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In Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address, there are some sections that give rise to more questions than answers.

I’ve been asking CEOs to give more long-term unemployed workers a fair shot at that new job and new chance to support their families; this week, many will come to the White House to make that commitment real. Tonight, I ask every business leader in America to join us and to do the same – because we are stronger when America fields a full team.

The Federal Government is the nation’s largest employer. Why isn’t Obama using his executive authority to establish a hiring preference for the long-term unemployed? If it is legal to hire someone because of his or her skin color, why isn’t it legal to hire someone because he or she has been at home for the past 99 weeks?

Estiven Rodriguez couldn’t speak a word of English when he moved to New York City at age nine. But last month, thanks to the support of great teachers and an innovative tutoring program, he led a march of his classmates – through a crowd of cheering parents and neighbors – from their high school to the post office, where they mailed off their college applications. And this son of a factory worker just found out he’s going to college this fall.

New York City has some of the most lavishly funded schools in the world. American colleges have some of the lowest admission standards. In fact, the City University of New York has had no admissions requirements, other than a high school diploma or GED, since around 1970 (see Wikipedia). Why are we surprised that the public’s investment in Mr. Rodriguez is yielding a return? Shouldn’t we expect that any child in whom $200,000+ of education is invested would be able to attend college if he or she chose to do so?

It’s not just oil and natural gas production that’s booming; we’re becoming a global leader in solar, too. Every four minutes, another American home or business goes solar; every panel pounded into place by a worker whose job can’t be outsourced.

The U.S. isn’t a significant manufacturer of solar cells (Wikipedia chart through 2010). We import them from China and install them. Are we a “global leader in LCD TVs” because we import a bunch of them from Korea, China, and Taiwan to watch this weekend’s Super Bowl? Are we a “global leader in camera systems” because a lot of Americans have purchased Canon, Nikon, and Sony cameras?

Last year, I asked this Congress to help states make high-quality pre-K available to every four year-old.

If the K-12 schools are so bad that we are shocked when a high school graduate (see above) is able to enter college, why will government-run pre-K be better? And how can the federal government “help states” to do this? If the federal government takes money away from residents of each state, brings that cash to Washington, D.C., then sends it back, how was that “helping the states”? Isn’t the federal government just collecting taxes that otherwise could have been collected by local or state governments? [Separately, it would be nice to see an explanation about how pre-K is the key. New Hampshire has historically not required that its town-run school systems offer kindergarten (i.e., public school would start at first grade). Yet New Hampshire’s high school graduation rate is nonetheless higher than the rate in neighboring Massachusetts (86% versus 83%; source) and is much higher than the national average.]

Today, women make up about half our workforce. But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong, and in 2014, it’s an embarrassment. A woman deserves equal pay for equal work.

Given these numbers, why does the federal government employ any men, starting with Obama? If women will do the same job just as well for 23 percent less money, couldn’t Obama trim the deficit substantially by firing all of the men and replacing them with women? [And separately, maybe this does explain why there are so many long-term unemployed people in the U.S. It would be irrational for a profit-minded company to hire a man, paying him nearly 30 percent more to do the same job (according to President Obama). Just imagine if Facebook had hired a man instead of Sheryl Sandberg. Instead of paying $845 million in 2012 for a COO (USA Today), the shareholders would have had to give up $1.1 billion. That extra compensation would have entirely wiped out the company’s $53 million profit for 2012 (10K).]

Let’s do more to help Americans save for retirement. Today, most workers don’t have a pension. A Social Security check often isn’t enough on its own. … That’s why, tomorrow, I will direct the Treasury to create a new way for working Americans to start their own retirement savings:

Since we already have Social Security, if it isn’t sufficient, why not fix it so that it is, instead of creating something new?

Already, because of the Affordable Care Act, more than three million Americans under age 26 have gained coverage under their parents’ plans.

How is this fair? If a person is under 26 and has had the misfortune to lose both parents and/or has parents who have the misfortune to remain uninsured after Obamacare, he or she suffers the additional misfortune of having to pay for his or her own health care?

Citizenship means standing up for the lives that gun violence steals from us each day.

Why do victims of gunshots get priority? (about 11,000 per year; source) Why doesn’t citizenship mean standing up for the lives that car accidents, many of them preventable through uncontroversial engineering improvements to roads and/or cars, steal from us each day? Or being concerned about other preventable deaths (table)? And why do we give priority to victims here in the U.S.? Shouldn’t we also stand up for the lives of people in other countries?

And we do them because we believe in the inherent dignity and equality of every human being, regardless of race or religion, creed or sexual orientation. And next week, the world will see one expression of that commitment – when Team USA marches the red, white, and blue into the Olympic Stadium – and brings home the gold.

If everyone is inherently equal, why are we so determined to bring home the gold? Wouldn’t participation be sufficient?

[And speaking of the Olympics, why did I fall on my face the last time that I tried ice dancing to Justin Bieber’s Believe album? Where was the inherent dignity that the President of the United States has promised?]

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Coolidge is primarily about events that occurred roughly 100 years ago, but the political debates often seem as though they could be in tomorrow morning’s news. We often like to think of ourselves as “progressive” but the long view looks more like mental stagnation.

In 1912, textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts went on strike (Wikipedia), making many of the same points as today’s advocates of a higher minimum wage. Opposition was also pretty similar…

President Taft … tiring of the progressive onslaught, … spoke out. Law could not make growth, he said. “Votes are not bread, constitutional amendments are not work, referendums do not pay rent or furnish houses, recalls do not furnish clothing, initiatives do not supply employment or relieve inequalities of condition or of opportunity.”

The federal government had expanded dramatically during a recent war (World War I in the book; compare to Iraq and Afghanistan in our time) and borrowed heavily. During the 1920s, “Hiram Johnson, a progressive Republican senator from California, was calling for the abolition of “250,000 useless jobs created at Washington during the war.” Having spent heavily during the war itself, politicians argued about how much to spend on veterans:

The next day, not pausing, [President] Harding vetoed the [veteran’s] bonus bill with an unyielding statement. The Bursum bill, he noted, established a precedent of paying veterans, regardless of need, each month. “The commissioner of pensions estimates its additional cost to the Treasury to be about $108 million annually,” Harding noted, an outlay that took the country in the wrong direction at a time when each dollar saved was hard won. More important, “I venture the prediction that with such a precedent established the ultimate pension outlay in the half century before us will exceed 50 billions of dollars.” The country could not help any one group without helping the other groups. …

In total, over twenty years, the bill would cost $2.28 billion, as Coolidge noted in a veto statement on May 15. There were millions of veterans across the country; once they were paid, they might have to be paid again. Even a bonus bill was not free of administrative costs, he warned. In the bill, Coolidge said, we “wipe out at once all the progress five hard years have accomplished in reducing the national debt. “We have no money to bestow upon a class of people that is not taken from the whole people,” he continued; the individual was going to lose out to the group. …

Coolidge could continue to use pocket vetoes at the end of sessions, killing bills by failing to sign them in the recess. Pocket vetoes were difficult to undo; they could not be overridden. Congress had to start anew with a new law in the next session. He used the pocket veto to kill a bill that introduced new pensions for widows of Civil War soldiers. Like so much pension legislation, it affected a tiny group, but established a principle that could be broadened to provide a benefit for millions. Coolidge, like Harding, found himself playing Scrooge.

But what Coolidge noticed was how much time went to military or diplomatic meetings necessary because of World War I. The effects of earlier wars and incursions, dating all the way back to the Spanish-American War, claimed many hours. … The cost of past wars was also evident in the pages of accounts over which he and Lord labored. They would have reached their $3 billion goal [for the total federal budget], passed it even, long ago, if not for wars. Outlays that fiscal year for veterans’ care and other payments to vets were about equivalent to all the payments made for civilian government together, and larger than any other single kind of payment by the federal government. If you totaled the veteran payments with the military costs and the amount paid in interest on debt mostly generated by wars, you could see that about three-fourths of the federal costs had to do with war in one way or another.

The Post Office delivered the mail, but people argued about whether or not their employees were paid too much:

“The postal service rendered the public is good,” [President Coolidge] acknowledged. He warned, however, that the precedent of an increase for the post office staff was itself troubling: “an organized effort by a great body of public employees to secure an indiscriminate increase in compensation should have the most searching scrutiny.”

“The post office ought to be self-supporting,” [private citizen Coolidge] wrote on August 4, 1930.

The elaborate procedures of the Senate attracted scrutiny:

[Coolidge’s vice president] Dawes could not resist the opportunity to deliver a 1,300-word rant against the Senate, three times as long as the 434 words Coolidge had delivered four years before. Senators were selfish, he suggested, in their decision to sustain the practice of the filibuster. Senate rules, written by senators, placed “power in the hands of individuals to an extent, at times, subversive of the fundamental principles of free representative government.” Because the Senate had not changed its ways, “the rights of the Nation and of the American people have been overlooked.”

Democrats advocated for high tax rates, up to about 70 percent, while Republicans argued that revenues would be higher with lower rates:

“It has been our experience that a reduction in taxation does not mean an equivalent loss in revenue.” As he had in Taxation: The People’s Business, here [Andrew] Mellon tried to put his case simply: “If income taxes are so excessive that a man of ability finds he must work more than three days a week for the Government and has but three days a week for himself he will become discouraged and decide that the result is not worth his effort.” …

But the new revenues undermined the argument that Mellon’s laws benefited the rich. For a good share of the new revenue was coming from higher earners. By lowering rates on the wealthy, the Treasury had actually collected more from them. A greater portion of the income tax came from top earners than had at the beginning of the decade. In 1927, those earning over $50,000—a tremendous sum—would pay about 80 percent of the income taxes, whereas in 1920 those top earners had paid about half. “The income tax in this country,” as Mellon wrote triumphantly to one of the Treasury’s correspondents, “has become a class rather than a national tax.”

“There is another tax reduction that usually brings up the revenue, and that is one in relation to capital increases. That is, persons buy land or they buy securities and hold them. When the tax is very high they don’t sell on account of feeling that if they sell they have got to give so much to the Government that they had better hold it,” he added. Dilating on his beloved topic, the president went on, “And when taxes were reduced on that item of income it resulted in a considerable increase.”

Democrats advocated for frequent attempts to optimize tax rates and policies. Republicans tried to keep things stable:

“In fixing rates, whether they be normal taxes or surtaxes or death taxes,” said [Treasury Secretary Andrew] Mellon, “the controlling factor should be the effectiveness of the rates in producing revenue, not only for the year in which they are levied but over a long period of years.” Tax changes should be infrequent and permanent when possible.

[in 1931] There was another problem: the Democrats would pursue action for action’s sake, continuing where Hoover had started. “The Democrats will probably set aside the Hoover measures and try some of their own. That only means more experimenting with legislation.” Harding’s great inaugural address about the damage of experimentation seemed gone from memory. Though Coolidge could not know the details, Roosevelt was preparing an inaugural address that called for the opposite: “bold persistent experimentation.”

When arguing against tax reductions it was highly effective to point out that those with high incomes would be the primary beneficiaries:

the opponents of the legislation began to quantify the share of the tax break that the wealthy would claim. This, they were discovering, was an easy way to frame an opponent. General, across-the-board cuts of any progressive structure always favored the rich, since they had been paying more under progressivity to begin with. …

George Norris pointed out, “Mr. Mellon himself gets a larger personal reduction than the aggregate of practically all the taxpayers in the state of Nebraska.” So he did. But Mellon paid more tax than the citizens of that state as well.

During Coolidge’s years as president, the federal budget was in surplus. Coolidge wanted to cut tax rates while Congress wanted to expand the government and spend money, especially on bridges, dams, and roads:

The loudest and most authoritative demand for costly programs came from infrastructure engineers, led by Herbert Hoover.

The U.S. could not refrain from foreign military adventures: “The United States kept a contingent force in Nicaragua more or less constantly; Coolidge wanted to end that conflict …”

Governments sought to end the possibility of war with words, paper, and ink, culminating in the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, signed by all of the nations that would shortly fight each other in World War II.

A distaste for direct American military involvement led to arms sales instead. Will Rogers pointed out the hypocrisy: “Here we are the Nation that is always hollering for dissarmament, and Peace, and just because we are not smart enough to settle our differences by diplomacy (because we have none) why we are going to make it possible for somebody else to exterminate the faction that we don’t like. Suppose they don’t like Coolidge down there, and they would allow arms to be shipped into this Country to arm a revolution against our Government that is in Power. Boy, what a howl we would put up! But it’s us doing it down their way now, so that’s all right. Here is the humatarian nation of the world fixing so more people can get shot.”

A large number of voters worked for the government and could be relied upon to vote for government expansion and/or larger salaries for government workers:

Under a plan like La Follette’s, as Herbert Hoover said, officeholders would proliferate, whether bureaucrats or elected officials. Together all officeholders would number 6 million; now that women could vote, their wives would join them and the government vote would be 25 percent of the electorate, Hoover said.

When natural disaster (Mississippi River flood) struck people complained that the federal government did not do enough:

Rescue was work for the state governments. A number of governors and senators shared this view. Governor Austin Peay of Tennessee, a Democrat, took a position to the right of Coolidge on that: he turned down the Red Cross, too, because he “felt that the people should be expected to provide for themselves,” as a Red Cross official had noted. Praise for Coolidge’s position came from The New York Times: “Fortunately, there are still some things that can be done without the wisdom of Congress and the all-fathering Federal Government.”

Hoover slipped into the role as flood chief so naturally that it was as if the war had never ended, as if he were again rescuing Belgium. The commerce secretary popped up everywhere in the news: He talked railroads into transporting the displaced for free and carrying freight at a discount. He commandeered private outboard motors and built motorboats of plywood. He urged the people who were not yet flooded out, such as the population around the Bayou des Glaises levee, to evacuate early, then rescued by train the tens of thousands who had ignored his warning. …

Coolidge stayed in Washington [after a terribly damaging 1927 flood in Vermont]. Just as before, the federal rescue was to come through the supervision of the Red Cross. Coolidge himself would lead a fund-raising drive; a public relations campaign

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Last week I attended a screening of the movie Divorce Corp. sponsored by the Massachusetts chapter of the National Parents Organization. My expectations were low, given that the movie was produced by a pissed off divorced guy, Joseph Sorge.

One theme of the movie is the extent to which everyone in the $50 billion/year divorce industry benefits from keeping the plaintiffs coming, making the stakes as high as possible, and making the process as complex and drawn-out as possible. The movie often presents this as an explicit conspiracy but doesn’t explain why it has to be a conspiracy. Just one or two assumptions is sufficient to generate the divorce industry as shown in the movie. One is that children are best served by a customized outcome, e.g., 55 percent time with one parent as opposed to 50 percent. The other assumption is that litigation doesn’t harm children, so if it takes $500,000+ in legal fees and a huge investment of time and energy by both parents to get to that 55/45 percent split instead of 50/50, the children are just as well off as if no litigation had occurred. With those two assumptions in place, the system that we have is superior to the Danish system where everything is rule-driven, formulaic, standardized, and therefore fast and cheap.

There are some candid interviews with divorce litigators. Jerry Nissenbaum of Massachusetts is on screen asking rhetorically “Am I worth $700 per hour? I don’t know, but that’s what I charge.” Another litigator explains how “the truth isn’t relevant” in divorce court. What is important is a story and it is always the same story: “There is a victim and a victimizer. Then you need a third person, a rescuer, which is sometimes an attorney and sometimes a judge.”

The movie itself illustrates that litigator’s point. The filmmakers could have highlighted the dry facts, e.g., statistics regarding how divorce lawsuits are decided or what motivates people to file divorce lawsuits (e.g., ten years of data from Nebraska or Brinig and Allen’s study of the correlation between child support obtainable and lawsuit filings). But instead they found the most extreme and heart-wrenching stories available. Want to find out about the generic two-income couple with a house and two kids? Who gets the house? Does the court give the kids to just one parent, reducing the other to a “visitor”? How long did it take? How much money was spent on legal fees? You’re out of luck. Instead you’ll get a story about children who have spent years without seeing one of their parents and oftentimes the filmmakers don’t explain how one parent won such a complete victory. Everyone knows that this isn’t a typical outcome and therefore it isn’t that interesting.

The film has interviews with a couple of seemingly competent women whose children have lost all access to them. The suggestion is that this outcome is primarily due to the fact that the women annoyed or insulted a judge, but the backgrounds of their cases is only barely sketched. When the filmmakers show children who have lost access to their father it is usually because the mother has accused the father of abusing her and/or of sexual abuse of a child. According to the movie, this is the most rational strategy for a plaintiff to pursue because it might result in a 100 percent victory and if the allegations are false there won’t be any penalty. When there is not enough evidence to obtain an arrest or criminal conviction, the filmmakers suggest that yet a divorce court judge may well rely on an allegation to rule in a devastating manner. At a minimum, alleging abuse is very effective for a woman seeking to obtain “temporary” sole use of the marital home, which then gives her a leg-up in obtaining sole custody of the children, after which the case is over (see below).

The filmmakers portray the courts’ usage of supposedly independent custody evaluators and Guardian ad litems as a farce. According to the movie, these folks get paid $25,000 to $70,000 to crank out a report that may simply be based on personal connections to one side’s attorneys or what they think the judge wants to hear (so that the judge will reappoint them). A cop turned private investigator gives the movie most of its best lines, pointing out in a colorful way that the system depends on people who are lying and motivated by the potential for financial gain.

The movie has one interesting statistic, but no source is cited. The claim is that despite more equality of the sexes in earning power and despite a lower divorce rate, the amount of money transferred as child support and alimony has gone up 30 percent (in constant dollars) over the last 20 years. The filmmakers cite a “2000% increase” in the number of divorce litigators in California, tying that increase to the rise in housing prices and the ability of attorneys to place a lien on a divorcing couple’s house (California Family Code Section 2033). The film implies that a major driver of divorce litigation is the existence of assets that can be transferred into attorneys’ pockets, but the point is not convincing because it could also be more aggressive plaintiffs or more determined defendants and the film simply assumes the greedy lawyers are to blame. (Why would divorce plaintiffs be more aggressive today than in previous years? A woman in the audience pointed out “Collecting child support is more profitable than it used to be. To collect child support in the old days you had to take care of children. There weren’t a lot of commercial care options. Now the judge who orders the father to pay for child support separately orders the father to pay for day care or a nanny. So a woman can go to work or the country club, do almost no child care, and still collect child support as though she were a stay-at-home mom.”)

The movie covers several of divorce lawsuit defendants who’ve been sanctioned by judges, threatened with a complete loss of their parental role, and/or imprisoned for writing private Facebook posts or public Weblog entries regarding their experience in the family court. The First Amendment is useful for the New York Times but the film suggests that it affords little protection for the ordinary citizen who is writing about the judiciary itself.

The movie is strong on the easy stuff. The filmmakers found some parents with sad stories to tell and the production values are reasonably high. The filmmakers included YouTube footage of a family court judge in Texas beating his disabled daughter and then noted that the man continued to serve on the bench (cnn.com). The movie is weak on proposed remedies. The main change suggested by the film is that divorce defendants should have the right to a trial by jury instead of the present system where a single judge decides all questions of fact, e.g., whether the children should have one parent or two, how profitable the children should be to the winning parent, who should get the house, etc. The filmmakers argue that a jury would be less susceptible to corruption by cozy relationships with divorce litigators. (In patent infringement cases there is a right to a jury trial despite the fact that the questions typically require specialized technical background to understand. I asked an experienced patent litigator why it wouldn’t make more sense to have judges decide patent cases, particularly judges with technical backgrounds. How was a jury able to decide which of two PhD chemists, experts on opposing sides, was delivering the correct analysis? He said “Juries are great at figuring out who is telling the truth, which expert is answering naturally and which is shading his testimony.” It does seem kind of odd that the Seventh Amendment guarantees a right to a jury trial if Joe is trying to get more than $20 out of Sally by a “suit at common law” but that if Joe wants to get two children and $1 million per year in child support out of Sally she is not entitled to a jury because divorce court is an “equity” court.)

[The attorneys in the audience were skeptical that a jury system would streamline family court. One lawyer said “If you add a jury but leave in place the laws that make getting custody worth $1-5 million, you’ll have the same number of trials.”]

After the movie, there was a panel discussion and then the audience broke up into small groups. Ned Holstein, the founder of the National Parents Organization, gave an epically bad mushy motivation speech/attempted pep talk. It was easy to see why groups of defeated men like this one have been ineffective politically. Holstein spoke enthusiastically about the 200 or so people in the room changing the world right after a movie that showed they are up against people who are banking $50 billion each year in fees that depend on the system staying the way it is.

The audience discussion was more interesting. About half of the folks who attended were drawing their income from the divorce industry, either as divorce litigators or mediators. Inadvertently these folks proved the filmmakers’ point that money drives peoples’ perception of fairness. A $450/hour participant said that the film’s examples, mostly from California, Texas, and the Midwest, were ugly but lawyers and judges in Massachusetts were full of integrity and sincerely doing their best for children. The attorneys in the audience nodded their heads in agreement. A mediator criticized the film for not showing that mediation was the answer and that all problems could be solved if the government paid mediators to work in the courthouse. The mediators cheered. A “second wife” who is tired of turning over half of her paycheck to lawyers and a non-working “first wife” suggested that the system could be improved if there were a cap on attorneys’ fees in divorce lawsuits. The defendants in the audience clapped while the lawyers gasped in horror.

The “mediation is the answer” idea was challenged by another mediator, who had been quietly shaking her head. “Mediation as in ‘compromise’ is not rational for a woman in Massachusetts. She’ll be able to get sole custody from the judge 99 percent of the time, and a very profitable stream of child support to go with it. There are very few women who will leave money on the table in order to preserve a cooperative relationship with the father. The only thing that has worked in my practice is getting the father to pay as though the mother were the sole parent, but he’ll take care of the kids half the time. I start my work by having a private session with the man. I tell him that divorce in Massachusetts is not about creating ex-husbands. It is about creating ex-fathers. As soon as his wife decided to divorce him he became an ex-father and that unless his wife is a prison inmate, a Massachusetts judge will give her sole custody. I tell him that he has a narrow window of opportunity to buy his way back into fatherhood by giving the mother whatever cash she wants. If he can’t pay her off right now in mediation, she’ll be in court next month. She is going to convincingly tell a judge that she is ‘afraid’ for herself and her children. Nobody will care that there was no previous record of domestic violence. The judge will order him out of the house and cut the kids’ time with him back to about a day a week. He will never be able to recover from that first temporary order. Then I sit down with the woman and tell her that she’ll end up with more cash if she mediates because her husband will have to feed just her lifestyle, not hers plus the lawyers’ on both sides. Typically I

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I got hold of some aggregate numbers for a typical private American university. Last year New York University (NYU) collected $1.395 billion in tuition and fees from students (this is actual money received net of discounts (“financial aid”), i.e., not the aspirational rates that they publish). How much was spent on education? Faculty salaries were $395 million and an additional $82 million was paid to adjuncts.

A little arithmetic shows that the students paid 2.92 times what the university paid out to teachers.

Related: posting regarding the ratio back in Calvin Coolidge’s college days.

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Suppose that a retired investment banker, now a widower, wants to give $25 million to a 20-year-old unmarried grandson. If he gives the grandson the money right now, it will be subject to a gift tax and/or possibly a generation-skipping tax. If he gives the grandson the money via a bequest, when the old man dies the inheritance will be subject to a federal estate tax (and also a generation-skipping tax?) plus, depending on the state of residence, an additional estate tax imposed by a state. If, on the other hand, the widower were to remarry and give this $25 million to a spouse, the transfer would be tax-free. Could the grandfather marry his own grandson? In the old days, the answer was an obvious “no.” A man could not marry another man. How about a grandfather marrying a granddaughter? That’s prevented here in Massachusetts by MGL Ch. 207:

Section 1. No man shall marry his mother, grandmother, daughter, granddaughter, sister, stepmother, grandfather’s wife, grandson’s wife, wife’s mother, wife’s grandmother, wife’s daughter, wife’s granddaughter, brother’s daughter, sister’s daughter, father’s sister or mother’s sister.

Under current laws, where same-sex marriage is legal in Massachusetts and recognized by the federal government, could the grandfather marry his grandson, give his spouse/grandson a tax-free spousal gift of $25 million, and then get a no-fault divorce after a couple of years? (if the marriage is too short, the IRS may disregard it (source))

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As the child of a mother whose college major was Art History and whose vocation was art teacher, much of my youth was spent in art museums. My parents spent a lot of time traveling around Europe with their Michelin Guides checking off every one-star church after admiring its fresco or altarpiece. Thus in my peregrinations around the 50 states, every Canadian province and territory including Nunavut, and the gringo highlights of Mexico, I have felt a genetic compulsion to visit art museums and sculpture parks. I believe that I have seen all of the major sculpture parks on our continent.

The archetypical sculpture park is Storm King Art Center, north of New York City. It is a beautiful landscape dotted with individually excellent works, which relate to each other oftentimes less than do the different holes of a miniature golf course (see my posting on the similarities between golf courses and sculpture parks like these). Back in November 2013 I visited Edward Tufte’s Hogpen Hill Farms in Woodbury, Connecticut (my photos (taken while herding a 4-year-old); better ones on Tufte’s site). Tufte has spent nearly a decade now reshaping the landscape with backhoes, digging up boulders to create Stonehenge-like environments, and adding metal sculptures that are all unified by having come from one mind (see The Mythical Man-Month for why this is important in software projects (short answer: even if three designers have more collective brainpower than one, the ultimate design will be more maintainable if it isn’t cluttered with ideas from three brains… terrible news for the open source community!)).

Many of the individual works at Storm King are fantastic, but the overall experience is more interesting, thought-provoking, and awe-inspiring at Hogpen Hill Farms. So I’m nominating the 234-acre place for North America’s best sculpture park!

[The next open house won’t be until the fall but it is worth watching edwardtufte.com and marking your calendar now.]

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I’m still reading Coolidge and sometimes the prices back around the turn of the 20th century are striking:

• “In 1890, professors’ salaries [at Amherst College] were $ 2,500, more than twenty times tuition. The step up from laborer to professor was immense, for the average wage earner in 1890 earned $425 a year. ” [i.e., tuition has gone from 1/20th of a professor’s salary to between 1/3 and 1/2]
• “[In 1894] Tuition at Harvard Law that year was $150, and the university catalog estimated additional expenses of up to $471.” [i.e., the tuition has gone from about $4000 in 2014 dollars (calculator used) to $52,350 (source).]
• “Homes in western Massachusetts ranged in price from $2,000 to $5,000, about what a young lawyer could earn in a year if he was lucky.” [Zillow says that the median sale price for a house or condo in Northampton is now $261,000, perhaps four times a young lawyer’s salary out there.]
• “The State House on Beacon Hill was a glorious structure, its cornerstone having been laid by Samuel Adams, the governor, who had arrived to deliver it with fifteen white horses. Its thirty-five-foot dome shone gold, having been freshly gilded in twenty-three-carat paint the autumn before at a price of $4,758.79, a sign that in autumn 1906, Massachusetts was feeling extravagant.” [Compare to present; the state government will spend $1 million to pay off-duty state police cars to park at the closed-for-construction Callahan Tunnel (Boston Herald).]
• Total federal income tax revenues for 1924: $1.84 billion [About $250 billion in today’s dollars, compared to about $3.78 trillion in current spending (Washington Post), i.e., enough to fund 24 days of our current government’s spending.]

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Here are some snippets of what was on friends’ minds at various Christmas and New Year’s gatherings….

A 65-year-old led off his good news summary from 2013 by pointing out that stocks had reached an all-time high. His cohorts were cheered by reflecting on this. I didn’t want to break their hearts by showing them this chart of the S&P 500 in real (inflation-adjusted) dollars. It turns out that the peak was actually in August 2000. We’re getting close to that high point from 13.5 years ago but we aren’t there yet (i.e., a person who is today 65 and put money away for his or her retirement back at age 52 would still be waiting for a positive return on that investment). Measured in barrels of oil, a good proxy for the kinds of things that a comfortable person might want to buy, e.g., gasoline or airline tickets, things are far worse. Oil in August 2000 was about $30 per barrel (source) whereas today it is about $110. So the S&P at 1565 in August 2000 would have purchased 52 barrels of oil. At today’s price of 1830, the S&P buys just 16 barrels of oil. What if you wanted to buy houses in the U.S.? The Case-Shiller index was about 100 in August 2000 and is now 150, so you could buy 15.6 houses back then with an S&P 500 position compared to 12.2 today. But people who have big S&P 500 positions don’t typically buy average houses. What about that condo in Manhattan? This source says the cost was $522 per square foot in 2000 and it is now $1,178. So the S&P 500 has gone from being worth 3 square feet of space in Manhattan to 1.55.

People talked about schools. A father talked about how Cambridge Public Schools (among the world’s most lavishly funded) had by accident managed to create a good Montessori school (Tobin). Children from Caucasian and Asian families, who could not take advantage of the city’s race-based preference system, had only about a 1 in 4 chance of being assigned to this school, according to this father. But recently the central bureaucrats had removed the principal, who had been beloved by both teachers and parents, and substituted a mediocre replacement. The school was now on a downward slide. A homeowner in Brookline talked about how it was unfair that people were crowding into the Brookline schools: “They used to be great. Now they’re just okay. These people are wrecking it for those of us who have been here for 20 years. There should be a 6-12 month waiting period before you can send a kid into our schools.” A passionate supporter of bigger government and higher taxes on “the rich” to pay for it, this owner of a $2 million home in Brookline spoke bitterly about his opposition to “the town considering a property tax override so that they can build a new school.” [Thus proving that most Americans can agree that the fairest tax system is a progressive one where rates are 0% up through whatever their income happened to be in any given year and then 100% above that!]

Despite the trepidation about schools nearly everyone seemed to be happy with how his or her children had turned out. And the kids who were present at these parties were all ones that any parent would be proud to call his/her own. Can our schools really be as bad as the statistics show if the children are turning out so well? [I do realize that this is a biased sample since the parents of these children generally have above-average educations, incomes, etc.]

My friends are mostly getting to the stage of life where they talk about health care for their aging parents. Despite the fact that Medicare was paying all of the bills and no expense or procedure was being spared, they were appalled at what they plainly perceived as disorganization, incompetence, and mismanagement at Boston’s top hospitals, e.g., Mass General. As these friends are mostly not doctors it is tough to know whether the problem is simply one of perception due to the large number of providers involved and the lack of clear communication to the patient and family.

A gathering of pilots and aircraft owners from Hanscom Field was notable for the enthusiasm that everyone displayed for helping young people (some of whom were present) progress towards personal and professional aviation goals. For example, all of the aircraft owners were offering the younger career-building pilots the opportunity to fly their airplanes. It is something that one doesn’t see as much in engineering and I’m not sure why.

[Another notable fact from the pilot dinner was that every man at one table who had been a father in Massachusetts had been sued for child support and, as part of the child support lawsuit, the plaintiff had ratted him out to the state’s Department of Children and Families as a child molester. We learned that this is no longer the default level of pressure applied, however, from a soft-spoken even-tempered guy that we’ve known for years. He was currently going through hearings as a criminal defendant: “The prosecutors around Worcester got a grant from the federal government to prosecute violence against women,” he noted [maybe this program?], “which means that they now go after every man who is accused because they get paid for it. So now all of the child support plaintiffs in Worcester are going to the police saying that they have been beaten up.” The mother of his 11-month-old son alleged that he had grabbed her wrist. “She has no evidence other than her own statement. She doesn’t have any witness to say that I ever yelled at her, threatened her, or touched her. She has no marks on her skin. But anyway my lawyers say that I will still have to go through at least four court appearances as an accused criminal. My plaintiff offered to drop the charges if I would pay her what she is demanding, but it works out to more than 100 percent of my after-tax income.”]

This is the time of year when I have the most contact with MIT Media Lab faculty. The lab seems to have settled into a moderately comfortable middle age (the lab, not the people!), with lots of fairly young faculty who are excited about the work that they are doing. I would say that the success proves the wisdom of Nicholas Negroponte, the founder, who invested heavily in a fancy building that seemed ridiculous at the time. Why did people still searching for a problem to solve deserve a better building than the drawers full of Nobel-prize winners in the Physics and Biology departments? At first glance it might seem that it would be more important to gather the best researchers doing the most important stuff. But it turns out that people are unreliable. Their ideas might not pan out. Their ideas might pan out so well that they get hired away by other institutions. What can be relied upon, however, is the persistence of a massive and deluxe building near the heart of the MIT campus. If you have a nice building at a good university you can always hire creative people to fill it.

Hardly anyone was worried about economic security. Each couple [couples with kids hardly ever seem to invite anyone who isn’t part of a couple] had at least one person with a reasonably well-paid job and usually both adults in a household were doing well in a career. The folks who seemed to have the toughest time finding a rewarding new job when necessary were older (50+) software engineers with no management experience. Their technical skills were excellent but despite the shortage of capable programmers, employers were more interested in hiring managers that age, not individual programmers.

Some people talked about books that they were writing but I don’t remember anyone talking about a book that he or she was reading. People who had been passionate 25-year-old consumers and then discussers of books, movies, theater, concerts, etc. are either no longer reading or no longer bothering to talk about what they read. (Right now I am reading a biography of Calvin Coolidge so maybe it is a good thing that people my age apparently don’t talk about what they are reading!)

It was in shopping for bagels to serve to my own guests that I met my personal hero for 2014. The trim man of about 40 behind the counter at the Harvard Square Dunkin’ Donuts filled a bag with 18 bagels then asked “Is there anything else that you want?” I began mentally going through the list of all of the donuts on display, starting with “Boston Kreme”. This led to a conversation on the subject of temptation versus willpower and he mentioned that he had once weighed 300 lbs. If he can lose 150 lbs. and keep it off while standing right next to 20 baskets of donuts, shouldn’t it be possible for me to keep a single New Year’s resolution?

A belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of my readers!

 

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The Washington Post says that the programmers who built healthcare.gov are being fired (story). They are being replaced by Accenture, at $90 million per year for maintenance.

This does raise some questions…

• if the site works, how is it possible to spend $90 million each year on maintenance?
• if the site doesn’t work, absent spectacular incompetence by the old team, how will it be possible for a team of new programmers that has never looked at the source code to make progress at a more rapid rate, at least in the short run?
• how much is actually going to be spent if you could the salaries of federal government workers in addition to these contractors? And, rather than building this site, would it have been cheaper to fly all of the Americans who have successfully signed up to non-Medicaid plans via healthcare.gov over to France every time one of those folks needed a real medical intervention? (paying market/private rates in France for the services consumed)
• should we buy Accenture stock as a way of getting some of our tax dollars back? This chart shows that building Web sites for hundreds of millions of dollars is actually pretty profitable.

[Note that Google was funded with about $25 million that lasted five years, albeit supplemented by some ad revenue (source). Thus if the healthcare.gov project goes perfectly in 2014 it will be consuming cash at 18 times the rate that the world’s most rapidly growing company did.]

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There has been a lot of news coverage about various politicians and political appointees conspiring against the public by closing lanes on the George Washington Bridge. None of the articles have addressed the question of whether it makes sense for this bridge to be government-owned. A private company surely would not voluntarily cut its own revenue by closing lanes unnecessarily. When was the last time that you went to a McDonald’s restaurant and had to sacrifice your health by ordering a salad because they weren’t selling Bacon Habanero Ranch Quarter Pounders due to a personal grudge among politicians?

There are probably a lot of governments worldwide that could operate a bridge competently and efficiently, but New York and New Jersey do not seem likely candidates. The Tax Foundation says that New York and New Jersey are the two least efficient states in the United States, in terms of the percentage of state income that they spend to fund state and local government. The Port Authority is one of the world’s most wasteful entities (see this July 2010 posting about them spending $15,500 per flight hour to accomplish a $400 per hour helicopter mission) and now we’ve learned that Port Authority properties are playthings for capricious rulers.

Why should an already-built bridge continue to be owned by this entity? There are no unusual capital or permitting requirements associated with its continued maintenance. If you are a fan of expanding the government’s role in our economy, the proceeds from selling the bridge could be used to build additional infrastructure to be managed by the Port Authority. If you’re a fan of arithmetic, you could note that New York and New Jersey are both insolvent if pension obligations are lined up against pension funds invested in financial instruments that exist in the market (i.e., not fictitious ones that return 8 percent per year). The money from selling the bridge could be used to reduce the pension funding gap.

Private companies own and operate some of the world’s busiest airports, e.g., Heathrow Airport. Maintaining a single bridge has to be simpler than managing Heathrow.

Given the scarcity of bridges across the Hudson in the New York City area it would probably make sense to require that whoever buys the G.W. bridge can’t charge more in tolls than the current price, adjusted for inflation (the current price is already close to the highest in the world so this restriction should not prevent a sale).

Why not put the bridge out for bid and see what it is worth?

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