Thoughts on the New Commanding Heights

Monday, September 12th, 2011

Arnold Kling shares some thoughts on the new Commanding Heights of our economy, education and health care.

From Paul Howard:

Government policy both encourages consumer spending in health and education and protects providers in those industries through licensing requirements that reduce competition from lower-cost or higher-quality providers (charter schools, retail clinics, etc.).

From John Goodman:

We are living in a world in which entrepreneurs are encouraged to make unlimited amounts of money exploiting reimbursement formulas, but are not allowed to make any extra money making the formulas better and more effective.

Posted in Arnold Kling, Economics, Policy | No Comments »

F-16s on 9/11

Sunday, September 11th, 2011

Yesterday I caught part of a radio interview of Karl Rove, describing the President’s circuitous route back to DC after the initial 9/11 attacks, when no one really knew what was going on, and security demanded that they remain unpredictable.

As they finally approached the White House, an F-16 escort arrived just off their wingtips. They briefly enjoyed a boyish “Aw, cool!” reaction before realizing that those pilots had been assigned the task of intercepting any incoming missiles — the hard way.  It didn’t come to that.

Similarly, other F-16 pilots were tasked with bringing down United Airlines Flight 93 — the hard way:

As remarkable as it seems now, there were no armed aircraft standing by and no system in place to scramble them over Washington. Before that morning, all eyes were looking outward, still scanning the old Cold War threat paths for planes and missiles coming over the polar ice cap.

“There was no perceived threat at the time, especially one coming from the homeland like that,” says Col. George Degnon, vice commander of the 113th Wing at Andrews. “It was a little bit of a helpless feeling, but we did everything humanly possible to get the aircraft armed and in the air. It was amazing to see people react.”

Things are different today, ­Degnon says. At least two “hot-cocked” planes are ready at all times, their pilots never more than yards from the cockpit.

A third plane hit the Pentagon, and almost at once came word that a fourth plane could be on the way, maybe more. The jets would be armed within an hour, but somebody had to fly now, weapons or no weapons.
[...]
“We don’t train to bring down airliners,” said Sasseville, now stationed at the Pentagon. “If you just hit the engine, it could still glide and you could guide it to a target. My thought was the cockpit or the wing.”

He also thought about his ejection seat. Would there be an instant just before impact?

“I was hoping to do both at the same time,” he says. “It probably wasn’t going to work, but that’s what I was hoping.”

It didn’t come to that.

Posted in War | 2 Comments »

The Blast-Proof City

Sunday, September 11th, 2011

A few years ago I saw first-hand how DC had become a city of planters and bollards. Even before 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing of the Murrah Federal Building had led to the Marshals Report, which suggested security measures for government buildings. Now DC could be called the blast-proof city — or blast-resistant:

The Marshals Report proposed no fewer than 52 specific criteria, which resulted in the deployment of a host of building security devices. Some, such as reinforced structure, blast-resistant glass, and hardened curtain walls, have a small impact on a building’s appearance. That is not the case with perimeter security.

“Depending on the facility type,” the report cautions, “the perimeter may include sidewalks, parking lots, the outside walls of the building, a hallway, or simply an office door.” Because truck bombs are the simplest and cheapest way of creating large detonations and given what happened in Oklahoma City, the focus has been on keeping vehicles far away from their target by creating a so-called “standoff” distance. The optimal standoff is large — at least 100 feet — and new buildings, such as the ATF headquarters in Washington, achieve this standoff by creating a sort of landscaped demilitarized zone between the building and the street. (Note that the Marshals Report came out at a time when the federal agency with the greatest experience of terrorism was the State Department, which had developed expertise in hardening diplomatic buildings abroad in the wake of several embassy bombings. This may explain why federal buildings are protected as if they were divorced from their surroundings and why so many federal buildings today, surrounded by barricades and layers of security, resemble foreign outposts: They’re actually modeled after embassies.)

But existing urban buildings are generally too near the street. The only alternative to closing a street completely — as with Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House — is to keep the potential truck bomber from driving right up to the building. This is achieved by a device that could serve as a symbol for our insecurity: the bollard.

Bollards are hardly new — Baroque Rome was full of them. But the attractive marble bollards that Bernini placed in St. Peter’s Square or those that prevented carriages from driving into his fountain in the Piazza Navona are a far cry from the security bollards of today. Old bollards were typically low enough to make a convenient seat and were spaced far apart, sometimes linked by chains. Cast-iron bollards were installed by 19th-century Dutch townspeople in front of their houses, but those decorative so-called Amsterdammertjes (little Amsterdammers) were not intended to stop a speeding truck, only to discourage driving on the sidewalk.

Modern post-Oklahoma City bollards are not so delicate. Designed to halt a 15,000-pound vehicle going up to 50 miles per hour, they are big: 8 to 10 inches in diameter, typically 3 feet high, and spaced no more than 4 feet apart, according to current standards. A large, block-size building might be encircled by several hundred of these oversized fireplugs. To reduce the monotony, architects have tried mixing in hardened fences, low walls, flower planters, reinforced benches, and light poles. When a security line occurs at the curb, however, as is usually the case, solid barriers are impractical because people need to be able to exit cars, so bollards remain the chief perimeter protection. Whether they are clad in stainless steel or granite, they are a visual intrusion on the streetscape; they also pose a nuisance for pedestrians and bicyclists.

Some agencies don’t seem to mind this intrusion, as it’s an external marker of their building’s strategic importance. In Washington, we’ve come to see the bizarre phenomenon that one federal official characterized to me as “bollard envy,” where the degree of protection becomes a symbol of bureaucratic status, like a choice parking spot or a corner office. Perhaps the most egregious example is the screening center for visitors that Congress built for itself; by the time the underground facility was finished it covered half a million square feet and cost $620 million.

Posted in Policy, Urbanism, War | No Comments »

Simply evil

Sunday, September 11th, 2011

Christopher Hitchens reminds us that some acts are simply evil:

The proper task of the “public intellectual” might be conceived as the responsibility to introduce complexity into the argument: the reminder that things are very infrequently as simple as they can be made to seem. But what I learned in a highly indelible manner from the events and arguments of September 2001 was this: Never, ever ignore the obvious either.

To the government and most of the people of the United States, it seemed that the country on 9/11 had been attacked in a particularly odious way (air piracy used to maximize civilian casualties) by a particularly odious group (a secretive and homicidal gang: part multinational corporation, part crime family) that was sworn to a medieval cult of death, a racist hatred of Jews, a religious frenzy against Hindus, Christians, Shia Muslims, and “unbelievers,” and the restoration of a long-vanished and despotic empire.

To me, this remains the main point about al-Qaida and its surrogates. I do not believe, by stipulating it as the main point, that I try to oversimplify matters. I feel no need to show off or to think of something novel to say. Moreover, many of the attempts to introduce “complexity” into the picture strike me as half-baked obfuscations or distractions.

These range from the irredeemably paranoid and contemptible efforts to pin responsibility for the attacks onto the Bush administration or the Jews, to the sometimes wearisome but not necessarily untrue insistence that Islamic peoples have suffered oppression. (Even when formally true, the latter must simply not be used as nonsequitur special pleading for the use of random violence by self-appointed Muslims.)

Underlying these and other attempts to change the subject there was, and still is, a perverse desire to say that the 9/11 atrocities were in some way deserved, or made historically more explicable, by the many crimes of past American foreign policy. Either that, or—to recall the contemporary comments of the “Reverends” Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson — a punishment from heaven for American sinfulness. (The two ways of thinking, one of them ostensibly “left” and the other “right,” are in fact more or less identical.)

That this was an assault upon our society, whatever its ostensible capitalist and militarist “targets,” was again thought too obvious a point for a clever person to make. It became increasingly obvious, though, with every successive nihilistic attack on London, Madrid, Istanbul, Baghdad, and Bali. There was always some “intellectual,” however, to argue in each case that the policy of Tony Blair, or George Bush, or the Spanish government, was the “root cause” of the broad-daylight slaughter of civilians. Responsibility, somehow, never lay squarely with the perpetrators.

(Hat tip to David Foster.)

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

To a Man With a Hammer

Sunday, September 11th, 2011

Two days after the 9/11 attacks, Robert X. Cringely reiterated that everything looks like a nail:

I’m a longtime pilot, and a guy who used to work in the Middle East. Twenty-two years ago, I was a Fed investigating the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, so I have some experience of how governments approach disasters. It’s not pretty.

The point of terrorism is to leverage the efforts of a small group in an attempt to modify the behavior of a much larger group. I worked long ago as a reporter in Northern Ireland, and left that gig specifically because I began to feel like a pawn of the Provisional Wing of the Irish Republic Army. That 300-member organization was using my stories about their acts to influence people all over the world. I was probably just as much a pawn of the Ulster Defense League, the folks on the other side, but I didn’t want to be a pawn of anyone, so I left. The most important reaction to terrorism that a free society can show is to not give in to it.

But not giving in takes many forms, and I fear that some of the official reactions to the events of this week will take the form of effectively giving in if they also mean that we give up our freedom.

“To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” wrote Mark Twain. In the current, context this means that the organizations charged with reacting to this catastrophe will do so by doing what they have always done, only more of it. Congress, which controls the budget and passes laws, will want to pass laws and to allocate more money, lots of money, forgetting completely about any campaign promises. The military, which is the nation’s enforcer, will want to use force, if only they can find a foe. The intelligence community, which gathers information, will want to be even more energetic in that gathering, no matter what the cost to the privacy of the millions of us who aren’t thinking of terrorist acts. And agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulate, will want to create more stringent regulations. Now here is an important point to be remembered: All these parties will want to do these things WHETHER THEY ARE WARRANTED OR USEFUL OR NOT.

In 1956 two airliners collided over the Grand Canyon and the regulatory response was today’s air traffic control system. The FAA felt that by keeping most planes under positive control — telling them where to go and when — they could avoid future collisions. Yet collisions continue to happen. In 1978 a Pacific Southwest Airlines plane smashed into a small Cessna over San Diego despite the fact that both planes were flying under instrument rules and were under positive control. The FAA response that time was to carve up even more finely the sky over nearly every metropolitan area, controlling the airspace even more stringently with the intent of keeping instrument and visual traffic apart. There was no visual traffic in the San Diego accident, yet we still live with rules that arose from that accident even though those rules would not have prevented it.

So how will the FAA react this time? They will do what they have always done, pass new and stricter rules, and they will do so because it makes them feel better, not because it will actually help.

There is already a restricted area around the Pentagon where planes have never been allowed to fly, yet that didn’t stop this week’s attack. Should we make the restricted area larger? How much larger is large enough? Will we mount anti-aircraft guns atop office buildings? It won’t help. Would creating a restricted area over the World Trade Center have kept a hijacked airliner from entering that space? No, it wouldn’t. New rules will follow, and some of those rules won’t help, either.

It’s not just the government that is guilty of this over-reaction. Tuesday morning, I was speaking to eighth graders at the Pleasanton Middle School in California. The school was abuzz with news from the East Coast, but even more abuzz the next day when the kids had been through a full evening of re-run explosion footage and talking news heads instead of “That 70s Show.” I’m not saying we shouldn’t cover the news, but sometimes the extent to which we cover it creates problems of its own. There has been much made of the terrorists choosing New York as a target because it is the heart of the world financial community, but what made it an attractive target was more likely the city’s role as the very center of world media. That Peter Jennings could grab a shower at home and get right back on the air wasn’t by accident.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana

Sunday, September 11th, 2011

Carl Orff‘s Carmina Burana — particularly the O Fortuna movement — holds quite a place in popular culture.

It’s often tempting to see Classical Music as sepia-hued etchings from the past, Borepatch says, but this misses the fact that the people involved were human — quite human:

And so with Carl Orff.

He was a very modern classical composer, who wrote what we would describe as classically classical music. Music that was praised by the Nazis in his native Germany. The music is great — you’ve heard it. His weakness was common — you’ve seen this sort of thing yourself, although almost certainly on a lesser scale.

You see, Orff had a life long friend, who got involved with an anti-Nazi resistance movement. When his friend was arrested, his friend’s wife begged Orff to use his influence to save him. Orff refused, fearing arrest himself. That all too common weakness haunted him for the rest of his life.

Orff’s fame came from his 1937 composition, Carmina Burana, which he based on a medieval manuscript of the same name. Lost in the Monastery library, the manuscript was found in the early nineteenth century. The fame is justified, and survives to this day. As I said earlier, you’ve heard this before.

This piece describes the goddess Fortuna, and her wheel. Some people are rising in stature and fortune, some are falling. I wonder if Orff thought of his friend in these terms, with his star rising, and his friend’s falling, ultimately towards the firing squad.

Bruce Charlton brings up Carmina Burana, his favorite piece of 20th-century music, while addressing the question of whether the Middle Ages were merry or miserable:

Any past era was “miserable” for most people in the sense that (compared with the past several decades) there was a lot of starvation, disease, warfare, torture, discomfort and dirt.

But in eras of great Christian devoutness — other-worldly eras — these factors carried much, much less weight than they do or would for us.

An interesting test case is Carmina Burana (songs from the Beuern, a monastery), which is a collection of essentially secular lyrics, a selection from which was set to music in a dramatized cantata by Carl Orff during the paganistic era of National Socialism — in other words a modern and non-Christian angle on medievalism.

Orff’s Carmina Burana represents just about the “merriest” version of the medieval era that is possible minus Christianity — and (yet) it is (taken in total) a terrifying vision of life.

Posted in Media | No Comments »

Top Shot Season 3 Mike Hughes Train Up Video Journal

Saturday, September 10th, 2011

I get the impression that Top Shot season 3 competitor Mike Hughes trained up a bit more than most:

Posted in Media, Weapons | No Comments »

The Polar Bear Problem

Saturday, September 10th, 2011

Matt Ridley discusses the polar bear problem — and how it has changed over a generation:

Today bears are now far more common in Spitsbergen and the other islands of Svalbard. They are more common all over the Arctic than 33 years ago. The US Fish and Wildlife Service estimated in 2008 that the polar bear population was at a historic high of 20,000-25,000 bears, up from as low as 5,000-10,000 bears in the 1960s. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature estimated in 1966 that there were 10,000 polar bears in the world; in 2006, the same source estimated 20,000-25,000 bears. Just last May the IUCN Polar BearSpecialist Group concluded there has probably been no drop in the numbers since then.

The reason for this boom is no mystery. When I travelled in Spitsbergen in the 1970s and 1980s you could still find old trap guns on remote headlands, dating from decades before: open-ended wooden boxes concealing rusty rifles with wires attached to the triggers so that a bear would shoot itself if it pulled the bait. The trapper would return later for the skin. Until 1973, bears were hunted for their fur and for sport; in that year, an international agreement banned unregulated hunting, shooting from aircraft and shooting from icebreakers. The species then thrived. Russia, Greenland and Canada all still allow some hunting, mainly by indigenous people, but at a much reduced level.

Not all populations are thriving. Some authorities think the numbers are declining in Hudson Bay and parts of the Canadian Arctic, while expanding elsewhere, but these are minor fluctuations compared with the impressive recovery of the species since the 1960s. Al Gore, in his film An Inconvenient Truth, made much of a report of four bears that drowned in open water off Alaska, implying this was a new and deadly fate awaiting polar bears as Arctic ice retreated. But polar bears often swim long distances — one was recorded swimming 400 miles — and nobody knows how unusual it was for four to get caught in a storm and drown.

The polar bear is a specialist seal-eating predator (so it is little wonder that it goes for other elongated six-foot mammals when hungry). It occupies a specific niche: the ice edge. It cannot thrive on unbroken Arctic sea ice, because seals are not found there. Nor can it survive on ice-free sea because it cannot kill seals in open water. In parts of the Arctic, notably Hudson Bay and Wrangel Island, it takes refuge on land for several late summer months when the ice vanishes, fasting — or scavenging ineffectually for young walrus, birds and fish — till the ice re-forms. This is when it is hungriest and most dangerous.

If the ice-free season lengthens in these places because of climate change, the bears might die out. After all, the most southerly polar bear dens in the world, in James Bay in Canada, are on the same latitude as Nottingham: they are at the extreme southerly end of their range. But by the same token, areas further north, currently too solidly frozen for seals, will become more hospitable to bears.

There is now good evidence that this sort of ice retreat has happened in the past. For example Svend Funder of the University of Copenhagen recently published a paper with two colleagues, based on a study of driftwood and beach ridges in north-eastern Greenland, where today year-round ice fastened to the shore prevents waves that can form beach ridges. They concluded that for thousands of years when the Arctic was known to be 2-4°C warmer, beach ridges formed and driftwood failed to make it to Greenland, indicating open water on this coast (driftwood needs multi-year ice to be transported from Siberia without sinking).

In Funder’s words: ‘Our studies show that there have been large fluctuations in the amount of summer sea ice during the last 10,000 years. During the so-called Holocene Climate Optimum, from approximately 8,000 to 5,000 years ago, when the temperatures were somewhat warmer than today, there was significantly less sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, probably less than 50 per cent of the summer 2007 coverage, which was absolutely the lowest on record.’

Much has been made of the 2007 summer ice retreat being the ‘greatest on record’, but records began only in 1979. In the 1920s and 1930s, there were probably still more open seasons; likewise in the medieval, Roman and other warm periods all the way back to the Holocene Optimum. Polar bears certainly survived such warmer spells, presumably by ranging somewhat further north. Indeed, fossils suggest that polar bears already existed in their current form during the last interglacial period, 120,000 years ago, when the Arctic was almost certainly wholly free of ice in late summer.

A total disappearance of sea ice at all seasons would undoubtedly doom thepolar bear’s lifestyle. But no scientist in his wildest exaggerations is suggesting the disappearance of Arctic sea ice in winter. As long as there is pack ice for much of the year with an ice edge, plenty of seals and controls on hunting, thepolar bear is going to thrive — and tent-based tourism to the Arctic is going to be dangerous.

Posted in Animals, Science | 1 Comment »

The Picoeconomics of Education

Saturday, September 10th, 2011

Some economists look at the effect of individuals‘ education on income — the microeconomics of education. Some look at the effect of countries‘ education on income — the macroeconomics of education. Bryan Caplan looks at what students actually study, learn and retain — the picoeconomics of education:

The microeconomic approach tells us how much the market rewards education.  But in the end, it doesn’t tell us why.  To discover why education matters, we must descend to the picoeconomic level.

Key example: the main reason I’m think signaling is big deal has nothing to do with either Micro-Mincerian or Macro-Mincerian estimates of the return to education.  The main reason I think signaling is a big deal is that (a) students study a ton of material that almost no job uses; (b) the Transfer of Learning literature shows that learning is highly specific – you don’t build general purpose mental muscles by learning Latin; (c) students quickly — and happily — forget most of what they learn, anyway.  And yet employers amply reward education!  The signaling model instantly looks like the best way to explain all the key facts.

You’d never extract any of these lessons from wage regressions.  To reach them, you’ve got to actually peer inside the individual mind — or introspect on your own experience.  Yet economists who study education habitually neglect not just these particular insights, but the very existence of a picoeconomic level.  And that is why they fail to see education for what it is.

Posted in Economics, Education | No Comments »

Rant Day, Ten Years On

Friday, September 9th, 2011

Ten years ago this day, the Web rudely told Joseph Fouché that Ahmed Shah Masood had been assassinated:

I was annoyed.

I hated the Taliban. To me, they were the enemy of all mankind. My hate didn’t single them out for their Third World thuggishness, their seventh century flavored oppression, or their harboring of a declared enemy of my country.

No, I hated them for blowing up some statues that had stood for 1,500 years.

For 1,000 of those years, Islam had lived besides the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan. Time and the enthusiasm of the occasional iconoclast had vandalized the statues by March of 2001. But the Taliban of March 2011 had ambitions to be the Taliban of March 622. They had the means of 2oo1 to carry out the imagined ends of 622. Dynamite, artillery, and rocketry let the Taliban do in three weeks what history had failed to do in fifteen centuries.

History is a fragile flower. What survives the unfolding of events is idiosyncratic. We inherit only a few suggestive piles of rubble. From these, numberless castles of the imagination have been conjured. One particularly insistent ghost of conjured history drove the Taliban to destroy the statues : the idealized community erected by Muhammad in Mecca and Medina from the hegira in 622 to his death in 632. This phantom umma, antiseptically removed far from the sordid and compromised Islam of March 2001, looked down on the Taliban from 15 centuries back and commanded them to erase the Buddhas of Bamiyan from history. They promised that, as each piece of the shattered idol flew away, the sacralized community of the Prophet would draw nearer and nearer.

And so the statues fell.

Since history swallows its own tail anyway, I oppose those who feel that it needs their enthusiastic help. History does a fine job on its own. Human meddling in what survives and what doesn’t is unnecessary. Accident and negligence will always consume more history than intention could ever aspire to. But the Taliban wanted to speed the work of history along. They figured that they could not only make it faster but that they could it flip 180 degrees and make it run backwards. So they declared war on history.

To me, this made them barbarians. To me, they deserved to be removed from history themselves. The only man who seemed to be actively helping the Taliban to remove themselves from history seemed to be Massood. And now Massood had gone to Allah, assisted by the same barbarians.

Downstairs I went. I ranted in the kitchen about the tragedy of Ahmed Shah Massood and his death to Mom and the occasional passing brother. They didn’t know who Ahmed Shah Massood was or where this Afghanistan was. To them, it was a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom they knew nothing. Massood might as well have been the Massood in the Moon, fighting to keep one small grubby corner of the lunar surface free of space Taliban.

Mom patiently listened as dinner was set. Over the years, she’d grown used to my ranting on and on about this or that distant obscurity. She knew that, with time, I’d fulminate my way out of my idée fixe of the moment and go back to quietly tending my garden of trivia. The world would go on. Normalcy would flow unvexed into the future. Rant mode ran out of steam. I ate dinner. I went back to my lair where my books and my computers would protect me. The sun set on September 9th, 2001. I went to sleep.

Two Buddha statues and the Lion of Panjshir would be only be the first to fall. Unseen in the gathering dark, history, with brutal intent, blatantly ignoring its own end in 1989, was creeping up on the East Coast to be reborn.

Posted in War | No Comments »

Why the Gender Gap Won’t Go Away. Ever.

Friday, September 9th, 2011

Kay S. Hymowitz explains why the gender gap won’t go away — ever:

Let’s begin by unpacking that 75-cent statistic, which actually varies from 75 to about 81, depending on the year and the study. The figure is based on the average earnings of full-time, year-round (FTYR) workers, usually defined as those who work 35 hours a week or more.

But consider the mischief contained in that “or more.” It makes the full-time category embrace everyone from a clerk who arrives at her desk at 9 AM and leaves promptly at 4 PM to a trial lawyer who eats dinner four nights a week — and lunch on weekends — at his desk. I assume, in this case, that the clerk is a woman and the lawyer a man for the simple reason that — and here is an average that proofers rarely mention — full-time men work more hours than full-time women do. In 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 27 percent of male full-time workers had workweeks of 41 or more hours, compared with 15 percent of female full-time workers; meanwhile, just 4 percent of full-time men worked 35 to 39 hours a week, while 12 percent of women did. Since FTYR men work more than FTYR women do, it shouldn’t be surprising that the men, on average, earn more.

The way proofers finesse “full-time” can be a wonder to behold. Take a recent article in the Washington Post by Mariko Chang, author of a forthcoming book on the wealth gap between women and men. Chang cites a wage difference between “full-time” male and female pharmacists to show how “even when they work in the same occupation, men earn more.” A moment’s Googling led me to a 2001 study in the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association concluding that male pharmacists worked 44.1 hours a week, on average, while females worked 37.2 hours. That study is a bit dated, but it’s a good guess that things haven’t changed much in the last decade. According to a 2009 article in the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, female pharmacists’ preference for reduced work hours is enough to lead to an industry labor shortage.

The other arena of mischief contained in the 75-cent statistic lies in the seemingly harmless term “occupation.” Everyone knows that a CEO makes more than a secretary and that a computer scientist makes more than a nurse. And most people wouldn’t be shocked to hear that secretaries and nurses are likely to be women, while CEOs and computer scientists are likely to be men. That obviously explains much of the wage gap.

But proofers often make the claim that women earn less than men doing the exact same job. They can’t possibly know that. The Labor Department’s occupational categories can be so large that a woman could drive a truck through them. Among “physicians and surgeons,” for example, women make only 64.2 percent of what men make. Outrageous, right? Not if you consider that there are dozens of specialties in medicine: some, like cardiac surgery, require years of extra training, grueling hours, and life-and-death procedures; others, like pediatrics, are less demanding and consequently less highly rewarded. Only 16 percent of surgeons, but a full 50 percent of pediatricians, are women. So the statement that female doctors make only 64.2 percent of what men make is really on the order of a tautology, much like saying that a surgeon working 50 hours a week makes significantly more than a pediatrician working 37.

A good example of how proofers get away with using the rogue term “occupation” is Behind the Pay Gap, a widely quoted 2007 study from the American Association of University Women whose executive summary informs us in its second paragraph that “one year out of college, women working full time earn only 80 percent as much as their male colleagues earn.” The report divides the labor force into 11 extremely broad occupations determined by the Department of Education. So ten years after graduation, we learn, women who go into “business” earn considerably less than their male counterparts do. But the businessman could be an associate at Morgan Stanley who majored in econ, while the businesswoman could be a human-relations manager at Foot Locker who took a lot of psych courses. You don’t read until the end of the summary — a point at which many readers will have already Tweeted their indignation — that when you control for such factors as education and hours worked, there’s actually just a 5 percent pay gap. But the AAUW isn’t going to begin a report with the statement that women earn 95 percent of what their male counterparts earn, is it?
[...]
So why do women work fewer hours, choose less demanding jobs, and then earn less than men do? The answer is obvious: kids. A number of researchers have found that if you consider only childless women, the wage gap disappears. June O’Neill, an economist who has probably studied wage gaps as much as anyone alive, has found that single, childless women make about 8 percent more than single, childless men do (though the advantage vanishes when you factor in education). Using Census Bureau data of pay levels in 147 of the nation’s 150 largest cities, the research firm Reach Advisors recently showed that single, childless working women under 30 earned 8 percent more than their male counterparts did.

Posted in Business, Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Arnold Kling’s NPR Non-Appearance

Friday, September 9th, 2011

Arnold Kling describes his NPR non-appearance:

Earlier today, I got an email from someone at NPR asking if I was available to comment on the President’s speech afterward. I replied with my phone number, and the woman called me (not an on-air personality. I will withhold her name.) She started asking me my opinions on various things. When she asked my opinion on having Federal agencies refinance everyone’s mortgage, I said that I thought that homeowners had already had enough subsidies thrown at them. She replied, “But I have friends with underwater mortgages!” She simply could not conceive of anyone holding my views.

An hour later, she left a voice mail saying sorry, but it was not going to work for me to appear on the show. She said they would keep me in mind and perhaps use me some other time. After hell freezes over would be my guess.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

First Electric Helicopter Flight

Thursday, September 8th, 2011

When the folks at Sikorsky announced their electric helicopter last year, I didn’t realize that they were still a ways off from getting it off the ground.

Now a fellow named Pascal Chretien has achieved the world’s first untethered, manned electric helicopter flight by following a very different strategy.  Instead of modifying a tried-and-true design to use electric motors, he went with counter-rotating coaxial main rotors, eliminating the need for a “wasteful” tail rotor. Further, instead of the typical cyclic control, which tilts the main-rotor blades to direct the helicopter, he went with a simple weight-shifting system, pushed and pulled with a big set of handlebars.  I’m not sure how well that’ll scale.

Anyway, this let him get a meter off the ground for a couple minutes.  Batteries don’t store a lot of energy.

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Are Smart People Getting Smarter?

Thursday, September 8th, 2011

The Flynn effect, Jonah Lehrer notes, has always been tinged with mystery:

Some measures of intelligence — such as performance on Raven’s Progressive Matrices in Des Moines and Scotland — have been increasing for at least 100 years. What’s most peculiar is how scores have increased:

  1. Scores have increased the most on the problem-solving portion of intelligence tests.
  2. Verbal intelligence has remained relatively flat, while non-verbal scores continue to rise.
  3. Performance gains have occurred across all age groups.
  4. The rise in scores exists primarily on those tests with content that does not appear to be easily learned.

What’s puzzling about this increase in general intelligence is that it appears where we’d least expect it. While one might assume that IQ scores could increase over time in terms of crystallized intelligence — the part of the test that measures particular kinds of knowledge, such as being able to count or vocabulary words — it’s actually increased on measures of fluid intelligence, which is the ability to solve abstract problems.

Apparently the Flynn effect isn’t simply a matter of the lower-classes getting increased access to good nutrition and school — and less exposure to lead and other toxins. The top 5 percent are also scoring higher, which suggests some new form of environmental stimulation is boosting liquid intelligence:

Even for those on the right side of the curve, intelligence gains probably have many distinct causes, from the complexity of The Wire to the social multiplier effect, which is the tendency of smart people to hang out with other smart people. (In this sense, gifted programs in schools might help drive IQ gains among the top five percent. The Internet probably helps, too.) The question, of course, is whether such factors have really changed over time. Has it gotten easier for smart people to interact with each other? Are those on the right side of the IQ distribution now more likely to have children together? Would the Flynn effect be even larger if we did more of [fill in the blank]? These questions have no easy answers, but at least we now know that they need to be answered.

I don’t think you need to point to smart TV to explain this, as even I Love Lucy and Gilligan’s Island reruns are challenging for children who might otherwise be outside throwing rocks and swinging sticks. Those shows were mainstream adult fare when they first appeared on the air.

Al Fin lists a number of hypotheses:

Explanations for the Flynn Effect generally range from better nutrition, increased literacy, higher use of abstract thinking as populations increasingly move into urban environments, and even the greater use of Caesarean section in childbirth!

One unusual explanation for the Flynn Effect is a higher incidence of Asperger’s variant of autistic spectrum disorder. Another interesting explanation given is the relatively accelerated physical development of youngsters today as opposed to youngsters half a century or more ago. Earlier onset of puberty in modern times is a partial support for this argument. If this is true, comparison of today’s 12 year olds’ scores to the scores of 12 year olds several decades ago, would not be valid. (more here)

Posted in Education, Science | No Comments »

Performance-Enhancing Drugs Work

Wednesday, September 7th, 2011

Performance-enhancing drugs work, but how much?

[W]e’ll use the example they give of a German Female shot-put athlete. This athlete had been training for 14 years before she was put onto the programme, so certainly, her improvement in results cannot be explained by a response to training, as it might be if she was still a junior athlete.

So the Figure below shows the improvement in performance in this woman shot putter during a 5 month period in 1968. The blue block on the X-axis shows when she was given the drug — Turinabol, in doses of 14 tablets per week (10 mg per day, each tablet = 5mg). You’ll see how she gains muscle strength and improves her performances dramatically in only a few weeks — we’re talking 9% over the course of about 10 weeks of drug use! But it gets better (or worse, depending on your point of view!)

Jump ahead to 1969, where the same woman went through very much the same procedure. The Figure below shows the performances over a similar five month period. This time, the drug was administered in slightly higher doses, and in three separate cycles. The result is the same. Her performance improved by an amazing 17% from the start to the end of the season, with a new world record of 20.10 m the culmination.

There was more to come. In 1970, the same athlete was again systematically doped, but with even higher doses. She once again broke the world record, and this time, broke the indoor world record as well. She ended with a personal best of 20.22 m, which was a fully 2m further than she had managed to achieve on 14 years of training BEFORE starting on the doping programme! This is an 11% improvement! But what is particularly important is to notice how her performances when NOT ON THE DRUG are so ‘poor’ — she starts each season a full 3 m off what she will reach at the end, with the aid of the steroid.

Anabolic steroids also dramatically improved female runners’ times — by 4–5 seconds in the 400 m, 5–10 s in the 800 m, and by 7–10 s in the 1500 m:

So if you look at the current world record in the 400 m event, it stands at 47.60 (Marita Koch). No one has managed to even threaten it since the 1980′s, and it’s quite conceivable, assuming the table above is correct, that this 47.60 is worth about, oh, 50.60. And suddenly then, today’s runners are comparable!

Posted in Fitness, Science | 2 Comments »

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