Time Off

I've been hearing a lot recently about the falling labor force participation rate, or the percentage of the population that is either working or looking for work. Generally, speaking, the unemployment rate is the percentage of this segment of the population that is unsuccessful in finding work at any given time.

There seems to be a substantial amount of hand-wringing over the relatively low numbers, but reasons for the hand-wringing are less common. This seems to be born of the idea that the American work ethic ("The average worker in the United States clocks more hours each year than those in Canada, Australia, Western Europe and now even Japan.") is a good thing in and of itself.

But work is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end. And while the current unemployment rate may be low, the fact that one exists at all proves that the American economy doesn't even need all of the people who present themselves to be workers in order for supply the level of goods and services that people wish to buy. (Okay, so that's not entirely true... but it's unlikely that businesses, or their customers, are going to want to pay the wages that would be needed to make cellular telephones in domestic factories.) In other words, no-one is pointing to any shortages that a boost in workers would cure.

And if people are not working because they don't particularly need to work, I don't see why this should be considered a problem. If people have found something that gives a better return for their time and energy than paid employment, more power to them.

Rate of Change

One of the arguments against the idea that humans evolved to their current state is that it denies the innate "special-ness" of humanity. If humans are not so much different from other animals, the thinking goes, how can it claim a privileged place? Whether humanity is "deserving" of a privileged place in the grant scheme of things is open to debate, but it's pretty clear, to me, anyway, that a lot of people understand that humans should operate under their own set of rules, if they don't already. One way that this manifests itself is in the idea that human evolution should be a matter of political will, at the species level, rather than a response to environmental and/or social pressures, like it is for other lifeforms.

There are a number of ways in which "human nature" gets in the way of people's ideas of what the world should be like. A primary one is the fact that humans have a habit of forming themselves into groups of varying sizes and setting themselves against other groups, if not then remainder of humanity, in ways that produce zero-sum outcomes. Politics the world over produces example after example of this, and it has, for pretty much the entirety of human history (and a good stretch of time prior to that).

For someone who wants to see a golden age of human cooperation and prosperity, this is clearly a sub-optimal state of affairs. And it's not rocket science to understand why. The misery and suffering that humans routinely inflict on one another in the name of marginal gains here or there comes across as utterly pointless. (Now, to be sure, that depends on one's understanding on what it means for something to have a point, and that's really what it at issue here.) But still, this is the way that humans tend to be wired, and there was a point in time during which this not only made sense, but was important to the survival of the species.

And for all that people will concede that point, the follow-on tends to be, "Well, it's time for humanity to evolve beyond that." Which is fine, except for the small problem that this isn't how evolution works. And it never has been. For all that, the idea that human beings should simply be different than they are, and so the change should just happen strikes me as a surprisingly common one, especially in left-leaning political and social circles.

To be sure, I think I understand why. It's not like it takes much to get people to concede that there's a lot about humanity that they would like to see done away with (although what exactly the outcome of that would, or should, be tends to be open to debate). It's easy to look at a massacre and say "we should be able to do better than this." But the reason we don't "do better" is that the underlying reasons for human behavior are varied and complex, and wrapped up in a lot of factors that are much more resistant to change than they are often given credit for.

It's entirely possible for evolutionary pressure to do away with the human propensity for intra-group infighting. But it takes more than wishing to bring that pressure about.

What Now?

It has been, thus far, a typical late Fall/early Winter in the Seattle area; dreary and overcast much of the time. But there's been snow on the ground for about a week now, and that's been something of a twist. There's something of a peculiar phenomenon I've noticed in the past year or so, and that is that deviations from the typical weather and temperature patterns have routinely started to last longer than the initial forecasts say they will. What was originally forecast to be just a couple days' worth of colder-than-average temperatures has stretched into a week, and it may drag on for a couple more days at that.

It brings home the difficulties of making these sorts of predictions, even in a fairly boring climate like that of the Puget Sound area, once things start to change here and there. Once the old patterns begin to suffer disruptions, it can be difficult to determine what the new pattern will be.

I suppose that a lot of things are like that. And I understand a bit more why people can become so bent out of shape when things shift beneath their feet. Predictability can be dull, but it can also be very comforting. It's one less thing to worry about. And although many people seem to be quite good at worrying about things, it's still true that too much of it is not healthy for most. And predictability, or at least the appearance of predictability, can give people a break from that.

Of course, there is more to it than that. A good portion of the local built environment was put in place with the understanding that it would rarely, if ever, be snow-covered. And local services tended to make the same assumption. That prediction no longer being reliably true will mean some significant changes may have to be made. We'll see how the area adapts to it all. In the meantime, I'm learning to live with a bit more uncertainty in what each day will bring. It's been interesting.

Oh, Deer

I hadn't really thought all that much about the shipping involved for holiday items until I came across this box in the aisle at Costco. But this is one of the many items that didn't survive the trip across the Pacific intact. I wonder what happens to all of them.
 

Cleanup on Track 8

Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, has kept his name at the top of papers by making an appearance on Alex Jones' Infowars show and making comments like "I like Hitler," and "They did good things, too. We've got to stop dissing Nazis all the time."

I won't belabor the point, given that I brought this up a month ago, but I think it's somewhat irrational to expect someone with known mental illness to be completely, well, rational; even when in front of an audience.

But the train wreck that Ye's life is becoming is going to generate a lot of clicks, and a lot of airtime for random people to denounce him, or hold forth about how harmful his words are. Because people are fascinated to watch him destroy his life in slow-motion and on full public display. It's the dark side of being a celebrity; it's not generally considered exploitative to watch someone go head-to-head with mental illness and have their head handed to them when that someone is already famous.

Of course, there is also the fear factor; the idea, hovering in the background that someone like Ye is, for all of his obvious problems, popular and respectable enough to bring the ethno-nationalist chauvinism of 1930s National Socialism back into vogue and kick off a round of modern pogroms against the Jewish population of the United States. I understand it; there is a similar suspicion in the Black community of the United States that all it takes are a few charismatic people in the right (or wrong) places to bring back Jim Crow, if not all-out slavery again. That said, it still doesn't strike me as a realistic possibility anytime soon. Treating everyone who expresses support (regardless of their mental health) for the atrocities of the past as an open invitation for those atrocities to repeat themselves overdoes it. Those times are gone. They can, of course, return. But it will take more than the flameout of an ill celebrity to restore them.