interiors

As part of the Damore-related article I responded and posted about , I later wrote responses to other posters in response to a NY Times article An Open Letter to James Damore by Debra Sterling . Additional responses are below: To someone criticizing, rightly, Damore's gender views... In Hofstede's cultural dimension models, the drive for status is part of the masculinity dimension, and it varies a great deal, with the Scandinavian societies on the low end, having equivalent gender expectations, as opposed to the more traditional societies like the US. Although one might find that such traits are heritable, it is obvious that culture has a large influence on social norms. Equally important, Damore does not realize that the men entering the profession have turned the industry toxic, e.g., high pressure, not that the industry was toxic and therefore drove women away, or that what he assumes is the profession is simply emblematic of life in corporate America. Several years...

I Am Not Your Negro by James Baldwin My rating: 5 of 5 stars A collection of thoughts, interviews, and snippets from media, a thought-provoking meditation on race in America. View all my reviews

I posted a comment in response to An Open Letter to James Damore by Debra Sterling , below: It doesn't get mentioned, but some of the same stereotypes that Damore claims make women ill-suited for technology, e.g., extroversion and emotional management, are the same traits that in some studies have been shown to make teams more productive. The concern about managing relationships, regardless of gender, has been shown to correlate with more effective team leaders. Extroversion in programmers has also been shown to correlate with team productivity. I'm sure there are findings that might contradict the above, but Damore seems to have a very narrow view of what makes one effective. Leadership, or at least getting to the top, in Damore's view, and in traditional masculine societies, might require a desire for dominance and a penchant for combativeness, but ideal styles of leadership typically require driving consensus, presenting a vision, social cohesion and charisma, obvious...

An excellent, incredibly insightful and informative book, somewhat marred by the tedium experienced in the authors' rehashing the ideas of organizations working for change. For most of this book, the writers masterfully tie together concepts in systems, mathematics, consciousness, the environment, society and biology, and for that, it is a brilliant read. My rating: 5 of 5 stars The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision by Fritjof Capra View all my reviews

A response to Mind the Gap , a review of The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger : At one time, as an MBA student with academic leanings, I considered researching and publishing an analysis using Hofstede's cultural dimensions and economic outcomes. What I found was that economic inequality, as measured by the GINI coefficient, correlated strongly with negative social outcomes. Trying to explain the underlying social dimension in developed countries, excluding Japan because of the vast differences in culture, it seemed that masculine (gender-divided) cultures were more unequal, but the correlation was only about .3. Intuitively, it seems obvious that the children of Britain are grossly unequal and the least social-outcome positive, and although the Northern European states are more equal and more socially positive, France and its 'children', Belgium and Canada, also have better social outcomes and lower inequality than the Anglo-Saxon states.

The following quote, from the NY Times article, irritates me: "they now favor economic equality over freedom" The author associates economic equality with lack of freedom, when it would likely translate into more freedom, and certainly freedom from the control of others, in particular, corporations and government, controlling our lives. Economic freedom, as embodied in a lower GINI coefficient, as is enjoyed by France, Belgium, Scandinavia, and Japan, translates into a higher quality of life. High income inequality, as embodied in the US and UK, translates in worse living conditions, subtle fascism, and outright militarism, with most people working more hours for lower standards of living. It is not an either-or kind of choice. The idea of one against the other smacks of the kind of brainwashing, or at a minimum, an unthinking acceptance of other's ideology.

For the past several years I've been telling myself the following: What's good for corporations is bad for people. A bit oversimplified, but true. There is no illusion as to what benefits from laws regarding sick leave, health care, etc. It is the corporations that hire people. The idea that what is good for the economy is good for people is rarely true, and although the goals can seem related, they are only positively related by the rate of productivity growth, rather than productivity itself. Also, the wealth of middle class America comes at the expense of the wealthy - a historical analysis from Wealth and Democracy by Kevin Philips, although the 90's would seem to belie this truth - so the recent cuts in capital gains and corporate taxes, combined with lax IRS oversight and CEO greed, have created a new gilded-age economic divide. Part of the way the US can become better for the middle and lower classes is by empowering unions and taxing the wealthy, along with creating...