Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

In January I posted a theory that the U.S. economy might not do anything more dramatic than slide sideways, which would look like a downward slide relative to other nations, more or less as the U.K. has done since World War II. There is no law that says we have to grow or crash. It has been six months since that post and the economic numbers remain depressing but not terrifying. GM is still in the news, having absorbed perhaps another $50 billion in taxpayer funds and hopelessly ill-equipped to compete with the Tata Nano or the electric cars coming out of China. The government continues to expand but few have noticed any great improvement in the quality or quantity of services delivered by the government. Any growth in GDP seems likely to be roughly matched by our 1 percent annual growth in population, which will result in a reasonably happy government, but a disappointed people. The government will be a happy due to a rising tax base. The people will be disappointed because increased population will bring congestion, rising real estate costs, and constant per-capita income that most likely will turn into a falling income for most Americans, given that a lot of forces tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

How accurate does this assessment seem? Are you seeing evidence of a recovery in your neighborhood?

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The Supreme Court has spoken in Ricci v. Stefano, the New Haven firefighter’s case. An employer developed what it thought was a purely job-related exam and said that they would promote the people who did well on the test. The alternatives presumably would have been promotion based on seniority or popularity with supervisor (i.e., suckuptitude). When it transpired that some blacks and Hispanics whom the city had hoped to promote based on the exam failed to score well, the city tossed out the results. The Supreme Court has ordered the city to live by the test results and self-proclaimed advocates for blacks and Hispanics are broadcasting their displeasure.

Initially it seems reasonable that advocates for groups that did poorly on an exam would advocate against an exam culture. But thinking about it a bit more, I found myself surprised.

Suppose I am a member of Group A within society. The average manager thinks that members of Group A are incompetent and doesn’t want to hire anyone in Group A. Membership in Group A can be easily recognized in a face-to-face interview by skin color and therefore, unless nobody else has applied, no member of Group A is likely to get a job after a face-to-face interview.

An employer switches to using a written exam, graded by a computer program unaware of the group membership of test takers. The highest scoring test takers will be given jobs.

This should be a dream come true for me and the rest of Group A. To get a job or a promotion, all that I have to do is study for a written test. I don’t have to worry about my skin color anymore. If Group A has a particular dialect of English or funny accent that turns off employers, I am also freed from worry about how I speak.

If the belief is that Group A is being discriminated against because employers are prejudiced, one would think that any advocate for Group A would welcome a method of hiring or promoting that is blind to personal characteristics.

Suppose that all jobs in the U.S. were exam-based. We would not have had the election of 2004 in which John Kerry and George W. Bush competed for our top job. Neither of them did especially well on exams, as evidenced by their mediocre grades in college. Had ability to be President been judged by an impartial computer system rather than voters, it is unlikely that two white guys from Yale would have been the top contenders.

[Separately, has anyone seen any of the exam questions? A tremendous amount of journalistic ink has been spent on this lawsuit yet I have not seen any sample questions from the exam. Perhaps they were lifted from http://snltranscripts.jt.org/76/76rblackperspective.phtml, e.g.,

You have been invited over for cocktails by the officer of your trust fund. Cocktails begin at 4:30, but you must make an appearance at a 6:00 formal dinner at the Yacht Club. What do you do about dress?

A. Wear your blue-striped seersucker suit to cocktails and change into your tuxedo in the bathroom, apologizing to your host for the inconvenience.
B. Wear your tuxedo to cocktails, apologizing to your host for wearing a dinner jacket before 6:00 PM.
C. Walk to the subway at Columbus Circle and take the “A” Train uptown.”

Julian Bond, Black Perspective, Saturday Night Live, April 9, 1977]

[Update: The New York Times did a story on a Hispanic firefighter in New Haven who joined the lawsuit supporting exam-based promotion. He was unaware of his own score, though as it happens it was high enough to earn promotion. Last paragraph:

Gesturing toward his three young sons, Lieutenant Vargas explained why he had no regrets. “I want them to have a fair shake, to get a job on their merits and not because they’re Hispanic or they fill a quota,” he said. “What a lousy way to live.”

]

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Sometimes I like to listen to classical music on WGBH, one of our local NPR stations. For what seems like a large percentage of the days in the year, however, they interrupt the programming for 20 minutes per hour with annoying fund drives. How much of WGBH’s revenue comes from driving listeners insane/away? Their annual report says that in 2008, only 12 percent of the total budget was from individual donations. Let’s assume that half of this money comes from people who would have given via the Web or via mail solicitations. The total revenue from on-air fund drives is therefore only about 6 percent of total revenues.

This 6 percent does not come for free, though. During fund drives, the station has less air time in which to sell ads. The station has fewer listeners during fund drives, which reduces the amount that can be charged for an ad. Furthermore, companies might not want their ads to run while listeners are being annoyed. Ad revenue, referred to in the annual report as “corporate support”, is 17 percent of total revenue and let’s assume that it could grow to 18 or 19 percent without the fund drives. Now the station is irritating listeners for a net 4 percent revenue boost.

Even this 4 percent isn’t free. The station needs to hire people to run the pledge drives, speaking on the air, coordinating volunteers, buying pizza, negotiating with companies for products and services to give away to donors. WGBH’s IRS Form 990 reveals that the station spent 10 percent of its total revenue on fundraising. If we assume that one third of that went to on-air fund drives, the net revenue boost from interrupting programming to have fund drives is only 1 percent.

I.e., if the station could trim expenses by 1 percent it would not need to do a fund drive ever again.

Another way to look at this is that the station spent 10 percent of its budget on fundraising. It received 12 percent of its budget from individual donations. If it trimmed expenses by 2 percent, it could stop asking for money via direct mail, on-air, on the Web, etc.

Is there any fat to be trimmed? Back in 2006, according to the IRS Form 990 (available from guidestar.org), the company was paying 14 vice presidents between $200,000 and $300,000 per year in current and deferred compensation. Henry P. Becton, Jr., the president, helped himself to $350,000 per year. [Did they need to pay Becton $350,000 for fear that this hard-charging young executive would be hired away by a new station in Los Angeles? The guy was in his 60s and about to retire, but presumably the Trustees of this non-profit organization thought that the wisest use of donor money was to give Becton a big pay raise.] In this economy, giving these folks a 5 percent pay cut should not result in anyone leaving for a commercial TV station (all of which are making drastic salary and staff level cuts).

If you weren’t annoyed enough by WGBH’s pledge drives, keep in mind that (1) the station could eliminate all fundraising and suffer only a 2 percent net loss (because they spent so much on administration, mailing, etc. in trying to get the money), and (2) all of the net proceeds from individuals barely suffice to pay a handful of top executives who never get anywhere near a TV camera or audio mixing panel.

The preceding analysis is in some ways too optimistic about fund drives. On-air fund drives might have made sense in the early days of public radio. The only other way to reach listeners and potential donors was via expensive printed direct mail. Public radio stations did not sell advertising in the early days and therefore there was no immediate cash value to having a larger audience. Listeners had no MP3 players, no satellite radio, no Internet radio, and no podcasts. A crummy station had a monopoly at least on its little corner of the dial and was guaranteed at least some audience. In the 21st Century, however, a public radio station has new competition and new opportunities, e.g., reaching listeners on the other side of the country or planet. Via its Web site and email, the station can communicate with listeners and ask for money “out of band” in a way that does not reduce the value of its service. One wonders if the fund drive is simply a leftover that hasn’t been eliminated because non-profit managers aren’t nimble enough to adapt to a changed world. By reducing the audience size and running up admin costs at an organization where a lot of employees are paid over $200,000 year, the fund drive probably reduces profits.

I’m listening to CBC Classical right now, which is free of all commercials, free of fundraising solicitations, and streamed at a much higher audio quality than WGBH’s Internet feed.

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Tomorrow at 7 pm, I will be at the Harvard Book Store to hear Katherine Howe read from The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, likely to be the bestselling book of the summer and certainly the perfect reading for anyone on a New England beach. By page 15 the reader has absorbed a complete history of witchcraft in New England, listening in on the protagonist sitting through a Ph.D. qualifying exam.

To get a sense of the author’s speaking voice, watch this clip from Good Morning America.

I’d be delighted to get together afterwards with interested readers of this Weblog, perhaps over ice cream at Herrell’s.

More: event page.

[This could be a good book for the Kindle, as the only illustrations are handwriting samples that could be rendered on the Kindle in plain text (perhaps a commenting reader can let us know how the book looks on a Kindle. The hardcover is beautifully designed, produced, and printed.]

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I ate breakfast with a United Nations staffer here in New York. I asked if the worldwide economic meltdown had changed her colleagues’ thinking and priorities. I was wondering if the U.N. was going to concentrate more on things that might contribute directly to economic development. She responded “Absolutely. There have been huge changes. Countries are cutting their contributions to the U.N. and all of us are worried about our salaries and benefits.”

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I’ve been making flying videos with a Sony HDR-FX1 camcorder. Sony, for perverse reasons known only to its corporate soul, has equipped this machine with a 1/4-20 socket rather than a standard shoe. Touring the professional camera stores of Boston did not result in any solution to the challenge of mounting a wireless microphone receiver or video light on this machine.

Being in Manhattan, I stopped in to see Jeff Hirsch, owner of Fotocare, who is the standard savior of troubled studio photographers. Jeff has just moved into a beautiful new storefront on W. 22nd (between 5th and 6th), considerably enlarged from his old place. I explained my problem to Jeff and within three minutes was walking out with the right adapter.

It is nice that the world’s leading expert on which studio digital backs work best and how to light a car in a warehouse can still take time to solve small problems for small customers. It is sad to think that the Amazonification of the universe is reducing the number of cities in which a shop like Fotocare will be able to exist, but we’ll always have New York… (I hope!)

[Across the street is an excellent Provencal restaurant, Allegretti.]

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If you’re feeling insignificant and unaccomplished, head over to the Metropolitan Museum and look at a painting on temporary display. It is a very complex oil painting with a lot of color and drama. The artist, Michelangelo, was 12 years old when he did it. More: nytimes.

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I had dinner the other night with a 21-year-old and his boss. The kid had worked for the company for two summers and was trying to decide between going back to college in September or taking a year off to get more work experience.

The boss said that one advantage of going back to school was that he was more likely to meet a potential wife in college where people sit around lazily than in the fast-paced working world. He then caught himself and realized that this might be offensive if the kid, with whom he’d worked for 1.5 summers, happened to be gay. He restated and rephrased his advice, saying “more likely to meet the woman or man with whom you’d spend the rest of your life.”

It pointed out that in earlier decades it would not have been considered polite to suggest to a man a roughly equal chance of his being gay or straight. In fact, if not for the employment relationship, a person who suggested that a man might be gay would have feared a response in the form of a punch.

The college kid said “I took it in the spirit of an attempt to be politically correct and wasn’t offended.”

Was he in fact gay? “I don’t even own an iPhone,” was his answer.

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I sat in a mock-up of the new Cirrus Jet today alongside Alan Klapmeier, the company’s co-founder, who was visiting Hanscom Field (KBED). The interior reflects some truly brilliant design. The seats slide back and forth on long tracks, allowing a lot of flexibility. People could swap seats with the pilots without knocking the thrust lever. The visibility is fantastic, certainly the best of any civilian jet. The panel is two medium-sized screens, a row of switches, and three small multi-function screens. By refraining from putting in the three or four big screens of a modern business jet, Cirrus has left room for windows.

This promises to be the least expensive of the very light jets, but for a lot of families possibly the most useful. The plane holds two people in front and realistically should be flyable by one parent. That leaves room for a second adult in the front, two sullen teenagers in the middle, and a parent with two younger kids in the back row of three seats (two of which are undersized).

If three adults want to sit in the back and have a conversation, the rearmost seat can slide forward so that it is just behind the two middle seats. This leaves a lot of shoulder room, but the three people are still close enough to talk. If someone wanted to sleep across the three middle seats, the rearmost seat can be pulled up even with the middle two.

Cirrus does not seem to be suffering from the Collapse of 2008 as badly as other airplane manufacturers. My theory is that this is due to their introducing a lot of new features recently, such as a Garmin-based instrument panel and a certified-for-flight-into-known-icing anti-ice system. A 2005 Cirrus is not a perfect substitute for a 2009 Cirrus, as would be the case with many other small aircraft.

Klapmeier is an interesting guy to talk with, very knowledgeable about engineering and certification testing. He is also candid, like you’d expect a company founder to be, rather than evading questions and parroting marketingspeak or legalspeak.

I’m pretty happy with the Cirrus SR20 that I fly regularly, but it isn’t revolutionary. If the Cirrus Vision jet can be delivered at anywhere near the originally promised price ($1 million 2006 dollars) it will certainly be a revolution in family jet transportation.

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I’ll be spending Sunday in Ridgefield, Connecticut looking at Edward Tufte’s new sculpture and hearing him speak at 4 pm (details). This should be convenient for anyone in the New York City area, particularly as the museum has an option for bus transportation to and from Manhattan (takes about 1:15 to drive). Having seen some of Tufte’s earlier sculpture, I’ve been looking forward to this event for months. If any readers of this weblog are interested in joining up for a coffee either on Sunday at the museum (around 3 pm), or Friday evening in Manhattan near the Metropolitan Museum, please let me know via email.

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