Allison Morgan, Dimitrios Economou, Samuel Way and Aaron Clauset: Prestige Drives Epistemic Inequality in the Diffusion of Scientific Ideas →

The bottom line: Truly high quality ideas do well wherever they come from in the academic network. But mediocre ideas succeed much better when they are passed on from teachers at the highest-rank institutions to their students.

Miles Kimball, Time Traveler: Regrets and Gratitude

What do I regret in my life? Let me give a serious answer. Regret implies wishing that one could have done things differently. This involves what the economic historians call a counterfactual history. In order to have a well-defined counterfactual, let me consider the time-travel capability in the wonderful film “About Time,” but stipulate that only I can travel back in time, and I can only do it once. Thereafter, I have to travel forward in time at the rate of 24 hours per day like anyone else.

The Setup: There are two other key things to note about the time travel capability in “About Time.” First, my consciousness from Thanksgiving, 2018 jumps back into my own body at an earlier moment in time. Second, as in the movie, I do not dare go back before the conception of my youngest child, Jordan, in mid 1992, because almost any change in the timeline would lead to a different child being conceived, replacing Jordan with someone else.

One other technical question before I dig in is how much stock-market foresight I would have. Let me assume that the butterfly effect would kick in quickly enough that the detailed history of the stock market would be different. However, just knowing the names of individuals such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos whose companies have continued to be successful would likely give me an ability to do much better than chance in the stock market. I don’t think their success was solely due to chance, so they would be likely to do well even if the timeline was altered. Also, I would have some memory of which business models could work at which stages.

Similarly, knowing which economists later became big names would give me a real insight when it came to recruiting season for the University of Michigan. Knowing someone’s true quality in the present is a big advantage, one doesn’t literally need to know the future. So despite the butterfly effect meaning there would be no exact rerun of history, my knowledge of the true quality of individuals would allow me to predict the future much better than others who hadn’t gone back in time.

Finally, along these lines, knowing what types of economic models people found appealing later on in macro in my original timeline would give my insight into economists’ preferences back in time.

What I Would Do Differently: Besides taking advantage of some of this additional insight, one of the big things I would do differently when I jumped back in time would be to start blogging and do other social media activities earlier—as soon as the technology reasonably allowed. On my blog and in academic articles, I would pursue the same big three projects that are my current focus: negative interest rate policy, fighting the rise of obesity and writing about other aspects of diet and health, and working toward a national well-being index. I wouldn’t be able to remember the text of my papers and blog posts in detail, so I would have to rewrite a lot of things from scratch.

There is some chance that with the knowledge and thinking I would be bringing back in time from 2018 that I could make enough progress in raising the knowledge of central bankers about negative interest rate policy to make a material difference in the Great Recession. The Great Recession might have a different timing, but would probably arrive at some point because of low capital requirements and at least an initial imposition of a zero lower bound. Here I am assuming that I would be a Cassandra about the dangers of low capital requirements—that the key decision-makers wouldn’t listen to me there. But on monetary policy, a more natural bailiwick for me, my knowledge of who were prime candidates for appointment to the Federal Reserve and the ability to play a role in the optimal monetary policy literature early on along with Mike Woodford (contrary to the actual timeline) might give me substantial influence on monetary policy when I spelled out how to eliminate any lower bound on interest rates.

A big help in doing good work would be how all the thinking I have done already in my life would put me ahead. And I would be able to free up some time for all of the other things I am listing here by knowing which things were dead ends.

Except where necessary for influence to avoid seriously bad outcomes, I wouldn’t be very interested in stealing a march on economic discoveries that in the actual timeline someone else made and did a good job with. In our actual timeline, I have always prized trying to work on things where I thought I would make a real difference relative to what would happen if I did nothing in that area.

In my private life, the greater maturity I have now at 58, carried back in time, plus the much deeper knowledge of Gail that I have now, would allow me to avoid or temper many of the arguments in my marriage that my wife Gail alludes to in the title of her post “Marriage—Not for the Faint of Heart.” Also, I love Gail much more now than I did in mid 1992. That would add a lot to our marriage.

My oldest son, Spencer, killed himself at the age of 20, in 2009. (See Gail’s post “The Shards of My Heart.”) His chronically low mood would still be an issue. The anti-depressants he used in the actual timeline didn’t do the trick. It is possible that trying others could have helped, which would be easier to experiment with starting earlier. Trying to have him acquire psychological self-management skills earlier might make a bigger difference. I also think I would involve him in writing posts on my blog. In late high school and in college, he showed quite a bit of writing talent. And I would hope that blogging as well as writing poetry as he did in the actual timeline would help give him a sense of purpose.

One powerful tool that I have only acquired in the last year-and-a-half is training as a career coach/life coach from the Coach Training Institute. Even just what I would remember from this could help me enormously back in time. I would also seek training as early as I could.

(In the actual timeline I finished the core curriculum at the end of September, 2018, and am set to go on for advanced training starting in May, 2019. That advanced training includes a practicum in which I need to have actual clients to work with. I would love to have some clients from among the readers of my blog! Contact me if you are interested. My email address is easy to find online.)

Summing Up—Gratitude: When I look at the picture of what I would do differently, it is much like my actual life, but getting to all of the good stuff sooner. I love my life and what I get to do everyday. If I had it to do over again, I would definitely do things differently, but I would be headed the same place. I am a lucky man.

Don’t miss my Thanksgiving column “Gratitude Is More Than Simple Sentiment: It Is the Motivation That Can Save the World.”

Jason Fung's Single Best Weight Loss Tip: Don't Eat All the Time

Thanksgiving is a day of feasting, and it should be. At its best, Thanksgiving is a chance for family and friends to bond over food. But a key counterpoint to feasting is fasting—by which I mean a period of time without food, but in which one still drinks water (and possibly tea and coffee). Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 is a beautiful poem:

  1. To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

  2. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

  3. A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

  4. A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

  5. A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

  6. A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

  7. A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

  8. A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

To this, let me add:

A time to feast, and a time to fast.

A feast like Thanksgiving should be counterbalanced by a fast at some other time. To explain why, let me turn to Jason Fung’s blog post flagged above. I featured Jason Fung’s book The Obesity Code as the most recent book in my post “Five Books That Have Changed My Life.” Jason’s blog post “My Single Best Weight Loss Tip” summarizes the essence of the book. Let me boil things down a bit more by excerpting the key passages from Jason’s blog post.

First, Jason emphasizes the importance of insulin. This is a key theme in my posts “Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon” and “Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid.” Here is Jason:

Insulin is a fat-storing hormone. There’s nothing wrong with that – that is simply its job. When we eat, insulin goes up, signalling the body to store some food energy as body fat. When we don’t eat, then insulin goes down, signalling the body to burn this stored energy (body fat). …

The “insulin causes obesity” hypothesis is easily tested. If you give insulin to a random group of people, will they gain fat? The short answer is an emphatic “Yes!” Patients who use insulin regularly and physicians who prescribe it already know the awful truth: the more insulin you give, the more obesity you get. Numerous studies have already demonstrated this fact. Insulin causes weight gain.

In the landmark 1993 Diabetes Control and Complications Trial, researchers compared a standard dose of insulin to a high dose designed to tightly control blood sugars in type 1 diabetic patients. Large insulin doses controlled blood sugars better, but what happened to their weight? Participants in the high-dose group gained, on average, approximately 9.8 pounds (4.5 kilograms) more than participants in the standard group. More than 30 percent of patients experienced “major” weight gain!

Second Jason explains the two main determinants of one’s insulin level:

There are really only two ways that insulin increases. Either:

  1. We eat more foods that stimulate insulin

  2. We eat the same insulin-stimulating foods, but more frequently.

You can read about the foods that cause insulin spikes in my post “Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid.” But in this blog post, Jason is emphasizing the second point, about frequency of eating:

What was the diet of the 1970s? They were eating white bread and jam. They were eating ice cream. They were eating Oreo cookies. There were not eating whole wheat pasta. They were not eating quinoa. They were not eating kale. They were not counting calories. They were not counting net carbs. They were not even really exercising much. These people were doing everything ‘wrong’ yet, seemingly effortlessly, there was no obesity. Why? …

The answer is simple. Come closer. Listen carefully. They were not eating all the time.

It all comes down to a very simple bit of advice from Jason:

So, here’s my best single tip for weight loss. It’s so simple and obvious that even a 5 year old could have come up with it. Don’t eat all the time.

Unfortunately, most nutritional authorities tell you the exact opposite. Eat 6 times a day. Eat lots of snacks. Eat before you go to bed. Eat, eat, eat – even to lose weight! It sounds pretty stupid, because it is pretty stupid.

I would be glad for any help in identifying the study or studies behind the recommendation to eat many small meals in a day. I’d like to write a blog post analyzing those studies closely. I won’t know until I get hold of those studies to read them, but I have two suspicions:

  1. They held the amount of food constant, simply spreading it out. But in real life, I’ll bet eating more frequently tends to lead to eating more total.

  2. However thin the evidentiary value of the study, it had such an appealing message, the message spread quickly.

Don’t miss my other posts on diet and health:

I. The Basics

II. Sugar as a Slow Poison

III. Anti-Cancer Eating

IV. Eating Tips

V. Calories In/Calories Out

VI. Other Health Issues

VII. Wonkish

VIII. Debates about Particular Foods and about Exercise

IX. Gary Taubes

X. Twitter Discussions

XI. On My Interest in Diet and Health

See the last section of "Five Books That Have Changed My Life" and the podcast "Miles Kimball Explains to Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal Why Losing Weight Is Like Defeating Inflation." If you want to know how I got interested in diet and health and fighting obesity and a little more about my own experience with weight gain and weight loss, see “Diana Kimball: Listening Creates Possibilities” and my post "A Barycentric Autobiography. I defend the ability of economists like me to make a contribution to understanding diet and health in “On the Epistemology of Diet and Health: Miles Refuses to `Stay in His Lane’.”

Jacob Bastian and Maggie Jones: Do EITC Expansions Pay for Themselves? Effects on Tax Revenue and Public Assistance Spending →

The minimum wage doesn’t do what many people think the minimum wage does. (On what is wrong with the minimum wage, see my “Inequality Is About the Poor, Not About the Rich.”) It is the Earned Income Tax Credit that does what many people think the minimum wage does. Therefore, people who love the minimum wage should love the Earned Income Tax Credit instead—and push for its expansion instead of pushing for a higher minimum wage.

Jacob Bastian and Maggie Jones have done a very interesting analysis of the Earned Income Tax Credit. The title of this post is a link to the pdf file. Here is the abstract:

This paper studies how behavioral responses to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) affect the program's budgetary cost. The EITC encourages labor supply and increases income, thereby reducing public assistance payments to households and increasing taxes paid by households. These sources of revenue reduce the EITC's net cost. We use administrative Internal Revenue Service tax data linked to Current Population Survey data on enrollment in public assistance programs to estimate the EITC's net cost. The evidence from three decades of EITC policy expansions implies that the EITC decreases public assistance received by mothers and increases payroll and sales taxes paid. Our estimates suggest that the EITC has a self-financing rate of 87 percent, so that the EITC's true cost is only 13 percent of the sticker price. Although the EITC is one of the largest and most important public assistance programs in the U.S., we show that the EITC is actually one of the least expensive anti-poverty programs in the U.S., costing taxpayers about half as much as the school lunch and breakfast programs.

John Locke: The Only Legitimate Power of Governments is to Articulate the Law of Nature

true power.jpg

John Locke, in his 2d Treatise on Government: Of Civil Government, Chapter XI (“Of the Extent of the Legislative Power”), Sections 134 and 135, limits governmental power to laying out specific laws to interpret and put into practice the law of nature. He makes this clear in two steps. First, in Section 134, he declares legislative or parliamentary supremacy in the sense of the legislature’s supremacy over every other arm of government or anyone claiming to be a governor. The reason the legislature is supreme is that it represents better than any other political body “the consent of society.”

§. 134. THE GREAT end of men’s entering into society, being the enjoyment of their properties in peace and safety, and the great instrument and means of that being the laws established in that society; the first and fundamental positive law of all commonwealths is the establishing of the legislative power: as the first and fundamental natural law, which is to govern even the legislative itself, is the preservation of the society, and (as far as will consist with the public good) of every person in it. This legislative is not only the supreme power of the commonwealth, but sacred and unalterable in the hands where the community have once placed it: nor can any edict of any body else, in what form soever conceived, or by what power soever backed, have the force and obligation of a law, which has not its sanction from that legislative which the public has chosen and appointed: for without this the law could not have that, which is absolutely necessary to its being a law,[1] the consent of the society, over whom no body can have a power to make laws, but by their own consent, and by authority received from them; and therefore all the obedience, which by the most solemn ties any one can be obliged to pay, ultimately terminates in this supreme power, and is directed by those laws which it enacts: nor can any oaths to any foreign power whatsoever, or any domestic subordinate power, discharge any member of the society from his obedience to the legislative, acting pursuant to their trust: nor oblige him to any obedience contrary to the laws so enacted, or farther than they do allow; it being ridiculous to imagine one can be tied ultimately to obey any power in the society, which is not the supreme. 

Note 1 makes this clearer:

Note 1. The lawful power of making laws to command whole politic societies of men, belonging so properly unto the same entire societies, that for any prince or potentate of what kind soever upon earth, to exercise the same of himself, and not by express commission immediately and personally received from God, or else by authority derived at the first from their consent, upon whose persons they impose laws, it is no better than mere tyranny. Laws they are not therefore which public approbation hath not made so. 

Hooker’s Eccl. Pol. l. i. sect. 10. “Of this point therefore we are to note, that sith men naturally have no full and perfect power to command whole politic multitudes of men, therefore utterly without our consent, we could in such sort be at no man’s commandment living. And to be commanded we do consent, when that society, whereof we be a part, hath at any time before consented, without revoking the same after by the like universal agreement.

Laws therefore human, of what kind soever, are available by consent.” Ibid.

Second, John Locke argues that the legislature, while supreme among political bodies in the nation, only has the combined power that all the members of the nation had in the state of nature. Anything that is illegitimate for an individual in the state of nature to do is illegitimate for the legislature to do. What is legitimate for people to do in the state of nature? To preserve their life, liberty and possessions.

§. 135. Though the legislative, whether placed in one or more, whether it be always in being, or only by intervals, though it be the supreme power in every commonwealth; yet,  First, It is not, nor can possibly be absolutely arbitrary over the lives and fortunes of the people: for it being but the joint power of every member of the society given up to that person or assembly, which is legislator; it can be no more than those persons had in a state of nature before they entered into society, and gave up to the community; for nobody can transfer to another more power than he has in himself; and nobody has an absolute arbitrary power over himself, or over any other, to destroy his own life, or take away the life or property of another. A man, as has been proved, cannot subject himself to the arbitrary power of another; and having in the state of nature no arbitrary power over the life, liberty, or possession of another, but only so much as the law of nature gave him for the preservation of himself, and the rest of mankind; this is all he doth, or can give up to the commonwealth, and by it to the legislative power, so that the legislative can have no more than this. Their power, in the utmost bounds of it, is limited to the public good of the society. It is a power, that hath no other end but preservation, and therefore can never[2] have a right to destroy, enslave, or designedly to impoverish the subjects. The obligations of the law of nature cease not in society, but only in many cases are drawn closer, and have by human laws known penalties annexed to them, to inforce their observation. Thus the law of nature stands as an eternal rule to all men, legislators as well as others. The rules that they make for other men’s actions, must, as well as their own and other men’s actions, be conformable to the law of nature, i. e. to the will of God, of which that is a declaration, and the fundamental law of nature being the preservation of mankind, no human sanction can be good or valid against it.

There are different possible interpretations of preserving life, liberty and possessions. One could argue that talking about “life, liberty and possessions” is a way of pointing to all of the many things people care about. In that case, John Locke would be saying that the government has no right to do anything except that which raises an appropriate social welfare function that can answer to the descriptions “preservation of mankind” and “the public good of the society.”

In other places John Locke puts limits on taking away one person’s life, liberty and possessions to benefit others, since at some point that individual would prefer to have remained in the state of nature.

In my evaluation of government policies, I have found I can identify many government policies clearly worth fighting against by this criterion: at a minimum, to be legitimate, government action must either lead to more of that freedom that people would have in a state of nature, or raise the value of a social welfare function that includes the inequality that most of us feel in our bones (see “What is a Supply-Side Liberal?” and “Inequality Aversion Utility Functions: Would $1000 Mean More to a Poorer Family than $4000 to One Twice as Rich?”). Therefore it is easy to see one should oppose as an illegitimate use of government power policies that both worsen inequality and reduce freedom. There are many policies of exactly this type: some of the big ones are land-use restrictions that have the effect of excluding the poor from a community, occupational licensing requirements that have the effect of excluding the poor from providing for pay services they are capable of providing, and immigration restrictions that exclude the desperately poor from from working in a country where someone is willing to pay them a better wage than they could get at home. (At a minimum, other great benefits would have to be proven to make up for these obvious harms. The burden of proof for demonstrating the existence of great indirect benefits is on those who would both directly take away freedom and directly hurt the poor.) Taking away freedom to help the relatively richer at the expense of the relatively poorer is not only ugly and wrong, laws that do so deserve no obedience—though pragmatic considerations in the face of the brute force of the state apparatus may lead one to obey them.

By contrast, anything that leads to greater freedom, or to higher social welfare (which typically is by providing public goods in the usual sense, establishing good rules, or by helping the poor) is a law that one should defer to, since one’s own judgment about the appropriate tradeoff between social welfare and freedom is probably not as good as the collective judgment of society or as good as the judgment of the median person in the society on this tradeoff.

For links to other John Locke posts, see these John Locke aggregator posts: 




The Prevalue Function

Despite aggressive self-promotion of my back-catalog of blog posts, I have been relatively slow to promote my academic papers on my blog. I will make an effort to right that imbalance by sprinkling in some blog posts about my academic papers.

By the way, while I give my blog tender-loving care constantly, I make very little effort to tend my university websites. The go-to source for my academic career (including my CV) is not any of my university websites, but this post, which I keep updated. Also, see my blog bio at the link right under the blog banner and motto.

My paper “The Effect of Uncertainty on Optimal Control Models in the Neighbourhood of a Steady State” is one you may not be aware of. You can see the abstract and a link to an ungated version above. One of the most useful things in the paper is a bit of terminology: a name for what will become the value function after optimization. Below is text of the section defining the “prevalue function”:

Christening the “prevalue function” F(k, x, ω)

In many different contexts, close analysis of the Bellman equation requires careful attention to the properties of the function underneath the maximisation operator on the right-hand side of the Bellman equation. Therefore, the right-hand side of the Bellman equation before maximisation deserves a name. Let me propose the name “prevalue function”. To make the case that this is a reasonable coinage, let me make the analogy to the terminology of physiology, in which a hormone that is converted into another hormone is given the prefix “pro-”. For example, “prothrombin” is converted into thrombin (one of the key agents in blood clotting). Similarly, if maximising a function over x yields the value function, then the original function that is converted into the value function by that maximisation can be called the “prevalue function”. There are two justifications for using pre—instead of pro— in the phrase “prevalue function”. First, “value” is of Latin rather than Greek derivation, so it is appropriate to prefix it with the Latin “pre-” instead of the Greek “pro-”. Second— and more importantly—political uses of “values” would give the word “provalue” other possible meanings that could be confusing—or at least distracting.

On usage, let me suggest that the phrase “prevalue function” will be most useful if it can be used in a flexible way for the object to be maximised on the right-hand side of any Bellman equation, whether a continuous-time or discrete-time Bellman equation, and regardless of how the Bellman equation is arranged. In other words, regardless of whether terms unaffected by the maximisation operator are put on the left- or right-hand side of the equation, and regardless of whether the equation is divided through by a term unaffected by the maximisation operator, the function under the maximisation operator can be called “the prevalue function”. (Thus, turning the “prevalue function” into the value function may require some other simple operations beyond maximising over the control variable vector.)

How Important is A1 Milk Protein as a Public Health Issue?

Advertising my post “Exorcising the Devil in the Milk,” I received a challenge and a question on Twitter from @kitchenslut.

The Challenge:

Look. I don't disagree but find there is a trend that among academically minded professionals economists are more likely to be converted to diet evangelism.

My view here is that it is a bad idea to trust any single academic discipline with any important scientific question. Every important scientific question should have at least two different academic disciplines thinking about it. For issues of diet and health, I hope that economics can be an additional discipline providing a cross-check on the science of diet and health. The training of economists makes them able to understand and think through the evidence in this area. Carola Binder discusses the role of economists in this area in her guest post “The Obesity Code and Economists as General Practitioners.”

My Rejoinder:

The orthodoxy is based on relatively slim evidence, and other hypotheses are worth testing. Diet evangelism doesn't have to be any more than "THIS IS A HYPOTHESIS WORTH TESTING!!!" And I'm going to live that way in the meantime.

The Question:

How would you rate the importance of the A1 milk protein on a relative scale of public health issues?

My Answer (with correction of a typo and some clarifications added in brackets):

  • Huge. Look at the cross-country graph of heart disease vs. A1 milk consumption [in “Exorcising the Devil in the Milk.”] Other issues are huge, too. But this one is easy to solve. At modest cost, all dairy herds could be converted to safe A2 cows in about ten years. The attempt at coverup is worth righteous indignation. [Read the book to see otherwise ordinary people participating in a routine coverup.]

  • To be clear, the big effects are on people who have leaky guts. So not everyone will have a big bad effect. But a lot of people have leaky guts.

  • And many people have leaky guts before they realize they have leaky guts. Plus infants are likely to have leaky guts.

  • Note that judgment of size is different from judgment of the amount of evidence for causality. The high correlations and large magnitudes across countries says there is a parameter that we really, really need to know the value of.

  • Although there is reason to think the mean is positive, the large variance of the parameter [due to our ignorance and possible large size], combined with the low cost (relatively to the income of most of us highly educated folks) of drinking A2 milk instead of A1 milk, makes precautionary individual action an easy choice.

  • Interestingly, this particular public health issue has very little to do with the rise in obesity. It is a separate issue.

Don’t miss my other posts on diet and health:

I. The Basics

II. Sugar as a Slow Poison

III. Anti-Cancer Eating

IV. Eating Tips

V. Calories In/Calories Out

VI. Wonkish

VIII. Debates about Particular Foods and about Exercise

IX. Gary Taubes

X. Twitter Discussions

XI. On My Interest in Diet and Health

See the last section of "Five Books That Have Changed My Life" and the podcast "Miles Kimball Explains to Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal Why Losing Weight Is Like Defeating Inflation." If you want to know how I got interested in diet and health and fighting obesity and a little more about my own experience with weight gain and weight loss, see “Diana Kimball: Listening Creates Possibilities” and my post "A Barycentric Autobiography.

Kenneth W. Phifer: The Faith of a Humanist

When I left Mormonism for the Unitarian Universalism in 2000, Ken Phifer was the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He gave beautiful sermons. I am grateful for his permission to reprint one of them here. (You will find links to some of my own UU sermons here.)

Below are Ken’s words.

I am a humanist.

l agree with Protagoras that "the human is the measure of all things" and with Sophocles that of all the many wonders of the world there is "none so wonderful as the human."

I see with Shakespeare what a piece of work is the human being:

How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world' the paragon of animals!

l am one with the Humanist Manifesto of 1933 in its assertion that the purpose and practice of humanism is to

(a) affirm life rather than deny it;

(b) seek to elicit the possibilities of life, not flee from it;

(c) endeavor to establish the conditions of a satisfactory life for all, not merely the few.

I believe, in the words of the Secular Humanist Declaration, that "human beings are responsible for their own destinies."

I rejoice in the humanism of a George Santayana, who once described a humanist as a "person saturated by the humanities" and humanism as "an accomplishment, not a doctrine."

I hold with the conviction of humanism that the scientific method is the best means we have discovered for advancing truth.

I have faith in that part of humanism which sees the human being as the highest form of life, an end not a means, the creator of moral values, the maker of history.

The humanism I embrace is materialistic.

Materialistic humanism asserts that matter comes before spirit, that soul is part of body, that the stuff of which this world is composed is the necessary context for the ideas and ideals that enrich human life.

Spirit enlivens matter, but where there is no matter there can be no spirit. In every infant we stand before the mystery of this process. From the combining of egg and sperm to zygote to fetus to baby and then through child-hood into maturity, a human being begins as simple matter and proceeds to develop personality, uniqueness, a spiritual dimension.

Until the male matter and the female matter come together there is nothing, no thing. When they do, a process of growth unfolds that leads to ... a Mother Theresa or an Albert Einstein, or a you or me.

The humanism I embrace is naturalistic.

The natural world is the only world there is. The universe is indeed "one song," not a melody in two parts. Human beings, as well as bears and bees, waves and winds, steroids and stars, proceed from, are always a part of, and return unto nature, our truest home.

Nature is unified, its parts connected, its laws regular, its mechanisms open to human understanding. At the infinite extensions of the macroscopic and the microscopic we find a harmony of nature, not two kinds of reality. The rules by which gravity functions or relativity operates or elements combine are true everywhere in the universe and do not contradict one another.

Nature is a miracle—in its magnificent story of a Big Bang which launched the universe, in the tale of the origins of life on this planet in the sludge and slime of primeval waters, in the saga of the evolution of the human race from living in the treetops to flying machines above them. The true meaning of "super nature" is not as a term for another whole realm of reality but as a description of the one reality that exists.

The humanism I embrace is religious.

Religion is a human enterprise. It is the human race that has created religions out of that unique self-awareness that drives us to ask questions about our origins and our destiny. It is the human race that has invented' religious communities in order to share the burden of our aloneness as individuals: It is the human race that is concerned with ethical values. We want to know what is good and what is evil, what is right and what is wrong, what is helpful and what is harmful. We desire to increase the measure of the good and the true and the beautiful in the lives of all people.

Albert Schweitzer, in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, remarked that "humanism in all its implicity is the only genuine spirituality." He spoke not of a humanism that worships humanity but a humanism that seeks, without creedal test or ritual requirement, to treasure each human being as a center of meaning and value. The adventure of religion is not in the discovery of Eternal Truth or Absolute Meaning— arenas in which human beings do not and cannot deal—but in our individual and communal search for and creation of meanings and values that dignify and enhance life.

The humanism I embrace is rational.

Beginning with Protagoras and Socrates, continuing through Lucretius and Epictetus, Erasmus and Bacon, into our own time with Dewey and Einstein, the life of the mind has been respected by the humanist. As Lester Mondale phrased it, "scholarship coupled with education has remained to a greater or lesser degree the perennial mark of the humanist." In the complex age in which we live nothing could be of more importance.

Humanism recognizes the importance of the non-rational aspects of human life. Passion and enthusiasm, joy and love are integral to our living. But only as these are guided by

reason even as reason is tempered by them can we avoid the dangers of mere prejudice and irrationality. It takes more than good will or good luck to build a good society.

I an, a humanist because humanism does not rely on tradition, a special book or person, "what I'm feeling right now," or the most recent revelation of the latest deity. It relies on reason, thought, the human mind as the best means we have of discovering truth and promoting justice.

The humanism I embrace is responsible.

Humanity has conceived countless numbers and kinds of divine forces, imagined innumerable and picturesque heavens and hells, devised all manner of schemes whereby gods intervene on behalf of men and women who call on them in the proper way. How many messiahs there have been to usher in paradise!

Yet the world goes on. The face of the planet is scarred with pain and sorrow. That is part of the tale of human and natural history. I see no evidence of a deity at work trying to ease that suffering. I look at the Holocaust and I see one and one half million children who were deliberately murdered by the Nazis and I say that if there is a god anywhere surely that god would have stopped that terrible carnage.

Humanism teaches us that it is immoral to wait for God to act for us. We must act to stop the wars and the crimes and the brutality of this and future ages. We have powers of a remarkable kind. We have a high degree of freedom in choosing what we will do. Humanism tells us that whatever our philosophy of the universe may be, ultimately the responsibility for the kind of world in which we live rests with us.

Humanism points to the deeds of those women and men who have chosen the good. Humanism lifts up the courageous work of a Margaret Sanger or a Betty Friedan, the significant contributions of a Marie Curie or a Jonas Salk, the persistent efforts of a Maggie Kuhn or a Linus Pauling, and says to each of us, you see what can be done. Go and do what you can. If each of us really did the best we could do, it would be a very different and a much better world than it is. I believe that that is what humanism urges on us to stop looking for help from out there and get busy with the task at hand.

The humanism I embrace is inclusive.

It is the only perspective because I am a human being. I cannot see things as an ant or an angel might, much less as a god, but solely from the vantage point of a human person. So many people so easily forget this limitation and speak glibly as though they really did know what the view from the godhead is. Such a splendid picture has not been vouchsafed to me nor do I believe it has been granted to anyone else. We all see reality from the humanist perspective.

Humanism is also the broadest possible perspective for us in the sense that any other definition of our position limits us and excludes others. A humanist approach is the broadest possible term of inclusion I know. Language and understanding that is universal and planet-wide and that embraces, not erases, all cultures and religious expressions, all

races and sexes and every other kind of difference is essential for human survival and prosperity.

How impressive it is to read the sermons of humanist preachers like John Dietrich and see that "man and woman" is the phrase used where others in the early years of this century—and many still today!—were using "man." How refreshing to read humanists of the Unitarian and Universalist and other religions of a hundred years ago and see the respect with which they were treating all the varied world religions, while Christian writers were describing them as stages on the way to Christianity.

The day may come when we can adopt an even wider identification. For now the struggle is to understand and appreciate how very much alike we are in our anxieties and our hopes. We need to find ways of celebrating those qualities that make each of us individually and the varied groups of which we are a part unique and valuable without harming others as we do so. Humanism is the best perspective from which to view and to work on this task.

Ultimately, of course, the name does not matter. Some will choose to call themselves theists or atheists, fideists or deists, or maybe just "ists." What matters is that we join with each other in seeking to do justice and to love mercy, walking humbly with one another in full respect of the preciousness and worth of every human life.

That is the faith of a humanist.
That is the faith by which I try to live my life.

William Strauss and Neil Howe's American Prophecy in 'The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny'

Ever since I read it, one of the books I find myself thinking about most often when I think about current events is The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe. We often talk about the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, and now Gen Z. Thinking of different generations as having different attitudes owes a lot to Neil Howe and William Strauss’s book “Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069.” (On Wikipedia, Neil Howe is described as an “author, historian and consultant” while William Strauss is described as an “author, historian, playwright, theater director, and lecturer.”)

In their 1997 book The Fourth Turning William Strauss and Neil Howe they used their theory of generational replacement combined with different generational attitudes to predict the future. Overall, their theory is almost too good to be true. But between 1997 and today their predictions have done very well. Two passages from The Fourth Turning make the idea clear. First, here is the synopsis of their theory:

Over the past five centuries, Anglo-American society has entered a new era—a new turning—every two decades or so. At the start of each turning, people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future. Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years, a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum. Together, the four turnings of the saeculum comprise history's seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and destruction:

  • The First Turning is a High, an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and the old values regime decays.

  • The Second Turning is an Awakening, a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime.

  • The Third Turning is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when the old civic order decays and the new values regime implants.

  • The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one.

Each turning comes with its own identifiable mood. Always, these mood shifts catch people by surprise.

In the current saeculum, the First Turning was the American High of the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy presidencies. As World War II wound down, no one predicted that America would soon become so confident and institutionally muscular, yet so conformist and spiritually complacent. But that's what happened.

The Second Turning was the Consciousness Revolution, stretching from the campus revolts of the mid-1960s to the tax revolts of the early 1980s. Before John Kennedy was assassinated, no one predicted that America was about to enter an era of personal liberation and cross a cultural divide that would separate anything thought or said after from anything thought or said before. But that's what happened.

The Third Turning has been the Culture Wars, an era that began with Reagan's mid-1980s Morning in America and is due to expire around the middle of the Oh-Oh decade, eight or ten years from now. Amid the glitz of the early Reagan years, no one predicted that the nation was entering an era of national drift and institutional decay. But that's where we are.

And here is the remarkable prophecy they made in 1997:

The Fourth Turning is history's great discontinuity. It ends one epoch and begins another.

History is seasonal, and winter is coming. Like nature's winter, the saecular winter can come early or late. A Fourth Turning can be long and difficult, brief but severe, or (perhaps) mild. But, like winter, it cannot be averted. It must come in its turn.

Here, in summary, is what the rhythms of modern history warn about America's future.

The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation, and empire. Yet this time of trouble will bring seeds of social rebirth. Americans will share a regret about recent mistakes—and a resolute new consensus about what to do. The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.

The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort—in other words, a total war. Every Fourth Turning has registered an upward ratchet in the technology of destruction, and in mankind's willingness to use it. In the Civil War, the two capital cities would surely have incinerated each other had the means been at hand. In World War II, America invented a new technology of annihilation, which the nation swiftly put to use. This time, America will enter a Fourth Turning with the means to inflict unimaginable horrors and, perhaps, will confront adversaries who possess the same.

Yet Americans will also enter the Fourth Turning with a unique opportunity to achieve a new greatness as a people. Many despair that values that were new in the 1960s are today so entwined with social dysfunction and cultural decay that they can no longer lead anywhere positive. Through the current Unraveling era, that is probably true. But in the crucible of Crisis, that will change. As the old civic order gives way, Americans will have to craft a new one. This will require a values consensus and, to administer it, the empowerment of a strong new political regime. If all goes well, there could be a renaissance of civic trust, and more: Today's Third Turning problems—that Rubik's Cube of crime, race, money, family, culture, and ethics —will snap into a Fourth Turning solution. America's post-Crisis answers will be as organically interconnected as today's pre-Crisis questions seem hopelessly tangled. By the 2020s, America could become a society that is good, by today's standards, and also one that works.

Thus might the next Fourth Turning end in apocalypse—or glory. The nation could be ruined, its democracy destroyed, and millions of people scattered or killed. Or America could enter a new golden age, triumphantly applying shared values to improve the human condition. The rhythms of history do not reveal the outcome of the coming Crisis; all they suggest is the timing and dimension.

How did this prophecy do? In 2000, it looked like Bush v. Gore might precipitate a crisis. But then 9/11 unified the country. Close to William Strauss and Neil Howe’s schedule, the souring of many people on the second Iraq War after weapons of mass destruction failed to be found in Iraq began to rend the country apart. Fueled by a variety of different events, America’s political and cultural polarization have grown since then.

The following chart gives a better picture of how the workings of the Strauss-Howe generational theory play out in attitudes. Here, the most recent “High” was 1946-1964. The most recent “Awakening” was 1964-1984: the “Conciousness Revoluation.” The most recent Unraveling was 1984-2003 or so: “The Culture Wars.” Since 2003 or so, we have been in a Crisis period. (In my mind I have often called these periods “Constitutional Crises.”)

William Strauss and Neil Howe make a prediction, still to be tested, of what will happen in the next few years. They say things will come back together in America. One key to things coming back together is Baby Boomers aging out of politics. The trouble with Baby Boomers is that they are what William and Neil call “Prophets” who cut their teeth as adults on the Consciousness Revolution and everything else that happened in the 1960s and 1970s, or cut their teeth as adults on the reaction to the 1960s and 1970s. On both sides of the political spectrum, there are many Baby Boomers who have a deep conviction in their beliefs—too deep a conviction for compromise, or even toleration, of the other side. And Baby Boomers don’t have a lot of more more mature supervision any more. This diagram shows the theory:

The other key to things coming back together is Millennials starting to vote in greater numbers. This is primarily a function of age, but movements in the participation rate for voting holding age fixed can accelerate or slow down the process. One of my personal favorites among my Quartz columns is “That Baby Born in Bethlehem Should Inspire Society to Keep Redeeming Itself.” There I write:

… however hard it may seem to change misguided institutions and policies, all it takes to succeed in such an effort is to durably convince the young that there is a better way. 

In the long run, gay rights are in no danger, because the young are convinced that gay rights are necessary for basic fairness and compassion. I think the young feel the same about treating minorities well, and treating immigrants (documented or not) as human beings. Thus, I think Donald Trump’s assaults on human dignity in these areas are unlikely to stand in the America of even ten years from now, let alone further in the future.

Grimly, this simple prediction of mine—in line with the earlier and thus much more daring prediction of William Strauss and Neil Howe—is backed up by the concentration of Trump supporters in the ranks of those who are close to death’s door as a result of old age. Donald Trump may win in 2020, but in America many of the most odious ideas he stands for are unlikely to survive long beyond his second term, should things come to that.

But William Strauss and Neil Howe’s prediction of things coming back together seems unlikely if Democrats got everything they wanted and Republicans got nothing. It is hard to know how things will be resolved; part of William Strauss and Neil Howe’s prediction is based on the rising generations being more civil than those who will be aging out of politics. That mechanism doesn’t tell us with what settlement the current crisis will be resolved.

But here is one possibility for a settlement of the current crisis: beginning in 2024, there is a period in which the Democrats hold the Presidency and both houses of Congress. But the Supreme Court and many lower courts are solidly Republican at that point. With the legislative and executive power in their hands, the Democrats would be able to get the most important things they wanted, while the Republicans would be protected by the Supreme Court from the outcomes they feared most.

Part of what makes William Strauss and Neil Howe’s theory impressive is its postdictions and well as its predictions. Here is a chart of how their cyclical theory of history based on generational replacement works out in the past. The last crisis was the Great Depression and World War II. The crisis before that was the Civil War. And the crisis before that was the American Revolution. All were write on schedule. And the Great Awakenings have also been right on schedule at the opposite end of the cycle.

The bottom line, if you take this theory seriously, is that there is hope for a less riven American politics. But the reason there is hope is that some people will die, and others will grow up. It is in the same spirit as Max Planck’s dictum:

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

which has been shortened in the inevitable game of “telephone” or “Chinese whispers” to “Science advances one funeral at a time.”

My Annual Anti-Cancer Fast

By (Image: Lance Liotta Laboratory) - Cancer-Causing Genes Can Convert Even the Most Committed Cells. PLoS Biology Vol. 3/8/2005, e276 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0030276, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1430234

By (Image: Lance Liotta Laboratory) - Cancer-Causing Genes Can Convert Even the Most Committed Cells. PLoS Biology Vol. 3/8/2005, e276 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0030276, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1430234

I am in the middle of my annual 7-10 day fast as a cancer prevention measure. I plan to fast until the election is over, which will make it 8 days total. The logic is in my posts linked below in the section on “Anti-Cancer Eating,” especially my post “How Fasting Can Starve Cancer Cells, While Leaving Normal Cells Unharmed.”

I first heard of this recommendation of an annual fast—in which I drink water, but don’t eat—from Jason Fung’s book The Obesity Code, which I feature in “Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon” and “Five Books That Have Changed My Life.” Before any of you try an extended fast yourself, let me give several cautions:

  1. Do not try to do a fast of more than 24-48 hours without first reading The Obesity Code, and possibly Jason Fung and Jimmy Moore’s The Complete Guide to Fasting

  2. Do not try an extended fast unless you are of prime age and not pregnant: that is, don’t try an extended fast if you are a child, a teenager, elderly or pregnant.

  3. If you are on any medication, you must consult with your doctor before trying an extended fast. Fasting can make the dosage of your medication wildly inappropriate. You should worry about this even with over-the-counter medication; for over-the-counter medication, lean very low on the dosage while you are fasting.

  4. You should take in some minerals/electrolytes. If not, you might get some muscle cramps. These are not that dangerous but are very unpleasant. What I do is simply take one SaltStick capsule each day.

What I can report is that this extended fast has not been that hard. I do find food a little more interesting than usual, and try not to dwell in the kitchen, but there is no physical discomfort from the fasting. I was less hungry after 3 days than after 2 days—both levels of hunger were mild. Then the level of hunger has been the same after 4, 5, and 6 days as after 3 days. The secret to keeping the level of hunger mild in the first day or two is to have been eating low on the insulin index before starting the fast. (See “Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid.”) Indeed, I try to have a meal especially low on the insulin index right before my fast. Theoretically, the further one gets into an extended fast, the less it should matter what you were eating beforehand. Eventually one should reach the same steady state either way (steady state except for the gradual decline in body fat).

I did have one person whom I mentioned my fast to ask “Couldn’t that harm your body?” The first part of the answer is that, in general, human beings who are in good health and of prime age (not children, teenagers or elderly) are well-designed for extended fasts. With the uncertainty of food sources at many points in human history, the contemporaries of our ancestors who weren’t adapted to extended fasts died, and didn’t become our ancestors. We are descended from those who managed to survive extended fasts.

The second part of the answer is that even if one concedes that fasting for 7-10 days might cause some negative physical stress, any such physical stress has to be compared to the harms of chemotherapy if one does get cancer. I know this only second-hand, but I am confident in saying that chemotherapy is a horrible experience and quite damaging to the body.

Of course, for me prevention of cancer by an annual 7-10 day fast is being done with a probability close to 1, and every year, while I would only need to do chemotherapy if I actual got cancer, which is a probability significantly below 1. And chemotherapy wouldn’t be done every year. But I have no problem saying that the ratio between the harm of chemotherapy and any plausible harm of an annual 7-10 day fast is likely to be quite large. In terms of relative effectiveness, as far as I know, no long-term studies have been done. But the theory for starving cancer cells is clear enough that that study definitely should be done. And studies to update our views on the safety of fasting can be done much more quickly and cheaply.

Although the primary motivation for this annual 7-10 day fast is cancer prevention, I have to admit that the fast-forward for weight loss is a great ancillary benefit. On that score, let me give a little perspective by saying that theoretically, fat loss should only be about 3/5 of a pound per day of fasting. But during your fast you will see a lot more than that. I am finding there are huge mass-in/mass-out effects during my extended fast. (See “Mass In/Mass Out: A Satire of Calories In/Calories Out.”) I don’t quite understand why the numbers on the scale are as low as they are right now, but I expect anything beyond 3/5 of a pound per day to be fairly quickly reversed once I end my fast.

I dread cancer. Cancer is bad enough that, for me, a non-painful annual fast of 7-10 days seems like a reasonable sacrifice in order to reduce my chances of cancer. Check out the logic in the posts linked below, read up on fasting, and see what you think.

For organized links to other posts on diet and health, see: