Archive for November, 2008

I have a column in today’s USA Today on outsourcing homeschooling called “Tailoring school to the child.” We start with the question of where Malia and Sasha Obama should go to school. Reformers suggest the DC public schools; realists talk about Sidwell Friends. But the reality is that these days, there’s a viable third option, even for busy parents like the Obamas: homeschooling. This column explains how it works, even when parents can’t or don’t want to teach.

So she may have lost the vice presidency, but she will likely win a big book deal coming out of this. According to this article from the Canberra Times, agents and imprints are lining up to make a bid for Gov. Sarah Palin’s memoirs. The current publishing guessing game? Whether the advance will top the $6 million Tina Fey landed for a book. There’s a chance it might not, which would be sad, but so it goes in the publishing world. We do know that conservative politico books sell pretty well.

That said, the literary types quoted in this piece talk about how her rough introduction to the national stage will be the biggest selling point of the book. I disagree. If Palin wants a future in politics, she can’t dwell on a grudge match with the national media and various sneering feminist types who greeted the idea of a first female conservative VP with outrage. Her memoirs should serve two more forward looking functions.

First, like Ronald Reagan after 1976, Palin is about to spend a few years in the political wilderness. She needs to build up her base, and make it extremely clear what she stands for (as Reagan did in radio shows, his writings and the like). She’s already talked a good game about being pro-entrepreneur, pro-free market, pro-Second Amendment and pro-life. All of these are solid philosophical ideas which she needs to defend at length. Why does she believe them? Why are they the right thing for America? She can really delve into political philosophy here, economics, plus personal storytelling — anecdotes of Alaska folks and the people in her life who believe these things (the Palins run a commercial fishing business… they know about the entrepreneurial spirit).

Second, I hesitate to talk about Dreams from my Father, but Barack Obama did do a good (if perhaps not 100% accurate) job of turning his early life into a narrative. The lost father is, of course, an archetypal hero’s journey, but Palin can definitely turn her childhood in this newest American state into a frontier story. She can talk of being lost a bit as a young person — literary readers love alienation, and I don’t know how else you define attending four colleges — and then about how she found herself being called to lead the people she grew up with. Throw in the gaudy world of pageants blended with the rough world of commercial fishing and snowmobiling races, the prestige of being a governor and the loneliness of knowing you are carrying an infant with special needs and not knowing who you can trust to tell… and you’ve got a good narrative.

Oh, and you need a good ghostwriter… (if anyone connected to the Palin camp is reading this, give me a call).

(Author’s note: This piece ran in the Huffington Post in November 2007. Given that Paula Radcliffe just won the NYC marathon again, I thought I’d reprint it. She’s an inspiring woman. I have a list of “people whose memoirs I would like to ghost” and she’s definitely on it).

Paula Radcliffe, the British distance runner and women’s marathon world record holder, won the ING New York City Marathon on Sunday for the second time in four years. Her all-out sprint at the end of a hard-fought 26.2 miles was a testament to human endurance. But what’s even more amazing is that the win comes just 10 months after Radcliffe spent 27 hours in labor delivering a little girl. She has described her childbirth experience as “frustrating,” but Radcliffe, like most marathoners, plays through pain. That same grit that helped her come back from a disappointing loss in the 2004 Olympic marathon in Athens to win the 2004 New York City Marathon had her come back from little Isla’s birth, and a post-childbirth sacrum stress fracture, to blow past Gete Wami (who is also a mom) for a 2:23:09 finish.

I took up running in 2004 after watching Radcliffe’s previous New York win. Seeing a photo of her, running, 8 months pregnant, in a spring issue of Vogue inspired me to keep running through my recent pregnancy. Radcliffe has made a career of showing that the female human body - even the pregnant and post-partum human body - is capable of amazing things. Pregnancy and childbirth need not slow a woman down.

Unfortunately, this message has yet to trickle down to most new moms and moms-to-be. More and more women are participating in sports these days, and some are sweating for two. Citing the growing body of evidence on exercise’s benefits for moms and unborn babies, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists revised its guidelines in 2002 to say that most pregnant women should get the universally recommended 30 minutes of exercise most days. But though women have made great strides in athletics, vigorous exercise during pregnancy is one of the last taboos to fall. A recent Saint Louis University study found that only 16% of pregnant women get the recommended amount of exercise, compared with 27% of all women.

This is a public health failure. Exercising during pregnancy not only reduces rates of complications, it helps keep women’s weight gain in check. Women who gain too much weight during their pregnancies may never lose it. That’s not just a cosmetic issue. According to the surgeon general, women who gain 20 lbs between age 18 and midlife double their risk of post-menopausal breast cancer. When doctors and others fail to push healthy pregnant women to exercise, they put them at risk for a lifetime of ills.

Even if people can get their heads around the idea that pregnant women can jog or swim, though, many coaches who work with young female athletes warn them that pregnancy can derail a career. The assumption is that there’s no way the human body can nurture another being for nine months, go through the process of birth, and emerge stronger on the other side. This puts young athletes in a bind, since a woman’s prime childbearing years (twenties and early thirties) are also the human body’s peak athletic years. Like corporate women, athletes seem to face a harsh choice: career or children?

But, just as statistics show that the career vs. children debate is a false choice (the majority of mothers are in the labor force in some capacity, and even the majority of high-earning women have children), Radcliffe shows that athleticism and childbearing aren’t incompatible, either. Just because no man has ever given birth to a child and then won a marathon doesn’t mean that women can’t.

In fact, pregnancy can have athletic benefits. Birth can hone an endurance athlete’s psychological toughness. Running with added pregnancy weight is the equivalent of a cyclist training at altitude. As Radcliffe told the BBC, “I actually feel stronger after giving birth and I noticed straight away I had a lot more stamina in my legs and my long runs came back very quickly.”

Though I’ve never been a fast runner, I likewise discovered that becoming a mother can build strength. Before I became pregnant with my son, Jasper, I ran 11 minute miles. Ten minute miles felt fast. I assumed pregnancy would slow my training. But, inspired by Radcliffe, I ran up until I delivered. When I started running again two weeks later, I noticed that my pre-pregnancy treadmill pace felt oddly slow. So I ran faster. A month after Jasper’s birthday, I ran my first 8:30 mile. I was amazed at what my body could do.

Girls in Isla’s generation probably won’t be so amazed. After all, they’re seeing that, like WellPoint CEO Angela Braly, you can be a business titan and a mom of three. They’re seeing that you can give birth and win a major marathon in the same year. That’s a lot to celebrate - and definitely a reason for balloons and confetti in Central Park this past weekend.

Like everyone, it seems, I’ve been stewing over what lessons can be learned from this election. The GOP has been having an internal war over whether the answer is to become more centrist or more conservative, more pragmatic or more principled. I’m probably inclined toward the latter in each case, but I understand why party leaders might be worried about aiming for purity. If Obama has his way, approximately half of Americans will soon pay no federal income tax whatsoever. One of the Republican Party’s biggest selling points has always been its low-tax philosophy, but if half of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes, they won’t have any particular personal incentive to vote for those in favor of lower taxes. In fact, the inclination will be the other way. After all, the federal government has to be funded, and if you are safely off the tax list, it makes more sense to vote for higher taxes. You get more government-funded goods, but don’t have to pay for them.

Unless, of course, you believe in income mobility, and fret (like Joe the Plumber) that someday you might find yourself in the income-tax paying brackets. Joe the Plumber was one of the few highlights of the McCain campaign (except for my hero, Sarah Palin, of course!) The other was McCain’s announcement at the Rick Warren/Saddleback debate that the exact income level qualifying as “rich” didn’t matter so much, because “I want everybody to get rich.” That’s a good, positive message. We want everyone to have the education and training necessary to land high-paying jobs. We also want lots of people to start businesses and succeed wildly. We need to create the economic climate where oodles of entrepreneurship is possible. That’s a message Republicans should stress more.

As it is, unfortunately, Republicans have become the Party of No. What’s happened is that the public currently believes that both Republicans and Democrats are perfectly OK with high levels of government spending. Republicans will spend money on the military-industrial complex, the testing regime of No Child Left Behind, earmarks, prescription drugs and bailing out banks. The Democrats want to spend money too, often on many of these same things, plus bailing out the auto industry, social programs and so forth. The Democrats don’t necessarily mind spending money on the Republican things as long as the Democrat things get funded too. The Republicans, though, occasionally have the ghost of Ronald Reagan appear in their heads and feel like they should say “no” to many of the Democratic social programs. Net result: Republicans are always put in the position of saying “no” to things that at least sound good on paper, like school lunches, children’s health insurance, “investment” in green energy and the like. There is absolutely no logical consistency to being OK with buying up mortgages, but not wanting to spend money on, say, children’s health insurance — especially since the Republicans seem to think that health insurance (with prescription drugs!) is A-OK for old people.

Personally, I’d like the GOP to say no to pretty much everything except courts and a smaller version of the military and at least be consistent, but I realize this is not a particularly inspiring message. So the party needs to figure out what it can be for. A few possibilities:

* More people becoming rich (and hence growing our way out of the shrinking-pool-of-taxpayers problem)

* A flat tax for people who are rich. Also, a flat, low, business tax rate — not because corporations are wonderful, but because other countries have more transparent taxes than we do and we’re losing jobs because of it.

* Becoming the top country on the ease-of-starting-a-business rankings

* Tax parity for the self-employed. The GOP needs to become the party of the self-employed because, frankly, that’s the business model of the future.

* On that note — the GOP needs to figure out a way to sell breaking health insurance apart from employment. McCain tried with his health insurance tax credit and taxing it as a benefit, but Obama just hammered him for wanting to tax health insurance for the first time (Obama knows why McCain is pushing this, and knows it needs to happen, but hey, that’s politics). The government may need to coax private companies into setting up group plans that are not tied to employers, but if people knew they could get health insurance as individuals, it would release a lot of entrepreneurial energy. The government doesn’t have to run these plans; the non-profit Freelancers Union in New York has a guaranteed-issue group plan that now provides health insurance to 19,000 people. Other states need such plans too.

* Free trade — but the GOP needs to come up with a better way to spin this one. Currently, people think it’s about outsourcing jobs to Mexico or India. Can someone come up with a good way of showing that it’s also about opening markets to American businesses?

* The free market in education. Vouchers, charter schools, homeschooling, virtual schooling — anything that can break the union stranglehold that keeps horrible teachers from being thrown out on the street. But with that…

* High standards — national standards. Chuck No Child Left Behind. Instead, everyone takes the NAEP and states, cities and schools should be absolutely humiliated when only 1% of students score at or above proficient. So should parents. Maybe that will cause some soul searching about turning off the TV and opening the books… OK, I realize that’s not being “positive” but it is about being for something!

* Honoring small business owners wherever possible. Small businesses create 60-80% of the jobs in this country. When more people start small businesses, more jobs are created. Simple as that. Such a PR strategy would also push the message of self-reliance (starting your own company in order to get somewhere, succeeding or failing on the merits) which the GOP should be stressing (but, alas, isn’t. See Wall Street, bail-out of).

* Yay rah Second Amendment. It really is a winner.

* So, I have to say, is a general stance against abortion. People don’t like extreme versions of this (e.g. being against stem cell research). But in a world in which starlets’ babies are all over the covers of magazines, being generally in favor of babies is not a bad way to go.

(Author’s note: Another 2002 USA Today goodie, originally titled “White Collar Sweatshops Batter Young Workers.” I was 23 when I wrote this — you can tell by the bluster — but it was a key development in my feelings about work. I quit my part-time “safety” job shortly after cranking this out and became a full-time writer. Interestingly, I learned a lot more about “high-end consulting” shortly afterwards, when I started dating, and then married, a McKinsey partner. As a new round of economic contraction hits us, I read this and smile. For all I’ve learned in six years, I wouldn’t change a word.)

Nancy Collins remembers when she hit rock bottom. She was in Australia for her investment-banking job at JP Morgan, trying to seal deals on two projects at once. She thought she could handle the stress. After all, co-workers had dubbed her previous boss the “Prince of Darkness” for making people work until 3AM, and she knew she was good at what she did. But then, one night after weeks of 18-hour days and constant travel, she staggered home at 7AM. Not to sleep. To shower. As she stood in the water, she started crying. At age 25, she was having a midlife crisis. “I started thinking, there’s got to be more to life than this,” she says.

JP Morgan isn’t the only firm driving its young employees insane. Salomon Smith Barney. Goldman Sachs. HIgh-end consulting firms such as McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group and many tech companies do the same. All hire the brightest Ivy League grads and make them a deal: We will pay you $60,000 or more a year and give you glimpses of corporate luxury, from ritzy hotels to jaunts on the jet. In exchange, you must work 70, 80, 100 hours a week through the best years of your life.

Forget accounting, these white-collar sweatshops are corporate America’s most successful scam. Give a kid a signing bonus and a $500 bottle of champagne, and he doesn’t notice that he’s working for $12 an hour. For years, exclusive firms have kept labor costs low by squeezing blood out of their hires. It’s not exploitation. These kids are savvy enough to know what they’re getting into. But they’re also smart enough to wonder whether the lifestyle’s worth the cost. As massive layoffs force the question, corporate bean counters should shiver at what the answer could do to their bottom line.

Since moving to New York a few months ago, I’ve marveled at Wall Street’s and consulting companies’ work-til-you-drop attitude. A friend still in a meeting at 10:30pm asks whether we can reschedule drinks. A party moves from 9pm to 10pm on a Friday to accommodate late workers.

People complain. Oh, they complain. You worked 80 hours this week? Well, I worked 90. You slept four hours? I slept at the office and showered there, too! The dirty secret is, many sweatshoppers actually like it. This generation vied for status in college by comparing workloads. Many of them then dove like lemmings off the cliff into corporate America. A high-wattage job fills an almost religious need to be part of something bigger than yourself, and 16-hour days mean you don’t have to deal with the messiness of life.

So people bought in throughout the boom. They skipped love affairs to save time and caught cabs back from the beach on Saturdays because the client needed that report. Ryan Sawchuk, whose co-workers at Amazon.com had to remind each other to eat, watched people bring sleeping bags to the office. He worked 12-hour shifts in the warehouse during the holidays and then did his real job, too. It got to the point where, according to Sawchuk, CEO Jeff Bezos told the Amazonians that since the company was no longer a start-up, they didn’t have to work 90-hour weeks. Seventy-hour weeks were perfectly acceptable. And 65, once in a while, were OK.

I can’t comprehend working anywhere for 65 hours a week. It’s doable, I suppose, if you know you’ll climb the corporate ladder to three-martini lunches soon. You sacrifice your 20s to the company, believing it will make you rich and powerful later.

Or not. For thousands of white-collar sweatshop workers, these next few weeks will be their last. Last week, the financial media reported that Morgan Stanley would lay of 2,200 employees worldwide. Lehman Brothers is trimming 500 jobs. McKinsey recently decided not to keep any of its second-year analysts. These layoffs continue the past year’s trend. Russell Eckenrod, 23, recounts working 80 hours a week for a consulting company during Christmas last year, only to be laid off three weeks later.

Talk about a reality check. Turns out the folks who took you on the corporate jet will shove you out on the street faster than you can recount missed autumn afternoons. I’ll never cheer a layoff. But every cloud has a silver lining, and the job-shedding at sweatshop firms is forcing brilliant young people with a world of options to consider that maybe they’d be happier somewhere else.

Nancy Collins ultimately started her own company, Global Adrenaline, which leads adventure tours to Africa and the Arctic. She values her JP Morgan skills, but “I’m much happier,” she says. When she works Saturdays now, the decision is all her own.

Sawchuk left the four-cups-of-Starbucks-a-day Amazon lifestyle for other pursuits. More will follow as young people realize comparable money can be made elsewhere and that when you are young, time is the most valuable asset you have. Why sell it all for $12 an hour?

This complicates the sweatshop bargain. If people don’t lust after glamour, these firms lose their lure. They can find less-savvy employees, but then they’ll lose the brainpower that attracts clients in the first place. Or the firms can accept shorter workweeks and pay for overtime. It won’t be easy: On Wall Street, at least, worker compensation is 50% of expenses. Try throwing that into a third-quarter statement.

But so it goes. A deal offered doesn’t have to be taken when you realize the emperor has no clothes. I remember a summer 2000 recruiting event for investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, for instance, on a Hudson River cruise boat. We rising college seniors flocked to the open bar as the recruiters showed us the Manhattan skyline and the cruising DLJ lifestyle. Pursue that deal with us, the message went, and all this will be yours.

I thought of that cruise the other day as I took the No. 6 train to the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a beautiful fall morning, the kind too beautiful to miss. I walked toward the middle of the steel trusses and stared back at Wall Street’s skyscrapers, imagining people laboring inside. It was the save view as from DLJ’s boat.

Still stunning. And from here, absolutely free.

Next week my weekly Scientific American column about former Westinghouse Science Talent Search finalists celebrates its 6 month birthday. The series, called “Where Are They Now?” has profiled Nobel Prize winners, nuns, doctors, teachers, inventors, linguists and so forth. It’s been a great experience for me in learning how to write about science for a general audience. You can read the columns here.

Just a note that I have yet to see an article claiming that our failure to elect our first female Vice President is a sign of sexism in America. Since I’m not sure how many “America is still a racist country” articles would have followed an Obama defeat, this is an interesting omission.

There are many spins being offered on the presidential election today. But here’s one that has me puzzled. Multiple headlines from the past month announced that we were expecting “record turnout.” For instance, see this story from CNN.

But with 97% of precincts reporting, according to CNN’s count, Pres.-elect Obama had received roughly 63 million votes, and Sen. McCain had received just shy of 56 million. In 2004, Pres. Bush received 62 million votes, and Sen. Kerry received 59 million. If I am adding correctly, that comes out to 119 million votes cast in 2008, and 121 million votes cast in 2004 (for major parties; third party votes do not change the tallies much. Also, not everyone votes for president, but presumably the majority do, and there’s no reason to suspect the percentage was much different this year than 4 years ago). If we add 3% to the total for this year to account for the precincts that have yet to report, we get just a smidge over 122 million, which would be a record, but hardly a blow-it-out-of-the-park record. There were over 215 million Americans of voting age in 2004, which means there are probably a few more now. No where near the number of people who could vote did. Even if there were 133 million votes cast in 2008, as some initial estimates called for, that’s going to be a lower percentage than turned out in 1960 (when about 63% of eligible Americans did).

It’s one of the fun things of growing older, and watching enough presidential elections, that you know news organizations are going to fall for the exact same stories every time. One biggie is the youth vote. Voters aged 18-29 made up 18% of the electorate this time. That’s a reasonable amount, but only slightly higher in percentage terms, than in 2004 or 2000 (see my take on the youth-vote fetish from USA Today, here). The conservative media keeps falling for a feature story on the “rise” of African-American Republicans. Never happens, alas. And then there’s the record turnout one. I suspect what happens every presidential election is that news reporters call poll workers, who are there every November working 6AM to 9PM even when the only race on the ballot is dog-catcher. The poll workers — for whom the modal experience is seeing no one — say “oh yes, it looks like record turnout!” given that people are actually lining up to vote instead of drifting in off the street, asking for directions to a nearby Starbucks.  So we get stories on record turnout, when the needle really doesn’t move that much.

I brought my son to vote with me this morning. At first glance, this seemed somewhat reckless, as he’s at that age where waiting for anything doesn’t work. He tries to squirm out of the stroller, and if you take him out of the stroller he just runs away and gets in to things. But it wound up being a good move, because I was ushered over to the wheelchair entrance and put in a much shorter line. I took him into the booth with me, where I cast a vote that, let’s just say, will put me in the minority in my precinct.

Will I be in the minority in the country, overall? It’s hard to say. Several of the mainstream polls show Obama winning by double digits, which seems a little strange. Ronald Reagan did not beat Jimmy Carter by double digits. Bill Clinton did not beat George H.W. Bush by double digits, nor did he beat Bob Dole by double digits. The last double-digit margin of victory was Reagan over Mondale in 1984 (incidentally, the first election I remember, when my mom took me to vote with her), but a popular president winning re-election is a very different matter than a wide-open election in a country that has voted roughly 50-50 for the past two. The biggest unknown in this particular election is the African-American vote. In theory, extremely high turn-out could tip red states and toss-up states, but this analysis from Sean Malstrom notes that neither Obama nor McCain has been spending that much time in states like Georgia that pollsters have been claiming are in play.

Anyway, as I wrote in a 2002 piece for USA Today called “Hurrah for the right to vote (or not),” I am not convinced that life as we know it will change that much under a President Obama or McCain — at least I hope not. If someone was talking about instituting a flat tax, I’d be excited, but as it is, the two are debating over small percentages in something that’s already way too high. I worry a high-majority Democratic Congress would destroy free trade and pass more onerous regulations.  But in general, unless you choose to enlist in the military, I guess, daily life has been and will be the same if you choose to ignore politics. (And even then — Obama can’t pull us out of Iraq immediately. He said in the debates that stopping genocide was a reason to use US troops, and it is entirely possible that Iraq would experience genocide in our absence).

That said, I have noticed an interesting phenomenon as a lonely conservative in Manhattan. There’s an underlying assumption of liberalism that pervades social gatherings to the point where people consider it perfectly respectable to start a conversation — even if they don’t know you! — with “oh, that horrible George W. Bush” or “aren’t you glad to be done with eight years of this nightmare?” There is the assumption that everything Republicans do is disingenuous, that the only reason McCain picked Palin was because he thought he needed a substitute Hillary. Um, no. Palin is no substitute Hillary. Like Clinton, she took her husband’s name, but she’s the one who made it famous. The commentariat just doesn’t get it. I don’t know how it is elsewhere, but I assume that there are some small southern towns or Midwestern evangelical congregations that are equally tipped the other way, where Democrats are so rare that no one knows any…except the shrill dingbats you see on TV. Pretty soon we’re all going to need anthropologists to understand each other.

Perhaps that’s what happens in a country with 500 channels, zillions of Internet outlets, and iPods which mean you no longer have to listen to what comes over the airwaves to the car radio. But politics doesn’t work in that environment, when you need governing majorities that acknowledge the humanity and good will of people who think differently than you do. Obama talks a good game that way — but when it comes down to it, he has the most liberal voting record in the Senate. Actions speak louder than words.