Half Changed World

I’ve quoted here before from the speech that Dr. King gave on the eve of his assassination.  It’s a stunning speech, made almost unbearable by the clarity of hindsight.  I’ve included pieces of it in my haggadah for Passover at times, and no one ever seems to manage to get through it without their voice breaking.  Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, you can watch some of it online. 

This 40th anniversary of King’s death has a particular resonance, because of the comparison in that final speech between him, and Moses, seeing the promised land, but not making it there himself.  The Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years before they made it.  How long will we wander?

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I was at a meeting last week where we were discussing Obama’s speech about race, and someone said that he thought there were echoes in it of Kennedy’s speech after King’s death.  I hadn’t heard it, so I went and found the video online.  Go watch it.  (Warning — this clip cuts to footage of Kennedy’s assassination.)

A few months ago, I received an offer to get the Economist for airline miles.  Since I an unlikely to use them for anything else, I signed up.  The Economist offers two things that I find interesting:

• A very distinct take on US politics, from a point of view that is quite different from either of the US political parties — very pro-market, but without the social conservativism of the Republicans.
• In depth coverage of world news.

That said, I have to admit that I often find myself skimming past many of the international stories — oh, there are protests in Albania, who knew?– but not really caring a whole lot about the details.

The world news story that I’m following most closely right now is the elections in Zimbabwe.  With no official results 4 days after the elections, it’s hard to believe that Mugabe’s people aren’t cooking the books.  (The opposition is claiming that they’ve won, but the government says that just saying that is an attempted coup.) And today some journalists have been arrested.  I don’t have any particular insight into how it’s going to turn out, but I’m watching with my fingers crossed.

Why do I care about this story?  Like Becca at Not Quite Sure, I’ve been there.  For two days, which doesn’t make me any sort of an expert.  But I know how desperate people were then for our American dollars, and I just can’t wrap my head around what a million-fold inflation since then means.  It’s a heartbreaker of a story, and a reminder that much (most?) hunger
in the world is political, not (just) the result of natural disasters. (And yes, we all had serious misgivings about our tourist dollars going to support Mugabe’s government, but we went anyway.  I don’t know if we did net harm or good.)

But I think I’d care about Zimbabwe even if I hadn’t been there.  I wrote a report about it in 6th grade, shortly after it achieved independence.  I can’t remember many of the details, but I know that I wrote to the embassy asking for information and they sent me a thick envelope with newspapers and other material. At the time, I think I was most intrigued by all the cities whose names were changed.

One concern I have about The Economist as my source for international news is that I don’t know enough to know where their biases and blind spots are.  For example, they had a story about Zimbabwe last month, in which they argued confidently that Simba Makoni is "no joke for the incumbent." But it looks like he’s a distant third, getting less than 10 percent of the vote from the unofficial figures that have come out so far.   Morgan Tsvangirai is the candidate who appears to be leading.

In skimming today’s Washington Post, I saw a short blurb that says that women’s careers are responsible for one-third of corporate relocations, up from 15 percent in 1993.  The study that it’s based on appears to be only available for a hefty fee, so I don’t know how reliable the data are, but if it’s real, that’s a fascinating trend.

In reading Pamela Stone’s book on Opting Out?, I was struck by how often a choice to be the "trailing spouse" in a relocation was the first (unintentional) step down a path that led to women leaving the workforce.  They assumed that their skills were strong enough that they’d have no trouble finding another job, and that was generally true, but often it wasn’t quite as good a job, or they just didn’t have the leverage in the new job to insist on the flexibility they wanted.  Or the relocation put stress on their family, and they wanted to take time to help the kids adjust…

The big question I’d want to know is what the breakdown of relocations by gender is among married couples — my guess is the 32 percent figure includes relocating singles.  If there’s really a big growth in the number of men willing to be a trailing spouse, that’s a bigger indicator of gender equality than the frequently cited stat that 1/3 of wives earn more than their husbands.

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.

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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 left off yesterday with Robert Frank’s hypothetical question of which would you prefer, 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.

He argues that most people would prefer B.  I’m not sure whether that’s true, and to the extent it is true, how much it’s driven by the correlation between housing prices and school quality.  I think I’d choose B, but my reasoning is that in world B, there would probably be nicer parks and other public spaces. 

The NY Times this week had an interesting article on people who were rejoicing in Bear Stearns’ downfall, and more generally in the possibility of a setback to the Wall Street types who have driven up the cost of living in New York.

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.

I return from my blog hiatus with a burning question… pretty much literally.  It’s about spatulas — the kind with the flat blade that you use for turning pancakes and moving the onions you’re sauteeing around, as opposed to the kind you use for scraping bowls or icing cakes.  In packing up our kitchen, I discovered that we have three of these, and on all of them either the handle or the blade has been melted. 

So, I’m thinking that when our new kitchen is done, I might splurge on a new, unmelted spatula.  But I’d like it to stay that way for a while.  And I want it not to destroy nonstick pans.  So, any recommendations?  We do have a couple of silicone spatulas, but they seem to be more in the cake icing and batter scraping families.  Do they make them with the offset handles, and rigid enough to use for pancakes?

Didn’t want anyone to worry — I’m still alive.  Just decided that I needed to prioritize things like getting a reasonable amount of sleep for a while…

Last night on the way home, I heard David Frum on Marketplace.  Frum is a former speechwriter for President Bush, and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, so I pretty much assume that I’m going to disagree with everything that comes out of his mouth.

But this is part of what he said:

"OK, the price [of energy] is high again. This is the perfect moment to pass a
standby energy tax, a tax that would kick in when the price of oil
falls below say $60 a barrel. Consumers could feel secure that if they
make the investment in a hybrid car, or a smaller house with a shorter
commute, they won’t feel like fools in four or five years…"

This makes a great deal of sense to me.  I think we’ve talked about it here before, but it’s pretty hard for most people to significantly reduce their driving in the short run in response to increased gasoline prices.  As a recent CBO study shows, the highest response is in those areas where there is existing mass transit as an alternative.  And if the price gets high enough, people start limiting leisure travel.  And indeed, there’s some evidence that gas consumption is finally starting to drop a bit.  But most people can’t just decide not to drive to work or the grocery store.  However, if people know that gas prices are going to stay high for long periods, they’re more likely to make the sort of big changes that Frum mentions.

So, what am I missing?  Is there a hidden problem with it that I’m not seeing?  Or if it’s really something that a libertarian true believer like Frum and a green progressive like myself can agree upon, why aren’t any politicians talking about it?