Job cuts in science

From Alyssa:

. . . last week, the Government of Canada announced that thousands of public service jobs will be cut. This includes a10% budget cut at the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).* Their budget is about $300 million (paltry compared to NASA's budget of about $20 billion - clearly not scaled by population), so cutting 10% is pretty huge. So, apparently the decision was made to completely abolish the CSA Space Awareness & Learning program - the program that funds 100% of my salary.
We have one more year on our grant. We're hoping that they'll make good on all their current grants and contracts - but looking at our contract with the CSA, it clearly states that they are entitled to change/cancel grants if the federal budget changes.
So, here's where I start preparing for any number of possibilities, from best- to worst-case scenario:
1. The last year of our grant comes through, and we have a year to come up with other funding sources.
2. The last year of our grant doesn't come through, but we find another source of funding. Depending on the source, this could be a short- or long-term solution, and could potentially mean a pay cut.
3. The last year of our grant doesn't come through, and we can't find another source of funding. I am out of a job. We have to pull Evan out of daycare. We can live on DH's salary alone if we cut back slightly on our spending, but we would not be able to do anything else. I have to find another job.

This is a really good (and actually Canadian) example of how austerity economics cause trouble during a recession.  Right now, unemployment rates are high.  This makes it a bad time to decide to cut programs.  In good times, the elimination of a government program would lead people to retool themselves for the public sector.  In a recession, it merely increases the overall level of hardship without people being easily able to find new employment.

What I found most interesting about this situation is that the person in question was funded on short-term rotating grant funding.  This is not the sort of high-security and extensive benefits type of work that is at the center of the public debate.  Instead, it is a PhD level educated person who is being funded entirely through a competitive mechanism.  So it is hard to imagine that the person in question isn't working very hard (I know I did under this sort of funding).

Perhaps now is not the ideal moment to reconsider precisely which government workers need to be re-purposed.  Maybe we could wait for the glut among the unemployed to pass?

Derivative originality -- the paradox of Harry Potter

Another lemma post (but at least it's the last in the series) in support of a longer piece I'm working on. The topic of that one is going to be plagiarism which leads naturally to the topic of originality, and since the post will involve Harry Potter/Twilight/Hunger Games, I thought I should address the question of J.K. Rowling's originality in advance.

Stephen King has said that Rowling is a terrific writer and I'm fully prepared to bow to his judgement, but it's possible for a writer to be good without being original and original without being otherwise good. Rowling built Harry Potter around an extraordinarily original idea working with parts that were almost completely derivative.

Let's start with the parts.

You could argue that there are two distinctly British traditions of coming-of-age novels: the Arthurian (think the Sword in the Stone) and the school story. The best known example of the latter is Tom Brown's School Days; the best is Mike. Both genres are uniquely tied to British character and culture but, as far as I know, no one saw how fundamentally similar they were until Rowling came along.

You can see that underlying similarity of the two genres (and Rowling's skill at combining them) by imagining the Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone first with the fantasy elements removed, then with the public school elements removed. The results would be, respectively, a conventional school novel and a conventional juvenile fantasy novel, but they would both be basically the same story. Most of the characters and the majority of the plot work equally well in both genres.

To see connections between seemingly disparate elements and to find a way to bring them together in a coherent whole is pretty much the soul of originality, even those elements are old and familiar and worn smooth with use. This is in sharp contrast to most of the writers in the upcoming post.

Quote of the week

From NPR:

"Blowing up carcasses is a little bit of an inexact science."

Out of town

I will be at a conference for the next four days.  Posting may be lighter than usual.

Is working through school still a viable plan?

Prices have risen for education in the past thirty years:

Representative Foxx would have paid $279 for the academic year—about $2,140 today. That’s about equivalent to what students pay right now at community colleges, not public four-year institutions—especially not public flagships.  

In-state students at Representative Foxx’s alma mater pay $7,008—more than three times what Foxx paid. It took Foxx seven years to graduate, probably because she was working to put herself through college. During the 7-year period she was at UNC, tuition and fees increased about 0.6 percent per year. Compare that to UNC students who have seen their tuition and fees increase on average 7.2 percent per year since 2005. UNC students who take fewer classes in order to subsidize their tuition through work have found themselves in a losing battle with steep tuition increases.  

They have also come up against work that pays less and less. When Representative Foxx was working her way through college, the minimum wage was worth about $9.62 in today’s dollars. Today’s students who work minimum wage jobs earn about 30 percent less per hour while paying much more in tuition. If Representative Foxx worked 20 hours a week for an entire year during her time at UNC, she would have made approximately $9,795 before taxes, which would probably cover her entire cost of attendance. Using the same calculation, a student today working 20 hours a week for an entire year would make $7,176. This would barely cover tuition and fees. It wouldn’t even make a dent in the estimated full cost of attendance of $20,660. Indeed, if a student worked 40 hours a week, a situation not feasible for a full-time student, he would only net $14,352—still leaving a considerable gap. That gap is exactly where student loans have come into play.

 I think that this (long) piece illustrates a few things (and neglects how the difference in costs for state schools is heavily driven by less state support for higher education).  One, is that there is a huge difference between $2,000 year (five years of school = $10,000 in tuition) which leaves manageable levels of debts (as I have seen people pay off $10,000 in debt).  Two, the return on unskilled labor continues to drop. 

The drop in unskilled labor compensation have two syngeristic effect.  First, they make working one's way through school even less viable.  Second, they make the opportunity cost of not getting a degree much higher.  When you couple this loss of value of unskilled labor with a dramatic rise in tuition, the real story seems to be that the rational choice seems to be to focus on being successful in school (to rise your eventual market wage) and give up on working.

This is not, as Representative Foxx seems to suggest, a loss of virtue among the youth of today.  Instead it is the best strategy available (among a set of bad strategies).  However, it is also predicated on having good information on the real value of special educational pathways.  Since guessing the job market in four years is always a "crap shoot", it just about guarentees a certian proportion of students will end up with a lot of debt and no way to pay it back. 

Most of this problem could be fixed on the tuition side as it is clearly the larger problem.  If state schools cost 2000/year and tuition was stable then working one's way through school would make a lot more sense. 

More on Markets

There is a good post over at the Incidential Economist that discusses games that companies can play with drug patents.  I think that this highlights one of the issues that we always neglect -- modern economic systems are based in a system of regulations.  In the absence of regulations we would not have patent protection and these games would be more difficult to play.  But a complete absence of rules (anarchy) isn't usually a very economically profitable equilibrium.

Once you have a government (with laws and soldiers), you are really just picking your poison.  Hyper-free market approaches have the same issues as communism does, only in reverse.  Communism removes private property, which weakens those parts of society that work best in private markets where ownership incentives productivity and long term care of the resource (think subsistence farming).

In the same sense, Randianism removes public goods, resulting in other problems (like the failure to have an educated workforce, a strong military, or a system of roads).  Health care seems to be one of those areas where treating it as a public good seems to lower costs no clear drop in outcomes.

So I think the authors of the above post are correct to doubt that free markets will improve health care anymore than communism improved agriculture.  The right tool for the right job should be the goal.

A lemma for a lemma -- Mike, Psmith and Orwell

I'm working on a long post that will refer to a post on British school novels (such as Tom Brown's School Days). That post will, in turn, refer to this literary evaluation of P.G. Wodehouse:

In 1909 came Mike, which George Orwell long afterward called "perhaps the best light school story in the English language." It is here that Psmith makes his first appearance, the initial P silent as nothing else about him is silent. He even had his monocle then, and the devious mind that makes him a pleasure to follow through all the rannygazoo of the later novels when he is, in a manner of speaking, grown up

Orwell's fondness for Wodehouse is one of those things that seem strange at first glance but make more sense the longer I think about it. Both were tremendously inventive writers and, at the same time, skilled craftsmen. Both brought a rare precision to their prose. Both were masters of plot. And though Wodehouse may have been gentler, both were still sharp satirists.

While on the subject of dystopian visions, the sometimes symbiotic, sometimes parasitic relationship between Wodehouse's servants and their childlike aristocratic masters has often reminded me of Wells' Morlocks and Eloi but that's a subject for another post.

Composition of the Economy

Brad Delong:

Second, over the past generation our our economy has shifted in directions--toward education and toward healthcare--where the private competitive market is much less effective. As a result, a good society now would have a significantly larger role for government than a good society then. And it is thus bad policy to drop any of our sources of revenue to fund government.

I think that this point is interesting and not one that I have thought much about before.

I notice, for example, that private universities actually pay higher salaries than public universities (or at least the top 10 list skews in that direction).  Or if we look north (to Canada) it is true that health and education seem to be sectors that a country with a larger government sector seems to do well with.  They have much more cost-effective schools and manage universal health care (at a much lower cost per person).  Sure, there are issues with quality of care between the the two countries (although it is not absolutely clear which one wins out in aggregate).   

Student Loans

This is a really good question by Steven Taylor:

Likewise, states are facing increased demands to pay for prisons and Medicaid and universities are facing increased health care costs (and increased enrollments). At a minimum we have to recognize that we have developed a system in which we expect a large number of high school graduates to go onto get college degrees at the same time we have cut spending to higher education. It is a problematic model, to be sure. Is it too much to ask that people who are in positions of power to acknowledge these complexities?

The context of this question is Virginia Foxx questioning the wisdom of student loans.  It is true that we have created a situation where state funding is declining but a university degree is a key element for a young person to enter the workforce.  After all, human capital development is one of the keys to increased productivity.  We can argue whether universities are ideal (hopefully in a context of the real world where waste, inefficiency and problems are present in all human systems) for this role.

But if we are not going to create alternatives then we should not be surprised that students see no good options.  In particular, is the trade-off of more prisons for less education really the ideal choice?

Looking at the same graph -- seeing an entirely different picture

There's plenty to talk about with this chart (which comes to us via Andrew Gelman), but the thing that struck me (and this happens a lot) is that, when you look at it closely, the graph actually undercuts the point it's supposed to be making.


The idea that technology is coming at us faster and faster is one of the most ingrained ideas in our society. Given the title of this chart, its creator would certainly seem to share this notion, but does the chart really show what its name indicates or are we seeing something more like a distant cousin of Simpson's paradox where shifts in make-up and other factors create the illusion of a trend?

(Before we get into these factors, though, take a minute to look at the graph. It looks like the steepest curve is associated with the VCR. That's over thirty years ago, a long time for a record to hold if we really are seeing an upward trend.)

As you're looking at the graph, think about these three things:

Infrastructure

Depression/War

Big ticket items

Going last to first, big ticket items requiring heavier manufacturing always had slow adoption curves regardless of when they were introduced (check out the dishwasher). Much of the appearance of acceleration can be attributed to a shift in composition to smaller items.

Then there's the period of 1930 to 1945, pretty much the ultimate in anomalous data. During the Depression most people couldn't afford new products. During the war, new technology was rapidly developed and adopted, but by the military, not consumers.

Finally there's infrastructure. The adoption curves of electricity and telephones are almost entirely governed by the hard work of developing infrastructure (something we have arguably gotten slower at) and infrastructure at least indirectly constrains every line on this graph (check out the Reivers for an account of what cross country driving was like at the beginning of the last century).

The infrastructure constraint points to perhaps the most impressive case of a technology exploding. Take a look at the curve for radio. Now look at the curve for electricity. Even allowing for a few crystal radios and battery operated sets, you have to conclude that radios achieved almost 100% penetration of houses with electricity in about a decade. By that standard, the record for fastest adoption is over eighty years old.

Update: There's a good string of comments on this over at Andrew Gelman's site, some of which make some of the same points I've made here..

A par-baked* idea for a programming competition

Here's a notion I've been kicking around for a while, sort of the opposite of Deep Blue. In the IBM initiative a single team of computer scientists (with the help of a grandmaster) built an extraordinarily complex machine to master a specific task. In what I have in mind (I'm tempted to call it "shallow pink" but I'm afraid the name might stick) a number of teams will write simple programs (at least simple by today's standard) that will do something extremely general.

The task is to write a program to play a game without knowing exactly what the game is.

This is how it would work:

The game will be played on a rectangularly or hexagonally tiled board of dimensions no more than 20x20 or 15x15x15. It would involve placing and/or moving pieces that may or may not be differentiated. The rules should be simple enough for a human player to get up to speed relatively quickly (no humans will actually be playing; this is just a rule of thumb to keep things manageable). The rest of the rules won't be announced until the programs have been submitted for that year's competition.

I'll leave the details to those better qualified to supply them but here are the basics. The programs will be size constrained, held to a format, set up so that game rules can be entered as a separate set of parameters, and configured for automated play.

Of course, the quality of play won't be that impressive but that's not the point. The idea is to get lots of bright people trying to come up with innovative, elegant and flexible approaches to problem solving.

I suspect most OE reader are better programmers than I am so I'm opening the floor for suggestions.



* Yeah, I mean half-baked, but this way sounds better.

More thoughts on the growth fetish

I recall a quote from investor Peter Lynch saying (if memory serves) that he didn't like it when companies invested his money, meaning that if a company he owned stock in was sitting on piles of cash he would prefer for it to send him his share of the money as a dividend (or use it for a stock buy-back) rather than spend it acquiring new companies.

I don't have the passage in front of me but I think it's safe to say that Lynch would consider exemptions for expansion and vertical integration. Acquisitions in those categories have to be examined on a case-by-case basis. I doubt, for instance, Lynch would have objected to Tyson picking up pork producers after it achieved dominance in the chicken market.

Instead, we're talking about something like a tobacco company acquiring a cookie manufacturer -- different markets, different vendors, different everything. There are a lot off these acquisitions that don't make a great deal of sense to the casual observer (how did Starwood hotels end up with ITT Tech?). Obviously, the people who made these decision had access to information not available to the general public and there are undoubtedly cases where these decisions would have made more sense had the casual observer been thoroughly briefed. Still, given sheer number of odd-looking acquisitions, I have to suspect that at least some of them are attempts to cash in on the growth fetish.

A brief argument in favor of splitting infinitives

I was listening to a public radio story on Facebook's recent billion-dollar acquisition and I heard the reporter say that the first order of business was "not to screw [the company] up." Of course, what he meant was that the first order of business was to not screw it up. The first statement simply says that there were other things more important than screwing up.

If it comes down to a choice between splitting an infinitive and not saying what you mean, always take the first option.

Today's required reading

On this blog, we have been talking about budget deficits on the blog recently and I thought that some perspective on the factors driving the US debt would be worth considering.  Aaron Carroll goes into the real drivers of the debt: increased interest on the debt (due to tax cuts) and increased health care costs.  It is well worth reviewing in detail.

Joseph lurches to the right

I have to admit that I'm a little perplexed. I always thought my co-blogger Joseph was fairly liberal on health care issues, but in his last post he voiced his support for a single payer system.

This is strange because Talking Points Memo quotes the following from an Associated Press story:

“[I]f Republicans have moved to the right on health care, it’s also true that Obama has moved to the left,” reads an AP wrap on the Obama speech. “He strenuously opposed a mandate forcing people to obtain health insurance until he won office and changed his mind.”

As TPM noted, Obama's previous position had favored single payer. Therefore, we would seem to have two possibilities:

1. Single payer is significantly to the right of individual mandates, a market-based approach with a solid conservative pedigree, thus making Joseph quite conservative, or;

2. A reporter for one of the world's most recognised news organisations was willing to misrepresent a move to the right as a move to the left in order to support a cherished but flawed narrative of partisan equivalence.

I wonder which is more likely?