WORK HARD, BE NICE - How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America

By: Jay Mathews

Jay Mathews is a bit of a journalistic oddball. Most reporters see the education beat as a stepping stone to bigger things, but much to his credit Mathews, who writes for The Washington Post, returned to covering schools after an international reporting career. He is best known for his book on Jaime Escalante, who taught low-income children in East Los Angeles to excel in AP calculus and was featured in the film "Stand and Deliver." Now Mathews is back to profile two young teachers -- Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin -- who founded the wildly successful Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), a chain of 66 charter schools now educating 16,000 low-income students in 19 states and the District of Columbia.

While I have some quarrels with the book's implicit and explicit public-policy conclusions, "Work Hard. Be Nice" provides a fast-paced, engrossing and heartening story of two phenomenally dedicated teachers who demonstrate that low-income students, if given the right environment, can thrive academically. In 52 short and easily digestible chapters, Mathews traces the story of two Ivy League graduates who began teaching in Houston in 1992 as part of the Teach for America program. Both struggle at first but come under the tutelage of an experienced educator, Harriett Ball, who employs chants and songs and tough love to reach students whom lesser teachers might give up on. Levin and Feinberg care deeply: They encourage students to call them in the evening for help with homework, visit student homes to get parents on their side and dig into their own pockets to buy alarm clocks to help students get to school on time. In Mathews's telling, it's hard not to love these guys.
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Their students flourish, but Levin and Feinberg worry about what will happen to the children under other teachers, so they come up with the idea of creating their own schools. Teachers would put in a longer school day (beginning at 7:15 and ending at 5 p.m.); teach Saturday classes and three weeks of summer school; and be subject to firing without due-process rights. Parents would sign contracts agreeing to check homework and read to their children at night. And students would go to school longer hours and do extensive homework each night in exchange for special rewards.

Over time, the program began to attract favorable media attention and foundation support, including that of the co-founders of Gap, who bankrolled KIPP to the tune of $50 million. Today, KIPP has raised more money than any other system of charter schools and spends $1,100 to $1,500 more per pupil than regular public schools. Overall, test scores in KIPP schools have risen faster for more low-income students than anywhere else, Mathews writes.

There are important lessons to draw from KIPP -- such as the potential value of longer school days and the importance of teacher home visits -- but there are also two misguided "lessons" that many readers may take from "Work Hard. Be Nice": that the KIPP example suggests that union-free charter schools are the key to closing the achievement gap and that poverty and school segregation are just excuses for teacher failure. Mathews himself doesn't explicitly endorse either position, but he lauds the union-free charter school structure. It provides, he writes, "a haven for Levin-Feinberg methods such as longer school days and school years, principals' power to fire poorly performing teachers, and regular visits to students' homes." Nevertheless, the highly accomplished KIPP Academy in the South Bronx, started by Levin, has been unionized from the beginning, as are the Green Dot charter schools that Mathews cites as equally successful. Meanwhile, plenty of nonunionized charter schools fail dismally. Some nonunion KIPP schools have suffered high rates of teacher turnover, and just last month teachers in two KIPP schools decided to unionize so they would have a greater voice in school affairs.

Moreover, KIPP's experience does little to rebut the longstanding social-science consensus that poverty and segregation reduce achievement. In many respects, KIPP schools more closely resemble middle-class than high-poverty public schools. KIPP does not educate the typical low-income student but rather a subset fortunate enough to have striving parents who take the initiative to apply to a KIPP school and sign a contract agreeing to read to their children at night. More important, among those who attend KIPP, 60 percent leave, according to a new study of California schools, many because they find the program too rigorous. As KIPP's reputation grew, it could select among the best teachers (who wish to be around high-performing colleagues), and it became funded at levels more like those of middle-class schools.

None of this should take away from the wonderful education provided to children in KIPP's 66 schools, a tale beautifully rendered by Mathews. But neither should KIPP's story become the ultimate excuse for ignoring the devastating effects of school segregation and poverty. ·

Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, is author of "Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy."

Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace... One School at a Time

Author: Greg Mortenson, David Oliver Relin

The inspiring account of one man's campaign to build schools in the most dangerous, remote, and anti-American reaches of Asia

In 1993 Greg Mortenson was the exhausted survivor of a failed attempt to ascend K2, an American climbing bum wandering emaciated and lost through Pakistan's Karakoram Himalaya. After he was taken in and nursed back to health by the people of an impoverished Pakistani village, Mortenson promised to return one day and build them a school. From that rash, earnest promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of our time—Greg Mortenson's one-man mission to counteract extremism by building schools, especially for girls, throughout the breeding ground of the Taliban.

Award-winning journalist David Oliver Relin has collaborated on this spellbinding account of Mortenson's incredible accomplishments in a region where Americans are often feared and hated. In pursuit of his goal, Mortenson has survived kidnapping, fatwas issued by enraged mullahs, repeated death threats, and wrenching separations from his wife and children. But his success speaks for itself. At last count, his Central Asia Institute had built fifty-five schools. Three Cups of Tea is at once an unforgettable adventure and the inspiring true story of how one man really is changing the world—one school at a time.

SOWING CRISIS The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East

Author: Rashid Khalidi

In “Sowing Crisis,” Khalidi, who holds the Edward Said chair of Arab studies at Columbia and is a major pro-Palestinian voice in American scholarship, argues that Washington’s drive for hegemonic control over the geostrategic and oil-rich axis of the Middle East stretches back three-quarters of a century, and has continued unabated to this day.

Khalidi’s central argument is that the Bush administration’s interventionist posture toward the Middle East is no mere post-9/11 aberration, but represents an especially bellicose expression of a longstanding campaign. Today’s enemy is terrorism; yesterday’s was Communism. And just as the threat of Communism was wildly exaggerated 50 years ago, so, these days, “the global war on terror is in practice an American war in the Middle East against a largely imaginary set of enemies.” ­Khalidi’s point is not that American policy toward the Middle East has been consistently hys­terical; rather, he says, it has been consis­tently cynical, exploiting an apocalyptic sense of threat in order to achieve the kind of dominance to which great powers, what­ever their rhetoric, aspire.

Most histories of America’s role in the Middle East, like Michael B. Oren’s Power, Faith and Fantasy,” focus on the naïveté and misguided idealism of a nation much given to moral crusades. Khalidi ­looks to interests rather than principles. His ­story of America’s active role in the Middle East begins in 1933, when the consortium known as Aramco signed an exclusive oil deal with Ibn Saud, the king of Saudi Arabia. Khalidi reminds us of familiar if ­squalid acts of American intervention, like the role of the C.I.A. in the 1953 overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh, the prime minister of Iran, who had championed the nationalization of his ­country’s oil industry. Khalidi also describes lesser-known ones, including the delivery of “briefcases full of cash” to Lebanon’s pro-Western president Camille Chamoun in order to help Chamoun rig the 1957 parliamentary election.

This brute meddling, Khalidi argues, not only kept the pot of civil conflict ­boiling in many already weak states, but also “profoundly undermined whatever limited pos­sibility there might have been of estab­lishing any kind of democratic govern­ance in a range of Middle Eastern countries.” That carefully hedged sentence shows that Khalidi is no conspiracy theorist, and recognizes the complicity of Arab regimes in their own predicament. And the Soviets occasionally play the ­heavy as well, ­though Khalidi sees the cold war as a very un­equal battle between a world-girdling United ­States and a defensive and fearful Russia.

“Sowing Crisis” vividly reminds us what it is like to be on the receiving end of American power. But it often reads like a polemic rather than a work of history. Khalidi’s sense of American motives and strategy seems flattened by his own preconceptions. God knows the United States has a great deal to answer for in the Middle East. But is it true, as Khalidi al­leges, that President Truman favored Israel, and ultimately agreed to recognize the country, because he had more pro-­Jewish than Arab voters to answer to? Only by check­ing a footnote does the reader learn that this comment, which Khalidi quotes twice, comes from an American diplomat who may not have been in the room when Truman is said to have uttered it.

But the most pressing question “Sowing Crisis raises is not whether American behavior in the Middle East has been consistently self-serving and expansionist. It is whether Arab failure is, at bottom, a consequence of that behavior. Another way of putting this is: can the problems of the region be reversed by a fundamental change in American policy?

If American policy were chiefly responsible for the Middle East’s difficulties, then the Arab world would scarcely be the only victim. It is hard to argue that the proxy battles of the cold war did more damage to the Middle East than to, say, Southeast Asia. Yet Vietnam is a stable auto­cracy experiencing rapid growth, and Thailand is a shaky and semiprosperous democracy. American policy makers were far more cavalier about the sovereignty of Latin American states than of Arab ones, yet Latin America is a largely democratic zone with both deeply impoverished and middle-range countries.

Why has the Arab world remained ­largely on the sidelines of globalization? There are, of course, many explanations offered. One of the most striking comes from the United Nations’ Arab Human Development Report, written by a group of Arab scholars in 2002. They concluded that Arab nations suffer from a “freedom deficit,” from pervasive gender inequality, from a weak commitment to education and from the widespread denial of human rights. They might have added that the experiences of colonialism and of the cold war have left much of the Arab world with the deeply ingrained habit of blaming its problems on outsiders.

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism

Author: George Akerlof and Robert Shiller

his is a good moment to propose a re-examination of orthodox economics. The current breakdown, possibly the worst since the Great Depression, was a shock to all but a handful of economists. It calls into question much of what they thought they knew.

Why did things go so wrong? What should governments do now? How do we stop it happening again? In their new book, two of the most creative and respected economic thinkers currently at work, George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, argue that the key is to recover Keynes’s insight about “animal spirits” – the attitudes and ideas that guide economic action. The orthodoxy needs to be rebuilt, and bringing these psychological factors into the core of economics is the way to do it.

Topicality can be a mixed blessing. The book was mostly written before the crisis became acute. A little awkwardly, the authors have tacked an excellent postscript, about what needs to be done, on a chapter about monetary policy. The connections between their thinking on the limits to conventional economics and the issues thrown up by the breakdown are plain, even if they were unable to make every link explicit. Even more than Akerlof and Shiller could have hoped, therefore, it is a fine book at exactly the right time.

Though it calls for a reworking of economic theory, Animal Spirits is not a difficult book. It is short, chatty and anecdotal. The general reader will be engaged and drawn in. But the book is serious, too. Good notes and a bibliography are a guide to the literature that the book aims to tie together. Animal Spirits carries its ambition lightly – but is ambitious nonetheless. Economists will see it as a kind of manifesto.

The first quarter divides animal spirits into five categories. They are confidence, whose role is pervasive and which stars throughout the rest of the narrative; fairness, which influences wage-setting and the working of the labour market; corruption and bad faith, which can especially affect financial markets; money illusion, the propensity to be fooled by inflation; and “stories”, which they could have called “culture”, a catch-all for economically significant ideas about the world and one’s place in it.

The rest of the book shows how thinking about these animal spirits yields answers to big questions that perplex orthodox economics – or force it to make bizarre and implausible assumptions. Why do economies fall into depression? Why is there unemployment? Why are financial prices so volatile? Why does the property market go through cycles? Why are minorities often especially poor? The answer in each case is partly, and sometimes mainly, animal spirits

Chapter by chapter, the analysis is fascinating and usually persuasive. Whether the larger project can be made to hang together, though, I doubt. The authors’ criticisms of the standard model are well taken and not that controversial. The orthodoxy assumes rational optimising behaviour, and is reluctant to contemplate more than minor deviations from that principle; as a result, it often goes astray. Ad hoc modifications, such as those the authors suggest, may get better results.

Without saying how, the book aspires to go further and calls for a new standard model. That is hard to envisage. The assumption of rational optimisation is a gross simplification, no doubt, but despite all the drawbacks emphasised in the book, it has been a highly productive one. Shiller and Akerlof would be the last to deny the power of the insights it has yielded. At issue is whether a psychologically enriched standard model would be too complex to offer useful simplifications. The standard model plus ad hoc modifications suited to the particular case might be the best economics can do.

A different problem arises in moving from explanation to prescription. Akerlof and Shiller argue convincingly that animal spirits give a richer and truer account of economic fluctuations. How to manipulate them for policy purposes, and when it might be right to try, are separate questions. The authors are doubtless sympathetic to the case for “libertarian paternalism” in Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein – another valuable book that explores the possibilities of “behavioural economics”. What the two have in common is the idea that once you take account of animal spirits, people can be guided, without being forced, to do what is in their best interests.

The question is, what about the claims of liberty? Likening the role of government to a parent’s duty to create a happy home, the authors write: “The proper role of the parent is to set the limits so that the child does not overindulge her animal spirits.” This is an unappealing analogy. I would sooner take up arms against a government that saw me as a child than vote for it.

The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty.

Author : Peter Singer

In The Life You Can Save, philosopher Peter Singer, named one of "The 100 Most Influential People in the World" by Time magazine, uses ethical arguments, provocative thought experiments, illuminating examples, and case studies of charitable giving to show that our current response to world poverty is not only insufficient but ethically indefensible.

Singer contends that we need to change our views of what is involved in living an ethical life. To help us play our part in bringing about that change, he offers a seven-point plan that mixes personal philanthropy (figuring how much to give and how best to give it), local activism (spreading the word in your community), and political awareness (contacting your representatives to ensure that your nation's foreign aid is really directed to the world's poorest people).

In The Life You Can Save, Singer makes the irrefutable argument that giving will make a huge difference in the lives of others, without diminishing the quality of our own. This book is an urgent call to action and a hopeful primer on the power of compassion, when mixed with rigorous investigation and careful reasoning, to lift others out of despair.

Review:

"Part plea, part manifesto, part handbook, this short and surprisingly compelling book sets out to answer two difficult questions: why people in affluent countries should donate money to fight global poverty and how much each should give. Singer (Animal Liberation) dismantles the justifications people make for not giving and highlights the successes of such efforts as microfinance in Bangladesh, GiveWell's charitable giving and the 50% League, where members donate more than half their wealth. Singer alternately cajoles and scolds: he pillories Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, who has given less than his former partner, Bill Gates, and lives far more extravagantly: 'His toys include a large collection of vintage military aircraft and a 413-foot oceangoing yacht called Octopus that cost him over $200 million and has a permanent crew of sixty.' Singer contrasts Allen's immoderation with the work of Paul Farmer (a cofounder of the international social justice organization Partners in Health) and the cost of basic health services in Haiti ($3,500 per life saved), or malaria nets ($623 — $2,367 per life saved). Singer doesn't ask readers to choose between asceticism and self-indulgence; his solution can be found in the middle, and it is reasonable and rewarding for all."

The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter

Author: Colin Tudge

In the early 1900’s, fruit and walnut growers ripened their harvest in sheds warmed with kerosene stoves. Eventually, forward-looking orchardists switched to electricity, which was cleaner and more reliable. But electric heating had an insurmountable drawback. It turns out it wasn’t warmth that had been doing the ripening, but the ethylene leaking from the smelly old heaters. Scientists now know that ethylene, a derivative of petroleum and natural gas, is also emitted — as a hormone — by plants. Ethylene causes fruit to ripen, and leaves and fruit to drop. Commercial growers use it to thin crops of plums and peaches (so the remaining fruits grow bigger) and to loosen berries in preparation for mechanical harvesting.

“So it is that plants control their form,” Colin Tudge writes in “The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter.” The subtitle is as straightforward as can be, but the book is oddly more — a descriptive catalog of all the trees in the world in which Tudge expounds on how many there are in each family, where they grow, their physical characteristics, why they are ecologically or economically important and the tasty details of their sex lives.

But this book isn’t useful as a guide: its illustrations are few, and there are no keys. It is written as a tribute to the world’s 60,000 species, but it’s hard to say for whom it’s intended. Maybe someone like me, who has a thing for trees, forgets her botany, marvels at what basic science has revealed and turns a sympathetic ear toward humanistic prescriptions for saving the earth.

Like most biographies of objects, this one presents its subjects as essential players on the global stage. Without trees, Tudge says, we wouldn’t be here. They helped form our atmosphere (without photosynthesis there would be no oxygen), they may have helped shape us (we may partly owe our big brain and dexterous hands to millions of years in the trees), they feed and shelter us, and they provide invaluable ecosystem services, like flood control. But Tudge sees grandeur in how trees exist in the world — “The themes of literature are indeed the themes of nature” — and demonstrates it with fascinating stories about trees’ mating and death, their acts of war and peace, their parent-offspring rivalry, their sibling rivalry and the tension between females and males.

Most people appreciate trees for their beauty and awesome utility, but Tudge wants us to know there’s more to it, that it’s hard out there on a pine. Trees must compete every second for “water, nutrients, light and space; and to fend off cold, heat, drought, flood, toxicity and the host of parasites and predators of all conceivable kinds,” he writes. In perpetual dialog with all that surrounds them, trees “gauge what’s going on as much as they need to, and they conduct their affairs as adroitly as any military strategist.” How? By growing toward light; concocting chemical deterrents to pests from raw materials they take from the air, water and soil; thickening their trunks in response to stress; and attracting their animal collaborators when it’s time to reproduce.

Tudge, the author of “Global Ecology” and other books, writes simply and with unapologetic enthusiasm. He also has a sense of humor. Pandas were once carnivorous, he says, but they now limit themselves to bamboo. “Though if you want to catch a panda, lure it into a (bamboo) cage with roast pork. It’s the same with all vegetarians.”

There are dozens of “wow” and “who knew?” moments throughout, until the book in its final section takes a sudden and uncompromising political turn. Thanks to all of us, the earth’s climate is rapidly warming, and trees can’t evolve fast enough to cope with the changes. What to do? Turn away from current development models, which focus on industrialization and will continue to pump out carbon dioxide, Tudge says, and support grass-roots arbo-centric economies.

Tudge calls for a new type of governance, one that takes account of the “realities of soil, water and climate” and the needs of humanity at large. If this sounds unrealistic (because it’s anti-business) try redefining the word. “Realistic,” he argues, should apply to people’s lives — “whether they have enough to eat, and water and shelter; whether they have control over their own lives, and worthwhile jobs and can live in dignity.” Despite sometimes slipping into vagueness, Tudge is courageous to take this stand and risk alienating readers who’ve stuck with him throughout solely for the love of trees and his enchanting way of writing about them.

Elizabeth Royte, whose most recent book, “Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash,” has just been published in paperback, is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

Author: Christine Kenneally

Academia, unlike every other sector of our culture, has apparently been considered too dull and esoteric to merit a reality show, but now there’s a natural vehicle: evolutionary linguistics, an emerging field awash in colorful personalities, wacky experiments and enough conflict to carry several seasons. Don’t let the name throw you; the scientists who study the origins of language are a passionate, fractious bunch, and you don’t have to be an egghead to be tantalized by the questions that drive their research: how and when did we learn to speak, and to what extent is language a uniquely human attribute? Call the show “American Babble.”

In this field, physical evidence is scarce — language, except in its written form, leaves no trace — and scholarly clout depends on a capacity for ingenious inference and supposition. Christine Kenneally, a linguistics Ph.D. turned journalist, shrewdly begins “The First Word,” her account of this new science, with candid portraits of several of its most influential figures. Appropriately, the first chapter is devoted to Noam Chomsky, whose ideas have dominated linguistics since the late 1950s, and who, as Kenneally reports, has been hailed as a genius on a par with Einstein and disparaged as the leader of a “cult” with “evil side effects.”

According to Chomsky, humans are born with the principles of grammar hard-wired in their brains, enabling them, from an early age and without formal instruction, to construct an infinite variety of sentences from a finite number of words. Moreover, Chomsky has suggested, language is a peculiarly human phenomenon, a trait so remarkable that evolutionary theory is virtually helpless to explain it. “It surely cannot be assumed that every trait is specifically selected,” he wrote in 1988. “In the case of such systems as language ... it is not easy even to imagine a course of selection that might have given rise to them.” Chomsky’s impatience with the question of language’s origins effectively squelched inquiry into the subject for decades. (In a sense, Kenneally notes, such considerations had been taboo for much longer: although Darwin noted similarities between human speech and sounds made by monkeys and birds, and speculated that language “has been slowly and unconsciously developed by many steps,” by the mid-1870s the linguistic societies of Paris and London had formally banned all discussion of evolution.)

Lately, however, Chomsky’s grip on the field has loosened, thanks to half a dozen or so determined upstarts, among them his former student Philip Lieberman, who has mined the human brain for evidence that language evolved from organs, like the basal ganglia, that we share with many other species; the primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, who taught a bonobo named Kanzi the comprehension skills of a toddler; and the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, an early champion of the notion that Chomskyan theory is compatible with Darwinian axioms.

In 1989, Pinker and a graduate student named Paul Bloom wrote a paper in which they argued that “language is no different from other complex abilities, such as echolocation or stereopsis,” and that “the only way to explain the origin of such abilities is through the theory of natural selection.” Just as the eye — an organ of breathtaking complexity and specialization — evolved incrementally through the combined effects of random mutations and natural selection over millions of years, so, too, Pinker and Bloom insisted, did language. The authors were invited to present their paper at M.I.T., where Pinker was then a professor, and they learned that Chomsky had agreed to serve as a commentator. Kenneally quotes Bloom on his reaction to this news: “I was absolutely terrified. ... Chomsky is utterly merciless in debate.”

In the end, Chomsky failed to show (apparently he had back trouble), and Pinker and Bloom went on to publish their paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, a leading scientific journal, where it appeared along with comments from 31 scientists, including one who titled his endorsement “Liberation!” “From that point on,” Kenneally writes, “more and more researchers felt that studying the origin and evolution of language was a legitimate academic inquiry.”

Liberation has frequently taken a creative form. Lieberman compared the language and motor skills of Parkinson’s patients with those of climbers on Mount Everest. Both groups suffered damage to their basal ganglia: in the first case because of disease, in the second because of oxygen deprivation. Lieberman discovered that the higher the climbers went, the more difficulty they had forming speech — a complicated motor skill — and understanding sentences.One climber displayed such alarming deficits that Lieberman’s research team, which was monitoring the man by radio link, urged him to descend. He refused and several days later fell to his death. It turned out that the man had failed to properly attach his safety harness. The conclusion Lieberman drew from his study — that the basal ganglia, which in animals regulate motor skills, are also crucial for controlling human speech and thought — suggests how such an accident might have occurred. As Kenneally puts it: “It appears that the lack of oxygen supply to the basal ganglia affected the climber’s ability to follow the basic sequence of clipping and unclipping.”

Alas, just as the science gets interesting, Kenneally inexplicably loses her way. She notes that more than a thousand studies on language evolution have been published since 1990, and she seems determined to cite as many as possible. Much of what she describes is fascinating: “gesture researchers” who train hidden cameras on apes in order to capture their repertoires of “muzzle wipes” and hand signals; neuroscientists who recently isolated the first gene known to play a role in communication; and a British linguist who studies the evolution of language by creating computer models in which a population of virtual humans must learn to communicate. But as a whole her book feels disjointed and repetitious, weighed down by superfluous details and lacking a narrative line that could braid the various strands together.

Paradoxically, as Kenneally points out, much of the research suggests that both Chomsky and his adversaries have it at least partially right: on the one hand, humans are uniquely gifted at language; on the other, many species display behaviors and abilities that are necessary for language, and share, to an extent previously thought impossible, our neuroanatomy. No one knows precisely when or why we began to speak, but it seems clear that we developed the capacity in piecemeal fashion rather than in a single, momentous leap.

Kenneally cites the work of Tecumseh Fitch, an evolutionary biologist who discovered that the human larynx, which lies low in the throat, allowing us to make a range of vowel and consonant sounds, is not the unique organ many researchers had assumed. Fitch found that animals like lions and koalas also have a descended larynx, and, equally important, he showed that bigger animals have deeper voices. The reason we evolved a descended larynx, he argues, has less to do with language than with the advantages that come with size. As Kenneally puts it, “If you hear a competitor wooing the female you are interested in, and you can tell from his voice alone that he is much bigger than you, slinking away without direct confrontation makes the most evolutionary sense.”

In 2002, Fitch and Marc Hauser, another prominent evolutionary biologist, wrote a landmark paper with Chomsky, in which they acknowledged some of the recent work on the origins of language and defined the uniquely human aspect of language quite narrowly, as recursion (the capacity to embed phrases inside one another, as in “the woman reading the book about the ape who threw the carrot that the trainer had washed in the morning before arriving at the lab to...”). Three years later, when, at a symposium on the evolution of language, Chomsky was asked what he thought about the field, he remarked, “I wouldn’t have guessed it could go so far.”

The Illusions of Entrepreneurship: The Costly Myths That Entrepreneurs, Investors, and Policy Makers Live By

Author: Scott Shane

Review
"This fascinating book, by one of the most competent investigators of the subject, tells us how much we think we know about entrepreneurship that is just not true. It has already led me to change several of my lectures (with thanks to the author). This book is a must read for anyone who takes a serious interest in the subject of entrepreneurship."-William J. Baumol, Academic Director, Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, Stern School of Business, New York University (William J. Baumol 20080208)

"Scott has clearly and entertainingly shown why policy makers, entrepreneurs and investors should focus more attention on high growth, high potential start-ups and less on the ''me-too'' new companies than is currently the case."-David T. Morgenthaler, founder, Morgenthaler Ventures (David T. Morgenthaler 20080303)

"In this fact-filled, but fun-to-read book, Scott Shane demolishes many myths about entrepreneurship and in the process provides much-needed guidance to entrepreneurs, investors, and policymakers."-Steve Crawford, Director, Social, Economic, and Workforce Programs Division, National Governor's Association (Steve Crawford )

"For its myth-busting findings and analytical rigor, Mr. Shane''s book is a welcome addition to the literature on a crucial part of any modern economy."-Nick Schulz, Wall Street Journal (Nick Schulz Wall Street Journal )

"The belief that the U.S. is a relative haven for small businesses is one of the many bubbles burst by Scott Shane. . . . While he''s busting myths, Shane also unveils weaknesses in common entrepreneur practices."-Mark Henricks, The Industry Standard (Mark Henricks The Industry Standard )

"This makes an excellent reality-check for anyone considering beginning their own business."-Publishers Weekly (Publishers Weekly )

"Business scholar Scott Shane debunks popular theories with research-based answers to questions such as why people start businesses, which industries are most popular for startups and what are the most common characteristics of the typical entrepreneur."-Mark Henricks, Entrepreneur Magazine (Mark Henricks Entrepreneur Magazine )

"The lessons in this book will perhaps save its readers a bundle of money that would otherwise be wasted on an ill-conceived business idea."-Morgan Lewis Jr., Inside Business (Morgan Lewis Jr., Inside Business )

"[This] book is important not just for clearing our minds of what''s erroneous but for reconsidering our public policy, which is based on the widespread feeling that startups are a magic bullet that will create a lot of jobs and generate innovation."-Harvey Schachter, Toronto Globe and Mail

Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Author: Dacher Keltner
In Born to Be Good, Dacher Keltner demonstrates that humans are not hardwired to lead lives that are "nasty, brutish, and short"—we are in fact born to be good. He investigates an old mystery of human evolution: why have we evolved positive emotions like gratitude, amusement, awe, and compassion that promote ethical action and are the fabric of cooperative societies?

By combining stories of scientific discovery, personal narrative, and Eastern philosophy, Keltner illustrates his discussions with more than fifty photographs of human emotions. Born to Be Good is a profound study of how emotion is the key to living the good life and how the path to happiness goes through human emotions that connect people to one another.

Keltner weaves together scientific findings with personal narrative to uncover the innate power of human emotion to connect people with each other, which he argues is the path to living the good life. Keltner was kind enough to take some time out to discuss altruism, Darwinism, neurobiology and practical applications of his findings with David DiSalvo.

DISALVO: You have a book that was just released called Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life. What in a nutshell does the term “born to be good” mean to you, and what are you hoping people learn from reading the book?

KELTNER: “Born to be good” for me means that our mammalian and hominid evolution have crafted a species—us—with remarkable tendencies toward kindness, play, generosity, reverence and self-sacrifice, which are vital to the classic tasks of evolution—survival, gene replication and smooth functioning groups. These tendencies are felt in the wonderful realm of emotion—emotions such as compassion, gratitude, awe, embarrassment and mirth. These emotions were of interest to Darwin, and Darwin-inspired studies have revealed that our capacity for caring, for play, for reverence and modesty are built into our brains, bodies, genes and social practices. My hopes for potential readers are numerous. I hope they learn about the remarkable wisdom of Darwin and the wonders of the study of emotion. I hope they come to look at human nature in a new light, one that is more hopeful and sanguine. I hope they may see the profoundly cooperative nature of much of our daily social living.

DISALVO: You’ve said that one of the inspirations for your work was Charles Darwin’s insights into human goodness. Because most people equate his name with “survival of the fittest,” it’ll probably be surprising to many that Darwin focused on goodness at all. What were a few of your take aways from Darwin’s work that really inspired you?

KELTNER: What an important question. We so often assume both in the scientific community, and in our culture at large, that Darwin thought humans were violent and competitive and self-interested in their natural state. That is a misrepresentation of what Darwin actually believed, and where the evolutionary study of human goodness is going.

My take aways from Darwin are twofold, and as you suggest above, I was surprised as well in arriving at an understanding of Darwin’s view of human nature. The first take away is found in Descent of Man, where Darwin argues that we are a profoundly social and caring species. This idea is reflected in the two quotes below, where Darwin argues that our tendencies toward sympathy are instinctual and evolved (and not some cultural construct as so many have assumed), and even stronger (or perhaps more ethical—see his observation about the “timid man” below) than the instinct for self-preservation:

“For firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of his fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them. … Such actions as the above appear to be the simple result of the greater strength of the social or maternal instincts than that of any other instinct or motive; for they are performed too instantaneously for reflection, or for pleasure or even misery might be felt. In a timid man, on the other hand, the instinct of self-preservation might be so strong, that he would be unable to force himself to run any such risk, perhaps not even for his own child.”

The second take away comes from close study of Darwin’s Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, published one year after Descent of Man. There, Darwin details descriptions of emotions such as reverence, love, tenderness, laughter, embarrassment and the conceptual tools to document the evolutionary origins of these emotions. That led me to my own work on the physiology and display of these remarkable emotions, and to the science-based conclusion that these emotions lie at the core of our capacities for virtue and cooperation.

DISALVO: You recently wrote an article with the provocative title “In Defense of Teasing.” Because we’re ostensibly a society set against teasing in any form (school, workplace, and so on), what do you think teasing has to offer that we might be missing?

KELTNER: Teasing is the art of playful provocation, of using our playful voices and bodies to provoke others to avoid inappropriate behaviors. Marc Bekoff, a biologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has found in remarkable work with coyotes that they sort out leaders from aggressive types in their rough-and-tumble biting. The coyotes that bite too hard in such provocative play are relegated to low status positions. We likewise accomplish so much with the right kind of teasing.

Teasing (in the right way, which is what most people do) offers so much. It is a way to play and express affection. It is a way of negotiating conflicts at work and in the family. Teasing exchanges teach children how to use their voices in innumerable ways—such an important medium of communication. In teasing, children learn boundaries between harm and play. And children learn empathy in teasing, and how to appreciate others’ feelings (for example, in going too far). And in teasing we have fun. All of this benefit is accomplished in this remarkable modality of play.

DISALVO: Your team at U.C. Berkley has done a lot of interesting research on the vagus nerve and its association with altruistic feelings. Tell us a bit about this research and its implications for better understanding the nature of altruism.

KELTNER: The vagus nerve is part of the parasympathetic autonomic nervous system. It is a bundle of nerves that originates in the top of the spinal cord, it activates different organs throughout the body (heart, lungs, liver, digestive organs). When active, it is likely to produce that feeling of warm expansion in the chest, for example when we are moved by someone’s goodness or when we appreciate a beautiful piece of music. University of Illinois, Chicago, psychiatrist Steve Porges long ago argued that the vagus nerve is a care-taking organ in the body (of course, it serves many other functions as well). Several reasons justify this claim. The vagus nerve is thought to stimulate certain muscles in the vocal chamber, enabling communication. It reduces heart rate. Very new science suggests that it may be closely connected to oxytocin receptor networks. And it is unique to mammals.

Our research and that of other scientists suggests that the vagus nerve may be a physiological system that supports caretaking and altruism. We have found that activation of the vagus nerve is associated with feelings of compassion and the ethical intuition that humans from different social groups (even adversarial ones) share a common humanity. People who have high vagus nerve activation in a resting state, we have found, are prone to feeling emotions that promote altruism—compassion, gratitude, love, happiness. Arizona State University psychologist Nancy Eisenberg has found that children with elevated vagal tone (high baseline vagus nerve activity) are more cooperative and likely to give. This area of study is the beginning of a fascinating new argument about altruism—that a branch of our nervous system evolved to support such behavior.

DISALVO: Oftentimes we learn about intriguing academic work being done on emotions, morality and related areas, but are left asking, “OK, but how do we do any of this? Is there anything we can make actual use of here?” Looking down the road, what do you want the impact of your work to be out in the world?

KELTNER: I have always felt that our science is only as good as the truthful rendition of reality that it provides and the good that it brings to our species. In summarizing the new science of emotion in Born To Be Good, I was struck by how useful this science is. The ancient approaches to ethics and virtue—for example, found in Aristotle or Confucius—privileged things such as compassion, gratitude and reverence. A new science of virtue and morality is suggesting that our capacities for virtue and cooperation and our moral sense are old in evolutionary terms, and found in emotions that I write about in Born To Be Good.

And a new science of happiness is finding that these emotions can be readily cultivated in familiar ways, bringing out the good in others and in oneself. Here are some recent empirical examples:

Meditating on a compassionate approach to others shifts resting brain activation to the left hemisphere, a region associated with happiness, and boosts immune functions.

Talking about areas of gratitude, in classrooms, at the dinner table or in the diary, boosts happiness and social well-being and health.

Experiences of reverence in nature or around morally inspiring others improves people’s sense of connection to others and sense of purpose.

Laughing and playing in the face of trauma gives the person perspective upon life’s inevitable difficulties, and improves resilience and adjustment.

Devoting resources to others, rather than indulging a materialist desire, brings about lasting well being.

This kind of science gives me many hopes for the future. At the broadest level, I hope that our culture shifts from a consumption-based, materialist culture to one that privileges the social joys (play, caring, touch, mirth) that are our older (in the evolutionary sense) sources of the good life. In more specific terms, I see this new science informing practices in almost every realm of life. Here again are some well-founded examples. Medical doctors are now receiving training in the tools of compassion—empathetic listening, warm touch—that almost certainly improve basic health outcomes. Teachers now regularly teach the tools of empathy and respect. Executives are learning the wisdom around the country of emotional intelligence—respect, building trust—that there is more to a company’s thriving than profit or the bottom line. In prisons and juvenile detention centers, meditation is being taught.

How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They Are Still on This Earth)

Author: Henry Alford

Armed with recent medical evidence that supports the cliche that older people are, indeed, wiser, Alford sets off to interview people over 70 — some famous (Phyllis Diller, Harold Bloom, Edward Albee), some accomplished (the world's most-quoted author, a woman who walked across the country at age 89 in support of campaign finance reform), some unusual (a pastor who thinks napping is a form of prayer, a retired aerospace engineer who eats food out of the garbage.) Early on in the process, Alford interviews his 79 year-old mother and step-father, and inadvertently changes the course of their 36 year-long union. Part family memoir, part Studs Terkel, How To Live considers some unusual sources — deathbed confessions, late-in-life journals — to deliver a highly optimistic look at our dying days. By showing that life after 70 is the fulfillment of, not the end to, life's questions and trials, How to Live delivers that most unexpected punch: it makes you actually 'want to get old.'

Review:

"Alford (Big Kiss) recognizes that the elderly have been through more in their lives than the rest of us, and figures it might be a good idea to talk to some of them and see if they have any meaningful advice to impart. This plan sets off a prolonged meditation: what is wisdom, anyway? Some of his interview subjects are famous, like playwright Edward Albee or literary critic Harold Bloom — but it's the less recognized figures who consistently provide Alford with the most evocative source material, like the retired schoolteacher who lost her husband, her home and all her possessions in Hurricane Katrina but refuses to feel sorry for herself. The search is not all rosy: shortly after Alford's interview with his stepfather, he loses his sobriety and the author becomes a sideline observer as his mother initiates divorce proceedings and moves into a retirement home. Such scenarios depart from the laugh-out-loud stories for which Alford is best known, but there are still enough moments of rich humor, like the guided tour of Sylvia Miles's cluttered apartment, for longtime fans of Alford."

Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

Author: Nicholas Wade

Scientists are using DNA analysis to understand our prehistory: the evolution of humans; their relation to the Neanderthals, who populated Europe and the Near East; and Homo erectus, who roamed the steppes of Asia. Most importantly, geneticists can trace the movements of a little band of human ancestors, numbering perhaps no more than 150, who crossed the Red Sea from east Africa about 50,000 years ago. Within a few thousand years, their descendents, Homo sapiens, became masters of all they surveyed, the other humanoid species having become extinct. According to New York Times science reporter Wade, this DNA analysis shows that evolution isn't restricted to the distant past: Iceland has been settled for only 1,000 years, but the inhabitants have already developed distinctive genetic traits. Wade expands his survey to cover the development of language and the domestication of man's best friend. And while "race" is often a dirty word in science, one of the book's best chapters shows how racial differences can be marked genetically and why this is important, not least for the treatment of diseases. This is highly recommended for readers interested in how DNA analysis is rewriting the history of mankind. Maps. (Apr. 24)
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From Booklist
Genetics has been intruding on human origins research, long the domain of archaeology and paleoanthropology. Veteran science journalist Wade applies the insights of genetics to every intriguing question about the appearance and global dispersal of our species. The result is Wade's recounting of "a new narrative," which also has elements of a turf war between geneticists and their established colleagues. He efficiently explains how an evolutionary event (e.g., hairlessness) is recorded in DNA, and how rates of mutation can set boundary dates for it. For the story, Wade opens with a geneticist's estimate that modern (distinct from "archaic") Homo sapiens arose in northeast Africa 59,000 years ago, with a tiny population of only a few thousand, and was homogenous in appearance and language. Tracking the ensuing expansion and evolutionary pressures on humans, Wade covers the genetic evidence bearing on Neanderthals, race, language, social behaviors such as male-female pair bonding, and cultural practices such as religion. Wade presents the science skillfully, with detail and complexity and without compromising clarity. Gilbert Taylor