Half Changed World

This week's book is Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell.  It's his attempt to look at the environmental and cultural factors that affect why some people succeed and others fail, and to blow apart the idea that individual genius is responsible for success.

It's a quick read (probably took me less than 3 hours front to back) and each section is reasonably entertaining, but it doesn't quite hold together as an overall book or argument.

In particular, the middle section, where he argues that Korean airlines have a terrible safety record because of the cultural pressures for subordinates to defer to their supervisors, seems to have little connection to the rest of the book.  And while it's possible that Gladwell is correct in his claim that the reason that Asian cultures respect hard work is that rice is more work to grow than wheat or corn, he sure doesn't present enough evidence to convince me.

Gladwell is correct that Bill Joy (one of the founders of Sun) and Bill Gates were extraordinarily lucky in having the opportunity to program a lot when very few people had access to computers at all.  And there's no doubt that practice is necessary (if not sufficient) for being good at programming.  On the other hand, the reason that Gates is one of the richest men in the world has very little to do with his coding skills. (He didn't write the code for DOS, after all.)

I thought the discussion of the relationship (or lack thereof) between extreme intelligence* and success** was the best part of the book.  In particular, Gladwell tells the story of an early 20th century researcher who identified 1470 highly gifted California elementary school students, and was shocked to learn that only a small fraction of them were particularly successful later in life.  Moreover, there was a huge correlation between economic class and success (not exactly shocking to me, but still sad).  Gladwell cites Lareau and argues that the upper class kids know how to manipulate systems to their advantage, but I'm not convinced –I'm pretty sure that "concerted cultivation" wasn't around in the 1920s.

In the last part of the book, Gladwell returns to the question of education and class, and argues that the intensive school setting of KIPP lets poor kids spend enough time learning to catch up with their middle class peers.   Among other things, he cites the data that shows that much of the growth in the gap between poor and upper class kids during elementary school is not about what happens during the school year, but that the wealthier kids continue to gain over the summer, while the poor kids stagnate, or even slip backwards. I've heard that before, but had never seen the underlying data before — what struck me the most is that for the upper class kids, they gained about half as much over the 3 month summer vacation as they did over the 9 month school year.  In other words, per month, the upper class kids learned more during vacation than during school. 

*When I initially wrote this post, I omitted the word "extreme" which significantly fails to represent Gladwell's argument.  He cites Arthur Jenson (whom he calls an "IQ fundamentalist") as saying that the four cutoffs that matter for IQ are 50, 75, 105, and 115 — and that for real world applications, the difference between having an IQ of 115 and 150 or between 150 and 180 is less important.

**Jennifer asked what constituted success.  Here's what Gladwell writes "But few of his [Terman's] geniuses were nationally known figures.  They tended to earn good incomes — but not that good.  The majority had careers that could only be considered ordinary, and a suprising number ended up with careers that even Terman considered failures.  Nor were there any Nobel Prize winners in his exhaustively selected group of geniuses.  His fieldworkers actually tested two elementary school students who went on to be Nobel laureates — William Shockley and Luis Alvarez — and rejected them both.  Their IQs weren't high enough… if Terman had simply put together a randomly selected group of children from the same family backgrounds as the Termites — and dispensed with IQ altogether — we would have ended up with a group doing almost as many impressive things as his painstakingly selected group of geniuses."

I noticed this week that I seem to have arrived at a new parenting stage, one where the emotional work of parenting is often harder than the physical.  My boys can dress themselves (most of the time), use the bathroom without assistance (most of the time), get themselves a glass of water.  D can entertain himself for hours between reading and playing with his DS.  N isn't quite so self-maintaining, but on a weekend morning, the boys generally can play together for a good hour before the arguing gets loud enough that we can't pretend not to notice any more.

But the emotional work is challenging.  N gave me huge hugs and kisses before I went away on a 36 hour trip for work, but then ignored me on my return.  D says "sorry" for hurting his brother without thinking or meaning it, but bursts into tears when we press him.  Both of them are constantly complaining about headaches or stomachaches, but it doesn't seem to stop them from running around like lunatics.

I'm fine, just very busy at work.  I went to Connecticut and back for a hearing on Tuesday, and had an audioconference this afternoon.  It's a sign of the state of my life that a 14 hour round trip train trip felt like a nice break. 

I took advantage of the trip to make some progress in the huge pile of unread papers that has been accumulating on my desk.  It made me realize that I've just been radically underestimating how long it's going to take me to read things, and that even if I was 100% efficient at work and didn't ever check personal messages, I still wouldn't have time to get to everything that strikes me as interesting.

I downloaded the Kindle software for my iPod touch.  I picked the Origin of Species as a free book to try.  My initial reaction is that the Kindle software slightly inferior as a reader to eReader, which is also a free download.  eReader allows for landscape orientation, and overall the text is somewhat easier to read.  (They've chosen an off-white background, which is a bit easier on the eyes, but I also just think that the font or something is slightly better.)  Kindle seems to have a better bookmark feature.

Of course, the big advantage that the Kindle has is Amazon.  There are far more books out for the Kindle than in eReader format, and the books that are available on both seem to generally be cheaper in Kindle format, sometimes significantly so.  eReader sells recent books for almost as much as the hardcover costs, and that seems like a losing proposition to me.  (Some of that may be because of what the publishers are demanding — my understanding is that Amazon actually loses money on most bestsellers, because they pay the publishers more than they make.)  Plus, Amazon is just a far superior user interface than the eReader store.  (Barnes and Noble actually just bought Fictionwise, which in turn owns eReader, but they plan to continue to operate the sites separately.)

I still have no plans to buy a Kindle until I can borrow library books to read on one.  But I might see if I can borrow one from a friend the next time I have a long trip coming up.

Today's book (and possibly this year's winner for longest subtitle) is Elsewhere, USA: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety,  by Dalton Conley.

This book looks at such modern phenomena as the blurring of work and leisure, savings and consumption.  To take the growth of "weisure" (Conley loves making up compound words like that) for example, he remarks on the generally recognized growth of people working from home (and the history of the tax deduction for home offices was one of the few bits of the book that surprised me) and shopping at work, but also argues that "networking" forces people to turn their social interactions into an extension of work.

I picked up the book mostly because I was interested in hearing what he had to say about parental anxiety (he twice cites the same study that found that higher income mothers reported more time pressure than low-income mothers, even when they worked the exact same hours).  He argues that women's higher earning potential is the main source of stress, as women who aren't working feel the opportunity cost.  I think that's part of the story, but misses out on the degree to which working mothers also feel a high opportunity cost to their time.

Conley is a "real" sociologist, in the sense that he's a professor at NYU, but this isn't an academic book.  The only original research is what Conley conducted by looking at the dual-income families around him.  And Conley challenges the reader to evaluate the book by looking around him or herself and seeing if it resonates.

By that measure, I think this book would have done a lot better if it had come out a year or two ago.  The argument that granite countertops are a form of investment, not consumption, seems very 2006, as does the claim that no one resents the rich because we all depend on them for our jobs.  Conley's an interesting thinker, although not as profound as he thinks he is, but if there's ever a book that should have been a blog, it's this one.

I can't find the link now, but last week I heard a story on NPR about a PTA that was buying paper for the teachers to use in the classroom, with money they had been saving for new playground equipment.  The reporter was shocked that this was necessary, but I went to public schools in New York City in the 1970s, and I definitely remember the school running out of paper (for the mimeos!) by late in the term.

Laura at 11d linked to this article about a Long Island school district where parents raised over half a million dollars to preserve school sports and other extracurriculars after the school system's budget was turned down.  Laura wonders if this undermines school equity.  I'm less worried about that situation, where the largess seems to have been spread across the whole district, than the situation you sometimes see where parents raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for specific schools, sometimes hiring extra teachers.  They're willing to do it, because it's still cheaper than private school.

Our school PTA's total annual budget is about $25,000, with the largest fundraisers being sale of Sally Foster giftwrap, a silent auction, and a craft fair.  When the economy gets better, I want to look into putting the big items for the auction online and marketing them outside the school community — we get some really nice donations, but there's just not enough people in the school who can afford them for them to go for more than the minimum bid.  But we sweat the small stuff too.  We had an election day bakesale, and we collect General Mills box tops.

What do we pay for?  The two biggest expenses are teacher workshops and training, and buses to let each class go on two field trips a year.  We buy some computer equipment for the school (smart boards) and books for the school library.  We bring in visiting authors, and give all the teachers small stipends to cover some of the things they buy for the classroom, which otherwise come out of their pockets.  It's not a ton of money, but it makes life measurably better for the school.

Oh yeah, and we also pay for cheese sandwiches for kids who don't have lunch money.  Unlike in some places, this hasn't been a big deal.  My guess is that it's because slightly more than half of the school qualifies for free or reduced price lunch, so the kids who wind up getting cheese sandwiches aren't particularly poor.  They're either kids whose families are having sudden hard times and haven't gotten the paperwork in, or they're kids who just forgot to bring in lunch money.  We do send a note to the parents, asking them to reimburse the PTA and giving them info on how to apply for school lunches. 

(By contrast, with hindsight, I'm horrified at the memory of the oh-so-progressive elementary school I attended, where only the kids who ate "hot lunch" sat in the cafeteria, and everyone else ate in the auditorium.  The hot lunch was notoriously awful, and I'm sure that everyone who ate it was getting the free lunch.  Sigh.)

What does your PTA pay for?  And do you think it's appropriate?

I keep saying that I know that Obama's going to disappoint me at some point and then he keeps exceeding my expectations.  As I read his budget document this morning, I kept on finding more and more things that blew me away.  Here's some of them:

• As Robert Reich said, this budget would substantially increase the progressivity of the federal income tax.  The very rich have gotten the lion's share of the gains in the US economy over the past few decades, while the tax system has gotten less progressive.  This would be a big step towards that.
• I nearly shouted out loud when I read the section on carbon permits, and saw the phrase "100 percent auction."  This means that, unlike the Senate bill from last year, none of the permits would be given away to  industry.  This is key because giving away permits rewards polluters, and dramatically decreases the funds that are available to provide targeted assistance to low-income consumers and displaced workers.  And Obama's proposal to use some of the money to extend the Making Work Pay tax cut is essentially a version of Cap and Dividend.
• I was also stunned at Obama's willingness to pick fights on things that aren't going to get headlines or win him any votes.  For example, he says that he will fully fund the Community Development Block Grant, but will seek to distribute the funds through a "more effective formula."  CDBG is one of the few federal programs that provides flexible funds to cities and other local governments, and the current formula is pretty poorly targeted — it provides a little bit of money to almost every local government, regardless of need.  I assume it's obvious why it's politically hard to change that.  It would have been easy for Obama to decide to let this one slide, given the major pieces of legislation he's trying to get through.  But he didn't.

I've written here a few times before about Prosper, the social lending site.  Last year at tax time I noted that you could see the recession starting to show up in the statement, with two loans sold as delinquent, and more and more loans running behind in payment.  Well, this year I've got a bunch more delinquent loans. 

What's annoying though is that Prosper is reporting them as "charge-offs" meaning that they don't think they'll ever be repaid, but they're still trying to collect them.  This makes it questionable to claim them as losses on my taxes, even though the one loan where they subsequently made some collections was reported as income.*  By contrast, if they sold the loans for less than face value, it could have been a standard capital loss.  My understanding is that they tried to sell them, but couldn't find anyone who would buy them.  Sound familiar?

What makes this a less than complete miniature version of the banking crisis is that Prosper didn't sell tranches on its loans — when you bought a share of a loan, it was just a straight fractional share, with everyone getting a corresponding share of the monthly payments. 

When Prosper suddenly stopped taking new money in the fall, they claimed it was because they were entering a SEC quiet period.  My understanding is that this wasn't exactly voluntary — the SEC said that they weren't just a middleman, but were creating securities without any oversight.  Frankly, I'd be shocked if they ever reopen for business.

*I've googled, and it's clear that some people are planning on claiming the charge-offs as losses.  But the IRS looks very closely at losses that aren't matched with a 1099-B, and the $30 I would save on my taxes is not worth the increased risk of being audited.  Even if I wasn't a DC policy wonk.

This week's This American Life is called Plan B and it starts with Ira Glass talking about how almost all of us are living in our Plan B, what we did when what we originally meant to do didn't work.

I'm not sure, but I think I'm more or less living in my Plan A.  I mean, if you had asked me in high school or college what I wanted to be, I might have said an astronaut, or a writer, or a lawyer, but I never made more than a half-assed attempt at any of them.* I got as far as writing away for law school catalogs, but as soon as I read in them about the existence of JD/MPP programs, and thus the existence of such a thing as public policy school, it was clear that was a much better fit.  And I'm married to someone I met when I was 18.

I'm very aware of how lucky I've been, and I'm grateful.  But I also think I might need a new goal, a new Ithaka to look for.  I think maybe I'll pull my copy of Barbara Sher's wonderful book Wishcraft: How to Get What You Really Want  (now in its 30th year in print) from the shelves and see what inspires me. 

*I went to space Camp, worked on the less serious of the two college papers for a couple of semesters, and took the LSATs.

I get a variety of pitches for stories in my inbox, most of which I can delete just from the subject.  One that did catch my eye enough to open the message was headed "everyone wants to life like Friends and Seinfeld, not the Sopranos."  The trick was that it was a pitch for the merits of the urban life of Friends and Seinfeld, versus the suburban life of the Sopranos.  I clicked through, glanced at the article, and then moved on.

Then, yesterday, I read David Brooks' column in the NY Times, where he claims that most Americans prefer the suburbs.  So, which is true?

I went back to the blog post at the Infrastructurist and found that Leinberger's argument was actually far more complicated than the trick headline.  What he actually said is "Gen Xers and Millennials want a lifestyle closer to Friends and Seinfeld (that
is, walkable and urban) than to Tony Soprano (low density and
suburban)."  Brooks agrees that "Cities remain attractive to the young. Forty-five percent of Americans
between the ages of 18 and 34 would like to live in New York City."  But Leinberger implies that the preference for urban living is a permanent characteristic of this cohort, while Brooks suggests it's something they will age out of: "cities are profoundly unattractive to people with families and to the elderly."  Neither one provides evidence for their hypothesis.

Leinberger goes on to say "It’s not that nobody wants Tony Soprano. About 50 percent of
Americans actually do want that configuration. But if we’ve
built 80 percent of our housing that way, that’s the definition of
oversupply. The other 50 percent of Americans want walkable urban
arrangements and yet that’s just 20 percent of the housing stock."

I'm not sure where those numbers come from.  The Pew study that Brooks' article cites (although the Times still doesn't include links) says that "Americans are all over the map in their views about their ideal
community type: 30% say they would most like to live in a small town,
25% in a suburb, 23% in a city and 21% in a rural area."  If the small town and city figures are combined as part of a "walkable lifestyle" you get about 50 percent, but that's sort of a stretch.

There's also an issue about whether people are talking about cities as they are, or cities as they might be.  If I could live in the world of Friends where people who aren't investment bankers can afford huge Manhattan apartments, sure, I'd be interested.  In the real world, I'm unlikely to move back to NYC unless I win the lottery.  Do people with kids say that they don't want to live in cities because they think yards are essential to childhood, or because they assume the schools will be bad?