Mostly harmless purveyor of gently-used memes. My latest book: "Red Queen: The substrate Wars," available at: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00QSP3JTU/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00QSP3JTU&linkCode=as2&tag=jebkinn-20&linkId=L5XO3S3LGKGGDT4B. Also see, "Bad Boyfriends: Using Attachment Theory to Avoid Mr. (or Ms.) Wrong and Make You a Better Partner," is now on sale exclusively for Kindle (this will change soon.) Get it at: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IW6JYV0
As I mentioned in this post about the health risks of overconsumption of sugared sodas, many soft drinks (both sugared and diet) are highly acidic and demineralize tooth surfaces. The amount of damage done is related to exposure time and strength, so it helps a bit to drink them with straws (which reduces the exposure of the teeth to the drink) and to rinse with milk immediately after. Brushing your teeth shortly after drinking acidic beverages is not advised because the scrubbing action can further damage temporarily weakened tooth surfaces.
Drinking water or tea is obviously better, but if you or your children enjoy the occasional soda, the tooth demineralization problem is not severe — the surfaces will be remineralized quickly by the teeth’s natural repair processes. But avoid continuous or frequent consumption.
I personally drank too much soda and ground my teeth due to the stress of being an undergraduate at MIT; the grinding surfaces of my teeth lost all of their enamel in those years.
Dental researchers at the University of Adelaide are warning parents of the dangers of soft drinks, fruit juice, sports drinks and other drinks high in acidity, which form part of a “triple-threat” of permanent damage to young people’s teeth.
For the first time, researchers have been able to demonstrate that lifelong damage is caused by acidity to the teeth within the first 30 seconds of acid attack.
The researchers say drinks high in acidity combined with night-time tooth grinding and reflux can cause major, irreversible damage to young people’s teeth.
“Dental erosion is an issue of growing concern in developed countries, and it is often only detected clinically after extensive tooth wear has occurred,” says Dr Sarbin Ranjitkar, corresponding author of a paper on tooth enamel erosion published in the Journal of Dentistry.
“Such erosion can lead to a lifetime of compromised dental health that may require complex and extensive rehabilitation — but it is also preventable with minimal intervention,” Dr Ranjitkar says. [He] says the number of cases of tooth erosion from the consumption of acidic beverages is on the rise in children and young adults. “Often, children and adolescents grind their teeth at night, and they can have undiagnosed regurgitation or reflux, which brings with it acidity from the stomach. Combined with drinks high in acidity, this creates a triple threat to young people’s teeth which can cause long-term damage.”
…
“The important thing to appreciate is that there is a balance between acids and host protection in a healthy mouth. Once that balance is shifted in favor of the acids, regardless of the type of acid, teeth become damaged,” he says.
The Anxious-Preoccupied are frequently attracted to the intermittent reinforcement provided by the Avoidant, especially the apparently cool and self-sufficient Dismissive variety. I go into this at some length in the book:
Anxious-preoccupied types do poorly with each other—two needy, clingy people who do manage to calm each other’s insecurities exist as couples, but it’s rare, and the resulting relationship is closer to unhealthy codependence; neither will be strengthened by the bond. A mildly Preoccupied person can last with a mildly Avoidant sort, but the relationship tends to be unhappy as the bond is based on the unmet neediness of the Preoccupied and the willingness of the Avoidant to accept the attention without providing emotional security. A preoccupied person is much better off with a Secure who can gradually calm the preoccupied person’s insecurities by steady love and support, as in this case:
The preoccupied wife who had ambivalent attachment to her parent cannot believe her husband when he says, despite their fights and mutual dissatisfactions, that he genuinely loves her and wants to stay with her. She cannot assimilate it to her worldview, her internal model. She is sure he will abandon her, either because he already wants to or because her impossible and anxious neediness will eventually drive him out. But his steadfastness over the years builds her trust. It causes her to remember her relationship with a great uncle, whose love was precious and unwavering, and to think more and more about him and how good she felt about herself around him. Gradually, she assimilates her marriage to this model, and it becomes more central. Feeling more secure, she now finds herself freer to reflect on the past.[1]
Though it appears a preoccupied person might be better off with a secure partner, some research indicates that in this case opposites attract:
A number of studies have looked into the question of whether we are attracted to people based on their attachment style or ours. Two researchers in the field of adult attachment, Paula Pietromonaco, of the University of Massachusetts, and Katherine Carnelley, of the University of Southampton in the UK, found that avoidant individuals actually prefer anxiously attached people. Another study, by Jeffry Simpson of the University of Minnesota, showed that anxious women are more likely to date avoidant men. Is it possible, then, that people who guard their independence with ferocity would seek the partners most likely to impinge on their autonomy? Or that people who seek closeness are attracted to people who want to push them away? And if so, why? Pietromonaco and Carnelley believe that these attachment styles actually complement each other in a way. Each reaffirms the other’s beliefs about themselves and about relationships. The avoidants’ defensive self-perception that they are strong and independent is confirmed, as is the belief that others want to pull them into more closeness than they are comfortable with. The anxious types find that their perception of wanting more intimacy than their partner can provide is confirmed, as is their anticipation of ultimately being let down by significant others. So, in a way, each style is drawn to reenact a familiar script over and over again.[2]
This kind of complementary dysfunction can lead to a stable relationship, but one where both partners stay in their insecure styles, with the preoccupied battling for every scrap of attention and the avoidant one only giving enough to confirm his view of attachment as a necessary evil. These attractions are based on re-enacting the dysfunctional touch and response cycles of their early childhoods, and generally these couples report they are together despite their unhappiness.
Levine and Heller point out that the slights and intermittent reinforcement of the attractive avoidant male often trigger activation of the attachment system—producing intrigue and sparks. So what if he only answers your text messages days later, if at all? He’s hot and just hard-to-get enough that you really want him! This is the terrible mistake so many make: they meet a secure guy and it’s all so drama-free that they think he’s dull:
If you are anxious, the reverse of what happens when you meet someone avoidant happens when you meet someone secure. The messages that come across from someone secure are very honest, straightforward, and consistent. Secures are not afraid of intimacy and know they are worthy of love. They don’t have to beat around the bush or play hard to get. Ambiguous messages are out of the mix, as are tension and suspense. As a result, your attachment system remains relatively calm. Because you are used to equating an activated attachment system with love, you conclude that this can’t be “the one” because no bells are going off. You associate a calm attachment system with boredom and indifference. Because of this fallacy you might let the perfect partner pass you by.[3]
So armed with foreknowledge, a wise preoccupied person will seek out a Secure and avoid the sometimes attractive but ultimately unsupportive Avoidant of both flavors, as well as other Preoccupieds, who are likely to be the worst partners of all for them.
The relationships between Anxious-Preoccupied and Avoidant partners are especially problematic, because their mutually-reinforcing insecurities can lead to a stable but unhappy partnership that does little to help them grow more secure but can go on for years.
Remember that while attachment types are relatively fixed characteristics, almost everyone can display insecurities when the situation is stressful or their partner is triggering them: as when the Avoidant are withholding responses, creating anxiety in their partner; or when the Anxious-Preoccupied are peppering their normally Secure partner with demands for response, creating a desire to distance from excessive clinginess.
The Anxious-Preoccupied are driven by their need for attachment to jump quickly into relationships and to immediately see the latest one as the solution to their problems. They feel safe when their desired partner is near and reassuring, and anxious when apart, or when messages aren’t replied to immediately. While a Secure will assume the lack of response means their partner is simply busy or away from the phone, an Anxious-Preoccupied person will start to worry and wonder if something has gone wrong with their relationship. Since they are so concerned about their relationships, they will then act — with more and increasingly demanding messages and even more obsessive worry if there is no response.
The Preoccupied think that because they put their relationships above all other priorities, and work hard to maintain contact and do things for their partner, that they are owed the same level of attention and devotion. This level of commitment would be admirable if it came after a long relationship of mutual support and knowledge, but the Preoccupied tend to rope someone into partnership and start acting as if it was eternal and perfectly intimate long before they have really come to know and understand their latest partner-victim. In other words, they use their new partner to fill the hole in their attachment security without a true knowledge and appreciation of the partner’s history and feelings. This is self-centered and shows that real empathy can only be fully exercised from a secure base.
This entitlement attitude (“I am a devoted partner so I am owed the attention I deserve!”) leads to disappointment and anger when no real person can instantly be as thoughtful and devoted as the Preoccupied would require. The Preoccupied spend much time obsessing about these unintended slights and going over every detail of interactions in their heads, making up scenarios where they lose their partner, and then being tempted to make another play for reassurance. The anxiety they feel and the demands they make without regard to their partner’s state of mind or current ability to respond ultimately can drive away partners and friends.
The increasing percentage of Dismissives in the dating pool as time goes on means that older Preoccupieds will encounter more Dismissives than any other type. The intermittent reinforcement provided by a Dismissive — sometimes they will respond reassuringly, sometimes not — means that when the attachment system of the Preoccupied goes on alert, it finds its challenging match in the Dismissive’s refusal to play along. To some Preoccupieds this partial response is what they remember from significant caregivers, most typically their father, and the familiarity of this yearning is itself attractive.
The Dismissive, on the other hand, expects partners to be too demanding and troublesome, and that too confirms their view of others. One might expect Dismissives to seek out partners who are happy to accept greater distance in partnership, but that is not how it works out in practice; it as as if the Dismissive is most comfortable exercising the balance of power in the relationship, holding their struggling partner at a distance and just providing enough attention and reassurance to keep them on the hook.
Since they are reinforcing each other’s view of others, neither will get any more secure with time; the Dismissive will accuse their partner of being clingy or needy, while the Preoccupied will accuse their partner of being too distant and uncaring. They are fulfilling each other’s basic need to have a partner, but the partnership will always be troubled by their complementary insecurities. Yet it is more likely to be stable than a Preoccupied-Preoccupied partnership.
The single Preoccupied person would be wise to resist the tendency to fall for a Dismissive. This can be avoided by noting the red flags of the avoidant: not responding reassuringly to simple in-person requests, not showing much interest and concern for your feelings, and having a history of bad or no relationships. Superficial looks and accomplishments should not be seen as indicating that your new prospect is a success in emotional or relationship spheres. Always remember when you meet someone intriguing that you know next to nothing about their personality until you have seen them in many situations over many months. Don’t try to have a Significant relationship with someone until you have enough history with that person to be able to rely on their feelings for you. Remind yourself that there are many possible partners out there, and don’t settle emotionally on someone who may not be right for you just because they have shown you a little attention. It is meaningless unless it is sustained and reliable.

[1] Karen, p. 404
[2] Levine, Amir; Heller, Rachel (2010-12-30). Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love. p/ 91, Penguin Group US
[3] Levine and Heller, p. 96
[Note: if you arrived here looking for insight into a dismissive or fearful-avoidant spouse or lover, I’ve just published a book on the topic: Avoidant: How to Love (or Leave) a Dismissive Partner. Right now available only from Amazon Kindle for $3.99 (or local currency equivalent), but by Oct. 15th a paperback should also be available.]
Social capital, what’s that? The built-up support networks of families and individuals that help maintain and order their lives. Family ties, community ties — with organizations like churches, schools, and voluntary associations that once were more common parts of everyone’s lives. The mutual assistance of friends and neighbors. Reputation, status, and the regard of others which motivated good behavior, honesty in dealing, and charitable assistance, which maintained and strengthened those ties, and helped those in need with both assistance and the strings of obligation to repay that assistance by being useful members of the community.
In a small town, the impulse to assist the poor and disorganized was direct, and the people being helped were known to everyone. Big cities with their concentrated slums of poor immigrants led to social service agencies, funded at first by churches and cities, and then by state and federal governments. As the source of the assistance became impersonal, so did the aid — and the direct contact between those assisting and those assisted declined. Instead of the local church matrons with their bourgeois ideas of proper behavior and work, harassed social workers with enormous caseloads processed cases quickly, and the ideology of government assistance changed so that any behavioral expectation of the client population was viewed as an affront to their dignity.
In time, the government assistance ethos spread to every corner of the country and crowded out the local community services. Meanwhile, locally-controlled schools were gradually taken over by higher levels of government and distant union bureaucracies so that the influence of local parents was minimized. This was viewed as “progressive,” since distant elites thought local school boards and parents were too parochial and backward to be entrusted with decisions, and would get in the way of teaching the correct materials.
The incorrect application of emotions of sympathy and support to faceless categories of people like “the poor” and “the undocumented” removes any possibility of understanding the real situations of each of the category’s members. A hazy idealized poor family is envisioned, then a response that would be appropriate if that family lived next door (help them!) leads to voting for politicians that offer new programs to help “people like that.” By misapplying family and community feelings to higher levels of government, voters put into place a bureaucracy that misses most of the social signalling features of local groups and takes tax money to grow itself, crowding out local groups (and the valuable social signals that maintained bourgeois standards.)
Progressives generally are sentimentally supportive of direct local politics — they especially favor the ideals of the New England town meeting, where everyone who showed up had a say. The reason why this form of local government was generally abandoned is that it is simply too time-consuming for larger communities, and allows the motivated minority to capture control. Election of representatives was an advance which allowed voters to go about their own lives most of the time while exerting control through their representative, who had time to understand the issues thoroughly and vote in council in the best interests of the voters. Being in the 1% of local voters who cares deeply enough about an item to show up at a public meeting about it does not mean your feelings about it are more important than the views of those who didn’t show up; the once-every-few-years election is more likely to reflect what most voters want.
What have been the effects of progressive, centralized control of education, healthcare, and social services? It is true that the backwards practices of a few local school boards have been reformed, but the loss of a rich layer of church and private charity social services has impoverished local social capital. While today’s mass communication and the Internet removed one of the impulses to community (“I’m bored. Let’s go into town and hang out!”), a lot of the loss is due to the crowding out by a monopoly government, which had deep pockets and would use them to continue failed policies, as Microsoft in the 80s used the profits from its near-monopoly OS business to keep creating mediocre applications software until the innovators in applications were destroyed.
Very wealthy people have always been freer than others from the stifling social controls and judgments of bourgeois community standards. The elite of Paris and London in the 1800s often kept mistresses and dabbled in drug use without having their lives destroyed. The lower classes did not have the wealth to recover from errors, and those who did not hew to bourgeois social norms were isolated and damaged.
As the upper middle classes in the US grew as wealthy as the elite had been in the previous century after WWII, the sexual revolution and War on Poverty bestowed more social freedom on everyone — the middle and upper classes got birth control, sexual freedom, and women in the workplace, while the poor got programs to “uplift” them from poverty (a term which exposes the condescension involved). Social workers in vast numbers were hired to distribute assistance, free of any obligation — except for unmarried mothers, who were told their assistance would be cut if they married a working man.
Over the course of several generations, the well-off used their freedoms and came out relatively unscathed — families were still largely intact, children were still trained in the arts of civilization and followed the path of university and marriage into professional careers. But the artificial assistance to the poor, with its lack of community obligations and support and its immediate withdrawal in the event of marriage and better work, removed the social incentives that keep healthy communities healthy. Intact families grew less common. Crime and social pathologies became the norm in poor inner-city communities. As conditions worsened, the motivated and organized left for more civilized neighborhoods with better schools. The segregation of cities and even whole regions by income increased. Whole generations of children were poorly raised, poorly schooled, and left to drift without purpose or guidance from now-absent fathers, who were in prison or adrift themselves.
See this post and its links for more discussion of the black community specifically.
Meaning well is no defense.
We have a large number of people trained in academia who think their impulses to control other people’s lives indirectly through election of technocrats are just as virtuous, and a replacement for, the individual impulse to assist someone near you. They are horribly, hopelessly wrong, but convinced they are right and that only troglodytes and racists would oppose their “help.” They live in a bubble with other Virtuous People and feel superior to people who work in trades or live away from the elite coastal cities. Their lives are rich with experiences and status goods, and they can handle sexual and social freedoms well (mostly) because of their deep reserves of cash and connections — “rehab” is an option, and being late to work because of a bender or hookup won’t get them fired.
But for the poor, the “assistance” of government bureaucracies has gradually destroyed their families, their jobs, their communities, and their social capital.
The Hunger Games is an entertainment, but part of its attraction is the funhouse-mirror view of the societal and geographic divisions we see today in the US. The country is divided between the rich and frivolous Capital District, distracted by the spectacles of the Games and government-provided entertainments, and the poorer Districts where laborers (generally of the grubby, lower-class kind) toil generation after generation to support the imperial Capitol.
The heroine, Katniss Everdeen, grows up impoverished in the coal mining district, but with a strong and resourceful spirit takes on the system as a focal point for rebellion. The economics of the government are far from clear (why does an empire with high technology still have manual labor as its foundation?), but its oppressive nature and manipulation of the educated and refined white collar workers of the Capitol are clear.
In Coming Apart, Charles Murray explores the formation of American classes that are different in kind from anything we have ever known, focusing on whites as a way of driving home the fact that the trends he describes do not break along lines of race or ethnicity.
Drawing on five decades of statistics and research, Coming Apart demonstrates that a new upper class and a new lower class have diverged so far in core behaviors and values that they barely recognize their underlying American kinship—divergence that has nothing to do with income inequality and that has grown during good economic times and bad.
The top and bottom of white America increasingly live in different cultures, Murray argues, with the powerful upper class living in enclaves surrounded by their own kind, ignorant about life in mainstream America, and the lower class suffering from erosions of family and community life that strike at the heart of the pursuit of happiness. That divergence puts the success of the American project at risk.
His point in focusing on the white class structure is that black communities have been the canaries in the coal mine — more fragile and more urban, and therefore the first to be effected by the social welfare bureaucracies. Now the social pathologies that destroyed inner-city black communities are spreading to the rural and suburban lower classes — marriage rates dropping, children brought up poorly, gangs and the drug war creating social chaos. Progressive whites could pretend the black community was in trouble because not enough was being done, and racism — but when the rot spreads to every city and town, it’s impossible to explain it as the result of racism.
The more progressives elect politicians purporting to care about income inequality, the worse the life of the poor. The phenomenal damage caused by the Drug War to inner city communities and families, the prison-industrial complex that has helped destroy the black family and the lives of millions of young men, the hair-trigger police SWAT teams raiding the innocent by mistake and killing dogs and people in the hundreds — these are all the effects of a government elected by “caring” people who want to control the lives of others from a distance. And now the damage is going mainstream.
The Economist this week has a great story about the Hunger Games-like divide in the US:
SHANA, a bright and chirpy 12-year-old, goes to ballet classes four nights a week, plus Hebrew school on Wednesday night and Sunday morning. Her mother Susan, a high-flying civil servant, played her Baby Einstein videos as an infant, read to her constantly, sent her to excellent schools and was scrupulous about handwashing.
Susan is, in short, a very conscientious mother. But she worries that she is not. She says she thinks about parenting “all the time”. But, asked how many hours she spends with Shana, she says: “Probably not enough”. Then she looks tearful, and describes the guilt she feels whenever she is not nurturing her daughter.
Susan lives in Bethesda, an azalea-garlanded suburb of Washington, DC packed with lawyers, diplomats and other brainy types. The median household income, at $142,000, is nearly three times the American average. Some 84% of residents over the age of 25 are college graduates, compared with a national norm of 32%. Couples who both have advanced degrees are like well-tended lawns—ubiquitous.
Bethesda moms and dads take parenting seriously. Angie Zeidenberg, the director of a local nursery, estimates that 95% of the parents she deals with read parenting books. Nearly all visit parenting websites or attend parenting classes, she says.
Bethesda children are constantly stimulated. Natalia, a local four-year-old, watches her three older siblings study and wants to join in. “She pretends to have homework,” says her mother, Veronica; she sits next to them and practises her letters.
Veronica is an accountant; her husband is an engineer. Their children “all know that school doesn’t end at 18,” says Veronica. “They assume they’ll go to college and do a master’s.” Asked how often she checks her various children’s progress on Edline, the local schools’ website that shows grades in real time, she admits: “More than I should, probably.”
In “Coming Apart”, Charles Murray, a social scientist, ranked American zip codes by income and educational attainment. Bethesda is in the top 1%. Kids raised in such “superzips” tend to learn a lot while young and earn a lot as adults. Those raised in not-so-super zips are not so lucky.
Consider the children of Cabin Creek, West Virginia. The scenery they see from their front porches is more spectacular than anything Bethesda has to offer: the Appalachian Mountains rather than the tree-lined back streets of suburbia. But the local economy is in poor shape, as the coal industry declines. The median household income is $26,000, half the national average. Only 6% of adults have college degrees. On Mr Murray’s scale, Cabin Creek is in the bottom 10%.
Melissa, a local parent, says that her son often comes home from school and announces that he has no homework. She does not believe him, but she cannot stop him from heading straight out across the creek to play with his friends in the woods.
She has other things to worry about. The father of her first three children died. The father of her baby is not around. Her baby suffers from a rare nutritional disorder. And Melissa has to get by on $420 a month in government benefits. Small wonder that she struggles to enforce homework. And small wonder the gap between haves and have-nots in America is so hard to close.
…
In a study in 1995, Betty Hart and Todd Risley of the University of Kansas found that children in professional families heard on average 2,100 words an hour. Working-class kids heard 1,200; those whose families lived on welfare heard only 600. By the age of three, a doctor’s or lawyer’s child has probably heard 30m more words than a poor child has.
Well-off parents talk to their school-age children for three more hours each week than low-income parents, according to Meredith Phillips of the University of California, Los Angeles. They put their toddlers and babies in stimulating places such as parks and churches for four-and-a-half more hours. And highly educated mothers are better at giving their children the right kind of stimulation for their age, according to Ariel Kalil of the University of Chicago. To simplify, they play with their toddlers more and organise their teenagers.
The Adventures of Supermom
“I talk to him constantly,” says Lacey, another Bethesda mother, of her two-year-old son. “As we go through the day, I talk about what we’re doing. I try to make the regular tasks interesting and fun, like going to the grocery store.” Her older son, who is five, devours maths apps and asks his mother questions about arithmetic. At the weekend the family might go to the American History Museum or the Washington Zoo or a park.
Cabin Creek parents love their children just as much as Bethesda parents do, but they read to them less. It doesn’t help that they are much more likely to be raising their children alone, like Melissa. Only 9% of American women with college degrees who gave birth in the past year are unmarried; for those who failed to finish high school the figure is 61%. Two parents have more time between them than one.
And even two-parent families in Cabin Creek tend to be more stretched than those in Bethesda. Sarah, another Cabin Creek mom, has a sick mother and a husband who was injured in a coal mine. Her three boys, two of whom make it a point of pride to be on the naughty kids list at school, exhaust her. She helps them with their homework and reads to them fairly regularly, but often just lets them watch television. “Dora the Explorer” is somewhat educational, she says: “It’s got Spanish in it.”
Children with at least one parent with a graduate degree score roughly 400 points higher (out of 2,400) on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (a test used for college entrance) than children whose parents did not finish high school. This is a huge gap. It is hard to say how much it owes to nurture and how much to nature. Both usually push in the same direction. Brainy parents pass on their genes, including the ones that predispose their children to be intelligent. They also create an environment at home that helps that intelligence to blossom, and they buy houses near good schools.
…
The two aspects of parenting that seem to matter most are intellectual stimulation (eg, talking, reading, answering “why?” questions) and emotional support (eg, bonding with infants so that they grow up confident and secure). Mr Reeves and his Brookings colleague Kimberly Howard take a composite measure of these things called the HOME scale (Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment) and relate it to how well children do in later life, using data from a big federal survey of those born in the 1980s and 1990s.
The results are striking. Some 43% of mothers who dropped out of high school were ranked among the bottom 25% of parents, as were 44% of single mothers. The gap between high- and middle-income parents was small, but the gap between the middle and the bottom was large: 48% of parents in the lowest income quintile were also among the weakest parents, compared with 16% of the parents in the middle and 5% in the richest (see chart 2).
Likewise, the difference between high-school dropouts and the rest was far greater than the gap between high-school and college graduates. Mr Reeves and Ms Howard estimate that if moms in the bottom fifth were averagely effective parents, 9% more of their kids would graduate from high school, 6% fewer would become teen parents and 3% fewer would be convicted of a crime by the age of 19.
Read the whole thing here. The story goes on at length about suggestions for improving the lives of children brought up in social and financial poverty. Some of these are just more of the same failed top-down ideas (universal pre-school, more social workers.) But the most useful strategy of all is to allow the laws of natural community organization to work again by ending the Drug War, the police war on poor citizens, the overregulation that makes it hard to start and keep a small business, and the paternalistic “assistance” that prevents natural formation of strong families.
The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game.Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.
Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”
Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.
There’s a natural human tendency to stereotype: to combine cultural and real-life knowledge about correlations between superficial, easily-observed characteristics and traits we cannot immediately observe, like trustworthiness, tendency to violence, and intelligence.
Famously, Jesse Jackson once commented on his own use of stereotypes about young black men: “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved…. After all we have been through. Just to think we can’t walk down our own streets, how humiliating.”
This is a good example of use of heuristics — simple rules for deciding which may not always be correct but help shortcut the time to decide. Mr. Jackson, like everyone else, discovers he is a little bit racist — he is using a stereotype about his own race to decide whether to be afraid about the man coming up behind him. He may decide to take evasive action if the young man is black, and not if it turns out to be a middle-aged, well-dressed white man.
And who can blame him? While there is some chance the white man is a mugger, the chance is far less than if it is a young black man in urban thug-style clothing. Note that it is not only race that people use to jump to conclusions on limited evidence — clothing, mannerisms, age, and walk also come into play.
Prejudice and stereotyping can harm those whose superficial characteristics are associated with negative judgments. The young black man who is hurt when others cross the street to avoid him is the least of the problems — the black man or woman who applied for a retail clerk’s job in the South in the 1950s would often be discouraged; even employers who were not themselves prejudiced would assume some of their customers would be, and hire the less qualified white person instead.
The civil rights movement, and other movements of the 1960s and on, tried to eliminate the harmful effects of prejudice and stereotyping by teaching everyone to internally reject stereotypes as a basis for making decisions. This has worked so well that now when we say the word “stereotype” it is assumed that what we are talking about is false and damaging. This makes us Better People because we do not treat others badly because of some irrelevant superficial characteristic, but may have gone too far.
The problem with today’s politically correct rejection of the entire idea of stereotypes is that cultural stereotypes and generalizations are actually remarkably accurate in many areas. Social scientists who study them have reams of data showing this, but rejection of stereotypes is now an article of faith impervious to any contrary data. So we all still make judgments based on stereotypes internally but pretend that we don’t! Jesse Jackson’s moment of shame was in realizing the inconsistency. And well-meaning white people in the same circumstance will try to avoid taking any action which might be seen as implying they fear the young black man — hoping to avoid hurting an innocent person’s feelings. Which can lead to being mugged.
Lee Jussim, Ph.D, writing for Psychology Today,discusses this problem:
I suspect that, when many of you saw the title, you assumed I would be discussing how inaccurate stereotypes are impervious to change in the face of data. That is how social scientists have been discussing stereotypes for nearly 100 years.
Nope!
But we agree that being impervious to data is a bad thing, right? Liberals routinely rail against conservatives’ supposedly anti-scientific stands, right? Liberals, in sharp contrast, don’t ever oppose data and science, do they?
Great! In that case, you will be interested to discover that:
1. Stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable effects in all of social psychology
2. The fact that this is true has had almost no effect on the frequency with which social scientists claim, assume, or imply that stereotypes are inaccurate.
You probably find this hard to believe. After all, you have been told, over and over and over and over, that stereotypes are inaccurate. This has been part and parcel of the liberal project of fighting oppression and prejudice.
…
Stereotype accuracy is an empirical question. You can claim anything you want. Your interpretation of your experience is whatever you believe. But combating the well-established flaws and limitations of subjective interpretation of experience is exactly why science was developed.
Which gets us to, not your personal experience, but the science. What has scientific research found about the accuracy of stereotypes?
Stereotypes are (Usually) More Valid Than Most Social Psychological Hypotheses
Over the last 40 years, there has been a ton of research assessing the accuracy of stereotypes. The findings are astonishing, at least if you have bought the longstanding line that “stereotypes are inaccurate.”
The following data are from my recent review of this area of research (Jussim et al, 2014). It gives the proportion of results for various types of research that are greater than correlations of .30 and .50, respectively, because Richard et al (2003) provided these figures for all of social psychology, which then constitutes an excellent standard of comparison.
Which is more accurate, social psychology or social stereotypes?
Percent of Correlations that are
>.30
>.50
All of Social Psychology
24%
5%
Race, consensual stereotype accuracy
95%
95%
Race, personal stereotype accuracy
47%
18%
Gender, consensual stereotype accuracy
100%
94%
Gender, personal stereotype accuracy
79%
58%
These results are based on over 20 studies of stereotype accuracy conducted by multiple independent researchers and laboratories (see Jussim, 2012; Jussim et al, in press, for reviews). Results for other stereotypes (e.g., age, occupation, politics, etc.), are similar. As such, stereotype accuracy is far more replicable than many far more famous “effects” in social psychology (large effects are inherently more replicable, but understanding why that must be involves an arcane statistical discussion that is beyond the scope of this blog entry).
To be sure, there is some evidence of inaccuracy in stereotypes, especially national stereotypes of personality. There is also good evidence that political ideologues exaggerate each others’ views. Nonetheless, the BIG picture remains intact: Stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable findings in all of social psychology.
Why, then, have social scientists been declaring and decrying the inaccuracy of stereotypes for nearly a century? The data don’t now, and never have, supported such a claim.
Social scientists don’t go around making stuff up to advance their leftish narratives of oppression. Do they?
Disclaimer II: I AM a social scientist. There are LOTS of other social scientists out there who go to great lengths and do a good job of not allowing their politics to distort their science. I admit that making claims that are unhinged from data does no credit to our field and, if taken out of context, can lead people to dismiss the field’s value and importance. However, the solution to bad science is not to kill science. It is to pressure and advocate for, and push, enhance, and support good science. Such efforts, which include exposing bad science, should count as a CREDIT to the social sciences.
So, my liberal friends who embrace science, you are now outraged at the anti-scientific stand of all those who deny the scientific evidence demonstrating stereotype accuracy, right?
His data show that groups have averaged stereotypical beliefs that are remarkably accurate, while individuals are less accurate but still doing much better than chance.
The takeaway lesson: the first-order reaction against stereotypes, while very useful in correcting poor treatment of individuals, is far too simple. A second-order or even more nuanced understanding of the mechanism of stereotyping can salvage their utility while still removing most of the harm to individuals.
The Enlightenment values of individualism and justice are best served by recognizing the real world utility of heuristics based on superficial factors, while always doing more to determine true characteristics of individuals in truly important matters. All of us are judged constantly and may do more or less well in interacting with others based on superficial characteristics and snap judgments; this cannot be completely removed. Those who wish to gain the trust of others will always need to signal their reliability. It may not be fair, but it is human.
Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations
The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game.Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.
Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”
Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.
Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations