Party of Science scores lower than Party of Stupid

by philg

“What Americans Know About Science” (Pew Research) is subtitled “Science knowledge levels remain strongly tied to education; Republicans and Democrats are about equally knowledgeable,” but it turns out that “equal” translates to “Republicans know more”:

Republicans and independents who lean to the Republican Party average seven correct answers, while Democrats and independents who lean to the Democratic Party average 6.6.

A difference of 0.4 doesn’t sound huge, right? But the difference between Americans with postgraduate degrees and bachelor’s degrees was only 0.6. Being a Republican was worth about the same as two years of graduate school.

Considering that Democrats have branded themselves the “Party of Science” while decrying the purported anti-science idiocy of Republicans, these data are interesting.

Even more interesting is why we continue to have faith in our unique capacity to solve the world’s science and engineering problems. When a politician proposes a reduction in the growth of government spending on grants to science labs (not an actual cut, of course, though a lower growth rate will be characterized by “scientists” as a “cut”), the reaction includes statements that this will mean the end of scientific progress. This necessarily assumes that scientific discoveries can be made only in the U.S.

Global warming? Only Americans can help! This has the same logical basis as Tom Cruise explaining that a car accident calls for a Scientologist. It won’t be Chinese and German engineers who come up with improved solar cells, wind turbines, batteries, and CO2 vacuums. (After all, the fundamentals were all developed in the U.S. It was American Edmond Becquerel, working in a Paris, Texas lab, who discovered the photovoltaic effect; American Albert Einstein later explained the photoelectric effect while working in Zurich, Kansas.)

Who are these Americans ready to help solve the world’s toughest problems? Fully 39 percent of us know that a “base” is the opposite of an “acid”. Plainly we are going to be experts on the carbon cycle and atmospheric CO2 washing out into carbonic acid. Americans can do even better when adjusting for the sun’s influence on climate, since 63 percent of us know that the tilt of the Earth is responsible for the seasons (survey methodology).

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Fatherhood of a child born after divorce in Massachusetts

by philg

A friend’s son got a call the other day from the woman who’d divorced him a year earlier (wedding planning and uncontested divorce legal proceedings combined lasted far longer than the marriage itself). She had found a higher-income sex partner at some point during the brief marriage and it seems that she’d given birth to a child 13 months after a divorce agreement was approved by a judge (this kind of divorce-by-agreement rather than actual litigation happens about 17 percent of time in the county that we sampled within Massachusetts (statistical study for Middlesex)).

The divorce didn’t become final until 120 days following the approval by the judge and Massachusetts presumes that a child born within 300 days of the technical end of a marriage is the responsibility of the ex-husband. A birth certificate application with the new husband’s name on it as the father had been rejected (tough to believe that all of these town and county record-keeping systems are linked!).

The new mom wanted her discarded former husband to sign an Affidavit of Nonpaternity. The situation turns out to be sufficiently common that there is a standard form.

(It wouldn’t have made great financial sense for her to try to collect 23 years of child support from this guy given his low-ish income and the fact that a DNA test might get him off the hook, but marrying the lover/biological father and collecting from the ex-husband can work; see “Post-Divorce Litigation” for a link to a NY Times article about an example situation:

“I pay child support to a biologically intact family,” Mike told me, his voice cracking with incredulity. “A father and mother, married, who live with their own child. And I pay support for that child. How ridiculous is that?”

)

Related:

  • Q&A on this topic with answer from lawyer: “You, as the bio-dad, have no rights if legally the child has another father. … If his rights are not terminated, you can file for child support and he must pay it.”
  • discussion forum thread, in which a responder asks the new sex partner of the divorce plaintiff: “Just to toss this out there; are you 100% [sure] this is your child?” (also provides some insight into how long it may take to litigate a no-fault divorce in Massachusetts: “My GF and myself have been together for 4 years, and now have a baby together. However she is in the process of getting Divorced but its not final yet.”)
  • relevant statute

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Green New Deal will not cost as much as feared

by philg

It turns out that a powerful Vestas wind turbine can be purchased for $199 on Amazon.com.

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Should lottery winners be exempt from wealth tax?

by philg

“Elizabeth Warren to propose new ‘wealth tax’ on very rich Americans, economist says” (Washington Post):

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) will propose a new annual “wealth tax” on Americans with more than $50 million in assets, according to an economist advising her on the plan, as Democratic leaders vie for increasingly aggressive solutions to the nation’s soaring wealth inequality.

Since announcing her presidential bid, Warren has pitched herself a champion of the working class against elites, arguing “billionaires and big corporations” have rigged the political and economic system to their advantage.

One billionaire who has been in the news lately is anonymous. She is the winner of $1.5 billion (pre-tax) in a government-run lottery (i.e., the same government that says it wants to fix the “problem” of wealth inequality will periodically create billionaires at random).

Should she have to pay Sachem Warren’s new wealth tax? It was a government-run lottery that made her rich. How is it reasonable to complain about her being richer than neighbors and impose a new tax to further trim her winnings?

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Gillette versus Dorco Shaving Test 4

by philg

After four weeks of shaving alternating sides of face with a Gillette Fusion 5 ProShield with FlexBall and a Dorco Pace 7, the Dorco was plainly doing a better job and also holding its edge better.

Blind test data: I told friends in Manhattan about my experiment, two days after a mixed Gillette/Dorco shave, and both husband and wife identified the right side of my face as cleaner. It was the Dorco side.

At roughly the two-week point, we conducted the following test:

  • back of neck, unshaven for three weeks
  • Gillette Fusion 5 ProShield with FlexBall on left side
  • Dorco Pace 7 on right side
  • neutral operator (she had never seen the Gillette ad)

Result: “The Dorco is much better. It gets all of the hair in one swipe. But maybe that is because it is new and the Gillette blade is old?”

In other words, the performance of the Dorco was so much better that she imagined it to be a test of a brand-new Dorco versus a weeks-old Gillette. (As noted above, the blades were of identical age and had performed an identical number of shaves, each on half of my face.)

Loosely related: Opinion from a Harry’s subscriber: The Dorco 6 (not 7) Korean blades and Harry’s Germany steel were comparable in shave quality.

From a man with a light beard (maybe an ancestor was a cousin to Elizabeth Warren’s great-grandparents?): The almost-free Dorco 4-blade system is far superior to the older Gillette system (pre-Fusion) that he had been loyally using.

From a woman: The unfortunately named Dorco Shai 3+3 (why not “bold” rather than “shai”?) system is far better than the Gillette Venus she had been using. The cartridge is truly massive! (Dorco makes some more conventional razors for women as well.)

Next project: Dorco Pace 6 Plus versus Dorco Pace 7 (Preliminary results: The trimmer blade on the Pace 6 Plus surprisingly does not result in more precision under the nose; the Pace 7 seems to feel and work better (I doubt my own sanity as I write this).)

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Mediocre U.S. average income makes it tough to reduce health care spending?

by philg

One thing that I learned during a month at Harvard Medical School is that health care spending is inversely correlated with income. The poorer people are, in other words, the more they cost for an insurance company (or the “plan sponsor”, such as an employer, behind the insurance company).

In some cases, of course the causation may go in the other direction, i.e., a person who has a chronic health problem can’t work as hard or as effectively and therefore earns less. But the consensus within the public health and insurance industry seems to be “lower income, therefore higher cost.”

Singapore is notable for low health care spending as a percentage of GDP (only 4.5 percent; compare to 18 percent for the U.S.) while simultaneously enjoying better outcomes, e.g., longer life expectancy. How much of that, though, could be attributed to Singapore simply having a higher-income population? The CIA shows that per-capita GDP, adjusted for purchasing power, in Singapore is $93,900 per person, 58 percent higher than the $59,500 for the U.S. (Singapore and the U.S. are close to each other in rankings of countries by income equality/inequality, so the median incomes should be similarly related).

Plainly this cannot explain most of our off-the-charts spending on health care. Canada and the big European countries spend much less, as a percentage of GDP, despite having lower per-capita income. But if we assume constant waste due to our more-or-less constant system design (fee-for-service, half government, patient doesn’t pay directly), the stagnant U.S. median income (FRED data) could perhaps explain some of why it is so tough for us to achieve incremental improvements.

The “U.S. population” is a moving target, especially due to immigration. Immigrants have a lower income than native-born Americans (see data below), but they also change the median age of the population, which is a big determinant of health care costs (older people are more expensive): “Without immigration since 1965, the U.S. today would have a median age of 41, not 38.” (Pew). Our incompetence at delivering health care may be masked to some extent by immigration, which has reduced median age. Also complicating matters is that immigrants may be less likely than average to have some chronic medical issues. A morbidly obese person, for example, might have trouble making it over the border.

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Virtual reality and augmented reality: the technologies of the future

by philg

Part of our Austin experience was visiting the virtual/augmented reality lab at Capital Factory. Folks there have decided that the best current VR hardware is the HTC Vive. They aren’t in love with the much-hyped Oculus, but have it available to demo.

We did a 3D drawing game, browsed around in Google Earth, and played a first-person space-themed shooting game with the Vive. With Oculus, I played Angry Birds.

The good news is that we didn’t get sick, even flying around in Google Earth. On the other hand, I would rather have just covered the walls with more TVs for a more immersive experience.

I asked the folks running the lab for their theory on why VR hasn’t caught on. They cited the cost, noting that a complete HTC Vive rig is about $600. Yet that’s nothing compared to what hardcore gamers spend.

Readers: What do you think? Is it fair to say that “VR/AR is the technology of the future, and always will be”?

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Generation Wealth

by philg

The movie Generation Wealth is currently streaming on Amazon. I loved the director’s previous The Queen of Versailles, so decided to give this one a try.

The movie is a mishmash of the director’s family history (retired parents and teenage children get a fair amount of screen time), musing regarding modern-day materialism, and interviews with people whose lives have been affected by parental or personal earnings.

One interesting character is Florian Homm, a fugitive from U.S. justice due allegations of fraud while running a hedge fund, resulting in investor losses of up to $200 million. He is back in his native Germany, which supposedly refuses to extradite its citizens (would that be true for an accused murderer or is it that they won’t extradite for a financial crime?). The filmmaker interviews Homm’s adult son and the son’s girlfriend for an all-around perspective.

Another interesting subject is a New Yorker who works on Wall Street. She refuses to consider the idea of marrying a lower-income man (a prudent policy in light of New York State’s winner-take-all family law) and explains that the pool of available men is thus quite small. At around age 40 she does find an old rich guy to marry and goes through exotic fertility treatments and the hiring of a surrogate. He eventually leaves her for a younger woman (i.e., the 70-year-old found a 30-year-old sex partner).

Kacey Jordan was featured as someone who went from minimum wage to high-paid porn star and then back to minimum wage. There was plastic surgery during this journey, which is another theme of the movie. Lauren Greenfield, the director, follows a bus driver “single mom” to Brazil for a life-changing investment in plastic surgery.

One interesting aspect is that the born-in-1966 Greenfield follows her classmates from a rich kids’ private high school into their adult lives.

The movie takes some swipes at Donald Trump and his supporters (they’re exposed as crass idiots!) and also takes a variety of standard 21st century feminist positions. Yet the filmmaker’s own life story contradicts the feminist complaints. Her college boyfriend-turned-husband is the person cited for maximum encouragement and facilitation of her career. He urges her not to quit in the early days when she’s discouraged and he takes care of an infant child while she travels to Asia on an assignment.

The central thesis is poorly supported. The film shows people today saying things about money-obsessed Americans that the film also shows people saying in the 1990s. Do we know that people didn’t have similar things to say in the 1970s about young Arab royals or circa 1900 about the children of industrialists? The world is richer so maybe there are just more rich kids running around.

One idea that does seem worth exploring is whether people are now less likely to aspire to be like their richest neighbor. The film says that, due to increased availability of media, Americans aspire to be like the rich crazy spenders that they see through electronic media. I wonder if this can be true. As the population booms and jobs are concentrated in a handful of cities, the realistic trajectory for a young American is a 2BR apartment shared among 4 people. Do the occupants of that crammed apartment look at an 8,000-square-foot house in Beverly Hills as a realistic aspiration?

My big take-away from the movie is that sending kids to a fancy private school is risky. Teenagers with a lot of unearned money to spend are not the best role models.

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Folks who identify new victims can’t figure out why the old victims are forgotten

by philg

“‘Women Here Are Very, Very Worried’: Afghan women used to be championed by almost everyone. Now they’re all but forgotten.” (nytimes):

It was once a prominent and bipartisan cause: the liberation of Afghan women from the tyranny of the Taliban.

These women were championed by an array of strange bedfellows: feminists like Eleanor Smeal, celebrities like Lily Tomlin and stalwarts of a conservative administration like Laura Bush and Dick Cheney.

In the early days of the invasion, the world heard vivid stories of the changes the war had brought. Women could walk freely outside their houses and put on makeup; girls could go to school. It was a narrative that helped buoy public support for the fight in Afghanistan and deflect criticism about American empire.

Nearly two decades later, Afghan women are all but invisible to an American public thoroughly weary of the war.

My comment:

A lot of new classes of victims have been discovered right here in the U.S. since 2001. For example, the NYT was recently running stories about Federal employees victimized by getting 35 days of paid time off in exchange for a delayed paycheck (one of my friends is a senior FAA employee; he said that he enjoyed his vacation trips to Arizona and Europe during the shutdown). Human sympathy and attention are not unlimited. If paid-late-for-not-working Federal employees are front-and-center victims then Afghan women cannot be front-and-center victims.

Example: “As Shutdown Drags On, Some Step Up to Help Unpaid Federal Workers”:

Predictions of pain that had been theoretical, or theatrical, in shorter shutdowns are now a reality for around 800,000 federal workers, scattered through states red and blue.

“The public does not realize the impact that a shutdown has on the F.B.I. or on our families,” a bureau official wrote in an email this week to supporters of the nonprofit Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI.

Readers: What do you think? Is there something special about women in Afghanistan, or is it simply that the victims of 2001 must yield mindshare to the victims of 2019?

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Jussie Smollett case shows how much faith Americans have in government officials

by philg

If a prosecutor had disliked Jussie Smollett for any reason, he could have been tried for 16 felony counts and been sentenced to as much as 64 years in prison (CBS).

The prosecutor, however, decided that $10,000 and two days of community service would be appropriate (i.e., 0 days in prison rather than more than 23,000). See this AP story in the New York Times:

Defense attorneys said Smollett’s record was “wiped clean” of the 16 felony counts related to making a false report. The actor, who also agreed to do community service, insisted that he had “been truthful and consistent on every single level since day one.”

“I would not be my mother’s son if I was capable of one drop of what I was being accused of,” he told reporters after a court hearing. He thanked the state of Illinois “for attempting to do what’s right.”

I think that this illustrates how much faith Americans have in their government, being willing to vest decision-making over whether this guy would spend the rest of his life in prison or walk free after paying over a few hours of wages (he gets paid more than $100,000 per episode of a TV show).

I don’t think that Europeans live with this kind of unpredictability or subject to the personal whims of government officials. Smollett’s alleged actions would be matched up as closely as possible with something in the big code book(s) and the appropriate punishment looked up.

[The situation in family law is analogous. European countries tend to have straightforward rules, e.g., “the mother will always win custody of minor children” (Denmark) and limits on profitability for both plaintiffs and attorneys (Germany). Contrast to a classical U.S. state, such as Massachusetts, where a child support plaintiff who had sex with a dermatologist could end up with (1) larger after-tax profits than the earnings of a primary care doctor plus 50%-100% custody of the resulting child, (2) profits capped at $1 million (23 years times $40,000) and half-time or primary custody, (3) 0-49% custody of the child and zero revenue. Much of this would be entirely unpredictable until there was a judge assigned to the case (see our statistical study of Middlesex County Probate and Family Court for how dramatic the judge-to-judge variation can be). From the Washington State chapter:

What if a case doesn’t settle? “My main concern with the courts is that lack of consistency from judge to judge,” says DeVallance. “I have two cases with similar facts. In Case 1 Dad has a shared parenting schedule. In Case 2 Dad has supervised visitation [his children can see him only in a facility run by social workers]. The only difference is the judge that was drawn in each case. I could take the exact same facts and make the exact same argument in front of five judges and get five different rulings. This is such a challenge for family law litigators because clients come to us asking for advice.”

The Washington State lawyer’s comments were consistent with what we heard from attorneys around the U.S., except in the handful of states with 50/50 shared parenting presumptions. It costs hundred of thousands of dollars in legal fees just to find out where a judge’s personal biases and prejudices will fall.]

Readers: Why would we give single individuals so much discretion? Is it because we think that Americans are uniquely talented and therefore individual Americans, in this case prosecutors, must be exceptionally capable? The same reasoning behind the often-expressed belief that Americans will play an important role in solving global challenges, such as reducing atmospheric CO2? (Our best engineers can’t make a safe airliner, but the Germans and Chinese will look to us for guidance when they’re building solar cells, windmills, and CO2 vacuums?)

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