Buddhist Marketer

Who doesn’t love babies?

My best friend had her second baby yesterday, a big ole’ nine pound eleven ounce girl measuring 22″ long who popped in a week early.  Welcome to the US and A, S.J.!

And for those of you who haven’t yet met him, here’s some video footage of S.J.’s older brother Adam, filmed when I roadtripped through Indy for Christmas 2006.

Congratulations, ALO.  I love you!

Why the loan to a top university might be worth it

Why eat beans and take out massive loans to attend a top university when your state school is offering you a merit scholarship?

Parents, significant others and acquaintances already working for a prospective employer are deemed to be the most influential contacts when making a career choice.

If you’re surrounded by people whose default options are careers whose average compensation is X vs. people whose default options are careers whose average compensation is X/2, then, all other factors equal (and by all other factors I include how comfortable one feels when they visit campus), wouldn’t it be optimal to surround yourself with the X-factor?

Source

The ethics of efficiency

There’s a paragraph in “Queuing conundrums” in the September 13th issue of The Economist that gave me pause and made me reflect on the role of the state and, more specifically, the ends towards which the state’s activities are directed:

The researchers [three physicists] looked at how this equilibrium ["what game theory calls a Nash equilibrium" ... "the point where no individual driver could arrive any faster by switching routes"] could arise is travelling across Boston from Harvard Square to Boston Common.  They analysed 246 different links in the road network that could be used for the journey and calculated traffic flows at different volumes to produce what they call a “price of anarchy” (POA).  This is the ratio of the total cost of the Nash equilibrium to the total cost of an optimal traffic flow directed by an omniscient traffic controller.  In Boston they found that at high traffic levels drivers face a POA which results in journey times 30% longer than if motorists were co-ordinated into an optimal traffic flow.  Much the same thing wa found in London (a POA of up to 24% for journeys between Borough and Farringdon Underground stations) and New York (a POA of up to 28% from Washington Market Park to Queens Midtown Tunnel).

I like how the delta used here is one baselined against the Nash equilibrium but I wonder if each and every driver suffered a POA, or if the numbers mentioned are in aggregate.  Did anyone save time?  Or does everyone suffer without Big Brother Traffic Controller?

I noticed this blurb as over the past few months I’ve been struggling in the back of my head with notions of a regulatory state and its Efficiency Imperative. Is it okay to impose artificial constructs onto the marketplace if the goal is a more efficient market? This is what Glaeser seems to argue in The Rise of the Regulatory State. At the time, I read it and thought, “Okay, yeah, maybe, I like efficiency.”

But then, I thought, “Wait a second.  Efficiency for whom and at what cost?”

I’m thinking about the fact that my default experience in school, pre-Academy, and in the workplace, excluding Blink and the Terrence Thomas Era, has been one of exclusion and limitation.  Which is to say:  I was excluded from the benefits accorded to the majority and asked to, in one way or another, limit my talents so that I didn’t disrupt the classroom / make people in the office feel dumb.  (I should probably put that last part in quotation marks as it’s not a paraphrase.)  I was asked to hold myself back and not perform at my top levels for the sake of the efficient functioning of the enterprise as a whole.

Which makes me think:  efficiency is great, in theory.  You sum things up, and then you perform an optimization process, bodda bing.  But this is so State Enterprise, so Stalin, so Hegel-revolutionary-history.  This is communism!  Why not optimize for each unit and then sum?  That is, instead of

Optimize sum of units

why not

Sum optimized units

???

Seems the communist, I mean regulatory, state seems to be horny for the former, whereas I’m feeling the latter.  Hence my take on libertarian maternalism:  I want to market optimized decision-making at the individual, unit level.  Very targeted marketing.  Not blanket policies that apply to all in all situations.  But intelligently engineered (sorry; eat it ;) human-centered programmes (I’m feeling a mite The Economist at the moment, Sirs) that optimize units, so that society, in its sum, kicks more ass than ever.

Without forcing me to bind my wings.

(Hmm, equation to prove:  is “sum optimized units” > “optimized sum of units”?)

That said, I’m still working things out in my head, and am open to different takes on this.

What say you in the matter of being bossed around and told what to do for the sake of an efficient state?

We are all mixed

As a kid I got picked on for a number of reasons, the top two being my non-whiteness and my then-atheism.  As I flummoxed (solecism alert!) into adulthood, I reworked my victimhood badge in one of honor, and made myself feel special because I Was A Member Of The Brown People’s Club.  My membership has made me feel anything from smug haughtiness at its worst to gentle relief (that I can wiggle my way out of ever feeling White Guilt) at its best.  Add to this the Woe Is Me I Am A Misfit Toy dirge of the half-n-half and what you get is a very flat view of self and humanity.

Which is to say: the notion that competing loyalties exists only in the domain of race is nincompoopery. Of course I don’t actually feel that way, but it’s easy for me to forget that just as my life’s journey is and continues to be a complex one, so too is your journey and the journeys of all our fellow humans.

I was reminded that being mixed does not just mean checking more than one race box whilst sucking down coffee and reading Kathleen Spivack’s nonfiction piece “Language” in the Winter 2007 issue of The Massachusetts Review:

Half German and half American, we had acquired a split which allowed us to be totally comfortable in neither realm.

She continues by sharing a childhood fantasy of metaphorically receiving a trophy for her victimhood:

We were Americans really, after all.  We wanted to be sloppy and free.

I invented the persona in which I was an American girl who went to war and killed Germans and Austrians, and I put myself to sleep at night with that fantasy.  The fantasy always concluded with me lying, wounded and bleeding, bayonet still in hand, on top of a pile of dead Nazi soldiers, and my mother sobbing over my impending death, realizing what a true heroine her daughter was.  In my fantasy she begged God for forgiveness for not appreciating my true heroic nature, her only daughter, and for having constantly bothered me with such trivia as bad posture, table manners, and general disorderly conduct.  “How could I have wronged you so, my darling daughter?”  In the final delicious scene I would close my eyes, a true American patriot, and expire.  When that did not give me enough satisfaction I would proceed to the funeral scene, a fantasy in gorgeous color.  And I would sob myself deliciously to sleep, in mingled sorrow and delight, imagining how much my family would miss me.

I am split, torn!  I suffer for this!  See my suffering!  Love me for it!

If and when I feel myself starting to re-mount the high horse of I Am Mixed And Have A Monopoly On Feeling Different, I need to remember:  we are all mixed.

Behavioral engineering. Or: playing God.

From “Correcting Biases Once You’ve Identified Them” by David J. Balan at blog Overcoming Bias:

I have a tendency to swing a bit too late at a (slow-pitch) softball.  I’m sure this bias could be at least partially corrected with effort, but it is definitely not simply a matter of saying to myself: “swing .5 seconds sooner than you feel like you should swing.”

True, true, true.  How many of us observe our own suboptimal decision-making patterns or behaviors and know, intellectually, that we need to course-correct?  And what’s the efficacy of being actually able to execute on said course correction?

It’s not easy to change ingrained behaviors.  DO X TO ACHIEVE GOAL Y.  If it were as simple as a finger-snap, then I wouldn’t get text messages from friends late at night a la

I’m starting to feel like I’m uncapable [sic] of loving someone but I really want to and it makes me sad

Am I right?  Holla.

All that said, I’m really digging the new ad campaign for Dentyne, which makes a call to unplug from the Interwebz and make face time.  It teases into that understanding that we are becoming one-dimensional people, little robo-humans who are varnished off from our own feelings and from our fellow man.  We create these flat versions of ourselves, these Facebook profiles, and then we see those around us as their analogous profiled selves, and not as a complex multi-dimensional human (who may or may not have bad breath).  This, of course, is intimately intertwined with refusing to see ourselves as complex multi-dimensional humans.  (With apologies to my man Herbert M.)

Will the campaign get people to actually make face time with other humans?  Will the campaign get people to buy more Dentyne?  (Methinks no unless Dentyne also takes the final step and adds the tag line “Make face time” to the product packaging — else how will folks be able to remember amongst all the options at point of sale which one had the cool tag line?? — duh!)  Hard to say.  But if LAUNCHING PRETTY AD CAMPAIGN attempts TO ACHIEVE GOAL OF INTEGRATED AND INCREASED COMPASSION AND UNDERSTANDING VIA CO-PRESENT INTERACTIONS, well, then, A for effort.

And on the issue of bias-correction police:  in the matter of the identification of and articulation of “DO X”, I’d like to nominate myself as a future econo-therapist.  After all, lottery-ticket-consumption expert Emily Haisley has already given the green light to econotherapy.  Who am I to argue with a Yale post-doc?!

(Especially one that’s paving the way for a potential future economist to play God?!)

Jen Chau speaks on Obama & Things Mixed Race

Read a great imaginary radio interview between Nonexistent Bob and my dear acquaintance* Jen Chau, founder of national multi-ethnic organization Swirl and woman-about-City. Nonexistent Bob summarizes her thoughtful discussion about the effect of Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy on discussions of mixed race in America as follows:

1. Give more credit to mixed race people and to Obama.
2. Mixed race people should not have to defend the way that they identify. Those who are mixed are always up for public scrutiny, and this is problematic.
3. One-person solutions to racism are not reasonable or realistic. We all have a lot of work to do together (whether Obama is our next President or not).

Choice Jen quotes (bolding mine):

Well, I can’t really speak for the entire mixed community, because we are not one homogeneous mass of people who all think the same way, talk the same way, dress the same way, oh you get my drift there, Bob, don’t you? (fake radio laugh) …

I am not here - and Swirl is not here - to police mixed people everywhere to ensure that they are checking off multiple boxes each time they fill out a form. The most important thing to us has been the right to identify as we really are.

* Can acquaintances be dear? I think so. I imagine a time and place where Jen and I are less married to our respective to-do lists and Big Ideas About The Universe and can upsell our acquaintanceship into friendship but alas, until then I have oodles of warm fuzzies for her while she saves the world and I campaign for God.

Matty Charles’ new album comes out 10/30

One of my favorite artists in the whole wide world is Matty Charles, whose music was put on my radar as his bassist, Josh Stark, is the oldest son of my ‘god’mother Neal, the ‘N’ in ‘ANP’.  When I lived in Brooklyn, every Sunday evening I’d hop into my Jetta and drive over to Pete’s Candy Store in outer Billyburg to experience the intimate live show.

As a marketer, I know that people are more likely to buy Product X of Quality N if it’s framed against Product Y of Quality Less Than N.  As a human, I love to sing, an experience I treasure all the more for its concomitant demons that I had to slay.  So, here:  you can play this YouTube video while reading the rest of this post.

The song I am singing along to is “Valentine Song” by Matty Charles and The Valentines from their 2003 album Land Beyond the Sea.  The lyrics — and the lyrics are one of the reasons I love Matty’s work so — start out:

Would you be a flower just for me
When the days are short & cold
and I won’t have to face the darkness all alone
if I have you there to hold

* Swoon *!

From his MySpace page (bolding mine):

If you want to know where I’m from, all you need to do is listen to my music. I don’t hold well to the idea of mere geometrical placement but the land is one of long rains and low clouds, stolen from the past and lurching unsteadily towards the future. In fact, the place of my childhood no longer exists. It’s an old brick building that has since crumbled. It’s a framework upon which I hang my thoughts and my feelings but it’s impossible for you to see just as my own vision of it has grown dim and unreliable.

My haunts were junk stores, old movie theatres, used book stores, rooms containing boxes and bins of old records and the people who would hang around looking for something exceptional in those dusty catacombs. Most of it was garbage but occasionally the needle would slip into the groove and colorful flowers of music would grow right out of the speakers. The clock would stop and so would the rain and monotony would cease to exist for a while. Most of my life happened internally and this is how it’s always been.

With any luck, my strategic inclusion of my own novice singing alonging butted up against Matty’s own have made you fall in love with his music too.

I am so grateful for artists like Matty who reach deep inside themselves and place palms out to the universe so that the rest of us can experience the ways in which they see the world.  And when their vantage point seems sympathetic to my own, it makes me feel like

I won’t have to face the darkness all alone.

Come to think of it, I think this is why I write.

Kudos to ‘Easy A’ Salovey

After Dean Brodhead left to become Duke prez, ‘Easy A’ Salovey became the Yale College Dean.  Now, Dean Salovey’s been announced as the University provost.  The appointment is likely the end of the Yale line for Salovey; Prez Levin’s last two provosts have become the presidents of the University of Cambridge and MIT respectively.

Although I never took his class, opting instead for the psych class Persuasion and Social Influence, here’s the official word:

Salovey has authored more than 300 publications, focused primarily on human emotion and health psychology. His research has explored the psychological consequences of the arousal of emotion, especially the ways in which moods and emotions influence thinking and social behavior. With John D. Mayer he developed a broad framework called “Emotional Intelligence,” the theory that just as people have a wide range of intellectual abilities, they also have a wide range of measurable emotional skills that profoundly affect their success in school, the workplace and social life.

I sat across from him at Mory’s during the ‘98 Ten Year and he was ultra-gracious in giving me advice for grad school.  I must also say that his wife was deeply lovely and I hate that the photograph is so unflattering (apologies!).

Congratulations to former Dean Salovey!

Collaborative GRE Analytical Writing scoring

I just took my first Princeton Review CAT practice test for the GRE.  I took two written practice tests earlier this summer but I’m glad I took this one as I totally boffed the first antonym question, not realizing that it was an antonym question (this is what I get for practicing first thing in the morning).

Though I got my score spit back out at me immediately (1420!  My target goal of 8000 is within striking distance!) I didn’t feel like paying to get the essay portion graded.  So, here, people.  Parse these bad boys and let me know if there’s anything you think I should be mindful of moving forward.

Essay one:  45 minutes (completed in 25)

Only once one has known real sadness can one feel true happiness.

Does one must know real sadness in order to “feel true happiness”?

The challenge with feelings, besides from having to endure their existence, is that they are difficult to pin down with a measuring stick.  Even the pain scale that’s standard practice within the medical establishment is fraught with normative challenges:  does Bob’s 3 equal Nancy’s 3?  What about Bob’s 3 after watching a comedy?  Is it the same as Bob’s 3 after seeing his favorite football team receive a bruising?  Alas, we cannot stick our heads inside of a machine and spit out an objective document that tells us how much pain we are currently enduring.

All of which is to say:  what is “real sadness”?  This seems a concept subjective and impossible to measure.  So, here we have the first difficulty with trying to determine is “real sadness” is a prerequisite for “true happiness”.

The second difficulty with a statement such as “Only once one has known real sadness can one feel true happiness” is, as you may have guessed, the challenge with defining “true happiness”.  Again, who am I to say that the slovenly man noshing Doritos in front of a sitcom is not truly happy?  I have no more right to impose my definition of happiness onto him than he has a right to strap me into a La-Z-Boy and force me to watch South Park (egads).  And so, trying to figure out if “real sadness” is required for “true happiness” ends up sounding like:

“Only once one has known ’some entity we cannot objectively define and/or measure’ can one feel ‘another entity we cannot objectively define and/or measure’.”

This is true not only within a person (again, Bob Pain 3 may not always equal Bob Pain 3, depending on the situation), but also across people.  Just as these conditions are not fixed or measurable within a human, they are similarly in flux across people.  “One man’s treasure is another’s trash,” says a familiar maxim.  Take divorce, for example.  For some it might bring great devastation; for others, liberation.

Not only is it hard to compare these conditions across humans, to complicate matters further, even within humans a moment of “trash” can also be a moment of “treasure”!  And it is true:  how many of us can recall a moment of pleasure bringing about a moment of sad, or vice versa?  “Oh no, not me,” you might think, but take a deep breath and think again.  If you ever suffered a scrape as a kid, through the tears and snot was it not also lovely to have your mother soften and embrace you?  Was it not, through this sadness of injury, also a moment of happiness to have someone, normally distracted, turn her attentions and love towards you?  The Buddhists do not have a monopoly on dhukka (the slight undercurrent of sadness in moments of happiness); not only are our feelings conflicted as we try and compare then across people, but even as we try to compare them within ourselves.

Who or what is to be the arbiter of “real sadness” or “true happiness”?

I will allow that perhaps in moments of self-defined “true happiness” we can each reflect back on the moments of “real sadness” and think to ourselves, “Wow, this victory tastes that much sweeter remembering the earlier bitter loss.”  But the assumption that trueness of happiness is inversely related to reality of sadness is predicated on states that cannot be truly measured within man or across men.

Within the ecosystem of the self, perhaps as new events that are sadder than ever experienced previously help us to appreciate the events that bring happiness. But we all have moments of sadness and happiness alike to reflect upon, and to judge and calibrate across men who has felt “real sadness” in an attempt to hand out ribbons that declare who has the right to feel “true happiness” is a deeply simplistic model that not only fails to appreciate the complexity of our fellow man, but also takes a reductive approach to appreciating the complexities of our self.

All of us have a right to feel true happiness, no matter how trivial we may perceive our claims to sadness and no matter how much worse everyone else around us may have it.  Happiness is not a function of previous sadness, nor is it a function of the feelings of everyone else around us, nor is it a function of anything else outside of the self.

Perhaps, then, the way to approach matters of happiness prerequisites is:  “Only once one stops looking for it can one feel true happiness.”

Essay two:  30 minutes (done in 22)

We have decided to institute a policy of all-day kindergarten, instead of half-day kindergarten, for all students at Greenwood School . All-day kindergarten will help all our students achieve at their highest levels. The classes will be ‘tracked’ so that average students are together, but high-achieving and low-achieving students will be put together in classes. In this way, the high-achieving students will be able to help pull the low-achieving students up to their level, so that no student falls behind. The all-day kindergarten classes will cover the same material previously covered in the half-day kindergarten classes, but will go at a slower speed to accommodate learning differences. In addition, the students will receive extra instruction in music, art, and physical education. One of the greatest benefits of the plan, however, is that students will be in a structured environment for longer hours, reducing the numbers of hours that otherwise would be wasted at home or in day care.

According to the principal of Greenwood School, a new policy of all-day kindergarten has been instituted with the stated intention of helping all our students achieve at their highest level.  While this may be true, the argument for the policy, as delineated in the letter sent to the parents of all incoming kindergarteners, is deeply flawed.  There is no cogent argument supporting the claim that all-day kindergarten will cause “all our students” to “achieve at their highest levels”.

The letter states that “high-achieving and low-achieving students will be put together in classes” so that “the high-achieving students will be able to help pull the low-achieving students up to their level, so that no student falls behind.”  Falls behind what?  Is there proof that high-achieving students will not suffer negative externalities from being in a classroom with low-achieving students?  Would Michael Jordan have been the basketball phenom he was had he limited his basketball-playing to a court full of third-graders?

The letter continues that the “all-day kindergarten classes will cover the same material previously covered in the half-day kindergarten classes, but will go at a slower speed to accommodate learning differences.”  Is there any evidence that this slower speed will not negatively impact students who might become bored, disinterested, or fatigued?  Is there any evidence that the existing pace is flawed or suboptimal and in need of tweaking?

While the letter does not state this explicitly, the “extra instruction in music, art, and physical education” in addition to the fact that twice the amount of teaching staff will be needed (assuming that the teacher : student ratio will not be compromised with the move from half-day to full-day kindergarten) will cost money.  These additional costs will be shouldered by all taxpayers in the Greenwood School district evenly, while the disproportionate benefits will be seen (assuming that this move is a benefit which, as detailed above, may not necessarily be true) by the citizens whose offspring are in kindergarten.  Is this move to full-day something for which the district’s taxpayers have shown support?

Finally, the letter’s final sentence reads as follows:

“One of the greatest benefits of the plan, however, is that students will be in a structured environment for longer hours, reducing the numbers of hours that otherwise would be wasted at home or in day dare.”

Let us set aside the notion that doing in eight hours what previously only took four is not a waste of time, a point which is arguable.  So, assuming that classroom time is not wasted, this assumes that hours at home or daycare are not structured or, even more troubling, that structured time is superior to unstructured time when it comes to helping our students achieve at their highest levels.  Is there any evidence to support the claim that structured time at this age is the best way to help our students achieve their best?

In sum, the move to full-day kindergarten classes is deeply worrisome. It is predicated on a number of claims that do not appear to have any grounding in evidence, which may not be terrible in a silo but is very problematic as it involves allocation of taxpayer dollars — taxpayers who may not necessarily have shown support for this policy.

For all the reasons above, institution of this policy should be put on hold until the concerns above can be addressed in a public forum.  Perhaps the claims are correct and can be bolstered by evidence.  Until that time, however, it does not seem prudent to proceed as detailed in the principal’s letter.

Had she read Didion this all could’ve been avoided

In this corner, recall the words of one Joan Didion in “On Keeping a Notebook” from her collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem (bolding mine):

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

And in this corner, from this morning’s New York Daily News, an AP bit entitled “Mommy cheerest busted” (bolding mine):

GREEN BAY, Wis. — A 33-year-old woman allegedly stole her daughter’s identity to attend high school and join the cheerleading squad.

Wendy Brown, of Green Bay, faces a felony identity theft charge after enrolling in Ashwaubenon High School as her 15-year-old daughter, who lives in Nevada with Brown’s mother.  Brown wanted to become a cheerleader and get her high school diploma because she wanted to regain her childhood, prosecutors said.  Brown allegedly attending cheerleading practices before school started, received a cheerleader’s locker and went to a pool party at the cheerleading coach’s house.

Oh, man, wow.  We humans are so hell-bent on recreating versions of our youth, it’s banal and fantastic all at once.

Wendy Brown, you don’t need that pleated skirt, baby girl. You are fabulous just as you are, clever conversation or otherwise. Unleash your kung fu grip on T-18 and say hello to the beautiful undulating present moment in all its shimmering complexity.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go look for another math class to take in order to re-enact Anittah Patrick’s Greatest Math Hits, Autumn 2008 edition.  Good day.