🏀 Here is for another abysmal season!
If I had to name people who have influenced my life the most — not counting parents, teachers and other usual suspects whose very job is to influence you — the most surprising person on the list would probably be Mike Judge, the creator of Beavis and Butt-Head, Office Space, etc. Now, I was too young for Beavis and Butt-Head, never really got into King of the Hill and even though I appreciated the humor of Office Space I was merficuflly never exposed to that kind of office culture. No, Judge’s influence stems from a single movie, and in fact it was only the first five minutes of that movie that made a difference. I am of course talking about the introduction to Idiocracy (2006), in which a crude thought experiment pitted a WASP-ish couple of intellectuals against three trailers worth of rednecks and wondered which would result in more progeny.
No, the hereditary case for intelligence doesn’t make much sense, and the intro’s reliance on the pseudoscientific concept of IQ now seems quaint. But the fate of the two WASPs, ever waiting for better times to have children — or, more likely, the one-and-done — until it was far too late, this rang true. It was a good warning for someone just about to graduate from medical school (2008) and start what can be a never-ending journey of post-graduate medical education in the US (2010–2017).
More importantly, my then-medical student colleague, now-wife saw the same movie and had the same thoughts. If all goes well — and this late in the game, it better — we will welcome our fourth child into the world next month.
It is therefore with great interest that I read Scott Sumner’s most recent article which for once had a good and descriptive headline: Billionaire baby boom. And he has some interesting observations:
Fertility rates seem to follow a sort of U-shape. People in central Africa are too poor to afford very many luxuries, so children become the focus of their lives. Upper middle-class professionals have enough wealth to provide themselves with all sorts of fun activities, but not enough to provide full time caregivers for their children. Billionaires have so much money that they can farm out the difficult parts of raising children to servants, and just do the fun stuff like playing with their kids.
Note that it goes without saying that the upper middle-class professionals would want to outsource care for their children, and pay for it handsomely. Also left unspoken is the secret wish of every upper middle-class parent for their children to go to an elite university, which means a certain high school, and middle school, and… no wonder you would want to stick to just the one.
Thankfully, Nassim Taleb’s Incerto innoculated me against that kind of thinking, and frequent exposure to products of the above system acts as a booster of sorts. Limiting how many children you have so that you could raise one certified IYI would be a very IYI thing to do.
Living in DC, we are very much the outliers in any social circle you can imagine. “You must be really disappointed” is what a (single child) friend said to our 13-year-old. And everyone assumes the baby was a complete surprise (it wasn’t). We do hear a lot of “I don’t have children so that I can have a glass of wine in a restaurant at 6pm”. That’s fine. From my experience in health care those kinds of lives tend not to be as fullfilled in old age, but that could just be selection bias.
Anyway, you can definitely have more than one or two children without being a billionaire, and have a reasonably good lifestyle at that. In fact, better lifestyle than anyone ever in the history of humanity including royalty, other than in the last ~100 years. Factor that in when you make your own decisions.
🏀 Here is for another abysmal season!
Most hotels have introduced a bunch of cost-cutting measures under the guise of “saving the environment”, but this is something I can get behind. Even the tiniest leftovers are good for making your own liquid soap.
Don’t go to Maine, it sucks.
📺 The Night Of (2016) we somehow missed when it first came out nine years ago (!?) but it was well worth revisiting. These kind of competent dramas with a deeper message than just whodunnit have become rare — was Mare of Easttown the last one? — particularly ones that feel like they were set in an actual place and not a softly-focused, sterilized backdrop of Netflixland.
The complete package is high enough quality to compensate for a few annoying stereotypes. Cutting to a street scene full of Southeast Asian pedestrians milling about? Queue vaguely ethnic music with a techno beat. Our innocent protagonist is sent to a penitentiary like a lamb for slaughter? Queue the wise black inmate to provide advice and protection… but is he himself in fact a wolf?
That whole prison story was a needless diversion, a sped-up Walter White to Heisenberg transformation which detracted from (to me) the more important message about the criminal justice system and all human systems in general. It says that competence in a profession is indistinguishable from obsession, is driven by annoyance not love, and is powerless against the greatest force of human civilization — institutional inertia. Application to medicine comes immediately to mind, a case of missed diagnosis standing in for wrongfully charging someone with murder. Now that would be a show to watch.
🍿 One Battle After Another (2025) was, I imagine, the best movie I will have seen this year. I went into the theater not knowing anything about it except that it is a PTA movie starring DiCaprio, and for the first few minutes I had to orient myself on whether it was set in the present day or the 1970s — initially because of the subject matter, but mostly because of the (beautiful, unforgettable) cinematography that resulted in more than one iconic scene. Should I remind you that I see the late 1960s/early 70s as the pinnacle of American movie-making? This is as firm a recommendation as you will get from me to go see a movie.