Month: July 2009

by Conor Friedersdorf

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Former General Electric Co. Chief Executive Jack Welch has some blunt words for women climbing the corporate ladder: you may have to choose between taking time off to raise children and reaching the corner office. "There's no such thing as work-life balance," Mr. Welch told the Society for Human Resource Management's annual conference in New Orleans on June 28. "There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences."

Mr. Welch said those who take time off for family could be passed over for promotions if "you're not there in the clutch."

I am unsure whether Mr. Welch is speaking descriptively or prescriptively. Either way, I've got two responses:

1) Imagine that three people, all about 50 years old, are competing to be named CEO of a large company like General Electric — one that pays a premium to compensate its top executive on the theory that singular talent at the top, drawn by necessity from a small pool of applicants, vastly increases corporate worth. Does it make sense that this decision would rest heavily on whether or not one of the applicants took a year off in her late twenties to care for her child? It makes perfect sense that the woman in question would be passed over for promotions that became available during her absence. Were Mr. Welch justifying a statistic showing that the average female CEO reaches the top at a slightly older age than the average male CEO, I'd buy into his theory.

But if what he's actually saying is that once you step off the corporate ladder it is impossible to get back on at the same rung, or to climb as fast once you do, I'd say that's a flaw in the corporate ladder, not a rational structure for penalizing employees who aren't "there in the clutch." Doesn't Mr. Welch's approach artificially limit the number of qualified applicants considered for top jobs where the applicant pool is already smaller than optimal? Doesn't it prevent some people with singular, extreme talent from ever being considered?

A similar sort of irrational behavior exists in corporate law and business consulting, where the time to join a prestigious firm is during recruiting season for your law school or MBA class. A job candidate who would have garnered offers from several top firms in that process might well find he can't get hired at any of those places if he applies after spending a year doing almost anything else. In my experience, folks who take conventional, highly codified steps toward success irrationally come to ascribe greater worth to those who follow the same path.

2) It is no coincidence that in our current corporate structure, a lot of CEOs and law partners lead miserable lives rife with lost friendships, dysfunctional relationships, divorces, alienated children, ludicrous attempts to use consumption as a stand in for actual happiness, etc. Perhaps if we stopped viewing these jobs as what we're aspiring to reach, and begin seeing them as fool's gold largely sought by folks with too narrow a conception of ambition, men and women who never reach the C suite would better count their blessings.

by Chris Bodenner

NIAC relays a new bit of drama:

According to Mowj Camp, the brother of Zahra Rahnavard (Mousavi’s wife), has been arrested for over a month.  Mousavi’s family, however, made an “ethical decision” to keep this a secret until the conservative Javan Newspaper revealed this news today.

“Mousavi’s family did not announce this news because they did not want Mousavi’s positions regarding the detainees to be considered personal or the families of other detainees to think Mousavi is more concerned about his own relatives…”

If you recall, Rafsanjani's daughter and four other relatives were also arrested and detained for a short period.

by Patrick Appel

Ta-Nehisi makes an point that isn't raised enough:

I am semi-skeptical of demography which predicts the coming white minority. Whiteness has proven to be an amazingly protean concept, absorbing whole groups that it once shunned. It's not clear to me that Latinos, or at least some Latinos, can't be absorbed too. I'd suggest a middle ground. Some Latinos absorbed. Some not. How that breaks down, I don't know. But I think the notion that all Latinos, in 2028, will be nonwhite is flawed. As I recall, the majority of Latinos, right now, check "White" when asked about race. It's been suggested to me that that says more about the census forms, then about Latinos. Maybe.

The only group whiteness has proven incapable of absorbing are blacks. This makes sense. In America, whiteness doesn't depend on Italians, Jews, Asians or Latinos–it depends on blacks. The whole point of the Civil War wasn't simply to protect slavery, but to protect a kind of "nobility for the masses." As long as blacks remained a bonded class, white people–slave holders or not–always had a peasantry beneath their feet. To be white was to have the latest Jordans. If everyone had Jordans, they'd be pro-Keds.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Does this make you feel better or worse about the American automotive industry?

ANTONELLA is an attractive 28-year old woman who lives in Rome. Her life is focused on friends and fun, clubbing and parties. She is also completely imaginary.

But her influence is definitely real. It is evident in the design of the Ford Fiesta, on sale in Europe now and arriving in the United States next summer as a 2011 model. Antonella was the guiding personality for the Ford Verve, a design study that served as the basis for the latest-generation Fiesta. A character invented by Ford designers to help them imagine cars better tailored to their intended customers, she embodies a philosophy that guides the company’s design studios these days: to design the car, first design the driver.

It couldn't help but remind me of this Simpson's episode, which is hardly a fair assessment, so I tried to stay open-minded. But then I got to this part:

I care about the design and function of my Web browser more than I do about my car, so I suppose if Ford ever designs a vehicle for me it will swap out the gear shift for "forward" and "back" buttons, the clock will be replaced by a cartoon Japanese fox whose activities signal the time of day, and touching a small house icon will cause the car to automatically drive me home.

In seriousness, a central panel inspired by those of a cellphone seems like an awful idea. Cell phones are quite different from one another, for starters, and most of them presume that you're looking at the interface as you use them. What car makers should do is eschew the gimmicks and buttons in favor of a return to the tactile control panels of yore. Is there anything better than a radio dial or a volume knob for intuitively sensing finite adjustments while keeping your eyes on the road?

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

How about Shahnameh comic books for kids? Shahnameh is an Iranian classic by Ferdowsi.

One of the heroes of Shahnamedh is Rostam, a giant of a man, and looking at the way he is depicted here it makes me wondering if the creator of the film 300 used Rostam as an inspiration (or orientalized transmogrification) for his Xerxes.

Wikipedia says:

Shahnameh is an enormous poetic opus written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi around 1000 AD and is the national epic of Iran. The Sh?hn?meh tells the mythical and historical past of Iran from the creation of the world up until the Islamic conquest of Persia in the 7th century.

Aside from its literary importance, the Sh?hn?meh, written in almost pure Persian unmixed with adoptions from Arabic, has been pivotal for reviving the Persian language after the massive influence of Arabic. This voluminous work, regarded by Persian speakers as a literary masterpiece, also reflects Persia's history, cultural values, ancient religions (Zoroastrianism), and profound sense of nationhood. Ferdowsi completed the Shâhnameh when national independence had been compromised. While there are memorable heroes and heroines of the classical type in this work, the real, ongoing hero is Persia itself.

by Patrick Appel

Ambinder does his best to pinpoint where the healthcare debate is currently:

by Robert Wright

What does radical creativity have in common with getting rich on Wall Street? And how are the two different? Both answers, as rendered by Tufts psychologist Robert Sternberg, struck me as a little depressing. 

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

Behavior change is hard – that's why everyone's looking for something (relatively) quick and easy like a medical intervention for HIV prevention.  MC/MGM was one of those promising medical interventions.  But as an HIV researcher, I am in complete shock and disbelief that the NYT would be so irresponsible as to publish an article scolding South Africa for not promoting male circumcision a mere three days after this piece was published in the Lancet.  Two to three times as many female partners of newly circumcised men were newly infected with HIV at every follow-up point than female partners of men who didn't receive the procedure.

This is one of the largest randomized control trials of male circumcision's effects among serodiscordant couples, and had to be stopped for ethical reasons because of the higher infection rates among female partners.  They're attributing the higher infection rates in the intervention group to men not waiting to have sex long enough to heal properly, making them more infectious to their partners.  Risk compensation leading to new infections among women may counteract the benefit from herd immunity that would be gained by circumcising men.  I agree you and Andrew, that this is an entirely separate debate from performing the procedure at birth.  South Africa, for everything it has done wrong in the epidemic, should be applauded for waiting until evidence from the trials came available.  Especially after this news has come to light, I don't think anyone should be ready to say that circumcising adult, sexually active males is the magic bullet that a. everyone hoped it was or b. the NYT claims it is.

by Chris Bodenner

Genius:

(Hat tip: The Daily What)