Tom File Briefs #2

Barbenheimer Reviews, Hannah Coulter, Vaccines, and the Housing Market

Review: Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry

I don’t tend to read a lot of fiction, but enough people speak highly of Berry and recommend this novel as an introduction to his work. Told from the perspective of an elderly, twice-widowed woman looking back on her life, this book asks but ultimately does not answer important questions about our connection to the land and rural life. Both of the protagonists, Hannah and her husband live the virtues of a small farming community in Kentucky, a group they call “the membership.” The husband’s ideal is a life where he neither “is a boss nor has a boss,” but provides for his family on his own land.

Over the course of their life, however, Hannah and her husband feel an obligation to support their children’s education. Their children, a girl and two boys, inevitably move away from the farm to the city; the one closest to the land becomes an agricultural professor at a nearby university. Towards the end of their life, their only hope for a continuing family presence on the land is their formerly drug-addicted grandson, who finds solace in the simplicity of rural life. The book ends on a realistically down note, as the various family farms get sold off, developed into subdivisions, and their organic community fades from history.

This book choked me up a few times in its tragic storytelling, and I respect Berry for not romanticizing the brutal economics of agriculture as they have developed over the last 100 years. In part, an irrational attachment to land prevented the historical American rural population from advancing economically. In Louisiana where I grew up, some of the wealthiest families were descended from Italian immigrants who, coming after the Civil War as agricultural workers, did not own land and so lacked a romantic attachment to it. Their children became entrepreneurs and professionals, surpassing the native Anglo population who kept trying to make agriculture work on the old home places.

Berry is correct in presenting the agricultural, rooted life as uniquely virtue-enhancing, but the poverty such a life entails as food became cheaper to produce at scale ultimately means we must find some other way to inculcate virtue. We have yet to find it, which is why it may be best pursued as a side hustle or hobby. Work in a cube during the week, but sell overpriced pastured eggs to rootless professionals on the weekends at the farmer’s market. Own some chickens, keep bees, or grow a garden for its own sake, but thinking one can live off the land with any kind of modern comfort is largely a fantasy.

Overall a 5/5, and a great introduction to Berry’s work without the sexual content present in some of his other novels.

The Housing Market

I continue to believe we are headed for a reckoning in the housing market. The housing consumer can best be modeled as a spendthrift who will borrow as much money as allowed. Higher rates mean they can borrow less, which means each home has fewer potential buyers at the margin. Buyers aren’t satisfied with their buying power, and sellers aren’t satisfied with the prices necessary to move homes. We have a three-way Mexican standoff between buyers, sellers, and the Federal Reserve which continues to hold rates high to mitigate inflation. In almost every market nationwide, for the first time on record, it is cheaper to rent than to buy, and rents are held down partially because so many potential sellers are becoming landlords instead of selling.

At the margin, however, there will always be more forced sellers (deaths, moves, financial problems) than buyers (who can rent). Right now buyers are held down by one limitation, their incomes relative to mortgage payments. But soon, as it takes about 18 months for prices to correct, more forced sellers will come into the market after attempting to wait it out for the past year. Once a few forced sellers cut prices to move their inventory, a new limitation emerges: comps.

Appraisers, who had their hands slapped and are now heavily regulated after the 2008 crisis, will see these new comps and lower the loan-to-value allowances when buyers try to get their contracts approved. The buyers, who largely don’t have much cash to close, will be forced to withdraw or modify offers. At the same time, once word gets out that new, lower comps have hit the market, the shadow inventory of waiting sellers will get spooked to list, to sell before prices fall further. I think this could begin to happen after the summer season, through the winter, as a few sellers take lower offers and reset comps, which would result in a glut of new inventory next spring.

I do not think the Fed will lower rates quickly enough to offset this, and even if they do, the feedback cycle is again too long to prevent a correction in prices. It takes 18 months for prices to fall, and at least 18 months for them to come back again, as timid appraisers rely on comps in the old interest rate environment.

The tragedy of all of the bailouts and money printing is its effect on young people. When I graduated from college in 2001, mortgage rates were about where they are now, which no one considered particularly high. We purchased a new construction three-bedroom starter home with an unfinished basement for $140,000, a value less than three times my salary. Our payment was around $1,000 per month.

Since then, the Fed has printed money such that home prices and tuition have doubled while wages are only up about one-third, all so rich Boomers who have over-borrowed and overspent their entire charmed lives don’t have a reckoning on their net worth spreadsheets. For parents of younger adult children with means, there is no shame for them or you in helping out with a home purchase if they’re forming families. They do not have the same opportunities thanks to the unending bubbles.

Rethinking Vaccines

Rhonda Patrick, one of the evidence-based fitness influencers I respect and who is generally pro-vaccine (including defending the Covid vaccine on Joe Rogan), recently shared her vaccination protocol for her own son on her member’s podcast. This link should take you to a timestamp of her answering this question at 1:29:10. She is obviously quite nervous answering the question, for fear of cancellation, but she admits that her son received no vaccines until age 4, which she considers acceptable because he avoided daycare, and other reduced risk factors like Mom not having sexually transmitted hepatitis.

A friend and I observed that the standard health care protocol for infants seems calibrated for the lowest common denominator environments as if every mother is a suspected promiscuous drug addict (here’s a hepatitis vaccine, and don’t let the unemployed, unrelated male living with you shake the baby!) who will feed her baby rotten food (diphtheria anyone?) and give them rusty metal objects (tetanus!) for toys. Since Dr. Patrick would have the expertise to analyze the risks, I find her solution for her own son telling.

I am questioning my former generally pro-vaccine views, for three major reasons. Since I am technically unqualified to dive into the research, I’ve zoomed way out to three observations informing my newfound skepticism.

1. The regulatory capture of the FDA by pharmaceutical companies, most notably the genesis of the opioid epidemic, and the medical establishment’s willingness to trust new junk science in prescribing them when they were formerly viewed as addictive. I could also cite under this heading the eagerness and gullibility of the medical community to expand on-patent chemical castration drugs into pediatric standards of care.

2. The “nobody knows anything” response and contradictions in Covid policy over time, including misleading, changing claims about the efficacy and risk of the Covid vaccine, the effectiveness of natural immunity, the addition of the notoriously ineffective vaccine to the childhood schedule despite post-Omnicron variants’ zero risk to kids, and the mysterious campaign to marginalize the non-mRNA one-and-done JNJ vaccine, which I identified early on as possibly the safest option for vulnerable populations. Watching all of this play out in real-time causes me to question their expertise on supposedly settled science.

3. The liability shield provided by Congress to vaccine manufacturers. The claim is that this benefits consumers by making vaccines cheaper, a claim I do not find persuasive coming from pharma. Imagine if Six Flags demanded a liability shield before building new roller coasters because the tickets would be cheaper that way. From a business perspective, I know why I would want a liability shield if I sold a medical product, and it’s not to benefit consumers.

Thankfully, these are not decisions I have to make, as my children are older. But given the damaged credibility of public health authorities and the medical establishment, this strikes me as a very difficult thing to parse for parents of younger children, particularly infants. Our former innocence in these areas is gone forever.

What makes this difficult is that even if I were 100% convinced that vaccines were net harmful, I would have more regret if someone I loved were harmed by a preventable disease for which there is a vaccine than an unknowable vaccine injury. The benefits are rare but discrete, but the risks are diffuse. Even for those of us who like to think of ourselves as independent thinkers, it’s painful to run away from the herd.

This may be why people tend to polarize into all-or-nothing opinions on the issue, as a psychological defense in case their child gets a difficult diagnosis, whether autism or measles (which is rarely deadly but can cause sterility in males). I find scientifically-informed middle positions like Dr. Patrick’s more credible.

Barbie

We did see it to have something to do during the heat dome, though I respect one of my daughters for opting out due to its messaging. The message, however, is entirely incoherent. Gerwig seems satisfied with feminism as generalized dissatisfaction with no discernible, specific solutions other than wanting to complain. That’s what relationship experts tell men, after all: just listen, don’t offer solutions unless asked, and Barbie is two hours of that.

The movie’s plot is driven by a mother who longs for the relationship she formerly had with her daughter, innocently playing with Barbies, before she is traumatized by the social brutality of public school junior high and copes by spouting left-wing talking points. They share an adventure but there’s no resolution, but Mom does vent for several minutes.

Ken is the most sympathetic character of the movie, as he seeks meaning in his own right and tries to “do a patriarchy” in Barbieland, and makes for the most laughs (because it’s ok to lampoon male stereotypes) in a movie generally too heavy-handed to be consistently funny. Perhaps most telling is that despite all of the efforts at inclusion, to make Barbie anything and everything, the camera finds itself drawn to Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as the stereotypical Barbie and Ken.

No amount of verbal acrobatics can deny the geometry of beauty, for its reality is involuntary, even coercive, as it just is, undeniable, highly unequally distributed, independent of what we wish it to be. I suspect this underlies the rage that motivates much of the Left’s war with nature. She is so cruel she must be denied.

Oppenheimer

Unlike Barbie, Nolan’s latest seems to have no particular agenda other than telling an interesting story about a highly flawed protagonist in one of history’s most interesting episodes. Because a straightforward story is told as it more-or-less actually happened, it’s hard to generate a narrative. Oppenheimer was probably a lower-c communist, but because he was such an egotist dilettante he never joined the party, and was negligent but not directly complicit in sharing nuclear secrets with the Soviets.

Those from the Left can view it as a story of red-baiting McCarthyism, but the facts were that Oppenheimer was an unstable person who, while needed in wartime, was a liability in peace, particularly when our enemy changed from fascism to communism. The scientists’ enthusiasm in nuking civilian populations quickly subsided when the target was no longer Germany but Japan and the lives to be saved were mere American GIs instead of the Red Army. None of them seemed to realize that no atom bomb would be used in Europe after a successful D-Day.

Perhaps the hero of the story is Matt Damon’s character, Leslie Groves, an MIT-trained engineer turned Army general who, unlike Oppenheimer, plays down his intelligence, and appeals to their vanity to manipulate the scientists into completing his project. WASP restraint, manners, and self-control convinced a bunch of prima donna Communist sympathizers to build the atom bomb for capitalist America.

An amazing thing about this era is the incredible ingratitude shown by these scientists and other academic refugees from Hitler’s Germany. Beyond their sympathy for the far more murderous Soviet regime, within a decade of American blood and treasure defeating the Nazis, they were attacking the American people with pseudo-scientific works like The Authoritarian Personality, which linked strong fathers, Christian faith, and military service to mental instability leading to support for fascism. The latter led to Left support for the Sexual Revolution to undermine the American family as an insurance policy against these supposed latent fascist tendencies*. As is so often the case in history and life, no good deed goes unpunished.

*One could question if repeating the preconditions of fascism is a smart strategy to prevent fascism.