Good morning.
I will not
focus on the negative this time, although not entirely on the eudemonic, either.
Maybe a little research that is displeasing, but not world-shakingly negative.
The fankle of George Floyd's lachrymogenic death and the coronavirus can remain
in the background for awhile. But I will say this: in my recurring hypnagogic
interludes with the Founding Fathers, I'd blame them to their faces for the
sequence of American history that led to Floyd's death.
A small
study out of Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany has produced results that
we don't like to see. The researchers administered an online test, the Critical
Online Reasoning Assessment (CORA, based on a test developed at Stanford
University) to 160 students in medicine and economics.
During the assessment, the test
takers are presented with short tasks. They are asked to freely browse the
Internet, focusing on relevant and reliable information that will help them to
solve the tasks within the relatively short time frame of ten minutes, and to
justify their solutions using arguments from the online information they used.
. . . The analysis of the results is based on the participants' responses to
the tasks. In addition, their web search activity while solving the tasks is
recorded to examine their strengths and weaknesses in dealing with online
information in more detail.
As you can imagine, and as the researchers reported,
analyzing the students' web usage is time-consuming.
The results
are disappointing. Most of the students "had difficulties solving the
tasks. On a scale of 0 to 2 points per task, the students scored only 0.75
points on average, with the results ranging from 0.50 to 1.38 points." They
didn't use scientific sources (no disciplinary knowledge of a science is
required to solve the problems). The students could not evaluate online sources
and use "relevant information from reliable sources . . . to solve the
tasks." The students could judge well-known Internet information sources
but did not do a good job of examining new ones. They are also influenced by
unreliable sources.
The good
news is that "students in higher semesters perform slightly better than
students in their first year of study. . . . In the United States, a
significant increase in these kinds of skills was observed only a few weeks
after implementing newly developed training approaches." So it's possible
to teach students how to be critical in their consumption of web sources of
information.
I have perhaps written this before:
Even though Elliott eventually graduated with a degree in art, to this day he
will say that the two most valuable courses he took in college (apart from the
art, of course) were the upper division psychology courses in statistics and in
research methods. The latter could easily incorporate segments on using the
Internet for research. Personally, I think that should be required coursework
for both high school and college students. Citizens having the ability to
discriminate "fake news" from the real McCoy would go a long way to
promoting an intelligent electorate. A lot more useful than algebra.
* * *
One impact
of the coronavirus economic shutdown may be careers foreshortened. I have been
thinking about people perhaps in their late 40s/50-ish, in a professional
career of some kind, who may not be welcomed back to a job because the job won't
exist for some time, as businesses slowly recover. I know that some
organizations will leap back to business but others, I read in the news, will
likely do so more slowly (in large part because consumer demand will be way
down, causing a ripple effect in the economy).
I thought I
would tell a story about my paternal grandparents, one that might be an
exemplum of career predicaments that may unfold in the upcoming months. When I
went back to look more carefully at the course of my grandparents' lives
through the Depression, however, I realized the analogy wasn't all that good.
But part of the story may have echoes today—and I wanted to write it anyway, so
I have.
The excerpt
below is more than you want to know, but apart from the personal connection for
me, it's an interesting tiny piece of history that someone—bless their
heart—captured for posterity. It was written in 1905. Brule, Wisconsin, is in
the far north central part of the state, only a short ways away from the south
shore of Lake Superior. This is about my grandfather.
Theodore Engstrand, the popular and
genial manager of the Brule Store Co., at Brule, Wis., is a native of Sweden,
born June 4, 1877. His parents, O. and Mary Engstrand, were also natives of
Sweden, and emigrated to America in 1879, settling in Price county, Wis., where
they still reside. The father, O. Engstrand, was engaged in lumbering seven
years but is now retired from active business. He was the father of six
children, five sons and one daughter.
In the public schools of Price
county, Theodore Engstrand received his elementary education. The schools then
in vogue in that locality, were primitive in the extreme, the curriculum
embracing only reading, writing and arithmetic. However, meager as were his
opportunities, he succeeded by dint of effort in becoming well grounded in the
preliminaries of an English education. Supplementary to this he took a year's
commercial course at Bryant & Stratton's Business College, Chicago, Ill.,
where by diligence he became thoroughly familiar with the principles of a
technical business education. In 1898 he abandoned his school duties within two
months of graduation, to assume the responsibility of managing the general
mercantile establishment of the Brule Store Co., at Brule, which had been
established in 1892 by his brother, C.G. Engstrand, and J.A. Lofquist. Since
accepting this responsible position, Mr. Engstrand has continuously devoted
himself to conducting the affairs of the establishment, which, under his wise guidance,
has been eminently prosperous. Socially and fraternally, Mr. Engstrand occupies
a conspicuous place in the community, being an honored member of West Superior
Lodge No. 236, F. & A.M., and of the Knights of the Maccabees, Brule Tent
No. 34. Mr. Engstrand's political affiliation is with the Republican party. He
takes an active interest in local affairs, and has been honored by his party as
delegate to Douglas county and Congressional conventions, serving three years
in the former. Mr. Engstrand was married
in Chicago, Oct. 2, 1900, to Miss Bessie Wilson, daughter of W.R. Wilson, of
Brule. They have one child, Allen Theodore.
When I was young my family would
occasionally visit my dad's parents in their apartment on Lake Street and
Bryant Avenue (816 W. Lake). The building, with storefront below and apartments
above, is still there. My dad described it to me years later as a "crummy
one-bedroom apartment." I remember it well; his characterization was
accurate. When you entered, you were at the (south) end of a large rectangle,
maybe 15' by 25-30' (I can remember the apartment vividly but am not sure of
dimensions this many years later). The dining area portion of the room was
right there inside the door, looking through to a kitchen on the right and a
Murphy bed in the wall to the left. Beyond the dining area was the living area.
To the left rear was a closet and the bathroom; to the right rear was their
bedroom. The windows (one in the bathroom, two in the living room, one in their
bedroom) faced north, on to the building's parking lot and a rather run-down
house on the far side. As a result, it was never bright and cheery in the
apartment and the view was urban unappealing.
My grandfather was born in 1877,
somewhere in Sweden. The family emigrated to the U.S. in 1879. His parents left
Sweden as Olaf and Mary Olson and arrived at Ellis Island, New York, as Olaf
and Mary Engstrand, and eventually made their way to Ogema, Wisconsin. (Their
names are among those on an extremely large circular plaque at Ellis Island.)
The family story is that they changed their name to Engstrand while on the boat
in order to move up in the food line, which provided meals on an alphabetical
basis. "Engstrand" in Swedish means, roughly, "meadow by a
stream," and my assumption is that it's a place name they took from where
they had lived in Sweden.
My grandmother, Bessie (Bess) Ethel
Wilson, was born in 1879, in Hersey, Michigan. She attended normal school and,
my notes say, was teaching school in Superior, Wisconsin in the late 1890s.
Despite having gone to normal school--unusual in that day--my father did not
believe she came from a well-to-do background.
When my grandparents moved into the
"crummy one-bedroom apartment" in the fall of 1934, in the middle of
the Depression, it must have been a dismaying comedown in their lives. In 1900,
when he was 23 and she was 21, they were married in a double wedding with my
grandfather's brother, held at Castlewood Terrace in Chicago. (An elderly
Chicagoan relative who knew my grandparents told me that Castlewood Terrace was
definitely in a ritzy part of town.) Small indicators of their economic status
are a few of the wedding gifts they received: engraved sterling silver
flatware, Rosenthal china, and a high quality brass-and-glass miniature
grandfather clock. By then, my grandfather was managing a successful family
business. My grandmother had calling cards. Their son Allen was born in 1901;
their second son, William, in 1911. They seemed to be on a path to a successful
life.
The best
years of their lives were from 1900 to about 1921. The general store expanded
in north central Wisconsin and my grandfather became the owner of one in Rib
Lake, down the road apiece from Brule. Life was good for them for a number of
years—my dad said they were not wealthy but they were well off—and they were
politically and civically active in their community. They had a nice home with
yard and trees in small-town America. But the stores lost business as
automobiles became more widespread and the lumber business declined.
In 1920 or 1921 they moved to
Minneapolis. My grandmother at one point worked at Dayton's. My father was born
in 1922, when my grandfather was 45 and my grandmother 43. It was no doubt
devastating to them when their oldest son Allen died of smallpox in 1924,
leaving behind a widow and two young children. My grandfather sold shoes for
about a decade and then opened a grocery store at 44th & Beard
Avenue in Minneapolis. A fire burned the store down and put them out of
business in 1933. That was effectively the last point at which they could have
been considered "affluent."
After the fire my grandfather came
down with "rheumatism in his knee" (according to my father) and he
was bedridden for almost a year. After he recovered, he went to work for
Donaldson's selling men's suits, which he did until 1947, when he was 70 years
old.
During the period of roughly a
dozen years between coming to Minneapolis in ~1921 and moving into the
apartment in 1934, my grandparents rented upper or lower parts of several
duplexes in Minneapolis just south of Uptown; they moved repeatedly (for
reasons unknown to my father, who was a youngster). An extended family (their
son Allen's widow and her two young children, the daughter-in-law's sister)
lived together with them in these large duplexes; only the daughter-in-law and
her sister had jobs after the grocery store burned and my grandfather was
disabled, providing the household income. Finally, in the midst of the
Depression, in late summer 1934 they moved to the apartment on Lake and Bryant,
where they lived until my grandfather died in 1960. They lived for 26 years in
that apartment.
They moved into the apartment when
he was 57 and she was 55. Their economic status had deteriorated substantially
between the time of their marriage in 1900 and the move into the apartment. I
wonder what they were thinking as they realized their diminished financial and
presumably social station in life; what kind of disappointment did they feel?
Their hopes and dreams must have died, particularly after the fire burned down
the grocery store in 1933.
I doubt it was fun for my dad. They
moved into the apartment when he was 12 years old and went to junior high school that year. So
for junior and senior high school (graduated in 1940) and up until May of 1942,
he slept on that Murphy bed in the dining area. When he returned from Europe in
1946 (invalided out with a German sniper shot in his shoulder in March 1945),
he moved back into the apartment, presumably slept on the Murphy bed, and
stayed there until he married my mother in October 1949. In those post-war
years he was going to the University on the G.I. Bill. (I had long recorded
interviews with my dad after my mother died but I never thought to ask him
about daily life in the apartment. I only know he didn't recall it as a happy
time.)
What was the evening routine like
when my dad was in school? Did he go to bed at age 12 or 14 while his parents
sat at the other end of the space, in the "living room," reading or
doing embroidery or listening to the radio? (They had a radio cabinet, like
many we've all seen from the 1920s and 30s, on top of which sat forever that
brass-and-glass miniature grandfather clock given to them as a wedding
present.) And what was daily life like after my father returned from the war,
recovering from a gunshot wound in the shoulder? No doubt a very much older
human in all senses of the word.
Like I
said, the analogy with 2020 and the coronavirus doesn't work very well. My grandparents'
loss of any sense of affluence came from the decline of the Wisconsin store
from economic forces and the fire in his grocery store in 1933; he never again
had a secure and remunerative position with a significant income. But I have to
believe that the Depression affected my grandfather's ability to get back on
his feet as an independent businessman. In 1933 he was 56 years old and may
have given up trying to start over yet again.
I wonder how many people will be in
a similar position—needing to find a new job, pick up a career—in their 40s or
50s, before they had any intention of retiring (and perhaps before they are
able to retire). And what sense of disappointment, of lost dreams, will people
feel if this happens to them? Those thousands or perhaps millions of life
disruptions may be one of the great unmeasured costs of the coronavirus.
So there, a long family story you
were almost certainly not interested in to reach a conclusion that could have been
one paragraph.
* * *
Tangentially
related to the foregoing: One of the faculty members I worked very closely with
from the late 1980s to the early 1990s—and remained in close touch with
thereafter—made an argument that I've always thought made some sense.
(University friends: Warren Ibele)
Warren was a submariner in the U. S. Navy during WWII, a self-described
southern boy who ended up at the University of Minnesota as a professor of
Mechanical Engineering (but who was widely read outside engineering). He went
to school on the G. I. Bill, and he argued that that piece of legislation was
effectively the third American revolution. The first obviously was the
Revolutionary War, the second was the Civil War. The G. I. Bill transformed
American society in that suddenly thousands of people were going to college,
people who would never have considered it otherwise, people who couldn't afford
it (even at the low cost of the times—during the Depression, any cost was too
much for almost everyone).
In the 3 decades starting with
1900, the percentage of 18-24-year-olds attending college rose from 2% to 7%,
and in the 1930s it increased slightly to 9%. That's still fewer than one in
ten high school graduates (or not) going to college. After the disruption of
WWII, which took out many of the potential male students, by 1949 the
percentage had risen to 15%. In the 1950s the percentage rose to 24% and by
1969 it was 35%. (The last figure may have been affected by the presence of the
draft and college deferments and the incentive they provided to young men to go
to college.) Even when the Vietnam War was past, enrollments (and the
percentage of people enrolled) continued to increase from the 1970s to the
present. In Minnesota, "In 2014, 69 percent of Minnesota's public high
school graduating class of 2014 attended a postsecondary institution the
following fall either in Minnesota or elsewhere." That's an astonishing
number.
There is a remarkable increase
after the War. The percentage of kids in college nearly tripled in the 15 years
after WWII, and continued to increase thereafter. I know from personal
testimony that my dad, Kathy's dad, and my ex-wife's dad would never have gone
to college except for the G. I. Bill. Those college degrees allowed them to
obtain jobs that moved them upwards both socially and financially, well beyond
what their parents had been able to achieve. That success, in turn, enabled all
of them to expect their children to attend college and to help ensure that they
did so. Those children (that is, for example, me, my siblings, Kathy and her
brother, Pat and her siblings) in turn were enabled to be financially and
socially successful to varying extents, but certainly all more than had they
not had the advantage of post-high school education.
On average, by the way, those with
bachelor's degrees earn between $800,000 and $1 million more than high school
graduates over the course of a lifetime of working. The gap gets much larger
when advanced degrees are included—M.D., J.D., D.D.S, D.V.M., M.B.A., Ph.D., etc.
The development of the three families—mine, Pat's, Kathy's—are small examples
of the accuracy of those data.
So I think there's something to
Warren's argument.
* * *
As a number
of my friends have commented to me in various messages, it's a relief to be
retired during the coronavirus mess. On the one hand. On the other, there have
been two times since I retired that I (sort of) wished I hadn't been. The first
was in the months immediately following Krystin's death; it would have been
helpful to have had the distraction of work. The second, actually, is now:
being confined to the house, even keeping myself busy, is sometimes tedious. I
thought I would like to be working (but maybe only half time 😊).
After Kathy's
recent work, however, I'm revising my opinion about working now. She spent much
of the day on Zoom meetings, and by late afternoons she was completely
frazzled. There's something about doing meetings virtually, rather than in
person in offices or conference rooms, that is more draining. What's also lost
are the hallway chats and sidebar conversations in meetings where much business
gets done or questions resolved. So maybe I'm glad I'm not working.
* * *
As I have
read about the events surrounding the death of George Floyd, two points have
been made in the media coverage about the history of racism in the Twin Cities and
the large gap in household income and home ownership between whites and Blacks,
among the largest gaps in the country. I have no reason to doubt the gap data
but I was curious about the history of I94 splitting the predominantly Black
Rondo neighborhood in St. Paul and the widespread use of discriminatory housing
covenants.
So I thought I would indagate; I asked
a long-time friend and colleague, an expert on urban geography and on the Twin
Cities in particular. The questions I posed were these: (1) It's true that I94
went right through the middle of the Rondo neighborhood. But didn't I35W cut
right through a very affluent area in south Minneapolis (Tangletown and surrounds)
and Richfield? (2) How widespread were housing covenants in the middle/later 20th
century? Here are the answers I received.
When the I-94 route between central
Mpls and central St. Paul was being planned, the highway planners put their
rulers on the map and defined the route as they were in the habit of doing at
the time. They paid little or no
attention to who was living along the route.
BUT, the highway department paid
handsomely for the houses that they bought and demolished to clear the corridor
for highway construction. The fact that
the highway plowed through the Rondo neighborhood was noted at the time, and
some were upset at having to sell their houses through the process of Eminent
Domain, but the highway department paid a premium for those houses, and in a
survey taken of those displaced after the fact, may respondents said that they
ended up in better housing than they had before.
I-35 through So. Mpls. As I wrote several times, suburban housing
construction after WWII occurred at the margins of 14 distinct sectoral
submarkets, 7 on the St. Paul side of the metro and 7 on the Mpls side.
The MOST ACTIVE SECTOR was the one
originating at the southern edge of the downtown and extending southward in a
corridor bounded roughly between Lyndale on the west and Chicago on the east.
Within that sector at the end of WWII lived the largest number of middle-class
households in Mpls eager to translate their upward mobility tendencies and
their purchasing power into geographic mobility--oriented southward, into
undeveloped parts of Mpls south of 58th street and on into Richfield.
NOW--because those new house buyers
were also households with one or two cars, with jobs concentrated in the
Central Business District, the highway department's "desire lines"
specified the need for improved accessibility between Richfield and Bloomington
into downtown Mpls. It was a simple exercise to define the appropriate route as
they did--where the highway is today.
The other element of that dynamic
is that the steady and high-volume outmigration of middle-class households
outward softened the housing markets in what was later named the Phillips
Neighborhood and the low prices of good quality housing attracted a steady flow
of Mpls newcomers, many of the black, into those areas.
So when the highway was planned, it
followed the course defined by the commuting desire lines and inevitably that
meant that the route would pass through part of the South Mpls black
neighborhood. The further fact that property values were lower along that route
was also noted and found to be significant, but the racial aspect of this
process was noted only years later to make other political points.
I watched the demolition and
movement of the houses along 2nd Ave when the highway dept was preparing for
the road construction. That area between
Nicollet and 3rd Ave was definitely a white, middle-class area from Lake Street
to the city limits.
On the matter of covenants--they
were common across the U.S. The history
of zoning and housing finance are part of the process of protecting property
values.
In essence, my surmisals were correct: it wasn't a nefarious plot to tear Rondo
apart and there was nothing unique about housing covenants.
So the question remains: why are Mpls and Madison such economically
terrible places for Blacks to live, two otherwise extremely politically liberal
cities?
It's not exactly clear to me but
there are some features of both places that
are similar.
In migration theory (and history)
it is typically the case that the people who move from "A" to "B"
(whether through domestic migration or in international migration) share
certain common features, namely those who leave "A" usually are among
the better informed, better connected with earlier migrants who left and
settled elsewhere, more likely to take chances to improve their welfare, and
come from among the upper half on the socio-economic ladder of the society in "A".
BUT, when they arrive at "B"
they find themselves within the lower half on the socio-economic ladder at "B".
That said, people on the move to
improve their lives and futures head toward places that are growing and
prosperous. Within such places, the upper rungs of the socioeconomic ladder are
MUCH HIGHER UP than was the case in the origins and the sense of "relative
deprivation" after arrival is enhanced. The fact that after arrival the
newcomers may be better off financially in absolute terms is less important in
one's feeling of well being than how they feel in relative terms.
Low-income African American
households move to the Twin Cities from Chicago, IL, Gary, IN, St. Louis, MO,
New Orleans, LA, and other origins in the South and Midwest--to improve their
economic and social prospects. If they
didn't come, there would be little or no gap.
Metro areas that are languishing, losing populations, and losing jobs,
as far as I know, have much smaller gaps than the Twin Cities. Why would a
person leave Mississippi for a destination that offered no economic
opportunity?
I followed by asking "to what
extent do you think the dominant Scandinavian/German culture of Minnesota had
on the housing and income gaps? (Apart
from the reasons you touched on in your last email.) One counterargument is that St. Paul was
Catholic and Irish, but wouldn't you say the "majority" culture of
the state is Scandinavian/German (and more the former)? Would the aloofness of
Scandinavians have affected how things developed here over the last century?"
I don't think it's a matter of
religion or national origin, it's more a tradition of deeply rooted values of
honesty, right and wrong, and belief in the idea of doing the right thing
because you've been taught to do the right thing. This is coupled with the idea
that the tradition in America (outside the Deep South) is that the country
provides freedom for you to chart your own course and the outcomes are
consequences of the choices you make along the way. What some may term "aloofness"
others might term "minding your own business" and not telling others
what to do.
The vast majority of middle-class
Americans come from an immigrant stock of European origin and imbued with the
idea that you plan ahead and do today what will put you ahead tomorrow--whether
you're a farmer, shopkeeper, tradesperson,
business owner or professional. It takes guts and significant foresight
to leave your home and emigrate.
I read a book in 1969 pointing out
that the poor and the rich are very similar in how they live their daily
lives--they live for today; the poor see no way to bring the future under
control on their behalf, whereas the rich don't have to worry about the future
because they are already set.
It's the middle class that operates
from the deeply held belief that decisions made today affect their future
welfare.
That last comment prompted a
comment from another friend who read these emails (who knows both of us).
I love the final insight about the
middle class vs. the poor and rich. It
seems to ring true. It is concerning
though, since the middle class seems to be shrinking. Perhaps this means the "live for today"
ethic may become the predominant influence in our society? If so, it is not really a good thing for our
country. The democracy and the rule of
law is appealing because it gives us a sense of fairness, control and security
about the future. We learn to accommodate the interests of others while
striving to improve our own lot in life. The ability to believe and trust that
what we do today matters and that our choices will be controlling well beyond
the current time and place and circumstance, seem to be undermined by the lack
of long term thinking. As we develop a "live
for the moment" mentality, do we become less concerned about precedent, or
about how choices we make today may affect our prospects or way of living
tomorrow? Is not the present our primary
concern? Such focus on the immediacy of
life seems like it produces an inherently more selfish, and less sacrificing,
way of living. Do the right thing
becomes do the best thing for me.
It still remains
unclear to me why the household income and home ownership gaps are as large as
they are in the Twin Cities.
Yeah, I had
fun in the first paragraph with a few words I've learned.
Gary
