Train of Thought

I was choosing a t-shirt to wear.  A yellow one was on the top but I decided I didn't want to wear yellow.  I told myself that it was to have a yellow shirt to ride my bike to the bar this evening, but I really knew that it was because I didn't want to wear something that bright.  I knew this was odd because I don't expect to see anybody for about nine hours, but there it was, no yellow.

I looked through the pile of t-shirts (folded, I now fold t-shirts) and chose a grey shirt.  I realized that I like grey.  I thought back and realized that when I was a teenager my favourite colour was grey and that I still feel a comfort with it.  I wondered if this was just a natural preference or something influenced me.  I thought of the books "The Chronicles of Amber" in which there are nobles each with their different colours.  The hero is Corwin, whose colours are black and silver.

I then remembered a video by The Cure that I had last seen probably 25 years ago.  Long enough ago that I couldn't quite remember the name of the song.  The miracles of Google produced a video for A Night Like This.

As you can see, the singer, Robert Smith, is wearing oversized grey clothes.  I seem to prefer oversized clothes.  My favourite sweater is oversized, as is my leather jacket.  I deliberately buy trousers that are 4-6 inches too long and made of thick cotton so that I can roll them up and feel both unbound by the cloth and still anchored by the weight around my ankles.  I wondered did I take these preferences from Robert Smith?  Does teenage fashion still roll around in my head?  Or, is it that my mind is similar enough to Robert Smith's that we share an aesthetic sense from music to clothing.  Are music and clothing connected in an aesthetic or are our aural and somatic sensibilities unconnected?

I watched the video and realized that I knew the tune intimately and most of the words.  I don't own the song and cannot remember when I last heard it.  It may well be decades.  Why do I remember this?  How did such precise information remain in my memory, unused, unnoticed?  At one point in my life that song was probably the most important emotional anchor that I had.  It expressed who I was as well as anything. 

Then I thought that I wanted some coffee.  Hmm, and probably granola and fruit in the back garden.  It feels like a tropical morning here.  I'm having one of those moments where I feel so far away from where I came.  Not in a bad way, I'm just mystified by how I got from there to here.

I am a Feminist

I'm a guy and I'm a feminist.  What do I mean by a feminist?  I mean that women should be treated in the same way as men to the extent that is possible while taking into account physical differences.  Women shouldn't have yearly prostate exams, for example.  I think that women should have equal opportunity to men, but no more.

Now, what does equal opportunity mean?  It means equal access to the things that lead to opportunity.  Examples are an equal education, the right to speak freely, own things, start companies, equality in hiring, etc..

In the USA, and also in the UK, women on average get paid a substantially lower wage.  This applies even for the same positions, women get paid less to do the same work.  There is an extreme difference in the number of women in high executive positions, the "Glass Ceiling."  Women are employed to a very large extent in the lower-prestige, lower paid service industry jobs.  In the USA women make up 17% of Congress.  In the UK women make up 22% of Parliament.

This seems a pretty clear case of unequal opportunity, doesn't it?  Surely women would like to get paid the same amount of money as men.  Surely women would like to have prestigious positions?  Surely women would like to run large companies?  Surely women would like to have a substantial say in the actions of their government?

However, those are measurements of results, not opportunity.  I am not a believer that society should be organized so that everyone is equal, with equal money, an equal job, equal respect.  Some people are smarter, more competent, harder working, more ambitious.  For me, it isn't necessarily an evil that different groups live in different conditions.  It is an evil if people are denied the opportunity, but a stupid, incompetent, lazy person shouldn't get paid much money.

So, let's take a look at the opportunity.  In the USA the Equal Rights Amendment was passed in 1964, forbidding discrimination in hiring practices towards women.  Women have had the right to vote since 1919, and there have been women members of Congress since 1917.  The distribution of girls by income is the same as boys, there's no systematic discrimination as to what comes out of the womb by income level.  Girls are required to go to the same schools as boys, and there are actually more women college graduates than men.  There is no legal, financial, or educational difference of potential opportunity between boys and girls.  Boys and girls have the same family incomes, in the same geographical areas, go to the same schools, and it is illegal to discriminate against them.  Legally there is an absolute equality between the sexes.

So, why the differences in income, careers, and leadership positions?  It is common to think that there is an "old boys" network that keeps women down.  That men hire men, pay men more, think men are better at jobs, and men have all the jobs with power.  I think there's a large amount of truth to that, but it simply cannot be the whole story. 

Women make up more than half of the population in a democracy.  This means that if women all wanted things to be a certain way they could simply make it happen by voting.  If women wanted a female dominated government they could simply nominate women for every government position and vote en masse for that candidate.  In a representative democracy the results would be a government almost entirely made up of women.  If women wanted universal health care, six months off for new mothers with pay etc. they could get it if they got together and voted on it.

Let us address the men hiring men etc. position.  Now, this is illegal.  Any women in such a situation could sue the company for money.    I am sure there is no shortage of women with employment law degrees who could successfully sue corporations if they consistently didn't hire women with equivalent qualifications.  If this is pervasive throughout the country why have there not been so many cases of legal discrimination that this problem is simply stamped out? This would apply at least as much to women at a higher level as to those at a lower level within a company.

There is simply not a law that forbids women from starting businesses.  I see no reason why women should not be as successful at starting businesses as men.  There are as many women as men.  If women don't discriminate based on sex then in at least half of the companies started up there would be no such discrimination.  In a free market, the company that won't hire half of the competent people in the field will be crushed by the greater competence of the company that will hire anyone.  The simple solution to supposed widespread workplace discrimination is for women to start their own businesses and be in charge.

The Equal Rights Amendment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has been in effect for 48 years.  Most of the people who had management positions at the time are dead.  It's been two generations since it was passed.  Women have the same legal rights as men and the same educational opportunities.  If they face discrimination there are two options available, a legal one or an entrepreneurial one.  As far as I can see there has been plenty of scope, time and opportunity for women to have equal positions in the workplace and government.  Given equal opportunity why is there such a stark difference between the sexes?

In my opinion it comes down to this; men and women are different.  Please understand that these are generalities.  Men and women are the product of thousands of years of evolution, and have developed different roles, and different physical and psychological attributes to fill those roles.  To put it simply, men evolved to leave a tribe and go hunt things, or fight other tribes.  Women evolved to produce and care for children, and to gather nourishment.  As a result men and women have different skills, and even different cultures within the sexes.

Men are bigger, faster, stronger.  They have better spacial relations (the are better at telling how far something is away etc.).  Men have a somewhat higher threshold for pain.  Men are  more violent, more competitive.  The basic way men think is to see a situation as a problem, find a solution, and try to solve it. 

Women, are smaller and slower, but have very similar levels of endurance.  Women are far better at noticing what is in an environment (go into a room for thirty seconds, come out and women can identify more things that were in the room than men).  Women are better at repetitive, detail oriented tasks.  Women are less violent, more collaborative.  The basic way women think is to see an environment, pass on the information to others, discuss the situation, find a consensus. 

These are well established psychological facts, and are cross-cultural.  If these differences are based on culture, upbringing, attitudes, then cultures around the world are the same in these respects.

In hunting or fighting what psychological characteristics do you need?  Risk-taking, aggression, hierarchical organization (when trying to kill a deer you can't sit around and discuss what you should do next and reach a consensus).  In gathering and child rearing what do you need?  Social cohesion, communication, environmental awareness, risk avoidance, methods of de-escalating violence.

Transfer this to politics and you get men being more willing to take the risk to become elected, more assertive in telling people what should be done, more aggressive when trying to defeat the enemy.  Transfer this to the workplace and you get men being more likely to demand raises, be more willing to quit a job, be more likely to do everything possible to obtain more power, care less about the business as a whole, be more willing to sue.  Human beings are also animal enough to naturally think that big males are supposed to be leaders.  In a study of all the presidential candidates of the USA, taking into account everything from age to psychological style, the best predictor of the winner was who was the tallest.  In such circumstances what we see is exactly what would be predicted.

Now, I don't want to get across the impression that women are inferior to men, because I simply don't believe it.  After all, I am a male housekeeper, who had a career in social work, whose best qualities are in writing and speaking, who is empathic and whose greatest skill is in the understanding and helping of people.  In many respects I am a stereotypical women, and I am most proud of those characteristics.  I think there is nothing wrong with being community oriented,  consensus building, being aware of our surroundings, de-escalating violence.  I think it much more worthy to be a teacher than a CEO.  If I had to choose a sex to run the world there would be no hesitation, women for certain.

I am a feminist.  I believe that women should have the same access to opportunity as men.  However, if women want the same outcomes as men they will have to act in the same manner as men.  As a women, if you think you deserve more pay or to be treated better you need to ask for it and be willing to leave if you don't get it.  If you wish to advance in a company you need to step on those beneath you, aggressively compete, care more for yourself than the company.  If you wish there were more opportunities for women you need to start things that produce those opportunities.

I am also a masculist.  I believe that men should have the same access to opportunity as women.  If men want the same outcomes as women they will need to sacrifice money for community and family.  They will need to seek consensus, pay attention to the feelings of those around them, put the group before the individual.

One of my axioms is that you can either complain and do something about it or not complain at all.  Complaining about something about which you do nothing is for me worse than useless, it's harmful to you and those who have to listen to you.  Which is very male of me.

Tripartite Dilemma of my Mind

At the moment my state of mind is a place affected by three forces, apathy, guilt, and serenity.  My actions are the same, what matters is how I feel about it.

Apathy is the position of not wanting to do very much, brought on by a feeling of there being little point in doing more than the minimum.  My position, expectations, and experiences are unlikely to change very much, why try?

Guilt is the feeling that I am wasting my time, not working hard enough, somehow letting people down, not making the most of things.

Serenity is acceptance of a lucky life.  Loved, comfortable, safe, surrounded by a beautiful world there to be noticed.

Solution?  Do the minimum that satisfies the guilt, keep trying to notice what I have.

Solutions are harder to do than decide.

Tests and Learning

Over the last couple of decades I have heard many people, often teachers, complain that requiring standardized testing is a bad idea.  They complain that it inhibits child-directed learning, that it can damage self-esteem, that it promotes "teaching to the test" rather than true understanding of the subject.  There are also complaints that standardized tests are a bad way to determine whether a pupil actually understands something because some children don't "test" as well as other students.

The alternative is the idea of a teacher introducing a subject and the pupils then explore that subject by asking questions, being exposed to answers, talking about the subject as a group, interacting with experiments or direct exposure.  This is essentially the idea of learning through playing.  At the end of this process it is proposed that children have a better experience, understand a subject more thoroughly/deeply, and without relying on rote answers that must be produced in a stressful environment.

At the moment I am attempting to learn two separate skills, playing the mandolin and learning Spanish.  Both of these are long term projects that are essentially impossible to perfect.  At no point will I ever be unable to play the mandolin better than I can at that moment, and I will never be entirely colloquially fluent in Spanish.

I am attempting to learn Spanish through a computer program called Rosetta Stone, which says that it teaches language in the same way that young children learn languages.  Basically it teaches words, pictures and sounds all together to produce associations with meaning.  At no point are any linguistic terms (like verb, noun, conjugation, tense etc.) mentioned.  There is a picture of a house, the word "casa" is put on the screen, and a native speaker says, "casa."  At no point does anyone say "The word for house is casa", there is no other language but Spanish used within the program.  Once associations have been made everything else is a test.  A word is said and you need to pick a picture, or vice versa.  It shows a picture with the words of a child having lost its dog, and then shows a picture of a man looking for his newspaper and asks you what should be said.  A correct answer gets you a green check mark and a happy "bling" sound.  An incorrect answer gets you an orange cross and a negative "bong" sound.  Often you don't even have the tools to answer the question and have to guess.

While using this program you can almost see the parent showing you, the child, something and saying, "What's that?   No, try again.  Nearly.  It's a tree.  Can you say, 'tree?'  No, tree".  Children learn language by being introduced to concepts, asked to repeat them, and told whether they are right or wrong.  When children are young they are told that they are doing something wrong all the time, and children learn things much faster than adults.  As an adult this can be monumentally frustrating, and I'm sure it is for children too.  It can make you feel stupid.  It doesn't attempt to get you to understand the subject deeply, it just wants you to know and understand what is happening, the depth of understanding arises from that.  The thing humans do best is speak, and language is the most complicated subject most of us will ever encounter.

I have attempted to learn the mandolin largely on my own.  I have looked up such things as where to put your fingers for chords, and the particular notes for songs.  I had one lesson and unfortunately the teacher was a great mandolin player who didn't know how to teach.  As a result I cannot read music, I have almost no music theory, I have never played a scale, I don't even know the name of the notes on the fretboard.  I have no fundamentals at all, but I can play some songs well enough that they sound like songs.  Learning how to play music is literally nothing but tests, and with the most direct and clear differentiation between passing and failing that you will find.  Play a note badly and the sound will be immediately obvious.  Play it well and it will sound like music.  Every time you make any sound it is a test as to whether you can make music or not.  At the beginning you fail many more times than you succeed, and as you try to learn more and more this truism remains.  Learning music is an unceasing series of tests, most of which you will fail, and it is immediately obvious that you have failed.

It seems to me that by far the most effective method of learning things is through testing.  In the educational environment students should be tested almost continuously.  When the answer is wrong the student should be told it is wrong and to go back and try again.  There are certain things that have to be learned in school, and you should be tested on these things and not allowed to progress until you learn those things.  It is pointless to attempt to teach almost anything until someone can read at a high level.  It is vitally important that children learn a standardized set of skills, somewhat less important that they learn a standardized set of knowledge.  This is how young children learn, and they do it extremely well.

As for the self-esteem/some children test badly argument my response is that life is entirely full of tests.  Any employment you get is simply a series of tests.  Fail the test and you will (or more accurately, should) get fired.  To get a job you will be tested.  Driving a car is a set of tests.  Meeting new people is a test.  As a result it is far more important to test children with low self-esteem and bad testing skills than other children.  One of the fundamental skills required in life is to face up to a test.  Fearfully avoiding tests cripples a life, it is a mental illness called General Anxiety Disorder.  It is no accident that in the USA, with its resistance to difficult tests (in English high school a passing grade was 50%, in US college it was more like 65%, and not because the US college students were smarter) that test scores are low but self-esteem is high.

A large problem is, of course, the tests themselves.  Standardized sets of skills and knowledge is not the same as identical tests and answers.  Multiple choice tests are the most convenient, inexpensive, labor saving method of testing, but they are a terrible way of finding out what is known.  I remember in a chemistry class in high school a bone idle student who was completely indifferent to learning got over half the answers right on a test.  This was a shock to everyone (including the student) and the teacher asked him how he had done it.  He had simply done a zig-zag pattern on the answer sheet without even reading the questions.  I remember studying for the SAT college entrance exam, and finding out that I could get the English comprehension questions right over half the time without reading what I was supposed to comprehend.  I had learned the test and the sort of answers they looked for.

Tests should have open ended questions.  Asking a student to pick from a through e answers as to the correct conjugation of the "informal you" future tense of "to go" is moronically stupid when you can ask (in French) 'Qu'est'ce que tu vas faire la semaine prochaine?" or "Que vas a hacer la semana que viene? (In Spanish).  "What are you going to do next week?" requires an understanding of the question, an ability to conjugate in the future tense, and the ability to convert ideas into language.  In one question you are testing for much more than a single multiple choice question.  It might take a human being to read and grade the answer, but ask twenty questions like that in half an hour and you'll get ten times the measurement of understanding that you would from a multiple choice test.  How could such a system possibly work?  Have teachers run the tests and grade them, and repeat them, and then simply surprise audit the teachers.

Education should be a series of hard tests, repeated until the children get them right.  These tests should be practical, starting with real life details and then human beings naturally look for the underlying features.  Teach an underlying feature first, and it's simply baffling.  I never learned what the future plu-perfect tense is in English, and I speak that language fluently.  When learning French I was repeatedly asked to "conjugate" a "verb" in a "tense", when until learning a different language I had no idea what "conjugate" "verb" or "tense" meant.  I ended my ability to study mathematics when we got to differential calculus because nobody told me what you did with it, or what it was for, or how it would be applied. 

I think schools should be challenging places, but challenges interspersed with far more free, entertainment time than they have now.  You shouldn't try to teach more than one idea a class, and that class shouldn't be more than half an hour long.  Every other class, at a minimum, should be testing of knowledge not just from last week, or last month, but last year as well.  Those classes should be hard work.  In between each class children should be free to relax, so that their minds can absorb the information and rest.  Homework is useless and moronic.

I am a big believer in tests.  I think they should be more common rather than less common.  I think they should be much harder than they are presently, and I think you should have to repeat them until you can pass them, otherwise what is the point of trying to learn?  I think testing should not be of just the last class, or the last year, but throughout the entire process of learning the subject.

Test more, test harder, be less sympathetic, test more practically, burn all multiple choice tests.

Do We Grow Up?

Human beings have an innate moral sense.  This innate moral sense is not much different than the ones in other social mammals.  A definition of individuals within "my" group.  Cooperation within that group (while still trying to get more than your fair share).  Severe punishment for cheating (going against cooperation).  Look on any school playground and this is what you will see.  As an aside, if you think humans are born good and then corrupted by the trappings of civilization, go to a playground populated by children between 5 and 10 years old.  There will be screaming, crying, violence, theft, lies, bullying until they return to the classroom and behave.  Children are our best guide to human nature, and they are indeed nasty, brutish, and short.

However, within our societies most of us as adults happily interact with a wide group of people, actually showing interest in people from other groups.  We may think of ourselves as a fan of the Owls, an Oregonian, an Agnostic, a Democrat, but we tend to show interest and friendliness to even a Wolverine, Englishman, Atheist, Independent until they start behaving badly.  I know for a fact that if you get lost on a mountain track in Costa Rica, local farmers will guide you back to the main road without even considering asking for anything in return.

The cooperation within societies is breathtaking.  300 million people, spanning a continent have all agreed to have pieces of paper represent goods, which can then be exchanged.  Rush hour traffic might seem chaotic, but imagine what it would be like if everyone just decided to drive where and when they felt like it? (I hear much of Asia drives like this, but I haven't seen it personally.)  This is cooperation on vast scales between people that would never consider themselves part of the same group, after all, they don't even know each other.  They have never met.

There is punishment for cheating, breaking the law, but the punishment is decided through a process that attempts to be objective and forbids cruel punishment.  Generally, someone found to be cheating isn't simply beaten by the surrounding group.  Compare this to Old Testament laws, particularly stoning, in contrast.

So, I want you to imagine a situation (1) where a child has bullied other children.  A much bigger child sees this and is worried that the bully might hurt some of his/her friends.  So the bigger child goes over and beats the snot out of the bully, makes sure that bully is incapable of bullying again, just in case.  What would we think about the bigger child?  Is this the behavior we want from a child?  I certainly hope not.

How about a situation (2) where there is a playground.  A new kid comes to school and all the other kids hate them because they are different and use the playground equipment that they want for themselves.  So they all get together to go smack that kid around in order to make sure it goes away from their playground and never comes back.  However, the new kid knows kung-fu and really kicks the group around.  For the entire time that all of these kids are in school the new kid takes away any toys and makes sure they can't play in the playground.  When asked why?  the kid replies that "they started it, and if I don't stop them they might try it again."

Two children have to work out where they want to go in the afternoon (3).  One wants to go to see a film, the other wants to eat ice-cream.  Both would prefer a film or an ice-cream to nothing at all.  A child pokes another child.  In return comes a pinch.  A slap comes in retaliation.  Then a punch.  The kids fight and then neither gets ice-cream or sees a film.

Or the classic, "My toy is better than your toy!"  "No it isn't, my toy is better!"  "My toy has three bits, yours only has one!"  "My toy is red, and that's way better."  "More bits is better."  Red is better!"  "I hate you!  "I hate you more."  'You're just a liar, you always lie.""  "That's a lie, see, you are the liar."

These are all the sorts of situations that we often see from children, but try and change through instruction, education, rules.  In short, we hope that children will grow up to behave better than their innate nature, and we work hard to ensure they do.  Those that don't are considered anti-social, deviant, possibly mentally ill.  However, it seems to me that once we get to the stage of international relations or internal politics these basic ideas of morality simply go out the window, and most people never even notice.

While the situations are obviously more complex, it seems to me the moral questions involved in the four situations described above are essentially the same as major modern situations involving vast numbers of adults.  Situation (1) seems to me to be essentially the same moral situation that was faced before the invasion of Iraq.  Situation (2) seems to me a pretty good representation of the situation between Israel and the surrounding countries.  Situation (3) seems to me a pretty good description of the many protracted conflicts based on ethnic, religious, or ideological differences (Muslim/Hindu problems between Pakistan and India, Kurdistan versus Turkey/Iraq, Marxist rebels in Colombia versus the free market economy of the government).  Situation (4) is simply the situation of political discourse in the United States, and probably elsewhere, in which differences in point of view descend into a death spiral whereby, regardless of what the other person is saying, they are wrong, lying, and have a grand plan to destroy everything good in the United States.

Can we not try to behave like adults, when behaving like adults really matters?  Why do we behave like naughty children?  How come nobody seems to notice that this happens.  Are we really going to take somebody seriously when they use the words "evil doers?"  Are we really going to take people seriously when they say that television is a method of distracting the "sheeple" from the Machiavellian machinations of the elite?

Things are getting better, generally.  There are fewer wars.  There is more democracy in which people fight with words rather than guns.  There are more, and more stable international organizations.  The number of religious fanatics willing to kill for their religion is going down.  But really, we have to wait decades for vast swathes of the adults in the world to stop acting like children?

A Day in Yelapa

It is a dangerous thing to try and relive the past.  For obvious reasons you always try to relive the best moments, the shining times of the past that meant so much.  The chances of being able to recreate such moments is so very slim.  You are not the same person as you were, the place is not quite the same, even the memory of the event impinges on the moment.  It can never be the first time again.  An attempt to recreate the same moment is a recipe for disappointment.

However, when trying to live a rich and happy life it is vitally important to remember such times and think of the elements that came together for that moment.  Taking those elements and putting them together in a new place, a new time, is a recipe for another happy moment.  A new happy moment has nothing to compete against.

In the winter of 2009 Christina and I were preparing for our move to Houston.  It was a stressful time for both of us.  I was involved in the massive undertaking of preparing the house to be sold.  Christina was immersed in a hard-working, socially unpleasant working situation.  At the time we were both convinced that Houston was going to be a peaceful, relaxing place for us.

So, we both agreed that we wanted a vacation, a mellow, easy time in the sun.  Away from work, away from the gloom.  The place we associate this with is Cahuita in Costa Rica.

 Cahuita's Main Street

However, Cahuita is on the Caribbean coast, over halfway across the country from the airport.  Many of the roads are frighteningly potholed, and it is necessary to drive through the capitol city of San Jose.  At the time it was an overnight flight to get there, and an early morning flight to leave.  So, that's three days of back and forth, and those back and forth days can be stressful (especially for the driver).  Christina didn't have more than a week for vacation, and so I suggested what I thought would be an easier place, Puerta Vallarta in Mexico.

Puerto Vallarta is a tourist town on the Pacific coast of Mexico.  Expanded from an old port on a vast bay it still has an old town, with promenade, old buildings and markets.  To the north there is an ever-expanding cultural wasteland of mega hotels, and to the south are cliffs and rocky islands.  Whales travel on their migrations to give birth in this bay.  It is a glorious setting.  I booked us a room in an old, proper Mexican hotel in the heart of the old town, a vast tree growing in the open courtyard, rooms arrayed around it up to seven floors providing a cool and shaded area.  The room was decorated with catholic icons, small, older, without modern conveniences - just like we like it.

However, this was the time that the "Great Recession" was just getting started.  The economy of the town was primarily based on American tourists, and Americans were tightening their belts and not traveling.  As a result the local people were intensifying their efforts to extract money from those who had traveled.  The beaches were mostly hotel beaches, servers coming down to ask you if you wanted something every five minutes.  Tourists packed around you.  Hawkers passed up and down the beach with sunglasses, jewelry, and other knick-knacks.  Christina still shudders at the words, "Braids senora?  Braids?  Braids senora?"  The town was very nice, we enjoyed wandering around, eating wonderful food, drinking in local bars, but it was a city, it was busy and dirty.  We were there to relax.

 My darling wife in a restaurant overlooking the promenade in Puerto Vallarta

We were not getting the relaxation we wanted and so I looked among the information sheets so readily available.  Among the pirate ship cruises, swimming with the dolphins (dolphins trapped in pools to entertain tourists), exhibits, zip-lines, I saw boat taxis to the village of Yelapa.  Nothing more said about it than that.  On the map I saw no road, no listed hotel, only a waterfall as a site of interest.  We went down to the small pier and looked around for the taxis.  We found some possibly disreputable looking people who took our money and gave us a slip of paper for the following day.  They were standing near some boats so we hoped they would be there the next morning, and indeed they were.  The boat ride was fabulous, past rocky outcrops on a beautiful blue ocean, wind and spray whipping through our hair. 

We stopped to see a whale breach with its baby.  The taxi silent, drifting on the waves, as the majestic creature passed by us.  it is illegal in the bay to get within a certain distance of a whale, and all engines must be turned off.  Whales are Christina's favorite.

A water taxi in Banderas Bay

After about 45 minutes we got to the beach at Yelapa, the taxi tying up at a stone dock to the south of a small bay, surrounded by steep, jungled hills, a shallow river running through the beach and four buildings in sight.  A sailboat bobbed gently in the bay.  In ten minutes we traversed the entire beach from dock to the steep stairway that led up the cliffs to a village out of sight, Jalapa.  We contemplated climbing those stairs but remembered what we needed, peace, relaxation.  We returned to the center of the beach (although climbed the stairs the following day) where there were some shacks with covered seating areas, the chairs cheap plastic or ancient wooden deckchairs.  There we sat, in a place of magical beauty, books to read, music in our ears, a steady supply of coolish beer, sand between our toes.  Not bothered by people, warmed by the sun or cooled by the shade.  Able to dip in the ocean, the sand between our toes.  We had no need to talk, just companionable silence, occasionally smiling at each other.  What a day.  Pure magic.  Nothing to do, nothing to achieve, nowhere to go.  Just being in beauty, quietly, restfully.

The bay at Yelapa

So, here in Texas, with the stress of my wife's work, and the unwelcoming world outside our doors, each weekend I try to create a little oasis.  Warmth, water, music, cold beer.  Books in the sunshine.  Nothing to do, nowhere to be.  A watchful man to provide simple food and a fresh beer when wanted, but not to pester or bother.  Not that magical day, but the elements from that day, so that there can be some new moments of peace, relaxation, and happiness.

Incarceration versus Rehabilitation, Safety versus Revenge

I believe most of my readers live in the USA or the UK.  These two countries have very high rates of putting people in jails in comparison to other, similar countries, and historically.  The USA has the highest incarceration rate in the world at 756 prisoners per 100,000 people.  The UK has the highest rate of incarceration in western Europe (at 156/100k edging out Spain), although the UK rate is one fifth that of the USA.  In both these countries the rate of incarceration has dramatically increased in the last two decades, in both cases essentially doubling.  During this time the crime rate has dropped somewhat.

The major driver for these statistics are longer prison sentences and the increased imprisonment of people for non-violent crimes, in particular drug possession or distribution.  There is no evidence that longer sentences reduce the chance that people will commit crimes.  What seems to matter is how likely people think they are to be caught.

Of those incarcerated about half are back in jail within three years.  Significantly the really nasty crimes have much lower rates (2.5% for rape, 1.2% for homicide), a factor is that these crimes have longer sentences and older people commit fewer crimes, but 25 times the difference must mean something. With the percentage of crimes solved in the USA somewhere near 50% (and higher the more violent the crime) it seems abundantly clear that the only way that jails stop crime in public is by criminals being in jail.  Of course, the most crime-filled place in the USA is prison.

So, putting people in jail for a long time, rather than a short time, doesn't do anything to reduce crime.  While the idea of jail is a deterrent (police strikes in Canada and Brazil show this pretty definitively) being in jail is not a deterrent against committing future crimes.

So, is there a different way to stop recidivism?  Rehabilitation is often suggested.  Rehabilitation is essentially a program that teaches criminals how not to be criminals.  There are classes, programs, mentors etc..  While initial research seemed to suggest that rehabilitation didn't do any better than incarceration, more recent research is suggesting a 25% reduction in recidivism.  I suggest this is probably because rehabilitation programs are improving with time, like most things.  Rehabilitation also costs less.

It seems, therefore, that if the criminal justice system was about reducing the amount of crime it would be a 100% rehabilitation system.  If the plan was to run the criminal justice system at the lowest cost, it would be a short-sentence, rehabilitation system.  Essentially the criminal justice system would be a medical system for the treatment of the disease of crime.  All the evidence above suggests that this would reduce the overall crime rate at a lower cost.  This would increase safety.

As the reality of the situation is close to being the opposite (increased sentencing with little rehabilitation) the criminal justice must be about something else.  To me there are two main reasons for the present system, the driving force is revenge, and money is being generated from that driving force.  People want those who cheat to be punished, and more severely than is proportionate to the crime.  This is natural, non-cognitive drive in humans actually useful for ensuring social cooperation in groups.  Evolutionarily, it makes sense to punish those who don't follow the rules of community cooperation beyond any possible rewards of cheating.  Game Theory has a nice example with the Prisoner's Dilemma.  As a result, any suggestion of increasing punishment without a noticeable cost is generally overwhelmingly approved,  Those with a cost are much more likely to be in favor of a reduction in punishment.  Drug users approve of reduced drug penalties, gun owners approve more lenient gun use laws (such as the one causing news in Florida), stealing money by cooking the books is considered less of a crime by executives than burglary, and vice versa for the poor.

The desire for revenge is very easily used by for-profit companies who make their money off of revenge.  The harsher the sentences, the more money a privately owned prison will make.  Private prisons came into prominence in the USA in the 1980's and in the UK in the early 1990's.  I do not believe that it is a coincidence that these are the times when prison populations started sky-rocketing in each country.

So, incarceration is more expensive than rehabilitation, doesn't work as well, is a premeditated act designed to make people suffer (surely close to the definition of a crime), and makes things less safe.  So, less safe, more suffering, for more money.  However, it does work as a deterrent until it is actually experienced.

People want revenge, they really do.  They want bad things to happen to bad people, and this is so ingrained that this occurs from a very early age, perhaps as young as five months.  The problem is that this desire to punish the bad guy is hurting all of us.  There are all sorts of things that are in human nature that human beings have overcome, or are in the process of overcoming.  We are becoming less violent, less bigoted, more tolerant of difference.  I hope that we can do the same with revenge, in that punishment is limited to those who actually hurt other people, is only enough to be an effective deterrent, and is designed to reduce the chances of committing future crimes.

Decriminalize personal drug use (at a minimum), reduce prison sentences.  Replace incarceration with rehabilitation (I would actually simply replace time of sentence to rehabilitation course completion, the most common one being a GED).   Eliminate the addition punishment of a public criminal record (police should keep it) and the requirement to disclose it for employment (this merely makes it harder to get a job making recidivism more likely).  Use the money saved to work on the real causes of crime, poverty, dysfunctional communities and families, lack of education.  It would make the world a better place.

What would it take for this to happen?  A movement from revenge to forgiveness.  A movement from irrationality to rationality.  A movement from fear to self-interest.