The Mars conversation I'd like to be having

As a bit of an antidote for all the accumulated bile of the last few Mars One posts, I'd like to recommend this IEEE paper from Ian McNab. I'll admit it lost me on the curves a few times, but on the whole it's remarkably readable.

From the introduction:

In the past 40 years, mankind has ventured into space using well-established rocket technology involving liquid fuels and/or solid propellants. This approach has the advantage for astronauts and fragile payloads that the rocket starts slowly from the surface of the Earth with its full fuel load, and, as the fuel is burned off, the altitude and speed increase. In addition to minimizing the aerodynamic and aerothermal loads, this provides relatively modest accelerations—maximum values of a few “gees” are used for human passengers. Because only a small fraction of the initial mass reaches orbit, rockets of substantial size are required to place tens of tons into near-Earth orbit. Offsetting these remarkable successes is the very high cost of burning chemical fuel with a modest efficiency in a rocket engine to get out of the Earth’s gravitational well. Present estimates are that it costs $20 000 to get one kilogram of material into orbit. Unless alternatives can be found, it seems likely that mankind’s ventures into space will be limited to a few adventures that can only be undertaken by wealthy nations—the science-fiction writer’s dream of colonizing the planets and stars may be unaffordable.

Proposed solutions fall into four general categories: better rocket propellants; the space elevator; gun launch from the Earth’s surface; and laser launch. Although these options will not be discussed in detail, a few comments are appropriate. First, there appear to be no acceptable alternative rocket propellants that can offer substantial improvements compared with present choices. Second, although the space elevator seems to have great promise as a concept for the future, its practical realization awaits the development of a material that is strong enough to be able to carry its own weight (and that of the payloads it will lift) from the Earth’s surface to geosynchronous orbit. Third, estimates indicate that to launch payloads of less than a ton with a laser would require multigigawatt lasers far larger than any presently in existence

[Having concluded that gun launches are currently the most viable option, McNab starts drilling down into the details.] 

... 

If the launcher is sufficiently long, the acceleration can be reduced to a level that is compatible with present component technology, although the acceleration forces will not allow people or fragile payloads to be launched with feasible launcher lengths. Guns may therefore be limited to launching robust packages such as food, water, fuel, and replaceable components. This may be an important support function for the International Space Station (ISS) or other missions

A disadvantage of gun launch is that the launch package has to leave the gun barrel at a very high velocity ( 7500 m/s) through the Earth’s atmosphere, leading to a very high aerothermal load on the projectile. The reentry vehicle community has successfully developed techniques to overcome this situation (when traveling in the reverse direction), and it seems possible that similar techniques can resolve this problem, either through the use of refractory or ablative nose materials or by evaporative cooling techniques. The mass of coolant required for this appears to be acceptable, as discussed below. The second concern for a gun is the size of the package that can be launched. Unless a very large gun can be built, the payload launched into orbit per launch will be a few hundred kilograms, which will require a large number of launches per year. For example, to provide 500 tons/year to orbit would require 2000 launches/year—a little over five per day on average. An infrastructure in space for handling this traffic and distributing the payloads will have to be created. Issues to be addressed will include decisions on handling or recycling the nonpayload components that reach orbit.

I don't want to get into whether or not we should be spending more on space exploration, and I certainly don't want to argue the merits of this proposal (that topic would take me out of my depth almost immediately). For now, I want to stay meta and discuss the discussion.

Let's think about the question of why so many reputable news organizations are devoting so much coverage to Mars One and so little to other, better aerospace stories such as this one.

What do I mean by better?

For starters, this is a credible proposal from a well-established authority published in an IEEE journal, and, based on my experience, it's an idea that other engineers in the field are not willing to dismiss out of hand; they may not consider it practical, but they do take it seriously. (For example, JPL was looking into using orbiting railguns to launch small interplanetary probes as far back as 1988.)

And we really are talking about a game-changer here. If McNab's estimates hold up, we're talking about reducing launch costs by considerably more than an order of magnitude. Even if we factor in the need to use traditional rockets for people and other delicate cargo, that cost reduction is still enough to shift the underlying economics of all space-based enterprises, ranging from asteroid mining to tourism to, yes, interplanetary colonies.

Finally, rail guns are cool. All Mars One has to offer is cheesy artist conceptions. With railguns you get video like this:



This is, of course, just one example. There are any number of fascinating stories about aerospace research. Why do they go unnoticed while Mars One continues to make the cut? Here are my guesses:

1. Bullshit does not count against you. As Elmo Keep spelled out in painful detail, every aspect of this story collapses under inspection, but even after Keep's expose, the stories kept coming;

2. People love a bargain (i.e. there's a sucker born every minute). I've noticed a number of cases recently where an unrealistically low price seems to make proposals more newsworthy (this example jumps to mind);

3. Everybody loves a messiah (even a Galtian one). Entrepreneurs and market forces are also easy pitches these days, while stories of public action and collective sacrifice fall out of favor. Of course, even in the Sixties, space was a tough sell (even as we were sending men to the moon, people were suggesting that the money would have been better spent down here), but now even the suggestion that we as a society would take on something expensive and challenging seems oddly quaint.

Corporate PR vs. Beat Sweetening -- different but not that different

Brad DeLong recently provided an interesting complement to our ongoing flack-n-hacks thread (which Andrew just joined). Just to review, we were talking about how PR firms (the 'flacks' in question) provide leads, leg-work and even finished  copy in exchange for favorable coverage. DeLong uses this embarrassing Politico puff piece of Stephen Moore to examine the way journalists trade favorable coverage for access and scoops (which is, more or less, Politico's unofficial mission statement).

This piece is what my old next-door office neighbor Jack DeVore, then Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen's Assistant Secretary for Public Relations, called a "beat sweetener": the point of such an article is not to inform the article's readers about some person regarded as either being influential or typical in an interesting way, but rather to burnish the reputation of the subject. As such, it omits key parts of the story and so misleads the readers in the interest of achieving that goal. The hope is that the subject of the article will at some future point then open up and preferentially dish to the reporter who has done him the favor of burnishing his reputation.
...

That is it. No observations about publishing the wrong numbers. No observations about how Stephen Moore has been a huge backer of Sam Brownback's Kansas tax-cut state revenue disaster. Nothing about how Herman Cain' 9-9-9 plan blew up in his face because no analyst who could add could get it to work arithmetically no matter how many thumbs they put on these scale. No critical quotes from anybody about the quality of Stephen Moore's analytical work--which would have been the easiest thing in the world to get. In fact, no positive quotes at all from any economist about Stephen Moore as an economist or an analyst.
...

So the message I get from this is that there is, still, an enormous need for publications and platforms that will call a spade a goddam shovel, afflict the comfortable, entertain-along-with-informing rather than entertain-instead-of-informing, and be trusted information intermediaries in which the words on the page are there to inform you about what is what rather than to mislead you in the hope that those in whose interest you have been misled will at some point in the future dish the writer a scoop.

I don't have time to discuss it today...

but you should definitely check out this post from Dean Dad if you've been following the higher ed side of the education reform debate.

Public Matters: A Response to Kevin Carey

More on the rise of PR

Living in North Hollywood, one gets plenty of notice of the upcoming Emmy season. Perhaps even more then with the Oscars, this award show is preceded by a blanketing of the neighborhood in "For your consideration" billboards. You can get a rough but reasonable idea of who is spending what by looking at how many billboards you see for different shows and different networks.

Per show, at least, there seems to be a huge disparity between Netflix originals and virtually everybody else. Billboards for House of Cards or Orange Is the New Black are all over the place. By contrast, I don't recall seeing an Emmy ad for Orphan Black or Justified or even the Good Wife. On this per show basis, it would certainly appear that the Emmy-season outdoor advertising budget for Netflix is many times larger than that of its nearest competitor.

I don't want to get into the question of whether or not this is a good business decision on the part of Netflix and I certainly don't want to open the topic of which awards were deserved. Instead, I want to tie this into the previous post on the rise of PR and the decline of journalism.

I read any number of pieces about how winning Emmys meant that Netflix had "arrived." As far as I can remember, none of these articles mentioned the disproportionate level of marketing it took to win these awards. Of course, omitting context is a common sin, particularly when the details undercut the standard narrative (adherence to the standard narrative is pretty much the prime directive of modern journalism), but there is an added layer of conflict of interest here.

The practice of letting interested parties research stories and even write copy is as old as typesetting, but there is reason to believe things have gotten much worse. What was once an occasional lapse now appears to be the norm.

Modern journalism is now basically row upon row of glass houses. Stone-throwers have become decidedly unpopular (check out the NYT's attitude toward Nate Silver). Even if a reporter wasn't beholden to some publicist, he or she would still face considerable pressure from colleagues and editors not to make a big deal of these questionable relationships.

I realize I seem to pick on Netflix a lot, but I really don't have a serious problem with the company.  My problem is with the way today's journalists cover business, neglecting due diligence, allowing conventional wisdom to outweigh facts, and letting companies write their own version of reality.

Netflix just happens to be a great example.

A premature diagnosis of cost disease?

After cuts in state funding, the most popular theory to explain the rapid increase in college tuition seems to be cost disease:

Baumol's cost disease (also known as the Baumol Effect) is a phenomenon described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s.[1] It involves a rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no increase of labor productivity in response to rising salaries in other jobs which did experience such labor productivity growth. This seemingly goes against the theory in classical economics that wages are closely tied to labor productivity changes.

I've never felt entirely comfortable with the way this explanation fits (or fails to fit) the data. It always seemed to me that the tremendous increase in very low-priced adjunct labor would more than balance out the flat productivity gains.

If this post by Paul Campos of Lawyers, Guns and Money is accurate, the theory is even more at variance with the facts that I thought. ( Campos also has some interesting things to say about the drop in state funding explanation.)

Everyone is aware that the cost of going to college has skyrocketed since [fill in any date going back to the middle of the last century]. Why has this happened? This post is about one possible explanation, that turns out not to have any validity at all: increases in faculty salaries. In fact, over the past 40+ years, average salaries for college and university faculty have dropped dramatically.

Salaries have increased, sometimes substantially, for a tiny favored slice of academia, made up of tenured professors at elite institutions, some professional school faculty (business, law, medicine), and most especially faculty who have moved into the higher echelons of university administration. Such examples merely emphasize the extent to which the economics of the New Gilded Age have infiltrated the academic world: the one percent are doing fabulously well, and the ten percenters are doing fine, while the wretched refuse of our teeming shores will adjunct for food.

Numbers:

Average salary for all full-time faculty in degree-granting post-secondary institutions (this category includes instructors and lecturers, as well as all ranks of professors) in constant 2012-13 dollars:

1970: $74,019

2012: $77,301

These figures, of course, give a very incomplete picture of the economic circumstances of the actual teaching faculty in America’s institutions of higher education.

One of the more astonishing statistics regarding the economics of our colleges and universities is that, despite the fantastic increase in the cost of attending them, there are now on a per-student basis far fewer full-time faculty employed by these institutions than was the case 40 years ago. Specifically, in 1970 nearly 80% of all faculty were full-time; by 2011, more part-time than full-time faculty were employed by American institutions of higher learning (note that the former category does not include graduate students who teach).

While comprehensive salary figures for part-time faculty aren’t available, it’s clear that their salaries are on average vastly lower than those of full-time faculty (and of course when it comes to who does the bulk of the actual teaching at many schools, the designations “full-time” and “part-time” have a distinctly Orwellian flavor). If we assume that “pat-time” faculty earn one-third as much as their full-time counterparts — and this seems improbably optimistic, given that the average compensation for part-time faculty for teaching a three-credit course is around $2,700 — that would mean that in 1970 average salaries for college and university faculty were nearly 30% higher, in real dollars, than they are today.

This an astonishing figure, given that, in the last 40 years, tuition at private colleges has more than tripled, while resident tuition at public institutions has nearly quadrupled.

You guys can write this post yourselves -- I'm tired

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/10/opinion/david-brooks-the-cost-of-relativism.html

http://andrewgelman.com/2015/03/10/voices-from-everywhere-saying-gently-this-we-praise-this-we-dont/

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a33569/moral-hazard-pays-us-a-call/

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/when-values-disappear/

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121265/david-brooks-argues-poor-people-need-morals-rich-people

http://observationalepidemiology.blogspot.com/2014/10/david-brooks-confirmation-artist.html

http://www.phillymag.com/articles/booboos-in-paradise/

More Martian musings – – reality shows and diet pills

Given all of the renewed attention to the Mars One project, this might be a good time for a quick little catch-up essay.

Maybe it's just me, but there are a few extremely salient points that have a way of being neglected in this conversation.

First, manned interplanetary spaceflight is almost certain to be very expensive and the cost for setting up permanent self-sustaining colonies is almost certain to be many times more so.

Second, the superiority of manned versus unmanned spaceflight is, for now, almost entirely symbolic. This does not mean that there are not certain specific economic and scientific benefits associated with manned spaceflight nor does it mean that manned spaceflight is a bad idea. It just means that, given current technology, sending explorers to Mars is something that, in the final analysis, we would do because we choose to as a society. This is even more true with sending colonists.

I actually don't have a problem with this kind of argument. At the risk of some muddleheaded nostalgia, I like the idea of leaders standing up and asking the people what kind of country we'd like to live it. Though I am not a huge fan of JFK, I greatly admire both the rhetoric and the sentiment behind "not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

Which brings me to my main objection to Mars one.

Without delving too deeply into the promise and the limitations of businesses like space X, when it comes to the kind of massive operations we're talking about here, we really only have two choices:

The first is to decide this is something we want to do and that we are willing to spend a considerable amount of money it would take to do it;

The second is to wait for a technological breakthrough which will change the underlying economics, with the understanding that this breakthrough may not come through in our lifetime.

I don't want to wait into that debate right now but, if landing on Mars is important, then it is a debate we need to have.

Though every major aspect of the Mars One proposal is laughably unrealistic, it resonates with people because it gives us an out. We can sit around and enjoy dreaming about how exciting the future will be without actually having to make any of the tough choices or do any of the hard work to make it exciting.

The idea of sending people to Mars just by watching a reality show is analogous to the idea that you can solve a lifelong problem with obesity by taking a miracle diet pill. I suspect that most of the people who try these products know on some level that it is foolish to trust the unlikely and unverified claims of late night TV pitchmen but the desire to believe outweighs their judgement.

Buying a proposal for a space program from a reality show producer isn't all that different.

The Decline of Journalism and The Rise of Public Relations

Any comments to a recent post, Andrew Gelman brought up a point that I want to dig into a bit more, at least briefly, the connection between the decline of journalism and the rise of public relations.

Here's my take: there is clearly a powerful relationship here though the direction of causality gets a bit complicated and goes both ways. For a variety of reasons, including but not limited to downsizing, an increasingly insular culture, and a shift to a star system that serves to hollow out the middle of the profession, journalism became both less diligent about maintaining quality and hungrier for free content (an appetite greatly expanded by online forums). While things changes were happening, companies were also growing more experienced at measuring and manipulating public opinion.

The decline in journalism created an extraordinary opportunity for corporate PR departments. News stories that portrayed products and companies in a favorable light were both more persuasive than traditional advertising and considerably cheaper.

While we are on the subject, my biggest concerns about the role of PR in modern journalism are not the question of accuracy or bias, though both of those are important. What really concerns me is the way these outside influences determine what does and does not get covered and the lack of awareness (or at least acknowledgement) on the part of the press. More on that coming later.

MOOCs and the Eugen Weber Paradox

As always seems to happen when I have other things I need to be doing, all sorts of interesting threads have started popping up and saying "Blog me! Blog me!"

Case in point, Erik Loomis of LGM has gotten back on the MOOC beat. I've got a couple of original posts on the subject in the works, but first I want to bring an old post from the teaching blog back into the conversation. It addresses what I think may be the fundamental questions of the ed-reform-through-technology debate:

After over a century of experimenting with educational technology, why have the results up until now been so underwhelming?;

And how will the new approaches being proposed fix the problems that plagued all of those previous attempts?


The Eugen Weber Paradox


If you follow education at all, you've probably heard about the rise of online courses and their potential for reinventing the way we teach. The idea is that we can make lectures from the best schools in the world available through YouTube or some similar platform. It's not a bad idea, but before we start talking about how much this can change the world, consider the following more-serious-than-it-sounds point.

Let's say, if we're going to do this, we do it right. Find an world renowned historian who's also a skilled and popular lecturer, shoot the series with decent production values (a couple of well-operated cameras, simple but professional pan and zoom), just polished enough not to distract from the content.

And if we're going to talk about democratizing education, let's not spend our time on some tiny niche course like "Building a Search Engine." Instead, let's do a general ed class with the widest possible audience.

If you'll hold that thought for a moment...

A few years ago, while channel surfing in the middle of the night, I came across what looked like Harvey Korman giving a history lesson. It turned out not to be Korman, but it was a history lesson, and an extraordinarily good one by a historian named Eugene Weber, described by the New York Times as "one of the world’s foremost interpreters of modern France." Weber was also a formidable teacher known for popular classes at UCLA.



The program I was watching was “The Western Tradition,” a fifty-two part video course originally produced for public television in 1989. If you wanted to find the ideal lecturer for a Western Civ class, it would probably be Eugen Weber. Like Polya, Weber combined intellectual standing of the first order with an exceptional gift and passion for teaching. On top of that, the Annenberg Foundation put together a full set of course materials to go with it This is about as good as video instruction gets.

All of which raises a troubling question. As far as I know, relatively few schools have set up a Western Civ course around "the Western Tradition." Given the high quality and low cost of such a course, why isn't it a standard option at more schools?

Here are a few possible explanations:

1. Medium is the message

There are certain effects that only work on stage, that fall strangely flat when there's not an audience physically present in the room. Maybe something similar holds with lectures -- something is inevitably lost when moved to another medium.

2. Lecturers already work for kind words and Pez

Why should administrators go to the trouble of developing new approaches when they can get adjuncts to work for virtually nothing?

3. It's that treadmill all over again

You probably know people who have pinned great hopes on home exercise machines, people who showed tremendous excitement about getting fit then lost all interest when they actually brought the Bowflex home and talking about exercise had to be replaced by doing it. Lots of technological solutions are like that. The anticipation is fun; the work required once you get it isn't.

This is not a new story. One of the original missions of educational TV back in the NET days was to provide actual classroom instruction, particularly for rural schools.* The selection was limited and it was undoubtedly a pain for administrators to match class schedules with broadcast schedules but the basic idea (and most of the accompanying rhetoric) was the same as many of the proposals we've been hearing recently.

Of course, educational television was just one of a century of new media and manipulatives that were supposed to revolutionize education. Film, radio, mechanical teaching machines, film strips and other mixed media, visual aides, television, videotape, distance learning, computer aided instruction, DVDs, the internet, tablet computing. All of these efforts had some good ideas behind and many actually did real good in the classroom, but none of them lived up to expectations.

Is this time different? Perhaps. It's possible that greatly expanded quantity and access may push us past some kind of a tipping point, but I'm doubtful. We still haven't thought through the deeper questions about what makes for effective instruction and why certain educational technologies tend to under-perform. Instead we get the standard ddulite boilerplate, made by advocates who are blissfully unaware of how familiar their claims are to anyone reasonably versed in the history of education.

* From Wikipedia
 The Arkansas Educational Television Commission was created in 1961, following a two-year legislative study to assess the state’s need for educational television. KETS channel 2 in Little Rock, the flagship station, signed on in 1966 as the nation's 124th educational television station. In the early years, KETS was associated with National Educational Television, the forerunner of the current PBS. The early days saw black-and-white broadcasting only, with color capabilities beginning in 1972. Limited hours of operation in the early years focused primarily on instructional programming for use in Arkansas classrooms

More on Mars One -- I expect this from ABC News but Sheldon?

There's been another wave of PR in support of the privately funded "Mars mission" Mars One (and yes, I do need to use quotation marks). There have been news stories, interviews with applicants who did or didn't qualify for the "mission," (NPR, how could you?) and even fictional characters like Castle and, sadly, Sheldon Cooper ("The Colonization Application").

Just to review, not only is this mission almost certain never to happen, but every major aspect of it collapses under scrutiny.

The funding goals are wildly unrealistic, the budget estimates are comically optimistic, and what little technology has actually been proposed is so badly designed that, according to an MIT study, it would be likely to kill all the colonists within a few months. I am pretty sure Howard would have pointed all of these things out to Sheldon.

You could also find some these objections in this piece from ABC, but you'd have to look closely because the reporters buried them as deep as possible, just far enough from the end to allow Mars One CEO/confidence man Bas Landorp have the last word.

Obviously this is a fun story, a lottery where anyone can become a colonist to Mars made even more dramatic by the twist of being a one-way trip. I also get that this is a story many probably most of us would like to believe. That is a high enough standard to justify a hook on a TV episode, but it is an embarrassingly low one for major news outlets.

The Golden Age of PR

I usually check out Jonathan Chait's blog once or twice a week and I usually ignore the "Most Viewed Stories" column to the right of the page. Recently, though, one of the items caught my eye.

"Who Was That at the End of the New Avengers Trailer, and Why Should You Be So Excited?"

The link led to a Vulture.com post about the comic book character the Vision, followed by some speculation about what part he might play in the upcoming Avengers movie. Looking over the article, it struck me that this is an amazing time to be a publicist.  We have gone from publications hyping movies to hyping trailers to hyping two-second shots in trailers.

Cartoon Metalogic

Bud Grace, creator of the comic strip the Piranha Club, is a former nuclear physicist -- No, really, look it up -- and every now and then a bit of STEM humor pops up.

For investors, all money isn't created equal

In our most recent discussion of driverless cars, I made the following assertion about Google:

Google has a lot of reasons to want to be seen as a diversified, broadly innovative technology company, rather than as a very good one-trick pony cashing in on a monopoly (possibly two monopolies depending on how you want to count YouTube). A shiny reputation helps to keep stock prices high and regulators at bay.

I didn't really think of it at the time, but this concern is a point we have hit tangentially in the past and which probably deserves a bit more direct scrutiny. Investors often care a great deal about where a company's money comes from. This concern is often neither rational nor consistent and often leads companies to mislead the public about the makeup of their revenues.

Here are a couple of examples. I am going to be rather vague about some details because, you know, lawyers, but the broad outlines are both accurate and the circumstances are common enough that I could always find other cases if pressed . The first involved a financial services company that had products for customers at both ends of the economic spectrum. If you were to look at the company as an outsider or even as a new employee, you might very well assume that the two divisions were roughly equal. You might even suspect that the upscale was more profitable.

In reality a large majority of company's profits came from the low end. It turned out that the profit margin for providing services for poor people in this case was much higher. Stockholders, however, did not particularly like products that served this demographic. Also having a heavily promoted line of products for upper-class people did wonders for the stock price.

Here's another example:

The bank in question was in the middle of a very good run, making a flood of money from its credit card line, but investors kept complaining that the bank was making all that money the wrong way. This was the height of the Internet boom but the bank was booking all of these profitable accounts through old-fashioned direct mail. If it wanted to maximize its stock price, the bank needed to start booking accounts online.

The trouble was that (at least at the time) issuing credit cards over the Internet was a horrible idea. The problem was fraud. With direct mail, the marketer decides who to contact and has various ways to check that a customer's card is in fact going to that customer. With a website, it was the potential customers who initiated contact and a stunning number of those potential customers were identity thieves.

The Internet was an excellent tool for account management, but the big institutional investors were adamant; they wanted to see the bank booking accounts online. Faced with the choice between unhappy investors and a disastrous business move, the company came up with a truly ingenious solution: they added a feature that let people who received a pre-approved credit card card offer fill out the application online.

Just to be absolutely clear, this service was limited to people who had been solicited by the bank and based on the response rates, the people who went online were basically the same people who would have applied anyway. From a net acquisitions standpoint, it had little or no impact.

From an investor relations standpoint, however, it accomplished a great deal. Everyone who filled out one of those applications and was approved* was counted as an online acquisition. Suddenly the bank was using this metric to bill itself as one of the leading Internet providers. This satisfied the investors (who had no idea how cosmetic the change was) and allowed the bank to continue to follow its highly profitable business plan (which was actually a great deal more sophisticated than the marketing techniques of many highly-touted Internet companies).

*'pre-approved' actually means 'almost pre-approved.'

Put bluntly, companies will often pursue strategies or introduce products that are profit neutral or worse because these strategies and products make the companies look diversified or forward thinking or poised to take advantage of some major opportunity. Investors reward these perceptions. With this fact in mind, you can make sense of all sorts of strange business decisions.

For example, Amazon is an innovative, well-run. forward-thinking company, but its  P/E ratio (when it turns a profit) is often in the hundreds,* meaning the company has to be seen as being on the cusp of explosive growth. When you read about the company's online grocery service or its proposed drone-to-door deliveries** and you ask yourself how they can ever make a profit doing this on a large scale, the answer may be that they don't expect to.


* There may be some controversy over how  P/E ratio is calculated for Amazon but that's a topic for another post and probably another blogger.

** I added "drone-to-door" to emphasis the distinction between that proposed technology and large cargo drones. The latter actually does make business sense but would face huge regulatory hurdles.

Elegant theories and headless clowns -- more bad tech reporting from the New York Times

The previously mentioned Paul Krugman piece on opera singer Jenny Lind  included a link to this NYT article "adapted from The Price of Everything: Solving the Mystery of Why We Pay What We Do, by Eduardo Porter, an editorial writer for The New York Times." Krugman was criticizing the reliance on simple economic stories that don't fit the facts. Porter was telling one.

Baseball aficionados might conclude that all of this points to some pernicious new trend in the market for top players. But this is not specific to baseball, or even to sport. Consider the market for pop music. In 1982, the top 1 percent of pop stars, in terms of pay, raked in 26 percent of concert ticket revenue. In 2003, that top percentage of stars — names like Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera or 50 Cent — was taking 56 percent of the concert pie.
...

But broader forces are also at play. Nearly 30 years ago, Sherwin Rosen, an economist from the University of Chicago, proposed an elegant theory to explain the general pattern. In an article entitled “The Economics of Superstars,” he argued that technological changes would allow the best performers in a given field to serve a bigger market and thus reap a greater share of its revenue. But this would also reduce the spoils available to the less gifted in the business.

The reasoning fits smoothly into the income dynamics of the music industry, which has been shaken by many technological disruptions since the 1980s. First, MTV put music on television. Then Napster took it to the Internet. Apple allowed fans to buy single songs and take them with them. Each of these breakthroughs allowed the very top acts to reach a larger fan base, and thus command a larger audience and a bigger share of concert revenue.

Putting aside the fact that, as Krugman pointed out, we have examples of superstar musicians that predate both recording and broadcasting, this paragraph is still stunningly incomplete and comically ill-informed.

The 1980s cutoff is arbitrary and misleading. The 1880's would make more sense, though it really wasn't until the 1890s that things really took off and it has been a fairly steady stream of technological innovations since then.

Here's a brief, roughly chronological view of some of the highlights:

Disc records

Amplification

Radio

Optical sound tracks on film

Stereo

FM

LPs

HiFi

Television (which brought with it everything from Hit Parade to American Bandstand, Sullivan, Midnight Special and countless shows like this)

Cassettes

CDs

Recordable  CDs

Affordable digital audio editing

And then, of course, a whole family of internet-based innovations.

The past 125 years has been one long stream of "technological disruptions" for the music industry, but most of the innovation over the past couple of decades has mainly broadened the market by increasing selection and lowering production costs. In terms of "allow[ing] the very top acts to reach a larger fan base, and thus command a larger audience and a bigger share of concert revenue," at least for the North American and European audience, the top acts have been near saturation since the Sixties. (Check out the ratings for Elvis or the Beatles on Sullivan.)

By looking at the past thirty years of advances and ignoring the previous ninety, Porter gives us a blatant example of headless clown causal reasoning, arguing that x explains the difference in A and B because x is present in A while ignoring the fact that x is also present in B. Data journalism has fully embraced the idea that two numbers briefly moving in sync constitutes a causal argument.



The phrase "elegant theory" should have set off the red flags and warning lights. Elegance in these books pretty much always means "simplistic and unrealistic." The theories are aesthetically and emotionally appealing but they just barely fit the data in their examples and they usually fall apart completely when taken out on the road.

As previously mentioned, this goes back to what George Polya called (in a quote I really need to dig up) thinking like a mathematician . Polya suggested that the default setting of most people when presented with a rule is to look for examples while the default setting of mathematicians and scientists was to look for exceptions. Mathematical ideas get a tremendous amount of press these days but very few of the people covering them think like mathematicians.

Epidemiology Research

I am a big fan of Aaron Carroll, who often blogs at the incidental economist.  However, in his latest New York Times column he says:

Most of the evidence for that recommendation has come from epidemiologic studies, which can be flawed.

Use of these types of studies happens far more often than we would like, leading to dietary guidelines that may not be based on the best available evidence. But last week, the government started to address that problem, proposing new guidelines that in some cases are more in line with evidence from randomized controlled trials, a more rigorous form of scientific research.

So when have randomized controlled trials stopped being a part of epidemiology?  It comes as news to me, who has done this type of work as an epidemiologist.  In particular, there are threats to validity in trials as well, and a lot of smart causal inference research has looked at that as well.  Trials also have concerns about cross-over, attrition, and even valid design.  These elements are all part of a typical epidemiological education and are an important part of public health practice.  Even things like meta-analyses, where trials (and now sometimes observational studies) are pooled are typical parts of epidemiology. 

It seems like he wants to conflate that observational research = epidemiology. 

There is also a difference of estimands.  The trials can only assess interventions in diet and how they perform.  The real (true) intake of the participants is always approximated, except perhaps in a metabolic ward.  Even doubly labeled water studies need to make assumptions. 

The real bug-bear of nutritional research in humans is measurement error.  It is present in all studies (even trials, which are much less susceptible to bias than cohort or case-control studies).  That is a lot of what we struggle with in this research area. 

Now, it is true (and I agree with Aaron Carroll completely) that the trials tell us a lot of what we want to know.  In a real sense we want to know how dietary interventions, as they will actually work out in reality, will change outcomes.  So I share his concern that the trials seemed to be overlooked by people writing guidelines.  Or, in other words, I think his main conclusion is quite sensible.

But let's not forget the observational research is critical to understanding patterns of diet that create the hypotheses and interventions that can actually be tested in trials.  They also give a lot of understanding into how people consume food in the state of nature.  I am never going to stop focusing on high quality data and the most rigorous possible study designs.  But I think it would be wiser to represent the eco-system more completely. 

On the other hand, I am not an expert in health care communications, and it might be that such broad strokes are necessary when focusing on the general public.  After all, improving public health is everyone's goal, and I am happy to take a few "hits" if that is the ultimate outcome.  But I think it's also a challenge to think about how to make this type of research, and the nuances in it, better understood in general.

I have a lot of thinking to do.