Category: Uncategorized

“The Challenge of Fighting Mistrust in Science” was right at the top of the Atlantic web site for a while.

This is interesting partly because searching online biographies reveals that a journalist with no experience as a scientist interviewed a foundation manager with no experience as a scientist (well, he did major in political science for a bachelor’s and master’s).

Mostly it is interesting because the article shows how some of America’s non-scientists think about science: as a body of correct knowledge that is being gradually refined. Why is that remarkable? Michael Myers, the foundation manager interviewed, appears to be at least 60. Thus he was born into a more-or-less static Earth, contracting from its birth heat and thus sometimes wrinkling up into mountains. Around 1968, however, at least the younger geologists began to accept the continental drift hypothesis (some history from New York Times). So he should know as well as anyone that to talk about someone rejecting “science” is a rather vague accusation. Does the denier deny today’s theories or yesterday’s?

Can it be that for these non-scientists science is actually a religion? That would explain why they get so upset that someone would dare to “deny science”. And that would explain why they can’t remember that the best minds of science used to believe completely different stuff than what they currently believe. Religious dogma tends to be mostly static, with gradual refinement.

[Separately, the journalist and the foundation manager show confidence regarding aviation and aerodynamics with “Like the extreme heat that was grounding planes in Phoenix this week” (with a link to a misleading article in WIRED). These folks believe that a regional jet with two engines spinning isn’t going to lift off the runway because it is 2 degrees hotter than yesterday? What else can we sell them? From WIRED: “According to news reports, the heat poses a particular problem for the Bombardier CRJ airliners, which have a maximum operating temperature of 118 degrees. Bigger planes from Airbus and Boeing can handle 126 degrees or so.”

In fact, the limits are related to regulation and paperwork. If the manufacturer doesn’t supply the airline with FAA-approved data for takeoff performance (really “fly down the runway, lose one engine, and continue the takeoff on one engine” performance) then it is a regulatory violation to fly, even though there is no reason that the plane can’t fly with the same safety margins at a reduced weight (unload some fuel or throw 5 fat passengers off for every degree above 118!).

What may be funniest of all is that the article promotes using this false statement about airplanes and jet engines (“they are grounded due to heat”) to “rebuild people’s trust in science.”]

Readers: What do you think of this? Obviously the journalist and the interview subject are just 2 people out of 325+ million in the U.S. So maybe it isn’t even worth looking at. But on the other hand, the Atlantic featured it and there are hundreds of comments.

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Professor Kari Adamsons of the University of Connecticut spoke about her research at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017.

What is American society getting from the roughly 3 percent of GDP that we spend making sure that alimony and child support cashflows are established and maintained? Professor Adamsons says that research psychologists can’t find any effect on American children’s well-being whether or not child support was being paid from one parent to the other.

Part of this may be due to the fact that adults who receive child support cash often respond by cutting their working hours and therefore the net spending power within the winner parent’s household may not change much.

Adamsons, however, described big differences in child-support/well-being correlation based on the race of the mother. For “non-white mothers” (Rachel Dolezal qualifies?), when child support was paid there was a negative effect on the children’s well-being. This is consistent with previous research, to the extent that “low-income” in the U.S. tends to overlap with “non-white,” e.g., see the Children, Mothers and Fathers chapter:

“Child Support and Young Children’s Development” (Nepomnyaschy, et al, 2012; Social Science Review 86:1), a Rutgers and University of Wisconsin study of children of lower income unmarried parents, found that any kind of court involvement was associated with harm to children: “We also find that provision of formal [court-ordered] child support is associated with worse withdrawn and aggressive behaviors.” The authors found that informal (voluntary) support from fathers could be helpful to children living with single mothers but court-ordered support, even when the cash was actually transferred, was on balance harmful.

It turns out that contact with the father was also a negative for well-being when the mother was non-white. Certainly Adamsons wouldn’t have suggested this, given that even tenure has its limits, but it seems that if what society cares about is child well-being and we accept that courts must deal with children on a rushed wholesale basis, the laws and defaults should be different depending on the race of the litigants(!).

Somewhat separately, Adamsons talked about what research psychologists have found regarding the effects of losing a father. Why are we always in the running for World’s Fattest Nation? Could that be related to the fact that we have the largest percentage of children without two parents (stats)? Adamsons said that “fathers have a strong and unique [not replaceable by another adult, such as the mother] influence on obesity.” What about the fact that courts usually assign a father to at least an every-other-weekend babysitting role? “That kind of parental involvement is probably not helpful. It isn’t normal. When they’re visiting with the father, the kids are waiting to go home to the mother.”

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A friend is on a California organ transplant surgical team, which apparently means long weekends in Tahoe every weekend. She posted the following on Facebook:

[stream of updates with pictures of snow in the Sierra and continued skiing]

Snowboard accident. Hit some little jumps, that I’ve gone over and landed fine. Bad landing/tumble today.

Shouldn’t think I can jump like Millenials

Guessing it’s tendon/ligament… when I took my SB boots off, pressed everything 1-5″ above medial malleous, didn’t feel like bone pain. Didn’t feel anything crunch. And my dexa was 2.5 SD above now for my age. Was suppose to hit Squaw next weekend and was hoping another mammoth visit in July

Thank God for Arctica race shorts… they won’t need to cut off any clothing

Wtf!!!? Been here almost 3 hrs!! If it weren’t for the painful hobbling to fuel, I woulda just waited til tomorrow. But I was a tad concerned if I wouldn’t be able to stand/drive in am. Guess next time (fingers crossed never again), unless I have a bone protrusion, bullet wound, knife wound, or CP…. not going to the ED. This is such a waste of time!

[response to comment blaming Donald Trump for the long wait times] I swear- no bone protrusion = no ED! This is a joke!

(“ED” = “Emergency Room”; see Medical School 2020)

Related:

• “Seriously!!?? 73 minute commute for 23 miles??? So over the Bay Area!” (same friend; May 31 status)

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Professor Irwin Sandler of Arizona State University spoke at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017. He was introduced as “an expert on children in high stress situations, including divorce.”

Sandler said that research psychologists had put a lot of effort into figuring out how badly damaged children were by divorce, by living primarily with one parent, and by low-quality parenting. He has been experimenting instead with training parents to do a better job. He and his colleagues run training programs for both mothers and fathers and then interview children. Based on the data from children, Sandler says that the training has been effective for both mothers and fathers and that it works best for adults who exhibited “poor parenting to begin with.”

(By “poor parenting” he wasn’t talking about the stuff that the $600/hour litigators throw around, e.g., one parent lets the kid stay up late. This program is run in cooperation with the local court system so the participants sounded as though they were struggling low-income types.)

What I found most interesting about the talk was that we run a family court litigation system that, compared to a European-style system, shrinks our GDP by about $500 billion per year (source). Most of this expenditure is ostensibly for the welfare of our children. Yet, assuming Sandler’s data are correct, if we put $500 billion of time and effort into training parents, both together and separated, our society’s children would be vastly better off. Since we aren’t trying this, must we infer that most Americans don’t actually care about how well the next generation turns out? (obviously they do profess to care, especially on Facebook!)

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Friends on Facebook are discussing “A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news for liberals” (Washington Post). Of course, like most things in the U.S. media, this starts off with a lie (the minimum wage in Seattle is $13/hour, not $15/hour). But let’s look at the rest of the article…

With labor more expensive, employers are getting rid of their lowest-skilled employees (certainly those for whom the market wage would be less than the minimum legal wage). Okay, that’s Econ 101. But is it “bad news for liberals”?

Suppose that the goal of a liberal is to live in a city without too many unsightly low-skilled people (see Tyler Cowen explains why rich white Democrats freely express love for immigrants and people of color for how liberals already have segregated themselves away from dark-skinned Americans and immigrants).

Can the liberal make it illegal for anyone without a college degree to live in his or her city? Probably not. Can the liberal make it illegal for anyone without a college degree to work in his or her city? Sure! That’s the minimum wage.

With a minimum wage much higher than other parts of the U.S., a city can limit its residents to (1) folks with high-paying jobs or pensions, (2) Official Poor who are already established in public housing and other welfare systems (mostly funded by state and federal taxpayers), and (3) divorce or custody plaintiffs who collected a free house, child support, and/or alimony through the family law system.

Low-skilled immigrants don’t fit into any of these categories. By definition they can’t have high-paying jobs (since they are “low-skill”). They would have to survive in the city for 5-10 years on a waiting list before they get their free apartment and they don’t have sufficient family connections to do this. Immigrants are unaware that having sex with a high-income American will yield the spending power of a medium-to-upper-income American and/or they have religious or social scruples that prevent them from having sex with an already-married dermatologist.

What do readers think? Instead of building a wall or aggressively preventing 8 low-wage people from sharing a 2-bedroom apartment, a city simply puts in a high minimum wage. With no jobs available for undesirable/Deplorable people, the city is left with the sought-after “creative class” plus some folks on Welfare who vote for Democrats and make the city wealthier by pulling in Federal Medicaid, food stamp, and housing dollars. If you’re a Democrat on the city council or in the mayor’s office, what’s not to like about that outcome?

Related:

• Can Puerto Rico be a laboratory for the future of the rest of the U.S.? (Puerto Rico already has the equivalent of a $15/hour minimum wage)

Update: A Facebooker commented on the above with “To illustrate that point, Singapore enforces a minimum wage on immigrant labor, but not on its own citizens. Does anybody believe a government would pass a law to treat foreigners worse than its own citizens?” (this post from a law firm suggests that it the minimum wage is about $2,660 per month)

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MIT’s way of reminding the Class of 1982 (average age: 57) that we are going to be dying soon was to schedule Nobel-winning economist Peter Diamond to speak on the subject of Social Security at our reunion dinner.

Why should running a retirement system be challenging? Why not take citizens’ money, save it for them, and give it back to them, plus interest, when they’re old? Singapore does this:

In contrast to the majority of other publicly managed pension schemes, the Singaporean system operates on a fully funded basis. The CPF does not include social risk pooling and redistributive elements. Individuals rely exclusively on defined contribution funds accumulating in individual accounts. The CPF covers private and most public sector employees as well as the self-employed, who may join on a voluntary basis.

This kind of system is bulletproof.

FDR and his fellow politicians in the 1930s couldn’t do this, however, because in order to get votes they wanted to start ladling out the cash immediately, to people who had put next to nothing in. So we tax currently working Americans to pay currently retired Americans. (Essentially everyone born prior to 1940 got more than they put in.) This is sustainable only with either a growing population or a growing labor force participation rate. Despite spreading out the welcome mat for immigrants, our population isn’t growing fast enough to offset increased longevity. Our labor force participation rate is falling as Americans discover the wonders of SSDI and OxyContin and/or collecting child support or alimony. Thus Social Security is always at risk of crisis.

Sometimes the roots of the crisis are easy to understand. Professor Diamond explained that in 1972, for example, Congress approved an inflation indexing scheme for Social Security that the experts in the Nixon Administration knew would “over-index” payments such that recipients would actually be better off in a high-inflation scenario. At least some senators knew this as well. Congress cheerfully passed the scheme into law because everyone knew that the U.S. would never have high inflation rates. By 1977 the system hit a wall and another emergency fix was required in 1983. (Our next scheduled emergency is in 2034 (source), when the trust fund is forecast to run dry and benefits will exceed contributions.)

Why does it matter? There is no law against Americans saving for their own retirement. However, most Americans spend like drug dealers. Presumably part of this is our nature, but we have a lot of structural discouragements to savings. Married with kids? Save and you’ll be punished by colleges in the financial aid process. Getting paid child support or alimony? Savings could be used against you in court; if you’re able to save maybe you don’t need child support and alimony (amounts always discretionary with the judge) at the current levels. Income below the median? Savings could disqualify you from various means-tested welfare programs, such as free or subsidized housing. Want to save up and buy a house? You will just be cheating yourself out of the mortgage interest deduction.

The result is “Among elderly Social Security beneficiaries, 48% of married couples and 71% of unmarried persons receive 50% or more of their income from Social Security.” (source) I.e., a lot of older Americans don’t have significant savings.

Professor Diamond laid out the history of political arguments about how to patch the actuarial holes in the system. He said that, to a first approximation, Democrats always propose higher taxes and Republicans always propose cutting benefits, except on the poorest recipients, for whom Republicans would like to see higher payments. He explained that politicians are never candid (not to suggest that they might lie!) regarding these proposals, e.g., disguising a benefit cut as a delayed cost-of-living increase or an increase in retirement age.

As with most other government programs, it gets sold to the public as a way of taking money from the fortunate to help the unfortunate. Social Security is advertised as “progressive” because people who had a low income get a larger percentage of their contributions back than high-income participants. In fact, this is undone because high-income participants tend to live longer and high-income participants are more likely to have a nonworking spouse who gets a kicker “spousal benefit” (if Nadine Nevermarried and Meredith Married put in the same amount over the same number of years, but Meredith was super attractive and had a boytoy husband at home, Meredith’s household gets about 1.5X the payments from Social Security). On average, Social Security doesn’t do anything to address the income inequality that has come to obsess at least some Americans.

The latest magic for plugging the most obvious holes? Democrats want higher rates on everyone and a special tax on earnings about $400,000 (soak the 1%!). What if the 1% get motivated and, like Eisenhower, manage to convert what would have been regular income into capital gains? That won’t help them because Democrats also want to tax investment income to feed Social Security. Republicans are opposed to these higher taxes, but they can’t just go on TV and shock Americans with “you have to work if you want money.” Diamond said that the likely fix is that Congress will change the law so that Social Security can borrow, like the rest of the Federal Government. If Social Security borrows approximately 100 percent of GDP, the system can keep working for about 75 more years (assuming that there are no advances in medical technology that increase longevity, for example, nor any further withdrawals by Americans from the labor force).

Borrowing doesn’t seem like the obvious solution to a long-term systemic problem of overspending. Are we going to be way richer than forecast in the future somehow? Have fewer old people around? Nobody seems to think so. However, in Diamond’s opinion, borrowing is the one option that will be palatable to both Democrats and Republicans (and certainly the two parties have cooperated to borrow more than 100 percent of GDP already).

Related:

• Pensions: How states and local governments indulge in deficit-spending (from 2009)

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Professor William Fabricius of Arizona State University spoke at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017 about two of his latest studies.

The first study presented was on infant overnights. Fabricius and his co-author started by asking college students about their relationships with parents. They found a cohort whose parents had divorced when they were aged 0-3 (there are a lot of these because cash-motivated plaintiffs file suits when the youngest child is 2 and can be easily parked in commercial care).

Unlike with a lot of American studies, they kept the time with the father as a continuous variable rather than dividing into sole care/shared care at a 35 percent threshold.

Results:

• overnights at age 2 positively correlate with the father-child relationship in college
• there is no way to make up for a lack of infant/toddler overnights with more father-child contact later; once a child and the father grow apart they stay apart (on average)
• the father-child relationship in college kept improving as a function of overnights with the father, with the maximum quality achieved at 50/50
• the best-adjusted college students had had, as toddlers, a 50/50 schedule with their divorced parents
• the mother-child relationship actually improved in going from 0/14 overnights to 2/14 overnights with the father, but after that it was constant (though no decrease in mother-child relationship quality from a 50/50 shared parenting arrangement)

Judges cite “conflict” as a reason for denying fathers’ requests for shared parenting (see, e.g., Massachusetts). Fabricius and co-author found that “when the parents disagree, it is actually more important to have a 50/50 schedule in order to maintain the father-child relationship.” No matter what the level of conflict, the more overnights with the father the better-adjusted the child turned out to be. (An attorney sitting next to me whispered, “This is interesting, but someone should tell him that judges don’t care about how well-adjusted children turn out to be. They can order dad to pay mom and the question is how much.”)

Fabricius then presented a study of 83 adolescents, half of whom had a parent relocate so that there was a 4-5 hour separation (average) between the parents. The children lived primarily with a mother and stepfather. Relocation degraded the quality of the child’s relationship with all three “parents” (mom, dad, stepdad; either the discarded fathers hadn’t managed to attract any women or the researchers didn’t consider an adult woman visited every other weekend to be significant enough to be labeled “parent”).

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Most of the speakers at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017 were primarily ivory tower researchers. Pamela Ludolph, on the other hand, had gone into courtrooms countless times as a forensic psychologist and custody evaluator (recommending a parenting time schedule to the judge; what some states called “Guardian ad litem”). Her talk was on how the theory translates into practice.

Ludolph, based at the University of Michigan, described how Attachment Theory, a product of the 1960s mostly from a British psychologist named John Bowlby, had become “the big weapon against fathers” in Americans nominally-gender-neutral courts. Mom is a “secure base” and children are in a “sensitive period” for the first 2-3 years of life. If anything is done to interfere with their attachment to Mom, there will be bad outcomes.

Ludolph noted that this was plainly misapplied because children of divorce tended to turn out badly even when they had a strong and secure attachment to their (generally plaintiff) mother. Pushing away the father, the typical result of a divorce lawsuit in most U.S. jurisdictions, is “a huge loss” to a child from which full recovery is unlikely.

In any case, it turns out that the attachment to mothers and fathers operates independently and, even when mothers spend 3-4X more time with babies, at 18 months they will protest separation equally from both parents.

Another way that children lose fathers when psychologists come into court is when the psychologist finds that exchanges between the parents causes “stress” (crying baby). Ludolph noted that “stress isn’t trauma” and “temporary stress is better than the loss of a father.” Ludolph notes that parents in intact families stress babies all the time, e.g., by taking them on vacation or dropping them at day care. She asked rhetorically, “Why should the standard for stress be different in family court?” The answer turns out to be that the standard is different. It is okay for a baby to be stressed to go on a Carnival cruise, but if switching to the father’s house is stressful, the father has to be cut.

What’s her perception of the reality for a father who gets sued these days in Michigan? “Mothers are so preferred as primary caregivers that judges are reluctant to pick the father even when the mother is psychotic or so depressed postpartum that that child could be killed.” The likely schedule result? “Short visits with the father that are stupid. It isn’t worth the driving time and hassle to spend two hours with a child.”

Related:

• our chapter on Michigan family law

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“I thought that because I was smart I should be rich,” noted one alum, still working 9-5 as a software developer. Especially when one factors in retirement/pension, it seems that not too many of the reunion attendees had earned more than a Massachusetts State Trooper or a California prison guard. Most of those who had out-earned an 80th-percentile public school teacher had gotten out of tech per se, e.g., to become doctors or work in financial services.

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science was the biggest department for the Class of 1982 and there were quite a few software engineers and some circuit designers at the reunion. The computer nerds agreed that, outside of Silicon Valley, one’s career was likely to be lame and irrelevant. Typing all day every day was apparently not a healthy lifestyle. Here are a classmate’s hands:

He didn’t earn enough to retire young. He spent three years teaching “maker skills” and found it rewarding, but it didn’t pay enough so he is back to the coding grind.

Heterosexuality was either the norm among our classmates or a condition of reunion attendance; I didn’t see anyone from 1982 with a same-sex adult companion (at an “all-classes” event with about 1000 attendees, I did see two young women holding hands). In our class of roughly 1,000 there doesn’t seem to be anyone who has changed gender ID. That may change with the next generation, however. Alumni from wealthy Boston suburbs reported neighbors having children who had changed gender IDs. One alum’s son (still!) is a 20-year-old liberal arts college student. The parents refer to “his girlfriend,” but in fact the individual is “non-gendered” and is offended if referred to with female pronouns.

Most of my classmates seem to have been married, at least at one point. This prospect filled some members of the Class of 1997 with horror. The 42-year-old never-married software engineers were fit, slender, cheerful, carefree, and could have passed for 30. One of them said “I’m being buzzed by Tinder right now.” What was wrong with marriage? “The women that I meet want to have kids, but the women I know with kids seem like total bitches and the stuff that upsets them is trivial. You go to a family’s house for dinner and the mom is obsessing over precisely what a 5-year-old is eating. I don’t remember a lot of 5-year-olds starving themselves to death. Why are these moms monitoring every bite?”

The prevalence of divorce tracked the research of Brinig and Allen pretty well. Classmates who’d lived in states where divorce was more lucrative, e.g., Massachusetts or California rather than Georgia or Texas, were more likely to have been sued by their spouses. Classmates who’d earned more money, e.g., by working in real estate or financial services, were more likely to have been sued than those who toiled as faceless cubicle-dwelling coders. The women who had been sued were the higher-earning spouse. For example, female physicians who survived 30 years of practice without a malpractice lawsuit had proved vulnerable to attack in family court. No-fault divorce for their plaintiffs was rephrased as “Would you like to discard your 55-year-old wife, take half of the money she saved from working as a medical specialist, take half of the money she’s going to earn going forward, and see if having sex with younger women is more exciting?”

Aviation was a field best suited to the patient. “My first job out of MIT was at Hughes Aircraft preparing a bid for the FAA on the NextGen Air Traffic Control System, which still hasn’t been implemented [35 years later],” said a tablemate at dinner. An aeronautical engineer, Class of 1960 (so he’s roughly 79), talked about starting his career working on a variant of the F-105 jet fighter and now finishing it as an FAA employee. Not that much has changed! [Thinking that you’ll work with newer technology in the U.S. military? A friend’s message: “I found out that [the Boeing 757 that becomes] Air Force Two’s nav databases have to be loaded by floppy with everything checked against some sort of huge spreadsheet to make sure they have the approaches and waypoints they need for wherever they’re going (they can only have a limited amount at any one time)”; it isn’t quite this bad in the civilian world because a Cessna 172 can have a $10,000 Garmin GPS with, if desired, an SD card containing a database covering every airport, airway, and waypoint on Planet Earth.]

One alum had worked for 30 years building trading software for big banks. What had he learned about the financial services business? “The only way to make money is by cheating the customer.”

Physical fitness seemed to be an important component of happiness for our group of mostly 57-year-olds. One guy works from home for a big integrated circuit manufacturer and his non-MIT girlfriend said that he worked 70-80-hours per week for 12 out of the preceding 18 months. She runs a fitness center (“I worked in corporate America for decades. I’m a lot happier now.”) and gets him out on the golf course regularly as well as into the gym. They both seemed to be doing great despite his lack of “work-life balance.”

Maintaining musical skills also seemed to be a good investment of time and energy. The Alumni Jazz Band (roughly our class’s age) performed at our brunch and they looked happy and sounded fantastic.

Understanding government and government regulation seemed to be the key to a lot of careers. One alum’s wife works for a “woman-owned small business” that perpetually keeps the headcount below 100 people. They are thus entitled to “sole source” federal contracts and don’t have to compete with other/larger companies. How do they get the work done on what might be huge contracts? “They subcontract everything to Booz-Allen. That’s how business is done in D.C.”

Readers: What did you learn at your latest college reunion?

Related:

• Life Lessons from Successful Pilots
• MIT alumni in their 50s

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“Investigators Believe USS Fitzgerald Crew Fought Flooding For An Hour Before Distress Call Reached Help” (U.S. Naval Institute News) contains an item related to some previous postings here:

In addition to the damage to the spaces, the collision knocked out Fitzgerald’s communications for the better part of an hour. At about the same time the crew was able to reactivate their backup Iridium satellite communications to radio for help,

This is the system that Bill Clinton-era Pentagon bureaucrats were unenthusiastic about using (they envisioned an official military contractor building them a more glorious one) and downright hostile to helping rescue from Motorola’s threats to de-orbit.

Iridium is apparently still useful, 18 years after going bankrupt.

The previous posts:

• Karl Marx was right: Iridium
• Resurrecting Iridium

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