When little Reginald (as I’m insisting on calling him, Carolina) arrives, we shall have three kids of car-seat-needing size. One will need an infant seat, one a regular seat, and the third a booster. The second could have a booster right now, if necessary. Reg will convert to a regular car seat before the eldest outgrows the need for a seat (at least 2 years unless we stretch her on a rack or something). We have one car, a Toyota Camry.
Can anyone suggest a way of accomodating the three needed seats in the back of a 2002 Camry? We’ve done a good deal of research and can’t figure it out, and are highly resistant for numerous reasons, to exchange the Camry for a van.
One solution, of course, would be to let the eldest out of the car seat prematurely. I’ve calculated that in the 2 years to go she will be driven an a total of 3000 city miles max (almost all of them in daylight and not during rushhour) and exactly 2000 highway miles (those in 2 trips, for each of which we could hire a van). How much is it worth paying to keep her the amount safer that a booster seat makes her (this sounds like a question for Levitt, or Daniel — and the “car seats and booster seats are no safer because no-one installs them properly” gambit won’t work in this case because one thing I have learned as a parent is how to install just about any car seat in just about any car properly [to forestall comment on this, I do know that this is not a fair representation of Levitt’s argument, which is about public policy, and at that level has a ring of plausibility, but I’m interested in individual choice here]).
Anyway, I want an answer to the first question, but the second would be interesting at least.
Ezra Klein has a nice explanation of the problems with the health insurance proposal in Murray’s In Our Hands
. (Read also numerous comments in the comment section which pretty much do for it anyway). He also expresses puzzlement at the laudatory nature of my review; because topnotch CT commenter bob mcmanus joins in, I explain my reasons there. Ezra says:
Give me a plan that’s $10,000, plus universal health care, funded through transparent means, and ratchets back in a more intelligent way, and we’ll talk.
I’ll follow up next week (there’s a promise) with references to left-wing versions of the idea that everyone should already know about but apparently doesn’t, in the hope of prompting Ezra into talking.
Laura asks:
Please tell the blogosphere one cool thing that you’ve done that you suspect that nobody else has done. And I don’t want to hear about athletic sexual events, because it’s impossible to shock me. I told one story in the comments section yesterday. Your turn.
Jane Galt dressed as the Pope for Halloween. Go there to add you 2 cents (and do it non-anonymously if you dare)!
So, are you ready for a rave review of Charles Murray’s latest book, In Our Hands, on Crooked Timber (yes, that Charles Murray)? Its a book that just about anyone interested in policy ideas ought to be read; I recommend it highly and without reservation. There, that’s that out of the way.
So here goes. Before writing about it I did a quick google search, and was glad to see it being attacked by some of his colleagues on the right; it confirmed my sense that there’s a lot of good stuff in it, and that the wool is not being pulled over my eyes. More than that, I found that some of the criticisms seemed dead on as comments, but not as criticisms. One blogger points out that whereas “flat tax” reform builds in a constituency that will always press to keep taxes as low as possible, a universal basic income grant of the kind Murray proposes builds in a constituency that will always pressure to make the benefit as large as possible. That sounds right, and good, to me. Liberals also attack it, but my sense of all those criticisms is that they are simply ad hominem. I’ll suggest a way to avoid ad hominem responses later. But, I’m running ahead of myself.
The central proposal is for a basic income grant of $10,000 per year for every citizen aged 21 and above.
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I used to have a friend who was a very energetic adulterer. We never talked about it much, because I was too repressed to ask, but it seemed to me that he and his many partners, all of whom he met in ordinary social situations, were giving out signals that could only be detected by one another (ok, I have lots of stories that would reveal that my own social antennae are, well, deeply defective, but in my defence no-one else seemed to notice either).
I sometimes think that in a low-fertility society like ours something rather similar is going on among people who have children. Now, I should declare that I never doubted that I’d want children (only, for a very long time, that anyone would want to have them with me). But even I, away from children for most of my late-teens to late-twenties, as most childless adults are in these low-fertility times, was much more vividly aware of the downside of having children than of the upside. As Laura says:
Last week, we briefly talked about why people, especially Europeans, aren’t making babies like they used to. I’ve got a new theory. Childless people are having too much fun. They are congregating in urban areas and when they outgrow body shots and apple core bongs, they move on to nice restaurants, museums, and last minute trips to Anguila. The breeders get stuck going on the DisneyLand cruise and posing for pictures with Goofy. And why are the Europeans having even less kids than the US? Ibiza.
Kids really are fantastic, but you don’t really know it until you have one of your own. When you take the love for your kids out of the equation, all you have is a comparison between fun and no fun. And without the social pressure to procreate, many people choose no kids.
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I just finished Charles Murray’s new book, In Our Hands (I’ll post a review in a couple of weeks). Almost in passing he comments that:
Few teenagers finish high school already knowing what job will make them happy. Or they may think they know, but change their minds. This is as true of those who go to college as of those who do not — that’s why students change their majors so often. The process of finding a job that makes one happy often continues well into a person’s twenties, if not beyond.
Or they do know, but that job disappears! I didn’t know what an academic was till I went to college, and I only developed the ambition to be one after I had already become one (about 2 years into my current job). As a kid I had numerous possible jobs in mind, but after I learned that there were jobs other than teaching, only one was a really lasting ambition; I thought what I’d most like to do was make History programmes for the BBC schools radio service. I thought schools radio programmes were fantastic, good enough that I would sometimes try to stayhome from school in order to listen to them; and the history programmes, with dramatisations of everyday life in distant times, were the best of the lot. When I told my 9-year old daughter (who is, if anything, more of a radio fan that I am) she pointed out that she never listens to the radio at school and that, probably, nobody does. There is some stuff up on the BBC site, mainly loads of great archival clips, but not much in the way of actual programmes (and I had no interest in making any other kinds of radio programmes, still less TV progammes, even in History); forming that ambition in the 1960s was probably rather like forming the ambition to be a blacksmith just before the explosion in car and tractor ownership. What did you want to be before you became what you are; and does that job still exist?
Are divorced opponents of gay marriage hypocrites?
I suppose it all depends on the reasons why they oppose gay marriage, and on the reasons they divorced. So I can imagine lots of ways of consistently endorsing one’s own divorce and opposing gay marriage; for example, one might oppose marriage tout court and, having freed oneself of its bourgeois chains, be determined to prevent others from being enslaved by it. Or one might simply hate gays and want to prevent them to get at the good of marriage.
But neither of these are the dominant public reasons for opposing gay marriage.
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Alison Wolf had an interesting piece on the consequences of women entering the workforce in April’s Prospect; May’s issue has responses by Rosemary Crompton and Pat Thane (all free I think) with a reply by Wolf in the June issue.
Wolf notes three supposedly neglected consequences:
Three consequences get far less attention than they deserve. The first is the death of sisterhood: an end to the millennia during which women of all classes shared the same major life experiences to a far greater degree than did their men. The second is the erosion of “female altruism,” the service ethos which has been profoundly important to modern industrial societies—particularly in the education of their young, and the care of their old and sick. The third is the impact of employment change on childbearing. We are familiar with the prospect of demographic decline, yet we ignore, sometimes wilfully, the extent to which educated women face disincentives to bear children.
Thane argues that women never had the similar experience that Wolf claims, and Crompton that neoliberalism, rather than any moral decline in women, is to blame for the deline in altruism. Wolf, I think, gives a pretty good account of herself in the reply.
You can make up your minds by reading the pieces. But I wanted to highlight a point not in dispute between the authors, and that I think Wolf and other people who think a good deal about education take for granted, but is not widely appreciated beyond that world; that restrictions on women’s participation in the labour market constituted a massive subsidy to public education:
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I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that BBC7 could have been devised just for me; no news, no music, no sport, no ads, just a lower-middle-brow selection of comedy and drama from the radio archives. I tape the classic comedies for the kids (ISIRTA, The Goons, and, a bit worryingly, Steptoe and Son, are top of the pops in our house, on which more another time) and listen to the dramas myself. The best part of the station finding its feet has been hearing the announcers grow into their material. Initially only Jim Lee seemed to know and love the classic shows (I gather he is considered eccentric for being a Clitheroe Kid enthusiast; I can’t imagine why). My favourite announcer was openly bemused — even a little mocking — when she first started presenting the Paul Temple shows, and it has been a lot of fun hearing her come to love them, a love which is sweetly on display in this interview with Peter Coke (pronounced Cook) who played Temple in the 50’s and 60’s. At 92 Coke is stunningly energetic and on the ball — I caught him misnaming Coronation Scot, but he was otherwise enviously youthful, and obviously delighted to have such a young fan. Example of Coke’s amazing shellwork here (John Q might want to take note); a picture of the great man himself here if you scroll down the page a bit (he was born the same year as Ted Grant!).
BTW, I’ve probably listened to all but one of the extant Paul Temple adventures at least 3 times each, having been introduced to them not by the BBC but by KCRW in the late 1980s. I have only found a couple of the books, neither of which I could struggle through; Durbridge might have been one of our greatest radio writers but it doesn’t work on the page. The quality gap between the books and the radio show is comparable only with the gap between Colin Dexter’s novels and the Morse series.
Update: after some trawling I thought I’d throw in this link to prove that others are nerdier about Paul Temple than I am.
Any of you who wonder what we are going on about when we talk about the Eurovision Song Contest, can spend an hour learning about its complete history here (complete with an interview with the marvelous Dana).
I used to be homesick all the time. Now, it is only when I realise that I cannot watch the greatest living Irishman presenting Eurovision on TV.
Roy Hudd’s investigation into the history of the comic song ended last week with a show on parody. The main highlight for me was being reminded of seeing Neil Lewis at the Cambridge Folk Festival in 1979 performing his hit song, “The Packer of the Leads” — google provides just a single reference, and the song is only mentioned (by Richard Digance) not played. The big question arising out of the show, though, is: why were The Smiths famous? Mitch Benn claims it is because fans fell for Morrisey’s winsome tortured poet act. But my wife (an American) says she liked them because they were funny. Me, I did fall for the act, so I thought they were prats; if I’d realised they were funny I’d probably have loved them (I eventually bought her their greatest hits, but only because it has Charles Hawtrey on the cover and I thought that was worth the money). Anyway, who’s right; Mitch Benn or my wife?
This is something that came up as an aside in a dissertation defence the other day (congratulations, A!). The dissertation was about privacy, and a brief comment was made that secret ballots might protect a voter’s right to privacy. I was surprised that I already had a half-thought-out but very strong dissent from this idea, so I thought I’d articulate it here and see what you think. There are some practical arguments in favour of having secret ballots in representative democratic elections for governmental positions; most obviously the argument that secret ballots obscure the information needed to perfect a market in votes; so that the vote remains effectively inalienable. But is there a right to vote secretly?; that is, if other measures could effectively prevent the emergence of a market in votes, or government retaliation against individual voters, would voters have a complaint if ballots were public? The privacy thought it that the interest in privacy, or something like that, protects this information; it protects us from others having the information about how we voted, just as it protects us from others having information about various other details of our thoughts and personal life.
I don’t think so.
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I’ve already let this slip out in a couple of threads, so I might as well announce that my wife is expecting our third child in September. We have two girls (9 and 5); they are thrilled. Some people will be relieved, and others shocked, that even in liberal Madison the number of people who have immediately said “A boy for dad” to one or other of us is now into double figures. I am neither relieved or shocked, but utterly bemused (this is apparently a common sentiment; I didn’t know). Anyway, we’re delighted, though only my 5 year old was gunning for a boy (why? No idea).
Naming a boy is going to be difficult, mainly because one of us (not me) doesn’t like many boys names, and the other (me), after coming up with two or three good names (Reginald, Alfred, Clement etc…) stops taking it seriously and starts proposing absurdities (Zebedee; Egbert; Canute etc…(no offense meant to holdrs of these excellent names, but you can see that someone who rejects Reginald wouldn’t even consider these)). Eszter sent me to this amazing site, which is no help at all, but a great time waster. So, there is a point to this post. Via the voyager I discover that my own name, which I have always liked despite its tendency to produce confusion, has completely collapsed in popularity since records began. What is amazing to me (but not at all distressing, is that its decline has not been halted at all since the arrival of on the scene of Henry Potter. Why would that be?
out of the local library a couple of years ago on the way to pick up my daughter. I was almost late; hearing Kate Rusby singing “Withered and Died” had me almost in tears and I had to pull of the road to compose myself. I don’t think there is a more beautiful voice in popular music than hers; better even than 
)… except that I’ve no interest at all in seeming cool, and I’ve already stocked up.