People of the world unite!

Against the truth!

Cuz sometimes things are more complicated then we wish them to be. I was reading an article on Jewcy (the Slate for Jews, or whatever), specifically this one about Sex Ed in schools. It got me thinking about something I read recently about how neither abstinence or "regular" (condom based) sex ed changes teenagers. As a recent (although it's fading quickly) teenager, I don't remember anything they taught us in sex ed. I think I just giggled occasionally at the beginning, and like all (or most) classes, proceeded to get bored.

Shockingly, it seems that it is more important to fill the teenagers time up outside of school, either with "after school" programs (even ones having nothing to do with sex ed, if the above linked article is to be believed) or "family" time. It's almost like people in their teens have sex to connect in some way!

I guess it got me to thinking how much of societies problems are a majority unconquerable by governmental means. Take the wealth gap everyone talks about. 75% of it is caused by two things (I can find the paper perhaps), the aging of the population (so more variation) and the increased average education attainment of the population (grad school for philosophy or med school; increased variation again). Or something I heard once was that they've done massive amount of studies on why kids nowadays are fat. They control for all the variables, and what pops out? The most important thing for children to stay thin is to brush their teeth every day!? Clearly, that's more of a proxy for parents paying close enough attention to force the kid to brush (and hence watch what the kid eats). Maybe "we" (in the government sense) can fix some of these problems, but really it comes down to personal decisions.

Hat Tip Megan