The New Defense Budget Considered

The big decisions in the 2012 Defense budget announced by Secretary Gates yesterday were a mixed bag.

Overview

No one has discused, because the decisions are largely uncontroversial outside the military, about $19 billion a year that the U.S. military will secure by streamlining its bureacracy, administrative operations, senior management bloat, and base structure. These are all good.

Secretary Gates has also laudibly shut down some troubled major weapons programs and recognized that the Defense budget does need cuts that extend beyond fraud, waste and abuse, while also recognizing that the military cannot simply entirely cease to replace and upgrade parts of its massive arsenal of military equipment, vehicles and weapons systems.

But, what Secretary Gates has failed to do is show any vision of how the U.S. military needs to be transformed relative to the status quo. Fraud, waste and abuse is not the only or even the principal reason that the Defense budget is so immense. It is an ongoing issue and must be ever pruned in a ceaseless task.

The bigger problem, however, is a systemic refusal of anyone associated with the budget process or the Department of Defense to do any meaningful balancing of strategic benefit relative to budgetary cost. It may be politically ugly, both within this massive bureacratic ediface and in the eyes of the larger public. But, the only way to trim the Defense budget down to an appropriate level is to do a better job of answer the question of whether the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, or subparts of those services need to be expanded or need to be cut. There are simultaneous shortfalls and bloats. And, the prevailing tendency, evident in Secretary Gates' budget speech when one compares the numbers between services, is that the bureacratic principal that each of the armed services should receive equal amounts of pain and gain matters more than getting to an appropriate mix for forces given who our likely military opponents are and what kind of resources we have now.

We have too few Army soldiers in many specialties, but too many in the areas of air defense and artillery and heavy tank operations. The Army is also grossly inadequate in its foreign language and civil affairs capabilities; it may not like nation building or counterinsurgency, but that is one of the primary missions that their boss the President has called upon them to serve, because we have no one else who is better at it in our system of government, time and time again.

The number of Marines may be close to right, but its overly technologically ambitious weapons programs have cost too much and don't work. But, it is too concerned with D-Day style amphibious assaults that are of tertiary relevance to modern warfare. World War II will not repeat itself. If the Marines are to remain relevant, they need to develop a new vision for themselves as all purpose elite expeditionary rapid reaction force, rather than one whose primary purpose is to storm the beaches.

The Navy's Blue Sea surface combatant forces are grossly excessive, but its capacity to deal with coastal submarines, and swarms of missile boats, sophisticated anti-ship missiles, and to deal with asymmetric opponents like pirates in a cost effective way, is deficient. Overall, the Navy is too large. The Air Force has excessive and little used air to air combat resources, large numbers of aircraft used for bombing that are overkill or have designs counterproductive for the purposes for which they are used, and underinvests in transport and support aircraft and close air support resources to back up the Army. Overall the Air Force is too large relative to the other services.

Is the military transforming itself to meet our nation's needs?

How does Secretary Gates' proposal measure up to the real needs of the military to transform itself? Not as well.

The number of active duty Army soldiers is reduced when it should be increased.

The overall size of the active duty Air Force and Navy should be reduced, but is not.

The programs he has killed or postponed largely deserve their fate, but his proposal to develop a next generation long range bomber is premature, his failure to cut the F-35A/F-35C buy is unfortunate, has failure to reduce the surface combatant fleet wastes money that is in short supply, and he make no real effort to identify and develop new capabilities that the U.S. military needs now or in the immediate future because they are gaps in its force structure.

We have encountered a number of those gaps in the past decade. The military need MRAPs (mine resistant armored personnel carriers, IIRC), it needed armored humvees and wider availability of body armor, it needed gun trucks to guard convoys, it needed short take off and landing aircraft to carry cargos smaller than those of a C-130, it needed air based communications hubs, it needed great sniper rifleman capabilities, it needed more people who were fluent in a variety of languages including Arabic, and so on and so forth.

Obviously, no one can fully predict what capabilities we will need in the next war. But, we should be doing a better job of pro-actively identifying gaps in our military capabilities and filling them, particularly when the cost of doing so is modest or actually cost saving because it deals with a problem more efficiently, and we need to do a better job of learning from experience what we need to stop spending money on because we don't need any more of it.

Better tailoring our military to the demands it is facing and will continue to face in the 21st century would allow us to be both more militarily capable and to reduce the Defense budget at the same time.

The Marines

The Marines were the big loser. Their active duty force strength is to be cut by about 10%, their bigger ground vehicle procurement program called the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV for short) has been cancelled, and their next generation fighter aircraft, the F-35B has been put on a "two year probation" and reduced in priority to be after the Air Force F-35A and Navy Aircraft Carrier F-35C version.

The EFV decision comes with good justification. They've spend $3 billion dollars over more than twenty years trying to invent it and it still doesn't work and would be extremely expensive even if it did work. According to Secretary Gates:

Today, I am also announcing my agreement with the recommendation of the Secretary of the Navy and the Commandant of the Marine Corps to cancel the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle. This program is of great interest to the Marine community so I would like to explain the reasons behind what I know will be a controversial decision.

The EFV’s aggressive requirements list has resulted in an 80,000 pound armored vehicle that skims the surface of the ocean for long distances at high speeds before transitioning to combat operations on land. Meeting these demands has over the years led to significant technology problems, development delays, and cost increases. The EFV, originally conceived during the Reagan Administration, has already consumed more than $3 billion to develop and will cost another $12 billion to build – all for a fleet with the capacity to put 4,000 troops ashore. If fully executed, the EFV – which costs far more to operate and maintain than its predecessor – would essentially swallow the entire Marine vehicle budget and most of its total procurement budget for the foreseeable future.

To be sure, the EFV would, if pursued to completion without regard to time or cost, be an enormously capable vehicle. However, recent analysis by the Navy and Marine Corps suggests that the most plausible scenarios requiring power projection from the sea could be handled through a mix of existing air and sea systems employed in new ways along with new vehicles – scenarios that do not require the exquisite features of the EFV. As with several other high end programs cancelled in recent years, the mounting cost of acquiring this specialized capability must be judged against other priorities and needs.

The F-35B, a short takeoff, vertical landing fighter aircraft designed to replace the Harrier jump jet in several world military forces on small aircraft carriers and the F-18 in the Marines, like the MV-22 Osprey and EFV before it, suffers from essentially the same problem. Current technology stuggled to meet the program's requirements without making unacceptable tradeoffs and costing a huge amount of money to develop. A short takeoff and landing aircraft isn't that technologically demanding as long as you have some fudge room in your definition of "short" and don't expect too much else of the aircraft. But, its takes far more technilogical effort to get a fixed wing aircraft to hover, and the vertical lift capability in the F-35B has required compromises in range and payload capabilities for the fighter.

The MV-22 Osprey, a vertical takeoff and landing fixed wing aircraft that uses a tilt wing to achieve this end, did make it into production, but has been a disappointment. It is faster and more fuel efficient than a helicopter, but smaller than a merely short takeoff and landing fixed wing aircraft with a comparable payload that has a similar speed and somewhat better fuel efficiency. The small capacity of the MV-22 prevents it from carrying even a Humvee or more than half a platoon of Marines - it can't carry any more than the larger Marine helicopters. And, the MV-22 is much more expensive that a comparable payload helicopter or a comparable payload short takeoff and landing fixed wing aircraft. As a result, the niche where the MV-22 makes military and economic sense compared to the alternatives is quite small.

But, this is still painful medicine for the Marines who designed their latest LPD-17 San Antonio class Amphibious Transport dock ships (basically big Marine amphibious assault force transport ships) on the assumption that it would integrate with the F-35B and EFV. It also has designed its recent and planned Amphibious Assault Ship (i.e. mini-Harrier and Helicopter Carrier) purchases around these systems. The usefulness of those purchases, past and future, has also been called into question somewhat by these decisions.

There is a consolation prize for the Marines in the speech, however. They get upgrades to their existing amphibious vehicle fleet and a promise of a new procurement program to build less ambitious version of the EFV to replace this fleet.

This decision does not call into question the Marine’s amphibious assault mission. We will budget the funds necessary to develop a more affordable and sustainable amphibious tractor to provide the Marines a ship-to-shore capability into the future. The budget will also propose funds to upgrade the existing amphibious vehicle fleet with new engines, electronics, and armaments to ensure that the Marines will be able to conduct ship-to-shore missions until the next generation of systems is brought on line.

The decisions to back off from the technologically troubled F-35B and EFV programs are both good ones. They were concepts that would be great, if possible, but aren't worth prioritizing when we aren't sure that we can make them work. The fact that the British backed out of the F-35B program and that the Italians have cut their F-35B order also reduced the importance of this program.

The Air Force

The Air Force wanted, but didn't get more F-22 fighters. It did get more military drone aircraft, a next generation space vehicle launch system, an increase in the priority given to its F-35A basic next generation fighter aircraft program, and as a consolation prize for not getting more F-22 fighters, upgrades to the radars of its existing F-15 fighter aircraft.

But, the Air Force also got a major new prize: a new long range bomber development program. According to Secretary Gates:

[A] major area of investment for the Air Force will be a new long-range, nuclear-capable penetrating bomber. This aircraft – which will have the option of being piloted remotely – will be designed and developed using proven technologies, an approach that should make it possible to deliver this capability on schedule and in quantity. It is important that we begin this project now to ensure that a new bomber can be ready before the current aging fleet goes out of service. The follow on bomber represents a key component of a joint portfolio of conventional deep-strike capabilities – an area that should be a high priority for future defense investment given the anti-access challenges our military faces.

The investment in an expensive new long range bomber that basically replaces the capabilities of the existing B-2 bomber is a boon that was not clear would be included in the budget. An unmanned capability isn't that big of a deal in this case. A B-2 bomber has a crew of two and can blow up half a dozen major cities in a single run if armed with nuclear weapons. The stealth capability and its long range is designed to prevent this kind of aircraft from ever having to engage another aircraft in air to air combat.

It is also interesting that the Air Force is justifying the urgency of this purchase with on the grounds that the B-2 fleet is aging, despite the fact that it has still made heavy use of the much older B-52 fleet in Afghanistan for missions where the stealth capability of the B-2 is not needed. Bombers age much more gracefully than other military aircraft because their training regime is less intense than that of fighters, and they aren't needed on a day to day basis for non-combat operations the way that transport aircraft are used for that purpose. There have been calls for the Air Force to develop a technologically unambitious "transport-bomber" to replace the B-52 based on existing off the shelf transport aircraft designs. But, this didn't happen.

The Air Force also surprisingly didn't have to reduce its active duty force strength, despite the fact that it is far less strained operationally than either the Army or the Marines who do face those reductions, and despite the fact that smart bombs and improved sensor technology have greatly reduced the number of sorties it takes the Air Force to accomplish the same missions that it would have required decades ago when the Air Force's active duty strength was set at roughly current levels. There have been some cuts, but they have been modest.

My intuition is that the Secretary of Defense's reasoning is that it is easier to train ground troops and resort to Reserve and National Guard forces on short notice to provide ground troops than it is to train new pilots and aircraft mechanics. But, this still seems to me to be a case of a lost opportunity to reduce the military budget without losing U.S. Air Superiority compared to plausible opponents.

Less surprising, but disappointing none the less, is a lack of any major new Air Force investment in transport aircraft or close air support aircraft which it controls but uses to support the Army. The Air Force has also not been force to back off at all from plans to replace existing F-15s and F-16s that have not already been replaced by the F-22 on a more or less one to one basis with the F-35A, despite the fact that smart bomb technology, the increased capability of the F-35A in air to air combat relative to the F-16 including stealth, and the reduction of the scale of the Russian military should make the Air Force capable of doing more with a somewhat smaller fighter fleet. The Air Force has also ignored the possibility of using lower cost, lower capability aircraft for the mission of domestic anti-terrorist air security around major cities, a mission that is now carried out with expensive, overkill F-16s and is scheduled to be carried out by expensive, overkill F-35As when they replace the F-16, despite the fact that features like stealth in the F-35A are actually counterproductive in this mission.

The Navy

The Navy, like the Air Force, unreasonably in my opinion, was spared reductions in active duty force strength, despite the fact that the Navy is the least taxed in operational pace relative to its capabilities of the four military services. Its current "hot" military role is to fight pirates with speedboats in Somolia. Apparently, Secretary Gates felt that preparing for potential threats from North Korea, China, Iran, and Russia probably in roughly that order, justifies the current scale of the U.S. Navy which is the pre-eminent naval force in the world by a large margin.

The Navy isn't rushing to buy new F-35Cs as fast as possible. It is instead hedging its bets with upgrades of existing F-18s and newly purchased F-18s, as well as an investment in a high tech, unmanned carrier based combat drone aircraft. If the combat drone aircraft is as promising as it seems likely to be, I wouldn't be surprised to see the F-35C program abandoned entirely or greatly reduced in purchase size. Buying more F-18s, when the Navy is already running its carriers with far less than full compliments of fighter aircraft because existing threats don't justify the additional expense casts doubt in my mind on the question of whether the additional F-18 purchases are really needed.

The new ship purchases over the next five years, of a DDG-1000 Zumwalt class destroyer (a class prematurely terminated with a smaller than originally planned number of ships bought because it is so extremely expensive), the Littoral Combat Ship (in two designs rather than one), and a new non-combatant Ocean Surveillance Vessel, which was contacted for in 2009, are all old news.

Reading between the lines, the Navy does appear to have lost some ground. Two versions of a next generation cruiser warship, one to replace existing aircraft carrier escorts in the cruiser and destroyer class, and the other to fill a stand alone missile defense mission, were not mentioned, nor were efforts in the design stages to build a new aircraft carrier design. There was also no mention made of efforts to design a next generation attack submarine, to purchase more of the current state of the art Virginia class attack submarine, or to design a next generation ballistic missile submarine (estimated to cost $7 billion each or more) to replace the aging Ohio class of ballistic missile submarines.

Secretary Gates also did not acknowledge serious ongoing technological problems with bringing the Littoral Combat Ship and its modules into service, criticisms of the capabilities of the Littoral Combat Ship (which are particularly meritorious with regard to the fleet's inability to adequately defend itself from swarms of the missile boats found in many world navies and for which the U.S. military has no real good answer), or the fact that the cancellation of the next generation Non-Line of Sight weapons system in the Army also impacts the Littoral Combat Ship program which had planned to use it in one of its modules.

The Navy remains to slow to reduce its massive investment in Blue Sea surface combatant warfare resources that will probably rust away before they are ever used in a military conflict. Russia continues to scale back its Navy and has become much less of a naval threat to the United States than it was during the Cold War. China has a growing and increasingly sophisticated Navy and regularly rattles its saber, but its large fleet of quite, coastal diesel-elecric submarines and its latest anti-ship missiles make it increasingly unclear that surface combatants will be effective in countering its naval strengths, and China seems less prone to rash military action that it did a couple of decades ago when post-Cold War structure of the Navy was determined.

Iran and North Korea are both more likely to engage in rash military action than China or Russia, and have the two most threatening navies, other than those of China and Russia that would plausibly be opponents of the U.S. navy in an international war. The North Korean threat comes almost entirely from its old and ill trained but still functioning and large submarine fleet and from its nuclear missile capabilities. The Iranian threat comes from a mix of land based anti-ship missiles, a large Persian Gulf fleet of missile boats that could swarm U.S. allied military or merchant ships, a small fleet of coastal submarines and the possiblity the the Persian Gulf could be filled with sea based mines. All of these countries, and many more, have fairly potent fighter aircraft complements as well.

No one in the world can pose a serious threat to the U.S. attack submarine fleet, but the eleven aircraft carriers that the U.S. has in its fleet, accompanied by cruisers, destroyers, frigates and attack submarines that are mostly tasked with serving as escorts as part of carrier groups, is not an ideal force with which to contend with coastal submarines and large numbers of land docked missile boats that can come out of nowhere, and is vulernable to advance missile strikes against them. These carrier groups are hardly defenseless. But, the kinds of strikes that they are vulnerable to can come with almost no warning, and in military exercise after military exercise, when submarines fight warships, the submarines win or at least draw disproportionate blood. Mostly, the Navy has avoided catastrophe because none of the serious military players in the world has wanted to risk picking a fight that would mean all out war with the United States.

Put another way, the U.S. Navy is extremely well equipped to fight Blue Sea naval battles of the kind seen in World War II that are extremely unlikely to ever happen, but ill suited to fight the submarined hunting and asymmetric warfare scenarios in coastal areas that are far more likely to arise. Yet, while the Navy is devoting some new resources to filling gaps in its capabilities, it is doing nothing to pare back old naval resources that are likely to be obsolete by the time that we need them.

The Army

A cut of 27,000 soldiers from the active duty Army is less deep than the cut to the Marines, about 5% compared to 10% for the Marines. But, the Army is the central player in Iraq, until we withdraw, in Afghanistan, and in just about any plausible future war the U.S. might be drawn into as a part of its larger effort to neutralize terrorist bases of power abroad and asist its allies in dealing with insurgencies.

The Army's soldiers have seen an unreasonably high pace of deployment for the last seven years, and the ability of the Army to draw upon Army Reserve and National Guard forces to supplement its capabilities has been close to exhausted. A reduced Marine Corps also limits the Army's ability to supplement its ground forces with Marines. At any give time, almost a third of the Army's soldiers are in, en route to, and immediately departing from (sometimes via medical evacuation) warzones in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army's large presence in South Korea is looking increasingly less risk free as well as military tensions between North Korea and South Korea mount.

The base of operations has been so great that an unprecedented share of Army veterans are returning home with injuries (traumatic brain injury from proximity to IED explosions, and PTSD, are the stereotypical injuries of these wars) and suicide rates in the Army have soared. It is all good and well that Secretary Gates wants to invest more resources in suicide prevention for Army soldiers, but the source of the problem is trying to do too much with too few troops.

Unlike the Navy, whose new Littoral Combat Ships operate with about a third of the crew of comparable sized ships that have come before it, and unlike the Air Force, whose smart bombs and improved tactical intelligence tools have made it much more efficient at the job of destroying targets, most soldiers on the ground in battlefields are only marginally more empowered to do their jobs than they were a generation ago. They have weapons that are only modestly improved in counterinsurgency situations since Vietnam (with the exception of their artillery, which is much more accurate, and their greatly increased use of night vision technology).

Secretary Gate is not wrong in observing that: "Even after the projected reductions in the Active Army beginning in 2015, the service’s permanent end strength would continue to be larger, by nearly 40,000 soldiers, than it was when I became defense secretary four years ago." But, there is nothing sacred about the force level that was in place four years ago. Experience has shown us that the number of soldiers in our Army is far less adequate relative to the military's needs for these resources than any other part of the United States military, which is prolifgate relative to its military needs in other respects.

The Department of Defense should be expanding the size of the active duty Army at the expense of high tech but less urgently needed weapons systems in the Air Force and Navy, instead of reducing it. Even if it is possible to call upon Reserve and National Guard forces, or to borrow resources from the Marines, the Army should have the regular active duty strength to adequately address wars in landlocked or nearly landlocked countries that the U.S. will be devoting substantial resources to fight wars in over the next few year.

The cancellation of an anti-aircraft weapons system, and a next generation missile based artillery system, that, as usual, were over budget and have had performance problems, aren't big worries in the short run. Anti-aircraft weapons systems aren't a priority when none of the Army's current opponents have any aircraft, and the Air Force has ample resources to deal with future opponents that do. The NLOS missile system, however wonderful it might have been if it worked, didn't work and was costing more and more to develop. And, the Army's existing Excaliber guided howitzer shells, MLRS rockets, helicopter based Hellfire missiles, and increased ability to call in precision Air Force bombing, while expensive in all of these forms, are already dramatically better than anything the Army had forty years ago.

Upgrades to Army surveillance resources and its armored vehicles are presumably welcomed by the Army, although the number and mix of vehicles involved aren't clear. Secretary Gates announced that the Army will "modernize its battle fleet of Abrams tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and Stryker wheeled vehicles."

Part of this decision makes sense. The Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Stryker wheeled vehicles have received heavy use in Kosovo, Iran and Afghanistan, so this will benefit the Army's ongoing operations, although the upgrades may mean that replacement of these vehicles with next generation systems is going to be postponed. But, the utility of an upgrade to much of the U.S. force of Abrams tanks has been cast in doubt. The war in Iraq is winding down. The A-10 aircraft and Bradley Fighting Vehicles proving just as effective as the Abrams tank in anti-tank warfare. Abrams tanks proved inpracticable for troops in Kosovo. The first few Abrams tanks belong to U.S. forces in the nine year old Afghan war arrived only late in 2010 and already on their way to being of secondary importance. Abrams tanks played a secondary role, although it did have some use in small number in the later phases of the Iraq War. Abrams tanks are hard to deploy because they are so heavy, and hard to use in the tight terrains of mountain passes, old world city streets, and jungles. The Russians have retired a large share of their tanks, and the U.S. has a large share of its Abrams tanks in the boneyard as well.

The U.S. probably could benefit from having some upgraded Abrams tanks. But, the number it needs is probably in the dozens, rather than the hundreds or the thousands.

Russia Phasing Out Big Nuclear Missiles

Most U.S. and Russian nuclear missiles have one ton or smaller nuclear warheads (actual size, not TNT equivalent yield). But, Russia also has about 70 nuclear missiles with 5-9 ton warheads, about 15 of which are land mobile, and the rest of which are in silos. Russia is phasing out these larger warhead nuclear missiles.

Presumably, the reason for this (in addition to the cost of coming up with a truly comparable replacement) is that a nuclear missile or two with a one ton warhead is more than sufficient to blow up anything that any military officer could want to blow up (we are talking entire cities here with a single missile), at least until we are invaded by technologically superior space aliens. But, any move to reduce the global nuclear weapon stockpile is still probably a good thing.

Defense Budget Shakeup Proposed

Defense Tech summarizes some changes proposed in the Defense budget:

* F-35B will go on a “two year probation” and move to the “back of the line” on development behind the “C” and “A” model. More F/A-18EF Super Hornets will be purchased and older F/A-18 Hornets will have their service lives extended for the Marine Corps to make up for the “B” delay or cut.

* EFV is gone. Savings will be used to upgrade the AAV with more armor, better electronics and weaponry.
* Army SLAMRAAM canceled.
* The Non-Line of Sight Launch System gone. [Something that also impact a related Navy Littoral Combat Ship module.]
* Drawdown by 27K Soldiers and up to 20K Marines from end strength in 2015.

. . .

[Making it into the budget are proposals including:]

New long range nuclear strike bomber — that can be “optionally piloted.” . . .

Modernize the Abrams, Bradley and Stryker vehicle. [And hence presumably not replace them right away.] . . .

New ship classes, including a destroyer, LCS, oilers and ocean surveillance craft. . . .

Gates said the 2012 DoD budget request will be $553 billion, $13 billion less than planned in the previous FYDP. He added that the new FYDP numbers are $78 billion less than previously planned.

Outsourcing The House

You probably don't have a cook, a butler, a live in maid, a stable boy, or a live in gardener. It isn't unlikely, however, sometimes pay someone to cook food for you and deliver it to your table, to mow your lawn, to clean your house, to plan your child's wedding, to press your shirts, or to maintain your car. The personal services industry employs many people, but today, those people are organized as independent contract small business people who provide the same service to many customers, rather than as household servants.

Suppose that you take that idea one step further. Suppose that in addition to outsourcing the work of people who work in your house, you outsource the house as well. We're already seeing this happen, and the trend is likely to continue.

Outsourcing the Workshop, Shed, Basement and Attic

One of the first instances of outsourcing household space was the safety deposit box which is a substitute for a household safe.

Many gun clubs offer safe storage of firearms intended for hunting or target shooting or as collector's items, away from your home, an increasingly relevant consideration in an area where many dorms and public housing don't permit them, and where prudence and state and local laws and ordinances require safe storage of firearms or impose liability for failure to safely store firearms. This obviously doesn't make sense for a firearm kept to defend one's home against intruders, but many firearms aren't intended for that purpose and many people have multiple firearms and don't need all of them to be in their home at once.

There is a whole industry that sells storage units to people who lack basements or sheds or attics or unused closets to hold their infrequently used stuff. These used to be limited to glorified garages (and many offer RV parking as well), but now there are climate controlled storage units and units specially designed to handle special contents like wine collections. Who hasn't seen one of the "PODS" parked in front of someone's house to be filled, taken away, and then retrieved (possible at a new and different house) later? What if there were a business that had mini-PODS that were tucked away with your out of season clothes that sent you a reminder card at a date you set when you thought you might want them again?

There are already several off site file storage companies, and "cloud computing" which stores data and computer program resources at some remote Internet accessible location is becoming commonplace, even for household users.

Down the road from my office is a place that rents workshops and studios for people who don't have their own.

Reading, Office Space and Study Space

Many new developments have community mailboxes rather than mailboxes attached to individual houses. One could imagine a neighborhood "reading room" that would be sort of a mini-library, with a full compliment of newspaper and magazine subscriptions, coffee and teapots, and a small stash of trashy reading - many campgrounds across the American West have that kind of space.

My own office, while fairly conventional, includes use of a break room, reception services, copying machines and scanners, fax machines, a lobby and conference rooms that are shared by the suite, and if I wanted to have a home office while not having real estate nice enough to meet with clients, I could arrange to have a "virtual office" with all of the services except the room devoted exclusive to me - those would be available on a reservation basis for a certain number of hours a month. Most virtual offices are oriented towards small businesses (and this also avoids some of the hassle of trying to take a home office deduction for tax purposes).

One can imagine a virtual office oriented towards students instead. More of more neighborhood library branches now have study rooms and community rooms where people might otherwise have gathered in a living room or large home office, that receive heavy use. University libraries have long had study carrels, but as studying and research become divorced from physical books, it wouldn't be too surprising to see a place that offered study carrel rentals by the semester together with a few hours a month of group study rooms time minus the library in the future. The neighborhood study rooms could have tutors on staff to help answer questions, actively encourage the formation of homework groups and writer's critique groups, have small stores that sold school supplies and snacks, and offered Internet access and affordable subscriptions to academic journal databases or virtual libraries. These kind of spaces might be particularly attractive to students in online high school or college programs, and to non-traditional students who need to get away from a chaos of a home full of children and all sorts of household activities and attention demands. Perhaps these kinds of centers could be natural outgrowths of branch college campuses, community colleges, or franchised tutoring businesses.

Entertaining

The outsourcing of the guest room and entertaining areas has probably not yet run its course.

Once upon a time, birthday party's at home were very common; now there is a whole industry built on creating usually indoor "play spaces" for children's parties complete with separate rooms for eating cake and opening presents on one hand, and racing around having fun on the other.

Coffee shops and bars aren't just places where you buy coffee and beer, they are to a great extent outsourced parlors and living rooms.

Many restaurants offer private rooms for meal gatherings.

While there have been hotels where out of town guests can be housed, and where one can rent rooms for events, this really hasn't penetrated the "house outsourcing" market yet. When I was in law school, a lived for a year in the law school dormitories called the "law club." This had, in addition to a sharing dining area, a mail room, and a shared recreation area, a suite of guest rooms where visiting friends and family could stay. This would be a natural addition to a subdivision of not so big houses, alleviating the anxiety of people who feel the need to own a house based on their peak need, rather than their usual need. For example, a senior citizen's development might be much more attractive if residents knew there were places in the complex where their children and grandchildren could stay on holiday visits. In existing neighborhoods, converting an existing property into a guest house or bed and breakfast for out of town family and household guests might offer more intimacy and walkable access to your host's home than sending guests off to a Holiday Inn or Motel 6, and thus be a more socially acceptable option for space constrained families. In fact, a number of new high rise developments combine condominiums and hotel rooms in the same building.

There is also a small but growing niche of places where one can entertain guests and hold parties that are separate from full fledged hotels oriented towards business conferences and large weddings where many guests are staying overnight, particularly as fewer people have natural and easy access to church halls, civic club halls and country clubs. Some condo complexes and apartment buildings in Denver have them. Since one of the factors that often drive people to purchase large houses is the desire to be able to hold large parties a few times a year, the availability of respectable entertaining venues, perhaps as part of a homeowner's association, perhaps as part of a "virtual office" or "time share" style subscription service, or perhaps through simple rentals, might make it more palatable for people who want to hold occasional big parties to live in smaller houses.

A Japanese style innovation that we might see is some variation on the rented karaoke room. While many American cities have karakoke bars where you can belt out your favorite tune in front of a large room full of strangers, fewer have private rooms where you and a half dozen of your friends can do that in greater privacy. And, similar sized entertainment rooms, outfitted a deluxe home theaters or multi-player deluxe videogaming rooms (with media rentals included and concession service available), for example, might also be hits.

The Yard, Workshop and Garden

Next to my children's school is a community garden where people with little or no lawn of their own can grow vegetables or flowers in a little plot down the road.

The "patio home" concept where single family homes share a communal front yard tended by a homeowner's association is also increasingly common. Some resort communities have private parks and beaches to provide residents with the benefits of a place to throw the kind of parties that one would ordinarily throw in your back yard in a single family house with a beach without the expense and waste of having one for every property when most go unused most of the time. The concept of urban residential neighborhoods like my own Washington Park is that each homeowner has a tiny lot, but in exchange the neighborhood has a premier park that everyone shares.

Rather than having a home gym, people join neighborhood health clubs or go to neighborhood recreation centers (incidentally, some even have showers that you can use when you have plumbing problems). Many homeowner's associations and condominium complexes have small community pools and exercise rooms.

What about the dog house? Lots of people in urban areas live in places that don't permit pets, but have or want pets. There are kennels, of course, but those are expensive and a lot of the cost goes into staff to provide care for the pets while their owners are absent. What if there were a kennel-like structure with a nice dog park within a short walk from a no-dogs apartment complex? Dog lovers could keep their dog there, talk their dog on daily walks, feed their dog themselves, and perhaps the structure would even have little rooms a bit like library study rooms where you could relax, watch TV, read a book, or have a coffee in the company of your dog, before or after work. It wouldn't be the same as having your dog in your own home, but it would be the next best thing. Similar arrangements already exist for people who live in the city but want to have horses.

The Sick Rooms

It isn't uncommon for someone who lives in a house without a ground floor bedroom or bathroom to experience a short term injury or illness that limits their ability to move around the house. Perhaps a broken leg, perhaps simply being very weak for a while.

Sometimes, a stay at home parent needs to recover from surgery or being sick or is pregnant and on bedrest, and doesn't need any special caretakers or hospital equipment, but does need to be genuinely relieved from the temptation to do any household chores or childcare while resting and recovering.

Sometimes, someone learns that they have an infectious disease, TB for example, and needs to stay away from a vulnerable elderly person or infant or other person with a weak immune system. Perhaps a child visiting frail grandparents comes down with the measles on Christmas vacation.

These conditions may all be ones where family members and friends and perhaps daily or less frequent nurse visits are all that one needs as caretakers, but staying at home is not a great option, and a hospital stay would be absurdly expensive for such a minor condition. It would be a shorter term alternative to an assisted living facilty or senior housing complex.

There are motels near most hospitals with a multistate draw (e.g. Mayo Clinic and National Jewish) that cater to this medically needy customers, but few closer to home that market themselves and are designed to meet this need niche.

This might be a niche for short term recovery room suites, a bit likely weekly motels but with the immobile and ill who need rooms that are accessable and antisceptic on short notice in mind. There might be room service available and a referral service for "home nursing" services.

Of course, hospices and nursing homes have already been brought into use for high intensity need cases.

Sharing Toys and Tools

The idea of outsourcing things that you need infrequently to avoid having to buy things based on "peak use" has applications in households beyond the house as well. Lots of people buy boats, ATVs, RVs, motorcycles, pickup trucks, cars with more seating capacity than most families usually need, specialty tools, snowmobiles, and the like that they may only use a few days or weeks a year. But, those things take space to store, often need to be maintained every year even if you don't use them much, and spend a lot of time sitting idle. Rental options exist, but they can be pricey because they are extracting large profit margins from people who don't regularly use those items, are in a place where their plans demand that they have them, and have only a choice between buying or renting. Rental operations also have a fairly high risk that the items will be stolen or damaged, because the renters are engaged in one time transactions and have no emotional stake in taking care of the equipment.

But, what if you were part of a "recreational toys and household tools co-op" that provided members with use of these items at cost (be offering annual rebates if there were any profits, in proportion to patronage), had a substantial deposit and credit check up front to make individual transactions for members go more quickly, trusted members a little more so that they would need less paid employee or volunteer services, and turned the relationship between the firm renting the stuff and the person renting it into a longer term, more warm and fuzzy one (what they call in the literature the "warm glow"). What if the co-op had multiple locations and you could get what you needed at one location and drop it off at another?

Denver's bike rental program is an example of the concept in practice.

Limits To The Trend

We haven't, and probably never will, go as far as some societies in this direction.

For example, public baths, while common in some parts of the world and developed at a time when many homes lacked them, are unlikely to make a comeback. The public Laundromat while still in existence is also fading away with increasing affluence and the appearance of affordable laundry machines that both wash and dry clothes further reduces the space constraints involved.

Sex hotels and capsule hotels also seem unlikely to come to a place near you anytime soon. But, the house outsourcing trend surely isn't entirely played out either.

Employment Trends

Colorado wages fell in 2009. Mining (-18.8%), construction (-16.4%), real estate (-8.5%) and wholesale trade (-8.5) had wages that were hit hardest; farming (+15.1%), military pay (+14.2%), hospitals (+8.0%) and the fishing/forestry industry (+6.8%) boomed. Private sector compensation fell 4.5% in 2009 in Colorado, while government compensation rose 5.4% mostly due to rising military pay. Pay per job actually rose an average of 1.8% in 2009, but overall wages in the state fell because the number of jobs well.

Unemployment in November increased from 8.2% in October to 8.7% in the Denver-Aurora-Broomfield metro area, from 6.3% in 6.8% in the Boulder metro area, and from 9.3% to 10.3% in the Pueblo metro area according to the Labor Department.

Despite the gloomy news, the net migration to Colorado as shown by moves in v. moves out of Allied Van Lines showed Colorado second only to Texas.

The national news leaves a little more room for optimism, but only a little:

[N]onfarm private employment grew . . . in December, at a pace well above what is usually associated with a declining unemployment rate. . . . September’s employment gain of 29,000, October’s gain of 79,000, November’s gain of 92,000 and December’s gain of 297,000 [show a positive trend]. Strength was also evident within all major industries and every size business tracked in the ADP Report. . . Construction employment was unchanged in December, ending continuous monthly declines since June 2007. The decline in Construction employment, since its peak in January 2007, is 2,306,000.

From here and here both quoting consultancy ADP.

Note that, due to population growth, it takes about 125,000 new jobs a month to keep the unemployment rate constant.

The public sector took its job hit in September 2010. "A net total of 159,000 government jobs were lost in September. Local governments cut 76,000 jobs . . . most of them teachers. That's the largest cut by local governments in 28 years. About 77,000 temporary federal census jobs ended and state governments shed 7,000 jobs."

The move to trim public sector workforces in the face of weak state and local tax revenues and Republican claims that there are too many public employees who make too much money could easily confound all the job gains being made in the private sector.

Updated: 1-6-2011

On Fitness, Advanced Parental Age and Selection

Advanced parental age, i.e. having an older father, is a risk factor for a wide variety of genetic diseases (e.g. schizophrenia and autism). Advanced maternal age is generally not. In part, this is because older women lose fertility. In part, this is because a woman's eggs are created when she is young, even if they are not available for fertilization until much later, while a man's sperm are created on a regular basis, and so bear the environmental and aging impacts that his body experiences, a mutation risk load that mounts as he gets older.

While it isn't absolutely conclusively, the evidence very strongly points to mutations in sperm cells as the predominant cause of advanced paternal age related conditions, which makes a great deal of sense, simply because there aren't many other mechanisms by which advanced paternal age could cause diseases with a strong hereditary component. The only additional possible source is closely related - epigenetic impacts acquired by a father during life or at birth that are passed on to a child.

Having an older father is not an entirely bad thing, however, from an evolutionary genetics perspective. An older father, by definition, was fit enough to have live to be reasonably old, and to be fertile enough and able to successfully secure a mother for his child at that age. Evolutionarily speaking, older fathers should, by definition, generally be more fit than the average father, and certainly should be more fit than the average man who is born without regard to whether or not he has children.

There is anecdotal ethnographic evidence that older fathers also tend to have greater success in securing more fit than average mothers for their children. Men who married well the first time may have prospered in part because they had better than average wives. Widowers have often been considered prize catches, at least by parents arranging marriages, and most marriages were arranged from at least the Neolithic era until the last couple of centuries. If children of older fathers also tend to have more fit mothers on average (presumably because their fathers are more fit themselves), then the children receive a double fitness benefit in their genetic inheritance, and the maternal half of that benefit does not carry any elevated mutational risks. Certainly, anyway, there is little evidence that the children of older fathers tend to have less fit than average mothers.

Thus, while children of fathers of advanced paternal age are at greater than average risk of novel, harmful mutations (harmful here meaning evolutionary selective fitness disadvantage), their paternal genetic inheritance will generally be one associated with above average fitness. And, since many novel, harmful mutations lead to miscarriages or congenital defects, children of fathers of advanced paternal age who survive past infancy are not bearing the full cost of the additional mutational risk associated with their father's advanced age. In a more harsh age, marginally fit young children might also have received less than full parental support as resources were devoted instead to more fit siblings - infanticide was common place for much of human history, and only in modern times has it become the norm for all of one's children to survive to adulthood.

Even those children of fathers of advanced parental age who do end up having novel and harmful (but non-deadly) mutations will take a general background of above average fitness in their genetic inheritance together with the novel, harmful mutations. Often, the good will be better than the bad, and as a generally rule there will be both fitness enhancing and fitness reducing genetic traits in the child who also had novel, harmful mutations. Novel fitness enhancing mutations are also probably more likely in children of fathers of advanced paternal age, although the literature seems to suggest that fitness reducing mutations are far more common than fitness enhancing mutations. (Many, if not most, mutations neither enhance nor harm evolutionary fitness.)

Of course, the other disadvantage faced by children of fathers of advanced paternal age is an increased likelihood of being without a father or paternal grandparents when one is relatively young, and if fathers and paternal grandparents enhance one's fitness, in the evolutionary selection sense, then that is another strike against them. There is a school of human evolutionary thought that attributes great selective advantage to the extension of life expectancy long enough that the society has a reasonable number of grandparents alive at any given time, based on circumstantial evidence related to life expectancy and population sizes, but it isn't obvious that the benefits of having elders in a community are primarily a benefit to their own grandchildren, or are a benefit to the community generally, for example, by providing it with continuity of knowledge and culture.

Now, the babies of the brood of an older father are still at a disadvantage relative to their older siblings who may have all of their father's genetic fitness, because they will have none of the novel, harmful mutations associated with a father of advanced paternal age, and because they will have received the benefits of having a living father, and perhaps living grandparents, for a larger share of their life. The only real advantage that the babies of the brood have are the possibility that their mother is a subsequent more fit spouse than their older siblings, and the possibility that the parents improved their parenting skills over time after making mistakes the first times around. The babies may also compensate for possibly less paternal parenting with more older sibling support.

The source of fitness for an older father may be different now than it was in pre-modern times.

In pre-modern times, the main genetic windfall one might receive from an older father might have been the good health related traits that allowed him to live until forty years of age or older, while a significant share of his peers died by then, or become infertile by then, or ceased to be able to attract any women to be mothers for their children at that point.

In modern times, in contrast, postponing fatherhood is usually closely associated with having obtained an advanced education before marrying, and having developed a career and obtaining socio-economic success. Simply living to be that old and being able to be fertile enough with reproductive medicine to have children at an advanced age is now common place and has only trivial fitness implications, but attracting a fertile woman to be a mother for your children, and having a reason to defer childbearing is a pursuit that strongly favors traits that favor socio-economic success. Also, the likelihood of an older father dying before a child comes of age is now greatly reduced from pre-modern times, and marriages entered into when a father is more mature and economically successful tend to be more stable (although there are certainly a significant number of serial divocees who have children in each new marriage among older fathers). Older fathers are likely to have more children overall as well, possible forcing each child to receive a smaller share of inherited wealth, although it isn't obvious that property inheritance at death is a very important factor in life success these days.

Another significant subset of men who are more likely than average to be older fathers are men who seek to have as many children as possible for religious reasons. Razib at Gene Expression has made some notable posts exploring the demographic impacts of this trend in affluent societies. Basically, in poor societies, almost everyone is religious and almost everyone has as many children as they can in the hope that some will survive. With economic development, the vast majority of people become less religious and reduce their childbearing rates to replacement levels in short order in order to maximize the economic resources that they can devote to each child because they can have faith that the child will live to be an adult and have children of his or her own. But, a minority of people in developed societies make a conscious, usually religiously motivated choice to have as many children as they can anyway, and that choice has a major impact of the demographics of developed societies (which universally are not willing to let children in big families start and die due to a shortfall of resources, although China did take a very punitive stance to discourage the large family option as it developed with its one child policy for urban families). These demographic trends also have population genetic implications. From an evolutionary fitness perspective having as many kids as you possibly can even in an economically developed modern society is a great choice for you and your co-religionists (although it may be bad for society as a whole), so from an evolutionary selection perspective, an older father who religiously believes in having many children and passed that cultural trait on to his children has caused them to be much more evolutionarily fit.

Also, of course, most children of older fathers don't have any novel harmful mutations. They get their parents above average fitness while bearing not of the hardships associated with having a father of advanced paternal age (except that a sibling may have such issues and that may stress family resources, but that is rarely a deal breaker in modern societies, and was often resolved by the premature death of the unfit sibling in pre-modern societies). This means that the new child enhances the father's evolutionary fitness, on average, making the ex ante decision to have more children an easy one from a selection perspective, and leave the child fit as well.

All of this is very general, but it may also help to provide a general explanation of why genetic mutations associated with advanced paternal age (even in subsequent generations for children whose parents are young), may tend to receive counterbalancing selective advantages that have no direct causal relationship to any novel, harmful mutations that they may have received because they are descendant from a father of advanced parental age.

Indeed, some of the upsides associated with conditions associated with advanced paternal age such as creativity or logical aptitude or enhanced courtship traits, may be products of having more fit than average patriline ancestors rather than of something flowing from the advanced paternal age condition itself. If so, one would expect the upside associated with advanced paternal age conditions to present more strongly in first generation people with those conditions than in subsequent generations where a fit paternal genetic inheritance that came with the novel harmful mutations has been diluted.

As a footnote, with the genetic risk associated with having inbred children is largely avoidable by someone interested in having children, simply by choosing an unrelated mate, which is something that if often possible in modern societies, once you are an older father, you can't undo the decisions to have or not have children that you made earlier in life. Those are sunk costs and the only decision that a prospective older father has to make is to have or not have children. There is no easy mutation risk reducing option at that point. This also makes it an easier choice and helps explain why of two parenting choices that present similar genetic condition risk to offspring, one is usually prohibited legally and discouraged socially, while the other is rarely prohibited legally.

Schizophrenia genes may make you a better date

Schizophrenia is associated with lower fertility, is not associated with increased family fertility, is highly heritable, and have a stable prevalence. Normally, genes that have strong negative effects, particularly associated with low fertility rates, are selected against and disappear from the gene pool. Why doesn't that happen in schizophrenia?

The Dating Advantage Theory

A new study argues that the same genes the increase schizophrenia risk also make you a more attractive person to date and mate. For example, those genes, when expressed in the general population at levels insufficient to lead to clinically diagnosed schizophrenia may enhance courtship related traits such as "creativity, emotional sensitivity, and expressiveness."

(The study is Del Giudice M (2010) Reduced Fertility in Patients' Families Is Consistent with the Sexual Selection Model of Schizophrenia and Schizotypy. PLoS ONE 5(12): e16040. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0016040).

As the article explains, one theory is that:

Schizotypy [i.e. genes that predispose a person to schizophrenia] . . . act[s] as an “amplifier” of individual differences in genetic fitness and condition: high-schizotypy individuals would be more likely to achieve outstanding mating success when they have high genetic fitness and/or grow up in good environmental conditions, but also more likely to develop schizophrenia (and to suffer reduced mating success) when they have low genetic fitness and/or grow up in poor conditions. Thus, schizotypy itself can be sexually selected, possibly more strongly so in populations characterized by high levels of mating competition and short-term mating patterns, where displays of good genetic quality are more critical to successful courtship [than traits associated with success in a long term committed couple relationship].

In other words, schizophrenia related genes may be particularly adaptive in societies with "love marriage" as opposed to arranged marriage, because traits that pre-dispose you to schizophrenia also make you someone who is fun to date. The fact that schizophrenia generally manifests clearly only towards the end of puberty or early young adulthood, also suggests that full blown schizophrenia may often be invisible until after marriage in societies that do not, as modern American societies do, favor historically late ages at first marriage. In other words, if a typical couple gets engaged in their late teens, the most negative aspects of schitzotypy are more likely to be invisible.

This analysis generalizes a similar evolutionary explanation for the persistence of bipolar disorder, which presents similar evolutionary issues to schizophrenia, and is also very common in individuals with extraordinary creative output, a trait that is considered fitness enhancing, at least in modest frequencies, in a society. There is some anecdotal evidence points out, for example, in the graphic novel history of modern mathematics found in Logicomix that there may be a similar association between schizophrenia and extraordinary output in mathematics and logic.

The Undercounted Descendants Theory

The study also hypothesizes that schizophrenics, particularly men, may be more likely to have unacknowledged children outside of marriage, artificially suppressing their measured fertility rates: "This is not an unlikely possibility, given that schizotypal personality traits specifically predict increased engagement in short-term mating and casual sex." This hypothesis, which is powerful in traditional societies, may have less force in societies where contraception is widely used and effective in these kinds of relationships.

The greater fertility impact in men than in women, however, may also be explained by the fact that schizophrenia is more likely to manifest before men have had children (because men have an earlier onset on average, and later peak reproductive years than women) than it is to manifest before women have had children.

Limits Of The Methodology

The study is primarily simply an exposition of a mathematical model that shows that the explanation proposed would be sufficient to explain the survival of genes associated with schizophrenia with mating advantage effects that are within a range that is plausible, without actually measuring if those advantages really exist. But, it has considerable force, despite its modest empirical grounding, because it is hard to find another explanation that could explain the facts that are observed. If the model proposed in this paper is wrong, one has to find some other model of how a strongly hereditary trait that is strongly selected against in many respects has remained stable in population frequency.

Persistent, fitness reducing genetic traits very frequently have an aspect that is fitness enhancing, or was at some time in the past. The sickle cell anemia gene, which is also connected to malaria resistance is the most commonly cited example of this kind of trait, but many strongly hereditary fitness reducing conditions share that feature. A more recent example (details behind pay wall) that is largely speculative at this point, is the hypothesis that a key breast cancer risk gene (BRCA1) may also enhance intelligence, and that the cancer risks and cognitive benefits may both relate to the production of connective tissue proteins. The problem with this model in the case of schizophrenia, however, is that almost all of the genetic conditions of this type known so far have simple, single gene Mendelian inheritance patterns, something that is not what is behind the strongly hereditary component of schizophrenia. Extensive research directed at the genetics of schizophrenia have pretty much ruled out such a simple cause, and it is much harder to develop a "some mutations good, many mutations bad" scenario in a more complicated genetic model. I am not aware of any hereditary condition that has been definitively established as having that kind of phenotype structure.

Breast cancer risk genes, like schizophrenia risk genes, are also notable in manifesting relatively late in life, which reduces their selective impact. "Schizophrenia occurs equally in males and females, although typically appears earlier in men—the peak ages of onset are 20–28 years for males and 26–32 years for females. Onset in childhood is much rarer, as is onset in middle- or old age."

Keep in mind that life expectancy in the Roman Empire (and much of the period before it and after it) was twenty to thirty years, and that historically people had children young, so conditions that first have negative fitness effects when you are in your later teens or early twenties, or later, have had only slight selective effects until the last dozen or so generations or less, in the West, and for half a dozen generations or so in much of the rest of the world. So both breast cancer risk genes and schizophrenia risk genes may have had far less of an impact of evolutionary fitness for 99%+ of their existence in the human genome.

Probably the weakest piece of the model is the significance attached to environmental impacts on the likelihood that schizophrenia will manifest, which seems to be quite low empirically.

A Mutation Model

Perhaps the best alternative explanation to those suggested in the study would be a model similar to that advanced for autism (where that evidence seems to suggest that a majority of all cases may be first generation mutations attributable to advanced parental age; many kinds of mental retardation are also due primarily to "first generation" mutations), which sees the condition as being a product of many different kinds of common mutations that all have the same phenotypic effect (perhaps because they all interrupt the same delicate neurological system). Thus, there may be enough "first generation" schizophrenics to make up for a deficit in schizophrenic children of schizophrenics. The main pieces of evidence supporting this as part of the explanation are the facts that schizophrenia, like autism, is associated with advanced paternal age probably due to the increased frequency of new mutations in children of older fathers, and that both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and autism seem to be associated more closely with the total number of atypical mutations (or subtypes of atypical mutations) in a person's genome than with any one mutation in a particular disease that accounts for a large share of all cases individually.

Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and autism may all be the "fevers" of mental health. In other words, they may be common observable symptoms because a multitude of underlying causes all disrupt the delicate system that causes each symptom (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism and fever respectively) to manifest.

As long as mutation rates among parents in the general population are high enough to make up for deficits in fertility in schizophrenics (which may be smaller than reported due to unacknowledged children of schizophrenic men who have lower fertility rates than schizophrenic women), schizophrenia can persist in the population at a steady prevalence despite being selected against.

The Theories Are Mutually Compatible And Avenues For Further Investigation

Of course, all three of these theories are compatible with each other. The larger the proportion of "first generation schizophrenics" (something that should be possible to estimate with reasonable accuracy from the strength of the paternal age-schizophrenia relationship), and the larger the number of unacknowledged children that men with schizophrenia are having (which might be best estimated as a percentage in excess of the percentage of unacknowledged children in the general population for which there is better empirical data with the percentage estimated by surveyed extramarital sex frequency of schizophrenic men relative to that of a control group), the less pressure there is on courtship trait advantages conferred by subclinical schitzotypy to have to be large and on subclinicial schitzotypy to be common in the general population (a frequency that can be estimated from the share of diagnosed schizophrenics with a family history of schizophrenia and that is, given the literature, probably quite low but non-zero) to explain the condition's evolutionary persistence.

Similarly, if it takes multiple mutations to create symptomatic schizophrenia, and a significant share of schitzotypy genes are "first generation", it is quite plausible that there is a significant rate of subclinical schitzotypy in the general population, which produces descendants who inherit a combination of schitzotypy genes that produce clinical schitzophrenia. One way to test this hypothesis would be to look not merely at advanced parental age as a risk factor, but also to examine advanced male grandparental age as a risk factor. A new mutation accumulation model with a threshold number of mutations required for an individual to be symptomatic would be supported and could be quantified at an order of magnitude level to the extent that advanced male grandparental age was a factor independent of advanced parental age. A study of advanced male grandparental age, of course, has the virtue of being something that can be cheaply, unobtrusively, and accurately determined from participants in existing studies.

Neurodiversity Implications

The "courtship advantage" model proposed in this study for schitzotypy genes, like the studies showing creativity advantages for sufferers of bipolar disorders, and analysis showing benefits in modern society from traits associated with the autism spectrum disorder all point to the importance of a neurodiversity model for thinking about human hereditiary cognitive differences.

If human hereditary cognitive differences are classified as flaws or diseases on one hand, and as enhancements on the other, there is a strong incentive for society and individual decision-makers to use eugenic approaches and gene therapy to wipe out the flaws from the human genome. But, if we recognize that some of the flaws are inseparable from cognitive traits that have value at some frequency (even if it is a low frequency) in our society, then efforts to wipe out genetic "flaws" in the population in the interest of improving mankind should be viewed with far greater skepticism.

Paragraphs Rock

One survey found that the most popular blog posts today are the longest ones, 1,600 words on average.

From here.

Of course, the irony, from the perspective of academia, which is still my cultural home, even though I live and work in the world of journalism and business and the Internet (I confess to never having had the heart to remove the title "Professor" from my bar journal subscription), is that in many disciplines, any published work less than about 20,000 words is considered trivial short form ephemera, while a mere 1,600 words on a blog is considered positively erudite and wordy in the blogosphere.

Bureaucratic Bloat Revisited

The driving force behind the growing number of federal regulatory employees can be explained with one very simple reason: 9-11.

Almost all of the Homeland Security growth, moreover, is due to the federal socialization of the previously private sector and state and local government function of passenger air traffic security in the federal Transporation Security Administration. Also note that the Tea Party faction in Congress has pledged not to make cuts to Homeland Defense, a pledge that clearly extends to the TSA.

Via Rortybomb.

9th Circuit Punts On Prop 8 Standing

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has been charged with deciding if proponents of the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 in California have standing to appeal a U.S. District Court ruling that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional. Officials from the State of California, who agree with the trial court, have refused to do so.

The 9th Circuit has dealt with this issue by asking the California Supreme Court in what is called a "certified question" if proponents of a ballot initiative have standing to defend it under state law, which would confer the right to bring an appeal even in the absence of a federal law basis for doing so.

In practice, it is extremely likely given the prior litigation history of the case and recent relevant California Supreme Court rulings, that the California Supreme Court will find that the proponents have standing to appeal under state law. Thus, the trial court ruling holding that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional will remain in force and gay marriage will very likely resume in California.

In theory, the federal standing issue could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which could grant certiorari to review it (or possibly consider it as a request for a writ of mandamus, another form of appeal in a situation where the name of the kind of appeal taken doesn't matter much). But, because the key issue pertains to the rights conveyed by state law under a state initiative process, and the prior federal precedents on that issue are fairly clear, the U.S. Supreme Court is unlikely to do so, and would be bound by any California Supreme Court determination of state law issues in any case.

If the California Supreme Court rules that the ballot issue supporters lack standing, as I predict that it will, there will be a ruling in force that effectively legalizes gay marriage in California via federal court order, but because no decision on the merits has been made at the 9th Circuit or U.S. Supreme Court level, the precedent will have no effect outside the State of California.

2010 Bankruptcies At Pre-Reform Levels

The Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2005 made significant, predominantly pro-creditor and anti-debtor changes in the bankruptcy law. There was a surge in filings before its enactment by debtors seeking to benefit from the pre-reform rules, followed by a slump in filings, partly due to people who had filed sooner than they otherwise would have and partly due to the reduced attractiveness of the new law. But, consumer bankruptcy filings were up 9% in 2010 to levels near their pre-reform peaks. In all, there were 1,530,078 consumer bankruptcy filings in 2010. This is roughly triple the number of filings in the year after the new bankruptcy law was adopted.

The growth breaks with trends in past years where the number of consumer bankruptcy filings has closely tracked aggregate consumer debt levels, while business filings have tended to more closely track recessions themselves. Consumer debt levels have been shrinking markedly compared to a year ago, but consumer bankruptcies are up substantially, long after the timing effects of the pre-enactment surge have vanished.

The growth in bankruptcy filings may, in addition to economic hard times, reflect the reality that bankruptcy law firms have started to adapt to processing bankruptcy petitions efficiently under the new law, and that the word has gotten out that for moderate income families who have always made up the bulk of consumer bankruptcy filers, that the changes in the new law are not all that much more onerous than under the old law.

The consumer provisions of the bankruptcy reform favored secured creditors and lessors relative to unsecured creditors, required five year long Chapter 13 repayment plans for most middle class debtors, tightened a number of loopholes (luxury purchase rules and homestead exemptions, for example) used mostly by more affluent debtors, required more paperwork, and made many kinds of debts previously dischargeable in Chapter 13 into non-dischargeable debts. But, it didn't fundamentally change the incentives to file for bankruptcy or not, for the average consumer debtor, other than simply making the process somewhat more expensive.

Rethinking Unemployment Insurance

You could be forgiven for believing that we have unemployment insurance in the United States. After all, there is a state administered and federally mandated program with that name. But, it is a misnomer.

What we have instead is a program that provides temporary, partial financial assistance to laid off workers who are actively looking for new positions and haven't found one yet.

Lots of unemployed people don't qualify for unemployment benefits. They expire after six months in ordinary times, and after two years even in the worst hit areas during the current recession. They don't apply to people who are fired for cause, or quit. The don't apply to people who have just finished school, or are homemakers re-entering the workforce, or retirees looking for work because they investment portfolios have underperformed. They don't cover people who used to be self-employed and have seen their business dry up to the point where it makes no profits. They aren't big enough to pay for COBRA health insurance payments, maintain rent or mortgage payments, maintain car payments, and maintain some semblence of normalcy in paying for food, clothing and other necessities at levels incurred before losing a job.

Unemployed workers without an emergency fund or credit cards with available balances are plunged into financial catastrophy in a month or so. Even unemployed workers who set aside three to six months of savings as an emergency fund are hard pressed to make it a year before running out of money. Unemployed workers who had counted on home equity and credit cards as their cushion in times of economic hardship discover that you can't get a home equity loan without an income, that home values tend to decline in recessions, that home equity has to be reduced by costs of sale including realtor commissions, that its is hard to rent an apartment without an income to put on the application, that rising credit card balances have caused credit card companies to shrink their credit lines, and that the fact that your car is worth a certain amount in the Blue Book doesn't mean that you can sell it for that in a month or two.

Unemployed workers can raid retirement accounts and education savings for their children, but the can pay taxes and penalties if they do. And, those savings are often meager for the less skilled and less educated workers who are mostly likely to be unemployed for prolonged periods.

There is no doubt that this encourages people to seek work. But, the American unemployment system is so punitive that the intense financial stresses that system imposes on workers may actually undermine the incentives to find work that financial hardship flowing from unemployment create for workers.

Looking for a new job is about as close as wage and salary workers get to strategic planning. It determines where people live, how they identify themselves, and their standard of living. But, you won't find many people who think that people make their best strategic decision making in a time of crisis with basic resources disappearing by the day.

The reality acknowledged by almost all economists, is that full employment almost never happens, and certainly doesn't happen in recessions. When the ranks of the unemployed are largest it is because the economy does not have jobs for the unemployed, no matter how dire their incentives to find them. There is nothing in economic theory suggests that the rolls of the unemployed operate on a first in, first out (FIFO) basis. Instead, if anything, the evidence seems to indicate that unemployment operates on a LIFO basis (last in, first out). The longer someone is unemployed, the harder it is for them to find a job - in part as a matter of selection (the least attractive candidates are first fired and last hired), but partially out of a stigma of unemployment that causes employers to assume that the long time unemployed are less hireable regardless of the reality.

Unemployment produces all manner of economically inefficient behaviors. It pushes people to take jobs that are inferior to those they could secure if they worked a little longer to look, producing long term reductions of standard of living. Unemployment itself is a huge waste -- tens of millions of people who are ready, able and willing to work could carry out all sorts of economically worthwhile goods and servies but are instead unproductive because they lack direction.

Unemployment leads to more subtle economic problems as well. It makes compassionate employers reluctant to fire marginal workers or lay off workers when it would make the company more efficient to do so. Unemployed workers who default on their debts impose costs on the financial institutions who lent money to them. Unemployed workers consume less, suppressing demand. When unemployed workers skip health insurance and health care, they may fail to treat short term health problems with long term disabling consequences. Their children may miss opportunities to have academic success that leads to harms their financial futures. It makes people who have jobs risk averse preventing them from risking efforts to get better jobs that would make them more economically productive.

Unemployment undermines families. There is pretty strong circumstantial evidence that unemployment is a key driving force behind many poor, single parent families. A father without a job is not infrequently jettisoned because he can't currently contribute economically and makes it harder to get government assistance for the rest of the family or to support it on the mother's income alone. There is also strong circumstantial evidence that unemployment is a major root cause of child abuse and neglect.

Unemployment also creates political barriers to economic restructuring that could make the economy as a whole stronger. It encourages the political system to try to hold on to jobs that don't make economic sense, while discouraging immigration and other economic reforms that could make the economy stronger.

Unemployment benefits while meager, are still especially generous now, as a result of a political response to the recession. But, for the less educated, less skilled and African-American men, for example, unemployment rates are perpetually at Great Depression levels, something that undermines support for our economic system for large shares of the population (who alas, too often, don't vote or can't vote).

Unemployment creates the same contigon of economic malaise that threatens the economy as a whole, writ small, that a failing bank does, writ large. It undermines a whole web of economic actors who deal with that person's family.

A better solution to dealing with unemployment would take a great deal of pressure off a host of other stressed pieces of our economic system. It might cost tens of billions of dollars more, but it would reduce costs elsewhere. Perhaps we need a "jobs first" approach to unemployment that while costly will reduce even more public and private costs elsewhere, just as a "housing first" approach to homelessness reduces the overall public cost of dealing with the needs of the homeless.

Roman Life Nasty, Brutish, and Short

The life expectency in the ancient Roman empire was probably between twenty and thirty years:

[T]he only countries that come close to the likely life expectancy of the average Roman are a long list of terribly poor countries, all but Afghanistan located in sub-Saharan Africa, most with very high levels of HIV infection in addition to any number of other illnesses. But even the worst-off country, Swaziland, comes at 39.6 years at least a decade ahead of the Roman average and on par with the luckiest Roman districts.

Combine this with the very high disease load of the average Roman and sustained undernourishment . . . at least as measured by average height, the food supply improved after the Roman Empire's collapse in the west--and the picture of a congenitally unhealthy population is inescapable. Combine that with the abundant evidence for the exceptionally unequal distribution of wealth and power within the Roman Empire, and with the significantly lower level of economic output (estimated . . . to be inferior to that of central Africa and, of course, lacking the imported technologies available to central Africans) and you have a Rome that stands few comparison with even the worst-off countries of our 21st century world. . . .

In pre-modern societies, the major cause of death was not the chronic, end-of-life conditions that characterize mortality in industrialized societies, nor primary malnutrition, but acute infectious disease, which has varied effects on age distributions in populations. Pulmonary tuberculosis, for example, characterized much of the Roman region in antiquity; its deaths tend to be concentrated in the early twenties, where . . . [data] show a mortality trough. Similarly, in pre-modern societies for which evidence is available, such as early modern England and early eighteenth-century China, infant mortality varies independently of adult mortality, to the extent that equal life expectancies at age twenty can be obtained in societies with infant mortality rates of 15% to 35%.

The oldest Romans were as old as elderly people today, or close, but they were rare.

Little wonder, then, that life was cheap then.

International Developments

* Estonia has become the 17th country to use the Euro.

* South Sudan votes on independence on Monday. This does not include genocide plagued Darfur, but does include most of the animist/Christian minority in the country.

Species Names Aren't Unique

It turns out that there are two or three scientific species-genus names for each actual species of plant. Cases of identical species with multiple names haven't been culled well.

North American English Dialects

One of the best maps of North American English language dialects that I have seen is found here with ample explanation (hat tip to Gene Expression).

My own dialect derives from the Cincinnati-Dayton region of Ohio which is one of a small number of places where the "General American" dialect with no distinctive, Northern, Eastern, Western or Southern features that is favored on radio and television broadcasts with national audiences is favored. This dialect is also spoken in Southern Illinois, Southern Florida, and the part of Northern Ohio where I went to college. It is a variant of the "Midland" dialect, although I tend towards the "Lowest Common Denominator" English fourteen vowel system of the American West, North Central dialect members, and Canadians, probably as a result of having lived in Colorado for fourteen years.

New York City and New Orleans have the most complex sets of dialects, with segregation of dialects by social class in New York City, and by neighborhood in New Orleans.

The distinctions generally track cultural, political and historical trends in U.S. history. The main eight dialects of white Anglo local native born people identified in North America are:

1. Canadian
2. Northern New England
3. The North - mostly Michigan, Milwaukee, Chicago and Upstate New York
4. Greater New York City
5. The Midland
6. The South -- in turn divided into Inland South (including but not limited to "Hillbilly" and Lowland South in a divide tracking slavery's extent, particularly in the subset of the Lowland South dialect called "Classical Southern."
7. North Central -- the dialect of the Upper Penninsula of Michigan and Northern Wisconsin and Minnesota
8. The West

The confluence of the most dialects turns out to be in Nebraska, a bit removed from the confluence of most of the major American river basins, which is in Colorado.

African American Dialects

African American Vernacular English (AAVE), the dialect of most African Americans in the United States, is derived from Classical Southern, and shares its main features and many other features. However, it also has a number of distinctive features. I have not included AAVE in this study, since its geographical distribution tends to be independent of “white” dialects.

The Wikipedia article linked on AAVE states that: "There is little regional variation among speakers of AAVE. Several creolists, including William Stewart, John Dillard, and John Rickford, argue that AAVE shares so many characteristics with creole dialects spoken by black people in much of the world that AAVE itself is a creole, while others maintain that there are no significant parallels. . . . AAVE has pronunciation, grammatical structures, and vocabulary in common with various West African languages." But, some scholars argue that the West African contribution is minor. The lack of regional variation is attributed "in part to relatively recent migrations of African Americans out of the South (see Great Migration and Second Great Migration) as well as to long-term racial segregation."

My own intuition is that there are emerging regional variations between AAVE in Northern and Midwestern cities, the American South, and California (as well are areas influenced by it). In Northern and Midwestern cities, the pace at which both whites and blacks speak is faster, the diction is more crisp, and there has been some borrowing from local dialects in usage and vocabulary. In California, there has been influence from Spanish and from other immigrant languages, in addition to the influences seen in Northern and Midwestern cities and considerable innovation of new grammatical forms in the hip-hop/R&B/rap scene.

Other Dialects

It isn't clear how much staying power new waves of immigration from Spanish speaking and Asian areas will have on existing English dialects. Second and third generation immigrants sound very much like other native English speakers of the area the areas where they grow up.

There are a couple of dialects, spoken predominantly by neither whites nor blacks, but stable, regional American English dialects notwithstanding, that the map does not seem to capture. One is the dialects of Hawaii, and another is the dialect spoken in Southern Colorado by people like Ken Salazar and John Salazar (which sounds superficially similar to a Hawaiian accent with its open wide sounds, at first hearing).

The other dialects of English that I hear increasingly in the United States, which are not strongly regional are Australian English (recently heard in the local grocery store), British and Scotish English, South Asian English, and the somewhat generic "universal British colony second language English" that has a more refined name that escapes me at the moment.

Municipal Bond Risks Lower Than You'd Think

Slate summarizes the data on municipal bond default risks.

Basically, they note that the economy sucks and that this has put great pressure on government budgets that could force them into bankruptcy, ("Vallejo, a city of more than 100,000 east of San Francisco Bay, is currently in Chapter 9."), but the default risk is overwhelmingly concentrated with debts owed by government affiliated entities not backed by tax dollars and even there default rates have been lower than expected.

[H]istorically, their rates of default come in around one-third of 1 percent, far lower than the rates for, say, corporate bonds. Thus, investors around the world own about $2.8 trillion in American municipal debt—an amount that has more than doubled in the last decade and increased about 35 percent over the course of the recession. . . .

Municipalities issue two main classes of bonds. One comes with a "general obligation" pledge, meaning that the government agrees to raise taxes or take other measures to pay bondholders back. But they also issue riskier "non-GO" bonds, or revenue bonds—often to fund the construction of things like hospitals, universities, and housing complexes. It's those bonds where the defaults happen, for the most part. According to Moody's Investors Service, between 1970 and 2009, municipalities have defaulted on Moody's-rated debt only 54 times, and 51 of those defaults came from bonds to finance things like housing projects. . . .

[D]efaults on non-GO debt—for things like hospitals and housing projects, debt already considered more risky—are happening at a slower rate than in years past. The National League of Cities notes that there have been at least 72 defaults this year, down from 204 in 2009 and 162 in 2008. Considering the thousands of bonds issued in the last decade by the 50 states,19,000 cities, 4,000 counties, 15,000 school districts, and tens of thousands of individual projects—that's not too bad.

Thus, there have been only three non-housing project related municipal bond defaults of Moody's rated debts in the last four decades. Tax backed debt default rates remain miniscule.

The low default rates also cast doubt on the proposition that higher corporate bond default rates are due to unavoidable bad luck as opposed to predictable risky decision making. Municipal bonds not supported by tax revenues involve large, complex enterprises that are influenced by the economy. Yet, somehow, they manage to avoid the default rates seen in the for profit private sector.

The Good News Of The Last Decade

Rather than coming up with my own good news from the last decade, which I'm not disposed to do with the front page story in the paper is Republican plots to repeal health care reform, I'll crip off others including science fiction writer Charles Stross who notes:

1. AIDs is treatable.
2. "[B]oth China and India underwent annual economic growth averaging around 10% per year throughout the decade. The number of people living in poverty and with unsafe water supplies world-wide today is about the same as it was in 1970. Only difference is, there were 3 billion of us back then and today we're nearer to 7 billion. Upshot: the proportion of us humans on this planet who are living in third world poverty (unable to afford enough food, water, clothing and shelter) has actually been halved."
3. "Africa averaged around 5% growth throughout the decade, too." Some haven't shared in those gains due to events like the Congo War, but those who escaped wars have come out far better than that average.
4. "we haven't nuked ourselves." We have had the longest time period (about sixty years) without an international war in Europe since the Roman Empire, and the number of people living in war zones dropped greatly in the last decade on top of further drops after the Cold War.
5. Computer technology is faster, has greater broadband speed, has more storage capacity and in cheaper by orders of magnitude from a decade ago.
6. Genetic science has advanced greatly.
7. The pace of terrorism seems to have slowed down in the first world.

And, I'll also turn to "The Big Picture" which notes:

1. Cell phone use has gone from rare to predominant.
2. Internet use is way up.
3. U.S. population density is modestly up and U.S. power consumption is modestly down. In part driven by rising oil prices.

But, the environmental picture is still bleak. Global warming continues and is speeding up, more species are endangered, and natural disasters have been worse in the last decade than in the decade before it.

Economically, the good news is that things aren't getting worse in employment or GDP. The bad news, however, is that employment isn't improving very fast.

Bullying and Cyber Bullying

A few notable facts about bullying and cyber bullying:

1. "[A]s few as 10 percent of bullying victims are cyber-bullied. Meanwhile, a study of fifth, eighth and 11th graders in Colorado that same year found that they were more likely to be bullied verbally or physically than online." About a quarter of all kids are bullied in the old fashioned meatspace way.

2. Most bullies learn to be bullies from experience as victims themselves: "72 percent of children who were physically abused by their parents became a bully, a victim of a bully or both." Most bullies are both victims and perpetrators, as are many victims of bullying, although generally not both in the same relationship.

3. "[N]early 50 percent of American workers have experienced or witnessed bullying in the workplace, . . . 80 percent of workplace bullying is legal - and and 72 percent of bullies outrank their targets."

4. Bullying may trigger suicide, but generally this happens in cases where the victims were already at grave risk for suicide from other factors.

5. Active efforts to control bullying can significantly reduce it, but probably not eliminate it.

Has Feminism Narrowed Our Understanding Of Bullying?

The article cited doesn't discuss it, but one way to conceptualize both domestic violence and child abuse is as a cycle of bullying behavior that encompasses all of the domains of work, home and school.

Japanese culture is quite sensitive to the existence of bullying as a problem at both work and in school, and sometimes spanning over into the home. Whether that is because it is more common there, or because it is conceptualized that way is hard to tell.

American cultural responses to bullying type behavior through sexual harassment and domestic violence lenses, a gender specific way of thinking that may go all the way back intellectually to 19th century culture of honor concepts, while effective in the domains targeted, may be preventing Americans from seeing the issue in a holistic way, or from a mental health as well as a criminal justice and private litigation perspective.

Bullying Compared To Gang Violence

Another, overlapping but not identical area, where there is a large overlap between the class of likely perpetrators and the class of likely victims is gang violence, which is probably the most variable component of the violent crime rate in the United States, rising and falling much more than other kinds of violent crime (e.g. impulsive assaults by people with drinking problems or domestic violence).

The insularity of gang violence is one of the reasons it is not addressed more assertively by the criminal justice system. Sorting out honor among thieves isn't easy for law enforcement to do.

A very large share of all murders and firearm assaults, and even even larger share of all murders and firearm assaults during periods when murder rates are high (particularly the subset of unsolved murders) appear to involve violence related to gang membership perpetrated with other gangs or member's of one's own gang as targets (and other victims being mere bystanders caught in the crossfire). The motives for gang violence include vigilante justice, establishment of territory, opportunistic raiding for loot, suppressing criminal justice system involvement, and reputation building to prevent further challenges to gang authority.

Much of this violence can be conceptualized as social, rather than psychological in origin, like the violent acts carried out by soldiers in furtherance of a sovereign's direction, although it is also true that a disproportionate share of gang violence appears to be carried out by the minority subset of gang members with mental health factors, some hereditary, that particularly predispose them to it.

Indeed, one can see gang violence as an apolitical version of terrorism. Terrorism is socially organized and motivated violence committed by non-governmental groups with political ends. Gang violence is committed by semi-sovereign non-governmental groups that don't aspire to genuine sovereignty seeing the legitimate government as too daunting to overcome outside their narrow space of organized criminal activities carried out for profit and personal safety.

Conceiving of gang violence as a fundamentally social activity provides insight into what will and will not work in the criminal justice system to reduce violent crime associated with gang violence. On one hand, a "sociopath" (i.e. someone who engages in anti-social behavior because it is acceptable or even required within the norms of his social context) may be redeemable in a way that a "psychopath" (i.e. something who is congenitally without a conscience psychologically), may not be. Governor Ritter's pardon of Reverend Kelly in December was an example of that kind of redemption being accomplished in real life. On the other hand, incarceration that is draconian relative to personal culpability (e.g. in the case of felony murder sentences) may work because they disrupt the social entities (gangs) that drive members to act in sociopathic ways.

If one is looking at social context, rather than individual culpability, as being the key to suppressing gangs, the natural next step is to consider non-traditional sentencing options and penal management methods that can disrupt gangs and put convicted gang members into a new social context with mainstream norms, without expensive overkill use of incarceration. The dynamics involved (and their intractability) are explored, for example, in "The Good Girl's Guide To Getting Kidnapped" (2010) by Yxta Maya Murray (who is also a law professor), in which a young woman with deep ties of Los Angeles gang life struggles between success in that context and success in the contexts of the middle class establishment. It is a young adult book that pulls no punches and is assiduously committed to showing rather than telling, and leaving morals open ended rather than resolving the issues.

Addressing the motivations of gang violence in sentencing in a way conscious of its social context, through the criminal justice system, which usually defines crime in the context of isolated individuals without much thought to context, may also be the key to really making progress in addressing racism in the criminal justice system, as a large share of all disproportionate involvement of racial minorities in the criminal justice system in related to gang affiliated crime. Indeed, given the ubiquity of gang related crime in high poverty minority communities, one of the big crimological and sociological question may be not "why do high poverty minority communities have so much criminal gang activity?," but "why do high poverty Anglo communities seem to lack significant criminal gang activity?" Criminal gangs, of couse, used to be common in immigrant communities in the United States, particularly those involving Catholic immigrants in the 19th century, but that American mafia is almost gone now and while there are exceptions, this does seem to be the case.

Worm Therapy Works For Inflammatory Bowel Disease

One major hypothesis of evolutionary biology is that humans used to live in a far less hygenic environment and in particular have an immune system designed to ward of parasitic worms (with a reboot of the gut microbiology being the true purpose of the appendix). The growing tide of auto-immune diseases, including inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), may be a product of the immune system being primed to wipe out these invasive agents and lacking a true target. This hygene hypothesis may also be behind the rise of problem allergies.

University of Iowa researchers have had success in treating patients with the autoimmune disease IBD for twenty-four weeks "with "cocktails" laced with microscopic whipworm eggs. . . . After 24 weeks of worm therapy, 23 of the 29 volunteers went into remission." This is despite the fact that the volunteers had no success with other therapies.

This joins a number of other therapies (e.g. "gut bacteria transplants" that involve putting other people's fecal materials into one's gut with depleted gut bacteria resources, and maggot therapy with decontaminated maggots let loose to eat dead tissue on a person since they don't eat live tissue and are mostly a worry because they carry diseases), that are gross but seem to work.

Annual Reports In A New Year

Yes, the New Year really began on Saturday, and I've already made one post this year already, but this is the first business day of the New Year. It is time for annual reports.

Looking backwards, it means that I have a tax return to prepare, which, as someone who is self-employed, is non-trivial. Also, while I have no one to whom I must report my financial results other than my dear wife, that is ample reason to prepare a full set of financial statements at the same time. And, it is also the time of year, since I have all the other paperwork in hand, when I review my spending for the past year and prepare a budget for the coming one. This year, as a sole practioner, that budget will again include both a personal budget as always, and a business plan.

It is also time to look backwards and forwards with this blog in mind. It is a notable little spot not too far out on the "long tail" of the blogosphere. As the sidebar shows, I made about 750 posts in 2010, about two posts per day, or three per business day, depending on how you measure it. I post less on weekends and holidays, but don't stop entirely. This is fairly typical apart from the burst of posts in my first year. The total number of posts through the end of 2010 was 5085. In 2010, per sitemeter, this site had 74,825 visits (an average of 205 per day) that produced 108,484 page views. This is about on part with a B list law professor's or academic blog.

Google loves this site, putting it on the first page of search results for a bizzare mismash of search queries and driving a large share of its traffic. Some of the most searched posts include one on the fraud in the Rich Dad, Poor Dad books, a post entitled How Safe Are Motorcycles (accident rates for motorcycles have risen since I wrote that post despite a general trend towards improved traffic safety), a post on Racism In Mississippi, posts on the Shane Company bankruptcy (which it recently emerged from) and the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, a post on a ballot issue in 2010 to require bail bonds in more circumstances, a post on "Republican criminals," a post on Creationist Kent Hovind's tax fraud conviction, a post on Gnostic Christian religious history, a post arguing against urban planning, a post on Louisiana's unfortunate odds in its war with the sea, a post on a replacement for the A-10 close air support aircraft and a post on the accuracy of artillery. This drives a global audience.

Technorati rates this blog as 7104th of all blogs with an "authority" rating of 437 which is based largely on citations from other blogs.

Largely as a result of my posts on military affairs, this post is cited on both right wing and left wing political blogs more evenly than most. I get referrals from both Daily Kos and the Free Republic. One post was licensed to the British War College for use in their curriculum. This blog won a Best of Westword award in 2007.

The site has ten Blogger followers, is part of the LeftyBlogs feed, and is also syndicated commercially (in an arrangement that is currently economically marginal). I have been told in meatspace that a number of my relatives are regular readers. I also have readers in the state capitol and in the Denver media commmunity. And, of course, there are about half a dozen people who regularly leave comments and about as many more who frequently e-mail me or communicate with Facebook with me regarding posts, or regularly link to my posts in their own blogs.

This blog is weak on copyediting, is skimpy on graphics, is devoid of videolinks and audiolinks which I personally rather dislike in other people's blogs, and is eclectic. I tend to write in paragraphs, rather than pithy pot shots (although sometimes those posts are too tempting to resist). I write on Colorado Politics, national politics, economics, legal issues, science, technology, military affairs, comics, pre-history, linguistics, daily life, parenting, and a variety of other subjects. As I've noted earlier, the main reason I blog is to prevent my basement from filling up with hard to access bankers boxes full of little scraps of paper with ideas written on them and newspaper clippings. I've had great success on this front, largely reducing my little scribblings to a few bound idea journals a year.

I have warded off one cease and desist letter alleging a trademark violation, and have so far escaped the Righthaven/Denver Post/Associated Press anti-blog lawsuit campaign (of which Know Your Courts is the most recent casaulty, and Colorado Pols was another recent target), probably due to some combination of being judicious in my quotations of Denver Post news stories, the fair use character of how I use that material, and the fact that as a lawyer, I can defend myself in court competently and cheaply if I must (although it is comforting to know after reviewing my insurance policies that my insurance company has a duty to defend me in blogging related lawsuits as well). Still, as a past member of the Society of Professional Journalists myself, I could, like Colorado Pols, live without the Denver Post and go directly to the sources and not given them credit for posts suggested by their stories, or link driven traffic, if I needed to do so or wanted to do so.

I've also so far avoided defamation claims despite the fact that I make a point of identifying people who have done disreputatable things by name compared to many other commentators, something that I attribute mostly to the fact that I disclose my sources and write pretty much exclusively about public figures and matters of public concern, which is insulation from liability under the New York Times reckless disregard standard. I've certainly made inadvertant mistakes in posts, of course, and I am generally happy to have those corrected in comments or even with updates in a post or follow up post if the issues are brough to my attention and I agree that I made a mistake.

I am ever vigilant against comment spam and spend perhaps an hour or two every week or two trying to pare it back. There is certainly some of it on this blog, and I don't police old posts as vigilantly as I do new ones. But, as of the end of the year, I was comment spam free going back at least six months, so the noise to signal ratio in the comments hasn't been too bad. There is no commercial advertising on this blog itself, although I could easily arrange to have it, and aside from the free blogger system that I use, I receive very little swag (although I am open to offers) and so far have not received any cash compensation for blog posts since I discontinued my contract with Colorado Confidential (now called the Colorado Independent), although I hope that syndication may change that equation.

Generally, when I have potential conflicts of interest with clients related to posts (or have a client with a direct interest in a matter that I might post about) I don't post at all. Those conflicts and direct interests vary from time to time.

I get a quite slow, but steady stream of potential clients from this blog, a good share of whom I must turn away because I am not licensed to practice law in their jurisdiction or because their cases are not economical for me to bring at my hourly rate or on a contingent basis (which I often don't have the deep pockets to make possible even when cases do have merit and potentially large payouts), despite the fact that the cases brought to my attention often do have merit. I get far more cases from my Facebook page and Linked In than I do from this blog. I often end up referring those cases generated by this blog that are uneconomical to litigate with a lawyer to an approriate governmental regulator and in rare cases to a non-profit or other attorney who can economically handle such cases.

South Carolina Celebrates Treason and Slavery

The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.

- William Faulkner

Despite being a white guy born in Atlanta, Georgia whose earliest memories include a trip to Stone Mountain (the Confederate answer to Mount Rushmore), I really don't have much sympathy for celebrations of the Confederacy.