Driving is a classic example of game theory. I’m trying to guess what other people will do, and drive appropriately to that. But they in turn are trying to guess what I’ll do, and respond. There’s a lot of feedback. A driver must consider a lot of variables. The result is a chaotic yet passably functional mess.

Tom Vanderbilt is not a traffic engineer. Like Mary Roach, he’s just a person who writes about things he fancies. He researches a lot, but writes fairly shallowly. Consequently, Traffic covers a lot of ground. The book contains 91 pages of notes, compared to 286 pages of regular coverage.

What you’ll find in the book is a survey of traffic issues. Most of what Vanderbilt writes about concerns psychology of driving. Why more than half of drivers think they are better than average, for instance. Or people will more or less keep a constant margin of safety; increase safety on a road, and drivers will increase their speed. He also covers some economic aspects as well. Why and how congestion pricing works.

My favorite parts of the book describe successful traffic engineering innovations. Traffic circles over stop lights. Removing signs and curbs to slow people down. Sadly, there are too few of these and they don’t always work. A lot of the ones mentioned stop working as drivers adjust their behavior and the changes become expected.

While good, I’m somewhat dissatisfied after having finished. This isn’t Vanderbilt’s fault, just the nature of the subject covered. The overall effect from the book is simply to come away feeling awed at how complex traffic is. The causes and inputs to traffic congestion and safety are so many and so varied that there’s no hope for a layperson to understand it.

And that’s somewhat of a problem. While we have to leave it to experts to execute on details, experts really shouldn’t set priorities. There’s too much opportunity for such small groups to be co-opted. On the other hand, the public likes to think it knows enough to muck around in the details. (After reading the book, I really want the city of Seattle to convert the intersections in my neighborhood to traffic circles.) However, traffic is too complex for that, as Vanderbilt’s book makes abundantly clear.

And thus I come away feeling a little hopeless. Luckily, I live only two neighborhoods away from the downtown core of Seattle. I’m close enough that traffic really needn’t affect my day to day activities.

A few other blogged reviews:

• BikeCommuters.com
• Notes from the Driving Seat
• On the Move
• The Transportationist

Title: Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)
Author: Tom Vanderbilt
Cover creator: Barbara De Wilde (designer)
Imprint / publisher: Alfred A. Knopf / Random House
Format: Hardcover
Length: 402 p. (includes extensive notes and index)
Publication date: 2008
ISBN-13: 978-0-307-26478-7

Though it’s billed as part memoir, part polemic on the jacket flap, I’d definitely place this book more in the polemic category. Norm Stamper’s Breaking Rank iterates his opinions on policing in five loosely organized categories with several chapters for each: crime and punishment, cop culture, police department structure, oversight of police, and departmental and city politics. Most chapters in these sections are illustrated with his own experience on the subject. A few of the chapters are devoted almost wholly to major experiences in Stamper’s career: when he shot and killed an unarmed man, his year infiltrating protest groups, and running the Seattle Police Department during the riots at the Seattle W.T.O. ministerial conference in 1999. Stamper espouses liberal, reformist ideas and presents them well in this engaging but cursory survey of policing from his perspective.

First off, a couple of caveats about my own perspective. I’m born and raised Seattle. I spent a few years in Idaho, but Seattle is home. I’m liberal. Seattle liberal. And my brother works as a police officer in the Seattle P.D. He started after Norm Stamper resigned following W.T.O. so his stories don’t cover the period about which Stamper writes. But I do hear stories about police work.

The first section is mostly Stamper’s political opinions on law enforcement policies that many folks are discussing: the drug war (decriminalize), prostitution (decriminalize), domestic violence (not treated as important as it should be), capital punishment (against), and gun control (for). His opinions here are only worth note because his views are opposite the general perception of what the police think. Police are the law and order people, so they should be for more law and more order. While I agree with him on every one of those ideas save that of gun control where my opinion is muddled, I thought Stamper’s arguments were not persuasive. He might have better arguments, but the length of these chapters precludes them from being elaborated.

The second section on cop culture I found a lot more interesting. While his views on marijuana legalization get more notice, this part is a real inside look, albeit of two nicer police departments in the U.S., San Diego and Seattle. Topics covered here include sexism, the blue wall of silence, and doughnut eating cops. But what struck me most were his thoughts on police racism. He wrote something that he admits he can’t back up with data, but which intuitively makes sense to me.

Simply put, white cops are afraid of black men. We don’t talk about it, we pretend it doesn’t exist, we claim color blindness, we say white officers treat black men the same way we treat white men. But that’s a lie. In fact, the bigger, the darker the black man the greater the fear. The African-American community knows this. Hell, most whites know it. Yet, even though it’s a central, if not the defining ingredient in the makeup of police racism, white cops won’t admit it to themselves, or to others.

So, why am I so certain that white cops are afraid of black men? Because I was a white cop. In a world of white cops. For thirty-four years.

From the earliest days of academy training it was made clear that black men and white cops don’t mix, that of all the people we’d encounter on the streets, he most dangerous to our safety, to our survival, were black men.

Legitimate kill or be killed events do happen — far more often today than when I was a beat cop. A police officer would be a fool not to be ever vigilant. But I’m afraid this reality has licensed panicky white cops to shoot unarmed black men when they should be talking, or fighting, their way out of a sticky situation.

Stamper’s only data on this is his own experience and statistics about the U.S. population’s fear of blacks in general. In other words, not specific to police officers who have guns and can arrest people.

The last three sections the major viewpoint expressed is that the police should not follow the military command and control structure. It was necessary at one point to combat corruption and cronyism, but now other concerns need to be dealt with. Aloof, rigid police departments become separate from the people they police. Without engagement between communities and law enforcement, relationships between the two will deteriorate. And without that engagement, crime can’t be fought effectively.

Throughout all his pontificating, Stamper illustrates his arguments with experiences from his own career. A lot of this frustrated me, because Stamper only names names when it’s safe to do so: the people are dead or he’s saying something nice or the person just won’t care what Stamper says (Rudolph Guiliani for instance). He’s tempers his criticism of police officers and officials individually while repeatedly calling for bad apples and people who don’t get with the progressive program to be removed. Perhaps you could have given a few examples, Mr. Stamper.

Who he’s hardest on in his personal stories is himself. After finishing, I can’t recall a single incident or story in the book where he claims he did well or credit for success. But he does include numerous stories of his own failures. Racist acts. Marital failure. In fact, the three big personal stories are all of failure of some sort. Killing an unarmed man. Spying unnecessarily on peaceful leftists. Presiding over the W.T.O. debacle. None of them ended up with happy people.

And in one way I’m fairly annoyed with him. After retiring, he’s taken his ball and gone home so to speak. He’s gone from urban to rural, now living in the relatively inaccessible San Juan Islands. He’s active in some causes, particularly marijuana legalization. The challenges of criminal justice are urban, racism in particular. I don’t think they can be combated from the reaches of northern Puget Sound. If he’s committed to these issues, I think he ought to come back to the city.

One other blogged review:

• Barers of Maple Valley

Title: Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing
Author: Norm Stamper
Imprint / publisher: Nation Books / Avalon
Format: Hardcover
Length: 396 p.
Publication date: May 2005
ISBN-10: 1-56025-693-1
Subject: Police — United States
Subject: Police — Job stress
Subject: Police misconduct
Subject: Police — California — San Diego
Subject: Police — Washington (State) — Seattle
LC classification: HV8138 .S673 2005

For today’s Sunday Salon, I finished Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.

Last year my friend Amanda pointed me at HumanEvents.com’s Top 10 Most Harmful Books. HumanEvents.com is a rabidly conservative group. I do not criticize them for making a list of books they don’t like; I’ve made my own. In fact, they have links to purchase the entire list from Amazon.com. But to me, this was like waving the red flag in front of the bull. I want to read these books after that.

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique is on that list at number 7. Here’s what they wrote:

In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, born in 1921, disparaged traditional stay-at-home motherhood as life in “a comfortable concentration camp”–a role that degraded women and denied them true fulfillment in life. She later became founding president of the National Organization for Women. Her original vocation, tellingly, was not stay-at-home motherhood but left-wing journalism. As David Horowitz wrote in a review for Salon.com of Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique by Daniel Horowitz (no relation to David): The author documents that “Friedan was from her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist, the political intimate of the leaders of America’s Cold War fifth column and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects in Berkeley’s radiation lab with J. Robert Oppenheimer.”

As if the only person to criticize something is a person who partook. Bah!

The bulk of my contact with feminism is with friends who bemoan the stereotypes of women in the media that somehow force women to try to achieve an unrealistic position. That is not Friedan’s complaint. Times have changed. Our culture has changed. There are significant challenges in women’s rights, but they are not necessarily the same challenges that Friedan saw hampering women in the 1940s and 1950s. The point being that I come from a different world, and putting myself back into the world of Leave It To Beaver is not possible. My reactions to this book will inevitably be that of a male child of the 1980s.

Friedan’s main thesis of the book is that the life of a housewife does not entail the kind of sense of purpose and intellectual fulfillment that most women require in order to be happy. After the pioneering strides of the women’s movement in the 1920s, she saw a retreat of women back to the home and role of housewife after World War II. Many felt this was the natural place for a woman.

Friedan saw this as aided and abetted by Freud’s theory of penis envy and functionalist psychology, which gave a scientific imprimatur to this retreat. I’d never heard of functionalism before. I know Freud had much more cachet years ago, but it seems that both had far more indirect influence than Friedan gives them. I’d simply call the retreat something of a backlash. It would have happened with Freud or functionalism. Of more direct influence is what Friedan calls the sex-directed educator: a turn to classes in home economics and women and marriage.

Still, Friedan notes that the first feminist movement that earned women the right to vote as well as changes in many laws faced far more opposition. By and large, according to Friedan, women became housewives of their own volition. They chose the path of their own depression. Perhaps as a reaction to a modern world. Perhaps as a reaction to the atrocities of World War II. But Friedan also identifies and identity crisis among women as well. The traditional role for boys forced them to decide what they wanted to be in life. The role of breadwinner was mostly foreordained, but that leaves a wide choice of professions from which boys had to choose. Women on the other hand didn’t really face that choice in large numbers prior to the war. Faced with risking unhappiness in a career, many women fell back on a traditional role that they believed would provide automatic fulfillment: wife and mother.

If there is any group that Friedan blames in The Feminine Mystique, it’s that of business and advertisers who manipulate women through well-planned campaigns in order to sell more product. In a telling and I think under-explored note toward the end of the chapter, Friedan relates a conversation with an advertising researcher:

That’s what I mean, I said. Why doesn’t the pie-mix ad tell the woman he could use the time saved to be an astronomer?

It wouldn’t be too difficult, he replied. A few images—the astronomer gets her man, the astronomer as the heroine, make it glamorous for a woman to be an astronomer … but no, he shrugged again. The client would be too frightened. He wants to sell pie mix. The woman has to want to stay in the kitchen.

The exchange shows the complicity of business perfectly. The pie mix business sole reason for existence is to make money through the selling of pie mix. It isn’t a social betterment agency. While we can change the rules of the game, the purpose of a business will not change. But it also makes me ask, Why isn’t anyone else running these ads? The Army and Marines make all sorts of ads to try to make joining the military sexy and desirable. They are pretty effective. I don’t see the Society for Women Engineers running similar ads. Ads that colleges and universities run, while populated by multi-cultural and gender-balanced students, are uniformly boring. I keep reading in the newspapers about shortages of suitably educated Americans in the sciences. So why aren’t the businesses that depend on a steady supply of new scientists and technicians making recruiting ads that sell the professions needed. Again, the few I see are boring as hell.

In addition to a lack of purpose and fulfillment, Friedan devotes a couple of chapters to ways housewives seek to fill that hole inside that the wind blows through. One method is through ever-expanding housework. She notes that most housework really isn’t a full time job, yet most housewives spend full time on it, and have some left over for the husband when he comes home. She sees this as an unconscious decision from women to create more busywork to fill their time because being a housewife is supposed to fill that need inside. In her view, it doesn’t. The extra housework simply leaves her feeling tired and still empty.

A second method Friedan saw housewives attempt to fill that hole is through sexual adventure. I personally have seen many people, women and men, do exactly this. So it’s no surprise that Friedan saw housewives illicit affairs as manifestations of the same tendency we still see. But it’s at this point that I really started seeing the book go off course. Friedan uses the opportunity to criticize a whole host of sexual practices she sees as harmful. In other words, she was a prude. Particularly galling to me is her description of homosexuals as forever childlike, afraid of age, grasping at youth in their in their continual search for reassurance in some sexual magic. She doesn’t think it a coincidence that homosexuals started coming out in greater numbers at the same time as the feminine mystique took hold. It might not be coincidence, but I doubt it’s causal. Friedan had in mind that smothering moms were creating through a Freudian mechanism greater numbers of gay men. This is where I roll my eyes. And she thought Freud too bound to his cultural prejudices.

After this, Friedan really jumps the rails for one more chapter, in which she blames housewives for a malaise in children during the fifties. Children without purpose or direction getting in more trouble than ever. Friedan’s position is that if women weren’t quite so doting that children would have to find their own way in the world, developing better identities of their own along the way. Instead, she sees them as acting out their mother’s unfulfilled phantasies. (Her spelling of the word weirds me out throughout the book.) Perhaps she’s right. I don’t have the social science background to say otherwise for sure. But my guess is that it’s far more related to a large increase in living standards and attached leisure time after the second World War. In other words, prior to 1940, living standards were much lower, and the United States was far more rural. Kids had extensive chores. They worked. They were kept occupied. Economically, the U.S. experienced a great leap in income for the median American following the war. It was now possible for women to stay at home doing housework, very different from rural homemaking during the 1800s. And it was possible for children to lounge around with little to occupy them.

But she brings it all back together for her final chapter: A New Life Plan for Women. Throughout the book she bemoans the trend for women to cut short their educations, frequently marrying at younger ages than in previous decades. She saw the lack of education as prime cause of the difficulties women had in making any sort of transition away from the house. He first recommendation is for women to imply stop buying in to the feminine mystique and make an effort to find fulfillment away from the role as housewife.

There are, of course, a number of practical problems involved in making a serious professional commitment. But somehow those problems only seem insurmountable a woman is still half-submerged in the false dilemmas and guilts of the feminine mystique—or when her desire for something more is only phantasy, and she is unwilling to make the necessary effort. Over and over, women told me that the crucial first step for them was simply to take the first trip to the alumnae employment agency, or to send for the application for teacher certification, or to make appointments with former job contacts in the city. It is amazing how many obstacles and rationalizations the feminine mystique can throw up to keep a woman from making that trip or writing that letter.

Friedan recommends education. If not earlier, then as soon as is practically possible. She believes that the more education focussed on making women productive members of society as opposed to housewives and as opposed to continuing education the better the chance that women will find fulfillment. She discourages women from dropping out and marrying early. She praises innovative programs at a few universities that allow for part-time and intensive education geared toward older women who still have children to care for as well as impatience with the slow pace of a normal four-year degree.

In order to appease traditionalists, I’ve often heard feminists argue that feminism is really arguing for a choice for women. Friedan really isn’t doing that. She’s does not argue for taking a woman’s choice to stay at home away from her. But she consistently argues throughout the The Feminine Mystique that full-time housewife is the wrong choice. It deprives women of their happiness and society of the contributions the best and the brightest could be making.

Either through the awareness created by Friedan and through economic pressure, the problem of the feminine mystique as Friedan described it is largely in the past. Of course, it’s been replaced by other pressures, perhaps more harmful and insidious. This book, even with warts, is hardly harmful unless one still clings to the idea that a woman’s place is in the home. Which I’m sure the panelists at HumanEvents.com still do.

Title: The feminine mystique
Author: Betty Friedan
Imprint / publisher: Dell
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 384 p. (includes notes and index)
Publication date: 1963 (9th printing Mar 1966)
Subject: Feminism — United States
Subject: Women — United States — Social conditions
Subject: Women — Psychology
Subject: United States — Social conditions — 1945-
LC classification: HQ1420 .F7

I thought this was a great book. Quite a few of my friends are in the category of people who struggle to make it on wage slave jobs. What Barbara Ehrenreich did was start off with a small budget (I think $1000) in three different cities and see if she could earn enough in one month at entry level jobs to pay for her next month’s expenses. The three places she chose were Key West, Florida, Portland, Maine, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. She was successful in the first two and not so successful in the third. In none of them was it easy.

I think Ehrenreich meant to dispel the idea that low wage earners are in poverty because of their choices. However, the people she described didn’t really change my view. Many of them were making choices that kept them from earning better money.

On the other hand, her stories did show just how much power employers wield, and how they wield it to keep wages low. From preventing employees from talking about wages to firing union organizers to simple things like not telling a person what they would make up front.

And one major thing I took away from the book was how petty small time employers can be.

Definitely a good read, and I generally agree with Ehrenreich assessments. I mostly disagree on the view that we owe low wage earners more. Yes, the man is keeping you down. Stand up to the man. Hell, at a small restaurant, a 1 hour walkout by 6 waitresses will bring pretty quick compliance.

Title: Nickel and dimed: on (not) getting by in America
Author: Barbara Ehrenreich
Imprint / publisher: Owl / Henry Holt
Format: Paperback
Length: 221 p.
Publication date: 2002
ISBN-10: 0-8050-6389-7
Subject: Minimum wage — United States
Subject: Unskilled labor — United States
Subject: Poverty — United States
LC classification: HD4918.E375 2001

Freakonomics has been getting a lot of press, so I picked up the book by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. The former is the new economics wünderkind; the latter is a journalist who once wrote a story on him. Later, Dubner was talked into being the co-author of the book because Levitt felt he wasn’t much of a writer. Levitt wasn’t, that is.

My overall impression of the book is that it’s a lot like reading something by John Allen Paulos. Both of them seek to explain the everyday. The major difference is that Paulos doesn’t have a problem with writing about something that isn’t novel. His treatise on the stock market doesn’t really break any new ground, whereas Freakonomics is getting the raves because of Levitt’s groundbreaking work on the drop in crime during the 1990s.

The big topic in the book is Levitt’s proposition that Norma McCorvey is responsible for the massive drop in crime during the 1990s. As you recall from your high school civics (unless you went to a religious school like I did), McCorvey is better known as Roe in Roe v. Wade. Now an anti-abortion crusader, in the early 1970s she was just a poor woman who wanted to have an abortion but could not because it was against the law. After she won her case, abortion was generally legal through the U.S. (with some restrictions allowed on 3rd trimester abortions and notification and whatnot). The bulk of those getting abortions are unmarried poor women. Their unwanted children are more likely to live a life of crime. 15 years later, starting in 1990, crime rates began dropping. While Levitt doesn’t argue that it is solely responsible for the drop in crime, he has some pretty convincing evidence that this case was a major contributor to the drop. His evidence? Several states (Washington among them) legalized abortion a few years before Roe v. Wade forced them. Those states experienced the drop in crime a few years before everyone else. In addition, those states with higher abortion rates have seen a larger drop in crime.

An overview of the rest of his topics:

• Cheating in the modern world, with examples from sumo wrestling and teachers who cheat on standardized tests. In particular, he has some convincing arguments on who cheated and how they were found.
• The value of expert information. In this chapter, he explores how real estate agents work against their own customers, how Superman reduced the membership of the Ku Klux Klan, and how the internet is helping to reduce prices by spreading expert information to the masses.
• How dealing drugs doesn’t tend to make most drug dealers much money, at least in the inner city, and how that’s pretty similar to other highly sought after glamor jobs in Hollywood.
• Most parenting skills that parents obsess about doesn’t really change much about the kids, with evidence provided in the form of test scores. I kind of wish he dealt with other statistics other than test scores, but the evidence that parents make kids smarter by their parenting skills seems slim, particularly in reading. He states, but doesn’t provide the evidence except in an end note, that peers have a much greater influence on children’s’ education. And he touches on the relative risks of catastrophe, particularly comparing the danger to children of guns in the household vs. the danger of swimming pools (the pool is more dangerous).
• And lastly, he has a chapter on how parents name their children. Of interest is how your name is probably indicative of your mother’s socio-economic status, particularly if you are black. And also how names cycle from being popular among the well-off, copied by the middle and then lower class becoming less popular among the rich, and then eventually dropping off the radar of the lower classes as they copy new names from the rich.

Definitely a most interesting book. Paulos gets points for explaining more things, but Levitt gets the points for talking about some more surprising things.

Authors: Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
Title: Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Imprint / publisher: William Morrow / HarperCollins
Format: Hardcover
Publication date: 2005
Length: 242 p. (including index)
ISBN-10: 0-06-073132-X
Subject: Economics — Psychological aspects
Subject: Economics — Sociological aspects
LC classification: HB74.P8L479 2005