tv Book TV CSPAN May 30, 2011 2:00pm-3:00pm EDT
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and numerous people said, you know, his actions embolden them to be recalcitrant, to pass the black coat, you know, to sort of tamp down any move for transformation. so it would not have been a land of milk and honey. the south would not have rolled over and accepted blacks as equal citizens but it wouldn't have been as bad as it was.
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i think it could have been different. history is all about contingencies and we ended up with a person who was strong enough to stand for union and understood the importance of the union but union but because of his own personal character, a character issue, was unable to see through the transformation of himself because to him, that was against everything that he believed. >> the please join me in thanking annette gordon-reed. >> annette gordon-reed is a history law professor at havard university. she is the author of "the hemingses of monticello" which was awarded the national book award and pulitzer prize in history. her book on andrew johnson as part of time books, the american presidents series. to find out more visit american presidents series.com.
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>> and now david brooks looks at our unconscious mind shapes our character, intelligence and biases. this is just under an hour. >> it is a great pleasure to be here more or less in my hometown, went to radnor high school about 13 miles west of here and so it is always good to be back home in this area. because i know philadelphians, i know you did not come to hear me. you came here to hear yourself. [laughter] and so i will try to be brief. and get out of your way. [laughter] it is a pleasure to be back. i try to think of what my high schoolteacher at rattner would have thought if they could have seen me addressing crowds in philadelphia. there would be widespread shock. i was not a big man on campus said radner though i was stuffed into lockers by some of the big man on campus.
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[laughter] i actually one of my debate partners on the debate team needless to say, one of my debate partners with tom wilson who played biff in the back to the future movies and another one was a guy named josh worman who chases tornadoes and was one of the subjects of the movie twister years ago. so they one on two lead exciting lives and i went on to talk. [laughter] now a lot of the people i talk with now are politicians, and so when i was given my current job at the time i was given a good piece of advice which was to interview three politicians every day and then from spending that much time around them i can tell you they are all emotional freaks of one sort or another. they have what i call logorrhea dementia which is they talk so much they drive themselves insane. [laughter] but they do have incredible social skills. when you meet them by and large they will stand request u.n. they will invite -- invade your personal space and brother back of your head and caress your
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cheek. i had dinner with a republican senator a few years ago and he kept his hand on my side at all times just for emphasis. several years ago i was up in the senate race gallery and i'm watching dan quayle and ted kennedy read each other in the well of the senate and they gave each other these big hugs and their faces are like so far apart that they are laughing and groping and their hands are rubbing up and down each other's backs and they are grinding away there. i was like, get a round. i don't want to see this. [laughter] another story i tell which is a bit of name dropping but you will forgive me. i call it reporting. i'm going for a hotel in boston a couple of years ago when bill clinton comes out of one of the elevators and he starts praising me for a column i had written praising him. [laughter] which he thought was particularly astute column but as he is talking people see bill clinton in the lobby and he starts backing up, and so they can all hear what he is saying.
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within a few minutes he is like 80 feet away but he is just talking to me but just embracing the crowd. [laughter] another case, i was following me run around while he was campaigning in the last election cycle and who is campaigning in new hampshire with his five perfect sons, biff, chip, rip, tip, lip and bip. [laughter] and so he goes into a diner and he starts going around to the tables of a diner and introducing himself to the families and asking what village in new hampshire they are from and describing the home in their village. then he would go around from table to table and he needs 30 people in on the way out he first names almost everybody he had just met. okay that is a profession i won't be going into. and then finally i was just a few weeks ago at the national institutes of health and i wish him by a neuroscientist at video of the young girl with williams syndrome and for those of you who don't don't know williams syndrome looks from the outside like reverse autism is a little
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girl is 18 months old when she is in a room with a 12-year-old boy a son of a researcher and she only wants to look into his eyes. the boy is juggling and knocking over stuff and she has no interest in the physical objects in the room. she only wants that social connection so she gets close to him and just stares right into his eyes minute after minute and i was watching the video thinking, this is every senator i have ever interviewed. [laughter] so they are socially tame creatures. the odd thing is when they turn their minds to policy, all that social sophistication vanishes and they start thinking like cbo reports, like computer models. i have covered a series of failures in my life, a lot of which have to do with the overly simplistic view of human nature, so i covered the soviet union and we send economists with privatization plans but what they really lacked there was social trust. and we were blind to that. as a result they really stole everything in the country
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because they had no social trust. then i cover the war in iraq. we sent the military in and were oblivious to the cultural and psychological realities in iraq and were unprepared for that. in a financial system and a regulatory regime based on the assumption that bankers are rational self-interested creatures who wouldn't do anything stupid en masse. that turned out not to be true. most importantly for 30 years i've covered education trying to understand why 30% or 20% of kids drop out of high school. we have tried for 30 years to try to raise high school graduation rates and most of those efforts have been disappointing because we rearrange the bureaucratic -- big schools, charter's vouchers while skirting the central issue which is the individual relationship between a the teacher and the student. and that people learn -- [applause] people learn from people they love but if you talk about love in a congressional hearing you a
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look at you you like you are oprah. they just don't talk in that language. the question is why are the most socially 10 people on earth where they completely dehumanized when they take about policy. i came to the conclusion that this was not simply a political problem but a broader cultural problem. we have in our society this inherit view that we are divided cells, that we have reason over here and emotion over here and the two are at war with one another like a seesaw. if you are emotional than you are not rational and if you are rational than you are not emotional. and that society progresses to the extent that reason riches trustworthy can suppress the passions which are untrustworthy. so this biases lead to a view of human nature that we are fundamentally rational individuals who responded straightforward ways to incentives. his lead to a lot of our academic disciplines that try to study human behavior using the methods of physics, emphasizing what they can count and model and sort of ignoring all the
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rest. i think it is led to an amputation, shallow view of human nature where we emphasize things that are rational and accountable but ignore or are inarticulate about the things down below. so it is created a culture in which we are really good at talking about material things but data talking about emotions, really good at talking about health and safety and professional skills but about the most important things like character and integrity, we often have very little to say. alastair macintyre the great philosopher said we live in a system where we still have the words for the important things like virtue and honor and vice, but we don't have the basic understanding of how they all fit together or cohesive imagine we had science words like neutron or gravity that we didn't understand how physics works so how they'll fit together. that is where we are. and so i do think we have this amputation which blows us in a certain way. ended blows us in the direction this sort of prevailing breeze
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that we are not always satisfied with. i mention i went to high school and my folks to live in wayne pennsylvania just west of here and you see that parents there and in many places around the country sort of track and do a certain style of raising their kids. you go to an elementary school out there and the third-grader come out and they are wearing these 80-pound backpacks. the wind blows them over there like needles eagles sort of stuck there on the ground. because we want them to study and do homework and get ready for the havard admissions test. they get picked up by saabs in audis and volvos because in that town it is socially acceptable to have the luxury car so long as the rest of the countries hostile to u.s. foreign policy. [laughter] they get raised in picked up by this creature i wrote about in a book called -- how to be successful career women and taking time off to make sure their kids get into havard and actually weigh less than their own children. [laughter] they are doing little exercises during the moment of conception
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and the delivery room, cutting the milk oak were themselves and the baby sorter plus out there and they are flush with a mandarin flashcards to learn chinese. and so they turn them into little achievement machines and s.a.t. prep over practice and they are not really happy with it. they don't think is most important ring but the tiger mom down the street is doing it and they feel sort of trapped into a system in which they ridiculed that they can't renounce and they are often in a system where they sort of intuitive morality and character matters most that they but they don't have a vocabulary for it so when people talk about morality often we talk about shopping. so with rather we have the ben & jerry's ice cream company. i joked in one of my books out there that ben & jerry's should make a pacifist toothpaste that doesn't kill germs, just ask them to leave. it would be a big seller. [laughter] it has a whole foods market, one of our grocery stores were all
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the cashiers look like they are on loan from amnesty international. in my household we buy their seaweed-based snacks. called veggie would kill for kids who come home and say mumbai wanted snack that will help prevent cancer. [laughter] so i think though with the world we are trapped and, we realize that is actually not all there is and there is more to life and more that we should be experiencing. so i was thinking about this problem and gradually i became aware of this other sphere of life where they were looking into some of the deeper things. oddly, it wasn't theologians know i've read about theologians but it was people who study the human mind. we are in this incredibly exciting period in the study of the mind being done in a wider range of spheres like neuroscience and cognitive
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science, behavioral economics. all the spheres that people are looking into the human mind and really it is a revolution in consciousness if you want to put it that way because when you synthesize their findings across these many different spheres, you really start with three key insights. the first insight is that while the conscious mind writes the autobiography of our speech, most of the action them the most impressive action is happening unconsciously below the level of awareness. one way to think about this is the human mind can take in roughly 12 million pieces of information a minute of which you can consciously process about 40. all the rest is being done really without our being aware of it. a lot of the things that are going on are somewhat odd and my favorite research finding from the university of buffalo scholar is that people named dennis are disproportionately likely to become dentists. [laughter] people named lawrence are disproportionately likely to become lawyers because unconsciously we gravitate towards things that are familiar, which is why i've
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named my daughter president of the united states brooks. and then some of the things going on unconsciously are sort of impressive. it is not to tangle the web of sexual urges that freud imagined. some of it, the unconscious is a different way of understanding the world and often yielding superior results so one of the tips i read about was if you have a tough decision and you can't make up your minds tell yourself you will decided by a coin flip and then flip the coin but don't go by how the coin comes up. go by your emotional reaction of the coin flip. are you happy or sad that he came up that way and that is your unconscious mind having made the decision and telling you what it thinks. and then the third area that happens unconsciously as the most important, how do we relate to people? how do we understand situations? had we perceive the world? these are really the fundamental factors in whether we are going to have a successful or unsuccessful life, for filling her and for filling life and a
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lot of the action is unconscious. the second insight is that emotions are the enemy of thinking. emotions are at the center of thinking. people who have strokes in lesions and can process emotions are not super smart, they are super dumb because with the emotions do is assign value to things. they tell you what you want, what you value in what you don't value and if you don't have that value device you cannot make rational decisions. silly notions are not separate from reason. they are the foundation of reason and now i'm a middle-aged guy. not comfortable talking about emotion particularly. one of the scientific experiments i ran into which i think is apocryphal but it gets at the truth is they took a bunch of middle-aged guys in with them and these brain scan machines. they have them watch a horror movie and then i have been described a in feelings toward their wives. the brain scans were the same in both circumstances. [laughter] so it was sheer terror and i know what that is like. my wife says me writing a book about emotions is like gandhi
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writing of length about glut in it. is not the natural thing and yet it motions really are at the center of how we perceive the world, how we value the world. they are the center of power brain organizes itself. in 1945 there's an orphanage in in the child a jobless study by psychologist named rené spitz and at this orphanage they decided to keep the kids healthy. they would keep them germ-free so they gave them food and good health care but they did not handle them. and they separated them. those kids died by age two because they had a 37% mortality rate. and they stopped naming the kids because they just weren't living long enough. so that is a sign of how emotions literally physically are necessary. so emotion is something you just have to get comfortable with. the third insight is that we are not primarily self-contained individuals. we are social animals with deep interpenetration is to one another. every sect of our mind is i'm not only seeing you when you are not seeing me we are reenacting
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what we see in each other. we are deeply interpenetrated and there are all sorts of communication methods for which we are communicating in ways we are not even aware. and so there was one, the story but a psychology professor who wandered up and down the stage from side to side and his class played a trick on him where they said, when he is over here we will look at him and when he is over there we want and within two minutes he was out the door over here. he just felt that are over there. and other experiment done in germany, the to cause pads and tape them under people's arms. had some people watch a horror movie and some people watch a comedy. they got other people to sniff the gauze pads, presumably well-paid. and did the gauze pad where watch a comedy or a horror movie and the people could tell way above average who saw wives, women by the way much better at this than men. and so we are deeply interpenetrated. so these findings really give us a different story of how life
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worked or who we are. we are in many ways children of the french enlightenment believing that reason is the highest of our faculties but this research really confirm some of the emphasis of the british or scottish enlightenment, david hune and adam smith in edmund burke that reason is weak and what they call her sentiments are quite strong, our most important faculty. that gives us a different view of who we are and i think a different view of human capital or what it takes to lead a fulfilling life. when we talk about human capital we often talk about the things we can measure, grades, degrees, s.a.t. scores and iqs. all that is important but there are other qualities which are to think more important which are both emotional and rational and make a hash of these two categories. one of these talents i would say is this thing called mind sight. the ability to mentor other minds and learn and download what those might have to teach you. babies come equipped with this to a great degree so a researcher at the university of washington leaned over a baby
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who was 43 minutes old, wag his tongue at the baby and she wags her tongue back. that is because babies have this -- are built to merge with the mines they come into contact with and really absorb models for understanding of the world from who they come into contact with. by 18 months, about 55% of american babies have established a two-way relationship with her mom primarily but also their debt. those kids have what they call secure attachments. they really know how to build relationships with parents and with adults and those kids have a huge leg up. researchers can take a look at kids who were 18 months old look at how they attach to mom and predict with 77% accuracy who is going to graduate from high school. if you can go into a school, even at three or two or at five and you know how to relate to a teacher, you have a better shot of doing well in school. 20% of the kids are what they call a void in glee attached.
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these are kids who've been sending out signals but not touch notches been coming back at them. a teacher described one of the of woodley attached kids coming into the classroom hacking like a sailboat into the wind wanting to get close to the teacher but not knowing how to do it and those of woodley attached kids have less activated during social and direction and they get less of a kick out of social engagement. by age 70 they will have many fewer friends than others. something that happens at 18 months does not determine the life course but it opens up a panoply which can be either confirmed or just confirmed by later experience. somebody with a bad attachment can discover a mentor and can be changed, their lives can be changed but these are some of the skills he learned very early on. the second skill i would list as we might call -- this is the serenity and maturity to look inside your own mind and be aware of your own weaknesses. so for example the unconscious at many skills but have some
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weaknesses. where overconfidence machines. 95% of college professors believe they have above-average teaching skills. 96% of college students have above-average leadership skills. "time" magazine asked people are you in the top 1% of earners? 19% of americans are in the top 1% of earners. [laughter] paul schoomaker and edward russo gave test to executives about their own industry and asked them how confident are you got your answers right? advertising against the said they were competent and got 90% of answers right in the back they got 60% of them wrong. computer executives the most over confident industry thought they got 95% of answers right and in fact they got 80% wrong. this is a strongly -- trade so men drown at twice the rate as women because men think they can swim across that lake especially after they have been drinking. and so, to have the ability to correct for your own biases and
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have the ability to be open-minded in the face of ambiguity to adjust the strength of your conclusions and the strength of your evidence to be modest in the face of things you don't know, to invent modesty devices for yourself. peter jerker had a great line when you make a decision right then your reasoning, seal it in an envelope and open it in nine months. you will discover the third of your discussions -- decisions were right, they were wrong but in most cases your reasoning will be completely irrelevant. these are all skills that are only tangentially related to iq, mental character and not mental force. it has to do with your emotional equilibrium. the third trait is the greek word called metis which we might call streetsmarts, the ability to look across a complicated scene and pick out a pattern to arrive just. there's a great story about soldiers in iraq who could look down a street and sort of tell if there was a bomb on that street. they couldn't exactly tell you why.
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they just felt the coldness inside. some people have the sensitivity to the landscape and that is a skill that comes from practice. from close ousted in a -- observation practice in most of that is perception is unconscious. the fourth thing you might call sympathy which is sensitive he to an emotional and social environment. can you pick out what other people are feeling and sense it? this comes in extremely handy working in groups. most of us work in groups because groups function more effectively than individuals. you give the group a card test and individuals the groups will solve it much better. the capacity of a group to solve card tricks or math problems or anything they're given is not related to the high iq or the median iq in the group. it is related to how well do those people read each others' emotional signals. how often do they take turns while communicating? that is how well the group does. face-to-face groups do a lot better than groups that
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communicate electronically by the way. at the university of michigan they gave some people math problems, give one set of groups 10 minutes to solve the problems face-to-face and they did very well solving the problems. gave another set of groups 30 minutes to solve them but they had to communicate by e-mail and those groups could not solve the problems. and so beware of teleconferencing. face-to-face is just a lot better. some people have the ability to read those things and some don't. the fifth grade i would list is called propriety. the ability to set up scaffolds to control some of your impulses. the most famous experiment in this whole field which many of you know is called the marshmallow spearmint and by a guy named walter mitchell. just very quickly michelle took 4-year-olds with them in a room that marshmallows on the table in front of them and said you can eat his marshmallow now. i'm going to leave the room and come back in 10 minutes and if you haven't eaten a marshmallow i will give you to marshmallows. he showed me videos of the kids trying not to eat the
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marshmallow. there's a little girl banging your head on the table trying not to eat the marshmallow. wendy michelle was using an oreo cookie. the little guy picks up the oreo, it carefully eats up the middle and carefully puts it back. back it is a u.s. senator. [laughter] but the scary thing is the kids can wait 10 minutes 20 years later had much higher college completion rates. the kids who could only wait one minute, much higher drug and alcohol problems and much higher incarceration rates 30 years later. some kids grow up in homes for actions lead to consequences and they develop strategies to control their impulses. ausley by pretending the marshmallow is a cloud or if it is not real, somehow pretending that temptation is not really there in front of them. and so the kids you can go to school with those controls, that self-control will find school a lot less frustrating than the
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kids who cannot. these or other traits that are really encouraged early and really happen unconsciously for the most part. the final trait i will mention is not so much a trade. it is more of a motivation. and i call it limber and. the conscious mind hungers for money, for success, for fame or recognition of the with the unconscious mind hungers for the most i think is those moments when the cell fades away and the school line fades away and we find ourselves lost in a challenge or a task. it is those moments of transcendence when a craftsman is lost in carpentry, when the naturalist feels at one with nature, when a believer feels and is subsumed by god's love or most frequently for most of us when we find love for one another and we lose the sense of ourselves because of love for one another. now this decision to fall in love like so many decisions is
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both rational and emotional at the same time. and it makes a hash of those categories. so when we see somebody they might potentially fall in love with one of the things we are doing unconsciously as measuring that bersin in all sorts of ways. we tend to marry people who have nose with similar to our own. we tend to marry people with eyewitness similar to our own. we tend to marry people with complementary immune systems. which you can tell by smell. we tend to marry people who have the maximum status symbols that we can get. so women apportion we tend to marry or tend to admire men who are taller than they are because the average inch in height in america equals about $6000 a year in annual salary. at one study i came across suggests a guy who is five feet six inches can get as many on line date offers on an on line site as a guy who is six feet so long as he makes $170,000 $2000 a year more. [laughter] and so some of this is sort of rational and cold and
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calculating even though it is being done unconsciously but some of it is quite deep and you would say -- stendhal had a great phrase that was called crystallization and he described the salt miners in austria who would take branches and throw it into a salt mine and come back a few weeks later and hold them up to the sun and the branches would be covered with these crystals and they would glimmer in the sun. and he said that is what we do to our beloved. we imagine they have all these crystals around them and exaggerate their virtues. and we become sort of addicted to them. the brain scientist say that love inside the brain works very much like a cocaine addiction. it is not an emotion so much of a state of need a desire to become completely fused, one with another. itel high school students so they don't believe me that every course they should take in college should help them decide who to marry. that is the only important decision they are going to mencken their lives.
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if you -- a good marriage produces the same happiness gains is making $100,000 a year more. if you have a good marriage and a bad career you'll be happy and if you have a bad marriage and a good career you will be unhappy so every course should help you make that decision. none of them believed me, none of them do it but in those courses and and that desire to fuse with one another we get the sense of essentially who we are, that we are divided by skull, divided by consciousness but deep down we deeply want to interpenetrate one to another and that is the highest thing we long for. one of the beautiful examples i got, i found a fat was in a book by a guy named douglas hofstadter who was at indiana university, scientists who researches the mind. and hofstadter was married to a woman named carol. he went out -- they lived in italy and when their kids were five and two carol suddenly suffered a stroke and died very suddenly. and when carol was dead but
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hofstadter was still living over there, one day a few months later he was walking through his bedroom and he had a picture of carol on the bureau. and just you know i see it done many days in a row he just happened to glance at her face as he was walking through. and here is what he wrote in his book. i looked at her face and i look so deeply that i felt i was behind her eyes and all at once i found myself saying as tears flowed, that is me, that is me. those simple words brought back many thoughts that i have had before about the fusion of our souls into one higher-level entity, about the fact that the court of both of our souls laid our identical dreams and hopes for children that those were not separate and distinct hopes up for just one hope, one clear thing that defined us both and welded us into a unit, the kind of unit i looked -- would dimly
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imagine before marrying and having children. and realize that carol had died that corpus core piece of are not dyed it all bad it had lived on very determinedly in my brain. now the greeks used to say we suffer a wait of weight of wisdom and hofstadter suffered his way to the wisdom which he confirmed as a scientist every day that they are our shared loops that permeate our minds in ways that are much deeper than we are aware of. in the shallow and less importantly, think of policy failures that we have seen in the educational failures come the soviet union and financial reform, we have suffered her way to wisdom but the shallow view of human nature that has become dominant in our society is an insufficient view and it is important to design policy and the good lives with much richer sense of who we are and the good news is that we are in this incredible period where researchers from all these fields are really giving us a deeper view and they think their
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influence is going to pervade society year upon year, decade upon decade and give us a much richer sense and remind us of a new humanism are gone not giving us a new view of human nature is reminding us of some of the old philosophies, the old truth and for me it has been just tremendously exciting to be around those people who for that past few years to look forward to all the things they will bring to our culture and the years ahead so thank you very much. [applause] >> i think him most of you know how this works. poacher put your hand up and just wait for the mic.
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>> to cook questions or comments. about children and many women who work today so when the child is six weeks or two months old they go to daycare. how does that affect them and the second thing is teachers especially with elementary and nursery schools can't touch kids, and he you made a comment about how most of these children -- and yet they are not allowed to touch them. >> first, on the daycare, the good part about this research is that you don't have to be a super parent to be good enough. that if you establish good relationship with kids, if you listen to them, if you attend to their needs and when they are nervous you sort of tried to calm them down, when they are down you try to bring them up if you are where of who they are in
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just a very basic way, that is the threshold the need to cross. you don't need to be super mom or dad. in fact most of the super mom or dad stuff doesn't do any good. so you just have to be good enough. so that is sort of relaxing i think for us parents when we look at that research. and so, most parents whether they work or not who are listening or attend have good relationships, they have done what they need to do at least on that front. now as for daycare, the evidence is sort of mix and i guess it is mix because the results are not that firm either way. it has an effect on kids. if kids who spend well the first thing to be said is there is daycare and there is daycare. some are very good and some are not so good. and some are very individually tend to kids and some are not. i remember that in belgium and we were going to club med and they have in belgium at least in
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our neighborhood something called the crash were the kids would go on the day. i asked the lady, we have a crash so you can relax what you on vacation. i said is that like the crash here? he said oh god no we do stuff for the kids. i thought -- i guess on average the study suggests on average and this is not a strong effect, but the kids who spend a lot of time in daycare tend on average to be slightly more aggressive than those that don't. and so i think that is the research as i understand it but i wouldn't say it is a tremendously strong effect and would not be on the top of my list on my concerned. i spent a fair bit of time in early childhood education, the good ones and to be honest i'm not sure what the rules are but the parents touch the kids, i mean the teachers touch the kids. and as they should but the main thing they do at the really good ones as they just talk to them. there is just a flow of words. one of the differences in our society is between middle-class kids who here on average 480
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words per hour and lower class kids who here on average 170 words per hour. and so that is over the course of her childhood, about 32 million words. that has an effect. and so if you go to a good early childhood program the teachers try to compensate for that and that is one of the important things they do. >> with -- [inaudible] for a lot of the social policies we are talking about to be effective ultimately? >> one of the things i think when he took knowledge is that we do have a vastly unequal society. there's a woman named annette lobo and she says we do not have a continuum of childrearing. we have two entirely different systems. what i grew up with an rattner is what she calls concerted cultivation when the kids are driven around and prepared for adulthood. the other is what, forgot the name jesus but basically the
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attitude is life is hard, but the kids relax. in some sense this is the more insane in -- sane and healthy way to raise kids but doesn't prepare the kids for the world we now have him. so we have to frankly acknowledge that and then at the most disorganized homes we have kids who are just not getting those organized attachments and we have to have schools and i'm a big supporter of these kids academies, some of these no excuses schools where you go into the school and they teach the kids had a walk down the hallway. they teach them how to look in the eye and not when somebody is talking to them. they teach them how to say yes, excuse me, thank you and to smile and get morning. they have drums and they have chance in the teachers chant out what is earned in the and the kids have to chant back everything that is earned. they learn discipline and order and brick or. a lot of the stuff frankly that middle-class kids get actually. the schools have to teach them and i think they were phenomenally well because they are explicitly based on this marshmallow type experiment that say we are going to give those
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kids those kinds of social skills. you have to acknowledge we have an unequal society. we have two different sorts of systems for kids who have certain advantages. >> another question, about five rows back. >> has your awareness of this new humanism changed your political thoughts at all? [laughter] >> i just cry a lot more. [laughter] yeah, it has. i guess i would put it this way. we have been through to sort of individualistic revolutions in our lifetimes in the 60s. the left-wing which was socially liberating individual, be free to be you and me, especially self in the 80's and more economic individualism entrepreneur ofism, and free-market reagan won on the left won one on the right so we have had to revolutions of emphasize individual.
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what this research doesn't emphasize the community emphasize citizenship and the relationship between people. so i am much more, i think community oriented. what can we do to strengthen communities than maybe i used to be. i wrote a book a couple of years ago about the fastest-growing suburbs in the far reaches of the suburbs. i'm now much more suspicious of them because the evidence suggests face-to-face contact really is more innovative and more productive than cities really have advantages. so there are a lot of areas like that where i guess i have changed my mind and i guess i see everything now psychologically first and so when i look at egypt and tunisia i see an emotional contagion sweeping across the region. i see the quest for dignity and the desire for recognition and dignity. that is when you appreciate how fundamental a drive that is and what happened in cairo does not
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really surprise you very much. it is influencing me and although his ways. it hasn't made me like you know, be closer to i don't know, frank rizzo or rick santorum or anybody like that, but it has pervasive influence on how i think. >> 10 rows back, the gentleman in the grain. >> david, i believe it was said the most important decisions we make in our lives are made from our values and i'm wondering how that fits in with your book and a follow-up on your earlier point, we are becoming more diverse and politically. how do you see as solving the most significant problems facing us as a country with this divergence politically? >> right, those are two big
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questions. for some of values, mentioned the importance of unconscious processes. some of the things that influence our unconscious have to do with early childhood but some of it has to do with things thousands of years ago genetic biases and some of them have to do with things that happened hundreds of years ago which our cultural biases. we inherited through our culture whether it is from the region we live in or from our ethnicity, we inherit certain ways of seeing the world and so for example there has been a lot of research done on how chinese and americans look at the world and one of the experiments they looked at the mona lisa and the chinese eyes, they measured the eye movements that were dancing all over the painting in the american eyes were basically focusing on the eyes of the lady, much more concentrated. and other famous experiment was they asked chinese people to describe a fish tank and they would describe the relationship between the fish, the plant life, the whole context. the americans would pick up the
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biggest fish in describe that. [laughter] another example is they did research. live up to people having coffee and a look at how much they touched each other. if i give the members -- numbers right, in real there were about 170 touches an hour as people had coffee. in paris i think was about 120 and in london it was zero. [laughter] so these are values we share not only how we perceive justice and some of our moral intuitions are universal. you don't need to tell any 2-year-old anywhere in the world what fairness is. we are born with a sense of fairness. we are born with a sense of delusion and a deference to authority, certain attitudes toward authority but within those value systems where they were jewish, catholic or protestant or muslim whether american or french you come in with a whole different category and you have to be aware of the negotiations of those things. but values can change over time
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and so it is all a very complicated stew but those things are basically fundamental. when i look at why a country does well or why it doesn't i think it is fundamentally a value thing. is not natural resources. these are two really crucial values. do you believe the future can be different than the present and do you believe you can control your future? these are not universal. some places they have in some places they don't. in the u.s. we have an exaggerated sense of how much control we have but it is good for us to have that. finally on the polarization tying it into the theme our brains register in group in our group very powerfully so i see somebody might group punished, my brain really reacts violently to that. by see someone in our group being punished i'm sort of callous about that. so we have a tribal nature and in washington we have tribalism on stilts. we have magnified tribalism. i mention mentioned mention the effect of groups where people
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took turns and communicated very well. if you want the dictionary definition of a dysfunctional group that would be the u.s. congress. and they don't communicate very well. they don't talk to each other and they don't really listen to each other. so the polarization that occurs in washington is in part caused by the fundraising and in impart cause baby idiot, redistricting but mostly caused by the psychological psychodynamics of tribalism i think and good people are stuck in this tribal hatfield and mccoy system. so i see primarily a moral problem less than the fundraising >> a political party? >> when we need parties in conversations with each other. >> lets let's see, back here the lady with her hand upon the right. >> in your column last sunday, he spoke about we americans
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overestimate our capability in every field and i'm wondering if that is an unhealthy thing, unrealistic and how would you compare that to the opposite which is the tiger mom? >> well, i told us to a group earlier tonight but i'm going to repeat it. a couple of months ago i was driving and listening to npr and i happened to your show called command performance which was a rebroadcast of an old radio show in the episode i heard was aired on v-j day the day we won world war ii. all of the big stars ron, bob hope and marlena dietrich. he got out there and he said we just learned we have won world war ii but i guess we are not proud, we are just glad we got through. burgess meredith got out there and read a passage from the great war correspondent, we won this war because we are brave soldiers and great allies. we have a lot of material abundance in this country.
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we didn't win it because we are gods chosen people or will because we are anything special. we should just be glad to be worthy of the piece. that tone of humility was so striking to me on the day they won world war ii. then i get home and turn on the tv and i'm watching football and the cornerback tackles a wide receiver after two-yard gain and does this victory dance to himself for his great achievement. and it occurred to me i had just seen greater self puffery after two-yard gain than winning world war ii. and i do think this is a change from a culture of self effacement. nobody's better than me and i'm not better than anybody else to waste culture of self celebration, look at me i'm pretty good. this polling data that uses a fourth is my favorite one is gallup asked high school seniors in 1950 are you a very important person and 12% said yes. in 2005 they asked again are you a very important person and it wasn't 12%. it was 80%. so that is just a change and if
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you look at our math scores, 36 in the world in math performance for number one in the world and thinking. we are really good at math. and so that is a change. this expansion of the self i think is led to partisanship because i know the answers to everything and everybody else who disagrees with me is just in the way. i think it is led to the expansion of debt because why should i say for save for future generation? i am here. i feel less connected to the broad change, and i think if you look at the societies that have done really well in math, they are the ones who have the least confidence in their own abilities. so i think the lesson from the research is that you should have a slightly above average view of yourself. you should exaggerate your virtues a little to make sure you did go out to dare to try difficult things that are hard for you but we have sort of taken it to the extreme. one of the phrases that i think
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is the core of my political phrase is an epistemological knowledge. the study what you know and modesty is modest and we should be aware of how little we know about ourselves and how little we know about the world and we should prepare ourselves for those weaknesses at all times and not think we are the bees knees. if you want honesty read a column twice a week. if you read it, oh god what was i thinking? [laughter] >> i've got a quick question for you. i believe is the question on everybody's mind. can you name a dozen things, 20 things that he has not?
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[laughter] >> three things he is has done correctly. one, he is the best education president we have had since i've been covering education. [applause] two, i disagreed with him at the time but he was right to rescue gm. [applause] i give us more actually. there are-somethings i disagree with but i do think and i covered the president, i speak to them periodically. i speak to people on the staff once a week and i would say within the white house i disagree with him. i am to his right but in the white house they are generally culture of debate. they are very smart people there. many of them come from havard and half of them from yale. we will all be up there watching the game, and so i think there
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is generally an honest culture. and failures, i thought when we did health care we had to central tasks. the first was to cover 39 million uninsured people and the second was to get our costs and inflation under control. we did one but i don't think we did the second. so that would be one thing i would disagree with. i think we try too much -- mickey try to much in the first few years and polarize the country more than it needed to be. i wish he would call some of the members of the opposing parties. paul ryan from wisconsin, very smart chairman of the house budget committee. i know them both and they would really get along and have wonderful conversations about the future budget which can lay the groundwork for compromises but obama is never called brian and asked them to the white house. he is never had a conversation
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with him and i just think they should at least talk. that is just the function of the nature of washington, which i think he is very well-equipped to change what hasn't taken the measures. i could go on but --. >> the lady about four rows back in the center. do you know what sir, we have other people with their hands up. further back. >> spoke about how some variables to success are based on the 18-month-old time period and in an effort to close the achievement gap the educational achievement gap, would you be a proponent of mandatory early childhood education? >> i would want to make it mandatory. just because that gives you all sorts of political problems and i still essentially think the relationship between a parent
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and a child is better and is going to happen in a public age especially the daycare center so i would want to force people to do it. nonetheless i do think there should be on the one hand much more funding for early childhood education and there should be a rite of passage. we should do a lot better job of organizing our early childhood centers or headstart centers of people there actually teachers rather than just people we needed to give a job to. and we should not only -- we should start earlier. we should start with family partnerships and visits so nurses are coming into the homes and giving mom help on how to coach. in the first year of life, the average mother loses 700 hours of sleep and gets interrupted every 20 seconds on average and sees a decline in marital satisfaction of 70%. it is tough. little babies are charming but they are invading your brain.
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and it is a brutal thing. and so people need help. if you go to certain neighborhoods, things i've seen our babies locked into the car seat eight hours a day in front of the tv, coca-cola and the bottle just to keep them quiet. there are things where people make up and we should just be more aggressive. than he can stop because if you help kids at an early age a lot of the help they doubt. a lot of the benefits so it has to be like nutrition, every day. you have to have early childhood education and you have to have schools where teachers are able to connect with kids. you have to have mentoring programs. they have to go to college where they feel emotionally engaged to someone so they think about dropping out there someone i care about that they can tell i am dropping out. so they're sort of engage with the campuses. all through life there has to be these concentrations of really relationships and so i would spend more money on that and i'm afraid in our budget straits the fact is the lobbies with the big guns are the k-12 lobbies, the higher ed lobbies and mostly the
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senior citizens lobby. zero through three lobby is a pretty pathetic lobby. so i'm afraid that is very vulnerable in state after state. >> can take us out with your predictions for 2012 because we are probably not going to see before them. >> i could write another book that it would kill me. >> you know i really wouldn't bet against president obama. he is a very -- [applause] he has an amazing ability, and i've seen them a few times since he lost the last election are the democrats did an amazing ability to self-correct. he is a very called the kitty person with many different personalities and the downside of that is he rarely commits all out. he is always one step back observing. the upside of that as he tends to look at himself and say how do i need to change? what do i need to do?
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so he does have the ability to adjust and he just has political skills. when i look at politicians like a scout looking at pictures, who has the best off? stuff? i remember when i saw him in 2005, a long time ago i thought he had the best stuff. he was probably going to be president someday and i wrote a column in 2006 on him because that body of the best stuff. i wouldn't bet against him. that said, i'm not quite sure what is going to run on. i don't think he can run the campaign he ran last time, the big transformational open change thing. he can do that anymore after the last four years because he can't run on health care, can't run on the seamless package in his administration has been slow to come up with a new big agenda for what to do in the next four years. and a country that is still seriously concerned about national decline and furious at government for screwing things up. so that will be a good challenge. on the republican side the person i would like to see get
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the nomination and i'm not supposed to root for one candidate or another but it is the governor of indiana, mitch daniels. i like him because he is five feet six inches, low to the ground, in touch with the people. i think you have to be low down there to see things. no, i think he has been an extremely effective governor to time when state budgets have ballooned in debt on average has gone up 40% in state after state. in indiana that debt has gone down 40%. at the same time a lot of the programs that really matter have been improved. even wait times at the department of motor vehicles have dropped from 60 minutes to eight minutes. i'm certainly impressed by that. so i think it's been a very effective governor. the governor of the republicans would be well to counter program against this graceful and elegant and really democrat with a guy who may not be charismatic but just knows how to run things. so i like daniels and i think there are two serious
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candidates, mitt romney and tim pawlenty. egg and managers, little less enamored with them i guess. pawlenty with a good governor but i haven't seen excellence of management that i saw with daniels. they would be fine. i guess i would like to see -- the republicans have two problems. the first is to their credit and this is to obama's deficit, they are saying we have to tackle entitlement and that is a courageous death because the country wants more government than it is willing to pay for. somebody has to call them on this. we have been willing to tackle and title minister right thing to do and we have to adjust some of these benefit levels. a politically dough not a salad and b i don't think the republicans understand not only do we have a recession, we have structural problems in our economy which i've heard the middle-class decade upon decade and i don't think there is a real good answer to that problem. so i think they face some challenges and they say sort of a deficit.
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i wouldn't bet against obama but it will be, we will eventually get to have a fight which we need to have is here is the money, here is the national wealth, here are our programs, here is our debt to our regrowing to figure this thing out? i would love to think we are going to have that really serious debate and then to end on a pessimistic note, i really don't think we are going to have that debate. thank you very much. [applause] [applause] >> visit booktv.org to watch any of the programs you see here on line. type the author or book title in the search bar on the upper left side of the page and click search. you can also share anything you see on booktv.org easily by clicking share on the upper left side of the page and selecting the format. tv streams live on line for 48 hours every weekend but top
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