July 2009 Archives

The BBC's ace economics blogger Robert Peston says the economic crisis is partly the result of testosterone poisoning. Consider, he says, that it's impossible to find a single woman at the top of the banks and other institutions that failed so badly. There's more:

But I think there may be a sense (and here I'm on very dangerous territory) in which masculine vices played a dominant role in fomenting the crunch.

And, I suppose, the simplest way of putting this is that I know very few women who measure their success in life by the size of their respective bank balances, whereas I know an astonishing number of men for whom the only thing that matters is "the score", as determined by the heft of their salaries, or bonuses or capital gain.

We've descended into the uncomfortable realm of hack psychology, so we're not going to stay here long.

But I would observe that - in my experience - men are more prone than women to simply run like a train at the goal, and never mind who's flattened along the way.

And the kind of complex mathematical modelling that underpinned so many of the toxic financial products - and of flawed systems for controlling risk - is also a peculiarly male practice. It's the equivalent of an obsession with computer games, or cricket scores or railway timetables: little worlds detached from the real world.

Anything to this? What do you think? I suspect there's more truth to it than I would be comfortable admitting. But if we accept that personality traits related to masculinity, either biologically or culturally based, are responsible to some degree for the catastrophic failure of these businesses, then we must logically accept that it is theoretically possible to blame business failures in particular circumstances on biological and/or cultural factors on the role women took in the business, or minorities. It's easy to float this kind of explanation when the people being cracked on are white males, and the person doing the cracking is also a white male. I, a white male, think that Peston is onto something. But if he is, then we cannot avoid the possibility that in the future, someone can justifiably point to a genetic or cultural factor related to other businesses failing (or succeeding). That's not something anybody will be able to talk about in public.

This Financial Times interactive map of the US showing a state-by-state glimpse of their budget deficits is pretty unsettling -- especially if you live in New York or Collyvornia. Turns out Texas and many other Flyover Country states are in relatively good shape. Freddy Gray says this graphic is good news for anarcho-collapsitarians.

The Food Standards Agency of the British government has released results of an exhaustive comparative study -- the most comprehensive ever -- of food grown organically, versus conventionally, and has concluded that organic meat and produce is only marginally more nutritious than non-organic.

I can't say that's a big surprise to me. As I noted in "Crunchy Cons," one ought to be skeptical of big nutritional benefits claimed for organic food. But belief in a superior number of vitamins and minerals is not why many of us tend to choose organic, as Rose Prince writes in the Daily Telegraph. Excerpts:

Interestingly, nutrition is an aspect of organic food that holds little interest for the Soil Association, the charity that campaigns for "planet-friendly" food and farming. It is more preoccupied with food production that promotes good standards of animal welfare, a chemical-free environment (clearly a human health benefit, since no sensible person wants to ingest hormone disrupters) and the encouragement of larger areas of pasture. It has also campaigned vociferously against genetically modified food.

More:

The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, whose researchers carried out the study, is a leader in science-based nutrition education. Its teaching body is not pro-big business.

But there are politics here. The FSA is not known for its support for the small margins of artisan food producers. It also runs the Meat Hygiene Service and the Environmental Health Service, which (depending on the region) spend a good deal of time imposing costly changes upon small-scale food producers for whom hygiene is paramount.

The principal job of the Food Standards Agency is to protect the health of the public. You cannot accuse organic food of being unsafe, and this review was not about safety. There are, however, several areas of food production where safety is in question: foremost in my mind, while swine flu rages, is the use of antibiotics; if the overuse of antibiotics in the pig industry is blamed for the outbreak, it will have much to answer for, not least the deaths of many people.

There is also the question of pesticide use. More than 400 chemicals are available to non-organic farmers, who are policed by the Pesticide Residues Committee. In Britain, residues are rarely reported reaching the maximum permitted level, but opponents of pesticide use say that this level is set far too high. The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution has issued serious warnings about the effects of agricultural chemicals on humans; it has also said that the Government's risk assessment is inadequate.

The question of whether or not organic food is nutritionally superior is not the same question as to whether or not it contains fewer pesticides, hormones and suchlike, or whether or not the animals have been raised according to humane standards of animal husbandry. One unarguably good thing the organic craze in England has brought about is a greater practice of humane animal husbandry on the part of meat producers who raise livestock conventionally (that is, non-organically).

Michael Kinsley writes that it's a shame we are so prissy about gaffes our leaders make. UK Tory leader David Cameron would no doubt agree. He got into trouble this week for using the rude word "twat" in a radio interview. He was actually being pretty funny. From the Times of London story (there's a video clip of the gaffe at that link):

The Tory leader used the word "twat" as he explained to Christian O'Connell, a presenter on Absolute Radio, why he did not use the Twitter social networking service.

"The trouble with Twitter, the instantness of it -- too many twits might make a twat," he said.

In the studio his remark was greeted with laughter. Mr O'Connell said: "That's fantastic."

However, according to the Collins English Dictionary, the word can refer to female genitals, a girl or woman "considered sexually", or a foolish or despicable person.

Now there's a slight kerfuffle here over the slip, but really, who could possibly care? It was a rude remark, but big deal? It was human. People talk like that here, especially people Cameron's generation and younger. Dave didn't cover himself in glory with that wisecrack, i guess, but I thought it was funny. We ought to cut our leaders a break sometimes.

Andrew Sullivan writes:

Dreher says he's "not trying to start a fight" and that he "really wants to know what people think" when he compares transgender people to those who want to needlessly have limbs amputated to feel "whole." Sigh.

I get sick of this kind of juvenile fusspot response whenever anyone tries to discuss the moral aspects of issues having to do with sexuality. You know, the "How dare you compare [thing I approve of] to [thing you disapprove of]!?!" As if how dare you were any sort of argument. It was clear to anyone who took the trouble to read my post that it was someone here on the Templeton fellowship who raised the question in a discussion about transgenderism, the body and personal autonomy. And it's a perfectly legitimate question, because it raises issues of the lines society draws around the individual's ability to alter his or her body. I asked for Celtic Dragon Critter, one of this blog's readers who is a transgendered person, to weigh in with her views, and intended by the tone I took to caution readers to discuss this stuff respectfully.

In fact, it appears we got a pretty interesting discussion going; I particularly like the points people made about cosmetic surgery. So it's discouraging to see somebody like Andrew try to make a discussion like this illegitimate by imputing bigotry to raising the question in the first place. I would say it's a pretty safe bet that nearly all the journalists and academics in the room when the question was raised today are pro-gay rights, and sympathetic to transsexuals. In fact, one of the journalists who followed up this question with a remark about how cultural politics makes honest discussion about this issue impossible is a married heterosexual who has several times during this course strongly defended gay rights in conversations. But we are grown-ups here who can talk about these things without getting all mad and saying that someone is a moral defective for asking, "How is this thing like or not like, that thing?"

Andrew likes to say that gay people should stand up for the free-speech rights of those who oppose gay rights. But surely he must understand that How Dare You, even when put to people who mean no apparent harm by asking a particular question, or who want to spark a civil discussion about something like the meaning of personal autonomy when it comes to surgically altering the human body, is a strategy to shut down inquiry. Does it really help the cause of transgender acceptance to try to shame people who don't understand what it's about into keeping quiet about their questions, their anxiety, even their disapproval?

Anyway, I appreciate that the overwhelming majority of this blog's readers who participated in that discussion, on both sides, went at it in a way that brought light, not heat, to an issue that is quite confusing for most of us.