August 31, 2013

Terroir

Steven Erlanger writes in the NYT:
The importance of terroir to the French psyche and self-image is difficult to overestimate, because it is a concept almost untranslatable, combining soil, weather, region and notions of authenticity, of genuineness and particularity — of roots, and home — in contrast to globalized products designed to taste the same everywhere. ... 
The notion of terroir is essentially political, at heart a conservative, even right-wing idea, even though it has been picked up by a new generation that would consider itself on the left, opposing globalization and pesticides. ...
Jean-Claude Ribaut, a food critic for Le Monde, called terroir “a sort of lost paradise.” But it also stands for a reaction to modernity, he said: “One could say it’s a vision a bit backward-looking, but it’s also, I think, a battle of today, to try to safeguard what gives us pleasure and health.” 
The preservation of terroir is finally a kind of unwritten conspiracy between the farmers and the wealthy, as well as the bourgeois bohemians of the big cities, who will pay more for quality, for freshness, for artisanal craft and for that undefinable authenticity that is the essence of terroir

I'm all in favor of localist eating in theory, but, lacking perceptive taste buds, I have to admit that I'm perfectly happy eating whatever Costco is selling.

In defense of Allison Benedikt

A couple of days ago I suggested that Allison Benedikt's much-denounced manifesto "If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person" was tendentious but understandable. In many gentrifying neighborhoods, the public schools would become a lot better if, say, the lower half of private school families in wealth all switched to public schools, which would benefit the upper layer of current public school families by providing their children with better classmates. And would it be so bad for the more hard-up private school families (who could use the free tuition)? The more who make the jump with them, the better.

But, organizing collective action is always a struggle.

Here's a previous article by Benedikt that lays out her family and financial situations.
Is Waiting to Have Kids a Big Mistake? 
With a third kid on the way and a 1,100 square foot, one-bathroom Brooklyn apartment, my husband and I talk a lot about when we’ll be able to afford a home to comfortably fit our family. I’m 35, he’s almost 40, and neither of us thinks we can even begin to contemplate shelling out for a mortgage or higher rent for another five years. In the fall of 2018, all of our kids will finally be in public school, and we will have the $5,000 we pay in child care every month back in our bank account. I will be 41, my husband will be 46, and perhaps then we can start to consider a second toilet. 
Not all of that $5K will go toward a family home—to pay for preschool, we stopped contributing to our 401K years ago. So 2018 will also be the year we start paying into it again—not that we will ever be able to retire—and, hey, let’s put some away for college, shall we? 
Let me just stop you mid-eye-roll to confirm that yes: We are, by the standards of most Americans, rich. My husband and I both have steady jobs, make good salaries, and are lucky enough to be able to live in one of the most expensive cities in the world simply because we want to. As Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan wrote earlier this year, we can’t cry poor just because we don’t have a lot of money left after we’ve spent it all.

Here is the couple's New York Times wedding announcement from 2003. I would guess they just barely made the cut for making the NYT.

Having multiple children is a lot more affordable if you can find public schools with tolerable demographics, so it's perfectly understandable to try to induce other desirable demographics into public schools.

But, why the white v. white shaming language instead of the language of mutual self-interest?

It's not uncommon in Southern California to see Chinese get together and pick out a small school district to take over and remake to meet their needs. Arcadia, east of Pasadena, where my cousins went to school, is an example: a nice but nondescript suburb where the high school is now 69% Asian. Asians hate paying for private schools when they could instead take over a public school by concentrating their forces to avoid being diluted. I've never read the inside story on how the Chinese coordinate this process -- why Arcadia rather than all the similar suburbs? -- but a fly on the wall would probably hear some frank statements about whites, blacks, and Mexicans.

In contrast, white people are more likely to run than to work together the way the Chinese do. To get white people to work together, they need some kind of ideological cover story, like ... uh ... diversity! We should all agree to stop paying private school tuition and send our kids to public school in the name of diversity! (If we all say that, then we can make the honors classes at the neighborhood public school less diverse.)

Moreover, while Asian people can work together to take over Arcadia out of conscious racial self-interest, white people can only be publicly motivated to work together out of stated animus toward other white people. For example, disarming urban blacks and Latinos can be justified only as a byproduct of the War of Liberal Self-Defense Against Armed Racist Rednecks, and so forth.

Similarly, the upper level of whites with children in public schools very much want whites with children in private schools to join forces with them, but ... blunt Chinese-like statements like "We need to team up to keep our kids from being overwhelmed by all the Mexicans" are nonstarters.

Thus, among whites, everybody denounces everybody else all the time.

August 30, 2013

The (poison) fog of war

Greg Cochran points out a chapter in WWII history that I'd never heard of before today: the 1943 Luftwaffe raid on Allied shipping in the Italian port of Bari, which released U.S. poison gas secretly stored on an American supply ship, USS John Harvey. Lots of nasty (and one nice) medical consequences ensued.

Israeli Jewish total fertility rates

Fertility rates in Israel are interesting not just for their relevance to Middle Eastern affairs, but for their relevance to America. Not surprisingly, the Israelis pay close attention to such matters, but Americans traditionally don't pay attention to Israeli population policy debates for the insights they can offer into American population policy. So, it takes some looking for Americans to find Israeli data.

Thanks to commenter Douglas Knight, here's a graph from Israel: Demography 2012-2030: On the Way to a Religious State by Bystrov and Soffer. This shows total fertility rates (expected babies per lifetime) from 1980 to 2008 for different classes of Jewish Israeli women. The top line is Ultra-Orthodox, who were down to 6.6 from a high of around 7.7. 

At the bottom are Secular at around 2.05, which is the replacement rate. That's a pretty high TFR for secular women in a crowded, advanced country. (Israel's not that different in terms of climate, terrain, population density, and real estate prices from Southern California.) How does Israel achieve replacement level fertility among its least likely category?

August 29, 2013

"If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person"

In Slate, Alison Benedikt writes:
If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person
I went K–12 to a terrible public school. My high school didn’t offer AP classes, and in four years, I only had to read one book. There wasn’t even soccer. This is not a humblebrag! I left home woefully unprepared for college, and without that preparation, I left college without having learned much there either. You know all those important novels that everyone’s read? I haven’t. I know nothing about poetry, very little about art, and please don’t quiz me on the dates of the Civil War. I’m not proud of my ignorance. But guess what the horrible result is? I’m doing fine. I’m not saying it’s a good thing that I got a lame education. I’m saying that I survived it, and so will your child, who must endure having no AP calculus so that in 25 years there will be AP calculus for all. 
By the way: My parents didn’t send me to this shoddy school because they believed in public ed. They sent me there because that’s where we lived, and they weren’t too worried about it. (Can you imagine?) Take two things from this on your quest to become a better person: 1) Your child will probably do just fine without “the best,” so don’t freak out too much, but 2) do freak out a little more than my parents did—enough to get involved. 
Also remember that there’s more to education than what’s taught. As rotten as my school’s English, history, science, social studies, math, art, music, and language programs were, going to school with poor kids and rich kids, black kids and brown kids, smart kids and not-so-smart ones, kids with superconservative Christian parents and other upper-middle-class Jews like me was its own education and life preparation. Reading Walt Whitman in ninth grade changed the way you see the world? Well, getting drunk before basketball games with kids who lived at the trailer park near my house did the same for me. In fact it’s part of the reason I feel so strongly about public schools.

While in 2013 this just sounds like Slate clickbait, this ideology was, I recall, the common view among middle and upper-middle Jewish parents in the San Fernando Valley in 1968. And this wasn't hypocrisy. As a parochial school student, my Jewish friends made clear that their parents considered Catholics attending Catholic school to be slightly un-American.

And guess what? Public school worked fine for them. The public schools in the Valley then were full of smart Jewish kids. 

I was talking to my dentist about his upbringing. He's nice Jewish guy the same age as me from Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley, and I realized that his parents never paid a dime of tuition for his education: Millikan Junior High, Grant H.S., Valley J.C., Cal State Northridge, and UCLA Dental School.

This pro-public school ideology worked well until busing from South-Central to the Valley was imposed in the late 1970s. The political resistance to busing in the Valley was led by Jewish moms like Bobbie Fiedler and Roberta Weintraub, and Jewish dads like Alan Robbins. They eventually had some success, but the tradition that Jews send their children to public schools was broken, and then the Hispanic influx overwhelmed LAUSD.

Nowadays in contrast, Jewish parents in Sherman Oaks almost always send their kids to private schools (there are vastly more private Jewish schools in the Valley today than when I was a kid) at least from sixth grade onward, move to the Las Virgenes school district, or figure out a way to get their children into magnet programs.

But, does it have to be this way? What if all upper middle class parents sweet-talked or badgered each other into sending their children to public school?

It's starting to happen in Lower Manhattan. Brooklyn is following.

The nirvana of gentrification is Good Public Schools.

Benedikt repeats the usual talking points about how public schools will be great if parents just demanded More Resources. Of course, the most valuable resource is Good Students. And, indeed, parents can play a big role in that. For example, when my wife finally figured out how to get our son into Millikan Middle School's fine elite programs, she talked the parents of my son's two best friends into transferring with him from the Lutheran school they were attending. (One of the pair is now at the U. of Chicago.)

U.K. still has constitutional government

From the NYT:
Prime Minister David Cameron said that Britain would not participate militarily in any strike against Syria after he lost a parliamentary vote on Thursday on an anodyne motion urging an international response by 13 votes.
It was a stunning defeat for a government that had seemed days away from joining the United States and France in a short, punitive cruise-missile attack on the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad for allegedly using chemical weapons against civilians. 
Thursday evening’s vote was nonbinding, but in a short statement to Parliament afterward, Mr. Cameron said that he respected the will of Parliament and that it was clear to him that the British people did not want to see military action over Syria. “I get it,” he said. 
The government motion was defeated by 285 votes to 272.

In contrast, the United States Congress hasn't bothered to exercise its Constitutional responsibility to declare war on anybody that the U.S. has gone to war with since WWII. It's just so much more pleasant for members of Congress to delegate the decision to go to war to the Executive Branch, while they go around passing laws (e.g., criminal sentence lengths) usurping state powers.

(Some of the sub-Declaration of War debates in Congress, notably the close, hard-fought one before the 1991 Gulf War, were pretty good. But, still ...)

Baseball eyesight question

In my review of David Epstein's The Sports Gene, I relay his surmise that major league hitters are distinguished less by quick reaction times than by phenomenal eyesight, 20/10 uncorrected being not uncommon among big leaguers. (Here's a list of bespectacled ballplayers: Chick Hafey, Reggie Jackson, and Dick Allen are the only top hitters. No mention of hitters with contact lenses or Lasik surgery available.)

To the extent that this is true, what's the maximum number of books you can read as a boy and still grow up to hit big league pitching? And does this have anything to do with the difficulties sportswriters have getting interesting quotes from sluggers?

August 28, 2013

NYT: Israel wants fertility quality, not just quantity

As with nature and nurture, it's useful to think about both quantity and quality. Apparently, that's more normal to do in Israel than in America. From the New York Times:
Children of Israel 
By SHMUEL ROSNER 
TEL AVIV — Israel likes children and it wants more of them. It has high fertility rates — the highest, in fact, of all the states in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development: almost 3 children per household, compared with an O.E.C.D. average of just over 1.7. It invests a lot of money in making fertility clinics and treatments accessible to its citizens. 
The main reason for this support is obvious: The Jewish people are small in number, and Israel is a small country surrounded by many enemies. 
And yet, under a cut implemented last week, my household will now receive just under $140 a month in state subsidies for my four children, down from $250 a month. 
Why? Because Israel’s concerns about demographics aren’t just about quantity. 
Almost all Jewish Israelis want the country to remain a Jewish homeland, and so it must maintain a Jewish majority. They also want it to be a democracy, both liberal and economically strong. 
And those goals may be threatened by the two Israeli sub-groups who have the most children — ultra-Orthodox Jews, known as Haredis, and Arabs. The birthrate for Jewish women in Israel is almost 3, whereas it is 3.5 for Arabs and 6.5 for Haredis.

It's hard to get TFR estimates for Jewish Israeli women who aren't Ultras. My guess is that they are fairly high by OECD standards, but it would be nice to have a link. Anybody?
Israel’s Bureau of Statistics says that by 2019 a majority of school children will be either ultra-Orthodox or Arab. And these are just the groups whose participation in the work force is low and among whom the poverty rate is high. 

What's the defection rate from the Ultras? I recall an article on a Brooklyn neighborhood, where somebody pointed out that if an ultra-Orthodox young man gets up one morning and trims his facial hair in a more ironic manner, well, he's now a hipster. And this happens not all that infrequently.
High fertility among these groups appears to have created an economic problem that is only exacerbated by state subsidies. Dan Meridor, a former finance minister known for his liberal views, formulated the problem this way back in 2010: “There are whole social classes in the population, especially where not everyone works, with many children born with the state’s encouragement.” ...
When the cuts became effective last week, Finance Minister Yair Lapid said: “It has been proven repeatedly that child allowances do not get people out of poverty. They perpetuate poverty.” If Arabs and Haredis received fewer subsidies, the thinking goes, they might enter the work force or have fewer children (or both), and so they might be less poor. 
This is a reasonable line of thinking. Births among Arabs and Haredis remain high, but they have declined in recent years, possibly because of a previous round of cuts in subsidies. And more Haredis seem to be joining the work force because of growing social and economic pressure.

My hunch is the Israeli government generally views the Ultras as a demographic reserve: it subsidizes healthy men to sit around studying the Torah and procreating to boost the overall Jewish birth rate. But when the government decides they have enough Jews and thus turns off the welfare spigot, how fast can these guys go from tax consumers to tax contributors? (My guess is that the Israeli military has studied this kind of question in detail, but I don't know what answers they came up with.)
There are also political and cultural reasons behind the government’s move. Muslim Arabs and Haredis aren’t dreaming the Zionist dream of a secular Jewish homeland in the land of Israel. And for the Israelis who are, be they secular or Zionist-religious, Arabs make Israel feel less Jewish while Haredis make it feel too Jewish. 
In other words, Israel’s love of children is conditional: It wants more only so long as having more advances its goals. Last week’s cuts in subsidies show that those allowances were always less a measure of social justice (supporting those in need) than a means of social planning (supporting desired demographic trends). 
Deploying subsidies as incentives isn’t inherently bad, of course. And the need for both Haredis and Arabs to join the work force and better integrate into Israeli society is real, even urgent. But there’s something depressing about making them do that this way. 
I can live without that $110 or so I’m losing, but I realize the cuts will really hurt some of the Haredis and Arabs they target. Yet do I worry about that? Well, that’s how the incentive is supposed to work. And however much this disturbs me, I must admit that, like many other Jewish Israelis, I have come to feel alienated from and impatient with Haredis and Arabs. As a result I see less the needs of their children than the burdens they’ve placed on Israel.

There is much that Americans can learn from Israelis.

"Blitzkrieg Bop" and the 10,000 Hour Rule

Malcolm Gladwell writes in The New Yorker in defense of his 10,000 Hour Rule of practice:
... the psychologist John Hayes looked at seventy-six famous classical composers and found that, in almost every case, those composers did not create their greatest work until they had been composing for at least ten years. (The sole exceptions: Shostakovich and Paganini, who took nine years, and Erik Satie, who took eight.)

Writing great classical music is extremely hard.

Indeed, counting up years or hours of work needed for historical influence might be a reasonable way to rank art forms against each other: average years required to achieve a place in the history books. (Charles Murray's 2003 book Human Accomplishment shows that encyclopedias can be used to come up with reasonable lists of influential artists and works of art for purposes of quantitative analysis.)

One methodological tweak would be to not focus on time to an artist's greatest work but look instead for his first work to achieve some consensus level of greatness. This somewhat reduces the amount of subjective judgment required. For example, what was Beethoven's greatest work -- the 3rd Symphony? 5th? 6th? 7th? 9th? Or the late quartets? A fun question to debate, but clearly the 3rd (The Eroica), whether or not it's Beethoven's greatest, makes any kind of grade for greatness.

Moreover, years of effort required to achieve the immense breakthrough of the 3rd Symphony (which premiered when Beethoven was 34) is a more relevant statistic. If Beethoven had died right after the 3rd, that shouldn't change the answer to how long it took him to achieve a 3rd Symphony-level of greatness in classical composition.

Perhaps the greatest child prodigy composer was not Mozart but Mendelssohn, who wrote enduring works at 16 and 17 (Overture to A Midsummer's Night Dream). He had enjoyed the finest cultural education imaginable. That Mendelssohn lived long enough to top that is impressive, but not really relevant to thinking about the applicability of the 10,000 hour rule.

At the opposite end from composing classical music in terms of hours required might be composing punk rock. Consider the Ramones, who remain ridiculously influential all these decades later:
The Ramones were an American rock band that formed in the New York City neighborhood of Forest Hills, Queens, in 1974. They are often cited as the first punk rock group.[1][2] Despite achieving only limited commercial success, the band was a major influence on the punk rock movement in both the United States and, perhaps to a greater extent, in the United Kingdom. ...
Their only record with enough U.S. sales to be certified gold was the compilation album Ramones Mania.[7] However, recognition of the band's importance built over the years, and they are now mentioned in many assessments of all-time great rock music, such as the Rolling Stone list of the 50 Greatest Artists of All Time[8] and VH1's 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock.[9] In 2002, the Ramones were ranked the second-greatest band of all time by Spin magazine, trailing only The Beatles.[10] On March 18, 2002, the Ramones—including the three founders and drummers Tommy and Marky Ramone—were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[2][11] In 2011, the group was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.[12][13]

Drummer Tommy Ramone had been in bands before, so maybe he got his 10,000 hours there? Or did it just not take all that much effort to change the course of popular music history?

Guitarist Johnny Ramone came up with a sort of ideological explanation for the Ramones' linear, utterly unfunky style: the blues had dominated electric guitar music for so long that it was getting boring, so it was time for white people to come up with their own form of rock stripped of black influence.

Strikingly, Johnny's ideology of stylistic racial separatism proved hugely influential and remains relatively dominant even today. It fit in well with black grievances over whites "stealing" their stylistic innovations.

It was a pretty good idea in the 1970s, but here we are in 2013 and people are still wearing Ramones t-shirts.

While pop (made for girls and gays) continues to be a mixture of black and white elements, serious (i.e., masculine) popular music tends to follow the white rock v. black rap divide that had become evident by the end of the 1970s. This enduring racial division probably accounts in sizable part for the slowing of American popular music innovation over the last few decades in contrast to the astonishing creativity unleashed by black-white interaction in the first three quarters of the 20th Century.

The Ramones' most historically influential song, the one you hear in all the TV commercials in recent years, was their first single:
"Blitzkrieg Bop" is a song by the American punk rock band Ramones. It was released as the band's debut single in April 1976 in the United States. It appeared as the opening track on the band's debut album, Ramones, also released that month.  
The song, whose composition was credited to the band as a whole, was written by drummer Tommy Ramone (music and lyrics) and bassist Dee Dee Ramone (lyrics).[2] Based on a simple three-chord pattern, "Blitzkrieg Bop" opens with the chant "Hey! Ho! Let's go!" ...  
"Blitzkrieg Bop" is number 92 on the Rolling Stone list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. In March 2005, Q magazine placed it at number 31 in its list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Tracks, and in 2008 Rolling Stone placed it number 18 on top 100 of Best Guitar Songs of All Time. In 2009 it was named the 25th greatest hard rock song of all time by VH1.[3]

Now, the interesting thing about the dominance of Blitzkrieg Bop today is that it doesn't stem from memories of a 1976 fad for the song. Practically nobody heard it in 1976. It slowly emerged later from a bunch of Ramones songs that are all quite similar.

A related but different question is the source of audiences' long-term bias toward the early stuff, such as Blitzkrieg Bop.

From Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing (1982):
Debbie: [...] How’s old Elvis? 
Henry: He’s dead. 
Debbie: I did know that. I mean how’s he holding up apart from that? 
Henry: I never went for him much. ‘All Shook Up’ was the last good one. However, I suppose that’s the fate of all us artists. 
Debbie: Death?
Henry: People saying they preferred the early stuff.

The Ramones, for instance, were not a flash-in-the-pan that burned brilliantly and vanished. I saw them in, roughly 1979, 1980, and 1994 and they were the same old Ramones each time. All those thousands of hours didn't seem to make them better, but there was also something a little endearing about how they didn't get worse.

I probably would argue that the Ramones' greatest song is Teenage Lobotomy from their third album. That appeared to be the opinion as well of Dee Dee Ramone, who named his memoir, Lobotomy, after his composition. (Dee Dee didn't offer too much insight into how he came up with so many of the Ramones songs: it was just kind of a knack, he explained.)

But, Blitzkrieg Bop might be the Ramonesiest Ramones song ever, so history has been kindest their first song, even though practically nobody heard Blitzkrieg Bop when it first came out.

I think this is an important point that's easy to overlook: much of historical influence comes from the impact of the artist's unique personality, once he's achieved some level of competence to allow his novel approach to be appreciated.

Similarly, Stoppard fans increasingly tend to view Arcadia from 1993 as his masterpiece, but his first play to be staged, 1966's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, remains his most famous. That's not unreasonably, because it's awfully Stoppardish. If you keep hearing about this Stoppard fellow and want to find out what his plays are like, Rosencrantz is a good place to start. It's classic Early Stuff: somebody comes a long with a new angle on things and this is the first time he gets it together well enough for the public to notice. After that, he has to react against what he's already done.

It's worth noting that "the early stuff" isn't necessarily the first stuff.  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead wasn't the first Stoppard piece to be mounted. I'm reading a book of early Stoppard work that includes some of his TV plays broadcast shortly before Rosencrantz. Pleasant, but their obscurity is not undeserved. By the way, by the time Rosencrantz debuted when Stoppard was 29, he'd been a full-time professional writer (e.g., reporter, theater critic, etc.) for a decade since leaving school.

It really does take a long time to get good in the higher fields.

Man doing his job

Evan Longoria, All-Star third-baseman for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, is being interviewed in foul territory in short right field, when ...

August 27, 2013

David Epstein's "The Sports Gene" reviewed

From my book review in Taki's Magazine:
Structured around the dismantling of the profitable notion pushed by self-help seers such as Malcolm Gladwell that 10,000 hours of monomaniacal practice is the secret of success, David Epstein’s The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance is one of the best books on human biodiversity in recent years.  
Beyond undermining Gladwellian blank-slatism, Epstein extols the sheer pleasure of noticing humanity’s variety for its own sake. On his book’s penultimate page, he writes:  
…sports will continue to provide a splendid stage for the fantastic menagerie that’s human biological diversity. Amid the pageantry of the Opening Ceremony of the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, make sure to look for the extremes of the human physique.…It is breathtaking to think that, in the truest genetic sense, we are all a large family, and that the paths of our ancestors have left us wonderfully distinct. 
Epstein, a Sports Illustrated reporter, builds upon the work of journalists such as Jon Entine (Taboo) and me in taking an evenhanded look at the roles of both nature and nurture.

Read the whole thing there.

The testing industry's Golden Age

When you are thinking about a career or a part-time job, don't overlook the testing industry. You might think that nothing much is going on in the cognitive testing racket since the implementation of item response theory awhile back as computing power became adequate, but you'd be mistaken. There are lots of new revenue opportunities in testing (and in it's evil/nice twin, tutoring). From the WSJ:
Are You Ready for the Post-College SAT? 
Employers Say They Don't Trust Grade-Point Averages 
By DOUGLAS BELKIN  
Next spring, seniors at about 200 U.S. colleges will take a new test that could prove more important to their future than final exams: an SAT-like assessment that aims to cut through grade-point averages and judge students' real value to employers. 
The test, called the Collegiate Learning Assessment, "provides an objective, benchmarked report card for critical thinking skills," said David Pate, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at St. John Fisher College, a small liberal-arts school near Rochester, N.Y. "The students will be able to use it to go out and market themselves." 
The test is part of a movement to find new ways to assess the skills of graduates. Employers say grades can be misleading and that they have grown skeptical of college credentials. 
"For too long, colleges and universities have said to the American public, to students and their parents, 'Trust us, we're professional. If we say that you're learning and we give you a diploma it means you're prepared,' " said Michael Poliakoff, vice president of policy for the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. "But that's not true." 
The new voluntary test, which the nonprofit behind it calls CLA +, represents the latest threat to the fraying monopoly that traditional four-year colleges have enjoyed in defining what it means to be well educated.

Here's a sample question: You look at some graphs on cell phone usage while driving, then write a several hundred word essay on whether it would be a good idea to pass a law banning phoning while driving.

Reasoning from quantitative data doesn't sound like a bad thing to test at all -- I do it all day long -- but I suspect it will just widen The Gap, with Moneyball fans benefiting the most. We all have these stereotypes about the reason that Hispanic girls don't do as well on tests overall as upper middle class white males is because tests don't test critical thinking skills and synthesizing inferences from data and so forth. But if you look around an airport book store, the frequent fliers, the people whose employers find it profitable to send around the country to deal with problems, seem to be mostly white and Asian guys who like Moneyball, Freakonomics, Nate Silver, Malcolm Gladwell and the like. So, making tests more like reading a Bill James essay is probably not going to close the gap, but you are a racist if you predict that, so, sure, go ahead.

After awhile, it will be noted that this latest panacea test hasn't closed The Gap, so new tests will be demanded.

Regarding job opportunities: My first thought is that they are going to have to hire a whole bunch of people to read these essays and grade them. It's boring work, but you get to do it indoors while sitting down. My second thought is that there would be a market if anybody could come up with a way to computerize grading. My third thought is that if this takes off, there will be a huge market for tutoring. And think how much more effective your tutoring will be if you could, say, know what the questions will be ahead of time.

Much the same thinking applies to the huge opportunities opened up by all the new tests demanded by the Common Core.

And then after awhile, there will be new buzzwords and then new tests. Rinse and repeat, forever.

Forrest Gump goes to Berkeley

Thanks to all my readers who called attention to a long Los Angeles Times article by Kurt Streeter:
South L.A. student finds a different world at Cal 
Kashawn Campbell grew up in one of the toughest neighborhoods in South Los Angeles. Yet he became a straight-A student at Jefferson High School. But at UC Berkeley, he found challenges far greater than he anticipated. 

Education Realist offers a close reading of the article and comes up, in so many words, with the most plausible interpretation: Kashawn is Forrest Gump, a sweet kid who may have suffered brain damage during a difficult birth, but whom everybody around him has conspired to make things easier for him ever since because he's so nice. For example, his 91% Hispanic school, Roosevelt High in South-Central, voted him Prom King. ER writes:
You know when a slight, geeky, weird guy with awkward social skills is voted most likely to succeed and prom king? When it’s an act of charity, an act that makes a group of tough kids feel good about themselves—that is, when the kid in question is “special”. 

It's a heartwarming story. Of course, Forrest Gump was only a movie, and unless somebody gives Kashawn a bundle of Apple stock (Laurene Powell Jobs, I'm looking at you), it's not likely to turn out as well. Berkeley, for example, is not a nice college for nice but slow students. 

California actually has a pretty good system, set up around the Sputnik Era, for how high school grads can go to community college, then, if they flourish, transfer to UC schools. But, that long slow path isn't as heartwarming for those around him looking for the quick self-congratulatory fix of getting poor Kashawn into Berkeley.

This whole Syria thing will work out, right?

August 26, 2013

The world's most boring insight, again

A couple of philosophers of science complain in the New York Times:
The trouble with economics is that it lacks the most important of science’s characteristics — a record of improvement in predictive range and accuracy.

This is what makes economics a subject of special interest among philosophers of science. None of our models of science really fit economics at all. 
The irony is that for a long time economists announced a semiofficial allegiance to Karl Popper’s demand for falsifiability as the litmus test for science, and adopted Milton Friedman’s thesis that the only thing that mattered in science was predictive power. Mr. Friedman was reacting to a criticism made by Marxist economists and historical economists that mathematical economics was useless because it made so many idealized assumptions about economic processes: perfect rationality, infinite divisibility of commodities, constant returns to scale, complete information, no price setting. 
Mr. Friedman argued that false assumptions didn’t matter any more in economics than they did in physics. Like the “ideal gas,” “frictionless plane” and “center of gravity” in physics, idealizations in economics are both harmless and necessary. They are indispensable calculating devices and approximations that enable the economist to make predictions about markets, industries and economies the way they enable physicists to predict eclipses and tides, or prevent bridge collapses and power failures. 
But economics has never been able to show the record of improvement in predictive successes that physical science has shown through its use of harmless idealizations. In fact, when it comes to economic theory’s track record, there isn’t much predictive success to speak of at all. 

On August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon announced a freeze on all wages and prices in America for three months. From the perspective of 2013, this sounds like I'm making it up. But it really happened and was popular at the time. Milton Friedman was the loudest voice predicting it would turn out to be a bad idea (which it did).

My recurrent point is that that the set of possibilities for which people are interested in predictions is a tiny fraction of all possibilities. In the past it seemed like a pretty good idea to freeze all the prices in the country. Today, nobody is interested in the opinions of economists on why that would turn out poorly. That's not the fault of economists.

People want predictions for situations that are hard to predict. Who will win the tennis tournament? Interesting. Can a woman tennis star beat a male tennis star? No longer interesting. Which question is more important in that the right answer is broadly applicable? The boring one. But noticing the pattern that boring predictions are more important than exciting predictions is meta-boring, so nobody notices.

Did the Mob win feminism's biggest battle?

Back in 1973, the biggest deal in the history of the world was a tennis match between the top American woman, 29-year-old Billie Jean King, and a 55-year-old tennis and golf hustler named Bobby Riggs. Riggs, a small man, had won Wimbledon as an amateur in 1939, and played some successful pro tennis after the War. Since then he'd supported himself gambling, such as playing amateurs using an umbrella while holding a dog on a leash. (Sports used to be more fun when they were mostly excuses for betting.)

In a television match earlier in 1973, Riggs had easily defeated the #1 ranked woman, Australian Margaret Court, flummoxing her with his cunning Old Man Game of dinks and floaters.

Jerry Perenchio, future owner of Univision, then set up a giant promotion machine to make the Riggs-King match in the Astrodome a referendum on Women's Lib. Riggs spent four months partying, showed up fat and listless, and was thoroughly drubbed by King, who, mercifully, denied him the contractually-required rematch.

A new article in ESPN by Don Van Natta Jr. (hat tip Jonathan Last) fleshes out the long-time rumor that Riggs threw the match to get out of debt to his mafia bookmakers. The journalist has found some guy who claimed to have overheard hitmen spell out the whole plan. It sounds much like JFK assassination lore.

Since then, there have been remarkably few Battles of the Sexes. Even before then, it was known that the best women softball pictures could strike out major league batters, at least until the guys got a chance to adjust to underhand pitching. But, mostly, nothing much happens.

Back in 2003, Annika Sorenstam got really pumped up and entered a PGA tournament. She was only one over par the first day, and that became a 24-hours wonder in the media, but she faded on the second day and missed the cut by four strokes, as I had predicted.

It would be interesting to know what other Landmark Cultural Milestones were rigged.

There's been a rumor that in recent years a Very Famous tennis or golf star had to be bailed out of 8 or 9 figures of debt to his sports bookmakers by his marketing company. I suspect that the rise of endorsement income in the country club sports has lowered the incentive to throw tournaments.

Hands off our megaphone!

The Washington Post runs the Associated Press's report on Oberlin:
Student: Racist postings on campus of Oberlin College meant as a ‘joke’

By Associated Press, Published: August 25 
OBERLIN, Ohio — An Oberlin College student acknowledged posting anti-Islam fliers and racist cards around the campus of the historically liberal Ohio university earlier this year, saying he meant them as a “joke” to provoke a reaction, according to statements he made after being detained by campus security. 
The student also took credit for the display of a large Nazi flag, which he also said he meant as a joke, and posting the face of Oberlin’s president onto a picture of Adolf Hitler, according to the statements contained in an Oberlin city police report. 
The student, detained after allegedly being seen posting anti-Islam fliers in the college’s Science Center Feb. 27, denied involvement in other, earlier racist postings and said he was trying to show people had overreacted to them. 
The student, whose name was blacked out, said the people who put up earlier fliers were just looking for attention. 
“I put out these fliers to get a similar over-reaction to prove this point,” the student said, according to the report. 
A series of postings and incidents over the winter caused an uproar at Oberlin, enrollment 2,900, one of the nation’s first universities to admit blacks. Black History Month posters were defaced, a “whites only” sign placed above a water fountain and a swastika drawn on a window. In early March, classes were canceled after a report of someone wearing what looked like a Ku Klux Klan-type hooded robe on campus. 
A second student detained the same day denied helping make a swastika banner placed in the center and also denied he knew what his friend was up to, saying he was just tagging along, according to his statement. 
Police declined to file charges but Oberlin College spokesman Scott Wargo said Friday both students are going through the school’s disciplinary system. 
“You had fliers with threats of violence and hate speech and rape that are being posted on doors and in hallways and on mailboxes,” Wargo said, adding: “It didn’t make it less real for those who had to endure it firsthand, and creating an atmosphere where people are afraid and feel threatened — it isn’t a joke.”

August 25, 2013

World War T funding becoming available

From the Forbes 400 list
James Pritzker
Net Worth $1.5 B As of March 2013
CEO, Tawani Enterprises
Age: 62
Source of Wealth: hotels, investments
Residence: Chicago, IL
Country of Citizenship: United States
Education: Bachelor of Arts / Science, Loyola University Illinois
Marital Status: Divorced
Children: 3

From the Chicago Sun-Times
Billionaire philanthropist Pritzker announces she is now a woman 
BY TODD SHIELDS Sun-Times Media August 23, 2013 9:12PM

The billionaire retired U.S. Army colonel James Pritzker has announced he is a woman — Jennifer Natalya Pritzker. 
According to Crain’s Chicago Business, a memo dated Aug. 16 and sent to the Pritzker Military Library and Tawani Enterprises announced Pritzker’s name officially had been changed. 
“This change will reflect the beliefs of her true identity that she has held privately and will now share publicly,” the memo stated. 
“Pritzker now identifies herself as a woman for all business and personal undertakings.” 
Pritzker’s father was the late Robert Pritzker. Robert Pritzker founded Marmon Group, a manufacturing and industrial conglomerate. 
Her uncles founded the Hyatt Hotel chain. 
Pritzker, 63, is president/CEO of Tawani and she chairs the military library. She served 11 years in the military, including a stint in the Army’s 101st Airborne Division. 
Bernard Cherkasov, CEO of Illinois Equality, said Pritzker’s announcement should inspire young people faced with the same life-changing decision. 
Equality Illinois’ mission is to secure and defend equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in Illinois. 
“It’s important to know that his high-profile life and distinguished military career should be a role model for young people,” he said. 
“Jennifer’s story moves the whole conversation forward to a national center on transgender equality.” 
Cherkasov also said Pritzker’s coming out into the open demonstrated transgender people “are in every walk of life.” 
“Her career has three streams — the military, business and the museum. She has a successful and accomplished life.”
In July, Pritzker’s Tawani Foundation gave a $3.5 million grant to the University of California’s Palm Center to study transgender people in the military, according to Courthouse News Service.

If gender is instantly and unquestionably malleable, how about race? Can I announce I now belong to the race of Pritzkers and therefore, despite any racist quibbles about my DNA that my new fellow Pritzkers might offer in objection, collect my fair share of the Pritzker inheritance?

P.S., You'll notice that, while the party line of transexuals is that they always felt like a little girl on the inside, they often get extremely angry at scientists who suggest an alternative explanation for some of them: that it's a weird sexual fetish.

For example, this guy, who has three children (does he want them to now call him "Mom?" And what does their mother think?), was born very rich -- a friend of mine served as a nanny to various Pritzker children over 40 years ago on their sojourns in Paris and the Riviera (perhaps as nanny to his cousin Penny, now Obama's Secretary of Commerce). He could have done anything. But, he chose to serve eleven years in the Army, then 16 in the National Guard, rising to the rank of colonel.
His big philanthropic endeavor was founding the Pritzker Military Library. In other words, this guy likes military stuff more than 99% of all men and 99.99% of all women on earth.

You can make up a list of other well-known transexuals with exceptionally masculine interests, such as economist Donald "Deirdre" McCloskey, who played football at Harvard. There are no athletic scholarships at Harvard, so he played football because he liked knocking other guys down.

Yeah, I know, I'm the victim of obsolete stereotypes that tackle football and warfare are more appealing to masculine than feminine minds. Who doesn't know a little girl these days who has a bedroom full of books on war and Ray Lewis posters?

Now, some transexuals are at the opposite pole -- extremely effeminate gay men who want to snag A Real Man. But many of the most aggressive take-no-prisoners transexual activists who have led the attacks on the scientists studying their condition are extremely masculine x-men.

And that's part of the added appeal of the oncoming World War T -- not just the "transgressive" stuff shocking the rubes in the corn belt, but the opportunity to lie, to silence scientists, and to not get the joke, well, that stuff is the cherry on top.

"Heaven's Gate"

I finally got around to watching a small fraction of Michael Cimino's famous flop of 1980, the epic Western Heaven's Gate. It's being critically re-evaluated following a Criterion DVD release last year. 

It appears to have been before it's time, as it's now being celebrated for exposing how rich white capitalists hated immigrants. You may have been under the impression that American capitalists favored mass immigration as a source of cheap labor, while the opposition to immigration came from labor, Progressive reformers, and the like, but that just shows you know a suspicious amount about history. What are you? An anti-ignorite?

"Heaven's Gate" is very long, but there are some staggering scenes in it. For example, check out the shot of the waltz after the 1870 Harvard graduation from 0:17 to 0:43 in the above clip. This tops even Cimino's endless Russian wedding celebration in the first 45 minutes of his 1978 Oscar-winning fever dream The Deer Hunter.

Granted, this waltz scene is goofy. This is a cowboy shoot-em-up movie, not a musical or a huge budget Student Prince operetta. And why is a middle-aged Kris Kristofferson finally graduating from college? Is his fraternity buddy played by Roddy McDowell, or is he that guy with the Alien in his chest? And in either case, isn't McDowell/Hurt a little old for Harvard? Is that Harvard, or is Harvard not picturesque enough for Cimino, so he filmed it at Oxford? And why after a couple of minutes of dancing does the film seem to jump backwards an hour in time to the newly graduated boys playing ring-around-the-rosey and brawling? 

Presumably, it's just all the Scarface-sized piles of cocaine consumed on the set, but who knows?

Then the movie jumps forward a couple of decades to the famous Johnson County War between big and small cattle ranchers. 

You may be surprised, however, to learn that Wyoming in 1892 was completely covered in Huddled Masses. Kristofferson, now the Marshall of Johnson County, is the only passenger inside the train carriage, while hundreds of impoverished immigrants cling to the roof, like it's the night train to Calcutta. Then, the immigrants trudge in a vast sea of humanity across the barren High Plains toward the looming Rockies. Why have so many chosen such a dry, cold destination? Perhaps they are going to Butte to work in the mines? No, they are just going out into the picturesque emptiness to farm or ranch or rustle cattle or do whatever it is that people who aren't music publishers and costume designers like normal folks (i.e., Cimino's parents) do.

Vincent Canby's famously destructive review in the New York Times' began:
''HEAVEN'S GATE,'' Michael Cimino's gigantic new western and his first film since the Oscar-winning ''The Deer Hunter,'' is apparently based on a historical incident that occured in Johnson County, Wyo. in 1890: with the tacit approval of the state government, the county's wealthy cattle barons banded together in a systematic attempt to murder more than 100 German, Bulgarian, Russian and Ukrainian settlers who were encroaching on their lands. If one can say nothing else on behalf of ''Heaven's Gate'' (and I certainly can't), it's probably the first western to celebrate the role played by central and eastern Europeans in the settlement of the American West.

Was Canby surprised about his ignorance of the giant role of immigrants in Wyoming history because nobody much cares about Slavs? Or was it because Cimino just made up the whole immigrant angle?

You can't really blame Canby for not knowing anything more than Cimino did about the history. They didn't have Wikipedia back then. Today, however, you can look up "Heaven's Gate" in Wikipedia and read:
Apart from being set in Wyoming and the fact that many of the characters have the names of key figures in the Johnson County War, the plot and the characters themselves have almost no relation to the actual historical people and events.[12] While there were certainly small numbers of settlers arriving in northern Wyoming, there were not hordes of poor European immigrants streaming en masse,[13] let alone killing rich men's cattle out of hunger.  

For example, the names of some of the small ranchers and their allies in the Johnson County War who were attacked by the big ranchers include Tom Waggoner, Nate Champion, Ellen Watson, Jim Averell, John A. Tisdale, Orley “Ranger” Jones, and Willis Van Devanter. The Johnson County War, as more accurately depicted in Open Range with Robert Duvall and Kevin Costner as small timers shooting it out with the big money boys, was actually Old Americans v. Old Americans.

But we've got the Internet now, so the critics who are revisiting Heaven's Gate at their leisure are  .... as well-informed about the immigration aspect as Canby working against deadline was in 1980. For example, NPR reported last December:
With that conflict established, the movie slowly, slowly, slowly builds to the actual historical event known as the Johnson County War between mercenary killers and immigrants. And it must be said that this showdown actually feels more timely now — in this era of Occupy Wall Street and fierce battles over immigration — than it did at the very beginning of the Reagan era, when the film's gutbucket Marxism ran against the prevailing cultural mood.

Oh, well.

Speaking of World War T, for recent photographs of Cimino and accompanying rumors, see here.

August 24, 2013

From Iron Mike to Marble Martin

by Harry Baldwin

Roger Federer

Approaching the U.S. Open where he's seeded only 7th, tennis great Roger Federer, now 32, appears well into the decline phase of his career. An odd thing about Federer is how much he looks like athletes used to look:
Up close, the thing you notice about Federer is how slight his 6-foot-1 frame is; he has stick-figure arms, and his legs are uncharacteristically thin for a professional tennis player. The contrast not only with the Popeye-like Nadal but also with Djokovic and Murray is striking. 

Contrast Federer's 1970s-looking body to #1-seeded woman Serena Williams, who is only a few weeks younger:
US Open: Serena Williams 'pumped up' by defeat to Victoria Azarenka


There is much speculation about whether Federer will soon retire, but there doesn't seem much reason for him to hang it up like a boxer or football player should after a last hurrah. Maybe he should if he's taking anti-anemia drugs like Epo for endurance -- in this golden age of men's tennis, matches last absurdly long -- but, in general, he looks like his profession agrees with him, just as golfers seldom see much reason to formally retire. The last golfer to flat out retire may have been Bobby Jones in 1930.

Federer needs two more major championship victories to break golfer Jack Nicklaus's record of 18, a record that Federer and his pal Tiger Woods have been chasing a long time. Tiger has been stuck at 14 since June 2008. Since Tiger last won a Grand Slam event, Federer has added five titles. 

Nicklaus didn't quit when he won #16 and #17 at age 40 in 1980. He kept grinding until he won #18 at age 46. And he still didn't retire then. I saw a fifty-year-old Nicklaus in the last round of the U.S. Open in 1990 cursing a blue streak when a birdie putt to move into contention for #19 didn't drop.

Celebrating Martin Luther King

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
End communication.
Our frequently downbeat President appears to be struggling to come up with something to say for the current whoop-tee-doo over the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. The media would squeal with joy if Obama gave a third speech justifying their Trayvon Martin fiasco, but, so far, the President seems rather discouraged by the thought.
“Fifty years after the March on Washington and the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, obviously we’ve made enormous strides,” Mr. Obama said in response to a question from a professor of African-American studies. “I’m a testament to it. You’re a testament to it.” He added that “we know that some discrimination still exists, although nothing like what existed 50 years ago.” 
“But,” he added, “let’s assume that we eliminated all discrimination magically with a wand, and everybody had goodness in their heart, you’d still have a situation in which there are a lot of folks who are poor, and whose families have become dysfunctional, because of a long legacy of poverty, and live in neighborhoods that are run-down and schools that are underfunded and don’t have a strong property tax base.”
His solution, he continued, was to promote programs like an expansion of early childhood education and his latest effort to make college more affordable — including, he said, making law school two years instead of three. 

Okay!

I've long offered two suggestions, one that Obama would never take up (although deep down, during his most depressed episodes, he might have to admit it makes sense), the other of which he might adopt. After all, my second proposal is at least more relevant to the current occasion than shortening law school is.

The first is:
Why not use that propitious occasion to declare victory in the long war on Jim Crow and white racism and announce you are bringing the federal troops home?

The second is to use the celebration over MLK's famous speech on August 28, 1963 to call for permanently commemorating the event by moving the currently not very popular MLK holiday from the frigid middle of January to late August:
Fortunately, one simple change in the holiday could end this racial divisiveness and unite workers of all colors in demanding a paid holiday honoring King.
The federal holiday currently falls on the third Monday in January. In 2004, that's Jan. 19. It's a great time for a holiday -- if you live in Honolulu or Key West. ... 
If we moved the King holiday to the Monday a week before Labor Day, it would suddenly become hugely popular. Everybody would want to take the last Monday in August off.
This would also rebalance our holiday calendar. It's dysfunctional that we currently have three holidays in the months of January and February, but none in the two months between the Fourth of July and Labor Day. 
Having two consecutive three-day weekends at the end of summer wouldn't disrupt business much, because the week before Labor Day already ranks with the post-Christmas week as one of the slowest periods of the year. 
Many people already consider the end of August a good time for a vacation. Europeans have found that making August the semi-official vacation month works well. With our shorter vacations, we could make the week before Labor Day a semi-expected vacation time, just as the week between Christmas and New Year's already is. 

This schedule would allow workers to take a 10-day vacation running from the Saturday before the new MLK day through Labor Day, yet use only four vacation days.

Or is the current (unspoken) thinking that holding the MLK holiday in dead cold winter keeps blacks from making trouble? Maybe. But my vague impression is that late spring or early summer is the rowdiest time of the year, while late summer is mellower, more lazy and hazy than crazy. Somebody should study the subject using data.

August 23, 2013

How rare is crime?

The liberal orthodoxy on the costs of crime victimization tend to be a weird combination of Eloi / macho: crime is rare, so man up and don't worry about it.

Yet, Ross Douthat pointed yesterday to a 1987 Bureau of Justice Statistics study estimating that 83% of Americans are subject to at least one violent crime over their lifetimes. But, since some people are subject to more than one crime, the expected average per Americans was closer to two violent crimes per lifetime.

A commenter notes that it's reasonable for people to include their loved ones being subject to violent crimes as well. 

So, let's use a stylized family tree to estimate the number of expected crimes committed against relatives by blood and marriage. Assume everybody in America gets married once and has two children. Thus, each person would have two parents, one sibling, one spouse, and two children. Counting yourself and your six first order relations, that would be an expected average of 14 violent crimes per lifetime committed against you and your closest relations.

A few caveats

Some of those violent crimes will be domestic. You, personally, might beat up your spouse, for example. On the other hand, society has put strong efforts into punishing and deterring domestic violence, with sizable gains, so domestic crime should hardly be wholly discounted.

Second, some of those crimes will happen before your birth or after your death, but that hardly means you feel all that great about that.

How many more relative do you have in this stylized schema:

4 grandparents -- 8 victimizations
4 grandchildren -- 8 victimization
2 nephews-nieces -- 4 victimizations
2 first cousins -- 4 victimizations
2 parents-in-law -- 4 victimizations
1 sibling-in-law -- 2 victimization
2 nephews/nieces-in-law -- 4 victimizations
1 spouse-in-law's spouse (e.g., your wife's sister's husband) -- 2 victimization

So, that's 36 more violent victimizations, along with the 14 of your inner circle, for a total of 50. And you can keep going onward from there. And then there are your friends.

No man is an island.

The only thing we have to fear is inference itself

A Washington D.C. journalist named Brian Beutler writes in Salon:
What I learned from getting shot 
Defenders of stop-and-frisk and racial profiling have made me break my public silence about the night I almost died 
BY BRIAN BEUTLER 
I haven’t said or written much publicly about the shooting that nearly killed me in 2008. But a recent confluence of events — Trayvon Martin’s death, the Zimmerman trial and the public pronouncements of mostly privileged, mostly white people in the aftermath of the verdict — has left me feeling like I have something to share. 
Most recently, actor-activist Kal Penn, once an avowed opponent of racial stereotyping in law enforcement (based in part on his own experience getting patted down at airports), changed his views after he was held up at gunpoint in Washington, D.C. (Penn published a brief explanation late last week, and apparently reconsidered his view over the weekend.) 
... What I can say with some authority — whether this is what happened to Penn or not — is that being a victim of gun violence doesn’t have to turn you into a supporter of racial profiling. 
My story is more than five years old now. It took place in Washington, D.C., on a typically warm July night. I was out late on a Tuesday with a friend whom I’ll call Matt, since that’s his name. [This Matt? The one who was the victim of a racial hate crime nearby in 2011?] We’d been drinking — probably too much for a weeknight, but not too much for a 25-year-old journalist. 
A half-hour after last call, on our walk home up 16th Street northbound toward Mount Pleasant where we lived at the time, we impulsively decided to grab a late night snack at a 24-hour diner we used to frequent in Adams Morgan and hung a left up Euclid Street — a dimly lit one-way street with a violent history. 

The corner of Euclid and 16th Street is 1.8 miles due north of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
I’d been up and down Euclid hundreds of times over the years — midday and late at night; alone and with friends; drunk and sober; and just about every permutation thereof. Always without incident. 
This time was different. About half a block up Euclid, Matt and I encountered two young men — both black, both wearing hoodies, characters culled from Richard Cohen’s sweatiest nightmares. They wanted our phones, which we were cleverly holding in front of our faces as we walked. 
We declined, gently under the circumstances. I worried we might end up in a fight. Maybe one of them had a knife, or a larger group of friends around the corner. I know I would’ve surrendered my phone eventually, but not before suggesting they go hassle someone else. Maybe they’d figure we weren’t worth the trouble. 
They didn’t oblige. The kid opposite Matt drew a small, shiny object from wherever he’d been concealing it and passed it to his accomplice, who was standing opposite me. A second or two lapsed — long enough for me to recognize they weren’t joking, but not long enough for me to beg — before it discharged clap clap clap; my body torqued into the air horizontally, like I’d been blindsided by a linebacker, and I fell to the ground. 

The ER removed Beutler's spleen to save his live, leaving him with big medical bills. Within a year or so he was over the trauma, although one of the three bullets is still inside him. But, he's proud to say, he hasn't learned anything.
[Former Indian-American Obama aide and movie star Kal] Penn got in trouble for touting the supposed merits of New York’s stop-and-frisk policy. To the objection that the policy disproportionately targets blacks and Latinos, he responded, “And who, sadly, commits & are victims of the most crimes?” 
But that’s a non sequitur. A false rationale. Take people’s fear out of the equation and the logical artifice collapses.

People's fear must be removed from the equation. Fear of crime is contemptible weakness. Just remember: What does not kill you makes you stronger.

On the other hand, it's completely reasonable for black youths to be terrified of all the roving white racists like George Zimmerman out to gun them down.
Canadians are highly overrepresented in the field of professional ice hockey, but it would be ridiculous for anyone to walk around Alberta presumptively asking strangers on the street for autographs. When you treat everyone as a suspect, you get a lot of false positives. That’s why above and beyond the obvious injustice of it, stop and frisk isn’t wise policy. Minorities might commit most of the crime in U.S. cities, and be the likeliest victims of it, and that’s a problem with a lot of causes that should be addressed in a lot of ways. But crime is pretty rare. Not rare like being a professional hockey player is rare. But rare. Most people, white or minority, don’t do it at all. ...

This may have something to do with the trillions spent fighting crime, the 800,000 cops employed, the two million in jail, the flight to the suburbs, the decline of walking, and other costs.

But still ... according to the liberal Center for American Progress): "According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, one in three black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime."

That's a lot.

And the conclusion:
Everyone who’s ever shot me was black and wearing a hoodie. There just aren’t any reasonable inferences to draw from that fact.

The only thing we have to fear is inference itself.

Over at his NYT blog, Ross Douthat asks in response: "How Rare Is Crime?"
But at the same time, crime is common enough that it’s quite likely to happen to the average person at some point in time. Not that the average person will go through what Beutler went through, mercifully. But over a span of years, your odds of experiencing at least an attempted robbery or an attempted assault are pretty good.
How good? Well, that depends on the crime rate over time. In the 1980s, the Bureau of Justice Statistics tried to quantify the “lifetime likelihood of victimization,” by assuming that the American crime rate over that hypothetical lifetime averaged what it averaged from 1975 to 1984. (Those were, of course, high crime years; more on that below.) The study calculated that at those rates, 83 percent of Americans could expect to be victims of an attempted robbery, rape or assault at least once as an adult; 40 percent could expect to be injured in a robbery or assault; 72 percent of households could expect to be burglarized and 20 percent could expect to have a car stolen, and 99 percent of the population (that is, everybody) could expect to experience some kind of personal theft. 
These numbers don’t suggest that crime is a regular occurrence in law-abiding lives; it is not. But they suggest that it can be a normal occurrence, in the sense of being something that you have to be prepared for, something that you can reasonably expect to have to deal with at some point, and something that will definitely affect somebody you care about even if it doesn’t touch you directly. 
(As a personal aside, I would hazard that my own experience is probably fairly typical: My parents’ home was burglarized when I was a teenager, I had my nose broken in Adams Morgan in the early 2000s, our car was stolen two years ago, and then I have various one or two-degrees-of-separation connection to incidents that involved extended hospitalization or worse.) 
And part of what makes the endless debates over profiling so vexed, I think, is that it’s hard to assess what constitutes a reasonable response to this reality. Is crime a low-probability danger? Well, yes in the everyday sense, but no in the sense that you could very easily be victimized at some point, which isn’t true of, say, lightning strikes and terrorist attacks and other truly low-probability threats. Clearly it isn’t a threat that should make you a shut-in; clearly it isn’t so non-threatening that urbanites should relax and leave their cars and houses unlocked overnight. But most of what counts as everyday profiling, whether by attire or attitude or age or race or by all those variables at once, falls into a much blurrier area, where the rational thing to do — cross the street to avoid a group of kids or not? keep a closer eye on customer X than customer Y in your store? call the cops to report suspicious-seeming behavior or not? — isn’t slam-dunk obvious given the variables and risks involved.

Well said. But Ross's methodology actually understates that 1987 federal Bureau of Justice Statistics' report on the prevalence of crime in the 1970s-1980s because many victims would be victimized multiple times. 

Similarly, in the marketing research business, we referred to total sales as penetration times buying rate. If a product is bought by 50% of the people (penetration rate of 50%), and they average five purchases each (buying rate of 5), then total sales will average 2.5 purchases per person.

While, as Ross says, 87% of the public could be expected to be a victim of violent crime (completed or attempted) at least once in their lifetimes, Table 1 reports that only 30% would only be victimized once. Another 27% would be victimized twice in a lifetime, and 25% three or more times. So, the average American would suffer at least 1.59 violent crimes in a lifetime, and almost certainly more (depending on the exact number of incidents befalling the 25% suffering "3 or more" crimes). 

For example, if the average number of victimizations for the 25% in the 3 or more category was 4.65, then the expected number of violent victimizations per American would be 2.0.

August 22, 2013

Obama to colleges: Be more like Harvard

Can anybody figure out Obama's new college finance plan? I haven't seen anybody use any examples yet of which colleges will benefit and which ones will be hurt, so it's hazy so far. (I find it easier to reason productively from examples to abstract principles, but many people seem to think it's worthier to reason in the abstract about principles without muddying them up by using real world examples. This is especially true of American education policy.)

The New York Times editorializes in support of Obama's plan:
The basic idea is to give more student aid to colleges that admit more disadvantaged students, that show progress in lowering costs and raising scholarships, and that shepherd students to earn a degree. To measure that performance, the government would create a rating system to compare similar colleges, a potentially useful consumer tool that would also serve to shame institutions that do not measure up. 
The rating system would examine a college’s accessibility, looking at the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants; its affordability, tied to tuition, scholarships and financial aid; and its outcomes, based on graduation rates, advanced degrees and the salaries earned by graduates. Students would be required to show progress toward a degree before receiving continued aid, and schools would be rewarded for developing innovative programs to serve more students at lower costs. All student borrowers would have a cap on their loan payments of 10 percent of their monthly income, expanding the current system.

So, it sounds like under Obama's new system you'd get the most federal financial aid for going to Harvard. After all, Harvard has a nearly 100% graduation rate. With its endowment of $32,012,729,000, Harvard gives out lots and lots of financial aid (that's why its basketball team has gotten so good lately -- it can't give out athletic scholarships, per se, but it now gives out so much financial aid to high five figure and low six figure parents that it can now give a free ride to middle class black kids who happen to be extremely tall and good at dunking). And Harvard has many accomplished and well-paid graduates. (Just ask one and they'll tell you.) If Harvard feels motivated to get the smartest Pell Grant students in the country, well, Harvard will get the smartest Pell Grant students in the country.

In contrast, if you are just some loser who can only get into, I dunno, Tufts, well, don't expect as much help from the taxpayers as your betters at Harvard rake in. As the Lucky Jim principle says, there's no end to the way nice things are nicer than less nice things. So, why shouldn't the Obama Administration give Harvard students more aid than Tufts students?

So, is the Obama Administration's message to America's colleges: be more like Harvard?

Or am I totally using the wrong examples and this isn't about high-end schools at all, this is about crushing low-end for-profit colleges? I believe in the magic of the market and all that, but more than a few for-profit colleges just seem focused on getting gullible people with two-digit IQs to take out loans to take classes in fields where they aren't smart enough to make a career.

Any insights?

"The Great Gatsby's" Limp Nick Problem

A friend writes:
I thought the film was okay - saw it late (though not as late as you!) and never got around to writing about it. Leo DiCaprio was excellent. The problem is that Tobey Maguire was God-awful. And since the story is really Carraway's, not Gatsby's, having a limp Nick kills the story. 

Nick needs to be a cool guy, quiet but good-looking, somebody to whom rich people want to reveal their secrets. Nick should have melancholy depths, but he also needs to be subtly charismatic. Otherwise, the plot makes even less sense. E.g., Tom Buchanan, Nick's cousin-in-law, instantly takes Nick along to meet his mistress with whom he's cheating on Nick's cousin Daisy. You can make up various explanations of Tom's motivation for this imprudent behavior, but the most plausible is that Tom just wants to be around Nick and to show off to his lady friend that Nick is his protege. (Thus, while Gatsby has ulterior motives for hanging around with Nick, he also always seems to really like Nick).

In other words, Nick should be both F. Scott Fitzgerald's self-pitying self-image of F. Scott Fitzgerald, combined with the real life F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was a big celebrity years before he wrote The Great Gatsby at age 30. There are no shortage of handsome, personable young actors in Hollywood who can play that role. You can order them up by the boatload in London. By the standards of movie stars, however, Tobey Maguire isn't one of them.

The 1974 film had Sam Waterston (Law & Order) as Nick. Waterston at least had some air of distinction about him, even if he always looked a little not quite right in the head (as if he not only looked a little bit like Abraham Lincoln, but also, deep down, believed he really was Abraham Lincoln). But Tobey Maguire mostly seems dorky and mundane, which served him well in Spider-Man, but not here.
I understand what Luhrmann has been trying to do since Moulin Rouge, but it isn't working for me. It isn't that I object to melodrama as a key component of fine art, and it certainly isn't that I object to conscious artifice. But I find his style hyperactive and his characterization shallow. When Vivien Leigh raises her fist to the sky and says, "I'll never go hungry again," she's insanely larger than life, whereas Luhrmann's characters too often wind up seeming like wind-up dolls. That's certainly how I felt about Nicole Kidman; I never believed in her for an instant. Daisy Buchanan, of course, is supposed to be shallow - but I couldn't tell if Luhrmann understood that, or if he thought she was just dandy.   

Luhrmann says he's influenced by Bollywood films' relationships with their unsophisticated audiences. So, what would a Bollywood audience think? Daisy is fair and rich. What's not to like?

As for Carey Mulligan as Daisy, she's fine. She's one of this new breed of refined British stars, like her rock star husband Malcolm Mumford. But she's not quite beautiful enough for a legendary role. She came to fame in An Education for her amazing ability to make tiny muscles in her face flutter -- she's like a very feminine Jim Carrey. But, Luhrmann doesn't have her do much of that here. In repose, her face isn't quite lovely enough. But, it's not a major defect in the movie, just a missed opportunity.
Finally, I like your suggestion of how to frame a film adaptation. Are you familiar with the Elevator Repair Service (a theatrical group) and their production, Gatz? It's a stage version of The Great Gatsby, but it's not exactly an adaptation. Rather, the play is set in an exceptionally depressing basement office of some dreary small business. Everyone's starting off their depressing day, when one employee, whose computer won't start, picks up a copy of The Great Gatsby. And starts to read. And, thereby, to take on the role of Nick Carraway - and one by one, the other employees get in on the act, taking on roles from the book and acting out scenes - but never leaving the world of the office, never putting on costumes or anything like that. And they read the entire book. It takes 8 hours, with intermissions, and it's fantastic. I got the impression that they were aiming for something similar to what you were thinking about with your frame story: what does a story like this mean to the people who read it and loved it, the normal people, not the academic students of literature (nor the bored high-school kids who are forced to read it). 
Anyway, I liked ERS's version a lot better than Luhrmann's.

Sometimes when I go for a walk in the park after dark, I run into this troupe of amateur actors in their early 20s who use the open air near the playground to rehearse Shakespeare plays. They'll be saying "doth" to each other and sword-fighting at 3/4ths speed to get ready for their shows. Obviously, they've got zero money if a dimly lit outdoor playground is their best option for rehearsal space.

But, from the perspective of cultural continuity, how great is it that young people are still coming together voluntarily like this to put on Shakespeare plays after 400 years?