God and White Men at Yale (Part 1)

Irving Fisher

This is a piece I wrote for the Yale Alumni Magazine, about the remarkable role that university played in the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century.

On a sweltering Friday in June 1921, a 54-year-old Yale economics professor named Irving Fisher delivered a major speech at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. The pain of the recent war in Europe was still fresh, and Fisher was troubled by the quality of those who had died, and the damage to “the potential fatherhood of the race” by the loss of so many young men “medically selected for fighting but thereby prevented from breeding.”

In light of these losses, the issue, it seemed to Fisher, was that graduates of leading universities were failing to do their reproductive duty: the families “of American men of science” averaged just 2.22 children, versus a national average of 4.66. (Or as he put it, perhaps too lucidly, “The average Harvard graduate is the father of three-fourths of a son and the average Vassar graduate the mother of one-half of a daughter.”) This “race suicide” among “the well-to-do classes means that their places will speedily be taken by the unintelligent, uneducated, and inefficient.”

To prevent that, immigration from certain regions needed to be sharply curtailed, and birth control “extended from the white race to the colored” and to other “undesirable” ethnic and economic groups, ideally under the control of a eugenics committee established to “breed out the unfit and breed in the fit.” Otherwise, “the Nordic race … will vanish or lose its dominance.”

It was strong stuff, and from a seemingly impeccable source.

Among the One Percent, Look Twice Before Crossing

Shiny Cars, Scary Drivers

For cynics, this might come as unsurprising science.  But a new study shows that as social status rises, so does the propensity to commit unethical acts, like lying in a negotiation, cheating, stealing, and breaking the law while behind the wheel.   The study fits a long line of research by Dacher Keltner at the University of California in Berkeley.

I’ve written in the past about his “Cookie Monster” experiment for The New York Times.  For the new study, published Monday on PNAS:

Observers stood near the intersection, coded the
status of approaching vehicles, and recorded whether the driver
cut off other vehicles by crossing the intersection before waiting
their turn, a behavior that defies the California Vehicle Code. In
the present study, 12.4% of drivers cut in front of other vehicles.

But drivers of top status cars cut off other cars almost 30% of time, versus less than 10% for the lowest-status cars.

It was even worse for pedestrians:  Top status drivers cut off pedestrians 45% of the time, versus close to zero for the lowest-status drivers.

The study attributes the effect to multiple factors:

Upper-class individuals’ relative independence from others and increased privacy in their professions (3) may provide fewer structural constraints and decreased
perceptions of risk associated with committing unethical acts (8). The availability of resources to deal with the downstream costs of unethical behavior may increase the likelihood of such acts among the upper class. In addition, independent self-construals among the upper class (22) may shape feelings of entitlement
and inattention to the consequences of one’s actions on others (23). A reduced concern for others’ evaluations (24) and increased goal-focus (25) could further instigate unethical tendencies among upper-class individuals. Together, these factors may give rise to a set of culturally shared norms among upperclass
individuals that facilitates unethical behavior.

The bottom line:   If there’s a Mercedes or Escalade in the neighborhood, stand back from the curb and pray, while also watching your wallet.

Let’s call it “the Lizzie Grubman effect,” for the wealthy publicist who allegedly yelled “Fuck you, white trash” before backing her Mercedes into a crowd of pedestrians outside a Long Island nightclub.  (And true to the study’s theory about “downstream costs,” she got off with 37 days in jail.)

“High social class predicts increased unethical behavior,” by Paul K. Piff, Daniel M. Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner

Our Built-In Propensity for Staring Down Rivals

Terburg

Our staring contests appear to be an instinctive dominance behavior passed down from our simian ancestors, though whether we glower or quickly turn away depends on individual tendencies to dominance or submission, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.  They published their work in the journal Psychological Science.  Here’s part of the press release:

Imagine that you’re in a bar and you accidentally knock over your neighbor’s beer. He turns around and stares at you, looking for confrontation. Do you buy him a new drink, or do you try to outstare him to make him back off? New research … suggests that the dominance behavior exhibited by staring someone down can be reflexive.

Our primate relatives certainly get into dominance battles; they mostly resolve the dominance hierarchy not through fighting, but through staring contests. And humans are like that, too.

Psychologist David Terburg and his co-authors set out to test the standard assumption that staring for dominance is automatic for humans:

For the study, participants watched a computer screen while a series of colored ovals appeared. Below each oval were blue, green, and red dots; participants were supposed to look away from the oval to the dot with the same color. What they didn’t know was that for a split-second before the colored oval appeared, a face of the same color appeared, with one of three expressions–angry, happy, or neutral. The researchers were testing how long it took for people to look away from faces with different emotions. Participants also completed a questionnaire that reflected how dominant they were in social situations.

People who were more motivated to be dominant were slower to look away from angry faces, while people who were motivated to seek rewards gazed at the happy faces longer. In other words, the assumptions were correct—for people who are dominant, engaging in gaze contests is a reflex.

“When people are dominant, they are dominant in a snap of a second,” says Terburg. “From an evolutionary point of view, it’s understandable—if you have a dominance motive, you can’t have the reflex to look away from angry people; then you have already lost the gaze contest.”

By the way, that’s a photo of Terburg at top, left, and my advice?

Buy him the beer.

Charlie Sheen and the Cookie Monster Test

The very public bad behavior of Charlie Sheen and fashion designer John Galliano–a future couple? …  They have so much in common–reminds me that it’s time to reprise this op-ed piece about why the rich and famous often act like such flaming idiots.  It originally appeared in 2007 in the New York Times:

THE other day at a Los Angeles race track, a comedian named Eddie Griffin took a meeting with a concrete barrier and left a borrowed bright-red $1.5 million Ferrari Enzo looking like bad origami. Just to be clear, this was a different bright-red $1.5 million Ferrari Enzo from the one a Swedish businessman crumpled up and threw away last year on the Pacific Coast Highway. I mention this only because it’s easy to get confused by the vast and highly repetitious category “Rich and Famous People Acting Like Total Idiots.” Mr. Griffin walked away uninjured, and everybody offered wise counsel about how this wasn’t really such a bad day after all.

So what exactly constitutes a bad day in this rarefied little world? Did the casino owner Steve Wynn cross the mark when he put his elbow through a Picasso he was about to sell for $139 million? Did Mel (“I Own Malibu”) Gibson sense bad-day emanations when he started on a bigoted tirade while seated drunk in the back of a sheriff’s car? And if dumb stuff like this comes so easy to these people, how is it that they’re the ones with all the money?

Modern science has the answer, with a little help from the poet Hilaire Belloc.

Tell Santa You Want to Go Swimming With Piranhas

Just got this very kind review of my current book (and perfect Christmas gift) Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time:

Here’s why it’d be impossible not to like Richard Conniff’s latest book: the subtitle is “My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals.”

Here’s the form the book’s preface takes: a fake classified for the job Conniff does.

Two best lines from the preface:

“Willingness to shed conventional norms a requirement. The candidate must be able to contemplate in a nonjudgemental way even the animals that happen at that moment to be having sex, possibly incestuous, on his forehead.”
“[A]ll reasonable expenses will be covered. OK, yes, that will include the mud-walled hotel in western Uganda with one toilet serving all rooms. And, OK, it’s not really a toilet, but a hole in the floor. And yes, yes, yes, you may experience near total liquefaction there in the form of the week-long gastrointestinal calamit called giardia.”

It’d be impossible to choose a favorite chapter from this book—they’re all terrific reads, each engaging and told with much humor, and this is absolutely one of those books which, by the end, you sort of want to be friends with the author—but “Lemurs in Love” and “Ghosts in the Grasslands” (maybe because it’s the book’s longest, at 20 pages) are both tremendously good.

Regardless: get it. Read it. Pass it to friends. (And this is what happens when you get giardia, if you’ve got the will to look.)

###

P.S.  I’ve had giardia.  So my advice is, don’t look.

Guess Who Did The “Curating” at this Aspen McMansion

The New York Times had a piece the other day about pretentious uses of the verb “to curate,” as when Tina Brown declares:  “The Daily Beast doesn’t aggregate.  It sifts, sorts, and curates.”  (But isn’t it good to have a beast that’s not bogged down in the tiresome old business of roaring, rending, and disembowelling?)

I first spotted this use of “curate” a few years ago on a photo spread in the Times Magazine, where the snow-queen wife of a famous financial type said that she had “curated” the collection of objets at the couple’s home in Aspen.  It happened that I had visited this very home in the course of researching my book The Natural History of the Rich.

Here’s a taste:

One afternoon in the Maroon Creek neighborhood on the outskirts of Aspen, a developer was showing me around a house he had recently sold.  The new owners, who had paid more than $10 million for the place, had settled in, and it looked like home.  A very rich home at that, with 9000 square feet of space encased in fifteen-inch logs, a chandelier made of nested elk antlers over the front entry, a collection of silver-topped canes in an ornately carved umbrella stand in the front hall, and beyond, across the vast living room, a floor-to-ceiling view of ski slopes and forested mountainside.

But the most interesting thing to me was that it was “a turnkey house”–already accessorized before the buyer ever walked through the door, down to the decorative chests, the little silver-framed pictures, and the leather-bound volumes on the mantle.

The developer, a bullet-headed, blue-eyed man, in black turtleneck and leather jacket, with a rat-tat-tat, time-is-money manner, had even chosen the paintings on the walls.  “Is it collectible? Is it Schnabel?” he said, bolting past the handsome frames and generic Western scenes.  “The paintings run from $2,500 to $8,500.  They’re more than wallpaper.”

So much for curating.

Come Again? Department of Junk Science

Back in the 1990s, when Ireland was just starting to feel prosperous, a joke made the rounds about the sex lives of Dublin women. Women on the North side of the Liffey were generally regarded as lower class, while women on the South side were richer, trendier, more fashionable. So the joke went, “What’s the difference between a North Side woman and a South Sider?  The North Sider has fake furs and real orgasms.”

But yesterday’s Times (London) says it’s the other way around.  Here’s the headline:  ”Why women have better sex with rich men.”  The article reports on “the latest scientific discovery about human sexuality: that the number and frequency of a woman’s orgasms is directly related to her partner’s wealth.”

So is your junk science antennae twitching yet?  (And if any other part of your body is twitching, thanks, but we don’t want to know.)  It turns out that University of Newcastle researchers based their study on an analysis of data from the Chinese Health and Family Life Survey.  No word on what constitutes “rich” for the survey participants, or if we’re talking about the sex lives in long-term relationships or short-term flings.  (Kind of makes a difference, you figure?)  Finally, it doesn’t say how being rich affects women’s sex lives.  It’s just about what happens when the man is rich.  The study looked at results from about 1500 women, and it’s self-reported data.  That is, these orgasms may be faked, too.

Read The Times article for yourself here.

Curiously, The Daily Mail does a more professional reporting job, including this “wake up, you idiots” paragraph:

The scientists say the findings could be explained by bias in the study – that women who have frequent orgasms tend to overestimate their partner’s income, or that women with ‘high powered’ partners exaggerate how much they enjoy sex.

You can also get a different view of the sex lives of the rich in my book The Natural History of the Rich:  A Field Guide (Crown).

Tally Ho! Time to Hunt Humans

 

I’m watching a show just now in which one of those snarky British television personalities travels hick America and makes fun of redneck ways.  Back in England, this is what used to be the heart of the fox-hunting season.  So the two things reminded me of a story I wrote a few years ago in England.  It’s not quite a modest proposal, but getting there:

It was an idea guaranteed to appeal to local foxes:  Put 30 or 40 English gentlefolk on horseback and send them hallooing across the countryside behind a pack of frantically baying hounds.  

But have their prey be a human being.  Get the Queen of England herself to join in the fun.  Let the foxes, who are bored with this victim business anyway, become spectators, shouting encouragement and advice to the field:  ”Fine day for hunting, no?  Got a glimpse of your quarry just now.  Big strong redhead in a Gore-Tex jogging suit.  Went that way.”

The remarkable thing is that the proposal caught on with humans, in a modest sort of way.  At least five packs in England now hunt humans, according to Horse and Hound, the weekly hunt journal.  For a cap fee of 15 pounds, an outsider can, for example, join the Windsor Forest Hunt on a Saturday when the weather is fair to hunt down three upstanding citizens of the placid Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Hampshire, or Surrey countryside.

Score One For The Elk (Two For The Bear)

Probably it’s just a coincidence, and the buck-a-year idea is hardly new.  But Tuesday morning NPR’s Marketplace featured my commentary arguing that we can look to nature for ways to fix the financial crisis.  Elk moms, for instance, put their own bodies on the line to protect their young from grizzly bears.  So it seemed natural for CEOs seeking a bailout to follow that lead and agree to do their jobs for $1 a year.  

That same day, a Senate Committee asked auto CEOs seeking a bailout if they would go along with the $1 a year idea.  Chrysler’s  Robert Nardelli said he would, if he got the bailout.

In further hearings Wednesday, the question came up again.  GM’s Richard Wagoner and Ford’s Alan Mulally came off sounding as if they would sooner let the bear eat their young than take a pay cut.  Read the Washington Post account for a classic example of caught-in-the-headlights executive behavior.

 

How the Natural World Deals With Bears

This commentary aired yesterday as part of the NPR Marketplace series “What’s The Fix?”  As soon as I heard it, I thought, “Oh, my god, I said ‘fawns’ when I should have said ‘calves.’  Feed me to a grizzly bear!”  But I really like that idea that CEOs at companies taking a federal bailout should do their job for $1 a year.  If we are all going to have to learn to sacrifice, I can hardly think of anyone I’d rather sacrifice first have as our heroic leaders.

I haven’t figured out how to download MP3 files to this website yet.  So click here to go to the NPR Marketplace website and then press “Listen to this story.”  Or read the original text below:

I spend a lot of time with animals, so I look to the natural world for ways to fix the financial panic.  Let’s take a herd of elk at Yellowstone National Park, for example. They really know what it means to have a bear threaten their security.  So when they’re out grazing, somebody’s always popping his head up and keeping an eye out. It’s an early warning system.  When all the elk start to turn and stare in the same direction, it generally means there’s a grizzly bear out there. Smart animals sidle off in the opposite direction.

What’s that got to do with the stock market?  We were all staring at the bear for more than a year as the credit crisis unfolded.  But let’s say you ignored the warning signals and missed the chance for a graceful exit.  

A couple of lessons from the natural world can still help.   First, when a herd panics, animals just get trampled and become food for the bear.  We need to calm down and look out for each other.  And we need real leaders to help.  In the wild, strong animals sometimes walk straight toward the bear, as if to say, “I see you and you don’t scare me.”  At Yellowstone, I’ve also seen mother elk band together and run interference to protect fawns from a charging bear.  That’s kind of what Warren Buffett’s been up to lately.  But now we need other big-money types to get into the market with everything they’ve got and show some nerve defending the system that made them rich.   It’s a chance for the golden parachute gang to redeem themselves.  If you’re a CEO taking federal bailout money, do your job for a dollar a year and be an American hero.

I saw forest fire ravage Yellowstone in 1988.  It looked like the end of the world then, too.   But when I went back a few years later, the blackened areas were flourishing with new growth.  The same thing happens when financial markets go up in flames.  Buck up your courage, buy some stock, and the grass can be green again for us, too.