Tag Archives: Society

The Decline in Social Capital: Bowling Alone 1

“The core idea of social capital theory is that social networks have value. Just as a screwdriver (physical capital) or a college education (human capital) can increase productivity (both individual and collective), so too social contacts affect the productivity of individuals and groups.”

Today we’ll start with the evidence for and causes of a decline in social capital in the U.S. – next week (link here) we’ll focus on the value of social capital and potential cures.

On April 30^th, 1999, the Charity League of Dallas met for the final time. They had met every Friday for 57 years, but by 1999, the average age of the members had increased to 80 and their last new member had joined two years earlier. As old members had passed, new members had not joined, despite increases in population. The same pattern is repeated across the country. Why? And does it matter? These are the questions Putnam seeks to answer. Bowling Alone is the classic work on social capital, and as such is frequently referred to elsewhere, both in sociology and more broadly.

Putnam believes that in the last forty years, America has undergone a dramatic fall in social capital. Social capital, he explains, is the networks and connections that unite us to others, smoothing our progress through life and adding value to our lives. Today, however, Americans no longer join as many clubs, volunteer as many hours, run as often for office, vote, play sports together, or eat together, and generally involve themselves less in civic affairs or their communities. At best, they are members of mailing list based organizations, watching from the sidelines as their organization lobbies Congress rather than being themselves involved.

Social change generally occurs as a result of a combination of two factors, changes in individual decisions and generational shifts. Putnam notes however that seniors remain as involved in the community as they were when younger. Instead, generational change has occurred; young people today are far less involved in the community than their forebears. Why? He lists four causes, and estimates their percentage of the total impact.

The changing nature of households (10%). The entry of women into the workforce and the increase in full time as opposed to part time work.
Urban sprawl (10%). Sprawl leads to an increase in commuting and the fracturing of communities.
Electronic media, particularly TV (25%). TV takes up time and drains energy, so that people who watch TV do far fewer other activities even after controlling for the time taken.
Generational change (50%). Intense community bonds were formed by generations who experienced the war, in contrast to late generations like baby boomers and others who did not have that formative communal experience.

Next week, we’ll discuss the benefits to social capital as well as Putnam’s suggestions for rebuilding or communal bonds.

In the meantime, if you want to read it for yourself, you can find Bowling Alone here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, just join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

The Public Intellectual in Canada – Nelson Wiseman

“It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.” – Albert Camus

Something of a specialist post this week, and not everyone is interested in the state of public intellectuals in Canada, I realize. But, I think it’s interesting, and I get to pick. So there.

According to the philosopher Julien Benda, because intellectuals existed, “humanity did evil for 2000 years, but honoured good. This contradiction was an honour to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.” A fairly intellectual way to look at it, of course, and it reflects an irony in asking public intellectuals to contribute to a collection of essays about public intellectuals. How public intellectuals see themselves and each other does not exactly capture all possible viewpoints.

The Public Intellectual in Canada is a collection of essays on, as can be guessed from the title, the role of the public intellectual in Canada, whether as public policy wonk, media don, professional pundit, or perhaps simply as thorn in the side of power. Canadian thought and thought-leaders can sometimes feel a bit overshadowed by our much larger neighbour to the South, a fact reflected by several essays, as is our somewhat unique cultural divide into English and French Canada. In other ways, however, our public intellectuals struggle with much the same issues as anyone else, and insight into the need for public opinion polls as a way for individuals to learn about themselves in the context of society, the history of public thought, the changing nature of universities and their expectations of academics, and perhaps most of all the role of slow deliberation to mediate the deluge of information from a 24 hour news cycle, is welcome – and applicable – anywhere.

Many of the essays are Canadian centric, and I suspect would have little interest beyond Canadians. One, for example, focuses on the history of Le Devoir, a Québécois publication, while another discusses the benefits of a larger population for Canada. Others have broader appeal; some individuals discuss their own experiences as public intellectuals, while others reflect on the role of an intellectual more broadly. Most of all, however, Wiseman has assembled a selection of essays both left and right, data-driven and qualitative, on how knowledge is constructed and ideas disseminated, and for someone interested in Canada, it is a great read.

Want more? Get the Public Intellectual in Canada from the U of T publisher. Or, sign up for the Subtle Illumination email list to your right for regular updates! Disclosure: I read The Public Intellectual in Canada as a free advance reader copy.

The Price of Everything – Eduardo Porter

A little bit late this week – my apologies! Life sometimes gets in the way of the internet, I find.

“Market-transactions do not necessarily provide people with what they want; they provide people with what they think they want… [Prices] provide a road map of people’s psychological quirks, of their fears, their unacknowledged constraints.”

What do religion, happiness, healthcare, women’s rights, culture, and gifts all have in common? For good or for ill, says Eduardo Porter, they all involve prices. In The Price of Everything he covers how these issues and more are affected by the price system, and how people directly and indirectly put prices on everything that we interact with.

The standard criticism of this perspective goes back Oscar Wilde, of course: that people know “the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Porter argues that this can actually be a strength: prices may have little to do with what is good for people, but they can tell us what they believe or what they are willing to pay for. Many of our everyday values can be captured by the implicit prices we assign them, and even when prices are inefficient or incorrect, they still tell us what the people involved in the transaction believe.

An iphone app entitled “I am Rich” (now taken down) did nothing but flash a red gem on the screen, and retailed for $999, providing a price on status. Organs in Iran go for $1,200. Monogamy, he argues, spread largely as a result of an increased price on social cohesion, while animal rights movements are more common in the developed world because humane actions cost more in developing countries. All of these prices may be interesting, but unfortunately though his arguments have some merit, they feel incomplete. Few of us would agree, for example, that the Protestant Reformation occurred because the Catholic Church wasn’t giving good value for money.

Porter’s knowledge is broad, and unfortunately as a result the book can feel like a literature review that brushes over the material instead of providing insight. A chapter per subject, when the subjects are as vast as happiness, culture, and religion, means the book sometimes reads like a list of facts. I would enjoy a chapter here and a chapter there, but reading it cover to cover can be a a bit dry. In the end, though I enjoyed the brief anecdotes, I would have preferred a book that engaged with the material, rather than listed it. That said, though I can’t tell you the price of everything, I can admit I only paid £2 for the book.

Want more about the price of religion? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

The Clock of the Long Now – Stewart Brand

“How do we make long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare?”

Stewart Brand is a worried man. Earthquakes, war, murder, the burning of libraries; bad things happen fast, he argues. Good things, in contrast, like reforestation, the growth of a child, the maturing of an adult, or the building of library, happen slow. Today’s world though happens on a faster and faster time scale – our “now” is a smaller and smaller increment of time. How, he wonders, can we make our society see the last ten thousand years as if it were last week, and the next ten thousand as if it were next week? How, in other words, can we give ourselves a long now?

The Clock of the Long Now is a collection of essays by Brand about this topic. Brand is an ecologist and environmental activist, including running the Whole Earth Catalog and being instrumental in having NASA release the first picture of Earth as seen from space, believing it could symbolize our shared destinies. Today, he is a co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, devoted to the issues The Clock of the Long Now raises.

For our world to survive, he argues, we must think and compete on 6 different time scales. Over the scale of years, individuals compete; over decades, families; over centuries, tribes or nations; over millennia, culture; over tens of millennia, species; and over eons, the whole web of life on our planet. Thinking on these scales means we can identify and work to preserve what really matters.

Unfortunately, as he points out, “the great problem with the future is that we die there.” It can be difficult to mentally immanentize the future. To help, he has a number of suggestions, including writing dates in five digits (02013, not 2013), increasing history education among all professions, and following James Lovelock’s proposal of writing a start-up manual for civilization, from making fire through ancient genetic design to modern biotech.

As with any collection of essays, any given reader will like some essays and dislike others. Overall, however, this book, and Brand’s foundation, form a powerful message. We can still read Galileo’s technical correspondence from the 1590s, but not the correspondence that launched AI research in the 1960s, because the electronic storage has decayed. What does that say about what we’re leaving to future generations? I’m not sure Brand knows the answer, and I certainly don’t, but the question is one that is too often lost in the babble of the present.

Want more illumination? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

Stranger Magic – Marina Warner

“Magical thinking structures the processes of imagination, and imagining something can and sometimes must precede the fact or the act.”

In Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, Marina Warner examines the presence of enchantment and magic in everyday culture, and the reasons for its continued persistence despite its difficult co-existence with science. To do so, she studies how the perception of magic and imagination has evolved over history in the context of the Arabian Nights, and worries magic has been made more comfortable for Western audiences through the exoticisation of Oriental material.

She begins each chapter with a chosen story from the Arabian Nights, and analyzes it in detail before moving on to its larger implications. For me, this was actually the highlight of the book: I haven’t read the Arabian Nights in years, and having someone explain the context of the stories was fascinating. She covers Shahrazad’s gradual move from stories of men wronged by women to stories portraying women as victims, eventually earning the Sultan’s forgiveness for all women and his agreement to stop executing one per day.

Arabian Nights was enormously popular in Europe when it was translated, so much so that many of the classic tales we associate with it, like Aladdin or Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, were actually additions by European translators. Warner argues that the Arabian Nights were one of the first major popularisers of flights of fancy in Western European thought. They have provoked imagination and ideas ever since, and it is imagination that is key to knowledge, key to ethics, and key to humanity. The Enlightenment may have been the Age of Reason, but it also required imagination, and it is fiction and magic that allow for imagination to grow. Unfortunately, she suggests, since then magic has become perceived as exotic and foreign, diminishing cultural exchange and cultural understanding, not just of reason and imagination, but of East and West.

The book, however, is almost impossible to take good notes on: she moves directly from Mongolian Shamanism to Obama’s Dreams from my Father, all in the context of understanding dreams. Such tangled webs make for interesting reading, though some chapters seem to lack relevance. That said, her thesis on the importance of imagination is one I am sympathetic to, and the framing of the issue in Arabian Nights is excellent. All of us might be better off if we were a little more willing, even in this rational world, to indulge in magic, both strange and everyday.

Want more enlightenment? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

The Invisible Gorilla – Chabris & Simons

“It’s true that we vividly experience some aspects of our world, particularly those that are the focus of our attention. But this rich experience inevitably leads to the erroneous belief that we process all of the detailed information around us.”

In what is perhaps one of the best known psychology experiments conducted, subjects are asked to carefully count the passes of a basketball made between a team wearing white shirts and one wearing black shirts. About half the subjects fail completely to notice when a woman wearing a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the screen, pounds her chest, and walks off!

The authors of the experiment, Chabris and Simons, argue in The Invisible Gorilla that this captures a cognitive illusion, a situation in which our intuition leads us astray. In this case, almost all of us believe that were such a situation to happen to us, we would notice the gorilla. In reality, they suggest, looking does not imply seeing if our attention is directed elsewhere. The same problem occurs when we talk on cell phones while driving: we all believe we will still see what is going on in front of us, when in reality we emphatically do not.

They list several such illusions, including attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, cause, and potential. We do not see everything we look at or remember everything we have seen; we massively overestimate our abilities, particularly those of us who are worst at something; we say we could explain how a zipper works or why the sky is blue, but when asked cannot; we believe spurious causation claims with no grounding in evidence, as in the case of autism and vaccinations; and we believe there must be an easy way to unlock vast abilities in our brains.

We tend to intuitively believe in our abilities, whether multitasking or memory, yet experiments like the invisible gorilla or one in which 50% of subjects failed to notice when experimenters replaced their conversational partner with a different person while they were distracted cast significant doubt on these claims. Intuition, Chabris & Simons argue, may well be useful in the Gladwellian sense, but the only way to know whether it is accurate or illusory is to conduct randomized experiments. In this sense, they are firmly on the side of Banerjee and Duflo, though in a different context.

At heart, though, their book is one of stories; for every claim they make they tell multiple stories of experiments run and demonstrations seen, and so the book is both entertaining and educational. Our intuitions can guide us well, often for reasons unknown to our conscious selves, but a little humility would do us all good, instead of assuming our intuitions will always steer us correctly.

Looking to understand more of the psychology of illusions? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

Numbersense – Kaiser Fung

“Big Data has essentially nothing to say about causation. It’s a common misconception that an influx of data flushes cause-effect from its hiding place.”

You recently graduated from a law school, and are still searching for a job. You get a voicemail from your school telling you that they are conducting a survey of whether recent graduates have gotten jobs. If you do not respond, they will assume you have a job. Do you bother to call them back to tell them the disappointing news?

Odds are, you don’t. That’s why law schools use this and other techniques to game the law school metrics, disingenuously boosting their entrance GPAs and LSAT scores, reputational reviews, and post-graduation employment statistics. Too often, unfortunately, those metrics are taken at face value.

In Numbersense, Kaiser Fung argues that we are in the age of Big Data – an age of extensive, personalized information useful for purposes including marketing, economics, and sports, but also a source of confusion, doubt, and increased evidence for theories both good and bad. Numbersense is the willingness to probe behind headline figures and decide if the data is actually meaningful, whether law school statistics or the unemployment rate. We turn to data for answers, but it is too often overwhelming, misleading, or evidence only of correlation, not causation.

The last point is perhaps the most critical. Target, a large shopping chain, was so effective at predicting pregnancy from consumption patterns they accidentally informed parents before the daughter had herself let them know – a triumph for Big Data, if something of an awkward one (details can be found in Charles Duhigg’s report here). Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean buying a large purse causes pregnancy, but simply that they correlate. Regardless of the size of the data set, Fung argues, Big Data shows correlations, not causations.

Big Data has become something of a buzzword in recent years, and the explosion in available information is indeed of huge importance. It is not, however, a panacea, and Fung rightly emphasizes this. Whether giving a how-to manual for Law School Deans looking to game the system, criticizing the Groupon business model, or studying obesity, Numbersense is an entertaining read. It will likely have the most appeal, however, to non-statisticians: Fung has succeeded in creating an almost entirely non-mathematical introduction to big data, explaining the challenges of econometrics without requiring knowledge of statistics, and for that reason alone the book is a worthwhile read. Understanding the difference between headline and core inflation may not induce murder-mystery suspense, but Fung makes it both interesting and enjoyable.

Still interested? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, sign up for the Subtle Illumination email list to your right! Disclosure: I read Numbersense as an advance reader copy – it is released tomorrow.

Present Shock – Douglas Rushkoff

“It’s not a mere speeding up, however much our lifestyles and technologies have accelerated the rate at which we attempt to do things. It’s more of a diminishment of anything that isn’t happening right now – and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is.” – Douglas Rushkoff

Early post this week: I’m in the air on Sunday, so won’t be able to post. I deny any irony in early-posting a review about bringing everything into the present.

Information can be either a storage or flow. Twitter is a flow: there is no point in going back and rewatching twitter feeds, because once it loses its present immediacy, it loses impact. We cannot catch up with it. Books, on the other hand, are storage, and can be returned to repeatedly. The problem with modernity is that we confuse the two, scanning a digital article with the same focus as we give our facebook news feed, and missing out on much of its value.

Rushkoff argues that we have begun to experience life as one long moment, always in the present, with no beginning and no end. As a result, we have stopped emphasizing narratives in our movies and tv shows; we attempt to be everywhere at once both in attention and physically; we try to make everything happen now rather than waiting; and we oversee patterns due to an overdose of data points. It is an interesting and compelling point, that we are placing less and less emphasis on things that are not happening now, and are overwhelmed by everything that supposedly is.

Beyond that (admittedly interesting) claim, however, I don’t find the rest of his thesis convincing. His argument that we no longer value narrative arcs, supposedly evidenced in flashback heavy Family Guy episodes, just doesn’t seem reasonable. Modern life is certainly accelerated, as Alvin Toffler argued in his book Future Shock, and it seems that the faster it gets, the faster we demand it goes. It seems to me though that we show just as much need for narrative arcs as ever, though perhaps less patience for long ones. Family guy still has a story – it’s just short and shallow.

Despite being on a fascinating topic, Present Shock didn’t add as much as I had hoped to the discussion, introducing few new ideas or ways of thinking about the world. Yes, multi-tasking brains do worse on almost every measure, but that’s fairly well recognized. His discussion of moon phases affecting chemical balances in the body, on the other hand, sounds a lot more like junk science, and the fact that he doesn’t provide any actual evidence for it suggests there may not be much. There is interesting information in Present Shock, but it is overwhelmed by the irrelevant and the unlikely to be causal.

Want more wisdom? Join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right! Or, keep reading (or in the UK or Canada).

Checklist Manifesto – Atul Gawande

Are you using enough checklists? It feels like the world is getting increasingly complicated, and I’m sure we’ve all experimented with various memory aides to try to remember everything we have to do. These range from the humble checklist to the mighty online planning tool with hyperlinked entries. For most of us, though, I suspect it’s hard to know what we’re doing right.

Gawande, a surgeon himself, is firmly convinced by the virtue of the checklist, and in his hands it becomes a powerful and thought-provoking tool to confront complexity. He begins by pointing out there are two reasons we fail: ignorance, if we don’t know something, and ineptitude, if we know how to do something and do it wrong. It is the second problem that is the most serious in the modern world, he argues, and checklists can make a dramatic difference.

There are approximately 150,000 deaths following surgery in the US, about 3x as many as deaths from car accidents, and so he’s got a point. If checklists can reduce even a small percentage of errors in surgery, it could make an enormous difference. Fortunately, Gawande has a number of stories of astonishing success from checklist adoption. When Johns Hopkins introduced a checklist for central line insertions, for example, infection rates dropped from 11% to zero; when Michigan did, it probably saved over 1,500 lives in 18 months. The results are much the same in fields as diverse as aviation or skyscraper construction.

He does caution readers not to overreach, however. Checklists longer than 5 to 9 items long become cumbersome, and people start ignoring them. Good lists therefore focus on the steps that make the biggest difference, and the ones likely to be forgotten. Too long, and they stop being effective. They also need to be carefully tested: much of the book is devoted to failed attempts at introducing checklists, as people have a tendency to ignore or fail to follow the list unless it is designed well.

The book’s a quick and easy read, but the idea is extremely powerful. Gawande talks about his own initial reluctance to adopt checklists, seeing himself as above them, and his more recent reversal of opinion. When he asked surgeons about the value of a checklist, 20% said it did not improve safety. When asked if they would want it used in surgery on them, however, 93% agreed. I suspect we could all benefit from a bit more humility and a few more lists.

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Waiting for the Barbarians – J.M. Coetzee

“Time for the black flower of civilization to bloom.”

I don’t know how to review fiction, so instead I’m just going to let Coetzee speak for himself. I’ll give a bit of background, but there are so many quotes with wisdom I think I’ll just share those.

Waiting for the Barbarians is the story of the Magistrate, a man who has “not asked for more than a quiet life in quiet times.” He administers a small town on the border between Empire and the barbarian lands. As the novel progresses, Empire becomes concerned over the possibility of war with the barbarians: interrogators come and go, prisoners are taken, and the army moves in. It captures a clash of worlds, Empire and barbarians, humanity and brutality, complexity and simplicity.

As the magistrate witnesses some of the horrors of Empire, he periodically reflects on them:

“I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering… The knot loops in upon itself; I cannot find the end.”

On new beginnings;

“It would cost little to march them out into the desert (having put a meal in them first, perhaps, to make the march possible), to have them dig, with their last strength, a pit large enough for all of them to lie in (or even to dig it for them!), and, leaving them buried there forever and forever, to come back to the walled town full of new intentions, new resolutions. But that will not be my way. The new men of Empire are the ones who believe in fresh starts, new chapters, clean pages; I struggle on with the old story, hoping that before it is finished it will reveal to me why it was that I thought it worth the trouble.”

On time;

“What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history.”

On certainty;

“In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets, that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished.”

I’m not sure a selection of quotes do him justice, but Coetzee is very much one of the wise, and there is definitely wisdom to be gleaned here.

There’s also some wisdom to be found in the Subtle Illumination email list to your right, however. Or, keep reading Coetzee (or in the UK or Canada).