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David L. Kirp, Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America’s Schools: A detailed examination of Union City, New Jersey’s school system, which serves many poor and immigrant children and gets them to results that compare well with New Jersey overall—and New Jersey is a high-performing state. Kirp identifies several key factors: (1) a shared curriculum, vital for children who often move schools in the middle of the year; (2) heavy investment in quality preschool; (3) strong political support for a long-term plan and a superintendent who will stay the course; and (4) a culture of respect and we-can-do-it rather than Michelle Rhee’s “no excuses”/“punish the teachers if they don’t improve results” approach. Unfortunately, No Child Left Behind’s focus on testing reading and math above all else mostly works against Union City’s successful endeavors, and at the very least leaves the effective teachers there burdened under paperwork and distracted from the things they’re doing right. But Kirp suggests that these lessons, rather than firing teachers and turning to charter schools, could help school systems around the country.
Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America: Terrifying and impressive book about white backlash and the deliberate exploitation of divisions by Nixon and his ilk (including a young, already dirty-tricking Karl Rove). There are so many echoes of our present time—liberals were convinced that if they only said the facts, they could not fail, and were surprised that voters instead believed the right’s lies; Lieutenant Calley of My Lai was George Zimmerman, receiving conservative adulation and donations he used to live in a luxury apartment; Nixon even ran a deceptive ad about how McGovern would put 47% of the country on welfare. The casual violence of the time—cop shootings every day; “hippies” beat to death for being hippies, as in Easy Rider—is now school massacres. Perlstein tells a gripping story about the country, framed by Nixon’s own experiences of being a powerful white man who always felt he wasn’t getting enough respect: the very model of the people he courted by telling them that they were the real victims.
Deception: From Ancient Empires to Internet Dating, ed. Brooke Harrington. Collection of not all that well connected essays about deception. Most interesting bits: (1) The few people who are good at detecting deception (and don’t just think they’re good, as most cops/lawyers/judges do and are totally wrong) are more vulnerable to being fooled when the deceiver looks like someone they know and love. (2) The Inca/Inka kept records in knotted strings, khipu/quipu, that moderns can’t fully translate, and for a while they convinced the Spanish that the khipu keepers were incapable of deception; even when the trust broke down, the Spanish still couldn’t read them and had to rely on the records anyway. (3) Victims of financial fraud in the “legitimate” economy—e.g., Enron, compared to penny stock fraud—don’t behave by withdrawing and licking their wounds, as sociologist Erving Goffman reported with other fraud victims. Instead, many victims refused to acknowledge that they’ve been conned—they either frame themselves as willing accomplices or deny that any con took place, instead “framing losses as a temporary setback in a fundamentally sound endeavor.” They say they won’t reduce involvement in investing because they have no choice—they can’t just keep the money under the mattress (though safer vehicles like CDs are in fact available to them, they reason that they need more money in retirement, and Harrington notes that retirement in the US is indeed very underfunded). It’s another troubling application of the just world hypothesis. When the game is rigged and people think they have no choice but to play anyway, can we ever get the game un-rigged?
Bruce Schneier, Liars & Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive: Schneier is a smart man, but this isn’t his most engaging work. It’s basically a series of schemas about what factors make people cooperate or defect, looking at the multiple communities/pressures/morals/interests/technologies etc. that affect such decisions. Big takeaway: societies that don’t have many defections (however defined—defections from a bad rule can be good, too) tend to be highly unfree; the key is to have a balance of deterrents and acknowledge the costs of various constraints. Otherwise you end up with the TSA, expensive and not very worthwhile.
Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America: Terrifying and impressive book about white backlash and the deliberate exploitation of divisions by Nixon and his ilk (including a young, already dirty-tricking Karl Rove). There are so many echoes of our present time—liberals were convinced that if they only said the facts, they could not fail, and were surprised that voters instead believed the right’s lies; Lieutenant Calley of My Lai was George Zimmerman, receiving conservative adulation and donations he used to live in a luxury apartment; Nixon even ran a deceptive ad about how McGovern would put 47% of the country on welfare. The casual violence of the time—cop shootings every day; “hippies” beat to death for being hippies, as in Easy Rider—is now school massacres. Perlstein tells a gripping story about the country, framed by Nixon’s own experiences of being a powerful white man who always felt he wasn’t getting enough respect: the very model of the people he courted by telling them that they were the real victims.
Deception: From Ancient Empires to Internet Dating, ed. Brooke Harrington. Collection of not all that well connected essays about deception. Most interesting bits: (1) The few people who are good at detecting deception (and don’t just think they’re good, as most cops/lawyers/judges do and are totally wrong) are more vulnerable to being fooled when the deceiver looks like someone they know and love. (2) The Inca/Inka kept records in knotted strings, khipu/quipu, that moderns can’t fully translate, and for a while they convinced the Spanish that the khipu keepers were incapable of deception; even when the trust broke down, the Spanish still couldn’t read them and had to rely on the records anyway. (3) Victims of financial fraud in the “legitimate” economy—e.g., Enron, compared to penny stock fraud—don’t behave by withdrawing and licking their wounds, as sociologist Erving Goffman reported with other fraud victims. Instead, many victims refused to acknowledge that they’ve been conned—they either frame themselves as willing accomplices or deny that any con took place, instead “framing losses as a temporary setback in a fundamentally sound endeavor.” They say they won’t reduce involvement in investing because they have no choice—they can’t just keep the money under the mattress (though safer vehicles like CDs are in fact available to them, they reason that they need more money in retirement, and Harrington notes that retirement in the US is indeed very underfunded). It’s another troubling application of the just world hypothesis. When the game is rigged and people think they have no choice but to play anyway, can we ever get the game un-rigged?
Bruce Schneier, Liars & Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive: Schneier is a smart man, but this isn’t his most engaging work. It’s basically a series of schemas about what factors make people cooperate or defect, looking at the multiple communities/pressures/morals/interests/technologies etc. that affect such decisions. Big takeaway: societies that don’t have many defections (however defined—defections from a bad rule can be good, too) tend to be highly unfree; the key is to have a balance of deterrents and acknowledge the costs of various constraints. Otherwise you end up with the TSA, expensive and not very worthwhile.
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