Apt. 11D

No One Makes Passes at Girls Wearing Glasses

Sunday morning, Steve and I were drinking coffee and reading the Times. I put down the house porn in the Real Estate Section and grabbed the Week in Review away from Steve, when I spotted the headline "The M.R.S. and the Ph.D." I thought the article was going to be about all the women Ph.D.s actually finding tenure track jobs. Ha! I spent too much time last week talking to over educated, under employed friends last week. 

Stephanie Coontz writes a column, disputing Kate Bolick, who wrote that American women face “a radically shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be ‘marriageable’ men — those who are better educated and earn more than they do.”

Coontz looks at surveys of men in 1939 and in 2008 and finds that the Modern Man places higher importance on "education" and "favorable social status" than did the Old Fogey Man. Sadly, Modern Man also places more importance on looks, so he's not really all that evolved. Old Fogey Man wanted a woman who had good health and could cook. You couldn't send out for Chinese Food in the old days, and antibiotics were hard to come by. 

I'm not sure what to say about the Coontz article. She conflates intelligence, education, and income, which was terribly confusing. Also, it's weird to compare a guy from 1939 and 2008, without considering the larger context. 

I did like her concluding idea: 

For a century, women have binged on romance novels that encouraged them to associate intimidation with infatuation; it’s no wonder that this emotional hangover still lingers. Valentine’s Day is a perfect time to reject the idea that the ideal man is taller, richer, more knowledgeable, more renowned or more powerful. The most important predictor of marital happiness for a woman is not how much she looks up to her husband but how sensitive he is to her emotional cues and how willing he is to share the housework and child-care. And those traits are often easier to find in a low-key guy than a powerhouse.

Being 16 years away from the dating world, I'm not the best person to give dating advice. OK, I'll give marriage advice.  Based on an unscientific review of my friends and family, it seems that in the marriages that work, the couple has to have something in common. It might be education, or maybe it's a similar culture or values. I guess there are guys who are intimidated by a spouse with higher income, but in those few cases, income-envy is part of a larger problem of general assholicness. 

There are people who are intimidated by high status professions or prestigious degrees. And there are people are people who look down on lower status professions and the lack of prestigious degrees. These prejudices not only affect dating prospects, but also friendships. To avoid these uncomfortable situations, we sort ourselves out into separate circles, which is a bad, bad thing. Or we end up "playing dumb" to avoid seeming snobby -- also a bad, bad thing. 

The issues of "marrying down" or "marrying up" is really part of a bigger problem. We're not "friending down" or "friending up" either. I wish we could get past this whole thing. 

DIY Fail and Guilt

We moved three months ago, and we're still not settled. While this house isn't in the desperate straights as the first house that we bought, it still needs lots of work. The previous owners last decorated their home in the early 80s, so the shrubbery is overgrown, the walls are covered in country wallpaper, and the light fixtures are dusty and dated. 

When we moved in, Steve and I figured that we could do much of this work on our own. We like feeling self-sufficient. We also like saving money. So, even though the house is surrounded by towering oak trees, Steve spent his weekends raking leaves, rather than hiring a landscaper. I pulled out the old junk left in the basement and painted the walls with waterproof paint. I painted the living room. Steve changed out some old light fixtures.

Last week, I started pulling down the orange starred wallpaper off the dining room walls. After three evenings, I stripped about three feet of paper. The stuff was stuck on with super glue. And under the wallpaper, I found bumpy walls. Someone had put primer over old wallpaper glue. The walls needed to be skim coated with plaster. Sigh. Skim coating is outside of my pay grade. I called in Eddie the painter. 

So, Eddie and his guys are doing the dirty work for us. For four days, they've stripped and painted the dining room, the kitchen, the TV room, and the entrance way. This job would have taken us a year to do on our own, and it wouldn't have looked so good. I keep sneaking upstairs to take pictures of the before and after. (That purple in the dining room is primer. Today, they should paint the upper walls a light grey.)

As happy as we are with their work, we still feel a little guilty. Yes, we're saving time. Time that can be used to play with the kids and pitch article stories. And we can afford this. But we still feel spoiled. 

Down the block from us, a huge mansion is being built. Someone bought a house for $700,000 and then knocked it down to build a house the size of a small town. Every morning, twenty trucks are parked out in front to install the plumbing, granite counter tops, decorative woodwork, in-ground pool. They've been working six days a week, since we moved in at the end of August, and they are still not finished. 

Painting four rooms is not in the same league as the mansion project, but living in such close proximity to extreme wealth is frightening. We're the people who used to live in a cockroach covered apartment with a four floor walkup. That year when I owned one pair of shoes. We're struggling to remain ourselves with our DIY projects amidst all this insanity.

Because of the weird turn of the market, we were able to buy a wallpapered house on a block filled with the 1%, and we're still not at peace with it. So, I find myself googling directions on how to remove polyurethane from slate floors without hiring a contractor. 

Is There an Ivy League Advantage?

I attended a bare-bones state college in upstate New York. The buildings and dorms were constructed in the style of Cement Block Modern. The students were rough around the edges; many were first generation college kids from Long Island or upstate New York. One friend's dad was a cow farmer. Another's dad was in construction. Over the summers, my pals would go home to summer jobs that involved pool cleaning or making pizzas.

Occasionally, I would visit my high school pals who went to loftier institutions. The names of these schools had been proudly decalled onto the rear window of their parents' BMWs. I remember visiting my friend, Sue, at Harvard. A group of guys wearing tuxes strode through the campus confidently. She introduced me to her friends who had famous parents. Everybody looked more beautiful and polished than my ragtag group of friends at SUNY-Binghamton who had perfected grunge-wear a few years before Nirvana.

With the release of The Social Network, many are debating the Ivy League experience. Is Harvard really a land of elite WASP privilege? Nathan Heller at Slate says no and that the movie got it all wrong. Maybe Sorkin overstated the WASP-ish world at Harvard, but there is still something about those schools that breeds privilege. Heather Horn at Atlantic Wire points to a chart that shows that there is a correlation between income and attendance at higher ranked colleges.

Without any direct experience at Harvard, other than a weekend visit or two, I really can't weigh in on this discussion, but I find it fascinating.

Affirmative Action for Snookie and "The Situation"

In today's New York Times, Ross Douthat writes about recent studies of admission practices at elite colleges. These studies show that lower-class whites aren't getting the fat envelope that promises a spot an elite school at the same rate as wealthy white kids.

For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.

While affirmative action programs have helped lower income minority students, there aren't the same practices set in place to help lower income whites. In fact, wealthy white kids have an advantage over less wealthy white kids. Why? Legacies?

Under Water

So, let's talk about Megan's post and Andrew's article. I read Megan's post last week when there were only 4 comments.There are 290 comment right now. (BTW, there's a laura in the comment section at Megan's blog. Not me.)

So, Andrews writes about how he, an economics reporter for the New York Times, managed to get so far in debt that his house will be foreclosed on as soon Chase gets around to it. He says that it was too easy to get money and that he and his new wife had trouble spending within their means. For them, being middle class meant a house, J.Crew clothes and a vacation, but a reporter's salary + child support payments for a previous marriage = not much leftover.

Megan describes the article as brave. It was. But it was also a tad annoying. I shop the clearance rack. We plug in every cent we spend into Quicken. My kids wear shoes from Payless. We drive one car.  I find it difficult to summon up pity for this guy. Nobody should feel entitled to J. Crew sweaters.

And yes, I guess it is difficult to be in a profession that is high status, but not well compensated. Brooks describes this as Status Income Disequilibrium. Megan says that this is a real phenomenon.

...unless you are among that happy breed of writers who is married to someone with a high-paying job, or who has a trust fund, you feel it keenly.  Everyone you write about makes more than you.  Most of the people you know make more than you.  And you come to feel that shopping at the farmer's market, travelling to Europe, drinking good coffee, are minimum necessities.  Your house is small, your furniture is shabby, and you can't even really afford to shop at Whole Foods.  Yet you're at the top of your field, working for one of the world's top media outlets.  This can't be so.

Yes, it does suck to be really good at something, have a great deal of recognition, work really hard, but be less well compensated than your plumber. Academics gripe about this all the time. In fact, my family has a talent for seeking out these high status/low salary jobs  -- journalism, academia, publishing. Still, you have to get over it. Get some new friends who are poorer than you. Befriend grad students.

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a dad on my kid's soccer team. He is a contractor who has barely had any work in two years. A Vietnam vet, who served his country and built homes for people is having a tough time putting food on the table for his five kids. He's ticked off, because he can't afford the taxes in town, illegal immigrants are doing his job for a tenth of the price, and nobody seems to care that boys are coming back from Iraq without their limbs.

I was reading Marx to my theory students recently. Marx describes the transition between economic systems as rough. There are also people who benefit from the old orders who lose out as the transition happens. I'm not a big Marxist and never got into his stages of historical materialism, but I do wonder if there is a transition going on.

In the mean time, people, don't run up big credit card debt.

Feeling Poor

The New York Times had an article this week on how financial CEOs couldn't possibly afford their lifestyles on $500,000 -- the proposed cap on their pay. It's a fun piece ticking off the cost of private schools, nannies, co-op maintenance fees, personal trainers, and gowns for charity gigs. And the article forgot other big ticket items like summer camp and tutoring. It fits in well with all the stories about John Thain's ridiculous office remodeling. It's fun to laugh at those dumb, rich people who are whimpering about poverty.

Of course, it's hard to maintain even a middle life style in Manhattan for under $200,000. To have access to good public schools, you have to have the right zip code. Daycare is triple the cost of suburban daycare. Rent for an apartment with laundry and a washing machine is more than most people's mortgage.

Yes, it's hard to summon up sympathy for the urban, middle class. Just move to the suburbs, people.

But a lot of us are going to have to live on less this year. Without Steve's bonus, we're going to be more frugal this year. It won't be a huge change for us, because we didn't use his bonus money to buy things. Rather, we've been repaying school loans, building up some semblance of a retirement plan, and putting a new roof on the house. The loans are now under control and the roof doesn't leak anymore, so that won't be an issue this year. Still, we're holding back on some purchases that we wouldn't have worried about before. I'm looking for a new armchair on Craig's List rather than Crate and Barrel.

If things get worse though, we will have to cut back on things that would really hurt -- gym membership, Jonah's summer camp, date night dinners. If we lost out on that stuff, we would feel poor. Because poverty isn't a number; it's making sacrifices on things that feel normal.

What would make you feel poor?

(Just to clarify here. Feeling poor is very different from being objectively poor with no running water or food. This is just middle class chatter here. Nobody is looking for sympathy for not being to afford gym membership.)

The Problem With Daschle

In my town, we have a powerful Planning Board. If you want to put an extension on your house or add an extra bathtub in a bathroom, you have to go before them with plans, an architect, a lawyer, and lots of ass kissing. This really rubs my town of libertarian teachers, cops, and contractors the wrong way. They feel that if they want to put an extra bathtub in their bathroom, it is nobody's fucking business.

A year ago, a former mayor who sits on the Planning Board ran into some financial problems. The talk of the town was that he was forced to use the church food pantry. He decided that he would raise money, by selling his tiny backyard to a developer. The Planning Board that freaks out about two tubs in a bathroom, let the former mayor turn his property into a shanty town.

My libertarian teachers, cops, and contractors grumbled about this a lot. They called the deal, dirty. But they sucked it up. That's the way it is, they thought.

David Brooks' column generated a lot of heat in the blogosphere yesterday. People either loved it or hated it. I dunno. I thought it was kind of funny and didn't take away any ideological subtext.

Clearly, there's a backlash going on against years of double standards. It's not a partisan thing. We all know that both sides are guilty of this stuff.

People are also sick of making $40,000 a year, while others are making $4m a year. It's annoying. So, there's two long standing grievances -- political double standards and rich people.

The tax problem didn't sink Daschle. It sounded as if it was a genuine mistake and a lot of people have made those types of errors. The problem was the amount of the error -- $100,000. That's more than most people in the country make all year.

He made a few million working as a lobbyist, after he left government. Again, this is nothing new. Hugh Heclo and the Iron Triangle. This is what politicians do after they leave office. They advise businesses about how to get the legislation passed. They give speeches. And they make a whole lot more money than they did when they were in office. They ALL do that. Bill has made a ton of money giving speeches in Dubai.

So, I do think that Brooks was clever, but wrong yesterday. This class backlash going on right now, isn't coming from DC. It's coming from America. They are sick of double standards and their average paychecks. The DC types might be slightly irritated that their college roommates were making a fortune on Wall Street, but they aren't that upset. They know they can always cash in later. No, DC is just responding to the new message of their constituencies.

We're moving into an Era of the New Modesty. No more Viking stoves and houses in Hamptons. No more corporate jets and trust fund brats. And there's some muscle behind the New Modesty. The bail-out money is being closely watched. Senate confirmations are putting the rich on trial. And this is a good thing. The teachers and cops and contractors are having their say.

My Son, The Doctor

I grew up in a very affluent town in New Jersey. My parents moved to a little house on the wrong side of tracks, so we could attend the fancy public school in town. But with their blue collar roots and my dad's professor salary, my parents never really fit in. My mom would come home from PTA meetings with stories about the strutting moms who would brag about their son, the doctor and their daughter, the attorney. The strutters had big plans for their other kids to go to Harvard and choose the doctor/lawyer route also. By eighth grade, most of my classmates had memorized Barron's list of elite schools and had begun SAT test prep classes.

Well, doctors and lawyers are no longer the blue chip professions. It seems that the definition of "prestige" has shifted. "Especially among young people, professional status is now inextricably linked to ideas of flexibility and creativity, concepts alien to seemingly everyone but art students even a generation ago."

The Internet has also helped kill the status of doctors, because they no longer have a monopoly on information. Anyone can log onto WEBMD and come armed to their appointment with print outs of the latest studies and reports.

The article really overstates matters. A good number of my college students are applying to law school next year. You don't hear too many kids saying that they are planning on launching a computer start up after graduation. The path towards being a lawyer or a doctor is more well traveled and less risky.

Still, this small shift is very interesting. I'm amused that the snobby PTA moms in my old town can't brag as loudly as they used to. I love that prestige is now connected with flexible living, rather 80 hours in an office. I love that creativity and entrepreneurship is prestigious.

Question of the Day: What careers would you steer my college students towards?

Door Knobs and Plastic Santas

Last Friday, as I waited for Ian to be released from school, I chatted with the other parents by the playground. One woman said that her cousin was a landscaper who was making a fortune decorating the houses in a nearby, rich town. He charged $20,000 for the deluxe treatment, which involved putting up lights on the house, setting up the trees indoors, and then taking everything down after Christmas. We laughed for a while at those crazy rich people until the little guys came running out of the side door.

I guess that shelling out big bucks for glow-in-the-dark homes is not that unusual, because two days later the Times reported on it. They really do have to be the first on the block to report these important tidbits.

Among his more ambitious customers was a man who lighted virtually everything on his property in Bethel, Conn. Not only did Mr. Fancher’s company light the house, the garage and virtually every tree, but it also created a display over a waterfall so that it looked as if the lights were spilling over with the water.

“It would take six guys about four to five weeks to do his whole place, inside and out,” Mr. Fancher said, noting that it cost the customer at least $20,000 for the display and nearly $2,000 more a month to light it. “The first year we blew the transformer out because it was too many lights.”

The Home Section today reports on perhaps the craziest rich person yet. The Times alternates between telling his story with its usual adoration and expressing some concern that this man may be off his rocker. This guy spent months looking for the perfect nickel plated door knobs for his mansion in New Jersey.

So it is with a great sense of expectation that one awaits a look at the latches of his English Tudor-style home and horse farm — the metallic tail that wagged the architectural dog, as it were. The anticipation is heightened by the knowledge that each of them required three different companies and four different craftsmen: designer, caster, machinist and fitter-finisher.

At last, they are unveiled: a clean silvery line, devoid of squiggles. And as so often happens, life is like a song — in this case, “Is That All There Is?”

Oh, Mr. Baxter, that’s it? This simple hunk of hardware took months to create and was the impetus for building a $3 million foundry?

As the gap between rich and poor expands, our only consolation is that we're left with these excellent stories.

Leveling The Playing Field

I really enjoyed Sunday's magazine article on the education gap. It brought together a number of interests of mine - education politics, parenting, class. The article begins with NCLB's goal of improving education in lower income areas, of ending the "soft bigotry of low expectations." No matter what you think about the implementation of NCLB, you must admit that is a worthy goal.

The article points to research by Annette Lareau and other sociologists who find that parenting styles of working class families has an impact on their later success in schools. Poor and working class kids enter Kindergarten at a huge disadvantage from middle class kids and they never catch up.

Aware of these deficits, a number of charter school leaders are working to give those poor kids the tools to succeed that they weren't receiving at home. They increased time in school and are teaching them how to behave in a classroom. The KIPP schools have been particularly successful and that model is being replicated across the country. Scaling up these small schools led by charismatic leaders is always tricky, but the new KIPP schools are also managing to bring up the test scores of new groups of poor students. These KIPP programs are significant, because they show that schools can make a difference.

Why aren't the KIPP schools being replicated in public schools? Why was NCLB so ineffective in bringing up test scores? Politics.

NCLB has relied on sticks and tests to bring up poor schools. The philosophy was that poor kids aren't doing well, because their teachers are lazy and stupid. Force the teachers to get advanced degrees and not waste time doing fluffy stuff in the classrooms. Without funding and other support for these schools, kids are still doing poorly on the national tests. To save face, the education department allowed the states to define their own weak standards to match the poor test results.

NCLB also didn't bring about the fundamental restructuring of public schools that is needed to really bring about change. KIPP schools succeed, because that they bring in the best teachers from Teach For America and lengthen the school year. These measures would also have to be applied to public schools to bring about major change. NCLB didn't do that, but any federal program that tried to do such things would face strong resistance. The teachers' unions would fight lengthening the school year and changing hiring practices. Middle class parents would bristle at the tough measures that are so effective in the KIPP schools. There aren't enough good teachers to go around. Tax payers resist sending more money going to schools, particularly to ones not in their backyard.

Education is the great promise for creating a society where people are able to succeed not based on their on their background or privilege, but one where people succeed based on their ability and hard work. The education gap is a major roadblock in creating a just society. The failure of NCLB shouldn't deter us from working harder to change things.

UPDATE: For a nice summary of the article, check out a new blog, The Psychology of Education.