This Is What Privilege and Entitlement Look Like

Fear, like rumors, can be viral, and in recent weeks we've had a great example in the coverage of crime near the University of Minnesota's Minneapolis campus. Despite the fact that every story begins by acknowledging the crime rate is the same as it has been for the past several years, the stories go on to quote freaked out people and use words like "crime spree."

Granted, there have been a few more-high-profile assaults this year, but the rate hasn't budged, and so any person's chance of being assaulted is no different than it has been any other year.

But the fear led to a hearing in front of a legislator, of all things. Are you kidding? Does that happen when there's a flat level of crime anywhere else in the cities?

A letter in today's Star Tribune tops it off. Written by a parent from Edina, probably the richest suburb in the area, it reads:

CAMPUS SAFETY
If we’d known then what we know now…

My daughter attends the University of Minnesota, and we are all aware of the massive growth in crime on campus (U students take their crime fears to Senate hearing, Dec. 11). In considering an institution that brings so much money to the area, I’m appalled by the lack of even the most basic amenities for students.

For example, many upper-class students live along the streets surrounding campus. You could drop an atomic bomb in the area and not hit a quality streetlight. I can tell you it makes me sick with worry every night my daughter walks home along dark streets after a late class.

Also, my daughter called recently to say her bus hadn’t shown and that she was waiting in subzero weather for another. There are very few structures to protect students who use these buses regularly in inclement weather.

Also, the dorms are expensive, old, cold and ugly …

If the over-the-top crime had been occurring when we were selecting a college, you can be sure the U would not have been on our list.

Nancy Maxwell, Edina

"Massive growth of crime on campus" "over-the-top crime" — right, that's what "the same amount of crime as in recent years" means.

And then there's the worst point of Maxwell's many bad ones: She's only concerned about upper-class students. I read that paragraph three times trying to figure why she had included that modifier. It still doesn't make sense, except as an overt statement of privilege. I kept thinking she was going to complain that upper-class students lived close and therefore were safer than less-well-off students, who have to live farther away and therefore are more at risk. But no. That was not at all what she wrote.

She also complains that her daughter is cold at the bus stop. This is a combination of cell-phone-tethering to a helicopter parent and a complete lack of contact with reality. Dress for the weather, kid. As a U professor friend said on Facebook yesterday (the day the high temperature was below zero), "I just saw a young woman walking outside wearing a skirt! No leggings... just a skirt, boots, gloves, and big jacket. These kids are crazy." And don't call momma the next time the bus is late.

Maxwell ends with a jab at the dorms as "expensive, old, cold, and ugly." Maybe she hasn't heard that building booms of luxury dorms for comfort-seeking students (or their parents) are part of what has driven up the cost of college in recent decades.

Oh, that's right, she doesn't need to be concerned about the cost of college because she's upper-class.

___

Reading a few stories on the Minnesota Daily website (the student newspaper of the University) reveals that crime isn't even flat: it's actually down. "University police have recorded a 13 percent drop in crime over the first 10 months of the last six years." The Daily story continued: "The apparent gap between perception and reality isn’t unique to the University community. A May report from the Pew Research Center found that a majority of Americans surveyed were unaware that gun violence nationwide is lower than it was 20 years ago." 

And this: "The 2nd Precinct, which includes all University neighborhoods in Minneapolis except Cedar-Riverside, is the safest precinct in the city so far this year, according to Minneapolis police statistics."

From the Daily story, I get the impression the fear is based on the new crime alerts that are being issued by the University via text message. One more example of how information is like a virus.

Stephen Colbert's Poverty Package

Last night's episode of the Colbert Report was one bit of greatness after another, all tied to the problems of poverty and low-wage work. Sometimes the only thing you can do is laugh to keep from crying.

Colbert began with the hiring phase at a new Walmart store, opening in Washington, D.C. (the one that blocked the city's move to pay living wages, remember). The store had 23,000 applicants for just 600 jobs. That means a 3 percent acceptance rate -- lower than Harvard's. Much merriment ensued.


He followed that with a report on a recent column by Virginia Postrel of Bloomberg News, titled Who needs a raise when you have TV? Postrel, channeling Marie Antoinette, claims you can't be poor when you live in the Golden Age of Television. Colbert labeled her approach "channel serfing" and it was all uphill from there. (Remember the research that showed watching television makes you passive and accepting of authority? Bonus!)

The final segment was an interview with NPR Planet Money producer Alex Blumberg, who ran the recent Planet Money T-shirt series. He described the gist of their findings and the thorny questions that result, such as whether the Bangladeshi factory should be considered a sweatshop or not. Blumberg included the money quote from the series, which was said by a Colombian factory owner: "Our industry follows poverty."

Blumberg then wondered aloud whether Bangladesh might be the end of the road for poverty opportunism. What place was poorer than that, he asked?

Colbert, sharper than a serpent's tooth as always, came right back with a suggestion that manufacturers should build their factories on large ships and pull them up to the shores of the latest poor country, then take off when the wages rise too high.

My suggestion is that the ship dock in Washington, D.C. Clearly there are more people there who want to work for low wages than Walmart can accommodate.

Decoration Dilemma

I look longingly at the spruce tips for sale everywhere this time of year, but I don't buy any.

Where do you think they come from? Seems pretty likely to me that at least some are illegally harvested, and yesterday's NPR report on "tippers" upheld my suspicion. According to the story, "they're damaging forests...plucking limbs bald and even cutting down whole trees so they can sell a lot of tips at once to ...big wreath makers. A hardworking person can make between $5,000 and $10,000 in a season of tipping."

Fake plastic stuff doesn't seem like a good alternative. So I was happy to see this option on Twitter:


Yes, it's the Wreath of Khan.

Voices from the Past

It's been over 20 years since I read through my master's thesis. I thought it might be fun... which was a bit optimistic, but I did come across a quote that seemed suitable for making into a graphic shareable in social media.


1986. Those guys were on to something.

No Fun in Fundamentals

I've found the perfect illustration for our country's school reform (better described as school deform) movement:


From the 1996 movie Matilda. The musical version, now on Broadway, was cowritten by the brilliant Tim Minchin.

Incomplete Thoughts on Age and Rights

One morning I woke up thinking about legal standards for my ideal society, particularly when it comes to age. When should rights and responsibilities apply?

The U.S. system had a period of 10–15 years when almost all laws said you became an adult at 18: As of 1972, you could vote, marry, sign a contract, enlist in the military, and drink alcohol. And very few people under 18 who committed a crime were treated as adults.

That all changed with the forced change in the drinking age to 21 and the general overreaction to crime, pushing treatment of juveniles into adult courts in far too many cases. Yet you can't get a rental car until you're 25. And recent research on the brain and maturity casts doubt on whether 18 or even 21 is the age of maturity, on average. At the same time, we infantalize teenagers unncessarily.

So why not create a more pro-rated system?

This is just a sketch, though. I've probably forgotten something important or said written something that's completely hare-brained.

Note: An assumption underlying my outline of rights is that the ideal society would also decriminalize all drugs, while offering treatment within a single-payer, universal health care system.

0 – 15: child status

• Criminal treatment — no incarceration, only supportive treatment
• Recommend that 14- and 15-year-olds be given previews of their approaching rights, akin to the way driver's permits work with driving.
• Work under 20 hours a week with parents' permission — 14 (lower ages allowed for children who are part of a family-owned and occupied farm).

16 – 24: youth status

• Right to vote — 16
• Drive — 16 with a provisional license for one year. If licensed at 18–21, six months provisional. Provisional means only one other person in the car, no driving between midnight and 5:00 a.m. (Of course, in my ideal society many fewer people will get drivers licenses because there will be free public transit!)
• Consume alcohol and other impairing substances — 16. Return drivers license to provisional after 1 DUI, revoke after second DUI (applies to 25+ too). If DUI occurs under a provisional license, revoke license for one year. Revocations after a second DUI are only restored after proof of treatment and being sober for some prescribed amount of time.
• Criminal treatment — restorative justice, empathy building, and alternative sentencing. Only incarcerate in youth-segregated facilities for violent crimes with no mitigating circumstances (rape, murder, aggravated assault). Fair and full representation in court, innocent until proven guilty.
• Sexual consent — 16
• Adult-restricted content — 16
• Medical decisions — 16 (possibly some decisions limited... such as sterilization?)
• Marriage — starter marriages at 16 that have to be reaffirmed or dissolved at 25. No community property until 25. Children discouraged in starter marriages, but if born, automatic joint custody unless proven abuse (physical or emotional).
• Work 30 hours or more a week — 16. 
• Allow the ability to make legal decisions for yourself incrementally. For instance, sign contracts with no more than 1 year's effect (such as a lease or work contract) until 20, no more than 3 years' effect from 21–24 (with executive function testing to allow full rights at 20?)
• Debt incursion — similar to ability to sign contracts. Can't incur debt until 25, or possibly only small amounts allowed until 20, slightly larger amounts 21–24. 

25+: adult status

• Smoke 25 (does this make sense? why is this the only drug that's not 16?)
• Volunteer in military (with executive function testing to allow early entry at 20 or 22?)
• Conscription (if it exists at all in my ideal society)
• You can make any decision for yourself that doesn't harm others (i.e., your rights terminate where your fist ends and my nose begins)

There would need to be some category for vulnerable adults, such as the brain-damaged woman who was selling off her personal injury settlement money for pennies on the dollar.

I realize it sounds like I'm considering having a test of executive function to prove you're an adult, and that this appears contradictory to my usual thoughts on testing (in education, for instance). Not to mention the fact that finding a test of executive function that can't be easily subverted may be a challenge.

There would be all sorts of legal repercussions to changes like these. This is just a thought experiment. There are probably scholars who've worked out all of this, so let me know if you've read such a thing.

Or maybe I should just write a science fiction story that takes place in such a place. Hmmm.

A Town Called Savage

Minnesota has a town called Savage. It's on the southern end of the Twin Cities.

It must be a hard place be from. I can't tell you how many times I've seen a headline that begins "Savage Man..."

Today's paper had this gem:


Appropriate, in this case.

Tabitha, a Pseudonym for More Tabs

Just a sampling of the tabs that are currently open in my dang browser.

As if the lead poisoning from leaded gas wasn't enough, the lead in all the old paint in our buildings is still hanging around. And poor kids were being used as guinea pigs to test cost-effective ways to clean it up as recently as 20 years ago. Aaaaagh.

A wordy comic that uses the staircase as a metaphor for how we humans can achieve the unthinkably horrible or the preposterously good.

Minneapolis loves to tear down great or at least unique buildings and put up ugly, same-old, dysfunctional ones. Downtown's Block E redevelopment is the current examplar. Bill Lindeke at Twin Cities Sidewalks tells us why:

The ironic thing about Block E's failure is that the redevelopment, after over a decade of sitting as an empty parking lot, installed a lot of the same things that had been there before. In both incarnations of the block, you had a bookstore, a record store, an arcade, a restaurant (complete with rock musicians), night clubs, a movie theater, and even (eventually) a mammary-themed entertainment venue. The problem was that all the replacements were chain versions of the unique and local places that had been there before -- AMC Theater for the World Theater, Borders for the Shinders, Gameworks for the Rifle Sport [gallery], Escape Ultra Lounge for Moby Dicks, Hooters for Fantasy House, etc. That's precisely the opposite direction that cities should be going in. You'll never recreate suburbia downtown. You have to offer something far more unique, something that the ring road shopping malls can never have... density and diversity.

Lindeke was also on MPR's The Daily Circuit talking about Block E.

Another cool map of how to distribute U.S. statehood to equalize population and therefore representation:


Hello from the state of Mesabi!

Charles C. Mann recently wrote in Smithsonian on what we know about the native people who lived in the areas around Plymouth, Mass., including "Squanto." As the story's subtitle put it, "The Indians who first feasted with the English colonists were far more sophisticated than you were taught in school. But that wasn't enough to save them."

Research written up by MinnPost's Susan Perry finds that conservatives overestimate the amount of agreement within their group, while liberals underestimate it. Liberals, it seems, have a higher need to feel unique. We undermine our own causes with our special snowflakiness.

Diane Ravitch asks, Why Do We Rank and Rate Students, Teachers, and Schools?

It seems to me that we are thinking about children, teachers, and schools the same way we think about sports teams. In every league, there are winners and losers.

But if we think about education as a culture that is very different from that of a competitive sports league, then the picture and the questions change.

What if we thought of schools as if they were akin to families?

Then we would work to develop school cultures that are collaborative and supportive. We would make sure that those with the greatest needs got the resources they need. We would stop thinking of winners and losers (and “racing to the top”) and think instead about the full development of each human’s potential.

The next book I read is going to be her recent Reign of Error.

I don't quite know what to make of this Salon piece, but it's provocative: End the 1 percent’s free ride: Taxing land would solve America’s biggest problems.

I just started reading this piece from Technology Review: Climate Change: The Moral Choices. Enough to recommend it. 

Which has had a bigger impact, the Internet or the washing machine? Here's the case for the washing machine (and other household labor-saving devices).

One more video of cops behaving badly, this time trying to intimidate a law-abiding citizen into giving up his rights at a DUI checkpoint.

NPR's Planet Money team doesn't always get things right, but their series this week on everything and everyone that goes into making a t-shirt has been worth listening to. From today's show, this quote from a Colombian garment factory owner: "Our industry follows poverty."

Almost Too Much Logic

Peter Orszag, former head of the Obama administration's Office of Management and Budget, proposes a way to help low-wage workers. It would have the side benefit of getting the economy moving through more consumer spending.

A low-income single parent can experience a marginal rate as high as 95 percent — for each dollar earned, the person takes home only 5 cents. And for married parents, the marginal rate for the family’s secondary earner can be almost as high.

This happens mostly because various means-tested benefit programs are phased out as income increases. A secondary earner who raises a family’s income to $30,000 from $15,000, for example, will trigger a decline of about $1,500 in the family’s Earned Income Tax Credit and a drop in food stamp benefits of almost $3,000. Factor in the child-care costs necessary for the second parent to work, and the family will take home less than 40 cents of each additional dollar earned.

If we care about encouraging work, these high marginal tax rates for low-income families deserve as much, if not more, attention than the rates for the biggest earners.

One way to boost work incentives for secondary earners is to create a new tax break for them. This is what University of Maryland economists Melissa Kearney and Lesley Turner have proposed. (Kearney is also the new director of the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project.) They recommend a deduction of up to 20 percent of a secondary worker’s earnings.

This proposal is similar to a tax provision that was briefly in effect during the 1980s. And it could be paid for, as Kearney and Turner suggest, by paring back other, less important tax breaks. It would encourage employment among secondary earners, who are still disproportionately women, by increasing their net income when they work outside the home.

The income cut-offs for safety net programs have never made sense to me—child care subsidies, for instance. When Daughter Number Three-Point-One was in child care, I knew a single mom who had to turn down a raise because it would put her over the top end for the child care subsidy, but wouldn't pay anywhere near enough to cover the cost of child care either. The gap between the two amounts was glaringly large.

It doesn't seem like it should be that hard to make those transitions more gradual. Why haven't we figured this out by now?

Not Tonight, I've Got a Headache

I really do.

As a bit of enlightenment, though, check out the way Google Images rewards anyone who searches the word "headache":

The Girl in the Last Audience of the Hapsburgs

The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon was a nice diversion for an afternoon during my recent trip to the Northwest. One painting in particular captured my attention for some time. (Click on either image for a much larger version.)

"The Last Audience of the Hapsburgs" was painted in 1918 by Artur von Ferarris, a Hungarian painter who lived from 1856 to 1936. It's not the kind of painting I usually find riveting.


Here's the text that accompanied it:

When this unfinished canvas was first exhibited in Eugene fifty years ago, it was described as a "painting with a history as romantic as old Vienna." Given that it was smuggled into the United States in a carpet roll by a political refugee, this claim is not unfounded.

The artist began the work in October of 1918 at Schönbrunn Palace, where the young Empress Zita (1892 - 1989) received an audience of war orphans and a group of wealthy noblewomen, the Organization of War Godmothers, who had "adopted" them. Within hours, Empress Zita (shown seated on her throne), her husband, and their own eight children were forced to flee across the Swiss border because of the contentious political climate. Despite several attempts, they were never able to reestablish themselves on their thrones; both the Emperor and Empress died in exile.

The unsettlingly incomplete canvas mirrors the frustrated desires of both the artist, who spent the rest of his life wandering the globe, and the people pictured in it, many of whom were displaced in the aftermath of the First World War. Yet the audience members wear placid, even bored expressions as the children present their flowers, betraying no portent that one of the oldest dynasties in Europe would crumble within a matter of days.

In person, the painting is a lesson in the methods of oil painting -- the drawing, the underpainting, and the move toward the final level of detail, all exposed by its incompleteness. Many of the adult faces have a grayish cast because they were awaiting their layer of color. Almost none have the specific features intended by the painter.

The one exception is this girl in the lower right corner:


Surrounded by the pencil ghosts of her fellow orphans, she gazes at the viewer, solemn but not accusatory, enigmatic. I can't help making up stories about why the painter had completed this one face so perfectly. Even the empress is not as finished. Was this girl one of the orphans who especially captured his artistic eye, or was she not part of the portrait group at all, but special to him in his own life?

The painting is thought to be romantic because it captures a lost age, but I'm not romantic about that, democrat (lower case D) that I am. The romance is in the missing story of this child. What happened to her?

Seven More Photos from the Northwest

Well, now I can say I've been to Eugene, Oregon. Nice town, even though I kept reading the name as "Eugenic" every time I saw it on a business sign.


Eugene and nearby Springfield were home to the merry prankster Ken Kesey. He's honored with a bronze statue in the downtown. It's located in a brick square that hosts food trucks, but because this photo is from Thanksgiving day, the vendors weren't open. Hence the billboard for Pepsi (rather than electric koolaid) in the background.


A random sighting in a Eugene parking lot.


Ferns grow everywhere in the Northwest, including out of the mortar joins of buildings. These were growing out of a stone wall (yes, there's a wall behind them).


I know I am fond of proclaiming that I've found the worst logo, but this one is a contender. Vertically stacked type, wimpy lines, and a meaningless name. The sign overall is busy, with no focal point to get your attention. Geez, I just realized now that the O in DOC is supposed to be an olive.


A Eugene hair salon to go with my earlier photos of hair places around the country. Bonus points here for the extraneous apostrophe.


From a mall in Olympia, Washington. It is imperative to warn people of all lawyer-imagined dangers.


Finally, a welcoming bit of zen.