The measure of success

What is the measure of success?

To some, it is material. The Porsche Cayenne. McMansion. Oversized yacht. To those of us looking on, we must wonder – how much do you own, how much the bank? Perhaps the measure of success is the ability to hornswaggle one’s banker?

There are many other measures of success. Popularity. Athletic skill. Acting chops, Oscars. Youtube views. Nobel Prizes.

But perhaps the more meaningful measure is deeply personal. At the end, what did you accomplish? Did you do good? Are others better off because of you? These are important questions.

Dad was second generation Italian. Sicilian, more specifically. That means that his parents migrated here through Ellis Island in the early twentieth century, nearly 100 years ago. Sicily, the land of intense sun, shimmering seas, incredible beauty, heartrending cruelty, and mind numbing poverty. A good place to be from.

Grandpa came first, his wife following a year later. This is because it was necessary to start a life, find work, build some reserves. Something the government does for folks nowadays.

Dad was the youngest of four, born in the late 1920s, with his formative years firmly spanning the Great Depression. Life was hard. Speaking only Italian, he learned English on the side as he attended school. He worked at twelve to help support the family, without complaint. Hard work, farming and landscaping, calluses, sunburn, exhaustion. The 1930s were not kind.

And then it got worse. His father, stressed, or drunk, was abusive. Other, darker things, not to be spoken of. He moved out of the house as a young teenager, just to survive.

Then, the war. Rationing, rag picking. Gleaning. Times were tough, but the American spirit was strong and we built ships and planes and trained our troops and won the war. Dad did his part, a proud Navy veteran at the ripe old age of 16, lying about his age, serving in the South Pacific. The war was soon over, and he, with millions of others, returned to civilian life.

He took up with his high school girlfriend, a ravishing redhead, the love of his life, and by 1948 was married. Soon after, the children began to come – third generation Italian English Scottish German mutts. The wonderful generosity of America chipped in with the GI bill, and Dad became the very first in his large, multigenerational family, spanning two continents, to gain a college degree. Physics, science, and mathematics, thank you. Not bad for a scruffy Italian brat, knees protruding from torn trousers just a few years prior.

We moved to the country, the family growing in size - ultimately nine kids, too expensive in the city. With room to breathe, we learned to prepare the soil, plant the garden, weed and cultivate, harvest and store. In spite of tough times, we never went hungry. Instead, we learned to prune the apple trees, milk the cows, tend the chickens, and care for the garden. We ate well, but it was the fruit of our labor. We learned the value of work.

Dad became a high school teacher. Science and math. Planning laboratory experiments for his students, he often tried them first on us at home. We learned to make gunpowder from scratch. To burn magnesium, brighter than the sun. That the age of paper could be determined by the degree of yellowing, and modeled by “aging” in a hot oven. We learned to think.

And much, much more. How to change the oil in the car. To replace a flat tire. To add an electrical outlet. Repair a leaky faucet. Plumb a brand new hot-water heating system. Dig a septic system and pour concrete footings. Always teaching, a lifetime vocation and avocation.

What was the outcome? At the end, he lived in a small cottage, drove a tiny, rusted car, and tended a postage stamp garden. He worried and fretted that he had not been a good father, could have done better, should have done more. The kids deserved far better.
 
Now that you’re at peace, Dad, you may rest well knowing what you’ve achieved. Your students, hundreds of them, benefited from your tutelage. Your children are successful, each in their own way. We are happy, secure. We are kind and charitable. Self-reliant and capable. We learned well.

Thanks Dad. You were a fabulous success, the model of a life well lived. You made us who we are. You made a difference. No Nobel Prize here, but perhaps there should be.

The poor need more than a safety net

A helping hand - just cash or also values?

What could be worse than a losing lottery ticket? Almost certainly, according to one study: a winning one.

In a 2009 paper published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, economists from the University of Kentucky, University of Pittsburgh, and Vanderbilt University attempted to determine what happens when people in financial straits are given large lump payments. “The Ticket to Easy Street? The Financial consequences of Winning the Lottery” aimed to assess the most basic approach used by policymakers to assist those in financial trouble – giving hefty cash transfers.

The longitudinal study utilized a large, linked database of Florida lottery winners and bankruptcy records. The findings were stunning – big winners (those receiving $50,000 to $150,000), while less likely to go bankrupt than small winners within  two years, were actually more likely to file three to five years later. In other words, the large infusion of cash had no lasting effect, and, in fact, a corrosive one. This in spite of the fact that the median prize ($65,000) was larger than the average unsecured debt ($49,000) owed by the player: these winners should have had a fresh financial start.

Is this a significant finding to policymakers fighting intransigent poverty? Does it suggest that cash transfers are ineffective, or perhaps even an example of pathological altruism (well meaning but harmful policies)? It is often said that the lottery is a tax on those who are bad at math, so perhaps this sample is biased to select those with poor financial skills.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could conduct an experiment where a large group of people were randomly endowed with significant wealth. There would be no sample bias and those not selected would act as a control group, and they could all be observed over many years to determine multigenerational effects. A very expensive experiment to be conducted over a fifty year time frame seems extremely unlikely.

Almost unbelievably, that experiment has been done.

In 1832, the state of Georgia conducted the Cherokee Land Lottery in which winners received 160 acres of land with no strings attached. It could be farmed or sold or traded. The value received was close to the extant median level of wealth (roughly $50,000 in today’s dollars), vaulting winners immediately into a higher wealth strata. The study, “Shocking Behavior: Random Wealth in Antebellum Georgia and Human Capital Across Generations,” was performed by economists Hoyt Bleakley, University of Chicago, and Joseph P. Ferrie of Northwestern University, published in the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2010 (updated in 2013).

(“Shocking” is not used in a horror movie sense, but meaning that the economic impact of winning was a shock to the winner’s financial status, bouncing them to a new level.)

Bleakley and Ferrie’s findings were surprising: “Although winners had slightly more children than non-winners, they did not send them to school more. Sons of winners have no better adult outcomes (wealth, income, literacy) than the sons of non-winners, and winners’ grandchildren do not have higher literacy or school attendance than non-winners’ grandchildren.”

From a policymaking point of view, this is highly disappointing. Large infusions of wealth to families did not “catch fire” but rather petered out. This brings us to a key question: what is more important to enabling social mobility: financial constraints or the household’s culture and values? How can we most effectively address multigenerational stagnation?

Bleakley and Ferrie refer to a 2007 study published by Gregory Clark in which he found that the “characteristics associated with better economic outcomes – patience, hard work, ingenuity, innovativeness, education – persisted and spread within family lines…” The family’s characteristics, or values  infrastructure, is more likely to be passed on from generation to generation and is more highly correlated to mobility and success than is wealth alone. Apparently, wealth accretes from values and not vice versa.

According to the Congressional Research Service, the cash equivalent of federal means-tested spending on households in poverty is over $60,000 per year. There is no doubt that this money is useful to support these families and their children. But is it enough? Will it engender social mobility and multigenerational change? The sad truth from the aforementioned studies is that, most likely, it is not.

So, it seems, as we prescribe programs to help our poor, to enable them to rise to and through the middle class dream of America, we must pay equal mind to cultural values as we do to cash. For without these, the effects of gifted cash alone are ephemeral and, perhaps, even harmful.

There is enough harm in the world without us adding to it, however well intended.

Let's end violence violence

This weekend’s Wall Street Journal (May 23-24, 2009) reports that community activists are begging president Obama to intercede in an epidemic of murders of young people (“Chicago student killings spark appeals to Obama”). Chicago has suffered the killings of 37 school age children so far in the 2008-2009 school year – which we can all agree is 37 too many.

Two thirds of the murders were drug or gang related, others may involve cases of mistaken identify. Activists decry gun violence and are calling for stricter gun control. This focus may be dangerously wrong headed in that it doesn’t address the root cause of the problem.

The Reverend Michael Pfleger (of “America is the greatest sin against God” fame) urged his congregation to sell and wear t-shirts emblazoned with an upside-down American flag (a sign of distress) and the exclamation “Gun Violence – An American Emergency.” Reverend Pfleger also asked them to wear American flag pins upside down. Reverend Pfleger thinks that America is sick.

Imagine that Mr. Obama could cause all of the guns in Chicago to be magically atomized. Do you think for one instant that the violence would end? That guns are the underlying cause of violence and, that by “disappearing” them, the violence would leave with them? If guns are the source of violence, then I must have had a blessedly lucky childhood. We had guns down on the farm and in all of my friends’ homes, too. None of these guns ever forced one of us to murder a classmate. No, there is something else at work here.

There are creatures in Chicago (hard to call them human) who do not blink to kill in cold blood. The willingness to pull a trigger would transfer with ease to the willingness to swing a baseball bat, crushing a skull, or wield a knife to stab the heart, or slice a throat, or rip open an abdomen. It is that willingness that is the problem. That is our enemy, and that which must be eliminated. Magically atomizing guns won’t make that willingness go away.

But from where does it arise? Much has been written on this, but I suggest that it is lack of boundaries, skewed values, and distorted social and cultural norms. The willingness to kill in cold blood is evil incarnate. So it is not gun violence, or knife violence, or brickbat violence, or dynamite violence, or motor vehicle violence that is the issue – it is violence violence. And until we address the root cause, we are tilting at windmills.

In this, I side with Dr. William Henry “Bill” Cosby, not with Reverend Pfleger. I wonder whom Mr. Obama favors.