Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
September 22, 2009
Tuesday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time Lectionary: 450
Reading 1
Responsorial Psalm
Gospel
Reading 1
Ez 6:7-8, 12b, 14-20
King Darius issued an order to the officials
of West-of-Euphrates:
“Let the governor and the elders of the Jews
continue the work on that house of God;
they are to rebuild it on its former site.
I also issue this decree
concerning your dealing with these elders of the Jews
in the rebuilding of that house of God:
From the royal revenue, the taxes of West-of-Euphrates,
let these men be repaid for their expenses, in full and without delay.
I, Darius, have issued this decree;
let it be carefully executed.”
The elders of the Jews continued to make progress in the building,
supported by the message of the prophets,
Haggai and Zechariah, son of Iddo.
They finished the building according to the command
of the God of Israel
and the decrees of Cyrus and Darius
and of Artaxerxes, king of Persia.
They completed this house on the third day of the month Adar,
in the sixth year of the reign of King Darius.
The children of Israel–priests, Levites,
and the other returned exiles–
celebrated the dedication of this house of God with joy.
For the dedication of this house of God,
they offered one hundred bulls,
two hundred rams, and four hundred lambs,
together with twelve he-goats as a sin-offering for all Israel,
in keeping with the number of the tribes of Israel.
Finally, they set up the priests in their classes
and the Levites in their divisions
for the service of God in Jerusalem,
as is prescribed in the book of Moses.
The exiles kept the Passover on the fourteenth day of the first month.
The Levites, every one of whom had purified himself for the occasion,
sacrificed the Passover for the rest of the exiles,
for their brethren the priests, and for themselves.
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 122:1-2, 3-4ab, 4cd-5
R. (1) Let us go rejoicing to the house of the Lord.
I rejoiced because they said to me,
“We will go up to the house of the LORD.”
And now we have set foot
within your gates, O Jerusalem.
R. Let us go rejoicing to the house of the Lord.
Jerusalem, built as a city
with compact unity.
To it the tribes go up,
the tribes of the LORD.
R. Let us go rejoicing to the house of the Lord.
According to the decree for Israel,
to give thanks to the name of the LORD.
In it are set up judgment seats,
seats for the house of David.
R. Let us go rejoicing to the house of the Lord.
Gospel
Lk 8:19-21
The mother of Jesus and his brothers came to him
but were unable to join him because of the crowd.
He was told, “Your mother and your brothers are standing outside
and they wish to see you.”
He said to them in reply, “My mother and my brothers
are those who hear the word of God and act on it.”
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Monday, September 21, 2009
Exploring News by the Amish Online
Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
September 21, 2009
Link by Link
By NOAM COHEN
IT’S not easy being the emissary from the digital world in Amish country.
For two weeks this summer, Jessica Best, a 22-year-old journalist from Wales, fell into that role as the intern at The Budget of Sugarcreek, Ohio, a weekly that is the largest newspaper serving the Amish.
Her self-assigned task, supported by a traveling scholarship from the Welsh Livery Guild, was to study The Budget’s transition to the Internet and the willingness of the Amish to accept that transition. It led, she said, to many a friendly, if awkward, conversation, some of which she chronicled in a blog written from Sugarcreek.
There was the Amish man where she was a houseguest who asked her what an “ip-id” was. “He had read about an iPod,” she explained. “I wish I had had mine with me to show him.”
Her experiences taught her a general rule: “it is difficult to explain a Web site to someone who hasn’t seen one.”
Yet for all the gaps among the technology-shunning Amish — grist for stand-up comics — Ms. Best said she was struck by what was familiar in the way news spread among the Amish.
The national edition of The Budget, now available in print only, is largely composed of submissions from hundreds of volunteer “scribes” from across the country. Typically, a scribe talks about the weather and segues into the goings-on in the local community. Around 500 scribe letters a week take up roughly 50 pages, said the publisher, Keith Rathbun, who like the rest of the Budget staff is not Amish. (The local edition covers just the area around Sugarcreek.)
In a letter dated Sept. 3, a scribe from Camden, Ind., told how a great-uncle, Owen, had the family over to “cut down a big tree in the front yard and turn it into firewood. Uncle Owen cut it down while his sons stopped traffic as they had to throw it on the road. He got tired out, but at 89 I think that is doing quite well.”
By assembling detailed reports from around the country, Ms. Best said, the editors of The Budget “have been doing for 100 years what we have only been doing recently — looking at news on the hyperlocal scale and asking each person what is on your mind,” she said in an interview from Newport, Wales, where she is a reporter at The South Wales Argus.
“They are looking at the individuals to make a bigger picture. With the Internet, the power has shifted to many hands, but they have done that for a long time.”
There are 843 scribes, Mr. Rathbun said, and they must write 12 times a year to get their subscription free. For others, a subscription costs $42 a year, and the national edition has about 9,000 subscribers. The local edition has about 10,000 and includes the national.
Like bloggers, the scribes have no editor and no limit on how much they write; like Twitter users, the scribes have followers who track their every utterance.
•
Mr. Rathbun said that each year, The Budget sends scribes a guide to “keep the letters to a manageable size” (one page per letter, hint, hint) but “some write very small.” Not all scribe letters are handwritten and mailed, he said: some are faxed, and some liberal Amish e-mail in their reports.
And much the way Twitter has enabled regular citizens to report on breaking news, Mr. Rathbun says that scribe letters have been sent from the farm in Pennsylvania where one of the planes hijacked on 9/11 crash-landed and from El Salvador, also in 2001, where a deadly earthquake had struck, though it appeared in print more than a week later.
Another new-media analogy from Ms. Best was how those scribe letters — viewed over the nearly 120-year history of The Budget — represent a database for the Amish, who regularly visit the newspaper’s office to consult its archive of microfilmed pages.
“Basically it is a search engine for them to catalog anything and everything,” she said.
Mr. Rathbun described how the newspaper will “get a call from Illinois, Missouri, from someone who needed to get a birth certificate” to deal with the government but whose home birth was never registered. The government, he said, will say, “If you can get the documentation from The Budget, we can give you a birth certificate.” The caller will tell the staff the date of birth and the scribe who reported on it, and The Budget will send a copy of the report.
For all the new-media analogies, Mr. Rathbun has had very little success in moving the material online. In 2005, when he took the first steps in that direction (“just to protect ourselves so we can give out advertising information, subscription information and own the name online,” he said in an interview), it became national news. And when that news trickled back to the scribes, there was a rebellion. (That some articles reported that Mr. Rathbun had published an alternative weekly in Cleveland did not win him any points, either.)
“I think it was mostly about privacy — uncertainty about the Internet,” he said.
Mr. Rathbun had to quickly explain himself and assure the scribes that their letters would not go online for the world to read, copy and forward.
•
Mr. Rathbun said he was not an Internet evangelist but rather had genuine questions about whether The Budget could remain a print publication forever, even if its readers preferred it that way.
“My concern is, ‘Are we going to be able to deliver the paper to our readers in any way other than the Internet?’ ” he said. “If they want to keep this communication between their communities, they need to find a way to do this.”
Ms. Best said she could understand the concern of the scribes. “Something I write for my newspaper, I know will go on the Internet,” she said. “Still, it can be a scary prospect, that loss of control.”
“It wouldn’t just be for an Amish readership anymore.”
September 21, 2009
Link by Link
By NOAM COHEN
IT’S not easy being the emissary from the digital world in Amish country.
For two weeks this summer, Jessica Best, a 22-year-old journalist from Wales, fell into that role as the intern at The Budget of Sugarcreek, Ohio, a weekly that is the largest newspaper serving the Amish.
Her self-assigned task, supported by a traveling scholarship from the Welsh Livery Guild, was to study The Budget’s transition to the Internet and the willingness of the Amish to accept that transition. It led, she said, to many a friendly, if awkward, conversation, some of which she chronicled in a blog written from Sugarcreek.
There was the Amish man where she was a houseguest who asked her what an “ip-id” was. “He had read about an iPod,” she explained. “I wish I had had mine with me to show him.”
Her experiences taught her a general rule: “it is difficult to explain a Web site to someone who hasn’t seen one.”
Yet for all the gaps among the technology-shunning Amish — grist for stand-up comics — Ms. Best said she was struck by what was familiar in the way news spread among the Amish.
The national edition of The Budget, now available in print only, is largely composed of submissions from hundreds of volunteer “scribes” from across the country. Typically, a scribe talks about the weather and segues into the goings-on in the local community. Around 500 scribe letters a week take up roughly 50 pages, said the publisher, Keith Rathbun, who like the rest of the Budget staff is not Amish. (The local edition covers just the area around Sugarcreek.)
In a letter dated Sept. 3, a scribe from Camden, Ind., told how a great-uncle, Owen, had the family over to “cut down a big tree in the front yard and turn it into firewood. Uncle Owen cut it down while his sons stopped traffic as they had to throw it on the road. He got tired out, but at 89 I think that is doing quite well.”
By assembling detailed reports from around the country, Ms. Best said, the editors of The Budget “have been doing for 100 years what we have only been doing recently — looking at news on the hyperlocal scale and asking each person what is on your mind,” she said in an interview from Newport, Wales, where she is a reporter at The South Wales Argus.
“They are looking at the individuals to make a bigger picture. With the Internet, the power has shifted to many hands, but they have done that for a long time.”
There are 843 scribes, Mr. Rathbun said, and they must write 12 times a year to get their subscription free. For others, a subscription costs $42 a year, and the national edition has about 9,000 subscribers. The local edition has about 10,000 and includes the national.
Like bloggers, the scribes have no editor and no limit on how much they write; like Twitter users, the scribes have followers who track their every utterance.
•
Mr. Rathbun said that each year, The Budget sends scribes a guide to “keep the letters to a manageable size” (one page per letter, hint, hint) but “some write very small.” Not all scribe letters are handwritten and mailed, he said: some are faxed, and some liberal Amish e-mail in their reports.
And much the way Twitter has enabled regular citizens to report on breaking news, Mr. Rathbun says that scribe letters have been sent from the farm in Pennsylvania where one of the planes hijacked on 9/11 crash-landed and from El Salvador, also in 2001, where a deadly earthquake had struck, though it appeared in print more than a week later.
Another new-media analogy from Ms. Best was how those scribe letters — viewed over the nearly 120-year history of The Budget — represent a database for the Amish, who regularly visit the newspaper’s office to consult its archive of microfilmed pages.
“Basically it is a search engine for them to catalog anything and everything,” she said.
Mr. Rathbun described how the newspaper will “get a call from Illinois, Missouri, from someone who needed to get a birth certificate” to deal with the government but whose home birth was never registered. The government, he said, will say, “If you can get the documentation from The Budget, we can give you a birth certificate.” The caller will tell the staff the date of birth and the scribe who reported on it, and The Budget will send a copy of the report.
For all the new-media analogies, Mr. Rathbun has had very little success in moving the material online. In 2005, when he took the first steps in that direction (“just to protect ourselves so we can give out advertising information, subscription information and own the name online,” he said in an interview), it became national news. And when that news trickled back to the scribes, there was a rebellion. (That some articles reported that Mr. Rathbun had published an alternative weekly in Cleveland did not win him any points, either.)
“I think it was mostly about privacy — uncertainty about the Internet,” he said.
Mr. Rathbun had to quickly explain himself and assure the scribes that their letters would not go online for the world to read, copy and forward.
•
Mr. Rathbun said he was not an Internet evangelist but rather had genuine questions about whether The Budget could remain a print publication forever, even if its readers preferred it that way.
“My concern is, ‘Are we going to be able to deliver the paper to our readers in any way other than the Internet?’ ” he said. “If they want to keep this communication between their communities, they need to find a way to do this.”
Ms. Best said she could understand the concern of the scribes. “Something I write for my newspaper, I know will go on the Internet,” she said. “Still, it can be a scary prospect, that loss of control.”
“It wouldn’t just be for an Amish readership anymore.”
Paul Krugman: Reform or Bust
Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
September 21, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
By PAUL KRUGMAN
In the grim period that followed Lehman’s failure, it seemed inconceivable that bankers would, just a few months later, be going right back to the practices that brought the world’s financial system to the edge of collapse. At the very least, one might have thought, they would show some restraint for fear of creating a public backlash.
But now that we’ve stepped back a few paces from the brink — thanks, let’s not forget, to immense, taxpayer-financed rescue packages — the financial sector is rapidly returning to business as usual. Even as the rest of the nation continues to suffer from rising unemployment and severe hardship, Wall Street paychecks are heading back to pre-crisis levels. And the industry is deploying its political clout to block even the most minimal reforms.
The good news is that senior officials in the Obama administration and at the Federal Reserve seem to be losing patience with the industry’s selfishness. The bad news is that it’s not clear whether President Obama himself is ready, even now, to take on the bankers.
Credit where credit is due: I was delighted when Lawrence Summers, the administration’s ranking economist, lashed out at the campaign the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in cooperation with financial-industry lobbyists, is running against the proposed creation of an agency to protect consumers against financial abuses, such as loans whose terms they don’t understand. The chamber’s ads, declared Mr. Summers, are “the financial-regulatory equivalent of the death-panel ads that are being run with respect to health care.”
Yet protecting consumers from financial abuse should be only the beginning of reform. If we really want to stop Wall Street from creating another bubble, followed by another bust, we need to change the industry’s incentives — which means, inparticular, changing the way bankers are paid.
What’s wrong with financial-industry compensation? In a nutshell, bank executives are lavishly rewarded if they deliver big short-term profits — but aren’t correspondingly punished if they later suffer even bigger losses. This encourages excessive risk-taking: some of the men most responsible for the current crisis walked away immensely rich from the bonuses they earned in the good years, even though the high-risk strategies that led to those bonuses eventually decimated their companies, taking down a large part of the financial system in the process.
The Federal Reserve, now awakened from its Greenspan-era slumber, understands this problem — and proposes doing something about it. According to recent reports, the Fed’s board is considering imposing new rules on financial-firm compensation, requiring that banks “claw back” bonuses in the face of losses and link pay to long-term rather than short-term performance. The Fed argues that it has the authority to do this as part of its general mandate to oversee banks’ soundness.
But the industry — supported by nearly all Republicans and some Democrats — will fight bitterly against these changes. And while the administration will support some kind of compensation reform, it’s not clear whether it will fully support the Fed’s efforts.
I was startled last week when Mr. Obama, in an interview with Bloomberg News, questioned the case for limiting financial-sector pay: “Why is it,” he asked, “that we’re going to cap executive compensation for Wall Street bankers but not Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or N.F.L. football players?”
That’s an astonishing remark — and not just because the National Football League does, in fact, have pay caps. Tech firms don’t crash the whole world’s operating system when they go bankrupt; quarterbacks who make too many risky passes don’t have to be rescued with hundred-billion-dollar bailouts. Banking is a special case — and the president is surely smart enough to know that.
All I can think is that this was another example of something we’ve seen before: Mr. Obama’s visceral reluctance to engage in anything that resembles populist rhetoric. And that’s something he needs to get over.
It’s not just that taking a populist stance on bankers’ pay is good politics — although it is: the administration has suffered more than it seems to realize from the perception that it’s giving taxpayers’ hard-earned money away to Wall Street, and it should welcome the chance to portray the G.O.P. as the party of obscene bonuses.
Equally important, in this case populism is good economics. Indeed, you can make the case that reforming bankers’ compensation is the single best thing we can do to prevent another financial crisis a few years down the road.
It’s time for the president to realize that sometimes populism, especially populism that makes bankers angry, is exactly what the economy needs.
September 21, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
By PAUL KRUGMAN
In the grim period that followed Lehman’s failure, it seemed inconceivable that bankers would, just a few months later, be going right back to the practices that brought the world’s financial system to the edge of collapse. At the very least, one might have thought, they would show some restraint for fear of creating a public backlash.
But now that we’ve stepped back a few paces from the brink — thanks, let’s not forget, to immense, taxpayer-financed rescue packages — the financial sector is rapidly returning to business as usual. Even as the rest of the nation continues to suffer from rising unemployment and severe hardship, Wall Street paychecks are heading back to pre-crisis levels. And the industry is deploying its political clout to block even the most minimal reforms.
The good news is that senior officials in the Obama administration and at the Federal Reserve seem to be losing patience with the industry’s selfishness. The bad news is that it’s not clear whether President Obama himself is ready, even now, to take on the bankers.
Credit where credit is due: I was delighted when Lawrence Summers, the administration’s ranking economist, lashed out at the campaign the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in cooperation with financial-industry lobbyists, is running against the proposed creation of an agency to protect consumers against financial abuses, such as loans whose terms they don’t understand. The chamber’s ads, declared Mr. Summers, are “the financial-regulatory equivalent of the death-panel ads that are being run with respect to health care.”
Yet protecting consumers from financial abuse should be only the beginning of reform. If we really want to stop Wall Street from creating another bubble, followed by another bust, we need to change the industry’s incentives — which means, inparticular, changing the way bankers are paid.
What’s wrong with financial-industry compensation? In a nutshell, bank executives are lavishly rewarded if they deliver big short-term profits — but aren’t correspondingly punished if they later suffer even bigger losses. This encourages excessive risk-taking: some of the men most responsible for the current crisis walked away immensely rich from the bonuses they earned in the good years, even though the high-risk strategies that led to those bonuses eventually decimated their companies, taking down a large part of the financial system in the process.
The Federal Reserve, now awakened from its Greenspan-era slumber, understands this problem — and proposes doing something about it. According to recent reports, the Fed’s board is considering imposing new rules on financial-firm compensation, requiring that banks “claw back” bonuses in the face of losses and link pay to long-term rather than short-term performance. The Fed argues that it has the authority to do this as part of its general mandate to oversee banks’ soundness.
But the industry — supported by nearly all Republicans and some Democrats — will fight bitterly against these changes. And while the administration will support some kind of compensation reform, it’s not clear whether it will fully support the Fed’s efforts.
I was startled last week when Mr. Obama, in an interview with Bloomberg News, questioned the case for limiting financial-sector pay: “Why is it,” he asked, “that we’re going to cap executive compensation for Wall Street bankers but not Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or N.F.L. football players?”
That’s an astonishing remark — and not just because the National Football League does, in fact, have pay caps. Tech firms don’t crash the whole world’s operating system when they go bankrupt; quarterbacks who make too many risky passes don’t have to be rescued with hundred-billion-dollar bailouts. Banking is a special case — and the president is surely smart enough to know that.
All I can think is that this was another example of something we’ve seen before: Mr. Obama’s visceral reluctance to engage in anything that resembles populist rhetoric. And that’s something he needs to get over.
It’s not just that taking a populist stance on bankers’ pay is good politics — although it is: the administration has suffered more than it seems to realize from the perception that it’s giving taxpayers’ hard-earned money away to Wall Street, and it should welcome the chance to portray the G.O.P. as the party of obscene bonuses.
Equally important, in this case populism is good economics. Indeed, you can make the case that reforming bankers’ compensation is the single best thing we can do to prevent another financial crisis a few years down the road.
It’s time for the president to realize that sometimes populism, especially populism that makes bankers angry, is exactly what the economy needs.
Feast of Saint Matthew, Apostle and evangelist
Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
September 21, 2009
Lectionary: 643
Reading 1
Responsorial Psalm
Gospel
Reading 1
Eph 4:1-7, 11-13
Brothers and sisters:
I, a prisoner for the Lord,
urge you to live in a manner worthy of the call you have received,
with all humility and gentleness, with patience,
bearing with one another through love,
striving to preserve the unity of the Spirit
through the bond of peace:
one Body and one Spirit,
as you were also called to the one hope of your call;
one Lord, one faith, one baptism;
one God and Father of all,
who is over all and through all and in all.
But grace was given to each of us
according to the measure of Christ’s gift.
And he gave some as Apostles, others as prophets,
others as evangelists, others as pastors and teachers,
to equip the holy ones for the work of ministry,
for building up the Body of Christ,
until we all attain to the unity of faith
and knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood,
to the extent of the full stature of Christ.
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 19:2-3, 4-5
R. (5) Their message goes out through all the earth.
The heavens declare the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day pours out the word to day,
and night to night imparts knowledge.
R. Their message goes out through all the earth.
Not a word nor a discourse
whose voice is not heard;
Through all the earth their voice resounds,
and to the ends of the world, their message.
R. Their message goes out through all the earth.
Gospel
Mt 9:9-13
As Jesus passed by,
he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the customs post.
He said to him, “Follow me.”
And he got up and followed him.
While he was at table in his house,
many tax collectors and sinners came
and sat with Jesus and his disciples.
The Pharisees saw this and said to his disciples,
“Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
He heard this and said,
“Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do.
Go and learn the meaning of the words,
I desire mercy, not sacrifice.
I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.”
Friday, September 18, 2009
36 Hours in Cleveland
Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
By BRETT SOKOL
“YOU Gotta Be Tough” was a popular T-shirt slogan worn by Clevelanders during the 1970s, a grim period marked by industrial decline, large-scale population flight and an urban environment so toxic the Cuyahoga River actually caught on fire. These days it still helps to be at least a little tough; a fiercely blue-collar ethos endures. But instead of abandoning the city, local entrepreneurs and bohemian dreamers alike are sinking roots; opening a wave of funky boutiques, offbeat art galleries and sophisticated restaurants; and injecting fresh life into previously rusted-out spaces. It’s a vibrant spirit best exemplified by Cleveland’s new all-female roller derby league, whose wry name, the Burning River Roller Girls, and home, a former GM auto factory retooled into a 60,000-square-foot sports facility, say it all.
Friday
3 p.m.
1) HELLO CLEVELAND!
Staring at platform shoes worn by Keith Moon or Elvis Presley’s white jumpsuit hardly evokes the visceral excitement of rock music, let alone its rich history, but the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum (751 Erieside Avenue; 216-781-7625; www.rockhall.com; admission, $22) thankfully has a wealth of interactive exhibits in addition to its displays of the goofier fashion choices of rock stardom. There’s a fascinating look at the genre’s initial 1950s heyday, as well as the hysteria that greeted it — preachers and politicians warning of everything from its incipient Communist subversion to its promotion of wanton sexuality. On the top floors, a well-curated exploration of Bruce Springsteen’s career is on display through next spring.
5 p.m.
2) FROM STEEL TO STYLISH
The steelworkers who once filled the Tremont neighborhood’s low-slung houses and ornately topped churches have largely vanished. A new breed of residents has moved in along with a wealth of upscale restaurants, artisanal shops and galleries showcasing emerging artists. Inside Lilly Handmade Chocolates (761 Starkweather Avenue; 216-771-3333; www.lillytremont.com), you can join the throngs practically drooling over the mounds of freshly made truffles. Or grab a glass at the wine bar inside Visible Voice Books (1023 Kenilworth Avenue; 216-961-0084; www.visiblevoicebooks.com), which features scores of small-press titles, many by local authors.
7 p.m.
3) IRON CHEF, POLISH CLASSIC
Cleveland’s restaurant of popular distinction is Lolita (900 Literary Road; 216-771-5652; www.lolabistro.com), where the owner and “Iron Chef America” regular Michael Symon offers creative spins on Mediterranean favorites including duck prosciutto pizza ($13) and crispy chicken livers with polenta, wild mushrooms and pancetta ($7). (Reservations are recommended.) More traditional comfort food is at Sokolowski’s University Inn (1201 University Road; 216-771-9236; www.sokolowskis.com), a beloved stop for classic Polish dishes since 1923. Even if you’re unswayed by Anthony Bourdain’s description of the smoked kielbasa ($7.25) as “artery busting” (from him, a compliment) at least swing by for the view from the parking lot — a panorama encompassing Cleveland old and new, from the stadiums dotting the downtown skyline to the smoking factories and oddly beautiful slag heaps on the riverside below.
11 p.m.
4) CLASSIC COCKTAILS
One aspect of Tremont has remained steady over the years: it’s a night crawlers’ paradise. Nowadays, discerning drinkers head for the nearby Velvet Tango Room (2095 Columbus Road; 216-241-8869; www.velvettangoroom.com), inside a one-time Prohibition-era speakeasy and seemingly little changed: the bitters are housemade, and the bartenders pride themselves on effortlessly mixing a perfect Bourbon Daisy or Rangpur Gimlet. Yes, as their menu explains, you can order a chocolate-tini — “But we die a little bit every time.”
Saturday
11 a.m.
5) FARM FRESH
Start your day with a visit to the West Side Market (1979 West 25th Street; 216-664-3387; www.westsidemarket.com), where many of the city’s chefs go to stock their own kitchens. Browse over 100 vendors selling meat, cheese, fruit, vegetables and baked goods, or just pull up a chair at Crêpe De Luxe’s counter (www.crepesdeluxe.com) for a savory Montréal (filled with smoked brisket and Emmenthal cheese; $6) or the Elvis homage Le Roi (bananas, peanut butter and chocolate; $5).
2:30 p.m.
6) ART CANVAS
For nearly 20 years the William Busta Gallery (2731 Prospect Avenue; 216-298-9071; www.williambustagallery.com) has remained a conceptual-art-free zone — video installations included. “With video, it takes 15 minutes to see how bad somebody really is,” said Mr. Busta, the gallery’s owner. “With painting, you can spot talent right away.” And that’s predominantly what he exhibits, with a focus on exciting homegrown figures like Don Harvey and Matthew Kolodziej. In the nearby Warehouse District, Shaheen Modern & Contemporary Art (740 West Superior Avenue, Suite 101; 216-830-8888; www.shaheengallery.com) casts a wider geographic net with recent solo exhibits from the buzzy ex-Clevelander Craig Kucia, as well as New York-based artists like Mark Fox and Keith Mayerson.
6 p.m.
7) PARIS ON LAKE ERIE
The most talked about new restaurant this year is L’Albatros (11401 Bellflower Road; 216-791-7880; www.albatrosbrasserie.com), which the chef Zachary Bruell opened last December. Set inside a 19th-century carriage house on the campus of Case Western Reserve University, this inviting brasserie serves impeccably executed French specialties like chicken liver and foie gras mousseline ($9), a niçoise salade ($10) and cassoulet ($22).
8 p.m.
8) BALLROOM BLITZ
The polka bands are long gone from the Beachland Ballroom (15711 Waterloo Road; 216-383-1124; www.beachlandballroom.com), replaced by an eclectic mix of rock groups. But by running a spot that’s as much a clubhouse as it is a concert venue, the co-owners Cindy Barber and Mark Leddy have retained plenty of this former Croatian social hall’s old-school character. Beachland draws local favorites like the avant folkie Bill Fox and post-punkers This Moment in Black History, as well as hot touring acts like Neko Case and the Hold Steady. Mr. Leddy, formerly an antiques dealer, still hunts down finds for the basement’s This Way Out Vintage Shoppe.
Sunday
11 a.m.
9) BEETS, THEN BEATS
One of the few restaurants in town where requesting the vegan option won’t elicit a raised eyebrow, Tommy’s (1824 Coventry Road; 216-321-7757; www.tommyscoventry.com) has been serving tofu since 1972, when the surrounding Coventry Village, in Cleveland Heights, was a hippie oasis. The bloom is off that countercultural rose, but the delicious falafel ($5.79) and thick milkshakes ($4.59) endure. The time warp continues through a doorway leading into Mac’s Backs bookstore (No. 1820; 216-321-2665; www.macsbacks.com), a good place to find out-of-print poetry from Cleveland post-Beat writers like d.a. levy, T. L. Kryss and rjs.
2 p.m.
10) FREE IMPRESSIONISTS
For decades, the University Circle district has housed many of the city’s cultural jewels, including Severance Hall, the majestic Georgian residence of the Cleveland Orchestra; the Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque, one of the country’s best repertory movie theaters; and the lush 285-acre Lake View Cemetery. At the Cleveland Museum of Art (11150 East Boulevard; 216-421-7340; www.clemusart.com), already famed for its collection of Old Masters and kid-friendly armor, the June opening of the museum’s Rafael Viñoly-designed East Wing puts the spotlight on more modern fare, moving from a roomful of Impressionists dramatically centered around one of Monet’s “Water Lilies” paintings, up to current work. A visually arresting 2008 drawing by Cleveland’s T. R. Ericsson more than holds its own amidst heavyweight contemporary pieces from Anselm Kiefer and Kiki Smith. A further enticement: admission to the museum’s permanent collection is absolutely free.
THE BASICS
Many major airlines fly nonstop from New York area airports into Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. A recent Web search found round-trip fares for fall flights starting at $239. Although a light rail system connects the airport with both downtown and University Circle, a rental car is advised for reaching most other neighborhoods.
The Marriott Downtown at Key Center (127 Public Square; 216-696-9200; www.marriott.com) is a 25-story, 400-room hotel in the heart of the city. The comfortable, amenity-filled rooms provide quick access to downtown attractions; some feature impressive views of Lake Erie. Doubles start at $159.
A boutique-style option is the Glidden House (1901 Ford Drive; 866-812-4537; www.gliddenhouse.com), 60 quaint rooms in a 1910 French Gothic mansion on the Case Western Reserve University campus, an easy walk to most cultural destinations around University Circle. Doubles from $139.
Life in the Slow Lane: Navigating the Erie Canal
Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
ON THE ERIE CANAL, N.Y. — With a hand on the sturdy brass tiller I sighted ahead and steered our boat, the Seneca, down the center of the placid green ribbon that is the modern Erie Canal. Bikers went faster than we did as they zipped along the towpath, now a biking and walking trail. Even Rollerbladers and joggers passed us going in the same direction.
At top speed, motor thrumming, we plowed along at a very relaxed five miles an hour.
Just a day earlier I’d been racing along the New York State Thruway at 70 m.p.h., anxious not to be late to pick up the canal boat.
But I found that life on the canal was plenty fast for me.
That meant chugging down the middle of the 150-foot wide, 12-foot-deep ditch that in its heyday transformed New York and the nation, ushering in an age of industrial and economic power. It meant maneuvering through locks and under bridges, as boats had done on the canal for nearly 200 years. That meant getting a backyard view of upstate New York, slipping past lawns and docks, past oversize summer homes and modest trailers at water’s edge. It meant gliding by farms, woods and marshes, watching herons wade in the shallows. And it meant exploring the small towns that line the canal, searching for traces of its past.
Our family of five picked up the boat for a three-day trip in Macedon, N.Y., east of Rochester, at a marina run by Mid-Lakes Navigation, the largest of several companies that rent houseboats on the canal. The first step was instruction in how to operate the 42-foot-long, 12-ton craft.
Our instructor, Matt Christ, was unfazed when he learned that my wife, Sarah, and I had little experience with anything larger than a canoe. Operating the Seneca, he said, was as easy as driving a car.
But first he cheerfully went over all the things that could go wrong. Don’t run aground by going on the wrong side of a buoy. Don’t let the boat’s ropes get caught in the propeller. And don’t tie the boat to the side of a lock as the water is draining, or you could find yourself hanging from the lock wall before the boat’s weight starts to tear it apart. “That,” he said, “will end your vacation early.”
We took a short training run, which included lessons in docking and in passing through a lock. After that we were on our own, heading west, on our floating home.
As promised, the boat was easy to handle. It helped that it didn’t go fast enough to get us into much trouble, and that the canal has about as much current as a bathtub.
There were two locks and four lift bridges (they have to be raised to give the boat room to pass) along our route, and they added immensely to the sense of novelty and history. Locks were one of the marvels of the canal when it was first built, making it possible to create a navigable waterway across upstate New York’s uneven terrain.
My 11-year-old son, Max, quickly took on the role of radio operator. “Lock 33, Lock 33, this is the Seneca, requesting westward passage,” he said into the handset as we approached our first lock.
On the outward trip we were heading upstream. That meant the lock’s function was to raise our boat to the level of the water on the upstream side, about 25 feet above the point where we entered the lock. We pulled in, and the tall gates shut behind us with a metallic clang. Our job was simple: hold on to guide ropes on the side of the lock to keep the boat from drifting. Then the operator opened a sluice gate and the water crept upward, until it had raised us nearly three stories to the upper level.
Work on the canal began in 1817. It was completed in 1825, stretching 363 miles from Albany on the Hudson to Buffalo on Lake Erie. For the first time goods could travel quickly by boat from New York City up the Hudson, through the canal, all the way to the Great Lakes and the interior of the country. It led to an upstate boom, and the industries, inventions and ideas that sprung up in the vicinity of the waterway helped create the modern world: the first factories for building mechanical harvesters (Brockport in the 1840s) and for making cheese (Rome, 1851); the invention of the Kodak camera (Rochester, 1888); an early large-scale hydroelectric plant (Niagara Falls, 1895); the start of the women’s movement (Seneca Falls, 1848); the creation of Jell-O (Le Roy, 1897).
In its earliest days the canal was just 40 feet wide and 4 feet deep, and boats were pulled by mules clomping along the towpath. Over the years it was enlarged twice and ultimately had room for huge modern barges. Commercial traffic fizzled out by the mid-1970s, and the canal became a recreational waterway, maintained and operated, as it always had been, by the state.
On the first day we got as far as Henpeck Park in the town of Greece, about six hours of steady motoring from our starting point. There are no docks jutting into the narrow canal. Instead boats tie up at concrete walls along the water’s edge.
We barbecued a steak on a portable gas grill provided with the boat, then lay beside the canal in the quiet park and watched meteors streak across the sky.
The Seneca was roomy and beautifully constructed (Mid-Lakes designs and builds its own boats), with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a shower, and a kitchen with a refrigerator and stove. The kitchen table folded down to make a third bed. Max and our daughters, Emma, 8, and Romy, 4, loved having the run of the boat as we motored along: it was like having an RV you could ride on top of. (When they were on the roof, the kids wore life jackets.)
The next morning we cruised for about an hour and put in at the town of Spencerport for a brief exploration and then lunch at Barton’s Parkside Hots, a cart on South Union Street. They take their frankfurters, which they call hots, seriously in western New York, and a long line of regulars forms at Barton’s at lunchtime.
We then continued west about an hour and a half to Brockport. The town is home to the College at Brockport, part of the state university system, which helps give it a funky, bookish feel. The town, with about 8,300 residents, retains a good deal of 19th-century architecture, and a brochure available at a dockside visitors center lays out a detailed walking tour.
We strolled along Main Street and browsed in the friendly Lift Bridge Book Shop. Then we set off in search of a playground (we found one at Utica and Holley Streets) and wandered through the tree-shaded town, admiring the flower gardens and old buildings.
Back at the canal eight other boats, from a little Boston Whaler to a 43-foot motor yacht, were pulled up for the night. There was a lively scene canalside, with boaters trading sea stories and locals out for an evening walk.
We cooked dinner on the boat and then returned to Main Street, for ice cream at Seaward Candies. The shop also makes its own chocolates, in fanciful shapes that include Band-Aids, a nearly life-size revolver and a tableau of the Last Supper.
The next day we headed back east. I noticed things on the return trip I hadn’t seen on the way out. One was the Great Embankment, a section of the canal built on an earthen mass piled seven stories above the surrounding countryside to carry it across a steep valley.
Early the following day we arrived back at the marina in Macedon. By now we felt like experienced “canawlers,” as the boatmen in mule-power days called themselves. We had gotten used to the canal’s easygoing rhythms, and we were reluctant to say goodbye to the Seneca — and life at five miles an hour.
IF YOU GO
WHAT TO DO
The New York State Canal Corporation lists charter companies with boats for hire on its Web site, nyscanals.gov. Mid-Lakes Navigation (800-545-4318, midlakesnav.com) rents boats from May to mid-October. Rates vary depending on the size of the boat and the length of the trip. The regular three-night rate for the boat we rented, one of the largest, was $1,875. But last spring, midrecession, when I booked the trip, the company was offering discounts and we agreed on a rate of $1,675. With tax and a $75 charge for insurance, the total came to nearly $1,900.
WHERE TO EAT
Barton’s Parkside Hots, South Union Street, between Slayton and Lyell Avenues, Spencerport, (585) 303-4265.
Seaward Candies, 7 South Main Street, Brockport, (585) 637-4120, serves ice cream and unusual custom-made chocolates.
Researchers Urge Cell Phone Users to Take Precautions
Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
By Laurel Bowman
Washington
17 September 2009
Most would argue that cell phones have changed our lives for the better. They have enhanced personal security, quickened emergency response and given us the ease of instant communication. But the radiation they emit could be placing us at risk for cancerous brain tumors.
Cellphone
Cell phone
They are the symbols of our time.
Cell phones. From Europe, to Asia to the Middle East, four billion people use them worldwide.
In this Chinese film, aptly titled "Cell Phone," a man's life is destroyed by his cell phone when he forgets it at home. His wife discovers it and his affair with a younger woman.
A Senate Hearing this week didn't deal with people's private lives.
International researchers and U.S. lawmakers looked at whether radiation emitted from cell phones will kill you.
They did agree that some studies have linked heavy, long-term cell phone use to cancer of the brain.
Physician Siegal Sadetzki advises Israel's Health Ministry.
"I believe that cellphone technology which has many advantages is here to stay," Sadetzki said. "The question that needs to be answered is not whether we should use cell phones but how we should use them."
Health warnings to cell phone users have been issued by governments of several countries.
Dr. Linda Erdreich represents the $4 trillion wireless industry. She says there's no need for concern.
"The current evidence does not demonstrate that phones cause cancer or other adverse health effects," Dr. Erdreich said.
Teresa Gregorio
Teresa Gregorio
But Teresa Gregorio's experience raises questions. She says she used a cell phone, beginning in the mid-1990's, even giving up her land line. Bad news came in 2008. She has an inoperable brain tumor.
"I had used a cell phone for 2-3 hours a day right here on my right side, right where my tumor was or is," she explained.
270 million people in America use cell phones. Seventy percent of teens or pre-teens have them. Younger children are even more vulnerable.
"Radiation gets much more deeply into the head of a 5-year-old or a 3-year-old than it does into that of an adult," Epidemiologist Devra Lee Davis explained.
She says children, because they have thinner skulls, are more at risk. "The science needs more work," she said, "but I want to ask are we really prepared to risk our children's brains until we find out for sure whether this is a hazard?"
Although results of studies on a cancer link are contradictory, scientists are urging consumers to be safe rather than sorry.
The idea is to keep the phone away from the body. Use earphones or a headset, keep your phone on your belt-- not in your pocket.
Texting is better. It keeps the radiation down and the phone further away from you.
Senator Tom Harkin chaired the hearing. He says he's just beginning to ask questions.
"I am reminded of this nation's experience with cigarettes. Decades passed between the first warnings about smoking tobacco and the final definitive conclusion that cigarettes cause lung cancer," Harkin said.
By Laurel Bowman
Washington
17 September 2009
Most would argue that cell phones have changed our lives for the better. They have enhanced personal security, quickened emergency response and given us the ease of instant communication. But the radiation they emit could be placing us at risk for cancerous brain tumors.
Cellphone
Cell phone
They are the symbols of our time.
Cell phones. From Europe, to Asia to the Middle East, four billion people use them worldwide.
In this Chinese film, aptly titled "Cell Phone," a man's life is destroyed by his cell phone when he forgets it at home. His wife discovers it and his affair with a younger woman.
A Senate Hearing this week didn't deal with people's private lives.
International researchers and U.S. lawmakers looked at whether radiation emitted from cell phones will kill you.
They did agree that some studies have linked heavy, long-term cell phone use to cancer of the brain.
Physician Siegal Sadetzki advises Israel's Health Ministry.
"I believe that cellphone technology which has many advantages is here to stay," Sadetzki said. "The question that needs to be answered is not whether we should use cell phones but how we should use them."
Health warnings to cell phone users have been issued by governments of several countries.
Dr. Linda Erdreich represents the $4 trillion wireless industry. She says there's no need for concern.
"The current evidence does not demonstrate that phones cause cancer or other adverse health effects," Dr. Erdreich said.
Teresa Gregorio
Teresa Gregorio
But Teresa Gregorio's experience raises questions. She says she used a cell phone, beginning in the mid-1990's, even giving up her land line. Bad news came in 2008. She has an inoperable brain tumor.
"I had used a cell phone for 2-3 hours a day right here on my right side, right where my tumor was or is," she explained.
270 million people in America use cell phones. Seventy percent of teens or pre-teens have them. Younger children are even more vulnerable.
"Radiation gets much more deeply into the head of a 5-year-old or a 3-year-old than it does into that of an adult," Epidemiologist Devra Lee Davis explained.
She says children, because they have thinner skulls, are more at risk. "The science needs more work," she said, "but I want to ask are we really prepared to risk our children's brains until we find out for sure whether this is a hazard?"
Although results of studies on a cancer link are contradictory, scientists are urging consumers to be safe rather than sorry.
The idea is to keep the phone away from the body. Use earphones or a headset, keep your phone on your belt-- not in your pocket.
Texting is better. It keeps the radiation down and the phone further away from you.
Senator Tom Harkin chaired the hearing. He says he's just beginning to ask questions.
"I am reminded of this nation's experience with cigarettes. Decades passed between the first warnings about smoking tobacco and the final definitive conclusion that cigarettes cause lung cancer," Harkin said.
Fed Considers Limits on Bank Pay
Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
September 19, 2009
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve is preparing what would be the most sweeping rules yet to regulate the pay at banks across the country, people close to the discussion said on Friday.
The rules would apply not just to the pay and bonuses of top executives but also to traders, loan officers and other employees. But rather than focusing on the specific amount employees are paid, Fed officials will be scrutinizing whether the structure of compensation, like the use of bonuses based on the volume of loan origination, encourages excessive risk-taking.
The proposed rules were reported on Friday by The Wall Street Journal.
The rules are not expected to be ready for several weeks. But the central bank is expected to invoke its authority as a regulator monitoring the safety of the banking system and soundness of banks’ decisions.
The surprising move comes as both the Obama administration and the Congress, as well as governments in other industrialized countries, are pushing for restrictions on executive pay, which many experts have cited as a contributor to the reckless risk-taking and the financial crisis of the last two years.
The Treasury Department already has a team led by Kenneth Feinberg that is examining the pay packages at banks that received money under its $700 billion bailout program. Congress is pushing for broader regulations that would apply to all financial institutions.
September 19, 2009
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve is preparing what would be the most sweeping rules yet to regulate the pay at banks across the country, people close to the discussion said on Friday.
The rules would apply not just to the pay and bonuses of top executives but also to traders, loan officers and other employees. But rather than focusing on the specific amount employees are paid, Fed officials will be scrutinizing whether the structure of compensation, like the use of bonuses based on the volume of loan origination, encourages excessive risk-taking.
The proposed rules were reported on Friday by The Wall Street Journal.
The rules are not expected to be ready for several weeks. But the central bank is expected to invoke its authority as a regulator monitoring the safety of the banking system and soundness of banks’ decisions.
The surprising move comes as both the Obama administration and the Congress, as well as governments in other industrialized countries, are pushing for restrictions on executive pay, which many experts have cited as a contributor to the reckless risk-taking and the financial crisis of the last two years.
The Treasury Department already has a team led by Kenneth Feinberg that is examining the pay packages at banks that received money under its $700 billion bailout program. Congress is pushing for broader regulations that would apply to all financial institutions.
Washington diary: Jobless recovery?
Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
By Matt Frei
BBC News, Washington
Ben Bernanke may be cautiously declaring that the recession is over.
Barack Obama
Mr Obama will be judged on his ability to improve the economy
But New York City is ahead of the curve.
In the Meatpacking District, you need to beg and bribe to get a restaurant table. Lower Manhattan was knee-high in supermodels, who had flocked to town like an exotic breed of storks for Fashion Week. The paparazzi hovered like vultures.
If President Obama can look through the tinted windows of his armoured limo on his way to the Letterman Show next Monday then this is the recovery he will see.
The epicentre of the financial earthquake that shook the world is behaving as if the last 12 months have been a nasty dream.
Bonuses will be paid out and the survivors of Wall Street - bigger, more judicious (we hope) and more bloated (thanks to all that surplus talent out there and the thirst for capital after last year's drought) - will loom ever larger.
In Lower Manhattan, the gilded era of the last two decades may well continue for a smaller number of uber-banks.
I asked Allen Sloan, the senior Editor-at-Large of Fortune Magazine, how the bankers and hedge fund managers will respond to the president's stern warning that the old ways must stop and new rules are coming.
"They will laugh into their Martinis", he scoffed. "Wall Street will be Wall Street!"
Matt Frei in the BBC World News America studio
If the jobs do not come back soon, their absence could well define Mr Obama's first term
The nascent period of recovery is fraught with political danger for Barack Obama, unless employment growth follows swiftly on the heels of banking profits.
America needs to create millions of new jobs just to get back to pre-crash levels. That is a very tall order.
But the employment landscape is not the only thing that has changed. Until the recent Great Recession, even the most outrageous pay packet on Wall Street was not viewed as an affront on Main Street.
This is odd when you consider the reality of the so-called boom. Despite the ballooning wealth of recent decades, middle class incomes have actually stagnated, the number of people living in poverty has increased and the mega-rich have grown richer.
By 2007, the average corporate CEO was earning around 400 times what his average employee was bringing home. In 1967 that ratio was about 20 to one.
The gulf had become a chasm. And yet few seemed to mind.
Expectation bubble
Rising property values and unending credit became the opium of the people, creating delusions of wealth.
During the 2004 presidential election campaign, Democratic candidate John Kerry wheeled out proposals to increase taxes for those earning more than $200,000 (£121,280) a year.
The proposal never caught fire because even Americans who were earning half as much considered themselves to be potentially rich.
This was the era of aspiration, in which the much-touted American dream became a fantasy fuelled by sub-prime mortgages and underwritten by a cast-iron sense of entitlement.
If a truck driver earning $60,000 a year could live in a small mansion in Orange County worth $600,000 on a 100% mortgage, keep a posse of five maxed-out credit cards and a stable of leased cars, it is hardly surprising that he felt rich even if he was not.
The asset bubble was complimented by the expectation bubble.
Courtesy of Lehman Brothers, the era of aspiration has become the era of resentment.
These days, ordinary Americans no longer feel a connection between them and the high rollers.
The rebirth of success on Wall Street merely underlines failure at home and "bank" has become a four-letter word.
First, there was their staggering incompetence, then they were bailed out by the tax-payer and - adding insult to injury - they are already able to pay back their loans to Uncle Sam while millions of Americans are struggling to cover the next mortgage payment.
Meanwhile, unemployment is nudging perilously close to 10%. In some swing states, like Michigan and Ohio, it is well above that, and every day the fear grows that these jobs may simply never return.
The fears about unemployment will trump the frustrations over healthcare - and if the jobs do not come back soon, their absence could well define Mr Obama's first term.
graph
Matt Frei is the presenter of BBC World News America which airs every weekday on BBC News, BBC World News and BBC America (for viewers outside the UK only).
By Matt Frei
BBC News, Washington
Ben Bernanke may be cautiously declaring that the recession is over.
Barack Obama
Mr Obama will be judged on his ability to improve the economy
But New York City is ahead of the curve.
In the Meatpacking District, you need to beg and bribe to get a restaurant table. Lower Manhattan was knee-high in supermodels, who had flocked to town like an exotic breed of storks for Fashion Week. The paparazzi hovered like vultures.
If President Obama can look through the tinted windows of his armoured limo on his way to the Letterman Show next Monday then this is the recovery he will see.
The epicentre of the financial earthquake that shook the world is behaving as if the last 12 months have been a nasty dream.
Bonuses will be paid out and the survivors of Wall Street - bigger, more judicious (we hope) and more bloated (thanks to all that surplus talent out there and the thirst for capital after last year's drought) - will loom ever larger.
In Lower Manhattan, the gilded era of the last two decades may well continue for a smaller number of uber-banks.
I asked Allen Sloan, the senior Editor-at-Large of Fortune Magazine, how the bankers and hedge fund managers will respond to the president's stern warning that the old ways must stop and new rules are coming.
"They will laugh into their Martinis", he scoffed. "Wall Street will be Wall Street!"
Matt Frei in the BBC World News America studio
If the jobs do not come back soon, their absence could well define Mr Obama's first term
The nascent period of recovery is fraught with political danger for Barack Obama, unless employment growth follows swiftly on the heels of banking profits.
America needs to create millions of new jobs just to get back to pre-crash levels. That is a very tall order.
But the employment landscape is not the only thing that has changed. Until the recent Great Recession, even the most outrageous pay packet on Wall Street was not viewed as an affront on Main Street.
This is odd when you consider the reality of the so-called boom. Despite the ballooning wealth of recent decades, middle class incomes have actually stagnated, the number of people living in poverty has increased and the mega-rich have grown richer.
By 2007, the average corporate CEO was earning around 400 times what his average employee was bringing home. In 1967 that ratio was about 20 to one.
The gulf had become a chasm. And yet few seemed to mind.
Expectation bubble
Rising property values and unending credit became the opium of the people, creating delusions of wealth.
During the 2004 presidential election campaign, Democratic candidate John Kerry wheeled out proposals to increase taxes for those earning more than $200,000 (£121,280) a year.
The proposal never caught fire because even Americans who were earning half as much considered themselves to be potentially rich.
This was the era of aspiration, in which the much-touted American dream became a fantasy fuelled by sub-prime mortgages and underwritten by a cast-iron sense of entitlement.
If a truck driver earning $60,000 a year could live in a small mansion in Orange County worth $600,000 on a 100% mortgage, keep a posse of five maxed-out credit cards and a stable of leased cars, it is hardly surprising that he felt rich even if he was not.
The asset bubble was complimented by the expectation bubble.
Courtesy of Lehman Brothers, the era of aspiration has become the era of resentment.
These days, ordinary Americans no longer feel a connection between them and the high rollers.
The rebirth of success on Wall Street merely underlines failure at home and "bank" has become a four-letter word.
First, there was their staggering incompetence, then they were bailed out by the tax-payer and - adding insult to injury - they are already able to pay back their loans to Uncle Sam while millions of Americans are struggling to cover the next mortgage payment.
Meanwhile, unemployment is nudging perilously close to 10%. In some swing states, like Michigan and Ohio, it is well above that, and every day the fear grows that these jobs may simply never return.
The fears about unemployment will trump the frustrations over healthcare - and if the jobs do not come back soon, their absence could well define Mr Obama's first term.
graph
Matt Frei is the presenter of BBC World News America which airs every weekday on BBC News, BBC World News and BBC America (for viewers outside the UK only).
Today's Reading
Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
September 18, 2009
Friday of the Twenty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time Lectionary: 447
Reading 1
Responsorial Psalm
Gospel
Reading 1
1 Tm 6:2c-12
Beloved:
Teach and urge these things.
Whoever teaches something different
and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ
and the religious teaching
is conceited, understanding nothing,
and has a morbid disposition for arguments and verbal disputes.
From these come envy, rivalry, insults, evil suspicions,
and mutual friction among people with corrupted minds,
who are deprived of the truth,
supposing religion to be a means of gain.
Indeed, religion with contentment is a great gain.
For we brought nothing into the world,
just as we shall not be able to take anything out of it.
If we have food and clothing, we shall be content with that.
Those who want to be rich are falling into temptation and into a trap
and into many foolish and harmful desires,
which plunge them into ruin and destruction.
For the love of money is the root of all evils,
and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith
and have pierced themselves with many pains.
But you, man of God, avoid all this.
Instead, pursue righteousness, devotion,
faith, love, patience, and gentleness.
Compete well for the faith.
Lay hold of eternal life,
to which you were called when you made the noble confession
in the presence of many witnesses.
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 49:6-7, 8-10, 17-18, 19-20
R. Blessed the poor in spirit; the Kingdom of heaven is theirs!
Why should I fear in evil days
when my wicked ensnarers ring me round?
They trust in their wealth;
the abundance of their riches is their boast.
R. Blessed the poor in spirit; the Kingdom of heaven is theirs!
Yet in no way can a man redeem himself,
or pay his own ransom to God;
Too high is the price to redeem one’s life; he would never have enough
to remain alive always and not see destruction.
R. Blessed the poor in spirit; the Kingdom of heaven is theirs!
Fear not when a man grows rich,
when the wealth of his house becomes great,
For when he dies, he shall take none of it;
his wealth shall not follow him down.
R. Blessed the poor in spirit; the Kingdom of heaven is theirs!
Though in his lifetime he counted himself blessed,
“They will praise you for doing well for yourself,”
He shall join the circle of his forebears
who shall never more see light.
R. Blessed the poor in spirit; the Kingdom of heaven is theirs!
Gospel
Lk 8:1-3
Jesus journeyed from one town and village to another,
preaching and proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom of God.
Accompanying him were the Twelve
and some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities,
Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out,
Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza,
Susanna, and many others
who provided for them out of their resources.
September 18, 2009
Friday of the Twenty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time Lectionary: 447
Reading 1
Responsorial Psalm
Gospel
Reading 1
1 Tm 6:2c-12
Beloved:
Teach and urge these things.
Whoever teaches something different
and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ
and the religious teaching
is conceited, understanding nothing,
and has a morbid disposition for arguments and verbal disputes.
From these come envy, rivalry, insults, evil suspicions,
and mutual friction among people with corrupted minds,
who are deprived of the truth,
supposing religion to be a means of gain.
Indeed, religion with contentment is a great gain.
For we brought nothing into the world,
just as we shall not be able to take anything out of it.
If we have food and clothing, we shall be content with that.
Those who want to be rich are falling into temptation and into a trap
and into many foolish and harmful desires,
which plunge them into ruin and destruction.
For the love of money is the root of all evils,
and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith
and have pierced themselves with many pains.
But you, man of God, avoid all this.
Instead, pursue righteousness, devotion,
faith, love, patience, and gentleness.
Compete well for the faith.
Lay hold of eternal life,
to which you were called when you made the noble confession
in the presence of many witnesses.
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 49:6-7, 8-10, 17-18, 19-20
R. Blessed the poor in spirit; the Kingdom of heaven is theirs!
Why should I fear in evil days
when my wicked ensnarers ring me round?
They trust in their wealth;
the abundance of their riches is their boast.
R. Blessed the poor in spirit; the Kingdom of heaven is theirs!
Yet in no way can a man redeem himself,
or pay his own ransom to God;
Too high is the price to redeem one’s life; he would never have enough
to remain alive always and not see destruction.
R. Blessed the poor in spirit; the Kingdom of heaven is theirs!
Fear not when a man grows rich,
when the wealth of his house becomes great,
For when he dies, he shall take none of it;
his wealth shall not follow him down.
R. Blessed the poor in spirit; the Kingdom of heaven is theirs!
Though in his lifetime he counted himself blessed,
“They will praise you for doing well for yourself,”
He shall join the circle of his forebears
who shall never more see light.
R. Blessed the poor in spirit; the Kingdom of heaven is theirs!
Gospel
Lk 8:1-3
Jesus journeyed from one town and village to another,
preaching and proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom of God.
Accompanying him were the Twelve
and some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities,
Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out,
Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza,
Susanna, and many others
who provided for them out of their resources.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Capitalism’s Little Tramp
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Fed Chief Says Recession Probably Over
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By Mil Arcega
Washington
15 September 2009
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke says the worst U.S. recession since the Great Depression is probably over, but he warns recovery will be slow. Bernanke says the pace of growth should be moderate in 2010, which he says will likely delay job creation. President Obama, meanwhile, was busy reassuring workers in Ohio that his administration's policies are working.
President Barack Obama
President Barack Obama
After talking about the need for tougher financial controls on Wall Street [Monday], President Obama continued his push on the economy Tuesday. He spoke to workers at a General Motors plant in Ohio. Demand from the "cash for clunkers" [clunkers: old cars with low gas mileage] program has been so high, the plant rehired 150 laid off workers.
"Our belief was that if GM retooled and reinvented itself for the 21st century, it would be good for the American worker," said President Obama. "It would be good for American manufacturing. It would be good for America's economy."
But the president's message comes amid mixed economic signals. Retail sales jumped nearly three percent last month while unemployment - now at a 26 year high, has continued to rise. Yet, in his strongest statements yet on the U.S. economy, Fed Chief Ben Bernanke says the recession is probably over.
"I've seen some agreement among the forecasting community at this point that we are in a recovery, that we will see growth in the third quarter and that growth will continue until 2010," said Ben Bernanke.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke
However, Bernanke warns recovery will be slow with unemployment continuing to rise into next year.
"From a technical perspective the recession is very likely over at this point," he said. "It's still going to feel like a very weak economy for some time as many people will still find that their job security and employment status is not what they wish it was."
For Rick Hirst, who recently lost his job at Microsoft - it was not the kind of news he wanted to hear.
"I did everything right," he said. "I got schooling. I stuck with my jobs. I did my best. I didn't lie, cheat or steal. Why am I not among the ranks of the employed?"
President Obama acknowledges the recovery will not be simple or swift. But he told workers he is confident the economic storms of the past two years are starting to break.
Memorial of Saint Cornelius, pope and martyr, and Saint Cyprian, bishop and martyr
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September 16, 2009
Lectionary: 445
Reading 1
Responsorial Psalm
Gospel
Reading 1
1 Tm 3:14-16
Beloved:
I am writing you,
although I hope to visit you soon.
But if I should be delayed,
you should know how to behave in the household of God,
which is the Church of the living God,
the pillar and foundation of truth.
Undeniably great is the mystery of devotion,
Who was manifested in the flesh,
vindicated in the spirit,
seen by angels,
proclaimed to the Gentiles,
believed in throughout the world,
taken up in glory.
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 111:1-2, 3-4, 5-6
R. (2) How great are the works of the Lord!
I will give thanks to the LORD with all my heart
in the company and assembly of the just.
Great are the works of the LORD,
exquisite in all their delights.
R. How great are the works of the Lord!
Majesty and glory are his work,
and his justice endures forever.
He has won renown for his wondrous deeds;
gracious and merciful is the LORD.
R. How great are the works of the Lord!
He has given food to those who fear him;
he will forever be mindful of his covenant.
He has made known to his people the power of his works,
giving them the inheritance of the nations.
R. How great are the works of the Lord!
Gospel
Lk 7:31-35
Jesus said to the crowds:
“To what shall I compare the people of this generation?
What are they like?
They are like children who sit in the marketplace and call to one another,
‘We played the flute for you, but you did not dance.
We sang a dirge, but you did not weep.’
For John the Baptist came neither eating food nor drinking wine,
and you said, ‘He is possessed by a demon.’
The Son of Man came eating and drinking and you said,
‘Look, he is a glutton and a drunkard,
a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’
But wisdom is vindicated by all her children.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Is Happiness Catching?
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September 13, 2009
By CLIVE THOMPSON
EILEEN BELLOLI KEEPS very good track of her friends. Belloli, who is 74, was born in Framingham, Mass., which is where she met her future husband, Joseph, when they were both toddlers. (“I tripped her and made her cry,” recalls Joseph, a laconic and beanpole-tall 76-year-old.) The Bellolis never left Framingham, a comfortable, middle-class town 25 miles west of Boston — he became a carpenter and, later, a state industrial-safety official; and after raising four children, she taught biology at a middle school. Many of her friends from grade school never left Framingham, either, so after 60 years, she still sees a half dozen of them every six weeks.
I visited the Bellolis at their home in Framingham last month, and when I asked Eileen about her old friends, she jumped up from her rose-colored rocking chair, ran to her cabinet and pulled down a binder filled with class photos and pictures from her school reunions. Every five years, she told me, she helps organize a reunion, and each time they manage to collect a group of about 30 students she has known since elementary and junior high school. She opened the binder and flipped through the pictures, each one carefully laminated, with a label on the back listing each classmate’s name. “I’m a Type A personality,” she said.
As I leafed through the binder, I could see that the Bellolis and their friends stayed in very good health over the years. As they aged, they mostly remained trim, even as many other Framingham residents succumbed to obesity. The fattening of America annoys Eileen — “people are becoming more and more accustomed to not taking responsibility for their actions,” she said — and she particularly prides herself on remaining active. Almost every day she does a three-mile circuit inside the local mall with her husband and a cluster of friends, though she speed walks so rapidly that some gripe about her breakneck pace. Her one vice used to be smoking, usually right after her teaching day ended. “I would take myself to Friendly’s with a book, and I would sit there and have two cups of coffee and two cigarettes,” she said. At the time, her cigarette habit didn’t seem like a problem; most of her friends also smoked socially. But in the late 1980s, a few of them began to quit, and pretty soon Eileen felt awkward holding a cigarette off to one side when out at a restaurant. She quit, too, and within a few years nobody she knew smoked anymore.
In the reunion photos, there is only one person who visibly degrades in health as the years pass: a boyish-faced man sporting mutton-chop sideburns. When he was younger, he looked as healthy as the rest of the crowd. But each time he showed up for the reunion, he had grown steadily heavier, until the 2003 photograph, when he looked straightforwardly obese, the only one of his size in the entire picture. Almost uniquely among the crowd, he did not remain friends with his old classmates. His only point of contact was the reunions, which he kept attending until he didn’t show up last year. It turned out he’d died.
The man’s story struck me as particularly relevant because Eileen and Joseph are part of a scientific study that might actually help explain his fate. The Bellolis are participants in the Framingham Heart Study, the nation’s most ambitious project to understand the roots of heart disease. Founded in 1948 by the National Heart Institute, the study has followed more than 15,000 Framingham residents and their descendants, bringing them in to a doctor’s office every four years, on average, for a comprehensive physical. Each time the Bellolis are examined, every aspect of their health is quantified and collected: heart rate, weight, blood levels and more. Over the decades, the Framingham study has yielded a gold mine of information about risk factors for heart disease; it was instrumental, for instance, in identifying the positive role of “good” cholesterol.
But two years ago, a pair of social scientists named Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler used the information collected over the years about Joseph and Eileen and several thousand of their neighbors to make an entirely different kind of discovery. By analyzing the Framingham data, Christakis and Fowler say, they have for the first time found some solid basis for a potentially powerful theory in epidemiology: that good behaviors — like quitting smoking or staying slender or being happy — pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses. The Framingham participants, the data suggested, influenced one another’s health just by socializing. And the same was true of bad behaviors — clusters of friends appeared to “infect” each other with obesity, unhappiness and smoking. Staying healthy isn’t just a matter of your genes and your diet, it seems. Good health is also a product, in part, of your sheer proximity to other healthy people. By keeping in close, regular contact with other healthy friends for decades, Eileen and Joseph had quite possibly kept themselves alive and thriving. And by doing precisely the opposite, the lone obese man hadn’t.
FOR DECADES, SOCIOLOGISTS and philosophers have suspected that behaviors can be “contagious.” In the 1930s, the Austrian sociologist Jacob Moreno began to draw sociograms, little maps of who knew whom in friendship or workplace circles, and he discovered that the shape of social connection varied widely from person to person. Some were sociometric “stars,” picked by many others as a friend, while others were “isolates,” virtually friendless. In the 1940s and 1950s, social scientists began to analyze how the shape of a social network could affect people’s behavior; others examined the way information, gossip and opinion flowed through that network. One pioneer was Paul Lazarsfeld, a sociologist at Columbia University, who analyzed how a commercial product became popular; he argued it was a two-step process, in which highly connected people first absorbed the mass-media ads for a product and then mentioned the product to their many friends. (This concept later bloomed in the 1990s and in this decade with the rage for “buzz marketing” — the attempt to identify thought-leaders who would spread the word about a new product virally.) Lazarsfeld also studied how political opinions flowed through friendship circles; he would ask a group of friends to identify the most influential members of their group, then map out how a political view or support for a candidate spread through and around those individuals.
By the 1980s and 1990s, alarmed by the dangers of smoking among young Americans, health care workers began to do the same work on groupings of teenagers to discover exactly how each individual was influenced to pick up the habit. The language of contagion is part of pop culture today, thanks in part to the influence of Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book “The Tipping Point.” It’s now common to speak of social changes as epidemics (like the “obesity epidemic”) and to talk about “superconnectors” who are so promiscuously well linked that they exert an outsize influence in society, ushering trends into existence almost single-handedly.
Yet the truth is, scientists have never successfully demonstrated that this is really how the world works. None of the case studies directly observed the contagion process in action. They were reverse-engineered later, with sociologists or marketers conducting interviews to try to reconstruct who told whom about what — which meant that people were potentially misrecalling how they were influenced or whom they influenced. And these studies focused on small groups of people, a few dozen or a few hundred at most, which meant they didn’t necessarily indicate much about how a contagious notion spread — if indeed it did — among the broad public. Were superconnectors truly important? How many times did someone need to be exposed to a trend or behavior before they “caught” it? Certainly, scientists knew that a person could influence an immediate peer — but could that influence spread further? Despite our pop-cultural faith in social contagion, no one really knew how it worked.
Sociologists began hunting for ongoing, real-life situations in which better data could be found. A 2000 study of dorm mates at Dartmouth College by the economist Bruce Sacerdote found that they appeared to infect each other with good and bad study habits — such that a roommate with a high grade-point average would drag upward the G.P.A. of his lower-scoring roommate, and vice versa. A 2006 Princeton study found that having babies appeared to be contagious: if your sibling has a child, you’re 15 percent more likely to have one yourself in the next two years. These were tantalizing findings, but again, each was too narrow to really indicate whether and how the effect worked in the mass public. What was needed was something more ambitious, some way of mapping out the links between thousands of real-life people for years — decades, even — to see whether, and how, behaviors spread.
NICHOLAS CHRISTAKIS BEGAN taking a new look at this question in 2000 after an experience visiting terminally ill patients in the working-class neighborhoods of Chicago. Christakis is a medical doctor and sociologist at Harvard; back then, he was posted at the University of Chicago and, at the age of 38, he had made a name for himself studying the “widowhood effect,” the well-known propensity of spouses to die soon after their partners’ deaths. One of his patients was a terminally ill elderly woman with dementia who lived with her daughter as her main caregiver. The daughter was exhausted from caring for her mother for months; the daughter’s husband, in turn, was becoming ill from coping with his wife’s extreme stress. One night after visiting the dying mother, Christakis arrived back at his office and got a phone call from a friend of the husband, asking for help, explaining that he, too, was feeling overwhelmed by the situation. The mother’s sickness had, in effect, spread outward “across three degrees of separation,” Christakis told me. “This illness affects the daughter, who spreads to the husband, who spreads to the friend, the guy who calls me up,” he added. He began talking to colleagues, wondering how he could further study the phenomenon.
In 2002, a common friend introduced him to James Fowler, at the time a Harvard political-science graduate student. Fowler was researching the question of whether the decision to vote in elections could spread virally from one person to another. Christakis and Fowler agreed that social contagion was an important area of inquiry and decided the only way to settle the many unanswered questions surrounding it was to find or compile a huge data set, one that tracked thousands of people. At first, they figured they would mount their own survey. They asked for $25 million from the National Institutes of Health to track 31,000 adults for six years, but the N.I.H. said they had to find some preliminary evidence first. So they went on the hunt for an existing collection of data. They weren’t optimistic. While several large surveys of adult health exist, medical researchers have no tradition of thinking about social networks, so they rarely bother to collect data on who knows whom — which means there’s no way to track whether behaviors are spreading from person to person. Christakis and Fowler examined study after study, discarding each one.
Christakis knew about the Framingham Heart Study and arranged a visit to the town to learn more. The study seemed promising: he knew it had been underway for more than 50 years and had followed more than 15,000 people, spanning three generations, so in theory, at least, it could offer a crucial moving picture. But how to track social connections? During his visit, Christakis asked one of the coordinators of the study how she and her colleagues were able to stay in contact with so many people for so long. What happened if a family moved away? The woman reached under her desk and pulled out a green sheet. It was a form that staff members used to collect information from every participant each time they came in to be examined — and it asked them to list all their family and at least one of their friends. “They asked you, ‘Who is your spouse, who are your children, who are your parents, who are your siblings, where do they live, who is your doctor, where do you work, where do you live, who is a close friend who would know where to find you in four years if we can’t find you?” Christakis said. “And they were writing all this stuff down.” He felt a jolt of excitement: he and Fowler could use these thousands of green forms to manually reconstruct the social ties of Framingham — who knew whom, going back decades.
Over the next few years, Christakis and Fowler managed a team that painstakingly sifted through the records. When they were done, they had a map of how 5,124 subjects were connected, tracing a web of 53,228 ties between friends and family and work colleagues. Next they analyzed the data, beginning with tracking patterns of how and when Framingham residents became obese. Soon they had created an animated diagram of the entire social network, with each resident represented on their computer screens as a dot that grew bigger or smaller as he or she gained or lost weight over 32 years, from 1971 to 2003. When they ran the animation, they could see that obesity broke out in clusters. People weren’t just getting fatter randomly. Groups of people would become obese together, while other groupings would remain slender or even lose weight.
And the social effect appeared to be quite powerful. When a Framingham resident became obese, his or her friends were 57 percent more likely to become obese, too. Even more astonishing to Christakis and Fowler was the fact that the effect didn’t stop there. In fact, it appeared to skip links. A Framingham resident was roughly 20 percent more likely to become obese if the friend of a friend became obese — even if the connecting friend didn’t put on a single pound. Indeed, a person’s risk of obesity went up about 10 percent even if a friend of a friend of a friend gained weight.
“People are connected, and so their health is connected,” Christakis and Fowler concluded when they summarized their findings in a July 2007 article in The New England Journal of Medicine, the first time the prestigious journal published a study of how social networks affect health. Or as Christakis and Fowler put it in “Connected,” their coming book on their findings: “You may not know him personally, but your friend’s husband’s co-worker can make you fat. And your sister’s friend’s boyfriend can make you thin.”
Obesity was only the beginning. Over the next year, the sociologist and the political scientist continued to analyze the Framingham data, finding more and more examples of contagious behavior. Smoking, they discovered, also appeared to spread socially — in fact, a friend taking up smoking increased your chance of lighting up by 36 percent, and if you had a three-degrees-removed friend who started smoking, you were 11 percent more likely to do the same. Drinking spread socially, as did happiness and even loneliness. And in each case one’s individual influence stretched out three degrees before it faded out. They termed this the “three degrees of influence” rule about human behavior: We are tied not just to those around us, but to others in a web that stretches farther than we know.
WHEN I FIRST MET Christakis and Fowler last spring, at a downtown Manhattan cafe, they seemed like a living example of their theory: even their conversational style appeared to be contagious, each of them bursting in in the middle of a sentence to complete the other’s thought. Christakis, an intense and jovial man with bristling eyebrows and a booming voice, wore a suit with no tie and sipped a coffee. Fowler, who is 39, looked like a boyish wunderkind, wearing a T-shirt and jeans and a constant broad smile. In the two years since they published their first work, they had become relatively famous and highly controversial. People — and late-night comics — were drawn to a theory that seemed to offer a scientific basis for some exquisitely calculating behavior, like avoiding your friends if they get fat. (Or avoiding your friends merely because some of their friends’ friends gained a couple of pounds.) Newspapers splashed Christakis and Fowler’s obesity findings across front pages, and the study penetrated into corners of the popular culture generally untouched by social-science research. “My favorite was the ‘Cathy’ cartoon,” Fowler told me; in it, Cathy and two friends sit in a restaurant, chatting about the obesity paper; when the waiter comes, each woman points to another and says, “She’ll have a small dry salad and a cup of water.”
Fowler told me their work had inspired him to lose five pounds and to listen to upbeat music before he arrives home from work so he will be in a good mood when he greets his family. “I try to get myself in a mental space where I’ll be happy,” he says. “Because I know that I’m not just having an impact on my son, I’m potentially having an impact on my son’s best friend’s mother.”
But how, exactly, could obesity or happiness spread through so many links? Between one immediate peer and another, some contagious behaviors — like smoking — seem pretty commonsensical. If lots of people around you are smoking, there’s going to be peer pressure for you to start, whereas if nobody’s smoking, you’ll be more likely to stop. But the simple peer-pressure explanation doesn’t work as well with happiness or obesity: we don’t often urge people around us to eat more or implore them to be happier. (In any case, simply telling someone to be happier or unhappier isn’t likely to work.) Instead, Christakis and Fowler hypothesize that these behaviors spread partly through the subconscious social signals that we pick up from those around us, which serve as cues to what is considered normal behavior. Scientists have been documenting this phenomenon; for example, experiments have shown that if a person is seated next to someone who’s eating more, he will eat more, too, unwittingly calibrating his sense of what constitutes a normal meal. Christakis and Fowler suspect that as friends around us become heavier, we gradually change our mental picture of what “obese” looks like and give ourselves tacit permission to add pounds. With happiness, the two argue that the contagion may be even more deeply subconscious: the spread of good or bad feelings, they say, might be driven partly by “mirror neurons” in the brain that automatically mimic what we see in the faces of those around us — which is why looking at photographs of smiling people can itself often lift your mood.
“In some sense we can begin to understand human emotions like happiness the way we might study the stampeding of buffalo,” Christakis said. “You don’t ask an individual buffalo, ‘Why are you running to the left?’ The answer is that the whole herd is running to the left. Similarly, you can see pockets of unhappy and happy people clustered in the network. They don’t even know each other necessarily,” but their moods rise and fall together.
The subconscious nature of emotional mirroring might explain one of the more curious findings in their research: If you want to be happy, what’s most important is to have lots of friends. Historically, we have often thought that having a small cluster of tight, long-term friends is crucial to being happy. But Christakis and Fowler found that the happiest people in Framingham were those who had the most connections, even if the relationships weren’t necessarily deep ones.
The reason these people were the happiest, the duo theorize, is that happiness doesn’t come only from having deep, heart-to-heart talks. It also comes from having daily exposure to many small moments of contagious happiness. When you frequently see other people smile — at home, in the street, at your local bar — your spirits are repeatedly affected by your mirroring of their emotional state. Of course, the danger of being highly connected to lots of people is that you’re at risk of encountering many people when they are in bad moods. But Christakis and Fowler say their findings show that the gamble of increased sociability pays off, for a surprising reason: Happiness is more contagious than unhappiness. According to their statistical analysis, each additional happy friend boosts your good cheer by 9 percent, while each additional unhappy friend drags you down by only 7 percent. So by this logic, adding more links to your network should — mathematically — add to your store of happiness. “If you’re at the center of a network, you are going to be more susceptible to anything that spreads through it,” Fowler said. “And if happiness is spreading more reliably, then on average you’re going to be catching happy waves more often than you catch sad waves.”
The Framingham findings also suggest that different contagious behaviors spread in different ways. For example, co-workers did not seem to transmit happiness to one another, while personal friends did. But co-workers did transmit smoking habits; if a person at a small firm stopped smoking, his or her colleagues had a 34 percent better chance of quitting themselves. The difference is based in the nature of workplace relationships, Fowler contends. Smokers at work tend to cluster together outside the building; if one of them stops smoking, it reduces the conviviality of the experience. (If you’re the last smoker outside on a freezing afternoon, your behavior can seem completely ridiculous even to yourself.) But when it comes to happiness, Fowler said, “people are both cooperative and competitive at work. So when one person gets a raise, it might make him happy, but it’ll make other people jealous.”
Obesity had its own quirk: Spouses didn’t appear to have as big an effect on each other as friends. If a male Framingham subject had a male friend who became fat, his risk doubled, but if his wife became obese, his risk was increased by only 37 percent. This, Christakis and Fowler say, is because when it comes to body image, we compare ourselves primarily to people of the same sex (and in the Framingham study, all spouses were of the opposite sex). In fact, different-sexed friends didn’t transmit any obesity to one another at all. If a man became fat, his female friends were completely unaffected, and vice versa. Similarly, siblings of the same sex had a bigger impact on one another’s weight than siblings of the opposite sex.
When it came to drinking, Christakis and Fowler found a different kind of gender effect. Framingham women were considerably more influential than Framingham men. A woman who began drinking heavily increased the heavy-drinking risk of those around her, whereas heavy-drinking men had less effect on other people. Why? In the age of frat-party binge drinking, you might imagine that hard-partying men are the most risky people to be around. But Fowler says he suspects women are more influential precisely because they tend to drink less. When a woman starts drinking heavily, he says, it sends a strong signal to those around her that it’s O.K. to start boozing too.
Christakis and Fowler’s strangest finding is the idea that a behavior can skip links — spreading to a friend of a friend without affecting the person who connects them. If the people in the middle of a chain are somehow passing along a social contagion, it doesn’t make sense, on the face of it, that they wouldn’t be affected, too. The two researchers say they don’t know for sure how the link-jumping works. But they theorize that people may be able to pass along a social signal without themselves acting on it. If your friends at work become obese, even if you don’t gain weight yourself, you might become more accepting of obesity as a normal state — and unconsciously transmit that signal to your family members, who would then feel a sort of permission to gain weight themselves, knowing they wouldn’t face any sort of censure from you.
Christakis and Fowler postulate that our ability to affect people three degrees away from us may have evolutionary roots — and so may the very shape of human social networks. Tribal groups that were tightly connected were likely more able to pass along positive behaviors than those that weren’t. Christakis and Fowler say social contagion could even help explain the existence of altruism: if we can pass on altruism to distant points in a network, it would help explain why altruistic people aren’t simply constantly taken advantage of by other members of their community. Last year, to test this theory, they conducted a laboratory experiment in which participants played a “cooperation game.” Each participant was asked to share a sum of money with a small group and could choose to be either generous or selfish. Christakis and Fowler found that if someone was on the receiving end of a generous exchange, that person would become more generous to the next set of partners — until the entire larger group was infected, as it were, with altruistic behavior, which meant the altruist would benefit indirectly.
CHRISTAKIS AND FOWLER’S work has produced a variety of reactions from other scientists. Many health care experts are thrilled. After years of observing patients, they suspected that behaviors spread socially; now there was data that appeared to prove it. “It was an aha! moment,” James O. Hill, a pioneering obesity researcher at the University of Colorado, Denver, said about the time in 2007 when he read the researchers’ first obesity paper. Tom Valente, the director of the master’s of public health program at the University of Southern California and an early investigator of the role of social networks in smoking behavior, was similarly excited. “The Christakis and Fowler work is fantastic,” he told me. Among public-health practitioners, he said, their theories have “had amazing acceptance.”
But many of those who study networks are more cautious in their reactions. Unlike medical experts, these scientists specialize in the study of networks themselves — anything ranging from neighborhoods linked via the power grid to teenagers linked on Facebook — and they are familiar with the difficulty of ascertaining cause and effect in such complex constructs. As they point out, the Framingham study has found intriguing correlations in people’s behavior. Christakis and Fowler can show what appear to be waves of obesity or smoking moving across the map. But that doesn’t prove social contagion is causing the spread.
There are at least two other possible explanations. One is “homophily,” the tendency of people to gravitate toward others who are like them. People who are gaining weight might well prefer to hang out with others who are also gaining weight, just as people who are happy might seek out others who are happy. The other possible explanation is that the shared environment — and not social contagion — might be causing the people of Framingham to change in groups. If a McDonald’s opens up in a Framingham neighborhood, it could cause a cluster of people living nearby to gain weight or become slightly happier (or sadder, depending on what they think about McDonald’s). The cluster of people would appear as though they are sharing a contagious form of behavior, but it would be an illusion.
Because of the confounding factors, as they are called, of homophily and the environment, many social scientists find themselves caught in an emotional bind when it comes to Christakis and Fowler’s work. As Alex Pentland, former academic head of the M.I.T. Media Lab and an expert in unconscious social signals, told me, “You couldn’t prove what they say, but I happen to believe it.” I heard precisely the same thing from many of Pentland’s peers. They have all long suspected that human behavior is widely contagious; they just don’t think Christakis and Fowler have proved their case.
One of Christakis and Fowler’s most prominent critics is Jason Fletcher, an assistant professor of public health at Yale University. Last year, he and an economist named Ethan Cohen-Cole published two papers arguing that Christakis and Fowler had not successfully stripped out all possible homophily effects from their calculations. Fletcher initially wanted to replicate Christakis and Fowler’s analysis of the data, but he didn’t have access to their source; Christakis and Fowler have not published their network data, arguing that doing so would violate the privacy rights of the participants in the Framingham Heart Study. Faced with that obstacle, Fletcher and his colleague decided instead to test Christakis and Fowler’s mathematical techniques on a different set of data: the Add Health study, a federal-government project that tracked the health of 90,118 students at 144 high schools and middle schools between 1994 and 2002. Among the questionnaires the researchers distributed was one that asked students to list up to 10 of their friends. This allowed Fletcher to build maps of how the friends at each school were linked, school by school, giving them a set of small social networks upon which to test Christakis and Fowler’s math. (Before they stumbled upon the Framingham data, Christakis and Fowler themselves had considered using the Add Health surveys to look for social contagion. But they decided the data sets were too limited — each of the schools had only several hundred students interlinked — to produce results in which they could have confidence. They also wanted to study adults, figuring that the peer effects among teenagers are qualitatively different.)
When Fletcher analyzed the student cliques using statistical tools that he says are similar to those used by Christakis and Fowler, he found that social contagion indeed existed. But the behaviors and conditions that were apparently contagious were entirely implausible: they included acne, height and headaches. How could you become taller by hanging around with taller people? This, Fletcher concluded, called into doubt whether Christakis and Fowler’s statistical techniques really removed homophily or environmental effects — and he says this means the Framingham results are just as dubious. When I spoke to Fletcher, he said that he, too, believes social-contagion effects are real. “We are on board with the idea that they exist and they’re important,” he added. But he simply isn’t impressed by Christakis and Fowler’s evidence.
Other scientists have pointed out another important limitation in Christakis and Fowler’s work, which is that their map showing connections between the people of Framingham is necessarily incomplete. When the Framingham participants checked in every four years, they were asked to list all their family members — but only one person they considered a close friend. This could arguably mean that those eerie three-degree effects might be an illusion. For example, if John lists Allison as his friend, and Allison lists Robert as her friend, and Robert lists Samantha as his friend, then Christakis and Fowler could conclude that John is three links away from Samantha. But what if John and Samantha actually know each other from church, but didn’t have a way to indicate this on the Framingham forms? Then if John and Samantha both become slightly fatter, it might look like a social contagion is spreading through three social ties, via Allison and Robert, when in fact it’s only spreading through one link, via church.
When I raised this concern with Christakis and Fowler, they agreed that their map of friendships isn’t perfect. “This is a general problem with our study and with any similar study,” Christakis said. But he said he believes their map of the Framingham connections has far fewer holes than critics charge. When he and Fowler tallied up the green sheets, they often were able to deduce relationships between two people who didn’t explicitly list each other as acquaintances — reducing the number of false three-degree links. (One helpful fact was that many participants listed more than one friend, despite the instructions on the green sheets.) “We are not overreaching our data,” Christakis insisted.
He and Fowler also acknowledged that it is impossible to completely remove the problems of homophily and environmental effects. This doesn’t mean they agree with Fletcher; in fact, they point out that in his height-and-acne paper, he used a somewhat looser mathematical model, one that makes it easier to produce spurious correlations between people — which is why, they say, Fletcher found that acne and height were contagious. When they ran their own statistical technique on the Add Health data, they found that obesity followed precisely the same three-degree pattern of contagion as they found in Framingham.
And Christakis and Fowler point to two other findings to bolster their case for social contagion over environmental effects. One is that in the Framingham study, obesity seemed to be able to jump from friend to friend even over great distances. When people moved away, their weight gain still appeared to influence friends back in Massachusetts. In such cases, the local environment couldn’t be making both gain weight, Christakis and Fowler say.
Their other finding is more intriguing and arguably more significant: They discovered that behaviors appear to spread differently depending on the type of friendship that exists between two people. In the Framingham study, people were asked to name a close friend. But the friendships weren’t always symmetrical. Though Steven might designate Peter as his friend, Peter might not think of Steven the same way; he might never designate Steven as a friend. Christakis and Fowler found that this “directionality” mattered greatly. According to their data, if Steven becomes obese, it has no effect on Peter at all, because he doesn’t think of Steven as a close friend. In contrast, if Peter gains weight, then Steven’s risk of obesity rises by almost 100 percent. And if the two men regard each other as mutual friends, the effect is huge — either one gaining weight almost triples the other’s risk. In Framingham, Christakis and Fowler found this directionality effect even among people who lived and worked very close to each other. And that, they argue, means it can’t be the environment that is making people in Framingham fatter, since the environment ought to affect each of these friends equally.
“If a McDonald’s opens up nearby, it should make both of us gain weight simultaneously,” Christakis adds. “It shouldn’t matter whether I nominate you as a friend or you nominate me.” In fact, though, the directionality effect seems to matter very much, and that fact, in turn, buttresses the case for social contagion.
Duncan Watts, a social-network pioneer and a researcher for Yahoo, has reservations about some of Christakis and Fowler’s findings — for example, he thinks the fact that most of the Framingham participants listed only one friend “really casts some doubt” on the three-degrees theory. But he told me that the directionality effect is one finding that none of Christakis and Fowler’s critics have been able to rebut. It is, for him, the strongest evidence that the Framingham results aren’t just caused by the environment or by people flocking to others like them. “I don’t see how that can be explained any other way,” he said.
IF YOU LOOK AT A CHART showing the change in smoking rates in the United States since the 1970s, it is a picture of early public-health success that soon tails off. In 1970, the smoking rate for adults was 37 percent. It fell to 33 percent by 1980 and then fell even more precipitously between 1980 and 1990. But after that, the rate at which people quit smoking began to slow. Between 2004 and 2005, in fact, the smoking rate stayed steady; on balance, nobody quit smoking those years. Antismoking forces successfully pushed the number of smokers down to one in five people, but they now seem stuck. Smoking-cessation experts have debated why it has become so hard to get the final holdouts to quit. Perhaps, some said, it was because the average cost of a pack of cigarettes remains largely unchanged nationally since 2002.
But there might be another, hidden reason: the shape of a smoker’s social ties. When Christakis and Fowler mapped out the way Framingham people quit smoking during roughly the same period — 1971 to 2003 — they found that the decline was not evenly distributed across the town. Instead, clusters of friends all quit smoking at the same time, in a group. It was like a ballroom emptying out one table at a time. But this meant that by 2003, the remaining smokers were also not evenly distributed: instead, they existed in isolated, tightly knit clusters of like-minded nicotine fiends. Worse, those clusters had migrated to the edges of the social network, where they were less interlinked with the mass of Framingham participants. In their everyday social lives, Christakis and Fowler say, the town’s remaining smokers are thus mostly surrounded by people who still smoke, and they rarely have strong connections with nonsmokers. Nonsmoking may be contagious, but the smokers don’t appear to be close to anyone from whom they could catch the behavior.
The federal government has officially set a goal of reducing the number of smokers in the country to 12 percent of the population by 2010. But the very shape of our social networks is working against that goal, Fowler says, and this poses a potential public-health challenge. Meanwhile, public-health strategists who want to counteract obesity face the opposite problem. Since the country is gradually becoming more and more obese, when individual people do lose weight, they are more likely to be surrounded by people who are still heavy. If it’s true that obesity can affect people even three links away, that may be one reason that people have such trouble keeping weight off. Even if they form a weight-loss group to lose weight with their close friends, they will still be influenced by obese people two or three links away — people they barely know. “We know that people are wildly successful in losing weight and wildly unsuccessful in keeping it off,” Hill, the obesity researcher, says; he believes Framingham offers an important explanation of why this is.
In essence, Christakis and Fowler’s work suggests a new way to think about public health. If they’re right, public-health initiatives that merely address the affected individuals are doomed to failure. To really grapple with bad behaviors that spread, you have to simultaneously focus on individuals who are so distant they don’t even realize they’re affecting one another. Hill says this is possible with obesity. Last year, he collaborated with David Bahr, a physicist at Regis University in Denver, to construct a computer model of society that replicates the way obesity spreads. They created a simulation of hundreds of thousands of individuals, each programmed to influence one another in precisely the same way that Christakis and Fowler documented in Framingham. To test whether their model accurately mimicked reality, they seeded it with a few obese people and set it running. The virtual society slowly became obese in the same pattern and at the same rate as Framingham. If they could accurately copy the way Framingham became obese, they figured, they could then use the model to test different ways that the spread might be halted. They began trying different experiments — like focusing on specific individuals and seeing whether or not they could use them to create a counterepidemic of skinniness.
One solution jumped out at them. In theory, the best way to fight obesity, the model predicted, isn’t to urge people to diet with a cluster of close friends. It is to encourage them to skip a link and to diet with friends of friends. That way, in your immediate social network, everyone would be surrounded on at least one side by people who are actively losing weight, and this would in turn influence those other links to begin losing weight themselves. When Hill and Bahr ran the simulation with this sort of staggered dieting, it worked: the virtual society began slimming down, and the obesity epidemic reversed itself. “It’s like you have bridging dams to try and stop the flow,” Bahr told me. (Bahr also found that the obesity epidemic could be reversed quickly, with only 1 percent of the entire population losing weight, so long as the dieters were placed in precisely the right spots. “You don’t need a lot of people, but you do need the right ones,” he said.)
In reality, of course, this sort of intervention would be quite difficult to pull off. You would have to figure out some way to persuade friends of friends to form dieting groups together. But other scientists have used Christakis and Fowler’s work to inspire more potentially practical public-health projects, some of which are now being implemented. Nathan Cobb, a smoking-cessation expert and researcher at the Schroeder Institute for Tobacco Research and Policy Studies, is designing an application that Facebook users can install on their pages when they’re trying to quit smoking. The application will publicly display how long they’ve gone without cigarettes, whether they are using a nicotine patch and how much money they have saved by not smoking. The idea, Cobb says, is to take your invisible, internal battle to quit smoking and make it visible so that it can influence your friends (and friends of friends) who are still puffing away.
IT’S TEMPTING TO think, confronted by Christakis and Fowler’s work, that the best way to improve your life is to simply cut your ties to people with bad behavior. And obviously this is possible; people change their friends often, sometimes abruptly. But reshaping your social network may be more challenging than altering your behavior. There’s also compelling evidence in their research that we do not have as much control as we might think we do over the way we’re linked to other people: our location in a social network, say, or how many of our friends know each other. These patterns in our life are relatively stable, and they might, weirdly, be partly innate.
Christakis and Fowler first noticed this effect when they examined their happiness data. They discovered that people who were deeply enmeshed in friendship circles were usually much happier than “isolates,” those with few ties. But if an isolate did manage to find happiness, she did not suddenly develop more ties and migrate to a position where she was more tightly connected to others. The reverse was also true: if a well-connected person became unhappy, he didn’t lose his ties and become an isolate. Your level of connectedness appears to be more persistent than even your overall temperament. “If you picked up someone who’s well connected and dropped them into another network, they’d migrate toward the center,” Christakis said. Your place in the network affects your happiness, in other words, but your happiness doesn’t affect your place in the network.
Christakis and Fowler began to wonder if a person’s connectedness is to some degree fated from birth — a product, at least in part, of DNA. To test the idea, they conducted a study of twins. Using the Add Health school data, they located more than 500 sets of twins and analyzed where they were located in their friendship clusters. Employing statistical techniques traditionally used to parse out how much of twins’ lifestyles are attributable to their genes as opposed to their environment, they found that almost half — 46 percent — of the difference between two twins’ levels of connectedness could be explained by DNA. “On average,” they wrote, “a person with five friends has different genes than a person with one friend.” More oddly still, twins also tended to have the same “transitivity”: their friendship groupings had a strikingly similar degree of interlinking, which is the number of friends who knew one another. By and large, the people who were most tightly clustered in Framingham tended to be better off — healthier, happier and even wealthier. (Several other economic studies have also found that better-connected people make more money.) But if half the reason these people were so well positioned is related to the accident of DNA, then you could consider connectedness a new form of inequality: lucky and unlucky cards, dealt out at birth.
Social-network science ultimately offers a new perspective on an age-old question: to what extent are we autonomous individuals? “If someone does a good thing merely because they’re copying others, or they do something bad merely because they’re copying others, what credit do they deserve, or what blame do they deserve?” Christakis asks. “If I quit smoking because everyone around me quits smoking, what credit do I get” for demonstrating self-control? If you’re one of the people who are partly driven by his DNA to hang out on the periphery of society, well, that’s also where the smokers are, which means you are also more likely to pick up their habit.
To look at society as a social network — instead of a collection of individuals — can lead to some thorny conclusions. In a column published last fall in The British Medical Journal, Christakis wrote that a strictly utilitarian point of view would suggest we should give better medical care to well-connected individuals, because they’re the ones more likely to pass on the benefits contagiously to others. “This conclusion,” Christakis wrote, “makes me uneasy.”
Yet there is also, the two scientists argue, something empowering about the idea that we are so entwined. “Even as we are being influenced by others, we can influence others,” Christakis told me when we first met. “And therefore the importance of taking actions that are beneficial to others is heightened. So this network thing can cut both ways, subverting our ability to have free will, but increasing, if you will, the importance of us having free will.”
As Fowler pointed out, if you want to improve the world with your good behavior, math is on your side. For most of us, within three degrees we are connected to more than 1,000 people — all of whom we can theoretically help make healthier, fitter and happier just by our contagious example. “If someone tells you that you can influence 1,000 people,” Fowler said, “it changes your way of seeing the world.”
Clive Thompson, a contributing writer for the magazine, writes frequently about technology and science.
September 13, 2009
By CLIVE THOMPSON
EILEEN BELLOLI KEEPS very good track of her friends. Belloli, who is 74, was born in Framingham, Mass., which is where she met her future husband, Joseph, when they were both toddlers. (“I tripped her and made her cry,” recalls Joseph, a laconic and beanpole-tall 76-year-old.) The Bellolis never left Framingham, a comfortable, middle-class town 25 miles west of Boston — he became a carpenter and, later, a state industrial-safety official; and after raising four children, she taught biology at a middle school. Many of her friends from grade school never left Framingham, either, so after 60 years, she still sees a half dozen of them every six weeks.
I visited the Bellolis at their home in Framingham last month, and when I asked Eileen about her old friends, she jumped up from her rose-colored rocking chair, ran to her cabinet and pulled down a binder filled with class photos and pictures from her school reunions. Every five years, she told me, she helps organize a reunion, and each time they manage to collect a group of about 30 students she has known since elementary and junior high school. She opened the binder and flipped through the pictures, each one carefully laminated, with a label on the back listing each classmate’s name. “I’m a Type A personality,” she said.
As I leafed through the binder, I could see that the Bellolis and their friends stayed in very good health over the years. As they aged, they mostly remained trim, even as many other Framingham residents succumbed to obesity. The fattening of America annoys Eileen — “people are becoming more and more accustomed to not taking responsibility for their actions,” she said — and she particularly prides herself on remaining active. Almost every day she does a three-mile circuit inside the local mall with her husband and a cluster of friends, though she speed walks so rapidly that some gripe about her breakneck pace. Her one vice used to be smoking, usually right after her teaching day ended. “I would take myself to Friendly’s with a book, and I would sit there and have two cups of coffee and two cigarettes,” she said. At the time, her cigarette habit didn’t seem like a problem; most of her friends also smoked socially. But in the late 1980s, a few of them began to quit, and pretty soon Eileen felt awkward holding a cigarette off to one side when out at a restaurant. She quit, too, and within a few years nobody she knew smoked anymore.
In the reunion photos, there is only one person who visibly degrades in health as the years pass: a boyish-faced man sporting mutton-chop sideburns. When he was younger, he looked as healthy as the rest of the crowd. But each time he showed up for the reunion, he had grown steadily heavier, until the 2003 photograph, when he looked straightforwardly obese, the only one of his size in the entire picture. Almost uniquely among the crowd, he did not remain friends with his old classmates. His only point of contact was the reunions, which he kept attending until he didn’t show up last year. It turned out he’d died.
The man’s story struck me as particularly relevant because Eileen and Joseph are part of a scientific study that might actually help explain his fate. The Bellolis are participants in the Framingham Heart Study, the nation’s most ambitious project to understand the roots of heart disease. Founded in 1948 by the National Heart Institute, the study has followed more than 15,000 Framingham residents and their descendants, bringing them in to a doctor’s office every four years, on average, for a comprehensive physical. Each time the Bellolis are examined, every aspect of their health is quantified and collected: heart rate, weight, blood levels and more. Over the decades, the Framingham study has yielded a gold mine of information about risk factors for heart disease; it was instrumental, for instance, in identifying the positive role of “good” cholesterol.
But two years ago, a pair of social scientists named Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler used the information collected over the years about Joseph and Eileen and several thousand of their neighbors to make an entirely different kind of discovery. By analyzing the Framingham data, Christakis and Fowler say, they have for the first time found some solid basis for a potentially powerful theory in epidemiology: that good behaviors — like quitting smoking or staying slender or being happy — pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses. The Framingham participants, the data suggested, influenced one another’s health just by socializing. And the same was true of bad behaviors — clusters of friends appeared to “infect” each other with obesity, unhappiness and smoking. Staying healthy isn’t just a matter of your genes and your diet, it seems. Good health is also a product, in part, of your sheer proximity to other healthy people. By keeping in close, regular contact with other healthy friends for decades, Eileen and Joseph had quite possibly kept themselves alive and thriving. And by doing precisely the opposite, the lone obese man hadn’t.
FOR DECADES, SOCIOLOGISTS and philosophers have suspected that behaviors can be “contagious.” In the 1930s, the Austrian sociologist Jacob Moreno began to draw sociograms, little maps of who knew whom in friendship or workplace circles, and he discovered that the shape of social connection varied widely from person to person. Some were sociometric “stars,” picked by many others as a friend, while others were “isolates,” virtually friendless. In the 1940s and 1950s, social scientists began to analyze how the shape of a social network could affect people’s behavior; others examined the way information, gossip and opinion flowed through that network. One pioneer was Paul Lazarsfeld, a sociologist at Columbia University, who analyzed how a commercial product became popular; he argued it was a two-step process, in which highly connected people first absorbed the mass-media ads for a product and then mentioned the product to their many friends. (This concept later bloomed in the 1990s and in this decade with the rage for “buzz marketing” — the attempt to identify thought-leaders who would spread the word about a new product virally.) Lazarsfeld also studied how political opinions flowed through friendship circles; he would ask a group of friends to identify the most influential members of their group, then map out how a political view or support for a candidate spread through and around those individuals.
By the 1980s and 1990s, alarmed by the dangers of smoking among young Americans, health care workers began to do the same work on groupings of teenagers to discover exactly how each individual was influenced to pick up the habit. The language of contagion is part of pop culture today, thanks in part to the influence of Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book “The Tipping Point.” It’s now common to speak of social changes as epidemics (like the “obesity epidemic”) and to talk about “superconnectors” who are so promiscuously well linked that they exert an outsize influence in society, ushering trends into existence almost single-handedly.
Yet the truth is, scientists have never successfully demonstrated that this is really how the world works. None of the case studies directly observed the contagion process in action. They were reverse-engineered later, with sociologists or marketers conducting interviews to try to reconstruct who told whom about what — which meant that people were potentially misrecalling how they were influenced or whom they influenced. And these studies focused on small groups of people, a few dozen or a few hundred at most, which meant they didn’t necessarily indicate much about how a contagious notion spread — if indeed it did — among the broad public. Were superconnectors truly important? How many times did someone need to be exposed to a trend or behavior before they “caught” it? Certainly, scientists knew that a person could influence an immediate peer — but could that influence spread further? Despite our pop-cultural faith in social contagion, no one really knew how it worked.
Sociologists began hunting for ongoing, real-life situations in which better data could be found. A 2000 study of dorm mates at Dartmouth College by the economist Bruce Sacerdote found that they appeared to infect each other with good and bad study habits — such that a roommate with a high grade-point average would drag upward the G.P.A. of his lower-scoring roommate, and vice versa. A 2006 Princeton study found that having babies appeared to be contagious: if your sibling has a child, you’re 15 percent more likely to have one yourself in the next two years. These were tantalizing findings, but again, each was too narrow to really indicate whether and how the effect worked in the mass public. What was needed was something more ambitious, some way of mapping out the links between thousands of real-life people for years — decades, even — to see whether, and how, behaviors spread.
NICHOLAS CHRISTAKIS BEGAN taking a new look at this question in 2000 after an experience visiting terminally ill patients in the working-class neighborhoods of Chicago. Christakis is a medical doctor and sociologist at Harvard; back then, he was posted at the University of Chicago and, at the age of 38, he had made a name for himself studying the “widowhood effect,” the well-known propensity of spouses to die soon after their partners’ deaths. One of his patients was a terminally ill elderly woman with dementia who lived with her daughter as her main caregiver. The daughter was exhausted from caring for her mother for months; the daughter’s husband, in turn, was becoming ill from coping with his wife’s extreme stress. One night after visiting the dying mother, Christakis arrived back at his office and got a phone call from a friend of the husband, asking for help, explaining that he, too, was feeling overwhelmed by the situation. The mother’s sickness had, in effect, spread outward “across three degrees of separation,” Christakis told me. “This illness affects the daughter, who spreads to the husband, who spreads to the friend, the guy who calls me up,” he added. He began talking to colleagues, wondering how he could further study the phenomenon.
In 2002, a common friend introduced him to James Fowler, at the time a Harvard political-science graduate student. Fowler was researching the question of whether the decision to vote in elections could spread virally from one person to another. Christakis and Fowler agreed that social contagion was an important area of inquiry and decided the only way to settle the many unanswered questions surrounding it was to find or compile a huge data set, one that tracked thousands of people. At first, they figured they would mount their own survey. They asked for $25 million from the National Institutes of Health to track 31,000 adults for six years, but the N.I.H. said they had to find some preliminary evidence first. So they went on the hunt for an existing collection of data. They weren’t optimistic. While several large surveys of adult health exist, medical researchers have no tradition of thinking about social networks, so they rarely bother to collect data on who knows whom — which means there’s no way to track whether behaviors are spreading from person to person. Christakis and Fowler examined study after study, discarding each one.
Christakis knew about the Framingham Heart Study and arranged a visit to the town to learn more. The study seemed promising: he knew it had been underway for more than 50 years and had followed more than 15,000 people, spanning three generations, so in theory, at least, it could offer a crucial moving picture. But how to track social connections? During his visit, Christakis asked one of the coordinators of the study how she and her colleagues were able to stay in contact with so many people for so long. What happened if a family moved away? The woman reached under her desk and pulled out a green sheet. It was a form that staff members used to collect information from every participant each time they came in to be examined — and it asked them to list all their family and at least one of their friends. “They asked you, ‘Who is your spouse, who are your children, who are your parents, who are your siblings, where do they live, who is your doctor, where do you work, where do you live, who is a close friend who would know where to find you in four years if we can’t find you?” Christakis said. “And they were writing all this stuff down.” He felt a jolt of excitement: he and Fowler could use these thousands of green forms to manually reconstruct the social ties of Framingham — who knew whom, going back decades.
Over the next few years, Christakis and Fowler managed a team that painstakingly sifted through the records. When they were done, they had a map of how 5,124 subjects were connected, tracing a web of 53,228 ties between friends and family and work colleagues. Next they analyzed the data, beginning with tracking patterns of how and when Framingham residents became obese. Soon they had created an animated diagram of the entire social network, with each resident represented on their computer screens as a dot that grew bigger or smaller as he or she gained or lost weight over 32 years, from 1971 to 2003. When they ran the animation, they could see that obesity broke out in clusters. People weren’t just getting fatter randomly. Groups of people would become obese together, while other groupings would remain slender or even lose weight.
And the social effect appeared to be quite powerful. When a Framingham resident became obese, his or her friends were 57 percent more likely to become obese, too. Even more astonishing to Christakis and Fowler was the fact that the effect didn’t stop there. In fact, it appeared to skip links. A Framingham resident was roughly 20 percent more likely to become obese if the friend of a friend became obese — even if the connecting friend didn’t put on a single pound. Indeed, a person’s risk of obesity went up about 10 percent even if a friend of a friend of a friend gained weight.
“People are connected, and so their health is connected,” Christakis and Fowler concluded when they summarized their findings in a July 2007 article in The New England Journal of Medicine, the first time the prestigious journal published a study of how social networks affect health. Or as Christakis and Fowler put it in “Connected,” their coming book on their findings: “You may not know him personally, but your friend’s husband’s co-worker can make you fat. And your sister’s friend’s boyfriend can make you thin.”
Obesity was only the beginning. Over the next year, the sociologist and the political scientist continued to analyze the Framingham data, finding more and more examples of contagious behavior. Smoking, they discovered, also appeared to spread socially — in fact, a friend taking up smoking increased your chance of lighting up by 36 percent, and if you had a three-degrees-removed friend who started smoking, you were 11 percent more likely to do the same. Drinking spread socially, as did happiness and even loneliness. And in each case one’s individual influence stretched out three degrees before it faded out. They termed this the “three degrees of influence” rule about human behavior: We are tied not just to those around us, but to others in a web that stretches farther than we know.
WHEN I FIRST MET Christakis and Fowler last spring, at a downtown Manhattan cafe, they seemed like a living example of their theory: even their conversational style appeared to be contagious, each of them bursting in in the middle of a sentence to complete the other’s thought. Christakis, an intense and jovial man with bristling eyebrows and a booming voice, wore a suit with no tie and sipped a coffee. Fowler, who is 39, looked like a boyish wunderkind, wearing a T-shirt and jeans and a constant broad smile. In the two years since they published their first work, they had become relatively famous and highly controversial. People — and late-night comics — were drawn to a theory that seemed to offer a scientific basis for some exquisitely calculating behavior, like avoiding your friends if they get fat. (Or avoiding your friends merely because some of their friends’ friends gained a couple of pounds.) Newspapers splashed Christakis and Fowler’s obesity findings across front pages, and the study penetrated into corners of the popular culture generally untouched by social-science research. “My favorite was the ‘Cathy’ cartoon,” Fowler told me; in it, Cathy and two friends sit in a restaurant, chatting about the obesity paper; when the waiter comes, each woman points to another and says, “She’ll have a small dry salad and a cup of water.”
Fowler told me their work had inspired him to lose five pounds and to listen to upbeat music before he arrives home from work so he will be in a good mood when he greets his family. “I try to get myself in a mental space where I’ll be happy,” he says. “Because I know that I’m not just having an impact on my son, I’m potentially having an impact on my son’s best friend’s mother.”
But how, exactly, could obesity or happiness spread through so many links? Between one immediate peer and another, some contagious behaviors — like smoking — seem pretty commonsensical. If lots of people around you are smoking, there’s going to be peer pressure for you to start, whereas if nobody’s smoking, you’ll be more likely to stop. But the simple peer-pressure explanation doesn’t work as well with happiness or obesity: we don’t often urge people around us to eat more or implore them to be happier. (In any case, simply telling someone to be happier or unhappier isn’t likely to work.) Instead, Christakis and Fowler hypothesize that these behaviors spread partly through the subconscious social signals that we pick up from those around us, which serve as cues to what is considered normal behavior. Scientists have been documenting this phenomenon; for example, experiments have shown that if a person is seated next to someone who’s eating more, he will eat more, too, unwittingly calibrating his sense of what constitutes a normal meal. Christakis and Fowler suspect that as friends around us become heavier, we gradually change our mental picture of what “obese” looks like and give ourselves tacit permission to add pounds. With happiness, the two argue that the contagion may be even more deeply subconscious: the spread of good or bad feelings, they say, might be driven partly by “mirror neurons” in the brain that automatically mimic what we see in the faces of those around us — which is why looking at photographs of smiling people can itself often lift your mood.
“In some sense we can begin to understand human emotions like happiness the way we might study the stampeding of buffalo,” Christakis said. “You don’t ask an individual buffalo, ‘Why are you running to the left?’ The answer is that the whole herd is running to the left. Similarly, you can see pockets of unhappy and happy people clustered in the network. They don’t even know each other necessarily,” but their moods rise and fall together.
The subconscious nature of emotional mirroring might explain one of the more curious findings in their research: If you want to be happy, what’s most important is to have lots of friends. Historically, we have often thought that having a small cluster of tight, long-term friends is crucial to being happy. But Christakis and Fowler found that the happiest people in Framingham were those who had the most connections, even if the relationships weren’t necessarily deep ones.
The reason these people were the happiest, the duo theorize, is that happiness doesn’t come only from having deep, heart-to-heart talks. It also comes from having daily exposure to many small moments of contagious happiness. When you frequently see other people smile — at home, in the street, at your local bar — your spirits are repeatedly affected by your mirroring of their emotional state. Of course, the danger of being highly connected to lots of people is that you’re at risk of encountering many people when they are in bad moods. But Christakis and Fowler say their findings show that the gamble of increased sociability pays off, for a surprising reason: Happiness is more contagious than unhappiness. According to their statistical analysis, each additional happy friend boosts your good cheer by 9 percent, while each additional unhappy friend drags you down by only 7 percent. So by this logic, adding more links to your network should — mathematically — add to your store of happiness. “If you’re at the center of a network, you are going to be more susceptible to anything that spreads through it,” Fowler said. “And if happiness is spreading more reliably, then on average you’re going to be catching happy waves more often than you catch sad waves.”
The Framingham findings also suggest that different contagious behaviors spread in different ways. For example, co-workers did not seem to transmit happiness to one another, while personal friends did. But co-workers did transmit smoking habits; if a person at a small firm stopped smoking, his or her colleagues had a 34 percent better chance of quitting themselves. The difference is based in the nature of workplace relationships, Fowler contends. Smokers at work tend to cluster together outside the building; if one of them stops smoking, it reduces the conviviality of the experience. (If you’re the last smoker outside on a freezing afternoon, your behavior can seem completely ridiculous even to yourself.) But when it comes to happiness, Fowler said, “people are both cooperative and competitive at work. So when one person gets a raise, it might make him happy, but it’ll make other people jealous.”
Obesity had its own quirk: Spouses didn’t appear to have as big an effect on each other as friends. If a male Framingham subject had a male friend who became fat, his risk doubled, but if his wife became obese, his risk was increased by only 37 percent. This, Christakis and Fowler say, is because when it comes to body image, we compare ourselves primarily to people of the same sex (and in the Framingham study, all spouses were of the opposite sex). In fact, different-sexed friends didn’t transmit any obesity to one another at all. If a man became fat, his female friends were completely unaffected, and vice versa. Similarly, siblings of the same sex had a bigger impact on one another’s weight than siblings of the opposite sex.
When it came to drinking, Christakis and Fowler found a different kind of gender effect. Framingham women were considerably more influential than Framingham men. A woman who began drinking heavily increased the heavy-drinking risk of those around her, whereas heavy-drinking men had less effect on other people. Why? In the age of frat-party binge drinking, you might imagine that hard-partying men are the most risky people to be around. But Fowler says he suspects women are more influential precisely because they tend to drink less. When a woman starts drinking heavily, he says, it sends a strong signal to those around her that it’s O.K. to start boozing too.
Christakis and Fowler’s strangest finding is the idea that a behavior can skip links — spreading to a friend of a friend without affecting the person who connects them. If the people in the middle of a chain are somehow passing along a social contagion, it doesn’t make sense, on the face of it, that they wouldn’t be affected, too. The two researchers say they don’t know for sure how the link-jumping works. But they theorize that people may be able to pass along a social signal without themselves acting on it. If your friends at work become obese, even if you don’t gain weight yourself, you might become more accepting of obesity as a normal state — and unconsciously transmit that signal to your family members, who would then feel a sort of permission to gain weight themselves, knowing they wouldn’t face any sort of censure from you.
Christakis and Fowler postulate that our ability to affect people three degrees away from us may have evolutionary roots — and so may the very shape of human social networks. Tribal groups that were tightly connected were likely more able to pass along positive behaviors than those that weren’t. Christakis and Fowler say social contagion could even help explain the existence of altruism: if we can pass on altruism to distant points in a network, it would help explain why altruistic people aren’t simply constantly taken advantage of by other members of their community. Last year, to test this theory, they conducted a laboratory experiment in which participants played a “cooperation game.” Each participant was asked to share a sum of money with a small group and could choose to be either generous or selfish. Christakis and Fowler found that if someone was on the receiving end of a generous exchange, that person would become more generous to the next set of partners — until the entire larger group was infected, as it were, with altruistic behavior, which meant the altruist would benefit indirectly.
CHRISTAKIS AND FOWLER’S work has produced a variety of reactions from other scientists. Many health care experts are thrilled. After years of observing patients, they suspected that behaviors spread socially; now there was data that appeared to prove it. “It was an aha! moment,” James O. Hill, a pioneering obesity researcher at the University of Colorado, Denver, said about the time in 2007 when he read the researchers’ first obesity paper. Tom Valente, the director of the master’s of public health program at the University of Southern California and an early investigator of the role of social networks in smoking behavior, was similarly excited. “The Christakis and Fowler work is fantastic,” he told me. Among public-health practitioners, he said, their theories have “had amazing acceptance.”
But many of those who study networks are more cautious in their reactions. Unlike medical experts, these scientists specialize in the study of networks themselves — anything ranging from neighborhoods linked via the power grid to teenagers linked on Facebook — and they are familiar with the difficulty of ascertaining cause and effect in such complex constructs. As they point out, the Framingham study has found intriguing correlations in people’s behavior. Christakis and Fowler can show what appear to be waves of obesity or smoking moving across the map. But that doesn’t prove social contagion is causing the spread.
There are at least two other possible explanations. One is “homophily,” the tendency of people to gravitate toward others who are like them. People who are gaining weight might well prefer to hang out with others who are also gaining weight, just as people who are happy might seek out others who are happy. The other possible explanation is that the shared environment — and not social contagion — might be causing the people of Framingham to change in groups. If a McDonald’s opens up in a Framingham neighborhood, it could cause a cluster of people living nearby to gain weight or become slightly happier (or sadder, depending on what they think about McDonald’s). The cluster of people would appear as though they are sharing a contagious form of behavior, but it would be an illusion.
Because of the confounding factors, as they are called, of homophily and the environment, many social scientists find themselves caught in an emotional bind when it comes to Christakis and Fowler’s work. As Alex Pentland, former academic head of the M.I.T. Media Lab and an expert in unconscious social signals, told me, “You couldn’t prove what they say, but I happen to believe it.” I heard precisely the same thing from many of Pentland’s peers. They have all long suspected that human behavior is widely contagious; they just don’t think Christakis and Fowler have proved their case.
One of Christakis and Fowler’s most prominent critics is Jason Fletcher, an assistant professor of public health at Yale University. Last year, he and an economist named Ethan Cohen-Cole published two papers arguing that Christakis and Fowler had not successfully stripped out all possible homophily effects from their calculations. Fletcher initially wanted to replicate Christakis and Fowler’s analysis of the data, but he didn’t have access to their source; Christakis and Fowler have not published their network data, arguing that doing so would violate the privacy rights of the participants in the Framingham Heart Study. Faced with that obstacle, Fletcher and his colleague decided instead to test Christakis and Fowler’s mathematical techniques on a different set of data: the Add Health study, a federal-government project that tracked the health of 90,118 students at 144 high schools and middle schools between 1994 and 2002. Among the questionnaires the researchers distributed was one that asked students to list up to 10 of their friends. This allowed Fletcher to build maps of how the friends at each school were linked, school by school, giving them a set of small social networks upon which to test Christakis and Fowler’s math. (Before they stumbled upon the Framingham data, Christakis and Fowler themselves had considered using the Add Health surveys to look for social contagion. But they decided the data sets were too limited — each of the schools had only several hundred students interlinked — to produce results in which they could have confidence. They also wanted to study adults, figuring that the peer effects among teenagers are qualitatively different.)
When Fletcher analyzed the student cliques using statistical tools that he says are similar to those used by Christakis and Fowler, he found that social contagion indeed existed. But the behaviors and conditions that were apparently contagious were entirely implausible: they included acne, height and headaches. How could you become taller by hanging around with taller people? This, Fletcher concluded, called into doubt whether Christakis and Fowler’s statistical techniques really removed homophily or environmental effects — and he says this means the Framingham results are just as dubious. When I spoke to Fletcher, he said that he, too, believes social-contagion effects are real. “We are on board with the idea that they exist and they’re important,” he added. But he simply isn’t impressed by Christakis and Fowler’s evidence.
Other scientists have pointed out another important limitation in Christakis and Fowler’s work, which is that their map showing connections between the people of Framingham is necessarily incomplete. When the Framingham participants checked in every four years, they were asked to list all their family members — but only one person they considered a close friend. This could arguably mean that those eerie three-degree effects might be an illusion. For example, if John lists Allison as his friend, and Allison lists Robert as her friend, and Robert lists Samantha as his friend, then Christakis and Fowler could conclude that John is three links away from Samantha. But what if John and Samantha actually know each other from church, but didn’t have a way to indicate this on the Framingham forms? Then if John and Samantha both become slightly fatter, it might look like a social contagion is spreading through three social ties, via Allison and Robert, when in fact it’s only spreading through one link, via church.
When I raised this concern with Christakis and Fowler, they agreed that their map of friendships isn’t perfect. “This is a general problem with our study and with any similar study,” Christakis said. But he said he believes their map of the Framingham connections has far fewer holes than critics charge. When he and Fowler tallied up the green sheets, they often were able to deduce relationships between two people who didn’t explicitly list each other as acquaintances — reducing the number of false three-degree links. (One helpful fact was that many participants listed more than one friend, despite the instructions on the green sheets.) “We are not overreaching our data,” Christakis insisted.
He and Fowler also acknowledged that it is impossible to completely remove the problems of homophily and environmental effects. This doesn’t mean they agree with Fletcher; in fact, they point out that in his height-and-acne paper, he used a somewhat looser mathematical model, one that makes it easier to produce spurious correlations between people — which is why, they say, Fletcher found that acne and height were contagious. When they ran their own statistical technique on the Add Health data, they found that obesity followed precisely the same three-degree pattern of contagion as they found in Framingham.
And Christakis and Fowler point to two other findings to bolster their case for social contagion over environmental effects. One is that in the Framingham study, obesity seemed to be able to jump from friend to friend even over great distances. When people moved away, their weight gain still appeared to influence friends back in Massachusetts. In such cases, the local environment couldn’t be making both gain weight, Christakis and Fowler say.
Their other finding is more intriguing and arguably more significant: They discovered that behaviors appear to spread differently depending on the type of friendship that exists between two people. In the Framingham study, people were asked to name a close friend. But the friendships weren’t always symmetrical. Though Steven might designate Peter as his friend, Peter might not think of Steven the same way; he might never designate Steven as a friend. Christakis and Fowler found that this “directionality” mattered greatly. According to their data, if Steven becomes obese, it has no effect on Peter at all, because he doesn’t think of Steven as a close friend. In contrast, if Peter gains weight, then Steven’s risk of obesity rises by almost 100 percent. And if the two men regard each other as mutual friends, the effect is huge — either one gaining weight almost triples the other’s risk. In Framingham, Christakis and Fowler found this directionality effect even among people who lived and worked very close to each other. And that, they argue, means it can’t be the environment that is making people in Framingham fatter, since the environment ought to affect each of these friends equally.
“If a McDonald’s opens up nearby, it should make both of us gain weight simultaneously,” Christakis adds. “It shouldn’t matter whether I nominate you as a friend or you nominate me.” In fact, though, the directionality effect seems to matter very much, and that fact, in turn, buttresses the case for social contagion.
Duncan Watts, a social-network pioneer and a researcher for Yahoo, has reservations about some of Christakis and Fowler’s findings — for example, he thinks the fact that most of the Framingham participants listed only one friend “really casts some doubt” on the three-degrees theory. But he told me that the directionality effect is one finding that none of Christakis and Fowler’s critics have been able to rebut. It is, for him, the strongest evidence that the Framingham results aren’t just caused by the environment or by people flocking to others like them. “I don’t see how that can be explained any other way,” he said.
IF YOU LOOK AT A CHART showing the change in smoking rates in the United States since the 1970s, it is a picture of early public-health success that soon tails off. In 1970, the smoking rate for adults was 37 percent. It fell to 33 percent by 1980 and then fell even more precipitously between 1980 and 1990. But after that, the rate at which people quit smoking began to slow. Between 2004 and 2005, in fact, the smoking rate stayed steady; on balance, nobody quit smoking those years. Antismoking forces successfully pushed the number of smokers down to one in five people, but they now seem stuck. Smoking-cessation experts have debated why it has become so hard to get the final holdouts to quit. Perhaps, some said, it was because the average cost of a pack of cigarettes remains largely unchanged nationally since 2002.
But there might be another, hidden reason: the shape of a smoker’s social ties. When Christakis and Fowler mapped out the way Framingham people quit smoking during roughly the same period — 1971 to 2003 — they found that the decline was not evenly distributed across the town. Instead, clusters of friends all quit smoking at the same time, in a group. It was like a ballroom emptying out one table at a time. But this meant that by 2003, the remaining smokers were also not evenly distributed: instead, they existed in isolated, tightly knit clusters of like-minded nicotine fiends. Worse, those clusters had migrated to the edges of the social network, where they were less interlinked with the mass of Framingham participants. In their everyday social lives, Christakis and Fowler say, the town’s remaining smokers are thus mostly surrounded by people who still smoke, and they rarely have strong connections with nonsmokers. Nonsmoking may be contagious, but the smokers don’t appear to be close to anyone from whom they could catch the behavior.
The federal government has officially set a goal of reducing the number of smokers in the country to 12 percent of the population by 2010. But the very shape of our social networks is working against that goal, Fowler says, and this poses a potential public-health challenge. Meanwhile, public-health strategists who want to counteract obesity face the opposite problem. Since the country is gradually becoming more and more obese, when individual people do lose weight, they are more likely to be surrounded by people who are still heavy. If it’s true that obesity can affect people even three links away, that may be one reason that people have such trouble keeping weight off. Even if they form a weight-loss group to lose weight with their close friends, they will still be influenced by obese people two or three links away — people they barely know. “We know that people are wildly successful in losing weight and wildly unsuccessful in keeping it off,” Hill, the obesity researcher, says; he believes Framingham offers an important explanation of why this is.
In essence, Christakis and Fowler’s work suggests a new way to think about public health. If they’re right, public-health initiatives that merely address the affected individuals are doomed to failure. To really grapple with bad behaviors that spread, you have to simultaneously focus on individuals who are so distant they don’t even realize they’re affecting one another. Hill says this is possible with obesity. Last year, he collaborated with David Bahr, a physicist at Regis University in Denver, to construct a computer model of society that replicates the way obesity spreads. They created a simulation of hundreds of thousands of individuals, each programmed to influence one another in precisely the same way that Christakis and Fowler documented in Framingham. To test whether their model accurately mimicked reality, they seeded it with a few obese people and set it running. The virtual society slowly became obese in the same pattern and at the same rate as Framingham. If they could accurately copy the way Framingham became obese, they figured, they could then use the model to test different ways that the spread might be halted. They began trying different experiments — like focusing on specific individuals and seeing whether or not they could use them to create a counterepidemic of skinniness.
One solution jumped out at them. In theory, the best way to fight obesity, the model predicted, isn’t to urge people to diet with a cluster of close friends. It is to encourage them to skip a link and to diet with friends of friends. That way, in your immediate social network, everyone would be surrounded on at least one side by people who are actively losing weight, and this would in turn influence those other links to begin losing weight themselves. When Hill and Bahr ran the simulation with this sort of staggered dieting, it worked: the virtual society began slimming down, and the obesity epidemic reversed itself. “It’s like you have bridging dams to try and stop the flow,” Bahr told me. (Bahr also found that the obesity epidemic could be reversed quickly, with only 1 percent of the entire population losing weight, so long as the dieters were placed in precisely the right spots. “You don’t need a lot of people, but you do need the right ones,” he said.)
In reality, of course, this sort of intervention would be quite difficult to pull off. You would have to figure out some way to persuade friends of friends to form dieting groups together. But other scientists have used Christakis and Fowler’s work to inspire more potentially practical public-health projects, some of which are now being implemented. Nathan Cobb, a smoking-cessation expert and researcher at the Schroeder Institute for Tobacco Research and Policy Studies, is designing an application that Facebook users can install on their pages when they’re trying to quit smoking. The application will publicly display how long they’ve gone without cigarettes, whether they are using a nicotine patch and how much money they have saved by not smoking. The idea, Cobb says, is to take your invisible, internal battle to quit smoking and make it visible so that it can influence your friends (and friends of friends) who are still puffing away.
IT’S TEMPTING TO think, confronted by Christakis and Fowler’s work, that the best way to improve your life is to simply cut your ties to people with bad behavior. And obviously this is possible; people change their friends often, sometimes abruptly. But reshaping your social network may be more challenging than altering your behavior. There’s also compelling evidence in their research that we do not have as much control as we might think we do over the way we’re linked to other people: our location in a social network, say, or how many of our friends know each other. These patterns in our life are relatively stable, and they might, weirdly, be partly innate.
Christakis and Fowler first noticed this effect when they examined their happiness data. They discovered that people who were deeply enmeshed in friendship circles were usually much happier than “isolates,” those with few ties. But if an isolate did manage to find happiness, she did not suddenly develop more ties and migrate to a position where she was more tightly connected to others. The reverse was also true: if a well-connected person became unhappy, he didn’t lose his ties and become an isolate. Your level of connectedness appears to be more persistent than even your overall temperament. “If you picked up someone who’s well connected and dropped them into another network, they’d migrate toward the center,” Christakis said. Your place in the network affects your happiness, in other words, but your happiness doesn’t affect your place in the network.
Christakis and Fowler began to wonder if a person’s connectedness is to some degree fated from birth — a product, at least in part, of DNA. To test the idea, they conducted a study of twins. Using the Add Health school data, they located more than 500 sets of twins and analyzed where they were located in their friendship clusters. Employing statistical techniques traditionally used to parse out how much of twins’ lifestyles are attributable to their genes as opposed to their environment, they found that almost half — 46 percent — of the difference between two twins’ levels of connectedness could be explained by DNA. “On average,” they wrote, “a person with five friends has different genes than a person with one friend.” More oddly still, twins also tended to have the same “transitivity”: their friendship groupings had a strikingly similar degree of interlinking, which is the number of friends who knew one another. By and large, the people who were most tightly clustered in Framingham tended to be better off — healthier, happier and even wealthier. (Several other economic studies have also found that better-connected people make more money.) But if half the reason these people were so well positioned is related to the accident of DNA, then you could consider connectedness a new form of inequality: lucky and unlucky cards, dealt out at birth.
Social-network science ultimately offers a new perspective on an age-old question: to what extent are we autonomous individuals? “If someone does a good thing merely because they’re copying others, or they do something bad merely because they’re copying others, what credit do they deserve, or what blame do they deserve?” Christakis asks. “If I quit smoking because everyone around me quits smoking, what credit do I get” for demonstrating self-control? If you’re one of the people who are partly driven by his DNA to hang out on the periphery of society, well, that’s also where the smokers are, which means you are also more likely to pick up their habit.
To look at society as a social network — instead of a collection of individuals — can lead to some thorny conclusions. In a column published last fall in The British Medical Journal, Christakis wrote that a strictly utilitarian point of view would suggest we should give better medical care to well-connected individuals, because they’re the ones more likely to pass on the benefits contagiously to others. “This conclusion,” Christakis wrote, “makes me uneasy.”
Yet there is also, the two scientists argue, something empowering about the idea that we are so entwined. “Even as we are being influenced by others, we can influence others,” Christakis told me when we first met. “And therefore the importance of taking actions that are beneficial to others is heightened. So this network thing can cut both ways, subverting our ability to have free will, but increasing, if you will, the importance of us having free will.”
As Fowler pointed out, if you want to improve the world with your good behavior, math is on your side. For most of us, within three degrees we are connected to more than 1,000 people — all of whom we can theoretically help make healthier, fitter and happier just by our contagious example. “If someone tells you that you can influence 1,000 people,” Fowler said, “it changes your way of seeing the world.”
Clive Thompson, a contributing writer for the magazine, writes frequently about technology and science.
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