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Seemingly every day politicians propose massive changes to U.S. taxes, laws, and budgets in order to “create jobs” (the politician will take the credit, presumably, if a small business owner decides to take the risk (and endure the paperwork) of hiring an additional worker; yet another cruel irony of doing business in the U.S.).

I’m wondering if a big impediment to job creation is in fact all of the talk about grand job creation schemes. Suppose that you own a business and you’re told that within a few months there will be some dramatic change in payroll tax rates, tax credits available for hiring new workers, etc. Would you hire people right now or wait until the dust settles and you know what the tax and regulatory environment will look like? (Debating tax credits for new workers seems like a particularly destructive activity; why hire a new worker today when, if you wait a month, the government might pick up most of the cost?)

A politician who proposes a 10-point “job creation” plan may be ensuring that few jobs will be created until all 10 points have been debated by Congress, passed into law or not, etc.

[Separately, this weekend I stayed with friends in California. I asked how one of their sons was doing. “He’s doing great,” they said, “with lots of work helping U.S. companies expand their business in China.” I replied that this was great news and that he should be congratulated for helping to pay for Social Security, Medicare, our various wars, etc. “Actually he’s not going to be contributing much because he renounced his U.S. citizenship and is now a citizen of Taiwan.”]

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The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get The College Education You Pay For is a book by a Wall Street Journal editor vaguely along the same lines as Academically Adrift and Higher Education?. Unlike Academically Adrift, however, the book does not have research data to relate. Unlike with Higher Education?, the author, Naomi Riley, did not spend time in classrooms.

In the first chapters of The Faculty Lounges, we learn that professors get tenure by conforming to established patterns of thought and then colleges pay tenured faculty long after they stop being effective. This is not news and the author explains that tenure in the old (pre-1994) days, when there was a mandatory retirement age of 60 or 65, was rather different from today’s tenure. Riley is a good journalist and digs up the most embarrassing episodes of tenured professors behaving badly, e.g., Northwestern’s Arthur Butz, an EE teacher, venturing into Holocaust denial.

Riley asserts that colleges today are handing out a lot more vocational degrees and professors of “security and protective services” shouldn’t need tenure protection for controversial ideas compared to traditional liberal arts faculty. I’m not sure that this is true. A professor of criminology might opine that the War on Drugs could not be won and should be abandoned, thus attracting the wrath of politicians who continue to appropriate funds to fight the War. By contrast, what would a professor of Ancient Greek be likely to say that would offend today’s powerful elite?

Riley decries the valorization of progress and novelty. She introduces the subject of debasement of standards by noting that Thomas Friedman addressed a group of 4000 university administrators by telling them to ignore “concrete outcomes like grades and test scores”. Teachers should instead try to install passion and curiosity in students because “the job students will hold probably doesn’t even exist today”. How a student was supposed to learn passion from someone who devoted the first half of his adult life to getting lifetime job security is a question Friedman did not address. Nor did Friedman address how a student was supposed to learn curiosity from someone who stayed in the same narrow research area for his or her entire career. Since it isn’t clear what colleges are supposed to teach it is therefore excusable that they don’t bother to measure quality of teaching or outcomes.

The miserable lives of adjunct faculty are covered in this book. It is not clear why a Wall Street Journal alumna has a problem with universities paying minimal dollars to adjuncts and working them like slaves. There is a market for PhD college teachers and presumably the adjuncts are paid a market-clearing wage. Riley does note that students don’t learn as much from these fatigued part-timers and that the rise of the adjuncts corresponded to a big rise in grade inflation. Adjuncts get re-hired based on previous semesters’ student evaluations and the best way to get high marks with students is to give out As.

The book contains a long chapter on unions. It isn’t clear why this is relevant. Colleges are terribly inefficient at helping students learn. Does it really matter whether or not the ineffective teachers are union members or not? Unions seem to be a factor in ensuring mediocrity, but plenty of non-union tenured faculty are mediocre as well.

Riley includes a chapter on politics and the tendency of university teachers to adopt liberal political views in order to fit in with their community. Once again, it is unclear how this is relevant given the terrible job that teachers do. Would you rather pay $50,000 for a bad education from a Republican or a Democrat? Riley cites no evidence that students are looking to their professors for guidance in how to vote. Perhaps the political views of the faculty are not interesting to students.

Riley makes an effort to figure out why costs are so high. She pinpoints the bloat in administration that has occurred at most schools: “As of 2007, private colleges employed one senior administrator for every thirty-five students.” But then she circles back to the faculty as being the main source of the problem, e.g., because professors get to decide when to offer classes at their own convenience rather than at convenient hours for students trying to fit in enough requirements to graduate.

The final chapter is devoted to Olin College of Engineering, perhaps the best undergrad engineering program in the U.S. Professors are on five-year contracts and everyone seems to be happy while the students learn far more than at traditional schools.

Riley doesn’t address the tough questions. Olin and some other schools have shown that they can hugely improve the quality and consistency of undergraduate education. Yet demand for a high priced low quality education delivered by adjuncts and elderly tenured professors remains very strong. Given that there is a more or less free market in higher education, why doesn’t the market self-correct?

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I’m visiting my cousin Doug in San Francisco right now. Walking near the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge, Doug’s wife wondered out loud if the pavement-melting Volvo SUV, packed with all of the detritus of a suburban family with two children, was locked. Her 7-year-old daughter noted that “they can’t steal it without the key”. Mom responded that they can steal what’s inside. The little girl said “at least that would clean it out.”

After enjoying a Vietnamese meal in the Richmond, rebuilding our energy after a visit to the House of Air trampoline park, we all went to the de Young Museum for the Picasso show. Mom and her daughters went off independently while Doug and I concentrated on a couple of paintings. I had my arm around Doug’s shoulders for a while before thinking “When these other folks see two guys in the art museum arm-in-arm, their first thought is probably not ‘cousins'”.

[A separate interesting observation occurred while driving to lunch in Berkeley. A friend looked at a Berkeley student wearing a nose ring and asked “Why would anyone want to turn herself into an ox?”]

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A typical line of reasoning on display in newspaper opinion sections is “It is unfair to criticize Barack Obama for doing X because King Bush II did X” (example from Paul Krugman today regarding borrowing more money to rebuild from Hurricane Irene: “After all, [Eric Cantor] and his Republican colleagues showed no comparable interest in paying for the Bush administration’s huge unfunded initiatives.” (link)).

I’m wondering why people accept this line of reasoning. First, considering the state of the U.S. economy, it is not obvious that King Bush II did a good job. Why would anyone want a politician to behave as he or she did during Bush II years? Second, King Bush II and Congress at the time were operating from a very different set of assumptions. People believed that the U.S. economy, and therefore the tax base, would grow 2-4% per year. People believed that returns on investment, including for public employee pension funds, were likely to be 8%/year. Currently the growth forecasts for the U.S. economy are maybe 0-1% per year and for investment yields perhaps 2-4%/year. It seems natural that thoughtful people would act differently given different assumptions.

Should it really be to a politician’s discredit to say “He advocated X in 2005 when the economy was forecast to continue booming for decades and now, with the outlook more or less dismal, advocates Y”?

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I keep seeing news articles about unemployment percentages. I’m surprised that so few people look at the actual employment numbers rather than unemployment. As I’ve written here before, I think total employment is a much more interesting number because it predicts demand for housing (generally you need a job in order to pay rent or a mortgage) as well as the overall strength of the economy.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2000 the U.S. had 131,785,000 nonfarm jobs, of which 20,780,000 were in government. In 2011, the corresponding numbers were 131,190,000 (slightly less) and 22,034,000 (about 6 percent more).

So to my mind there should be demand for approximately 350,000 fewer houses and apartments (budgeting in some two-career households) and the overall economic strength of the U.S. should be lower because we have fewer private-sector jobs supporting more government jobs.

The raw data on employment don’t seem that hard to interpret. Why do they so rarely appear in the news?

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… but they would have declined (or at least slowed in growth) anyway.

A lot of the value in Apple has come from the ineptitude of other companies and the passion and willingness of early adopters to spend huge money. There are inherent limits to growth fueled by those two factors. For example, the early adopters with the greatest willingness to pay for smartphones (and associated service) have already purchased smartphones. Now the big market is from people in emerging countries, such as China, and the average consumer in developed countries. The record companies were so poorly managed that they gave up 30 percent of their digital music revenue because they were too lazy to run their own Web site. What other industry is going to give Apple 30 percent of its revenue in exchange for Apple running a server?

So let’s not be too hard on the new Apple CEO (Tim Cook, who seems to be more experienced with logistics than product design). If revenue and profit growth flattens it might well have done the same under Steve Jobs. For Apple to justify a comparable market cap to Exxon’s (which owns oil wells, after all) would require a lot of things to go right over the next decade. The current P/E ratio of 15 doesn’t look that high, but since Apple is a tech company that issues a lot of stock options they may end up diluting current investors so much that a public holder of a share of Apple stock may never receive his or her full $383 worth in dividends and capital gains.

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One of the things that I did not like about King Bush II was his publicly personal involvement in the Iraq war. Here’s something that I wrote during a 2002 trip to Alaska:

From June through October 2002, every time we emerged from the wilderness we’d find George W. Bush complaining about Saddam and Iraq and every time we felt diminished. Iraq is a country that, before the Gulf War, had a GDP comparable to that of West Virginia. George W. Bush represented the entire American public. Was it possible that we the American People had nothing better to think about than a tiny country on the other side of the globe? It occurred to us that, as a matter of protocol, Queen Victoria would not have dealt directly with the potentate of an insignificant foreign land. It would have diminished the citizens of England to see their leader treating one-on-one with the leader of an inferior nation. A problem like Saddam would have been delegated to a 3rd undersecretary in the Foreign Office. When asked about Iraq, we kept expecting to hear George W. say “I’m not sure. I delegated that problem to Colonel Smith and he is going to report back to me in three months. Can we move on to questions that more directly concern our society?” But of course it never happened.

I’m therefore thrilled that the Libyan war is coming to an end while President Obama is on the golf course on Martha’s Vineyard. As U.S. military power fades (due to our fading economic power), this is how I’d like us to be remembered, i.e., our hero president casually squashing a Third World dictator while sitting on the beach with the family.

[I myself would be on the Vineyard as well right now, visiting a close friend who is getting on in years, but it is not practical for peasants to fly personal airplanes there during Obama’s visit. I was there the day before the lockdown began and the airport was crammed with cargo planes, vehicles that had been flown in, etc. Before my departure, my friend and I shared the pilot’s lounge with some of the Secret Service employees. We were amazed that the country could afford to take so many young intelligent people out of the productive workforce, put them on taxpayer-funded salaries, rent them cars with tax dollars (or fly SUVs in on C17 cargo planes), and rent them beach houses on Martha’s Vineyard for two weeks.]

[Note that even had we stayed we would not have been able to see Air Force One land. The main runway at MVY is just over a mile long and when your personal airplane is a Boeing 747 it means you need to fly to Otis Air National Guard base to meet one of the helicopters that has been previously flown up there to greet you. Then you transfer from the B747 to the helicopter for the flight back south to the MVY airport, then shut down Vineyard traffic for the motorcade trip to the $50,000/week estate (it is unclear why he couldn’t take a helicopter directly to Blue Heron Farm, but maybe his Marine One helicopters are simply too big to land on the small private golf course associated with the house (aerial photo inside this article)). Michelle Obama and her daughters arrived four hours earlier via a similar collection of taxpayer-funded jet-powered aircraft (an extra $500,000 cost to taxpayers, considering operating costs and the Secret Service details required?).]

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I visited my 12-year-old friend Sophie at Boston Children’s Hospital today. Despite the month of inpatient chemotherapy that she has endured, she was sensitive to my own mood and asking about me. I asked if she was getting bored and she replied that there was always a lot of activity. “There are volunteers who come by every few hours to ask if I need anything.” Were they helpful? “They’re annoying. If I had the energy to see people, I would be seeing my friends.”

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Folks: A 12-year-old friend has come down with Burkitt’s lymphoma and is at Boston Children’s Hospital for four months of inpatient chemotherapy. I’m visiting her tomorrow morning and then donating blood for her at 11:30 am. Would anyone like to join me at the blood center (best to email for appointment)? I’ll buy lunch afterwards.

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This is sad, but apparently my backup and version control methods aren’t perfect… I’m looking for copies of my own source code from prior to September 1999. According to http://philip.greenspun.com/doc/version-history that would be ArsDigita Community System 2.2 or prior. It would also be nice to cover the source that I once distributed from demo.webho.com with my tutorial books). Apparently I put a robots.txt file in there to prevent it from being indexed (not sure why; maybe I thought the files were too big and AltaVista wouldn’t want to choke on a lot of source code?) so it isn’t in archive.org.

[I know that this sounds pathetic. My defense is that I relied on the company that I had founded to keep the source code and maintain the version control system. After I sold my shares in the company and went my separate way, the company failed and the servers were likely discarded. I guess the lesson is that programmers should keep a personal archive of everything that they’ve done.]

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