Shocking Common Financial Realities

Bill Cimbrelo directed me to a CNN Money story titled “Retirement Shocker: 60% of Workers Have Less Than $25,000 Saved.”  To my mind, the main question that this raises is for whom is this a “shocker”?  If the cited fact applies to more than half of the people concerned, isn’t it safe to assume that the majority of people should be unsurprised by the information?  The only reason that I see why a person would be surprised by statistics that affirm the day-to-day reality of his life is if he thinks his own experience is somehow anomalous, somehow out of keeping with the daily experience of other people like him.  Unfortunately, this is almost certainly the situation with most lower-middle class and poor individuals.

So here’s a breaking point that I’m looking forward to, and it’s one that’s on my mind often, and that I’ve brought up earlier and elsewhere.  The news media and society in general needs to stop presenting affluence as the default state of life in America.  It’s not correct, and more than that it can be damaging to policy and social discourse.  Our collective understanding of income disparity is distressingly skewed by a distinctly hopeful presentation of American life in most media, whether fiction or non-fiction.  As with all things, failure to accurately recognize the problem makes failure to craft solutions almost certain.

 People should never be shocked by information that’s right under their noses all the time.  If they are, then it’s pretty clear that something had been wildly misrepresented in the past.  You might object that it’s not as though people walk around with their total retirement savings tattooed on their heads.  Why should we have any idea what sort of figures apply to the majority.  You shouldn’t, of course.  And if you’re not a meteorologist you shouldn’t know exactly how much rain your area has gotten this month.  But when somebody tells you that figure would you be shocked?  If so, surely you’re either terrible at estimating rainfall or you haven’t been looking outside very much.  And if you weren’t paying attention, in order to be shocked you have to have made some groundless assumption about what the amount might be, which will then be contradicted by the facts.

There’s a lot of information that casual observers can’t be expected to know about people, about the economy, about the world.  But learning something new is not the same as learning something shocking.  Yet I don’t dispute that the headline for the given story was accurate and that a great many people were shocked by the revelation.  They wouldn’t have been if they hadn’t concluded on the basis of nothing whatsoever that the majority of Americans are well prepared for a comfortable retirement.  I put forth that this sort of thing reveals the entire perception of income demographics in America to be pure fantasy.

Such a fantasy promotes a victim-blaming mentality.  And it promotes that not just among the beneficiaries of income inequality but among the victims of it, too, as they may tend to be surprised by information that shows their experience to be firmly in the majority.  And yet even the recognition of that information is not in itself enough to move commentators towards the idea that financial difficulty is an endemic problem and not a personal one.  The language applied to stories about the plight of the masses still suggests that the simple fact of their being a part of the masses is in some measure attributable to their own negligence, sloth, or ignorance.

The CNN article takes pains to spin the subject in a certain direction that is at once optimistic about general patterns and unfair to individuals.  It points out, “While workers' lack of saving and confidence in their ability to retire comfortably is troubling, [Employee Benefit Research Institute director Jack] VanDerhei said it's good that people are becoming more realistic about their financial situations.”  Sure, maybe, but there’s an enormously significant dimension of this story that stretches beyond the personal responsibilities of the people who are negatively affected.  At the same time that those people exhibit realism about that, how about analysts, media, and society as a whole become more realistic about the financial situations of people other than themselves?

The Tragedy of the Modern Library

I try to listen to A Prairie Home Companion each Saturday evening, in large part because, despite being politically and socially liberal, I am personally quite conservative and prone to nostalgia and wistfulness for a purer experience of things that it seems I was denied by the unrelenting progress of history. This week’s broadcast featured an episode in the adventures of Ruth Harrison, reference librarian, a character who is rather similar in that regard. She is educated, non-combative, socially permissive, but often silently critical of people’s tastes and a widespread loss of noble ideals.

In this latest episode she editorialized for a moment in conversation with her twenty-eight year-old intern, Trent (not the other one, Brent, who is thirty-seven) after he had helped a patron find a thriller that showcased truly heinous crimes. Miss Harrison, voiced by the highly talented Sue Scott, commented: “In library school we were taught that the role of the library is to educate, to uplift, not to cater to every whim.” I didn’t even go to library school, but I have always had the same image of libraries.

On hearing that line of dialogue, I thought of the last couple of trips I have taken to the Central Library in the City of Buffalo. It has come a long way from the libraries that were so domestically familiar to me throughout elementary and high school. These days, when you walk around a library, you find that the stacks are deserted but that a sea of people stretches throughout the computer banks. On an occasion when I lost my internet connection, I had to carry my laptop to the library in order to borrow its wireless connection for a day. Doing so made me feel sort of cheap and disloyal, and it also gave me an opportunity to occasionally observe the behavior of the other patrons, which in turn made me feel worse.

I noticed a middle aged couple sharing a long game of solitaire on one computer. Elsewhere, a man about my age was watching Youtube. My eyes have passed over various computer screens each time I’ve been back there, and I find that these are extremely commonplace activities. Many different kinds of games are played in the Buffalo library – first-person shooters, adventure games, bejeweled and similar puzzles. A significant portion of the library patronage these days, perhaps the majority, is evidently poor people who have no access to such entertainment at home and utilize the library for the idle passage of time instead.

Oh, to be poor but also have such free time or the means of transportation to frequent the region’s most expansive library! I understand not reading because you simply don’t have the time amidst your exhausting and low-paying work, and I understand having little access to either books or technology, particularly in a town where everything is so spread-out. But here the people I’ve seen at the library have the opportunity to beautifully enrich their lives with the information and artistry that surrounds them in a variety of media, and they choose to play dull games. It is a tragedy that libraries are used this way, that they are little more than the low-rent internet cafes and LAN parties of the twenty-first century.

Even if people ventured away from the computers, I find that the most prominently featured books aren’t all that much better. I want to believe that there are a few librarians who work in that building and react to the public much as does Ruth Harrison, diligently pointing them towards the popular fiction with easily digestible plots and few themes, then lamenting that she could have recommended Hemmingway or Faulkner. I’ve found that those sorts of lamentations often meet with comments along the lines of, “Hey, anything that gets kids reading.” That’s not the least bit persuasive to me. The mere act of allowing one’s brain to process typewritten words doesn’t in and of itself make for a richer intellectual experience than other alternatives. Is a child really better off reading Stephanie Meyer or Dan Brown than watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos on DVD or listening closely to a Brahms symphony?

The sentiment of “as long as they’re reading” speaks to what I think is the underlying misconception that drives the degradation of libraries and of collective appreciation of art and literature. It also speaks to the difficulty that we face in reversing the trend. I resent what libraries have become, but I see no way of changing them back into grand temples of information and culture. In order to draw in the public and avoid closure, they have to provide the type of access that people want. And as a matter of principle, anything that qualifies as information or culture should have a place there, regardless of its intrinsic quality. So it’s not as if there is any cause for libraries to restrict people from being able to use them in such frivolous ways. But so long as easy escapism can be found there, the public will surely continue to gravitate toward it.

We need a collective breaking point to overturn the misconception, which drives both trends, that a greater quantity of information is effectively the same as a greater quality. I’m inclined to think that libraries think they are providing an adequate public service and that the public thinks it is adequately utilizing that service simply because, between the books and the high-speed internet, there’s a lot of information that’s directly accessible to the entire public. It doesn’t seem to matter how it’s utilized. But the danger to libraries is the danger to all of society – that as everything comes to be more and more at our fingertips, we will grow increasingly complacent about it and let the petty distractions dominate our attention. Since everything else is still there, such allowances seem to come at the expense of nothing, but in fact they come at the expense of our very minds.

Twitter Breaks News First, Often Makes It Up

Mediabistro led its newsfeed today with praise for a Twitter user who broke the story of Whitney Houston’s death an hour before the Associated Press did. The story began:

Twitter has long-established itself as the ‘go to’ place for breaking news, and this has never been so clearly demonstrated following the sad passing of music superstar Whitney Houston on Saturday.

Other celebrities whose sad passing I recall Twitter been the first to mention include Cher and Zach Braff, both of whom are still very much alive. If Twitter is anyone’s go-to place for news about anything, they are courting rampant misinformation. A network on which any user can post any claim they want is not a news service, it’s a rumor mill.

That is exactly the way Twitter functioned in the case of Whitney Houston’s death. The tweet that “broke the story” was from user @BarBeeBritt, and said only, “Is Whitney Houston really dead?” News reports, by their very nature, do not take the form of questions. There isn’t supposed to be any uncertainty about the essential facts of the story; it’s only news if you’ve confirmed the story with a reliable source and you’re certain that you’re not playing an inadvertent hoax on the public.

If CNN functioned as Twitter does, an anchor would come back from commercial break, look squarely into the camera and say, “We think Katy Perry might have been crushed by an anvil this morning. If anyone knows anything about this, please send us an e-mail.” If that ever happened, or the New York Times ever ran a story along the lines of “Australian Possibly Engulfed by Giant Fireball: Will Confirm/Deny for Tomorrow’s Edition,” I hope that a mob of angry, truth loving citizens would grab torches and clubs and destroy the infrastructure of the organization. Then, when all the media goes that way, we can just rely on a nationwide game of telephone to disseminate every fact-like piece of possibly-information.

Yeah, Twitter was the first to mention the story of Whitney Houston’s death, but speed cannot possibly be the only criterion we have for what constitutes the go-to source for breaking news. There’s got to be a place for reliability. Thirteen minutes after @ BarBeeBritt’s tweet, user @AjaDiorNavy tweeted, exactly thus: “omgg , my aunt tiffany who work for whitney houston just found whitney houston dead in tub . such ashame & sad :-( “

That actually counts as information, but the trouble is that there’s no way of knowing that at the moment that it’s tweeted. On Twitter, anyone could have said that about any celebrity just to get attention or cause a stir, and many have. I expect that when someone sees mention of a significant event on Twitter, his first impulse is to turn on the television or check a professional news website. And if a person doesn’t do that, but just takes whatever has been tweeted at face value, he is disturbingly naïve and gullible.

The old saying applies about a stopped clock being right twice a day. But also, a stopped clock will tell you it’s eleven o’clock long before it actually is. It’s easy to be the first on a story; it’s not so easy to get it right. I’d rather wait a little while for news that is relevant, accurate, and thorough, and I’m much more likely to focus my attention on the media outlet that misinforms me least often, rather than on the one that informs or misinforms me most quickly.

It was forty-two minutes after the tweet by @AjaDiorNavy that the Associated Press used Twitter to break the story by indicating that the news of Houston’s death came from her publicist Kristen Foster. Forty-two minutes past hearsay and fifty-five minutes past the intimation of rumor. I know that the world moves fast these days, but is one hour really too long to wait for information that’s been vetted by an organization whose very purpose is to provide the public with news? Is there no lower limit breaking point at which the rapid speed of the news cycle is no longer worth its resulting unreliability? Personally, I think we should have hit that point long before anybody had the gall to describe Twitter as the go-to source for anything other than rumor and idle chatter.

Life, Googled

I saw a television advertisement for Google yesterday. Not for any particular service offered by Google, just for the Google brand as a whole. I find it kind of strange that a powerful company with virtually no competition for its major services would run advertisements in the popular media simply promoting its own name. But I suppose it’s aimed not at encouraging people to use Google, but at encouraging them to use Google for everything. I’m taking the fact that they’ve seen fit to run the ad as a good sign that Google does still have competition and people are not yet flocking to it for all their worldly desires.

Yet the style and content of the ad does give the impression that that’s precisely what they are promoting. It consists of a lengthy montage of web searches, e-mail messages, videos, status updates, and so forth, and clearly the main idea is that every facet of life can be served by a Google application. It’s a familiar style of advertising – one that tries to saturate the viewer with beautiful or inspiring imagery to make them desire a more intimate connection with the world being depicted on the screen. And the consumer is meant to come away from it thinking that the given brand will help them to obtain that closeness.

I have two pieces of commentary to bring to bear on Google’s application of this advertising style. One observation is general to the commercial, and one is specific to a brief part of it that I find objectionable.

My general criticism is that the advertisement as a whole falls flat in its effort to inspire me with a barrage of imagery, drawn from disparate corners of human experience. It’s a type of content that I’ve considered effective elsewhere, for instance in the 2008-9 Discovery Channel “I Love the World” campaign. There’s a straightforward reason why I consider the Google ad to fail where that one succeeded. Google’s montage presents every scene as being two steps removed, rather than just one.

The images included in its montage are fairly familiar, on the whole. They are simply of people talking, or of significant but commonplace daily events like a child’s first bike ride. These things are perfectly accessible without a technological medium, and yet when I see them on the television screen, it is perfectly clear that they are being channeled through something external to both me and the person being depicted. Where the visual is of a Google+ chat session or the like, I find myself looking at a screen upon a screen, and that leaves me quite far from the reality of another person’s life. And where the scene is not affixed to a separate little box, it is a poor quality image, shaking as someone films the event on a handheld video camera.

The Discovery Channel ad was similar in basic intent to the Google ad, in that it was offering a mode of access to other events, experiences, and parts of the world through an intermediary, whether television media or computers. But two things differentiated the Discovery Channel visuals: They were professionally produced and they depicted experiences that were clearly remote and uncommon. Thus, I enjoyed crisp, almost lifelike views of African tribal ceremonies, and skydiving, and undersea exploration, and I got the impression that the Discovery Channel was capable of bringing me closer to things that I could not easily or quickly access on my own.

By contrast, the Google ad reminds me that the use of some of their services might actually put additional barriers between me and the people or circumstances I wish to access. And if what I’m trying to access is just people roughly like me and experiences similar to those that I’ve had, I can step out my front door and gain access to something of the same kind without Google’s help. And personally, I think I would be better off doing so in many cases. As so often happens, I worry that I’m practically alone in that thinking. I worry that most Americans have eschewed any breaking point on this subject, and that they think it’s actually preferable to use a technological middle man for everything they used to do for themselves.

That brings me to my particular gripe with the scenes depicted in the Google ad. At one point it shows someone Googling the phrase, “How to be a better dad.” Have we really come to a point where we think that even that is the sort of question that Google can resolve for us. I know some people think that widespread access to the internet means it’s no longer necessary to memorize any factual information whatsoever. Are we now at the point that retaining ethereal information, standards of personal behavior, and methods of character development are also considered obsolete?

There are some things that you don’t Google. I don’t care how sophisticated their algorithm becomes; no information that can be posted to the web takes the place of experience, practice, and acquired wisdom. Anyone who would Google the phrase “How to be a better dad” has no business being a dad. After all, he seems to be under the shockingly erroneous impression that effective parenthood is easy, and that the problem of child-rearing can be resolved with the click of a mouse, as opposed to, say, rigorous study and earnest commitment.

It troubles me to think that Google is encouraging people to lean on their brand to resolve fundamental human questions for them. Just so that I can beat them to the punch, I would like to recommend against Googling the following phrases, in case their next ad suggests that a web search will provide the answer to any of them:

“How to live my life.”

“How to believe in the one true faith.”

“Why do bad things happen to good people?”

“Should I commit suicide?”

“Do I have a soul?”

“What is justice, Polemarchus?”

If at any time you have Googled one or more of these phrases, go outside and talk to somebody.

The Simplest Explanation is Often the Tesh One

During a recent, lengthy conversation with my brother Brian, he brought up the John Tesh radio show so that we could badmouth the host’s daily contributions to the lives of his listeners. I don’t think all that badly of John Tesh, but the sentiment that my brother and I seem to share is that he takes a rather unquestioning attitude towards the information that he cites on his program, and tends to dispense, as if it is gospel, advice that needs to be context-dependent at best. Then again, sometimes it’s probably just wrong altogether.

Yesterday, I just happened to hear a bit of the John Tesh broadcast, and really got my dander up over his latest explanation of some academic study. To his credit, I’m sure that a lot of the fault lies with the researchers who are putting out this material in the first place, but again, it is Tesh’s unquestioning attitude in broadcasting the stuff that turns irresponsible reasoning from an academic footnote into a corruption of popular knowledge.

In this case, Tesh thought himself to be informing his audience that cultural and artistic activities improve people’s health. According to surveys of study participants in Norway, he says, those who reported going to museums on a regular basis or either participating in or watching things like ballet tended to be significantly healthier overall than people who didn’t take part in those activities.

And then, setting aside any possible questions as to the meaning of the data, Tesh asks what he apparently thinks is the only natural question: how does this work? He promptly answers his own question, apparently restating the opinions of the original researchers. Not knowing where to find the original reporting, I can’t say with certainty that that’s the case, but coverage of the story in the UK Daily Telegraph back in May made the same statements about a unidirectional, causal relationship between cultural activity and physical outcome, so that suggests that such statements are repetition of the claims of the researchers. Whatever their original language, Tesh puts it simply and stupidly: cultural activities engage us mentally, and that helps us to be able to deal with stress and keeps us healthier.

It is absolutely shocking to me that professional academics and paid researchers still sometimes use the most obvious kind of faulty reasoning and confuse correlation with causality. Observing that healthy people go to museums absolutely does not mean that going to museums makes people healthy. In fact, assuming that that’s the case strikes me as amazingly unimaginative and intellectually lazy. I recognize that one needs a hypothesis in order to make scientific progress, but in general I’d say that good advice for researchers would be unless you have a damn good scientific explanation for how two phenomena are linked, don’t guess. As near as I can tell, everyone who’s communicating the story of this culture-health connection, from the Nordic researchers to the staff of the Telegraph to John Tesh, is taking it for granted in exactly the same way. Do none of them consider that there might be other factors at play?

It’s not difficult to identify alternative explanations. Of course, any of them would need additional data in order to have sufficient support, just as the claim that cultural activities cause good health needs additional data as to exactly what the mechanism of that cause is. Without access to a university research staff or other such resources, I can only guess, but I’d be quite willing to bet that if you did a study of people’s social class as compared with their cultural engagement, you’d find that wealthier people participated in more activities.

Take the three data sets together, and you’ve got a picture of more affluent people who are healthier than poor people and go to museums more often. I don’t know what John Tesh or the Daily Telegraph would say, but I have a fairly clear sense of which of those is the more significant variable in determining the other two. And yet I still wouldn’t say that being rich makes you healthier, because that’s a stupid thing to say. What I would say is that being wealthy gives you greater access to a wide range of food options, and allows you to pay for health-enhancing luxuries like gym memberships and spa vacations, while still having enough left over to go to the opera. So being wealthy makes it easier to make both healthier and more culturally refined lifestyle choices. But unless someone gives me a thoroughly refined scientific explanation of newly discovered physical mechanisms, I’m fairly certain that the only things that have a direct impact on health are the things that interact with your body’s functioning, such as what you eat and how often you exercise.

Since the British newspapers covered this study, Britain’s National Health Service took it up and posted a thorough, reasonable discussion of it on their website, including the prominent image caption at the top of the page, “It’s hard to tell if culture affects health, or vice versa.” It also adds tremendously to my sense of frustration at this sort of study by pointing out that surveys of participants wasn’t only used to determine their level of cultural participation; the surveys were actually the gauges of participant health. Their actual health, as determined by medical indicators, remains completely unknown.

In the NHS’s conclusion, it reiterates that the direction of causality is difficult to determine, and adds:

For example, just as participating in cultural activities might cause people to report better physical and mental health, it is just as plausible that people who feel healthier were more likely to engage in cultural activities.

No kidding. All a person should have to do to come up with this alternative explanation for the data is to think for just one minute about their own experience. Surely even John Tesh has felt down in the dumps at one or two points in his life. I’d be surprised if he reported that he was especially well-traveled among his local cultural institutions during those periods.

For that matter, the curve for this study would be absolutely shattered by interviewing just a few people who are genuinely sick. The researchers did adjust for things like chronic disease, but presumably not for recent, persistent disease. If, say, you’ve gotten the flu in each season of this year and have been laid up in bed for weeks at a time, of course you’re not going to the symphony. But if the poll was worded with sufficient vagueness, anyone who was reviewing the data blind would just see that participant x reported being in somewhat poor health and was highly unlikely to go to the cinema, theater, or gallery. Such a researcher might easily conclude that participant x’s cultural disinterest was contributing negatively to his health, if that researcher didn’t think very hard about the different ways to interpret what he was reading.

The study also analyzed reports of satisfaction with life, anxiety, and depression, and found that particular activities, depending on the gender of the participant, were correlated to differing levels of each. I take it that the essential conclusion from this part of the research is “Doing stuff makes you feel better.” You don’t say! And yet here also, to claim a unidirectional relationship is to draw an illogical, indefensible, and irresponsible conclusion, because feeling better makes you do stuff, too.

It’s the irresponsibility of this kind of reporting that really drives me crazy and prompts me to write 1,500 word rants on the topic. And that is also why I focus my umbrage on John Tesh, because it’s his sort of highly digested, exceptionally simplistic, and frequently repeated iterations of this kind of terrible academic research that are especially poisonous. One-dimensional interpretations of correlation between behaviors and conditions send a clear message of blame to people experiencing the less favorable conditions.

I imagine John Tesh rhetorically asking his audience “worried about your health?” and then cheerfully explaining to them that “if you think the problem is that you don’t have insurance or you can’t afford anything but empty calories at the grocery store, you’re wrong! It turns out that you, listener, just fucked up by not attending enough literature readings.”

Sadly, I’m sure that John Tesh genuinely feels as though he’s helping out his audience by telling them about the little aspects of their day-to-day lives that can contribute to their lasting health. But the thing is that for those of them who really have to struggle with these issues, he’s just making it worse. Considering that that Nordic research group included anxiety as a factor in its calculations, you’d think that someone would have given some thought to the likely future effect of believing that your health is tied to the number of lectures you attend this year. If people of distinctly low socioeconomic class listen to Tesh on this one and come to believe that frequent participation in cultural activities is key to their physical and mental health, the actual effect may turn out to be the opposite of what Tesh intends. I say that based on experience; I know what severe anxiety can come of trying to be culturally engaged while knowing all along that you cannot actually afford it.

If this possible ill effect was the consequence of just some one-off comment from John Tesh, I could give him a pass, but from what I’ve heard of his show, this is part and parcel of his daily broadcast. The list of recent topics on his website at this moment includes “Loneliness is bad for your health,” and “Volunteering boosts your health.” Bullshit claims, both. There is almost no conceivable way that in either of those cases the two factors being linked aren’t just simultaneous effects of other causes. Yet somehow Tesh doesn’t know that. Tragically, the researchers who produced the original claims may not. And certainly, much of Tesh’s listenership doesn’t realize that, and will take the voice on the radio at its word.

And what will come of these claims? Well, sure, certain frequent volunteers will feel more confident that their next check-up is going to go just fine. But also, some people who don’t have the time to volunteer because they’re working three jobs and still can’t afford health insurance will have found a new source of stress, anxiety, and depression, while some of those who have the best health care money can buy will attribute its effects to that Thanksgiving they spent working at the soup kitchen downtown. And at the same time, John Tesh is telling his sick and lonely listeners that if they’re worried about their health they’d better make sure they aren’t lonely, and if they’re worried about their loneliness, they damn well should be because it’s going to keep them in poor health. That information is rather less than helpful unless you’re neither lonely nor afflicted.

But the simpler the explanations of everyone’s problems, the better it is for everyone who doesn’t suffer them.