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Folks:

Continuing in my series of “horrors of having children late in life,” I’m doing a one-night trip from Boston to San Francisco later this week (will take redeye back so as to be home for the kids). Would anyone like to meet for breakfast or coffee in Redwood City (near the big Oracle towers) on Friday, September 1? It has to be 0730 because I need to be in an office building by 0900.

Please email me (philg@mit.edu) if interested in meeting! Always happy to talk about aviation nerdism, computer nerdism, or any of the other topics on this blog.

Thanks in advance.

Philip

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A Ukrainian friend who speaks German derisively linked to “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism” (nytimes):

A comparative sociological study of East and West Germans conducted after reunification in 1990 found that Eastern women had twice as many orgasms as Western women. Researchers marveled at this disparity in reported sexual satisfaction, especially since East German women suffered from the notorious double burden of formal employment and housework. In contrast, postwar West German women had stayed home and enjoyed all the labor-saving devices produced by the roaring capitalist economy. But they had less sex, and less satisfying sex, than women who had to line up for toilet paper.

Consider Ana Durcheva from Bulgaria, who was 65 when I first met her in 2011. Having lived her first 43 years under Communism, she often complained that the new free market hindered Bulgarians’ ability to develop healthy amorous relationships.

“Sure, some things were bad during that time, but my life was full of romance,” she said. “After my divorce, I had my job and my salary, and I didn’t need a man to support me. I could do as I pleased.”

Ms. Durcheva was a single mother for many years, but she insisted that her life before 1989 was more gratifying than the stressful existence of her daughter, who was born in the late 1970s.

“All she does is work and work,” Ms. Durcheva told me in 2013, “and when she comes home at night she is too tired to be with her husband. But it doesn’t matter, because he is tired, too. They sit together in front of the television like zombies. When I was her age, we had much more fun.”

“As early as 1952, Czechoslovak sexologists started doing research on the female orgasm, and in 1961 they held a conference solely devoted to the topic,” Katerina Liskova, a professor at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, told me. “They focused on the importance of the equality between men and women as a core component of female pleasure. Some even argued that men need to share housework and child rearing, otherwise there would be no good sex.”

Agnieszka Koscianska, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Warsaw, told me that pre-1989 Polish sexologists “didn’t limit sex to bodily experiences and stressed the importance of social and cultural contexts for sexual pleasure.” It was state socialism’s answer to work-life balance: “Even the best stimulation, they argued, will not help to achieve pleasure if a woman is stressed or overworked, worried about her future and financial stability.”

Although gender wage disparities and labor segregation persisted, and although the Communists never fully reformed domestic patriarchy, Communist women enjoyed a degree of self-sufficiency that few Western women could have imagined. Eastern bloc women did not need to marry, or have sex, for money.

Those comrades’ insistence on government intervention may seem heavy-handed to our postmodern sensibilities, but sometimes necessary social change — which soon comes to be seen as the natural order of things — needs an emancipation proclamation from above.

Let’s leave aside the fact that the research results may be peculiar to Germany and German culture (if we assume that law is a reflection of cultural attitudes, note that German family law is completely different from the U.S.; alimony has been substantially eliminated and child support is capped at a small fraction of U.S. levels).

The Ivy League university professor who wrote the Times piece blames Capitalism for ruining female sexual satisfaction. What would a Buddhist peasant say, though? Perhaps that the suffering described could only stem from materialism and greed. An American content to live at the same material standard of living as a former East German wouldn’t have a “work-life balance” problem because a superior standard of living can be obtained today without working at all, either by collecting welfare or collecting child support. The American who doesn’t work can then spend his or her time doing whatever he or she wants. Does The Redistribution Recession show that there are millions of Americans who have figured this out and are therefore smarter than the professor?

The professor says that only Bigger Government can give women bigger sexual satisfaction. But what if the factors are simpler, e.g., working hours for the person seeking satisfaction, working hours for the sex partner(s) of that person, the availability of no-fault divorce so that one is not chained to a boring sex partner, and social approval and financial support for single parenthood so that one can enjoy children without being chained to a single sex partner. Every U.S. state offers no-fault or “unilateral” divorce. U.S. society offers social approval and either publicly or private-supplied cash for single parents. That leaves the working hours factor to explore.

Before declaring the Capitalist experiment a failure (what’s the point of money if you’re not enjoying life, right?), why not look at sexual satisfaction as a function of hours worked by the people studied and their sex partners? Maybe it will turn out that people who work at a government or union job with a strict 35- or 40-hour week can achieve the same level of sexual satisfaction as the women of former East Germany while simultaneously enjoying a higher material quality of life.

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My Facebook friends are squawking with outrage about the Trumpenfuhrer’s pardon of Jerry Arpaio.

“Pam and PETA in Love With Joe Arpaio, Arizona’s Anti-Immigrant Sheriff” (Jezebel, 2015) concerns the retired sheriff’s introduction of vegetarian cuisine in an Arizona jail.

The 85-year-old Arpaio was apparently a pioneer on an issue that has been in the news lately, i.e., protecting women in the workplace: “He also banned inmates from possessing “sexually explicit material” including Playboy magazine, after female officers complained” (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Arpaio )

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New York and Moscow metro areas have populations that are on a similar scale (20 million for NY; 16 million for Moscow) and both have a lot of diversity in terms of ethnicity, culture, and religion. I recently completed my first visit to New York after returning from Moscow. Here are some things that struck me…

Flying down in the Cirrus SR20 (20 mpg!) took me over the Tappan Zee Bridge, currently being replaced by a new bridge that, after adjusting for inflation, will cost 5X the 1950s price for the original bridge and, with 60 years of improved technology and techniques, take longer to construct.

Driving into Manhattan from the New Jersey suburbs took more than 2 hours on a Sunday afternoon:

Traffic is so bad that Facebook has a “place” called “Holland Tunnel Traffic jam” and, after checking in there with a status update, Facebook asked me “Would you recommend this place?”

The 9-year-old in the back of this minivan said, during the traffic jam, that she doesn’t want more immigrants to come and share her roads (. However, she was opposed to a wall along the Mexican border because she loves tacos.

We had stopped for gasoline in Elizabeth, New Jersey. It didn’t look as though anyone in the neighborhood had a W-2 job and the gas station convenience store clerk was in a bulletproof plastic box (to get rung up you placed your purchases in a turnstile; the clerk scanned them and then put the bagged items back into the turnstile).

Once we were riding in the car in Manhattan, we were bumped by potholes and plates every few seconds, a completely different experience than the perfectly smooth roads of Moscow (though in the pre-Putin 1990s apparently things got to a comparable level of decay over there).

Midtown Manhattan was crazily packed to the point where it was often challenging to find space on the sidewalk. Moscow is populous but it is more spread out and with fewer high-rises so it never feels anywhere near as crowded in any one spot. Our 9-year-old friend was excited about taking the subway so we descended into a 100-degree station to wait for about 10 minute. Then we got into a 90-degree subway car whose air conditioning was broken. An Upper West Sider who travels a lot said “New York has become Bangladesh, basically.” (the Moscow subway runs at one-minute (weekdays) or two-minute (weekends) intervals; see previous posting)

After Moscow, one of the most striking things about New York is how filthy it is. The curbs are lined with cup-sized trash. The sidewalks are dotted with cigarette-butt-sized trash.

Some of the streets in New York had so many homeless guys sitting and waiting that it looked as though a Hollywood team had been asked to prepare a scene of what it would look like after 90 percent of a city’s housing had been destroyed by a natural disaster or war.

After the debacle of trying to drive in from the suburbs we decide to escape via New Jersey Transit. The commuter rail runs only once per hour during mid-day (compare to every 15 minutes in Moscow) and therefore the service is barely used. We were the only passengers on a brand new car ($1.82 million) with about 150 seats, i.e., 1.3 percent occupancy. At $15 per person for the fare it is going to take a long time to pay off that Bombardier-built car! (New Jersey’s main fiscal problem seems to be unfunded pension liabilities.)

We had breakfast with a New Jersey resident whose live-in girlfriend is pressing him to get married and have children. About half of his peers who went down this road have lost houses, children, and future income via divorce lawsuits so he is planning to move away from New Jersey family law and into Nevada (50/50 shared parenting, capped child support, and limited alimony reduce the incentive for a lower-income spouse to end the marriage with a divorce lawsuit).

We stopped in Connecticut to see cousins. At the airport we met a police officer who complained that the unions had allowed the state to skip making pension contributions and then, years later, when the yawning gap between assets and liabilities became too big to ignore, government workers would be forced to make concessions. He was equally angry with the union bosses and the politicians. (despite these concessions, Connecticut is still having budget problems)

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Based on media reports, a world-ending hurricane is visiting southeast Texas. I checked in with friends in Houston. Two said that they were at home and planning to go to work on Monday. Here’s my exchange with a pilot who lives just north of Houston:

• Are you in your concrete bunker (i.e., house)?
• Yes. We have food, water, guns, and sex toys. All set.

Readers: what are you hearing from friends in the drenched and wind-blown region?

[Sunday night updates from my friends in the area: water in their streets, but not in their houses; all of them have power; water damage at Houston’s Hobby Airport, only 46′ above sea level, seems to be significant.]

[Sunday night update from a friend of a friend: Ben Taub county hospital (primary county hospital in the med center) is evacuating due to possible flooding in the basement compromising power. This is very similar to what happened to Hermann Hospital back in 2001. Thankfully the water has been receding at our house, dropped by 8″ in the last 4 hours. Normal drainage has not resumed as of yet due to overwhelming flood waters. This probably won’t drop much more until the major drainage systems empty enough to provide relief. Everything in Houston has come to a halt as we deal with this mess. Interstate is closed, no stores are open, no way to drive anywhere, even if there were somewhere to go. This has affected an extremely large area of SE & SC Texas. We have received 50% of our average annual rainfall in 24 hours, we don’t really need any more. All of the work on the drainage systems since 2001 have improved and changed the hydrology, but it still was not enough. All of the folks south of us have water up to their eves. So we are home bound at least for a couple of days, it could be worse for us.]

[late Sunday night update: One friend got flooded out, rescued, and reported “Grateful tonight to be safe and warm on the 15th floor of a hotel downtown.”]

Related:

• “Harvey is causing ‘epic catastrophic flooding’ in Houston. Why wasn’t the city evacuated?” (Washington Post) — governor told people to evacuate; mayor of Houston and other local officials told them to stay

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Let’s check in with the folks discussed in Where in the world are the current round-the-world pilots?

Karl-Heinz Zahorsky has made it to the middle of the Pacific Ocean in his Malibu. This description of a 9.5-hour over-water flight talks about how the HF radio never worked at all. Regulatory authorities worldwide insist on these heavy trouble-prone radios for all extended over-water flights and yet almost nobody ever seems to be successful with one. Fortunately, everyone these days carries a lightweight Iridium phone, which does work.

How about Shaesta Waiz, trying to encourage women to study STEM by doing something that requires zero STEM knowledge? Her site still says “At this time, flight tracking is unavailable due to the region Shaesta is flying.” A search of the news shows that she made it to Fiji on August 24.

[How little STEM knowledge is required to be a career pilot? I remember my airline training on the CRJ’s jet engines. I thought “finally I will learn all about the turbine stages, the aerodynamics within the engine, compressor stalls, etc.” The first slide was a picture of the thrust levers and the instructor explained that you push them forward for more power, pull them back for less.]

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A Hillary- and Sheryl-supporting Facebook friend posted the following:

Let’s let everyone talk about it – open up the HR files and voices. Women have higher IQs, more college degrees, higher grades, but when they join the workplace they are blocked from advancement, wages, credit, and impact… And the millennials according to several studies are far worse in accepting female tech talent than the baby boomers that are now over 65. Studies have shown that millennial men can’t fairly assess female talent. For example this HBR study.

The cited Harvard Business Review article:

The researchers found that male students systematically overestimated the knowledge of the men in their [college biology] classes in comparison with the women. Moreover, as the academic term progressed, the men’s faulty appraisal of their classmates’ abilities increased despite clear evidence of the women’s superior class performance. In every biology class examined, a man was considered the most renowned student — even when a woman had far better grades. In contrast, the female students surveyed did not show bias, accurately evaluating their fellow students based on performance.

In a 2014 survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults, Harris Poll found that young men were less open to accepting women leaders than older men were. Only 41% of Millennial men were comfortable with women engineers, compared to 65% of men 65 or older. Likewise, only 43% of Millennial men were comfortable with women being U.S. senators, compared to 64% of Americans overall. (The numbers were 39% versus 61% for women being CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and 35% versus 57% for president of the United States.)

If women have “higher IQs, more college degrees, higher grades” and these things can translate into effective higher performance at work, why don’t working-age men recognize this?

Could it be that the women with the highest IQs are not in the workforce at all? “Why Women Are Leaving the Workforce in Record Numbers,” (Fiscal Times, April 17, 2013):

A recent study by Joni Hersch, professor at Vanderbilt Law School, makes that case. She looks at female graduates of our top universities – those presumably who have the best shot at shattering the glass ceiling – and finds that once they have children, they are more likely to quit their jobs than are women who graduated from less selective schools. … Perhaps most astonishing is that only 35 percent of women who have earned MBAs after getting a bachelor’s degree from a top school are working full time, compared to 66 percent from second-tier schools.”

If we assume that high IQ+good grades leads to “top school,” it would seem that the women who do best in school are the least attached to the U.S. labor force. So men could have a low opinion of women in the workplace because the best women have figured out “The cash that comes from selling your labour is vulgar and unacceptable for a gentle[wo]man … for wages are effectively the bonds of slavery.” (Cicero) But this can’t explain why men underestimate the performance of their female peers in biology classes.

What about changes in public policy? The HBR study compares men over 65 with their Millennial brothers. Men over 65 grew up in an Equal Opportunity (no discrimination) legal environment. Millennials grew up in an Affirmative Action (“positive discrimination”) environment.

How about changes in media coverage? Men over 65 weren’t exposed to a lot of articles celebrating women for simple achievements (see Are women the new children?). Maybe all of the do-gooders trying to help women by cheerleading are convincing men that women are actually intellectually inferior? Millennials have grown up in an environment where adult women are regularly celebrated for things that 12-year-old boys can do. Wouldn’t this tend to give them the idea that adult women aren’t competitive with adult men?

What about simple organized resistance by privileged white males? They recognize that women are superior and therefore, to preserve their unearned dominance, collude to exclude women from the workplace. This seems tough to square with the fact that the privileged white males welcomed Asian male coworkers (for example, Google, the “Uber standard” of chauvinism, has an Indian CEO). Why would white men allow themselves to be unseated by non-white men but object to being unseated by white non-men?

Idea to test this last theory: do partnerships and male-owned closely held companies hire and promote women at a higher rate than do public corporations and government? A prejudiced manager at a big company or government agency, for example, can preferentially hire less qualified people without suffering any immediate personal reduction in pay. A prejudiced partner or business owner, however, has to pay for any prejudiced hiring decision with lower earnings. (Ellen Pao, of course, was alleging that the Kleiner Perkins partners wanted to make themselves poorer by discriminating against her due to her gender ID.)

[Anecdotal data: As an owner-manager of a small software company I promoted a higher percentage of the female developers to management. I found that the women were more likely to listen to customers and end-users and work toward meeting customer needs as opposed to doing stuff that a programmer might consider “cool,” but that a customer or end-user wouldn’t be able to notice. The women were not necessarily the most experienced, productive, or accomplished software developers per se, but they were, in my opinion at the time, more likely to be effective in the management role than their male peers.]

Readers: How to explain the fact that younger men, who’ve been exposed to a lot more gender equality propaganda, have a lower opinion of women than do older men?

[Separately, I think the post shows at least one gender difference. James Damore, who identifies as a man (as far as I know), cited social science suggesting that men might be more likely to be attracted to the dreary solitary coding jobs that Silicon Valley offers. He was ostracized for his heresy. My Facebook friend, who identifies as a woman, cited social science suggesting that women are more intelligent than men, better educated, and thus better suited to almost every kind of job. Her posting garnered roughly 50 “likes”.]

Related (Department of “The Science is Settled”):

• Women in 4 out of 5 countries surveyed out-score men by 0.5 to 1.5 points (Psychology Today, July 2012)
• “Why Women Are Smarter Than Men” (Forbes, June 2016); women have equal IQs but much higher emotional intelligence. [Just imagine how likely Forbes would have been to publish this piece if the author’s conclusion had been “Despite equal IQs, men are smarter than women overall.”]
• Professor Dimitri van der Linden, of Erasmus University in Rotterdam, said: “We found that the average IQ of men was about four points above that of women. (Express, July 2, 2017)

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“‘Hypocrite preaching feminist ideals’: Director Joss Whedon’s ex-wife accuses him of cheating” (Washington Post) is a good companion to the sexless marriage post today.

Many applauded him for being a champion of women, a feminist in an industry accused of misogyny and sexism.

That image was challenged by his ex-wife Kai Cole, who wrote an essay in a Hollywood industry blog called the Wrap Sunday accusing him of serially cheating during their 16-year marriage and calling him a “hypocrite preaching feminist ideals.”

“I want to let women know that he is not who he pretends to be,” Cole wrote. “I want the people who worship him to know he is human, and the organizations giving him awards for his feminist work, to think twice in the future about honoring a man who does not practice what he preaches.”

Whedon first gained fame in 1996 when he created the fantasy series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” … The show and Whedon were lauded for their feminist message.

Women’s rights group Equality Now gave him an award “for his courageous support of women’s right’s” in 2006.

Plainly these two California family court litigants are no longer best friends. However, how can a cheating heterosexual husband be a “feminist” issue? If both the spouse and the extramarital sexual partners identified as “women,” couldn’t it just as easily be characterized as a conflict among women? (see Wikipedia on female intrasexual competition) What is the specific feminist principle that Mr. Whedon might have violated?

Disclaimer: I have not seen Buffer the Vampire Slayer and had never heard of this guy until this article was emailed to me.

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Audible has an included-for-subscribers (a.k.a. “free”) 30-minute piece titled “Sexlessness” where you can listen in on a therapy session run by Esther Perel. This is part a series; see “Esther Perel Lets Us Listen In on Couples’ Secrets” (New Yorker).

The young-by-my-standards couple in this episode met on the Indian dating site Shaadi.com (my local Indian-American friends knew all about this), though they sound American-born. The wife is a physician and uninterested in sex with the husband except for procreation (trying to have a second kid at the time of the session). Otherwise the two adults seem to be compatible and they’re happy with their joint child. Worth listening if you’ve never been married and simply assumed that married people have sex with each other.

As an MIT undergraduate, I took a class led by Evsey Domar, an economics professor who told us assembled youngsters (juniors, seniors, beginning grad students) that romantic love was a bad deal because “you’re giving someone else monopoly power over your happiness.” He was also down on the idea of marriage because you put yourself into a situation where there is only one supplier of love, thus wreaking havoc with the Econ 101 supply and demand curves we’d studied a couple of years earlier. As a 17-year-old I didn’t appreciate that he might have been using “love” as a euphemism for “sex.”

Assuming that Domar was speaking elliptically, here’s an alternative formulation that I’ve heard: “Food and sex are both human needs, right? Would you sign a contract with a local restaurant that you’ll eat every meal there for the rest of your life, regardless of the quality of the meals, the hours of the restaurant, or even if the restaurant decides to close? If not, why would you agree to get married?”

Some recent female statements on married-with-kids life:

• “I don’t know anyone would get married,” physician-wife in suburban New Jersey, apparently happily married with kids 8 and 10
• “I can’t for the life of me understand why anyone would want to spend years voluntarily sharing his life with a woman,” business executive-wife in Texas, definitely happily married with 4 kids. She also has a comprehensive theory of marital happiness: “Women make demands of men for various reasons. If you meet too few demands, the woman leaves you. There are men who attempt to too many demands. The problem it’s that the goal line keeps moving further away. To meet every demand, you have to become totally emasculated and controlled by the wife and children. Then the wife learns to loathe you, and she leaves saying you aren’t the man she initially was attracted to. … my husband’s “line” of meeting just enough demands infuriates me. And infuriating women just enough seems to be the key to creating and sustaining sexual attraction. “

The corresponding male perspective?

• “We’re like two co-workers in a daycare center who occasionally have sex in a closet.”

Circling back to Esther Perel and her Audible series…. There is no way to know if her therapy is effective, but it is interesting to hear the discussion and maybe the entire series should be required listening for anyone contemplating marriage. The FAA makes a pilot learn about the causes of accidents before he or she can get a certificate. Maybe it would be good for engaged couples to study marriages that go in unexpected directions and this series is certainly an easy way to do that.

Related:

• Real World Divorce (when the lawyers take over from the therapists)

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Our neighbors who are passionate on the topic of climate change are packing up their pavement-melting SUVs to drive their “strong and independent” children to college (where mom and/or dad will unload, unpack, plug in the toaster oven, etc.), then return home to work like slaves to pay for what formerly would have been learned in high school. Let’s assume that 18-22-year-olds who’ve had $500,000 of K-12 education (at taxpayer expense) are not capable of getting themselves to college, so the parents must do the drive. Is it obvious that the parents also have to pay?

A software engineer with middle-school-age children told me that he spends every dime that he earns, immediately selling stock when it is issued to him, for example. “The way that college financial aid is structured, it doesn’t make sense to save unless you’re earning more than hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Your kids’ colleges will take any savings.”

“Can Married Students Get More Financial Aid Money?” (the nest) says

If you were considered a dependent student — your parents’ financial information was required on the financial aid application — before you tied the knot, that has changed. Married students become financially independent overnight as far as federal student aid is concerned.

as a married student, a higher amount of your assets are protected than with a non-married student. Your EFC will be based on your combined income, assets and student status.

Consider two 18-year-olds. They are starting college next month. Both come from families with $250,000-per-year in combined parental income and are therefore ineligible for a discount off the absurd “rack rates” that colleges post: they don’t have any “need” so they aren’t entitled to “need-based financial aid.” Why don’t they fly to Las Vegas this weekend, get married, tell their colleges that their situation has changed and now they want their financial aid recalculated? At Harvard, they would now be a “family earning less than $65,000” and therefore would get entirely free tuition, fees, room, and board (source).

How challenging would it be to find a mate? There does not seem to be any requirement that they attend the same college or live together. There is no requirement that they be of opposite sexes. So a male college student could marry another male and thus be assured of no liability for child support in the event that his spouse became pregnant at a fraternity event (in at least Massachusetts, children conceived during a marriage generate a 23-year child support entitlement for a plaintiff parent even if the defendant parent was not involved sexually or biologically). After college, or if one of them starts earning big $$, the happy couple takes advantage of the no-fault divorce laws (maybe spend a semester abroad in a European country where it can be done administratively without going to court; or go back to Vegas for a $199 divorce).

There are a lot of families liquidating their savings to pay for college, so I’m thinking that the above plan might not work, but I can’t figure out the flaw. (Of course, for some Americans the idea of marriage has a religious component and they wouldn’t be interested in this procedure for saving $200,000+)

[In this country with the world’s highest proportion of children who don’t live with two parents and therefore with the highest percentage of adults who are entitled by a court order to get child support cash from another adult, one complicating factor in the above plan is that a child’s marriage may result in the loss of the child support cashflow as the marriage makes the child “emancipated.” This can be an important factor in states where children can generate revenue beyond age 18.]

Readers: In our era of colleges shaking parents upside-down for cash while simultaneously offering a free ride to those with the correct paperwork profile, why don’t we see more marriages to form new zero-income “families” for financial aid calculation?

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