David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers

David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers is a firsthand report from an Army battalion’s deployment in Iraq from 2007 to 2008. Finkel takes you there with the American soldiers, many still teenagers, as they drop into a bewildering world of hostility, horrid conditions, and ambient dread.

[Upon landing] the air caught in their throats. Dirt and dust coated them right away. Because they arrived in the dead of night, they couldn’t see very much, but soon after sunrise, a few soldiers climbed a guard tower, peeked through the camouflage tarp, and were startled to see a vast landscape of trash, much of it on fire....They had been told that [roadside bombs] were often hidden in piles of trash. At the time it didn’t overly worry them, but now, as they looked out from the guard tower at acres of blowing trash across dirt fields and ashes from burned trash rising in smoke columns, it did....

Out they went through the heavily guarded main gate of [their base] and were instantly on the front lines of the war. In other wars, the front line was exactly that, a line to advance toward and cross, but in this war, the enemy was everywhere, it was anywhere out of the wire, in any direction: that building, that town, that province, the entire country, in 360 degrees.

The enemy’s main weapon was the roadside bomb—something you can’t fight, only avoid if you’re lucky. It made going on patrol like Russian Roulette: Who’s going to get hit today? Finkel unflinchingly reports the carnage of the inevitable hits. It is ugly, harrowing, and, as far as Finkel is concerned, necessary reading if you want to understand the actual war as opposed to the made-for-TV political bickering about the war.

[W]hile the news in Rustamiyah on September 4 was all about three dead soldiers and a fourth who lost both legs, and a fifth who lost both legs and an arm and most of his other arm had been severely burned over what remained of him, that wasn’t the news in the United States. In the United States the news was all macro rather than micro. It was about President Bush arriving in Australia that morning, where the deputy prime minister asked him how the war was going and he answered, “We’re kicking ass.” It was about a government report released in the afternoon that noted the Iraqi government’s lack of progress toward self-sustainability, which Democrats seized on as one more reason to get out of Iraq pronto, which Republicans seized on as one more reason why Democrats were unpratriotic, which various pundits seized on as a chance to go on television and do some screaming.

The soldiers tried to win hearts and minds. By training they were not diplomats or social workers or nation builders. The people they were supposed to be helping either wanted to kill them or were at risk of being killed for accepting the soldiers’ help. Local leaders were often corrupt and infighting. As recipes for success go, this one was full of bad ingredients.

Nevertheless, amid the violence and despair, personal acts of bravery and kindness sometimes redeemed scraps of a tattered, seemingly unfixable whole. A soldier ignored the rules to save a hurt Iraqi child; a soldier pulled his paralyzed buddy from a burning Humvee. In an environment where the months, days, and hours varied only among shades of dark, perhaps such moments of grace were all that was left for good soldiers.

A convoy of three platoons and two body bags left at 3:22 a.m. By 3:40 a.m., the first IED had exploded and flattened some tires. By 3:45 a.m., the first gunfight was under way. By 3:55 a.m., soldiers had found and destroyed three EFPs. By 4:50am, they were at the DAC, where the ruined Humvee had been taken. By 5:10 a.m., they were lifting and then scooping Bennett and Miller into the body bags. By 5:30 a.m., they were on their way to COP Cajimat to rendezvous with Nate Showman and his soldiers. By 5:47, they were in another gunfight. By 5:48, the vehicle leading the convey was hit by some type of IED but was able to keep going. By 5:49, the same vehicle was hit with another IED but was still able to keep going. By 6:00 a.m., the convoy had made it to COP Cajimat. By 7:00 a.m., the soldiers were escorting Showman, his ruined platoon, the ruined Humvee, and the remains of Bennett and Miller to the FOB. By 7:55 a.m., everyone was back, and the mission was officially a success.

Most people, understandably, won’t be up for hundreds of pages of this stuff. But if you’ve read this far, I hope I have been able to convey some of The Good Soldiers’ impact.

Finkel deserves a medal for living enough of the story to write it. And the U.S. Army deserves credit for allowing him the unfettered access to do so.

Here is the link to the book at Amazon, where it deservedly has 4.5 out of 5 stars across nearly 100 reviews.

The Ultimate Niche Business

While on a business trip near Dallas, TX, I ran across what may be the ultimate niche business:

So if you are a Hun, and you are in the Dallas / Fort Worth metropolitan area, and you need a tailor, accept no substitutes.

Warrent Buffett versus The Efficient Market Hypothesis

My wife Jacqueline got her MBA from the University of Chicago, where the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) was religion. EMH says that in the long run, no one can beat the stock market because it is too efficient. An investor might beat the market for a year, or maybe several years, but that’s just luck.

This was the standard view at Chicago during Jacqueline’s time there, and it was well supported by data: The long-term performance of professional fund managers against market indexes was notoriously poor.

But there was always the standard challenge, “What about Warren Buffett?”

That challenge had its own standard reply: If you have enough investors, somebody like Buffett is inevitable—just like if you have enough people flipping coins, you’ll get someone who tosses twenty heads in a row.

It made sense at the time. However, this year Jacqueline was surprised to read about a debate held in 1984—well before her time at Chicago—that pitted an EMH advocate, University of Rochester Professor Michael Jensen, versus Buffett. The episode is recounted in Sebatian Mallaby’s More Money Than God.

Jensen presented the standard argument that Buffett was a random fluke. In response, Buffett continued Jensen’s line of thinking. He said that if 225 million people (then roughly the population of the United States) were in a coin-flipping contest to get the most heads in a row, 215 people should achieve 20 heads in a row by chance. Buffett then said that if those 215 people were randomly distributed, he would agree that chance was merely at work. But if a significant number of those people all had something rare in common—say, a specific coin-flipping technique—that would be a different situation. As Mallaby summarizes, “If you found that a rare cancer was common in a particular village, you would not put that down to chance. You would analyze the water.”

Buffett went on to argue that the few investors who beat the market over the long term were not randomly distributed. As evidence, he cited nine fund mangers, including himself, whose value-investing strategies descended from those of investor Ben Graham. As Mallaby writes:

Buffett insisted that he had not cherry-picked his examples; he was reporting the results of all Graham-Newman alumni for whom there were records and all the fund managers whom he had won over to the value-investing method. Without any exceptions, and without copying one another’s stock choices, each of Ben Graham’s heirs had beaten the market. Could this be simple fortune?

Buffett later converted his debate comments into an article, which has its own Wikipedia page. The page is perhaps most notable for its “Rebuttals” section, which suggests that academia has ignored, rather than rebutted, Buffett’s argument: “A 2004 search of 23,000 papers on economics revealed only 20 references to any publication by Buffett.”

Of course, EMH is about a model. A model can be wrong in some respects but right (or at least useful) in many other ways. Buffett’s challenge may have exposed some wrongness in EMH, as have more recent critiques from behavioral and complexity economics. Moreover, the financial crisis that started in 2007 further undermined EMH as a safe assumption. But a widely accepted, “less wrong” alternative to EMH has not emerged.

What has emerged is a questioning of standard views. Such questioning always existed—even at Chicago—in rarefied theory classes. But I suspect today’s equivalents of Jacqueline’s MBA classes have a little less of Jensen’s perspective and a little more of Buffett’s skepticism.

America the Start-Up

I was reading William Goetzmann’s Beyond the Revolution: A History of American Thought from Paine to Pragmatism, when I came across this:

Thanks to [the American revolutionary thinkers’] efforts, certain Enlightenment qualities or habits of mind became traditional American values. Among these were a reverence for principles, particularly individual liberty, a dedication to reason and the rational solution, a belief in order and at the same time constant change, a talent for practicality and down-to-earth political organization, a faith in learning, a sense of world responsibility and mission, and perhaps most important of all, an extreme and sensitive receptivity to new ideas, and a confidence in intellect.

Don’t those values seem similar to the best traits of great start-up companies?

Grading Teachers Based on Their Students’ Test Scores

In a tour de force of investigative journalism, The Los Angeles Times analyzed thousands of teachers’ performance over seven years, based on their students’ progress on standardized tests. Here are some key findings, quoted from the excellent lead article of a series:

• Highly effective teachers routinely propel students from below grade level to advanced in a single year. There is a substantial gap at year’s end between students whose teachers were in the top 10% in effectiveness and the bottom 10%. The fortunate students ranked 17 percentile points higher in English and 25 points higher in math.
• Some students landed in the classrooms of the poorest-performing instructors year after year — a potentially devastating setback that the district could have avoided. Over the period analyzed, more than 8,000 students got such a math or English teacher at least twice in a row.
• Contrary to popular belief, the best teachers were not concentrated in schools in the most affluent neighborhoods, nor were the weakest instructors bunched in poor areas. Rather, these teachers were scattered throughout the district. The quality of instruction typically varied far more within a school than between schools.
• Although many parents fixate on picking the right school for their child, it matters far more which teacher the child gets. Teachers had three times as much influence on students’ academic development as the school they attend. Yet parents have no access to objective information about individual instructors, and they often have little say in which teacher their child gets.
• Many of the factors commonly assumed to be important to teachers’ effectiveness were not. Although teachers are paid more for experience, education and training, none of this had much bearing on whether they improved their students’ performance.

The analytical technique used is called a value-added analysis, explained in the article this way:

In essence, a student’s past performance on tests is used to project his or her future results. The difference between the prediction and the student’s actual performance after a year is the “value” that the teacher added or subtracted.

For example, if a third-grade student ranked in the 60th percentile among all district third-graders, he would be expected to rank similarly in fourth grade. If he fell to the 40th percentile, it would suggest that his teacher had not been very effective, at least for him. If he sprang into the 80th percentile, his teacher would appear to have been highly effective.

Any single student’s performance in a given year could be due to other factors — a child’s attention could suffer during a divorce, for example. But when the performance of dozens of a teacher’s students is averaged — often over several years — the value-added score becomes more reliable, statisticians say.

The Times quoted experts who said students’ test performance should not be the only way a teacher is evaluated, especially in high-stakes decisions like firing. Academic and government supporters of value-added analysis in education, including the Obama Administration, suggest that it comprise half a teacher’s evaluation.

Nevertheless, the president of the local teachers’ union responded, “You’re leading people in a dangerous direction, making it seem like you can judge the quality of a teacher by...a test.” The teachers’ union launched a boycott of The Times, asking the union’s members to cancel their subscriptions.

Bad response. Better would have been to respond like two low-scoring teachers did when interviewed by The Times. They said they want to use the data to help them improve. The Los Angeles Unified school district has always had the data, but never used it for teacher feedback.

That said, there are legitimate questions to be asked when teachers are rated largely by students’ scores on standardized tests. I know too many good teachers who say it forces teaching to the test, which leads to standardized, least-common-denominator teaching—not what comes to mind when you think “great teacher.” And of course no one wins if we create a generation of ace test-takers who lack any deeper understanding or motivation.

Acknowledging those concerns, I’d still say the lesson of The Los Angeles Times investigation is that its type of teacher-targeted analysis has merit. The questions are how to maximize such an analysis’ fairness, how to integrate it into a larger evaluation of a teacher, and how to avoid undesirable side effects like teaching only to the test.

In other words, we can argue about issues like how to choose the data, how to analyze it, and what decisions it should affect. But please let’s have those arguments rather than the one about whether test data should be used at all. If you ever had doubts, The Times series should put those to rest.