Month: March 2013

Will the aging of America cause it?:

[Arthur] Nelson [director of the Metropolitan Research Center at the University of Utah] calls what’s coming the “great senior sell-off.” It’ll start sometime later this decade (Nelson is defining baby boomers as those people born between 1946 and 1964). And he predicts that it could cause our next real housing crisis. “Ok, if there’s 1.5 to 2 million homes coming on the market every year at the end of this decade from senior households selling off,”  Nelson  asks, “who’s behind them to buy? My guess is not enough.”

(Hat tip: WRM)

In an attempt to reduce recidivism, Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips seek to redirect the energy of ex-convicts:

Many gangsters are natural born innovators with restricted economic opportunities. Nobody understands this better than Catherine (Cat) Rohr, who quit her job in private equity to become a champion for the incarcerated. As she told us, “Initially I had this attitude that people in prison were the scum of the earth, that they were a waste of tax dollars.” But in getting to know the prison population better, Cat’s position began to change. “I suddenly realized I was meeting entrepreneurs in prison. That these guys who had run drug businesses had all these entrepreneurial characteristics like scrappiness, charisma, and real skills in leadership and management.” With this realization, Cat began a life committed to honoring the talents and skills of those in prison.

Cat has launched a program in New York called Defy Ventures, which “provides a business incubator for ex-offenders who then have an opportunity to compete for $150,000 in seed capital for their businesses.”

David Haglund defends the secondary definition of “literally”:

I recommend reading (or re-reading) Jesse Sheidlower’s Slate piece about literally, published back in 2005. Sheidlower, as it happens, is an editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary. He points out people have used literally as an intensifier for statements that were not literally true since at least the late 18th century. And it wasn’t just anyone using the word this way: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain—any number of respectable writers have thus employed literally. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, for instance, Mark Twain writes that Tom “was literally rolling in wealth.” But Tom is not, in fact, rolling around “in a literal, exact, or actual sense.”

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA5Ub6T_fOg]

Readers sound off on the controversial new book and cover-story and the woman behind them:

What Sheryl Sandberg and her ilk don’t seem to understand is that I, and many of my sisters, don’t want to be them. I just want a job with flexibility so that I can earn a few dollars, get some mental stimulation and still have a full family life.  I have a master’s degree and a law degree but realized early in my career that I didn’t want to be a slave to it. I wanted to stay home, at least in part, raise my kids myself and bake cookies.  I don’t “lean in” because I don’t want to lean in.  That said, I want any woman who wants to be a CEO to be given the chance and the opportunities to be CEO, and I don’t think any woman who makes that decision should be criticized for prioritizing her career over her family.

Telling women that they are, in effect, sabotaging themselves shows that Sandberg doesn’t understand many of the women who work under her.  It also shows how women have a long way to go in accepting the decisions that other women make for themselves.

Another:

The “lean in” issue is not just a womens’ issue. I’m a man, and my husband and I had a daughter when I was 30, almost 15 years ago. Just at the moment I should have been leaning into my career, I had just become the youngest producer to win a Tony Award, it became clear to me that I would have to lean out because my husband (partner at the time) had a much bigger, more important, and more lucrative job and he was not going to think about playdates and if there was milk in the fridge and all the billions of other things parents have to fill their brain with to raise a child. It is all about balance, and until there is parity on chores and kid duty there will never be equal opportunity in the workplace. I leaned out (not totally), and I don’t regret it for a minute, but getting back in is very tricky, male or female.

One more point, the woman making $60K cannot lean into the impromptu meeting at 4:45 that might lead to drinks because she knows she’s got to get to daycare by 5:30.  Sheryl Sandberg is not living in the real world.

Another:

I agree wholeheartedly with Michelle Goldberg’s statement that “leadership tomes by wildly successful male executives aren’t typically pilloried for ignoring the concerns of immigrant day laborers” and Jessica Valenti’s take. The following is actually about Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, but it’s honest and refreshing and one of the most sane things I’ve read on this issue yet:

Mayer is more honest than everyone else. The workforce divides into two sides: people who try very hard to decrease the conflict in their life between work and home, and people who try very hard to get to the top of the work world. You can’t do both. You know that, you just don’t like that Mayer is institutionalizing it.

Once we get honest about what you need to do to get to the top, we can start having a real discussion about how to make choices in adult life. The reality of today’s workforce is that if you want to have a big job where you have prestige and money and power, you probably need a stay-at-home spouse. Or two full-time nannies. Which means most people don’t have the option to go on the fast track, because most people have not set their lives up this way.

So let’s just admit that most of us are not on the fast-track. Stop bitching that people won’t let slow people on the fast track. Stop saying that it’s bad for family. It’s great for family. It means people will not continue operating under the delusion that you can be a hands-on parent and a top performer. People will make real choices and own those choices.

I have no desire to be on the fast track. But good for those women who do want to be and who go for it. Yes, Lean In has little to offer women who want to focus on child rearing. So what. That’s not Sandberg’s audience.

Another:

I haven’t read Sandberg’s book, but am really looking forward to doing so. I don’t think I need to be a married, straight woman with children and a supportive husband in order to recognize a lot of other truths in the parts I’ve seen from Sandberg’s book. Do women, regardless of their marriage and childrearing plans, lean back more than their male counterparts? In my experience, I’d say, “Yes” and when they do show a more forward approach, their competitiveness or seriousness is sometimes greeted with less enthusiasm than when it’s seen in men. I’ll never forget an accomplished colleague of mine, who’s children were already off to college, who applied for a higher level position she didn’t get. When she asked the hiring committee (it was for a dean’s position at a university) how she could have improved her interview success, she was told, “You could have smiled more.” That was it. There is absolutely no way that would have ever been the feedback to a man.

But I digress. When I see that Kira Goldenberg asked: “(Where do butch women fit into that suggestion to adhere to societal rules of femininity?)”, I saw myself. I’m a 6’2″, athletic looking butch woman who wears men’s clothes to work. What I experience, at least at my university, is that I never get told I don’t smile enough. I’ve noticed men in higher positions do not really see me as a woman in the traditional sense. When I greet them, I’m eye-level with them or taller. I’m expected to be competitive. I get asked about sports and can answer because I played basketball in college. There’s no question of whether I’m an attractive, feminine woman they worry about thinking sexual thoughts about. I’m just not, for them, and that’s a relief. They shake my hand differently than they do more feminine women. And, I look like what they expect a dean or an higher-level administrator will look like … a man.

This idea that I adhere to societal rules of femininity just don’t apply to me and I’ve found a place where that works. At this point in my career and this stage in the evolution of gay rights, I’m beyond surprised to discover that being a butch has turned out to be a bit of an advantage for me. It only took 45 years or so of being on the outside to find that advantage, but I’ll take it.

My podcast with Michael Wolf on the Dish experiment is now up, and embedded below.

Virginia Hughes examines them:

[Rachel Best, a sociologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who studies the politics of medical research funding] tracked federal funding and patient advocacy for 53 diseases over 19 years. Though it’s impossible to tease out cause and effect, on average for every $1,000 spent on lobbying, the disease received $25,000 more in research support the following year, she found.

The data also revealed more subtle consequences of lobbying. For example, the general classification by advocacy groups of people struck by disease as helpless ‘victims’ may have led to less funding for diseases that are stigmatized because they are brought about by the affected individuals’ own lifestyle choices. Liver cancer (caused by alcohol and hepatitis infections) and lung cancers (driven largely by cigarette smoking) received less and less funding over the past two decades than would be expected on the basis of their prevalence and mortality rates, she found. “That’s potentially a problem,” Best says. “We need to guard against these considerations of worthiness and deservingness becoming more influential on scientific decisions.”

In a follow up, Hughes wonders if the sequester will impact disease lobbying:

[I]t’s interesting that the rise of disease-specific organizations came at the same time that the NIH budget was growing rapidly. During that period, advocacy wasn’t a zero-sum game: the government could put more money into one disease without taking from another. With the budget cuts, though, advocates could get much more competitive. “It would be a shame if that meant that diseases that had stronger advocacy would be preserved at the expense of diseases without advocates,” says Clay Johnston, director of UCSF’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute. “We would all suffer from that.”

According to a recent study (paywalled), they’re happier:

Out of 140 people over the age of 63, a pretty surprising 61 percent of the subjects said they played video games occasionally, and an even more surprising 35 percent said they played once a week. Okay, so some old people play video games — read: solitaire and/or Angry Birds — and they’re better off for it.

Scientists said that the gamers “reported higher levels of well-being,” while non-gamers reported more negative emotions and a tendency toward higher levels of depression.” The study’s abstract concludes, “Findings suggest that playing may serve as a positive activity associated with successful aging.”

Kevin Charles Redmon warns that the illegal “rhino horn trade is flourishing”:

Twenty years ago, a kilo of horn went for $4,700. Today, it sells for $65,000, making it more valuable than either gold or cocaine. Poaching is on the rise, and by some accounts, the number of endangered (but not yet extinct) white rhino killed doubles each year. By 2035, African wildlands could be devoid of the animal.

One possible, controversial way to avoid this fate? Horn farming:

“Rhino horn is composed entirely of keratin and regrows when cut,” writes [Duan] Biggs [a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Queensland]. “Sedating a rhino to shave its horn can be done for as little as $20.” A white rhino produces about a kilo of horn per year, and the current global demand could be met by “farming” as few as 5,000 animals on a private, well-guarded preserve. (Natural rhino death “would also provide hundreds of horns annually,” even as the herd continues to grow at a rate near 10 percent.) The millions of dollars generated by the legal enterprise could be used to fund further conservation efforts, such as wildland preservation, sustainable rural development, and field research.

Jill Filipovic makes the case for women keeping their surnames after marriage:

Your name is your identity. The term for you is what situates you in the world. The cultural assumption that women will change their names upon marriage – the assumption that we’ll even think about it, and be in a position where we make a “choice” of whether to keep our names or take our husbands’ – cannot be without consequence. Part of how our brains function and make sense of a vast and confusing universe is by naming and categorizing. When women see our names as temporary or not really ours, and when we understand that part of being a woman is subsuming your own identity into our husband’s, that impacts our perception of ourselves and our role in the world. It lessens the belief that our existence is valuable unto itself, and that as individuals we are already whole. It disassociates us from ourselves, and feeds into a female understanding of self as relational – we are not simply who we are, we are defined by our role as someone’s wife or mother or daughter or sister.