Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.

In looking up one quote by H.L. Mencken, I come across several others, all serving to illustrate his intellectual allure despite the passage of a century and the evolution of social sentiments.

From "On Truth" in Damn! A Book of Calumny (1918), p. 53

The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived. ... But the razor edge of ridicule is turned by the tough hide of truth.

From The American Language (1919)

Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.

"The Incomparable Buzzsaw", The Smart Set, May 1919

The allurement that [women] hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.

"Duty Before Security", The Smart Set, June 1919

Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the delusion of masculine superiority. Their one comfort is the assurance that, even though it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always possible to enslave and torture a man.

Heat or cold?

Yet another aspect of the benefits of mobility and freedom of choice.

This paper is from 2007, Extreme Weather Events, Mortality and Migration by Olivier Deschenes and Enrico Moretti. From the abstract:

We estimate the effect of extreme weather on life expectancy in the US. Using high frequency mortality data, we find that both extreme heat and extreme cold result in immediate increases in mortality. However, the increase in mortality following extreme heat appears entirely driven by temporal displacement, while the increase in mortality following extreme cold is long lasting. The aggregate effect of cold on mortality is quantitatively large. We estimate that the number of annual deaths attributable to cold temperature is 27,940 or 1.3% of total deaths in the US. This effect is even larger in low income areas. Because the U.S. population has been moving from cold Northeastern states to the warmer Southwestern states, our findings have implications for understanding the causes of long-term increases in life expectancy. We calculate that every year, 5,400 deaths are delayed by changes in exposure to cold temperature induced by mobility. These longevity gains associated with long term trends in geographical mobility account for 8%-15% of the total gains in life expectancy experienced by the US population over the past 30 years. Thus mobility is an important but previously overlooked determinant of increased longevity in the United States. We also find that the probability of moving to a state that has fewer days of extreme cold is higher for the age groups that are predicted to benefit more in terms of lower mortality compared to the age groups that are predicted to benefit less.

Within the paper, they observe that heat spikes lead to a rise in mortality rates which then fall immediately afterwards while speaks in extreme cold also generate higher mortality rates but rates which do not decline as quickly once the aberrant temperature has passed.

The broader point is that to live longer lives, Go South.

Transportation as communication

From The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions That Made Modern Europe 1648-1815 by Tim Blanning. The revolutions are: scientific, industrial American, French and Romantic.

Blanning's first chapter is communication and he leads that discussion with transportation. The ability for people to move about is the ability to transfer ideas. He provides some striking data illustrating just how expensive mobility was in terms of time, money and risk.

Four or six draught animals were needed to pull a coach and they had to be changed every 6 to 12 miles (10 to 20 km), depending on the condition of the roads. In England it was calculated that one horse was needed for every mile (1.6 km) of a journey on a well-maintained turnpike road. So, for the 185 miles (300 km) from Manchester to London, 185 horses had to be kept stabled and fed to deal with the seventeen changes required by the stagecoaches which travelled the route. Those horses in turn required an army of coachmen, postillions, guards, grooms ostlers and stable-boys to keep them running. As a coach could carry no more than ten passengers, fares were correspondingly high and out of reach for the mass of the population. A journey from Augsburg to Innsbruck by stagecoach, although little more than 60 miles (100 km) as the crow flies, would have cost an unskilled labourer more than a month's wages just for the fare.

Elsewhere in the text we glean that a 60 mile journey might take a couple of days. Today, making a 60 mile journey requires about an hour and would cost perhaps $10 for fuel and loaded costs compared to 48 hours and would cost about $1,200. 48X in time and 120X in costs. We've come a long way.

Blanning makes the point that roads in the UK were better than on the continent, the difference being that the building and maintenance of early roads was a centralized responsibility off-loaded locally and coercively. Coercion is not a particularly strong motivator for good work. England was an early adopter of private turnpikes. Private companies built and maintained roads with users paying a fare. The private turnpike model was an important transition to more effective transportation.

Increased mobility and communication were disruptive.

The turnpikes brought speed and mobility into a society previously characterized by their opposites. This was a culture-shock which many found upsetting - especially when the lower orders started to move out of their villages, on to the roads and into the towns, picking up insubordinate habits on the way. John Byng complained bitterly in 1781: 'I wish with all my heart that half the turnpike roads of the kingdom were plough'd up, which have imported London manners and depopulated the the country - I meet milkmaids on the roads, with the dress and looks of Strand mistresses, and must think that every line of Goldsmith's Deserted Village contains melancholy truths.' The reference to Goldsmith's poem is revealing, for it is an elegy for a lost world of rural innocence and harmony, from which the forces of modernization have banished the inhabitants to urban anomie and vice.

Among other disagreeable side-effects of the transport revolution to make contemporaries wonder whether it was all worth it were crime and congestion. Just as computers can solve crimes, but also allow more crimes to be committed, so did better roads both improve social control and create new opportunities for criminals. Turnpikes were places where hard cash had to be paid, so were frequently robbed. The more travellers there were on the roads, the more highwaymen appeared to make them stand and deliver. The legends surrounding Dick Turpin, hanged at the Knavesmire outside York in 1739, and his mare Black Bess, epitomized the new career opportunities offered by roads. As those roads now made it worthwhile to keep a private carriage, towns came to be plagued by traffic jams, especially London, where about a third of the 20,000 carriages paying tax in 1762 were kept. Faujas de Saint Fond revealed both phenomena when he he recorded that he had been reluctant to leave Sir Joseph Banks' house at seven in the evening, because that was a time when highwaymen were known to be very active. However, he was assured that, as it was Sunday, there would be safety in numbers, as so many Londoners would be returning home in their carriages from day-trips to the country.

An endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary

I am always perplexed by H.L. Mencken. I have read a few of his books. I have dipped often into his The American Language. What a mix of muscular management of the English language, almost admirable arrogance, obnoxious toxicity and occasionally repugnant attitudes.

But what a way with words and what an eye for cutting truth.

From In Defense of Women (1918) there is the timeless observation.

Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

In our current governance environment, riddled with regulatory capture, rent seeking, and crony capitalism, we are inundated with pathological do-goodery mixed with blitheful incompetence and blind indifference to catastrophic unintended consequences.

NGOs, special interests, and advocacy groups seek to tweak the levers of power to circumvent the consent of the governed to coercively impose some policy or outcome inimical to truth. Income inequality, gender wage gap, campus rape culture, anthropogenic global warming, patriarchy, critical race theory: an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary, all used to menace the populace into something beneficial to the conjurers of such hobgoblins and to no one else.

In which country he passed the rest of his days constrained by the native prince from returning to Portugal

I love learning new things.

A visit to Feldman's Books in Menlo Park, California always results in an armful of books brought home. Among the obscure, or more specialized, books I found this time was Shipwreck & Empire: Portuguese maritime disasters in a century of decline by James Duffy. I am a sucker for history, maritime history, and shipwrecks and adventure. How could I not buy this? There is always the danger of academic pedanticism in such a specialized topic, but this looks like it will be a good read.

Page 6 and I have already encountered information new to me. I knew of Bartolomeu Dias as the first known European to round Cape Horn and enter the Indian Ocean in February, 1488, part of the great wakening and reintegrating of humanity after the out-of-Africa diaspora 60,000 years before. Dias was a herald of the slow obliteration of distance.

Dias's journey wasn't the only one that the Portuguese crown launched in 1487.

Inflamed with the success of Diogo Cão's explorations, João persisted wholeheartedly in his efforts to reach the southern tip of the continent. In 1487, he sent out two expeditions, one by land and the other by sea. The overland journey of Alfonso de Paiva and Pero de Covilhã had a double purpose: the two men were to reach India and they were to establish contact with the semi-mythical kingdom of Prester John. The sea voyage undertaken by Bartolomeu Dias was more restricted in its goals: the captain was to push south along the West African coast until - if this was possible - he reached land's end. Both journeys were successful. Covilhã, after separating from Paiva in Aden, made his way to India and visited there the magic city of Calicut. On his return he found out in Cairo that his companion Paiva had died while attempting to reach the lands of Ethiopia and the kingdom of Prester John. Following royal instructions, the loyal Covilhã sent a detailed report of his Indian journey to João and then made his way to Ethiopia, in which country he passed the rest of his days constrained by the native prince from returning to Portugal. The navigator Bartolomeu Dias was even more fortunate than Covilhã. In 1488 the caravelas under his command were blown around the Cape of Good Hope by a great storm, and Dias survived to tell his king that the golden door to India at last stood open.

I knew of Dias but not of Covilhã. What journeys in 1488. Simply amazing when you consider the dangers and logistical barriers. I was saddened that such a persevering and brave hearted adventurer might have ended his days a prisoner in a distant and forbidding land.

But that wasn't quite the complete story. Wikipedia indicates that he at least was not a jailed prisoner.

Finally, by Mount Sinai, El-Tor and the Red Sea, he reached Zeila, whence he struck inland to the court of Prester John (Ethiopia).

Here he was honorably received by the Emperor Eskender; lands and lordships were bestowed upon him, but Eskander refused to grant him permission to leave, and his successors evaded granting Covilhã permission. According to James Bruce, Covilhã maintained a correspondence with the king in Portugal, describing Ethiopia as "very populous, full of cities both powerful and rich".

In 1507, he was joined by João Gomes, a priest sent by Tristão da Cunha, who had reached Ethiopia by way of Socotra. When the Portuguese embassy under Rodrigo de Lima, which included Ethiopian ambassador Mateus and missionary Francisco Álvares, entered Ethiopia in 1520, Covilhã wept with joy at the sight of his fellow-countrymen. It was then forty years since he had left Portugal, and over thirty since he had been a prisoner of state in Ethiopia. Álvares, who professed to know him well, and to have heard the story of his life, both in confession and out of it, praises his power of vivid description as if things were present before him, and his extraordinary knowledge of all the spoken languages of Christians, Muslims and Gentiles. His services as an interpreter were valuable to Rodrigo de Lima's embassy. Covilhã was well treated, but was not allowed to leave the country until his death.

State prisoner he might have been but for the last six years of his life, he had the company of fellow countryman in the kingdom of Prester John.

Consistently making matters worse

This is sad. From College Loan Glut Worries Policy Makers by Josh Mitchell. Brings to mind Jason L. Riley's recent book, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder of Succeed..

The U.S. government over the last 15 years made a trillion-dollar investment to improve the nation’s workforce, productivity and economy. A big portion of that investment has now turned toxic, with echoes of the housing crisis.

The investment was in “human capital,” or, more specifically, higher education. The government helped finance tens of millions of tuitions as enrollment in U.S. colleges and graduate schools soared 24% from 2002 to 2012, rivaling the higher-education boom of the 1970s. Millions of others attended trade schools that award career certificates.

The government financed a large share of these educations through grants, low-interest loans and loan guarantees. Total outstanding student debt—almost all guaranteed or made directly by the federal government—has quadrupled since 2000 to $1.2 trillion today. The government also spent tens of billions of dollars in grants and tax credits for students.

New research shows a significant chunk of that investment backfired, with millions of students worse off for having gone to school. Many never learned new skills because they dropped out—and now carry debt they are unwilling or unable to repay. Policy makers worry that without a bigger intervention, those borrowers will become trapped for years and will ultimately hurt, rather than help, the nation’s economy.

Read the whole sorry saga. It is not enough to have good intentions. You need to know what you are doing and especially should be alert to making the problem worse.

No wonder there is so little trust among the citizenry of the federal government. Pathological altruism is not a good foundation.

Sociological self-beclowning by purported social scientists

An interesting post from Philip N. Cohen, How broken is our system (hit me with that figure again edition). He is making a point about the practices and quality of research in the field of Sociology. Fair enough. I haven't dug in to the details of his argument but am in agreement on the broader issue and accept that this is likely an example of poor publishing practices in the field.

It wasn't his argument that caught my attention but the original research he is criticizing. His criticism is not about the quality of the research per se but about the publication practice associated with it (multiple papers in multiple publications reporting basically the same thing.) Cohen's description of the original research.

In a paywalled 2013 paper in Journalism Studies, the team used an analysis of names appearing in newspapers to report the gender composition of people mentioned. They analyzed the New York Times back to 1880, and then a larger sample of 13 newspapers from 1982 through 2005. Here’s one of their figures:

The 2013 paper was a descriptive analysis, establishing that men are mentioned more than women over time.

Shor et al. 2014 asked,

How can we account for the consistency of these disparities? One possible factor that may explain at least some of these consistent gaps may be the political agendas and choices of specific newspapers.

Their hypothesis was:

H1: Newspapers that are typically classified as more liberal will exhibit a higher rate of female-subjects’ coverage than newspapers typically classified as conservative.

After analyzing the data, they concluded:

The proposition that liberal newspapers will be more likely to cover female subjects was not supported by our findings. In fact, we found a weak to moderate relationship between the two variables, but this relationship is in the opposite direction: Newspapers recognized (or ranked) as more “conservative” were more likely to cover female subjects than their more “liberal” counterparts, especially in articles reporting on sports.

OK, lot's of interesting things in here.

The first thing that jumped out at me was the consistency of the range of female mentions over the 26 year period, 18-28%.

What is striking about that is the consistency with the working hypothesis I have documented numerous times in these posts, that in any particular field, observationally, women are 15-30% of the top achievers. The researchers are looking at news in general rather than specific measured accomplishments, but I suspect that it is a workable proxy to link mentions in the press to actual accomplishments. My working hypothesis is that women's 15-30% share is driven 1) the fact that excellence is a function of deep, purposeful practice/experience which equates roughly to continuous effort over long periods of time at high levels of effort (hours per day) and 2) women are 15-30% of the population who work continuously and excessively in any particular field.

Very interesting affirmation of my assumptions from a completely different angle.

The second thing that caught my attention was the lazy stereotyping of conservatives by the researchers. Sociology is a field overwhelmingly dominated by those who self-identify as left or far left in their politics. It seems that they are blind to the stereotyping and bigotry that they are displaying in their hypothesis: "Newspapers that are typically classified as more liberal will exhibit a higher rate of female-subjects’ coverage than newspapers typically classified as conservative." The unquestioned assumption is that stupid conservatives are inherently misogynistic and therefore they won't report on women as much. That is pretty revealing of academic stereotyping and bigotry.

I can only imagine their disappointed surprise when they discovered that in fact the left leaning newspapers were less likely to report on women.

The researchers reveal that the finding is apparently consistent with other research.

Some work suggests that conservative newspapers may cover women less (Potter 1985), but other studies report the opposite tendency (Adkins Covert and Wasburn 2007; Shor et al. 2014a).

The "conservative" tent is a pretty big one and very diverse. There are Burkean conservatives, Hayekians, Libertarians, Randian conservatives, economic conservatives, social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, religious conservatives, free trade conservatives, Lockean conservatives, etc. There are many issues upon which they differ.

One topic on which there is a fair amount of overlap is a general inclination to focus on the individual rather than on identity/victim groups. You are who you are as an individual and not as a representative of a putative group. One would expect conservative papers to report people based on their competence/achievement and therefore that women would be 15-30% of the news since that is supported by other studies. Overly simplistically, they don't care about the race or identity of the achiever, just about the achievement.

The real mystery is why liberal papers are suppressing news about women.

In one of their related papers, the researchers double down on their bigotry. They cannot find the empirical evidence to support the stereotypes they want to hold about conservatives but they don't let that stand in their way. They are social scientists. Why should data stop them?

Notwithstanding these inconclusive findings, there are several reasons to believe that more conservative outlets will be less likely to cover women and women’s issues compared with their more liberal counterparts. First, conservative media often view feminism and women’s issues in a relatively negative light (Baker Beck 1998; Brescoll and LaFrance 2004), making them potentially less likely to cover these issues. Second, and related to the first point, conservative media may also be less likely to employ female reporters and female editors. Finally, conservative papers may be more likely to cover “hard” topics that are traditionally considered more important or interesting, such as politics, business, and sports, rather than reporting on issues such as social welfare, education, or fashion, where women have a stronger presence.

To recap the the researchers conclusions. Empirical analysis indicates that conservative newspapers report more news about women than do liberal newspapers but the researchers have good reason to believe that is simply wrong because the researchers believe that conservatives don't like feminism, conservatives discriminate against hiring women in newspapers, and finally, the researchers believe women are more involved in soft issues that are less newsworthy. Of course all three of these assumptions are not empirically supported. Because they aren't supportable. They are simply biases that the researches carry

Wow. I really wish they would quit digging. It's embarrassing what they are revealing about themselves.

I'll go with the actual numbers they produce. If you want good reporting about women, read conservative papers.

Granularity-related inconsistency of means

A surprisingly simple test to check research papers for errors from The Economist.

I routinely rail against cognitive pollution arising from poorly structured experiments. This problem is especially prevalent in social sciences, psychology, culture studies, gender studies and similar fields. Virtually all findings in these fields are automatically suspect owing to small sample size, poor controls, self-selection and self-reporting, non-randomization of participants, etc.

Usually you can catch these cognitive pollution generators simply by looking at the methodology description. A team out of Europe has now come up with a simple objective measure to test the likelihood of study error.

The GRIM test, short for granularity-related inconsistency of means, is a simple way of checking whether the results of small studies of the sort beloved of psychologists (those with fewer than 100 participants) could be correct, even in principle. It has just been posted in PeerJ Preprints by Nicholas Brown of the University Medical Centre Groningen, in the Netherlands, and James Heathers of Poznan University of Medical Sciences, in Poland.

To understand the GRIM test, consider an experiment in which participants were asked to assess something (someone else’s friendliness, say) on an integer scale of one to seven. The resulting paper says there were 49 participants and the mean of their assessments was 5.93. It might appear that multiplying these numbers should give an integer product—ie, a whole number—since the mean is the result of dividing one integer by another. If the product is not an integer (as in this case, where the answer is 290.57), something looks wrong.

There is a wrinkle, though. Usually, the published value of the mean is rounded to two decimal places, for convenience. That rounding clearly affects whether the product of it and the sample size will be an integer. The GRIM test gets around this by rounding the product itself to the nearest integer (ie, 291), which is what the result would have to have been if the original numbers were accurate and the mean had not been rounded. That rounded product is then redivided by the sample size and the result of the calculation rounded to two decimal places. If this figure is not exactly the same as the original mean (and it is not, for it is 5.94) then either the original mean or the sample size is incorrect.

Very clever. How does it work in real life?

When Mr Brown and Dr Heathers test-drove their method on 71 suitable papers published in three leading psychology journals over the past five years, what they found justified the pessimistic sounding label they gave it. Just over half the papers they looked at failed the test. Of those, 16 contained more than one error. The two researchers got in touch with the authors of these, and also of five others where the lone errors looked particularly egregious, and asked them for their data—the availability of which was a precondition of publication in two of the journals. Only nine groups complied, but in these nine cases examination of the data showed that there were, indeed, errors.

The mistakes picked up looked accidental. Most were typos or the inclusion of the wrong spreadsheet cells in a calculation. Nevertheless, in three cases they were serious enough to change the main conclusion of the paper concerned.

That, plus the failure of 12 groups to make their data available at all, is alarming.

Pretty much as expected given the reputational diminution of the social sciences over the past decade.

The known is finite, the unknown infinite

From The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin by Francis Darwin (Appleton, 1904), vol. 1., On the Reception of the Origin of Species chapter by Thomas Huxley.

The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.

Kids who were doing more homework also tended to get higher test scores

It is tempting to sigh in the vein of George Orwell, "only an intellectual".

An Atlantic magazine article supports my contention that for too long, our American public policy debate has been dominated by the sterile fretting about institutional racism, gender discrimination, income inequality, etc. Not that those are non-existent issues. They do exist and should be tackled with the laws which already exist for that purpose. The problem is that racism and gender discrimination and income inequality cover only a very small portion of inequalities that exist.

Most of these inequalities arise from personal choices, either freely made or from necessity. The root of children's life outcomes is substantially determined, not by racism or discrimination or economic inequality. They are determined by personal choices and circumstances of family structure.

From Homework Inequality: The Value of Having a Parent Around After School by Alissa Quart.

Much has been written lately about homework: There’s too much of it; it’s stressing out parents, kids, and teachers; the time it takes is overwhelming. Many of the critiques of homework focus on how valuable it actually is: Do rote teaching-to-the-test worksheets truly improve students’ understanding? But far less discussed is how some children do their homework without the luxury of parental attention and assistance, or even just quiet time at home to complete assignments. There is not nearly as much being said about how increasing amounts of homework unduly affect poor families and exacerbate inequality.

According to a recent OECD study, higher-income 15-year-olds tended to do more homework than lower-income 15-year-olds in almost all of the 38 countries surveyed, and kids who were doing more homework also tended to get higher test scores. Parents inevitably play a role in managing their kids’ schoolwork, but many find themselves stretched. According to a 2015 Pew Research Center study, close to half of parents with school-age children say they wish they could be more involved in their kids’ education, but aren’t able to be. Many complain that they don’t have the time to keep tabs on their children’s assignments, and that wealthier families with stay-at-home parents or nannies are more likely to. On top of that, parents, especially wealthier ones, frequently hire tutors to help their children along.

But for many working-class parents, especially those with on-call or non-traditional schedules, today’s homework load can be impossible to manage. Journalists and academics already refer to a “homework gap”—a divide between families who have computers and access to the internet at home, and those who do not. But there is also a chasm separating students with parents who control their own work schedules and those whose parents don’t. A 2014 report from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth noted that nonstandard work schedules affected children’s cognitive development and success.

Every individual and family knit together incredibly nuanced trade-off decisions between time, money, children, parental relationship, personal capabilities, etc. There is no predetermined "right answer", only answers which are more or less optimal for the individual/family circumstances.

There is a social justice ideological tinge to the article, with the dog whistle of excusing good test results as due to tutors who help the wealthy along when in fact it is known that wealthy parents engage tutors at a lower rate than middle class and poorer parents. The author wants to make this about income inequality and also about evil, or at least insensitive, employers. In aggregate though, there is little that individual employers can do other than properly communicate the nature and demands of a job. It is wrong to describe a job as 40 hours a week from nine to five when in fact it is known that it is 45 hours a week with fluctuating start and stop times.

But except where the employer is lying about the nature of the job, there is no wrong being committed. If the work is too unpredictable and you need to move to a more predictable job, then that is what you have to do if that is indeed a priority. It likely has other consequences in terms of convenience or income, etc. but no one can know those details and make those trade-offs save the individual.

It mostly comes down to family structure and family goals which in turn are shaped by culture and personal values. We would be better off ceasing to chase chimera and focus on real root causes.

UPDATE: And speaking of real root causes, there is this; Genetics affects choice of academic subjects as well as achievement by Kaili Rimfeld, Ziada Ayorech, Philip S. Dale, Yulia Kovas & Robert Plomin. In the one corner we have income inequality and social injustice and in the other we have assortative mating, heritable IQ and disposition towards learning. An age old battle which the Gods of the Copybook Headings always win.