None of those things are observable

An interesting article, The STEM Crisis Is a Myth by Robert N. Charette.

For years I have been hearing about the STEM shortage but every time I look at the employment and salary numbers, all I see is the market functioning normally. People with STEM degrees and functioning in a STEM capacity in a STEM field are always in demand and their average compensation, as the article points out, has been fairly steady.

Granted, there are emergent fields, unique circumstances, and pressing needs that will suddenly create a temporary demand for those with a very particular STEM skill set, but the market functions, more people move in or specialize in the hot area and pretty soon things are back to normal. Also granted that the best people in any one of the STEM fields can command very high premiums over the novice. You might not like having to pay $150,000 for an experienced ERP implementation manager and you might wish that they were cheaper but that does not necessarily mean that there is a shortage of experienced ERP implementation managers.

I think this is once again an issue arising from particular advocates wanting to use the coercive force of government to achieve individual objectives. Engineers too expensive, issue more green cards. Increased supply will reduce the cost.

Given all of the above, it is difficult to make a case that there has been, is, or will soon be a STEM labor shortage. “If there was really a STEM labor market crisis, you’d be seeing very different behaviors from companies,” notes Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in New York state. “You wouldn’t see companies cutting their retirement contributions, or hiring new workers and giving them worse benefits packages. Instead you would see signing bonuses, you’d see wage increases. You would see these companies really training their incumbent workers.”

“None of those things are observable,” Hira says. “In fact, they’re operating in the opposite way.”

Read the whole thing.

Code of Hammurabi, crime, economics and imagining the past

The Code of Hammurabi translated by L. W. King.

I haven't looked at the Code in a couple of decades. 282 laws and a level of binary harshness strange to our age. Highly pragmatic in many ways and lots of checks and balances. Number three certainly incents only honest accusations:

3. If any one bring an accusation of any crime before the elders, and does not prove what he has charged, he shall, if it be a capital offense charged, be put to death.

The power of the state looks out for its own.

6. If any one steal the property of a temple or of the court, he shall be put to death, and also the one who receives the stolen thing from him shall be put to death.

There is a steep discount on the value of human life.

8. If any one steal cattle or sheep, or an ass, or a pig or a goat, if it belong to a god or to the court, the thief shall pay thirtyfold therefor; if they belonged to a freed man of the king he shall pay tenfold; if the thief has nothing with which to pay he shall be put to death.

This touches on something I noted a while ago, (Eighteen were for burglary and eighteen for forgery);

Existence was hand-to-mouth in a fashion which we can theoretically conceptualize but find it hard to really comprehend. When the theft of your loaf of bread meant going hungry for a day or when the making off with your tool box might mean the loss of your livelihood, shelter and food for your family, things begin to come into focus. When 80% lived at the edge of starvation, and most the rest lived within a couple of weeks of disaster, then the reasons for the apparent barbarism of the age begin to become clearer. Property crimes had the capacity to incapacitate or extinguish life to almost the same degree as a physical assault - it begins to make a kind of sense why the two actions - so distinct to us - were treated so similarly in that age.

I am currently reading a collection of memoirs from the early 19th century as well as Fernand Braudel's The Structures of Everyday Life and they both make a similar point. The central government was small, weak and with little financial resource. People at large lived hand to mouth. Braudel comments on the low level of agricultural productivity in general and how easy it was for an economy to get out of kilter between population growth and food production, leading to either starvation or population outflow. A description from page 71 gives a sense of the precariousness.

Increases and declines therefore alternated in the short term, regularly compensating each other. This is invariably demonstrated (until the eighteenth century) by the zigzag curves representing births and deaths anywhere in the West - whether in Venice or Beauvais. Those most vulnerable - young children, who were always at risk, or anyone with precarious means of support - would be carried off by epidemics if the balance required it. The poor were always the first to be affected. Innumerable 'social massacres' took place during these centuries. At Crepy, near Senlis, in 1483, 'a third of the town goes begging about the countryside, and old people are dying in squalor everyday'.

Only with the eighteenth century did births gain over deaths, and this was to be the pattern regularly thereafter. But counter-attacks were still possible, as happened in France in 1772-3; and again in the population crisis that struck between 1779 and 1783. These alarms showed how precarious was an improvement of very recent origin and which was still subject to reverses, still at the mercy of the ever-hazardous balance between the demand for food and the possibilities of meeting it through production.

Combine these factors - marginal productivity, near non-existence of central government, no margin of stored wealth to ride out weather fluctuations, and routine presence of starvation (from weather) and death (from epidemics) - and you have a precariousness of life that illustrate why life expectancy was on the order of 20-35 years.

When thought of in this fashion, the Hammurabi Code begins to make a little more (economic) sense. When there is no surplus, all property crimes are really a proxy for survival. When there is no surplus, the choice of punishment for a crime is 1) restitution, 2) some physical punishment (hands, ears, breasts, eyes cut off or out), or 3) death. There is no option for jail as we know it because there is no surplus to pay for a jail. Finally, the fact that life expectancy was so low, probably also meant that the "marginal cost" of a lost life was lower than today. If someone was so insufficiently productive that they had to resort to theft, they probably had only a few more years of life, they were probably unlikely to cover their own food needs, and therefore the loss of their life to the community on the knife edge of survival might likely have been deemed, from a strictly economic survival perspective to have no downside and some upside.

Once again, I am seeing that what I once considered mindless barbarism, was not perhaps mindless but more a function of conditions which I have a hard time imagining but which were none the less real. There is nothing like the privilege of prosperity to dull our awareness of the privation of others.

Logical descriptions of complex worlds contain within themselves the seeds of their own limitation

From Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits by John D. Barrow, page 3.

Logical descriptions of complex worlds contain within themselves the seeds of their own limitation. A world that was simple enough to be fully known would be too simple to contain conscious observers who might know it.

One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

From Notes on Nationalism by George Orwell. I had gone looking for a particular quotation but found the whole essay an intriguing time capsule of the past and yet also an accurate reflection of the present as well.

Orwell is discussing the different forms of intellectual hubris; Trotskyism, Irish Nationalists, Communists, Pacifists, Tories, etc. He lumps then all into forms of nationalism which he describes as "the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labeled [sic] "good" or "bad." But secondly -- and this is much more important -- I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests." In contemporary parlance, something more akin to ideology.

He is writing in May 1945, and yet the tenor of ideological commitment is everywhere you turn today - debates about abortion, or gun rights, or capital punishment, or how to best ensure adequate health, etc.. When we ought to be discussing things as respectful individuals, judging on fact and logic, extending tolerance, debates are instead marked by all the issues Orwell raises - isolating the other as evil, engaging with alternative ideas not to test our way towards truth but rather to destroy the enemy, and always, willful blindness to plain realities.

All of these facts are grossly obvious if one's emotions do not happen to be involved: but to the kind of person named in each case they are also intolerable, and so they have to be denied, and false theories constructed upon their denial. I come back to the astonishing failure of military prediction in the present war. It is, I think, true to say that the intelligentsia have been more wrong about the progress of the war than the common people, and that they were more swayed by partisan feelings. The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no impression on Germany. He could believe these things because his hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. When Hitler invaded Russia, the officials of the MOI issued "as background" a warning that Russia might be expected to collapse in six weeks. On the other hand the Communists regarded every phase of the war as a Russian victory, even when the Russians were driven back almost to the Caspian Sea and had lost several million prisoners. There is no need to multiply instances. The point is that as soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged. And, as I have pointed out already, the sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also. There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when "our" side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that it is unjustified -- still one cannot feel that it is wrong. Loyalty is involved, and so pity ceases to function.

The reason for the rise and spread of nationalism is far too big a question to be raised here. It is enough to say that, in the forms in which it appears among English intellectuals, it is a distorted reflection of the frightful battles actually happening in the external world, and that its worst follies have been made possible by the breakdown of patriotism and religious belief. If one follows up this train of thought, one is in danger of being led into a species of Conservatism, or into political quietism. It can be plausibly argued, for instance -- it is even possibly true -- that patriotism is an inocculation against nationalism, that monarchy is a guard against dictatorship, and that organized religion is a guard against superstition. Or again, it can be argued that no unbiased outlook is possible, that all creeds and causes involve the same lies, follies, and barbarities; and this is often advanced as a reason for keeping out of politics altogether. I do not accept this argument, if only because in the modern world no one describable as an intellectual can keep out of politics in the sense of not caring about them. I think one must engage in politics -- using the word in a wide sense -- and that one must have preferences: that is, one must recognize that some causes are objectively better than others, even if they are advanced by equally bad means. As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the make-up of most of us, whether we like it or not. Whether it is possible to get rid of them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort. It is a question first of all of discovering what one really is, what one's own feelings really are, and then of making allowance for the inevitable bias. If you hate and fear Russia, if you are jealous of the wealth and power of America, if you despise Jews, if you have a sentiment of inferiority towards the British ruling class, you cannot get rid of those feelings simply by taking thought. But you can at least recognize that you have them, and prevent them from contaminating your mental processes. The emotional urges which are inescapable, and are perhaps even necessary to political action, should be able to exist side by side with an acceptance of reality. But this, I repeat, needs a moral effort, and contemporary English literature, so far as it is alive at all to the major issues of our time, shows how few of us are prepared to make it.

I ought to have eaten a pretzel in the first place!

From Fables and Fairy Tales by Leo Tolstoy, page 37.

Three Rolls a Pretzel

Feeling hungry one day, a peasant bought himself a large roll and ate it. But he was still hungry, so he bought another roll and ate it. Still hungry he bought a third roll and ate it. When the three rolls failed to satisfy his hunger, he bought some pretzels. After eating one pretzel he no longer felt hungry.

Suddenly he clapped his hand to his head and cried:
"What a fool I am! Why did I waste all those rolls? I ought to have eaten a pretzel in the first place!"

To be, or not to be - that is the question

From William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act 3 scene 1, the famous soliloquy,

To be, or not to be--that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep--
No more--and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep--
To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprise of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action. -- Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia! -- Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered.

Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Achievement

PERMA, a concept of life outcomes, developed by Martin Seligman of University of Pennsylvania.

Positive emotion — tunable by writing down, every day at bed time, three things that went well, and why
Engagement — tunable by preferentially using one's highest strengths to perform the tasks which one would perform anyway
Relationships — tunable, but not in a way that can be explained briefly; listen to timestamp 15:12 and following of the audio
Meaning — belonging to and serving something bigger than one's self
Achievement — determination is known to count for more than IQ

Progress doesn't come from early risers — progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.

From The Shape of History: Ian Morris, historian on a grand scale by Marc Parry.

Social behavior boils down to the "Morris Theorem": "Change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things." These people are much the same everywhere. Their societies develop along similar paths. Geography explains different outcomes. "Maps, not chaps," as Morris likes to say.

The Morris Theorem sounds a lot like Heinlein. From Time Enough for Love,

Progress doesn't come from early risers — progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.

Without mathematical language one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth

The Assayer (1623), by Galileo Galilei, as translated by Thomas Salusbury (1661), p. 178, as quoted in The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (2003) by Edwin Arthur Burtt, p. 75

Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes — I mean the universe — but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols, in which it is written. This book is written in the mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.

The greater part of progress is the desire to progress

On the Supreme Good, Letter LXXI by Seneca

That which is short of perfection must necessarily be unsteady, at one time progressing, at another slipping or growing faint; and it will surely slip back unless it keeps struggling ahead; for if a man slackens at all in zeal and faithful application, he must retrograde. No one can resume his progress at the point where he left off. Therefore let us press on and persevere. There remains much more of the road than we have put behind us; but the greater part of progress is the desire to progress.