The admission fee at the 9/11 Memorial Museum

I haven't yet been to this Museum and am not sure I will ever want to. But we needed to build this museum. Now the museum is open, but it charges an admission fee of $24. 

I didn't like this news when I first heard it (thoughtfully covered, by the way, by Patricia Cohen in the New York Times) and I'm not thrilled by it now. But it is less troubling, and harder to fix, than I'd first thought.

It's been said that the reason for the high charge is that there is no federal subsidy for the museum's operating costs (and not enough subsidy from anyone else either). There's plenty wrong in Washington these days, of course, but evidently the federal government did provide $250 million, hardly a small amount, towards the memorial's construction costs. The museum's estimated operating costs are reported in Cohen's article as $63 million a year; should the taxpayers be on the hook for this sum too? (A major reason the costs are this high is security, at a site that, as its president has pointed out, has twice been attacked by terrorists -- though whether the security measures are actually necessary can certainly be debated.) 

How does one measure the value of a memorial? Obviously, in one sense its value is limitless and unmeasurable. But few things are really completely beyond valuation -- we determine, regularly, how much to spend on them, and how much we spend is a measure, however, imprecise, of value. So we might ask how the 9/11 memorial's value compares to other memorials, of which there are quite a few. Here's one such comparison, from a 2012 news report:

A report Sunday by The Associated Press noted that $12 million a year would be spent on security, more than the entire operating budgets of Gettysburg National Military Park and the monument that includes the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor.

Here's another: the US Holocaust Memorial Museum charges no admission fee, and receives $52.4 million in federal funding to help cover its operating costs. Can we say that these costs rightly measure the value of these memorials? Or are they at least as much the result of the vagaries of history and politics?

We might ask, instead, what the impact of the ticket price will be on the place this memorial will come to have in people's hearts. The answer seems to me to be that $24 is enough to mean that the memorial will not be casually visited by anyone who isn't well off. $24 isn't an impossible sum, but it is three hours of work at the current $8 minimum wage in New York - more than that, actually, since that minimum wage employee would have money taken from his or her paycheck for social security and other taxes. To decide to spend three hours or more's worth of income on coming to the museum, a minimum wage worker will have to really want to make this trip. Someone with less than a minimum wage income may be unable to pay this amount no matter how much she might want to. 

But the museum is not altogether beyond anyone's reach. The memorial's website notes that there are three hours of free admission on Tuesday evenings; discounts for military, firefighters and police; and free admission for 9/11 family members. Maybe it isn't really likely that many people would casually visit the museum anyway, even if its admission charges were much less. 

So perhaps the memorial will serve its purpose. For those who want to visit, it is there and not entirely out of anyone's reach. For those who remember 9/11 but do not want or need to visit a memorial, its simple existence may have meaning. But it is hard not to worry that over time the Memorial will become a part of the city's glittering cultural sphere, available to all under some restrictions but still primarily serving only a limited group of people. That will be too bad. Perhaps it reflects that this memorial is simply too elaborate, as some have suggested. Or perhaps it reflects that we as a people cannot afford today the sort of memorial we would like, and must therefore rely on the charity of some and the admission charges (and gift-shop payments) of others to sustain us. 

What's underneath us (or at least underneath Manhattan)?

Here’s an odd question: where is ground level in Manhattan, or more precisely in lower Manhattan?

I ask because I found myself the other day, in Tribeca (which is near the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan), looking down on a narrow space between a building and a street-level parking lot. It wouldn’t have been odd to look down there at a stairway coming up from a basement. But here what I was looking at, 10 or 15 feet below me, was ground, complete with a couple of trees growing out of it. It rather looked as if the street level where I was standing was not the true ground level at all, but rather the result of piling who knows what – concrete, pipes, power-lines, etc., etc., etc. – on top of the ground to reach where I now stood.

I tried to google this, and learned that Manhattan is built on granite that’s hard to tunnel down into. As a result, evidently, many Manhattan subway lines aren’t very far beneath the ground. But what I’m wondering about is roughly the opposite: how far above the ground has the city chosen to perch itself? I’m sure the answer is different in different parts of the city, but I begin to think that as a general matter the whole place has been built up several feet, at least, above the actual ground. New York’s skyscrapers are a remarkable sight, of course, but the idea that the bottom of the city, perhaps most of an entire island, might have been built up this much is quite remarkable too.

And not to be forgotten - the persistence of anti-Semitism

While we’re on the subject of prejudice, let us not forget anti-Semitism, a vintage prejudice that definitely has not gone away. According to the ADL Global 100, a study based on a recent poll undertaken on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League in 101 countries, the West Bank and Gaza, with a total population of 4.16 billion, 1.09 billion “harbor[] Anti-Semitic attitudes.” That’s a somewhat murky phrase, but closer examination makes it seem worse rather than better. Survey respondents were “considered to harbor anti-Semitic attitudes” if they felt that at least 6 of the following 11 statements were “probably true”:

1.  Jews are more loyal to Israel than to [this country/the countries they live in – the latter phrase was used in countries where Jews made up no more than 0.1 % of the population]

2. Jews have too much power in international financial markets

3. Jews have too much control over global affairs

4. Jews think they are better than other people

5. Jews have too much control over the global media

6. Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars

7. Jews have too much power in the business world

8. Jews don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind

9. People hate Jews because of the way Jews behave

10. Jews have too much control over the United States government

11. Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust

It seems from the ADL’s description that survey respondents were asked only about these 11 statements, and – without being a survey researcher – I can imagine that hearing this grim series of statements might actually have reinforced the respondents’ prejudiced feelings. So perhaps the results are somewhat overstated. But still it’s quite something to agree with at least 6 out of these 11, as the survey reports 1.09 billion people do (to be sure, with a statistical sampling error, reported as 0.97 % for the weighted global average, more for some of the individual countries).

If there are, as the Jewish Virtual Library website reports (for 2012), 13,746,100 Jews in the world, then it seems to be the case that for each Jew in existence there are about 79 people who hold a negative opinion of them. I wonder what proportion of those 1.09 billion anti-Semites have even met a Jew. It’s not surprising, given today’s world politics, that 74 % of those sampled in the Middle East and North Africa hold such views, but the statistics from the rest of the world also bear remembering:

            Eastern Europe:          34 %

            Western Europe:         24 %

   Sub-Saharan Africa:   23 %

   Asia:                            22 %

   The Americas:            19 %

   Oceania:                      14 %

Some things never change!

How far we've come -- and how far we haven't

You may know the Goya portrait that's now nicknamed “Red Boy” – a tremendously winning picture of a 4-year-old child of the Spanish nobility, decked out in a red suit with a big sash, in his right hand a string attached to the leg of a pet magpie, at whom three cats gaze intently and hungrily. It turns out, as the Spring 2014 issue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Bulletin (“Goya and the Altamiras”) explains, that Goya painted not only this little boy, whose name was Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga, but several other members of his extremely rich and powerful family, the Altamiras. The boy’s father held so many titles that he used to sign things “el marqués conde duque” (27). Their wealth shouts across two centuries in these portraits. But there was one thing these tremendously privileged people didn’t have, that most people in the developed world today enjoy: decent health. Poor little “Red Boy” was dead at the age of 8 (34). Huge amounts of human efforts have transformed the lives of many, not yet most, people since he lived his brief years of privilege.

Meanwhile, however, in case you thought all was well at least for the privileged portion of humanity living in the developed world, here’s this note from a study by Katherine Milkman of The Wharton School and two colleagues, Modupe Akinola and Dolly Chugh, as reported by Shankar Vedantam for NPR on April 22, 2014 (and also by several other news outlets): The authors sent 6500 e-mails to faculty around the country, expressing admiration for the recipient’s work and asking to meet with him or her. The e-mails that were identical in every respect except the names of the signers, names that had been chosen to strongly suggest the gender and/or ethnicity of the supposed senders. 

The responses, however, were not identical. The e-mails seeming to have come from women and minorities were answered less, and the requests for a meeting were accepted less, than was the case for the e-mails sent by men and whites. (There were other intriguing findings: humanities professors stood out for their nondiscriminatory behavior, while natural sciences faculty discriminated more and business academics were the worst; black, Hispanic and female faculty behaved no better than their white male counterparts; and Asian students were subject to “tremendous bias.”) 

There are many such studies of what one hopes is unconscious discrimination – I blogged about another not long ago – but this is the first I’ve heard of that addressed the behavior of people who one might have hoped would be especially vigilant to avoid discriminatory conduct. It turns out many of them apparently aren't. And this isn't just irritating; Vedantam presents the study as shedding light on mentoring in higher education, and indeed the study can be seen as a rough gauge of the likelihood that a young person's search for senior mentors will bear fruit. Mentoring, in turn, can matter a lot to academic success. 

In sum: we’ve learned pretty well how to give ourselves our full span of years, but we haven’t mastered treating each other decently along the way.

Happy Mother's Day

From my mother Mary Ellmann's book Thinking About Women (1968), an excerpt from the preface, an imagined dialogue between an interviewer (I) and the author (ME) (at page xii):

I.        It cannot be wrong to urge understanding.
ME.   No, it must be right in social work. But in novels, say, misunderstanding reasserts itself. its resilience is apparent, and one feels a grudging admiration for resilience, the admiration one might feel for a viral strain which all the aspirin in the world won't eradicate.
I.        Then really, you relish confusion -- or even sore throats.
ME.    I said it was a grudging admiration. There's an enormous number of opinions about women, and I will admit I'm impressed by the regularity and the intensity with which they are expressed. Some are more plausible than others, but their plausibility or implausibility isn't so much the point. It's their reiteration. 

 Carefully expressing no opinions, I simply say: Happy Mother's Day!