Ghost students.

Essentially, it's a transfer payment. I basically believe that anything that would take Social Security payments below their present guaranteed level is a mistake. I think that in this country -- extraordinarily rich country -- that the people in their productive years can take care of those outside in both areas, even though the ratio of productive to non-productive has changed and is changing. But we take care of our young. And a rich country takes care of its young, and it takes care of its old.--Buffett on Social Security

He favors raising the cap. He doesn't explain how the demographics play into this opinion.

***

Abundance is about the specific puzzle of Gavin Newsom beginning his governorship by saying he wanted to build 3.5 million new homes in California and falling far, far, far short. Abundance is about why we never got high-speed rail, even though Californians voted to fund it and the federal government kicked in billions under Barack Obama. Abundance is about the reality that we cannot build enough clean energy infrastructure to meet the climate goals that virtually everyone on the Left believes we should meet under the laws we currently have.
Abundance is about the category of goods for which the government has lost the ability to deliver, even when the people who want to deliver in that way win power. --Klein, Abundance's author. 

So maybe incompetence is just a force of nature?

***

By as late as 1940, the federal and state governments’ investment in research amounted to only 23 percent of U.S. R&D and 10 percent of U.S. basic science, and the nature of that investment could have had little or no impact on rates of American economic or health growth: Defense R&D has almost no economic benefit, while the agricultural R&D was surplus to requirement.--Kealey


***

When people say Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, they are not making a metaphysical claim. They are pointing out that there is no external source from which its value is derived. Gold retains value because it has physical and industrial uses regardless of price. Equities derive value from businesses. Debt derives value from repayment. Fiat currency derives durability from taxation, legal-tender laws, and institutional enforcement. Bitcoin derives value only from the expectation that someone else will want it later. That expectation can sustain a price for long periods, but it is not a reference. There is nothing for valuation to converge toward.--Lincoln Square

And...Research cited by CryptoNews found that more than 60 percent of Trump-themed meme coins have effectively failed, losing most of their value and trading activity. CoinDesk has reported that at least one high-profile Trump coin is down more than 80 percent from its launch price.

***

Ghost students.

Community colleges cannot decline high school graduates under most circumstances. Imagine what can happen.

Over the past five years, the federal government has investigated more than $350 million in fraud perpetrated by "ghost student" schemes

The scammers will use stolen or fake identities to enroll in classes online and sign up for Pell grants and loans, then disappear once they get the money -- robbing the federal government of hundreds of millions of dollars and leaving an untold number of victims of the stolen identity. 

In California alone, nearly a third of all community college applicants in 2024 were identified as fraudulent, according to the California Community Colleges, the state's administrative body for the community college system.
Dr. Beatriz Chaidez, the chancellor of the San Jose Evergreen Community College District, told KGO-TV in San Francisco that at one point, a 50-person online class was booked in minutes and had 100 individuals on its waitlist. The school later learned that just six of those "students" were real people trying to get an education.

More than 200 investigations have opened nationwide, with some schemes suspected of racking up more than a billion dollars.
3 women, using prison inmates' IDs, made $1 million in one year.
Before their arrests in 2018 and 2019, a father and son in Arizona made off with more than $7 million from ghost student scams, and both served 12-month prison sentences after pleading guilty. And a Maryland man who used the identities of 60 people to take in more than $6.7 million in fraudulent financial aid was sentenced in 2023 to four years in prison.

California has been particularly vulnerable.
California does not require ID.
Pierce College's student body shrank 36% when ghost students were purged.

$9 billion stolen from day care centers by people who don't speak English.

Does anybody have a job anymore?

 

Labor Day

On this day:
1864
American Civil War: Confederate General John Bell Hood evacuates Atlanta, Georgia after a four-month siege by General Sherman
1923
The Great Kantō earthquake devastates Tokyo and Yokohama, killing about 105,000 people.
1939
Adolf Hitler signs an order to begin the systematic euthanasia of mentally ill and disabled people
1939
World War II: Nazi Germany and Slovakia invade Poland, beginning World War II.
1972
In Reykjavík, Iceland, American Bobby Fischer beats Russian Boris Spassky to become the world chess champion.
1983
Cold War: Korean Air Flight 007 is shot down by a Soviet Union jet fighter when the commercial aircraft enters Soviet airspace. All 269 on board die, including Congressman Lawrence McDonald.
1985
A joint American–French expedition locates the wreckage of the RMS Titanic.
2004
Beslan school hostage crisis commences when armed terrorists take children and adults hostage in Beslan in North Ossetia, Russia.

***

The Trump administration is drawing up plans to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War, according to a White House official, following up on the president’s push to revive a name last used in 1947.

***

AI fiction authorship has created a strange, obtuse, intelligent-sounding gibberish. 

If AI learns from us, what does that mean?

***

Populist or far-right parties are leading the polls in the U.K., France, and Germany simultaneously.

***

Under President Trump, the government has become a minority owner of Intel and will take a cut of Nvidia’s and Advanced Micro Devices’ sales of artificial-intelligence chips to China. This might sound like Chinese-style state capitalism, not classic U.S. free enterprise. However, government investment in companies is as American as apple pie and was common in the 19th century, Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Zweig writes. Unfortunately, history suggests the likely results will be massive misallocation of capital and a surge in waste, corruption, and conflicts of interest. --wsj

***

India is meeting with China, China is meeting with Russia. We are meeting with ourselves. 

Now, if Russia would just give China some of that eastern land...

***

Florida State true freshman linebacker Ethan Pritchard was injured and subsequently hospitalized following a shooting incident in Havana, Florida, on Sunday evening.

***

The navigation system of a plane carrying Ursula von der Leyen was disrupted due to suspected Russian interference, the European Commission said.
A spokesperson said the "GPS jamming" happened while the Commission president was about to arrive in southern Bulgaria on Sunday, but she still landed safely.

***

Labor Day


A Labor Day parable I stole off a blog:

A guy looked at my Porsche the other day and said I wonder how many people could have been fed for the money that sports car costs. I replied I am not sure, it fed a lot of families in Bowling Green, Kentucky who built it, it fed the people who make the tires, it fed the people who made the components that went into it, it fed the people in the copper mine who mined the copper for the wires, it fed people in Decatur IL, at Caterpillar who make the trucks that haul the copper ore. It fed the trucking people who hauled it from the plant to the dealer and fed the people working at the dealership and their families. BUT,… I have to admit, I guess I really don’t know how many people it fed.

*

Another thought on labor for Labor Day.

"Growing cotton, further, unlike sugar or rice, never required slavery. By 1870, freedmen and whites produced as much cotton as the South produced in the slave time of 1860. Cotton was not a slave crop in India or in southwest China, where it was grown in bulk anciently. And many whites in the South grew it, too, before the war and after. That slaves produced cotton does not imply that they were essential or causal in the production.

Economists have been thinking about such issues for half a century. You wouldn’t know it from the King Cottoners. They assert, for example, that a slave was “cheap labor.” Mistaken again. After all, slaves ate, and they didn’t produce until they grew up. Stanley Engerman and the late Nobel Prize winner Robert Fogel confirmed in 1974 what economic common sense would suggest: that productivity was incorporated into the market price of a slave. It’s how any capital market works. If you bought a slave, you faced the cost of alternative uses of the capital. No supernormal profits accrued from the purchase. Slave labor was not a free lunch. The wealth was not piled up.
….
We need to stop using the history of slavery to bolster anti-capitalist ideology. Ingenuity, not exploitation by slavery or imperialism or finance, is the story of the modern world."--McCloskey

The Substance of Work

Dubas struck down any notion that Guentzel would be moved speaking on his bi-weekly GM Show with Josh Getzoff and said a conversation will be had with the forward about his future, but he has not been shopping the forward.

***

The U.S. secretly warned Iran that Islamic State was preparing to carry out the terrorist attack early this month that killed more than 80 Iranians in a pair of coordinated suicide bombings, U.S. officials said. The confidential alert came after the U.S. acquired intelligence that Islamic State’s affiliate in Afghanistan, ISIS-Khorasan, known as ISIS-K, was plotting to attack Iran, they said.

***

King Charles III announced he had been suffering from an enlarged prostate, also known as benign prostatic hyperplasia, and would be undergoing a corrective procedure at the hospital sometime this week.

***

Roughly 70% of battery-powered electric car sales in the United States are courtesy of Tesla. However, for four straight quarters, TSLA stock has plummeted after reporting earnings, and the stock is more than 50% off its all-time high of $414.50, which was achieved in 2021.

***


The Substance of Work

The FAA website carries the declaration that the FAA is actively recruiting disabled people to employ. That is to say, disabilities have entered the hierarchy of desirable employment elements--but not skills--presumably competing with more traditional qualities--skills.

What does this mean?

Apparently, the search for workers has separated from worker performance; the job itself has become the objective of the hire. The purpose of the entity has become employment, not the achievement of an occupational objective. So the job does not demand efficiency and quality. 

If this has a familiar ring to it, it should. The old Marxist idea is that the value of a commodity can be measured by the average number of labor hours required to produce that commodity. The product and the workers that produce it are only distantly related. Indeed a product created by one organization in X hours has half the value of the same product in another organization created in 2X hours.

This confuses value with cost. Such thinking adds value to inefficiency and mediocrity. 

It's a bad economic idea. We can only wait to see what kind of aerodynamic idea it is.

SatStats

 

                        SatStats

Some new research — “Evidence of The Unintended Labor Scheduling Implications of The Minimum Wages” — shows that every $1 an hour increase in government-mandated minimum wages (“political wage-setting”) leads to the following (mostly) adverse outcomes:

-a 27.7% increase in the total number of workers scheduled to work each week

-a 20.8% decrease in the average number of hours each employee worked per week
-For an average store in California, these two changes above translated into four extra workers per week and five fewer hours per worker per week, resulting in a 13.6% decrease in the total wage compensation of an average minimum wage worker
-a 23% decrease in the percentage of employees working more than 20 hours per week (making them eligible for retirement benefits)
-a 14.9% decrease in the percentage of employees working more than 30 hours per week (making them eligible for health care benefits)
-a 33% increase in fluctuations in the number of hours worked per week
-a 9.5% increase in fluctuations in the number of hours worked per day
-a 9.8% increase in fluctuations of shift start times and
average net losses of at least $1,590 per year per employee, equivalent to 11.6% of workers’ total compensation (assuming that workers were able to use their reduced hours to work a second job — an assumption which may not hold true for many employees).

Here’s a summary of the research from the authors in the Harvard Business Review (“Research: When a Higher Minimum Wage Leads to Lower Compensation“):

While proponents of increasing the minimum wage have grown increasingly vocal in the U.S., new research suggests that raising the minimum wage can actually have a significant negative impact on the total compensation of hourly workers. Researchers analyzed a detailed dataset of wage and scheduling data for more than 5,000 employees at a single national retailer, and compared outcomes for workers in California (which had several minimum wage increases during the study period) and Texas (which had zero increases). They found that in the stores that experienced a minimum wage hike, workers on average worked fewer hours per week, were less likely to qualify for benefits, and had less-consistent schedules. These factors corresponded to an average 11.6% decrease in total compensation for every $1 increase in the minimum wage. Based on these findings, the authors argue that policymakers should consider minimum wage hikes with caution, and should be sure to complement them with policies designed to ensure consistent schedules and adequate hours for workers — or risk harming the very people they’re aiming to support.

And here’s the conclusion from the HBR article:

When it comes to assessing the impact of minimum wage on worker welfare, economists and policymakers tend to emphasize employment rates alone. But our study shows that other factors, such as benefits and worker schedules, can make a major difference. Even if overall employment rates remain constant, increasing the minimum wage can lead firms to make strategic shifts in their labor scheduling practices that can ultimately have a substantial, negative effect on the welfare of the very workers these policies aim to protect.

Someone is probably surprised.

Harris and The Impossible Dream

And even the romantic ideals of socialism, so appealing to youth, are crazy-inconsistent, as Kolakowski showed in his history of European socialism. They promise a freedom from work that nonetheless makes us rich, a central plan without tyranny, and individual liberties strictly subordinated to a general will. Craaaazy, kids.--McCloskey

Back from Austin. Neat town, flat and hot. Interesting motorized scooters everywhere. Trip was late and I am seriously tired. Good meeting. My first really bad Uber driver.

Adam Smith's policy of free trade was not based on any belief in the ‘perfection’ of markets but, rather, on his understanding that markets are superior to political interventions.

Race hustlers focus on “gaps” between whites and blacks with regard to income and educational attainment, which they attribute to “systemic” racism. But what about the gaps between Asian-Americans and whites? Asians, on average, earn considerably more than whites and as a group they do better in school.  Such incongruities would stagger honest, thinking people. Fortunately for the hustlers, they are spared any conflict.
A New York City Department of Education-sponsored panel designed to combat racism told parents that Asian American students “benefit from white supremacy” and “proximity to white privilege." The comments drew backlash from some parents and Asian activists, but not the Department of Education, which neither denied nor denounced them.
Stupid ideas about complicated problems create real risks to the people who hold them. And to the communities that tolerate them. The problem with really bad ideas is that it sometimes takes a lot of time for them to move along in the evolution of their implosion.

“Consequences of breeding from stock lacking human vitality always will give us social problems and perpetuate institutions of charity and crime.”--the sainted Margaret Sanger

                Harris and The Impossible Dream

Presidential candidate Kamala Harris has seen a problem and she has a plan. 
The ideal?: Men and women should receive equal pay for equal work. She cites the known discrepancy between the median pay for men and women, a disparity that does not include choice of occupation, time worked and the like. She's smart; she must know the inaccuracy of the generalization but politics and ambition must rise above truth.

But her solution to the non-problem is worse. Instead of having workers claim and then prove discrimination, she wants the opposite: Companies would have to prove a negative—that they aren’t discriminating. Under Ms. Harris’s plan, every business with 100 workers or more would have to get an “Equal Pay Certification” from the federal government. To earn this gold star, they must “prove they’re not paying women less than men for equal work.”

That means demonstrating, to the satisfaction of some bureaucrat, that any wage gap “is based on merit, performance, or seniority—not gender.” The penalty for failure is a steep fine: “1% of their profits for every 1% wage gap they allow to persist.” More than 100,000 companies in the U.S. have at least 100 workers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says. Together they employ some 80 million people. How does Ms. Harris expect the government to expertly and impartially second guess all of their performance reviews? She says certification must be complete in three years.

If you were a company faced with this aggressive illogic and impossible criteria, what would you do?

Move.

The Elusive Butterfly Of Equality

A graph encouraging Equal Opportunity Fatality Day:

In the Pink

Dan Pink is a guy who makes his living assessing and encouraging motivation. He has TED talks and is a speaker and writer.

According to Mr. Pink, monetary incentives work best for repetitive, rules-based jobs. Yet those  motivators where  monetary rewards are linked to performance often reduce productivity in cognitive and creative jobs. People under such incentives take longer and achieve inferior results.

Researchers all over the world reproduce this finding consistently in different cultures and industries. They’ve put people in all kinds of test situations, and the same happens every time.

The reason, Pink says, is that bonuses, commissions, and the like make you narrow your focus. You concentrate on delivering the results that will give you the reward.

That’s fine in jobs like manual labor, certain kinds of accounting, some computer programming, and financial analysis. Maybe not so fine elsewhere.

In a recent TED talk, Pink said: "And if we really want to get out of this economic mess, if we really want high performance on those definitional tasks of the 21st century, the solution is not to do more of the wrong things, to entice people with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. We need a whole new approach."

If sweeter carrots aren’t the right motivator in today’s jobs, what is? Pink says we all want three things:

• Autonomy—the urge to direct our own lives

• Mastery—the desire to get better and better at something that matters

• Purpose—the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves

If you wonder where money fits into that, it’s part of autonomy. People want to be comfortable and independent. Pink says wise employers get the money question off the table immediately. Pay people a fair wage, then start motivating them in other ways.

Testing--and Not

An interesting perspective, especially in the light of Caplan's book on the low value of education.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act banned pre-employment tests that were not “a reasonable measure of job performance.”

In 1971, the US Supreme Court decided a case called Griggs vs. Duke Power Co. The subject was employment requirements. Duke had an intelligence test it gave to its job applicants. They were sued on the argument that such tests are racially discriminatory. Duke lost.

The court ruled that Duke’s tests were too broad and not directly related to the jobs performed, which made them illegal.

Furthermore, the court said employers had the burden of proving employment tests were necessary for business purposes and not racially discriminatory. That’s hard to prove, so many US companies stopped using pre-employment tests at all.

Now what do they do? How does Duke test its employees for competence? They turned to college degrees. They decided that it would be a good indicator of intellectual competence and grit.

Fascinatingly, colleges test for admission, something Duke was not allowed to do. Colleges essentially became a proxy--government approved--for testing.

And this created the college gold rush where every potential employee felt he had to take out a loan and go to college--and he did.

For want of a nail....

Unemployment Rates

The Council of Economic Advisers reports "Economic Indicators," prepared for the Joint Economic Committee.

Some highlights for the March data:

​

Unemployment rate for blacks or African Americans: 6.9 percent.
Unemployment rate for whites: 3.6 percent.
Unemployment rate for Asians: 3.1 percent.
Unemployment rate for Hispanics or Latino ethnicity: 5.1 percent.
Unemployment rate for men 20 years and over: 3.7 percent.
Unemployment rate for women 20 years and over: 3.7 percent.
Unemployment rate for both sexes, 16-19 years: 13.5 percent.
Unemployment rate for married men, spouse present: 2.1 percent.
Unemployment rate for women who maintain families: 5.6 percent.

The number of people receiving insurance benefits from state programs fell from 3.3 million in 2012 (this is the weekly average for the year) to 1.9 million in 2017.
The number of people receiving unemployment insurance benefits from all programs, including the federal extended benefit program fell from 6.0 million in 2012 (again, a weekly average) to 4.6 million in 2013, and 2.7 million in 2014.

Eberstadt

Men Without Work

 

 

These are some notes from Nicholas Eberstadt’s new book, Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis. He sees a serious, long term problem here that has been going on for a long time, not just recently.  There are some identifying factors: Immigrants work with more regularity than native born Americans, a felony conviction weighs powerfully upon a man's not working, and participation in the community with wives and families are factors that correlate with work.

Between 1948 and 2015, the work rate for U.S. men twenty and older fell from 85.8 percent to 68.2 percent. Thus the proportion of American men twenty and older without paid work more than doubled, from 14 percent to almost 32 percent. Granted, the work rate for adult men in 2015 was over a percentage point higher than 2010 (its all-time low). But purportedly “near full employment” conditions notwithstanding, the work rate for the twenty-plus male was more than a fifth lower in 2015 than in 1948.

Before World War II, the exclusive economic activity for the overwhelming majority of U.S. women was unpaid labor at home. Today the overwhelming majority of women – including women with young children – engage in at least some remunerated employment outside the family. Needless to say, this shift has opened up new prospects for prosperity, as well as new horizons of economic independence and autonomy. The tremendous expansion of economic opportunities for U.S. women created a massive new supply of workers in the postwar economy. The share of women with paid work skyrocketed in every age group and doubled for women between twenty-five and sixty-four. For women twenty-five-to-fifty-four, the work rate was 34 percent in 1948; in 2015, it topped 70 percent. In arithmetic terms, this enormous influx of new workers completely offset the decline in work rates for prime-age men.

In sum, an American man ages twenty-five-to-fifty-four was more likely to be an un-worker in 2015 if he (1) had no more than a high school diploma; (2) was not married and had no children or children who lived elsewhere; (3) was not an immigrant; or (4) was African American….No matter their race or educational status, married men raising a family work more, and never-married men without children or children in their home work less. No matter their ethnicity or race, prime-age men who come to this country work more than those here by birth.

 

Having a criminal record is a key missing piece in explaining why work rates have collapsed much more dramatically in America than other affluent Western societies over the past two generations. This single variable also helps explain why the collapse has been so much greater for American men than women and why it has been so much more dramatic for African American men and men with low educational attainment than for other prime-age men in the United States.

Employed Canadians and Britons now work at least one hundred hours per year (over two full workweeks) less than working Americans. The gap between the United States and France, according to the OECD, is now nearly three hundred hours (over eight full workweeks). More than four hundred annual hours (over ten full workweeks) separate workers in America and Germany.
20 million men in the U.S. have been convicted of a felony but only a tiny fraction of all Americans ever convicted of a felony are actually incarcerated at this moment. Maybe 90 percent of all sentenced felons today are out of confinement and living more or less among us.

But they are not working.

Wisdom from Mike Rowe

“Dirty Jobs” host Mike Rowe did a video for PregerU, a website with a religious bent dedicated to explaining American values. It is curious that a TV personality (he is also the cab driver in the "Cash cab" thing and is not, but looks like, the new Maytag spokesman) would be asked to do something like this. What is worse is how sensible he sounds in this goofy world. His topic was the popular advice to “follow your passion.” He argues, sensibly, that passion and ability often have nothing to do with each other.

“If we’re talking about your hobby, by all means, let your passion lead you,” he said. “But when it comes to making a living it’s easy to forget the dirty truth: Just because you’re passionate about something doesn’t mean you won’t suck at it.
“Your happiness on the job has very little to do with the work itself,” he said. “Never follow your passion, but always bring it with you.”
He then wrote this in response to some questions about the talk:
"I’m fascinated by the beginning of American Idol. Every year, thousands of aspiring pop-stars show up with great expectations, only to learn that they don’t have anything close to the skills they thought they did. What’s amazing to me, isn’t their lack of talent – it’s their lack of awareness, and the resulting shock of being rejected."

16%

This Friday, a new jobs report will come out. If the Wall Street consensus is correct, it will show the unemployment rate continuing to hover around 5% while nonfarm payrolls will grow about 180,000 for the month. There are a lot of different positions on unemployment but a new book out has a very disturbing take.
Nicholas Eberstadt, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, argues in a new book called Men Without Work, due out next week, that we're suffering not from full employment, but massive underemployment. In particular, nearly one out of six working-age men have no job and are no longer looking for one. A release for his book calls this "a hidden time bomb with far-reaching economic, social and political consequences." We have 10 million fewer male workers in the labor force than we should have. Eberstadt in 2013 warned that our reliance on the standard unemployment rate "seriously disguises and understates the magnitude of the ongoing jobs crisis."

Some of Eberstadt's observations:
--Men age 25 to 54 now have a lower labor participation rate than they did in 1940, as the Great Depression was winding down. It is also far lower than in 1948, the year millions of men from World War II were flooding the labor market.
--One in six men today have no job and most have given up looking. At current trends, one in five will be out of the labor force in a generation.
--African-American men are twice as likely to be in this condition as either whites or Latinos.
--Many of these nonworking men support themselves by government disability benefits
--Surveys show an alarming increase among men age 25 to 54, the prime working years, engaged in doing such things as "socializing, relaxing and leisure," "attending gambling establishments," "tobacco and drug use," "listening to the radio" and "arts and crafts as a hobby." Many men, it seems, have virtually no work skills at all — and no way to get them.
Many of these trends in the collapse of male work may be a result of our soaring prison population and the "prevalence of non-institutionalized felons and ex-prisoners," Eberstadt argues.

It is unlikely that any real change will result from these observations because, again, so much is debatable. But one thing is not: Bad things happen in cultures where young men do not work.

The Cauldron of Success

Edison famously said that he did not have 1000 failures to construct a usable light bulb, he discovered 1000 ways not to make one. This implies a progress in failure.
One hears this often. So many people with eventual success worked their way through failure, sometimes significant failure. This implies that failure may be part of the process of success, as if failure in business or life was like a science lab where each setback purified the vision, clarified the next step and allowed for eventual success.
Failure as the co-enzyme of success.
But is that true? Is the real success a product of bad experiences or is it a combination of great energy, fortitude and vision overcoming the temporary? Everyone has failures. Is failure really a process or is success a function of the individual's ability to make it a process so that eventual success only heightens the appearance of the earlier drawback?
Are all failures opportunities to learn?

Gaps

Sowell has an article recently raising a question of what he calls the  "honesty gap" when the topic of gender based "earnings gap" is discussed. One example he offers is the earnings gap among physicians.
"Innumerable studies, going back decades, show that women do not average as many hours of work per year as men, do not have as many consecutive years of full-time employment as men, do not work in the same mix of occupations as men and do not specialize in the same mix of subjects in college as men.
Back in 1996, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed young male physicians earned 41% higher incomes than young female physicians. But the same study showed young male physicians worked over 500 hours a year more than young female physicians.
When the study took into account differences in hours of work, in the fields in which male and female doctors specialized and other differences in their job characteristics, "no earnings difference was evident.""

Women's wages are not simply a matter of comparing them to men's. Women live more complicated lives. Women, for a number of reasons, work less hours than men, have more career interruptions than men and have developed less seniority. When these elements are included in analysis, there is no gap. And every analyst knows this. The question is, why does the antagonism over the distinctions continue?

A Graph on Age and Labor

There has never been a lower percentage of American men in the workforce. What is even more stunning - given the daily avalanche of "buy-and-hold" for a "safe-retirement" holding hands with your loved on as you stroll the beach at sunset - the percent of Americans aged 65 years or older has almost doubled in the last 30 years and is near its highest since the mid '60s. So much for that dream retirement...

 (From Zero Hedge)


This can be read a number of ways: Less men working, more women working, older men needing to work, older men harder to replace. But it is a change.

Working Stiffs

Sherpas are ethnic nomads who settled in eastern Nepal; "Sherpa" means "eastern people." They are said to be of the "Red Hat Sect" of Tibetan Buddhism which emphasizes mysticism and local deities. Indeed their clans are filled with disparate gods and holy places with stories of treasure and sacred valleys. They hold Everest in great religious awe, calling it "The Mother of the World." As a group they are renown climbers, mountain men and guides. Everest, specifically, is filled with Sherpa lore; the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary were the first men to climb Everest in 1953.
The Sherpa is involved in every Everest climbing attempt. They are aides and companions to the professional foreign climber and they smooth the climb for the less talented, the less prepared and the amateur. Often they will climb ahead, mark the safe trail, build ladders, prepare rest areas, prepare a camp for the next leg up, place the supplies there then return to the camp below and lead the amateur climbers on the path they have laid out to the camp they have created--sometimes all in the same day.

The New York Times had a recent article decrying the apparent abuse of these stalwarts.

In the United States there are two groups of people, those who do not work and those who support them. For example, 43% of people in the United States do not pay taxes and 20% of people in the United States pay 90% of the taxes. These people who work to care for and support those who do not work should be called "Sherpas."

The Other Side of the Gold Coin

NPR recently interviewed journalist Matthew Hart who wrote Gold: The Race For The World's Most Seductive Metal. He spoke about the huge Mponeng Mine of South Africa which produces about one billion dollars of gold a year. The biggest mines are in the Carlin Trend of Nevada, U.S. but the Mponeng is huge, 2.5 miles deep, serviced by a project with tunnels and chutes the size of Manhattan and worked by 4,000 men a day.

As one goes deeper into the Earth (or any planet) there is an increase of temperature, called the geothermal gradient. This is the result of radioactive decay, the effect of ancient impacts and some other, debatable, causes. The gradient averages 1°F per 70 feet of depth in most of the world.
In Mponeng the geothermal gradient at the mine's deepest level is 140 degrees Fahrenheit. They cool the depths with an ice-salt slurry they pump to deep reservoir and use giant fans to cool the area down to about 85 degrees.

A big component of mining in South Africa is theft. From 10 to 20 percent of the ore in all of South Africa is stolen, probably 2 billion dollars a year. The thieves, called "ghosts" because of their sickly appearance, live in the mines and refine the gold there with dangerous chemicals (mercury). This requires a lot of collaboration, including the legitimate miners themselves who make a good side income with black market food. (One dollar bread on the surface brings twelve dollars underground.)


Abuse. Theft. Deprivation. Cruelty. Another system to make a living.

Antebellum America

The battle over the Affordable Care Act will probably go on forever. It will undergo attacks by amendment and by lawyers. People will be outraged, constituencies created and defended as it progresses along to become a distorted legislative monolith, wounded but ennobled by its trials. Yet there is an element of the discussion that probably will get little attention but might be the law's most important revelation. We are changing as a culture in how we view work as is shown in a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) assessment.

Most cultures, even revolutionary Marxism, have had regard for work. Indeed, Marx felt it was how man defined himself and one of his demands on modernity was that it bring man closer to his production. The Affordable Care Act creates some problems with work; first, it redefines what a real job is. The effect of the law can be muted under some circumstances; it is less burdensome if the business has less than 50 employees. And an employee is defined as someone who works for more than 30 hours. It is easy to see how companies would decrease the number of employees to 49 or effectively do that by decreasing employee working hours to less than 30. Either way the company ducks the ACA hammer.

This disincentive to full employment has become a talking point since the CBO's published estimates of job losses. But there is more here; one of the factors in the CBO's calculation was voluntary unemployment. Since the great objective of decoupling work from employment has been achieved, some are expected to take their insurance and tell the boss to 'take this job and shove it." Thus the government support of insurance--with other supports--makes working relatively unnecessary for some. Some have escaped the demands of a job.

This has been embraced by many. The peculiar Nancy Pelosi has gushed, "Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance." Jay Carney, when pressed on this topic, said that the Affordable Care Act gave people the "opportunity" that "allows families in America to make a decision about how they will work, and if they will work."

So work is an option for these people. And there is the assumption that those others, those without the creative muse, should and will continue to get up every day, go to work and contribute their fair share--which in this instance is 100%--to the well-being of those who do not find the reward of work necessary.

This disrespect for work, this facile reading of the nature of man, this unsubstantiated rewriting of man's historical makeup is a revolution in what passes for thought. It will be interesting to read what the reflective and knowledgeable world has to add to the thoughts of the less than profound Pelosi.

More, if one group of people working to support the comfort of another does not strike a familiar memory cord, it should.

Reward Limits

Behavioral scientists divide tasks--job or school--into two categories. An algorithmic task has a set of established behaviors for success. There is a sequence, or algorithm, for it. A heuristic task has no algorithm, no prescribed pattern of behavior. Often described as "trial and error," the heuristic task must be worked through, experimented with, and solved. Algorithmic work follows successful pathways, heuristic work requires innovation. Something new.

 

This academic sounding separation is becoming more important and practical. Most jobs in the United States up until the last decades have been algorithmic. Production lines, clerking, warehousing--most jobs had predictable assignments and definable paths. But the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. estimates that in the United States, only 30 percent of job growth now comes from algorithmic work, while 70 percent comes from heuristic work. It may be that the nature of modern work has changed but an easier explanation is that  routine work can be out sourced or automated while artistic, empathic, non-routine work generally cannot.

 

Which brings us to Sam Glucksberg. His work--from the 1960's--is summarized in Daniel Pink's book "Drive: Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us." Glucksberg, a psychologist now at Princeton University, took two groups and asked them to solve a puzzle. The first group was told they were being timed to establish a norm for how long the puzzle solving should take. The second group was offered incentives. The fastest 25% would get five dollars, the fastest puzzle solver would get twenty.

 

The the incentivized group took nearly three and a half minutes longer than the control group to solve the puzzle. Longer.

 

There are a lot of explanations for this but one possibility is significant: The creative forces necessary to solve the puzzle were blunted and narrowed by the demand of time created by the incentive. Rewards are helpful when the path is straight but limiting when creativity is demanded. Focus eliminates breadth of thinking, expansiveness.

 

Now, just for fun, how would you classify the American education process, algorithmic or heuristic?

Priorities and Well Rounded Men

Several days ago I attended a conference where several small companies were presenting themselves to potential investors. It is common for such events to be attended by university students interested in small businesses and startups; often interested guests will be in the audience as well. I met two young men there, both graduates of graduate programs, one in geology from Cornell, one in bio-engineering from Carnegie Mellon. Both were there for possible contacts, the mysterious "networking." Neither had been employed since graduation and both were supporting themselves with small jobs.

It is unsettling to see competent people, well educated and presentable, who can not get work. And indeed these are difficult economic times for many reasons. But there was something else at play, at least with the geologist. He had gone to job fairs while in school and had been called back for a second interview by a major oilfield service company but he had missed the interview. It had been in conflict with a rowing event he could not miss.