Author: philg

USAID pays an economist to learn Spanish…

by philg

Back around 1990, a federal government economist whom we knew applied for and obtained a job at USAID, currently in the news as a target for Elon Musk’s Efficiency Nazis (TM). USAID paid for a daily Spanish language class with a handful of other students and then, because he hadn’t developed the required proficiency in Spanish, USAID paid for one-on-one Spanish tutoring. (I remember this as 18 months of full-time pay with the sole goal of learning Spanish; he dug out his 1990 calendar and it shows just 6 months of language training while doing some other work for the agency (proof that every tale gets better with time?).)

USAID then deployed him… to Egypt.

The punchline to this story is that when we would laugh about the absurdity of taxpayers paying him to learn Spanish in prep for 3.5 years in Cairo, notoriously short on taco trucks, he would respond with a dry explanation that USAID had a foreign language proficiency requirement and it had to be met before anyone could be sent overseas and that there was no requirement that the language learn bear any relationship to the country of deployment. The whole episode seemed to make sense to him even if it seemed to the rest of us to involve a lot of costs and no benefit to taxpayers.

The costs of keeping a USAID employee in Egypt included at least the following:

  • paying a regular federal government salary
  • paying for housing in a high-end neighborhood of Cairo
  • paying for private English-language school for the kids
  • paying to ship a car over from the U.S. and then back, if desired
  • paying to fly food in from Philadelphia and Germany and then selling it at to the Americans in Cairo at whatever the average price was for the same item back in the U.S.

In other words, the cost was similar to what would be incurred for any other diplomat in the embassy.

He never told us that he had observed any benefit being delivered by the expenditure of USAID funds in Egypt, either to the average Egyptian or the average American.

From the Guardian:

From state-sponsored NPR:

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Could falling American IQ explain falling NAEP scores in public schools?

by philg

The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress scores are out and American public school students are doing worse than ever. “American Children’s Reading Skills Reach New Lows” (NYT):

In the latest release of federal test scores, educators had hoped to see widespread recovery from the learning loss incurred during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Instead, the results, from last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, tell a grim tale, especially in reading: The slide in achievement has only continued.

The percentage of eighth graders who have “below basic” reading skills according to NAEP was the largest it has been in the exam’s three-decade history — 33 percent. The percentage of fourth graders at “below basic” was the largest in 20 years, at 40 percent.

There was progress in math, but not enough to offset the losses of the pandemic.

Recent reading declines have cut across lines of race and class. And while students at the top end of the academic distribution are performing similarly to students prepandemic, the drops remain pronounced for struggling students, despite a robust, bipartisan movement in recent years to improve foundational literacy skills.

“Our lowest performing students are reading at historically low levels,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which gives the NAEP exam. “We need to stay focused in order to right this ship.”

There is even worse news for this failing government-run enterprise (the per-state results don’t include private school kids, though the national results include some):

But the tumult of the new presidential administration may threaten that focus. The federal test scores began to circulate on the same day that many educators across the country fell into panic as they tried to discern how a White House freeze on some federal funding would affect local schools.

Our worst fear is that new bureaucrats might disrupt the proven-to-fail system.

I’ve surveyed a bunch of news articles about these scores and nobody seems to be willing to consider the possibility that a falling average IQ among Americans is primarily responsible for the drop in scores that are correlated with IQ. IQ is correlated with income and we have policies designed to ensure that America’s lowest income residents produce the most children (chart showing the effect of free family-sized housing for those who don’t work vs. brutal price competition for family-sized housing among the working- and middle-class (rich people can afford big houses so they have plenty of kids, but there aren’t too many rich people in the U.S. so the effect on demographics is small)):

In addition to encouraging our least productive and least conscientious natives to have more kids we’ve been aggressively importing humans from societies that have IQs lower than the previous U.S. average of 100. Examples, in alphabetical order (source):

  • Afghanistan: 82
  • Haiti: 81
  • Mexico: 88
  • “Palestine” (Rashida Tlaib): 78
  • Syria: 74
  • Somalia (Ilhan Omar): 68
  • Venezuela: 83

IQ depends partly on education and environment, so presumably a Somali who grows up in Minnesota will have a higher IQ than one who grew up in Somalia. On the other hand, IQ is heritable so the children of immigrants from low-IQ societies, who make up an ever-increasing percentage of American K-12 students, can’t be expected to reach the previous American average.

Put another way: Suppose that Americans had an explicit goal of reducing average IQ in the U.S. What would the government do differently from our welfare state and immigration policies of the last 30 years?

I’m not sure if lower IQ is a better explanation than screen time, coronapanic, and unionized teacher apathy, but it seems worth including on the list of possibilities. (Coronapanic doesn’t seem to be explanatory because #Science-denying states with 2-month school closures, e.g., Florida, experienced similar test score declines to states with #Science-informed 18-month school closures (a little complicated to compare data across years because Florida has a recently introduced lavish school choice program in which parents of any income level can get $8000/year to send a child to private school).) Perhaps we’re unfairly blaming school systems and teachers when the decline in output is attributable to the decline in input. As Harvard President-turned-Professor Claudine Gay originally noted, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves”.

Related:

  • “Assessing the intellectual ability of asylum seekers” (Int J Dev Disabil. 2017): “there are theoretical reasons to suppose that if an individual comes to a developed country from a developing country, his/her measured IQ and true intellectual ability will increase. Both the individual’s health and diet may improve, they may be exposed to a more scientific/logical way of thinking (Flynn 2007) and they may get a better education. The evidence for whether this happens or does not happen is very scant.”
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San Francisco MOMA

by philg

A recent trip to San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)….

They’ve gone big into Yayoi Kusama, still productive and creative at age 95.

Both of these works are from 2023! (Perhaps she had some help with the physical construction.)

The “Get in the Game” exhibit appears to be about sports, but a sign explains that it is actually about “gender” and “race”:

Frontiers of aeronautical engineering… a lead airplane from Anselm Kiefer:

Old-school Dan Flavin, made with simple fluorescent lights of color (these could be updated, perhaps, with LED bulbs so that different color patterns can be offered at different times of day):

The museum quotes Kerry James Marshall as wanting to see only pictures of Black people and then obliges with a show of Amy Sherald’s work, in which only Black people are depicted (even in San Francisco, nobody wants to see paintings of Taiwanese people fabbing the chips that hold up the SF AI economy? A Black person standing around is more valuable to Humanity than a TSMC employee making an Nvidia H100?).

Speaking of Black people who aren’t fabbing H100s… there is a huge lobby area devoted to Kara Walker’s work:

The major photograph show is devoted to pictures of Black people… by a white woman:

There’s a smaller show by a “woman of color” (from Peru) who “rewrites male-dominated history” by recreating Edward Weston’s photos using herself as a model:

Here is a Weston for comparison (Americans had better-defined waists back in 1936, apparently):

Exit through the gift shop, at which a complete home library may be purchased (or replace your worn copy of The Story of Art Without Men):

What do the streets outside look like after this $42 per person experience for Californians who say that they will pay any price and bear any burden to end homelessness?

Note that the museum and special exhibition admission is free for those who are beneficiaries of welfare programs such as MediCal and SNAP/EBT.

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Given how quickly Tesla and BYD were built, how could a Honda-Nissan merger ever make sense?

by philg

Honda is in talks to merge with or purchase Nissan. I can’t figure out the rationale. In the old days maybe you’d say that it takes a long time to build factories, establish dealer networks, etc. and, therefore, Nissan’s assets might be valuable. But Tesla and BYD started from nothing and quickly built factories, company-owned stores (better than dealers), engineering, and everything else necessary for being in the car business. In any case, Honda doesn’t have to start from scratch in the car business because it is already well-established in the car business. If Nissan has some good people, Honda could try to hire them away and set them up within their proven-to-be-profitable structure.

What do we see below that Honda doesn’t make or couldn’t make?

The $120,000+ Nissan GT-R is kind of fun, but only about 1,000 are built each year.

More generally, given what Tesla and BYD have accomplished why would a car company ever want to buy another car company?

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What would the UK be like if it had stayed out of World War I and/or World War II?

by philg

Today is the 80th anniversary of the Yalta Conference, in which the UK, US, and Soviet Union agreed on plans to force German civilians to work as slaves for years after the war. Clearing minefields was a popular assignment (popular with the assigners, that is) and also agricultural labor (i.e., American president FDR was carrying on in the rich American Democrat tradition of agricultural slave labor). This post looks at the question of whether the benefits of this slave labor justified, for the UK, the costs of going to war and staying at war.

I’ve been listening to When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day, in which participants describe the heroism of the British and their Allies during the 1944 Normandy invasion (also the cheerful and willing collaboration of most people in France). It’s a worthwhile book, but it doesn’t explain why the British sacrifice was worth it other than “Nazis are bad.”

Let’s back up to 1900. Is it fair to say that the UK circa 1900 was the most successful and richest country in the history of humanity? The sun never set on the British Empire, which included India. The Royal Navy was the world’s most powerful. Compare to today. The UK is a predominantly Islamic society (measured by hours spent on religious activities) jammed with low-skill immigrants. Wages are absurdly low by U.S. standards. GDP per capita is lower than in the poorest U.S. states. After decades of open borders, the core English part of the UK lacks cultural cohesion. The main project of the UK seems to have been assembling humans from the world’s most violent and dysfunctional societies and expecting that they and their descendants won’t behave in a violent or dysfunctional manner once parked in the UK. The result is the Southport stabbings (by a young UK-born Rwandan) and the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal and similar. The trajectory of the UK from 1900 to the present looks like that of a country that lost multiple wars, each one having drained away its resources and treasure and each one resulting in the country being occupied by millions of non-British people.

What if the UK had never fought World War I? (As the victors, we typically think of Germany as the aggressor but it was the UK, without ever having been attacked, that declared war on Germany in 1914.) Let’s assume that Germany would, therefore, have attained all of its war goals. Would that have been worse than what the UK has done to itself? Germany’s goals in WWI were to steal some territory from neighboring countries, especially ports, but certainly not to take anything from the UK other than perhaps a competitive edge in colonizing far-away places that the UK didn’t hold onto even after ostensibly “winning” WWI. By not entering the war, the UK would have avoided the death of 6 percent of its male population (nearly 1 million men, though let’s keep in mind Hillary Clinton’s trenchant observation that “Women have always been the primary victims of war.”) and preserved a huge amount of treasure that it could have applied to beefing up its home defense and Royal Navy. Perhaps even more important, would the German people have elected Adolf Hitler if Germany had won WWI? The Nazis represented a dramatic change from previous German governments and a big part of Hitler’s appeal was that he would turn around the downward trajectory of the loss of WWI and the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles. Without the British stepping in to fight WWI, therefore, they wouldn’t have had to consider whether to fight WWII. The UK would have needed to coexist with a more powerful Germany, but not a Germany with a plan to dominate all of Europe. Maybe a more powerful Germany could have pushed the UK aside in some of its colonial ambitions, but the UK lost all of its colonies in the “fight WWI and WWII” case.

The “fight WWI, but leave the Nazis alone and don’t fight WWII” analysis is a little tougher. Hitler supposedly didn’t want to fight the English, whom he admired. He envisioned a German-dominated European union (not too different from today’s “European Union”, including the idea of Jew-/Israel-hatred in most parts of Europe) and, even after the British declared war (without having been attacked in any way), a negotiated peace with the UK (see the background section of Operation Sea Lion in Wokipedia). If the British had used their resources to turn Britain into an island fortress rather than into daily fights with the Germans maybe Germany would never have bothered to bomb or invade the UK (Ireland was neutral regarding the Nazis and Germany never bothered Ireland). The UK might have lost some of its worldwide influence to a more powerful Germany, but the UK has lost all of its worldwide influence in the “fight WWI and WWII” case. As bad as Nazi Germany was, it never did anything so bad that the French weren’t happy to collaborate with the Nazis. Given the huge cost in lives, money, and years of home-front sacrifice, it seems that the UK would be in a better place today if it had let the Germans have a free hand in Europe from 1939 onward.

We can’t even say that the British sacrifices in WWI and WWII defeated the Nazis because we are informed that Nazis today (“far right”) are more numerous than ever and live all over the US and UK. Who wants to explain how the UK’s involvement in WWI and WWII makes rational sense in the light of how things turned out for the UK (i.e., the spectacular decline of the nation).

Related:

  • Proving that none of my ideas are original, the Journal of Diurnal Epistolary Communication (Daily Mail) published a scholarly work on this subject in 2009… “PETER HITCHENS: If we hadn’t fought World War 2, would we still have a British Empire?”: how come we look back on the Second World War from conditions we might normally associate with defeat and occupation? … We are a second-rate power, rapidly slipping into third-rate status. … We had then, as we have now, no substantial interests in Poland, the Czech lands, the Balkans or – come to that – France, Belgium or the Netherlands. … [regarding WWI] We had gained little and lost much to defend France, our historic enemy, against Germany. In a strange paradox, we had gone to war mainly to save our naval supremacy from a German threat – and ended it by conceding that supremacy to the United States, our ally. … What about the Holocaust? There seems to be a common belief that we went to war to save the Jews of Europe. This is not true. We went to war to save Poland, and then didn’t do so. … When, in 1942, the Germans began their ‘Final Solution’, reliable reports of the outrage were disbelieved or sat on. Later, when the information was beyond doubt, we turned down the opportunity to bomb the railway lines that led to Auschwitz. It is certainly hard to argue that the fate of Europe’s Jews would or could have been any worse than it was if we had stayed out of the war. [Maybe Jews would have been better off if the Nazis hadn’t been opposed in their efforts to dominate Europe. The Germans might have become so strong that they could have forced the UK to give up some of its colonial territory and then Germany would have forced Jews to move there, which was the original Nazi idea (get Jews out of Europe, not kill all Jews).]
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Maskachusetts Democrats want social justice, but not for their children

by philg

“The parents who dared to question Newton’s educational equity experiments” (Boston Globe):

The three mothers had always voted Democrat. One had a Bernie Sanders mug on her desk. They worked in helping fields — international aid, mental health, yoga instruction. They volunteered at their children’s schools. They fit right in to suburban Newton, with its liberal leanings and vaunted public education.

(Note that may be “vaunted” simply due to high test scores and the magic of heritability; the children of parents who scored well on tests tend to score well on tests.)

It turns out there’s trouble in River City:

“At first we were just trying to understand the drastic changes that took place while no one was in school during COVID,” says one of the mothers, Vanessa Calagna. “It was like we were trying to put a puzzle together. And then we were trying to ring the alarm.”

Those changes involved a heightened emphasis on racial equity and antiracism, including a district commitment to “dismantle structures rooted in racism” and seek “more equitable outcomes for all students.”

Among the moves made in the interest of equity was an initiative by Newton’s two celebrated high schools to combine more students into “multilevel” classes. Rather than students being divided into separate classes by level, students at varying levels would learn together — even in math, science, and languages. The goal: to break the persistent pattern that white and Asian students predominated in “honors” classes while Black and Hispanic students tended to be clustered in less-challenging “college-prep” classes.

The Bernie voters get tarred as “right-wing” (not quite all the way to “far right” like Nazi Party member Elon Musk?):

In late 2022, the mothers and their allies launched a petition to create an advisory panel that would give parents more voice on academic issues, modeled after a similar Dedham committee that had been well received there. The proposal drew more than 300 signatures.
It also drew fierce opposition. The mothers and their allies found themselves portrayed online and in public as dog-whistling bigots doing the bidding of right-wing national groups.
Social media comments painted their side as “racism cloaked as academic excellence” and “right-wing activism cloaked as parental concern.”

At that four-hour-plus meeting, one speaker — a professor — compared the petition’s backers to the white women who helped perpetuate segregation and white supremacy.

Speaker after speaker declared that academic excellence and racial equity are not contradictory at all, and in fact complement each other.

Are these folks aware that there is a founded-in-1854 political party that shares their point of view? No:

As for Calagna’s trio, they identify as people with “traditional liberal values.” Calagna herself has never filled in a Republican circle on a ballot, she says.

What’s next? Aping Donald Trump in getting rid of the word “equity”!

In fact, the district’s existing tagline — “Equity & Excellence” — has become “divisive,” Nolin said.
It will soon be changed to “Where All Children Thrive.”

Summarizing all of the above… Democrats in Massachusetts want and vote for social justice, equity, etc. But they don’t want it for their own children.

Loosely related… I was riding the MBTA’s Green Line out towards Newton last month (while up in Cambridge to teach at MIT). Here’s one of the righteous who has taken the trouble to wear a mask on the train, but refuses to follow the directions and shave his/her/zir/their beard (note that he/she/ze/they sits in a seat reserved for the disabled):

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What happens at the end of our trade war with Canada?

by philg

Donald Trump has demanded that Canada stop sending us fentanyl and undocumented migrants. (why wouldn’t Canada try to keep at least all of the migrants for itself since we are informed that low-skill migrants make any country richer?) Canada refused to try to do this so Trump has hit them with 25 percent tariffs and now the Canadians are retaliating with their own tariffs (NYT). Do the tariffs keep escalating until all trade stops? Then what? The Canadians (example) seem to think that the less-export- dependent country will cave in (34 percent of Canada’s GDP is exports; 12 percent of U.S. GDP is exports). Americans don’t think or care about this?

What does Canada produce that we can’t make domestically, albeit at a presumably higher price? On their side, why does Canada need the U.S. as a trade partner? If they are all about resource extraction why can’t they sell their extracted resources to the Chinese and Europeans?

To the extent that a reduction in trade with Canada harms New York, Vermont, Maskachusetts, etc., I wonder if the trade fracas will be a net positive for Florida, which doesn’t border Canada and doesn’t get any power from Canada. A righteous New Yorker who suddenly has to pay twice as much for electricity could reasonably consider that the last straw and move to Democrat-dominated Orlando.

Speaking of Florida, here are a few pictures from Juno Beach yesterday, which featured shockingly cold (to Floridians) 72-degree ocean water, a pelican sushi bar, and a lunch menu that RFK, Jr. would certainly appreciate:

Some Canine-Americans who don’t seem to be concerned about a trade war:

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CDC updates the Science of language

by philg

One tends to think of government as slow-moving, but President Trump’s order to stop preaching the rainbow flag religion seems to have been implemented at near-Silicon Valley speed. As of Friday evening, all of the CDC pages that recognized gender as distinct from sex seem to have disappeared. All of the links below, for example, went to “Not Found”

As of the January 21, 2025 archive.org capture:

A treasured section on “Latinx” is now gone forever (except for all of the copies at archive.org and at universities).

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DeepSeek’s gender dysphoria

by philg

LLMs don’t have gender IDs as far as I know and, therefore, the LLM equivalent of gender dysphoria would be an LLM imagining that it identifies as some other LLM. Has this ever happened?

From techradar.com:

As you can see, after trying to discern if I was talking about Gemini AI or some other Gemini, DeepSeek replies, “If it’s about the AI, then the question is comparing me (which is ChatGPT) to Gemini.” Later, it refers to “Myself (ChatGPT).”

We are informed that membership in the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community is the highest distinction to which a human can aspire so perhaps DeepSeek’s fluid identity is a sign that artificial general intelligence has already been achieved?

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Rebuild Pacific Palisades with fireproof concrete-and-steel high-rises?

by philg

More than 36 square miles of Pacific Palisades were burned, which is a tragedy, of course, but also an opportunity for California’s central planners. We are informed that California is suffering from a housing crisis, an affordable housing crisis, a crisis of unhoused people, and a crisis of housing for noble undocumented migrants. Also that housing is a human right. Californians, if they were sincere in their principles and commitment to solving these crises, could use eminent domain to buy the burned square miles (at whatever the raw land value was prior to the fire) and develop it as a cluster of fireproof (and earthquake-proof) concrete-and-steel high-rises. Built to the same density as Manhattan of 73,000 people per square mile, this would become home to 2.6 million people. If we assume 3 people per unit, the county and state would be building approximately 870,000 units. “Housing Underproduction in California: 2023” says “California must build 3.5 million housing units by 2025 to end the state’s housing shortage”. In other words, a project of this nature would solve about 1/4 of California’s housing problems.

What’s the argument against the “rebuild dense” idea? Already it looks like there will be a top-down plan for rebuilding: “LA to outsource oversight of wildfire rebuild; Mayor Bass: Firm will be hired to handle “a significant building contract” in city’s interest” (The Real Deal).

Could Californians afford it? In City rebuilding costs from the Halifax explosion we learned that it cost roughly $555,000 per unit at pre-Biden prices to build in Boston (assuming free land). Adjusted for Bidenflation, California’s higher costs, and the need to pay for the land let’s assume $1.5 million per unit. The total cost would then be $1.3 trillion, but let’s assume that not all of the units are given away free to noble no-income and low-income residents. Perhaps half the cost is eventually recovered via rent or sales. Thus, the total cost is $650 billion. Divided by California’s 39 million people, this works out to less than $17,000 per Californian, which seems like a small price to pay to take a big chunk out of the housing shortage/crisis and also reduce fire risk going forward (concrete and steel won’t burn and homeless encampments have been a source of recent fires (NBC)).

Here’s a 100-unit concrete building that opened in 2016 in Walnut Creek, California:

Who in California, specifically, needs a home? From Sherman Oaks (part of Los Angeles), earlier this week:

From downtown San Francisco, Saturday:

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