‘Behavior’ Category

Ear­lier in the week, it was announced that First Lady, Michelle Obama, plans to fight child­hood obe­sity. See, for exam­ple, First Lady Girds to Fight Fat.

It seems like a wor­thy cause, but we’re not sure what she can do from the White House. If she isn’t home with the over-​weight kids, nag­ging them to go out­side and play or prac­tice their sports or walk the dog(s) or ride their bikes or not to eat too much junk food or not drink too much soda, then we doubt that her cam­paign will be very suc­cess­ful. (Yeah, being a scold, we think nag­ging and over­sight are crucial.)

Look at the table of state-​by-​state obe­sity rates that accom­pa­nied the above-​referenced arti­cle. There are a cou­ple of pat­terns worth mentioning.

First, notice the his­tor­i­cal trend across the table. In thir­teen years the national obe­sity rate – the per­cent­age of indi­vid­u­als with” too much” mass for their respec­tive heights has increased about 60%. That’s a huge increase in the num­ber of peo­ple who are huge: an increase of about 30 mil­lion peo­ple in a lit­tle more than a decade. (The table notes that about two-​thirds of the pop­u­la­tion is over­weight, and a trip to just about any shop­ping mall pro­vides all-​too ample empir­i­cal evi­dence of that fact.)

Sec­ond, sort the above-​mentioned table by any year, say, 2008, and com­pare that col­umn to this per-​capita income by state table from Wikipedia. (That one is sortable by columns, too.) Notice that the most obese states – the ones with the high­est per­cent­age of obese cit­i­zens – tend to have the low­est per-​capita income, and vice versa. We haven’t run any sta­tis­ti­cal tests, but our casual obser­va­tion, alone, seems suf­fi­cient to notice a rather strong inverse rela­tion­ship between per-​capita income and the obe­sity rate.

We wrote about some­thing sim­i­lar last Sep­tem­ber in No Fat Kids, which could have been more descrip­tively enti­tled, The Absence of Fat Kids, and in that respect, there are a cou­ple of facts worth mentioning.

There’s no obvi­ous rea­son why poorer chil­dren should be fat­ter than wealth­ier chil­dren. In the his­tory of the world, we’d argue that is a very, very recent phe­nom­e­non. It is evi­dence of a very, very finely-​meshed social ser­vice net that pro­vides almost every­one with (at least) what they need, but it goes beyond that.

We hypoth­e­size that, all things equal, the rela­tion­ship between income and body mass index is an arti­fact of some­thing else, and among other things that some­thing else involves parental super­vi­sion and time, espe­cially in single-​parent fam­i­lies – par­tic­u­larly fam­i­lies headed by sin­gle mothers.

Fam­i­lies headed by sin­gle moth­ers tend to have sub­stan­tially less income than fam­i­lies with two par­ents. So, we won­der whether the like­li­hood of child­hood obe­sity is related to the parental sta­tus of the house­hold. In other words, sin­gle par­ents imply lower income and sin­gle par­ents imply more child­hood obe­sity; so, at least for those chil­dren in single-​parent house­holds, lower income means more obesity.

Now, we are not say­ing that sin­gle par­ents are bad par­ents. Not at all. Instead, we are say­ing that keep­ing kids thin may be a task that’s too dif­fi­cult for one par­ent to man­age. We are say­ing that being a good, nag­ging, atten­tive, avail­able par­ent takes a lot of time, energy, and dis­ci­pline. With­out suf­fi­cient sup­port from a spouse or other fam­ily mem­bers or friends, try­ing to keep chil­dren active and healthy, is very difficult.

Look at the types of nag­ging we men­tion in the sec­ond para­graph, con­sider the amount of energy required, and real­ize the amount of time required to trans­port kids to phys­i­cal activ­i­ties (and to attend those activities.) Of course, we’re ignor­ing a host of hered­i­tary or genetic fac­tors, e.g., slow metab­o­lisms, etc., but is there a more par­si­mo­nious expla­na­tion than it seems to require at least two adults to mon­i­tor diets and get the kids away from tele­vi­sions, com­put­ers, cell phones, PS2s, Xboxes, etc.?

Finally, and we men­tioned this above, is it not truly remark­able that obe­sity is more preva­lent among the poor than among the middle-​class or the wealthy in the United States? (So much for Obama’s “fat cat bankers.”)

Regard­less of how much or how lit­tle, you, dear reader, know about world his­tory, con­sider that fact. Can you name any other era or place in his­tory when or where that has occurred? Where the poor have been heav­ier than the wealthy? It’s not just the near-​elimination of star­va­tion and hunger in the U.S., but an over-​abundance, an excess, of calo­ries that per­mits many of the poor to be obese (to the point where their health suf­fers). Think of the equal­ity of power – through the Rule of Law – and the advanced tech­nol­ogy in agri­cul­ture, trans­porta­tion, stor­age, refrig­er­a­tor, hygiene, food safety, etc. and con­sider the innate gen­eros­ity of the cit­i­zen­ship that per­mits such con­sump­tion – to the point of dys­func­tion­al­ity. That’s one of the rea­sons we con­sider the fol­low­ing ques­tion to be noth­ing more than a rhetor­i­cal one: despite all the trou­bles and prob­lems and con­flicts, has there ever been a bet­ter time (for so many peo­ple) to be alive, espe­cially the poor?

And So Is ‘Gay’

In fact, stu­dents of his­tor­i­cal lin­guis­tics could tell you that many other words are homo­graphs, too, and those stu­dents could also explain seman­tic change, includ­ing the pejo­ra­tion and recla­ma­tion of words. (Don’t be a fool, you know where this is head­ing.)

We doubt that we have much in com­mon with Pres­i­dent Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, but we do sym­pa­thize with him for the grief he is tak­ing for using ‘retarded’ as a pejorative.

Was it poor judg­ment? Sure. Should he have known bet­ter? Of course. Are we ital­i­ciz­ing homo­graphs? You know it. (Actu­ally, because we are lazy and didn’t major in lin­guis­tics, only the homo­graphs that are easy to iden­tify and only the first time, but we’ll stop now.)

So, while polit­i­cally we tend to agree with his crit­ics like Sarah Palin, in this case we think that she and all the other cyn­i­cal or pious grievance-​mongers should grow-​up, shut-​up and go away.

If you are aggrieved by some­thing that a stranger said about some­one else in a place where you weren’t approx­i­mately six months ago, then you, dear reader, are either a cyn­i­cal, politically-​motivated d.b. or you are a humor­less scold – pos­si­bly a bit too sen­si­tive and pos­si­bly with deep emo­tional problems.

In fact, it would do every­one – indi­vid­u­ally and col­lec­tively – much good to remem­ber that on occa­sion, every­one behaves like a butthead, but there is a huge dif­fer­ence between mali­cious behav­ior and sim­ply mak­ing a mis­take in the heat of the moment.

In our mind, that dif­fer­ence is nearly anal­o­gous to Saint Fran­cis de Sales’ dis­tinc­tion between sin and imper­fec­tion; how­ever, in this case we have a dif­fer­ent ‘Fran­cis’ quote in mind. That would be one spo­ken by Sargeant Hulka in the 1981 movie, Stripes. When one of the recruits states, “… Any of you guys call me Fran­cis, and I’ll kill you,” the good sergeant replies, Lighten Up, Francis.”

So, lighten up, Sarah and posse. There are too many impor­tant issues where he is on the wrong side to worry about a silly one like this one.

Poor, poor, piti­ful me!

This morning’s Gospel included Luke 4:18.

That’s where Jesus returns to Nazareth, goes to the syn­a­gogue, and reads aloud from the scroll of Isaiah.

What inter­ested us was (our para­phrase of) one of the lines from Isa­iah: “He has sent me… to let the oppressed go free.”

We won­dered: of the sub­set of the folks who were lis­ten­ing, how many of our (rel­a­tively for­tu­nate and middle-​class) fel­low parish­ioners thought, “Yes, Lord, that’s me. I’m oppressed. Please help. Please set me free. Please stop the oppres­sion by my spouse-​children-​parents-​classmates-​bosses-​teachers-​neighbors-​creditors-​clients-​patients-​etc.”

We also won­dered how many of the oth­ers thought that he or she were the sin­gu­larly most oppressed per­son in the entire con­gre­ga­tion. Of course, in that respect we knew, beyond any rea­son­able doubt, that any­one else who had drawn that con­clu­sion must be wrong.

If they con­sid­ered it, we sus­pect that they would know that we were just as wrong, and to be hon­est, they would be right.

Ah, the human condition.

Heather Mac Don­ald has a very nice opin­ion col­umn, A Crime The­ory Demol­ished, in today’s edi­tion of The Wall Street Jour­nal.

In the col­umn, she cites much evi­dence to debunk the notions that (1) poverty is the root cause of crime, and (2) given (1), there is lit­tle that police depart­ments can do to reduce crime.

We won’t recite her col­umn, but we think we have a nice way to sum­ma­rize it: some argue that crime is a “social” phe­nom­e­non that can­not be attacked directly while oth­ers argue it is sim­ply anti-​social behav­ior that can be con­trolled with directed effort and appro­pri­ate pun­ish­ment. There’s more evi­dence of the lat­ter than the former.

We often hear or read of the same bad the­ory applied to inter­na­tional ter­ror­ism (usu­ally from the same peo­ple who view ter­ror­ism as crime and for­eign ter­ror­ists as crim­i­nals enti­tled to our rights and due processes). So, we would like to see Ms. Mac Don­ald or some­one like her thor­oughly debunk that the­ory, too.

For exam­ple,

• Just this morn­ing, we heard that the CIA base bomber in Afghanistan is a Jor­dan­ian physician.
• Accord­ing to Wikipedia, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a mechan­i­cal engineer.
• Would-​be bomber Umar Farouk Abdul­mu­tal­lab is the son of a promi­nent Niger­ian banker.
• An admit­tedly very quick, very lazy search of the web pro­vides no evi­dence that any of the ⁹⁄₁₁ hijack­ers were born into poverty. Sev­eral came from promi­nent fam­i­lies and either grad­u­ated or attended col­lege. A few came from poor regions, but their fathers had respectable jobs. Maybe a few did, but they would have formed a minority.
• As we recall, many domes­tic ter­ror­ists – espe­cially many of the rad­i­cals from the 1960s – attended col­lege and came from middle-​class or wealthy families.

It’s true that many failed and poor nations became reserves and havens for ter­ror­ists, but fre­quently those ter­ror­ists are not indige­nous, and they are attracted to the regions because of the state’s inabil­ity to main­tain con­trol, which includes the inabil­ity pre­vent such oper­a­tions from forming.

In addi­tion, with­out cit­ing any esti­mates of GDP or per-​capita GDP, it doesn’t seem that many states that spon­sor ter­ror­ism are par­tic­u­larly poor. To be fair, often those states are much poorer than they could be because of the greed and tyranny of those who rule.

So, when we hear that a person’s poverty and sup­posed resent­ment of the wealthy west moti­vates them to pur­sue a career as a ter­ror­ist, we scoff, and we wish our gov­ern­ment did, too.

P.S. Actu­ally, we don’t think that poor folks are any more resent­ful than wealthy ones. Pro­vided that their basic needs are met – food, shel­ter, cloth­ing – we doubt that there is much evi­dence to show that they are less happy than the wealthy or middle-​class. While one can eas­ily argue about mea­sure­ment issues of such research, stud­ies do show that the newly rich tend to be hap­pier than when they were poor, but that ben­e­fit quickly dis­si­pates through time, i.e., every­one has prob­lems, just dif­fer­ent ones. (See Nas­sim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan for references.)

P.P.S. That’s one of the prob­lems with Marx­ists. They don’t under­stand why oth­ers, espe­cially the poor, aren’t as angry about per­ceived injus­tices as they, them­selves, are. Thus, they tend to a dim­mer view of the poor, and cor­re­spond­ing less respect, than the wealthy. That rarely well-​serves the poor in Marx­ist societies.

(The Other Net­works Are No Better)

Our younger princess wanted to watch the Rose Parade this morn­ing; so, we tuned into NBC’s broad­cast and half-​dozed next to her while she watched.

That’s when we heard the promo for an upcom­ing episode of a show that we’ve never watched. Some guy asks, “How was the sex?” Some girl answers, “It was like mak­ing love to Amer­ica.” At least, that’s what we think we heard.

Now, we’re not sure what her answer means. She didn’t say any­thing about receiv­ing pay­ments from the coun­try; so, pre­sum­ably she is not a pros­ti­tute – just a slut. Tak­ing her at her word, pre­sum­ably, she has some type of addic­tion or com­pul­sion, and we’d infer that she very likely car­ries a mul­ti­tude of STDs.

Now that’s must-​see TV!

No one has ever mis­taken us for a prude, but really, what elementary-​school-​aged child needs to be exposed to that?

… And the net­works won­der why they con­tinue to hemorrhage viewers.

It’s dif­fi­cult enough to com­mand the “Mute” but­ton on the remote dur­ing sport­ing events when we’re fully awake. We do that because we see no rea­son why we need to explain to some­one in a pri­mary grade about the use or need of Via­gra, Cialis, or dual, cast-​iron tubs in out­door set­tings.¹

So, we ask: why should it be nec­es­sary to main­tain such vig­i­lance or pre-​screen what should have been a “G-​rated” broad­cast of a “G-​rated” parade?

It shouldn’t be nec­es­sary. We sus­pect that some­one who (1) hates fam­i­lies or young chil­dren and (2) has extremely poor judg­ment chose to run the spot. Per­haps the grownups are on vaca­tion dur­ing the hol­i­days. Per­haps, not. Regard­less, it makes us won­der: what’s wrong with those people?

Per­haps, sub­se­quently, one of the parade announc­ers apol­o­gized for the inap­pro­pri­ate pro­mo­tion. We doubt it, and didn’t get the chance to see; our lovely, quick-​fingered wife switched off the set before we could.

We doubt that she is the only mom that did.

There was a very inter­est­ing arti­cle in last Tuesday’s (Novem­ber 10) edi­tion of The Wall Street Jour­nal. It is enti­tled, It Just Isn’t Work­ing? Some File for Cus­tomer Divorce, and it relates how some small busi­nesses are elim­i­nat­ing prob­lem­atic customers.

In the paper edi­tion, the arti­cle appeared under the “Small Busi­ness’ ban­ner, and it now resides under a similarly-​labeled sec­tion of the web site; how­ever, it applies equally well to busi­nesses of all sizes.

We must admit, though, that the topic is espe­cially poignant for small busi­nesses because the decision-​maker and the imple­menter (exe­cu­tioner) are often one-​and-​the-​same per­son, and the cus­tomer may be a friend or acquain­tance. There’s no, “my boss told me that I have to do it” excuse when you are the boss. Note, how­ever, that many seemingly-​independent, entre­pre­neur­ial men still use their wives as rea­sons why some­thing can’t be bought or sold at a given price. We would never admit to such behav­ior, unless our Chair­man, Jill, per­mits us.

The main point of the arti­cle is that despite gen­er­ally tough eco­nomic times, a few small busi­nesses are find­ing that it is not worth­while to deal with cer­tain clients because those clients dis­pro­por­tion­ately con­sume time and resources given the rev­enue that they generate.

Dis­ci­pline! Discipline!

Though we sound like Colonel Hathi from The Jun­gle Book, there are a cou­ple of obvi­ous ways to min­i­mize the prob­a­bil­ity of enabling such problems:

1. Don’t appear too des­per­ate or too needy for the busi­ness. (In that sense, it is a lot like dating.)
2. Eval­u­ate the client, and have a slid­ing scale of prices rang­ing from lower prices for easy clients to higher prices for pains-​in-​the-​butt or annoy­ing ones, and stick to it.

Admit­tedly, such tac­tics may not be fea­si­ble with all prod­ucts and ser­vices. They gen­er­ally work bet­ter for ser­vices than prod­ucts, and for cus­tomized ser­vices, rather than uni­form or generic ones, and for short-​term projects rather than long-​term ones. How­ever, unless there is a sub­stan­tial ben­e­fit that can be derived from either exist­ing or prospec­tive clients because of the rela­tion­ship with a tire­some one, the tire­some one should pay for the irri­ta­tion, aggra­va­tion, dis­com­fort, and effort that they cause. (We’ll qual­ify this a bit below.)

If such cus­tomers are not will­ing to pay, then the sup­plier or ven­dor is, in fact, sub­si­diz­ing the oppor­tunis­tic behav­ior. More­over, if the sup­plier is not will­ing to sever the rela­tion­ship (or take actions that will change the other party’s behav­ior and prof­itabil­ity), then we humbly rec­om­mend that they not com­plain to every­one around them (thereby mak­ing their employ­ees’ and fam­i­lies’ lives more mis­er­able than need be).

That may seem a bit harsh, but it is con­sis­tent with our response when some­one com­plains about a spouse: divorce them, kill them, or shut-​up. Revealed pref­er­ence says that despite the com­plaints, if the ven­dor is unwill­ing to sever the rela­tion­ship, then he or she must find the arrange­ment to be accept­able. Some­times it is nec­es­sary to do unpleas­ant things – not immoral, uneth­i­cal, or ille­gal, just unpleas­ant ones – to get what one wants out of life.

So, be a good stoic, and live with it in silence (or turn it into a blog post).

We pre­fer to main­tain pric­ing dis­ci­pline because at the mar­gin, one’s will­ing­ness to lower the price or fee is often viewed as a sign of weak­ness. So, clients who make that infer­ence then often request more time and/​or resources. That means that a sign of weak­ness harms both rev­enue and resource-​usage, espe­cially for ser­vices that are pro­vided over time. (Note that this prob­lem can be mit­i­gated some­what by offer­ing a lower-​quality or less-​robust sub­sti­tute when­ever some­one wants a lower price, i.e., “we’ll lower the price, but you’re not getting…”)

By the way, another option is to write very, very detailed con­tracts, but those prepa­ra­tion costs only add to the resource con­sumed by such cus­tomers, and cov­er­ing those incre­men­tal, transaction-​related costs increase the nec­es­sary price to make the trans­ac­tion “worth­while.” (You can see why many folks open fran­chises where such devel­op­ment and prepa­ra­tion costs can be shared nation­ally or even globally.)

Two Costs to Consider

Before fir­ing a cus­tomer who is thought to be “unprof­itable” be sure to con­sider a few fac­tors to deter­mine if the cus­tomer is truly unworthy.

Clearly the choice of fir­ing or retain­ing a cus­tomer is a deci­sion, or the selec­tion (and imple­men­ta­tion) of one pos­si­ble alter­na­tive from sev­eral avail­able alter­na­tives. (Note that “do noth­ing” is often an avail­able course of action.) So, rather than be con­cerned with the report­ing of finan­cial results, or account­ing, per se, we are inter­ested in the costs and ben­e­fits that vary across alter­na­tives, the rel­e­vant costs and ben­e­fits.

In par­tic­u­lar, we are inter­ested in

1. Expected Rel­e­vant Ben­e­fits and Costs
2. Expected Oppor­tu­nity Costs

Note that these costs may vary through time as cir­cum­stances and capac­ity uti­liza­tion change. Tech­ni­cally, oppor­tu­nity costs, which we’ll define below, can be cat­e­go­rized as rel­e­vant costs, but we think that they are wor­thy of their own place on the list.

Read the rest of this entry »

In Sep­tem­ber, when Pres­i­dent Obama spoke to many of the nation’s school chil­dren, we wrote The Impor­tance of an Edu­ca­tion.¹

In that post, we wrote that regard­less of the field, a good edu­ca­tion per­mits the stu­dent to deter­mine when oth­ers are com­pletely full of sh… The more spe­cial­ized the train­ing, the more nar­row the abil­ity to dis­cern, to be sure, but pos­si­bly the more acute the ability.

We fur­ther noted that an excep­tional edu­ca­tion is one that per­mits the stu­dent to deter­mine when he or she – the stu­dent him­self or her­self – is com­pletely full of sh… We then men­tion a few impli­ca­tions and ben­e­fits of that knowledge.

Clearly, we were not writ­ing about the mem­o­riza­tion of facts nec­es­sary to learn and even­tu­ally become edu­cated, nor were we writ­ing about what we’ll call pseudo-​facts– all those things that teach­ers repeat with nary a thought of their valid­ity. (Iron­i­cally, many sci­ence teach­ers seem to be the worst vio­la­tors of the “it’s in the text­book, so it must be true” fal­lacy.) We have in mind higher-​level learn­ing and with it the ben­e­fits of objec­tive and crit­i­cal think­ing that per­mits the analy­sis and eval­u­a­tion of dif­fer­ent designs, choices, con­clu­sions, behav­iors, and rec­om­men­da­tions, regard­less of the field.

We don’t mind repeat­ing our def­i­n­i­tions, because we really like them. In fact, we like to think that Socrates (and there­fore Plato) might approve. As we under­stand it, isn’t that what Socrates taught when he tried to show oth­ers that they were com­pletely full of sh…? (We’re not say­ing that his approach wins friends, but it is ana­lyt­i­cal and requires dis­cern­ment and at least a good education.)

More­over, we don’t mind repeat­ing our old post here, because it is closely related to this one. After writ­ing that post in Sep­tem­ber, we thought more about the cer­tain types of une­d­u­cated folks. That allowed us to con­clude that:

The only thing worse than lying to oth­ers is lying to oneself.

By ‘worse’ we mean harm­ful, in gen­eral, and self-​destructive, in par­tic­u­lar. Actu­ally, we should write that “lying to one­self is worse than lying to oth­ers” but we like the hyper­bole of “The only thing worse.”

Self-​deception is the rea­son why many stu­dents score poorly on exams and why actors for­get lines and and singers flub solos and why ath­letes run the wrong routes or plays and why addicts and alco­holics over-​consume drugs and alco­hol…, ad infini­tum and ad nau­seum.

It hap­pens when some­one asks, “are you ready” or “did you study enough,” and the self-​deceiver answers, “yes” or “of course” or “yeah, I worked hard,” and they are then sur­prised by their poor results and showings.

As we note, it is worse when the per­son answer­ing the ques­tion is also the per­son ask­ing it. Com­pletely, yet erro­neously, self-​delusionally con­fi­dent in their abil­i­ties and pre­pared­ness. Sur­prised or maybe con­fused when they fail or per­form poorly.

As we see it, that self-​deception is due to the com­plete lack of self-​criticism.

So, what hope is there for self-​control (and self-​improvement from directed and sus­tained effort) if one’s feed­back loop is bro­ken and left dan­gling uncon­nected – like a downed power-​line in the after­math of a storm?

Observ­ing such behav­ior reminds us of a Greek tragedy, but with­out all the effort of, say, actu­ally push­ing a huge stone to the top of a hill. It is weak­ness exhib­ited as the lack of effort and/​or will com­bined with the inabil­ity to rec­og­nize the insuf­fi­ciency of req­ui­site effort that defines the prob­lem and inflicts the harm and dam­age. (We’re not say­ing that we’re immune to it, but it is eas­ier to see in others.)

Accu­rate self-​evaluation and self-​criticism seem to be nec­es­sary abilities/​functions for self-​control, self-​improvement, and self-​respect. Why does it seem that the self-​esteem move­ment – you are spe­cial, you’re the only one – can destroy such those good atti­tudes and behav­iors? Because the eas­i­est way to improve self-​esteem is to snip the feed­back loop that makes it very easy to lie to your­self. (So we say, so what if you don’t like this essay, AT LEAST WE TRIED (well, not too much).)

Reg­u­lar read­ers know that we occa­sion­ally write about scholas­tic sports because we’re involved as a par­ent, coach, and (vol­un­teer) admin­is­tra­tor. It’s a great venue to see oth­ers’ foibles.

We’ve writ­ten about (rel­a­tively) seri­ous sub­jects–shoot­ing per­cent­age as a func­tion of dis­tance–and com­plained about bad coach­ing and the quid pro quo that many vol­un­teers expect and/​or demand for their efforts. It ain’t char­ity and it ain’t ser­vice if you’re look­ing for some­thing in return.

We also men­tioned that we think that folks under­es­ti­mate the value of Sarah Palin’s small town expe­ri­ence because mak­ing deci­sions that affect neigh­bors and friends and fel­low parish­ioners and folks who you see in the super­mar­ket has much more per­sonal impli­ca­tions than mak­ing deci­sions from an impe­r­ial city, far removed from one’s con­stituents. (Per­haps that’s what made last summer’s town hall meet­ings so painful for many of our elected pub­lic ser­vants.) We’ve learned that les­son by help­ing select coaches and play­ers, by rep­ri­mand­ing indi­vid­u­als when nec­es­sary, and by allo­cat­ing gym time to var­i­ous coaches, for which sub­stan­tial exces­sive demand exists.

Dur­ing that time, espe­cially dur­ing our first sea­son as a coach, we coined an adage, that we never mind repeating:

There is no bet­ter place to see the Fallen Nature of Man than Catholic school sports.

Of course, there is noth­ing spe­cial about the ‘Catholic’ part of school sports. The sen­ti­ment expressed above, like the Fallen Nature of Man, is far more uni­ver­sal than parochial schools. How­ever, we think it appeals to both anti-​Catholics, who mis­tak­enly think that it is another exam­ple of Catholic hypocrisy, and devout Catholics, who know that it is, in fact, a cen­tral tenet of the reli­gion. (That we can be saved despite our behav­ior is the remark­able thing. Actu­ally, you know that every­one thinks that the fact that oth­ers, despite their behav­ior, can be saved is the truly remark­able part.)

We wish we knew enough Latin to trans­late our adage because we think it would be an excel­lent motto for many dio­ce­ses to adopt. Yeah, we real­ize there is lit­tle chance of that hap­pen­ing, but think how highly you, dear reader, regard­less of your beliefs, would con­sider a bishop who adopted such a motto for sports.

Tonight we had a con­ver­sa­tion with a friend in another town about their involve­ment as an ath­letic admin­is­tra­tor, and that exchange allowed us to derive a corol­lary, which will present below. The friend relayed a recent tele­phone con­ver­sa­tion with a par­ent who wanted to rail about a coach. The par­ent began to com­plain, and towards the abrupt end of the con­ver­sa­tion, our friend cor­rected the par­ent by stat­ing the par­ent was mis­in­formed and by explain­ing what actu­ally happened.

When we heard that we were reminded of Gilda Radner’s char­ac­ter, Emily Litella, on the old Sat­ur­day Night Live show dur­ing the late 1970s. (We thought the show was funny back then, but we’re not sure nowa­days if it truly was or if we were just young and stu­pid and with no taste. Does any­one know if the show is still on tele­vi­sion?) Per Wikipedia, she gave angry and mis­in­formed edi­to­r­ial replies on SNL’s ‘Week­end Update.’ When told of her mis­take by one of the ‘news­cast­ers,’ she would apol­o­gize and say, “Nevermind.”)

After hang­ing up, we sent a mes­sage with a corol­lary of our adage. (Can adages – like the­o­rems – can have corol­lar­ies? It’s meant to be humor­ous, any­way, so who cares!) So here’s our corollary:

You can work, vol­un­teer, live, pray, and play besides folks, (you may, in fact, already know that they are com­plete slime balls) but you can­not deter­mine the true depth of their butthead­ness until closely involved with their kids and sports.

Sad (and funny) but true.

The other remark­able thing worth men­tion­ing is that through­out the coun­try, there are tens of thou­sands of (gen­er­ally) semi-​gray and semi-​wrinkled vol­un­teers who are will­ing – usu­ally as politely as pos­si­ble – to soothe and/​or rep­ri­mand those who behave child­ishly. Most don’t sign up for it but still do it when they learn its their respon­si­bil­ity. We project – in a strict psy­cho­log­i­cal sense – and joke that they do it as penance: per­haps con­sciously, per­haps not.

Seri­ously, thank God for them and God bless them as they do their gen­er­ally unno­ticed and under-​appreciated work of attempt­ing to help par­ents grow up. We don’t think that it is an over­state­ment to say their efforts help keep soci­ety func­tion­ing, and they most cer­tainly help keep it civil.

Or, It’s Hard to Win an Argu­ment against Fools!

For a vari­ety of rea­sons, we haven’t posted much lately. That is par­tially due to the fact that we have been extremely busy with both revenue-​generating activ­i­ties and non-​profit, vol­un­teer activities.

One of those activ­i­ties involves mit­i­gat­ing the effects of a decent-​sized mess cre­ated by oth­ers. (What other kind of mess is there, we joke?)

While pon­der­ing the effects of that effort, we thought of an inter­est­ing apho­rism; how­ever, as yet, we’re not sure if our cur­rent phras­ing is as pithy as we’d like. This one’s along the lines that “noth­ing is fool­proof because fools are so ingen­u­ous.” (We first felt the sting of that one many years ago when writ­ing Lotus 1−2−3 macros for com­mer­cial bankers. “How could they do that to my beau­ti­ful pro­gram!” we would fre­quently whine – with just cause.)

Now, our recent efforts made us real­ize that: ignor­ing good luck, it takes less wit (and guile and clev­er­ness) to defeat the efforts of a wor­thy oppo­nents than it does to defeat the con­certed efforts of (a group of) unwor­thy ones.

Of course, we’re using the word ‘oppo­nent’ to sig­nify some­one with an dif­fer­ent pre­ferred out­comes (than one’s own) but not nec­es­sar­ily a sworn enemy for life. We have in mind col­leagues or co-​workers or co-​volunteers. One is most likely to observe such an out­come in a civil sit­u­a­tion, but for what we have in mind, the phrase “civil dis­course” gives too much credit to the other side.

We think it’s true because it is eas­ier to argue against a rea­son­able or thought­ful person’s posi­tion than it is to rebut the impulses and non sequiturs of shal­low, incon­sid­er­ate folks. The lat­ter are no-​win sit­u­a­tions. How does one argue against impulses, non sequiturs, or well-​known fal­lac­ies held dear as truth? Ah, if we knew that we’d attempt to share it with like-​minded Sen­a­tors and Con­gress­man as they try to pre­vent nation­al­iza­tion of health care. Given that, maybe one corol­lary should be: it takes less wit (and guile and clev­er­ness) to defeat the efforts of a wor­thy, intel­li­gent oppo­nent than it does to defeat a gov­ern­ment bureau­cracy.

Epi­logue: by the way, we started think­ing along these lines when we were explain­ing a sit­u­a­tion to a rea­son­able friend. We’re were relay­ing to him a con­ver­sa­tion with another per­son, in which we attempted to per­suade that party to change their deci­sion, which had quite messy impli­ca­tions. As we explained to our friend, our posi­tion was well-​reasoned, and our adversary’s posi­tion was not. If the dis­cus­sion were about the best defense to use in a par­tic­u­lar bas­ket­ball game, the other person’s posi­tion would be equiv­a­lent to, “we’re going to play zone defense today because it’s going to rain tomorrow.”

Our friend, being a bright, rea­son­able per­son – if a bit naïve – agreed with us and remarked that, “Well, what you said makes sense. So, they lis­tened to you and changed their mind, right?” We remarked that, sadly, no. Our friend’s con­clu­sion that we were suc­cess­ful was wrong, and our expla­na­tion to him was depress­ingly sim­ple: with­out our help, the third party had made a deci­sion based upon irrel­e­vant facts and had ignored rel­e­vant impli­ca­tions; so, why would they bend to rea­son when it was explained to them? They wouldn’t and they didn’t. Yeah, as the sub­ti­tle reads, it’s hard to win an argu­ment against fools.

P.S. We’re not writ­ing about folks with a deep under­stand­ing of game the­ory or what­ever, who are try­ing to act stu­pid or behave irra­tionally as a strat­egy. Some­times it’s use­ful and wealth-​maximizing to play dumb, but that’s a dif­fer­ent story for another day.

What’s Up with that?

We actu­ally mean the absence of fat kids.

On the sports page of today’s edi­tion of The Wall Street Jour­nal, there’s a very small blurb that men­tions that 22% of the play­ers in the NFL weigh more than 300 pounds. Of course, because many of them are giants, so they’re not nec­es­sar­ily overweight.

How­ever, that fact reminded us of an obser­va­tion that we made a few years ago, and that we were reminded of recently in another set­ting. We’ll let the reader draw his or her own conclusions.

This month, we’re assist­ing at an after-​school bas­ket­ball camp for third-​graders. Recently, we were demon­strat­ing and the kids were prac­tic­ing ball-​handling skills, includ­ing one where each per­son has a ball and revolves it around his or her waist as fast as pos­si­ble – sev­eral times one way and then the other. Given the size of the ball and the short­ness of their third-​grade arms, it’s not easy for most of them to do.

We shouted – we’re good at that – for them to “suck in their stom­achs” (to pro­vide a bit of clear­ance) when we noticed that there wasn’t much in the way of stom­achs to “suck in.” There were no over­weight kids – not even any chubby kids. So, “suck­ing in” their stom­achs wouldn’t do much good. To us, it looked very much like a rep­re­sen­ta­tive group of eight– and nine-​year olds from any income class from the 1970’s or earlier.

Now, based upon our obser­va­tions of the locals, there is (1) noth­ing spe­cial about that grade in our parochial school of about 550 kinder­garten through eighth-​graders, and (2) based upon the kids in the neigh­bor­hood, the pub­lic ele­men­tary school isn’t very dif­fer­ent nor is the local pubic high school. We attribute that to the fact that most kids are pushed to do some­thing, and we cite the recent pop­u­lar­ity of crew as evi­dence. (We joke that a great slo­gan is: “Crew: when you’ve given up on play­ing sports.”) For another exam­ple, the school hosts a sports ban­quet for sev­enth and eighth-​graders, and of approx­i­mately 120 chil­dren in those grades, only a hand­ful of chil­dren – usu­ally two or three – aren’t eli­gi­ble to attend because they haven’t played a sport at school. Often those non-​attendees play other sports that aren’t offered by the school, like tennis.

Any­way, almost all the kids are pushed to play some­thing (and, of course, they’re pushed to do a vari­ety of other things, too: aca­d­e­mics, vol­un­teer and char­i­ta­ble activ­i­ties, etc.)

All of this occurs about twenty miles away from the heart of the city in what seems to be a sleepy (and rel­a­tively afflu­ent) exurb/​suburb. The key word is rel­a­tively. There are a few absolutely wealthy fam­i­lies but not in our neigh­bor­hood or street, nor, unfor­tu­nately, in our house.

Now, the rea­son that we’re writ­ing is that the bas­ket­ball drill reminded us of a related obser­va­tion that we made a few years ago when we coached middle-​school bas­ket­ball for girls. Our sec­tion was com­prised of parochial schools located at var­i­ous dis­tances from the cen­ter of the city and ours was about the far­thest away. (They were all in the same gen­eral direction.)

What we noticed was that on aver­age, the girls were thin­ner the far­ther they lived from the city. The inner-​city schools had a rather high per­cent­age of obese chil­dren and the per­cent­age and aver­age weight/​height ratio seemed to decrease as one moved out­ward to the near, mid– and far sub­urbs. In our quad­rant, our casual empiri­cism would argue that afflu­ence is pos­i­tively cor­re­lated with the dis­tance from the city. As such, we don’t think dis­tance is the key vari­able, but it serves as a use­ful proxy for wealth. In other words, aver­age weight (when adjusted for height or not) is a decreas­ing func­tion of wealth or income.

Now, obvi­ously the rela­tion­ship would hold for only a rel­e­vant range of dis­tances and the cor­rect term for the func­tion might be non-​increasing, not decreas­ing and clearly it’s not deter­min­is­tic. (Oth­er­wise, those in dis­tant rural areas might weigh noth­ing or some­thing negative.)

Any­way, we think the fol­low­ing graph cap­tures the rela­tion­ship we observed.

There are many, many assump­tions in our graph, which is a draw­ing, not a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of cal­cu­la­tions. It is not based on any­thing other than casual obser­va­tions, i.e, other than our own child we don’t know the height or weight of any other. More­over, there are huge vari­a­tions in wealth within com­mu­ni­ties, and unlike pub­lic schools (in our region), chil­dren can attend Catholic schools wher­ever their par­ents choose to send them. That just means that there could be social and/​or com­mu­nity effects, etc. Also, the rela­tion­ship between dis­tance and wealth need not hold for other direc­tions away from this city and likely doesn’t hold in other cities where many wealthy peo­ple actu­ally live in the down­town area.

As we men­tioned above, other than infer­ring there is no gen­eral short­age of calo­ries in the USA, we’ll let the reader drawn his or her own conclusions.

The Wall Street Journal’s web site has an arti­cle, Drunken-​Driving Arrests Jump Among Women. The study cov­ers the years between 1998 and 2007 and finds that arrests of women were about 29% per­cent higher in 2007 than in 1998.

Accord­ing to the arti­cle, when asked, here is what Laura Dean-​Mooney, pres­i­dent of Moth­ers Against Drunk Dri­ving, had to say, “There’s no hard data on that. What you’re hear­ing more is that women are under more pres­sure, they’re now per­haps the bread­win­ner because of the unem­ploy­ment rate.”

Indeed, the unem­ploy­ment rate is over nine per­cent this year, but it was about 4.6% in 2007, which was the last year of the study. Accord­ing this report, the over­all rate was 4.5% in 1998, but because dif­fer­ent method­olo­gies were used, the two rates aren’t strictly com­pa­ra­ble. The rate for women was 4.5% in 2007 – not much of a dif­fer­ence from 1998.

Sorry Ms. Dean-​Mooney, but unless the quote was taken out-​of-​context, it’s non­sen­si­cal and stupid.

Spe­cial Treat­ment for Vol­un­teers and Donors

We like the new tele­vi­sion show Royal Pains because much of the pilot episode rang so true with us.

If you haven’t seen it, we’ll explain why.

Dur­ing the episode, a for­mer emergency-​room physi­cian, Dr. Hank, serendip­i­tously becomes a concierge physi­cian in the Hamptons. He is a for­mer emergency-​room physi­cian because dur­ing the first few min­utes of the show he was fired by the admin­is­tra­tor of a New York City hospital.

He was fired by the admin­is­tra­tor because he fol­lowed pro­to­col – i.e., did the right thing – and treated a young man who was in more des­per­ate need of care than one of the hospital’s largest donors, who hap­pened to be in the emer­gency room at the same time. As luck would have it, the wealthy donor had an unex­pected set­back and died and Hank was fired. Again, it seems that both morally and accord­ing to the hospital’s estab­lished pro­to­col, Hank did the right thing (for hoi pol­loi, at least).

It’s not clear whether the donor would have sur­vived had Hank devoted his atten­tion to the man, but clearly Hank was fired for not giv­ing spe­cial atten­tion to him, which, it seems, would have been at the expense of the younger man.

Dona­tions or Transactions?

The episode is too sketchy to deter­mine whether the dead donor would have expected spe­cial treat­ment or whether he would have demanded it had he been con­scious, but in real life, many want some­thing for their donations.

That quid pro quo is okay – and some­times under­stand­able – how­ever, such con­tri­bu­tions should not be con­fused with charity.

We’re not par­tic­u­larly naïve about the fallen nature of man, but in cer­tain set­tings we’re still shocked when we see egre­gious, self-​serving behav­ior thinly dis­guised in a veil of char­ity and philanthropy.

As such, although we don’t like much about income taxes, we do like the fact that to deter­mine the deductible por­tion of the con­tri­bu­tion, the IRS requires that the value of din­ners, ser­vices, or prod­ucts pro­vided be sub­tracted from the contribution.

We wish there were a way to cal­cu­late the option value of such con­tri­bu­tions so that the expected value of a pos­si­ble future request could also be sub­tracted from the con­tri­bu­tion (to deter­mine the net, expected value that could be attrib­uted to good inten­tions.) We won­der whether that amount is usu­ally pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive. Whether the sac­ri­fice involves cash, time, or effort, it’s not self­less char­ity if you expect some­thing in return. More­over, whether good deeds count or not depends upon your par­tic­u­lar beliefs; how­ever, we think that motives mat­ter, too.

Spe­cial Accom­mo­da­tions for Me, not Thee

Slightly – but only slightly – less egre­gious than those seek­ing quid pro quo for their “dona­tions” are those who vol­un­teer thier time and effort but seek spe­cial accom­mo­da­tions and arrange­ments and favors not granted to other volunteers.

Again, we’re shocked – but no longer sur­prised – by such behavior.

It cer­tainly behooves char­i­ta­ble and other not-​for-​profit orga­ni­za­tions to min­i­mize the bur­den placed upon vol­un­teers, espe­cially if there are no sub­sti­tutes for the time and effort (and, say, blood). How­ever, the admin­is­tra­tors of most not-​for-​profits under­stand that fact, and already attempt to mit­i­gate that bur­den in the opti­mal, sys­tem­atic fash­ion. (We’re not argu­ing that they always get it right.)

You should note that not grant­ing a spe­cial priv­i­lege to you – despite all that you do – may be the best way to main­tain the long-​term effi­ciency of the orga­ni­za­tion. (There are few secrets.) So, don’t take it per­son­ally. Rec­og­nize the poten­tial dam­age or cost if other vol­un­teers were given the same priv­i­lege. (You know how others are fallen and would want or demand what you got if they knew about it.)

Also, please note the sub­jec­tive nature of the assess­ment if you con­clude that your time, efforts, and inter­est are more valu­able than sim­i­lar con­tri­bu­tions made by oth­ers (so that only you deserve spe­cial con­sid­er­a­tion). It’s prob­a­bly the case that oth­ers have drawn the same con­clu­sion about their own efforts.

Penul­ti­mately real­ize that, per Clare Boothe Luce, “No good deed goes unpun­ished.” So, why should you expect more than the sat­is­fac­tion of know­ing that you did the right thing.

Finally, please note that we con­sider this post’s title to be an excel­lent dou­ble entendre.

In the pre­vi­ous post, we men­tioned today’s brief edi­to­r­ial, The Right and Wrong Stuff, in The Wall Street Journal com­par­ing the eight years of progress between the time of Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s famous moon speech and the actual moon land­ing with the nearly eight years of very lim­ited progress in con­struc­tion at Ground Zero from ⁹⁄₁₁ until today. The edi­tors right­fully call the present cir­cum­stances a national disgrace.

We think that one of the rea­sons we like the com­par­i­son is that we’ve made sim­i­lar ones in the past.

We’ve heard about many cor­po­rate projects and ini­tia­tives that through lack of will or direc­tion or com­pe­tence take far longer to accom­plish (or merely end) than they should. When we’ve expe­ri­enced those sit­u­a­tions we’ve asked: (1) do you know that the Allies planned and launched D-​Day in less time than it’s taken for to get this project mov­ing, and (2) do you know that the U.S. and its allies defeated Ger­many and Japan in less time than this project has been alive?

Think about that the next time you waste away your day and life in a sta­tus meet­ing for an upcom­ing soft­ware con­ver­sion. (How many soft­ware revi­sions and gen­er­a­tions has the con­ver­sion lasted.)

Senior man­agers may want to con­sider what mech­a­nisms and poli­cies they’ve enacted that makes such lacks of progress accept­able tac­tics. Oh, it’s not your fault because you’re not directly involved? Are you sure it’s not?

We did noth­ing to deserve it, but we are very grate­ful to have been born in the United States. (Granted, that was tem­pered by being born near Pitts­burgh, but we write that qual­i­fi­ca­tion mainly in jest.) In fact, we doubt that we did any­thing prior to our birth to deserve it, and haven’t done much since that day to be wor­thy of cit­i­zen­ship, but, hey, we do tend to pay our taxes on time and under-​utilize our share of gov­ern­ment ser­vices. (That has to count for some­thing and likely makes us some sort of oppressed minority.)

One need read no more than the first Opin­ion page in today’s edi­tion of The Wall Street Jour­nal to get some indi­ca­tion of the enor­mity of our geo­graph­i­cal luck. In a pre­vi­ous post, we men­tioned L. Gor­don Crovitz’s col­umn on Chi­nese cen­sor­ship and the com­plic­ity of west­ern firms, which is at the top of the page. Glad we’re not there.

There’s also a col­umn about prob­lems in South Amer­ica that is in the mid­dle of the page. Glad we’re not there.

Finally, there is a short essay about Iran at the bot­tom of the page: Iran and the Tragedy of Bad Ideas by Andrew Kla­van. Glad we’re not there, too.

It is a very, very good essay. Mr. Kla­van writes about a movie, “The Ston­ing of Soraya M.” and why he found it to be so com­pelling. He explains why it shouldn’t be com­pelling, e.g., given the title, there’s not much sus­pense. More­over, she was inno­cent; so, it is no sat­is­fac­tion or jus­tice when pun­ish­ment is meted out.

Instead, Mr. Kla­van writes how one woman’s sense­less exe­cu­tion rep­re­sents all that is wrong with that nation’s gov­ern­ment and that cul­ture, and that is what he finds so grip­ping. We think the fact that such an appalling event occurred only 23 years ago and still occurs today is what strength­ens the movie’s grip on the viewer. Yes, it is a “tragedy of bad ideas” although “ideas” is an overly gen­er­ous term to describe the impulses, urges, and ten­den­cies that would per­mit such transgressions.

So, as we go to eat din­ner, and thank God for our bless­ings, we’ll also to remem­ber to thank Him for our geo­graph­i­cal good fortune.

*Except, pos­si­bly the malicious.

There’s an op-​ed piece in today’s edi­tion of The Wall Street Jour­nal about some­thing called life­track­ing, Track­ing Life in Graphic Detail. It’s by Chris­tine Rosen, and it’s on the Taste page in the Week­end Jour­nal section.

It seems that many self-​absorbed indi­vid­u­als pub­lish all the details of their lives on the web, includ­ing graphic, sex­ual details and data like their GPS-​location details, too. (We pub­lish our opin­ions to strangers on the web for a vari­ety of rea­sons, includ­ing as a cathar­tic way to spare the fam­ily at the din­ner table. Whether the chil­dren deserve that cour­tesy is much in doubt.)

We sup­pose that such folks who pub­lish those kinds of details are too self-​absorbed to real­ize the risk and poten­tial harm they face from stalk­ers, bur­glars, and other mali­cious per­sons. Think of the human equiv­a­lents of Dig­ger the der­mato­phyte. They do exist and our cul­ture breeds no short sup­ply of them.

So, when you’re blast­ing the details of your oh-​so-​interesting-​life to the world, please real­ize that you may be annoy­ing a psy­chotic ex-​lover, inform­ing a stalker of you con­stant where­abouts or telling the neigh­bor­hood bur­glar that you’re not home. (Yeah, given their fallen natures, we’re deeply sus­pi­cious of men (and some women, too), which is why we believe that it is the Sec­ond Amend­ment that ensures the free­doms promised by the other nine.)

By the way, the pedant in us must take issue with one of Ms. Rosen’s state­ments. She writes: “Enthu­si­asts of life­track­ing com­pare their quest for turn­ing infor­ma­tion into self-​knowledge with the great diary-​keepers of ear­lier eras…” Sorry Ms. Rosen, but as we often write, details are not infor­ma­tion. Other than in a few rare cases or for those indi­vid­u­als who may use such details for the above-​mentioned mali­cious pur­poses, it seems that such self-​reported data are worth­less details that – by def­i­n­i­tion – are ignored and uncon­sid­ered. In that respect, they have sim­i­lar, zero, signal-​to-​noise ratios of most text mes­sages sent by teenagers: see the first three linked posts, espe­cially Tex­ting, Dante and McLuhan.

By the way, there’s another essay on the same page about equally obscene lev­els of self-​absorption. That col­umn is enti­tled, This Boomer Isn’t Going to Apol­o­gize, and it’s by Stephen Moore. Of course, it’s another story about baby-​boomers and how they think the the world should think and care (only?) about them. (Please grow up!)

In his col­umn, Mr. Moore notes the ten­dency at many grad­u­a­tion cer­e­monies this Spring for speak­ers in their fifties and six­ties to apol­o­gize for their generation’s many mis­takes. It seems that, child­ishly, they can’t let their children’s grad­u­a­tions be about the chil­dren. They feel com­pelled to inflict their own feel­ings (and short­com­ings) on their chil­dren and the pro­ceed­ings because it must always and every­where be about them.

While it is a pleas­ant sur­prise to see folks, who are quite old enough to be adults, attempt to take respon­si­bil­ity, we’d pre­fer that they just shut-​up and go away.¹ Because, frankly, it’s not all about you, and as we state in the title, it is the case that nobody cares. Tell it to your priest, but remem­ber, they’re only human and bore eas­ily, too.

Last month, we wrote Let the Girls Play, which was sub­ti­tled, The Problem’s Worse when Coaches Can’t or Won’t Shut-​up.

Here’s another exam­ple of extremely bad coaching.

We recently attended a game in which we noticed that one of the start­ing point guards couldn’t drib­ble with­out look­ing at the ball. When she looked at the ball, she was a fine drib­bler, but unfor­tu­nately, she couldn’t tell when any­one was open on (1) fast breaks or (2) when she was “run­ning the offense” from the top of the key. Because we were sit­ting on the end line, it was quite easy to notice the bad habit every time she brought the ball up the court.

Short passes to other guards weren’t the prob­lem, but hit­ting the open per­son under the hoop was an impos­si­bil­ity unless she had already stopped dribbling.

When we inquired, we learned that the girl – who looked to be about 16 – had the same coach for the past sev­eral years; this upcom­ing sea­son is to be the fourth year in a row. It’s only in those sit­u­a­tions that you real­ize the dif­fi­cult odds that chil­dren face when deal­ing with incom­pe­tence in posi­tions of authority.

Look­ing at the ball while drib­bling is an easy enough prob­lem to fix – almost every six-​year does it, but most 16-​year-​olds don’t – but if your coach (or your par­ent) doesn’t notice, what hope do you have to improve? A bad habit remains a bad habit and becomes some­thing to cling to dur­ing stress­ful episodes, i.e., when the game is to be decided. Clearly, that can lead to bad out­comes for all involved.

What’s worse is that when we asked a few of the play­ers after the game, all were aware of it, but no one would men­tion it. Even the least expe­ri­enced player knew about it, but the coach, who was not young, did not. We sus­pect that at least a few of the girls didn’t men­tion it because it gave them an advan­tage when com­pet­ing against her. We sus­pect that oth­ers imag­ined that the girl wouldn’t take kindly to the criticism.

Yeah, we know, there’s almost a countably-​infinite num­ber of analo­gies in cor­po­rate and polit­i­cal life every sin­gle day. Regard­less, it’s still sad, but then that’s why we’re the pres­i­dent of our own firms.