Consider a transaction that wouldn't seem, on the surface, to create much fear: selling your house. What's so scary about that? Aside from the fact that selling a house is typically the largest financial transaction in your life, and that you probably have scant experience in real estate, and that you may have an enormous emotional attachment to your house, there are at least two pressing fears: that you will sell the house for far less than it is worth and that you will not be able to sell it at all.
In the first case, you fear setting the price too low; in the second, you fear setting the price too high. It is the job of your real-estate agent, of course, to find the golden mean. She is the one with all the information: the inventory of similar houses, the recent sales trends, the tremors of the mortgage market, perhaps even a lead on an interested buy. You feel fortunate to have such a knowledgeable expert as an ally in this most confounding enterprise. It is the quintessential blend of commerce and camaraderie: you hire a real-estate agent to sell your home.
She sizes up its charms, snaps some pictures, sets the price, writes a seductive ad, shows the house aggressively, negotiates the offers, and sees the deal through to its end. Sure, it's a lot of work, but she's getting a nice cut. On the sale of a $300,000 house, a typical 6 percent agent fee yields $18,000. Eighteen thousand dollars, you say to yourself: that's a lot of money. But you also tell yourself that you never could have sold the house for $300,000 on your own. The agent knew how to- what's that phrase she used?- "maximize the house's value." She got you top dollar, right?
Right?
A real-estate agent is a different breed of expert than a criminologist, but she is every bit the expert. That is, she knows her field far better than the layman on whose behalf she is acting. She is better informed about the house's value, the state of the housing market, even the buyer's frame of mind. You depend on her for this information. That, in fact, is why you hired an expert.
As the world has grown more specialized, countless such experts have made themselves similarly indispensable. Doctors, lawyers, contractors, stockbrokers, auto mechanics, mortgage brokers, financial planners: they all enjoy a gigantic informational advantage. And they use that advantage to help you, the person who hired them, get exactly what they want for the best price.
Right?
It would be lovely to think so. But experts are humans, and humans respond to incentives. How any given expert treats you, therefore, will depend on how that expert's incentives are set up. Sometimes his incentives may work in your favor. For instance: a study of California auto mechanics found they often passed up a small repair bill by letting failing cars pass emissions inspections- the reason being that lenient mechanics are rewarded with repeat business. But in a different case, an expert's incentives may work against you. In a medical study, it turned out that obstetricians in areas with declining birth rates are much more likely to perform cesarean-section deliveries than obstetricians in growing areas- suggesting that, when business is tough, doctors try to ring up more expensive procedures.
It is one thing to muse about experts' abusing their position and another to prove it. The best way to do so would be to measure how an expert treats you versus how he performs the same service for himself. Unfortunately a surgeon doesn't operate on himself. Nor is his medical file a matter of public record; neither is an auto mechanic's repair log for his own car.
Real-estate sales, however, ARE a matter of public record. And real-estate agents often do sell their own homes. A recent set of data covering the sale of a nearly 100.000 houses in suburban Chicago shows that more than 3,000 of those houses were owned by the agents themselves.
Before plunging into the data, it helps to ask a question: what is the real-estate agent's incentive when she is selling her own home? Simple: to make the best deal possible. Presumably this is also your incentive when you are selling your home. And so your incentive and the real-estate agent's incentive would seem to be nicely aligned. Her commision, after all, is based on the sale price.
But as incentives go, commissions are tricky. First of all, a 6 percent real-estate commision is typically split between the seller's agent and the buyer's. Each agent then kicks back half of her take to the agency. Which means that only 1.5 percent of the purchase price goes directly into your agent's pocket.
So on the sale of your $300,000 house, her personal take of the $18,000 commission is $4.500. Still not bad, you say. But what if the house was actually worth more than $300,000? What if, with a little more effort and patience and a few more newspaper ads, she could have sold it for $310,000? After the commission, that puts an additional $9,400 in your pocket. But the agent's additional share- her personal 1.5 percent of the extra $10,000- is a mere $150. If you earn $9,400 while she earns only $150, maybe your incentives aren't aligned after all. (Especially when she's the one paying for the ads and doing all the work.) Is the agent willing to put out all that extra time, money, and energy for just $150?
There's one way to find out: measure the difference between the sales data for houses that belong to real-estate agents themselves and the houses the sold on behalf of clients. Using the data from the sales of those 100,000 Chicago homes, and controlling for any number of variables- location, age and quality of the house, aesthetics, and so on- it turns out that a real-estate agent keeps her own home on the market an average of ten days longer and sells it for an extra 3-plus percent, or $10,000 on a $300,000 house. When she sells her own house, an agent hold out for the best offer; when she sells yours, she pushes you to take the first decent offer that comes along. Like a stockbroker churning commisions, she wants to make deals and make them fast. Why not? Her share of a better off- $150- is too puny an incentive to encourage her to do otherwise.
This can be tricky. The agent does not want to come right out and call you a fool. So she merely implies it- perhaps by telling you about the much bigger, nicer, newer house down the bloc that has sat unsold for six months. Here is the agent's main weapon: the conversion of information into fear. Consider this true story, told by John Donahue, a law professor who in 2001 was teaching at Stanford University: "I was just about to buy a house on the Stanford campus," he recalls, "and the seller's agent kept telling me what a good deal I was getting because the market was about to zoom. As soon as I signed the purchase contract, he asked me if I would need an agent to sell my previous Stanford house. I told him that I would probably try to sell without an agent, and he replied, 'John, that might work under normal conditions, but with the market tanking now, you really need the help of a broker.' "
Within five minutes, a zooming market had tanked. Such are the marvels that can be conjured by an agent in search of the next deal.
Consider now another true story of a rea-estate agent's information abuse. The take involves C., a close friend of mine. C. wanted to buy a house that was listed as $469,000. He was prepared to offer $450,000 but he first called the seller's agent and asked her to name the lowest price that she thought the homeowner might accept. The agent promptly scolded C. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself," she said. "That is clearly a violation of real-estate eithcs."
C. apologized. The conversation turned to other, more mundane issues. After ten minutes, as the conversation was ending, the agent told C., "Let me say one last thing. My client is willing to sell his house for a lot less than you might think."
Based on this conversation, C. then offered $425,000 for the house instead of the $450,000 he had planned to offer. In the end, the seller accepted $430,000. Thanks to HIS OWN AGENT'S intervention, the seller lost at least $20,000. The agent, meanwhile, only lost $300- a small price to pay to ensure that she would quickly and easily lock up the sale, which netted her a commission of $6,450.
So a big part of a real-estate agent's job, it would seem, is to persuade the homeowner to sell for less than he would like while at the same time letting potential buyers know that a house can be bought for less than its listing price. To be sure, there are more subtle means of doing so than coming right out and telling the buyer to bid low. The study of real-estate agents above also includes data that reveals how agents convey information through the for-sale ads they write. A phrase like "well maintained," for instance, means that a house is old but not quite falling down. A savvy buyer will know this (or find out for himself once he sees the house), but to the sixty-five-year-old retiree who is selling the house, "well maintained" might sound like a compliment, which is just what the agent intends.
An analysis of the language used in real-estate ads shows that certain worlds are powerfully correlated with the final sale price of a house. This doesn't necessarily mean that labeling a house "well maintained" CAUSES it to sell for less than an equivalent house. It does, however, indicate that when a real-estate agent labels a house "well maintained," she is subtly encouraging a buyer to bid low.
Listed below are ten terms commonly used in real-estate ads. Five of them have a srtong positive correlation to the ultimate sales price, and five have a strong negative correlation. Guess which are which.
Ten Common Real-Estate Ad Terms
Fantastic
Granite
Spacious
State-of-the-Art
!
Corian
Charming
Maple
Great Neighborhood
Gourmet
A "fantastic" house is surely fantastic enough to warrant a high price, isn't it? What about a "charming" and "spacious" house in a "great neighborhood!"? No, no, no, and no. Here's the breakdown:
Five Terms Correlated to a Higher Sales Price
Granite
State-of-the-Art
Corian
Maple
Gourmet
Five Terms Correlated to a Lower Sales Price
Fantastic
Spacious
!
Charming
Great Neighborhood
Three of the five terms correlated with a higher sales price are physical descriptions of the house itself: granite, Corian, and maple. A information goes, such terms are specific and straightforward- and therefore pretty useful. If you like granite, you might like the house; but even if you don't, "granite" creatingly doesn't connote a fixer-upper. Nor does "gourmet" or "state-of-the-art." both of which seem to tell a buyer that a house is, on some level, truly fantastic.
"Fantastic," meanwhile, is a dangerously ambiguous adjective, as is "charming." Both these words seem to be real-estate agent code for a house that doesn't have many specific attributes worth describing. "Spacious" homes, meanwhile, are often decrepit or impractical. "Great neighborhood" signals a buyer that, well, THIS house isn't very nice but others nearby may be. And an exclamation point in a real-estate ad is bad news for sure, a bid to paper over real shortcomings with false enthusiasm.
If you study the words in the ad for a real-estate agent's OWN home, you see that she indeed emphasizes descriptive terms (especially "new," "granite," "maple," and "move-in condition") and avoids empty adjectives (including "wonderful," "immaculate," and the telltale "!"). Then she patiently waits for the best buyer to come along. She might tell this buyer about a house nearby that just sold for $25,000 ABOVE the asking price, or another house that is currently the subject of a bidding war. She is careful to exercise every advantage of the information asymmetry she enjoys.
But like most other professions, the real-estate agent has also seen her advantage eroded by the Internet. After all, anyone selling a home can now get online and gether her own information about sales trends and housing inventory and mortgage rates. The information has been set loose. And recent data show the results. Real-estate agents still get a higher price for their own homes than comparable homes owned by their clients, but since the proliferation of real-estate websites, the gap between the two prices has shrunk by a third... More on the Internet later...
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Politics and Money... Hmm...
Of all the truisms about politics, one is held to be truer than the rest: money buys elections. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Bloomberg, Jon Corzine- these are but a few recent, dramatic examples of the truism at work. (Disregard for a moment the contrary examples of Howard Dean, Steve Forbes, Michael Huffington, and especially Thomas Golisano, who over the course of three gubernational elections in New York spent over $93 million of his own money and won 4 percent, 8 percent, and 14 percent, respectively, of the vote.) Most people would agree that money has an undue influence on elections and that far too much money is spent on political campaigns.
Indeed, election data show it is true that the candidate who spends more money in a campaign usually wins. But is money the cause of the victory?
It might seem logical to think so, much as it might have seemed logical that booming 1990s economy helped reduce crime. But just because two things are correlated does not mean that one causes the other. A correlation simply means that a relationship exists between two factors- let's call them X and Y- but it tells you nothing about the direction of that relationship. It's possible that X causes Y; it's also possible that Y causes X; and it may be that X and Y are both being caused by some other factor; Z.
Thank about this correlation: cities with a lot of murders also tend to have a lot of police officers. Consider now the police/murder correlation in a pair of real cities. Denver and Washington, D.C., have about the same population- but Washington has nearly three times as many police as Denver, and it also has eight times the number of murders. Unless you have more information, however, it's hard to say what's causing what. Someone who didn't know better might contemplate these figures and conclude that it is all those extra police in Washington who are causing the extra murders. Such wayward thinking, which has a long history, generally provokes a wayward response. Consider the folktale of the czar who learned that the most disease-ridden province in his empire was also the province with the most doctors. His solution? He promtly ordered all the doctors shot dead.
Now, returning to the issue of campaign spending: in order to figure out the relationship between money and elctions, it helps to consider the incentives at play in campaign finance. Let's say you are the kind of person who might contribute $1,000 to a candidate. Chances are you'll give the money in one of two situations: a close race, in which you think the money will influence the outcome; or a campaign in which one candidate is a sure winner and you would like to bask in reflected glory or receive some future in-kind consideration. The one candidate you won't contribute to is a sure loser. (Just ask any presidential hopeful who bombs in Iowa and New Hampshire.) So front-runners and incumbents raise a lot more money than long shots. And what about spending that money? Incumbents and front-runners obviously have more cash, but they only spend a lot of it when they stand a legitimate chance of losing; otherwise, why dip into a war chest that might be more useful later on, when a more formidable opponent appears?
Now picture two candidates, one intrinsically appealing and the other not so. The appealing candidate raises much more money and wins easily. But was it the money that won him the votes, or was it his appeal that won the votes AND the money?
That's a crucial question but a very hard one to answer. Voter appeal, after all, isn't easy to quantify. How can it be measured?
It can't, really- except in one special case. The key is to measure a candidate against... himself. That is, Candidate A today is likely to be similar to Candidate A two or four years hence. The same could be said for Candidate B. If only Candidate A ran against Candidate B in two consecutive elections but in each case spent different amounts of money. Then, with the candidates' appeal more or less constant, we could measure the money's impact.
As it turns out, the same two candidates run against each other in consecutive elections all the time- indeed, in nearly a thousand U.S. congressional races since 1972. What do the numbers have to say about such cases?
Here's the surprise: the amount of money spent by the candidates hardly matters at all. A winning candidate can cut his spending in half and lose only 1 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, a losing candidate who doubles his spending can expect to shift the vote in his favor by only that same 1 percent. What really matters for a political candidate is NOT how much money you spend; what matters is who you are. Some politicians are inherently attractive to voters and others simply aren't, and no amount of money can do much about it. (Messrs. Dean, Forbes, Huffington, and Golisano already know this, of course.)
And what about the other half of the election truism- that the amount of money spent on campaign finance is obscenely huge? In a typical election period that includes campaigns for the presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, about $1 billion is spent per year- which sounds like a lot of money, unless you care to measure it against something seemingly less important than democratic elections.
It is the same amount, for instance, that Americans spend every year on chewing gum.
Indeed, election data show it is true that the candidate who spends more money in a campaign usually wins. But is money the cause of the victory?
It might seem logical to think so, much as it might have seemed logical that booming 1990s economy helped reduce crime. But just because two things are correlated does not mean that one causes the other. A correlation simply means that a relationship exists between two factors- let's call them X and Y- but it tells you nothing about the direction of that relationship. It's possible that X causes Y; it's also possible that Y causes X; and it may be that X and Y are both being caused by some other factor; Z.
Thank about this correlation: cities with a lot of murders also tend to have a lot of police officers. Consider now the police/murder correlation in a pair of real cities. Denver and Washington, D.C., have about the same population- but Washington has nearly three times as many police as Denver, and it also has eight times the number of murders. Unless you have more information, however, it's hard to say what's causing what. Someone who didn't know better might contemplate these figures and conclude that it is all those extra police in Washington who are causing the extra murders. Such wayward thinking, which has a long history, generally provokes a wayward response. Consider the folktale of the czar who learned that the most disease-ridden province in his empire was also the province with the most doctors. His solution? He promtly ordered all the doctors shot dead.
Now, returning to the issue of campaign spending: in order to figure out the relationship between money and elctions, it helps to consider the incentives at play in campaign finance. Let's say you are the kind of person who might contribute $1,000 to a candidate. Chances are you'll give the money in one of two situations: a close race, in which you think the money will influence the outcome; or a campaign in which one candidate is a sure winner and you would like to bask in reflected glory or receive some future in-kind consideration. The one candidate you won't contribute to is a sure loser. (Just ask any presidential hopeful who bombs in Iowa and New Hampshire.) So front-runners and incumbents raise a lot more money than long shots. And what about spending that money? Incumbents and front-runners obviously have more cash, but they only spend a lot of it when they stand a legitimate chance of losing; otherwise, why dip into a war chest that might be more useful later on, when a more formidable opponent appears?
Now picture two candidates, one intrinsically appealing and the other not so. The appealing candidate raises much more money and wins easily. But was it the money that won him the votes, or was it his appeal that won the votes AND the money?
That's a crucial question but a very hard one to answer. Voter appeal, after all, isn't easy to quantify. How can it be measured?
It can't, really- except in one special case. The key is to measure a candidate against... himself. That is, Candidate A today is likely to be similar to Candidate A two or four years hence. The same could be said for Candidate B. If only Candidate A ran against Candidate B in two consecutive elections but in each case spent different amounts of money. Then, with the candidates' appeal more or less constant, we could measure the money's impact.
As it turns out, the same two candidates run against each other in consecutive elections all the time- indeed, in nearly a thousand U.S. congressional races since 1972. What do the numbers have to say about such cases?
Here's the surprise: the amount of money spent by the candidates hardly matters at all. A winning candidate can cut his spending in half and lose only 1 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, a losing candidate who doubles his spending can expect to shift the vote in his favor by only that same 1 percent. What really matters for a political candidate is NOT how much money you spend; what matters is who you are. Some politicians are inherently attractive to voters and others simply aren't, and no amount of money can do much about it. (Messrs. Dean, Forbes, Huffington, and Golisano already know this, of course.)
And what about the other half of the election truism- that the amount of money spent on campaign finance is obscenely huge? In a typical election period that includes campaigns for the presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, about $1 billion is spent per year- which sounds like a lot of money, unless you care to measure it against something seemingly less important than democratic elections.
It is the same amount, for instance, that Americans spend every year on chewing gum.
Monday, February 26, 2007
Where have all the criminals gone?
This is long, but worth your time, I think. Read it all the way through. I believe you'll be surprised at the end.
Anyone living in the United States in the early 1990s and paying even a whisper of attention to the nightly news or a daily paper could be forgiven for having been scared out of his skin.
The culprit was crime. It had been rising relentlessly- a graph plotting the crime rate in any American city over recent decades looked like a ski slope in profile- and it seemed now to herald the end of the world as we knew it. Death by gunfire, intentional and otherwise, had become common place. So too had carjacking and crack dealing, robbery and rape. Violent crime was a gruesome, constant, companion. And things were about to get even worse. Much worse. All the experts were saying so.
The cause was the so-called superpredator. For a time, he was everywhere. Glowering from the cover of newsweeklies. Swaggering his way through foot-thick government reports. He was a scrawny, big-city teenager with a cheap gun in his hand and nothing in his heart but ruthlessness. There were thousands out there just like him, we were told, a generation of killers about to hurl the country into deepest chaos.
In 1995 the criminologist James Alan Fox wrote a report for the U.S. attorney general that grimly detailed the coming spike in murders by teenagers. Fox proposed optimistic and pessimistic scenarios. In the optimistic scenario, he believed, the rate of teen homicides would rise another 15 percent over the next decade; in the pessimistic scenario, it would more than double. "The next crime wave will get so bad," he said, "that it will make 1995 look like the good old days."
Other criminologists, political scientists, and similarly learned forecasters laid out the same horrible future, as did President Clinton. "We know we've got about six years to turn this juvenile crime thing around," Clinton said, "or our county is going to be living with chaos. And my successors will not be giving speeches about the wonderful opportunities of the global economy; they'll be trying to keep body and soul together for people on the streets of these cities." The smart money was plainly on the criminals.
And then, instead of going up and up and up, crime began to fall. And fall and fall and fall some more. The crime drop was startling in several respects. It was ubiquitous, with every category of crime falling in every part of the country. It was persistent, with incremental decreases year after year. And it was entirely unanticipated- especially by the very experts who had been predicting the opposite.
The magnitude of the reversal was astounding. The teenage murder rate, instead of rising 100 percent or even 15 percent as James Alan Fox had warned, fell more than 50 percent within five years. By 2000 the overall murder rate in the United States had dropped to its lowest level in thirty-five years. So had the rate of just about every other sort of crime, from assault to car theft.
Even though the experts had failed to anticipate the crime drop- which was in fact well under way even as they made their horrifying predictions- they now hurried to explain it. Most of their theories sounded perfectly logical. It was the roaring 1990s economy, they said, that helped turn back crime. It was the proliferation of gun control laws, they said. It was the sort of innovative policing strategies put into place in New York City, where murders would fall from 2,245 in 1990 to 596 in 2003.
These theories were not only logical; they were also encouraging, for they attritubted the crime drop to specific and recent human initiatives. If it was gun control and clever police strategies and better paying jobs that quelled crime- well then, the power to stop criminals had been within our reach all along. As it would be the next time, God forbid, that crime got so bad.
These theories made their way, seemingly without question, from the experts' mouths to jounalists' ears to the public's mind. In short course, they became conventional wisdom.
There was only one problem: they weren't true.
There was another factor, meanwhile, that had greatly contributed to the massive crime drop of the 1990s. It had taken shape more than twenty years earlier and concerned a young woman in Dallas named Norma McCorvey.
Like the proverbial butterfly that flaps its wings on one continent and eventually causes a hurricane on another, Norma McCorvey dramatically altered the course of events without intending to. All she had wanted was an abortion. She was a poor, uneducated, unskilled, alcoholic, drug-using twenty-one-year-old woman who had already given up two children for adoption and now, in 1970, found herself pregnant again. But in Texas, as in all but a few states at that time, abortion was illegal. McCorvey's cause came to be adopted by people far more powerful than she. They made her the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit seeking to legalize abortion. The defendant was Henry Wade, the Dallas County district attorney. The case ultimately made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, by which time McCorvey's name had been disguised as Jane Roe. On January 22, 1973, the court ruled in favor of Ms. Roe, allowing legalized abortion throughout the country. By this time, of course, she had given birth and put the child up for adoption. (Years later she would renounce her allegiance to legalied abortion and become a pro-life activist. - that's for Michael)
So how did Roe vs. Wade help trigger, a generation later, the greatest crime drop in recorded history?
As far as crime is concerned, it turns out that not all children are born equal. Not even close. Surprising, huh? Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal. And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe vs. Wake- poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get- were often models of adversity. They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. But because of Roe vs. Wade, these children weren't being born. This powerful cause would have a drastic, distant effect: years later, just as these unborn children would have entered their criminal primes, the rate of crime began to plummet.
It wasn't gun control or a strong economy or new police strategies that finally blunted the American crime wave. It was, among other factors, the reality that the pool of potential criminals had dramatically shrunk.
Now, as the crime-drop experts (the former crime doomsayers) spun their theories to the media, how many times did they cite legalized abortion as a cause?
Zero.
In the late 1960s, several states began to allow abortion under extreme circumstances: rape, incest, or danger to the mother. By 1970 five states had made abortion legal and broadly available: NY, CA, WA, AL, and HI. During the Roe vs. Wade trial, abortion was legalized throughout the country with the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling by the majority opinion, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, specifically to the would-be mother's predicament:
"The detriment that the State would impose upon the pregnant woman by denying this choice altogether is apparent... Maternity, or additional offspring, may force upon the woman a distressful life and future. Psychological harm may be imminent. Mental and physical health my be taxed by child care. There is also the distress, for all concerned, associated with the unwanted child, and there is the problem of bringing a child into a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it."
The Supreme Court gave choice to what mothers had long known: when a woman does not want to have a child, she usually has good reason. She may be unmarried or in a bad marriage. She may consider herself too poor to raise a child. She may think her life is too unstable or unhappy, or she may think that her drinking or drug use will damage the baby's health. She may believe that she is too young or hasn't yet recieved enough education. She may want a child badly, but in a few years, not now. For any of a hundred reasons, she may feel that she cannont provide a home environment that is conducive to raising a healthy and productive child.
Before Roe vs. Wade, it was predominantly the daughters of middle or upper-class families who could arrange and afford a safe illegal abortion. Now, instead of an illegal procedure that might cost $500, any woman could easily obtain an abortion, often less than $100.
What sort of woman was most likely to take advantage of Roe vs. Wade? Very often she was unmarried or in her teens or poor, and sometimes all three. What sort of future might her child have had? One study has shown that the typical child who went unborn in the earliest of legalized abortion would have been 50 percent more likely thatn average to live in poverty; he would have also been 60 percent more likely to grow up with just one parent. These two factors- childhood poverty and a single-parent household- are among the strongest predictors that a child will have a criminal future. Growing up in a single-parent home roughly doubles a child's propensity to commit crime. So does having a teenage mother. Another study has shown that low maternal education is the single most powerful factor leading to criminality.
In other words, the very factors that drove millions of American women to have an abortion also seemed to predict that their children, had they been born, would have led unhappy and possibly criminal lives.
To be sure, the legalization of abortion in the U.S. had myriad consequences. Infanticide fell dramatically. So did shotgun marriages, as well as the number of babies up for adoption (which has led to the boom in the adoption of forieign babies.) Conceptions rose by nearly 30 percent, but births actually fell by 6 percent, indicating that many women were using abortion as a method of birth control, a crude and drastic sort of insurance policy.
Perhaps the most dramatic effect of legalized abortion, however, and one that would take years to reveal itself, was its impact on crime. In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe vs. Wade was hitting its late teen years- the years during which young men enter their criminal prime- the rate of crime began to fall. What this cohort is missing, of course, were the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals. And the crime rate continued to fall as an entire genereation came of age minus the children whose mothers had not wanted to bring a child into the world. Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime.
This theory is bound to provoke a variety of reactions, ranging from disbelief to revulsion, and a variety of objections, ranging from the quotidian to the moral. The likeliest first objection is the most straightforward one: is the theory true? Perhaps abortion and crime are merely correlated and not casual.
It may be more comforting to believe what the newspapers say, that the drop in crime was due to brilliant policing and clever gun control and a surging economy. We have evolved with a tendency to link casuality to things we can touch or feel, not some distance or difficult phenomenon. We believe especially in near-term causes: a snake bites your friend, he screams with pain, and he dies. The snakebite, you conclude, must have killed him. Most of the time, such a reckoning is correct. But when it comes to cause and effect, there is often a trap in such open-and-shut thinking. We smirk now when we think of ancient cultures that embraced faulty causes- the warriors who believed, for instance, that it was their raping of a virgin that brought them victory on a battlefield. But we too embrace faulty causes, usually at the urging of an expert proclaiming a truth in which he or she has a vested interest.
How, then can we tell if the abortion-crime link is a case of causuality rather than simply correlation?
One way to test the effect of abortion on crime would be to measure crime data in the five states where abortion was made legal before the Supreme Court extended abortion rights to the rest of the country. Those early-legalizing states saw crime begin to fall by 13 percent compared to the other states between 1988 and 1994. Their murder rates fell 23 perccent more than those of the other states between 1994 and 1997.
But what if the early legalizers simply got lucky? What else would we look for to relate abortion and crime?
One factor to look for would be a correlation between each state's abortion rate and its crime rate. Sure enough, the states with the highest abortion rates in 1970s experienced the greatest crime drops in the 1990s, while states with low abortion rates experienced smaller crime drops. In the states with high abortion rates, the entire decline in crime was among the post-Roe cohort as opposed to older criminals. Also, studies of Australia and Canada have since established a similar link between legalized abortion and crime.
To discover that abortion was one of the greatest crime-lowering factors in American history is, needless to say, jarring. It feels less Darwinian than Swiftian; it calls to mind a long ago dart attributed to G. K. Chesterton: when there aren't enough hats to go around, the problem isn't solved by lopping off some heads. The crime drop was, in the language of economists, an "unintended benefit" of legalized abortion. But one need not oppose abortion on moral or religious grounds to feel shaken by the notion of a private sadness being converted into public good.
Indeed, there are plenty of people who consider abortion itself to be a violent crime. One legal scholar called legalized abortion worse than either slavery (since it routinely involves death) or the Holocaust (since the number of post- Roe abortions in the U.S., roughly thirty-seven million as of 2004, outnumber the six million Jews killed in Europe.)
Now, for the sake of argument, let's ask an outrageous question: what is the relative value between a fetus and a newborn? If faced with the Solomonic task of sacrificing the life of one newborn for an indeterminate number of fetuses, what number might you choose? This is nothing but a thought exercise- obviously there is no right answer- but it may help to clarify the impact of abortion on crime.
For a person who is either resolutely pro-life or resolutely pro-choice, this is a simple calculation. The first, believing that life begins at conception, would likely consider the value of a newborn versus the value of a fetus to be 1:1. The second person, believing that a woman's right to an abortion trumps any other factor, would likely argue that no number of fetuses can equal even one newborn.
But let's consider a third person. (If you identify strongly with either person number one or person number two, the following might strike you as offensive, and you may want to skip this paragraph and the next.) The third person does not believe that a fetus is the 1:1 equivalent of a newborn, yet neither does he believe that a fetus has no relative value. Let's say that he is forced, for the sake of argument, to affix a relative value, and he decided that 1 newborn is worth 100 fetuses.
There are roughly 1.5 million abortions in the U.S. every year. For a person who believes that 1 newborn is worth 100 fetuses, those 1.5 million abortions would translate- dividing 1.5 million by 100- into the equivalent of a loss of 15,000 human lives. Fifteen thousand lives: that happens to be about the same number of people who die in homicides in the U.S. every year. And it is far more than the number of homicides eliminated each year due to legalized abortion. So even for someone who considers a fetus to be worth only one-hundreth of a human being, the trade-off between higher abortion and lower crime is, from a few's opinions, terribly inefficient.
What the link between abortion and crime does say is this: when the government gives a woman the opportunity to make her own decision about abortion, she generally does a good job of figuring out if she is in a position to raise the baby well. If she decides she can't, she often chooses the abortion.
***For the record, this is not meant to come off as offensive to anyone. It is simply history, statistics, and a twist on thinking put together to form a potential argument. I am 100 percent pro-life, but enjoy looking at the hidden side of certain issues. This is also an idea for a paper I'm writing for one of my classes.
Anyone living in the United States in the early 1990s and paying even a whisper of attention to the nightly news or a daily paper could be forgiven for having been scared out of his skin.
The culprit was crime. It had been rising relentlessly- a graph plotting the crime rate in any American city over recent decades looked like a ski slope in profile- and it seemed now to herald the end of the world as we knew it. Death by gunfire, intentional and otherwise, had become common place. So too had carjacking and crack dealing, robbery and rape. Violent crime was a gruesome, constant, companion. And things were about to get even worse. Much worse. All the experts were saying so.
The cause was the so-called superpredator. For a time, he was everywhere. Glowering from the cover of newsweeklies. Swaggering his way through foot-thick government reports. He was a scrawny, big-city teenager with a cheap gun in his hand and nothing in his heart but ruthlessness. There were thousands out there just like him, we were told, a generation of killers about to hurl the country into deepest chaos.
In 1995 the criminologist James Alan Fox wrote a report for the U.S. attorney general that grimly detailed the coming spike in murders by teenagers. Fox proposed optimistic and pessimistic scenarios. In the optimistic scenario, he believed, the rate of teen homicides would rise another 15 percent over the next decade; in the pessimistic scenario, it would more than double. "The next crime wave will get so bad," he said, "that it will make 1995 look like the good old days."
Other criminologists, political scientists, and similarly learned forecasters laid out the same horrible future, as did President Clinton. "We know we've got about six years to turn this juvenile crime thing around," Clinton said, "or our county is going to be living with chaos. And my successors will not be giving speeches about the wonderful opportunities of the global economy; they'll be trying to keep body and soul together for people on the streets of these cities." The smart money was plainly on the criminals.
And then, instead of going up and up and up, crime began to fall. And fall and fall and fall some more. The crime drop was startling in several respects. It was ubiquitous, with every category of crime falling in every part of the country. It was persistent, with incremental decreases year after year. And it was entirely unanticipated- especially by the very experts who had been predicting the opposite.
The magnitude of the reversal was astounding. The teenage murder rate, instead of rising 100 percent or even 15 percent as James Alan Fox had warned, fell more than 50 percent within five years. By 2000 the overall murder rate in the United States had dropped to its lowest level in thirty-five years. So had the rate of just about every other sort of crime, from assault to car theft.
Even though the experts had failed to anticipate the crime drop- which was in fact well under way even as they made their horrifying predictions- they now hurried to explain it. Most of their theories sounded perfectly logical. It was the roaring 1990s economy, they said, that helped turn back crime. It was the proliferation of gun control laws, they said. It was the sort of innovative policing strategies put into place in New York City, where murders would fall from 2,245 in 1990 to 596 in 2003.
These theories were not only logical; they were also encouraging, for they attritubted the crime drop to specific and recent human initiatives. If it was gun control and clever police strategies and better paying jobs that quelled crime- well then, the power to stop criminals had been within our reach all along. As it would be the next time, God forbid, that crime got so bad.
These theories made their way, seemingly without question, from the experts' mouths to jounalists' ears to the public's mind. In short course, they became conventional wisdom.
There was only one problem: they weren't true.
There was another factor, meanwhile, that had greatly contributed to the massive crime drop of the 1990s. It had taken shape more than twenty years earlier and concerned a young woman in Dallas named Norma McCorvey.
Like the proverbial butterfly that flaps its wings on one continent and eventually causes a hurricane on another, Norma McCorvey dramatically altered the course of events without intending to. All she had wanted was an abortion. She was a poor, uneducated, unskilled, alcoholic, drug-using twenty-one-year-old woman who had already given up two children for adoption and now, in 1970, found herself pregnant again. But in Texas, as in all but a few states at that time, abortion was illegal. McCorvey's cause came to be adopted by people far more powerful than she. They made her the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit seeking to legalize abortion. The defendant was Henry Wade, the Dallas County district attorney. The case ultimately made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, by which time McCorvey's name had been disguised as Jane Roe. On January 22, 1973, the court ruled in favor of Ms. Roe, allowing legalized abortion throughout the country. By this time, of course, she had given birth and put the child up for adoption. (Years later she would renounce her allegiance to legalied abortion and become a pro-life activist. - that's for Michael)
So how did Roe vs. Wade help trigger, a generation later, the greatest crime drop in recorded history?
As far as crime is concerned, it turns out that not all children are born equal. Not even close. Surprising, huh? Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal. And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe vs. Wake- poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get- were often models of adversity. They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. But because of Roe vs. Wade, these children weren't being born. This powerful cause would have a drastic, distant effect: years later, just as these unborn children would have entered their criminal primes, the rate of crime began to plummet.
It wasn't gun control or a strong economy or new police strategies that finally blunted the American crime wave. It was, among other factors, the reality that the pool of potential criminals had dramatically shrunk.
Now, as the crime-drop experts (the former crime doomsayers) spun their theories to the media, how many times did they cite legalized abortion as a cause?
Zero.
In the late 1960s, several states began to allow abortion under extreme circumstances: rape, incest, or danger to the mother. By 1970 five states had made abortion legal and broadly available: NY, CA, WA, AL, and HI. During the Roe vs. Wade trial, abortion was legalized throughout the country with the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling by the majority opinion, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, specifically to the would-be mother's predicament:
"The detriment that the State would impose upon the pregnant woman by denying this choice altogether is apparent... Maternity, or additional offspring, may force upon the woman a distressful life and future. Psychological harm may be imminent. Mental and physical health my be taxed by child care. There is also the distress, for all concerned, associated with the unwanted child, and there is the problem of bringing a child into a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it."
The Supreme Court gave choice to what mothers had long known: when a woman does not want to have a child, she usually has good reason. She may be unmarried or in a bad marriage. She may consider herself too poor to raise a child. She may think her life is too unstable or unhappy, or she may think that her drinking or drug use will damage the baby's health. She may believe that she is too young or hasn't yet recieved enough education. She may want a child badly, but in a few years, not now. For any of a hundred reasons, she may feel that she cannont provide a home environment that is conducive to raising a healthy and productive child.
Before Roe vs. Wade, it was predominantly the daughters of middle or upper-class families who could arrange and afford a safe illegal abortion. Now, instead of an illegal procedure that might cost $500, any woman could easily obtain an abortion, often less than $100.
What sort of woman was most likely to take advantage of Roe vs. Wade? Very often she was unmarried or in her teens or poor, and sometimes all three. What sort of future might her child have had? One study has shown that the typical child who went unborn in the earliest of legalized abortion would have been 50 percent more likely thatn average to live in poverty; he would have also been 60 percent more likely to grow up with just one parent. These two factors- childhood poverty and a single-parent household- are among the strongest predictors that a child will have a criminal future. Growing up in a single-parent home roughly doubles a child's propensity to commit crime. So does having a teenage mother. Another study has shown that low maternal education is the single most powerful factor leading to criminality.
In other words, the very factors that drove millions of American women to have an abortion also seemed to predict that their children, had they been born, would have led unhappy and possibly criminal lives.
To be sure, the legalization of abortion in the U.S. had myriad consequences. Infanticide fell dramatically. So did shotgun marriages, as well as the number of babies up for adoption (which has led to the boom in the adoption of forieign babies.) Conceptions rose by nearly 30 percent, but births actually fell by 6 percent, indicating that many women were using abortion as a method of birth control, a crude and drastic sort of insurance policy.
Perhaps the most dramatic effect of legalized abortion, however, and one that would take years to reveal itself, was its impact on crime. In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe vs. Wade was hitting its late teen years- the years during which young men enter their criminal prime- the rate of crime began to fall. What this cohort is missing, of course, were the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals. And the crime rate continued to fall as an entire genereation came of age minus the children whose mothers had not wanted to bring a child into the world. Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime.
This theory is bound to provoke a variety of reactions, ranging from disbelief to revulsion, and a variety of objections, ranging from the quotidian to the moral. The likeliest first objection is the most straightforward one: is the theory true? Perhaps abortion and crime are merely correlated and not casual.
It may be more comforting to believe what the newspapers say, that the drop in crime was due to brilliant policing and clever gun control and a surging economy. We have evolved with a tendency to link casuality to things we can touch or feel, not some distance or difficult phenomenon. We believe especially in near-term causes: a snake bites your friend, he screams with pain, and he dies. The snakebite, you conclude, must have killed him. Most of the time, such a reckoning is correct. But when it comes to cause and effect, there is often a trap in such open-and-shut thinking. We smirk now when we think of ancient cultures that embraced faulty causes- the warriors who believed, for instance, that it was their raping of a virgin that brought them victory on a battlefield. But we too embrace faulty causes, usually at the urging of an expert proclaiming a truth in which he or she has a vested interest.
How, then can we tell if the abortion-crime link is a case of causuality rather than simply correlation?
One way to test the effect of abortion on crime would be to measure crime data in the five states where abortion was made legal before the Supreme Court extended abortion rights to the rest of the country. Those early-legalizing states saw crime begin to fall by 13 percent compared to the other states between 1988 and 1994. Their murder rates fell 23 perccent more than those of the other states between 1994 and 1997.
But what if the early legalizers simply got lucky? What else would we look for to relate abortion and crime?
One factor to look for would be a correlation between each state's abortion rate and its crime rate. Sure enough, the states with the highest abortion rates in 1970s experienced the greatest crime drops in the 1990s, while states with low abortion rates experienced smaller crime drops. In the states with high abortion rates, the entire decline in crime was among the post-Roe cohort as opposed to older criminals. Also, studies of Australia and Canada have since established a similar link between legalized abortion and crime.
To discover that abortion was one of the greatest crime-lowering factors in American history is, needless to say, jarring. It feels less Darwinian than Swiftian; it calls to mind a long ago dart attributed to G. K. Chesterton: when there aren't enough hats to go around, the problem isn't solved by lopping off some heads. The crime drop was, in the language of economists, an "unintended benefit" of legalized abortion. But one need not oppose abortion on moral or religious grounds to feel shaken by the notion of a private sadness being converted into public good.
Indeed, there are plenty of people who consider abortion itself to be a violent crime. One legal scholar called legalized abortion worse than either slavery (since it routinely involves death) or the Holocaust (since the number of post- Roe abortions in the U.S., roughly thirty-seven million as of 2004, outnumber the six million Jews killed in Europe.)
Now, for the sake of argument, let's ask an outrageous question: what is the relative value between a fetus and a newborn? If faced with the Solomonic task of sacrificing the life of one newborn for an indeterminate number of fetuses, what number might you choose? This is nothing but a thought exercise- obviously there is no right answer- but it may help to clarify the impact of abortion on crime.
For a person who is either resolutely pro-life or resolutely pro-choice, this is a simple calculation. The first, believing that life begins at conception, would likely consider the value of a newborn versus the value of a fetus to be 1:1. The second person, believing that a woman's right to an abortion trumps any other factor, would likely argue that no number of fetuses can equal even one newborn.
But let's consider a third person. (If you identify strongly with either person number one or person number two, the following might strike you as offensive, and you may want to skip this paragraph and the next.) The third person does not believe that a fetus is the 1:1 equivalent of a newborn, yet neither does he believe that a fetus has no relative value. Let's say that he is forced, for the sake of argument, to affix a relative value, and he decided that 1 newborn is worth 100 fetuses.
There are roughly 1.5 million abortions in the U.S. every year. For a person who believes that 1 newborn is worth 100 fetuses, those 1.5 million abortions would translate- dividing 1.5 million by 100- into the equivalent of a loss of 15,000 human lives. Fifteen thousand lives: that happens to be about the same number of people who die in homicides in the U.S. every year. And it is far more than the number of homicides eliminated each year due to legalized abortion. So even for someone who considers a fetus to be worth only one-hundreth of a human being, the trade-off between higher abortion and lower crime is, from a few's opinions, terribly inefficient.
What the link between abortion and crime does say is this: when the government gives a woman the opportunity to make her own decision about abortion, she generally does a good job of figuring out if she is in a position to raise the baby well. If she decides she can't, she often chooses the abortion.
***For the record, this is not meant to come off as offensive to anyone. It is simply history, statistics, and a twist on thinking put together to form a potential argument. I am 100 percent pro-life, but enjoy looking at the hidden side of certain issues. This is also an idea for a paper I'm writing for one of my classes.
Thursday, February 1, 2007
The Sacred Realm
Yet, another one about art... obviously I'm a little too much into it...
Who made the universe? How did life begin, and what is its purpose? What happens to us after we die? For answers to these and other fundamental questions, people throughout history have turned to a world we cannot see except through faith, the sacred realm of the Spirit. Gods and goddesses, spirits of ancestors, spirits of nature, one God and one alone- each society has formed its own view of the sacred realm and how it interacts with our own. Some forms of faith have disappeared into history, others have remained small and local, while still others such as Christianity and Islam have been major regions that draw believers from all over the world. From earliest times art has played an important role in our relationship to the sacred, helping us to envision it, to honor it, and to communicate with it.
Many works of architecture have been created to provide settings for rituals of worship and prayer, rituals that formalize contact between the earthly and divine realms. One such work is the small marvel known as the Sainte-Chapelle, or holy chapel. Located in Paris, the chapel was commissioned in 1239 by the French king Louis IX to house an important collection of relics that he had just acquired, relics he believed to include pieces of the True Cross, the Crown of Thorns, and other instruments of Christ's Passion. The king's architects created a soaring vertical space whose walls seem to be made of stained glass. It is said that light passing through the glass creates a dazzling effect, transforming the interior into a radiant, otherwordly space in which the glory of heaven seems close at hand.
The Sainte-Chapelle is a relatively intimate space, for it was intended as a private chapel for the king and his court. In contrast, the Great Mosque at Cordoba, Spain, was built to serve the needs of an entire community. Begun during the 8th century, the Great Mosque at Cordoba grew to be the largest place of prayer in western Islam. The interior of the prayer hall is a vast horizontal space measured out by a virtual forest of columns. Daylight enters through doorways placed around the perimeter of the hall. Filtered through the myriad columns and arches, it creates a complex play of shadows that make the extent and shape of the interior hard to grasp. Alternating red and white sections break up the visual continuity of the arch forms. Oil lamps hanging in front of the focal point of worship would have created still more shadows.
In both the Saint-Chapelle and the Great Mosque at Cordoba architects strove to create a place where worshipers might approach the sacred realm. The builders of the Sainte-Chapelle envisioned a radiant vertical space transformed by colored light, while the architects of the Great Mosque at Cordoba envisioned a disorienting horizontal space fractured by columns and shadows.
The sacred realm cannot be seen with human eyes, yet artists through out the ages have been asked to create images of gods, goddesses, angels, demons, and all manner of spirit beings. Religious images may serve to focus the thoughts of the faithful by giving concrete form to abstract ideas. Often, however, their role has been more complex and mysterious. For example, in some cultures images have been understood as a sort of conduit through which sacred power flows; in others they serve as a dwelling place for a diety, who is called upon through ritual to take up residence within.
The last image is also for a religous purpose. This Buddist image was made in Tibet. The painting portrays Ratnasambhava, one of the Five Transcendent Buddhas, seated in a pose of meditation on a stylized lotus throne. His right hand makes the gesture of bestowing vows, his left, the gesture of meditation. Unlike other Buddhas, the Five Transcendent Buddhas are typically portrayed in the bejeweled garb of Indian princes. Arranged around Ratnasambhava are bodhisattvas, also in princely attire. Bodhisattvas are enlightened beings who have deterred their ultimate goal of nirvana (freedom from the cycle of birth, death and rebirth- in order to help others attain that goal). All wear halos signifying their holiness. The buddha, being the most important of the personages shwon, dominates the painting as the largest figure. He faces straight front, in a pose of tranquility, while the others around him stand or sit in relaxed postures. It is a safe assumption to say that this artist independently found a format that satisfied his pictorial needs. (I couldn't find a picture of this on the internet, but you can look it up if you just absolutely have to.)
The three different works I have shown are all from their own separate, particular religion. Whether it be Islam, Christianity, or Buddhism, they are all special in their own way. Each show the beliefs of their cultures and I find it very interesting how different cultures vary so across and through our world. Some people of the Christian faith may find it offensive to see Islamic and Buddist works as something of value, but it's through art that we are able to visualize and appreciate other cultures in the world. I would hate to grow old and not see, learn, or appreciate all the different ways people worship. I despise close-mindedness...
Who made the universe? How did life begin, and what is its purpose? What happens to us after we die? For answers to these and other fundamental questions, people throughout history have turned to a world we cannot see except through faith, the sacred realm of the Spirit. Gods and goddesses, spirits of ancestors, spirits of nature, one God and one alone- each society has formed its own view of the sacred realm and how it interacts with our own. Some forms of faith have disappeared into history, others have remained small and local, while still others such as Christianity and Islam have been major regions that draw believers from all over the world. From earliest times art has played an important role in our relationship to the sacred, helping us to envision it, to honor it, and to communicate with it.
Many works of architecture have been created to provide settings for rituals of worship and prayer, rituals that formalize contact between the earthly and divine realms. One such work is the small marvel known as the Sainte-Chapelle, or holy chapel. Located in Paris, the chapel was commissioned in 1239 by the French king Louis IX to house an important collection of relics that he had just acquired, relics he believed to include pieces of the True Cross, the Crown of Thorns, and other instruments of Christ's Passion. The king's architects created a soaring vertical space whose walls seem to be made of stained glass. It is said that light passing through the glass creates a dazzling effect, transforming the interior into a radiant, otherwordly space in which the glory of heaven seems close at hand.
The Sainte-Chapelle is a relatively intimate space, for it was intended as a private chapel for the king and his court. In contrast, the Great Mosque at Cordoba, Spain, was built to serve the needs of an entire community. Begun during the 8th century, the Great Mosque at Cordoba grew to be the largest place of prayer in western Islam. The interior of the prayer hall is a vast horizontal space measured out by a virtual forest of columns. Daylight enters through doorways placed around the perimeter of the hall. Filtered through the myriad columns and arches, it creates a complex play of shadows that make the extent and shape of the interior hard to grasp. Alternating red and white sections break up the visual continuity of the arch forms. Oil lamps hanging in front of the focal point of worship would have created still more shadows.
In both the Saint-Chapelle and the Great Mosque at Cordoba architects strove to create a place where worshipers might approach the sacred realm. The builders of the Sainte-Chapelle envisioned a radiant vertical space transformed by colored light, while the architects of the Great Mosque at Cordoba envisioned a disorienting horizontal space fractured by columns and shadows.
The sacred realm cannot be seen with human eyes, yet artists through out the ages have been asked to create images of gods, goddesses, angels, demons, and all manner of spirit beings. Religious images may serve to focus the thoughts of the faithful by giving concrete form to abstract ideas. Often, however, their role has been more complex and mysterious. For example, in some cultures images have been understood as a sort of conduit through which sacred power flows; in others they serve as a dwelling place for a diety, who is called upon through ritual to take up residence within.
The last image is also for a religous purpose. This Buddist image was made in Tibet. The painting portrays Ratnasambhava, one of the Five Transcendent Buddhas, seated in a pose of meditation on a stylized lotus throne. His right hand makes the gesture of bestowing vows, his left, the gesture of meditation. Unlike other Buddhas, the Five Transcendent Buddhas are typically portrayed in the bejeweled garb of Indian princes. Arranged around Ratnasambhava are bodhisattvas, also in princely attire. Bodhisattvas are enlightened beings who have deterred their ultimate goal of nirvana (freedom from the cycle of birth, death and rebirth- in order to help others attain that goal). All wear halos signifying their holiness. The buddha, being the most important of the personages shwon, dominates the painting as the largest figure. He faces straight front, in a pose of tranquility, while the others around him stand or sit in relaxed postures. It is a safe assumption to say that this artist independently found a format that satisfied his pictorial needs. (I couldn't find a picture of this on the internet, but you can look it up if you just absolutely have to.)
The three different works I have shown are all from their own separate, particular religion. Whether it be Islam, Christianity, or Buddhism, they are all special in their own way. Each show the beliefs of their cultures and I find it very interesting how different cultures vary so across and through our world. Some people of the Christian faith may find it offensive to see Islamic and Buddist works as something of value, but it's through art that we are able to visualize and appreciate other cultures in the world. I would hate to grow old and not see, learn, or appreciate all the different ways people worship. I despise close-mindedness...
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