Half Changed World

Picking up on the comments on the last post.

The problem with Mead’s view of the world is that even if you got all the men who are unemployed and got them to work in the same types of jobs as men of comparable education and work experience and even somehow married them off to the mothers of their children, they’d still overwhelmingly be poor.

Most poor people in the US are in families that include workers.  But the jobs aren’t regular enough, and don’t pay enough to lift people out of poverty.  And even if they make more than the official poverty line, it’s still not enough to make ends meet.  And it only takes one crisis — a sick kid, a car breaking down, a cold winter that makes the utility bill skyrocket — to make the whole damn house of cards fall down.

The folks at Inclusion argue that the problem with talking about poverty is that as soon as you start talking about "poor people" the image that jumps into most people’s mind is of dysfunctional teen parents in inner cities — of Random Family, rather than The Working Poor.   And the comments here show that there’s some truth to that.  But I’m still unconvinced that "social inclusion" is a viable alternative.  I do think that talking about "job quality" is an important piece of the conversation, but it doesn’t provide the framework for talking about other solutions, like expanding the earned income tax credit.

Yesterday, the Center for American Progress released From Poverty to Prosperity: A National Strategy to Cut Poverty in Half.  It offers a 12 point agenda designed to reduce the poverty rate in half in 10 years.

Perhaps what’s most exciting about this report is that there’s nothing terribly exciting in it.  Pretty much all of the recommendations have been made before: raise and index the minimum wage, expand the EITC, make it easier for workers to join unions, provide universal child care subsidies, make college more affordable, encourage savings, rebuild the safety net.  But the point is that it doesn’t take geniuses to figure this out.  The report makes clear that we’re not missing ideas about good things to do, but the political willpower to do them.

Poverty is finally starting to get some attention again.  It’s one of the key elements of John Edwards’ presidential campaign.  Bloomberg is focusing attention on it in New York.  The House Ways and Means Committee had a hearing on it today.  But even Charlie Rangel said that he’s focusing on getting rid of the AMT before he thinks about EITC expansions.  So don’t count on anything happening unless we build public support for it.  So go write your members of Congress and urge them to commit to reducing poverty.

The folks over at Inclusion have been pushing their argument that we should be talking about "Social Inclusion" rather than reducing (or eliminating) poverty.  While I understand their argument, I don’t agree.  First, I think that no one in the US has a clue what "social inclusion" means.  If we’ve got someone willing to give us 2 minutes of attention, I’d rather say "eliminate poverty" and spend the next 110 seconds pitching the main policy proposals than say "promote social inclusion" and spend all my time trying to explain what I mean by that.  Second, and more importantly, I think there’s a real risk of playing into the hands of folks like Larry Mead who think that poor people’s problem isn’t lack of money but that they are "outside the mainstream" and aren’t working a lot.  And finally, when the media is finally paying some attention to this issue, I’d like the coverage to focus on the proposals, and not on liberals’ perennial attraction to circular firing squads.

As I mentioned at the time, T went out the first day that the Wii went on sale and got one.  I meant to write a review, but when they became impossible to buy, I felt sheepish about doing so — it felt too much like gloating. So here’s the long postponed review.

In case you hadn’t heard, what makes the Wii cool is the controller, which is wireless and motion sensitive.  So, to play tennis you swing the controller like a tennis racket, to race a car you turn it like a steering wheel.  It’s incredibly intuitive, even (especially) for a non gamer like me.  And it’s an awful lot of fun.

We have four games — Excite Truck, Super Monkey Banana Blitz, Rayman Raving Rabbids, and Wario Ware — as well as the sports pack that comes with the system.  We played them a LOT for the first couple of months we had the system, less often now.  As with most games, it’s a lot more fun to figure out how to play the game and develop an initial level of competence than it is to keep hammering away trying to get the last 5 points needed for a perfect score. 

So, a couple of months ago I got an email at the address on this blog, from a Nintendo publicist, offering to send me a system to demo.  They’re targeting moms, arguing that this is a gaming system that you don’t have to worry about your kids playing, because it gets them up and jumping around, not just using their thumbs.  And it’s certainly true that D gets an aerobic workout playing, because he often gets so excited that he jumps up and down the whole time he plays, even when it’s not required for the game. And I broke a sweat trying to get through the dance sections on the Rabbids game.  But overall, I think it’s a stretch to suggest that Wii games are all that more physical than your average video game.

Laura at 11d and her commenters (especially Tim Burke) have an interesting conversation going on about the value of video games.  She’s focused on their role as a form of social interaction, which hasn’t been an issue for us yet — whether because of D’s age or the makeup of the neighborhood, I’m not sure.

For now, we’re ok with the TV-based system — it seems to substitute pretty directly for TV time, and that doesn’t seem to be a problem. It hasn’t been an issue yet, but we’re really reluctant to even consider handheld systems, because D would definitely want to play with them all the time.  (Someone gave him a silly handheld electric Yatzee game, and he totally obsessed over it, even though he doesn’t really understand the rules.)  And I’d rather have one argument over getting the system than constant arguments over turning it off.

As a parent, I’m most impressed at how much D was willing to persist
and keep on trying until he got S (super?) scores on Excite Truck.  As discussed before, he
sometimes thinks he’s supposed to be able to do things perfectly from
the start and gets frustrated when he doesn’t.  So that’s a plus.

This whole moving thing has been quite a wild ride.  We’re under contract, and moving in 2 weeks.  And it may take us a while to sort out the internet access at the new house.  (We can get fiber optic service, but I think that means they have to come out and lay the lines to the house.)  So posting is still going to be intermittent for a while.

I’m just heartsick about the murders at Virginia Tech.  There’s not much else to say, I don’t think.  I don’t have any VT connections, but everyone I know who grew up in the area or who has college age kids knows lots of people who went there, or are there now.  Obviously the scale is smaller, but it’s in some ways like 9/11 was for New Yorkers, where even if you weren’t directly affected, everyone knew someone who was.

The boys were sick over the weekend, but seem to be mostly on the mend.  T and I both feel crappy now, of course.  But at least the weather is supposed to be nice by next weekend.

Ok, I’m coming really late to this discussion, but I really liked Penguin Unearthed’s comments on the research about how it’s better to praise effort than results.  I had a reaction similar to Phantom Scribbler’s to the New York Magazine article that kicked off much blog discussion — I’m pretty sure that no one is  going to break their kids by praising them the wrong way.

But the idea rang true that kids who are always praised for their smartness — particularly if they don’t feel smart — might get afraid to do anything that might show that they’re not so smart after all.  Among adults, it’s the same phenomenon sometimes called the Imposter Syndrome.  (This is supposedly far more common among women than men, but I think that’s probably a story for another post.)

I definitely worry about this for D, who already shows serious perfectionist tendencies, and an unwillingness to do things that he can’t do well.  I actually think this is at least in part a matter of innate temperament — we’re talking about a kid who didn’t take his first steps until 15 months, and then was walking without hesitation within days.  So I was very pleased that the imax film we saw today about the Mars rovers emphasized the parachutes shredding upon impact in the tests and the frantic work that the scientists needed to do to make them work before launch.  D adored it, and I was wiping tears from my eyes.

If you want to send a note to Elizabeth Edwards, the campaign has set up a page for people to write to her.  I know she’ll be in my thoughts and prayers. 

My guess is that John would have suspended his campaign (as was inaccurately reported this morning), but that Elizabeth told him no way.  I hope she stays in good health for as long as possible.  That family has certainly had its share of heartbreak. 

Suzanne at Mimilou was kind enough to select me as a "Thinking Blogger."  I gather I’m supposed to tag 5 more.  I think most of the blogs I read are by thinking bloggers, so I’m going to try to pick 5 who I think most of you won’t be reading already.

So my five, in no particular order:

• Flea, at One Good Thing
• Sandy, at the imponderabilia of actual life
• Quev, at Mobtown Blues
• Shannon, at Peter’s Cross Station
• Laura, at Geeky Mom

Because of the house stuff, blogging is likely to be very light for a couple of weeks…

I can’t say that I liked the first book I read by Rachel Cusk, her memoir A Life’s Work.  While I thought her prose was remarkable, I found it incredibly infuriating that as intelligent a woman as Cusk clearly is, would do something as irrevocable as having a child with so little forethought about how it would affect her life.  It’s one thing to hate the tediousness and isolation of parenting a newborn; it’s another thing to be surprised to discover that caring for a newborn can be tedious and isolating.

But her writing was powerful enough to make me pick up her new novel, Arlington Park, when I saw it at the library. The good news — Cusk still writes some extraordinary sentences.  The bad news — Cusk doesn’t feel compelled to have any plot at all.   The book is just about a group of women who live in a suburb of London, and what they do one rainy day — drop children at school, drink coffee, go shopping, take care of children, go out to dinner.  But when I say it like that, it sounds something like Mrs. Dalloway.  So imagine Mrs. Dalloway if the author didn’t have any affection for her subject, and you’ll have something like Arlington Park.

Here’s a paragraph chosen pretty much at random to illustrate what I mean:

"’Gypsies,’ Maisie said.  She shook her head.  ‘What a place to have to live.  Right where people come to pick up their sofas.’

Christine pondered the caravans and tried to work out what Maisie’s remarks signified.  It wasn’t the nicest thing to have a pack of Gypsies staring at you when you came to collect your sofa, she could admit, but it wasn’t the end of the world either."

Ultimately, for a book like this to work, I think you need to enjoy the company of either the author or the characters, and I was left quite cold about both.

Poking around the Census web page today, I ran across this report, issued earlier this year, on A Child’s Day, 2003 (Selected Indicators of Child Well-Being).

It’s full of all sorts of odd and interesting statistic, like 6.7 percent of parents living with a child 12-17 said that they talked to or played with their child for 5 minutes "never" to "once a week."  What really jumped out at me is the ability to see what parental characteristics are associated with different parenting behaviors.  Affluent parents are more likely to report  reading to their preschool aged children than poor parents (although 40 percent of poor parents still said that they read to their kids 7 or more times in the last week).  The association with parental education is even stronger than with income.

I was quite struck by the correlation they found between "television rules" imposed on children (restricting the type of programs, the time of day, or the number of hours watched) and the frequency with which parents read to their kids.   This suggests at least the  possibility that the supposed negative effects of television on young children is a spurious correlation with parenting behaviors.

Consistent with Lareau’s description of concerted cultivation vs. accomplishment of natural growth, more affluent and more educated parents were far more likely to report that their school-age children participated in extra-curricular activities, including sports, clubs, and classes.  (There was no "egghead effect" — children of parents with post-baccalaureate degrees were still more likely to play sports than any other kind of activity.)  And the higher level of education the parents have, the more likely their children are to participate in gifted classes, and the less likely the children are to have been suspended or to repeat a grade.

One of the indulgences of having a blog is that you have a platform for complaining about crappy customer service.  I don’t know if anyone at the company will read it (although lots of companies do have people monitoring the blogosphere for posts about them), but it will make me feel better.

As previously mentioned, T. went out and got a Wii in November.  We agreed that we’d get a few games for it for Hanukkah.   I discovered that Buy.com and Google checkout were running a discount promotion, so I decided to order the games through them.  But it turned out they only had one of them in stock.  So I ordered that one, plus some books to push the order over the required minimum. 

I placed the order in November.  The books came, but on December 19, with Hanukkah almost over, I emailed buy.com to point out that my order hadn’t arrived.  On December 24th, they responded that they needed to file a lost shipment claim, and asked if I wanted a replacement or a refund.  I said replacement.

On January 2, they emailed me to say "Your claim is currently being investigated. We will update you on the status of your claim via email or phone.  Please
allow between 3-5 business days for us to research and to process your
claim with any relevant third parties, such as the shipper."

They then sent another message as follows:

"As your claim was for replacement and you are in immediate need of
the missing item from your order, we suggest that you place a new order
for the item on the Buy.com
website and change your claim to refund. If you would like us to make
the change from replacement to refund, then please email us and we will
gladly do so for you."

The next day, January 3rd, I got the game from a local store and asked them to switch the order to refund.

On January 4th, I got an email stating "Following your request we have updated your lost shipment claim to
reflect a refund instead of a replacement. We assure you that we are
working diligently to resolve this issue."  I also (same day) got an email saying "We have received your order….We’ll send you an email as soon as your order is sent."

I immediately emailed them back saying I already asked for a refund.  Two days later they got around to emailing me and said that I could cancel the order from their website.  I did so. 

Then I got this email from them:

"As you requested, we attempted to cancel your order for the item listed below from order #31827637.  However, this item has already entered the shipping process and could not be cancelled.  We apologize for any inconvenience and offer you three options when your order arrives:

– You may keep the product.

– You may refuse shipment for a full refund, in which case the carrier will return the product to us at our cost.

–
If you are unable to refuse the package, you may return the product for
a refund. In this case you might not be automatically credited for your
shipping costs depending on the condition of the package or when you
requested cancellation, etc."

Two weeks later, when the package finally showed up, I refused it.

They say that they never received the return, and so won’t give me a refund.  Since they never should have shipped it to me in the first place, I figure this is their problem.  They disagree.

So I’m out 50 bucks.  And there’s not much I can do about it.  But I’m never buying from them again.

Update:  On May 7, I received an email from Google checkout that buy.com had directed them to refund my money.  No further communication from buy.com directly.