The State of the Lutheran Church

The Lutheran church, generally, and in particular, its predominant mainline denomination, is rapidly shrinking and growing less vital in terms of nominal member participation.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), a Protestant denomination, is twenty-five years old in 2013. It was formed through a series of mergers of prior mainline Lutheran denominations. The last phase of the process that gave birth to the ELCA, effective January 1, 1988, merged the American Lutheran Church, the Lutheran Church in America, and the much smaller Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, each of which had already largely shed an ethnic identity vis-a-vis the larger public. This last component of the merger explains why the denomination which would generally be classified as "mainline" rather than part of the Evangelical Christianity movement in the United States, prominently contains the word "Evangelical."

The three merged denominations, in turn, were the product of mergers involving Lutheran denominations that had been mostly organized along ethnic lines by immigrants who had been members of the established Lutheran churches of their home countries. The ethnically based American immigrant denominations merged, in several steps, when the ethnic identity has faded in successive post-immigration generations. The established churches of Northern Europe, in turn, were successors were established when national churches were formed after these nations churches broke from the Roman Catholic Church in the part of the Protestant Reformation that was led by Martin Luther, a German minister, in the 16th century. The Calvinists, whose successors in the U.S. are mostly Presybeterians, and the Episcopalians (from whom the Methodists and United Church of Christ were ultimate derived as well around the 17th century) who made a less complete break of the Roman Catholic church, were the other two biggest components of the Protestant Reformation.

In many other countries, the merger process of mainline Protestant denominations (that are not Anglican), that are successors to leading European denominations went one step further, to form a single dominant "United" or "Uniting" churches (e.g. the "Protestant Church of the Netherlands"). But, in the United States, the ELCA is accompanied by a number of other major mainline Protestant denominations not organized on an explicitly ethnic basis, such as the United Methodist Church, the Presybeterian Church (U.S.A.), the United Church of Christ, the American Baptist Church, the Disciples of Christ, the Episcopal Church, and the Reformed Church in American. All of the Lutheran denominations and Episcopalians and Methodists are grouped together as "liturgical churches", which share an infant baptism tradition and a mode of worship derived from the Latin mass translated into vernacular English and modified somewhat, by the chaplancy of the United States military.

Almost all mainline Christians who are Lutherans in the United States are members of the ELCA. Historically, the other two main Lutheran denominations in the United States, the socially conservative Missouri Synod Lutherans and the smaller and even more conservative Wisconsin Synod Lutherans, include almost all other American Lutherans. There are, however, about a dozen much smaller bodies of Lutheran churches in addition to the big three, including one that some of my relatives have affiliated with that is between the Missouri Synod and the ELCA if the many social issues and theological questions dividing the movements were abstracted down to an oversimplified single left-right dimension. All or almost all of the smaller Lutheran church movements in the United States are more conservative than the ELCA.

I have personal ties to the denomination and hence I am interested in its progress. My mother was raised in one of the pre-merger denominations with mostly Scandinavian Lutherans, while my father was raised in another one of the pre-merger denominatioon with mostly German Lutherans. My mother was an active member of the ELCA from the time it was formed until her death and my father and stepmother have been active members of the ELCA for its entire existence, as do many (but not all) of my blood relatives (some of my relatives are secular or Roman Catholic, a few belong to the national Lutheran church denominations of Finland or German, and a few belong to Lutheran church denominations that have recently left the ELCA over questions such as the relatively progressive stance of the ELCA towards gay rights). I was an active member of the ELCA for a couple of years after the merger before rejecting Christianity, after spending the rest of my childhood as a baptized and then confirmed member of churches in its antecedent denominations).

There are 9,638 ELCA Lutheran congregations with a baptized membership of 4,059,785 and an average worship attendance of 1.1 million on a given Sunday. Thus, 38% of baptized ELCA Lutherans are inactive; 56% of active ELCA Lutherans don't go to church on any given Sunday; about 26% of baptized ELCA Lutherans do go to church on any given Sunday, according to statistics from The Lutheran (January 2013) at page 9.

Nearly 30 percent of ELCA churches reported an average worship attendance of fewer than 50 people in 2010. From 2003 to 2011, average weekley worship attendance dropped 26 percent. And from 2009 to 2010, ELCA membership decreased 5.9 percent, the sharpest decline among mainline denominations according to the National Council of Churches. . . . "Since the inception of the ELCA, we've seen decline every year, and it has accelerated over the last five years," said Elizabeth Eaton bishop of the Northeastern Ohio Synod. "It doesn't matter where a congregation is situated, we have congregational decline in every demographic, every geography" . . . Neary every U.S. Christian denomination has seen membership declines in the last two years, including Southern Baptists, who seemed invincible in the 70s, 80s and 90s . . . . More than 1000 ELCA churches have closed over the past 10 years, some merging with others, some simply shutting their doors and dispersing."

- Nicole Radziszewski, "The Shrinking Church", The Luthern (January 2013) at pages 23-25.

Presiding Bishop Mark S. Hanson pointed out in a recent open letter about the anniversary year that in this time we've started 435 congregation, ordiained nearly 8,000 pastors, send more than 2,000 missionaries to serve around the world, and contributed more than $350 million to end hunger and poverty.

- Daniel J. Lehmann , Editorial, The Lutheran (January 2013) at page 4.

The number of new congregations in twenty-five year life of the denomination is less than half of the number of congregations that have closed in the last ten years.

On one hand, the state of the ELCA and almost by definition, the state of the organized mainline Lutheran Church movement in the United States, is in a state of rapid decline. On the other, the ELCA is in many respects more vital than many of the established or recently disestablished Lutheran denominations of Europe, where the secularization trend that the United States is starting to experience is far more advanced. But, this discrepency may cease in a few decades.

There is a certain symmetry to the decline of the Lutheran Church. The countries that joined the Lutheran part of the Protestant Reformation were among the last in Europe to be converted to Christianity (initially, to Roman Catholicism). So, it makes a certain amount of sense that areas where Lutheran churches were established last (and hence where there has been the least amount of time for them to become irrevocably embedded in the culture) have been among the first to become highly secular countries.

The decline in mainline Christianity, more generally, leaves a growing void in the American religious landscape between conservative Evangelical Christianity and the non-Christian America.

Selected Factoids

* Colorado is second only to Texas in new farm creation, accounting for close to a third of new farms in the United States.  New Mexico and Arizona are also states in which large numbers of new farms are being created.  This is happened despite declining acreage in agriculture in all of these states.  I suspect that the cause is a rise in the number of small organic farms.

* Boys are four times as likely to die from suicide as girls.

* Among surveyed women aged 45-49, 42% say that the never have sex, 20% say that they have sex less than once a month, 12% say that they have sex monthly, and 26% say that they have sex weekly or more often.

The Secret Truth About Men

Men aren't really complicated. . . They are very simple, literal creatures.  They usually mean what they say.  And, we spend hours trying to analyze what they've said, when really it's obvious.  If I were you, I'd take him literally.  That might help.
 

- E.L. James, "Fifty Shades of Grey" (2011)

Thinking Like An American Judge

[The Judge] is known to be a rational man, one who loves logic and facts.  He can weigh murky, emotionally charged information - rage and love, for instance, divorce and hit and runs - and come up with a fitting legal solution.  Who gets the children, who keeps the house, how many years is enough time served, what constitutes a crime of passion.
 

- Alice Hoffman, "Here on Earth" (1997), Chapter 6.

DSM-5 Worse Than DSM-IV In Field Trials

The latest edition of the standard diagnostic manual for psychiatric disorders has been tested in a round of field trials to see if different psychiatrists can produce consistent results when using it.  The results of those trials is the discovery that the already controversial DSM-5 is producing far less consistent diagnoses than the previous two versions did in their field trials.  Even the DSM authors' self-assessment is downbeat.   And, this is despite greatly lowering the standards for reliability that were deemed acceptable.

A few conditions are consistently diagnosed in the new manual, for example, PTSD, autism and ADHD.  But, the diagnostic reliability of very common conditions, such as depression, generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, and antisocial personality disorder, for example, are all very low.  The new mixed anxiety-depression disorder diagnostic reliability rating in essentially equivalent to random chance.

All of this is very, very bad for psychiatry as a profession and suggests that the results of the DSM-5 process should be mostly scrapped.

A Demon Haunted Time

The Context Of The Book Of Tobit

The Book of Tobit, one of the apocryphal Old Testament books, is set around 735 BCE (during the lifetime of the Greek poet Homer), not quite six centuries before it was probably written.  It was probably written in Hebrew or Aramaic (the Dead Sea scrolls include copies of parts of it in both languages).  Tobit made it into circulation just in time for it to be included in the final phases of the process of transcribing the Hebrew and Aramaic texts of the Hebrew Bible into Koine Greek in Alexandria.  This translation took more than a century and concluded around 135 BCE, at a time before the Jewish people had developed the modern Hebrew Bible canon that would ultimately determine that Tobit was not a part of this canon. 

Tobit isn't a long tale.  It runs just over eleven pages in the Revised English Bible (which is the consensus translation of the Bible into modern English in the United Kingdom, that was completed in 1989 with input for all of its major Western Christian denominations: the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, and many Protestant denominations).

Synopsis

Tobias is the son of the righteous but down on his luck Jewish international merchant Tobit after whom the book is named who has continued to follow Jewish law and make generous charitable gifts when his fellow Jews in exile have ignored their religious obligations and gone native in during their exile from their Gallilean homeland (a place now located in Israel).

Tobias travels from his home in exile (Niveah, Iraq) to Tehran (now part of Iran) and back, accompanied by the disguised angel Raphael who has been ordered by God to assist Tobit and his daughter-in-law to be Sarah through Tobit's son.

The purpose of the journey that Tobias takes is to recover a small fortune held for Tobit by one of his father's cousins in an informal banking arrangement there that was stranded in Iran when trade relations between the countries broke down.  With Raphael's guidance, Tobias uses fish guts to heal his father's blindness.  Tobias also uses guts from the same fish seized with his hands on the bank of the Tigris River to exorcise on the night of his wedding to his cousin Sarah from Tehran, a demon who killed her previous seven cousin-husbands on the night of their weddings to her, before any of these seven men had an opportunity to consummate their marriages. 

For good measure, the story includes a beginning and an ending monologue from Tobit, extolling his son to generously give to the poor, adhere to the law of the Torah, and not to marry anyone who wasn't Jewish and wasn't one of his cousins.  It concludes with a song of prophecy that embeds an apocalyptic prophecy predicting the destruction of the Temple and then the restoration of a Temple in the end times following a return of Jews from their Diaspora.

Familiar Themes

In worldview and style, the Book of Tobit has great similarities to the portions of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke attributable to the presumed prior sayings Gospel called the Q source, to early catechetical work used by the Jerusalem headquarters of the Jewish Jesus movement around the same time that the Gospels were being written called the Didache, and to the canonical New Testament Letter of James.

In Tobit and the New Testament alike, faith healing and exorcism go hand in hand with each other are a practiced not only by Tobit under the direction of Raphael, but also by Jesus, Saint Paul, and the other Apostles.

The focus on faith healing and exorcism seems far less pronounced in earlier Hebrew Biblical writings. It remains a part of "the tradition", after the New Testament canon is closed, in the stories of the lives of Saints in the early Roman Catholic church.  But, these accounts gradually grow more sparse after Christianity transitions from its status as a persecuted counter cultural movement to become the established religion of the Roman Empire. Soon careful philosophers and bureaucrats had mostly replaced crazed and wild mendicants and martyrs in the organized Christian church.

What Did This Mean To Its Intended Audience?

I am not a believer.  But, even atheists do not deny that Judaism and Christianity are absolutely real phenomena. 

It also seems plausible that even though demons don't actually exist, that in the last couple of centuries BCE and the first couple of centuries CE, there was widespread popular belief in the theory that all manner of afflictions were attributable either to demon possession or to some other cure that a faith healer could resolve in a moment. 

Or did they?

Why at this moment in time in the Eastern Mediterranean, did people come to think that they lived in such a demon haunted world?  What changed that caused this belief system to fade?  Was this really a change in belief system or just a change in literary style?  What motivated someone to invent this story which reads more like a parable than a history or memoir?

Was Demon Possession An Imperfect Germ Theory of Disease?

One way to understand a demon possession theory of disease is as a natural set of inferences to make from the germ theory of disease infused with our natural psychological tendency to infuse coincidence or correlation with the coherence of a presumed agent acting with intention and moral purpose. 

A colony of harmful viruses or bacteria or parasites or fungi in your body can certainly feel like a demon intentionally possessing you, but are invisble to people who are not infected except via the symptoms of the disease.  People who have these kinds of infections, which would have been much more common two thousand years ago, give or take a couple of centuries, can certainly act in strange ways in the throes of fever and internal pains.  And, people who didn't adhere to Talmudic law regarding ritual purity and food preparation may also have been more likely to receive these infestations, reinforcing the perception that disease and immorality went hand in hand. 

Exorcists and faith healers with good timing and immunity derived from having suffered from the latest outbreak personally, could ritually schedule their rituals shortly before these infectious diseases were due to have run their course in their latest victims, so as to create a steady stream of what seemed to be cause and effect anecdotes to support their abilities.  Failures could be attributed to particularly menacing demons that were too powerful for the exorcist to defeat.

Were These Miracle Stories Universally Understood As Fictional Parables?

Perhaps, however, the people of the time believed no such thing.  It could be that this was a literary convention and that stories full of people who could heal with a touch and exorcise demons were understood to be fictional stories in the nature of parables.  In the same way, people in the early 21st century generally do not believe in vampires and werewolves and superheros, even though our popular literature is so full of them and those accounts often contain no express statement that they are fictional.  Perhaps all reasonable people at the time understood these elements as parables and symbols of the virtue of the people who had these powers as a matter of literacy convention and from context.

Did Miracle Stories Have Different Meanings For Adults And Children?

Or perhaps, the legends, like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, were meant to be understood in different ways by different audiences at the same time.  They may have been intended to be understood as real by children, and as parables by adults, a scenario in which a disclosure that a story was fictional within the text itself would be inappropriate.  Indeed, publicly acknowledging that tales like these could be fictional even today is considered a major breech of etiquette.  Perhaps modern day Biblical literalists are acting like iron age children who never grow up, unlike their fellow iron age child believers.

The Non-Naturalist Explanation

Suppose that you are not a metaphysical naturalist (i.e. you are not a skeptic).  Then, perhaps that was something about that particular historic era that allowed demons to overrun the region, and God or some other cosmic force sought to restore the balance with exorcists that culminated in the century or so around the time of Jesus and Saint Paul (several similar exorcist-faith healing Messiahs expired around 4 BCE).  As the exorcists were successful, demons went the way of the Mammoth and with them exorcist lines grew dilute, assisted by the fading practice of cousin marriage, a celibate priesthood, and the absence of a societal need to maintain large corps of natural born or specially trained exorcists.

In this account, demon possession only seems implausible now because demons, and the miracles needed to counter them, are now so rare in the "civilized world" even though they were once far more common.

Are These Questions Unanswerable?

From a remove of two millenia, with precious little contemporary commentary until the third century CE or so, it is hard to know what people actually believed and what these stories meant to them.

Law and Plumbing

Upper division law school courses are notorious for "law and" course.  Law and economics.  Law and sports.  Law and feminism.  Law and religion.

One course that I have never seen a law school offer is "law and plumbing."  This mostly reflects the lack real world experience practicing law on the part of law professors, and also the serious deficit of plumbing knowledge on most law faculties.

You think I jest.  But, honestly, after law and economics, law and plumbing probably runs a close second in relevance to a practice like mine which is built around serving upper middle class and affluent individuals, and small and medium sized business.

I probably have at least one or two matters a year, probably at least two or three a year on average, that present law and plumbing issues.  In contrast, for example, law and religion comes up in my practice only once every several years.  Law and plumbing  issues are just a bit more common than law and medicine issues.

Plumbing disclosures are a mandatory part of every residential real estate transaction.  Sometimes there are construction defect questions.  Sometimes there are disputed between neighbors that implicate the laws of easements or condominium law.  Sometimes they present as water law issues.  Sometimes they come up as landlord-tenant disputes (not necessarily small ones, commercial property owners have these issues as well).  Not infrequently, they involve questions of governmental liability, insurance coverage (when is a plumbing issues a "flood" that is not covered, and when it is an accidental casualty that is covered), and licensing law.  They come up in divorces, foreclosures, real estate development and estate planning cases, since plumbing issues go to the valuation of property (particular in determining development value of vacant or only partially developed land) and generate expenses that must be allocated to the right people.  They can come up in tort liability cases in a variety of ways.  They can come up in quasi-criminal ordinance violation cases.  They come up in oil and gas law contexts.

Lawyers can also relate to the business model of plumbers.  They are selling services, have a fairly low overhead, and struggle with issues related to the value associated with the time they must spend to get something done and the value associated with their expertise. Plumbers have analogs to transactional practice (new construction and renovation work), and also analogs to litigation practice (when things break in someone's home or business).  Plumbers charge for their services on a time and materials basis, although there is some experimentation with alternative billing structures, and sometimes charge hourly rates similar to ours.  Plumbers face marketing issues similar to lawyers, and are still fairly decentralized outside "big transactions" (like installing new plumbing for large new developments and major commercial buildings).  Plumbers, like lawyers, are licensed by the state and sometimes serve as expert witnesses, but mostly help clients meet their personal needs.  Both lawyers and plumbers need to have a certain amount of slack in their schedules, because new client emergencies that require prompt and intensive and time consuming provision of services come up all the time.

The range of legal issues and plumbing issues involved is quite diffuse, but these problems do suffer from the core element of any multi-disciplinary enterprise.  One needs a high level of expertise in lots of different kinds of legal and plumbing knowledge to adroitly and efficiently handle these issues, and not a whole lot of people have all of the relevant skill sets.

James D. Tabor on Christianity

[T]he Christian faith, confessed by millions each week in church services all over the world, originates from the experiences and ideas on one man - Saul of Taurus, better known as the apostle Paul- not from Jesus himself, or from Peter, John, or James, or any of the original apostles that Jesus chose in his lifetime.  And further, I maintain there was a version of "Christianity before Paul" affirmed by both Jesus and his original followers, with tenets and affirmations quite opposite to these of Paul. This is the lost and forgotten Christianity of James the brother of Jesus, leader of the movement following Jesus' death, and the Christianity of Peter and all the apostles.  In other words, the message of Paul, which created Christianity was we know it, and the message of the historical Jesus and his earliest followers, were not the same.  In fact, they were sharply opposed to one another with little in common beyond the name Jesus itself.

- James D. Tabor, "Paul and Jesus" (2012) at xv-xvi (emphasis in the original).

Tabor is a professional New Testament scholar whose research focuses on the historical context of the early Christian church and a particular focus on the life of the apostle Paul.  The book is something of a magnus opus of his 45 year career. 

Later is his preface, Tabor states (emphasis in the original) that: "Paul is the most influential person in human history, and realize it or not, he has shaped practically all we think about everything." He begins the book proper with this short sentence: "Paul never met Jesus."

What Do I Know About This Stuff?

While not quite as erudite as Tabor, this is something I know a bit about.  I've read the Biblical and extra-canonical Christian texts he is referring to, I grew up as a liturgical Christian and have the experienced first hand daily church life of Lutherans, Episcopalians, and two kinds of Presbyterians (one more evangelical than the other) as a congregant, and have more episodic first hand experience with Reformed Jewish practice, Roman Catholic practice, United Methodist practice, and Unitarian Universalist practice.

I was a history minor in college in a curriculum that focused heavily on European history, and in particular the history of Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches.  I have read over the last couple of decades, not infrequently, magazines and books directed at the educated Christian laity. 

As such, I have some qualifications to put Tabor's statements into a larger context.

How Accurate Is Tabor's Thesis?

I would concur with Tabor that there were indeed different movements in the early Christian church, one centered around Peter and closer to the original teachings of Jesus, sometimes called Petrine Christianity, and another centered around Paul that contained innovations and a different emphasis that sometimes seems contradictory to Petrine Christianity, sometimes called Pauline Christianity. 

I would also agree that modern Christianity, both the Western Christianity of the Roman Catholic church and its Protestant descendants, and the Eastern Christianity of the Orthodox Christian Churches draws more heavily from Pauline Christianity than Petrine Christianity, and that they are largely an outgrowth of Pauline Christianity.  Paul's church actively sought converts from the ranks of Gentiles (i.e. non-Jews) and this is what allowed the church as an institution to grow phenomenally.  The Petrine church focused much more heavily on converting the Jewish community to the revelations of a Jewish Messiah who was the son of a Jewish god, and had far less success on this approach to evangelization.

I would dispute that Petrine Christianity is "lost and forgotten."  I was aware of the tensions between these two threads of Christianity at least as early as the time at which I was a young teenage Lutheran in junior high school and I was surely not all that precious in that regard; our pastor explored these tensions frequently in his sermons.  The scholarly debate of the issue and its theological implications has raged for centuries within the Christian church.

Petrine Christianity is not lost and forgotten because Petrine Christianity and Pauline Christianity, while having important differences and innovations, have a great deal in common.  An essential kernel of Petrine Christianity is embedded in Pauline Christianity.  They share much of the Gospel message.  They also share borrowings from the Jewish Hebrew Bible that are profoundly different in their shared understanding from the theological assumptions of the Greco-Roman pagan worldview that they replaced in most of the Roman Empire and in some places beyond it.  They have much more in common than the name "Jesus" even though they come to very different conclusions about the meanings of the common materials.

Lastly, while I would agree that Paul was a profoundly influential person in the early Christian church who almost certainly did exist, whether or not the historical Jesus did, I am inclined to believe that Tabor attributes too much of the character of early Western Christianity to Paul himself.  Western Christianity was a syncretic religion that borrowed heavily from Platonic philosophy, from the cult of Mithras, and from the cult of Dionysus, to name a few, and there were at least half a dozen to a dozen individuals, such as Saints Augustine and Jerome, and even Emperor Constantine, who played important roles in cobbling together the Biblical canon, the liturgy and rituals of the early church, the organizational form of the early church, and the theological framework of the early church.  Paul was one of the earliest figures in his movement and thus contributed to almost all of these things to some extent, but it was a collective effort.  He set a course into which later innovations by others would position themselves, but he did not make all of those innovations and borrowings himself. 

Moreover, the influence of Pauline Christianity on thought outside the realm of religion, and even on lay understandings of religion, is fairly limited.  For example, popular understandings of Hell, who have profound influences on how we think about religion at all, probably owe more to Dante than to Paul.

Is Tabor Right About What Is Important?

My critiques of his thesis aside, Tabor's thesis has to be understood in the essential context in which it arises, which an era in which multiple Christian denominations are facing internal schismatic theological divides on questions of how to apply the Christian message to modern ethical challenges such as the church's response to issues like the role of women in the church, gay rights, and other social issues.

The schismatic fault lines in 20th and 21st century Christianity fall squarely on opposing sides of the divides between Pauline and Petrine Christianity.  And, as Petrine Christianity is closer to Jesus, even though it is farther from historical Christian practice, it has moral authority.  An elucidation of the ways in which the modern church departs from Petrine Christianity is the foundation of a case for the internal theological reform of Christian denominations and with that reform, a restatement of their social message.  In particular, it favors the "liberal" wing of the schismatic divide in the Western Christian churches over the "conservative" wing of that divide, and provides justification for reforms sought by the "liberal" wing of Christianity on issues like gay rights and feminism.

These implications, which have long been apparent, even on the face of the New Testament texts without further elucidation, are important reasons that conservative Christians have fervently opposed the historical-critical-linguistic method of Biblical interpretation since it arose in 19th century Germany.

Indeed, one can go back further than that.  Sola scriptura, by scripture alone, was one of the slogans of the Protestant Reformation in  the 16th century, which in that context, sought reform by a similar intellectual strategy.  The Reformers held up early Church practice up as an ideal, as a means of displacing innovations and interpretations by later post-Pauline innovations by formative figures in the Roman Catholic tradition, as a means of addressing schismatic disputes over social issues of that day and age.

So, yes, there is room to criticize Tabor's main thesis, as I do above.  But, on the essential element of his claim, in the context of modern Christianity, that Petrine Christianity is closer to the earliest Christian church than Jesus, assuming the New Testament texts to be accurate at least in gross consensus details as Christians do, is closer to "true Christianity" and further from modern Christian practice, than Pauline Christianity.  Hence, his main thesis is solid on question of whether the liberals or the conservatives in the modern schismatic fights of Christian denominations hold the moral high ground.

Edward Gibbons on Christianity

As the happiness of a future life is the great object of religion, we may hear without surprise or scandal that the introduction, or at least the abuse of Christianity, had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire.  

The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers' pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity. 

Faith, zeal, curiosity, and more earthly passions of malice and ambition, kindled the flame of theological discord; the church, and even the state, were distracted by religious factions, whose conflicts were sometimes bloody and always implacable; the attention of the emperors was diverted from camps to synods; the Roman world was oppressed by a new species of tyranny; and the persecuted sects became the secret enemies of their country. [...]  

If the decline of the Roman empire was hastened by the conversion of Constantine, his victorious religion broke the violence of the fall, and mollified the ferocious temper of the conquerors.

Edward Gibbons,  "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," Chapter 39.

Many twenty-first century atheists decry the negative influences of Christianity.  But, very few anticlerically inclined people these days would offer some of the criticisms that Edward Gibbons did, e.g. that it encouraged people to be more patient, that it promoted charity, that it made people less ambitious, and that spending on religion cut into the defense budget.  These days those are the aspects of Christianity that are either praised or decried as being under emphasized (e.g. in criticism of the "prosperity gospel").  The "civic virtues" that Gibbons extols, are political values one might expect to hear from Tea Party Republicans these days, although targeted at the evils of "big government" rather than Christianity.

His criticisms are basically criticisms on Christianity from the political right, as opposed to the political left, that have been dampened in modern times by the steadfast alliance that has emerged between conservatives and conservative denominations within Christianity  These alliance are present both in the United States and in Europe.  They are, however, absent in Asia, where Christianity tends to be associated with liberal political forces or is politically neutral.

Hard drive crap

While I was out of the office sick for a while, I attended to some mindless tasks that always get put off in the rush of the day practicing law.  One was to run a full system scan, which takes a bit more than two hours.  It turns out that my laptop's little hard drive has about 1.3 million files on it.

Another was to delete duplicate working copies of documents that are also on the client document server at work that I had made over the last couple of years when I needed to work in places where it wasn't accessible (yes, there are places in the United States that lack internet access!).  There were about 5 gigabytes of this, and a similar amount of data that one of the utility programs on the computer advised me were safe to delete.

After that rush of destruction, there were about 72 gigabytes on my hard drive, of which about 17 gigabytes were documents (tens of thousands of files, about two-thirds of which were inactive client files not ready for destruction and the rest of which were files I actually might use somewhat regularly) and the other 55 gigabytes of which were the operating system and programs.

So, about 98% of the files on my hard drive and about three-quarters of the hard drive space in use, consists of the operating system and programs that I don't understand at all and don't dare interact with via the file folders on the hard drive, even though I can.

When a look at the top level folders on my hard drive, four have incomprehensible long more or less random strings of numbers and letters, three look like they might make sense to someone with a CS degree but mean nothing to me (BAT Files, Intel, PerfLogs, and SwSetup), and four make some kind of sense to me (Program Files, Program Files(x86), Users and Windows). 

The program files folders even have subfolders that correspond to computer programs that I use and understand to some extent.  The Users folder has my documents in it, which I understand perfectly well.  But, the Windows folder, while temptingly understandable at the top level folder level as the operating system, is a heart of darkness and incomprehensive files and file names and subfolders in vast numbers once you open it up.

A few bits seem to make sense, like "Fonts" folder, but others, like SysWOW32, winsxs, and twain_32 are utter mysteries and the files within them often have long random strings of numbers and letters for names.

In the interest of my psychological well being, I tell myself that all of the incomprehensible crap on my hard drive probably has some essential purposes that shouldn't be messed with, but my aethestic sensibilities are offended.  A tool that I rely upon every day for my livelihood (and a great deal of entertainment), should not be so unfathomably complex that I don't even have a remote idea what parts that are placed prominently in ways that make it possible for me to interact with them do.  I may not know how to fix my car, a vastly simpler machine, but at least I know more or less what all the parts that go into it are for, and even the names of most of them.

It also stinks to high heaven of sloppy, lazy, software design by companies like Microsoft that have gotten fat and lazy.  Even if this mess is unavoidable, it is entirely unnecessary for vast amounts of this muck to take up such prominent real estate in the file folder hierarchy of the hard drive.  They might as well have printed out all of the programs in word processing files filed with machine code.  If it must exist, stick all of the muckety muck three layers down in a single obscure corner of a single folder marked prominently with "don't touch" warnings on it.

The only reason I don't switch to Linux, aside from the compatability issues with some key programs that might be lurking out there, is that then I really might have to know what all that muckety muck is and I really don't want to go there.

Why is it so hard for everyone in the world of IT except Apple to understand that computer users want simplicity and not maximum complexity and modifiability?  We want something that works and does what we use it to do, not a Swiss Army knife with attachments we've never even learned the names of.  Maybe in some future utopia, this little concern will be addressed, but I'm not hopeful.

The Great Adjustment

What big idea can sum up a whole host of the trends that are at work in our daily lives?

One way to sum it up is that we are in the midst of the "Great Adjustment."  We are in the thick of forming a new culture that is adapting to new technologies and new economic realities, to the "Post-Modern" world. 

Examples

The notion is easiest to explain with examples.

* We experienced a huge change in how we reproduce in the 1960s and 1970s with the advent of a variety of new contraceptive methods and the legalization of abortion.  The sexual revolution followed, but it was followed with a sort of counter-revolution of concern about date rape, marital rape, domestic violence, STDs, teen pregnancy, child sexual abuse and pornography, and human trafficing.  A bit later, women who had used these technologies and reacted to these new attitudes by postponing child bearing decided they wanted children and have turned to assisted reproduction technologies to have children late in life.  Often this has had the side effect of creating affluent older mothers of young twins or triplets or higher order multiples.

Reliable contraception has also made it possible for the first time in history, pretty much, for men and women to have long term sexual relationships, within or outside marriage, without a realistic possibility of having children together before deciding to have children together (or not).

It has similarly made it possible for the first time in history, pretty much, for women to decide to focus on higher education and careers for long periods of time, even their entire lives, without commiting to sexual abstinance or being lesbians.  Likewise, it has become much easier for women to have just one, two or three children and then to stop having more children and become employed full time later in life as the children get older.

Where are we now?  We are at the tail end of making a permanent, at least for the indefinite future until something changes, adjustment to these realities by incorporating effective ways of managing them into to basic script of our culture.

Pessimists bemoan the end of traditional culture as we head to hell in a handbasket.  They are half right.  Traditional culture is dying.  But, we aren't heading to hell.  Instead, we are heading to a new post-modern cultural synthesis that is going to become the new traditional culture, possible for centuries or even thousands of years to come.

* Since the 1970s, our economy has slowly, but surely shifted from valuing labor to valuing intelligence.  The economy has always valued both and still does.  But, the economic premium that smart people can obtain relative to equally hard working, decent, not stupid people has surged immensely.  The former, who make up perhaps 20% of the workforce, have received perhaps 80% of the last four decades of economic growth.  The latter, who make up perhaps 80% of the workforce, have received perhaps 20% of the last four decades of economic growth.  The upper middle class has grown more affluent at a rate perhaps sixteen times that of the social class rungs below them over the last forty years.

Social class divisions have hardened.  After about a half a century in which servants disappeared from economic life and everyone was expected to deal with their own household needs, the older scheme in which there is a reasonably large class of people who have servants in some form or another has started to re-emerge.

The middle class has shrunk, losing "market share" to both the working class and the upper middle class.  We are on the verge of seeing a meaningful and potentially long term redrawing of the social class system.

* For most of human history, the fundamental issue was simply getting enough calories.  The first big change came in the Neolithic revolution when modern humans domesticated plants and animals, making possible herding and farming, and not long after that in many cultures, developed lactose tolerance, making it possible for adults to digest cow's milk.  Yet, even with herding and farming, annual periods of fasting driven by the food production cycle of the seasons and the limited means of perserving food, were the norm.  The developed world standard in which almost no one wants for food in their entire lives and diets have almost no connection to the season is recent indeed.

We have also, for most of human history, needed for more physical activity to sustain daily life.

Following old norms and ill advised changes in those old norms (e.g. the switch from butter to margarine, which substituted saturated fats for equally unhealthy or worse transfats), unhealthy obesity has surged.  So, we are in the process of changing the food ways of our culture in a way better adapted to the new realities.

* For roughly a century, we have enjoyed an economy fueled by oil obtained easily and cheaply from oil wells.  This has revolutionized transporation, urban design, and a whole host of other aspects of how we organize the global economy.  This era is winding down.  With it, conserving energy becomes more important, more compact land use becomes more attractive, public transit's desirability relative to private automobiles increases, and alternatives with their own demands on our culture emerge.

Oil use has already almost entirely ceased in electricity generation and has dramatically declined in industrial uses and home heating.  Very active efforts are underway to find transportation alternatives and alternatives for agricultural fertilizers and chemicals that are less dependent upon petroleum.

As oil becomes more scarce, organic foods will become more attractive, not because the are healtier or more environmentally friendly than non-organic foods, but because they will become less expensive than non-organic foods because petroleum is a less important factor of production for organic foods than for non-organic ones and petroleum will grow more expensive.

Land use has already seen a period in which the affluent are returning to central cities from the suburbs.

Analysis

The examples above aren't exhaustive or even particularly well explained.  But, they help illustrate what I mean when I say that we are in the midst of the Great Adjustment.

Technology, demographic change, long term shifts in natural resource availability, global warming and more have made and are continuing to make irreversible changes in the enviroment within which people find themselves and in order to adapt better to these changes, our culture is being remade in a manner that is better suited to this new world order.

The name of the game is to determine what the new synthesis the results in the Great Adjustment will look like.

Reality Bites: Career v. Family Edition

Here is a Friday afternoon treat for you (via Marginal Revolution) addressing in an utterly practical and realistic and witty way the fundamental conundrums of modern applied feminism from Penelope Trunk, whose new book: The New American Dream: Blueprint for a New Path to Success a feel obligated to draw your attention to.  The fine writing in the linked blog post quite vividly recreates the essence of how decisions on balancing work and family are made by women with a great deal of well substantiated wit and a little more Myers-Briggs personality analysis than is probably reasonably necessary for the task (mostly omitted in the excerpt below).  Here is a taste of it:

You cannot pick a husband to have kids with until you know if you want to work full-time while you are raising them. Some women will say they know for sure that they do want to work full-time. Most women will say that they don’t know for sure. But there are actually only two choices: be a breadwinner or marry a breadwinner. . . .

Scenario 1: Be a Breadwinner . . .

Breadwinner option 1: Marry a stay-at-home dad. . . .

High-powered jobs leave little time for kids. And people who advance past the age of 35 have a stay-at-home spouse supporting them. If you have kids, the top-tier jobs in the business world are two-people jobs. People who have kids and a stay-at-home spouse advance at a much, much higher rate than people who don’t.

Breadwinner option 2: Nannies . . .

Women who have kids and a big job and no stay-at-home husband have two nannies, and a household staff, because you need to be covered every second of every day because you don’t know what work will need. (Remember: this is from day one of having kids.)  . . .

How to pick a husband who will co-exist with a breadwinner and nannies.

If you are picking the two-nanny route, you will need to find a husband who earns more than you. Statistically your marriage is high risk if you and your husband are both in the workforce and you earn more than him because surveys show that you will resent him. This is not logical, or social, it is primal. Statistically, you will marry a guy who does not make as much as you and then you will have kids and get a divorce. Because women hate the feeling of out-earning their husbands.

To be clear: there is no scenario where you have a big job but do not work long hours. That does not happen. There are not those jobs in this world. And that is fair: . . . You give something up to get something. Always. 

Scenario 2: Be Home with Your Kids

If you want to be home with your kids, you’re going to need a solid plan to make that happen. Pew Research finds that about 60% of all working women with kids want to work part-time and be home with their kids part-time. (Note that Macleans magazine reports that women with kids who work part-time are the happiest in the world.) Gallup reports that about 40% of women don’t want to work at all. (Note that this leaves a statistically irrelevant number of women who have kids and want to work full-time.)

Home with Kids Option 1: Work part-time.  Let’s assume you want to work part-time, since this is the more complicated of the two scenarios. The problem with this scenario is that part-time jobs don’t offer advancement or a lot of money, so you need to be with a guy who will work full-time.  Don’t tell me that you want your husband to work part-time, because aiming for the impossible 50/50 split leads to divorce. First, because it’s the road to eternal poverty; part-time jobs are low pay, without advancement, and they are the first to go when it’s time to cut jobs. So you create massive financial instability by having two people work part-time. Also, parents who do this say it’s total chaos, and in a 50/50 split the women always end up doing way more.

Home with Kids Option 2: Don’t bother with earning money. 

If the guy is working full-time, then he is not going to do all the parenting stuff. You are. So you are working part-time and you are a full-time parent. You will have to work hard to not get resentful about this. And really, who could blame you? The best antidote for this resentment is money. If the guy makes a lot of money you can hire people to help you and then you don’t have to be upset that the guy is not helping you.Or not. Or you can just let the guy go to his job, which, you will certainly know, is way easier than taking care of kids, because every job in the whole world is easier than taking care of kids, and you will be home doing everything else. Maybe you will have a part-time job, but that will not be the focus of your energy because the stuff at home is way harder than your part-time job. Your part-time job will be a break from the hard stuff. So pick a guy who will earn enough to ensure that you are not pissed.

Also, pick a guy who will earn enough so that you don’t have to work. Because statistically speaking, you will not want a full-time job, and you definitely won’t want a job where you have to earn six figures, because that’s way more than full-time.

How to find a husband who is a breadwinner.

[E]veryone looks like a breadwinner in their twenties. . . . at some point, the salary gets high enough that you have to actually be good at what you do to continue getting jobs at that salary. Then some people start getting stuck . . . This happens to most people around age 30. . . . So the best thing to do is to assume anyone over 30 is making as much as they will make in their life. . . .  (By age 40 almost no one’s salary increases.) . . . If you are marrying young, which I recommend, then you’re playing the odds.

Scenario 3: Denial. Don’t do this.

There will be people who say you can’t choose who you fall in love with. This is a lie, of course. There are a million people you could fall in love with. If one is impractical, just go find another. There will be people who say they don’t know what they want until they see who they marry. . . . the odds are you do not want a huge job and you are in scenario two.

Most people just will not like these choices. Nothing here is good. It’s reality, and of course it’s not as good as fantasy. The only good, real thing is that you have choices, and you can figure out who you are and what you need and you can get what you need. The only thing worse than the choices I’ve just laid out is not making a choice.

U.S. Public Health And Safety Dismal

The United States lags behind almost every other developed country in terms of both public health and public safety, according to a major new comparative study of mortality and mobidity (i.e. deaths and impairment from illnesses) in United States and sixteen other developed countries (see also here).  Canada, Japan, Australia and most of Western Europe was included in the study. 

American levels of public health and public safety are often closer to those of developing countries and third world countries than to those of its developed nation peers.

The key findings of the 378 page study by a panel of experts included the following:

Americans Under Age 75 Are Less Healthy Than Their Developed Country Peers

* "Deaths before age 50 accounted for about two-thirds of the difference in life expectancy between males in the United States and their counterparts in 16 other developed countries, and about one-third of the difference for females. . . . American men ranked last in life expectancy among the 17 countries in the study [at 75.6 years], and American women ranked second to last [at 80.7 years]. . . . Americans also had the lowest probability over all of surviving to the age of 50." 

* "The United States had the second-highest death rate from the most common form of heart disease, the kind that causes heart attacks, and the second-highest death rate from lung disease, a legacy of high smoking rates in past decades. . . . The report . . . details health indicators for youths where the United States ranks near or at the bottom. There are so many that the list takes up four pages. Chronic diseases, including heart disease, also played a role for people under 50."

* "American adults . . . have the highest diabetes rates." . . . Americans consumed an average of 3,770 calories per day, a higher average than in any other country."

* Americans lose more years of life before age 50 to alcohol and drug abuse than people in any of the other countries."  This is despite the fact that Americans are less heavy drinkers.  Americans "abuse more prescription and illicit drugs."

*"The United States has the highest infant mortality rate among these countries, and its young people have the highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases, [and] teen pregnancy."  "The rate of premature babies in the United States, at 12 percent, is comparable to that of sub-Saharan Africa."

Americans Are Less Safe Than Their Developed Country Peers

* "Car accidents, gun violence and drug overdoses were major contributors to years of life lost by Americans before age 50."

* American "young people have the highest rates of . . . deaths from car crashes . . . Deaths from motor vehicle cashes, non-transportation-related injuries, and violence occur at much higher rates in the United States than in other countries and are a leading cause of death in children, adolescents and young adults."

* "Americans are less likely to wear seat belts and more likely to ride motorcycles without helmets."

* "[S]uicide rates were lower in the United States, [but] firearm suicide rates were six times higher."

* As another report on the study notes: "The United States has about six violent deaths per 100,000 residents. None of the 16 other countries included in the review came anywhere close to that ratio. Finland was closest to the U.S. . . . with slightly more than two violent deaths per 100,000 residents. . . . [H]omicide and suicide together account for about a quarter of the years of life lost for U.S. men compared to those in those peer contries. . . . our risk of death from homicide is seven times higher[.]" Homicide is the second leading cause of death among Americans aded 15-24, the large majority of which involve firearms.

* "The rate of firearm homicides was 20 times higher in the United States than in the other countries, according to the report, which cited a 2011 study of 23 countries. And though suicide rates were lower in the United States, firearm suicide rates were six times higher. Sixty-nine percent of all American homicide deaths in 2007 involved firearms, compared with an average of 26 percent in other countries[.]"  * The "United States has the highest rate of firearm ownership among peer contrie - 89 civilizan-owned firearms for every 100 Americans, and the U.S. is home to about 25 to 50 percent of the wold's civilizan-owned firearms[.]"

* "[T]here is little evidence that violent acts occur more frequently in the United States . . . . It's the lethality of those attacks that stands out."

Poor Americans Are Worst Off, But Americans Of All Social Classes Are Worse Off

* The United States "has the highest rates of poverty among the countries studied. . . . In the other countries, more generous social safety nets buffer families from the health consequences of poverty[.]"  Child poverty in the United States was particularly high relative to its developed country peers.

 

*Americans who have not graduated from high school die from diabetes at three times the rate of those with some college[.]" 

 

* The "United States has a highly fragmented health care system, with limited primary care resources and a large uninsured population."

 

* While low income and minority individuals in the United States are comparatively worst, "even the people most likely to be healthy, like [white] college-educated Americans and those with high incomes," are less health than the peers in other developed countries. 

 

* Immigrants in the United States are generally healthier than native born Americans.

 

American's Have Grown Less Healthy Only After World War II

* "[T]he pattern of higher rates of disease and shorter lives . . . was responsible for dragging the country to the bottom in terms of life expectancy over the past 30 years. . . as recently as the 1950s, Americans scored better in life expectancy and disease than many of the other countries in the current study. . . . And it’s getting worse.”

In Some Respects The U.S. Does Well 

* The U.S. "spends more on health care than any other in the survey." 

* The U.S. has among the highest per capita incomes in the developed world (particularly after adjusting for mineral resource driven wealth).

* The has among the highest rates of secondary and higher education completion in the world. 

* "Death rates from cancers that can be detected with tests, like breast cancer, were lower in the United States. Adults had better control over their cholesterol and high blood pressure."

* "Americans are less likely to smoke and may drink less heavily than their counterparts in other countries." 

* American health outcomes are better than its peers for people aged 75 or older. 

The U.S. Is Showing Progress Or Implementing Reforms On Many Fronts

Progress On Smoking And Room For Progress On Heart Disease and Diabetes

* Greatly reduced smoking rates in the last couple of decades are almost certain to greatly reduce future lung cancer rates, and bans on smoking in public which have just started to take effect in the last few years have also been shown to greatly reduce heart disease deaths.

* There is considerable room to reap the benefits of studies showing dramatic reductions in cardiovascular diseases through moderate alcohol consumption, low dose asprin regimes, and statin drugs.

* Obesity and adult onset diabetes have been recognized as major public health problems, even if the solutions to those problems remain elusive.

Weight loss experts like South Beach Diet author Arthur Agatston, M.D., attribute a significant share of the blame fo the obesity epidemic to widely promoted low-fat, high-carb diets promoted by George McGovern's Senate Committee, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's "food pyramid" and the American Heart Association.  This consensus on what went into a healthy diet were based on early empirical research by Dr. Ansel Keys and others that missed key nuances like the importance of fiber and the health distinctions between different kinds of fats, which led to a conventional wisdom about healthy eating that was greatly at odds with the reality of healthy eating.

A more sedentary lifestyle due to increased use of computers and television, and less walkable communities due to suburbanization and the rise of Euclidian zoning have also been important factors on the exercise side of the equation.

There is good reason to believe that major cultural changes based on increased empirical studies of what works in weight reduction and what kind of weight reduction really matters may provide a route to addressing the obseity problem. Long term studies of food consumption by Americans over the past decades have shown that Americans have been quite responsive in changing their diets in response to new widespread understandings about which foods are or are not healthy to eat.

Progress Related To Teen Pregnancy And Fertility Rates For The Poor

* While teen pregnancy rates in the United States are high by international standards, they have fallen greatly and are at all time lows for the United States.

* In the last decade or so, for the first time in more than a century, poor women are having fewer children than affluent women, which should help to reduce the rates of child poverty.

Progress Related To The Health Care System

* The Affordable Health Care Act, aka Obamacare, the key provisions of which take effect in 2014 and is almost certain to actually take effect in light of the 2012 election results and U.S. Supreme Court decisions upholding the constitutionality of some of its key provisions, will dramatically reduce the ranks of the uninsured in the United States and will also make other improvements to the health care delivery system in the United States.

* The quality of U.S. trauma care in hospitals has made significant improvement in recent decades in many metropolitan areas that have developed "trauma center" hospitals, and also a result of improved medical treatment options.  For example, "liquid bandages" have greatly improved the ability of medical providers to treat blood loss particularly from internal bleeding.

* Medical treatments for AIDS have become much more effective, and vaccination for HPV which is just beginning has the potential to greatly reduce the incidence of this STD and the cancers it causes over the next several decades.

Progress Related To Homicides

* While homicide rates in the United States are high by international standards, they have fallen dramatically in the last twenty years to near all time lows.  Also, some U.S. regions have homicide rates far below the U.S. average, so much of the homicide problem in the U.S. is a product of regional cultures and policies rather than national ones.

Progress Related To Accidental Deaths And Drug Abuse

* U.S. deaths from accidents have fallen to near record lows in almost every category except accidental drug overdoses (often of prescribed or unprescribed prescription drugs like painkiller Oxycontin) and continue to do so.  DUI related motor vehicle accident deaths, for example, have fallen greatly.

* Concerted efforts to reduce DUI deaths and deaths in motor vehicle accidents by young drivers are ongoing and showing signs of success.

* The drug overdose problem in the United States is very particularized, is linked to the legal health care delivery system quite intimatedly, and is recent in origin, so it is plausible that a quite narrow solution could solve this major public health problem.

* Rising levels of prescription drug abuse and overdoses have obscured progress in reducing rates of deaths and hospitalizations from illicit drug overdoses.

* American policymakers are slowly but steadily beginning to treat drug abuse more like a public health problem as many of our developed country peers have, and less like a criminal justice issue.

The U.S. Is Slipping Or Making No Progress On Other Fronts

Weak Points In U.S. Health and Health Care Systems

* Obesity rates continue to rise despite widespread public health efforts to address them because no empirically validated, consensus approach to successfully address it has been devised.

* Health care costs continue to rise and remain dramatically greater than those of peer nations despite the fact that our system has worse outcomes for all but the oldest patients.  Moreover, where the U.S. has better outcomes (for patients age seventy-five and older), U.S. health care costs are extremely high compared to other developed country peers.

* U.S. mental health care systems have still not recovered from the deinstitutionalization revolution half a century ago.  More mentally ill people are incarcerated than are in inpatient mental health care facilities.

Economic Inequality, Business Cycles and Political System Flaws

* The U.S. is making little or no progress in addressing income inequality, poverty, or child poverty.  And, marriage rates continue to fall while divorce rates remain high for poor and working class Americans even as marriage remains a healthy institution and divorce rates are falling for the upper middle class.  The one bright spot is that the 2012 fiscal cliff legislation has left the United States with the most progressive federal income tax structure that it has had since 1979.  But, higher taxation for the affluent was not accompanied by any improvements in the safety net for the less affluent.

* Little progress is being made in developing and implementing ways to address child abuse, child neglect and the poor conditions faced by children in foster care.

* Some of the recent positive trends in U.S. public health and public safety indicators are the product to a great extent of a long term economic boom that continue from about 1983 to 2007 interupted by recessions that were relatively mild in terms of economic pain for most Americans. Since then, we have had the worst recession since the Great Depression and it may be decades but for public health and public safety consequences of this recession manifest themselves and reverse these trends.

* No progress has been made in finding ways to fix a political system that systemically favors the old over the young.  Few people even recognize this as an important deep political source for U.S. policy biases in this regard.

Gun Control and Criminal Justice

* Recent developments in Second Amendment law have seriously limited policy efforts to regulate firearms.

* It is not clear if the trend towards reduced incarceration in the United States, which has the highest incarceration rates in the world, will be positive, by reducing poverty and public expenditures on prisons and allowing for more people to contribute economically to U.S. life, or while be negative by fueling increased crime rates.

Education

* The academic achievement of American students is only middling by developed world standards and the U.S. is starting to lag within higher education by the critical measure of native born residents who are earning STEM degrees. Arguably, the U.S. is merely par for the course in education, dramatically underdevelops the educational potential of academically strong students from lower and middle income families, and is greatly overcredentialed. The U.S. record of preparing the non-college bound for the workforce is also well below international standards.

* Efforts to include public health through the curriculum of schools are very slight, are frequently ineffectual, and not infrequently promote approaches that recent research has demonstrated to be counterproductive (e.g. home economics classes that teach middle school kids to make Hamburger Helper (R) and other nutritionally poor foods.