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Now that we have some distance from Father’s Day and the requisite Hallmark sentiments around it, here’s a report on a Father’s Day weekend presentation in our woodsy (Lyme-disease-y) suburb by The Fatherhood Project, based at the Massachusetts General Hospital and affiliated with Harvard Medical School.

I spoke to one of the staffers who helps run a “Divorcing Fathers” program. It turned out that she had not carefully studied Massachusetts family law. She did not understand that a divorce was a civil lawsuit. She believed that it was usually a mutual decision and, when it wasn’t, it was usually the father who initiated a divorce (the stats show only about 17 percent of the time is there a “joint petition” and that, when there is a conventional lawsuit, mothers are 3.14X more likely to sue fathers than vice versa). She was aware that mothers nearly always turned out to be the “primary parent,” but believed that a father simply had to ask a judge for an equal parenting role and it would likely be unopposed by the mother and granted by the judge. She had no idea that, when both parents had similar-paying jobs, the mother would be cutting her after-tax spending power by 30-50 percent (depending on tax bracket and number of kids) by agreeing to a move from 67/33 to 50/50 parenting. She denied the relevance of economic incentives or the family law environment to the topic of “divorcing dads”.

[Coincidentally, as this local expert was explaining the irrelevance of family law, a friend of a friend was venting via text message from Pennsylvania. She is, well, rather spirited, and had threatened her husband repeatedly with divorce (though in fact she did not want one). He eventually consulted a litigator, learned that Pennsylvania is a 50/50 shared parenting state, and sued her. The result by formula is minimal child support revenue (both parents are high earners) and she has to compromise on the child’s schedule with a person whom she hates and whose equal importance to the child she disputes (she gave birth to the child, breastfed the child, fussed over the child, etc.). None of this bad stuff would have happened to her under Massachusetts law. Aware that Massachusetts was a winner-take-all state and that the often-enraged wife would end up with the house, the kid, and most of the money, the father probably would have signed her up for anger management classes instead of suing her. If for whatever reason they did end up divorced, her “pattern of historical [hysterical?] caregiving” would have enabled her to easily obtain primary/winner parent status. She would be getting a healthy slice of the father’s income until the child turned 23 and the father would be an every-other-weekend babysitter. All that she would have had to do to preserve her marriage was learn about family law and move across the border to Maryland (also a mom-friendly winner-take-all state) or New Jersey or up to New York or Massachusetts.]

The keynote speaker was Andre Dubus III, author of The House of Sand and Fog, who experienced a terrible childhood (described in Townie) and nonetheless turned out to a great writer just like his dad (demonstrates the power of genetics?). Dubus opened by saying that he had never texted, Facebooked, or used “Twatter.” He said “I’m bringing all of me here for the next 45 minutes and ask that if you need to text, otherwise use your phone, or urinate, that you go outside and do it.”

Dubus talked about the divorce lawsuit between his parents in a passive manner, as though it had simply happened to them or perhaps had been a mutual decision. He did mention that, prior to the divorce and “single parent” culture that developed in the 1960s, they probably would have just stayed together and maybe ended up being reasonably happy. In any case, after this divorce that somehow descended on the two parents for obscure reasons, his father was reduced to living in a small apartment and the mother and four kids were reduced to living in crummy rental houses. They went from “educated struggling academic family” to just-above-welfare status and Dubus went to a Haverhill, MA high school with “the 7th worst drug problems in America.” His elder sister turn into a promiscuous drug dealer by age 16. His younger sister padlocked herself into her room. He and his younger brother drank and got into fights. The four sibs’ only contact with the father was two hours every Sunday morning when he took them to a Catholic church (the father’s apartment was never large enough to permit an overnight stay). The single moms in the neighborhood abused drugs and alcohol and neglected their children. His mom was no exception. Dubus is a great storyteller and he was effective at communicating the suffering of the children and the permanent wreckage of some of his siblings, but it wasn’t clear what their parents could have done differently other than stayed together (not a likely scenario in our no-fault divorce age).

The professionals of MGH/Harvard talked to the assembled crowd as well.

The take-away perspective was pro-divorce, especially “expressive divorce” (see the History of Divorce chapter), in which one adult individual within a couple gets what he or she wants, as long as psychiatrists and psychologists (like themselves!) were brought in (on a paid basis) to help clean up the wreckage, run training programs, etc. The mantra used by cash-seeking plaintiffs, “I’m doing it for the kids,” was affirmed. Maybe Dubus’s childhood had been ruined by parental separation, but in general divorce could be great for kids because they would be spared exposure to fights between their parents (research psychologists have found the opposite, but that doesn’t stop anyone profiting from the divorce industry from asserting the widespread benefits of divorce for children as fact).

“The evening felt surreal to me,” said a guy who lost a divorce lawsuit 15 years ago and had lost nearly all of the subsequent rounds of custody and child support modification litigation. “These MGH people are out of touch with reality. We’re in what might be the most hostile-to-fatherhood state in the U.S. and these guys are going on about how important fathers are. It doesn’t even make sense for fathers in Massachusetts to invest in kids because they’re not really his from a legal point of view. They’re just on loan from the mother until she decides to take them away.” Certainly a move to a shared parenting state such as Pennsylvania, Delaware, Nevada, Arizona, or Alaska would be a lot more helpful for a man interested in fatherhood than any amount of advice from MGH psychiatrists and psychologists, however brilliant.

One thing that neighbors could agree on was that the successful divorce plaintiffs in our midst were the more relaxed mothers in town. Instead of being “on call” 24/7 they had every other weekend completely free of responsibilities (their children being with the loser parent) and, apparently, were using that time to recharge. There was no social stigma attached to being a “single mother” in our town, partly because the mothers were able to sell their divorce lawsuit as a means of protecting children from an unfit caregiver (result: Instead of the kids being in a house with the mother, a nanny, and the unfit father 24/7, the kids were under the exclusive and unsupervised care of the unfit father for about 33 percent of the time (the max free babysitting before the mother’s child support profits could be reduced).)

I thought the evening was a good illustration of the contradictory attitude Americans take toward marriage, divorce, and fatherhood. On the other hand we lead the world in maudlin expressions of sentiment. On the other, we lead the world in the portion of the economy and the cash rewards allocated to citizens who work to separate children from their fathers. In a two-hour period, nobody mentioned that, under Massachusetts law at least, including fathers would require a lot of mothers to act against their own economic interest (unlikely because, as a research psychologist at a recent shared parenting conference noted, “If mothers valued fathers none of us would need to be here.“).

[What else do the Millionaires for Obama discuss on a rainy Friday night? Over wine and cheese at the end, a neighbor talked about going back into the working world after being a stay-at-home mother. She has chosen to work for a non-profit organization helping refugees settle into American life. I said “I’ve offered to all of my Facebook friends to pay for the airfare from Kabul, Amman, or Beirut for any refugees that they want to shelter in their spacious suburban homes.” She said “Oh, that’s not nearly enough. They’re going to need help for 20 years or more.”]

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Measured by support for the Democrats, Boston certainly qualifies as a Sanctimony City. How are we doing on the issues on which we consider ourselves superior to the benighted Fox News viewers in the Deplorable Red States?

“50 years later, Metco’s dream is still unanswered” (Boston Globe) says that sorting children by skin color and then busing some of the “non-white” ones out to the mostly-white suburbs hasn’t worked as well as hoped:

Fifty years after Massachusetts launched an ambitious voluntary school desegregation initiative, the yawning social disparities and tensions the plan aimed to ease remain — and painful incidents persist.

But when some 3,300 Metco students walk into those suburban schools, they encounter student peers who are predominantly white, and teachers and administrators who are overwhelmingly so, state data show. There are no requirements for the 37 suburban districts to diversify their teaching or administrative ranks. And the state’s Metco rules, which mostly cover reimbursement for the suburban districts, have long been silent about recommending or requiring training that would help teachers better understand cultural differences and help make Metco students feel more welcome.

The good news is that learning a third as much as a student in Finland can qualify an American as a “superachiever”:

Despite these hurdles, Metco students, who often spend hours each day bused to and from school, tend to be superachievers. State data show they score higher on state MCAS exams than their counterparts in Boston and are significantly more likely to graduate from high school and attend college. “The educational resources are great,” said Sammi Chen, who graduated last month from Lincoln-Sudbury and expects to major in biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

[Chen? How does someone with a Chinese last name qualify for a program that starts with skin color sorting? It turns out that Asians are considered to “non-white,” though in a lot of the suburbs that participate in Metco there are now a lot of local Asians.]

Being surrounded by well-meaning Hillary-supporters can be annoying:

Day, who lives in Lincoln, said he didn’t feel like an outsider until he hit high school, where he said some teachers and students assumed he was a Metco student bused from Boston because he is black. … Day said teachers at the high school would sometimes ask if he needed financial assistance to go on a field trip because they assumed his family couldn’t afford it. … he asked that the caption under his yearbook picture reflect that. “I do not feel safe at this school,” it reads.

The Millionaires for Obama in my neighborhood were discussing this article on a listserv (that’s how old we are here!):

The elementary school still has a problem even if it is “substantially more integrated”. All one has to do is walk down the hall any given morning before school starts and you can see & hear the kids of color being reprimanded more harshly than the other kids for speaking too loudly or to sit down on the benches.

Last year I met a young woman of color who attended LS… Her experience was of a school that oozed with entitlement and white privilege.

I refrained from trying to cheer them up with the following response:

At least the inner-city kids who come out here are learning about transportation engineering. Now they know that transporting a 110 lb. person and a pair of yoga pants a distance of 3 miles over smooth pavement requires a 6,000 lb. vehicle.

What about when these kids graduate from their bureaucratically integrated schools and go to work? The good news is that they can become infinitely rich by starting a company and employing only female workers. “Boston Has Eliminated Sexism in the Workplace. Right?” (Boston Magazine) says “women here [in the Boston area] are actually being paid 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man,” which is, according to the article, a larger disparity than in the U.S. as a whole. This opportunity will be shut down if people listen to the geniuses behind Enron: “perhaps the most convincing argument comes from a McKinsey & Company study, which showed Massachusetts would receive a jaw-dropping 12 percent bump in GDP if it achieved gender parity in the workplace.”

It isn’t on their web site, but the August 2017 issue carries an interview with 85-year-old Harvey Mansfield, the only “conservative” left at Harvard. You can see why universities want to get rid of old people. His explanation for why Harvard has so much grade inflation: “the early 70s. When black students arrived, they benefited from great good will, which is the passion behind affirmative action. … a professor wasn’t going to give a black student a C, so … he couldn’t give them to white students either.” Are parents getting good value for paying Harvard prices? “the curriculum is a mess. If you look at a typical Harvard transcript, you see courses all over the place. Often on small subjects or policy questions, instead of meat and potatoes: history, economics, philosophy. … there are a whole lot of [gut] courses and it’s easy to waste your money…”

At least the students can party, Missoula-style, right? Professor Mansfield says “the sexual scene [at Harvard] is a mess. … ‘sexual adventure,’ if I can put it that way, is expected, even though it doesn’t always materialize. And when it does materialize, it can often be misadventure. … There’s no backing from the faculty, from the mores, from the churches, from reality, to a woman’s ability to say no. It much more depends on her courage and her good sense than used to be the case.” (Note that “saying no” may not make good economic sense; collecting child support in Massachusetts can be worth more than 3X the median after-tax income of an Ivy League graduate.)

What’s the predictive power of being a professor of Government at Harvard? No better than mine! In response to “Did you expect Trump to win?” Mansfield replies “I didn’t see him coming. I kept thinking he would lose.”

How is Harvard doing going forward? Answering a question about Harvard’s president, Mansfield says “she hasn’t done anything … to make [Harvard] offer a more demanding education, and she has participated in this slow decline from veritas to change. Our motto is truth, but we now interpret that as adjusting to the changes of society. That is an essentially passive goal, which is conformist.” Mansfield still likes the school, though: “The students are great, the faculty is okay, and the administration is about average.”

So… here we are feeling superior to the rest of the U.S. with no data to support our beliefs!

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A round-up of divorce attitudes from the neighborhood (rich Boston suburb)…

“She had a fresh pedicure and manicure and looked fantastic,” said one mom about a recent divorce plaintiff, encountered at the supermarket. “She didn’t have any of her kids with her.” (The plaintiff sued her husband due to an expressed desire to “protect the children” from what the defendant’s “addiction issues” (apparently not severe enough to prevent him from bringing home a physician’s paycheck every two weeks). Now the kids are fully protected by being parked unsupervised with the addict every other weekend. [Also, apparently nothing is better for an adult’s mood than to be completely-off-the-child-care-hook roughly 30 percent of the time (while still being paid to provide child care). See also Newsweek for a report on a recent Harvard Business School study that found that leisure time was the key to happiness.]

“He would have had a good reason to divorce her,” said a 60-year-old married-with-kids friend regarding a former colleague, a Manhattan-based retired financial services industry executive (he didn’t know whether the wife or the husband was the plaintiff, only that his friend was no longer married). “She was bipolar.” In other words, the “in sickness and health” part of the marriage vows didn’t apply, in his view, given the wife’s mental illness. Now the man is enjoying the NY dating scene, mostly with divorcees in their 40s, though he says “all the women are lying about their age” so it is tough to establish a precise age.

An Arab immigrant renting a neighbor’s mother-in-law apartment explained that he and his wife, also an Arab immigrant, had started a business and purchased a house together. The wife sued him and obtained the business, the house, and the kids down at the Middlesex Family Court (our statistical study of what happens there). Asserting “I am afraid of him,” she got a restraining order against her defendant. Among other things, this keeps him from saying anything regarding their mother to the children, who are over 18 (they can yield child support profits through age 23 in Massachusetts and are therefore still a fit subject for family court litigation). He endures a lot of hassle whenever he returns through U.S. immigration due to the fact that the border agents find a red flag in his record from the restraining order.

From a woman who apparently followed her heart rather than optimizing her life and reproduction to align with Massachusetts family law: “Recently divorced mom, 14 yo son, and a 10 yo daughter in need affordable rental, 2-3 BR ASAP. Would be willing to help with some of the maintenance.” (Safe to assume 5 years of happiness, 10 years of annoyance/irritation, and, going forward, decades of financial struggle?)

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Foxconn is going to build a new factory in the U.S. Because we don’t have a crony capitalist system it is presumably coincidence that the factory will be within the Congressional district of Paul Ryan, House Speaker (i.e., the factory will be between Milwaukee and Chicago).

“Wisconsin’s Lavish Lure for Foxconn: $3 Billion in Tax Subsidies” (nytimes):

According to a presentation by the state, the incentive package consists of $1.5 billion in state income tax credits for job creation, $1.35 billion in state income tax breaks for capital investment, and up to $150 million for a sales tax exemption.

Over all, the subsidies for the Foxconn plant, which would produce flat-panel display screens for televisions and other consumer electronics, equal $15,000 to $19,000 per job annually. … The new Foxconn jobs are expected to have an annual salary of at least $53,000 plus benefits…

I’m not sure why Foxconn would have paid any Wisconsin (or U.S.) corporate income tax. Wouldn’t they set things up Apple-style so that the Wisconsin factory paid a huge annual license fee to an offshore corporate shell in either a tax-free or low-tax (Taiwan is at 17 percent) country? If that wouldn’t have worked, it seems that Foxconn could have gone to North Carolina and paid state income tax at half the rate of Wisconsin’s or to South Dakota or Wyoming and paid nothing (Tax Foundation).

Readers: Does this mean that big companies, except those based in SD or WY, should be expected to move every 10 years or so when their state corporate income tax exemption runs out? So that they can get new exemptions from a new state? Would it make sense to design factories in advance for modular shipping via rail?

Related:

• Wisconsin family law (unlimited child support makes it straightforward to collect $53,000 per year without working at Foxconn…)

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Back in 2008, I wrote up an “Economic Recovery Plan” for the U.S. that suggested, as part of a plan to achieve vibrant GDP growth, “corporate governance that relieves investors from worry that profits will be siphoned off by management”:

Right now the shareholders of a public company are at the mercy of management. Without an expensive proxy fight, the shareholders cannot nominate or vote for their own representatives on the Board of Directors. The CEO nominates a slate of golfing buddies to serve on the Board, while he or she will in turn serve on their boards. Lately it seems that the typical CEO’s golfing buddies have decided on very generous compensation for the CEO, often amounting to a substantial share of the company’s profits. The golfing buddies have also decided that the public shareholders should be diluted by stock options granted to executives and that the price on those options should be reset every time the company’s stock takes a dive.

If current trends continue, the CEO and the rest of the executive team will eventually have salaries that consume 100 percent of a public company’s profits and they will collect half ownership of the company via stock options every few years. Who would want to invest in that?

“State Street: corporate governance has grown up” (Financial Times), an interview with Rakhi Kumar, points out that things have gone in the opposite direction since 2008:

Top of the 43-year-old’s list of concerns is the move by many of the world’s biggest technology companies, including Snap, Facebook and Alphabet, to adopt controversial voting structures that limit the power of their shareholders. The issue came to the fore in February when Snap became the first US company to issue shares at its initial public offering that gave investors no voting powers.

With $2.6 trillion in assets under management, State Street has been able to achieve some of its goals:

State Street has also taken a tougher approach to companies that have failed to appoint women to their boards, vowing earlier this year to vote against company directors that do not commit to improving the gender balance in their boardrooms. … “[Our push against all-male boards] has been a great success,” she says. “Some companies have proactively called us and asked us not to take action against them. We will keep voting against those that don’t [improve], and we hope other investors will join us.”

A quota system for women on corporate boards will apparently make State Street happy, but what will it do for ordinary investors? If the CEO and pals on the Board are stealing from shareholders via fat salaries, stock options, etc., does an ordinary shareholder care about the gender IDs of the thieves?

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A fit 68-year-old friend recently tripped over a laundry basket and broke her hip. She needed a replacement hip installed (at nearly 4X what it would have cost in France or the UK; see also nytimes for price comparison) and then a couple of months of rehab. This led me to wonder “Why don’t all of us wear hip pads all the time?”

A study from 2007 found that there was no benefit to simple pads (see also ABC News article: many fractures don’t even occur as a result of impact but from the unnatural rotation of the hip in a fall. “Fractures often occur prior to impact,” [the doctor] said.).

ActiveProtective is a company that has a great TED talk, but it doesn’t seem as though their airbag-based hip protector is available.

Will exoskeletons to improve stability be available before reliable protections against the consequences of falling are?

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The Trumpenfuhrer’s pronouncement that he would like to get transgender-related medical costs off the military’s books has apparently changed the opinions of journalists:

• CNN, July 31, 2015, “The high cost of being transgender”: “the Philadelphia Center for Transgender Surgery posts cost estimates for different procedures. Its price list mentions estimates of $140,450 to transition from male to female, and $124,400 to transition from female to male.”
• CNN, July 26, 2017: the cost to provide transgender-related services to active military personnel would amount to 0.004-0.017% of the Defense Department’s total health care spending

(I’m not sure that the accounting in the second article is correct, incidentally. The “total health care spending” may include retirees and not simply “active military personnel.” (Forbes provides a breakdown of the $52 billion total that was spent back in 2012; note that this number is in the same ballpark as the entire military budget of Russia.) Also, the military historically has rejected recruits based on the possibility of being on the hook for long-term medical costs. “Long-Term Follow-Up of Transsexual Persons Undergoing Sex Reassignment Surgery: Cohort Study in Sweden” says that ” Sex-reassigned persons also had an increased risk for … psychiatric inpatient care.” A Guardian article from 2004, “Sex changes are not effective, say researchers,” suggests that long-term psychiatry costs could be significant.)

[Since I’m not in the military and haven’t had gender-related surgery I don’t have a personal opinion on the merits of Trump’s proposed policy. I just think it is interesting that a statement by Trump has the power to effect such a dramatic change in point of view.]

 

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Four of us, including two pilots, went to see Dunkirk last night. Since the historical story is well-known I won’t worry too much about spoilers.

Massive navy ships sink almost immediately after being hit by small bombs or torpedoes. Airplanes without engines, on the other hand, have near-infinite glide capability.

The movie is good at portraying the simple and non-redundant nature of the planes of the day, e.g., the Spitfire. But when a pilot is about to ditch in the English Channel, why doesn’t he take advantage of the near-infinite glide time to pull back the canopy and facilitate egress? There is also a pilot who has such great control of his aircraft that, after running out of fuel and thereby losing the engine, he can shoot down a German plane. After this heroic deed, however, he is unable to make a few turns such that he can land on the beach near the still-evacuating British and French soldiers. Instead he lands on a German-held beach (except that you wouldn’t know that the beach is held by “Germans” per se from watching the movie; the opposing forces are always “the enemy” and never “the Germans” or “the Nazis”).

The movie is about the individual experience of being in the midst of Dunkirk. There are no maps and there is no context provided. Nor is there the rolling text wrap-up at the end of the movie telling you what happened in real life. One friend complained that she was “confused” during the movie, but maybe that is the point. Being in the midst of a war is confusing, according to every first-person account that I’ve ever read.

Readers: what did you think?

[Separately, one member of our group had recently seen Valerian and pronounced it “the worst movie ever made,” based on the plot and acting. Who has seen Valerian and wants to comment?]

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If we ask the average person “Why don’t you want to take a long bike ride?” I would bet that two big concerns are the following: (1) lack of sufficient fitness, and (2) fear of being hit by a car.

I wrote Business idea: Luxury bike tours with electric bikes about how the latest generation of electric bikes, combined with a sag wagon full of spare batteries, could completely address Point 1. What if the sag wagon were a self-driving van, though? Could it address Point 2?

Suppose that the sag wagon follows 10′ behind the cyclist. The sag wagon has some big flashing hazard lights on the back. Approaching traffic has to slow down and swing wide to get around the sag wagon and therefore can never be in a position to hit the cyclist. The self-driving sag wagon contains spare batteries. The sag wagon is immediately available in case of mechanical failure, rain, fatigue, etc.

Readers: What do you think? Will self-driving minivans revolutionize bike touring?

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“Greece Looks to Turn a Corner After Years of Economic Pain” (nytimes) is interesting for what it tells us about how modern humans think about economic success:

The proposed bond sale, the details of which were released on Monday, offered hope…

Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, the economy minister, said his country was “getting out of a rut,” adding: “There’s an opportunity for Greece to become a normal country.”

The bond offering does not mean that Greece is out of the woods. It is just the first of several steps that Athens must take to test whether it can raise money in international markets to support its economy and government operations when the latest bailout, worth €86 billion, expires in August 2018.

Greece continues to stagger under a mountain of debt, which is now worth €314 billion. [As is typical for American media, the journalists can’t be bothered to put information into context. With a population of 10.75 million, this works out to about $29,200 per resident of Greece. Compared to GDP of $195 billion, this is just shy of 2 years of GDP.]

Quick summary of the article: “This country has been so successful lately that it will be borrowing money in order to pay its bills.”

(Maybe in fact the money is going to be borrowed to redeem old bonds that are coming due? But the article makes it sound as though simply borrowing is a sign of robust economic health!)

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