Friday, Jul 25, 2008
You pay your handyman more than your nanny?! Plus: Pop psychology Mach test too close to Cosmo quiz; "broadband warrior" Jermoluk is wrong about wireless.
Sep 20, 1999 | My nanny, myself
BY JENNIFER BINGHAM HULL
(09/13/99)
Hiring poor women of color to care for the children of privileged white families, paying them poorly and then idealizing these caregivers as more natural, more nurturing and more giving than ourselves is exploitative to say the least -- a problem that Ada's (presumably Latina) grandchild recognizes intuitively in wondering whether her grandmother prefers her high-status white employers' child to herself. When addressing the fundamental need for good, affordable child care for working couples, let us not blind ourselves to other, equally pressing issues of class and ethnicity. If privileged women remain blind to the needs of poor women and women of color, can we really consider ourselves feminists?
-- Tedra Osell
Seattle
As a mom who has had a full-time nanny for most of my children's lives, I agree with Jennifer Bingham Hull on the importance of the nanny in the life of a family, and on the capacity for love and friendship that a nanny brings. But when she says, "I entrust Ada with the most important person in my life, but I pay her less per hour than I pay the handyman," I cannot help but ask why. This person who is so important to her and to her child deserves the respect of earning a living wage! If it means paying more than "market," so be it.
-- C. J. Atsatt
What a self-centered, shallow, Grade-A boomer yuppie stereotype Hull is: one who wants to have children, but not raise them. One who would abandon time with her daughter for the sanctification of her precious "art" (i.e., journalism, whose salaries are notoriously low for all but a tiny few). One who complains because her husband, obviously a tenured professor who works all day and teaches at night (and without whose secure income there would be no healthy, happy child, let alone full-time nanny), seems "uninvolved." Such ethical battles! Such pathetic hypocrisy! Hull is a coward, so lamentably blind she doesn't know how lucky she is.
-- Gary Higgins
Machiavelli personality test
BY RICHARD CHRISTIE
(09/13/99)
Dear oh dear. I read "The Prince" about 12 years ago, and was impressed by what I understood as a clear-eyed analysis of not how politics should be done, but how it tends to be done. And there is a difference.
Similarly, your "personality test" suffers from the usual split-personality problems of the genre: begged questions, overarching assumptions and a complete inadequacy as a test of anything meaningful. Twice it refers to "getting ahead": How culturally specific is that? What does it mean? And why are humble and important automatically diametric opposites -- unless you're already a believer in the "dog-eat-dog" school of life?
There's plenty of research -- which the accompanying article touches on, but doesn't really get to grips with -- covering game theory and the discovery that initial collaboration, coupled with harsh and immediate punishment of betrayal and then a return once more to collaboration, is a more successful evolutionary strategy, at least.
The whole thing feels akin to an IQ test -- a concept which I thought was pretty much exploded outside the Bell Curve constituency -- or, alternatively, the faux-intellectual equivalent of a Cosmo quick quiz. Neither of which exemplars I guess you'd want to follow.
-- Jeremy Scott-Joynt
London
I was pretty disappointed by your Mach test analysis; saying that "High Machs constitute a distinct type: charming, confident and glib" is a pretty big stretch. Many of these people are very socially inept, exuding a sense of self-righteousness or superiority which turns off those around them. Likewise, low Machs can be very socially pleasant and strong people, not "dependent, submissive and socially inept."
People are a lot more complicated than what a 20-point questionnaire loosely based on 16th century ideals can safely analyze.
-- Thane Morgan
The Mach test would have been much nicer had it been a nice clickable form with buttons and auto-scoring, rather than having to write everything down.
-- Stephen Waters
Austin, Texas
Editor's note: The contest format has been adjusted to provide an automatic scoring function. We hope readers will give it another chance.
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