From the library: Tough Choices by Carly Fiorina

Last updated on: August 23, 2015 at 9:54 pm By Jane the Actuary

By Raysonho @ Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

I’ve posted two excerpts from this book already: a passage on cultural differences, and a passage about women in business, but reading the whole book has been slow going because I haven’t had a lot of down time (or, rather, the down time has been family time). But I’ll present my summary to you, with more excerpts. And, yes, of course, this is Carly Fiorina’s life as she perceives it, and I’m not going to try to second-guess and talk back at her, and will simply say “she did X” rather than “she says that X”. (I do have another book on the reading pile, called The Big Lie, about what went on at HP, and I have a collection of links on my facebook page waiting to be turned into a blog post. But — spoiler alert! — I find the story she tells to be fairly credible.)

Ready? Let’s begin, and please bear with me on the length of this. I tend to approach such books by tearing off little mini-bookmarks and flagging pages as I go, or by marking a few notes and page numbers on my notepaper-bookmark, so my summary will now largely be a matter of flipping through and landing at these page markings. Feel free to refer to her wikipedia biography for more specific dates and details (even in her book, she makes only passing reference to her age and the passing of time).

The book was written in 2006, after her departure from HP, so well prior to her becoming involved in politics, and, while she spends a lot of the later part of the book on her years at HP, slightly more than half the book is devoted to her career up to that point. She covers her childhood in one chapter — the daughter of a law professor whose work necessitated moving often, she developed purposeful strategies for making friends, the simplest of which was simply asking lots of questions to make the “prospect” feel interested-in. She also loved piano, and considered aiming at playing professionally (though, unlike Condoleezza Rice, I can’t find anything online that indicates she continues to play). She covers her college career in the next chapter: she loved her studies in medieval history and philosophy, but graduated having no idea what to do, so she went to law school, but was miserable, and dropped out after the first semester.

Having left law school, she had no idea what to do next (hey, that’s me! except I didn’t become a Fortune 20 CEO). So, in 1976, she took a look at the want ads, and found a job as a receptionist for a small property brokerage firm. Not only did she discover that she enjoyed the work, but the brokers took an interest in her and encouraged her to train to become a broker for their firm, which first gave her reason to believe that she could ultimately work in the world of business. Before that, though, she married and moved with her husband to Italy, where he was doing graduate study; upon their return, she earned her MBA at the University of Maryland, while her husband finished his studies in Washington D.C., and then found work as a management trainee at AT&T, in the days just before the breakup.

Fiorina struggles to find her place, but at the same time she is engaged by her work in the sales department, learning about AT&T’s customers and their needs, and trying to meet those needs. She also tells that sort of “women in business” story that one hopes doesn’t happen any longer, but it did to her: being disinvited from a client meeting she was supposed to attend with her manager who was supposed to transition projects to her, because those clients had asked to meet at a local strip club. Undaunted (well, quite daunted, actually), she forges ahead and attends:

I arrived at the destination, took a deep breath, straightened my bow tie (Dress for Success for Women, a must-read in those days, recommended floppy bows tied at the throat of all blouses) and stepped into The Board Room. It was very dark and very loud. There was a long bar down the right-hand side of the place and a large stage to my left. There was a live act going on with probably ten or more women. My colleagues were sitting as far from the door as possible, and the only way to reach them was to cross in front of that stage. I clutched my briefcase tighter and walked to their table, looking seriously out of place and quite ridiculous.

I was cordial and tried to appear relaxed, tried to sound knowledgeable about BIA business, and desperately tried to ignore what was going on all around me. David was in high spirits and really didn’t have much interest in working. He was slugging back gin and tonic and kept calling the women over to dance on top of the table. The other men were either amused or slightly embarrassed, but no one tried to stop him. In a show of empathy that brings tears to my eyes still, each woman who approached the table would look the situation over and say, “Sorry, gentlemen. Not till the lady leaves.”

Now, it turned out, David was an alcoholic, but they developed a good working relationship, based on his knowledge and client relationships, and her ability to learn. She moved to new teams, became a manager, and learned about other areas of the business, all the while getting promoted and having authority over increasing numbers of people. All the while, she describes her experiences learning about managing and leadership not so much in terms of finances, or P&L, as working with others, doing right by them (and defending them against colleagues who are abusive, even if just verbally abusive), but at the same time motivating them to achieve their potential, and holding them to account. She also describes pursuing a major sale, in which she had to push the individual in charge of the account, who appeared almost indifferent to the task at hand, and ultimately brought in considerable resources and executives support, and ultimately had her first experience of having to fire an employee. She learns about the importance of strategy, but also experienced corruption — they lost a major government contract, successfully appealed (as is apparently possible), and along the way learned that the decision-makers had been bribed.

In the meantime, she discovered that her husband had been cheating on her, they divorced, and she remarried. Frank, her new husband, had two daughters from a prior marriage; they never had children together, though because of infertility not intentional childlessness.

She also, being groomed for greater things, is sponsored to attend MIT for a master of science in management under the Sloan Fellows program, and describes her experiences as energizing and the coursework engaging; she mentions specifically such topics as game theory, systems thinking, and organizational psychology, and she later references what she learned. When she returned to AT&T, she moved to Network Systems, the manufacturing side of the company, with a vaguely defined role related to strategy and international business — the director of International Strategy and Business Development. It’s here that her story about negotiations in Italy comes in; she also travels to Korea and learns about Korean customs (and later Japan and China), including the focus on entertaining and drinking with clients.

Over the years I would participate in many drinking rituals in Korea, Japan, and China. I would learn to prepare myself mentally, to prepare myself physically by eating the right kinds of foods ahead of time, and to toss liquor straight back in my throat, not sip it, so that the alcohol is absorbed more slowly into the system.

I came to appreciate these rituals. I made good friends in China because of them. It is true that trust, respect, and shared experience make it easier to do business. It is true that participating in others’ customs lays foundations for common understanding.

One “cultural tradition”, however, she refuses to participate in — as she describes a meeting in Brazil with government ministers, at which it becomes clear to her that she’s expected to bribe those officials, and the local management intends to do so; she acts to have him fired.

In addition to her travels, she also learns to take this undefined role and build a team, work with them to develop a strategy, and motivate them to apply the strategy. She isn’t afraid to set up silly-seeming challenges to encourage her team to meet their goals. (Side comment here: one of my failings in my work life is that I just can’t get myself deeply interested in what’s going on in the wider company. Fiorina, in contrast, in her story, cares deeply about how well she and her team do, not simply as a matter of getting the bonus or the next raise or promotion, but really exudes a feeling of mission far more than the trite “mission statement.”)

And along the way, Network Systems is spun off into Lucent Technologies, and she is thrust into the lead role in the spin-off. “Our enthusiasm about our new company and our new mission was obvious to anyone who listened to us.”

The road show was a mind-numbering three weeks of eight presentations a day. And yet I loved every minutes of it — the intense pleasure of the seamless team that Henry, Jim and I became, the thrill of doing something for the very first time, the excitement of talking about something I believed in so deeply, the knowledge that we were building a company right before our very eyes.

Fiorina continues to hold high-ranking executive positions at Lucent until, in February 1999, she is recruited by HP; after a long series of interviews, she is hired for the job.

Why did HP select an outsider CEO? Because HP was stuck in a rut.

HP lacked, and desperately needed, an external focus on customers and competitors; that time was not on our side, and a sense of urgency was required; and that synergy was the key to unlocking the unique value of the Hewlett-Packard Company.

She says that the vaunted “HP way” was used as an excuse for slacking off, and that the tradition of temporary pay cuts during economic downturns had gone too far, not firing anyone ever, no matter how poorly they performed. She describes a business structure in which each entity within the company, and there were many, basically ran their business wholly independently, so much so that multiple sales teams called on clients with no clue as to what the others were doing; multiple research projects were developing similar items, etc. Even the CFO didn’t have any line of sight as to the financial results until the CFOs of the business units completed all their reporting and sent it in. She describes a research project at HP Labs called Cool Town, which impressed her as deeply innovative, but was slated to be shut down because none of the business units were interested in something that integrated capabilities from multiple units.

There was also a serious lack of marketing, and 150 brands rather than a single unified HP brand.

She was brought in with a mission to reshape HP, and the layoffs that later occurred were a part of this process. While, on paper, a “forced ranking” system had existed, in practice all employees had been ranked highly, so her imposition of such a system was not new so much as insisting on following through on a previously-established system. (Another side note: I do oppose such “forced ranking” systems in which the bottom 5% or 10% is continually canned, and I’m not sure, from Fiorina’s description, if that’s what happened here, vs. a matter of removing those who were genuinely poor performers and consolidating duplicate roles.)

At the same time, though she faced resistance from employees who didn’t want change, she made extensive efforts to meet with employees, and increase employee communication company-wide, rather than just silo-by-silo, even developing an intranet system where none had existed.

In the meantime, much as she wanted to be treated as “a CEO who happens to be a woman,” she couldn’t escape the “woman CEO” notoriety, worsened by not coming from a tech background.

From my first until my last day at HP, I was criticized both for being in the press too much and for being unavailable to the press. From the first stories of my hiring until the last of my firing, both the language and the intensity of the coverage were different for me than for any other CEO It was more personal, with much more commentary about my personality and my physical appearance, my dress, my hair or my shoes. That first week, the editor of BusinessWeek came to see me with the beat reporter because they’d been working on a story for several months. Hewlett-Packard was going to be the cover story whether we liked it or not, and everyone recommended that I talk with them. Before we’d even sat down, the very first question from the editor was “Is that an Armani suit you’re wearing?”

Vanity Fair, despite being warned numerous times that they were writing fiction about me, continued to report that I traveled constantly with a hairdersser and a makeup artist. There was a persistent rumor, bolstered by commentary in the local press, that I’d built a pink marble bathroom in my office. (I had actually moved into my predecessor’s office and neither built nor bought anything for it.) There were no private bathrooms or even doors in executive offices. The CEOs of Lucent, Cisco, IBM, Dell, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Compaq, Oracle, GE, 3M, Dupont and son on all flew in corporate jets, and HP had owned them for thirty years. Nevertheless, my travel on a company plane was reported as evidence of my disrespect for the HP Way, my “regal” nature, my “distance” from employees.

Along the way, by the way, she cites several times, her favorite Lao Tzu quote:

A good leader is he whom men revere. An evil leader is he whom men despise. A great leader is he of whom the people say, “We did it ourselves.”

So she begins making changes. Along the way, some board members and other executives get cold feet, and she has to persuade them to stay the course.

Early on, “toward the end of 2000,”, discussions begin about acquiring Compaq, as a way of remedying competitive deficiencies with the company. She doesn’t initiate this, but instead another executive raises the idea with her, and, in fact, the CEO of Compaq even visits and proposes an acquisition. The board deliberated the acquisition extensively but they approved it, and it was announced on September 4, 2001, unknowably terrible timing. What’s more, shortly after the announcement, Walter Hewlett, son of the founding Hewlett, changed his mind, announced his opposition, and convinced the Hewlett and Packard families and foundations to oppose the acquisition in the proxy vote. Employees who were opposed to the changes Fiorina was making allied with him, and Hewlett even conducted bogus “surveys” of employees to prove their opposition.

The media took up the story and positioned it as one of CEO greed. Accusations were levied that she had handpicked board members, when, in fact, with one exception, they hired her, not the reverse. In the end, the proxy fight was won, but not without a lot of unpleasantness, and she set to work with integration. There were growing pains, but by 2003-2004, the company is strong, profitable, and innovative.

It is no exaggeration to say I routinely worked twelve- or fourteen-hour days, slept little and thought always about HP. It is also impossible to overstate my deep satisfaction with what we’d accomplished as 2004 drew to a close . . .

The only clouds on the horizon were the press and the stock price. These were not insignificant, but I believed that the strong performance we would deliver over the coming year would take care of both in time. . . . The year 2005 was going to be the payoff year for all the grueling work since July of 1999.

So what went wrong?

Board politics started to become an issue. Three board members proposed, out of nowhere, a plan for wholly reorganizing the company. Board members wanted to re-instate a member who had left a short time ago at the mandatory retirement age, as a personal favor to him. On other issues, due, board members began to disagree and, after a extensive three-day meeting, she learned that reports of their confidential discussions had been leaked to the Wall Street Journal. All board members later denied having done so, and Fiorina, not seeing the urgency, determines that outside counsel would investigate, and a short time later, Larry Sosini (who I think is the lawyer, but I’ve lost track) reported to the board that he’s confirmed there were at least two, maybe three, leakers. The board had also simply become dysfunctional on other ways.

A further board meeting was scheduled, in February, this time in Chicago to avoid media speculation. She prepared an extended speech (which she reprinted in the book), which she read. Then the board dismissed her, and left her waiting for 3 hours, and they all left, too, with only two members waiting when she was summoned to return, to tell her that she’d been fired.

What happened? Had the board responded to the stock price drop? To these changes within the board and the divisions which had appeared? The vote was divided; and the ouster occured on a one-vote margin.

And here ends her story. Thanks for sticking with me! Next: her follow-up book, with what happened next.

Reading Carly Fiorina, on cultural differences

Last updated on: August 17, 2015 at 9:13 pm By Jane the Actuary

From Tough Choices (FYI: written in 2006, well before HRC’s Hard Choices), chronicling an experience as a rising manager at AT&T in her early 30s. It’s a long excerpt (and from the library copy, not just copy/pasted from an electronic version) but interesting as a tidbit about Fiorina and for its own sake.

Our relationship with Italtel [a joint venture partner in Italy] and their parent, STET, had reached an impasse. We were trying to negotiate a change in our respective ownership positions, and we were deadlocked. Our day-to-day operating relationships were becoming frayed as a result, hurting our collective efforts in the marketplace. I was asked to take over the negotiations. I had lived in Italy and spoke Italian; what had been a lark then became an important asset.

I knew that Italians, like many people, place high value on protocol. I was more junior than the executives I would be negotiating with, both in title and in age. Although I certainly could have demanded that they travel to the United States, given our ownership position, it would have been disrespectful. I would go to them, and they would set the agenda for how we would proceed through negotiations. I asked them to send me their proposed agenda in advance of my trip so that I could be adequately prepared.

The agenda I received was meticulous in its allocation of time. When we would start, when we would take a break and when we would conclude our discussions were all alid out for each of two days. The food at each break and meal was detailed in a complete menu. I knew in advance what we would be having at each coffee break, the wine we would be drinking at lunch and the sauce that would accompany the pasta. Left out completely was the substance of what we would discuss This same pattern would be repeated for six months. I would ask for an agenda in advance, and I would receive a timetable and a complete menu — and nothing more. At first I thought Id failed to communicate. Later I thought it was a negotiating tactic. Finally, I came to understand that for these Italians, productive discussions required personal relationships. Personal relationships took time to develop and were built while eating and drinking around a table together. After quite a lot of time together, and a great deal of fabulous Italian food and wine, we had made substantial progress and had agreed upon a change in our ownership positions.

STET was the government entity that owned the Italian telephone companies as well as Italtel. As such, our negotiations encompassed network services and systems issues. From my perspective, this meant that both AT&T Long Lines and Network Systems had interests in these discussions, so I was representing both of them. When I wasn’t negotiating in Italy, I was negotiating in New Jersey, trying to find a solution that would satisfy all parties. We had achieved this accord, but now an executive vice president from Long Lines decided to come to Rome to solidify his part of the deal we’d reached.

His first mistake was to pick a date that was convenient for him because it occurred in the middle of an already planned visit to Europe Unfortunately, it coincided with one of the many national holidays in Italy. When our STET counterparts objected to the date, the EVP’s staff sent word back that this was a crucial meeting and the only time possible. The Italians canceled their holiday out of respect for this executive vice president — whom they had never met. When he arrived, he brought with him some staff memebers he hadn’t warned them about. This was his second mistake.

We sat at a square table in a conference room. The AT&T executive sat opposite the Italians. He said STET was an important partner, and he appreciated the meeting. I believe he sincerely meant it, but from the Italians’ point of view, everything he did contradicted those words. He read from a set of notes. He rarely made eye contact. He didn’t engage in social chitchat. He talked a great deal about the purpose of his broader trip and the relationships he was crafting with other partners. When an hour had passed, he indicated that the meeting was over. He said he had no time to join his STET counterpart out on the terrace to enjoy the view of Rome and the Vatican along with a glass of wine. And this last mistake only added to the disastrous nature of the meeting he had just conducted. It wasn’t the substance of what he’d said that was the problem. It was how he’d said it, how he’d behaved, and how he’d treated them.

When the executive and his entourage had departed, the Italians exploded. I had never seen them angry like this before. I tried in vain to calm them down and focus them on the substance of his words, but they were insulted in the extreme. All the progress we had worked so hard to achieve vanished. They declared that they could not do business with a company that behaved int his way, and they would have to “reconsider” our agreements. We spent many more months trying to regain lost ground; but it was never the same again, and the agreement we’d had eluded us. The agreement we eventually achieved was less advantageous to AT&T, and we’d lost a lot of time. (p. 94 – 95)

Now, I’ve read before that in Asia (e.g., Japan, Korea) personal relationships are key, but when I shared this story with my husband, he said that in his experience (and he’s gaining a lot of experience lately in global business) it’s the U.S. that’s the outlier, not Asia.

What do you think?

Two quotes on violence

Last updated on: August 15, 2015 at 6:52 pm By Jane the Actuary

From Under the Same Sky, by Joseph Kim, the memoir of life in North Korea I wrote about a couple days ago:

I started kindergarten that year and met my first school friends — and my first mean kids, too. In North Korea, when you go to school, you aren’t ranked academically, but by your ability to fight. Literally. I can tell you who was the number-one boy in my first-grade class, and the number seven — and the numbers refer to only one thing: how good a battler you are, as judged by your classmates. The schools encouraged this kind of thinking: for example, when a child fails to show up for class, the teacher doesn’t call the parents and ask about the absence (to begin with, there are no phones). Instead, she sends a group of the toughest students to yell at the kid. Sometimes they even beat the boy until he agrees to come back. (p. 10)

From German Boy, by Wolfgang W.E. Samuel, which I’m in the middle of reading now (though I might set this aside, as I just checked out Fiorina’s Tough Choices from the library), recounting the author’s signing up for the Jungvolk (the organization for ages 10 – 13, prior to joining the Hitler Jungend) in April 1945:

“How old are you?” he screamed into my face. I was terrified of him.

“Ten,” I said in a whisper. “I am ten years old.”

“When did you turn ten?” He continued shouting loudldy.

“The second of February.” I knew I was in deep trouble. It was April. He came around the counter and stopped in front of me with anger lighting up his eyes.

“You little swine,” he said in a lowered tone of voice. “Why didn’t you come and register in February when you turned ten? Don’t you like the Hitler Youth? Maybe this little swine doesn’t like us.” He was shouting again, laughing loudly, and mimicking surprise by throwing his arms in the air. My tormentor turned to face his fellow Hitler Youths behind the counter. No one responded to his act. Others were yelling at a pair of unfortunates like me whom I had not seen as I entered.

As he turned back toward me, I quickly said, “I am a Flüchtling [refugee]. I couldn’t register in February. I wasn’t here.”

“Fill out this form,” he said in an almost civil tone of voice, handing me a stubby, dull pencil and a form. . . . As I got to the door and was about to reach for the handle I muttered an embarrassed “Heilitler,” slurring the words as I always had in the past when I used the embarrassing greeting. . . .

A fist smashed into the right side of my head, downward across my face. I fell to my knees on the dirty wooden floor. My nose bled profusely. Blood dripped onto the raw unpainted floorboards. I was both stunned and confused. I got back on my feet and looked around frantically, trying to figure out who had hit me, and raised my arms in front of my face to defend myself against further blows. I was close to tears, but I didn’t cry. I couldn’t let them see me cry, and I wanted out of this awful place. I wanted my mother. Several Hitler Youths gathered around me, shouting and screaming. They had not heard me give the German greeting loudly enough and with sufficient respect for the Führer. (p. 84 ff.)

This is one small scene from the book, which mostly recounts the postwar years, but it fits which another book I read some years ago, which describes the Hitler Youth not in line with the Leni Reifenstahl image of happily marching blond boys, but awash in bullying and brutality.

Now, I don’t have a big point to make, but I was struck by these two passages and thought they merited sharing.

From the library: Under the Same Sky, by Joseph Kim

Last updated on: January 26, 2016 at 7:44 pm By Jane the Actuary

To begin with: a pet peeve. Many years ago, I read a book called A Mother’s Ordeal, by Steven Mosher. The topic was forced abortion in China, told from the vantage point of someone who was both perpetrator, eyewitness to babies being aborted just as their mothers went into labor, and victim — having later come to the U.S. with her husband on his student visa, a pregnancy brought demands by the Chinese government to abort, and, ultimately, a successful asylum claim. The narrator also experienced the famine as a child and the Cultural Revolution as a teenager, and, if memory serves, was sent to the countryside and clawed her way back.

In the introduction, Mosher says this (paraphrased): “I helped Chi An in her asylum claim, and she told me her life story in detail. To better tell the story, I chose to write in the first person.” In the year 2015? You bet it’d be “by Chi An with Steven Mosher” — or even more extreme, leaving Mosher’s name to be thanked in the acknowledgements. And I’d like to see, as a matter of ethics, full disclosure about how much writing the purported author actually did, vs. simply sitting for interviews with a ghostwriter. In this case, it’s not terribly important, but in the case of a politician, I do think it matters — when they write a book with their name on the cover, they are making claims about their abilities to write, and to formulate their ideas.

But back to Joseph Kim (whose co-writer at least gets his name on the cover). It’s the story of his life in North Korea, before escaping to China and ultimately arriving in America. It won’t surprise you, if you’re reasonably well-informed about world affairs, to hear that he suffered through years of famine, first with his family moving to progressively worse living conditions (with a brief respite during a modest and temporary economic recovery), then with homelessness interspersed with stays with relatives or friends, until they kicked him out as one more mouth to feed. His father died of cirrhosis (with no medical treatment of any kind available) compounded by starvation. His mother was in and out of his life, as she tried to earn a living with various trading schemes, and ultimately by trading goods smuggled from China, but inevitably lost money on deals gone bad. One of those deals? Selling his treasured sister to a Chinese broker, for an unknown fate — that of an enslaved “wife” to a poor villager in the best case, far worse otherwise. He describes learning to beg, then learning that begging doesn’t produce enough food to stave off starvation, and learning to steal — off merchants’ stalls, then as a pickpocketer, from farm fields, and ultimately breaking and entering with a group. He lands in an “orphanage” — where homeless kids are locked away, used as free labor with woefully insufficient food, but later escapes while on a work detail, only to track down his mother and find her on the verge of starvation, so he returns to supporting her by theft. Later, she recovers enough strength to return to smuggling but is caught and imprisoned, and here, at the age of 15, Joseph makes a decision, on impulse, to cross to China himself, to attempt to earn money to rescue his mother. And throughout he describes that dog-eat-dog mentality of North Koreans, along with additional petty cruelties such as the government requiring its people to “donate” scrap metal for yet more statues of the Great Leader, even if that means surrendering their cooking pots.

Now, the region of China which directly borders North Korea is populated, to a large degree, by an ethnic Korean minority who, in fact, speak Korean, so he is able to go from house to house, and town to town, begging. Back in North Korea, he had been told that Christians, who can be found in buildings with crosses on them, are willing to give money to strangers, so he goes from church to church, collecting funds, but he eventually is taken in and stays with a “grandmother” who takes care of him. He is then, out of the blue, offered the chance to go to America, which occurs by means of going to a consulate, and after 4 months, arriving in the U.S. After endless details on his life in North Korea, the story of how he ended up in the U.S., and how he made it through his years in the U.S., as an older teen and a young adult, is oddly brief. Given that most North Korean refugees who make it out of China, do so through an “underground railroad” via Thailand and end up in South Korea, his arrival in the U.S. instead merited an explanation; even if at the time it was a bit mysterious to him as well, there was no reason not to provide the context later. Really, it felt a bit as if his ghostwriter just gave up the ghost and he completed the remainder of the text himself. He also discusses his conversion experience in China, but he was brought to the U.S. by a secular group (LiNK – Liberty in North Korea) and there’s no indication of whether Christianity continued to be a part of his life once he arrived here.

I’ve read a number of Holocaust biographies and memoirs, and I have the impression that memoirs of escapees from North Korea (and Kim’s book is one of a growing number) are, in some way, the “Holocaust memoir” genre for the next generation. I’ve read a number of these, too; the stories themselves are gripping, and page-turning, even in cases where the writing isn’t as artful as it might be. (By the way: Anne Frank in hiding in a “secret annexe”? In Clara’s War, teenager Clara Kramer, along with a dozen others, lived in a small basement, not much bigger than a crawl space, under their protector’s home in Poland.) I find it extraordinary, the degree to which human beings can survive even the most inhumane conditions — starvation, brutality — and always wonder, is there something built into each one of us that pushes us towards survival, even in these most extreme circumstances, and it was just luck, or skill, that gave survival to some but not others, or are there some who have, and others who don’t have, this drive to keep pushing forward? And would I have had that drive?

But beyond that: with respect to Holocaust memoirs, the purpose in publishing one after the next is, beyond simply preserving the historical record, to continue to affirm the “never again” commitment. But with respect to North Korea: once we know what has happened, and what continues to happen, what responsibility do we as outsiders, as Americans, have? And many leaders who are eager to dismiss a call to action simply say, “that was then; it’s over with, the North Koreans will behave now, or can be trusted if we just extend a hand” or come up with even odder rationales such as Jimmy Carter’s from earlier this year.

(Oh, and, yes, I know, it’s not exactly light beach reading. But I also finished reading Carly Fiorina’s recent book, which I’ll tell you about next, and also post a few more pictures, and tell you why Grand Haven is a great vacation spot, but not so great that you all should stampede here and bump up the price of rentals.)

Your handy-dandy guide to health care outside the United States

Last updated on: June 23, 2015 at 5:56 am By Jane the Actuary

Yeah, OK, that’s an ambitious title for what’s mostly an unresearched “what I know” type of post.

The key point is this: there is a lot of variation, and it’s a mistake to think that the rest of the world has single-payer healthcare and the U.S. is the outlier. Heck, even countries we think of as having single-payer healthcare, don’t, really. Now, the U.S. is an outlier in the amount of private spending on healthcare, to be sure, but the story is more complicated than Single Payer vs. the U.S.

Let’s start with the data:

Take a kuken* at this table from the OECD:

	Dollars, PPP (2012)			%s
	Public	Private	Total	Public	Private
Australia	2,733	1,264	3,997	68%	32%
Austria	3,716	1,180	4,896	76%	24%
Belgium	3,323	1,096	4,419	75%	25%
Canada	3,224	1,378	4,602	70%	30%
Chile	776	801	1,577	49%	51%
Czech Republic	1,745	332	2,077	84%	16%
Denmark	4,029	669	4,698	86%	14%
Estonia	1,139	308	1,447	79%	21%
Finland	2,669	889	3,559	75%	25%
France	3,317	971	4,288	77%	23%
Germany	3,691	1,120	4,811	77%	23%
Greece	1,617	791	2,409	67%	33%
Hungary	1,128	675	1,803	63%	37%
Iceland	2,847	689	3,536	81%	19%
Ireland	2,628	1,261	3,890	68%	32%
Israel	1,377	926	2,304	60%	40%
Italy	2,481	728	3,209	77%	23%
Japan	2,997	652	3,649	82%	18%
Korea	1,248	1,043	2,291	54%	46%
Luxembourg	3,846	731	4,578	84%	16%
Mexico	531	517	1,048	51%	49%
Netherlands	4,375	724	5,099	86%	14%
New Zealand	2,623	549	3,172	83%	17%
Norway	5,222	918	6,140	85%	15%
Poland	1,065	475	1,540	69%	31%
Portugal	1,539	918	2,457	63%	37%
Slovak Republic	1,468	637	2,105	70%	30%
Slovenia	1,907	761	2,667	71%	29%
Spain	2,142	845	2,987	72%	28%
Sweden	3,336	770	4,106	81%	19%
Switzerland	4,001	2,078	6,080	66%	34%
Turkey	756	228	984	77%	23%
United Kingdom	2,762	527	3,289	84%	16%
United States	4,160	4,585	8,745	48%	52%

Yeah, sorry, that’s a long table. That’s from OECD Healthcare at a Glance — the full PDF is here, or a link to key tables is here. The PDF also has a number of graphs, but sometimes I like to have the actual numbers — namely, that even prior to the Obamacare subsidies/expanded Medicaid eligibility, nearly half of U.S. healthcare spending was public, not private, spending. (More recent figures don’t seem to be available to see how much more spending has shifted to public spending since then.)

Anyway, here are a few comments on specific countries, mostly off the top of my head (I figure that way I’m not sharing information that’s proprietary to my employer):

The U.K.

Yeah, 16% public spending isn’t huge, but it’s not nothing: middle-management and higher-level employees are provided private health insurance by their employers. Not for them the NHS horror stories! They have access to private clinics and treatments, and “upgraded” spots at public hospitals, whenever NHS is insufficient, has too long a wait list, doesn’t cover a treatment, or is just generally icky.

Switzerland

They’re actually the most Obamacare-ish country: a standardized basic level of private insurance is mandatory, with subsidies for the poor. No practice of employer provision — you just buy it on your own. The catch? They’re the second-highest-spending country, and are struggling with growing costs.

Germany

Health insurance is managed through regional quasi-public entities, which set (very low) reimbursement rates. How low? When we lived there, there was a protest march by doctors upset at their low pay. But hey — medical school was free. It’s paid for by a payroll tax. But if you make over a given income level (I think about 50K-ish), you have the option to opt out of the payroll tax and buy your own insurance, with the stipulation that you’re then obliged to continue buying private insurance, rather than switching back and forth. In addition to potentially cheaper coverage, private insurance gives you such benefits as top-tier doctors and the ability to select a private, rather than three-bed room at the hospital.

France

Employer-provided health insurance is customary (and I think not just for management but in general); it picks up the not-trivial copays. In addition, the reimbursement levels provided by the national health insurance are low enough that providers often have a surcharge which the private insurance covers. This system of surcharges at the “good doctors” and private clinics, paid for by private health insurance, is, it seems to me, fairly common, say, in Italy, as well.

Canada

Historically, insurance was not permitted to pay for any service that the national healthcare system covered, so that you couldn’t use it to get coverage at a private provider to skip waiting lists. It seems to me that I read recently that this has changed. In any case, what private health insurance does do is cover everything that the national healthcare system doesn’t: prescription drugs primarily, and upgrades from ward to semi-private or private rooms, and various sorts of therapists and other providers that aren’t covered otherwise. In addition, private insurance covers out-of-country treatment, and policies specify either all out-of-country treatment or only in cases of emergencies.

Australia

Again, single payer, but with a policy of encouraging upper-income folk to buy private insurance — it doesn’t allow you to opt out of payroll tax contributions, but does give you a modest rebate.

Korea

Yeah, they’ve got a large percentage of private spending; it seems to me that this is because the State healthcare provision has a lot of holes, copays, etc., which private insurance, routinely a part of employee benefits, covers.

Mexico

Strictly speaking, there’s comprehensive medical coverage. But in practice, well, it’s like being obliged to use Cook County hospital for everything. Again, salaried employees expect to have insurance provided by their employer, to get them access to private, first-world hospitals. Same with Brazil, which is a huge health insurance market for white collar employees, and I think even blue collar employees at large employers, in order to escape the poor quality and wait times of the “free” national healthcare system.

One more, also not on the table — Singapore

Singapore’s system gets frequent mention by supporters of “market-based” systems, because one component is a “savings account” similar to the HSA savings accounts that accompany high-deductible plans in the U.S. See this older post, for instance. The reality is that “universal” coverage has a lot of copays and employer-provided insurance fills these gaps.

So there you have it: a world tour of health insurance.

(* “take a kuken” = a Dad-ism for “take a look.” Typical use: “take a kuken in the refrigerator to see what’s there.” An expression he picked up in Germany, where kuken is a regionalism for “look.”)

(By the way: the chart that appears as an image? I had a hard time getting a table to look right — that was one of the tries.)

What if diversity is not our strength?

Last updated on: June 19, 2015 at 8:55 pm By Jane the Actuary

A while ago I drafted a post that went something like this:

We say this over and over again: “diversity makes us stronger,” and we celebrate the mixture of cultures in this, the Land of Immigrants, and we tell ourselves that the different points of view that all these immigrants bring, makes our country more vital, energetic, creative, forward-thinking, and poised to succeed in the 21st century, bounding past stagnating monocultural countries.

But what if we’re wrong?

What if the desire to be with one’s own “kind” is simply so built-in that our efforts at integrating everyone, while simultaneously preserving their native cultures, are doomed to failure?

Well, that’s as far as I got, but I was thinking about a link from a facebook friend, to a site pushing back on the use of the label “transracial” to draw a parallel between/mock the Jenner and Dolezal stories. The article pointed out that transracial is already in use to refer to cross-race adoption, e.g., black children with white parents. So, fine, but this was an article on a site called “Lost Daughters” and the article continues with this:

For the past 35ish years, I’ve considered myself to be a transracial adoptee. The “trans” in transracial for me, never meant my race changed. It meant I was a multiracial black girl, adopted into a white family. It meant I was taken without my consent from one home, one place of origin and put inside another family, another culture, another race, one that didn’t belong to me. It meant I had to learn how to navigate my blackness and my black girlness, inside an often times racist, religious, violent and rigid white world. It meant living in a house and community that simultaneously erased me, racialized me and tokenized me. It gave me a language to articulate what was happening to me. But you know what it didn’t do? It never actually changed my race. An even with all the ‘privileges’ of whiteness, even with all the education, the middle class living, camping, fishing, hunting — It never made me white.

Which reminded me of an article I read and commented on a while back, on Korean adoptees returning to Korea as adults; though they lamented the cruelty of Korean society at the time, unwelcoming to single mothers and their children, their complaints about their American life were not really about adoption per se as living as a minority and feeling that they “belonged” elsewhere, where they would be in the majority culture.

And now we have this awful, awful story out of South Carolina. The details are spotty, but the Washington Post has about as much information as I’ve seen anywhere else, though I’ve run out of page views for the month on the computer on which I’m typing this — but none of it makes much sense: dropped out of high school after 9th grade, then, at the age of 21, he’s unemployed, but no one yet has any idea, that I’ve seen, of what he’s done in the meantime. There are reports of an imagined “race war” that places him in the same category as the killer in Norway who imagined that he would rally Norwegians to his anti-immigrant cause. Did he think that his action would cause black residents to riot, and his white imagined-peers to fight back? Or was this his crusade, and his alone?

In his case, his parents haven’t had anything to say but his uncle has said something to the effect of “that’s not how he was brought up” — and we don’t know whether that’s completely the case or if there was an undercurrent of racism that metastasized into this monstrosity. Was he “recruited” by White Power groups online in the same way as kids who run off to join ISIS or undertake Lone Wolf attacks, or, if not, did he read and follow them and buy into their ideas from afar? To judge from the angry twitter comments, South Carolina is lousy with racists — I don’t really know one way or the other.

But what can you do? We can’t imprison these groups. And if a child, as a teen or young adult, “converts” to white supremacist ideas, it’s hard to imagine that parents can consistently succeed in raising their kids in a way that’s “immunized” to racism.

There’s the old song, “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught,” that expresses the idea that it’s only due to one’s upbringing that one is racist, that by nature we are welcoming of differences, and what perpetuates racism is racist adults passing it on to their children. But what if it’s the reverse — that racism is inborn, an “original sin” if you will, and lies there, dormant, biding its time, but ultimately, being at risk of manifesting itself in some mild way like a preference for socializing with or living near others who look like you, or the extreme of this sort of unfathomable violence — and that openness to those who are different is what has to be taught, and that with difficulty, and with the lessons at risk of being unlearned in the face of some future life circumstances?

Yes, maybe this man, like other recent killers, was mentally ill, and maybe it was just the nature of his delusions that he convinced himself of a “race war” rather shooting at a school or a movie theater. But it’s more likely to turn out that that was wishful thinking (after all, then we can tell ourselves, “all we need to do is identify the mentally ill people, treat them, and keep guns away from them”), and that he is just as much of sound mind as those ISIS-joining teens. What then?

What was it like to watch Saigon fall?

Last updated on: May 26, 2015 at 7:34 am By Jane the Actuary

Here’s instapundit, from this morning, with a particularly-extended pulling-together of links on Iraq and Syria, and the fact that (in a rare direct quote from Glenn Reynolds)

As late as 2010, things were going so well in Iraq that Obama and Biden were bragging. Now, after Obama’s politically-motivated pullout and disengagement, the whole thing’s fallen apart. This is near-criminal neglect and incompetence, and an awful lot of people will pay a steep price for the Obama Administration’s fecklessness.

It truly is extraordinary, in a bad way, to contemplate the damage in Iraq since 2011, and in Syria and Libya, too; one might choose to deflect the far-reaching consequences of Obama’s pull-out by saying, “the Iraqis failed to defend themselves” but that misses the point that, had we (or rather, Obama) not been so eager to leave, it wouldn’t have happened. And, given that we have soldiers in bases all over the world, including Germany and Korea, despite having won the conflicts that placed those soldiers there generations ago, there was no strategic need to pull those troops, only a short-sighted desire for political gain, at best, or a personal, willful damn-the-consequences desire, at worse, with a certain, “washing my hands” it’s-not-my-fault attitude towards the whole thing.

Is this how it was, when Saigon fell? Was there, at the time, a majority that believed that Ho Chi Minh’s ascendance was the Will of the People, and that the subsequent events in Cambodia were wholly unrelated? Were Americans just wholly indifferent? Were there memories too short, as ours seem to be now?

Oh, and by the way: the fact that the media favor the 2003 what-if hypothetical over the 2011 what-if, asking “would you have invaded” rather than “would you have withdrawn”? This is my pet peeve about that question: we imagine that the choice was either “keep the status quo” or “invade and overthrow Saddam” but forget that the same protesters who later turned to protesting the war were in the meantime protesting the sanctions — the imagined status quo, of Saddam contained and unable to do any harm, itself was not sustainable.

Is math optional? Or, should we have O and A levels, a Bac or an Abitur?

Last updated on: March 15, 2015 at 5:49 pm By Jane the Actuary

A couple days ago, I wrote about the “Power of 15” initiative at our local high school/community college, in which they were going to offer dual-enrollment courses, that is, courses offered at the high school which would earn credit at the community college. My take? That in principle the idea was sound, for classes which were truly at a college-level degree of rigor, for instance, by transforming AP History or Calculus into the equivalent college class, and earning the credit based on the work over the semester rather than everything hinging on a single test. Unfortunately, the way this was being implemented was with classes which were not particularly rigorous and seemed to be designed to be granting credit solely for the sake of having those credits to one’s name, rather than providing an enhancement to the educational offerings.

But the Chicago Tribune had an article today which provides a new, and sobering perspective, “Community colleges turn to high schools to keep students out of remedial math.” (Try this link if that article’s paywalled.)

Here are the key paragraphs:

Half of all American community college students must take remedial math and English classes, according to the advocacy group Complete College America. The courses do not count for credit but must be completed before students can advance in their studies. About 90 percent who start at that level fail to earn a degree within three years.

Now, Chicago-area community colleges and high schools are trying to improve the odds by helping students avoid remedial classes altogether. They are creating new courses aimed at high school seniors with shaky academic skills, offering them a chance to enter directly into college-level classes.

The results so far have been promising, administrators say. McHenry County College, for instance, has seen the percentage of incoming students who need remedial math drop from 40 percent to 26 percent since the 2012 introduction of a new math class in the county’s high schools.

“(Remedial college math) is really redoing high school math,” said Tony Miksa, the college’s vice president of academic and student affairs. “The problem is you’re wasting dollars and time. We don’t want them to come here and repeat the same things.”

. . .

The problem is particularly acute in math, a subject that snares many more remedial students than English. Educators say that’s because Illinois requires high school students to take only three years of the subject, allowing those with weak skills to skip it their senior year.

Another Chicago-area community college, the College of Du Page, offers juniors the chance to take its placement test early, to find out where they stand and, hopefully, take an additional math class in their senior year.

My first reaction?

It is worrisome that we treat math and English differently. The fact that only three years of math are required in Illinois, and presumably elsewhere, communicates that its of lesser importance to learn math. Even for kids who don’t have an aptitude for math, they should be taking some kind of math class for each of their years of high school, even if, for kids who know they will not study any math-related field in college, that last year is more focuses on practical applications, such as finance (e.g., compound interest), statistics, and the like. But instead — even the Common Core math curriculum ends after three years, though it seems to me that I remember reading somewhere, “of course nothing stands in the way of taking a math class senior year . . .”

And kids should be taking math classes corresponding to their aptitude level, culminating in precalculus or calculus wherever possible, regardless of their planned major in college.

But maybe this is a bigger issue:

It seems to me that the United States is outside the norm among in developed countries in its one-size-fits-all high school diploma. France has the Bac, and Germany the Abitur to certify that a student is prepared to enter college, quite apart from whether they’ve completed a course of study at one of the tiers of secondary education. Japan, Korea, and China are well-known for their pressure-cooker high-stakes college-entrance exams. The UK has a system that has a certain appeal, though I don’t know much about it, with O level exams to certify that a student has an adequate level of knowledge and A level exams to certify that a student is capable of doing college-level work in the subject.

In our system, in which a high school diploma, or even a GED, has a basic set of requirements that are, in the end, reasonable for students planning on entering vocational training or the workforce directly, it is a mistake to consider this credential sufficient for entering college. If there were a college-entry exam separate from simply high school graduation, college-bound students and their advisors would not believe that whatever high school graduation requirements exist for them (in our case, three years of math, two years of science) are enough to move on to college and succeed there.

From the library: The Smartest Kids in the World, and how they got that way, by Amanda Ripley

Last updated on: March 10, 2015 at 7:54 am By Jane the Actuary

Yeah, I’d been meaning to read this one for a while, and now I’ve got to get this summary written before returning the book to the library. (New readers: this is one of the nerdier things I do, as I figure that if I write up little summaries of books I’ve read, I won’t forget what they’re about later.)

Who are the Smartest Kids in the World? Ripley refers to kids from the countries that have top scores on the PISA international student assessment tests, tests which are designed to measure not rote learning but critical thinking skills. Here organizing device is to chronicle, side-by-side, the experiences of three American exchange students in these countries, along with more general background on the school systems. The countries: top-scores Finland and Korea, and up-and-comer Poland.

(Are these the actual top scorers? Here are the most recent PISA scores, in PDF form, or excel (click on the link following “chapter 1” to download the file). These countries are still among the top — Ripley excludes China (which only tests kids from Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Macau, so not representative of the country) and Singapore and non-democratic countries in general — though now Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Estonia have moved ahead of Finland in math. In any case, the United States is decidedly at the middle of the pack: 33rd out of 61 for math, somewhat better in reading at 21st.)

Anyway, here’s what I flagged from the book:

p. 64. U.S. spends considerably more on technology than these “high performing” schools. “However, there was little evidence that these purchases had paid off for anyone other than the technology vendors themselves.”

p. 86. On Finland: teaching requires a rigorous master’s degree in the subject, not just in “education,” and a full year of student teaching. The math teacher the Finland-bound exchange student, Kim, had at home? He mostly wanted to be a football coach, and “figured the best way to become a coach was to become a math teacher.” “Instead of taking the more rigorous mathematics classes offered to other students, for example, education majors tended to take special math classes for students who did not like math.”

p. 90 – 91. Attempts to improve rigor of U.S. education for future teachers. In Rhode Island, plans to strengthen test-score requirements for teachers produced a hue-and-cry, but “Rhode Island’s teacher colleges already churned out 1,000 teachers a year, about 800 more than the school system needed to hire.”

p. 100. “In my own survey of 202 foreign-exchange students, an overwhelming majority said their U.S. classes were easier than their classes abroad.”

P. 130 ff. Poland — major reform in the system in 1998. For components: 1. new curriculum, with fundamental, rigorous goals, but local autonomy in implementation. 2. Standardized testing at the end of elementary, jr high and high school — at elementary, for diagnostic reasons, but at older ages, for tracking students and determining university admission. 3. delay tracking; high schools were tracked, but kids would basically stay in junior high, with an untracked curriculum, a further year. 4. Teacher autonomy. These reforms were controversial, but Poland zoomed up the PISA ranks.

p. 138 ff. Tracking: despite Germany’s famous early tracking system, “by the early 21st century, many countries were slowly, haltingly, delaying tracking. When they did so, all kids tended to do better.” Finland doesn’t track until age 16.

p. 144. key differences between U.S. and elsewhere: 1. heavy role of sports in American schools. 2. more autonomy during and outside of school.

p. 162. What about minorities? In Finland, even immigrant kids do well in school.

Her bottom line: American schools just aren’t as rigorous and demanding as in other developed nations — and American students aren’t as motivated — and this impacts their success substantially.

Now, to be sure, if you look around, you can manipulate the data to tell either story: that it’s the nonwhites who drag the United States down, or that, apples to apples, even the white middle class kids do poorly.

But I find it telling that the US math score was decidedly worse than the reading score — and that in the U.S., it’s perfectly acceptable for college-bound kids to simply decide, “I don’t need math” and that’s that, whereas in countries with a rigorous test required for admission to universities, math is certainly not optional, even for kids who want to study the humanities.

Can you even imagine a rigorous test required for admission to American universities? Yes, of course, there’s the SAT and the ACT, but each university decides on a different admission standard, and many don’t require anything. I’m talking about a test without which you may not enroll at any university or college — though, with our decentralized system — it’d probably have to be a test that the federal government would require for financial aid, or perhaps for accreditation. Can you imagine the uproar it would cause for students to know math? They’d probably demand that their poor math scores were disability-related and therefore the requirement was discrimination.

On the other hand, Canada’s test scores are quite respectable — 7th or so, and, so far as I can tell, the general structure of their system is pretty similar to ours. Is their greater success due to lack of poor-performing minority populations, or something else?

From the library: Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created its Own Lost Generation, by Michael Zielenziger

Last updated on: February 24, 2015 at 9:15 pm By Jane the Actuary

This is actually an old book, dating from 2006. I strayed from the new book section at the library and stumbled upon it. And reading it, I wondered whether I was essentially reading history, or whether conditions in Japan are still much the same now as nine years ago. I also had a major dose of schadenfreude, having grown up in the Detroit area in the ’80s.

The book starts out talking about a phenomenon in Japan of the hikikomori, teenagers and young men who isolate themselves to an extreme degree. Their nearest American equivalent might be the stereotypical young man who spends all his time in his parents’ basement, playing computer games — in the first place because these are Japanese homes; there is no basement. They spend all their time in their bedrooms, completely isolated. They neither interact with their families, nor do they have online relationships; they generally don’t even have computers, but instead they do such things as watch TV, draw, or just . . . nothing, all day long. They’re paralyzed.

And it’s the nature of Japanese society that gives them this paralysis. In the first place, many of them stopped going to school at as young an age as middle school, because of bullying. And unlike the U.S., where administrators, teachers, and parents work to stop bulling, there, everyone’s pretty much OK with it, because it’s what compels conformity, and Japan insists on conformity and punishes deviance. This insistence on conformity further means that these boys and men keep the shades closed, and don’t dare let anyone see them inside, or leaving the house, out of fear that the family will be talked about. And seeking help is even worse, as it brings shame upon the family — though some courageous men and women are beginning to establish programs to help these hikikomori, such as day programs and drop-in centers.

And these aren’t just a few isolated cases; the estimate is that there are 1 million such teens and men.

The author interviews a number of these hikikomori, and reports that their fundamental problem is that they just can’t fit in to Japanese society. In fact, in some cases, when they’ve been able to travel abroad, they’re freed from their isolation. And this ultimately means that it’s Japanese society that’s dysfunctional, and these people would be perfectly ordinary elsewhere.

He then extends his story to Japanese society more generally. After World War II, the nation threw itself into a frenzy of rebuilding, focused on Japan, Inc. The government focused on transforming Japan into an economic powerhouse with cozy relationships between banks and major corporations meaning that the concept of corporate accountability to shareholders didn’t really exist. There is no independent media to speak of — no one to report corporate or political scandals. And the government has been controlled by a single party since shortly after the end of World War II, with no reform (economic or social/cultural) on the agenda and no means of any young upstarts placing it on an agenda — no way for anyone reform-minded to work within the system, or outside the system. No protests, no Movements, etc.

(Skipping ahead, at the end of the book, he further says that America played a role here, too — its desire for an ally in the Cold War and, later, for someone to purchase its government bonds meant that it was the enabler for Japan’s dysfunction. But here he speaks very much from a 2006 standpoint, when Japan was, wrongly in his view, an “ally” with Bush rather than standing up and going their own way. Heck, at the end of the book, he points to J-Pop as a promising new development, when, according to The Birth of Korean Cool, it has now been surpassed by K-Pop.)

Anyway: conformity, conformity, conformity. Some of this is familiar: the Japanese child, in cram school ’til late at night, exhausted. (And the parents, financially burdened by its cost.) The Japanese man, expected to work late hours and/or go drinking with the boss — and with the boss calling the shots, and pouring the shots, and essentially compelling their subordinates to keep drinking because it would be shameful to refuse. The father having no relationship with his child, because all he wants to do is sleep on the weekends. The women, many professing their unwillingness to marry because Japanese men expect women to abandon their careers, and, anyway, the ambitious ones are stymied by severe discrimination against women; those that do, often unable to find a husband because the old “arranged marriage” culture never really evolved into a modern “dating” culture. And the birth rate, low as it is, is only propped up due to an openness to sex before marriage, but without much modern contraception, and a still-very-much-alive shotgun wedding expectation. (Though at the same time, the author says there is no cultural or other disapproval of abortion — it’s not clear what the story is.)

On top of all this: the crash of the 90s put a major dent in the lifetime employment expectation, leaving the country adrift, but without any actual reform coming from this.

Then there’s a lot of pyschologizing, which I can’t really summarize, because I read the book in too many fits and starts, but here’s something striking: Japan doesn’t have much, if any, tradition of charity/civic engagement/altruism. Japan doesn’t have much in the way of religion. Shintoism isn’t really a theology in the sense that we would think of it, but more a set of ritual practices and shrines to visit from which modern Japanese may pick and choose (in the same way as they have, ever since modernization, chosen which aspects of Western techonology, governance, and culture to adopt). And due to their history, the Japanese people don’t have a values system in the way that we would imagine (“Judeo-Christian” values). Here’s a striking paragraph:

Unlike most of the people in the West who profess belief in a force beyond themselves, the Japanese worship many gods, not one. Modern Japanese find no contradiction in visiting a Shinto shrine at New Year’s to bow and pray for health and prosperity; and then hiring a Caucasian preacher to conduct their wedding ceremony in a Christian church for the status it conveys; and finally being cremated in a Buddhist temple as saffron-robed monks chant sutras in Sanskirt amid wafting incense. In this pragmatic menu of beliefts, Japanese learn to pick a la carte, to choose what they need, when they need it, much as they might place their orders for individual morsels at a sushi bar. By implication, even moral values are situational. Taiichi Sakaiya — eocnomist, former Cabinet minister, and renowned social thinker — says this relativist belief system allows Japanese to go through life without ever developing either a conviction about absolute, inviolable, or divine teachings, or a fixed “road map” of ethical principles. “What’s morally right today is what a majority of Japanese people say is right today,” he told me, when I asked him to define Japanese ethics. “Of course, if tomorrow the majority changes its mind, then the same behavior becomes immoral and wrong.” A Japanese must cast his gaze outside, not within, to discern right and wrong. (p. 124 – 125.)

Indeed, there’s another consequence of the lack of something recognizable to us as religion: it drives a materialism, a search for status symbols, like designer handbags, as a source of meaning, lacking the meaning found in some kind of spirituality. And (skipping ahead a bit) in a digression, the other considers the different path that Korea took, in which youth protests produced democracy in the 80s, and a greater vitality now (though, ironically, a lower birth rate), and notes that Korea welcomed, rather than persecuted, Christians, who are, though not a majority, nearly so at 1/3 of the population and growing, and were the driving force behind economic, social, and political change. The author says, though as an American Jew he didn’t expect this:

It may be too simple to argue that exposure to Christianity alone has changed Korean consciousness. Yet the churches have coached the Korean people in forming social networks, building trust among strangers, and accepting universal ethics and individualism in ways that served as powerful antidotes to the autocratic worldview that their grandparents — and indeed, the Japanese — had been taught (p. 261.)

The author also discusses another feature of Japanese society: the high suicide rate. Japanese men kill themselves at the rate of 36.5 per 100,000, double the American rate; no other wealthy country has such a high rate (only the Finns, who are apparently called the “Japanese of Europe,” come close, at 34.6). The rate of depression is high, too, but Japanese rarely seek help, due to the shamefulness of it. And alcoholism is a serious problem, and the Japanese language has even created the term akuru-hara, or “alcohol harassment”: “a company worker being forced to get drunk even though drinking makes him sick.” (p 216).

Not surprisingly, many young Japanese “flee to the breathing room more open societies offer” (p. 280) and, once they do so, find that they have extreme difficulty reintegrating themselves, or simply never return.

And the author leaves us with one final data point, the experience of three Japanese humanitarian workers who were held hostage in Iraq in 2004. Returning home, they weren’t greeted with relief and celebration, but with anger and disapproval for having ignored government warnings, and found this experience far more difficult to bear than their actual captivity.

Where does that leave us? Zielenziger offers some final conclusions about American-Japan relations and the U.S.’s role as enabler, but he’s also very clearly writing from a 2006 American political viewpoint, with a few jabs at Bush. Has anything changed?

The book also raises further questions:

It’s understandable that Japan’s birthrate is so low if their society is so dreadful. But then why is Korea’s even worse, and Germany’s just as low?

And if Japan is in some ways a prototypical atheist society, is it a warning for secularists in the United States and Europe?

(Added: let’s go there: multi-kultis always want to say that “deep down, we’re all the same” — but deep down, the Japanese as profiled here are quite alien in many ways.)