In response to my comments about my neighbors moving to the suburbs, reader Kevin Maquire writes:
To carry the theme of your hotel upgrade column, yards and parks aren't equivalent goods, particularly fenced yards. Even if the park is across the street. While you could take your unfolded laundry or your domestic paperwork down to the park, it's a lot easier in your own yard. Your kids can leave their toys out overnight in your yard. You can watch your kids out the kitchen window while you wash dishes, cook a meal, or work on your computer.
Finally, it's not acceptable for adult or teenage strangers to be in your yard, particularly the living-in-the-park sort of strangers common to urban parks in some cities.
Not to mention the dog poop you find in our local park, thanks to dog owners who are only half-civilized.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 25, 2005 • Comments
In an op-ed in USA Today, Bruce Kluger uses a PBS documentary about an inspiring teacher to lament current education policies:
More than just a fly-on-the-classroom-wall peek at an exceptional educator, however, Greatness serves as a cautionary tale about our nation's current education system, and the way in which policymakers' ongoing efforts to tinker with the process may be, at best, heavy-handed or, at worst, wrongheaded.
For instance, in the past year, the debate over social promotion reached high decibels in school districts across the nation, most notably in New York, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg instituted rigid policies to hold back third-graders who aren't keeping up with their classmates. But it wasn't until I watched Greatness that I truly understood how counterproductive such a policy can be. After all, classrooms are simply microcosms of families, and no family I know of jettisons its lesser members.
"I see (the classroom) as a wagon," Cullum explains early on in the film. "Your thoroughbreds of the class are going to pull the wagon--they're the leaders. But everyone is on that wagon, and everyone reaches the goal. No one is left out."
Granted, Cullum called roll in his classroom more than a generation before slashed budgets, plummeting scores and hallway metal detectors would become the stuff of modern education. But building a child's mind is inarguably as daunting a task as building a new system, and in this regard, Cullum made the grade.
The film also offers a decent argument about the potential myopia of modern-day standardized testing, which customarily cleaves to math and grammar as the true litmus of our kids' smarts. Though Cullum certainly didn't abandon these areas of study, he devoted an extraordinary amount of energy to the arts--and it paid off.
Leaving aside the questions of whether a classroom is in fact like a family and whether it's good policy to expect good students to "pull the wagon" for others, focusing on a single outstanding teacher misses the real dynamic of what's going on with education policy. It's a struggle created by the demand for objective, articulable standards.
If you want teachers to be judged on subjective qualities like their ability to inspire students, you have to let schools hire, fire, promote, and demote their teachers accordingly. That means paying not by objective criteria like degrees and seniority but by a boss's professional evaluation. It means allowing into the classroom great teachers who have subject knowledge but not a lot of idiotic education courses on their transcripts.
Of course, teachers as a group don't want to give their bosses the power to evaluate them. Certainly, the teachers' unions don't want that. So to create any connection between classroom performance and professional evaluations, we're stuck with objective criteria, notably test scores. The alternative, beloved by teachers' advocates, is to have objective measures of teacher "quality," including seniority and acadmic credentials, and no measures of teaching quality. Standardized tests and prescribed curricula are far from perfect, but they're better than no accountability at all.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 24, 2005 • Comments
I'll be speaking at the University of North Texas tonight (Thursday) and at the Pacific Design Center in LA next Wednesday. Both events are free and open to the public. See the Upcoming Appearances page for details on these and future talks.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 23, 2005 • Comments
The NYT discovers that people with kids would rather live in the suburbs than in cool urban neighborhoods like mine.
FURTHER THOUGHTS: The Times suggests the reasons for moving are strictly economic, and in hugely expensive places like San Francisco that may be true. But my Uptown Dallas neighbors generally hightail it to the suburbs as soon as their kids start walking, and these are people who already own spacious three-bedroom townhouses. They want yards (even though there's a park two blocks away), less traffic, and less crime. They want suburbia.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 23, 2005 • Comments
When a hotel room improves its aesthetics and raises its rates, should the price hike count toward inflation? If the room is nicer and the price doesn't go up, should that push down the CPI? My new NYT column looks at the dilemmas intangible quality improvements pose for inflation watchers:
Earlier this month, Marriott International unveiled new designs for the rooms in its various hotel chains. These are not routine updates to replace worn-out furniture or carpets. They represent a significant shift from the cookie-cutter standardization that built Marriott into one of the world's largest hotel companies, to a new emphasis on aesthetics and personalization.
"It's a makeover," said a company spokesman, John Wolf.
From granite countertops and aromatherapy shampoos in the bathrooms to piles of pillows on the beds, the rooms aim to please a style-conscious new generation of travelers. The floral bedspreads once ubiquitous in hotel rooms are out. After all, says Mr. Wolf, "Who has one of those at home?"
Marriott is following an industry trend. Over the last several years, hotel chains have been competing ever more intensely to upgrade the look and feel of their rooms. That competition was set off by Starwood Hotels and Resorts with its stylish redesigns of Westin and Sheraton rooms beginning in 1999.
This emphasis on aesthetics goes beyond hotels to all sorts of products and commercial environments, from the design of cellphones and trash cans to the look and feel of stores and restaurants. The quality of goods and services is increasingly judged not only by function but also by style.
These upgrades present real problems for economists charged with tracking inflation. Hotels hope to sell their redesigned rooms at higher rates. If they succeed, should economists count those higher rates as contributing to inflation or simply as consumers' paying for more to get more value?
The rest is here.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 23, 2005 • Comments
I will be on MSNBC today at around 4:30 Eastern time, discussing congressional overreach (and grandstanding) on baseball steroids and the Terri Schiavo case.
Reminder: You can get notices of my TV appearances and copies of (or links to) my articles via email by sending an email to [email protected].
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 18, 2005 • Comments
Professor Postrel's colleague Suzanne Shu has a series of posts on the subject: here, here, and here. Suzanne is a behavioral economist (a student of Richard Thaler) and marketing professor whose research focuses on how increased temptation and the need for self-control changes as choices increase. Her work nicely combines insights on how the mind works with a dynamic understanding of markets.
Suzanne points me to this profile of Thaler, which includes a discussion of what his research on the Swedish experience suggests about private social security accounts in the U.S. It does not suggest we shouldn't have them:
Although Thaler and Cronqvist acknowledge that "three years of returns does not prove anything," they believe the United States can draw several lessons from Sweden's experience. First, a default fund must be devised carefully, because human nature dictates a large portion of investors' money will go there. With a U.S. economy 30 times the size of Sweden's, free-market entry for funds could result in thousands of choices, paralyzing the average consumer. Instead, the authors recommend offering a small number of funds, perhaps three, investing in index funds and bonds, with varying levels of risk. The funds would be managed by private firms subject to competitive bidding.
President Bush's proposal for Social Security reform, a 256-page document titled "Strengthening Social Security and Creating Personal Wealth for All Americans" (available for downloading at csss.gov) offers evidence of behavioral economics' move into the mainstream. Though no behavioralists sit on the bipartisan commission that wrote the report, its plan, Thaler admits, "is not much different from what we would propose." The document outlines three possible models through which 2 to 4 percent of a worker's wages would be invested in private accounts. Each model includes a "standard fund," akin to the Swedish default. A two-tier system allows initial contributions, say up to $5,000, to be invested in a limited number of funds, between three and five; once the first-tier threshold is reached, a still-to-be-determined number of second-tier funds will be available for investment. Fund managers must meet certain standards and compete to be included in the second tier. A governing board would be created to provide workers with "informative advice, and to implement reasonable changes in either tier that it believes is in the best interest of workers and retirees."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 18, 2005 • Comments
My latest Forbes column takes a look at the latest argument that markets make people miserable: too many choices.
In the early 20th century critics attacked product variety as being wasteful--a sign that markets were less efficient than central planning. Hence, the Chinese wore Mao suits, Americans got uniformly round automobile headlights and British authorities "rationalized" furniture designs.
A famous scene in the film Moscow on the Hudson has Robin Williams as a Soviet immigrant collapsing at the sight of an American coffee aisle, circa 1984. Imagine what would happen in Starbucks.
A free economy multiplies variety, the better to serve buyers with different tastes and different needs and to give people the chance to experience different goods at different times. Arguing that this plenitude is inefficient went out decades ago. The problem with markets, the detractors now say, is that all these choices make us unhappy.
To understand why there's a photo of jams here, and what they might (or might not) have to do with private retirement accounts, read the rest of the column.
I'm also at work--hard at work right this minute, Nick, just taking a small blogging break--on a more-extended Reason essay on the anti-choice critique.
In related news, this site will soon feature two new sections, representing my current areas of research: Variety and Glamour. Watch for them.
REMINDER: To receive my articles by email, send an email message to [email protected]
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 14, 2005 • Comments
The WaPost's David Segal reports.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 13, 2005 • Comments
This year's Blogads survey, like last year's, shows that about three-quarters of respondents are male.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 11, 2005 • Comments