Society

I Want to Know What Ginny Has to Say About This

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According to this blog post, the number one goal for baby boomers over the age of 50 is to lose weight.

I have to admit that I am feeling some conflicting emotions about this.

My interest in history has convinced me that living in past centuries was Hobbsian in that life was nasty, brutish and short. In fact, the majority of the world�s population still lives that way. I�m extremely grateful to be living at this time, in this country, where eating too much is a concern for people who would have probably died of old age a century ago.

On the other hand, I can’t help but feel that there should be some other goals that these people should try and achieve.

The rest of the top ten list also strikes me as frivolous. Number 2 is write a book. Goals numbered 3, 4, 5 and 7 is to take some sort of elaborate and expensive vacation.

I’m 42 years old. Does that make me a baby boomer?

Considering this list, I certainly hope not.

(Hat tip to Triticale, the Wheat Guy.)

Hayek on Tradition

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Just as instinct is older than custom and tradition, so then are the latter older than reason: custom and tradition stand between instinct and reason — logically, psychologically, temporally. They are due neither to what is sometimes called the unconscious, nor to intuition, nor to rational understanding. Though in a sense based on human experience in that they were shaped in the course of cultural evolution, they were not formed by drawing reasoned conclusions from certain facts or from an awareness that things behaved in a particular way. Though governed in our conduct by what we have learnt, we often do not know why we do what we do. Learnt moral rules, customs, progressively replaced innate responses, not because men recognized by reason that they were better but because they made possible the growth of an extended order exceeding anyone’s vision, in which more effective collaboration enabled its members, however blindly, to maintain more people and displace other groups.

F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of SocialismThe Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism

(I remembered this passage when reading Shannon’s prior post, entitled On Tradition.)

Over-Celling

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When the woman in the Toyota Highlander drifted into my lane this morning, she apparently inhabited a Japanese-designed Cartesian monad, with her cell phone as the only source of sensory input. According to some recent research using a driving simulator, cell phone users are about as impaired as drivers with 0.08% blood alcohol levels. Some studies have reached similar conclusions. The literature has convinced state legislatures to restrict or regulate cell phone use while driving. Much as I would like to agree with the findings, I can’t do it. It seems far-fetched to me, judging by the number of people I see using cell phones while driving, that they constitute a hazard equal to an equivalent number of drunk drivers. The legislation is unwarranted.

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Quote of the Day

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If America is to accommodate the strong population and economic growth that lies in our near future, and still remain a highly mobile society, innovative thinking will be necessary. We must get beyond the notion of some mythical golden age. Forcing people to march back to an idealized early twentieth century pattern of dense, transit-dependent urbanity is not the solution.

Ultimately, our goal as a nation should be to create a more mobile society, one that allows ever greater choices for people to live how they wish, whether in a dense city, a decentralized suburb, the countryside, or some hybrid. Today, a false dichotomy is being foisted on the public which suggests their only options are either long highway commutes from anonymous exurbs, or being packed together in dense developments next to mass transit stations. Those are not choices we have to be limited to—if we will show the courage to say no to those who wish to drive us relentlessly back to a vanished past.

–Joel Kotkin