Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Palin Comparison

Sarah Palin. Caribou Barbie? That's a pretty cool nickname. Personally, I'm going with Sabre-Toothed Cougar. But in any case, she's got my endorsement. Thought I'm not sure what value that has. As you all have seen in previous postings and discussions, I'm not exactly an "issues voter." Heck, I'm not even a "voter." In fact, that position was my initial foray into blogging.

But, I am somewhat decent at this sort of analysis. My instinct went to Obama relatively early on, and I was right about Edwards being shady. I was on the Huckabee trend relatively early (and hoped that he could pull it out), but knew that he didn't have much of a chance. I was pretty accurate with my early assessment of Romney as being too stiff, despite being an early favorite. But Sarah Palin? Awesome choice. Not for winning or anything like that. But awesome choice.

Now, I don't have a clue who this Caribou Barbie chick actually is, what she stands for, or anything else, other than that she was Miss Alaska or something back in the day. That's sort of like being the fastest kid at the Special Olympics, but still, it's cool. But this is what I do know:

Alaska. Cold state. Hot Governor. 128% Awesome.

Like I said, Sabre-Toothed Cougar. She's cracking jokes, winking at the camera, and going on SNL and being awesome. Now compare this to what we've had in the past, when it comes to women in politics. In fact, there's a beautiful symmetry at work. Back in 1984, Caribou Barbie was strutting around in a swimsuit, while the lady below was making a run at the White House as VP for the democratic ticket.

Aerosmith sang about this, right?

Happily, Geraldine Ferraro isn't strutting around in a swimsuit on YouTube now. Yeah. I'm guessing the League of Women Voters ran a DNA test, but I think that's a dude in drag. And if you consider our almost-option, Hillary, there isn't much improvement.

I don't make this stuff up. There are already enough people who do that.

Don't even need to add to that headline. In any case, what we will probably be seeing more of is this lady:

Not so much scary as nuts. In a fun way. Sort of like Left-Eye burning down Andre Rison's house.

I don't think that she's exactly scary. Maybe a little insane. She's got this thing where she sees her husband as a messiah. Of course, since Louis Farrakhan thinks that he's the messiah, then I'm down.

Conclusion? Like OJ's book... If I were to vote, here's how I would do it... Palin. I'm not voting for McCain. Just Palin. I'd going to cross out McCain's name on ballot, and replace it with Obama's. And then I'd vote again by crossing out Biden's name, and replacing it with Palin. I could care less about who's going to win the election (since it's going to be Obama). But I want more Sarah Palin, and more impressions from the sneaky-hot Tina Fey.

That is, if I were to vote. Which I won't.

-Chairman

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Ramble On

It's been a while since I've had a rambling, train of thought sort of posting. So here goes.

My goal is to offend as many distinct philosophical viewpoints as I can.

First of all, I'm concerned with the state of education in this country. I get some great stories from my little bro who's teaching out in Hawaii. Now, he's not exactly one of those teachers that will be getting an award for excellence any time soon. But from the stories that he's telling me, he's struggling with his new job because he actually seems to be caring too much. When that's the case, you have to wonder about the future of our children. You hear report after report of how schools are failing, how "No Child Left Behind" has resulted in everyone being slowed down. And then you hear about how teachers are subpar now, and how our best and brightest are not going into teaching.

I have a hypothesis. And before I get into it, I want to clarify that, though I am a misogynist, that only partially explains my position.

Women's rights have made our children dumber. There's more to it that just women's rights, but that's the part that makes this rambling more interesting (and is likely to generate more hate mail).

The basic premise is this. You also make the assumption that high mental ability leads to success in the workplace, as well as socioeconomic status (income, education, occupation). That's a pretty reasonable assumption, based on most of the research that's been done. Now, you also assume that people are inherently greedy, which is a basic assumption upon which the discipline of economics is built on. So, smart people will try to maximize their income by filtering into high-paying occupations. Nothing particularly intriguing, right? We've always known that people went into med school, law school, and B school to make bank.

Now, you assume that men and women have equal mental ability. Naturally, this assumption is faulty, since it's been proven that at the highest levels, women find math to be tough (I'd cite this, but I'm not exactly sure how to quote those old Barbie dolls with the pull strings). But let's assume it anyway. So, you take the next step and make sure that everyone in the world hates you by stating that if there was less female empowerment in this society, our schools would be better.

How do we make that drastic leap? Before the women's lib movement, what were the occupational roles that educated women played? Teacher, nurse, receptionist/typist, housewife. So, most of your smart women were being sent into the workplace, with a much higher proportion of them sent on a mission to educate our children.

Now, flash forward. Women have been told that they have the ability to be lawyers, doctors, engineers, pilots, astronauts, soldiers, accountants, race car drivers, CEO, vice president, president (note, the last two remain theoretical), and whatever else a man can do. And for the most part, that's been great for the individuals. For example, I'm sure that GoDaddy girl Danica Patrick has carved out a great life for herself. But what does this do to our educational system?

We have an economic system where teachers don't make much, compared to other professions, and have relatively low prestige. So, logically speaking, where should the smartest folks go first? Probably into the engineering, law, and business schools and the hard sciences. Or into bikini modeling, but that correlations between intelligence and beauty are rather spurious. And only after we filter out the smartest folks do we get into teaching.

Now, in years past, that was OK, because there were fewer acceptable occupations for women. And pay for nursing, teaching, and office work were about the same (actually teaching probably was better). So our brightest women were going into teaching. Even though men didn't really go into teaching, we still had a lot of smart people becoming school teachers. Maybe the smartest 5% went into some non-traditional roles, but you can say that the next 30% were probably teachers or nurses. So, out of the overall population, you had access to a good chunk of the top 1/3 for teaching. Note, I'm just making up the numbers, but you should get the point. If anyone cares to dig up actual numbers, we could see if all this still makes sense.

Flash forward today, and even though there are more men going into teaching, we're still missing out on the smartest folks. After you filter out all of the smart folks who are driven by income/prestige (which is still a basic assumption that's fairly robust), you have much more limited access to the top 1/3 of the population, and are largely limited to the next 1/3.

Back when we had more glass ceilings, we funneled more smart people into teaching. Thus, women's rights have led to dumber kids.

Now, there's more to the story. The free market also has led to dumber kids. I'm sure that Ron Paul and our libertarian friends will have hate mail for me. And heaven forbid if there are any feminists that support Ron Paul that read this.

The free market basically lets individuals set prices according to value. This works out well when things are quantifiable (commodity prices come to mind quickly). And this works as a system at the individual level, where social factors are small.

Wages are the price for labor. So, higher wages are offered for positions where employee ability is valued more. Employers want employees that contribute value (i.e., profit) to the employer. We have good accounting rules (generally speaking) that help us measure value in this realm.

But what happens in social services where the value goes to society? And what happens when these things are difficult to measure?

The tragedy of the commons.

The free market is this idea at work. People act independently, trying to maximize their value. Unregulated, shared resources (the commons) are inevitibly depleted, though no one believes that is a good outcome.

The free market sets the price for tangible things well, but poorly for less tangible things. This intangibility leads to more risk when it comes to investment. And even if we could measure the value of something like the quality of education, it may not make economic sense for us to invest in education. After all, if my investment in education leads to smarter accountants and financial analysts, it may only benefit society in a minimal way. So, my investment on a public good, may not be good for me.

Basically, the free market sets a lower price for things like public education, environmentalism, community health, and other social issues. Part of this is the increased riskiness of investment associated with intangiblility, and part of this is that the benefits of associate with the outcomes are outweighed by the costs. So, even though we know that we should invest in education to get more talented poeple into the classrooms, and we know that the degradation of our educational system would be catastrophic, it may not make sense for individuals to invest.

So why can't we privatize education? We could, but there's no clear business plan for education as a profit maker, is there? I don't really know, but nothing jumps out at me. Current models basically take the same taxpayer money in, and use it to run schools privately, with the profits coming in efficiency. But efficient delivery only gets you so far. You still have the same issue - how do you convince individuals to pay for this? In a free market, you basically don't. In our system, we have taxes. Now, traditionally, we have a pretty laissez-faire attitude, so our tax structure is geared toward allowing free markets. If you compare this to somewhere like, say, Norway, where things are basically socialist, you see a very high quality public education system. Of course, many Norwegians go abroad for college. Norwegian universities are not world-class. Now where the American system shines is in higher education, where the goal is excellence of the individuals involved. This shouldn't be surprising. Our relatively free market system leads to the greatest rewards for individual success.

Now, as you go more broadly, from education, to society, you have to ask "what's the answer?" I think that we're seeing many outcomes that suggest that carte blanche free market structures lead to problems when goals are at a social level. However, we also see where the free market leads to excellence at the highest levels. I think that you can incorporate both structures. The question is where you shift from more socialist to more free market.

I think that free market proponents overstate the degree to which free markets have benefits. Areas where you need excellence , need free markets. Bear in mind, excellence has been diluted. Not every company is excellent. In fact, by definition, most are mediocre. And bear in mind it should be the need of excellence that is important. Many industries can thrive with mere competence. So, regulations should be geared toward a free market where radical innovation and knowledge generation can be rewarded. Heavy R&D companies come to mind. For example, phamaceutical companies need to be rewarded for breakthrough drugs (though they need to be strongly regulated for drugs that are only incrementally beneficial - like the myriad drugs that are essentially the same, save for an additional feature that allows for a new patent). Companies that can change the way energy is consumed need to be rewarded for helping us live sustainably (but companies that contribute to the status quo should not recieve such protection).

At the individual level, we can do this through smarter taxing. For environmental issues, we can regulate consumption. If you read Gregg Easterbrook, you've read about how improving fuel efficiency, going from 10 mpg to 20 mpg is much more beneficial than going from 20 mpg to 30 mpg. Since companies often use their manufacturing cost as a baseline for pricing, we often misprice goods by not considering the societal cost of usage. For example, SUV's can be considered underpriced, because we don't consider the increased cost of usage. We can increase the tax on the SUV, but we can also increase the cost of the gasoline for SUV's. For community health, we can impose taxes based on healthiness of the food, with unhealthy options taxed higher. We're starting to do this with tobacco. Alcohol should probably be more expensive, given the costs to society. But where this really can change society is with foods, particularly with processed food manufactureres and our incredibly screwed up agricultural industry.

And back to education. School taxes should not stay local. The broad role of basic education is not for individual excellence - it's for competence amongst the masses. Basics need to be instilled - this requires standardized programs where there is equal access, regardless of a community's income. National curriculum that sets a high bar is needed. This is of particular importance in K-6. Within each individual school, recognizing the most talented individuals and giving them some separate instruction for part of their studies can still allow for individual achievement, particularly in teaching writing, logic, mathematics, and ethics. The teaching of facts doesn't necessitate a separate classroom. Overall, it's providing uniformity in education, regardless of the neighborhood you happen to live in. This isn't a small change on how we teach. This is taking a bulldozer to a system that's intrinsicly skewed.

Oh yeah. And we need to get smarter people back in there as teachers. My first thought is to severely restrict employment opportunities for women in other arenas :-)

Remember. Roland in 2020. A Vision for the Future. I'm guessing that I won't be President anytime soon. But, I think that if I ever become Dictator For Life, that I'll have some interesting ideas.

-Chairman

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

The Waiting

The waiting is the hardest part
Every day you see one more card
You take it on faith, you take it to the heart
The waiting is the hardest part

-Tom Petty

So now I wait. I just had a campus visit last week. This was a final interview for a position on the faculty in the business college of a reasonably well-regarded BCS school. I think that I did well on the interview. I'm one of 3 finalists, and was the last one to take my campus visit. We'll see how it goes, but I think that I've got an above average chance, so instead of 1 in 3, maybe 50-50? I have to say, I enjoyed my visit, so if I get the offer, I'm pretty much there. And if not? Beats me.

All I know is that this time next year, I'll be hanging around a different town, being overpaid as a professor. The thought of making roughly 6-7 times my current salary sort of makes me laugh. I mean, I definitely think that I'm underpaid right now for what I do, but I definitely don't think that if you give me 50% more work (which is roughly what the difference will be) that I would expect to get paid 600% more. Honestly, if you told me that I was going to basically do what I'm doing now, only teach one more class each semester, I'd be happy to make $50K. Now, let's go ahead and more than double, or maybe even triple that number?

If you remember my old posts that discuss why I should never be rich...

This can't be good. Can it?

-Chairman