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Whatever investigators and courts ultimately decide about three deaths and a number of alleged injuries in a "sweat lodge" program at his Arizona New Age retreat, the guru James Arthur Ray has no plans to abandon his mission. And to judge from the positive reaction of many prospects, the risk might even make the program look more attractive -- no pain, no gain and all that. (There's a theory that as technology makes motoring and other activities safer, some people compensate by craving new risks.) According to the Los Angeles Times,Though shaken by the deaths, Ray has quickly returned to the road, teaching his secrets of success even as he uses them to cling to his own.Self-help gurus--and their disciples--have exasperated skeptics for over a century, at least since the debunkers of the Russian-born spiritualist Helena Blavatsky, whose Theosophy movement has survived its early detractors to become a presence on the Web. Even negative publicity keeps leaders in the news, and weren't many of the founders of today's great religions denounced in their own time as charlatans?
"I've taught that we're all going to have adversity and we can't run from it," a somber, teary-eyed Ray said Tuesday night at the beginning of his free recruitment session in Denver. "I've certainly learned a lot in the past 10 days."
Some weren't aware of the Sedona deaths until Ray addressed it. But Lyle Guthmiller, 44, a heating and air conditioning technician, said it didn't dissuade him from considering signing up for one of the retreats. "When you're pushing the limits, unfortunately, things can happen," he said. "I'd rather live that life than be a couch potato."
Video in particular favors today's prophets, with their often spellbinding performances, over less charismatic naysayers. Ray was featured on the Larry King show, as the self-help critic Steve Salerno notes with dismay in the Wall Street Journal. Even accomplished investigators of alleged occult phenomena like the magician James Randi, who offers $1,000,000 prize for proof of the paranormal, can't expose the advice of motivational speakers in the same way. One of Randi's blog contributors does have an illuminating account of a post-tragedy appearance by Ray. It should not be so surprising that Ray and his followers have taken the offensive; over 50 years ago, a Chicago end-of-the-world movement was not dissolved but galvanized into action after its Armageddon deadline passed, helping inspire the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance.
There are many sins in the self-help industry. One is the dogma that anybody can be a great success at any time simply by drawing on inner resources. It's one thing -- and a good thing -- to show how many people have overcome poverty, illness, disabilities, and discrimination. It's another to deny the role of factors beyond our control, especially chance (despite some evidence that our attitudes can affect our luck) and circumstances. For example, in 1996 magazine interview, the great computer scientist Donald Knuth observed that people with exceptional programming aptitude existed and exist where there was no opportunity to display their gifts: "I imagine there are computer scientists in the pygmy forest." Some people's gifts may no longer be profitable; others' not yet. And then there's the insidious Just World Hypothesis, recently exposed here by Jonah Lehrer. Louise Hay, the publisher-doyenne of New Age healing, told the New York Times Magazine writer Mark Oppenheimer that while she would not confront victims with guilt, she could see justice even in genocide:
"Yes, I think there's a lot of karmic stuff that goes on, past lives." So, I [Mark Oppenheimer] asked, with a situation like the Holocaust, the victims might have been an unfortunate group of souls who deserved what they got because of their behavior in past lives? "Yes, it can work that way," Hay said. "But that's just my opinion."Should we condemn all self-help books? Some are recommended by mental health professionals, as Daniel Goleman observed years ago, before going on to write a best-seller of his own. The monarch of the genre may still be Samuel Smiles, author of the original Self-Help, a Victorian sensation still in print after 150 years.Smiles was a disillusioned political reformer who argued for individual effort. Reactionary propaganda or progressive politics by other means? Make up your own mind here. Smiles glorified the work ethic, not wealth or social status, and admired his protagonists for the sacrifices they made, for example the French Protestant ceramicist Bernard Palissy supposedly fueling his furnace with his household furniture as a last-ditch measure. This and many other anecdotes in Smiles have been questioned by more recent scholarship. But his message was the opposite of most of today's movement. He taught at workers' schools and declined lucrative offers to memorialize self-made industrialists.He preached no Secret but perseverance and dedication to the work for its own sake rather than for external rewards.Smiles the Scots Calvinist may have been the last great apostle of the Protestant Ethic, but he was also a forerunner of twenty-first-century ideas like self-efficacy.
Photo Credit: Flicker User Casey Serin
In flu season, what price prevention? That's a question the Philadelphia Inquirer is asking as religious and medical leaders discuss the ethics of the handshake. While there is medical debate about avoiding the gesture -- some doctors say a ban is only minimally effective, others carry hand sanitizer in bottles with them -- some people fear a moral contagion. One mother whose family had swine flu last summer called avoidance"extreme. . . . That's who we are as human beings. We do shake hands. We do hug each other. We do kiss our friends on the cheek. If we let go of all that, then what do we have left? We're just walking by each other as strangers."Philadelphians' concerns on such questions have deep historic roots. Handshaking was once a common form of greeting in Europe, then displaced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by hat doffing and bowing, only to re-emerge as an allegedly English innovation. But it was the Quakers, first settlers of Philadelphia, whose founder George Fox promoted the gesture as a symbol of the equality of believers -- at a time when authorities considered refusing to doff a hat to magistrates something between heresy and treason. Philadelphia even has a handshake historian with a classics Ph.D.She still shakes hands, kisses cheeks, and refuses to use hand sanitizer, even though Har Zion Temple in Penn Valley, where her husband is the rabbi, recently installed dispensers after a member made the request.
There's a sinister side of anti-handshake campaigns. Mussolini cited hygiene in officially banning the handshake in favor of the "Roman Salute," a gesture that has its own scholars. (Some historians think the Duce just wanted "excuse to avoid one form of human contact.") And Youtube hosts a virtual festival of conspiracy-theory handshake videos like this.
Despite hygienic reservations, the handshake, like the chair, is a Western custom that has made its way around the world. Influenza did not reverse the trend even after the 1918 pandemic, so it's not going to do so now. Some alternative gestures like elbow bumps make as much sense (outside their original cultural contexts) as rituals of safe blood brotherhood. In fact the small risk makes the clasp even more meaningful. So handshakes, perhaps followed by discreet private disinfection, are here for the duration.
(Photo: Flickr/star5112)
Who thought up the white-coat policy for doctors meeting with President Obama in the Rose Garden to advocate health care reform? Since when do physicians attend political gatherings in semi-ritual clinical garb? I haven't seen many caps, gowns, or hoods at higher education conferences. More importantly, why choose a custom that has itself been targeted for reform? Authorities in Scotland recently banned white coats from hospitals on the grounds that long sleeves can transmit MRSA and other infections. They substituted a new set of unforms, barred, incidentally, from street use Meanwhile, the AMA is still studying the question. This article in Slate notes other disadvantages of the symbolic attire, including inspiring enough fear to raise hypertension in some patients. Seven out of eight doctors don't wear them at work. Business suits are the dress code of Mayo Clinic doctors. (On the other hand, older patients seem to like the coats.)White coats may turn out on balance to be a bacteriological menace, a potent placebo, or both. But for an Administration that wants to break from conventional thinking, why go out of the way to proclaim tradition? The AMA declares judiciously:
Although your Reference Committee appreciates the intent of the [dress-code] resolution, the action requested ... may have unintended consequences, a concern raised by some speakers who testified.Whatever the AMA decides, the President seems to find symbolic theater irresistible, not necessarily to the advantage of his own causes. But at least he didn't follow suit, as George W. Bush did during a (non-medical) laboratory visit in 2007.
Photo Credit: Flickr User Waldo Jaquith
It's good to be the king, or queen, be your realm ever so small, according to the findings of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a survey of over 100,000 working adults. The Newark Star-Ledger elaborates with a local case study:
Of course these statistics have their limits. You could say that the difficulties of running most small businesses (or farms) means that the people who have stayed with them, or entered them, are self-selected for intrinsic enjoyment of what they are doing. And what's the satisfaction level of employees of small businesses versus large corporations in the same line of work?
But the study still underscores an important finding of epidemiology. It's not stress itself but the sense of control that determines what work is beneficial or injurious to health. For helping reduce levels of obesity, smoking, excess drinking, and heart disease, perceived control is a dimension of life that deserves more attention.Writing in the Wall Street Journal of a wave of suicides at France Télécom, a business school professor in Paris, Isaac Getz, calls for new organizational styles:
If John Beck Sr.'s happiness depended on his success, he'd probably be miserable. Sales at his Branchburg hair salon are down for the fifth straight year, a trend that began when budget chains such as Supercuts, Fantastic Sams and Great Clips moved into town. To make matters worse, when the recession hit, even his most loyal clients started stretching out their hair appointments.The report also suggests that farming, forestry, and fishing are satisfying occupations despite their risks and low compensation.
But Beck, who runs DJ's Hair Studio with his wife and daughter, is anything but miserable. After spending most of his life working for other people, he's just happy to be his own boss.
"We're in control. A lot of decisions that are made, are made by me," said Beck, 69, who opened the salon in the mid-90s after retiring from a 40-year career at Johnson & Johnson. "We have a lot of very happy clients."
Of course these statistics have their limits. You could say that the difficulties of running most small businesses (or farms) means that the people who have stayed with them, or entered them, are self-selected for intrinsic enjoyment of what they are doing. And what's the satisfaction level of employees of small businesses versus large corporations in the same line of work?
But the study still underscores an important finding of epidemiology. It's not stress itself but the sense of control that determines what work is beneficial or injurious to health. For helping reduce levels of obesity, smoking, excess drinking, and heart disease, perceived control is a dimension of life that deserves more attention.Writing in the Wall Street Journal of a wave of suicides at France Télécom, a business school professor in Paris, Isaac Getz, calls for new organizational styles:
Treat people as modern pilots, not as soldiers of the old wars. Give people real control over their work, stop giving them orders about how to do their jobs, and their stress will go down. With it, absenteeism will drop, and stress's hidden costs will shrink, while employee engagement goes up. All this, of course, is hard to accomplish in a traditional command-and-control company that often pays a lip service to autonomy but preserves the hierarchical chain of command--but it is possible.France has a highly regarded medical care system. But there, as here, the most important determinants of health and disease occur during the time people spend outside physicians' offices and hospitals.
The Athenaeum Club, 1830. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
When the great and good convene to ponder the future in historic landmark buildings, there is not always happy news. A group of pharmaceutical executives and government regulators, invoking the name of one of London's most venerable clubs, seem to be ratifying the idea of an "innovation drought," according to the Financial Times.
The Athenaeum Group's proposals seem unexceptionable in themselves: more efficient regulation, more cooperation among pharmaceutical researchers to combat a discouraging trend:
. . . the number of new medicines has steadily dropped, while the cost of bringing each one to market has risen sharply to more than $1bn (£605m, €700m).Still, it concerns me to read that Thomas Lonngren, chief of the European Union's pharmaceutical regulatory agency,
. . . argues that the biggest barrier to progress is science itself. "We are going into a new era of drug development where it's getting more and more complex. It is generally accepted that we have moved from low- to high-hanging fruit. Mother Nature is saying that she has the cards."This idea is plausible, but isn't it part of the scientific outlook to question "generally accepted" views, especially in one's own industry? Only four years ago, the Australian physicians Robin Warren and Barry Marshall received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery (beginning with old-fashioned serendipity) of the bacterium Heliobacter pylori and its role in causing stomach ulcers. Is it really conceivable that there are no other mavericks with ideas that will cost less than a billion dollars to develop and test?
In a newspaper interview as late as 1902 the great physicist and technologist Lord Kelvin, an Athenaeum member, told a newspaper interviewer (link courtesy of Wikipedia):
Neither the balloon, nor the aeroplane, nor the gliding machine will be a practical success.Fortunately the Wright Brothers did not depend on Lord Kelvin for funding, and demonstrated their flyer at Kitty Hawk the following year anyway.
The social psychologist Daniel Gilbert, in his book Stumbling on Happiness, notes about this episode that "when scientists make erroneous predictions, they almost always err by predicting that the future will be too much like the present."
Too much "realism" about lagging innovation can become a self-fulfilling prophecy with the discouraging message of an ever more resistant Mother Nature. Naysayers to the contrary, there is a place for hype. And there's a lot to be said for the motto of the 1968 student protestors: "Be realistic, demand the impossible."
The Simon Wiesenthal Center has deplored comparisons of President Obama's health care plan logo with Third Reich insignia:
"It is preposterous to try and make a connection between the President's health care logo and the Nazi Party symbol, the Reichsadler," said Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
"Americans have every right to be critical of the President's health care plan but we demean ourselves and everything that America stands for when we compare either Democrats or Republicans to the Nazi Third Reich. Some of us may be too liberal and others too conservative, but none of us are Nazis," Rabbi Hier concluded.
Agreed. But behind the cynical distortion, there's the disturbing fact that strong political graphics are more closely associated with dictatorial regimes than with democracy. That doesn't mean that America has cloned European totalitarian design directly; it does suggest that both New Deal and fascist symbols drew on a common Western modernist heritage. The National Recovery Administration (NRA), with its corporatist controls on American life, was criticized by the Left as well as by many business interests. Its logo does not seem to have been influenced by the Nazis. Its designer was no activist hothead but a respected advertising man, George Coiner of N. W. Ayer & Son, celebrated even now for introducing great artists and photographers into American commercial publicity. He even designed the font.credit: Wikimedia Commons
Still, this poster, with its grasping statist talons and message of subordination to a national goal, has disturbing overtones to the post-World War Two mind, and the NRA was soon declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and it is even now a prime target of the New Deal's conservative and libertarian critics.
I asked my friend Steven Heller, author of a recent book on art and dictatorship, Iron Fists, about the New Deal. He replied in an e-mail that it was
...certainly rooted in similar aesthetics to the fascists and nazis - strong logos, initials, posters galore. But it was our fascism, which means it was democracy at work.No place reflects this better than the main chamber of the Supreme Court itself. Cass Gilbert, the architect, considered Mussolini a great man. The historian Michael G. Kammen has described their mutual admiration society. Gilbert met personally with the Duce to assure the finest possible columns for the main chamber, according to an article in the 1976 Supreme Court Historical Society Yearbook:
Architecturally the U.S. built its early identity on Greece and on Roman monumentalism. Well, that was not dissimilar from the neo-classicism of the Fascists.
As for the marble in the Courtroom itself, Gilbert felt that only the ivory buff and goldenReturning to the Obama health plan logo, the problem isn't authoritarian classicism. It's the adaptation of campaign brand identity to a program intended to cross lines of party and ideology. The dictatorships--communist as well as fascist--did have the habit of sharing symbols among agencies. The Nazis published color illustrated books of official logos as guidelines. The party secretary Achille Starace wrote a Vademecum of Fascist Style. In the Soviet Union, the hammer and sickle collectively was such a versatile and ubiquitous theme that the Russian airline Aeroflot is still using it.
marble from the Montarrenti quarries near Siena, Italy, would be beautiful enough for this room. So intent was he upon procuring the best quality marble that in May 1933, he met with Premier Mussolini in Rome to ask his assistance in guaranteeing that the Siena quarries sent nothing inferior to the official sample marble that he had selected and specified for use in the Supreme Courtroom.
This heritage might be affecting, subliminally, the reception of the Obama health care logo. And there's another issue that has nothing to do with twentieth century tyrants. It's the staff with two coiled snakes. These (as Louis N. Magner wrote in A History of Medicine) represent not the one-serpent, wingless staff of Asclepius, the healer, but "the magic wand of Mercury, the messenger of the gods and patron of thieves and merchants."
Asclepius, credit: Nina Aldin Thune, via Wikipedia Commons; Merury, credit: Wikimedia Commons
So why not remove the disputed logo from the medical plan and recycle it for the financial ER of the Troubled Asset Relief Program?
StevenHeller interviewed the designer of the original Obama logo immediately after the election, and his blog recently reviewed some 1970s predecessors of the design, not remotely fascist but as reassuringly all-American as Ohio housing developments and California cheese. For more on design, ethics, and public life, see my conversation with Steven Heller in Print Magaine.
Top Photo Credit: Simon Wiesenthal Center release
Thomas L. Friedman's column on Tom Watson, "59 Is the New 30," is a reminder that there continues to be a global pensions storm as well as a US health insurance debate.George Magnus pleads for (further) raising retirement age in the Financial Times:
Source: Murray Gendell, "Retirement age declines in 1990s,"
Monthly Labor Review, October 2001, via Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Gazette, full article here.
In either case, government-supported retirement started 120 years ago at the initiative of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck with an explicit link between age (70 originally) and incapacity, not leisure. As Emperor Wilhelm I put it in his address to the Reichstag in 1881, "those who are disabled from work by age and invalidity have a well-grounded claim to care from the state." [emphasis added] The Kaiser and his minister were thinking of coal miners and spinning machine hands who deserved medals for surviving the machinery, dust, and noise into their 60s, let alone 70. Even then, many of the powerful saw things differently for themselves. When Wilhelm's son Wilhelm II retired Bismarck involuntarily, the Iron Chancellor was 74 and not entering his golden years joyfully, as the textbook-classic cartoon drawn by Sir John Tenniel (age 70), "Dropping the Pilot," makes clear:
Source: Wikipedia
And Frank Lloyd Wright was 67 and considered a has-been when he designed his most celebrated house, Fallingwater, as the Philadelphia Inquirer recently recounted. Wright was 92 when his Guggenheim Museum was complete; it is currently celebrating with a retrospective exhibition.
Source: Wikipedia
The problem with retirement talk is that one institution can be a means (to use the sociologist Erving Goffman's phrase) of "cooling the mark out," persuading someone to accept an inferior status and (in the vision of personal finance journalism) a stage of self-realization.
The anti-retirement faction can take some comfort from a recent Washington Post article on the extension of athletic careers. Sally Jenkins writes:
Maybe the demographic and recessionary squeeze on pensions and the need to keep working will yield a health blessing in disguise for people delaying retirement. And those who do want to retire as early as possible are going to need a society in which other people work longer. The real problem -- outside of physically and mentally stressful and dangerous work -- is encouraging growth of skills and renewal at all ages in the work force. I'll be returning to strategies for renewal at all ages in later posts.
Average life expectancy at birth in advanced economies is expected to rise from 77 to 83 in the next few decades. The population of over-65s is expected to double, while the number of over-80s will grow even faster. Meanwhile, low birth rates mean the working-age population will grow slowly or decline. The resulting rise in dependency of the over-65s on the working age population will be unprecedented. Unaddressed, it will create financial stress for individuals and the state, rising pensioner poverty, social dislocations and the possibility of intergenerational conflict.Retirement is a fraught subject because people of the same age bring such different expectations to it. Over the last few decades, as health and longevity of older people have improved, retirement ages have dropped. But why? Is age discrimination to blame? That depends on whether you believe the Wall Street Journal or USA Today. Or do the statistics reflect a sense of a relatively carefree period of travel, hobbies, and time with grandchildren that more and more people see as the best part of life. The blog Soul Shelter, citing Charles Lamb's famous essay "The Superannuated Man," about his own transition at 50 as a clerk in London's India House, suggests that we have been ambivalent about retirement for a long time.
Source: Murray Gendell, "Retirement age declines in 1990s,"
Monthly Labor Review, October 2001, via Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Gazette, full article here.
In either case, government-supported retirement started 120 years ago at the initiative of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck with an explicit link between age (70 originally) and incapacity, not leisure. As Emperor Wilhelm I put it in his address to the Reichstag in 1881, "those who are disabled from work by age and invalidity have a well-grounded claim to care from the state." [emphasis added] The Kaiser and his minister were thinking of coal miners and spinning machine hands who deserved medals for surviving the machinery, dust, and noise into their 60s, let alone 70. Even then, many of the powerful saw things differently for themselves. When Wilhelm's son Wilhelm II retired Bismarck involuntarily, the Iron Chancellor was 74 and not entering his golden years joyfully, as the textbook-classic cartoon drawn by Sir John Tenniel (age 70), "Dropping the Pilot," makes clear:
Source: Wikipedia
And Frank Lloyd Wright was 67 and considered a has-been when he designed his most celebrated house, Fallingwater, as the Philadelphia Inquirer recently recounted. Wright was 92 when his Guggenheim Museum was complete; it is currently celebrating with a retrospective exhibition.
Source: Wikipedia
The problem with retirement talk is that one institution can be a means (to use the sociologist Erving Goffman's phrase) of "cooling the mark out," persuading someone to accept an inferior status and (in the vision of personal finance journalism) a stage of self-realization.
The anti-retirement faction can take some comfort from a recent Washington Post article on the extension of athletic careers. Sally Jenkins writes:
Somebody once described retirement as "statutory senility." . . . . Studies show that retirement is no good for you. Even if you hate the job you go to every day, sudden abrupt inactivity is a bad idea. A working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research entitled "The Effects of Retirement on Physical and Mental Health Outcomes" studied people in complete retirement over six years. It found that retirement led to a 5 to 6 percent increase in illness, a 6 to 9 percent decline in mental health, and a 5 to 16 percent increase in mobility difficulties. The study also suggested that when retirement is involuntary, the symptoms -- which can range from expanding waistlines to depression to tobacco and alcohol use -- tend to be even worse.
Maybe the demographic and recessionary squeeze on pensions and the need to keep working will yield a health blessing in disguise for people delaying retirement. And those who do want to retire as early as possible are going to need a society in which other people work longer. The real problem -- outside of physically and mentally stressful and dangerous work -- is encouraging growth of skills and renewal at all ages in the work force. I'll be returning to strategies for renewal at all ages in later posts.
Dan Akst's post on height opens up one of the most intriguing topics in social science -- not the well-established fact that tall people earn more than short people but why this is so. The authors of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study he cites say it's because tall people have been more likely to have reached their full cognitive development -- in other words, their IQs grew faster, too.
But that can't be the whole explanation. The world's leading scholar of height, whose work tends to support their hypothesis, is John Komlos of the University of Munich. His life story recently appeared in the New Yorker. He is one of the rare Americans to have his own institute at one of Germany's premier universities. At 5 feet 7, probably as a result of wartime and postwar malnutrition under Hungary's totalitarian regimes (his family emigrated after the 1956 revolution), Komlos developed such a powerful interest in the determinants of stature that he virtually created it as a subdiscipline. His disadvantage, contrary to the NBER paper, probably promoted his cognitive development.
The sociologist Irving Goffman was one of the highest paid members of his discipline and liked to boast that his royalties and investments each were at least equal to his salary. (Among other things, he had qualified as a blackjack dealer and pit boss in a Las Vegas casino, according to colleagues.) His former graduate student, Gary Marx, remembered him:
On the social level, studies are linking height with well-being, and diminishing US physical (and possible economic and political) stature with rising inequality. The credit for Northern European stature goes not to genes but to the European welfare state, Komlos and his collaborators have suggested. Here's a new motto for the US's social democrats: "Grow Up, America!"
Paradoxically, though, as Europeans get taller they appear to be choosing shorter leaders, or rather once more accepting the rule of assertive short people. And while Barak Obama is several inches taller than John McCain, the role of height in US politics has always been complex, or so I suggested during the 2004 campaign, before George W. Bush neutralized the four-inch gap with John Kerry.
See this paper (subscription possibly required) on the paradox that the effect of height on income appears due to adolescent experience rather than to effects of adult height. The white males in this study who were short in high school but grew to normal or above-average height in later growth spurts had the same disadvantages as those who remained short. So it's early social disadvantages, including lower participation in team sports, rather than later discrimination that is key. See also the excellent book of the science writer Stephen S. Hall, Size Matters, reviewed here.
The lesson I draw: It's attitude, not altitude, that matters.
But that can't be the whole explanation. The world's leading scholar of height, whose work tends to support their hypothesis, is John Komlos of the University of Munich. His life story recently appeared in the New Yorker. He is one of the rare Americans to have his own institute at one of Germany's premier universities. At 5 feet 7, probably as a result of wartime and postwar malnutrition under Hungary's totalitarian regimes (his family emigrated after the 1956 revolution), Komlos developed such a powerful interest in the determinants of stature that he virtually created it as a subdiscipline. His disadvantage, contrary to the NBER paper, probably promoted his cognitive development.
The sociologist Irving Goffman was one of the highest paid members of his discipline and liked to boast that his royalties and investments each were at least equal to his salary. (Among other things, he had qualified as a blackjack dealer and pit boss in a Las Vegas casino, according to colleagues.) His former graduate student, Gary Marx, remembered him:
In his book Stigma (1963), Goffman observed that there is "only one completely unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant father of good complexion, weight, height, and a recent record in sports" Such men might become CEOs more often than others, but they're less likely to excel in other well-paid endeavors -- stand-up comedy, among other things -- where skills honed in childhood can flourish.As a Canadian Jew of short stature working at the margins (or perhaps better, frontiers) of a marginal discipline, he was clearly an outsider. His brilliance and marginality meant an acute eye and a powerful imagination. He had a fascination with other people's chutzpah, weirdness and perhaps even degradation. He appreciated people who had a good thing going and those able to assert themselves in the face of what could be an oppressive social structure and culture. In a stodgy, timid, bureaucratic world the hustler has a certain freshness and perverse appeal.
On the social level, studies are linking height with well-being, and diminishing US physical (and possible economic and political) stature with rising inequality. The credit for Northern European stature goes not to genes but to the European welfare state, Komlos and his collaborators have suggested. Here's a new motto for the US's social democrats: "Grow Up, America!"
Paradoxically, though, as Europeans get taller they appear to be choosing shorter leaders, or rather once more accepting the rule of assertive short people. And while Barak Obama is several inches taller than John McCain, the role of height in US politics has always been complex, or so I suggested during the 2004 campaign, before George W. Bush neutralized the four-inch gap with John Kerry.
See this paper (subscription possibly required) on the paradox that the effect of height on income appears due to adolescent experience rather than to effects of adult height. The white males in this study who were short in high school but grew to normal or above-average height in later growth spurts had the same disadvantages as those who remained short. So it's early social disadvantages, including lower participation in team sports, rather than later discrimination that is key. See also the excellent book of the science writer Stephen S. Hall, Size Matters, reviewed here.
The lesson I draw: It's attitude, not altitude, that matters.
Citing an aside in David Brooks's column on the Sotomayor hearings,
"Eminent scientists": 26 percent
"Eminent French and English poets": 24 percent
"Eminent English writers and poets": 55 percent
"Historical geniuses": 30 percent
American Presidents: 34 percent
British Prime Ministers: 33 percent
Even allowing for higher morality before the later twentieth century, these are quite a contrast with the average of 8 percent who lose a parent by 16.
In the current Atlantic, see Christopher Hitchens on Abraham Lincoln's traumatic childhood:
Returning to the main point of David Brooks's column, he seems to be saying that if you want to know the price of success, you can't afford it. We still don't know why tragedies and abuse seem to strengthen some people and shatter others. But maybe it really isn't so bad to get what you wish for. High status people live longer. The tensions of power are a walk in the park compared to the stress of powerlessness. The elite have many pressures, but these arise from their greater autonomy. Even many middle-class people with professional credentials may have little control over the decisions most closely affecting them, especially now. And nobody understands this better than people who have known poverty and loss.
It is amazing how many people who suffer parental loss between the ages of 9 and 13 go on to become astounding high achievers.a reader in India writes
I would enjoy knowing the other examples that Brooks had in mind when he remarked that often those losing a parent in their childhood grow up to become high achievers. I can think of many such people in my own life, but would like to know the public figures.This is the kind of paradox I've been looking into. Teresa Amabile, in Creativity in Context, cites a number of studies (212, 263):
"Eminent scientists": 26 percent
"Eminent French and English poets": 24 percent
"Eminent English writers and poets": 55 percent
"Historical geniuses": 30 percent
American Presidents: 34 percent
British Prime Ministers: 33 percent
Even allowing for higher morality before the later twentieth century, these are quite a contrast with the average of 8 percent who lose a parent by 16.
In the current Atlantic, see Christopher Hitchens on Abraham Lincoln's traumatic childhood:
The law as it then stood made children the property of their father, so young Abraham was "hired out" only in the sense of chattel, since he was obliged to turn over his wages. From this, and from the many groans and sighs that are reported of the boy (who still struggled to keep reading, an activity feared and despised by his father, as it was by the owner of Frederick Douglass), we receive a prefiguration of the politician who declared in 1856, "I used to be a slave." In Lincoln's unconcealed resentment toward his male parent, we get an additional glimpse of the man who also declared, in 1858, "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master."Joshua Wolf Schenk has likewise traced the origins of Dr. George Vaillant's quest to understand long-term mental health in his father's unexplained suicide when the son was only ten.
Returning to the main point of David Brooks's column, he seems to be saying that if you want to know the price of success, you can't afford it. We still don't know why tragedies and abuse seem to strengthen some people and shatter others. But maybe it really isn't so bad to get what you wish for. High status people live longer. The tensions of power are a walk in the park compared to the stress of powerlessness. The elite have many pressures, but these arise from their greater autonomy. Even many middle-class people with professional credentials may have little control over the decisions most closely affecting them, especially now. And nobody understands this better than people who have known poverty and loss.
The accused killer of a security guard in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, James W. von Brunn, followed a trajectory sadly common on the racist and terrorist fringe: good family, education at top schools, promising beginnings in the arts, science, or engineering -- and a puzzling slide into infamy. Think American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell (Brown), the Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski (Harvard, Michigan), the Sept. 11 ringleader Mohammed Atta (Cairo, Technical U. Hamburg), and the physicist turned neo-Nazi publisher and novelist William Pierce (Rice, Colorado, fast-track tenure at Oregon). (Gary Weiss seems to have scooped the Times on von Brunn's wedding announcement in its own electronic archive.)
Von Brunn's first marriage had a further, bizarre, twist; in 1951, while still a promising young advertising man at a top New York agency, he had illustrated a reprint (edited by his English-born father-in-law, a writer also on Madison Avenue) of a sporting book by "Frank Forester." Title: Upland Shooting. Forester was the pseudonym of Henry William Herbert (1807-1858), an exiled, eccentric early nineteenth-century English aristocrat now considered the founder of American sports writing.
Herbert's suicidal rage in his decline was directed only against himself, but (as von Brunn probably did) he originally hoped to make his own death a spectacle, sending invitations to his chosen spot, a New York hotel. According to an article by Brad Parks in the Newark Star-Ledger, he is buried in a Newark cemetery with an epitaph of his own choosing: "Infelicissimus." ("Most unhappy")
Herbert and von Brunn had something else in common, according to a number of sources about each: violent outbursts linked to drinking. (Jeffrey Goldberg points to this revealing look at von Brunn's past in the New York Daily News.) One clue to von Brunn's fatal choices occurs in Joshua Wolf Schenk's "What Makes Us Happy" in the June Atlantic, about the Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant, who has been studying the long-term sources of life satisfaction for decades:
Von Brunn's first marriage had a further, bizarre, twist; in 1951, while still a promising young advertising man at a top New York agency, he had illustrated a reprint (edited by his English-born father-in-law, a writer also on Madison Avenue) of a sporting book by "Frank Forester." Title: Upland Shooting. Forester was the pseudonym of Henry William Herbert (1807-1858), an exiled, eccentric early nineteenth-century English aristocrat now considered the founder of American sports writing.
Herbert's suicidal rage in his decline was directed only against himself, but (as von Brunn probably did) he originally hoped to make his own death a spectacle, sending invitations to his chosen spot, a New York hotel. According to an article by Brad Parks in the Newark Star-Ledger, he is buried in a Newark cemetery with an epitaph of his own choosing: "Infelicissimus." ("Most unhappy")
Herbert and von Brunn had something else in common, according to a number of sources about each: violent outbursts linked to drinking. (Jeffrey Goldberg points to this revealing look at von Brunn's past in the New York Daily News.) One clue to von Brunn's fatal choices occurs in Joshua Wolf Schenk's "What Makes Us Happy" in the June Atlantic, about the Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant, who has been studying the long-term sources of life satisfaction for decades:
Again and again, Vaillant has returned to his major preoccupations. One is alcoholism, which he found is probably the horse, and not the cart, of pathology. "People often say, 'That poor man. His wife left him and he's taken to drink,'" Vaillant says. "But when you look closely, you see that he's begun to drink, and that has helped drive his wife away."
Edward Tenner
