Unmasking Millionaire Superheroes: Edwin Chadwick and Thomas Southwood Smith

Posted on January 9, 2015 by Jonathan Andreas — 1 Comment

Max Roser has created a treasure trove of unique visualizations of data showing what the work of millionaire superheroes has accomplished over the past two centuries at his personal blog, and at his new site, Our World in Data. The graph that is currently at the top of maxrosser.com shows the dramatic rise of life expectancy around the world:

As my colleague, Ross Kaufman mentioned at the Bluffton University Forum this week, public health efforts are estimated to account for over 80% of the rise in longevity that we see on the above graph. Edwin Chadwick and Thomas Southwood Smith were early leaders in creating the public health movement. Wikipedia notes that:

Chadwick took up the question of sanitation in conjunction with Dr Thomas Southwood Smith. Their joint efforts produced a salutary improvement in the public health. His report on The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population (1842) was researched and published at his own expense. …These national and local movements contributed to the passing of the Public Health Act 1848.

Elizabeth Fee & Theodore M. Brown wrote a history of Chadwick’s public health efforts in The Bulletin of the World Health Organization:

Chadwick played the leading role in… arguing that poverty, crime, ill-health and high mortality were all closely associated with the appalling environmental conditions of the industrial cities. He proposed that central government assume basic responsibility for the public health with the creation of a new government department and that, in each locality, a single administrative body be responsible for all water supplies, draining, paving, street cleaning and other necessary sanitary measures.

These ideas sound boringly obvious today, but it was revolutionary at the time and it took a lot of work by reformers like Chadwick and Brown to convince the public to spend money on basic sanitation and public health. In those days even street cleaning was a crucial public health issue. Street cleaning meant shoveling raw garbage and excrement (both human and animal) that was routinely dumped onto the streets before municipal trash collection and modern sewer drains.

Chadwick and Brown’s efforts were motivated by an incorrect theory of disease. They did not understand germ theory. Instead, they thought that diseases were caused by miasma (stale or stinky air). Fortunately, they were scientific enough to notice that getting rid of the sewage that caused miasma also helped eliminate disease, so their theory worked despite being wrong. They were also motivated by utilitarianism which also helped them become superheroes even though it is also an oversimplification that is wrong in many respects.

Posted in Millionaire Superheroes

Sarcasm Marks? ¡¿We Don’t Do No Stinking Sarcasm!

Posted on January 8, 2015 by Jonathan Andreas — 4 Comments

We only have two official punctuation marks that express nuance, the exclamation point for emphasis and the question mark for questions. This makes writing flat and inexpressive and has spawned the use of emoticons 😉 Writing limits our ability to express the vast spectrum of nuance that verbal intonation and body language communicate. This limitation is particularly evident in the expression of sarcasm.

Fortunately, there are international symbols that are built in to every computer’s existing capabilities that fit the need perfectly because they intuitively communicate the desired meaning. These symbols are used in Spanish, and they are readily available for English writers to appropriate for our own needs. They are the inverted exclamation and question marks (¡¿) and they should be used at the beginning of a sarcastic sentence.

Because English sentences are structured differently for questions than for statements, writers do not need to put a question mark at the beginning of a question like Spanish writers do. To ask a question in Spanish, speakers simply raise their voice at the end of a sentence to mark it as a question and there need not be any difference in the sentence structure. This makes it important for Spanish writers to put the question mark at the beginning of their sentences as well as at the ends. Sarcasm is similar. You need to infuse an entire sentence with nuanced intonation to denote sarcasm. Therefore, a sarcasm mark needs to go at the beginning of the sentence to be effective just like the question mark needs to go at the beginning in Spanish.

Sarcastic sentences could end with regular punctuation to further signify the nature of the sarcasm. Most sarcastic sentences should end with an exclamation point, but dry sarcasm should end with a period and sarcastic (often rhetorical) questions should end with a question mark. In everyday conversation, sarcasm is sometimes revealed after a statement is spoken by showing a wry smile, a raised eyebrow, or a wink. But this is often because a listener didn’t understand the intended sarcasm and the additional gesture is needed to correct the misunderstanding. Sarcastic writing will usually flow better if the sarcasm is revealed at the beginning of each sentence because will need to think of a different nuance and intonation for sarcastic sentences than for serious sentences. The end of the sarcastic section should be denoted by a single upside-down punctuation mark. Use an upside-down question mark for a sarcastic question and and upside-down explanation mark for any other sentence. In those cases where the writer wants to reveal the sarcasm at the end of the sentence, it is fine to use bracketed upside down marks at the end. Such as to say, “This sentence is soooo sarcastic[¡¿]” You can also put sarcasm marks in the middle of a sentence in brackets to denote the beginning of a sarcastic clause. I also use sarcasm marks in brackets within someone else’s quotation (example here) to emphasize that their quotation is ridiculous.

The upside-down marks used in Spanish (¡¿) are a superior punctuation for signifying sarcasm in English compared with other mooted punctuation marks for sarcasm such as:

1. The SarcMark®. I’m not even sure if I’m allowed to display it because it is a registered trademark. Its main advantage is that it got some significant attention from the press and punctuation must become common knowledge to be successful. But drawbacks include:

The SarcMark® is a registered trademark. Punctuation should be based on open standards.
It is difficult to use because it is completely new. It does not exist among existing keyboard letters. You have to purchase patented software to be able to use it!
The section entitled, “How to Use the SarcMark®” says to put it at the end of a sentence, not the beginning. This makes the sentence’s meaning ambiguous until the end and it limits the ability to indicate if the sentence is dry sarcasm (end with a period), or more biting (end with an upside-down exclamation point), or a question (end with an upside-down question mark).
It is so hard to use in a sentence, that there is no example of a sentence that uses it even on the webpages of the company that is promoting it for profit (as of 5/13/2013). They only talk about using it. But there is a lot of merchandise for sale that displays the mark without actually communicating anything sarcastic. [UPDATE, 1/8/2015: Sarcmark.com has added some actual examples of sarcasm on their website! Because of the awkwardness of putting sarcasm punctuation at the end of the sarcasm, almost all of their examples of sarcasm are really short sentences of six words or less.]
¡¿A patented symbol that costs $1.99 to use is sure to be popular for sentences describing itself¡ The more you spend on it, the more sarcasm you will generate. The Sarcmark.Com homepage tells you to buy it because: ¡¿It is, “The official[¡], easy-to-use[¡] punctuation mark… [¡¿]It’s as simple as hitting…” the link to buy… entering your payment information… downloading the software… installing the software… learning to use it… and then repeating these simple procedures every time you use another computer¡

2. The irony mark or point d’ironie was promoted by Alcanter de Brahm in the late 1800s, but you probably have never seen it used because…

Although it is part of unicode (U+2E2E), it is mostly ignored, so most applications don’t include it. For example, the WordPress system I am currently using for this website does not include it in the standard set of symbols even though WordPress has an extensive set of other obscure symbols including symbols like ♣,ζ,¤,‰, & ◊. The irony mark is so obscure, it doesn’t even display correctly on many of the Wikipedia pages that write about it! And Wikipedia is built to communicate in almost every written language, so if Wikipedia doesn’t display it correctly, it must be hard to display.
Dyslexics don’t get it. They can correctly perceive when a character is upside down, but have a hard time perceiving flipped left-right mirror images.
The symbol already has prior alternative meanings. It was originally invented by Henry Denham in the 1580s, but he called it the Percontation Point and used it to signify a rhetorical question. The same symbol is also used in Arabic to signify a regular question. So the irony mark is already has a history of use for a completely different meanings.
¡¿Over a century of failure to catch on is a remarkable record. ¡¿We should respect this longstanding tradition¡

3. A bracketed exclamation point or question mark. Subtitles for the hearing impaired, sometimes express sarcasm and irony using “(!)” so this punctuation has had some success. But it is less than ideal because:

It uses excessive characters. Why use three characters when two characters can be even more expressive?
Sarcasm marks need to be at the beginning of a sentence rather than at the end, at least for English speakers. It might be fine to put it at the end for deaf people. I don’t know how deaf people communicate sarcasm in sign language, but I would guess that they also infuse entire sentences with irony rather than waiting until afterwards to reveal the twist.
Less intuitive. The metaphorical advantage of upside-down symbols is that it indicates that the meaning is somehow upside down too.
Bracketed exclamation marks are already used for a different meaning. For example, it is often used within quotations of other people’s words to ridicule something that is being said. Karl Marx often used bracketed exclamation marks. I sometimes do this with upside-down marks for extra kick.
¡¿This idea is so impressive that it is impossible to even ridicule it with sarcasm¡

4. Scare quotes are sometimes used to express irony or sarcasm.

¡¿Great idea. ¡¿Nobody uses quotations marks for anything else anyhow. ¡¿Finally somebody found an practical use for “quotation marks”¡

5. The temherte slaq is used in some Ethiopic languages to denote sarcasm and unreal phrases. This is similar to my proposal and it seems to have the longest and most solid tradition of any sarcasm punctuation. The temherte slaq simply looks like an inverted exclamation point at the end of a sentence. It falls short of the ideal for English sarcasm punctuation because:

Nobody uses it outside of some Ethiopic languages. Even proponents like the Open Sarcasm Organization can’t seem to make it work on their homepage. The only examples where sarcasm works on their site is when other context before the sarcastic sentence that identifies the sarcasm. This is mainly because…
Sarcasm marks belong at the beginning of a sarcastic sentence, not at the end. The reader needs to begin reading a sentence with a sense of how to intone the vocalization of the sentence from the start. Questions can be sarcastic too and so we need to keep space at the end of sarcastic sentences for regular question marks. The uptalking intonation of a question only comes at the end of a sentence and so that is the natural place to put a question mark. But sarcasm is different. It is a subtle attitude that is usually infused in the intonation of a sentence from its beginning.
Unfortunately the temherte slaq looks very similar to a lowercase I as you can see here: i¡. In some typefaces it is identical to an i. ‘I’ is already an extremely common word in English and so it can be ambiguous as to whether the symbol is a badly capitalized I in English. The punctuation is less ambiguous in Ethiopia which does not use i as a word.
In some typefaces it looks like a slightly elongated semicolon. For example, Josh Greenman was a pioneer proponent of the temherte slaq, but in his Slate article it looks more like a semicolon than something new:

¡¿That temherte slaq doesn’t look confusing… Not! Ok, ok, so I also use the upside down exclamation point at the end of sentences, but I precede it with a “¡¿” so that the reader is prepared by having to context to see that it isn’t just a semicolon, and the temherte slaq is not the same as an inverted exclamation point. The temherte slaq looks a lot more like a semicolon than what I use.

6. The interrobang. This symbol is primarily used the same way as “!?” and this is different from sarcasm. An inverted interrobang at the beginning of a sarcastic sentence would work just as well as my proposal, but it is not universally available under current typographic standards. Inverted question and exclamation marks are supported by most international standards that are common to nearly every modern computer, including ISO-8859-1, Unicode, and HTML .

The interrobang is so rare that I couldn’t even figure out how to insert the character into this post. ¡¿That’s not a problem, is it¿

7. Pseudo-HTML such as, “</sarcasm>", and the Twitter hashtag, “#sarcasm” are also used to denote sarcasm.

¡¿Writing out the entire word #sarcasm isn’t clunky punctuation.We only have two official punctuation marks that express nuance, the exclamation point for emphasis and the question mark for questions. This makes writing flat and inexpressive and has spawned the use of emoticons;-) Writing limits our ability to express the vast spectrum of nuance that verbal intonation and body language communicate. This limitation is particularly evident in the expression of sarcasm.Fortunately, there are international symbols that are built in to every computer’s existing capabilities that fit the need perfectly because they intuitively communicate the desired meaning. These symbols are used in Spanish, and they are readily available for English writers to appropriate for our own needs. They are the inverted exclamation and question marks (¡¿) and they should be used at the beginning of a sarcastic sentence.Because English sentences are structured differently for questions than for statements, writers do not need to put a question mark at the beginning of a question like Spanish writers do. To ask a question in Spanish, speakers simply raise their voice at the end of a sentence to mark it as a question and there need not be any difference in the sentence structure. This makes it important for Spanish writers to put the question mark at the beginning of their sentences as well as at the ends. Sarcasm is similar. You need to infuse an entire sentence with nuanced intonation to denote sarcasm. Therefore, a sarcasm mark needs to go at the beginning of the sentence to be effective just like the question mark needs to go at the beginning in Spanish.
Sarcastic sentences could end with regular punctuation to further signify the nature of the sarcasm. Most sarcastic sentences should end with an exclamation point, but dry sarcasm should end with a period and sarcastic (often rhetorical) questions should end with a question mark. In everyday conversation, sarcasm is sometimes revealed after a statement is spoken by showing a wry smile, a raised eyebrow, or a wink. But this is often because a listener didn’t understand the intended sarcasm and the additional gesture is needed to correct the misunderstanding. Sarcastic writing will usually flow better if the sarcasm is revealed at the beginning of each sentence because will need to think of a different nuance and intonation for sarcastic sentences than for serious sentences. The end of the sarcastic section should be denoted by a single upside-down punctuation mark. Use an upside-down question mark for a sarcastic question and and upside-down explanation mark for any other sentence. In those cases where the writer wants to reveal the sarcasm at the end of the sentence, it is fine to use bracketed upside down marks at the end. Such as to say, “This sentence is soooo sarcastic[¡¿]” You can also put sarcasm marks in the middle of a sentence in brackets to denote the beginning of a sarcastic clause. I also use sarcasm marks in brackets within someone else’s quotation (example here) to emphasize that their quotation is ridiculous.

The upside-down marks used in Spanish (¡¿) are a superior punctuation for signifying sarcasm in English compared with other mooted punctuation marks for sarcasm such as:

1. The SarcMark®. I’m not even sure if I’m allowed to display it because it is a registered trademark. Its main advantage is that it got some significant attention from the press and punctuation must become common knowledge to be successful. But drawbacks include:
- The SarcMark® is a registered trademark. Punctuation should be based on open standards.
- It is difficult to use because it is completely new. It does not exist among existing keyboard letters. You have to purchase patented software to be able to use it!
- The section entitled, “How to Use the SarcMark®” says to put it at the end of a sentence, not the beginning. This makes the sentence’s meaning ambiguous until the end and it limits the ability to indicate if the sentence is dry sarcasm (end with a period), or more biting (end with an upside-down exclamation point), or a question (end with an upside-down question mark).
- It is so hard to use in a sentence, that there is no example of a sentence that uses it even on the webpages of the company that is promoting it for profit (as of 5/13/2013). They only talk about using it. But there is a lot of merchandise for sale that displays the mark without actually communicating anything sarcastic. [UPDATE, 1/8/2015: Sarcmark.com has added some actual examples of sarcasm on their website! Because of the awkwardness of putting sarcasm punctuation at the end of the sarcasm, almost all of their examples of sarcasm are really short sentences of six words or less.]
- ¡¿A patented symbol that costs $1.99 to use is sure to be popular for sentences describing itself¡ The more you spend on it, the more sarcasm you will generate. The Sarcmark.Com homepage tells you to buy it because: ¡¿It is, “The official[¡], easy-to-use[¡] punctuation mark… [¡¿]It’s as simple as hitting…” the link to buy… entering your payment information… downloading the software… installing the software… learning to use it… and then repeating these simple procedures every time you use another computer¡
2. The irony mark or point d’ironie was promoted by Alcanter de Brahm in the late 1800s, but you probably have never seen it used because…
- Although it is part of unicode (U+2E2E), it is mostly ignored, so most applications don’t include it. For example, the WordPress system I am currently using for this website does not include it in the standard set of symbols even though WordPress has an extensive set of other obscure symbols including symbols like ♣,ζ,¤,‰, & ◊. The irony mark is so obscure, it doesn’t even display correctly on many of the Wikipedia pages that write about it! And Wikipedia is built to communicate in almost every written language, so if Wikipedia doesn’t display it correctly, it must be hard to display.
- Dyslexics don’t get it. They can correctly perceive when a character is upside down, but have a hard time perceiving flipped left-right mirror images.
- The symbol already has prior alternative meanings. It was originally invented by Henry Denham in the 1580s, but he called it the Percontation Point and used it to signify a rhetorical question. The same symbol is also used in Arabic to signify a regular question. So the irony mark is already has a history of use for a completely different meanings.
- ¡¿Over a century of failure to catch on is a remarkable record. ¡¿We should respect this longstanding tradition¡
3. A bracketed exclamation point or question mark. Subtitles for the hearing impaired, sometimes express sarcasm and irony using “(!)” so this punctuation has had some success. But it is less than ideal because:
- It uses excessive characters. Why use three characters when two characters can be even more expressive?
- Sarcasm marks need to be at the beginning of a sentence rather than at the end, at least for English speakers. It might be fine to put it at the end for deaf people. I don’t know how deaf people communicate sarcasm in sign language, but I would guess that they also infuse entire sentences with irony rather than waiting until afterwards to reveal the twist.
- Less intuitive. The metaphorical advantage of upside-down symbols is that it indicates that the meaning is somehow upside down too.
- Bracketed exclamation marks are already used for a different meaning. For example, it is often used within quotations of other people’s words to ridicule something that is being said. Karl Marx often used bracketed exclamation marks. I sometimes do this with upside-down marks for extra kick.
- ¡¿This idea is so impressive that it is impossible to even ridicule it with sarcasm¡
4. Scare quotes are sometimes used to express irony or sarcasm.
- ¡¿Great idea. ¡¿Nobody uses quotations marks for anything else anyhow. ¡¿Finally somebody found an practical use for “quotation marks”¡
5. The temherte slaq is used in some Ethiopic languages to denote sarcasm and unreal phrases. This is similar to my proposal and it seems to have the longest and most solid tradition of any sarcasm punctuation. The temherte slaq simply looks like an inverted exclamation point at the end of a sentence. It falls short of the ideal for English sarcasm punctuation because:
- Nobody uses it outside of some Ethiopic languages. Even proponents like the Open Sarcasm Organization can’t seem to make it work on their homepage. The only examples where sarcasm works on their site is when other context before the sarcastic sentence that identifies the sarcasm. This is mainly because…
- Sarcasm marks belong at the beginning of a sarcastic sentence, not at the end. The reader needs to begin reading a sentence with a sense of how to intone the vocalization of the sentence from the start. Questions can be sarcastic too and so we need to keep space at the end of sarcastic sentences for regular question marks. The uptalking intonation of a question only comes at the end of a sentence and so that is the natural place to put a question mark. But sarcasm is different. It is a subtle attitude that is usually infused in the intonation of a sentence from its beginning.
- Unfortunately the temherte slaq looks very similar to a lowercase I as you can see here: i¡. In some typefaces it is identical to an i. ‘I’ is already an extremely common word in English and so it can be ambiguous as to whether the symbol is a badly capitalized I in English. The punctuation is less ambiguous in Ethiopia which does not use i as a word.
- In some typefaces it looks like a slightly elongated semicolon. For example, Josh Greenman was a pioneer proponent of the temherte slaq, but in his Slate article it looks more like a semicolon than something new:
- ¡¿That temherte slaq doesn’t look confusing… Not! Ok, ok, so I also use the upside down exclamation point at the end of sentences, but I precede it with a “¡¿” so that the reader is prepared by having to context to see that it isn’t just a semicolon, and the temherte slaq is not the same as an inverted exclamation point. The temherte slaq looks a lot more like a semicolon than what I use.
6. The interrobang. This symbol is primarily used the same way as “!?” and this is different from sarcasm. An inverted interrobang at the beginning of a sarcastic sentence would work just as well as my proposal, but it is not universally available under current typographic standards. Inverted question and exclamation marks are supported by most international standards that are common to nearly every modern computer, including ISO-8859-1, Unicode, and HTML .
- The interrobang is so rare that I couldn’t even figure out how to insert the character into this post. ¡¿That’s not a problem, is it¿
7. Pseudo-HTML such as, “</sarcasm>", and the Twitter hashtag, “#sarcasm” are also used to denote sarcasm.
- ¡¿Writing out the entire word #sarcasm isn’t clunky punctuation¡ ¡¿How about writing out the punctuation for <question mark> too¿ ¡¿Or why not just use “#<I’m being sarcastic now, ok>”¿ Ugh.
8. Emoticons like “:-)”
- Emoticons have been successful, but they are too many characters in length and complex ones look a bit like cartoon profanity: #<!%*”>?.
9. Tone indicators are growing in popularity on Twitter and other social media. Because of increasingly brief posts, the context of phrases is stripped away and cannot provide emotional tone. Plus, autistic people benefit from a wide array of emotional signals. The one that is used for sarcasm is: /S.

These various attempts demonstrate the need for a sarcasm mark, but they all suffer from simple problems and the English language is still waiting for a better sarcasm mark. Fortunately Spanish punctuation has given us a perfect alternative:

¡¿

¡¿Sarcasm can never be overused¡ I have nothing more to say.

Update: Economists need sarcasm more than most professions due to the depressing absurdities that we constantly have to deal with. For example, Paul Krugman’s blog would be much clearer with better punctuation.

The Daily Beast has a good article about the Rise and Fall of the Sarcmarc which has a great picture of European Parliamentarians holding up sarcastic-looking punctuation:

It would look even more sarcastic if they held up sarcasm marks like this: ¡¿

Also see Geoff Rodgers’ HalfBlog which has had some great posts about punctuation. In particular, he finds a humorous proposal for the sarcastises:

Although the sarcastises was invented as a joke, it is better than most other sarcasm mark ideas because, as with my proposal, it marks a text as sarcastic from the beginning rather than just at the end. It differs from my proposal in that it can span multiple sentences. I would just put my sarcasm mark at the beginning of every sentence (or phrase) as a reminder of its sarcasm like we do with questions and exclamation marks, but this idea does have merit. In my system the above sentences could look like this: ¡¿Oh wow. ¡¿Thank you. ¡¿This sweater is just what I wanted¡

Alternatively, because the sentences are so short, the entire section could end with an upside-down punctuation mark to denote the end of sarcastic section: ¡¿Oh wow. Thank you. This sweater is just what I wanted¡

Sartalics is a system with similar advantages to sarcastises. It seems to be intended for Twitter which currently uses emoticons and “#sarcasm”. The Card Chronicle uses a tilde (~) at the end of a sentence for sarcasm. The tilde is an underused part of the keyboard and it looks like a sarcastic eyebrow, but it’s use as punctuation for sarcasm hasn’t taken off.

Shady Characters has the most exhaustive work about punctuation and particularly the punctuation of irony, and the author has even written a book on the subject. Brain Pickings gave a comprehensive summary of the irony section of the book.

The easiest way to start using sarcasm punctuation in your own writing is to simply select the characters here–¡¿–then copy and paste them into your writing. All computers can already create the characters and several websites tell how.

How about writing out <question mark> too¿
¡¿Why not just use “#<I’m being sarcastic now, ok>”¿ Ugh.

8. Emoticons like “:-)”

Emoticons have been successful, but they are too many characters in length and complex ones look a bit like cartoon profanity: #<!%*”>?.

9. Tone indicators are growing in popularity on Twitter and other social media. Because of increasingly brief posts, the context of phrases is stripped away and cannot provide emotional tone. Plus, autistic people benefit from a wide array of emotional signals. The one that is used for sarcasm is: /S.

These various attempts demonstrate the need for a sarcasm mark, but they all suffer from simple problems and the English language is still waiting for a better sarcasm mark. Fortunately Spanish punctuation has given us a perfect alternative:

¡¿

¡¿Sarcasm can never be overused¡

Update:

Gen-Z is using ellipses to indicate sarcasm as in:

“Just ~*love*~ when I remember a paper two hours before it’s due.”

Gen-Z also sometimes uses wacky capitalization like, “ArE yOU kIdDIng mE!” That mix of uppercase and lowercase letters makes the statement look unhinged like the scribbling of a conspiracy theorist. In text messages, they sometimes think that the mere use of a period at the end of a sentence is a signal of sarcasm!

Economists need sarcasm more than most professions due to the depressing absurdities that we constantly have to deal with. For example, Paul Krugman’s blog would be much clearer with better punctuation.

The Daily Beast has a good article about the Rise and Fall of the Sarcmarc which has a great picture of European Parliamentarians holding up sarcastic-looking punctuation:

It would look even more sarcastic if they held up sarcasm marks like this: ¡¿

Also see Geoff Rodgers’ HalfBlog which has had some great posts about punctuation. In particular, he finds a humorous proposal for the sarcastises:

Although the sarcastises was invented as a joke, it is better than most other sarcasm mark ideas because, as with my proposal, it marks a text as sarcastic from the beginning rather than just at the end. It differs from my proposal in that it can span multiple sentences. I would just put my sarcasm mark at the beginning of every sentence (or phrase) as a reminder of its sarcasm like we do with questions and exclamation marks, but this idea does have merit. In my system the above sentences could look like this: ¡¿Oh wow. ¡¿Thank you. ¡¿This sweater is just what I wanted¡

Alternatively, because the sentences are so short, the entire section could end with an upside-down punctuation mark to denote the end of sarcastic section: ¡¿Oh wow. Thank you. This sweater is just what I wanted¡

Sartalics is a system with similar advantages to sarcastises. It seems to be intended for Twitter which currently uses emoticons and “#sarcasm”. The Card Chronicle uses a tilde (~) at the end of a sentence for sarcasm. The tilde is an underused part of the keyboard and it looks like a sarcastic eyebrow, but it’s use as punctuation for sarcasm hasn’t taken off.

Shady Characters has the most exhaustive work about punctuation and particularly the punctuation of irony, and the author has even written a book on the subject. Brain Pickings gave a comprehensive summary of the irony section of the book.

The easiest way to start using sarcasm punctuation in your own writing is to simply select the characters here–¡¿–then copy and paste them into your writing. All computers can already create the characters and several websites tell how.

Posted in sarcasm

Paul Krugman Needs Sarcasm Marks

Posted on January 3, 2015 by Jonathan Andreas — Leave a comment

Paul Krugman regularly uses sarcasm in his blog posts that falls a bit flat because he doesn’t use sarcasm punctuation. He is a good enough writer that he doesn’t use sarcasm (or dramatically modifies his wording) in his columns, but in his blog posts are full of it. For example, he sometimes writes blog posts as extensions of his NYT columns and his posts are full of awkward sarcasm, but the accompanying columns are not. For example, even when a sarcastic blog post links to a related column, the column has no sarcasm, even though both are using exactly the same metaphor and discussing the same topic. Here is how his sarcastic blog post reads without sarcasm punctuation:

…the ideal policy is to shut half the economy down for a while, then start it up again — that way you get 100 percent growth. Also, hitting yourself in the head with a baseball bat is a great idea, because it feels good when you stop.

This is the opposite of Krugman’s true beliefs and he wisely avoids using this kind of sarcastic language in his column, but on his blog, he writes less formally. It would be clearer with sarcasm punctuation:

…¡¿the ideal policy is to shut half the economy down for a while, then start it up again — that way you get 100 percent growth. ¡¿Also, hitting yourself in the head with a baseball bat is a great idea, because it feels good when you stop¡

If the NYT allowed sarcasm punctuation, Krugman could write better columns. He regularly uses awkward sarcasm in his blog because he is regularly writing about absurd and/or dismal situations. I’ll update this post with more examples in the future. Paul, the easiest way to start using sarcasm punctuation is to simply copy and paste select the characters–¡¿–into your own writing.

Posted in Personal (not econ)

The Emasculization Of The American Workforce

Posted on January 2, 2015 by Jonathan Andreas — Leave a comment

A Brookings Institution paper by Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney has a particularly salient introductory quote about male workers. Not only did the median income stagnate after the 1970s, but median male income plummeted. A lot of great things happened for women workers after 1970 which helped keep the median total income from plummeting, but if you just look at male workers, things are amazingly bleak.

From 1950 to 1970, the average earnings of male workers increased by about 25 percent each decade. And these gains were not concentrated among some lucky few. Rather, earnings rose for most workers, and almost every prime-aged male (ages 25-64) worked.

Technological advancement and ever-broadening global markets brought opportunities that increasingly educated American workers raced to embrace. This resulted in steadily rising living standards, generations of children who outearned their parents, and a thriving middle class.

But in the mid-1970s, that pattern abruptly changed. Technological change and globalization continued to power both economic growth and the total earnings of the work force. Women, who were entering the market at increasing rates, enjoyed the fruits of that prosperity in rising wages. But the fortunes of a large segment of workers – male workers lacking specialized skills – was unhitched from the engine of growth.

Over the past 40 years, a period in which U.S. GDP per capita more than doubled after adjusting for inflation, the annual earnings of the median prime-aged male have actually fallen by 28 percent. Indeed, males at the middle of the wage distribution now earn about the same as their counterparts in the 1950s! This decline reflects both stagnant wages for men on the job, and the fact that, compared with 1969, three times as many men of working age don’t work at all.

This is an under-appreciated cause of the breakdown of the traditional nuclear family in America. It explains a lot of the reasons why old TV shows like Leave It To Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet look foreign today.

Posted in Labor, Medianism

Norman Borlaug, Millionaire Superhero

Posted on January 2, 2015 by Jonathan Andreas — Leave a comment

Norman Borlaug is the first person that I thought of as a millionaire superhero because when he died in 2009, his obituaries usually credited him with saving millions of lives or even a billion lives. He and his teams of fellow scientists accomplished this through simple selective breeding of wheat and other crops. Selective breeding is a practice as old as agriculture, but it was mostly just a haphazard part of saving seeds for planting the next crop for most of history until it was transformed into a methodical system using the scientific method in the last couple centuries. Even so, before the advent of the scientific method, primitive societies accomplished incredible transformations of wild plants over thousands of years. For example, Native Americans in Mexico turned the humble wild teosinte into the mighty maize.

Teosinte on the left and corn (maize) on the right. Photo by Hugh Iltis: teosinte.wisc.edu

Norman Borlaug simply applied scientific selective breeding to improving the crops of the tropical regions of the globe where poor people mostly live. It wasn’t a terrible complicated task compared with genetic engineering, but it required a lot of painstaking work and financial resources to fund a dedicated effort. Seed companies in the temperate parts of the northern hemisphere had been doing the same kind of intensive selective breeding for decades, but nobody had applied those modern techniques to crops for tropical regions until Borlaug’s lab began the Green Revolution. Thousands of scientists have had a part in this revolution such as Robert F. Chandler, and many other recipients of the World Food Prize and the Wolf Prize in Agriculture, but even the biggest superheroes like Norman Borlaug are mostly unknown.

Their work continues to improve life in both poor nations and in rich nations like the US. Over the past half century, these superheros have been reducing hunger around the world and in the US they have reduced the percent of income that Americans spend on food.

Matt Yglesias at Vox created this graph using USDA data, and unfortunately the USDA doesn’t look at the percent of the median disposable income that is spent on food in the US. That would not look as good as this graph because of stagnant median income in the last few decades, but median income rose briskly in the 1960s, so the first part of the graph would still show great progress.

Posted in Development, Millionaire Superheroes

Millionaire Superheroes

Posted on December 30, 2014 by Jonathan Andreas — 2 Comments

Do you know anyone who has saved someone’s life? It is pretty heroic. The Medal of Honor, is sometimes awarded for saving a single life in a valiant way. So imagine how heroic it would be to save more than a thousand lives or even a million. Even comic book superheroes rarely manage to save a million lives because it is hard to even dream up a plausible way for a superhero to save a million lives even in science fiction. Anyone who could claim that kind of heroism should be a household name. Surely they would be well rewarded for that kind of heroism.

But it turns out that there are many real-life superheroes who could credibly be credited with saving more than a million lives, and most are much less well known than minor celebrities in the Kardashian family. These real-life superheros have had mostly secret identities without even trying.

How did these unsung heroes accomplish their feats? They are mostly people who developed effective new public health technologies that were cheap enough to be widely copied around the world. It is impossible to quantify exactly how many lives each superhero saved, but anyone who has definitely saved thousands of lives and who could plausibly have saved more than a million lives over the past century deserves to be called a millionaire superhero. The other group of millionaire superheroes are those who developed the agricultural technologies that reduced the real price of food and staved off mass starvation when population exploded due to the millions of lives saved by the public health innovations. The Global Hunger Index shows that undernutrition has continued to fall over the past 24 years in an ongoing continuation of this trend. Undernutrition kills people by making them more vulnerable to disease and other stressors, and the world’s population could not have exploded without a parallel explosion in food production. The millions of people who were saved by public health innovations would have just starved to death.

Millionaire superheroes have shaped the last two centuries more than anyone else in history. The history textbooks are full of military and political leaders who rarely had that much impact on the world. Wikipedia only lists about 20 wars in history that resulted in more than a million deaths, and historians obsess about minor wars that had a much smaller death toll. Surely we should study people who saved more than a million lives with just as much interest as the wars that killed fewer peopel . Diarrhea kills far more people than warfare and diarrheal diseases used to be much, much deadlier. In 1900 diarrhea caused 9% of the deaths in the US and it was undoubtedly much worse in poorer nations that lack statistics. The heroes who won the big battles against diarrhea have changed world history more than any military general.

Imagine living in a world where life expectancy at birth is roughly between 25 years and 40 years. That was the history of the human race for all of time until about 1800. Then the world’s history dramatically changed over the next two centuries as you can see played out on Gapminder World. The circles represent every country in the world

There was no country in the world in 1800 with a life expectancy above 40 years and most nations had a life expectancy of about 30 years. The richest nation on earth was England with per capita income of US$2,737 and most people in the world earned well under $1,000/year. For all of human history before 1800, that was the norm. Extreme poverty and very low life expectancy.

Fast forward to 2012 and Gapminder’s graph reveals that there is no country on earth with a life expectancy below 45 years even though there are still numerous countries that are earning less than $2,000 per capita. Nations like North Korea and Bangladesh have life expectancy of 70 years despite earning less than $2,000 and despite the new AIDS epidemic which caused many poor nations’ life expectancy to drop.

Poor countries like Bangladesh have not gotten any richer than the richest nation in 1800, but life expectancy has more than doubled anyhow. Poor nations like Bangladesh have dramatically increased life expectancy without more economic resources per person. Millionaire superheroes accomplished that.

The work of these superheroes is still ongoing. For example, in 1990, the under-five mortality rate in the US was almost double what it is today. In 2012, 6.6 million American children died before their fifth birthday, so our superheroes are saving over six million more children every single year compared with 22 years ago.

In the past 200 years, millionaire superheroes have saved billions of lives. They have changed history much more than our highly creative comic-book writers imagined that Spider-Man, Batman, or most other superheroes could do.

The millionaire superheroes caused a:

Population explosion. For most of human history, women averaged six kids just to keep population from shrinking. The mortality rate was so high that most kids did not live long enough to reproduce, so women who reached the point of being capable of childbearing had to pump out the babies to keep the population stable. The doubling time for the human population for all of time was about 1,000 years. Then, suddenly the superheroes started saving millions of lives and the population doubling time dropped to a low of only about 35 years in the 1960s.
Decline in family size. When parents started realizing that their kids weren’t dying so fast anymore, they started having fewer kids. It turns out that most people don’t really want 10 kids, but they were having extra kids as a precaution so that they hoped that at least one would survive to produce grandchildren and support the parents in old age if they got lucky enough to live past their 50th birthday.
Rise of education. There was much less benefit to spending resources educating kids when they died so frequently. Plus, there were fewer resources per kid when families were so large. Societies had to spend more resources to just keeping large numbers of kids alive (and more resources burying them) and had less resources to invest in each kid’s development. Some societies did not even name children until they reached two years of age or so because infant mortality was so high that they did not even want to emotionally invest in thinking up a name until after the most dangerous time had passed.
Increase in income. Greater per-capita investment in human capital (education) increased productivity which increased per-capita income. Literate workers were able to share technologies and spread good ideas. For the first time in human history, median income more than doubled and rose for generations and a large middle class was born. Other factors contributed to the rise in income too, but the above factors were crucial.
Decrease in violence, humanitarian revolution, decrease in child labor, etc. There were numerous other domino effects on our lives and cultures. Stephen Pinker provides evidence that the percent of humans killed by other humans has declined over the past two centuries and two of the reasons he gives are the rise of education (#3) and the rise in income (#4). The rise in longevity was also an important reason because when life is short there is more risk taking and life is cheaper when it is shorter. Dueling and other violence seems like a more reasonable mechanism for settling disputes in a society where death is so common anyhow. Similarly, child labor disappears when family size decreases (#2) and incomes rise (#4). Only 1 in 10 kids in the world are child laborers today which is great news. Every kind of social progress of the past century (and every new social pathology) was made possible by the accomplishments of the millionaire superheroes.

I’ll reveal the secret identities of some millionaire superheroes in upcoming posts. Like most comic-book superheroes, almost none cashed in on their achievements to become rich, so at least we should give them some honor. If you want to nominate some people whose work has plausibly saved millions of lives in the last century, please leave a comment.

Posted in Development, Millionaire Superheroes

Robert Samuelson Bravely Bashes The Uppity Middle Class

Posted on December 29, 2014 by Jonathan Andreas — Leave a comment

Robert Samuelson is an economics columnist for the Washington Post who is usually wrongheaded. I suspect the only reason that he has his prominent position is that he has the same last name as one of the most influential Nobel laureate economists of the 20th century, Paul Samuelson, who also used to write economics columns for part of the Washington Post company.

Today Robert Samuelson bravely claims that, “The [US] system is rigged in favor of the middle class” and that elites haven’t been getting their fair due. He even blames the financial crisis on government subsidies to the middle class while defending the elite banksters. [Note that I agree with Samuelson that we should eliminate housing subsidies because boosting housing prices doesn’t help most Americans, but that has nothing to do with the financial crisis. The elite banksters are truly to blame for that.]

Samuelson claims that the whole superstructure of government has been turned against elites in favor of the middle class who are resentful of elite success. Then he ends the essay saying that the middle class just needs to stop seeking policy solutions (like Social Security and Medicare) and “restore traditional beliefs and confidence… But repairing the middle class won’t be easy, because it’s a matter of psychology as much as economics.”

WRONG! Repairing the middle class is purely a matter of economics. None of the government spending programs that he blames for the decline in middle class belief “opportunity, stability, reward for effort, a brighter future and the ability to control their lives” actually help the working middle class whose wages have stagnated. All the spending programs he mentions are for the poor, elderly, or unemployed. What about stagnant middle-class wages?

Samuelson complains that fewer Americans believe in “opportunity, stability, reward for effort, a brighter future and the ability to control their lives” because it is measurably true that all these things really have declined over the past four decades. If we reverse the economics, the psychology naturally follow.

Tagged with: Middle class
Posted in Inequality, Medianism