Posts tagged longread
Black? White? Asian? More Young Americans Choose All of the Above
Great article from Sunday’s frontpage. Yes, Sunday. We’ve been busier than you can possibly fathom. Excerpt below (along with embedded chart). Click photo or text linke for full piece. Enjoy…
From left: Shannon Palmer, Japanese/Irish; Vasco Mateus, Portuguese/African-American/Haitian; Laura Wood, black/white.More Photos »
COLLEGE PARK, Md. — In another time or place, the game of “What Are You?” that was played one night last fall at the University of Maryland might have been mean, or menacing: Laura Wood’s peers were picking apart her every feature in an effort to guess her race.
“How many mixtures do you have?” one young man asked above the chatter of about 50 students. With her tan skin and curly brown hair, Ms. Wood’s ancestry could have spanned the globe.
“I’m mixed with two things,” she said politely.
“Are you mulatto?” asked Paul Skym, another student, using a word once tinged with shame that is enjoying a comeback in some young circles. When Ms. Wood confirmed that she is indeed black and white, Mr. Skym, who is Asian and white, boasted, “Now that’s what I’m talking about!” in affirmation of their mutual mixed lineage.
Then the group of friends — formally, the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association — erupted into laughter and cheers, a routine show of their mixed-race pride.
The crop of students moving through college right now includes the largest group of mixed-race people ever to come of age in the United States, and they are only the vanguard: the country is in the midst of a demographic shift driven by immigration and intermarriage.
One in seven new marriages is between spouses of different races or ethnicities, according to data from 2008 and 2009 that was analyzed by the Pew Research Center. Multiracial and multiethnic Americans (usually grouped together as “mixed race”) are one of the country’s fastest-growing demographic groups. And experts expect the racial results of the 2010 census, which will start to be released next month, to show the trend continuing or accelerating.
Many young adults of mixed backgrounds are rejecting the color lines that have defined Americans for generations in favor of a much more fluid sense of identity. Ask Michelle López-Mullins, a 20-year-old junior and the president of the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association, how she marks her race on forms like the census, and she says, “It depends on the day, and it depends on the options.”
They are also using the strength in their growing numbers to affirm roots that were once portrayed as tragic or pitiable.
“I think it’s really important to acknowledge who you are and everything that makes you that,” said Ms. Wood, the 19-year-old vice president of the group. “If someone tries to call me black I say, ‘yes — and white.’ People have the right not to acknowledge everything, but don’t do it because society tells you that you can’t.”
No one knows quite how the growth of the multiracial population will change the country. Optimists say the blending of the races is a step toward transcending race, to a place where America is free of bigotry, prejudice and programs like affirmative action.
Pessimists say that a more powerful multiracial movement will lead to more stratification and come at the expense of the number and influence of other minority groups, particularly African-Americans.
And some sociologists say that grouping all multiracial people together glosses over differences in circumstances between someone who is, say, black and Latino, and someone who is Asian and white. (Among interracial couples, white-Asian pairings tend to be better educated and have higher incomes, according to Reynolds Farley, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan.)
Along those lines, it is telling that the rates of intermarriage are lowest between blacks and whites, indicative of the enduring economic and social distance between them.
Prof. Rainier Spencer, director of the Afro-American Studies Program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the author of “Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix,” says he believes that there is too much “emotional investment” in the notion of multiracialism as a panacea for the nation’s age-old divisions. “The mixed-race identity is not a transcendence of race, it’s a new tribe,” he said. “A new Balkanization of race.”
But for many of the University of Maryland students, that is not the point. They are asserting their freedom to identify as they choose.
“All society is trying to tear you apart and make you pick a side,” Ms. Wood said.
Who Is Marrying Whom
Nearly 9 percent of all marriages in the United States in 2009 were interracial or interethnic, more than double the percentage in 1980. The rates of intermarriage vary widely depending on gender, race or ethnicity. Gender differences are most pronounced among blacks and Asians. Black men marry someone from a different group twice as often as black women do, while among Asians, the gender pattern is reversed. Over all, black Hispanics and American Indians have the highest rates of intermarriage. For Asians and white Hispanics, the rates of intermarriage have remained static or decreased.
Julian Assange on 60 Minutes this weekend. He actually came off as pretty polished. By contrast, the long NYTMag piece about him was….unflattering. But they did have an interesting perspective from working with him to release some of his docs
The Leverage Debate Revisited, aka GREAT MOMENTS IN BANKING HISTORY
This being Christmas (at least for those who didn’t get coal in their stockings), it seemed like a fine time to revisit the leverage debate. We here at The Scrambler thought this was just the moment to return to our occasional series/tongue in cheek hashtag, GREAT MOMENTS IN BANKING HISTORY.
The Baseline Scenario had a great piece a little while back by Anat Admati (she teaches Finance I, among other things at the Stanford GSB). She responds to a long NYTMag article on Jamie Dimon and his assertion that JPMorgan should continue to grow. She also dismantles the larger issue of the cost of capital for the street. It’s riveting. Basically, her argument is that debt financing has made it too cheap for the banks to operate (ie, they don’t fully internalize their costs to society and risk to investors alike due to their heavy reliance on leverage/debt financing). If they moved more towards equity, we’d all be better off (or at least, less likely to suffer another cataclysmic meltdown). Excerpt from the piece below. Click the link here for the full Baseline Scenario. Her article is based on a longer working paper put out last October (the full paper is Scribd below). Print this one out and enjoy with your lunch. If you took a low blow (or some long-dated shares) last week, you could use it to wipe away your tears. But it’s really fascinating. Read it before turning it into Kleenex…
What Jamie Dimon Won’t Tell You: His Big Bank Would Be Dangerously Leveraged
By Anat Admati, Professor of Finance and Economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business. To see her explain these issues in person, watch this Bloomberg interview. This is a long post, about 3,500 words.
The debate is raging about banks and their size, financial regulation, and the international capital standards known as “Basel”. Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, in his New York Times magazine profile, expresses admiration for the Basel committee and says,
“… they are asking the questions that, in theory, bankers ask of themselves: how much capital do banks need to withstand the inevitable downturn, and what is an acceptable level of risk?”
There is one problem, however. Basel may have asked the right question, but it did not come up with the right answers, mainly because it allows banks to remain dangerously leveraged, setting equity requirements way too low. This fact is not understood because the debate on capital regulation has been mired with a cloud of confusion, and filled with un-substantiated assertions by bankers and others. As a result, the issues appear much more mysterious and complicated than they actually are.
After a massive and incredibly costly financial crisis, we seem to have financial system that is a more consolidated, more powerful, more profitable and, yes, as fragile and dangerous as we had before the crisis. How did this happen and what can we do?
Here are some questions on which the confusion is staggering.
(i) Is “too big” the same as “too big to fail?”
(ii) Do capital requirements force banks to “set capital aside for a rainy day” and not use it to help the economy grow?
(iii) Are banks different than non-banks in that high leverage is essential to banks’ ability to function?
(iv) Would terrible things happen if capital requirements were to increase dramatically?
The first order of business is to clear the fog and focus on the right things. I will try to explain. With the basics in place, answers will begin to emerge, or at least the right questions to ask.
By the way, I answer an emphatic NO to each of the above questions.
David Shaw And The Future Of Stanford Football
Major props to longtime reader and contributor Adam. Dr. K (not to be confused with Dr. Lou) presents a refereed paper breaking down the latest news from Stanford Football- new head coach David Shaw. Insightful analysis on the press conference, the hiring, the immediate future, and the long term. Print this thing out and enjoy w/your lunch.
The whole this is excellent. Full Scribd version below. A few key passages…..
As a Stanford fan, I could not be happier with Coach Shaw’s comments. It also appeared that Bowlsby, who has a history of fantastic hires at Iowa and Stanford, is quite confident in this move. Of course, when selecting from mutually exclusive choices, an opportunity cost always exists.
As I see it, Bowlsby was looking for three things in the next head coach.
1. The ability to win in the short-term.
Let’s not kid ourselves – 2011 represents a golden, perhaps singular opportunity for Stanford football. Andrew Luck appears to be a once-in-a-generation talent, not just for our program but for the entire sport. He is surrounded by playmakers on offense, and we return many of the most important cogs of a dramatically improved defense. As fate would have it, Stanford’s status appears to be at an all-time high. It is crucial that the program maintains both the culture of success and the schemes that have produced 20 wins the past two seasons. The best way to do that was to hire internally……
2. The ability to win in the long-term.
There are a few components to this. First, the ability to recruit effectively. This is no small feat at Stanford, where a national view, effective communication with admissions, and the right sales pitch to high school kids and their parents are key. Shaw has contributed significantly to the outstanding classes brought in over the past few years, and appears equipped to continue that success…..
3. The ability to win the Stanford way.
Stanford is unlike any other athletic department. Nobody does so much winning: 100 national titles and 16 consecutive Directors’ Cups. However, it’s also true that nobody even close to this level of success places such tremendous pressure on its coaches to recruit student-athletes who can succeed at the university, keep them out of trouble, and ensure that they graduate. The football program finally has the top-down support necessary to build a consistent winner, but this is entirely contingent on continuing to run a clean program with players who do not embarrass the university…
Bowlsby clearly believed Shaw was the best man to meet criteria 1-3. Either way, the Stanford community will look back on this defining moment for years to come. Here’s hoping the sentiment is overwhelmingly positive.
Looking ahead, plan on a thorough recruiting synopsis in mid-February and a recap of spring practices sometime in April or May.
GO CARD!
David Shaw And The Future Of Stanford Football
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How Will You Measure Your Life?
Thanks to reader Emily. Great piece in this month’s Harvard Business Review. I’ve been puzzling over this one a lot recently. Excerpt below….
My class at HBS is structured to help my students understand what good management theory is and how it is built. To that backbone I attach different models or theories that help students think about the various dimensions of a general manager’s job in stimulating innovation and growth. In each session we look at one company through the lenses of those theories—using them to explain how the company got into its situation and to examine what managerial actions will yield the needed results.
On the last day of class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, to find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Though the last question sounds lighthearted, it’s not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent time in jail. Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were good guys—but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction.
As the students discuss the answers to these questions, I open my own life to them as a case study of sorts, to illustrate how they can use the theories from our course to guide their life decisions.
One of the theories that gives great insight on the first question—how to be sure we find happiness in our careers—is from Frederick Herzberg, who asserts that the powerful motivator in our lives isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognized for achievements. I tell the students about a vision of sorts I had while I was running the company I founded before becoming an academic. In my mind’s eye I saw one of my managers leave for work one morning with a relatively strong level of self-esteem. Then I pictured her driving home to her family 10 hours later, feeling unappreciated, frustrated, underutilized, and demeaned. I imagined how profoundly her lowered self-esteem affected the way she interacted with her children. The vision in my mind then fast-forwarded to another day, when she drove home with greater self-esteem—feeling that she had learned a lot, been recognized for achieving valuable things, and played a significant role in the success of some important initiatives. I then imagined how positively that affected her as a spouse and a parent. My conclusion: Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team. More and more MBA students come to school thinking that a career in business means buying, selling, and investing in companies. That’s unfortunate. Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.
I want students to leave my classroom knowing that.
Create a Strategy for Your Life
A theory that is helpful in answering the second question—How can I ensure that my relationship with my family proves to be an enduring source of happiness?—concerns how strategy is defined and implemented. Its primary insight is that a company’s strategy is determined by the types of initiatives that management invests in. If a company’s resource allocation process is not managed masterfully, what emerges from it can be very different from what management intended. Because companies’ decision-making systems are designed to steer investments to initiatives that offer the most tangible and immediate returns, companies shortchange investments in initiatives that are crucial to their long-term strategies.
Over the years I’ve watched the fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I’ve seen more and more of them come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. I can guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberate strategy of getting divorced and raising children who would become estranged from them. And yet a shocking number of them implemented that strategy. The reason? They didn’t keep the purpose of their lives front and center as they decided how to spend their time, talents, and energy.
It’s quite startling that a significant fraction of the 900 students that HBS draws each year from the world’s best have given little thought to the purpose of their lives. I tell the students that HBS might be one of their last chances to reflect deeply on that question. If they think that they’ll have more time and energy to reflect later, they’re nuts, because life only gets more demanding: You take on a mortgage; you’re working 70 hours a week; you have a spouse and children.
For me, having a clear purpose in my life has been essential. But it was something I had to think long and hard about before I understood it. When I was a Rhodes scholar, I was in a very demanding academic program, trying to cram an extra year’s worth of work into my time at Oxford. I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth. That was a very challenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent doing that, I wasn’t studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really afford to take that time away from my studies, but I stuck with it—and ultimately figured out the purpose of my life.
Meet Basel III- Courtesy of the Brookings Institution
By November, banking regulators are likely to complete an international agreement that will determine how strong banks must be. Tough new rules on capital and liquidity are being negotiated through the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (Basel Committee). The agreement, which is known as “Basel III” because it will be the third version of these rules, will have a large effect on the world’s financial systems and economies. On the positive side, newly toughened capital and liquidity requirements should make national financial systems — and indeed the global financial system — safer. Unfortunately, enhanced safety will come at a cost, since it is expensive for banks to hold extra capital and to be more liquid. It is beyond serious dispute that loans and other banking services will become more expensive and harder to obtain. The real argument is about the degree, not the direction. The banking industry argues that Basel III will seriously harm the economy. For example, the Institute of International Finance (IIF) calculated that the economies of the US and Europe would be 3% smaller after five years than if Basel III were not adopted. My own analyses, and those of other disinterested parties, generally suggest a much smaller cost that would seem to be considerably outweighed by the safety benefits. As the recent crisis clearly attests, severe financial crises can cause permanent damage to the world’s economy, imposing economic loss and emotional pain on hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people. It is worthwhile to give up a little economic growth in the average year in order to avoid these major impacts, as my work suggests would be the case. On the other hand, if the industry is right, the additional safety is probably not worth the cost and a more modest regulatory revamp would be preferable.
This paper explores the following questions about Basel III.
- What is Basel III and who is making the decisions?
- What is the timetable for Basel III?
- What are capital and liquidity?
- What are the current rules?
- What are the proposed changes from the current rules?
- What stays the same?
- What are the major areas of disagreement?
- Will the originally proposed changes or timetable be modified?
- What are the likely effects of Basel III?
Atul Gawande in the New Yorker- Letting Go What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?
Pretty deep. Gawande brings the hot fire. This piece will take you awhile to read through, asks a lot of tough questions that we’ll have to answer as a society moving forward. Enjoy your lunch.
Modern medicine is good at staving off death with aggressive interventions—and bad at knowing when to focus, instead, on improving the days that terminal patients have left.
This is the moment in Sara’s story that poses a fundamental question for everyone living in the era of modern medicine: What do we want Sara and her doctors to do now? Or, to put it another way, if you were the one who had metastatic cancer—or, for that matter, a similarly advanced case of emphysema or congestive heart failure—what would you want your doctors to do?
The issue has become pressing, in recent years, for reasons of expense. The soaring cost of health care is the greatest threat to the country’s long-term solvency, and the terminally ill account for a lot of it. Twenty-five per cent of all Medicare spending is for the five per cent of patients who are in their final year of life, and most of that money goes for care in their last couple of months which is of little apparent benefit.
Spending on a disease like cancer tends to follow a particular pattern. There are high initial costs as the cancer is treated, and then, if all goes well, these costs taper off. Medical spending for a breast-cancer survivor, for instance, averaged an estimated fifty-four thousand dollars in 2003, the vast majority of it for the initial diagnostic testing, surgery, and, where necessary, radiation and chemotherapy. For a patient with a fatal version of the disease, though, the cost curve is U-shaped, rising again toward the end—to an average of sixty-three thousand dollars during the last six months of life with an incurable breast cancer. Our medical system is excellent at trying to stave off death with eight-thousand-dollar-a-month chemotherapy, three-thousand-dollar-a-day intensive care, five-thousand-dollar-an-hour surgery. But, ultimately, death comes, and no one is good at knowing when to stop.
The subject seems to reach national awareness mainly as a question of who should “win” when the expensive decisions are made: the insurers and the taxpayers footing the bill or the patient battling for his or her life. Budget hawks urge us to face the fact that we can’t afford everything. Demagogues shout about rationing and death panels. Market purists blame the existence of insurance: if patients and families paid the bills themselves, those expensive therapies would all come down in price. But they’re debating the wrong question. The failure of our system of medical care for people facing the end of their life runs much deeper. To see this, you have to get close enough to grapple with the way decisions about care are actually made.
Kabuki Democracy: Why a Progressive Presidency Is Impossible, For Now
Mike Allen’s Playbook (from Politico) is the best morning email out there (for now). Brace yourself. 17,000 words. I’d suggest printing this for the subway/bus home. Or the wknd. Redux below.
Eric Alterman — columnist for The Nation, and distinguished English and journalism professor — is up this morning with a 17,000-word agenda-setter, “Kabuki Democracy”: “Few progressives would take issue with the argument that, significant accomplishments notwithstanding, the Obama presidency has been a big disappointment. … Face it, the system is rigged, and it’s rigged against us. Sure, presidents can pretty easily pass tax cuts for the wealthy and powerful corporations. … But what they cannot do, even with supermajorities in both houses of Congress behind them, is pass the kind of transformative progressive legislation that Barack Obama promised in his 2008 presidential campaign. … Obama faces the conundrum of a system that … gives the minority party no strategic stake in sensible governance. … This is just the beginning of the problems Americans face in terms of disproportionate representation. The average age of a US senator is 69, while the median age of Americans … is just over 35. Women are a majority of the US population but only 17 percent of the Senate. … Financial power … can define potential alternatives, invent arguments, inundate with propaganda … Politicians do not need to ‘switch’ their votes to meet the demands of this money. They can bury bills; they can rewrite the language …
“[O]ne hypothesis … for the Obama administration’s willingness to compromise so extensively on the promises that candidate Obama made during the 2008 campaign would be that as president, he is playing for time. Obama is taking the best deal on the table today, but hopes and expects that once he is re-elected in 2012 … he will build on the foundations laid during his first term to bring on the fundamental ‘change’ that is not possible in today’s environment. This would be consistent with FDR’s strategy during his second term and makes a kind of sense when one considers the nature of the opposition he faces today and the likelihood that it will discredit itself following a takeover of one or both houses in 2010. For that strategy to make sense, however, 2013 will have to provide a more pregnant sense of progressive possibility than 2009 did, and that will take a great deal of work by the rest of us.
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