Saturday, February 22, 2020

Sophie Lewis: We Can't Have a Feminist Future Without Abolishing the Family, which create the infrastructure for capitalism, exploiting people of color and disowning queer children

We Can't Have a Feminist Future Without Abolishing the Family. Marie Solis. Vice, Feb 21 2020. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qjdzwb/sophie-lewis-feminist-abolishing-the-family-full-surrogacy-now
The feminist thinker Sophie Lewis has a radical proposal for what comes next.

[Full text, photos, lots of links, at the URI above.]

A little more than two weeks before I planned to meet the feminist theorist Sophie Lewis, her mother died. She had been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer in March, requiring Lewis to travel back and forth between her home in Philadelphia and a hospital in the UK—a journey she technically wasn’t allowed to make due to the pending status of her green card. When her mother passed away in late November, she did so thousands of miles away, while Lewis and her brother sang the Taylor Swift song “Safe and Sound” to her over Skype.

Earlier that month, at a lecture in Lower Manhattan hosted by the arts journal e-flux, Lewis, who is 31, reflected on what some might see as an obvious irony to her crisscrossing the ocean to care for her ailing mother: Verso Books had just published her first book, Full Surrogacy Now, a polemic that calls for abolishing the family.

“2019, in addition to its more general geopolitical ghoulishness, has been a difficult one for this particular family abolitionist,” Lewis told the audience of about two dozen. “It's been surreal because the temporal coincidence of the Full Surrogacy launch with this unprecedented requirement for me—that I be at my closest bio-relative’s bedside—brought the stakes of my subject matter to life with almost unbearable intensity.”

The book, and its core premise, has gained widespread attention, from leftist publications like Jacobin and The Nation all the way to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, who dedicated a June segment on his prime-time show to tearing it down. Recently, the columnist David Brooks declared in The Atlantic that the “nuclear family was a mistake.” The piece inspired a niche version of a popular Drake meme, with the singer shaking his head in disapproval at Brooks’ column in one frame, and smiling at Full Surrogacy Now in the next. (“I gave up after two minutes admittedly, but let it be known that I (incredulous) started reading it,” Lewis tweeted of the Atlantic piece. “Like....have we reached David Brooks?”)

When Lewis demands “full surrogacy now,” she isn’t talking about commercial surrogacy, or ”Surrogacy™,” as she puts it. Instead, she uses the surrogacy industry to build the argument that all gestation is work because of the immense physical and emotional labor it requires of those who do it. She often refers to pregnancy as an “extreme sport.”

If all forms of pregnancy count as work, we can take a clear-eyed look at our current working conditions: “It is a wonder we let fetuses inside us,” she says at the start of her book, citing the roughly 1,000 people in the United States who still die as a result of pregnancy and childbirth each year—mostly poor women and women of color. “This situation is social, not simply ‘natural.’ Things are like this for political and economic reasons: we made them this way.”

And so we can also make them different, Lewis argues. She imagines a future where the labor of making new human beings is shared among all of us, “mother” no longer being a natural category, but instead something we can choose.

At this point, “surrogacy” becomes somewhat metaphorical: Lewis isn’t asking that we all agree to physically gestate fetuses that aren’t biologically ours. Her radical proposition is that we practice “full surrogacy” by abolishing the family. That means caring for each other not in discrete private units (also known as nuclear households), but rather within larger systems of care that can provide us with the love and support we can’t always get from blood relations—something Lewis knows all too well.

Even those of us who might call our family situations relatively “happy” should sign onto this project of demolishing their essential structure, Lewis says. Nuclear households create the infrastructure for capitalism, passing wealth and property down family trees, concentrating it in the hands of the few at the top of our class hierarchy. Maintaining the traditional family structure over time has also meant exploiting people of color and disowning queer children.

Lewis imagines a future where the labor of making new human beings is shared among all of us, “mother” no longer being a natural category, but instead something we can choose.

Lewis isn’t concerned with incremental changes within our existing systems—Full Surrogacy Now, for example, doesn’t make any concrete policy proposals or spend time worrying over issues like the gender pay gap and paid family leave. She’s concerned with much bolder possibilities: In Lewis's utopian future, the family as we know it no longer exists. Everyone, regardless of gender, is a surrogate; we mother each other.

And so, no, Lewis didn’t find that looking after her sick mother contradicted her stance on the nuclear family. If we had achieved the ends of family abolition already, there would have been a vast network of people to care for her mother in those final months of her life, not just Lewis and her brother.

“Nothing could have better illustrated the impossibility, the unjustness, and the structural scarcity—for all concerned—baked into the heart of the private nuclear household,” she said.

When I visited Lewis in Philadelphia in December, we met at a cafe across the street from her apartment around 1 pm. We’d planned to meet earlier, but that morning Lewis had texted me asking if we could push back our breakfast date a couple of hours—she’d stayed out until 5 am dancing at her partner Vicky Osterweil’s birthday party. She walked into the cafe looking fresh and buoyant, her hair a brilliant shade of orange, which she had recently dyed to match the walls of her mother’s apartment.

Over the loud hum of families eating Sunday brunch, Lewis, told me about her somewhat unlikely path to writing a book on surrogacy and family abolitionist theory. We started at the beginning: Lewis was born in Vienna, Austria, where her parents had been working as journalists, but she spent most of her childhood in Geneva, Switzerland, and parts of France, moving around often for her father’s job, which she said often took precedence over her mother’s job, or her family’s other needs.

This arrangement was an indicator of other, darker family dynamics, according to Lewis. One of her earliest family memories was of an argument she had gotten into with her father when she was just three years old: Lewis and her brother were both singing the Queen of the Night’s part in The Magic Flute, an opera they loved watching as children. Her father scolded them both, telling them that they shouldn’t sing the Queen’s part because the King had banished her, and she’d deserved it. Lewis sobbed. “If you skip forward seven years or so, he’s asking me: Why hasn’t there ever been a female Mozart? Why hasn’t there been a female Shakespeare?” Lewis said.

Years later, her father doubted Lewis when she told him she was raped at 13, writing to her partner in an email that rape is “good for the feminist CV.”

She left the house the first chance she got.

Lewis studied English literature at Oxford as an undergraduate, and then received a master’s in the university’s environmental policy program. To her chagrin, what had historically been a rather radical program, led by a Marxist professor, had become one run by an employee of the World Bank; a representative from the oil and gas conglomerate BP delivered a lecture on the first day of classes. When Lewis told the professor she’d been under the impression that the program would be about challenging the corporate interests BP represented, Lewis said the professor told her: “You can’t just change the world.”

Lewis completed the master’s, but took her utopian visions elsewhere. She organized a university reading group dedicated to Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, a complicated essay that imagines a feminist future inhabited by hybrid creatures engaged in political struggle against the racism, misogyny, and colonialism that formed them. Lewis had first discovered the text when she was just 16, using dial-up internet.

“I didn’t understand shit obviously,” she said over breakfast. “But there’s a soul in her writing that I found very exciting, and I felt a queer kinship with it. It was very comforting.”

Lewis went on to study human geography—a field that examines how humans interact with their environment—and write a thesis on gestational labor, all the while turning over ideas in her head about labor, gender, and nature and how they intersect.

In Lewis's utopian future, the family as we know it no longer exists. Everyone, regardless of gender, is a surrogate; we mother each other.

Much of the writing Lewis did during and immediately after her schooling foretells Full Surrogacy Now. But she also applied her critical feminist eye to film and television, writing about Nymphomaniac, Phantom Thread, The Handmaid’s Tale Hulu adaption, and a British reality dating show called First Dates. It was this last piece of criticism that caught the attention of Verso editor Rosie Warren.

“Review” isn’t quite the right word for what Lewis does in these essays. She’s not evaluating the artistic success of these works so much as she is reading them closely to understand how we are living in the world as it is, and how we might go about making it otherwise. Phantom Thread, for example, isn’t a wry love story, but proof that romance is ”a series of atrocities people perpetrate on one another in the name of love and art, for the sake of class power.” And The Handmaid’s Tale—a favorite subject of criticism for Lewis—is hardly a feminist dystopia for its cosplaying fans. Rather it is a feminist utopia, portraying a fantasy of solidarity where all women experience exactly the same form of oppression, regardless of other identity categories like race or class.

Watching First Dates, it occurred to Lewis that heterosexual dating in real life very much resembled the staged, stylized version of it that contestants participate in on the show: “‘Dating,’ as it is currently known and practised, casts ordinary people as perfectible investment opportunities in competition with each other across myriad platforms,” like OkCupid and Tinder, she wrote.

“Verso read the essay and the editor was like, ‘The incredible thing about your writing is that it’s like you’re an alien who has come down to tell us the bad news about heterosexual culture,’” Lewis recalled. “And that’s why they gave me the book.”

Warren laughed when I recited this over the phone. Lewis’s approach to culture “allows you to see things as they are,” she said. “It’s such a wonderful feeling to have someone point out things you don’t even realize you’ve accepted as ‘normal.’”

Lewis appears to be at her most excited when she’s turning some cultural artifact inside out. Between bites of mushroom pizza one evening, she told me animatedly that she and Osterweil had figured out the secret to understanding Gilmore Girls, which they had both recently watched together for the first time. The show, a family drama from the aughts, casts men as marginal characters while the women drive the action, she explained.

“All of the women are men and all of the men are women,” Osterweil added.

When Full Surrogacy Now came out in May, conservatives were aghast. Shortly after its release, Fox News host Tucker Carlson invited Lewis onto his show; when she declined, Carlson moved forward with the segment anyway, airing a YouTube clip of Lewis calling abortion “a form of killing” (a pro-abortion rights statement she stands by). What followed was a torrent of internet abuse, largely from right-wing viewers who saw Lewis as confirmation of all the insidious things they suspected feminism of to begin with: She was “Satan” or “worse than Satan” or “feminism’s true agenda, unmasked!” as Lewis later recalled.

But Lewis’s proposal for dismantling the nuclear family was met with befuddlement from left-leaning outlets too. In a review for The New Yorker, contributor Jessica Weisberg—though otherwise sympathetic to Lewis’s position—argues that Full Surrogacy Now failed to account for that “mysterious variety of love” only biological motherhood can offer. Even at Jacobin, a socialist magazine, writer Nivedita Majumdar declared that the “real path to liberation isn’t the call to ‘abolish the family,’” condemning Lewis’s “dogmatic hostility to the parent-child relation.”

Lewis has found that when she talks about family abolition people respond as though she’s “not even speaking English anymore … like [I’m] not even making syntactical sense,” she said at the e-flux lecture. “Real brain explosion emoji to the max.”

Abolishing the family may not have ever been a mainstream proposition, but for a stretch of time in the 1960s and 70s it was a fairly well-known one. Arguments for family abolition date back to Marx and Engels (and indeed, even further, to Plato), but the radical feminist Shulamith Firestone is credited with popularizing the concept on the modern-day left. In her foundational 1970 manifesto The Dialectic of Sex, she identifies the biological family as the basis for women’s oppression because it establishes women as an underclass by forcing them to bear the brunt of gestational labor.

To be a radical feminist during these years would have meant being familiar with this text and its central demand, which appeared in leftist pamphlets and literature. Yet just a decade later, any advocacy for family abolition had all but disappeared from feminist discourse. Instead, the movement chose to embrace family values, preferring to fight for the reform—rather than the annihilation—of the nuclear family structure.

In the late 70s and 80s, liberal groups and individual feminist leaders argued that family was the new frontier in women’s struggle for equality, given the gains women had recently made in the workforce. “Now that women are beginning to have an active voice in the economy and politics, the nation’s agenda may begin truly to include the family,” said Betty Friedan, the author of The Feminine Mystique, during a keynote address for the 1979 National Assembly on the Future of the Family, which was hosted by the National Organization for Women.

The family, Friedan said, was no longer “enemy territory” for feminists.

When Lewis was writing Full Surrogacy Now, she didn’t give much thought to how her renewed calls for family abolition might be received in 2019. “I think some people take my book as a really intentional, purposeful attempt at pissing everybody off,” she told me with a laugh. “But I don’t feel like I’m strategic; I don’t think my skill is seeing what everyone else is saying and making a calculated intervention.”

Nonetheless, Lewis has chosen a good time to intervene. Over the last decade, feminism has been seemingly emptied of any remaining, actual politics in order for it to be subsumed by brands marketing empowerment. In a post- Lean In climate, still very much dominated by “girlbosses” and “She-E-Os,” mainstream feminism can appear as though it has been completely divorced from its radical roots. Contemporary debates around gender roles, women’s labor, and sexual politics often seem to circle the same arguments feminist theorists had decades ago, but rarely acknowledge that this is the case. (Her next project is tackling some of these contemporary feminist archetypes in a book she's working on now, tentatively titled Feminism of Fools.)

Lewis’s call to abolish the family is also a call to re-energize and repoliticize feminism.

It would be wrong to credit Lewis with rediscovering figures like Firestone. But while these second-wave thinkers have not by any means been forgotten, their early work is more often cited than it is actively engaged with.

“At this point, the radical interventions of these feminist scholars and thinkers happened 30 to 40 years ago,” said Natasha Lennard, who is the author of Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life, as well as a close friend of Lewis’s. “There’s been this static and hagiographic upholding of these ideas, but not a lot of pushing them forward, at least not in the public intellectual sphere.”

This kind of reverence is anathema to Lewis. When I asked her what contemporary feminists she admired, she named the queer feminist theorist Sara Ahmed, anti-work feminist Kathi Weeks, and the founding members of the Wages for Housework movement as a few examples, but said it’s “a mistake” to have feminist heroes. “You make them and in doing so you’re platforming someone who then is kind of cursed by that,” Lewis said. “They no longer keep learning and growing to the same degree,” potentially hampering new feminist thinking.

Haraway is an exception. Forgetting herself, Lewis will sometimes refer to Haraway as her “idol.”

Lewis’s call to abolish the family is also a call to re-energize and repoliticize feminism.

Even so, Haraway doesn’t get a free pass. Though Lewis builds on the theory found in Cyborg Manifesto and other early Haraway texts, she has critiqued some of the scholar’s more recent argumentation. In 2017, Lewis penned an essay for Viewpoint Magazine arguing that Haraway appeared to betray her own principles in her latest book, Staying With the Trouble. In Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway envisions a utopian post-gender future created by every member of the human species; but in Staying With the Trouble, Haraway calls for a dramatic reduction of the population in order to reduce humanity’s effects on the climate—a cynical turn toward misanthropy, Lewis wrote.

To Lewis’s surprise, she received an email from Haraway herself not long after the piece went up, inviting her into conversation with several other big-name feminists who were cc’ed. Haraway told Lewis that she had no choice but to “contend” with what Lewis had written: a well-argued piece of criticism. (Haraway told me she wasn’t available for interview due to travel.)

Lewis is bashful about this, but Haraway has made it clear that she sees Lewis as continuing the legacy of her work, even as she challenges it. Much of Lewis’s writing is fundamentally Harawayan in the sense that while at times very dense, it is filled with imagination and metaphor.

“Surrogates to the front!” Lewis exclaims toward the end of her book. “By surrogates I mean those comradely gestators, midwives, and other sundry interveners in the more slippery moments of social reproduction: repairing boats; swimming across borders; blockading lake-threatening pipelines; carrying; miscarrying.”

Afew hours after our breakfast, Lewis invited me to see Queen & Slim with her, Osterweil, and their friend Zach at a theater near the University of Pennsylvania's campus. The film—a drama about a young Black couple on the run after fatally shooting a police officer in self-defense—is not, on its face, about the nuclear family. But after spending just one afternoon with Lewis, I couldn’t help but think of it that way.

Slim is preoccupied by his “legacy,” which he initially sees as something that can exist only through a biological lineage. But at the end of the film, having made the choice to abandon his family to start a new life with Queen, he tells her that she’s his legacy.

Lewis said this happens all the time, this experience of watching something and noticing family abolitionist subtext. It’s probably even happened watching “some superhero movie,” she joked.

“Vicky always digs me in the ribs when we’re watching something that has to do with non-nuclear kinship,” Lewis told me the next day at a ramen restaurant near the office of her therapist, whom she had met with before lunch. “I already know when she’s going to do it. She’s like, ‘Uh?! Uh?!’”

Another place Lewis has found family abolitionist themes is in Ari Aster’s horror films, Hereditary and Midsommar, which she wrote about in August for Commune. The essay is Lewis at her best, weaving together the sharp analysis that caught Verso's eye with her idiosyncratic humor and wit. But it is also a somber look at the nuclear household of her childhood, of which we only get a glimpse in Full Surrogacy Now: Though Lewis may have come to her theories about family abolition and surrogacy intellectually, her own family upbringing has played a role that is difficult to ignore.

In the piece, Lewis tells us that her father taught her and her brother to treat their mother with contempt. When her parents separated, they literally divided the house in half, sealing off doorways and even creating a second kitchen, sectioned off from the original by an improvised partition.

“In other words, I know the family not to be a benign ‘default' situation,’” Lewis writes. “I’ve always known.”

In the wake of her mother’s death, she’d been contending with these family tensions once again. Lewis’s dad was blaming her for one of her mother’s long-ago suicide attempts, and sending nasty messages to her and her brother on Facebook and through email.

But even absent her father’s interventions, growing up, Lewis’s relationship with her mother wasn’t of the “mysterious variety of love” sort. This made grieving her death difficult, especially when so many people seemed to consider the loss of one’s mother—one’s “closest bio-relative,” as Lewis had put it in her November lecture—to be the greatest loss one can suffer.

“People have been saying to me, ‘Love yourself in the days ahead like she loved you,’” Lewis said. “And I’m like, ‘Oh my god, that’s a terrible idea!’ I need to do a lot better than that and so do all my friends.”

On the last day we spent together, I visited Lewis at her home. Originally, she was going to take me on a short walking tour of her neighborhood, but it was raining and gloomy outside, so we settled into two armchairs in her living room. She made us green tea, pouring mine into a mug that read “I’ve got 99 problems and white heteronormative patriarchy is basically all of them.” To my delight, her cat, a small tabby named Robespierre—after the French revolutionary—jumped onto my lap.

Lewis described her slice of West Philadelphia as a “village”: It includes Gold Standard, the quaint cafe where we first met, a tattoo parlor, a “social-justicey” yoga studio, a community garden, a “punk” hair salon, and an antique shop where Lewis and Osterweil had a $50 voucher, a wedding gift they still hadn’t used more than a year after they married. Days earlier, hunting for a seat at Gold Standard, we spotted someone leaving who turned out to be a friend of Lewis: They told her that they planned to sign up for the Brooklyn Institute class she is teaching this month at the anarchist bookstore Wooden Shoe Books.

Shortly after we found seats facing the window, we waved to Osterweil, who was smoking a cigarette as she crossed the street.

"I know the family not to be a benign ‘default' situation. I’ve always known.”

Sitting beside me in her apartment, Lewis showed me a scrapbook her mother had made, filled with photos of her playing with buckets of water and grinning at the beach—a reminder of her own arguments in Full Surrogacy Now that we should, figuratively, return to the “wateriness” in which we were gestated. It is at this time, Lewis says, when we are suspended in amniotic fluid, that the boundaries of our physical selves are in flux. To acknowledge that this is also true in life—that we are all inextricably connected to each other, biological family or not—would create the conditions for “radical kinship.”

She also showed me one of the zines she and Osterweil gave to guests at their wedding, which include speeches from friends and promises to each other. The latter could not properly be called “vows,” because they are in fact disavowals: of the institution of marriage, the biological family, and the dysfunction that both can breed. (They had a more traditional ceremony in Boston, at the request of Osterweil’s mother.)

To spend any amount of time with Lewis is to feel that the world she imagines is nearby. Whether we realize it or not, many of us are already familiar with her arguments for abolishing the family. When we talk about the prevalence of domestic violence and child abuse—when some of us find ourselves inside family units that perpetrate these crimes—we acknowledge that, in horror movie parlance, the violence is coming from inside the family.

We may not call it “family abolition” or “full surrogacy,” but many people have begun to erect the caregiving communes Lewis wants to see realized. Queer people build “chosen families,” as do other marginalized groups who depend on each other for their survival. And even within traditional nuclear households, parents might find themselves saying that it “takes a village” to raise children—an acknowledgement that it’s not a job one can do on their own.

In many ways, Lewis shows us, the family has already been abolished. At the same time, the “open-source, fully collaborative gestation” she imagines remains on a distant horizon. Riffing on a famous quote from the philosopher Fredric Jameson, Lewis considers that “if it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, it is perhaps easier still to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the family.”

Nonetheless, Lewis sees glimmers of this future everywhere. When she is surrounded by her partner and her friends, she sees that she is “mothered by many.” They are not her biological relatives, but they are each other’s kin in an even truer sense: They have chosen to care for each other without the dictates of the nuclear family structure. In Lewis’ feminist utopia, family has not vanished; it has become more wild, more abundant, and less constrained.

Just a few days after her mother died, Lewis confused a woman crossing the street for her. “It provoked, in the moment, a torrent of intense tears,” Lewis wrote on Twitter. “But now I’m thinking about it and realizing she hasn’t just evaporated. She’ll always be around even after she stops haunting (e.g.) pedestrian crossings in Philadelphia.”

Mothers, of course, are everywhere.


Shorter and longer durations of sleep are associated with an increased twelve-month prevalence of psychiatric and substance use disorders

Shorter and longer durations of sleep are associated with an increased twelve-month prevalence of psychiatric and substance use disorders: Findings from a nationally representative survey of US adults (NESARC-III). Pierre A. Geoffroy et al. Journal of Psychiatric Research, February 21 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychires.2020.02.018

Highlights
• This study present nationally representative data on the prevalence of mental disorders stratified by duration of sleep.
• A U-shaped association was observed between sleep duration and all psychiatric and substance use disorders.
• Highest risks, exceeding a 3-fold increase for some mental disorders, were observed for short sleepers, especially for the <5 h/night group compared with the 7 h/night reference group.
• These results suggest that adequate sleep duration may have general clinical benefits, calling for actions for primary prevention in public health settings.

Abstract: The lack of comprehensive data on the association between psychiatric and substance use disorders and habitual sleep duration represents a major health information gap. This study examines the 12-month prevalence of mental disorders stratified by duration of sleep. Data were drawn from face-to-face interviews conducted in the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions III, a nationally representative survey of US adults (N = 36,309). There were 1893 (5.26%) participants who reported <5h of sleep/night; 2434(6.76%) 5 h/night; 7621(21.17%) 6 h/night; 9620(26.72%) 7 h/night; 11,186(31.07%) 8 h/night, and 3245(9.01%) ≥9 h/night. A U-shaped association was observed between sleep duration and all mental disorders. The prevalence of mental disorders was 55% for individuals with <5 h/night and 47.81% for ≥9 h/night, versus 28.24% for the 7 h/night (aOR = 1.90 and 1.39 respectively). The greatest odds ratios were for the <5 h/night group, with an increased risk above 3-fold for panic disorder (PD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), psychotic disorder, and suicide attempt; between 2 and 3 fold for major depressive disorder (MDD), bipolar disorder (BD), and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD); and between 1 and 2 fold for tobacco and drug use disorders, specific and social phobias. The ≥9 h/night group had an increased risk above 1 to 2-fold regarding tobacco and drug use disorders, MDD, BD, PD, social phobia, GAD, PTSD, psychotic disorder, and suicide attempt. U-shaped associations exist between sleep duration and mental disorders, calling for respect to recommendations for adequate sleep duration in routine clinical care as well as to actions for primary prevention in public health settings.

Keywords: SleepCircadian rhythmsPsychiatric disordersPsychiatryAddictions

Weaker copyrights encouraged the creation of follow-on science by a reduction in access costs, allowing scientists at less affluent institutions to use existing knowledge in new follow-on research

Effects of Copyrights on Science: Evidence from the WWII Book Republication Program. Barbara Biasi and Petra Moser. Feb 2020. https://www.dropbox.com/s/3go6y47fplwt6nf/BRP.pdf

Abstract: Copyrights, which establish intellectual property in music, science,and other creative goods, are intended to encourage creativity. Yet, copyrights also raise the cost of accessing existing work - potentially discouraging future innovation.This paper uses an exogenous shift towards weak copyrights(and low access costs) during WWII to examine the potentially adverse effects of copyrights on science. Using two alternative identification strategies, we show that weaker copyrights encouraged the creation of follow-on science, measured by citations.This change is driven by a reduction in access costs, allowing scientists at less affluent institutions to use existing knowledge in new follow-on research.

Previously: Effects of Copyrights on Science - Evidence from the US Book Republication Program
Barbara Biasi, Petra Moser. NBER Working Paper No. 24255, January 2018. https://www.nber.org/papers/w24255

Abstract: Copyrights for books, news, and other types of media are a critical mechanism to encourage creativity and innovation. Yet economic analyses continue to be rare, partly due to a lack of experimental variation in modern copyright laws. This paper exploits a change in copyright laws as a result of World War II to examine the effects of copyrights on science. In 1943, the US Book Republication Program (BRP) granted US publishers temporary licenses to republish the exact content of German-owned science books. Using new data on citations, we find that this program triggered a large increase in citations to German-owned science books. This increase was driven by a significant reduction in access costs: Each 10 percent decline in the price of BRP book was associated with a 43 percent increase in citations. To investigate the mechanism by which lower book prices influence science, we collect data on library holdings across the United States. We find that lower prices helped to distribute BRP books across US libraries, including less affluent institutions. Analyses of the locations of citing authors further indicate that citations increased most for locations that gained access to BRP books. Results are confirmed by two alternative measures of scientific output: new PhDs and US patents that use knowledge in BRP books.

Shifting the distribution of daily energy intake towards the breakfast meal may be a potential strategy to reduce overall energy intake and improve dietary intakes

Breakfast size is associated with daily energy intake and diet quality. Wenjie Wang et al. Nutrition, February 17 2020, 110764. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nut.2020.110764

Highlights
• Consuming more energy at breakfast relative to daily energy intake was associated with better dietary profiles and lower daily energy intake in a large nutrition survey
• Those consuming more than 25.5% of energy at breakfast had higher diet quality scores but similar daily energy intakes than breakfast skippers
• Shifting the distribution of daily energy intake towards the breakfast meal may be a potential strategy to improve dietary intakes and reduce overall energy intake

Abstract
Objective  The aim of this study was to investigate the role of breakfast consumption and breakfast size on daily energy, nutrient intakes and diet quality.

Methods  One-day 24-hour recall data from 2011-12 National Nutrition and Physical Activity Survey (n=9,341, adults ≥ 19 years) was analysed, where respondents were classified into breakfast consumers or skippers. Breakfast consumers were further classified into quartile of breakfast size (energy intake (EI) from breakfast x 100% / daily EI). Diet quality was assessed using the Healthy Eating Index for Australian Adults (HEIFA-2013). General linear modelling was undertaken to compare groups, adjusting for potential confounders.

Results  Overall, 85.9% of adults consumed breakfast, contributing a mean of 19.9 ± SD10.9% of daily EI for consumers. Among breakfast consumers, obtaining a higher proportion of daily EI from breakfast was associated with lower daily intakes of energy, added sugars, saturated fat and alcohol (%E) and higher intakes of dietary fibre (%E) and most micronutrients (per 1,000 kJ) and better HEIFA-2013 scores (Ptrend<0.0001). Additionally, those in the highest quartile of breakfast size (>25.5% EI) had higher diet quality scores (P <0.001) but similar daily EI (P =0.751) compared with breakfast skippers.

Conclusions  These findings indicate that obtaining a higher proportion of daily EI from breakfast may result in more favourable dietary profiles and lower daily EI. Further research is needed to confirm this.

Keywords: BreakfastMeal sizeEnergy intakeDiet qualityAdultsNutrition survey

Quiet rooms have a larger impact on patient satisfaction than medical quality; communication with nurses affects satisfaction far more than the hospital-level risk of dying, medical excellence or patient safety

Patients as Consumers in the Market for Medicine: The Halo Effect of Hospitality. Cristobal Young, Xinxiang Chen. Social Forces, soaa007, February 13 2020, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaa007

Abstract: Consumer-driven health care is often heralded as a new quality paradigm in medicine. However, patients-as-consumers face difficulties in judging the quality of their medical treatment. With a sample of 3,000 U.S. hospitals, we find that neither medical quality nor patient survival rates have much impact on patient satisfaction with their hospital. In contrast, patients are very sensitive to the “room and board” aspects of care that are highly visible. Quiet rooms have a larger impact on patient satisfaction than medical quality, and communication with nurses affects satisfaction far more than the hospital-level risk of dying. Hospitality experiences create a halo effect of patient goodwill, while medical excellence and patient safety do not. Moreover, when hospitals face greater competition from other hospitals, patient satisfaction is higher but medical quality is lower. Consumer-driven health care creates pressures for hospitals to be more like hotels. These findings lend broader insight into unintended consequences of marketization.


For many traits, males show greater variability than females; largest-ever mega-analysis of brain structure (international data spanning nine decades of life) shows greater male variability

Greater male than female variability in regional brain structure across the lifespan. Lara M Wierenga et al. bioRxiv, Feb 17 2020. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.17.952010

Abstract: For many traits, males show greater variability than females, with possible implications for understanding sex differences in health and disease. Here, the ENIGMA (Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis) Consortium presents the largest-ever mega-analysis of sex differences in variability of brain structure, based on international data spanning nine decades of life. Subcortical volumes, cortical surface area and cortical thickness were assessed in MRI data of 16,683 healthy individuals 1-90 years old (47% females). We observed patterns of greater male than female between-subject variance for all brain measures. This pattern was stable across the lifespan for 50% of the subcortical structures, 70% of the regional area measures, and nearly all regions for thickness. Our findings that these sex differences are present in childhood implicate early life genetic or gene-environment interaction mechanisms. The findings highlight the importance of individual differences within the sexes, that may underpin sex-specific vulnerability to disorders.


Truth tellers reported more verifiable digital details & sources than liars; also provided more unverifiable detail than liars, which was not predicted & goes against the findings in previous studies

Fading lies: applying the verifiability approach after a period of delay. Louise Marie Jupe,Aldert Vrij,Sharon Leal & Galit Nahari. Psychology, Crime & Law, Sep 25 2019. https://doi.org/10.1080/1068316X.2019.1669594

ABSTRACT: We tested the utility of applying the Verifiability Approach (VA) to witness statements after a period of delay. The delay factor is important to consider because interviewees are often not interviewed directly after witnessing an event. A total of 64 liars partook in a mock crime and then lied about it during an interview, seven days later. Truth tellers (n = 78) partook in activities of their own choosing and told the truth about it during their interview, seven days later. All participants were split into three groups, which provided three different verbal instructions relating to the interviewer’s aim to assess the statements for the inclusion of verifiable information: no information protocol (IP) (n = 43), the standard-IP (n = 46) and an enhanced-IP (n = 53). In addition to the standard VA approach of analysing verifiable details, we further examined verifiable witness information and verifiable digital information and made a distinction between verifiable details and verifiable sources. We found that truth tellers reported more verifiable digital details and sources than liars.

KEYWORDS: Deception, verifiability approach, investigative interviews, delay

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We also found that truth tellers provided more unverifiable detail than liars, which was not predicted and goes against the findings in previous studies. We are unable to explain these different findings in our experiment compared to previous work. It could be related to the delay, but to test this an immediate condition needs to be included in the design. One of our initial aims was to see if the VA was still applicable in delay conditions. We did not include an immediate condition as we did not expect significant differences between the immediate and delay conditions. With hindsight, an immediate condition should have been included.

China & South Korea: Drivers had a greater intention to bully automated vehicles than to bully humans; Chinese (vs Korean), male (vs female), & younger (vs older) had a greater intention to drive aggressively

Ready to bully automated vehicles on public roads? Peng Liu, Yong Du, Lin Wang, Da Young Ju. Accident Analysis & Prevention, Volume 137, March 2020, 105457. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aap.2020.105457

Highlights
• We designed an eleven-item bullying intention questionnaire.
• Participants in China and South Korea had a greater intention to bully AVs than to bully other human drivers.
• Chinese (vs. Korean) participants reported a greater intention to drive aggressively.
• Male (vs. female) participants reported a greater intention to drive aggressively.
• Younger (vs. older) participants reported a greater intention to drive aggressively.

Abstract: Automated vehicles (AVs), the wide adoption of which is expected to improve traffic safety significantly, are penetrating our roads. The AVs that are testing on public roads have been bullied by human road users. We are not sure whether the bullying incidents are isolated or will be common in the future. In a cross-national survey (N = 998 drivers in China and South Korea), we developed an eleven-item bullying intention questionnaire. We assumed and confirmed that, overall, participants had a greater intention to bully machine drivers than to bully other human drivers. Compared to the Korean participants, the Chinese participants reported a greater intention to drive aggressively. The correlations of their intention to bully AVs with their attitude toward AVs and with risk-benefit perception of AVs were weak. Male participants (vs. female participants) and younger participants (vs. older participants) reported a greater intention to drive aggressively. Drivers' aggressive behaviors toward AVs might be common in the future, which might increase traffic risk and hinder the implementation of this technology.

Keywords: automated vehiclesintention to bullymixed traffic flowbullying intention questionnaireaggressive driving



The unique contribution of blushing to the development of social anxiety disorder symptoms: results from a longitudinal study

The unique contribution of blushing to the development of social anxiety disorder symptoms: results from a longitudinal study. Milica Nikolić  Mirjana Majdandžić  Cristina Colonnesi  Wieke de Vente  Eline Möller  Susan Bögels. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, February 20 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.13221

Abstract
Background  Self‐conscious emotional reactivity and its physiological marker – blushing has been proposed to be an etiological mechanism of social anxiety disorder (SAD), but so far, untested in longitudinal designs. This study tested, for the first time, whether self‐conscious emotional reactivity (indexed as physiological blushing) contributes to the development of SAD symptoms over and above social behavioral inhibition (BI), which has been identified as the strongest predictor of SAD development in early childhood.

Methods  One hundred fifteen children (45% boys) and their mothers and fathers participated at ages 2.5, 4.5, and 7.5 years. Social BI was observed at all time points in a stranger approach task, and physiological blushing (blood volume, blood pulse amplitude, and temperature increases) was measured during a public performance (singing) and watching back the performance at ages 4.5 and 7.5. Child early social anxiety was reported by both parents at 4.5 years, and SAD symptoms were diagnosed by clinicians and reported by both parents at 7.5 years.

Results  Higher social BI at 2.5 and 4.5 years predicted greater social anxiety at 4.5 years, which, in turn, predicted SAD symptoms at 7.5 years. Blushing (temperature increase) at 4.5 years predicted SAD symptoms at 7.5 years over and above the influence of social BI and early social anxiety.

Conclusions  That blushing uniquely contributes to the development of SAD symptoms over and above social BI suggests two pathways to childhood SAD: one that entails early high social BI and an early onset of social anxiety symptoms, and the other that consists of heightened self‐conscious emotional reactivity (i.e. blushing) in early childhood.


Large beauty premium: Attractiveness & trustworthiness perception increased with makeup wearing; male trustors transferred more money to women with makeup; effect is larger for less attractive females

Is the beauty premium accessible to all? An experimental analysis. Angela Cristiane Santos Póvoa et al. Journal of Economic Psychology, February 21 2020, 102252. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2020.102252

Highlights
• There is a large beauty premium caused by makeup wearing.
• Both attractiveness and trustworthiness perception increased with makeup wearing.
• Makeup wearing increased transfers in the trust game.
• Male trustors transferred more money to women with makeup than female trustors did.
• The makeup effect is larger in magnitude for less attractive female trustees.

Abstract: We conducted a trust game experiment to investigate whether women are trusted more when they wear makeup than when they do not. Facial attractiveness, which was manipulated through the application of makeup by a professional makeup artist, was measured before and after makeovers. Trustors were shown a photograph of their female counterparts before they made decisions about money transfers to trustees. The results showed that wearing makeup increased perceived attractiveness, which in turn led trustors to make larger transfers to female trustees during the trust game. Additionally, we discovered a pure makeup premium that was mediated by gender. Specifically, female trustees with makeup received larger transfers than female trustees without makeup when the trustors were men, even after controlling for female trustees’ levels of attractiveness.

Keywords: trusttrust gamebeauty premiummakeupgender
Jel Code: C71 D003 C91



Older adults more strongly endorsed a nonlimited account of energy, which perceived as more available for social activities; also saw higher negative cross-domain energy spillover after physical exertion

Cardini, B. B., & Freund, A. M. (2020). More or less energy with age? A motivational life-span perspective on subjective energy, exhaustion, and opportunity costs. Psychology and Aging, Feb 2020. https://doi.org/10.1037/pag0000445

Abstract: Two studies investigated subjective conceptualizations of energy for goal pursuit across adulthood. Study 1 (N = 276, 20–92 years of age) explored age-related differences in the (a) endorsement of a limited versus nonlimited account of energy for goal pursuit, (b) amount of energy available for physically, mentally, socially, and emotionally demanding activities, and (c) extent to which spending energy on a demanding activity inhibits or facilitates energy expenditure for subsequent activities, both within and across functional domains. Study 2 (N = 147, 18–86 years of age) experimentally induced energy loss through a 20-min physical exercise and examined age-related differences in the increase of subjective exhaustion and opportunity costs as a motivational cue for goal disengagement. With increasing age, adults more strongly endorsed a nonlimited account of energy and perceived having more energy available for personally relevant social activities. However, older adults also reported higher negative cross-domain energy spillover after physical exertion. Multilevel growth curve models further revealed that, compared with younger adults, older adults reported a steeper initial increase in exhaustion and opportunity costs during physical exercise, but converged with the younger age groups again at the close of the exercise session. The discussion centers around the importance of selectivity in older adulthood and motivational accounts of effort and exhaustion.



Athletic scholarships are negatively associated with intrinsic motivation for sports, even decades later: Evidence for long-term undermining

Moller, A. C., & Sheldon, K. M. (2020). Athletic scholarships are negatively associated with intrinsic motivation for sports, even decades later: Evidence for long-term undermining. Motivation Science, 6(1), 43–48, Feb 2020. https://doi.org/10.1037/mot0000133

Abstract: In the United States, many colleges offer some student athletes scholarships contingent on maintaining high-level performance at a particular sport. Consistent with the well-supported “undermining effect,” studies have demonstrated that such scholarships can reduce athletes’ intrinsic motivation for their sport during their college playing career. The present study examines what happens to former college athletes’ intrinsic motivation after college, even decades later. Three hundred forty-eight former Division I college athletes completed an online survey (67.5% men, Mage = 49.2, 76% formerly on scholarship). Even after controlling for time elapsed since college, scholarship (vs. no scholarship) status was positively related to felt external motivation during college, and negatively related to present-day enjoyment of the target sport. Our findings suggest that undermining effects may persist much longer than previously documented (i.e., for decades, as opposed to hours, weeks, or months).