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Amazon has produced a dramatized version of the rise of Playboy magazine and its founder, Hugh Hefner: American Playboy: The Hugh Hefner Story. Like everything else Amazon does, it is pretty awesome in my opinion!

Why should anyone care about this? The social issues and conditions that enabled Playboy to thrive are no longer relevant. Even if you don’t care about what might have interested men back in the early 1950s, I think the series is rewarding for its coverage of a rapidly growing startup company. Though he didn’t do it all while wearing a bathrobe (that came later?), Hefner did an amazing job of managing growth, extending the brand into television and physical clubs, and achieving his vision.

The series is interesting also for a seamless blend of documentary footage and modern dramatized footage. A lot of cameras were rolling back in the 1950s and there are also some interesting retrospective interviews from the early 1990s.

If you’re interested in a genetic basis for success, as explored in The Son Also Rises, the story is kind of interesting. Hefner was a remarkably successful person and his children, notably former Playboy Enterprises CEO Christie Hefner, turned out to be remarkably capable as well. (Young Cooper Hefner has recently taken over as Chief Creative Officer.) The practical genius behind the Playboy Clubs, Arnie Morton (later founder of Morton’s steakhouses), had a son who co-founded the Hard Rock Cafe chain and additional children and grandchildren who have been successful in the notoriously challenging restaurant business.

Students of cultural change will also be interested in the series. Footage from the 1950s shows a nation (well, at least hundreds if not thousands of Americans as the cameras panned around) of thin people. Americans who were out dining and drinking every night were as slender as today’s Hollywood actors. Lay off the Cheetos when watching…

What about economic change? Detroit and Baltimore were thought to have sufficient promise, in the 1960s, that Playboy developed Clubs in both cities. How about real estate? The company supposedly paid $2.7 million for a 37-story skyscraper, the Palmolive Building, in downtown Chicago! (Wikipedia makes it sound as though Playboy bought only “the leasehold of the building”.)

Some things haven’t changed as much as we might think. As covered in The History of Divorce, the big no-fault revolution in family law statutes happened in the 1970s. But Playboy’s first issue, December 1953 (available on archive.org), describes a system in which divorce can be easily obtained by a plaintiff (i.e., a de facto no-fault system). Pages 6-8 contain an article “Miss Gold-Digger of 1953.”:

subtitle: when a modern-day marriage ends, it doesn’t matter who’s to blame. it’s always the guy who pays and pays, and pays, and pays.

[unlike in the old days when only rich defendants paid] alimony has gone democratic. .. Even the simplest wench can make a handsome living today. … The wife may be a trollop with the disconcerting habit of crawling in and out of bed with the husband’s friends. … When the judge grands the divorce, he will also grant the little missus a healthy stipend for future escapades and extravagances.

it’s important to remember that the modern gold digger comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. She’s after the wealthy playboys, but she may also be after you.

As in today’s family courts, judges 64 years ago were calculating a plaintiff’s profits according to a hypothetical theory of what a defendant might be able to earn:

a wife asked for an allotment that exceeded what her ex-husband was earning. … [The judge] ordered the man to “stop fooling around [with a commission-based sales job] and get a regular job.”

As with nearly all U.S. states (see Real World Divorce for the specifics), alimony profits varied with the judge:

there are very few actual laws regulating alimony. Most states don’t have statutes that set requirements for alimony payments. That leves each case in the hands of the presiding judge.”

The alimony deck is heavily stacked against any man in the game.

The economic incentives around divorce, custody, and child support haven’t changed…

The courts aren’t interested in whether a woman is capable of earning her own living. In fact, their decisions discourage any thoughts an ex-missus may have of returning to work. They penalize the girl who is willing to earn her own way by reducing or eliminating her alimony payments. It doesn’t take a very sharp sister to figure it’s a lot easier to stay home afternoons and play Scrabble with the girls and let the ex-hubby pay the bills.

Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton’s narratives of women being victimized in the workplace counterbalanced against statistics showing that many women actually do work was being played out in 1953 more or less word for word:

The whole concept of alimony is a throwback to the days when grandma was a girl. A couple of generations ago, this was a man’s world, and a nice young woman without a husband had a difficult time making her own way. Nothing could be further from the truth in 1953.

In other words, the 1950s that we look back on as a period when women stayed home was perceived by at least some contemporaries as a time when women were peers in the office! (The series actually shows that Playboy depended heavily on women in creative and managerial roles, though top managers were mostly men until Christie Hefner took over.)

The series shows Hef being challenged by interviewers as a smut peddler. His mind was in the gutter while well-bred American men were occupied with loftier topics than sex. Hef’s standard reply seems to have been “I am making a magazine that covers the interests of men today and men are keenly interested in sex.”

It is pretty obvious that the Hefner family leaned on the scale during the production. At times, the magazine is portrayed as being primarily about social justice. Hef and associates were colorblind and working practically hand-in-hand with Martin Luther King, Jr. If true, why did the first black Playmate appear in the Centerfold in 1965, 12 years after the magazine’s founding? Wikipedia(!) says that the first Asian Playmate was in 1964. The bias is so obvious, however, that it doesn’t really take away from the series. You know that you’re getting the founders’ and insiders’ view of the project. It is a bit wearing to see Playboy’s quest to free Americans from the horror of having sex with the same person day after goddamn day aligned with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s quest to free Americans from race-based discrimination. And sometimes it is misleading. For example, the series implies that the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by Palestinian immigrant Sirhan Sirhan had something to do with a reaction against the civil rights movement.

Politics and government control the company’s fortunes to a large extent. Playboy has to pay a $100,000 bribe to New York officials to get a liquor license, without which its $7+ million investment in a Manhattan club would have become worthless. The magazine is nearly shut down by local officials in Chicago and Hefner is tried on obscenity charges. He doesn’t exactly beat the rap; the jury was deadlocked 7 to 5 in favor of acquittal.

The series proves that nobody cares about aviation. In a long segment about the company’s private jet, the type (turns out to be a DC-9) is never mentioned. It sure look as though Hef had more fun in his converted airliner than did Donald Trump!

If the series covers the decline of Playboy I haven’t gotten that far yet. I don’t think it is fair to blame Hef for the fact that Playboy had only 20-30 years of being culturally significant and commercially vibrant. The company was an expression of one person’s vision and when Hef got older it wasn’t reasonable to expect that young men would want to adopt his vision. Perhaps more significantly, Playboy set itself up in opposition to the conventional-in-1953 idea that every American adult should aspire to be part of a married couple with kids in a suburban fortress.  In the 1960s, however, the Federal government began a multi-trillion-dollar assault on this idea with a welfare system that made single motherhood a smarter economic choice at the low end of the income spectrum. By 1980, nearly every state had adopted no-fault divorce. By 1990, many states had adopted child support guidelines that made single motherhood a potentially smarter economic choice at the high end of the income spectrum (e.g., because a brief sexual encounter with a high-income partner was more lucrative than a long-term marriage with a middle-income partner). Once the government opened its treasury and courthouses for the purpose of destroying traditional ideas of family, how would it have been possible for any private individual to have a significant ongoing impact?

Another way to measure Hef’s success as a thinker is to consider that Friedrich Nietzsche‘s views on religion shocked contemporaries, but only a few decades later they made people shrug. Hefner’s ideas remained fresh for about as long as Nietzsche’s. That’s not a bad run for anyone.

One interesting question is why there isn’t a successor to Playboy. Perhaps today’s young men wouldn’t be interested in the same things that Hef found interesting circa 1953, but why isn’t there a mass-market magazine catering to men in general? Aren’t we kind of back to where things were in the early 1950s, with Esquire and a bunch of hunting, fishing, and sports magazines? Playboy peaked at roughly 7 million issues sold in 1972. These circulation figures show that no men’s magazine today comes close to that, despite more than 50% growth in U.S. population. Is today’s population more fragmented? More androgynous? More static so that there is no point in learning about changes in the social environment?

Related:

• Milton Friedman Interview
• Steve Jobs Interview (don’t forget Bill Burr on this subject)
• Malcolm X Interview
• MLK Interview
• a full list of interview subjects, which include, incredibly, Bertrand Russell (he is not mentioned in the series; but perhaps we can measure the trajectory of American thought by noting that it was the 20th century’s greatest logician in 1963 and Bill O’Reilly in 2002)
• The People vs. Larry Flynt (great 1996 movie about the Americans (Deplorables?) who thought that Playboy was elitist)

While down in Ft. Lauderdale I saw a beautiful cruise ship departing. The word “Fathom” was emblazoned on its side. Wikipedia says that this is a “social impact travel” product, set up in 2015. The basic idea is a one-week cruise, of which three days are spent in the Dominican Republic helping young people learn English, planting trees, etc. (web page with options) The line is operated by Carnival on the Adonia and she was built in 2001 and renovated in 2016. The monster ship is configured for only 704 passengers. This kind of “smaller ship” cruising is usually on the more expensive end of the spectrum.

How much does it cost to signal one’s virtue beyond Facebook? $399 per person, according to the Fathom site. That includes Carnival-grade hotel and 24/7 food for a week, the organization of “impact activities”, entertainment during the sea days, gym and “wellness” activities, classes, and ground transportation to the activities. It would be tough to stay home and prepare meals from ingredients bought at Whole Foods for less than this!

Given the hundreds of millions of folks on Facebook who express their deep feelings of concern for the world’s less fortunate, Fathom should be raking in the dough, right? If they want to run 40 weeks per year at 80 percent occupancy they need to get 22,500 would-be do-gooders to do more than “like” or “share” on Facebook. Let’s assume a purely American market for these cruises. Hillary Clinton got 48 percent of the popular vote in the most recent election. That represents roughly 156 million people (not all 325 million Americans can vote, of course, but any Hillary voter can bring children on this trip). Let’s assume that anyone who voted for Hillary professes concern for “the vulnerable.” Fathom thus needed to attract only 1 in 7000 of these folks every year in order to prosper.

How did they do? Wikipedia says “Fathom will discontinue operations in June 2017.”

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen paints a moderately bleak picture of Americans as screen-addicted couch potatoes:

In past generations, people moved through the physical world at ever faster speeds, whereas today traffic gets worse each year and plane travel is, if anything, slower than before.

The big practical questions for the postwar generation were about what we might place in the physical world and how that would exert its effects on us, because the physical world was viewed as a major source of inspiration. Would it be cities reaching into the heavens, underwater platforms, or colonies in outer space? All of these possibilities were embedded with futuristic architectures and also utopian ideologies, such as space travel bringing humankind together in cosmopolitan dreams of peace. Those options seemed like logical next steps for a world that had recently been transformed by railroads, automobiles, urbanization, and many other highly visible shifts in what was built, how we got around, and how things looked. But over the last few decades, the interest in those kinds of transportation-based, landscape-transforming projects largely has faded away.

We’re much more comfortable with the world of information, which is more static, can be controlled at our fingertips, and can be set to our own speed. That’s very good for some people—most of all the privileged class, which is very much at home in this world—and very bad for others. The final form of stasis has to do with how and where we place our individual bodies. Most of all, it seems we like to stay home and remove ourselves altogether from the possible changes of the external physical world.

Americans can literally have almost every possible need cared for without leaving their homes. This is a new form of American passivity, where a significant percentage of the population is happy to sit around and wait for contentment to be delivered.

only about half of the Millennial Generation bothers to get a driver’s license by age eighteen; in 1983, the share of seventeen-year-olds with a license was 69 percent.

In 1965, the most common leisure activity for American kids was outdoor play. Recent surveys suggest that the average American nine-year-old child spends fifty hours a week—by direct comparison, nearly seven hours a day—or more looking at electronic screens, which include televisions, computers, and cell phones.

We’re not doing the awesome stuff that we used to do…

One final way of thinking about progress, sometimes stressed by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, is to ask whether the era of grand projects is mostly over. In the twentieth century, American grand projects included the Manhattan Project, which was highly successful, and cemented an era of Pax Americana. Two other grand projects were winning World War II and, starting in the 1950s, construction of the interstate highway system, both examples of thinking big and changing the world permanently on a large scale. The Apollo moon program was another grand project, and although its usefulness can be questioned, its mechanical success and above all its speed of execution cannot. At its peak it consumed over 2 percent of American GDP.29 “Defeating communism” is perhaps too abstract to qualify as a specific project, but it is another major victory backed by a coordinated effort. Another potential nominee would be “construction of a social welfare state,” although parts of this are politically controversial. In any case, a lot of these grand projects succeeded, often rather spectacularly. If we look at the last twenty-five years or so, what do we have to count as grand projects? Some people might cite the environmental movement, but for all of its virtues, we are still living in a world where biodiversity is plummeting, carbon emissions are rising, and the overall human footprint on the environment, including from the United States, is increasing. So this is a possible contender for the future, but no, it hasn’t happened just yet. Reforestation and cleaner air and water are major triumphs, but those happened much earlier in the twentieth century. The most obvious and most successful grand project today is that virtually every part of the United States is wired to the internet and cell phone system. You can go to almost any inhabited part of the country and immediately access Wikipedia or make a phone call to Africa; sometimes this even works on hiking trails or in other out-of-the-way places, ensuring we are never that far away from communicating with any and all of our friends and relations or maybe business associates.

When we try to do something big, it usually turns out badly

The other potential grand project would have to be … reconstructing Iraq, making Iraq democratic, and bringing peace to the Middle East. On that project we have seen a miserable failure, and with the rise of ISIS and the collapse of Syria, the situation is becoming much worse yet. So the post-1990 era for the United States is scored at one out of two. I don’t, by the way, count Obamacare on this list of grand projects. No matter what you think of it as policy, it provided health insurance to about 10 to 15 million of America’s previously uninsured 40 million–plus population, with the exact number for new coverage still evolving. That helps many of those individuals, but it is hardly a game-changer in terms of a broader social trajectory, especially since many of those people already were receiving partial health care coverage and, furthermore, the Obamacare exchanges are experiencing some serious problems. If anything, Obamacare has locked in the basic features of the previous U.S. health care system rather than revolutionizing them.

But could it be that the world isn’t stagnating, it is just that Americans are terrible at “big systems” thinking and public infrastructure? The Chinese, for example, have built about 14,000 miles of high-speed rail out of what will eventually be a 24,000-mile system (Wikipedia). About 1.5 billion rides occur per year on a system that did not exist a decade ago. The Chinese are building airports at a frantic pace and the transportation options for middle-class Chinese citizens improve dramatically every year. Cowen is a bit of a China fan:

Even with its recent economic troubles, China has a culture of ambition and dynamism and a pace of change that hearken back to a much earlier America. China, even though it is in the midst of some rather serious economic troubles, makes today’s America seem staid and static. For all of its flaws, China is a country where every time you return, you find a different and mostly better version of what you had left the time before. Hundreds or thousands of new buildings will be in place, the old restaurants will be gone, and what were major social and economic problems a few years ago, such as unfinished roads or missing water connections, will have disappeared or been leapfrogged. That is what life is like when a country grows at about 10 percent a year for over thirty years running, as indeed China had been doing up through 2009 or so, with some years of 7 to 8 percent growth thereafter (and an unknown rate of growth today, due to lack of trust in the government’s numbers). When a country’s growth rate is 10 percent, it’s as if a new country is being built every seven years or so, because that is how long it takes for such a nation to double in economic size.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. it is often illegal to work:

Some of the decline in labor mobility may stem from the law itself, specifically the growth of occupational licensure. In the 1950s, only about 5 percent of workers required a government-issued license to do their jobs, but by 2008, that figure had risen to about 29 percent.

The data show that individuals in tightly licensed occupations demonstrate lower levels of cross-state mobility. For instance, men in heavily licensed occupations are less likely to move across state lines than men in less heavily licensed occupations, even after adjusting for demographic variables that might cause the two groups to differ. Those same men, reluctant to cross state lines and lose licensure rights, are not less reluctant to move around within their states, where they keep their licenses.

Or you’ll get sued as a result of hiring someone:

It’s also harder to fire workers than it was several decades ago, in part because of fear of lawsuits over discrimination, as American society has steadily become more litigious. This means that some employers will be less likely to hire in the first place, in order to minimize their lawsuit risks. They look more for the kind of workers they will not need to fire or not need to replace anytime soon, which also slows down the pace of job turnover.

So we sit around reading prissy Jane Austen novels (or, since we’re screen-addicted, watching movie adaptions):

Current philosophies and aesthetics mirror this shift toward the calm. The metaphysics of the big political debates of the 1960s now strike us as absurd. In the 1970s, intellectual, angst-ridden American teenagers noodled over Nietzsche, the meaning of the counterculture, and the classic Russian novels of ideas. Woody Allen satirized these books in his movie Love and Death, and it was assumed that enough of the viewers would catch the references. These days Jane Austen is the canonical classic novelist, with the Wall Street Journal even referring to “the Jane Austen industry.” And a lot of her stories are about … matching. For better or worse, these stories are less concerned with the titanic struggle of good versus evil—can you imagine Mr. Darcy shouting, as would a Dostoyevsky character, “If there is no God, then everything is permitted!”? Instead people are afraid of having their calm disturbed, so the frontier issue in many colleges and universities is whether to put “trigger warnings” on school curricula, out of fear that somebody will be offended or traumatized by what we used to welcome as radical and revisionist texts.

Cowen sounds pessimistic about the 325 million souls here in the U.S. It is tough to argue that he is wrong. A friend points out that regulatory compliance is the true religion of the U.S.: “People used to spend a huge amount of time in the Middle Ages going to church and praying. Now they spend about 40 percent of their time doing regulatory compliance so it has the same place in our society that religion had in theirs.”

But why do we need to be innovative? The Chinese are great at engineering (look at DJI!) and building infrastructure. Let them vacuum the CO2 out of the atmosphere. Singapore and Switzerland are full of rich well-educated hard-working people. They will presumably develop all kinds of new ideas for us. The Iranians and Koreans have already shown that they can make more interesting movies than Americans. The world might be a way better place in 50 years even if no American were to create anything useful between now and 2067. Do you really need Xbox to get through 99 weeks of cashing unemployment checks if you have Nintendo and PlayStation?

Cowen is optimistic about our social freedoms:

This relatively recent emphasis on security pops up in so many forms, many of them extremely beneficial for our lives. For instance, the acceptance of gay marriage has proved a big (and to me pleasant) surprise. As recently as 2008, neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton would endorse national gay marriage, and they both openly expressed reservations about the idea.

Even within the community of gay and LGBT intellectuals, the gay marriage movement was not entirely popular. Michael Warner, for instance, a leading “queer theorist,” argued that marriage was too conservative an institution and what the gay community needed instead was a radical liberation from the idea of shame. Warner wanted straights to learn from the sexual practices of gays at

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen presents some interesting data. Contrary to what you might have thought, the trend in the U.S. has been toward more segregation.

Circa 2016, you can see a black president on your television or internet screen, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to see more neighbors of a different race than you would have seen a few decades ago. Or if you do, you’re much less likely to see such individuals outside of your income class, even if they are not of your race.

Segregation by income grew dramatically over the period of 1970 to 2000, with some respite in the 1990s, but then faster yet during the period of 2000 to 2007. For instance, in 1970, only about 15 percent of families lived in neighborhoods that were unambiguously “affluent” or “poor.” By 2007, 31 percent of American families were living in such neighborhoods. At the level of school districts, segregation increased as well between students eligible for free lunch and those who were not. In other words, those students who were eligible for free lunch were more likely to be grouped together than in times past.

In the South, if we consider the variable “percentage of black students in majority-white schools,” that figure peaked in 1988 at 43.5 percent; as of 2011, it had fallen dramatically, to 23.2 percent. That is slightly lower than the integration level in 1968, a time when civil rights battles were close to their peak activity

In 1980, in Maryland, 30 percent of black students were in intensely segregated schools. That same figure is now about 53 percent. If we look at the percentage of black students in what are called intensely segregated minority schools, since 1980, in Mississippi, that number has gone up 9 percentage points; in Tennessee, it has gone up 15 percentage points; in Texas, 9 percentage points; in Georgia, 16 percentage points; in Alabama, 10 percentage points; in Florida, 17 percentage points; and in Arkansas, it is up 21 percentage points. By the phrase intensely segregated schools, the literature usually is referring to white enrollment below 10 percent.21 Unfortunately, many parts of the North are failing as well, as the northern states and also California rank among the worst for many measures of educational segregation. For instance, let’s consider the variable “% black in 90–100% Minority Schools.”22 That is a measure of levels rather than changes, and by that standard, the five most segregated states are: 1.  New York 2.  Illinois 3.  Maryland 4.  Michigan 5.  New Jersey.

The future of the country looks troublingly similar on both coasts, as both New York and California perform poorly on segregation measures. In two of the three main measures of educational segregation by race, they are the worst and third-worst states in this regard, alternating those two positions. Again, the claim is not that New York and California are somehow especially racist or objectionable states but rather that segregation is being enforced by incomes, rents, home prices, building codes, how school districts are drawn, and a culture of sorting and matching.

Latinos are experiencing more significant integration problems than are African Americans. For instance, in California, only 7.8 percent of Latino students are in majority-white schools. In part that is because California has large clusters of Latinos and in part because the fanciest white neighborhoods are difficult to afford, the latter again indicating a lot of economically enforced segregation rather than racist animus. The broader data on trends in Latino segregation also are not entirely encouraging, as, for instance, in 1990 Latinos had more residential proximity with whites than they did in the period 2005 through 2009.

What if you’re a rich Silicon Valleyite paying 0 percent income tax thanks to the Qualified Small Business Stock exclusion and featuring yourself on Facebook at a Hillary Clinton fundraiser? Or maybe you’ve got tenure at a major university and therefore could keep watching those direct deposit checks flow into your checking account while you knitted a pussy hat? It turns out that you can advocate for unlimited low-skill dark-skinned immigration to the U.S. without running any risk of having one of the newcomers as a neighbor:

One implication of these measures is that the affluent and well educated in America may be especially out of touch, no matter how ostensibly progressive their politics. A high-income family, for instance, is less likely to live in a mixed-income neighborhood than is a poor family.

Florida and Mellander also find that racial segregation is positively correlated with areas that have a lot of high-tech industry, with those that have a preponderance of people in the so-called creative class, who hold jobs requiring creative skills, and with those heavily populated by college graduates. Segregation also tends to be found in places with relatively high percentages of gay and foreign-born populations—think of San Francisco as having a fair share of both, but also a lot of neighborhoods with mostly white people. Median rent in San Francisco just passed $5,000 per month for a two-bedroom apartment, and so most people, even in the upper-middle classes, feel that residence in the city involves too much financial hardship.

If we look at all metropolitan areas, rather than just the large ones, Durham–Chapel Hill, Bloomington, and Ann Arbor—all college towns—climb into the top five for segregation of the working class away from the non–working class.

many of America’s trendiest cities, including cities with quality universities, are among the most extreme for segregation by socioeconomic class.

For the folks who put up a “no matter where you’re from we’re glad you’re our neighbor” sign in Arabic and Spanish, their most likely readers are Saudi diplomats and Cemex executives.

More: Read The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream.

Related:

• Sanctimony Cities

I have been a faithful reader of New Yorker for about 40 years, but I am wonder if it is time to let my subscription lapse. They are no longer content to have ideas big enough to justify waiting a week so they email readers every day. Here are some subject lines:

• Trump’s Sham Populism, Exposed (i.e., Donald Trump is a liar and we need to pay $100/year to understand that)
• Scott Pruitt Rejects Climate-Change Reality, an article on planetary physics by Amy Davidson, who has a bachelor’s degree in “Social Studies”
• Donald Trump’s Worst Deal (about a hotel in Azerbaijan that is no doubt core to the multi-billionaire’s empire; the only dollar figure mentioned is $2.8 million, less than the cost of a D-check (12-year) inspection on King Donald’s personal Boeing 757)
• Trump Learns That Health Care Is “Complicated” (i.e., Donald Trump is a moron)
• Can a Free Mind Survive in Trump’s White House?
• Holding Trump Accountable (for not being Hillary Clinton?)
• The Deep Denialism of Donald Trump (for not admitting that he is inferior to Hillary Clinton?)
• We Need the Truth About Trump and Russia (because the Red Scare of the 1950s wasn’t sufficient)
• Orwell’s “1984” and Trump’s America (Trump is “pure Big Brother”)
• “Neil Gorsuch Tried to Prove His Independence — During his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Gorsuch attempted to show that he is not a stooge of the Trump machine.” (A guy who gets a guaranteed hyper-technical job for life will be secretly controlled by the layperson who appointed him.)

Even if I could vote for President at some point prior to 2020 and even if I lived in a state in which my vote counted, why would any of this be interesting? The New Yorker used to publish material that people referenced 10 or 20 years later. Statistically Donald Trump will be dead and buried pretty soon. At that point who would care to read, recall, or reference any of the above?

The top story as I wrote this entry was “The G.O.P.’s Lousy Health-Care Bill,” pointing out that if it is no longer illegal to refrain from purchasing health insurance then a lot of young people will shut their checkbooks. The magazine’s bias is apparent in the subhead “Twenty-four million people stand to lose their insurance”. Clicking into the article reveals that what people are “losing” is being compelled to buy something that they don’t want, at least not at the quoted price. Isn’t almost everything regarding Obamacare and its repeal a dog-bites-man story (stop using tax dollars to give people free X and there will be fewer people with X; stop making it illegal to go without X and there will be fewer people with X)?

Presumably this strategy is working for New Yorker’s bottom line. I’m wondering if it is because of Facebook and the fact that the most-shared stories are the ones that generate outrage. So they print stuff that virtuous Trump-haters can feature to their Trump-hating friends and they can all be outraged together about how stupid, racist, and sexist their fellow citizens are. But isn’t this market niche already pretty well filled by traditional news sources such as the New York Times, the Guardian, or CNN? Is the market for Trump-hatred truly unlimited?

Other New Yorker readers here in Massachusetts, where at least Two Minutes of Trump Hatred are required every day, are pointing out the same thing: we don’t need the New Yorker to remind us that people who live in a city that got crazy fat off the status quo don’t like the candidate voted in by the non-coastal deplorables. There must be something else occurring or being created on Planet Earth that is worth writing about.

Related (some New Yorker stories that I remember liking, none having to do with the moral superiority of Democrats):

• International oil, environment, and litigation story from New Yorker
• Interesting New Yorker article on the world’s biggest hedge fund
• Whole Foods in the New Yorker
• Scientific Management Article from New Yorker

A Hillary Clinton supporter here in Cambridge hosted a party for a friend who landed a new job. The Hillary supporter is in her 70s and rich and connected enough to have met Hillary on numerous occasions. At the party she expressed criticisms of Donald Trump, and her fellow citizens who had voted for him, pretty much nonstop. This was not out of hatred for the Mr. Trump so much as due to her bighearted sympathy for the vulnerable, most of whom she had never met and would never meet (Zillow estimates the value of her home, which is typical of the neighborhood, at $3.6 million).

She learned that an immigrant guest was heading out to Logan Airport to pick up a family member coming in with a visa obtained at a U.S. consulate (not in any of the countries that have been the subject of Donald Trump’s attempted executive orders restricting travel). She was effusive in her concern that the Trumpenfuhrer’s border thugs might obstruct this elderly traveler’s entry into the U.S.

Shortly after this discussion about a hypothetical problem we learned that a different guest was dealing with a real problem: her husband wanted to leave her and their two young children. The wife/mother said that she wanted to stay married and was trying everything within her power to persuade the husband to honor his promise. The kids were plainly at risk (see “Children, Mothers, and Fathers” for links to some of the research; plus, under Massachusetts family law they were sure to lose their college funds and inheritance to legal fees in the event of a typical non-mediated divorce). After the potential unwilling divorcee had left, the hostess was asked if she was concerned about the husband/father breaking his promise. She framed the issue entirely in terms of the man’s happiness: “Maybe he hadn’t found the right person [in the current wife].” The welfare of the children, who seemed to be solidly on track to losing their two-parent home, was not mentioned. Readers would be disappointed in me if I hadn’t asked “So you’re saying that if the guy found a 22-year-old off Craigslist you might not be able to support his decision, but if he has found two 22-year-olds and they are both super hot then, of course, he has no choice but to leave the wife and mother?” The Hillary supporter’s evaluation process turned out not to involve 22-year-old women, but it was essentially the same: she would approve of the husband’s decision to leave the wife/mother if he had found some way to make himself a lot happier. There were no circumstances under which the children’s welfare, suffering inflicted on the wife, or marriage vows would be a consideration.

Within our social circle, the folks who are not active opponents of Donald Trump and the Republicans (e.g., people who did not attend the Women’s March and who do not post virtuous and/or outraged political content on Facebook) are much more sympathetic to the wife/mother and are deeply concerned about the children.

Does it make sense to think of human sympathy and attention as a scarce resource? If so, can we infer that people who occupy their minds with concern regarding the ability of people they’ve never met to become undocumented immigrants will be therefore less sympathetic to suffering among people they encounter face-to-face?

My cold wasn’t getting any better after two weeks so I went to the doctor. The receptionist asked for my insurance card. This is a “silver” Obamacare policy that costs $8,460 per year. I noticed that the co-pays are now higher than what the corresponding services typically cost not that long ago (and therefore higher than the market price today in a lot of rich countries). A generic prescription is $20; branded drugs will be $60 or $90 if they are covered at all. An office visit is $30 or $50. A few stitches at the “ER”? $700 co-pay.

My appointment was right after the lunch break so I was seen almost as fast as a dog would be seen at a vet. A sinus infection was diagnosed. “I used to prescribe Erythromycin for this,” the doctor said, “and it was a couple of pennies a pill. Now it is $200 for a course so I’m going to give you a Z-pack.” How was it possible for a generic to cost $200? “I think the generic manufacturer was acquired.” (Medscape says that “For example, erythromycin in 500-mg tablets had three increases of more than 100%. Its price increased from 24 cents per tablet in 2010 to $8.96 per tablet in 2015.” while Wikipedia gives the wholesale price at 3-6 cents in countries not subject to U.S. government regulation.)

[Separately, I posted this story on Facebook and a passionate Hillary Clinton supporter living in the Bay Area responded with

I know it’s crazy. Just this week I slightly scratched my back bumper on my car, but because my car insurance has a $500 deductible, I had to pay the whole thing myself. And to think I pay $1700/year in car insurance for me and my wife… clearly I’m losing money on this deal!

(or, you know, that’s how insurance works.)

Is the analogy apt? I haven’t had any health problems in the last two years nor changed my plan or vendor yet the cost of insurance has doubled while the emergency room deductible went from $100 to $700. I haven’t seen car, home, or aircraft insurance rates rise. In fact, my Obamacare policy now costs about the same as what a private owner would pay for insurance on a $2 million turbine-powered aircraft in which as many as 11 people might be killed if the single non-professional pilot should make a mistake. Thus it now costs as much to insure someone against the hazard of falling into the hands of the world’s least efficient medical system as it does to insure 11 people against the hazard of flying through the air at 300+ mph.]

A middle-aged married father of two, in between his ecstatic praise of Barack Obama and enthusiastic expressions of support of Hillary Clinton, often mentions his passion for gay marriage. Another subject of which this Bay Area dweller is fond is the pernicious influence of Christianity and Judaism on American society. The other day he said that he couldn’t stand conservative Christians for suggesting that Americans were descending into anarchy due to an abandonment of Christian values.

I asked “Without Christian values or similar cultural ones, wouldn’t a man be free to abandon his middle-aged wife and young children in favor of a childless 25-year-old woman?” He replied “If he needs to do that I wouldn’t judge him.” What about the woman who leaves her husband and kids to travel the world in an Eat, Pray, Love-style journey of self-discovery? It turned out that was okay as well.

The conversation reminded me of one that I had recently with a college student (and, of course, therefore at least a moderately outspoken advocate for LGBTQIA rights). His non-working mom, attractive at nearly 50, had sued his high-income father and used the resulting cash to enjoy a sex-and-travel relationship with a man just over 30. The student acknowledged that the divorce had a devastating effect on him and his sibling, ruining their teenage years. However, he said that he thought that his mother was right to break up their home because “people shouldn’t stay married if there is no passion.” I asked “So if a guy is married to a woman who is exhausted from running after kids and thus tends to collapse at night before the question of passion becomes relevant, he should feel free to seek passion with a 22-year-old off craigslist?” The answer turned out to be basically “yes” because in deciding whether or not to stay married there were no important considerations other than the passion currently experienced by one of the married adults.

I’m wondering if the whole gay marriage debate among heterosexuals was the result of the two sides misunderstanding each other’s concept of “marriage.” Marriage under the law of a typical U.S. state is a temporary financial arrangement that can be terminated by either party for any reason (“no fault”; see Real World Divorce). But citizens often invest the term with additional meaning. Perhaps the hetero anti-gay-marriage folks dragged in concepts from religion and ideas that marriage might involve a personal sacrifice? While the hetero pro-gay-marriage folks added in stuff about passion and personal satisfaction? So they ended up talking past each other and, though using the same word, were talking about two different things.

Related:

• see “Litigation, Alimony, and Child Support in the U.S. Economy” for how we have about twice as many children who live without both parents compared to some of the European countries

From a Facebook friend regarding Hidden Figures (movie) who works for the government and is still mourning Hillary Clinton’s loss:

It really was an excellent film (and a very insightful interview about the story), and captured much of what I experienced [as a white male?]. It left me very conflicted, however. First, I was awed (and loved) that it so honored the long unsung minority (and female) contributions and that my former employer (NASA) was such an unusual agent of change and inclusion. I very much appreciated the pointed lessons at a time when our country seems to be retreating from these ideals. But at the same time I felt a sense of shame and disgust that so many of the same issues persist to this day, and that too many people who need to receive those messages are either unlikely to even see the film, and even so, are unlikely to recognize the persistent biases that are ongoing even today.

I worked on the NASA plantation as a Fortran programmer on the Pioneer Venus project for $13,000 per year back in 1978 (that’s $47,854 in today’s mini-dollars). My co-workers included women, Indians, Chinese, white males, etc. Other than receiving a paycheck, all of us were “unsung” for our contributions of software for the PDP 11/70 and the IBM 360/95.

I’m not sure why the (white male) author of the above posting thinks he is doing women a favor by encouraging them to become “nameless faceless scientists” (see Bill Burr at about 0:50) at one-fifth the salary of a dermatologist (see “Women in Science” for a comparison of the career trajectories). Maybe this is actually how white men will keep women and, specifically, women of color, down? Encourage them to become quiet nerds in a cubicle farm instead of going into medicine, politics, etc.?

During my annual visit to the gym today I saw Jeff Sessions being grilled about his suitability for the job of Attorney General. I had never been previously aware of the guy and hadn’t seen him on TV before today so I don’t have an opinion as to his fitness for the job. My stupid political question for today is why would he want to switch from senator (making the law) to Attorney General (enforcing whatever laws the Senate happens to make).

Wikipedia says that he has been a senator for 20 years. Thus boredom is a potential explanation. But what else? What is so great about being Attorney General that a senator would want to quit?

[Also at the gym, I overheard a woman talking to her personal trainer about how she had recently ended a 35-year friendship with another woman. Why? It seems that the long-time friend had refused to support Hillary Clinton. “She just doesn’t see that Trump’s attitude will trickle down to everyone,” said the exerciser. I also met a guy with a remarkably lifelike portrait of a long-haired woman on his calf. It was at least as detailed as a Wall Street Journal hedcut. He’d gotten it before getting married down in Texas, 15 years earlier: “fortunately I still like my wife.” He moved up here just two months ago. Let’s hope that the difference in profitability for a plaintiff under Massachusetts family law compared to Texas family law doesn’t motivate his wife to make a trip down to the courthouse! (Papers referenced from the Causes of Divorce chapter show how changes in the prevailing law can make people more or less likely to sue for divorce.)]