Monthly Archives: December 2011

Untangling the effects of TV watching on mortality

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Interpreting the results of studies can be difficult, particularly if one confuses a correlation (indicating some relationship between two variables) and a direct causal relationship (where one variable causes another). This usually is translated into the common phrase “correlation, not causation” which is illustrated in this example from Entertainment Weekly:

Researchers in Australia are reporting that, on average, every hour spent watching television after the age of 25 decreases the amount you live by 22 minutes.

“As a rule, the more time we spend watching TV, the more time we spend eating mindlessly in front of the TV, and the less time we spend being physically active,” explained Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine to HealthDay.com. “More eating and less physical activity, in turn, mean greater risk for obesity, and the chronic diseases it tends to anticipate, notably diabetes, heart disease and cancer.”

Before you throw your soul-sucking flat screen out the window, here’s a key thing to remember:

TVs are not like the year-draining torture machine in The Princess Bride. This study measures a casual lifestyle correlation — people who watch a lot of TV, on average, die younger than those who do not.

This seems to make sense – it is not TV watching that is the real issue but rather sitting around a lot, which is related to TV watching. This was echoed in the HealthDay story the EW post refers to:

But other experts cautioned that the study did not show that TV watching caused people to die sooner, only that there was an association between watching lots of TV and a shorter lifespan.

But I wonder if this is more of a conceptual issue that an analysis issue on the part of the original researchers. While I can’t access the original article, here is part of the abstract that sheds light on the issue:

Methods The authors constructed a life table model that incorporates a previously reported mortality risk associated with TV time. Data were from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle Study, a national population-based observational survey that started in 1999–2000. The authors modelled impacts of changes in population average TV viewing time on life expectancy at birth.

Results The amount of TV viewed in Australia in 2008 reduced life expectancy at birth by 1.8 years (95% uncertainty interval (UI): 8.4 days to 3.7 years) for men and 1.5 years (95% UI: 6.8 days to 3.1 years) for women. Compared with persons who watch no TV, those who spend a lifetime average of 6 h/day watching TV can expect to live 4.8 years (95% UI: 11 days to 10.4 years) less. On average, every single hour of TV viewed after the age of 25 reduces the viewer’s life expectancy by 21.8 (95% UI: 0.3–44.7) min. This study is limited by the low precision with which the relationship between TV viewing time and mortality is currently known.

Conclusions TV viewing time may be associated with a loss of life that is comparable to other major chronic disease risk factors such as physical inactivity and obesity.

Some key parts of this:

1. This was done using life table models, not correlations. Without seeing the full article, it is hard to know exactly what the researchers did. Did they simply calculate a life table (see an example in 7.2 here) or did they run a model that included other independent variables?

2. Their confidence intervals are really wide. For example, the amount of TV watched in 2008 could only shorten someone’s life by 8.7 days, hardly a substantively significant amount over the course of a lifetime. Watching 6 hours a day on average (compared to those who watch no TV), could live just 11 minute shorter lives.

3. The abstract suggests there is “low precision” because this link hasn’t been studied before. If this is true, then we need a lot more science on the topic and more data. This article, then, becomes an opening or early study on the topic and is not the “definitive” study.

4. The conclusion section says “may be associated with a loss of life that is comparable to other major chronic disease risk factors such as physical inactivity and obesity.” The key word here is “may.” This might simply be an academic qualification but it is an important distinction between saying “proved” (how the public might want to interpret it).

Here is my guess at what happened: media reports (or perhaps even a press release) about the study were a lot more strident about these results than the researchers themselves. In fact, here is a piece from the HealthDay piece that suggests this may be the case:

Researchers in Australia found that people who averaged six hours a day of TV lived, on average, nearly five years less than people who watched no TV.

The emphasis here is on the average, not necessarily the confidence interval. This would be like reporting poll results that say a candidate leads by 6 over an opponent but forgetting to mention that the margin of error (a confidence interval) is 5.9.

What the HealthDay report should include: comments from the researchers themselves explaining the work. Interestingly, the story quickly suggests that other researchers say there are other factors at work but we never hear from the original researchers outside of a few pieces lifted from the study. Without the proper context, a study can become a “shock headline” used by media sites to drive traffic.

I do have to ask: does Entertainment Weekly have a vested interest in debunking a study like this since they are in the business of reviewing television shows and channels?

Required for political participation: “digital skills”

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Here is an argument that African-Americans and Latinos could participate more in American politics if they had more “digital skills”:

Could the key to increasing civic engagement among Latinos and African Americans be computer classes?   A growing body of research is linking Internet use, particularly social network use, and increased social capital and civic engagement.  A new reportfrom the MaCarthur foundation finds that Facebook use is correlated with increased interest in and participation in politics. Scholars like Northwestern Sociologist Esther Hargatti [sic] speak eloquently about the information gap between rich and poor online.  This gap is less about access to technology and more about developing the skills to harness the technology for political and social gain.  The ability to do information searches, send text messages, tweet, share content and other on-line skills is a central element in becoming what Evegny Morozov calls a “digital renegade” rather than a “digital captive.”

The key to using the Web in democracy-enhancing ways is acquiring digital skills.  While this concept has been measured in lots of ways, the presence of digital skills can be measured by the level of autonomy the user has, the number of access points a user has to get online, the amount of experience a user has with different types of online tools, etc.

This should be an area of interest to a lot of people: how social factors, such as race, education levels, location, and other forces affect online use. “Digital skills” are not simply traits that everyone picks up on their own. It requires a certain level of exposure, time, and resources that not all have. See a video clip of Hargittai talking about this.

I wonder how much arguments like this are behind recent government efforts to provide cheap or free broadband to poorer US residents. Here is part of the statement from the head of the FCC:

“There is a growing divide between the digital-haves and have-nots. No Less than one-third of the poorest Americans have adopted broadband, while 90%+ of the richest have adopted it. Low-income Americans, rural Americans, seniors, and minorities disproportionately find themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide and excluded from the $8 trillion dollar global Internet economy.”

As I’ve asked before, how close are we to declaring Internet access an essential human right?

Living Earth Simulator to model social world

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Here is an interesting project, the Living Earth Simulator, that hopes to take a lot of data and come to conclusions about social life:

Described as a “knowledge collider,” and now with a pledge of one billion euros from the European Union, the Living Earth Simulator is a new big data and supercomputing project that will attempt to uncover the underlying sociological and psychological laws that underpin human civilization. In the same way that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider smashes together protons to see what happens, the Living Earth Simulator (LES) will gather knowledge from a Planetary Nervous System (PNS — yes, really) to try to predict societal fluctuations such as political unrest, economic bubbles, disease epidemics, and so on.

Orchestrated by FuturICT, which is basically a consortium of preeminent scientists, computer science centers around the world, and high-power computing (HPC) installations, the Living Earth Simulator hopes to correlate huge amounts of data — including real-time sources such as Twitter and web news — and extant, but separate approaches currently being used by other institutions, into a big melting pot of information. To put it into scientific terms, the LES will analyze techno-socio-economic-environmental (!) systems. From this, FuturICT hopes to reveal the tacit agreements and hidden laws that actually govern society, rather than the explicit, far-removed-from-reality bills and acts that lawmakers inexorably enact…

The timing of EU’s billion-euro grant is telling, too. As you probably know, the European Union is struggling to keep the plates spinning, and the LES, rather handily, will probably be the most accurate predictor of economic stability in the world. Beyond money, though, it is hoped that the LES and PNS can finally tell us why humans do things, like watch a specific TV show, buy a useless gadget, or start a revolution.

Looking at the larger picture, the Living Earth Simulator is really an admission that we know more about the physical universe than the social. We can predict with startling accuracy whether an asteroid will hit Earth, but we know scant little about how society might actually react to an extinction-level event. We plough billions of dollars into studying the effects and extent of climate change, but what if understood enough of the psychology and sociology behind human nature to actually change our behavior?

I don’t know about the prospects of such a project but if the BBC is reporting on it, perhaps it has a future.

A couple of statements in the description above intrigue me:

1. The simulator will help uncover “the tacit agreements and hidden laws that actually govern society.” Do most social scientists think this is possible if we only had enough data and the right simulator?

2. The comparison between the natural and social sciences is telling. The portrayal here is that the natural sciences have come a lot further in studying nature than social scientists in studying human behavior. Is this true? Is this a fair comparison – natural systems vs. social systems? How much “unknown knowledge” is really in each realm?

3. The coding for this project must be immense.

4. The article makes no mention of utilizing social scientists to help develop this project and analyze the data though the group behind it does have some social scientists on board.

End of the conversation about affordable housing in Winnetka

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I highlighted earlier this year (original post in March, update in April) a public discussion taking place in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka over affordable housing. After a vote last night, Winnetka has decided to table this discussion:

The six trustees were evenly split on a resolution to take several Plan Commission recommendations off the table. Village President Jessica Tucker broke the tie by supporting the resolution to drop talks about the issue.

The Plan Commission began studying affordable housing in 2005, and in April offered its recommendations to diversify the village’s housing stock by encouraging rental apartments and coach houses, as well as sub-market rate condominium units in qualifying future developments.

On Tuesday, village trustees cited a Winnetka Caucus survey in which a majority of respondents opposed affordable housing by more than a 2-to-1 margin…

The three most controversial components of the plan were “inclusionary” zoning, a housing trust fund, and a community land trust. After being sent back to the advisory panel for more consideration, plan commissioners voted to withdraw their recommendation regarding a community land trust.

I can’t say I’m terribly surprised. Wealthier suburbs, like Winnetka, often don’t desire affordable housing because of connotations the term has with poorer residents, lowered property values, and a diminished community image.

The Winnetka Caucus Survey is interesting in of itself. As the Causus notes, “One out of every four households in the village completed this survey.” This is not exactly a representative sample although this isn’t terribly different than the percentages of people who tend to turn out for local elections across suburbs. Here is how the survey gave background for the affordable housing questions:

Beginning in 1979, the Winnetka Plan Commission identified the need for modest-priced housing for seniors,
young families, and those who work in the community. For a variety of reasons, over the ensuing years
Winnetka lost many rental units and restrictions on renting coach houses further impacted the stock of modest priced housing. In 2004, the State of Illinois enacted the Affordable Housing Act, and under it Winnetka was required to file an affordable housing plan. However, in 2005, Winnetka adopted Home Rule and asserted its rights to have local control over the affordable housing issue. That same year, Winnetka filed an Affordable Housing Plan with the State declaring that Winnetka would assert its Home Rule authority and not be subject to the State’s standards for Affordable Housing. The Village Council instructed the Winnetka Plan Commission to conduct further studies and propose a customized affordable housing plan for Winnetka. The resulting proposal from the Plan Commission includes zoning, code changes and other options to foster the availability of modest priced housing. It expands its vision to establish a program to set aside some units as affordable housing units and creates tools that bridge the affordability gap for qualified households. This Affordable Housing program is limited to multi-family units within Winnetka’s commercial districts and includes preferential access to these units for long-time residents and those who work in the community. Because of the higher affordability standards, it would not qualify for state or federal affordable housing funds or fit under Section 8 housing. The new program would engage local government – either the Village Council or an appointed agency – in housing issues, as the new administrator would determine (according to the program’s guidelines) who may live in these affordable housing units and at what cost. Resources would be required to manage the program and properties on a permanent basis (i.e. forever) and, potentially, to purchase property. Further, the program would require developers of multi-family projects to dedicate a portion of their units to the Affordable Housing program in which the units would be sold or rented at below-market “affordable” rates.

On the whole, respondents were against the village getting involved in these housing issues with 85% of respondents saying “It is not appropriate for Village government to be involved in determining who can live here and what prices can be charged for housing in Winnetka” and similarly negative responses to specific pieces of the affordable housing proposal (pages 5-10 of the PDF). Interestingly, there was also strong support (over 60%) for Winnetka needs more affordable housing options for seniors” and “Winnetka needs more affordable housing options for those who work in the community.” Providing this kind of affordable housing is more of “workforce housing” for which some suburbs openly advocate. So if people want these housing options but don’t want the affordable housing proposal run by the village, how exactly might this get done?

Despite the low number of people who completed the survey, the Winnetka Caucus Council has a long history and likely is an influential force in the community.

Higher taxes might push companies to leave but not necessarily wealthy residents?

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Many municipalities and states are looking for ways to raise additional tax revenue and this has led to conflict with companies that either have had or want tax breaks to stay where they are (a prominent Illinois example here). But we could also consider whether higher tax rates prompt wealthier residents to move elsewhere. Some evidence from New York City suggests this did not happen:

According to the Census Bureau’s latest American Community Survey, the average household income of those who left the state in 2010 was $44,739. The average for those who came was $55,419 — the largest differential in at least five years…

A separate analysis of census data found that the number of households making more than $250,000 who lived in New York a year earlier but left peaked in 2004 and has generally declined since 2007. About 14,000 households in 2009 and the about the same number in 2010 reported having left New York within the past year, the lowest numbers in that category since 2003.

That analysis did not take into account inflation, and could reflect lower migration rates in general across the country.

As this short piece suggests, we may not want to run and apply this to all wealthy residents in the United States. Additionally, if this can be done with American Community Survey data for New York City, why not do it with other areas of the country in order to make comparisons? Then we could find out whether this data is more reflective of New York City and its relative wealth and importance as a finance and cultural center than of larger trends about wealthy people.

I do wonder about the value of using short-term migration data to prove points about new legislation and revised taxes. People could move for a lot of reasons beyond just one change and I don’t think the ACS data tells us why people move. This could be a clever way to examine a “natural experiment” but there needs to be care taken in interpreting the results.

The “vibrant cottage industry in polemics against consumerism”

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In reviewing two new academics book on consumerism, Megan McArdle takes a look at the field of “polemics against consumerism”:

All this profligacy supports a rather vibrant cottage industry in polemics against consumerism. Authors as varied as the economist Robert H. Frank (1999’s “Luxury Fever”) and the political theorist Benjamin R. Barber (2007’s “Consumed”) have ganged up on what they see as the particularly unequal and excessive American spending habits. Unsurprisingly considering their abhorrence of waste, they are avid recyclers; the same arguments, behavioral economics studies and anecdotes appear time and time again. Access to credit makes consumers overspend. Materialistic people are anxious and unhappy. The conspicuous-consumption arms race is unwinnable. Down with status competition! Down with long work weeks, grueling commutes and McMansions! Up with family time, reading and walkable neighborhoods! The effect is rather like strolling down the main tourist strip in a beach town: Each merchant rushes out of his shop, gesticulating wildly and showing you exactly the same thing that you saw at all the previous stores…

Like their forebears in this robust polemical genre, neither Mr. Livingston nor Mr. Roberts gets us much closer to answering the essential questions: What makes American consumers spend as they do—and is it a bad thing? For some thoughts on these matters, I’d suggest turning to James B. Twitchell’s “Living It Up” (2002), a wry account of the author’s own complicated relationship with luxury brands that explores the moral and psychological aspects of our free-spending ways without seeming to be a paternalist rant against the folly of BMWs. “The pleasure of spending is the dirty little secret of affluence,” says Mr. Twitchell, a professor of English literature and advertising at the University of Florida. “The rich used to do it; now the rest of us are having a go.” He is keenly alive to the risks—and occasional risibility—of American-style consumerism. But he never pretends not to understand its undeniable appeal.

This could be a very interesting research project: what are the common arguments against consumerism, how many of these arguments are backed by data and social science theories (rather than just opinion), how do the authors position themselves within the debate (I assume generally they suggest they are above it), do these arguments have a sizable effect on readers, and do the books address structural issues and solutions or primarily peddle in individualistic concerns? Additionally, how often are these ideas tied to other ideas like environmentalism, New Urbanism, and other popular schools of thought?

This is also often a complaint within the Christian marketplace of ideas. And yet, have Christian consumption patterns changed or been reduced by these books/sermons/polemics? This reminds me of something one of my graduate school professors said: even the monks who took a vow of poverty couldn’t get rid of their books. (I don’t know the actual truth of this statement.)

Do any of these authors consider the irony that they are making money by selling books about reducing consumerism? Perhaps the book is supposed to be the last item purchased…

Keep McMansions out by adding cemeteries

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I have not heard of this strategy before: zone for cemeteries in order to limit the spread of McMansions.

Looking toward a time when cemetery space is likely to be in short supply, the Diocese of Trenton is seeking approval to eventually turn acres of farmland in the Crosswicks section of the township into a final resting place for local Catholics…

In Hamilton, the situation is not as dire as in North Jersey, where, Dressel said, high-rise mausoleums have been suggested as a solution for overcrowding…

Councilman Dave Kenny said a cemetery is preferable to other types of development. And since the land is already owned by the tax-exempt diocese, it’s not as if the township can wring more tax money out of it.

“It protects the hamlet to have cemeteries there to prevent it from more intense development, like McMansions, that would certainly be out of character there,” Kenny said.

Historic districts in order to keep McMansions away? A common strategy. Cemeteries? Interesting. I wonder if there are every NIMBY concerns about cemeteries. And if the diocese could have sold the land to developers who might then build McMansions, why can’t the land be sold and developed in such a way that local governments could get new tax revenues?

The suggestion in this article is that some municipalities don’t plan ahead enough so that there is adequate cemetery space when growth occurs. How often do local zoning boards consider proposals for cemeteries? Is it primarily the responsibility of dioceses or religious organizations to bring proposals forward?

This reminds me that Simcity made little provision for cemeteries (it may only have been a reward in Simcity 4). There has to be some place for people to be buried…

The “value of estimating”

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Here is another way to help students develop their mathematical skills: learn how to estimate.

Quick, take a guess: how tall is an eight-story building? How many people can be transported per hour on a set of train tracks in France? How many barrels of oil does the U.S. import each year?

Maybe you gave these questions your best shot – or maybe you skimmed right over them, certain that such back-of-the-napkin conjecture wasn’t worth your time. If you fall into the second, just-Google-it group, you may want to reconsider, especially if you’re a parent. According to researchers who study the science of learning, estimation is the essential foundation for more advanced math skills. It’s also crucial for the kind of abstract thinking that children need to do to get good grades in school and, when they’re older, jobs in a knowledge-based economy.

Parents can foster their kids’ guessing acumen by getting them to make everyday predictions, like how much all the items in the grocery cart will cost. Schools, too, should be giving more attention to the ability to estimate. Too many math textbooks “teach how to solve exactly stated problems exactly, whereas life often hands us partly defined problems needing only moderately accurate solutions,” says Sanjoy Mahajan, an associate professor of applied science and engineering at Olin College…

Sharpen kids’ logic enough and maybe some day they’ll dazzle people at cocktail parties (or TED talks) the way Mahajan does with his ballpark calculations. His answers to the questions at the top of this story: 80 ft., 30,000 passengers and 4 billion barrels. To come up with these, he guessed at a lot of things. For instance, for the number of barrels of oil the U.S. imports, he made assumptions about the number of cars in the U.S., the number of miles driven per car per year and average gas mileage to arrive at the number of gallons used per year. Then he estimated how many gallons are in a barrel. He also assumed that imported oil is used for transportation and domestic for everything else. The official tally for U.S. imports in 2010 was 4,304,533,000 barrels. Mahajan’s 4 billion isn’t perfect, but it’s close enough to be useful – and most of the time, that’s what counts.

It sounds like estimation helps with problem solving skills and taking known or guessed at quantities to develop reasonable answers. I tried this question about the barrels of oil with my statistics class today and we had one guess of 4 billion barrels (among a wide range of other answers). This also suggests that there is some room for creativity within math; it isn’t all about formulas but rather takes some thinking.

This reminds me that Joel Best says something similar in one of his books: being able to quickly estimate some big figures is a useful skill in a society where statistics carry a lot of weight. But to do some of this, do people have to have some basic figures in mind such as the total population of the United States (US Census population clock: over 312 million)? Is this a commonly known figure?

The article also suggests ways to take big numbers and break them down into manageable and understandable figures. Take, for example, the national debt of the United States is over 15 trillion dollars, a figure that is perhaps impossible to comprehend. But you could break it down in a couple of ways. The debt is slightly over $48k per citizen, roughly $192k per family of four. Or you could compare the debt to the yearly GDP.

How sociology can help explain the high prices of art

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Collecting art is an expensive hobby – and sociology can help explain why:

The top art prices may have little to do with classic economics. Noah Horowitz, whose Art of the Deal is a crucial text on the subject, says in the long run your investment in art may only do about as well as your holdings in bonds—and comes with greater risk. (But, as one major New York collector put it, that’s not so bad, if you have nowhere else to store your income. And anyway, “bonds aren’t that good to look at.”) At this moment, when the 1 percent has the cash to burn, buying art is less about finance than about the cultural value of money, and of art. “A dollar is not a dollar is not a dollar,” says Viviana Zelizer, the great Princeton sociologist who wrote The Social Meaning of Money. The dollars spent in Miami are “cultural dollars,” Zelizer says, and that makes them obey their own rules. Below, five reasons why art defies economics…

The sociologist Mitch Abolafia, who has made a study of Wall Street financiers, says that sometimes money speaks for itself. “A trader said to me one day, with glee in his eyes, ‘You can’t see it, but money is everywhere in this room. Money is flying around—millions and millions of dollars.’ It was a generalized excitement about money. Even I felt it.” That’s the excitement we all get from expensive art. One collector, who believes deeply that art should be bought for art’s sake, acknowledges basking in the “robust glow of prosperity” that his purchases give off once their value has soared.

The people who are spending record amounts on art buy more than just that glow. (And much more than the pleasure of contemplating pictures, which they could get for $20 at any museum.) They’ve purchased boasting rights. “It’s, ‘You bought the $100 million Picasso?!,’” says Glimcher. Abolafia explains that his financiers were “shameless” in declaring the price of their toys, because in their world, what you buy is less about the object than the cash you threw at it. The uselessness of art makes any spending on it especially potent: buying a yacht is a tiny bit like buying a rowboat, and so retains a taint of practicality, but buying a great Picasso is like no other spending. Olav Velthuis, a Dutch sociologist who wrote Talking Prices, the best study of what art spending means, compares the top of the art market to the potlatches performed by the American Indians of the Pacific Northwest, where the goal was to ostentatiously give away, even destroy, as much of your wealth as possible—to show that you could. In the art-market equivalent, he says, prices keep mounting as collectors compete for this “super-status effect.”…

I’m convinced that most collectors spend their surplus millions on art because they have a genuine belief in its aesthetic value. “We don’t consider art an investment. We get a psychic reward—I love to come home and look at our walls,” says Eli Broad, a prominent collector from Los Angeles, taking a break from shopping with his art-loving wife at the fair in Miami. (They’d just bought some early Cindy Sherman photos, for sale at Metro Pictures for a modest $150,000.) Aesthetics are the bedrock the art market is built on. But, for want of any other reliable measure, they often get tallied in dollars. One of New York’s biggest dealers told Velthuis, the Dutch sociologist, that collectors “permanently have to explain to themselves why they spend so much money on art, sometimes up to 40 percent of their total net worth. So that they want to hear all day long that it makes sense what they do.” And the easiest way to gauge the aesthetic “sense” of an art purchase is to check out the “cents” the thing is selling for. When you’re looking for great art, you may spot it by its price tag.

Sounds like a common sociological explanation: status matters. In order to show their social status or to break into elite circles, people with money buy art.

It would be interesting to read more about how this plays out with emerging artists. After watching Exit Through the Gift Shop, it looks like there is quite an interest in “discovering” and capitalizing on the “next best thing.” It’s one thing to be able to buy works by the masters but another to find the next Banksy and become a new patron.

And can the wealthy create a different kind of status by donating their works to museums or traveling exhibitions to show that they are sharing?

A bear asks for an apology for McMansions

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A New Jersey bear explains his point of view which includes asking for an apology about the McMansions that have been built:

You see, there are an awful lot of us these days – thousands when their used to be a handful. Twenty years ago I was something special, a character out of a storybook. I was mean or cuddly, depending on your personality. Today I am a nuisance, and I completely understand this. There’s not a whole lot of room anymore, thanks to our large and growing population combined with your government’s collusion with developers over the past few decades. As I write this they are taking down more land near me for what you folks call “affordable housing,” but of course it’s just a front for a massive shopping complex. You folks are pretty gullible, if you don’t mind me saying.

Occasionally, we get the urban sophisticate coming our way and he/she treats me like the old days. They look at me with wonder and awe, and I’m guessing it’s because they don’t have much wildlife around the outskirts of Trenton, Newark, or Hoboken. Usually the people are on their way to the Mount Airy Lodge or some other oasis and I give them what they want – an authentic outdoor experience (even if that experience is realized along a highway). Anyway, those same city dwellers are trying to protect me now and I appreciate it. I do. I don’t want to be hunted just as the woodchuck doesn’t want to fall under my claws. But it’s not reality. We are a safety hazard to you (and you to us), and while it’s not our fault, there are too many of us and too many of you. Someone has to be minimized. Both of us can’t pull up fake wicker chairs on a back deck and debate the healthcare bill. It is the natural order of things. A cat is territorial and will fight off any other cat that invades that space (and kill any mouse), so too are humans. I am only thankful that you are sensitive enough to minimize and not eradicate.

So there it is. I am sorry for the destruction around town and the occasional fright.   I am sorry for the debate we spawn between rural residents that have to deal with us on a constant basis and city residents that don’t. And I hope one day you apologize to us for taking so much of the woodland for your McMansions and strip malls. It made things difficult, to say the least.

I assume there is a (good?) reason for this piece. Regardless, it illustrates the sprawl argument that is often made about McMansions. Even more so than the particular features of McMansion homes, McMansion neighborhoods, or people who buy McMansions, a number of people consider McMansions to be the primary exemplar of suburban sprawl that brings highways, strip malls, and single-family homes. This doesn’t just ruin the landscape for humans but has other ecological consequences including flooding issues, a loss of open space, and a negative effect on animal habitats.

And perhaps sometimes you just need to hear it from a bear.