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Book Review: Life at the Bottom, by Theodore Dalrymple

Posted on by David Bookstaber

In April, National Review published an entire issue of essays on California exploring the dismal results of the state’s increasingly progressive political experiments. The punchline is that dysfunctional government has managed to make that otherwise attractive geographic region so unlivable that people with the means to leave for other states are doing so in droves.

Among wealthy democratic nations, Great Britain has taken the lead in boldly implementing progressive ideology in both government and culture. Theodore Dalrymple has been documenting the dismal results for years. His cautionary essays are essential reading for anyone who traffics in political ideas. Life at the Bottom is a collection of those essays.

Learning Violin

Posted on by David Bookstaber

While learning to play violin I benefited from a good ear. For example, when I finally acquired sheet music for Vivaldi’s Four Seasons I was able to make my way through them in their entirety on first reading because I knew them so well by ear. But my ability to rely on playing by ear that left me practically incapable of sight-reading.  Like embarrassingly abysmal: If I don’t know how a piece is supposed to sound I could be mistaken for not knowing how to read music. I might have reinforced that when I started studying piano at age 10 and immediately attacked difficult pieces where the technical difficulty made sight-reading impossible anyway and by the time a passage was mastered it had also been memorized. So after two years of piano I could smash through Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in c#, but I have never been able to sight-read a even a simple church hymn.

I didn’t realize that I had a skill of any note until I was 9 and I agreed to someone’s request to play a violin piece in Sunday School.  I performed Fiocci’s Allegro and thought nothing of it until my parents heard that afterwards bunch of kids had asked their parents if they could learn violin.

When I was 11 I got to play at my church’s Handel’s Messiah sing-in, which was funny because the minimum age for attendance was 12. I was playing second-violin, which is very difficult to practice alone – or play by ear – because it’s an accompaniment and doesn’t have the melody. The orchestra, which was otherwise mostly professional musicians, only had two rehearsals, so in performance I only played along to the half dozen pieces I had practiced. I was amazed when the second string of the violinist to my right snapped in the middle of one of the movements and he was able to keep playing by shifting on the third string. At the end of the movement I assumed we would stop so he could change his string, but no: we kept right on going.

I can only find one recording of me performing before I went to high school: Here’s me playing a Mozart violin concerto (accompanied by a piano arrangement) at age 13:

Huckleberries

Posted on by David Bookstaber

It’s huckleberry season! Huckleberries ripen beginning in late July. And since huckleberries resist cultivation, they have to be picked in the wild from bushes that grow on mountain slopes.

In Idaho and Montana, huckleberry foraging locations are traditionally family secrets. I was permitted to accompany one expedition to a patch just off a dirt road deep in Forest Service land at 6,600 feet elevation.

Wild Huckleberries in late July at 6,600 feet ASL

Picking huckleberries is not easy: The bushes are low to the ground, the sparse berries tend to form under the leaves, and even when fully ripe the small berries do not easily detach. An hour of concerted picking yields dark purple fingertips and only about three cups of huckleberries (which reduce to just two cups when crushed).

It took an hour to pick these three cups of huckleberries

What’s the attraction? Huckleberries have a taste along the same axis as blueberries, and blackberries, but the flavor is far more intense than that of similar fruit.

Blueberries and Huckleberries

Huckleberries are often canned as jam and syrup. I helped can a traditional jam recipe that cooks equal parts berries and sugar, plus some pectin. The result was a precious product that we canned in 4-ounce jars. Given the strength of the huckleberry’s flavor I thought that recipe was excessively concentrated. So for a second batch I added crushed cultivated (i.e., large and relatively flavorless) blueberries in equal part to huckleberries; reduced the sugar by 20%, and canned the jam in 8-ounce jars. Informal blind taste tests concluded that my modification did not diminish the product.

Canned Huckleberry Jam

Overtourism

Posted on by David Bookstaber

Fifteen years ago I was on a Mediterranean pleasure cruise that stopped at the major tourist destinations of Italy and Greece. It was a transformational experience. Not because of the landmark tourist attractions – seeing them in person offered nothing of substance that I hadn’t already learned or seen in documentaries. The thing that changed me forever was experiencing the other tourists. Vast crowds. Throngs. Hoards of international travelers queuing to the same locations to tread, ogle, and photograph the same things.

A recreational traveler who claims to be an environmentalist or conservationist is selfishly delusional. The environmental costs of intercontinental travel and infrastructure – of seasonally transporting and hosting masses of spectators – are enormous. And to what end? What is the benefit?

Do you feel an itch to travel to popular destinations? First ask yourself: What do you bring to the experience besides money?

Tourism is a ridiculous enterprise. I sampled global tourism for a few years because my wife worked in the industry and our travel was subsidized. I can say, from firsthand experience, that it is not worth the time and money, especially given the alternatives.

Do you want to immerse yourself in history or culture? Stay home and read or watch documentaries – written by world-class scholars and narrators; shot by professional photographers with the best equipment and unlimited access. Do you value the landmarks? Stay home and patronize conservationists. Do you need to escape or get out for recreation? Explore the attractions of the region in which you live.

Tourists are indulging in a vicious cycle of peer rivalry or bland FOMO. Somebody boasts of visits to the Pantheon or the Colosseum, and now a dozen acquaintances feel the need for their own first-person collection of passport stamps and photos of … the same thing? Are they all exceptional writers or documentarians?

Bitcoin Bubble

Posted on by David Bookstaber

I explained this in more detail last month on my finance blog, but for the record here:

Bitcoin (BTC) is a pathological cryptocurrency. BTC does not represent the opportunities that are emerging in the decentralized-finance (“DeFi”) paradigm.  BTC is one of many evolving cryptocurrencies. As an early mover it attracted speculators who think “crypto” is the future but who don’t have an intelligent way to invest in that future.  The speculators drove a bubble in BTC price which then created a mob of “Greater Fools” who heard stories of people making windfall profits in BTC and didn’t want to miss out.  This is a classic manic bubble.

On the Primacy of Women

Posted on by David Bookstaber

The Judeo-Christian story of the creation of humans in Genesis 2:18 is quaintly androcentric, describing the female sex as a supplemental creation to the male sex. The Hebrew description of the purpose of woman, עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּֽוֹ – most reasonably translated as counterpart – is often given an even more chauvinistic translation to describe woman as a helper or companion for man.

The androcentric perspective has continued into the modern era with women struggling to establish all sorts of equality with men. This is utterly bizarre when considered in the context of our species and its survival: It is males who are the adjunctive gender. The only essential role that men play in the survival of the human species is to supply sperm to fertile females. Everything else that men do is secondary to the essential and consuming labor of mothers.

Human females have a heavy reproductive burden: We are bipedal mammals with upright backs. This makes carrying a fetus awkward and delivering a baby often debilitating and even lethal. Human babies are altricial and have a longer period of dependence than any other animal.1 We have hungry, enormous brains but relatively weak digestive systems. Mankind exists because women have the capacity to balance and serve the onerous task of bearing and rearing children to maturity.2

It is males that are relegated to a supporting role in the human life cycle. Human males have virtually no reproductive burden – if men did nothing but make a momentary seminal deposit and then disappear humans would be fine. Another way to look at this is in terms of male biological freedom, and it’s interesting to see how that freedom is exploited. In phenotypic terms, human males can afford to display a greater variance of every measurable trait. While this leads to more apparently pathological behavior, it also leads to extremes of constructive traits that have fostered the development of human innovation and the proliferation of civilization.3

1 Interestingly: the time it takes an species’ young to mature is strongly correlated with the number of cortical neurons in its brain. Humans have far more cortical neurons than any other animal.

2 A few weeks after posting this I found this book review of Mom Genes, which details the remarkable neuro-physiological transformation that occurs in women who become mothers.

3 Is There Anything Good About Men? is a book I later found that appears to delve into this in more detail. I found an earlier paper by the author bearing the same title that is a really fascinating and worthwhile read.

The Fabulous World of Shareware

Posted on by David Bookstaber

Today I wanted to convert 26 height measurements I made into a topographic map. Complicating the project was the fact that my data were not spaced at regular cartesian grid points, but rather compass-style at 30-degree intervals from a series of reference points. Within a few minutes of searching online I found this shareware program from 2004 that could take a plaintext file of the xyz points as an input and interpolate a surface, producing this:

Another great piece of freeware that recently simplified some of my other work is this VBA “Decompiler”: I have been pushing the envelope with Excel, and since Microsoft Office is sloppy with its Visual Basic interpreters one must occasionally purge all VBA code from a workbook and reload it – a kludgy process that was automated by the author of that clever tool.

Tax Optimization: Charitable Giving

Posted on by David Bookstaber

If you don’t itemize deductions when filing your personal federal taxes then you get no tax benefit for charitable giving. But if you coordinate charitable donations with other taxpayers you can keep more money out of the hands of the government.

Important tax terminology: A “deduction” is an expenditure or loss that reduces the amount of income that is subject to tax. Individual taxpayers have the option of either listing (“itemizing”) and subtracting all allowed deductions when calculating and filing their taxes, or instead just subtracting a Standard Deduction. Itemized Deductions can’t reduce your tax bill unless they exceed your Standard Deduction. The Standard Deduction for tax year 2020 is $12,400.

The idea behind the Standard Deduction is that on average every taxpayer has some deductions. Correctly itemizing deductions – i.e., listing them out and ensuring they are valid and compliant with the tax code – can take a lot of work. In order to simplify tax compliance for the average taxpayer the tax code offers the Standard Deduction for free. Taxpayers who think they have more deductions than what is assumed by the Standard Deduction can choose to do the accounting work to claim those deductions.

When you claim Itemized Deductions you “lose” your Standard Deduction. This is only meaningful if you can shift deductions around. Shifting deductions is not something the tax code was designed for, but it can be done legally and it’s a big part of tax optimization.

Shifting as an individual (a.k.a. “bunching”)

If you claim the Standard Deduction then your Itemized Deductions have no tax value. For many taxpayers the biggest deductible expense – and often the only one that can be easily “shifted” – is Charitable Donations. In order to minimize taxes you should “bunch” donations into a single tax year in which you Itemize Deductions, and then claim the Standard Deduction the other years.

For example: Suppose you tithe $10,000 a year to your church, and you don’t have many other deductions. If you pay your tithing once per tax year you would get no tax benefit from your tithes because it doesn’t exceed the Standard Deduction of $12,400. But suppose you paid your 2019 tithing all on 1 January 2020, and then you paid your 2020 tithes on 31 December 2020 (instead of in January 2021). Now for tax year 2020 you have $20,000 in deductible donations (which is worth itemizing), and in 2021 you can claim the Standard Deduction.

In practice not so many individuals will find themselves able to profitably shift Itemized Deductions.

Shifting within groups

When coordinated within a group, shifting charitable donations can readily save a lot of taxes. Remember that as an individual claiming the Standard Deduction your donations have no tax value … to you. But if you know somebody who is Itemizing Deductions and you donate through them then your donation will reduce their tax bill!

How do you donate through someone else? Whatever you want to donate to a charity you “gift” to them, and then they donate it instead. (Shifting like this need only be a paper transaction: So long as they get the receipt they can claim the donation.) The tax code contains an annual gift exclusion – currently $15,000 per person. I.e., you can gift anyone up to $15,000 per year without triggering a gift tax. (The gift exclusion is per person, so you can give a couple up to $30,000 per year. This is relevant because spouses have to choose between the Itemized and Standard Deduction whether filing separately or jointly.)

For example, if everyone in your family gives $10,000 a year to your church, it could be that nobody is able to deduct the tithes. If everyone instead gives their tithes to one donor and that donor Itemizes Deductions, then the donor gets the full tax value of the donations and everyone else gets the full value of the Standard Deduction.

The tax benefits compound further if the donor is the group member with the highest marginal tax rate. For example, suppose you and your siblings live in states with no income tax and you only earn enough to put you in the 24% tax bracket. If you itemize and deduct everyone’s tithing then each $10,000 donation will save you 24% of $10,000, or $2,400 in taxes. But suppose your father lives in New York City: his marginal tax rate could be over 45%. If he donates and deducts $10,000 it saves him $4,500 in taxes!

What benefit do you get by shifting through someone else? There’s the principled argument, which is that big government is wasteful and does not spend money wisely, and it is therefore best to keep as much money out of the government’s hands as possible. (If you disagree, then you are welcome to pay more in taxes than required by law: Donations to the U.S. Treasury are tax deductible! But for all the big-government sanctimony out there the reality is that virtually nobody gives money to the government voluntarily.)

Then there’s the practical consideration: You could share the tax savings created by shifting. For example, if you gift your father $10,000; he donates it to your church; he saves $4,500 in taxes; he could gift that full $4,500 in savings back to you and be no worse off.