Winners

Okay, this is going to be a snippy little blog, I admit it.

Every Sunday the ritual at my house is to read the NewYork Times Style Section for the wedding announcements. Wedding advertisements, really. But that's another rant.

My wife refuses to allow me to read them aloud. I used to do this, but it interrupted her doing the crossword puzzle and as she has gotten older, she will not broke interruptions to the things which really matter in life.

So, now the ritual is we read them separately and then comment on them, without mentioning names, but just the schools, the little stories they tell about how they met, we refer to these later in the day, as we are walking the dog. It's actually even more fun that way.

This Sunday, there was a real gem. She was magna cum laude, Harvard College. Then Johns Hopkins medical school. He was magna cum laude, Princeton, then Harvard Med.

She went on to get into the hardest of all subspecialties to get, dermatology. He went on to another difficult field in which the competition for a residency is intense: plastic surgery.

They meet at a "recruiting dinner," at Hopkins and he is attracted to her and she is not interested because she has a rule about not dating residents in the same institution because she has watched Scrubs, or some television show which depicts the torrid bedroom life of medical trainees who spend very little time thinking about patients and quite a lot of time thinking about which hot ticket in scrubs they want to bed next.

Her rule is grounded firmly in Fox TV.

As luck would have it, they meet over a patient they see together the next morning and he is blown away by "the compassion she showed as a dermatologist."

And there you have it.

My wife, being of the medical world did not have to explain, she simply drawled, "the compassionate dermatologist."

Now, I love my dermatologist. But, truth be told, dermatologists are dentists with MD's. They work hard, moving quickly room to room, excising and snipping and burning and freezing, but compassion is not really part of the game. Dermatologists make an exorbitant amount of money, the highest paid specialty, with virtually no on call, no hospitalized patients and low malpractice premiums. It's the ideal specialty and there are seventy applicants for every training spot. Women, in particular, strive to get derm residencies because you can bill like a star and still get home to greet the kids as they come home from school. Your patients, in general, do not die or ever get very sick and they are pretty grateful because they usually improve. It's a great specialty.

And, I have known plastic surgeons I respected enormously--the reconstructive guys who take a woman who's lost a breast and they try to restore some sense of body image, or they repair an abraded or lacerated face after an auto accident.

But, you and I both know this particular Princeton product, this particular plastic surgeon is not of that ilk. He is Nip Tuck, and all about thread counts in the bed linen.

Can you imagine what their dining room looks like? And his car? What does he drive? Hers is a little easier to imagine, but with him, well you could spend hours speculating. This would be a very important part of him. And, if you really want to run wild, think of their children. Think of their children's rites of passage--birthday parties, weddings.

Their whole lives stretch out before us. They are what immigrants dream about, well Asian immigrants, Jewish immigrants, when they dream about America. They are real lace. They are beyond real lace. These are the people reality shows will be built around in the future.

These are the Warner Brothers lot people, all front, but when you look behind, what is there?

My patients need compassion. Her patients need compassion. We are passionate about what we do, because, after all, look at the dire circumstances we help our patients through, that woman with the acne, at age thirty. That woman with the puppet lines running from the corners of her mouth to her jaw. They need help and they need compassion. And maybe some botox.

It is true, the dermatologist worked, for some part of her day, on an incurable disease, scleroderma, for which neither plastic surgeons nor dermatologists have a single useful thing to offer. But those scleroderma patients afford them a few minutes of the day during which they can develop the compassionate side of themselves.

It's like flying to Tanzania for five days and getting pictures taken of you in your scrubs with your arms around native children, before your airplane returns you to the safety of your plush office Stateside.

I told you it was going to be snippy.

But, oh, please. The compassionate dermatologist and the Nip Tuck plastics guy she won by touching his perfect body with her mind.

Thinking Fast and Slow: Who Defines Intelligence?

Daniel Kahneman, in his new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, presents a psychologist's delight, this problem: A plastic bat and ball costs $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Most people see the answer quickly and answer: The ball costs 10 cents, but, of course, if you stop to think about it, the ball costs 5 cents, because you have been told the bat costs $1 more than the ball so $1.05 - 0.5= $1.00, but $1.00-0.10= 0.95.

Kaheman tells us about only about 10% of students going to state schools answered correctly and about 52% of the kids getting into Harvard got it right. Kahneman goes on to assure us that one important aspect of intelligence is this capacity, to stop your "Fast Thinking (System 1)" the intuitive, quick thinking, and to bring to bear the slower "System 2" thinking.

I beg to differ.

I think this capacity is simply a matter of privilege and training. Once you have been told about this sort of trick, you can see it in many questions, and you can find the right answer. The kids whose parents can afford to send them to Kaplan SAT preparatory courses can learn these games, to become "more competitive," and can score high on exams which test this sort of thing, namely the SAT's.

The real definition of intelligence, read, "aptitude" or talent, i.e. the sort of thinking we find valuable in the world is quite different.

In fact, in my world, the person who can use his System 1 is at a premium. You can teach him to bring his slower thinking, System 2, to bear; that can be trained.

The patient is carried in to your examining room in the Emergency Room in shock. Looking at the patient, you take in hundreds, thousands of data bits and form an impression. He may have anything from a penetrating wound and blood loss to cardiogenic shock, and you go down one road or another based on initial observations, knowing as data comes in, you'll redirect. But you go with the first answer the ten cent ball, and that works until it doesn't, then you correct.

You do not, however, fail to come back around to the other possibilities, you have a check list for the things System 2 would have made you think about, and you get around to covering all the bases, at minute fifteen. But until that time, you have gone with System 1, and played the most likely possibilities, based on snap observations and judgments. And that is intelligence.

Quarterbacks, looking over defensive arrays at the line of scrimage take in lots of data, read cues, make mistakes, correct and fire off an answer in the form of a pass or an audible change to the planned play at the line. All of this puts quick thinking and slow thinking in play, but the predominant, and very intelligent, function is fast thinking.

When I was in middle school I had to take a course called, "Mechanical drawing," in shop class. Shop, I knew, was a "minor" subject, for kids who weren't "smart enough" to to go to college.

But I found mechanical drawing both difficult and fascinating. It made me look at a desk from just one angle an to see and draw only what you can see from that angle and it did not look at all like a desk from that angle. It was just a rectangle, could have been anything. It is precisely this sort of intelligence which is required of radiologists, as they move through different "slices" of abdominal organs and see them only from one angle, from north to south, head toward toe, then from back to front. The radiologist then has to reconstruct a three dimensional image in his mind from the two dimension images he's been scanning through.

As far as I know, there are no examinations given medical students for this intellectual capacity. Future radiologists are chosen based on examination which test skills more like "the bat and ball cost $1.10" variety.

Why? Because, there are no such exams available. The chiefs of radiology have never got together to think about what sort of skills and aptitudes radiologists really require and then worked with test makers to identify these capacities among medical students who will become radiology residents.

Or maybe the chiefs of radiology departments figure they do not need such exams because this sort of "intelligence" can be taught.

There is no Super Bowl in radiology. If chiefs recruit lesser talents, there is no way to know. No other radiology department beats you if you recruit a bunch of losers who had straight A's from kindergarden on, but who could not reconstruct an image to save their lives.

Medical school classes, in fact, are filled in much the same irrational way. They select kids who, to use the phrase from Moneyball, look good in jeans. That is, in baseball, talent scouts choose players who look athletic, who run the fastest sprint times and who look good in the baseball uniform. But, as a more methodical method was developed, teams discovered the player who looked terrible in a uniform, was often the better player: Yogi Berra was a pretty good catcher, but he could never impress anyone with his foot speed or his vertical leap.

Intriguingly, Daniel Kahneman, the man whose business it is to define intelligence, to devise tests which reveal real insight in those select few, commits the most astonishing leaps of assumption himself, in his discussion of studies which match behavior to blood glucose levels.

It is well established the brain runs of two things, minute to minute: oxygen and glucose. Deprive the brain of either for more than a few minutes and it spirals into dysfunction. But taking that little piece of knowledge, he spins off into studies which show that judges are more likely to grant parole to prisons in the hour after they've eaten lunch. There is so much wrong with his conclusions about the effect of blood glucose on brain glucose and brain function, it's hard to know where to begin.

He also spins off. drawing conclusions about behavior from imaging studies in which different parts of the brain "light up" as glucose utilization in those parts of the brain increase, conclusions which make the ten cent baseball look like genius.

The fact is, the brain is more like a ball of string than an assembly line. In the assembly line, you can pinpoint, geographically, anatomically, just where certain parts get added to the automobile. The brain is more like a computer, where things are lighting up and electrons are flowing in many places at oncem. True, there are "regions" where speech is centered, where vision is localized, more or less, but these regions are far more fluid and plastic than current imaging can really show.

I have not yet finished Kuhneman's book. This is just a progress report, a bulletin from the front. But I am beginning to see the general drift of the argument.

This is enlightening, because it suggests, just maybe, where we have gone wrong in our research and development world, at least that part of the R&D world located i the university, is we have been awarding the glittering prizes to the sons and daughters of the upper classes, and called it "Meritocracy."

It must also means something that Bill Gates and Zuckerberg both dropped out of Harvard, once they got their first glimmer of where the real ideas were pullulating.

It reminds me of the story told about Tony Fauci, which he has never forthrightly denied. Fauci is the chief the the National Institutes of Health Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He is also head of the task force on AIDS research. He was called into the office of the Chief of Medicine the day after he finished his chief residency at Cornell and all the grand mucky mucks of the Cornell University Mecical College were there and the Chief fo Medicine told him he was would be given admitting privileges to The New York Hospital/Cornell Medical Center and appointed to the faculty. Fauci turned him down. The room was aghast. The news went viral through the medical center in a heart beat--and these were the days before computers.

Somebody asked Tony how he could turn down this ultimate plum, this glittering prize above all prizes.

"Well, " Fauci said. "Some day I'm going to be either very rich or very famous. If I stayed at Cornell, I'd be neither."

Tony could answer that question about the bat and ball, but he knew that's just gamesmanship. He wanted to make a real difference.

Nobody Owns Money

There is a wonderful scene in The Wire, where Omar crashes a poker game and holds a gun on the high roller drug lords around the table as his partner scoops up the cash from the table.
One of the drug lords says, "That's my money you're taking."
Omar, smiling corrects him, "You don't own money. You just get to use it for a while. Nobody owns money."
Omar, of course, has no more than a high school education, but he understands something today's pundits do not seem to appreciate. (Of course, Omar is really David Simon & Co.) What he (they) are saying is that money, cash, is a creation of the government and of society, it's a medium of exchange, no one person owns it.

In another scene, Ziggy lights up a $100 bill in a bar and the longshoremen react as if he has destroyed something which belongs to them, and he has. Ziggy doesn't own that bill, the whole country does.

Consider a Van Gogh painting. Any Van Gogh. I love Van Gogh. One of his paintings now sells for $20 million dollars. You can buy a huge mansion in the Hamptons for $20 million. Think of all those stone masons, all those electricians, plumbers, construction workers, painters, gardeners, landscapers who worked to create that mansion. Van Gogh painted that painted in three days.

Or think of giving Albert Pulhous, a baseball player, $250 million dollars. Now, you can say, he is paid what the market says he's worth. He can fill baseball stadiums. If a stadium of 50,000 fans pays an average of $20 a ticket, he brings in $2 million days that one day. And there are 80 home games, so thats $160 million. But, the fact is, he does not bring in that much money. He is playing with other players. Nobody can say he fills stadiums. Nobody will come to the stadium even if he hits a home run every third time at bat, if his team is in last place.

What am I saying?

I'm saying we all have a stake in the use of money. If a dimwit burns a $100 bill at the bar, it diminishes the value of the $100 bill I just earned by working an hour. If a painter or a painting's owner can get $20 million for a painting, it diminishes the value of the work of all those workers who built the $20 million dollar mansion. Individuals can damage the value of something we all own collectively.

And they shouldn't be able to do this.

But, how, practically to put my value into practice?

I'd say, if I were the dictator in this plutocracy/monocracy we have, I'd insist that for any contract over $1 million dollar some bureaucrat ought to pass judgment on whether or not the guy getting the money is entitled to it. Or something like that.

We need a balancing mechanism.

I'm still a little fuzzy on the details of how to practically achieve that. But I go the principle pretty well worked out.

Doomed to Repeat It

If you want a truly eerie experience, read a history of the 1920's. I've been reading Only Yesterday and Howard Zinn's The Twentieth Century, but you can check out Roger Butterfield's The American Past, or any of a variety of accounts of that era.

Of course, every period has its own peculiarities, but what is so weirdly familiar is the odd little echos. During the Harding and Coolidge presidencies the Secretary of the Treasury was one of America's super rich, a man who would feel quite comfortable among today's one percenters, Andrew Mellon. He ushered through Congress, in 1923 "The Mellon Plan," which Zinn notes, called for "What looked like a general reduction of income taxes, except that the top income brackets would have their tax rates lowered from 50 to 25 percent, while the lowest-income group would have theirs lowered from 4 to 3 percent."

As Congressman William Connery (Massachusetts) noted, this "is going to save Mr. Mellon himself $800,000 on his income tax." Today, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are channeling Mellon, as they declaim we simply must cut taxes on the richest Americans, (the "job creators" is the Republican re branding of the 1%) as they dig in their heels and refuse to allow the income tax rates on millionaires and billionaires be raised from 28% to 31%, or some numbers in that vicinity.

It's the same fight--we must cut taxes for the rich. Cutting taxes for the rich is good for the poor, for the jobless. Money will flow from the rich to the poor.

As if. As if, ever.

Because this was an act of Congress, the Mellon plan was entirely legal. This law was just one way the rich wrote the laws to enrich themselves, while selling it to the 99% of their day on the notion the Republicans were taking the government off their backs.

There is a certain fairness to this Republican swindle, of course: If you can sell this to Joe Sixpack, Joe Sixpack deserves his place at the bottom of the barrel . Anyone who is this stupid, deserves to be flushed down the toilet and kept there.

During these years, America saw income distribution fall into a steep pyramid. "One tenth of one percent of the families at the top received as much income as 42% of the families at the bottom," as the Brookings Institution reported. Sound familiar? Pie graphs today, actually, look even worse.

When the stock market crashed in 1929, the blame was assessed through the lenses of the beholder. The verdict from Milton Friedman, the Nobel prize winning libertarian economist from the University of Chicago, a man who believed nothing the government ever did was right, was that the whole calamity was just a big government blunder. Specifically, Friedman said the Federal Reserve caused the crash by tightening the money supply and that was that.

(This, if I may digress, simply illustrates how a Nobel prize may be won by an imbecile. The Nobel committee may have been impressed by Friedman's mathematical models, which the committee did not understand. They may have been impressed by his clarity, which made complex jumbles understandable. What they apparently missed,was that he was simply wrong, but working in a field where there is no experimental process, so he could say outrageous, patently stupid things and nobody could prove he was wrong.The man may have been revered by his colleagues, but truth be told, he was an imbecile. He was the original Chauncey Gardner.)

Of course, John Kenneth Galbraith saw it differently, in his classic study, The Great Crash. He pointed to a complex of infirmities, but most basically the severe redistribution of wealth, with the very few rich and the many poor. Unhealthy corporate and banking practices--and they didn't have mortgage backed securities or modern day derivative trading--trouble in foreign economies and trade.

The problem capitalism has, is once the bottom 42% do not have enough money to buy the things made by the 1% and their factories, there are no customers to support the 1% any more. Henry Ford realized this, which is why he paid his workers more than he really had to, in strictly short term terms. On some level, he realized, he had to make somebody just rich enough to buy his cars, so he started with his own workers, selling his product to the men on his assembly lines. He paid them a wage and they paid him back by buying his cars. There was the original, and most benign version of trickle down. Henry Ford was no friend of the working man, but he at least realized he needed the masses, if only to manipulate them.

Mitch McConnell and his patrons cannot even grasp that much. They don't think they need the lower 80% at all, except as voters.

The Republican President, Calvin Coolidge, looking on from retirement, set the standard for sophistication of economic analysis, as he inveighed in all his wisdom: "When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results."

Today's Republicans, of course, are less reality based. They believe the whole problem with joblessness is we haven't made our richest 300,000 rich enough. This 300,000 richest would be hiring and turning the economy into high gear if only we cut their taxes even more than we already have, and promised them enough money so they will be finally willing to spend some money on hiring new workers.

Of course, most rich people run businesses. And most businesses need customers with money to spend on things the businesses provide. But, not to worry, if you just make these rich richer, they will not worry about where the customers are going to come from--they'll hire and trickle down wealth, because, ultimately, they are very nice rich people.

What is particularly disturbing about all this is not so much we have heard it all before, nor even that when we heard this before it was just before the bottom fell out. What is really disturbing is when you read about what Mellon did and said, and when you read about how the American voters voted in Harding, then Coolidge, then Hoover, all of whom were owned by the richest 1%, and were saying these very same things, the American voters kept voting them in.

Every four years, you hear the reassuring phrase: Voters are not fools.

But the evidence is to the contrary.

What you hear locally is voters do not remember beyond yesterday. They remember the last political ad they heard before they got in their car to drive to the polls. They are, simply put, incompetent. And they elect the wrong people.

What they have voted for, with the Tea Party revolution, was a government shut down. The guiding concept was government is the problem, not the solution. It's an old Reagan line, one of those lines Rush Limbaugh makes his living exploiting.

And it's this thinking which will destroy Medicare, Social Security, and ultimately, our military, our interstate highway system, our bridges, ports, airports and our economic power, along with our universities, our capacity for research and development and anything which depends on cooperative effort.

Name me a country which has prospered, let alone prevailed, which had a weak central government.

This is really what Barney Frank said, when they asked him why he was leaving Congress. Was he simply fed up with the vitriol welling up from Congress? Were the Republicans now just too venomous to deal with? He kept replying, Congressmen do not parachute in through the Capitol Dome. They are elected by voters at home. Nobody knew what he was saying. He was saying: Stupid people voted these stupid people in. I cannot keep working in an institution controlled by stupid people. For this, Barney Frank is despised as being elitist, a bully and mean. Of course, he is none of these things. He simply refuses to remain politically correct. He is pugnacious just as Rush and Mitch McConnell are. But David Brooks and others are offended by Barney because he does not suffer fools gladly and sees stupidity as something which should be challenged.

He made cub reporters think before they asked a question, so Barney is a bully. And the Congress and the cub reporters will not save us.

Eventually, the stupidity will catch up with us.

Probably Linda (Continued)

The Linda Problem, which I discussed last time, is an illustration of how ordinary people do not engage in "right thinking." We are told the story of an imaginary woman, Linda, who was heavily into social justice and anti discrimination and you are asked which is more probable, that she is a bank teller or that she is a bank teller and a feminist. The correct answer is, in the world of probability theory, she is a bank teller. You are supposed to realize that adding the information she is a feminist reduces the probability, because there is a small chance that those characteristics which we associate with someone who might become a feminist does not guarantee she is a feminist. She might have been brought up in the Bible belt and while she shares some sympathies which are common among feminists, she does not embrace all the rest.

On the other hand, this whole problem hinges on your embracing the conventions of probability as it is taught in schools. What you are doing when you fail to think right, is you are going with "street knowledge" as opposed to what you've been taught in class, usually a class at some elite university or prep school. You have been schooled to think right.

But suppose we change the meaning of the word "probability" to the meaning it might have in the real world or say, the world of espionage. Suppose, for example, we are told the story of Linda, who has been tracked from her home in Russia to a training school in the elite Russian intelligence agency known to train sleeper agents who come to the United States, get ordinary jobs and ply their trade. Now I ask you the question: What is the greater probability A/ She is bank teller B/ She is a bank teller who is a Russian spy?

Now, of course, same rules apply by Dr. K's theory: She is a bank teller is the correct answer. It is possible she is not a Russian spy. The rest of the evidence is circumstantial and it is unproved she is working for the Russian spy agency which ran to the school, which got her her visa and provided her money, car and home. There is a small, however small chance, she is not a spy. She may have rejected all that training and just enjoys life in America as a bank teller. The chances may be small she is not a spy, but the chances are not zero.

On the other hand, if you are watching this on TV, or on the jury, while you understand more evidence is needed and you understand the chances are not 100% she is a spy, you know the greater probability is she is a bank teller (which is irrelevant, given the totality of the information you have been given) and a spy than the probability she is simply a bank teller.

If we had a jury of engineers, math majors and Ivy League graduates she might be set free. If we had a Baltimore jury, she's a spy.

Who is thinking more right, now?

The Linda Problem

Reading a review of Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, I ran across this problem which resonated with me: You are asked a simple question about Linda, who you are told is an imaginary woman who as a student was deeply moved by concerns about discrimination and social justice. You are asked which is more probable: A/ Linda is a bank teller B/Linda is a bank teller who is active in the feminist movement.
Of course, the answer is A, because adding the detail can only lower the probability. Any engineer or math major will choose A.
I would have taken B, knowing the answer is A. This is why I could never score 800 on my SAT exams. I would have answered B because: 1/ It is the more interesting answer. 2/ It indicates I can infer something about Linda from the extra information about her, even if what I infer may be wrong, it provides a more interesting working hypothesis. 3/ It shows I was thinking about Linda and wanted to know more about her.

It is also an attempt to spit in the eye of the obvious.

I also got questions wrong like: Does England have a Fourth of July? Now, of course, I knew, England uses the same calendar we do, but when you capitalize the Fourth, then you are talking about our American holiday celebrating what England might not be expected to celebrate, i.e., our independence from England. Answering "no" indicates I have thought beyond the literal to the implied. Would England be celebrating this holiday? Some uneducated American might think they are setting off fire works in England because the Fourth of July must be a holiday everywhere, because this goof ball has never thought past the fireworks to what the holiday is all about. I wanted to show I knew what the holiday celebrates, so I answered no, knowing it is, in a literal sense, wrong.

It's thinking like this which has gotten me into academic trouble my whole life.

People who can force themselves to "Just answer the question," i.e. to think in a certain way, will score high on their SAT's and go to Harvard.

A high school classmate of mine in senior advance placement English completed an assignment, "Trace the use of 'roads' through the Tale of Two Cities," by writing down every time the word "road" appeared in the book. (And this was before computers with word search.) She had a five hundred page list of, "Road appears on page 1," and so forth. And she started to go through this as I (and several of my classmates) sat there, mouths on our chests, astonished. After about three minutes of her cataloguing the appearance of "road" I finally said, "Uh, Martha, I think the point of the question is Dickens uses "road" as an image. He's saying we all travel different roads, with different and divergent paths through life." Martha stared at me, uncomprehending. She scored high on her SAT's and she went to Harvard. Heaven only knows what became of her.

Toward the end of my third year in medical school, a dean pulled me aside and said, "You know you have got honors in every rotation third year, including Neurology, and you were the first student to get honors in Neurology in five years. But you were just below the middle of your class, 51 out of 100 at the end of the second year. What got into you?"

I said, "I didn't change. What changed were the people who were asking the questions."

He had no clue what I was talking about. But the questions on the tests during the first year were of the "Trace the use of Roads" and they meant, literally, recite the page numbers. In third year, you had to infer and use all of the information given you to form meaning.

A different sort of mind excelled in the first two years' setting. My roommate, who used to sit motionless with his microbiology book in his lap, just reading and memorizing, did superlatively his first two years, while I made outlines and tried to fit all the detail into meaningful categories: There must be a reason they separate gram positive bacteria from gram negative bacteria. Perhaps they behave differently when they cause infections. But no, in the second year microbiology course the differences in the diseases caused by the two groups were of no concern. All they wanted you to know was which bug stains gram negative, which gram positive. It was memory without meaning.

It was: Memorize this--NYSE, DJA, WSJ, and so on. So many meaningless letter combinations. I was unable to do this, and I would have to say, "Okay, think of some meaning for these letters. Think of financial pages: New York Stock Exchange. NYSE. Get it? Now you can remember.

When we got to the wards, suddenly I was able to use the information I had learned the first two years. For my room mate, none of it helped. He was barely able to keep his head above water. Nothing on the wards made sense. He had no outlines in his head. He went from a top twenty student to below 50. But he was a star when all he had to do was "answer the question." Don't try to attach a meaning to your answer.

Later, when we applied for internships, the wise men who reviewed our applications said, "Well, Bob is a really intelligent guy. His first two years show that. He just had no personality. Third year grades are all about charm and personality. It's the first two years which tell you how bright medical students are."

I would beg to differ. The questions in the first two years, multiple choice, the answer is right there in front of you; answer A or B, did not allow for inference, attaching meaning. The probability is greatest Linda is a bank teller, not that she is a bank teller with some specific characteristic of feminism. She might, after all have been an impassioned rejector of discrimination and social injustice, but there's a slim chance a woman who was that sort of student is not a feminist now. Strictly speaking, the answer is A.

The person who answers "A" is not any smarter or dumber than the person who picks "B."

The problem is not with either the person or the answer; the problem is with the guy who judges one better, more correct, than the other.

And, as far as I can tell, too many people who have been in a position to judge other people have not understood the limitations of their own thinking. They have seized upon easy formulae because it's easier for them to cling to their beliefs.

These are the same sorts who read US News and World Reports and believe Harvard is a better college than Stanford this year, but last year believed just the reverse, because the US News and World Reports gave the opposite answer last year. Something must have changed over the year. There couldn't be anything wrong with the method of the US News and World Reports.

I'll look forward to reading Thinking, Fast and Slow, because I have been told it explores "systematic errors in thinking of normal people." But if the basis for this analysis is the Linda problem, I may well be concluding the error is not in the thinking of normal people but in the thinking of those narrow minded judges. People answer not the question asked, sometimes, but the more interesting aspect raised by the question, the part that interests them, not the part that interests the questioner. Many people care nothing about probability, especially when the probability is so obvious, so they ignore that and go to the "better" answer.

It reminds me of that wonderful line in Roger Rabbit where Eddie, the detective, explodes at Roger for an answer which was clearly wrong and he asks how Roger could have made such a
obviously wrong statement when the truth was right in front of him and Roger stammers, rather astonished Eddie could not see why he answered that way: "Because," Roger says, "It was funnier that way."

For Roger, it was important to choose the answer he liked better, not the answer the questioner liked better.

I get this every day, when I take a medical history from a patient. I ask a specific question and the patient answers a slightly different question, a question he is more interested in, or a question he knows the answer to rather than the question I asked which he does not recall the answer to.

This is not because he is stupid. It is because he cannot see the underlying reason for my question, because he doesn't have my training. It's up to me to point out how he has answered a different question, and I need the answer to the one I'm interested in. I don't tell him he gets no points for his answer. I just ask the same question again, maybe a different way. Often, it turns out he didn't know the answer.

"What hour of day do you take this drug?" He cannot remember when he takes that drug. All he knows is he takes his drugs when his wife tells him to. So he tells me about how he feels after he takes his bedtime drugs, how he has to get out of bed an hour later and pee after he takes his bedtime drugs. "But do you know whether you take this drug I'm asking you about at bedtime?"

"Hell, doc," I just take those little pills out of that plastic box with the morning, noon, dinner, bedtime compartments. I don't know which drugs are in what compartment."

Okay, now we are getting somewhere. He did not know the answer I'm looking for. But he had his reasons for answering the way he did.

Priests of Their Own Desire

Christopher Leinberger is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor of practice in urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan.

Now there is a set of credentials which lies somewhere between impressive and intimidating.

Given that on your letterhead, you can write an article which the New York Times which will run above the fold on the op ed page, with a little art sketch adorning it.

Professor, senior fellow, Leinberger has analyzed some statistics, which makes his invocations unassailable. He looked at the Zillow real estate database, so he has some big numbers, and big numbers can never be wrong, or misinterpreted.

And what did he learn? He learned the collapse of the mortgage system was not caused by the avarice and shenanigans of brokers who used bogus, immoral, wildly doomed-to-fail mortgages to back stocks which were sold as can't fail because the most reliable, most vetted, surest bet things in the world are mortgages, which people will always pay because their homes are the things they value most in life--home and hearth.

Nope, the reason the mortgage system collapsed is the rise in appeal of the inner city, places which mean people do not need cars, can walk out of their townhouses and shop and walk to the theater, the museum the shopping they like.

So outer suburbs are bad. McMansions, with too many rooms, too much space, to much land between houses which tend to isolate rather than foster communities, are unattractive, nasty places to live and will inevitably be abandoned and decay, like Tara from Gone with the Wind, which is actually the name of a McMansion development in Potomac, Maryland, the fantasy upon which those tracks of large homes were built.

Now, I love New York City, personally. I loved the neighborhoods, where you walk along the sidewalks and everything is at street level: newspaper stores, laundry, grocery stores. You can buy shoes, get them repaired, and everything within walking distance. Or, you can jump down into a subway. If I could afford it, I'd still love to live in New York City or a place with all those characteristics.

But I would not try to argue that my personal preferences are confirmed as the way things should be for my countrymen based on my "analysis," of "data."

Actually, there are things about living in New York City and any like urban environment I found difficult: There was, eventually, a claustrophic feeling. I didn't spend much time in my apartment, but eventually, I started paging through L.L. Bean catalogues for images of country life. Shopping was restricted to what you could carry, groceries limited to what would fit in a roller crate. Buying furniture or any bulky items was a problem, but you don't do that all that often.

There is much to recommend urban life, and clearly New York City is better for the environment than living in suburbs, with the damage done by cars, the energy required to heat and cool large homes, the use of water and pesticides for lawns and gardens.

But there are trade offs, and not everyone, especially parents with small children, are willing to make them. City children have to be taught to stop running at the corner so they cannot be kidnapped when they turn out of sight.

I would love to see more city options emerge. I'd love to see Portsmouth, New Hampshire become a small Upper West Side, and Portland another Brooklyn. Personally, I'd love to see that. But I very much doubt I can read the minds of my countrymen based on the Zillow real estate database, and I doubt Professor Leinberger can either.

You see this sort of "analysis" and "thinking" done by most politicians and many "commentators." They begin with their own likes and dislikes and find "data" and numbers, the bigger the better to "prove" what they like is the best for everyone.

I am not a Brookings Institution fellow, but I got to believe that thousands of local bankers consumed with ambition, burning with avarice, had something to do with the housing mortgage crash, as they pushed loans on people who could not afford them, telling those gullible, eager to believe folks that yes, this part of the American dream can be theirs; it's all so simple, just move into this dream house. I'm a banker for Pete's sake. Would I lie to you?

I don't know, but I find that scenario easier to believe than the scenario painted by Professor Leinberger, that of wealthy one percenters driving through Potomac, Maryland and McLean, Virginia, shaking their heads a the sight of those stone mason walls, those sweeping driveways and saying to themselves--nope, I'd rather live in Logan Circle, in downtown Washington, DC, with its horrific, dysfunctional city government, its constantly changing neighborhoods, which only a few years ago were so crime ridden and violent nobody wanted to walk there, much less live there, which were so forbidding restaurants could not survive there.

It's true more and more of Washington, DC has gentrified, but for how long is anyone's guess. Cities may be drawing more affluent people back in as they "downsize" once their children have grown up and moved away, but, actually, I would not be at all surprised to learn most boomers are staying put in their empty homes, because they cannot sell them for anything close to what they would need to sell them for, in order to pay for pricey urban homes. And the boomers, especially the older ones, often find any change difficult, so the suburbs may be senescent and senescing, but I bet they are not going to wither into ghost towns, as Professor Leinberger hopes.

The sad fact is, many inner cities are still decaying--just look at Detroit--and parts of Washington, DC have never recovered from the riots of 1968. I wish it weren't true. I wish those lovely brownstones in Bedford Styvestant, Brooklyn were being brought back to life; I wish the Grand Concourse in the Bronx was being rejuvenated. But no, despite the wishes of urban planners, urban blight persists. Baltimore sinks deeper and until government and policy and basic institutions like schools, police, media and banks and industrial base can actually find adequate people to make rational decisions, that city will never come back.

There may be ghost towns of unsold suburban homes in Arizona or in Ireland, but the homes of aging boomers will remain occupied until they die, I would bet. And I suspect my bet, based on no data is just as likely to be correct, as Dr. Leinberger's guess, who based his explanations on his holy scripture, the Zillow data.

This is the sort of "analysis" you hear from Rush Limbaugh every day. It's more sophisticated, and the numbers are examined with greater care, but it amounts to the same thing in the end: The expert, the opinionator, arrives at his conclusion not because a dispassionate observation leads him to question, hmm, why do you suppose sales around Logan Circle were better than sales in Potomac the last year? It's got to be people are finally coming around to the value of inner cities, and at this point in the lives of our aging population, the inner cities serve their needs better. They have finally awakened to the wisdom of what I've believed and preached all these years.

Or not. Actually, not.

I Would Rather Be Phil Sheridan's Widow

Phillip Sheridan played a monumental part in winning the Civil War. Battles, campaigns depended on his leadership. It was no accident he was in the room with Grant, to witness Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House.

His wife, who was 24 years younger, was an Army brat, grew up around soldiers, the daughter of an officer.

She had been thought a great beauty and after he died, she was young and still beautiful and everyone from close friends to newspaper reporters asked her when she might marry again. She said, famously, "I would rather be Phillip Sheridan's widow than any living man's wife."

She died in 1917, during World War One, in a house just blocks from Sheridan Circle in Washington, DC, Phillip Sheridan's widow, a wizened little woman, grown old, alone.

Perhaps, she was simply a child of the nineteenth century, a woman who clung to those romantic notions of love and marriage we, in the 21st century, associate with times long gone. Perhaps there was something there we might today call psychopathology. A woman who would rather live with the dead than with the living. A sort of fulfilled Mrs. Haversham, not living in jilted bitterness, but in the past, nevertheless.

Or maybe, she was just saying, "I had a man with whom none other can compare. Why should I live with someone for mere companionship?"

I don't believe for a moment men or women of the 19th century really believed, in private, the myths of finding a soul mate who God intended for them to marry, or any of the socially useful delusions peddled at marriage ceremonies.

I suspect, but cannot know, this woman grew up in a culture which prepared her to admire certain characteristics in men: Courage, perseverance, tenacity, leadership, intelligence and honesty. Whatever his faults, Sheridan had all this in spades, and she could see it, recognize it and compare him to other men and say, "This man is the best man I have ever known, or likely ever will know."

Sheridan burned and pillaged farms throughout the Shenandoah Valley, and he took the skills and lessons he learned during the Civil War to Texas, after the Civil War and analyzed the problem white settlers were having with the Comanches. Just as the Shenandoah had been the breadbasket for Lee's army, the buffalo were the breadbasket for the Comanche Plains Indians. Eliminate the buffalo, he said, and you will bring the Comanches to their knees. So he arranged for the wholesale slaughter of the great buffalo herds and applied his burnt earth strategy to the war with the Comanche and won. "The only good Indians I saw," he said, "Were dead Indians."

So, he was not, by 20th century, multicultural, ecological standards, an example of enlightened thinking.

He was brutally honest.

His wife could see that.

She was no Jackie Kennedy.

I wonder how many 21st century women think this way. If any glimpse into the souls or minds of women can be gleaned from the New York Times Style section wedding "announcements" with the self serving stories of how women met their mates, and what attracted them, then one would have to conclude, women today, for the most part, do not look for men they admire. They look for men with good earning potential, or for men who might make good fathers while they pursue their own careers, or for any number of things, but not for a man who is a hero in any sense of the word.

I'm sure there are exceptions.

I suppose there are women who see men in the work place who are heroes, by today's standards. Those women may marry "for love," in the sense Mrs. Sheridan married. And with time and domesticity those heroes look less heroic. Apparently Phillip Sheridan did not look less heroic with time.

If it were a good thing for women to marry heroes, as a policy, that would leave a lot of unmarried women, because there are few heroes, in the Phil Sheridan sense, in these times. Even in his times.

But it does make one wonder about how marriage and what it means has changed through the years.

But whatever love is in the 21st century, I don't think it's based on what Mrs. Sheridan saw, on what moved her.

What is Education?

When older people think about education, those older people who are not in the field, they typically look back, rather than forward.

This is not necessarily a bad thing; in order to understand what it is you are trying to accomplish for those generations which follow you, it helps to have some idea of where you would like to see them go.

One of the distinguishing features of Homo Sapiens is they possess not just brains and muscles and highly complex central nervous systems, they possess a culture and they can pass it on to succeeding generations, not through chromosomes or plasmids, but by teaching their young. In this way the young have a better chance to survive and they do not have to go back to square one with every newborn.

So the next generation is taught how to use and how to make tools and most important, they are taught values, abstractions about the purpose of life, the best rewards and what to avoid. Children whether in America or China are taught engineering, i.e. problem solving for the practical world in which they live and they are taught philosophy, i.e., why bother?

Reading Higher Education? in which Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus describe the Humanities 2510 course at Florida Gulf Course University, a course taught on line without live professor or classes, in which students are taught the names of paintings and then asked in multiple choice questions who painted a particular painting (Starry Night--van Gogh) and they now think they have an appreciation of art, I laughed aloud.

Then I asked myself, what made my own college experience so life changing?

Well, there were social, personal things. There was self discovery and reinvention of self and all those things which have to happen when you leave home and travel 500 miles away from your parents and all the friends you grew up with from age 8 to 18.

But, more important, there were moments, good and bad, which occurred in class.

I looked forward to class because I spent most of my time in the library, and class was one of the few times during the day I was actually interacting with people. Sometimes I spoke in class, but mostly I listened.

And the most exciting thing was, unlike my public high school, where, with perhaps five exceptions, I thought the teachers had nothing to teach me, I was lucky enough to have real professors, even as a freshman, who knew their subjects in great depth. When a student asked a question, the professor would spin off into a realm of knowledge which had me sitting there thinking: Wow, that was an amazing answer. He actually knows something. (As opposed to high school, where it was obvious the teacher was caught and faking it.)

Even now, I remember a class with a professor named Rosenfeld, a class in literature, in which Rosenfeld asked a student what he meant by the word "fact." They went back and forth for some time and it was really exciting.

Another professor, David Krause, was teaching Shakespeare and he could reel off stuff from any of the bard's plays at will, to illustrate a point, but more than sheer feats of memory, he made it mean something in today's world; he showed us why we still read Shakespeare, not because it's Shakespeare but because what he was talking about then, is still so important today. "There's honor for you," says Falstaff, pointing to a rotting, swollen corpse, a dead soldier. Falstaff has no desire to die honorably. He wants to live, to enjoy wine and women. Dying for king and country has no appeal. In 1967, when every male in that class was thinking about the Vietnam which awaited him as soon as he graduated, the ideas of "honor" and "Peace without Honor," were relevant.

Then there was Professor Thomas, who taught the one and only gut course at my college. Every football player, every hockey player signed up. Thomas gave the questions and the answers for the final exam, all typed up, twenty five pages. All you had to do was read through them and write your exam from them. Of course, Thomas was cagier than we knew: He got all those jocks focused on that playbook and they learned at least that much.

One day, Thomas started talking about the Bible story of God, Abraham and Isaac. God told Abraham to kill his son. But why, asked Thomas, did Abraham not say to himself, wait a minute, the God I know would never tell me to murder a child, my own child? Must be the Devil speaking. There were objections from around the room. No, in the Bible, the people always knew the voice of God. The whole point was: would you do what God told you to do, on faith?

No, Thomas persisted, you have to ask yourself, does this make sense? Otherwise, how different are you from the guy who hears his dog commanding him to murder young women? The class erupted, there were Bible thumping defensive lineman who'd grown up in Alabama Baptist congregations just about levitating from their chairs; their teammates, guys from Maine and Wisconsin, who were laughing at them. They thought they knew each other, from so many hours on the practice field, and now they were fighting pitched battles over how you know what you know.

It was thrilling.

I was a science major, and there were some pretty well done classes in biology, but never anything like what I experienced in Philosophy, English lit, courses in drama and poetry which still stay with me even today, forty years later.

MaybI suppose you could do this sort of thing with Sykpe or some other videostreaming program.e, but I doubt it. I suppose you see some real interaction on The News Hour, but that takes a lot of production skill.

I visited a class with a girl I knew at the University of Maryland. We filed into a huge amphitheater with 400 students and there was a big screen in front and the professor was giving his lecture in another building. This was 1968. I was appalled. How could you learn anything in a setting like that?

When she visited me later, we went to Professor Thomas's class. It was one of the biggest classes at my college, about 100 kids in the chapel, sitting in the pews with Thomas on stage.

"Well," she sniffed. "This isn't all that different from Maryland"

Then, Thomas prowling around his stage fastened on her.

I'm not sure why he called on her. Probably because most of the other students were scribbling notes or looking out a window and she was staring right at him, and, truth be told, she was a very fetching young lady, eyes the color of azure skies, dark hair, high cheekbones and heads turned whenever she walked into a room, if there was anyone of the male persuasion lurking about.

So there she was, staring at him, and he did a double take and asked her some question, and she missed the point completely, and I tried to save her by saying, "I think what she is saying is..."

Our relationship went straight downhill from there. If I hadn't noticed before, she was as clueless as she was beautiful, and looks could get you on the train but eventually, they didn't take you where you wanted to go.

She was not stupid. And she was not without character. She put herself through Maryland as an undergraduate and then through law school and ultimately became a judge and she stood up to some local politicians, at some cost to her career.

But that day, she was unprepared. None of her courses in rooms filled with 400 students and professors in another building had taught her to analyze and to think abstractly. She was fine on the multiple choice tests. She had an excellent memory. But faced with a question about how we know what we know, how can we trust what we think we know, she was at sea without a rudder.

There is a great line from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, in which Miss Brodie says education is the leading out from students. She does not mean teachers have nothing to put in to students' heads, but she means you must bring the learner from where they are to where they must go, and that is a more difficult task than simply asking, "Who painted Starry Night?"

Boy's Dream

"He who cannot learn from defeat cannot profit from victory."

--The Phantom, 2011









I don't watch baseball, or any sport much, unless I'm on the treadmill in my basement and need something, anything, to divert me. Usually, It's The Wire, which can make an hour on the treadmill simply evaporate.

But October 27, 2011, I thought, well, I'll just watch the World Series until it gets really boring. Never did. Cannot recall a game I've watched which was as wonderful, ever. I've played in two games which were just as crazy and unlikely and fantasy like as this one, but never seen a major league game like this one.

Usually, baseball is a game of anticlimaxes, but this time it was a game of one climax after another. The St. Louis third baseman, David Freese, who I had watched drop a routine pop up, allowing Texas to score and take the lead, comes to bat in the last of the ninth, gets two strikes on him. St. Louis is down to its last strike, understand, and Freese hits a shot to right field and Nelson Cruz, who had homered just an inning before, races back to make the Series winning catch and can't quite get his glove on it. The ball sails just a bit to his left and below his glove and Freese, who hit the ball, the guy who dropped that easy pop up just innings earlier, winds up on third, having driven home two runs to tie the game. And that does not even begin to explain how much more went into setting up that moment.

Every boy who has played backyard ball has dreamed up something like this, but I doubt any boy ever dreamed up the build up to that moment, which involved two Texas home runs which seemed to come out of nowhere, as if God were speaking and saying, "Okay, let's just get this over with."

As they say, you could not make this stuff up.

Then, the same player comes up in the bottom of the eleventh, with the score tied. Freese gets down to his last strike, two strikes on him, and hits one out to the deepest part of center field and wins the sixth game, sending the Series into the seventh game.

No way.

So that's what childhood and life are made of.

This is what dreams show us. Dreams show us you can dream big, but life can dream even bigger.

And then there is the reality of school. And there is the subject of how school can crush dreams and childhood and imagination and make minds constrict, if we are not very careful.

If we allow burnt out adults to burn out our children, we get...What? A burnt out aristocracy maybe.

The New York Times ran a story about Dalton School, an exclusive private New York City school, which is considering lightening the homework load and all the agonizing about this. One parent says he doubts Chinese or Indian parents are worrying much about over working their children: The message being, don't be wimps; we've got to not spare the whip, if our children are to compete in a global market place.

But does that line of Dalton School to Princeton to Harvard Business School to Goldman Sachs really constitute the playing fields of Eton (as in, the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton)?

I cannot know, but I doubt that parent knows what parents of children at competitive schools in India or China think, and I doubt he has much of a clue about the homework successful Indian or Chinese children are doing.

I wonder whether the Dalton School or the Horace Mann School homework assignments have much to recommend them beyond the length and ponderous heft of the reading and workbooks.
James Atlas's recent article about "Super People" in the Sunday Times, described people who seemed to be buffing their own personal stories for publication in the Style section wedding announcements, with prestigious fellowships, mastery of classical piano and brand name schools.
Could these parents be grooming their trophy kids for this ultimate accolade?
Are these parents really worried about stoking their kids' competitive spirit or are they simply creating trophy kids for their own ego gratification, so they can brag on their kids and feel superior and strut?

It's a given none of the parents mentioned, save Adam Gopnik, will read Andrew Hacker's fine examination of the outcomes of all this effort at resume building, Higher Education?: When Dr. Hacker examined what happened to the members of the Princeton class of 1973, the results were eye opening, dismal and predictable.

These were not kids with something to prove. They had already proven themselves just getting past Dalton or wherever, and getting into Princeton, or Harvard. Some of them probably stopped working--and Hacker tells stories of Harvard students telling their parents their classes weren't important, it was being at Harvard which was important. Can you blame these kids for resting on their laurels? Maybe they are not so much burnt out as simply recovering. But they are not kids with something to prove. Been there, done that.

The outcomes in terms of performance of this highly select class was one of, overall, moderate success, yes men and yes women who fit in as organization people, who made their low six figure salaries but were in no way really remarkable, and in no way changed the world; they sustained the world as it was given to them. They earned money for their law firms or financial firms, but they squandered their brainpower and lived lives with bound feet, in straight jackets.

People whose highest ambition had been self promotion and striving for effect, had gone on, for the most part, to undistinguished careers and, one imagines, lives of much disillusionment.
Is this the glittering prize these parents covet? Admission to one of the big three? And if the ultimate outcome beyond those campuses is uninspiring, then why?

At this point, you may be wondering what the epigram at the top of this posting has to do with any of this? It's about kids who have had too much success, who have had too little failure and feared failure too much and who play not to win but not to loose. It's about being able to shake off a defeat and move on. This is the root of persistence. It's what made U.S. Grant the essential general. He could absorb defeat, mistakes, and press on. Steve Jobs, same thing. It's what the chief of Radiology at Duke meant when he said he preferred jocks to the medical students who had never had anything but A's when he selected his residents. The jocks were accustomed to getting things wrong, correcting and getting better the next time. The never less than an A kid got corrected and fell to pieces.

Adam Gopnik is likely on to something, when he asks if the parents at Dalton are robbing their kids of their childhood.

The best thing he might do for his kids is to remove them from the pressure cooker and place them in a greenhouse, and allow them to grow.

What a curse, if the best thing you can say about your life is you went to Dalton School, and then Princeton, or Harvard, or Yale, or you name it. You have measured out your life in teaspoons, and with Eliot, found a wasteland.

Higher Education? The Emperor's Clothes

Memory is a slippery and shifting thing, but as I remember it, my friends in high school drove each other crazy competing to get into Harvard, Yale and Princeton, and if you didn't make that cut, well you could live with the rest of the Ivy League or some of the smaller schools like Swarthmore, Haverford or Amherst, and we were all very shocked when the class valedictorian, a kid who never had a single grade below A since elementary school,l shoved off to Stanford. Did he know something we didnt'?

No pleasure in life was permissible unless it somehow helped you take a step toward Harvard: You like to swim? Well, if you get on a team and compete in the leagues around town, you might interest the Yale swimming coach. Oboe appeal to you? Maybe your ticket to Princeton. And so on.

The only kid I knew who did not got straight to college after high school joined the army in 1964, and we all felt very sorry for him. His life was over. He'd spend the rest of his life struggling. Met him three years later, 1967. He had just got back from Germany and was going to college on the GI bill. And he, unlike all the rest of us, was not sweating bullets about getting drafted and being sent to Vietnam. His path less taken had proved to be smarter.

Then there was the guy who dropped out of college and wound up working in a General Electric aircraft engine factory, doing a sort of welding which is so high tech welding seems a very poor description. He is a bright fellow and moved up the ranks to the manager level, but there GE drew the line; he could not become part of management because he did not have a college degree. So a bunch of guys who spent four years drinking on their fraternity veranda got moved ahead, until the plant managers got tired of calling in this non college grad to fix all the messes the college boys made, and now this guy, who put in 32 years at the plant has retired, quite comfortably at age 55.

Around here, in New Hampshire, there are legions of men and women who work at small factories, fewer than 300 employees making stuff for airplanes or spacecraft or submarines, or they work on the nuclear submarines at Portsmouth Navy Yard, and they are not living in McMansions, but they have nice homes, boats, cars and time off. And maybe, if their companies do not screw up too much, they will have good pensions.

Which brings me to the book by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, which examines the value, beyong bragging rights, of an education at one of those elite colleges which parents in New York City begin grooming their kids for in kindergarten.

Hacker and Dreifus do not deny the cachet these brand name schools carry among parents, nor does he deny the sense of validation of the gene pool, parenting prowess, good karma, sense of the cream having risen to the top and all those things which parents of children who receive those fat envelopes from the big three or the golden dozen may feel; you have arrived. Now what?

What actually happens once the phone calls to the grand parents are made, once the neighbors are casually informed of the family triumph, once the faculty at the high school know, once the congregation hears, once the decals go up triumphantly on the rear window of the car?

It should come as a great satisfaction to anyone who was ever turned down by Princeton to read of Hacker's study, such as it could be a study, of what happened to the Princeton class of 1973. After acknowledging the many famous and important people who have been Princeton graduates, Hacker and Dreifus make the point that for any school with thousands of graduates, you would expect some to become rich and famous and important.

But what happens to most of the graduates? The answer for this Princeton class appears to be: Not much. They become middle managers, and most lead comfortable lives. The median income was--and I may not have the exact number--but in the neighborhood of $160,000, which means half fell below that and some were probably several multiples above it . But, as a group, they were remarkably unremarkable, mediocrities, yes men, yes women, not cage rattlers or earth shakers, just people who had learned to game the system, not to change the system.

Which is not to say we don't need people who can keep the law firm running, who can manage the automobile plant or plot the marketing strategy for General Motors, but it does mean that if you go to Princeton, your roommate is not going to be the new incarnation of F. Scott Fitzgerald, or the intellectual heir to Albert Einstein, or even, most likely as interesting to listen to as Paul Krugman.

He'll likely be a guy who is really good at video games and can play these all day, then cram all night and ace the calculus exam the next morning.

Harvard grads speak of "Dropping the H bomb," on people when they are asked where they go or have gone to college.

The effect of the name in a bar or at the beach or on the cruise may be worth all the effort, which is to say, it may get you to first base, maybe even second base with the girl. But what happens then?

But the best reason I've heard for going to HYP is you'll spend four years having really interesting conversations with very bright people and you'll make friends you'll never forget.

I hope that's true, for all the effort and expense, but from personal experience, not by any sort of scientific survey, judging only by the people I have known who went through HYP, I'm not so sure.

Beyond the competition and the social cachet, there is the more important portrait drawn by Hacker and Dreifus: The university as a center of unworthiness. Faculty who are overpaid, who spend their time pursuing consulting gigs off campus, who regard their own students as a burden and impediments to their own self advancement, constitute a pretty unappetizing lot.
Faculty who, once established, work remarkably little and are burnt out and uninspiring. Classes taught by undergraduates to undergraduates or by graduate students. Papers graded, not by the professor who teaches the course, but by graduate students.

There are wonderful teachers who love what they do in the classroom, but no mechanism to select for these teachers and against the unworthy ones.

It's not a pretty picture.

The famous remark: "The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eaton," may have been the prototypically English snob statement. But it is this basic faith which guides so much public support for our own universities: From these playing fields will come the future leaders in thought, science and finance. But no. The big leaders lately have all been college drop outs: Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg. Reminds me of the remark attributed to Tony Fauci, who now heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, the man organizing research to combat AIDS. He was offered a cushy position on the faculty of Cornell University Medical College and turned it down to the stupefaction of the faculty, who were scandalized. How could he do this, he was asked, to turn down such a plum? "Someday, I'm going to be either very rich or very famous, but if I stay at Cornell, I'll be neither." He denies having said that, but the story will not die. Probably because it so neatly summarizes what so many, who have been through the drill at elite institutions believe. Education at these places is not what the Greek source of the word "education" means: To Draw Out. Education is the pouring on, the beating down. People who have real internal compasses flee it. They have more important things to do.

Makes you wonder how our country is going to do, in the coming decades. Look at our institutions: The universities of Hacker and Dreifus; the courts and police of The Wire; the banks and financial institutions of mortgage backed securities; government thwarted by a disloyal Republican opposition; a "professional" or some would say "mercenary" military given missions by the likes of George W. Bush; the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

Gads, what dystopia. George Orwell would blush.