"Relationship Science"

Yesterday, I read The New York Times Magazine's feature on marriage.

In line with the thinking of my previous post about cities, the salient question for me is, What kind of a problem is a relationship?

With language reminiscent of that used in The Corrections (Franzen), Elizabeth Weil describes her marriage variously through the lens of economics, psychoanalysis and military strategy.

Economics:

[Marriage is] an environment of scarcity, it's "a barbaric competition over whose needs get met"; it's "two people trying to make a go of it on emotional and psychological supplies that are only sufficient for one."

Psychoanalysis:

Monogamy is one of the most basic concepts of modern marriage. It is also its most confounding. In psychoanalytic thought, the template for monogamy is forged in infancy, a baby with its mother. Marriage is considered to be a mainline back to this relationship, its direct heir.

Military strategy/Politics:

...I began seeing Dan as my adversary, the person against whom I was negotiating the terms of our lives.

Perhaps we'd been striving in raising children and not in marriage because child-rearing is a dictatorship and marriage is a democracy. The children do not get to vote on the direction of the relationship, on which sleep-training or discipline philosophy they like best. But with a spouse, particularly a contemporary American spouse, equality is foundational, assumed. (emphases mine)

The problem to me seems to be that Weil approaches her marriage much as she would other facets of her life, that is, with the same industry and the same resources at her disposal. She says as much: "...I started wondering why I wasn't applying myself to the project of being a spouse. My marriage was good, utterly central to my existence, yet in no other important aspect of my life was I so laissez-faire. Like most of my peers, I applied myself to school, friendship, work, health and, ad nauseum, raising my children. But in this critical area, marriage, we had all turned away. I wanted to understand why. I wanted not to accept this."

In regarding her role in her marriage as a "project," Weil tries to dissect her marriage and analyze it as she would other problems. She tests hypothesizes. She gives herself exercises and homework assignments. She appeals to expert advice: marriage counselors, sex therapists, psychoanalysts, relationship scientists. There is even mention in the article of a "Love Lab," where one purported expert claims 94 percent accuracy in predicting whether a married couple will last longer than six years.

Absurdity in my ears. Management consultants get assigned to "projects," not life partners. Being in a relationship is fundamentally a different kind of problem than a work project, an investment decision, a weight-loss plan or an international treaty. It is an area of life in which our maximizing tendencies come up against a wall and our typical modes of thinking meet their limits. Thinking otherwise can be of real detriment.

I think Weil's efforts to grow in her marriage are admirable. But something about the way she sets out to improve her marriage strikes me as deeply wrong. Something in my gut tells me that we need to draw upon a different set of resources when thinking about matters of the heart. As a culture, we have let the language of economics and politics infiltrate our thinking about relationships. We increasingly regard love as something that can be demystified with the right application of analytical tools. Despite our best efforts, relationships resist demystification, rightfully so in my mind.

What kind of a problem is a relationship? What are the implications of how we choose to answer that question?

What kind of a problem is a city?

Cities happen to be problems in organized complexity, like the life sciences. They present “situations in which a half-dozen or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously and in subtly interconnected ways.” Cities, again like the life sciences, do not exhibit one problem in organized complexity, which if understood explains all. They can be analyzed into many such problems or segments which, as in the case of the life sciences, are also related with one another. The variables are many, but they are not helter-skelter; they are “interrelated into an organic whole.”

...The tactics for understanding [the life sciences and cities] are similar in the sense that both depend on the microscopic or detailed view, so to speak, rather than on the less detailed, naked-eye view suitable for viewing problems of simplicity or the remote telescopic view suitable for viewing problems of disorganized complexity.
In the life sciences, organized complexity is handled by identifying a specific factor or quantity—say an enzyme—and then painstakingly learning its intricate relationships and interconnections with other factors or quantities. All this is observed in terms of the behavior (not mere presence) of other specific (not generalized) factors or quantities. To be sure, the techniques of two-variable and disorganized-complexity analysis are used too, but only as subsidiary tactics. (433-440)

That's Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. If we take the metaphor of a city as a living organism seriously and recognize cities as emergent phenomenon, then what is the appropriate analytical approach for cities? Although my friends tell me that Jacobs is dated in her understanding of how the life sciences are studied, I think the basic point remains: Cities are not "understandable purely by statistical analysis, predictable by the application of probability mathematics, manageable by conversion into groups of averages."

For me, this is a profound point, especially given the ubiquity of the statistical approach in social science thinking today. What is more, the framing of the problem determines the nature of the solution. Moving forward, the question is, How does one combine the sensibilities of Jacobs' street-level humanity with the empirical rigor of an econometrician?

Are You Interesting?

Ben Casnocha writes a lot about interesting-ness: what it means to be interesting, how to be interesting, how to determine quickly whether someone else is interesting. Sometimes, I like what he has to say about the topic, particularly when he says something along the lines of, "The way to be interesting is to be interested."

But for the most part, his thoughts leave me a little bit peeved. Who are all these people that Ben comes across in daily life that he deems so uninteresting? Does he meet so many inexcusably boring people that he feels compelled to write about how to be interesting so regularly?

At one point in my life--namely, during the intellectual awakening of my adolescence--I would sneak away from social gatherings to read James Joyce. His words--"Evidently she had been unfit to live, without any strength of purpose, an easy prey to habits, one of the wrecks on which civilization has been reared." (Dubliners 91)--sent fireworks off in my head as I exclaimed to myself, "How true and how sad it is that so many people muddle through life in zombie-like fashion!"

So I admit it. I've made my fair share of snap judgments about people I find uninteresting and not worth my time. But, taking a break from Joyce, I started talking to people and took a stab at understanding others. Everybody's got a story to tell, obstacles encountered and overcome, dreams foiled and realized, hearts broken and filled. Looking back, I regret every single time I have written someone off as being uninteresting.

Back to my question: Are you interesting? Yes, you are.

A Sense of Place

1) My grand-uncle was born in Dong Shih, a small farming town in the central highlands of Taiwan. He grew up speaking Hakka, the dialect of his parents, and Japanese, the language of formal schooling during Japanese occupation. My grand-uncle has lived through colonialism, World War II, forty years of martial law and an economic miracle that saw Taiwan engage the global economy at unprecedented levels. While his beginnings may have been humble and provincial, his knowledge of the world is vast and his experiences diverse. My grand-uncle forged a career as a successful businessman, but as life would have it, his wife became ill at a young age and was largely confined to the house. He refused to leave his wife's side and never once left the country even as opportunities for travel became commonplace and it became clear that my grand-aunt's health would neither worsen terribly nor substantially improve.

A couple years ago, my grand-aunt passed away. So at the age of seventy, my grand-uncle left Taiwan for the first time in his life to go to Japan. Upon his return, I was eager to hear his impressions of the wider world, what it was like for him to step off Taiwanese soil for the first time. With a proud grin, he responded to my inquiries, "Taiwan is a great place to live."

2) A couple weeks ago, I participated in a tour of the Village Bottoms district of West Oakland, which for over half a century has been the object of systematic marginalization. I moved to San Francisco about a year ago, and I must admit that I know embarrassingly little about the Bay Area and its history. Fortunately for me, the leader of the tour, Marcel Diallo, a Village Bottoms native, intimated vast and deep knowledge of the neighborhood. Every block we walked he infused with rich history. For years, he has labored to revitalize the neighborhood for which he harbors obvious love. At a venue that Marcel has toiled to designate as a cultural space, there hangs a portrait of his grandmother. On the portrait reads a quote from Marcel's grandmother: "When I sat for this portrait in 1951, West Oakland was one of the few places we as Black folks were allowed to live. Today I wouldn't leave the Bottoms if they paid me."

3) I was talking to a colleague the other day trying to figure out how she landed in San Francisco after growing up her whole life in Michigan. She told me she had been ready for something new and wanted to experience for herself all the hullaballoo about San Francisco. Three fantastic years, she tells me, she has been in San Francisco. Now she's itching to move on to something new again. "You can only do Bay to Breakers so many times. You know what I mean?"

You've Gots to be Kidding Me

There was not a single tree growing in San Francisco when the first Spanish arrived; it was too dry and wind-blown for trees to take hold. Today, Golden Gate Park looks as if Virginia had mated with Borneo, thanks to water brought nearly two hundred miles by tunnel. The same applies to Bel Air, to Pacific Palisades, to the manicured lawns of La Jolla, where the water comes from three directions and from a quarter of a continent away. (Mark Reisner, Cadillac Desert 333)

An Explosion of Good Will

From David Bornstein's How to Change the World: "In the United States and Canada, for example, almost everyone has heard about the explosion of dot-coms--a much smaller phenomenon--but millions have still not heard the big story: the worldwide explosion of dot-orgs" (6). The book begins with an account of how the number of NGOs and nonprofits has ballooned over the last couple decades. Readers, I presume, are supposed to applaud what is taken as a proxy for an explosion of good will.

My training in economics has me asking a number of questions:

1) What is driving growth in what Bornstein calls "the citizen sector?" My economic intuition tells me it is something other than good will.

2) NGOs and nonprofits form to address social goods that are neglected by both private and public sectors. Why are these social goods being neglected? Government exists for the provision of public goods, or when possible, to enforce legislation (taxes and property rights) that helps internalize externalities. What role does that leave for the citizen sector?

3) From what are resources being diverted to fund newly formed NGOs and nonprofits? Does this represent an efficient allocation of resources?

4) If there is a loss in efficiency, can we count growth in the citizen sector as a boon to society? How might we begin to answer this question?

5) How do market forces and competition operate in the citizen sector?

The book doesn't answer many or any of these questions. Nonetheless, I found it a worthwhile read for its stories of ground-level, piecemeal change throughout the world. The Ashoka Foundation sounds fascinating and definitely seems to be onto something.

No doubt there is abundant literature to answer some of the questions that I have posed. Now if only I could find some of what is out there...

Storytelling

Recently, Chris Blattman linked to this essay about how book clubs diminish the intimacy of the reading experience.

For me, the essay brought to mind my undergraduate study of postcolonial literature, which helped me appreciate the diversity of different models in reading. The author of the essay, Adam Sternbergh, no doubt relies upon a Western model that envisions an intimate, singular connection between text and reader. Implicit in the model is a highly individuated reader, a liberal self isolated from community and context. No surprise then that Sternbergh romanticizes the ideal of reading Moby Dick "while sailing the world alone."

For myself, I draw inspiration for my reading from a different model. In an essay on oral subjectivity, Cynthia Ward writes, "The value of the oral tale to the oral culture lies not entirely in the tale itself but, perhaps more significantly, in the discussion it generates after it is told." This insight accords with my experience of texts that come alive in discussion. In such cases, the give-and-take of discussion heightens the reading experience rather than cheapens it.