Week of February 5, 2001
[Note: Some now-dead links have been removed from archived items.]

TEST TIME: Joanne Jacobs makes the point that the extra time ETS doles out to make up for handicaps is completely arbitrary: "An extra 90 minutes is assumed to be the equalizer for all disabilities." Joanne's new site--a result of her switch from writing San Jose Mercury News columns to working a book on the founding of a charter school--specializes in education topics. [Posted 2/11.]

THANKS, APOLOGIES, A WARNING: 1) Thanks to all of you who've paid to keep The Scene going. The response has been quite heartening. 2) Sorry for the delay in posting. I've been having serious problems uploading files to the server, leading to a few blank or almost-blank pages. Fortunately I discovered the problem while doing minor maintenance, so I didn't damage The Scene. 3) I'll be traveling for the next few days and probably won't be posting anything before Wednesday. [Posted 2/10.]

MORE TESTING: I've gotten a lot of response on the item below about ETS's agreement to give learning-disabled students more time on its standardized tests. Much of the commentary, pro and con, has been about non-handicapped students gaming the system. That's an interesting subject and, in the short term, an important one. But my long-term concern is with "legitimate" claims to need extra help. They spell the end of all academic standards.

The only question should be whether the tests are relevant to their goal--in this case, helping grad schools evaluate the ability of graduate students to do academic work. Since we're talking about grad students, that includes future research in a publish-or-perish environment (the GRE), the ability to process information quickly to make high-stakes business decisions (the GMAT), and the ability to communicate fluidly in English (TOEFL). Why people may not be able to do those things is not relevant. Low intelligence is every bit as serious a learning disability as dyslexia. Being slow to remember things under pressure is too. Why do some performance problems merit special protections while others don't?

I am not in any way against giving students special help in learning, especially at early ages when specialized instruction can make a life-long difference. I'm all for identifying learning problems and trying to address them, just as I'm for identifying vision and hearing problems and addressing them. But making it illegal to evaluate student performance under equal circumstances--especially at the graduate and professional school level--makes it impossible to have any standards at all.

There are some deep philosophical issues here that go far beyond academics, and that are going to get more and more prominent as various forms of psychological and genetic research advance. To quote myself (chapter six of TFAIE):

We live, after all, in an era in which evolutionary psychology explains that sexual promiscuity and often-violent sexual jealousy are only natural for human males, an outcome of reproductive imperatives. Psychopharmacology demonstrates that changing brain chemistry can change personality. Traits ranging from happiness to violent tendencies to sexual orientation appear to be at least partially "hardwired," the product of our natural physical makeup. These ideas have zoomed out of the labs, academic conferences, and psychiatrists' offices to permeate popular culture. They are the stuff of best-selling books, newsweekly cover stories, and talk show discussions. They are inescapable.

If the source of a problem--who or what is "at fault"--is more important than the consequences, then we will find ourselves forced to excuse evil acts once we have identified their biological influences. There's more at stake in this debate than who gets into B-school. [Posted 2/10.]

HERBERT SIMON, R.I.P.: Herbert Simon, who won the Nobel prize for economics in 1978 but may be better known as a pioneering artificial-intelligence researcher, has died at 84. He is well-described in the New York Times obituary as a "polymath." The vast scope of his own scholarly contributions makes one of his most profound ideas--"bounded rationality"--all the more interesting. Simon argued that people cannot know everything that might be relevant to their economic (or other) decisions; they just do the best they can with the knowledge they do have. This is one of those insights that seems obvious once it is stated but that has vast implications for understanding how individuals and organizations behave. Bounded rationality weakens an assumption of conventional economics but does not invest omniscience in some external power. To the contrary, Simon's deep thinking about artificial systems also gave him an understanding of how feedback loops can substitute for design. Here's a quote from the 1981 edition of his Sciences of the Artificial (which I also quoted in TFAIE).

We have become accustomed to the idea that a natural system like the human body or an ecosystem regulates itself. To explain the regulation, we look for feedback loops rather than a central planning and directing body. But somehow our intuitions about self-regulation without central direction do not carry over to the artificial systems of human society. I retain vivid memories of the astonishment and disbelief always expressed by the architecture students to whom I taught urban land economics many years ago when I pointed to medieval cities as marvelously patterned systems that had mostly just 'grown' in response to myriads of individual decisions. To my students a pattern implied a planner in whose mind it had been conceived and by whose fiat it had been implemented. The idea that a city could acquire its pattern as 'naturally' as a snowflake was foreign to them. They reacted to it as many Christian fundamentalists responded to Darwin: no design without a Designer!

For more Simon, see a recent Pittsburgh Post-Gazette interview, a 1994 interview with Omni, his Nobel autobiography, and more quotations.

DEFENSE POLICY: Washington is abuzz with talk about Pentagon shakeups, now that Donald Rumsfeld has asked big-thinker Andrew Marshall to review strategy. Marshall isn't one to make defense recommendations based on maximizing the distribution of pork or muddling along with a variation of the status quo. But from what I've seen of the commentary, most generalist pundits have never heard of Marshall and have no idea what he represents.

This gives me a tiny little advantage. My resident strategist has actually met Marshall (years ago, on a brief consulting gig) and followed his ideas. Bottom line: This is good news. It means the Bush administration is serious about rethinking U.S. military strategy, at a time it desperately needs rethinking. It also points to the advantages of an administration full of CEOs instead of just lawyers/wonks/politicos: 1) Business executives don't think, or pretend, they're the experts on everything; they see their jobs as finding the best, smartest specialists they can hire. 2) Over the past couple decades, CEOs have gotten used to making big changes in large organizations in order to adapt to a rapidly changing world. From what I hear from military folks--my fans are not a random sample, to be sure--there are a lot of warriors who think we need a much more adaptable, dynamic military. Finally, Marshall is right that Asia, not Europe, is the most important front for U.S. military concerns. We are a Pacific nation, much as the Eastern Time Zone finds that hard to remember. [Posted 2/10.]

CATTY COMMENT: This isn't gossip; it's my new beat (see below). We all know by now that post-White House Hillary looks dowdy. In a hilarious bit of hype, Drudge called her transformation Hillary's "glamour spiral", and Camille Paglia said Hillary "began her Senate committee work looking like a bug-eyed, droopy derelict flushed out of a train tunnel." (And you thought people were mean to Katherine Harris.) I've always thought Hillary was reasonably attractive, even when she was incredibly obnoxious. But those who hate her have generally always believed she must actually be ugly. Maybe that explains why no one is mentioning the obvious: The glamour spiral isn't just a matter of bad hair and makeup. Hillary has obviously put on at least 10 pounds. [Posted 2/10.]

LOOK AND FEEL: Why am I doing research by reading fashion magazines? (See next item.) Making up for my nerdy adolescence in a tax-deductible manner? Well, you could say that. It's all part of a crash course in understanding our new aesthetic age--the subject of Look and Feel, my next book, which is due to HarperCollins at the end of the year. I've assembled some of my previous writing on the subject on a new page here. [Posted 2/10.]

HEALTH AND BEAUTY AIDS: The line between health and beauty is melting away. So, more slowly, is the idea that medical intervention is legitimate to protect health but not to enhance--or restore--beauty. Beauty and health are both biological phenomena, connected in deep and sometimes surprising ways. Substances that affect one may, applied differently, affect the other--think blood-pressure-medicine-turned-baldness-cure. Now The New York Times brings intriguing news of another such instance. Thanks to its ability to slow hair growth on women's faces, a market now exists for an otherwise unprofitable sleeping-sickness drug. Those of us who do research by reading fashion magazines know the drug is Vaniqa and that its multi-page ad supplements aren't just appearing in Cosmopolitan. Big bucks are at stake in the vanity market and so, apparently, are many lives. [Posted 2/10.]

TEST OVER: The Educational Testing Service settles a lawsuit by announcing the beginning of the end of standardized tests. It eliminates the de facto asterisk on scores from people given special accommodation for disabilities while taking the GRE, GMAT, and a couple other grad school exams. The guy who sued to get this policy change has no hands and obviously can't fill in little circles with a pencil (or however they do these things nowadays); anyone who cared to inquire would take his scores seriously, despite the asterisk. The real winners aren't the physically handicapped. They're academically disabled people who know how to work the legal system. Admissions offices might as well give up the tests. The New York Times naturally spins the story as good news. The L.A. Times has a more balanced account, including information on how the affluent game the system. (Thanks for reader John Thacker for calling the LAT piece to my attention.) How long before a disgruntled student sues to change his unofficial real grade from Harvey Mansfield? [Posted 2/8.]

GOOD GRADES: Harvard's Harvey Mansfield has come up with a novel solution for a problem that plagues professors nationwide--how to resist grade inflation without screwing your students and making your own life hell. Professors can solve the latter problem, in elective courses anyway, by declaring the first day that they're "waging a holy war against grade inflation," as my old philosophy professor, Thomas Nagel, did. That's essentially what Mansfield has done for decades. But fair warning doesn't solve the problem that your students look bad compared to their grade-inflated classmates. So Mansfield will now give out two grades: the official, inflated one and the real, uninflated one. (The surprisingly sketchy Harvard Crimson report is here.)

According to his former teaching assistant Andrew Sullivan, Mansfield traces the origins of Harvard's grade inflation to the admission of underqualified blacks in the 1960s. That explanation seems odd to me. Why inflate everyone's grades to cover for a handful of students? I think there are some important economic dynamics at work. Students see themselves as customers paying huge amounts for their education, and they expect good grades for their money. (And, of course, the Vietnam-era draft famously played a huge role in the first surge of grade inflation. My theory is more relevant to the 1980s.)

Perhaps Princeton's recent decision to spend some of its endowment giving more generous scholarships and eliminating loans--rather than irresponsibly piling billions up indefinitely--will help grade inflation at my alma mater. It may even get us to resume our annual contributions. [Posted 2/7.]

DEATH AND TAXES: Congressional committees looking into tax reform might consider hearing from the person who said the following at Esther Dyson's 2000 PC Forum. I guarantee TV coverage:

Estate tax is my nemesis. I refuse to die! You have to give everything away now--I really don't understand this. I bought it, I paid a tax on it, I want to live with it, I want it in my house. They say: "No, no, no." If you have it in your house and you croak, your family has to pay for it. And I say: "We already paid for it! What is this? Layaway?" And then you've got to make all these things, foundations and stuff. This is ridiculous! I want to give the painting I bought to my daughter--I want to pass some stuff on.

The cool thing about you guys is that you can pass stuff through the Internet and nobody will ever know. This is part of the reason I'm so curious about this Internet--it's a good way to beat the government out of a whole lot of stuff.

The source of this subversive tax bashing? Self-described "old hippie" and homeless advocate (oh, yes, and actress) Whoopi Goldberg. This common-sensical rant against double taxation and cumbersome tax dodges goes a long way toward explaining why abolishing the estate tax is so popular, even when it affects so few. [Posted 2/7.]

MORE ON REAGAN: Jack Pitney has a good take on Reagan's accomplishments. Contemporary conservatives (or at least Republicans who want to get elected) would do well to heed the final two paragraphs. You certainly wouldn't read them in The Weekly Standard. [Posted 2/6.]

MORE ON MICROPAYMENTS: As you can see, I've decided to join Amazon's experiment in collecting micropayments. And because I sent Jeff Bezos an email on January 4 predicting they'd get into this business, he included me in his press calls this morning. (Background and caveats: I was one of the first reporters to write about Amazon, and I hit it off well enough with Jeff to briefly but seriously entertain notions of going to work there. Jeff and I continue to have a friendly, though rather sporadic, relationship that consists mostly of me sending him emails, both sweet and tart, about Amazon. He gave The Future and Its Enemies an enthusiastic post-publication endorsement. Following the Postrel family strategy of investing only in index funds and townhouses, I do not own Amazon stock, although I occasionally contemplate buying it.)

What interests me about Amazon is that it is building the technological and institutional infrastructure to make the Web a rich part of commercial and intellectual life. Its new payments system follows this tradition.

What's good about the Honor System: It's easy, for both the site and the reader. It takes advantage of back-end software, procedures, and billing information Amazon has already developed and has refined for this purpose through its experience collecting hundreds of thousands of $1 payments for Stephen King's The Plant. From the company's point of view, it's a good business because all the trade involves bits; no trucks and warehouses are required. And Amazon has anticipated most of the privacy and security concerns that might arise.

What's not so good: 1) The payments are too big, $1 minimum. That makes it unlikely that readers of frequently updated sites like this one will make paying a part of their visit routine. No routine and it's easy to forget--and never pay. Contrary to my predictions, Amazon has not applied the microcurrency it developed for "sponsored results" advertising. Jeff Bezos says the problem is the cost of customer service. The numbers of customers potentially involved is several orders of magnitude greater for Honor System micropayments than for advertising, and as the number of customers rises so does the number of problems that require costly service. Over time, some of those problems can be taken care of with automation--learning from the King experiment, the system already includes an "unpay" button for people who change their minds--but that will take time to identify and address patterns. 2) There are also some startup glitches. The description/greeting for the payment page appears twice, in what should be two entirely different blocks of text, a personal description of the site from its representative (that would be me) and one impersonal description of the payment page. As far as I can tell, however, there's only one form to fill out, and the copy just gets repeated twice.

What's unknown: If it works--that's a big unknown--will this form of payment be as a) an honor system (don't pay and you're essentially shoplifting), b) tipping (don't pay and you're not stealing, but you're rude), or c) charitable contributions (pay and you're a mensch)? Amazon seems to think of it as an honor system, a la King's novel, but every sample site they referred me to was using the tipping or charity model. That raises another question: If they think of their payments as donations rather than prices, will people mind that Amazon takes a 15 percent cut (plus 15 cents per transaction)? That could be a problem for some people, though it doesn't bother me. All payments--minus Amazon's cut--are cheerfully accepted. [Posted 2/6.]

I TOLD YOU SO: Amazon announces micropayments, as I predicted. More later. [Posted 2/6.]

EASY ACCESS: You can now get to The Scene at www.vpostrel.com. Now it is that much easier to recommend The Scene to your friends and associates. And, yes, I will eventually put a link in the left-hand column of dynamist.com pages. [Posted 2/6.]

SMART RONNIE: First Ike, now Reagan. Now that he's 90 and senile, revisionists are discovering what anyone who read the 1975 Reason interview or used basic powers of observation would have known years ago: Ronald Reagan was not a moron. He was, in fact, reasonably well read and up on an enormous amount of data. He loved facts. The latest evidence is a humongous new book of radio scripts in Reagan's handwriting. Now that it's OK to say Reagan wasn't an idiot, I'm still waiting for someone comment on another important fact about his intellectual background: For a working class kid born in 1911--especially for the son of a drunken ne'er-do-well--he was unusually well educated. Attention elite journalists: Ronald Reagan wasn't a baby boomer. He did not even go to school on the G.I. Bill. Reagan graduated from college during the Depression--something precious few people of his generation, and hardly any of his social background did. According to a 1962 Census study, only 6.7 percent of American men born between 1908 and 1917 whose fathers were in "manual and service" jobs had four-year college degrees; only 9.6 percent of all U.S. men that age did. So Reagan was not only intelligent. He had more schooling than 90 percent of other American men his age.

The author doesn't qualify as a revisionist, since he was never a Reagan detractor, but to mark Reagan's 90th birthday, I recommend Andrew Sullivan's tribute. [Posted 2/5.]

Buy Virginia Postrel's The Future and Its Enemies in hardback or paperback.