Month: May 2006

Voting With Your Joystick

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My fridge crapped out on me some months ago. I bought a new one from Sears and paid extra to have the old one hauled away to the dump. They contracted the heavy lifting out to a couple of guys with their own truck.

When they showed up I noticed two things right away. The first was that they had heavy Latin American accents, which is hardly surprising considering that both were from Venezuela. The second is that they were very surprised that I was willing to help them with the grunt work.

All of the doors in the house were too small to get the old fridge out. (How did it get in there? When they were building the house, did they install the kitchen appliances before framing the doors?) I dumped the box on the floor and took my ten pound sledge to the cooling coils on the back, pounding them flat. The contractors stood around and chatted with me while I worked out my frustrations.

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What is a reward?

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A reward is a consequence of an activity that encourages more of that activity.

A punishment, of course, is a consequence of an activity that encourages less of that activity.

Now a reward can be in the form of a monetary profit. The reason that a monetary profit works as a reward is because people like to make money, and the reason for that is that people who liked to make money consistently outbred and outlived people who didn’t. You can work out further links in the chain of causation yourself.

At any rate, most of what we think of as rewards are rewards because most individual humans will change their behavior to get more of them.

A reward can also work by causing more humans to exist who tend to behave in the rewarded way. This would obviously be a longer-term reward. But it does the same thing… encourages more of the rewarded activity to occur.

So having kids and raising them to adulthood is itself a long-term reward for whatever behaviors are handed down to them through example or heredity. Having kids and letting someone else raise them to adulthood is a long-term reward for whatever behaviors are handed down through heredity, and raising someone else’s kids is a reward for whatever behaviors are handed down through example.

Which means the “free-rider” problem that appears to obtain from parents not getting monetary rewards for raising kids is not as bad as it might seem. The reward is a slower one, acting over several generations instead of a few years. But it is there. And so is the punishment… if you don’t have kids, whatever behavior caused you not to have kids will not be handed down and will occur less in the future.

The real problem comes from just what behaviors are being rewarded and punished in this way…

Tangential Barone

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If Sandy P is right (that Nagin was the better candidate) – and she may well be, then how did New Orleans arrive at that point? I am willing to readily accept that he might be because A) I don’t know LA politics, but he was hardly a picture of leadership, & seemed to screw up pretty badly & pretty self-righteously; and B) I remember the LA bumper stickers of a few years ago: Vote for the Crook, It’s Important. Choices that might under normal conditions seem bad, in some political climates may well be the best of the two.

And how much does gerrymandering take what should be hard America – where bad policy & bad choices are punished at the next election – and make it soft America?

Depression

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It’s sometimes said that our affluent society causes or encourages or fails to discourage depression, and that in previous eras when people actually had to earn their keep and/or fight to stay alive, they didn’t get depressed because they had more important things to worry about.

Is this true? Do people actually succumb to depression more often in our affluent society? Or are there simply more surviving depression sufferers around?

When it takes a lot of effort to stay alive, depression can drastically shorten your life expectancy, often in ways that don’t make its presence obvious. It’s really easy to miss in a culture with a higher overall death rate and less meticulous record-keeping than ours.

This is doubly true in wartime. A war offers endless opportunity for a man growing weary of his mortal coil to be relieved of it without anyone (including himself) realizing the nature of his condition.