The Pasty Little Putz has seen fit to try to tell us all about “The Games Putin Plays.” He says the events in Ukraine offer a lesson in the limits of Russia’s grand strategy. MoDo tells us that “Christie Puts the Gloves On,” and that as Chris Christie returns to his forum of choice, the bully is on his best behavior. The Moustache of Wisdom tells us “How to Get a Job at Google.” He has a hint: Getting hired is not about your G.P.A. It’s about what you can do and what you know. Sure it is, Tommy, sure it is… In “When Even the Starting Line is Out of Reach” Mr. Kristof says one little boy’s story illuminates how we can build opportunity for all. Here’s The Putz:
The last time geopolitics intruded into an Olympics, during the 2008 Beijing Games, Vladimir Putin was the crisis’s winner: his military delivered a decisive spanking to Russia’s neighbor Georgia, whose government had fatally overestimated the West’s willingness to intervene on its behalf. The mini-war sent a clear message: after a long period of retrenchment, the Russian bear still had an appetite for power politics, and the claws to satisfy it.
Today the Olympics are on Russian soil, and violence is convulsing another nation in Moscow’s traditional orbit. But the crisis in Ukraine is sending a rather different message. So far, events in Kiev have been a lesson in the limits of Russian influence, and the implausibility of Putin’s claim to offer a rival civilizational model to the liberal democratic West.
That such a rivalry is Putin’s goal seems clear enough. After a century in which Russia styled itself a revolutionary power fighting the West’s reactionary capitalists, the former K.G.B. man has sought a return to the ideological role his nation played under the czars — as a conservative bulwark against the West’s revolutionary liberals.
As The Week’s Michael Brendan Dougherty has pointed out, this back flip has been visible across the post-9/11 era. But it’s been thrown into relief by Putin’s recent domestic gambits — the blasphemy trial for Pussy Riot, the crackdown on gay rights, the rhetoric contrasting Russia’s “traditional values” with American and Western European relativism.
Crucially, this rhetoric isn’t just for domestic consumption: it’s also pitched to the developing world. In the British Spectator, Owen Matthews argues that just as it did in the Communist era, “Moscow is again building an international ideological alliance,” with Putin offering himself up as a potential leader for “all conservatives who dislike liberal values,” no matter what country they call home.
But there is a vast difference between Putin’s grand strategy and both its Czarist and its Soviet antecedents.
The czars sought a “Holy Alliance” to defend a still-extant ancien régime — a rooted, hierarchical system that still governed many 19th-century European societies. But today’s Russia, brutalized by Communism and then taken over by oligarchs and grifters, is not a traditional society in any meaningful sense of the term, and the only thing it has in common with many of its potential developing-world allies is a contempt for democratic norms. In the Romanov era, the throne-and-altar idea still had a real claim to political legitimacy. But there is no comparable claim Putin can make for his own authority, and no similar mystique around his client dictators, be they Central Asian strongmen or Bashar al-Assad.
The Soviets’ claim to be in history’s vanguard, meanwhile, earned them allies and fellow travelers not only in Latin America, Asia and Africa, but among the best and brightest of the liberal West. No comparable Western fifth column seems likely to emerge to enable Putin’s goals. A few voices on the American right have praised his traditionalist rhetoric — but only a few. As beleaguered as America’s social conservatives sometimes feel, we’re a long distance from signing up as useful idiots for a thuggish, obviously opportunistic “family values” crusade.
Which is not to say that Putin’s geopolitical approach is all folly. On the contrary, he often plays the great game far more effectively than his European and American counterparts.
But the weakness of Russia, its government’s corruption and the unattractiveness of its alleged traditionalism all combine to foreclose his grandest ambitions.
This is basically what we’re watching happen in Ukraine. Despite the blunders of the European Union — which courted Kiev without seeming to realize that Russia might make a counteroffer — Putin is struggling to win a battle for influence in a country that both the Romanovs and the Soviets dominated with ease.
And the struggle is particularly telling given that the Great Recession exposed the E.U. as a spectacularly misgoverned institution, whose follies consigned many of its member states to economic disarray. Yet even that record hasn’t persuaded the majority of Ukrainians to warm to Moscow’s embrace instead. It takes much more than mere misgovernment to make the European project less attractive than Putin’s authoritarian alternative.
For an interesting parallel to Putinism’s problems, consider what’s happening halfway around the world, in Venezuela, where the laboratory Hugo Chávez built for “Bolivarian Revolution” is descending into the same kind of violence as in Ukraine.
Like Putin’s traditionalism, Chávez’s neosocialism was proposed as an ideological challenger to the American-led world order. (And Chávez had more American cheerleaders than does Putin.) But like Putinism, Chavismo lacks basic legitimacy absent the threat of violence and repression.
The lesson in both cases is not that late-modern liberal civilization necessarily deserves uncontested dominance.
But 25 years after the Cold War, from Kiev to Caracas, there is still no plausible alternative.
Next up we have MoDo, writing from Port Monmouth, NJ:
There’s nothing more amusing than a bully forced to be on his best behavior.
Chris Christie may be cutting back on his butter, but it wouldn’t melt in his mouth at a town hall here Thursday.
For the first time since his revving ambition stalled in a traffic jam, he returned to the forum that helped vault him to the head of the pack.
The New Jersey governor, depicted in The New Republic as Tony Soprano in his underwear getting his paper from the driveway, toned down his tough-guy Jersey act.
The fist-pumping and finger-jabbing were gone at his 110th town hall. As were the swagger, flashes of temper and glossy self-promotional videos. The chastened governor didn’t call anyone a “jerk,” an “idiot” or “stupid.” He even let one guy grab back the microphone that he had confiscated when the question went on too long.
Christie pitched his voice in a warm, helpful tone and, in an instamacy Instagram moment, took a knee to high-five a 3-year-old named Nicole Mariano who keened that Sandy broke her house.
He stayed dispassionate even on the most passionate topic. When a military veteran named Joe Williams urged him to destroy his Springsteen CDs — given the Boss’s tart parody of Christie’s bridge woes with Jimmy Fallon — the governor smiled and said he had the rocker on his iPhone.
Noting that he had been to 132 Springsteen concerts, he said rather wistfully, “Hey, listen, I don’t do drugs. I don’t drink. This is it for me, O.K.? It’s all I got. I still live in hope that someday, even as he gets older and older, he’s gonna wake up and go like, ‘Yeah, he’s all right. He’s a good guy. It’s all right. We can be friends.’ ”
The governor’s exit music was Springsteen’s “We Take Care of Our Own.”
I tend to agree with Bill Maher that Christie is “350 pounds of toast,” and that he should have run for president in 2012 when he had “that new candidate smell” because “the longer you stay in the more likely some bad thing will stick to you.”
Many Republicans on Capitol Hill, already fed up with Christie’s grandstanding on Sandy and his election-eve embrace of President Obama, are casting about for a different presidential contender. The newly constrained Christie is taking a pass on dinner at the White House this Sunday, the better to avoid another photo op with the president.
Americans are so disgusted by political polarization that the minute Christie hugged Obama, he seemed like a white knight.
But in The New Republic, Alec MacGillis argues that the image of Christie as an independent bull in a china shop was never accurate. MacGillis’s reporting shows that Christie worked within the state’s political machinery at the same time as he was setting himself against it — that his strategy all along was to use his power as a corruption-busting prosecutor to bring down many Democratic officials, even as he cultivated bonds with the Democratic bosses left standing, with their influence enhanced.
As long as there’s no smoking traffic cone, there’s always the possibility that Christie can muster enough of the old bonhomie and bombast to clamber back to a rarefied perch as a presidential front-runner. His millionaire pals are sticking to him for the moment, and he can keep his new position as chairman of the Republican Governors Association as long as he continues to rake in the dough for the group, no matter how low-key he gets.
To start his comeback, Christie chose a safely red pocket nestled on Sandy Hook Bay in this blue state.
And the Jersey residents obliged over the nearly two-hour session by not taking “the governor of New Jersey out for a walk,” as Christie calls being confrontational. Questioners stayed mostly on Sandy recovery, tossing out some compliments, and never once directly mentioned the pesky matter of the vindictive lane closures and vivisection of staff.
If you ignored Elizabeth Brady, a Rutgers student and intern for the Monmouth County Democrats, who was outside holding a sign that read “Bruce Springsteen hates you!” and just surveyed the crowd lost in their own issues in the VFW hall, it reminded you of Iowa. And that felt like the point of the exercise, as all the national press swarmed in to see if Christie could escape the house falling on him and resume skipping down the yellow brick road to Iowa.
The governor was a beneficiary of America’s desperate hunger for genuine leadership. You can blame Obama for the Christie tulip craze. The president has been so wan, he confused people into thinking that bluster was clarity. In a climate with no leadership, the bully looks like a man. If you’ve only been drinking water, Red Bull tastes like whiskey.
Obama’s ethereal insipidity made Christie’s meaty pugilism attractive; Obama’s insistence on the cerebral made voters long for the visceral, even the gracelessly visceral.
George W. Bush was the Decider who engaged in thoughtless action. So America veered toward Obama, who engaged in thoughtful inaction. Then they careered toward Christie, another practitioner of thoughtless action.
When all you have is leading from behind, there’s a place in your heart for in-your-face.
“V” from Los Angeles had this to say about MoDo’s efforts today: “Only you, Maureen Dowd, can take a column denigrating Christie and turn it into a column denigrating Obama and his “ethereal insipidity?” Well, you, and David Brooks, and Ross Douthat.” And now we get to The Moustache of Wisdom:
Last June, in an interview with Adam Bryant of The Times, Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google — i.e., the guy in charge of hiring for one of the world’s most successful companies — noted that Google had determined that “G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. … We found that they don’t predict anything.” He also noted that the “proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time” — now as high as 14 percent on some teams. At a time when many people are asking, “How’s my kid gonna get a job?” I thought it would be useful to visit Google and hear how Bock would answer.
Don’t get him wrong, Bock begins, “Good grades certainly don’t hurt.” Many jobs at Google require math, computing and coding skills, so if your good grades truly reflect skills in those areas that you can apply, it would be an advantage. But Google has its eyes on much more.
“There are five hiring attributes we have across the company,” explained Bock. “If it’s a technical role, we assess your coding ability, and half the roles in the company are technical roles. For every job, though, the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information. We assess that using structured behavioral interviews that we validate to make sure they’re predictive.”
The second, he added, “is leadership — in particular emergent leadership as opposed to traditional leadership. Traditional leadership is, were you president of the chess club? Were you vice president of sales? How quickly did you get there? We don’t care. What we care about is, when faced with a problem and you’re a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead. And just as critically, do you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else? Because what’s critical to be an effective leader in this environment is you have to be willing to relinquish power.”
What else? Humility and ownership. “It’s feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of ownership, to step in,” he said, to try to solve any problem — and the humility to step back and embrace the better ideas of others. “Your end goal,” explained Bock, “is what can we do together to problem-solve. I’ve contributed my piece, and then I step back.”
And it is not just humility in creating space for others to contribute, says Bock, it’s “intellectual humility. Without humility, you are unable to learn.” It is why research shows that many graduates from hotshot business schools plateau. “Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don’t learn how to learn from that failure,” said Bock.
“They, instead, commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it’s because I’m a genius. If something bad happens, it’s because someone’s an idiot or I didn’t get the resources or the market moved. … What we’ve seen is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They’ll argue like hell. They’ll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, ‘here’s a new fact,’ and they’ll go, ‘Oh, well, that changes things; you’re right.’ ” You need a big ego and small ego in the same person at the same time.
The least important attribute they look for is “expertise.” Said Bock: “If you take somebody who has high cognitive ability, is innately curious, willing to learn and has emergent leadership skills, and you hire them as an H.R. person or finance person, and they have no content knowledge, and you compare them with someone who’s been doing just one thing and is a world expert, the expert will go: ‘I’ve seen this 100 times before; here’s what you do.’ ” Most of the time the nonexpert will come up with the same answer, added Bock, “because most of the time it’s not that hard.” Sure, once in a while they will mess it up, he said, but once in a while they’ll also come up with an answer that is totally new. And there is huge value in that.
To sum up Bock’s approach to hiring: Talent can come in so many different forms and be built in so many nontraditional ways today, hiring officers have to be alive to every one — besides brand-name colleges. Because “when you look at people who don’t go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people.” Too many colleges, he added, “don’t deliver on what they promise. You generate a ton of debt, you don’t learn the most useful things for your life. It’s [just] an extended adolescence.”
Google attracts so much talent it can afford to look beyond traditional metrics, like G.P.A. For most young people, though, going to college and doing well is still the best way to master the tools needed for many careers. But Bock is saying something important to them, too: Beware. Your degree is not a proxy for your ability to do any job. The world only cares about — and pays off on — what you can do with what you know (and it doesn’t care how you learned it). And in an age when innovation is increasingly a group endeavor, it also cares about a lot of soft skills — leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn. This will be true no matter where you go to work.
“MetroJournalist” from the NY Metro Area has this to say: “With all due respect, Mr. Friedman, this is the sort of babble that all executives like to spew. It doesn’t really mean anything.” Last but not least we have Mr. Kristof, writing from Point Pleasant, WV:
Johnny Weethee, a beautiful and beaming child who at the age of 3 still struggles to speak, encapsulates the shortcomings of our approach to poverty.
As an infant, Johnny was deaf but no one noticed or got him the timely medical care he needed to restore his hearing. He lives in a trailer here in the hills of rural Appalachia with a mom who loves him and tries to support him but is also juggling bills, frozen pipes and a broken car that she can’t afford to fix.
“We weren’t aware of his hearing problems,” said his mother, Truffles Weethee. It was Save the Children, the aid group, that discovered Johnny’s deafness in a screening when he was 18 months old. That led to medical treatment that restored most of his hearing, but after such a long period of deafness in infancy, it’s unclear if he will fully recover his ability to communicate.
Johnny is a happy, friendly child, and it’s infuriating that lapses in infancy may hold him back for the rest of his life — but that’s often how disadvantage works.
One reason American antipoverty efforts over the last half-century haven’t been more effective is that they mostly treat symptoms, not causes. To put it another way, we don’t invest nearly enough in helping children in the first few years of life as their brains are developing. If we miss that window, then adult interventions like higher minimum wages can never be fully effective.
Almost one-fifth of children here in West Virginia are born with drugs or alcohol in their systems, one study found. Those kids may never reach their potential as a result.
What would make a difference? We need an integrated set of early interventions, starting with family planning to help women and girls avoid unwanted pregnancy (four out of five births to teenagers are unplanned or unwanted). We need outreach efforts to help pregnant women curb use of drugs, alcohol and tobacco, as well as free at-home help for new moms who want to breast-feed.
Let’s push for home visitation programs that encourage parents to speak to children and read to them; many low-income homes don’t have a single kid’s book. We also need initiatives to reduce exposure to lead and other toxins. Finally, how about screenings for problems like hearing and visual impairment — all followed by a good prekindergarten.
Rigorous evidence suggests that these kinds of interventions save money because the costs of failure are so great. Yet most kids don’t get such help.
Johnny’s deafness may have been congenital. But there are also preventable causes of hearing loss. Most low-income moms here would like to breast-feed, but only one-third do so — partly because there is no free help available when they run into troubles, according to Tonya Bonecutter, a local Save the Children caseworker. Research suggests that formula-fed babies are 70 percent more likely to get ear infections, and that’s a special concern for low-income families with only haphazard access to medical care.
Dr. Irwin Redlener, a Columbia University professor who is president of the Children’s Health Fund, notes that untreated ear infections can lead to deafness. This comes on top of a well-known finding that low-income children hear 30 million fewer words by the age of 3 than the children of professionals.
“Poor kids are already at a disadvantage,” Dr. Redlener said. “Add chronic, untreated ear infections and you have extreme risk of insufficient language development — inevitably leading to increased rates of learning challenges and school failure.”
Dr. Redlener says that all young children should have a primary care physician who screens them for eight barriers to learning: vision problems, hearing deficits, undertreated asthma, anemia, dental pain, hunger, lead exposure and behavioral problems.
Poverty isn’t just a lack of money, but sometimes a complex web of challenges that keep children from ever reaching the starting line. One home I visited was a trailer jammed with eight people, and some nights it has double that. None of the adults has a job, and most are former drug addicts or alcoholics whose addictions began when they were children. Two are convicted felons, which makes job-hunting difficult. Several dropped out of school. Only one can drive.
They have lofty dreams for their children, but those kids face struggles that middle-class children don’t. Breaking the cycle of poverty means helping those kids get a solid start.
Johnny’s fortunes were transformed by the screening, and now that he can hear again he’s trying to speak. I watched him attend his first day of preschool. Johnny dashed around the classroom, giddily playing with toys and books, trying to repeat words. He beamed.
Let’s broaden the conversation about opportunity, to build not just safety nets for those who stumble but also to help all American kids achieve lift-off.
