Freddy Adu and George Washington

(I bet that's a phrase that doesn't get a Google hit. Checked and I was right.)

In last week's New Yorker, the review of David McCullough's "1776" focused on George Washington's presence and the process by which he achieved a command presence that impressed the hell out of everyone. A feature piece on Freddy Adu, the teenage soccer phenom, included a couple paragraphs on his training in Florida to have a presence in dealing with the media. Interesting contrast, but the idea's the same--to get one's aims you have to impress others. We are social animals.

Managerial Delusions

The Washington Post's "Unconventional Wisdom" in The Curse of Drafting First highlights a piece by "behavioral economists Cade Massey of Duke University and Richard H. Thaler of the University of Chicago" claiming that top NFL draft picks don't earn the money they're paid--low first rounders and high seconds are a better value.

"One reason why top players tend to be chancy investments is that general managers think they're better at evaluating talent than they really are, so they willingly overpay for first-rate talent."

It's natural, I guess, to think that if you've spent your working life trying to understand football, you do. The same goes for many walks of life.

The Importance of a Rising Tide

I'd put two articles together, one in the Post on Finland's school system (free to all and top scores on international rankings) and one in the Times on the problems of the poor going to college. Featured in the Times story is a man who went to college for a while, then dropped out. He's got a good job in his home community now, but is worried about future insecurity. In my reading of the story, a part of the problem for him was the extensive social network, his family and friends. Going to college wasn't a part of the network's world, so he was climbing a hill. (Does this show the social capital praised by people like Robert Putnam ("Bowling Alone") also has a downside?) (Ironically, his life sounds idyllic. Going back to school, as he finally decides, is essentially buying insurance against future change, at the cost of present happiness.)

Reading between the lines, in Finland there's now a social expectation for learning and education. By making higher education free it's the equivalent of the GI Bill--after World War II many of the vets went to college using the GI Bill's benefits. That was the way many of the boomer's parents achieved some mobility.

Kennedy used the metaphor of a rising tide lifting all boats for the importance of prosperity. But you can apply it also to education--if the society, and the subset of society you belong to, expect everyone to do well in school and go far, it makes things a lot easier.

Class Matters - Social Class in the United States

The NY Times site for the series has some interesting links, including an interactive graphic for plotting one's position by occupation, education, income and wealth. But I can't rate their bibliography very highly, at least in comprehensiveness.


Class Matters - Social Class in the United States of America - The New York Times

Finland Diary

Robert Kaiser is touring Finland to write pieces for the Washington Post. The first one focuses on education:

"Finland finishes first in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) exams that test 15-year-olds in all of the world's industrial democracies. Finland also finishes at or near the top in many global comparisons of economic competitiveness: Internet usage, environmental practices and more. Finland, where the modern cell phone was largely invented, has more cell phones per capita than any other nation -- nearly 85 per 100 citizens.

As recently as the 1970s, Finland required that children attend school for just six years and the education system here was nothing special. But new laws supported by substantial government spending created, in barely 20 years, a system that graduates nearly every young person from vocational or high school, and sends nearly half of them on to higher education. At every level, the schooling is rigorous, and free."

H-Net Review: Jonathan Beard on Overconfidence and War: The Havoc and Glory of Positive Illusions

This sounds like an interesting book--review from H-Net Review: Jonathan Beard on Overconfidence and War: The Havoc and Glory of Positive Illusions:

"[the book] begins with a short examination of optimism's roots in human evolution and psychology. It is both useful and pervasive, Johnson argues. During much of human history, people have been prey, and during the last few thousand years, warfare has been a significant factory in our lives. Optimism and (unwarranted) confidence aid survival under such conditions. Psychological testing has found, over and over, that almost everyone rates themselves as above average, and they underestimate their chances of getting sick or having accidents. Leaders, he suggests, are almost sure to incarnate both optimism and high self-esteem. Confidence combined with faulty information frequently leads to miscalculation."

Beard is a political scientist who reviews leaders' decisions: World War I; the Munich Crisis of 1938; the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; the choice by five American presidents to continue engagement in Vietnam; and the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

Certainly we don't like leaders who are pessimistic--remember Jimmy Carter's "malaise" speech? Yet some leaders go far by demonizing their opponennts. Emotions, including optimism, enable us to overcome the inertia to which humanity is subject.

Achenbach on George Washington

Joel Achenbach of the Post, and a blogger, gets a good review from the academy for his book:
The Grand Idea: George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West:

"the story of George Washington and the Potomac River, which has often been told before, has never been told so well, in large part because the reader comes away with an impression of the man as well as the river. Since the 1980s, historians and the Mount Vernon Ladies Association of the Union have struggled to present Americans with 'the man' rather than 'the monument,' often too consciously. In The Grand Idea Achenbach skillfully presents the man as a bold, geographically-obsessed, ambitious visionary. "

Although the review dates back to January, it was just circulated on the American Studies list from H-Net, the site for humanities and social sciences.

Legislative Process Changes Make a Difference

A sharp observation from Mark Schmitt at The Decembrist:

"I believe that one reason -- not the only reason, but an important one -- that this particular fight [the "nuclear option"] has become so bitter and so polarizing is exactly that fact, that so much of the Senate's business is now run through the rubber-stamp, party-line process of budget reconciliation. (Including pure policy decisions whose budget impact is incidental, such as opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.) Much of the rest is pushed through using the bizarre technique of rewriting legislation from scratch in small, tightly controlled conference committees, and then forcing the Senate to pass it or not, without amendment."

If my memory serves, budget reconciliation originated with David Stockman, Reagan's OMB director. A lot of Reagan's program of tax cuts and program cuts was wrapped up in one package. The one package idea provides cover for some--by combining disparate provisions you can do your logrolling in one vote. It may also reflect Theodore Lowi's "interest group" liberalism, the idea that politics has been taken over by narrowly focused groups.

How Big Is Government?

One of the illusions of political discussion is the definition of the federal government as "big". It's not. Or rather, bigness is relative to who you are. If you are an ordinary citizen, you have little direct contact with the federal government besides the IRS. Where the government becomes most visible and most onerous is for small business, those who employ people and who may impact the environment. That fact partially accounts, I think, for the division between Democrats and Republicans; they simply experience the government differently.

Planning, or Lack Thereof

Liberals need to remember we humans can't predict the future well, nor plan too far ahead. Timothy Noah at Slate had the bright idea of doing a poll of readers to see how they rated the New York Times op-ed stable. Unfortunately:

"The poll was a stunning success—and that, I'm afraid, created a problem here in the Chatterbox War Room. Even though I limited the voting time to roughly four and a half hours, I ended up with about 1,000 entries. That was roughly 10 times as many as what I imagined to be a likely upper limit. Each entry, remember, contained eight numbers for me to enter into a spreadsheet. And devoted though I may be to my readers, there was no way I was going to enter 8,000 numbers into my Microsoft Excel program. (Memo to the several hundred people who have continued to vote since the deadline three days ago: Please stop.)"