Adolescent capitalism

The Boston Globe has an interesting article arguing that the recent revelations about Chinese goods has antecedents in the early days of British and American industrial growth. The writer argues that “China’s fast and loose brand of commerce is not an expression of national character, much less a conspiracy to poison us and our pets, but a phase in the country’s development. Call it adolescent capitalism.”

Taking a page from the British, who had pioneered many ingenious methods of adulteration a generation or two earlier, American manufacturers, distributors, and vendors of food began tampering with their products en masse — bulking out supplies with cheap filler, using dangerous additives to mask spoilage or to give foodstuffs a more appealing color.

A committee of would-be reformers who met in Boston in 1859 launched one of the first studies of American food purity, and their findings make for less-than-appetizing reading: candy was found to contain arsenic and dyed with copper chloride; conniving brewers mixed extracts of “nux vomica,” a tree that yields strychnine, to simulate the bitter taste of hops. Pickles contained copper sulphate, and custard powders yielded traces of lead. Sugar was blended with plaster of Paris, as was flour. Milk had been watered down, then bulked up with chalk and sheep’s brains. Hundred-pound bags of coffee labeled “Fine Old Java” turned out to consist of three-fifths dried peas, one-fifth chicory, and only one-fifth coffee.

Though there was the occasional clumsy attempt at domestic reform by midcentury — most famously in response to the practice of selling “swill milk” taken from diseased cows force-fed a diet of toxic refuse produced by liquor distilleries — little changed.

After recounting the history of piracy, counterfeiting, and other assorted expressions of the entrepreneurial spirit in the U.S., the writer pleads for a bit of empathy for the growing pains of the Chinese economy.

Piracy, fraud, and counterfeiting, whether of currency, commodities, or brand-name electronics, flourishes at a particular moment in a capitalist society: the regulatory interregnum that emerges in the wake of fast-paced capitalist change. This period is one in which technology has improved, often dramatically, and markets have burst their older boundaries. Yet the country still relies on obsolete ways of controlling commerce. Until there’s something to replace them, counterfeiters and other flim-flam operators flourish, pushing new means of making money to their logical, if unethical, conclusion.

Indeed, the ease with which counterfeiters and corner-cutters operate in China today can be attributed to many of the same failings that plagued the United States 150 years ago: a weak, outdated regulatory regime ill-suited to handling the complexities of modern commerce; limited incentives for the state to police and eliminate fraud; and, perhaps most important of all, a blurring of the lines between legitimate and fraudulent means of making money.

Lost in the supermarket

According to a study reported by the Economist, women have a better sense of direction than men, at least in the supermarket.

Dr New used the market to test two hypotheses. The first was that women remember the locations of food resources more accurately than men do. The second was that the more nutritionally valuable a resource is, the more accurately its location will be remembered.

To prove these conjectures he recruited 41 women and 45 men and led each of them individually on a merry dance around the chosen market. In the course of this peregrination, each participant visited six of the 90 food stalls in the market. At each of those stalls, participants were given a piece of food to eat. They were asked their preference for the taste of the food, how often they ate that food in normal life, how attractive they found the stall and how often they had made purchases from that stall in the past. After visiting all six stalls, they were taken to the centre of the market and asked to point toward those stalls, one at a time, using an arrow on a dial. In addition, they were asked to rate their own sense of direction.

On average, women were 9° more accurate than men at pointing to each stall—a significant deviation if you have to walk some distance to get to a place. This was not because those women had more experience of visiting the market than the men had. Nor did the women rate themselves as having a better sense of direction—indeed the men rated their own navigating skills more highly.

Dr New suggests that these results show women are better than men at the particular task of relocating sources of food. That contrasts with the idea that men are better at navigation in general. In other words, women’s minds are specialised for their ancestral task of gathering the sort of food that cannot run away.

That such food is in a different mental category from the one occupied by general landmarks was suggested by the answer to the second hypothesis. The higher the calorific value of the food sold by a stall, the more accurately Dr New’s volunteers were able to point towards it. And that result applied to both sexes, though women still did better than men.

Going up in smoke

A. N. Wilson, the British writer, has a wistful essay on the quiet acquiescence of the British people to the ban on smoking in public places and the possibility that it could entail the death of literature in England. He begins his essay with a question,

What do the following have in common: Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, T S Eliot, W B Yeats, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Evelyn Waugh, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis?

The answer is, of course, that if they were to come back to life in Gordon Brown’s Britain and wanted to go out to their club, or a restaurant or café, they would not be allowed to indulge in a habit which sustained them during the most creative phases of their lives.

He states that after “racking my brains to find a single non-smoker among the great English poets or novelists of the 17th, 18th, 19th or 20th centuries,” he has been unable to think of a single one who was not a smoker. He proceeds to give a extensive list of these tobacco stained literary giants and concludes with a call to arms: “Heroic Beryl Bainbridge keeps on smoking for England, but will there be any more writers in the years to come, following in her heroic steps?”

SAT myths and reality

A conservative political scientist, Charles Murray, makes a case for abolishing the SAT. He notes that the 2001 study by the University of California system revealed, “The surprising empirical reality is that the SAT is redundant if students are required to take achievement tests.” The study points out that achievement test scores and high school grades were better independent forecasters of a student’s success in college than the SAT score. Moreover, the SAT score did not add in any significant way to the forecast made by the achievement test scores and high school grades.

Murray also tackles some of the myths surrounding the SAT. For instance, here is the myth and the reality about coaching:

From 1981 to 1990, three separate analyses of all the prior studies were published in peer-reviewed journals. They found a coaching effect of 9 to 25 points on the SAT Verbal and of 15 to 25 points on the SAT Math. In 2004, Derek Briggs, using the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, found effects of 3 to 20 points for the SAT Verbal and 10 to 28 points for the SAT Math. Donald Powers and Donald Rock, using a nationally representative sample of students who took the SAT after its revisions in the mid-1990s, found an average coaching effect of 6 to 12 points on the SAT Verbal and 13 to 18 points on the SAT Math. Many studies tell nearly identical stories. On average, coaching raises scores by no more than a few dozen points, enough to sway college admissions in exceedingly few cases.

But the coaching business is booming, with affluent parents being the best customers. If the payoff is really so small, why has the market judged coaching to be so successful?

Most obviously, parents who pay for expensive coaching courses ignore the role of self-selection: the students who seem to profit from a coaching course tend to be those who, if the course had not been available, would have worked hard on their own to prepare for the test.

Then parents confuse the effects of coaching with the effect of the basic preparation that students can do on their own. No student should walk into the SAT cold. It makes sense for students to practice some sample items, easily available from school guidance offices and online, and to review their algebra textbook if it has been a few years since they have taken algebra. But once a few hours have been spent on these routine steps, most of the juice has been squeezed out of preparation for the SAT. Combine self-selection artifacts with the role of basic preparation, and you have the reason that independent studies using control groups show such small average gains from formal coaching.

According to Murray, the overriding truth about the SAT is this:

the children of the affluent and well educated really do get most of the top scores. For example, who gets the coveted scores of 700 and higher, putting them in the top half-dozen percentiles of SAT test-takers? Extrapolating from the 2006 data on means and standard deviations reported by the College Board, about half of the 700+ scores went to students from families making more than $100,000 per year. But the truly consequential statistics are these: Approximately 90 percent of the students with 700+ scores had at least one parent with a college degree. Over half had a parent with a graduate degree.

And, he adds, “The children of the well educated and affluent get most of the top scores because they constitute most of the smartest kids. They are smart because their parents are smart. The parents have passed their smartness along through parenting practices that are largely independent of education and affluence, and through genes that are completely independent of them.”

Getting short-changed II

Timesonline has an article that points to the discrimination against short people as one of the last tolerated biases in our society. The writer argues that the reason is that the preference for the tall and statuesque is an evolutionary adaption inbred into our species.

The advantages in our society of being tall are well documented:

Research has shown that a tall, broad-shouldered man is more likely than a shorter rival to have an advantage when looking for a mate, or for employment. Research published last year from Princeton University showed that both tall men and women earn 10 per cent more than those who are 4in shorter. The chances of a man reaching the equivalent in Britain of the directors’ boardroom are 3 per cent greater if he is 6ft 2in than 5ft 10in.

What is truly discouraging for the height challenged is that the bias seems so unconscious:

Doctors Karen Dion and Ellen Berschied, from the University of Wisconsin, published a paper showing that children aged 4 to 6 asked to judge classmates’ desirability assessed it on appearance. This bias wasn’t confined to the children: it was also reflected in the teachers’ expectations of their performance. Similarly, Doctors David Landy and Harold Sigall, of the University of Rochester in the US, demonstrated that when undergraduates were asked to evaluate their colleagues’ intellectual ability and the value of their essays it was heavily biased by height and build.

This is not only a transatlantic phenomenon. As long ago as 1962, Walter Burger and Heinz Schuler of the University of Augsburg in Germany demonstrated that a tall, good-looking man was likely to be chosen for a job not just because of his ability to carry it out efficiently: he was given better ratings for friendliness, creativity and motivation.

After pointing out that height matters more to men than to women, the author throws a bone to short men: “men are lucky because women have a broad range of criteria for prospective partners. Short men can always trade off other attributes – such as wealth!”

Mating Mind Hypothesis

The Economist has an article on Geoffrey Miller, who offers an interesting hypothesis. He believes that “mental processes which are uniquely human, such as language and the ability to make complicated artefacts, evolved originally for sexual display,” and, further, that “men and women will have different criteria for making their choices [in selecting a mate], and so the sexual-display sides of their minds may differ in detail.” To test this hypothesis, he and his colleagues conducted a study to “look into two activities—conspicuous consumption and altruism towards strangers—to see if these support the ‘mating mind’ hypothesis, as Dr Miller has dubbed his idea.”

They divided a bunch of volunteers into two groups. Those in one were put into what the researchers hoped would be a “romantic mindset” by being shown pictures of attractive members of the opposite sex. They were each asked to write a description of a perfect date with one of these people. The unlucky members of the other group were shown pictures of buildings and told to write about the weather.

The participants were then asked two things. The first was to imagine they had $5,000 in the bank. They could spend part or all of it on various luxury items such as a new car, a dinner party at a restaurant or a holiday in Europe. They were also asked what fraction of a hypothetical 60 hours of leisure time during the course of a month they would devote to volunteer work.

The results were just what the researchers hoped for. In the romantically primed group, the men went wild with the Monopoly money. Conversely, the women volunteered their lives away. Those women continued, however, to be skinflints, and the men remained callously indifferent to those less fortunate than themselves. Meanwhile, in the other group there was little inclination either to profligate spending or to good works. Based on this result, it looks as though the sexes do, indeed, have different strategies for showing off. Moreover, they do not waste their resources by behaving like that all the time. Only when it counts sexually are men profligate and women helpful.

That result was confirmed by the second experiment which, instead of looking at the amount of spending and volunteering, looked at how conspicuous it was. After all, there is little point in producing a costly signal if no one sees it.

As predicted, romantically primed men wanted to buy items that they could wear or drive, rather than things to be kept at home. Their motive, therefore, was not mere acquisitiveness. Similarly, romantically primed women volunteered for activities such as working in a shelter for the homeless, rather than spending an afternoon alone picking up rubbish in a park. For both sexes, however, those in an unromantic mood were indifferent to the public visibility of their choices.

These two studies support the idea, familiar from everyday life, that what women want in a partner is material support while men require self-sacrifice. Conspicuous consumption allows men to demonstrate the former. Blatant benevolence allows women to demonstrate the latter. There is, however, a confounding observation. The most blatant benevolence of all, that of billionaires giving away their fortunes and heroes giving away (or at least risking) their lives, is almost entirely a male phenomenon.

To examine this, the team did another experiment. They found that when requests for benevolence were financial, rather than time-consuming, romantically primed men were happy to chip in extravagantly. Giving money to charity is thus more akin to conspicuous consumption than it is to blatant benevolence. The primed men were also willing (or at least said they were willing) to act heroically as well as spend—but only if the action suggested was life-threatening. Women, romantically primed or not, weren’t.

Mr. Woo and his creations

Found through Boing Boing, this clip on YouTube is of Paul Merton, a british reporter, who takes a detour to search out a chinese farmer who collects people’s junk and transforms it into remarkable robots, much to the consternation of his wife.

Turn off the t.v. III

Yet another study, as reported by the LA Times, shows that plopping an infant in front of a t.v. screen is not only not beneficial, but also downright harmful.

Christakis and his colleagues surveyed 1,000 parents in Washington and Minnesota and determined their babies’ vocabularies using a set of 90 common baby words, including mommy, nose and choo-choo.

The researchers found that 32% of the babies were shown the videos, and 17% of those were shown them for more than an hour a day, according to the study in the Journal of Pediatrics.

For every hour a day that babies 8 to 16 months old were shown such popular series as “Brainy Baby” or “Baby Einstein,” they knew six to eight fewer words than other children, the study found.