Against Teaching Kids Good Behavior Via Violence

You know it is wrong.

Apropos of nothing, I stumbled onto these thoughts while reading Andrew Gelman’s recent post on the conflicting statistical evidence on spanking kids.

He writes,

I think it’s fair to say that the research results on the effects of parents whacking children are not so clear, and that’s kind of inevitable given the observational nature of the data, the difficulty of recall, reporting errors, etc.

Parenting can be tough. Whether you think it’s ok to handle your frustrations with the job by occasionally whacking your kids until they cry, that’s your call. Unfortunately, your kids don’t have much of a say in it, at least not until they’re big enough to fight back.

I don’t think any of the studies under discussion considered the immediate effects of whacking, balancing out the parent’s stress release and feeling of satisfaction in exercising power with the child’s pain and feelings of betrayal.

It’s kind of funny (in the interesting, not the ha-ha sense) to consider only the long-term effects, and none of the intermediate effects, of an immediately violent action that’s pretty much being taken for the purpose of giving immediate satisfaction to the perpetrator.

The old expression goes, “This is gonna hurt me more than it hurts you.” Yet I’ve never heard of a parent taking this to its logic implication of having the child hit the parent. This seems to give lie to that common saying.

If so, then why is it necessary to say? Is it just a noble lie told in attempt to justify actions that are contradictory to what parents are generally trying to teach their kids? Namely that hitting others is wrong. I’m troubled by the idea that a morally dubious act is supported by another morally dubious act—a noble lie.

Continuing with the position that the hurts-me-more statement is untrue, are you secretly benefiting from this action? Or is your lesser hurt just a little or a lot less than the hurt felt by the child? Is this a lie you’re telling yourself or your child?

“But the statement is true. It does hurt us more than it hurts our kids.” I hear spankers protest. They continue, “But this is necessary to bring about a better outcome—shaping the child’s behavior. Besides, it isn’t logical to switch roles here as the kids cannot fully grasp the idea of feeling pain when someone we love is feeling pain.”

I’ll get back to this last statement momentarily. And let’s set aside the assumption that this emotional pain could be worse than physical pain PLUS the emotional pain of being physically overpowered and hurt. The parent’s reply raises numerous questions:

• Is the apparently large amount of pain worth it?

• Is this the lowest-cost, most-effective method of teaching the lesson?

• Just why does it hurt you so much? How much of it is guilt for having chosen a quick and easy solution that might just also provide you some emotional satisfaction as you get your anger out at the child’s expense?

Perhaps answering these questions is a bridge too far. I think the reaction would be to shut down basically saying, “All I know is it hurts me and this is necessary—a necessary evil.” They might follow with some nonsense about spanking being a very traditional form of punishment, which simply begs the question.

Getting back to the statement claiming that children cannot fully grasp the pain one feels when one’s kids are in pain, here we transition from where my weak argument (just have the kids spank the parents to properly align the punishment) begets an actual strong argument.

If you truly are feeling more pain than is the child, that is a strong indication that what you are doing is wrong. And I don’t mean this from an efficiency standpoint. I mean it is a signal of moral wrongness. Morally appropriate punishment generally is inefficient—at least in the short run.

The death penalty is theoretically an easy way to conduct punishment. A quick trial with a hanging the next morning has so many benefits: avoids the expense of long-term imprisonment, gives finality to the matter, is emotionally satisfying, etc. Yet I reject the idea that a moral question can be answered by appealing to the apparent budgetary benefit, elevating a solution (finality) to the status of being a justified solution, or simply reaching for something that feels good (revenge as a moral good).

I embrace the principle that we should punish wrongdoing proportionate to the crime. This does not mean we should go fully eye-for-an-eye. It likewise does not mean we should lock people up so that they suffer. All the moral questions remain to be decided even with a punishment-fits-the-crime policy. Supporting the death penalty without answering moral objections is simply yielding to the emotional desire for revenge.

Of course alternative punishments should also face moral scrutiny. As we apply this scrutiny, we will find a stark lack of moral support for many things that are otherwise emotionally satisfying—everything from small disregards for human dignity to extreme torture. So another good principle is that punishments always be morally supported. And as a corollary considering those who have harmed us who deserve punishment: We should imprison those who we are afraid of (and to the extent we are rightfully afraid of them) rather than those we are mad at.

Likewise, a child’s punishment should be fitting to the transgression and designed to best teach the lesson desired imposing the minimum amount of suffering all around. Any suffering they must endure should be a necessary evil to teach and shape behavior—good moral behavior.

Responses that hitting the child is a necessary evil begs the question. I’ll agree with half of it disagreeing that it is necessary. There are many alternatives. It is just that these alternatives either don’t come as easy or don’t bring as much satisfaction as a physically violent punishment.

“Timeouts?!? Who has time for that?” I hear the truly busy and stressed parent unironically retort. My reply is that I get it. Good parenting is hard, bad parenting is much easier. Quit reaching for the easy and potentially satisfying emotional response of physical violence.

To complete the implied analogy: “Lock a child up” in timeout because you are afraid of them (doing wrong and never learning right from wrong). If that doesn’t work, get creative without giving up and giving in to your emotional desires or lazy parenting.

Surprising Stats (Suboptimal Edition)

Did you know . . . ?

I.

If you’ve ever been to NYC, you’ve probably noticed the blocks and blocks of scaffolding and boarded up store fronts for businesses that are otherwise open. But you probably didn’t realize the extent to which this is happening, nor would you likely know the reasons why. Alex Tabarrok fills us in:

Local Law 11 requires owners of New York City’s 16,000-plus buildings over six stories to get a “close-up, hands-on” facade inspection every five years. Repair costs in NYC’s bureaucratic and labor-union driven system are very high, so the owners throw up “temporary” plywood sheds that often sit there for a decade. NYC now has some 400 miles of ugly sheds.

The ~9,000 sheds stretching nearly 400 miles have installation costs around $100–150 per linear foot and ongoing rents of about 5–6% of that per month, implying something like $150 million plus a year in shed rentals citywide.

There is goodish news here, but don’t get your hopes up. They aren’t reforming the law or looking for technology solutions to stop the back log. How silly of you to think that. No, fool, they are just going to pretty the sheds up so the wrapped appearance will be slightly improved as they let them linger.

II.

It is a shame that NYC allows itself to look like a zombie apocalypse. The reasonable question is could there be a better way.

Let’s consider something else that demands but doesn’t get proper questioning: medical testing. In particular PSA tests for middle-aged men.

The absolute rates of prostate cancer deaths were 1.4% vs 1.6% in the screened vs control arm. So the absolute risk reduction was 0.2%. This means that the number needed to screen to prevent one prostate cancer death is approximately 500. I like to think of this as: 499 out of 500 men get no benefit from being invited to be screened.

That is from Dr. John Mandrola writing at Sensible Medicine discussing a study that began in 1993 that now has a 23-year follow-up. This is an important challenge to the conventional wisdom that medical testing is benign and always desirable.

It is hard to get it into your head yet true that it is not always better to fight cancer risk by screening for it. The silence of not knowing is better when what you “know” is not actually helpful. That is the case with much of prostate cancer—it is not a common cause of deaths. Additionally, not all prostate cancers are worth the bombs of surgery and radiation. As Mandrola says, “The problem is that PSA tests cannot distinguish the slow-growing from aggressive forms.”

III.

Something that we can distinguish quite easily is how much homeownership is changing seemingly everyday.

If owning a home is still the American dream, then it is increasingly out of reach for many young Americans. The average age of a first-time homebuyer is now 40, up from 33 just a few years ago and 29 in 1981.

That is from Allison Schrager writing at Bloomberg.

She makes the point that this is not altogether a bad thing writing,

To which I say: It’s just as well. Buying a home in your 20s is not the best financial goal, nor should it define the American dream of financial success.

Her point is well made. One thing she only alludes to is how homeownership ties one down geographically hindering one’s willingness and ability to relocate—an on-going problem of late.

While arguing that the increase in age isn’t necessarily a bad thing, she does address the substantial increases in housing unaffordability. These developments have become impossible to ignore, and she emphasizes the negative effects.

Channeling Kevin Erdmann, I believe he would raise the point that the disastrous policy choice made 15 years ago to make mortgages all but illegal for what was the main mortgage consumer is a factor to consider here. And the knock-on effects of that contribute strongly to driving rental costs up.

So I’m not as sanguine as Schrager on the increase in first-time buyer age. There is more to it than simply young people making (or having made for them) a better financial decision. The underlying cause is what is critical—not the obvious effect. It’s never quite as it seems.

Surprising Stats (What Goes Up . . . Edition)

Did you know . . . ?

Three surprising stats links for you today. The first is good news that might actually be bad news and the next two are “this-is-fine” news that is actually unsustainable bad news.

I.

We are less deviant than ever in recent memory. So argues Adam Mastroianni in The Decline of Deviance.

Let’s start where the data is clear, comprehensive, and overlooked: compared to their parents and grandparents, teens today are a bunch of goody-two-shoes. For instance, high school students are less than half as likely to drink alcohol as they were in the 1990s:

They’re also less likely to smoke, have sex, or get in a fight, less likely to abuse painkillers, and less likely to do meth, ecstasy, hallucinogens, inhalants, and heroin. (Don’t kids vape now instead of smoking? No: vaping also declined from 2015 to 2023.) Weed peaked in the late 90s, when almost 50% of high schoolers reported that they had toked up at least once. Now that number is down to 30%. Kids these days are even more likely to use their seatbelts.

They’re even less likely to bring a gun to school.

I didn’t find a lot of these otherwise very interesting statistics to be that surprising, but perhaps you will. The story is we’ve gotten very homogenized and boring. The world is safer and less innovative it would seem. The reasons behind it and the implications as described in the post are themselves somewhat interesting and surprising.

This post from Mastroianni is certainly counter-conventional wisdom. It isn’t as long as it appears as there are a lot of great graphs and other pictorial evidence presented. Definitely worth the read and consideration of his thesis. The story about sculptor Arturo di Modica and his famous work, the Charging Bull, might make my 52 things learned for the year post.

II.

Consistent with the desire for increased safety, we have only a short leap to the current state and future status of Social Security.

According to the latest Social Security Trustees Report, closing the system’s funding gap would require raising the payroll tax to 16%, costing the median worker earning $67,000 about $110,000 more over their lifetime—the equivalent of working two full years for free. [emphasis added]

That is from Romina Boccia at The Debt Dispatch. The kids might not be taking risks, but their grandparents happen to be doing it for them financially. Well, at least they’ll have AI to help them through the coming mess, right . . .

III.

Well, maybe not.

Recently, analysts at JPMorgan Fundamental Research created a financial model that projects total investment in global AI infrastructure through 2030, taking physical limitations into account. That figure is $5 trillion.

Then they calculated how much new revenue these companies will have to generate to justify that $5 trillion investment in AI supercomputers. The result: AI products would have to create an additional $650 billion a year, indefinitely, to give investors a reasonable 10% annual return. That’s more than 150% of Apple’s yearly revenue, and a far cry from OpenAI’s current revenue of about $20 billion a year.

This equates to every iPhone owner in the world paying an extra $35 or so a month for products and subscriptions, according to the JPMorgan analysts.

That is from Christopher Mims and Nate Rattner in the Wall Street Journal.

The implication is not that AI won’t be revolutionary and a great boon to mankind. I certainly believe it will be. I just think that the benefits will flow to the consumer rather than the companies pouring TRILLIONS into it. The bad news is for the investors who are committing vast amounts of capital to investments that almost certainly will disappoint—even if they are profitable. Rate of return matters A LOT.

Risk is a tricky, harsh mistress.

Surprising Stats (Jobs Edition)

Did you know . . . ?

I.

When it comes to work-ethic stereotypes, you simply don’t think of Germans as being on the low end. And yet . . .

Germans have perhaps the lowest level of annual hours worked in the entire world:

That is from Scott Sumner discussing if stereotypes are often true. He works through good examples of how and where our thinking goes awry with these generalizations and false comparisons.

Specifically on German workers he goes on to write:

So where did the hard-working German stereotype come from? Consider that Germany is a very affluent country with a highly productive workforce. In addition, Germans are often seen as being quite orderly and disciplined. Those presumably accurate stereotypes are often (correctly) associated with hard work. And perhaps during the 1360 hours that the average German is on the job, they do work very hard. Maybe they take fewer coffee breaks. Or perhaps they study harder when young, allowing them to become more productive and thus work fewer hours. But it is not true that Germans are hard working in the conventional sense of the term—working long hours.

II.

There is a lot about the labor market most people don’t understand. One thing in particular is how dynamic it is.

Start with the basic facts. The Business Dynamics Statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau demonstrate that, in a typical recent year, about 10% of establishments will close and another 10% will open. The job-creation rate hovers around 15% of total employment. The job-destruction rate is similar. Every five years, roughly half of all jobs turn over.

That is from Brian Albrecht in a larger discussion of creative destruction and the recent economic Noble winners.

III.

One implication of the underappreciated dynamism of the labor market is to realize how important immigrants are to it. This would include how much immigrants help add lubrication to the process filling much needed roles and changing with those changing needs. Cato’s David Bier gives examples specific to just one particular group of immigrant workers, H-1B visa holders.

In fact, tens of thousands of H‑1B workers leave their original H‑1B employers every year. Figure 1 shows the number of H‑1B workers switching to new employers by fiscal year. Between fiscal year 2005 and 2024, H‑1B workers changed jobs over one million times (1,115,069). The number of switches grew from about 24,000 in 2005 to a record 123,888 in 2022—a more than fivefold increase. The number of approved H‑1B petitions for a change of employer has fallen in the past two years, plummeting to just 63,865 in 2024.

Keep in mind that this is within a pool of only about 700,000 H-1B workers. So that is A LOT of turnover.

Surprising Stats (Good News Edition)

Did you know . . . ?

I.

The middle class is shrinking! But don’t clutch your pearls and shriek in horror. It is a good thing as they are moving into the upper class. And before you try to counter with the obvious, the poor are getting richer too.

That graph is from Jeremy Horpedahl where as he notes in the subject line one-third of U.S. families earn over $150,000 [annually].

He followed up with another post digging deeper into the trends. In particular he wanted to address the question regarding if the rise in dual-income families explains the growth in family income. His answer:

In short: most of the growth of high-income families can not be explained by the rise of dual-income families. The basic reason is that the growth in dual-income families had mostly already occurred by the 1980s or 1990s (depending on the measure). So the tremendous growth since about 1990, when just about 15 percent of families were above $150,000 (in 2024 dollars), is better explained by rising prosperity, not a trick of more earners.

Kevin Erdmann, while agreeing with the general point of the original graph, does find something to challenge in the straightforward implication that the rising tide is lifting all the boats.

In a nutshell, this data is not fully adjusted for inflation. Or, rather, I should say, the adjustment is biased. The housing shortage creates rent inflation that is highly regressive, down to the neighborhood level. Go 5 miles in one direction to a neighborhood with residents earning more than $150,000 and go 5 miles in the other direction to a neighborhood with residents earning less than $50,000. It is likely that rents in the first neighborhood have risen along with general inflation and that rents in the second neighborhood have risen something like 40% more than general inflation since 2016.

II.

Back to the good news, Don Boudreaux elaborates on four ways you’re living better than ever. One of these is the surprising stat.

Supermarkets today carry many more items than they did in the past. Estimates vary, but supermarkets now carry roughly 32,000 different items (with some estimates being over 40,000 items, and some even as high as 50,000), while in 1975 the number was around 9,000.

There is more at the link certainly worth reading in full including this on life expectancy:

Life expectancy today is three percent longer than in 2000, five percent longer than in 1990, eight percent longer than in 1980, 12 percent longer than in 1970, and 13 percent longer than in 1960.

III.

Those stats on life expectancy might be surprising to you—especially if you pay much attention to the news media. That is because they tend to give A LOT of coverage to the sensational but unlikely causes of death while glossing over or ignoring totally the likely but unremarkable causes. Consider this graphic from Our World in Data as posted by Nathan Yau at FlowingData.

IV.

Finally, one potentially life-threatening ailment is in sharp decline: Peanut allergies in children. From the NYT:

In 2017, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases formally recommended the early-introduction approach and issued national guidelines.

The new study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, found that food allergy rates in children under 3 fell after those guidelines were put into place — dropping to 0.93 percent between 2017 and 2020, from 1.46 percent between 2012 and 2015. That’s a 36 percent reduction in all food allergies, driven largely by a 43 percent drop in peanut allergies.