November 14, 2013

Fundamental questions about the Common Core standards

Why do the Common Core educational standards (e.g., a list of what needs to be taught in each grade dreamed up by David Coleman) need to be common across the country? Why is it crucially important that 45 states upend what they're doing to jump on board this untested bandwagon? Wouldn't it make more sense to test Dave's brainstorm in one state to see if it actually works before betting the country on it?

For example, a couple of decades ago, the state of California had a great idea: stop teaching kids to read using phonics and use only whole word instruction instead, because studies prove that really good adult readers are whole word readers (e.g., "whooping cough" pretty much equals "whooping crane" in the eyes of the fastest readers). This proved a famous disaster. For years afterward, you could look at California test scores and instantly tell which grades the poor kids who got stuck with whole word instruction were in by how much lower the reading scores were of, say, eighth through tenth graders versus seventh or eleventh graders.

Fortunately, due to our federal system, that only happened in one state (granted, the state that is 1/8th of the country), and other states learned salutary lessons from California's mistake.

The only argument I've heard for why a Common Core being must be almost nationally common is that it would be nice for students who suddenly move from one state to another to find their new school is exactly where their old school left off. But how important is this?

The French minister of education is famously proud that in every school in the country the nine-year-olds are reading the same page at the same moment. Is this better or worse than a more federal system like Germany's? Off hand, the results don't seem all that different. The differing approaches seems more to reflect the French state's obsession with centralization in case they want to put together an army big enough invade Russia again. In contrast, German federalism reflects their interest in decentralization so they aren't tempted to put together an army big enough to invade Russia again.

Moreover, what is the point of lockstep standards, anyway? How do they survive their collision with the reality of human diversity? If you say that all students must learn U, V, and W in 4th grade so they will be prepared to learn X, Y, and Z in 5th grade, what happens to the students who fail to learn V and W in 4th grade and thus aren't ready for X,Y, and Z if fifth grade? What about the students who learned U,V, and W in the first months of 4th grade?

And shouldn't somebody, somewhere test the Common Core before it's rolled out to 45 states?

Education Realist writes:
I’ve stayed out of the Common Core nonsense. The objections involve much fuss about federal control, teacher training, curriculum mandates, and the constructivist nature of the standards. Yes, mostly. But so what? 
Here’s the only important thing you need to know about Common Core standards: they’re ridiculously, impossibly difficult.

America is just finishing up a colossal failure called No Child Left Behind, a plan dreamed up by President Bush and Senator Kennedy that mandated that every public school student in America score "proficient" in reading and math by next May. It was obvious from the get-go that it would never work, but it was wildly popular within the education industry for many years because it justified no end of conferences, meetings, pet projects, days out of the classroom to get "professional development," and all the other things that are more fun than teaching other people's children day after day after day.

Now that NCLB is dying, we have a whole new fad that is suspiciously like the old one.

American patriots dodge the fifth bullet of the century?

This year, we were unlucky, but remember we only have
to be lucky once. You Americans will have to be lucky always.
With House Speaker Boehner finally promising not to get involved in a House-Senate immigration bill reconciliation conference (where Senator Schumer would undoubtedly take him to the cleaners), it's starting to look as if Americans in 2013 may have won yet another political victory over the bipartisan amnesty Establishment, just as we did in 2001, 2004, 2006, and 2007. 

If this pans out, I should be feeling good about it, after all those years fiddling with spreadsheets that showed the conventional wisdom wasn't quite the slam dunk everybody assumed it was. But, mostly, I'm feeling tired right now by the knowledge that nobody will learn anything and we'll have to fight again. 

As a commenter pointed out, Congress's lame duck session after the 2014 election is a particular danger point, since it's the maximum time possible from the next election.

November 13, 2013

JDF: "27% of Jewish Children Are in Orthodox Homes — Huge Jump"

From the Jewish Daily Forward:
Orthodox Population Grows Faster Than First Figures in Pew #JewishAmerica Study 
27% of Jewish Children Are in Orthodox Homes — Huge Jump 
By Josh Nathan-Kazis

The Orthodox population is growing even faster than earlier reports from the Pew Research Center’s recent survey of American Jews suggested. 
A new analysis of data from Pew finds that 27% of Jews younger than 18 live in Orthodox households. That’s a dramatic jump from Jews aged 18 to 29, only 11% of whom are Orthodox. 
“Orthodox birthrates in just the last few years have been soaring,” said Jewish sociologist Steven M. Cohen, who requested the new data from Pew. “The sky is falling for the rest of the population.” 
Previously published Pew data suggested that growth among the Orthodox was tempered by high dropout rates. No data was previously available on the proportion of Jewish children in Orthodox homes. The new figures show that the demographics of today’s Jewish children are radically different from those of even today’s Jewish young adults. 
“There is a trend afoot, and in the next big population survey like this, we will see the beginning of a switch, whereby Orthodox Jews will eventually likely be the majority of American Jews,” said Sarah Bunin Benor, a professor of Jewish studies at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. She, like Cohen, was a member of the Pew study’s advisory committee. 
The Pew report was based on interviews with 3,500 Jews across the United States 
In its analysis of its research, Pew described a gradual decrease in Jewish identity among the non-Orthodox, and a gradual rise in the overall proportion of Jews who identify as Orthodox. The study reported that 10% of Jews were Orthodox, just 2% higher than a roughly approximate study 10 years ago. 
The new numbers give those findings a different cast. 
As a proportion of the community, the Orthodox population more than doubles when you compare the demographic slice of middle-aged Jews with that of Jewish children based on the new data, according to Cohen. “Every year, the Orthodox population has been adding 5,000 Jews,” Cohen said. “The non-Orthodox population has been losing 10,000 Jews.” 
The nationwide findings are in line with a 2012 study by UJA-Federation of New York. The study reported that 60% of Jewish children in the New York City area live in Orthodox homes. 
Much of the growth appears to have come from the ultra-Orthodox including the Hasidic sectors. Though Pew did not break out age data for that subgrouping, the survey found that of the 10% of Jews who identified as Orthodox, only 3% said they were Modern Orthodox. 
The factors driving down the non-Orthodox population were explored thoroughly in early coverage of Pew and discussed widely in the Forward and elsewhere. 
Less noticed were the exceptionally high birthrates reported by Orthodox Jews. 
Low levels of retention among older Jews who grew up Orthodox distracted from the birth rates and gave the impression that enough children were leaving Orthodoxy to keep the population relatively flat. 
The new data challenges those assumptions. 
High ultra-Orthodox birth rates are often visible in news media anecdotes For instance, when Israeli ultra-Orthodox rabbinical leader Yosef Sholom Elyashiv died in July 2012, he was said to have more than 1,000 living descendants. 
Pew puts data to those anecdotes. The study’s numbers suggest that the Orthodox birthrate in the United States is far higher than that of most other religious groups. Pew found that Orthodox Jews averaged 4.1 children per adult [woman, I suspect], while America’s general public averages 2.2 children. The Orthodox number is higher than the average for Protestants (2.2) and Catholics (2.4). Hispanic Catholics (3.1) come close, but still fall short. 
These birth rates, which are helping to push the demographics toward an Orthodox majority, remain confounding to outsiders. 
“Orthodox life is very, very different than a conventional lifestyle,” said Alexander Rapaport, 35, a father of seven. Rapaport lives in a Hasidic community in Brooklyn’s Boro Park and runs the soup kitchen network Masbia. 
He described a social structure designed to encourage and support large families — and that structure has apparently succeeded in more than doubling its share of the Jewish population in less than two decades. 
Rapaport’s wife had the couple’s first child when Rapaport was 21. Their total of seven (so far) is about average for their community. Their latest, a 3-month-old, wears baby clothes passed down from a cousin born a year earlier. 
“My wife didn’t buy any new stuff for my daughter,” Rapaport said. “My sister gave her all her stuff that she had for her daughter.” 
Food, Rapaport said, is also inexpensive. “Most people in New York think of food, they think of eating out,” Rapaport said. In his community, it’s “chulent and gefilte fish eaten at home.” 
Besides economizing and informal support networks, Orthodox communities rely on government aid programs to subsidize their child-heavy lifestyle. 
In Rockland County, N.Y., the Hasidic village of New Square receives Section 8 housing subsidies at a higher rate than anywhere else in the region. In New Jersey, schools in the Orthodox city of Lakewood get more federally backed E-Rate telecom subsidies than schools in any other municipality. Half of the people living in the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic village of Kiryas Joel, in Orange County, N.Y., are on food stamps; a third are on Medicaid. 
Some of that government aid goes to cutting school prices. For secular parents, the price of private school can often be a factor in family planning. Religious school tuition could make having large numbers of children unfeasible, but ultra-Orthodox schools are inexpensive. Hasidic men contacted by the Forward reported that Hasidic families pay between $200 and $400 per month year-round for school and summer camp. 
Catholic elementary schools in Brooklyn cost $3,500 for the school year. Tuition to the Abraham Joshua Heschel School in Manhattan begins at $34,000. 
Large families, however, don’t only create burdens on the parents. Older children are often tasked with raising their younger siblings. The result, according to Lani Santo, executive director of Footsteps, which helps people leaving Orthodoxy, is that a disproportionate number of their members are the eldest in their families. 
A survey of 70 Footsteps members found that 30% were the oldest of their siblings.  
“The oldest children are burdened with a lot of the responsibility of taking care of younger children, and that could lead to resentment,” Santo said. 
That could be a factor in the Orthodox dropout rates, which remain substantial. 
According to Pew, among Jews aged 18–29 who grew up Orthodox, 17% say they are no longer Orthodox. 

One thing to keep in mind in reading about American Jewish numbers is that the study of Jewish demographics in the U.S. is a fraught field. In contrast to Israel, where the government invests heavily in collecting and analyzing demographic trends, since the late 1950s the U.S. government hasn't been allowed to count anything that would be terribly useful in identifying Jews. 

There is plenty of private money and talent to do the job, but the various critics, nit-pickers, and interested parties who want to put thumbs on the scale are also world-class. So, publication of survey results tend to lead to recriminations and spin, such as the early 2000s survey that caused a huge rumpus among Jewish organizations before everybody more or less agreed to forget it ever happened.

"El Futuro"

From a while ago in the Washington Post, Eli Saslow reports from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas on Blanca, a single mother of five:
But the cheap foods she could afford on the standard government [food stamp] allotment of about $1.50 per meal also tended to be among the least nutritious — heavy in preservatives, fats, salt and refined sugar. Now Clarissa, her 13-year-old daughter, had a darkening ring around her neck that suggested early-onset diabetes from too much sugar. Now Antonio, 9, was sharing dosages of his mother’s cholesterol medication. Now Blanca herself was too sick to work, receiving disability payments at age 40 and testing her blood-sugar level twice each day to guard against the stroke doctors warned was forthcoming as a result of her diet.

Hidalgo County, Tex., is one of the fastest growing and poorest places in the nation. Although 40 percent of the county's residents are enrolled in the food-stamp program, diabetes and obesity have exploded in the region. 
She drove toward the doctor’s office on the two-lane highways of South Texas, the flat horizon of brown dirt interrupted by palm trees and an occasional view of the steel fence that divides the United States from Mexico. Blanca’s parents emigrated from Mexico in the 1950s to pick strawberries and cherries, and they often repeated an aphorism about the border fence. “On one side you’re skinny. On the other you’re fat,” they said. Now millions more had crossed through the fence, both legally and illegally, making Hidalgo County one of the fastest-growing places in America. 
“El Futuro” is what some residents had begun calling the area, and here the future was unfolding in a cycle of cascading extremes: 
Hidalgo County has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation . . . which has led almost 40 percent of residents to enroll in the food-stamp program . . . which means a widespread reliance on cheap, processed foods . . . which results in rates of diabetes and obesity that double the national average . . . which fuels the country’s highest per-capita spending on health care. 
This is what El Futuro looks like in the Rio Grande Valley: The country’s hungriest region is also its most overweight, with 38.5 percent of the people obese. For one of the first times anywhere in the United States, children in South Texas have a projected life span that is a few years shorter than that of their parents.

Tyler Cowen's leguminous insight about the future of America -- "Let them eat beans!" -- isn't popular in El Futuro, where local sentiment is more inclined toward "Let them drink Red Bull!" Saslow's article goes on to document how a Mexican-American politician tried to change the law so that food stamps couldn't be used to purchase energy drinks, which are made mostly of sugar, caffeine, and profit margin. But a combination of corporate and liberal interests defeated his reform effort.

The latest Gap

I presume that universal pre-K schooling can solve this. (This is covered in the Common Core, right?)

From Slate:
This week, the New York Times parsed two recent studies of orgasm rates for men and women in casual hookups and found that men get off a lot more in those situations than women do. One study of 24,000 students at 21 colleges found that only "40 percent of women had an orgasm during their last hookup involving intercourse, while 80 percent of men did." ... Gay men and lesbians weren't mentioned at all. I asked Indiana University sex researcher Dr. Debby Herbenick, quoted in the Times piece, to help fill in some of the gaps on the orgasm gap. ... 
Slate: The New York Times story focuses on why women might not reliably have orgasms during casual hookups. But what about the men they’re hooking up with? Why are they so good at it?

You can read the whole thing there, because I can't.

Michelle Obama: Exhibit A for "mismatch theory"

From the NYT:
Michelle Obama urged high school students on Tuesday to increase the opportunities available to them by pursuing higher education as she kicked off an initiative that seeks to increase the number of low-income students graduating from college and signaled her plans to focus more on administration policy during the president’s second term. 
Opening up to high school sophomores gathered in an auditorium at Bell Multicultural High School in Washington, Mrs. Obama spoke of her struggles as an underprivileged student in Chicago, taking a long bus ride across town to attend a better school and dreaming of the diploma from Princeton University that she eventually earned. ...
It was clear from her remarks that the initiative, which will take her to schools around the country, is a personal one. Answering students’ questions — along with Arne Duncan, the secretary of education — she referred to “kids like us” and recalled those who had discouraged her ambitions. 
“Some of my teachers straight up told me that I was setting my sights too high,” Mrs. Obama said. “They told me I was never going to get into a school like Princeton. I still hear that doubt ringing in my head.” 
She continued: “So it was clear to me that nobody was going to take my hand and lead me to where I needed to go. Instead it was going to be up to me to reach my goal. I would have to chart my own course.”

This is all very fine as advice, but not entirely accurate as autobiography.

The First Lady's admission to Princeton wasn't entirely her own doing. Besides the usual affirmative action, she was also a Princeton legacy. In fact, her two-year-older brother Craig Robinson was already the Big Man on Campus, both metaphorically (he's always been popular, although he appears to be wearing out his welcome as Oregon State basketball's head coach) and literally (he's 6'6"). While Michelle Robinson's application was under consideration in the January to March of 1981, sophomore Craig Robinson was helping Princeton to the Ivy League title. Her big brother was then Ivy League basketball player of the year in her first two years on campus, and led Princeton to the 3rd round of the NCAA tournament in 1983.

And I presume her application wasn't hurt either by her being close friends with one of Jesse Jackson's daughters.

This latest speech continues a 35-year-old pattern of Michelle Robinson Obama being peeved that other people noticed that she only got into Whitney Young H.S., Princeton, Harvard Law School, and Sidley Austin because of pull, racial and personal.

"A modern feminist takes her husband's [Spanish sur]name"

From the Los Angeles Times:
A modern feminist takes her husband's name 
A young self-described feminist surprises friends and colleagues by adding her husband's last name to her own. Why? Because she wants to.

By Emily Alpert Reyes 
As a kid, I played with toy dinosaurs and dolls alike. At 13, I insisted that a female rabbi perform my bat mitzvah ceremony. I didn't shave my legs during high school and much of college, in protest against sexist and generally pain-in-the-rear beauty norms. I have a career I love — and no plans to leave it. 
So how did a modern woman like me end up changing her name? 
I am now Emily Alpert Reyes, instead of Emily Alpert. The decision took friends and family by surprise. My bemused and wonderful husband told me, "You know you don't have to do that, right?" My editors found the decision so baffling that they prodded me to write this column. 
"She was the last person I would expect to go along with what really is a patriarchal tradition," a college friend wrote in an email she later forwarded to me. She added, "I am routinely surprised by the number of my well-educated, feminist friends who still change their names without question." 
Why did I do it? Not because anyone made me. Not because I disliked my old name — it's still there in plain sight, sandwiched between Emily and Reyes.

What could be more Spanish-surnamed and thus affirmative action-worthy than "Alpert Reyes?" I mean Alpert is already a Spanish-surname, isn't it? I know it has something to with Tijuana ...

November 12, 2013

"12 Years a Slave"

Brad Pitt drops by 12 Years a Slave
after a barnraising on the Witness set
From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:
New Movie, Same Old Skin Game

12 Years a Slave—a biopic about Solomon Northup, a black fiddler born in New York who somehow wound up a slave in Louisiana from 1841 until the law rescued him in 1853—is the nearly universally acclaimed frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar. 
Yet it’s built upon a fourth-rate screenplay that might have embarrassed Horatio Alger. Screenwriter John Ridley’s imitation Victorian dialogue is depressingly bad, reminiscent of the sub-Shakespearean lines John Wayne had to deliver as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror
12 Years a Slave is hailed by critics as a long-awaited breakthrough that finally dares to mention the subject of slavery after decades of the entertainment industry being controlled by the South. Yet as cinema encyclopedist Leonard Maltin notes: "12 Years A Slave is a remake."  ...
You can watch Gordon Parks' 1984 version, Solomon Northup's Odyssey, online for $2.99. 
The remake has more whippings, though. 
The message behind the ongoing enshrinement of the rather amateurish 12 Years a Slave is that the cultural whippings of white folk for the sins of their great-great-great-great-grandfathers will continue until morale improves.

Read the whole thing there.

By the way, here's the lobby card from the 1971 movie that has unexpectedly turned out to be one of the major influences upon this decade's Oscar contenders:

Any resemblances between Skin Game, starring James Garner and Louis Gossett Jr. as itinerant rapscallions in the South in 1858, and Django Unchained are not coincidental. Any coincidences between Skin Game and 12 Years a Slave are ironic.

Former Labour minister admits "spectacular mistake" on immigration

From the Daily Mail:
A spectacular mistake on immigration: Straw finally admits Labour 'messed up' by letting in one million East Europeans 
Former Home Secretary said the party's 2004 decision to hand immediate working rights to migrants from other EU states was a mistake 
Admission in his local paper is furthest any Labour minister has gone 
His successor David Blunkett also warned Roma migrants could cause riots 
Government had predicted influx of 13,000 a year - 1m came in a decade 
By JACK DOYLE
Jack Straw has admitted that throwing open Britain’s borders to Eastern European migrants was a ‘spectacular mistake’. 
The former Home Secretary said Labour’s 2004 decision to hand immediate working rights to Poles and migrants from other new EU states was a ‘well-intentioned policy we messed up’. 
His comments emerged on the same day as his successor as Home Secretary, David Blunkett, warned that the influx of Roma migrants into Britain risked causing riots. ... 
Virtually every other EU state, apart from Ireland and Sweden, kept their jobs markets closed for the seven years permitted.  
In an article for his local paper, the Lancashire Telegraph, Mr Straw – who is MP for Blackburn – admitted the forecasts were ‘worthless’. 
And he accepted the ‘social dislocation’ which can be caused when ‘large numbers of people from abroad settle in a particular area’.


By the way, Straw has also shown some courage in mentioning the pattern of Pakistani gangrapes of young English girls.

It's interesting how American elites are almost alone in the world in maintaining a unified front in never ever apologizing for what they've wrought with their immigration policies.

The missing I-word in the inequality mystery

From the NYT:
Rethinking the Income Gap and a College Education 
By EDUARDO PORTER 
... Still, the growing skepticism about the value of a [college] degree has fed into a deeper unease among some economists about the ironclad trust that policy makers, alongside many academics, have vested in higher education as the weapon of choice to battle widening income disparities and improve the prospects of the middle class. 
It has given new vigor to a critique, mostly by thinkers on the left of the political spectrum, that challenges the idea that educational disparities are a main driver of economic inequality. 
“It is absolutely clear that educational wage differentials have not driven wage inequality over the last 15 years,” said Lawrence Mishel, who heads the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning center for economic policy analysis. “Wage inequality has grown a lot over the last 15 years and the educational wage premium has changed little.” 
The standard analysis of the interplay between technology and education, developed by economists like Lawrence Katz and Claudia Goldin of Harvard, and David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is based on a simple proposition: technological progress increased the demand for highly educated workers who could deploy it profitably, increasing their incomes. Like trade, it rendered many less-skilled occupations obsolete, eliminating what used to be solid, middle-class jobs. 
This rendition of history suggests that improvements in technology from the PC to the Internet — coupled with a college graduation rate that slowed sharply in the 1980s — have been principal drivers of the nation’s widening income gap, leaving workers with less education behind. 
But critics like Mr. Mishel point out that this theory has important blind spots.
For instance, why have wages for college graduates stagnated over the last decade, even as innovation continues at a breathtaking pace? Between 2000 and 2008 the typical earnings of men with at least a bachelor’s degree fell by more than $2,000, after inflation, to $70,332 a year. Between 2008 and last year they fell a further $3,500. Though somewhat less pronounced, the pattern is similar for women. 
Both sides agree that the overall weakness of the job market since the turn of the millennium is a prime culprit. As Professor Katz noted: “The only moments we’ve had of broadly shared prosperity have been in tight labor markets.” 
Still, the sluggish job growth of the last decade – following the rapid expansion during the second half of the 1990s — demands an explanation, which the interplay between technology and skill does not provide. 
“We have no handle on what happened in the 2000s,” Professor Autor told me. 
“That is a mystery that nobody I know understands, and I can’t point to a single policy lever or a single external force that would explain it.”

Try to guess what word is completely missing from this article and from almost all respectable thinking about this mystery.

Women made up 31% of top novelists ever in a man of letters' 1898 list

At the Times Literary Supplement, Michael Caines reproduces a list drawn up in 1898 by a prominent man of letters named Clement K. Shorter of the 100 best novels of all time.
"He doesn't explain what exactly makes a book one of the "best", only that he has deliberately limited himself to one novel per novelist. Living authors are excluded ..."

The list is biased toward the British Isles, tending to overlook American books (such as Moby-Dick and The Red Badge of Courage), but has a smattering of Continental novels. 

And of course women writers were totally ignored in 1898. Back then, women were kept illiterate and chained to the stove so no women could read novels, much less write them. And if they did, no male critic would praise them.

Oh, wait, that's not true. 

At all. 

In fact, 31% of this Victorian gentleman's choices of the 100 best novelists no longer living are female. Here's Mr. Shorter's list, with female novelists in pink:
1. Don Quixote - 1604 - Miguel de Cervantes
2. The Holy War - 1682 - John Bunyan
3. Gil Blas - 1715 - Alain René le Sage
4. Robinson Crusoe - 1719 - Daniel Defoe
5. Gulliver's Travels - 1726 - Jonathan Swift
6. Roderick Random - 1748 - Tobias Smollett
7. Clarissa - 1749 - Samuel Richardson
8. Tom Jones - 1749 - Henry Fielding
9. Candide - 1756 - Françoise de Voltaire
10. Rasselas - 1759 - Samuel Johnson
11. The Castle of Otranto - 1764 - Horace Walpole
12. The Vicar of Wakefield - 1766 - Oliver Goldsmith
13. The Old English Baron - 1777 - Clara Reeve
14. Evelina - 1778 - Fanny Burney
15. Vathek - 1787 - William Beckford
16. The Mysteries of Udolpho - 1794 - Ann Radcliffe
17. Caleb Williams - 1794 - William Godwin
18. The Wild Irish Girl - 1806 - Lady Morgan
19. Corinne - 1810 - Madame de Stael
20. The Scottish Chiefs - 1810 - Jane Porter
21. The Absentee - 1812 - Maria Edgeworth
22. Pride and Prejudice - 1813 - Jane Austen

23. Headlong Hall - 1816 - Thomas Love Peacock
24. Frankenstein - 1818 - Mary Shelley
25. Marriage - 1818 - Susan Ferrier

26. The Ayrshire Legatees - 1820 - John Galt
27. Valerius - 1821 - John Gibson Lockhart
28. Wilhelm Meister - 1821 - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
29. Kenilworth - 1821 - Sir Walter Scott
30. Bracebridge Hall - 1822 - Washington Irving
31. The Epicurean - 1822 - Thomas Moore
32. The Adventures of Hajji Baba - 1824 - James Morier
33. The Betrothed - 1825 - Alessandro Manzoni
34. Lichtenstein - 1826 - Wilhelm Hauff
35. The Last of the Mohicans - 1826 - Fenimore Cooper
36. The Collegians - 1828 - Gerald Griffin
37. The Autobiography of Mansie Wauch - 1828 - David M. Moir
38. Richelieu - 1829 - G. P. R. James
39. Tom Cringle's Log - 1833 - Michael Scott
40. Mr. Midshipman Easy - 1834 - Frederick Marryat
41. Le Père Goriot - 1835 - Honoré de Balzac
42. Rory O'More - 1836 - Samuel Lover
43. Jack Brag - 1837 - Theodore Hook
44. Fardorougha the Miser - 1839 - William Carleton
45. Valentine Vox - 1840 - Henry Cockton
46. Old St. Paul's - 1841 - Harrison Ainsworth
47. Ten Thousand a Year - 1841 - Samuel Warren
48. Susan Hopley - 1841 - Catherine Crowe 
49. Charles O'Malley - 1841 - Charles Lever
50. The Last of the Barons - 1843 - Bulwer Lytton
51. Consuelo - 1844 - George Sand
52. Amy Herbert - 1844 - Elizabeth Sewell

53. Adventures of Mr. Ledbury - 1844 - Elizabeth Sewell [sic, actually by Albert Smith]
54. Sybil - 1845 - Lord Beaconsfield (a. k. a. Benjamin Disraeli)
55. The Three Musketeers - 1845 - Alexandre Dumas
56. The Wandering Jew - 1845 - Eugène Sue
57. Emilia Wyndham - 1846 - Anne Marsh
58. The Romance of War - 1846 - James Grant
59. Vanity Fair - 1847 - W. M. Thackeray
60. Jane Eyre - 1847 - Charlotte Brontë
61. Wuthering Heights - 1847 - Emily Brontë
62. The Vale of Cedars - 1848 - Grace Aguilar

63. David Copperfield - 1849 - Charles Dickens
64. The Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell - 1850 - Anne Manning
65. The Scarlet Letter - 1850 - Nathaniel Hawthorne
66. Frank Fairleigh - 1850 - Francis Smedley
67. Uncle Tom's Cabin - 1851 - H. B. Stowe
68. The Wide Wide World - 1851 - Susan Warner (Elizabeth Wetherell)
69. Nathalie - 1851 - Julia Kavanagh
70. Ruth - 1853 - Elizabeth Gaskell
71. The Lamplighter - 1854 - Maria Susanna Cummins

72. Dr. Antonio - 1855 - Giovanni Ruffini
73. Westward Ho! - 1855 - Charles Kingsley
74. Debit and Credit (Soll und Haben) - 1855 - Gustav Freytag
75. Tom Brown's School-Days - 1856 - Thomas Hughes
76. Barchester Towers - 1857 - Anthony Trollope
77. John Halifax, Gentleman - 1857 - Dinah Mulock (a. k. a. Dinah Craik)
78. Ekkehard - 1857 - Viktor von Scheffel
79. Elsie Venner - 1859 - O. W. Holmes
80. The Woman in White - 1860 - Wilkie Collins
81. The Cloister and the Hearth - 1861 - Charles Reade
82. Ravenshoe - 1861 - Henry Kingsley
83. Fathers and Sons - 1861 - Ivan Turgenieff
84. Silas Marner - 1861 - George Eliot
85. Les Misérables - 1862 - Victor Hugo
86. Salammbô - 1862 - Gustave Flaubert
87. Salem Chapel - 1862 - Margaret Oliphant
88. The Channings - 1862 - Ellen Wood (a. k. a. Mrs Henry Wood)
89. Lost and Saved - 1863 - The Hon. Mrs. Norton
90. The Schönberg-Cotta Family - 1863 - Elizabeth Charles

91. Uncle Silas - 1864 - Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
92. Barbara's History - 1864 - Amelia B. Edwards 
93. Sweet Anne Page - 1868 - Mortimer Collins
94. Crime and Punishment - 1868 - Feodor Dostoieffsky
95. Fromont Junior - 1874 - Alphonse Daudet
96. Marmorne - 1877 - P. G. Hamerton ("written under the pseudonym Adolphus Segrave")
97. Black but Comely - 1879 - G. J. Whyte-Melville
98. The Master of Ballantrae - 1889 - R. L. Stevenson
99. Reuben Sachs - 1889 - Amy Levy
100. News from Nowhere - 1891 - William Morris

My potted history of the novel would roughly be that what are now recognized in hindsight as early novels tend to be somewhat isolated tour d'forces by male pioneers like Cervantes and Defoe. It wasn't clear before the second half of the 18th century if the novel was a permanent type of writing. 

But, in the 1740s Samuel Richardson discovered with Pamela and Clarissa that there was a large market for books about women, and presumably read heavily by women, and from then on the novel was definitely a thing. Fairly quickly, women novelists emerged and earned a sizable share of the commercial market by the 1770s.

In general, female novelists tended to be less stylistically innovative or ambitious, and got less critical respect. Dr. Johnson, for example, would grump to Boswell about how much money Mrs. Burney was making, but also confess to having stayed up all night reading her latest page-turner.

The undisputed best of the first couple of generations of women novelists, Jane Austen, was a bestselling writer toward the end of her short life, with a major fan in the Prince Regent. After her death in her early forties, interest inevitably faded, but her reputation was kept alive, although not by critics and scholars, but by subsequent great writers such as Charles Dickens who frequently mentioned his large debt to her books. A recent computer study of word patterns in English literature found that the two most influential writers after Shakespeare were Austen and Sir Walter Scott. 

(By the way, I'm becoming interested in Scott as a political-historical thinker on ethnic conflict, such as between Scottish Highlanders and the English and between the Normans and the Saxons. Any recommendations for the most accessible of Scott's books along those lines?)

In general, I'd say that the male writers on Mr. Shorter's list are, from the perspective of 2013, on average more distinguished than the female writers. This would be another example of the common phenomenon of the male sex having a larger right tail of whatever bell curve you are looking at than the female sex. But the effect is not overwhelming. 

The 1898 list also adds 8 novels by living writers (e.g., Tolstoy, Hardy, Henry James, and Zola), none of them women. That's a tiny sample size, but I suspect that it's possible that women novelists subsequently faded in literary importance for awhile during the stylistically innovative late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Let my children play!

Here in the U.S., a current educational panacea envisioned for Closing the Gap is to round up all the four-year-olds (and maybe three-year-olds, or younger) and set them to studying their ABCs while they get their 30 million words of being talked at by adults with college degrees.

Earlier this month the "Too Much, Too Soon" campaign made headlines with a letter calling for a change to the start age for formal learning in schools. Here, one of the signatories, Cambridge researcher David Whitebread, explains why children may need more time to develop before their formal education begins in earnest.

In England children now start formal schooling, and the formal teaching of literacy and numeracy at the age of four.  A recent letter signed by around 130 early childhood education experts, including myself, published in the Daily Telegraph  (11 Sept 2013) advocated an extension of informal, play-based pre-school provision and a delay to the start of formal ‘schooling’ in England from the current effective start until the age of seven (in line with a number of other European countries who currently have higher levels of academic achievement and child well-being). 
This is a brief review of the relevant research evidence which overwhelmingly supports a later start to formal education. This evidence relates to the contribution of playful experiences to children’s development as learners, and the consequences of starting formal learning at the age of four to five years of age. 
There are several strands of evidence which all point towards the importance of play in young children’s development, and the value of an extended period of playful learning before the start of formal schooling. These arise from anthropological, psychological, neuroscientific and educational studies. 
Anthropological studies of children’s play in extant hunter-gatherer societies, and evolutionary psychology studies of play in the young of other mammalian species, have identified play as an adaptation which evolved in early human social groups.

Yeah, but how many Mbuti pygmies or bonobo chimps made partner at Skadden, Arps last year?
It enabled humans to become powerful learners and problem-solvers. Neuroscientific studies have shown that playful activity leads to synaptic growth, particularly in the frontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for all the uniquely human higher mental functions. 
In my own area of experimental and developmental psychology, studies have also consistently demonstrated the superior learning and motivation arising from playful, as opposed to instructional, approaches to learning in children. Pretence play supports children’s early development of symbolic representational skills, including those of literacy, more powerfully than direct instruction. Physical, constructional and social play supports children in developing their skills of intellectual and emotional ‘self-regulation’, skills which have been shown to be crucial in early learning and development. Perhaps most worrying, a number of studies have documented the loss of play opportunities for children over the second half of the 20th century and demonstrated a clear link with increased indicators of stress and mental health problems. 
Within educational research, a number of longitudinal studies have demonstrated superior academic, motivational and well-being outcomes for children who had attended child-initiated, play-based pre-school programmes. 
One particular study of 3,000 children across England, funded by the Department for Education themselves, showed that an extended period of high quality, play-based pre-school education was of particular advantage to children from disadvantaged households. 
Studies have compared groups of children in New Zealand who started formal literacy lessons at ages 5 and 7. Their results show that the early introduction of formal learning approaches to literacy does not improve children’s reading development, and may be damaging. By the age of 11 there was no difference in reading ability level between the two groups, but the children who started at 5 developed less positive attitudes to reading, and showed poorer text comprehension than those children who had started later. In a separate study of reading achievement in 15 year olds across 55 countries, researchers showed that there was no significant association between reading achievement and school entry age. 
- See more at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/discussion/school-starting-age-the-evidence#sthash.0OUafq1M.dpuf

That reminds me of when my son was three. My wife spent a lot of effort getting him accepted by the most fashionable pre-K program in Chicago's Lincoln Park. But at the last moment it all fell apart, when she mentioned that he wouldn't be coming on Wednesdays: That's when he went to his grandmother's to help her bake cookies (i.e., lick the spatula). And maybe he'd come home at lunchtime a couple of other days per week because 8 to 3 was a long day for him. 

The pre-K's admission officer was shocked by my wife's cavalier attitude toward her three-year-old's academic career. All the educational progress they were making would be at risk if he left early, much less spent an entire day per week in the non-academic atmosphere of his grandmother's house. When my wife voiced skepticism, the admission officer pointed out that she had an M.A. in Education and my wife did not. 

Talks broke down irretrievably, so he stayed home another year and kept going to his grandmother's house to help her bake cookies.

November 11, 2013

Rolling Stone needs a large type edition

For the last few months, I find that I have a subscription to the venerable Rolling Stone magazine in print, which helps me stay up to date on what kids these days are into. For example, currently on the cover of the Rolling Stone is Lou Reed. It sounds like this promising young man has a great career ahead of him. 

The only drawback is that the magazine is no longer printed on oversized paper, so the font is tiny. Surely, though, the average Rolling Stone reader must be about as presbyopic as I am, so isn't it about time for a Large Print version of Rolling Stone, just like Reader's Digest long put out?


By the way, here's a 1968 photo of a panel discussion at a mandatory school assembly at Beverly Hills High School following a performance by the Velvet Underground, which had been arranged by student body president Mickey Kaus. From left to right: young Mickey, the school psychiatrist (how many public high schools besides Beverly Hills had a school psychiatrist in 1968? I imagine he was a Freudian, with a couch and everything ... ), a school music teacher, and Lou Reed, who appears less fascinated by what the student council leader is saying than are the two older gentlemen.

By the by the way, this is a good illustration of how male sitting styles changed during the 1960s. The older men have their legs tightly crossed, the way women cross their legs today. Lou and Mickey have their knees splayed wide apart. If they were to cross their legs, it would be by putting one ankle on top of a knee.

November 10, 2013

Tom Friedman: Let them hack cabs and take in lodgers!

Thomas Friedman's estate
Thomas Friedman writes:
But thanks to the merger of globalization and the I.T. revolution that has unfolded over the last two decades ... “the high-wage, medium-skilled job is over,” says Stefanie Sanford, the chief of global policy and advocacy for the College Board. The only high-wage jobs that will support the kind of middle-class lifestyle of old will be high-skilled ones, requiring a commitment to rigorous education, adaptability and innovation, she added. ...
To be in the middle class, you may need to consider not only high-skilled jobs, “but also more nontraditional forms of work,” explained Manyika. Work itself may have to be thought of as “a form of entrepreneurship” where you draw on all kinds of assets and skills to generate income.
This could mean leveraging your skills through Task Rabbit, or your car through Uber, or your spare bedroom through AirBnB to add up to a middle-class income. 

A reader comments:
Menial work + part time driver + renting out your personal space = the bright future envisioned by Tom Friedman, NYT chief futurologist!

November 9, 2013

I told you so

From Vanity Fair:
The Lonely Guy 
By Todd S. Purdum 
When Barack Obama arrived in Washington almost five years ago, the universal assumption was that the young president—who had, after all, won office by exploiting every connective tool of the national social and electoral network—would run his White House in sharp contrast to the bunkered, hunkered-down George W. Bush. 
Like so much conventional wisdom, that impression has proved dead wrong. In fact, Obama’s resolute solitude—his isolation and alienation from the other players and power centers of Washington, be they rivals or friends—has emerged as the defining trait of his time in office. He may be the biggest presidential paradox since Thomas Jefferson, the slaveholder who wrote the Declaration of Independence: a community organizer who works alone.

You know, while Obama was a community organizer, he didn't actually organize any communities. The job was a useful box for him to check off while he boned up for the LSAT, a way for him to prove to Harvard Law School admissions that this guy from Hawaii with a name not uncommon in Japan wasn't just another Asian applicant, but was instead a Man of His People.
In early 2011, when the president’s most trusted political adviser, David Axelrod, left the White House to return to Chicago to run his re-election campaign, Obama made a surprise appearance at Axelrod’s going-away party in a grand apartment off Dupont Circle on a wintry Saturday night. Clad casually in a black jacket, he spoke warmly, even emotionally, of the aide who had done so much to elect him. Then he made his way quickly around a living room full of Cabinet members, other aides, and off-duty reporters, grasping each proffered hand with a single, relentless, repeated greeting: “Gotta go.”...

I could imagine myself as President being, like Obama, worn down by all the people wanting to shake my hand and (shudder) talk to me. On the other hand, I can't imagine myself as President in the first place, but he could.
Obama’s self-evident isolation has another effect: It tends to insulate him from engagement in the management of his own administration. The latest round of “what did the president know and when did he know it” on the disastrous rollout of Obamacare and the tapping of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone raised troubling questions: Were Obama’s aides too afraid to tell him? Was he too detached to ask? Or both? At the least, such glaring failures cast fresh doubt on Obama’s invariable assurance to those around him in times of trouble: “I got this.” 
... If he had chosen to be a novelist or neurosurgeon, an airline pilot or an atomic engineer

Novelist, sure, although not a terribly interesting one. But those other professions? They are specifically ones where a man with an ego bigger than his competence can do disastrous harm.
, the very qualities of self-sufficiency that even some of his strongest supporters find so frustrating would be an unalloyed asset. But in a politician—above all, in a president—such qualities are confounding and, at times, crippling. 
“He never needed anyone to affirm his value,” one of his longest-serving advisers told me, “and for that reason, I’m not sure he understands what it would mean to provide a little affirmation to another politician. Because it wouldn’t mean much to him.” 

No, Obama thrives on public affirmation. He was a run of the mill Ivy grad, more or less treading water in his mid-20s, up until the moment he arrived at Harvard Law School where he was instantly apotheosized at the First Black President. As classmate Jackie Fox of the Runaways noted, his persona swelled like her old bandmate Joan Jett's had.

Obama loves standing on a stage and receiving mass public adoration. What he doesn't like is talking to people, especially people with their own agendas, such as other politicians.

He seems to have a Zero Sum approach to cheers -- if other people are also being praised, that makes the praise he's getting relatively less awesome. If he insincerely flatters other politicians that raises the troubling question that maybe some of the worship he receives is insincere flattery, too.
... Indeed, however he treats his enemies, Obama could work harder to get by with a little help from his friends. Throughout his tenure, he has generally refused to adopt the practice of every president since at least Gerald Ford by posing for pictures with his guests at the more than a dozen White House holiday parties (except in the case of the receptions for Congress and the White House press corps, who could be counted on to make a real fuss).

When I was in the corporate world in Chicago, I don't know how many executives had a pictures of themselves and Michael Jordan at charity golf outings. Posing with complete strangers as if you are old buddies is part of the job description of being Michael Jordan or President.
Successive flights of frustrated senior aides to both the president and the First Lady have battled the Obamas’ persistent assumption that supporters (and staffers, for that matter) don’t need to be thanked—a battle fought largely in vain. 
Five years into their tenure, the couple has a social reputation few would have envisioned when they came to town: more standoffish than the Bushes, and ruder than the Clintons. 

Obviously, Michelle has a lot of issues involving garden variety insecurity and resentment. But, Barry has the interpersonal skill set of a humble man, combined with an inflated sense of entitlement: Well, of course, those little people would want to slave away to help me lower the sea level or whatever. Why should they expect to be thanked? Isn't being permitted to assist in my achieving my rightful status it's own reward?
... On Syria, Obama clearly did not run the congressional traps. Having announced—on his own—that the use of chemical weapons would constitute a red line requiring an American response, he suddenly decided in September to seek congressional approval without any real count of the Democratic caucus. And he made up his mind not in deliberations with his secretaries of state or defense but after a walk around the White House lawn with his chief of staff Denis McDonough—an adviser since his Senate days—before informing a handful of other senior aides of his decision.

Another aspect of Obama is (relatively) low energy, especially for one of the youngest Presidents ever. Sending America off to war is (or ought to be) a big decision, involving much consultation and coalition-building (e.g., the energetic George H.W. Bush in 1990-91). Yet, with both Libya and Syria, Obama did it in an offhand manner, in part because that's about all he's got in the tank.
And then there is golf. ... Obama has taken a page out of Wilson’s book, invariably competing in a foursome with the same retinue of junior aides and old friends—most of whom are better than he is and whose seemingly sole mission is to sharpen the president’s own game.

Obama's primary golf partner is Marvin Nicholson, his current body man. Nicholson is this cool slacker, a 6'-8" white guy from Vancouver Island, who drifted around in low-level sports jobs, mixed with a little bartending. He was discovered by John Kerry working at a wind surfing shop. Kerry thought he was so brotastic that he wanted to hire him as an aide, but Nicholson instead chose to go caddy at Augusta National Golf Club for a year. Finally, Senator Kerry won him over. Obama inherited Nicholson from Kerry.

Obama is so averse to playing golf with anybody important that another of his more frequent partners is Nicholson's brother.
... (And speaking of summits, Obama has no relationship with any foreign leader that is remotely akin to Ronald Reagan’s with Margaret Thatcher, or Bill Clinton and George W. Bush’s with Tony Blair. The scandalous phone-tapping imbroglio—even if the fault of the Bush administration—now makes it unlikely that he ever will.) 
... “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Obama told his 2008 campaign political director, Patrick Gaspard, now his ambassador to South Africa. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.” ...
Just how someone wired the way Obama is got so far in politics remains a puzzlement.

Uh ... well ... you know ... Okay, since everybody seems to be permanently baffled by how Barack Obama ever came to be seen as Presidential Timber, let me just ask: if he'd remained "Barry Soetoro," half-Indonesian-American of "international" and "multicultural" background, would anybody have ever heard of him?
His aloneness is generally regarded as springing from a surfeit of self-confidence, a certitude that he really does know best. But at least one former senior administration adviser has argued that the trait springs from the opposite source: a basic insecurity on the president’s part, one that keeps him from surrounding himself with strong intellectual rivals in either the White House or the Cabinet. 

So, at some level, Obama, who has some powers of self-awareness, realizes he's not really all that.

The whole situation would be funny, if anybody were allowed to joke about it.

November 8, 2013

"Did Twitter Leave Money on the Table?"

Back in March 1983, the marketing research company I worked for went public at $23 per share, while this week Twitter went public for $26 per share. Both stocks immediately shot into the 40s.

The way an initial public offering works is that a firm, whose stock has previously been owned by its founders, favored employees, and private investors (such as venture capitalists), creates new share and offers them to the public through a 2 stage process. A price per share is picked and the new shares are offered just before the opening day of trading to selected allies, such as the Wall Street firm taking the company public, the investment bank's financial friends, and to more employees.

Initially, the IPO price before trading was going to be $16 a share, but at the last second the buzz was so intense that the shares went for $23 each. For example, as brand new employee, I was given the privilege of buying some shares at the IPO price. I bought $2,000 worth at $23 per share.

But the stock instantly shot upwards as soon as trading began and quickly stabilized around $43 per share, and finished the day at $43. So, I made $1739 on my $2000 investment in one day. Woo-hoo!

Of course, all that raised questions about who, beside junior employees like me, benefits when the IPO is severely underpriced.

The numbers for Twitter's first day of trading were almost identical (instead of $23 to $43, Twitter was offered to the privileged at $26 and instantly shot up to $45 in public trading, although the total number of shares Twitter offered was vastly greater.
Did Twitter Leave Money on the Table? 
BY DAVID GELLES AND PETER EAVIS 
The first day of trading in Twitter stock added more than $10 billion to the company’s market value.

Twitter’s stock jumped 73 percent in its first day of trading, adding more than $10 billion to the company’s market capitalization. 
If the company had sold its 70 million shares at $45.10, the price of the first trade, instead of at $26, the price of the initial public offering, it would have raised $3.16 billion instead of its more modest $1.82 billion. 
That math suggests that, as Dan Primack of Fortune wrote, “Twitter left more than $1.3 billion on the table.” 

In case you are wondering about the arithmetic ($10 billion v. $1.3 billion), note that Twitter, like all IPOs, only offered a fraction of its shares to the public.
This is a common assertion when new stocks soar in their first days of trading. It suggests that the bankers managing the offering miscalculated investor demand for shares and that the company somehow lost out. Twitter shares closed down 7.24 percent, to $41.65, on Friday. 
But unpacking this claim raises thorny questions about who, exactly, is supposed to benefit from an I.P.O. and what exactly is motivating investors when they seek shares in a new company. 
Should a stock offering maximize value for the companies selling shares, for the investors looking to gobble those shares up, or for early employees and funders? And why are investors buying the shares – because they love the company’s fundamentals, or because they sense a good deal? 
One school of thought says companies should use I.P.O.’s to raise the maximum amount of cash, regardless of what that does to its short-term share price.
“It’s not in Twitter’s interest to really care about the price they close at today,” David Stewart, co-founder of a start-up called JumpCam, said in an email on Thursday. “What should matter to them is one, how much money they raise via the I.P.O., and two, their long-term valuation.” 
Mr. Stewart argues that Twitter and its banker, Goldman Sachs, widely miscalculated demand for the stock, depriving the company of cash in the bank and long-term market value. 
There may be some truth to that, but Twitter is clearly satisfied with the amount of cash it raised and now has access to the capital markets should it need to raise more money soon.

You know, in the opening day jubilation, the founders of my company laughed off the money their investment bankers had left on the table by underpricing the stock. But, a half decade later, they desperately needed that money and, indeed, just barely avoided bankruptcy.
As for the investors who bought the stock as part of the offering, they did indeed make out well. Those who were able to secure an allocation of shares recognized an instant 73 percent gain on their investment. Mr. Stewart and those who share his view argue that that’s an irresponsible move, “transferring some value” from Twitter “to pre-I.P.O. speculators.”

Here's an anecdote I've told before:
When I was getting an MBA many years ago, I was the favorite of an acerbic old Corporate Finance professor because I could be counted on to blurt out in class all the stupid misconceptions to which students are prone. 
One day he asked: "If you were running a publicly traded company, would it be acceptable for you to create new stock and sell it for less than it was worth?" 
"Sure," I confidently announced. "Our duty is to maximize our stockholders' wealth, and while selling the stock for less than it's worth would harm our current shareholders, it would benefit our new shareholders who buy the underpriced stock, so it all comes out in the wash. Right?" 
"Wrong," he thundered. "Your obligation is to your current stockholders, not to somebody who might buy the stock in the future." 

That's not the easiest moral point to understand. And you see almost everybody who is anybody mess it up when it comes to the value of citizenship and immigration.

In the case of an IPO, the small number of executives signing off on the price picked by the investment bank generally own a large fraction of pre-IPO existing shares, so if they want to feel cool for having their stock shoot upward on the first day, well, that's their loss. (Of course, they aren't all the pre-IPO shareholders, so my old prof's moral point still applies.)
But it is also in Twitter’s long-term interest to remain in the good graces of institutional investors that believe in the company and will continue to invest. 
After all, based on fundamentals alone, it was hard enough to justify valuing Twitter at $13 billion, let alone $30 billion. 

In other words, the IPO industry exists in sizable part to give Wall Street insiders a discounted price on shares that they can, if they want, sell to the public. In return, the Wall Street insiders whoop up the stock to get the rubes in Shaker Heights and Scottsdale excited about it. In fact, the bigger discount the firm gives the Wall Street big boys, the harder they'll work to make the doctors and dentists out there who keep an eye on CNBC worked up over the stock.
As for the early employees, venture investors and those who managed to secure Twitter shares on the secondary market, they also made out well in the debut.
Like I made $1,700.

Of course, the founders/executives could have gotten a higher valuation and paid bonuses to employees, so shortchanging yourself seems like an inefficient way to pay for Steve Sailer's big night on the town. (I don't recall the exact size of the bar tab I picked up that evening in 1983 with some friends back home at the snazziest bar in Sherman Oaks, but it must have been $40, maybe even $50.)
Sometimes insiders sell during the I.P.O. Such sellers might therefore favor pushing hard for a high offering price. Such was the case at Facebook, where internal pressure for a lofty valuation contributed to its high offering price.

Facebook was offered to insiders at $38 and closed its first day of trading at $38.23. This was widely considered shameful by all the Wall Street insiders who you usually pick up a larger profit out of being pals of the underwriter, but Mark Zuckerberg appears to have preferred getting the market price for his firm to being the toast of Wall Street.
But no Twitter insiders sold stock as part of the offering, meaning their shares, valued at as little as $17 just a week ago, are now worth more than $40 a share. With the shares still at least 60 percent above the I.P.O. price, Twitter’s insiders must feel rather pleased with how the offering was executed.

At my employer, the feeling was universal: if our stock goes up 87% in one day, then surely it will go up 8.7% tomorrow and the day after and the day after. Instead, the stock price drifted back down from $43 per share back to $23 per share over the next year. In other words, the IPO price had been quite reasonable, but there just happened to have been a mini-tech IPO bubble blowing up the week we went public. (Spring 1983 may have been the first broad tech IPO bubble in American history. It definitely hasn't been the last.)

But, the firm couldn't get its hands back on the capital it could have acquired by setting the IPO price at, say, $40 per share.
The truth is, there’s no way to know how much money Twitter left on the table.
If Twitter had priced its shares more aggressively in recent weeks, the tenor of media coverage might have been more skeptical, investors might have been scared off and demand could have lagged. 
By taking a more conservative approach to pricing, Twitter possibly deprived itself of some capital. But it won the good graces of the market, which will help determine its fate going forward. 
Without a doubt, Twitter probably could have raised more money for itself by increasing its I.P.O. price. But an I.P.O. is far more than a fund-raising exercise. 
When a company has publicly traded shares, it has taken the bracing step of putting itself at the mercy of investors. Twitter’s stock is now a public barometer of sentiment toward the company. That is something that had to be considered when pricing its I.P.O. 
If the price had been much higher than $26, the stock might have plunged below the offering price on the first day of trading, setting off a swirl of negativity. 
Facebook’s shares sagged after its I.P.O., complicating management’s efforts to convince investors that it was working on ways to increase advertising revenue. 
Twitter still has to prove it can make money. But for now, at least, it has the confidence of the public markets.

Oh, boy ... I think we need to subdivide the concept of the "public markets" a wee bit, from, at the high end, Twitter's underwriters (Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley) to the middle range being close personal friends of the underwriters who got shares for only $26, down to the low end of daytrading dentists who paid $45.

The upper and middle ranges of the public markets love Twitter for putting hundreds of millions of dollars in their pockets. The mass end of the market, the people who pay the retail price for Twitter shares, loves Twitter because the business press, which takes their leads from the upper and middle section of Wall Street who pay the wholesale price, tells them to love Twitter.

Just because Goldman, the two Morgans, and you are all playing in the same game doesn't mean you are all playing on the same team.

Miami Herald: "Incognito considered black in Dolphins locker room"

The NFL brouhaha involving two teammates on the Miami Dolphins -- in which a thuggish white named Richie (cue Geoffrey Holder) Incognito (6'3", 319) is accused of hazing and bullying an upper middle class half-black named Jonathan Martin (6'5", 312 pounds) -- is a cornucopia of iSteve fixations.

For example, Martin is the son of a white woman and a black man with a Harvard degree. Sound like anybody? Martin attended the top prep school in his region: not Punahou, but Harvard-Westlake. That's a school that comes up frequently on iSteve for multiple reasons: it was my debate team's arch-rival, it's not impossible that my son lined up against Martin in a football game in the mid-2000s, it's the alma mater of the NBA Collins twins, most notably, Jason Collins), etc. etc.

Martin went on to play football for Stanford. One observer noted:
“Before, [Martin] wasn’t around Nebraska [Incognito's college], LSU kind of guys. He’s always been around Stanford, Duke, Rice kind of players,” Eumont said. “In locker rooms full of Nebraska, LSU, Southern Cal players, Miami players, they’ll look at this as a weakness."

I may have mentioned Stanford, Duke, and Rice once or twice over the years.

I can identify with the apparently tattoo-less Martin more easily than with the heavily tattooed Incognito, but one iSteve-connection is that the acne-prone Incognito, who has a long history of bad behavior, has been accused (without proof) of being prone to 'roid rage.

Of course, what makes this locker room story a national media obsession, on the other hand, is that it's another racial man-bites-dog story, like the Duke lacrosse story or the KKK running amok at Oberlin. In this case, it's a low class white bullying a high class black: Bull Connor hosing down Dr. Martin Luther King, that kind of thing that's so beloved by the dominant worldview.

In contrast, consider Michael Jordan punching, say, teammate Steve Kerr in the face to, uh, encourage him. (Kerr is from the rarefied class of Protestant American Arabists -- his martyred father Malcolm Kerr was president of the American University of Beirut.) Does that make Jordan a bully? Of course not! That just proves that MJ was the Greatest Competitor Ever.

But, but, but, Incognito used the N-word! And that's all anyone needs to know.

Of course, in the real world, it all turns out to be much more complicated.

Armando Salguero writes in the Miami Herald:
Incognito considered black in Dolphins locker room
... ESPN analyst and former Dolphins wide receiver Cris Carter has know Mike Pouncey [the Dolphin's black center, who played next to Incognito and Martin on the offensive line] since the player's childhood. Today Carter said on air he recently spoke to Mike Pouncey and the center, who is Incognito's friend, addressed race. 
"They [the Dolphin players] don't feel as if [Incognito's] a racist, they don't feel as if he picked on Jonathan repeatedly and bullied him, but if they could do it all over again there would be situations that they might change but they’re very, very comfortable with Richie,” Carter said. 
“They think it’s sad, not only that Jonathan’s not on the football team, but also that Richie is being depicted as a bigot and as a racist.” 
How is this possible? 
Well, I've spoken to multiple people today about this and the explanation from all of them is that in the Dolphins locker room, Richie Incognito was considered a black guy. He was accepted by the black players. He was an honorary black man. 
And Jonathan Martin, who is bi-racial, was not. Indeed, Martin was considered less black than Incognito. 
"Richie is honarary," one player who left the Dolphins this offseason told me today. "I don't expect you to understand because you're not black. But being a black guy, being a brother is more than just about skin color. It's about how you carry yourself. How you play. Where you come from. What you've experienced. A lot of things." 
Another former Dolphins employee told me Martin is considered "soft" by his teammates and that's a reason he's not readily accepted by some of the players, particularly the black players. His background -- Stanford educated and the son of highly educated people -- was not necessarily seen as a strength or a positive by some players and it perpetuated in the way Martin carried himself. 
And so -- agree with it or not, comprehend it or not -- this is a reason the Dolphins haven't turned on Incognito as a racist.

November 7, 2013

Venezuelan mannequins

Typical
Venezuelan
mannequin
From the NYT:
Mannequins Give Shape to a Venezuelan Fantasy

Venezuela's Inflated Vision of Beauty: In Venezuela, women are confronted with a culture of increasingly enhanced physiques fueled by beauty pageants and plastic surgery. 
By WILLIAM NEUMAN

VALENCIA, Venezuela — Frustrated with the modest sales at his small mannequin factory, Eliezer Álvarez made a simple observation: Venezuelan women were increasingly using plastic surgery to transform their bodies, yet the mannequins in clothing stores did not reflect these new, often extreme proportions.

So he went back to his workshop and created the kind of woman he thought the public wanted — one with a bulging bosom and cantilevered buttocks, a wasp waist and long legs, a fiberglass fantasy, Venezuelan style. 
Typical Venezuelan
window shoppers
The shape was augmented, and so were sales. Now his mannequins, and others like them, have become the standard in stores across Venezuela, serving as an exaggerated, sometimes polarizing, vision of the female form that calls out from the doorways of tiny shops selling cheap clothes to working-class women and the display windows of fancy boutiques in multilevel shopping malls. 
Mr. Álvarez’s art may have been meant to imitate life. But in a culture saturated with such images, life is returning the compliment. 
“You see a woman like this and you say, ‘Wow, I want to look like her,’ ” said Reina Parada, as she sanded a mannequin torso in the workshop. Although she cannot afford it, she said, she would like to get implant surgery someday. “It gives you better self-esteem.”

The article doesn't get around to mentioning that the mannequins are white in facial features, which also isn't true of most Venezuelan women.

The article does feature an interview with gown designer Osmel Sousa, who has been the de facto Generalissimo of Beauty in Venezuela since 1981. Sousa highly approves of women doing whatever it takes to look like mannequins. In fact, he insists upon it.
Osmel Sousa, the longtime head of the Miss Venezuela pageant, takes credit for the [plastic surgery] trend. He recommended a nose job for Venezuela’s first Miss Universe, which he says made her victory possible more than three decades ago.

“When there is a defect, I correct it,” Mr. Sousa said. “If it can be easily fixed with surgery, then why not do it?” 
For Mr. Sousa, beauty really is skin deep: “I say that inner beauty doesn’t exist. That’s something that unpretty women invented to justify themselves.”

Call me crazy, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that old Osmel isn't the straightest guy in the world.

If this Venezuelan beauty pageant gig ever peters out for Osmel, he should move to America, where he'd be welcomed in Washington and New York as a natural leader of the Immigration Reform movement. Who better to upbraid the white racists resisting the Path to Citizenship?