Salon.com > Dalton Conley

All hail the SAT snafu!

Tue, 21 Mar 2006 11:39:00 +0000

For thousands of high school students, the recent news that there were scoring errors in thousands of this year's Scholastic Assessment Test scores is the stuff that nightmares are made of -- particularly in this nervous time of envelopes arriving with colleges' rejections and acceptances. And the number of students affected isn't minimal. The College Board now admits that about 4,600 students -- or almost 1 percent of the 495,000 who took the October 2005 test -- had received erroneous scores as a result of answer sheets expanded by moisture, as well as other problems. While not trying to minimize the anxiety and pain of these college aspirants, I must confess that for a social scientist such as myself, these scoring errors -- particularly ones from years past, which we must assume also exist in significant numbers -- are a dream come true because they afford an opportunity to finally subject the controversial test to an important experiment.

The Afghan handshake

Wed, 21 Nov 2001 20:00:00 +0000

Almost a decade ago, while candidate Bill Clinton was in the midst of promising information superhighways, high-velocity trains and German-engineered interstates, I was a 22-year-old freelance reporter promising that very same America to an Algerian I had come to know as Abdul Aziz. I called him Abdul Aziz as everyone else I know did, but we all knew, and he freely admitted, that this was a nom de guerre and that he could not share his real name with us. He had a nom de guerre because we were in Peshawar, Pakistan, just across the border from Afghanistan, where he had come to help wage holy war against the Russians three years earlier.

"When I was your age," he began to tell me, "I could think of nothing but Afghanistan. Every day in Algiers I ate, drank, slept Afghanistan." I found myself with something of an older brother. It didn't matter that he looked nothing like me with his black beard, olive skin and the pajama-like salwar kameez clothing he wore. We were driving to the tribal areas of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province, right at the lip of the Khyber Pass and the Afghan border. The tribal areas are a true free market. Once you had passed the last police checkpoint, you weren't really anymore in Pakistan, but you weren't quite in Afghanistan. You could hire an assassin (the rates for killing started at $80 a head and went up from there for particularly famous or powerful targets), buy automatic weapons, opium or hashish -- but only by the kilo. My desires were simpler. I wanted to get a duty-free shortwave radio to catch up on the American presidential campaign.

How to widen the black-white wealth gap

Fri, 06 Apr 2001 00:18:00 +0000

On Wednesday, 49 prominent black business executives, led by Black Entertainment Television founder Robert L. Johnson, took out full-page ads in major U.S. newspapers calling for the repeal of the estate tax. A pointed rejoinder to February's pro-estate-tax ads sponsored by Warren Buffett, Bill Gates Sr. and several Rockefellers, Johnson's ad claimed the estate tax helps widen the gap between whites and blacks in net worth, and abolishing it "will help close the wealth gap in this nation between African-American families and white families."

Nothing could be farther from the truth. The federal estate tax, which has been in place since 1916, affects only the richest 1.4 percent of the deceased, and there are only a relative handful of African-Americans in that group. As the law currently stands, the first $675,000 of individuals' net estate value is exempt from tax. It's $1.35 million for couples. A 1997 change in the law will gradually increase the exemption until it reaches $1 million for individuals and $2 million for couples in 2006. Exemptions are even higher for businesses and small farms.

What you lookin’ at?

Thu, 14 Dec 2000 17:38:00 +0000

I was lucky to be sent a copy of Dalton Conley's "Honky" in galleys six months ago. Lucky because it's a wonderful book but also because, as a memoir describing Conley's experiences growing up in 1970s New York as a white kid in a largely poor black and Hispanic neighborhood, it confirmed some of the strangest parts of my own childhood experience. I'd just been searching for a way to give some of this material a voice in a new novel, and Conley's book helped.

Conley is a trained sociologist and a career academic teaching at New York University. His book raises his own anecdotal experiences into a sociological light, making it a kind of memoir-plus. Yet it seemed to me the book ultimately comes down on the side of the personal, and on those terms it's a triumph. Like any novelist arraying himself with inspiration for a long voyage into unknown territory, I took it as a hopeful sign.

A free market election failure

Thu, 16 Nov 2000 20:01:00 +0000

If there were ever a time when the country needed a better way to predict elections, it is now.

For a while, it seemed like economists had the answer: create a futures market for political candidates. A decade ago, the University of Iowa received a special waiver to allow gambling on U.S. elections. And so the Iowa Electronic Markets were born to test an economic theory: the efficient markets hypothesis.

The theory is simple. It states that the current price of any commodity in an exchange market reflects the total amount of information available at the time; in other words, it's the "correct" price or the best possible prediction.

In terms of politics and predicting elections, the implication is that free markets are smarter than polls or pundits. However, it seems that for the time being at least, economists will have to go back to the drawing board with the rest of us, for the futures markets performed as badly, if not worse, than astrology, sports superstitions and every other method for handicapping the presidential race.