Omni vincit amor

From Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study by George E. Vaillant. The Grant Study is one of a handful of longitudinal studies which track individuals across a lifetime with measurements relating to physical health, mental health, psychology, circumstances and context, education, income, wealth, familial outcomes, etc. Such studies are enormously expensive, complex, and challenging to conduct but when done well, they are enlightening about trends, causations, and life outcomes.

The Grant Study has been following 268 healthy men from Harvard classes of 1939-44 across 78 years and three cohorts of study directors.

With such a small population, with study assumptions and objectives which changed over time and with the evolving social and epistemological environment over the course of the study, findings have to always be asterisked as indicative but requiring confirmation. That said, it is very interesting.

One pair of findings is the first hard data I have come across that supports one of my working hypotheses; to wit, that past a certain IQ level, life outcomes are more determined by behaviors and values than they are by incremental increases in IQ. The data findings are:

Those who scored highest on measurements of “warm relationships” earned an average of $141,000 a year more at their peak salaries (usually between ages 55 and 60).

No significant difference in maximum income earned by men with IQs in the 110–115 range and men with IQs higher than 150.

Additionally:

The warmth of childhood relationship with mothers matters long into adulthood:

Men who had “warm” childhood relationships with their mothers earned an average of $87,000 more a year than men whose mothers were uncaring.

Men who had poor childhood relationships with their mothers were much more likely to develop dementia when old.

Late in their professional lives, the men’s boyhood relationships with their mothers—but not with their fathers—were associated with effectiveness at work.

The warmth of childhood relationships with mothers had no significant bearing on "life satisfaction" at 75.

The warmth of childhood relationship with fathers correlated with:

Lower rates of adult anxiety.

Greater enjoyment of vacations.

Increased “life satisfaction” at age 75.

Vaillant has a number of conclusions. My summary of his words.

One is that positive mental health does exist, and to some degree can be understood independent of moral and cultural biases.

The second lesson is that once we leave the study of psychopathology for positive mental health, an understanding of adaptive coping is crucial.

The third lesson is that the most important influence by far on a flourishing life is love.

But - this is the fourth lesson - people can really change, and people really can grow.

A fifth lesson is that what goes right is more important than what goes wrong, and that it is the quality of a child's total experience, not any particular trauma or any particular relationship, that exerts the clearest influence on adult psychology.

A sixth lesson is that if you follow lives long enough, they change, and so do the factors that affect healthy adjustment. Our journeys through this world are filled with discontinuities. Nobody in the the Study was doomed at the outset, but nobody had it made, either.

There is burgeoning evidence that many of our behaviors are genetically scripted but subject to a vast array of exogenous circumstances and contexts. The Grant Study findings seem concordant with that branch of research.

All these men were at the peak of society in 1939, privileged if you will, but their intelligence and their behaviors were heavily influenced by context and circumstances. Not all golden lives ended happily and some among those marked as bleak at the beginning blossomed into beautiful outcomes.

The findings are a nice antidote to the Jacobin inclination that everything is deterministic and there is no free will.

Vaillant makes a particularly salient observation.

Throughout our lives we are shaped and enriched by the sustaining surround of our relationships. The seventy-five years and twenty million dollars expended on the Grant Study points, at least to me, to a straightforward five-word conclusion: "Happiness is love. Full Stop." Virgil, of course, needed only three words to say the same thing, and he said them a very long time ago - Omni vincit amor, love conquers all - but unfortunately he had no data to back them up.

There is no infallible algorithm of success. There are certainly factors which contribute but ultimately all success is a function of choices. Choices which both shape the context and circumstances and are, in turn, shaped by them.

A various and a changeful thing

From The Aeneid by Virgil, translated by John Dryden.

Who knows what hazards thy delay may bring?
Woman's a various and a changeful thing.

Minor mystery

The New Yorker has been a long standing staple in our household. Among their features are, of course, their cartoons and in the past several years, they have included a running feature where readers can submit captions to cartoons. These are winnowed down to three contenders and readers vote on the caption they prefer. This example gives you the idea. A new contest, the three contenders for a recent contest, and the winner of an earlier contest.

This weekend I purchased The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest Book. While I bought it for the humor, there is actually a fair amount of surprising information in it. One has to do with the sex of the participants. The New Yorker readership is 52% female. However, from page 6:

Entrants

In general, five times more men than women enter the contest.

Winners

Of the 138 contests so far, 105 of the winners have been male.

Finalists

Of the first 138 contests, 309 of the finalists have been male and 105 have been female.

To put it in comparative language, 48% of Now Yorker readers are male but males constitute 85% of the participants, 75% of the finalists, and 76% of the winners.

Why?

I have no idea. Gross social stereotypes have males as more analytic than verbal oriented which would depress their participation but on the other side there is the stereotype of males being more humor oriented than females which would increase participation. Males are more risk taking and competition seeking than females which might be a factor. There is empirical evidence behind all of these stereotypes but whether they constitute much of a material effect size in real world circumstances is perhaps debatable.

I wondered whether there were any comparable activities to this which might shed some light. I came up with a comparable but I am not sure it sheds light.

Cartoon captioning relies on word play as does crossword puzzle construction. I could not find any information about the sex of crossword participants but did uncover that data, and a controversy, regarding crossword puzzle constructors. I do not seek out crosswords and am relatively uninformed about this niche but longstanding corner of cognition.

From Xan Vongsathorn, Word Puzzle: Why is the Crossword Gender Gap Growing?

The topic of the debate is the large and growing gender imbalance in published puzzles. Like many fields, crossword construction is (and always has been) pretty male-dominated. But why is it getting worse, unlike so many other historically male-dominated fields? Apparently the percentage of puzzles with female bylines has plummeted from 35% (in the old days) to 24% (ten years ago) to 16% (now). A puzzle about puzzles!

His post outlines multiple possible causes for the observed trend but none seem compelling which probably means the answer is some combination of a weaker version of most of the arguments.

I do note that all the above numbers fit within the range I have observed in past posts. In competitive endeavors with material risk (social, financial, psychological, etc.) where there are real or public consequences, women represent 15-30% of the top performers in whatever the field might be. Not true all the time and everywhere but a useful heuristic none-the-less.

My guess for the explanation of the New Yorker numbers has several components. I am guessing that the language gap between the sexes is reasonably self-selected out for The New Yorker. In other words, if you are reading the New Yorker, you probably are already high-performing in the language arena and therefore differences between the sexes in language orientation are probably mooted among New Yorker readers. If that is true, then I suspect much of the gap might simply be explained by male competitiveness.

But that is pure speculation and grasping at straws but its all I have in the face of an otherwise reasonably inexplicable gap.

Knowledge does not ensure success

From Carnage and Culture by Victor Davis Hanson, page 72. I maintain some reservations about some of Hanson's thesis but he is a good writer and always informative.

After tearing off the western portions of the empire and Egypt, Alexander in late summer 331 B.C. drove on toward Babylon in hopes of capturing the ancient city and forcing a showdown with the final military reserves of the Persian Empire. After having witnessed his own Achaemenid armies routed at Granicus (334) and again at Issus (333), as well as losing the key strongholds at Tyre and Gaza, in addition to the rich provinces of Ionia, Phoenicia, Egypt, and Cilicia, Darius understood that he must finally stay put and fight for the survival of the remaining, eastern half of his empire. He chose a small plain, more than three hundred miles north of Babylon on a small branch of the Tigris River, the Bumelus, about seventy-five miles from the town of Arbela.

Because Alexander's tactics were well known, Darius had a good idea what to expect. The king, always on the enemy right wing, would seek a gap or some flanking entry around his own left, pour through with 2,000 to 3,000 heavy horsemen, and head straight for the Persian high command, all in hopes of creating a breach through the mass, as his shield-bearing spearmen and dreaded pikemen followed. Meanwhile, Parmenio on the left would stay steadfast and pivot if need be, until the morale of the imperial army was shattered as the ruling Achaemenid clique fled for their lives. All that Darius knew, but was helpless to stop, and so the day's slaughter followed the script Darius feared and Alexander planned.

The Macedonians parted on cue for the scythed chariots — Gaugarnela seems to be the only time these much-feared but rather impractical weapons were actually used en masse in any battle — and stabbed the drivers as they sped past. Darius's elephants apparently panicked or were let through the phalanx — or never even made it to the front. Both chariots and elephants were found largely unscathed after the battle and taken as trophies. The latter after their maiden appearance at Gaugamela became a mainstay of Hellenistic warfare; the former became little more than the rhetoric of Greek romances and the sketch-pad doodles of Western engineers until the age of Leonardo da Vinci. The Persian flanking columns never quite surrounded their enemies; and the decisive charge of Indians and Persians that slammed into the Macedonian left and center now went after plunder, not Parmenio.

The consequence was that when the dust cleared on the morning of October 2, the plain of Gaugamela was an ungodly mess — Diodorus says that "the complete area of the battlefield was full of corpses" (17.50.61). Fifty thousand Persians were dead or dying—we need not believe some ancient reports of 300,000 killed—among a general detritus of wandering camp followers, crippled horses, and booty scavengers. Thousands of wounded crawled to the tiny streams and mudholes of the surrounding alluvial plains. Alexander himself returned to the battlefield to bury his dead. He collected little more than a hundred men from under the carcasses of well over a thousand Macedonian horses. Five hundred Persians had fallen at Gaugamela for every Macedonian—such were the disparities when a polyglot, multicultural force of panicked men fled on level ground before heavily armed veteran killers with pikes and seasoned cavalry, whose one worry was not to turn fainthearted in front of lifelong companions-in-arms.

Bob Dylan's Dream

Bob Dylan’s Dream
by Bob Dylan

While riding on a train goin’ west
I fell asleep for to take my rest
I dreamed a dream that made me sad
Concerning myself and the first few friends I had

With half-damp eyes I stared to the room
Where my friends and I spent many an afternoon
Where we together weathered many a storm
Laughin’ and singin’ till the early hours of the morn

By the old wooden stove where our hats was hung
Our words were told, our songs were sung
Where we longed for nothin’ and were quite satisfied
Talkin’ and a-jokin’ about the world outside

With haunted hearts through the heat and cold
We never thought we could ever get old
We thought we could sit forever in fun
But our chances really was a million to one

As easy it was to tell black from white
It was all that easy to tell wrong from right
And our choices were few and the thought never hit
That the one road we traveled would ever shatter and split

How many a year has passed and gone
And many a gamble has been lost and won
And many a road taken by many a friend
And each one I’ve never seen again

I wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That we could sit simply in that room again
Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat
I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance

From The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper.

The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

Indeed, we hopefully are at the apogee and about to experience the decline of the pervading intolerance of the authoritarian utopianism of the left. The strength of our society, our tolerance, is sorely strained by the increasingly gramscian demands for greater tolerance of those behaviors and policies which are only intended to lead to the destruction of our tolerant society.

Low level of discrimination and not for the anticipated reasons

I am frustrated by the native assumption on the part of many people that America is inherently racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, etc. My experience individuals is that most people attempt to be generally fair and dispassionate. Their beliefs and actions might be shaped disproportionately by experiences but there is little evidence of the malevolent discrimination which is assumed by the bien pensant.

But data is scarce in terms of any sort of objective or empirical measure of any of these social pathologies. This is one of the few efforts I have come across to put some empirical parameters on the issue. From The Experience of Discrimination in Contemporary America: Results from a Nationally Representative Sample of Adults by Brian Boutwell. From the abstract.

A large body of social science research is devoted to understanding the causes and correlates of discrimination. However, less effort has been aimed at providing a general prevalence estimate of discrimination using a nationally representative sample. The current study is intended to offersuch an estimate using a large sample of American respondents (n = 14,793), while also exploring perceptions regarding why respondents felt they were discriminated against. The results provide a broad estimate of self-reported discrimination experiences—an event that, on average, was relatively rare in the sample—across racial and ethnic categories.

[snip]

Using a representative sample of American respondents who represent a variety of racial and ethnic groups, the current study examined perceived experiences of discrimination. Our results suggested that the majority of the sample reported either no experience with discrimination or that it had happened only rarely. Of those reporting having experienced discrimination, the majority suggested that factors otherthan race, gender, sexual orientation, and age were the cause(s) of discrimination (for additional insight, see Everett et al., 2016). Analysis of the Add Health data suggests that discrimination, even among minorities, is not especially prevalent. Moreover, perceived reasons for experiencing discrimination were highly variable, but those that are most commonly discussed in the media and, perhaps, among scientists (i.e., race, gender, sexual orientation, and age) were not the most frequently cited reasons

The following charts will be the bane of gender, ethnic and other victim studies departments.

Click to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.

Across all race categories, the range of those reporting ever having experienced discrimination is relatively tight; 18.7% (Asian Americans) to 31.9% (African Americans). Mixed, Hispanic, White, and Native American are all within a couple of points of 25% reporting any discrimination ever.

The upshot, from this study of nearly 15,000 Americans, is that there is a relatively low incidence rate of perceived discrimination of around 25% ever having experienced discrimination. Even more interestingly, of those few experiencing discrimination, 50-80% attribute that discrimination to reasons other than those most popularly identified among the modern day Jacobins/SJWs; race, gender, religion, orientation, age, class, and disability. It is worth noting that this low incidence rate is compatible with the low incidence of hate crimes to all crimes (roughly 5,000 hate crimes out of some 2 million crimes in a year).

It is one study but it has a large number of participants. One drawback is that it is not time bounded. The logical expectation is that the 25% number would be even lower if it were constrained to past month or past year.

A story to be truly miraculous must be ballasted with facts

A few months ago I read and enjoyed A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest by Hobson Woodward. From the blurb.

Merging maritime adventure and early colonial history, A Brave Vessel charts a little-known chapter of the past that offers a window on the inspiration for one of Shakespeare's greatest works. In 1609, aspiring writer William Strachey set sail for the New World aboard the Sea Venture, only to wreck on the shores of Bermuda. Strachey's meticulous account of the tragedy, the castaways' time in Bermuda, and their arrival in a devastated Jamestown, remains among the most vivid writings of the early colonial period. Though Strachey had literary aspirations, only in the hands of another William would his tale make history as The Tempest-a fascinating connection across time and literature that Hobson Woodward brings vividly to life.

I am currently reading Rudyard's Lost World, a collection of little know pieces by Rudyard Kipling. On page 48 there is A Letter to the Spectator in 1898 outlining the connection between The Tempest and the Bermuda shipwreck.

To the Editor of the Spectator.

SIR:—Your article on ‘Landscape and Literature’ in the Spectator of June 18th has the following, among other suggestive passages:—“But whence came the vision of the enchanted island in the ‘Tempest’? It had no existence in Shakespeare’s world, but was woven out of such stuff as dreams are made of.”

May I cite Malone’s suggestion connecting the play with the casting away of Sir George Somers on the island of Bermuda in 1609; and further may I be allowed to say how it seems to me possible that the vision was woven from the most prosaic material—from nothing more promising in fact, than the chatter of a half-tipsy sailor at a theater? Thus: A stage-manager, who writes and vamps plays, moving among his audience, overhears a mariner discoursing to his neighbor of a grievous wreck, and of the behavior of the passengers, for whom all sailors have ever entertained a natural contempt. He describes, with the wealth of detail peculiar to sailors, measures taken to claw the ship off a lee-shore, how helm and sails were workt, what the passengers did and what he said. One pungent phrase—to be rendered later into:

‘What care these brawlers for the name of King?’

—strikes the manager’s ear, and he stands behind the talkers. Perhaps only one-tenth of the earnestly delivered, hand-on-shoulder sea talk was actually used of all that was automatically and unconsciously stored by the island man who knew all inland arts and crafts. Nor is it too fanciful to imagine a half-turn to the second listener as the mariner, banning his luck as mariners will, says there are those who would not give a doit to a poor man while they will lay out ten to see a raree-show,—a dead Indian. Were he in foreign parts, as he now is in England, he could show people something in the way of strange fish. Is it to consider too curiously to see a drink ensue on this hint (the manager dealt but little in his plays with the sea at first hand, and his instinct for new words would have been waked by what he had already caught), and with the drink a sailor’s minute description of how he went across the reefs to the island of his calamity,—or islands rather, for there were many? Some you could almost carry away in your pocket. They were sown broadcast like—like the nut-shells on the stage there.

“Many islands, in truth,” says the manager patiently, and afterwards his Sebastian says to Antonio:

I think he will carry the island home in his pocket and give it to his son for an apple.

To which Antonio answers:

And sowing the kernels of it in the sea, bring forth more islands.

“But what was the island like?” says the manager. The sailor tries to explain. “It was green, with yellow in it; a tawny-colored country”—the color, that is to say, of the coral-beached, cedar-covered Bermuda of to-day—“and the air made one sleepy, and the place was full of noises”—the muttering and roaring of the sea among the islands and between the reefs—“and there was a sou’-west wind that blistered one all over.” The Elizabethan mariner would not discriminate finely between blisters and prickly heat; but the Bermudian of to-day will tell you that the sou’-west or Lighthouse wind in summer brings that plague and general discomfort. That the coral rock, battered by the sea, rings hollow with strange sounds, answered by the winds in the little cramped valleys, is a matter of common knowledge.

The man, refresht with some drink, then describes the geography of his landing place,—the spot where Trinculo makes his first appearance. He insists and reinsists on details which to him at one time meant life or death, and the manager follows attentively. He can give his audience no more than a few hangings and a placard for scenery, but that his lines shall lift them beyond that bare show to the place he would have them, the manager needs for himself the clearest possible understanding,—the most ample detail. He must see the scene in the round—solid—ere he peoples it. Much, doubtless, he discarded, but so closely did he keep to his original informations that those who go to-day to a certain beach some two miles from Hamilton will find the stage set for Act ii, Scene 2 of the ‘Tempest,’—a bare beach, with the wind singing through the scrub at the land’s edge, a gap in the reefs wide enough for the passage of Stephano’s butt of sack, and (these eyes have seen it) a cave in the coral within easy reach of the tide, whereto such a butt might be conveniently rolled.

(My cellar is in a rock by the seaside where my wine is hid).

There is no other cave for some two miles.

Here’s neither bush nor shrub; one is exposed to the wrath of “’yond same black cloud,” and here the currents strand wreckage. It was so well done that, after three hundred years, a stray tripper and no Shakespeare scholar, recognized in a flash that old first set of all.

So far good. Up to this point the manager has gained little except some suggestions for an opening scene, and some notion of an uncanny island. The mariner (one cannot believe that Shakespeare was mean in these little things) is dipping to a deeper drunkenness. Suddenly he launches into a preposterous tale of himself and his fellows, flung ashore, separated from their officers, horribly afraid of the devil-haunted beach of noises, with their heads full of the fumes of broacht liquor. One castaway was found hiding under the ribs of a dead whale which smelt abominably. They hauled him out by the legs—he mistook them for imps—and gave him drink. And now, discipline being melted, they would strike out for themselves, defy their officers, and take possession of the island. The narrator’s mates in this enterprise were probably described as fools. He was the only sober man in the company.

So they went inland, faring badly as they staggered up and down this pestilent country. They were prickt with palmettoes, and the cedar branches raspt their faces. Then they found and stole some of their officers’ clothes which were hanging up to dry. But presently they fell into a swamp, and, what was worse, into the hands of their officers; and the great expedition ended in muck and mire. Truly an island bewicht. Else why their cramps and sickness? Sack never made a man more than reasonably drunk. He was prepared to answer for unlimited sack; but what befell his stomach and head was the purest magic that honest man ever met.

A drunken sailor of to-day wandering about Bermuda would probably sympathize with him; and to-day, as then, if one takes the easiest inland road from Trinculo’s beach, near Hamilton, the path that a drunken man would infallibly follow, it ends abruptly in swamp. The one point that our mariner did not dwell upon was that he and the others were suffering from acute alcoholism combined with the effects of nerve-shattering peril and exposure. Hence the magic. That a wizard should control such an island was demanded by the beliefs of all seafarers of that date.

Accept this theory, and you will concede that the ‘Tempest’ came to the manager sanely and normally in the course of his daily life. He may have been casting about for a new play; he may have purposed to vamp an old one—say, ‘Aurelio and Isabella’; or he may have been merely waiting on his demon. But it is all Prospero’s wealth against Caliban’s pignuts that to him in a receptive hour, sent by heaven, entered the original Stephano fresh from the seas and half-seas over. To him Stephano told his tale all in one piece, a two hours’ discourse of most glorious absurdities. His profligate abundance of detail at the beginning, when he was more or less sober, supplied and surely establisht the earth-basis of the play in accordance with the great law that a story to be truly miraculous must be ballasted with facts. His maunderings of magic and incomprehensible ambushes, when he was without reservation drunk (and this is just the time when a lesser-minded man than Shakespeare would have paid the reckoning and turned him out) suggested to the manager the peculiar note of its supernatural mechanism.

Truly it was a dream, but that there may be no doubt of its source or of his obligation, Shakespeare has also made the dreamer immortal.

Interesting to see the earlier echo of Woodward's later work. Culture and literature are a deeply woven web of connections, ideas and echoes.

Traces of this administrative exercise are still perfectly visible

From Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott, page 69. One of Scott's central theses is that states require legibility of their populations - they need to know who, how many, what, etc. States will go to great lengths to convert the messiness of human activities, processes and traditions into something that is more legible to the state. An example from the Philippines regarding the earlier tradition of using only a single name.

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the Philippines under the Spanish. Filipinos were instructed by the decree of November 21, 1849 to take on permanent Hispanic surnames. The author of the decree was Governor (and Lieutenant General) Narciso Claveria y Zaldua, a meticulous administrator as determined to rationalize names as he had been determined to rationalize existing law, provincial boundaries, and the calendar." He had observed, as his decree states, that Filipinos generally lacked individual surnames, which might "distinguish them by families," and that their practice of adopting baptismal names drawn from a small group of saints' names resulted in great " confusion." The remedy was the catalogo, a compendium not only of personal names but also of nouns and adjectives drawn from flora, fauna, minerals, geography, and the arts and intended to be used by the authorities in assigning permanent, inherited surnames. Each local official was to be given a supply of surnames sufficient for his jurisdiction, "taking care that the distribution be made by letters [of the alphabet]." In practice, each town was given a number of pages from the alphabetized catalogo, producing whole towns with surnames beginning with the same

Each local official was to be given a supply of surnames sufficient for his jurisdiction, “taking care that the distribution be made by letters of the alphabet.” In practice, each town was given a number of pages from the alphabetized [catalog], producing whole towns with surnames beginning with the same letter. In situations where there has been little in-migration in the past 150 years, the traces of this administrative exercise are still perfectly visible across the landscape. “For example, in the Bikol region, the entire alphabet is laid out like a garland over the provinces of Albay, Sorsogon, and Catanduanes which in 1849 belonged to the single jurisdiction of Albay. Beginning with A at the provincial capital, the letters B and C mark the towns along the coast beyond Tabaco to Wiki. We return and trace along the coast of Sorosgon the letters E to L, then starting down the Iraya Valley at Daraga with M, we stop with S to Polangui and Libon, and finish the alphabet with a quick tour around the island of Catanduas.

The confusion for which the decree is the antidote is largely that of the administrator and the tax collector. Universal last names, they believe, will facilitate the administration of justice, finance, and public order as well as make it simpler for prospective marriage partners to calculate their degree of consanguinity. For a utilitarian state builder of [Governor] Claveria’s temper, however, the ultimate goal was a complete and legible list of subjects and taxpayers.

Lottery winners disproportionately male

From Lottery winners: The myth and reality by H. Roy Kaplan. There is an established bromide that lottery winners can be undone by their good fortune. This research seeks to interrogate that assumption and finds it inaccurate. From the abstract.

This paper is based on a study of 576 lottery winners from 12 states. Respondents to a mailed questionnaire included winners of sums ranging from $50,000 to millions. The data indicate that popular myths and stereotypes about winners were inaccurate. Specifically, winners came from various education and employment backgrounds and they were clustered in the higher income categories than the general population indicating that lotteries might not be as regressive as popularly believed. Winners were older than the general population and more often male (60 versus 40%). There was significant association between the amount a person won and his or her work behavior. Individuals with psychologically and financially rewarding jobs continued working regardless of the amount they won, while people who worked in low paying semi-skilled and unskilled jobs were far more likely to quit the labor force. Contrary to popular beliefs, winners did not engage in lavish spending sprees and instead gave large amounts of their winnings to their children and their churches. The most common expenditures were for houses, automobiles and trips. It was found that overall, winners were well-adjusterd, secure and generally happy from the experience.

I found this sentence interesting: "Winners were older than the general population and more often male (60 versus 40%)." Why would there be a sex difference among lottery participants? I can think of no obvious reason other than the generally observed greater propensity of men to take risks.