Americans are Polygamists

This is from my recent reading of the book Elsewhere USA.  In the book it describes that similar to the African areas of Mali and Malawi, America also practices a form of polygamy.  All thanks to the laws of economics and biology.

A the book describes, one of the best predictors of polygamy in a society is income inequality.  While America doesn’t approach at all those of some African villages, we are certainly number one in the Western world in income inequality.

As Elsewhere describes:

The linkage between economic inequality and polygamy is two-way – that is, polygamy both causes and is caused by inequality.  Let’s start with the basic fact that a man can produce thousands of offspring by spreading his seed while a woman is limited to around twelve or so.  But when women choose their mates, they are not just after who can provide good sperm; they also want to make sure that a would-be father both has enough resources to support a child and will, in fact, invest time and money in that child.

Confronted with a distribution of income in which the distinctions across potential suitors is not terribly great, a woman will still try to land the best catch, but she probably will not be willing to share her man.  If there are a thousand fish in the sea; it’s not worth it to take one half (or 1/3, or 1/4) of the resources of any given man.  Better to go down a notch and enjoy the complete attention, time and money of the next richest fellow.  However, sometimes the distinctions between men are so great as to alter the calculations.  If a few men control almost all of the wealth while the vast majority have very little to offer in terms of a stable source of income, then it may be worth it to be the 4th wife of the very rich man rather than the first and only of a very poor one.  At least you can guarantee your babies will eat well.

Now that the US income is becoming increasingly unequal, we’re becoming polygamists as well. Our version however are different than the African versions in these ways:

1. Ours is not a static, mormon-type of polygamy but rather a dynamic version.  It’s better suited for a society with fluid status and class positions like ours
2. Ours is a polyandrous society – meaning multiple husbands
3. America’s polygamy is both a result and a cause of inequality

The first point called “dynamic polygamy” can also be called “serial monogamy”  It’s a semantic difference.  As the author says,

If “being married” means producing offspring and/or having ongoing mutual responsibilities, then when you get a divorce, you are not really pressing the erase button, you are just building another thatched hut across town where you may set up with another wife while still paying child support, alimony, or plain old respects to the first.  It doesn’t matter if the 2nd marriage started as an affair during the first, the end result from the point of view of family responsibilities is more or less the same: you have two wives (or husbands).

Our tendency to divorce is in many ways extremely similar to the form of polygamy that’s occurring in Africa.  This results in something interesting things in America.  For instance, many women today don’t get married at all as not all men have the means to support a family. It’s been calculated that there are now 60 eligible men for every 100 women.

Over the past 20 years, other things are happening in society.  According to the book, the concept of a “starter wife” is becoming more and more uncommon whereas dual-earner mairrages (both people earn high wages) dual-poor marraiges are rapidly increasing.  The rich are getting more rich and the poor are getting more poor (two low earning folks).

It’s interesting to think of divorce as a form of polygamy.  When you hear that – how does that make you feel?  Is it fair?

Elsewhere USA is a good book

A few months ago i read the book Elsewhere USA at danah boyd’s suggestion.  It didn’t disappoint.  While it wasn’t as good as last year’s Generation Me (which i couldn’t stop blogging about), it did have some good insights.

The point of the book is the strange paradox that is occuring in America.  People used to work and struggle so their kids wouldn’t have to.  Leiseure was something you attained at a certain income level.  Today however, this isn’t the case.  For the first time in history, the more we are paid, the more hours we work.  The rewards for working are so great they make the “opportunity cost” of not working all the more great.  The result is that there is no longer a leisure-class of elites. The rich are working harder than ever.  Now, leisure is something for the poor.  There is now a crazy measure of the income elasticity of leisure and this fundamentally changes how many of us (including me) live.   As it says in the book,

Obviously, this change has affected not just when we work, but also how we play, how we love, how we raise our children – how we live

Some interesting parts in the book are:

1. There’s now a fear amoung the successful that their success isn’t geniune and an axiety that a person’s personal house of economic card is about to collapse. One interesting stat behind this is that while drinking has declined, adult use of other mind-altering substances such as Valium or marajuana has risen to the point where mature adults consume more than teenagers for the first time since these trends were tracked
2. More and more, household income rising and falling has less to do with economic times but more about relationships.  About a quarter of American children experience two or more mother’s partners by the time they are fifteen. Over 8 percent experience three or more
3. Similar to the African areas of Mali and Malawi, America also practices a form of polygamy.  Post coming on this soon….
4. Religion and The Corporate man have been at odds.  A further description below:

In medieval Cathoic Europe, poverty was a virtue and to profit off one’s fellow man was considered evil.  The Protestant Reformation changed all that which led to one-on-one relationships to go and also spiritual insecurity.  This led to working harder and acculating lots of money. Success as salvation was a new incentive structure.  However, the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the trade unionism eclipsed the Protestant Work Ethic in the mid 1900’s.  There was a truce found between expansive corporate America and organzied labor such that a communitarian eithos could reign supreme.

The rift remained though as Protestants valued thrift over consumption, work over leisure, and meritocracy over social connections.  But large organizations like IBM and GM put a premium on teamwork, compromise and being a “company man.”

Today these have been resolved through the redefinition of: leisure is work and work is leisure. Consumption is investment (home equity loan is savings).  Social connectoins don’t indicate nepotism but rather social capital and entrepreneurial skill.  Loyalty is replaced by value (you show your value by calculated displays of disloyalty – displaying offers from competitors).

——-

While it doesn’t offer many solutions, the book is thought provoking and a good read.  I recommend you pick it up.

25 Random Things About Me

Image via CrunchBase

I got tagged in Facebook to do one of these lists.  I really enjoyed reading some of my colleagues and some of my old friends from high school so i thought i’d put one together.

The rules are that once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged or however many you want. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

Here are my items:

1. I don’t like fruit (with the exception of apples) and i’m happy that my sister’s the same way. It makes me feel less strange

2. I tend to get around. I’ve been to 49 states and hope to get to the final one, Mississippi, sometime soon.  Since college, I’ve lived in Virginia, New York, Washington DC, Boston (sort of), and now Los Angeles.

3. I have no toenails on my 2 little toes

4. I was born in NY, then moved to CA, then moved to Texas before i finished my youth in Minnesota.

5. I grew up in Minnesota.  When i moved east in 1996, i felt like a Midwesterner.  I then lived on the east coast for 11 years.  When i moved to California last year, i felt like an Easterner.  After a few years here, who knows who i’ll be

6. i’ve never broken a bone. I attribute this to my love of milk

7. I love the extended Lewis Family clan and feel so fortunate that i have such great cousins, aunts and uncles.

8. When i was younger I used to dress up like a ninja and wonder around in the woods with my brother.

Recording Life

I just read a great article by Clive Thompson called “Head for Detail” about Gordon Bell’s latest experieement.  Please just read the first 2 paragraphs.  It’s about Gordon and how he is recording everything he’s doing (video, audio, emails, web, everything).  He’s been doing it for the past 14 years and is able to bring up almost eveyrthing.  Clive writes about Bell, saying:

He[Bell] had a tiny bug-eyed camera around his neck, and a small audio recorder at his elbow. As we chatted about various topics–Australian jazz musicians, his futuristic cell phone, the Seattle area’s gorgeous weather–Bell’s gear quietly logged my every gesture and all my blathering small talk, snapping a picture every 60 seconds. Back at his office, his computer had carefully archived every document related to me: all the email I’d sent him, copies of my articles he’d read, pages he’d surfed on my blog.

This really resonated with me as i am already trying to record my life. I have photos up on Flickr, i have my ideas going to my blog, i have my mundane thoughts going to Twitter, my videos going to YouTube, and my friend interactions recorded on Facebook.  I’m already on the web but just in the totality that Bell is.  Storage is getting cheaper and cheaper it’s gone from $233,000 for a gigabyte in 1980 to less than $1 today.  Soon there will be enough storage in your cell phone for your entire life to be stored.  I do this because i want to remember. I want my memories to be accesible all the time and reading the article made me realize how inefficent i’ve been in capturing them.

I really like articles like this becaues they make you think about where the world is going and wonder how human interactions and functions will change.  It touches on how humans will change when we no longer have to remember stuff.  I already don’t remember phone numbers beceuase of your cell phone. What if you don’t have to remember people’s names and interactions and you free you mind to be more creative.  Just imagine – that’s what i’m doing now….

Related articles:

• In Defense of Friendships Formed With People We Meet Online
• 2009: Products I Can’t Live Without
• If You Liked This, Sure to Love That (Clive Thompson/New York Times)

How many people can you know? What’s your Dunbar number?

In the same NY Times article i just wrote about, there’s a great section the “hard-wired upper limit on the number of people he or she can personally know at one time” and compares that number between humans and apes.  It reads:

In 1998, the anthropologist Robin Dunbar argued that each human has a hard-wired upper limit on the number of people he or she can personally know at one time. Dunbar noticed that humans and apes both develop social bonds by engaging in some sort of grooming; apes do it by picking at and smoothing one another’s fur, and humans do it with conversation. He theorized that ape and human brains could manage only a finite number of grooming relationships: unless we spend enough time doing social grooming — chitchatting, trading gossip or, for apes, picking lice — we won’t really feel that we “know” someone well enough to call him a friend. Dunbar noticed that ape groups tended to top out at 55 members. Since human brains were proportionally bigger, Dunbar figured that our maximum number of social connections would be similarly larger: about 150 on average. Sure enough, psychological studies have confirmed that human groupings naturally tail off at around 150 people: the “Dunbar number,” as it is known.

The big question then is: Are people who use Facebook and Twitter increasing their Dunbar number, because they can so easily keep track of so many more people?

I find my social networks work against/for this number in 2 ways:

1. For my good friends the relationships are strengthened through social networks and Twitter. I learn more about them and we’re able to interact more often
2. There are weak friends that i normally would discard and never talk to again but instead they hang around on Facebook and Twitter and i gradually grow to learn more about them.  Over time they turn into actual friends or i delete them and they turn into nothing.

The Isolation of Marriage?

I read a good article in the NY Time this week called Too Close for Comfort, and got to thinking more about how society treats marriage these days.

The article begins with stats from latest census bureau surveys which show that married-couple households are now a minority. The typical reaction to this was: What is happening to our relationships? This is a bad thing! But the article goes in the other direction, asking instead “is this really such a bad trend?” ….

It has only been in the last century that Americans have put all their emotional eggs in the basket of coupled love. Because of this change, many of us have found joys in marriage our great-great-grandparents never did. But we have also neglected our other relationships, placing too many burdens on a fragile institution and making social life poorer in the process.

There are some interesting facts pulled out of the study:

• From 1985 to 2004 Americans reported a marked decline in the number of people with whom they discussed meaningful matters
• People reported fewer close relationships with co-workers, extended family members, neighbors and friends (only close relationship where more people said they discussed important matters in 2004 than in 1985 was marriage)
• The number of people who depended totally on a spouse for important conversations almost doubled, to 9.4 percent from 5 percent. Not surprisingly, the number of people saying they didn’t have anyone in whom they confided nearly tripled.

What is going on with the world? Apparently marriage is the only place where people can have close relationships. What a screw for the rest of us non-married folks. When discussing this with Toby, he raised a good point in that this is due to the lack of community. We no longer are in constant contact with others so it’s no wonder we don’t have strong connections with them. Without building these connections between brothers, sisters, parents and friends people are lost without good friends and confidants.

There’s one good place where we have strong community, where we are constantly surrounded by friends and live with them day to day. It’s called College and it’s no wonder that people look back on it as the best times of their lives.

Why I like to blog

While reading Fred Wilson’s blog today about Live Blogging, he ended his post with this comment:

Blogging has a reputation as an ego centric activity for people who want to be heard. And that is certainly true and a big motivation for many people who do it. But blogging can be valuable in many other ways.

I often get in conversations with people as to why i blog.  To many it’s viewed as pure a vanity project.  I’ve found that putting my ideas and thoughts down for others to read is a great way to stimulate conversation and “talk” with friends but to do so by;

1. allowing them to jump in at their leisure.  After they see the movie or read the book that i’ve written about or if they finally get a moment when they’re bored at work.
2. not requiring them to participate.  They can read and process but unlike email they don’t have to respond unless they want to.  I’ve noticed that many of my friends will read my blog, never comment but will bring it up with me weeks or months later.  I love this.  We’re talking but in a turn-based way.  I’m just always making the first move
3. making the conversation to be public – anyone can join.

I love it for these reasons. I don’t really care how many people read it or if anyone at all reads.  Sometimes i like to just get my thoughts down on paper so they’re organized and stated and i can forget them.

Why do you blog?  What do you like about it?

Generation Me

I just finished reading a fascinating book called Generation Me. It’s a non-fiction book about the youngest generation. The book dives into all aspects of this generation. It’s major parts are worth repeating:

Generation Me doesn’t need you approval. They don’t care what anyone thinks. For them social rules are out the window. It’s all about individual needs and desires. Because of this many changes in society occur from increased swearing, more self-expression, lack of respect for other individuals and social conventions. The book states right in the beginning:

July 2005, when about half the members of the Northwestern University women’s lacrosse team wore flip-flops during the White House visit

It’s all about self-esteem. Generation Me is raised to have very high self-esteem. By giving a gold star to everyone and removing the goals from the soccer field, kids are raised to think they are great – and they believe it. Because of this lots of Generation Me are narcissists. Narcissism is the darker side of the focus on the self, and is often confused with self-esteem. Self-esteem is often based on solid relationships with others, whereas narcissism comes from believing that you are special and more important than other people which is what happens when someone’s been told their entire life that they are great.

You can be anything you want to be. This is also shoved down their throats in movies, books and society. Because of this most of Generation Me thinks they’ll be famous. They all believe they’ll be an actor, artist or at least on TV.

Most people are not going to realize their dreams because most people do not dream of becoming accountants, social workers, or trash collectors…..In 2004 a national survey found that more college freshman said they wanted to be an “actor or entertainer” than wanted to be a veterinarian, a dentist, a member of the clergy, a social worker, an architect, or work in the sales department of a business

Because of this belief there is an advanced focus on appearance and materialism. However, achieving success is becoming harder and harder which leads to increase in anxiety and depression. More and more people have serious emotional problems. This is due to:

• Economics: housing, education, health care and day care costs have far outstripped inflation. Most people spend over 40% of their income on housing instead of the typical 25%. The average home costs 37% of an average person’s pre-tax income.
• Person-to-person interactions are at an all-time low. We’re malnourished from eating a junk-food diet of instant messages, email and phone calls instead of actually interacting. Relationships aren’t valued as highly. Increasingly, there’s a belief that there’s a fine line between love – and a waste of time
• Higher expectations. As Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) says in Fight Club, “We were raised on TV to believe that we’d all be millionaires, movie gods, rock stars, but we won’t. And we’re starting to figure that out. And we’re very, very, pissed off.” All of society’s entertainment pieces show role models (read: celebrities) who are much more successful than the average person. From Cribs, Super Sweet 16 to Friends, to US Weekly.
• Because of the focus on the self, when people are fiercely independent and self-sufficient, disappointment looms large because there is nothing else to focus on when it occurs.
• Mobility stress. College admissions and jobs. They are both increasingly more selective and it’s harder and harder to standout in society as the number of people finishing both high school and college increase

After reading through the entire book, I found myself nodding my head again and again as things I see everyday start to make more and more sense. Similar to The Long Tail, Generation Me better articulates everyday patterns I’ve noticed and gives it some structure and theory. A good read – i recommend it.

When you are old

I read this passage on the plane this morning and it got me thinking…

When You Are Old

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars
– William Butler Yeats

Here’s a woman looking back on her life thinking of herself and past loved ones. Did the woman reject love at one point or has it just passed her by?  I love the thought of Love fleeing and hiding its face amid a crowd of stars.  To me this is either because its a perfect love in an absolute sense or because its gone and now out of reach.  I like the former thought but i tend to think its written as the latter.  Anyone else with me?

The american way of romance

This was first seen in Craigslist about a girl looking for a guy and an appropriate response by a guy. It was re-run in the local newspaper: