White achievement gap by class exceeds black-white gap

White class gap in math test scores as great now as black-white gap in the racial backwater prior to Brown vs. Board of Ed.

The New York Times had a powerful and alarming story today “Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Show“.

One thing that the story didn’t point out is that the class gaps even just within non-Hispanic whites are growing and this also exceeds the black-white test score gap.  I’ve appended a chart showing the within whites 90/10 math scores over time [comparing the math scores of a white child in a family earning $160,000 to the math scores over time of a white child in a family earning $17,500 in 2008].  [This is from an Appendix to Sean Reardon's paper, Figure 5.A2.]

The first graph shows that by 2000, the within white class gap (90/10) ratio has now risen to almost 1.25. It started rising with the birth cohort born around 1972, or in other words high school seniors around 1990.  This white class gap has risen about 65% from 0.75 in the early 1970s to almost 1.25 by 2000.   Reardon notes that 1.0 on this scale is about the difference in math between a 5th grader and an 8th grader.  So the white class gap is probably nearing the difference between an average 5th grader and a 9th grader.  [Interestingly, the white class gaps for math are greater than the class gaps within Blacks or Hispanics, probably because the wealth gap between the 90th and 10th percentiles for whites are wider than the similar wealth gap among Hispanics or Blacks.]

The second graph solid line shows whites and non-whites together but the dotted line on the second chart (the black-white racial gap) has been almost halved over the last 60 years from about 1.2, dropping to around 0.65 by 2000 (about the difference between a 5th grader and a 7th grader).

So even if you take race completely out of the equation, the class gap in math (and reading scores) within whites is almost DOUBLE the racial gap along these same measures and upper class whites are about 2 grade levels ahead compared to the black-white gap.  And the within white class gap in math test scores is about as great as the black-white test score gap in math was in the racial backwater leading up to Brown vs. Board of Education when the Supreme Court recognized that racially separate schools were inherently unequal.

The conclusion is that our focus on racial inequality in education has been important in halving these differences, but in an era of deindustrialization of America and the decline of good-paying high-school education jobs, we need to be paying as great attention to class gaps in math and English achievement if we hope to have vibrant social mobility in the decades ahead for the white working and lower middle class.

See somewhat related strong Op-Ed by Nick Kristof “The White Underclass” (2/9/12) (acknowledging some of the social truth of the cultural and family collapse of the white working class as Charles Murray’s Coming Apart does, while also identifying the much larger structural changes taking place as well which Murray does not).

See earlier blog post on social mobility in America.

No foreclosure from gift debt

Flickr/martingommel

Thomas Meaney, recently reviewed David Graeber’s DEBT: The First 5,000 Years for the NYT Book Review.  [Graeber helped inspire the Occupy Wallstreet movement.]

Meaney writes:

In 1925 the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss published his classic essay “The Gift,” which argued that contrary to the textbook account of primitive man merrily trading beaver pelts for wampum, no society was ever based on barter. The dominant practice for thousands of years was instead voluntary gift-giving, which created a binding sense of obligation between potentially hostile groups. To give a gift was not an act based on calculation, but on the refusal to calculate. In the societies Mauss studied most closely — the Maori of New Zealand, the Haida of the Pacific Northwest — people rejected the principles of economic self-interest in favor of arrangements where everyone was perpetually indebted to someone else.

Picking up where Mauss left off, Graeber argues that once-prevalent relationships based on an incalculable sense of duty deteriorated as buying and selling became the basis of society and as money, previously a marker of favors owed, became valuable in its own right….

So what, then, is to be done? Graeber finds reasons for hope in some unexpected places: corporations where elite management teams often operate more communistically than communes; in the possibility of a Babylonian-style Jubilee for Third World nations and students saddled with government loans; and from his own study of the Malagasy people of Madagascar, who he claims were adept at evading the snares of consumer debt encouraged by the state. But there is a sizable gulf between Graeber’s anthropological insights and his utopian political prescriptions. “Debt” ends with a paean to the “non-industrious poor.” “Insofar as the time they are taking off from work is being spent . . . enjoying and caring for those they love,” Graeber writes, they are the “pioneers of a new economic order that would not share our current one’s penchant for self-destruction.”

It’s an old dream among anthropologists — one that goes back to Rousseau. In 1968, Graeber’s own teacher, Marshall Sahlins, wrote an essay, “The Original Affluent Society,” which maintained that the hunters and gatherers of the Paleolithic period rejected the “Neolithic Great Leap Forward” because they correctly saw that the advancements it promised in tool-making and agriculture would reduce their leisure time. Graeber approves. He thinks it’s a mistake when unions ask for higher wages when they should go back to picketing for fewer working hours.

Michael from the Front Porch Forum (FPF) in Burlington, VT writes in response to Meaney’s quote that he loves that others in his FPF community in Burlington have undertaken a voluntary life of ‘favor debt’ (owing someone a favor) in place of monetary debt:

“Perpetually indebted to someone else”… this sums up so much of what I love about my community life in Burlington, VT right now….

I was raised to value making my contribution to others while taking great pains to avoid accepting the same from others.  So were lots of folks here.  But that’s a recipe for setting yourself apart, for isolation.  As my family has learned to accept favors from those around us, it’s made our contributions to others that much more meaningful and personal.

Now, through Front Porch Forum, MealTrain, our church, school, neighborhood and other means, we ask and offer favors daily from hundreds of friends, neighbors and acquaintances.  Each request works against isolation and lays down another thread in the web of community that supports our life.  This is a crucial asset… as much as our house, my job, the kids’ college savings.

My brother and his family are planning a holiday visit to see us in Vermont this month.  We could all jam into our house, but I know they would sleep better if we had more space for the two families.  Hotels are expensive and distant… B&Bs too.  So, I put the word out to neighbors and got several offers of empty houses that we could use on our block.  These neighbors are traveling out of state and are glad to share their home while they’re away.  We’ve done this a dozen times over the past few years… offering or asking for empty-house guest lodging.  Make that hundreds of times if we include other favors… meals, rides, tools, advice, kids stuff, labor, baby/pet sitting, on and on.

This is incredibly generous and trusting of all involved… but it’s also keeping each of us “perpetually indebted to our neighbors” in a way that makes our community stronger with each exchange.

It’s a wonderful description of generalized reciprocity of the sort that undergirds social capital as discussed in Bowling Alone.

See somewhat related earlier post “Economists ignore a critical third of economy: the social economy“

Hat tip to Lew Feldstein for spotting the FPF post.

Two recent articles on the importance of groups for health

Flickr/EdsonHong

Tina Rosenberg (author of the recently blogged about Join the Club) had two recent opinion pieces in the New York Times in November on how groups play a key role in healthy outcomes.

One “Fixes: For Weight Loss, a Recipe of Teamwork and Trust” (11/15/11) focuses on how patients are much more successful in trying to lose weight when they are in groups.

Another “Fixes: At a Big Church, a Small Group Health Solution”
discusses how Saddleback Church (also featured in Bob Putnam and Lew Feldstein’s Better Together) uses small-groups to encourage more healthy lifestyles of their members.

Tip o’ the hat to Lew Feldstein for these articles.

Trust/Approval of federal government hits all-time low

Flickr photo by reskiebak

Approval ratings for Congress dropped into single digits this month for the first time since CBS News and the New York Times began asking the question more than three decades ago.

A New York Times/CBS poll conducted between October 21-24, 2011 showed just 9% percent of US respondents approving of the job of Congressional lawmakers. [The question read "Do you approve or disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job?'] This is a drop from 11% back in September and the first time approval ratings have been in single digits over the almost three and half decades that the question has been asked (since 1977). [84% in the recent October poll said they did not trust congressional lawmakers and 9% said they didn't know.]

Rates of approval peaked in the early 2000s when over 60% approved of the way Congress was handling its job and has dropped precipitously since then.

The same precipitous drop is true about trust of national government.  [Question: "How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right?"]  Trust of national government hit an all-time low in October 2011 of 10%.  Back in the early 2000s, about 55% of Americans said they trusted the government in Washington.

One can see the time series for Congressional approval and trust of the federal government since 1977 here.

For sure, a heavy component in these declines in trust are macro assessments about the economy and the country.  That said, at least in the short-term, the precipitous decline in trust of government presents a strong headwind for those who aspire to mobilize government to do something either about record high levels of inequality or to help stimulate the US out of the deepest recession it has experienced in the last century.   I am also working on some scholarship with Chaeyoon Lim (not yet published) that suggests that partisanship may be greater in times of greater economic woes, so this may also be playing a role in the declining trust.

See earlier comments of Bob Putnam from 18 months ago on these declines in governmental trust.

Growing inequality in the news; point of no return?

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued a report early this week that outlines factoids known to scholars of inequality for some time — that over the last 30 years the share of income captured by the top has grown at the expense of those in the middle or low-end of the income hierarchy.

After-tax incomes for the top 1% grew 265% over the roughly three decades from 1979-2007 while those with incomes in the bottom 20% of the distribution saw after-tax income rise a paltry 18% over roughly 30 years (or about half of 1% per year).

The top 1% now capture 17% of the nation’s income, more than double the 8% they captured back in 1979.  The bottom 80% of households (most of us) saw their share of income decline 2-3 percentage points over this period.  [CBO points out that part of this trend toward increasing inequality was the result of higher-income households capturing a higher share of wages in the market and part was government doing less than 3 decades ago to redistribute and even out this market-based inequality.]

While these factoids are known by some, what may be new is: 1) that general unrest and anger/frustration at this inequality is growing, as evidenced by the Occupy Wall Street protests; and 2) even mainstream believers of capitalism, like PIMCO bond-fund investment chief Mohamed El-Erian (also former manager of the Harvard endowment) or Harvard pre-eminent labor economist Larry Katz (former chief economist for the department of labor under Clinton) believe that we have drifted into economically deleterious levels.

Mohamed El-Erian, another pillar of the financial world … is sympathetic to aspects of the Occupy movement. He told me that the economic system needs to move toward “inclusive capitalism” and embrace broad-based job creation while curbing excessive inequality.

“You cannot be a good house in a rapidly deteriorating neighborhood,” he told me. “The credibility and the fair functioning of the neighborhood matter a great deal. Without that, the integrity of the capitalist system will weaken further.”

Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist, adds that some inequality is necessary to create incentives in a capitalist economy but that “too much inequality can harm the efficient operation of the economy.” In particular, he says, excessive inequality can have two perverse consequences: first, the very wealthy lobby for favors, contracts and bailouts that distort markets; and, second, growing inequality undermines the ability of the poorest to invest in their own education.

“These factors mean that high inequality can generate further high inequality and eventually poor economic growth,” Professor Katz said. [quoted from "Crony Capitalism Comes Home" by Nick Kristof, NYT Op-Ed 10/27/11]

Is Occupy Wall Street a moment or a movement? (UPDATED 2/1/12)

Flickr photo by eleephotography

Despite their lack of demands, it’s been fascinating to watch the growth in Occupy Wall Street protests (in the US and abroad).  As someone long puzzled that the US don’t object more to the uneven distribution of wealth, it is heartening to see many Americans taking the issue of inequality to the streets.

Is it a social movement?  Or as Marshall Ganz says “is it a moment“? The eminent Univ. of Columbia sociologist/political scientist/historian Charles Tilley (1929-2008) identified three components widely considered to be the core elements of a social movement:

1. A sustained, organized public effort making collective claims on target audiences (“a campaign”);
2. Employing various combinations of political action (“repertoire”), including special purpose associations and coalitions, public meetings, processions, vigils, rallies, demonstrations, petition drives, public statements through the media, and pamphleteering; and
3. Participants’ concerted public representations for themselves or  constituents of their worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment (WUNC).

Along these three criteria, Occupy Wall Street merits mixed success.

1a. sustained campaign: so far Occupy Wall Street has been going for 3+ months and while they vow to continue their efforts through the winter, time will tell, and their funding is running short.  [The ouster of protesters by police in places like NYC, Oakland, Portland, Denver, and the like, seems to have substantially dissipated their numbers.  And violent confrontations with police in places like Oakland have undermined broader support for the Occupy movement.]

1b. organized:  so far Occupy Wall Street is highly unusual in their self-organization.  They do not have leaders.  They don’t even have megaphones so they resort to people around a speaker physically amplifying a speaker’s comments by repeating it in unison or developing hand signals to show approval/disapproval with comments.  OWS certainly is organized as far as things like the provision of food, having various committees, etc.  While there was no leader to the OWS protest, it was the brainchild of Adbusters, and based on the Arab Spring protests and designed to be a US-based Tahrir Square, but having called people to protest, they have remained fairly hands-off.  [Note: it's worth reading the interesting "Pre-Occupied" on the history of OWS and ongoing involvement of Adbusters.]

1c. demands:  so far, there are no demands that Occupy Wall Street has made of the government, of Wall Street, etc.  In fact some (like Bill Clinton) are criticizing OWS for not having made specific demands, although in some ways it makes it easier to sustain this amorphous “movement” by being potentially all things to all people and being a vehicle for people’s general anger.  They have now formed a committee to try to develop demands.  Many of their demands like “an end to Wall Street greed” seem relatively unachievable without a cap in pay on Wall Street (which seems very unlikely).  Other possible goals like writing down student debt for unemployed students might be more achievable.

Derek Thompson, writing for The Atlantic claims that the mid-November ouster of OWS from Zuccotti Park is a good thing because it enables the protesters to reformulate their movement and focus on a central demand:  “Whether or not the protesters return to their tents, New York police have given them a chance to lift up, take stock, and pitch their energies in an issue worth occupying. Writing for The Atlantic yesterday, Sara Horowitz reached back into the Industrial Revolution protests that culminated in the Eight-Hour Day Movement. From a “massive, inchoate, messy movement emerged a central demand: an eight-hour workday,” she wrote. And that eventually led to Fair Labor Standards Act as part of the New Deal in 1938.

“What should be the Eight-Hour Day Movement of the moment? Maybe they should focus on student debt reform. Today, student debt lives with you until you die and cannot be unwound in bankruptcy court; perhaps it should be. Maybe they should focus on the minimum wage, which has declined in real value for the last few decades. Maybe they call for repealing the Bush tax cuts, a savvy request that would represent broad sacrifice (it would raise taxes on almost all households, but mostly at the top) to demonstrate to Americans that the movement is willing to sacrifice for its ultimate goals. There is also welfare reform, unemployment benefit support, and other platforms that would aim to support the least well-off.”  Such demands don’t require a physical base.

Some protesters after the Zuccotti Park eviction said they “were already trying to broaden their influence, for instance by deepening their involvement in community groups and spearheading more of what they described as direct actions, like withdrawing money from banks, and were considering supporting like-minded political candidates.” But “Doug McAdam, a sociology professor at Stanford, predicted that the energy could quickly dissipate without the occupation. ‘The focal point will be lost,’ he said. ” (NY Times)

In total, on dimension 1, given how short this protest has lasted and the current lack of demands, I’d give them a C+ on this.

2. repertoire:  OWS has largely resorted to rallies thus far, but they have had a couple of marches (to places like Times Square).  They make wide use of social media, including the Internet, Meetup, Twitter.  They have a website (Occupy Together) that charts their efforts in other cities.  They use protest signs, music (although often more entertaining than protesting).  I’d give them a B+ on this front.

3. WUNC: they clearly have made a general statement that government has been there during the Great Recession much more for the 1% than for the 99% (Wall Street at the expense of Main Street).  Moreover, their message appears to be resonating, in terms of number of actual and inchoate demonstrations, number of Facebook sympathizers, and views in the general public.   As noted in a lack of their demands, there is relatively little “unity” and their “numbers” while growing are still relatively small in any one site.  As to “commitment”, it certainly appears that some of the protesters are there for the long-haul, sleeping there overnight. I’d give them an B- on this dimension.

As someone who has written about the power of Meetup before and about “alloy social capital“, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) folks who originally showed their support on Facebook (a far less meaningful indicator of support in my book) have now taken to using Meetup as a tool to organize protests in new cities.    As Micah Sifry noted on 10/14/11, “On Meetup.com/OccupyTogether, where the OccupyTogether folks shifted their efforts, the number of communities represented has also doubled in the last 8 days, from 945 to 1,749. The number of occupiers listed as having joined one of those Meetups has tripled, from just under 4,000 to about 12,300.”

If this chart to left is put on a logarithmic scale, one sees that the rate of growth dramatically slows after 10/7, even with an action (registering a “like” on facebook that is quite easy.

I think the growth on Meetup is much more real, but many of these locations are currently inactive (see below).

- number of actual and inchoate demonstrations.  There is not great data on this.  Nate Silber had an interesting post on 10/17/11 about the size and geography of protesters.  Meetup charts the current number of “occupiers” by location, but this is likely an overestimate since some/many(?) of these “occupiers” may not show up on a given day and an underestimate since it only includes people registered on Meetup (and not their tag-along friends or people who see a protest and join in).

- views in the general public. Over 54% of Americans have favorable views of OccupyWallStreet. And a Quinnipiac University poll on 10/17/11 found two-thirds of Big Apple voters support the Occupy Wall Street protests.  [Although more recent polls show support for the OWS protest slipping.]

- moreover, there is some evidence that the OWS efforts are changing at least what the media is discussing.  See this post by Zaid Jilani of Think Progress on what the media was covering in the end of July versus what it was covering in October.  [Granted that the resolution of the showdown over the national deficit naturally made the focus naturally shift away somewhat from a focus on debt, but the turnaround in attention to jobs, fairness and inequality has been remarkable.]

Syd Tarrow, a pre-eminent scholar of social movements defines them as “collective challenges to elites, authorities, other groups or cultural codes by people with common purposes and solidarity in sustained interactions with elites, opponents and authorities.”  Along this definition, the OWS movement would have to wrestle with proving that they are sustained (see above), that they have “common purposes and solidarity” (see above) and “collective challenges” when they have yet to present any unified demands.  Moreover, the OWS movement has been less about interacting directly with elites, opponents or authorities (other than fighting off arrests or threats to clear them from Zuccotti Park).

Where OWS may be more successful as a quasi social movement is to the extent that they get political leaders to stand up and take notice and change their policies accordingly.  On this score, time will obviously tell, but they have tapped into a period of fundamental and widespread feeling of malaise and lack of economic confidence about the future.

+++

For a primer on Occupy Wall Street, see this LA Times piece and see this CBS piece comparing the actual distribution of income in the US against what respondents think the distribution is and what they would desire.  There is also an interesting abridgement of a Scientific American article on attitudes/behaviors toward income redistribution in the US.

Note: Jeffrey Sachs calls OWS “The New Progressive Movement“, but he is far looser about using the term social movement.

- From analysis of 5,600 completed surveys at occupywallst.org, fastcompany concludes that the typical protester is white (82%), male (61%), college-educated (61%), has a political affiliation of “independent” (70%), is 25-44 years old (44%), has a full-time job (47%), has income under $25,000 (47%) although 30% have income over $50,000 and 2% have income over $150,000, and about one quarter of them have attended occupation events previously.  Other demographics here.

- And an interesting article about how the Teamsters are allying with Occupy Wall Street around shared goals.

Measuring happiness comes close to home

Flickr photo by seq

We’ve reported earlier on the UK government’s recent decision to measure the happiness of its citizens.  The latest government to do so is neighboring Somerville, MA.  Somerville, which went by the nickname of “Slummerville” in the 1980s for cheap and affordable 3-decker housing and the highest residential concentration of any community in New England, has recently become more hip and gentrified thanks to the revitalization of places like Inman Square and Davis Square.

Somerville Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone is a recent graduate of the mid-career program Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) and a visionary who has worked with HKS on many other local government measurement projects (SomerStat). The NY Times quotes Curtatone as saying that the project was a “no-brainer” and he noted that “cities keep careful track of their finances, but a bond rating doesn’t tell us how people feel or why they want to raise a family here or relocate a business here.”

The city is collaborating with happiness expert Dan Gilbert at Harvard and ultimately hopes to use these data to see how things like the extension of the subway green line affect happiness or how Somerville’s happiness compares with neighboring towns.

The voluntary survey asks such questions like:

• How happy do you feel right now? (1-10 scale)How satisfied are you with your life in general? (1-10 scale)
  In general, how similar are you to other people you know? (1-10 scale)
  When making decisions, are you more likely to seek advice or decide for yourself? (1-10 scale)
• Taking everything into account, how satisfied are you with Somerville as a place to live? (1-10 scale)

The survey also asks residents to rate Somerville’s “beauty or physical setting” [likely fairly low for anyone who has spent time in Somerville], “availability of affordable housing”, quality of local public schools, and effectiveness of local police.

Researchers hope to correlate ratings of well-being, demographics, satisfaction with Somerville amenities, and proximity to various parts of Somerville to unpack what makes residents more or less satisfied.

As the NY Times observes: “Monitoring the citizenry’s happiness has been advocated by prominent psychologists and economists, but not without debate over how to do it and whether happiness is even the right thing for politicians to be promoting. The pursuit of happiness may be an inalienable right, but that is not the same as reporting blissful feelings on a questionnaire. “

See “How Happy Are You? A Census Wants to Know” (NY Times, 4/30/11 by John Tierney)

See Somerville’s voluntary “Wellbeing and Community Survey“

See “Somerville, Mass., aims to boost happiness. Can it?” (CS Monitor, 4/4/11 by Mary Helen Miller)

Americans far less trusting than per capita wealth would predict

Catherine Rampell has a couple of interesting charts describing the relationship of trust, income and equality (among countries).

The US is 10th most trusting of the 30 countries examined (with 48.7% saying that others can generally be trusted).  Norway and Denmark are the most trying with almost 90% saying that others can be trusted; Turkey and Mexico are the least trusting with only 20-25% of residents saying that others can be trusted.

Since wealthy countries generally are more trusting, it’s surprising that America is only ranked 10th.

The U.S. is the country in the top center of the graph, way above the black regression line with median equivalized income of $27,000 per person (y-axis) but trust just below 50% (x-axis).  If one moved the US over to the right until it hit the regression line it would have social trust levels of 90%, like Norway.  [better picture here.]

The reason for America’s low level of trust can be seen by looking at the levels of inequality in the US.  More equal countries tend to have higher levels of trust, and viewed through this lens, Americans are just as trusting as one would expect, down around the levels of trust and inequality of a Portugal or a Poland, which while far poorer than the US has similar levels of equality to the US.

The implicit conclusion seems to be that income equality trumps wealth when it comes to trust, which makes some sense as it may engender a “we’re-all-in-this-together” esprit de corps.  But the regression line, if anything, seems to better fit countries for the graph of trust against income per person than the level of trust maps onto levels of equality.  And notably, Denmark and Norway, have higher levels of trust than one would expect from their level of equality.

Food for thought…

See NY Times Economix, “Trust Me, We’re Rich” (Catherine Rampell, 4/18/11)

Shrinking Detroit while retaining its social capital

Flickr photo by buckshot.jones

Detroit faces a painful decision.  Its population has crumbled over the last decade, shedding 25% of its residents (or 235,000 people).  What was once the fourth largest city in America in 1920 and which had nearly 2 million residents in 1950, now has only 713,777 residents.  As the NY Times observes, “Detroit is now smaller than Austin, Tex., Charlotte, N.C., and Jacksonville, Fla.”

The challenge is that people, as one might expect, are not neatly leaving from one or two neighborhoods, instead leaving vacant lots scattered throughout a 139 square mile city.  This complicates government’s ability to police, educate, collect trash, etc. all with lower tax revenue.  (Vacancy rates are obviously highest in general in the downtown area and in the east side, areas generally inhabited by poorer and less educated residents.)

The Mayor is trying to figure out how to demolish 10,000 structures, given that there is a 20% vacancy rate in housing across the city.

The challenges are two-fold: 1) the city lacks any power of eminent domain to force these people to leave but the city plans to focus its investments on neighborhoods it considers more vibrant and healthy; and 2) the city doesn’t seem to focus on what the “social capital” consequences will be of all these people moving.  In fact, they seem to be measuring almost everything except for that, tracking “population densities, foreclosed homes, disease, parks, roads, water lines, sewer lines, bus routes, publicly owned lands, and on and on.”  The city may also cut back services to these less “viable” neighborhoods.

We should bear in mind the horrible lessons of slum clearing in the 1950s where “slum” neighborhoods like Boston’s West End were razed to build new housing.  Herbert Gans in his book Urban Villagers details the high social cost of this ill-conceived experiment as thousands of social ties and the vibrant life of this community was extinguished.  It seems like Detroit Mayor Dave Bing would be wise to hire some ethnographers or social networks students to map out people’s social networks and identify sociometric clusters of individuals that could be encouraged to move together; this would maximize the happiness and sense of engagement of those who moved and minimize the social costs from dislocated friendships.

Of course, even if Mayor Bing does this, one overarching question of the Detroit plan is whether poor residents will largely be asked to move to more affluent neighborhoods, and if so, how they will be able to afford this, and what the city will do to try to build more bridging social capital between the existing residents and the new in-movers.

See “The Odd Challenge for Detroit Planners” (NY Times, 4/5/11)

See maps of where demolitions are proposed: (NY Times graphic, 4/5/11)

David Brooks’ “The Social Animal” (REVIEW, UPDATED)

The Boston Globe reviews Brooks’ Social Animal: How the new sciences of human nature can help make sense of a life: “The outward mind, according to Brooks, focuses on the power of the individual; the inner mind highlights the bonds among people. Those bonds have become frayed in recent decades, he argues, and need rebuilding if we are to thrive as individuals and as a society.

“ ‘The unconscious is impulsive, emotional, sensitive, and unpredictable. It has its shortcomings. It needs supervision. But it can be brilliant. It’s capable of processing blizzards of data and making daring creative leaps. Most of all, it is also wonderfully gregarious. Your unconscious, that inner extrovert, wants you to reach outward and connect. It wants you to achieve communion with work, friend, family, nation and cause. Your unconscious wants to entangle you in the thick web of relations that are the essence of human flourishing.’ “  (Boston Globe)  Brooks suggests that the unconscious is more important to determining our actions than the conscious.

“Some groups are far better than others at inculcating functional norms and social skills. Children from disorganized, unstable communities have a much harder time acquiring the discipline to succeed in life. And a famous experiment conducted around 1970 demonstrated that the ability of 4-year-olds to postpone gratification by leaving a marshmallow uneaten for a time as a condition of receiving a second marshmallow was a very good predictor of success in life: ‘The kids who could wait a full 15 minutes had, 13 years later, SAT scores that were 210 points higher than the kids who could wait only 30 seconds. . . . Twenty years later, they had much higher college-completion rates, and 30 years later, they had much higher incomes. The kids who could not wait at all had much higher incarceration rates. They were much more likely to suffer from drug- and alcohol-addiction problems.’ ” (NY Times)

The WSJ suggests that it is directionally correct (and that non-cognitive skills may be 75% of the action), but in fictionalizing research into its novels two characters (Erica and Harold), it strays from some of the strict limits of the underlying research.

In the process of celebrating intuitive over rational thinking, Mr. Brooks lets his own unconscious biases get him into trouble. He describes in some detail, for example, clever experiments by Dutch psychologists who found that consumers make better purchasing decisions if they mull the relevant information unconsciously while their minds are occupied with other tasks—as opposed to making a quick decision or consciously analyzing the options and then deciding. But he doesn’t tell the reader about the one big problem with studies like this: Other researchers have been unable to reproduce their results.  This is a chronic problem…[t]he first study on a topic is rarely the last word.

…The narrative [in The Social Animal] begins with Erica taking a job with a consulting firm of wonks who show off their big brains by citing their favorite equations and debating esoteric trivia at staff meetings. They hire mainly on the basis of intelligence but never develop lasting, profitable relationships with clients. Once Erica figures this out, she leaves to start her own company.

If this story is meant to illustrate a broader point, it must be that …[t]he brilliant are more likely than the average to be socially awkward. But…] in reality, tests of emotional intelligence correlate positively with IQ tests.

But Mr. Brooks makes an even bigger claim: “Once you get past some pretty obvious correlations (smart people make better mathematicians), there is a very loose relationship between IQ and life outcomes.” [Chabris notes that Brooks in relying on an argument made by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers that IQ attendance at Harvard or MIT can't predict who will win Nobels, encounters problems that this research is based on] “tiny sample sizes, the shaky assumption that prize juries (and elite universities) make decisions based only on merit, and the focus on the tails of a distribution (here, the highest extremes of intelligence and academic achievement), which is the method guaranteed to tell you the least about the characteristics that matter across the whole range of human ability. To dismiss IQ testing as invalid because it can’t pick out the minuscule minority that will attain world-wide fame is to confuse a positive correlation with a perfect one. Only oracles have perfect records of prophecy, and surely no one desires a world in which IQ tests are that good.

…The research that Mr. Brooks minimizes or ignores does not, of course, prove that intelligence is the only relevant trait for success. A host of “noncognitive” skills, many of which Mr. Brooks explains well, are undoubtedly important. But there is no need to tear down intelligence in order to build up the rest.  Even if differences in intelligence explain 25% of the differences among people in how well they perform at work (a much better estimate than the low-ball 4% cited by Mr. Brooks), there is still three times as much territory left to be mapped out. Surely that’s plenty of space for researchers to investigate the role of social acumen, mindset, culture, self-control and much else. A thousand flowers can bloom.

See also David Brooks’ humorous TED talk on this topic, relating his talk to everything from politicians, to school reform, to financial reform, to the war in Iraq. He discusses why the rational world has trumped the social and emotional world at great cost.  He talks about how we are deeply social animals, and formed out of relationships with each other (mentioning the importance of “social capital.”)  To succeed in life, Brooks believes we need mindsight (empathy into what others are thinking), equipoise (serenity in reading our overconfidence and biases), metus (sensitivity to the physical environment), sympathy (ability to work within face-to-face groups through non-verbal communication), blending (a new fusion of two different ideas), and limerince (the ability to find moments of transcendence).

David Brooks’ book  Social Animal: How the new sciences of human nature can help make sense of a life

See Guardian article “What’s the big idea?: David Brooks’s theories on society were fashionable 200 years ago, he tells Stuart Jeffries. So why are British politicians such fans of his new book?“