Ben Guest’s Blog

Gladwell

nobody@vox.com(Mississippi Teacher Corps) — Mon, 12 May 2008 10:12:58 -0700

Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favorite authors. He has a great ability to assimilate and explain complex data. I've been reading through some of his past New Yorker articles. Here are three of my favorites, with quotes:

The Taboo of Race and Sports:

To use track as an example-since track is probably the purest measure of athletic ability-Africans recorded fifteen out of the twenty fastest times last year in the men's ten-thousand- metre event. In the five thousand metres, eighteen out of the twenty fastest times were recorded by Africans. In the fifteen hundred metres, thirteen out of the twenty fastest times were African, and in the sprints, in the men's hundred metres, you have to go all the way down to the twenty-third place in the world rankings-to Geir Moen, of Norway-before you find a white face. There is a point at which it becomes foolish to deny the fact of black athletic prowess, and even more foolish to banish speculation on the topic. Clearly, something is going on. The question is what.

The Rise of the SUV:

According to Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills... At a focus group in Los Angeles "an elegant woman in the group said that she needed her full-sized Lexus LX 470 to drive up over the curb and onto lawns to park at large parties in Beverly Hills. " One of Ford's senior marketing executives was even blunter: "The only time those S.U.V.s are going to be off-road is when they miss the driveway at 3 a.m."

Is violent crime a choice?

In his confession to the police, after he detailed every step of the synagogue attack, Franklin was asked if there was anything he'd like to say. He stared thoughtfully over the top of his glasses. There was a long silence. "I can't think of anything," he answered. Then he was asked if he felt any remorse. There was another silence. "I can't say that I do," he said. He paused again, then added, "The only thing I'm sorry about is that it's not legal."

"What's not legal?"

Franklin answered as if he'd just been asked the time of day: "Killing Jews."

Bonus: Gladwell speaking, about the way genius works, at the 2007 New Yorker Festival.

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College Football, Revenue, Stanley Kaplan, and Consumer Reports

nobody@vox.com(Mississippi Teacher Corps) — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 14:01:04 -0800

What do all of those have in common? They are all topics of interesting articles that I have read in the last few days.

Should college football players be paid? That is the question asked by Michael Lewis in his NYT piece (and a question that is worthy of its own blog post, which I shall try to produce in the next few days). Favorite quote:

College football’s best trick play is its pretense that it has nothing to do with money, that it’s simply an extension of the university’s mission to educate its students. Were the public to view college football as mainly a business, it might start asking questions. For instance: why are these enterprises that have nothing to do with education and everything to do with profits exempt from paying taxes? Or why don’t they pay their employees?

How much revenue does college athletics generate in Mississippi? Some answers here:

Southern Miss football brings in about $2 million per game, adding to the $52 million annual economic impact of university athletics to the Hattiesburg area, said Scott Carr, associate athletics director for Southern Miss.

Does the SAT measure a fixed intelligence level? Malcolm Gladwell's well-researched piece answers that question by starting with Stanley Kaplan. This article also touches on the off and on talent debate that has taken place in these pages:

Some years ago, a group headed by the British psychologist John Sloboda conducted a study of musical talent. The group looked at two hundred and fifty-six young musicians, between the ages of ten and sixteen, drawn from élite music academies and public-school music programs alike. They interviewed all the students and their parents and recorded how each student did in England’s national music-examination system, which, the researchers felt, gave them a relatively objective measure of musical ability. “What we found was that the best predictor of where you were on that scale was the number of hours practiced,” Sloboda says. This is, if you think about it, a little hard to believe. We conceive musical ability to be a “talent”—people have an aptitude for music—and so it would make sense that some number of students could excel at the music exam without practicing very much. Yet Sloboda couldn’t find any. The kids who scored the best on the test were, on average, practicing eight hundred per cent more than the kids at the bottom. “People have this idea that there are those who learn better than others, can get further on less effort,” Sloboda says. “On average, our data refuted that. Whether you’re a dropout or at the best school, where you end up can be predicted by how much you practice.”

Finally, "Success Without Ads" is the title of a nice piece about the magazine Consumer Reports, of which my father, Jim Guest, is President. CR is proving to be one of the only print magazines/newspapers to be financially successful (knock wood) online. This accomplishment is even more impressive in that CR does not accept advertisement (online or in print) of any kind.

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IQ and Race

nobody@vox.com(Mississippi Teacher Corps) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 16:02:43 -0800

I've read two good articles recently.

The first is Malcolm Gladwell's piece on IQ and race. This fits in nicely with the debate I've been having about talent, and whether people are born with certain gifts (more thoughts on that debate, and on Gladwell's piece, here). The Gladwell piece is primarily about the Flynn Effect, which shows that IQ scores have been rising, across the board, over the last century. To quote:

"And, if we go back even farther, the Flynn effect puts the average I.Q.s of the schoolchildren of 1900 at around 70, which is to suggest, bizarrely, that a century ago the United States was populated largely by people who today would be considered mentally retarded."

The second piece is a NYT profile of Roland Fryer, a 27 year old African-American who grew up dirt poor in Florida. After embarking on a criminal career in his early teens, Fryer had two close brushes with the law. He is now an economics professor at Harvard and a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard (sometimes called "Harvard's Harvard"). His research focuses on race and intelligence (and is, in this way, linked to Gladwell). Fryer's goal as an economist: to create a unified theory of Black America. The profile is written by Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics fame.

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