In other words, Good Will Hunting understood sigma notation

From Michael Winerip's NYT article:

The calculation for Ms. Isaacson’s 3.69 predicted score is even more daunting. It is based on 32 variables — including whether a student was “retained in grade before pretest year” and whether a student is “new to city in pretest or post-test year.”

Those 32 variables are plugged into a statistical model that looks like one of those equations that in “Good Will Hunting” only Matt Damon was capable of solving.

I'll have more to say about this later. I don't think Winerip really understands what's going on here but the story's definitely worth a read.

Update: it is now later.

Something else that shouldn't surprise people but probably will

I suspect Seyward Darby spoke for a lot of people on the left when she admitted growing disenchanted with Michelle Rhee (despite Rhee's remarkably consistent educational philosophy). Rhee was, of course, part of the Adrian Fenty administration in D.C. and Darby and the New Republic were big supporters, endorsing him in 2010 with the headline, "Why the fate of education reform rides on the D.C. mayoral race."

TNR's editors might be rethinking that support now:

Speaking on Morning Joe Tuesday morning, Fenty -- whose term in office was marked by battles with organized labor in the city, especially the teacher's union -- said that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) was "right on the substance" and "right on the politics" when it came to the fight with unions and their supporters in the Badger State.

"I think it's a new day," Fenty said. "I think a lot of these collective bargaining agreements are completely outdated."

Analogy of the day -- it's your funeral

Once again, Mark Thoma gives us an elegant counter-argument to a dubious piece of conventional wisdom:

I keep seeing the argument that the way Social Security is funded -- the young provide the funds needed for the retirement of the elderly -- and the fact that tax collections can be viewed as one big pot of money imply that the government is not providing a service (insurance in this case) as you might see in the private sector:

The confounding problem is that many people believe the payroll taxes they pay go to fund the benefits they will receive, which is completely untrue. The payroll taxes go to pay current expenses of the US government. They are just a tax on labor. The government is spending every penny of those payroll taxes to pay for current expenditures. ... the [government] is free to use your premia to buy fighter jets and space shuttles!!

Some go so far as to argue this means it must be welfare. I disagree.

Consider (and apologies for the example) a firm that provides funeral services. This firm sells burial plots to the young, those still working, and it issues a promise. When the time comes, you have a place to be buried, and your payment will cover the following services (which are listed explicitly).

However, the firm does not take your money and put it into savings for the next however many years. Instead, it uses the money to cover the expenses of current funerals. Your money is used to pay for the services of the old, those who have passed away.

So, the money of the young is used to provide services for the old, just like Social Security. Does this mean that the people whose funerals were paid for when they were younger received welfare? Of course not. Does it mean they received no services from the firm? Again, no. It's even possible that when your turn comes (and hopefully it's far away), the funeral will cost more than you paid in advance -- the firm may have not anticipated future costs correctly. In that case, there will be an income transfer from the young to the old (the young will be charged higher prices to reserve a plot in the future), but that still doesn't mean it is welfare. Fundamentally, this is an advance purchase of a service.

While 'real' news shows were covering Charlie Sheen...

This is the sort of thing that makes me nervous

Having recently discussed the role of tenure and LIFO in preventing political abuses, this quote from Grover Norquist struck me as somewhat disturbing:

"Yes, the McKinley era, absent the protectionism, [is the goal]. You're looking at the history of the country for the first 120 years, up until Teddy Roosevelt, when the socialists took over. The income tax, the death tax, regulation, all that."

You'll notice he didn't say "absent the protectionism and the abuse of government power." Of course, that doesn't mean Norquist and his fellow travellers would bring back the patronage system, but it doesn't give me a warm feeling inside either.

The right likes it better but the left does it better

This Naked Capitalism post, "More Public Infrastructure Sale Tales of Woe," reminded me of an apt observation Felix Salmon made a couple of weeks ago while discussing Scott Walker's privatization proposals:

It probably comes as little surprise to note that the most lucrative privatizations have generally been done by parties of the left: I’m thinking in particular of the UK’s auction of 3G licenses, which netted the Exchequer $35.4 billion at the height of the dot-com bubble.

Right-wing parties, by contrast, are more prone to thinking of privatization as something inherently good, and of monies flowing to the government as a kind of taxation which is inherently bad.

What is this word, 'contract,' of which you speak?

The Daily Show continues its extraordinary coverage of the stand-off in Wisconsin.

Ultrasonic Remote/Observational Epidemiology cage match?

OK, maybe not, but I do have a quibble Brian's otherwise excellent observations:

One of the members of the ART [Algonquin Round Table] was Harpo Marx, one of the few members that not only didn't write, but left school early. When asked why he, a member of a comedy team that many of the members might have considered lowbrow, was a member, he replied, "Well, they needed someone to listen."

Rather than considering them lowbrow, the ART was pretty much packed with the brothers' friends and admirers. Herman Mankiewicz produced their best films, Alexander Wolcott's reviews made them stars, and as for Kaufman, here's a relevant anecdote from Dick Cavett:

In the years I was lucky enough to know Groucho, there was one trait of the elderly that I, at least, never experienced in him. The one where you have to pretend to be hearing an oft-told joke or story for the first — rather than the seventh or eighth — time.

With one exception. Kaufman had known and written for the Brothers Marx — the original Fab Four (then three) — and Groucho worshipped him.

It went: ‘Did I ever tell you the greatest compliment I ever got?”

I said no the first time and, also, the four or five times thereafter over the years. I can hear Groucho’s familiar soft voice in my mind’s ear: “The greatest compliment I ever got was from George S. Kaufman.” I expected a joke.

“George said to me once, ‘Groucho, you’re the only actor I’d ever allow to ad-lib in something I wrote.’ And that’s the greatest compliment I ever got.” (Each time, he teared slightly.)

I loved hearing this treasured story repeated. It was no trouble pretending to hear it for the first time.

Why we forgive him the puns

Today's column in the New York Times is another reminder of why Paul Krugman is so essential. It directly contradicts some of the most cherished conventional wisdom about the relationship between education and economic opportunity, but he doesn't say anything that I haven't been hearing from researchers and academicians.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill. That’s why, in an appearance Friday with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Obama declared that “If we want more good news on the jobs front then we’ve got to make more investments in education.”

But what everyone knows is wrong.

...

The fact is that since 1990 or so the U.S. job market has been characterized not by a general rise in the demand for skill, but by “hollowing out”: both high-wage and low-wage employment have grown rapidly, but medium-wage jobs — the kinds of jobs we count on to support a strong middle class — have lagged behind. And the hole in the middle has been getting wider: many of the high-wage occupations that grew rapidly in the 1990s have seen much slower growth recently, even as growth in low-wage employment has accelerated.

Why is this happening? The belief that education is becoming ever more important rests on the plausible-sounding notion that advances in technology increase job opportunities for those who work with information — loosely speaking, that computers help those who work with their minds, while hurting those who work with their hands.

Some years ago, however, the economists David Autor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argued that this was the wrong way to think about it. Computers, they pointed out, excel at routine tasks, “cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules.” Therefore, any routine task — a category that includes many white-collar, nonmanual jobs — is in the firing line. Conversely, jobs that can’t be carried out by following explicit rules — a category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors — will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress.

And here’s the thing: Most of the manual labor still being done in our economy seems to be of the kind that’s hard to automate. Notably, with production workers in manufacturing down to about 6 percent of U.S. employment, there aren’t many assembly-line jobs left to lose. Meanwhile, quite a lot of white-collar work currently carried out by well-educated, relatively well-paid workers may soon be computerized. Roombas are cute, but robot janitors are a long way off; computerized legal research and computer-aided medical diagnosis are already here.

And then there’s globalization. Once, only manufacturing workers needed to worry about competition from overseas, but the combination of computers and telecommunications has made it possible to provide many services at long range. And research by my Princeton colleagues Alan Blinder and Alan Krueger suggests that high-wage jobs performed by highly educated workers are, if anything, more “offshorable” than jobs done by low-paid, less-educated workers. If they’re right, growing international trade in services will further hollow out the U.S. job market.

As a statistician, I might quibble with the "If they're right."

So what does all this say about policy?

Yes, we need to fix American education. In particular, the inequalities Americans face at the starting line — bright children from poor families are less likely to finish college than much less able children of the affluent — aren’t just an outrage; they represent a huge waste of the nation’s human potential.

This is another point worth dwelling on for a moment. The educational reform movement likes to draw its poster children from poor urban and rural schools. Having taught in both Watts and the Mississippi Delta, I'm usually glad to see attention focused on these areas, but it's clear in this case that the plight of these kids is being used to market general changes in education that have little if any special relevance to the schools that need the help.

But there are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.

What we can’t do is get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don’t exist or don’t pay middle-class wages.

Update: Lawrence Mishel makes some important related points here.

Hoisted from comments: "Well, they needed someone to listen."

Brian of Ultrasonic Remote writes in to provide some historical context to our previous posts (here and here) about Orson Welles, Herman Mankiewicz and the Vidal/Bogdanovich(/Kael**) cage match:

Bogdanovich is, of course, an unabashed fan of Orson Welles, which is no sin in my book. His fandom has sadly blinded him. How is this for a statistic?

No. of Oscar nominations for Welles - 2
Oscar wins - 1

No. of Oscar nominations for Mankiewicz - 2
Oscar wins - 1

The "talented hack" remark rings hollower when you take into account that the second nomination for Mankiewicz was for "Pride of the Yankees", one of the listed films!

By the way, lest you think that I am swayed solely by numbers of awards (Welles has more), here is a funny sidelight. To perhaps emphasize the perfidy of either organization, it should be noted that two of Orson Welles later nominations were for his work in the movie "Butterfly". It was nominated for a Golden Globe for BEST Supporting Performance by an Actor and for a Razzie for WORST Supporting Performance by an Actor.

The other hole in this theory is numbers. Some sexist might say something along the lines of "Men are better musicians than women". Let's look at that statement on the basis of recorded work. While it is certainly true that there are more male names than female ones on lists made by critics and musicians, it is an unfair argument, because, quite simply, many more men have recorded. The more at-bats one has, the greater possibility of hitting a home run.

If one looks at the sheer amount of material Mankiewicz wrote, he wins handily over Welles. It is the select few that can turn out a prodigious amount of material AND have an overwhelming percentage of it adjudged genius level or thereabouts.

Mankiewicz was hired at a time that movies were the ONLY visual medium around. People loved the new medium, therefore many, many people needed to write and write a lot. In Vaudeville, if you had a successful act, you could tour for years and never change it, because it was live, could not be preserved by the amateurs and due to a circuit of theaters, it could not be centralized. Radio and movies didn't slow Vaudeville, it killed it. Radio killed the visual acts and the verbal ones could do their act a few times at best as guests, but if one of these performers got a series, you HAD to have new material. There were hours in every day and every day needed programming to fill some or all of those hours. One man was hired on radio, because someone missed a gig and a panicky station owner literally stopped him on the street and asked him, "Can you do anything!?", and fortunately, he was a pianist; he was hired permanently not long afterwards. Radio also brought about convenience. The entertainment came to you, right into your home.

Movies added the bonus of seeing as well as hearing celebrities and celebrities-to-be. it too needed to be fed a lot of material. They needed people that could write and write quickly and Mankiewicz fit the bill. Did some who found work skate by with a minimum of talent? Yes. Was some of Mankiewicz's work less than memorable? Yes. However, Mankiewicz's career did something that Welles' could not have done, which is to say that it spanned the era of movies from silents to sound. Any number of people lost their jobs because they might have been able to write title cards, but could not write screenplays. Mankiewicz was a journalist, theater critic, playwright AND a screenwriter and a member of the "Algonquin Round Table".*

Is this the resume' of a talented hack?



*One of the members of the ART was Harpo Marx, one of the few members that not only didn't write, but left school early. When asked why he, a member of a comedy team that many of the members might have considered lowbrow, was a member, he replied, "Well, they needed someone to listen."

** Pauline Kael did start this though she had the good sense to walk away when the conversation got silly.

Flashman finds work

Back in the late Sixties, George MacDonald Fraser came up with a wonderful idea for a series of comic historical novels. He took Flashman, the villain from the best known example of Britain's beloved school novels (a genre that includes the Mike and Psmith books, much admired by Orwell, and, of course, Harry Potter) and placed him on the scene at every military fiasco of the Nineteenth century from the Charge of the Light Brigade to Custer's Last Stand.

Had Fraser been a student of business instead of military history and had decided to make Flashman a consultant in the late Twentieth Century, his resume might read something like this:

• Advocating side pockets and off balance sheet accounting to Enron, it became known as “the firm that built Enron” (Guardian, BusinessWeek)

• Argued that NY was losing Derivative business to London, and should more aggressively pursue derivative underwriting (Investment Dealers’ Digest)

• General Electric lost over $1 billion after following McKinsey’s advice in 2007 — just before the financial crisis hit. (The Ledger)

• Advising AT&T (Bell Labs invented cellphones) that there wasn’t much future to mobile phones (WaPo)

• Allstate* reduced legitimate Auto claims payouts in a McK&Co strategem (Bloomberg, CNN NLB)

• Swissair went into bankruptcy after implementing a McKinsey strategy (BusinessWeek)

• British railway company Railtrack was advised to “reduce spending on infrastructure” — leading to a number of fatal accidents, and a subsequent collapse of Railtrack. (Property Week, the Independent)

* Update: Here's a bit more on the Good Hands People, part of our ongoing "How to Lie with Statistics" series (more examples here and here).

Then they made that terrible movie about him with Kevin Spacey

I was going to write up a post on the games of David Gale but my weekend filled up unexpectedly. Fortunately, Sandy Dean has a good paper online discussing Bridg-it (a.k.a. the Game of Gale) and the mathematics behind it.

Weekend Gaming -- Recommending a book and appreciating a publisher

This is a nice little book, cheap if you get it new, probably next to free if you get it used and it has a very useful list of mathematical games ranging from battleship to nine-men's-morris to hex, sprouts and a board version of Eleusis.

The reissue I have comes from one of my favorite publishers, Barnes & Noble. You have heard all sorts of abuse heaped on this company but none it from me. These are damned fine book stores with a business model built around the realization that the strong, steady sales of the classics could be as or more profitable than the unpredictable spikes of the best seller list.

As a publisher, the company has a wonderful track record of bringing back books that ought to be in print but aren't. My copy of Extraordinary Popular Delusions came from Barnes and Noble, as did my collection of Damon Runyon stories and a great anthology culled from the chthonic pages of Weird Tales. All told, I probably have a couple dozen with their imprint and every one's a keeper.

This does explain a lot

From Mark Thoma:

The inalienable right to have a nice lawn

I keep trying to reconstruct the reasoning behind this:

Texas has long been a hotbed of controversy on immigration issues. And a proposed immigration bill in the Texas state House is sure to raise more than a few eyebrows. The bill would make hiring an "unauthorized alien" a crime punishable by up to two years in prison and a $10,000 fine, unless that is, they are hired to do household chores.

Yes, under the House Bill 2012 introduced by a tea party favorite state Rep. Debbie Riddle -- who's been saying for some time that she'd like to see Texas institute an Arizona-style immigration law -- hiring an undocumented maid, caretaker, lawnworker or any type of houseworker would be allowed. Why? As Texas state Rep. Aaron Pena, also a Republican, told CNN, without the exemption, "a large segment of the Texas population" would wind up in prison if the bill became law.

I would think that people could simply start doing without maids and gardeners. I had always assumed that undocumented domestic workers didn't have ironclad employment contracts.