Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

I’m currently at the Loews Le Concorde hotel in Quebec City, a 424-room business hotel recommended by some guys at the airport.  Nearly every aspect of the hotel operation reflects enormous management attention to detail.  Yet when it comes to Internet access they’ve outsourced it to a company called DataValet, “a trademark of TravelNet Technologies.”  When it works you’re supposed to pay $20/day for a 100Kbps link but their authentication server was dead.  So I called the 800-number to talk to a tech support guy.  After about 30 minutes of flailing about I was finally able to connect.

Curious to see how this obviously very effective management, which would not tolerate a burned-out light bulb or a rubbed-off number on an elevator button, was able to tolerate this kind of incompetence, I called the manager.  Although a very nice and competent executive, she was undisturbed by the fact that it was so painful to connect to the Internet at her hotel.  She had even stayed at Hilton Garden Inns where Internet is free and therefore reliable (you just plug in and because they don’t try to charge anyone they can use $50 routers; it is also about 15X the speed of “DataValet”).  But as far as she was concerned it was something that they’d outsourced to a contractor and if it wasn’t working it wouldn’t reflect badly on her management.

I would submit that Internet is the only thing that she would have tolerated sucking in her hotel.  If she’d outsourced room service and the contractor told customers to call tech support and then walk down to the McDonald’s next door, she would change contractors.  If the telephones in the rooms were flaky she would put in new lines, instruments, and switches.

Just as Web sites are an area where companies feel that they can lag leagues behind their competitors (who even bothers to try to do as good as job as Google?), Internet access seems to be one where an enterprise will cheerfully tolerate being 60X worse that its competition in terms of time to connect and then 15X worse in terms of bandwidth.  I infer from this experience that tech companies are in for another few very bad years in which customers won’t want to pay attention to or invest in improved computer hardware and software.

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Here in the capital of a former jewel in the French imperial crown (Quebec City), I just finished a rather dry academic biography of Napoleon by Steven Englund.  It is easy for to forget that France was once an important military power, just like us.  Rather than exploiting and/or pillaging, Napoleon tried to liberate the people in the territories that he conquered, just like George W. Bush.  And just like George W. Bush, Napoleon suffered his first defeat in a multi-ethnic Middle Eastern country:

“The Turkish Empire, which nominally ruled [Egypt], was regarded as an immoral and declining power, so the French saw an opportunity to revive civilization …

“The effective goverment of Egypt at this time was in the hands of the Mamelukes, an equestrian feudal order of slave origin that had long held power over a disparate population of Moslem Arabs, Coptic Christians, and Sephardic Jews. …

“To the [French] expedition’s stunned disillusionment, the land of the pharoahs turned out to be a filthy backwater of flies, mud huts, disease, howling dogs, and superstition.  Alexandria offered nothing worthy of its grand name. …

“The most controversial [decision by Bonaparte] in this campaign was his decision to execute three thousand Turkish prisoners … [who] had surrendered on a promise of quarter …

“[The French] intention to bring ‘enlightenment’ and ‘development’ to blend ‘the rights of man’ with ‘the law of the Koran.’  From Egypt’s perspective, the Europeans dropped suddenly onto their scene as an alien, hostile force majeure. …

“What eluded Napoleon’s anticipation was the degree and persistence of Moslem mistrust of the French, coupled with their comparative indifference to Western notions of reform.  …  The preponderance of Egypt’s populace sincerely believed that anything worth knowing was already explicit or clearly implicit in the Koran.  More seriously, many Napoleonic measures outraged people.  … Decrees on behalf of women, Jews, and Coptic Christians … went down almost as badly as the imposition of high taxes to support the French army. …

“The French hold on Egypt thus remained what it started out as: force operating behind a facade of hypocrisy…

“For the mass of the populace, the French could not get out from under the burden of being seen as ‘the Christian enemy,’ the crusaders returned.  In that perspective, the Ottomans and even the Mamelukes were preferable because at least they were not infidels.”

The good news for W. is that Napoleon bounced back from that 1799 defeat and several others, managing to return to power even after exile to Elba, for example.  So if his obsession with Iraq results in the loss of the White House he might still manage to come back in 2008.

[Nouvelle France and Quebec prefigure to some extent conflicts and controversies today.  The French came to live in a reasonable amount of harmony with the Indians, whom they saw as valuable economic allies in such endeavors as the fur trade.  The early French immigrants learned Indian languages and many married Algonquin women.  They expected some sort of ethnic and cultural fusion to be the end result.  The English, by contrast, came to displace the Indians.  They also did not shy from the ethnic cleansing of Nova Scotia, deporting 10,000 French-speaking Acadians between 1755 and 1762.]

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Now that I’m 40 years old most of my friends are in their riper years.  The women who are trying to have children in their late 30s and early 40s are going through torture.  Hormones, needles, in-vitro fertilization, miscarriages, etc.  Maybe teenage pregnancy isn’t such a bad idea after all.  I wonder if in pre-industrial societies it wasn’t the case that the grandparents did most of the child-rearing that required judgement and experience.  The teenage girl did the child-bearing but was still living surrounded by extended family so that her 30-35-year-old mom and mother-in-law could provide adult guidance for the baby.  Perhaps we believe that teenage pregnancy is bad only because our family structures have been broken up.

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In Sunday’s New York Times the article “No Wonder C.E.O.’s Love Those Mergers” discusses how top managers (i.e., a bunch of folks with fairly high IQs) are managing to collect in the neighborhood of 8 percent of the value of two public companies when they merge… all without disclosure to the widows and orphans who own stock.  It is apparently a beautiful world out there for those who are smart enough to navigate the maze of regulations and laws.

[Make sure that you read “Hourly Pay in U.S. Not Keeping Pace With Price Rises”  in the same sitting to see what life is like at the other end of the wage-IQ scale.]

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According to this story in the BBC local boy Tim Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his early 1990s development of HTTP, HTML, and a collection of open-source tools to work with those standards.  This distinguishes QE II from George W.  She apparently is occupied with something that relates to the life of the average citizen of her country, rather than concentrating on Iraq.

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A friend was complaining about Ronald Reagan yesterday, not completely mollified by his death.  What had Reagan done to bother her, I asked?  She was upset by Reagan’s appointments to the Supreme Court, by his inaction on AIDS, and a variety of other domestic issues.  How could she hate Reagan more than Bush?   “Bush is out there messing up foreign countries instead of our own.”

Despite not having voted for either man, I discovered a strong personal preference for Reagan over Bush II.  Reagan was an American working on American problems.  Maybe he didn’t do as good a job as we would have liked, but at least he was trying.  Bush, on the other hand, projects an image of spending all of his time and energy thinking about Iraq and Iraqis.  The only explanation that makes sense is that Bush is actually an Iraqi.  Who other than an Iraqi would be so interested in Iraq?  When W. is not talking about Iraq he is often talking about Jesus so probably he is an Assyrian Christian, one of the groups that lived in Iraq before the Arab invasion (background).

Perhaps Kerry and Edwards have a chance after all because they are running against a foreigner.

[Note:  there is some chance that Bush is Kuwaiti or Saudi rather than Iraqi.  The owners of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were badly inconvenienced by Saddam.  There was a New York Times article right after the 1991 Gulf War where they talked about how the Emir of Kuwait would marry a 13- or 14-year-old girl every Friday night and then divorce her on Saturday and that this was the kind of lifestyle that American troops were supporting by giving Kuwait back to the Emir–you could understand why the Emir, even with $billions in foreign bank accounts, was so anxious to have his country back.  Still, there were never too many Christians in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia so evidence points back to W. being an Iraqi]

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A recent New Yorker magazine story on Egypt (full text online from link) contains the following passage:

Ibrahim taught Arabic literature at Berkeley in 1998, an experience that evidently did not suit him. “I despised the total individualism, the control of multinationals, the manipulation of the media over the ordinary person, the values of life, just living to eat, drink, fuck, have a car, and that’s all,” he said. “There are no moral values, no broad-minded attitudes toward life in general or a sense of what is happening in the world, no sense of the role America is playing in trying to control the resources of the world.” Perhaps what irked him most, he said, was “the genuine stupidity of the normal American citizen. He is ignorant. He doesn’t know what his own country is doing in the world. The U.S. is following the same policy of racism as the Nazis. Do I really have to explain something to you that is so well known everywhere?”

Ibrahim’s “genuine stupidity” observation certainly adds some weight to the Bell Curve thesis (see below).  But suffering through the horrible weather here in Boston as I do mostly it cheers me to find out that there is anyone who manages to resist the lures of California.

[The very last part of the article is also worth reading, about an Egyptian kid who believes himself involved in a “clash of civilizations” where the West is trying to destroy Islam.  A big fan of September 11th and Al-Qaeda, he is confident that Islam will destroy the West first, which seems odd.  The belief system holds simultaneously that (a) the U.S. is completely immoral, (b) the U.S. is involved in a kill-or-be-killed war to the death with Muslims, and (c) the U.S. won’t simply unload its warehouses full of nuclear weapons on the heads of Egyptians, et al.  If the U.S. were truly as evil as these guys say, W. and Co. would just use our leftover nukes to kill all the people in every country where Al-Qaeda recruits and then come back a few years later to pump out the oil.  And yet the fact that they are still alive and well in Cairo would seem to demonstrate that the U.S. is not completely immoral.  You would think that, at a minimum, the U.S. and W. would get credit from “the Arab Street” for the continued existence of “the Arab Street.”]

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Driving back and forth to Nashua, NH yesterday I listened to The Bell Curve as an abridged book on tape (picked it up for $5 in a used bookstore in San Diego).  This book created quite a stir in 1994 because of its discussion of average IQ differences among races but I had never read it.  It turns out that even if you leave out all the controversial stuff about race the book is potentially very relevant to our times.

The Bell Curve starts out by talking about how we live in an era where people get sorted by cognitive ability into socioeconomic classes.  In 14th century England if you were a peasant with a high IQ or a noble with a low IQ it didn’t affect your life, reproductive potential, or income very much.  In our more meritocratic and vastly more sophisticated economy a smart kid from a lower middle class might make it to the top of a big company (cf. Jack Welch, who paid himself $680 million as CEO of GE) or at least into a $300,000/year job as a radiologist.  For the authors of the Bell Curve the increasing disparity in income in the U.S. is primarly due to the fact that employees with high IQs are worth a lot more than employees with low IQs.  They note that we have an incredibly complex legal system and criminal justice system.  So you’d expect people with poor cognitive ability to fail to figure out what is a crime, which crimes are actually likely to be punished, etc., and end up in jail.  (A Google search brought up a report on juvenile justice in North Carolina; the average offender had an IQ of 79.)  If they stay out of jail through dumb (literally) luck, there is no way that they are ever going to be able to start a small business; the legal and administrative hoops through which one must jump in order to employ even one other person are impenetrable obstacles to those with below-average intelligence.

The trend that the decade-old Bell Curve book misses is telecom and outsourcing.  The authors assume that an American with high IQ will have a higher income and better standard of living than an American with low IQ.  That’s the sorting function of an advanced economy.  They don’t get into the question of whether it is sustainable that an American with low IQ should have a higher income than someone in India or China with a high IQ.  Statistically, due to their sheer hugeness, you’d have to expect that there are more really smart people in India and China than the total population of the U.S.  If the sorting-by-IQ process were efficient across international borders you’d expect that an American with an IQ of 100 should be making less than an Indian with an IQ of 120.  Given that a lot of brilliant well-educated people in India are getting paid less than $5,000 per year, this is a bit worrisome those of us here who are fat, dumb, and happy.  [Imagine that you were running a company.  Would you rather employ a local high school graduate with an IQ of 90 or an Indian college grad with an IQ of 130 via Internet link?]

For us oldsters, one unexpected piece of cheerful news from this book is that younger Americans are getting genetically dumber every year.  Even if you ignore the racial and immigrant angles of the book that created so much controversy back in 1994 it is hard to argue with the authors’ assertion that smart women tend to choose higher education and careers rather than cranking out lots of babies.  As a middle-aged (40) guy whose own cognitive abilities are beginning to fade due to neuron death I felt sure that there would be no place me for in the America of 2050.  Our population is predicted to reach 450 million or so, i.e., the same as India had back when we were kids and our mothers told us about this starving and overpopulated country.  An individual person’s labor in India has negligible economic value–the American firm Office Tiger gets 1500 applicants, many of whom are very well qualified, on a good day in Chennai.  It would seem that no enterprise would need an old guy’s skills in a country of 450 million; why bother when there are so many energetic young people around?  And how would we be able to afford a house or apartment if there are 450 million smart young people out there earning big bucks and putting pressure on real estate prices?  But if the book is right most of those young people will be dumb as bricks.

[Update:  The Sunday New York Times has a long article in the Business section “Hourly Pay in U.S. Not Keeping Pace With Price Rises” about how American workers in jobs that don’t require high IQs are losing ground compared to the middle class and compared to inflation.  Raw labor isn’t worth very much right now.]

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I’ve recently finished up the school year doing volunteer tutoring in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’s most expensive (and one of the worst-performing) public high schools, right across the street here in Cambridge.  Simultaneously I’ve been reading some articles about the most expensive high school ever built in the United States, the $286 million Belmont Learning Center in Los Angeles (background article).  I’m beginning to wonder if the idea of a local public high school isn’t just a leftover habit from the 19th century when international travel was expensive and time-consuming and telecommunications did not exist.

Suppose that you had a 16-year-old named Johnnie and the $14,000 per year that the local school district will spend to keep him occupied for a year.  If there were no Boeing 747s, cheap telephones, or Internet you might want to send him to a nearby school.  But for less than $2000 we can send that kid anywhere in the world and bring him back for Christmas and Spring Break.  For a few cents per minute we can pick up the phone and talk to our kid regardless of where he happens to be.

Hmm… maybe we can send Johnnie to China for one year.  He will go to an elite private boarding school and learn Mandarin, probably the most useful language for business, aside from English, for the foreseeable future.  With the money left over from the $14,000 after subtracting for airfare and school fees we can send Johnnie on a backpacking tour around Australia during his summer break.  Next year, because Johnnie was never that great at math, maybe we’ll send him to India to be tutored 1:1 by a math PhD (compare to being one of 25 students in a classroom led by a teacher only slightly ahead of the better students).  The $12,000 we have left over after paying for airfare is more than the salary of a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, one of the world’s finest universities.  So Johnnie can also learn how to manage a few servants and maybe play some polo.  For Johnnie’s last year before college maybe it would be good if he learned fluent Spanish and got to know our neighbors in Latin America.  So we send him off to Argentina or Mexico to attend one of their finest private schools.

Wouldn’t Johnnie be a lot better prepared to distinguish himself among college applicants with such an education?  And better prepared to get a job in a global economy?  Maybe the best option to settle the debate over what kind of high school is best is “no high school”.

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A friend who blames Jews for all of the ills that he perceives in American society asked me if it was a Jew who started using “BCE” (“Before the Common Era” rather than BC or “Before Christ”) for dates of events that occurred more than 2004 years ago.  Being a techie rather than a historian he had only recently come across this coinage and was convinced that it was part of a contemporary Jewish plot to deestablish Christianity as America’s default religion.

My response was that I believed BCE/CE instead of BC/AD was a bit of 19th century academic pedantry from Europe or England.  I remember seeing the term on yellowed labels next to objects in museums that had been gathering dust for 50+ years.  Given that Jews had only recently escaped from their ghettos in the 19th century and that most classics or Bible scholars would have come from wealthier families, I thought it highly unlikely that a Jew coined the term.  Most likely I thought it was Christian scholars who wished to employ a bit of jargon to make their professional work appear more scientific.  The only etymological reference that I could find was this Word IQ article, that talks about the appearance of the term “Common Era” in a 1908 encyclopedia published by the Roman Catholic Church.

Anyone have a better source for settling this question?  The Oxford English Dictionary and first Supplement don’t contain “BCE” or “Common Era”.

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