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“Harvard Is Vaulting Workers Into the Middle Class With High Pay. Can Anyone Else Follow Its Lead?” (nytimes) is a feel-good story for readers about an enterprise so stuffed full of cash that it claims to pay workers wages based on something other than the market (left out of this is that, with higher pay, the contractors may just hire fewer and more-productive workers; see “MIT professor studies high-wage retailers” for how high wages may actually cut the percentage of an enterprise’s revenue that flows out to labor due to “Costcoization” (hiring only the most productive and energetic folks)).

From the Times:

Martha Bonilla is not your typical middle-class worker. And it’s not just that she was born in a backwater of El Salvador and crossed Mexico hidden among a pile of bananas in the back of a truck to make her way illegally into the United States at age 20.

Like millions of Americans lacking a college degree…

“Coming to the United States was the best decision I ever made,” Ms. Bonilla said.

For Ms. Bonilla, the result is an hourly wage of more than $25. Adding the money from a part-time job cooking at a student dorm, most weeks she clears more than $1,500.

So the good news for an American with minimal education is that it is possible to earn nearly $80,000 per year (in a town where a 3BR house costs $2 million!). On the other hand, the actual job described has been taken by an illegal immigrant.

The folks at the New York Times can’t imagine that an expanding supply of low-skill workers due to low-skill immigration has anything to do with the challenge of finding a high-paying job:

As the wages of American workers without a college education languish below where they were 40 years ago, Harvard’s experiment has led some economists and union organizers to think about similar arrangements to broadly benefit low-pay service workers, who form the biggest and fastest-growing part of the job market.

Recent research by economists at four top universities and the Social Security Administration concluded that the parceling out of less-skilled work to low-wage contractors — Goldman Sachs outsourcing its janitorial services, say, or Apple contracting out the assembly of its iPhones to Foxconn — could account for around one-third of the increase of wage inequality in the United States since 1980.

It is shuffling an employee from one enterprise to a different one that accounts for the huge wage cut. Nothing to do with supply and demand. Thus, if you’re a hospital and tired of paying surgeons $600,000 per year you can contract with Surgco and get surgeons for $400,000 per year plus a 5 percent fee for Surgco.

Larry Summers still remembers some economics (see “Women in Science” for how he never considered an economic explanation when he pondered a phenomenon and got fired):

But as Mr. Summers pointed out, across the economy, better jobs may mean fewer jobs. If, say, Massachusetts were to introduce a similar policy for public services, it would need to find the money. Taxpayers could provide it — or the state could scale back services and cut jobs. And employers forced to pay more may attract better-trained workers, displacing less-educated ones.

(i.e., Summers could manage a Costco if he gets forced out completely the next time he says something about women)

Readers: Is the nytimes trying to get low-skill Americans to vote for Trump? If not, how can we explain this article highlighting the fantastic low-skill job that has been snagged by an illegal immigrant?

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“Toilets Clogged, Plane Passengers Asked to Urinate in Bags” (NBC) will amuse those of you who fly in light piston-powered aircraft…

[It is tough to believe that one diaper in one toilet was enough to disable this critical system!]

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“Alexander Ciccolo to get 20 years for terror plot, assault” (Berkshire Eagle) is about a young Massachusetts man who converted to Islam and aspired to wage, but did not actually wage, jihad.

He couldn’t finish high school, but supposedly he was going to accomplish his terrorist goals: “he dropped out of school in the 11th grade and worked fast-food and roofing jobs after that, had once been a peace advocate, having taken part in a peace walk around Lake Ontario, organized by the Grafton Peace Pagoda, located off Route 2 in Petersburgh, N.Y., in July and August 2012.”

He only got close to his goals because the U.S. govenrment helped him: “On July 4, 2015, he accepted a small cache of weapons from an informant cooperating with the FBI and who had been in contact with Ciccolo beginning in June 2015”

He did not grow up in a two-parent home: “He came to the attention of authorities after his estranged father, a Boston Police captain, alerted them to his son’s stated interest in supporting the work of the terror group. … Ciccolo’s mother and stepfather attended the hearing…” (The child was the subject of significant litigation in Massachusetts family court. From ABC News:

Ciccolo had missed so many days of school the Wareham School Department filed what is known in Massachusetts as a CHINS – or Child In Need of Services – complaint to the Department of Social Services which opened an investigation into his mother, who had full custody.

The entire time his father, who was rising in the ranks of the Boston Police Department, desperately petitioned the court to let Alexander live with him, his new wife, and his stepchildren in Needham, an upscale Boston suburb, rather than with his ex-wife, Shelley Reardon, who refused, he claimed in court records, to have Alexander evaluated by mental health professionals.

“He [Robert] seeks this change because the child’s mother…who presently has primary physical custody of the child has in the past verbally agreed to allow the child to be evaluated but without exception has subsequently refused to allow such evaluations to proceed,” Ciccolo’s lawyer wrote in an emergency motion that petitioned a court to give him full custody of Alexander. “At present mother… has threatened legal action against father if initiates” psychological treatment.

The contentious divorce between Robert Ciccolo and Reardon, who split after 10 years of marriage when Alexander was five, are a glimpse into their only son’s long history of behavioral problems and mental illness that culminated with him coming “under the sway of ISIS,” as a young adult, prosecutors said at his first court appearance on July 14. He changed his name to Abu Ali al Amriki 18 months ago and opened a Facebook account where he posted a picture of a dead American soldier along with “Thank you Islamic State! Now we don’t have to deal with these kafir [non believer] back in America.”

).

He doesn’t seem like great neighbor, but does it make sense to put him away for 20 years given that he didn’t do much besides dream? What else could we have done with this troubled young person that would have kept us safe in case he did ever become capable enough to realize his dreams (without government assistance)?

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Folks: Weather permitting, I’m heading down to New York on Thursday, September 13 to hear Brian Keating present a lecture on cosmology and his interesting book for laypeople, Losing the Nobel Prize. The lecture is free and at the National Museum of Mathematics (5th Avenue and 26th; registration link). Refreshments (and conversation amongst ourselves) at 6:15 pm. Lecture at 7. I would love to get together with readers. If that doesn’t work, maybe coffee on Friday morning? Happy also to meet at Teterboro on Thursday morning or Friday around noon.

Related:

• Losing the Nobel Prize
• Losing the Nobel Prize: on careers in science

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Back in 2017 I did some analysis for an inter-partes review ( IPR2017-00886) at the U.S. Patent Office. The patent in question, 7,480,694, covers a way to make a slide show of web pages. The decision was recently issued and I thought that readers might be interested to see it. (All of the documents in any IPR are public, incidentally, and available for free download via the Web.)

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I recently attended a wedding of two best friends from high school. They met on their first day of high school… in 1975. In a society with strong social pressure to marry it seems likely that they’d have gotten married shortly after completing high school or college, presumably to the most compatible person they’d identified at that time. As members of the Me Generation, however, they were entitled to pursue a search for self-actualization with no time limit, including a search for the ideal partner. As it happened in this case, the 40-year delay didn’t result in finding anyone more compatible than they’d already identified in high school.

Would they have been happier if they could have spent their core adult years together? Married at an age when it was still biologically possible to have children?

Musicologists say that Mozart did better work because he operated within constraints established by Haydn. Is it possible that Americans would do better with a few more constraints?

[Scorecard on the two most recent weddings that I’ve attended, both within the last couple of years… One wedding was in Paris. The couple remains together. One was in Massachusetts. The wife sued the husband a year later.]

Separately, this wedding was held at a Colorado ski resort, with events at 10,200′ and 9,400′ above sea level. At least one third of the guests who had flown in from sea level were suffering from altitude sickness (not me, though; I spent three nights in Denver before heading up to nosebleed territory).

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At Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture) we talked to a 55-year-old MIT graduate who’d been fired from his engineering job (he mentioned this in the context of a multi-week cross-country trip with kids in a light airplane; he said that he was glad that he didn’t cancel the trip after he’d been fired). His camp site was organized as well as a typical Hilton hotel.

Another member of our merry band works at one of the world’s largest HR consulting firms. Asked “How could someone so qualified and so obviously competent be fired?” the HR expert responded “stale, pale, and male.”

Happy Labor Day to all of the young replacements!

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“The Gender Divide in Preschoolers’ Closets” (nytimes) has a subtitle explicitly referring to #MeToo:

I buy my daughter boys’ pants because even in an age of female fighter pilots and #MeToo, boys’ clothes are largely designed to be practical, while girls’ are designed to be pretty.

In a paragraph adjacent to “#MeToo” the following sentence:

I scoured the internet for girls’ pants with capacious pockets and reinforced knees, and found maddeningly few options.

A close reading of the article makes it clear that the author writes “girl” to mean “young children who happen to be female,” but the reader who skims and parses “girl” as “a young unmarried woman” (Merriam-Webster definition #3) may be a little shocked that “pants with reinforced knees for young unmarried women at work” is the latest demand from self-described gender equality advocates.

The editors are too busy reviewing each others’ old tweets to look for stuff like this?

Related:

• “Pink Wasn’t Always Girly” (Atlantic): “In the 18th century, it was perfectly masculine for a man to wear a pink silk suit with floral embroidery,” says fashion scholar Valerie Steele, director of The Museum at the Fashion Institute Technology and author of several books on fashion. Steele says pink was initially “considered slightly masculine as a diminutive of red,” which was thought to be a “warlike” color.

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From an Atlantic magazine article on an analysis of the database of an online dating site:

Bruch and her colleagues analyzed thousands of messages exchanged on a “popular, free online-dating service” between more than 186,000 straight men and women. They looked only at four metro areas—New York, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle—and only at messages from January 2014.

The key, Bruch said, is that “persistence pays off.”

In the study, men’s desirability peaks at age 50. But women’s desirability starts high at age 18 and falls throughout their lifespan.

Across all four cities, men tended to use less positive language when messaging more desirable women. They may have stumbled upon this strategy through trial and error because “in all four cities, men experience slightly lower reply rates when they write more positively worded messages.”

“The most popular individual in our four cities, a 30-year-old woman living in New York, received 1504 messages during the period of observation,” the study says. This is “equivalent to one message every 30 min, day and night, for the entire month.” Yikes.

The last part is what seems to suggest an opportunity for software. Wouldn’t that young lady be a lot better off if she had a robot to screen out and/or reply to these 1504 monthly messages? Or at least highlight the ones to which she should consider replying?

Related:

• “For 13 Days, I Believed Him” (nytimes); author discovers that new boyfriend has no job, savngs, or apartment (result: “You ain’t got no money, you just ain’t no good”, just as in the Percy Mayfield song “Hit the Road Jack”, made famous by Ray Charles)
• Whitney Cummings: I’m Your Girlfriend (HBO streaming), in which the comedienne says that, were she to become pregnant by a lower-income man, her lawyer would come over to her house and do the abortion himself
• “Is it possible to build an app whose job is to use another app?”

 

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“Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Affirmative Action Win Justice Dept. Support” (nytimes) is kind of interesting for the reader comments. Now that Trump is against Harvard, most readers are confident that Harvard is in the right (see Inside Higher Ed for some data on just how much higher Asians have to score in order to get into Harvard, roughly 400 points higher than the most desired racial group).

Some of the readers want the current system of race-based admissions torn down in favor of family income-based. They want Harvard to give preference to children of low-income families. But if you read

• The Son Also Rises: economics history with everyday applications
• The Son Also Rises: Tips for Optimizing Your Life
• The Son Also Rises: Policy Implications

the take-away is that Harvard’s best statistical chance of turning out a group of highly successful graduates is to select from children of highly successful parents (where “highly successful” need not be “rich” but probably isn’t “low income”). In other words, to preserve its prestige Harvard should actually select preferentially from high-income families and/or families where parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents are highly accomplished.

How about a straight sort on standardized test results? Wouldn’t the class then be almost all folks from foreign countries? The U.S. does not have a monopoly on smart English speakers who are willing to study for a test. This would really get the NY Times readers upset. Quite a few of the comments are of the form “Asians are not creative or especially intelligent; they just cram for exams because their parents make them. Therefore a university with mostly Asian students would never be an interesting learning environment.” (I’ve noticed this attitude among elderly Hillary voters. One reason why they support an infinite expansion of U.S. government spending is that they think that the U.S. has a monopoly on creativity and therefore an entitlement to high economic growth rates. The Chinese can build stuff, but they can never invent stuff (your typical 80-year-old is apparently not aware of DJI!).)

One idea: Accept some age diversity (right now the passionate diversity advocates insist that everyone starting at Harvard be 18 or 19) and insist that anyone who wants to come to Harvard has to accomplish something in the real world. Harvard already has a lot of students coming after a gap year. So if someone is going to study English literature, that applicant needs to get some stuff published and positively reviewed. If someone is going to be a nerd, that applicant has to develop something that gets adopted and used. If someone is going to be a scientist, that applicant has to work in a lab and get the mature scientist to say “This person did useful work.” Mix that in with a minimum standardized test score and now there is a class full of people who can actually do stuff, albeit maybe the age shifts from 18-19 up to 19-21.

[Olin College of Engineering (higher median SAT score than MIT, last I checked) does something slightly related. Applicants come to the school for a weekend and work on projects so that faculty can get a sense for their real-world capability. Admission is partly based on performance during that weekend.]

Readers: What should Harvard do if the court system orders the school to tear down its race-based admissions process?

Related:

• Ivy League colleges thinking like Einstein?

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