"Upward mobility" and economic growth

I've realized in the last few years that a lot of my professional success is due to working at a growing company for so long.  People needed to move into new roles, learn new things, take on more responsibility, and some of that naturally went to internal people who were in the ballpark in skill and experience.  Sure, some of that happens everywhere but the rates would be very different.  So while in one sense I can look back and think "work hard and get rewarded" it just wouldn't have happened in a contracting company like much of the pharmaceutical world.

This also applies nationwide--people who came of age in the '50s would have experienced, in aggregate, a lot of salary increases over the course of their career and looking at themselves and their cohort have learned that hard work is rewarded and if you're patient you should get ahead.  The lower growth rates of the last few decades will leave people with a different view of how things work, even if all else were equal.

Long intro but I kind of assumed that this phenomenon--lower growth--is a big part of people not doing better than their parents.  Not moving up in relative terms (ie, staying in the same quintile) is primarily a policy issue but as it turns out so is not earning more than your parents.


From Vox.

In retrospect I should have been able to figure this out without seeing a graph, given what I believe about the impact of policy on equality over the last 60 years.

Privilege of the Sword

At some point I'll go back and just post links to my missing reviews I suppose, but this was one of the more charming books I've read and a good fit for my middlebrow views on how literature should address important topics.


The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Lucius Perry was masked so it's a good thing I recognized his smooth dark hair, that and his sleeve, which was of an unusual cut in that glorious peacock blue. When you've mended as many clothes as I have, you sort of memorize fabrics without meaning to.

This book started seeming a little forced to me but grew into such a pleasure soon I was convinced the initial problems were all on me. This is definitely true of the ending, which initially felt unsatisfying but after sleeping on it seemed to be exactly what it should have been.

The setup has Katherine, a young woman, invited by a rich relative to come to the city. Against all conventions of civilized behavior he then dresses her in men's clothes and starts training her in swordplay. You could have ended up with an straightforward young-adult style adventure story which just plopped a girl in the hero's slot. But for a story that is rather explicitly about gender it's a testament to Kushner's craft how the points fill the background too. The mad uncle's idea is that a woman, given a sword and trained in dueling, can now decide for herself what "honor" is. This metaphorical give-a-woman-her-own-voice approach is mirrored in a book with long segments from women's point of view, neither of whom are Arya Stark like tomboys. Hence the quote--when Katherine thinks of needle, she is in fact thinking of a sewing needle and her domestic skills, and those have an unembarrassed place in this swashbuckling yarn.

I picked this up on an Audible sale with a 2-for-1 offer without knowing anything about it, except the "Neil Gaiman presents" bit on the recording. I've never been so satisfied with such a blatant marketing ploy.

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Improbable Transition Forms

An interesting way to view life:

There exists between the sun and the Earth a colossal difference in temperature . . . The energy of the sun may, before reaching the temperature of the Earth, assume improbable transition forms.  It thus becomes possible to use the temperature drop between the sun and the Earth for performing work, as is the case with the temperature drop between steam and water.

Boltzmann, quoted in Morton's Eating the Sun.  From the quote I'm not sure if Boltzmann was really thinking of all of life's intricate processes as just complicated and improbable cascades of energy through electrons and molecules, but Morton definitely is.

Mystères à Twin Peaks

Still Life by Louise Penny
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

First in an ongoing and apparently well-loved mystery series; I kind of get the appeal but for me it was not quite what it wanted to be.

The main gimmick (at least for American me) is the small town Quebec setting. There's a murder by hunting arrow (or maybe it was an accident, but of course it wasn't an accident) and big city inspector Gamache and his team turn over stones in the town until they uncover the hidden secret that matters.

Characters, description and plot were satisfying for moderately long stretches--I didn't hate the book. I found the final resolution disappointing but my main complaint was there was too much showing and not enough telling. For example, putatively insightful characters or actions that I thought were shown in such detail as to seem empty puffery. This includes various interview tricks or bits of detection, but the low point for me was a long conversation in which an ex-psychiatrist (part of he local color) explains how she left the profession because realized that some people just don't want to change. This is such a cliche it's a lightbulb joke* but it's presented as if it were a politically incorrect secret that was extracted by a brave soul after a long career. Better at this point I think to skip the details and just remark on her warmth or cutting humor or whatever trait was imagined.

Maybe things tighten up in the later books--the errors seemed avoidable--but there will be other books for me instead of the sequels.

*"Just one, but it has to want to change."

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Red In Horn and Claw

Animal Weapons: The Evolution of Battle by Douglas J. Emlen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Why don't all animals evolve fearsome weapons like saber tooth tigers? Why do some beetles have horns at 30% of their body weight? Why do elk grow antlers so big each year that they have to leech calcium from their bones to do so, giving themselves "seasonal osteoporis?"

This is a remarkably clear read about how much more we know that I learned in high school. It's primarily about evolution, and secondarily about the joys of biologist doing field work with dung beetles and howling monkey feces. (I kid; of course there are multiple types of fecal matter during the author's career.)

The outlier in my examples above is the tiger, whose teeth evolved for use in hunting. They came at a cost of mobility, which was acceptable because the tiger became an ambush predator, jumping on larger animals and chomping down. Put the teeth on a lynx or a house cat named Timmy and their hunting skills would plummet. That trade off makes massive weapons rare--thousands of species have them, but it's a relative drop in the bucket of life.

Most animals evolve massive weapons for intraspecies fighting. If you are fighting something with a big horn, it makes sense for yours to be just a little bigger--and the next generation the logic still holds. Once the arms race starts it becomes self-perpetuating, even if the cost is high in resource needs and mobility. Sometimes fights are mostly posturing (which is what I believed was the default starting the book)--fiddler crabs wave their claws and the smaller one backs down. Other times though it's brutal, as elks and deer seem to fight literally round the clock, wearing themselves our, during mating season.

Which raises the question of why fight in the first place? That high school answer was "over females"** and it's correct, but the book covers more specific requirements such as a gender imbalance in breeding-ready animals and geographical restrictions on resources that make defending controlling them worthwhile.

Reading about many of the examples leads to the thought that males really should have something better to do. Think about the way non-breeding ant drones work for the success of their kin; this is the opposite, a species wasting massive resources and energy fighting itself almost entirely for individual benefit. It sounds like some beetles have females digging tunnels, carrying in tastydung, and laying the eggs while the males just fight each other to control the tunnel entrance; this can't be a net positive. But it makes evolutionary in certain situations, at least for a while.

There are asides into human battle, which I admit was part of the gimmick that got me to buy the book but I found almost uniformly lacking in insightful or interesting comments. The author is a biologist, not a historian. Fortunately these sections are quite brief.

*Well, figuratively, but I like the image of male elk staking out mating territory around clocks.

**Or in rare cases, such as the jacana bird, over the males.

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