access from Google News would be the English language page of Al Jazeera. It reminds me of the BBC - they use the British English term "Sport" rather than "Sports" as we do in the United States. (As an aside, the lead sports headline was the Super Bowl.) Curious, I read their article on the Court-Martial of First Lieutenant Ehren Watada. I also popped over to a local paper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and read their article on the same topic for today.

The P-I, went into a LOT more detail. This is unsurprising. For most of Al Jazeera's readership this is foreign news. But since the trail is being held at Fort Lewis, which isn't all that far from the Seattle-Tacoma area, its something of a big deal around here. Given the realitive brevity of the Al Jazeera piece, and the likely nature of its audience. Also, given the expected audience, I'm not suprised that the Al Jazeera story seemed to focus more or less exclusively on Lieutenant Watada's side of things, although it didn't veer into an anti-United States Government screed, or anything like that. I don't know if the goal was to illustrate dissention in the ranks of America (just in case there was someone who wasn't already aware of that) or to say: "See, there are even American SOLDIERS who know the war is wrong." I guess you could go either way. Perhaps I'll take some time and read more of their coverage - next time contrasting it with a source for whom it isn't the big local story of the day, and see how they stack up.

Right Things

One day, I was in a bar in Seattle, and I ran into a man whom I could only describe as a "moderate White Supremacist." Perhaps it says something about Seattle that even the people who hold extreme right-wing views can manage to be reasonably civil (if not always tactful) about it.

In any event, he was going on about books that he'd read that supported his views, and when the topic of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond came up, he described it as "politically-correct propaganda." And while I found GG&S to be fascinating and informative (although somewhat dry), I can see how he'd reached that conslusion.

If you're unfamiliar with the book, Guns, Germs, and Steel seeks to explain, in understandable terms, why some cultures developed higher technology levels, denser and more complex societies, and nastier infectious diseases than other societies. To boil it down to it's absolute simplest, the reason the book puts forth is that all of these things spring from certain accessable natural resources in any given area, mainly domesticable plant and animal species, and that these vary around the world.

Of course, there have been plenty of other explanations for this phenomenon, many of which deal with the idea that certain groups are superior in intellect or inventiveness to other groups. Mr. Diamond takes direct issue with such theories, stating that: "The objection to such racist explanations is not just that they are loathsome, but also that they are wrong."

But why does that fact that racist explanations are loathsome matter? Isn't it enough that they be wrong? And if a demonstrably correct explanation of a phenomenon is loathsome, is that by itself grounds for objection? This is where we run the risk of confusing an arrival at popular orthodoxy as scientific rigor. As William Saletan put it: "It's too bad they think good science consists of believing the right things."