Month: February 2019

NYT: Greedy employers love women; woke university professors hate them

by philg

“The Secret History of Women in Coding: Computer programming once had much better gender balance than it does today. What went wrong?” (NYT, February 13, 2019) describes a golden age of female nerddom from the 1950s through the mid-80s. Employers would recruit, train, and pay people who identified as women to write software in IBM 704 assembly language. They would even do this for applicants who identified as part of two victim groups (a “young black woman” is cited).

According to the newspaper, once it became conventional for programmers to get Computer Science degrees, the percentage of women choosing coding dropped:

If we want to pinpoint a moment when women began to be forced out of programming, we can look at one year: 1984.

Who was forcing them out, then? University professors and the environments that they set up! Women-hating CS faculty were apparently eager to send approximately half of the potential students, and the funding that would accompany them, into the arms of less sexist departments.

The women described in the article don’t support the narrative of the NYT. One left coding because she wanted to be a lawyer and had a successful four-decade career in the law (see Atlantic article below on how the availability of higher-paid and more prestigious work in, e.g., finance, medicine, law, and politics can draw women away from the last-resort jobs of engineer and computer programmer).

The comments are interesting. A young woman reading these would certainly choose some career other than programming. Women describes decades of misery and sexism in the cubicle plantations where they’ve been stuck (and now they don’t even get cubicles!). So we have the odd phenomenon of the NYT saying that they are passionate about pushing up the number of women in STEM while simultaneously writing articles that any rational young woman would interpret as a huge warning flag regarding a STEM career.

Alternative explanations are not considered by the journalist and editors. For example, the purported golden age of female coding ended just as programming changed character. The job of data scientist today is a lot more like what a “programmer” was doing in the 1970s.

Another alternative is that the golden age coincided with a time of maximum female economic insecurity. No-fault divorce was being rolled out, in which the husband could unilaterally shed the wife in favor of a younger sex partner. But post-divorce financial arrangements were subject to the whims of individual judges due to a lack of guidelines and precedent. Once known-in-advance rules were set up, a lot of married women concluded that they didn’t need to work (see the economic study by Voena cited in “Litigation, Alimony, and Child Support in the U.S. Economy”). Child support guidelines introduced in the 1980s made it more lucrative for a woman to have sex with an already-married dentist or doctor than to go to work as a software engineer (see Massachusetts family law, for example).

Nor does the Times consider why female-run profit-hungry employers don’t seek out women to hire, train, and exploit. Sheryl Sandberg runs Facebook and advertises her passion for the advancement of women. If there is a huge reservoir of female coding talent out there, why wouldn’t Facebook tap into it with an aptitude test and an in-house training program? The cost of training women to the standard of a BSCS is less than what Facebook is currently spending to recruit men. (Remember that most of the four years of a BSCS is spent doing stuff that doesn’t relate to being a software engineer. For one thing, a full two years is spent not being in school at all.) How about Epic Systems and its multi-billionaire founder who identifies as a woman? Why wouldn’t they save a ton of money by recruiting and training an all-female staff to relive the glorious days of the 1960s with their 1960s database technology? (Epic rejects the RDBMS!)

Finally, the Times doesn’t consider the apparent inconsistency between this article and the rest of their journalism. Capitalism is responsible for the evils of racism and sexism. Universities are where enlightenment prevails. Is it that CS professors are the exception to the general rule? And what’s their motivation? Why do they want to see the biology department get the fancy new building to accommodate all of the female students (now a majority on campus)?

Finally, the article is strong on its mischaracterization of what James Damore, the cast-out Google heretic, wrote. (Has anyone at any American newspaper actually read his infamous memo?)

Readers: What was your favorite comment on this piece? I like the ones that say that the waning of female nerddom was due to the high salaries that purportedly began to be paid to programmers (the BLS can’t find this! Programmers today get paid less, on average, than the women described in the article were getting way back when). None of these coastal elites ask why, if it is all about the Benjamins, the percentage of women is growing in the highest-paid fields, such as medicine and finance.

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Meet in Austin, Texas this week?

by philg

Ever since being assured by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that socialism is essential for well-being, I have planned to visit Texas, where state/local government consumes only 7.6 percent of income (Tax Foundation; compare to New York at 12.7 percent), and enjoy it before the inevitable downward spiral from an undersized government.

It turns out that this is the big week for the investigation into the suffering endured by an under-served population.

I myself will be under-served at the Fairmont (no free Internet!).

Who would like to meet in Austin, perhaps coffee at the Fairmont, this week? I should be available Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings. I can also get together in the evening. Email to philg@mit.edu if interested.

Who has brilliant ideas for activities, cultural events, and sightseeing?

[Update: Wrap-up meeting on Thurday morning, 2/21, Fairmont lobby coffee bar, starting 8:30 am.]

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The Line Becomes a River: Illegal immigrants want to work

by philg

The Line Becomes a River is by a guy who worked as a Border Patrol agent between 2008 and 2012. It is a worthwhile book if you want to understand the texture of land-based illegal immigration and border control (only a subset of illegal immigration; a lot of our uninvited permanent guests showed up in an airplane on a visa of some sort and then either asked for asylum or simply stayed).

The book repeatedly makes the point that illegal immigrants are good people and want to work:

At the station I processed the man for deportation. After I had taken his fingerprints he asked me if there was any work for him at the station. You don’t understand, I said, you’ve just got to wait here until the bus comes. They’ll take you to headquarters and then on to the border. You’ll be back in Mexico very soon. I understand, he assured me, I just want to know if there is something I can do while I wait, something to help. I can take out the trash or clean out the cells. I want to show you that I’m here to work, that I’m not a bad person. I’m not here to bring in drugs, I’m not here to do anything illegal. I want to work. I looked at him. I know that, I said.

My mother sighed and looked up at the ceiling. There are ways to learn these things that don’t put you at risk, she said, ways that let you help people instead of pitting you against them. But that’s just it, I offered—I can still help people. I speak both languages, I know both cultures. I’ve lived in Mexico and traveled all across the country. I’ve seen towns and villages that were emptied out by people going north for work. Good people will always be crossing the border, and whether I’m in the Border Patrol or not, agents will be out there arresting them. At least if I’m the one apprehending them, I can offer them some small comfort by speaking with them in their own language, by talking to them with knowledge of their home.

it I saw two figures lying on a blanket that had been spread out between the pews and the altar. As I approached, a man looked up at me and squinted, holding out his hand to block the light. We were resting a little, he said. It’s just that we are lost, muy desanimados. A woman huddled close to him, hiding her face. The man propped himself up on one elbow and told me that they had crossed four days ago, that their guide had left them behind on the first night when they’d failed to keep pace with the group. They were lost for days, he said, with nothing to drink but the filthy water from cattle tanks. Puede ser muy fea la frontera, I told him. The man shook his head. Pues sí, he replied, pero es aún más feo donde nosotros vivimos. The man told me that they came from Morelos. My wife and I, we’re just coming to find work, he said. He rubbed his eyes in silence. I have fresh water for you, I told them. At the station there’s juice and crackers. The man looked at me and smiled weakly, then asked for a minute to gather their belongings. He stuffed some things into a backpack, then helped his wife to her feet. Her face was streaked with dried tears, and when she turned toward me I saw that she was pregnant.

The author describes encounters with drug smugglers and other criminals, but stresses that the majority of illegal immigrants are looking for work that would be legal if they were documented U.S. residents or citizens.

So the book supports the open borders abolish-ICE point of view? Yes, but it also inadvertently supports the “build the wall” point of view! The immigrants described, no matter how long they’ve lived in the U.S., never graduate from Welfare. They work at minimum wage and have 2-6 children. Thus they’re entitled to subsidized public housing, food stamps, Obamaphones, and either Medicaid or subsidized Obamacare health insurance policies. So they are simultaneously workers cheered by advocates of expanded immigration and lifetime welfare recipients decried by opponents. Example:

Agents found Martin Ubalde de la Vega and his three companions on the bombing range more than fifty miles north of the border. The four men had been in the desert for six days and had wandered in the July heat for over forty-eight hours without food or water.  … I had been charged with watching over de la Vega until his condition was stable, at which point I would transport him to the station to be processed for deportation. I settled in a chair next to him, and after several minutes of silence, I asked him to tell me about himself. He answered timidly, as if unsure of what to say or even how to speak. He apologized for his Spanish, explaining that he knew only what they had taught him in school. He came from the jungles of Guerrero, he told me, and in his village they spoke Mixtec and farmed the green earth. He was the father of seven children, he said, five girls and two boys. His eldest daughter lived in California and he had crossed the border with plans to go there, to live with her and find work. We spent the following hours watching telenovelas and occasionally he would turn to ask me about the women in America, wondering if they were like the ones on TV.

So this guy will be earning a middle class wage as soon as American employers need a lot of Mixtec speakers. The drug dealers, at least, have credible plans to make money:

We caught our first dope load only two days after arriving at the station. We were east of the port of entry when a sensor hit, just three miles away. … Two hundred fifty pounds of dope—not bad for your second day in the field. I asked Cole if we should follow the foot sign up into the pass, if we should try to track down the backpackers. Hell no, he said, you don’t want to bring in any bodies with your dope if you can help it. Suspects mean you have a smuggling case on your hands, and that’s a hell of a lot of paperwork—we’d have to stay and work a double shift just to write it up. Besides, he said, the prosecutors won’t take it anyway. Courts here are flooded with cases like this.

On the ride back to the station, the kid regained some composure. He told me he was eighteen, that he had planned to go to Oregon to sell heroin, un puño a la vez.

The book leaves some questions unanswered, e.g., why didn’t all of the people the author catches immediately claim asylum and thus delay their deportation for a few years? Why didn’t everyone find a young companion (who at least can credibly claim to be under 18) with whom to cross the border and then stay together after being caught under the Obama Administration’s policy of releasing parents if they had been snagged with a child?

As a taxpayer, I was horrified to read about the money being spent. The cost of border patrol agents, including pension and benefits, is staggering. Helicopters are flying constantly, notably for medical evacuation of dehydrated migrants found by these highly paid border patrol agents. These aren’t $350/hour Robinsons, but $1,500/hour Eurocopters (which become $4,000/hour Eurocopters when federally operated; 40,000 aircraft hours per year in 2014!). I wonder if we could simply pay the Mexicans to patrol the border. If we offered them $10 billion per year and then subtracted the cost of lifetime welfare (about $2 million?) for every unauthorized person who slipped through, I have to believe that they would be a lot more efficient and effective. It would also cut down on gun fights between U.S. agents and bad guys, which have killed 123 officers since 1904. The author of the book makes the job sound incredibly dangerous and spends quite a few pages recounting his vivid dreams. The Marines on Iwo Jima faced only token resistance by comparison. The author never explains why Border Patrol agents are able to purchase life insurance at a lower cost than other federal employees from an independent nonprofit association. Either the underwriters are pinheads or carrying a gun for the Border Patrol is actually less hazardous than sitting at a desk in a D.C. bureaucracy.

Given that immigration policy will determine the future of the U.S., I recommend reading the book. I don’t think it will change anyone’s mind, though. Folks who support more immigration will be cheered by the stories of all of the big-hearted hard-working migrants who come to the U.S. to work. Folks who are against more immigration won’t be surprised to learn that the best-case scenario painted by the author is someone who earns minimum wage, is entitled to nearly every variety of U.S. welfare, and doesn’t commit any crimes.

More: read The Line Becomes a River

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California ran out of other people’s money to build its high-speed rail line?

by philg

“California Scraps Plan to Build High-Speed Railroad Between Los Angeles and San Francisco” (TIME):

California Governor Gavin Newsom is abandoning plans to build a high-speed railroad between Los Angeles and San Francisco, saying the ambitious project that was approved by voters and championed by his predecessor is too costly.

Instead, the state will finish roughly 120 miles of track already under construction in the Central Valley, a mostly rural agricultural region that runs down the spine of the state, Newsom said.

California was one of the first U.S. states to champion a government-owned high-speed rail system like those that are ubiquitous in parts of Europe and Asia. Former Governor Jerry Brown defended the project as part of the state’s nation-leading effort against climate change, an issue that Newsom has made a centerpiece of his administration.

The Central Valley segment was expected to cost $10.6 billion, according to the latest business plan. [That’s about $66 million per mile in what would seem like some of the world’s simplest terrain.]

Newsom said workers will continue building a stretch of the line between Merced and Bakersfield.

What could have changed? The project has grown a bit in price, but not dramatically more than anything else government does. I wonder if the difference is the new tax law. With direct federal cash plus California state taxes being deductible, taxpayers in Indiana, Ohio, New York, et al. were previously going to pay for 75 percent of this fun project? Now that non-Californians would be stuck with only 50 percent of the bill, it isn’t fun to do anymore? So it would be fair to say that California ran out of other people’s money?

[Regarding the new mini-line: Google Maps shows that it is practical to drive between Merced and Bakersfield in roughly 2.5 hours. Why spend $10.6 billion on a short train line in a thinly populated area and then $1 billion/year (?) to run it? The answer can’t be energy efficiency, I don’t think, because even when tracks already exist an ordinary inter-city bus uses less energy per passenger than today’s trains. If Californians wanted to save energy, wouldn’t they just run more buses on their existing roads?]

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Wall-o-nomics: Calculating the cost of refugees to the U.S. economy

by philg

The proposed Wall/fence that dominates the news right now is at least partly about economics. People who make it across the border are then entitled to make an asylum claim and live in the U.S. for years of administrative processing and, if successful, live in the U.S. forever. They can collect welfare while doing this. Their children and grandchildren born on the U.S. side of the border can collect welfare as well. Advocates for an open border (“A wall, in my view, is an immorality.” — Nancy Pelosi) say that taxes paid by migrants exceed the welfare cost. Let’s look at this…

A reader of an earlier post cited “The Economic and Social Outcomes of Refugees in the United States: Evidence from the ACS” (NBER) as evidence that we are running a profit on our refugee industry:

“By the time refugees who entered the U.S. as adults have been here for 20 years, they will have paid, on average, $21,000 more in taxes to all levels of government than they received in benefits over that time span, according to a working paper released Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research that examined the economic and social outcomes of refugees in the U.S.”

So if we believe the expert economists at NBER and don’t dig into the paper, we make a profit of $1,050 per year on every refugee who arrives as an adult. The Federal deficit of $779 billion for FY2018, therefore, could be wiped out if we simply admitted 741,904,761 adult refugees, e.g., by asking most adults in India or China to move here and spin an abuse yarn.

When we dig a little deeper, though, it seems that the economists have had their thumbs on the scales (or somewhere else?). An “adult” is defined by the researchers as 18-45, but refugees are admitted without any age limit. A disabled 70-year-old has the same right to asylum as an able-bodied 22-year-old.

Suppose that all refugees were actually aged 18-45 and the economists had gotten the rest of the analysis correct. Would refugees yield a net profit? They’re paying more than they’re taking so they’re not “takers,” right? The Abstract reveals one question to explore: “After 6 years in the country, these refugees work at higher rates than natives but they never attain the earning levels of U.S.-born respondents.” Even for this cherry-picked age subset, the idea is that we’ll become richer overall by having lower earnings on a per-capita basis (and of course anyone in the U.S. income inequality industry will have an uglier statistic to wave around). Can that work?

The paper looks at six government welfare programs: “There are six social insurance programs that account for the majority of government payments to U.S. citizens: welfare, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Social Security, food stamps, Medicare, and Medicaid.”

What if we subtract the cost of these programs from the total cost of running local, state, and federal government and then see if $1,050 per year per person will pay for the remainder? If we budget the above subset of welfare at $2 trillion per year and subtract from about $7.5 trillion per year in total spending (source) we get $5.5 trillion. Divide by a population of 328.4 million (popclock) and we find that it takes $16,748 per person to fund our government minus these headline welfare programs.

Each refugee paid a net $1,050 per year and consumed an additional roughly $15,700 in government services (roads, schools, libraries, police and fire protection, etc.). Over a 20-year period, then, the refugee took approximately $314,000 from other taxpayers.

Did the economists even begin to do a full cost accounting, though?

As of 2012, there were 79 Federal means-tested welfare programs (Heritage). The NBER looked at only 6.

Since the refugees never get to the median U.S. income, the typical refugee never gets above the 400 percent of poverty disqualification threshold for Obamacare health insurance subsidies. The typical refugee would also be eligible for public housing, a program that can be worth $60,000+ per year per family in the NBER’s home town of Cambridge, Massachusetts and yet they didn’t think it was worth including.

If we assume $5,000 per year in health insurance subsidies and $20,000 per year in public housing subsidies per refugee, over a 20-year period the best-case refugee now costs $814,000. That best-case refugee showed up during his or her core working years.

Once across the border, of course, the best-case refugee or asylum seeker should live for longer than 20 years. Would it be fair to round up the total cost to $2 million? Therefore if $5 billion is spend on an immoral wall/moral fence it has to stop 2,500 migrants in order to pay for itself in pure economic terms?

[Of course, there is more to life than money. We might have other reasons for wanting an open border, e.g., superior morality, loneliness if the U.S. population remains stuck near 330 million, etc.]

Readers: Did I miss anything? Or is $814,000 over 20 years a reasonable estimate? Also, how can people imagine that someone who pays a net $1,050 per year in tax is going to be of any real help in keeping the U.S. government going?

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Why did Trump have to declare a National Emergency?

by philg

“Trump Declares National Emergency to Build Border Wall” (nytimes):

President Trump declared a national emergency at the border on Friday to access billions of dollars to build a border wall

Suppose that he wants to spend $4.4 billion per year on wall construction. That’s 1/1000th of the $4.4 trillion federal budget. It is 0.6 percent of the ordinary annual budget for the military of which Mr. Trump is Commander in Chief.

What would have stopped President Trump from directing military personnel to go down to the border area and install some fences, using the budget that he already has available? Why must it be an emergency? If the Commander in Chief decided that the military should build some new fences around various bases, that wouldn’t require declaring a national emergency, would it? How is this different?

Based on my reading of The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border, all that Trump would need to do to shake loose significant money is have the Border Patrol stop flying Eurocopters all day every day (a lot of this seems to be evacuation of the dehydrated, something that could be accomplished for $100/hour instead of $10,000/hour if done with SUVs).

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Why does the FBI investigate “truths” that violated no federal law?

by philg

A friend on Facebook cited “2nd Fairfax accuser says she was raped by former Duke basketball player Corey Maggette” (CNN):

“I say again without reservation: I did not sexually assault or rape Meredith Watson, Vanessa Tyson or anyone else,” Fairfax said in the statement.

“The one thing I want to make abundantly clear is that in both situations I knew at the time, and I know today, that the interactions were consensual.”

Fairfax said what he has “expressed is the truth.”

“I want to stand here in that truth and restate that my truth, as well as the truth of Dr. Tyson and Ms. Watson, should be fully investigated and thoroughly assessed,” Fairfax’s statement said. He called on the FBI to “investigate fully and thoroughly the allegations against me.”

The story was highlighted for the fact that the person accused of a criminal act asserts that his accusers are telling “the truth,” but that he is also telling “his truth” in contradiction them.

As a taxpayer, I’m more interested in the question of why the FBI even could be involved. From the bureaucracy’s web site:

Federal law gives the FBI authority to investigate all federal crime not assigned exclusively to another federal agency (28, Section 533 of the U.S. Code). … The FBI has special investigative jurisdiction to investigate violations of state law in limited circumstances, specifically felony killings of state law enforcement officers (28 U.S.C. § 540), violent crimes against interstate travelers (28 U.S.C. § 540A0), and serial killers (28 U.S.C. §540B). A request by an appropriate state official is required before the FBI has authority to investigate these matters.

There is no “truth” that has been covered by the media that would fit into one of the above categories.

Why do taxpayers in Ohio need to pay the FBI for an investigation of stuff that happened at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston or in North Carolina? If there were crimes committed under state or local laws, why wouldn’t it be state or local taxpayers paying the bills for any required investigations?

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First Officer Fame

by philg

In a room of about 70 people at MIT (mixture of undergrad, grad, and alum), I asked how many thought that Captain Sully had another pilot up front with him in the Airbus A320 that landed on the Hudson.

A few hands went up.

“What was his name?”

Blank stares. One student seemed to be struggling and then came out with something that sounded almost like “Jeff Skiles“.

I gave him $20 on behalf of current and former First Officers.

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Will New York build public housing on the defunct Amazon HQ2 site?

by philg

Amazon is bailing out of New York City (thus, thousands of potential fat-target defendants have now escaped New York’s winner-take-all family law system!). From a Facebook friend:

Bezos is like every Manhattanite, says he’s going to a great house party but then finds out it’s in Queens and doesn’t show up….

What will the wise central planners in the NYC government do now? From their site:

Every New Yorker deserves a safe and affordable place to live, in a neighborhood that provides opportunities to get ahead. The market alone is not always able to meet that need, and, accordingly, governments at all levels must work together to help. Mayor Bill de Blasio has made affordable housing a top priority of his administration and has committed the City to “build or preserve nearly 200,000 affordable units, and help both tenants and small landlords preserve the quality and affordability of their homes.”

New York City’s shortage of affordable housing has reached a crisis point. The crisis has many causes, starting with the erosion of New Yorkers’ purchasing power in the housing marketplace. Wages for the City’s renters have stagnated over the last 20 years, increasing by less than 15 percent, after adjusting for inflation. During the same period, the average monthly rent for an apartment in New York City increased by almost 40 percent.

A massive increase in the population results in stagnant wages as humans are no longer scarce? While simultaneously generating increased demand for housing that drives up prices? Textbook Econ 101 in action? Not exactly, according to the government technocrats:

Another cause of the affordable housing crisis is the mismatch between demand for, and the supply of, housing.

Econ 101 wouldn’t call this situation a “mismatch.” It would just turn out that the market-clearing price is higher than people want to pay and folks would have to start sharing 2BR apartments with 7 roommates, moving to eastern Pennsylvania and riding buses, etc. Maybe the technocrats are illustrating the general principle of “When the market gives you an answer that you don’t like, declare market failure”.

Regardless of whether this shows the failure or success of Econ 101, the politicians have promised more apartments and the city has plenty of money, since the finance industry has been booming for years. With Amazon out, there is a big empty space. The neighborhood already contains a big government-run apartment complex (see “Amazon’s New Neighbor: The Nation’s Largest Housing Project” (nytimes)).

If the politicians in New York are true to their word and housing those who are unable or unwilling to work is truly a “top priority,” should we expect to see government-run housing built on the proposed Amazon site? If not, what else could happen with this part of the city?

[My own Facebook comment on the collapse of the Amazon deal with New York’s Office of Crony Capitalism: “It is a dark day when small retailers in NYC are denied the opportunity to pay the expenses of their largest competitor.”]

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