The Super Bowl and American Values

VISA is running a series of ads that feature four men who have never missed a Super Bowl. It is part of its Super Bowl Trip for Life sweepstakes, which (as its name implies) is giving away to one grand prize winner (and one guest) round-trip airfare, accommodations and tickets to every Super Bowl, beginning this year, for the rest of their lives.  One of the four men featured in the ads, Larry, makes the following comment regarding his "remarkable" streak:

I have missed weddings. I have missed babies being born. But, I've never missed a Super Bowl.

Now, I'd love to win tickets to every Super Bowl for the rest of my life, and most Super Bowl Sundays will find me watching the game and laughing at the commercials (well, most of the commercials), but are these the kind of values we should be celebrating? Is the Super Bowl really more important than life-course events such as the births and weddings of our loved ones? I would hope not.

Stress and the Presidency

There was a picture this morning in the paper of President Obama consoling the families and friends of the victims of last week's shooting in Arizona. It is amazing how "grey" the President's hair has become in such a short time. The same thing happened to George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. In fact, it happens to most Presidents. The stress of the job is obviously overwhelming. I can't understand why anyone would want it.

The Race to Nowhere: What are We Doing to Our Kids?

I recently saw a screening of the documentary, Race to Nowhere, which I believe should be seen by everyone: parents with young children, parents with older children, parents with grand children. It is that good. Not because it makes you feel good all over. It doesn't. Instead, it challenges the assumptions of a culture that is so focused on "success" (however that may be defined) that we are running our kids into the ground with endless homework and after school activities. Put simply, we aren't allowing them to be kids.  (My mom, who was a elementary school teacher, refused to send me to summer school. Her reason? She thought it important for kids to have the time to be kids.)

The Internet Movie Database provides a nice summary of the film:

Race to Nowhere is a close-up look at the pressures on today's students, offering an intimate view of lives packed with activities, leaving little room for down-time or family time. Parents today are expected to raise high-achieving children, who are good at everything: academics, sports, the arts, community-service. The film tackles the tragic side of our often achievement-obsessed culture, with interviews that explore the hidden world of over-burdened schedules, student suicide, academic cheating, young people who have checked out. Race to Nowhere asks the question: Are the young people of today prepared to step fully and productively into their future? We hear from students who feel they are being pushed to the brink, educators who worry students aren't learning anything substantive, and college professors and business leaders, concerned their incoming employees lack the skills needed to succeed in the business world: passion, creativity, and internal motivation.

Take the issue of homework, for example. It turns out, it doesn't offer a whole lot of benefits. There are what economists refer to as diminishing marginal returns: To wit (for citations see this link):

• The amount of homework assigned to kids from 6 to 9 almost tripled between 1981 and 1997. Assigned homework increased from about 44 minutes a week to more than 2 hours a week. Homework for kids aged 9 to 11 increased from about 2 hours and 50 minutes to more than 3 and a-half hours per week.
• A 2006 synthesis of research on the effects of homework found no correlation between amount of time spent on homework and achievement for elementary school students, a moderate correlation in middle school.
• An international comparison by two Penn State professors concluded that junior high students who scored highest in math tests tended to come from countries where teachers assign relatively little homework - including Denmark, the Czech Republic and Japan. Conversely, the lowest-scoring students came from countries where teachers assign large amounts of homework, such as Iran, Thailand and Greece.
• A 2006 national Scholastic/Yankelovich study found that reading for pleasure declines sharply after age eight. The number one reason: too much homework.
• Most teacher education programs do not cover research about homework. Consequently most teachers are unaware of the research-based critique of the way homework is used in the majority of schools in the US.
• The more important that homework becomes in school, the more a child can fall behind. Etta Kralovec, the director of teacher education at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, and author of The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning, worked on a state-financed study there in the early 90's, interviewing dropouts about why they quit school. Every person in her survey mentioned the inability to keep up with homework as a major factor.

Screenings are held all the time, all over the United States. You can find a listing of the screenings here (Race to Nowhere: Screenings). I'm almost certain you will find one in your own area. I'm just as certain that if you go, you'll be glad that you did.

Now That Seniors Are Texting...

Here's something that came across on email. Since Seniors are texting and tweeting more and more, a senior texting code appears to be emerging:

ATD: At The Doctor's
BFF: Best Friend Fainted
BTW: Bring The Wheelchair
BYOT: Bring Your Own Teeth
CBM: Covered By Medicare
CUATSC: See You At The Senior Center
DWI: Driving While Incontinent

FWB: Friend With Beta Blockers
FWIW: Forgot Where I Was
FYI: Found Your Insulin
GGPBL: Gotta Go, Pacemaker Battery Low!
GHA: Got Heartburn Again
HGBM: Had Good Bowel Movement
IMHO: Is My Hearing-Aid On?
LMDO: Laughing My Dentures Out
LOL: Living On Lipitor
LWO: Lawrence Welk's On
OMMR: On My Massage Recliner
OMSG: Oh My! Sorry, Gas.
ROFL... CGU: Rolling On The Floor Laughing... And Can't Get Up
SGGP: Sorry, Gotta Go Poop
TTYL: Talk To You Later
WAITT: Who Am I Talking To?
WTFA: Wet The Furniture Again
WTP: Where's The Prunes?
WWNO: Walker Wheels Need Oil

More Good News on the Economy?

There's more evidence that the U.S. economy is finally starting to generate good news on the job front. Two reports from Wednesday are part of the evidence. One was a monthly report on private-sector jobs by the ADP National Employment Report, which said the economy added 297,000 new private positions in November. (See the MarketWatch story on ADP jobs report). The second came from jobs consultant Challenger, Gray & Christmas that showed that job cuts nationally in 2010 fell to their lowest level since 1997. (See the related MarketWatch story). And then today we learned that the economy added 103,000 jobs in December and that the unemployment rate dropped to 9.4%, its lowest rate in a year and a half. (See the related MarketWatch story).

This isn't all good news. The number of additional jobs added in December is actually lower than predicted and hoped for, and the drop in the unemployment rate is due in part because of a drop in the number of people in the labor force (i.e., the number of people actually looking for employment), which suggests that the current recovery will be a slow one (see the related New York Times story). Nevertheless, it does appear that things are (slowly) looking up on the economic front. Whether the unemployment rate will drop (and the economy will expand) quickly enough in order to save President Obama job is unclear at this point, however.

Has Christmas Made Christians Too Secular?

Over the holidays some of you may have run across the story about two new surveys that "indicate that while most call this a holy day that is primarily religious, their actions say otherwise. Many skip church, omit Jesus and zero in on the egg nog." Most of those surveyed said they planned to give gifts (89%), dine with family or friends (86%), get and decorate a Christmas tree (80%) and play holiday music (79%), but when it comes to religious activities, the percentages were substantially lower: 58% said they planned to "encourage belief in Jesus Christ as savior"; 47% said they planned to attend a Christmas Eve or Christmas Day worship service; 34% planned to watch "biblical Christmas movies"; and 28% planned to read or tell the Christmas story from the Bible.  Ed Stetzer, president of LifeWay Research, a Nashville-based Christian research organization finds these results disconcerting:

It's alarming to me that while nine in 10 celebrate Christmas, only six in 10 encourage any belief in the source of Christmas and only three in 10 actually read the story of Christmas.

But are these percentages unreasonably or unexpectedly low? Not when you consider the percentage of Americans who regularly attend worship services. Take, for instance the following two graphics. The first indicates the frequency that all Americans attend religious services, while the second indicates the frequency that Christians attend religious services.

As you can see, approximately 40% of all Americans and 48% of Christians regularly attend religious services (i.e., 2-3 times a month or more). We also know that the percentage of Americans who are members of a faith community is around 60% (not all of these are Christians).  Thus, when 58% of Americans indicate that during the Christmas holidays they intend to encourage belief in Jesus Christ in savior, that is actually quite high, not low. It means that a higher percentage of Americans plan to share the Gospel than those who are members of a church or who attend church regularly. Moreover, the percentage of Americans who said they intended to attend a Christmas Eve or Christmas Day worship service is higher than those who say that they attend church regularly.

In short, Mr. Stetzer should be happy, not alarmed, about these numbers. They suggest that during the holidays Christians are actually witnessing and worshipping at rates higher than they do during the rest of the year. The fact that a higher percentage of Americans planned to give gifts or dine with friends is simply evidence that marginal and non-Christians celebrate the holiday as well. Nothing more.

Do Expensive Wines Really Taste Better?

Some years ago I read about a study conducted at an apartment complex that asked residents to take part in a month-long beer tasting experiment.  Residents could choose between three different types of beer: one costing, say $2.00/six pack, another costing $4.00/six pack and another costing $6.00/six pack (in today's dollars, they'd probably cost $4.00, $8.00 and $12.00 per six pack respectively). At the end of the month, they were asked to rate the three types of beer in terms of taste. Not surprisingly, the most expensive beer was judged to be the best tasting, the middle-priced beer, the next best, and the lowest-priced beer, the least best. The catch, of course, is that there was no difference between the beers. All three were the same. What mattered, in other words, was the price, not the taste.

It turns out that price appear to matter more than taste when it comes to wine as well.  For example, a study by the economist Robin Goldstein that involved more than 6,000 blind tastings found that “individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine,” and this finding applied to amateur wine tasters as well as the so-called experts. Another study by wine broker Brian DiMarco turned up similar findings. While many of us believe that our palates can distinguish good from bad wine, it appears that for most of us, whether we are amateurs or experts, "price is often a far-too-powerful signal to our taste buds."

In a related study, Goldstein was able to win an Award of Excellence from Wine Spectator magazine for his fictitious restaurant, Osteria L’Intrepido, supposedly located in Milan, Italy. Goldstein's created a website for the restaurant and put together a wine list based on wines that Wine Spectator had previously rated as "terrible." Evidently, all that mattered when it came to winning the award was whether Goldstein paid the requisite $250 fee to be considered for the award. So much for Wine Spectator's objectivity.

All of this is summarized in a recent "Freakanomics" podcast, which you can download from iTunes or listen on-line at: "Freakonomics Radio: Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?" A brief summary of the podcast and the related studies can be found at the same website.