As farmers north of the equator get ready to plant their seeds, we’ve started wondering about agriculture before Columbus. Conventional wisdom says Native Americans were mostly hunters and gatherers. When they did farm, their slash-and-burn techniques exhausted the soil, forcing them to clear new fields.

Although Native Americans domesticated corn, tomatoes and potatoes, their farms were generally unproductive, and most of their plant food came from gathering tubers, greens, berries and shoots.

But as we learned at a series of talks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, this picture needs editing:

The provision of permaculture

Until the 1960s, the government of Canada enforced assimilation of First Nation children at boarding schools that banned ancestral languages and practices. The goal was to homogenize Canada’s population, but suppressing culture also squelched knowledge of the traditional methods for raising and gathering food.

When the police boats arrived in British Columbia in the 1930s, to take children to boarding schools, Adam Dick (tribal name Kwaxsistalla) escaped, and went to live in secluded locations with his grandparents for about a decade.

Dick, a member of the Kwakwaka’wakw (formerly Kwakiutl) tribe, has become a link to a vanishing past. “His people have learned from him, they all benefit from his teaching,” says Nancy Turner, in the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria (Canada).

Turner, who has spent a career studying indigenous agriculture, says knowing what to look for is key to understanding native agriculture on the coast of British Columbia. “They used perennial cultivation. ‘Keep it living’ was part of their philosophy, and it shows the way they value other life. A lot of perennial plants were being cultivated, but outsiders saw this as random plucking.”

People in the First Nations of British Columbia ate 35 species of roots, 25 greens, berries, even the inner bark of some trees, Turner says.

Overall, coastal people used 250 species of plants for food, tea, fuel, construction, fiber, canoes, dye and glue, Turner says.

When the natives harvested bark and wood from a living tree, they took what they needed without killing the tree. “They believed trees have sentient life, and called these ‘begged from’ trees,” Turner says. “‘We have come to beg a piece of you today.’”

“Gardens” in the water

The same attitude of “stewardship and caring” also applied to aquatic food, Turner says, especially the all-important salmon. “The salmon streams were carefully tended, and even cleaned. If the stream changed course, Adam and the others were taught by the elders to transplant [salmon] eggs to the new stream channel.”

Similarly, she says, people moved rocks to “create the most productive clam beds on the coast.”

Courtesy Nancy Turner.

Small plots of springbank clover (Trifolium wormskioldii), about to blossom in British Columbia produced “immense quantities” of roots that were “regarded as indispensable to good health,” says Turner. In this permaculture, the harvesters replanted segments of the roots for another crop.

This was more like farming and harvesting than hunting-and-gathering, Turner insists. But the colonists, more interested in survival and profit than the people they were displacing, “were blind to these practices. They had in mind Mr. McGregor’s garden, with a fence and rows you can harvest. They looked at these things, but they did not see them.”

Restoring the foods

Most cultures give a central role to the production, preparation and consumption of food. What happens when the land that grew traditional foods is drowned by dams?

That’s the conundrum facing Linda Different Cloud Jones, an activist and student from the Lakota Sioux Nation. “The loss of biodiversity is the greatest challenge on traditional lands,” she told an audience in March at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “and the loss of one culturally important species has significant impact.”

The Lakota people “are stereotyped as the people of the plains,” says Jones, “but we are also people of the river, or were a people of the river, until, in the 1950s and ’60s, when dams built in the Pick-Sloan project changed the way of life for the Lakota forever.”

Standing Rock, the Lakota reservation, is sandwiched between the Dakotas, and borders the Missouri River. “Overnight, hundreds of thousands of acres of native land was underwater,” said Jones. “All the plant and animal species in the riparian cottonwood forest were gone.”

The underground seedpods of the hog peanut (AKA mouse bean), were collected by prairie voles. These small mammals, which the Lakota called “mice,” cached the big seeds underground.

Lakota women found the caches with a stick and removed the seeds, Jones said, but “They always left a gift, dry berries, animal fat or corn. They would sing, ‘You have helped sustain my children during this coming winter, and we will not let your children go hungry.’ Their song echoed from the trees, and it seriously breaks my heart that my young children will never see that.”

A sustainable yield?

The song revealed that “an entire world view and behavior went along with this one plant species,” Jones said, and both suffered when dams flooded the forest. “We haven’t eaten these for 50 or 60 years. With the death of this one plant was the death of a little piece of our culture.”

The hog peanut was part of a larger cycle, Jones says. In spring, “We would tap box elder maples for syrup, then collect biscuit root, wild strawberries, currants, juneberries, cattail shoots, and acorns in December. Nothing was ripe at exactly the same time. When the plants are no longer there, the cycle is broken.”

Jones, a Ph.D. student at Montana State University, is attempting to grow the hog peanut as a form of “ecocultural restoration.” “Research for the sake of research was not what I wanted to do,” she says. “I wanted to change the world for my people, to make their lives better.”

Millions of people made a living for thousands of years in the New World, she says. “Everyone always thought that when European people colonized the Americas, they were coming into a pristine place, but we were managing the landscape for thousands of years.”

Iroquois corn

Corn is an indisputable triumph of Native American agriculture. The plant, domesticated thousands of years ago in Mexico and Central America, was a staple of the American diet and is now the largest crop in the world (global production in 2009 was 819 million metric tons).

Although natives also invented the highly productive “three sisters” companion-cropping technique, their agricultural prowess has been underestimated, says Jane Mt. Pleasant, an associate professor of horticulture at Cornell University.

Although the Native Americans had transformed a weed into the phenomenally productive crop maize, “There are claims by scholars, archeologists, geographers and historians that native agriculture was predominantly shifting cultivation… largely marginal, not too productive,” Mt. Pleasant says.

In “shifting cultivation” (a politically correct locution for “slash and burn”), farmers move to new plots as they exhaust their soil. According to this logic, native farmers in North America “sowed the seeds of their own destruction through environmental degradation,” says Mt. Pleasant, who directs the American Indian Program at Cornell.

But Mt. Pleasant says this is bunk. Rather, she contends that:

The soil should be the starting point for understanding agriculture, says Mt. Pleasant. While many soils on the Eastern Seaboard are not great, large parts of upstate New York had good soil that still supports productive farms.

About 300 years ago, the Iroquois Confederacy, a union of five (later six) tribes, lived in the area, and evidence for their farm productivity comes, ironically, from armies that sought to destroy them. “The quantity of corn which we found in store in this place, and destroyed by fire is incredible,” wrote the governor of New France in 1687.²

The French attacked the Iroquois, who were allied with France’s great enemy, Great Britain.

Slash ‘n burn, or sustainable agriculture?

Then in 1779, a soldier sent by General George Washington reported that his unit had destroyed at least 200 acres of Iroquois corn and beans that was “the best I ever saw.”

“This was not backyard gardening, not primitive farming,” Mt. Pleasant says. “They were dynamic, producing farmers on really good soils.”

In modern tests of corn varieties believed to resemble those grown by the Senecas, one of the Iroquois tribes, Mt. Pleasant got yields of 2,500 to 3,000 pounds per acre (45 to 54 bushels per acre or 2,800 to 3,400 kilograms per hectare).

This was far above the 500 kilograms per hectare of wheat grown in Europe.

Turner calculated that the Iroquois could support roughly three times as many people on an acre as contemporaneous Europeans could with their wheat crops.

Part of the advantage, she says, comes from maize’s inherent productivity. But observers have long wondered how this production could have occurred with neither plow nor draft animals, usually deemed the hallmarks of agricultural progress.

Plows, however, are now viewed as mixed blessing by many soil scientists. Although they prepare a good seedbed and bury weeds, they expose soil to the air, which encourages oxidation of humus, the organic content that supports essential microorganisms.

Although, after plowing, the humus briefly releases a burst of nitrogen, the depletion of organic matter and increased erosion continue for decades.

And thus on balance, Mt. Pleasant says the lack of the plow was an advantage, because planting with hand tools saves soil organic matter.

“If you are not tilling, and start with good soil, you are not going to lose fertility,” Mt. Pleasant says. “The system is stable as long as the crop yields are moderate and there is no plowing.”

But without plowing, there was no need for slash and burn.

Overall, Mt. Pleasant says, the new data provide a “quite different” perspective on agriculture. “Who were the primitive farmers? This is sustainable agriculture at its highest level.”

Rethinking agriculture

This type of revelation changes our view of the origin of agriculture, says Eve Emshwiller, an assistant professor of botany at UW-Madison who organized the seminar on native agriculture and who studies oca, a root crop grown in the Andes. “We have always talked about hunter-gatherers as if one day they were gathering food and noticed a plant growing from seed and thought, ‘We could gather seeds and start farming,’ as if this brilliant idea happened all of a sudden.”

Aside from historical curiosity, why worry about how native Americans grew their crops? One reason is the growing interest in sustainable agriculture, says Emshwiller. As agriculture faces the challenge of feeding more people without further damaging soil and water, older traditions could contribute.

Looking at other ways to grow and gather food will broaden our perspective, Emshwiller says. “There were a lot of people who were not considered agriculturalists, who were [supposedly] just gathering from the wild. But if you really understand what they were doing, there is not a sharp line between gathering and farming. There is a huge continuum of ways that people manage resources and get more from them.”

As the science of genetics advances, the task of informing patients has grown both more complicated and more essential. Good communication must reflect the science of the genetic situation and the attitudes and beliefs of patients and their families, says Roxanne Parrott, professor of communication arts and sciences, and health policy, at Penn State.

Photo: futurowoman

This child may one day choose to know the genetic risks passed down from her parents.

In starting a new study, Parrott used a survey to elicit attitudes and beliefs from family members and patients with three genetic conditions: Down syndrome, Marfan syndrome and neurofibromatosis. The results, she says, confirm the idea that communication must reflect the audience: “There is not a one-size-fits-all notion of how to communicate about genetic conditions, but there are enough patterns that we don’t have to adapt to each individual or family member.”

Although some genetic mutations always cause disease, more raise the risk without spelling doom — and that’s often a hard concept to get across, she adds. “There is so much media attention to genetic determinism,” so those who would communicate with patients must realize that many people assume that having a gene means getting a disease, when in fact more disease genes raise the odds of getting that disease, but are also affected by environmental and behavioral factors.

Talking genes blues

Communications researchers “have focused on the threat, and on trying to motivate people to take action,” says Parrott, “and this is correct, as long as we package the message in ways that can help them change their behavior and reduce the threat.”

A fearsome genetic test

Huntington’s disease, a hereditary neurological disorder, was one of the first diseases linked to a single gene. Huntington’s progressively attacks motor, mental and emotional abilities.

Photo: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Digital ID: cph 3c30859

American folk singer Woody Guthrie died from Huntington’s disease in 1967. His son Arlo Guthrie chose to be tested for HD and found that he does not carry the mutation.

HD is caused by a dominant mutation in the Huntington gene, so any child of a parent with HD has a 50 percent risk of inheriting the disease. Huntington’s is the archetype of genetic determinism: if you have the mutation, HD is inevitable.

Once the genetic test became available, a child of a parent with HD could be tested for the mutated gene. This is a difficult decision: Would you rather live in uncertainty, or get tested and possibly learn you will develop a fatal, incurable disease?

Messages about the genetic contribution to heart disease, cancer and diabetes should reflect the needs of patients with disparate beliefs, says Parrott. She and co-author Kathryn Peters, a genetic counselor, found that each group was about equally common among family members and diagnosed patients. “When we think about communication, these four frameworks represent quite different things to listen for, ideas to probe for, and a different approach to communication.”

In an online survey of 541 patients and family members, Parrott and Peters found that some beliefs were misconceptions while others were accurate, and that despite the media emphasis on single mutations as causing disease, not everybody thought “that genes alone determine health.”

Genes are relative

One interesting result came from the “integrated relativists,” who talked about how behavior, religious faith and social support “could come together to predict health,” Parrott says. That is a rather sophisticated attitude concerning genomic information, she adds.

Unfortunately, “The integrated folks were the most uncertain about their future, and how things would work out with their diagnoses,” says Parrott. “That’s probably a good indication of having almost too much information, conflicting information. Their integrated perspective puts them in a situation where they … believe that a lot of things contribute to their health, and they don’t know what to do about it.”

Learning what’s inside your genes can have a psychological impact, Parrott adds. “How do you know who to tell? How could this affect your personal relationships? When do you start having these conversations? Does your identity become a package of genes?”

Ever wonder why the calendar requires us to retool a schedule every year? Ever question why your birthday will fall on a different day of the week next year? Do you grit your teeth trying to remember to insert a leap day every four years, except on the century, except you do add a leap day on the fourth century?

Any rule that requires a double-exception to the exception, friend, is a rule that has overstayed its welcome.

Our calendar must account for the fact that Earth rotates 365.2422 times during one full orbit of the sun, so any calendar will require some shimming.

Two questions: How many shims are too many? And how many people would be willing to swap out the clunky calendar for a better one? Remember, no matter how smart the invention, inertia always gives an undeserved advantage to tried-and-true kludges like the QWERTY keyboard, invented to slow your typing speed.

Shims and arrows of outrageous calendar

The modern calendar dates to 46 B.C., when Julius Caesar (or more likely a lackey) built a calendar on the assumption that the year contains 365.24 days.

For a while, that was close enough, but by the 16th century, the tiny error was adding up, and the actual seasons no longer jibed with the calendar. In 1582, Pope Gregory (or was it his flunkeys?) pruned 11 days from October and produced the modern calendar.

The Gregorian calendar, sadly, still relies on that jury-rigged leap day, and it also forces any given date, whether holiday or not, to rotate around the seven days of the week like a weather vane in a tornado.

All those encumbrances bothered Richard Conn Henry, a professor of astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s disjointed, hideously inefficient and there’s no value added,” he told us.

Hideously inefficient?

Rather than kvetch ’til the end of days, however, Henry worked with Steve H. Hanke, an economist also at Hopkins, to build the logical, “permanent” calendar seen in the rollover, above.

Henry studies an obscure type of background radiation in the universe. We mentioned that astronomers are obsessed with time, date and Earth’s position, but Henry says, “I got into this calendar as a complete sideline. Some years ago, I was putting together a schedule for my course, and I thought, ‘Why do I have to put together a schedule? I just taught the same identical course.’ The reason is the stupid calendar changes each year in a pattern that is completely irregular.”

Nor was he the only person with this problem, he realized. “Every school, team, club, everybody has to go through this. But it’s not necessary at all. We can make a simple adjustment, preserve religious sensibilities, and come up with a stable calendar.”

Calling clever calendars

The Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar has 12 months: four have 31 days, and eight have 30. Each quarter of the year is 91 days long, with two 30-day months and one 31-day month. Each year starts on Sunday, meaning Christmas is also Sunday.

Every year.

If you’ve been pecking keys on your calculator, you’ve already objected: I’ve been short-changed! The year has only 364 days! Right, and to compensate, every five or six years, we get an added seven-day week.

The freebie week, while not part of a month, allows the calendar to jibe with the seasons.

Beyond simplicity, the new calendar would help the money-changers, Hanke observes. Financial institutions calculate interest on a daily basis, but months have different numbers of days, and calculations require a lot of software tweaks. “Our calendar would simplify financial calculations and eliminate what we call the ‘rip off’ factor,” explains Hanke. “To determine how much interest accrues on mortgages, bonds, forward-rate agreements, swaps and others, day counts are required. Our current calendar is full of anomalies that have led to the establishment of a wide range of conventions that attempt to simplify interest calculations.”

Can the new calendar fly? The Gregorian calendar won acceptance because the Pope backed it, Henry notes, but he’s not sure he can get papal participation this time around. But without widespread acceptance, an “improved” calendar would really make things even worse.

Image: eliazar

Here’s a great idea that flopped: Part of a lesson in Esperanto, a simplified language invented in 1887 that, sadly, never caught on and brought international peace despite its many practical advantages.

One time fits all?

We’ve been saving the best for last. Doesn’t a stable calendar deserve a universal system of time? That’s right: one time, one date, worldwide. If it’s midnight in London (already hour zero on universal time), it’s midnight in San Francisco — where the sun is shining.

For people who do lots of traveling, or arrange international meetings, the advantages are obvious. Although this sounds awkward to The Why Files, Henry notes that, “In every single country, with zero exceptions,” airplane pilots already use coordinated universal time (UTC) rather than local time.

UTC helps fight confusion in the air, but even Henry recognizes that one-time-fits-all could be a tougher harder sell than the permanent calendar. The new calendar, he says, can stand on its own. “There are 365.2422 days in the year, there is nothing you can do about that. Our calendar must reflect that length. We have to take that magic number that nature has given us by accident and see what kind of calendar we can make.”

You have read it in black and white: the economy is improving: Factories are hiring. Adding 200,000 jobs in December cut the unemployment rate to 8.5 percent. Consumer confidence is rising, and cars are selling again.

Meanwhile, corporate profits hit a record $2-trillion a year, and since the cataclysm in 2008, real gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services, has grown for more than two years.

These economic measures are broad, ubiquitous and reliable, but there are other ways to measure the economy. If you poke around, you’ll find economists — on Wall Street and Elm Street alike — with their own idiosyncratic economic indicators.

Like the GDP and unemployment rate, many are less forecasting tools than measures of the current economy. That may diminish their prognostic value, but not their human-humorous-interest value.

To stay or to vacate?

Vacations, however necessary, can be expensive, and so when the economy tanked in 2008, we began to hear about the cost-cutting “staycation.” By taking time off from work (assuming we had a job…) without leaving home, we could enjoy friends, family and local attractions: parks, museums, lakes and beaches.

We could, in other words, enjoy many of the benefits of a vacation while ducking the hefty price tag. Staycations can have pizazz: would you rather be taking off your shoes in a frenetic airport or building a tree house with the kids?

We failed to find anybody who studies staycations, so the best we can say about their merit as economic indicators is that past performance is no guarantee of future success; read the full prospectus before investing!

Vacant at home

It doesn’t take a Rhodes scholar to deduce from foreclosure stats or photos of abandoned houses that housing remains a black hole in the American economy. But like the staycation, a foreclosure boom follows a sour economy, and is more informative about the immediate past than about the immediate future.

We were, however, intrigued to learn that foreclosure could be a disease vector. Clouds of mosquitoes are breeding in abandoned ponds and swimming pools at foreclosed homes in Arizona.

That gives us another reason to hate skeeters, even if their whine is the sound of love.

Sports: No rush to the finish line

Pro-sport tickets are not cheap, so a full stadium must signify a healthy economy. But it ain’t necessarily so, says Andrew Billings, who studies broadcasting and sports at the University of Alabama. “People often get a flawed picture from simply going by attendance figures. It depends on the sport.”

In the National Football League, he notes, “the majority of stadiums sell out, and demand far exceeds supply.” Before a sick economy leads to empty seats, he says, it deflates ticket prices on resale markets, “but you will still see a full stadium, and may think the economy must not be too bad, even if the demand is cut in half.”

And don’t bother counting duffers at a private golf course, either, Billings says. A full golf course “is not always a straight-off indicator of prosperity,” because the major expense is the cost of membership. “For many people, once they have bought the membership, the costs are sunk, and golf becomes the cheap option for entertainment.”

When money is tight, he says, “They may be playing twice as frequently because it’s already paid for.”

Big screen, big sales, bogus economic indicator?

You might think sales of pricy electronic goods, including those “mine-is-bigger-than-yours” TVs, would closely track prosperity, but Billings says they “may be another misleading measure.”

Many of those giant video screens, more suited to aircraft hangers than living rooms, are bought to watch sports, and looking at the full economic picture reveals the folly of the sales = prosperity equation, he says.

Consider the cost of season tickets for big-league sports — up to $20,000 for a seat behind home plate at the New York Yankees. When times get bad, Billings says, “The buyer may think, ‘Why don’t I get a $2,000 TV and the major-league baseball package? Once you add in parking and food, sports can be very expensive, and that makes the flat screen look pretty cheap.”

Although another flat-screen sale may contribute to the image of prosperity, Billings says, this fan “has really cut their budget to avoid going to the stadium.”

Pretty Byzantine?

How do we get a measure of economic activity in the long, dark epoch before the invention of the GDP or the flat-screen television? In the 14th century, during the death throes of the Byzantine empire, the church was an economic engine and a wealth center. If you bought a marriage license, you paid the church, which also owned buildings, even entire communities.

Because churches hold some of the best documents from the period, some scholars have proposed using records of church wealth as a proxy for economic development — or decline — during this benighted epoch before the spreadsheet was envisioned.

Garbage everywhere

With the possible exception of unwrapped broccoli from a local farm, everything you buy creates garbage, and the garbage disposal system is always affected by economic slowdowns.

Duh.

But we were surprised to hear that garbage can offer almost a real-time economic readout. According to Edward Humes, author of the forthcoming book Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, “Until the housing bubble burst, the largest landfill in the country, by intake, was Puente Hills in Los Angeles County, which was taking up to the legal limit, 13,000 tons per day. This was cut in half after the housing bubble burst. Home construction and demolition debris fell as construction stopped, and people started buying less stuff.”

Construction fell so quickly, Humes says, that “Landfill operators probably saw [bad economic] things coming ahead of a lot of the rest of us.”

Even “durable goods” can quickly start bulking up the garbage stream, he says. “So much of what we buy is pretty ephemeral, even the stuff defined as durable goods must last just one year. A lot of it is designed to be thrown away; not fixed. The age of the TV repairman is long behind us.”

Garbage tells us about more than just economics, Humes adds. “It’s a little scary, one of our greatest exports is trash. We used to make things, and now we make trash.”

Although high garbage flows correlate to prosperity, Humes says the linkage cannot last forever. “Every culture figures out” that wasting resources is not a long-term solution, he says. “Suddenly, when resources are scarce, humans get more conscious of how much they have wasted, but by then it’s too late.”

Night lights, big city

Can lights at night, as seen from space, measure a region’s economy? After all, lighting requires bulbs, generators, energy and wires, so the argument has face validity. But a 2011 study returned mixed results. Night lights were a useful gauge in 25 percent to 33 percent of counties in the United States (excluding Alaska and Hawaii). In India, night lights gave a useful picture of local GDP in a “very small number” of districts.

And in China, fewer than 10 percent of districts showed a significant correlation between night lights and GDP. One reason: light from the intense coastal urbanization overwhelmed the satellite’s sensors and could not be measured accurately.

Underwater underwear

Alan Greenspan, who ran the Federal Reserve for oh-so-many years, was said to favor sales of men’s underwear as an economic indicator. His theory: When times get tight, men decide to forgo the pleasure of a new pair of briefs or boxers.

We were unable to unearth evidence for this notion, but wish to ask two follow-up questions: Do sales of women’s underwear convey an economic message? And how do you know?

Stick with lipstick?

If men can withstand the urge to buy boxers and briefs, women apparently can’t cut back on “small indulgences” like lipstick. In 2001, the chair of Estee Lauder coined “lipstick index” to explain why lipstick sales rise during a bad economy.

Going to war

For some, the military is a job of last resort, and so the number and quality of new recruits offers a proxy for economic conditions.

But military recruiting ads may be just as telling as the numbers. In 2009, the New York Times described a new Marines ad showing “men crawling through mud and under barbed wire, being smacked in the head with padded fighting sticks, vomiting after inhaling tear gas and diving, boots and all, into a swimming pool.”

With so many potential recruits in the job market, the ad didn’t bother soft-selling the rigors of Marine life.

Recouping the coupons

When pressed for coins, why not cash in on those coupons that clutter mailboxes and newspapers? In hard times, coupon redemptions do rise, according to a company that processes them.

Skirting the economic reality?

If we can believe QI, a quiz show from the United Kingdom, long hair and short skirts are both signs of prosperity. Hey, we tried, but failed, to track this revelation back to a legit study, but still give thanks to reader “St Ga” for the suggestion, and for an elegant mix-mastering of cause and effect: “If the government makes short skirts & long hair compulsory for EVERYONE will the economy improve? :)”

We wish.

Forget that secret childhood crush, forget those teenage indiscretions you posted on Facebook and cannot escape.

Is this your deepest secret — that you actually look forward to the holidays?

Lucky you. For the rest of us, we’re stuck on those holiday-stress media fretlines: over-drinking, under-sleeping and indecent exposure to idiotic in-laws.

Not to mention getting mauled at the mall.

These “Beware: awful-holidays ahead” warnings make little sense to us. Sure, there’s relentless pressure to consume — material goods, foods and alcohol alike. And even if the buy! pressure has intensified (did 24/7 coverage of Black Friday mean it was more important than killing Osama Bin Laden?), those holiday-stress headlines are nothing new.

And if the holidays are so horrid, why do we still have them?

In other words, what have Christmas, Hanukah and New Year’s and Kwanzaa done for us lately?

Maybe not so awful after all?

Because holidays are not (yet?) considered psychological disorders, they get less study than, say, post-traumatic stress disorder or autism. Still, The Why Files rounded up some experts — mainly positive psychologists — to discuss the upside of the holidays.

Holidays can be a spur to beneficial changes, says Robert McGrath, coordinator of student mind/body wellness services at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  ”The disruption to routine that they create can serve as an opportunity to change.  For example, if you’ve been meaning to catch up with a friend for months, the holidays may help bring that deeper priority to the surface.”

The tradition of cooking and distributing sweets can serve as an excuse to walk over to see neighbors we always intend to visit. And New Years resolutions can become a socially sanctioned reason to make beneficial changes to diet, exercise, social involvement or volunteerism.

Rituals, religious and otherwise

However, much of the power of holidays is embodied in things that don’t change, says Lee Ann de Reus, an associate professor of human development and family studies at Penn State University in Altoona. “One thing we know about healthy families is that they incorporate rituals, and that certainly comes with holidays, no matter what your tradition.”

Rituals, she says, can range all over the map, from attending religious services like midnight mass to holding ceremonial feasts at the same house, or eating the same foods, prepared by the same family cooks.

De Reus solicits examples from her students, and says, “Some open all their gifts on Christmas eve, some open one on Christmas eve and everything else next morning. Families may have traditions about who they invite for Hanukah or who takes part in ceremonies around the dinner table.”

Many traditions are unique and whimsical, de Reus adds. “In one family, everybody gets a new set of pajamas, and wears them to open gifts. They may watch a specific film or stay up all night playing Trivial Pursuit. And a lot of traditions revolve around food preparation.”

Reading ritual

Rituals are not just about repetition, de Reus says. “We know that ritual gives multiple things. It’s a way to transmit values, it’s a way to reconnect in a meaningful way, and it brings families together, even families that don’t necessarily get along outside the holidays.”

After a divorce, she says, tradition can temporarily trump animosity. “The parents may put their differences aside; they may come together for the sake of the children.”

College students from families that have split up “often can work it out, spending Christmas eve with one part of the family, and Christmas day with the other part,” says McGrath “But when it has not been worked out, they must choose to be with one parent, and the other one can feel very hurt.”

Ritual also provides a chance for a family to reconnect with its history, de Reus says. “If I ask college age students about their favorite memories about growing up, you can bet the majority are going to talk about some sort of event, memory, probably involving a ritual, often around a holiday or a birthday.”

Ritual, de Reus says, “tells us what are we about, helps a family to regain its center. Maybe they have strayed from these values, are too caught up in consumerism, materialism. It takes an assertive parent to push back against the larger societal pressures that exist around holidays: drinking, overindulgence, mass consumerism. I think we totally underestimate the value and importance of ritual in family life.”

Total togetherness

Holidays bring together many of the most important people in our lives, and, as McGrath points out, researchers regularly find a strong relationship between happiness and time with family and friends, “especially if the gathering is for positive reasons rather than to deal with problems. In terms of the positive experience, just being with people is the key. I don’t know that people come back from the holidays and say, ‘I did not get a good present.’”

The good-will that comes from these gatherings need not end with the holidays, McGrath says. “A positive note is to realize that you can enjoy those same activities daily: eat meals mindfully and enjoy them, have fun with friends and family, share stories, and practice giving often.”

What do you expect?

Part of the holiday-blues problem may exist in excessive expectations, says Leaf Van Boven, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Colorado. “There are very clear cultural stereotypes for what ought to happen at the holidays, for how people will behave, for gifts that will be exchanged. For most people, the holidays don’t meet that expectation, so there can be a sense of disappointment, but that is very different from saying we don’t actually enjoy ourselves.”

And while holidays can be times of reduced stress, “That’s not to say no stress, which is often the expectation,” says Van Boven. “For most people, holidays involve spending time with close others, family and friends.” Sure, those relationships can carry their own challenges, “but most people enjoy spending time with friends and family more than they do spending time at work.”

Money can’t buy me love

The pressure to buy, Buy! BUY!! can be a major source of holiday stress, but a growing body of evidence shows that ’tis truly “better to give than to receive.” In a 2008 study, Elizabeth Dunn, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, gave college students either $5 or $20, and directed them to spend it on themselves, or on a charitable donation or a gift by 5 p.m.

That night, the students who gave away the money reported a higher level of happiness, and the real kicker was being with the beneficiary, Dunn adds. “We did not say you have to give it and walk away. A lot of people took a friend for lunch or bought a toy for a younger sibling.”

The curious thing is that this preference does not operate at the conscious level, Dunn says. Most people think that it make them happier to receive $20 to spend on themselves, she says. “It’s not that they love to give, but when we give them those amounts to spend on someone else, they are more happy.”

For a 2010 study,¹ Dunn put players through a game that allowed them to donate money to another player, and found that the stingy players had less positive emotions, more negative emotions, and higher levels of both shame and stress hormones.

Not so bad after all?

If we’re getting the picture that giving reasonable gifts and hanging out with friends and family make the holidays less painful than medieval dentistry, that’s the message we got from a rare study of Christmas happiness. In 2002, Tim Kasser of Knox College (Illinois) found that a 57 percent of a small sample said Christmas was not stressful.

That, Kasser told us by email, is still a “reasonably high level of stress … around the midpoint of the scale.” Women and people who focused on spending had higher levels of stress.

Yet Christmas may still be “merry,” Kasser wrote. “While levels of life satisfaction and negative emotions were more or less the same as what people report at other times of the year, people do report somewhat higher levels of pleasant emotions during Xmas.”

The study² found more satisfaction among people who focused on family time and took part in religious activities, and less among those who focused on consumption.

“It seems that connecting with others and with something ‘bigger than yourself’ promotes higher levels of well-being; that’s consistent with past research, as is the finding the materialism undermines well-being,” Kasser wrote. “It is not much fun to be fighting the crowds and most research shows that shopping is rarely an inherently engaging and interesting activity.”

(You’ve got to) Accentuate the positive

All of these observations seem to explain why the winter holidays have survived the headlines about holiday horrors. “The big three holidays are good ways of maximizing those things that we tend find most enjoyable, and probably go a long way toward explaining why they are so powerful emotionally, why they persist,” says Van Boven.

One way to cut holiday stress, Van Boven says, “Is to think about what we value in the holidays, what really matters, and then try to behave in way that reflects those values. Often that kind of exercise can be extremely transformative, will get you out of the gift-giving rat race, and more toward the development of social engagement.”

Dunn adds that giving can be more emotionally satisfying when it involves personal contact. “When you have the opportunity to give so you can see the positive impact, that’s when the potential happiness benefit of Christmas giving is greatest. If your mother-in-law loves pedicures, you could buy her a gift certificate, but I think the research shows that it’s better to make the appointment and go with her. That’s the critical piece. If you can turn the gift into an opportunity for social connection, that’s going to maximize the benefit.”

Almost four years after the economy started sliding into the Great Recession, unemployment in the United States is still at 9.1 percent. On Sept. 1, the White House announced that it expected a 9 percent rate at least through the presidential election.

And on Sept. 13, the Labor Department revealed that the poverty rate had reached 15.1 percent, a rate not seen since 1993. A family of four must have income below $22,314 to qualify as poor.

Those numbers hide even more grievous problems: Among blacks, the rate is 16.7 percent, and among all Americans under age 24, it’s 18 percent.

And if you count discouraged workers, who have quit looking for a job, and part-time workers who would prefer full-time work, the rate soars to 16.2 percent — or 14 million Americans.

All this, and the average period of unemployment has stretched to 22.9 weeks.

Who is looking for work? It’s easier to ask who isn’t…. According to new research from the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, men, single parents, young adults, and people with less education have been hit harder. Marybeth Mattingly, a research assistant professor of sociology who directs research on vulnerable families, says, “Jobs in manufacturing and construction have disappeared in the recession and they may or may not be coming back, and these tend to be jobs held by men and the less educated.”

Beyond the numbers

Unemployment is not just about economics. Psychologist Maria Jahoda argued in the 1930s that employment provides latent byproducts, hidden things,” says economist Arthur Goldsmith of Washington and Lee University. “She said people always see the explicit benefit — the wage — but employment also organizes your day, gives you a way to connect to other people, status; there are many other things associated with work. If all you do is say, ‘We have a lot of unemployment, the GNP is down 1.4 percent,’ you don’t capture the potential psychological and social costs.”

Goldsmith adds that developmental psychologist Erik Erikson said “your sense of self is undermined by an incapacity to become a self-sustaining member of society.”

In 2011, the psychological effects of unemployment are compounded by a devastating surge in foreclosures: Millions of families are confronting poverty and being forced to find a place to live. “Foreclosure has been an enormous part of this narrative that does not always happen with a wave of unemployment,” says Goldsmith.

And so we got to wondering. Beyond the obvious — and ominous — economic harm from unemployment, what does it do to self-esteem, psychological health, the willingness to get up and face the world with diminished prospects? In a time when so many people identify themselves by their occupation – what does it mean to be out of work?

Suffer the children

Being laid off, even when you are one of millions with the same problem, can lead to “why me?” questions, and to doubts about your self-worth, about your role and utility in society.

When the story ends with a well-paid, fulfilling job, these doubts usually answer themselves.

Otherwise, these doubts can easily lead to brooding, depression, despair, isolation and anxiety – even apparently to child abuse. A study presented in April¹ found that the incidence of shaken baby syndrome had doubled in the Great Recession (December 2007 through June 2010), compared to a prior period of prosperity.

Babies have weak neck muscles, so severe shaking can cause violent head movement and serious, even fatal brain injury. Shaking, often by angry, frustrated care-givers who cannot stop the baby’s crying, causes an estimated 1,300 such head injuries each year. Surviving children can have varying degrees of visual, motor or cognitive damage, or even end up in a permanent vegetative state — a coma.

Beyond a doubling of the rate of such abuse, the researchers also saw trends toward graver injury and a higher death rate, though they were not statistically significant.

Suffer the teachers!

In a study of school behavior among children of single mothers that started in the 1990s, Heather Hill, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, found a higher level of problems among children of mothers who had been out of work years earlier.

The study was intended to explore the effects of welfare reform, which mandated that welfare mothers find jobs, and was performed when their children were 8 to 10 years old, five years after some of their mothers had been unemployed for at least three months.

The teachers reported a rise in both “external” problem behavior, such as acting out or disobedience, and “internal” behaviors, such as seeming depressed or anxious. “Problem behavior captures how they are coping, processing, as they have to sit in class, pay attention, stay on task, and do what they are told,” Hill told us.

Both categories of behavior were much more prevalent among the children of mothers who had been unemployed years earlier. The delayed reaction reflects the fact that early childhood sets the stage for future achievement and adjustment, Hill says. “The early years, prior to starting school, are very important for the developmental process.”

Life on the line?

The stakes in unemployment may be even greater, however. A new analysis of 42 studies, mainly performed in western nations, found a 63 percent increase in deaths (78 percent for men) among those who had been unemployed.

Although this deadly impact probably reflects financial and physical roots, not just emotional ones, “Our study results clearly indicate that unemployment is not just bad for your pocketbook; it’s also bad for your health,” said Joseph E. Schwartz, professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine in New York, in a press release. “The results suggest a causal relationship between unemployment and higher risk of death, as well as the need to identify strategies to minimize the adverse health effects of unemployment.”

Map: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

The analysis of unemployment and mortality data, which covered 20 million people, showed that a significant history of job loss raised the risk of death by 75 percent among people younger than 50. The elevated risk of mortality was 25 percent among older people.

Bright spots in a dark picture

Could the woes of unemployment be temporary? In a study of 774 Germans who lost their jobs between 1984 and 2003, psychiatrist Isaac Galatzer-Levy of the New York University School of Medicine found that most people had regained their emotional equilibrium within a year.

The participants were divided into four groups based on how satisfied they with their lives. The largest group, 69 percent, reported a relatively high and stable level of life satisfaction before job loss, and although they were affected more severely by unemployment, a year later their life satisfaction was restored to its pre-unemployment level.

Although life satisfaction scores were less positive among the other subjects, the results tend to refute the standard view of unemployment, says Galatzer-Levy. “There’s a real concern that [unemployment] will have long-term implications on the mental well-being of a large portion of the work force. But this analysis suggests that people are able to cope with a job loss relatively well over time.”

We tried to reach Galatzer-Levy to ask how well results from Germany, where unemployment is lower than in the United States, apply to the United States, but we could not connect. But by looking at the same people before and after they lost their jobs, the study sidestepped a basic pitfall in understanding the psychological outcome of unemployment: the problem of causation.

A word on method

In science, an experiment is the cleanest way to establish cause and effect, but this technique does not apply to studying the psychology of persistent unemployment. Instead, researchers try to correlate unemployment and health, behavior or psychological well-being.

They ask, are people with jobs healthier, happier, or more stable than those without?

But finding that two things go together — are correlated — cannot distinguish cause and effect. To take an obvious example, unemployment could cause psychological depression, or depression could cause unemployment.

The correlation between unemployment and psychological harm dates to the Great Depression of the 1930s, Goldsmith says. To get a better picture of causality, researchers began to follow individuals over time, as the German study did. Having evidence of mental-health and job status in 2010 and again in 2011 helps pinpoint cause and effect, Goldsmith says, but “Unfortunately, many things could also happen during this period,” and some could override employment status.

A grimmer picture

In an effort to refine the methodology, Goldsmith and colleagues are completing a study on the psychology of unemployment, using data from 2002 and ‘03. The first step was to exclude people with a history of psychological difficulties.

“We focused on people who have never had a psychological problem, or had a first bout of poor mental health in the past year,” Goldsmith says. “We all lose girlfriends, dogs, our surfboards get dented, but these are pretty tough people.”

Among subjects who were fully employed and then were unemployed, the researchers statistically controlled for education, work experience, marital status, having children, and church membership, all of which can buffer assaults on mental health.

The goal, Goldsmith says, was to tease out the psychological effects of unemployment from the other slings and arrows of unfortunate fortune. “Suppose you were unemployed last year, and had your first ever bout of poor emotional well-being. It’s hard to believe that caused your unemployment, because we know you are resilient.”

The study, which has not yet passed peer review, included contributions from Tim Diette, Darrick Hamilton and William Darity Jr. The results, Goldsmith says, show that long-term joblessness has an especially severe emotional impact among those with more education. “This is not surprising, those are the kind of people who have an internal locus of control, a lot of self efficacy, have always had the sense that they could govern the things that happen to them.”

Similarly, a study of 9,570 people found that those who were conscientious — and likely to fulfill their obligations — had a 120 percent greater decrease in life satisfaction during unemployment. “Thus the positive relationship typically seen between conscientiousness and well-being is reversed: conscientiousness is therefore not always good for well-being,” the authors wrote².

Although Goldsmith found a small detriment following unemployment of less than 15 weeks, people with longer unemployment were almost twice as likely as employed people to evince depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder. “These are not trivial diagnoses, they are very serious, can be long lasting,” Goldsmith says. “They can spill over and have effects on people around you.”

Thus the emotional fallout is not restricted to the 16 percent of Americans who are unemployed, discouraged, or involuntarily working part time, Goldsmith contends. “These people have spouses, children, grandchildren, and former coworkers. This says to policy makers that the cost of joblessness is more than financial, there is a substantial social consequence, and while we are having this debate about budget deficits, we ought not to forget that putting people to work does not just produce output, but also greater well-being as a society.”

— David J. Tenenbaum

In a world studded with intractable conflicts, none seems more nettlesome than he one between Israelis and Palestinians. In this and many other conflicts, people are often trained to believe the worst about the other side, who are variously stereotyped as immoral occupiers or immoral terrorists.

These conflicts, as history has shown, are not ideal for peacemaking based on compromise, and yet the conflicts in Northern Ireland and South Africa have come to peaceful resolutions.

But during the conflict, even mentioning the opposing side can backfire, says Eran Halperin, a professor of political psychology at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya Israel. “When you try to tell an Israeli something positive about a Palestinian, or vice versa, the immediate reaction is defensive. In many cases, they are not willing to hear positive information about the other side.”

A sideways approach, however, may be more effective at changing attitudes and creating a willingness to compromise. In a study just published in Science¹, Halperin and co-authors demonstrated that simply reading a few sentences about the successful resolutions of historic conflicts elsewhere made Israelis and Palestinians more amenable to compromise.

“There are positive pieces of information that the parties could absorb, that could lead to a change in positions,” says Halperin, “but people in almost every group involved in a conflict are not willing to hear it. But if you try to go more indirectly … to talk in a general way, you hope they will apply these beliefs to the other group, and this is what our results show.”

Testing tolerance

In a series of experiments, Halperin and colleagues asked Palestinians and Jewish and Arab Israelis to read a few paragraphs in a supposed “reading comprehension” test. Then, as part of a supposedly different study, the same people were asked about their attitudes toward the opposing side.

The tested paragraphs that contained a more positive interpretation of history strongly affected willingness to compromise to resolve conflicts.

Instead of confronting the subjects by stressing that the other side could change its views, Halperin says, the test paragraphs “say that people in other conflicts went through meaningful change in their positions and behavior, and we expect people to understand by themselves that this can happen here.”

The study opens a crack in the despair aroused by prolonged conflicts, says Halperin. “We have now the first indication of what kind of message we should convey to people, to make them more open to the other side. And we already have preliminary data showing that the exact same pattern occurs in other long-term intractable conflicts around the world.”

Still to come, he acknowledges, is “the biggest challenge, using a larger scale intervention to make these changes.” Using the education system and mass media, he proposes a “simple message: Groups change, and behavior that is violent and immoral is a result of a specific situation, leaders and economics. They are not the result of a long-term culture with a fixed character.”

The intervention was focused on hope, Halperin says. “One of the biggest barriers to peace is because people don’t have hope, they don’t believe that the other group can change. If you don’t believe the other side can change its attitude, and as a result its behavior, there is no reason to offer a gesture or compromise, to take a risk in negotiation, and then you can’t make any progress in any intergroup conflict.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

El Niños, the global cycles of weather that are driven by a hot spot in the tropical Pacific Ocean, have been linked to drought, storms and famine in many parts of the tropics.

Today, a study in Nature finds that deadly conflicts have started twice as often during the el Niño years – but only in the many countries affected by el Niño.

Scientific interest in el Niño mushroomed during the 1980s, when climate experts began to correlate historic cycles of anchovy harvests along the west coast of South America with changes in weather thousands of kilometers distant, and eventually unraveled a planetary cycle driven by the appearance of huge pools of warm water in the western Pacific.

Because the warming seemed to coincide with Christmas, it was called el Niño, for the Christ Child.

El Niño is now recognized as the warm-water segment of the el Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which also includes a cold-water counterpart called la Nina. Now acknowledged as an engine of global climate, el Niño is linked to prolonged droughts, heat waves and crop failures.

Previous efforts to study whether weather and global warming could affect war have related past environmental changes with conflict and the decline of civilizations, says Solomon Hsiang, who completed the new study as a graduate student at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. But the studies tended to be case-by-case, he notes, and “even if every conflict or collapse happened at random, some would occur during a period of environmental change, so this isn’t compelling evidence.”

Looking carefully

To study the issue more systematically, Hsiang and collaborators Mark Cane and Kyle Meng:

The data showed that conflicts are twice as likely to start during an el Niño, says Hsiang, and that 21 percent of overall conflicts can be attributed to el Niño. The increase was only seen in countries strongly affected by el Niño.

Surprisingly, the average changes wrought by an el Niño are quite minor, Hsiang admits – about 0.05°C rise in temperature, and about 0.1 millimeter reduction in daily rainfall.

Small is … powerful?

How could such minor changes affect warfare?

A study that correlates data does not show why they are related, but there are many ways that seemingly small effects could change human behavior, says Hsiang, who is now at Princeton University, especially considering that averages can conceal major alterations in different locations:

However, Marshall Burke, who published an influential 2009 paper ¹ that found a significant increase in warfare during hot weather in sub-Saharan Africa, noted by email that the increase in conflict was seen only inside the el Niño region, and thus, “We might conclude that these global market mechanisms are not at work.”

Still, the new study adds something to the discussion, Burke says. “The [Hsiang] paper’s main innovation is in linking historical changes in the global climate to conflict risk, whereas past studies (including ours in PNAS) looked only at the effect of local weather variations on conflict.”

Burke, a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley department of agricultural and resources economics, added, “They provide very convincing evidence that ENSO-related changes in the global climate are strong drivers of conflict risk in the regions whose weather is affected by ENSO.”

Looking at limits

Mark Cane, a climate scientist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and a co-author of the new study, said weather does not equal destiny. “No one should take this to say that climate is our fate. Rather, this is compelling evidence that it has a measurable influence on how much people fight overall.”

Ultimately, the motivation for the new study was to peer through the keyhole of time and anticipate a warmed world, Hsiang says, but he admits that the predictive power is limited. “In relationship to global warming, we want to be careful. El Niño is very different … in terms of its spatial pattern, the changes on the ground, and the rate of change. Until we have a much better grasp of these, it’s very hard to take these results and produce any kind of projection for future climate change.”

Still, he adds, “The debate until now has been whether there is any reason to believe that a shift in climate can produce conflict.” Now, “The question is not whether it’s possible, but how much global climate will influence conflict.”

– David J. Tenenbaum