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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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The newest issue of the Atlantic contains an article about our increasing social isolation titled: The Anti-Social Century (You can get behind the paywall here). The author of the article blames our information technologies: TV and more recently cell phones, destruction of third spaces like libraries, parks and neighborhood bars, national and international mobility, and a culture that chooses convience over forging genuine connections over time. In terms of solutions, the author posits that we need a national culture change towards a more skeptical attitude towards new technology like AI and deliberate attempts to be more social. He cites the rapid growth in independent bookstores and board game cafes as a cause for hope in this kind of change.

I'm directionally on board with the diagnosis and prognosis offered in the Atlantic article, but I worry about the vagueness and naivity of the solution. I had similar worries after reading a similar piece, the book Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, which highlighted the deleterious effects of phones on our attention spans. Hari spends a summer phone free in Provincetown, MA which he really enjoys, and manages to recover much of his attention span. However, upon returning to the "real world" he finds himself sucked right back into the vortex. Hari rightly recognizes that this is an issue he cannot tackle alone, and advocates for collective action on a national or international level. He draws inspiration from movements like women's suffrage, the fight for gay rights, and the campaign against CFCs. Perhaps I am cynical, but I find this level of optimism to be hopelessly naive for a number of reasons.

Firstly, those examples which I just listed were examples in which the forces of capital were neutral (CFCs, gay rights), or in fact in favor of the so-called revolution (women's suffrage). In this case, like that of the fight against climate change, or degrowth, capital is fundamentally against a system that would free our attention, as such a system would reduce profits.

Secondly, I'm not sure democratic change will actually work in this scenario. As we saw with prohibition & the failed war on drugs, people like their vices. I'm not sure my generation would be in favor of something like banning TikTok. Hari even states that his first week on Cape Cod was pretty difficult psychologically without the soothing mind-wipe of scrolling. Faith in democracy also misses the forces of capital arrayed against the interests of the common people who have so clearly been gaming our electoral system since the Civil War. If we can't stop Big Pharma from price gouging insulin, what makes the author think that we could upend the entire media ecosystem?

I think change fundamentally has to come from a level in-between the individual & the state (or global culture). I think many cultural critics miss the very existence of this level of culture, possibly because it has almost totally vanished from our world as an element of social change. I'm talking here about the family, the local community, and to some extent, the parishes/church.

Yet I think this new Atlantic article, and my experiences over the past few years has revealed how frustrating trying to affect change at this level can be. There might well be an explosion of board game bars and independent bookstores, but at least where I live in the US, even thriving institutions have problems with inconsistency and high turnover on the scale of years which makes it very difficult to build real community. A couple examples from my personal life might be helpful.

1). I'm pretty involved in the running community here in Baltimore and in some senses the running scene has never been better. Races are packed and the casual running clubs are seeing more people come out than ever. But the more serious running teams are doing very poorly. We can't get people out for organized workouts, or for important team races. It's very hard to build team camraderie or real friendships in this kind of environment where everyone is a flake.

2). With my local church the problem is similar. Plenty large mass attendence, but people my age aren't interested in the other ministries that the church offers: working with soup kitchen, church garden, and food pantry to help feed the homeless, book clubs, or even social events, many of which take place right after mass. In addition to the flakiness present in the running scene, there's also a geographic transience: many people are here for school or temporary work, and are not inclined to work towards any kind of more permenant community.

There are similar vibes in many of the other hobbies I take part in: gardening, swing dancing, reading: a trend towards pick-and-choose attendence of events, rather than attendence out of any sense of obligation to a particular community. I'm clearly guilty of this too: I would probably be a stronger running club participant or parishoner if I didn't have so many hobbies, although I like to think I lack the worst of the scrolling/TV vices.

I'm kind of at a loss about what we can do about all this. A big part of the problem is clearly the phones,which hopefully the upcoming Tik Tok ban will help with, but I think there's also a large element of constant geographic mobility at play at here too. I grew up in Chicago, went to college in Boston, and currently am doing my PhD in Baltimore. At each stage of life I built or was part of a community, which, in the case of the first two, I have gradually lost. The thought of the same happening with my friends here fills me with dread, but staying in Baltimore is not a rational economic prospect, and also requires that most of my friends here don't leave themselves. But if not going to stay, why would I ever want to sink my roots in deeper?

Any thoughts/advice appreciated. I also think there's a lot of value in online communities that I have found here at the Motte, in my philosophy book club (university friends), and on Substack, and I'm immensly grateful for their existence, but I don't think they can even come close to fulfilling many of the needs that meatspace does. But that's a whole seperate post.

Firstly, those examples which I just listed were examples in which the forces of capital were neutral (CFCs, gay rights)

For an even more cynical interpretation I'd like to point out that CFC ozone damage was first discovered in a research paper in 1974. The CFC patent expired in 1978. Things didn't get rolling on a CFC ban until the 80s.

Sure these things take time, but I think the forces of capital saw the introduction of new patentable refrigerants as an opportunity.

The CFC patent expired in 1978.

I don't know what patent you refer to, but R-12 was invented in 1928 and in general the classic CFC refrigerants go back no later than the 1930s. They were not just out of patent but long out of patent. That the environmentalists now find something wrong with every replacement between the time of mandate and the time of adoption, so we're on a treadmill, is certainly an opportunity for the chemical companies but they're not driving the bus.

According to wiki:

"In 1978 the United States banned the use of CFCs such as Freon in aerosol cans, the beginning of a long series of regulatory actions against their use. The critical DuPont manufacturing patent for Freon ("Process for Fluorinating Halohydrocarbons", U.S. Patent #3258500) was set to expire in 1979"

citing DeSombre, Elizabeth R. (2000). Domestic Sources of International Environmental Policy: Industry, Environmentalists, and U.S. Power. MIT Press. p. 93

I think we should at least mandate that tech companies provide the ability to opt out of maximally addictive features.

For example, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, to an extent X, basically every social app has adopted the “infinite scroll of short video reels” that makes TikTok so addictive.

You used to be able to opt out of automatically being shown “shorts” on YouTube. However, they’ve taken away that option.

Instagram, used to be a place where photography enthusiasts post their pictures. Now it’s an attention on screen maximizer using algorithmic suggestions and infinite scroll short videos.

I read a book recently which if anyone is curious I can link the name, but basically identified that a problem with the digital age is that all of our digital tools and utilities come built in with distraction maximizing features. An article tries to shove 3 videos and 4 advertisements with maximally weird looking photos in my face while I read it. A currency exchange rate app is showing me ads. Everything that I do is trying to grab and divert my attention.

Some people say it’s choice, e.g. it’s my choice to use instagram for example. And I could always go for a dumb phone. Yes, but. The choice has largely been engineered out of my environment. And I believe we should mandate the ability to opt out of addiction and attention maximizing features on the tools and the so called town squares of our digital age.

I’m not sure you could meaningfully enforce a ban on maximally addictive features simply because the entire industry is based on getting, holding and selling your attention. As tge saying goes, “if you’re not paying for it, you are the product.” You can’t really do anything unless you’re going to change the business model. The other option being paid subscription, which to my knowledge has never worked for a social media platform. And absent that, the incentive would be to be as addictive as possible, while avoiding the things the public associates with addictive content. This would be a constant arms race, and likely the social media platforms would win because they can always stay just on the legal side of the line and can deploy new techniques before the regulations can be drafted to stop them.

The choice has largely been engineered out of my environment.

I'm not so sure this is true.

I don't use Instagram, I don't use X, I don't use Snapchat, I quit Facebook a few years ago, I have never installed TikTok. Facebook is the one I miss the most, as it's an easy way to access information on small businesses, and Messenger is an easy way to keep in touch with people you know in real life. WhatsApp is similarly useful outside of the US. But I have no regrets over my abstinence from the other platforms.

I do use YouTube, but not because anyone has engineered me to use it -- I just get net value out of it, and rarely watch shorts.

So I don't see why you'd say that these addictive apps are required. Sure, you won't be able to participate in "the so called town squares of the digital age." But in almost all cases, the actual net value of participating in the so-called town squares is negative. I can confidently predict that you will accomplish nothing of true value on X unless you're profoundly lucky, and even then the harm will exceed the benefit. Your voice will be drowned out by a billion other voices, all nonsensical, and your greatest triumphs will be forgotten in an instant.

There are absolutely choices that have been realistically taken away by the environment, like not having a smartphone or not reading messages on the go. There may also be careers where some level of networking online is necessary. But none of that requires anyone to use Instagram or TikTok or X, unless you are a social media manager. And the job of a social media manager is emphatically not to watch shorts, any more than the job of a bartender is to drink alcohol.

I grew up reading the kinds of novels that are popular with homeschool girls. Ann of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, George Macdonald, the Bronte Sisters, the kind of novel where the girl's only friend is a horse, and it's not even her own horse. Solitude seems intrinsic to whatever culture it is my family belongs to. It's the class of pastors, teachers, and the kind of farmers who moved to the Western US. When I read novels and hear accounts from older relatives, it sounds like people were mostly reading books in their leisure time. My father recounts playing wall ball with himself in the sweltering summer heat, but mostly reading Tarzan novels that summer. My mother recalls trying to learn to write in Elvish. She didn't have school friends, due to bussing, despite the city not having black kids or ghettos. My grandmother recalls reading Les Miserables in elementary school. Maybe according to the article they weren't alone, because it would be two or three teens and their mother silently reading in the same room.

According to data gathered by the online reservations platform OpenTable, solo dining has increased by 29 percent in just the past two years. The No. 1 reason is the need for more “me time.”

This is interesting. Why do these alienated, lonely people want more "me time?"

Was going to a theater ever actually social? I used to go to movies, and the norm was to sit there quietly, and not engage with anyone, even the people you came with, in a dark room. It's more social to watch TV in my house with my family. We talk to each other and interact.

My grandparents didn't go to restaurants alone because they couldn't go to restaurants more than once a month, and it was an occasion. Take out was an occasion, even when I was a kid. I can't think of anyone I knew in real life who met up in bars.

Because I'm from a long line of bookish but high openness introverts, it's unsurprising that I'm posting on my online culture war club instead of arranging play dates and attending potlucks.

My parents still keep in touch with their five college friends, even though they've all moved to different cities. I just met up with a friend from youth group I haven't seen in four years, and it was nice.

As I write this, my husband has been talking to me about joining a lapidary club, and taking our kids to look for local rocks at a nearby wash. It has taken me most of an hour to write this post, as I made cookies, put the kids to bed, and discussed going to the mineral show.

I'm not saying that there isn't a problem, but perhaps it's a recurrent problem. Or a problem that's always with us.

the kind of novel where the girl's only friend is a horse, and it's not even her own horse.

I had to laugh, that is a good genre description!

Solo dining is more of a city thing, and I think it's largely due to small apartments and a decline in public spaces.

If you live in a 300 square foot unit, you're going to want to get out of the house to eat. Cooking and eating alone in a tiny space is depressing. The "me time" response is just a poor classification of the problem. Trying to schedule things with friends every time you leave the house is a huge amount of work. No one ever did that all the time. Prior to cell phones it was basically impossible.

Due to the difficulty in scheduling everything, striking up conversations with random people was way more socially acceptable.

Also people would pick up location based hobbies like bird watching and just chat with the other bird watchers.

I suspect that packing a meal and eating it in the park was more common in the past. People in the park were able to beat up anyone harassing picnickers without the police getting upset. Police carried batons and used them to deal with small problems without the courts getting involved.

Old homes have front porches because prior to TV people would just sit there in the evenings. Watch their kids play, chat with neighbours.

people would pick up location based hobbies

Kind of a tangent but I think there's a widespread problem with people ignoring their locale and imitating the activities of other locales. People who live in the mountains want to be surfers, people who live in the city want to keep a farmyard menagerie, people who live surrounded by pine forests want to make mahogany furniture, etc.

Instead of people grouping around the opportunities that are present and available you end up with people separating and going to lengths pursuing aspirations that aren't present or available. That's fine in moderation but it can diminish the base until there's not enough people to sustain the local activities that require that kind of group.

I feel it's parallel to how people continuously opt for breadth of experiences, whether that's foreign travel or high cuisine or multiple partners, and then lament a lack of depth in their lives when they come to a rest.

Maybe your experience is more common in the vast low-density landscapes of America, but to me that sounds pretty atypical. Even in a tiny village you'd have a bunch of kids you'd hang out with. This wasn't always for the better, because bored kids in a low-stimulation environment would come up with dumb ideas, but the specific problem of isolation wasn't really there.

I don't know if comparing watching TV with a trip to the theater makes sense, it's not like you'd do the latter every day after work, most people I knew went maybe once or twice per year. It's not something you'd do to be social, but something you'd do to "uplift" yourself culturally. The mention of restaurants also feels neither here nor there, yeah it was a treat, normally you'd just eat at home with your family, and the typical family size tended to be larger that 2+1.

Don't get me wrong, there were always loners that preferred their own company, and by the sound of it, that seems to have been the case in your entire family, but it was nowhere bear as widespread as nowadays. Plus, the technology we have nowadays turned even social activities, like playing games with your friends or dating, into something rather alienating.

I'm not saying that there isn't a problem, but perhaps it's a recurrent problem. Or a problem that's always with us.

Maybe, but I'm skeptical. It's not just a question of looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses, I can literally just travel to parts of the world that are less affected by these social changes and notice they still have things like kids of all ages playing by themselves on the streets, and compare it to my country where it used to be a common sight, but isn't anymore.

Traditionalists always catch heat for nostalgia, but as far as I can tell the problem is perfectly symmetrical. There are people who find it really hard to believe that progress caused something to get worse, and once they get over that hump they'll insist nothing can be done about it.

Is there a supportive book you can cite that isn’t by the notorious plagiarist Johann Hari? I think we shouldn't be rehabilitating him.

I find the framing of capital vs people to be misleading. There's only really one vector for commerce to care about or impact your focus, advertising, which we can certainly attack in a number of ways. Its demise would result in the death of a lot of things like most massive free websites but that could be seen as a benefit. I don't think banning it outright is really possible, there needs to be some mechanism for matching products to people who would like to have them but surely many forms could be banned and with them the goes the doom scrolling media sources that rely on hooking you into watching ads to exist.

The other end of the coin for rootedness is family. having kids gives you a ready made community with a shared prosocial interest in the kids. The decline in family formation is really probably partially the upstream cause of most of the ills of modernity. As someone who also moved across the country away from family I think this probably isn't a good thing in hindsight. My immediate family has since split into several different cities and only now has there started to be some interest in coordinating moving back closer together, maybe not surprisingly as my generation has started to work on families of our own. Much ink has been spilt on suggestions for increasing family formation, I won't put another attempt at a solution here.

Its funny, I'm an elder millennial, so I can remember a childhood without phones (and, barely, one without computers or internet), so I actually balk from blaming 'the phones' in the abstract. I was able to adapt from the old nokias to the slick flipphones to several different form factors for 'smartphones' and I think this gave me a practical view of the phone as a tool for organizing IRL activities and keeping in touch with distant friends. That's what we used it for originally.

BUT, I work with 20-21 year old Zoomers, and holy COW they treat their phones like an inseparable appendage, and you can catch them doomscrolling constantly. I can SEE that growing up with this influence leads to a qualitatively different relationship to/dependence on the gadget, which could be source of the other observable problems. Oh, and now they're used to having a semi-reliable AI assistant in their pocket at all times, so now they can use this machine to do a lot of their literal thinking.

And now there's been a couple decades of engineering and testing to optimize the apps for taking your money and sucking up your attention and otherwise making you dependent on various digital services that we previously lived without.

Tiktok being banned won't solve much, there are 50 other apps ready to jump in and replace it, but maybe, just maybe someone will produce reliable research to measure the impact of these apps and finally get towards some policy proposals aimed at cutting out the most harmful elements while retaining the benefits. I can dream, right?

There are similar vibes in many of the other hobbies I take part in: gardening, swing dancing, reading: a trend towards pick-and-choose attendence of events, rather than attendence out of any sense of obligation to a particular community.

Seen this issue a lot. You can't build a community without a core of dedicated people constantly showing up and doing the work to put together events, and that core of people will get frustrated and burn out or give up if there's too much turnover in membership or members are extremely flaky and unreliable. So hard to even get one off the ground.

My martial arts gym, which HAS an extremely dedicated core tries to hold social events every so often, with plenty of advance notice, and it still a crapshoot as to who will show up outside of that core group.

I've spent the past two years holding regular social gatherings at my house, which is cheap, low-pressure, and I can control the environment to 'guarantee' a pleasant experience. Wrangling adults to hang out together is HARD. Some can't find a babysitter, this one's busy with work or school, that one's just tired and wants to go to bed at 9. So you invite people on the assumption that there'll be a number of last minute dropouts.

Everyone has like 15 different commitments going on at any one time, so getting them to TRULY prioritize a commitment to one group over the other is nigh-impossible. And this also seems to have shifted how humans value individual relationships. There's billions of humans you can potential interact with, and if you aren't satisfied with the ones in your circle of friends, discarding them for new ones is easy. Even if you can't find local friends, your phone offers the potential to make 'infinite' friends! Parasocial relationships! You can spend all day chatting with an AI version of Hitler or Tony the Tiger if it strikes your fancy! Why value real-life relationships at all?

This becomes especially stark on the dating apps. Human connection is immensely devalued.

As somebody whose preferred method of making friends is to identify good people and then forge a deep, long-lasting bond with them (my best friend, whom I still talk to regularly, has been in my life since Kindergarden, literally 30 years), this world of ephemeral connections where people flit in and out of your life on a whim is a bit of a waking nightmare.

but people my age aren't interested in the other ministries that the church offers: working with soup kitchen, church garden, and food pantry to help feed the homeless, book clubs, or even social events, many of which take place right after mass

I can say for myself, I used to attend the soup kitchens, food pantries, and service to shut-in elderly folks to mow their lawns and such. It was fulfilling in its way.

But what I concluded is that this was basically burning up the manhours of competent people to provide modest benefits to people who simply aren't able to produce value on their own. It is literally more efficient to donate money to some professional org that will pay to provide these services than for me to go out and spend hours on a weekend mowing a lawn myself, and I could do something more enjoyable, to boot. I guess I was engaging in prototype effective altruist logic.

But I do think that engaging in activities that constantly expose you to the 'dregs' of humanity, and seeing that no matter how much money and effort is poured into these folks, at best you're basically just raising their standard of living by 2-3% temporarily, not dragging them permanently out of destitution and fixing the problems that put them there. If you're not a certain type of person, the futility of it probably burns you out. I even tried volunteering at a dog shelter, but that burned me out EVEN QUICKER because holy cow the problem of stray and abandoned dogs is intractable, and there will never be enough funds to shelter all those poor animals, just the few that we can locate, rehabilitate, and get adopted. Volunteering your time for such a sisysphean endeavor seems irrational unless you honestly do have a deep and abiding love for animals. Which some do.

Now, I'm not denying that engaging in acts of service is enriching, and exposing yourself to that side of humanity probably makes you a better-informed person. But its also easy to do it just for the virtue-signal points.

That might be another part of the equation. Sympathy for strangers seems to be on the wane, and this has pushed us ever deeper into our chosen ingroups, and built up a wall of suspicion against all outsiders who might want to forge a connection with us.

Tiktok being banned won't solve much, there are 50 other apps ready to jump in and replace it, but maybe, just maybe someone will produce reliable research to measure the impact of these apps and finally get towards some policy proposals aimed at cutting out the most harmful elements while retaining the benefits. I can dream, right?

Jonathan Haidt is trying. But he’s getting the entire academy screaming at him for it. There’s certain forces deeply invested in ensuring teens stay addicted to their phones, and to my eyes it appears to be leftists primarily who desire to keep the status quo, who will try to argue you that it’s “alarmist” to be concerned at all about the massive societal rot and atomization occurring all around you. Phone addiction is politics addiction and a massive opportunity for political brainwashing of young impressionable kids. It’s done wonders for their movement. The moment people stop being addicted to their phones is the moment the trans movement and other adjacent movements wither and die. So it’s not just capital set against you - it’s woke capital.

Reasonable hypothesis.

It gels with my general model that scared/anxious citizens are more conformist and easier to sway by simply telling them what to be afraid of and how they can alleviate their anxiety by voting the 'right' way come election time. It failed to produce the desired outcome in 2024 but there are plenty of folks who still think we're about to collapse into a fascist dictatorship.

Phone use and anxiety and similar disorders is very strongly correlated in the research, so that's one way to 'produce' your loyal voters.

I've spent the past two years holding regular social gatherings at my house, which is cheap, low-pressure, and I can control the environment to 'guarantee' a pleasant experience.

For about four years now, my thing has been trivia night. It helps that I enjoy it, so I’m almost always there. It’s super low-pressure, and I don’t have to overthink it. Meet a couple at a coffee shop who seem cool? No need to try setting something up, “I’m at the same place the same time every week. If you want to hang out, that’s where I’ll be.” You work through the chaff and start finding a core group of consistent people. Really this is what church was but that's just too much for most people to bite off.

Another key, though, is that if you want to develop a social circle, oneself has to show up when others put on events.

Another key, though, is that if you want to develop a social circle, oneself has to show up when others put on events.

Whoah now buddy, that could turn me into some kind of... extrovert?

More seriously, the type of friends I make tend to be introverted nerds so generally speaking they don't like planning and holding events, so I do most of the heavy lifting there. But when somebody is putting in the effort to coordinate something, be it trivia or just hanging out at a park and tossing a frisbee, I want to recognize that effort and show up for it.

I'll be honest, its a good way to sort high agency people from low agency ones. The sort who actually plan events and put out the word and do the legwork to 'make things happen' are generally high functioning and reliable, which is a signal correlated with other good traits, generally. That is the signal I'm trying to send.

With my local church the problem is similar. Plenty large mass attendence, but people my age aren't interested in the other ministries that the church offers: working with soup kitchen, church garden, and food pantry to help feed the homeless, book clubs, or even social events, many of which take place right after mass.

I'd speculate it might be prevalence of stay at home moms. Stay at home moms give a lot more bandwidth for that sort of thing.

Stay at home moms are probably the most important ingredient of social fabric.

Or women otherwise engaged in home industry, to account for the historical pattern.

I think the issue of lost trust has an impact on the park and 3rd space issue. Those places often end up attracting homeless people, criminals, drug users etc. because they’re free to the public and thus nobody can stop them. Which makes nobody else want to really use the space for the intended purpose. And thus when people want a third space that they can be relatively sure is safe for them and their family, the admission charge is a feature, not a bug. The same sort of problem plagues the building of public transit. It cannot go anywhere useful (because people move to good neighborhoods to avoid the kinds of people who ride buses, subways, and trains), and because the public transport itself often invites the criminals and homeless and others. You aren’t going to see either thing take off until the issues creating a low trust society are solved.

I think in some cases it’s why the internet has become the hangout of choice. Watching TV or doing things online doesn’t involve contact with such undesirables or the results of their activities. Buying online is simpler because you don’t have to hunt down an employee to unlock the item you want.

I think in some cases it’s why the internet has become the hangout of choice.

What follows is speculative but, this feels to me as completely backwards causality. The internet didn't become a hangout because of the decline of 3rd spaces it's the opposite. People go to third spaces for things like

  • It's a schelling point for engagement
  • To get stimulation
  • To get information

The internet is much more efficient at all of these things. Unfortunately, efficient doesn't= better at scale, and there are a bunch of 2nd and 3rd order benefits that have been lost to the point that the system of community is worse off for it in many respects.

But you can't return people to libraries by getting rid of the homeless. You have to get rid of high-speed, wireless internet. The homeless are in these places because communities abandoned them, not the other way around.

The decline in social connection has happened across the first world, whereas the takeover of public space by derelicts is mostly US-specific. So that is unlikely to be a major contributor.

With my local church the problem is similar. Plenty large mass attendence, but people my age aren't interested in the other ministries that the church offers: working with soup kitchen, church garden, and food pantry to help feed the homeless, book clubs, or even social events, many of which take place right after mass. In addition to the flakiness present in the running scene, there's also a geographic transience: many people are here for school or temporary work, and are not inclined to work towards any kind of more permenant community.

This is the main problem- married homeowners will participate in community, but otherwise you need some draw. If they’re transient, good luck.

There are a fair number of married homeowners, but they don't generally tend to do a good job of participating in the community beyond attending mass and doing things like inviting the priests over for dinner.

If I can steelman an argument: If they're married, working professionals trying to build their own life, have kids, etc. its not particularly efficient for them to donate times to various causes that, while altruistic, are also burning up manhours that they could use on things that produce more value, and for which they capture more of the value.

They're married, so they don't need to meet potential partners.

If they donate a sufficient portion of their money to the church, ostensibly this should substitute for actually doing the low-value work themselves?

What does the Bible actually command about spending your own time in service of the poor?

Yeah, I've become significantly worse at contributing to church events since having a family. In my experience, it's the stable single adults, and couples with older children who hold things together.

Interestingly, my observation is that it’s couples with older children, irrespective of whether they also have younger children.

's also a geographic transience: many people are here for school or temporary work, and are not inclined to work towards any kind of more permenant community.

The geographic transience is the hardest, that I have personally dealt with. Almost all of my close friends I've known for over a decade have moved away. Many of them want to come back because they're lonely, but constraints of work / family / finances make it difficult.

It's a very stupid and annoying cultural situation that everyone moves all the time. Sigh.

Geographic transience in America overall is overstated - the median American lives 18 miles from their mother.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-family.html

I'd imagine among the sort of intellectual elite class the numbers are FAR higher. Anecdotally for me it's well over 50% for the well off amongst my friend groups.

Maybe I'm an outlier, but this is not true at all for my community in Baltimore. Every single person I know, except for my boss who moved his parents here when their health started to decline, lives more than 18 miles from their mom.

The Baltimore region seems to have a higher median fwiw.

The use of median rather than mean suggests a selective approach to characterizing transience relative to other parts of the world.

I don't know how it's characterized in other parts of the world, but median makes intuitive sense given that the distribution has a long right tail and it tells you what the situation of the typical American rather than an ""average"" American who may not exist in any large numbers.

It's precisely because the distribution has a long right tail that you want a mean rather than a median if you want to discuss relative differences. The relative differences are themselves located in the nature of the right-end tail.

Mean, median, and mode are all forms of averaging, but imply different things and thus serve different demonstrative / comparative purposes.

Median average is just '50% of the population is below this number, and 50% is above.' It's decent for centering on clusters, but when spectrums are non-symmetrical it's also non-representative. This can be a good thing- it's a way to ignore outliers- but it can also be a bad thing- because it ignores outliers. In the structure the claim- 'American transience is overstated'- the very premise is about the nature of the outliers (if Americans are more transient than others), but the model of averaging chosen specifically omits the role of outliers.

A mode-average is just the most common category in a set. If you broke the average distances of [distance from mother] in 20km blocks (0-20 km,20-40, etc.), a mode-average could tell you which category was the most common, but not actually what a mean or even median average was. After all, there is only 1 20-unit blocks between 0 (co-located with mother) and 20, but there are potentially infinite blocks beyond 20, but as long as more people in the single 0-20 block than in any single 20-unit block beyond it, it wouldn't matter if a hypermajority of people lived beyond 20 units from their mothers, the 'average' would still be 0-20.

Median averaging is where you'd expect to the differences in cultural differences show up in data, because the nature of the right tail is itself going to be that difference. Being a long right tail is itself a demonstration of transience compared to a population which has a short right tail. However, only a median-average would be expected to capture that if/when mode-groups or medians are skewed towards a hyper-concentrated left.

This is especially true when you consider reasons why mother and adult-child might live close other than a lack of transience. The article / you worked with an assumption that it's because people never move away in the first place (non-transient), but a transient-lifestyle could alternatively simply move back after some point (to take care of an elderly parent)... or see the parent move after the child (moving closer to the grand kids). Transience could be very high, but the median being used (heh) wouldn't reflect it. This is something that only a highly transient, but also exceptionally rich, society could do. It would have very different implications from a society where the generations never left the home village at all, even if both fit the same median average.

It's not that median-average doesn't serve very important roles, but for comparing different populations- and thus the validity of macro-trends such as relative transience- you need means.

when spectrums are non-symmetrical it's also non-representative.

On the contrary - it is representative in that half the people you meet will be above that number, and half below. A mean would represent a much more unusual case.

In the structure the claim- 'American transience is overstated'- the very premise is about the nature of the outliers (if Americans are more transient than others), but the model of averaging chosen specifically omits the role of outliers.

The claim is not about the nature of the outliers, it's about the nature of the median experience. The other comments in this thread talk about all or many/most people being transient and not living in a particular place for a long time. The median speaks directly against that in a way that the mean does not, because you're more likely to encounter a median American than a mean one

As for cross country comparisons, I didn't say anything about those at all. Obviously you should compare means with means and medians with medians. My point is that 18 miles is not very far, and that stands regardless of what happens in other countries.

The article / you worked with an assumption that it's because people never move away in the first place (non-transient), but a transient-lifestyle could alternatively simply move back after some point (to take care of an elderly parent)... or see the parent move after the child (moving closer to the grand kids). Transience could be very high, but the median being used (heh) wouldn't reflect it.

This is a legitimate point and I'd be interested to see more data that looks at this side of the equation.

As for cross country comparisons, I didn't say anything about those at all. Obviously you should compare means with means and medians with medians. My point is that 18 miles is not very far, and that stands regardless of what happens in other countries.

The transience of Americans being transients isn't based on how much Americans move in and of themselves- it is how much Americans move compared to non-Americans.

What happens in other countries is what matters when characterizing a relative characteristic of a country-level population (Americans), just as minority difference in the face of overwhelming similarity are key distinguishing factors in other forms of overall-population comparison.

This can go from comparisons of GDP per capita (we don't go with a median income), to comparisons of intelligence (the interesting difference in a 100 vs 120 IQ is not the 100 they have in common), to even species (the DNA overlap between humans and monkeys sharing 99.8% DNA would not imply a difference if you took a more median-concept basis of comparison).

That both Americans and non-Americans have 50% of their populations that live in the same pattern isn't what would indicate whether Americans and non-Americans significantly diverge in ways that drive a population-level characterization.

What happens in other countries is what matters when characterizing a relative characteristic of a country-level population

Again, I never implied anything about any relative characteristics. My point is that 18 miles is not much in an absolute sense.

This can go from comparisons of GDP per capita (we don't go with a median income)

Median income is often more useful for the same reasons I describe above, and the same goes for the rest of your points (although I must again stress that between country comparisons have nothing to do with my claim).

Probably "hours of travel" to one's mother is a better metric, as the functional difference between living in LA and living in Chicago for me would be an extra two hours spent on the plane, whereas the difference between Trenton and Montauk is larger than the mileage would indicate. Like, the difference between Philly and Richmond is pretty linear to distance, but the difference between Richmond and Chicago and LA are unmoored from it.

I think this is a salient concern when discussing two regimes (driving distance vs flying distance) but less salient when we're really just focusing on the driving regime. I'd be surprised if there's any plane route that you can take that's faster than driving 18 miles anywhere in the country (excluding perhaps LA at rush hour?) once you account for driving to the airport, security, waiting, baggage claim, driving from the airport, etc.

Differences come back around at very close distances within urban areas. Around me ten miles is practically a neighbor. The fifteen miles from Brooklyn to Yankees Stadium is a trek, no matter how you do it.

A big part of this data is captured by "more people live in cities than is popularly imagined by middle class Americans."

Yep, I think this is at the root of much of the problem, even more so than TV, and would explain the early data from Bowling Alone where there wasn't very high TV penetrance.

Looking back I wish I had just gone to the University of Chicago and either got a job in the city afterwards of went to grad school at Northwestern or something. Right now I'm kind of stuck between my parents living in Chicago (and wanting to move back to the UK where my sister lives), my college friends in Boston or the Bay, and others randomly scattered all over.

Your second link seems to go to a First Things article about secular monks.

Fixed. Thanks!

I want to read about secular monks. Can you share the original (but mistaken) link? It sounds really interesting.

First Things article about secular monks

Maybe this one? https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/03/secular-monks

Yep, that's it. We did it The Motte!