'Tis the Season

It's that time of year again: Although Thanksgiving's two weeks away, ABC Family is starting to play holiday movies, malls are being trimmed with Christmas decorations, friends and family are sending out invitations to holiday parties, and radio stations are starting to play Christmas music. And that is why it is also that time of year when many of us launch into our annual complaints about the "commercialization of Christmas," start clamoring that we need to put the "Christ" back in "Xmas," and remind anyone who will listen that "Jesus in the reason for the season."

I get it. I understand peoples' frustrations. In fact, I've bemoaned the commercialization of Christmas before ("Black Friday and the Spirit of Christmas"). But, I have to confess that I love the Christmas season. I love watching the movies. I love listening to the carols. I love walking through malls bedecked with tinsel and stars and lights and kids climbing onto the laps of Santas. And I'm clearly not alone. Most of us appear to crave the holiday season. We can't get enough of it.

I think the reason why is because it evokes in us a desire for something more. It taps into our longing to be better people and live in a better world (Aristotle might say that it evokes in us our longing for eudaimonia). It recalls the sense of magic that Christmas had for us when we were kids. It engenders feelings contentment when family and friends gather to celebrate life and one another other. It elicits images of a world in which the lion and the lamb lay down together and nations don't train for war anymore (Isaiah 2, 11). And isn't that world in which most of us want to live? I suspect so, and if I'm right, that might be why the Christmas season begins a little earlier every year. And while at first it may seem like a bad thing, I'm unconvinced that it is. It isn't only for the money (although that's part of it). It's also because we long for a world where it's Christmas year round. And I think that's a good thing.

Note: Complaints that the use of "Xmas" rather than "Christmas" is a secular attempt to remove the religious aspect of Christmas by taking the "Christ" out of "Christmas" are somewhat misplaced. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the letter "X" was used as an abbreviation for "Christ" as early as 1485, long before the term "Xmas" was used. It comes from the Greek letter Chi, which is the first letter of the Greek word Χριστός, which is translated "Christ." It is also found in the labarum (see an example of it to the right), which is often referred to as the Chi-Rho, and is a Christian symbol representing Christ.

A Key to Wedded Bliss? Families and Friends without the Frills

The October issue of the Atlantic reported the results of a recent study that found that the percentage of marriages that lasted was positively associated with the number of people who attended their weddings. In particular, weddings where

• 1-10 people attended, the marriage was 35% more likely to last
• 11-50 people attended, the marriage was 56% more likely to last
• 51-100 people attended, the marriage was 69% more likely to last
• 101-200 people attended, the marriage was 84% more likely to last
• 201 or more people attended, the marriage was 92% more likely to last

At the same, however, the study found that the more a couple (or their parents) spent on a wedding, the less likely it would last. More precisely, marriages where the weddings cost

• $1,000 or less were 53% more likely to last than those that cost between $5,000 and $10,000
• Between $1,000 and $5,000 were 18% more likely to last than those that cost between $5,000 and $10,000
• $10,000 or more were 46% less likely to last than those who spent between $5,000 and $10,000

At first blush, the results suggest that couples should invite lots of family and friends to their weddings, while keeping the costs of the wedding down. A more likely explanation is that couples who are embedded in a dense network of friends and family probably don't feel the need to have extravagant weddings. The simple act of acknowledging their commitment to one another in the presence of their family and friends is more than enough, which is why their weddings are more likely to be well attended and cost relatively little. There's a lesson here I think...

Should the NCAA Pay It's Athletes?

In recent years more and more people have called on colleges to start paying their athletes. Most (not all) get scholarships, but the value of those pales in comparison to the money that college coaches, the colleges, and the NCAA make. Add to this the fact that others, such as video game manufacturers such as EA Sports (see image at right), can use the images (and stats) of college athletes without paying the athletes themselves for the right to do so. This is the topic of a recent NPR Planet Money podcast ("Is The NCAA An Illegal Cartel?"), which you can download from iTunes or listen to at the Planet Money website. It's quite good and only 18 minutes long.

Are Things Really Going to Get Bad for Obama and the Democrats?

Judging by most of the headlines following the retaking control of the Senate by the GOP is that the next two years will be difficult for both President Obama and the Democrats. But will that be the case? Possibly, but history also suggests that losing control of Congress may benefit the Democrats in the long run, in particular, in terms of the 2016 election. Consider, for instance:

1. The last time the Republicans won control of the Senate was 8 years ago when George W. Bush was President. Two years later Barack Obama was elected President and the Democrats retook control of the Senate not long after George Bush's approval rating hit an all-time low (19%).
2. Toward the end of President Bill Clinton's second year in office, when his approval rating got as low as 38% (not the lowest but close), Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress, and most people believed Clinton would be booted out of office when he came up for reelection. That, of course, is not what happened. The next two years were among Clinton's most successful, he was easily reelected, and he left office with relatively high approval ratings.

In short, because every President experiences periods of low approval ratings, what the party that holds the White House should hope for is that such periods occur during nonpresidential election years. That doesn't bode well for controlling Congress, but it does for controlling the White House. Presidential approval ratings aren't the only factor, of course, as the inability of Al Gore to get a bump for Clinton's popularity illustrates. But it does suggest that if Obama's approval ratings increase over the next two years, the nominee for the Democrats could do well.

Moreover, voter demographics continue to favor Democrats for national elections. In nonpresidential election years, minorities and young people are more likely than are older, white voters to stay home and not vote, meaning that conservative voters make up a disproportionate share of the electorate. That is unlikely to be the case two years from now when there's a strong possibility that Hillary Clinton will be the Democrat nominee ("How Hillary Clinton won the 2014 midterms"):

It’s one thing to win an election in a nonpresidential year, when minorities and young people stay home and older, whiter voters make up a disproportionate share of the electorate. It’s another thing to win when a Democratic presidential candidate is luring the party’s base back to the polls — especially when that candidate is Hillary Clinton, the most popular Democrat in America.

To be sure, a lot can and will happen between now and 2016, and I'm not quite ready to trot out my quadrennial presidential election predictions. I'll wait at least a year before I do that. Still, I don't think the Democrats have reason to panic, at least not yet, and as an editorial in Forbes magazine points out, the Republicans should not be too overconfident ("Republicans humiliated Obama, now they need to humble themselves").

The 2014 World Series Was a Classic

Evidently, a few folks have been complaining about the two teams that ended up in the World Series ("So What If These Aren’t The Two Best Teams In Baseball?"). Both the Giants and the Royals won fewer than 90 games this season, and more than one person has argued that neither team were the best team of their respective leagues. This assumes, of course, that regular season records accurately reflect which team is the best team, but that is debatable. As I noted in an earlier post, a team that, on average, wins 90 games a season, in a given season will win from 78 to 109 games (although the extremes are unlikely). Thus, the teams with the most wins during the regular season is not necessarily the best team. As FiveThirtyEight notes

Major League Baseball’s regular season (not even the playoffs, which are almost universally regarded as a crapshoot, but the 162-game regular season) is too short to definitively allow the best team to stand out from the pack. Even if MLB expanded to a schedule of 1,000 games per team (!!), the true best team in baseball would have less than a 54 percent chance of producing the regular season’s best record.

Moreover, each team plays more games against teams within its division, than without, which makes a straight up comparison of records problematic.

That said, MLB could return to a playoff system with only two leagues (no divisions), but does that guarantee that the World Series will be an exhibition of great baseball? No. In fact, the current system is probably better in that regard because it raises the probability that the two teams that reach the World Series will actually be playing good baseball.

And for those of you who missed it, this year's World Series was a classic. Probably the best since the Cardinals rallied and came back against the Rangers in 2011 ("One of the Best World Series Game Ever?") and maybe as good as the 1979 World Series when the Pittsburg Pirates ("We Are Family") beat the Baltimore Orioles in seven games (winning, like the Giants, their final game on the road). Next year, you might want to tune in (even if your team isn't playing).

One Last (Anti) Rant (at Least Until Next Season)

Several times over this past baseball season, I've ranted about how MLB managers often go to their closers before they need (or even have) to ("Not to Beat a Dead Horse" "The Closer Temptation is Hard to Resist" "MLB's Ridiculous Obsession with Closers" "Not Everyone Can Throw Like Mariano Rivera"). My belief is that if a pitcher's throwing well, there's no reason to take him out. In fact, one of the reasons why the Giants even made it to the World Series this year is because on two occasions (once against the Cardinals and once against the Nationals), the opposing managers (both of whom played for the Giants at one time) pulled a pitcher who was throwing well, and the Giants promptly scored either tying or go-ahead runs.

As a Giants fan, I'm happy to report that this past Sunday San Francisco Giants manager, Bruce Bochy, did not succumb to the "closer temptation" but instead let Giant pitcher, Madison Bumgarner, finish (and win) the game. Perhaps in the future more MLB managers will take notice. Then again, maybe they won't, and the Giants will be able to win a few more World Series.

Terrorism and ISIS

I've previously noted that the stereotype that many people have of Islamic terrorists is mistaken. They are often portrayed as religious fanatics from poverty stricken backgrounds with little or no education. That, however, is not the case. As Marc Sageman noted in his 2004 study ("Understanding Terrorist Networks"), most Islamic terrorists come from a middle-class backgrounds, attended secular grade schools, weren't terribly religious as children, and have attained a higher level of education than average person from their respective countries of origin. Other studies have turned up similar findings:

• Alan Krueger of Princeton University found that there is little evidence that terrorists are poor or poorly educated
• Claudia Berrebi of the RAND Corporation compared the characteristics of of suicide-bombers recruited by Hamas and Islamic Jihad from the West Bank and Gaza to the general Palestinian population and found that almost 60% of the suicide bombers had a high school education, which is a higher percentage than the general Palestinian population (approximately 25%) 
• Berrebi also found that they were less than half as likely to come from an impoverished family as a typical man from the general population
• The 2004 Pew Global Attitudes Project surveyed adults in Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, and Turkey and discovered that there is no evidence that sympathy for terrorism is greater among economically deprived individuals -- instead, more schooling correlated with more sympathy

And now along comes ISIS. At this point it's unclear what the demographics of the group are, but as the video linked to below illustrates (just of kids playing in a park and enjoying living life under ISIS, nothing more), unsophisticated they are not. And if those of us in the West treat the group as a bunch of illiterate country-bumpkins, we could be in for a very long fight.