Month: September 2010

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

I work at a small family owned casket factory in Los Angeles that has been around since 1933.  The Let the Corpses Decay posts from last week captured a few of the peculiarities of funerals, but neither mentioned the grotesqueness of funeral industry overpricing. Funerals are overpriced mostly because of mortuaries and partially due to people’s lack of awareness of how to shop for a funeral (e.g. people usually spend an extra thousand dollars by shopping at cemeteries instead of through cemetery brokers). The biggest price gouging normally occurs at mortuaries.  Large mortuaries are usually very overpriced, but sometimes local mom and pop mortuaries are worse.  Even though the FTC attempted to regulate exorbitant funeral prices with the Funeral Rule in 1984 and put a stop to a number of deceptive marketing tactics, mortuaries have developed new sales tricks.  Prior to the Funeral Rule, mortuaries could refuse to accept outside caskets.  This allowed them to put exorbitant mark-ups of 2.5 to 7 times the cost of the caskets they would then resell.

After the Funeral Rule, some casket manufacturers sold directly to the public, and a savvy consumer could cut thousands of dollars out of a funeral transaction.  This is still possible; however, mortuaries have a number of methods to keep this from happening.  One is offering people “package deals” which sell a funeral service and a casket together, promising huge savings on the casket.  Listed prices for the casket and funeral savings are deliberately inflated to have no bearing on their real value, just to give the illusion of huge savings after their costs to the consumer are “cut.”  The remaining mark-up after the so-called “savings” is what is really huge.

Mortuaries now try to lock families into using them by adding an exorbitant corpse movement fee (it used to be about $400 a few months ago, now it is frequently over $1000).  Bodies are often taken to mortuaries in a rush because the need to immediately refrigerate them leaves people with 2-3 hours to find a place for them.  If a family discovers their mortuary is grossly overpriced and wants to move the body elsewhere, it may be too late because the unreasonable thousand plus dollar moving fee removes potential savings (trapping the family at that overpriced mortuary). Newly bereaved individuals or families often are short of time and energy and do not take the proper precautions of shopping around for a fairly priced casket, cemetery, and mortuary instead taking the path of least resistance (the predatory sales packages that many heavily marketed mortuaries “generously” offer their customers).

Considering the costliness of funerals, failure to properly prepare for them in advance often ends up costing thousands of dollars extra per funeral. This is not to say that pre-purchasing a casket is a good idea either since many of these arrangements also sell an overpriced product, or disappear from bankruptcy before the person for whom the casket was bought dies and fail to reimburse them.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

Since you've extended this "Can Church Be Hip" storyline beyond just Christian music, I'd like to point out an absolutely beautiful adaptation of the classic Jewish prayer "Avinu Malkenu (My Father My King)" recorded and frequently performed by Mogwai.  Mogwai is a Scottish 'post-rock' band that has always held a very unique, and revered, place in hipster/indie rock music circles because of their high-brow, atmospheric instrumentals. This particular song is especially epic in that it accurately represents the sadness and reverence of the original liturgy, one that is left only to the highest of holy days of the Jewish calendar.

Throughout this thread I've been – like many readers I'm sure – continually amazed at the prevalence of religious influence in some of the best alternative bands out there. ("Sine Wave" is my personal favorite of Mogwai's.)

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

Yes, law firms and consulting firms are easy targets when companies pass the buck. Yes, law firms want to be able to say that they have hired a bevy of Ivy-Leaguers to give comfort to their clients that, when they pass the buck, they've passed the buck to a highly-credentialed crew of professionals.  But there is something much more to the choice of Ivy-Leaguers (and their top-tier equivalents).  As much as the credentials that they bring, it is the network that they bring that makes recruiting offices (and those they work for) salivate. 

The people you meet at Harvard and Yale and Brown and Dartmouth will — more often than not — find themselves working in other law firms, other consulting firms, or businesses that may be clients.  When you go to Harvard or Yale or Brown or Dartmouth, chances are you probably went to a pretty good high school.  If you didn't go to Exeter or Andover, you probably went to Choate or Collegiate (or Dalton or Trinity or some other place your parents spent 30k per year to send you to Kindergarten).  You met people at all of those places.  More than that, you met people who also met people.  And you met people who know that, the key to success in the business world, is meeting people.  That network (the tentacles of which extend wide and deep even after college, grow further in graduate school, and expand exponentially in the "real world") is the real key to why these folks get hired.  As the old adage goes, it is, in very large part, not what you know but who you know.

Yes, I can't believe I neglected to mention this. Elite colleges don't draw from quite as narrow a range of high schools as the reader implies, but Ivy League universities are certainly filled with extraordinarily talented people, and those institutions do their utmost to cultivate a networked alumni that indirectly benefit their employers. Partners at big business consulting firms often land major clients through their business school alumni network, to cite one example.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Although it doesn't persuade me to end my long-running campaign against diamonds, I've received a note from a reader in the industry who I can't help but admire. If you must buy a diamond, then by all means get it from this commendable woman:

Until recently I shared Conor's view. I had never been a fan of diamonds, much less diamond engagement rings, and couldn't imagine myself purchasing one. Their tragic history, superficiality, and impracticality were major turn-offs, notwithstanding their geologic magnificence. So as my friends began to get engaged (I'm 28 and part of an über progressive culture in San Francisco) we discussed our options for how to symbolize our engagements in ways that aligned with our ethics. In the process we looked into diamonds.

When I say we looked into diamonds, I mean, we really looked into diamonds. I had spent the last year and a half as a fact-checker at Mother Jones, and I had just finished fc-ing Heather Roger's book Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining Our Environmental Revolution (a good read if you get the chance). Prior to that, I had worked in the certification department at TransFair, the largest US Fair Trade organization. My friends are just as serious as I, so we tore into the industry from every angle, interviewing human rights researchers, diamond retailers, suppliers, traders, manufacturers, cutters, polishers, and the miners themselves. Ultimately we decided that nothing available on the market met our standards for transparency and fairness ("conflict-free" is a joke much akin to "gourmet"). Admittedly our standards were uncommonly high, but there was just nothing we could feel comfortable supporting.

Then we had an idea: What if we did it ourselves?

So we did… for us, by us… so to speak. Having done an immense amount of research, we traveled to South Africa and purchased diamonds from a women's mining cooperative in Lesotho. There we met like-minded folks including a fellow who started a business incubator in Johannesburg that teaches "previously disadvantaged" (which basically means black) people how to start businesses designing and manufacturing jewelry. Soon we began building rings and other jewelry for our circle of friends and family, which they were happy to pay for. Any extra money we took in we committed to investing with a few select (and again extensively researched) nonprofits and microfinance organizations working within mining communities — building schools, opening health clinics, rehabilitating old mining land, and more. Through word of mouth, more and more people started to approach us, and we eventually decided to make it real. Last year we registered with California as a social enterprise (a company in business for social good). We call it The Clarity Project.

The Clarity Project has been operating for about a year now with great success. There are three of us who are officially the founders, although many others are involved, and we each still have day jobs (and have still not paid ourselves any salary). Our official mission is to improve the quality of life for artisanal miners. As I've described, we achieve this by selling high-quality (rated "excellent" by NE Gem Lab), fairly sourced (we work with small-scale miners) jewelry, and investing all of our profits back into mining communities. And we've now invested quite a bit, most recently having fully funded the teachers' salaries at a school in the war-torn Kono district of Sierra Leone. But we've gone a step further in order to help navigate the tensions that inevitably arise while running a business: We've decided to make every decision based on what will MOST benefit the miners.

Through this adventure, I now have a much different perspective on diamonds. I see them as holding incredible potential and as a powerful vehicle for funding nonprofits and microfinance programs that are having a tremendous impact by opening new opportunities for miners and their families. For too long, these excessively expensive symbols have only served to line the pockets of European traders and African despots, fueling the destructive cycle of resource extraction that has plagued and marginalized communities in diamond regions for centuries. I now believe diamonds themselves offer a potential solution. There may not be a more emotional purchase in one's life than an engagement ring, and I think we ought to leverage the symbolic power of diamonds to create a more fair world.

Right now The Clarity Project is exceptional as a jewelry retailer and social enterprise. But we'd like to think that perhaps one day, every new engagement ring will build a school. This would be a wonderful new norm, and it's something worth pushing for. As we like to say: Get Engaged!

 

by Patrick Appel

Marrying the Apatow debate to the costly gifts thread, Culture Channel editor Eleanor Barkhorn points me to an old exchange between Judd Apatow and his wife, Leslie Mann. Money quote:

JUDD

One year, as a present, I got Leslie a trip to Italy. We had never visited Europe together, and it was something I knew she would love to do. So I had a basket made with Italian bread, airline tickets to Rome, a guidebook. Stuff like that. Here is the shocking part: When I gave it to her, she got mad at me.

LESLIE

Why is that shocking? It was a terrible present.

JUDD

It was a great present.

LESLIE

Let me rephrase that. It wasn’t even a present. A trip is something we do together. It is something we would do whether or not it was a present for me. You get to go, so it is for you also. That means it is not a present. It is an activity that would happen anyway.

The gift violates Tyler Cowen's first rule of gift giving: that it can't be something you yourself will benefit from. But it satisfies Cowen's other rule: experiences are better than possessions.

by Chris Bodenner

Tracy Clark-Flory teases a WSJ report:

We've written before about the dating simulator Love Plus and how it brought about the world's first marriage between man and virtual woman, and inspired jealousy among Japanese girlfriends and wives. But Love Plus+, the sequel to the original Nintendo DS game, has brought the insanity to a whole new level. As part of a promotional package deal, more than 2,000 of the game's mostly male devotees have flocked to the resort town of Atami for real-life vacations with their virtual girlfriends. This fits with the whole point of the game, which is to woo one of three teenage girls and then to keep her around by doing all the things a good boyfriend supposedly does — like, say, planning a romantic weekend getaway.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Let's begin with my favorite.

Your children tell me lots of things that would make you cringe from embarrassment, maybe because you didn't want them airing your dirty laundry or they misunderstood the way you said something to them.

Don't worry: I know they come home and misrepresent some of the things that I tell them, too. Let's just trust that maybe half of what they tell us about each other is true. This will save us all a lot of time when your child gets detention, and blames me for it.

From a middle school teacher….

On teaching: The best description I know of teaching is that it is, in essence, giving a 7-8 hour presentation every day to a group of 20-30 people, all of whom will stop paying attention every 7-8 minutes and all of whom must show they have learned the content of what you have presented for your presentation to be considered a success.  The reality of what it takes to be a successful teacher is exhausting just to think about.

On good schools: If the grown-ups in a building are doing their job, the students will succeed.  Without exceptions.

On good parents: They read with and talk to their children.  Constantly and from an early age.  Little else is necessary for a child to become a successful student.

A seventh grade teacher:

I am frequently the lone adult in a room of pre-adolescent, hormonally unpredictable young people, and that strangely, I love it. That sounds odd. But it is precisely this vulnerability that I enjoy protecting, even when it manifests as eye rolling, a surly sigh accompanied by a desk slap, or loudly crumpled papers. It's an unpopular age to teach. Junior-highers aren't cute. They don't give you hugs, and they can't discuss Shakespeare yet. They don't come back to thank you and you're rarely remembered at graduation. That's ok. I think tendering the transition from childhood to adolescence is a lot like beekeeping. You are stung many times, and you must be careful in your movements. But under the surly hum is a sweetness and a resonance that sometimes feels – and sounds – like music.

An elementary school teacher:

The #1 misconception about my job? The main thing that people fail to appreciate? Simple: that in the long run, I have some power over your child's academic achievement or performance. I don't need studies to back me up (although they most certainly do), I just need my own experience. How am I supposed to instill a culture of learning in your child when you do not have books in your home, and refuse to emphasize reading at this critical age? How am I supposed to teach your kid when you refuse to see to it that she does her homework? How am I supposed to teach your child about diligence and perseverance when you allow them unlimited play time at home; a home which does precisely nothing to foster a serious academic environment?

Here is the bottom line: as a teacher, I and my colleagues have your child for no more than 8 hours per day. Personally, I only have your child for 2 hours per day. The other 16 hours, they are in your care. And in those 16 hours, you do absolutely nothing to advance you child's academic growth. So, explain to me again, how am I responsible for you kid's academic failure? How can you expect me to undo the laziness and disinterest that you foster in your home in only 2 class periods per day? 

A high school teacher:

Every time a parent or guardian dismisses proper language usage as unnecessary or "snobby" or "old-fashioned," not only does that make my job that much more difficult (not just because of lost interest, but because of lost respect), it hampers that child from developing the skills they need to be and appear educated in a world that values education more and more. You may not think proper grammar and writing, etc., is important, but please don't tell my student that. You're only hobbling their growth and teaching them that my job is unimportant and not worthy of their respect and attention.

The writer teaches beginning medical students in the Middle East:

…what people don't realize is the amount of emotional energy I put into teaching — as does almost every other teacher. It is a form of performance art: keeping 18-yr-olds entertained, informed, and awake. Or being prepared for the simply crazy things that can happen in class. And acting happy when I'm exhausted, or concerned when I really don't care why their assignment is late. Yet, all this interaction is why I teach. Sure, the hours and the pay are great, but there's so much more. I teach because sometimes I really reach someone … I can see my words about learning or discovering or honesty or responsibility suddenly click. I get to see people improve.
 
So, yes, roll your eyes at how few hours I work. And scoff at my explanation of the huge amount of energy I put into my lesson plans. That's okay. I understand. I'd feel the same if I were you. But I love this job because it gives me an opportunity to connect with someone on a basic, life-changing level. Not many jobs do that.

A high school math teacher writes:

When people ask where I work, and I tell them I have always taught in urban public high schools, I often get a reaction that leads me to believe they heard "I defuse nuclear bombs using a toothpick and a gum wrapper." Urban high schools — and particularly urban high school students — have been pigeon-holed and misrepresented so often that many people assume they are battle zones. Worse, they assume the students are somehow different from the kids who attend suburban schools,  They are not. Teenagers are teenagers — tempests of uncertainty and bravado — no matter what zip code they live in.

Another high school teacher:

I work approximately 80 hours per week during the school year and another 30 hours per week during the summer… While the workload is taxing, trying to meet the emotional needs of children in underfunded, understaffed schools is grueling.  I had over 190 total students in my classes last year.  I agreed to take on 12 more as Independent Studies without pay because they asked me to be their advisor.  This means that I had about 34 students in each of my classes.  Additionally, we attend 30 hours of meetings per year without pay and have office hours once every other week without pay.  To maintain our sanity, we had to cut back our curriculum or else the paper would never end.  If every student wrote a three-page paper, that would be over 500 pages to read and correct.  Pile that on top of lesson planning and other obligations, and time becomes a black hole.  I work with dedicated people for whom the situation in the same.  Our family and social relationships have become strained or non-existent because we are consumed by our work.

I make $50,594 as a fifth-year teacher and I have five college degrees (three Bachelor's and two Master's) from a top-ten public university where I graduated with highest honors each time.  I nearly have a 4.0 cumulative grade point average.  I have to pay three percent of my salary into a health care fund on top of $34 per pay.  I also have to pay union dues because I can't opt out (it's currently against the law to do so).  Union dues are $847 per year and they have done nothing but sell us out and sell us short, as is usually the case.  Indeed, I am more educated than 97 percent of the population and have five-years experience in my field with exemplary reviews and results in any measure, objective or subjective, but I'm making less than almost anyone I know.  In fact, most of my friends and family are not only making more, they work far less…

We are always political targets; pawns in a game. I would argue that this is because of the misconceptions of teachers and other public employees as new Welfare Queens, living the high life off public money.  I can say that this depiction–offered mostly by Conservative critics–is errant on so many levels.  These attacks not only make it difficult to stay in the profession, but they make it completely undesirable for smart, talented people to find their way to teaching.  I question how much longer I can stay with it.  I think most teachers wouldn't necessarily want a six-figure salary or lavish perks, but they want to be compensated fairly and they want the very public humiliations and indignities to cease.

Many people tell me that I get other rewards from my work (i.e. personal satisfaction), which is true, but I never understand how that relates to the argument about being adequately compensated.  I never hear anyone talk about how doctors should work for mere satisfaction.  I have as many years of training and education as most doctors, but I'm not making anywhere near what they do.  You may say that there are fewer people that can do what they do, but I'll say that there aren't than many people who can do what I have done either with respect to student learning outcomes.

An exhausted teacher:

Everyone thinks that teaching is some kind of rewarding profession. Bullshit. I hate my job most of the time, like a lot of people. It is Sunday night and the last thing I want to do is go to work tomorrow. However, I am not really qualified to do anything else. I do my job well, but if I had the skills or training for a 9 to 5 job that would pay me enough to live comfortably in my fair city of Chicago, I would do it in a heart beat. I am on my feet for 8 hours a day…and for those 8 hours I have to be "on." If I am off for a second, I will get eaten alive.

Then after my day is done, I have all my regular work to do (grading papers, planning lessons and making parent phone calls, not to mention all the other little projects and administrative type things that we are asked to do by the administration). The worst part is the guilt. The guilt that I can always be more prepared, more educated, and more dedicated. I feel guilt because I can always be educating my students better than I am. This has a direct effect on their life. I also feel the guilt when I see what some of the other teachers are doing. I can tell they feel the pressure too, but they don't give in to it like I do. They stay at school until 9pm, they get in early, they are constantly trying to better themselves. Unfortunately there are too many other things I want to do with my life. I want to read the Dish, for one, I want to play and write my music, I want to build a computer, I want to learn new recipes to cook, I want to take a class on photography, I want to work on a radio documentary, I want to watch the Bulls and the Bears, I want to read for pleasure…..and well I want to have a Sunday to myself.

Why don't I do all that on my summers off? This summer, I moved, took a trip to visit my brother in Europe, spent a weekend on Lake Michigan and then had to get ready again for the coming school year. I had about 2 days in there to do nothing and no days to do any of those things I listed. Now, I know a lot of teachers feel different than I, but there are others that feel the same. Is teaching rewarding enough for me to not stop working or thinking about someone else (my students) from late August- early June. Not to me…I want to go home at 5 pm and be done with work until the next day. I don't want to be lazy, and I know a lot of other professionals work their tail off for minimal vacation time, but my job is supposed to be "rewarding." It's not…its exhausting.

by Chris Bodenner

David Cross' take on "white fright":

A reader writes:

Thank you for posting the video where participants were asked why they were attending the Beck event. I was struck how every participant referenced American exceptionalism in their answer. Even when criticizing Obama (much milder than I expected, btw), they mostly cited how he doesn't appreciate America's unique and exceptional standing in human history. Considering the economy, Katrina, the inability to dispatch, not one but two wars, their fear is understandable. Attributing it all to Obama and his election makes perfect sense, because he too is different and represents anything but the past. Call it ironic or a contradiction, but one of the exceptional parts of America (not the same thing as exceptionalism) is that considering our history, we elected an Obama so soon.

by Patrick Appel

Ezra Klein complains that Americans don't get much time off. Reihan adds context:

It’s true that American have fewer paid vacations and paid holidays. But the top 80 to 90 percent of U.S. households have more disposable income than their counterparts in the vast majority of OECD economies. Paid vacation is best understood as a form of non-cash compensation. It’s not obvious that we should collectively choose more paid vacation over more pay, and the lack of mandatory paid-vacation gives employers and employees more flexibility to choose an arrangement that works for them.