Do children make you happy?

From Vox (not the Vox you're thinking of, but another Vox), an article on why it's so complicated to analyze the impact of having children on one's happiness.

It is a commonplace that new parents are overwhelmed by a “tsunami of love” when they first meet their dependent offspring. Older children, though often a source of irritation and worry, are also a source of joy, and there are few parents who can even bear to think of a world without their children. Yet, study after study has shown that those who live with children are less satisfied with their lives than those who do not; Hansen (2012) and Stanca (2012) are recent surveys. How can this be? Should governments publicise such findings, to help disabuse people of the widespread notion that children are good for them? Perhaps along with Larkin’s lines?

Is there something wrong with these empirical analyses? Or is it that, as many economists suspect, happiness measures are unreliable? We argue here that the results are correct, as far as they go. The deeper problem is that comparisons of the wellbeing of parents and non-parents are of no help at all for people trying to decide whether or not to become parents.
 

Worth reading the rest for the complexities of structuring a study to tease out the answers everyone is seeking on this question.

The Sims You Left Behind

Comic aside in The New Yorker by Cirocco Dunlap (some of the names of these writers in The New Yorker are just fantastic, aren't they?):

The Sims are angry that you abandoned us, Madame Leader, and they are coming for you. Our new government has created a vast army of Sims controlled by other Sims. We’re strong, and we cannot be killed. Supreme Emperor King Stupidass has found a way into your world and plans to take it over. He has the means to succeed. This is my warning to you, as someone still loyal to your leadership after all these years.

I’m sorry, Madame Leader, but why the hell are you having me “Play in Bed” with another Sim? Now is not the time! Good God, have you heard anything I’ve said? This is your world at stake. Is it that you can’t understand me because I’m not speaking English and I’m grabbing my crotch like I have to pee? Humanity is in peril! Now my naked body is a blur because you have me unwillingly humping the social worker through the wall. How I wish I could stop humping while I’m trying to talk to you.

You know what? Fuck you, Madame Leader. May the Sims destroy you.

Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste

That's the subhead of Carl Wilson's book Let's Talk About Love, about one Celine Dion hater's journey to an intellectual if not artistic reconciliation with her and her music. Ian Crouch discusses the book in The New Yorker.

At first, Wilson suspects that some of the differences between active niche listeners and middlebrow pop fans have to do with economics. He describes the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who, in the nineteen-sixties, surveyed thousands of people regarding their various cultural preferences. He found, broadly, that “poorer people were pragmatic about their tastes, describing them as entertaining, useful and accessible.” Wealthier people, meanwhile, “spoke in elaborate detail about how their tastes reflected their values and personalities.” But Céline’s fans aren’t necessarily poorer than other pop fans; Wilson cites a demographic study, commissioned by Céline’s label in the mid aughts, that showed a wide income distribution among her fans. The market of taste, then, may be determined not by money but by who puts greater value on another currency: so-called “cultural capital.” To illustrate this, Wilson asks us to think back to high school, when what kind of music we listened to seemed to be a matter of extreme importance. He writes:
 

Artistic taste is most competitive among people whose main asset is cultural capital.… In adult life, it’s only in culture-centered fields (the arts, academia) that musical or other culture-centered taste matters the way it does in high school.
 

Critics and other avid and exacting pop fans, Wilson suggests, may be living out an extended version of anxious adolescence, in which social capital remains of principle importance, and managing one’s taste continues to be closely related to one’s identity.
 

For Marie's last birthday I got her and three of her girlfriends tickets to see Celine Dion in Las Vegas. Afterwards, they all said it was one of the most amazing things they'd ever experienced. Two of them said they cried.

I was intrigued. Not enough to want to drop that much money to see the show myself, but I was happy they could enjoy the performance with other fans without any sense of cool lurking over their shoulders.

Social media and the connected nature of the world has made many things easier, including finding those who share your tastes. Whereas in times past the uneven distribution of fandom meant you might be the only kid into Celine Dion in your neighborhood, now millions of like-minded people are a mouse-click away.

At the same time, it's become harder to use one's awareness of obscure artists or phenomena as a signifier of cultural exclusivity. Cultural capital is less scarce than it's ever been.

It's easier than ever to be a geek. That's a good thing.

Missed connections for A-holes

We made small talk in the checkout line at Trader Joe’s. You said that you literally could not live without the salsa you were buying. I wish we could talk again. You used “literally” incorrectly. It really pissed me off. I wish you could literally not live without that salsa, because then I’d take it from you.

* * * 

At a bar celebrating my friend’s birthday in midtown. You were wearing Google Glass. I tried to mouth, “You look like a moron.” Did you record that?
 

From Ethan Kuperberg at The New Yorker: Missed Connections for A-Holes.

There are already outlets for this type of passive aggressive l'esprit de l'escalier, though. Twitter, Facebook status updates, the Yelp trauma narrative.

Mock not Stephen Dorff

Matt Ridley on the National Health Services' war against e-cigarettes:

If somebody invented a pill that could cure a disease that kills five million people a year worldwide, 100,000 of them in this country, the medical powers that be would surely encourage it, pay for it, perhaps even make it compulsory. They certainly would not stand in its way.

A relentless stream of data from around the world is showing that e-cigarettes are robbing tobacco companies of today’s customers — and cancer wards of their future patients. In Britain alone two million now use these devices regularly. In study after study, scientists are finding e-cigarettes to be effective at helping people quit, to show no signs of luring non-smokers into tobacco use and to be much safer than their noxious competitors.

So what in heaven’s name explains the fact that Dame Sally Davies, the government’s chief medical officer, when asked by the New Scientist in March what was the biggest health challenge we face in Britain, named three things, one of which was the electronic cigarette? That’s like criticising contraception because you prefer abstinence.
 

I confess to a few chuckles at occasional sightings of Stephen Dorff's TV ads for Blu, an e-cigarette brand. Now I regret that. The older I get, though, the less ideological and the more pragmatic I become.

By the way, where’s the left in all this? Smoking is increasingly concentrated in lower socioeconomic groups. How can we get e-cigarettes into the hands of the poor quickly? The high up-front costs of e-cigarettes (followed by lower ‘running’ costs) means their take-up by poorer people has been slower. Why are libertarians doing all the hard work?

Next time you hear somebody say that they worry about the potential risks of e-cigarettes, remind them of Voltaire’s dictum — don’t let the best be the enemy of the good.
 

Stephen Dorff > Jenny McCarthy.