Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

In Two big questions for economists today (2015) I reported that, coming away from an economics convention, one of the big questions was “Can higher education make a person more productive at his or her ultimate job?” It sure seems as though the answer for American higher education is “oftentimes no”. The New York Times today is focusing on the evils of the financial institutions profiting from Americans’ blind faith in the university system, e.g., with “Loans ‘Designed to Fail’: States Say Navient Preyed on Students”. I think the details are more interesting and the Times provides that with a separate story: “Voices of Navient’s Borrowers: ‘The Biggest Mistake of My Life’”

One 36-year-old attended two public schools in Florida and came out with what is now $83,300 in debt. She got a “B.A. in maritime history.” In the old days a young person from a wealthy family might have enjoyed four years studying maritime history (tuition would have been about $500 per year back then too). Somehow today this same experience is being marketed to the non-rich. For me the interesting question is why public universities don’t put more effort into online degrees in subjects such as these. Georgia Tech can deliver an online master’s in CS for $7,000. If learning maritime history is mostly reading books that are available in libraries or are no longer within copyright, why couldn’t a degree in the subject be earned by downloading a reading list and writing some papers? If the mission of a public university is to educate the public at a reasonable cost, why didn’t they offer this kind of degree online starting in the 1980s when personal computers became popular or the 1990s with the rise of the Web?

[Separately, if you’re a young economist and don’t like this subject, let me suggest looking at the effects of the change to no-fault divorce in the 1970s (history) and the 1990s switch to child support guidelines (in many states, these give a higher spending power to the person who has sex with a high-income partner than to the person who marries a medium-income partner; they also make it more lucrative to have sex with a high-income person than to go to college and work). See “Litigation, Alimony, and Child Support in the U.S. Economy” for an example. A group at MIT led by David Autor, for example, was referenced in the New York Times for their 2016 look at how children turn out depending on whether they are raised in two-parent or single-parent households. They didn’t have to compete for attention with a classic paper from 1960 because the government didn’t encourage single-parent households back then and there weren’t enough of them.]

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“A Modest Immigration Proposal” (Seltzer) is kind of interesting. He points out that if immigrants are actually boosting an economy then employers should be happy to pay for them. Therefore, if the goal is maximizing economic growth (or paying back $20 trillion in debt), the best way to choose non-refugee immigrants is to auction slots to the highest-bidding employers.

Seltzer heaps derision on central planners in the slightly-smarter countries:

At the moment, countries that try to restrict the inflow to the most productive applicants rely on bureaucrats to decide which skills are most needed, and assign points to applicants possessed of those skills. If recollection serves, in Australia social workers received more points than economists, a system that is clearly flawed, at least in the view of this practitioner of the dismal science.

The Canadian system, which requires bureaucrats to assign points to prospective immigrants, the system that President Trump unthinkingly holds up as a model, just doesn’t work, as the pro-immigration New York Times recently pointed out. “The formula has changed over the years, with points for training and job categories rising or falling as officials’ ideas on job readiness changed. . . . Head scratching.” Worse, one province decides it needs long-distance truck drivers, another food and beverage processors. There is no sensible way to balance regional interests to produce a permit allocation that is in the national interest.

Where I would part company with Mr. Seltzer is on his top-level “Set a limit on total immigration” procedure. He says “it can be reviewed annually, perhaps adjusted in response to changing labor-market conditions—down in periods of rising unemployment, up if tight labor market conditions threaten an inflation upsurge.” Immigrants and their children and grandchildren will determine our population size 50 or 100 years from now. It doesn’t make sense to change a 50- or 100-year goal based on immediate labor market conditions (see Should everyone be glad that judges have blocked Donald Trump’s restrictions on entry to the U.S.?).

What about temporary labor?

In the case of the temporary (e.g., seasonal) permits, the employer would post a bond, refundable upon proof that the worker had left the country when his/her visa had expired. Over time, employers would learn which workers were most efficient and might raise the bids for permits for those workers every year. We would soon learn whether agribusinesses are correct when they say that Americans simply won’t take these sorts of jobs, their alternative being to spend hard cash on temporary visas.

(I’m not holding my breath waiting for Americans currently on SSDI/Oxy to start harvesting lettuce.)

The trend in the U.S. is away from market-based approaches like this and towards central planning. However, it is kind of an interesting mental exercise nonetheless!

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One of my Facebook friends linked to this editorial from the Weather Channel about a proposed 17 percent budget cut to NOAA. Americans will die, said these Hillary supporters, if the Trumpenfuhrer’s cruel axe falls on NOAA.

One question is why would a federal agency’s work suffer from a budget cut? If NOAA is like the USDA, they could fire half of their workers without any effect on productivity. Given that Federal workers are paid roughly 2X the private sector average (higher salary plus more valuable benefits, especially pension), there could simply be a 17-percent pay cut and almost nobody would quit (since their compensation would still be higher than what is obtainable elsewhere).

Let’s assume, however, that NOAA would have to shut down the hurricane forecasts that are cited by the Weather Channel. I linked to “Are Europeans Better Than Americans at Forecasting Storms?” (Scientific American 2015), which says that the European weather nerds continuously forecast the same hurricanes and do a better job.

• me: How would you be affected if the U.S. government stopped forecasting hurricanes? What is wrong with the European forecasts that are available at no cost to U.S. taxpayers?
• Passionate Democrat 1: “National security vulnerability”
• Passionate Democrat 2: “The 2016 and 2017 budgets addressed the computing gap” (i.e., if we only had a fancier computer we would kick those European asses; it is not that they might be smarter than us regarding physics)
• me: “Why not cut NOAA back to gathering data to give to the Europeans? Where’s the national security risk? We don’t trust our allies in Europe to give us weather forecasts when we ask?”
• Passionate Democrat 1: “It’s not just trusting them to give us weather forecasts, it’s trusting their integrity protections. An attack on the US could be enabled by perhaps a one hour blackout of weather forecasts if well timed. So $ENEMY gets into their system. Ok, they could get into our system. But we could respond to that, or ensure redundancy etc, directly. Fast warfare happens in the air, so does weather.” (i.e., now that Marissa Mayer and her team at Yahoo have freed up they can show the Europeans how computer security is done)
• me: “What if we could form a military alliance with some of these efficient and capable Europeans? Maybe get something formal together with the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and other advanced economies in Europe? Do you think that it would be possible to have some kind of organization where we didn’t have to be solely responsible for everything military?” [this was apparently too oblique; nobody read this as a reference to the already-existing NATO]
• Passionate Democrat 1: “Not for something as fundamental as weather is to military operations. We might as well have them running the simulations for response deployments in the event of an attack.”
• me: “It looks like there is already a parallel military weather forecasting operation. Why would the feared cuts to NOAA prevent these military forecasters from continuing to do what you say is critical national security work?”
• Passionate Democrat 2: “It’s not just blackout, etc. It’s getting the specific information you want for your operations. We might be able to pay for that — but a major reason our forecast quality declined after 2013 is we didn’t budget money for commercial data like Tamdar. Is it really more efficient to pay someone else to do something? Doubtful — they’d have to ramp up their capabilities to provide the results we need, including buying the commercial data. … it’s not just military that has specific needs. FEMA, for example.”
• me: “How do the European countries survive then? Does each country say ‘we can’t take the security risk of relying on European weather forecasting so we’ll build our own domestic operation’? Why doesn’t a 10-year-old with a rifle take over France if France doesn’t have its own NOAA-style agency?”
• Passionate Democrat 1: ” Imagine $ENEMY changing hurricane tracking just slightly, enough that we mistakenly conclude there’s no need to secure NYC.”
• me: “Your point about NYC being unprepared is a good one, but doesn’t that suggest that we shouldn’t rely on the low reliability U.S. forecasts and should instead rely on the high reliability European ones?”

This is a selection from roughly 100 responses involving a bunch more Americans. All of them were terrified about losing something for which a free and arguably superior alternative exists on the Web.

Obviously the NOAA budget is small change and, as a pilot, certainly I would be the last person to suggest cutting it even if we do have trouble figuring out how to borrow the next $20 trillion. What I find interesting about the above is the reaction to any reduction in the Great Father in Washington’s responsibilities for us.

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Tyler Cowen says that Americans are increasingly immobile and unwilling to get off the sofa to do anything more challenging than hold up their phones to watch a movie. The FAA seems to agree. The bureaucracy’s forecast for individual flying is that it will die off at roughly the same rate as the population of currently certificated pilots: 0.8 percent annually. There will be some growth in business jet travel to compensate for this, but it might take until 2037 to exceed the number of “general aviation” (everything but airlines) hours flown in 2007. This against a backdrop of population growth from about 300 million Americans in 2007 to roughly 380 million in 2037 (Census projections).

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My standard line in response to neighbors fearful of King Donald I starting a war was “Why would a guy who owns $4 billion in real estate want to start a war?” It looks as though I was wrong. The leftovers from the inauguration festivities are still in the fridge and we lobbed $93 million of missiles into Syria.

Readers: Can you explain the point of this attack? How does it serve American interests? How does it help the average person in Syria if the effect is to weaken the government and thus prolong the civil war that they’re having? Do we now have to let in the entire population of Syria (23 million people) as refugees because they can credibly claim to be at risk from being hit by our $1.6 million missiles?

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If you were wondering what would happen after customers with 20 hours of training got in their Icon A5 amphibious seaplanes, here’s a story about a factory instructor wrecking one. The word on the ramp (at Sun n Fun) was that the hull split open after a hard landing. What hope is there for the rest of us?

Note that I’ve got a single-engine seaplane rating and about 10 hours of seaplane time. That, plus my CFI certificate, means that I’m legal to teach people how to fly seaplanes! Who wants to be my first student? Separately, a friend told me that he fell into the water while trying to dock a seaplane at the end of his checkride. The examiner said “oh, that happens all the time” and proceeded to issue him the modified certificate with new rating.

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I’m kind of awed by the young genius described in “Student gets into Stanford after writing #BlackLivesMatter on application 100 times” (CNN). Can we think of a better example of someone able to get into the mind of a modern day university bureaucrat?

I wonder if genius will inspire imitators. What better way to assure a college that you’re not going to rock the groupthink boat than to clutter one’s application with references to “progressive activist” events? As there is no way to verify attendance, an applicant could play Xbox all through high school and fabricate an impressive resume of activism. Can the Stanford admissions officer question the statement “I went to the Boston Women’s March”? Impossible! Even if the officer happened to be in Boston and happened to attend the march, he or she could not know about everyone who attended. Telling details can be cribbed from media or Facebook reports. Why didn’t you get an A in Calculus? “I was too busy protesting Trump.” Why weren’t you elected president of any groups in your high school? “I was too busy knitting a pussy hat.”

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“Going From Marginalized to Welcomed in the Workplace” (nytimes):

… TransCanWork, a nonprofit that has teamed up with the California Restaurant Association, among other groups. The program trains employers to become transgender-friendly in their hiring practices and their overall operations. It also connects transgender people with employers; a state grant pays for the first 60 hours of each new employee’s wages.

If you’re an employer, why not ask every new-hire to identify as “transgender” (Wikipedia says that this is “an umbrella term” that covers potentially almost anyone)? At that point state taxpayers are funding most of your costs of bringing a new person on board.

What’s the flaw in this strategy for cutting costs and increasing profit?

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Folks:

A market research firm wants to understand the light helicopter (R22 and R44, for example) market, as well as why people drop out of private helicopter training (folks whose objective was to be a Private-rated hobbyist, not flying to the oil rigs). They want to pay you about $300 for your time. Interviews would be in early May.

Please email me (philg@mit.edu) if interested.

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