Books – Page 78 – artdiamondblog.com

Authentic Happiness Requires Engagement and Meaning

(p. 278) Recent research into what happiness is and what makes people happy sheds some contemporary light on the connection Aristotle claimed between wisdom and happiness. Students of the “science of happiness” try to measure happiness, identify its components, determine its causes, and specify its consequences. This work doesn’t tell us what should make people happy. It aims to tell us what does make people happy.
Ed Diener is perhaps the world’s leading researcher on happiness. His recent book, written in collaboration with his son, Robert Biswas-Diener, confirms some things we might expect. The major determinants (p. 279) of happiness (or “well-being,” as it is sometimes called) include material wealth (though much less than most people think, especially when their standard of living is above subsistence), physical health, freedom, political democracy, and physical, material, and psychological security. None of these determinants of happiness seems to have much to do with practical wisdom. But two other factors, each of them extremely important, do. Well-being depends critically on being part of a network of close connections to others. And well-being is enhanced when we are engaged in our work and find meaning in it.
The work of Martin Seligman, a distinguished psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, points in the same direction. Seligman launched a whole new discipline– dubbed “positive” psychology– in the 1990s, when he was president of the American Psychological Association. We’ve talked to Seligman often about his work. He had long been concerned that psychologists focused too exclusively on curing the problems of their patients (he himself was an expert on depression) and spent too little time investigating those things that would positively promote their well-being. He kick-started positive psychology with his book Authentic Happiness.
The word authentic is there to distinguish what Seligman is talking about from what many of us sometimes casually take happiness to be– feeling good. Feeling good– experiencing positive emotion– is certainly important. But just as important are engagement and meaning. Engagement is about throwing yourself into the activities of your life. And meaning is about connecting what you do to the lives of others– knowing that what you do makes the lives of others better. Authentic happiness, says Seligman, is a combination of engagement, meaning, and positive emotion. Seligman collected a massive amount of data from research on people all over the world. He found that people who considered themselves happy had certain character strengths and virtues. He further found that in each individual, some of these strengths were more prominent than others. Seligman concluded that promoting a person’s particular (p. 280) strengths– he dubbed these a person’s “signature strengths”– promoted authentic happiness.
The twenty-four character strengths Seligman identified include things like curiosity, open-mindedness, perspective, kindness and generosity, loyalty, duty, fairness, leadership, self-control, caution, humility, bravery, perseverance, honesty, gratitude, optimism, and zest. He organized these strengths into six virtues: courage, humanity and love, justice, temperance, transcendence, and wisdom and knowledge. Aristotle would have recognized many of these strengths as the kind of “excellences” or virtues he considered necessary for eudaimonia, a flourishing or happy life.

Source:
Schwartz, Barry, and Kenneth Sharpe. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.
(Note: italics in original.)

Steven Johnson Is Advocate of Collaboration in Innovation

(p. A13) Theories of innovation and entrepreneurship have always yo-yoed between two basic ideas. First, that it’s all about the single brilliant individual and his eureka moment that changes the world. Second, that it’s about networks, collaboration and context. The truth, as in all such philosophical dogfights, is somewhere in between. But that does not stop the bickering. This controversy blew up in a political context during the 2012 presidential election, when President Obama used an ill-chosen set of words (“you didn’t build that”) to suggest that government and society had a role in creating the setting for entrepreneurs to flourish, and Republicans berated him for denigrating the rugged individualists of American enterprise.
Through a series of elegant books about the history of technological innovation, Steven Johnson has become one of the most persuasive advocates for the role of collaboration in innovation. His latest, “How We Got to Now,” accompanies a PBS series on what he calls the “six innovations that made the modern world.” The six are detailed in chapters titled “Glass,” “Cold,” “Sound,” “Clean,” “Time” and “Light.” Mr. Johnson’s method is to start with a single innovation and then hopscotch through history to illuminate its vast and often unintended consequences.

For the full review, see:
PHILIP DELVES BROUGHTON. “BOOKSHELF; Unintended Consequences; Gutenberg’s printing press sparked a revolution in lens-making, which led to eyeglasses, microscopes and, yes, the selfie.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Sept. 30, 2014): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Sept. 29, 2014, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Book Review: ‘How We Got to Now’ by Steven Johnson; Gutenberg’s printing press sparked a revolution in lens-making, which led to eyeglasses, microscopes and, yes, the selfie.” )

The book under review, is:
Johnson, Steven. How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2014.

A Critical Mass Need to Be Motivated by the Telos of a Practice

(p. 227) The fact that some people are led into a practice in pursuit of goals that are external to the practice– money, fame, or what have you– need pose no threat to the integrity of the practice itself. So long as those goals do not penetrate the practice at all levels, those in pursuit of external goals will eventually drop out or be left behind or change their goals or be discredited by those in pursuit of a practice’s proper goals. However, if external goals do penetrate the practice at all levels, it becomes vulnerable to corruption. Practices are always developing and changing, and the direction that development takes will be determined by participants in the practice. Good practices encourage wise practitioners who in turn will care for the future of the practice.

Source:
Schwartz, Barry, and Kenneth Sharpe. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.

Tesla Cars Are Built on Government Subsidies

(p. A13) Nowhere in Mr. Vance’s book, . . . , does the figure $7,500 appear–the direct taxpayer rebate to each U.S. buyer of Mr. Musk’s car. You wouldn’t know that 10% of all Model S cars have been sold in Norway–though Tesla’s own 10-K lists the possible loss of generous Norwegian tax benefits as a substantial risk to the company.
Barely developed in passing is that Tesla likely might not exist without a former State Department official whom Mr. Musk hired to explore “what types of tax credits and rebates Tesla might be able to drum up around its electric vehicles,” which eventually would include a $465 million government-backed loan.
And how Tesla came by its ex-Toyota factory in California “for free,” via a “string of fortunate turns” that allowed Tesla to float its IPO a few weeks later, is just a thing that happens in Mr. Vance’s book, not the full-bore political intrigue it actually was.
The fact is, Mr. Musk has yet to show that Tesla’s stock market value (currently $32 billion) is anything but a modest fraction of the discounted value of its expected future subsidies. In 2017, he plans to introduce his Model 3, a $35,000 car for the middle class. He expects to sell hundreds of thousands a year. Somehow we doubt he intends to make it easy for politicians to whip away the $7,500 tax credit just when somebody besides the rich can benefit from it–in which case the annual gift from taxpayers will quickly mount to several billion dollars each year.
Mother Jones, in a long piece about what Mr. Musk owes the taxpayer, suggested the wunderkind could be a “bit more grateful, a bit more humble.” Unmentioned was the shaky underpinning of this largess. Even today’s politicized climate modeling allows the possibility that climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide is far less than would justify incurring major expense to change the energy infrastructure of the world (and you certainly wouldn’t begin with luxury cars). Were this understanding to become widespread, the subliminal hum of government favoritism could overnight become Tesla’s biggest liability.

For the full commentary, see:
HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR. “BUSINESS WORLD; The Savior Elon Musk; Tesla’s impresario is right about one thing: Humanity’s preservation is a legitimate government interest.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 30, 2015): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 29, 2015.)

The book discussed in the commentary is:
Vance, Ashlee. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. New York: Ecco, 2015.

The Mother Jones article discussing government subsidies for Musk’s Tesla, is:
Harkinson, Josh. “Free Ride.” Mother Jones 38, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 2013): 20-25.

George Bailey Wanted to Make Money, But He Wanted to Do More than Just Make Money

(p. 219) Actually, it’s not so strange. The norm for bankers was never just moneymaking, any more than it was for doctors or lawyers. Bankers made a livelihood, often quite a good one, by serving their clients– the depositors and borrowers– and the communities in which they worked. But traditionally, the aim of banking– even if sometimes honored only in the breach– was service, not just moneymaking.
In the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, James Stewart plays George Bailey, a small-town banker faced with a run on the bank– a liquidity crisis. When the townspeople rush into the bank to withdraw their money, Bailey tells them, “You’re thinking of this place all wrong. As if I had the money back in a safe. The money’s not here.” He goes on. “Your money’s in Joe’s house. Right next to yours. And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Backlin’s house, and a hundred others. Why, you’re lending them the money to build, and they’re going to pay you back, as best they can…. What are you going to do, foreclose on them?”
No, says George Bailey, “we’ve got to stick together. We’ve got to have faith in one another.” Fail to stick together, and the community will be ruined. Bailey took all the money he could get his hands on and gave it to his depositors to help see them through the crisis. Of course, George Bailey was interested in making money, but money was not the only point of what Bailey did.
Relying on a Hollywood script to provide evidence of good bankers is at some level absurd, but it does indicate something valuable about society’s expectations regarding the role of bankers. The norm for a “good banker” throughout most of the twentieth century was in fact someone who was trustworthy and who served the community, who was responsible to clients, and who took an interest in them.

Source:
Schwartz, Barry, and Kenneth Sharpe. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.
(Note: italics in original.)

Institutional Improvements Can Sometimes Be Designed, Rather than Only Spontaneous

A distinguished school of libertarian and neo-Austrian economic thought argues, following F.A. Hayek, that institutional improvements only arise from spontaneous order, and never from conscious design. There is something to their argument, but the designs of Alvin Roth provide counter-examples.

(p. A13) Mr. Roth’s work has been to discover the most efficient and equitable methods of matching and implement them in the world. He writes with verve and style, describing many market malfunctions–from aboriginal tribes in Australia arranging marriages for children not yet born to judges bending every rule in the book to hire law clerks years before they have graduated from law school–and how we ought to think about them.

Mr. Roth’s approach contrasts with standard debates over free markets versus government regulation. We want markets to be thick, quick, timely and trustworthy, but without careful design markets can become thin, slow, ill-timed and dangerous for the honest. The solution to these problems is unlikely to be regulation legislated from on high. Instead what Mr. Roth practices is nuanced market design created mostly by market participants. Mr. Roth found, for example, that even though the problems in the market for gastroenterologists and law clerks looked the same (hiring started years before schooling ended), the solutions had to be subtly different because of differences in culture, history and norms.

For the full review, see:
ALEX TABARROK. “BOOKSHELF; The Designer of Markets; In some markets, price isn’t the determining factor. You can choose to go to Harvard, but Harvard has to choose to accept you first.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., JUNE 16, 2015): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date JUNE 15, 2015, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Matchmaker, Make Me a Market; In some markets, price isn’t the determining factor. You can choose to go to Harvard, but Harvard has to choose to accept you first.”)

The book under review is:
Roth, Alvin E. Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co., 2015.

To Maintain Enrollments Professors Are Often Pressured to Inflate Grades

(p. 198) Dedicated college professors demand that students do the difficult reading and writing necessary to become skillful in understanding the complexities of the world. But the university distributes resources like research funds and new faculty positions based in part on how many students populate classes and how positively students evaluate courses. How much do you simplify to keep up enrollment and keep resources flowing into your department?

Source:
Schwartz, Barry, and Kenneth Sharpe. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.

“Nimble” Account of the Creative Destruction of the Music Industry

(p. C1) Stephen Witt’s nimble new book, “How Music Got Free,” is the richest explanation to date about how the arrival of the MP3 upended almost everything about how music is distributed, consumed and stored. It’s a story you may think you know, but Mr. Witt brings fresh reporting to bear, and complicates things in terrific ways.
He pushes past Napster (Sean Fanning, dorm room, lawsuits) and goes deep on the German audio engineers who, drawing on decades of research into how the ear works, spent years developing the MP3 only to almost see it nearly become the Betamax to another group’s VHS.
. . .
(p. C6) Even better, he has found the man — a manager at a CD factory in small-town North Carolina — who over eight years leaked nearly 2,000 albums before their release, including some of the best-known rap albums of all time. He smuggled most of them out behind an oversized belt buckle before ripping them and putting them online.
Mr. Witt refers to this winsome if somewhat hapless manager, Dell Glover, as “the most fearsome digital pirate of them all.”
. . .
Into these two narratives Mr. Witt inserts a third, the story of Doug Morris, who ran the Universal Music Group from 1995 to 2011. At some points you wonder if Mr. Morris has been introduced just so the author can have sick fun with him.
The German inventors and Mr. Glover operate as if they unwittingly have voodoo dolls of this man. Every time they make an advance, and prick the music industry, there’s a jump to Mr. Morris for a reaction shot, screaming in his corner office.
. . .
Mr. Witt covers a lot of terrain in “How Music Got Free” without ever becoming bogged down in one place for long. He is knowledgeable about intellectual property issues. In finding his reporting threads, he doesn’t miss the big picture: He gives us a loge seat to the entire digital music revolution.
He is especially good on the arrival of iTunes and the iPod.

For the full review, see:
DWIGHT GARNER. “Books of The Times; That Download Has a Back Story.” The New York Times (Tues., JUNE 16, 2015): C1 & C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date JUNE 15, 2015, and has the title “Books of The Times; Review: In ‘How Music Got Free,’ Stephen Witt Details an Industry Sea Change.”)

The book under review is:
Witt, Stephen. How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy. New York: Viking, 2015.

Some Learn in Order to Gain Competence, Others Learn to Gain Direct Rewards

(p. 184) Think about two different tennis pros giving you tennis lessons. The first pro says things like “good shot” and “good swing” all the time, to encourage you. The second one says “good swing” only when you make a good swing. If hearing “good swing” gives you a hedonic charge, then you will prefer the first instructor to the second (more gold stars, more encouragement). But if what gives you the charge is getting better at tennis, you will prefer the second instructor to the first. That’s because the second instructor’s feedback to you is much more informative than the first one’s. You’re not after “good swing” gold stars; you’re after a better tennis game. So feedback is essential to the development of a complex skill– whether it be empathy or a strong forehand. But he-(p. 185)donic feedback, in the form of incentives, is not. It may even be counterproductive, as in the case of instructor number one.
In schools, tests provide an extremely important source of feedback– of information– to the teacher and the student– about how things are going. Tests, or something like them, often offer the best way to diagnose problems and correct them. So tests as a source of information are good and important. The problem is that in addition to providing information, tests provide outcomes that students, and their parents, and their teachers, want and like– outcomes like approval, prizes, awards, honors, special privileges, and school ratings. The hedonic character of these outcomes is what gets students and teachers to orient their work to passing the tests, and to regard what they do in the classroom as merely instrumental, as merely a means to various rewarding ends.
There are important differences between children oriented to getting A’s and children oriented to learning from their mistakes. Psychologist Carol Dweck and her associates have spent thirty years studying the incentive systems that govern the learning of children throughout the educational process. They have uncovered two fundamentally different approaches to learning in kids that can often lead to profound differences in how well kids learn. One group of kids has what Dweck has called performance goals; the other group has what she has called mastery goals. Children with performance goals are primarily interested in gaining favorable judgments of their competence. They want to do well on tests. They want social approval. They want awards. Children with mastery goals are primarily interested in increasing their competence rather than in demonstrating it. They want to encounter things that they can’t do and to learn from their failures. As Dweck puts it, performance-oriented children want to prove their ability, while mastery-oriented children want to improve their ability. Children with performance goals avoid challenges. They prefer tasks that are well within the range of their ability. Children with mastery goals seek challenges. They prefer tasks that strain the limits of their ability. Children with performance goals respond to failure by giving up. Children (p. 186) with mastery goals respond to failure by working harder. Children with performance goals take failure as a sign of their inadequacy and come to view the tasks at which they fail with a mixture of anxiety, boredom, and anger. Children with mastery goals take failure as a sign that their efforts, and not they, are inadequate, and they often come to view the tasks at which they fail with the kind of relish that comes when you encounter a worthy challenge.

Source:
Schwartz, Barry, and Kenneth Sharpe. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.
(Note: italics in original.)

Woodrow Wilson Violated Free Speech

I viewed part of a CSPAN presentation on June 27, 2015 by Margaret MacMillan, based on her book The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914. (It was probably a rebroadcast.) The presentation seemed serious, well-informed, and judicious in trying to be fair and balanced to Woodrow Wilson. MacMillan is more sympathetic to Wilson than I am, but she made it quite clear that he enacted serious violations of free speech.

MacMillan’s book is:
MacMillan, Margaret. The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914. New York: Random House, 2013.

Should Students Read to Learn, or to Get Gold Stars?

(p. 181) When a consultant tells teachers to concentrate on the bubble kids and ignore the kids who are most in need of help, something has gone wrong. And if gold stars turn reading from an adventure into a job, something has gone wrong. But what? The typical response to examples like these is not to blame incentives but to blame “dumb” incentives. The presumption is that “smart” incentives, or at least “smarter” incentives, will do the job.
This is a mistake. In many situations, for many activities, no incentives are smart enough. Teachers like Deborah Ball and Mrs. Dewey spend their day figuring out how much time to spend with each student and how to tailor what they teach to each student’s particular strengths and weaknesses. They are continually balancing conflicting aims– to treat all students equally, to give the struggling students more time, to energize and inspire the gifted students. Along comes the incentive to bring up the school’s test scores, and all the nuance and subtlety of Mrs. Dewey’s moment-by-moment decisions go out the window. And what “smarter” incentive is going to replace judgment in making sensitive choices in a complex and changing context like a classroom?
Or what, exactly, would you incentivize to encourage hospital custodian Luke to seek the kind and empathetic response to the distraught father who wanted his son’s room cleaned? Incentives are always based on meeting some specific, measurable criterion: read more books; raise more test scores; wash more floors. Left to his own devices, Luke asks himself, “What can I do to be caring?” and because he has moral skill, he comes up with a good answer. With “caring” incentivized, Luke (p. 182) might ask, “What do I have to do to get a raise or a bonus?” “Reclean the room” might be a right answer. “Look sympathetic” might be a right answer. “Be caring” surely is not. Aristotle thought that good
people do the right thing because it is the right thing. Doing the right thing because it’s the right thing unleashes the nuance, flexibility, and improvisation that moral challenges demand and moral skill enables. Doing the right thing for pay shuts down the nuance and flexibility.

Source:
Schwartz, Barry, and Kenneth Sharpe. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.
(Note: italics in original.)