Category: Psychology

Walls and a Door Allow “a Quiet Place to Think”

(p. B6) The lofty building Jordan Hamad moved his tech-advisory firm into four years ago had the trappings of a startup idyll: open floor plan, polished concrete floors, custom-built communal tables.
Soon, the 33-year-old founder of Chairseven says he craved something else: walls and a door.
. . .
Now as he moves the company from Portland, Ore., to New York, Mr. Hamad has joined a cadre of bosses chucking the egalitarianism of working alongside their employees for the old-fashioned private office. Their open-office revolt, they say, is less about reclaiming the corner office than about needing a quiet place to think.
“People will say it’s so cool to have the CEO right next to you, but at the end of the day your team sometimes needs their space and you need yours,” says Mr. Hamad, who currently leases a private office for himself and co-working space for other staff. Other senior team members will soon get private office space, too, he says.
. . .
In a review of more than 100 studies of work environments, British researchers found that despite improving communication in some instances, open-office spaces hurt workers’ motivation and ability to focus.
. . .
“When you’re in a territory that’s clearly yours, you perform better,” says Sally Augustin, an environmental psychologist and principal at La Grange Park, Ill.-based consulting firm Design With Science.
. . .
Open offices are so popular among tech companies that when CircleCI’s founders moved the software-testing startup from an open space in San Francisco to one with 25 closed offices in 2014, it paid half the market rental rate, says co-founder Paul Biggar. In Silicon Valley, many people are “playing startup,” he says, emulating the open spaces of tech giants such as Google Inc.
In reality, he says, engineers need quiet places to concentrate–and so does he. “I love the private office,” he says.

For the full commentary, see:
Vanessa Fuhrmans. “Bosses Say they Want Their Offices Back.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., May 23, 2017): B6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 22, 2017, and has the title “CEOs Want Their Offices Back.” The following sentence, quoted above, appears in the online, but not the print, version of the article: “Other senior team members will soon get private office space, too, he says.”)

Dynamism Dying from Bad Attitudes or Bad Policies?

I agree with Tyler that the U.S. is less dynamic than it once was. But I mainly blame our bad government policies, while he mainly blames our own bad attitudes.

(p. A15) Is the “land of opportunity,” with dynamic labor markets and fresh sources of renewal, a thing of the past?

That’s the fear of Tyler Cowen, who argues in “The Complacent Class” that America is increasingly defined by an aversion to risk as well as to anything that is unfamiliar or different. He sees a broad swath of the American population losing “the capacity to imagine or embrace a world where things do change rapidly for most if not all people.” This mind-set, he says, has “sapped us of the pioneer spirit that made America the world’s most productive and innovative economy.”
. . .
To make his case, Mr. Cowen draws a contrast between the changes that Americans experienced in the first half of the 20th century and the changes of the past 50 years. The earlier period saw dramatic improvements in health and education as well as a proliferation of automobiles, airplanes and telephones. By comparison, the changes since 1965 have been modest. “A lot of our technological world seems to have stood pretty much still,” he writes, “albeit with a variety of quality improvements along the way.” He even notes that, while popular narcotics in the past were mind-altering (LSD) or activity-inciting (cocaine), today’s drugs of choice, such as heroin and opioids, “induce a dreamlike stupor and passivity.”
. . .
Given Mr. Cowen’s own innovative thinking, it’s disappointing that he does not focus more on potential remedies to the torpor he describes.

For the full review, see:

Matthew Rees. “BOOKSHELF; How American Workers Got Lazy.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Feb. 28, 2017): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Feb. 27, 2017.)

The book under review, is:
Cowen, Tyler. The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

Retiring Later Improves Health in Old Age

(p. 3) Despite what may seem like obvious benefits, scholars can’t make definitive statements about the health effects of working longer. The research is inherently difficult: Just as retirement can influence health, so can health influence retirement.
“I would say, in my experience, the research is mixed,” said Dr. Maestas of Harvard Medical School. “The studies I have seen tend to show that there are health benefits to working longer.”
As the economists Axel Börsch-Supan and Morten Schuth of the Munich Center for the Economics of Aging of the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy put it in an article for the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Even disliked colleagues and a bad boss, we argue, are better than social isolation because they provide cognitive challenges that keep the mind active and healthy.”
Other studies have examined the impact of work and employment on the richness of social networks and social connectedness. The economists Eleonora Patacchini of Cornell University and Gary Engelhardt of Syracuse University tapped into a database of some 1,300 people from ages 57 to 85 that asked about their social networks in 2005 and 2010. After controlling for marital status, age, health and income, they concluded that people who continued to work enjoyed an increase in the size of their networks of family and friends of 25 percent. The social networks of retired people, on the other hand, shrank during the five-year period. In the study, the gains were found to be largely limited to women and older people with postsecondary education.

For the full commentary, see:
CHRISTOPHER FARRELL. “Retiring; Their Jobs Keep Them Healthy.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., MARCH 5, 2017): 3.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date MARCH 3, 2017, and has the title “Retiring; Working Longer May Benefit Your Health.”)

The article by Börsch-Supan and Schuth, is:
Börsch-Supan, Axel, and Morten Schuth. “Early Retirement, Mental Health, and Social Networks.” In Discoveries in the Economics of Aging, edited by David A. Wise. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014, pp. 225-50.

Open Offices Disrupt Analytical Thinking and Creativity

(p. A13) Visual noise, the activity or movement around the edges of an employee’s field of vision, can erode concentration and disrupt analytical thinking or creativity, research shows. While employers have long tried to quiet disruptive sounds in open workspaces, some are now combating visual noise too.
. . .
“I could barely ever focus,” says Ms. Spivak, marketing and communications director for San Francisco-based Segment.
Her company overhauled its layout when it moved to new offices in April. Its former space was like a warehouse, creating “these long lines of sight across the workspace, where you have people you know and recognize moving by and talking to each other. It was incredibly distracting,” CEO Peter Reinhardt says.
. . .
(p. A15) Being surrounded by teammates with similar work patterns can be comforting to employees. Unpredictable movements around the edges of a person’s field of vision compete for cognitive resources, however, says Sabine Kastner, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Princeton University who has studied how the brain pays attention for 20 years. People differ in their ability to filter out visual stimuli. For some, a teeming or cluttered office can make it nearly impossible to concentrate, she says.
. . .
In an experiment with Chinese factory workers published in 2012, Ethan Bernstein, an assistant professor of leadership and organizational behavior at Harvard Business School, found teams were 10% to 15% more productive when they worked behind a curtain that shielded them from supervisors’ view. The employees felt freer to experiment with new ways to solve problems and improve efficiency when protected from their bosses’ critical gaze, Dr. Bernstein says.
A loss of visual privacy is the No. 2 complaint from employees in offices with low or no partitions between desks, after noise, according to a 2013 study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology of 42,764 workers in 303 U.S. office buildings.

For the full commentary, see:
Sue Shellenbarger. “WORK & FAMILY; Why You Can’t Concentrate at Work.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., May 10, 2017): A13 & A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 9, 2017 and has the title “WORK & FAMILY; Why You Can’t Concentrate at Work.”)

The Bernstein paper, mentioned above, is:
Bernstein, Ethan S. “The Transparency Paradox.” Administrative Science Quarterly 57, no. 2 (June 2012): 181-216.

Workers in Open Offices Are Less Able to Focus and Take More Sick Days

(p. R7) Noisy, open-floor plans have become a staple of office life. But after years of employee complaints, companies are trying to quiet the backlash.
Many studies show how open-plan office spaces can have negative effects on employees and productivity. As a result, companies are adding soundproof rooms, creating quiet zones and rearranging floor plans to appeal to employees eager to escape disruptions at their desk.
Companies are “not providing sufficient variety in spaces,” says David Lehrer, a researcher at the Center for the Built Environment at the University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Lehrer studies the impact of office designs on employees, and lack of “speech privacy” is currently a significant problem, he says. Employees in open-plan offices are less likely to be satisfied with their offices than employees in a traditional office layout, Mr. Lehrer adds.
. . .
Companies with open offices, . . . , soon encountered the downsides. For one thing, workers took increased sick days–a 2014 Swedish study of more than 1,800 workers found open-plan workers were twice as likely to take sick days as workers in traditional offices. The reason, the researchers hypothesized: the spread of germs and increased environmental stress of working in an open space. Workers also complained of an inability to focus and were generally less content with their work environment, the study said.
Now, companies are again “realizing people actually have to be productive,” says Ned Fennie, partner at San Francisco-based architecture firm Fennie + Mehl.

For the full story, see:
ALINA DIZIK. “Open Offices Lose Some of Their Openness; Companies look for ways to add privacy and quiet areas without reverting to the traditional design.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Oct. 3, 2016): R7.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 2, 2016, and has the title “Open Offices Are Losing Some of Their Openness; Companies look for ways to add privacy and quiet areas without reverting to the traditional office design.”)

The 2014 Swedish study mentioned above, is:
Bodin Danielsson, Christina, Holendro Singh Chungkham, Cornelia Wulff, and Hugo Westerlund. “Office Design’s Impact on Sick Leave Rates.” Ergonomics 57, no. 2 (Feb. 2014): 139-47.

We Want Meaningful Work

(p. 1) HOW satisfied are we with our jobs?
Gallup regularly polls workers around the world to find out. Its survey last year found that almost 90 percent of workers were either “not engaged” with or “actively disengaged” from their jobs. Think about that: Nine out of 10 workers spend half their waking lives doing things they don’t really want to do in places they don’t particularly want to be.
Why? One possibility is that it’s just human nature to dislike work. This was the view of Adam Smith, the father of industrial capitalism, who felt that people were naturally lazy and would work only for pay. “It is the interest of every man,” he wrote in 1776 in “The Wealth of Nations,” “to live as much at his ease as he can.”
This idea has been enormously influential. About a century later, it helped shape the scientific management movement, which created systems of manufacture that minimized the need for skill and close attention — things that lazy, pay-driven workers could not be expected to have.
Today, in factories, offices and other workplaces, the details may be different but the overall situation is the same: Work is structured on the assumption that we do it only because we have to. The call center employee is monitored to ensure that he ends each call quickly. The office worker’s keystrokes are overseen to guarantee productivity.
. . .
(p. 4) To start with, I don’t think most people recognize themselves in Adam Smith’s description of wage-driven idlers. Of course, we care about our wages, and we wouldn’t work without them. But we care about more than money. We want work that is challenging and engaging, that enables us to exercise some discretion and control over what we do, and that provides us opportunities to learn and grow. We want to work with colleagues we respect and with supervisors who respect us. Most of all, we want work that is meaningful — that makes a difference to other people and thus ennobles us in at least some small way.
. . .
You enter an occupation with a variety of aspirations aside from receiving your pay. But then you discover that your work is structured so that most of those aspirations will be unmet. Maybe you’re a call center employee who wants to help customers solve their problems — but you find out that all that matters is how quickly you terminate each call. Or you’re a teacher who wants to educate kids — but you discover that only their test scores matter. Or you’re a corporate lawyer who wants to serve his client with care and professionalism — but you learn that racking up billable hours is all that really counts.
Pretty soon, you lose your lofty aspirations. And over time, later generations don’t even develop the lofty aspirations in the first place. Compensation becomes the measure of all that is possible from work. When employees negotiate, they negotiate for improved compensation, since nothing else is on the table. And when this goes on long enough, we become just the kind of creatures that Adam Smith thought we always were.

For the full commentary, see:

BARRY SCHWARTZ. “Rethinking Work.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., AUG. 30, 2015): 1 & 4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date AUG. 28, 2015,)

The commentary is related to Schwartz’s book:
Schwartz, Barry. Why We Work, Ted Books. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015.

G.D.P. May Understate Growth by 2% or More

(p. B1) As the economy has shifted from one that primarily produced things — refrigerators and cars, guns and shoes — to one that now deals largely in services and information, economists have grown more and more skeptical that the traditional measure of gross domestic product — the nation’s total output — is accurately capturing much of the economy’s innovation and improvements.
“I think the official data on real growth substantially underestimates the rate of growth,” said Martin Feldstein, an economist at Harvard.
. . .
(p. B2) Mr. Feldstein likes to illustrate his argument about G.D.P. by referring to the widespread use of statins, the cholesterol drugs that have reduced deaths from heart attacks. Between 2000 and 2007, he noted, the death rate from heart disease among those over 65 fell by one-third.
“This was a remarkable contribution to the public’s well-being over a relatively short number of years, and yet this part of the contribution of the new product is not reflected in real output or real growth of G.D.P.,” he said. He estimates — without hard evidence, he is careful to point out — that growth is understated by 2 percent or more a year.
. . .
For Mr. Feldstein, it is misleading measurements that are contributing to a public perception that real incomes — particularly for the middle class — aren’t rising very much. That, he said, “reduces people’s faith in the political and economic system.”
“I think it creates pessimism and a distrust of government,” leading Americans to worry that “their children are going to be stuck and won’t be able to enjoy upward mobility,” he said. “I think it’s important to understand this.”

For the full story, see:
PATRICIA COHEN. “Is the Slogging Economy Blazing? Growth Our Old Gauge Can’t See.” The New York Times (Tues., FEB. 7, 2017): B1-B2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date FEB. 6, 2017, and has the title “The Economic Growth That Experts Can’t Count.”)

“More Women in Their 60s and 70s” Work in Fulfilling Jobs

(p. 1) Kay Abramowitz has been working, with a few breaks, since she was 14. Now 76, she is a partner in a law firm in Portland, Ore. — with no intention of stopping anytime soon. “Retirement or death is always on the horizon, but I have no plans,” she said. “I’m actually having way too much fun.”
The arc of women’s working lives is changing — reaching higher levels when they’re younger and stretching out much longer — according to two new analyses of census, earnings and retirement data that provide the most comprehensive look yet at women’s career paths.
. . .
Most striking, women have become significantly more likely to work into their 60s and even 70s, often full time, according to the analyses. And many of these women report that they do it because they enjoy it.
. . .
Nearly 30 percent of women 65 to 69 are working, up from 15 percent in the late 1980s, one of the analyses, by the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, found. Eighteen per-(p. 4)cent of women 70 to 74 work, up from 8 percent.
. . .
Of those still working, Ms. Goldin said, “They’re in occupations in which they really have an identity.” She added, “Women have more education, they’re in jobs that are more fulfilling, and they stay with them.” (Ms. Goldin happens to be an example of the phenomenon, as a 70-year-old professor and researcher.)

For the full story, see:
Claire Cain Miller. “With More Women Fulfilled by Work, Retirement Has to Wait.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., FEB. 12, 2017): 1 & 4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date FEB. 11, 2017, and has the title “More Women in Their 60s and 70s Are Having ‘Way Too Much Fun’ to Retire.”)

The paper by Goldin and Katz, mentioned above, is:
Goldin, Claudia, and Lawrence F. Katz. “Women Working Longer: Facts and Some Explanations.” NBER Working Paper #22607. National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., Sept. 2016.

People Root for Billionaires If They Believe They Also Could Become Billionaires

(p. 22) “Billions” manages the feat of making you want the guy who has everything to have even more.
“People still root for billionaires because it reinforces the idea that they can do it too,” Mr. Kirshenbaum said recently. “People don’t want to be in a place where there’s not a lot of magic left in the equation.” Political analysts have long given this explanation for why poor or working-class people vote against tax increases for the wealthy: They want to believe that some day they, too, will have assets to guard.
. . .
Like the TV series, the film “The Big Short” puts you in the position of wanting the investors — or at least the investors depicted on the screen — to win. The movie channels your anger at the banks that came up with the perilous financial instruments that devastated the economy, but it leaves you no room to despise the charmingly eccentric rogue geniuses who made hundreds of millions of dollars shorting the housing market. All that hard work, the culling of documents and the fact-gathering trips to endangered Sun Belt real estate markets — it would be so wrong if they didn’t triumph in the end. Institutions are greedy; people are merely obsessed.

For the full commentary, see:
GINIA BELLAFANTE. “Big City; Rooting for the Robber Barons, at Least Those Onscreen.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., MARCH 20, 2016): 22.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date MARCH 18, 2016, and has the title “Big City; Rooting for the Robber Barons, at Least on the Screen.”)

Venture Capitalists Expect Future Successful Entrepreneurs to Look Like Recent Successful Entrepreneurs

(p. 4) In recent months, the fund-raising atmosphere has cooled as venture capitalists react to the poor stock market performance of some public tech companies and question whether the recent fast pace of investment is sustainable. Venture capitalists are making fewer investments at lower valuations.
“There is this delusion that it’s easy to raise money in Silicon Valley,” said Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, a mentorship and investment program for start-ups. “Raising money is incredibly hard.”
. . .
Venture capitalists, who hold the keys to success in Silicon Valley by providing start-up money, are even more likely to be white and male than tech company employees are. Theirs is an insular business. Most investors accept pitches only from entrepreneurs who come through an introduction, and they tend to finance people who have succeeded before, or who remind them of those who did.
According to a 2014 study published by the National Academy of Sciences, investors prefer pitches by men, particularly attractive men, to those by women, even when the content of the pitch is the same. In addition to studying the results of three entrepreneurial pitch competitions, the researchers conducted two experiments in which a representative sample of working adults heard identical pitches in male and female voices. Sixty-eight percent of people preferred to finance the company when it was pitched by a male voice, while 32 percent chose the female.
. . .
At the gender discrimination trial last year against Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which the venture capital firm won, female employees said they were excluded from a ski trip, denied credit for deals they brought to the firm, and told they both didn’t speak up enough and talked too much.
“I feel like it’s a lot more nuanced and sometimes it’s subconscious,” said Julia Hu, the founder and chief executive of Lark, which makes a health and weight-loss app. “V.C.s are pattern matchers, and they’re just used to seeing men like themselves.”
Many women convey confidence and leadership in a different way than men do, she said. As an Asian woman, she said, she was raised to be humble and quiet and felt uncomfortable promoting her skills. “To try to be who I thought they wanted me to be, which was another Mark Zuckerberg, was actually very difficult for me without feeling inauthentic.”

For the full story, see:
Miller, Claire Cain. “The Venture Capital Ceiling.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., FEB. 28, 2016): 1 & 4-5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date FEB. 27, 2016, and has the title “What It’s Really Like to Risk It All in Silicon Valley.”)

The National Academy of Sciences study mentioned above, is:
Wood Brooks, Alison, Laura Huang, Sarah Wood Kearney, and Fiona E. Murray. “Investors Prefer Entrepreneurial Ventures Pitched by Attractive Men.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 111, no. 12 (March 25, 2014): 4427-31.

Hitler Could Not Face Reality (or His Conscience?) Without Opiates and Cocaine

(p. C1) Given the sheer tonnage of books already devoted to the Nazis and Hitler, you might assume that everything interesting, terrible and bizarre is already known about one of history’s most notorious regimes and its genocidal leader. Then along comes Norman Ohler, a soft-spoken 46-year-old novelist from Berlin, who rummages through military archives and emerges with this startling fact: The Third Reich was on drugs.
All sorts of drugs, actually, and in stupefying quantities, as Mr. Ohler documents in “Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany,” a best seller in Germany and Britain that will be published in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in April [2017]. He was in New York City last week and sat for an interview before giving a lecture to a salon in a loft in the East Village, near Cooper Union.
. . .
. . . the most vivid portrait of abuse and withdrawal in “Blitzed” is that of Hitler, who for years was regularly injected by his personal physician with powerful opiates, like Eukodal, a brand of oxycodone once praised by William S. Burroughs as “truly awful.” For a few undoubtedly euphoric months, Hitler was also getting swabs of high-grade cocaine, a sedation and stimulation combo that Mr. Ohler likens to a “classic speedball.”
. . .
(p. C4) “There are all these stories of party leaders coming to complain about their bombed-out cities,” Mr. Ohler said, “and Hitler just says: ‘We’re going to win. These losses make us stronger.’ And the leaders would say: ‘He knows something we don’t know. He probably has a miracle weapon.’ He didn’t have a miracle weapon. He had a miracle drug, to make everyone think he had a miracle weapon.”
Lanky and angular, Mr. Ohler quietly conveys the mordant humor that occasionally surfaces in his book, which has a chapter titled “High Hitler.”

For the full interview, see:
DAVID SEGAL. “How Hitler’s Henchmen Were Kept Hopped Up.” The New York Times (Fri., December 10, 2016): C1 & C4.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date Dec. 9, 2016, and has the title “High on Hitler and Meth: Book Says Nazis Were Fueled by Drugs.”)

The book mentioned in the interview, is:
Ohler, Norman. Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.