We’ve been sending unmanned probes to Mars, and, as Elon Musk likes to point out, they are very expensive probes:
They aren’t exactly bargain-basement. The last RC car we sent to Mars cost more than $3 billion. That’s a hell of a droid. For that kind of money, we should be able to send a lot of people to Mars.
Sometimes, when we open a test, we see familiar questions on material we’ve studied — and yet we still do badly. Why does this happen?
Psychologists have studied learning long enough to have an answer, and typically it’s not a lack of effort (or of some elusive test-taking gene). The problem is that we have misjudged the depth of what we know. We are duped by a misperception of “fluency,” believing that because facts or formulas or arguments are easy to remember right now, they will remain that way tomorrow or the next day. This fluency illusion is so strong that, once we feel we have some topic or assignment down, we assume that further study won’t strengthen our memory of the material. We move on, forgetting that we forget.
Often our study “aids” simply create fluency illusions — including, yes, highlighting — as do chapter outlines provided by a teacher or a textbook. Such fluency misperceptions are automatic; they form subconsciously and render us extremely poor judges of what we need to restudy or practice again. “We know that if you study something twice, in spaced sessions, it’s harder to process the material the second time, and so people think it’s counterproductive,” Nate Kornell, a psychologist at Williams College, said. “But the opposite is true: You learn more, even though it feels harder. Fluency is playing a trick on judgment.”
The best way to overcome this illusion is testing, which also happens to be an effective study technique in its own right. This is not exactly a recent discovery; people have understood it since the dawn of formal education, probably longer. In 1620, the philosopher Francis Bacon wrote, “If you read a piece of text through twenty times, you will not learn it by heart so easily as if you read it ten times while attempting to recite it from time to time and consulting the text when your memory fails.”
Scientific confirmation of this principle began in 1916, when Arthur Gates, a psychologist at Columbia University, created an ingenious study to further Bacon’s insight. If someone is trying to learn a piece of text from memory, Gates wondered, what would be the ideal ratio of study to recitation (without looking)? To interrogate this question, he had more than 100 schoolchildren try to memorize text from Who’s Who entries. He broke them into groups and gave each child nine minutes to prepare, along with specific instructions on how to use that time. One group spent 1 minute 48 seconds memorizing and the remaining time rehearsing (reciting); another split its time roughly in half, equal parts memorizing and rehearsing; a third studied for a third and recited for two-thirds; and so on.
After a sufficient break, Gates sat through sputtered details of the lives of great Americans and found his ratio. “In general,” he concluded, “best results are obtained by introducing recitation after devoting about 40 percent of the time to reading. Introducing recitation too early or too late leads to poorer results.” The quickest way to master that Shakespearean sonnet, in other words, is to spend the first third of your time memorizing it and the remaining two-thirds of the time trying to recite it from memory.
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In the 1930s, a doctoral student at the State University of Iowa, Herman F. Spitzer, recognized the broader implications of this insight. Gates’s emphasis on recitation was, Spitzer realized, not merely a study tip for memorization; it was nothing less than a form of self-examination. It was testing as study, and Spitzer wanted to extend the finding, asking a question that would apply more broadly in education: If testing is so helpful, when is the best time to do it?He mounted an enormous experiment, enlisting more than 3,500 sixth graders at 91 elementary schools in nine Iowa cities. He had them study an age-appropriate article of roughly 600 words in length, similar to what they might analyze for homework. Spitzer divided the students into groups and had each take tests on the passages over the next two months, according to different schedules. For instance, Group 1 received one quiz immediately after studying, then another a day later and a third three weeks later. Group 6, by contrast, didn’t take one until three weeks after reading the passage. Again, the time the students had to study was identical. So were the quizzes. Yet the groups’ scores varied widely, and a clear pattern emerged.
The groups that took pop quizzes soon after reading the passage — once or twice within the first week — did the best on a final exam given at the end of two months, marking about 50 percent of the questions correct. (Remember, they had studied their peanut or bamboo article only once.) By contrast, the groups who took their first pop quiz two weeks or more after studying scored much lower, below 30 percent on the final. Spitzer’s study showed that not only is testing a powerful study technique, but it’s also one that should be deployed sooner rather than later. “Achievement tests or examinations are learning devices and should not be considered only as tools for measuring achievement of pupils,” he concluded.
The testing effect, as it’s known, is now well established, and it opens a window on the alchemy of memory itself. “Retrieving a fact is not like opening a computer file,” says Henry Roediger III, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis, who, with Jeffrey Karpicke, now at Purdue University, has established the effect’s lasting power. “It alters what we remember and changes how we subsequently organize that knowledge in our brain.”
There it is: ______s are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are decent enough people like ______ and Company, if you don’t expect too much.
It’s not exactly Mad Libs, but it caught my fancy. Do you recognize the source?
William Morris is known for many things. As a writer and a medievalist, he inspired Tolkien to pen The Lord of the Rings. As a socialist and a craftsman, he dreamed of a post-capitalist world where all labor would provide the gratification assigned, in his lifetime, to art.
Alain de Botton considers him one of the great philosophers:
The 19th-century designer, poet and entrepreneur William Morris is one of the best guides we have to the modern economy – despite the fact that he died in 1896 (while Queen Victoria was still on the throne), never made a telephone call and would have found the very idea of television utterly baffling.
Morris was the first person to understand two issues which have become decisive for our times. Firstly: the role of pleasure in work. And, secondly: the nature of consumer demand. The preferences of consumers – what we collectively appreciate and covet and are willing to pay for – are crucial drivers of the economy and hence of the kind of society we end up living in. Until we have better collective taste, we will struggle to have a better economy and society.
[...]
The experience of building and fitting out his house taught Morris his first big lesson about the economy. It would have been simpler (and maybe cheaper) to have ordered everything from a factory outlet. But Morris wasn’t trying to find the quickest or simplest way to set up home. He wanted to find the way that would give him – and everyone involved in the project – maximum satisfaction. And it fired Morris with an enthusiasm for the medieval idea of craft. The worker would develop sensitivity and skill; and enjoy the labour. It wasn’t mechanical or humiliating.
He spotted that craft offers important clues to what we actually want from work. We want to know we’ve done something good with the day. That our efforts have counted towards tangible outcomes that we actually see and feel are worthwhile. And Morris was already noticing that when people really like their work, the issue of exactly how much you get paid becomes less critical. (Though Morris always believed, in addition, that people deserved honourable pay for honest work.) The point is you can absolutely say you are not doing it purely for the money.
[...]
The [décor] firm [he established] soon encountered a very instructive problem. If you make high quality goods and pay your workers a fair and decent wage, then the cost of the product is going to be higher. It will always be possible for competitors to undercut the price and offer inferior goods, produced in less humane ways, for less money.
If you ask a comparatively high price – to ensure the dignity of work and quality of materials and so make something that will last – you really risk losing customers.
The factories and machines of the Industrial Revolution had brought mass production. Prices were lower, but there was a loss of quality and a dependence on routine, deadening labour in depressing circumstances.
[...]
For Morris the key factor is, therefore, whether customers are willing to pay the just price. If they are, then work can be honourable. If they are not, then work is necessarily going to be – on the whole – degrading and miserable.
So, Morris concluded that the lynchpin of a good economy is the education of the consumer. We collectively need to get clearer about what we really want in our lives and why, and how much certain things are worth to us (and therefore how much we are prepared to pay for them).
An important clue to good consumption, Morris insisted, is that you ‘should have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful’.
Morris believed that a good economy should pass the following tests:
These mesmerizing maps of where people jog reveal something telling about major U.S. cities:
But as the Washington Post alleges, these aren’t just maps of the best places to go jogging. They’re also maps which clearly match up very closely with the neighborhoods of rich and poor people in those cities.
Note, for example, there aren’t many people using Runkeeper in London south of the Thames, or in Boston’s South Side, or anywhere in New York but the financial district, the richest parts of Brooklyn, and the Upper East Side (exception: some people do appear to be crossing through the South Bronx to use the bridges there). Scenic D.C. is rich with routes; southeastern D.C. less so. The farther you get away from rich coastal San Francisco, the less people are jogging. It goes on and on.
As “Know More” notes, the correlation isn’t unexpected: Richer people tend to prefer living near parks and rivers, which are also the best jogging spots. And the poor are less likely to spend their money on “rich people” things like expensive smartphones or fitness apps. (I’d also argue that fitness tracking of this manner tends to be a bourgeois affectation.) But what’s clear is that fitness and class status tend to be correlated.
A more in-depth article in The Atlantic argues that while the link between poverty and obesity is poorly understood, we can take away some major points.
“… Poverty might make some people obese, but obesity definitely makes many people poorer, through two broad channels: (a) it reduces take-home pay, particularly for women; and (b) it’s related to health conditions that reduce discretionary income, too.” Black women in particular are victims of this trend.”
Clearly the best explanation is that the poor are less likely to spend their money on “rich people” things like expensive smartphones or fitness apps.
CrossFit gyms are now offering preschool programs:
In preschool CrossFit, dangling off hanging bars is likened to being a monkey. Squats are frog-inspired. Box jumps, plyometric leaps long beloved by elite athletes, are smaller and rebranded for kids as superhero leaps.
In Long Island City, a tunnel constructed from red tumbling mats inspired comparisons to snakes and worms. Games and exercises were punctuated by water breaks and doodling. CrossFit Kids instructors are discouraged from telling children to lift weights or move faster, Martin said. High-fives for effort are prevalent.
[...]
For some parents and children, CrossFit has become an alternative to the travel teams and year-round youth sports schedules that can be so demanding.
Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic, James C. Scott argues. It always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order:
This truth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on the fact that any production process depends on a host of informal practices and improvisations that could never be codified. By merely following the rules meticulously, the workforce can virtually halt production. In the same fashion, the simplified rules animating plans for, say, a city, a village, or a collective farm were inadequate as a set of instructions for creating a functioning social order. The formal scheme was parasitic on informal processes that, alone, it could not create or maintain. To the degree that the formal scheme made no allowance for these processes or actually suppressed them, it failed both its intended beneficiaries and ultimately its designers as well.
The 1918 influenza pandemic hit almost every country on Earth, Gregory Cochran explains:
It missed American Samoa entirely, which is interesting. It’s even more interesting when you notice that it hit the neighboring islands of West Samoa harder than anywhere else.
[...]
American Samoa was physically quite close to Western Samoa, less than 100km. There were close cultural ties: people intermarried and often sailed back and forth. But the governmental structure was different. There were no copra plantations in American Samoa, so you didn’t have any powerful business interests lobbying for suicide. The US Navy ran the colony. John Martin Poyer, an officer that had retired from active duty due to illness, was brought back to active duty in 1915 to serve as Governor of American Samoa.
Both American Samoa and West Samoa had advance warning of the flu’s danger: they both had wireless sets and occasional mail.
Washington didn’t micro-manage American Samoa, not being all that interested. A policy of benign neglect was interpreted by Poyer as an opportunity to act on his best judgment, in the finest traditions of the US Navy. He imposed quarantine. That was harder that it sounds, because of the frequent family visits between West Samoa and American Samoa — but Poyer also had the support of the local chiefs, who understood how serious imported epidemics could be. The people of American Samoa self-blockaded, on top of official quarantine: they sent out canoes to stop any and all visitors. They never had a single case.
The inspiration for Disney’s Robin Hood wasn’t actually Robin Hood:
Since the 1930s, Walt Disney had been interested in telling a version of the 12th century Alsatian story of Reynard (or Renart) the Fox. In the Roman de Renart, Reynard the Fox is summoned to the court of a cruel lion, King Leo, to answer charges brought against him by Isengrim the Wolf. Leo sends out various agents, including a bear, an ass, and a cat, to get him to court, but Reynard overcomes all three of them (incidentally, the Cat is named Tibert or Tybalt, which is why in Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio calls Tybalt a ‘rat-catcher’ and ‘king of cats’), defeats Isengrim, and becomes Leo’s new advisor. This was just the start of a quite complex body of stories about Reynard, many of which were satires directed at aristocratic society.
The problem with all this material is that it was extremely violent (the bear gets attacked by bees, Tybalt loses an eye, and Reynard decapitates a rabbit and substitutes its head for a secret treasure). Reynard is a crook, and a deeply anti-authoritarian one at that. Walt Disney concluded that the material simply wasn’t appropriate for children. But Ken Anderson, one of the key members of Disney’s creative team, held onto the idea an periodically played around with it. In 1968, when the studio was looking for follow-up to The Aristocats, Anderson suggested doing a Robin Hood story. But Robin Hood is a problematic story for children, since like Reynard, he is anti-authoritarian. However, by merging the two figures and making an animated fox the hero fighting against a cowardly lion who is not the legitimate ruler, Anderson was able to kill two bird with one stone by taming the violence and reducing the anti-authoritarianism of both stories. Additionally, making the story animated rather than live-action helped create distance between the characters and the young audience, reducing the likelihood that they would absorb the anti-authoritarianism of the story.
The choice to model Robin Hood loosely off the story of Reynard was an inspired one. While Reynard is not a familiar figure to English-speaking audiences, foxes are still considered clever and sly, which fits well for Robin Hood. Modeling Prince John after Leo but making him a coward is a brilliant contradiction (as well as echoing the Cowardly Lion of The Wizard of Oz). Isengrim the wolf becomes the villainous Sheriff of Nottingham. Making Allan-a-Dale a rooster riffs nicely on the character of Chaunticleer the Rooster, who is perhaps the most famous (to English-speakers at least) of all the Reynard cycle characters, because Chaucer wrote a version of his conflict with Reynard in “The Second Nun’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales. The addition of two poor church mice as supporting characters is also a clever little joke.
When I first heard about Reynard the Fox, I got a chuckle out of the name, because renard is French for fox:
The traditional French word for “fox” was goupil from Latin vulpecula. However, mentioning the fox was considered bad luck among farmers. Because of the popularity of the Reynard stories, renard was often used as a euphemism, so that today renard is the standard French word for “fox” and goupil is now dialectal or archaic.
The most tragic episodes of social engineering include these four elements, James C. Scott argues:
The first element is the administrative ordering of nature and society — the transformative state simplifications described above. By themselves, they are the unremarkable tools of modern statecraft; they are as vital to the maintenance of our welfare and freedom as they are to the designs of a would-be modern despot. They undergird the concept of citizenship and the provision of social welfare just as they might undergird a policy of rounding up undesirable minorities.
The second element is what I call a high-modernist ideology. It is best conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws. It originated, of course, in the West, as a by-product of unprecedented progress in science and industry.
High modernism must not be confused with scientific practice. It was fundamentally, as the term “ideology” implies, a faith that borrowed, as it were, the legitimacy of science and technology. It was, accordingly, uncritical, unskeptical, and thus unscientifically optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production. The carriers of high modernism tended to see rational order in remarkably visual aesthetic terms. For them, an efficient, rationally organized city, village, or farm was a city that looked regimented and orderly in a geometrical sense. The carriers of high modernism, once their plans miscarried or were thwarted, tended to retreat to what I call miniaturization: the creation of a more easily controlled micro-order in model cities, model villages, and model farms.
High modernism was about “interests” as well as faith. Its carriers, even when they were capitalist entrepreneurs, required state action to realize their plans. In most cases, they were powerful officials and heads of state. They tended to prefer certain forms of planning and social organization (such as huge dams, centralized communication and transportation hubs, large factories and farms, and grid cities), because these forms fit snugly into a high-modernist view and also answered their political interests as state officials. There was, to put it mildly, an elective affinity between high modernism and the interests of many state officials.
Like any ideology, high modernism had a particular temporal and social context. The feats of national economic mobilization of the belligerents (especially Germany) in World War I seem to mark its high tide. Not surprisingly, its most fertile social soil was to be found among planners, engineers, architects, scientists, and technicians whose skills and status it celebrated as the designers of the new order. High-modernist faith was no respecter of traditional political boundaries; it could be found across the political spectrum from left to right but particularly among those who wanted to use state power to bring about huge, utopian changes in people’s work habits, living patterns, moral conduct, and worldview. Nor was this utopian vision dangerous in and of itself. Where it animated plans in liberal parliamentary societies and where the planners therefore had to negotiate with organized citizens, it could spur reform.
Only when these first two elements are joined to a third does the combination become potentially lethal. The third element is an authoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power to bring these high-modernist designs into being. The most fertile soil for this element has typically been times of war, revolution, depression, and struggle for national liberation. In such situations, emergency conditions foster the seizure of emergency powers and frequently delegitimize the previous regime. They also tend to give rise to elites who repudiate the past and who have revolutionary designs for their people.
A fourth element is closely linked to the third: a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans. War, revolution, and economic collapse often radically weaken civil society as well as make the populace more receptive to a new dispensation. Late colonial rule, with its social engineering aspirations and ability to run roughshod over popular opposition, occasionally met this last condition.
Most sports were invented years ago, Scott Adams(Dilbert) notes, and much has changed since then:
Equipment technology has improved. We have far more knowledge of health risks. Our attention spans have shrunk, and our options for leisure activities have increased. If you were to invent the rules of sports today, from a blank slate, you would do a lot of things differently.
For example, when tennis was invented, serving was just a way to start the rally. One player bunted the ball into the service box and it was on.
Fast-forward to 2014.
Now the pros are 6’8″, their rackets and strings are made from exotic materials, and they are trained to serve at 140 miles per hour. As you might imagine, that creates a lot of double-faults and aces. Both are boring.
To fix tennis, eliminate the serve. That is already happening where I live. A group of folks in my town already play without the serve. Under the no-serve rules either player can start the rally and the point is live on the third hit. You play to 21, win by two, so no more funky tennis scoring with the 15-30-40 ridiculousness. This version of tennis is about twice as fun as playing serve-and-miss while wishing you were getting some exercise.
In 2014 we know a lot about the dangers of concussions. Football wouldn’t be allowed as a youth sport if it were invented today. Soccer players wouldn’t be allowed to head the ball for the same reason. So let’s get rid of football entirely, at least for kids, and make it a penalty to head a soccer ball.
Speaking of soccer, if we invented that game today the goals would be 50% wider to create more scoring and there would be TV timeouts built into the game design so the major networks could more easily monetize with commercials. And the off-side rule has to go; that is just boring. And while we are at it, let’s put up a glass wall around the field so the ball stays in play.
Baseball could be interesting if it were slow-pitch and any ball hit out of the park were ruled an out. I might add another player to the outfield, but the idea is to have lots of hits and lots of defense. In the age of smartphones, no one has the patience to watch nine guys standing around in the grass wondering when something might happen.
Volleyball has one of the most ridiculous rules in sports. The players need to rotate positions after every point. The well-coached teams do a quick, synchronized rotation as soon as the serve is hit to get into the positions they prefer instead of the positions the game rules require. Let’s just lose the player rotation rule.
Golf also needs to be fixed. The main problem is that 18 holes is far too much time commitment and 9 holes seem too little. I hear that 12-hole courses are being built for exactly that reason. That makes sense in 2014.
Another thing that golf needs to lose is the annoying foursome behind you that makes you feel rushed and guilty. I don’t know how to fix that in an economically way, but it sure would improve the game if someone did.
DARPA has granted $2.9 million to Harvard researchers developing a soft exoskeleton made of spandex, nylon, cables, and motors:
The Harvard exoskeleton is highly efficient because it applies force in a way that closely aligns with the natural movements of muscles and tendons. Sensors monitor the wearer’s motion, and battery-powered motors move cables to pull up on the heel, or on part of the leg near the hip — adding a propelling tug at just the right moment as the wearer steps forward. “It’s quite lightweight, flexible, and conformal,” says Conor Walsh, a professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering at Harvard. “It doesn’t disrupt normal walking and movement.”
The machine is designed to fit easily under clothes, and novel, soft sensors made of silicone rubber are integrated into the suit. The sensors, developed at another lab at Harvard, include embedded channels filled with a conductive liquid that changes in resistivity as the silicone is stretched.
James C. Scott draws an analogy between beekeeping and governing:
In premodern times the gathering of honey was a difficult affair. Even if bees were housed in straw hives, harvesting the honey usually meant driving off the bees and often destroying the colony. The arrangement of brood chambers and honey cells followed complex patterns that varied from hive to hive — patterns that did not allow for neat extractions. The modern beehive, in contrast, is designed to solve the beekeeper’s problem. With a device called a “queen excluder,” it separates the brood chambers below from the honey supplies above, preventing the queen from laying eggs above a certain level. Furthermore, the wax cells are arranged neatly in vertical frames, nine or ten to a box, which enable the easy extraction of honey, wax, and propolis. Extraction is made possible by observing “bee space — the precise distance between the frames that the bees will leave open as passages rather than bridging the frames by building intervening honeycomb. From the beekeeper’s point of view, the modern hive is an orderly, “legible” hive allowing the beekeeper to inspect the condition of the colony and the queen, judge its honey production (by weight), enlarge or contract the size of the hive by standard units, move it to a new location, and, above all, extract just enough honey (in temperate climates) to ensure that the colony will overwinter successfully.
I do not wish to push the analogy further than it will go, but much of early modern European statecraft seemed similarly devoted to rationalizing and standardizing what was a social hieroglyph into a legible and administratively more convenient format. The social simplifications thus introduced not only permitted a more finely tuned system of taxation and conscription but also greatly enhanced state capacity. They made possible quite discriminating interventions of every kind, such as public-health measures, political surveillance, and relief for the poor.
What would it take to fix our wasteful and unjust system of university admissions?, Steven Pinker asks:
Let’s daydream for a moment. If only we had some way to divine the suitability of a student for an elite education, without ethnic bias, undeserved advantages to the wealthy, or pointless gaming of the system. If only we had some way to match jobs with candidates that was not distorted by the halo of prestige. A sample of behavior that could be gathered quickly and cheaply, assessed objectively, and double-checked for its ability to predict the qualities we value….
We do have this magic measuring stick, of course: it’s called standardized testing. I suspect that a major reason we slid into this madness and can’t seem to figure out how to get out of it is that the American intelligentsia has lost the ability to think straight about objective tests. After all, if the Ivies admitted the highest scoring kids at one end, and companies hired the highest scoring graduates across all universities at the other (with tests that tap knowledge and skill as well as aptitude), many of the perversities of the current system would vanish overnight. Other industrialized countries, lacking our squeamishness about testing, pick their elite students this way, as do our firms in high technology. And as Adrian Wooldridge pointed out in these pages two decades ago, test-based selection used to be the enlightened policy among liberals and progressives, since it can level a hereditary caste system by favoring the Jenny Cavilleris (poor and smart) over the Oliver Barretts (rich and stupid).
If, for various reasons, a university didn’t want a freshman class composed solely of scary-smart kids, there are simple ways to shake up the mixture. Unz suggests that Ivies fill a certain fraction of the incoming class with the highest-scoring applicants, and select the remainder from among the qualified applicant pool by lottery. One can imagine various numerical tweaks, including ones that pull up the number of minorities or legacies to the extent that those goals can be publicly justified. Grades or class rank could also be folded into the calculation. Details aside, it’s hard to see how a simple, transparent, and objective formula would be worse than the eye-of-newt-wing-of-bat mysticism that jerks teenagers and their moms around and conceals unknown mischief.
So why aren’t creative alternatives like this even on the table? A major reason is that popular writers like Stephen Jay Gould and Malcolm Gladwell, pushing a leftist or heart-above-head egalitarianism, have poisoned their readers against aptitude testing. They have insisted that the tests don’t predict anything, or that they do but only up to a limited point on the scale, or that they do but only because affluent parents can goose their children’s scores by buying them test-prep courses.
But all of these hypotheses have been empirically refuted. We have already seen that test scores, as far up the upper tail as you can go, predict a vast range of intellectual, practical, and artistic accomplishments. They’re not perfect, but intuitive judgments based on interviews and other subjective impressions have been shown to be far worse. Test preparation courses, notwithstanding their hard-sell ads, increase scores by a trifling seventh of a standard deviation (with most of the gains in the math component). As for Deresiewicz’s pronouncement that “SAT is supposed to measure aptitude, but what it actually measures is parental income, which it tracks quite closely,” this is bad social science. SAT correlates with parental income (more relevantly, socioeconomic status or SES), but that doesn’t mean it measures it; the correlation could simply mean that smarter parents have smarter kids who get higher SAT scores, and that smarter parents have more intellectually demanding and thus higher-paying jobs. Fortunately, SAT doesn’t track SES all that closely (only about 0.25 on a scale from -1 to 1), and this opens the statistical door to see what it really does measure. The answer is: aptitude. Paul Sackett and his collaborators have shown that SAT scores predict future university grades, holding all else constant, whereas parental SES does not. Matt McGue has shown, moreover, that adolescents’ test scores track the SES only of their biological parents, not (for adopted kids) of their adoptive parents, suggesting that the tracking reflects shared genes, not economic privilege.
Regardless of the role that you think aptitude testing should play in the admissions process, any discussion of meritocracy that pretends that aptitude does not exist or cannot be measured is not playing with a full deck.
Los Angeles isn’t London, Dave Munson notes, but contemporary California housing is built for an English climate, rather than a Mediterranean one:
Traditional Mediterranean and Arab cultures both used courtyard houses. Exterior walls in these cultures were often plain or even drab, with much more of the focus being on the interior courtyard. By having a smaller landscaped area and using native plants rather than ones introduced from a wetter climate, a household could cut its water use dramatically. The courtyard house also takes advantage of microclimates, shared walls, shading, and the solar chimney effect to naturally ventilate the house and use less energy than the detached home.
