The flap over Larry Summers' bravely analytical comments on why women might be scarce at the top of math and science scholarship demonstrates that political correctness is alive and well and, even more depressing, that a remarkable number of scientifically talented women are incapable of understanding plain English or the difference between general statistical patterns and individual data points. It's been a long time since female scientists did so much to advance the stereotype of women as hysterically incapable of rational analysis.
As it so often does, the WaPost distinguished itself with a more sophisticated knowledge of relevant sources than demonstrated in newspapers to the north, quoting the eminent economic historian Claudia Goldin, who knows where the statistical bodies are buried on all sorts of labor market issues:
"I left with a sense of elation at his ideas," said Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economics professor who attended the speech. "I was proud that the president of my university retains the inquisitiveness of an academic."
"Retains the inquisitiveness of an academic." Which implies that those who want to silence him do not. That's tough. And true.
I parsed the debate on sex roles in this Reason editorial.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 19, 2005 • Comments
My latest article, in Sunday's NYT Book Review, looks at the job-hunting manual What Color Is Your Parachute? (I read the 1973, 1983, 2004, and 2005 editions.)
Thirty-five years ago, an Episcopal minister self-published 100 copies of a slim job-hunting guide and gave them away at a conference for college chaplains, many of whom were facing layoffs. Soon he was getting requests for more and more copies. Two years later, the little book had a commercial publisher, the small Ten Speed Press in Berkeley, Calif. "What Color Is Your Parachute?" has since become a classic, the "job hunter's bible," and sold more than 8 million copies. The 2005 edition, with a large grinning photo of its author, Richard N. Bolles, on the cover, was published in November. A lot has changed since the early 1970's, but not as much as we sometimes like to think. Job losses and career angst didn't start with the bursting of the tech bubble or the midlife crises of the baby boomers. Even way back when, white-collar workers, some of them highly trained technical experts, lost their jobs for reasons beyond their control. The first commercial edition of "Parachute" singled out aerospace engineers, whose profession was "being phased out of our society."
The book takes its title from the idea that sooner or later each of us is going to have to bail out of our current job, usually involuntarily, with only our enduring talents to support us: "The time to figure out where your parachute is, what color it is, and to strap it on, is now -- and not when the vocational airplane that you are presently in is on fire and diving toward the ground," Bolles wrote in the 1973 edition.
"Parachute" arrived on the scene when business practices and employee ideals and attitudes were beginning to shift. The postwar "loyalty ethic," in which workers got security in exchange for obedience, was dying. More Americans were starting to look for personal fulfillment in their work, which made them increasingly likely to change jobs, while employers were becoming more ruthlessly pragmatic about layoffs. "The view that there was loyalty between company and worker back then was also a myth," Bolles said in a 1999 interview in Fast Company magazine. "Even then," he said, "the conditions that produced the workplace realities of today were very much in place."
The article's conclusion got compressed a bit for space reasons. Here's the original:
The old work ethic preached that liking your work wasn't important. The new one preaches that enjoyment is essential, even (in Bolles's 1972 formulation) "divine radar" indicating what you should be doing. Parachute's 2005 edition includes a chapter aimed at helping readers identify the transferable skills they most enjoy using and the environments in which they find the greatest satisfaction. Its title, "When You Lose All Track of Time," suggests a purely secular reading of Parachute's search for meaningful work.
Even if you don't believe that a higher power has given you a destiny on earth, every human being has the capacity to find what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly calls "flow"--the total engagement with some sort of problem solving, from climbing mountains to writing computer programs to knitting, that causes a person to lose track of time. Flow activities give people their happiest moments, and these activities are intrinsically rewarding, regardless of any greater meaning. The point of a life-changing job hunt is to find work that provides flow.
That message makes Parachute not only practical but intellectually contrarian. Protestantism, claimed Weber, divested work of its earthly delight, making it purely a religious duty. Capitalism, he continued, "has destroyed" that delight "forever."
What Color Is Your Parachute? is an extended, market-grounded argument that Weber was wrong. A century after The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was published, the best-selling book about job hunting is an explicitly Protestant guide to finding joy at work.
For more on related themes, see my 1995 review of Charles Heckscher's White-Collar Blues, this oped piece on William Whyte's The Organization Man, and this lecture on the "power of play," derived from chapter seven of The Future and Its Enemies.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 18, 2005 • Comments
And reenacted by bunnies. More bunny reenactments here.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 18, 2005 • Comments
As the nation remembers Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas H. Garver, organizing curator of the O. Winston Link Museum, writes to to correct this old post:
I note your reference in your website to the fact that Modernism Magazine cites the O. Winston Link Museum, located in the old Norfolk and Western Railway station in Roanoke as having removed the "COLORED" sign from above its door.
Let me point out that this sign was removed decades ago when segregation on public conveyances was no longer permitted nor tolerated. The station itself was closed in 1971, with the termination of passenger service, and subsequently used for offices until it was abandoned about 20 years later. The museum does discuss the fact that the station was a segregated facility in a text and illustrative panel installed inside the museum.
From the Library of Congress, here are a couple of vintage photos of the station, which was redesigned by Raymond Loewy in 1947:
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 18, 2005 • Comments
Details here.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 14, 2005 • Comments
My post below on Wegmans elicited fan mail--for the stores, that is--from all over. How many people do you know who get excited about their supermarket? Reader Greg Tetrault writes from Tennesee:
As a former Rochestarian who returns there annually, I can attest to the appeal of the Wegman's experience. The local nickname for Wegman's biggest store in the Rochester area is "Mega-Weg." The quality and variety of foods and goods are amazing. The stores are clean, have wide aisles, and have more sensible floor plans than most other big grocery stores. (Wegman's does not mimic its competitors that put simple, common staples at opposite ends of their stores hoping that you'll buy something extra from the 20 aisles you walk past.) As you noted, Wegman's prices are higher than the big bargain groceries, but Wegman's value is unsurpassed.
We now live near Memphis, and the large groceries here (Schnucks, Kroger, and Wal-Mart Super Stores) can't hold a candle to Wegman's. The former two deliberately understock popular brand-name items hoping that customers will buy their lower quality, higher margin, in-house goods. My wife and I both are annoyed by this inconsiderate policy.
Doug Rubin '81 writes that there's now a Wegmans in Princeton, which has come a long way since the two of us were in college there:
Whole Foods just opened as well (but I hear it's very expensive)
Meanwhile the local (relatively small) Wal-Mart is being transformed. Their stationery and housewares sections are being taken over by its grocery offerings which offer Cheerios, Pace Picante Sauce and Coca-Cola at "low prices every day". It's a pit and a pain the check out, but it's cheap. We've probably saved $400 or more on diapers there during the last 3 years!
Three things about Wegman's that my wife and I are thrilled by:
1) their store brands are of the highest quality/value I've ever seen.
2) they go out of their way to buy local produce, which must be a hassle, but engenders relationships and "stickiness"
3) their in-store cafeteria(s, yes I've been to others) offer quality that exceeds the specialty ethnic restaurants (Indian, Chinese) in the area.
And, yes, they are always training and recognizing their employees.
And Reason's Jeff Taylor, who visited a Buffalo Wegmans in the summer, adds:
The produce was amazing, a result of what must be some serious attention to detail and a great quality-control system. It was there I encountered the Platonic form of peaches, the uber-peach, the one peach to rule them all. Almost as big as a grapefruit and positively erupting with that peachy smell of peachiness. We took pounds from the store and ate them raw with the abandon of zombies eating brains, grilled them for insane salads, pureed them for drinks. Then they were gone and, I think, we cried.
I find it hard to believe you can buy a decent peach, let alone a great one, outside the peach orchards and farmers markets of the South. But Jeff lives in North Carolina (not as good as South Carolina or Georgia for peach expertise but close), so I'll trust him.
Thanks to designer James Wondrack, president of the Upstate New York AIGA chapter, who took me to Wegmans when I was in Rochester last year speaking to the AIGA and a conference at RIT. One of the great things about all the traveling I do is that I don't have to wait for national press coverage to find out what's going on in the country.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 13, 2005 • Comments
Reader Eric Akawie writes with an interesting footnote to the Sarbanes-Oxley post below: "I'm a Technical Writer, and in various job hunts over the last six months, it looks like companies are desperate to hire TWs with financial experience to produce their S-O documentation. I don't have any financial experience, and it's documentation that would have me slitting my wrists by the second week of the job, so I never even interviewed for any of the positions, but it looks like right now an accountant with writing skill, or a Tech Writer who can add and subtract, can write their own check. (Maybe not. Folks writing their own checks is what got us into this mess in the first place...)"
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 13, 2005 • Comments
This Dale Buss article from yesterday's WSJ could have come straight out of The Substance of Style:
DETROIT -- Automotive companies are caught in the tension between Americans' continuing thirst for speed and horsepower, and their nobler impulses toward better mileage and cleaner emissions. But there's no ambivalence about something else: Consumers relish vehicles that simply look sharp, making design itself the new rudder of the automotive marketplace.
The renewed preoccupation with design is understandable, given a little history. The '70s and '80s snuffed out the industry's bolder renderings, victims of safety and fuel-economy concerns. And auto makers spent the '90s essentially copying the unvariegated "jellybean" design of Ford's best-selling Taurus sedan. But global competition, the rise of the SUV and the digitization of the design process have combined to produce a profligate number of new vehicle types and models these days.
With quality and functional differences among products largely having narrowed over the past decade or so, eye-catching design can be decisive. "Both consumers and the car companies are ready to see more chances taken out there," says Chris Chapman, director of automotive design for DesignWorks USA, a unit of BMW. "People are kind of sick of the same old thing, and they're looking for something new."
Thanks to reader Lawrence Rhodes for sending this free link from the Opinion Journal site.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 13, 2005 • Comments
It turns out that the Indian guy from the Village People--his name is Felipe Rose--really is half Lakota Sioux. Now he's given his gold record for "Y.M.C.A." to the National Museum of the American Indian. Hank Stuever's WaPost account starts out funny--the story sounds ridiculous, after all--but includes enough detail to subtly convey a serious point. Strange as it is, Rose's story is a great example of the unpredictable ways in which American culture actually evolves. Any true representation of that culture, including the lives of American Indians, has to include just such quirky stories, and the artifacts that represent them.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 13, 2005 • Comments
Taxes and spending get most of the attention, but regulations can be just as expensive and far more wasteful. Take the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, passed in the post-Enron panic as a demonstration that Congress and the administration cared and were doing something. Compliance costs a fortune, siphoning funds from productive investments (including hiring); that the law took effect in the middle of a recession didn't help the economic recovery. More significant is the long-term effect. The law threatens to block smaller firms from going public, cutting them off from a major source of capital. That effect will filter backward, making venture capital funding more difficult by eliminating one way VCs get their money out. The Dallas Morning News reports on some of the local effects:
John Davis, chief executive of Pegasus Solutions Inc., figures Sarbanes-Oxley cost his Dallas-based technology services company nearly $1 million, or 2.5 cents a share in unrealized earnings. For a company with just under $200 million in 2004 revenue, that's a lot of dough.
"All of our controls were already in place," Mr. Davis says. "All we did was put them in writing."
Chief executive Jeff Rich says Dallas-based Affiliated Computer Services Inc. spent an extra $8.5 million on Sarbanes compliance without changing its operations one iota.
"Sarbox should be called the Accounting Industry Rehabilitation Act," he says. "The only people benefiting from Sox are lawyers and accountants. That's ironic since they were part of the problem to begin with....
Sarbanes is actually bolstering ACS' acquisition pursuits, Mr. Rich says, pointing to its tender offer for Superior Consulting Holdings Corp. in Dearborn, Mich.
"In all candor," says Mr. Rich, "Superior is $100 million in revenue and too small to be a public company today."
Even with twice that much revenue at Pegasus, Mr. Davis says he feels the pressure.
"Quite frankly, we may be too small to be a public company," he says. "You're going to have to look at revenues probably in excess of $500 million a year before going public makes sense."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 13, 2005 • Comments