Admissions fraud layered on top of the existing American college fraud

by philg

A professor friend’s Facebook post:

A game: name a worse investment than spending $6.5M to get your kid into college.

“College Admissions Scandal: Actresses, Business Leaders and Other Wealthy Parents Charged” (nytimes) has all of my academic friends excited.

(One interesting aspect is that the people involved are charged with “racketeering,” a crime that was defined to apply to mobsters. Presumably these folks are guilty of something, but it doesn’t seem like a Godfather-style situation. We will find out that the people are facing potentially epic-length prison sentences?)

The American undergraduate education system is already mostly a fraud, in the sense that families pay a lot, but students may not learn anything (see my review of Academically Adrift, in which Collegiate Learning Assessment scores, before and after attending college, are discussed; see also Higher Education?).

[Why a “fraud”? If Honda sold cars at $30,000 and half did not function for transportation people would say “Honda is a fraud.” But a liberal arts college may charge $300,000 for four years of tuition and produce quite a few graduates whose thinking and writing abilities are no better than they were when those folks entered as freshmen. So why not hold the college to the same standard that we would hold Honda?]

Could we use this as an opportunity to motivate folks to fix a fundamentally broken system?

Currently, since there is no agreed-upon measure of achievement in college, graduating with a label from a prestige university is critical. Nobody seems to care that, with the exception of a school such as Caltech, it is almost impossible not to graduate once admitted.

The result is huge pressure on the admissions process. When U.S. population was under 100 million, almost anyone with money could go to an Ivy League college. In my youth, when U.S. population was just over 200 million and international students were rare, any American who was reasonably intelligent and worked hard in high school could attend a top school. Now that we’re heading toward 400 million (Atlantic), parents will be ever more tempted to take extreme measures to assure their children’s futures.

Complicating matters is that virtuous Americans agree that the system actually should be rigged. See “Turns Out There’s a Proper Way to Buy Your Kid a College Slot,” from the righteous editorial board of the NY Times:

And colleges have a legitimate interest in emphasizing various forms of diversity. But it seems safe to stipulate that being born to wealthy parents is not by itself meritorious.

In other words, it is legitimate to base admission on criteria other than academic achievement (“various forms of diversity”). But then the authors say that it is illegitimate to favor children from wealthy families. Every reasonable person can agree that the scales should be tilted and, even better, every reasonable person will recognize a set of universal moral principles that can guide the tilting.

Could we take some of the pressure off young Americans who will be entering a crowded-like-Asia adult world? Why not a set of national examinations that people can take in various areas to demonstrate accomplishment? Then the Harvard graduate who can’t do anything won’t be ranked by employers above the Holy Cross (Worcester, MA) graduate who is able to demonstrate achievement. We would truly have multiple paths to success and we would have a meritocratic system in which anyone who works hard can succeed.

One could argue that we already have some of this in place. There is the Graduate Record Exam that some graduate schools use for admissions. It is SAT-like, though, and doesn’t seem to measure real-world capability (it is more of a test of IQ (correlation 0.7-0.85) plus studying for the test). There are some “major field tests,” e.g., in Physics. But these suffer from some of the same issues as other standardized multiple-choice tests.

What about investing in a week-long supervised test in which students have to solve problems, do research, write up results, etc.? It would be a little challenging to accomplish given that you’d have to figure out a way to deny test-takers the use of 10 Ph.D. helpers connected via smartphone.

Since the government runs a substantial portion of the economy, perhaps people could be motivated to take this test by using it as a factor in government hiring, e.g., for schoolteachers (maybe we can catch up to Finland if we start hiring academically strong teachers the way that they do!) or Federal workers.

Readers: What do you think? If there were a recognized test of achievement and capability for 22-year-olds, would that take some of the pressure off?

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Antarctic aviation in the 1930s

by philg

If you love Antarctica stories and airplanes, Antarctica’s Lost Aviator: The Epic Adventure to Explore the Last Frontier on Earth is the book for you. Lincoln Ellsworth, whom the author says would be a multi-billionaire if his fortune at the time were adjusted to today’s mini-dollars, spent years organizing a flight across the continent and finally succeeded in 1935. He decided to become a polar explorer at age 44.

How had things gone for the world’s greatest polar explorer?

Roald Amundsen had devoted his life to polar exploration, and by 1924 it had left him bankrupt and bitter.

In truth, Amundsen’s biggest mistake was that he had won. A small team of hardy and hardened men from Norway, with experience and careful planning, had upstaged the ambitions of the proud and mighty British Empire and the Empire did not like it. Burdened by debt, made weightier by accusations of cheating, Amundsen again sought refuge on the ice, but his plans were interrupted by World War I. After the war, he made an attempt to sail the Northeast Passage, before deciding his future was in the sky. He gained a pilot’s license and resolved to fly to the North Pole and across the Arctic Ocean. He took an obsolete plane to Wainwright, Canada, but crashed it landing on rough ground. Amundsen reasoned that what he really needed was a plane that could take off and land on water or ice: a flying boat. The best available at the time were the Italian-built Dornier Wal flying boats. But how to pay for them? Amundsen was forced to turn to the only way he knew to raise money: touring and lecturing. The money was in America, so that’s where he went. Thus, in October 1924, Roald Amundsen was holed up in New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, refusing to accept visitors lest they be creditors and “nearer to black despair than ever before,” on a tour that, “was practically a financial failure”:

Amundsen, Ellsworth, and some well-qualified pilots and mechanics of the day did head up towards the North Pole in two German-designed Italian-built Dornier Wal seaplanes (two 350 hp engines). Mechanical issues prevent them from reaching the Pole, however. They have better luck in an airship, making it from Svalbard to Alaska via the North Pole in 1926 (story).

What were prices like in the early 1930s?

Bernt Balchen agreed to be the pilot [of a trans-Antarctic flight in a Northrop Gamma] if he was paid $800 a month plus his expenses, for the length of the expedition. For a successful flight across Antarctica he would receive a $14,700 bonus. It was a lucrative contract at a time when professionals, such as doctors, were earning $60 per week and production workers were lucky to manage $17.

Women today are generally prevented from taking flying lessons. A T-shirt from a flight school in Bentonville, Arkansas

Back in the 1930s, however, men were not sufficiently organized to exclude women from aviation:

While at Mittelholzer’s airfield, the fifty-two-year-old Ellsworth met Mary Louise Ulmer, a fellow American, twenty-five years his junior, who was taking flying lessons. Ulmer was the daughter of an industrialist, Jacob Ulmer (who had died in 1928) and Eldora, who was fulfilling her duty as the wealthy, idle socialite mother of a plain, awkward, and painfully shy daughter. Eldora was dragging her child around Europe in the hope of finding a suitable husband. When Ellsworth and Mary Louise met at Mittelholzer’s airfield, Eldora instantly knew she had hit the jackpot. Ellsworth was older, equally shy, and, she may have suspected from his bachelor status, gay. But he had two qualities that made him an ideal son-in-law: he was incredibly wealthy and he was well practiced in doing what he was told. … ten days after they met, Ellsworth proposed marriage to Mary Louise.

Having succeeded in her safari to the continent to hunt down a husband for her daughter, Eldora’s next task was to return to America to display the trophy. Any fleeting attention Ellsworth might have given to his polar expedition was redirected to surviving the less forgiving environment of a society wedding.

By 1930, Antarctica was still 90 percent unknown. Maybe this is because explorers were usually too plastered to make maps?

Ellsworth also sent on board forty bottles of whisky for his personal consumption, in addition to the whisky and beer taken on board for the crew.

The expedition leader had some reasons to drink:

[Hubert] Wilkins tried to make sense of his life and plan what he should do next. He had no money and was living on the small salary that Ellsworth was paying him to take care of the Wyatt Earp. He felt that his debt—moral or financial—had been repaid. He had organized the expedition and got everything successfully to the Ross Ice Shelf, until circumstances beyond his control had brought the whole affair to a premature end. He was alone and lonely; famous for a failed submarine expedition to the North Pole, while living in hotels at the bottom of the world, touring country towns and showing his films for a little extra cash. … On the personal front, Wilkins had not seen his wife in two years and was conscious that she was dating other men. He had married Suzanne Bennett, an Australian-born chorus girl working in New York, shortly after he was knighted. It was a whirlwind romance, consummated at a heady time in Wilkins’s life. It was soon apparent to Wilkins that Suzanne’s main motivation in attaching herself to the famous explorer was to gain the title Lady Wilkins, then put it to use to elevate her career from chorus girl to movie star. (A strategy that was spectacularly unsuccessful.) Wilkins constantly wrote Suzanne long letters expressing his love, but she rarely replied, and when she did it was usually only to taunt him about his lack of success, his age, or the fact he was going bald.

(The wife later writes to him saying that she is pregnant.) He dispenses life advice to the crew: “Remember, Magnus, you will never gain anything without personal wealth, or government backing.”

The Southern ocean was not any better behaved back then

The Wyatt Earp had a rough trip south. In heavy weather it would roll fifty degrees to each side. From being heeled over to port, rolling though one hundred degrees to starboard, then back to port, took only four and a half seconds. Anything not secured would be catapulted about the cabins with dangerous velocity.

The first trip was going great until the ice shelf from which they had planned to launch the airplane split apart, in cartoon-like fashion, right underneath the airplane. The plane dangles into the crack, supported by the wings on both sides. The season of 1933-34 wasted.

The season of 1934-35 is ruined by a mechanic’s error in trying to start the engine without first draining the preserving oil, then by some bad weather.

The author explains why a lot of folks have had trouble in one particular part of this continent:

Today we know that on each side of Antarctica there is a huge bight. On the side facing the Pacific Ocean it is the Ross Sea, while facing the Atlantic Ocean it is the Weddell Sea. Currents, which are driven forcibly from the oceans to the north, flow into these great bights to scoop up millions of tons of ice that have descended from the Antarctic Plateau and, in a swirling clockwise motion, sweep it out to sea. In the Ross Sea where, at the western extremity Victoria Land does not extend north, the piled pack ice easily reaches open water. At the western end of the Weddell Sea, however, the Antarctic Peninsula extends north. Here the ice cannot escape so freely. Trapped, it becomes deadly as it is caught, crushed, jumbled, and tumbled over itself. And small rocky islands jut from the water and conspire with the ice to crush any ship foolish enough to venture into the area. The northwest corner of the Weddell Sea is the most dangerous coastal area in the Antarctic. In February 1902, Swedish explorer Otto Nordenskjöld and a small party were landed on Snow Hill Island at the edge of the Weddell Sea. Returning in December, their relief ship found it impossible to reach them and had to move away from shore. Returning again in February 1903, the ship was caught and smashed by the ice, marooning the relief party on nearby Paulet Island. Nordenskjöld’s group, which had already built a hut, spent a second winter in Antarctica, while the relief group survived in a small stone shelter, before all the men were eventually rescued. Nordenskjöld claimed the area had “a desolation and wildness, which perhaps no other place on earth could show.” Another person to risk entering the Weddell Sea was Sir Ernest Shackleton, who ignored the advice of the whalers and based his decision on his two trips to the more benign Ross Sea. When he attempted to unload the team that planned to walk across Antarctica, his ship Endurance was famously caught and crushed. In the twenty years since the Endurance, no one had tried to navigate the Weddell Sea. In fact, in more than thirty years, no one had returned to visit Nordenskjöld’s hut. But Wilkins’s previous experience told him there was no other possibility of finding a flat runway. Venturing into the infamous Weddell Sea was their only hope.

Supposedly we are living in a woker-than-ever age of tolerance. People in the old days were morally defective by comparison. Yet when Sir Wilkins’s wife sends him a letter repeating gossip regarding Ellsworth being gay, he replies “I am not the least bit concerned as to what people say. He may be a sissy for all I know, but I do know that I gave my word that I would do the job of putting him in a position for doing the flight he has made up his mind to do and that is that. One does not argue or ask to get out of a contract by word of honor.” The unconventional sexual choices purportedly made by Ellsworth did not keep him from being awarded the Congressional Gold Medal twice, one of only four people to have achieved this. Nor did his sexual orientation prevent a lot of stuff on the map from being named “Ellsworth” (plus a hall at the American Museum of Natural History).

For the 1935-36 season, the pilot is Herbert Hollick-Kenyon, born in England 38 years previously and with 6,000 flying hours behind him.

During the months before the flight, the author describes what is surely Ellsworth’s most remarkable achieve: “he went tiger hunting in the jungles of Brazil.”

The challenge and the proposed solution:

Ellsworth and Hollick-Kenyon had to fly 2,200 miles, more than half of which was over an unexplored area of the Earth’s surface. That unexplored area, lying roughly in the middle of their flight, could be flat ice shelf, towering mountains ranges, or a series of islands. They would be taking off from a point north of the Antarctic Circle (63°5′ South, 55°9′ West), flying to within six hundred miles of the South Pole, and through more than one hundred degrees of longitude (over a quarter of the way around the globe) to an ice shelf the size of France, on which they needed to locate a buried base, only indicated by radio aerials protruding from the snow.

Balchen was proficient at dead reckoning navigation. So was Wilkins. Importantly, Balchen and Wilkins knew that a key to dead reckoning was knowing the plane’s flying speed, and the only way to accurately measure that was to time a flight from point A to point B. Balchen had flown the Polar Star and claimed its top speed was 220 mph and that it cruised at 150 mph. But Balchen had made that test flight in

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“If Liberals Won’t Enforce Borders, Fascists Will”

by philg

Federico was kind enough to send me “If Liberals Won’t Enforce Borders, Fascists Will” (Atlantic). I think that the article might answer the question that I raised in https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/03/06/why-werent-families-coming-over-the-border-to-seek-asylum-30-years-ago/. If our laws haven’t changed and Central American countries are experiencing less violence than 30 years ago, why do we see more immigrants from those countries today?

immigration is accelerating so rapidly in the 21st century less because of pervading misery than because life on our planet is improving for so many people. It costs money to move—and more and more families can afford the investment to send a relative northward. “Every boat person I’ve met has been ambitious, urban, educated,” says Doug Saunders, a Canadian journalist who has reported extensively on global population movements. “They are very poor by European standards, but often comfortable by African and Middle Eastern ones.”

The article reminds us that the best way to build a high-achieving society is via a flood of unskilled immigrants:

This massive new wave of immigration has brought many benefits to the United States. Of the 122 Americans who won a Nobel Prize from 2000 to 2018, 34 were immigrants.

In other words, it wasn’t a handful of targeted visa applications by universities bringing in graduate students or faculty that resulted in these 34 folks settling here, but rather a “massive new wave of immigration” that blessed us with their presence. We can never know which caravan member will suddenly become a tenured professor of physics, so one sensible approach to dominating the Nobel scoreboard is to start by admitting unlimited caravans.

The author doesn’t say how many of these 34 were undocumented immigrants versus how many got in through relatives, a visa lottery, or any of the other programs that Donald Trump has tried to scale back. Nor does he raise the question of whether there might be cheaper ways to lure Nobel winners to the U.S. We spend $18.5 billion per year on health care for the undocumented (Forbes). What if we offered Nobel winners and anyone who seemed to be on track for a Nobel the opportunity to split $18.5 billion per year on condition that they move to the U.S.?

The article makes it plain that the U.S. has been transformed and will eventually be unrecognizable:

In the 60 years from 1915 until 1975, nearly a human lifetime, the United States admitted fewer immigrants than arrived, legally and illegally, in the single decade of the 1990s.

By 2027, the foreign-born proportion of the U.S. population is projected to equal its previous all-time peak, in 1890: 14.8 percent. Under present policy, that percentage will keep rising to new records thereafter.

… When natives have lots of children of their own, immigrants look like reinforcements. When natives have few children, immigrants look like replacements. No wonder that, according to a 2016 survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic, nearly half of white working-class Americans agree with this statement: “Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.”

The author reminds us that Barack Obama, at one point in his life, had to talk to a car mechanic!

Barack Obama, in his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, lamented, “When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”

(It was too audacious for him to hope that he could learn a language besides English?)

The author proposes a fuzzy line and a policy that is as clear as mud:

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand have called for abolishing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Gillibrand denounced the agency as a “deportation force”—as if it were possible to enforce immigration laws without deportation. While it would be destabilizing and impractical to remove all the people who have been living peaceably in this country for many years, it does not follow that any nonfelon who sets foot in the U.S. has a right to stay here.

People who got over the border a month ago have a better entitlement to permanent residence and citizenship than people who got over the border this morning? What’s the logical basis for this and how can this kind of reasoning be applied in practice?

Donald Trump and the people who voted for him are idiots:

The Trump-era debate about a wall misses the point. The planet of tomorrow will be better educated, more mobile, more networked. Huddling behind a concrete barrier will not hold the world at bay when more and more of that world can afford a plane ticket. If Americans want to shape their own national destiny, rather than have it shaped by others, they have decisions to make now.

But at present, the most important immigration decisions are made through an ungainly and ill-considered patchwork of policies. Almost 70 percent of those who settle lawfully in the United States gained entry because they were close relatives of previously admitted immigrants. Many of those previously admitted immigrants were in their turn relatives of someone who had arrived even earlier.

Every year some 50,000 people are legally admitted by lottery. Others buy their way in, by investing a considerable sum. In almost every legal immigration category, the United States executes its policy less by conscious decision than by excruciating delay. The backlog of people whose immigration petitions have been approved for entry but who have not yet been admitted is now nearing 4 million. (Only spouses and children are exempted from annual numerical caps.)

On average, a settled immigrant will sponsor 3.5 relatives to follow him or her into the United States.

Why is it obvious that most people who apply for a tourist visa should be given one and that, afterwards, anyone who shows up in the U.S. by plane can, as a practical matter, stay forever? (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2015/04/29/au-pair-to-green-card/ for one current technique) What would stop the U.S. from tracking residents more intensively such that it was practically impossible to live and work as an undocumented immigrant?

Atlantic raises some of the same questions that I raised in https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2017/04/12/how-much-would-an-immigrant-have-to-earn-to-defray-the-cost-of-added-infrastructure/:

Under present immigration policies, the U.S. population will exceed 400 million by 2050. Nobody is seriously planning for such population growth—building the schools and hospitals these people will need, planning for the traffic they will generate. Nobody is thinking very hard about the environmental consequences, either. The average American causes the emission of almost 17 tons of carbon dioxide each year, quadruple the annual emissions of the average Mexican and 45 times the emissions of the average Bangladeshi.

The article makes the same point as Milton Friedman, i.e., that you can’t run a Welfare state and open borders:

Too little immigration, and you freeze your country out of the modern world. Too much, or the wrong kind, and you overstress your social-insurance system—and possibly upend your democracy.

But why is it obvious that there is a risk of being frozen out of the modern world? China has a low rate of immigration. Is China frozen out of the modern world? Newark is modern (27 percent foreign-born) and Shanghai is old and crummy?

All of the choice spots in the U.S. will eventually be primarily populated by immigrants, albeit in crummy cramped living conditions:

Americans in the 2010s are only half as likely to move to a new state as their parents were in the 1980s. What has changed? Economic researchers have refuted some possible explanations—the aging of the population, for example. The most plausible alternative is directly immigration-related: Housing costs in the hottest job markets have grown much faster than the wages offered to displaced workers. Simply put, a laid-off Ohio manufacturing worker contemplating relocating to Colorado to seek a job in the hospitality industry is likely to discover that the move offers no higher pay, but much higher rent. An immigrant from Mexico or the Philippines faces a very different calculus. Her wage gains would be significant. And while her housing options may seem lousy to someone accustomed to an American standard of living, to her they likely represent a bearable sacrifice for all the other opportunities offered by life in the United States—and possibly a material improvement over living conditions back home.

(see also https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2017/03/27/tyler-cowen-says-weve-lost-our-mojo-but-maybe-it-is-just-welfare/ for why the mobility stats may be coming down; it is tougher to switch states when you’re receiving means-tested welfare benefits, such as a subsidized or free house)

Wikipedia lends support to the theory that the places in the U.S. that were formerly considered the nicest are heavily settled by immigrants. Miami, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Honolulu, Boston, and San Diego have foreign-born populations between 25 percent and 56 percent.

After reminding readers that Trump voters are stupid, the author inadvertently suggests that they are likely rational:

… the gains from immigration are divided very unequally. Immigrants reap most of them. Wealthy Americans claim much of the rest, in the form of the lower prices they pay for immigrant-produced services. Low-income Americans receive comparatively little benefit, and may well be made worse off, depending on who’s counting and what method they use.

Estimates from the National Academy of Sciences suggest that on average, each immigrant costs his or her state and local governments $1,600 more a year in expenditures than he or she contributes in revenues. In especially generous states, the cost is much higher still: $2,050 in California; $3,650 in Wisconsin; $5,100 in Minnesota.

Immigrants are expensive to taxpayers because the foreign-born population of the United States is more likely to be poor and stay poor. Even when immigrants themselves do not qualify for a government benefit—typically because they are in the country illegally—their low income ensures that their children do. About half of immigrant-headed households receive some form of social assistance in any given year.

Assertions that federal tax revenue from immigrants can stabilize the finances of programs such as Medicare and Social Security overlook the truth that immigrants will get old and sick—and that in most cases, the taxes they pay over their working life will not cover the costs of their eventual claims on these programs. No matter how many millions of immigrants we absorb, they can’t help shore up these programs if they’ll need more in benefits than they can ever possibly pay in taxes.

The author says that immigrants are making Americans less self-destructive because immigrants are less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol or commit suicide: “white people commit suicide at nearly three times the rate of ethnic minorities.” But this is semantics. The definition of “Americans” is not held constant. The people who were “Americans” before the immigration wave aren’t experiencing a life free of drugs, alcohol, and suicide. They’re just being diluted statistically.

American workers, even as many demand Socialism to ensure that they are paid more, are less educated and lower skilled and therefore have less value to employers:

In 2007, ETS—the company that administers the SAT—warned of a gathering “perfect storm”: “Over the next 25 years or so,” it said, “as better-educated individuals leave the workforce they will be replaced by those who, on average, have lower levels of education and skill.” This warning shows every sign of being fulfilled. About 10 percent of the students in U.S. public schools are now non-native English speakers. Unsurprisingly, these students score consistently lower on national assessment tests than native speakers do. In 2017, nearly half of Hispanic fourth graders had not achieved even partial mastery of grade-level material. According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, these children are at significant risk of dropping out of high school.

But here’s something more surprising: Evidence from North Carolina suggests that even a fairly small increase in the non-native-speaking presence in a classroom seriously depresses learning outcomes for all students.

Perhaps indicating a huge advance in functional

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Brexit will take longer than the American Civil War?

by philg

“Brexit Vote Looming, Theresa May Secures E.U. Help” (nytimes):

On Monday, after a telephone call with Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, Mrs. May flew to meet him in Strasbourg, where the European Parliament is holding a plenary session.

Back in London, David Lidington, Mrs. May’s de facto deputy, told Parliament that the prime minister had won a legal pledge to reassure pro-Brexit lawmakers who fear that Britain could be trapped indefinitely inside parts of the European Union’s economic rule book.

Tuesday’s vote is seen as a pivotal moment in the endless withdrawal saga, known as Brexit, coming less than three weeks before the deadline for Britain to leave the European Union.

How much longer would Brexit have to be delayed before it would be fair to say that the question of Britain’s secession from the EU took longer to resolve than the question of Confederate secession from the U.S.?

Slowing things down back in 1861-1865: communication limited by the speed that a horse could trot (admittedly there were some telegraphs and railroads as well).

Slowing things down today: bureaucrats and politicians.

It would be interesting if it turns out that bureaucracy is slower than horse-drawn travel over muddy unpaved roads.

[Separately, for folks who think Brexit is a bad idea and being part of the EU is a huge benefit for the UK… shouldn’t the U.S. be seeking to join the EU either in Britain’s place or in addition to the UK?]

European readers: What more needs to be done before the Brits can wander off into the global economy?

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Conventional to have a 200-hour copilot on a Boeing?

by philg

Friends have been asking about the recent (second) Boeing 737 MAX crash (Wikipedia). I wrote some stuff about the first crash, e.g., in

(Summary: A single sensor going bad can cause a “runaway trim” situation from the pilot’s point of view. In theory, pilots can handle runaway trim. In practice, quite a few crashes have resulted from runaway trim.)

The latest crash has friends asking a new question: Was it normal to have a low-time pilot in the right seat? (see “Ethiopian Airlines said the pilot of Flight 302 had 8,000 hours of flying time but the co-pilot had just 200.” (nytimes))

I wrote about this question back in 2009 in “Foreign Airline Safety versus U.S. Major Airlines”:

Buttonhole any pilot in a U.S. commercial airport and you’ll learn that the major airlines hire only those pilots who have previously been captains of regional airliners or military planes. And the regional airlines, which supply most of the nation’s major airline pilots, mostly hire from among those who have been flight instructors for 750-1500 hours.

What’s changed since 2009? Following a regional turboprop crash in Buffalo, in which both pilots had more than 1,500 hours, Congress decided that they would prevent future crashes by requiring that all airline pilots have at least 1,500 hours (the possibility of the $30 million plane having 1/100th of the intelligence of a consumer drone was not considered).

Another change is that Corporate America’s passion for “diversity” enables members of official victim groups, e.g., pilots identifying as “women”, to be hired by a major airline without first flying for a regional (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/05/12/the-purported-airline-pilot-shortage/).

Back to my 2009 article:

A foreign major airline, by contrast, does not have a large pool of regional airline pilots, ex-military folks, and flight instructors from which to draw. Most foreign countries do not have an infrastructure of airports, flight schools, and private pilots. There would be no work for a flight instructor in such a country. Unless the country is very large, there won’t be any regional airlines. Due to the shortage of qualified nationals, the foreign airline may screen young people and send the most promising to flight schools in the U.S. until they are trained to the minimum legal standards. For example, Japan Airlines runs a training center in Napa, California. Lufthansa trains its pilots in Arizona. A 23-year-old who can barely speak English and barely knows how to fly can go directly to the right seat of an Airbus.

So the crew experience situation on the accident aircraft was unusual by U.S. standards, but not by the standards of European or Asian airlines.

Friends have been asking whether they should fly the B737 MAX. With about 350 delivered so far and all during the last two years, the plane is developing a worse safety record (per year, if not per flight hour) than the four/five-seat Cirrus SR22. My advice: take the Airbus, if one is available. The Airbus fly-by-wire computer-in-the-middle philosophy is to protect the aircraft and passengers from pilots who aren’t at their best, for whatever reason. (Example: Captain Sully had the yoke full back during his famous approach into the Hudson River; a B737 would have stalled and spun given that control input, but the Airbus software kept everyone safe.)

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Financial Times: People turn socialist when they can’t afford an apartment

by philg

“Quantitative easing was the father of millennial socialism” by David McWilliams, an Irish professor (Financial Times), says that the bailouts following the Collapse of 2008 helped out older property owners, by reflating the prices of the stuff that they had unwisely purchased, on the backs of millennials.

He notes that “the worst of investments are often taken in the best of times.” (Maybe good to point out to anyone with money or income considering getting married and living in one of the U.S. states that provides for winner-take-all divorce litigation!)

He notes that average hourly earnings have gone up 22 percent in the past 9 years while property prices are up 55 percent in Houston, 67 percent in LA, and 96 percent in San Francisco: “The young are locked out.”

(The article says that 79 percent of the same folks who can’t afford apartments also think that “immigrants strengthen the US”. Certainly every landlord would agree that more demand is a good thing, but why are landless peasants happy to see another caravan of housing-seekers arrive?)

Why are people so obsessed with wealth inequality these days? The author says that “wealth inequality was not the unintended consequence, but the objective, of [quantitative easing] policy.”

The close:

For the purist, capitalism without default is a bit like Catholicism without hell. … what if the day of reckoning was only postponed? What if a policy designed to protect the balance sheets of the wealthy has unleashed forces that may lead to the mass appropriation of those assets in the years ahead?

Appropriation? Could it happen here? Elizabeth Warren has proposed to take wealth gradually, via a 2 percent tax on rich bastards (over $50 million in wealth). If they try to escape by renouncing their U.S. citizenship, she’ll hit them with a 40 percent exit tax. (Slate) Not too scary to the merely comfortable, right? Remember that income tax started out in 1913 between 1 and 6 percent and it was limited to those with incomes over $103,000 in today’s mini-dollars ($4,000/year for a married couple at the time). Once the structure is in place, the rates and thresholds can be tweaked as necessary.

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Righteous Americans develop a fondness for long prison sentences

by philg

My Facebook friends are expressing their dismay that Paul Manafort was recently sentenced to only about 4 years in prison for tax evasion. CNN describes the prison sentence as “light” in “Manafort’s light sentence shines a light on US prison inequality”.

Certainly I would expect this kind of zeal for long prison terms from executives in the American prison industry, but none of these folks owe their paychecks to the incarceration mill.

How does Manafort’s first sentence (he’s still being chased by some other prosecutors for some other crimes) compare to sentences considered fair a few decades ago?

The Growth of Incarceration in the United States says that circa 1980, the average time served in prison for an American convicted of murder was 5 years.

Japanese war criminals responsible for killing thousands rather than millions of innocent people were released after about four years (nytimes, 1949; see also the Wikipedia page on Japanese war criminals (none served more than 13 years)). The typical convicted Nazi war criminal was released after a few years (Wikipedia list of the highest-profile ones). Some of the higher level ones were imprisoned until the mid-1950s (example: Otto Hofmann, one of the architects of the death camp system at the Wannsee Conference).

Damir Dosen was “indicted for persecutions, inhumane treatment and torture as crimes against humanity and for outrages upon personal dignity, torture and cruel treatment as violations of the laws or customs of war”, pleaded guilty, and was found “responsible for crimes against humanity”. The Bosnian Serb was sentenced to 5 years and served 3.5 (released in 2003).

How about Jussie Smollett? He has now been indicted for 16 felonies as a consequence of trying to expose Trump supporters for who they really are (unfortunately he didn’t know where to find any actual Trump supporters). He could be imprisoned for up to 64 years (Vox).

Related:

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New York Times tried to teach Americans how digital computers worked…

by philg

… back in 1967: “The Electronic Digital Computer: How It Started, How It Works and What It Does”:

Many men have played pivotal roles in the evolution of technologies important to computer science. Among them are the following:

George Boole (1815-1864), a British mathematician who developed the concepts of symbolic logic.

Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose Cybernetics systematized concepts of control and communications.

Alan M. Turing (1912-54), a British mathematician who formulated a definition of automatic machines, worked out a mathematical model of an elementary “universal computer and proved theoretically that it could be programmed to do any calculation that could be done by any automatic machine.

John von Neumann (1903-57), a Hungarian mathematician who came to the United States where he developed the concept of the stored program for digital computers.

Claude E. Shannon, now aged 50, of M.I.T, who defined the application of symbolic logic to electrical switching and is even better known for his basic work in information theory.

The journalists missed the Atanasoff–Berry computer (1937-1942), but it apparently didn’t become widely known until a 1967 patent lawsuit.

There is some real technical info:

The stored-program concept involves the storage of both commands and data in a dynamic memory system in which the commands as well as the data can be processed arithmetically. This gives the digital computer a high degree of flexibility that makes it distinct from Babbage’s image of the Analytical Engine.

Despite its size and complexity, a computer achieves its results by doing a relatively few basic things. It can add two numbers, multiply them, subtract one from the other or divide one by the other. It also can move or rearrange numbers and, among other things, compare two values and then take some pre-determined action in accordance with what it finds.

For all its transistor chips, magnetic cores, printed circuits, wires, lights and buttons, the computer must be told what to do and how. Once a properly functioning modern computer gets its instructions in the form of a properly detailed “program,” it controls itself automatically so that it responds accurately and at the right time in the step-by-step sequence required to solve a given problem.

Progress has enabled us to use more lines of code of JavaScript to format a web page than the pioneers used of assembly code to run a company:

Developing the software is a very expensive enterprise and frequently more troublesome than designing the actual “hardware”—the computer itself. As an illustration of what the software may involve, it is often necessary to specify 60,000 instructions or more for a large centralized inventory-control system.

Hardware:

A flip-flop is an electronic switch. It usually consists of two transistors arranged so that incoming pulses cause them to switch states alternately. One flips on when the other flops off, with the latter releasing a pulse in the process. Thus, multiple flip-flops can be connected to form a register in which binary counting is accomplished by means, of pulse triggers.

Stable two-state electronic devices like the flip-flop are admirably suited for processing the 0 and 1 elements of the binary-number system. This, in fact, helps to explain why the binary-number system is commonly used in computers.

Math:

In Boolean representation, the multiplication sign (x) means AND while the plus sign (+) means OR. A bar over any symbol means NOT. An affirmative statement like A can therefore be expressed negatively as Ā (NOT A).

Hardware again:

There are three basic types of gates: the OR, which passes data when the appropriate signal is present at any of its inputs; the AND, which passes data only when the same appropriate signals are present at all inputs; and the NOT, which turns a 1-signal into a 0-signal, and vice versa.

All operations in the computer take place in fixed time intervals measured by sections of a continuous train of pulses. These basic pulses are sometimes provided by timing marks on a rotating drum, but more frequently they are generated by a free-running electronic oscillator called the “clock.”

The clock-beat sets the fundamental machine rhythm and synchronizes the auxiliary generators inside the computer. In a way, the clock is like a spinning wheel of fortune to which has been affixed a tab that touches an outer ring of tabs in sequence as the wheel revolves. If a signal is present at an outer tab when the wheel tab gets there, the appropriate gate is opened.

Each time-interval represents a cycle during which the computer carries out part of its duties. One machine operation can be set up for the computer during an instruction cycle (I-time), for example, and then processed during an execution cycle (E-time).

Click through at the bottom to the scanned page and you will see flowcharts, circuit diagrams, and an instruction set.

The public used to be interested in this stuff, apparently!

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Private airplanes built in 2018

by philg

General Aviation Manufacturer’s Association 2018 Annual Report is available. If you love numbers and love flying, this is a fascinating document.

Table 1.1 shows total piston deliveries were 1,139, less than half the recent peak of 2,755 (2006). Turboprops are actually up compared to 2007 (465 to 601). Bizjets are off from 1,317 (2008) to 703, but higher prices mean that $22 billion in total revenue is down only to about $18 billion (1.2).

The percentage of piston-powered airplanes going to Asia has doubled since 2007 while bizjet deliveries are up even more (1.3).

Gulfstream is doing quite well, with 121 jets shipped compared to a peak of 156 in 2007. Even the G280, which cannot legally be landed in most Arab countries, is pretty successful (29 delivered). Cessna, on the other hand, is down to 188 from a peak of 466 (2008). So it sort of looks like the rich are getting richer until you look at Boeing and Airbus monster bizjet sales. There were a total of only 7 delivered in 2018 compared to 27 in 2010. (Table 1.4a)

Standout successful jets are the Cirrus SF50 (63 delivered), Bombardier Challenger 350 (60 delivered), the Embraer Phenom 300 (53 delivered), and the Pilatus PC-24 (brand new, but 18 delivered). Honda delivered 37 of its relatively new jet, compared to 43 the previous year.

Pilatus delivered 80 PC-12 turboprops, down from a peak of 100 in 2009. Piper achieved an all-time record of 56 for its six-year PA-46. Textron sold 94 King Airs (off a peak of 172 in 2008) and 92 Caravans (off a peak of 107 in 2012). The TBM is enjoying record near-record sales of 50 per year.

Down in the piston ghetto… Cirrus delivered 380 planes, of which the volume leader is the SR22T (maybe this is the best version, since the prop is governed to a maximum of 2500 RPM, which should be quieter than the 2700 RPM of the SR20 and SR22). This is down from 710 planes sold in the glorious year of 2007. Cessna and Piper delivered 193 and
173 , respectively. Italy’s TECNAM actually made more planes than Piper: 180. Austrian/Canadian/Chinese Diamond is down at 134, off a peak of 471 in 2007. ICON managed to deliver 44 planes. That’s a total of 59 delivered since inception.

Airbus delivered 323 helicopters. Bell was at 245, including an astonishing 116 of the new 505. Robinson was at 316, down from a peak of 893 in 2008. It looks as though the Guimbal Cabri (priced like a four-seater; sized like a two-seater) is failing. Sales are down to 25 from a peak of 50 in 2016. Robinson managed to out-sell this purpose-built two-seat trainer with 33 R22s. Note that these numbers include military helicopter sales.

Table 1.5 is depressing. The U.S. made at least 5,000 general aviation airplanes from 1956 through 1981. During the Jimmy Carter malaise year of 1978, the factories made 17,811 planes, 17,032 of which were piston-powered. In 2018 it was 1,746, of which 829 were piston-driven. The revenue numbers (Table 1.6) show a flatter picture, even for the piston world. Cirrus’s $1 million SR22 prices are apparently helping. We’re exporting about 42 percent of our airplanes, measured in dollars.

Tables 2.2 and 2.3 show that Americans flew 140,000 aircraft approximately 7.8 million hours for personal/recreational reasons. Flight instruction occupied 16,000 aircraft for 5 million hours.

Table 2.5 shows the increasingly static society that Tyler Cowen wrote about. Despite population growth from 1980 to 2017 of 226 to 326 million, total hours flown in general aviation fell from 41,000 to 25,000.

Table 2.6 shows how much sitting on the ground planes do. The average piston-powered airplane flies only 95 hours per year, down from 130 in 2000. The average bizjet flies only 286 hours. Helicopters fly an average of 239 (piston) and 351 (turbine) hours per year. Homebuilders tinker with their planes rather than fly them (only 46 hours per year).

Table 2.9 shows that getting environmentalists to Davos in their Gulfstreams uses a lot of dinosaur blood. Piston fuel consumption is down from 333 million gallons in 2000 to 210 million in 2017. Jet fuel, on the other hand, has gone from 972 million gallons up to 1535 million.

The average age of a single-engine piston airplane is 46 years and 44 for a piston multi. Average jets are 16 years old. (2.11)

General aviation is making less use of Air Traffic Control. Operations at towered airports fell from 38.4 million in 1992 to 27.7 million in 2017.

The U.S. pilot numbers have fallen from 702,659 (5.77 percent women) in 1990 to 633,318 (7.34 percent women; 42,127 of whom may live outside of the U.S.) in 2018. U.S. population, meanwhile, grew from 250 million to 330 million. Holding a pilot certificate is becoming more unusual. (6.1)

The average age of all pilots is not rising as fast as one might expect from hanging around a GA airport. It was 41.9 in 1994 and is 44.9 today (essentially steady since 2012).

The busiest GA airports: KDVT (Deer Valley, AZ), KAPA (Denver), KHWO (Florida), KTMB (Tamiami, Florida), KGFK (University of North Dakota), KVNY (Van Nuys, California). The obvious suspects such as Teterboro are not on the list (7.3).

Even as the U.S. adds population, we are losing public airports, down slightly from 5,288 (2004) to 5,119 (2016).

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