Science Surprise of the Week: Parents are Less Happy

Here's an article from Newsweek on the latest official study on parenting:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/143792

To quote:

The most recent comprehensive study on the emotional state of those with kids shows us that the term "bundle of joy" may not be the most accurate way to describe our offspring. "Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers," says Florida State University's Robin Simon, a sociology professor who's conducted several recent parenting studies, the most thorough of which came out in 2005 and looked at data gathered from 13,000 Americans by the National Survey of Families and Households. "In fact, no group of parents—married, single, step or even empty nest—reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It's such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they're not."

This study might be important, but not for the obvious reasons. Let's see, you go through 9 months of pain and discomfort, with an apex in childbirth. Then you have a mewling little thing that outputs several pounds of gross stuff per day, your social life is now anchored to that thing, it catches diseases and makes you sick, becomes a teenager and won't talk to you and wrecks your car, and then goes to college and spends $100,000 of your money on four years of sleeping
through class. Then it moves back in with you.

And that doesn't sound like it will make you happy?

Come on, people should know that if you want to be happy, the best person to do it is you and the best way to do it is to live your life focused on maximizing your happiness. The whole point of having kids is that they're autonomous, which means, surprise, they're not focused on your happiness all the time. So of course I'll do a better job of keeping myself happy than my child will!

This is bad news if life is about accruing a commodity called happiness. So a childless person will report more happiness and well-being. Children wear you out and screw up your life. But is life really about maximization of the Maslow hierarchy? If you're all about self-actualization, you probably shouldn't bring non-selves into the picture. Yet you have a need to do it, despite the occasional resulting unhappiness.

Looking at the paragraph above, remove the pronoun "it" and replace it with "he"/"she"/"him"/"her." All of the sudden it looks different, a less "modest proposal." It looks more possible and more reasonable because kids aren't "its," they're other selves. The benefits of having another person around who is independent of your own desires, these benefits are not measured in surveys of well-being. Parents specifically sacrifice happiness, knowingly (or it should be knowingly), when they have kids.

The point is that real life is centered around sacrifice and not happiness. And this doesn't mean childless people can't be part of "real life," either. I offer the church as an example for how childless people can have family, with all the accompanying happiness-sapping relationships. St. Paul never had kids, but his family was the church. He wasn't necessarily self-actualized or even happy all the time. One day he was singing hymns in prison, but the next he was writing in tears to his Corinithian church because his family -- his source of happiness -- was hurting him. So you don't need to have children to have a full life, but you do need other people. And not to make you happy. You just need 'em.

It's just not about the happy-meter, and the sooner we get over that idea the better off -- even happier -- we'll be.

Book Review: Longitude

Dava Sobel is good at telling scientific stories. This particular one may have been her breakthrough, and it's a good one, about John Harrison's 18th-century quest to build a clock that would keep time accurately on board a ship. Why this was important, and why it was hard, and why at times it seemed that the entire scientific establishment was against it, are all covered colorfully and efficiently in this book.

When I was in Westminster Abbey leaving a Sunday service a few weeks ago (and you know there's only a few times in my life when I'll be able to use that introductory phrase), I looked down and saw a memorial to John Harrison in the stones under my feet. A gold line was etched on that stone, with the exact longitude of that position. The integration of science with that building of faith is one of my favorite things about the U.K. I was just a few steps away from Isaac Newton, to boot.

Sobel's account occasionaly omits part of the human story. I completely missed how and when Harrison passed away, for instance. But she makes the best of a complex situation and a somewhat opaque main character, and so I recommend this book.

The "Lone Genius" of the title is what gets me thinking about broader implications. Harrison did have to fight against a lot of institutional barriers. The lunar-calculation method promoted by the establishment wasn't really wrong, it was just unwieldy. That groupthink stood in his way for about 50 years of unnecessary testing and refinement. Once sailors had a chance to use Harrison's clocks or the establishment's tables, they quickly chose Harrison's clocks.

Try as I might I can't find a close parallel to this situation in current science. If I did I could make some money off it. How and where is the "establishment" wrong? When is someone a lone genius or just a quack? As an American, I can say we're all born and bred to think of ourselves as potential "lone geniuses" (or, failing that, potential American Idol winners). But the proof is in the pudding, to continue the British metaphors. Lone geniuses are few and far between. The freedom to communicate and sell your stuff is crucial to letting lone geniuses succeed -- but it sure does lead to a lot of "noise" in the signal of all sorts of people who think they're lone geniuses but are really just lone.

Book Review: Predictably Irrational

Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist. This means, rather than assuming people always behave in their own dispassionate self-interest, he looks for the ways in which people behave irrationally. His book is called Predictably Irrational because his research attempts to predict irrationality.

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This aspires to be a book on the level of The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (in fact, at one point it also mentions the Pepsi Challenge, and Ariely's take conflicts with Gladwell's). Although it doesn't quite reach the counterintuitive heights found in Gladwell's books, it's a very easy read and there's a good nugget or so in each chapter. Many of Ariely's experiments take place in the classroom or with students, so I found several points of real-life application. For one, to eliminate cheating, it's best to ask students to sign something that simply says an Honor Code exists (even if an Honor Code does not exist for your institution!). The Ten Commandments will also suffice as a cheating deterrent. Also, you overvalue what you personally own: this is why so many eBay prices are ridiculous.

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A few times connections to current morality structures are glossed over. Anyone who reads the Old or New Testament should know that you make decisions differently (and worse) in the heat of passion. The "reptilian nature" of behavioral economists seems a lot like the "flesh" of St. Paul.

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The most illuminating chapter in my view was the one about choices, which describes how we will irrationally hold on to "lesser options" and make our lives worse, just for the sake of keeping our options open. Decide and commit -- that's another virtue that comes out of this book.

In fact, this book reads surprisingly like a book of virtues. Not in every case, but close enough, I find that the structures offered by St. Paul or Jesus already incorporate an understanding of the predictable irrationality of us fleshly humans.

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"But Jesus did not commit himself unto them / because he knew all men /
And needed not that any should testify of man / for he knew what was in man."

Lots of Book Reviews

So when going (by yourself) to the City of the English Language, you might as well immerse yourself in the English Language. That and what else are you gonna do when the entire in-flight entertainment system shorts out 5 miutes after takeoff for a 9-hour flight? So over the past week I polished off:

Sacrifice by Eric Shanower (Part 2 of the Age of Bronze)
Betrayal Part One by Eric Shanower (Part 2 of the Age of Bronze)
The Professor and the Madman (The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary) by Simon Winchester
Have a Nice Doomsday: Why Millions of Americans are Looking Forward to the End of the World by Nicholas Guyatt

That last one was particularly interesting. A Brit from Simon Frasier University who's a historian turns his research questions to current America, asking what exactly and why evangelicals believe about the apocalypse. Of course, he pretty much interviews the lunatic fringe and those making lots of money of it, but because he actually talks to them, his portrayal has an impressive amount of sympathy and context (though he still doesn't seem to like John Hagee and I don't blame him at all for that). Once in a chapter or so he gets a theological point just plain wrong, but then again, he's reporting on people who do that for a living, so can't get too bothered. I found it surprisingly readable and relatively nuanced. It even helped me in conversations at my convention about my own country, so there ya go.

Oh, and as for the convention? The only one I've ever been to where a music/history/theology talk was followed by an art talk was followed by a clinical psychology talk. For that reason alone I hope more conventions like that take place.

N.T. Wright on the Colbert Report June 19

So I'm flying to London the night of my anniversary (by myself, unfortunately), and as if that's not bad enough, I just found out that same night is when N.T. Wright will be a guest on the Colbert Report.

Let's see, so not only will it be the ninth full year since the best decision I've made in my life (nine years with my favorite person), I also won't be able to see my favorite theologian and one of my favorite comedians together on TV.

On the plus side, I hear British Air isn't yet charging $15 to check a bag. That's gotta count for something.

(And yes, this means I am more excited about fake news than I am about real news.)

Book Review: Arthur and George

Arthur and George by Julian Barnes is a novel that quotes real-life. The real-life incident it recounts is when Arthur Conan Doyle helped clear the name of an Englishman of Indian descent who had been injustly accused of a series of crimes (and his name was, yes, George). A good book, with just a few complaints. It was too self-indulgent in spelling out the thoughts of many characters at length, and many times it wouldn't really sound like a 19th-century Englishman but rather an early-21st-century one (namely, the author). These two faults often went together: I would have preferred something more like GK Chesterton (a product of this exact era of history), but what I got sometimes verged on Oprah. That said, whenever possible the historial documents and records are used, and it is a lot more entertaining than the average biography. It probably could have been half the length, but it does detail the entire lives of each of the protagonists, and does a fairly good job of translating some odd details like the prevalence of Spritualism in Arthur's life, as well as the kind of solicitor George turned out to be. The frustrating nature of the local police force is also well described, although it's hard to think of characters that frustrating as being real and not distortions. Given the contents of the accusations made against George, I'll have to conclude that the author got that one right and it's the real people from 100 years ago who are frustrating, not the author's version of those people!

Book Review: God's Secretaries

Now we enter the "preparing for London/Oxford" section of my summer reading. First up is Adam Nicolson's God's Secretaries, an account of how the King James Bible was translated. The basic message is that good things can come from committees. The translation process was so communal and anonymous that it's very difficult to reconstruct. It came from a society that was truly steeped in words, spoken and written, and that was the single most important factor in making this whole thing work. That and a less-than-strict adherence to literalism, interestingly enough.

The book is enjoyable but the writing seems strangely dense at times -- you're enjoying it and you want to keep finding out about that word and that translation process, but you also want to put it down because you feel vaguely tired by the author's style. I'm not sure how that happened, but it's not just me, I confirmed it with a colleague who's also read the book (or, more precisely, the first part of the book!).

The last part of the book holds the KJV up to more modern translations, which are also communal efforts but focus on getting it to be right rather than getting it to sound right. Some good criticisms in there, although I'm concerned that the deck has been intentially stacked by the author, and I'd like to know what happens with two other translations in particular: The Jerusalem Bible, which I think navigates literalism and beauty particularly well; and The Revised Standard Version, which purports to be derived from the KJV and is the most commonly used by scholars (at least the scholars I read). There are lots of problems with current translations, mostly along the line of "you get what you ask for" and the fact that the Bible is just not read as much, whether singly or communally.

Shakespeare was also a product of this same word-drenched period. So will that time never come again? Can there be no more Shakespeares? I like to think we've gained something with scholarly accuracy, but I do admit that there's something more to the KJV. Reading this book has convinced me to stick with KJV for personal reading for another year or two at least. After all, if it was good enough for Paul and Timothy, it's good enough for me.