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Arthur Brooks on happiness.
… Along the way, I learned that rewarding work is unbelievably important, and this is emphatically not about money. That’s what research suggests as well. Economists find that money makes truly poor people happier insofar as it relieves pressure from everyday life — getting enough to eat, having a place to live, taking your kid to the doctor. But scholars like the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman have found that once people reach a little beyond the average middle-class income level, even big financial gains don’t yield much, if any, increases in happiness.
So relieving poverty brings big happiness, but income, per se, does not. Even after accounting for government transfers that support personal finances, unemployment proves catastrophic for happiness. Abstracted from money, joblessness seems to increase the rates of divorce and suicide, and the severity of disease.
And according to the General Social Survey, nearly three-quarters of Americans wouldn’t quit their jobs even if a financial windfall enabled them to live in luxury for the rest of their lives. Those with the least education, the lowest incomes and the least prestigious jobs were actually most likely to say they would keep working, while elites were more likely to say they would take the money and run. We would do well to remember this before scoffing at “dead-end jobs.”
Assemble these clues and your brain will conclude what your heart already knew: Work can bring happiness by marrying our passions to our skills, empowering us to create value in our lives and in the lives of others. Franklin D. Roosevelt had it right: “Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.”
In other words, the secret to happiness through work is earned success. …
The best fish story in years from More Intelligent Life.
AS THE SUN was setting on August 18th 2003, the night fishermen of Hahaya village eased their wooden pirogues off the jagged lava rocks and slid into the water. The ocean off the western coast of Grande Comore was calm and as the half-moon rose, they could see the volcano of Karthala silhouetted against the darkening sky. A few hundred metres offshore, one of the fisherman, a veteran of decades of nights on the dark water, laid his paddles across the boat and prepared a line. He tied two flat black stones above a baited hook, then let the fine filament slip through his fingers until it touched the seabed, deep below.
He was waiting for the nibble and tug of a fish—a snapper or a grouper, perhaps, or if he was lucky, a marlin, which he would take the next morning to sell at the market in Moroni. But this time the tug was unfamiliar, and the old fisherman fought with the line before he managed to pull the fish to the surface.
Deep water at night is ink-black and the first thing he saw was a pair of eyes, glowing pink in the pale moonlight. As they surfaced, he could make out a large fish. He recognised it instantly as a gombessa, or coelacanth (pronounced see-la-kanth). Although rarely caught, it was known to all in the Comoros as their most precious asset, a fish that some said was the ancestor of man.
Only six coelacanths had been caught in the waters off Hahaya since 1966, and none in the previous five years, but the old fisherman knew what to do. He tethered it to the back of the boat and paddled back to the village. He knew there was little time to lose as gombessa live in the ocean depths and had never survived for more than a few hours at the surface. Determined to try, he made a safe water pool, and waited for the sun to rise.
The next morning, his nephew took the first bus into Moroni and went straight to the Centre National de Documentation et de Recherche Scientifique (CNDRS)—a handsome white building off the central roundabout in Moroni, which houses the national museum and archives. He told them about the catch. It was what they had been waiting for since the previous year, when Professor Rosemary Dorrington of RhodesUniversity in the Eastern Cape had visited the island to talk about a new project—the African Coelacanth Ecosystem Programme (ACEP)—that had been set up in South Africa. She had left behind some equipment and instructions on what to do if a coelacanth was caught. Her point man in Moroni was Said Ahamada, a young environmentalist.
Ahamada was at home when the phone rang. He rushed to the CNDRS, grabbed the collecting kit and then caught a bush taxi to Hahaya. “It was very emotional,” he remembers. “I was very impatient to see the fish. And when I got there it was still moving a little. It was a very big female, close to two metres, and had already turned brown. But its eyes were still shining; it was amazing to see lights coming from its eyes.” …
Wesley Pruden writes on the scam that will not die – globalony.
We were all supposed to be dead by now, fried to a toasty potatolike chip. Or doomed to die with the polar bears. It was to be a soggy end for the most beautiful planet in the cosmos and for all the passengers riding on it. The global alarmists never quite got their story of fright and fear straight, whether by now we would be fried or frozen.
First they warned of global warming, and when they needed a new narrative “global warming” became “climate change.” They finally settled on something they could prove because the climate does, in fact, change. First it rains, and then the sun comes out. Then it rains again. Rain, sun, rain, sun, drip, drip and dry. The narrative is ever new.
There was always a scarcity of evidence that the globe was on a wild tear, but there was never a scarcity of alarm. We got bedtime stories of ghosts and goblins from the graveyard, wild monsters from Boggy Creek, even a creature from a black lagoon and all kinds of other things that make the night a time of fearsome fun and games. Al Gore, who had a lot of time on his hands after his White House gig was aborted, even made a movie about it. It’s still popular in certain circles on Halloween night. …
And, as John Hinderaker points out, a cooling climate might be the big worry.
As Steve noted a little while ago, the Northern states have been in a deep freeze for a while now. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports that northern Minnesota hasn’t had a six-day stretch colder than the one the state has just suffered through since the Nixon administration, 1972. From December 6 through 11, the temperature in Duluth averaged 6 degrees. The Brainerd Dispatch went farther back in history to find the record coldest six-day stretch in December. If you’re curious, it was 1927, when for six days in Brainerd, the average temperature was 7.5 degrees below zero.
Of course, that’s just weather. But many scientists are growing increasingly concerned about the prospect of a long-term chill. The Earth has barely emerged from the Little Ice Age, and already solar activity is diminishing to an alarmingly low level. At Watts Up With That, Dr. Leif Svalgaard says, “None of us alive have ever seen such a weak cycle.” Here is the graph: …
And in the feel good story of the week, we learn from Technology Review that this cold weather is making things difficult for electric cars.
EVs could cut gasoline consumption, but their appeal is limited by practical issues like their variable range on a charge.
As winter weather arrives, electric car owners are worrying about what the cold will do to the range of their vehicles. Message threads with titles like “Winter driving warning” and “Another way to stay toasty on long trips without running heat” are showing up on online customer forums run by Tesla Motors, which sells many of its cars in particularly cold places such as Norway.
Cold weather presents two main challenges for electric vehicles: cold air limits battery performance, and running the heater drains the battery. As temperatures go below freezing, some drivers accustomed to traveling 250 miles on a single charge have seen their car’s range drop to 180 miles. Drivers in extreme climates might see the range decrease even more. That might force drivers to choose cars with bigger batteries than they would need in the summer, adding $10,000 or more to the cost of the cars. …
Walt Mossberg has been writing tech reviews for WSJ for 22 years. He writes about the most significant 12 advances he has covered in that time.
This is my last column for The Wall Street Journal, after 22 years of reviewing consumer technology products here.
So I thought I’d talk about the dozen personal-technology products I reviewed that were most influential over the past two decades. Obviously, narrowing so many products in the most dynamic of modern industries down to 12 is a subjective exercise and others will disagree.
Though most were hits, a couple weren’t blockbusters, financially, and one was an outright flop. Instead, I used as my criteria two main things.
First, the products had to improve ease of use and add value for average consumers. That was the guiding principle I laid down in the first sentence of my first column, in 1991: “Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it’s not your fault.”
Second, I chose these 12 because each changed the course of digital history by influencing the products and services that followed, or by changing the way people lived and worked. In some cases, the impact of these mass-market products is still unfolding. All of these products had predecessors, but they managed to take their categories to a new level. …
We top off the week with Late Night Humor from Andrew Malcolm.
Leno: George Zimmerman’s girlfriend is dropping assault charges against him and wants to get back together. Apparently, she heard Charlie Manson is no longer available.
Leno: The Washington Redskins have benched quarterback Robert Griffin III. He showed great promise at first but now his play has fallen apart. President Obama said, “Tell me about it.”
Leno: Kanye West says he wants to be the Obama of clothing. He’s designing fashions no one wants and selling them on a website that doesn’t work.
Leno: Only one government health program is having a worse roll-out than ObamaCare: Rwanda is trying to hand out 700,000 kits for self-circumcision. Low demand so far.