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Sharks Don’t Sink – Neither Must We!
By Shlomo Maital
Consider sharks. They have been around on this earth for 400 million years – far older than dinosaurs, older than even trees. And evolution has made them superbly adapted to their environment, to survive and thrive. Sharks have survived five mass extinctions — and are currently struggling with their sixth, as humans kill sharks with fishing nets and overfishing, depriving them of food.
We can learn a lot from them – despite Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film Jaws, which inspired enormous fear of sharks.
First, consider fish. They have swim bladders — gas-filled organs that provide them with buoyancy without having to expend energy by swimming. Fish can sleep, thanks to swim bladders – watch your goldfish do it sometime. Darwin wrote that lungs of some fish evolved from these swim bladders.
Sharks, in contrast, have no swim bladders. If they stop swimming, they sink – because they have negative buoyancy. So, sharks cannot, may not, stop swimming. Ever. Sharks don’t sink – because they are continually moving forward. They even sleep while swimming – though never with closed eyes.
What does this have to do with people?
Sometimes, people sink. They sink into despondency and depression. And they don’t have mental ‘swim bladders’ to keep them afloat.
We can perhaps avoid this – by learning from sharks. Keep moving forward.
Keep learning new things. Keep making new friends. Keep trying to bring value, create value, by helping friends and families and strangers. Keep being curious. Keep trying new skills. New foods. New music. Stagnate – and you sink. All too common among us seniors.
Sharks don’t sink. Neither must we. Human beings have been around for 50,000 years. Sharks survived – and mostly thrived — around 80 times longer! Maybe they know something we can use?!
I recommend Jasmin Graham’s new book Sharks Don’t Sink: Adventures of a Rogue Shark Scientist, just out – subject of an On Point podcast episode.
If You Want To Be Happy For the Rest of Your Life…
By Shlomo Maital
The 1963 hit song by Jimmy Soul (“If you wanta be happy for the rest of your life, never make a pretty woman your wife…”) is so offensive and politically incorrect, it would die today long before reaching the airwaves.
Moreover, it is dead wrong…as I will explain later.
But there is research that DOES complete the sentence, “if you want to be happy for the rest of your life…”… and it says: find a soul mate. Find a GOOD wife. And yes, she CAN be pretty.
Massive research just published in Nature – Human Behavior [1] finds this:
“Depression represents a significant global public health challenge, and marital status has been recognized as a potential risk factor. However, previous investigations of this association have primarily focused on Western samples with substantial heterogeneity. Our study aimed to examine the association between marital status and depressive symptoms across countries with diverse cultural backgrounds using a large-scale, two-stage, cross-country analysis.
“We used nationally representative, de-identified individual-level data from seven countries, including the USA, the UK, Mexico, Ireland, Korea, China and Indonesia (106,556 cross-sectional and 20,865 longitudinal participants), representing approximately 541 million adults.
“The follow-up duration ranged from 4 to 18 years. Our analysis revealed that unmarried individuals had a higher risk of depressive symptoms than their married counterparts across all countries.”
The other day, I saw a dentist (periodontist). She asked my age. I said 81.98 (five days to my birthday). She noted that I looked healthy and happy. I am. I said, unprompted, I have a secret. I have a good wife.
Indeed I do. My wife of 57 years is beautiful, interesting, supportive, and keeps me in line. There are reasons to be unhappy these days in our little country Israel – but at home, none at all. Having a spouse to love and care for is a major blessing and a significant reason to get out of bed in the morning.
The research I cited involved N=541,000,000! My life is N=1. But that N=1 is for me significant. How about you?
[1] Xiaobing Zhai, Henry H. Y. Tong, Chi Kin Lam, Abao Xing, Yuyang Sha, Gang Luo, Weiyu Meng, Junfeng Li, Miao Zhou, Yangxi Huang, Ling Shing Wong, Cuicui Wang & Kefeng Li. ” Association and causal mediation between marital status and depression in seven countries”. Nature — Human Behaviour. (2024)
Paul Krugman: How Economists Got It VERY Wrong
By Shlomo Maital
Paul Samuelson was arguably the great economist of the 20th C., and certainly one of the greatest of all time. He was a professor at MIT, where I taught for 20 summers, and invariably could be found on weekends working away in his office, even after officially retiring. His book Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) (his Ph.D. thesis) reconstructed economic theory, using clever mathematics. But Samuelson was not deceived by his keen mathematical skill. “Elegance is for tailors”, he once said, in describing elegant, but empty, economic theories.
Alas the Economics profession did not heed him. UK Economist Geoffrey Hodgson reminds us of Paul Krugman’s 2009 New York Times article, analysing where economists went wrong in missing the 2007-8 financial collapse, and in some ways actually causing it with their gung-ho free market enthusiasm.
At that time, Krugman (a Nobel Prize winner, it should be recalled) wrote:
“As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations.” …..the central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess. ”
I feel a personal sense of loss and defeat as I read those words. I chose by mistake to study economics. I never did have the mathematical ability to excel in research. But I did have an insight, that behaviour was more important than math, in understanding how people choose and decide. But that idea was like aging wine, ‘before its time’. Behavioral economics has now replaced math as mainstream, helped by the tailwind of economics’ massive failure in 2007/8.
Will this help economists avoid culpability in the next financial crisis?
TIMnovate 