Summer is coming to an end, even if we officially have another few weeks to go. I always get a jab of melancholy when I realize that another season has passed and that we’re now on the downhill slope to fall … and winter … and holidays … and, after much too long, spring and then another summer.
One of the happy things about summer is the leisure it brings actually to do some reading and reflecting.
The things I read are often not particularly serious or thought-provoking. I liked, for example, “Empire of Ivory,” Volume Four of a fanciful series by Naomi Novik about a dragon, Temeraire, and his pilot who fly for England during the Napoleonic Wars. Great fun.
But I also greatly enjoyed Freakonomics, the 2005 best-seller by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, which applies unexpected insights from economics to all kinds of things.
Among their conclusions: It was the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, Roe v. Wade, that was responsible for the inexplicable and sudden drop in the crime rate in the 1990s.
Their argument — which is bound to be controversial — is that unwanted children of poor and desperate, often unmarried women are disproportionately likely to commit crimes. They also raise questions about whether early childhood enrichment programs like Head Start really make much of a difference.
They say there is little evidence it helps much in terms of raising test scores. Why? Perhaps because “instead of spending the day with his own undereducated, overworked mother, the typical Head Start child spends the day with someone else’s undereducated, overworked mother.”
In other words, merely sending a child to early childhood education programs is not enough. The programs themselves have to be high quality, which means that the teachers in the program must be top-notch, too. And if we really want that, that means we’ve got to pay them what they’re worth.
Then, in reading a collection of speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King, I came across this passage from James Russell Lowell’s 1844 poem, “The Present Crisis”…
Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne:
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping Watch above His own.
That poem provided much of the inspiration for the early civil rights movement — and is why the NAACP’s magazine is The Crisis. It is also one stanza of a hymn I used to sing in the Episcopal Church. I shiver whenever I remember the words and the thundering tune.
Speaking of which, if you have not read The Arc of Justice, by Kevin Boyle, you’ve missed a stunning and heart-wrenching history of racial injustice in Detroit in the 1920s. It is without a doubt the best book I’ve ever read on the disaster of race relations in this part of the world — and offers profound insight into what is going today in what is still one of the most segregated metropolitan regions in America.
Some books are so well written that I can’t help underlining great phrases. The definitive 2008 biography of the great financial genius, Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, by Alice Schroeder, sparkles with such gems.
The board of directors of a company could “summon no more than low to middling dudgeon” in the face of economic reversals. And when searching for a fourth CEO in eight years, the company faced repeated rejection by possible candidates, each of which “fed the media another bit of Schadenfreudenfodder.”
That, by the way, is the German term for malicious joy. More telling to me – and to anybody who wants to follow the giant Buffett footsteps – is a tale of a dinner between Buffett and Bill Gates, Sr., the father of Microsoft’s founder.
What factor did they feel was the most important in getting as far ahead in life as these financial and creative geniuses have?
Focus.
“It is unclear how many people at the table understood ‘focus’ as Buffett lived that word,” the author writes. That’s not something you can copy. “It meant the intensity that is the price of excellence. It meant the discipline and passionate perfectionism that made Thomas Edison the quintessential American inventor, Walt Disney the king of family entertainment, and James Brown the Godfather of Soul.”
In short, “It meant single-minded obsession with an ideal.”
Summer reading gives me pleasure, insight and perspective. In more ways than one, I can’t wait for next year!
Editor’s Note: Former newspaper publisher and University of Michigan Regent Phil Power is a longtime observer of Michigan politics and economics and a former chairman of the Michigan chapter of the Nature Conservancy. He is also the founder and president of The Center for Michigan, a bipartisan centrist think-and-do tank which is sponsoring Michigan’s Defining Moment, a public engagement outreach campaign for citizens. The opinions expressed here are Power’s own and do not represent the official views of The Center. He welcomes your comments at ppower@thecenterformichigan.net.
2 Comments
Phil–enjoyed seeing what you read this summer and have added some of these titles to my list of “to reads.”
Our early education programs must be funded and staffed by quality mentors and coaches. Look to the efforts of the Early Childhood Investment Corporation and the Great Start Collaborative organizations in each county.
Early education captures a child’s imagination when the brain is experiencing its highest rate of growth. It is at this point that learning differences (they are not disabilities) can be identified and the child can begin a successful journey to their future, not a future prescribed by an anonymous adult or a damaging environment.
To understand why this is so important add one more book, to your fall reading schedule, “The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog” by Perry.
Our children are the future. Invest in the future.