Half Changed World

The Ten-Year Nap

Today's book is The Ten-Year Nap, by Meg Wolitzer.  I'm reviewing it as part of a MotherTalk blog book tour.

The book follows the lives of four stay-at-home mothers who have been friends for years, at a point when they're sort of re-examining their lives and wondering what happens next.  The book is mostly set in Manhattan, with a nod to a neighboring suburb, and the characters are all the sort of upper-middle class professionals whose life choices wind up as long articles in the New York Times.  But Wolitzer isn't of this milieu herself, and the book isn't full of the brand name references that many such books drop in order to establish their accuracy -- when brands are mentioned, they're generally made-up (I think).  She's less interested in capturing the precise details of the lifestyle than in exploring what drives people to make the choices they do.

I disliked the start of the book: "All around the country, the women were waking up.  Their alarm clocks bleated one by one, making soothing sounds or grating sounds or the stirrings of a favorite song..."  The move from "the women" to a subset of women -- those who don't have to go to work, who aren't already sitting bleary eyed with a nursing infant as the sun rises -- jarred me, and made me ready to dislike the book as a whole.

But I actually mostly enjoyed the book.  Once Wolitzer settles down to the individual characters and stops talking in generalities, her writing skills shine through.  And unlike Rachel Cusk, she seems to have some affection for her characters.  While the plot is fairly thin, and overly driven by random external events, I was perfectly happy to spend a few hours in the company of Amy, Karen and Jill.  (And Roberta, but in thinking over the book, I can't remember any of the sections from her perspective...)

I noticed in this interview in the NY Times last week that Wolitzer said "I’m not writing the Big Book o’ Motherhood and Work."  I think that's a bit disingenuous, as the book has a series of short vignettes of other people's lives that only fit into the book as quick looks into the role that work plays in people's lives --  Amy's mother discovering feminism and her life's work as a writer,  Nadia Comanici thinking that gymnastics isn't work at all, someone's aunt who is an assistant to Margaret Thatcher, feeling like she's part of something important even as she gets verbally abused, a minor character enjoying the camaraderie and energy of working in a dead end casino job.

At some point in the book one of the characters concludes "work doesn't make you interesting; interesting work makes you interesting."  One of the strengths of the book is that for all that Wolitzer comes down on the side of work (and I think she does), she also recognizes that most jobs aren't all that exciting and wonderful.

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There's an interesting discussion of finding your passion going on in the comments on Ask Moxie's post on this book.

Clarke's 3rd law

... as a Venn diagram, at indexed.

T. showed me an article last week that pointed out that there's a reason that geostationary satellites are in what's called the Clarke orbit. 

is housing a positional good?

I left off yesterday with Robert Frank's hypothetical question of which would you prefer, World A, where you live in a 4,000 square foot house and everyone else lives in a 6,000 square foot house OR World B, where you live in a 3,000 square foot house and everyone else lives in a 2,000 square foot house.

He argues that most people would prefer B.  I'm not sure whether that's true, and to the extent it is true, how much it's driven by the correlation between housing prices and school quality.  I think I'd choose B, but my reasoning is that in world B, there would probably be nicer parks and other public spaces. 

The NY Times this week had an interesting article on people who were rejoicing in Bear Stearns' downfall, and more generally in the possibility of a setback to the Wall Street types who have driven up the cost of living in New York.

TBR: Falling Behind

I thought about calling this post, "the book that killed my blog."  I read Robert Frank's Falling Behind a couple of weeks ago, and have been wanting to post about it ever since, but I'm not sure I can do it justice, especially when I'm tired and distracted.  Although it's a short book (just over 100 pages, paperback), there's a lot of ideas packed into it.  So let's see if I can unpack them.

The main idea in the book is that people's well being is determined by their relative income as well as their absolute income, and by how far behind they are as well as their ordinal ranking.  I think this is a relatively non-controversial statement if you're talking about people at the very bottom of the income distribution -- most people recognize that the poor in the U.S. are still very well off compared to much of the world's population, but suffer from their low relative income and status.  But it's a pretty controversial statement to say that the very high wealth of Bill Gates or Wall Street financiers makes everyone else worse off.

So, probably the first third of the book goes to justify that statement.  This leads Frank into some interesting detours -- he first has to justify that "happiness" is something meaningful, and that "having more money" is not synonymous with "being better off."  He then spends a good chunk of space arguing that the reason that other people's wealth makes us worse off is not envy, or conscious attempts to "keep up with the Jones'" but rather the result of  context affecting our perception of what's adequate and what's reasonable.

One example he gives is that the existence of $2,000 grills with all sorts of bells and whistles makes it seem more reasonable for him to spend $300 on a new one, even though his old one that cost $40 had done a perfectly adequate job.  I can verify that I could see this happening as we made our choices about our kitchen. 

In the second half of the book, Franks argues that positional concerns cause people to spend more and more of their money on things where ranking rather than absolute levels of consumption matter.  But this makes everyone worse off, because if everyone doubles their spending, the ranking is left unchanged, only people have less money to spend on other things (or less free time).  I thought this made a lot of sense, although I'm still not entirely convinced by his arguments about what is and what is not a positional good.

Frank poses a pair of thought experiments about this, and I'd be interested in reading some responses.  He asks, which would you prefer:

1) World A, where you live in a 4,000 square foot house and everyone else lives in a 6,000 square foot house OR World B, where you live in a 3,000 square foot house and everyone else lives in a 2,000 square foot house.

2)  World C, where you have 4 weeks of vacation and everyone else has 6 weeks, OR World D where you have 3 weeks of vacation and everyone else has 2 weeks.

I think I'll stop here, and come back to the discussion after I've gotten some responses in the comments.

spatulas

I return from my blog hiatus with a burning question... pretty much literally.  It's about spatulas -- the kind with the flat blade that you use for turning pancakes and moving the onions you're sauteeing around, as opposed to the kind you use for scraping bowls or icing cakes.  In packing up our kitchen, I discovered that we have three of these, and on all of them either the handle or the blade has been melted. 

So, I'm thinking that when our new kitchen is done, I might splurge on a new, unmelted spatula.  But I'd like it to stay that way for a while.  And I want it not to destroy nonstick pans.  So, any recommendations?  We do have a couple of silicone spatulas, but they seem to be more in the cake icing and batter scraping families.  Do they make them with the offset handles, and rigid enough to use for pancakes?

still here

Didn't want anyone to worry -- I'm still alive.  Just decided that I needed to prioritize things like getting a reasonable amount of sleep for a while...

standby energy tax

Last night on the way home, I heard David Frum on Marketplace.  Frum is a former speechwriter for President Bush, and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, so I pretty much assume that I'm going to disagree with everything that comes out of his mouth.

But this is part of what he said:

"OK, the price [of energy] is high again. This is the perfect moment to pass a standby energy tax, a tax that would kick in when the price of oil falls below say $60 a barrel. Consumers could feel secure that if they make the investment in a hybrid car, or a smaller house with a shorter commute, they won't feel like fools in four or five years..."

This makes a great deal of sense to me.  I think we've talked about it here before, but it's pretty hard for most people to significantly reduce their driving in the short run in response to increased gasoline prices.  As a recent CBO study shows, the highest response is in those areas where there is existing mass transit as an alternative.  And if the price gets high enough, people start limiting leisure travel.  And indeed, there's some evidence that gas consumption is finally starting to drop a bit.  But most people can't just decide not to drive to work or the grocery store.  However, if people know that gas prices are going to stay high for long periods, they're more likely to make the sort of big changes that Frum mentions.

So, what am I missing?  Is there a hidden problem with it that I'm not seeing?  Or if it's really something that a libertarian true believer like Frum and a green progressive like myself can agree upon, why aren't any politicians talking about it?

Another election day

I made a couple of calls to women in Texas tonight for Obama, and the people I reached sounded pretty grumpy.  Maybe I just had a bad streak, but they just didn't want to hear from me.  By contrast, when I was calling into Super Tuesday states, even the people who were going to vote for Clinton sounded happy with their options and willing to talk.

I'm guessing that tomorrow's going to be a split decision.  Clinton will take Ohio and Rhode Island; Obama will take Texas (at least by delegates) and Vermont.  And I think that means the campaigns will slog on to Pennsylvania.

I'm a self-admitted political junkie, but I've run out of enthusiasm for this primary.  I like both candidates, and worry that the infighting is becoming too destructive.  I want Obama to win the primary, but I want a Democrat to win in November even more.

Prosper update

I'm starting to do my taxes, so I've been looking at my Prosper statement.  I must stay, the headache of figuring out the taxes is a major disincentive to lending through Prosper.  The couple of bad loans I've had are a particular bother.  Prosper's tax page is pretty much useless: this blog post  and this wiki are a lot more helpful.

Since the last time I wrote about Prosper in October, my performance has dropped quite a bit.  As predicted, the two loans that were 3 months late were sold as delinquent; I now have another 3 that are between 1 and 3 months late.  What's striking is that only one of them was what I'd consider a "high risk" loan based on credit -- the other two had A or AA ratings.  And when I picked my loans, I made a deliberate choice to avoid anyone who wanted money for a real estate deal... So, another sign that people are hurting...