Po Bronson

Most people, most Americans anyway, of my generation can't expect to spend their entire lives with one company, or even in one industry. The best thing about "What Should I Do With My Life," then, is that it provides a clear, honest picture of how complex and chaotic career paths can be these days. The people who are the subjects of Bronson's stories one thing and then another, they fall into jobs as if by accident, they abandon careers they've spent decades training for and even turn show more hobbies into whole new careers. For better or for worse, "What Should I Do With My Life" could be called "The Way We Work Now."

The problem with Bronson's book, and the reason I didn't finish reading it, is that, despite its relatively simple mission and Bronson's more-or-less unadorned prose style, it contains a well-hidden but unmistakable current of what might be termed Bullshit Business Spirituality. You know, the sort hawked by management consultants who've trademarked a raft of touchy-feely buzzwords and self-absorbed MBA-wielding jackasses who think they're so interesting that they need to publish their memoirs. I've only read a few excerpts of John Bowe's "Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs," but it seemed a more honest and direct piece of work. Let's face it: only a twenty-first century American would title a book about the workplace "What Should I Do With My Life," and call that "the ultimate question." While some people are lucky enough to find fulfillment in the workplace, there's also a pretty good argument for remembering that what moist people call real life takes place elsewhere. Heck, in this economy, most people feel lucky if they can cover both the rent and the electric bill each month. While Bronson makes a serious and sincere attempt to understand his subjects' stories and usefully interpret their career trajectories, his book, like most attempts to fuse capitalism and spiritual contentment, comes off as naive at best and foolish and hollow at worst. Funnily enough, this isn't to say that some people won't find it useful or inspiring; at the very least, it'll let people who didn't find their life's vocation the first few times out that they're not alone. Still, I'd rather get my inspiration elsewhere.

p.s.: This review was written during a lull in the workday on an office computer. What do you say to that, Po? show less

Nutureshock is a fascinating synthesis of the best available research by a pair of journalists on paradoxes in childrearing. Despite raising children for, well, as long as there have been people, there is a lot of diversity of opinion about how best to do it. Even with decades of research, we still don't really know how to best raise children.

The good news is that children are resilient. Short of outright abuse, it's hard to really mess a child up. The bad news is that children are show more resilient. There's very little evidence of any intervention or change in condition that leads to better outcomes for kids.

I will focus on some paradoxes. In the past 16 years since this book was first published, it's become broadly accepted that praising children for intelligence leads to fragile perfectionists, and that it is much better to praise children for grit.

Social aptitude is also a mixed bag. Increased social aptitude is associated with lying in very small children, around five or six. In elementary school, children with high social aptitude score very high in both empathetic and relational aggression, using a mixture of kindness and cruelty to shape the norms and social hierarchy of their classrooms. This extends into the teenage years. While most parents believe that their teens would talk to them about anything, teens routinely lie about topics from the serious, like drug and alcohol use and older boyfriends, to the medium, like is homework done, to the irrelevant, like what you did after school, when the options are hang out at the mall or the park.

What does strike as true through the paradox is that teens arguing is a sign of respect, not disrespect. What is important is not to be permissive or strict, but to have a finite number of well-enforced rules, and an open and contextual process for debating them so that teens feel like participants in their own growth and developing autonomy.

Another area where the book hits at conventional thinking is in gifted classrooms. Educational tracking is a third rail in American politics, where providing the best resources for talented kids runs into serious concerns about equity and racial discrimination. Either way, most districts start gifted programs far too early, with initial sorting at or before kingergarten. IQ scores vary wildly in young children over time, and don't really settle down until third grade.

Surveys of new curriculums and teaching methods to develop both cognitive and emotional skills is a litany of null results, except for the Tools of the Mind curriculum, which apparently boasted astonishing results. I use past tense, because a 2021 survey shows no result, again.

Finally, there are some real head scratchers. The authors have no opinion on corporal punishment, and note a racial divide, that White kids find spanking traumatic and Black kids don't. This hints at some of the worst "Black people don't experience pain the same way" racist psuedoscience, though the explanation, that African-American culture more broadly accepts getting whooped a few times as something that just happens, and that the moral exclusion from the family signified by spanking is what is traumatic, is at least cultural and not biological. I do wonder if the authors would be okay with me taking a swing at their kids.

As an older book, NutureShock has little to say about whatever the fuck has happened to kids since 2010. Jonathan Haidt blames cellphones, I think a little called the Global Financial Crisis might be to blame, but whatever the cause, mental health is DOWN and Skibidi Toilet is UP.

Plot from The Atlantic, End the Phone Based Childhood Now

And again, returning to the use of evidence, while the authors provide citations and ably discuss the research, epistemic closure on interactive kinds is impossible. Or without the STS jargon, as much as we try to determine the truth about people, they change as we examine them. For any topic as politically fraught as education, there will be ample room to disagree. show less

I am not convinced.

To oversimplify: the authors of this book divide people into two groups, each with two subgroups. One group likes to compete, the other doesn't. Since the first is mostly men and the second mostly women, they exist in roughly equal proportions in the population. The subgroups of the Competitors are the Honest competitors and the Win-at-any-cost competitors. The subgroups of the Non-competitors are the those who succeed if forced into competition and those who fail.

I'm show more willing to accept their four groups as a tentative hypothesis (though I've given them "classificatory" names rather than the names they use, such as "Warriors" and "Worriers"). They offer some pretty good data that there are such groups. But now I'm going to rename those four groups....
Honest Competitors: Competitors who build things up
Win-at-all-costs Competitors: Jerks
Successful Non-competitors: Cooperators
Unsuccessful Non-competitors: Failures.

Based on what the authors say (and here I don't consider their data as good), the Honest Competitors add the most to society. The Cooperators are next. The Failures contribute nothing but don't impose much cost on society. And the Jerks give us wars, financial crises, racial discrimination, sexual prejudice, crime, sexual abuse, and so forth.

So: Suppose we can push people to become either Competitors or Non-competitors, but can't determine in advance which subgroup they will belong to. Which is what it sounds like to me. Which is better, to produce Competitors or Non-competitors? If you produce all Competitors, you'll have Honest Competitors building things up and Jerks tearing things down. If you produce all Non-competitors, you'll have Cooperators building things up (if not as effectively as if you had a society of Honest Competitors) and you'd have Failures, well, failing -- but not doing any harm.

The authors assert that the payoff for producing maximum Competitors is higher than that for producing maximum Non-competitors. This is where the problem comes in. Have they proved this? I'm definitely a Non-competitor, and it didn't seem so to me; when I apply utility theory, it sure looks like Non-competitors win. I suspect that a Competitor would say that they did prove it. The "winner" is in the mind of the beholder.

So who is right? Well, here's an interesting thought: If either Competitors or Non-competitors had a fundamental advantage, evolution would favor it and the other sort would die out. We still have Competitors and Non-competitors. Which argues that Competitors aren't overwhelming the opposition nearly as much as this book suggests.... show less

The authors took several "popular wisdom" issues and looked at the research about them. The result is fascinating revelations that will change the way you parent. They take on the American parent's obsession with praising children for everything, and find that it demotivates them. Only praising for effort bears good results. They look at what creates mean kids, and find that more often, the mean kids are also the nice kids. Also, educational children's TV makes kids much meaner than violent show more TV makes kids violent. Nearly every chapter I wanted to read aloud to others! Definitely a book I would like on my shelf to refer to and have some data to challenge assumptions with. show less