Sometimes it's valuable to keep track of things that got tepid reviews, so that I won't spend my limited time slogging through them.
Two in that category:
War of Necessity, War of Choice by Richard Haass. Reviewer Geoffrey Wheatcroft opines that it covers little new ground.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain de Botton. Botton is bored by his interviewees, which makes the book mocking and condescending. We can't all be famous French essayists, surely. I'd much rather read the Crawford book about the joys of shopwork - in fact I am planning on it.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Industrial giants
As usual, great richness in this week's NY Times Book Review section. I'm intrigued by Gavin Weightman's The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World 1776-1914. The basic thesis is that the Industrial Revolution should be viewed as a series of opportunities taken with emerging technologies and infrastructures, rather than quantum leaps by Great Men. We see much further when we stand on the shoulders of giants, etc.
The reviewer, Stephen Mihm, faults the book only for its failed attempt to draw grand unifying theories out of the stories of individuals.
The reviewer, Stephen Mihm, faults the book only for its failed attempt to draw grand unifying theories out of the stories of individuals.
some informal empirical evidence about recycling
I have been trying to walk a bit (about 1.5 miles, I'd guess) every day - not easy in the perma-rain we have been experiencing for the last several weeks. Today is trash/recycling day in the hood.
1.Recycling rates are highest in the single-family areas inhabited by retirees. (They also have the least trash - like one tiny bag per household.)
2.Recycling rates are almost non-existent in the two-family and three-family areas. I could be all sanctimonious about this (because we recycle extensively) but there is a strand of thinking that says that curbside recycling is mainly just a eco-feel-good mechanism for the middle class. What we need to do is have/use/buy less stuff in the first place.
3.Most of what is being recycled in my neighborhood is plastic. That's bottles for water, milk, juice, and sports-type drinks, as well as plastic containers for food (like the ones berries come in). Also some styrofoam, like doggy-bag containers - I didn't know those were recyclable. Very little paper. We, on the other hand, recycle a LOT of paper, with our two daily papers plus the NYT Sunday, and now I'm recycling junk mail too. This is apparently not the common thing. Very little glass and metal.
4.At around 3:30 this morning, the bottle harvesters came through. There is an old guy with a shopping cart who makes the rounds around dinnertime on Mondays and sometimes makes a second pass early Tuesday. This was more organized: in a car, quick, and relatively quiet (I've been known to go down and yell if they make a racket). When I checked the bins this morning, all the redeemables were gone.
5.I will be interested to see if the regular trash dudes pick up my neighbor's yard waste. They aren't supposed to, but sometimes they do. (Although not usually from my neighbor; there is some sort of favoritism thing going on perhaps.) Yep, the yard waste is being taken! Score one for the neighbors!
6.All our trash was taken. We put a lot of wood out this week, left over from the garage cleanout 2 weeks ago. Next up: the shed cleanout. Summer vacation fun never ceases!
1.Recycling rates are highest in the single-family areas inhabited by retirees. (They also have the least trash - like one tiny bag per household.)
2.Recycling rates are almost non-existent in the two-family and three-family areas. I could be all sanctimonious about this (because we recycle extensively) but there is a strand of thinking that says that curbside recycling is mainly just a eco-feel-good mechanism for the middle class. What we need to do is have/use/buy less stuff in the first place.
3.Most of what is being recycled in my neighborhood is plastic. That's bottles for water, milk, juice, and sports-type drinks, as well as plastic containers for food (like the ones berries come in). Also some styrofoam, like doggy-bag containers - I didn't know those were recyclable. Very little paper. We, on the other hand, recycle a LOT of paper, with our two daily papers plus the NYT Sunday, and now I'm recycling junk mail too. This is apparently not the common thing. Very little glass and metal.
4.At around 3:30 this morning, the bottle harvesters came through. There is an old guy with a shopping cart who makes the rounds around dinnertime on Mondays and sometimes makes a second pass early Tuesday. This was more organized: in a car, quick, and relatively quiet (I've been known to go down and yell if they make a racket). When I checked the bins this morning, all the redeemables were gone.
5.I will be interested to see if the regular trash dudes pick up my neighbor's yard waste. They aren't supposed to, but sometimes they do. (Although not usually from my neighbor; there is some sort of favoritism thing going on perhaps.) Yep, the yard waste is being taken! Score one for the neighbors!
6.All our trash was taken. We put a lot of wood out this week, left over from the garage cleanout 2 weeks ago. Next up: the shed cleanout. Summer vacation fun never ceases!
Monday, June 29, 2009
Bait and Switch: a second look
I was too hasty in my previous post. The last chapter of Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch contains some provocative ideas. (Come to think of it, this was the problem with Nickeled and Dimed too - her analysis of her experience, in the final chapter, was a lot more interesting than the bland details of the indignities she suffered. Sometimes common experiences aren't bonding; they are just boring.)
Some observations:
1.If we can generalize from her experience and those of the job-seekers she met, corporate America is as age-biased as ever. This is a bigger and bigger problem on 2 fronts: there will be more and more middle-aged people in America; and people will work more and more years to close the pension gap and the impending blow-up of Social Security.
2.The old Weberian idea that "you work hard and you will be rewarded" is no longer true (if it ever was, although it's very much the foundation of the 20th century middle-class psyche) and white-collar workers, no less than blue-collar workers, have to adjust to uncertainty and a rapidly changing occupational mix. Their main loyalty must be to themselves (and their brand) because they will not get any loyalty from their corporation - they are completely expendable.
3.The white-collar unemployed could be a powerful force for social and economic change in this country. They have skills, education, intelligence, resources, access. Yet they tend to be marginalized into self-help job-seeking groups of the many kinds she journals. Moreover, the attitudes and activities of these job-seeking groups reinforce passivity, victimhood, isolation, and silence. Unemployment continues to be shameful, especially for white-collar workers, and especially for men.
4.Current corporate infrastructure (and accountability to shareholders) rewards job-cutting, which betters the short-term bottom line. No CEO ever got atta-boys from his board by saving jobs or cutting his own perks so that subordinates could remain employed.
5.Corporations blather endlessly about diversity and teamwork, but in fact LACK of diversity and individualism are what get you ahead.
6.Many of the so-called professions of corporate America don't have clearly defined tasks and barriers to entry (marketing, say, or PR) and thus employees in those fields are vulnerable to the perceptions, rather than the realities, of those evaluating them.
It would be useful to think about how these points could be tested and operationalized, as a part of the larger project of looking at sectoral shifts in labor markets.
Some observations:
1.If we can generalize from her experience and those of the job-seekers she met, corporate America is as age-biased as ever. This is a bigger and bigger problem on 2 fronts: there will be more and more middle-aged people in America; and people will work more and more years to close the pension gap and the impending blow-up of Social Security.
2.The old Weberian idea that "you work hard and you will be rewarded" is no longer true (if it ever was, although it's very much the foundation of the 20th century middle-class psyche) and white-collar workers, no less than blue-collar workers, have to adjust to uncertainty and a rapidly changing occupational mix. Their main loyalty must be to themselves (and their brand) because they will not get any loyalty from their corporation - they are completely expendable.
3.The white-collar unemployed could be a powerful force for social and economic change in this country. They have skills, education, intelligence, resources, access. Yet they tend to be marginalized into self-help job-seeking groups of the many kinds she journals. Moreover, the attitudes and activities of these job-seeking groups reinforce passivity, victimhood, isolation, and silence. Unemployment continues to be shameful, especially for white-collar workers, and especially for men.
4.Current corporate infrastructure (and accountability to shareholders) rewards job-cutting, which betters the short-term bottom line. No CEO ever got atta-boys from his board by saving jobs or cutting his own perks so that subordinates could remain employed.
5.Corporations blather endlessly about diversity and teamwork, but in fact LACK of diversity and individualism are what get you ahead.
6.Many of the so-called professions of corporate America don't have clearly defined tasks and barriers to entry (marketing, say, or PR) and thus employees in those fields are vulnerable to the perceptions, rather than the realities, of those evaluating them.
It would be useful to think about how these points could be tested and operationalized, as a part of the larger project of looking at sectoral shifts in labor markets.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Bait and Switch...
...is the name of a book by Barbara Ehrenreich about the soul-sucking depression of the white-collar unemployed (even before the current financial melt-down; imagine if she were researching and writing it now!).
On impulse* I picked up a copy for $2 at the Friends of the Library booksale this morning, and am about 2/3 through.
It is so thoroughly a downer that I believe I will throw it away when I am finished. I can feel its bad karma seeping through the house. I NEVER throw books away; I've only done it once before, and that was after the pure revulsion of reading the first several chapters of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho. I saw his Glamorama at the library this morning too and gave it a wide berth. Yuck, yuck, YUCK.
*I am planning on using a chapter from Nickeled and Dimed in my economic geography class this fall, but Bait and Switch is mainly about those who profiteer from "coaching" the unemployed on networking, dressing-for-success, resume-writing, etc. They are a seamy and exploitive (although pathetic) bunch. Ewww.
On impulse* I picked up a copy for $2 at the Friends of the Library booksale this morning, and am about 2/3 through.
It is so thoroughly a downer that I believe I will throw it away when I am finished. I can feel its bad karma seeping through the house. I NEVER throw books away; I've only done it once before, and that was after the pure revulsion of reading the first several chapters of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho. I saw his Glamorama at the library this morning too and gave it a wide berth. Yuck, yuck, YUCK.
*I am planning on using a chapter from Nickeled and Dimed in my economic geography class this fall, but Bait and Switch is mainly about those who profiteer from "coaching" the unemployed on networking, dressing-for-success, resume-writing, etc. They are a seamy and exploitive (although pathetic) bunch. Ewww.
Friday, June 26, 2009
The kid could sing and dance. And almost crash the Internet
RIP Michael Jackson, 1958-2009. Wow! - I think of him as a young adult, though ageless. Yet he was older than I. A boy-child: ever-thinner, ever-whiter, and thus ever less threatening. I saw him a few years ago on TV on one of those E-rehabilitation shows and his speaking voice was that of a shy 10-year-old’s. Perhaps it’s naïve, but I always thought he was truly misunderstood, a simple song-and-dance kid exploited by the craven media. All the sexy dancing was that of a kid, doing the steps, not informed by adult passion. He was incredibly talented, yet all that was turned into breathless fodder for the hungry celebrity press.
He was an entertainer who knew his craft: yet a figure of pathos in recent years on the tabloid stage. I hope his wealth and fame were able to bring him joy in his last years. (I doubt it though, poor soul.)
He was an entertainer who knew his craft: yet a figure of pathos in recent years on the tabloid stage. I hope his wealth and fame were able to bring him joy in his last years. (I doubt it though, poor soul.)
Thursday, June 25, 2009
The purpose of college
Somewhere last night I flew by a blog entry that spoke of the choice that higher education must make to survive: between teaching students to think and training them for employment. The cynical among us (no, not me, never!) would suggest that those are antithetical - because, really, the last thing the Workplace Bosses want is people to think critically: questioning authority and all that. Yet I think it's incredibly dangerous and impoverishing to cast this as a choice. Students need to learn stuff - facts, theories, techniques, skills - but they also need to learn how to place all that in context, which for me is really the substance of critical thinking.
One school is premiering a new way of teaching based on introducing students to disciplinary ways of thinking (read about it here, http://bohemianseacoast.blogspot.com/2009/05/teaching-concepts.html) - and yes, that's the same model of teaching that Harvard just dumped in their revamp of the core curriculum, see my June 2 entry). The questions faculty should be asking themselves in this model go like this:
1. What is the main purpose [goal] of geography?
2. What questions [problems, issues] does geography ask?
3. What information [data, facts, experiences] is most useful to geographers?
4. What possible conclusions [interpretations, inferences] do geographers draw?
5. What concepts [theories, principles, models] are used by geographers?
6. What assumptions do geographers make?
7. What are some of the consequences [implications] of the work of geography?
8. What is the point of view of the geographer?
I find that students are super-bored by this sort of epistemological navel-gazing. Not that that means we shouldn't teach it. But how to teach it effectively? I think you have to model real-world problems or issues in which it is useful to think about these questions.
But really, I don't have many ideas about how to do this. And unfortunately, during the regular academic year, my brain is just not set up to think this way.
One school is premiering a new way of teaching based on introducing students to disciplinary ways of thinking (read about it here, http://bohemianseacoast.blogspot.com/2009/05/teaching-concepts.html) - and yes, that's the same model of teaching that Harvard just dumped in their revamp of the core curriculum, see my June 2 entry). The questions faculty should be asking themselves in this model go like this:
1. What is the main purpose [goal] of geography?
2. What questions [problems, issues] does geography ask?
3. What information [data, facts, experiences] is most useful to geographers?
4. What possible conclusions [interpretations, inferences] do geographers draw?
5. What concepts [theories, principles, models] are used by geographers?
6. What assumptions do geographers make?
7. What are some of the consequences [implications] of the work of geography?
8. What is the point of view of the geographer?
I find that students are super-bored by this sort of epistemological navel-gazing. Not that that means we shouldn't teach it. But how to teach it effectively? I think you have to model real-world problems or issues in which it is useful to think about these questions.
But really, I don't have many ideas about how to do this. And unfortunately, during the regular academic year, my brain is just not set up to think this way.
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