Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

I just wrote a review of a strange and compelling book that I want to tell you about. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, is by Rebecca Solnit, an author and essayist.

The book chronicles five disasters--the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Halifax explosion of 1917, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, Hurricane Katrina and 9/11. But instead of rehashing the old stories of suffering and redemption, Solnit focuses on the ways many people seemed to thrive in some ways in the midst of all that loss. It is a rarely discussed truth about disasters--they provide a sort of clarity and community that is lacking in normal times. And Solnit makes the point that if we are too become a more resilient society, we need to understand the “joy” of disasters as much as we understand the pain.

I found the book to be thoughtful and smart--right up to the point when Solnit lectures us on the media and the rest of the “elites” who perpetuate disaster myths. I am not one to defend the media coverage of disasters, as is evidenced throughout this blog, but I found her condemnations to be more preachy than productive. We have to understand why reporters mischaracterize disasters if we hope to do better; righteous indignation is satisfying, but it doesn’t get us anywhere at this point.

That said, the book is a provocative exploration of the dark chasm between disasters as we expect them to be and as they are. The review came out today in the Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, and you can download the full review at no charge here here.

I’ve been doing some TV interviews about this week’s TIME cover story on paying kids to learn in school. People keep asking me: “What will happen as a result of these findings?” If we know that paying kids to perform in school can work if it’s done right (and studied carefully), are more schools going to do it?

Well, you’d think so, wouldn’t you? It’s a no brainer--especially since this kind of program costs literally 1/10th of what other reforms with similar results cost. But the truth is, I really don’t know what will happen. We know that DC is continuing its program, as is Dallas, which is fantastic. And New York and Chicago continue to experiment with various kinds of incentives. But we don’t know if this research will translate into policy everywhere. And why don’t we know?

Because not everyone has the courage of Joel Klein, New York City’s Schools Chancellor. Klein let Harvard economist Roland Fryer into his school system three years ago to test what would happen if you paid kids to get good test scores. This is a big deal. It was controversial and no one knew if it would work. Using private funds, Fryer paid more than 8,000 kids some $1.5 million in New York, with Klein’s support.

As it turns out, the New York City model did not work--at least not in any way that’s easy to measure. The kids enjoyed the money, and they weren’t harmed in any way. But their standardized test scores and grades did not go up compared to kids who did not get paid.

But, and this is key: some of the other models (particularly in Dallas) did work. So Klein and the NYC schools took a risk so that the rest of the country could learn. The question is, will they? “You want to look at these things and expand those that are successful and certainly try to figure out why certain things didn’t work,” Klein told me. “What you don’t want to do is to resist all innovation on the theory that some of it might not work.”

In education, big policy decisions almost never get made according to evidence. Then again, there almost never is evidence. Now we have some. I look forward to seeing what happens.

I have a story in today’s TIME Magazine about what happens when you pay kids to work hard in school. I got interested in this because, most of the time, schools operate in the dark--through trial and error, hunches and theories, year after year. The practices and assumptions have never been tested in a rigorous way. So I was intrigued to learn about this latest project of Roland Fryer, a Harvard economist who is dedicated to the radical notion of doing education research using the scientific method.

Fryer thought it would be interesting to see if paying kids cash money could help them perform better in school. So he and his team launched a massive, randomized experiment in Chicago, Dallas, DC and NYC to test the idea. They paid out $6.3 million in largely private money to 18,000 kids. They also tracked control groups whom they did not pay. The program generated a massive amount of buzz, but until now, no one knew if it was working.

Fryer agreed to share his results with me for the story. (His full academic paper, released just after the story came out, is here. Warning: PDF.) Almost as fascinating as the findings is his story of launching the experiment itself. You’d think he was trying to pay kids to lie, cheat and steal--not to learn. A wild tale.

But the best part was hanging out in the classrooms, talking to the kids about the experiment from the inside. They totally get it. They know that many of their teachers don’t approve of them being paid for coming to class; they know that their parents are skeptical; they know it won’t help some kids. And they totally dig it. They. Love. It. They want to earn more. The real problem is, as the story explains, they don’t always know how. 

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An op-ed in today’s New York Times offers a nice reminder that girls are not in fact becoming more violent. They are becoming less so, despite the occasional horror story.

“We have examined every major index of crime on which the authorities rely. None show a recent increase in girls’ violence; in fact, every reliable measure shows that violence by girls has been plummeting for years. Major offenses like murder and robbery by girls are at their lowest levels in four decades. Fights, weapons possession, assaults and violent injuries by and toward girls have been plunging for at least a decade.”

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports, based on reports from more than 10,000 police agencies, is the most reliable source on arrests by sex and age. From 1995 to 2008, according to the F.B.I., girls’ arrest rates for violent offenses fell by 32 percent, including declines of 27 percent for aggravated assault, 43 percent for robbery and 63 percent for murder. Rates of murder by girls are at their lowest levels in at least 40 years.”

The recent spate of suicides at Cornell University reminds me of how little we understand suicide--despite how common it is.

As a student at Cornell, back in the day, I remember it as a fabulous place to be if you were feeling good--and a terrible place to be when you were sad. The winters last most of the year. The school is isolated from the rest of civilization. And worst of all, it seemed like you were always walking uphill. I don’t know how that is possible, but it definitely felt that way.

Then there were the gorges. Glorious cuts into the earth, dramatic and, to me anyway, proof of life--not death. When I got stressed out, I used to put on my Walkman (oh yes!) and go running down the slick stone boulders lining the gorge, jumping from one to the next, racing the booming rush of water.

It’s worth noting that Cornell’s suicide rate has not historically been higher than other university rates. But it is also true that way more people kill themselves (everywhere) than most of us realize. For a very thoughtful read on the mystery of suicide--and whether gorges, bridges and other dramatic scenery can in fact tempt people to kill themselves--it’s worth looking back at this 2008 New York Times Magazine story.

“[I]f the impulsive suicide attempter tends to reach for whatever means are easy or quick, is it possible that the availability of means can actually spur the act? In looking at suicide’s close cousin, murder, the answer seems obvious. If a man shoots his wife amid a heated argument, we recognize the crucial role played by the gun’s availability. We don’t automatically think, Well, if the gun hadn’t been there, he surely would have strangled her. When it comes to suicide, however, most of us make no such allowance. The very fact that someone kills himself we regard as proof of intent — and of mental illness; the actual method used, we assume, is of minor importance. But is it?”

In the piece, writer Scott Anderson describes a fascinating study conducted in San Francisco. Researcher Richard Seiden got a police list of the 515 people who had been thwarted while trying to kill themselves by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge over the course of three decades. Then he investigated what had happened to these poor souls:

“His report, “Where Are They Now?” remains a landmark in the study of suicide, for what he found was that just 6 percent of those pulled off the bridge went on to kill themselves. Even allowing for suicides that might have been mislabeled as accidents only raised the total to 10 percent.”

Vivian Reyes lives in San Francisco, where she likes to go biking and play with her puppy. She is also an emergency medicine doctor who recently went to Haiti to help with the relief effort. 

Before she left, Dr. Reyes read The Unthinkable. Much to my relief, she found it useful. And she also learned some lessons which are not in the book. Her blog post has some specific realizations about fear, chaos and the small problems created by spontaneous acts of generosity.

We have all heard the statement, “Communication is always the biggest problem during a disaster.” In retrospect, I never truly understood the implications of this statement until now. When I arrived in Haiti, local phone coverage was intermittent, at best.  Even when calls went through, the reception was often so bad that it was more frustrating than helpful. Satellite phones were unreliable and generally unusable.  Surprisingly, my iPhone seemed to send and receive text messages and email without much problem. While this was good for simple communications, texting proved too time-consuming, and time was not a luxury that I had. Coordinating relief operations via any electronic means proved to be difficult, and face-to-face communication became invaluable....[T]he time delay and content limits of text messages made me realize how important it is to be self-sufficient and decisive during the aftermath of a disaster.

I watched all the Chile “looting” footage I could find yesterday. It was hard to know what I was looking at, as it always is when you are watching disasters from afar--and often even when you are right there. I mostly saw people carrying water, diapers, sacks of flour and other necessities. I saw young men playing Robin Hood, throwing paper towels and toilet paper rolls from storefront balconies to older women waiting, arms uplifted, below.

Not to say that these people are wrong--or right. Just to say, I don’t know either way. I do think looting is happening, but it is equally clear that the reporting of the looting is somewhat more righteous than it probably should be.

What is looting? Is it the taking of property after a disaster? If so, then was it looting when some World Trade Center evacuees on 9/11 broke into soda machines and distributed water to people in the stairways? What about when civilians took water trucks in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and drove around neighborhoods distributing clean water? Where is the line?

The one consensus seems to be what I call the “plasma TV test.” If people are taking TVs, then that, we can all agree, is probably looting. Especially if they are fancy TVs! You see this pattern after most big disasters. First comes the catastrophe, then comes TV people talking about the generalized fear of looting--then comes a strange and disconcerting looting montage: footage of people carrying groceries out of stores, hearsay about violence and, finally, reports of stolen plasma TVs.

Here is one of the many plasma-TV stories to come out of Chile. (Notice the photo, which features a disheveled and frightened young man carrying...diapers.)

As I’ve written before, looting reports usually turn out to be exaggerated after most disasters. Looting happens, and it is damaging to the relief effort and the social fabric, but it rarely represents more than a drop in the bucket compared to the damage inflicted by the disaster itself.

As Ilan smartly pointed out in a comment to the previous post, we just don’t know much about disaster looting. What we do know is mostly from the U.S., which may or may not be relevant in this case. The scant research that has been done outside the U.S. suggests that it only happens in a major way when three other pre-existing conditions are met:

1. Dramatic disparity between rich and poor.
2. High levels of petty crime and gang activity.
3. An ineffective and corrupt police force.

We will one day (hopefully) get better information about what happened in the streets after Chile’s earthquake. Until then, my strategy is to listen to all the reports I hear with one question in the back of my mind: “How do you know that?” In other words, did you see it?

For example, when reading this Washington Post story today (which also includes the plasma TV claim. Check!), I had to wonder about this line:

“...the pillaging was carried out largely by poorer Chileans.”

Really? How do you know? Did you do a random sampling of the pillagers and survey them about their income levels? Or are you making that conclusion based on how the 27 looters you saw looked--what they were wearing, how they spoke, etc.? Either way is OK, but I’d love to know. 

I’ll be talking today about the Chilean earthquake and the reports of looting on the BBC’s The World Tonight.