Marigolds for Malthus

The reputation of Thomas Robert Malthus, author of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), had a rough couple of centuries after his assertion that efforts to alleviate poverty never could be more than temporary in their effects since population always consequently would rise to absorb all the new resources (food in particular) dedicated to the purpose. The poor thereby would become more numerous but no better off. Then, in concert with the industrial revolution, for the next two centuries after Malthus’ essay population soared while per capita income and food production rose along with it. The world grew wealthier and better fed while the percentage of poor diminished. The predictions of latter day Malthusians fared no better. Paul Ehlrich’s influential 1968 book The Population Bomb predicted global famine by the end of the 1970s. Instead the “green revolution” boosted agricultural production faster than population growth and again the global percentage of poor dropped for the next 50 years.

Yet, though they underestimated the rate of increase in agricultural and industrial productivity, the Malthusians were not and are not simply foolish. There are negative consequences to population growth. All of our most serious environmental problems are at bottom a population problem. Were the population of the earth today (7.8 billion) what it was the year I was born (2.5 billion) little need be done to address them beyond what has been done already. In fact, we could all go back to burning coal and driving gas guzzlers and still be ahead of the game.

At the beginning of this century, global population was expected to rise to 14 billion before 2100, which portended a frightening increase of demands on natural resources. It seems, however, that those initial expectations were wrong. Current mainstream guesses (and they are no more than educated guesses) are for a rise to 9.7 billion, and even this might be high. Historically, population soars in a region when industrialization takes hold and incomes rise, just as Malthus predicted. Industrialization happened first in Europe and then sequentially in other regions with the same demographic result. Then it appears something happens as industrial economies mature. The fertility rate is the lifetime number of offspring expected per woman on average, and a rate of 2.1 or higher is required to keep the population steady or growing. In recent decades in the West and in the advanced economies of Asia the rate has dropped well below the 2.1 replacement figure. The USA is currently 1.8. In several countries (Italy, Russia, Cuba, Japan, et al.) there are absolute declines in population. In Japan, where immigration is minimal, more people turn 80 every year than enter the work force thereby constraining economic growth and impacting the affordability of social welfare programs. Only high immigration levels keep numbers in the US, Canada, UK, and several other immigration magnets growing. Enough poorer countries are still expanding rapidly to keep global population rising strongly, but even among them fertility rates, while high, are trending steadily downward. If the trend continues so that world population at some point reverses course and goes into decline (by choice, not by catastrophe) the benefits would outweigh the inevitable attendant economic stresses.  Malthusians still have grounds to worry, but at least they now also have grounds to hope.

Why people are choosing to have fewer (or no) kids is a matter of much debate, and the proposed answers tend to vary along with the politics of the proposers. No one really knows. Apparently at a certain stage of economic and social development, at least so far, most women (the ultimate arbiters) make this choice, while ever larger numbers both of men and women grow disenchanted with the notion of even being couples, much less parents. (See Half of Singles Don’t Want a Relationship or Even a Date by Bella DePaulo Ph.D.) The change in my lifetime has been dramatic. Adult singles were very much the exception when I was a kid; today they outnumber coupled adults. Further, the median age for first marriage in the USA in 1960 was 22 for men and 20 for women, meaning half of brides were teenagers. Today it's 28 for women and nudging 30 (29.6) for men, and that is for those who marry at all. (While single parenthood is an ever more popular option, those who deliberately choose it have fewer kids on average than couples.) Young people just have a different set of priorities and (perhaps unrealistic) expectations nowadays.

In the way that one thought sometimes leads to another with only a tenuous connection, Dr. DePaulo’s article brought to mind a novel by Gore Vidal I first read as long ago as 1968. The eponymous protagonist Myra Breckinridge, deeply concerned about global overpopulation, takes a teaching position at an actors’ school in Los Angeles. Myra is a classic film aficionado who argues that no insignificant film was made between 1935 and 1945. She asserts that every culture has a mythology and the movies of 1935-45 form the American mythology. The characters in them are the gods and goddesses of our myths. They define our sense of ethics, our world view, and our ideals of masculinity and femininity. She believes the sex roles embodied in these films were all very well for building a nation and fighting Nazis, but are inappropriate to a 1968 overpopulated world with nuclear weaponry. She wants to remold our mythology through movies in order to create an America and (to the extent Hollywood movies have global reach) a world that is more sexually fluid. The birthrate thus will fall and pressure will be eased on the nuclear trigger. A school for actors is as good a place to start as any.

The traditional gender types reflective of 1935-45 are embodied by two students at the film school who plan to marry. Rusty is handsome, swaggering, and an ass. His wholesome, pretty, and somewhat air-headed girlfriend Mary-Ann wants nothing more than a white picket fence and four children with Rusty. Myra reprograms them by sexually humiliating Rusty and seducing Mary-Ann. She considers it a great success when the shattered Rusty shouts he is “sick of women.” He then acts so hostile to Mary-Ann that she announces, “I’ll never marry! I hate men!” Both are now better able to bring Myra’s vision to their future screen roles.

In 1970 this book was made into a movie (trailer) starring Raquel Welch and Rex Reed. Also in the movie are a 77-year-old Mae West, a young Tom Selleck, and an even younger Farah Fawcett. The film would be “so bad it’s good” had the filmmakers not altered the ironic ending of the book and thus tilted the result heavily toward the plain bad. The film bombed at the box office so badly that sales of the novel (previously a best-seller) nearly stopped. Nonetheless, it seems that Myra, whether on page or on screen, was ahead of her time.

Too Many People - Paul McCartney

Digital Afterlives

Kick the bucket, push up daisies, bite the dust, draw aces and eights, check out, buy the farm, cash in one’s chips, take the long nap, etc., etc. The length of our list of euphemisms for something is a pretty good indicator of our wish to avoid thinking about that something. It doesn’t help. Avoiding thinking about something is thinking about it. We try anyway. Half a century ago anthropologist Ernest Becker, diagnosed with terminal illness, developed a theory of human behavior called terror management (TMT) that he described in his 1973 book The Denial of Death for which he won a posthumous Pulitzer the following year. Humans, so far as we know, are the only animals aware they are mortal, and Becker argued that in the process of trying to deny our mortality we developed civilization, art, religion, and neuroses. Studies by experimental psychologists (see On the Role of Death in Life by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenburg, and Tom Pyszczynski) largely support Becker’s conclusions.

One of the many ways we try to cheat death is by creating a legacy such as books, art, businesses, buildings, and (of course) children in order to live on in some fashion. Nonetheless, few of us enjoy facing our motives head on, which explains why a large majority of adults have not written wills. Some event usually has to prod us into doing it: a health scare, the loss of someone close to us, or even just a close call on the interstate. In the current century, however, new questions have arisen that people who do write wills generally fail to address: our digital legacies. A physical photo album is personal property and transfers to heirs in the same way as furniture, but what of an online photo album (quite aside from whether anyone knows the deceased’s password)? What of e mail accounts, which are often forbidden by the Terms of Service to be turned over to third parties? What of a Facebook page or Instagram account? Is it property at all? Keep in mind that a Facebook page contains not just the user’s info but links to everyone who interacted with the user. In 2004 the scifi movie The Final Cut anticipated a time when implants would record our entire lives, and a professional editor could be hired to pare the final record into a watchable video biography made of key moments; very different pictures could emerge depending on what was included and omitted. We don’t have implants (yet) but we do create voluminous digital records with similar potential.

Psychologist Elaine Kasket (an aptronym if there ever was one) discusses the various aspects of digital legacies in her book All the Ghosts in the Machine. She recommends writing specific instructions for the disposition of your digital footprint in your will. 

While users can instruct Facebook to delete their accounts upon death, very few do and someone would have to notify Facebook of the event. An uncertain number of “users” are deceased; estimates are in the tens of millions. In the US alone hundreds of thousands of people with Facebook profiles die every year and most of those profiles remain standing. The dead will inevitably outnumber the living later this century – assuming the platform itself survives that long. Pages are sometimes kept active by survivors who have password information – which can be disconcerting to other friends and family who see posts from their deceased loved one. It is also permitted to turn the profiles into memorial pages where people can continue to speak to the deceased. Going to physical cemeteries to visit relatives for much the same reason was more of a thing when I was a kid than it is today. My mom never saw the sense in it. “Give your flowers to people when they are alive,” she always said. My dad did find solace in it, however; after my sister died he went every day. Online memorial pages are vastly easier: people can visit them without leaving their chairs. There are even dedicated sites, such as World Wide Cemeteries, for virtual graveyards. I have my mom’s perspective on such things, but I understand that visits to real and virtual memorial sites do have value to many.

We are far away from the scifi fantasy of downloading one’s own consciousness into a machine and thereby breaking free of biological limitations and mortality. However, we can make eerily convincing simulations of this. The holograms of Roy Orbison and Michael Jackson already perform before live audiences. (Who owns these images is still not entirely settled.) Sophisticated AIs with access to a deceased person’s digital media presence – blogs, comments, messages, posts, etc. – can uncannily imitate his or her conversational style and content right down to the type of jokes cracked. Few of us at present inspire the investment of resources needed to create such virtual simulacra of ourselves, but as they become easier and cheaper to produce they will become more common. What postmortem rights, if any, do we have with regard to them? Case law has conflicting opinions, but there is generally a recognition of some interest by surviving family members.

For now, most of us need only be concerned about blogs, email, social media profiles, online subscriptions, photographs, and financial data. Yet the importance of these should not be underestimated as fewer and fewer of our records are stored on paper in boxes in the closet and more and more on the cloud. Kasket makes several recommendations. Nominate a digital executor and create a master password list so that the executor can access your accounts – do not store the list somewhere that needs one of the passwords to open it. Curate your presence online. Each of us likes to self-present in certain ways and none of us is proud of everything. Be sure you want your survivors to see what is online – after all, we edit physical scrapbooks, too. Remember we won’t be around to explain context. Back up the most important stuff the old-fashioned way: physical photo albums and paper-and-ink documents. Yet, Kasket reminds us, nothing is forever, including legacies. Digital formats change, social media platforms go broke, physical photos fade. Immortality, digital or otherwise, is not on the table. Try to be OK with that.

Also, I have it on good authority that you should give your flowers to people while they’re alive.

On rare occasions an inscription apparently is legacy enough:

The Pretty Reckless – Death by Rock and Roll (acoustic)

Trust Me

The charming rogue con artist is a common archetype in literature and movies as in The Lady Eve, The Flim-Flam Man, Catch Me If You Can, or for that matter (arguably) The Odyssey. What all these have in common is good-humored sympathy for the con artist. I have to assume the writers of such scripts and books have never been seriously victimized by one of these people. I say “seriously” because we all have been victimized by them, sometimes in large ways, sometimes in small. As psychologist Maria Konnikova points out in her book The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It ... Every Time, the most tempting targets are those who are confident in their own skepticism: “You can’t fool me.” True, they may be unlikely to fall for random phone scams (e.g. the classic call from the “Sheriff’s office” informing you that you missed jury duty but can pay your fine over the phone rather than face arrest) but that very self-confidence makes them vulnerable to more sophisticated swindlers.

When caught, con artists often justify their actions by being dismissive of interpersonal morality as subjective and arbitrary, but at bottom the essence of conventional morality is not difficult to understand nor is it especially mutable: don’t initiate force or commit fraud. In other words, you can defend yourself when assaulted and you can trade, but the traded goods should be what you say they are and the money should be real. It’s that simple, and it is the basis for all civil society. Con artists know this better than anyone, which is why they get such a thrill out of violating the “fraud” injunction.

What motivates these people? Unsurprisingly, status, sex, and money loom large, but more important than just money is that it is your money. Taking it from you is a game that they take great satisfaction in winning; it proves their superiority over you. The Spielberg movie Catch Me If You Can was based on the book of the same name by Frank Abagnale, a convicted con man who made millions from passing phony and kited checks around the US and Europe while posing as a Pan Am first officer, a doctor, and even an FBI agent. He was so convincing that the Houston police chief commented, “Frank Abagnale could write a check on toilet paper, drawn on the Confederate States Treasury, sign it ‘U.R. Hooked’ and cash it in any bank in town, using a Hong Kong driver’s license for identification.” Given Abagnale’s history, what he writes about himself in his book also should be treated cautiously, but he seems (on this occasion) to be telling the truth when he writes, “Right and wrong are not factors, nor are consequences. These people look on crime as a game, and the goal is not just the loot; it’s the success of the venture that counts. Of course, if the booty is bountiful, that’s nice, too.” Abagnale is currently a security consultant for banks and other financial institutions.

By the way, a short story of my own features a con artist as an antagonist whom I hope I didn’t make too appealing.: The Great Gaffe .

A disregard of consequences is one of the most puzzling characteristics of swindlers, whether small-time short change artists or multimillion dollar Ponzi schemers – Bernie Madoff’s $65 billion scheme was unusual only in its scale. Their criminal activities are always unsustainable in the long run, but few of the perpetrators quit when they are ahead and simply retire to a Costa Rican beach house. The ongoing short-term pleasures of winning seem to outweigh other considerations.

Is there any way to spot these people in general company? Not really. Konnikova mentions that all of them score high in the so-called “dark triad” of traits that is so common among chronic criminals of all types: Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. Yet these traits are also common among people successful in business and politics. (Apparently dark triad folks who do think of consequences make the rational – not moral – decision to keep their activities legal.) They typically have charm, which should never be mistaken for sympathy. (It is often said that psychopaths don’t have empathy. That is not strictly true. Being able to gauge what you are feeling is central to their tactics. They just don’t care, so what they lack is sympathy.) Con artists play on people’s hopes, fears, and ambitions, so Konnikova recommends using the Third Party test to get some perspective: if you overheard this offer being made to your neighbor, would you be skeptical of it? If the answer is yes, take a step back. It is not a foolproof method of protecting yourself but it will help.

A story told by Abagnale is very revealing about how con artists think. He had opened a bank account in Philadelphia with a worthless check for $17,000. However, he had found a trick with the routing numbers on the check that would keep it tied up in the banking system (but not immediately rejected) for longer than the standard three day waiting period before he could draw against his new account. Carefully timing his next move, he flew down to Florida (for free, posing as an airline first officer), rented a Rolls Royce, and parked in front of a local bank. He told the bank manager that he needed a $15,000 cashier’s check in order to make a deposit that afternoon to secure a real estate deal with competitive offers but that his own bank had no local branches – it had to be a bank check or cashier’s check. He offered to pay the Florida bank with a personal check. She called his bank to check his balance, which was reported to her as $17,000. She said, “Tell you what, Frank Adams, [his alias of the day], I’ll take your check if you’ll come to a party I’m having tonight. I’m short of handsome and charming men.” So, he got a cashier’s check payable to cash for $15,000. He writes, “I cashed the check the next morning, returned the Rolls-Royce, and caught a plane for San Diego. I reflected on the woman and her party several times during the flight and nearly laughed out loud when I was struck with one thought. I wondered what her reaction would be when she learned she had treated me to two parties on the same day, and the one had been a real cash ball.”

I suspect she didn’t laugh out loud. I’ve encountered my share of notable swindlers over the years – beyond the everyday phone and email scammers. For many years I was a real estate broker, and the largish sums involved in that business attracted the breed to the door. Making a “good faith” deposit into the brokerage’s trust account in conjunction with an offer, but then withdrawing the offer and asking for the deposit back before the first check had a chance to clear was a minor stratagem for which I fortunately didn’t ever fall. Sometimes the schemers were much more ambitious. All of the ones I encountered had girlfriends, boyfriends, or spouses; looking at expensive houses was a cost-free but effective way of playing the big shot in front of them and raising their hopes. I doubt any of those relationships ended well. Con artists do love, but not you; they love your money.

Daisy Chainsaw – Love Your Money

Dark Nights

The lights are on. That seems like a minor thing until they are not.

Lines down around the corner from home

Tropical Storm Isaias blew into NJ last Tuesday stirring up a couple tornadoes for good measure. Power went out in my house midday at 12:22 (an old fashioned electric wall clock marked the moment) and remained out for 5 days. This is not a first – even for this year. I live in a high risk area since electric power is provided from overhead lines on winding tree-lined streets and the population density is low; so there is a high probability of falling tree branches cutting power lines while there is a low probability crews will deal with the area first. Whenever there are widespread outages, the more densely populated areas get priority. It is not uncommon to be out for 3, 4, or 5 days when the bulk of the county is restored in 1. After Hurricane Sandy I was out for two weeks. I’m on a well, which means water goes out with the power, but there is a pool out back so I can recharge the toilet tanks with buckets. At least it is summer and I could dive in the pool to prevent becoming too…well…aromatic. JCP&L has called in substantial outside help to get their lines back up – I passed Alabama Power trucks on the road this morning – but they are not entirely done yet.

I can tell which houses on my street contain kids since they are also the ones with generators – often the expensive kind that service not just a few circuits but the whole house. Imagine a modern 12-year-old without internet service or video games and one well can understand why. My usual solution to an outage is to go out in the evening to a movie, a diner, or a club or some other place with power. This year, however, the restrictions still in place in NJ on account of Covid-19 eliminate those diversions. While I’m OK with contemplating the ceiling in a Zen state in a dark room at night (flickering candles cast interesting shadows – even without psychedelics) most of my approach to the oncoming darkness this time has been tackling those “someday I’ll get to it” jobs that can tucker out a person – at least one who is not 18 anymore. Yesterday, for example, the job was resetting walkway slates that had subsided below the 6x6 (15cm x 15cm) borders thereby creating a tripping hazard. (The slates seem a trifle heavier than they did 42 years ago when they were set the first time.) Sleep comes earlier that way.

The outage brought to mind, as it always does, just how dark the evenings of our ancestors were. Yet, urban (or at least urbane) types didn’t rise with the sun and sleep when it went down. They stayed up to all hours. Ben Franklin, one such night owl, is sometimes falsely accused of having invented Daylight Savings Time, but he meant it as a joke. In a 1784 letter to The Journal of Paris Ben wrote that one night, as usual, he “went home, and to bed, three or four hours after midnight.” He says he forgot to close the shutters on the window and was awakened at six o’clock by sunlight. He thought it “extraordinary that the sun should rise so early... Yet it so happens, that when I speak of this discovery to others, I can easily perceive by their countenances, though they forbear expressing it in words, that they do not quite believe me.” He goes on to explain how all that unused sunlight can be exploited, but of course he is just playfully gibing himself and his fellow lovers of the nightlife for never getting up early. Before the last century people apparently just dealt with the dark, for candles and oil lamps simply do not compare to electric lights even of feeble wattage.

In truth, there is something peaceful about the dark – and the absence of electronic noise. The past few evenings on the porch while the tree frogs sang their love songs were relaxing. Still, I’m glad to have light, and water, and coffee, and (with reservations) even the internet.

 Dorothy – Dark Nights

Still Rolling Down Highway 61

Back in high school, English teacher Mr. Drew assigned our class The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot. The poem was way over all of our heads. This was not because understanding it requires intelligence but because it requires erudition: a depth of learning that high school students (bar the occasional world-class prodigy) simply don’t have. Mr. Drew was aware of that. He expected us to flounder (as we did), but he sometimes liked to push us beyond our limits anyway in order to make us at least aware of things that some of us might learn to appreciate later on. He was right to do it, much as I would have disagreed at the time.

Bob Dylan’s latest album Rough and Rowdy Ways is not remotely as abstruse as Eliot, yet that old English class came to mind because I think younger listeners might flounder when they listen to this deeply retrospective album – and maybe not even know they are floundering. Accumulated “stuff” of the sort that fills the head of a 79-year-old autodidact of both high and low culture flows into Dylan’s lyrics. “I contain multitudes,” he says. And so he does. That said, Rough and Rowdy Ways is Dylan’s best album in more than 20 years – maybe more than 40.

I’ve mentioned before that having a hip older sister was huge advantage when I was growing up. I was anything but hip, but at least thanks to Sharon I heard music and was exposed to trends when they were still cutting edge rather than last year’s news. Accordingly, the first Bob Dylan album I heard play on the home stereo was in 1963. I still have her vinyl of Dylan’s game-changing 1965 Highway 61 Revisited. His 1967 Greatest Hits album (with its poster inside) was one of the must-have albums of the ‘60s. While his popularity faded rapidly thereafter, he never went away or became a nostalgia act. He repeatedly nudged into the Top 40 charts with the occasional single (e.g. “Shelter from the Storm” in ’75, “Everything is Broken” in ‘89) and album (e.g. Time Out of Mind in ‘97), though one gets the feeling he didn’t much care by that point if his songs were popular. I don’t know if he has another album left in him after this one but it wouldn’t surprise me.

Sis's vintage vinyl still on the shelf 

No breezy pop hit is lurking on this album. No one ever bought a Dylan album to hear dulcet vocalizations, and nowadays his voice sounds like gravel in a churning concrete mixer. While sometimes musically interesting, his albums aren’t noted for stellar instrumental work either. (Covers of his songs can be a different matter, such as Jimi Hendrix’ classic version of “All Along the Watchtower.”) Dylan always has been about the lyrics, and it’s not a bad idea to read them when listening to Rough and Rowdy Ways for the first time. It’s not necessary, but not a bad idea.

The 17-minute “Murder Most Foul” about the JFK assassination and its aftermath was released separately as a single a few months ago. This event remains an inflection point in the American psyche in ways no longer obvious to the 85% of the population born after 1963, but it is still no less pertinent for that. In the double-cd set the number gets its own disc. The other songs are a mix of rock, folk, and blues, which Bob’s gravel voice suits better than one might think. The lyrics make as much straightforward sense as any by Dylan ever do, but they poke at our memories more than usual. Beyond the blatant by-name call-outs to Elvis, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and others, the references to Shakespeare, Greek mythology, and historical figures that permeate the verses are obvious enough. However, you might have to be a Boomer or older to catch right away the allusion to Roy Orbison in “I go where only the lonely can go” or to Ricky Nelson in his mention of Mary Lou, or to Barbara Lewis in “hello stranger,” or to Janis Joplin in “a ball and chain,” or to Dr. Strangelove (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) in “People tell me I ought to try a little tenderness.” (An instrumental of “Try a Little Tenderness” is the soundtrack to the title sequence of the movie.) Referential lines of this ilk are in every song on the album: some jump out more than others. All of these bits of songs, movies, people, history, and events are parts of who we are today. They are part of those too young to have experienced any of them first hand, for they form much of the general cultural background regardless.

Dylan is sometimes grim (“I've already outlived my life by far”) and often funny (“And I ask myself, ‘What would Julius Caesar do?’”), but while he swims in the past he never drowns in it. He hasn’t chosen to sit on his Nobel Prize and rotely sing “Positively 4^th Street” and “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” to septuagenarians who haven’t purchased a new album since 1979. He writes and performs new songs for whomever might happen to appreciate them. The results this time are outstanding.

Thumbs Up 

Track 2: “False Prophet”