Apt. 11D

How Do You Explain the Girl Scouts?

In a fascinating paper in the March issue of Perspectives, Barbara Arneil examines membership numbers in the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts.

There was a major drop in membership in both the Boy and the Girl Scouts in the 1970s. Robert Putnam explains that the drop in membership was a result of the rise of time in front of TV and later video games, the increase in dual family employment, the increase of suburban sprawl, and a decline in civic spirit. 

Arneil says that the decline occurred in the 1970s, which was a critical period for in American history. "For the 1970s ushered in a “civil rights” generation with a new post-materialist set of values  that sought to rectify the injustices associated with war, race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability." The Girl Scouts adjusted to the new mentality, while the Boy Scouts didn't. Therefore, the Girl Scouts saw a jump in membership after 1985, while membership in the Boy Scouts did not.

It was a very interesting, well-written paper. It was fascinating to see the differences in membership between the scouts. However, I think that other factors have to explain why the girl scouts have thrived and the boy scouts haven't. Some ideas:

• It's all about the cookies and the tiny drops of meth mixed into those Thin Mints.
• Fear of perverted scout leaders getting in a tent with little Johnny.
• Competition with organized sports. I bet that time in little League and soccer game has increased.

The First Order Meme

What was your first order on Amazon? This is the latest meme, via Megan McArdle.

I ordered my first books from Amazon in 1998 -- one cookbook, Madhur Jaffrey's Quick & Easy Indian Cooking, and a bunch of books for my diss, including  Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform and The Politics of Deregulation.

Crafty Blogs

Yesterday, lmc sent me to an article on Jezebel about crafty blogs. The author describes her surprise at finding this section of the blogosphere. It's funny, because I stumbled upon that section of the blogosphere randomly a few months ago. Click. Click. Click. And suddenly I fell down Alice's hole to another world. I usually tromp around in the political and academic blogosphere with occasional forays into the mommyblogs. But there are huge communities of other blogs out there.

The blogger at Jezebel wonders if these websites are the new Martha Stewarts. They use their blogs to hype a certain lifestyle, but they are just a little too perfect.

Whatever. They're super pretty, and I'm sucker for the whole vintage, bohemian vibe. Some places that I found through the Jezebel post: The snail and the cyclops. Oooh, I just love Jadite. I have to take some pictures of my collection. Blushing Ambition Much Love Just Something I Made

Related: Women and Work, Chicks with Chicks, Spreadin' Love, Spreadin' Love

The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home & Home Becomes Work

A month ago, I picked up The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work from the town library. I read a few chapters, but it threw me into a tailspin of despair and I had to skip to the last chapter.

Hochschild interviewed all levels of employees at unnamed corporation on one of those meticulously landscaped office parks that are nestled into suburban communities. She wanted to find out how the workers juggled their lives at work and at home and whether they took advantage of the company's work-life programs. In addition to in-depth interviews, she followed them around the office and observed them at home. It was certainly thorough research.

She found that few employees were taking advantage of the company's work flexibility packages. Some really needed that flexibility, but couldn't leave work because of old stodgy bosses. Others didn't leave work early, because they didn't want to. They liked their neat and tidy lives in the office. Their officemates had become their family. Their real family was needy and demanding and complicated. It was much nicer to come into the office with tidy clothes and leave the kids and their spouse behind. 

Hochschild is very pessimistic about these developments. You feel her sympathy for the abandoned families and her disgust at people who have sold their souls to the company. There were too many forces working against change in the workplace. By the end of the book, a downturn in the economy meant that the flexibility program was entirely discarded.

She has wonderful little observations about corporate life. For example, she notes the differing ways that people display pictures in their office. The lower level workers, such as the secretaries, had informal pictures of their kids taped discretely to their computer screens, so they could look at their kids while they worked. Upper level management did things differently. The men had formal shots of their kids in expensive frames on credenzas behind them. The pictures were for other people to look at, like trophies. The female managers had no pictures of their children in the office at all.

While these sorts of case studies are wonderful for providing thick descriptions, I was left unsure of how typical this office was. What happens in other companies, in other industries, in other parts of the country? The book was published in 1997, which isn't that long ago, but I worried that the findings in the book were a little dated.

The Dark Side of the Anti-Obesity Movement

When I was in grad school and working in a policy center, one of my friends went to the corner where an outdoor vendor sold some wonderful Indian chicken and rice. He cooked raw chicken out there in the open sun on the streets of New York, but our digestive systems were young enough to withstand it.

When my friend came back into the office to eat her chicken and rice at the desk, she told me that some stranger on line turned to her and said "you shouldn't be eating this." My friend was overweight, and frequently had random people come up to her on the street who felt that it was important to point out this fact to her. Like she didn't know.

There are two dark sides of the anti-obesity movement. The first dark side is shame. Now, shame in some cases can be a very effective method of reducing undesirable behavior. It has helped millions of people quit smoking or at least hide it from others. But there's something icky about it, too, especially when it's heaped at kids who don't have control over what is served for dinner and who have been cursed with slow metabolisms.

Marc Ambinder did an excellent job discussing his own battle with obesity and the humiliations that he faced as an over weight man in America. 

The other dark side of the anti-obesity movement is that many people are simply unable to control their weight. Diets and exercise don't work. Ambinder only conquered his weight through surgery, which reduced his stomach to the side of a walnut. How useful is it for Jamie Oliver to be yelling at schools about french fries, when for many people, the problem is deeper than french fries? Ezra Klein thinks that the forces that create obesity are so strong that "a mix of surgeries and pharmaceuticals eventually becomes our society's answer to obesity."

Klein also writes,

Obesity is much more structural than it is personal. That's why it's so depressingly predictable. It afflicts certain communities, with certain socioeconomic characteristics, and it has only really emerged across a certain time period. Those communities contain a lot of different individuals, but their environments and their time and money stresses and their transportation and grocery options and their street safety and exercise opportunities are broadly similar. How we live has changed much more quickly than who we are, and no effort to turn back the tide on obesity will succeed without an accurate understanding of what's made us obese.

In other words, beating obesity means a complete overhaul of society from transportation to grocery options to healthcare. A jog on the treadmill isn't going to change anything.

KFC's Double Down

This morning, I blogged about KFC's Double Down. This afternoon, Nate Silver compares the Double Down to other fast food sandwiches. Great minds.

While the Double Down is incredibly unhealthy, it isn't the most unhealthy. The worst goes to.... drum roll... Wendy's Triple Baconator.

The Benefits of Exercise

This weekend, Jonah and I ran another 5K race, along with my sister and her family. I took five minutes off my last time finishing in the 28 minute zone. After we finished the race and patted each other on the back, we drove home. On the way back, I spied a McDonald's at the side of the highway. I threw on the turn signal and flew off the highway Dukes of Hazzard-style. Two Egg McMuffin meals, please. I was starving.

For the past couple of months, I've been running two miles every morning. It took a while to get into shape to run the whole thing without stopping. My knees have always been a problem, but I found that if I went to the gym every day rather than just a couple times per week, my legs developed enough muscles to protect my knees.

The two mile workout is great, because I can do it even on days when I don't have a lot of time. Half an hour including some stretching time, and I'm out of the gym. If I have more time, then I can do more miles or increase the speed or do weight exercises to help my knees. I'm doing one 5K per month, because I thrive on the competition.

Even with all this exercise, I haven't lost a single pound. I'm not overweight. Compared to most Americans, I'm thin. But I wouldn't mind knocking off five pounds. At first when I started running, I kept stepping on the scale expecting to see a loss of big pounds. That didn't happen. In fact, I'm sure that I'm consuming more calories, because I'm so hungry. 

The New York Times discusses how ineffective exercise is as a method of losing weight. My experience would confirm all those studies.

However, my two mile regimen has had other benefits. It redistributed my weight from my waist to the muscles on my legs. I certainly have greater endurance. It improved my mental attitude. With all this running, I can also justify buying cute, new running pants.

The goal of exercise shouldn't be weight loss; it's about a healthy lifestyle. Exercise, along with home cooked meals that include lots of green stuff and that are eaten at the dinner table, will help some lose weight, and it will help everyone live longer, better lives.

UPDATE: Laura/GeekyMom points to the important conclusion of the NYT article, which is that moderate activity, even standing, is as good for you as my two-mile daily sprints.

The Politics of Public Health

Thanks to Michelle Obama and Jamie Oliver, everybody is talking about fat kids and what government can be doing differently. Fatty school lunches, the need for exercise programs, the possibility of a soda tax, and the creation of food awareness classes are all on the table The discussion has gone beyond fat kids to talking about fat adults.

The New York Times magazine issue this weekend was devoted to the topic of health. Marc Ambinder had a fabulous cover article in Atlantic Monthly about his battles with obesity and policy proposals for reducing the wiggle and jiggle in kid's bellies. Also, I've started running again. I ran my second 5K race this weekend. I've been spending more time cooking better meals. So, I'm completely inundated with information and experiences about public health. I'll come back to the details of the articles later. First, I just want to talk about the politics of public health policy.

Libertarians are generally suspicious of all public policy, because they reject the notion that government can make a positive impact on people's lives. The less government, the better. When government gets involved in people's lives, the outcome is usually expensive and results in unexpected outcomes. Welfare creates dependency, for example.

Libertarians especially hate governmental programs that push people to change their behavior regarding their health. For all but a radical fringe, they accept mandatory vaccinations for kids, but they aren't enthusiastic about other programs, which restrict a person's individual freedom to kill himself. I have a Big Mac, and I'm going to eat it. Efforts to reduce smoking and the availability to fast food is beyond the scope of government. They say that when government wades into these matters, it becomes a "nanny state" and adults should be able to make their own decisions about the Big Mac v. Tofu.

Liberals, on the other hand, say that obesity is expensive. Obesity-related diseases cost the public billions of dollars in healthcare costs. People don't really have the choice of a Big Mac v. Tofu, because tofu isn't available to most people and they don't know how to cook it. The Big Mac is cheaper than a good salad. The current system is rigged to make the Big Mac the most popular option and that isn't fair. Let's give people some real choices and, thus, increase their freedoms.

Liberals also say that children can't make the same choices as adults. They need guidance. If the parents and the community can't provide them with better options, then government must step in to help out. It's immoral to allow this generation of children to fill themselves up on Slurpies and candy bars. Government can do better.

Please admire this sandwich. It's KFC's new Double Down -- two Original Recipe fillets, Swiss and pepper jack cheese, Colonel sauce, and bacon.

Finally Relaxing

I can never remember to take a picture of the meal when it's coming out of the kitchen. Things are too crazy. Parents are yelling at the kids to wash their hands and dishing out plates of ham and potatoes for the kids to eat in the kitchen. I'm pulling the asparagus out of the oven and plating them with shavings of parmesan cheese. Oh, don't forget the corn bread. I only remember to pull out the camera after we're mostly done eating and the food comas have set in.

Spreadin' Love 429

And yet another week of a school vacation and no child care. I can only ignore the kid for so long before parental guilt sets in, so most work (including blogging) will happen in the evenings. The mute kid will be dragged along to the gym, the supermarket, and other assorted chores. Perhaps he'll get some video game time later in the afternoon, and I can get back to the computer.

In the meantime, here are some of the issues that we talked about this weekend:

My grandfather was born in Abruzzo, Italy in a small mountain village where everyone had the same last name -- a last name that contains too many vowels. It's a gorgeous area of Italy and still untouched by tourism. Wonderful pork dishes.

Return to Sender. A seven-year old boy was sent back to Russia by his adopted parents in Tennessee, because they couldn't handle his psychological problems. He was put on a plane by himself with a backpack of candy. Russia is fuming and may end on foreign adoptions. 

Unbelievable tragedy for Poland. The Monkey Cage asks whether any other country has ever lost so many senior political leaders at once.