Frighteningly faddish academia

A good, though perhaps needlessly aggressive, piece on sustainability as a long emerging fad in academia, Sustainability: A new college fad with fangs by George Leef.

I have a handful of friends who have ended up involved in "sustainability" programs of one sort or another at universities. Most of them are from environmental or urban planning backgrounds. None of them are engineers.

I have been disturbed to see many of the foundational beliefs or passions of my youth so rudely twisted and grossly morphed into programs and policies which have little semblance to their origins. There is Anthropogenic Climate Change, formerly known as Global Warming, a poorly documented, ill-sourced, highly disputed source of pseudo science or advocacy science which emerged out of environmentalism. I still am strongly committed to intelligent conservation and environmental protection within the rule of law. There is much that has been accomplished to clean up the world and there remains much yet to be done. ACC has been a gross diversion of focus touted on the weakest of foundations to argue for essentially a Gramscian portfolio of statist and redistributional policies. It has very, very little to do with the environment and much to do with political posturing for preferred regulatory and confiscatory policies.

There is what would seem to be the relatively straight forward issue of freedom of speech. There isn't too much that is significantly complicated about this issue. But our universities are cracking down on thought crimes, our media pundits have difficulty speaking of any terrorist attack on speech without including the all critical "but" as in "I believe in free speech BUT . . .". And intellectuals butts they are. They are certainly not advocating for the free exchange of ideas. The ACLU used to defend Illinois Nazis and now they have difficulty mustering even the barest twitch of a protest over increasing efforts to suppress free speech.

Then there are the faddish policies that emerge out of the originally well intended but latterly twisted precepts. Recycling is far more a signal of good intent and more critically, a signal of self-goodness than it has anything to do with actually benefitting the planet and the environment. Most recycling programs are a massive waste of energy.

Alternate energy was the coming thing when I was a student hopping around campus in the late 1970s and it still can't pay its way without massive governmental subsidies very much awarded on a crony capitalist basis. Solyndra, anyone?

Leef covers the sustainability fad/fraud at universities. Again, the idea has been around since the 1970s and earlier and the general principle of waste not, want not is well established. Read Leef's article for the details of how this well intentioned idea has morphed into yet another crony capitalist commercial/academic complex of fraud and deceit. I am familiar with universities, who already are pricing themselves beyond the capacity of even middle class students to afford them, sinking millions of dollars into programs and ventures that have no prospect of return. This is simply a means of extracting money from students to invest in vanity projects.

I had a conversation with a friend several years ago. I don't recall the numbers but they were of this ilk.

Me: How much are you spending to rehabilitate that building to make it more sustainable?
Friend: $10 million.
Me: Wow. How much energy are you going to save with the new refit?
Friend: 10%.
Me: Hmm. Is your energy bill that high?
Friend: What do you mean?
Me: How much were you paying annually for energy before the rehab?
Friend: I don't know, something like $50,000 a year.
Me: So you spent $10 million to save $5,000?

When more and more kids are priced out of an education, it is morally reprehensible, no matter how noble the intent, to be indulging in waste like this.

Morality versus legality

Leading up to Hillary Clinton's announcement of her second run for the Presidency, I read a number of right leaning pundits all making similar arguments to the effect that this second run would resurrect all the old scandals (Travelgate, Whitewater, Lewinsky, Filegate, the Pardons, Rape and other sexual misconduct allegations against Clinton, Perjury, etc.), reminding people of just what they didn't like about the Clinton's in the first place. Their argument hinged in part on the assertion that Hillary Clinton does not have either the charisma or the retail political chops to carry off these controversies the way Bill Clinton was able to.

All of which I thought at least to be defensible arguments though I didn't see much meat to it. Everybody knows that there is a pretty thick portfolio there. Romney might have binders full of women but nothing to compare to the Clinton's folders full of scandals. Yes, people might have forgotten just how many and what a wide range of scandals and almost certainly might have forgotten many of the details but I just didn't think that the pundit's argument was particularly significant. True but not material.

Until I cam across this, Whitewater’s Predatory Lending by James Taranto. Whitewater again. But not the Whitewater I remember, which was basically a financial scandal. This is a scandal of moral turpitude of which I had never heard. From the article.

When we read this last year, we recalled a similar story, which was told in a 2006 book, “Do as I Say, Not as I Do,” by the Hoover Institution’s Peter Schweizer. It involved an Arkansas land development known as Whitewater that was partly owned by Bill and Hillary Clinton and managed by Mrs. Clinton, then the state’s first lady. Here’s Schweizer’s anecdote:

Clyde Soapes was a grain-elevator operator from Texas who heard about the lots in early 1980 and jumped at the chance to invest. He put $3,000 down and began making payments of $244.69 per month. He made thirty-five payments in all—totaling $11,564.15, just short of the $14,000 price for the lot. Then he suddenly fell ill with diabetes and missed a payment, then two. The Clintons informed him that he had lost the land and all of his money. There was no court proceeding or compensation. Months later they resold his property to a couple from Nevada for $16,500. After they too missed a payment, the Clintons resold it yet again.

Soapes and the couple from Nevada were not alone. More than half of the people who bought lots in Whitewater—teachers, farmers, laborers, and retirees—made payments, missed one or two, and then lost their land without getting a dime of their equity back. According to Whitewater records, at least sixteen different buyers paid more than $50,000 and never received a property deed.

Schweizer notes that although “this sort of contract was illegal in many other states, because it was considered exploitative of the poor and uneducated,” it was perfectly permissible in Arkansas. That’s why you didn’t hear much about it during the Whitewater investigations of the 1990s. The Soapes story was apparently first told in a 1994 Washington Post article—at the bottom of the story, whose lead was simply that Mrs. Clinton “was more involved in the management of the Whitewater land venture in its later years than the White House has acknowledged previously.”

Is this really true? The Clinton's have always been good at sailing very close to the legal wind without jibbing but this in some ways is more serious in that it reveals what they are willing to do as long as it is legal. Most of us don't care about the legality of a thing because our moral boundaries are tighter than those of the law. There are some things you don't do even if they are legal. We care about the morality.

I initially thought the pundits were being silly in pointing out the resurrection of past scandals and misdeeds but I guess I was wrong. If this one proves to have a factual basis, then perhaps some of those past misdeeds will have a second life. Again.

Both rational optimizing and conspiracy over-estimated.

A good old bulletin board conversation that I just came across, Grand truths about human behavior by Edward Tufte. Edward Tufte is of course the author of several wonderful books dealing with visual communication such as The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

Kind of a mish-mash. Here are the one's that I thought were particularly interesting:

It's more complicated than that.

Unintended consequences inevitably attend purposive social action. (Robert K. Merton)

All the world is multivariate.

Much of the world is distributed lognormally.

People are different.

Rehearsal improves performance.

Effective intervention-thinking and choice-thinking necessarily require reasoning about comparisons, approximations, opportunity costs, and causality.

All grand theories, other than perhaps the scientific method, ultimately err (and some collapse) by overreaching.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." (Richard Feynman)

In explanations of human activities, both muddling through and incompetence are under-estimated, and both rational optimizing and conspiracy over-estimated.

Nearly all self-assessments claim above-average performance.

It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.

Authority gone to one's head is the greatest enemy of truth.

It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.

An approximate answer to the right question is worth a great deal more than a precise answer to the wrong question.

There never was anything by the wit of man so well-devised or so sure established which in continuance of time has not been corrupted.

If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

90 percent of everything is crud.

It is a human trait to organize things into categories. Inventing categories creates an illusion that there is an overriding rationale in the way the world works.

No matter how many options there are, it is human nature to always narrow things down to two polar, yet inextricably linked choices.

Personal truths are often perceived as universal truths. For instance it is easy to imagine a system or design that works well for oneself will work for everyone else.

It's not what you're thinking, it's what they're seeing.

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. (Hanlon's Razor)

Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice. (Grey's Corollary)

It is the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive.

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation.

Nothing is always absolutely so. (Sturgeon's Law)

Later on there is this observation which addresses one of the issues in decision-making. In the Decision Clarity Consulting methodology, after having clarified definitions, provided measurable context and establishing shared assumptions, the first question about any statement or phenomenon is: Is it real? That is followed by Do we understand the causes? Describe the issue, Measure it, Explain it.

Tufte has something of a variance of that.

"If you know nothing, take the average or use persistence forecasting. To describe something, observe averages and variances, along with deviations from persistence forecasting. Understanding, however, requires causal explanations supported by evidence."

"Average" is meant both in the statistical sense and in the wisdom-of-crowds sense. "Persistence forecasting" is, for example, saying the tomorrow will be like today (and is often a hard forecast to beat).

There might be a grander (although probably more cryptic) way of making the point about the difference between description and causal explanation. Perhaps this point can be combined with the point about the requirements of intervention thinking.

He then elaborates and asks an important question.

Stereotyping and its issues (useful generalization v. destructive ignorance) are picked up by my "know nothing, explain something" item:

"If you know nothing, take the average or use persistence forecasting. To describe something, observe averages and variances, along with deviations from persistence forecasting. Understanding, however, requires causal explanations supported by evidence." "Average" is meant both in the statistical sense and in the wisdom-of-crowds sense. "Persistence forecasting" is, for example, saying the tomorrow will be like today (and is often a hard forecast to beat)."

Thus stereotyping is a "know nothing" strategy which often works, but sometimes there are relevant variances that should assessed and explained.

The deeper issue is: What strategies identify those situations when variances become relevant? When is it worthwhile to consider possible anomalies from average or persistence forecasting--and not merely reopen solved problems?

Stereotyping is conceptually much maligned in the common vernacular for obvious historical reasons. None-the-less, in the absence of understanding of some observed phenomenon, stereotyping is the closest thing we can do cognitively to address the unknown. Stereotyping can consist of either finding the closest category to which to fit the phenomenon and hope that it is close enough to be useful or, as Tufte counsels, "take the average or use persistence forecasting."

The stereotype may not be right but in the absence of any information at all, it triggers "It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong."

Raising awareness by having a conversation

I have been mulling about the constant calls to "have a conversation" or the justification for some set of actions because it "raises awareness." It is not that the issues behind the conversation or the need to raise awareness aren't potentially real and/or serious. But the calls for conversation or the desire to raise awareness both seem to occur in situations where those calling are actually wanting someone else to accept their view without argument or even more often, simply want the other side to shut up.

It feels like both these tactics have lost whatever legitimacy they might once have had and now serve to signal that the calling side has lost the debate and now wants to suppress discussion. It doesn't help that in many cases, those making the call for the conversation or desiring to raise awareness are actually asking for resources, whether from the government or from private donors.

Many of these issues are touched on in this article, What Good Is 'Raising Awareness?' by Julie Beck.

I think many times, these tactics of calling for conversation and awareness are simply desperate attempts to obtain relevance or attention. They reflect no empirical reality nor do they actually proffer any likelihood of a solution. But if no one is paying attention to what you find interesting, then it is hard to make a living; better have a conversation.

What are some of the things people want us to have a conversation about? Off the top of my head, I think Race is probably the number one topic. Others I can think of include gun control, domestic violence, income inequality, poverty, prison reform, etc. These calls for conversation are often cast as a daring challenge to discuss something we would not otherwise talk about. Of course that is absurd. All of these topics are endlessly chewed upon by the chattering classes, written about, debated, etc. We need a conversation is really just "Pay attention to what I think is important." The frustrating thing for the chattering classes wanting to raise awareness and have conversations is that the great majority of their fellow citizens do not see their topics as being important and/or do not see them as having anything important to say. Most surveys I see trying to elicit what the public is concerned about have some regular monotony to the list of most important issues. Money, Jobs, the Economy, Crime, National Security are almost always right up there at the top jockeying for first place. Race relations, income inequality, poverty, etc. are right down there at the bottom garnering less than 5% of the public identifying them as important issues and usually, unless there has been some particular incident, down around 1%.

I understand why people are wanting to raise awareness and have a conversation. If they did not issue these calls, they wouldn't have anyone to talk to and they would have no money to spend on that which they think to be important. I suspect that the rapidly evolving informational ecosystem has something to do with this phenomenon as well. If you do an Ngram Viewer of "a national conversation" it is low and flat line up until 1985 or so and then begins a slow rise with a major jump circa 1992. That looks interestingly correlated with the new information ecosystem powered by the internet. You see the same thing with "raising awareness."

Beck, in her article, focuses in on a more epistemological aspect. Both calls for a conversation and attempts to raise awareness have an implicit assumption that people would behave differently, would make different decisions, if they had a better understanding of the issues and better access to facts. That is an assumption that is not borne out by research. Beck focuses only on the impact of Awareness Days but there is actually a lot more research on the more general issue of whether people make different and better decisions when exposed to more information. The general finding is that people's decisions don't change but they become more sophisticated in their post hoc justification of their decisions.

Where has my mulling led me? I think that by and large calls to have a conversation or efforts to raise awareness are largely self-serving to the interests of those making the calls, rarely are genuine in the sense of wanting to have an open airing and exchange of ideas, often signal marginalization and unimportance of the issue to the broader population, and have little correlation with people actually changing their behaviors or their decisions.

Decision-making, definitions, goals prioritization

A wonderful example of two or three issues that are common in the decision-making process. Examples are from What Parents Mean by “Think for Yourself” by Jeffrey S. Dill.

The example from the article has to do with goal identification, prioritization, weighting, and trade-offs.

Since 1986 the General Social Survey has asked Americans, “What is most important for a child to learn to prepare him or her for life?” For over 25 years, respondents have ranked “to think for him or herself” as their top priority by far (the other choices are to help others, to obey, to work hard, and to be well liked or popular). Sociologist Duane Alwin uses this and other data to demonstrate the steady decline of obedience as a desired quality for children in polling data through much of the twentieth century.

[snip]

In our interviews with 100 parents, we asked the same question about raising children from the General Social Survey, and had respondents rank their desired qualities for their kids from a list. The majority of all parents in the interview sample, regardless of education level, say “thinking for yourself” is the quality they most desire for their children; it is, by far, the highest ranking choice for all parents.

So all parents, based on this sample, have the same goals AND they prioritize those goals in the same order 1) Think for Yourself, 2) Work Hard, 3) Obey, 4) Help Others, and 5) Be Well-Liked. That congruence of goals and priorities is pretty neat on its own.

But look at the differences between those who are college educated versus those with less than a college education. Same goals, same priorities but what a difference in weightings. (There's more detail in the original report, Culture of American Families Interview Report by Jeffrey S. Dill). For simplicity's sake, let's call this blue collar and white collar. Blue collar parents put three or four more times as much emphasis on community capital values (obedience and helping others) than do white collar parents. White collar parents value thinking for yourself nearly forty percent more than do blue collar parents. Those are some pretty spectacular differentials.

Given that most government public policies are created and implemented by white collar professionals with the greatest impact, usually, on the blue collar working class, these differences in relative weighting of priorities probably explains why so many government policies fail.

I think this data is a good example of the often underrated importance of establishing not only the fact that you have same goals in the same order of priority but also ensuring that they are weighted to roughly the same degree. What this data does not provide any illumination about but which remains a significant issue is the acceptable trade-offs for example, between working harder or helping others, between independent thinking and obedience, etc.

The second lesson from this research as it relates to decision-making is that of definitions.

We then asked all the parents in our sample what, precisely, “thinking for yourself” means to them in order to investigate why most of them value it so highly. It is clear that for some parents (28 percent of the sample), the “think for yourself” ideal is an autonomous, fulfillment-seeking, “do whatever you want” approach. Their ideal of American individualism means expressing yourself and being happy. The individual child should be the arbiter of what this happiness is and how to achieve it.

But this was the minority view. Many other parents seem to have a different understanding of thinking for yourself.

The larger group of parents (72 percent) does not see the child as the final arbiter of good and bad or right and wrong, but rather perceives an external standard to which their children should conform. This majority falls into two related but slightly different categories. For one group (23 percent), thinking for yourself means resisting peer pressure, not following the herd, and not conforming to certain things that parents judge to be negative influences. Many other parents (49 percent) make more explicit their belief that thinking for yourself is a form of doing the right thing—the “right thing” as usually determined by the parent. In this sense, thinking for yourself, to many parents, is more an internalization of parental morality than it is a conventional understanding of autonomy and independence.

I would have equated Think for Yourself as being very close to Think Critically, i.e. I equate it with a process of thinking. Clearly more people see it in moral terms (Do the Right Thing or Resist Peer Pressure) rather than in process terms.

If so many people see Think for Yourself as the same as Do the Right Thing, then that begins to muddle the earlier response Help Others which you would guess might often be the Right Thing to do.

Dill is right though to point out the stark contrast between Think for Yourself as Do the Right Thing versus Do What You Want (my paraphrase of autonomous self-fulfilment).

In decision-making, goal clarification and definition are both critical steps towards efficient and effective decision-making and this research provides an example of why that is so.

What percentage of the population is truly incapacitated in such a way as to preclude productivity?

One question I have long had is what the base line population might be in terms of true non-productivity.

What I mean is that everyone (or most people) can support some concept of transactional insurance. You are a hard worker with a track record of sustained employment. Suddenly your industry declines or you are injured and out of work for a year or so. In those type of cases, often characterized as deserving cases, I believe most people would be inclined towards significant generosity. And I suspect, with a lot of red-tape and missteps, we do in fact take somewhat reasonable care of the deserving cases.

But everything exists on a continuum of some sort. Where does deserving separate from undeserving?

This goes to the larger issue of definitions of poverty. For example, in the US the base poverty rate has hovered around 15% for decades. Partly this is because poverty, for federal purposes, is defined not in absolute terms but in relative terms. Our poorest quintile of citizens have household incomes equal to those of middle quintile Europeans.

What I have long wondered is about that ever changing population of 15%. Who is deserving (deserving of temporary of temporary assistance to get back on their feet) and who is long term destitute? This is in turn partly an issue of productivity. Who has the Knowledge, Experience, Skills, Values, Emotions, and Behaviors (KESVEB) to recover from some external disruption and continue a productive life versus who is long term unproductive and can we distinguish in this latter group between those who unproductive because of genuine disability versus unproductive because of bad decision-making versus unproductive as a life choice?

I would have gueesed that the 15% was divided along these lines:

Deserving, 1%
Disabled, 2%
Decision-making, 7%
Life choice, 5%

This book is long dated but at least a partial answer: Families, Poverty, and Welfare Reform: Confronting a New Policy Era edited by Lawrence B. Joseph. ON page 153 he indicates that 50% are on welfare for more than ten years and 75% are on welfare for at least five years. That doesn't answer the question but does indicate that the number who are "deserving" is in fact a relatively low percentage.

Global remittances, development and unintended consequences

I read somewhere recently that the flow of remittances to developing nations is greater than the global flow of development aid. The comment was made with the additional observation that remittances are probably much more effective in fostering development because 1) the use of those remittances is closely supervised compared to foreign aid (personal supervision is always tighter than process supervision), 2) remittances are more targeted to actual recipients, 3) there is much less syphoning off of remittances for administration or corruption, and 4) remittances used for investment purposes, because of the above reasons, has a much higher rate of return than the often white elephant projects of centrally planned aide agencies.

The graph below from India Wins Remittance Race Again by Eric Bellman lends credence to the above claim.

$70 billion in remittances to India alone. Woof!

Note both France and Germany with surprisingly robust remittances from citizens overseas, $25 billion to France alone. I was quite surprised by that number.

Also in the article is the information that roughly 4% of the global population, 250 million people, are living and working as non-citizens in countries outside those in which they were born.

Using newly available census data, the stock of international migrants is estimated at 247 million in 2013, significantly larger than the previous estimate of 232 million, and is expected to surpass 250 million in 2015.

The aggregate sums are huge.

Migrants’ remittances to developing countries are estimated to have reached $436 billion in 2014, a 4.4 percent increase over the 2013 level. All developing regions recorded positive growth except Europe and Central Asia (ECA), where remittance flows contracted due to the deterioration of the Russian economy and the depreciation of the ruble.

A great example of trade-off decisions and unintended consequences. Remittances are a huge and extremely effective form of development aid for developing nations. We should want to make that as easy as possible to occur. But look at the cost of remitting those earnings:

The global average cost for sending money remained broadly at 8 percent in Q4 2014, with the highest average cost (about 12 percent) in Sub-Saharan Africa.

8% of the capital amount. Ouch! Why so high. Well, we have other objectives as well including money laundering for criminal and terrorist purposes. These are not illegitimate concerns but look how they impact the poor.

Concerns over money laundering are keeping costs high by increasing compliance costs for commercial banks and money transfer operators, and delaying the entry of new players and the use of mobile technology.

Sea Fever

An illustration by one of my favorite artists of one of my favorite poems.

Sea Fever, 1937 by N.C. Wyeth

Sea Fever
by John Masefield

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

Holloways, bostles, shutes, driftways, lichways, ridings, halterpaths

The English language is wonderfully varied, rich and expressive, facilitated by a linguistic kleptomaniacy leading to the purloining of words from all ages and places.

This is brought to mind by a passage in The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert MacFarlane.

Always, everywhere, people have walked, veining the earth with paths visible and invisible, symmetrical or meandering,’ writes Thomas Clark in his enduring prose-poem ‘In Praise of Walking’. It’s true that, once you begin to notice them, you see that the landscape is still webbed with paths and footways – shadowing the modern-day road network, or meeting it at a slant or perpendicular. Pilgrim paths, green roads, drove roads, corpse roads, trods, leys, dykes, drongs, sarns, snickets – say the names of paths out loud and at speed and they become a poem or rite – holloways, bostles, shutes, driftways, lichways, ridings, halterpaths, cartways, carneys, causeways, herepaths.

Language that is in itself poetic. What a wonderful collection for different types of paths.

Until you have found the major flaws in an argument, you do not understand it

Tyler Cowen's Three Laws

1. Cowen’s First Law: There is something wrong with everything (by which I mean there are few decisive or knockdown articles or arguments, and furthermore until you have found the major flaws in an argument, you do not understand it)

2. Cowen’s Second Law: There is a literature on everything.

3. Cowen’s Third Law: All propositions about real interest rates are wrong.