Politics: Economics

On Feelings and Votes

drorzel — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 08:41:33 +0000

On Feelings and Votes

This is going to be a bit of a rant, because there's a recurring theme in my recent social media that's really bugging me, and I need to vent. I'm going to do it as a blog post rather than an early-morning tweetstorm, because tweets are more likely to be pulled out of context, and then I'm going to unfollow basically everybody that isn't a weird Twitter bot or a band that I like, and try to avoid politics until the end of the year. Also, I'll do some physics stuff.

This morning saw the umpteenth reshared tweetstorm (no link because it doesn't matter who it was) berating people who write about how liberals ought to reach out to working-class whites-- as I did a little while back-- for caring too much about the "feelings" of white people. While there are undoubtedly some disingenuous op-eds being written for which that's true, I think it misses an extremely important point about this whole thing. That is, it's true that these pieces are concerned about the feelings of white people, but only as a means to an end. What really matters isn't their feelings, but their votes.

And all the stuff being thrown out there as progressives work through the Kübler-Ross model need those votes. You think it's ridiculous that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.5 million votes but still lost, so you want to get rid of the Electoral College? Great. To do that, you need to amend the Constitution, which requires control of Congress and/or a whole bunch of state legislatures, most of which are in Republican hands, because they get the votes of those working-class whites. You want to ditch the Electoral College, you need to change those votes.

Think those working-class whites have too much power because of gerrymandered districts that over-weight rural areas? You're probably right, but if you want to fix it, you need to control the legislatures that make the districts, and those are mostly in Republican hands because they get the votes of those people in rural districts. You want to stop gerrymandering and protect voting rights, you need to change those votes.

There are a whole host of things wrong with our current system. Fixing any of them requires winning elections, particularly those off-year legislative elections where Democrats underperform even when they're winning statewide and national elections. Winning some of those is going to require getting the people who vote in those elections to change their votes, and hopefully their minds.

And that is why pundits and those who play pundit in a half-assed way on their blogs are saying you should care about the feelings of those working-class whites: because they vote, and you need their votes. And you're not going to get those votes by berating them and insulting them and disparaging their feelings. You get their votes by understanding where they're coming from, offering them something they want, and treating them with respect.

And again, this does not mean you need to cater to their basest impulses. Fundamental principles of tolerance and equality are not negotiable, and can not be compromised. But you don't have to pander to racism to move some votes-- most of the policies in the Democratic platform are already clearly better for those people than the Republican alternatives. It's just a matter of pitching them in a way that makes that clear.

As an attempt at a concrete example, look at issues of affirmative action and immigration. If you're dealing with someone who's concerned about immigrants or people of color "taking our jobs," you're not likely to bring them to your side by lecturing them about how they're not really entitled to that job, they're just the beneficiary of hundreds of years of racist policy, and so on. You might be right about the history, but that's not terribly persuasive to somebody who's worried about having a stable income and health insurance to support their family. But you don't need to go full "build a wall," either-- something like "The real problem is that there ought to be enough good jobs for both you and them, and here's what we're going to do to make that happen" could work. (It has the disadvantage of needing a plan to create jobs for all, admittedly, but as the recent election shows, such a plan doesn't even need to be all that plausible.) That steps around the implicit racism of the original concern in a way that preserves their feelings, gets their vote for better policy, and doesn't compromise any fundamental principles.

(Yes, this is basically the Bernie Sanders strategy. I would've been all for Bernie's economic program; I don't think he would've been a viable candidate in the general election, though.)

Another common and maddening refrain the past few weeks has been "Why do we have to care about their feelings, when they're hateful toward us?" The answer is, bluntly, that they don't need your votes. They're living in gerrymandered districts that give them too much power, and they're winning the elections that matter. If you want to change the broken system in fundamental ways, you need to convince them to vote for policies that involve giving up some of that power. They can keep things just the way they are, or make them much, much worse, without any assistance from you.

And, yes, it's unquestionably true that a distressingly large number of those voters are openly racist and probably not persuadable. But the hard-core racist fraction is not 100%, and you wouldn't need a huge effect to make things better. As I said before, even if 39 out of 40 Trump voters in PA, MI, and WI was a full-on alt-right Twitter frog, flipping the vote of that one decent human being would've avoided our current situation. I think that would've been worth a little bit of effort to respect their feelings, at least long enough to win their votes.

Yes, that's messy, and compromised, and leaves some big issues unaddressed. Welcome to politics. It's not about feelings, on either side, it's about getting enough votes to win elections.

Rant over, catharsis achieved. Shutting up about politics, now.

drorzel Thu, 12/01/2016 - 03:41

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Think those working-class whites have too much power because of gerrymandered districts that over-weight rural areas? You’re probably right, but if you want to fix it, you need to control the legislatures that make the districts, and those are mostly in Republican hands because they get the votes of those people in rural districts.

In some states, mostly in the South and West, there is a popular initiative process for passing laws, amending the state Constitution, or both. In such states one can use this process to enact a requirement that legislative districts be drawn by a non-partisan (or bi-partisan) board. California has already done this, and as a result their Congressional delegation and state legislature come close to matching statewide party preferences.

That's not an option in my state (NH), but if it is in yours, give it a thought.

Here’s my mini rant:
1)
Why do people rant about white racism winning the 2016 election, when a black man was elected in 2008 (winning the electoral votes by 36 percentage points and the popular vote by 7 percentage points)
and RE-elected in 2012 (winning the electoral votes by 23 percentage points and the popular vote by 4 percentage points) ?

Although Barack wasn’t running in 2016, he said over and over HIS legacy, HIS accomplishments were, and Hillary was the person to carry them on.

His SKIN COLOR didn’t change. So, why didn’t his successor, Hillary, win? Because of RACE??

2)
Why are so many people now screaming that Hillary won the popular vote and wailing that the electoral college system is “unfair.”

Where was all this wailing about the “unfair” electoral college BEFORE 11/8/16?

3)
You know how in the year and a half leading up to election night, in all the election polls and predictions and campaign stops, California and New York got maybe 30 seconds of coverage? You know, because CA and NY are no-brainer, big-time Blue, and
for presidential election purposes, virtually no cares about CA and NY?
Well, if you exclude CA and NY, then, in the other 48 states, Trump won the popular vote by over 3.1 million (2.8 percentage points).

Where was all this wailing [emotive language in original] about the “unfair” electoral college BEFORE 11/8/16?

Um, it was in late 2000, when Bush was handed the presidency by virtue of the suppression of a recount that might have changed the results in Florida. I imagine there was also some when Rutherford B. Hayes, whom we used to call one of the most corrupt presidents before there was Trump, was handed the presidency despite getting shellacked in the popular vote and the quid-pro-quo was that the feds would no longer protect the rights of Southern blacks.

I understand the legitimate geopolitical rationale for the Electoral College, but it was instituted in a time when all states were mostly agricultural. It was not intended to be a permanent handout to the cracker class.

Um, when I said “Where was all this wailing about the “unfair” electoral college BEFORE 11/8/16?”
I was talking in the time period, of about a year-and-half, of the recently completed 2016 presidential campaign. Not the year 2000 or about the time of Rutherford B. Hayes.

Also, regarding your “handout to the cracker class”,
isn’t “cracker” the color flip-side of “ni**er”?

The US House Science and Technology committee tweeted this today:
.@BreitbartNews: Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists http://bit.ly/2gINZNf
Now, if you go to that website, you will find a link to a Breitbart post and within that post you will find comments by people with avatars like "Euro Pox" with a disgusting caricature of a black person, and another with a Confederate flag waving. This is the sort of site that the US House of Representatives points to for information on Climate Change???? Lamar Smith should be removed from the Science and Technology committee, and he should be censured for stupidity.

And the N-word, by way of explanation for those overly sensitive white people who are offended by the term cracker, is particularly despicable because it has been used as a term of contempt for centuries, and because it was used to imply social, economic, and moral inferiority to any person who wasn't saltine white in color. Any white person who resents the fact that they are being categorized as a privileged white person ought to take a deep breath, exhale, and think about what it must be like to be continually taunted, belittled, discriminated against, and, in many cases, murdered, just because their skin wasn't white. . Whites get no sympathy for having to endure the term cracker.

What is really a source of concern is that we have a Nazi as an advisor in the White House. Not good.

So Herr Flaggenpussygrabber has chosen Steve Bannon as his advisor . Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon is a man who praises Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer. Spencer says the white race must conquer or die.

Trump has basically raped and murdered America (with the administration he is forming), and what he is going to put in its place is some zombie approximation. America is basically done. Finito. Over. Finished. Unless Mike Pence goes psycho and turns on him with a letter opener , he is here to stay. And while he is dictator, he will undoubtedly hit some trip wire that the state department warned him to avoid. Then, any one of a number of states with leaders as bellicose and primitive as the boy monster will feel threatened and wukk stand up to Trump. Then we will be on our way to our next major war. .

Well, I guess we are just still in the stage of evolution where Prussian warrior virtues are the most important things in Murka.

After this election I have given up on belief in basic human decency and right winning over wrong.

It is selfishness and short-sightedness. Screw the climate and my grandchildren or even the country - it is all about my comfort right here and right now.

People in southern states I expected. But PA, WI? I didn't expect people in these states to be this racist and stupid.

To SteveP #5:

“Whites get no sympathy for having to endure the term cracker.”

You might be right. Just so long as it’s one white person calling another white person “cracker.”
Like how black people call other black people “nig*er” all the time, and it’s perfectly OK.

“What is really a source of concern is that we have a Nazi as an advisor in the White House. Not good.”

No, it’s actually good, because Bannon’s not only not a Nazi, he helped Trump win the election and will help Trump’s presidency be perhaps the greatest presidency in my lifetime and one of the greatest presidencies ever.

"because Bannon’s not only not a Nazi"

Very few people alive now are nazis. What is true is that bannon is a liar, a misogynist, a racist, a bigot, and prime example of the worst people the United States has to offer. He's almost as vile as you sn, and that's quite an accomplishment.

The election was lost by Hillary Clinton's campaign, right down to their choice of ads in my battleground state, ads that energized Trump voters to turn out and vote.

It didn't help that she is not an isolationist, and the country is leaning the other way. It isn't clear if Trump is actually an isolationist or just ran as one, but what he campaigned on was part of why he won. His moves as President-elect suggest he might be the opposite, or so malleable regarding foreign affairs that his own views don't matter. If he starts sending troops all over the Middle East, he will see his support plummet.

It was also lost years before by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and their sub leaders, who were worse than ineffective at framing the issues for this election. For them, it was all about the Obamacare votes, not about jobs. They were on TV every week and not a peep about infrastructure -- construction jobs and Caterpillar and trucks -- when the Republicans repeated stalled those recovery-related bills. That is what working-class whites didn't hear from Democrats or non-Trump Republicans. On that issue, Trump ran as a Democrat against the obstructionist Republicans, only he did it by blaming "government" rather than the party responsible.

And it was lost because some parts of the media could not put the Trump circus in the corner. MSNBC probably swung voters to Trump with their wall-to-wall coverage of his unfiltered speeches. They thought it was funny. He won. And others, like CBS, are so sensitive to criticism that they broadcast falsehoods and half-truths as news.

It was NOT lost because of gerrymandering. The House was lost because of gerrymandering.

Regarding gerrymandering. It does NOT make a particular party invulnerable. It helps if you pack all of the racially identifiable Democratic voters into one district, as they do arguing that it is required by law, but it actually works by trying to have a lot of reliably 60-40 and 55-45 districts while giving away some 1-99 districts while also having some 80-20 districts of your own.

Results in those middle districts depend on turnout, which is why turnout at midterm elections is so important. Doubly so in a census year that is also a midterm year, like 2010. If one party or interest group (like seniors, or those who lost health care, or minimum wage workers, or angry people) turns out during a midterm election, House districts and state legislature districts can be flipped. But that requires two things that the Democratic party has been miserable at for at least twenty years: Grooming good candidates in those "middle" districts and backing them with year-round public relations (what gets said on TV talk shows and then spread on line) and ads pointing out the horrible vote their rep just made. That is where Pelosi and Reed were spectacularly ineffective if not downright counterproductive. The only thing that kept Reed from looking like a total idiot was the elderly guy on the other side.

Finally, the flip side is not cracker or red neck, it is honky.

And, See Noevo, the President is not, technically, black. He is mixed race or mullato or, most precisely, an African-English American. However, most importantly, the President is male. It should be noted that Hillary lost to a male Democrat in 2008, almost lost to a male Socialist in 2016, and then lost to a male Republican in 2016. Biden would have crushed Trump if he had run.

Dem candidates are failing at the basics. I don't think most voters really want to see marginal tax rates for the richest folks drop from 39.6 to 33%, but I think very few voters knew that was the proposed policy. Instead I think lots of voters think the poor don't pay enough taxes, cause they are repeatedly told the poor pay little or no income taxes, but are not told that the poorer people pay sales taxes, payroll taxes, and other fees and taxes so that it's actually non-trivial. I have argued with people who are not that horribly innumerate, who do not understand these simple things, and many similarly simple things. We might explain much better that higher taxes on the wealthy, invested into infrastructure, education, and public health, can lift allot of boats. But we suck at it.

How often did you hear about Trump capital gains proposals? Have we heard proposals to increase capital gains taxes a bit from Dems? How often was the 99% discussed?

The Democrats aren't helping the cause by supporting Keith Ellison as the new DNC chairman. Ellison is hardly the man to right the ship and appeal to working class voters in the rust belt, which is where Hillary lost the election. Of course, the smear campaign reeking of antisemitism is being launched against anyone who has the temerity to question the appointment of Ellison. Look no further then Mano Singham's blog on Freethoughtblogs, ole Mano being a long time Israel basher.

It doesn't matter whether those voters stayed home, voted for dumbkopf Donald or a third party. Many of them were long time Democrats who, for whatever reason, didn't think that Hillary was the answer.

"ole Mano being a long time Israel basher."

Holding a view that is not the same as yours does not qualify as being an Israel basher. Stop with the false representations.

Re #15

Apparently dean is either not a regular visitor to Singham's blog or he is also an Israel basher. Singham gave an Aussie named StevoR the heave ho for having the temerity to politely disagree with him on the subject of Israel. He probably would have given me the heave ho too if I had not stopped commenting there, refusing to cast my pearls before swine. It is quite clear from following Singham's blog that he wishes that Israel would just go away.

I do read his blog on a regular basis. SteveR did not politely disagree, he went on several racist rants advocating annihilation of people didn't like - as you have.
This is the last I will comment on your dishonesty, but make no doubt: you are being dishonest (which is surprisingly tame behavior for you.

I have mostly been keeping out of this, as I've got a ton of other things to deal with right now. I have absolutely no interest in hosting a new round of a pre-existing argument, though, so here is your only warning. Subsequent comments continuing this pissing contest will be summarily deleted.

It's a big Internet; find another comment section to squabble in.

Everything Would Be Better With Shitloads of Money

drorzel — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 07:24:14 +0000

Everything Would Be Better With Shitloads of Money

Over in Twitter-land, somebody linked to this piece promoting open-access publishing, excerpting this bit:

One suggestion: Ban the CV from the grant review process. Rank the projects based on the ideas and ability to carry out the research rather than whether someone has published in Nature, Cell or Science. This could in turn remove the pressure to publish in big journals. I’ve often wondered how much of this could actually be drilled down to sheer laziness on the part of scientists perusing the literature and reviewing grants – “Which journals should I scan for recent papers? Just the big ones surely…” or “This candidate has published in Nature already, they’ll probably do it again, no need to read the proposal too closely.”

And, you know, I sympathize, at least to a point. Paper-counting is dumb, and impact-factor-weighting is even sillier. But then, there are a lot of problems with this idea, most of them tracing back to the fundamental fact that there isn't enough money to go around.

That is, yes, in an ideal world, you would give out grants on the basis of "the ideas" in some abstract sense. But there are lots of people with cool ideas out there, and a pretty large fraction of them even have "the ability to carry out the research" (we'll assume for the moment that there's some sensible way to establish that ability without a CV). But we're in a world where grant approval rates dip toward single-digit percentages, so a bunch of those people aren't going to get funded. So we end up accreting stupid criteria for approval, just because you need to do something to cut the pool down.

And this happens in all sorts of places in academia. There are all sorts of factors that get used in academic hiring that are problematic to various degrees, the classic example being the nebulous catch-all of "fit," but that happens because there isn't enough money to hire everyone who deserves a job. When you've got 200 people applying for a single tenure-track job, good people are going to get left out through no real fault of their own. And the sloooow progress on faculty diversity has similar roots-- I'm sure that if you gave the administration of the University of Missouri the money to hire 400 new faculty and staff they would be thrilled to make their racial diversity problem go away. But nobody in academia has the money to do that.

Absent a sudden influx of astronomical amounts of cash, I don't know what realistic options there are to do a better job with allocating the limited resources we do have. At some level, it would probably be just as fair and effective to distribute grant funding by filtering out the small number of totally unqualified people and then rolling dice to determine the lucky folks who actually get funding. I doubt that'd make people any happier, though. For faculty positions you'd probably need to combine random number generation with massively illegal collusion, to make sure that the same handful of superstars don't get offered all the jobs.

I'm sympathetic to the concerns of the open science community, and more generally to concerns about the absurd pressures placed on junior faculty. But most of the things people propose as solutions would need the sudden appearance of shitloads of money to work out as intended, and that's just not happening.

And on that depressing note, I'm going to go edit some photo-of-the-day pictures.

drorzel Thu, 02/04/2016 - 02:24

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Chad,

Thanks for saying it so clearly. I've been preaching this message for years - measures for academic merit aren't going away because they are necessary. Every other month or so, there is a commentary in Nature complaining about these, but no practical solution whatsoever.

I think the major problem with these measures is that they're supposed to be a one-size-fits-all approach. They're infinitely cheap and unintelligent. They use data that we already know doesn't correlate with success. Many of these so-called measures are actually driven by publishers who want to score high on some scale. They're not made for scientists, they are, in a sense, deliberately made against them.

We can do much better than that. The best (and I think, the only) way to do it is to allow scientists to build their own measure together from available data (say, bibliometric, keywords, rating by colleagues, coauthor networks, whatever you can find!). An individual, customizable, transparent measure. I'm thinking of some shareware that comes with templates for measures and where people can exchange their templates and adjust them as desired. The administrative measure can then be an aggregate from this - one that has the great benefit of also being adapted to the local environment.

"Absent a sudden influx of astronomical amounts of cash..."

Planetary Resources is working on that.

Your headline reminded me of my main take-away from a visit to our university last year by the dean of engineering at Harvard: You can do some pretty amazing educational things if you have essentially unlimited financial resources.

On Intelligence and Talent

drorzel — Wed, 04 Feb 2015 09:10:33 +0000

On Intelligence and Talent

Probably the dumbest person I've ever met in my life was a housemate in grad school. I didn't do my lab work on campus, so I wasn't living in a neighborhood where cheap housing was rented to students, but in a place where folks were either genuinely poor, or in the market for very temporary lodgings while they looked for something better. There were low-income housing units across the street, and also an apartment building full of families who didn't quite qualify for welfare.

This particular guy rented one of the other rooms in the house, and worked a series of unskilled jobs-- assistant on a furniture delivery truck, assistant carpenter, pizza delivery. He was the sort of person who didn't have a checking account because "I don't want to deal with all that math," and on one memorable occasion when I told him I was going to visit family on Long Island for the weekend, guessed that Long Island must be located in "either Missouri or England."

And yet, there were things he could do that I found kind of amazing. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of roads and businesses in the central part of Montgomery County, Maryland-- Rockville, Bethesda, etc. And on one occasion when he was working furniture delivery, he bought a giant dresser that I was sure would never make it into his upstairs bedroom. And yet he effortlessly identified a set of rotations that got it up the narrow stairs and around a tight corner without a scratch. Had I attempted that, the dresser probably would've ended up forever wedged in the stairway, like the sofa in that one Douglas Adams book.

I think of him now and again when the subject of innate intelligence comes up, as it does more or less every time I talk to people about Eureka. One of the biggest sources of push-back I get on the general argument is of the form "Surely you're not saying that everyone can be a scientist? Because I know a lot of stupid people..." And, no, I'm not saying that everybody has what it takes to make a living as a scientist-- being a professional scientist is hard, and involves a lot of specialized technical knowledge that not everybody will have the skill or inclination to acquire. (Also, stop calling me Shirley...)

But then, pretty much any task more complicated than digging holes and filling them back in will involve its own sort of specialized knowledge. And pretty much all of those tasks involve using the same core reasoning process that makes science work. Even my extremely dumb former housemate was capable of scientific reasoning in the process of moving furniture-- he looked at that dresser, thought of a set of rotations that would get it up the stairs and into his room without dinging up the walls, and to my amazement, executed it perfectly. Then he gloated about it, because I had said "There's no way that's getting into your room."

As a result, I kind of dance around the issue of innate intelligence in Eureka, because it's not all that relevant to the argument I am making. I think it's a mistake to put too much emphasis on raw brain power, because inclination has a big role to play, and because setting scientists off as "really smart" has a kind of distancing effect that I think is ultimately pretty corrosive. If you like, you can read more or less that whole part of the book in this excerpt at the Science of Us. (Though you should buy the book. Buy my book. Buuuyyyy myyyyy boooooook. OK, I'm done now.)

Of course, there's a second reason to dance around that topic, which is that it's highly politically charged. In sort of an odd way, as pointed out early in this very long Slate Star Codex post by Scott Alexander (which is the proximate cause of this post; a bit of lede-burying on my part, maybe)-- there's a sense in which the arguments about the role of innate ability reverse the usual political polarity. (Though it's also entirely possible to recast the argument in a way that makes both sides seem more consistent than it suits Alexander's purposes to do...) It's a really tricky subject, and one I'm generally uneasy about, which is why I rarely wade into those arguments here, and tried to avoid it in Eureka.

I'm conflicted about this subject because on the one hand, it's one of the areas where I think there genuinely is something approaching the oppressive sort of "political correctness" that people often try to invoke in much sillier contexts. There's a strong push in some quarters to declare the whole subject totally illegitimate, and say that it's inappropriate to ever bring up arguments relating to innate abilities. Particularly when applied to particular sub-groups of the population. And I'm generally not wild about declaring whole areas of inquiry off-limits in this manner.

At the same time, though, even responsible well-intentioned research in this area is frequently used as political cover for a kind of creepy racism and classism. If you can assign a dominant role to genetics when it comes to intelligence, well, then, the observed correlation between family income and things like standardized test scores (which are proxy measurements for intelligence) isn't a problem any more. And then we don't need to worry about doing anything to correct gross iniquities in our educational system that place low-income and minority students at a huge disadvantage. And we don't need to worry about issues like income inequality, which is really just innate ability reaping its just reward. And a whole bunch of other positions that kind of make my skin crawl. So I totally understand the desire to keep the whole mess at a distance, which again, is part of why I try to stay out of these arguments.

Alexander's epic post (which also has a follow-up) is largely an attempt to wrestle with this issue by casting things in terms of talent-- having high IQ is a talent, like musical ability, and different people have different talents, and we should just embrace that. And there's certainly a sense in which his argument rings true-- many of my colleagues are amazed at my tendency to bang out thousands of words of bloggage daily, but it's never seemed like a chore to me. I enjoy this, and in fact get a little twitchy when I'm deprived of the opportunity to sit down and type a bunch of words. It's not too different, on some level, than my argument in Eureka about the role of personal inclinations in determining who becomes a scientist.

At the same time, though, these arguments don't exist in a social and political vacuum, and it's hard not to notice that certain kinds of talents are regarded as more worthy of celebration than others. And also that the ones deemed most worthy just happen to correlate very strongly with the talents of groups of people who already have a great deal of social and economic power. There's also an effort to play up the role of innate intelligence in activities that lead to making shitloads of money, while downplaying the role of the "soft skills" that are often just as important to amassing wealth-- Alexander holds up Ramanujan as an examplar of mathematical talent, but it's worth noting that all his massive brainpower didn't make him wealthy.

So, you know, I remain conflicted about the whole business. There is a sense in which you could take this basic argument about innate intelligence and talent and turn it into the basis of a robust leftist politics in which celebrating everybody's various inborn talents justifies economic equality for all-- a comfortable basic income for everyone from mathematical prodigies to assistant furniture movers, to let everyone explore and develop their particular talents. Instead, it's most frequently coupled to a kind of asshole libertarianism-- I hasten to add that Alexander does not explicitly do that in this post, though several people I saw linking it on social media do; I haven't read enough of his blog to say anything sensible about his general politics.

So while there are aspects of the whole intelligence-as-talent notion that I find attractive-- unsurprisingly, as it tends to flatter my vanity-- I remain pretty suspicious of the whole business. It's an area where the political payoff to biasing results is so large and blatant that extreme caution is required-- as Thoreau wrote a little while back, a lot of articles about this feel less like objective examinations of data than working through pre-existing narratives. And having written this, I will probably resume my general policy of assiduously ducking the issue as much as possible.

drorzel Wed, 02/04/2015 - 04:10

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One does have to be careful about these sorts of things, because sometimes the relative standing of an ethnic group will change over time. For instance, nineteenth century pseudo-science on the topic "proved" that Chinese were an inferior race compared to whites. As a result, Chinese became the only ethnic group to be specifically barred by law (the Chinese Exclusion Act) from immigrating to the US. (The plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that established birthright citizenship in the US was challenging his exclusion under the Chinese Exclusion Act.) Today, people of East Asian ethnicity are frequently overrepresented in settings such as prestigious university admissions. I suspect a selection bias in both cases: nineteenth century Chinese immigrants to the US were frequently laborers (so there was classism along with the racism), whereas more recent Chinese immigrants have tended to be people who came to the US for grad school, who would typically be more intelligent than the average (either Chinese or American). Lately I have been seeing large numbers of Chinese undergraduates at my local university. I haven't had occasion to interact with them much, so I don't know anything about their innate abilities, but I do know they are from well-off families: their parents pay out-of-state tuition, and apart from certain forms of work-study, they cannot qualify for financial aid.

There are empirical reasons for being highly skeptical of "innate-ist" or "entity-theoretic" explanations of success in a field, or at the very least, treading very cautiously when putting such explanations forward. Such attitudes, if widely prevalent tend to exacerbate gender and racial imbalances (take a look at http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21639439-women-are…)

Work on stereotype threat also indicates that attaching more importance to innate talent rather than hard work serves to make success harder for certain groups. Basically, activating a more "entity theoretic" model in the minds of students tends to put negative selective pressure that feeds into determining who succeeds and who doesn't.

So the distancing effect of such views of intelligence---the effect that you have described as corrosive---acts unequally on different groups of people, leading to even more distancing and creating a rather pernicious feedback loop.

I'm always surprised that some people discern the relationship between Archie Manning and Peyton Manning, but refuse to see a relationship between Marie Curie and Irene Joliot-Curie.
On the other hand I once read a study of the undergraduate colleges attended by US Nobel Laureates in science/medicine. About half were university names easily recognizable, but the other half were small colleges that were hardly known outside their local areas. Similarly, the IQ info available indicated that anyone with 115 (about the average for college graduates) had a shot at an award. Looking at our business and political leaders, 115 is a generous assumption.
But really, what we need to teach our kids is that having a successful and rewarding life does not mean getting a Nobel prize or being on the Forbes 400 list. Instead you can be happy with a three-bedroom ranch in the suburbs and a loving spouse.

Chad, I'm curious. Do you seriously believe that Ashkenazi Jews have no genetic advantage over most of the rest of humanity?

JohnGalt47 - The defendants at Nurenberg were given IQ tests. The scores ranged as I recall from Kaltenbrunner somewhere between 110 and 115, I think, to Seyss-Inquart who I think scored a bit above 140. The greatest number of scores were in the 120's. Based on this as well as the IQ data of Linda Gottfredson I would guess that the US business and political elite probably averages somewhere around 125.

125 is roughly the 95th percentile of the US population IQ distribution.

I just checked on Wikipedia and it says that Seyss-Inquart's tested IQ at Nuremberg was 141 but it also says that Schacht had the highest score although it doesn't give his score. Schacht was acquitted. Seyss-Inquart was hanged.

Let me just note that a lengthy discussion of the IQ scores of leading Nazis is doing nothing to dispel my uneasiness about the association between discussions of innate intelligence and creepy racism.

Evolution is a complex natuaral process and there is essentially no chance that it would produce results corresponding to some simple moral pattern such as equality. Measured IQ levels of different racial/ethnic groups range over 4 standard deviations. Measured heights of different racial/ethnic groups range over about six standard deviations.

Asheekenazi Jewish accomplishments in intellectually demanding fields as measured by Nobel Prizes, Field Medals, number of Grandmasters etc in relation to their population numbers are simply extraordinary. If you can beiieve that this has nothing to do with genetics you can believe anything.

To JohnGalt47 - 115 would be abou the 85th percentile of the US IQ distribution. You can't be serious.

To JohnGalt47 - In Linda Gottfredson's study of the relation between IQ and occupation the lawyer with the lowest IQ was 115 and the engineer with the lowest IQ was 114. If you seriously believe that the average IQ of the US business/political elite is 115 you're bat-shit crazy.

I see much slinging of IQ scores, but no mention of their Standard Deviation constant. Which are different in the UK and the US. In the UK, spcifically the Cattel Scale III and siblings, use 25 as the marker, thus 148 is used by Mensa to select from the 98th percentile. In the US, exemplified by the WAIS IV and siblings, the constant is 15, so here Mensa use IIRC 125 for the 98th percentile. Both reflect taking the tail above slightly under 2 standard deviations from the IQ 100 point (which is the same in both scales).

So you are probably all correct, were you to apply the correct deviation constants. Although I agree, whichever one uses, 115 does seem a bit low for highly educated professions, but were those measurements also correlated with proficiency?

Chad, I don't know if you're familiar with any of the work of Professor John Mighton.

He is a mathematician who, while he doesn't claim that everyone has equal inclination, or even exactly equal ability, to do math, also firmly knows that there aren't people who "can't do math" (other than, perhaps, those few with extremely rare brain disorders).

He has developed a program called JUMP that uses that fact as a starting principle, and it seems to be having quite an effect in places where it's used.

As for Jim:
When you can show me a population of children of Ashkenazi Jews who were not raised in the culture, who do as well as those who are, then I'll consider that there might be some merit to your genetic claims. However, since forcibly doing this experiment would be very wrong, that's never going to happen.

Love your writing, but wonder what your story would be like if you just left out the info about how poor the neighborhood was at the outset. I'd like it better since wealth and opportunity are not guarantors of intellectual curiosity. Ask any humanities prof who teaches business students.

Nice essay. Regarding distribution of wealth related to socially approved talents, the Nobel-winning physicist Steven Weinberg - whom, to feed your troll, I would guess from his name might be of Ashkenazi heritage - once said something to the effect of: "I have never understood why the untalented were less deserving of the finer things in life than other people." That is to say, if the only reason we aren't all employed as PhD physicists is that we are lazy and have inferior cultural backgrounds, we might deserve material deprivation, but if it is because we lack the genetic gifts to hack it, how is it fair we should be made to suffer for accidents of birth?

Cash and Respect

drorzel — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 07:41:03 +0000

Cash and Respect

The London School of Economics has a report on a study of academic refereeing (PDF) that looked at the effect of incentives on referee behavior. They found that both a "social incentive" (posting the time a given referee took to turn around the papers they reviewed on a web site) and a cash incentive ($100 Amazon gift card for meeting a 4-week deadline) worked to increase the chance of a referee accepting a review request, and improved the chances that they would meet the deadline. The effect of cash was a little smaller for tenured faculty, but they were slightly more susceptible to the social incentive.

The effect of cash is substantial in both cases, though. When offered a cash incentive, 58% of tenured faculty met the deadline, compared to about 30% without the money; for untenured faculty, it was 78% up from around 40%. It's easy to explain this in purely economic terms-- junior faculty are paid less, and thus the money means more-- but for both groups it roughly doubled the fraction of faculty who got reviews in on time. Which is kind of impressive for not all that much cash.

Of course, there's another factor at work in both of the incentives, namely respect. As with all volunteer or poorly compensated work, it's a lot easier to get people to do it if they feel that their efforts are really appreciated. To some extent, the cash incentive serves as a tangible demonstration of that respect.

And that's something that's easily underrated in all sorts of interactions. One of the things I really hate about going to medical appointments is the all too common sense of disrespect-- I take time off work to go there, I arrive on time for my appointment, and then I'm kept sitting around for a long time for no obvious reason. This can be further compounded by attitude during the appointment-- back in 2007 or so when I had a serious acid reflux problem, the PA I was sent to at the local gastroenterology practice made it absolutely clear that his primary concern was to get me out of his office as quickly as possible. He didn't want to listen to anything I had to say (to the point where when I said "The medication seemed like it worked for a day or two, but it's just as bad now as it was before the pills" and he wrote down "symptoms controlled by medication"). That was almost as dispiriting as the continued symptoms themselves.

I got more useful feedback from the allergist I was seeing for a different problem (who had had reflux issues of his own) than from the expensive specialist I was supposedly being treated by for the stomach problem. Mostly because he was sympathetic, and listened to what I said, so I felt I was being taken seriously. In fact, it's a particularly interesting comparison, because while the acid reflux issues went away as mysteriously as they started, I continue to have allergy symptoms. And yet, I have a much more positive association with the unsuccessful allergist than the nominally successful gastroenterologist, because I feel like the former treats me with respect, while the latter did not.

(There's also a connection here to the studies that show that a significant fraction of medical malpractice lawsuits could be avoided by an apology from the doctor. People get driven into court not so much because of the financial impact, but because the feeling of being jerked around and disrespected makes them want some tangible form of revenge.)

Similarly, you have civic obligations like jury duty, which I was discussing with a colleague not that long ago. This is, as I blogged about a long time ago, another area that's annoying not just because of the time it takes away from other things, but because of the palpable lack of respect for the time of the people being asked to serve. Jury service would be a lot more palatable if the process were re-thought so that the potential jurors felt their time was actually being valued, beyond the rote statements of thanks in the mandatory videos and comments from the judge. This doesn't need to involve any real expense, just treating the people who are giving up a day of work with the same respect accorded to the judges and lawyers running the process.

Getting back to academic journal refereeing, in theory, simply being asked to review a paper ought to be some indication of respect within the profession. In practice, though, most people are well aware that journals are desperate for referees, and will accept reports from just about any warm body who will agree to submit a report. And while you can, in theory, list "Referee for Journal of Important Stuff in My Field" on your CV, that carries next to no weight, in part because there's no way to confirm it. Which is probably why the social incentive works, as well-- even a list of names on a web site is a more tangible token of respect than the form-letter thank you (followed closely by another paper to review) that is the usual reward.

Of course, cash is an even more substantial means of conveying respect. Which is why it shows up in lots of places. And I suspect that the conflation of cash and respect is a big part of why academics are so willing to invest disproportionate amounts of time and energy in wrangling over relatively small amounts of money.

We have a "merit pay" system at Union that provides a small extra payment to faculty whose activities for the year are judged particularly worthy (in addition to an across-the-board pay raise given to all faculty in the general direction of a cost-of-living adjustment). If you tally up the faculty time spent reporting activities and reviewing reports to make merit decisions, though, the cost in terms of salaries is almost certainly comparable to the amount of money being distributed in merit pay, but people are very attached to the system, and will argue bitterly about what should and shouldn't count, and how the distribution should be handled. I consistently find myself sucked into these discussions, even though I worked out some time back that in purely financial terms, it's not worth the time.

But purely financial terms aren't the whole story-- it's also about respect as a professional academic. And for people who have passed their tenure review, the merit system is just about the only mechanism we have for indicating respect. The arguments about what should and shouldn't count toward merit decisions are as intense as they are not because the financial benefits are life-altering, but because the criteria have a symbolic value that greatly exceeds the financial value-- as an indicator of what the college as a whole finds worthy of respect.

There's a negative effect to the conflation of cash and respect in this sort of system, though. In particular, there are a number of activities that are not generally recognized through the merit system because they are compensated through other means that are directly or indirectly financial in nature-- outside work that's paid directly, say, or activities that come with release time reducing the teaching load for that person. In financial terms, this makes sense, but when you view the money as an indicator of respect, it ends up having a negative psychological effect. While it's a logical solution to the problem of limited resources with which to reward faculty, it's difficult to keep people from feeling that their hard work has been disrespected on a professional level, even if they're been appropriately compensated in purely economic terms.

Of course, the conflation of money and respect can get way more toxic than it does in academia-- the service industry has it way worse. I suspect there's a strong element of confusion between cash and respect going on in the problematic culture of tipping in the US, for example. All too many customers evidently feel that the financial transaction associated with buying a meal (or whatever) takes the place of needing to treat their servers with non-financial respect. And while the obvious solution would be to raise salaries for service industry workers to the point where tips aren't financially necessary, changing the social norms so that not getting a tip doesn't feel like an act of disrespect is a tricky issue.

So, anyway, kind of a meandering post, I know. Anyway: respect, it's a Thing. Which may or may not involve the exchange of cash, but needs to be considered when thinking about how to motivate people to do important tasks.

And here, have a music video as a reward for reaching the bottom of the post:

drorzel Thu, 09/18/2014 - 03:41

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All too many customers evidently feel that the financial transaction associated with buying a meal (or whatever) takes the place of needing to treat their servers with non-financial respect.

There's at least anecdotal evidence that it's worse than that, that many tippers think that they're entitled to a creepy degree of control over servers because they're tipping. See this shorter Slate overview article and this more detailed bit from a series written by a restaurant owner who abolish tips in favor of a service charge.

abolish tips in favor of a service charge

Or better yet, include taxes and gratuities in the price on the menu, which is standard practice in Europe. (Rounding up the bill is tolerated.) Over there, if the menu says that dish costs EUR20, it costs EUR20. Here, depending on where the restaurant is, your $20 course will cost you $24-26, because taxes and gratuity are not included in the quoted price.

As for refereeing, the current system has a perverse incentive. Not only is there no explicit reward for doing it well, but scientists who demonstrate proficiency are often "rewarded" by getting more assignments, while an editor who finds that a reviewer consistently gives superficial and/or late reviews tends not to give that reviewer future assignments. This is part of why I have seen turnaround times of 12 months or more on some of my proposals.

I recall a few times when I felt compensation was in order. Have you ever been the third referee on a paper, because the first two wildly disagree? Or an appeal referee when the author insisted on one? Those are nasty jobs. Or be the second or third to get the paper because the first ones couldn't stand to read it or wanted to delay a competitor but didn't want to actually reject it?

I am lucky to have a doctor who listens to me, but they also do a good job of scheduling (at least in the morning when I make my appointments).

I am also lucky to live in a community that has contiuously improved its jury selection bureaucracy. For example, they now have a secondary pool that is called for noonish (you phone in after 10:00) rather than bringing in 30 extra people at 8 am to be sure they have a big enough pool for all of the juries being picked that day. (They pick all juries on the same day even if the trial doesn't start until mid week.) Not so easy if you need to have someone cover a class, but much easier on many employers.

We also have the 21st century option of deferring jury service to a particular date within a 2 month window. A web calendar shows the dates when they will be seating juries but haven't yet sent out notices. That must make their job 100% easier.

Thanks for the Queen of Soul video, but I would have felt more respected if it wasn't lip-synched!

Having reviewed my share of physiology papers over the years, I agree wholeheartedly with your thesis that reviewers deserve a little respect from the publishing community. It is especially galling when you see how much they charge our libraries to subscribe to the journals that depend on our uncompensated work.

Kids Those Days

drorzel — Sun, 27 Jul 2014 06:32:59 +0000

Kids Those Days

Lance Mannion has a really nice contrast between childhood now and back in the 1970's that doesn't go in the usual decline-of-society direction. He grew up not too far from where I now live, and after describing his free-ranging youth, points out some of the key factors distinguishing it from today, that need to be accounted for before lamenting the lack of kids running around outside:

-- A lot of the houses in "the old neighborhood" are still owned by the people who owned them back in the day, so the only kids around are visiting grandkids,

-- Those homes that are occupied by families with kids are usually occupied by families with fewer kids than back in the day, so there are fewer older siblings to keep tabs on younger kids and that kind of thing,

-- Most importantly, back in the day, there were fewer two-career families. Those kids running around out in the neighborhood were always within shouting distance of multiple parents.

I'm a bit younger than Lance, and grew up way out in the country, but this rings pretty true to my experience. And as I said, we live in a neighborhood not all that far from the one he talks about, and the changes he describes also ring true. Our neighborhood is great, but it's split between families with kids and empty-nesters. The "with kids" fraction is increasing, but there are probably two childless houses for every one with kids, and most of the families are on the smaller side compared to the 70's-- I can't think of anyone in the immediate neighborhood with more than three kids.

So a lot of things have changed to make it less likely that you'll see kids running around outside. Which doesn't mean there aren't kids running around outside-- my computer sits in front of a window that faces the street, and when I'm home during the day, I regularly see kids running and playing outside. But the overall numbers are reduced to a point where it's fairly likely that people driving through the neighborhood could reasonably be clucking their tongues and talking about how sad it is that no kids play outside any more. You have to live here to know that there are kids around, because the density is lower than it used to be.

And the lack of kids is more apparent during the day, for the economic reasons Lance notes. Basically all of the families with kids in the area are two-career families, which means that during work hours, the number of kids around drops to nearly zero. They're all in day care, even in the summer. Not because parents are overly controlling, or afraid to let their kids roam, but because they're at work, because they have to be to live in this neighborhood. This also feeds some of the "never away from parents" thing that people talk about, because the time parents get to spend with their kids is more limited and thus more valuable.

But there are pockets that seem a lot like the old days-- down the block from us, there's a cluster of three families all with kids about SteelyKid's age (including one of her kindergarten classmates). Those kids are in and out of each others' houses and yards all day long, often with no visible adult supervision. SteelyKid had a friend over yesterday, and we wandered down there after lunch, where the kids ran around a lot like it was back in the day. It's a little too far to just send a six-year-old off there on her own (and none of the houses between here and there are families with kids), but within a few years, I can easily imagine pointing SteelyKid in their direction after school and on weekends, and having the kids from down there show up in our yard.

Anyway, it's worth reading Lance's post, because it's a cut above most of the hand-wringing you see about the way we raise kids these days. It's really not as dire a situation as a lot of cultural critics make out, if you look carefully at what's changed from the "good old days."

drorzel Sun, 07/27/2014 - 02:32

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Taking a mental inventory of my street: Of 17 houses with addresses on the street, four have children high-school age or younger (I'm including one who may have graduated last month), and there are a total of six kids in those houses: the possibly-graduated high schooler, one middle schooler, a pair in elementary school/middle school, and a pair where the older is in elementary school and the younger is a preschooler. There are other kids in the neighborhood, but I'm not sure there are enough for two complete baseball teams.

There are also five houses owned by empty nesters (including two whose kids grew up elsewhere), two owned by heirs who grew up in those houses (neither of which have children of their own), two occupied by students, and four (including me) owned by people who don't have children and didn't grow up on that street.

I live in a university town, so we probably have more childless homeowners and more group rentals than most places, but I don't think these numbers are extreme.

One thing that has really changed since the 1970s is that the leisure/cultural activities of adults and children have merged. In 1974 it would have been unthinkable for my 40-year old father to accompany my brothers and me when we rode our bikes along the muddy trails in the woods behind the school. Today, it's often the parent who initiates the mountain bike adventure.

In a strange way, this merging of youth and adult culture is actually a trend back to the way things used to be. I think the 1950-70s were unique in that "youth culture" was very separate from culture in general. You can see it clearly in photos from the era, where kids dress very differently to their parents. Today, dad and junior will be wearing the same t-shirts and hoodies -- just as dad and junior would be wearing similar clothes in a pre-war photo.

Maybe what we are mourning is the end of a unique era when -- as Chad and Lance point out -- the economic and social situation allowed children to be children rather than smaller versions of adults.

I am older than both of you, and that analysis is spot on. (A common factor might be that our neighborhood was fairly new and affordable so it was occupied by people who moved in and had kids. Exactly when that happened is not important as long as it was before the changes that took place during the 70s and 80s inflation years and structural changes that got built into law starting with Reagan.)

Every house had kids and most had a parent at home. I had classmates at the end of the block or on the next block that I never played with because there were plenty in the next house or two. All we had to do was tell mom where we were going and be home on time. It probably helped that the parents knew each other, either in the neighborhood or via the PTA.

That doesn't explain why we were allowed to ride our bicycles miles from home. The probably assumed (sometimes incorrectly) that the other neighborhoods were just as safe as ours, but we had also developed a bit of sense along the way (e.g. supervised ride on a city bus) in the same way my parents had learned to be on their own.

As you note, those same neighborhoods became depelted of children because all the homeowners remained around the same age. I know one in particular where the turnover is now complete, but the age distribution of the owners (and thus the children) is now more diverse because the change happened over decades, and the number of children per family is also smaller. Affordability also plays into this shift.

Finally, IMO, the nationalization of one-in-a-million local events onto every local TV news show came later and is another important explanation of the differences seen today. Local TV news was only 15 minutes long when I was in elementary school and both TV and newspapers were fundamentally local until after I was in college. Paranoia became rampant and seems to generate exactly what is feared the most.

I have to disagree with Hamish @2, although I can understand how photographs would lead to that impression. You have to remember that photographs were expensive and posed until well into the 50s. You have to get into the Instamatic era to see informal situations, and even those were far less common than today.

First hand stories tell a different tale. I won't go into details, but my father and grandfather had more freedom of movement than my generation did, and we had a lot.

What Scientists Should Learn From Economists

drorzel — Mon, 07 Jul 2014 07:58:05 +0000

What Scientists Should Learn From Economists

Right around the time I shut things down for the long holiday weekend, the Washington Post ran this Joel Achenbach piece on mistakes in science. Achenbach's article was prompted in part by the ongoing discussion of the significance (or lack thereof) of the BICEP2 results, which included probably the most re-shared pieces of last week in the physics blogosphere, a pair of interviews with a BICEP2 researcher and a prominent skeptic. This, in turn, led to a lot of very predictable criticism of the BICEP2 team for over-hyping their results, and a bunch of social-media handwringing about how the whole business is a disaster for Science as a whole, because if one high-profile result is wrong, that will be used to argue that everything is wrong by quacks and cranks and professional climate-change deniers.

This happens with depressing regularity, of course, and it's pretty ridiculous. The idea that climate-change denial gains materially from something as obscure as the BICEP2 business is just silly. They don't need real examples, let alone examples of arcane failures that even a lot of professional physicists can't explain. We had a conversation at lunch a week or so after the initial announcement, and none of the faculty in the department could manage a good explanation of why the polarization pattern they saw would have anything to do with gravitational waves. There was some vague mumbling about how we should see if we can get somebody here to give a talk about this, and that was about it. If tenured faculty in physics and astronomy take a shrug-and-move-on approach to the whole business, it's not likely to make much of an impression on the general public; certainly not enough to be politically useful.

People profess doubt about climate science not because of any rational evidence about the fallibility of science, but because it's in their interests to do so. A handful of them are extremely well compensated for this belief, while for many others it's an expression of a kind of tribal identity that brings other benefits. It's conceivable, barely, that a "Scientists can't even properly account for the effects of foreground dust on cosmic microwave background polarization" line might turn up in some grand litany of claims about why you can't trust the scientific consensus, but it's going to be wayyyyy down the list. They're perfectly happy to run with much splashier and far stupider claims that have nothing to do with the physics of the Big Bang. (Which a non-trivial fraction of their supporters probably regard as heretical nonsense, anyway...)

I'm not even sold on the complaints about "hype," and particularly the notion that somehow the BICEP2 results and possible implications should have been kept away from the public until after the whole peer review process had run its course. For one thing, that's not remotely possible in the modern media environment. Even if the BICEP2 folks had refrained from talking up their result, posting a preprint to the arxiv (as is standard practice these days) would've triggered a huge amount of excitement anyway, because there are people out there who know what these results would mean, and they have blogs, and Twitter accounts. This isn't something that you're going to just slide under the radar, and if there's going to be excitement anyway, you might as well ride it as far as it will take you.

(Really, the fact that there's any market at all for hype about cosmology ought to be viewed as a Good Thing. It means people care enough about the field to be interested in hot-off-the-telescope preliminary results, which isn't true of every field of science.)

And I don't think the BICEP2 people have done anything underhanded, or behaved especially like hype-mongers. Confronted with issues concerning their data analysis, they quite properly revised their claims before the final publication. A real fraud or faker would double-down at this point, but they're behaved in an appropriate manner throughout.

Most importantly, though, as Achenbach notes, science is a human enterprise, and is every bit as prone to error and misinterpretation as anything else hairless plains apes get up to. (In fact, as I argue at book length, this is largely because all of those enterprises use the same basic mental toolkit...)

All those other enterprises, though, seem to have come to terms with the fact that there are going to be mis-steps along the way, while scientists continue to bemoan every little thing that goes awry. And keep in mind, this is true of fields where mistakes are vastly more consequential than in cosmology. We're only a week or so into July, so you can still hear echos of chatter about the various economic reports that come out in late June-- quarterly growth numbers, mid-year financial statements, the monthly unemployment report. These are released, and for a few days suck up all the oxygen in discussion of politics and policy, often driving dramatic calls for change in one direction or another.

But here's the most important thing about those reports: They're all wrong. Well, nearly all-- every now and then, you hit a set of figures that actually hold up, but for the most part, the economic data that are released with a huge splash every month and every quarter are wrong. They're hastily assembled preliminary numbers, and the next set of numbers will include revisions to the previous several sets. It's highly flawed provisional data at best, subject to revisions that not infrequently turn out to completely reverse the narrative you might've seen imposed on the original numbers.

Somehow, though, the entire Policy-Pundit Complex keeps chugging along. People take this stuff in stride, for the most part, and during periods when we happen to have a functional government, they use these provisional numbers more or less as they're supposed to be used. which is what has to happen-- you can't wait until you have solid, reliable numbers from an economic perspective, because that takes around a year of revisions and updates, by which time the actual situation has probably changed. What would've been an appropriate policy a year ago might be completely wrong by the time the numbers are fully reliable. So if you're in a position to make economic policy, you work with what you've got.

And everyone accepts this. You won't find (many) economists bemoaning the fact that the constant revising of unemployment reports makes the profession as a whole look bad, or undercuts their reputation with the general public. They know how things work, policy-makers know how things work, and everyone gets on with what they need to do. And, yeah, every report gets some political hype, blasting the President/Congress for failing to do something or another, but every round of these stories will include at least a few comments of the form "Yeah, this looks bad, but these are preliminary numbers, and we'll see how they look a few months from now."

So, this is the rare case where scientists need to act more like economists. Mistakes and overhype are an inevitable part of any human-run process, and we need to stop complaining about them and get on with what we need to do. If people still trust economists after umpteen years of shifting forecasts, science will weather BICEP2 just fine.

drorzel Mon, 07/07/2014 - 03:58

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I think you are right that science could learn much from the field of economics. The concept of preliminary data is completely consistent with both fields of study. I think a better example however is Freakonomics a book that pioneered the economic study of non-traditional topics. The authors pointed out over and over that financial incentives drove the results. The same principle can apply to scientific inquiry and to the critics of same. It is a powerful force.

Of People, Things, and Places

drorzel — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 07:21:26 +0000

Of People, Things, and Places

I'm not quite awake enough yet to deal with reviewing copyedits and reformatting figures for the book-in-process, so while I wait for the caffeine to kick in, let's talk something simple and cheerful: rural poverty. This week, Vox and the New York Times both touched on this, the former with a story about the food stamp cookbook and the latter with a magazine story about Clay County, KY, spinning off a statistical study of the hardest places to live in the US.

The Vox piece is mostly on poverty in general, and how there's more to the bad diets of poor people than just lack of money-- something I've written about before but also includes a brief acknowledgement that poor people in rural areas face different problems, something that's not handled very well in most discussions of inequality. The Times piece gets more to the heart of the issue, though, noting that the biggest problem with rural areas is that they're, well, rural. They're not on major highways, or close to cultural centers, and thus it's hard to do anything that would draw industry there. As the author notes, this leads to an uncomfortable conclusion:

The queasy answer that economists come to is that it would be better to help the people than the place — in some cases, helping people leave the place. Generally, the wealthier and better educated the family, the more mobile they are. It takes resources to pack up all your things, sign a new lease, pay for gas or a flight and go. That might help explain why more Americans aren’t flocking from places with high unemployment rates to places with low ones, even if those places are surprisingly close together. College graduates, for instance, are several times as responsive to differences in labor demand as those who completed only high school, according to a study in The Journal of Human Resources.

But government policy based less on place and more on people might help ameliorate that trend. “Let’s say I was a hardworking person who lost my job in Harlan, Ky. — the ideal place, really, to go is Williston, N.D.,” Senator Paul said. “People need to be mobile to go there. Some government programs prevent mobility or discourage mobility.” And none encourage it: There are scant federal resources to help the unemployed or the poor in rural areas move to a job or even just a better neighborhood.

This is a topic that's relevant to my interests because of where I grew up, in a small town in central New York state, during a time when the local industries were all packing up and moving away. I've seen a lot of people struggle with this-- when I was a kid, it was a rare year that we didn't see a classmate or two move away as IBM (the biggest white-collar employer in the area) shifted most of its operations to North Carolina-- they moved so many people from the Binghamton area down there that in the mid-90's, you could find Salamida's Spiedie Sauce in Food Lion supermarkets on the Outer Banks). And now, the high school classmates I'm in contact with on Facebook are spread over a huge range, many down South, but a lot still in the Broome County area.

And, of course, it wouldn't be a Times article about stuff on the far side of the Tappan Zee bridge without a couple of bits that get my back up a little-- though it should be noted that this is vastly better than the usual pith-helmeted anthropological reporting they churn out. The chief problem is the way this is treated as a purely abstract economic issue. There's a faint tone of puzzlement that it's difficult to get people to move, and a quote from a Kentucky official saying "People are really connected to place here."

But this sort of circles back around to the problem noted in the Vox piece. It's not just the place, but the people in the place. The resistance isn't just that a Kentuckian moving to North Dakota would hate the winters or miss having scenery with more topography, it's that moving a single family out is often taking them away from a deeply rooted support network. Which is, in large part, how rural families cope with issues in the Vox piece, of lack of time and so on-- if you're in a place where you have lots of close relatives, you can help each other out with extra food and emergency child care and so on. And even less tangible stuff like general emotional support-- the benefits of just having somebody close you can vent to over coffee or beer after a bad day are tremendous but hard to quantify.

And that's what makes this a harder problem than the raw numbers might suggest. While on paper it might seem like a no-brainer to move from collecting disability in Kentucky to working a better-paying job in North Dakota, there are a lot of difficult-to quantify other factors that play in. The pay might be better in North Dakota, but if moving means finding and paying for child care that used to be provided free by a nearby relative, well, the pay better be a whole lot better. There are also cascading effects on folks left behind-- if moving away means leaving a less-mobile relative without somebody to run errands and help around the house, that has negative consequences for others that might outweigh individual financial benefits. And so on.

So, while I agree that the Times piece correctly identifies one of the issues at the heart of this, I don't think they've really grasped the full dimensions of the issue. Particularly in small communities, people aren't just isolated units, but are bound into a whole web of interactions that go beyond the readily measurable economic factors (which is not to say that they couldn't be measured, just that it's not as straightforward as comparing salaries). And given the background you need to have to end up writing for a major national media outlet, or working on government poverty policy, there's a systematic bias that prevents this from being fully grasped and incorporated into the discussion.

This has consequences in policy areas beyond simple economics, too-- it's a big and underappreciated factor in things like the debate over fracking (a major and continuing issue in Broome County), as I've written about before. A lot of the unpleasantness in the arguments over fracking come from a lack of understanding of the connection between people, places, and things-- on both sides of the debate. On the pro-fracking side, I got in a shouting argument over this with some college friends who said "People in that area should sell the drilling rights for shitloads of money, and if the drilling wrecks the local environment, well, they'll be rich enough to move away." They were boggled at the idea that "just move away" wasn't a trivial matter for people in the affected area, in a way that seemed to me to be condescending and borderline insulting.

And on the anti-fracking side, while as a scientist and a squishy liberal I agree that it would be better to leave that gas underground and switch to energy sources that don't drive climate change, as someone who grew up in Broome County, I totally understand why people are in favor of drilling. It's not just laziness or Fox News brainwashing or simple greed-- shale gas might be the first good economic news for that region since I've been aware of economic news. To a lot of people in those communities, fracking represents a lifeline, an infusion of cash into the community that can prevent the need to make the wrenching decision of whether to leave. A lot of the environmental anti-fracking arguments end up in that same condescending "just move away," because they don't understand what it's like to be in that position.

For all that the national political rhetoric pays lip service to salt-of-the-Earth rural communities as the wholesome core of our national character, there's basically no understanding of the ground-level issues and concerns of those communities. Because the people who are involved in national-level politics and the discussion thereof are, more or less by definition, not the kind of people who understand what it's like to be strongly tied into that kind of community. The terms of the debate, and the policy options, are set by the class of people who feel free to move away to the cities where policy is made and chin-stroking think pieces about the problems of the rural poor are published.

And that, right there, is probably the biggest infrastructure problem facing rural American communities: that they're not the sort of places that people who write for the New York Times live.

drorzel Fri, 06/27/2014 - 03:21

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Something else that having a little money can buy is the ability to stay connected with the people you left behind in your home town. Both of my parents came from small towns on the Great Plains, and while we were growing up we would take family trips to visit both sets of grandparents (who lived about a day's drive apart, and 4-5 days drive from where we lived). I see it even more with my foreign-born co-workers, who find a way to bring the family back to the old country every couple of years or so to visit their relatives.

One possibility is for a family to send somebody where the job is, and he sends money home. This is routine in some communities in the US and throughout the world. But this is hardly an ideal solution, either: who is willing to be the first person from Harlan to try taking a job in Williston? Certainly it gets easier for the others who follow, because they will find a support network of people from their county in place. This is part of why immigrants frequently cluster together (Chinese in my town, Indonesians a couple of towns away, etc.). But in the meantime you have, at least in this country, a group of (mostly) men separated from their families. In countries where both foreign workers and domestic servants are common, like the oil states of the Arabian peninsula, the gender imbalance isn't as bad, but the issues of separation from family still apply. In other places, women and girls are lured into the sex trade.

Looking back at history, it seems the there are two groups of people who came to the US one group came and essentially stayed where they were for generations, forming tight communities as suggested in KY. (In my background this happened in Southern Indiana, and lasted until after WWII). The other group kept moving every generation, From NJ in 1790 to Ohio to IA in 1840, (other members of the family kept moving west even after that). Of course back then such moving meant cutting your self off from support groups. Now in some cases in terms of immigration preachers led entire communities to come to the US.
What I take from looking is there must be two different personality types involved. Do we know of sociological studies that determine when one moves and one does not (I suspect that a tightly knit community discourages movement as suggested in the post). Looking at family history you find often that relatives would come to the us and settle in the same area, i.e. the pathfinders did write back and tell folks how it was and more came over)

These regional concentrations are also sometimes deliberately encouraged. Broome County has a very large Eastern European community because the Endicott-Johnson shoe company recruited heavily among those immigrants. Local tradition has it that immigrants on ships bound for the US were taught to say "Which way EJ?" at Ellis Island, and shipped up to the Binghamton area.

(More recently, Broome County has attracted a lot of immigrants from Southeast Asia, particularly Laos, a process that was starting when I was in high school (one of the area schools suddenly had a really good soccer team made up mostly of Laotian kids). There's a big Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Whitney Point, now. I'm not sure how deliberate that was, though.)

Schenectady had some programs in the early 2000s to bring recent immigrants from Guyana here to join a smallish community that was already doing well. One of the previous mayors even went to Guyana at one point in hopes of bringing some people straight here. That's worked out pretty well, on the whole.

Do we know of sociological studies that determine when one moves and one does not

I don't know about sociological studies, but certainly some people move when conditions become so severe that staying where they are is not an option, even if they otherwise would remain.

If you go walking in the woods around here (New Hampshire), you will occasionally encounter a stone wall. These walls marked the boundaries between neighboring farms. Then in 1815 an Indonesian volcano called Tambora erupted, the most powerful eruption witnessed by people who lived to write about it. Several years of crop failures followed. Many people left for Ohio and points west, where the soil is better and the growing season is longer. As marginal farmland was abandoned, the forests grew again.

In other cases, the driver is war (that's why many of the Southeast Asian immigrants who arrived in the US in the 1970s and 1980s came over) or persecution (probably a contributing factor to the Indonesian community a couple of towns over--they're mostly Christian, coming from a majority Muslim country, and those two religions have a history of not playing well together).

It would be interesting to look at families where some stay and others move. That would include some of my relatives: one of my cousins operates the ranch that our grandfather ran, and his two surviving brothers also live in the state (having moved back after several years elsewhere), but the rest of us are elsewhere.

Apropos of Eric Lund's comment on New Hampshire: Science had a short article on why people move from place to place in Indonesia. It's usually the heat. Changes in average temperature and, sometimes, changes in rainfall, encourage people to move elsewhere. This shouldn't be surprising as 40% of Indonesian households are agricultural.

http://news.sciencemag.org/asiapacific/2014/06/volcanic-eruption-probab…

With a Broome County, that assumes that people that own the land own the mineral rights, too, which they may not.

I sometimes wonder if there is a gene or roup of genes for "moving" and "not moving" that is responsible for what Lyle noted @2. I know people who move frequently, both within a given area (house to house) as well as from job to job, whereas my extended family migrates somewhat but tends to stay where they end up. I come from generations of paid-off 30 year mortgages, but separating genetics from culture is a difficult game.

Great Moments in Puzzling Axis Labels

drorzel — Sat, 26 Apr 2014 06:50:43 +0000

Great Moments in Puzzling Axis Labels

While I'm complaining about statisticulation in social media, I was puzzled by the graph in Kevin Drum's recent post about college wage gaps, which is reproduced as the "featured image" above, and also copied below for those reading via RSS. I don't dispute the general phenomenon this is describing-- that the top 10% of college grads earn way more than the average, and the bottom 10% way less, and somewhat less than high school grads-- but I'm baffled about what was done to generate this graph.

Specifically, I'm puzzled by the vertical axis, which is labeled "Real hourly wage (natural log)." That seems to imply that this is a log scale in disguise, so a particular vertical interval corresponds to a multiplication of the starting value, not an addition. But then the scale is completely wacky-- a value of 100 for the natural log would imply that a college grad in the 90th percentile earns 10⁴³ times the wage of a high-school grad, which is rather more than the entire economic production of the planet. That's an understatement, by the way-- 10⁴³ is something like the number of atoms in an asteroid with a mass of 1,000,000,000,000,000 kg.

Give that the figures for both men and women are very close to 100 at the modern end of the time series, I suspect that they divided college-grad income by high-school-grad income, took the log, and then scaled everything so the most recent data point has a value of 100. Which is the kind of thing economists like to do. I say "I think" because the figures is lifted almost directly from this 2010 report (PDF), which doesn't explain the vertical axis in any detail, either.

(Why take the log at all? Good question. I suspect because the high income is a large-ish multiple of the small, and using a linear scale would put the lower lines too close together to see any variation. A log scale spreads things out, and as a bonus makes the smaller numbers negative. The re-scaling completely obliterates any ability to reconstruct the underlying data, though.)

Really, this doesn't matter to anyone other than a giant nerd like me, because they don't do anything remotely quantitative with the data in the figure. Basically, they just say "Look, high-earning college graduates make more than high school grads, and low-earning ones somewhat less," and leave it at that. They could've left the puzzling numbers off entirely, and avoided distracting me, but they're working for the liberal Center for American Progress, not the American Enterprise Institute, so they use numbers on graphs to signify that they weren't just sketched on a cocktail napkin.

The underlying point-- that college-graduate wages are spread over a wider range than most people realize-- is a good one, worth thinking about. I also share Kevin's skepticism about some of the interpretation of this, particularly when you consider that some fraction of those recent grads are going to be in graduate or professional school earning minimal wages for several years in hopes of a larger payoff down the road.

But the labels on that graph are really distracting, at least if you're a giant nerd.

Figure from Kevin Drum's blog, modified from Schmitt and Boushey report.

drorzel Sat, 04/26/2014 - 02:50

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It's been a while (i.e., a couple of versions ago) since I have attempted to plot a log scale in Excel, but at the time it would only give you one major tick per decade, at best. (There might be a secret axis setting to change that, but I haven't looked, because there are better tools for plotting data). I suspect that Kevin tried to work around that issue, but wasn't completely accurate in describing what he did. I say this because while those graphs look a lot better than what you get by default in the Excel version I was using back then, they still scream Excel to me.

To be frank, the graph essentially constitutes an exercise in numerology. Not only is the y-axis scaled inappropriately, you can't even take the log of hourly wages in the first place. It's not a dimensionless number. You may as well take the log of meters.

It's sad to think that decisions affecting the lives of millions get based on such charts.

You may as well take the log of meters.

But you can do that, as long as you are clear that 1 meter is your reference length. Signal intensity is often measured in decibels, which is a logarithmic scale based on some reference level (typically but not always 1 mW). The problem (one problem, anyway) is that it's not clear what the reference level is in these graphs. That could have been easily solved by specifying the reference level (wage/salary per unit time). Of course, they also botched the scaling: we don't know what 100 means (only that the explanation they gave is absurd), whereas we would know that 100 dB means 10^10 times the reference level.

It's true that most people don't do that nowadays, because there are plotting utilities to handle the raw numbers. But electrical engineers and signal processing types still do, largely for historical reasons (log-log graph paper was hard to obtain when they started working on such things).

You're more charitable than I am: Those graphs appear to be made-up bullshit.

Even if you assume there's a slipped decimal place-- that 100 should be 10, etc-- that still implies that the "average" female college grad makes about 150 times as much as the "average" female high school graduate.

I don't know how they're massaging "average" but in Illinois, minimum wage is $8.25. Even if the average high school graduate is only working ten hours a week, that implies an annual income of well over half a million dollars a year for the average college grad.

As to the issue of dimensions, I'm pretty sure they took the log of the college-graduate wage divided by the average high-school-graduate wage (that is, ln(coll$/hs$)), which is a dimensionless number. That's why the high-school wage is zero for all years.

I don't think this is a genuine attempt at any sort of decibel scale (where everything would be multiplied by ten because reasons). I'm pretty sure that 100 is totally arbitrary-- after taking the log, they normalized everything to the last data point in the time series, and then multiplied by 100.

Niall: "You may as well take the log of meters."
Eric Lund: "But you can do that, as long as you are clear that 1 meter is your reference length."

It's even better, if you do things formally: log(Xm) = log(X)+log(m). Ignore the fact that "m" is a unit and not a number. Changing the unit of measure (e.g., foot vs metre) translates your data, whereas changing the base of the log scales it.

Some might see that as a bug, but it's actually a feature: if you're looking for something qualitative or even semi-quantitative (e.g., comparing histograms), you don't need to be distracted by those annoying numbers on the side or bottom of the graph, because they are (qualitatively) irrelevant.

The comparing histograms example was not hypothetical; I once had an engineer interrupt my presentation because the numbers on the horizontal scale didn't make sense (until you realize they're natural log, not base ten), whereas the main (only) point of the graph was to show that two histograms were significantly different ("look, this one's bimodal").

Occasionally (like in my histogram example, or the example that is the subject of this blog post), the mantra "always show the scale on your axes" backfires.

Their first figure reminded me that I had posted a longer time series of those data a year before:
http://doctorpion.blogspot.com/2009/06/gender-of-college-students-vs-ti…

You only hit the surface of the problem with that graph. What is worse is that it does not show the 90th and 10th percentile of HS grad wages, so they can be compared over time to the same median (not mean) HS grad wage. Might even be fun to have "median income of a 25-34 year old HS teacher" on that graph, but I'm more concerned that the "HS grad" population might include many with some college (or even a 2-year degree) but without a 4-year degree.

Not only that, the authors ignore their own graphs when making some of their claims. The "penalty" (if there is one, because we don't know the earning potential of the persons at the bottom before they went to college) of going to college has been decreasing, just as the unemployment rate of HS grads is higher than that of other populations.

Finally, the cover of that report, featuring a black man leaving a college building, reminds me of an ancient cartoon "a strong back is a terrible thing to waste" from the National Lampoon that showed a black student lifting a calculus book.

One more oddity - the x scales are different between the two graphs.

Well it's definitely not a decibel scale, because decibels use logs base ten. Nepers use natural log. But that's more pedantry than I think is warranted here.

If the vertical scale were simply labeled "percent more (less)" it would be clearer. I presume the actual formula used for the value on the vertical axis is equal to 100*{ln(wi/wo)-1} where wo is the high school wage and wi is the wage of the referenced group.

Food Takes Time

drorzel — Wed, 12 Feb 2014 07:45:32 +0000

Food Takes Time

Kevin Drum and Aaron Carroll report on a new study of the effect of new grocery stores opening in "food deserts" in poor neighborhood. The study is paywalled, so I can't speak to the whole thing, but both of them quote similar bits making the same point: no statistically significant effects on the BMI of people in the neighborhood, and very few signs of healthier eating in general.

This is one of those studies that probably belongs in the Journal of "Well, Yeah...", because it doesn't surprise me a bit. Not for reasons that can be addressed via policy measures-- Drum quotes the study saying "The development of new food retail stores should be combined with initiatives focused on price and availability that could help bridge the gap between improvements in people’s perceptions of accessibility and behavior change"-- but because of much more fundamental economics. I seriously doubt that people in the neighborhoods in question are eating badly because they don't know that what they're eating is crap-- they're eating badly because anything else takes time.

This story caught me at a moment when I was particularly susceptible to it, because one of the reasons today's planned physics posts didn't get done is that I made dinner last night before taking the kids off to a basketball game. Which I didn't strictly need to do-- I didn't even eat any of the food I made-- but I felt it was important because we've been eating a lot of frozen crap lately. All I did was to fry up some chicken breasts and steam some broccoli, but even blocking out 45 minutes for that is a challenge-- Kate and I both work all day, and don't get home until around 6pm. Bedtime for the kids is 7:30, which is about as late as we can let SteelyKid go and still be able to get her on the bus at 7:30 the next morning. That's not a time to cook and eat, especially once you factor in that SteelyKid requires half an hour of constant nagging to eat one hot dog.

So, if we want to eat healthy, fresh food, it comes out of my work day. I need to go home a little early, to do dinner prep, so stuff is nearly ready by the time the kids get home. To some extent, we can make large batches of stuff on weekends and re-heat leftovers, but weekend days have a way of getting eaten up as well, with play-dates and trips to see shows or movies, and home maintenance, and work that spills out of the office day. On the other hand, pre-made frozen food heats up in fifteen minutes, start to finish. When things get busy, that's a hard choice not to make.

And keep in mind I have a great job. I'm paid quite well, thank you very much, as is Kate, so buying food isn't a problem. And we're both highly educated professionals. If I need to leave a little early to deal with family stuff, I can do that, as long as I show up to teach my classes. And a lot of the time, we're just barely able to keep everything together. So imagine how much worse it would be for somebody punching a clock at one or more low-paying service jobs, where leaving a little early to get dinner ready means coming up short for the week.

People aren't eating crap because they don't know it's bad for them, or because they're brainwashed by food industry marketing, they're eating crap because it's fast and easy and if you've only got a narrow window in which to cook and eat, fast and easy is really tempting. Plus, most of that stuff tastes pretty good, and small pleasures, even guilty ones, are hard to begrudge people at the end of a long day.

On top of that, there's the question of habit-- this study is looking for and failing to find changes in set routines, and that's another big time sink. When we cook fresh food, we tend to rotate through a handful of dishes over and over, because while they're more complicated to make than frozen crap, they're familiar enough to be routine and easy. If I'm standing in the grocery store exhausted at the end of a long week, I'm not going for new recipes and unfamiliar vegetables. It's not that I don't like variety-- I enjoy cooking, and try out new recipes and ingredients when I can-- it's that learning to cook something different would take time that I just don't have. We regularly get offers to sign up for shares of vegetables from local farms, and while I'm sure it would be good for us, I always end up passing, because I don't have the time to learn how to cook new things, or badger the kids into eating them.

And again, if that's the situation for a family in eighty-mumbleth percentile of the income distribution, with jobs that allow flexible scheduling, it's going to be vastly worse for people who are punching the clock in the service sector. Learning new habits takes time, and there are only so many hours in the day. If you're just scraping by as it is, taking the time to learn new stuff-- particularly new stuff that will take more time on a continuing basis-- just isn't that attractive an option. Even if, on balance, it would be better for you in the long run.

So, again, the results of this study are utterly unsurprising to me. I'm also generally unimpressed with the policy prescriptions mentioned as possible solutions, though, because the issue is much deeper. This isn't something you can solve by spending money on educating people about eating better, it's something you can only solve by giving people more time. Which means a whole host of liberal-ish policies that don't seem to have anything to do with food-- higher wages, better working conditions, national health care, etc.-- but lie at the root of absolutely everything else.

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(Of course, there's also a cultural component to this that goes beyond mere economics. Most of the work-life juggling problems I have are to some degree self-inflicted. That is, I could choose to do the absolute minimum at work, and not run this blog, not write books, etc. That would free up lots of time for healthy cooking, exercising more, etc. We'd take a slight income hit from that, but we'd be perfectly comfortable with just our base salaries.

(A big part of why I don't have time is that I take on these extra projects that are optional. But then, I put a lot of time into the blog and the books because there are things that I want to accomplish via those activities. And I've been raised in a culture that values ambition, and striving for more, and that's just as hard to break out of as anything income-related...)

drorzel Wed, 02/12/2014 - 02:45

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I used to eat a lot of Trader Joe's frozen pastas. It seemed better than other quick stuff, but I was eating way too much pasta. Then Three Stone Hearth opened up in Berkeley. Now they cook amazing food that I can buy and heat up. Local, organic, sustainable ingredients - bone broth soups and stews, sourkraut, polenta with greens. It's expensive, but I'm in a similar situation to yours. Money isn't the issue, time is.

most of that stuff tastes pretty good

It's designed to do that. We evolved to crave protein and sugars, which provide a lot of energy but were scarce in the pre-modern world. Today we get plenty of those things--especially sugars--in processed foods. And it's a hard habit to get out of.

Fast food (McDonald's et al.) is tempting for the same reasons. If there is an outlet in your town, or on the way home from daycare, it's a quick solution to the food problem. It's not that much cheaper than cooking good meals from good ingredients, but it is quicker for most people. (I have various reasons for not patronizing such places, but one of the biggest is that most of the major chains don't have stores in my town--so driving back and forth eats up most of the time I would otherwise save.)

Amen. Cooking (properly) is difficult. You need:

a) Good ingredients (bought and stored)
b) To prepare ingredients
c) A recipe (Find a good book is a chore in itself)
d) Time to actually cook the food, and
e) (important in my opinion) Time to set the table properly to be conducive to a good meal
f) Clean up time

Each of this steps is straightforward, but takes time. We're all supposed to be working eight hours, and have eight hour at home, but with commutes, this works out to more like 11-12 hours work and 4 hours to ourselves. The art of daily cooking is a hobby a lot of people simply don't have time for anymore.

I honestly don't understand why supermarket don't sell pre-packaged, fridge-able sets of ingredients, (possibly prepared) with cooking instructions for full meals. They make a killing! I guess it's easier just to pile em high and sell em cheap.

Chad got close but missed the key element; it's about life style and what's important, not about time. Eating together as a family is essential, so make that a priority. Someday you will have the time and perhaps more insight to be able to write a great blog.

A Billion's Not That Much

drorzel — Fri, 24 Jan 2014 08:46:58 +0000

A Billion's Not That Much

The local sports-talk radio station is running a bunch of commercials from a tax prep service in which a loud announcer declares that "People who did their own taxes left one billion dollars on the table last year. That's billion with a 'b.'" and urges people to "Get your billion back!" by paying for their tax-return service. Which, you know, sounds like quite a bit.

Only, there are upwards of 300 million people in the US. So, a billion dollars is about $3 per person. So, it's maybe not as impressive as they want you to think.

Of course, a lot of those people are too young or too old to be filing tax returns anyway-- that probably reduces the population for the per-capita figure by around a factor of two, so $6 per working adult. And, of course, half of those folks (47%, famously, but we're going back-of-the-envelope here) don't pay federal income tax, so we're up to $12.

Then there's the question of how many people did their own taxes, which is a little tricky to answer. Obviously, the extremely rich have people to do their taxes for them, but they're only a few percent of the total. I'd be kind of surprised if the fraction of tax-paying adults who used a tax-prep service was even 50%, but let's take that as the figure, bringing the average taxpayer's share of those unclaimed tax benefits to a princely $24. $48 for a two-income family. That's not nothing, granted, but I bet it's also not a lot more than it costs to pay these folks to do your taxes for you...

Thus ends today's lesson about how knowing a bit of math makes advertising claims much less impressive.

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(Now, of course, that $1b isn't going to be evenly distributed-- lots of folks at the low end are already getting everything they can; it's really the people at the upper end of the taxpaying-but-not-paying-a-tax-service block who are being targeted, and those people probably stand to make well above that average. Still, we're not really talking vast sums of money for individual taxpayers, which makes the ad creepy and deceptive along with loud and annoying...)

drorzel Fri, 01/24/2014 - 03:46

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On the other hand, 9.2 quintillion is a lot. But even sports folks, who presumably know something about odds, are repeating it as if they genuinely believe that every game in the NCAA tourney is a 50-50 tossup. If you simply assume the 1-16 and 2-15 games are locks for the higher seed, you're down to 1 in 36 quadrillion. Quite manageable! Although, in comparison, the $1b that Warren Buffet is offering is still not that much.

If you're filing the 1040A or 1040EZ, it makes sense to do that yourself. You get a few standard exemptions and deductions, and that's all, folks. Conversely, if you're a rich person with lots of investments, hiring an accountant to do your taxes is a no-brainer, because he'll easily find enough deductions to cover his fee, and he will tell you exactly what records you need to keep (if he's not keeping them for you, which is likely if you are in the 0.1%) so that you can take those deductions.

This ad is targeted at the in-betweens: people with moderately complicated tax situations, but not so complex that a layman would have no hope of figuring it out. I'm in that category, and if you and Kate do your own tax returns, so are you. But TurboTax, which is what I use, is already reasonably good with tax situations like mine. I can envision circumstances where I would be better off going to an accountant (e.g., if I move and turn my current house into a rental property), but historically and for tax year 2013, TurboTax is good enough.

Side note: Why do so many ad people make their ads annoying? You want people to look at (or listen to, if it's a radio ad) your ad. I can't comment on the specific commercials you are hearing, but many of the ads I have been seeing on web sites for several years are visually repellant to me, and the radio ads I've heard aren't much better ("Call 1-800-URA-SUKR now! That's 1-800-URA-SUKR. 1-800-URA-SUKR."). I won't name any specific examples, lest the perverse algorithm of Google AdSense serve up the ad in question, but you've probably seen some of them, too.

There is some double counting here (not that it matters for the point of the post.) The 47% includes people who people Chad says "too old to pay taxes." About half or so of the 47% were seniors living on Social Security.

I think giving me a candy bar with a dollar bill taped to it was a more effective advertising campaign.

Not effective enough, mind you. But more effective.

Figure that there are, roughly, 330 million people in the US $1x10^9 works out to about $3 per person. No, not too awful much.

OTOH, the real decider of what is, or is not, too much to pay is not the price but what you get for your money. The presumption, one of the right-wing dog whistles, is that money given to the government is always wasted. That assumption is GOP boilerplate despite the actual evidence that many government programs are more efficient, in terms of both throughput versus overhead and outcomes. But evidence, true to form, has no impact on ideology held as an article of faith.

Sure, if you're so ideologically anti-government that you'd rather throw away $50 than give the federal government $12 to "throw away" and keep the other $38. Put it that baldly--do you hate the feds enough that you'd burn $38 of your own money to spite them?--I think most people would see that this is not in their own interest. If you think they're spending any of it efficiently, well, "Would you burn $38 of your own money so that another $12 could go to a tax preparer instead of paying for road repairs or veterans benefits?" [I'm picking programs that appeal to the sort of people who like to believe that food inspection is a waste of money.]

The commercials are by HR Block, not Intuit/TurboTax, just to clarify.

HR Block desperately wants your business because last year, for tax year 2012, they did not update their systems per IRS specifications, and most tax returns filed with the Education Credit / Form 8863 passed bad data to IRS. They (HRB) hemmed and hawed for a while, while taxpayers blamed the IRS, until HRB 's CEO/President admitted they were at fault. Facebook and other social media sites blew up last year, a lot of people waited several MONTHS for refunds that normally would take 3 to 4 weeks. A lot of them vowed never to use HRB again, wonder if they will or not?

A fair number of the people who pay no net federal income tax do so because of the earned income tax credit.

I think something like 20% of people eligible for the EITC fail to claim it (shocker: poor people aren't the best at navigating bureaucratic paperwork).