What’s Your SSQ?

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Ron Byrnes

Social science quotient.

Probably not as high as it could or should be because we’re shaped by Ron and Don.

The “Ron and Don Show” is a popular Seattle-area radio program on 97.3 FM that I occasionally tune into during NPR fundraising campaigns and sports talk commercial breaks.

Their success isn’t accidental, it rests on great names, radio voices, personalities, energy, chemistry, and pacing, all topped off with a laser-like programming focus on whichever individual is deemed most interesting each particular day: the barefoot bandit from Whidbey Island, the Bellevue City Council person who got mauled by a black bear, the police officer charged with deadly force, the college student that committed suicide.

Ron and Don hammer away at each individual’s story for hours on end and we eat it up because we always have been and always will be suckers for detailed stories well told. Even better when the stories are somewhat sordid and make us feel better about our lives.

But we’re out of touch with the effect of the Ron and Don-like media shining its spotlight so continuously and narrowly on individuals.

The cumulative effect is we’re utterly unable to think sociologically about pervasive patterns and themes among groups. Put differently, we can’t take stories of individuals and extrapolate about what they do and don’t represent in terms of larger social scientific trends.

We’re intellectual weaklings.

Here’s two non-Ron and Don stories from last week that I offer as a social science quotient quiz. Determine your “SSQ” by using a scale of 1 to 10. Assign yourself a “1” if these findings completely surprise you, a “10” if you were already familiar with the studies and the findings, and “2’s” through “9’s” for points in between.

Story one is available here. An excerpt:

Harvard and Duke Biz school professors Michael Norton and Dan Ariely asked over 5,000 Americans about US wealth distribution and how it should look if things could be changed.

“Respondents vastly underestimated the actual level of wealth inequality in the United States, believing that the wealthiest quintile (20 percent) held about 59 percent of the wealth when the actual number is closer to 84 percent.” Studies show current US wealth inequality is near record highs, with the top one percent of Americans estimated to hold around 50 percent of the nation’s wealth.

Story two—available at Slate.com.

The U.S. imprisons more people in absolute numbers and per capita than any other country on earth. With 5 percent of the world population, the U.S. hosts upward of 20 percent of its prisoners. The country’s incarceration rate has roughly quintupled since the early 1970s. In 1980, one in 10 black high-school dropouts were incarcerated. By 2008, that number was 37 percent.

For extra credit, submit your score via the comment section.

If our scores are low, as I presume they will be, it’s not Ron’s and Don’s fault. They don’t have a dog in the “individual versus collective thinking” fight I’m outlining. All they care about is that more listeners tune into them than NPR and sports talk. And their winning formula elevates the individual at the expense of social scientific understanding because we tune in and don’t demand any more from them.

Why the Rich Don’t Feel Rich

Posted on October 6, 2010 by Ron Byrnes

The title of a great article by Laura Rowley on Yahoo’s Personal Finance page last week.

In short, Todd Henderson, a U of Chicago lawyer who makes $300k/year with his doctor wife, got hammered by his blog readers for arguing that he wasn’t rich and couldn’t afford a tax increase.

The blowback took two forms. First, people understandably took him to task for his questionable logic. After reading his post, I was stunned by his lack of perspective. I guess he doesn’t know many regular folk. And I guess he didn’t read the recent WSJ article that detailed how many poor people go shopping at Wal-mart at 11:50p.m. the last day of every month so that by the time they hit the check-out registers with their baby formula, diapers, and food, their new food stamps have kicked in. Or I guess he hasn’t traveled in a developing country.

Second, people questioned his sanity for daring to write the post, intimating that he would have been better off not writing it at all. This is where I disagree. While I have no sympathy for his argument, I admire his courage for honestly stating his views. As a blogger, and person I suppose, I probably self-censor myself way too much. Henderson didn’t get hung up on “what might other people think”, instead he chose authenticity. Questionable arguments honestly communicated deepen our civil discourse and strengthen our democracy.

The Intrapersonal Conundrum

Posted on October 4, 2010 by Ron Byrnes

Recently I advocated accepting and adapting to people’s irritating behaviors rather than trying to change them. But what about our own irritating behaviors? How do we know when to accept them versus when to commit to trying to change them?

Of course, not everyone is introspective; as a result, some people lack self understanding. Ask them which of their behaviors most irritate the people they’re in relationships with and they draw a complete blank. I’m probably too reflective for my own good, regularly engaging in self-assessment. One limitation I’m keenly aware of is an aversion to personal networking. Closely related to that, I suck at self-promotion.

Among other ripple effects, this blog has a small readership and my professional successes exist mostly within my classrooms. A colleague of mine is the opposite, a brilliant networker and self-promoter. A mediocre teacher, she’s developed a national reputation as an expert in a very specific sub-category of education. She travels all the time and speaks to large groups for lots of money.

Am I envious? Not on a personal level, but maybe professionally. I would enjoy more consulting opportunities than the one or two a year I average. But not enough to change. I understand that there’s a perfect correlation between my lack of networking initiative and the number of consulting gigs I get.

Even though social and professional networking skills are more important than ever, I’m perfectly content not being a networker or self promoter. In fact, I don’t want to get better at networking or self promotion. I’m an educator, so I’m not anti-social, I just have no patience for the phoniness on which so much of it seems to rest. “Here’s my card.” “Who cares.”

Another limitation I’m keenly aware of is a deeply rooted counter-cultural propensity for saving. My dad grew up during the Depression, and it left an indelible mark on him, and so I blame his hyper-frugal modeling. But unlike my aversion to personal networking, this is a limitation I want to change.

Here’s one of millions of examples of my often irrational economic behavior. One day in Chengdu, China I argued at length with a Carrefour manager about socks I purchased. Despite being on sale, the socks were rung up at the regular price. Our language differences, the store’s employee hierarchy, and my stubbornness made for a combustible, and in hindsight, hilarious combination.

In this area of my life, I want to act more rationally, so I’m working on loosening up.

What explains my markedly different way of thinking about these two personal limitations?

I’m not sure.

Make Parents Accountable for Children’s Fitness

Posted on September 20, 2010 by Ron Byrnes

More positive impacts of aerobic activity. Wish I had a dollar for everyone of these types of articles I’ve read recently. Key paragraph from a NYT blog titled “Can Exercise Makes Kids Smarter?” “. . . the researchers, in their separate reports, noted that the hippocampus and basal ganglia regions interact in the human brain, structurally and functionally. Together they allow some of the most intricate thinking. If exercise is responsible for increasing the size of these regions and strengthening the connection between them, being fit may ‘enhance neurocognition’ in young people.”

Later in the post the blogger references research that claims 25% of school-aged children are sedentary. The conventional conclusion, recommit to physical education in schools. Before doing that, it’s important to ask who should be accountable for K-12 students’ relative fitness, their teachers or their parents and guardians? Recommitting to physical education in schools assumes it’s their teachers, but I assume two things: 1) public school teachers are being held accountable for far too many non-acacademic social/economic/health-related problems and 2) parents or guardians should be held most accountable for their children’s relative fitness.

Consequently, I propose doing away with traditional team-sport based physical education in elementary, middle, and high schools and in its place breaking up the school day with two or three ten minute-long calisthenic/walking/yoga breaks. In addition, I propose mothballing every school bus in urban and suburban districts and banning parents and guardians from driving their able-bodied students to school. Similarly, I propose banning urban and suburban high school students from driving to school. Under my proposal, every able-bodied urban/suburban K-12 student will have to walk or ride bicycles to school every day.

The protests will take the following forms: 1) it’s too far and will take too long; 2) at times throughout the year it’s far too cold, dark, and wet; 3) the neighborhoods we’d have to walk/bike through aren’t safe enough; 4) it violates freedom of choice.

In order. 1) Move closer or enroll your child in your neighborhood school. My tenth grade daughter lives 1.75 miles from her locker. Most people can walk 16 minutes/mile, so in her case it would take approximately 28 minutes to walk to school or about 15 more than in a car given the before school traffic jam on the streets and in the school lot. She’d have to go to bed 15-20 minutes early which is tragic because she’d probably miss “SuperNanny.” So it’s an extra 30 minutes a day, but not really since I’ve eliminated physical education. In actuality, she saves 25 minutes a day. If she rides her bike at a comfortable 12mph, she’d reduce her commute to about the same time as a car. I can hear her, “What about my gargantuan textbooks and violin?” “Get an iPad and I didn’t hear you practice last night.”

2) Inevitably, parents/guardians would have to walk with young children which would create community and also contribute to their fitness. And a little physical toughness would be a very good thing.

3) This might be just the impetus to make them safer. It’s illogical for some to claim we’re the “greatest country in the world” if some of our neighborhoods aren’t safe enough to walk through. Again, groups of parents taking turns escorting children in the mornings and afternoons would most likely have a very positive ripple effect on the safety of dicey neighborhoods.

4) True, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Consider not just the health benefits, but the economic ones. Imagine what school districts could do with their transportation savings. Reduce property taxes, offer more extracurriculars, reduce class size, update their technology tools.

To make my proposal more pragmatic I propose letting any student (and all bass players) that can verify that they’re getting at least 30 minutes of cardiovascular activity a day (through after school sports or independent play that a coach or non-parent/guardian adult can vouch for) opt out. Ideally, this will lead to swimming, cross country, and other teams being overwhelmed by new students turning out, which in turn will require districts to devote some of their transportation savings to these activities. It may also provide coaching opportunities for the displaced physical education teachers, the only real losers in my proposal.

Or parents and other citizens can keep blaming teachers for problems mostly outside of their control.

Three Changes

Posted on September 17, 2010 by Ron Byrnes

Life in the U.S. will be considerably different in twenty years as result of three changes that few people think about much at all. While we watch “reality television,” obsess about celebrities, follow sports as if which team wins really matters in the grand scheme of things, and shop til’ we drop, these changes will remake the United States in profound, yet unknowable ways.

1) Young women are running circles around young men in secondary schools and in colleges and universities. I’ve written about the implications of this before.

2) The world’s economic power is shifting to the east.

3) The earth is warming much more rapidly than anticipated.

What specific, symbolic, yet tangible changes might wake people up to these fundamental shifts? This example is far too subtle, but still worth noting. With respect to the first change, last year, for the first time ever, women earned more Ph.Ds than men. Another more dramatic example I anticipate happening sometime in the next twenty years, the first female President of the United States.

The second change isn’t as worrisome to me as to citizens whose identities are primarily national in orientation. I reject the zero sum assumptions of the global economic race metaphor. I celebrate the fact that hundreds of million impoverished, rural Chinese and east-Indians, fellow human beings, are experiencing markedly improved qualities of life.

Number three is the most vexing because reducing C02 emissions will require international cooperation on a level never before demonstrated by the world’s governments.

Like waking from a collective slumber, twenty years from now many will wonder when and how women became so much more influential than men, when and how three billion Chinese and east-Indians became so much more influential than 400-500 million Americans, and when and how we made such a mess of the natural world.

Patraeus

Posted on September 10, 2010 by Ron Byrnes

Full title “Patreaus Gives FL Lunatic More Attention Than He Ever Envisioned”. Patreaus is an extremely impressive individual and we’re all indebted to his unparalled service. However, last week he made a big mistake when he brought global attention to a FL pastor of a 50 person church (of which apparently 12-15 show up most Sundays).

Patreaus has no regrets. Here he is in a recent Christian Science Monitor article. “I’m not commenting on an issue of free speech. I’m providing an assessment of the likely impact of an action by a fellow American citizen on the safety of our troopers and civilians. I think I’ve got an obligation to those I’m privileged to lead to provide such an assessment.”

“It’s perfectly fine for a four-star general whose mission depends on developing goodwill to say that the action of this small group of extremists in Florida is going to undermine what we’re trying to do,” says Christopher Swift, a fellow at the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. That doesn’t mean, he adds, “that they are going to shut down these folks. He’s concerned about an 18-year-old private running into an 18-year-old Afghan. How is that Afghan going to give the American soldier the benefit of the doubt when he has pictures of Koran-burning on his mobile phone? Petraeus is right to call that out.”

I strongly disagree. Patreaus and Swift have forgotten what everyone learns on playgrounds when first starting school. . . the simple effectiveness of ignoring and isolating oneself from problematic people, or in the case of the FL “pastor,” the seemingly unstable.

Here’s what I suspect Patreaus would say to me. “Assume the burning goes ahead in the church’s parking lot. At minimum, the local paper covers it, which would most likely provide all the necessary kindle for a much larger media firestorm anyways.”

We are a rubber-necking, tabloid loving, reality television watching people, so maybe Patreaus is right about that, but the FL “pastor” is absolutely loving his fifteen hours of fame. The way he’s playing it, his fifteen hours is about to turn into fifteen days.

Patreaus has exacerbated a problem that all of us, bloggers included, should have ignored. Odds are had we turned our back to the burning and not written or spoken about it, it wouldn’t have ended up on any Afghans’ mobile phones.

Resilience

Posted on September 6, 2010 by Ron Byrnes

I’ve been thinking about how different my daughters’ lives are and the seventeen year old central character’s in Winter’s Bone.

Winter’s Bone has the feel of a documentary/commercial hybrid. It’s the story of a seventeen year old woman taking complete care of her mentally out of it mother, 12 year old brother, and six year old sister in a desperately poor, rural, Appalachia-like environ.

Her dad is elsewhere cooking meth and he’s put the house up as collateral on a bond and then missed his court date. As a result, the house will be repossessed if he’s not located within a week. The bulk of the film is the daughter trying to locate the father. In the hands of these particular filmmakers, it’s a brutal, powerful, mesmerizing story.

Despite the increasing prominence of national chain stores in this country, this film was a reminder that substantive regional and subcultural differences still exist.

My daughters have a legion of educated, financially secure parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and older cousins. They’re entering adulthood with a nine-person offensive line to run behind. The central character in Winter’s Bone had an extended family wracked by poverty, substance abuse, and violence. When the ball was hiked to her, she had no one to block for her.

Despite all the countervailing evidence, many Americans believe every young adult has an equal opportunity to flourish. Did the drug users in Winter’s Bone choose separately to take drugs or did they succumb to pervasive environmental influences? Were they immoral, undisciplined psychological weaklings or rather was their demise practically inevitable and entirely predictable from a socio-psychological point of view?

Even though the central character turns out okay because of her uncommon resilience, we need social, economic, political, and education reforms to expand the life opportunities of poor young people. The challenge is implementing those reforms without forcefully capping other young people’s life opportunities. Exceedingly difficult to pull off, especially in a recessionary era.

Sometimes I wonder if my daughters might be too privileged to develop the type of resilience they’ll have to draw upon to be successful adults. They don’t project a sense of entitlement, and they are socially aware, but they could be even more so.

Eighteen’s fancy pants college should show the class of 2014 Winter’s Bone so that they more fully appreciate the amazing opportunities their college experience will provide them.

[first Pad post, harder to edit sans mouse, so DKB cut me some slack]

Libertarian Cubism

Posted on September 3, 2010 by Ron Byrnes

Ever seen a plexiglass smoke cubicle in an international airport? Tiny with a few stools around a high table. Need a smoke? No need to leave the airport, just pop into a smoke cube and spark up. Sparking up is not really necessary though because you can easily get your nicotine fix just by breathing in the Cheech and Chong second hand cloud. Visibility is about a foot so you have to look very closely to see anyone. I can’t fathom sitting next to a smoke cuber in coach on an international flight.

Smoke cubes are an interesting libertarian solution to individual differences. In essence, airport officials are saying, “Go crazy smokers with .01% of the airport.” Apart from higher group health care costs, why should government limit people’s freedom to fill their lungs with carcinogens, suffer more health problems, and probably die prematurely?

Maybe we should embrace libertarian cubism and extend their use. For example, in the Pacific Northwest we could use some “the weather is depressing” cubes for people like Y-guy who I heard complaining vociferously this morning, the first cloudy/rainy day in recent memory. Pacific Northwest summers are idyllic, sunny and in the 70’s, but some people like Y-guy never get enough vitamin D and consequently suffer from perpetual Seasonal Affective Disorder. The chronically SAD. This morning Y-guy tried to put a damper on my life-giving swim workout by proclaiming, “Hell, it will probably rain for the next 11 months!”

Just as Y-guy should be free to smoke, he should be free to be a walking, talking, downward spiral of negativity and pessimism. I just don’t want to be subjected to his depressing monologue. What if we had a “weather is depressing” cube in the Y locker room for Y-guy and his equally depressing friends?

What other examples of libertarian cubism would you like to see introduced in your neighborhoods, workplaces, and surrounding environs?