Half Sigma

Career and class

The comments by superdestroyer, Jody, and The Superflous Man to my post about unpaid internships make some valuable points about career choices and class.

It's probably obvious to most people that if a college professor and a UPS truck driver earn the same salary (and there are many college professors who earn less than the unionized UPS drivers), the college professor still has more class.

But the class distinctions between other jobs aren't quite as obvious and therefore are easily overlooked, or intentionally ignored by people who pretend there's no such thing as class.

Jobs in engineering and computer programming are lower class white collar jobs compared to journalism or museum curating, even though the former jobs pay better. It's easier to earn a six figure salary as a computer programmer than it is as a lawyer, but the lawyer has a higher class job.

When a low class job has salaries that are "too high," people consider this a "shortage" that needs correcting by allowing more immigration. This is why the computer programming field is full of immigrants. And I wrote about the nursing shortage a few days ago. Nursing is definitely seen as a low prestige job despite that fact that four year college degrees are offered in nursing.

On the other hand, there is no call to import more lawyers in order to lower the cost of legal services. To the ruling upper classes, it seems natural and right that high class workers make a lot of money, but if someone in a low class job makes a lot of money then this is a "problem" that needs to be solved by importing more workers from overseas.

What are some of the characteristics that distinguish upper class white collar jobs from lower class white collar jobs besides the social class background of the workers?

The upper classes seem to favor winner-takes-all professions. In computer programming, engineering, or nursing, it's easy to find a job and work your way into a good salary, even a six figure salary, but then your career reaches a plateau. In upper class professions the salary distribution is much more pyramidal. A few lucky lawyers who become partners at big law firms earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, but a large number of lawyers at the bottom are worse off than typical computer programmers.

Upper class professions are more verbal, while lower class professions are more numerical.

Career paths in which the entry level position requires commision based sales are lower class. In higher class careers, one starts out with a salaried position and then gets promoted into sales. For example, the partners at law firms do the sales while the associates do the real work, and the same is true in investment banking except that the salespeople are called "directors" instead of "partners."

Certain types of federal government jobs are upper class but others are lower class. This seems related to the location of the office. If the office is in DC it's more likely to be an upper class job, but if it's located in Virginia then it's probably a lower class job. If it's in Virginia outside the Beltway then all the people working in the office have big beer bellies and drive to work in pickup trucks.

Unpaid internships are more common for upper class career paths, as pointed out by superdestoyer. I think there are two reasons why this is the case: (1) students from middle class backgrounds are less able to afford unpaid internships; and (2) the higher class career paths are more likely to be winner-takes-all, and therefore it is crucially important to get on the right track in order to avoid being left behind. On the other hand there is an opening for every single qualified nurse so there's no need for nursing students to further enhance their resume.

Unpaid internships, another class divide

Anya Kamenetz, the author of the book Generation Debt, has an op ed piece in today's New York Times about unpaid internships.

This fits in with a theme of my recent blog posts, that young people are worse off today than they were in the past. In the past, students' summer jobs would pay them money. Today they work at unpaid internships, or sometimes even pay for the privilege of working for free. Ms. Kamenetz is correct that a pool of educated but inexperienced laborers willing to work for free will depress wages for the educated but inexperienced who actually seek to make money.

Given the importance of one's first job, it's a sensible career strategy to take an unpaid internship. Young people need to do whatever it takes to build up their resume so they can get on the correct career track. Ms. Kamenetz is therefore wrong to advise young people not to take unpaid internships. (Although if everyone refused to work for free then everyone would benefit: an example of a prisoner's dilemma.)

The new trend towards unpaid internships creates another class divide because rich parents can afford to pay for their children to work for free in expensive cities like New York while children of middle class parents have to work in a paid job which doesn't advance their career. Furthermore, the middle class values of the middle class, who believe in the virtues of "hard but honest work," tend to torpedo the future career prospects of their children.

Those cheating CEOs

Finance professor Erik Lie has proven, by examining historical stock price data, that many companies have been backdating their options grants in order to enrich management. The options are backdated to a date when the stock price was lower (WSJ article).

He examined options that weren't granted the same date every year and found a striking pattern in which prices fell before the grant date, and rose soon afterward. He also discovered that the stock market as a whole also often rose following option grants at certain companies. "I said, 'look, it's uncanny how good these executives must be at predicting what will happen with future stock prices," he says. He began to wonder "that maybe it wasn't so uncanny."

Calling his hypothesis "novel," he wrote a paper entitled "On the Timing of CEO Stock Option Awards" that suggested that "at least some of the awards are timed retroactively."

"The results are provocative and might cause some investors to cry foul," he wrote. The paper was published a year ago in a journal called "Management Science." He and another researcher, Randall A. Heron, have since completed a forthcoming, follow-up study that looked at a 2002 change in regulatory law that now requires companies to report option grants within 48 hours. The study found that when companies reported options the same day they were granted, there was no pattern of share prices quickly rising. But the pattern continued when companies delayed reporting option grants.

Last week I asked if CEOs are overpaid, and I wrote about Fannie Mae execs who manipulated earnings to increase their pay.

There definitely does seem to be a pattern of greedy CEOs who are willing to break to rules in order to enrich themselves. A CEO who was acting in the best interest of shareholders would not be cheating in order to increase his pay. So why do CEOs get paid so much for harming shareholder interests?

Is “future time orientation” racist?

Yes according to the Seattle Public Schools website (as pointed out by a commenter calling himself “Frank N Stein”). To avoid taking anything out of context, here is the quote from the entire paragraph defining “cultural racism.” I’ve italicized the part about “future time orientation”:

Cultural Racism:
Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as “other”, different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers.

What is “future time orientation”? Presumably this refers to planning for a better future and placing future benefits over immediate gratification. So, for example, if a college student has a big test the next morning, and that evening his buddies ask him to go out and drink beer, something he really would enjoy doing, if he declines the invitation and studies for the test he’s demonstrating “future time orientation.”

(Some might add that going to college in the first place is a demonstration of “future time orientation,” but spending four years going to parties and drinking beer isn’t really all that difficult, and in fact it’s preferable to working. There’s really no reason not to go to college if your parents are paying for it.)

The prisons are full of people lacking in “future time orientation,” because committing a crime to get some quick cash or get revenge at someone who pissed you off is an example of enjoying immediate gratification at the expense of one’s future. It’s no surprise that the prisons are disproportionately full of black people, evidence that a too large percentage of black people are severely lacking in “future time orientation.”

There is also the stereotype that black people are lazy, that the black man would rather hang out and do drugs and the black woman pop out a baby and live off welfare instead of working hard to secure a better future. Traditionally it has been seen as racist to point this out, but the paragraph from the Seattle Public Schools website concedes that these negative stereotypes of blacks are actually true, but that society itself is racist for rewarding people with “future time orientation.” Or maybe the paragraph means that it’s racist for white people to take advantage of their “future time orientation” to pull ahead of blacks, and to avoid being racist they should also be hanging out doing drugs and collecting welfare in order to create greater equality between the races.

Is "shutter lag" the bane of digital photography?

So says a page one WSJ article. This made the front page of the Journal?

Shutter lag is the delay between the time you push the shutter button on a camera and when the picture is actually taken. The WSJ article is correct that, in their default mode, digital cameras don't take photos instantly, and the delay is typically a second because the camera takes time to focus.

If this is really important to you, then you can buy a digital SLR camera (or DSLR for short) which has a separate focusing system and doesn't rely on using the image sensor--it focuses faster but still there is a delay. Compared to a compact digital camera, a DSLR is more expensive and much bigger and heavier. Only dedicated photographers really want to carry one around.

I disagree with the article's take that this problem is somehow unique to digital photography. The article says that "in the age of film, when the button was pressed, the picture was captured in an instant," and that is simply not true. Old auto-focus "point and shoot" film cameras weren't especially speedy at focusing either.

There are two ways to eliminate shutter lag. One way is to depress the shutter button halfway, which causes the camera to focus and stay locked as long as you keep the button half depressed.

The second way is to put the camera into manual-focus mode. Without the need to focus, the camera takes the photo nearly instantly. Because compact digital cameras have a much wider depth of field compared to film cameras (on account of the imaging sensor being much smaller than the area used on 35mm film), you can manually set the focus and nearly all of the frame will be in focus anyway.

The author of the WSJ article really should have learned how to use his camera properly.

Screwed for life?

If you don't get good job right out of college, or graduate school, then you are screwed for life.

Yes, that's the depressing news from a New York Times Economic Scene article:

The recent evidence shows quite clearly that in today's economy starting at the bottom is a recipe for being underpaid for a long time to come. Graduates' first jobs have an inordinate impact on their career path and their "future income stream," as economists refer to a person's earnings over a lifetime.

. . .

The Stanford class of 1988, for example, entered the job market just after the market crash of 1987. Banks were not hiring, and so average wages for that class were lower than for the class of 1987 or for later classes that came out after the market recovered. Even a decade or more later, the class of 1988 was still earning significantly less. They missed the plum jobs right out of the gate and never recovered.

And as economists have looked at the economy of the last two decades, they have found that Dr. Oyer's findings hold for more than just high-end M.B.A. students on Wall Street. They are also true for college students. A recent study, by the economists Philip Oreopoulos, Till Von Wachter and Andrew Heisz, "The Short- and Long-Term Career Effects of Graduating in a Recession" (National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 12159, April 2006. []), finds that the setback in earnings for college students who graduate in a recession stays with them for the next 10 years.

This was certainly true for law school. In fact, the summer associate position you get, or fail to get, during the summer between the second and third years of law school basically seals your fate in the legal job market.

This clearly demonstrates what a large role luck plays in how much money a person earns. Being unlucky and graduating during a year when firms aren't hiring creates a permanent stain upon a person's future earnings.

Why is Harvard the best?

Harvard is the best because it's Harvard.

Yes, that's the answer. Maybe it seems too circular to some readers. Here's an attempt at a longer answer. The prestige of a school is based on the success of its alumni. Harvard has the most successful alumni. Because of this, Harvard attracts the best students who after they graduate, combined with the prestige of their degree, get the best careers and become the most successful themselves. The cycle perpetuates itself.

Harvard alumni control the best career opportunities. If you want to work at the Queens DA's office, a lousy low paying job, you can go to St. John's law school. The ADA interviewing you probably went there hiself. "Wow, you also went to St. John's! Cool, you're hired." But if you want to work at an elite law firm like Cravath Swaine & Moore, then you need to go where the partners of Cravath went, and they went to Harvard.

Harvard has the largest endowment because it's alumni are richest so they have the most to give. Theoretically Harvard could use this mega-endowment to make Harvard even better than it already is, but Harvard chooses not to do that.

In fact, there has been talk in the blogosphere of a Harvard Paradox. According to the Coyote blogger, who attended Harvard Business School, Harvard treats its students like garbage. "I do not think it an exaggeration to say that had Harvard scoured every post office in the country for employees, it could not manage to provide worse customer service day-to-day."

I don't think this is a paradox at all, it's an expected result of a business with monopoly power. Everyone knows that monopolies treat its customers like garbage. Take your local electric company, for example. They know you can't buy electricity from anyone else. So you get treated like garbage.

Because Havard is is head and shoulders above all other schools, there is no substitute for Harvard. (As one of the characters in the movie Soul Man exclaimed, "Havard! There's no subsitute!") In this sense, Harvard has a monopoly. If you are at one of the shoulder schools, you can defect to another shoulder school, so they have to treat the customers better.

At Arizona State University's business school (now called the W.P. Carey School of Business), from a prestige perspective this school is in the stomach. But they sure did treat the students well! They signed us up for classes with a complete minimum of hassle, occasionally treated us to dinners at places like the Pinnacle Peak Patio and the Stonebridge Manor in Mesa. We didn't even have to shop for textbooks. At the beginning of each semester we'd just show up at a private bookstore near campus, give the person behind the counter our name, and they'd hand us a package of all the textbooks needed for the semester, free of charge.

So would I recommend anyone get an MBA from ASU? Hell no, not if you can get into Harvard or another elite school. An MBA from Harvard will get you an elite six figure job at an elite firm where one day you may make seven figures or even eight figures. An MBA from ASU gets you the same garbage job opportunities you had before getting the MBA. Better to get treated like garbage by Harvard for two years, and then after you graduate you make the big bucks and get to pass along the misery and treat the rest of the world like garbage.

The return of multigenerational households

In today's New York Times there's an article about multigenerational households. That's where grandparent, child, and grandchild all live under the same roof.

This generally remains a living arrangement for the poor. The rich will buy their children their own place because the rich understand that there is a big loss of status when young adults live with their parents and they don't want their children to sink in status.

There are several converging trends causing the increase in multigenerational households.

(1) Immigration. Immigrants from Latin American and Asian countries don't realize that multigenerational households aren't the American way.

(2) Increasing out-of-wedlock births. It's the norm for black children to be born without their mother being married, but this trend has also become common for white women. "Births to unwed white mothers were 22.5 percent in 2001, compared to 2.3 percent in 1960." (Source: WaPo article). Single mothers need more help from parents and have less resources available to live on their own.

(3) The declining economic status of young people. Even when women are married, a young husband can't provide as well as he used to. The median real income of young men has been declining. Yet if you look at this U.S. census table, you will see that the median price of a "home" has risen by a huge amount. In year 2000 dollars, in 1960 the median home cost $58,600, and that rose to $119,600 in 2000, an increase of 104%. (Unadjusted for inflation the home in 1960 was only $11,900--damn that's cheap!) The 104% rise in the median home price doesn't even take into account the big rise in housing prices since 2000.

Rising home prices represent a big transfer of wealth from the young to the old, because the average homeowner is older than the average non-homeowner, so the older generation grows richer because of its home ownership while the younger generation has no capital appreciation but faces declining incomes.

The Human Beast

I highly recommend this lecture by Tom Wolfe, The Human Beast. Wolfe explains that status is the most important thing that the humans desire.

Yes, let's let more nurses immigrate

According to a NY Times article, poor nations are complaining about a provision in the new immigration bill which allows an unlimited number of trained nurses to immgrate to the United States.

There's some irony here. The same countries that are joyously happy for us to absorb their least productive people get mad that we will allow their productive citizens to immigrate.

In order to immigrate here as a nurse, the immigrant must pass an English test and a nursing test. The nursing test is surely correlated with intelligence. Immigration of intelligent people who speak English sounds like a better idea to me than immigration of stupid people who don't speak English.

Fannie Mae to pay $400 million in settlement

Yesterday I wrote about whether CEOs are overpaid (and I don't think I directly answered the question). So it's interesting to see in the New York Times today that Fannie Mae is paying a $400 million settlement to the government because its former top executives "manipulated earnings in the 1990s so they could receive bigger bonuses."

As if CEOs don't get paid enough money already, the CEO of Fannie Mae felt the need to cheat in order to make even more money.

Although this story seems to prove something about CEOs, I have two important problems with it:

(1) The current shareholders are being punished for deeds done in the past by executives that most shareholders had no part in hiring. The wrong people are being punished. The blameworthy people are, in descending order of responsibility: (a) the executives; (b) the directors who hired the executives; (c) the auditors and/or accountants who contributed to the fraud.

(2) There are two kinds of companies: (a) companies that manipulate earnings; and (b) companies that manipulate earnings and get caught.

Can't cancel your subscription? Negative sum competition.

Ever encounter the situation where you are able to sign up for a service over the internet, but then when you want to cancel the service you have to call customer service and/or go through a big rigamarole?

I encountered this situation today when I wanted to downgrade the hosting plan on my old blog because I was paying for more bandwidth than I needed.

Although you are able to upgrade your account via the hosting service's (Netfirms') control panel, there are absolutely no instructions on how to downgrade your account. I had to waste an annoying amount of time (1) finding the phone number to customer service (2) waiting on hold (3) having to compose an email and (4) then having to respond to the email with more information.

Clearly, Netfirms' strategy is to make it difficult to downgrade so you won't bother. Netfirms increases its profits by giving worse customer service and in fact the inferior service costs them more money because instead of me completing the transaction by myself I have to use up their employees' time.

Is this something that calls for government regulation? Free marketeers will say "but the free market should sort this out." The problem is that laissez faire competition with assymetry of information rewards the bad behavior. A government regulation, requiring that any service or upgrade that you can sign up for on the internet you must also be able to downgrade or cancel on the internet, would create a benefit for the economy because consumers wouldn't have to waste time trying to cancel their services.

Are CEO's overpaid?

Tyler Cowen has a NY Times column supposedly offering a "contrarian" take on the issue (also see his blog post).

Cowen's viewpoint is that CEOs are paid according to their value, and I don't see why that's contrarian because it's the standard line spouted by pro-free market people.

The proper way to understand CEO pay is to look at it as a winner-takes-all market. A small increase in ability, or luck, results in massively greater earnings. So whether or not CEOs are overpaid depends on how you define "overpaid." Winner-takes-all markets happen to be a naturally occurring phenomena, but if you define "overpaid" as meaning someone makes far more money than someone else without actually contributing any additional value to the economy, then yes, CEOs are certainly overpaid.

As I explained in my post about baseball and Atlas Shrugged, the loss of the world's top baseball players would have little effect on the economy, and the same would apply to the loss of the highest paid CEOs. Other people would step into their roles, and it's doubtful that there would be any noticeable ability difference between the two.

We don't even know how good the selection criteria are for CEOs. Maybe the skills and abilities needed to get hired are not the same skills and abilities need to do the job? In fact, it seems likely to me that in order to make the really big bucks as CEO one must focus on self-promotion at the expense of the interests of shareholders. So by the very nature of the selection process, the highest paid CEOs are inevitably not the best people for the job.

Tyler Cowen explains that CEO pay has risen with market capitalization of companies. Some commenters to his blog have asked why the CEO pay should rise based on external factors (such as the increase in the P/E ratios of all publicly traded companies) which the CEO has no contol over? If CEO pay is based on their contribution to the economy, then they shouldn't get any more money for doing the same job they were doing before. But in fact, CEO pay is not based on what they contribute, but rather what's available in the pool. So rising market capitalizations increase the amount of money available for CEOs to take from the pool. In the same manner, increased profits for baseball enable the best baseball players to earn more money even though their batting average hasn't changed. Increased box office revenues enable the most popular actors to make more money even though their acting skills remain constant.

It's certainly understandable for the average worker to feel that winner-takes-all compensation schemes are unfair, because the people at the top are gettinging paid for all the hard work of the people at the bottom who receive little benefit from the increasing fortunes of their employers.

The Da Vinci Code, the movie: watered down paganism

Spoiler alert: in order to write anything meaningful about the movie, I need to give away all the plot points. So bypass this post if you haven’t yet read the book or seen the movie, but plan to in the future (although I certainly recommend the book over the movie).

Oil and geopolitical tensions

Are geopolitical tensions inflating the price of oil? Read my thoughts about oil and geopolitical tensions in my other blog.

Does anyone read the Constitution?

Sandra left the following comment to my post about cursive handwriting:

I can give you a specific example. Last year, I wrote end-of-semester notes to each of my students in my fairly neat, but definitely cursive, handwriting. One of my 9th grade students had to ask another student to read it to him because he had never learned to read cursive.

It also bothers me that such students will not be able to read important documents like the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution in their original form. Granted, these documents are certainly available (and more easily read) in typed form, but I think we lose a vital link with our history when our children need an interpreter to read our founding documents.

So we see, Sandra is worried that not learning how to write in cursive means not being able to read cursive, and consequently this will somehow harm people's understanding of the Constitution.

The bigger problem, Sandra, is that few Americans have even bothered to read the Constitution at all, and those few who read it certainly don't try to understand it, and if they understand it they ignore it.

The Constitution isn't supposed to be a museum piece, it's supposed to define the laws of the United States. And the system of government set up by the Constitution, where the government of the United States is one of limited enumerated powers (per Article II Section 8), and powers not granted to the United States remain with the state governments (per Amendment X), is ignored and not followed.

If the original Constitution is such a bad document that it's not worthy of being followed anymore, then why does it matter if people can't easily read it in its original handwritten form? (I use the word "easily" because I'm sure that a bright person who had a desire to read old documents but never had cursive writing in the third grade would be able to figure it out.)

None of the responses to my post about cursive writing really make any sense. I think the responses reflect a basic human failing, that people illogically hang on to tradition.

Jocks behaving badly

I never heard of the site badjocks.com until reading about it in the NY Times.

The following line from the NY Times article sums the whole thing up:

Members of the women's lacrosse team at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., are seen in sexually suggestive poses with a male stripper in just a thong and socks.

If that's going on at a Catholic school, it makes you wonder how the girls behave at atheist schools.

The Da Vinci Code, worst movie ever?

The critics hate it. I mean they really hate it. (At the time this post was written, of 16 reviews only one was positive.)

THURSDAY MORNING UPDATE

There are now five positive reviews, at least some critics liked it.

William Arnold liked the movie and had this interesting comment:

Good or bad, history or hoax, sacrilege or metaphoric feminist truth -- beyond these matters, "Da Vinci: the Movie" holds an added importance to the world that hasn't been fully recognized. It's the first summer blockbuster in two decades that has hugely excited people and is not a sequel, remake, science-fiction extravaganza or sword-and-sorcery kid's fantasy.

Resource-insecurity and childlessness

Here's a thought provoking article about evolution and childlessness.

Now the author has an interesting point when he writes "For more than 99.99 percent of their evolutionary history, humans haven't had the luxury of deciding whether to reproduce: simply engaging in sex took care of that, just as eating solved the problem of nutrition."

But this is not the end of the the story. For many thousands of years, humans understood the link between sex and having children. Women seem to spend a lot of time thinking about babies. This is evidence enough for me that women have a genetically programmed desire to have children, and childbearing isn't just about a biologically programmed desire for sex.

So what then explains the childlessness of modern women? I think that there is another misplaced biological impulse; the need for humans to feel resource-secure before having children. In the past, there was probably an evolutionary benefit to delaying having children in times of resource scarcity. This resource scarcity was usually the result of something temporary like a drought. By waiting for the drought to end before starting a family, women increased their chances of raising a healthy child to adulthood.

We saw this biological impulse on a macro level after World War II. Women felt more secure after the war ended and they started having lots of babies. But this period of feeling secure didn't last too long.

The problem today is that most people in their childbearing years are resource-insecure. As I previously blogged, young people are comparatively worse off today than they were a generation ago.

This is a problem unique to the present day. In the past people reached their peak earnings capacity at an early age--when they reached physical maturity. An 18 year old is a much better farmer than a 40 year old because farming mostly involves physical labor. But in modern society the ages are reversed. An 18-year-old today qualifies for little better than a minimum wage job.

When people estimate their level of resource-security, they look to their own family as a baseline. So poor women, ironically, feel more resource-secure than rich women. Poor women can earn the exact same welfare check as their mothers did. But upper middle class people need many years of education and work experience before they can be as resource-secure as their parents. And because of regression towards the mean, children of the poor are likely to do better than their parents, but children of the well off are likely to do worse.

The problem of childlessness (if it really is a problem) will go away in a few generations. The genes that cause people to not have children when they feel resource-insecure are rapidly being culled from the gene pool.

We have a housing crisis, not an energy crisis

The more I hear about how the energy "crisis" is huring Americans, the angrier I get. The story, according to the mainstream media, is that Americans are mad that the price of gasoline is so high and Congress has to do something about it.

The real crisis is not in energy, it's in affordable housing. Housing eats up a vastly larger portion of people's salaries than do gasoline and other petroleum distillates. Yet no one complains about the crisis in affordable housing.

Yet the problem of affordable housing is a problem that politicians can actually fix, because the reason why housing is so expensive is because of restrictive zoning laws and labyrinthine construction approval processes. Making housing affordable really is a matter of politicians passing a few laws (or repealling some laws).

In contrast, politicians cannot do much to lower the price of gasoline because its primary ingrediant, crude oil, is a global commodity that's outside the control of U.S. politicians.

Of course I am aware of the dirty little secret--approximately 70% of Americans own their home, and the well off 70% couldn't care the less about the less well off 30%. The 70% probably vote with greater frequency too, and they have more money to donate to political campaigns. So 70% of Americans couldn't be happier when housing costs increase and the bottom 30% of society become even more worse off.

Big Bronx cheer to Major League Baseball

Here's another example of an outrageous intellectual property lawsuit. Major League Baseball is suing a fantasy sports league for using baseball players' names and statistics without licensing them.

The courts have already ruled that player information is in the public domain. It's printed in the newspapers every day.

What a greedy money-grubbing industry. As if baeball isn't already making enough money, with the help of publicly subsidized stadiums,

The end of cursive handwriting?

The quality of handwriting is on the decline, and many children are not properly learning cursive writing. There's an old article from 2003, and a newer article from a few days ago about this problem which the older article calls "alarming." And check out the discussion at Slashdot.

My own handwriting is pretty horrid (which makes one wonder why I am so obsessed with pens), and I was never able to write in cursive as quickly as I was able to block letter, despite the fact that my grade school teachers insisted on it and I always got dinged on my report cards for bad handwriting.

It turns out that I was able to have a successful life without being good at cursive writing. The most useful skill I learned in the 6th grade was how to type. Typing has proven to be ten times more useful than writing in cursive, yet only a fraction of the educational time was spent on it--clearly a misallocation of teaching resources.

In law school, I couldn't have been happier when I learned that we were allowed to type our essay exams instead of having to handwrite them. The same was true of the Arizona bar exam.

As an adult, no one wants to read your handwriting. It's only used to take notes for yourself. I'm having trouble trying to figure out if hand writing is important at all?

Writing by hand does have some significant advantages over writing with a computer. You can write if there's no electricity. Even the tiniest and lightest notebook computers are a lot heavier than a pad of paper, and you don't have to worry about dropping or losing your paper. Paper is cheap. If you need to write something and you left your notebook computer at home, you can go into any drugstore and buy a paper notebook for not much more than the price of a cup of coffee at Starubcks. And writing on paper is nearly completely silent. It annoyed me in my classes in law school and graduate business school when people were typing in the middle of the class--even though there were times in graduate business school when I was one of the people typing during class. Although writing by hand still has its uses, in the end no one expects to read your handwriting, it's only for you to retype later if you want anyone else to read it.

Given that people will only write for themselves and not for others to read, it doesn't really make sense to spend so much time teaching children handwriting. Maybe it's time to end the teaching of cursive handwriting and just focus on block lettering? Cursive writing is supposed to be faster, but this seems to be true for only a minority of the population despite all the time and effort spent in grade school. Given the failure to successfully teach cursive writing, it makes a lot more sense for grade schools to just give up and instead focus on legible block lettering.

UPDATE

I have an additional thought in my post Does anyone read the Constitution?

Digital libraries and copyright

There is an article in today’s NY Times Magazine about digital libraries and the problem of copyright.

We are lucky that bricks and mortar libraries were invented a long time ago. If someone came up with the idea today, and they didn’t already exist, you can be certain that publishing companies would be all outraged that their copyrights were being violated and people could read books for free.

I wrote before about copyright and the music industry, and pretty much the same applies to books. Authors would have adequate incentive to keep writing books if their copyright only lasted a decade, so it’s absolutely outrageous that their copyright extends until 70 years after their death.

Congress ought to do something about it, but the problem is that Congress has been doing just the opposite. Every few years, in order to help the publishing industries (which I imagine are donating big money to politicians’ reelection campaigns), Congress keeps extending the copyright period.

It’s interesting to note that the entertainment and publishing industries are heavily Democratic, and the Democrats who are supposedly the anti-big business party have no moral qualms with helping their big business friends in the entertainment and publishing industries by granting them practically perpetual copyrights at the expense of poor people who can’t afford to buy books and CDs.

Namiki/Pilot Knight fountain pen: a review

I believe that fountain pens shouldn’t just be for the rich. So I was excited to discover a new pen from Namiki/Pilot called the Knight with a list price of $45. And it was on sale at Art Brown for only $36. What a bargain! But how does it stack up to the fountain pen competition? Find out by reading the rest of this review.

Atlas Shrugged and baseball

What would happen if the 100 highest paid baseball players, inspired by the book Atlas Shrugged, walked off the job and moved to a secluded valley in the moutains?

The answer is that nothing bad would happen at all. New players would step up to the plate (literally and figuratively) and you would barely notice the old players' absence. The overall quality of play would decrease ever so slightly, but this would be hard to notice because slightly less able batters would be swinging against slightly less able pitchers. It's hard to say that the game would be any less entertaining. It's widely believed that the level of play in the 1920s was far below the level of play today, but 1920s fans enjoyed the game just as much as the fans today.

Baseball is a winner-takes-all occupation. A slight difference in baseball ability results in a huge salary difference at the top.

So when people get the idea that baseball players don't "deserve" their high salaries, they are just observing the fact that the highest paid baseball players aren't contributing any more to the economy than the lowest paid baseball players.

The Da Vinci Code, the book

With the movie coming out in just eight days, this is a good time to write my review of the book, which I finished reading last weekend.

The Da Vinci Code is a mediocre thriller/murder mystery about the murder of the curator of the Louvre, a college professor from Harvard named Robert Langdon, and a police cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, who is also the granddaughter of the murder victim.

I say it’s mediocre because the actions of the characters seem very unrealistic and the characters are also poorly developed, especially Robert Langdon who we learn absolutely nothing about despite the fact that he’s the main character. And regarding the mystery aspect of the book, the author Dan Brown purposely deceives you so that you have no hope of figuring things out for yourself.

I have to admit that I haven’t really read many thriller/murder mysteries. In fact, this might be my first. So maybe my above objections are par for the course and this book is actually a well written example of the genre. In any event, it sure isn’t literature.

The reason for the book’s popularity has nothing to do with the plot, but rather it has everything to do with what the characters have to say about Christianity and the Catholic Church. What we learn is that there exists historical evidence that Jesus wasn’t really the Son of God born from a virgin, but rather a regular person who was married to Mary Magdalene who bore Jesus a child. The New Testament wasn’t created until several hundred years after Jesus’ death. The Council of Nicea in A.D. 325, sponsored and strongly influenced by Roman emperor Constantine, is when the religion of Christianity as we know it today (in its Catholic incarnation) was actually created. At that time, the four Gospels included in the New Testament were edited to ensure that they agree with the story of Jesus’ divinity.

That Jesus wasn’t really God should come as no shock to the majority of the world’s inhabitants who already don’t believe in the religion, but it’s shocking indeed to people who believe. This is why Christian groups are trying to boycott the movie. It’s really too bad that the West had to cave into Muslims on the Danish cartoon controversy, because now Christians think that they too should have free speech antithetical to their religion banned.

There is nothing new in The Da Vinci Code, it’s a rehash of the nonfiction book Holy Blood, Holy Grail (which I haven’t read). However, The Da Vinci Code has sold a lot more copies, which is evidence that people would rather have their history served to them in the form of an easy to read novel rather than a long-winded tome.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the existence of a centuries old secret society known as the Priory of Sion, which was supposedly documented in detail in the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, is believed by many to be a hoax. A secret society makes for a good addition to a thriller/murder mystery, which probably explains why Dan Brown made it an important element of The Da Vinci Code storyline. Nevertheless, if Dan Brown got his facts wrong about the Priory of Sion, this in no way invalidates that idea that Jesus was just a regular person and not a miracle performing Son of God, but some Christians don’t seem to understand that.

The idea of teaching through a novel is not new. The best example is the novel The Goal, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, in which the manager of a factory saves both his factory and his marriage with the knowledge of just-in-time supply chain management he learns from a mysterious Israeli college professor. The Da Vinci Code has both a more interesting story and a more interesting (to Christians) set of facts to teach, which explains why it’s a huge bestseller while The Goal is only popular at business schools.

I predict that the movie, to be released May 19th, will be a huge box office success.

FOLLOWUP POSTS

The Da Vinci Code, the movie: watered down paganism

Success and birth order

William left an interesting comment to my last post:

[Link to an article entitled “Does Birth Order Determine Success.”]

Apparently, according to these researchers, "75 percent of the income inequality between individuals in the United States occurs between siblings in the same families.", among other things. It's an interesting article.

This kind of flies in the face of your belief that genetics determines success, dontcha think? If the deciding factor is genes, then siblings, sharing the same genes, should share approximately the same fate as well. Apparently, such is not true. How can you reconcile this data with your theory?

First of all, a statement like “75 percent of the income inequality between individuals in the United States occurs between siblings in the same families” means absolutely nothing unless you have an extremely expert understanding of statistical mathematics. It’s designed to confuse the reader rather than enlighten him. However, it should be noted that siblings don't have the same genes unless they're identical twins.

Secondly, I’ve never stated anywhere in this blog that 100% of income differences are the result of genes. Just the opposite, I’ve written extensively about class and the benefits of being born to a higher social class. I’ve also written about the winner-takes-all economy which causes some lucky people to become fabulously wealthy even though they don’t contribute any more to the economy than their less wealthy peers.

If you meant to say that genes are the “deciding factor” when it comes to how one scores on the SAT, then I’d agree wholeheartedly. The SAT is primarily a test of intelligence, and according to the research, intelligence is approximately 70% to 80% genetic. (I also suspect that most of the other 20% to 30% is related to random development of the brain and not to any identifiable macro-environmental factors.)

Although liberals seem to think that intelligence is the single most important defining characteristic of a person (which is why they make such a big deal about it), when it comes to being successful it’s only one of many factors involved.

In my recent post about libertarians, I wrote that “[h]aving real knowledge and skills only gets you so much money. Maybe as much as $200,000/year if you possess some super valuable skill like being a pyschometrician. Becoming filthy rich is mostly about having interpersonal skills....”

Although personality is also related to genetics, it’s a lot more malleable than general intelligence. It’s perfectly reasonable to assume that first born children, because of the different environment they live in, develop better interpersonal skills and better self-esteem. I believe that learning interpersonal skills is like learning a foreign language. They are easily learned while young but very difficult when older. I believe that by the time people graduate from high school, they are pretty much stuck with the interpersonal skills they acquired, or failed to acquire, for the rest of their lives.

In addition to intelligence and good interpersonal skills, making money also requires that you want to make money. No one is going to hand you a million dollars just because you scored high on the SAT or were voted most popular in high school. There are lots of capable people who sabotage their potential for making money by doing dumb things like majoring in liberal arts. Perhaps some environmental factor causes first born children to have a greater desire to succeed?

In conclusion, there is nothing about birth-order theory that invalidates the fact that innate ability is very important, especially in professional sports where athletes are judged purely on ability (as evidenced by the large number of professional athletes with dysfunctional personalities).

Freakonomics column bogus

Steve Sailer points to the comments at the Freakonomics blog where a reader revealed that the latest NY Times Freakonomics column contains bogus data.

To summarize the column, Levitt/Dubner claims that "elite soccer players are more likely to have been born in the earlier months of the year than in the later months," and this proves that nurture is more important than nature. The early birth mont children supposedly get better training because the cut-off date for youth leagues is December 31st. So a kid born early in the year is bigger than a kid born later in the year and "January-born players are the ones who, year after year, receive the training, the deliberate practice and the feedback — to say nothing of the accompanying self-esteem — that will turn them into elites."

The problem is, there is no correlation between elite players and birth month. And thus, the data proves just the opposite of what Levitt/Dubner say. Cream always rises to the top. The kids with the innate talent become the elite players despite the fact that less innately talented kids might be getting better training on account of being born in January.

The commenter who calls himself Bill L. Lloyd writes:

My summaries show that from a sample group of 1,302 players in four World Cups (1982, 1986, 1998, 2006), 638 (49%) were born in the first half of the year, while 664 (51%) were born in the second half of the year.

The NY Times column is currently number three on the paper's most emailed list. People are reading this and getting the wrong message. "You can do anything you want as long as you try hard yada yada yada." Not true. If ever the NY Times owed the world a retraction, it owes it for this poorly researched article.

Iran will have bomb by 2010

Israeli intelligence says that Iran will have a nuclear bomb by 2010.

Some people are no doubt thinking that this is just a self-serving statement because the Israeli government wants Iran attacked regardless of the state of Iran's nuclear weapons program.

However, I don't see what Israel has to gain by stirring up the pot with these accusations unless the Israeli government believes them to be credible. Without nuclear weapons, Iran isn't a serious threat to Israel because there is too much distance between the two countries. It is true that Iran finances anti-Israeli terrorist groups, but a U.S. led attack on Iran is not likely to change that unless the attack causes the current government to be overthrown.

A U.S. led attack on Iran will likely lead to Iranian missile retaliation against Israel (see my post U.S. attacks Iran), so my conclusion is that Israel wouldn't be hyping the Iranian threat unless it was real.

Why do prostitutes make so much money?

Via Marginal Revolution comes a link to an analysis of prostitution by mathematics author John Allen Paulos. Paulos asks why prostitutes make so much money. He comes up with a ridiculously complicated answer involving the benefits women get from being married versus how engaging in prostitution hurts a woman's chances of finding a husband. His policy recommendation is to reduce prostitution by increasing salaries for both men and women. Huh?

Paulos needs to bring his head of the clouds and apply basic economics to the problem.

The earnings from prostitution is determined by supply and demand, just like everything else. Because demand for prostitution services is high relative to supply, prostitutes make pretty good money.

Why is supply so low? It ought to be pretty easy to think of reasons for why there aren't more prostitutes.

(1) The stigma of the profession--and this is really a big one.

(2) Risk of catching disease.

(3) Risk of violence by customers.

(4) Risk of violence by pimps.

(5) Risk of going to prison. (In the same manner, the risk of going to prison for selling cocaine keeps the price of cocaine much higher than it otherwise would be.)

(6) Prostitutes prefer leisure over money so they service far fewer customers than they might be able to.

(7) Prostitutes might not make as much money as you think because pimps take most of it from them. (Similarly, Steven Levitt, the author of Freakonomics, researched drug dealers and discovered they make approximately minimum wage because their bosses take most of the profits.)

(8) Barriers to entry. I'm not sure what they are exactly, but I'm willing to entertain the notion that there are hidden barriers to entry I don't know about.