Bah, Humbug! (Sort Of)

I am decidedly ambivalent about the holiday season.

As a child I can remember being so excited that I was unable to sleep on Christmas Eve.  Everything was so special -- the decorations at our house and around the city, the presents under the tree, the Christmas music on the radio and in the shopping malls, the heartwarming holiday specials on television, the dozens of Christmas cards we sent and received.  Although my family wasn't devoutly religious, we usually attended midnight mass on Christmas Eve at our local Episcopalian church.  Christmas day was a hectic family affair that started with opening presents, followed by dinner in mid-afternoon with in-laws and relatives, more exchanging and opening of gifts, then socializing until 8 or 9 o'clock.  All in all this was a very intense and long day.

The next day was a big let down.  I can remember getting together with neighborhood friends to compare gifts and to play with each other's stuff.  But the big thrill was over and it seemed anticlimactic.  Amazing what a difference 24 hours can make -- from heartfelt joy, eager anticipation, and warm fuzzy emotions to a kind of emptiness, deflation and a feeling of  despondency.  And those presents I had wanted so badly almost never lived up to my expectations.

As an adult I have to fight a tendency to become a bit depressed during the holiday season.  It's not that I'm a Scrooge at heart -- I really would like to feel the holiday spirit and experience those warm fuzzies again.  But it is hard to do when retailers start their holiday push even before Halloween, Christmas carols are used to sell merchandise rather than express holiday sentiments, and buying gifts is evaluated in terms of contribution to GNP rather than as a gesture of caring.  It seems commercialized, shallow and insincere.

And of course it is hard to reconcile the messages of goodwill and peace with pervasive international conflict, and with the exploitation, denigration and ruthless subjugation of large segments of the global population. If we could act like it was Christmas Eve throughout the year these problems might disappear. But I fear we are more likely to act like it was the day after Christmas.

To end on a more positive note, and to illustrate my ambivalence, not just negativity toward the holidays, I'll offer this thought:  maybe capturing the spirit of the season shouldn't be easy.  Maybe the challenge of overcoming the obstacles, of seeing past the commercialism, conflict, and shallowness can lead to a more significant personal and social experience.  I think it's worth a try.

Business Math + Banker's Math: 0 = - 4

That's right, Business Math.  In my previous series of Banker's Math blogs I have railed against some of the practices of the banking industry that I consider excessive, like 9% ATM fees and unnecessarily high mortgage refinancing costs. Today's topic, though, is an example of how business calculations in conjunction with banking practices can sneakily take more money out of your pocket.

My wife and I travel internationally quite a bit.  As I've mentioned before, we've managed to minimize fees for transactions in foreign currency by using a credit card that waives the usual 3-4% extra charge and an ATM card that doesn't have fees on our side of the transaction.  For the past several years this has worked out well, and we've probably saved hundreds of dollars.

But after our most recent trip -- a very enjoyable three weeks in northern Italy -- I discovered a new wrinkle in the foreign transaction boondoggle, this time by a U.S.-based rental car company, not a bank.  Of course, rental car companies have long been notorious for some pretty sleazy practices, so maybe this should not have been a surprise.  But after researching this more thoroughly I have learned that a number of businesses, including local merchants are also joining in.

The practice is known as DCC, or "Dynamic Currency Conversion."  A merchant can bill you in local currency, say Euros, then convert the amount to Dollars through a financial services company, add on 3-4% and charge your credit card the total dollar amount.  Merchants make money off of this because they keep the conversion charge (minus some fees they have to pay to their financial services company).  If you have a credit card that charges international transaction fees (ours doesn't but most do), you could also pay your own company another 3-4% even though they didn't do the conversion because the fee is for any transaction that goes through a foreign bank regardless of currency.  Total cost of the charge then is 6-8%.  And this may happen even without you being aware of it.

In our case we rented a car from Budget which we picked up and returned in Milan.  When we turned in the car the agent gave us a receipt in Euros which was the exact amount we had been quoted when reserving the car online, and so we were satisfied. We left thinking our credit card would be charged the total on the receipt, in Euros, with the conversion to Dollars handled by our credit card company for which there would have been no fee.  Nope.  When the charge appeared on our statement it was 4% higher than it should have been.

I emailed Budget's customer service and asked why the amount was too high.  Here are excerpts from the subsequent exchange.

Budget: Thank you for contacting the E-mail Customer Service team.
I truly apologize for the inconvenience and confusion; however, the total indicated on the final rental receipt is showing as 399.59EUR which was converted to 548.21USD.  Please note that, because the conversion to be made by AvisBudget was signed for on the rental agreement rather than allowing your banking institution to process it, an additional 3-4% conversion fee was also assessed.  This may explain the slight difference after conversion.  I hope this information helps clarify.

Badabing!  In other words, I apparently agreed to this when I signed the rental agreement though I don't recall seeing it in the fine print (unfortunately I can't find my copy of the contract to check) nor is it to be found anywhere in the online conditions listed when you reserve the car.

So, is it possible to avoid this? 

Me:  Thank you for your fast reply.  Is there any way I can avoid this additional 3-4% in future international rentals with Budget?  I have a credit card that explicitly waives international transaction fees and I would like to take advantage of it (I thought I was doing so in this case).  If other companies allow the rental to be processed by my banking institution then I will likely use them instead. 
Budget: Thank you for contacting the E-mail Customer Service team. When you get to the counter to pick up your rental you need to tell them that you do not want to be charged in US dollars. This way you will be charged in the currency of the country and your credit card company will do the conversion. If we can be of further assistance, please let us know.

There you go, all you have to do is ask.

Maybe.

Fast forward to planning for a trip next year to Chile, where we are going to rent cars in two different locations.  Budget does business in Chile and our research found their rental rates to be competitive.  Encouraged by Budget's emails we reserved cars with Budget, but I thought I'd check on the conversion policy just to make sure I had it right. So I emailed customer service again.

Me: I have reserved Budget cars in Chile for our trip next year and will use a U.S credit card to pay for the rentals.  How can I make sure that the currency conversion from CLP to USD will be handled by my Credit Card issuer rather than Budget?
Budget: Thank you for contacting the Budget E-mail Customer Service team. You will need to request that you are billed in USD when you arrive at the location to avoid this. [my emphasis]

Whoa! Note that this is exactly the opposite advice I received earlier (and very likely wrong).  Confusing?  I wrote back pointing out my experience in Italy and asking if the conversion policies were different in Chile.  Here's the reply.

Budget: Thank you for contacting Budget. Budget locations in Italy and in Chile are independently owned franchise locations and may have different policies in place which deviates from standard policy. As advised, renters are to make their currency request [my emphasis] at the beginning of the rental. We apologize for any misunderstanding or inconvenience. If we can be of further assistance, please let us know.

Not helpful.  The advice is for renters to make their currency request at the beginning of the rental.  But which request?  Dollars?  Local Currency?  Do you still sign the same contract?  If you do sign it what recourse do you have later if they don't follow your request?  What do you do if they refuse? Try on the spur of the moment to rent from another company?

Well, at least the customer service person was polite.

Now I know some of you are saying,  "Just use a different company."  But a little internet research reveals that others do this as well.  For example, I found a forum exchange from 2010 in which Hertz did exactly the same thing to a customer.  And as my email exchange above shows, it isn't easy to find out a company's policy in advance, even if you contact them directly and ask.

And now for the coupe de grace. On Budget's web site they offer to show you the estimated total for your rental in either dollars or in pesos.  If you reserve your car based on the dollar estimate, then show up and get them to charge you in pesos instead (thus avoiding DCC), what rate do they use to calculate the pesos total?  Answer:  compared to the global standard rates available on www.xe.com, Budget adds 1 %!!  (It could be worse -- Thrifty adds 2%).  So even if you pay in pesos and use your no-fee credit card, you will still pay at least 1% more.

There you go.  My smugness in thinking I had achieved a consumer victory by using a credit card with no international transaction fees was unjustified.  In Business Math + Banker's Math: 0 (no fees) = - 4 (gotcha anyway!).

I'll let you know how the Budget rentals in Chile turn out.
______________________________________
Here's some additional reading on this topic if you're interested:

• A succinct statement of the practice and the potential problem: http://www.cardhub.com/edu/dynamic-currency-conversion/
• A statement by FEXCO, a financial services company to merchants touting the benefits of the DCC program.  FEXCO was apparently the company that came up with this wonderful "service" back in 1996:  http://www.fexcoms.com/products/dynamic-currency-conversiondcc/
• A statement by KeyBank, a major financial services company in the U.S. and Europe, touting the financial benefits to merchants and supposedly to customers:  https://www.key.com/business/collecting-payments/dynamic-currency-conversion-banking-service.jsp 
• A 2008 forum discussion started by a credit card holder describing the difficulties in trying to opt out of this practice:  http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/credit-card-programs/916377-dynamic-currency-coversion-should-illegal.html
• A 2011 blog that offers a critical look of the DCC practice from the consumer's point of view.  Includes a reader who had a similar experience as ours with Dollar Rental Car: http://www.askmrcreditcard.com/creditcardblog/the-foreign-conversion-scam/
• A 2005 study by a consulting firm regarding DCC's acceptance by merchants and customers: http://www.psel.co.uk/pdf/articles/acquiring/dcc_myth_vs_reality.pdf

Breathing Again .... Again

Four years ago November 5th I wrote that I was Breathing Again after the divisive and derisive campaigning of McCain and Palin failed to win the White House for the GOP and Obama was elected by a substantial margin.  I also cautioned, however, that the euphoria over his election was likely unwarranted by political reality -- though at the time I didn't foresee the magnitude of the obstructionist tactics the GOP/Tea Party would employ to limit his effectiveness.  During this campaign I was holding my breath again because the strategy of Romney/Ryan was working and it seemed there was a very real prospect of not only a GOP president but also both House and Senate controlled by fiscal and social conservatives with no interest in compromise or consensus (recall John Boehner's adamant rejection of the word "compromise").  And so I'm breathing again....again.

But once again I'm not euphoric.  It is clear that nearly 1/2 the nation's voters saw Romney and Ryan in a positive light and therefore any solutions to the nation's economic and social problems have to consider their conservative viewpoints.  There was no mandate given here, other than through the polls that repeatedly show that most Americans want government to solve problems, not remain paralyzed by unbending adherence to a single philosophical agenda. And I can hardly be encouraged by the fact that this election may have simply maintained the status quo in congress of the last two years which showed a stunning inability to solve anything.

It is correct to say that our congressional leaders have become polarized and the distance that must be bridged in order to reach agreement is greater than it has been in a long time.  However, the GOP has moved farther to the right than the Democratic Party has to the left.  There was a time when I could have accepted a GOP dominated government because accommodation and negotiation (aka "civility") were still the norm.  But not now.

Maybe the positive impact of the election will be in causing the GOP/Tea Party to re-examine its position on the political spectrum and its relationship to a broader electorate.  Michael Gerson of the Washington Post recently offered an analysis of this possibility that I think is very insightful and I'll close with his words:

Some of the most important intellectual groundwork is needed on the role of government. Mitt Romney had a five-part plan to encourage job creation. He lacked a public philosophy that explained government’s valid role in meeting human needs. Suburban women heard little about improved public education. Single women, particularly single mothers, heard little about their struggles, apart from an off-putting Republican critique of food stamps. Blue-collar workers in, say, Ohio heard little about the unique challenges that face declining industrial communities. Latinos heard little from Republicans about promoting equal opportunity and economic mobility.

Neither a vague, pro-business orientation nor tea party ideology speaks to these Americans — except perhaps to alienate them. Conservatives will need to define a role for government that addresses human needs in effective, market-oriented ways. Americans fear public debt, and they resent intrusive bureaucracies, but they do not hate government.  [Emphasis added]

 We'll revisit this topic in another couple of years to assess if the situation has improved.  In the meantime I'll keep breathing, but I will also keep my fingers crossed.

Don't Go To Your 50th High School Reunion!

I recently attended my 50th high school reunion -- an "interesting" experience. 

This was my first reunion with my classmates over the years.  I've received notices for the interim gatherings but it never seemed worth the expense and time to attend any of them.  However, the 50th seemed significant somehow -- a milestone worth acknowledging.  It also seemed to fit in with my more reflective and nostalgic tendencies associated with retirement.

One thing I learned right away is that the internet has made reunions much easier to promote and to manage.  Websites like ClassReport.org, Classmates.com,  MyEvent.com allow organizers to display information about the event and to provide biographical and contact information about alumni.  (I'm sure that Facebook will soon find a way to supplant these independent venues and make it even easier to do this. For the potential downside, see my cautionary blog about Facebook.) Very slick.

I graduated from South High in Denver.  We were the South High Rebels, a designation clearly linked to the Confederacy and the Civil War. On the reunion website was our logo, the profile of a confederate soldier.  We were obviously less culturally sensitive in those days (imagine being one of the few Black students at our school during a rally to cheer on our Johnny Reb football team).  Just for kicks I went to the current website for South High and found that the "Rebels" term is still used, though the soldier has been replaced by a more neutral block letter "S."  The current website also extolls the school's diversity (not a defining characteristic while I was there) and its goal of developing in students "...a sense of civic responsibility to contribute to their global community."  Sounds great.  I just hope they don't still wave little confederate flags at the rallies like we did.

Since I really didn't keep in touch with very many of my classmates after graduating, I was curious to read the biographical information posted on the website.  I learned three things from this.  First, I couldn't remember most of the people in my class (this might be due in part to the sheer numbers involved -- there were 700 in my graduating class).  Second, of the ones I could remember a disturbingly large proportion of them were dead.  Third, the people I recalled most fondly were often those with whom I had also attended junior high, where we were "tracked" -- the same group of kids went from class to class for three years and we got to know each other very well.

At the event itself we were given id tags with our yearbook photo and name.  This was very helpful, because most people didn't look much like they did in high school.  Even when I could place either the face or the name, I was often at a loss to remember the context in which I knew the person.  It was an exhausting cognitive effort to bridge a gap of 50+ years when there was no connective thread between then and now, nothing in the middle.  By the end of it I came to the painful realization that as emotionally charged as those days may have been at the time, they have little relevance for my life today.  Revisiting memories of those times was actually a little depressing, because it didn't reveal any significant truths about who I am today (as I thought it might) and instead presented a puzzling and disjointed picture of someone I hardly recognized.

I realize that for many people high school memories are very positive and that reunions are a joyful and heartwarming way of maintaining meaningful relationships.  My high school experience was not so great.  It was a period in my life of great uncertainty, social isolation, and near-calamitous life choices. Somehow I pulled out of it in time, and I now think high school was something I survived, not something I enjoyed.  The reunion did what I guess it should have -- it reminded me that now is the most important time of my life, not the past.

Microbes for Breakfast!

On the breakfast buffet table was a big bowl of white stuff the consistency of thick whipped cream.  The little sign beside it said "Yogurt." Normally I would have moved right on to the real food, since at that time I placed yogurt in the same "not-past-my-lips" category as cottage cheese (what are all those lumps, anyway?) and buttermilk (anything that leaves scum that thick on the empty glass can't be good).

This was in 2003, on our third trip to France. Previous visits had introduced me to some fabulous French food and although for most of my life I've not been very adventurous when it comes to eating I tend to throw caution to the wind when traveling there.  And so I tasted it.

Well, as has happened a few other times in France, I thought I had died and gone to heaven (two other occasions were when I tried my first chocolate croissant and when I took my first bite of Roquefort cheese).  This homemade yogurt stuff was rich and creamy and smooth and not quite like anything I had ever tasted before -- I loved it.  Wow, me eating yogurt -- wonders will never cease!

Since then I have become a real yogurt fan, and now I have it for breakfast (usually with granola my wife makes) almost every day, and when we travel I seek it out whenever possible. But those who know me will understand that I don't just eat it -- I've had to investigate it and research it so I can justify my recent passion for something I rejected for most of my life.  And what I've learned is that (a) yogurt is one of nature's most perfect foods and (b) many of its beneficial qualities come from a most unlikely source -- microbes, aka "germs."

Webster's defines yogurt as "a fermented slightly acid often flavored semisolid food made of milk and milk solids to which cultures of two bacteria (Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus) have been added."  Sometimes other strains of bacteria are also added.  Sounds yummy, right?  Fermented....semi-solid...bacteria...... Had I read this first I would never have tried it.

Yogurt can be made from the milk of cows (most common in the U.S. and Europe), sheep or goats (common in Turkey, where yogurt probably originated), and water buffalo (India & Egypt). Each of these has a different flavor and texture.  Greek style yogurt is strained to remove some of the liquid and is therefore thicker and a bit more tart.  Yogurt can be made from whole milk or from reduced-fat milk.  When the source is low-fat or non-fat milk the resulting yogurt has almost no cholesterol and the calories it contains are nearly all from protein, a very good thing from a health viewpoint (though there is some loss of flavor -- let's face it, fat tastes goooood).  Assuming the yogurt hasn't been adulterated by adding sweeteners, the nutritional qualities are remarkable.  It is a food that is high in protein, calcium, and several vitamins but low in fat and cholesterol.

But that's not all.  What about those bacteria?  It may be obvious that they are responsible for the fermentation process that results in yogurt, just like microbes are used to make beer, cheese, and wine.  However, in those cases the bacteria are pretty much finished once the job is done and they convey no particular health benefits of their own.  In yogurt, though, they continue to produce benefits even after the yogurt is consumed, assuming they are still alive (some manufacturers heat the finished yogurt, which kills the bacteria).  That's right, it is healthier to eat live germs than dead ones.  Here are some of the health benefits that research has shown derive directly from the live bacteria, excerpted from a summary by the Dr. Sears Health Group:

• Yogurt is easier to digest than milk. Many people who cannot tolerate milk, either because of a protein allergy or lactose intolerance, can enjoy yogurt. The culturing process makes yogurt more digestible than milk. The live active cultures create lactase, the enzyme lactose-intolerant people lack, and another enzyme contained in some yogurts (beta-galactosidase) also helps improve lactose absorption in lactase-deficient persons. Bacterial enzymes created by the culturing process, partially digest the milk protein casein, making it easier to absorb and less allergenic.
• Yogurt contributes to colon health.  ... yogurt contains lactobacteria, intestines-friendly bacterial cultures that foster a healthy colon, and even lower the risk of colon cancer. Lactobacteria, especially acidophilus, promotes the growth of healthy bacteria in the colon and reduces the conversion of bile into carcinogenic bile acids. The more of these intestines-friendly bacteria that are present in your colon, the lower the chance of colon diseases. Basically, the friendly bacteria in yogurt seems to deactivate harmful substances (such as nitrates and nitrites before they are converted to nitrosamines) before they can become carcinogenic...For senior citizens, who usually have more sensitive colons or whose intestines have run out of lactase, yogurt is also a valuable food. Elderly intestines showed declining levels of bifidus bacteria, which allow the growth of toxin-producing and, perhaps, cancer-causing bacteria. [my italics]
• Yogurt improves the bioavailability of other nutrients. Culturing of yogurt increases the absorption of calcium and B-vitamins. The lactic acid in the yogurt aids in the digestion of the milk calcium, making it easier to absorb.  
• Yogurt can boost immunity. Researchers who studied 68 people who ate two cups of live-culture yogurt daily for three months found that these persons produced higher levels of immunity boosting interferon. The bacterial cultures in yogurt have also been shown to stimulate infection-fighting white cells in the bloodstream. Some studies have shown yogurt cultures to contain a factor that has anti-tumor effects in experimental animals.
• Yogurt is a rich source of calcium. An 8-ounce serving of most yogurts provides 450 mg. of calcium, one-half of a child's RDA and 30 to 40 percent of the adult RDA for calcium. Because the live-active cultures in yogurt increase the absorption of calcium, an 8-ounce serving of yogurt gets more calcium into the body than the same volume of milk can.  [my italics]
• Yogurt is an excellent source of protein. ...Besides being a rich source of proteins, the culturing of the milk proteins during fermentation makes these proteins easier to digest. For this reason, the proteins in yogurt are often called "predigested." 
• Yogurt can lower cholesterol. There are a few studies that have shown that yogurt can reduce the blood cholesterol. This may be because the live cultures in yogurt can assimilate the cholesterol or because yogurt binds bile acids, (which has also been shown to lower cholesterol), or both. 

So the lesson here is that although there are plenty of nasty microbes out there that will kill us or make us very sick, there are many that do the opposite.  In fact, as detailed in my blog "How About A Fecal Transplant?"  we apparently can't live without some of them residing in our guts.

And of course the additional lesson of yogurt is that these little critters can be very tasty, too.

________________________
Some additional info:
A summary of research studies on the benefits of yogurt from the National Yogurt Association.

WebMD's summary of yogurt benefits.

Mini Monks in Myanmar

Earlier this year my wife and I had the good fortune to visit Myanmar (aka Burma) for about three weeks.  I emphasize "good fortune" because it was one of our best travel experiences ever -- warm, friendly and welcoming people, surprisingly good food, rich history, exotic culture, astonishingly beautiful Buddhist monuments and archeological sites.  "Good fortune" too in that geopolitical shifts suddenly allowed us to make the trip before mass tourism takes its inevitable toll.

We've wanted to travel there for years but didn't want to support the corrupt and repressive military regime that seized power in 1962.  This is the government that caused international condemnation in 2007 when it refused humanitarian aid after a horrific typhoon hit the southern provinces leading to an estimated 180,000 deaths from disease and starvation.  It also held the pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest for much of the last 20 years, despite the fact that in 1990 she resoundingly won the first election held after the military takeover. Recently however the military has introduced significant political, social, and economic reforms that have led to an improvement in relations with the U.S., giving us the opportunity we've been waiting for.

Of Myanmar's 56 million population, about 500,000 are in the military.  A fairly large army is needed because this is one of many countries in the world where order and stability come from the barrel of a gun.  But there are also about 300,000 Buddhist monks in Myanmar, a striking spiritual counterweight to raw physical force. Their orange robes and shaved heads make them stand out everywhere, adding to the exotic atmosphere that emphasizes to a Western visitor that "Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore."  There are also about 20,000 Buddhist nuns who also shave their heads but wear pink robes instead of orange.

The country is 89% Buddhist, a large portion of whom are fairly devout. Christians and Muslims are a tiny minority, about 4% each, with the remainder being mostly Hindu. There are very few Jewish citizens. This is a different variety of Buddhism than the type we saw in Bhutan (see my blog Bummin' With Buddha in Bhutan) though the basic tenets are the same. As was the case in Bhutan, Buddhism incorporated earlier religious beliefs rather than attempting to supplant them. In Myanmar this involves belief in Nats, spirits who inhabit objects and places and who have the power to protect those who worship them.  Monks seem to tolerate this but do not promote Nat worship. In the 11th century the monastic order cleverly declared that the most powerful of Nats had historically paid homage to Buddha, thus making all Nats subordinate to Buddhism. Despite this rather obvious self-serving maneuver, I found Buddhist practice in Myanmar much more agreeable than in Bhutan, where the monastic order seems to actively encourage and benefit from decidedly non-Buddhist beliefs in magic, superstition and demons.

The sight of thousands of monks and nuns is certainly novel to most Western visitors who have at best a rudimentary understanding of Buddhism.  Even more striking is that many of these monks and nuns are children as young as ten years old. This is very hard for someone raised in the deist religions of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam to grasp. For us clerical robes usually signify a consecrated spiritual leader dedicated to transmitting received knowledge to the laity -- definitely not something a 10-year old is capable of doing. Somewhat closer to the Buddhist concept are cloistered monastic orders in which monks and nuns dedicate themselves to a contemplative life rather than service to the larger community. But in Western religions children would not likely be candidates for such an order.

So what are these mini monks and mini nuns doing and why are they doing it?  The answer is a bit different for males and females.  In Myanmar (as in neighboring Buddhist countries Thailand, Laos and Cambodia) all Buddhist males are expected to become members of the monastic order twice during their lives -- once as novices between the ages of 10 and 20, and again as an ordained monk sometime after age 20.  These are usually temporary associations, though about 15% become permanent.  For girls there is no requirement to become a nun, but joining the order offers an attractive means for social advancement, especially for those of low economic status.

The novices reside in a monastery or convent and follow the daily monastic routine which involves secular and religious education as well as meditative practice.  For Buddhists meditation is the primary means of progressing toward the goal of enlightenment and thereby achieving Nirvana, the complete absence of suffering and unhappiness.  Meditation is not prayer or worship in the sense of deist religions but rather a way to gain control over one's mind and emotions, to develop insight into the nature of suffering and unhappiness, and to achieve a deeper understanding of life. I suspect that younger novices might have difficulty with some of the more complex issues but they still benefit in both the short and long term from acquiring the self-control and discipline needed for meditative practice. Thinking back to my own youth I am certain this would have been time better spent for me than the semi-delinquent and angst-ridden things I actually did.

For us the chance to interact with these mini-monks and nuns was one of the highlights of the trip.  Like many children of that age they were very curious about us and eager to practice their English. We had many enjoyable encounters with them but one special time for me was at the beginning of the trip in Yangon, when we paid an evening visit to the famous Shwedagon Paya, one of the largest Buddhist monuments in the world.  Local people gather on the terrace below the central stupa in the evening to socialize and pay homage to Buddha.  I broke away from our tour group and found a quiet place to sit and observe the scene. I was soon approached by three novices 14-15 years old who politely initiated a conversation about politics, religion, and social norms.  This is a situation where my years of world travel caused a cautionary alarm to sound in my head at the beginning but it was clearly unfounded. They were delighted to learn I was an American, and even more pleased to learn I was a teacher (educators in Myanmar are highly revered).  But in this case I was the one who learned the most -- I saw first-hand the disciplined thinking, openness to ideas, skillful concentration and emotional control that are very likely attributable at least in part to being mini-monks.

I have no illusions that Buddhism in Myanmar has avoided the kinds of gaps between principle and practice that are characteristic of other religions. History has shown that when religions become institutionalized they often transform from spiritual philosophies to social organizations focused on power, status, dominance and self-preservation.  Self-righteous violence against others, exploitative accumulation of wealth, sexual misconduct of spiritual leaders, and ruthless suppression of dissent are the frequent result. A glaring example in Myanmar is the long-standing conflict between two ethnic/religious groups in the northwest: Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims.  As reported by the BBC, recent violence erupted in late May when a Buddhist woman was raped and murdered by three Muslims. A Buddhist mob later killed 10 Muslims in retaliation, though they were unconnected with the earlier incident. In the violence that has followed about 80,000 people have been displaced and thousands of homes destroyed.

All religions are characterized by such disconnects between behavior and belief, including Buddhism, and my travels have frequently brought me face-to-face with their historical remnants around the world.  Although Buddhism is clearly not immune to this shortcoming, the historical record seems rather more negative for the major deist religions.  I am unaware of any Buddhist equivalents equal in scale to crusades, holocausts, jihads, or inquisitions.

Maybe these mini monks are on to something.

Let's Ban Political Ads!

There are many advantages to living here in Hawai'i, but one of the best is that in Presidential campaigns we don't matter.  The state population is small by national standards and our one puny little Electoral College vote doesn't warrant spending much time or money on us.  This means that we are spared the media blitz during election years that is targeted at those of you who live in more important "swing" states.

We used to live in Ohio, a state that is regularly a focus of intense campaigning. This meant lots of visits by the Presidential candidates or their surrogates, rallies, door-to-door canvasing, and a relentless barrage of 30-second t.v. spots.  This began during the primary season and continued right to the November election.

I was reminded of the obnoxiousness of the t.v. ads recently when I had to make a short trip to the mainland to attend a funeral.  The airwaves were full of 30-second ads for Romney and Obama, all of which seemed designed to be low on information and high on emotional impact. Careful factual analysis of the messages in many of these ads would reveal them to be vacuous, but then they aren't supposed to be logical or informative.  The media specialists who create these spots are masters at manipulating image, innuendo, and emotional associations (you can enjoy recent ads from this year's campaigns at Stanford's Political Communications Lab web site).  The messages may be logically weak but they can be highly effective in swaying voter opinion anyway, particularly as part of negative advertising campaigns.  This is why candidates and their supporting organizations spend so much money on media, estimated to be nearly $100 million for this month of July alone, according to Washington Post's Dan Eggan.

In the 2008 election, the total spent on media reached a staggering $359 million (see the Center for Responsive Politics for more detailed information).  The total campaign spending by McCain and Obama during that election was more that $1 billion (!) according to data released by the Federal Election Commision.  This time around more relaxed accountability rules for donations via so-called "Social Welfare Organizations," like Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS, and the recent Supreme Court ruling that corporations can donate unlimited amounts to "SuperPacs" are likely to push spending even higher.  If it weren't for the questionable ways in which this money is spent, we could regard it as a nice economic stimulus package.

Political ads have become increasingly negative over the last 20-30 years.  According to Shanto Iyengar, Director of the Stanford Political Communication Lab, negative campaigning in American politics blossomed as an effective strategy in the 1980's, pioneered by Fox News' Roger Ailes who was a campaign consultant to Ronald Reagan and George Bush at that time. Although the Republicans were the first to use negative campaigning effectively, Iyengar points out that the Democrats caught up quickly and are just as apt to use it as a campaign strategy.  His research shows that negative campaigning is particularly prominent in close elections and tends to depress voter turnout and polarize the electorate.  Given the likely closeness of the Obama/Romney race, then, we are probably going to see more and more negative ads this time around, and the campaigns will unfortunately reinforce the extreme polarization that is now paralyzing our government and will further reduce public perceptions of congress, already at an all-time low.  Whoopee.
 
Political ads are not held to the same "truth-in-advertising" principle that governs commercial advertising.  This is because they are considered "political speech" and are therefore protected by the First Amendment, to the point that broadcasters are required by law to air ads even if they contain demonstrably false information.  As a Time Magazine analysis of the 2008 election put it:

The noble idea undergirding what otherwise seems like a political loophole is the belief that voters have a right to uncensored information on which to base their decisions. Too often, however, the result is a system in which the most distorted information comes from the campaigns themselves. And as this year's presidential race is showing, that presents an opportunity for a candidate willing to go beyond simple distortions and exaggerations by making repeated and unapologetic use of objectively false statements.

So far I'd say the "this year" referred to in this analysis applies equally well to the current 2012 election.  Two online sources of unbiased examinations of the truth or falseness of  political statements that I find useful are PolitiFact.com and FactCheck.org , which I check regularly to get a more objective assessment of current campaign claims. Don't go to these sites expecting to support your hunch that one side is far more truthful than the other -- so far as I can tell the facts are abused about equally.  But the careful analyses of positions and statements (not just ads) can be very informative.

Shanto Iyengar points out that a growing trend in broadcast journalism has been to focus on political ads as news stories, which often simply gives them free air time and reduces a factual analysis to a matter of  "he-said-she-said."  In fact, savvy media consultants craft ads with this media attention in mind. For those voters who missed seeing the ads at other times, watching a news broadcast almost guarantees being exposed to at least some of them. Those who did see them during regular programming are exposed a second time.  In general news media attention to ad content rather than policy positions and proposals for solving problems may reinforce the negative tone of the election process and add to the polarization.  At the very least, focusing on ads and campaign strategy reduces coverage of more substantive information about candidates and their positions.  As Iyengar puts it: "in place of candidate positions and past performance on the issues, reporters gravitate toward the more entertaining facets of the campaign: the horse race, the advertising, the strategy, and whenever possible, instances of scandalous or unethical behavior."

Can the internet save us from this media morass?  There is no doubt that campaigning is incorporating more online technology as strategists try to reach the growing number of voters don't watch much t.v. but spend a lot of time online.  A recent report by Ryan Grim estimates that about 25% of consultant expenditures during this election cycle are going to online efforts.  And online ad campaigns seem to be effective. For example, the consulting firm Chong & Koster targeted some Florida voters with an average of five ads a day on Facebook, encouraging a no vote on a proposition that would have increased school class sizes. Voters exposed to the ads were more likely to vote no than a typical voter -- and more likely to oppose it than a typical Democrat. 

Online technology offers more than just a digitized medium for delivering the same ads, however.  Facebook and other social media are potentially powerful tools for linking candidate supporters and actively involving them in the campaign.  For instance, in one study described by Ryan Grim voter turnout was increased by messages from Facebook "friends" and people were more likely to remember information about the election when it came from a "friend" than from less personal sources.  As one top media consultant put it, candidates should not underestimate the power of social networks and peer-to-peer activism, and even though some politicians get nervous about the two-way nature of the online medium, they need to trust their supporters to fight for them in the online political debate. Whether this kind of activism produces positive or negative outcomes for the country as a whole remains to be seen.  Surely it depends on the quality and thoroughness of the information it is based on -- and this brings us right back to the original question concerning the content of campaign rhetoric.

A glimmer of hope for our electoral process is that online resources give voters access to substantive information about candidate positions on issues that is given short-shrift in in 30-second t.v. or internet ads and in most t.v. news coverage of campaign developments. Iyengar's assessment of the internet in this regard is particularly optimistic: 

...[internet] technology at least makes it possible for voters to bypass or supplement media treatment of the campaign and access information about the issues that affect them. Rather than waiting for news organizations to report on the policies they might care about, voters can take matters into their own hands and visit candidate websites to examine their positions on the issues. This form of motivated exposure is hardly an impediment to deliberation: paying attention to what the candidates have to say on the issues facilitates issue-oriented voting; paying attention to the media circus does not. Thus, there is some reason to hope that the spread of new forms of unmediated communication will eventually provide a better way to inform and engage voters.

 "Eventually" can't come soon enough for me.

Hiding From Facebook

I'm a pretty tech-savy guy.  I have a blog and my own homepage.  I have three email accounts. I own three computers, two Ipods and an Ipad. I manage our home wireless network.  I back everything up in the cloud. I'm a webmaster for an educational resource called PsyberSite. I've even taught courses about how the internet has influenced our society, for example "The Social Psychology of Cyberspace."

You might think I would be in the thick of the social network phenomenon --Tweeting and Google +'ing and Facebooking like crazy.  But you would be wrong.

There is no doubt that these recent developments in internet technology are having a tremendous impact on social relationships and the structure of our social world.  As a social psychologist I regard the social networking phenomenon as something that is very significant and fascinating to study.  And to my friends  who are Facebook fans (some of whom are reading this right now), let me assure you that I appreciate the many positive benefits this technology can have -- staying in contact with friends, sharing important life experiences with them, finding and reconnecting with old friends, and in general adding to the social richness of life. 

However, my personal reaction has been quite different.  You see, despite (or maybe because of ) my close involvement with internet technology over the years I have a skeptical, aversive, even paranoid stance regarding these latest social developments.  My wife and I do have a Facebook page, but we hardly ever post anything on it.  We have a whopping total of 36 Friends, a pretty puny number compared to some people who have hundreds.  And I admit it is fun to read the posts of others and to learn of the events in their lives and the lives of their family and friends.  But we both balk when it comes to sharing the same sort of information on our own Facebook page.  I should point out here that my reluctance is greater than my wife's, and she has sometimes expressed regret at feeling left out of this phenomenon.  (Perhaps we will soon go our separate ways and get individual accounts.)

I think there are a couple of reasons why I'm hiding from Facebook, both of them stemming from personality flaws that are long-standing and deeply rooted.

First, I'm generally a very private person and even in face-to-face situations I'm not comfortable disclosing personal information, even to very close friends.  Of course, professorial pontificating is an entirely different matter, and I have never been reluctant to do that, though my students often viewed me as "aloof" and "impersonal."  I think I'm friendly and approachable but I'm hesitant to be very open except with a few people I've know for a long time.

It is possible on Facebook to divide "friends" into differing categories like "Close Friends, " "Acquaintances,"  "Family," and even to create your own divisions.  You can also create groups of "friends" within each of these categories depending on interests or activities and then share different information with people in each one.  I don't know how many Facebook users take advantage of these features, but I find the categorization process very daunting and fraught with the danger of forgetting who is in which group and posting something that inadvertently offends someone or is at least regarded by them as inappropriate.

Another related issue for me is that as part of my private personality it is difficult to feel comfortable with the high frequency that seems to be the norm in posting Facebook information. Even with very close friends I much prefer fewer but more intense and personal interactions.

My second reason for hiding from Facebook may be that I have this "thing" about institutions or organizations that quickly become big and powerful, no matter how benign they may seem.  (See my slogan for Snow Crash.) My negative reaction is a complex bundle of paranoia, issues with authority, and wanting to assert independence by being non-conformist -- in short, not entirely rational.  Facebook is indeed big, reaching 750 million users in just eight years. And it has certainly become powerful as well.  As Steven Johnson noted in a recent Wired Magazine analysis, "Facebook is on the cusp of becoming a medium unto itself—more akin to television as a whole than a single network, and more like the entire web than just one online destination.....The difference, of course, is that no one owns the web—or in some strange way we all own it. But with Facebook we are ultimately just tenant farmers on the land; we make it more productive with our labor, but the ground belongs to someone else."

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, wants us to be able to share everything, "...to make the world more open and connected."  He has created an interface that makes sharing extraordinarily easy to do -- but also that makes it easy for our social connections to be tracked and exploited.  Here's a small excerpt from the list of data Facebook receives and stores about users, taken from its Data Use Policy:

• We receive data about you whenever you interact with Facebook, such as when you look at another person's timeline, send or receive a message, search for a friend or a Page, click on, view or otherwise interact with things, use a Facebook mobile app, or purchase Facebook Credits or make other purchases through Facebook. 
• When you post things like photos or videos on Facebook, we may receive additional related data (or metadata), such as the time, date, and place you took the photo or video. 
• We receive data from the computer, mobile phone or other device you use to access Facebook, including when multiple users log in from the same device. This may include your IP address and other information about things like your internet service, location, the type (including identifiers) of browser you use, or the pages you visit. For example, we may get your GPS or other location information so we can tell you if any of your friends are nearby. 
• We receive data whenever you visit a game, application, or website that uses Facebook Platform or visit a site with a Facebook feature (such as a social plugin), sometimes through cookies. This may include the date and time you visit the site; the web address, or URL, you're on; technical information about the IP address, browser and the operating system you use; and, if you are logged in to Facebook, your User ID. 
• Sometimes we get data from our advertising partners, customers and other third parties that helps us (or them) deliver ads, understand online activity, and generally make Facebook better. For example, an advertiser may tell us information about you (like how you responded to an ad on Facebook or on another site) in order to measure the effectiveness of - and improve the quality of - ads.

I get very nervous when I read that list, despite assurances that my information is shared only "after we have removed your name or any other personally identifying information from it."  It seems to me that the detail contained in the information makes it very personal indeed, whether my name is associated with it or not.  I note also that the use to which my information may be put is rather open-ended.  I really don't know the specific ways Facebook uses tracking information and so I just have to trust that it will be benign.

My issues with authority and control lead me to get nervous about another aspect of Facebook -- its tendency to try to keep me within its warm and fuzzy embrace.  For example, a recent unannounced move was for Facebook to change people's email addresses that they had listed in their public profiles to addresses that use a Facebook email account.  If a friend sends a message to me at earthlink.com, for instance, it gets delivered to my Facebook email account instead.  Another development is Facebook's "Open Graph" initiative to encourage users to install apps that function within the Facebook interface even though they utilize content from the broader internet.  For example, if a friend has posted a link to a Washington Post news article, clicking on that link doesn't take you to the Washington Post web site, but rather serves the article to you through a internal app that you must install within Facebook. Of course, keeping a user within the Facebook interface allows even more thorough tracking of online behavior.  Wired's Steven Johnson raised a broader and more philosophical objection in his article that resonates well with my personality quirks:

This reluctance to link to the outside is, to say the least, hard to reconcile with Zuckerberg’s paean to open connection. Hyperlinks are the connective tissue of the online world; breaking them apart with solicitations to download apps may make it easier to share data passively with your friends, but the costs—severing the link itself and steering people away from unlit corners of the web—clearly outweigh the gains. Surely we can figure out a way to share seamlessly without killing off the seamless surfing that has done so much for us over the past two decades.

In the meantime, I'll just keep hiding......
 

How About A Fecal Transplant?

Yes, you read correctly.  A fecal transplant.  "Fecal" as in "poop."  "Transplant" as in "from one person to another."

This new medical procedure makes the idea of using leeches, maggots, and flesh-nibbling fish seem appetizingly appealing by comparison.  I recently learned about it from a couple of New York Times science articles by Carl Zimmer and Gina Kolata, and it was so interesting I did some followup investigating of my own. The transplant is one promising development in the treatment of all kinds of health problems that has emerged from the field of medical ecology, a branch of microbiology which studies the complex interactions between health and a person's microbiota (or microbiome), the collection of 100 trillion microbes that live on and in each human body.

The two to five pounds of complex microbial communities that inhabit our bodies are apparently essential to not just our health but to our very existence.  Without them we would be unable to digest food, synthesize certain vitamins, and fight off many infectious diseases.  While it is certainly true that quite a few bacteria are harmful to us, many more are beneficial to the point that we can't live without them.  Our microbiome is as essential to us as our heart or our brain.

A microbiome is a true ecosystem in the sense that it involves a complex balance among the many different species of bacteria, viruses and fungi that comprise it.  In fact, one difficulty in studying these organisms has been that they are so adapted to living surrounded by other microbes and are so dependent on their host body that many can't be isolated and grown in the lab, and even if they do survive outside of the body they often behave differently than in their natural environment. However, a recent five-year federally funded research program has begun to give a clearer picture of our microbial communities and their impact on our health by using DNA analysis that doesn't require laboratory cultures. Called the Human Microbiome Project, the study involves 200 scientists at 80 institutions who have sequenced the genetic material of bacteria taken from nearly 250 healthy people, an immense effort that has led to some surprising findings.

For one thing, the researchers discovered more strains than they had ever imagined — as many as a thousand bacterial strains on each person. And each person’s collection of microbes was different from the next person’s, a kind of microbial fingerprint that uniquely identifies each individual.  Also surprising was that there were genetic signatures of disease-causing bacteria and viruses lurking in the microbiome of every one of these healthy individuals.  Instead of making people ill, or even infectious, the disease-causing microbes were simply living peacefully among their neighbors, held in check by the complex interactions of the microbiome community.

Another finding is that a person's microbiome changes throughout life in response to environmental and biological influences.  This process begins at birth, when certain key bacteria are transferred from mother to child during delivery and afterward during nursing. In pregnancy the relative concentrations of certain bacteria change in a women's birth canal in response to hormonal shifts.  One species of bacteria that is normally rare but becomes dominant is lactobacillus johnsonii. It is usually found in the gut, where it produces enzymes that digest milk. It’s an odd species to find proliferating in the vagina, to say the least. Dr. Aagaard-Tillery, one of the scientists who made this discovery, speculates that during delivery a baby will be coated by lactobacillus johnsonii and ingest some of it, an inoculation that prepares the infant to digest breast milk. The milk, it turns out, contains some 600 species of beneficial bacteria and also certain sugars that the baby can't digest but which nourish the bacteria. It seems the mother is not only feeding the child but also the child's bacteria and thereby promoting the development of the child's microbiome.

Our cultural attitude toward microbes is decidedly negative and non-selective:  "The only good microbe is a dead microbe."  However, the more we learn about the microbiome the clearer it becomes that this is not really justified and may be very harmful to us in the end.  For example, the use of broad-spectrum antibiotics to treat infections, while effective in the short run, wipes out not only the bad bacteria but also many of the the ones that are necessary to restore and maintain health.  We have generally assumed that the microbiome would return to normal on its own, but scientists are now realizing that assumption isn't justified -- it would be like assuming that lettuce and tomatoes would spontaneously return after spraying the whole garden with herbicide to kill the weeds.  In fact, there appear to be certain strains of harmful bacteria that thrive in disrupted or diminished microbiomes following broad-spectrum antibiotic treatments, like the antibiotic-resistant Clostridium difficile.  Re-establishing a healthy microbiome is very difficult in these circumstances.

Enter the fecal transplant.

According to Lita Proctor, program director for the Human Microbiome Project, "Half of your stool is not leftover food. It is microbial biomass.”  Assuming the donor is healthy, this means stool contains the complex collection of microbes needed to restart a depleted microbiome in another person.  And it seems to work.  Initial studies using fecal suppositories to treat Clostridium difficile infections have been very promising, and larger clinical trials are underway.  Fecal transplants are also being studied as a way to treat obesity by transplanting fecal samples from lean donors to obese patients. Researchers at the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam are running a clinical trial to see if fecal transplants can help treat obesity. They have recruited 45 obese men; some are getting transplants from their own stool, while others get transplants from lean donors. The scientists are finding that the transplants from lean donors are changing how the obese subjects metabolize sugar.

Efforts are also underway to isolate the bacteria from the poop, to remove the "ick" factor, as researcher Dr. Alexander Khoruts puts it.  He would eventually like to develop probiotic pills that contain just a few key species required to build the intestinal ecosystem  -- Poop Pills, so to speak.

I certainly learned a lot from researching this topic, and the information has changed my outlook about who and what I am. For one thing, I realize how wrong my belief is that I am separate and independent from my environment.  "I" am composed of trillions of other organisms without which I could not exist.  They are as much "me" as any other part of my body.  As Dr. Barnett Kramer of the National Cancer Institute has said,  "humans in some sense are made mostly of microbes. From the standpoint of our microbiome, we may just serve as packaging.”

Certainly a humbling thought.

Disney Dreams

Walt Disney opened his California theme park in 1955 with these words: "To all who come to this happy place, welcome."

"This happy place" quickly morphed into the slogan of the park that persists to this day -- "The Happiest Place on Earth."  The recognizability of the phase as referring to Disneyland and now to other Disney parks certainly attests to its success as a marketing logo, but also to the fact that several generations of visitors have agreed with the sentiment it expresses.

Although Walt clearly wanted to make people happy, there was quite a bit more to it than that.  At the 1955 opening ceremony he went on to say,

 "Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past...and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams and the hard facts that have created America...with the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world."

His own dream was embodied in his plans for Disney World in Florida,  a project that went way beyond anything he had accomplished at Disneyland.  As I mentioned in my last blog, Disney World was opened in 1971 but sadly Disney died of lung cancer before it was completed. The official motto of WDW became "Where Dreams Come True," perhaps a reference not only to the dreams of visitors but also to Walt's own. At the grand opening Walt's brother Roy alluded to this:

"Walt Disney World is a tribute to the philosophy and life of Walter Elias Disney ... and to the talents, the dedication, and the loyalty of the entire Disney organization that made Walt Disney's dream come true. May Walt Disney World bring joy and inspiration and new knowledge to all who come to this happy place ... a Magic Kingdom where the young at heart of all ages can laugh and play and learn ... together."

And Julie Andrews, host of the televised ceremonies, made the connection very clear, referring to the park as "...a joyful land built by an inspired dreamer for other dreamers and dreams still to come."

It is hard to find fault with these sentiments.  They seem particularly uplifting in this time of economic, political, and social malaise.  After the deaths of Walt and Roy, it fell to the corporate structure they created to carry on the ideals they had espoused in these dedication speeches. For the most part I think the Disney brothers would approve of the changes in the parks and the numerous other new projects and developments that have taken place in their name over the years.

The many times I have visited the parks (almost always WDW) I have enjoyed myself thoroughly.  However, my last stay at WDW produced some nagging qualms that I have been struggling to deal with.  In my last blog I explored one of them, the presence of thousands of school-age children before the end of the school year who did not seem to be there to "...savor the challenge and promise of the future" nor to appreciate "new knowledge."  But they were certainly managing to "...laugh and play"  (well, when they weren't on their cell phones).

Another qualm has to do with the message that seems to underlie the current use of the slogans mentioned above.  It was about five years since I was at WDW, and I'm not sure whether it is me who has changed or whether it is the way the taglines are being used, but during my most recent visit I began to detect a shallowness to the constant emphasis on dreams, wishes, memories and magic -- a shallowness that certainly doesn't do justice to Walt and Roy.  The message, delivered in performances and attractions that were invariably entertaining and thoroughly effective at evoking warm and fuzzy visceral emotional responses, seemed to be that your dreams will always come true if you just wish with all your heart.  Just wish it and it will happen, no matter what you want.

This idea appeared in many venues and was especially evident in the spectacularly well-produced nightly fireworks show called, appropriately enough, Wishes. The show begins with some great fireworks and a few words from the Blue Fairy, who proclaims that when a star is born it has the power to grant a wish.  A song follows ending with the well-known refrain "When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are, anything your heart desires will come...to...you."  Jiminy Cricket then directly addresses those who might be skeptical:  "I'll bet a lot of you folks don’t believe that, about a wish coming true, do ya? We'll I didn’t either. Course, I’m just a cricket, but lemme tell you what made me change my mind. You see, the most fantastic, magical things can happen, and it all starts with a wish!"  The evidence is then presented in the form of the wishes-come-true of Tinkerbell, Cinderella, Snow White, Ariel, Peter Pan, Pinocchio, and Aladdin.  Jiminy concludes "You see, its just like I told ya. Wishes can come true, if you believe in them with all your heart."

Well, ok.  But I wonder if a more beneficial lesson might not be drawn from Disney's own life.  His dreams didn't come true just because he wished them to but rather because he worked hard, took great risks, and sacrificed much to overcome many difficulties and obstacles.  He was frequently on the brink of financial disaster;  his creative ideas and plans were often met with skepticism and derision;  a number of his projects were failures, or were abandoned before they were started.  Despite these challenges he persevered when many of us would have given up.  Wishing and dreaming were necessary to his success, but hardly sufficient. 

In my view that's the true legacy of Disney.

A Disney Education

My wife and I just spent a week at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. No, we didn't take kids or grand kids with us -- we don't have any, and besides in our view they would spoil our fun.

We have visited WDW many times since it was opened in 1971, usually every five years or so.  Any more often is an overdose, similar to going to Las Vegas too often.  Both places offer escapist fantasy of the highest order, best enjoyed after a break to re-center and re-ground your sensibilities.

It is important to distinguish between Walt Disney World (WDW) in Florida and Disneyland in California.  Disneyland was Walt's first theme park, a ground-breaking concept that opened in 1955 and almost immediately outgrew its available space.  WDW in contrast consists of a vast tract of 47 square miles in central Florida, with four widely spaced theme parks (Magic Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, EPCOT, and Animal Kingdom),  two water parks, 23 on-site themed resort hotels (excluding eight more that are on-site, but not owned by the Walt Disney Company),  a campground, two spas and physical fitness centers, five golf courses, and other recreational and entertainment venues in an area known as Downtown Disney.  If you stay on site, as we choose to do, you are immersed in the whole Disney experience 24/7.  Mickey and friends are everywhere, including on the soap in your bathroom;  everything is neat and tidy; everyone is polite, friendly, and happy.  As I said, escapist fantasy of the highest order.  Sadly, Walt Disney died at 65 from lung cancer, five years before his dream opened in 1971.  His older brother Roy delayed retirement to oversee the initial development of WDW and then died a few months after the opening. 

Our visit was at the end of April, a time we thought would be less crowded because it was after most school spring breaks and before summer vacations.  We reasoned that most parents are concerned with their children's education and wouldn't take them out of school just to visit a theme park. This is also a time when central Florida weather is still moderate.  Our other visits have been in the fall, around Christmas, and during the summer, and so we were looking forward to our first springtime visit.

We were right about the weather --  most days were clear and the temperature was pleasant.  And the crowds weren't as bad as they can be in the peak summer months.

But we were dead wrong about the numbers of school-age kids.  Besides quite a few families with one or more children there were many, many groups of junior high and high school kids from all parts of the country, apparently on field trips or senior outings.  And there were thousands of teenage girls who were participating in the annual World Championship Cheerleading competitions being held at EPCOT.  When the cheerleaders weren't competing they were roaming the parks in packs of 10 to 20 giggling and jiggling "nubile nymphettes," as I called them. Needless to say, this altered the "Magical" atmosphere considerably.

The presence of so many kids whose schools were still weeks away from summer break raised questions in our minds about the commitment of the kids as students, the educational priorities of their parents, and the values of the sponsoring organizations (maybe including Disney Corp.).  I'm sure there are all kinds of practical justifications for these children to miss school in order to visit WDW;  parents cannot always control the timing of their vacations from work;  it's easier for organizations to schedule venues at WDW during this time of year;  travel arrangements are cheaper and more plentiful now than in the summer.  It is also true that not all "education" takes place in a classroom and indeed there are a number educational aspects to be found in WDW. 

These justifications seem reasonable but I think they may be problematic in several ways.  First, though visiting WDW can be educational in some ways, that is true no matter when it occurs.  On the other hand certain important educational experiences are closely tied to a classroom --  for example, I've never seen anything in WDW that would substitute for a skillful explanation of algebraic expansion or the laboratory experience of working through an analytical chemistry problem.  Second, the absence of large numbers of students poses significant logistical problems for teachers and schools, both in altering the classroom structure that is supportive of learning and in placing additional demands on teachers to help students make up work they have missed. Third, when parents and organizations endorse school absence they convey to young people that education is less important than entertainment and enjoyment.  I'm afraid this is a general trend in our society today, and I don't believe it serves us well in the global community.  As my wife and I have traveled around the world we have seen many developing countries investing heavily in education and  infrastructure. The support for educational institutions and teachers is striking.  Just the opposite seems to be the case in the U.S., as illustrated by recent budget cuts to schools and universities and salary freezes and reductions for teachers.

Maybe I'm making too much of this.  Or maybe I just received my very own Disney Education.

 _______________________________________________

An additional resource on Disney can be found at http://www.units.muohio.edu/psybersite/disney.  This web site was created by a group of my students as a class project some years ago.

Here are a couple of quotes about Disney you may find interesting:

When Dwight D. Eisenhower was President, called Disney a "genius as a creator of folklore" and said his "sympathetic attitude toward life has helped our children develop a clean and cheerful view of humanity, with all its frailties and possibilities for good."

Prof. William Lyon Phelps of Yale said of Mr. Disney: "He has accomplished something that has defied all the efforts and experiments of the laboratories in zoology and biology. He has given animals souls."

Bankers' Math -- Part Sept

The first blog in my Bankers' Math series was three years ago and dealt with some of the self-serving manipulations my bank went through when my wife and I refinanced our mortgage.  Since then I've documented several excesses of the financial industry that I've encountered first-hand, and you can find links to these blogs below if you haven't read them.  Caution -- those readers with high blood pressure are advised against exposure to this material.

In this installment of "what-are-the-folks-who brought-us-the-great-recession-up-to-now" we return to mortgage refinancing, an ordeal we have just undergone once more.  We chose to endure this again because we could get a new mortgage rate that is more than a percentage point less than our old rate. Most personal finance experts say a drop of this magnitude is worthwhile -- provided the length of time it takes to recoup the umpteen bank fees and charges is reasonable.

In January we contacted our bank (Bank of Hawaii) and started the process.  Because of my tendency toward obsessiveness when it comes to keeping financial and personal information, we quickly got all the required records together -- tax returns for the last two years, mutual fund and investment statements for all of 2011,  payment statements from our pension funds, birth certificates, life history, retinal scans, DNA samples, diplomas, fingerprints, Kirlian photographs, urine analyses, etc., etc.   We completed the application by the end of January.  After 2 1/2 months BOH finally deemed us worthy of their blessing and we "closed" -- the bank's term for an hour-long session in which you sign several thousand documents, all designed to give the bank every possible legal advantage over you.

Of the many irksome aspects of this process, one stands out.  It occurred when we received the official Loan Approval Notice which said:  "We are pleased to inform you that your application for a mortgage loan on the terms set forth is approved, provided the conditions and terms below outlined are satisfied prior to the expiration date of the loan approval and loan closing."  (In other words, keep jumping through hoops until we tell you to stop.)  Some of the conditions listed were simply not under our control, for example "Lender (my italics) will provide customer with an IRS 4506-T to be signed at closing."  Huh???

But one condition was truly rankling:  "Borrowers must provide proof of liquid assets required for closing."  (The money required for closing had been spelled out in the application and amounted to just a few thousand dollars.)  We puzzled over this because it seemed obvious to us that we had already documented all of our assets, including those that were liquid. But bankers apparently see the world differently than the rest of us....

In our view the documents we provided with the initial application established the following facts that would seem to be relevant to whether we would be able to show up at the closing with enough cash:

• Our financial records clearly indicated liquid assets five times greater than the value of the loan itself  and dozens of times greater than the estimated closing costs.
• We had been through this process twice before with BOH and both times we successfully paid the closing costs.
• For six+ years we'd faithfully made mortgage payments to BOH showing, one would think, that we have enough liquid assets to meet our financial obligations.
• The appraised value of our house is twice the value of the loan we were asking for, clearly indicating we were not in over our heads.
• We have no other debts of any kind -- no other obligations competing for our liquid assets.
• We both have credit scores over 800 -- only obtainable if financial obligations are fully met over a long period of time.

So what did we do?  We printed a screen shot of our Vanguard accounts showing the up-to-the-minute balances and wrote a letter suggesting that this "proved" we had enough money to cover the closing costs. This seemed to mollify the bank and we oozed closer to a closing date.

However, about a week from D-Day we got a message demanding the latest statement of some accounts Karen has with DWS, a mutual fund company.  We had furnished a summary with the initial (now accepted) application, but apparently someone decided that wasn't enough and now they wanted a recent detailed, transaction by transaction statement.  I quickly complied and just for good measure I also sent the latest monthly Vanguard Statement showing transactions for all the rest of our mutual funds, and I even threw in a copy of our 2011 Federal Tax Return that I had just filed.  Again, the bank bean-counters seemed mollified and we continued oozing.

Until four days later.  "Please furnish the most recent monthly statement for your......[wait for it]......Vanguard Accounts"  (!!!!!!)  Yes, the very same information I had given them four days earlier!

I drew their attention to the fact I had just given them this statement (with great restraint, I might add) and we moved forward.  I never received an apology, an explanation or even an acknowledgment that they might have made a mistake.  But it's clear they weren't really looking at the information we were providing to them.

It's over, and I'm very glad to have it behind us.  But I have to think that if this is how we were treated -- someone with excellent credit and a solid financial status -- then people with even slightly less fortunate circumstances must suffer tremendous insults during this process. 
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Other Blogs in the Bankers' Math Series:
Bankers' Math -- Part Six
Bankers' Math -- Part Cinq
Bankers' Math -- Part Quatre
Bankers' Math -- Part Trois
Bankers' Math -- Part Deux
Bankers' Math -- 29=31=$

Flying the (Un)Friendly Skies

One of the worst things about traveling is...traveling.  Specifically, air travel. This once-glamorous mode of transportation has now become a stressful, hassle-laden, uncomfortable, and often degrading experience.  My wife and I visit other other places for fun and enrichment, which usually makes up for some of the negatives of getting to our destination.  We have great sympathy for business travelers who endure flying for their jobs and don't have this compensation.

My wife and I fly quite a lot, often to places that are far from home (see my blogs on Bhutan and on the Middle East).  We can't afford Business Class or First Class, so these journeys are in "steerage" unless by some increasingly rare miracle we get a free upgrade. It isn't unusual for the total flying time on these trips to be 15-20 hours, usually but not always broken into two or more segments of 5-10 hours each.  Once we suffer through the cattle-pen atmosphere of checking in, the indignities of going through security, the elbow-fest of getting our share of overhead bin space, and finally shoe-horning ourselves into our seats, the rest of the trip is primarily a matter trying to cope with excruciating boredom and physical discomfort.

At this point I should acknowledge that we have it incredibly easy compared to the days before air travel, and we forget that commercial aviation is a very recent technological marvel.  Someone from the late 1800's would find our complaints trivial in light of the wondrous feat of traveling half-way around the world in a day or two.

But human nature leads us to use a more restrictive basis of comparison, namely how things have changed in the recent past.  Geopolitical events, like 9/11, have led to tightening of airport security. Financial pressures on airlines have led to a host of cost-cutting measures, including reducing the number of flights, cramming more seats in each aircraft, charging for luggage, meals, and on some airlines even for the privilege of reserving a specific seat in advance.  In short, it seems like the situation is getting worse and worse.

The latest round of decline for us involves the recent merger of United Airlines and Continental Airlines.  For years we have been members of United's frequent flyer program primarily because United has offered the best mainland and international connections.  Of course, actually cashing in our award miles has always been a little difficult because we live in Hawai'i -- a popular destination for people to use their miles to visit, making competition for available award seats fierce.  Still, we've managed to take advantage of the program often enough that it has balanced some of the negatives of air travel.

One of the best features of United's program was that if your paid travel in a year totaled 25,000 miles or more you were rewarded with some extra perks (please note -- these must be miles flown, not earned in other ways, like with a credit card):  You could reserve seats in economy with more leg room, check two bags free, and board the plane earlier (thus avoiding some of the slug-fest for overhead storage).  On our marathon journeys these things have made a big difference, particularly having more comfortable seats, and have kept us loyal to United's program.  And given the amount of money required for us to achieve 25,000 miles in a year, these perks seemed a fitting gesture of appreciation from United for our business.

The merger has changed all that -- for the worse, naturally.

A few weeks ago we received notice from United about the new "wonderful" and "exciting" features of the merger, including the merged frequent flyer programs.  Cutting through all the breathless corporate hype revealed new policies that represent a dramatic downgrade of benefits for customers like us at the 25,000 mile level.  The most irksome change is that now reserving seats with more leg room requires 50,000 miles in a year -- double the earlier number and certainly out of reach of the ordinary traveler.  Even many business travelers might have trouble meeting that requirement.  You can, however, pay extra for those seats -- an additional $150-250 per person for trips of the length we usually take.  There is one shred of this perk left -- 24 hours before the flight we can vie for the unsold premium seats with all the other 25k-milers.  Of course, this means that we may not find seats together, or that the available seats will be in those wonderful "middle of the middle" locations.  Spending 15-20 hours in one of those seats is decidedly unappealing, something you might wish only on the CEO who masterminded this new policy.

For us these changes no longer give United an edge compared to other airline frequent flyer programs. The new policies convey that our loyalty and considerable level of spending don't count for as much as they did.  So be it, and we wish United a profitable future. Their profit probably won't be coming as much from us, however, because we will be much more likely to consider alternative carriers.

Decision Making in Geezerhood

The waitress returned for the third time, order pad in hand.  "How we doin' here folks?  Are you guys ready to order or would you like another few minutes?"  There was a tone of sweet condescension in her voice, likely the result of her reaction to our grey hair.  I imagine she was thinking: come on geezers, make up your minds!

One of the stereotypes of older people is that they have difficulty making decisions and the decisions they finally come up with are often flawed.  Like most stereotypes, this one has a kernel of truth but also distorts the real picture, and is flat-out wrong in certain cases.  For instance, my wife and I have always taken a long time to order in a restaurant because we share each dish and we are both particular -- so it takes some time to select things we both will like.  Being geezers is irrelevant.

However, there is ample evidence from research on aging that the average performance of older people on many types of decisions is both slower and less optimal than younger people.  This is particularly true when the decision involves remembering, evaluating, and comparing many pieces of information that vary in relevance to making an optimal choice.  The cognitive declines in memory, analytic reasoning, and executive functioning that are common in older adults make these kinds of decisions more difficult and results in sub-optimal choices (Henninger, Madden, and Huettel, 2010).

Financial decision-making is one realm in which the consequences of poor choices can be very important. The cognitive deficits associated with aging have been found to be particularly problematic in this context. For example, a Brookings Institute study comparing age groups on a variety of financial products found that older people wind up paying higher fees, penalties, and interest rates across a wide range of credit transactions, including credit cards, mortgages, and car loans (Agarwal et al., 2007).  Interestingly, the relationship between decision quality appears to be U-shaped, with the most optimal decisions made by those around 50.  One explanation of this curvilinear function is that young people, though they have high cognitive abilities lack experience and background knowledge, whereas older people have a great deal of experience and knowledge but have difficulty applying this because of cognitive deficits.  In middle age there is an optimal trade-off of experience and cognitive functioning.

Another important aspect of financial decision-making involves making choices that require an assessment of risk of loss versus probability of reward.  For example, maintaining an investment portfolio of 100% bonds entails very little risk but provides limited rewards, whereas a portfolio of 100% equities entails much more risk but also may provide significantly greater returns over time.  And of course there is considerable variation in the risk levels of individual stocks and bonds that requires evaluation and comparison of complex information in order to make an optimal choice.

Unfortunately, research evidence concerning the quality of decisions involving risk indicates that geezers tend to make poorer decisions than young people.  Henninger et al.(2010) recently summarized the data succinctly:

...older adults’ real-world decisions involving risk are often of objectively worse quality than those of younger adults, both in laboratory and real-world settings, with an abrupt decrease in decision-making skill observed in individuals over 70 years of age (Korniotis & Kumar, in press). As examples, older adults within that age range earn 3%–5% lower risk-adjusted annual returns (Korniotis & Kumar, in press) and obtain systematically worse outcomes on a wide variety of financial instruments (Agarwal, Driscoll, Gabaix, & Laibson, 2007), even when controlling for confounding factors like income, investment horizon, and desired rate of return... In short, substantial evidence demonstrates that older adults are more likely to make poor-quality financial decisions, often leading to significant negative personal consequences.

In line with the "conservative geezer" stereotype, one source of these sub-optimal decisions might seem to be a general tendency toward risk aversion even when some degree of risk is adaptive. However, the evidence indicates a more complex picture. Though older people do exhibit detrimental risk aversion in some circumstances (Mather, 2006), they also may show the same or even more risk preference as young people in other situations.  For example, if the benefits of an alternative with more risk are emphasized, older adults may weigh them more heavily than young people.  This stems from the general tendency of older people to be more optimistic and positive than younger people, a phenomenon I explored in an earlier blog.  In the financial arena this tendency may lead to poorer choices and susceptibility to scammers (Ross, 2010).

So far the picture looks pretty bleak, but fortunately I can end on a couple of positive notes.  First, recognizing the challenges of geezer decision-making allows the development of ways of presenting information modifying the context of decision making to compensate for declines in cognitive functioning, for example by reducing the memory load in decision tasks and by presenting information in ways that can be more readily related to older adults' greater past experience (Henninger et al., 2010) and that may more clearly balance the positive and negative aspects of risk alternatives (Ross, 2010).

Second, it is clear that there is considerable variability in the quality of decision-making by geezers, to the degree that some older people outperform younger adults.  This variability has been shown to be tied to differences among older people in the degree of cognitive decline -- an important fact because it means that it isn't age per se that leads to poorer decisions but rather it is the degree of specific types of neurological deficit.  And there is abundant evidence that the rate and amount of cognitive decline can be altered by life style choices, with the most dramatic effects coming from continuing physical exercise throughout middle and old age (see my blog Jogging the Memory of a Geezer for a review of this research).

Yet another reason to lace up those walking shoes -- it might keep you solvent!

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Agarwal, S., Driscoll, J., Gabaix, X., & Laibson, D. (2009). The age of reason:  Financial decisions over the life-cycle and implications for regulation.  Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2, 51-117.

Henninger, D.E., Madden, D., & Huettel, S.A., (2010). Processing Speed and Memory Mediate Age-Related Differences in Decision Making. Psychology and Aging, 25, No. 2, 262–270.

Mather, M. (2006). A review of decision-making processes: Weighing the risks and benefits of aging. In L. L. Carstensen & C. R. Hartel (Eds.), When I’m 64 (pp. 145–173). Washington, DC: National Academies
Press.