Blog Mirror: Why 2018 Was the Best Year in Human History!

What?

Yep.

An op ed from the New York Times.  And one worth reading:

Opinion

Why 2018 Was the Best Year in Human History!

Once again, the world’s population was living longer and living better than ever before.

People really like to imagine that they live in the worst of all possible times. But they don't.  Things have been getting better and better for average people almost every year since year one.  Some really worthwhile points.

None of which are going to convince most people.  Even if you could transport people back in time to any era fifty or more years ago and find them stunned, for the most part, human nature being what it is, people are still going to believe things are really bad now, and they were really great then, no matter when the then was.

Heck, people are even romantic now about World War Two. . . which wasn't fun by anybody's rational measure.

Education and the real, technological, world.

Fairly recently I wrote an item here about romanticizing the past.  Fairly recently, I received some well deserved critical analysis on one of the comments I made there, from a reader, but the comments themselves basically supported the overall thesis of the thread, which was that romanticizing the past  has its dangers.

 

Oil Bowl Rally, 1980, at Natrona County High School.

It may be somewhat okay to romanticize the past, as long as we are cognizant of the realities of what we're doing. And to admire an era in the past, or something about it, is not wrong.  We shouldn't live in the past of course.  But even worse than living in the past, is to believe that the past really is the present.

I bring this up in the context, perhaps surprisingly, of the bond issue here in Natrona County.  The other day I read a well meaning letter to the editor  I set that letter out, in part, here:
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The school bond issue is ridiculous! They designed more than they had funds available assuming approval of more tax money to complete things. Swimming pools are nice but not needed. Times are tough: We don’t need these now. Maybe later.

Recent letters state the Wyoming State Board of Education’s job is to “approve academic standards.” In my opinion they have failed so far. Graduation rates, low test scores for reading and math and high school graduates barely able to read are proof. Despite creating the Department of Education, more money, new standards, etc., we are failing to educate. Forget about Common Core Curriculum or Next Generation Science Standards from a centralized government.

Here’s a thought: Let’s go back to mastering mathematics, (good enough to put man on the moon), reading, science (earth, human, biology facts), government (local, state and U.S.), finance like counting back change and balancing a checkbook) and writing and penmanship. Today’s kids would be in great shape if they were educated the way we were back before any Department of Education or National Education Association. We spent a lot less money. We don’t need the government or “education experts” telling us how to teach our kids. It is our responsibility to get them educated, not the school districts, state board or federal government.

The first comment I'd make here is the "times are tough" comment.  I hear this a lot, but here, they are not.  The entire region is booming due to oil plays. That should be self evident just looking around. To the extent that times are tough here, it's for those moving in who can't afford a place to live. That is pretty common, but the reason that's occurred is that property values have leaped, due to the boom.  Those folks, and they do have a tough situation, aren't the ones whose tax dollars would go to pay for the bond.

In actuality, the state is enjoying good times.  It's times like this in which we should build, and we always claim that we've learned from the last boom/bust cycle and that when times are good, we're going to expand our infrastructure, broaden our base, etc.  The school bond actually seeks to do just that.

But it's actually the following comments that cause me to make this post, as they're so common, and sadly, so off the mark.  We don't live in this world.

Here’s a thought: Let’s go back to mastering mathematics, (good enough to put man on the moon), reading, science (earth, human, biology facts), government (local, state and U.S.), finance like counting back change and balancing a checkbook) and writing and penmanship. Today’s kids would be in great shape if they were educated the way we were back before any Department of Education or National Education Association. We spent a lot less money. We don’t need the government or “education experts” telling us how to teach our kids. It is our responsibility to get them educated, not the school districts, state board or federal government.

"Back to Basics" has been an educational movement for at least 30 years.  Perhaps, although probably not, 30 years ago it made some sense. But that world of 30 years ago has died.  This no longer reflects reality at all.  It's not that these topics are bad, they're not, its just that not only do the schools teach them (except for penmanship, which has passed by the wayside) but they're doing well with them, and have a lot of additional material to teach.  In short, not only do the schools do much better with the basic topics than they were here 30 years ago, they are tasked with a monumental task of educating children for the world we live in today.

I graduated from NCHS in 1981. The first thing that I'll note about that is that, in spite of what people may sometimes romantically recall, the education being offered in the school now is far and away superior to what it was then.

This isn't to say our education was bad. Far from it.  It was pretty good.  Some of the critics of our local district later found that when we graduated we fared pretty well compared to the graduates of public schools elsewhere.  But, having said that, what students are taught presently, and how they are presently taught, has enormously improved.  The number of credits required to graduate has gone up and up and year after year, and the quality of that learning has as well.

And the world that we graduated into in 1981 just isn't the same as the one that exists now.

In 1981, when I graduated, with an oil boom going on, locals could enter a work world in which everything was mechanical.  Most boys messed with cars at the time in a "shade tree mechanic" sense.  When I graduated in1981 I owned a 1974 Ford F100, a vehicle which was only seven years old at the time, and which was purely mechanical.  It didn't last long after that, as it had over 140,000 miles on it, a tremendous number of miles for the time.  I could, however, actually work on it.  We presently have a 1997 Dodge D1500, a roughly equivalent truck, for use by the teenagers and around town here.  It's computerized and there are aspects of it that only a trained technician can work on.

This is equally true of everything else in that 1981 world.  All shop equipment was mechanical.  A drilling rig I worked on while in college was purely mechanical. The logging equipment used on that rig was electric and radioactive, with the data recorded in analog fashion.  When I went to basic training the howitzers we trained on were adjusted manually and hydraulically.  If we direct fired, which we only occasionally did, we used the guns telescopic sight.  When I switched to fire support I used a Brunton compass, binoculars, and a map to spot artillery.  I used the Brunton compass again while a geology student at the University of Wyoming, where I also learned how to make maps using a theodolite and plain table, instruments so old that George Washington would have recognized them from his surveying days.

All of this is now a think of the past. While I do feel that the past is much more with us than we imagine, it is folly to pretend that a graduating student today can get by with basic skills in a world in which absolutely nothing remains basic.  Reading, writing, and arithmetic, in their basic forms, are not going to suffice in this world.  A person needs to know how to apply them, or how they can be applied.  Ideally they'll have some experience in applying them.  And, beyond that, hopefully they will have received a solid foundation in history, science and a foreign language.

I should note that I also wrote a letter to the editor, although because of my late submission and my crowding the word length restriction, I'm not sure if it will be published.  It reads as follows.

As a lifelong Natrona County resident familiar with industry and the economics of our communities I’ve often heard that industry and commerce is the lifeblood of our community and that we should do what we can in order to provide an entry way for graduating students into local careers. I’ve also heard from those in business that they wished there was a greater pool of well-trained residents who were ready to enter the work place.  Natrona County School District No. 1’s Center for Advanced and Professional Studies (CAP) is designed to address those needs.

The CAP will provide high school students with a facility that will offer them training in a variety of fields relevant to our community.  Courses in business, agriculture & natural Resources, architecture, construction, and manufacturing & engineering, will be offered, giving those who take them a jump on a later college career or the ability to go directly into work.  For those planning to go directly to work, having these courses increases their chances of finding a good paying job in their immediate future.  For those going to college, exposure to these fields when they are still forming their plans offers them a big advantage later.  For those of us in the community, having this facility available to students increases the chances that our local community will benefit from a well-trained group of motivated young people, something we always claim we desire, and which employers clearly want.

The pending bond will pay for equipment at the CAP facility it will otherwise not be able to obtain.  Having modern equipment available to students is critical in this era in which nearly every industrial, technical and scientific job is now high tech compared to even a decade ago.

This provides another reason to support the bond, and to demonstrate that what we’ve claimed to be our views for many years really are.  In addition to building and repairing the critical swimming pools and upgrading safety facilities in existing schools this provides an ample reason to support the bond.  Please vote yes on May 6.

This touches upon the same topics, but here I'll add one more.  Here in this county, for as long as I have remembered, residents have looked toward the oil and gas industry for employment, while at the same time arguing that we need to broaden our economic base.  But in reality, we're not doing a good job of training people who want to enter these industries to do so at the entry level.  Here too we seem to look towards a romantic past that just no longer exists.  If we're really serious about this we need to adjust accordingly.  Of course, perhaps we really aren't that serious, or perhaps we just don't care to pay for our aspirations, no matter how minor the costs, either.

Young people have been the greatest export of rural areas for some time.  Generally, rural areas do a pretty good job of educating people really, and I think our district is no exception.  But then we find that we ship them off elsewhere to finish their education.  I can't say that these measures will stop this, but I am sure that for those who look back to some time when they imagine a more rigorous basic education, they look back to a world that never existed and which will not be coming back.

Postscript

A thought occurred to me related to my point yesterday on this particular topic.

Regarding the thought that a basic education ought to suffice for the modern high school graduate, the computer system present in a current model automobile is more advanced, and more complicated, than the one that was in the B-52 Stratofortress at the time it was introduced in 1955.

The B-52 is still around, but at no point in its history did they allow people simply to go to work on one without training.  Those who think a basic education suffices in today's world just aren't being realistic, when everything out there is now more complicated than this.

On a related topic, the writer above noted, one of the items was " finance like counting back change and balancing a checkbook".  Again, who actually does that?  It's rapidly becoming the case where everything is done electronically.  Yes, checkbooks still exist, but a lot of people don't use them.

And, based upon the math they're now teaching, the schools have this covered.  Actually, the amount of math expected out of a graduate now, is far more than it was in 1981, when I graduated.

Romanticizing the Past

One of the things a lot of blogs like this one do is to romanticize the past.  It's really common on some "looking back" blogs, and then accidental in others.  I suppose its both here.

Be that as it may, it's really important, when looking back, to credit what was better, and some, maybe many, things really were, while at the same time being realistic about the past.  A lot of things were pretty dicey, quite frankly, about any one historical era.  And, as part of that, knowing something about the mindset of any one era is important when looking back at it as well.

One thing that stands out enormously between the past and the present is the state of medical care.  We're so used to the type of medical care we now have, the availability of fairly effective medicines, that we can hardly grasp how that was once not the case.  Some types of diseases, like asthma for example, have increased in the modern era, which is worrying, but at the same time many diseases, such as asthma, are treatable now and really weren't once.  Asthma was darned near a death sentence for some up until the second half of the 20th Century.  People didn't understand what caused it, and treatments for it were crude at best.  The book Mornings On Horseback gives one of the best descriptions of the condition of asthma in any era, and gives a fantastic description of how young Theodore Roosevelt, an asthmatic, was treated for the condition as a child. When he went into an asthmatic attack, he was loaded into a buggy and required to smoke a cigar as the buggy went at high speed through the streets of New York.   That sounds absurd now, but that's what they did. 

Medicines have become so common, in fact, that there's debate about whether some treat real conditions or not.  Behavior medicines are something that wouldn't even have been considered necessary up until maybe the 1960s when they really started to come in for the first time.

Serious injury and premature death is still with us, but not like it once was.  According to something I read quite awhile back, in the 19th Century the majority of men in the US, by their 40s, lived with a chronic injury.  I can believe it.  Indeed, at age 50 I have some aches and pains that I know stem back from some old injury, and that most men endured that is pretty believable.  When you look at photos of Americans in their 60s, or even 50s, that are 50 or more years old its almost shocking as they tend to look so old.  In contrast, quite a few, but certainly not all, Americans in that age range today look much younger (although not all do).  Men in their 40s, prior to 1950, generally have a much older appearance than men in their 40s do today.

Premature death in males was so common in the late 19th Century that the number of women who raised a child, for some time, as a single parent is about the same number who do today.  The reasons were different, however.  They had been married and their spouse was killed in some sort of an accident.

This isn't the only example of this, by any means. It's really common to see things like "those were a more peaceful time" or "that was a simpler time".   For a lot of people, these statements weren't true at any one point in the past.  Certainly immigrants living in densely packed crime ridden east coast ghettos weren't living a peaceful life.  Members of the Irish diaspora, pretty much anywhere, faced a pretty rough life.  Big populations of people from European and even the Middle East were on the move in the early part of the 20th Century for a reason.

Wars were pretty darned bad in various early eras as well.  Contrary to what people want to believe, there are fewer and fewer wars on the entire planet every year.  A human being is less likely to fight in a war now that any time in the history of civilization.  Indeed, in certain earlier eras a male was practically guaranteed to fight in a war, and the loosing side's female population was guaranteed to receive the worst possible humiliating treatment.  This sort of thing has resided to an all time low, which doesn't mean that it doesn't still happen.

All this isn't to say that there aren't some thing in the past that are better than now.  There are, and people who like to maintain everything now is prefect are fooling themselves.  Somethings that people take as progress are not, and some things in terms of social norms are actually swinging pendulum type deals which will reverse course and go in another direction, at some point.  For certain occupations, those which are passing into history because of technology, this isn't a good time, if you occupy one of those occupations and like your job.  For others, where this is an era of uncertainty, that's also true.  For some classic occupations, like farmer, this is the roughest time imaginable for people in the Western world, as the dreams and aspirations of somebody not born into it are nearly unrealizable.  

But, all in all, in looking at anyone era, we need to be careful about romanticizing it.

Violent society?

From the New York Times:

Murders in New York have dropped to their lowest level in over 40 years, city officials announced on Friday, even as overall crimes increased slightly because of a rise in thefts — a phenomenon based solely on robberies of iPhones and other Apple devices.

There were 414 recorded homicides so far in 2012, compared with 515 for the same period in 2011, city officials said. That is a striking decline from murder totals in the low-2,000s that were common in the early 1990s, and is also below the record low: 471, set in 2009.

Interesting, isn't it?  To listen to the news, you'd think we were awash in a sea of violence. But, in actuality, violence is down everywhere in the United States, indeed, everywhere in the Western World.  And there seems to be no statistical correlation at all between what people traditionally argue for, such as ignoring the 4th Amendment restrictions on search and seizures and gun control, and this phenomenon.  On the other hand, our perception that the world is extremely violent has everything to with the media focusing on what violence is around, and on the common erroneous assumption that we must live in the worst of all times (Holscher's Sixth Law of Human Behavior).

“The essence of civilization is that you can walk down the street without having to look over your shoulder,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said.

Hmmm. . . is that the essence of civilization?  That sort of argument is quite fascistic, actually.

I'd think the essence of civilization is that you love your neighbor.  That's  what brings about civilization.  There have been societies that had low levels of civil violence that none of us would want to live in. For that matter, societies like Saudi Arabia today are like that, but not too many of us would wish to live in them.

The Police Department said thefts of Apple products had risen by 3,890, which was more than the overall increase in “major crimes.”

Sign of the cyber times, I guess.  Folks who stole Ford automobiles in earlier eras, now still Iphones.  Maybe that's progress in and of itself.

Of the 400 murders in 2012, 223 were gunshot victims, 84 victims were stabbed to death, 43 died of blunt trauma and 11 died of asphyxiation. More of the 400 homicides occurred on a Saturday than any other day, followed by early Sunday morning. More occurred between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. than any other time. People were more likely to be killed outside than in. Nearly 70 percent of the victims had prior criminal arrests, the police said.

Another telling set of statistics. What does this tell us? Well, about half of all people who are murdered in New York are murdered by a primitive implement.  They'd be dead if there were no firearms at all.  Probably quite a few of the remaining also would be.

People seem to kill each other on the weekend. That seems odd, but it's the time when a lot of people are out and about.  So perhaps it isn't particularly when you consider that 70% of the victims had criminal records. Recidivism being what it is, this would suggest that a lot of people get killed because they choose to associate with a criminal element and, in all liklihood, quite a few of them are engaging in some sort of criminal activity.

Again, that suggests the current debate about what to do about "gun deaths" or homicide is probably off the mark, at least as to New York City, and probably everywhere, more murders occur in the big urban areas than anywhere else.  It seems a lot of people who have been involved with crime, hang out with criminals, and that can go wrong.  There's nothing a person can regulate or ban that's going to address that.  On the other hand, overall crime is going down, so these deaths are too, which is a good thing.

The likelihood of being killed by a stranger was slight. The vast majority of the homicides, Mr. Kelly said, grew out of “disputes” between a victim and killer who knew each other.

Same story.  People mad enough to kill, or motivated to kill by greed, revenge or drugs, kill.  Seems pretty obvious.

Left out of this, of course, are events like Newton Connecticut.  But if we throw them in, what do we have? That said events are extremely rare, and are almost exclusively committed by somebody with a severe and obvious psychological impairment that we're ignoring as a society.

So, do we think this information will enter our current analysis?

Probably not.  It's not what we mistakenly believe, and it's not what a lot of people want to believe.