National No Bra Day

Ladies, is taking off your bra the first thing you do when you get home? Is it the first thing you would want to do? Then this article is for you! (Disclaimer: I am a man. I am not necessarily best suited to talk about female clothing. I’m doing it anyway.)

July 9 is known as national no bra day in the United States. This was started by a woman going by the name Anastasia M. Doughnuts in 2011 and has been popping up on facebook every year since. It is an opportunity (or an excuse) to not have to wear a bra for a day.

July 9: National No-Bra-Day

Breast Cancer Awareness

Let me get this out of the way first. In many discussions, no-bra-day gets linked to breast cancer awareness. In particular the other national no-bra-day (yes, there are at least two!), October 13th, which falls in the middle of Breast Cancer Awareness Month (October), has been publicized as a way to heighten awareness of breast cancer. This is, with all due respect, a load of BS.

The first time I heard about no-bra-day in the context of breast cancer, I did not think any further and accepted the statement at face value, But when I read the excellent article on the Cancer in my Thirties blog, I realized how this does not make any sense and is actually quite offensive. I don’t have anything to add to that. By all means, celebrate no-bra-day, but don’t claim it is in support of breast cancer.

History of the Brassiere

The word “bra” is short for brassiere and dates back to the 1890s. Of course, support for breast has been around much longer than that; the Wikipedia article on the history of brassieres traces some form of them back 3,400 years.

For most of history, the “bras” women have been wearing were bands of cloth wrapped around the upper chest, which I can imagine provided comfort, especially for women with larger breasts. But later, women in the upper class of society would wear different types of corsets, which would squeeze the middle while pushing breasts upward. Comfort cannot have been much of a reason for choosing that particular type of garment.

Modern bras have evolved out of those corsets, so it is not surprising that the majority of brassieres are designed for looks, not comfort. In particular, they are designed towards a theoretical ideal image of women, which would be someone in their twenties with a breast shape that is unrealistic at best.

Selection of Underwire Bras; image adapted from Wikipedia

Why Bras?

Why do women wear a bra? Of course, there are as many answers to that question as there are women. For some, it is about comfort, and there is nothing wrong with that. If you feel more comfortable, go for it!

Also I have heard women say they wear a bra because they think it helps keep the desired shape of their breasts. They would sometimes point to National Geographic photos of women in African tribes with severely sagging breasts. Unfortunately, this argument does not really hold water. On the surface, it seems to make sense that wearing a bra helps breasts keep their shape, but actually it turns out that reality is more complicated than that.

I’m not sure if the research by dr. Rouillon, which concluded that bras are useless, can be trusted, but I do know that many women who do wear a bra all the time still end up with breasts that are much more sagging than they were in their teens. This is obviously the result not just of gravity but of the natural changes in breasts over time as the result of child bearing, changes in diet, and the like.

In fact, I don’t believe there is any scientific research supporting the idea that wearing a bra prevents sagging. And those women in National Geographic? Don’t forget that these have often had many children, perform back-breaking work and go through periods of malnutrition.

Mandatory Bras

But I would venture that most women wear a bra because, well, that is what women do. They feel they cannot leave the house without wearing breast support. And this is where the national no bra day comes in.

Breasts are a normal part of a human body. We all have them, in some shape or form. Any difference between male and female breasts is based on function, and in fact, some men have breasts that are more pronounced than those some women have.

Men are not made to hide their chest, regardless of how much tissue they have, so there is really no need for women to feel such pressure. And there is no reason to feel ashamed about the shape of your body either. When we get older, our breasts, like all other parts of our body, mature. Sure, some of us would like to keep the body we had when we were young, but that's not how it works.

Celebrate No-Bra-Day?

So how about it, ladies, will you celebrate no-bra-day? Will you consider, for one day a year, to resist societal pressure, to let out the inner rebel in you? To show that you are an adult who is free to make her own choices?

July 9: National No-Bra-Day

Extractive Economies

On a recent road trip, my wife and I listened to the audio version of the book Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, which tries to answer why some countries are prosperous while others are poor and backwards. Although I do not necessarily agree with all of the authors’ ideas, I found the dichotomy between extractive versus inclusive economies, and its connection to extractive or inclusive political systems, fascinating.

The book’s website can be found at www.whynationsfail.com.

What Are Extractive Economies?

Simply put, an “extractive” economy is an economic system where a small upper class reaps most of the benefits of the work that the large masses put in.

European kingdoms in the middle ages had mostly extractive economies, where a relatively few nobles lived in comfort from the wealth that the peasants produced. The Soviet Union had an extractive economy, where the communist elite lived in luxury but most normal people had to stand in line to get groceries. North Korea has an extractive economy, again with the elite living well while large parts of the country are plagued by famine.

The opposite of extractive economies are inclusive economies, where most people share in the products of the economy. Modern-day Western European countries have inclusive economies, where most people do participate and reap some benefits of economic progress. The United States supposedly has an inclusive economy, or at least had one in the 1950s and 1960s. However, the economy of the United States has been slipping towards the more extractive end of the spectrum; more about that later.

Economies and Political Institutions

Next to laying out the dichotomy between extractive and inclusive economies, Why Nations Fail goes on to then also separate extractive and inclusive political systems and institutions. A democratic system is typically built on inclusive political institutions, whereas a dictatorship is built on extractive political institutions, where the power is typically in the hands of the ruling elite and the people have no influence.

Acemoglu and Robinson then draw a line connecting the economical and the political institutions. They show that extractive political institutions, where the power is in the hands of a few, tend to favor extractive economic systems, where the few that are in power get all the benefits, whereas inclusive economies tend to flourish under inclusive political systems.

There are different forces at work here, which go a long way to explaining this connection. Inclusive political systems are, by necessity, based on a rule of law, which provides stability and consistency. It is worth starting a business or planting a field or investing in your factory if you can feel confident that contracts you enter into will be honored and that you will be able to reap the benefits from your efforts.

Extractive political systems, on the other hand, where a relatively small elite rules the country, tends to have that elite be “above the law” and able to seize anything they can. In those environments, doing well would mean becoming a competitor of the existing elite, which will do everything it can to prevent this. Therefore, there are few if any incentives to work harder or do better.

Interestingly, it is very hard for the elite in an extractive environment to actually work for the best of their country. Even in the poorest extractive countries, the elite lives better than the elite of the richest inclusive countries live. As long as they can hold on to their power, they are better off running their country into the ground then they would be trying to improve the lot of their people.

The example of North and South Korea is very illustrative in this respect. South Korea is a thriving country where many people are very comfortable. It is a country with upward mobility, a country where entrepreneurs are rewarded, but also where everyone shares in the collective wealth. North Korea, on the other hand, is among the poorest of the poor, even though the leaders live in luxury. And there are no signs that those leaders are losing their grip on the country.

What About the United States?

Where does all of this leave the United States? Why Nations Fail doesn’t ask this question, but if there is something to the idea of extractive versus inclusive economies connected to extractive versus inclusive political institutions, you start to see the history of the United States over the past 50 years in an entirely different light.

The middle class was booming in the 1950s and 1960s. Its decline probably started with the oil crisis in the 1970s, but really was accelerated with Reaganomics in the 1980s. Time after time economists have shown that, after compensating for inflation, wages and disposable income for middle-class people rose steadily in the years after World War II, but have stagnated or gone down in the past 30 years. Disposable income for the wealthiest, on the other hand, has continued to rise. In effect, the economy as a whole has grown, but most or all of that growth has gone to the wealthy few, which is a hallmark of an extractive economy.

Although I have to admit that I don’t have any scientific studies to back this up, it is clear to me that the political institutions have more and more become dominated by the same entities (wealthy individuals and corporations) that dominate the economy. Lobbyist have achieved increasing influence and, with the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court, corporations no longer have to hide their influence peddling. Again, a shift from inclusive to extractive institutions.

Interestingly, it seems that some of the Republican concerns that are being expressed during the current (2012 presidential) election cycle are also indicative of an extractive economy: lack of growth, lack of entrepreneurship, a feeling that things “aren’t getting better.” However, their proposed solutions (more tax breaks for the elite, paid for by the masses) seem to be geared towards increasing the slide towards an extractive system rather than trying to halt that process. Which, in turn, supports the hypothesis that the elite has gotten hold of the political institutions and use them for their own benefit.

It is worth remembering that the study of many of the poorest countries has shown that what is good for the ruling elite is not necessarily good for the country. The intuitive idea that the elite would want a strong economy and prosperity for all, because they would be better off in such an environment, actually turns out to be false. The elite, in an extractive environment (as the examples of North Korea and many other countries show), are actually better off increasing the level of extraction, as long as they can prevent a complete revolution.

What Next?

Knowing that the United States is sliding towards an extractive economy supported by extractive political institution, what can we do? How does this knowledge help us revert the process?

I have to admit that I don’t have any good answers here. One thing is clear, and that is the old adage that “when you are in a hole, the first thing is to stop digging.” Clearly, the one thing we should not be doing is continue to strengthen the elite in this country and their stranglehold on the political and economic institutions.

In the early 20th century, presidents like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson set out to break the stranglehold of the elite of their time — the ”robber barons,” the oil monopolies, the railroads. They were actually faced with a situation not dissimilar to our own, where the American economy was becoming more and more extractive. It took a little time, but they were able to revert the process. In the end their actions led to one of the greatest periods of prosperity in America.

We can take heart from this example and look to them for ideas of what we can do. Break virtual or total monopolies. Stop allowing banks, insurance companies, airlines, phone companies to merge and become bigger and bigger. If necessary, break up industries that are dominated by a very few players, which end up acting as monopolies. It is the lack of competition inherent in monopolies that breaks the backbone of what makes capitalism strong. Break up vertical monopolies, where a single company dominates the entire supply chain.

Increase consumer protections. Again, the backbone of what makes capitalism strong is the ability of the consumers to have choices and to make their choices based on accurate information.

Recognize that it is important for entrepreneurs to be rewarded for not only the effort they put into their business, but also the risk they take. Most people are not the kind of risk taker you need to be to start your own business. But also recognize that, when someone is successful in building a business, that business can only thrive in the entire ecosystem of our economy, which includes the government-sponsored infrastructure as well as the consumers who buy the products and services of the business. That therefore a successful business has the moral responsibility to support those elements of the economy that made their success possible in the first place.

Most of all, we, the people of this country, need to try to understand what is happening and try to engage our friends, our family, our representatives in debates about our policies...

Atheism and Religion

I am an atheist. This will not come as a surprise to many who know me, although I do not go around waving my beliefs under other people’s noses. Just like I appreciate it when they don’t wave their believes under my nose.

Church on the Market Square in Delft

I was not raised religiously, in fact, I never knew my parents’ religious beliefs until I was well into college. But as a child I did sometimes discuss religion with my grandmother. I remember thinking that it wouldn’t hurt to believe in God if he didn’t exist, and would only benefit if it turned out he did exist after all.

As a teenager, I realized that this position was essentially hypocritical; that I didn’t know whether or not God existed, and I should admit to myself I was an agnostic. It wasn’t until after my college time that I finally realized that this whole God business did not make any sense to me at all and that I actually had become an atheist.

I live in a world where religion is an important aspect of my lives, where religions have a lot of in many parts of everyone’s life. Even though I do not believe in a God myself, I live and work with many people who do. As an atheist, I have had to figure out what this means.

I respect religious people. There are some good friends of mine who are very religious; these are people I respect highly, and as far as I can tell, they respect me as well. Then on the other hand, there are some religious people that I do not respect at all. Like people who are convinced that they alone know that absolute truth, that everyone else is wrong and needs to be “saved.”

I respect some religions. There are groups of people that come together to celebrate their shared belief, and honestly try to act in accordance with those believes. These are typically not the congregations you read about in the paper or hear about on the news.

I am generally very skeptical about religions, though. Throughout history, religions have shown an uncanny ability to align themselves with the worldly powers, if not to become the center of power themselves. Actually, this is probably not so strange at all if you realize that religions that did not fit within the power structures of their time probably ended up getting wiped out very quickly.

What I find I have less and less patience for, is people and organizations that feel that everyone should follow their particular beliefs, and want to incorporate those into the laws of the land. I’m not talking about Iran or Saudi Arabia here, which are recognized theocracies, but about the good old U. S. of A.

This behavior can be seen everywhere nowadays, and it seems to be on the rise. It is behind the movement for school prayer, the attempts to allow for the display of the ten commandments in court rooms, the resistance against LGBT equality, as well as behind the Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks in the media.

I am an atheist, but that does not mean that I do not believe in things. I believe in honor and dignity, I believe in loving and respecting my fellow human beings. But most of all, I believe in freedom, the freedom to live my life the way I see fit, and the freedom for everyone else to live their lives the way they see fit. A freedom that should be limited only when it would hurt others.

Today, September 17, is Constitution Day in the United States. Constitution Day is a little-known federal holiday, celebrating the signing of the United States constitution in 1787. What better moment to remember the first Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Let us never forget that the separation of church and state is one of the fundamental principles of the United States, one that formed us from the first moments on, and one that contributed to making us the great country we are. Let us continue to respect everyone’s personal convictions, but continue to work hard to keep them out of our collective laws and customs!

Freedom of Sex

In the past few weeks, topics of relationships, adultery, marital fidelity and such have raised themselves in surprising ways. There were a number of movies I saw that dealt with these issues, and it came up in three unrelated discussions at work. In trying to order my thoughts about these subjects, I’m starting a series of posts about related freedoms. This first post delves right in by talking about the taboo subject of sex.

At its core, sex is there for procreation, to continue the existence of the species. I once read that we, humans, are really there as a mechanism for our DNA to reproduce itself. Of course, this is taking the evolutionary viewpoint to its extreme, but I felt it a sobering thought to realize that all our achievements, our history, are just ways for a couple of strands of DNA to reproduce themselves.

In animals, sex is almost entirely linked with reproduction. Studying animals, in particular mammals, makes it clear that copulating is usually a pleasurable experience for them, however that does not make them seek it outside of the reproductive experience.

Humans are fairly unique in that they have expanded their sexual behavior beyond the reproductive purpose. Performing sexual acts purely for the pleasure, without a desire or attempt to reproduce, has been part of human history since its oldest recordings. It can probably be argued that enjoying sex for itself is one of the things that make us different from animals.

It is not until fairly recently, though, that the connection between sex and procreation got entirely severed. The development of various reliable birth control tools in the latter half of the twentieth century, combined with medical advances in fertility treatment, has resulted in a situation where you can have sex without reproduction, and reproduction without sex.

Society has not kept up with these developments, however. Much of the mores of society are based on traditions that are thousands of years old. In order to understand society’s attitude towards sex, we need to take a look at the origins of these traditions.

One of the other ways in which humans are different from other animals is in the time it takes them to rear their young to adulthood. Human babies are born as entirely helpless creatures. Where other animals can walk or fly within days or weeks after birth, it takes humans more than a year before they even have independent locomotion. Where other animals can often take care of themselves within a year, human children remain dependent on their parents for fifteen years; in fact, in modern society when they attend institutes of higher education, the children may be economically dependent on their parents for the first twenty-five years of their life.

An investment into the raising of offspring of fifteen years or more cannot easily be supported by a single parent. Children supported by both of their parents would, on average, have a better chance to succeed in life; hence there would be an evolutionary force that would favor societies that encourage long-term bonding.

This puts in particular the male (but to a lesser extend also the female) of the species in a tug-of-war between conflicting goals. On the one hand, his DNA is trying to spread itself as far as it can, and encouraging the man to impregnate as many women as possible. On the other hand, society is pressuring him to provide his share towards the raising of his children. Perhaps it is not surprising that the 1950-era Kinsey Report found that half the American men and a quarter of the women had engaged in extramarital sex: over the thousands of years, society has evolved a don’t ask, don’t tell attitude to deal with its fundamental contradictions.

The introduction of reliable birth control, and thereby the severing of the connection between sex and reproduction, through a monkey wrench into this balance. For a while, the hippie culture tried to find a new balance in dealing with sexuality, but it was too different from mainstream society to become generally accepted. In fact, the backlash against the hippie culture of the 1960s seems to have driven American society backwards...

Conclusion: society’s attitudes towards sex are hopelessly outdated and can safely be ignored. The only value left in these attitudes is a an unspoken default, a baseline for expectations and interactions.

Valuable Freedom (cont.)

Yesterday, I wrote about the typical preparations for a trip to communist East Germany in the late 1980s. After all the preparations, the actual day of travel would arrive. Since the distance from Delft, where I lived, to Dresden, where my pen friend lived, was “only” about 550 miles (880 km), I would leave really early and do the trip in one day. Crossing the border into the East Block country at Helmstedt was a bit of a scary experience. Although I never had any real trouble (apart from it taking two hours or so), there was always the possibility they would find something wrong with the paperwork, or have questions about the things I was bringing into the country. (I would always have a box with me with all kinds of stuff that was hard to get in East Germany, like various shampoos, candy, etc.) Crossing the border felt like entering a maximum security prison. I had repeatedly been warned not to stray from the direct route to my destination, as my entry permit was only valid from the border crossing to the place I was staying. The day after arriving, I would report to the police station, my passport would be stamped with a permit to stay for a specific number of days, and I would get a separate exit permit. At the end of the visit, I would usually take two days to drive back, because crossing the border back into the free world would take even longer than entering the communist country. They would inspect the car much more careful, making sure I wasn’t smuggling any people out.

Brandenburger Tor, Berlin, 1988

One of the most impressive moments came in 1988, when my pen friend and I visited Berlin for a few days. In those days, Berlin was a divided city: East Berlin was the capital of East Germany, while West Berlin was effectively a part of West Germany. West Berlin was of course surrounded by East Germany, and had, since 1961, been separated from it by the famous Berlin Wall. Standing at the Brandenburger Tor, we could not only see the Wall, but also West Berlin behind it. There it hit me, stronger than ever before, the difference between my friend’s world and mine. A few years earlier I had stood at almost the same spot, in West Berlin, looking at the East. I could go back to West Berlin whenever I wanted, but she would (we thought back then) never be able to do that. Look at the police man in the photo above. For a moment, I thought of him as a kind of park ranger, there to help tourists and protect the monument from vandalism. In reality, he was a border guard—not to protect the country from outside attacks, but to make sure the East German people stayed inside. Earlier, I compared crossing the border from West to East Germany to entering a maximum security prison. That analogy was no accident: East Germany was, for all practical purposes, one giant prison for its population. The prison warden, Erich Honecker, determined what was shown on TV, what was printed in the newspapers and magazines, who could do what, where and when. The sixteen million or so East Germans had to obey him. Standing there in front of the Brandenburger Tor, looking at the West, knowing that I was free and my friend, because she happened to be born in this country, was not, really brought home to me that Freedom isn’t a given, isn’t free. Freedom is something we inherited from our parents and grandparents, some of whom may have paid dearly for it. I feel that we, all of us in the “free world,” have a responsibility to cherish and defend this precious gift.

Valuable Freedom

I have been thinking about starting a Blog, and finally decided to take the plunge. There are things I want to say, and here people may be hearing them. “Freedom” is something that is very dear to me, to a level that sometimes even surprises me. Looking back at my life, I have realized that some of the formative events in that respect were a series of visits I made to the then-communist East-Germany.

Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin, 1985

Back in the late 1980s, visiting East Germany was not something one would do on the spur of the moment. It started off with the visa application. This application process would take six weeks—if you were lucky. To be safe, better plan two months of more ahead. As part of your visa application, you would have to specify where you would expect to be staying. In my case, I would be visiting a pen friend who lived in a small village not far from Dresden, and would be staying with her. She had told me that this information would go into her “file.” Nobody know exactly what information the Stasi (the East-German secret police) was collecting about the country’s citizens, but it was fully expected that contact with foreigners would be noted. Of course, the fact that she was regularly receiving letters from people in a capitalist country would already have been noted. Being a kindergarten teacher, which would have been considered a kind of public trust position, she would not have undertaken a regular correspondence with foreigners lightly. Choices like these could impact her career opportunities, could cause her to loose her job even. As someone born and raised in the West, I had always taken our basic freedoms for granted. Sure, western countries have their own “secret service” agencies, and we expect them to protect us against potential evil people. But I never expected that my government would want to know or care who I would exchange letters with, who would be visiting me, where I would travel. The East German government was known to keep that kind of information about its own citizens. In fact, with my visa application, they were bound to have opened a file on me. Sure, I could understand that there would be some kind of a background check if I would apply for a position that involves dealing with state secrets, and at such a point there might be questions about what I had done and who I would have known as a student. But for my East German friend, this was expected as part of every government job—and in a communist country, just about every job is directly or indirectly a government job. ... to be continued