Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Folks: I’ve completed a review of Higher Education? and would appreciate comments/corrections.

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We’re getting into roughly the 15th year of Internet digital photo sharing. Back when I was teaching one-day courses in Internet applications to broad audiences, e.g., in 1999, folks would ask me “What will cameras look like in the future?” I confidently predicted that the typical point and shoot camera would have an 802.11 transceiver and, whenever it came within range of a wireless network, would upload all of the recently captured images to an Internet photo sharing site.

It looks as though this prediction has been dead wrong, but I can’t figure out why. I still think it would be useful for the average photographer to have a camera that trickled all of the pictures up to Picasa, Flickr, or similar. Can this even be purchased? http://www.eye.fi/ seems to do most of what I envisioned, but it isn’t part of the camera itself. The latest Canon and Nikon compact digital cameras don’t offer this capability, though they can cost over $300 and you’d think the cost of a WiFi radio would be negligible.

Why would the average consumer want to monkey with USB cables, memory cards, etc. in order to get the photos up to where they can be viewed by friends and family?

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News accounts on the latest federal budget deal gave the numbers in a vacuum, e.g., “The deal cuts $38 billion from last year’s budget. It’s being called the largest domestic spending cut in U.S. history” (source). How can an individual voter make sense of quantities that are ordinarily written in scientific notation? I think the easiest way is to divide everything by 100,000,000 (10^8).

Let’s start with federal spending. The FY 2011 federal budget is approximately $3.82 trillion (3.82×10^12). Of that, approximately $2.17 trillion will be paid for by taxes collected and the remaining $1.65 trillion will be borrowed from our grandchildren. If we divide everything by 100 million, the numbers begin to make more sense.

We have a family that is spending $38,200 per year. The family’s income is $21,700 per year. The family adds $16,500 in credit card debt every year in order to pay its bills. After a long and difficult debate among family members, keeping in mind that it was not going to be possible to borrow $16,500 every year forever, the parents and children agreed that a $380/year premium cable subscription could be terminated. So now the family will have to borrow only $16,120 per year.

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I have just cracked open Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—and What We Can Do About It and would be delighted if readers of this Weblog also pick up a copy and start reading. I’ll try to do a review later.

As inspiration, the very first chapter has some awesome calculations. A professor at Kenyon College earns $242 per hour (based on actual classroom and office hours); his or her counterpart at Yale? $820 per hour. “We readily acknowledge that [professors] do something outside their classroom and office hours. But the great bulk of it is less real than contrived: committees, department meetings, faculty senates, and yes, what they call their research, the utility of which we question in a later chapter.”

The authors point out that professors often aren’t on campus at all: “At Harvard, even untenured asssistant professors get a fully paid year to complete a promotion-worthy book. Thus in a recent year, of its history department’s six assistant professors, only two were on hand to teach classes. In Harvard’s department of philosophy that same year, almost half of its full-time faculty were away on sabbaticals. Of course it was the students who paid. Many of their undergraduate courses were canceled or given by one-year visitors unfamiliar with the byways of the university.”

“At the end of the day, this strange little world [of academia] often alienates the genuinely smart and idealistic. Many of the best people find it intolerable, clearing the path for careerists.”

Combined with Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, the legacy higher ed system has never been under more serious attack, even as it has never enjoyed more generous federal funding (the Department of Education did not exist until May 1980 and in 2011 will spend $71 billion of future taxpayer’s dollars).

Update: I’ve completed my review at http://philip.greenspun.com/book-reviews/higher-education

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I attended a Bat Mitzvah today. As is conventional for the Jewish tradition, the 13-year-old girl was encouraged to dedicate a major part of her life to helping the less fortunate and was in the middle of a project to assist some needy folks (collecting supplies for a local women’s shelter).

A variety of sources show that today’s 13-year-old will be, whether she wants to or not, spending her working years taking care of a lot more non-workers than her parents did. Here are some sources for the dependency ratio:

• http://aging.senate.gov/crs/ss4.pdf
• http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/aging_population/cb10-72.html
• http://www.investmentu.com/2010/January/the-dependency-ratio.html

Furthermore, public employee pensions were not nearly as generous nor did public employees retire as early or live as long during her parents’ career-building years. Retiree health care costs were insignificant for governments.

If the girl is inevitably going to be paying heavy taxes to support retired public employees, interest on money borrowed for government deficit spending before she was born, interest on money borrowed to pay for wars that she wasn’t old enough to vote “yes” or “no” for (she’ll be paying for our Libya war, for example), etc., should we also try to guilt her into working extra hours to indulge in private charity? Suppose that she ends up paying 60 percent of her lifetime income in sales tax, property tax, income tax, gasoline tax, excise taxes, etc. And much of that will go so that others need not work. Can we say that she has done her share and the Jewish/Biblical obligations of charity have been fulfilled? If not, what if the government takes 70 percent of the fruits of her labor? Is there any amount that would relieve her of the obligation to engage in private charity?

[Separately, one of the guests at the event illustrated how challenging it might be for the young woman to carry her parents and grandparents, financially, on her shoulders. “We produce sheets for American retailers,” said the gray-haired New Yorker in a blue suit. “Everything was in South Carolina until about 15 years ago, but the unions made it impossible to deliver at the prices demanded by consumers. We were lucky because we were one of the first to move overseas, first to China, then Pakistan, and four years ago, when Pakistan became too chaotic, to India.” How many people did his operation employ in India? “We started working with a small company, with about 2400 people, but because of our orders they’ve grown to 27,000.” How many folks does his enterprise employ here in the U.S.? “Just one. You’re talking to him.”]

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My flight instructor certificate was expiring this month (unlike a pilot’s license, the instructor certificate must be renewed every two years), so I rushed over to the FAA’s Boston FSDO to have an Aviation Safety Inspector bless my paperwork and issue me a temporary certificate. He said “You didn’t have to rush; we’ll all be here during any shutdown.” What about the mailing of the permanent certificate? Wasn’t there a risk of that being delayed? “It’s done by a contractor, so you should have it within a week regardless.”

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Congress and President Obama are fighting over whether the federal government should spend $40 trillion (Republicans) over the next ten years or $46 trillion (Democrats). Either way, the government will spend more money than it takes in and future generations will be burdened with additional debt. Either way, the states will continue to have enormous pension and retiree health care obligations that they have set aside no money to pay.

In the midst of this question of how best to impoverish our grandchildren, there is a risk that the “non-essential” federal government will shut down. To me, the most senseless part of a shutdown is the closure of the National Parks. A principal reason that the U.S. is so wealthy is that we stole such a great piece of land from the Indians. We’ve been reaping a return on that stolen investment for 400 years. The National Parks yield some of the highest return of any of the land. Foreigners come here to see the parks and pay at least the following taxes: airfare taxes, airport facility fees (mostly to government agencies), rental car tax, gasoline tax, hotel tax, restaurant tax, sales tax on anything that they buy, payroll tax (indirectly through the workers whose jobs at hotels, restaurants, etc. they support), property tax (indirectly through the landlords of the hotels and restaurants, etc.), and income tax (again through workers).

If, as a society, we’re running out of money, shouldn’t we at least keep the profit centers open?

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As a taxpayer, my only comfort in our newest war is that it provokes some thought on the nature of international organizations. A Nobel Peace Laureate is killing people who recently chaired the United Nations Human Rights Commission. Why? Because the United Nations Security Council has decided that the former chair of the Human Rights Commission doesn’t provide enough human rights. Truth is truly stranger than fiction.

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I’ve drafted a review of a More Money than God, a history of hedge funds. Comments and corrections would be appreciated. I’m particularly interested to hear what folks have to think about my theory that the tendency of retail investors to buy near peaks and sell after crashes (i.e., near troughs) is a consistent source of gains for hedge funds.

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We went to the Metropolitan Opera’s Tosca last night. The singing and orchestra were excellent as always. The 2009 sets were very plain, as you might expect from an organization whose Form 990 indicates that it pays its general manager $1.5 million per year (what could they have left over for fancy sets, especially since donations were down about 40 percent?). The staging was designed to ensure maximum frustration among those who paid hundreds of dollars for box seats along the sides of the cavernous theater; for no obvious dramatic purpose singers would stand in side corners of the stage for minutes at a time. They were thus rendered invisible to hundreds of audience members. I emailed a composer friend just before the concert started and he replied with the following:

“I do not go to the MET as I am severely allergic to the smell of formaldehyde. These large orchestral organizations of this country should be tried for cultural treason, for they have suffocated the birth of our own orchestral voice. Any New Yorker or American that could give money to support these institutions has no self esteem. And why are we so concerned with the acoustics of our classical concert halls when ninety percent of the audience has hearing aids.”

Until I read James Wolfensohn’s autobiography, it seemed odd to me that donors would give so readily to cultural organizations that manifestly do not need the money. In my non-profit ideas page, I calculated that $5 million would suffice to create a free Internet library of most of the world’s classical music. But being on the board of an organization that has no fancy hall, no Chagall murals, no gala opening night, etc., is not going to advance one’s business or personal interests.

My companion summed up the evening succinctly: “I doubt that there is any other opera where such a high percentage of the characters are dead by the end.”

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