I'm coming around to the idea that polyamory may not be as euvoluntary as I'd previously argued. Short version: a polyamorous marriage may be fine, but I have to agree that as an institution, it has some pretty serious predicted shortcomings.
So here's the question: does the logic of prohibition apply to plural marriage? Will desperate consumers resort to black market harems to secure illicit booty? Would a legal regime in which abused plural marriage spouses were free to contact law enforcement agents for assistance without fear of reprisal reduce the severity and frequency of bride trafficking?
I'm not familiar enough with the law enforcement statistics to judge. Swinging is legal, so is cohabitation. A married couple can have a "roommate" without attracting attention. Open marriages are fine. People are already pretty much at liberty to set the terms of their domestic arrangements, so it's difficult to say that there's much of a thwarted market the way there is for cocaine or extended-capacity AK-47 magazines. It's possible that whatever downsides that accompany polygamous institutional arrangements are already being felt. If so, to consider a legal regime means to consider what the potential upsides would be.
I'm not sure what they'd be though. Inheritance? Estate execution? There's not much common law guidance there other than what already exists for business partnerships. Seems kind of a slender reed.
At any rate, I think one of the problems with discussions of law and relationships is one side is talking about private costs and benefits, while the other is talking about public costs and benefits. Is it a self-interest debate or is it an institutional debate? And which of those should provide a basis for a compelling state interest?
Showing posts with label children. Show all posts
Showing posts with label children. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
FYIAD, the Ecstasy of the Otherkin
One of my favorite non-Bakshi animated features growing up was a Don Bluth-helmed adaptation of Robert O'Brien's seminal children's novel, Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. You may have seen it yourself. The silver screen title was The Secret of NIMH, and it was a tale of escaped laboratory mice, told from the perspective of the mice themselves, much the way another of my favorite animated classics, Plague Dogs is told from the perspective of escaped canine test subjects.
What I didn't know at the time was that the very fanciful story featuring the charming voice talents of Dom DeLuise was inspired by a very real organization. NIMH is an acronym standing for National Institute of Mental Health, a subsidiary of the US Department of Health and Human Services. As a boy, I had thought the organization a flight of fancy, the product of an author's imagination, much like the organization responsible for the antics of James Bond, or the man from U.N.C.L.E.. To the contrary, it is a very real, very prolific research organization. Its Wiki page (for what it's worth) lists the 2010 budget as $1.5B.
In the early 60s, prominent NIMH researcher John B. Calhoun began an experiment (warning: the previous link contains out-of-sample remarks not necessarily supported by the data) in the dewy fields near Poolsville MD. This experiment would later serve as inspirational fodder for one of Wil Wheaton's earliest credits (see for yourself). The experiment was simple enough: introduce mice into an ideal environment with ample room, plentiful food, abundant nesting material, and unlimited water. See what happens.
The early stages were perfectly predictable: the mice reproduced enough to fill the enclosure to capacity, and somewhere in the aether Malthus grimaced in dour approval. The later stages, particularly right before the colony collapsed completely and the last mouse died, were (and remain) of great interest to amateur sociologists. Notably, the mouse Utopia exhibited a breakdown of standard social rules. Dominant males couldn't defend their territory, females became aggressive, and the one curious phenomenon that seems to have gained attention of late, some males withdrew completely, devoting all of their time to grooming, never getting into fights, never mating.
Calhoun called them "The Beautiful Ones."
If you're an amateur sociologist, and you find it tempting to map Calhoun's mice onto human societies, the Japanese Beautiful Ones are 草食(系)男子, soshokukei danshi, grass-eaters in the vulgate. These are pretty boys, passive, obsessed with fashion, often wearing makeup, groomed immaculately. In the US, you might identify Calhoun's Beautiful Ones with the so-called "metrosexual" males of a few years back, or with image-conscious normcore hipsters. You might even go a little more abstract and say that the two chief characteristics of the Beautiful Ones is (a) obsession and (b) withdrawal. If that's the case, Otherkin, Furries, Otaku, Bronies, even a certain stripe of stereotypical gamer would fit the description.
I do not find the hypothesis that a social experiment using mice can predict what will happen to human populations convincing. What I do find convincing is the claim that many post-industrial nations are in the midst of some troubling demographic concerns. What I do find convincing is that unfunded liabilities, public and private, loom shimmering on the time horizon. What I do find convincing is that productivity is slowly becoming decoupled from employment and that negative-marginal-product make-work government jobs are likely to take over as the dominant transfer scheme (unless Morgan Warstler can ever get GI/CYB off the ground, that is), since there is dignity in work, perhaps even the sort of work that has people burying jars of dollar bills in the desert so that others can dig them back up.
With that in mind, can I also consider Otherkin culture to be euvoluntary? If you believe in your heart of hearts that you are, in point of fact, not a human, but rather a dragon, or a hippogriff, or a gelatinous cube, and all my fancy rhetoric and book-learnin' can't convince you to the contrary, does that herald the End of Times? Or more prosaically, does that contribute to the fiscal difficulties implied in the off-balance-sheet accounting of the fisc? Do members of the younger generation have an obligation to support an older generation by procreation?
Individually, the idea sounds monstrous. If personal sovereignty means anything at all, it means that a person's choice to have children or not is up to that person and that person alone. "It is your civic duty to raise children" is a totalitarian sentiment, one you might expect in a Warhammer 40k codex or an Orwell short story. But collectively? Collectively, political elites have no problem fiddling with the tax code, or with workplace regulations, or even with outright bribery (hello, Finland) to encourage marginal births. The family, it seems, is a private arrangement, but a public institution. Do grass-eaters, do otherkin, do shut-ins threaten the wider social order by shirking or avoiding participation in this institution?
Or are they merely canaries in the coal mine, here to warn us of Total Social and Economic Collapse?
Curious. In the meantime, happy yiffing, everyone. Have a Merry Solstice.
What I didn't know at the time was that the very fanciful story featuring the charming voice talents of Dom DeLuise was inspired by a very real organization. NIMH is an acronym standing for National Institute of Mental Health, a subsidiary of the US Department of Health and Human Services. As a boy, I had thought the organization a flight of fancy, the product of an author's imagination, much like the organization responsible for the antics of James Bond, or the man from U.N.C.L.E.. To the contrary, it is a very real, very prolific research organization. Its Wiki page (for what it's worth) lists the 2010 budget as $1.5B.
In the early 60s, prominent NIMH researcher John B. Calhoun began an experiment (warning: the previous link contains out-of-sample remarks not necessarily supported by the data) in the dewy fields near Poolsville MD. This experiment would later serve as inspirational fodder for one of Wil Wheaton's earliest credits (see for yourself). The experiment was simple enough: introduce mice into an ideal environment with ample room, plentiful food, abundant nesting material, and unlimited water. See what happens.
The early stages were perfectly predictable: the mice reproduced enough to fill the enclosure to capacity, and somewhere in the aether Malthus grimaced in dour approval. The later stages, particularly right before the colony collapsed completely and the last mouse died, were (and remain) of great interest to amateur sociologists. Notably, the mouse Utopia exhibited a breakdown of standard social rules. Dominant males couldn't defend their territory, females became aggressive, and the one curious phenomenon that seems to have gained attention of late, some males withdrew completely, devoting all of their time to grooming, never getting into fights, never mating.
Calhoun called them "The Beautiful Ones."
If you're an amateur sociologist, and you find it tempting to map Calhoun's mice onto human societies, the Japanese Beautiful Ones are 草食(系)男子, soshokukei danshi, grass-eaters in the vulgate. These are pretty boys, passive, obsessed with fashion, often wearing makeup, groomed immaculately. In the US, you might identify Calhoun's Beautiful Ones with the so-called "metrosexual" males of a few years back, or with image-conscious normcore hipsters. You might even go a little more abstract and say that the two chief characteristics of the Beautiful Ones is (a) obsession and (b) withdrawal. If that's the case, Otherkin, Furries, Otaku, Bronies, even a certain stripe of stereotypical gamer would fit the description.
I do not find the hypothesis that a social experiment using mice can predict what will happen to human populations convincing. What I do find convincing is the claim that many post-industrial nations are in the midst of some troubling demographic concerns. What I do find convincing is that unfunded liabilities, public and private, loom shimmering on the time horizon. What I do find convincing is that productivity is slowly becoming decoupled from employment and that negative-marginal-product make-work government jobs are likely to take over as the dominant transfer scheme (unless Morgan Warstler can ever get GI/CYB off the ground, that is), since there is dignity in work, perhaps even the sort of work that has people burying jars of dollar bills in the desert so that others can dig them back up.
With that in mind, can I also consider Otherkin culture to be euvoluntary? If you believe in your heart of hearts that you are, in point of fact, not a human, but rather a dragon, or a hippogriff, or a gelatinous cube, and all my fancy rhetoric and book-learnin' can't convince you to the contrary, does that herald the End of Times? Or more prosaically, does that contribute to the fiscal difficulties implied in the off-balance-sheet accounting of the fisc? Do members of the younger generation have an obligation to support an older generation by procreation?
Individually, the idea sounds monstrous. If personal sovereignty means anything at all, it means that a person's choice to have children or not is up to that person and that person alone. "It is your civic duty to raise children" is a totalitarian sentiment, one you might expect in a Warhammer 40k codex or an Orwell short story. But collectively? Collectively, political elites have no problem fiddling with the tax code, or with workplace regulations, or even with outright bribery (hello, Finland) to encourage marginal births. The family, it seems, is a private arrangement, but a public institution. Do grass-eaters, do otherkin, do shut-ins threaten the wider social order by shirking or avoiding participation in this institution?
Or are they merely canaries in the coal mine, here to warn us of Total Social and Economic Collapse?
Curious. In the meantime, happy yiffing, everyone. Have a Merry Solstice.
Thursday, July 17, 2014
Kayfabe Rules Everything Around Me (K.R.E.A.M.)
The BLS estimated that Hurricane Katrina produced about 1.8 million evacuees.
Take you time with that link. Savor the tables, the figures, and the charts. Investigate the summary statistics. Here's one of the better ones: 16.4% of evacuees reported "less than HS" for education. You may not have a calculator handy, so let me multiply that for you. That's roughly 295,000 people who had to leave their homes because of a violent exogenous shock with not so much as a high school diploma to show for it.
And disease? Katrina was responsible for a West Nile outbreak.
How about labor force participation? Go back to the BLS link; look at Table 6. Victims of Katrina were involuntarily disemployed in 2005-2006, and with public assistance measures, by gum, they were a net burden on the welfare state.
And no one complained. Well, at least no one complained as roundly and vociferously as they are now about a group of children roughly the same size as a small-to-medium sized American town (Chico, CA has about 60,000 residents, for example). If the American public applied the same moral intuition-&-kayfabe to displaced residents of the Big Easy as they commit to a far smaller band of Central American refugees, each of the 1.8 million residents who chose to flee the terrible disaster of Katrina would have been forced to tie up their bindle and head straight back to the wards from whence they nearly drowned.
Thankfully, ordinary Americans aren't even close to being that cruelly obtuse. Indeed, communities recognized that people in need deserve if not commonplace charity, then at least the temperance to keep from violently preventing others from pursuing their charitable instincts.
Sadly, the nationalist zeal which appears to be the sole residual difference between today's Guatemalan children and yesteryear's Katrina survivors erodes my confidence in the accuracy of the following (deservedly famous) passage from Adam Smith:
I strain to explain such a clear and obvious abdication of conscience without at least three mutually-bound rhetorical parts. Nationalism is the soil tilled by the plough of partisan kayfabe into which the seed of non-euvoluntarity is sown. The weed that there grows is a poison thing that would send children to rack and ruin. This infamy corrodes the public character and shames a great and mighty nation.
Take you time with that link. Savor the tables, the figures, and the charts. Investigate the summary statistics. Here's one of the better ones: 16.4% of evacuees reported "less than HS" for education. You may not have a calculator handy, so let me multiply that for you. That's roughly 295,000 people who had to leave their homes because of a violent exogenous shock with not so much as a high school diploma to show for it.
And disease? Katrina was responsible for a West Nile outbreak.
How about labor force participation? Go back to the BLS link; look at Table 6. Victims of Katrina were involuntarily disemployed in 2005-2006, and with public assistance measures, by gum, they were a net burden on the welfare state.
And no one complained. Well, at least no one complained as roundly and vociferously as they are now about a group of children roughly the same size as a small-to-medium sized American town (Chico, CA has about 60,000 residents, for example). If the American public applied the same moral intuition-&-kayfabe to displaced residents of the Big Easy as they commit to a far smaller band of Central American refugees, each of the 1.8 million residents who chose to flee the terrible disaster of Katrina would have been forced to tie up their bindle and head straight back to the wards from whence they nearly drowned.
Thankfully, ordinary Americans aren't even close to being that cruelly obtuse. Indeed, communities recognized that people in need deserve if not commonplace charity, then at least the temperance to keep from violently preventing others from pursuing their charitable instincts.
Sadly, the nationalist zeal which appears to be the sole residual difference between today's Guatemalan children and yesteryear's Katrina survivors erodes my confidence in the accuracy of the following (deservedly famous) passage from Adam Smith:
Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own. To prevent, therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself, would a man of humanity be willing to sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren, provided he had never seen them? Human nature startles with horror at the thought, and the world, in its greatest depravity and corruption, never produced such a villain as could be capable of entertaining it. But what makes this difference? When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble? When we are always so much more deeply affected by whatever concerns ourselves, than by whatever concerns other men; what is it which prompts the generous, upon all occasions, and the mean upon many, to sacrifice their own interests to the greater interests of others? It is not the soft power of humanity, it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart, that is thus capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love. It is a stronger power, a more forcible motive, which exerts itself upon such occasions. It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct.The kayfabe over the non-euvoluntarity of refugee children tells me that many of my fellow citizens would indeed snore with the most profound security over the ruin of sixty thousands of human lives when indeed it would cost him far less than the value of his pinky-finger to allow his fellow countrymen to relive their great suffering.
I strain to explain such a clear and obvious abdication of conscience without at least three mutually-bound rhetorical parts. Nationalism is the soil tilled by the plough of partisan kayfabe into which the seed of non-euvoluntarity is sown. The weed that there grows is a poison thing that would send children to rack and ruin. This infamy corrodes the public character and shames a great and mighty nation.
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Carpet Conflation: Slavery, Debt Bonds, and Child Labor
Harvard's FXB Center for Health and Human Rights releases a report on carpet manufacturing in India.
ATSRTWT.
TL;DR: making carpets is a rough affair. The work itself is dusty and dangerous. Workers spend hellaciously long shifts hunched over looms at dimly-lit stations, surrounded by sharp tools, litter, and rusty machinery. Pay is low, and even when workers agree ex ante to a particular wage, they often find ex post that actual wages are on the closed interval between zero and the agreed-upon wage, more than just a token epsilon from the right bound. Overtime pay is not a thing that exists there.
Please direct your attention to pages 22-23 of the report. There, we have a discussion of relevant legislation. The author takes the reader on a tour of the statutes defining forced labor, bonded labor, child labor, and human trafficking. Let me quote the latter verbatim so you can see for yourself how many of the EE conditions are engaged (statute in italics, EE-relevant passage also in bold):
Smithian sympathy is hard. Framing matters. Context matters.
Everything in this report is good shoe-leather investigation up until the Recommendations section (p. 53). There, the author settles back into predictable feel-good Western, affluent-style nostrums that do precisely zero to address the underlying problems that generate heritable poverty. #9 is particularly risible: "Support and empower vulnerable communities." That's a fine idea, one quite consistent with good institutional analysis, but it's expressly not something that can be fixed with a wave of a magic wand. I daresay that my neoliberal dudebros AG and NS would agree that the Lindy Effect is not that bad a way to describe the durability of India's caste system: a British occupation ended suttee, but did little to eradicate untold generations of dominion-by-birthright. Reformers with no skin in the game are going to do better? Pollyanna please.
Look, the way to root out corrupt business practices like this must provide better alternatives for all parties. Bonded labor is a problem, so why not push for immigration reform so that poor villages can send folks to earn wages in highly productive enterprises and send home remittance payments? Prosecutions and investigations (#8) do quite literally nothing for the workers other than force them to accept a definitionally poor BATNA.
A soft heart is an asset. Please let's not couple it with a soft head.
ATSRTWT.
TL;DR: making carpets is a rough affair. The work itself is dusty and dangerous. Workers spend hellaciously long shifts hunched over looms at dimly-lit stations, surrounded by sharp tools, litter, and rusty machinery. Pay is low, and even when workers agree ex ante to a particular wage, they often find ex post that actual wages are on the closed interval between zero and the agreed-upon wage, more than just a token epsilon from the right bound. Overtime pay is not a thing that exists there.
Please direct your attention to pages 22-23 of the report. There, we have a discussion of relevant legislation. The author takes the reader on a tour of the statutes defining forced labor, bonded labor, child labor, and human trafficking. Let me quote the latter verbatim so you can see for yourself how many of the EE conditions are engaged (statute in italics, EE-relevant passage also in bold):
Human trafficking is defined in numerous international conventions and domestic laws. The first international definition for human trafficking was provided by the 2000 United Nations “Palermo Protocol.” India ratified the Protocol in May 2011. Article 3 of the Protocol defines human trafficking as:All there, black and white, clear as crystal. The investigation found just shy of 300 cases of human trafficking that fit this particular bill. And to their credit, they did heap much of the blame for these abhorrent working conditions on the institutions that support them, particularly the caste system, but mostly acknowledging that what's going on is coercion by circumstance (p. 29, Table 3). For the bonded-labor cases, parents valued cash advances more than they valued their kids not going off to make carpets. Rightly or wrongly, that shocks the sensibilities of well-to-do readers, particularly when 80% of the bond debenture was for "consumption." Why, just imagine sending your own child off to work with dangerous industrial equipment so you could pick up a PS4.
“Trafficking in persons” shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.
Smithian sympathy is hard. Framing matters. Context matters.
Everything in this report is good shoe-leather investigation up until the Recommendations section (p. 53). There, the author settles back into predictable feel-good Western, affluent-style nostrums that do precisely zero to address the underlying problems that generate heritable poverty. #9 is particularly risible: "Support and empower vulnerable communities." That's a fine idea, one quite consistent with good institutional analysis, but it's expressly not something that can be fixed with a wave of a magic wand. I daresay that my neoliberal dudebros AG and NS would agree that the Lindy Effect is not that bad a way to describe the durability of India's caste system: a British occupation ended suttee, but did little to eradicate untold generations of dominion-by-birthright. Reformers with no skin in the game are going to do better? Pollyanna please.
Look, the way to root out corrupt business practices like this must provide better alternatives for all parties. Bonded labor is a problem, so why not push for immigration reform so that poor villages can send folks to earn wages in highly productive enterprises and send home remittance payments? Prosecutions and investigations (#8) do quite literally nothing for the workers other than force them to accept a definitionally poor BATNA.
A soft heart is an asset. Please let's not couple it with a soft head.
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
How Do I Sold Babby?
Should you be able to sell your infant to the highest bidder?
No, I'm not asking this question just so I can imagine the smoke curling from your ears. I'm being quite serious. The first-order effects are likely to be welfare-enhancing. In a voluntary transaction, the biological mother is better off, by definition with the cash instead of the baby, the adoptive parents are better off with the child than with the cash, and the child itself is better off in a relatively affluent home than abused, neglected, or aborted by a mother who didn't want to keep it.
But that's mere first-order reasoning. We've all studied economics and criminal justice. We know that an unregulated market in children turns kids into chattel and young women into biological factories, right? Wouldn't child pornographers have an incentive to buy up kids and force them into brief lives of unimaginable horror?
Isn't that what they do anyway? How would making it legal for childless couples to transact for adoption affect their sordid business model in the slightest? It's still illegal to produce child pornography, so what changes?
And is a career as a surrogate mother really so bad that it needs to be banned outright? Is the risk of ex post regret systematic or idiosyncratic? There's no fraud as far as I can tell, so it has to be the latter. Unpaid surrogacy is perfectly legal, so I have a hunch that the paid version has something to do with BATNA disparity. How dare those rich people take advantage of poor women by paying them to bring another human life into the world? Exploitation!
Exploitation that redistributes not just money but genes. It seems to me as if Rawls would approve. I don't see how it's any better that the child have no chance of life at all or that it's raised in relative destitution.
But even if I could convince you of all that, there's still an interesting bit of residual moral intuition. It seems to me that holding everything else constant, folks would probably be more okay with paid surrogacy than with the sale of a child already born. If my hunch about this is true, what's the difference? And does that difference engage with folks' moral intuitions on other reproductive rights topics?
No, I'm not asking this question just so I can imagine the smoke curling from your ears. I'm being quite serious. The first-order effects are likely to be welfare-enhancing. In a voluntary transaction, the biological mother is better off, by definition with the cash instead of the baby, the adoptive parents are better off with the child than with the cash, and the child itself is better off in a relatively affluent home than abused, neglected, or aborted by a mother who didn't want to keep it.
But that's mere first-order reasoning. We've all studied economics and criminal justice. We know that an unregulated market in children turns kids into chattel and young women into biological factories, right? Wouldn't child pornographers have an incentive to buy up kids and force them into brief lives of unimaginable horror?
Isn't that what they do anyway? How would making it legal for childless couples to transact for adoption affect their sordid business model in the slightest? It's still illegal to produce child pornography, so what changes?
And is a career as a surrogate mother really so bad that it needs to be banned outright? Is the risk of ex post regret systematic or idiosyncratic? There's no fraud as far as I can tell, so it has to be the latter. Unpaid surrogacy is perfectly legal, so I have a hunch that the paid version has something to do with BATNA disparity. How dare those rich people take advantage of poor women by paying them to bring another human life into the world? Exploitation!
Exploitation that redistributes not just money but genes. It seems to me as if Rawls would approve. I don't see how it's any better that the child have no chance of life at all or that it's raised in relative destitution.
But even if I could convince you of all that, there's still an interesting bit of residual moral intuition. It seems to me that holding everything else constant, folks would probably be more okay with paid surrogacy than with the sale of a child already born. If my hunch about this is true, what's the difference? And does that difference engage with folks' moral intuitions on other reproductive rights topics?
Friday, October 4, 2013
Nothing Compares Amanda 2 Miley
There's a cultural trope of "dad" that describes me pretty well, and it's got little to do with having kids. I'm vaguely befuddled about the intricacies of pop culture, a tad alienated from what could be generously called "style", and have long abandoned what wispy shreds of the ever-elusive "coolness" I might have once laid partial claim to to bleed out in a muddy ditch with a knife stuck in its ribs and a broken jaw. So it shouldn't come as all that much of a surprise that I'd only recently heard of Miley Cyrus, the daughter of the Achy Breaky Heart guy. According to semi-credible sources, she's decided to break the orbit that's doomed many other former child stars.
Of course, we sometimes get this, so maybe it's a mixed bag.
Naturally, hijinks visible enough to pierce the stubborn drapery that shields my attention from the scary world outside will be strong enough to elicit reactions from lots of voices. Most of what I've seen has been head-wagging and tongue clucking, but two missives have struck me as both thoughtful and grounded in interests consonant with the EE project.
The first, from veteran Irish crooner Sinéad O'Connor is a plea to the young singer to maintain her dignity in the face of industry pressures to compromise artistic integrity for cheap visibility. A rebuttal from the impish Amanda Palmer encourages the Emerald Isle songstress to consider that young Miley may in fact be making a series of calculated career decisions and that she's not as exploited as she may seem at first blush.
Ah! A disagreement over "exploitation". Excellent. Identify the BATNA disparity and away we go. For child stars, you can catch a glimpse of a standard alternative in the video above (yikes!). Then again, there's Mara Wilson, who as far as I can tell (judging by an appearance with the Nostalgia Chick) is indistinguishable from a NORP like me. If you want to select into an entertainment career as a former child star, you can probably do worse than making yourself a household name that clearly breaks from your younger self. The private calculus seems to at least hint that Miley's recent performances could conform to the hard & soft coercion terms of the EE formulation.
As for the salacious nature of her artistic product? Is it analogous to pollution? As the father of a daughter, I'm best poised to answer "yes". As a create-your-own economist, I'd nevertheless have to reject externality arguments. Part of my responsibility as a parent is to educate my child, guide her towards a comfortable integration into the world of adults (which at this point seems to be watching an animated Mr. Rogers spinoff show set in the Land of Make-Believe), and if you ask me, a Mileyesque (Sarah, please don't take me to task for this particular neologism) conversation that I may have someday with my daughter is a fine opportunity to discuss the nature of broad-network euvoluntary exchange, soft coercion by conformity, and DIY cultural economics. In this light, I hope for more such future opportunities. [edit] Indeed, as JR points out, even if this counted as a negative externality, it's still a very far cry indeed to make a decent foundation for a policy response, and I find myself relatively relieved to see that much of the discussion has been on the "moral suasion" side, though I'm less than thrilled with some of the slut shaming out there. But it's my job to catalog this stuff. Positive analysis of normative beliefs and all that.
But I'm still going to raise my kid to appreciate Beaudelaire, Shakespeare, Tori Amos, and improvisational jazz. At least to the extent I am able. The uncertainty, I must confess, is part of the fun of parenting.
Of course, we sometimes get this, so maybe it's a mixed bag.
Naturally, hijinks visible enough to pierce the stubborn drapery that shields my attention from the scary world outside will be strong enough to elicit reactions from lots of voices. Most of what I've seen has been head-wagging and tongue clucking, but two missives have struck me as both thoughtful and grounded in interests consonant with the EE project.
The first, from veteran Irish crooner Sinéad O'Connor is a plea to the young singer to maintain her dignity in the face of industry pressures to compromise artistic integrity for cheap visibility. A rebuttal from the impish Amanda Palmer encourages the Emerald Isle songstress to consider that young Miley may in fact be making a series of calculated career decisions and that she's not as exploited as she may seem at first blush.
Ah! A disagreement over "exploitation". Excellent. Identify the BATNA disparity and away we go. For child stars, you can catch a glimpse of a standard alternative in the video above (yikes!). Then again, there's Mara Wilson, who as far as I can tell (judging by an appearance with the Nostalgia Chick) is indistinguishable from a NORP like me. If you want to select into an entertainment career as a former child star, you can probably do worse than making yourself a household name that clearly breaks from your younger self. The private calculus seems to at least hint that Miley's recent performances could conform to the hard & soft coercion terms of the EE formulation.
As for the salacious nature of her artistic product? Is it analogous to pollution? As the father of a daughter, I'm best poised to answer "yes". As a create-your-own economist, I'd nevertheless have to reject externality arguments. Part of my responsibility as a parent is to educate my child, guide her towards a comfortable integration into the world of adults (which at this point seems to be watching an animated Mr. Rogers spinoff show set in the Land of Make-Believe), and if you ask me, a Mileyesque (Sarah, please don't take me to task for this particular neologism) conversation that I may have someday with my daughter is a fine opportunity to discuss the nature of broad-network euvoluntary exchange, soft coercion by conformity, and DIY cultural economics. In this light, I hope for more such future opportunities. [edit] Indeed, as JR points out, even if this counted as a negative externality, it's still a very far cry indeed to make a decent foundation for a policy response, and I find myself relatively relieved to see that much of the discussion has been on the "moral suasion" side, though I'm less than thrilled with some of the slut shaming out there. But it's my job to catalog this stuff. Positive analysis of normative beliefs and all that.
But I'm still going to raise my kid to appreciate Beaudelaire, Shakespeare, Tori Amos, and improvisational jazz. At least to the extent I am able. The uncertainty, I must confess, is part of the fun of parenting.
Friday, May 17, 2013
Sad. But Illegal?
In a pathetic way, this woman is trying to take responsibility for her child (though, since she's pregnant again, it's hard to predict a good outcome).
"Stephanie Redus, 29, told authorities that she placed the ad [on Craigslist] because she struggles with depression and anxiety, CBS Houston reports. She is currently pregnant. The ad stated:
'Hi, I'm trying to adopt out my three-year-old son. I'm not in a good place in my life and don't feel like I can care for him properly, but I don't know where to start. If you or know anyone who is interested in caring for him please let me know. I'm a single mom and can't do this. Thanks, Desperate.'
...Redus is charged with advertising for placement of a child."
ATSRTWT
So, the lady is NOT trying to sell her son, she is trying to "adopt out" the lad. Doing it on Craig's List is a bad idea, since the state has asserted a monopoly on controlling adoption. But is that right? Should a parent be able to make arrangements to take of her own child?
Note that if she were advertising for day care, or extended care, and SHE could pay, it would be fine. The mom can advertise for an arrangement to take care of her child if she is rich.
And it would be clearly wrong if she were trying to sell the child, asking for money in exchange for "title" in the form of adoption.
The middle case, this one, is the interesting one. Can she give the child away? And, if so, can she use social media to try to find a good match?
Nod to Kevin Lewis
"Stephanie Redus, 29, told authorities that she placed the ad [on Craigslist] because she struggles with depression and anxiety, CBS Houston reports. She is currently pregnant. The ad stated:
'Hi, I'm trying to adopt out my three-year-old son. I'm not in a good place in my life and don't feel like I can care for him properly, but I don't know where to start. If you or know anyone who is interested in caring for him please let me know. I'm a single mom and can't do this. Thanks, Desperate.'
...Redus is charged with advertising for placement of a child."
ATSRTWT
So, the lady is NOT trying to sell her son, she is trying to "adopt out" the lad. Doing it on Craig's List is a bad idea, since the state has asserted a monopoly on controlling adoption. But is that right? Should a parent be able to make arrangements to take of her own child?
Note that if she were advertising for day care, or extended care, and SHE could pay, it would be fine. The mom can advertise for an arrangement to take care of her child if she is rich.
And it would be clearly wrong if she were trying to sell the child, asking for money in exchange for "title" in the form of adoption.
The middle case, this one, is the interesting one. Can she give the child away? And, if so, can she use social media to try to find a good match?
Nod to Kevin Lewis
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