Gompertz law of mortality

A British actuary, Benjamin Gompertz, noticed this pattern back in 1825, and ever since it's been called the Gompertz law of human mortality — yes, death creeps closer, but it creeps closer in orderly steps (for humans about every eight years).

Roughly every eight years, the odds that a human will die doubles. This is Gompertz law of mortality.

This led physicist Brian Skinner to try to figure out why, and he made a surprising discovery.

OK, so this happens. The pattern, says Brian, "holds across a large number of countries, time periods and even different species. While actual average lifespan changes quite a bit from country to country and from animal to animal, the same general rule that 'your probability of dying doubles every X years' holds true."

But here's the dangling question: Why the regular interval? Why eight years for humans?

Why eight years?

Brian's answer: "It's an amazing fact, and no one understands why it's true."

Why Do Intellectuals Favor Government Solutions?

That's the title of an interesting post by Julian Sanchez.

Before answering the question, he first provides some context.

One thing to bear in mind is that even informed and intelligent people do not typically arrive at their political views by an in-depth review of the evidence in each particular policy area. Most of us can only be really expert in one or two spheres, and in others must rely heavily on those who possess greater expertise and seem to share our basic values. In practice, most people select a “basket” of policy views in the form of an overarching political ideology—which often amounts to choosing a political community whose members seem like decent people who know what they’re talking about. So we needn’t assume the majority view of the intellectual class represents the outcome of a series of fully independent judgments: A relatively mild bias in one direction or another within the relevant community could easily result in an information cascade that generates much more disproportionate social adoption of the favored views. So any potential biasing factors we consider need not be as dramatic as the ultimate distribution of opinion: Whatever initial net bias may exist is likely to be magnified by bandwagon effects.

It's a worthwhile point. Most people just can't be experts in so many areas, but one thing the Internet has done is made it easier and easier to choose from a wide selection of baskets of viewpoints or opinions. In other words, it's easier now than ever to sound smart on a wide range of topics. That may sound more condescending than I mean it to: often a gateway to forming one's own opinions is trying others on for size, and as with innovation in other fields often it's easier to build off of or react to another person's ideas than to birth one from scratch.

Back to the question posed in the title of Sanchez's post.

Here, then, is an alternative (though perhaps related) source of potential bias. If the best solutions to social problems are generally governmental or political, then in a democratic society, doing the work of a wordsmith intellectual is a way of making an essential contribution to addressing those problems. If the best solutions are generally private, then this is true to a far lesser extent: The most important ways of doing one’s civic duty, in this case, are more likely to encompass more direct forms of participation, like donating money, volunteering, working on technological or medical innovations that improve quality of life, and various kinds of socially conscious entrepreneurial activity.

You might, therefore, expect a natural selection effect: Those who feel strongly morally motivated to contribute to the amelioration of social ills will naturally gravitate toward careers that reflect their view about how this is best achieved. The choice of a career as a wordsmith intellectual may, in itself, be the result of a prior belief that social problems are best addressed via mechanisms that are most dependent on public advocacy, argument and persuasion—which is to say, political mechanisms.

It's worth contrasting the situation with the technology industry where a great deal of quarterback coaching and navel-gazing occurs online. It's not all just people signaling how smart they are: if you have a legitimate issue with something, the densely interconnected network of folks online will likely hear you if you express your opinion cogently.

Tracking shot over a sea of desks

[WARNING: Minor plot spoiler for The Wolf of Wall Street included below. Not a critical plot point by any stretch, but I'm hyper sensitive to spoilers]

Billy Wilder first paid tribute to King Vidor's silent film The Crowd with a tracking shot gliding over a sea of desks in his masterpiece The Apartment.

Every generation deserves its tracking shot over a sea of desks, and ours is the one Martin Scorsese provides in The Wolf of Wall Street. It occurs just after Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) gives a speech to his firm firing them up to pump Steve Madden stock (it was their firm's first IPO and Belfort owned a majority of the Steve Madden's equity through friends). After Belfort concludes his impassioned speech with a rousing denouement screamed at the top of his lungs, the camera takes off from the front of the office where Belfort has been standing and flies through the office over row and row of desks of stockbrokers smiling and dialing and pumping Steve Madden stock to naive investors. Nearing the end of the office it then backtracks back over all the desks, all the time taking in the chaos of a boiler room operating at full steam.

The tech industry may be next to earn such a shot. I picture a tracking shot soaring over row and row of a mixture of seated and standing desks, half the workers wearing headphones while tapping away furiously at their ergonomic keyboards.

What is American food?

Natasha Gelling at Smithsonian Mag:

Are there any dishes or foods that you would classify as typically, or even exclusively, “American?”

A number of iconic foods—hot dogs and hamburgers, snack food—are hand-held. They’re novelties associated with entertainment. These are the kinds of food you eat at the ballpark, buy at a fair and eventually eat in your home. I think that there is a pattern there of iconic foods being quick and hand-held that speaks to the pace of American life, and also speaks to freedom. You’re free from the injunctions of Victorian manners and having to eat with a fork and knife and hold them properly, sit at the table and sit up straight and have your napkin properly placed. These foods shirk all that. There’s a sense of independence and a celebration of childhood in some of those foods, and we value that informality, the freedom and the fun that is associated with them.

I grew up eating mainly a mix of my mom's homemade Chinese cooking and then random American dishes when she was busy, so the primary attribute I associate with American food is convenience. TV dinners, pizza delivered to your door, frozen hamburger patties you can throw on the grill, something you can toss in the microwave, cereal you can dump out of a box and finish with a pour of milk. With two busy working parents and a houseful of kids to feed, dining is a daily hurdle to be leaped three times, it has to be built into one's schedule. An occasional shortcut that satisfies that requirement with minimal work is bound to be popular.

Nowadays, my dining is definitely shifted around to accommodate my work schedule, thus Gelling's quote rings so true: “It’s not the meal that shapes work, it’s the work that shapes the meal.”

It's fascinating to hear her discuss the social conventions that came to shape the three meal a day tradition that is the dominant model in the U.S. today as it is so instructive as to how dining differs from country to country and why.

How did the associations between certain meals and certain foods, like cereal for breakfast, form?

You start in the very early colonial era with one meal in the middle of the day—and it’s the hot meal of the day, dinner. Farmers and laborers ate earlier because they were up really early, and the elite were eating later in the day because they could sleep in. Breakfast and supper were kind of like glorified snacks, often leftovers or cornmeal mush, and there was not a lot of emphasis placed on these meals. Dinner, the main meal, at which people did tend to sit down together and eat, was really not the kind of social event that it has become. People did not emphasize manners, they did not emphasize conversation, and if conversation did take place it wasn’t very formal: it was really about eating and refueling. That’s the time where there are very blurry lines between what is and what isn’t a meal, and very blurry lines between what is breakfast, dinner and lunch.

Then, with the Industrial Revolution, everything changed, because people’s work schedules changed drastically. People were moving from the agrarian lifestyle to an urban, factory-driven lifestyle, and weren’t able to go home in the middle of the day. Instead, they could all come home and have dinner together, so that meal becomes special. And that’s when manners become very important, and protocol and formality. It’s really around then that people start to associate specific foods with certain meals.

Then, with dinner shifting you have the vacuum in the middle of the day that lunch is invented to fill. People are bringing pie for lunch, they’re bringing biscuits, but the sandwich really lends itself to lunch well. So the popularity of the sandwich really does have something to do with the rise of lunch—and especially the rise of children’s lunch, because it’s not messy. You don’t need utensils, you don’t have to clean up—you can stick it in a lunch pail really easily.

Gelling's upcoming book Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal sounds quite promising.

h/t Marginal Revolution

Early adopters of illegitimate professions

When the movie industry first came into being in the U.S., it wasn't seen as a very reputable profession. Given discrimination against immigrants and women in other more established industries, it was only natural that they were first in line to grab jobs in Hollywood. Specifically, many ”screenwriters“ in those days (I put screenwriter in quotations because it was the silent era for movies so the job consisted of writing the interstitial title cards, not dialogue) were women:

Women had been a major force in the film industry during the silent era, particularly in the area of "screenwriting." Since dialogue wasn't needed, and inter-titles were a separate discipline, screenplays were called "scenarios", with the concept of "play" devolving onto the movie itself, which commonly was called a "photoplay" in the first generations of cinema.

June Mathis, who helped make Rudolph Valentino a superstar, wrote the scenarios and screenplays for over a hundred films, and also as an "editorial director" on many other films, from the mid-Teens until 1930.

Women directors were not uncommon during the silent era (In fact, the first "feature" film was directed by a woman, back in 1896).

After sound came to the movies, however, women started to be squeezed out of the movies. Why?

The era of the Talkie launched was followed closely by The Great Depression, and several dominoes toppled into each other in succession.

At first, movie studios were not hurt by the downturn in consumer spending, as Americans sought entertainment in the movie theaters. By the end of the Hebert Hoover Administration, attendance was declining as economic conditions worsened.

The studios were forced to turn to the New York money center banks to seek capital. The banks put their own representatives on movie studios' boards of directors. The financial experts brought in to the industry by the banks reorganized the business and imposed a corporate management paradigm on the studios. This outside influence exerted a great deal of pressure towards conformity and the imposition of strict hierarchies.

It is a truism of organizational theory that the more complex the structure, the more control is exerted over all aspects of the organization, and the more conformity is demanded from organizational players. The corporate hierarchies were dominated by men, and the pressure for conformity made the vertical, publicly traded studios inhospitable to women, who by their very gender, could not conform to the dominant corporate paradigm.

Notably, it was a woman, Frances Marion, who was the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood from 1916 through 1935.

I think of this story when I read about discrimination in other fields. The life cycle of discrimination often repeats itself across industries, leading its victims to be early adopters of new and not yet socially respected professions.