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Anyone else ever have trouble logging in to DW from your own journal? I have followed all past advice (clearing cache, cookies, etc.) to no avail, but discovered my own workaround, which is that I can log in from the “post entry” form and then everything is cake again. Bizarre.
Pretty Little Liars: How do the parents on this show just continue to grow on me? I long had little use for Byron’s cheating ass, but his delivery of the thank-you to Ezra was the best since Zachary Quinto made “live long and prosper” sound exactly like “fuck off and die.”
A poem by Patricia Lockwood, Rape Joke. The title is its warning.
Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education: Mea culpa and cri de coeur of a former reformer who looked at the data and found that the popular solutions to America’s educational woes were being pushed on schools despite the absence of evidence to support them and substantial evidence that a focus on testing math and reading harms the curriculum, demoralizes teachers, and encourages cheating and other efforts to make sure underperforming students are someone else’s problem, which is pretty much the opposite of helping them. Ravitch argues that demanding test score improvement on math and literacy is not the same thing as having a curriculum, which is really what’s needed. By focusing on math and reading reformers have harmed schools and teachers—especially the ones whose students need the most—by denying them time, energy, and rewards for teaching history, social studies, science, art, and PE.
Ravitch also makes a nice point about the way in which culture wars in the US have given way to/are in fact about serving the desires of the 1%. She notes that, even as school voucher proponents won court victories that paved the way for large-scale voucher programs that would’ve allowed religious schools to get a lot of money from the government, reform ideology shifted to charter schools, which are considered public and can’t be religious but can be for-profit. “Choice” is now about entrepreneurship and opening up a new money funnel for investors—kids with state money strapped to their backs—not about parents selecting the values they want their children to learn. The book is repetitive because the stories of attacks on teachers and the failure of reforms to make things better are repetitive. (Also, one of Ravitch’s big points is that we aren’t in decline; Americans in general have never done well on international tests since the tests began, and wealthy districts perform at the top of the international rankings. We have a poverty problem and therefore we have an education problem.)
Sendhil Mullainathan & Eldar Shafir, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. Excellent collection of research, much of it new to me, on decisionmaking and why scarcity (what the authors often call “lack of bandwidth”) matters. If you only read one pop culture behavioral economics book this year—sadly, this does not describe me—then I’d recommend this one.
Scarcity of time makes us busier because of the decisions about what to put off we make, borrowing from the future; scarcity of money makes us poorer for the same reasons. There’s also some research about other resources, like food (calorie restriction makes us obsess about food, and more likely to make mistakes about our desired consumption), but mostly the authors focus on poverty and, secondarily, time shortages. People who are focusing on their need for money and are asked to do a money-related task do worse on it; the same people do differently on IQ tests depending on where they are in a payment cycle.
The bad news: because scarcity changes how we think, narrowing our focus and often outpacing the effects of alcohol or a sleepless night in diminishing our performance, there is very little individuals can do to compensate, though the authors have a few minor suggestions for bringing important considerations “into the tunnel” where scarcity-induced focus goes. Resource-constrained people are both more likely to make significant mistakes and less able to recover for them: a rich person can shrug off a $1000 car repair, while someone without the $1000 may lose her job for want of transportation or take out a payday loan that just keeps driving her further into debt. The good news: because performance is so profoundly affected by external environments, poverty isn’t a fixed condition of people and giving them more resources or taking away barriers (e.g., removing onerous requirements for renewing food stamps) can make them perform better on what were supposedly indicators of individual characteristics. But the changes have to be significant—even a 1-page form may be too much of a barrier given that resource-stressed people spend so much time and energy putting out fires and have almost nothing left for long-term goals; assistance filling out the form or automatic importation of tax and other information by the service provider may be required.
The book is packed with neat experiments/research, including a study about perceptions of change, which turn out to be highly relative: for weight, a noticeable difference is about 1/30th of the background amount. If you’re holding 3 pounds, 1/10th of a pound will be noticeable, but if you’re already holding 30, it would take a pound. This is also true of our perceptions of cost: we go out of our way to spend 40% on a $20 book, but often won’t do the same for 1% on a $1000 refrigerator—though poorer people turn out to be better judges of absolute cost in this way. Indeed, the book emphasizes that tunneling can produce efficient decisions for the very short term, which may be necessary—it’s just that it also harms judgment and memory for other, often quite important, issues.
One of the striking findings to me was that excise taxes—which are part of the posted price—affect smoking behavior of the rich and the poor equally, whereas changes in the sales tax only affect poor smokers, because poorer people are better at knowing, at a level that affects decisionmaking, that the total price isn’t the posted price. Also, sometimes supermarkets charge more per unit for larger packages, taking advantage of the standard assumption that bulk means discount—but supermarkets in low-income neighborhoods are least likely to do this, because it’s harder to trick people who are tracking every penny in this way. It’s easier to trick people with things like interest rates: the research also shows that people understand payday loans better and borrow less when interest is disclosed in dollars rather than percentages. But the controlled research shows that it is poverty itself—being short in a key resource—that causes the underlying cognitive difficulties, rather than being a simple effect of personal characteristics that land people in poverty, and that’s an important message.
Timothy Egan, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America: A history of early park rangers, the corrupt oligarchs who opposed them, and the people in the new western towns growing out of logging and mining. Many of the debates are eerily familiar: demands that all resources be opened up to private exploitation; deliberate underfunding and constraining of government; then complaints that government workers aren’t doing a very good job. The fires seem almost incidental.
Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: Another of Roach’s excursions into the messy, squelchy world of human biology (there’s a lot about eating and excreting, and a bit about sex), this time focused on how it’s done in space, or in space-simulating environments. Enjoyable if flippant.
Pretty Little Liars: How do the parents on this show just continue to grow on me? I long had little use for Byron’s cheating ass, but his delivery of the thank-you to Ezra was the best since Zachary Quinto made “live long and prosper” sound exactly like “fuck off and die.”
A poem by Patricia Lockwood, Rape Joke. The title is its warning.
Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education: Mea culpa and cri de coeur of a former reformer who looked at the data and found that the popular solutions to America’s educational woes were being pushed on schools despite the absence of evidence to support them and substantial evidence that a focus on testing math and reading harms the curriculum, demoralizes teachers, and encourages cheating and other efforts to make sure underperforming students are someone else’s problem, which is pretty much the opposite of helping them. Ravitch argues that demanding test score improvement on math and literacy is not the same thing as having a curriculum, which is really what’s needed. By focusing on math and reading reformers have harmed schools and teachers—especially the ones whose students need the most—by denying them time, energy, and rewards for teaching history, social studies, science, art, and PE.
Ravitch also makes a nice point about the way in which culture wars in the US have given way to/are in fact about serving the desires of the 1%. She notes that, even as school voucher proponents won court victories that paved the way for large-scale voucher programs that would’ve allowed religious schools to get a lot of money from the government, reform ideology shifted to charter schools, which are considered public and can’t be religious but can be for-profit. “Choice” is now about entrepreneurship and opening up a new money funnel for investors—kids with state money strapped to their backs—not about parents selecting the values they want their children to learn. The book is repetitive because the stories of attacks on teachers and the failure of reforms to make things better are repetitive. (Also, one of Ravitch’s big points is that we aren’t in decline; Americans in general have never done well on international tests since the tests began, and wealthy districts perform at the top of the international rankings. We have a poverty problem and therefore we have an education problem.)
Sendhil Mullainathan & Eldar Shafir, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. Excellent collection of research, much of it new to me, on decisionmaking and why scarcity (what the authors often call “lack of bandwidth”) matters. If you only read one pop culture behavioral economics book this year—sadly, this does not describe me—then I’d recommend this one.
Scarcity of time makes us busier because of the decisions about what to put off we make, borrowing from the future; scarcity of money makes us poorer for the same reasons. There’s also some research about other resources, like food (calorie restriction makes us obsess about food, and more likely to make mistakes about our desired consumption), but mostly the authors focus on poverty and, secondarily, time shortages. People who are focusing on their need for money and are asked to do a money-related task do worse on it; the same people do differently on IQ tests depending on where they are in a payment cycle.
The bad news: because scarcity changes how we think, narrowing our focus and often outpacing the effects of alcohol or a sleepless night in diminishing our performance, there is very little individuals can do to compensate, though the authors have a few minor suggestions for bringing important considerations “into the tunnel” where scarcity-induced focus goes. Resource-constrained people are both more likely to make significant mistakes and less able to recover for them: a rich person can shrug off a $1000 car repair, while someone without the $1000 may lose her job for want of transportation or take out a payday loan that just keeps driving her further into debt. The good news: because performance is so profoundly affected by external environments, poverty isn’t a fixed condition of people and giving them more resources or taking away barriers (e.g., removing onerous requirements for renewing food stamps) can make them perform better on what were supposedly indicators of individual characteristics. But the changes have to be significant—even a 1-page form may be too much of a barrier given that resource-stressed people spend so much time and energy putting out fires and have almost nothing left for long-term goals; assistance filling out the form or automatic importation of tax and other information by the service provider may be required.
The book is packed with neat experiments/research, including a study about perceptions of change, which turn out to be highly relative: for weight, a noticeable difference is about 1/30th of the background amount. If you’re holding 3 pounds, 1/10th of a pound will be noticeable, but if you’re already holding 30, it would take a pound. This is also true of our perceptions of cost: we go out of our way to spend 40% on a $20 book, but often won’t do the same for 1% on a $1000 refrigerator—though poorer people turn out to be better judges of absolute cost in this way. Indeed, the book emphasizes that tunneling can produce efficient decisions for the very short term, which may be necessary—it’s just that it also harms judgment and memory for other, often quite important, issues.
One of the striking findings to me was that excise taxes—which are part of the posted price—affect smoking behavior of the rich and the poor equally, whereas changes in the sales tax only affect poor smokers, because poorer people are better at knowing, at a level that affects decisionmaking, that the total price isn’t the posted price. Also, sometimes supermarkets charge more per unit for larger packages, taking advantage of the standard assumption that bulk means discount—but supermarkets in low-income neighborhoods are least likely to do this, because it’s harder to trick people who are tracking every penny in this way. It’s easier to trick people with things like interest rates: the research also shows that people understand payday loans better and borrow less when interest is disclosed in dollars rather than percentages. But the controlled research shows that it is poverty itself—being short in a key resource—that causes the underlying cognitive difficulties, rather than being a simple effect of personal characteristics that land people in poverty, and that’s an important message.
Timothy Egan, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America: A history of early park rangers, the corrupt oligarchs who opposed them, and the people in the new western towns growing out of logging and mining. Many of the debates are eerily familiar: demands that all resources be opened up to private exploitation; deliberate underfunding and constraining of government; then complaints that government workers aren’t doing a very good job. The fires seem almost incidental.
Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: Another of Roach’s excursions into the messy, squelchy world of human biology (there’s a lot about eating and excreting, and a bit about sex), this time focused on how it’s done in space, or in space-simulating environments. Enjoyable if flippant.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject