Carol Graham's "Happiness Around the World"

Carol Graham is Senior Fellow and Charles Robinson Chair at the Brookings Institution and College Park Professor at the University of Maryland. She is the author of numerous books and articles on poverty, inequality, and social welfare policy. Graham has an A.B. from Princeton University, an M.A. from The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a Ph.D. from Oxford University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Happiness around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires, and reported the following:

Page 99 finds us right in the middle of studying happiness in Russia, from 1995 to 2000, a period of time when both economy and society were undergoing tremendous changes due to the collapse of communism. What we find, which supports one of the remarkable stories in the book, is how similar the standard determinants of happiness are across societies – even in contexts of adversity: Russia is no different. Enough but not too much income makes people happier; marriage, employment, and health also make people happier. There is a U shaped relationship between happiness and age, with the low point in the mid to late forties; remarkably this relationship holds across countries across the world. Happier people are healthier and generally perform better in the labor market.

Russia departs from the rest of the world, though, in that married people are not happier than the average and because retired people are unhappy (unhappy pensioners?). Other things about happiness in Russia do support our world-wide story: happier people are more supportive of democracy and have higher prospects of upward mobility for themselves and their children. In short, happiness seems to be linked to things we care about, like democracy, and may even result in better outcomes in the labor market and in the health arena.

That’s the simple part of the story. Our happiness research – both in Russia and in the rest of the world – suggests that people are remarkable at adapting to extreme adversity and maintaining their natural cheerfulness, while some others that live in prosperity report to be miserable: the paradox of happy peasants and miserable millionaires. Respondents in Afghanistan are happier than the world average, and Russian respondents living in contexts of high unemployment are happier than the average for Russia. This may be a good thing from an individual psychological perspective: Afghani respondents manage to retain their good cheer despite high levels of conflict, poverty, and corruption, while Russians living in low or no growth contexts have adapted to an unpleasant certainty, which they seem to prefer over the uncertain prospects of economic change. Yet this capacity to adapt may result in collective tolerance for things like crime, corruption, unemployment, and other bad things, helping keep some societies stuck in bad equilibrium.

My studies of happiness around the world suggest that happiness is a good thing and that we want more of it in the world. And happiness surveys are allowing us to answer all sorts of new questions, such as the effects of obesity, crime, commuting time, and participating in politics on happiness. At the same time, before we leap to making happiness an objective of public policy, we must understand its complexity and how its definition varies across people, countries, and cultures. Finally, some outcomes that we as societies care about, such as the toppling of dictatorships or the reduction of budget deficits, may require much unhappiness in the short term in order to achieve a greater good. This very nascent science is still grappling with these questions.

Learn more about Happiness Around the World at the Oxford University Press website, and read Carol Graham's brief essay, "Happy Talk: The Economics of Happiness."

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathleen Gerson's "The Unfinished Revolution"

Kathleen Gerson is Professor of Sociology and Collegiate Professor at New York University. The author of No Man's Land: Men's Changing Commitments to Family and Work and Hard Choices: How Women Decide about Work, Career, and Motherhood, she frequently contributes to such media as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, National Public Radio, and CNN.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Unfinished Revolution: How a New Generation is Reshaping Family, Work, and Gender in America, and reported the following:

As the last page of the first part of the The Unfinished Revolution, page 99 alludes to one of the book’s central arguments: amid the gender revolution at work and in the home, “flexible approaches to work and parenting help all types of families overcome economic uncertainties and interpersonal tensions (while) inflexibility in the face of new social realities leaves (other) families ill prepared to cope.” Contrary to popular images, 21st century families are unfolding pathways, not static types, and their fate depends on the ability of parents and other caretakers to respond to unexpected economic and interpersonal crises in flexible ways. The generation who came of age in this era of revolutionary change agrees that gender flexibility in providing both money and care is the key to achieving family well-being. Women and men from all family, class, and ethnic backgrounds thus hope to share earning and caring in the context of a flexible, egalitarian, and lasting partnership.

Page 99 concludes that “building on these lessons, young women and men from all family backgrounds are searching for new, more flexible ways to combine love and work. But mindful of the obstacles that block this path, they are also preparing for a bumpy journey with no preordained destination.” This conclusion hints at the central story of the book’s second part, in which we find that, despite their egalitarian aspirations, today’s young women and men are preparing for “second best” options that may put them on a collision course. While the gender revolution has created new ideals, it has not provided the supports needed to achieve them. Fragile relationships and rising standards for marriage leave women doubtful about the chances of finding a suitable partner to share family and work, while time-greedy workplaces leave men fearful of the heavy penalties that family involvement imposes. Amid these fears, women and men are falling back on different – and conflicting – strategies, with women seeking self-reliance through work and men hoping for a neo-traditional relationship that leaves primary caretaking to someone else.

Despite the obstacles, we can take heart in the high aspirations of young women and men. In today’s uncertain world, gender equality and family well-being are not in conflict. To the contrary, the welfare of a new generation and the generations to follow depends on creating the flexible jobs and child-supportive communities that will help them close the widening work-family divide.

Learn more about The Unfinished Revolution at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alexandra Natapoff's "Snitching"

Alexandra Natapoff is Professor of Law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and a nationally recognized expert on criminal snitching.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice (NYU Press), and reported the following:

Criminal informants are everywhere in the American justice system. Every year, thousands of offenders--from drug addicts to Wall Street investors—avoid punishment for their crimes by providing the government with information. Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice reveals how influential these snitching deals have become: from the war on drugs to hip hop music, white collar crime, and terrorism investigations. An important consequence of these widespread deals is that they make the criminal system more informal and secretive. Guilt is increasingly resolved off the record and under the table, while investigations rely heavily on confidential criminal sources. Chapter 4, entitled “Secret Justice,” is devoted to this problem and it concludes on page 99 as follows:

Today’s informant culture goes beyond the inquiry in any specific case about whether it might be dangerous to reveal the name of an informant or whether a particular investigation might be compromised by such revelations. Rather, the system is moving towards wholesale policies of keeping cases, dockets, and practices secret. Today, the potential threat to some witnesses is now seen by courts as a reason to overcome the presumption of openness for all criminal records.

In these ways, the practice of using informants undermines public transparency throughout the criminal system. By resolving liability in secret, it insulates investigative and prosecutorial techniques from judicial and legislative scrutiny. This reduced public access affects numerous other constituencies as well, making it more difficult for the press, crime victims, families, and policy analysts to obtain information about the workings of the justice system or about specific criminal cases. Informant use has thus become a powerful and destructive informational policy in its own right, reducing public transparency and obscuring the real impact of criminal practices on individuals, communities, and other institutions.

Snitching creates some other big problems for the criminal system as well, each of which is addressed in a separate chapter. “Beyond Unreliable,” for example, discusses the infamous unreliability of informants and why police and prosecutors continue to rely on them. “Snitching in the Hood” describes the heavy use of criminal informants in poor urban communities and the increased crime and violence that can result, while the chapter on “Stop Snitching” explores problems of witness intimidation and police-community distrust. The book also surveys the common use of informants in white collar, political, and terrorism investigations. By examining these pervasive underground practices, Snitching reveals surprising and sometimes shocking features of how our criminal process really works.

Read an excerpt from Snitching, and learn more about the book at the official Snitching blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Catherine Lutz & Anne Lutz Fernandez's "Carjacked"

Catherine Lutz is the Thomas J. Watson, Jr. Family Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at Brown University where she holds a joint appointment with the Department of Anthropology. As an author and editor, Professor Lutz has published nine books. Anne Lutz Fernandez is a former marketer and investment banker with fifteen years of corporate experience. She is an English teacher in Westport, Connecticut.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives, and reported the following:

To really understand what Americans pay and what they forego to own a car, however, we need to take a detour through a diverse set of the nation’s neighborhoods, because while all men and women may be created equal according to our political ideals, the American automobile discriminates between us based on whether it’s parked in the driveway of a double-wide trailer, a middle-class bungalow, or a mansion-studded gated community.

Carjacked is a book on a mission to understand how Americans feel about, and live with, their cars. To do this, we interviewed drivers from across the country, as well as car dealers and automotive executives, mechanics, cab drivers, toll booth operators, auto museum directors, crash victims, doctors, EMTs and other health professionals, and environmentalists. We traveled to traffic court, Detroit proving grounds, DMVs, seedy used car lots, exurban housing developments, and junkyards, among other places to learn about the often taken-for-granted and taken-for-inevitable object in our driveways.

Our page 99 quote focuses on the remarkably different effects that owning and operating a car have on families and individuals at different income levels. While car and oil stocks and stakes benefit the richest Americans, for everyone else, cars represent the largest family expense besides housing. Fully one in five dollars earned goes to their vehicles, on average, but an especially big bite is taken from the budgets of families with limited incomes. Car dealers and loan officers see the working poor as easy targets for overpricing—they are often victim to dealer fraud and pay high prices for older cars in poor condition; they can pay more for insurance based solely on their zip code; they pay higher loan rates; and they are the pool of customers for car title loan outfits that have repossessed hundreds of thousands of cars out of neighborhoods around the country each year. Finally, those Americans who are poor enough to be carless must rely on our thin public transit system. This creates an awful catch-22: with a landscape built around the car and job growth concentrated in the suburbs, the urban poor in particular find it difficult to get or keep jobs that they need a car to reach.

Besides its look at the car in American life, Carjacked also provides immediate, practical advice on how families at all income levels can reduce their dependence on the car and end up with greater savings, time, and safety.

Read excerpts and learn more about the book and authors at the official Carjacked website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Janet Poppendieck's "Free for All"

Janet Poppendieck is Professor of Sociology at Hunter College, City University of New York. She is the author of Sweet Charity? Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement and Breadlines Knee Deep in Wheat: Food Assistance in the Great Depression.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Free for All: Fixing School Food in America, and reported the following:

I had never heard of the “Page 99 Test” before I received an e-mail inviting me to comment on its application to my new book, Free for All: Fixing School Food in America. My first association was the practice reportedly used for naming children in parts of the rural South. Open the Bible, stab your finger on the page, and the first gender-appropriate name you come to—that will be the child’s appellation for life. OK if you land on Elijah, but not so great if you strike Beelzebub. I turned to page 99 with some trepidation.

I found myself in the middle of a discussion of the preponderance of highly processed, pre-packaged food among school lunch entrees, part of a chapter dedicated to deconstructing the menu. A former President of the School Nutrition Association (SNA), the professional organization of food service workers, was explaining to me why I had seen so many corn dogs and burritos and other hand-held items in the schools I had visited; “That’s the way kids eat now…That’s the way families eat. Not sitting down with a knife and fork.” It could have been worse. At least it’s a page that captures the voices of some of the school food service personnel that I interviewed, a primary source of “data” for this book. Food service workers, and especially food service directors, were a crucial component of the process by which I tried to educate myself about the day-to-day realities of the National School Lunch and Breakfast Programs that serve some seven billion meals to America’s school children every year. The challenges these workers face are enormous and really, really interesting. I’m glad they were represented on Page 99.

Day-to-day realities, however, were not my only concern. I was trying to get a grip on public policy—on the history that has shaped these programs, and the politics and policies that constrain them. I was glad to find, therefore, that page 99 at least mentions policy, though not the school lunch and breakfast programs per se. In fact, the critique of the role of federal commodity subsidies in shaping the larger food system that begins on page 99 is a fundamental point of the book: “the growing reliance on highly processed food is not some sort of inevitable, inexorable process driven by forces of nature. In many ways, it is an outcome of public policy. The farm subsidies created during the New Deal and revised after World War II favored seven basic commodities. Among those are corn and soybeans, two ingredients essential to the kinds of long-lived processed goods that fill our grocery shelves.” The passage goes on to explain that by making corn and soy exceptionally cheap, crop subsidies have induced agribusiness to invest in the technologies for producing long shelf-life “food like substances,” affecting the taste preferences of consumers and thus the foods that schools choose to serve.

Of course, one page cannot substitute for an entire book. Page 99 focuses on food quality issues while the book as a whole is at least as concerned with issues of access. It analyzes the stigmatizing means test that creates an administrative nightmare for program operators and deters some hungry children from eating the meals prepared for them, and it argues for universal free meals, integrated with the school day, as a solution to both the access and quality problems. I wrote this book in the hope of empowering reformers and mobilizing support for the change we need. Hopefully, you’ll care enough to read more than just page 99. What could be more important than the way we feed our children?

Learn more about Free for All at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul C. Rosier's "Serving Their Country"

Paul C. Rosier is Associate Professor of History, Villanova University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Serving Their Country: American Indian Politics and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century, and reported the following:

I revisited Page 99 of Serving Their Country, curious to see if it could support and sustain Ford Madox Ford’s insight. I believe it does; in fact, it offers a fine opportunity to visit the two main contexts of the book, which explores the ways in which American Indians acted patriotically in helping the United States assume a prominent role in world affairs during the 20th century, especially during the Cold War, both by serving in the Armed Forces and by demanding that the U.S. keep the promises it made in hundreds of treaties signed with Indian nations in the 19th century. Serving Their Country joins a growing body of scholarship on Cold War Civil Rights and contributes to studies of American patriotism and national identity.

The first context is how American Indians experienced new pressure on their land base during World War II, a portent of the federal government’s “termination” campaign to eliminate Indian reservations after the war. On Page 99 I assess the dynamic of Japanese Americans being sent to internment camps on American Indian reservations, a conflation of two ethnic American groups deemed un-American because of racial difference. I write on Page 99 that “the Japanese presence reflected Indians’ continuing struggle against colonial pressures to maintain the hard-fought boundaries they were willing to cross for the purpose of defending their right to be both American and Indian.” During World War II congressional terminationists began to assert that American Indians were kept against their will in those reservations, which they increasingly called “concentration camps,” a rhetorical strategy to justify their attempts to terminate them.

The second major context featured on Page 99 is the significance of this federal termination agenda in international terms. American Indians fought in World War II in part to gain access to the freedoms enunciated by President Roosevelt as well as to the right of self-determination for which they fought in the name of Wilsonian democracy during World War I. Both American Indian and non-Indian leaders connected the U.S. government’s increasingly coercive treatment of American Indians with its emerging leadership position among peoples seeking freedom from colonial rule. This story is situated within the rhetorical frame of the “American Dilemma,” the title of Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 book An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy. Myrdal highlighted the disjunction between America’s ideals of freedom and democracy, expressed in numerous documents of the 18th century such as the Declaration of Independence, and its practice of racial exclusion in everyday life in the 20th century. On Page 99 I use the words of John Collier, the commissioner of Indian Affairs, to emphasize this connection between the domestic and the international. Addressing the “problem of small states and small groups everywhere,” Collier argued in 1942 that “if here in the United States with our Indian groups we can show the solution to this problem we shall have made a material contribution to the maintenance of world peace.”

The rest of the book looks at how increasing termination pressures at home, which American Indians came to call a domestic “cold war,” complicated the U.S. effort to wage the Cold War abroad. The final chapter of the book looks at the intersection of American Indian treaty rights, Red Power, and the Vietnam War. And in a short Epilogue I consider how termination pressures remain an issue for American Indians in the 21st century.

Read an excerpt from Serving Their Country, and learn more about the book at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Paris' "Framing Equal Opportunity"

Michael Paris is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Framing Equal Opportunity: Law and the Politics of School Finance Reform, and reported the following:

In the United States, reformers seeking progressive policy change often turn to law and courts. How do such reformers go about translating their moral visions and policy goals into plausible legal claims and arguments? What difference does it make for the politics of reform that would-be change agents choose to speak one way rather than another in legal settings? How can we best understand this process of “legal translation” and the difference that it makes?

Framing Equal Opportunity examines two controversial and far-reaching litigation-based campaigns to change the distribution of resources for education. It follows lawyers and activists in New Jersey and Kentucky as they negotiate the complicated political terrain of educational change in their respective states. The book shows that the kinds of legal argument that lawyers choose to make matter not only for their success in the courtroom, but also for the kinds of fights they face in the community at large. It also offers a general theoretical framework for understanding legal translation and the politics of social reform.

There isn’t much of a relationship between Page 99 of the book and “the quality of the whole.” Page 99 drops us into the middle of the New Jersey case study. Here, by way of a summary of a 600-page opinion by an administrative law judge, I am explicating the New Jersey reformers’ “compensatory vision” of education and its successful translation through pre-existing legal norms and categories. For example, consider these two paragraphs from Page 99 (the “ELC” is the Education Law Center, a Newark-based law reform organization):

The ELC’s case about what it called “program disparities” across rich and poor districts was highly detailed; it proceeded under fully eighteen subheadings, including such things as “science education,” “guidance and counseling,” and “class size.” The ELC’s main purpose was to fix the standard of “adequacy” in two ways: first in relation to the needs of the urban students and second in relation to the resources available to already advantaged suburban students. Moreover, it was here that the ELC sought to make vivid and lifelike the conditions of education and their social meaning for administrators, teachers, and students in the ghettos. A few illustrations of the ELC’s approach will provide a sense of its emotional appeal.

State regulations defined “artistic expression and appreciation” as a “state education goal.” However, art education received rather short shrift in poorer urban districts. Whereas elementary school children in the wealthy districts of Montclair, Princeton, and Scotch Plains/Fanwood received “art instruction at every elementary school with certified teachers,” Camden did not even employ any art teachers at the elementary level.

Read more about Framing Equal Opportunity at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Caroline Fraser's "Rewilding the World"

Caroline Fraser was born in Seattle and holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University in English and American literature. Formerly on the editorial staff of The New Yorker, she has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Outside Magazine, Allure, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review, among other publications. Her essays and reviews have also appeared frequently in The New York Review of Books. She has received a PEN Award for Best Young Writer and numerous prizes for her poetry.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution, and reported the following:

As luck would have it, page 99 is the last page of the first section of Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution, a book about attempts to save biodiversity around the world. The page examines the most bizarre “accidental” wildlife corridor in the world: the Korean Demilitarized Zone, 155 miles long and 2 1/2 miles wide, where no human being has set foot in fifty-five years. Because the DMZ is so dangerous, it has become a perfect corridor for the preservation of Korean biodiversity, providing a secure haven for 2,700 species of plants and animals, including the Amur leopard, the Asiatic black bear, and perhaps even the Siberian tiger. But perfection comes at a price: “The DMZ is more fully functional, less developed or disrupted or disturbed than Y2Y or the Mesoamerican or the Green Belt [corridor projects described previously]. It only took a million land mines to do it.”

Renowned biologists are urging that this strip of land be preserved as a conservation “peace park,” while developers eye its future potential for factories or farms. For now, the 38th parallel hangs in the balance, a living metaphor suggesting nature’s recuperative powers and the difficulty of curbing humanity’s voracious appetites. Page 99 sums up the most troubling issues facing conservation: “Land and wildlife recover when we leave them alone, but the question remains: Can we find the will to restrain ourselves without the threat of annihilation? Can we do it in time?”

Learn more about the book and author at the Rewilding the World website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Ekbladh's "The Great American Mission"

David Ekbladh is assistant professor of history at Tufts University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order, and reported the following:

Harry Truman is the center of action on Page 99. Readers catch him in the midst of justifying a major foreign policy initiative. To do so, he did what politicians still do: relate it to domestic American life. What’s happening on the page illustrates some elements that are at play throughout a book that traces the role of modernization in U.S. foreign affairs in the twentieth century.

In 1949 Truman proposed the “Point Four” program as part of his Cold War strategy that would promote modernization on an American pattern worldwide. But what would the United States actually do to poorer nations? He had to make “Point Four” legible to domestic (and foreign) audiences. He compared it to a reigning model of how liberal societies could promote economic and social development—the New Deal’s Tennessee Valley Authority.

“We [the United States] are somewhat famous for...technical knowledge. What I propose to do is to present to the peoples of the world that know-how... That is what Point Four means... I see immense undeveloped rivers and valleys all over the world that would make TVA’s... All it needs...is somebody who knows the technical approach to their development.”

Such a comparison was popular with important constituencies. There were those who saw the TVA and similar projects as huge successes, proof that the deflating urge for reform at home could be successfully reinvigorated and transmitted overseas. John Gunther, a popular journalist of the day, concurred when he said that the TVA “proves the idea of…development works” and that “its horizons could be illimitable.”

Truman’s talk of the TVA shows how politics and ideology are connected with modernization and exposes the links between domestic reform and development efforts abroad. These links were apparent even before Truman made his plea.

Of course, the rhetoric recounted on page 99 only begins to reveal the depth of the story. There is much more as the book covers the sweep of how such ideas and the policies they inspired were actually applied. Crucially, the liberal brand of development the TVA epitomized and Truman grasped as a Cold War tool, would be used around the world to contain the influence of fascist and communist models of progress. In places like China, South Korea, Iran, and South Vietnam tracing the impact of U.S. sponsored programs demonstrates that modernization did not always live up to the claims of its boosters.

Read an excerpt from The Great American Mission, and learn more about the book at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Brier's "Infectious Ideas"

Jennifer Brier is assistant professor of gender and women's studies and history at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis we find Gary Bauer, then a senior advisor to President Ronald Reagan and the administration’s point person on the AIDS epidemic, and several other presidential advisors, frantically trying to revise the content of Understanding AIDS, an AIDS prevention brochure being produced by the Department of Health Human Services (HHS). The booklet, authorized by Congress to be designed “without necessary clearance of the content by any official,” provided readers with information on how to prevent the spread of the AIDS virus by using condoms when having sex. HHS’s 1988 decision to focus on condoms infuriated Bauer: he argued the brochure “promotes condoms, assumes widespread promiscuity among young people, and is medically inaccurate by making categorical statements about the way AIDS cannot be transmitted [through kissing]. (100) In an attempt to censor this kind of educational material, Bauer had personally convinced the president, one year earlier, to sign a directive requiring all federally funded AIDS education to “encourage responsible sexual behavior…within the context of marriage.” That HHS was now designing Understanding AIDS in contradiction to this order left Bauer doubly mad. He not only opposed the discussion of sexuality and condoms, he also feared the “gradual dilution of or attenuation of executive power” because HHS was moving forward without presidential oversight.

While this battle’s resolution appears on page 100 of Infectious Ideas (HHS mailed 100 million copies of the brochure without making a single change to the document’s content), the disagreement detailed on page 99 is representative of one of the book’s major arguments: that internal battles within the Reagan administration often left social conservatives like Bauer unable to push through an agenda that relied exclusively on morality as a form of public health advice. In this respect, the content of the brochure was much more similar to the AIDS prevention material produced by AIDS workers (a term I’ve coined to refer to both AIDS activists and service providers) than it was to what Bauer called for.

Infectious Ideas’ argument is much larger than what appears on page 99, however. I detail the scope and substance of AIDS prevention produced by a wide range of actors over the course of the 1980s and 1990s to argue that with AIDS at the center of a political history of the 1980s we no longer see the decade as overwhelmingly conservative.

Read more about Infectious Ideas at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue