Month: June 2017

“Minitel, the Open Network Before the Internet” (Atlantic) is worth reading (though I wish that someone could find good videos of people actually using Minitel terminals). Minitel is a good reminder that most stuff that folks do on the Web today was already happening on the Minitel system in the 1980s. Programmers aren’t smarter today. We only look smarter because the hardware engineers have given us so much more power (most of which we turned around and wasted!).

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An opening speaker at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017 wondered “How can courts determined the best interests of a child when two parents in an intact family may spend weeks or months arguing about this regarding a particular issue?” [This dovetails with Linda Nielsen’s comment in Real World Divorce that it isn’t possible for a psychologist to figure out which is the better or more important parent within an intact family, so how is a family court judge in one of the winner-take-all states supposed to do this?]

“Conflict” between parents is a common reason for U.S. courts and legislators to deny children a 50/50 schedule with their two parts. The doctrine is that conflict will be less important and/or will be reduced if the children see the loser parent just every other weekend (often trending down from there, especially after a relocation).

But what if conflict is the natural condition of two involved parents? Then courts would be discarding the most involved co-parents.

The ever-rich-in-data Swedes came to the conference with what might be an answer. Malin Bergstrom presented statistics on conflict between parents whose children live in different situations. Guess who fights the most? Parents in nuclear/intact families! Separating and putting the kids on a 50/50 schedule reduces the amount of parent-to-parent conflict. Separating and putting the kids on an every-other-weekend schedule reduces the amount of parent-to-parent conflict yet more.

[Note that these data might be different in the U.S. due to the fact that divorce is typically an administrative proceeding in Sweden and child support payments are limited to about $2,000 per year per child. So children who are on an every-other-weekend schedule does not suggest that there was a big winner-take-all lawsuit with bitter winner (did not get as much cash as hoped) and a bitter loser (greatly reduced standard of living and seldom sees children).]

The news is not all bad for those of us who live with a co-parent: the amount of cooperation tracks the amount of conflict.

Still, the Swedish data suggest a life strategy for those who want to enjoy a conflict-free existence as a parent: have a baby without a partner.

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Lesotho starting getting foreign aid at least 50 years ago (see “Aid, Development and Democracy in Lesotho, 1966-1996” by Khabele Matlosa). “Remember the Population Bomb? It’s Still Ticking” is a recent nytimes article by an expert who has been tracking the country for most of that time:

In tiny Lesotho, a landlocked kingdom in southern Africa, about one-third of its estimated two million people spent much of the past two years in danger of starving because of the lingering effects of a drought.

More than 40 years ago, I made Lesotho the centerpiece of a book, “The Alms Race,” that explored why so many development projects kept failing. I chose it because in 1974 it received more development aid per capita than any other nation.

It could also have been voted most likely to vindicate Thomas Malthus’s warning in 1798 that human numbers would inevitably outrun the resources on which our lives depend. Today, Lesotho’s experience since the 1970s is an even stronger case study of what happens when development plans ignore the reality that such efforts can be a recipe for exploding human numbers.

Even with only 1.2 million inhabitants in 1974, Lesotho’s leaders saw the country was overpopulated. A 1966 British Colonial Office study estimated that the land could support 400,000 people at best — a number Lesotho had reached by 1911.

It has been a bad situation for these past 50 years, but fortunately the New York Times has identified the villain primarily responsible:

Unfortunately, the Trump administration seems bent on exacerbating the problem. Apart from cutting aid for family planning, it has now backed out of the global Paris agreements that seek to avert the most devastating impacts of climate change, even as rising sea levels and drought-related famines threaten to create tens of millions of new migrants.

 

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North Americans at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017 tended to be sentimental. Presenters sometimes showed maudlin videos of fathers playing with kids. Therapists and psychologists would talk about the complex emotions that centered around a desire to win sole custody of kids, never mentioning that being the winner parent was more profitable than being a shared parent (see an example from our Massachusetts chapter:

if each parent earns $125,000 per year, for example, child support would be $0 in a 50/50 arrangement, $10,000 per year in a 60/40 arrangement. $20,000 per year in a 67/33 custody arrangement, and $30,000 per year or more in a 100/0 arrangement (discretionary with the judge). Over a 23-year period, therefore, the parent who earns $125,000 per year and has roughly the same expenses (a dedicated bedroom) regardless of the timeshare can collect anywhere between $0 and $690,000 tax-free depending on the outcome of the custody fight

).

Into this Kumbaya-singing party walked Professor Dr. Hildegund Sünderhauf, a researcher from Nuremberg: “I used to be a divorce litigator, but I didn’t want to be a rental weapon against the other parent.” She explained that she’d been kicked out of the German Association of Women Lawyers due to her work on shared parenting. Why didn’t they like it? “The aim of the women’s movement has shifted from equality to mothers as owners of children getting paid as much as possible for the purpose of enjoying their freedom.” (see the feminism section of the Rationale chapter for a North American view)

Prof. Dr. Sünderhauf gave us some statistics: 91 percent of Germany’s “single parents” are women. 95 percent of separated German parents share legal custody while about 15 percent of them have a 50/50 care arrangement for children, “a big shift” from just a few years ago. (see our interview with a German litigator) As in a lot of U.S. states, German mothers can block shared parenting and win primary parent status by asserting the existing of conflict. Simply appearing in court without a packaged settlement shows a judge that there is conflict and that shared parenting could therefore be inappropriate.

Prof. Dr. Sünderhauf noted that the “mom wins” aspect of German law is now likely in conflict with EU law, notably the European Convention on Human Rights, articles 8, 14 (see also Protocol 7, Article 5, in which “Spouses shall enjoy equality of rights and responsibilities … in their relations with their children, as to marriage, during marriage and in the event of its dissolution”). The “unless she is too busy smoking crack, it is always in the best interests of children to be with mom” practical outcomes of German courts is in conflict with the Council of Europe Resolution 2079, which made a non-binding recommendation that a “shared residence principle” be adopted by EU states. (In the meantime, what happens to the child of a divorce or separation will be completely different from one EU country to another, but purportedly the child and the parents have the same “rights” in all of these places. Is the EU diluting the term “right” to the point that it is meaningless?)

At a coffee break I asked Prof. Dr. Sünderhauf if Germans could actually be motivated by the cash, given that the numbers were so small compared to most U.S. states’ guidelines. It wasn’t possible to become a middle-income spender by having sex with a high-income earner, as would be straightforward in many U.S. states, was it? (In retrospect, this was a dumb question because the research on Danish men and women shows dramatic responses to child support orders that are similar in financial scale to Germany’s.) She pointed out that wage incomes are a lot lower in Germany than in the U.S. (countries ranked by GDP per capita). When you consider child support from the father plus subsidies for single moms and parents in general from the state, that wage income is taxed, that child support and the various subsidies are tax-free, and that it is possible for a woman to run a portfolio of cash-yielding children (rather than just one), the possibility of collecting maximum dollars through the family law system begins to look more exciting.

[Of course, if Germans were exclusively motivated by cash and fully aware of U.S. law, you’d expect them to fly over to Boston, New York, and Los Angeles to get pregnant with American co-parents and then return to Germany to collect at U.S. rates. (see the “American Child Support Profits Without an American Child” section of “Child Support Litigation without a Marriage”).]

It will be interesting to see how the Europeans resolve these conflicts. In the U.S., the Supreme Court has ruled that states can dispose of children, defendant spouses, etc. more or less as they wish. A child who loses a parent hasn’t been deprived of a “right” under federal law or the Constitution. A parent who loses 110 percent of income to child support and/or alimony can borrow from a relative or go to prison. Even if it turns out that 100 percent of the losers in a state happen to be of one gender, law professors say that isn’t a problem under federal law. But the Europeans can’t seem to resist making grand and vague pronouncements that are supposed to apply to their diverse group of member states (so diverse that often parenting time outcomes are radically different from region to region within an EU country!).

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One of the good things about the Web is gathering perspectives from readers who know a lot more than the author.

A comment on “Sleeping Sailors on U.S.S. Fitzgerald Awoke to a Calamity at Sea” (New York Times) looks like a great example of this.

[from Dan Weiss] As an Officer of the Deck (OOD) on USN destroyers for 5 years I stood hundreds of mid-watches (0000-0400) and have the following comments based strictly on what’s been published so far. The tracks indicate Crystal was the privileged vessel, required to maintain course/speed, while Fitzgerald was the burdened vessel, required to change course/speed so as to let Crystal pass ahead. Approximately twenty-five percent of Fitzgerald’s crew of about 300 would have been on watch including Bridge/OOD, multiple radar personnel, and lookouts. In an open water crossing situation Crystal would see Fitzgerald’s “green” starboard running light, while Fitzgerald woud see Crystal’s “red” port running light, meaning Fitzgerald is burdened and must yield. The CO’s I served under were routinely awakened many times a night for these situations and their sea cabins were adjacent to the bridge. The biggest challenge was when we were the privileged vessel and the burdened vessel failed to yield. Merchant ships are/were notorious for sailing on “Iron Mike” (auto pilot) and just kept coming. That doesn’t appear to be the case based on what I’ve gleaned so far. The collision on the starboard side puts the burden of proof on Fitzgerald. Hopefully there will be mitigating circumstances explaining the inexplicable. My sincere condolences to all.

The event surrounding this is sad, of course.

Related:

• USS Indianapolis sinking

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The news lately has been full of stories about attacks in Western cities by drivers of cars, vans, or trucks. Latest example: “Armed Man Is Killed After Driving Into Police Convoy on Champs-Élysées” (nytimes)

I’m wondering if this will hasten the acceptance of the self-driving vehicle. I dimly remember years ago writing that the transition to self-driving might involve a cliff date beyond which it would become illegal for humans to drive, the theory being that a 6,000 lb. SUV was too dangerous in the hands of a distracted/incompetent human. But if the hazards from human-driven vehicles now include intentional attacks rather than just accidental ones, perhaps the day will come sooner?

This raises the question of how to ensure that self-driving vehicles aren’t themselves converted into weapons. What stops a malevolent person from updating or substituting out the software in a self-driving vehicle? Can this problem be solved technically with trusted systems?

Here’s a scary thought: fearful citizens will demand that the government outlaw privately-owned vehicles. The only vehicles allowed to exist will be not only self-driving, but owned and maintained by the government or government-authorized companies.

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“The Myth of Disability ‘Sob Stories’” (nytimes) is fascinating for the comments. The typical New York Times reader is gushing with sympathy.

[David desJardins] Everyone else at your university would benefit if instead of writing an op-ed about this in the newspaper, you filed a complaint with your administration so this professor is reprimanded and changes his behavior. If you just tolerate it then it keeps happening.

[Joy Abbott] The vast majority of people receiving Social Security Disability are genuinely disabled. It’s cruel to imply that everybody receiving disability is scamming the system, when in truth, only a very small percentage are running scams.

(Don’t work for a railroad, certainly, if you want to avoid disabling injury!)

What about America’s doctors? How about these for bedside manner:

[ras] As a primary care physician I see many people trying to game the system by applying for disability for things that have no objective measure, e.g. pain, back problems or depression. They impugn those with legitimate claims to disability, but they are very real. It’s human nature to look for an easy way out, a gravy train to ride as far as possible; but I can assure you that “sob stories” are not a myth and in fact explain a large fraction of the tremendous increase in disability claims in recent years.

[Maturin25] I’m an orthopedic surgeon. Many sustain serious injuries and impairments. However, malingering is rampant, both in the general public and in the US military.

[Kate Connor] While it is rude of the author’s professor to make those comments, and the concept that a disability confers special powers is nutty, we still see on a daily basis people who appear to scam the system. As a physician, I get forms every day from patients applying for disability in the state where I practice (Florida) and I do not think one in ten of them are disabled, and I DO know their medical history. (My practice is to make no statements, just send the medical records and hope they get denied.) …

Speaking Truth to Patients, however, is not as popular as Speaking Truth to Power. New York Times readers definitely did not enjoy hearing from these docs!

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Patrick Parkinson was one of the best-spoken presenters at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017. He’s a law professor in Australia who has studied what happens when the winner parent wants to relocate and take the child(ren) away from the loser parent. (“Relocation” or “Removal” in U.S. family law parlance.)

His introduction was on the subject of the “Promise of Divorce.” In the bad old days, married citizens who wanted to separate or divorce would have to negotiate with their partners and come to an agreement. Legislators gave voters no-fault (“unilateral”) divorce in which at any time a plaintiff could make a fresh start. The plaintiff could get the kids, child support cashflow to go with the kids, a share of any accumulated property, and be able “to form new relationships free from the former partner or court.” The courthouse became a welcoming environment for the plaintiff seeking freedom and a better life with one or more new sex partners.

Parkinson noted that “the Catholic idea of the indissolubility of marriage turned into the unilateral dissolubility of marriage” and everything seemed great and was working according to plan… until lawmakers began to consider the rights of children to maintain some kind of contact with the discarded defendant parent. The felicity of the adult plaintiff crashes into the rock of indissolubility of parenthood.

But what if the winner parent can move to the other side of a continent, thus rendering the child’s “indissoluble” relationship with the loser parent moot? That restore the “promise of divorce” for plaintiffs.

Parkinson noted that it is “almost always mums who want to move and almost always dads who oppose it.” He noted that it is in this relocation case where the rights of the adult mother and the rights of the children come into starkest conflict.

Parkinson explained the context of Australian divorce with “we have gotten away from the winner-take-all system with ‘reasonable access/visitation’ as the wooden spoon for the loser” system, though he noted that only 15 percent of children of divorce/separation in Australia are in shared parenting (i.e., in 85 percent of cases the outcome is just like in the old winner/loser days). The practical decision as to whether a child will spend the rest of his or her life with one parent is made in an “interim parenting” hearing that will last for less than one hour “with no evidence presented.” (As in the U.S., where temporary orders are the de facto resolution of a custody lawsuit, there may be a trial a year or two later where witnesses testify and can be cross-examined.)

Parkinson then proceeded to relate his research on 80 adults, 39 women who had wanted to move with their children and 40 men who had opposed the move. Most of the children were under 10 years of old at the time of the move. Women prevailed in their desire to move 2/3rds of the time (“the mantra in law is ‘happy mum, happy child'” (similar to the Massachusetts standard)). For cases that went all the way to trial, the judgments were roughly 50/50 in allowing or forbidding a move with the children. However, a lot of men gave up after adverse interim rulings or reports. One strategy that successful plaintiffs employed, on the advice of their attorneys, was agreeing to an onerous travel schedule for the kids, e.g., they’ll fly back (5 hours) every month. The defendant would cave in. Mom would then go back to family court a year later and say “this travel schedule really isn’t working for the child” and the judge would modify it down to something minimal.

Parkinson explained that women’s reasons for wanting to move including “going home,” “new partner,” and “getting away from that bastard” and that “only a very small number cited domestic violence.” He noted that while the woman might be moving to go back “home” to her parents, the children were being moved away from their home and one parent. Thus there was almost a perfect balance between the mother’s gain and the children’s loss. A majority of mothers, five years after the move, recognized this. Out of 15 mothers who did move (an average of 1500 km), 8 said that their kids would have been better off if they had stayed and 3 were uncertain.

“Loss of contact was an almost universal experience,” said Parkinson. “Some fathers made heroic efforts, but there was a diminution over time. Conflict before relocation also demotivated fathers. The father would travel 5 hours to see the kids and they wouldn’t be home. The cost of contact was also a big obstacle for ordinary Australians. Expenses were A$15,000 per year at a time when average gross [pre-tax] income was A$45,000 per year.”

As measured by change in happiness over the years of the study, the Australian system works well for plaintiffs. The mothers who moved were the happiest, followed by the mothers who did not move. Fathers were made unhappy by the Australian divorce system, apparently, with the fathers who prevented the mothers from moving still not being too happy and the fathers who’d lost their children entirely being very unhappy. Parkinson said that suicide for divorced fathers was reasonably common in Australia. (See the Children, Mothers, and Fathers chapter for some U.S. statistics.)

Like a lot of Americans who work in the divorce industry, Parkinson was excited by the idea of using the courts to identify and then replicate whatever pattern of child care prevailed while the parents were together. A mother told him “I was a single mother before we separated” and therefore for Parkinson it made sense that the mother should be allowed to move with her children. (See Michigan for an example of a U.S. state where courts may not be interested in the pre-litigation pattern of child care, e.g., “If the wife says ‘the husband didn’t have anything to do with the kids’ the court can respond ‘that’s not necessarily what he will do once he has the kids. Maybe he didn’t come home because he didn’t want to be around you.'”)

Parkinson also thought it was sensible to have courts extend a voluntary breadwinner-dependent partnership into a long-term involuntary one, which is what courts in about half of U.S. states do (see our Summary chapter). The parent who voluntarily works hard during a marital partnership and sees the kids for a few hours every evening is forced by court order to continue working hard and paying a plaintiff while seeing the children a few days per month. Regarding the fact that 85 percent of Australian divorce outcomes are still primary/secondary (winner/loser) parent, Parkinson noted that “men can’t manage shared care because they work too many hours and might also commute an hour or more to work each day. Whereas women work part-time or don’t work.”

For Parkinson, the gold standard seemed to be the child’s pre-lawsuit relationship with the father. Children who had been close with their fathers never recovered from the mother’s move. As in the U.S., he didn’t consider that it might be expensive or difficult to look into the hearts of child and father and ascertain true feelings. The intensity or cost of litigation that such a standard entailed were of no concern. This standard got a reasonably good reception at the conference. I tried it out on a few laypeople later in that week. All immediately dismissed the standard as ridiculous. “How does the court know that the relationship between the child and father won’t change over time? If human relationships didn’t change and evolve, how is that divorce court exists in the first place?” An entrepreneur said “What if the father has been in the middle of a startup working 90 hours/week while the wife is having an affair to keep herself busy? The kids aren’t especially close to the father at that moment, but he won’t be in that phase of the startup for 18 years.” A military officer said “What if the father was deployed for the year prior to the court psychologist interview the children? Isn’t he going to lose automatically?” (see the Practical Tips chapter for how military parents fare in U.S. custody lawsuits) A parent of adult children: “This is a fool’s errand. Who cares about the answer when it is the wrong question. Dad doesn’t like to play dollhouse with a 4-year-old? How does the judge know that the girl won’t grow up to be a soccer player and enjoy spending hours on the field with her dad?”

[Separately, during a coffee break I asked for Parkinson’s perspective on economic incentives in Australian family law. He volunteered that child support was so minimal that it wouldn’t motivate anyone to have a child or opposed shared parenting. What was available to the Australian who had sex with a high-income partner? A$22,000 per year per child. I asked “Well, doesn’t that mean a person who is collecting child support on two kids can have about the same after-tax spending power as the average full-time worker?” The answer was, of course, “yes,” but though Parkinson and I were surrounded by Westin employees presumably motivated to come into work by their (modest) paychecks, he categorically denied that any Australian comes into family court with an eye for child support cash.”]

Related:

• William Fabricius, of Arizona State University, presented results of a study of the effects of relocation on 83 adolescents with divorced/separated parents. Relocation was associated with lower quality relationships with all three parental figures (biological mother, biological father, mom’s new boyfriend or husband; stepmoms were not mentioned for some reason) and this was true regardless of which parent had relocated.

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A born-in-Germany pilot friend posted the following on her Facebook page:

In honor of my Dad’s birthday and Father’s Day …. to the man who taught me so much. He may not be here anymore but he’ll be forever in my heart I miss him every day !!!!

This sentiment yielded 20 “Likes” and three comments of the form “Awesome Photos, I know your Dad is proud that his daughter followed in his footsteps.”

What were the “awesome photos” that were so widely liked? Photo 1: Dad pictured in his military officer’s uniform; Photo 2: Dad at the controls of what would today be an antique airplane.

What kind of footsteps might the daughter be following in? A mutual friend, who happens to be Ukrainian, private-messaged me:

• wait a second
• is this a luftwaffe uniform????

Zooming in a bit it turned out that Dad, who was born in 1915 (I asked via PM), had a swastika under the eagle over his right jacket pocket.

Happy Father’s Day to all of my readers!

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Nordic countries are unusually prominent in research on the health and welfare of children, including in the context of divorce and “parental separation” (how researchers describe two biological parents that might have spent 15 minutes having sex and then never talked to each other again). Partly this is because they gather a lot of data on subjects, such as the health and happiness of children, that other societies apparently don’t care about. “Parental Responses to Child Support Obligations: Causal Evidence from Administrative Data” (Rossin-Slater and Wust 2014) is one example of what can be done with a big data set. The work of Malin Bergstrom and colleagues referenced from the Children, Mothers, and Fathers chapter is an even better one.

Swedes showed up in moderate force at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017 to present their latest research. Their data continue to show that children in 50/50 shared parenting do much better than children who live primarily with one parent. Unprompted, however, they would try to explain why shared parenting is more common in Sweden than in other countries. It would have been a major breach of conference protocol to say that “one possible explanation is that children are not profitable in Sweden and therefore people don’t fight over them.” (see the International chapter for how a plaintiff could have sex with the richest person in Sweden and get only about $2,500 per year). Certainly nobody had the temerity to raise a hand and suggest “Maybe Swedish women work because they can’t get paid for having kids or having once been married.” (See the aggregate economic effects chapter for a reference to a paper out of University of Chicago finding that married women cut back their labor force participation when no-fault-with-50-50-property-division divorce was made available.)

The go-to explanation for the Swedes was that Sweden has more gender equality than other countries. In other words, setting up court systems to give women primary custody of children (and a paycheck to go with the kids) is a remedy for gender inequality. Because Sweden doesn’t have as much gender inequality therefore fewer women put in the effort to supplement their wage income with child support checks.

What are the key elements of Swedish gender equality, as explained at the conference? One is that Swedish men can take paternity leave. Economist says that Swedish couples can divide 180 days of paternity leave between the mother and father (but what if the biological parents are no longer acquainted? How is the decision made then?). Nearly 90 percent of Sweden fathers take at least some leave and that the average amount taken is 7 weeks. But can that initial 7-week leave actually affect the parenting time schedule if the parents are together at the birth but split up when children are 8 and 10 years old?

How about gender pay gap for full-time workers, without adjusting for field, years of experience, etc.? Sweden’s is 13.2 percent. That’s a larger gap than in New York (source: National Women’s Law Center), a winner-take-all jurisdiction for custody and child support. The gap is roughly the same as in Florida, home to “permanent alimony” for the litigant identified by the court as a “dependent spouse.”

Does this focus on the family law/gender equality relationship make sense? Based on our research for Real World Divorce, there doesn’t seem to be a perfect correlation between a state’s gender equality level and friendliness toward shared parenting. If we look at state-by-state gender wage gaps (source: National Women’s Law Center) we find that Maryland has more gender equality than Pennsylvania, yet Pennsylvania is the state that supports shared parenting. California has a lower gender wage gap than neighboring Nevada and Arizona, yet it is California that stages the winner-take-all primary/secondary parent court battles (guess who wins, statistically!) and Nevada and Arizona that have 50/50 shared parenting statutes. Maine has a larger gender wage gap than Massachusetts (the two were once a single state), yet it is Maine where courts are more likely to award 50/50 shared parenting.

Anecdotally, a Swedish family stayed in our Harvard Square apartment last year. I had spent years listening to tales of Swedish superiority in gender equality, environmentalism, welfare systems, etc. Both parents were well-educated and had full-time jobs. I took the family out for a day of suburban sightseeing, helicopter flying, etc. in our minivan. Mom sat in the back in between the two toddlers. Dad sat in the front and talked to me about computer nerdism, aviation, etc. Dad would lend a hand when necessary with the kids, but Mom did most of the child-related tasks. The condo neighbors complained that the family did not properly sort items into trash versus recycling.

Readers: Are Swedes in your direct personal experience more gender-equal than Americans? If so, does it make sense that their radically different family law system is somehow related to this increased gender equality?

[Note that Michael Lamb, a professor of psychology at Cambridge University (“the real Cambridge”), was at the conference and offered his own non-economic perspective: “The Swedes believe that children have two parents and that parents matter. You will not see fundamental changes in laws and outcomes without changes to underlying attitudes. The focus on law alone is misplaced.” (but how to explain a sudden shift from winner-take-all primary/secondary to 50/50 shared parenting as a result of a court ruling (Alaska) or a piece of legislation (Arizona and Nevada)?]

Related:

• Gender equity should be measured by consumption, not income?

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