Books – Page 135 – artdiamondblog.com

Risking Likely Death for a Tiny Chance to “Dwell in Freedom and Earn $5.15 an Hour”

(p. 281) For all the legitimate problems people experience in the Western nations, we cannot imagine a world which generates such hopelessness that people will hurl themselves toward moving trains, or climb into the wheel wells of jetliners bound for the sky in order to have a tiny chance of getting to a place where they can dwell in freedom and earn $5.15 an hour.

Source:
Easterbrook, Gregg. The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. Paperback ed. New York: Random House, 2004.

“A Dart-Throwing Chimpanzee” Predicts as Well as “Experts”

The image is of the Canadian edition, which has a different subtitle than the American edition cited below. Source of book image: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_qGSiMLu6NXM/TTWIQkcllmI/AAAAAAAADEI/qD2yo1rxnL0/s1600/Future%2BBabble.jpg

(p. C6) How bad are expert predictions? Almost predictably bad. In 2005, Philip Tetlock, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, published the results of a magisterial 20-year analysis of 27,450 judgments about the future from 284 experts. He discovered that the experts, in aggregate, did little better, and sometimes considerably worse, than “a dart-throwing chimpanzee.”

While Mr. Tetlock guaranteed anonymity to get his experts to reveal how useless they were, Mr. Gardner names names. In the late 1960s, he notes, the political scientist Andrew Hacker predicted that race relations in America would soon get so bad that they would lead to the “dynamiting of bridges and water mains” and the “assassinating of public officials and private luminaries.” In the early 1970s, Richard Falk, at Princeton, imagined that by the 1990s we would be living in a world dominated by “the politics of catastrophe.” In the mid-1970s, Daniel Bell and other analysts assumed that high levels of inflation were, as Mr. Gardner puts it, “here to stay.” (In fact, inflation cooled off in the early 1980s and has stayed low for decades.) In the early 1990s, Lester Thurow, the MIT economist, was one of the experts who predicted that Japan would dominate the 21st century, though he noted that Europe had a chance, too.
The high priest of erroneous prediction is, of course, Paul Ehrlich, who, though a respected entomologist, turned into an end-of-the-worlder with “The Population Bomb” (1968) and “The End of Affluence” (1974). In the latter book he wrote: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Now 77, Mr. Ehrlich is “a gregarious and delightful man, a natural performer,” Mr. Gardner reports, thereby tapping into the sources of his success in the face of repeated failure: Never admit mistakes, never sound doubtful. As Mr. Gardner shows in his survey of expert prediction-making, the more you sound like you know what you are talking about, the more people will believe you.

For the full review, see:
TREVOR BUTTERWORTH. “Prophets of Error.” Wall Street Journal (Sat., APRIL 30, 2011): C6.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated APRIL 30, 2011.)

The book being reviewed, is:
Gardner, Dan. Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Better. New York: Dutton Adult, 2011.

The important Tetlock book mentioned, is:
Tetlock, Philip E. Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

“The Frozen Body of Someone Desperate to Enter the United States”

(p. 279) In August 2001, as an American Airlines 777 jetliner arriving from overseas descended toward John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and lowered its landing gear, the frozen body of a man fell into a marsh beneath the field’s approach lanes. The body, believed to be that of a young Nigerian, was buried in a plain wooden casket in City Cemetery, the resting place of New York indigents popularly known as Potter’s Field. No one will ever know for certain, but it appears the young man, who carried no identification, had hidden in the wheel well of the jet, hoping to steal into the United States. If, as police speculated, he was from an African village, he might not have known that the air outside a jetliner at cruise altitude may be minus-80 degrees Fahrenheit, and that wheel wells are unheated; they are also not pressurized, rendering breathing almost impossible at a jetliner’s cruise altitude. Or the victim might have known these things and climbed into the wheel well anyway because he was desperate. The unknown man’s death (p. 280) marked the third time since 1997 that the frozen body of someone desperate to enter the United States had fallen from the wheel wells as a jetliner from overseas lowered its landing gear on descent toward JFK. In the man’s pockets were a few minor personal effects and a street-vendor’s map of Manhattan.

Contemplating this tragedy I thought, first, of the horror the man must have experienced as the plane’s mindless hydraulic mechanisms drew the landing struts and wheels up to crush him. Somehow he avoided being crushed–only to realize as the air craft ascended that it was getting very cold and the air was getting very thin, and he was going to die gasping and shaking. Then I contemplated what the man’s final thoughts might have been. Fear, of course; regret. Perhaps, at the last, dread that his own death might consign the rest of his family in his village to a life of suffering: for the desperation of many trying to reach the West from the developing world is motivated by their desire to work extremely hard and to live on the edge here, sending part of their incomes back home to those even worse off.

Source:
Easterbrook, Gregg. The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. Paperback ed. New York: Random House, 2004.

Nearly Half of College Students Learn Nothing in First Two Years

Source of book image: http://ffbsccn.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/academically-adrift.jpg

(p. D9) Andrew Carnegie didn’t think much of college. More than a century ago, he looked around at the men commanding the industries of the day and found that few had wasted their time lollygagging on a campus quad. “The almost total absence of the graduate from high positions in the business world,” he wrote in “The Empire of Business,” “seems to justify the conclusion that college education, as it exists, is fatal to success in that domain.”

. . .
. . . , as the reward for the collegiate credential has been going up, what goes into getting that degree has been going down. So find sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in their book “Academically Adrift” (University of Chicago Press). Institutions of higher learning are “focused more on social than academic experiences,” they write. “Students spend very little time studying, and professors rarely demand much from them in terms of reading and writing.” More than a third of students do less than five hours of studying a week–and these shirkers end up, on average, earning B’s.
Ms. Roksa, who teaches at University of Virginia, and Mr. Arum, a professor at New York University, mined data from thousands of sophomores who retook a learning assessment test they had first been given when they arrived at college. Nearly half the students showed no sign of intellectual progress after two years of undergraduate endeavor.
. . .
What would Mr. Carnegie have thought of it? “While the college student has been learning a little about the barbarous and petty squabbles of a far-distant past,” he wrote, “or trying to master languages which are dead…the future captain of industry is hotly engaged in the school of experience, obtaining the very knowledge required for his future triumphs.” Mr. Carnegie may have thought the knowledge gained at college was “adapted for life upon another planet,” but he did expect that the students were gathering some sort of knowledge. Shouldn’t parents footing the massive tab for tuition be able to expect the same?

For the full commentary, see:
ERIC FELTEN. “POSTMODERN TIMES; Now College is the Break.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., FEBRUARY 11, 2011): D9.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The book under discussion is:
Arum, Richard, and Josipa Roksa. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Hillary Clinton Blasted “Materialism” in Others and Bought a $1.7 Million House for Herself

(p. 145) . . . , it is standard to denounce materialism in others while lusting for it ourselves. At the end of the 1990s, Hillary Rodham Clinton decried “a consumer-driven culture that promotes values that undermine democracy” and blasted “materialism that undermines our spiritual centers.” Shortly thereafter, she bought a $1.7 million home and signed an $8 million book contract. As the novelist Daniel Akst has noted, Rodham Clinton thus joined the long line of commentators “bent on saving the rest of us from the horrors of consumption” while taking care to make themselves rich and comfy.

Source:
Easterbrook, Gregg. The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. Paperback ed. New York: Random House, 2004.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

“When We Get ‘Out of Book,’ We Are at Our Most Human”

Source of book image: http://www.turingfilm.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/11-3-18-The-Most-Human-Human.jpg

To be an innovative entrepreneur is to “get out of book” in the language well-expressed below.

(p. A17) In chess, computers are strongest in the parts of the game in which human players rely most on memory: the opening and closing sequences. (Serious players learn strategies by rote, and the early stages of even grandmaster games contain few surprises for the cognoscenti.) Knowledge of these tried and tested moves is called “the book.” By the middle section of a game, however, the number of permutations of moves is too vast for memorization to help. Here players need to get “out of book” and act unexpectedly, which is why computers–even Deep Blue–can struggle.

Mr. Christian elaborates on this distinction and applies it to human intelligence in general. For isn’t it precisely when people refuse to get “out of book”–just following orders or playing their role–that we find them least human? Likewise, when we get “out of book,” we are at our most human. Think of the difference between the waiter who runs through the usual routine and the one who responds to your order with a witticism. Remaining alive to what is mechanical or original in our own behavior can preserve a sense of human difference.

For the full review, see:
JULIAN BAGGINI. “BOOKSHELF; More Than Machine; No computer has yet to pass the Turing Test, fooling judges into believing its responses come from a person.” Wall Street Journal (Tues., MARCH 8, 2011): A17.

Limits to “Sprawl” Add to House Prices Which Benefits the “Already Entrenched”

(p. 130) If 50 percent more Americans are on the way that means there must be 50 percent more suburban subdivisions, 50 percent more malls, 50 percent more of everything–unless anyone thinks it is fair to deny to newcomers the physical space and comfort that current Americans enjoy.

Sprawl may he managed well or poorly, and “smart growth” is better than dumb growth. But when people object to development per se, what they almost always mean is that they have achieved a nice lifestyle and now wish to pull up the ladders against others–and, not coincidentally, to make their own properties more valuable by artificially limiting supply. California real estate prices in particular have shot up in the last decade because slow-growth ordinances and no-growth judicial rulings have artificially restricted housing supply. Opposing sprawl can be a financial boon to anyone who’s already entrenched.
Anything that runs up housing prices is of particular concern to educational equality, since today, in many parts of the United States, the housing market in effect regulates access to the best public schools. Buyers pay significant premiums for homes in the districts of high-quality public schools; in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, a home in the excellent Fairfax County or Montgomery County school systems may sell for $200,000 more than an identical dwelling from which children would attend the troubled schools of Prince George’s County or Arlington County. In turn, SAT scores rise in tandem with family income–each $10,000 increment of increase in family income adds twenty to thirty points to a child’s total SAT scores, studies show. Why does family income raise SAT scores? Partly because a high income enables parents to give children extra advantages, partly because low income parents or parents in broken families may shirk their responsibility for helping children succeed in school, but mostly (p. 131) because the higher a family’s income the better a school district it can buy into, via the housing market. Since education is closely linked to success in later life, the nation has an interest in preventing exclusionary housing prices. That means there must be more sprawl and more growth to increase the housing supply and thereby reduce prices.

Source:
Easterbrook, Gregg. The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. Paperback ed. New York: Random House, 2004.

Are Small Bets Enough to Get Breakthrough Innovation, Or Do You Usually Need Big Bets?

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

I am dubious of the main thesis of the book discussed in the review quoted below. But it sounds like an interesting read.

“I’ll be happy to give you innovative thinking,” a bedraggled employee tells his boss in a classic Leo Cullum cartoon. “What are the guidelines?”

Guidelines are what Peter Sims seeks to provide in “Little Bets,” an enthusiastic, example-rich argument for innovating in a particular way–by deliberately experimenting and taking small exploratory steps in novel directions. Some little bets will not pay off, of course, in which case little is lost; but others may pay off in big ways.
. . .
The point is that good (or even just delicious) ideas rarely emerge fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus; rather they evolve in a discursive and unpredictable fashion. The challenge is to enable this process rather than squelch it because it is hard to manage or because its results are hard to predict.
Light, bright and packed with tidy anecdotes, “Little Bets” feels at times like a motivational speaker’s presentation. Its claims are often attractive, but the analytical apparatus can be shaky: correlation is confused with causation; counter-evidence is ignored (such as those who put down small bets but never enjoy large returns); the role of circumstance or luck is underestimated; and some facts seem cherry-picked to push the message.

For the full commentary, see:
DAVID A. SHAYWITZ. “BOOKSHELF; Where the Action Is; Taking small exploratory steps and ‘prototyping,’ as when Chris Rock tests out jokes at obscure comedy clubs.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., APRIL 22, 2011): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

The book under review is:
Sims, Peter. Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries. New York: Free Press, 2011.

Impressions of the Movie Atlas Shrugged, Part 1

Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was the most important book of my youth. I still believe that it is an important, and mainly good, novel.
My brother Eric asked me what I thought of the Atlas Shrugged, Part 1 movie that my family went to see on Saturday afternoon (4/16/11). I sent him these first impressions:

I think some of the people making the movie probably meant well—but it turned out pretty wooden.

Rearden is the main male character in the movie, and the range of his facial expressions is between mildly annoyed and mildly amused.
There isn’t anger or passion or joy or fear in the movie, although all of those were in the first part of the book. Watching the movie is like watching a set of dramatized homilies.
The hokey scenes of a shadowy John Galt, kill some of the suspense. (And dressing him in a 1940s fedora seems awkwardly atavistic, given that the movie is supposed to be taking place in 2016.)
It wasn’t all bad. There are some nice scenes of a fast train traveling through Colorado and over a sleek bridge of Rearden metal. And I agree with many of the homilies.
Overall, I wasn’t appalled, but I was disappointed.

“Elites Like Bad News”

(p. 101) Many elites love writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, who viewed all human action as meaningless, or Thomas Pynchon, whose novels, such as Gravity’s Rainbow purport to present hard-science arguments that ours is a pointless universe doomed to meaningless demise. Pynchon’s grasp of physics is debatable; what matters is that when he claimed to have found scientific proof the universe is pointless, many of a certain ilk were eager to believe him. Eighty years ago, elites of the United Stares and Europe gushed in praise over the social historian Oswald Spen-(p. 102)gler’s work The Decline of the West, which argued not only that American and European civilization “one day will lie in fragments, forgotten” but that the downfall of Western civilization was imminently at hand. Similarly, William Butler Yeats in the early twentieth century was praised by Western intellectuals for predicting pending social disintegration through his famed phrase, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Spengler even maintained that the collapse of Western civilization would be a beneficial development, because America and Europe were contemptible. Eight decades later, the West is far stronger, richer, more secure, more diverse, and more free than when Spengler declared it a decaying relic about to vanish. Nevertheless, his work and similar predictions of impending Western collapse are still spoken of reverentially among intellectual elites, a portion of whom delight to hear anything American and European called bad.

If elites like bad news, then the eagerness of intellectuals, artists, and tastemakers to embrace claims of ecological doomsday, population crash, coming global plagues, economic down fall, cultural wars, or the end of this or that become, at least, comprehensible.

Source:
Easterbrook, Gregg. The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. Paperback ed. New York: Random House, 2004.
(Note: italics in original.)

U.S. Citizens Choose Cars for 99% of Trips

(p. 92) America is a car culture and has been for almost a century, the phrase “traffic jam” dating to 1910, meaning we’re stuck with car culture for the time being. In the United States, the number of trips taken on public transportation has since 1998 been rising more rapidly than trips taken in cars. But public transportation nevertheless cannot be a cure-all for traffic congestion, since only a total of 1 percent of all U.S. trips occur on public transit. Double the share, which would require notable effort and capital expense, and it’s still only 2 percent. A car culture with a rising population and rising prosperity has little choice but to keep investing in roads and parking.

Source:
Easterbrook, Gregg. The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. Paperback ed. New York: Random House, 2004.