The Magic Pill that will bring us all together

I've moved on to some of my thesis-oriented reading finally, language politics and rent theory. I think the feminists may be easier to get along with than some of these language people. I certainly can see a need for a language of record for federal and state level business, so that all people are held to a single standard wrt laws and policies. But to try to legislate private language use, or to use policy to bully people into speaking English is just plain wrong. The argument that 'our' common language is what brings us together as Americans is baloney. Just because a house full of Hispanic migrant workers can and do speak English, they would not automatically be accepted as full Americans by those who are against them now for their Spanish. The new law in Arizona that allows people suspected of being illegal aliens is almost certainly put into practice by people watching for poor-looking, Spanish speaking Hispanic people, and no doubt if these people are detained and questioned, they are not always fully informed and questioned in Spanish, in the presence of an attorney, as they ought to be if they turn out to be citizens of the US. I can't actually imagine how the implementation would come about except in big cities. In a small town, no doubt everyone knows who everyone else is, so unless this thing turned into a staged witch hunt to clear out undesirables, who could a small town target? And if I, a white English-speaking person, was in Arizona, out in public, would I be questioned? If so, could I prove my identity as a citizen? I don't drive, so I don't have a drivers' license, and while I have a state ID, my hair is rather different in that picture, taken a few years back, and no one on first meeting me thinks I look 31. But no, I would never be questioned, let alone detained on suspicion of being foreign, because I am white and speak English with a Western accent. Even if I spoke entirely in a French, or German, or Russian accent, no one would be at all alarmed. If I spoke with a Spanish accent even, I'd be safe. It isn't the English then that protects me, but my skin-color. There are Mexicans who speak better English than their US citizen counterparts this side of the border, so the language test won't root out the 'extra' Hispanics, but it'll keep their numbers down, perhaps. (And this language business is bringing us all together?)

Call me old-fashioned, but to my thinking people are drawn together when they seek to understand and appreciate each other as human beings. Last I checked, speaking English was not synonymous with being human, as a necessary and sufficient condition for inclusion in our species.

Seeking the patterns of the universe underlying all things

I think I have settled enough for myself of a coherent theory of gender that I can read other people's ideas, however blatantly and intentionally offensive, and assess them reasonably. Does gender have much to do with my thesis? Not directly. Rent is due to the differences in production costs or productivities of things all operating within the same system. On a very brief timescale gender can operate as this sort of relation, for instance in a place like China, where modernization is accelerated and both genders are expected to work in factories and science/technology positions, and in modern business models, if women were traditionally socialized to be further from the new ideal than men were, then it would cost more to bring women up to speed relative to the cost for retraining the men, This would be a cost that could be assessed by using variations on rent models, but in general gender issues are not this simple or of this pattern.

One criticism of using rent concepts to discuss gender, which I consider pretty weak, is that it uses a cold mathematical construct from with paternalistic knowledge, from economics in particular, to try to discuss something which involves emotions and experiences at an individual level, beyond the reach of economic modeling. It could, indeed, be misused such that this would be good criticism. But using a mathematical model correctly, as a tool to understand the relationships between things, is no more wrong than using a hammer to nail a bench together.

The problem with rent being applied to gender where it is less homogenized than the China example above is that there is no single standard of productivity or value against which all people are measured, and no homogeneous group of 'women' or 'men' to compare. Human beings vary in enough details that the things we might wish to calculate are more likely to run on a continuous distribution, with the male and female mean, mode and average shifting only slightly relative to the overall values. But, underneath the idea of using rent in social and political theory lies the idea of considering the mathematical shapes of systems as they compare across fields. I still want to try mapping chemistry equations against social behaviors like voting, or the matrix and differential equations from parts of ecology mapped against multiculturalism. The importance here is pattern. The details matter, of course, but there are equations with some degree of success in describing complex events in the 'hard' sciences that could be mapped into social systems as well, to get at the underlying dynamics of societies. Would this be useful? At one point many of the physics concept demonstrations were mostly considered cheap parlor tricks, not really of much use, and not worthy of much funding outside the ivory tower of academia. Those demonstrations and the physics behind them lie at the foundation of our whole modern high-tech world. I doubt a computer will ever regulate society any more than a computer really regulates the Internet. Big complex systems have too many complex dynamics, generating emergent systems and all sort of odd singularities, so that for a species as stubborn and vain as humans, there may always be too much going on for a computer to manage. Being able, though, to discover more completely how stable peaceful governments become established might help improve the lives of millions of people, and figuring out how to successfully address the growing population of pets in the US might help prevent the millions of cats and dogs and other animals killed or abandoned to die each year as excess pets. These are the sorts of dynamics where math is a tool our species would be foolish not to utilize.