How the Time of Day Affects Productivity: Evidence from School Schedules

Abstract—Increasing the efficiency of the school system is a primary focus of policymakers. I analyze how the time of day affects students’ productivity and if efficiency gains can be obtained by rearranging the order of tasks they perform throughout the school day. Using a panel data set of nearly 2 million sixth- through eleventh-grade students in Los Angeles County, I perform within-teacher, class type, and student estimation of the time-of-day effect on students’ learning as measured by GPA and state test scores. I find that given a school start time, students learn more in the morning than later in the school day. Having a morning instead of afternoon math or English class increases a student’s GPA by 0.072 (0.006) and 0.032 (0.006), respectively. A morning math class increases state test scores by an amount equivalent to increasing teacher quality by one-fourth standard deviation or half of the gender gap. Rearranging school schedules can lead to increased academic performance. 

I. Introduction 

Companies, schools, hospitals, and other organizations are always looking for innovations that increase productivity with little to no increase in inputs. History has proven that simple innovations such as assembly lines, crop rotation, washing hands, changes in incentive structures, and other simple managerial practices have been successful at increasing efficiency. By using such methods, companies increase their profits, hospitals improve patient outcomes, and schools produce more academically prepared students. 

In this paper, I propose a simple innovation that schools can use to improve student performance: rearranging schedules to take advantage of time-of-day effects. I use detailed, studentlevel panel data from the Los Angeles Unified School District for 1.8 million student-year observations. The data include the complete class schedule, grades, and California Standards Test (CST) scores for all sixth- through eleventh-grade students from 2003 to 2009. 

The fundamental challenge in estimating time-of-day effects is that class assignments are not random. Certain teachers or subjects might selectively be placed at certain times of day. The panel nature of the data allows me to control for individual characteristics, and the main results are estimated within teacher, class type, and student. The data allow previous years’ GPA and test scores to be used as clear falsification tests. These falsification tests, with the notable exception of English GPA, also support a causal interpretation of the results. I find that having math in the first two periods of the school day instead of the last two periods increases the math GPA of students by 0.072 (0.006) and increases math CST scores by 0.021 (0.003) standard deviations. These effect sizes are equivalent to increasing teacher quality by one-fourth standard deviation or half of the gender gap (Rockoff, 2004; Hyde et al., 2008). Similarly, having English in the morning increases the English GPA of students by 0.032 (0.006); however, there is no increase in their English CST score. There are no clear systematic differences in the time-of-day effect between boys and girls, older and younger students, students with high- and low-educated parents, or low- and high-performing students. The time-of-day effect may be caused by changes in teachers’ teaching quality, changes in students’ learning ability, or differential student attendance. The time-of-day effect may be interpreted as differential productivity during different parts of the day due to the circadian rhythm; stamina effects, with decreasing productivity the longer a student is at school; or school structure effects such as lower productivity after a lunch break. 

by Nolan G. Pope, The Revew of Economics and Statistics |  Read more (pdf):

 

No Evidence of Aloe Vera Found in the Aloe Vera at Wal-Mart, Target, CVS
Image:Wikipedia
[ed. Surprise, surprise]

René Magritte, Les Moyens d’Existence, 1969.
via:

Affluenza Anonymous

Tall, lean, and lantern-jawed, Jamison Monroe Jr. could pass for a third Winklevoss brother. His childhood in Texas, as he recalls it, was a series of misadventures with addiction: pretending to have ADHD in ninth grade to get Adderall; getting booted from his Houston prep school; being arrested five times and cycling through four rehabs, all with no real effect. He was a spoiled rich kid, the namesake of a prominent Houston financier. “I had such low self-esteem and such severe depression that drugs and alcohol worked,” Monroe says. Until, of course, they didn’t. “I did self-harm, cutting myself, burning myself, contemplating suicide. Plus a lot more cocaine, a lot more drinking, blacking out a lot more. Everything just got progressively worse and worse.”

Even at his life’s darkest moments, young Jamison had something available to him that thousands of other people don’t: seemingly limitless access to wealth. Despite going through a divorce, his parents could afford to help him through his DUIs and expulsions and send him anywhere in the world to get better. In 2006, after a host of false starts and detours, including a therapeutic wilderness program, he found the right place for him—a 30-day, $2,200-a-day program in Malibu with a full team of specialists drilling down into the root causes of his addictions. “I had a primary therapist, I had a family therapist, I had a recovery counselor, I had a spiritual therapist,” Monroe says. Slipping easily into the patois of recovery, he explains that the real culprit behind his drug use was a lack of self-worth that all the money in the world couldn’t help him overcome; all that overflowing privilege, he suggests, may have been part of the problem. “The focus was on my negative self-beliefs, which stem from early childhood—this feeling of not being good enough.”

When he emerged from the program he was 25, with no college degree, no career, and no obvious prospects. Six months later, Monroe came up with a startup idea. He went to his father and asked for the money to open a drug rehab facility of his own. It would have been comical if it weren’t also poignant: What do you do if you’re a young, rich screw-up who wants to help other young, rich screw-ups? Ask Dad to buy you a rehab.

Jamison Monroe Sr. let his son down gently. “It’s not happening at this point,” he said. But what both understood, after so much exposure to so many addiction treatment services, was that opening a rehab center in America is practically as easy as opening a fast-food franchise. From the research he’d done since getting out of rehab, Monroe knew that of the 10,000 or so behavioral health-care providers in this country, more than 90 percent are single operators, mom and pops. A large number of those are started by people in recovery themselves. You don’t need to be a doctor to start one; you just have to hire a qualified staff.

One more thing made the rehab business appealing: The demand for treatment constantly overwhelms supply. So many providers are springing up so quickly that quality varies wildly, and regulation and oversight are spotty. Many rehabs avoid regulation entirely by being what the industry calls “sober houses,” where the license sits not with the residence but with the professionals doing the clinical work. Monroe spent a year starting a sober house for an investor friend, in part to prove to his father that he was serious. “When I showed him that I had basically broke even the first two months of operations with a shoestring budget, that gave him enough confidence to say, ‘OK, yes.’ ”

In the spring of 2009, a few months after Monroe’s 28th birthday, Newport Academy opened the doors of a six-bed rehab facility for adolescent girls in a spacious house on a residential street in the hills of Orange County, a horsy suburban neighborhood miles away from the more glitzy, Real Housewives-ready Laguna Beach. This house came to be known as the Ranch—a one-floor Spanish modern on 3 acres of arid California hillside. A few months later, Monroe opened a second location in another house not too far away, for six boys. These rehabs were more regulated than sober houses, licensed as group homes by the California Department of Social Services. Anxious to establish a serious pedigree, Monroe appointed David Smith, founder of the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics of San Francisco, as his medical director. Smith, who stayed four years before leaving Newport Academy in 2013, says he was glad to help start a facility that “demonstrates that you can successfully treat adolescents. For adolescents, just talking about how bad drugs are, that isn’t going to do it. They have to find positive alternatives.”

Monroe was alone in the Orange County marketplace, without any serious competition. “There were teen treatment centers in L.A.,” he says, “but you had 6 million people between Orange and San Diego counties and nothing for them.” He also stood out for the sheer opulence and pampering he provided his young patients. The Ranch’s nickname may make it seem rustic, approachable, back-to-the-land, but its parlor has four ornate chandeliers. Its grounds have a rose garden and stables. There’s an on-site gym for mixed martial arts, yoga, meditation, and dance and movement therapy. There’s art therapy, cinema therapy (watching and discussing movies), and an on-site chef offering organic nutritional counseling and cooking classes. Newport Academy’s staff-to-client ratio is 4 to 1—not counting the horses that each resident is given regular time with for equine-assisted psychotherapy. At $40,000 a month, there may be no other teenage rehab in America that, at first glance, seems more like Canyon Ranch. “What’s the price on a kid’s life?” Monroe said in an interview a few years ago about the cost of Newport Academy. “If you’re a parent of a child, there’s no price tag you can put on that.”

by Robert Kolker, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Simone Lueck

Mississippi Fred McDowell

[ed. This is not actually "Jesus on the Mainline", but "Mercy" instead. If you'd like to hear Mainline here's an excellent version by Ry Cooder.]

Moon Balls

I love potatoes in all their forms—even raw—but especially hash browns, latkes, French fries, baked potatoes, soufflés, puffs, pastries, and homefries. And vodka. Don’t get me started on vodka. Please don’t! The last time I imbibed potato liquor I wound up hiring a bicycle taxi to pedal five people to my mother’s house for a nightcap. Mom was delighted; the taxi-cyclist quite a bit less so.

The word “potato” comes from the Taíno word batata, which evolved to Spanish patata, and finally the English word “potato.” I much prefer the evocative French term of pomme de terre, meaning “apple of the earth.” This generous designation grants a higher status—the burnished apple with all its attendant glory.

Idioms involving potatoes are often pejorative: couch potato, small potatoes, dropped like a hot potato. My goal is to rectify this unfair politicization by becoming a literary Johnny Potato Eye, wandering America planting potatoes for the future of our species. This essay is my first salvo into the shallow furrows of potato meadows.

I consider myself fortunate to be alive during the renaissance of the lowly spud, the Solanum tuberosum, making me an avowed “tuberist.” The local Kroger, country stores, gas stations, and fancy food joints offer multiple variations of my favorite snack food. New chips proliferate more often than David Bowie reinvented himself. He never released a weak record, but awful chips abound: Dill Pickle, Hamburger, Steak & Eggs, Biscuit & Gravy, Chicken & Waffles, Home Run Hot Dog, Cajun Squirrel, Butter Garlic Scallop, and Bacon Mac & Cheese. Eager aficionados of chip culture have also endured baked chips, a dreadful concept. Low-fat chips entered the fray, typically including extra salt to make up for the lost oil, while unsalted chips are greasy as possum meat.

Potato chips have become so popular that manufacturers compete using clever marketing on the bag itself. The standard trope is a means to distinguish their product from all the others as if the chips were designed by a gourmet, carefully assembled from the best raw material. One common element is the insistence that the chips in question are cooked in single batches. After careful and intensive research, I’ve learned that all chips are cooked in single batches. It’s far too cost-prohibitive to make them one at a time. What’s important is how big the damn batch is! A 200-gallon vat of month-old oil is still a “single batch.” Equally irritating are trendy catchphrases such as “organic growing” and “sustainable harvest” and “ecologically sound.” These are potato chips, not luxury furs or koi fish.

(I once knew an actor who spent five thousand dollars for a koi pond, and another ten thousand for a single fish. He hosted a party to celebrate his acquisition, then watched in horror as a hawk dropped from the sky and took the fish. I laughed like the dickens and was never invited back to his house. Actors . . . They receive a great deal of attention for people who speak in sentences someone else writes for them.) (...)

The origin of the potato chip is shrouded in mystery, much like the invention of the wheel or the constuction of the ancient pyramids. Many legends have accrued. In 1973 the St. Regis Paper Company manufactured bags for potato chips. Part of their advertising campaign insisted that chips were originally known as “Saratoga Crunch Chips.” Three years later the Snack Food Association held its annual convention. At this austere gathering in Saratoga Springs, New York, it was decreed that a local restaurant, Moon Lake House, had invented the potato chip in 1853. According to an article in the Watertown Daily Times, the shipping and railroad robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt had complained to a waiter that his French fries were too thick. He sent them back to the kitchen. The irritated chef sliced his potatoes extremely thin, fried them to a crisp, and salted them. Vanderbilt loved them!

This anecdote is politely termed “apocryphal,” which traditionally means an outright fabrication. In the absence of corroboration, the story mainly serves to promote potato chips through association with a rich industrialist. Other people are credited with originating the chip, including the chef George Crum, his assistant Kate Wicks, manager Hiram Thomas, and restaurant owner Cary Moon. Despite the murky origin, it’s clear that Saratoga Springs is trying to claim the potato chip! This honor was challenged by a restaurateur in Troy, New York, who said “Old Flora,” an African-American cook, invented the snack. The feud became so heated that in August 1882, chip rival Cary Moon wrote a letter to the Troy Daily Times saying that he’d never heard of Flora and believed she was “base fabric of the brain.” (No one really knows what that means.) In 1893 the New York Times failed to set the matter straight with its assertion that the chip was invented by Cary Moon’s second wife, a woman with the phenomenally cool name of Freelove Moon.

Unfortunately for Saratoga Springs, Troy, Freelove, and Vanderbilt, the first recipe for the potato chip had already appeared thirty years earlier in an 1822 British cookbook: The Cook’s Oracle by William Kitchiner. Two years later, Mary Randolph published The Virginia House-Wife and included a recipe for potato chips.

by Chris Offutt, Oxford American | Read more:
Image: Detail from Miracle Chips®, 2010, by John Baldessari

Anthony Wallace, Food Stall Hong Kong
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Vancouver Gets Creative on Housing Crisis

His first campaign during the Vancouver mayoral election hinged on a deceptively simple idea: housing is a human right. In 2008, as he stumped through this city of some 600,000 people Gregor Robertson vowed to boost affordable housing and end homelessness.

Eight years later, Robertson is into his third term as mayor. Housing remains one of the top issues facing the city, but the battle has been recast. No longer is Robertson simply fighting to keep the city’s most vulnerable off the streets, he’s part of a global cadre of mayors squaring off against superheated housing markets to ensure that middle- and low-income earners have a place to call home.

The city’s struggle to inject affordability into a housing market that ranks as one of the world’s least affordable was laid bare last week, as Vancouver became the first jurisdiction in Canada to slap a tax on vacant homes.

“I wouldn’t have dreamed the crisis would get this intense, half a dozen years later,” Robertson told the Guardian in an interview at Vancouver’s city hall. “We’re dealing with global capital, national governments underinvesting in housing and provincial governments not doing enough. That leaves the cities dealing with chaos on our streets and people struggling to find a place to live.”

Housing in metro Vancouver, which includes the city of Vancouver and the greater region that surrounds it, now ranks among the least affordable in the world. In a city where the median household income in 2014 stood at about C$76,000 (US$56,000) a year, low interest rates and foreign capital – much of it from China – have pushed more than 90% of the city’s detached homes past C$1m (US$740,000) in value while homelessness has rocketed to record highs.

It’s a challenge echoed in cities around the world, from London to Sydney. But in Vancouver the pace of the transformation has been singular; one decade ago the percentage of million-dollar homes in the city stood at 19%. “We’re now in a different league,” said Robertson. “It’s been a big change, it’s pretty dramatic.” (...)

Mounting public anger and a chorus of concern emanating from the country’s banks forced a turnaround in recent months. In August, the province of British Columbia instituted a 15% tax on all home buyers in metro Vancouver who are not Canadian citizens or permanent residents. Soon after, the federal government said it would close a tax loophole believed to be used by some speculators.

The city of Vancouver has proposed its own measures in recent months, from a 1% tax on vacant homes starting next year – after an attempt to do so last year was stymied by the provincial government – and a crackdown on short-term rentals, such as those done through Airbnb.

by Ashifa Kassam, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Alamy

The View from Nowhere: Questions and Answers

(This Q and A was conducted by Jay Rosen, solo. He did the questions and the answers.)

Q. You’ve been using this phrase, “the view from nowhere,” for a while–

A. Yeah, since 2003…

Q. So what do you mean by it?

A. Three things. In pro journalism, American style, the View from Nowhere is a bid for trust that advertises the viewlessness of the news producer. Frequently it places the journalist between polarized extremes, and calls that neither-nor position “impartial.” Second, it’s a means of defense against a style of criticism that is fully anticipated: charges of bias originating in partisan politics and the two-party system. Third: it’s an attempt to secure a kind of universal legitimacy that is implicitly denied to those who stake out positions or betray a point of view. American journalists have almost a lust for the View from Nowhere because they think it has more authority than any other possible stance.

Q. Well, does it?

A. What authority there is in the position of viewlessness is unearned– like the snooty guy who, when challenged, says, “Madam, I have a PhD.” In journalism, real authority starts with reporting. Knowing your stuff, mastering your beat, being right on the facts, digging under the surface of things, calling around to find out what happened, verifying what you heard. “I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it.” Illuminating a murky situation because you understand it better than almost anyone. Doing the work! Having a track record, a reputation for reliability is part of it, too. But that comes from doing the work.

Q. Who gets credit for the phrase, “view from nowhere?”

A. The philosopher Thomas Nagel, who wrote a very important book with that title.

Q. What does it say?

A. It says that human beings are, in fact, capable of stepping back from their position to gain an enlarged understanding, which includes the more limited view they had before the step back. Think of the cinema: when the camera pulls back to reveal where a character had been standing and shows us a fuller tableau. To Nagel, objectivity is that kind of motion. We try to “transcend our particular viewpoint and develop an expanded consciousness that takes in the world more fully.”

But there are limits to this motion. We can’t transcend all our starting points. No matter how far it pulls back the camera is still occupying a position. We can’t actually take the “view from nowhere,” but this doesn’t mean that objectivity is a lie or an illusion. Our ability to step back and the fact that there are limits to it– both are real. And realism demands that we acknowledge both.

Q. So is objectivity a myth… or not?

A. One of the many interesting things Nagel says in that book is that “objectivity is both underrated and overrated, sometimes by the same persons.” It’s underrated by those who scoff at it as a myth. It is overrated by people who think it can replace the view from somewhere or transcend the human subject. It can’t.

Q. You are very critical of the View from Nowhere in journalism. It’s almost a derisive term for you.

A. That’s true. I let my disdain for it show.

Q. Why?

A. Because it has unearned authority in the American press. If in doing the serious work of journalism–digging, reporting, verification, mastering a beat–you develop a view, expressing that view does not diminish your authority. It may even add to it. The View from Nowhere doesn’t know from this. It also encourages journalists to develop bad habits. Like: criticism from both sides is a sign that you’re doing something right, when you could be doing everything wrong.

When MSNBC suspends Keith Olbermann for donating without company permission to candidates he supports– that’s dumb. When NPR forbids its “news analysts” from expressing a view on matters they are empowered to analyze– that’s dumb. When reporters have to “launder” their views by putting them in the mouths of think tank experts: dumb. When editors at the Washington Post decline even to investigate whether the size of rallies on the Mall can be reliably estimated because they want to avoid charges of “leaning one way or the other,” as one of them recently put it, that is dumb. When CNN thinks that, because it’s not MSNBC and it’s not Fox, it’s the only the “real news network” on cable, CNN is being dumb about itself.

In fact, American journalism is dumber than most journalists, who often share my sense of absurdity about these practices. A major reason we have a practice less intelligent than its practitioners is the prestige that the View from Nowhere still claims in American newsrooms. You asked me why I am derisive toward it. That’s why.

Q. Okay, but as I’m sure you know, smart journalists figured out a long time ago that complete objectivity is unattainable. They are quick to acknowledge that. They may say that it’s a goal worth striving for, but they are not unaware of the problems you mention. Many of them think fairness a better goal, anyway. Why go on and on about it, when these concessions have been made?

A. Well, part of the reason I started using the term View from Nowhere is to isolate the part I found troublesome. About that larger contraption, newsroom objectivity, I have a mixed view. When people talk about objectivity in journalism they have many different things in mind. Some of these I have no quarrel with. You could even say I’m a “fan.”

For example, if objectivity means trying to ground truth claims in verifiable facts, I am definitely for that. If it means there’s a “hard” reality out there that exists beyond any of our descriptions of it, sign me up. If objectivity is the requirement to acknowledge what is, regardless of whether we want it to be that way, then I want journalists who can be objective in that sense. Don’t you? If it means trying to see things in that fuller perspective Thomas Nagel talked about–pulling the camera back, revealing our previous position as only one of many–I second the motion. If it means the struggle to get beyond the limited perspective that our experience and upbringing afford us… yeah, we need more of that, not less. I think there is value in acts of description that do not attempt to say whether the thing described is good or bad. Is that objectivity? If so, I’m all for it, and I do that myself sometimes.

The View from Nowhere is my attempt to isolate the element in objectivity that we don’t need, and call attention to it.

by Jay Rosen, PressThink |  Read more:

Image: The Front Page

Body and Soul

Considering the eternal dance of Eros and Thanatos.

Conceived in pleasure and begotten in pain, the human animal is born naked like all other beasts. Much of the history of ideas about our condition is devoted to puzzling out the contrasts between the brutish constraints of our embodiment and our seemingly disembodied capacity to think, which projects us into abstract realms, away from our mortal, fragile, messy bodies. It is not enough that we can create mathematics, music, physics, and writing, in which bodily needs are silenced and sometimes transcended; we must also wonder about this very capacity. We are animals at once conscious, aware of finitude, and locked into corruptible flesh.

The word flesh conjures the potency of sexual desire and the bitterness of decrepitude and finitude, the one limiting the other, in the eternal dance of Eros and Thanatos. Flesh is what Titian’s luminous, erotic nudes celebrate, but also what Lucian Freud’s thick paint unforgivingly depicts as garish. It is the miraculously transformed marble of the Greco-Romans, Michelangelo, Bernini, and Rodin. It is at the center of the aestheticized and grotesque sexuality of Edo-era Japanese prints and of the nightmare visions of contemporary horror movies. It is the sensuous mass of fat and muscle painted by Rubens, but also the carcasses lovingly depicted by Chardin. Flesh conjures skin both as smooth cover behind which entrails hide and as those actual entrails, desirable as food for carnivores, for flesh is also meat.

The word body conjures none of this; the body is the observable structure of a living being, which is dressed for social existence and undressed for general care. Bodies may figure in a landscape as exempla, like those by Poussin, who was good at painting the skin color of his expressively gesturing figurines but did not manifest much interest in what was beneath the skin. Bodies are part of a composition, determined by external conditions, by clothes, by measurements, by the gazes of ourselves and others. We treat our bodies as an “it” and not quite identical with the self.

The state of flesh fluctuates from glorious pleasure to excruciating pain. When we die, our flesh disintegrates. As physical creatures, humans are at once beautiful and repulsive to one another—lovely skin enveloping innards unlovely to all except the doctors whose vocation it is to know their byways. Our being depends on physiological processes invisible to the eye, at once fascinating and terrifying in their potency. We are always potentially medical patients, teetering just this side of biological viability.

The enraging recognition of our imperfect, brittle embodiment has contrasted, for much of human history, with an incorruptible and immaterial sphere. Attached to the awareness of our biology, we have imagined a universe untouched by the limiting conditions of our flesh and posited laws that enable life to function according to this imagined realm.

In the West, and specifically within the Christian tradition that has shaped it to a large extent, there is a profoundly examined strand of thought about the status of flesh as inferior to that of the mind. This idea relies on dualism: the separation of the realms of flesh and mind. The dualist narrative in the West has its roots in ancient Greece, in the psychology envisioned by Plato and developed by Aristotle, and conceives of a hierarchical, divided soul—a higher order and a lower order. Reason was in touch with the cosmic order, above the disorderly passions and disruptive bodily appetites that humans shared with other living creatures. Both Greek philosophers’ schemes percolated into Christian doctrine, first by way of Augustine, later through Thomas Aquinas, who reinterpreted Aristotle for Christianity. The rational soul, unique to humans, was located in the brain. The sensitive soul, shared by humans and animals, was in the heart. And the appetitive soul, which ensured nutrition and reproduction, was in the liver. For Aristotle and the scholastic psychology that followed, the three organs were connected, sustaining conscious, sentient life.

Augustine, the inspired Church father, begins his Confessions as a fourth-century convert to the then-new religion as he grows aware of the sinful nature of the sensuality and unbridled sexuality he experienced in his youth. Spiritual enlightenment, for Augustine, was a function of the domination of the body’s urges. The body was capable of disobeying the spirit’s entreaties—so Saint Matthew’s “the flesh is weak”—meaning that it dictates its needs with greater force than the nobler spirit. For Augustine, life was “a long, unbroken period of trial” because of our embodied nature, and the immortal soul—the part of being whose job on earth was to hark at divine presence—had to define us more powerfully than biology. God, to whom Augustine speaks in the second person throughout the Confessions, commanded man “to control our bodily desires,” and so “it is by continence that we are made as one and regain that unity of self that we lost by falling apart in the search for a variety of pleasures.” Hence the notion later developed within monastic orders that marriage to Christ is the highest calling, far above marriage to a human whose life is to an extent limited and defined by bodily needs. Augustine confessed to God how his former desires returned to him in his sleep, since they were lodged in his memory. He was mostly able to restrain “the fire of sensuality that provokes me in my sleep,” but not always, and he prayed to God to feel pleasure no longer, even in dreams in which he succumbed to temptation. The body was a site of struggle between a higher calling and the lower appetites of the flesh. Humans, thought Augustine, stood midway between angels and beasts.

by Noga Arikha, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
Image:Venus and the Lute Player, by Titian, c. 1570

Arlie Panting, Still Life with Leeks
via:

China’s Great Leap Backward

What if China is going bad? Since early last year I have been asking people inside and outside China versions of this question. By “bad” I don’t mean morally. Moral and ethical factors obviously matter in foreign policy, but I’m talking about something different.

Nor is the question mainly about economics, although for China the short-term stability and long-term improvement of jobs, wages, and living standards are fundamental to the government’s survival. Under China’s single-party Communist arrangement, sustained economic failure would naturally raise questions about the system as a whole, as it did in the Soviet Union. True, modern China’s economic performance even during its slowdowns is like the Soviet Union’s during its booms. But the absence of a political outlet for dissatisfaction is similar.

Instead the question is whether something basic has changed in the direction of China’s evolution, and whether the United States needs to reconsider its China policy. For the more than 40 years since the historic Nixon-Mao meetings of the early 1970s, that policy has been surprisingly stable. From one administration to the next, it has been built on these same elements: ever greater engagement with China; steady encouragement of its modernization and growth; forthright disagreement where the two countries’ economic interests or political values clash; and a calculation that Cold War–style hostility would be far more damaging than the difficult, imperfect partnership the two countries have maintained.

That policy survived its greatest strain, the brutal Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989. It survived China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 and the enormous increase in China’s trade surpluses with the United States and everywhere else thereafter. It survived the U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999 (an act assumed to be intentional by every Chinese person I’ve ever discussed it with), periodic presidential decisions to sell arms to Taiwan or meet with the Dalai Lama, and clashes over censorship and human rights.

The eight presidents who have managed U.S. dealings with modern China, Nixon through Obama, have essentially drawn from the same playbook. The situation could be different for the ninth. The China of 2016 is much more controlled and repressive than the China of five years ago, or even 10. I was living there at both of those earlier times—in Shanghai in 2006 and in Beijing five years later—and have seen the change firsthand. Given the chaotic contradictions of modern China, what any one person sees can be an exception. What strikes me is the consistency of evidence showing a country that is cracking down, closing up, and lashing out in ways different from its course in the previous 30-plus years. (...)

Why does china need to be high on the new president’s priority list? Because an important assumption has changed.

In both word and deed, U.S. presidents from Nixon onward have emphasized support for China’s continued economic emergence, on the theory that a getting-richer China is better for all concerned than a staying-poor one, even if this means that the center of the world economy will move toward China. In one of his conversations with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Barack Obama said, “I’ve been very explicit in saying that we have more to fear from a weakened, threatened China than a successful, rising China.”

Underlying this strategic assessment was an assumption about the likely direction of China’s development. This was not the simplistic faith that if China became richer, it would turn into a liberal democracy. No one knows whether or when that might occur—or whether China will in fact keep prospering. Instead the assumption was that year by year, the distance between practices in China and those in other developed countries would shrink, and China would become easier rather than harder to deal with. More of its travelers and students and investors and families would have direct connections with the rest of the world. More of its people would have vacationed in France, studied in California, or used the internet outside China, and would come to expect similar latitude of choice at home. Time would be on the world’s side in deepening ties with Chinese institutions.

For a long period, the assumption held. Despite the ups and downs, the China of 2010 was undeniably richer and freer than the China of 2005, which was richer and freer than the China of 2000, and so on.

But that’s no longer true. Here are the areas that together indicate a turn:

[ed. Communications. Repression of civil society. Extraterritoriality. Failed reform. Anti-foreignism. The military. What is to be done?: Choosing battles carefully. Concerns for the moment. Confidence in the long run. Steadily shaping China’s choices.]

by James Fallows, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Oliver Munday

Politics 101

[ed. Over the next four years (if we last that long) we'll encounter outrage after outrage, and analyses of those outrages until, like the Bush years, outrage fatigue takes over and numbness becomes the default condition. I'm not going to pollute this blog with all that, but it'll be hard to ignore the effects of this on our country and the rest of the world. So, from time to time, I'll just post a few links to what I consider particularly noteworthy commentary and leave it at that. We'll call it Politics 101.]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/opinion/the-right-way-to-resist-trump.html
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/theda-skocpol-responds-to-judis

Trader Joe's: Are We Having Fun Yet?

[ed. Original story here.]

John Shields, the former chief executive of Trader Joe’s, would famously tell new workers that they should quit if they weren’t having fun a month into the job.

Mr. Shields seemed to believe there were two kinds of people in the world: those born to be Trader Joe’s “crew members,” as the company calls its rank and file, and those who weren’t. The born crew members were naturally warm and cheery and couldn’t help sharing their warmth and cheer with customers. The rest would find working at Trader Joe’s, where employees are instructed to convey their “delight” in tending to each customer, to be a special form of torture.

It turns out that Mr. Shields was half right. There are certain people who are cut out to work at Trader Joe’s, but it’s not so much because they find it fun. Several times during interviews for my story on the company, current and former crew members told me they saw the job as a kind of acting exercise. They excelled at it by embracing the challenge of getting into their Trader Joe’s character.

One former employee said many of her colleagues were in fact aspiring actors logging hours at the store until they could make it on a bona fide stage. Another told me he had acted in high school and college, and drew on his acting experience at work. “You have to motivate yourself,” said a third, Christopher Livingston, who spent a few months at a Washington, D.C., Trader Joe’s. “And it’s a lot easier to motivate yourself if you’re in a good mood.”

(Reflecting on my story, David Colon, who once worked at a location in Brooklyn, highlighted another approach not unheard-of in the performing arts: “Some of us were also stoned,” he wrote in The Gothamist. “Like, really stoned.”)

It was revealing, but maybe not surprising, to hear that managers at several Trader Joe’s stores aspired to a customer experience worthy of Disney, which calls its theme park workers “cast members” and pays many of them to impersonate actual Disney characters. Thomas Nagle, the recently terminated Manhattan Trader Joe’s worker at the center of my story, told me that his managers once experimented with a policy requiring employees to wave to customers as they left the store, in the way that Disney theme park characters wave at visitors.

As with Disneyland, the Trader Joe’s version of “acting” tends to be a bit hokier and altogether more crass than the Hollywood version. Who among those of us who have shopped at Trader Joe’s hasn’t wondered how it’s possible that every flavor of kosher hummus you buy just happens to also be the favorite of your checkout clerk?

Mr. Nagle’s girlfriend, Vanessa Erbe, who worked at the same store, said managers were so intent on encouraging such banter that they once hatched the idea of “register bingo,” in which workers would cross off products on laminated cards as customers brought them to the register.

Suffice it to say, the psychological calisthenics necessary to pull off “register bingo” are not trivial. “They hire nice, cool, friendly people who have the ability and sensibility to be real enough without making it seem forced, but there’s still a double consciousness going on,” said one former worker at the Brooklyn store.

by Noam Scheiber, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Joshua Bright

The End of Ice

Polar Bear Ambassadors
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Pierre Jamet
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Fight the Power! (With Safety Pins)

[ed. Sorry to go on and on about worthless signalling efforts, but if you really want to change government why not just flash the peace sign? It's cheaper and you can't argue with success! (plus, you might need the pins later to keep your rags together). Seriously, if you really want change, support unions, support strikes and walkouts (private and government), support boycotts against corporations and banks, and vote! Do something tangible like Solidarity in Poland and there might be, possibly, hopefully, some reasonable chance of a real populist revolution. See also: Mark Zuckerberg is in Denial.]

Eggplant. Cilantro. Theater kids. The world is full of polarizing things that humanity will never agree on. Some of those emotions are irrational, while others are based in fact (eggplant, theater kids).

And the most divisive object in post-election United States right now might be a safety pin.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential victory, the safety pin has emerged as a symbol of unity: a way for people — regardless of their politics — to show they are allies and do not stand for the kind of violence and abuse that has emerged and been reported on since Trump was elected last week.

Wearing a safety pin began as a gesture of kindness. But some people also see it as a performative, bullshit type of "slacktivism," arguing that it allows people to pat themselves on the back without actually trying to fix the problems they say are important.

The safety pin is now at the center of a national conversation about hate crimes, prompting the discussion about the facile shallowness of white men and women and what good comes out of the backlash against such gestures of solidarity.

by Alex Abad-Santos, Vox | Read more:
Image: Christine Pedretti via Shutterstock

Edvard Munch, Train Smoke 1900
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The Sad Rush and Dark Power of Firing a Gun

[ed. One of my best friends managed the Rabbit Creek rifle range in Alaska for years and years. We'd get together and shoot once in a while. Some of the experiences he told me about would make my brain explode. See also: Confessions of a Gun Range Worker]

In the parking lot, Scott had his red cap pulled down low over his face. I could see only the shadows on his chin. We shook hands, introduced ourselves. “You don’t have to do this,” I said. He kind of snorted and did not answer, turned and opened the hatch of his SUV, pulled out a duffel bag. His shoulder sagged with its weight as he held it by its handles in one hand. “Ready?” he said. He headed toward the door. I followed.

At the door a big sweaty guy came out grinning, face flushed, a big semiautomatic pistol on each hip. He held up his hands and he passed, gave us high fives, saying, “Beautiful day to be an American!” Scott held the door for me. “You ever do this before?” he said. “Nuh uh,” I said and started to explain, defend myself, but Scott cut me off and said it didn’t matter, that I was here now. I started to tell him why I wanted to do this—because I wanted to know what it was like—but Scott did not want to hear that either. He said, “I’m just happy you’re here.”

We were outside the end unit of a business park in northern Virginia, a generally upscale metro-area region outside of Washington, DC the rest of Virginia, where they still have southern accents, considers snooty. From outside, it might have been an orthodontist’s office. It was clean, new, with black windows and ample parking. Inside it might have been a bowling alley. But when you walked in the first thing you heard was not the crashing of pins but incessant gun fire. It was visceral, exciting. Bowling alleys have bags and balls and those silly shirts for sale up front but here they sold heavy-duty double breasted shooting shirts, knives, bullets, rifle scopes, military grade weaponry. A customer was shopping for a semiautomatic pistol, a big bearded salesman showing him various options. It was an intimate interaction, they were murmuring to each other, gravely examining the body of each opened-up weapon. There was a desk where instead of renting shoes you rented guns. There were no pitchers of beer for sale, no nachos—only water and soda via vending machines. Bowling alleys have those screens overhead showing the scores and the big X when someone gets a strike, and the gun range had screens overhead too but they were television screens showing cable news. (...)

It was a Saturday in spring and the range was packed, so we had to wait for a lane. I was surprised by who was there: the solitary middle-aged white men I expected, yes, but also a black couple on what seemed to be a good first date, an entire Asian family, a group of young men and women who from their style would not have been out of place at a National concert, a couple of guys who I guessed were Central American wearing military-like uniforms here training for God knows what. It was the same people I would have seen if I’d have gone to the nearby public park instead. The difference was everybody was focused and alert. Nobody was lost in their phone, or bumping into each other, or staring into space. There was minimal frivolity in the air, maximum seriousness. Because you had to pay attention at all times to what you were doing. Your every action had to be mindful, deliberate. Because you and everyone around you had a gun.

Scott and I sat on the couch while we waited. Rather, I sat and Scott squatted before me, unzipping his duffel bag and pulling out firearms as I stared down at the top of his hat. “We’re going to shoot three types of firearms today,” Scott said. He introduced them to me one at a time: a Glock 19 semiautomatic pistol which, Scott said, is what cops often use; a little five-shot .38 revolver which, Scott said, cops carry on their ankles for backup incase something happens to their Glock; and, lastly, an AR-15-type semiautomatic rifle, the type of gun used in most mass shootings including Newtown, San Bernardino, Aurora, and Orlando (it’s also called an assault rifle, though not by anyone you’d find at the gun range—that’s a political term liberals use, and an inaccurate one too that betrays one’s ignorance of firearms). A good introductory lineup.

Scott was now showing me how to hold the Glock. When Gaston Glock invented it, he had no experience with guns and therefore did not know there even was a proper way to hold one, so he made up his own way and when the gun became dominant in the marketplace everyone had to learn how to hold it. To show me how, Scott did not have me hold the actual Glock which would have been a no-no because we were not yet in the shooting gallery. It did not matter if the gun was unloaded—it would have been a breach of safety and general public decency. Therefore Scott had brought a fake gun, just a gun-shaped piece of plastic, bright blue so no one could mistake it. He put it in my hands then bent and twisted my thumbs and fingers until I was holding it the way Gaston Glock wanted me: thumbs pointing out away from the body on either side of the barrel, left forefinger extended along that side, left hand cupping the right. It felt unnatural and uncomfortable and not tough at all. Your whole body tries to crouch behind the gun ridiculously, like a St. Bernard trying to hide behind a mouse. I told Scott this. He said you have to train your hands until eventually it becomes second nature. That way you can hold it properly without even thinking about it, in the middle of the night, half asleep, someone breaking in to your house. I asked how to train my hands and he said dry firing. You have to dry fire constantly. Always be dry firing. I did not know what dry firing is. He explained it is shooting an empty gun. He said it’s a good idea, when you’re home, on the couch, vegging out in front of the TV, to have your unloaded gun in your hand in the proper grip, pulling the trigger on it over and over until it feels normal. Have the gun on the coffee table, reach over, pick it up, pull the trigger. Do that repeatedly, always. You should have your firearm within reach at all times anyways, he said. I asked Scott if he does that and he said yes, he was doing it last night as a matter of fact. I asked if his wife minds it. He started to answer but seemed to think better of whatever he was about to say and instead said nothing, turned his attention to loading bullets into the guns’ ammunition magazines, giving me tips as he did so about home defense, saying how a Glock is better than something like a shotgun because it allows for more maneuverability if your enemy is right on top of you. (...)

From where I was sitting, past Scott’s head, I could see the people in the gallery shooting. It was startling and dystopian seeing such ordinary strangers now standing side-by-side with rifles and handguns unloading clips of live ammo. This was an unseen side of us. Our violence visible. It felt incredible this was allowed, it seemed insane and dangerous, something that should have been happening not in this suburb with all its garbage collection regulations and home owner association ordinances but off in a desert somewhere. I do not mean to say it felt wrong or bad—just the opposite, it felt exciting and great. Like I was being shown a new dimension behind humdrum day-to-day modern life that everyone had been in on but me. All you did was show up, pay for a lane, and start blasting. Anyone at anytime could have made a fatal error, or a nefarious decision. And we were all okay with it. We placed so much trust in each other just by being there. It did not matter that we were strangers to one another. In fact, it felt like we were not strangers at all. I’d felt more nervous on the street driving a car. Maybe, I thought, I wanted this. Maybe I had been doing life wrong, by not doing this, by not being a gun guy, or owning one, by being critical of those who do. Maybe I was a bloodless urban pussy with no trust in human beings, no joie de vivre, who was not taking advantage of being an American, who was not appreciative of being one. Maybe American rights had been wasted on me. Maybe Scott was so eager to help me and ask nothing in return because he felt the way I might if someone came up to me and asked me to help them vote for the first time. Maybe going to the gun range, I thought, is basically like voting. But with lethal force.

A lane opened up. Our turn. Scott had me put on big green earmuffs and protective eyewear. We entered.

Inside the gallery the shooting was intensely loud. Even with the earmuffs the boomboombooms penetrated my skull, you felt them in your sternum. It was smoky and smelled like sulfur, from all the gunpowder. It was hot. Spent shells were all over the ground, you kicked them as you walked. Everything was concrete, like an unfinished basement. The Central American paramilitary guys were shooting semiautomatic versions of AK-47s, their rounds making big bright sparks as they struck the concrete backstop. They had handcuffs on their belts, big black stormtrooper boots. No one seemed to be paying attention to them. They were trusted, just as I was. Just by being in that room with them I was trusting them, and vice versa. It felt remarkable that no one had stopped me before this point to ask me who I was or why I was here or to make sure I was not drunk or crazy—I had interacted with nobody but Scott up until this point and here I was about to start blasting.

Many people were using those paper life-size human silhouette targets, but Scott, shouting to be heard, said he prefers not to use those, because in real life situations, due to many reasons including darkness or adrenaline, most of your shooting skills will go out the window no matter how much time you have spent on the couch dry firing. But if you have been training on a very small target, your muscle memory will once again kick in and you’ll miss a little less severely, you’ll still be more likely to hit your enemy in an area of the body that will kill him quickly. “And the area of his body that will kill him quickly,” Scott said, “producing from his back pocket a 3 x 5 index card, is about the size of a 3 x 5 index card.” Scott slapped a black bull’s-eye sticker on the card, clipped it to the target holder and sent it down range a few feet. He gave me the loaded Glock. It was very heavy. I liked its substantial presence. It felt perfect in my hand, a natural extension of it. Scott stood behind me, his arms around me, both of our hands on the loaded gun. He put me like a doll into proper grip, stance. He kicked at my feet, to get me to widen them. I could feel his body’s warmth, smell his breath. How often did two straight white men stand like this? It was part of the intimacy, part of the experience.

He did something to the side of the gun then shouted into my ear that the safety was now off. “Okay,” he shouted, “when you’re ready, take a deep breath in, and as you exhale pull the trigger back smoothly and steadily all the way back without stopping.” He let go of me. Stepped back. All alone now. I was trembling, energy coming to boil inside my veins. I did not know what to expect or what it would feel like. I inhaled, exhaled, pulled the trigger. The gun came to life. It felt like an animal in my hands, like I was choking a coyote. You had to dominate it. You had to be a man. You had to kill it. It only came to life for a brief moment, then the life was gone—not dead, just gone again. I made a big boom that joined with all the other ones from my fellow shooters. The firing felt removed from the life. I was not sure a bullet had in fact shot out. I had to shout back at Scott over my shoulder to ask him if it had worked, very conscious about keeping the gun pointed down range. Scott had come to life too, he was jumping up and down behind me, the life had gone from the gun into him. He had pushed the brim of his hat back on his head, revealing his face for the first time. It looked completely different from how I thought it would—younger, rounder, thinner. He was grinning like a proud father. He seemed happy and naked, eyes bright. I could not imagine this man alone on the couch pulling the trigger on an empty gun. He slapped me on the shoulder. “That’s it!” he cried. “Do it again!” I did. This time it was easier, and I saw the shell casing come flipping out the top of the gun as it fired, it landed on my wrist, warm. “See?” Scott shouted, pointing at the target. A neon green nick had appeared on the edge, meaning that’s where I’d hit it. Not much of a hole, you could hardly see it. Entrance wound, I guessed.

He had me pause, showed me that I had to line up the sights of the guns—there were two, one at the front and one at the back—and that when I aimed I had to focus on the sights themselves and let what I was shooting blur behind them. You had to almost not see what you were shooting, who you were shooting. You had to forget about it, forget about them, forget about everything else and pay attention only to yourself and your gun. I tried that—aimed at the target, imagined it a person. The hell with them, I told myself. Me and my gun, me and my gun. I pulled the trigger, obliterated the bull’s-eye. Fatal shot to the heart.

Scott whooped, clapped me on the shoulder again. I could hear him faintly behind me, amid the firing: “Yeah! Outstanding! Outstanding!” I felt good. It had been so long since I’d had somebody react to me the way Scott was. He was on my side, he wanted to help me, to teach me how to defend myself and my family. When was the last time a stranger was on my side and wanted to help me, without condition, simply because I had asked him? I could not remember. As I emptied that magazine, clustering my shots around the bull’s-eye, I was gushing sweat. We all were, in the gallery. It was our exhilaration, our energy. Our shared decency. My eyewear was fogging up, I could see very little, but I did not care, I could see the sights of my gun clearly enough, and I could tell from Scott’s cheering that I was shredding the bull’s-eye over and over. Eventually the gun stopped firing, which meant I had emptied it. It happened too quickly. That’s it? Scott took the gun and reloaded me, then I emptied that clip too, and then another. The bullets I was using cost money, they were Scott’s, he had paid for them, and they were not cheap—but he would not let me reimburse him, he would not hear of it. Just glad you’re here, he kept saying.

by James Boice, LitHub | Read more:
Image: uncredited