Current read: Hidden Figures

 I'm finally reading Hidden Figures, the story of African-American women mathematicians who were involved in the space program. One thing that strikes me is how different the attitudes towards excellence were. Or, for that matter, how different they actually are even today, if you step beyond the academic world. To wit, the author (Margot Lee Shetterly) has spent her career in media and publishing, mostly, not academia, so she hasn't drunk our anti-excellence kool-aid. Consider this passage from page 73, describing a professor who taught mathematician Katherine Johnson:

On staff in the math department was William Waldron Shieffelin Claytor, move-star handsome with nut-brown skin and intense eyes fringed by long eyelashes. Just twenty-seven years old, Claytor played Rachmaninoff with finesse and a mean game of tennis. He drove a sports car and piloted his own plane, which he once famously flew so low over the house of the school's president that the machine's wheels made a racket rolling over the roof. Math majors marveled to hear Dr. Claytor, originally from Norfolk, advancing sophisticated mathematical proofs in his drawling "country" accent.

Claytor's brusque manner intimidated most of his students, who couldn't keep up as the professor furiously scribbled mathematical formulas on the chalkboard with one hand and just as quickly erased them with the other. He moved from one topic to the next, making no concession to their bewildered expressions. But Katherine, serious and bespectacled with fine curly hair, made such quick work of the course catalog that Claytor had to create advanced classes just for her.

I cannot imagine progressive educators eagerly lauding him today, given the highlighted parts. Yet we know that this polished, demanding genius trained an accomplished woman who did important technical work for American victory in WW2 and then contributed to the greatest of human achievements: The moon landing. Even his hobbies, bespeaking a Renaissance flair for exotic and edgy pursuits, would be deemed a bit out of place; far better to show enthusiasm for pop culture and stuff like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObvxPSQNMGc

Not that there's anything wrong with enjoying pop culture, but it should be equally fine to enjoy Rachmaninoff and other decomposing composers.

Final Thoughts on The Son Also Rises

 The last few chapters touch on minority groups and then his final thoughts on the bigger picture. He mostly addresses minorities that have been unusually successful, but also touches on Travelers (Gypsies) in the UK. Naturally, these things attract controversy; Clark is careful, and I will try to do likewise. His points are mostly inoffensive, but since he doesn't have surname data to address the full sweep of history as he would like, he gets speculative. But he does make a few good points:

If a minority group persists unusually long in a successful tier of society (e.g. Christian and Jewish minorities in certain Muslim societies), one thing you should ask is whether unsuccessful members of the group disaffiliate. This doesn't necessarily mean that people leave their religion in frustration if they don't succeed as merchants or whatever. But in many Muslim societies there were historically special taxes levied on non-Muslims. An economist would expect this to lead to conversions among people who cannot easily afford the tax. 

It's not necessarily that a Christian or Jew would say "Screw it, God doesn't pay enough." But if somebody lives among Muslims, likes their neighbors, and sees them as good people who worship the same God of Abraham, somebody might decide to assimilate into their community rather than paying a price to remain distinct. On the other hand, people who feel particularly strong bonds with and benefits from their minority group are going to pay the price to remain in their group. This will not only filter out people based on willingness to pay or ability to pay, it will also foster strong in-group ties that successful merchant classes have leveraged. In eras where people didn't have instant communication and bank transfers, long-distance trade required strong bonds of trust, bonds that are easy to foster in close-knit kin groups. And such bonds will be even stronger if people feel deep connections to far-flung members of their tribe, bonds even stronger than bonds with immediate neighbors. But if somebody does not make their living off those far-flung tribal ties, it's not just that they'll say "Eh, I'm no merchant, let's convert", it's that they'll likely feel stronger ties to their immediate neighbors. Their kids will marry into neighboring families. They'll convert. These are not crass transactions but normal human bonds.

So, as data-sparse as elements of his analysis are, I think they also bring a deeply human insight to groups that haven't always been treated well. Both the Jewish and Armenian diasporas in the Middle East have often been particularly successful in the merchant class, and similar things can be said for Parsis and other groups in India, but Clark argues that this is in part because the people who were most successful stayed in the group, and those who were more like their neighbors married their neighbors, as humans do when they connect to people.

One other point Clark makes is that everyone tries to explain the success of prominent minority groups in terms of some unique cultural factor, but every group has successful and unsuccessful people. If a group seems particularly successful, you need to ask if the people who aren't succeeding select out of the group. (The part about long-range bonds of trust is something I've read elsewhere; you'd expect it to matter less in a world where you can communicate and transfer money instantly across long distances.)

He makes related points about prominently successful diasporas in the US today. If you look at the ranks of medical doctors and certain other professions, you'll see disproportionate numbers from certain immigrant groups. Clark notes that much of this is not because some particular group is particularly good at medicine, but because US immigration law makes it easier for doctors for that group to come in and harder for poor manual laborers. He expects to see regression to the mean over generations, unless selection processes keep it so that only certain members can enter and replenish the ranks, while people who marry out of the group lose their identity.

A few other points:

1) If we all face Markovian dynamics in social mobility, nobody can truly feel secure. Obviously it's better to have more money rather than less, but people are loss-averse, and people with more money make bigger investments that can result in bigger losses or gains. So they face remarkably similar anxiety.

2) Adoption studies are all over the map on nature vs nurture, showing some nurture effects but also real nature effects. One thing he does note is that the nurture effects are subject to statistical range restriction: Adoptive parents go through selection processes that birth parents don't have to go through. Yes, there are always bad adoptive parents, but they'll be comparatively less abundant, so the bottom of the range will be under-represented in adoption studies. Combine that with diminishing returns on parenting beyond the basics, and you wouldn't expect huge nurture effects in adoption studies.

Pinker under-emphasized that point. Clark, an economist, is much more open to the idea that parenting matters but has diminishing returns. Sending your kids to a half-decent school and making them do their homework is important. Sending them to the fanciest school imaginable will not matter nearly as much, because of diminishing returns.

3) He disagrees with Charles Murray on the effects of assortative mating. People select for phenotype, not genotype, and phenotypes are heavily influenced by noise. So regression to the mean will keep happening, and with Markovian dynamics. (His disagreement with Murray made me breathe a sigh of relief.)

4) In the 1830's Georgia had a lottery to give formerly Cherokee land to white settlers. The value of the land was about $150,000 per lot in today's dollars, so effectively Georgia handed out a whole bunch of winning lotto tickets. A generation later, outcomes for descendants of the winners were remarkably unaffected by the win. Some people are bad at business no matter how much of a windfall you give them. (America's most recent head of state provides ample evidence for this.)

The Son Also Rises, Chapters 8-12

 The first few chapters in this section look at India (specifically the state of West Bengal), China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and Chile. The specific numbers that he finds when looking at England and certain US demographics don't always hold up; I think he's a bit too wedded to the idea that he's found a universal law of class mobility/persistence. Shocks from big events do matter, to some extent. However, a few patterns do hold:

1) If you look at the persistence of families in elite tiers of society, as opposed to intergenerational correlations of income, you see very slow regression to the mean. Income is just a proxy for status, and is imperfectly correlated 

2) Social reforms don't have nearly the effect that reformers were hoping for. Families that know how to navigate society still do fine, for a while at least. This should be deeply dismaying for social reformers who think that we can remedy inequality in the classroom. We can probably have some effects on the margin, but not only are our students not blank slates, they aren't even erasable slates, and large portions of the slate are off-limits to us.

3) When he's able to look at long time scales there are strong signs of Markovian dynamics in many cases, and these Markovian dynamics are as true for upward regression to the mean as downward regression to the mean. While the pace would be dispiriting to social reformers, the fact that each generation has an element of reset should be encouraging for them.

Chapter 12 is the most interesting chapter for me, as a physicist, because he looks at time reversal. He shows that if, instead of starting with people who were high-status centuries ago in England, you start with people who were high-status more recently, and then look into the past, going backwards in time they also regress to the mean. This is consistent with the idea that microscopic dynamics of Brownian motion look the same in either time direction, even if macroscopic dynamics look very different. This is just such a cool chapter that I would seriously consider discussing it the next time that I teach statistical physics. Seriously.

As to the persistence of the upper classes after putative egalitarian reforms, let me just note that upper-class jerks always write the best Diversity and Inclusion Statements. I don't if it's always been that way, or if they learned it after the French Revolution, but the offspring of the upper classes seem to be absolutely amazing at explaining that they're One Of The Good Ones and it's those other assholes who need to face a guillotine.

The Son Also Rises, Chp. 3-7

 I'm a bit less skeptical after reading more, but only up to a point. When examining surnames in England, Clark looks at more than just medicine and law (rather specific professions). He looks at estates and probate cases in English courts, enrollment in Cambridge and Oxford, and even elections to the House of Commons. Perhaps most interesting is that he doesn't just look at common elite surnames (where people might benefit from everyone around them knowing that, say, Montgomery is an elite name), but also rare elite surnames. This is an important way to rule out the possibility that people benefit from name recognition. Interestingly, his patterns hold up through the 20th century, even though the past few centuries saw substantial changes in social policy, educational admissions standards, professional standards, etc.

In the US, he is looking at shorter time periods (his analysis of England goes back to the Middle Ages), and some of his patterns are less convincing, but plausible. Perhaps most interesting is that he looks at both downward mobility (e.g. decline in common surnames of doctors and lawyers) but also upward mobility (rises in surnames from disadvantaged groups). When looking at disadvantaged groups he includes both the obvious ones (African Americans, Native Americans, Jews) and also a less obvious one (French people in the northeastern US). The less obvious one is interesting because totally different mechanisms should be in play. While I have no doubt that families lower on the socioeconomic scale will be known locally, and face stigma accordingly, white people of French descent have some clearly plausible ways to blend in if they move a little ways away. Nonetheless, multi-generational persistence in comparatively lower status shows patterns similar to other situations in both the US and elsewhere.

In the case of the US, the nice Markovian upward regressions to the mean are a bit less obvious. The 20th century saw some pretty clear and significant changes to laws that barred advancement for certain groups, so one would expect upticks, and some of the data is messy. If we take away any message, it's that some of the regressions to the mean have not involved changes as sharp as one would have hoped. We have an obvious explanation: Ongoing discrimination. And no doubt that is part of it. But Clark invites us to consider the possibility that the patterns of adjustment are close enough to other societies that maybe slow progress is sadly inevitable.

There are obvious things that a 21st century college professor must say at that point. Some of those mandatory responses even have some validity! As much as I'm a skeptic of rapid progress, even I hold out hope that we can change more rapidly than the English class system. I mean, there's a ton of room between "We'll totally transform things in one generation" (which some people seem to think is the only goal we can allow ourselves to have) and "Well, we'll improve as slowly as a country that still has a House of Lords."

Clark proposes in chapters 6-7 that families pass on knowledge and skills, which, yeah. It's pretty much what we advanced primates do. He gives much less consideration to genetic explanations than I feared, acknowledging that anything passed from parents to children will show similar statistical patterns whether it involves nature or nurture. That's encouraging. Also, as much as the slow progress is dispiriting, the Markovian nature of the patterns means that each generation is, in some sense, a new start. A start with loaded dice, but at least a fresh dice roll.

There's one other encouraging thing in these chapters (and I note that encouragement about social problems is a rarity from the Dismal Science of economics): He argues that whatever parents are doing to make their kids successful, it isn't (for the most part) about their money. If it were about money, families with more kids would have less successful kids than families with similar financial resources but fewer kids. The per-child investment would differ. But the data he cites doesn't support such a model.

Now, at this point one might say "What kind of idiot thinks rich kids don't have it better?" Of course they do. His point is that it's not JUST the money spent on the kids. It's also the fact that people who have money know how to get money and they know how to teach kids to do the same. That includes connections.

I can't find the reference now, but I vaguely recall reading that after the Communist revolutions in Russia and China, the bureaucracies remains in the hands of more or less the same families. Yes, yes, there were some high-profile punishments of selected upper-class people, but you can't run a complex country without keeping the people who are experienced at running it. You can hand over a few things to the revolutionaries (e.g. punishing ideological crimes), but if you want the public infrastructure to run you keep more or less the same people at the Department of Water and Sanitation. An extreme example is Egypt, where my understanding is that even after successive conquests by Greeks, Romans, and Arabs, the public records continued to be kept in Coptic (the language that evolved from Ancient Egyptian) until at least a century after Arab conquest. Yes, eventually they switched to Arabic, but when the Arabs first arrived the bureaucracy was run by Copts. I imagine that the Copts simply explained that this place only functions if they properly manage all of the water infrastructure projects associated with the annual rise and fall of the Nile, and if the new rulers want to avoid bread riots they'll let the pros continue to handle all of the civil engineering projects.

Finally, if the role of families is as great as Clark suggests, it makes more sense that revolutionaries frequently contemplate (but never succeed at) major changes to family structure. It also makes sense that Rawls would call for massive projects to ensure truly equal lifetime chances (from the earliest stages) for children. You don't really have equal opportunity unless you massively engineer the most influential period of life. Except you can't actually do it, at least not without horrors.

First thoughts on "The Son Also Rises"

 The main topic of the book is a study of last names. He looks at names that were, at some point in the history of a particular society, associated with a high or low status group, and then looks at data on professions and income over subsequent decades or centuries. He makes two points, one of which is inoffensive and the other of which is controversial:

1) While correlations between parental income and children's income can be surprisingly weak (suggesting that there's better mobility than we think/fear), if you look at names there's surprising persistence of certain families in high or low income tiers and elite professions. Nonetheless, the persistence decays, albeit much more slowly than the individual income data suggests.

He notes that the fact that there's a decay of correlation in this data does show a churn, and it's an exponential (Markovian) decay, strongly suggesting that it's hard to entrench certain advantages, but the decay is slow. This I agree with. The slow decay can be a problem from many perspectives, but the Markovian decay gives assurance that parents aren't destiny, that people can rise or fall. In a Markov process each step is a "reset", even if a rest with weighted probabilities.

He suggests that the correlations on single-generation time scales capture short-term random fluctuations, and ignore the longer-term effects, and that tracking names means it's easier to see long-term persistence. This is also reasonable. His attention to professions sheds light on some of this: Suppose that we look at a family of doctors, and a grandparent is a surgeon (high pay) while the next generation has a pediatrician (usually more modest pay), and the third generation has some high-paid specialist. This is a family that isn't leaving the upper tiers of society anytime soon, but a simple income analysis would show large fluctuations, even though those fluctuations are all within a comfortable tier.

Since names are usually patrilineal, a name analysis is leaving out half of the population, but if your goal is to understand control of resources then it's not completely inappropriate to focus your attention on the half of the population that has controlled and, sadly, largely still controls the most resources. Of course, it is still a significant limitation of the data set, and you have to be honest about that. But all real-world data on social phenomena comes with huge limitations, so as long as he is candid about this it's an acceptable study.

2) He argues that since this persistence shows up in many societies, both at the top and at the bottom, and across centuries (I've only read his analysis of Sweden so far), and since it remains unaffected even by major changes to economic conditions (e.g. it shows up both in egalitarian Scandinavia and cut-throat capitalist America), workers' rights, and educational systems, there's probably a genetic component.

This is obviously more controversial and less convincing, partly because parents pass on customs and ideas as much as DNA, and your childhood environment in any society depends on your class position.

Also, thus far his analysis of professions has been limited to law and medicine, two professions that have high barriers to entry (medicine especially). And the barriers have only risen as educational credentials have become more common. Once upon a time some people attended med school or law school without finishing an undergraduate degree. Now you see many people not only do a bachelor's degree but even a master's degree or a few years of carefully-chosen professional or community service experience to polish their applications. It's a lot easier to spend a few years studying for the MCAT and volunteering at community health clinics after college if you have affluent parents. But if your affluent parents are in some other profession, they might say "Why are you wasting your time so you can take out huge med school loans and then work for low pay as a resident? Just go get a job in my field!" It might be that you need a parent who's a doctor to see it as worthwhile to spend a few years further polishing your application.

I'll have to see what else he looks at besides medicine and law.

This essay's on fire

 From the Chronicle, an essay by Justin E. H. Smith. He takes apart a professor of higher ed administration who got in trouble for praising college football and then had to apologize for the sin of racism. Smith has his own criticisms of college football (as do I) but the spectacle of the ritual apology is just bizarre. Smith puts it in the context of bigger problems in universities. A few choice quotes:

Mayhew’s career, which began well before that critical year but was also a harbinger of it, has been built entirely on tracking and echoing the transformations of the university itself. He obtains research funding for projects with names like “Assessment of Collegiate Residential Environments and Outcomes,” and publishes in volumes with titles like The Faculty Factor: A Vision for Developing Faculty Engagement With Living Learning Communities. He has an h-index, according to Google, of 34, which indicates that he is doing whatever it is he is supposed to do according to the rules — which increasingly is to say, the algorithms — that shape the profession. And this is where I think his spectacular public recantation is significant: Hewing so close in his career to the vicissitudes of the institution that both pays him and constitutes the object of his study, Mayhew sooner or later could not fail to embody and express, through his own personal conversion, the conversion of higher education to whatever you want to call this peculiar new sensibility that has transformed large sectors of American society in the Trump era.

I wonder if Mayhew would understand why Smith considers a recitation of Mayhew's accomplishments to be a takedown. Probably now.

Or this:

My considered view is that there is nothing more important or worthy than drawing out submerged and forgotten voices. What makes me sad is the pro forma character of the new emphasis on this among my contemporaries. I do not, to say the least, get the sense that it is motivated by intellectual curiosity. I detect something much more like a survival instinct — a desperate effort to adapt to a transformed university landscape, where different rules apply than the ones we signed up for.

The prevailing air of desperation today makes a temperamentally curious person into a rarity and an oddball in the university setting. You are supposed to affirm the value of including more non-Western traditions in the philosophy curriculum, for example, but only in a way that anchors this change to current social and political goals, even if in the end these goals only ever require fairly small-stakes adjustments that do not so much improve society as display conformity to a new moral sensibility. If you get into deciphering Nahuatl cosmological texts, but really into it, not because it is part of a concern to see greater Latinx representation in the philosophy curriculum, but simply in the same way you are into Paleolithic cave art or Aristotle on marine biology or Safavid pharmaceutical texts — because you are a voracious nerd and you thought when you were a student that that was precisely what made you prime professor material — then you are really not doing what is expected of you to adapt to the new academic ethos.

Pretty much. As I wrote a while ago:

Dwelling on similarity suggests, at a minimum, a lack of enthusiasm for the zeitgeist, and perhaps even a lack of awareness of one’s privileges. Actually valuing similarity over difference borders on subversive. However, for all the value in diversity, and all the confusion and conflicts that can arise if we fail to understand differences, diversity is most valuable when people succeed in shared endeavors rather than stare across chasms of difference. While The Farewell centers people from backgrounds not usually seen in Hollywood films, it has succeeded both critically and commercially by getting the audience to identify with a character, regardless of whether we share the character’s identity labels.

A great reason to study Mesoamerican thought prior to Columbian contact is that the people of the Americas are people and they built civilizations and thought thoughts about the human condition and it's always worth geeking out on that. A boring reason is that we should study them for representation's sake. They become steamed vegetables that you eat because you want to be virtuous, not a savory vegetable stir-fry that you eat because you like the texture and seasoning. I like learning about all sorts people because of the interplay of similarity and difference and uniqueness and universality, not because I want to satisfy some moral mandate to achieve a proper balance on my reading list.

Next book: The Son Also Rises

 I've been reading some books that I lacked the energy to blog, but the semester is wrapping up, so I have more energy to write. I'm going to read The Son Also Rises by economist Gregory Clark, a study of class mobility in different societies. He looks at family names and apparently draws big conclusions. I'm reluctant to say more than that until I get farther into the book.