March 06, 2008 IN WHICH A SINGLE WOMAN DISCOVERS HER INNER ECONOMIST
This article advocating "settling" for a not-so-perfect husband has attracted a lot of attention, and there certainly is much to say about it. For some reason, it reminded me of a recent piece by economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, which does one of the best jobs I have seen of summarizing the relationships between economic changes and the family. I find it hard to argue against their observations. Their conclusion:
So what drives modern marriage? We believe that the answer lies in a shift from the family as a forum for shared production, to shared consumption. In case the language of economic lacks romance, let's be clearer: modern marriage is about love and companionship. Most things in life are simply better shared with another person: this ranges from the simple pleasures such as enjoying a movie or a hobby together, to shared social ties such as attending the same church, and finally, to the joint project of bringing up children. Returning to the language of economics, the key today is consumption complementarities - activities that are not only enjoyable, but are more enjoyable when shared with a spouse. We call this new model of sharing our lives "hedonic marriage".
...Thus marriage isn't dead, it is, again, transforming. Hedonic marriage is different from productive marriage. In a world of specialization, the old adage was that "opposites attract," and it made sense for husband and wife to have different interests in different spheres of life. Today, it is more important that we share similar values, enjoy similar activities, and find each other intellectually stimulating. Hedonic marriage leads people to be more likely to marry someone of their similar age, educational background, and even occupation. As likes are increasingly marrying likes, it isn’t surprising that we see increasing political pressure to expand marriage to same-sex couples.
Lori Gottleib summarizes marriage differently:
Once you're married, it's not about whom you want to go on vacation with; it's about whom you want to run a household with. Marriage isn't a passion-fest; it's more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way.
If that's not a description of marriage as a "forum for shared production" (at least in the post-industrial age) rather than "hedonic," I'm not sure what is. Her article is all about deemphasizing the hedonic function of marriage in favor of the more prosaic and productive aspects - and not just children, but also the more practical benefits of having a permanent partner. Perhaps her article should have been published at Cato Unbound as a response to Stevenson & Wolfers' piece.
March 02, 2008 WHAT DO PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES, BASEBALL PLAYERS WHO TAKE STEROIDS, AND AMY WINEHOUSE HAVE IN COMMON?
Don't tell the children.
A longer version of that sentence below the fold:
I was recently (at the end of December) talking politics with a DC-based acquaintance. In the course of the conversation, he asked me who I was supporting in the upcoming Presidential race. I told him that I was still undecided, because - as my own personal strike against the continuous election cycle - I wasn't going to pay close attention to the candidates and their policy proposals until the calendar year in which the election would be held.
Well, it really is an election year, and I am still having trouble paying enough attention.
Basically, I'm not sure I really want to know "what it takes" to win the White House. I know that any semi-close analysis will reveal any candidate, regardless of party, doing and saying all sorts of things that range from the offensive to the ridiculous. A one-word, thoroughly bipartisan example: ethanol.
And I know the candidates have no choice, regardless of whether they are smarter than the drivel they spout. From what I've recently read and heard, the one candidate in this election cycle with whom I might have been more impressed if I'd been paying closer attention, rather than less, was Fred Thompson. (Which is not to say that I would've voted for him.) And it was not coincidental that Thompson's candidacy never caught enough fire to flame out. As expertly detailed by Andrew Ferguson, the modern presidential campaign requires a level of both substantive pandering and personal exertion as to screen out virtually any normal human being. I think we should replace the "anyone can grow up to be President" mantra with "Mom, don't let your kids grow up to be a Presidential candidate." (This may be an underrated factor in the increase of political dynasties - they're the only ones who think of the lifestyle as normal.)
Similarly, not enough has been said about the extent to which steroid use in baseball is different in degree, but not in kind, from much of what else goes into a career as a top-flight career as a professional athlete. "What about the children?" is a mantra uttered by cretinous sportswriters and Congressmen alike bemoaning the health risks of steroid use. Well, how many sports fans level with their children about the ghoulish injury rates among young pitchers, or the need to schedule knee replacements in advance for catchers? (Megan had this right a while ago.) And baseball is spa-like compared to what football does to its participants. (I leave boxing out of this discussion, which is a world unto itself. And let's not get into women's gymnastics.) These health risks are, if anything, more demonstrable than those of professional athletes' use of PEDs (especially the HGH that has so captivated Washington and the sports media lately, which has virtually no effect on healthy athletes (unless it's "stacked" with steroids)). We sports fans who like to occasionally call ourselves "grownups" have to reconcile ourselves to the reality that the objects of our passion are harming themselves for our sakes. Denial, or refusal to tell the children, doesn't make it any less true.
And this is also true with respect to music: we might not be so quick to tell our children that virtually all of the good music of the last several decades has been created by people who were strung out on drugs and/or alcohol. As Mickey Kaus said in his pre-Slate days (scroll down to the 5/7 entry), whenever you hear a musician say that he or she is clean, sober and feeling better than ever, the next album is guaranteed to suck. The most prominent recent example is, of course, multiple Grammyist Amy Winehouse. After listening to her music for a total of ten minutes, I can confidently say that: (a) she is a transcendent talent, and (b) her music wouldn't be close to as good if she wasn't quite so self-destructive. (Proof of both counts is at the end of this post.) Unless we want to forswear any good music, this is another truth we have to recognize, even if we finess telling the children.
One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.
No matter how well it would perform, I will never construct any sort of machinery which is completely indestructible except for one small and virtually inaccessible vulnerable spot.
When I capture the hero, I will make sure I also get his dog, monkey, ferret, or whatever sickeningly cute little animal capable of untying ropes and filching keys happens to follow him around.
I will not use any plan in which the final step is horribly complicated, e.g. "Align the 12 Stones of Power on the sacred altar then activate the medallion at the moment of total eclipse." Instead it will be more along the lines of "Push the button."
If an attractive young couple enters my realm, I will carefully monitor their activities. If I find they are happy and affectionate, I will ignore them. However if circumstance have forced them together against their will and they spend all their time bickering and criticizing each other except during the intermittent occasions when they are saving each others' lives at which point there are hints of sexual tension, I will immediately order their execution.
A symphony version of "Stairway to Heaven," performed as it might have been written by Schubert, Mahler and Beethoven, among others. Click here for it.
It was a fraction of the size of the Shop Rite, but it had all the best stuff. They saved a lot of room by cutting out the Wonder Bread and having less varieties of sliced pickles and baked beans. Like a city street, the aisles twist and turn, and there is always too much traffic at the deli section. In the produce section, there is a mountain of mescaline, an organic area, and a bushel of fresh basil. By the deli, they have an olive bar, three variety of heavily herbed chickens, bagels that are bagels (not rolls with holes in the center), and a huge cheese section. 100 variety of cheeses are available -- goat cheese, feta, fresh mozzarella tied up in bags, obscure moldy cheese that fermented under some French guy's armpit for two years. And meat, fish, and dairy is in a walk-in freezer. You and your kids put on communal coats before entering to buy extra firm tofu and organic yogurt. Everything looks so fresh and exotic that you're immediately inspired to try out the recipe from the Sunday Times. Shop Rite only inspires me to nuke some frozen pizza.
The Manhattan household seconds the endorsement of Fairway (also a short trip away). Even the non-organic produce is much better than its supermarket competitors. And they've got plenty of eclectic kosher products that keep us coming back. Do they have everything? No. Are huge suburban supermarkets a great resource? Absolutely (we frequent them as well). But Fairway has its own unique niche, which we appreciate and are happy to support.
I finally say Spider-Man 2 today. For those who didn't grow up reading the comics (Mrs. Manhattan, for example), it was an excellent film, far smarter than your average summer blockbuster. For those who did (me), it was transcendent. Here's one of the best reviews I've seen.
The filmmakers have hit most of the canonical themes from the comics already; in fact, there's only one they haven't done yet. Are they really going to do a Gwen Stacy on MJ? I doubt it (if only because no career-conscious Hollywood producer would allow it), but am looking forward to seeing what they do with that story.
Then check out the revived Protein Wisdom blog, whose short break from August of 2002 ended last week. There's a reason I never delete a blog from the sidebar. It's like the CIA - nobody ever really leaves.
For around $470,000, recent listings show, you could buy a four-bedroom, four-bathroom traditional house in Dallas with granite kitchen countertops and vaulted living room ceilings. In Columbus, Ohio, you could buy a sprawling four-bedroom house with two fireplaces, a whirlpool and a ravine outside your front door.
Or you could buy a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan.
Why then is it that the nice guys so often finish last? How can being nice actually be a turn off and harm someone’s chances for a meaningful relationship? I think the answer can be found in an old adage which usually has a different connotation:
“Why buy the cow, when you can get the milk for free?”
The usual interpretation is that since men are only interested in one thing. Once they get it, they would see no need for a commitment i.e. marriage. I think the same logic holds true for women. Assume the popular myth that women want an emotional connection of some sort. If there is a “nice guy” around, she can the emotional support she needs from someone without having to commit. She may be able to confide in him, have him work around her apartment, help her with just about any crisis, and she doesn’t have to make any sort of commitment back to him. The guy will obviously put up with it, because after all, he’s “nice” and this is what nice people do.
So if there's a person who is willing to do all this for you - with nothing in return, why would you consider a serious relationship with this person? You can go find someone else who is cooler, richer, better looking, or anything else and still have that "nice" person around when you need him or if nothing else works out.
Cow, Milk, Free.
Ah, the nice guy's lament...sometimes, there is something to it. And sometimes there isn't. But this man certainly deserves the right shidduch.
(Despite his off-line denials, I still think that he and the proprietess of newly-permalinked GirlHock have a Jerry-Elaine thing going. There must be a backstory that I don't get.)
On an almost-serious note, check out this Salon piece that attacks nice guys from the opposite pole - of being too attractive, in a perverse way, to marriage-minded females. (Let's say it's written from a non-frum perspective.) As above, sometimes there's something to it and sometimes there isn't.
As we Christopher Lee fans can attest, there's something hugely satisfying about seeing regal English snobs with perfect enunciation hiss through bared fangs while drooling blood. It clarifies so much about Great Britain's role in world history.
I finally saw "The Matrix Reloaded" today, and got a laugh that was certainly not intended by the filmmakers.
The scene was where Neo, Morpheus and assorted subordinates are discussing how they will shut off power to the building that houses the "Source" so Neo can go meet the "Architect" (as opposed to the "General Contractor" or the "Interior Designer"):
SOMEBODY: "We'll have to shut off power to the whole block!"
MORPHEUS: "T-w-e-n-t-y s-e-v-e-n blocks."
SOMEBODY ELSE: "Shutting off power to twenty-seven blocks? That's impossible!"
ME: "No, it isn't! Just ask someone in Ohio to throw a switch and you'll have all the powerlessness you could ask for!"
Apparently there is a research project to study the motivations of those who read weblogs.
Since the research assistant to one of the professors involved is allegedly a Yankee fan, the project is hereby endorsed by the editorial staff of this site.
Any and all readers are invited to click here for the survey.
Vote early, vote often...
It's good to be back. Thanks for sticking with me.
What was supposed to be a short pause due to personal and professional pressures (don't worry - nothing bad) turned into a much-longer break, as those pressures didn't let up for a long while. (They're a little better now.)
I've heard a few things happened while I was away. I'll try to gradually catch up on some of them (and I've promised response posts to a couple of bloggers already on very old topics), but not all at once. If I try to catch up on everything at once, it won't happen and I'll just give up and stop blogging again. And, as I found out, not blogging can be as addictive as blogging. But much less fun.
Sorry for the absence and I'll try to make it up to all of you.
Several long posts have been eaten in the last week by ill-timed computer crashes. Is a jealous Blogger seeking revenge for my defection to Movable Type? This sounds like a plot for a really bad horror movie. Just to be safe, I'll keep the lights on when blogging for a while...
Date/Time: Monday, 12/30 - 7:00 P.M.
Location: O'Flanagan's Ale House - 1591 2nd Ave. (between 82nd and 83rd)
At a mutually convenient time, we can move next door for some quality kosher dining at Va Bene. Or not, depending on what people feel like doing.
UPDATE: Here's another reason to come.
All NY bloggers - and any other bloggers who happen to be in NY at the time - please take note of the following two-part, ecumenical opportunity. Date/Time: Monday, 12/30 - 7:00 P.M. Location: O'Flanagan's Ale House - 1591 2nd Ave. (between 82nd and 83rd)
At a mutually convenient time, we can move next door for some quality kosher dining at Va Bene. Or not, depending on what people feel like doing.
Come one, come all. RSVP by comment or e-mail.
This article in Salon asks why books cost so much, and implies that the costs have increased dramatically in recent years.
Except they haven't. As the author notes:
When the prices of hardcover books are adjusted for inflation, they turn out to have remained fairly flat between 1975 and 2000.
Nonetheless, for those who remember the 1970s, the escalation in prices does appear substantial. Figures obtained from R.R. Bowker, the company of record for information about the publishing industry, show that, from 1975 to 2000, the price of the average hardcover book of fiction went up 200 percent to $24.96. Average prices for hardcover poetry and drama books increased 211 percent to $33.57. Nonfiction hardcovers went up 123 percent to $40.29. The largest increase was in the juvenile category, which climbed 227 percent to arrive at the current average of $18.40.
Still, adjust these figures for inflation and you get a different story, says Robert Sahr, an associate professor of political science at Oregon State University who studies media coverage of complex matters such as budgeting and economic policies. He found that the cost of hardcover fiction in real dollars had actually gone down 2 percent, while poetry and drama and juvenile categories had risen only a few percentage points. Nonfiction hardcovers had decreased in real price by 27 percent.
"I'm not very surprised," Sahr says. "Trade books are one of the clearest examples of a completely discretionary purchase. They have to be price-sensitive."
So why imply that the nominal increase is meaningful, when in the same breath you've shown that it isn't?
Chalk up another entry in the "famous last words" file. At the risk of further fattening it, this week should provide more & (possibly) better blogging.
My return to blogging, among other things. It's tough trying to bill a year's worth of hours in a couple of weeks. As a Chanuka present, I've closed a deal and expect to have more time for blogging in the upcoming weeks. Happy Chanuka and Thanksgiving to all.
Megan McArdle, aka Jane Galt, has renamed and redesigned her blog, joined the Foreign Service and announced that she will accordingly be restricted from commenting on certain topics.
If such self-censorship really is required by her employment, I can't think of a more pressing problem for Congress to rectify in its lame-duck session.
One word of advice to families planning a trip to Disney World: it is better for all involved when the child to whom the trip was primarily geared is not feverishly, barfingly sick for the entire trip. (If "barfingly" isn't a word, it should be.) It also helps when every other members of the family do not alternate being sick immediately before, during and after the trip.
For more controllable advice, the House of Manhattan officially recommends this book for use in planning a Disney vacation with kids.
Welcome to the new site! Blogger was a wonderful tool for getting started with, but - as many of you know - it had serious long-term technical problems. Also, I wanted to have a site with more features, and figured it would be more efficient to have those incorporated by people who actually knew what they were doing. So here we are. Special thanks to the wonderful Robyn Pollmer and Stacy Tabb of Sekimori for the design. I hope the posts will live up to their work!
What is at issue here is a matter of moral intelligence, not just good taste or historical accuracy. This kind of casual and unreflecting use of the Hitler smear trivializes both Hitler and the radical evil of the Holocaust.
...The Holocaust cannot reasonably be assimilated to other historical events and trends. The mass death in Cambodia under the communist regime of Pol Pot was not an episode of "autogenocide" comparable to the Holocaust; most of the victims died of a famine caused by socialist agricultural policies, which produced the same result in Mao Zedong's China and Josef Stalin's Soviet Union. The mass executions of political opponents and "class enemies" in Cambodia and other communist states were monstrous crimes, but of a kind all too familiar from the history of dictatorships and revolutions. Nor was the ethnic cleansing of Albanian Kosovars by Serbia comparable to the Holocaust. While the Serbs carried out mass executions of military-age men and mass rapes of women, they aimed to deport, not kill, most of the Albanian population. The Nazis, by contrast, sought to extinguish entire categories of people.
Common sense is missing altogether when the plagues that decimated American Indian populations after their contact with Europeans are called a "Columbian holocaust." Conquerors and traders from Europe exploited and enslaved native Americans, but they cannot be held morally culpable for spreading Old World diseases by sneezing. If they could, then Americans suffering from AIDS and West Nile virus, diseases which spread from Africa, could be called victims of an African attempt at genocide in North America.
I agree, up to a point. Lind is correct to note the influence of early 20th-century theories of eugenics on the Nazis, but he argues:
Even if there had been no Jews in Germany or German-occupied Europe, there would have been a Holocaust of some kind -- the planned, putatively "scientific" extermination of so-called "dysgenic" groups. Stigmatized by pseudoscience as literal "subhumans," homosexuals, the mentally and physically handicapped, and ethnic minorities such as Jews and Gypsies could be exterminated like animals, using methods like those used in industrial agriculture -- the cattle car, the slaughterhouse and Zyklon B, an insecticide used against crop-destroying pests.
Perhaps, but (a) it would've been on a totally different scale, and (b) Lind fails to appreciate the centrality of anti-Semitism to the Nazis program. At most, the eugenics component provided a framework; the animating principle was anti-Semitism.
Lind concludes:
It follows from all this that there should be an absolute ban on Hitler analogies in every sphere of society and every form of partisan rhetoric. Hitler should not be revived in Baghdad, or the White House, or Denver, or the Maryland suburbs, or on the "Today" show. Hitler should be left in Hell, where he belongs.
Sounds good. But the arguments prove too much. Used intelligently (and I'll stipulate that it usually isn't, including most of the examples Lind cites), the Hitler example is: (a) a useful reminder that world-threatening evil does and can exist if we are not careful, and (b) provides a useful standard for inspiring action against lesser horrors. Not for lack of trying, Saddam may not equal the depravity of Hitler. But, as Quentin Tarantino, (of all people) might say, it's "not the same thing, [but] the same ballpark."
UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg has more on the subject.
In the great philosophical dispute of our time—cable or satellite dish?—a big plus for the satellite is that it allows you to live out one of humanity's deepest fantasies: telling the cable company to go away.
Our apartment building has finally completed the installation of DirecTV. We had it installed on Monday. It doesn't even work perfectly yet, thanks to installers whose incompetence and non-responsiveness were worthy of a cable company. And the Yankees' early exit from the playoffs and the October date meant that the long-awaited availability of the YES Network wasn't too meaningful. (Although there are few experiences more surreal than watching the "Mike and the Mad Dog" talk show on TV.) But with all that, the joy of telling Cablevision to go away is something that every person should experience at least once in their lifetime.
Without the U.S. News rankings, elite colleges would likely be turning over even larger numbers of coveted spots in their undergraduate classes to athletes, imperiling racial and intellectual diversity at the nation's top breeding grounds for future scholars and leaders. And state schools -- accountable to lawmakers and, ultimately, the public -- could find themselves pressured to squander even more money in pursuit of national championships many of them will never even come close to competing for.
... Sports is the only thing colleges do that can be quantified. It provides the only concrete claim a college can make to being better than another college. Is Harvard better than Yale? Impossible to say. But which school won the Harvard-Yale football game last year? That's an easy question to answer.
The U.S. News rankings have changed that. Critics of the rankings charge that they're meaningless, but the critics are missing the point. Of course it's meaningless to say that the University of Virginia is the twenty-third best school in America and Georgetown is the twenty-fourth. But the point is not whether the rankings are accurate in any sense, as if such rankings could ever be anything but vaguely arbitrary. The point is that by trying to quantify educational quality -- however imperfectly -- U.S. News sends a strong message that college academics matter and provides an incentive for universities to counterbalance the longstanding athletic arms race with an academic arms race. And that balance is a good thing for higher education as a whole.
.... In the absence of U.S. News, the only quantifiable game in higher education is sports. And that situation has real consequences for educational quality.
...By creating another highly-publicized arms race, U.S. News has diluted the sometimes-harmful influence of the athletic arms race -- and somewhat refocused the public's attention on the primacy of academics in higher education. In April, everyone knows who won the Final Four. In January, everyone knows who won the Bowl Championship Series. And now, in September, a decent percentage of Americans know what the number one school in the country is -- and more importantly, how the public schools in their states, which are funded with their tax money, measure up. Whether these ratings are impeccably fair is less important than the fact that they exist. It's the spotlight they shine on academic quality, not the precision of the measurements, that really matters. And it seems safe to assume that without them, the pressure for colleges to make unwise choices in pursuit of athletic glory would grow even more overwhelming than it already is.
This gem from a New York Times article on "Dr. Phil" and other daytime TV shows: And while many television executives held high hopes for psychic talk shows modeled on the John Edwards show "Crossing Over," they were let down by the low ratings of "Beyond With James Van Praagh," the psychic's efforts to contact ghosts of loved ones. Nielsen, it turns out, does not include the dead in its sample pool of viewers.
Really?
September 19, 2002 NOT WORTH THE WAIT, BUT OFFERED FOR YOUR AMUSEMENT NONETHELESS
Enjoy the overhauled link sections on the right of this page. Some of the absences from the site over the summer were attributable, in part, to attempts at overhauling the format of the site and in efforts (now abandoned) to design a separate baseball blog. Instead, I've decided to keep everything in-house. I hope the links will augur a renewed dedication to the site.
Columbia is famous (infamous, if you're a student) for allowing films to be shot on the campus. But I never expected them to allow this movie to be filmed there.
September 18, 2002 YES, THESE ARE NICHE HUMOR PIECES, BUT I LAUGHED SO HARD I COULDN"T BEAR NOT TO POST THEM
YES, THESE ARE NICHE HUMOR PIECES, BUT I LAUGHED SO HARD I COULDN'T BEAR NOT TO POST THEM: This first piece is aimed at Modern Orthodox Jews who are familiar with: (a) the intellectual crises that have been raging within Orthodoxy and one of its flagship institutions, Yeshiva University, (b) the tipping of segments (the size of which is disputed) of Lubavitch Hasidim into Christian-style messianism, and (c) the disputes about how to properly appreciate the complex legacy of the late Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. If you meet those criteria, check this out and start laughing.
You can't get a more different subject than this great Bill Simmons piece. It is aimed at those who: (a) spent way too much of their adolescence watching bad horror movies and (b) are devotees of ESPN's "SportsCentury" series. If you meet both those criteria, this piece is one of the funniest things you will read in your entire life.
GREAT MOMENTS IN JOURNALISM: A better-than-usual retrospective from the Miami Herald on some of its finer moments. Here are two of the all-time great corrections of printed stories:
``Last Sunday, The Herald erroneously reported that original Dolphin Johnny Holmes had been an insurance salesman in Raleigh, N.C., that he had won the New York lottery in 1982 and lost the money in a land swindle, that he had been charged with vehicular homicide but acquitted because his mother said she drove the car, and that he stated that the funniest thing he ever saw was Flipper spouting water on [coach] George Wilson. Each of these items was erroneous material published inadvertently. He was not an insurance salesman in Raleigh, did not win the lottery, neither he nor his mother was charged or involved in any way with a vehicular homicide, and he made no comment about Flipper or George Wilson. The Herald regrets the errors.''
The explanation? For a ''whatever happened to'' story about the 1966 Dolphins, an editor in sports pounded out some top-of-the-cortex stuff he made up as he sketched out an estimate for the length of the story. The ''dummy type'' came alive when reporters and editors working on the story copied the format and wrote over the fictional words -- except in the case of Johnny Holmes, whose name was typed in but not the real information about him. The dummy type made it into print. Holmes was never heard from.
• When police demanded a correction in 1995, Broward Managing Editor Joe Oglesby obliged: ``A Nov. 18 story about the firing of Oakland Park police officers Brian Rupp and Jay Santalucia incorrectly reported that they allegedly engaged in oral sex with juvenile prostitutes for 23 minutes during a videotaped sting operation. In fact, the tape is 23 minutes long, but the sex act lasted only part of the tape.''
THE SEX LIVES OF SUPERHEROES: Meryl Yourish started a fascinating round of discussion regarding the...desirability of different superheroes. (Here's Rounds 2 and 3.)
I'm surprised she didn't discuss my namesake.
The blogger formerly known as Sgt. Stryker rated the heroines. I was a Jean Grey guy myself (no Silk Spectre jokes).
Finally, check out this classic Larry Niven piece about how the world would end if Superman ever had sex, and many other issues which have no doubt kept you all up at night.
THE POLITE AMERICANS: According to a global survey of tourism workers cited by an expat Brit blogger, Malcolm Friend, British tourists were ranked the "rudest, brashest, most tongue-tied and least desirable holidaymakers in the world." The poll, by the travel company Expedia, ranked each nation on criteria ranging from respect for hosts to tipping, and general behaviour to ability to speak a foreign language. Britons came lowest in all but one of the criteria, scoring a total of minus 44, some 38 points fewer the next worst behaved, the Irish and Israelis, and 83 behind the Germans.
38 points behind the Israelis!? Wars have been started over lesser insults!
And which country's tourists were ranked as the most polite? That's right - the ugly Americans! Mr. Friend is not surprised; he has apparently not been brainwashed by BBC-style anti-Americanism.
Congratulations and welcome to these shores.
TALK ABOUT SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL: In honor of the opening of "Attack of the Clones," Jonathan Last argues for the superiority of the Empire over the Rebel Alliance. I like his point about the meritocracy of the Empire versus the genetic roaylism of the Jedi Knights.
I reject the alarmist notion that ignorance threatens our social cohesion or democracy by cutting us off from the roots that define the American experience.
If that were so, we would have foundered long ago. Perhaps there was some golden age when most Americans knew their history. It seems unlikely, but without good survey data before the 1930s, we cannot know. Since then, we do know; we're dummies.
"Our comparisons of recent surveys with polls from the 1940s and 1950s suggest that there's been no overall increase in knowledge despite enormous increases in education," says political scientist Scott Keeter, co-author with Michael X. Delli Carpini of "What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters." A 1986 poll found that only 49 percent of Americans knew that the United States was the only country to have used nuclear weapons in war. In a 1989 survey, only 63 percent correctly identified Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a Democrat. Ugh.
To blame inept schools and lazy students is to miss the larger cultural failing. I grew up in the 1950s. My parents didn't discuss the Great Depression, which was history only two decades old, let alone the Revolution or Civil War. They probably were typical.
... The "greatest generation" knew why it was fighting, even though it was as ignorant of history as its children and grandchildren, perhaps more so. In 1943, a Gallup poll found that about 30 percent had never heard of the Bill of Rights and fewer than 23 percent could identify it as the first 10 amendments to the Constitution; the rest were confused about what it was.
In 1942, Elmo Roper -- a pioneer in opinion surveys -- wrote (in his pre-politically correct prose): "A great many of us make two mistakes in our judgment of the common man. We overestimate the amount of information he has; we underestimate his intelligence. . . . During my eight years of asking the common man questions about what he thinks and what he wants I have often been surprised . . . that he has less information than we think he should have. . . . But I have more often been surprised . . . that, despite his lack of information, the common man's native intelligence generally brings him to a sound conclusion."
As a history-obsessive who once considered pursuing an academic career in the field, I think that Samuelson is absolutely right about the (lack of) consequences of Americans' ignorance. And the stats cited by Samuelson regarding the knowledge of the "greatest generation" illustrates one of the most important lessons of history: Nostalgia is for the weak-minded. Nine times out of ten, the sentiment of "things were so much better back [insert time of speaker's childhood]" is wrong, and the tenth time is usually overstated.
I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE BETTER: A.O. Scott trashes "Attack of the Clones." Fans may hope that institutional incentives have affected his review: it was rumored that Janet Maslin's positive review of the previous installment helped cost her the job as the Times' movie critic.
NOT ALL "PEACE PROCESSES" FAIL: The NY Times had a great account of how peace has been restored to Columbia's English Department. Apparently they need to have outsiders make the important decisions because the department is so divided.
I wasn't an English major, but I took a lot of classes in the department, with the good guys (defined for purposes of this post as those who did not mention the word "deconstruction.") I had no idea any of these tensions existed. Obliviousness is sometimes a very good thing.
AND WHILE YOU'RE AT IT... Steven Spielberg has made some changes to the version of E.T. about to be re-released. Most notably, he has digitally altered the guns in one chase scene to walkie-talkies - after all, a whole generation of children has been traumatized by the sight. My old college classmate Tim Carvell has some other editing suggestions for Mr. Spielberg.
