Don't cut down your oak tree, and other topics!
RWL #351
Greetings from the Last Homely House! There is a saying I have heard many times:
The best time to plant an oak tree is 50 years ago; the second best time is today.
I’m sharing that little aphorism because on Monday night I joined a Brazilian jiu-jitsu school. I trained regularly from about 2005-2010, but when we moved to Texas, there just wasn’t a jiu-jitsu school within reasonable driving distance of our home, and when we got here, although there were several nearby, I was far to bogged down with life. And then the pandemic, and we all know what that did to anything that required breathing the same air as other people, never mind rolling around with them in close proximity. So after a 13-year break (with a few bits of training here and there), I am finally back at it. So maybe I should adapt the saying - the best time to plant an oak is 50 years ago, but if you do, for God’s sake, don’t cut it down!
I had a great time at my first class. I was sore in places I had forgotten you could be sore, I got tied up like a pretzel and choked and generally squashed - and it was great! My body still remembers how to move, though the specific moves are a little rusty. I find the grappling arts - especially the ones that rely heavily on live sparring like Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ) and judo - really create a sense of community. In addition to the physical work out and the learning, I missed the sense of secular fellowship that comes from working hard to improve yourself in a group of likeminded people. I find myself wishing I had made the jump back in years ago.
Martial arts training touches on the three sources of meaning that I have talked about previously - competence, connection, and contribution. The training is all about competence, of course. The practice of martial arts is a journey, it is atelic, not telic. It is virtually impossible to study the martial arts alone - it is by definition a community-based practice. A well-run program creates a sense of connection because you are all working toward a common goal and helping each other improve. Finally, the farther along in your journey you are, the more you are expected to teach and give back to your community. I know - I’m talking on this side of one class - but I was positively giddy when I came back from training. My wife very patiently humored me by acting interested in all the details. But I can’t wait to get back on the mat. Martial arts isn’t for everyone, but I hope you have something in your life that helps you fill each of the three C’s of meaning.
See you Sunday with another essay. As usual, willing good for all of you!
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Read
What: FastCompany, Is a thumbs-up emoji a contract? A Canadian court says yes
https://www.fastcompany.com/90920697/thumbs-up-emoji-contract-canada
Why: Written contracts are, relatively speaking, a new technology. Even when they were first accepted, the signatories had to be in the room to sign them. Today we have notary publics and whatnot to verify signatures. But there was a time in various cultures where the idea of a written contract was laughable. Only a face-to-face, verbal agreement was enforceable by law. The advent of long-distance trade required the acceptance of written contracts, and the enforcement of written contracts over long-distances is an especially recent thing. It’s pretty cool that contracts can be regarded as complete using a text emoji to indicate assent. As bizarre as this sounds, I think it is an actual social advance.
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What: The Conversation, 400 years ago, philosopher Blaise Pascal was one of the first to grapple with the role of faith in an age of science and reason
Why: I’ve written about Pascal’s Wager before, but this article does a nice job capturing how Pascal thought more broadly about our whole existence as essentially a wager:
Our big decisions are risks: For example, in choosing a certain course of education and career or in marrying a certain person, people are betting on a fulfilling life. In Pascal’s view, people choose how to live and what to believe without really knowing whether or not their beliefs and decisions are good ones. We simply don’t and can’t know enough to live without wagering.
Short, fun historical piece. Pascal lived at the beginning of the Enlightenment and therefore the beginning of the secularization of society. I am looking forward to recording my first Being in the World podcast in a couple of weeks with Michele Dillon, PhD, the dean of UNH’s College of Liberal Arts and a world renowned scholar in the sociology of religion. We will be talking about what she refers to as “Post-Secularism”, so we will definitely talk about Pascal.
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What: The Economics Daily, Unemployment rate 1.3 percent in Burlington-South Burlington, Vermont, in May 2023
Why: According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the LHH (and UNH) is located in the 3rd lowest unemployment region (Dover-Durham) in the country as of May. Nice to be semi-famous for something!
When I first started studying economics, I remember the discussion that the “natural rate of unemployment” was supposed to be 5%. Now the national average is 3.5%, and unemployment in Durham stands at 1.5%. That’s seriously crazy.
Link has a graph you can zoom around and look at your area of the country to see what unemployment is where you are.
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What: WSJ, Americans Have Quit Quitting Their Jobs
Why: We saw a huge uptick in Americans quitting their jobs (The Great Resignation) in the latter half of the Pandemic. Quitting being defined as voluntarily leaving, not fired or laid off. Now it seems that rate of quitting is coming down (though still high).
Something that is interesting when one looks at this graph is the rate of quitting is a coincident indicator of a recession, meaning the rate of quitting starts falling at the beginning of a recession and only starts to rise again at the end. The recessions are the gray columns on the graph (So 2000-2002, 2008-2009, 2020). You can see how the rate falls through the gray sections, then starts to rise again.
People quit jobs when they are confident they can get another job. People don’t quit jobs, even jobs they don’t like, when they don’t think businesses hiring. Is this quit rate decline a sign of an oncoming recession? Who knows. It’s historically quite high, so maybe it is just correcting. Or maybe us workers, collectively, know something is up.
In the below graph I add workers in the health care and social assistance category (red line).
Since I pay close attention to this sector, I will admit I thought the health care sector was much worse than the overall private sector. Apparently not. Bear in mind this is an aggregate, so it could be nursing staff are quitting while other kinds of health care and social services workers are staying put - this would drive the rate down. But I really thought there would be a big gap.
I thought for sure we would be in a serious recession by now. Maybe we’ll just cool down slowly. Inflation is falling, which is good news.
But the market believes the Fed is planning to continue to raise rates, so I wouldn’t count a recession out. But, really, 5% is not that high when you compare it to history. It’s just we’ve gotten used to a near-zero rate, making borrowing really cheap for the last 20 years or so. It’s not so much the absolute rise, but the relative rise.
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Watch
What: Connor Neill, We prefer a Problem we can't Fix to a Solution we don't like (4 min)
Why: A little motivational pep talk - solutions to problems are often hard. We prefer to keep the problem rather than take our medicine.
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Listen
What: The Art of Manliness, Thick Desires, Political Atheism, and Living an Anti-Mimetic Life (43 min)
https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/behavior/thick-desires-anti-mimetic-life/
Why: Mimetic desire is something I want to look more into. This pod was a good introduction to the concept.
Mimesis means to copy. Mimetic desire basically means we desire something because someone else models it. Here’s a good passage from a Psyche article:
‘Man is the creature who does not know what to desire,’ wrote Girard, ‘and he turns to others in order to make up his mind.’ He called this mimetic, or imitative, desire. Mimesis comes from the Greek word for ‘imitation’, which is the root of the English word ‘mimic’. Mimetic desires are the desires that we mimic from the people and culture around us. If I perceive some career or lifestyle or vacation as good, it’s because someone else has modeled it in such a way that it appears good to me.
One of the points in the pod is that we need to be careful about who we surround ourselves with, because we develop our desires based on their desires. In the interview they bring up the idea that I have quoted before, that you are essentially a mashup of the people who you spend the most time with. Mimesis clarifies how that happens.
Definitely more to follow.
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What: Political Economy with Jim Pethokoukis, Leah Boustan: Busting Immigration Myths (27 min)
Why: There are a bunch of interesting facts discussed in this pod. Among them, what is the burden of immigrants? Sort of answer: immigrants themselves, on average, tend to make less than native born citizens. However, the children of immigrants (2nd gen) tend to catch up with the children of native born citizens.
Asian immigrants (which is a huge mish-mash of people - akin to saying “European immigrants” and saying Germans and Greeks are the same) tend to come from the top of their home country’s talent pool. Thus many Asian immigrants arrive with human capital in excess of native born citizens and consequently have higher earnings. If you are an electrical engineer in India and immigrate to Boston, chances are you are not going to earn minimum wage.
I highly recommend Doug Tallamy's 'The Nature of Oaks'. Or any of his books. I try to plant at least one -- or help someone else plant one -- every year.