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Assuming the intervention increased self esteem and correspondingly decreased tolerance for abusive relationships, but failed to improve the subjects’ status enough to make better dating options available for them, this is exactly what we would see. And indeed, the intervention did not improve some of the most important outcomes that determine dating market value, such as education or employment.

I believe people with healthy self esteem would agree that no relationship is better than an abusive relationship. If the relationships available to these people come with a high risk of abusiveness, then the rational choice and best outcome is fewer relationships.

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The back-and-forth on this discussion branch has some interesting and important points, but they’re getting buried underneath the tone.

You both know better, less irrationality-provoking ways to say what you mean. I’d appreciate it if you’d use them, and I doubt I’m alone.

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But the familiarity of cars leads to other metaphors, metaphors about seeing collisions and their aftermath. SS mentions “like watching a car crash in slow motion.” And when Americans talk about a “car wreck” they usually mean not the size of the disaster, but “rubbernecking,” a compulsion to keep looking at the aftermath.

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Perhaps train crashes are uncommon enough (largely due to the countries being smaller) that they simply do not rise to the tongue when a metaphor is required.

I imagine a couple of hundred years ago, the corresponding metaphor would have been shipwreck.

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Onyomi, you should definitively read Steve Randy Waldman’s introduction to welfare economics (so should everyone who hasn’t, it’s really exceptional pedagogic writing). If a growing economy provides any guarantees at all, they’re certainly not simple.

Also, yes, I think Meiji and Taisho Japan were pretty hellish. The sociologist and missionary Toyohiko Kagawa described baby farms of the outright murderous variety in the slums of Kobe at least as late as 1909.

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“it’s “changes of being arrested five or more times dropped from 55% to 36%.””

If you have a Poisson distribution with a 55% chance to be greater than or equal to 5, then lambda is 4.9461. For a 36% chance, lambda is 3.942. That’s a decrease of 20%.

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If this in fact correct, then assuming a Poisson distribution, lambda originally was 4.95, but decreased to 3.94. That is a decrease of 20.3%. (I previously calculated using the rounded numbers of 50% and 33%, which is where 18.5% came from.)

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