Half Changed World

This week’s book is a novel, Tom Perrotta’s latest, The Abstinence Teacher.  Like Little Children, the pleasure of this book is mostly how Perrotta captures the realities of daily suburban life.  In this one, the characters are a little older, on their second marriages, wondering whether it’s possible to connect with their teenage children.  Perrotta occasionally loses his lightness of touch and relies on crude stereotypes (the stay at home mother who used to be a biomedical researcher working on autoimmune disorders but now is "playing a lot of tennis") but mostly his characters are both believable and likable.

The plot of the book on first glance is ripped from the headlines — a sex ed teacher forced to teach an "abstinence" curriculum that she doesn’t believe in, a soccer coach who causes waves by praying with his players.  But Perrotta doesn’t really do much with the plot — it’s just an excuse to spend some time exploring the two main characters and what makes them tick.

In some ways it’s a slight book,  but I was sufficiently engrossed in it that I missed my stop on the train coming home this evening. 

Steven Greenhouse covers the labor beat for the New York Times, and The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker is his summary of the state of working America.  It’s not a pretty picture.  He describes a world of layoffs, unionbusting, sexual harassment, workplace injuries, and broken promises.  These issues are what I work on professionally, so little of it was news to me, but Greenhouse brings the abstract issues to life with individual stories.  And even I was surprised at the ubiquity with which Greenhouse found that store managers forged timekeeping records and forced workers to work off the clock in order to cheat them of overtime and keep labor costs down.

Unfortunately, while the topic is important, I have trouble imagining anyone reading it all the way through but those who are already convinced.  The unremitting grimness of the book is only slightly broken by a chapter on model employers, such as Costco, Patagonia, and Cooperative Home Care Associates.  The last chapter of the book offers some possible solutions, all of which would be positive steps, but which either don’t seem up to the magnitude of the challenge (enforcing wage and hour laws more strongly) or are far easily said than done (expand health coverage to all while bringing costs under control).

Today’s book review is part of a MotherTalk tour.  That means I got a free copy of the book and an Amazon gift certificate to review the book.  But, given the topic, I’m confident that I would have reviewed the book in any case.

The Maternal is Political, edited by Shari MacDonald Strong, is a collection of essays by women writers about "the intersection of motherhood and social change."  Some of the authors are famous, either as politicians (Nancy Pelosi, Benazir Bhutto), activists (Cindy Sheehan), or writers (Barbara Kingsolver, Anne Lamott, Anna Quindlen), but most of them are by women you’ve never heard of, talking about how their motherhood has affected their political activity.  In most cases, the essays are about how mothering has inspired them to take action, but some of them are about the struggles to balance the demands on their time from their families and their activism (the essay by Valerie Weaver-Zercher about "Peace March Sans Children" made me grin in recognition).

One of the things I liked about the book was the wide range of issues covered,  Several of the essays are about opposing war as a mother’s issue, but others touch on abortion, homeschooling, public schooling, religious freedom, disability, environmentalism, sexual harassment, adoption and more. Of course, I have some quibbles about the topics that are missing… I find it hard to believe that there’s not one about health care (Flea could have done a great job with that one) and in general, I think economic justice issues were under-represented.  (And yes, I should have submitted an essay… I can’t find it now, but I’m pretty sure I posted the call for submissions here when it came out.)

In spite of that long list of issues, the voices were different enough that the book never felt like a litany of complaints.  Anna Quindlen’s piece on being pregnant in New York made me laugh, and two essays made me cry — Cindy Sheehan’s anguished farewell to activism to "try to regain some of what I have lost… before it [the system] totally consumes me or any more people that I love" and Kathy Briccetti’s joyful account of her family’s second-parent adoption.

I also liked the recognition that there are many ways to be political.  A few of the writers were elected officials, and some engaged in politics by writing letters to the editor, going on protest marches, or submitting testimony to their state legislators.  But many of them were political in everyday ways — raising feminist sons and daughters, choosing to reduce use of hazardous chemicals and natural resources, speaking up about equality in personal encounters, standing up to a man harassing another woman (who is someone else’s daughter), helping out another mother by taking care of her kids when she’s in a crunch.  I think those examples may really help people who feel like they don’t have time to be politically active — or that nothing they do will make a difference — to think of ways to incorporate activism into their lives.

My one real complaint about the book is that there are two essays about personal relationships with people who are (gasp!) Republicans, but no actual Republicans — or even conservatives — in it.  I would have liked to read an essay by someone whose experiences as a mother made them an anti-abortion activist.  I would have loved to read an essay by Cathy McMorris Rodgers on the challenges and insights of serving in Congress as the mother of an infant with Down’s syndrome.  I don’t know if Strong made a deliberate choice to only include liberal voices, or if it’s a function of the way the call for essays was marketed, but I think it limits the audience for the book unnecessarily.

Some quick reviews and comments:

• D and I have been reading The Phantom Tollbooth as his bedtime story.  I had great fond memories of this book from my childhood and was eager to share it with D.  We both enjoyed it, although not quite as much as I’d hoped.  He didn’t get a lot of the puns, which probably means that it might have been better to wait a year or two.  And I was surprised in re-reading it to discover the near total lack of female characters.  (The exceptions are the Which, the Soundkeeper, and Rhyme and Reason, who need to be rescued, of course.)  My recommendation if you’re reading it out loud is to go ahead and make Tock female.  Next up is The Champion of Merrimack County.

• I got sent a review copy of Snacktime! the new kids album from Barenaked Ladies.  I’m a fan of BNL and am always up for new kids music, so it seemed like a good fit.  It’s a fun album, similar in silliness to Here Come the ABCs’.  N particularly likes 789, and D likes Popcorn and The Ninjas (although he protests that he’s a ninja and he’s not "unspeakably violent").  I don’t think there’s anything on the album that’s as inspired as If I Had a Million Dollars, but I wouldn’t want to throw it out the window after a long car trip (and that’s actually high praise for kids’ music).

• I’ve been getting Cookie magazine for a few months (I was offered a chance to get it for airline miles).  It’s certainly nothing profound, but it’s entertaining, and I think the reviews of kids books, games, etc. are interesting.  The fashion layouts are pretty absurd — I don’t spend $70 for a shirt for myself, and I’m sure not spending that kind of money on clothes for my kids. But they’ve decided that if I get this, I must want Lucky as well, which is a total waste of paper as far as I’m concerned.

I’m listening to the political news while I post.  I wouldn’t have believed it two years ago, if you had told  me that on the night that Obama clinched the nomination, I’d be feeling bittersweet.

This week’s book is Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely.  It’s a quick read, but has far reaching ramifications.  It’s about how people aren’t as rational as economists think we are.  That’s not particularly surprising, but Ariely goes on to argue that people are irrational in systematic– predictable — ways, and to explain the elegant experiments that psychologists and behavioral economists have developed to tease these out.  So, let’s look at some of the examples:

• People are hugely biased for the idea of getting something for "free."  They’ll take the crappy thing for free over the good thing for a modest cost.

• People don’t know what things are really worth, and so anchor to arbitrary comparisons.  People often won’t buy the most expensive thing on the menu, but they’ll buy the next most expensive thing.  I was particularly impressed by the studies that showed that if the researchers asked people if a percentage was higher or lower than the last two digits of their social security number, and then had them guess at a concrete number, there was a strong correlation between the guess and those last two digits.  Based on this, I’d guess that including a high "buy
  it now" price pulls up the value of bids on ebay, even when no one uses
  the buy it now option.  (Although I don’t know if it would pull them up to offset the increased fee.)

• When you ask people to choose among three things, two of which are similar (but one is clearly better than the other) and one is very different, they’re more likely to choose the better of the two similar choices.  It’s hard to tell if an apple is better than an orange, but a fresh apple is clearly better than a rotten apple — and the presence of the rotten apple stand out against the orange.

All this isn’t just entertaining, but has pretty significant policy implications.  Orthodox economists — for all their pessimistic reputation — actually tend towards a Panglossian view of the world — that we’re in the very best of all possible worlds, or at least that the world couldn’t be made better for anyone without making it worse for someone else.  This is because economists take pretty seriously the idea of revealed preference: the idea that you can tell what agents in a free market prefer by what they chose, given the options that are available to them.

Ariely more or less blows up this idea, by showing studies where given choices A, B and C, no one chose option B, but taking away option B dramatically changes the distribution of choices between A and C.  The bad news is that this means that lots of people are making suboptimal choices all the time; the good news is that it means there’s room for improvements without making anyone worse off.  The problem is that there’s a lot of resistance — for good reasons — to having public institutions adopt the strategies of direct marketers…

Somewhat related books that I’ve read recently:

• Discover Your Inner Economist, by Tyler Cowan (of Marginal Revolution).  While Cowan is much more of a traditional economist than Ariely, I’m not sure you’d be able to tell that by this book.  Cowan’s big take-away here is that economics is about scarcity, and so the key is always to figure out what’s the resource that’s scarce (and it’s often attention or time, rather than money).
• Your Money and Your Brain, by Jason Zveig.  Specifically focusing in on why we behave irrationally when it comes to investing.  I thought the first chapter or two was fascinating, but then it got repetitive, and I didn’t finish the book before it was due back to the library.  Maybe a good one to give to your brother who thinks that he’s figured out a way to beat the markets.

This week’s book is Life Work, by Donald Hall.  When I agreed to review The Ten Year Nap, the blog tour organizers sent me links to some resources, including a review that said: "In fact, the novel, like poet Donald Hall’s memoir "Life Work," is a
passionate paean to the redeeming power of purposeful occupation."  This sent me off looking for Hall’s book.

Life Work is a short book, really just an extended essay.  In unfussy but eloquent prose, Hall writes about his daily routine, and connects it to the lives of his ancestors, in particular his maternal grandfather, in whose house he lives.  For him, contentment is "work so engrossing that you do not know you are working," what others might call "flow."  He writes about waking up in the morning, wondering if it’s close enough to 5 am that he can reasonably get up and start working on his poems.  He criticizes the idea that only what is paid should be considered valuable.

Hall writes with love about his ancestors, and their work, especially his grandparents who were farmers in a time and place where farmers could still do a bit of everything — raise cows for dairy, chickens for pullets and eggs, maple syrup, enough vegetables to eat year round.  Except for buying store-bought cloth, their lives were closer to the prototype of the Ingalls family than to modern farmers.  And he contrasts them with his father, who spent his life doing the books for his family’s dairy business, and hating every minute of it.

I still can’t decide whether I believe that Hall’s grandparents were as content with their lives of unremitting labor as he makes them out to be.  He writes that his grandmother had planned to be a medical missionary until her mother died, and then she set all those plans aside to keep house for her father and later her husband and children, without a word of complaint.  I think there’s a difference between being not unhappy and being happy, and it’s hard to know where they would have fallen.  And for all of Hall’s romanticization of his grandparents’ lives, he doesn’t have any interest in taking up farming himself, unlike his friend Wendell Berry.

In any case, it’s a lovely little book, filled with Hall’s love for his work, his wife, and his family.

Today’s book is The Ten-Year Nap, by Meg Wolitzer.  I’m reviewing it as part of a MotherTalk blog book tour.

The book follows the lives of four stay-at-home mothers who have been friends for years, at a point when they’re sort of re-examining their lives and wondering what happens next.  The book is mostly set in Manhattan, with a nod to a neighboring suburb, and the characters are all the sort of upper-middle class professionals whose life choices wind up as long articles in the New York Times.  But Wolitzer isn’t of this milieu herself, and the book isn’t full of the brand name references that many such books drop in order to establish their accuracy — when brands are mentioned, they’re generally made-up (I think).  She’s less interested in capturing the precise details of the lifestyle than in exploring what drives people to make the choices they do.

I disliked the start of the book: "All around the country, the women were waking up.  Their alarm clocks bleated one by one, making soothing sounds or grating sounds or the stirrings of a favorite song…"  The move from "the women" to a subset of women — those who don’t have to go to work, who aren’t already sitting bleary eyed with a nursing infant as the sun rises — jarred me, and made me ready to dislike the book as a whole.

But I actually mostly enjoyed the book.  Once Wolitzer settles down to the individual characters and stops talking in generalities, her writing skills shine through.  And unlike Rachel Cusk, she seems to have some affection for her characters.  While the plot is fairly thin, and overly driven by random external events, I was perfectly happy to spend a few hours in the company of Amy, Karen and Jill.  (And Roberta, but in thinking over the book, I can’t remember any of the sections from her perspective…)

I noticed in this interview in the NY Times last week that Wolitzer said "I’m not writing the Big Book o’ Motherhood and Work."  I think that’s a bit disingenuous, as the book has a series of short vignettes of other people’s lives that only fit into the book as quick looks into the role that work plays in people’s lives —  Amy’s mother discovering feminism and her life’s work as a writer,  Nadia Comanici thinking that gymnastics isn’t work at all, someone’s aunt who is an assistant to Margaret Thatcher, feeling like she’s part of something important even as she gets verbally abused, a minor character enjoying the camaraderie and energy of working in a dead end casino job.

At some point in the book one of the characters concludes "work doesn’t make you interesting; interesting work makes you interesting."  One of the strengths of the book is that for all that Wolitzer comes down on the side of work (and I think she does), she also recognizes that most jobs aren’t all that exciting and wonderful.

***

There’s an interesting discussion of finding your passion going on in the comments on Ask Moxie‘s post on this book.

… as a Venn diagram, at indexed.

T. showed me an article last week that pointed out that there’s a reason that geostationary satellites are in what’s called the Clarke orbit. 

I thought about calling this post, "the book that killed my blog."  I read Robert Frank’s Falling Behind a couple of weeks ago, and have been wanting to post about it ever since, but I’m not sure I can do it justice, especially when I’m tired and distracted.  Although it’s a short book (just over 100 pages, paperback), there’s a lot of ideas packed into it.  So let’s see if I can unpack them.

The main idea in the book is that people’s well being is determined by their relative income as well as their absolute income, and by how far behind they are as well as their ordinal ranking.  I think this is a relatively non-controversial statement if you’re talking about people at the very bottom of the income distribution — most people recognize that the poor in the U.S. are still very well off compared to much of the world’s population, but suffer from their low relative income and status.  But it’s a pretty controversial statement to say that the very high wealth of Bill Gates or Wall Street financiers makes everyone else worse off.

So, probably the first third of the book goes to justify that statement.  This leads Frank into some interesting detours — he first has to justify that "happiness" is something meaningful, and that "having more money" is not synonymous with "being better off."  He then spends a good chunk of space arguing that the reason that other people’s wealth makes us worse off is not envy, or conscious attempts to "keep up with the Jones’" but rather the result of  context affecting our perception of what’s adequate and what’s reasonable.

One example he gives is that the existence of $2,000 grills with all sorts of bells and whistles makes it seem more reasonable for him to spend $300 on a new one, even though his old one that cost $40 had done a perfectly adequate job.  I can verify that I could see this happening as we made our choices about our kitchen. 

In the second half of the book, Franks argues that positional concerns cause people to spend more and more of their money on things where ranking rather than absolute levels of consumption matter.  But this makes everyone worse off, because if everyone doubles their spending, the ranking is left unchanged, only people have less money to spend on other things (or less free time).  I thought this made a lot of sense, although I’m still not entirely convinced by his arguments about what is and what is not a positional good.

Frank poses a pair of thought experiments about this, and I’d be interested in reading some responses.  He asks, which would you prefer:

1) World A, where you live in a 4,000 square foot house and everyone else lives in a 6,000 square foot house OR World B, where you live in a 3,000 square foot house and everyone else lives in a 2,000 square foot house.

2)  World C, where you have 4 weeks of vacation and everyone else has 6 weeks, OR World D where you have 3 weeks of vacation and everyone else has 2 weeks.

I think I’ll stop here, and come back to the discussion after I’ve gotten some responses in the comments.

Today’s book is The Missing Class, by Katherine Newman (author of Chutes and Ladders and No Shame in My Game) and Victor Tan Chen.  By "The Missing Class," the authors mean the not-quite-poor, those with family incomes between 100% and 200% of the poverty line.  And in particular, they focus on the experiences of several New York City families who fall in this category.  They explore the things that help them rise up (mostly getting a better paying job, or adding another wage-earner to the family, homeownership in one case) and the things that drag them down (predatory lending, poor health, legal troubles, divorce and separation).

Although Newman and Chen emphasize repeatedly that these families are not "poor," the book in fact covers much of the same ground as David Shipler’s The Working Poor, as many of those families also had income above the official federal poverty level, which pretty much everyone agrees is outdated.   If I had to pick one, I’d probably go with Shipler’s book, which covers a greater geographic and social range.  (200 percent of the poverty level is a lot poorer in NYC than in much of the country, and I’d also like to have learned about people who were slipping into the "missing class" from above, as well as those struggling to stay out of poverty.) One of the new contributions of the book is the discussion of No Child Left Behind,
and how the combination of overworked, time-deprived parents, mediocre
to lousy schools, and high stakes testing comes down hard on the
children of the working poor.

My understanding is that the reason Newman and Chen want to draw the distinction between the "missing class" and "poor" people is that they want to draw attention to how these people often fall into the cracks, earning too much to benefit from means-tested public benefit programs.  I agree that’s an important policy issue.  But I worry that their discussion creates an impression that the benefits for the poor are more generous than they really are.  And it doesn’t acknowledge how much middle income people benefit from government subsidies for employer provided benefits, especially health care, and the mortgage interest deduction.