Last post, I talked about the great benefits that have come from religion, but also about how many of the great religions’ cosmological claims have been proven false. In this post, I’ll talk about the problem with adopting a literal approach to religions’ claims.

Much of what our ancestors believed about cosmology is plainly contradicted by what we have discovered about the universe. When the teachings of the great religions are based on the premises of a false cosmology, then the teachings themselves should be suspect – there is no reason to believe a conclusion based on a false premise.

Religious believers who take a literal approach to their religion’s sacred books or to the teachings of their religious leaders may appeal to authority and argue that the words of god, as contained in their scriptures (or as transmitted by their holy leaders) are the ultimate authority and therefore modern cosmological claims must be wrong. There are two problems with this approach.

First, believers base their claims about a text or leader’s divine authority on circular and subjective arguments. Believing in a leader or a text’s divine authority merely because the leader or the text says so is circular: we have no reason to believe in the leader or the text’s claims unless we already believe in their claims – there is no external reason to believe in their authority. Believing in a leader or a text’s divine authority because of our subjective emotional responses to them is almost equally problematic. As I have discussed before, spiritual feelings are very subjective.¹ People from wildly different religions – religions with contradictory and mutually exclusive teachings – describe the same sorts of spiritual feelings confirming their belief in the religion. Some followers may isntead place their trust in stories about a teacher’s or a leader’s miraculous or supernatural abilities. Such stories invariably lack objective verification and are nearly always told second or third hand; I have never seen such stories stand up to rigorous scrutiny. Things like a religious text’s or leader’s own claim to authority, pleasant feelings, or stories of dubious veracity are not be enough to validate the claims to authority of religious texts or teachers, especially when some of their claims are directly contradicted by our modern observations of the world.

Second, it is a logical fallacy to believe in a statement’s truth merely because it was uttered by an “authority.” None of us can know everything. There is nothing wrong with relying on experts. And there is nothing wrong with arguing that a statement made by an authority is true. The problem arises when we argue that something is true because it was uttered by an authority. If something is true, then it is true whether or not it was uttered by an authority. Any statement made by an authority, therefore, should be able to stand up to criticism and independent verification. If an authority’s statements are true, it should be consistent with our knowledge of reality.

As alternatives to the literal approach to religious teachings, I present four reasonable approaches to religious claims beyond just relying on statements from purported authorities: 1) the gaps approach; 2) the symbolic approach; 3) the rejection approach; and 4) the practical approach. Next post, I’ll talk about the first three.

The great religions of all the major cultures have accumulated insights into human living and interactions over the generations and developed the moral rules that are essential to modern society and as more people more fully live these moral principles, people’s lives have significantly improved. The moral teachings of the great religions have tremendous value in teaching us how to live together, and how to attain enlightenment, contentment, and happiness. Religion even provides much value and meaning to even non-adherents – secular notions of morality originally started from religious ideas about morality.

But in spite of the great value we can derive from religion, the great teachings of the world religions are also intertwined with ancient pre-modern cosmologies (cosmology is the study of the universe and humanity’s place in it) of decreasing relevance to us in light of modern scientific discoveries. The world’s major religions were founded in pre-modern times by people with radically different cosmologies than our modern conceptions. Many of the doctrines, practices, and teachings of modern religions are thus based on pre-modern cosmologies founded on superstitious beliefs and practices; they are based on false premises and assumptions about the world which we now know to be wrong.

For example, at the time of the founding of the great religions of the world, many of those religions’ adherents believed that the world was flat or that it was at the center of the universe. Biblical cosmology presupposes that the Earth is a flat disc floating in water.¹ For biblical writers, heaven was a literal place just above the sky and hell was a literal place just below the ground. In Acts in the New Testament when Jesus ascends to heaven, Jesus is going to a literal place just above the sky. When John writes in Revelation about Jesus returning to Earth, he is talking about Jesus descending from a literal place located just above the sky. When the Bible talks about hell, it is referring to a literal place just below the ground that is the abode of departed spirits.² The Bible presupposes a geocentric model of the universe, in which the Earth sits at the center and everything else, including the Sun, revolves around the Earth.³ Many of these types of passages are now interpreted metaphorically, but their writers’ literally believed them.

Our ancestors based their cosmologies on rudimentary observations of the world around them and then combined their observations with doctrines from religious teachers and culturally-inherited superstitious notions about unseen actors and forces. Modern scientific cosmology is based on fields such as astronomy and physics. The breakthroughs in modern cosmology frequently require advanced math; sophisticated tools, such as telescopes and particle accelerators; and a knowledge of past discoveries (because one lifetime is not enough for one person alone to figure out all the wonders of the universe).

Much of what our ancestors believed about cosmology is plainly contradicted by what we have discovered about the universe. When the teachings of the great religions are based on the premises of a false cosmology, then the teachings themselves should be suspect – there is no reason to believe a conclusion based on a false premise.

In Part 2, I’ll talk about the problems with taking a literal approach to  religious teachings

Footnotes

In my previous posts on morality, I’ve listed a set of baseline premises which we can use as the foundation of a system of morality:

• Perpetuation of the human race
• The value of human life
• Individual autonomy and accountability
• Importance of community
• Respect for living things
• Intentions and consequentialism are both relevant when evaluating an act’s morality
• Utilitarianism: we should maximize the benefit to the greatest number of people without violating the above principles

From those premises, I have derived three basic universal moral rules:

1. Be selfless and loving and live the golden rule
2. Act for the future
3. Be a part of the community and promote its welfare

In this post, I will discuss Rule #3: promote the community’s welfare. Rule 3 can be dangerous if it is used to justify a combative “us versus them” attitude, especially when combined with a zero-sum view of the world. This is why Rule #3 comes last. Promoting the community’s welfare does not justify acts that violate Rules 1 and 2.

What is “the Community”?

Humankind’s history of religious and moral thought has been one of a general progression (though often faltering) toward an ever-expanding notion of who we include in our conception of “us.” This is seen in the creation of the more universal world religions of the axial age that transcend race and ethnicity (at least in theory, if not always in practice), such as Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Rules 1 and 2, which I’ve previously discussed, embody that universal spirit.

But even with an ever-expanding definition of who we include in our conception of “us,” in practical terms there are still different categories of “us.” Let’s think about an example: say that you see two people standing in the road in the path of an oncoming truck – one of them is a stranger, and the other is a close friend. Let’s also say that you only have enough time to save one of the two people by pushing them out of the way. Who do you save? Almost everyone would, without hesitation, save their close friend.

How big is a community?

Humans are social animals. Though we are adapted to flourish and thrive as members of a mutually supportive group, there appears to be physical cognitive limits to the number of people who we can emotionally and intuitively incorporate into our mental model of the world. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar was the first person to propose this cognitive human limit. He conducted a statistical analysis of different primate groups by comparing the average group sizes of various primate species with other characteristics of those species. He created a regression equation which predicted that, based on human characteristics, the average natural human group size would be about 150 (with a 95% confidence level that the real number is somewhere between 100 and 230). He then looked at the sizes of stone age villages and hunter gatherer tribes and found that their average population sizes matched his predictions. In fact, 150 may even be at the high end and seems to only be achievable for groups of people who are physically close together and who spend a significant amount of time nourishing their social relationships.¹

Dunbar’s number is based on comparisons of humans with non-human primates and by studying our primitive ancestors (and contemporary cultures living in situations similar to our stone age ancestors). Two anthropologists – H. Russell Bernard and Peter Killworth – conducted studies of people’s social connections in modern society in the United States and came up with a higher number. Their results showed that the mean number of meaningful social ties that each individual had was 290 (the median was 231).

Perhaps the Bernard-Killworth number is evidence of our continued evolution – as our ancestors moved from living in small hunter gatherer bands to living in larger, more complex societies, perhaps selective pressures have increased our cognitive capacities and made it possible for us to handle larger social circles. But whether Dunbar’s number (150) or the Bernard-Killworth number (290) is right, either way we have an upper bound of about 300. When we think about being part of a community, three hundred is a relatively low number when we consider the number of people who live in an average city or country.

What Dunbar’s number shows us is that there is apparently a limit on how many people we can emotionally include in our conception of “us.” This makes intuitive sense. We may intellectually understand that all people – even those outside our community – are worthy of equal moral consideration, but in the real world, when a truck is barreling toward our friend and a stranger, we push our friend out the way first, and few people would argue that this natural tendency is immoral.

This disconnect between our intellectual understanding of morality and our emotional understanding grows out of the human tendency over the last few millenia of living in ever-larger polities and societies. In small groups, maintaining social cohesion is relatively easy because we are well-adapted to this behavior. In larger groups, however, we lack the cognitive and emotional capacity to intuitively self-organize in the way that small stone age bands and modern hunter-gatherer tribes have been able to organize. The large institutions of modern life (along with the resulting stability and technological progress they bring) are foreign to our natural constitutions. In light of Dunbar’s number, it thus becomes clear why the universalistic tendencies of the major world religions were necessary to the flowering of human culture and development. Such moral rules give us the cognitive and emotional tools to step beyond our normal mental limits to reach out of our social circles and act morally to “others.” But universally applicable moral rules do not come naturally to us. Thus, while our intellectual conception of who we include in “us” has expanded (and even perhaps the limits of our emotional conception of “us” has almost doubled from 150 to 290), in practical terms, our innate biological tendency is to morally and emotionally commit ourselves to relatively small social groups.

I think it unlikely that Dunbar’s number is a hard cutoff. We have a much smaller group of close friends and family with whom most closely identify as “us.” Moving out from there, we have growing concentric circles of people until we reach our “Dunbar group” of people for whom we have devoted our brains’ limited capacity to build strong social ties. Past our Dunbar group, most of us have at least some social contact with more than just 150 (or 290) people in a given week or month – those are people who we start to emotionally consider as “others”; as our emotional ties to them weaken, we start to apply learned rules of morality to our interactions with them. Our emotional conception of social ties becomes weaker and weaker as we move from our core social group of 150-300 people to others with whom we have weaker social ties.

None of us has one single static conception of “us.” Instead, we each have concentric and overlapping definitions of “us,” and those specific definitions are different for each person. Beyond their higher intrinsic priority, it is especially important that the first two rules take precedence over Rule 3 because universal moralistic thinking does not come naturally to us. Our ability for learning and using rational thinking makes universally-applicable moral rules possible; the fruits of these moral developments have become obvious over the last few thousand years as violence in human societies has gradually decreased and stability has increased (along with accompanying increases in material welfare). But no rational moral system can ignore the realities of human biology. And thus Rule 3 has tremendous importance because humans naturally organize themselves into groups and communities, and much of the meaning and fulfillment we get from life comes from our membership and participation in the communities of which we are a part. Community members care for each other, and are willing to make sacrifices for each other that perfect strangers would be unwilling to make. The strength of our social links to others declines as we move from our small core group to others, but each of those concentric circles constitutes a community that we would identify as being an ever-weakening version of “us.”

Be a part of your community

Many people consider differences and diversity to be of supreme importance. My personal experience has been that being exposed to different cultures and ideologies has forced me to look at things from a different perspective, has helped me sharpen my thinking, and has broadened my perspectives. But being part of communities of people who we consider as being the “same” as us is also important for our personal well being and for the future of our society.

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam’s research indicates that “the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings.”² Other research by political scientists has shown that the level of ethnic and linguistic diversity in a country is correlated with higher levels of instability in a country and lower levels of democracy.³ The ordering of the three rules tries to strike the balance between deriving the benefits of community while not forsaking the benefits of universal morality and exposure to diversity.

Once we’ve committed ourselves to the first two Rules, then creating unified communities promotes social welfare. Rule 3 can be dangerous if misinterpreted. It is not a justification for ethnocentrism or racism. It does not justify harming outsiders in order to benefit the community. Since strong communities and strong social ties are so beneficial for us, however, it is important to properly support the idea of community. Because of our social nature, the best future outcomes for humanity will come from building strong and cohesive communities of ethical people.

So how do you follow Rule 3? First, identify your communities. Look at the expanding concentric circles of the social groups that you are a part of, starting with your closest associates (such as family and close friends) and expanding each new circle out to slightly more distant relationships. Then, think of the strong moral obligations that you have under Rules 1 and 2 and apply those rules even more strongly to the members of your community. Look for ways to make sacrifices to help those in your community. Actively participate in the community, you do your fair share of the work to keep it functional, volunteer in your community and promote good relationships within the community (such as by reaching out to others and by avoiding negative gossip). Again, the same moral obligations and behaviors behaviors from Rule 1 and Rule 2 apply to your dealings with fellow community members, only more so.

Would it be better if we could conceive of humanity as being one giant community? Yes. But our brains are just too limited to emotionally conceive of a community of 7 billion people. Rule 1 and Rule 2 point us toward a universal human community and help us focus our behavior toward that ideal. But it is important to recognize our biological and cognitive limits and that is why it is not only morally justifiable, but also morally desirable, for us to also focus on building strong small communities in our day-to-day lives as well.

Footnotes

2. The EU has prohibited the use of airport body scanners that use x-rays. In related news, the Transportation Security Administration in the United States has failed to follow through on its promise conduct safety studies on the x-ray machines currently being used in many US airports (not all body scanners use x-rays, and the ones that use x-rays use fairly low amounts of x-rays, but unlike x-ray machines at the doctor’s office, the x-rays used by the body scanners are mostly absorbed by the skin, thus concentrating the energy received into a relatively small part of the body; the safety of this practice has not been studied).

3. End bonuses for bankers.

4. Huge pools of liquid water lie beneath the surface of Europa, the icy moon of Juipter. Arthur C. Clarke may have been right after all!

5. Orbiting solar power plants may be possible within a decade.

Over at GNXP, Razib Khan points out the errors¹ some media commentators have made when they’ve claimed that if Mitt Romney wins the 2012 presidential election, he would be the first non-Christian president in the United States, or least the first president outside of “orthodox” Christianity.^{2 3} Razib points out that this is simply not true – we have had non-Christian presidents before, and cites President Taft (a Unitarian) as an example.

Well, as it turns out, we have had a lot of Presidents whose religious beliefs placed them outside of orthodox Christianity – including Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln – and other presidents whose devotion to Christianity are highly doubtful – including Eisenhower.

I’m not interested in the debate about whether Mormons are Christians or not; frankly, I find that debate to be fruitless and boring. But I do think it is very interesting to see just how many of our presidents have been irreligious or held non-traditional religious beliefs. It is nice to help dispel people’s ignorance about American history and about the purported orthodoxy and piousness of our forefathers, especially when people who are historically misinformed try to justify their religious prejudice on the basis of ignorant misunderstandings of American history. Some of these presidents were closer to traditional Christianity than others, but likely none of them would meet the strict definitions for orthodoxy being bandied about by commentators and conservative Christians. So, without further ado, the following is my list of America’s irreligious and non-Christian presidents:⁴

George Washington

Washington did attend church, but not regularly (for example, attending just sixteen times in 1760 and fourteen times in 1768).⁵ Ministers at the churches where he attended mentioned that he did not take communion.⁶ After he had died the minister at one of the churches Washington frequently attended was asked about Washington’s religious beliefs, to which the minister replied, “Sir, Washington was a Deist!”⁷ Deists generally rejected the divinity of Jesus and rejected the idea of a personal god who intervenes in the affairs of humankind. They were definitely not traditional Christians.

John Adams

John Adams was a Unitarian.⁸ Unitarians reject trinitarianism, and are thus not traditional or orthodox Christians.

Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson rejected the divinity of Jesus, the resurrection, and the miracles of the New Testament.⁹ He also rejected the doctrine of the trinity.¹⁰ His beliefs seemed to have incorporated elements of Deism¹¹ and Unitarianism.¹²

James Madison

Deism / Unitarianism.¹³

James Monroe

At least one scholar, Franklin Steiner, has concluded that it was doubtful he had religious beliefs,¹⁴ and others have classified him as a Deist.¹⁵

John Quincy Adams

Unitarian.¹⁶

John Tyler

Deist.¹⁷

Millard Fillmore

Unitarian.¹⁸

Abraham Lincoln

Historian Mark Noll explained that “Lincoln never joined a church nor ever made a clear profession of standard Christian belief.”¹⁹ Wikipedia explains that

William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner, stated that Lincoln admired deists Thomas Paine and Voltaire, and had read and knew of Charles Darwin before most. “He soon grew into a belief of a universal law, evolution, and from this he never deviated.”²⁰

Some people claimed that Lincoln converted to Christianity after his son died and as the Civil War raged on. Several of his close associates, however, denied this. Lincoln’s private secretary, Colonel John G. Nicolay, stated in 1865 that “Mr. Lincoln did not, to my knowledge, in any way change his religious ideas, opinions, or beliefs from the time he left Springfield to the day of his death.”²¹ Judge David Davis , Lincoln’s lifelong friend and executor said that Lincoln “had no faith in the Christian sense of the term.”²² And finally, Wikipedia explains:

His biographer, Colonel Lamon, intimately acquainted with him in Illinois, and with him during all the years that he lived in Washington, says: "Never in all that time did he let fall from his lips or his pen an expression which remotely implied the slightest faith in Jesus as the son of God and the Savior of men." Both Lamon and William H. Herndon published biographies of their former colleague after his assassination relating their personal recollections of him. Each denied Lincoln’s adherence to Christianity and characterized his religious beliefs as deist or skeptical.²³

Ulysses S. Grant

He was unbaptized and was never a member of any church, but he did accompany his wife to her Methodist church.²⁴

William Howard Taft

Unitarian.²⁵

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Until he became president, he did not belong to any church and had never been baptized. He was baptized as a Presbyterian only after he was elected president.²⁶

Unaffiliated

The following presidents were not members of any church:²⁷

William Henery Harrison

Andrew Johnson

Rutherford B. Hayes

Unbelievers

Thefollowing presidents have been classified as most likely being unbelievers:²⁸

Martin Van Buren

Zachary Taylor

Chester A. Arthur

Conclusion

So,by my count, out of the United States’ forty three presidents, eighteen were non-believers or unorthodox. That means 42% of the Presidents were not “traditional Christians.” If the next president is not a Christian, he will be joining a distinguished body of some of our country’s best leaders, a body that includes close to half of our presidents!

Update: Honorable Mentions

Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon were both Quakers. The Quakers are a religious group which has no set dogma, and there is a variety of belief amongst Quakers. Many, if not most, Quakers would self-identify as Christians. Some conservative Christians, however, have accused the Quakers of not being Christian (much like they have done with Mormons). If you include Hoover and Nixon on our list, the number of non-Christian presidents rises to 20.

Footnotes

2. The genetics of happiness. Recent research suggests that about one-third of the variation in people’s happiness levels is accounted for by heritable. The gene which seems to account for increased happiness was found least often among those of Asian ancestry and most often among those of African ancestry, with Europeans falling in the middle.

3. More jobs for machines, not people. Machines are predicted to take over more and more of the things that people have usually done. This sounds like good news to me — automation has always increased productivity in the past, leading to higher incomes and greater economic development. But it would be wise to focus on developing skills not easily replaced by a machine!

4. Aged Wisdom.

You might look inside yourself and think you know yourself, but over many decades you can change in ways you won’t see ahead of time. Don’t assume you know who you will become. This applies all the more to folks around you. You may know who they are now, but not who they will become.

5. How Brazil Is Sending 75,000 Students to the World’s Best Colleges.

“Brazilians have gotten used to going abroad for tourism, business, shopping and diplomacy. Now their students are finally getting an incentive to see the world, thanks to a major government program that aims to award 75,000 scholarships to attend the world’s top universities. Available only to Brazilians studying subjects of strategic national importance, like engineering, they reflect “an effort by the government to take a quantum leap in the formation of a scientific and technological elite,” says Aloizio Mercadante, Brazil’s Science and Technology Minister.”

A great idea! The United States government would be well-served by doing something to incentivize more people to study STEM fields — perhaps better student loan terms for STEM majors, and making the amount of student loan money available for non-STEM majors proportional to the average salaries for people with that major.

What does it really mean for an institution to be too big to fail? The idea is that some banks and companies are so big and integral to the national economy that if they fail, it will cause disastrous ripple effects for the economy and cause a wave of bankrupt corporations and failed banks.

Proponents of this idea of “too big to fail” argue that the only solution available to government is to bail out distressed institutions which are too big to fail. Critics of this idea argue that the failure of these institutions would not be as disastrous as claimed.

This talk about "too big to fail" is probably nothing new to you. It certainly isn’t new to me. Like most people, I’ve been uncomfortable and angry about the huge amounts of money the government poured into failing institutions. I’ve never done much about it, because at the end of the day none of us average citizens have much say in this debate or in the resulting government policies. If you’re not a politician, government regulator, or bank executive, your opinion on the issue doesn’t count for much. After much thought about the issue, though, I’ve concluded that this doesn’t mean we’re powerless to influence the future of these big institutions, and I think that there are good reasons for us to exercise our power to change them.

The bailouts given out by the United States government were mostly done under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The U.S. Treasury has spent over $200,000,000,000 ($200 billion) bailing out banks,¹ and another $100,000,000,000 bailing out other institutions (such as AIG and the automotive industry).²

If they are too big to fail, then they are too big

Whether or not the TARP recipients were really too big to fail, something needs to be done. If these institutions are not really too big to fail, then it means their lobbyists are too powerful. It means that these institutions managed to fool the U.S. government into offering a huge unneeded bailout. If they managed to fool the government so badly, then we must make these banks smaller to ensure the health and vitality of our democracy.

But even if the banks really were too big to fail and TARP was a necessary program, we still need to make the TARP recipients smaller. When institutions become so big that they can rely on the government to immunize them from the consequences of their leaders’ bad decisions and stupid risks, we have a big problem. You don’t have to be an economist or social scientist to understand that programs like TARP will encourage executives at big banks to take bigger risks than they otherwise would – if the bank succeeds, it will reap the benefits (and the executives will get their bonuses), and if it fails, then the U.S. taxpayer will cover the loss.

Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England (somewhat akin to the Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the United States), very aptly summarized the problem:

If some banks are thought to be too big to fail, then . . . they are too big. It is not sensible to allow large banks to combine high street retail banking with risky investment banking or funding strategies, and then provide an implicit state guarantee against failure.³

Part of the beauty of a properly functioning market economy is that competition prunes out the loser institutions. Poorly managed businesses will naturally fail, and the resources being put into those businesses can be freed up to be used more productively elsewhere. Nothing should be too big to fail. Failure is essential to the orderly functioning of the economy: poorly-run institutions should fail to make room for well-functioning institutions to succeed.

A Solution

It thus does not matter whether the banks were too big to fail or not. Either way, they are too big. When presented with situations like this, most people just say “someone should do something about that” and then ignore the problem. But politicians and government regulators have been completely unwilling to take drastic action, such as breaking up the big banks (which is what Alan Greenspan suggested⁴) or taking other less drastic steps to address the problem. If “someone” is going to do something about it, it has to be you and me!

But what can average citizens do? Here’s my solution: take your money out of the big banks. The only reason the big banks are so big is because people keep their money there. If lots of us started closing our accounts at the big banks and depositing our money somewhere else, the banks would get smaller.

Not Too Big

Let’s make sure that no banks is ever again too big to fail. Let’s call it the “Not Too Big” movement. The easiest way to determine whether an institution falls into that the “too big to fail” category is to see whether they received TARP funds. Each bank that received TARP funds had to fulfill the U.S. government’s TARP participation criteria. This means the government believed that the institution was too big to fail. And each bank that accepted TARP funds also implicitly acknowledged its belief that it was too big to fail. So if you want to be part of “Not Too Big,” here is all you need to do:

1. Your first step to participating in Not Too Big is to find out if your bank received TARP funds. To find out, you can search for it here or look on this list. If you didn’t find your bank on the list, it is very possible that it still received TARP funds. A lot of smaller “local” banks are actually owned by larger bank holding corporations. For example, National Bank of Arizona is not really an Arizona bank. It is owned by Zions Bancorporation,⁵ which is the 34th largest bank in the United States, with over $51 billion in assets.⁶ You can quickly find out if your bank is subsidiary of a bigger bank holding company by doing a quick search on Google or Wikipedia (or even easier, just call your bank to ask).

2. If your bank is a TARP recipient, the second thing to do is to close your account with your bank. Make it very clear to them when you are closing the account that you are closing your account because the bank was a TARP recipient and that you are trying to do your part to shrink the size of the the bank to make sure that it will not be too big to fail, and thus a threat to our national economy (and, potentially, our political system). Be pleasant, but firm, and make it clear that you are not withdrawing your money to penalize or attack the bank, but out of a sense of civic duty to protect our national economy and the integrity of our system of government.

3. Third, deposit your money in a small community bank or into a credit union (these were the types of institutions that avoided making the risky loans that caused the financial crisis in the first place – we should reward theirresponsibility). Some people have claimed that having these big mega banks is good for the economy because they can achieve economies of scale. Well, credit unions consistently have better interest rates and lower fees than the big banks,⁷ so it seems like their small size hasn’t really been an obstacle to their efficient functioning so far.

4. Fourth, the big banks derive a lot of their revenue from credit card use. If you have a credit card that has been issued by a bank that accepted TARP funds, consider canceling it and getting a card from a smaller institution. If you are worried about whether canceling the card will affect your credit score, then just stop using that card and start using a card from a small institution.

Addendum: this is not about anger

I started writing this post a few months ago, but never quite got it polished and ready to post. Since then, the Occupy Wall Street (“OWS”) movement has taken off, and along with it, a movement to penalize big banks by encouraging people to take their money out of the big banks and put it into credit unions. The people involved in this movement are explicit that they are motivated by their anger with the banks and the feelings that the big banks are acting unjustly. Anger against your fellow citizens (even if they are bank shareholders and executives) is a terrible way to motivate and sustain a political movement. Anger leads to irrationality. Anger divides communities and sets people against each other (for example, just look at the “53%” movement which has already formed in opposition to OWS).

The OWS crowd have even set up a Facebook event encouraging people to take their money out of the big banks all on the same day. If they’re actually successful in creating a mass movement, it is a recipe for starting a run on the banks. A run on the banks would just create a second financial collapse.

Let me be clear: what I’m advocating is not motivated by any animus for big banks, or by any desire to hurt them or penalize them. Like I said before, many big banks are actually bank holding companies that own a number of subsidiaries. Other banks are the product of growth or many acquisitions of smaller banks. We need a gradual and sustained movement to show the banks that, if things stay as they are, people will continue to withdraw their money. We don’t want all of the big banks to collapse – we want them to get smaller. A gradual and growing movement will give the big banks time to shrink in an orderly fashion, hopefully by spinning of their subsidiaries or by splitting themselves into smaller independent units.

Not Too Big is about us normal citizens rationally taking actions to get the result our leaders have failed to seek, to make sure our country’s economy stays healthy and robust. Don’t take your money out of your bank because you’re mad. Take your money out because it’s the right thing to do to make sure that we never have a set of banks that are so big they can demand hundreds of billions of bailout dollars to survive.

If, like me, you’re concerned about the state of our economy, and the risks of continuing to have giant banks that can demand government largess to help them continue to operate, but don’t feel terribly sympathetic to the Occupy Wall Street movement, please help spread the word about Not Too Big. You can do something to help our country without becoming an unproductive Angry Protester. Here’s how you can help spread the word!

1. Email this article to your friends and family and post a comment here about your personal story taking your money out of the big banks.

2. Email your friends and family telling your own personal story about how you’ve done your part to fix our country’s failing financial institutions and including a link to this blog post. (I’ll be posting my own personal experience with Zions Bank soon).

Footnotes

Let's go visit the planets!

I’ve finished my very first children’s book, and it is now available for sale. I wanted to write a book about astronomy that had good rhymes my 2 year old son would enjoy. The result is my first book, “Let’s go visit the planets.”

You can download a PDF version here. A high-quality, full color, soft cover copy of the book costs $8 plus shipping, available here.

I must say that I completely agree that Wall Street, the big banks, the government, and greedy CEOs are huge problems, and that their misdeeds have tremendously hurt millions of people and plunged our country into terrible economic problems. I really feel for those who are hurting because of others’ mistakes. I really want the malfeasors to be held accountable.

But from what little I’ve read on the “we are the 99 Percent” blog, it seems like most of the people submitting their stories are complaining because they made poor life choices, and now they’re in a rough spot because the economy tanked. From what I’ve seen of the OWS protesters, I get the same impression. They don’t seem to be really suffering, and most of them seem to be doing relatively well. How many of the protesters at Wall Street have expensive Mac laptops, iPhones, pricey monthly cell phone contracts, and flat screen TVs at home connected up to a full cable tv package? Everything I’ve seen indicates that a significant percentage of OWS-types enjoy many of these perks of the upper-middle-class lifestyle. They hardly seem like people who are really poor.

And even the poorest five percent of Americans are still richer than 70% of the rest of the world. What does that mean? It means that The poorest five percent of our fellow Americans have incomes that would make them upper middle class in most of the world.

Like the OWS protesters, I worry about poverty and inequality, but I worry about REAL poverty and inequality– like people who don’t have clean water to drink and who live in huts with dirt floors. I worry about people who have to helplessly watch their children die of dehydration caused by a bad case of diarrhea (which kills millions of kids in the developing world).

By global standards, nearly all of us Americans are rich fatcats who are skimming undeserved wealth off the top. Nearly all of those OWS protesters are part of the 99 percent of Americans who enjoy unprecedented wealth and prosperity (by global standards). If those protesters really care about inequality and exploitation of the poor, they would look in the mirror and realize that, on a global scale, each of them is guilty as well. It’s easy for them to complain about all the rich people above them on the pyramid, but they don’t seem very willing to recognize the life of undeserved privilege (undeserved, at least, when you evaluated their lifestyles by the same standards they use to evaluate the merits of others’ wealth) that each of them already enjoys compared to the vast majority of humanity who sit below them on the income pyramid. If they don’t want to be hypocrites — if they really want all of the rich to held accountable and forced into a life like all of the “average” people in the world — they should each sell all their fancy first world toys, give the proceeds to the poor, and devote themselves to a lifetime of backbreaking manual labor doing subsistence farming on a small plot of land, or go live in a shantytown in New Delhi or Lagos.

Being a politician requires two completely different skill sets: campaigning skills and governing skills. The two skills sets are very different from one another. A candidate’s skill at campaigning tells you very little about their skill at governing, and vice versa.

Someone who is good at governing is a good leader and manager. They are intelligent and able to quickly get up to speed on almost any issue; they have the insight to hire intelligent and competent advisors and subordinates; they listen and consider the opinions and views of the people around them, outside experts, and the opposition; they are able to analyze and synthesize these divergent views and decide on the optimal course of action; they are not afraid to admit they’re wrong, and are willing to change their opinion in the face of convincing evidence; they are good at bringing people together and getting them to agree and reconcile their differences.

The “skills” most politicians have developed to win elections are quite different. Politicians focus on rhetorical ability and convincing people to like them. They are more concerned with appearance than substance. They are good at winning arguments and convincing people that their opinion is right (especially in campaign debates); they are good at criticizing their opponents; they are good at making promises to win votes, even though many of those promises will be impossible to keep if they win; they are good at playacting and projecting their “image”; they are good at marketing and selling themselves; they are good at using all the dirty campaign tactics, but are equally good at distancing themselves from all of that negativity.

It is easy for candidates to talk in broad terms about their policy goals and the like, but that rarely tells you very much about how good they will be at implementing their goals, or even whether they really will try to implement them.

It seems to me that many of the skills required for successful campaigning are antithetical to the skills required for good governing. And unfortunately, most people don’t pay very close attention to how a politician is actually governing. The skills that will propel a person to power, therefore, are usually their campaigning skills.

What is the end result? We get “leaders” who are good at holding fast to their pre-determined positions and who are good at selling themselves, but who lack meaningful leadership skills. I’ll write more later about how we can fix this problem with new ideas about government.

2. Limits to growth. We have grown used to continuous economic growth. But such growth cannot continue forever. No matter how much we innovate, the physical laws of the universe impose limits on how much the economy can grow.

3. Juno looks back, photographs earth-moon system A photograph of the earth and the moon taken from 6 million miles away by the Juno spacecraft. It shows how small our planet really is. Here is a similar image from the Mar Express probe from 2003.

I think that the research summarized in the video is fascinating, but the video’s creator commits a huge logical fallacy that really undermines its conclusion. The psychology experiments described in the video explain quite well about group dynamics and how we form opinions, but they tell us nothing about how we should react to the majority opinion of a group or how to approach the question of the truthfulness of Christianity.

The studies presented in the video generally involved situations where the study subject was presented with a situation where everyone else in the group (who, unbeknownst to the subject, are all actors and not true study subjects) expressed an opinion that clearly contradicted the study subject’s personal observation. Rather than contradict the rest of the group, the subjects would give answers that they secretly believed were wrong.

This does not perfectly replicate the real world, however. In many cases, the majority of the group will come to the right conclusion (which is probably why we evolved this cognitive bias for group conformity in the first place — probably because in many cases, it may help us arrive at the right conclusion). The internet has proven quite well that the “wisdom of the crowds” can do wonders (just look at prediction markets or Wikipedia) at coming to better answers than one person could come up with by themself.

Overcoming group bias is a great thing to strive for — but it is not useful to try to overcome group bias just for the sake of being a contrarian (which is what this video seems to advocate). The video is a great tool to remind us groups can be wrong. But it is a huge leap to then conclude that groups are usually wrong .

The video says that the answer to our tendency to conform to groups is “dissent.” The video presupposes, without providing any basis for doing so, that Christianity is false and advocates that non-believers dissent against the group to give fellow dissenters the courage to also make their true opinions known. But what if Christianity is true? What is the point of “dissent” if your group is already right?

Dissent is probably a reasonable tactic, but only after you’ve come to a valid conclusion that the group’s opinion is wrong. The first step after you learn about the problems with group dynamics and conformity is not dissent. The first step is to figure out a proper approach to epistemology. Read some basic books about the philosophy of science and some basic philosophy on epistemology. Another great book to read is The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Once you’ve nailed down some good approaches on how to know things, you will probably realize that no one can ever really be completely certain about anything. The next step after studying epistemology is to evaluate your personal beliefs and opinions and come to some conclusions about what you think is the most probable conclusion. Only then would dissent be warranted. But even after this, you need to watch out for the big problem of confirmation bias. You should thus keep an open mind and continually look out for evidence that contradicts your current beliefs. Always be willing to reject your beliefs and opinions if you find disconfirmatory evidence, or if you find new ideas or conclusions that better fit the facts.

And in all of this, remember that, as I’ve previously discussed, emotions and spiritual feelings are not a reliable guide to truth.

The ancestry part of it has been particularly fascinating, given my mixed ethnic background (my mom is Brazilian, and Brazil is a real melting pot of races and cultures). The first interesting thing that I discovered is that my mitochondrial DNA is from the L3 haplogroup, which means that four or five hundred years ago, my direct maternal ancestor was probably living in what is now Mozambique, and she was almost certainly brought to Brazil as a slave — it has been interesting to get little bits of information about my ancestors that I never could have known before. The 23andme data also showed that I had some indigenous ancestry as well (listed as “Asian” in 23andme’s results, but Native American DNA shows up as Asian, since Native Americans are descendants of Asians who came across the Bering Strait ).

The Dodecad Project is an online project which collects and analyzes samples of people who have done tests from places like 23andme. They have just released a tool which you can use to analyze your 23andme data to get an idea about the percentages of admixture from 12 different ancestral groups in your own genotype. It is an interesting way to get an idea about where your ancestors came from.

Here are my results from the tool:

East_European                 11.17%
West_European                42.00%
Mediterranean                  28.65%
Neo_African                    1.02%
West_Asian                     7.05%
South_Asian                    0.88%
Northeast_Asian               2.16%
Southeast_Asian               1.71%
East_African                    0.39%
Southwest_Asian              1.92%
Northwest_African           2.78%
Palaeo_African                 0.27%

As you can see, I’m mostly European / Mediterranean, with added admixture of a little bit of everything else. I wonder if the Northwest African / West Asian / Southwest Asian indicate some Moorish ancestry from my Portuguese ancestors who moved to Brazil.

I can’t wait until it is cheap enough for anyone who wants to sequence their entire genome. Until then, all of these tools are very interesting indeed.

2 Computer learns language by playing games. A computer was able to learn to read a the text of a computer game manual (without having any prior English language knowledge programmed into it) and learn how to improve its gameplay strategy (in the game Civilization 2). My favorite Skynet-related comment left by a reader: “I’m curious about which victory conditions the AI tended towards. I’m hoping it was space colonization and not world domination.” As it turns out, the computer’s strategy was world domination (winning the game by conquering all other civilizations through warfare).

3. A chart showing the different ways the Bible defines marriage.

4. Driven off the Road by M.B.A.s. “Lutz’s main argument is that companies, shareholders and consumers are best served by product-driven executives. . . . The auto industry is actually a terrific proxy for a trend toward short-term, myopically balance-sheet-driven management that has infected American business.”

5. On discovering you’re an android. “The idea that the self, or the conscious mind, emerges from the workings of the physical structures of the brain – with no need to invoke any supernatural spirit, essence or soul – is so fundamental to modern neuroscience that it almost goes unmentioned.”

6. Power powers promiscuity, new study finds. “With power comes confidence, and for both men and women, such confidence often results in marital infidelity, a new study finds. The study, to be published in an upcoming Psychological Science, found that among 1,275 Dutch professionals, those with the higher-paying, higher-ranked positions were more likely to have thought about or actually engaged in extra-marital entanglements, thanks to boosted levels of confidence. . . . The powerful see the world, themselves, and other people in a different manner and they act in a different manner than do those who lack power.”

7. 6 premature predictions of tech failure. A list of 6 technologies / products that industry leaders wrongly predicted would fail.

8. The Brain on Trial.

When your biology changes, so can your decision-making and your desires. The drives you take for granted (“I’m a heterosexual/homosexual,” “I’m attracted to children/adults,” “I’m aggressive/not aggressive,” and so on) depend on the intricate details of your neural machinery. Although acting on such drives is popularly thought to be a free choice, the most cursory examination of the evidence demonstrates the limits of that assumption. . . .

[W]e are not the ones steering the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe. Who we are runs well below the surface of our conscious access, and the details reach back in time to before our birth, when the meeting of a sperm and an egg granted us certain attributes and not others. Who we can be starts with our molecular blueprints—a series of alien codes written in invisibly small strings of acids—well before we have anything to do with it. Each of us is, in part, a product of our inaccessible, microscopic history. . . .

When it comes to nature and nurture, the important point is that we choose neither one. We are each constructed from a genetic blueprint, and then born into a world of circumstances that we cannot control in our most-formative years. The complex interactions of genes and environment mean that all citizens—equal before the law—possess different perspectives, dissimilar personalities, and varied capacities for decision-making. The unique patterns of neurobiology inside each of our heads cannot qualify as choices; these are the cards we’re dealt. . . .

The legal system rests on the assumption that we are “practical reasoners,” a term of art that presumes, at bottom, the existence of free will. The idea is that we use conscious deliberation when deciding how to act—that is, in the absence of external duress, we make free decisions. This concept of the practical reasoner is intuitive but problematic. . . .

After all, there is no spot in the brain that is not densely interconnected with—and driven by—other brain parts. And that suggests that no part is independent and therefore “free.” In modern science, it is difficult to find the gap into which to slip free will . . . because there seems to be no part of the machinery that does not follow in a causal relationship from the other parts.

Free will may exist (it may simply be beyond our current science), but one thing seems clear: if free will does exist, it has little room in which to operate. It can at best be a small factor riding on top of vast neural networks shaped by genes and environment. In fact, free will may end up being so small that we eventually think about bad decision-making in the same way we think about any physical process, such as diabetes or lung disease. . . .

While our current style of punishment rests on a bedrock of personal volition and blame, our modern understanding of the brain suggests a different approach. Blameworthiness should be removed from the legal argot. It is a backward-looking concept that demands the impossible task of untangling the hopelessly complex web of genetics and environment that constructs the trajectory of a human life.

Instead of debating culpability, we should focus on what to do, moving forward, with an accused lawbreaker. I suggest that the legal system has to become forward-looking, primarily because it can no longer hope to do otherwise. As science complicates the question of culpability, our legal and social policy will need to shift toward a different set of questions: How is a person likely to behave in the future? Are criminal actions likely to be repeated? Can this person be helped toward pro-social behavior? How can incentives be realistically structured to deter crime? . . .

We will never know with certainty what someone will do upon release from prison, because real life is complicated. But greater predictive power is hidden in the numbers than people generally expect. Statistically based sentencing is imperfect, but it nonetheless allows evidence to trump folk intuition, and it offers customization in place of the blunt guidelines that the legal system typically employs. The current actuarial approaches do not require a deep understanding of genes or brain chemistry, but as we introduce more science into these measures—for example, with neuroimaging studies—the predictive power will only improve. (To make such a system immune to government abuse, the data and equations that compose the sentencing guidelines must be transparent and available online for anyone to verify.)

This means that about .13% of Brazilians have emigrated to the United States. Compared to other similar countries, this is a small number. For example, there are about 135,000 Argentines living in the United States,³ out of a total Argentine population of about 40 million⁴ and there are about 70,000 Chileans living in the United States,⁵ out of a total Chilean population of 17 million.⁶ This means that about .34% of Argentines and about .41% of Chileans live in the United States. The proportion of Argentines in the United States is thus over two and a half times greater than the proportion of Brazilians and the proportion of Chileans in the United States is more than three times greater. So why don’t Brazilians emigrate as much as other Latin Americans? This post gives my completely anecdotal explanations.

My observations are based on my family background and personal experience. My mother is Brazilian and immigrated to the United States when she was in her 20s. Out of the eight children in her family, she and only one sister have come to the U.S., while the other six siblings have stayed in Brazil. In my own personal experience, I have lived in Brazil as an adult, speak Portuguese, and minored in Latin American studies as an undergraduate. Here are my explanations for the relative rarity of Brazilian migration to the United States:

1. Internal migration. Brazil is a large continental country with a growing economy and increasing opportunities. The big cities of in the relatively wealthy state of São Paulo (it it were its own country, the state of São Paulo would be the 16th-largest economy in the world⁷) are inundated with immigrants from the Northeast of Brazil seeking jobs and better opportunities. It is far easier to migrate within your own country (and thus avoid the necessity of learning another language and adapting to a new culture).

2. Opportunities are available for the ambitious. My mother’s family was relatively poor when she was a child (they even lived in a dirt-floor house for a while). Even though Brazil’s growth has been inconsistent over the last 40 years, the general trend has been upward over that time. For those who are ambitious and smart, there are good opportunities for a prosperous life in Brazil. It is not as easy for the poor in Brazil to escape their poverty, but it is possible. In spite of their humble background, all of my mom’s siblings are solidly middle class and enjoy good lives in Brazil. I don’t think any of my Brazilian aunts and uncles or cousins would ever consider leaving — they have everything they need in their own country.

3. Sentimentality. Brazilians are much more openly affectionate and devoted to their relationships with friends and family than most Americans and they would see the separation as a huge drawback.

4. Patriotism and national pride. Brazilians are proud of their country, its potential for greatness, and its achievements (just ask a Brazilian who invented the airplane — they will vehemently deny that it was the Wright brothers, but instead insist that it was a Brazilian named Santos Dumont). They don’t want to leave and give up something to which they feel so much attachment and pride.

5. The lack of a large Brazilian diaspora. It is easier to emigrate when you are going to a place that already has living there a large group of your fellow countryman who speak your language and can help you adapt to your new country. The lack of many large Brazilian migrant communities in the United States makes it more difficult to immigrate. In the places where there is an established Brazilian community — Massachusetts (which has its roots in early-20th century Portuguese cod fisherman who immigrated there first), New Jersey, and Miami — there are plenty of new Brazilian immigrants.

(As an interesting aside: there was a 2005 Brazilian novela (daily nighttime serialized TV show) which was set in Florida and dramatized the plight of immigrants in Brazil. The novela was called “América.” Even though the novela portrayed a generally negative view of illegal immigration and of life in the United States, illegal immigration from Brazil to the United States temporarily skyrocketed as a result of the novela. Perhaps another explanation is that the lack of immigration is because of a lack of general knowledge about potential options to immigrate. The United States is close to Mexico and Central America, so knowledge about options for migration is easier for citizens of those countries, and the cultural and linguistic ties they have with Spanish speaking countries in South America perhaps makes that knowledge more widespread in places like Argentina and Chile than in Brazil.)

This post was based on a comment I left here.

Footnotes

2. RIAA Accounting: How To Sell 1 Million Albums And Still Owe $500,000. In case you didn’t already know, the music industry is run by immoral thiefs who get rich by exploiting artists.

3. The Backfire Effect. When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger. (As an aside, the linked article is from a blog that always has interesting articles summarizing the science about all the many ways we humans delude ourselves and think irrationally — I highly recommend it!)

4. The first non-human meat farmers. Preliminary observations may indicate the first discovery of a non-human animal that has domesticated another species, herds that animal, and uses it for meat!

In my previous posts on morality, I’ve listed a set of baseline premises which we can use as the foundation of a system of morality:

• Perpetuation of the human race
• The value of human life
• Individual autonomy and accountability
• Importance of community
• Respect for living things
• Intentions and consequentialism are both relevant when evaluating an act’s morality
• Utilitarianism: we should maximize the benefit to the greatest number of people without violating the above principles

From those premises, I have derived three basic universal moral rules:

1. Be selfless and loving and live the golden rule
2. Act for the future
3. Promote the community’s welfare

In this post, I will discuss Rule #2: act for the future. Acting for the future is a natural extension of Rule #1 Following Rule #1 means not just being selfless and loving toward people in the present, but showing that same love and selflessness towards those in the future. It also means showing that same love and concern for your future self. We think of our “self” as one continuous being, existing from birth until death. It can sometimes be helpful, however, to consider this idea of a continuous self as an illusion and consider the “you” of the present moment as a finite entity, one which will soon no longer exist, and of the different “yous” at future times as separate independent selves. Consider who you were 10 years ago. Chances are that there are substantial differences between who you are now and who you were in the past. You probably look different. Your opinions about many things may have changed. Your personality may have changed. Your relationships and personal circumstances may be different. These changes were probably mostly gradual ones, so it may be difficult to fix a moment in time when the “you” of the past changed into the “you” of the present, but it is probably clear that the change has happened.

One of the unique properties of personhood that makes us consider our future and past selves to be the same “self” is that the condition of each of your future selves is largely determined by your actions in the present. But taking a moment from time to time to look at your future selves as separate, independent beings for whom you have complete responsibility helps you remember that because of your obligations of love and selflessness, you have an obligation to work in the present to ensure the welfare and personal development of your future selves.

Why focus on the future?

Human beings are not very good at predicting the future. Our predictions of what will happen in the future, and how we’ll feel about it, are often wrong. Over time, almost every mutual fund underperforms when compared with the market average. Pundits and so-called experts generally avoid making specific predictions that can be easily measured and evaluated, and when they do, they are usually wrong (of course, they love to trumpet the rare occasions when they are right, but conveniently forget to mention the far greater number of times that they were wrong). On a more personal note, we are very bad at predicting how we will feel in the future, and how potential life events will affect our future levels of happiness.¹ So if the future is so opaque, why should we act for the future, and how can we do it?

Acting for the future doesn’t require that we predict specific events, but that we engage in the behaviors most likely to fulfill the premises of the moral system. How can we know which behaviors will do this? First, we can use all of our methods for discovering truth, including the scientific method, past experience, and our knowledge about cause and effect. Second, we can draw on the experiences of others. Most people are very similar to each other. We can get a good idea about the effect of certain behaviors in our life by looking at the effect of those same behaviors in others’ lives.

We act for the future by doing the things now that will make the world a better, more moral place in the future. We act for the future by improving ourselves and doing the things which will make us better people in the future. Acting for the world means seeking progress: both personal progression, progression of others, and progression of humanity.

Make the World Better

The most basic way to “live for the future” is to live so that the world will have been a better place for having you in it. My conception of morality places human beings at the center, so making it a “better place” focuses first on making it a better place for human beings, but also secondarily on making it a better place for all other living things, so long as we can do it without hurting humans beings in the process.

Family

So where do we start in our quest to make the world better? The first place is the family. Almost none of us will do much that will be remembered in history books or encyclopedias. The vast majority of even the “famous” people of today – including most scholars, writers, politicians, movie stars, and musicians – will mostly be forgotten in 100 years, relegated to footnotes in books that nobody reads. And in 1000 years, most will be completely unknown. The most lasting contribution most of us will make to humanity’s future is through the children we leave behind.

Because our greatest impact on the future is through our children, we should put a proportionate amount of time and effort into our children, but not in the way that most people would think. Things like dance lessons or piano practice, private school tuition or tutors, extra homework or sports practices are not the most important places to direct our efforts. As I’ve discussed previously,² there is a large and ever-growing body twin and adoption studies examining a variety of life outcomes which show that, out of heredity, home environment, or the outside environment, the home environment is the least important variable.³ Now, of course, parenting is still important. Good parenting can have small effects at the margins. Moreover, bad parenting can have disastrous effects: any kind of abuse will very likely have significant negative impacts on children. Parents need to care for their children, teach them basic manners, ensure they have access to an education, etc. But assuming that those basic needs are met, most of the life outcomes for your children will be determined, to a large extent, by genetics and by environmental factors outside of your control.

So how do we put forth the time and effort to making the world a better place through our children? First, if you are a decent person and are someone who is contributing to society, then chances are that your children will be that way too. So, you can contribute most to future society by focusing more on having more children and less on being a helicopter parent who micromanages every aspect of your child’s upbringing.

Other than abuse, one of the worst things that parents can do to negatively influence their children is divorce. Just like most other behaviors and life events, likelihood of divorce does seem to have a genetic component,⁴ and it appears that some of the same genetic factors that increase parents’ likelihood to divorce, and not the divorce itself, are responsible for some of the negative outcomes in children in divorced families. Some of the negative outcomes, however, do appear to be caused by the divorce itself, and not by genetic factors.⁵ That means that you should be committed to monogamy for life (and that if you have a family history of divorce, you should be concerned about whether you might have a genetic propensity for divorce). Of course, there are situations (such as abusive relationships) when a divorce would be best for children, but in our world of no-fault divorces, these are likely a minority of current divorces.

Research has indicated various factors which increase the probability of a stable, enduring marriage. Women who delay their first sexual encounter until adulthood (after age 18) have much lower divorce rates.⁶ While it could be that some other factor makes a woman both more likely to have sex as an adolescent and to get divorced later in life, the research indicates that it is more likely that having sex at early age itself made women more likely to get divorced (although more research needs to be done to confirm this). I don’t know what the research shows about the effect on men of having sex at a young age, but it doesn’t matter: the sexual partners of young women are mostly young men, so that means that to prevent early sexual behavior from increasing the likelihood of divorce, both young men and young women should not have sex until adulthood.

People who live together before marriage are far more likely to divorce.⁷ Couples who cohabit “reported significantly lower quality marriages and a greater potential for splitting up than other couples.”⁸ Some researchers have questioned the causality in the relationship between cohabitation and divorce,⁹ but I have not found any hard data from these critics to back up their criticisms. Thus, absent further data to the contrary, it is also prudent to avoid cohabitation before marriage.

Economic Welfare

The most dramatic large-scale improvements in quality of life for large numbers of people have been brought about by the astronomically high levels of economic growth since the industrial revolution.¹⁰ Some people like to portray humanity’s far past as being an idyllic existence living in harmony with nature, free of exploitation or hierarchies. They are wrong. Life for our forebears was nasty, brutish, and short. Our farmer ancestors generally lived lives close to subsistence, doing backbreaking labor all day, every day.

Before agriculture, our hunter gatherer ancestors had somewhat better health and diets than their farmer descendants, and they usually worked fewer hours as well. But warfare and violence between tribal groups in hunter gatherer societies was generally high. Infanticide was probably fairly common. And life was still not easy. For example, women had to carry each child child up to about age four for miles every day. Our hunter gatherer ancestors living in that “idyllic past” did all sorts of things to harm the environment, such as hunting to extinction almost all large mammals outside of Africa and practicing slash and burn agriculture that radically altered the environment of many places on Earth. Medical knowledge was nonexistent. Literacy amongst our ancestors was rare, if it existed at all in their culture. People didn’t have the leisure or the knowledge to worry about things like education, the future of humanity, economic growth, or the environment. The truth is that the only reason people in the present day worry about such things as quality of life, humanity’s future, or the environment is because economic growth (along with the accompanying scientific advances) have given them enough education, prosperity, and leisure to be able consider those issues.

Acting for the future means doing the things we can do now to make sure that the future is a better place to live for ourselves, our descendants, and every other human being. The best way to achieve that is through economic growth (both on a personal and societal level).

How can we as individuals do this? One the biggest long-run determinants of economic growth is the savings rate. We should therefore avoid using debt to finance personal consumption and we should save. Not all debt is bad, though. It can a good idea to use debt to accumulate capital – this could include going into debt for an education to build human capital (but only to the extent that the education increases our earning power and gives us skills which will contribute to society) or to build physical capital (by, for example, building a factory or starting a business).

More than just saving, we should be frugal and restrained in our lifestyle and consumption of resources. One of the miracles of the human condition since the industrial revolution is decreasing prices for almost every type of good. It seems that human ingenuity has been able to cope with increasing population sizes and the limits of earth’s resources such that we have been able to provide better living conditions for ever-growing numbers of people. It would be easy to assume that this will always continue. I hope that it does. But prudence dictates at least some caution. It makes sense to conserve our resources. The great prosperity we enjoy in the developed world is a direct result of the frugality and savings of our forbears. It is fascinating to read through accounts of the living conditions of average Americans from previous eras. They endured many hardships to be able to save their money and ensure a better future for their children. The infrastructure and physical capital that we have now in the United States is the result of generations of hardworking Americans who saved and worked and built up our country. We owe it to future generations to do the same – it would be tremendously short-sighted and selfish to refuse to do the same thing for future generations.

That means we should keep a budget. We should live below our means and save our money. We should be frugal and conservative in what we buy and what we consume. Reduce, reuse, recycle, etc. We should also minimize our consumption of meat. When you feed plants to animals, most of the energy contained in the plants is lost – it is far more efficient to devote the same land and resources used to feed and raise animals to growing crops for human consumption.¹¹ If everyone ate the same kind of diet as Americans, the world would only be able to support 2.5 billion people.¹²

On a societal level, we should seek governments and economic systems that encourage economic growth. This means governments free of corruption and free of onerous economic regulations. It means governments with laws that encourage real competition between firms (and not the oligopolies and monopolies we see in so many industries today) and that prevent corporate executives from extracting high rents (in the form of ridiculously high salaries) or from maintaining a shortsighted perspective focused on short-term profits (to keep a high stock price so they can get bonuses) at the expense of real long term growth.

Implications of Rule #2: specific sub-rules

I’ve discussed some of the implications of this rule, but there are many more. So what are some of the moral rules that would derive from Rule 1? I list below the rules that I think most important. An individual discussion of each rule is beyond the scope of this blog post, but I think that most of them speak for themselves.

1. Act with self-control.
2. Practice the things you want to succeed doing.
3. Persist in doing good.
4. Cease doing unnecessary or less important things and instead prioritize doing the necessary and more important things first.
5. Always seek to improve your character and discipline yourself.
6. Get married, and don’t cheat on your spouse. Don’t cohabitate before marriage.
7. If you’re a good person, have children. Have more children.
8. Be good to your children. Teach them and give them the basic opportunities and tools for success in life.
9. Live within your means.
10. Be frugal and save your money, work to be self-reliant.
11. Avoid debt.
12. Minimize the resources you use.
13. Work hard.
14. Work doing things that contribute to society.
15. In all of your work, balance your efforts so that you do not neglect the most important things in life: your family and relationships with others.
16. Always seek greater knowledge and wisdom.
17. Help others achieve the comfort and well-being that you enjoy.

In the next post in the series, I will discuss Rule #3, “Promote the community’s welfare.”

Footnotes

2 The first advertising campaign for non-human primates . Researchers are seeing if using sex in advertising targeted tochimpanzees can get them to start eating a flavor of jello that they otherwise don’t like.

3. Could Legally Getting High Reduce the Deficit?. “Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) and Barney Frank (D-MA) plan to introduce a bill on Thursday that would end the federal prohibition on marijuana. . . . Miron estimates that the US would be around $88 billion a year better off if drugs were legalized, with $41.3 billion saved on enforcement of drug-related laws and $46.7 billion garnered in tax revenues.”

4. Homemade ‘Mars in a Bottle’ Tortures Bacteria. Scientists have built small habitats designed to mimic Martian surface conditions to see how bacteria cope with such conditions and to discover which species of bacteria could survive on Mars. This will give us a better idea of what to look for when searching for life with future probes sent to Mars.

5. Contradictions in the Bible. There are a lot more even than I expected!

6. The Rewards of Revenge.

The most striking finding, however, was limited to the minds of men. According to the data, when men (but not women) watched a defector get punished, they showed additional activation in reward related areas of the brain, such as the ventral striatum and nucleus accumbens. These are essential elements of the dopamine reward pathway, that same highway of nerves that also gets titillated by sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. Apparently, we are engineered to get pleasure from punishing those who deserve to be punished. As the scientists note:

“The findings of enhanced activation in ventral striatum to a signal indicating that a defector is receiving pain are in agreement with the hypothesis that humans derive satisfaction simply from seeing justice administered, even if the instrument of punishment is out of their control.”

7. Who Needs a Moon? “The number of Earth-like extrasolar planets suitable for harboring advanced life could be 10 times higher than has been assumed until now, according to a new modeling study. The finding contradicts the prevailing notion that a terrestrial planet needs a large moon to stabilize the orientation of its axis and, hence, its climate.”

8. Trust and education. People’s levels of trust in others is positively correlated with level of education and with IQ.

9. Easily distracted people may have too much brain . Researchers “found larger than average volumes of grey matter in certain brain regions in those whose attention is readily diverted.”

1. Steady Decline in Major Crime Baffles Experts:

The number of violent crimes in the United States dropped significantly last year, to what appeared to be the lowest rate in nearly 40 years, a development that was considered puzzling partly because it ran counter to the prevailing expectation that crime would increase during a recession.

In all regions, the country appears to be safer. The odds of being murdered or robbed are now less than half of what they were in the early 1990s, when violent crime peaked in the United States. Small towns, especially, are seeing far fewer murders: In cities with populations under 10,000, the number plunged by more than 25 percent last year.

2. Crime Statistics and The Village. As you can see from this chart, homicide rates in the United States have been consistently falling since the 1650s. Contrary to what you might expect from watching shows like “Little House on the Prairie”, murder rates in the 1870s were higher than in the 1970s. There was a spike in murder rates in the 1960s and 1970s, but murder rates have been declining for many years, and are approaching their pre-spike levels from the 1950s.

2. The heritability of feminism. New research indicates that political beliefs are heritable — some of the variation between people’s political beliefs (an average of 32%), appears to be caused by genetic factors. Does this mean that political beliefs which tend to reduce fertility will decrease over time in a population?

3. How Power Corrupts. “The very traits that helped leaders accumulate control in the first place all but disappear once they rise to power. Instead of being polite, honest and outgoing, they become impulsive, reckless and rude. According to psychologists, one of the main problems with authority is that it makes us less sympathetic to the concerns and emotions of others. For instance, several studies have found that people in positions of authority are more likely to rely on stereotypes and generalizations when judging other people. They also spend much less time making eye contact, at least when a person without power is talking.”

4. The Brazil-Bolivia border:

Agricultural geneticists have long argued that the area around the railroad route — the Brazil-Bolivia border — was the development ground for peanuts, Brazilian broad beans…, and two species of chili pepper… But in recent years evidence has accumulated that the area was also the domestication site for tobacco, chocolate, peach palm (Bactris gasipaes, a major Amazonian tree crop), and most important, the worldwide staple manioc (Manihot esculenta, also known as cassava or yuca).

5. The OECD Better Life Index. Trying to figure out which OECD country is right for you? Use this handy tool to rank the importance and relative weight of different characteristics and see which country would be the best match for you.

6. Where to live to avoid a natural disaster. Looks like the Pacific Northwest is the place to be.

7. The “law school scam” media bubble. A summary of some of the recent stories in the press about how law school game the rankings and do other underhanded things to attract students.