Spelling Bee Champions Make H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. NewsWire

NEWSWIRE: 6/3/19

• This year’s National Spelling Bee ended in an unprecedented 8-way tie, with eight 12- to 14-year-old teens crowned co-champions. While there have been two-way ties before, these Homelanders were prepared to the point where the organizers simply couldn’t come up with enough challenging words. (The New York Times)
  
• NH: The age-old purpose of the annual National Spelling Bee is to test the spelling skills of 7th- and 8th-graders against the nearly half a million words contained in Webster's Third International Dictionary, Unabridged. Over the last twenty years--as Millennial and now Homelander birth cohorts have entered this narrow age bracket--the skill level of the contestants has obviously been rising. (See "Examining Homelanders Through the Lens of Spelling Bees.") Now, apparently, the kids have won and Webster's has lost. The judges simply ran out of difficult words. The kids knew them all. We're talking about words like pendeloque, erysipelas, odylic, auslaut, and aiguillette.
  
• And so, in a very Millennial fashion (see "Millennial NHLers Abandon the Captain's 'C'."), the judges just decided to break the tiara into pieces and give a prize to all of the eight kids who could not be induced to make a mistake.
• To judge by their comments, many readers were upset by the story. Some think the spelling bee is an anachronism that rewards sheer rote and memorization skills. They suspect that kids must have been drilled to the point of abuse. Couldn't the kids compete instead on being able to define the words accurately or use them felicitously in a sentence? Others (mostly Xers, I suspect!) think the kids should be forced into some sort of Hunger-Games sudden death. A typical suggestion, again, is that the kids be required to define the words.
• These criticisms are misguided. In fact, in past bees, the judges have used definitions as a tie-breaker--but without result since the kids invariably know the definitions of the words they are trying to spell. Interviews with kids show them to highly informed and articulate about their vocabulary. This should not be surprising, since, in order to spell all these words correctly, the kids need to be familiar with roots and etymologies: Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, German, Old Norse, even Sanskrit, and Polynesian. Nor do the kids show any sign of abuse. To the contrary, they seem to be bright, well-rounded kids in loving families--though, to be sure, competing in the bees is often a family enthusiasm. (See the new documentary "Breaking the Bee"; or the 2002 documentary that continues to inspire many of these families, "Spellbound.")
• A more provocative question is whether these kids are simply smarter today than kids of previous generations. Before shaking your head in disbelief, look carefully at the vast evidence underlying the "Flynn Effect"--the finding that successive birth cohorts are registering progressively higher IQ scores at any given age, especially on tests assessing fluid intelligence. The Flynn effect seems to be happening in most societies around the world, at least in those that have historical IQ data.
• A more unsettling question, perhaps, is whether the Spelling Bee championships highlight the importance of being raised in families that prize excellence versus those that don't. While the Flynn effect does reflect cohort averages, it seems undeniable that high spelling bee scores are the result of an intense family dedication to performance that simply can't be replicated in schools. K-12 classrooms today de-emphasize structured knowledge, especially in the so-called "language arts," with the result that most kids (even in AP classrooms) are only vaguely familiar with classical etymologies or with declensions, conjugations, or parts of speech.
• Most unsettling of all--maybe even politically incorrect--is the question of why "Americans of South Asian" descent (mostly meaning children of Indian immigrants) have increasingly dominated the Spelling Bee winner's list. Six of the eight crowned this year are South Asian. As were all the top winners from 2007 to 2018. And as were all but four top winners since 1999. No one doubts that the caliber of contestants of every ethnicity is much higher than it used to be. But why are South Asians so unusually good?
• Possible explanations are that these kids benefit from being raised in multi-lingual families. It may also help that the family language often includes Tamil or written Sanskrit (now being heavily promoted again by the BJP in India), heavily inflected languages that require lots of memorization. In India, no doubt, rote learning does continue to play a large role in education--certainly more than in America.
• The biggest reason, however, less mysterious. These families are mostly headed by immigrant professional parents whose drive to succeed is infectiously passed on to their kids. What's more, since the 1990s, many of these parents have come to make excelling on the bee a sort of family tradition. And indeed it's now a community tradition, supported by explicitly ethnocentric institutions like the South Asian Engagement Foundation that provide coaching and training tools. All this support gives these kids not just brains, but perseverance. Most of these South Asian winners try and fail for several years--there is no minimum age--before finally making it to the top.
• WSJ columnist Joseph Sternberg doesn’t mince words in the title of his new book: The Theft of the Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials’ Economic Future. In a recent interview, he squared off with Vox writer Sean Illing in a debate over Boomer governance and economic dysfunction. (Vox)
• NH: Sternberg, a Millennial columnist for The Wall Street Journal, calls himself a "free-market conservative." But in this book, he agrees with most of his peers that Boomers are responsible for imperiling America's economic future. And he blames, in particular, the hypocritical "centrism" of most Boomer policies (Democratic and Republican) that pretends to deregulate the economy but in fact enables special interests always to come out on top.
• Sternberg concludes: "The middle way, in which we meld the state and the market, isn’t really working. So that leaves us with two options: You can either have more state and less market, or you can have more market and less state." Though he himself prefers the latter option, he acknowledges "that certainly a lot of the energy among Millennial voters seems to be in the more state direction."
• If Sternberg's understated, almost self-effacing defense of "more market" is the best that a Millennial free-market conservative can do, well then, the libertarian camp may be in trouble! In particular, his swearing off of any middle way reinforces one of my steadiest refrains--which is that the Fourth Turning political mood is turning both to populist left and to populist right, but away from the centrist establishment.
• If you want a zestier, no-holds-barred version of this whole down-with-Boomers argument, look instead at Sean Illing's interview of Bruce Gibney, author of Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America. (See "A Harsh Rebuke of Boomer Politics.") Gibney, a late-wave Gen-Xer, and a Silicon Valley VC, goes after Boomers swinging a 2-by-4. "The boomers inherited a rich, dynamic country and have gradually bankrupted it. They habitually cut their own taxes and borrow money without any concern for future burdens. They’ve spent virtually all our money and assets on themselves and in the process have left a financial disaster for their children."
• Gibney's basic thesis is that Boomers championed an ethic of individualism and irrationalism that allowed them to avoid bearing any responsibility for the community--past or future--and refuse to face the objective consequences of their behavior. Hmm. Sounds about right to me. 
• The once-strong relationship between presidential approval ratings and the state of the economy has weakened, first under Obama and now under Trump. Americans now feel much the same about their presidents in good times and bad, which suggests that the economy has become yet another thing we see through a partisan lens. (The Economist)
• NH: It's hard to think of an issue today that isn't increasingly tainted or transformed by partisanship. That includes people's attitudes on everything from Vladimir Putin to climate. And yes, that includes judgments on how well the economy is performing. Late in the Obama presidency, no amount of evidence could persuade Republicans that the economy was improving. Democrats disagreed and gave the economy far higher grades back in 2014 and 2015. In the Trump era, it's been the reverse. Republicans are ecstatic and Democrats are despondent--seemingly regardless of the evidence. I first pointed this out back in early 2017. (See "'Soft' Indicators Could Take a "Hard' Fall.") See first chart below.
• Pew has also done a revealing comparison over time of which issues Americans regard as the highest priority, by party affiliation. Back in 1999 and 2009, there was a broad overlap in the priorities of Republicans and Democrats. In 2019, remarkably, there is no overlap at all. The only issues that are close are jobs, Medicare, Social Security, deficits, drug addiction, and transportation, health care, and education. If the Democrats were smart, they would focus on those issues in 2020--as they did reasonably well in the 2018 midterms. See second and third chart below.

 

• Demographer Peter Francese highlights several demographic trends that have reshaped the U.S. retail sector. Among the most important have been a lagging birth rate and the emergence of the Boomer-driven “grandparent economy,” which have caught most retailers off guard—but has rewarded forward-thinking companies like Walmart. (Forbes)
• NH: Peter Francese is something of a legend among demographers. He was the founder (in 1979) of American Demographics, the magazine that got CEOs and CMOs to start thinking seriously about demography. Alas, American Demographics was bought out by Ad Age in the early 2000s and thereafter disappeared. The Forbes interviewer, Pamela Danziger, specializes in marketing to the wealthy and often works with Francese.
• The four broad trends that Francese describes here are pretty well known: (1) falling fertility and the shrinking the share of families with children; (2) the declining share of young adults (even in the "Millennial" era); (3) the rising importance, both in number and affluence, of seniors (i.e., "grandparents"); and (4) the gradual browning of America, that is, the rising importance of Hispanic and nonwhite Americans.
• The declining importance of young adults is often overlooked in all the talk about the Millennial "echo boom." Don't the Millennials constitute their own baby boom? Aren't they the largest generation ever? Yes, but Francese is right: They don't hold a candle to the original Baby Boom. The U.S. total fertility rate (TFR) peaked at 3.77 in 1957 during the Boomer birth era--versus peaking at only 2.12, barely above replacement, in 2007 during the Millennial birth era. Yes, Millennials are slightly larger (per birth cohort) than Xers or Boomers, but they are nowhere near as large, relative to older generations, as Boomers once were.
• Here's one more way to put this into perspective. During the Great Depression, the TFR hit its low point (for the Silent Generation) in 1936 at 2.15--a value that is still higher than the Millennial TFR at its peak. In 2018, as we recently reported (see "U.S. Fertility Passes Another (Ominous) Milestone"), the TFR fell to its all-time historical low.
• The NYT published a blockbuster investigative series on the taxi medallion bubble, which left a generation of drivers deeply in debt after it burst. The collapse was blamed on ride-sharing, but the main driver was reckless lending practices similar to those that precipitated the global financial crisis. (The New York Times)
  
• NH: This is a truly heartrending series on how immigrant NYC taxi drivers, who could barely speak English much less decipher thick loan contracts, were duped into taking out "no doc" loans that ruined their lives while enriching creditors hungry for new borrowers after the GFC. Most of these loans had draconian penalties for both early payment and late payment. They had utterly unaffordable "balloon" balances. And many even included "confession of judgment" clauses that enabled immediate seizure of personal assets upon the slightest infraction. For a few years, these loans sent the price of taxi medallions soaring (see graph below). But, like the price of housing during the GFC, this soon came crashing down again. Many of these drivers declared bankruptcy--or committed suicide.
• In a recent podcast, I mentioned this NYT series in an ironic commentary on Mayor Bill de Blasio's announced presidential candidacy. De Blasio, along with the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission (which facilitated the creditors), knew about this victimization but preferred to blame the plight of Big Apple cabbies on Uber and Lyft. (See "The Dark Side of the Gig Economy.")

• A recent WSJ article breaks down the plight of early-wave Millennials: educated, employed, but in woeful financial shape. One 32-year-old interviewee sums it up: “Myself and a lot of my peers still feel like we’re playing catch-up in the game of life.” (The Wall Street Journal)
  
• NH: Much of this story relies on data that were ably summarized in a Fed research paper by Christopher Kurz, et al., "Are Millennials Different?" As we originally reported (see "Financial Habits Are Remarkably Similar Across Generations"), the data presented in the paper were markedly at variance with the authors' headline conclusion.
• These WSJ reporters likewise go where the data go. First-wave Millennials, those today roughly age 27 to 36, are doing worse than any of the last four generations were at the same age in terms of (1) marriage rate, (2) attained fertility, (3) homeownership, (4) student debt, (5) net worth, and (6) real income growth. Meanwhile, the older generations have saddled them with unprecedented unfunded liabilities as a share of GDP. The fact that they are much better educated than prior generations does not seem to benefit them much.
• It may be no coincidence, say the reporters, that these Millennials--in sharp contrast to any older generation or half-generation--don't see America as "exceptional" and are more likely to have a positive view of "socialism" than of "capitalism." Clearly, many remain hell-bent for Bernie. We'll see how this plays out in the primaries.
• A recent essay by Niall Ferguson and a younger coauthor argues that generational division, not race or class, is the deepest fault line in American politics. They cover multiple data points we’ve discussed at length—including voting patterns, policy views, and economic differences—and arrive at a similar conclusion: that Democrats have younger voters on policy, but Republicans have the edge with older voters on culture. (The Atlantic)
• NH: Best-selling author and historian Niall Ferguson has long argued that generational conflict is replacing class conflict in Europe. And from time to time he has wondered why Americans have been so resistant to the notion of generational conflict. With this article, Ferguson has apparently stopped wondering. Looking ahead to the increasing radicalism of Millennials, he sees a new rising generation that has Boomers in its sites. (Yes, that's right, Ferguson is yet another blame-the-Boomers crusader.)
• I have frequently pointed out the same trends. More than that, I recently conducted an entire survey warning the congressional GOP about the generational locomotive heading their way.
• My only complaint about Ferguson's essay is that it doesn't see any historical pattern behind the trend he identifies. Ferguson does mention my view, only to dismiss it with the generic remark: "We are skeptical about cyclical theories of history." More surprisingly, Ferguson is not familiar with the most recent data and literature on this topic. He comments that Millennials are still hindered by low voter participation, with no mention of the historic jump in under-30 voter participation that occurred last fall. Also, his discussion of how political generations typically evolve as they grow older could have benefited from citing what we already know. See my discussion of this topic early in our recent Demography Unplugged video, "The Politics of Falling Crime."
• In Q1 2019, U.S. satellite, cable, and telecommunications companies saw their steepest loss in TV customers on record: 1.4 million. The livelihood of pay TV operators increasingly relies on their ability to offer programming that streaming services don’t have, namely live news and sports, or other services like cable Internet. (The Economist)
• NH: Plenty of doom and gloom here for the entire TV industry--from big telecoms, which are rapidly losing subscribers, to the networks themselves (starting with younger-targeting, nonsports networks like Viacom) which are taking ever-larger contract hits. Among telecoms, the best situated are quasi-monopolies like Comcast and ATT&T that also offer Internet service. But if a Democratic administration is around the corner, even these could find their moats drained. Among networks, event-driven programming like sports still holds a premium. But once sports go "over the top" (see ESPN+), that game may be over.
• IMO, it's a clear mistake to be strategically long in an industry glutted by so much content, competing with so many competitors for eyeballs, and heading into such strong generational, political, and technological headwinds.

• It’s better to be rich than smart: Just 30% of low-income kindergartners with high test scores become well-off young adults, compared to 70% of high-income kindergartners with low test scores. This report suggests that America’s education system is, in the words of report author Anthony Carnevale, “an aristocracy posing as a meritocracy.” (MarketWatch)
• NH: God knows there are big structural problems with our educational system. But the report cited in this article ("Born to Win, Schooled to Lose," published by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce) fails to identify them. Instead, it pursues a host of simplistic arguments known to be fallacious. It is not true, for example, that better performance by kids of high socioeconomic status (SES) parents means low-SES kids are being treated unfairly. It could reflect--and indeed, almost certainly does in large part reflect--both environmental and genetic advantages of high SES parents. (On the overwhelming evidence on this last point, see Robert Plomin's recent book, The Blueprint.) Nor is it true that schools that spend more money on kids boost their educational achievement. Experts have looking for--and failing to find--evidence for this ever since the famous Coleman Report back in the 1960s.
• The report also shows highly unequal college attainment by tenth-graders, by SES, after holding math scores constant. In the highest SES quartile, 70% of students with above-median math scores complete four years of college. In the lowest SES quarter, the rate is only 30%. Here the report is on firmer ground. The high cost of a four-year degree from a regionally accredited institution does indeed deter many smart kids from poor families from realizing their potential. The Center's report would have been much better if it had defined the problem better.

• In an op-ed, author Anand Giridharadas highlights the growing moral component at play in charitable gifting. The rejection of Sackler family donations by several prominent museums reflects a new attitude taking hold among nonprofits: that the money is only worth it if the institution approves of how it was made. (The New York Times)
• NH: It's undeniable: The public is looking much more closely at where the money is coming from. Just as the major Democratic contenders are shying away from Wall Street contributions, so too are major philanthropies--who never cared where their money was coming from back in the heyday of the Clinton Foundation--now scrutinizing their donors. Not taking money from the Sacklers? That's an easy call. (See "Purdue Pharma Prepares Bankruptcy Filing.")

DID YOU KNOW?

Keep Your Friends Close and Your Phones Closer. Fully 32% of 12- to 18-year-olds use a mobile device within 5 minutes of waking up, and 40% within 5 minutes of going to sleep. In addition, more than a third (36%) wake up in the middle of the night to check their devices, and 29% even sleep with a mobile device in bed. Their parents aren’t all that different: 26% of parents wake up to check their devices, and 62% keep their mobile devices within reach of the bed. This comprehensive study offers some of the clearest evidence yet of the effects that mobile devices are having on sleep patterns and illustrates how far tech companies have to go to persuade the public to use their devices less. (See “Tech-Lash Batters Silicon Valley.”) While the share of parents who think they spend “too much” time on mobile devices has surged since 2016 (from 29% to 52%), the share of teens who say the same has fallen sharply (from 61% to 39%). (Common Sense Media)