Things They Should Study: best use of charitable donations

There is a lot of information out there about different charities from the perspective of the percentage of money raised that goes to the cause vs. administration. And there's a lot of information about how to optimize tax incentives etc. But I'd really like more information about the best general strategic approach to take.

Would you get better results by donating to a charity, or by donating to a political organization that works to obsolete the need for that charity? Would my charitable dollar help more people if I donated it to a third world country (on the assumption that the cost of living is lower there, so therefore they could buy more stuff with it) or if I donated it locally (on the assumption that less of it might get lost in transit?). Callous as it sounds, do you get better long-term results by saving lives or by improving lives? Do you save more lives, or improve more lives, with food or with health care? Or health research? Or education? Or literacy? Do microloans get better results because of their relendability?

The same could apply with volunteering. What's the best use of general volunteer labour? Which sectors benefit most from a donation of time, and which benefit most from a donation of money? What about donations of specialized professional services? What about in-kind donations?

Some might object to this way of thinking on the basis that it might lead to a dearth of donations in areas that, while still worthy causes, are found to not to be the very best use of charitable donations. I'm not sure whether this would be the case, because people donate for all kinds of reasons. People donate to research into the disease that killed their grandparents or the disease whose genes they carry. People donate because a friend is doing a charity run. People volunteer for the humane society because doggies are awesome. People donate because they're asking for a loonie at the cash register and they're getting a loonie in their change. People donate because they have some stuff in their house that they want to get rid of. It isn't all calculated.

But, in cases where it is calculated, it would be useful to have information on the best strategic approach.

Fear and respect

Before the G20, I respected the police and was not particularly afraid of them.

Since the G20, I'm afraid of police and find it very difficult to respect them.

It appears that, in my emotional matrix, fear and respect correlate inversely, and might even be mutually exclusive.

I'm more inclined to cooperate with people when I respect them than when I fear them. Respect makes me actually want to cooperate, whereas fear makes me just not want to get caught not cooperating. (Nuance: fear doesn't make me not want to not cooperate, it just makes me not want to get caught not cooperating.)

It would be interesting to study how universal these feelings are.

Things They Should Study: income range for which additional tax credits would actually make a difference

All this election talk of tax credits makes me wonder how many people they're actually useful for.

People at the low end of the income scale hardly pay any tax anyway, and most of what they do pay gets refunded, so they wouldn't achieve any additional savings with additional tax credits.

But the more money you have, the more the savings from a tax credit become negligible. For example, I currently don't feel the tax credit I get for my TTC Metropass. If it disappeared, I wouldn't notice. However, I still feel my RRSPs. Someone who makes ten times what I make might not feel their RRSPs either.

Tax credits whose goal is to modify behaviour (fitness, home renovation) tend to apply for things that require a certain amount of disposable income. If your budget is so tight that you just can't find room for a kickboxing class or a new kitchen, you aren't going to be able to benefit from these.

And, of course, the more tax credits you already have, the less impact any additional tax credits will have. When I was in university, my tuition deduction and educational tax credits were huge (relative to my income at the time - now they'd be nothing more than a nice little bonus). But because of this, any additional credits would have been useless to me. I was already paying no taxes and getting money back, there was nothing left to deduct!

So someone should do research: for what segment of the population are tax credits useful, and for what segment are they useless? How big do they have to be? How many people have room for those kinds of expenditures in their budgets?

Things They Should Study: how comprehensible are phone answering scripts?

I'd say about half the time I call a business or office where an actual human answers the phone, I don't understand what they say when they answer. They just rattle it off so quickly I can't catch the information I'm looking for.

And, conversely, it's quite possible I rattle off my own phone answering script so quickly that people can't understand it. I recently had a guy repeatedly call my work number wanting help with his phone card, and I couldn't seem to convince him that I couldn't help him and he had the wrong number. In retrospect, he probably didn't catch a word of my greeting and thought he was calling the phone card place.

I think this problem might be due in part to the fact that callers don't always know how the phone is going to be answered. I could answer my phone with "Hello?" or with my name or with "Translation" (and, because it's translation, I could answer in another language that the wrong number is totally unprepared for.) But conversely, because we answer the phone several times a day, we tend to rattle it off automatically, like how most people rattle off "ThanksHaveANiceDay" at the end of a cash register transaction.

Someone should research this

Things They Should Study: the origin of the neener cadence

Picture a small child taunting his friend, tongue sticking out, thumbs to temples, fingers waving, saying "Neener neener neee-ner!" or "Nanny nanny boo boo!"

You know the exact cadence with which he's neenering, don't you? It's close to the tune of Ring Around the Rosie.

Why does everyone neener with the exact same cadence?

Someone needs to find out where this came from and why it's so universal.

Things They Should Study: kindness patterns

I blogged before about how I find that smaller kindnesses are bigger than bigger kindnesses. In my own life and experience, in the way my own mind and emotions work, the bigger kindnesses come more readily and with less effort, and feel like less of an imposition, whereas for the smaller kindnesses don't come readily and require more conscious effort (and, actually, use up more spoons for my introvert brain).

I'm thinking of all this because of a couple of people who have been in the news here in Toronto lately. (I know it's obvious who I'm talking about, but I'm not naming names in this post because I'm repeating hearsay and speculating on other people's thought processes. I don't want to slander people or propagate rumours or presume to know what's in their brains, but it happens that the inspiration for this idea and the best example of what I'm trying to explain is these specific individuals, so I'm compromising by making sure that this post isn't in their google results.)

The individuals in question have, with some frequency, very loudly and publicly made statements that I think we can all agree are ungenerous (in the sense of anti-generous rather than non-generous) about other people or groups of people. They are on public, often televised record calling names and yelling.

There are also many anecdotes of individual kindnesses and generosity perpetrated by these individuals. There are stories of them going far more out of their way than necessary to help someone who's having a problem. I know someone personally who has witnessed the more famous of these individuals making a specific effort to do something for a young fan despite the fact that he was going through a difficult time in his own life.

This juxtaposition is interesting. The fact that these people make ungenerous statements, yell, and call names often enough that they're known for it means that these ungenerous and rather angry thoughts are in their heads. After all, you don't utter something if the thought has never entered your head. But, at the same time, despite the ubiquity of the ungenerous thoughts in their heads, they're able to do the small kindnesses frequently enough to develop a reputation for it. I literally cannot fathom how a person's mind could possibly work that way, how both ungenerous thoughts and ease of inclination towards small kindnesses can coexist in the same brain, but it looks like it exists.

I certainly can't claim to be an objectively generous person, but I've never had thoughts as ungenerous as these individuals' public statements. I'm not saying this like it's virtuous or anything, it just doesn't occur to me. But despite the fact that my thoughts are less ungenerous, the smaller kindnesses for which these individuals are known don't come as easily to me. But, at the same time, bigger kindnesses and more macro-generous baseline behaviour (voting for the greater good, not speaking ungenerously about people in public) are default, practically second nature. I'd have to put thought and effort into not doing them. I can't say I never yell, but when I do it's more defensive. It's something like "Shut up and go away and leave me alone!" or "Why can't you just not hurt me?" rather than outright attacking someone. Again, I'm not claiming any of this as virtue, it's just how my brain works. And other people whom I like and with whom I identify seem to have brains that work this way too.

So this has me wondering: do different people have different patterns of generosity of thought vs. ease of small kindnesses vs. ease of big kindnesses? If so, does it correlate with some other factor? (Age? Gender? Wealth? Politics?)

This also has me thinking of something else I've noticed. There are some adults who consider a child polite based on the social formulas the child has been trained to use. If the kid says "Please" and "Thank you" and "Sir" and "Ma'am", they are deemed polite, without even thinking about looking at their actual behaviour. I find this odd because I, personally, don't care about the formulas at all. If a kid calls me by my first name and says "Can I have a cookie?", but they aren't a bully and don't wreck stuff or bring home a cockroach to keep as a pet, I consider them good and polite. I wonder if this correlates in any way? My gut instinct tells me that preferring children to use the correct social formulas regardless of actual behaviour would correlate with favouring small kindnesses over big kindnesses, but I have no evidence or anything.

Things They Should Study: what would it cost to make critical workers unbribable?

Apparently border guards might soon be authorized to strip search airport and port employees because they think these employees might be involved in smuggling illegal drugs.

This makes me wonder about the economics of the situation from the employees' point of view. How much money do they make? How much bribe money or whatever would they get for helping to smuggle drugs? How much bribe money can drug cartels afford to pay them? How much of a pay increase would it take to make this bribe money negligible to them? What if they offered the workers financial incentive greater than the bribe amounts for fingering known drug smuggling operations?

Has anyone done the numbers on this yet? If not, someone should.

Things They Should Study: do countries' political positions correlate with the strength of their economies?

Quick, name a European country that's having economic problems. Just keep the name of that country in mind when you click the link further down in this post.

A while back, I was pondering the fact that when we hear about European economic problems, we never hear about Scandinavian countries. We keep seeing articles about how this economic crisis shows that the European socialist model is unsustainable, but Scandinavia, which is generally considered the epitome of European socialism, is never mentioned.

Now think of the countries that are mentioned in conjunction with the economic crisis, like the country that you thought of at the beginning of this post.

Now click here to see where European governments fall on the political compass.

At first glance there seems to be a correlation, doesn't there?

I don't have the economic or political knowledge to conduct a proper analysis and determine definitively if there is in fact a correlation. But it would be really interesting if someone who does have the knowledge could do this.

Things They Should Study: what percentage of medical appointments are due to red tape?

Most of the medical appointments I've had in my adult life have been to renew my birth control prescription. Red tape requires that I see a doctor to keep taking the same medication I've always been taking.

My employer requires a doctor's note if you want to get your workstation ergonomized. My insurance requires a note from your primary care physician before it will cover the services of certain specialists.

After getting strep throat every year for most of my life, I can recognize it. However, I still have to go to the doctor to get a prescription for antibiotics.

Gardasil required four doctor's appointments: one to get the prescription, and three to have the doctor administer it.

Apart from a minimal amount of psychiatry, all the medical attention I've received in my adult life has been because of red tape. I didn't actually want or need to go to a doctor, I already knew what I needed, the doctor was just the gatekeeper.

In light of the idea that was recently floating around in Quebec to have patients pay a user fee every time they go to a doctor, I wonder what percentage of all medical appointments are like this? It really is not fair at all to make rules that the doctor has to be the gatekeeper even when you know what you need, and then charge people for going to the doctor.

Things They Should Study: economic return on refugees

My grandparents came here on a boat 50 years ago with their gaggle of children. They did manage to find jobs and be self-supporting, but if they had been economically dependent the entire time they were in Canada, plus their children had been economically dependent until adulthood, there would have been about 150 total person-years economically dependent on the state.

My grandparents' direct descendants have, so far, put in nearly 200 total person-years of full-time gainful employment, plus an additional 60 total person-years of part-time work like you have as a student.

The majority of their grandchildren are still in school. I'm the oldest and I'm not yet 30. The youngest is still in high school. Parity between my grandparents' hypothetical person-years of dependence and their descendants' person-years of productive employment may well have been reached before I even finished university. Barring mass unemployment, we're going to reach 300 person-years of productive employment within the next decades.

Wouldn't it be interesting to do research and see to what extent this pattern holds throughout the general population?

Edited to add: It has also been pointed out to me that some of my grandparents' descendants have run businesses and therefore created jobs, and some have been responsible for teaching or training future members of their own fields. (To say nothing of the fact that some have saved lives.) So our ROI is greater than just the taxes and consumer spending produced by our salaries.

Things They Should Study: the impact of gender imbalance on future generations

A while back, I read a book called Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived without Men After the First World War by Virginia Nicholson. So many men died in WWI that there were an enormous number of women of that generation who never married because there were simply not enough men to go around. (I'm trying to find the percentage of missing men but can't - both 10% and 25% come to mind, but there's an anecdote in the book where a teacher at a girls' school tells her class that only one in ten of them will get married.) Apparently this was historically unprecedented (which seems odd to me - there have always been wars - but that's not he point of this post). The book explores the situation of the women who never married, which was rather interesting, but today I found myself thinking it would be interesting to study this situation from the opposite perspective: what impact did this gender imbalance have on marriage and then on future generations?

(To explain what I'm trying to say here, I'm going to have to make a lot of gross generalizations. I'm taking a heterocentric, heteronormative approach, I'm reducing people's appeal as a spouse and as a human being to a number on the classic 1 to 10 scale, I'm presenting as a given the assumption that people are only "worthy" of spouses who are close to them on the 1 to 10 scale, and I'm assuming that children only look to adults of their own gender as role models. I do realize that human beings and relationships are a lot more complex nuanced than that, but I'm just trying to outline the general concept that I think someone should study so it gets silly to insert appropriate qualifiers into every single sentence.)

We can assume that the missing men were distributed evenly over the 1 to 10 scale. So normally only someone who is a 9 or 10 can get with another 10. But with all these men missing, there weren't enough 10 men for all the 10 women, so 10 women ended up with men as low as 8 or even 7. But meanwhile, 10 men never found themselves having to stoop to a 9. So you've got a whole generation of marriages where there are a significant number of wives who are objectively out of their husband's league, but few or no husbands who are out of their wife's league.

The thing is, people might not notice this is happening. The pool of prospective spouses available just…is. It isn't really something you question. For example, I have never in my life met someone, even in passing, who is independently wealthy. (I know that such people exist, I've read about them in books, but I've never met one in real life.) Therefore, if I were to write down everything I want in a prospective mate, it would never even occur to me to write down independently wealthy, any more than it would occur to me to say I want someone with a flying car. That just isn't something that happens in real life.

So because no one notices this is happening, as everyone comes back from WWI and that cohort starts to get married, the 1 to 10 scale gradually gets realigned. 10 women keep ending up with, say 8 men, so eventually a marriage that objectively consists of a 8 man and a 10 woman is assumed to be a fair match. And, as this new normal takes over, people look at the couple, figure they're well-matched by general social standards, there's no way he's a 10 and there's no way she's an 8, so they must both be 9s.

So then some time passes and all these people have children. The children look around, see their parents and their friends' parents and the other grownups around them, and blindly accept these misaligned matches as normal because they don't know anything else. They see the woman who is objectively a 10 and the man who is objectively an 8, and unquestioningly accept that both these people are 9s. So this creates a situation where women have to be "better" than men just to get the same number of points, but this children don't realize this because the whole world has always been like this for them.

So what impact does this have on the children? Does it cause girls to underestimate their worth and boys to overestimate their worth? (Or, alternatively or in addition, does it cause society as a whole to underestimate girls' worth and to overestimate boys' worth?) What impact does it have on the mating and dating game? What impact does it have on the next generation of children?

It was beyond the scope of the book I read, but, as we know about a generation after WWI there was WWII. Did this also result in a shortage of men? If so, did this exacerbate even more this now-socially-internalized idea whereby a woman has to be objectively better to be condsidered a 10 than a man does? How did this affect their kids (i.e. the Baby Boomers)?

Writing this out has given me a theory. Not sure how good a theory it is, but it's a theory that I have. You know how they keep talking about how boys are falling behind in education, how schools aren't serving them well etc.? What if it's really this idea, internalized and multiplied over several generations? Maybe boys feel "good enough" at a lower level of achievement than girls do? Maybe boys are just as happy with a 60% as girls are with an 80% for the same reasons that a man who, just a few generations ago, would have been considered a 6 is now considered evenly matched with a woman who, the same few generations ago, would have been an 8?

I have no idea how much of this is true or valid, but it would be an interesting thing for someone to research if they could figure out a methodology.

Things They Should Study: do kids see parent-child relationships as typical of all relationships?

A recurring theme in my relationship with my parents and how that affected my social skills is that as a child I took how my parents treated with me as an example of how I should treat others. To use one of the milder examples, if I didn't say "please" when asking for something, my parents would say "What do you say?" Therefore, in the rest of life, if someone asked for something without saying "please", I'd say to them "What do you say?" Not so very good for general social interaction with peers or elders, but I truly thought that was What's Done. When I first read Miss Manners in my early 20s, I was quite genuinely surprised to learn that it's rude to correct other people's manners. It would never have occurred to me.

This has come up in conversation with other people who happen to be parents (haven't discussed it with my own parents) and they all seemed surprised that it wouldn't occur to me that parenting is an exceptional circumstance. But I can't imagine how it would have occurred to me. That was life as I knew it, that's how the world had been every day of my whole life.

It would be interesting to study a bunch of children and see how many of them see parent-child relationships as typical of all relationships, and how many of them see them as exceptional.

Things They Should Study: gender ratios of different neighbourhoods

The other day I was sitting in my hairdresser's chair looking out the window, and I noticed that about 80% of passers-by were male. This morning, about 75% of the people in my section of the subway platform were female. I haven't made any other observations (I think this is going to lead me to walk around counting though), but it would be interesting to study whether there are patterns in different neighbourhoods or different places or different times of day.

Things They Should Study: is ESL harder when both parties are ESL?

I overheard a conversation today between two people, from two different countries, both of whom spoke English as a second language, speaking to each other in English because it's the lingua franca here in Toronto. They seemed to be having some difficulty, and I wondered if it's because both of them spoke English imperfectly in different ways, and they weren't accustomed to each other's imperfections. I didn't hear enough of the conversation to tell if this was the case, or if they would have had as much trouble with a native speaker of English.

However, it also occurred to me that it might be easier when both parties are ESL, because both their vocabularies evolved the same way, from textbook English. I was once told (by an expert in my field) that the typical speaker of English as a Second Language in their professional life has an English vocabulary numbering in the thousands of words, whereas a native speaker of English has an English vocabulary numbering in the hundreds of thousands of words. Most of the time we don't notice this. If someone speaking ESL knows words like "good", "great", "excellent", "fantastic", "wonderful", native speakers probably aren't going to notice that they don't know "groovy", "copacetic", "the bees knees", "gnarly", etc. But native speakers can sometimes come up with words like that and confuse ESL speakers, whereas other ESL speakers most likely wouldn't.

When I was in Germany, there were exchange students from all around Europe there, and how well I managed to converse with them varied based on the quality of their German (and, I'm sure, the quality of my German.) I can't identify any general trends. (My other languages were basically canceled out by the German immersion. After two weeks there, I couldn't even speak French, even though I could still understand it perfectly. When I reached for a French word, it came out in German.)

It would be really interesting to do research on this.

Things They Should Study: does athletic success correlate with religious faith?

Watching Joannie Rochette's short program, I found myself coveting whatever sports psychology she does. I wish I had that mental resilience and focus!

Coincidentally, the next day Rosie DiManno wrote a column about sports psychology, and I realized it would never work on me. I know some people who swear by visualization or mantras or positive thinking, but it doesn't work on me because I know that it's just visualization. I'm not actually doing anything, I'm just picturing stuff in my head.

Within my own mind, in terms of the thoughts and feelings I experience, my inability to do visualization come from the same place as my inability to have religious faith. I know that it is powered solely by believing in it, and because of that I'm unable to believe in it.

Elite athletes are obvious able to believe in it. I wonder if this also means that they're more likely to be capable of religious faith?

Things They Should Study: what is the impact of xmas on flu pandemics?

Public health officials are being accused of overinflating the flu threat get rid of extra vaccine doses, with the thinking that the flu threat is currently winding down.

But it seems to me that xmas could exacerbate the spread of the flu just because people tend to travel back to their families of origin.

By a quick mental head count, over xmas eve and xmas day I'm going to be seeing, talking to, and eating with (in rather close quarters) people from about 20 different households and 15 different schools/workplaces, including a few medical institutions. They could carry in viruses from any of those places, and any viruses brought in could be carried back to any of those places. And this is happening in many many families all around the world.

Surely that would have some impact on the spread of the flu?

Things They Should Study: do dynamic opinions ever change direction?

There are many many things in life I don't know everything about. So in circumstances where I don't know everything but I still need to have an opinion, I tend to pay attention to my dynamic opinions. The more I learn about X, the more I think Y. For example, the more I learn about WWI, the more I think it wasn't a worthwhile war. The more I learn about real estate, the more I think it shouldn't be treated as an investment. The more money I make and the more taxes I pay, the more I feel it's essential to use our taxes to strengthen our social safety net.

What I'm wondering: are dynamic opinions reliable in the long term, or do people's dynamic opinions ever reverse directions? If so, under what circumstances? Are there specific triggers?

Things They Should Study; how does cultural prioritization of self-sufficiency affect employment rates and the economy as a whole?

Further to my previous thoughts about cultural prioritization of self-sufficiency stemming from Big Sort, I find myself wondering about its economic impact.

For example, my parents think it's decadent to buy lunch at work every day and think people should bring lunch from home. I think it's an annoying waste of time to make lunch at home and much prefer to buy it. If everyone thought like my parents, there'd be far few fast food places, food courts, coffee shops, delis, etc. So those food service jobs wouldn't exist, so there'd be less demand for wholesale food suppliers and bulk purchases of paper napkins, so there'd be less work for commercial delivery drivers, etc. etc. etc. If everyone thought like me, there'd be more of these jobs. I'm not an economic expert, but it seems to me that it might affect the broader economy.

Similar, in my family we do our own taxes or each other's taxes. Taxes are done within the "tribe" (in the sense of tribe that I coined in my Big Sort post). If everyone worked like us, there'd be no call for businesses such as H&R Block. However, because there are people who think it's a valid option to pay someone else to do your taxes, this whole business sector exists.

Given the geographical trends in attitudes towards self-sufficiency, I find myself wondering if they correlate with employment rates. Is there less employment in places that place greater priority on self-sufficiency because people are doing for themselves or keeping it within the tribe?

The trick to studying this would be you'd have to control for the fact that urban areas (which place less priority on self-sufficiency) have more jobs as a matter of course. That's how they got to be urban areas. If you build, say, a steel plant, all the jobs are going to be at the steel plant. The workers probably aren't going to live right next door to the steel plant (they do tend to get a wee bit smelly), but they may well end up sorting themselves into certain other neighbourhoods depending on whether they do or don't prioritize self-sufficiency.

Thoughts from Big Sort

A while back, I was chatting with my hairdresser and found out that most of her clients are childfree. I thought on this a while, and it led to my noticing that in a great many areas in life, I choose things that are most suitable for me, and find myself surrounded by people who are like-minded in other ways on top of the factor that led me to that choice.

So I was googling around this idea for a while, and found this book: The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop. The book is very US-centric, but parts of it still seem applicable to my reality, and it led to a number of interesting trains of thought, which I'm going to blog about here.

(Note: The book deals with generalized demographic trends, so this post necessarily does to. I started out putting all the necessary mitigative language in everywhere and it quickly became ridiculous, so everything here is to be interpreted as a generalized trend, not an absolute truth, even if it is phrased absolutely.)

How do educated people perceive education?

One of the things touched on in the book is that people who don't have higher education tend to be...suspicious is the best word I can come up with, but that isn't quite precise (I'm foolishly writing this without the book in hand)...of people who do have higher education. They see us as up in some ivory tower completely removed from their reality, with perhaps an undertone of that we think less of them. That's just completely unlike my corner of reality. Round these parts, education is just something you have or have not done depending on your circumstances and inclination. It's morally equivalent to having read a particular book or not. If you've read the book, then you've...read the book. If you haven't read the book, you can always read it later, or watch the movie, or google it, or continue to go about your life without it. No big deal.

But then in some of the recent strikes (TTC, City of Toronto workers), some people were getting really pissed off that these workers were earning a decent living in jobs that didn't require higher education, and even calling for these jobs not to pay a decent living on the tacit basis that they didn't require higher education. That's so totally WTF I can't even begin to speculate.

But this raises a lot of questions. How many people with higher education think it's no big deal like I do, and how many think it's like some sacred golden key like the strike haters do? Do people with less education perceive people with more education as Other because of the strike hater types, (or vice versa, although I couldn't imagine how that would work), or did the two evolve separately? Could we create a better-functioning society by getting more people to think of it as no big deal? Would affordable tuition do this?

Why do people who value self-sufficiency need small-talk from strangers?

One of the points made in the book was that people who live in more rural areas tend to value self-sufficiency and independence. This surprised me, because one thing I have noticed in real life is that people in more rural areas are tend to want to small-talk with strangers, and find it off-putting that city people tend to not initiate conversation unless there's a specific reason to. My reasoning behind not talking to people unless I have a specific reason to is out of respect. I assume they're perfectly competent people with their own lives and their own concerns, and there's no reason why they would be interested in me. And yet, the population that disagrees with this approach correlates with a population that values self-sufficiency. So what's the story?

Are people who value self-sufficiency more actually more broadly competent?

As I mentioned above, people who live in rural areas and are more conservative tend to value self-sufficiency, seeing it as practically a moral imperative. This reflects something that has long been baffling me. If I mention that I can't do something or can't do it well enough to bother, certain people I know try to convince me I can - like they try really hard, far beyond social ego stroking, and seem really invested in the idea that I really can do whatever if I just try. After reading the book, I realized the people who do this are among the most conservative people I know. So they view self-sufficiency as more of a moral imperative - if you're self-sufficient, you're a good person; if you're not self-sufficient, you're being a lazy-ass and therefore a bad person. These people generally see me as a good person, so their initial gut reaction is that because I'm a good person, of course I can do whatever it is!

But, of course, the way real life works is that different people are good at or not good at different things to different degrees. So people who value self-sufficiency are going to do things themselves whether they're good at it or not, and are more likely to interpret the results of their efforts as adequate even if they are sub-optimal because they view it as a moral imperative. Meanwhile, people who have no particular problem with the idea of not being self-sufficient are more likely to look at sub-optimal results as "Meh, I'm not very good at this" and hire someone to do it next time.

It would be really interesting to study people who do and don't value self-sufficiency as a moral imperative and see how good they are objectively at various things. The trick is you'd have to control the results for the amount of practice the people have. For example, my parents think it's excessively decadent to hire someone to paint, so they paint themselves, and they've probably painted a whole house a total of four times in their lives. Meanwhile, I'm not very good at painting neatly and the smell of paint nauseates me, so I've painted maybe a quarter of a wall in my life and very much hope never to paint anything ever again. (I would unhesitatingly choose to live with peeling paint if I couldn't afford painters rather than attempt to do it myself.) So if you wanted to study who is objectively better at painting, you'd have to control for the fact that my parents have painted so much more than I have. Maybe they could study what people consider an acceptable result for their effort or something like that

What if we're working with two different definitions of self-sufficient?

One of the major examples the book gives of these attitudes towards self-sufficiency is that the self-sufficiency as moral imperative people view public transit as a waste of taxpayers' money and everyone should just STFU and drive themselves. (No mention either way of how they feel about toll roads - I haven't seen many toll roads in exurban areas.) This made my brain explode a little, because my initial, visceral attitude towards public transit is that it provides self-sufficiency. You can just go anywhere, no need to be dependent on a car or on other people to drive you, life is easy.

This all reminded me of a conversation I once had with my father back when I was a in my early teens. They were thinking about extending a bus route into our neighbourhood, and my father thought it was a waste of money because everyone in our transitless neighbourhood had a car - that's why they chose to live in the transitless neighbourhood. I was all "Um, no, I don't have a car. Kids who are old enough to go places themselves but not old enough to drive don't have cars. Seniors living with their adult children can't necessarily drive." I could think of dozens of individuals in the neighbourhood who would be well-served by a bus route. But my father was like "You don't need a bus, your mother and I drive you places. Kids are driven places by their parents. Mrs. Old Lady down the street is driven places by her adult children." A very disheartening thing when you're at the point where you're starting to want to do things independently of your parents, like all the protagonists in your favourite young adult novels.

But in that conversation, my father and I personify the two different views of self-sufficiency that I think are on the two sides of the Big Sort. I see self-sufficiency as an individual's independence from other individuals. I don't want to be dependent on my parents to drive me around. I see my grandparents also being dependent on my parents to drive them around, and I don't want to live like that either. However, people like my father see self-sufficiency as what I will for lack of a better word call their "tribe" (family, household, relatives, neighbours) being independent from outsiders. I think they feel that they take care of their tribe, and they don't want anyone else meddling with it. And I think they also feel that they're already doing the right thing and taking care of their tribe, so they shouldn't have to take care of someone else's tribe too. So at the crux of the divide is whether you think the tribe should be independent of the government, or whether you think the government should enable people to be independent of their tribe.

How you feel about this isn't necessarily reflective of the quality of your tribe. For example, I once saw someone propose that to save money, hospitals shouldn't give their patients meals, on the logic that hospitals are in the business of medicine, not catering. Patients' families should bring them food instead. Now, if I were in the hospital, my family would totally bring me food. We don't always like each other, we don't agree on most aspects of politics, but I have no doubt they would bring me any and all food I wanted for the duration of my hospital stay. However, I can totally imagine dozens of situations in which this model of the patients' families bringing food would be unsuitable, so, despite the fact that my tribe would totally feed me, I remain vehemently opposed to the idea of leaving people dependent on their tribe for food.

I think a problem with the tribe-centric view is that it doesn't always allow for the possibility that individuals do need to operate independently of the tribe. For example, I have seen several cases where right-wing fathers (I've only ever seen it with right-wing fathers, although I'm not discounting the possibility that other people do it too) have opposed some political measure because they think it would make it harder for them to provide for their children. However, they either didn't notice or didn't care that said political measure would make it easier for their children (who were either already or almost launched) to provide for themselves.

It would be interesting to study this self-sufficiency/tribe-centricity thing to see if the attitudes correlate with a person's position in their tribe. For example, cities are full of people who have left their tribe of origin upon reaching adulthood, which means that their only role without the tribe has been one of dependence. This would lead one to conclude that the people who value the individual's independence from the tribe are those who would be dependent upon the tribe, and the people who value the tribe's independence from outsiders are those with provider roles within the tribe. However, there are still people who stay in the more rural/conservative areas by choice despite their dependence on the tribe, even though they could live as independent individuals with the greater amenities available in urban areas. So there must be some other factors going on there, but I can't see them at the moment.

So how do we unsort ourselves?

As the book points out, people don't choose where to live because of the presence of like-minded individuals. We choose where to live because it suits our various needs. It's a reasonable commute to work. The quality of the housing is as close to ideal as we can manage. The distance from or proximity to various things is as close to optimal as we can realistically manage. Similarly, I chose my hairdresser because she specializes in long hair, not because she and her clientele are childfree. I chose my job because the work is a good match with my strengths, not because I'd be working with people with a similar family immigration history.

So how can we unsort ourselves? I don't know about you, but I'm not about to move to a less suitable neighbourhood, job, or hairdresser, especially not in service of spending more time with people whose political opinions I consider somewhere between sub-optimal and repugnant.

Or should we?

One thing that has really baffled me about Toronto municipal politics is people who live in Toronto proper, but don't want the trappings of urban life. They don't want bus service on their street or a subway stop in their neighbourhood or mixed-use zoning. They want to be able to park three cars on their property. I honestly do not understand at all why they choose to live in Canada's most urban municipality when they don't want urban life, and when the lifestyle they do want is readily available (at a significantly lower cost) just over in 905. As I've blogged about before, I chose my neighbourhood of highrises specifically for its urban nature, and it's very frustrating when people who live in houses outside our highrise neighbourhood try to stop the building of new highrises. So maybe we'd all be happier if we sorted ourselves fully.

But it doesn't seem right to position ourselves so we're completely disregarding a whole chunk of society just because they prefer a different lifestyle.

Things They Should Study: ROI of socio-economic security

The older I get, the more of life I experience, the more I come to recognize the vast and disproportionate value of security, in the socio-economic sense of the word. Having a Good Job. Having safe housing. Having dental insurance. Having a bit of money put aside that you can throw at any moderate unexpected problem that might arise. Having a role in society that is generally considered respectable. Having the majority of people you encounter every day not look down on you. Simply being able to do, without drama or a second thought, whatever small and harmless thing you want to do, whether it's having a long hot shower, or making love to the consenting adult of your choice, or dyeing your hair red, or enjoying a glass of wine before bed.

The older I get, the more of life I experience, the more I enjoy doing what socio-economic security I do have and enjoy being empowered to do these kinds of small and harmless things that you can't always do (or at least not without drama) when you don't have socio-economic security, the more I become convinced that the benefits of socio-economic security are exponentially greater than any investment required to achieve it. I've already blogged about how I think the best way to help consumer confidence (and therefore economic recovery) is the perception among the general population that their jobs are safe. I've also found that the more social acceptance and less social censure I receive, the less defensive and more socially pleasant I become (which snowballs into even more social acceptance and less social censure), and I'm also in a better position to truly see and respect other people's points of view when I don't feel defensive about my own. I also find that in general, having a sense of my place in the world makes me a more productive citizen of the world. For most of my life, the world was a blur of confusion, swirling around me in an impenetrable mass of unwritten rules and unspoken expectations and uncertain futures. But the more socio-economic security I achieved, the more this blur came into focus. Instead of stumbling through a fog, it's more like walking down a busy street. Still lots going on, still lots of unknowns, but I have a better sense of what they are. Instead of using all my energy on not falling into unseen traps, I can spend some of it on inventing stuff and learning things and thinking about the societal implications of my choices. It's all very Maslowian.

So, thinking about all this, I think it would be fascinating if someone could quantify the ROI of providing people with socio-economic security. What would we have to invest to give everyone safety, a respectable place in society, and the leeway they need so that an innocent mistake or stroke of bad luck won't ruin them and so that they can enjoy harmless indulgences often enough to keep morale up? And what kinds of benefits would we gain from it?