Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Last week I donated a helicopter intro lesson to a suburban daycare center’s benefit auction. The retail value of this lesson is $199, but the auctioneer did not mention any price. He stressed what an amazing achievement it would be to take the controls of a real helicopter. The high bid was $750. I was in the room and said I’d be willing to donate a second lesson. The auctioneer persuaded the underbidder to come up to $750 as well. So we got $1500 for two lessons in three minutes. Neither of the bidders had any flying experience.

East Coast Aero Club was a co-sponsor of a standing-room only aviation safety presentation this evening here in Bedford, Massachusetts. The hotel conference room must have held at least 600 people and perhaps closer to 1000. Nearly all were certificated airplane pilots. We had our brochures for helicopter training and a sign advertising a “$99 helicopter intro” special. The people in the room would have known that this is an amazingly good deal for a brand-new Robinson R44. They pay more than that per hour to fly a 30-year-old Cessna or Piper airplane.

How many pilots leaped at the chance to try out the helicopter for less than the cost of a dinner for two? Zero. How many expressed any interest in helicopter lessons? Zero. Of the folks who were passionate enough about aviation to earn a certificate and spend an evening at the Doubletree, how many were willing to pay 1/7th the price offered by a suburban mom? Zero. Almost universally they said “It is too expensive”. These are folks who fly for pleasure. They don’t have a second home on an island or a job in the Adirondacks to which they must commute. They rent little planes to fly up to southern Maine for breakfast and fly back. I began to wonder “If saving money is so important to these guys, why do they fly at all? A 10-year-old Honda Accord would get them anywhere they need to go at a much lower cost.”

[Speaking of flying and cost… http://www.airnav.com/airport/kteb shows that Jet Aviation at Teterboro is charging $9.02 per gallon for 100LL aviation gasoline. That’s the highest that I’ve ever seen, despite the fact that oil is not at an all-time high. It may be the case that taxes and fees collected by the airport have gone up, so I’m not sure that Jet is to blame. I would find this alarming except that the federal government assures me that we do not have inflation in the U.S.]

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Folks: Those of you who live in Boston might be interested in attending a free 6-9 pm flying safety seminar this evening at the Doubletree Hotel in Bedford. These are usually well-attended, with at least a few hundred pilots and students, and the stories are interesting. The first portion is more of a social hour (assuming your idea of “social” is “a bunch of old white guys standing around drinking”), with the real talk starting at 6:50 pm.

East Coast Aero Club will have a booth at the event and a bunch of us instructors, including me, will be there to answer questions about flying helicopters or airplanes.

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One of the services that the USPS offers is that I get to read most of my neighbor’s magazines, placed in my mailbox, before passing them on to him. His April 2011 Consumer Reports arrived today and they’ve aggregated test results and reliability data by automaker. The top tier is Honda (#1 overall), Suburu and Toyota. Their cars test out well and are reliable. The next tier is Ford, Hyundai, Mazda, Nissan, and Volvo (pretty good cars with pretty good reliability). The German companies have their own tier of high test scores but poor reliability and BMW, Mercedes, and Volkswagen ended up with similar overall scores (VW had substantially better reliability than BMW or Mercedes, though).

How did your $100 billion in tax dollar contributions work out? GM was near the bottom, with crummy cars that have average reliability. Chrysler was an outlier at the bottom, with off-the-chart bad test results and worse-than-average reliability.

This could also serve as a scorecard for government industrial policy. The U.S. government has gone to extraordinary lengths to prop up GM and Chrysler, but their products remain uncompetitive. The Japanese government tried to discourage Honda, then making motorcycles, from entering the automobile market, but Honda ignored the bureaucrats.

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The latest article by Paul Krugman says that it is hopeless for Americans to try to educate themselves into higher-paying jobs. White collar work will be outsourced to Watson or India/China. The exciting action in the U.S. job market will be for truck drivers and janitors. In a globalized economy, how is the U.S. janitor to continue to out-earn his counterpart in India or Cambodia? Unions: “We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages.”

Part of me wants to agree with Krugman. As I’ve already noted, investing in America’s children may be a waste of money; we’re so bad at education that we would be better off investing in other stuff. On the other hand, his argument seems to be “a stupid society, given enough labor unions, can sustainably earn more money than a smart society”. That doesn’t strike me as intuitively reasonable.

If Krugman were correct, wouldn’t the countries with the highest middle-class standard of living have been the Central and Eastern European nations under socialism? They had a high level of education and a good infrastructure and all of the means of production were controlled by workers or the state. There were no hedge fund managers or investment bankers skimming off the cream, and consequently wealth was distributed fairly equally, yet somehow the total prosperity was not sufficient to make the average worker better off than in neighboring West Germany or France.

What do folks think? Are you convinced by Krugman’s argument?

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For those passionate about the intersection of litigation and software, this new article on Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison will be exciting. This is a Court-approved method of determining whether or not one program infringes the copyright of another.

Comments and corrections would be appreciated.

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At the convenience store today, the checkout clerk complimented a youngster on his Star Wars T-shirt. “Those were the best movies,” noted the recent graduate of a suburban Massachusetts high school, “but you really should read some of the books. I never read. Never. But there are two books that follow Episode 6 and they are awesome. Much better than George Lucas’s screenplays. They’re really worth the time.”

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I talked to a Spanish teacher in a suburban Boston public high school last night. She expressed her disapproval of the idea of merit pay for teachers. “Some of my students hate their parents and some have been sexually abused,” she noted, “but my salary is supposed to be based on their performance?”

I responded that I thought the deeper question was how school administrators would evaluate merit. I asked “What incentive does a school administrator have to do a good job evaluating merit, or indeed, to do any work at all?” The teacher said “none, especially if they are a member of a protected minority group. They can’t be fired, no matter how little they do.” That made sense to me; the school is guaranteed to get nearly all of the students in the town regardless of whether or not the administrators do anything (few parents can afford to pay property taxes that fund public schools and then pay private school tuition as well). Wasn’t a teacher also guaranteed customers even if she didn’t work? “You have to try to sell the students at the beginning of the year that the class will be fun. Otherwise it is just unpleasant to sit with them for the remaining 8 months. If I’m incompetent and lazy, I will still get the same paycheck and the same number of students, but it will be tedious to share a classroom with unhappy students. That’s my incentive to work.”

Reflecting on this conversation, I was surprised that anyone thinks merit pay will work. Restaurants aren’t very important to our society or our future. Great empires have been built by countries with bad restaurants. Yet nobody would propose having restaurant compensation be determined by a government bureaucracy assigning “merit” to each restaurant. We allow citizens to choose which restaurant to visit and eventually the bad restaurants wither away and disappear due to lack of customers. Short of something like that in public education, how would we ever expect quality to improve? Wouldn’t parents and kids, simply by talking amongst themselves, quickly figure out who were the effective teachers and try to crowd into their classrooms, abandoning the ineffective teachers. An administrator looking for “merit” would simply need to count heads in the classroom and/or pay a teacher according to the number of kids who signed up (this is how education has worked for most of human history, actually; our current bureaucratized and tenured system is a relatively recent innovation; current “merit pay”).

I circled back later to the Spanish teacher and asked her if parents and kids knew who the good teachers were. “Of course. There is a huge amount of pushing by parents and kids to get into the best teachers’ classes. But at the end of the day the worst teachers still get a more or less full classroom and a full paycheck as well.”

[The complex merit pay schemes so far don’t seem to have worked, e.g., see this story on Nashville schools. Why isn’t anyone anywhere seriously considering the “parents/kids get to choose their school and teacher” approach? I don’t think it is fair to say that charter schools represent full choice because they don’t get anywhere near the funding of public schools (see this study on how the cost of public schools, if normal accounting measures are used, is much higher than quoted). Anyway, charter schools are hugely complex to set up. Assuming a normal distribution of effectiveness, the public schools already contain millions of above-average teachers. Without building any new buildings or setting up any new infrastructure, we could presumably improve outcomes simply by allowing those above-average teachers to attract more students.]

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Via a political process we’ve agreed that it is reasonable for the president of the U.S. to earn $400,000 per year. Does it make sense to use tax dollars to support non-profit organizations whose employees pay themselves more than that?

This Wall Street Journal article by Senator Jim Demint says that Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio executives earned between $$370,000/year and $1.2 million per year. Regardless of whether or not the non-profit organizations could have found people to work for less money, there is a reasonable question of whether the government should forcibly collect tax dollars from folks earning the median $16/hour wage and feed those dollars to public broadcasting employees earning far more than President Obama.

Who voted for that?

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A reader pointed out an interesting confluence of stories in today’s New York Times.

Story 1 is “Teachers Wonder, Why the Scorn?”, about how it is an unsolvable mystery as to why taxpayers have a low opinion of teachers (a 2nd-year teacher earning $36,000 ($4,000 per month) is the salary poster child; the journalist apparently could not find any $10,000+/month senior teachers to quote.)

Story 2 is about how 75 percent of students delivered by those teachers to City University of New York require remedial instruction. It notes that only 23 percent of students who graduated from New York City public schools, some of the most lavishly funded in the world, were “prepared for college or careers” (just imagine how little the dropouts learned!).

[Speaking of New York City school funding… when Michael Bloomberg was running for elections and to hold onto the Mayoralty for a third term, he dished out future taxpayers’ money at a record pace to unionized city workers. Now that he is a lame duck and doesn’t need their electoral support, he is proposing to scale back pensions for workers yet to be hired (i.e., he will help get the city’s fiscal health in order starting in the year 2040 or 2050).]

[How do the $130,000/year (+ $75,000/year pension starting at age 53) schoolteachers in Rochester perform compared to NYC? Five percent of their students end up being prepared for college (source).]

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