Mistakes By TjM

Consolidation Notes -- 12

2012-02-10T09:17:00.000-08:00

Well, it's almost a year since I wrote on School Consolidation that

My Upstate New York village has had a school for quite a while; it may not have a school for much longer.

Later I listed some Consolidation links, and some more, and then some data about Upstate NY Demographics and School Consolidation, and more Consolidation News. Then I thought about Khansolidation as an alternative, but more Consolidation News kept coming from many states. Then New York passed an actual budget and I wrote a few Budget Notes; here and in other states there's a connection between Budgets, Consolidations, Charters. The budget looked very bad for 2011, but Colgate helped: Colgate v. Consolidation -- maybe. For now. And then in fall we had an author come talk about it, and my reaction was Consolidation and "Hollowing Out the Middle".

Since then we've had a few months with no particular merger-movement, but that's over: on Wednesday this week we saw School Boards Meet to Discuss Merger Study. They met at the Morrisville Stadium's Hospitality Center, which (as the tour video says) has "kind of a sports bar feel to it"; an amusing choice. For someone like me, it's a choice to prompt meditation on education as a consumption good, at least as much as it is a source of skills and knowledge (and a status good, and so on). The main purpose of the meeting, it seems, was to go around and around the table of superintendents and school board members, asking for questions to be addressed by the study: by the time nobody had any more to ask, there were 31, and then the same people were asked to prioritize the questions. "You have 40 points; choose one question that gets five points, and apply the rest of your points as you please except that you shouldn't give more than five points to any question."

Questions included a variety of topics -- I don't have the phrasings right because they were edited as I scribbled, but there were items resembling "How does merger affect transportation?", "Would class size change?", "How will state aid affect the new district?", "What will be the impact on the community's voice in governance?", and "How can we get the community to feel involved?"

The questions as questions were not objectionable, but it wasn't really the way I'd do it. I'd like to start with a list of basic assumptions about the next 10, 20, 50 years, like declining upstate population and enhanced technology and; for each of these assumptions we'd have a list of uncertainties. For example, Colgate's baby boomers, my generation whose kids are mostly grown, are retiring and being replaced with younger families -- the nursery school is turning kids away and we may be at the bottom of enrollment rather than locked into continuing decline. But that's not certain; all we know is that each of us has some assumptions, and it would be good to list them and list the questions about them. (Will Dodd-Frank, and other factors pushing finance-industry bonus packages downward, result in a permanent decline in state aid?)

Then I'd have a list of the groups of affected people, starting of course with current students and current teachers and their subdivision into overlapping subgroups. (E.g., athletic groups overlap with theatric groups overlap with Model UN; at the same time we have farm kids and local-business kids and academic's kids from Colgate and from Morrisville, and in "Hollowing Out The Middle" terms we have the kids who are likely Leavers and the kids who are likely Stayers and....) For each group, I'd like a list of what they put into the system, if that's distinctive, and what they get out of it; then for each of these a list of descriptions of how this may change if there is a merger, and how it may change if there is no merger. And I'd throw in the effect of uncertainty: does merger circumscribe future flexibility, or enhance it? (I suspect the merger, as a multi-million multi-year commitment, would necessarily make it hard to make future choices, but I could be wrong. I usually am.)

In effect, we want voters to have two crystal balls, one showing the after-merger view and the other the after-no-merger view; we can't quite do that, but we can try. And then I'd expand the choices a bit: what if we set up a charter school? A STEAM school (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics)?

One which tried to use...well, never mind. We'll see.

Or then again, maybe not.

update:Our Superintendent reports at The Consolidation Fesibility Study Begins.

Afghanistan & The Drake Equation

2011-10-22T14:48:00.000-07:00

I spent last weekend in NYC at the singularity summit, listening to very bright geeks of various kinds talking about recent/near-future changes in technology, in the rate of change of technology, in the funding and organization of technology, and thus how everything may soon (unknown but likely-small number of decades, say) become very very much better/worse. (See listing here.)And a few speakers, notably cosmologist Max Tegmark, talked about the Drake Equation and how the fact that we haven't heard from other civilizations, even though we now know that extrasolar planets are common, means there's a roadblock somewhere: either the evolution of life and intelligence is unusual, or there's something up ahead of us that civilizations tend not to survive, like maybe the Singularity itself. (I think he's oversimplifying; I'd call the roadblock theory highly probable but it's not the only explanation for silence.) Then I came back to Hamilton in time to walk up the hill to listen to journalist Kim Barker talk about Afghanistan and how the "good war" went bad...how she filled a notebook, some years back, with interviews and background with seventeen people and as of this year, they're all dead, and the Obama announcement that we are definitely out by a particular date means that counter-insurgency can't work. (Copies of her Taliban Shuffle book were stacked up in the back of the hall, but the last time I bought signed books at a Project Afghanistan lecture the author was killed soon after and well, I dunno, I didn't feel like doing that; so I downloaded the Kindle version and started reading it on my phone, while waiting for the lecture to start. Maybe I should have asked her to sign my phone.)

For me, there really is an existential threat in here. I can only repeat what I wrote almost five years ago:

The situation is bad. Still, I don't think we're in trouble yet. Trouble is when we have half a million or so dead Americans and a tens of millions dead around the world. Big trouble is lots, lots worse than that. You don't think it can happen? You think terrorism is an overhyped nuisance? Well, I sort of agree: it can't happen now, at least I don't think so, and terrorism now is in some ways an overhyped nuisance. I'm talking about a timeframe that probably doesn't start for ten years, and might not start for thirty. But it will start. In the thirty-one years since I started working on my PhuD in computer science, Moore's Law has increased computer bang-for-the-buck by a factor of approximately one million: 20 doublings. People haven't changed. In the next thirty years, technology will go on getting more so, and up to a point (past which I have no predictions) people will go on not changing. That's the problem.

And Gaddafi was killed this week; probably a good thing, just as Hussein's death was probably a good thing, but not exactly a guarantee that tomorrow in Libya will be a better day than yesterday. I'm glad that Obama has continued Bush's Big Bang of disrupting dictators, glad that our investment in drone technology is paying off, really worried about his promise to get out, really really worried that (apart from such promises) we're in Bush's third term in the bad ways as well as the good ways -- in particular, attacking troops and citizens of a foreign country without Congressional authorization and pretending that it's not legally a "war", apparently on the ground that he's not putting troops on the ground. Yeah, right. And it also won't be a war when vastly improved drone tech spreads to many countries including Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, etc., up to the point when some descendant of Sunrise I in the air or perhaps Spray in the water ( Underwater Robot Makes History...Spray has a range of 6,000 kilometers, or about 3,500 miles, which means it could potentially cross the Atlantic Ocean and other ocean basins...) pays us a return visit, with payload upgraded far beyond what Pakistan's nukes can now do.

Near the start of the Singularity Summit, PayPal founder/billionaire Peter Thiel was worrying about the slowdown in innovation in the "developed" countries, about the way that so much of our (very real, really excellent despite current difficulties) global improvement statistics simply reflect copying of our tech into China and India and others. And I was thinking that this is worse than he thinks it is, because it's not just about economics: it's about the fact that the (moderately) liberal democracies have a technological edge which we need them to keep. And maybe they will, maybe they won't. Thiel believes regulation is holding us back, that a lot of what we now depend on is stuff which we wouldn't be legally able to develop now if we hadn't already developed it -- well, I believe that too. Will we keep the edge we need? Maybe.

Still, I have here an actual physical copy of Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and it does suggest that maybe my statement above that "People haven't changed" is oversimplified. Even with WWI and WWII, and the Nazi and communist slaughter+starvation of scores of millions, people in the 20th century were several times less likely to die violently (that's counting starvation-by-government as violent death, as it should) than the people whose bones tell us about life and death thousands of years back, or the hunter-gatherer societies we've studied more recently. (See Will Wilkinson's commentary, which I pretty much trust.) Of course Neolithic violence was not an existential risk; the 20th century brought us lower means but higher standard deviations, so to speak. We needed Petrov to be there, doing his job; that did not apply to any previous century. If things are getting better, maybe we can survive without future Petrovs, or maybe there will always be one around when we need him (or her).

Or then again, maybe not.

Footnote: I said above that the "roadblock theory" wasn't, I think, the only explanation for interstellar silence in a galaxy of many planets. Clearly one possibility is that species with enough "aggressiveness" to proceed to interstellar activity have enough real aggressiveness to destroy themselves. I'll list four others; I'm sure there are many. First, most attractive in a way, would be a moral dynamics sort of explanation: the species which develop morally (to the point of non-interference with primitives like us) are exactly the ones which don't wipe themselves out. Next would be a physics explanation: expansionist species discover physics which we haven't found yet, physics which lets them create bubble universes that it's easy to expand into so they never bother with the actual galaxy. Next would be a simulation-version of that: expansionist species wind up discovering that they can simulate the universes they want, and upload themselves into the simulations...same thing. And finally, for now, would be the now-familiar notion that we are in a simulation -- there are no other species not because we're bound for destruction but because we're the one being simulated. (And as I was typing this, my daughter came to say she'd finally finished the Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke; we're probably in one of his universes. Should that be a reassuring thought? "Cancel Programme GENESIS"..."Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."..."The crusade will reach the vicinity of Earth about the year 2050." So it goes.)

Consolidation and "Hollowing Out the Middle"

2011-09-19T17:40:00.000-07:00

The logic of rural school consolidation is pretty simple, I think:

Conventionally-structured public schools don't work well at small sizes (e.g., my daughter's in Latin 3, with fifteen students. Will there be at least ten for Latin 4? If not, it won't be offered. Advanced science courses, same deal...etc.)
Rural small towns are getting smaller, so what used to be big enough isn't any more, or won't be soon -- I've already talked about demographic projections for my own area.

There are good reasons for the shrinkage: as Ryan Avent of the Economist notes in a Kindle book (location 618) "doubling county-level employment density raises productivity 6%...over half of the variation in output per worker across US states can be explained by density." Other economists find higher figures, especially for "skilled cities", i.e. places that high achievers tend to go. But take the 6% as a conservative estimate -- Madison County, NY is more than 500 times less dense than Manhattan. That's nine doublings, and 9*6% is more than a 50% increase in productivity, as if you'd added a couple of decades to a career. Quite an incentive, usually expressed in the simple form of job opportunities found mainly in the cities. It's a fundamentally intractable problem -- or is it? There are several responses possible:

Go with the flow: consolidate, at least for high schools where the advanced-course shortage is an issue.
Tinker around the edges: merge some administrative functions, some transportation costs, maybe kill the art class, hope that we can last a few more years (until my daughter graduates, perhaps -- she's my youngest, and my elder granddaughter just started preschool in NYC.)
Look at unconventional structures; after all, the limiting case of smallest size is home schooling, and it doesn't seem that home schooling needs to be academically harmful, e.g. this week's research word from Canada is that "Structured homeschooling may offer opportunities for academic performance beyond those typically experienced in public schools". I doubt that home schooling would work outside a self-selected group, but it indicates that small size in itself need not kill academics, and I've noted before that in various states recently, consolidations and (mostly smaller) charters have seemed to go together. I like the charter idea; somewhat looser rules enabling a number of things like Khansolidation. Or maybe
Push back against the demographic trends: figure out why these towns are shrinking, and get them to grow again -- that's the path suggested by Carr and Kefalas' Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America. That's what this post is mostly about: Carr and Kefalas have various suggestions, and Carr will be in town this week.

On August 31, our school superintendent, Dr. Bowers, blogged that New York State Releases Money for the Merger Study; in a meeting that same day she spoke about the Hollowing-Out book, so I promptly downloaded the Kindle edition to read on my cell phone (I've really started to like having a few books always with me.)

I don't think that there's much resemblance between the really-truly-rural community of "Ellis" in the book, and the semi-rural village I live in where the major employer is Colgate University, followed by the hospital where my daughter was born -- a lot of our kids are the children of professors, doctors, administrators of various kinds, and so on. There's some resemblance between Ellis and us, though, and it's crucial to the consolidation issue: both are shrinking and aging as young people, especially the "Achievers" and "Seekers", go away at the end of high school and mostly don't become "Returners", i.e. they don't come back except on holidays. How to fix this?

Carr and Kefalas note as they close that "The policies and programs for saving small towns run the gamut" but are not sufficient...

they want small towns "to equalize their investment across different groups of young people and to tie education and training for Stayers more closely to...technical computer-based skills."
They want small-town high schools to "avail themselves" of community college programs, which should reduce their focus "on those students who are likely to pursue an academic track" and do more about wind energy and welding.
There's an important note in the middle of this, which I want to emphasize: graduates...mostly flock to metropolitan areas because of the higher returns on education found there, and because this is rational behavior, we should not try to stop them.
Instead, they want to emphasize the human capital represented by those who are not Achievers. Specifically,
education should be transformed to funnel young people into vocational and preprofessional training that will fill the holes in the countryside's labor force.
(These holes are in "accounting, business, nursing and medical technology...and computer science."
They want to encourage immigration, but with "tighter oversight by state and federal regulatory bodies" along with advertising campaigns to reduce bias and segregation.
Finally, they want federal money for infrastructure/clean energy/organic farming.

Well, that's the plan -- there are parts of it that I could partly get behind, I guess. One problem is that the first items sound like they're describing the BOCES service, which we already use:

An example of programs that BOCES might offer are Academics Support, Auto Body Repair, Auto Technology, Building Maintenance, Business Computer Technology, Carpentry, Computer Repair and Networking, Cosmetology, Criminal Justice, Culinary Arts, Early Childhood Education, Electrical Wiring Technology, Forestry & Conservation, Gas/Diesel Mechanics, Life Skills, Medical Careers, New Vision Health, Nursing Assistant, Practical Nursing, Small Animal Care and Visual Communications.

The school we might merge with does it more the way Carr and Kefalas recommend, with BOCES supplemented by dual-credit community college coursework which can indeed be very "practical." One of my sons took BOCES courses. Another took Colgate courses, but those were in ancient Greek -- not a Carr&Kefalas recommendation. Both now live in NYC. I have no objection to these recommendations, but this is what we're already doing. I don't see the evidence that it works to prevent "Hollowing Out." I do favor substantially increased immigration on various grounds, and I'm disturbed by its recent shrinkage, but that's not something a small community can do a lot about. Infrastructure, ditto. I think I'll skip the clean energy and organic farming issues. Overall, I don't see much help here.

Well, maybe there's not much help to be had. I do think there's some reason to expect that telepresence (in medicine as I've written before, in education, in manufacturing, in getting things done generally) will reduce the difference between Here and There for employment purposes, and that will make cheaper locations with better scenery more attractive. But not for some years -- an unpredictable number of years. Meanwhile, I'm thinking about possible ways to restructure schools, and I suspect that this would require reformulation as a public charter.

Update: Well, I've heard Carr speak (as did my daughter's class, earlier in the day.) He commented that this village is more "robust" than the ones he's worrying about; he commented on the central role of the school in small-town existence, and what a disaster a school's disappearance can be. I was surprised by the extent to which it turned into an anti-college talk, arguing that college graduates are overqualified for a large fraction of near-future jobs and that pushing everyone towards college is doing them a disservice. He said that average college debt was $50,000 (and he gave the same figure to my daughter's class, so I don't think I misheard.). This really startled me so I looked it up and find that Consumer Reports says

The average total of debt per student in the class of 2011 will be $22,900.

There is some confusion here; CR agrees that it's rising (but still a good investment), but earlier figures from the NYT say Average College Debt Rose 6 Percent to $24,000 in 2009 - NYTimes.com. I think the difference is that CR is reporting actual average debt per student (for all students) whereas the NYT had been reporting average debt per student-with-debt (a majority of all students, but by no means all.) I'm not sure of that, though. I am, however, reasonably sure that Carr's figure is quite drastically wrong, which doesn't help his credibility. (My credibility is absolute; I never make mistakes, which is why this blog does not exist.) I do think some of what he said is good: if a region-based training program with certification can connect new high-school graduates with employers, or even encourage employers to move in, that's great. BOCES is a good thing. Welding is a good thing. But robotic welding is growing fast, and I don't think that a career as a welder is a good bet any more. Robotic health care is not as far along, and Carr also talked about certification in health care. Mostly, though, I expect that these certified workers are going to find jobs in higher-density areas...how many certified health-care workers is a small town going to absorb? Overall, when it comes to disappearing schools, I don't think that "Hollowing Out the Middle" has much help to offer. A little, especially for states that don't already have something like BOCES, but not much. Too bad. Some of my daughter's classmates apparently summarized his talk to them as "don't go to college, stay at home until you're thirty, work at McDonald's" -- they simply didn't believe in the jobs he spoke of. That's a little unfair, but I'm not sure that it's a lot unfair. I don't believe in those jobs (as local jobs) either.

Health Care and the Experts: Financial Analogy?

2011-09-05T13:59:00.000-07:00

Some co-author or other saw the Myers (fragment-of-a-) Health Care Plan which I put up last Easter, which started with

1. Allow unlicensed health care, wherever it's clearly labeled as such; it won't get public support but people can choose to spend their money on it. The argument against this is apparently that people will make bad choices. Yeah, some will, probably including me and you. So? I've never understood the way some people believe that they (or those they select) can make good choices for others; in fact I'm moderately cynical about licensure requirements as they are now structured, whether for medics or morticians or cosmetologists.

His comment says

I came to look at Chelyuskin but chanced upon healthcare. Your item 1 is the only time I can remember when I totally disagree with you. You say: Some people will make bad choices including you and me. This equates mistakes by poor slobs who lost their houses and livelihoods in 2008 with "mistakes by TJM," that same TJM who, I suspect, belongs to that tiny minority who made money in 2008, because he has both sharp analytical mind and enough money to hire a top-notch money manager. Besides, this just won't work politically: as soon as a poor slob somewhere takes her child to an unlicensed healer, and the child ends up with an amputated limb, the outcry for regulation will be irresistible and, IMHO, justified.

I wasn't sure how to respond to this money-management analogy, and I let it go; I'll give it a try now...

I'm astonished -- and encouraged, because I would not have expected item 1 to be the only total disagreement even in this post, much less in general. And of course it's possible that I'm totally wrong...but I haven't changed my mind yet. Let's take it one step at a time.

The first point of disagreement, a very big one: No, I didn't make money in 2008. In fact in September 2009 I said

I haven't posted for a long time, but it's not that I haven't made any mistakes. Indeed, I've participated to some extent in one of the biggest mistakes of my lifetime -- the market crash of 2008.

Personally, I did see the bubble as such, earlier than some...

In fact I lost much less than I might have because (like my "top-notch money manager" -- I must remember to tell him about that description) I was expecting a downturn at some unpredictable point Real Soon, a small-to-middling wealth-effect recession whenever the bubble popped, and also of course because I avoided real estate. But I did lose, because we weren't expecting what happened. Was this an issue of expertise, in any useful sense of that term? People with far greater expertise than mine, including both the then-current and currently current heads of the Federal Reserve, were denying the problem -- even denying the limited problem that I saw then. (Indeed, since a big part of the problem was excessive risk-taking -- i.e. excessive confidence -- I think those public statements contributed to our still-continuing doldrums in addition to the policy errors I believe they made.) There were indeed a very few people who actually made money by understanding a part of what was going on: a short-seller named Eisman was quoted in late 2008 in The End Of Wall Streets Boom

“We always asked the same question,” says Eisman. “Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.” He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says.

S&P denies that; I haven't heard any coherent excuses for the way they performed as the Supreme Appointed Financial Experts of the American economy (co-equal with Fitch and Moody's, of course). I dunno. Still it's my understanding that Eisman made money whereas on the average, people with more to lose (them with money managers) lost more, disproportionately more, than those with less. That's a Good Thing, as far as it goes -- it didn't go as far as it should because of Too-Big-To-Fail, i.e. some high-income people had their losses made good at the average guy's expense -- but it doesn't fit well with a belief that experts protect us from making disastrous mistakes. As I said in that Sept 2009 post, "To a disturbing extent, I think expertise in (macro)economics has been discredited. I don't believe this is adequately answered by Greg Mankiw's [remarks about economics being non-predictive]". I agree with parts of Brad DeLong's remarks a few days ago in What To Do About Jobs? that

given that most of what we macroeconomists were saying in 2007 was wrong, what, if anything, do we have to say today? Bear in mind that what turns out to have been wrong was pretty much everything that had been done since 1950....

Well, with part of it. As the the Economist (Ryan Avent) said last week,

The narrow point to focus on, however, is that the story in which the housing bust gave us the recession, because America suddenly had lots of houses and workers it couldn't use doesn't appear to fit the data. The economy muddled on despite the housing bust for two years, at which point, for some reason, all sectors suddenly decided that the outlook for growth was much worse than they'd previously believed.

As he says, that fits the Scott Sumner story I've blogged about before, which can be read as very conventional textbook macro and which blames most of the recession on the experts of the Federal Reserve, who simply did the wrong thing in a big way. (There's still room for other blames, of course.) On a more micro-economic level, I'd say that expert stock-picking advice is also of dubious value: I'm a moderate believer in a very weak form of the efficient-market hypothesis, and if this country were to adopt a deduction-free progressive consumption tax system (which it should do on grounds of efficiency/fairness/sanity) I would almost certainly stop using a money manager -- the money-manager's value is rather strongly dependent on his understanding of a complex system that really shouldn't exist. (Also dependent on the fact that his services are mostly deductible, i.e. you're helping to pay. Thanks!) What would I do then? I would switch to a passive management pattern, which in pure investment terms is at least as good and likely better:

In the United States, indexed funds have outperformed the majority of active managers, especially as the fees they charge are very much lower than active managers. They are also able to have significantly greater after-tax returns.

Most of my decisions would then have to do with asset allocation:

The conclusion of the study was that replacing active choices with simple asset classes worked just as well as, if not even better than, professional pension managers. Also, a small number of asset classes was sufficient for financial planning.

Hooray for Malkiel! And for Samuelson and Bogle!. This doesn't prove that financial expertise is worthless, but I don't think it has the kind of value you're suggesting.

Let me put it this way:

Failure to consult such an expert now and then is really stupid. There are a lot of things a financial specialist knows that are not intuitive; important things.
Many of these are routine things, how to file this-and-that.
Many of these are simple things you really ought to learn yourself (why it probably makes sense to own more bonds and fewer stocks as you get older, etc. etc. etc.)
Some of the others are simply not true, and we don't know which until it's too late (why the top tranche of a pile of mortgage-backed securities deserves its AAA rating, etc. etc.)
Unlimited trust for your expert is not wise.
Compulsory obedience to your expert is a really really bad idea, which fortunately is not employed except for the way that S&P and the other experts are embedded in the laws about risk ratings, which effectively required banks to invest in disastrous mortgage-backed securities...
Perhaps the most important financial skill you can have is that by which you evaluate an expert; nobody else can do this for you, but certification and track-record-checking and recommendations are all important.

Your analogy between medical and financial services is not one that would have occurred to me, but it may have merit. Failure to consult an actual medical expert now and then is really stupid. Medical specialists do indeed know a lot of unintuitive things. Many of these are routine. Many are things you should learn for yourself. Many are false. Trust is a good thing, unlimited trust is a bad thing, compulsory obedience is a really bad thing. Certification and track-record and recommendations...yup. Okay, I'll take the analogy. :-)

Seriously, I think you're saying, effectively, that

If there's one seriously bad (but non-fatal) outcome from an unlicensed healer, public outcry will correctly push us back to requiring licensure

It seems to me you're forgetting something: the licensed doctors we have now are responsible for some 100,000 fatal errors per year (perhaps a little less, perhaps a lot more; see Wikipedia.) Those deaths are on top of a death-toll which I believe to be very much larger: deaths caused by the FDA's prevention of innovation. I'd suggest reading one article, Theory, Evidence and Examples of FDA Harm by Tabarrok and Klein:

Three bodies of evidence indicate that the costs of FDA requirements exceed the benefits. In other words, three bodies of evidence suggest that the FDA kills and harms, on net...

Or you might prefer The FDA: Neither Safe nor Effective ending with a Friedman quote:

“‘The FDA has already done enormous harm to the health of the American public by greatly increasing the costs of pharmaceutical research, thereby reducing the supply of new and effective drugs, and by delaying the approval of such drugs as survive the tortuous FDA process.’ When asked, if you could do anything to improve health in America, what would you do? Friedman replied: ‘No more licensing of doctors. No more regulation of drugs. Not of any kind. Period.’”

Actually, I don't quite agree, but my position is a whole lot closer to Friedman's than to anything that's likely to happen, and I'd accept his as being substantially better than what we have now. (And if we magically went to his, I like you and most others would go right on consulting a conventional MD -- but the MD I consulted might not be in the US. It might depend on what happened to the insurance industry, which would now be free to sell the sort of insurance policy that I'd want to buy.)

Or then again, maybe not.

Update:Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-Winning Economist, Says Federal Reserve System 'Corrupt' according to the Puffington Host:

To Stiglitz, the core issue is that regional Fed banks, such as the New York Fed, have clear conflicts of interest -- a result of the banks being partly governed by a board of directors that includes officers of the very banks they're supposed to be overseeing.

The New York Fed, which was led by current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner during the time leading Wall Street firms like Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, AIG, and Goldman Sachs were given hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts, presently has on its board of directors Jamie Dimon, the head of JPMorgan Chase. He's been there for three years. He replaced former Citigroup chairman Sanford "Sandy" Weill.

"So, these are the guys who appointed the guy who bailed them out," Stiglitz said. "Is that a conflict of interest?" he asked rhetorically.

That really might explain the Fed's behavior... in finance as in medicine, the incentives of regulatory capture and crony capitalism apply. People who exert government's influence are always going to be pushed towards exerting it in favor of those who can exert influence on their behalf, and regulation -- especially licensure, as the power to say who can't compete with you -- is always going to be a Very Good Thing from the point of view of those who have a seat at the table. They may even sincerely believe that they are the only true experts, and that those who do things differently are simply not good for the public. (Or then again, maybe not.)

Two Hundred Trillion Dollars

2011-07-31T13:10:00.000-07:00

There are some silly songs on Youtube about the $46,000 debt we're giving each new child at birth; the songs are supposed to make you feel guilty about what we're doing to our children, and I think they're supposed to energize you against the debt-ceiling rise and for the balanced budget amendment. Well, the debt ceiling is stupid, and the balanced budget amendment is a really bad idea, and $46,000 is a ludicrous figure; the correct figure, the figure that the average kid needs to pay (or pay interest on, or pass on with accrued interest to the next generation,) is probably well over half a million. Nobody can know exactly; it depends on future growth of expenses and revenues and population, but $46,000 is a very small fraction of the total.

In April 2010, after the health-care bill's passage, I wrote a "One Hundred Trillion Dollars" context post in which I quoted the Dallas Fed:

Add together the unfunded liabilities from Medicare and Social Security, and it comes to $99.2 trillion over the infinite horizon. Traditional Medicare composes about 69 percent, the new drug benefit roughly 17 percent and Social Security the remaining 14 percent. ... all we would have to do to fully fund our nation’s entitlement programs would be to cut discretionary spending by 97 percent....defense and national security, education, the environment ... All of them [forever]

Today I noticed on Yahoo a more up-to-date and more complete and therefore more scary view of the same concept, from BusinessWeek, in Why the Debt Crisis Is Even Worse Than You Think:

A more revealing calculation is the CBO’s measurement of what’s called the fiscal gap. That figure is conceptually cleaner than the national debt—and consequently more alarming. Boston University’s Kotlikoff has extended the agency’s analysis from 2085 out to the infinite horizon, which he says is the only method that’s invulnerable to the frame-of-reference problem. It’s an approach used by actuaries to make sure that a pension system doesn’t contain an instability that will manifest itself just past the last year studied. Years far in the future carry very little weight, converging toward zero, because they are discounted by the time value of money. Even so, Kotlikoff concluded that the fiscal gap—i.e., the net present value of all future expenses minus all future revenue—amounts to $211 trillion.

How does that work? Well, let's think about the Smith family and the Jones family, each expecting the same future expenses spread out over time. Joe Jones intends to pay as he goes; he hasn't borrowed anything. Sam Smith has borrowed enough money from a bank to fund an investment account which will pay exactly the same expenses. In fact, aside from the issue of bank profit, he had to borrow exactly the net present value of those future expenses. (He has a triple-A rating, of course. For now.) You can think of various ways that they're in different situations, but the Smith and Jones families are basically comparable: the payments on Smith's loan will not over time be appreciably different from Jones' direct expenses. So we can think of both of them as having the same financial future: if one is in trouble, they both are. And right now, the US has the same financial future as if it had made no unfunded promises but had borrowed a grand total of $211,000,000,000.00. So far.

Is that exact? No, of course not. Things might not be quite that bad, they could be even worse: as the article says, the calculation is quite sensitive to assumptions about future events and policy. But it's accurate enough to say that the "debt" is not what we should worry about; we should worry about the "fiscal gap".

Of course, if you worry about the debt, then it makes sense to talk about the deficit: $850 billion dollars last year. What if you're worried about the fiscal gap? Does the deficit become irrelevant? Yes, really; as Kotlikoff says:

The gap was $205 trillion last year, measured in today’s dollars. That’s an increase of $6 trillion. ... Hence, the real deficit we should be worrying about is more than six times larger than the $850 billion official deficit capturing all the attention.
In other words, Congress and the president’s administration could agree to run a balanced budget, making this year’s official deficit zero, and the nation’s true indebtedness would still rise by $5.15 trillion!... the main reason is that we are one year closer to having to pay 78 million baby boomers roughly $40,000, on average, per year in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits. Because the fiscal gap is a discounted present value, one year makes a big difference.

If you think back to the Smith and Jones family, and imagine the fiscal gap as an implicit debt, then the $5 trillion is mainly the result of our failure to pay even the interest on the $206 trillion we owed last year -- we do have a really good interest rate as long as we keep the AAA rating, but it's not zero.

So, should we balance the budget anyway, even if it's inadequate to do so? No -- not in years with high unemployment. I'd agree with Calculated Risk: Debt Ceiling Update

A politician can say "We should have a balanced budget". It sounds good, but why aren't they challenged about operating vs. capital budgets? And about business cycle spending (obviously revenue falls during a recession - and spending increases)?
What they really want is a balanced operating budget over the business cycle. You can't put that in the Constitution. It requires effective government and constant vigilance.

But even capital vs. operating budget doesn't quite do it for me: I want the fiscal gap, over the business cycle, to remain a limited multiple of GDP. Fifteen times GDP? Okay, fifteen times GDP. (It would be nice to shrink it.) But don't let it keep growing (as a multiple of GDP) from one business-cycle peak to the next.

And with all that, should my taxes be raised? Yes, emphatically so -- my taxes should be raised as part of a plan to deal with the fiscal gap. I can and should pay more taxes than most people; that part's understood. I'm not in Kerry's league for lifetime income, not even in Obama's, but I can pay more taxes than I do -- it won't even cut my consumption until taxes get quite a lot higher. What I don't think most raise-taxes people understand is that even though a fairly substantial tax hike won't be a "hardship", won't seriously cut my consumption, it will cut my reinvestment. It has to. So it will reduce the money available to future generations of taxers; in fact a dollar of tax revenue increase now is somewhat more than a dollar of tax revenue decrease later, because you'll have spent the money before it grew. So it's crucial, when you take my money, to take it as part of a plan to deal with the fiscal gap--otherwise the gap grows and you've taken some of the resources we'll need to deal with it. (I tried to go over this in the aforelinked One Hundred Trillion Dollars post.) In any case, if you actually want to fix things, focus on consumption, not income. (I'll still pay more than average, I promise.)

And is it hopeless? Not at all. We still see, e.g. Foxconn to replace workers with 1 million robots in 3 years. We still see Sarcos Exoskeleton Bringing Iron Man Suit Closer To Reality and the beautiful Watch Festo's SmartBird Robot Soar Over TED Conference. We still see Loss of memory due to aging may be reversible and, for young and old, How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education. We may even see Could 100 Kilometer high towers usher in the next space age?

The SpaceShaft concept isn't as ambitious as the space elevator but it is much more feasible. For 130 million Euros we could design and construct a 100 kilometer tall SpaceShaft within a decade. Once we have SpaceShafts up and running, the frontier of space will finally be open to humanity.

Or then again.... maybe not.

Language-Learning Software; Bottom-Up?

2011-07-30T15:25:00.000-07:00

As I've said, this year I've been working some on modern Greek, and thinking about it. My context, though, is a little more than simply that of a programmer with Greek family but no aptitude for languages. For more than ten years now, I've been on-and-off involved with media-annotation software that was mostly intended for teaching languages in a higher-education setting. (See, e.g., a 2005 Semantic Web Applications writeup as "Semantic Annotations for Digital Video" (PDF).) Quite a few Colgate students have learned Russian using Russian video with time-aligned transcript and commentary, texts that I can't read but that were linked by code I wrote. (The commentary may or may not be just one "layer", and may or may not include a translation; the time-aligned transcript starts as the sort of thing you create in transcriber, which I had scripts for the previous version of, or with ELAN — Language Archiving Technology; I've contributed code to ELAN, and I like its design and I'm doing more work on it this year, but I end up wanting an actual editable HTML page to contain the transcript etc. I'm hoping to do it all in HTML5, Real Soon Now.)

Of course, I'm not trying to learn modern Greek in a higher-education setting; I'm doing that on my own. Self-study software? I did get the Rosetta Stone Greek Level 1-2 Set and used it for a while (the little doggie at my feet is in fact named Rosetta, and that's why.) I haven't used it for a long time, though, and I really can't do it while trying for nine-minute miles on the elliptical. Still, the idea of language learning as a figure-it-out-as-you-go-along matching game does appeal; it's a common way for game worlds to work, and I have thought about implementing it within a world of time-aligned transcript+commentary, where we match sentences and play the selection...Hmm. But that would be further from my own personal current requirements than Rosetta itself. Well, since I was using actual flashcards for exercise-study and then using texts that I could think of as flashcards, it obviously might make sense to use flashcard software, say The Mnemosyne Project offering

Efficient scheduling algorithm, so you don't waste time on things you know well
Support for languages using different scripts through unicode
Support for pictures, sounds and html formatting
Support for three-sided cards, e.g. foreign words where you are interested in written form, pronunciation and translation

Mostly, though, I've been using pages that look like this fragment, from Dover's Listen & Learn Modern Greek:

I treat these as three-sided cards of variable size; in other words, I try to memorize a word at a time, then a phrase at a time, then a clause at a time, then a sentence at a time, and maybe even a dialog-fragment at a time. I start with the English and phonetic rendering, over and over, one word at a time, and then when I come back to a piece later I try to pay attention only to the Greek text. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Hmm....

My ideal software, maybe, would have time-aligned video dialog scenes (pretend or even real restaurant scene, airport scene, hotel scene...) done at full speed by native speakers and time-aligned sentence by sentence, but that wouldn't be the starting point. That would be the goal. The starting point for each scene would use the same transcripts spoken much more slowly with alignment points between each word and the next, and markup to indicate phrase/clause/sentence/paragraph structure.

The user would start with word-at-a-time audio to play over and over while getting used to the English; in effect, single-word flashcards with audio support. As those got familiar, they'd be merged into phrases and so on up; a Mnemosyne-like strategy would have to track which phrases contain only words you've adequately learned, which clauses contain only phrases you've adequately learned, and so on. There would also be auxiliary pseudo-scenes for verb conjugations and such, but they'd be dealt with in the same way: bottom-up.

Sure, it would be nice to click "KRAH-tee-seh" or the Greek it represents and get a dictionary entry which identified as much as possible. But that kind of thing is easy enough; it so happens that I'm spending part of my work-time trying to improve the extent to which ELAN can talk to SIL's FLEx, which does dictionaries nicely. (As long as somebody creates the dictionary data; content is hard.) And it might be nice to add a link to a Google Translate suggestion, in this case "κράτα τα ρέστα". Many things might be nice, but the idea I'm thinking about has what I'd like to call bottom-up flashcards, based on an ELAN-style breakdown of each sentence as a basic framework, with the actual dictionary for the bottom level if possible. Hmm.

I would really like a piece of software that supports this kind of use-case, and maybe one exists. Or it's possible that the code I work with now can be modified to do so.

Of course, maybe I shouldn't be thinking about this as a strategy; it may be a bad strategy even if implemented well. If I were a foreign-language teacher, or even a good foreign-language student, I'd probably know better.

Or then again, maybe not. I dunno.

Thoughts on Greece, and us

2011-07-23T11:07:00.000-07:00

A large part of what holds Greece back, and us as well, is fairly described as rent-seeking--manipulation of public power for private profit, one way or another. In Greece, as in the Latin America of my childhood, it's much more likely to take the form of simple corruption: imagine (as I was told in Greece last week) an underpaid government official who approves environmental permits, and who provides faster service for those who provide extra money. And then he slows down the uncompensated permits sharply, to encourage the trade. It's not that he is lazy or works few hours, it's not even that there are too many such officials -- all that is often said but seems to be wrong. It's simply that his work product tends to detract from actual GDP, even as it's added at "cost" to official GDP. If he weren't doing that, Greece would be richer.

Other kinds of rent-seekers include those who profit from government-imposed monopolies, like the Athens taxi-drivers now striking, unpredictably blocking port and airport. Rent-seeking is a pretty broad category in my mind. I suppose that all countries end up with issues of regulatory capture and indeed of crony capitalism; government makes rules, and these rules will tend to promote the interests of those who have something to offer to the rule-makers, or some credible threat they can make. That interest-promotion is "rent," paid to the people who've managed to make some government power into their own property, legally or not.

I spent last week on Spetses, with various extended-family events relating to my granddaughter's baptism. It's interesting and educational to listen to Greeks and Greek-Americans talking about their fiscal crisis; I'd hoped to get some time specifically listening to Yannis Ioannides and Anna Hardman, and did, but not enough for real understanding. Yannis' basic Greece-is-not-bankrupt statement surprised me considerably (see Ioannides Says Greece Not Bankrupt, Must Change Economy: Video - Bloomberg). He thinks Greece really can pay its debts -- and he thought that even before the ’Restricted Default’ deal of this week, so I presume he thinks his case has been strengthened. He's an advocate for the austerity measures, which I suppose makes him one of the Serious People of whom Paul Krugman said this week in 1937! 1937! 1937! - NYTimes.com that

OK, so we’re going to demand harsh austerity in the debt-crisis countries; and meanwhile, we’re also going to have austerity in the non-debt-crisis countries. Plus, the ECB is raising rates. So demand will be depressed in both crisis and non-crisis economies; this will lead to a vigorous recovery through … what? The Serious People are determined to destroy all the advanced economies in the name of prudence.

I'm mostly on Krugman's side there; we're combining monetary policy from the ECB which may be reasonable for Germany but not for Greece, along with drastic contractions of an uncomfortably the-beatings-will-continue-until-morale-improves flavor. Or so it seems to me. But Yannis isn't supporting austerity to reassure bond markets as Krugman says; Yannis thinks that the "austerity" (including the deregulation of taxi medallions being protested) is part of breaking or at least limiting the rent-seeking system. Well, I'm not sure he or Anna ever said "rent-seeking" but that's my understanding of what they did say, and when I look for related material online I find things like BusinessInsider's querying a member of the `professional "elite" class' of Greece, who said

We want the Greek economy reformed. An end to the of unimaginable waste of taxpayers money,...cronyism and corruption. A much smaller and reformed public sector... A pursuit and prosecution of presently wide spread tax evasion practices. The above would immediately provide us with a considerable primary surplus, enabling us to keep repaying our debt, an obligation we wish to honour. ... Unfortunately it appears that the average Greek, does not view things the same way.

That certainly sounds like the viewpoint of the Greeks with whom I spoke. And how big is the corruption problem? Well, Transparency International said

The Greeks paid an average of €1,355 ($1,830) in bribes [in 2009] for public services such as speeding up the issue of driver's licenses and construction permits, getting admitted to public hospitals or manipulating tax returns, ... Bribes paid for private sector services such as lawyers, doctors or banks were even higher...

So really, Yannis and those he supports (to the extent that I understand what's going on here) are not so much engaged in economics as in political action aimed at restructuring Greek culture. Otherwise, the bailouts fail. In The Painful Arithmetic of Greek Debt Default | e21 - Economic Policies for the 21st Century I see

How does corruption limit the capacity for tax and spending reform? Tax avoidance, which relies on bribery to avoid prosecution, is a national pastime in Greece – the envelope used in the bribe even has its own name, the “fakelaki,” confirming the age-old adage that the Greeks “have a word for it.” Bribery is so rampant in Greece that real estate developers’ method of obtaining cheap land is to burn down public land, squat on the burned parcels, and pay off public officials to permit this. Greece’s forest fires, particularly in the Peloponnese in 2007, have been a source of public outrage for years, and yet the developers continue to squat on the land with impunity. Is a society that permits that sort of lawlessness capable of tax reform?

Maybe. Maybe not. I respect Yannis, but if the average Greek doesn't believe in it to begin with, I don't see a happy ending to this story.

Corruption is by no means the only problem, and an end to rent-seeking would not necessarily make Greece fit comfortably into the Eurozone. Clearly, little Greece will never be the target of the ECB's monetary policy. Krugman, in Anatomy of a Euromess, said that

Spain’s troubles are not, despite what you may have read, the result of fiscal irresponsibility. Instead, they reflect “asymmetric shocks” within the eurozone, which were always known to be a problem, but have turned out to be an even worse problem than the euroskeptics feared.

David Beckworth took Krugman's analysis and extended it in "Optimal Currency Area" terms within Eurozone Periphery and the Euro, saying

If a region’s economy is not in sync with the currency union’s business cycle and the above listed shock absorbers ("flexible wages and prices, factor mobility, fiscal transfers, and diversified economies") are absent then it does not makes sense for a country to be a part of the currency union. Instead, the country should keep its own currency which itself will act as a shock absorber.

It's no great surprise to see that in his graphs, Greece ends up as the most ill-placed. But I believe that part of the "austerity" program is intended to increase the flexibility of the job market (by pruning job protection programs, as has been tried before) and maybe, if the austerity programs are accepted, maybe things will work out. For a while. Public Pensions and Labor Force Participation: The Case of Greece

The pension system of Greece is a representative case of the “Mediterranean welfare state”, which is characterized by extensive segmentation, very high payroll tax rates, and yet inadequate pension benefits. In order to explain this paradox we construct an economic–demographic model. We show that in the period 1980–2000, the segmentation of the system and the very low labor force participation rates of the Greek economy have resulted in very high payroll tax rates in relation to the current level of benefits. On top of these problems, the expected adverse demographic developments in the period 2005–2050 will render the pension system completely unsustainable.

Still, the near-term need is to cut the rent-seeking (including corruption) and collect the taxes and shrink the regulatory/welfare state. Maybe. And can it be done? Well, my own approach in Greece, even more than in the US would be:

automate, eliminate, simplify, outsource.

Almost all of a government's functionality should be virtual... Well, maybe I will make a separate post about that, sometime.

Meanwhile, a little more time has been bought. The Economist remarks that

the biggest risk to the euro zone is that its leaders will begin thinking that they've solved the problem. As growth figures worsen in coming months, markets will once again become antsy. Euro-zone officials had better be preparing for a way to convince them anew that they want this thing to work.

And I go back to the pattern I established last winter, of exercise and education

This morning I spent 45 minutes trying to pound a few modern Greek words and phrases into an aging memory; until a month ago, this would have required a major effort of willpower, but lately I've been doing it every day with no problem...

As I commented to my son's mother-in-law, see-gah-see-gah mah-THAY-no, which I think means "little by little I'm learning;" since her response was "bravo, Tom, ah-krih-VOS!" (precisely), maybe it does. And maybe I will eventually learn some economics too. Or then again, maybe not.

Chelyuskin: Drifting, sinking, rescue (data entry sample)

2011-06-18T04:48:00.000-07:00

Drifting from Chukchi Sea to Bering Straight

From 1933-09-23 to 1933-11-04 at location, Initially the ship was drifting eastward, reaching the Bering Straight. Only a few miles separated it from open water, but at that point the drift changed direction towards North-West.

More drifting, and the end of the ship

From 1933-11-04 to 1934-02-13 at location, The ship drifted for another three months, until it was crushed by the ice packs near the island of Kolyuchin, and sank two hours later. The crew had been prepared for this outcome, and managed to unload all the necessary supplies, including bricks and lumber to build temporary dwellings. They built and rebuilt their makeshift airstrip on ice thirteen times before they were rescued.

First rescue

From 1934-03-04 to 1934-03-05 at location, The ship had left Murmansk with 112 people on board. Eight of them disembarked at Cape Chelyuskin, to work at the observatory there. There was an addition: one of the land surveyors on board traveled with his pregnant wife who gave birth to a baby girl as the ship was passing the Kara Sea; the girl was named Karina. There was also a loss: a man was squashed to death by the shifting cargo as the ship was going underwater. 104 people remained on ice. The first aircraft to reach them took 12, eight women and two children (one of them a baby).

Amphibian departure

From 1934-04-02 to 1934-04-03 at location, Chelyuskin traveled with a small amphibian plane. Its pilot and mechanic flew the plane approximately 150km to the village of Vankarem, shortly before the comple evacuation.

Complete evacuation

From 1934-04-07 to 1934-04-13 at location, All the remaining people were flown from their ice settlement to Vankarem. The head of the expedition, Otto Schmidt, fell gravely ill and was immediately taken to an American hospital in Alaska. Fifty three men were flown to the larger villag of Uelen where there was and is a sea port. The rest walked almost 300 miles from Vankarem to Uelen.

Chelyuskin: construction to ice-pack capture (data entry sample)

2011-06-18T04:46:00.000-07:00

Boat built

From 1933-03-11 to 1933-03-12 at location Steamship Chelyuskin, named after the 18th century Russian explorer, was built for the Soviet government by the famous Danish shipyard Burmeister and Wain (B&W, Copenhagen). It was classified by Lloyd as "+100 A1 strengthened for navigation in ice."

From Copenhagen to Leningrad

From 1933-06-03 to 1933-06-05 at location, Soon after its maiden voyage on May 6, the ship sailed to Leningrad, where the expedition was to originate. The head of the expedition was Otto Yuliyevich Shmidt, and the ship's captain was V. I. Voronin.

Leningrad to Murmansk via Copenhagen

From 1933-07-16 to 1933-07-24 at location, The first leg of the expedition was from Leningrad to Copenhagen, to correct minor defects discovered in testing. From there, the ship continued to Murmansk.

Murmansk to Cape Chelyuskin

From 1933-08-02 to 1933-09-01 at location, First ice was encountered after sailing out of the Matochkin Straight into the Kara Sea. Helped by an ice-breaker, the ship managed to get through solid ice and continue the voyange on its own, reaching Cape Chelyuskin on September 1.

Cape Chelyuskin to Chukchi Sea

From 1933-09-01 to 1933-09-23 at location, Continuing its journey, the ship reached Chukchi Sea where it was caught in solid ice packs.

Notes on Afghanistan

2011-04-25T17:38:00.000-07:00

Back in February, Tim Hetherington came to Colgate and talked about his career photographing war and about how things aren't working out in Afghanistan. Then last week he was killed in Libya, and I'm left looking at this signed copy of Infidel. He was a good guy. Today Candace Rondeaux came to Colgate and talked about her career as journalist/analyst, and about how things aren't working out in Afghanistan. It's a drug-cartel war, it's a civil war, it's a religious war, and it's a war in which we're supporting the thoroughly corrupt side which many citizens decide they just can't deal with. (Of course we're also supporting the other side via drug money and oil money.) She did offer a specific, concrete suggestion: she suggested that many of the Afghan officials most responsible for corruption hold dual passports which could be pulled by their other countries. Hmm....

Bob Kraynak asked her to comment on possible silver linings, both in the short-term "decimation" of Al-Qaeda and in the long-term change in regional culture so that in several countries now we're seeing possible democratization and in a generation or so we might see a lot of it. Rondeaux does not believe A-Q has been decimated (Bob's term, here) because Taliban forces seem frequently to be guided by A-Q advisors; she admits the possibility that in a generation, or two generations, we may think the whole thing was worthwhile, but it's only a possibility if we "face reality" and stay in, but not in the way we're doing now; it's only a possibility if we take nation-building seriously.

Well, if decimated still means killing one in ten, I think it's likely that Al-Qaeda's leadership has been decimated, for what that's worth -- and I think our situation would be a lot worse if that decimation hadn't happened. I suspect that the TSA has done little or nothing to prevent terrorist attacks since 9/11, but it's not that the bad guys thought they'd done enough. They're far from gone, but they've been hurt; just as important, their friends in the Taliban got hurt. In the short run, I do think that's a silver lining on some very stormy clouds.

Democratization is more problematic; the long run is more problematic. As I've said many times, I think we're likely to be in really bad trouble somewhere in the ten-to-thirty-year time frame because a variety of technological destructive possibilities "improve" in Moore's Law style but human destructive tendencies change slowly if at all. We can withdraw from Afghanistan, and fewer Americans will be killed for a year or five thereafter, but some of the nuts we'd be leaving as we bolt are already nuclear. Things will get worse; three thousand dying at once is not guaranteed to stay maximal, or even to seem like a bad day. 9/11 may yet be recognized as the wake-up call for which we groped around, banging around the alarm clock, before finally hitting the snooze button -- for just a little too long. There are times when I agree that the reason we don't hear radio communications from the stars is simply that no intelligent species survive their inevitable development of really bad technology. "Intelligent?" Well, you (probably) know what I mean.

So what can we do? As usual, I'm left looking over what I said before, thinking that it still looks reasonable -- but maybe it's too late. I would certainly

cut bad-guy funding
- in the short term, by calling a halt to the drug war -- opium should be moderately taxed and treated like nicotine, not pushing immense profit into the hands of those who hate us;
- in the longer term, by initiatives like intrinsically blow-up proof nuclear reactors to reduce world-wide oil usage. (I'm not even thinking about carbon.)
improve good-guy funding
- directly, via free trade, and
- indirectly, by pushing transparent interactions...my basic message, repeated millions of times at immense expense even in the midst of our own economic troubles, would still be close to what I said before:
  here is your RFID/bar code/photo/fingerprint/biometric ID, linked to a bank account which already has a couple of bucks in it, and here is your personal cell phone....
  (and everything has a URL)
And there would still be a somewhat-internationalized Barnett-style SysAdmin force behind that, as before...

But of course it's not going to happen, and I don't see why any more practical plan is likely to happen either. Some nights are less cheerful than others.

clarification: A random reader might well think it's insane to think of free trade as direct support for good guys--direct support is arms and material for them what's shooting at bad guys. No, those who shoot at bad guys may be our allies, probably some good guys and some -- well, Stalin was an ally in WWII. Aid for them is necessary, but it's not the same as aid for good guys. The good guys mostly just want to live their lives with family, friends, neighbors and perhaps letting others live their lives too, sometimes even helping. Support for them is mainly lowered transaction cost for doing business, which I loosely call "free trade".

It's all about healthcare. Well, and signaling.

2011-04-23T19:41:00.000-07:00

This afternoon I was sitting in the third row, right behind the woman who placed the winning bid -- $13,000 -- on the auction of Harry Potter's bow tie. Well, of J. Pierpont Finch's bow tie, Finch being the lead character of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying; Finch is played by Daniel Radcliffe, a talented young actor/singer/dancer (well, a bit weaker as a dancer, I thought, but I'm no judge) who will probably be plagued for the rest of his life by people who can't help but think of him as Harry Potter. And he and his co-star were trying to raise money for a Good Cause, namely healthcare, after the performance. (Okay, a specific healthcare cause, but I'm still fussing about healthcare in general.) So....

So I would call the winning bid rather impressive; I think most people would. Radcliffe commented that we were "well over the record", some time before the auction closed---I presume he does this with a fresh bow tie for each performance. But I couldn't help but be reminded of the cost of my own appendectomy, not quite a year ago: it was in fact a little over the bow tie's price. Consider what that audience pays for healthcare each year...the auction was a Good Thing to Do, an Exercise in Nobility, a demonstration of the Brotherhood of Man (that being the last song&dance) but as a contribution to healthcare it was a teaspoonful in a lake.

Yes, I understand that's not the point. It's not really about healthcare, even healthcare is not really about healthcare. Robin Hanson put it rather well, some time ago, in his argument that it's about Showing That You Care:

I can explain these puzzles moderately well by assuming that humans evolved deep medical habits long ago in an environment where people gained higher status by having more allies, honestly cared about those who remained allies, were unsure ... These ancient habits would induce modern humans to treat medical care as a way to show that you care. Medical care provided by our allies would reassure us of their concern, and allies would want you and other allies to see that they had pay enough to distinguish themselves from posers who didn’t care as much as they.

That makes sense to me as the beginning of a model, and it certainly isn't a criticism of the woman who paid so much for the bow tie. She evidently does care, and presumably cares that it's evident that she cares, and that's a good thing.

Nonetheless, if you want to use healthcare provision to show you care, I think it would be a good idea to spend some time looking for actual ways to provide actual healthcare; a few more teaspoons of water in the lake won't do it. So I'd like to go back over my proposal of a bit more than a year ago. I'd organize it a bit differently now, but I don't seem to have moved all that far.

If I were (heaven forfend) In Charge, I would crowd-source as much as possible of the decision-making by pushing it into a market, with participants being given as much data for decision-making as possible, and being simultaneously milked for as much data as possible. I want incentives for innovation, to reduce the death-rate for billions yet unborn; I also want incentives for good performance now, not for the sort of regulatory capture our current system maximizes. Specifically I would:

Allow unlicensed health care, wherever it's clearly labeled as such; it won't get public support but people can choose to spend their money on it. The argument against this is apparently that people will make bad choices. Yeah, some will, probably including me and you. So? I've never understood the way some people believe that they (or those they select) can make good choices for others; in fact I'm moderately cynical about licensure requirements as they are now structured, whether for medics or morticians or cosmetologists.
Require transparent pricing, uniform no-bargaining pricing, from all providers of licensed health care. (The services producing my appendectomy really don't do this.)
Require that "licensing" be independent of geography; if the best/cheapest supplier of a particular treatment is two states over or on another continent, that's fine. As I've said before, I believe that telepresence medicine can enable the specialization and trade that has made markets work in other contexts since before Adam Smith wrote about it, so I expect this as the usual case, not an exception.
Take away the employer-based tax exemption; health care shouldn't be an employment issue.
Add a universal tax-funded "insurance" policy (insulation, actually): if your expenditures for "proven procedures" from licensed health care providers exceed the overall 16% (of GDP) average, then the taxpayers contribute some. Maybe if your cost is 30% of your income, then the taxpayers kick in (30-16)/2=7%, half of the overage, and the maximum you can pay is 50% of your income whether that's $0/year or $10M/year. Is that too generous? Not enough? I dunno. The point is to combine protection from catastrophe (but not from serious pain) with making sure that market prices are set by people or groups who are actually bargaining in that market, i.e. the better-off people for whom procedure X will not be covered. I want to do that combination with some simple, less-than-perfect-but-better-than-nothing rule with which I can trust a government. (Democrats and Republicans trust government on different things; just figure you want a better-than-nothing rule with which you'd trust a politician of the party you despise.)
If you want "unproven procedures" and you can pay for them, that's fine too; the licensed health care providers should have a strong motive to come up with new stuff and document/publish that it works. The FDA should not be able to keep you from paying for these likely-to-fail treatments, but it should keep you from charging it to the rest of us. If procedure X has no accepted studies supporting it, then it's up to you to pay for it.
Whatever additional insurance/insulation you want to buy for proven or unproven procedures is just fine, and can be bought across state lines. It's your problem. You want to save your money in a special bank account? Feel free.
Any care that has been paid or partly paid by public funds goes into an anonymized public database, so that we learn more about which treatments have what effects on which conditions. Organizations promoting not-yet-approved treatments will be encouraged to contribute data.

And that's really it, for me. I'm even less confident of this than I was when I wrote the first version, but I still don't see anything else I like as well. I think that the market I'm describing would probably evolve rather quickly into a market in which people choose and buy packaged health plans from "insurance" agents, and web sites build up crowd-sourced ratings of those health plans; there would be quite a bit of overlap with the better parts of what we have now. I hope. And I care, and I suppose I'd like to signal that I care.

Or then again, maybe not.

update:I never actually mentioned that this post was prompted by thinking about Mark Thoma's Economist's View: Discussion Question: How Can We Reduce the Growth of Health Care Costs?

there is far too much discussion of cutting services, and not enough about how to control costs without affecting services (e.g., using the government's purchasing power to reduce the amount the government pays for drugs, reducing the cost of insurance companies fighting over who pays bills, etc.)

You see, I doubt the premise: if you use government power as I believe Thoma wants, you are increasing the incentives for regulatory capture, crony capitalism, rent-seeking... you are putting yourself on a path where you have signaled your concern but healthcare is not what you're rewarding. Of course government power needs to be used -- to collect the money for treatments which research results say are crucial and which markets say are expensive. And government power needs to be used to maintain a context for innovation (rather than squelch it, as I believe our recent trends in "intellectual property" law tend to do.) But if bargaining-on-prices-with-the-government is the multi-billion$ activity you focus on, then that's what companies will have to invest in. That's a bad bad bad bad thing. I commented here.

Well, it's Easter morning. Maybe we're all saved?

Or then again, maybe not.

Colgate v. Consolidation -- maybe. For now.

2011-04-13T09:06:00.000-07:00

At last night's budget meeting, Superintendent Bowers had very good news to announce. As Radio Free Hamilton put it, Colgate Contributes $300,000 More to HCS

HCS is able to restore the equivalent of 3.5 teaching positions scheduled to be cut from the 2011-2012 budget thanks to a $300,000 contribution from Colgate.

The state had planned to cut $486K; a last-minute cut reduction had restored $94K of this; now we're back within $92K of last year's situation, except that various expenses have risen. But the immediate layoffs of teachers are deferred. Yay!

RFH continues

Colgate's donation, which will be followed by a similar one next year, was announced at the HCS Board of Education budget presentation Tuesday night. Superintendent Dr. Diana Bowers said Colgate is willing to make two more similar donations in the future depending on need and the outcome of a potential merger with Morrisville-Eaton Central School.

Actually I'm not sure she mentioned M-E by name, but the point was clear; Colgate's extra support is not forever, but might continue for two more years, unless the Hamilton district had become part of a larger district "funded in a different way." Colgate has an interest in supporting HCS as the kind of school it now is.

This doesn't take consolidation off the table, even in the short run; it does provide a substantial incentive counter-balancing the state pro-consolidation incentive, at least for now. For me as a parent whose youngest child is an 8th grader, whose grandchildren will almost certainly grow up elsewhere -- gee, I can reasonably hope that takes care of it. Probably. We'll probably muddle through for several years.

For me as a local citizen, one who wants things to go well even for current elementary school students and maybe even for those who haven't been born yet....hmm.... the upstate NY demographic prospects are still what they were. Things that can't go on forever, won't.

Is there an answer? Sure. This local school, like many similar local schools, will not go on as it is -- that's a given. But that doesn't mean that there will be no local school, just that there will be no local school based on the current model of school organization. Personally that thought doesn't bother me, because even without financial pressures I would expect the current model of schools to change. It's really not a great model; it's a 19th-century factory model, as stretched in various directions by good people trying to work inside that model.

If I were trying to get a community school model that would last for a while, I'd try to follow the people in this region and others that I talked about in Budgets, Consolidations, Charters. A charter school might work better against consolidation pressure; might be better able to adopt the sort of technology that would help it work at a smaller scale. I'd like to know what my neighbors would think about that. Of course most of the ones I know are parents of 8th-graders, or older -- maybe they'll settle for a solution that will last a few years. “Après moi, le déluge.”

Or then again, maybe not.

Sines of Spring

2011-04-05T07:25:00.000-07:00

I'm a wee bit tired of consolidation, but I am happy this morning even though it's April 5th and I'm looking out the window at snow falling. (It's not sticking, yet, though there is a small patch of snow still remaining from the major snowfall of last month. Too small; our little doggie who has been looking for snow-patches to poop on, a couple of times each day, had to poop on the grass this morning.) Anyway, I am happy because I was looking at Hamilton, New York (13346) Conditions & Forecast : Weather Underground

Length of Day 12h 54m -- Tomorrow will be 2m 52s longer.

The days are getting longer, but that "2m 52s" is a few seconds less than it was at the equinox. Sure; day-length is quite close to a sine-wave, if you think of 12 hours as the "zero" point around which day-length oscillates, hitting a maximum at the summer solstice of about 15 hours in this part of the world, and a minimum of about 9 hours at the winter solstice. At the equinoctial points for spring and fall, day-length is changing as fast as it ever does: almost 3 minutes per day.

And it occurred to me, not for the first or the fortieth time, that the 3 minutes per day and the three hours offset ought to be mathematically connected. Of course.

But this time (while out with the small doggie, just before daybreak hence significantly before the sun actually gets over the eastward hill) I actually thought about it, and remembering that it's about 90 days to the solstice, so if 3 minutes per day were fixed we'd add 90*3=270 minutes, four and a half hours, to the basic 12 hours and that would be the day length. How do we get from that too-large to the actual? It's simple, divide that 270 by pi/2, i.e. multiply it by about 2/3rds, to get 180 minutes which is the three hours we actually observe. Why pi/2? Well, the three minutes per day actually shrink, being multiplied by the cosine of the number of degrees (almost equal to the number of days) we've traversed, as that cosine heads from 1.0 down to 0.0 on the 90th day[degree]. How to evaluate that?

Think about it as an ant crawling around a circle, starting at x=1,y=0 on the right and going counterclockwise to x=0,y=1 at the top. In order to crawl an upwards distance of 1.0 along this path, in which the upwards component of her motion is proportional to the cosine (and total motion-so-far to the sine), she has to crawl pi/2, right?

And for some reason I'm thinking of the rock that my eldest gave me when he was working for a landscaper; he engraved pi on one side, e on the other, and the note said "because some things really are written in stone."

And we now have an eighth of an inch of snow with more falling fast, and the doggie was happy to run in it and chase a robin -- but I called her back in before she started yapping at several deer on the golf course, just on the other side of our fence.

Of course the temperature is also a sine-wave, but it lags day-length by over a month; our average temperature is a little under 50.5F, I know because that's how it comes out of a well into the geothermal system, and so the actual temperature will average something like 50+40*cos(d-120) where d is the day-count in the year...

Or then again, maybe not.

Budgets, Consolidations, Charters

2011-04-03T12:19:00.000-07:00

The NY budget aftermath is not quite as painful as expected, but that's the best that can be said for it. N.Y. prepares for sharp pains from budget:

As of Friday, roughly 240 districts had announced plans to lay off 15,783 teachers and staff, said Carl Korn, spokesman for New York State United Teachers. Yonkers said this week it would lay off 732 employees.
The final number is expected to be between 18,000 and 20,000, Korn said.
A recent state School Boards Association survey found that many districts plan to increase class sizes, reduce or eliminate sports and other extracurricular activities, and offer fewer electives.

Some people think that consolidation will help a lot, and that even districts much larger than ours are simply too small to exist. Consider the NYT op-ed at How State Cuts to Education Affect Rich and Poor:

No district, no matter how wealthy, that has but 1,600 students in 13 grades, or roughly 125 students per grade, can offer as many AP classes as a much larger district.
The extremely small Ilion district should not exist, for both financial and educational reasons.

But even much larger districts are in trouble. Fulton school district budget cuts positions, programs

The proposed budget includes using up to $2 million in reserves and cutting about 21 staff positions, including the director of universal pre-kindergarten, a teacher on special assignment and nearly 15 teachers and teaching assistants....
Also being cut is $400,000 in software program purchases, all public relations from Oswego County BOCES, teacher aide positions at all buildings, totaling about $100,000 and some extracurricular activities.
He also is reducing... ... Lynch also said all of the unions were approached about taking pay freezes for the coming year. Five of the unions are still talking about the move, while the teachers union declined.

There probably isn't any "good" answer for most of this, but, well, we have to try. We have to try new things. One context for innovation is the charter school, like The Equity Project: "a New York charter school, that opened in September 2009". This week the Utica Observer-Dispatch reports Charter schools — idea praised, funding criticized:

The Mohawk Valley Charter School for Excellence last week submitted its book-sized application to the state...The district...is worried that funds siphoned off by a charter school would make a bleak situation worse.
Charter schools are independent, like parochial schools, but are funded by taxpayers, like other public schools. They have been heralded by supporters as leaders in education reform because they allow big ideas to be tried out quickly. Detractors say they take resources, successful students and involved parents away from traditional public schools....
The school wants to give Utica parents a small school alternative to the Utica City School District. It would have longer days, a longer school year, and be math and English intensive. Students would wear uniforms, and each would have an individualized education plan called a “plan for excellence.”

There are obviously real advantages and disadvantages to the charter-school approach; it's an option, something to be remembered. It may be that charter schools have a natural advantage when districts shrink. From Michigan we hear Why are charter schools not part of the consolidation debate?

Each of the state’s more than 200 charter schools is smaller than the smallest Kent County school district.
But ... leaders from President Barack Obama to state Superintendent Michael Flanagan have included expanding the role of charter schools as part of their Race to the Top education reform measures.
About 111,000 Michigan students attend 243 charter schools, including 7,500 students in Kent County and 2,760 students within the Ottawa Area Intermediate School District. Charter school backers said their operations are efficient despite their small size.

Also in Michigan, charters are growing -- Sound Off: What's Your Reaction To Detroit Public School Plan

DPS Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb on Wednesday released a list of 45 Detroit public schools that could be converted to charter schools. It's part of the district's Renaissance 2012 Plan.

In Oklahoma school consolidation, it seems okay for closed schools to become charter Vacant TPS schools to go up for bid after Project Schoolhouse closings | Tulsa World

"Our plan is to try to be sensitive to what the repurpose would be. If a charter school asked for a building, we would probably consider that to be an acceptable reuse of the building," he said.
Previous consolidation efforts in TPS have resulted in long-term vacancy at some former school buildings, but McCarthy offered several examples of how old schools have been successfully converted for other uses....

And in Obama's home state, his ex-aide seems to be pushing charters in the context of consolidation -- CPS brass considers school consolidation - Chicago Sun-Times

The discussion comes as Andrew Broy, head of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, complained that one dozen to 18 charter schools that share buildings with traditional public schools “are on the cusp of outgrowing their facilities and need a solution.” Consolidating an underused school into another school would theoretically free up a building for a charter.
... Mayor-Elect Rahm Emanuel is a charter proponent and has packed his education transition team with charter operators, funders and supporters.

Obama is not the first President to like charters. The DOE in 2004 reported on Innovations in Education: Successful Charter Schools -- TOC

Elements of effective charter schools and stories of eight successful charter schools are presented in this report, the third in our Innovations in Education series.

My thoughts are obviously going to focus on charters that emphasize technology, in a variety of ways. A charter that made heavy use of online resources might run into regulatory trouble, as seems to be the case Colorado Charter Schools: Blended or Hybrid?

There is a broad array of online educational options for students. The type of online education delivery models has changed as school leaders realize that most students, particularly at-risk students, do better with a combination of online learning and meeting face-to-face with a teacher. People call this either blended or hybrid learning ...
In Colorado, hybrid/blended schools cannot get funding to operate.

In Tennessee, there seems to be some experimentation in progress -- Memphis Parents May Have New Charter School Options

“[We want to] build a stem elementary school - stem meaning science, technology, engineering, mathematics,” Wingood said. "The design of this school will be to focus on science and mathematics, in addition to literacy and social studies and so forth, but with a real emphasis on science and math at an early age to get students interested in and excited about mathematics and science.”
It's a busy year for charter school applications in Memphis.
Charter schools are still public schools, but they often have smaller classrooms, and a specialized curriculum. The schools have been “very well received” across the state, ... “We have individuals that oppose charter schools or aren’t sure what they are, but when they open, [the schools] fill right up,” ... In Tennessee, local school boards authorize new charter schools, and funnel money to them.

As underused schools consolidate and people start charter schools, emotions rise in New Jersey -- NJ Spotlight | Newark's Public Schools: Overcrowded or Underutilized?

As much of Newark’s education and political community has gone into a tizzy in the last month over a plan to consolidate some of these schools and potentially move charters into others, these numbers lay bare the heart of the matter.
The bottom-line claim... on the consolidation plans: There is room to spare in the New Jersey’s largest school system, why not share it and save money at the same time?
But even in a district that has lost 5,000 students in the last 15 years and could lose another 3,000 next year alone to new charter schools, the discussion about whether there even is extra space is not a calm one.

Even after a transition, it's not necessarily clear which caused what. Lessons from Erie County's charter schools:

When charter schools came to Pennsylvania in 1997, advocates said school districts would make up any lost funds by not having to spend that amount of money to educate charter-school children in regular schools.
Erie School District officials said that's not the reality, and that charter schools leave the district at a disadvantage.
Local charter-school leaders say the opposite is true. They argue their schools have been doing more with less and avoiding the politics they say plague the Erie School District. Their success, the charter school officials said, isn't the reason for the school district's failures.

Well, maybe not.

Budget Notes

2011-03-31T09:55:00.000-07:00

The NY budget has actually passed, Albany Approves Budget – On Time | FrumForum

The Assembly closed its gallery because it did not have enough people to handle crowd control. One protester was arrested for reportedly hitting a legislative staffer in the head with a cymbal....
The budget restores about $230 million of the $1.5 billion reduction in education spending that Mr. Cuomo proposed. The majority of that restoration, $134 million, will go to counties north of New York City. Another $53 million will go to New York City, and $43 million will go to Long Island.
Senator John J. Flanagan, a Long Island Republican and the chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said the restorations were aimed at “achieving a regional balance” in school financing. “We took a bad situation and made it better,” he said. “It’s not perfect.”

From Syracuse, we hear Budget gives Onondaga County schools $24 million less:

Because the Legislature restored some aid, the district expects to eliminate 500 positions from its payroll instead of the 584 it would have had to trim under Cuomo’s budget proposal, Lowengard said.

How much state aid will your school district get? | syracuse.com

Under the approved cuts, the Fayetteville-Manlius School District will sustain an 11.6 percent cut in aid, the biggest drop in Onondaga County. Under the governor's proposal, the district would have lost 20 percent of its aid compared to last year. Not counting building aid, F-M will receive $12.6 million from the state, nearly $1.7 million less than last year.
The Liverpool School District will see the smallest drop in school aid, 1.5 percent, in Onondaga County. Under Cuomo's plan, the district would have lost 14.7 percent.

And Hamilton goes down to $3,218,215 in state aid, a cut of $141,124 or 4.2%.oops, see update below.

Also from Syracuse, unions make concessions to save three percent of the jobs being cut according to North Syracuse School District unions offer concessions to help budget - NewsChannel 9 WSYR

11 unions in the North Syracuse School District agreed to several concessions in an effort to ease the tax burden on their community. The union's move will enable the district to save 15 positions.
Most of the concessions they made involved their health care plan. They say the concessions will save the school district $1.2 million.

Generic info on the budget at Governor touts “historic, transformational” budget | Politics on the Hudson

The budget realigns education financing to meet New York’s fiscal reality and provide sustainable and predictable funding while reaffirming the commitment to improve educational outcomes in the classroom. Prior to this budget, education spending was projected to grow at an unaffordable rate of 13 percent for the 2011-12 school year.

Comments on the disparate impact of budget cuts on upstate schools at Our view: Make equity in education aid a priority - Utica, NY - The Observer-Dispatch, Utica, New York

The average tax levy needed to fill the gap left in budgets in Oneida-Herkimer-Madison BOCES schools, based on proposed reductions in aid for 2011-12, is 11.80 percent. In wealthier Rockland County, where the same aid reduction is a smaller percentage of the budget, the average tax levy needed to fill the gap is 3.03 percent.
That means local districts need to either raise taxes by an unacceptable amount or, much more likely, slice more meat out of their programs. As a result, area students get less than their counterparts in wealthier districts.
“Downstate is cutting specialized programs,” Mettelman said. “We’re cutting English teachers.”

Of course, that doesn't mean that everybody downstate is happy. State Budget Gives City 'Very Modest' Restorations, Says Bloomberg Administration - WNYC

The Bloomberg Administration is still looking at the city's share of the state budget, but officials say it appears as though the legislature restored only about 1/3 of the $600 million the mayor relied on his budget — which already included agency cuts and nearly 4,700 teacher layoffs.
Director of State Legislative Affairs for the city, Micah Lasher, said the city wasn't treated fairly by Albany lawmakers.
"When they cut revenue sharing for other localities, there was a 3 percent cut," he said. "For New York City, there was a 100 percent cut.

NY Budgeting: worse for everybody than for anybody else!

update: Apparently things aren't quite as they seem; how unusual. Our Superintendent comments/corrects the values cited above on ...What it means for HCS

In the new runs, they took the Jobs money out so it looks like districts are being cut far less that they are. The numbers are deceiving and look much more favorable. They show Hamilton losing -3.38% in aid (with building aid) instead of 11.03%.
The new run also increases projected expense driven aids....In reality, even with an increase in projected expense driven aids, we are now at -8.38% in aid loss, using the original values as they were depicted in February.
All in all, the good news is that we are $94,000 to the good in real figures.This will certainly help!

Consolidation News

2011-03-30T17:52:00.000-07:00

From the Finger Lakes region, Watkins Glen Looks For Input:

Phillips says two ways to close the gap are almost guaranteed. One is a consolidation of schools to one main campus. The other, laying off employees.
Phillips said, “If things do not change in spite of the governors claim that this is a game and education is simply threatening, this is not a game and this is real. Eleven people in this district, instructors, teachers, will not be employed in Watkins Glen next year.

I'm not sure I see how consolidation will avoid the layoffs, unless he means that the state incentives provide enough money to keep paying the same salaries for a while.

Near them, in Auburn, Jordan-Elbridge school district’s budget situation called ‘severe’:

The proposed budget is currently $27,596,582, a 4.7 percent increase over the current budget, he said. The current projected tax levy increase is 7.3 percent, but Zacher stressed that cuts can still be made to lessen this amount. Included in the proposal is the elimination of 29.7 staff positions. Of these, 26.7 are teaching and non-instructional support and three are administrative,...

And big districts get hit too, as in Proposed Rochester schools budget would cut 900 jobs

The city school system could lose 900 jobs — about 15 percent of its workforce — if a budget unveiled by Superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard wins approval from the school board.
The job losses come as the district looks to bridge one of the largest budget shortfalls in recent memory, with administrators planning for an $80 million deficit as expenses continue to rise and funding sources dwindle. The 2011-12 proposed budget of $678 million is down from $708 million for this year.

New Jersey news includes Red Bank Board of Education OKs tentative $19.33M budget:

The district was spared the 14 personnel cuts that had to be made in the current budget, predicated by a loss of state aid. Staff cuts that were made for 2011-12 were absorbed by attrition, Morana said. The proposed budget came with other reductions, such as putting off a new roof on the primary school, repainting ...Also cut or reduced were middle school sports — which a nonprofit foundation has formed to raise funds for — computer, technology and music supplies; replacement classroom furniture; and student assemblies and field trips.

NJ also produces a pro-consolidation editorial from Asbury Park, at It shouldn't be all about the money:

It's past time to test the hypothesis that school district consolidation would save money and raise test scores of the disadvantaged. With regionalization, there would be enough money and resources to absorb students stranded in historically underachieving districts.

And there's a pro-consolidation note struck in Michigan under Opposing points of view: School district consolidation provides efficiencies to help cope with funding cuts

The economic situation in Michigan is forcing school districts to consider multiple approaches to more efficient use of their funds. The rising cost of fuel, food and health services, as well as student support services such as special education teachers, school psychologists, counselors and nurses, make it very difficult for small districts to afford.

New York also has a pro-consolidation editorial from the Gotham Gazette, at New York Needs Real Reform, Not Higher Taxes

New York's two biggest areas of spending are Medicaid and education.... New York's Medicaid program has the most generous eligibility standards in the nation and provides patients with "Cadillac" health care plans. It also ... This is why our Medicaid costs are double the national average. ...
When it comes to education, 21 percent of the $52 billion state school budget goes for non-instructional purposes. The state has far too many local school districts, each insisting on running its own transportation system and maintaining a gaggle of administrative employees, consultants and turf prerogatives. New York's education spending is 67 percent higher than the national average, without a commensurate advantage in student outcomes. Districts resist consolidation, but their parochial concerns should not trump taxpayer interests.

Meanwhile, the Governor of Maine says Post Posts: Arundel company among stops on governor’s tour

“I feel bad for teachers and state employees. You’ve been sold a bill of goods.”
LePage said teachers and state employees were “promised the Brooklyn Bridge.”
“The promises made were so rich the state could never afford it,” he said
LePage said Democrats caused the pension shortfall with support from teachers’ unions...
LePage said he supports allowing Mainers to purchase health insurance across state lines and buy insurance plans to cover specific issues.
“I could never understand why a nun in the state of Maine is required to buy maternity insurance,” he said.
When asked by Brett Davis of Hollis Center about school choice and vouchers, Commissioner of Education Bowen said both he and LePage “are moving in the direction of school choice.” He said they also want to change the school consolidation law. He said there are savings to be had by consolidating some services, but the “one-size-fits-all model” does not work for Maine.

And what can you do? Well, you can write letters, as reported from Syracuse lately in Letter-writers raise concerns about Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York state budget. Some of the letters that get out there are really, umm, interesting, e.g. Watertown Daily Times | Change procedures for voting on school budget

Grossly inflated school budgets have prevailed for decades, mostly to meet the requirements of liberal contracts negotiated between powerful and greedy public service employee unions (notice that I said unions) and state politicians. Any excuse to increase the size of local budgets routinely prevails with minimal, if any, benefit to the educational process. Unbridled power of these unions...

Well, I think a lot of people feel that way; it's not just him and the Governor of Maine. Sometimes officials write letters too, as reported in Local Democrats from across New York attack Governor Cuomo's budget cuts

ALBANY -- More than 40 elected Democrats -- all local officials -- made a rare attack on Gov. Cuomo and his proposed cuts to education and health care as the state tries to trim a $10 billion budget deficit, according to a letter obtained by The Associated Press.

I'm not sure the letter-writing on any side does any good, but then, here I am collecting links. Does that do any good? Probably not.

Update:The budget in question has actually passed, --- and I moved this section to be its own post.

Khansolidation

2011-03-29T15:33:00.000-07:00

As our schools run out of money, we look for ways to make better use of the resources we have: mainly, the teachers. Consider the Khan Academy approach, as now funded and promoted by Bill Gates, and described by Salman Khan in a TED talk video that everybody interested in education ought to watch whether they're thinking about consolidation or not. Salman Khan: Let's use video to reinvent education

Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script -- give students video lectures to watch at home, and do "homework" in the classroom with the teacher available to help.

The system he's describing is not just a big set of short video explanations with self-tests; it has software by which a teacher can see exactly what a student has mastered and when, and which questions are still not getting answered. It has been (and is being) developed with feedback from teachers in actual classrooms,

By removing the one-size-fits-all assumption .... these teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom.

Instead of the the teacher delivering a lecture to everybody including those who aren't ready for it and also those who don't need it, the teacher assigns the lecture material which students can watch as many times as necessary, and then the teacher can spend time one-on-one with students. We change what we worry about:

not student-to-teacher ratio, but student-to-valuable-human-time-with-the-teacher ratio.

And he claims that

We got a million people on the site already, so we can handle a few more...No reason why it really can't happen in every classroom in America tomorrow.

Well, I suspect quite a few classrooms could benefit greatly; others involve material not yet covered by the Khan Academy. Even those might use Khan's original formula, developed in tutoring his cousins: just break the explanations into small pieces, record, and post to YouTube; the FAQ says he uses

Camtasia Recorder ($200) + SmoothDraw3(Free) + a Wacom Bamboo Tablet ($80) on a PC. I used to use ScreenVideoRecorder($20) and Microsoft Paint (Free).

I would think it's worthwhile to have a transcript of each piece, posted with the video. And the transcript should be annotated with a list of prerequisite knowledge, I suspect. And I suspect that in the end, there should be a lot of Khan-style academies with different lecture styles for different kinds of student. I suspect that this is what Isaac Asimov would have been doing for some years past, if he were still alive. I suspect -- well, I suspect a lot of things. But everybody ought to watch that video, and think about what he's doing right, and what he's doing wrong.

Or then again, maybe not.

Update: shrank video a bit.

Consolidation News

2011-03-29T10:44:00.000-07:00

Recent news listed on my consolidation bookmarks on delicious.com include New York's new budget: the New York Daily News says

The budget enacts initiatives Governor Cuomo proposed to make districts more efficient and improve student performance. Funds totaling $500 million will be awarded competitively to districts that demonstrate significant improvements in student performance and to districts that undertake long term structural changes to reduce costs and improve efficiency. The budget also restores $270 million in education related funding.

Hmm. Smaller budgets have to work around that one, including a neighbor: The Fayetteville-Manlius School District is proposing a budget that would cut about 14 staff positions. And as always it's not just NY; from Kansas we hear that Lawrence school board members vote to close Wakarusa Valley School / LJWorld.com

The task force also calls for consolidating a list of six schools — Cordley, Hillcrest, Kennedy, New York, Pinckney and Sunset Hill — down to three or four within three to five years, with construction of new or expanded schools through a bond issue.

Saving money by constructing new schools. Hmm.. From Canandaigua we get opinions like Town/village systems, not schools, are where to save:

There is no question that New York state wastes ridiculous amounts of money. There are so many areas the state can cut waste and fraud. Remember the New York Times piece about retired Long Island Railroad workers? The reporters discovered that 90 percent are on disability, including accountants, clerks and other nonphysical workers — and the state offers them free golf privileges! Let’s cut nonessential programs before we make our children go to school in dilapidated facilities.

And there are more opinions from Albany, looking for options at

Find ways to rescue N.Y. school districts

All school districts face the reality of less state aid and rising costs, along with the possibility of a property tax cap. ... consider all available options.
It seems logical that school consolidation is the answer. However, in the past 10 years, there have been only four consolidations in the state. Two districts in western New York attempted both a merger with each other and an annexation. Both efforts failed.
What other options do they have? ...

Is additional consolidation practical?
Could superintendents and other central office functions be shared among several districts?
Could central or regional high schools serve the needs of our rural schools?
Could small rural schools be served through online learning?
Could districts negotiate regional collective bargaining agreements and health insurance agreements?

Well, maybe. Or then again, maybe not.

Upstate NY Demographics and School Consolidation

2011-03-22T11:32:00.000-07:00

This is a doom-and-gloom post. Well, not really. But partly. It's not obvious that school consolidation would actually contribute to the solution, but there really is a problem. Let's look at it.

The image here, which is as it says from Cornell's Program on Applied Demographics, shows the Hamilton Central School district in the recent past and probable near-term future. Fifteen years ago we had 879 students -- we're down by more than 300, i.e. if the line kept going down we'd have a negative number of students in thirty years or so. Of course we won't do that, but we may reach 400 even sooner than the 2017 suggested by the (pessimistic) blue line on the graph. School consolidation is an obvious thing to think about, wouldn't you say?

What's actually going on here? Well, of course a lot of young people move out of upstate NY looking for jobs, a lot of people move out of NY altogether looking for jobs (and lower taxes, and following businesses which are following the people and looking for lower taxes too) and in any case my generation of Baby Boomers are aging fast -- and expensively. Here are two charts on Madison County demographics from the same Cornell group, at County Projections.

Just pick Madison as the county, and then consider 1990 and 2035.

As you can see, back in 1990 we had a bulge in high school (just before leaving to go find a job or college) and in 2035 they think we still will, but it's thinning out, no longer dominating the oldsters who use up the Medicare and pensions that our juniors will be trying to pay for. As our state office of mental health puts it,

In 2011, the first of the post-war “baby boom” generation (those born between 1946 and 1964) will reach the traditionally defined “old” age of 65 years. This “elder boom” will result in a doubling of the number of older adults from 35 million in 2005 to 70 million by 2030. In New York State, the number will increase over 50% from 2.4 million to 3.7 million.

So, fewer and fewer students, and the money is needed elsewhere. We cannot afford to go on spending $20K per student per year, and as time goes on we will get less able to afford it. It's not a comfortable picture. It doesn't have to be that way, of course: there's a whole lot that the federal government does to make things worse, that doesn't have to happen. We might end up looking at American history to see what kind of population influx we have handled before, and dramatically increasing the immigration rate. That would cause problems, but they'd be different problems; the projections would change. And the "elder boom" doesn't have to be that bad, if we don't retire -- you weren't going to retire, were you? Actually, maybe we can retire. On current projections we can't afford the Medicare that we've been promising each other (well, our kids won't be able to afford it on our behalf) but if we got rid of a bunch of anti-innovation laws and regulations, I think we'd do just fine. Moore's Law is applying to robotics and 3d printing; we should be able to afford much more than we ever did before -- unless innovation is blocked, as it so often is. I'm happy to blather on about that as I have before on this blog, but I don't see much that can be done about it locally, or even at the state level.

And Cuomo may be trying hard to spin his budget cuts, but he has to make some big ones -- the state is losing the ability to pay for what it used to pay for. Sure, some of that is due to the Great Recession and still-horrendously-high unemployment which keeps government outlays high and income low, some of that will return if and as the overall economy recovers (please note Japan's Lost Decade, still going strong after 20 years, if you think it has to recover) but some of it is just the way that New York never had a plan to fulfill the promises we've made to each other.

So, think about it. What would you cut? And don't say "well, I wouldn't cut X, that's no answer" even if X=education; look at New York state and local spending 2011 and decide: what would you cut?

Update: I should have put a link to the state budget data, at least to the (PDF)Executive Budget Briefing Book saying, on page 13 of 101,

New York public schools spend more per student than any other state – fully 71 percent above the national average – yet New York ranks 40th in graduation rates and 34th in the nation in the percentage of adults who have a high school diploma or the equivalent.

So what would you cut? Would education really be altogether off your list?

Consolidation Links; Cuomo Unfair to Upstate? --Mar 19

2011-03-19T06:43:00.000-07:00

I've gotten behind on this, but the links (collected as always on delicious.com) don't link to each other so I will try to catch up; Superintendent Bowers blogged on further Albany budget cuts and Ken Bausch commented in News From Albany [comment by Ken]

While building aid and UPK are exempted,all other aids are reduced by @23% this year. Thus we are not actually receiving transportation aid at 76 cents on the dollar, rather the effective rate is only 59 cents on the dollar. Thus a dollar spent on new vehicles last year costs the district 41 cents, rather than the 24 cents we assumed during the vote on the acquisition of a new bus and fuel efficient vehicle last year.

Radio Free Hamilton reported HCS Budget Cuts Include Positions


The cuts include the equivalent of five and a half full time positions. These include:

    * 1 full time administrative position;
    * 1 full time secondary guidance counselor;
    * 1 full time occupational therapist (these services will be purchased...);
    * 1 full time elementary school teaching position;
    * 1/2 choral music teaching position;
    * 1/2 science teaching position;
    * 1/2 custodial position.

Other cuts totalling $94,000 include:...

Of course it's all over the state; earlier this month, a Rochester-area district about a dozen times our size reported Proposed Greece school budget would eliminate 89 full-time staff positions

Greece, N.Y. — At a Greece school board meeting Tuesday night, interim superintendent John O'Rourke proposed a school budget that would slash 89 full-time staff positions from the Greece school district, reduce music education, and merge sports programs....The proposed $195 million budget would increase the tax rate 1.68 percent, bringing it to $22.92 per $1,000 assessed value. The budget calls for a reduction of elementary classroom time by 30 minutes a day, an increase in class sizes, the elimination of 4th grade music, reductions of instrumental and vocal music, and cuts to elementary art and library. The plan would also consolidate sports programs

The state-wide cuts do seem to have their main impact on rural schools, simply because the aid has been disproportionately directed to them, as argued in the Rochester area Glover: Proposed state cuts would be 'catastrophic' to rural schools:

Understanding that the state is in financial crisis and that everyone must make sacrifices, the superintendent says the proposed cuts in state aid are not fair spread out among suburban and rural districts. Small rural schools stand to lose the most. “We should all share in an equitable way,” Glover said. “Everybody has to tighten their belts, but this takes opportunities away from kids in rural schools.” Data taken from the Statewide School Finance Consortium website shows... Comparatively by county... “The poor schools are getting poorer,” as a result of the governor’s proposed budget cuts.

And smaller districts are being pushed towards consolidation, as in the Ithaca-area Trumansburg, South Seneca schools explore sharing resources:

Trumansburg Central School District officials are considering merger and resource sharing with the neighboring South Seneca Central School District. Spurred by Gov. Andrew Cuomo's public push for consolidation of smaller school districts in New York...

It's really quite a push, with some rather strong statements in which the New York governor hits school districts, defends education cut | Reuters

Claiming local school districts are playing "political games," New York's governor on Thursday defended his $1.5 billion cut to education spending. Governor Andrew Cuomo's proposed cut in state aid to schools -- the largest in history -- is aimed at closing a $10 billion budget gap for the next fiscal year. Cuomo told reporters on Thursday that his cuts average 2.7 percent per school district, and could be offset by rooting out inefficiencies, using reserve funds and lowering the salaries of superintendents.

It does seem that the governor is trying to understate the pain:Most school districts don't have deep pockets:

Andrew Cuomo continues his fiery rhetoric about school districts, claiming they have enough reserves and federal money in their coffers to weather state education cuts. Just Thursday he said districts shouldn't have to lay off teachers because of the aid cuts. But a report by the state Comptroller's Office this week shows that 100 of the state's 700 districts don't have the reserves and one-time federal "Education Jobs Fund" aid to offset the state reductions. Batavia is one of those districts.

The governor's not just making speeches. Capitol Confidential » Save NY now airs on school money

The pro-Cuomo Committee to Save New York is airing its third advertisement, targeting education waste. It quote a statistic that has made school officials bristle: New York is first in education spending but 34th in performance. That 34th ranking refers to the percentage of adults over 25 who have a high school diploma, and educators say it’s not a good measure given New York’s status as a magnet for immigrants. They point to other indicators, like the number of kids taking Advance Placement exams, which show New York doing better. It’s a clever ad. Someone is cutting up an education dollar while ticking off the stats, before Gov. Andrew Cuomo appears as the announcer says, “The governor’s plan target’s bureaucratic waste, and protects our students and teachers. Tell your lawmaker to support the governor’s plan.”

Upstate N.Y. schools anguish over aid cuts | The Ithaca Journal | theithacajournal.com

Among school districts facing the largest cuts per pupil, 97 percent are in upstate communities while 75 percent of those facing the smallest cuts are in downstate suburban communities, according to the Alliance for a Quality Education, an Albany-based union-backed advocacy group.

The cuts are necessary, because the state has run out of money. Why has the state run out of money? Well, quite a few reasons...here's one, as reported in the NYT two weeks back: State Workers and N.Y.’s Fiscal Crisis - NYTimes.com

At a time when public school students are being forced into ever more crowded classrooms, and poor families will lose state medical benefits, New York State is paying 10 times more for state employees’ pensions than it did just a decade ago. That huge increase is largely because of Albany’s outsized generosity to the state’s powerful employees’ unions in the early years of the last decade, made worse when the recession pushed down pension fund earnings, forcing the state to make up the difference. Although taxpayers are on the hook for the recession’s costs, most state employees pay only 3 percent of their salaries to their pensions, half the level of most state employees elsewhere. Their health insurance payments are about half those in the private sector...

So that's part of it. And what to do about it? I have no idea. Or rather, I have lots of ideas but of two kinds: trivial on the one hand, and politically impossible on the other. I dunno.

Mostly-Irrelevant Update: the NYT has an interesting proposal for partially fixing the long-term pension/budget problem which would have made the last couple of years more equitably disastrous, and would make the future better able to fund education: share the pain.

It is that simple: Just scrap the current indexing of pensions to the Consumer Price Index and replace it with a link to the state’s gross domestic product. We can’t accurately fund traditional pension plans until we have G.D.P.-linked bonds, or “trills,” which I described in a recent column. But it is time to start the transition, so that pensions share risks across generations.

That would be a good thing. It wouldn't fix our impending mainly-health-care financial disaster, but it would be a good thing.

Consolidation links

2011-03-10T09:24:00.000-08:00

This is intended as a slightly-organized collection of links about the possibility of Hamilton Central School consolidation (merger with another district, most likely Morrisville-Eaton.) The central link at the moment, for community discussion and comment, is HCSCommunity.net, kicked off as reported by Radio Free Hamilton on March 1 in Community Forum Focuses on HCS' Future, Merger

About 60 people attended a meeting at the Hamilton Public Library Monday night to discuss the future of HCS, and to learn more about and consider alternatives to a possible merger with Morrisville-Eaton Central Schools (MECS).

The powerpoint presentation at HCSCommunity.net can be viewed in your browser as a Google presentation here unless somebody minds my having put it on Google docs, in which case I'll remove it.

My own links would be on Delicious at (consolidation links) and on this blog at (consolidation posts), including this post.

In addition to the meeting-report above, Radio Free Hamilton said on Jan 20 that Board Gets Dire Budget Outlook; Approves Seeking Grant for Merger Study

The details presented by Superintendent Dr. Diana Bowers portrayed not so much a forecast of stormy weather but a financial natural disaster that could strike HCS programs as early as the 2011-2012 budget and devastate it as the Class of 2013 begins its senior yearyear.

on Feb 6 that 1 + 1 = 1: HCS, MECS Merger

The Morrisville-Eaton school board Friday voted to join Hamilton in a study of a possible merger of the two districts. HCS voted in favor or a merger study last week.

And on March 9, Updated: Insult to Injury: HCS Faces Another State Aid Cut

First, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he was going to cut the state's $10 billion deficit byt cutting state aid to schools. Hamilton's hit: $485,000.
Then, the governor said he wants to take the pool of state education aid and divide it differently, taking from wealthier districts and redistributing funds to poorer districts. Hamilton's hit: $103,000.
... Add to that cuts from the federal government and HCS starts its 2011-2012 budget process about $1 million in the hole.

And Superintendent Diana Bowers has a Is It True That...? Blog, which lately is mostly about consolidation. Just Keep Scrolling.

The Post-Standard editorialized that Merger talks: Exploring school district consolidation will be a learning experience | syracuse.com

Facing the one-two punch of rising costs and declining state aid, superintendents in Morrisville-Eaton, Hamilton, Madison and Stockbridge Valley have initiated talks on merging the four districts into two.

(Note comment by Ken Bausch of HCSCommunity.net below.)

The Oneida Dispatch reported on the proposed study as Morrisville-Eaton and Hamilton Central school districts seek funding for merger study (updated) - oneidadispatch.com

If selected, the grant would be awarded by June 1 and a community group would be formed. The group would begin the study in July and finish in January 2012. The completed study would then be submitted to the New York State Education Department. It would be sent back to the districts for more public hearings.
The boards of education may then decide to put the merger up for a vote around September 2012. Voters for both districts would have to approve the merger in two rounds of voting in fall 2012.
Hamilton Superintendent Diana Bowers said the study is a “fact finding” mission.

Personally, I was quite depressed as I went to the meeting; the meeting left me with a sense that maybe we might possibly perhaps muddle through; lately I'm feeling more depressed again. But we might muddle through.

Or then again, maybe not.

Exercise and Education

2011-03-09T16:38:00.000-08:00

This morning I spent 45 minutes trying to pound a few modern Greek words and phrases into an aging memory; until a month ago, this would have required a major effort of willpower, but lately I've been doing it every day with no problem. Also this morning, I did almost 5 miles of gently uphill jogging against random resistance on an elliptical machine, a Life Fitness X5i; up until a month ago, this would have required a completely impractical effort of will. No problem, because I now do them together. As Seth Roberts put it a year ago, Boring + Boring = Pleasant!?:

Two boring activities, done together, became pleasant. Anki [flashcards] alone I can do maybe ten minutes. Treadmill alone I can do only a few minutes before I want to stop. In both cases I’d have to be pushed to do it at all. Yet the combination I want to do; 60 minutes feels like a good length of time.

I'm a lot slower at memorizing than I was forty years ago, but this is good. It's funny to think how close I was to finding this for myself; I have tried music while exercising, watching TED talks while exercising, even memorizing verse while exercising. I think the crucial missing factor was total focus-in-the-moment, as required by flashcards or the Dover Books Listen & Learn Modern Greek (CD Edition) which is basically a booklet of flashcard-style utterances, English+Greek+phonetic, to be read along with the audio. (I photocopied the booklet with 41% enlargement.)

I do wonder how many people this would help. I look at related discussions like What is the best and fastest way to memorize a lot of material for a test? and of course Seth Roberts' later posts at Walking and Learning Update and at Walking Creates A Thirst For Dry Knowledge and gee, I dunno. Learning is good; exercise is good; making both easier is a very good thing.

Snow and WD-40

2011-03-08T15:56:00.000-08:00

A neighbor commented that the storm that ended yesterday totaled 26 inches in our area; there was enough wind that I had some bare patches and some drifts, including door-blocking drifts, but the driveway was mostly 18 inches after things settled down (I had removed a couple of inches, twice, early on). There was no Monday paper, or Monday school -- Colgate shut down too, which is unusual. [Update: I see I was wrong, Colgate was delayed not closed, according to Radio Free Hamilton at Hamilton Buried; Colgate Opens Late

Because of the heavy snowfall and winds, HCS is closed today and Colgate has a late start.

Well, whatever.]

And it was wet, sticky snow. Heavy snow. Not fun to shovel, especially because I had to hit the snow shovel against something hard after carrying each load to the edge and tossing it. But another neighbor (Thanks, Ray) suggested cooking oil on the shovel, and I modified that: I dried it off and then sprayed WD-40. It worked beautifully. Everybody should know about the magical powers of WD-40.

Well, it worked as I went down from garage toward the street, until I got to the ultra-compact hard stuff left by the sidewalk plow and sidewalk snow-blower, each of which had been by several time. I couldn't make any impression on it with a snow shovel, and the regular dirt shovel was going very slowly. And Stub Baker, who put that driveway there (as well as digging various things for me over the years including the basement under me right now), was driving down the street in a John Deere 410G backhoe loader, which for him is a small machine, and my exercise was cut short. Aww, gee. I have a suspicion that Stub knows more about WD-40 than I ever will, too.

School Consolidation

2011-02-28T13:59:00.000-08:00

My Upstate New York village has had a school for quite a while; it may not have a school for much longer. New York has long had a consolidation "incentives" policy, pushing "central schools" like ours (which serves neighboring villages and the rural area around) into mergers into larger, more central, more remote schools. There is an argument that consolidation saves on overall costs; there is a certainty that it shifts costs, and control, from the local taxpayers (and their representatives) to the state taxpayers (and theirs).

I don't much like the idea; I don't think I'd be here if this consolidation had happened by the mid-80s, when I came with four small children and talked with Colgate faculty about research, about teaching, and about life in the village where the new school playground was a big deal. We were tired of a 20-minute drive to school which automatically created distance between our eldest and his classmates, between us and their parents; it was good to be a 15-minute walk away. Some people find community easily, but some of us don't, and putting obstacles up is not good. But it may happen anyway. On January 20th, Board Gets Dire Budget Outlook; Approves Seeking Grant for Merger Study.

the board approved having Bowers seek a state grant to fund a study of some sort of merger/consolidation with another neighboring district...

and tonight, well, Meeting About HCS Future Feb. 28

To be discussed: ... the pros and cons of various school consolidation proposals... The meeting -- which is not organized by the school district -- will be held in Hamilton Public Library's Community Room at 7p.m. The meeting is open to the public.

Hmm.

Well, I look for arguments on the web, arguments about school consolidation generally and about Upstate New York in particular, and I certainly find some.

From the Cornell Department of Education, 1999, I find (PDF) School Consolidation and Transportation Policy: An Empirical and Institutional Analysis and it's overall skeptical about consolidation, indeed perhaps cynical about consolidation:

Traditional reasons for consolidation were discussed and shown to (a) falter under transportation efficiencies, and (b) create disproportional impacts small, rural schools. Institutional arguments demonstrated how ideological reasons have outweighed traditional and rational explanations for consolidation in light of the transportation disadvantage evidence shown for of rural schools. The institutional arguments show how consolidation has been principally justified according to the exaction of state authority over local school districts (Strang, 1987). Secondarily, consolidation has been supported through national policy towards housing and land use development....

From the National Rural Education Association, there's a similarly skeptical (PDF)Rural School Consolidation Report with lots of references:

In studies from 1960 through 2004, there has not been evidence that consolidation of small districts into larger districts has necessarily reduced fiscal expenditures per pupil (Hirsch, 1960; Sher and Tompkins, 1977; Valencia, 1984; Jewell, 1989; Kennedy et al., 1989; Eyre and Scott, 2002; Reeves, 2004). The Rural School and Community Trust concluded: “School consolidation produces less fiscal benefit and greater fiscal cost than it promises. While some costs, particularly administrative costs may decline in the short run, they are replaced by other expenditures, especially transportation and more specialized staff. The loss of a school also negatively affects the tax base and fiscal capacity of the district. ..." Mary Anne Raywid concluded that, “When viewed on a cost-per-student basis, they (small schools) are somewhat more expensive. But when examined on the basis of the number of students they graduate, they are less expensive than either medium-sized or large high schools.” (1999, p.2, EDO-RC-98-8)... A study by Lyson (2002) looked at the fiscal impact and socioeconomic effects of consolidation on communities in New York, most of which once had a school. He found that towns that lost their school had a lower social and fiscal capacity compared to towns that maintained their schools. Other reports have also indicated that when a community loses a school, the tax base and fiscal capacity of the district is negatively affected. ... Cotton (1996) built an impressive case for the advantages of small schools by a quantitative study of the literature. Her analysis indicated an advantage for small schools in the following areas: achievement, attitude toward school, social behavior problems, extracurricular participation, feelings of belongingness, interpersonal relations, attendance, dropout rate, self-concept, and success in college among others.

But what might have been saved in administrative costs was often more than offset by increases in other costs. As a result, although not statistically significant, total costs per pupil actually increased more in the 19 consolidating districts than statewide average increases (32% compared to 29%), including in three of the five Arkansas districts.

That's all pretty negative. But in NY, there's a Syracuse U study of 12 rural-school consolidations suggesting the contrary: "Does School Consolidation Cut Costs?" by William Duncombe and John Yinger

We find that consolidation clearly cuts costs for small, rural school districts in New York. Moreover, the cost savings from consolidation appear to be driven almost entirely by economies of size. Consolidation does affect the time pattern of both operating and capital spending, but in both 29 cases, the initial impact is offset by later changes. Moreover, the time-related impacts on capital spending are roughly offset by the impacts on operating spending. We conclude that consolidation is likely to cut the costs of two 300-pupil districts by over 20 percent, cut the costs of two 900-pupil districts by 7 to 9 percent, and have little if any net impact on the costs of two 1,500 pupil districts.

Pluses and minuses; I'm a little skeptical of that degree of precision supposedly coming from N=12, with the wide range of variation that those 12 schools must have had, but still it is real data, and it's about our general area. They discuss this at AASA :: School District Consolidation: The Benefits and Costs(2):

This study is based on all the rural school districts in New York state between 1985 and 1997. During this period, 12 pairs of these districts consolidated. These consolidating districts had enrollments ranging from 250 to 1,990. To isolate the impact of consolidation, the costs in consolidating districts can be compared both with their own costs before consolidation and with the cost of similar districts that did not consolidate. ... .... Non-Cost Effects When deciding whether to encourage consolidation, state policymakers may want to consider several factors other than cost savings. To some degree, consolidation may break parents’ valued connections with existing schools, result in higher transportation costs for parents and students, or raise costs for improving school outcomes other than the test score measures included in existing studies.....the net benefits of consolidation to voters still could be far below the cost savings to the districts themselves. Some evidence on these issues comes from two recent studies of the impact of consolidation on housing prices............... found that, after controlling for student performance and property tax rates, consolidation lowers property values by about $3,000 on average. ............................this result simply indicates the cost savings from consolidation must be at least $3,000 per household to offset the apparent losses from consolidation associated with less local control, lessened accessibility of teachers and school administrators, higher parental and student transportation costs, or other unidentified negative effects. Another study of rural school districts in New York state by Yue Hu and John Yinger, “The Impact of School District Consolidation on Housing Prices” in the December 2008 issue of National Tax Journal, yielded results consistent with Brasington’s. .... ..... ......... Two additional findings from the Hu and Yinger study are worth mentioning. First, they found roughly a third of consolidation’s positive impact on housing prices is due to the aid bonus that consolidating districts receive in New York.... .............. The negative value placed on the impact of consolidation outside the school budget apparently is greater (in absolute value) for households in neighborhoods with relatively expensive housing, predominantly higher-income households, than for households where house values and rents are relatively low. In short, consolidation is popular with the average household in small rural school districts in New York state, but it is not popular among households with relatively valuable housing.

Well, it's data. And in local data, I see that in 2008-9, the budget was $10,602,046 / 639 = $16,591.62 per student, in HCS District:

The K-12 school building contains two gymnasiums, an auditorium, music rooms, high school library, elementary library, and cafeteria. The 2008-09 student enrollment of 639 students is supported by an approved budget of $10,602,046. There are currently 78 faculty members, which provide a very favorable student/teacher ratio. Average class sizes for elementary and core secondary subjects range from 14-22. The District’s current state aid ratio is 67 percent. Residents have been very supportive of the District’s programs with voter approval of school budgets annually since 1975. The school provides specialists in enrichment and innovation, art, physical education, music, guidance, reading, speech therapy, special education, and psychological services. The music program consists of vocal, band, and orchestra instruction and performance. At the secondary level advanced placement courses are offered in English, American History, World History and Calculus. The pre-engineering program, Project Lead the Way, is available to students in grades 9-12. Extensive curricular and extra-curricular programs have been established...

Of course the budget has risen since, and I don't think the enrollment has. And the budget is necessarily less than the true cost because it can't include the future cost of pension claims, so far as I know. So we're certainly spending a lot of money per student. (That's what you expect when voters approve every annual budget for 35 years in a row. Will they go on approving for a school that's moved away?) Is it sustainable? Incidentally, can not-quite-totally-broke New York State even afford the substantial sums it's offering in consolidation incentives? Maybe.

Or then again, maybe not.

update: I should also have linked to the older (original?) mention of the possibility, last November at Could Tight Finances Drive HCS to Consolidate?

Continued cuts in state aid could lead several area school districts -- including HCS -- to share even more services than they already do or even consolidate into one large district.

The Greenspun Recovery Plan: November 2008

2011-01-02T07:50:00.000-08:00

My co-author, rather than updating his Project Afghanistan page for 2010, sends me a link to Philip Greenspun's Economic Recovery Plan -- minimum steps for averting a Depression in the U.S. , with a note that I "will probably find this congenial", probably meaning that it's closer to my views than his, but interesting. So I look at the minimum steps as of two years ago for averting a Depression in the US, and the first thing I notice is that we didn't do those things and we didn't get a Depression, so they weren't minimal steps for avoiding a Depression. QED. (I think we avoided a Depression because the Fed wasn't quite as stupid as it was in the 30s, but I've probably talked about that enough and Greenspun never mentions it.) Greenspun says the minimal steps are

Reducing Government Spending In 2006 we were spending roughly 36 percent of GDP on government at local, state, and federal levels ... We need to [reduce] government spending to 30 percent of GDP within two years and ...

Well, actually I often think about this measure of the size of government; I don't like it much, especially when transfer payments are most of government spending, and ultra-especially when the big transfers like SocSec and Medicare are going to older people, who have other income, sometimes more income than the younger ones, and are also taxpayers. Government salaries are hardly more than a rounding error here. Let's say my income this year is $100 and yours is $10; the government takes $40 from me, carefully evaluates your needs, gives you $10 and spends the rest on other stuff. I now have $60 and you have $20. Now let's suppose that we replace this with a linear tax which is simpler, but nominally even higher: the government takes (50%-$20) from everybody, so it takes $50 from me and $5 from you over the year, and gives each of us $20 in weekly payments. I end up with $70, you with $25. Okay, has the government expanded or shrunk? It collected $55 where before it collected only $40, and borrowed nothing in either case, so obviously it's "bigger" -- or is it? Or is this the wrong question? I'd choose a linear tax at the Federal level (no deductions at all, except that your 401(K) can hold any investment paper you like including your bank account, so money is taxed only as you spend it), and I'd watch state/local experiments with more complicated schemes, but I don't believe "spending/GDP" would measure the result in an interesting way. No, this is not congenial.

Greenspun goes on:

What about Keynes? Japan is a good example of the failure of Keynesian economics in the globalized era. The country spent hugely on public works projects in the 1990s,...

Well, yeah. As Sumner has written over and over again (and as Bernanke wrote years ago), Japan's central bankers have repeatedly chosen a monetary policy calculated to prevent growth no matter what fiscal policy was adopted. Very odd, but Greenspun isn't making a suggestion so much as countering a fiscal-policy suggestion -- yet he never brings monetary policy into it, which I find even odder.

Now we get into strange territory:

Investor Representation on Public Company Boards Right now the shareholders of a public company are at the mercy of management. ...

I don't get this one at all. If management salaries and bonuses are "looting" companies, then investors should do better by choosing the least-looted companies; we are perfectly free to vote with our feet. I think that my simplified no-deductions tax scheme would reduce the value of superstar friends-of-Bill-or-George-or-Barack managers, I see crony capitalism and regulatory revolving doors as significant problems for democracy as well as startup businesses, but I don't see where Greenspun is coming from here.

Depreciation of Capital Expenses...

Oh, please. I believe this to be another non-problem: if a cash-flow-negative company has good earnings prospects it can borrow the money for its first few years. This is routine. If it doesn't, then flexible depreciation won't help.

Education... Our country's best performing schools (all of them private) have non-unionized teaching staffs. We can't afford to experiment with unionized teachers anymore...

Ummmm, well, absotively posilutely maybe. Or not. I could see a federal role for educational infrastructure, mostly in the form of teaching/testing material (especially educational computer games) to be freely used by anyone who likes it. I would like to introduce competition for every school...I would like lots of stuff. My impression of the overall generational impact of the teachers' unions is extremely negative, but I would put this way down on any list of stuff I'd like.

Transportation System Reform... Public transit unions should be eliminated because ...

I think I see a theme here. Greenspun doesn't like unions. Well, I dunno as how I like what they've gradually grown into all that much myself, but if Greenspun thinks that businesses don't invest in NYC because they're afraid that public transit stoppages will keep workers from getting to work, I think he's going just a teensy bit over the top. The main transportation reform we need is for transportation of bits so telecommuting works better than it does. (This will greatly relieve NYC traffic congestion, but congestion charges should be applied also: my E-ZPass should be charged a few cents, about once a block, whenever I drive in NYC -- rather than just once on the GW Bridge as I head to the city and Icon Parking. And E-ZPass should be required for driving in the city. Period. But the Feds should have nothing to do with it, and it has little to do with averting a recession, so it doesn't belong here.)

Predictable Product Liability System We need a fixed range of prices for people killed or injured by products...

Wow. Well, I guess we're working on Exodus 21 KJV

28 If an ox gore a man or a woman, that they die: then the ox shall be surely stoned, and his flesh shall not be eaten; but the owner of the ox shall be quit. 29 But if the ox were wont to push with his horn in time past, and it hath been testified to his owner, and he hath not kept him in, but that he hath killed a man or a woman; the ox shall be stoned, and his owner also shall be put to death. 30 If there be laid on him a sum of money, then he shall give for the ransom of his life whatsoever is laid upon him. 31 Whether he have gored a son, or have gored a daughter, according to this judgment shall it be done unto him. 32 If the ox shall push a manservant or a maidservant; he shall give unto their master thirty shekels of silver, and the ox shall be stoned.

Wow. I guess I sympathize with Greenspun, and with those who disagree with him. Hmm... It doesn't belong here. What else?

Labor Market Deregulation We may soon have deflation. Workers who are young or with poor skills need entry-level jobs in order to build skills and experience. They won't be able to get them if the minimum wage is set higher than the market-clearing wage. ...

Well, here again I think I'm seeing a tendency to look at the current (2008) emergency and see one's prior preferences as solutions to whatever's wrong. Yeah, I think that some entry-level unemployment, along with the increasing use of gadgetry in your neighborhood McDonald's and Burger King, are driven by the minimum wage. And I'd like to get rid of it, as one of the items that gets replaced by the weekly payments of my linear tax scheme above. But I'm averse to pushing it into a "minimum steps" for Depression-aversion.

Substitute Web-based Education and Trade for Foreign Aid We don't spend a large percentage of GDP on foreign aid, but the perception is that the absolute amount is large and nearly all of it is wasted or siphoned off by Third World officials. ...Let's start with a simple message that business investors can embrace: "We've eliminated all U.S. foreign aid spending."

That's interesting, and again I can mostly support his substitution (especially the end to farm subsidies) as better support for developing-country economies. But I simply wouldn't put it in this list at all.

Immigration Policy ...With our crushing overhang of government debt, entitlement programs, and public-employee pensions, the only question we can afford to ask about an immigrant is "How much in taxes will this person pay and for how long?" Countries such as New Zealand apply a point system.

Well, that's interesting. And I do think that our excess housing inventory could have been fixed, reducing the minor recession that we would have gotten even if the Fed had chosen NGDP level targeting from (at least) early 2008 onwards, by admitting a whole bunch of people on a points system. And our current immigration system is so awful that any rational basis would be better than what we've got. But It Doesn't Belong On This List.

Now, my short-range recovery plan, for whatever it may be worth, would be Sumnerian -- it would have to do with my acceptance of Sumner's view of the immediate causes of the recession. Note again that Greenspun was writing in November 2008. As Sumner says,

1. The NGDP and RGDP collapse ... occurred almost entirely between June and December 2008. I argue that NGDP targeting could have prevented that collapse..... the financial crisis of September 2008 did not cause a stock market crash, as the markets expected the Fed to continue its multi-decade policy of keeping NGDP growing at about 5% a year. If the markets had given up on the Fed in September 2008, they wouldn’t have waited until October to crash. 6. I argue that stocks crashed 23% in early October on little financial news. Instead, there were ominous reports of rapidly falling orders all over the industrial world. Markets then sniffed out Fed passivity, a failure of the Fed to do what it takes to maintain the Great Moderation. They became demoralized. 7. I argue that the only significant Fed policy during the October crash was the [contractionary] IOR program,

The recession's unemployment has gradually become more structural, but I believe more monetary response would still help a lot. Indeed, I believe QE2 did help a bunch.

Whatever. Yeah, I'm Greenspunish in some ways. Okay, I'd really like "Market Deregulation" on a really large scale -- in fact I'd like to move away from regulatory government to required-insurance government. Hm... that's not a Greenspun concept. Overall, I don't find Greenspun all that congenial. Interesting, and he's dissatisfied with many of the same things I am, but not congenial. There's an overlap between his thinking then and my thinking now, but then I overlap quite a bit with almost everybody.

Except, of course, for me. I hardly overlap with me at all, and since whichever of us is right I'm certainly wrong, these thoughts belong on this blog.

NGDP Level Targets; Incentives and Feedback

2010-12-20T06:17:00.000-08:00

As I said awhile back, I think The Fed Did It.

Think of a zillion spreadsheets carrying business plans and personal plans forward a few years, each projecting current trends. Aggregate cash flow -- that's "Nominal GDP". NGDP. Money. Some of those spreadsheets, some of those plans, will fail and others do better than expected, but generally the aggregate cash flow rises each year as population goes up, as productivity goes up, and as inflation goes on. If it falls or rises a little away from the expected trend implicit in all those individual plans, we adapt. If it falls sharply below trend, then cash isn't going around as expected and plans start failing simply because cash isn't going around: businesses fail and it's not their fault. Things are broken. We have a recession, a bad one. In fact, people act by plans and promises, betting on their projections, so we get a recession as soon as the expected NGDP growth fails so that people stop buying and employers stop hiring.

That's my version of the Scott Sumner explanation of the recession. So...

I'm looking at the monetary policy argument between Sumner, DeLong, and now Woolsey, pointing out at least one DeLong error, which DeLong summarizes at DeLong Smackdown Watch: Nominal GDP Targeting Via Index Futures - Grasping Reality with a Shiny Red Nose: Merry Christmas, Everyone!

Right now, in December 2010, we want to give people an incentive to take actions that expand the money supply if they think that nominal GDP at the end of 2011 is likely to be lower than $17.5 trillion and to contract the money supply if they think that nominal GDP at the end of 2011 is likely to be higher than $17.5 trillion.... Touche...I think....

I think I follow most of it, perhaps all of it -- well, not all of it, but I'm not sure that my confusion is a result of not following. I'm still confused about incentives and feedback in the proposed market.

Woolsey's idea, which Sumner defers to, is that the Fed would offer dollar contracts, in effect loans at an interest rate depending on future NGDP; these would be hedged, in fact Woolsey says that

the Fed's goal should be to remain fully hedged. The market expection should be that NGDP remain on target. The long positions of the bulls should be exactly offset by the short positions of the bears. If the market expectation is that NGDP will be above target, then the purchases of the bulls will be greater than the sales of the bears...

and the Fed can use this as a guide to bring NGDP growth back on target.

In other words, the Fed will say "we will define the NGDP growth path, and if you bet against us expecting us to fail then we will use that as a guide to get back on track and thus make sure that you don't make any money." This strikes me as an inadequate incentive. If the bulls/bears bet, then they will provide the feedback by which they don't make money; if they don't bet, there will be no feedback and they could make money by betting. Bulls and bears alike are being asked to make self-negating prophecies. My thoughts turn to Curry's Y combinator and the standard "paradox",

Y not = not(Y not)

but that's probably just me.

I really don't see how this will work; if I'm right (unlikely), then we do need a secondary market to provide the guidance, a "derivatives" market of a sort, a prediction market: we need to let people bet instead on their self-fulfilling prophecies of how much expansion/contraction the Fed will have applied, on net, in their efforts to get to the NGDP target level. My preference is still, as I've said, to use some version of the Wilshire Index, to have the Fed use some version of a daily-rebalancing stock/bonds/money portfolio as a primary tool of monetary policy, to help with what DeLong calls "a Minskyite downturn--a flight to quality because of a collapse in the market's risk tolerance and a shortage of safe assets." The bears can make money if the Fed has to raise its stocks+bonds percentages in trying to reach the desired NGDP, and the bulls can make money if it has to lower them; if bears outweigh bulls or vice-versa, then that portfolio percentage will adjust. (It may adjust anyway if the Fed board actually believes they won't otherwise make target; unlike Sumner and Woolsey, I'm not really confident of an autopilot solution. But of course autopilot would be better if we could be sure it would work.)

Or then again, maybe not.

Budget Balance: Healthcare

2010-11-17T07:17:00.000-08:00

I've been looking at a fair number of blog posts like David Henderson's I Agree: Budget Cutting is Easy

Like Arnold and some of his commenters, I found it way easier than I thought it would be to cut the federal budget on the New York Times' interactive site. After I was done, the Times announced that I had solved the deficit. How did I do so? Entirely with budget cuts, with one exception. ...I did increase taxes by having the favorable tax treatment of employers' contributions to employees' health insurance phase out gradually.

Somewhat similar (fewer cuts, more tax increases) we get Megan McArdle's In Which I Overbalance the Budget

allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, eliminating or modifying major tax subsidies like the employer health insurance deduction, and cutting all manner of subsidies. I could have gone farther, but I deliberately left most military spending alone ... In fact, I generated too much in savings; we now have large surpluses in 2018 and 2030.

I was mildly surprised at how easy they found it, but as long as politically unrealistic solutions are okay I wish I could have expressed my actual preferences. Right now the Federal budget structure is roughly:

Defense and security: ... some 20 percent of the budget, or $715 billion,... includes the cost of .. Iraq and Afghanistan...

Social Security: Another 20 percent of the budget, or $708 billion....

Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP: ... 21 percent.., or $753 billion...Both Medicaid and CHIP require matching payments from the states....

Safety net programs: About 14 percent...

Interest on the national debt:... $209 billion, or about 6 percent...

That's 55% redistribution to old/young/sick/poor, 7% federal pensions, 6% interest, 20% defense, 3% educ, 3% highways etc., 2% research, 1% furriners, 4% other. Present projections have the budget busted mainly because of the redistributions' future growth, mainly old/sick. (That's a completely separate issue from this year's deficits, which come mainly from the recession.)

As Ezra Klein puts it in Ezra Klein - Four budget calculators, one story

they're all good, clean fun, and they all make the same basic point: It's the health-care system, stupid. In the Times' calculator, the single biggest thing you can do is add a "magic asterisk" to the health-care system. We don't know how exactly we're going to hold Medicare's spending growth to GDP+1%, but if... we get that growth rate, or something close to it, we can get the budget into balance. If we can't, well, we can't.

Nothing else matters (to the deficit) but healthcare? Well, nothing else matters nearly as much, and "healthcare reform" didn't deal with it. So how do we reform healthcare? Answer: well, you already know my answer. In today's news from England, we have A patient was recovering today after making medical history by having a world-first heart operation carried out by a robotic arm.

Patrick Flood, 63, yesterday thanked doctors at Leicester's Glenfield Hospital just minutes after the operation finished. He was due home today. Dr Andre Ng, a consultant cardiologist, used a robotic arm and sophisticated computer images of Mr Flood's heart to fix its irregular rhythm. ... Dr Ng controlled the robot arm in a room next to the theatre, using the 3D computer model as a guide.

This is telepresence robotics: it doesn't replace the doctor with a robot (not for a long time yet), but it does mean the doctor doesn't have to be there. Next room? Next county? Across the Atlantic? Anywhere. And that means that the traditional economic benefits of specialization and trade are available for medicine: the world's best surgeons for sub-sub-sub-specialization X.37.Z.13 can be based in countries A,B, and C, available 24/7 anywhere on earth, competing with the almost-as-good group in countries D,E,F... Since they don't have to handle anything but their own kind of operation, their training can be shorter, and updated more frequently, than that of a surgeon who has to handle a wide variety of problems for patients from a particular region. (You do need a local patient's representative trained as a general-purpose physician's assistant, probably.) Of course telepresence in diagnosis is just as important; here's a two-week-old press release Vator.tv - AT&T announces new health division

AT&T already boasts a health portfolio that includes AT&T’s Telehealth Solutions, which uses video and audio conferencing to allow patients in rural and under-served areas to consult a specialist who may be hundreds of miles away. AT&T partnered with the University of California in April to provide Managed Network Services for the California Telehealth network...

and yesterday, Crain's New York Business was reporting on NYers discover potential of mobile health

The idea that electronic devices could bring health care to areas with few services is attracting big donors and setting off an applications race among technology and software companies.

Yeah, maybe. Well, actually, yeah. Right now they're talking about it as a way to communicate with the doctor you already have, but I expect and hope that if your doctor doesn't start outsourcing to specialists (who are always available, and FedEx will deliver your self-test tomorrow) then you'll find yourself using an Android/iPhone app that gets you directly to better diagnostic services.

Cheaper and better healthcare. Maybe. If we don't stop this from happening via the wrong kind of healthcare reform, then we'll get there eventually. And if we had the right kind of healthcare reform, like what I've talked about before, we'd get there sooner.

Or then again, maybe not

update: Well, there's another issue which I should have mentioned again as looming large in my always-mistaken thoughts: growth. David Leonhardt notes One Way to Trim Deficit - Cultivate Growth - NYTimes.com

The Times’s online deficit puzzle... asks you to find almost $1.4 trillion in annual spending cuts and tax increases by the year 2030. If growth were a half point faster than expected, the needed savings would instead drop to less than $700 billion.

And how to promote growth? Well, tax reform is the approach suggested by today's Economist in Inequality and executive pay: All hail the progressive consumption tax!

Mr Frank's proposal is well worth considering on pro-growth and counter-cyclical grounds. As Mr Frank writes: "If a progressive consumption tax were phased in gradually, its main effect would be to shift spending from consumption to investment, causing productivity and incomes to rise faster. Should a recession occur, a temporary cut in consumption taxes would provide a much more powerful stimulus than the traditional temporary cut in income taxes."

Yup. I've said it before. The simplest approach, for my simple mind, would be to stretch the 401K notion to include a long list of kinds of accounts (not just your bank accounts but investment portfolio including real estate that you don't live in) as "pre-tax"; your income can flow into this list without paying taxes, and then it can grow, but you can't spend it without paying taxes. And we get rid of most kinds of deductions, apart from that deferral. (I say this as one who has a whole lot of deductions, each of which can be reasonably argued for, but whose net effect is that people like me are being tax-subsidized by people with a lot less money.)

I don't personally sneer at earmark reform; I view it as a significant part of a favor-trading system that makes it profitable for companies to lobby for targeted legislation , which I suspect of hurting growth far more than the dollar amounts of the earmarks would predict. But the main growth-promotion that a government can do is...well, all I can do is quote Adam Smith:

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.

Peace is an arguable issue--how much should we (or can we) pay for the Pax Americana even if it's real? Tolerable administration of justice (mostly, rule of law) is something I think we've been moving away from, and I believe Obama has moved us further, and sometimes I'm even less optimistic than other times. But easy taxes, not needing to be nearly as low as Smith would have thought because we're so much wealthier now -- easy taxes we might be able to get.

Freecell

2010-10-01T11:29:00.000-07:00

I use Freecell as a break quite often, or as a way to submerge-my-conscious-mind-and-let-Something-Lower-do-the-work. Or whatever. Sometimes I tell myself that it's a good way to wake up, or that it's a test of the degradation of my aging brain, or any other excuse that I can think of. And I do play it on Ubuntu (setting the default AisleRiot launcher for GNOME games to /usr/games/sol -v Freecell), but I prefer the Mac version because it has a history feature which I haven't seen on Ubuntu, so I mostly play it on my wife's iMac. And in the last few years, between us we have played 6060 distinct games as of this morning. Quite a few of these games have been played more than once, though. A perfect (perfectly boring) game would involve clicking once and watching 52 moves self-play; my best is a 71-move game, which I've done three times. (My wife prefers to build huge stacks and watch them self-play, which doesn't lead to low move-counts). When I need (or my wife uses) more than 99 moves to win, I keep going back to that game in the history until I can do it in 99 moves or less.

It gets frustrating to play a game over and over and over again, though, so I've adopted a policy that whenever I take too many moves, I try it again just once. Then the three-digit game waits until I come back to it, which happens the next time I score in the 70s unless there's a more recent three-digit game; this is a LIFO process. This morning I got a 74, so I went back to a game which had needed 101 moves last time, 117 moves the time before that, and other scores before; it had been around for almost a year, while others came and went. I did it in 98 moves, and then realized that the "Moves" column in the history is now a 2-digit column, with three 71s, a couple of hundred 99s, and thousands in between.

Remember, this is a blog of mistakes....surely Freecell qualifies.

Yeah, the Fed Did It.

2010-09-29T11:23:00.000-07:00

(More precisely, the Fed aggravated it; the Fed could have prevented most of it; the extent to which we depend on the Fed's good judgment should shrink, not grow.)

I believe we've been having a three-component economic crisis, each component building on and worse than the one before it, with overambitious or overconfident regulators/legislators making each component far worse than it needed to be. The three components I see are

the trend-following housing (and financial services) bubble, which the Fed worsened slightly by false reassurances;
the security-seeking, trend-breaking cash crunch which the Fed worsened greatly by too-tight monetary policy;
the longer-run tech-based employment recalculation. (All right, the Fed is not guilty here but it mostly hasn't happened yet, and our sensitivity to the mistakes the Fed made this time is growing with time. Cheer up, the worst is yet to come.)

bubble: I've commented on the housing bubble before, and how I think it was worsened by regulators and legislators (and raters) who denied the problem. Investor irrationality was real, but part of that irrationality was the willingness of investors to trust pronouncements by Greenspan and Bernanke, by Barney Frank and others on both sides of the aisle, and of course their willingness to believe that AAA meant "safe". I'm not arguing that interest rates were or weren't too low. (I do not believe that was the problem.) I'm not saying that the regulators were (or are, or will be) stupid or malevolent. I am saying that they were, quite obviously, wrong, and that those who relied on their assurances did very badly. (Those who simply said "prices are rising, I'll bet everything I can borrow that the trend will continue" did exactly as badly; there are always some of those.) I'd fix that (following Arnold Kling) mainly by going back to a world of high down payments. You could still give 100% financing if you wanted, but any federal support (including FDIC guarantees for a bank that offers mortgages) should depend on at least 20% down payment. Leverage would shrink generally, and underwater mortgages would be extremely rare. This would reduce homeownership rates, of course, and that may be regrettable, but it's not obvious that people are helped by encouraging them to make commitments they are likely to break, or be broken by. Of course this version of Kling's reform won't happen; what we're getting instead is expanded trust in that which failed before, to which we add taxpayers having to guarantee more than 95% of mortages, still being pushed on those who can't afford them.

cash crunch: As I've said before, I've become a semi-Sumnerite:

the real problem right now is not a “real” problem. The real problem is a nominal problem. When the growth rate of nominal GDP falls sharply there is always a severe recession. We have a severe nominal shock, a problem which has been understood by economists at least as far back as Hume. At the time, it always looks like the “real problem” was some symptom of the monetary shock, such as financial panic. Thus in the 1930s people thought the collapsing financial system caused the Great Depression, only later did we discover it was too little money.

Investors' efforts to minimize individual risk ended up adding to systemic risk. Actually it seems to me that we knew by February 2008, when Roubini said,

"Cash is king in 2008,"... the U.S. went into recession in December and will stay there for at least a year.

The Federal Reserve under Bernanke ignored what Bernanke had written academically; it brought down interest rates and then declared a "liquidity trap". It did expand the monetary base, but not nearly enough to satisfy demand -- and they neutralized part of their monetary expansion in fall 2008, by paying interest on excess reserves, encouraging hoarding by banks. Cash remained king, mostly because people were worried about too much risk in their portfolios. Here I would agree with Sumner that we should target NGDP (nominal GDP, aggregate cash flow) but I worry that buying Treasury bonds with cash, exchanging one low-risk item for another, might not succeed; we need to cope with people trying to shed risk. The Fed's purchases of mortgage-backed securities seems like a really bad idea: this is not absorbing risk in the sense of variability, it's buying a bet that already failed and attempting to prop up a market that should go downwards because there are too many houses out there for a while. So,

I'd make NGDP measures tradable in the form of Shiller's trills, creating a permanent market growing to perhaps a billion trills, paying one-tenth of one percent of our GDP, owned by citizens or foreigners but not by our own government.
Like Sumner, I would announce that we're targeting a 5% growth trend in trill yield (i.e., in NGDP), based on the pre-2008 trend so that if it rises too fast or too slow in one year we compensate the next; this is "level targeting".
I would give the Fed a stock-bonds-cash portfolio to be rebalanced daily, where the cash can be effectively imaginary (set it at last year's NGDP, most will never be printed) and all stocks are treated equally via a Wilshire Index fund; this rebalancing portfolio is the key difference between me and everybody else, hence probably totally wrong, but it makes sense to me. If investors starts selling stocks, the Fed will automatically buy, or sell if everyone else is buying, so this couple-of-trillion portfolio would automatically tend to stabilize the market. It would probably make money for taxpayers, too.
How would it stabilize the NGDP trend? When trills (next year's trills; buy them now!) start to fall, the Fed would change the portfolio proportions, giving cash for stocks and perhaps bonds, absorbing risk and satisfying the demand for cash. When trills start to rise above the price level target, the Fed portfolio proportions would change back.
Actually, I might make this last item more indirect: I might start a prediction market on the proportions required to achieve the actual NGDP target. In effect, I'd be giving knowledgeable parties something to bet on, so that they'd make money by getting it right. I don't want them able to make money by betting on the actual cash value of a trill's annual yield: that's (2008 yield)*(1.05^N), so the "right answer" is known in advance. Bet on the unknown path to that, instead. The Fed would use this prediction market to guide the proportions.

Instead of this, of course, we're giving the Fed a more complex mission as if its people had enhanced credibility. Since their credibility with me has gone way down, I don't find this reassuring.

employment recalculation: Kling talks about recalculation, reallocation of resources including labor in the constant search for "sustainable patterns of specialization and trade", and the unemployment this causes. Sumner acknowledges that some recalculation was required at the beginning, but mostly he just means the structural issues of too big a housing sector (and finance.) Delong and Krugman point to aggregate-demand-based unemployment and say that structural unemployment is on the way, but not yet a big deal. (Of course current unemployment is made worse by underwater mortgages which keep people from moving where the jobs are, and therefore by low-down-payment policies. And it's made directly worse by the cash crunch which motivates companies to sit on their cash, and it's made worse by regulatory uncertainty (and especially health care) and inflation uncertainty. But this is talking about aggregate demand v. structural, with recalculation as part of a slightly different story.)

I'd agree with them all, mostly, but add that recalculation is growing as an issue in a way they haven't (to my knowledge) discussed. My feeling is that overall technological productivity will gradually become the biggest factor in continuing unemployment, in the sensitivity of unemployment rates to (failures in) NGDP trends. I think that our increasing wealth and productivity means that a sharply decreasing fraction of the population is generating stuff we actually need, and a less-sharply decreasing fraction of the population is generating stuff we think we need. When money-trends continue, this doesn't matter because people buy whatever they were planning to buy. When money-trends fail and people want to hide their money, only the essentials keep going and that's a shrinking part of the economy. In the long run, (almost?) all production of goods and services is optional. In the short-to-medium run it would be enough to have the Fed do its job, making sure money-trends continue so people are comfortable buying stuff they want, not just what they think they need. In the long run, we will also need a negative income tax.

My approach to this stuff would be even more drastic, and therefore more unlikely, than my approaches to the preceding problems. So I won't finish this part of this post.

Footnote, since this is stuff that wasn't part of the way I thought through 2008: Aggregate cash flow is NGDP, Nominal Gross Domestic Product, the sum of all the money we pay (or get paid) for all the goods and services we use (and produce). You can divide that by your best guess at an inflation multiplier to get "Real GDP", the theoretical "constant-dollar" value of all those goods and services, but your paycheck and mortgage payment and grocery bill are paid in actual nominal cash flowing around and around, keeping our individual financial plans going by fulfilling the promises that we need to make economics ("sustainable patterns of specialization and trade", as per Arnold Kling) work. If expected NGDP drops, then you're already in a recession. I didn't really follow this argument when Tyler Cowen first recommended Sumner's blog. In the end, it's not that complicated. Think of a zillion spreadsheets carrying business plans and personal plans forward a few years, each projecting current trends. Aggregate cash flow -- that's "Nominal GDP". NGDP. Money. Some of those spreadsheets, some of those plans, will fail and others do better than expected, but generally the aggregate cash flow rises each year as population goes up, as productivity goes up, and as inflation goes on. If it falls or rises a little away from the expected trend implicit in all those individual plans, we adapt. If it falls sharply below trend, then cash isn't going around as expected and plans start failing simply because cash isn't going around: businesses fail and it's not their fault. Things are broken. We have a recession, a bad one.

In fact, people act by plans and promises, betting on their projections, so we get a recession as soon as the expected NGDP growth fails so that people stop buying and employers stop hiring.

Q: That sort of sounds almost convincing. Very odd. But isn't the future causing the present here?

A: Gee, thank you. It's actually close to tautological: expected NGDP is the aggregate of expected cash flow, and your belief that you're no longer going to be able to buy the goods and services you expected to buy will immediately change your behavior, the recession hits as soon as you expect it. So it's your beliefs about the future causing your behavior in the present.

In the current case we had a small recession because a whole lot of investors had believed our regulators and legislators who downplayed the risks of the bubble. They -- the investors -- had believed in the AAA ratings. When they hit reality they bounced, and needed more cash.

Q: But is this the Fed's fault? I mean, apart from Greenspan and then Bernanke denying the bubble?

A: The Fed has a dual mandate: they are supposed to manage inflation and unemployment, by managing the money supply. I'm saying that I mostly believe Sumner: the Fed did expand money somewhat, but they could have avoided most of the pain we've felt if they'd done more. So yeah, it's their fault.

Q: Done more? Done what? Lowered interest rates below zero?

A: Well, first by not paying interest on (excess) reserves, which was and is contractionary. Second, by announcing an inflation target or better an NGDP level-targeting sequence. Third, by expanding their open market purchases; preferably by starting the kind of automatically daily-rebalancing portfolio I described above.

Q: I understand why paying interest on reserves is contractionary; why are they doing it?

A: I don't really understand, but I think it's simply a way to give the banks money so they don't fail, while pretending that it's not Main Street bailing out Wall Street. I'm getting very cynical in my old age.

Ryan Avent of the Economist said

It's getting ever more difficult to avoid concluding that the Fed's inflation target is not the 2% we'd all come to expect, but something much closer to zero. This obviously impacts economic behaviour. The Fed could potentially have a significant effect on conditions simply by letting markets know that it's not actually happy with the current inflation trajectory.

Recently (Sept 2010) Bernanke has said that, with good effect; let's hope he goes further. There's some evidence that it will happen, e.g. Calculated Risk's Fed's Lockhart: The Approaching Monetary Policy Decision Dilemma

I think a consensus is building for QE2 in early November.

But I don't trust Bernanke to follow through, or at least I don't trust the Fed he leads...and that's what it depends on.

Or then again (I hope), maybe not.

Update: I see Avent saying in The perils of prediction: Forget forecasts, trust markets | The Economist that

I like to point out that in June of 2008 the Federal Reserve forecast real GDP growth in 2009 of 2.0% to 2.8%, when in fact the economy shrank in 2009 by over 2%. Of course, this doesn't mean that central banks have no basis on which to make policy. All they need do is look at the evidence in front of them. Markets...

I trust markets a lot more than I trust the Fed.

Perhaps I should note that Sumner does not blame the Fed for failure to predict, as he said in TheMoneyIllusion » The Fed doesn’t have a crystal ball

All the major investment banks with their million dollar Ivy League employees missed this crisis (and its eventual impact), and yet the Fed was supposed to have predicted it? The Fed pays much lower salaries than Wall Street.

Indeed, I wouldn't blame the Fed for the housing bubble recession-trigger at all if Greenspan (and then Bernanke) had simply said "Bubble-detection is not part of my job, I can't help you with that." But this is not what I understood them to be saying.

update: Ah-ha! An actual reputable economist, Nick Rowe, says at least that

If I had my druthers, the Fed would buy stocks. Something like the S&P500 index.

This is not equivalent to saying that the Fed should do a large part of its monetary policy via a rebalancing portfolio somewhat similar to what investment people prescribe for individuals, but it's a start. Yay!

(Or then again, maybe not.)

upd: The same Nick Rowe is quoted approvingly by Brad Delong in Against Money-Financed Fiscal Expansion, For Open Market Operations in Equity Indexes

OK. Start with the Fed buying bridges. That will work. Now, wouldn't it be nice if the Fed could also sell those bridges again later, if it needs to, as it probably will. Bridges aren't very liquid. And, the Fed is good at clipping coupons on bonds, but perhaps not very experienced at collecting tolls on bridges. Hmmm. Maybe if the Fed just bought shares in bridges instead, that would be as good as bridges, but even better from the practical point of view. Hmmm. Why stop at bridges? Why not buy shares in everything? Why not just buy the Wilshire 5000, or some such index?

Excellent. The right index identified, along with the need for later sale; we are close to portfolio rebalancing.

Financial "Reform" thoughts; bubble

2010-07-27T18:26:00.000-07:00

I've written a few notes on the housing bubble, but things have changed. We are adopting a financial reform bill which relies on increased discretionary power for regulators, to deal with bubbles and crashes on a case-by-case, company-by-failed-company basis. Broad discretion for case-by-case regulation is the traditional recipe for encouraging regulatory capture, so I'm agin it. Besides that, I have a problem. Our regulators have a really bad track record for interpreting bubbles and crashes. As Matthew Yglesias » The Fed and the Housing Bubble says, Greenspan

essentially spent this period egging the bubble on, touting ARMs, downplaying the possibility of a national bust, etc. Similarly, Ben Bernanke’s 2006 Economic Report of the President specifically considered and rejected the possibility of a housing bubble. The point, to my mind, isn’t merely that these guys were wrong. Nor is it that their wrong analysis led to bad policy. It’s that their wrong statements and absence of accurate ones themselves helped egg the bubble on.

In my mind, at least, our regulators have seriously downgraded credibility. You may want to say their actual impact on the bubble (and crash) was quite small, and I disagree but that disagreement is tentative. If, on the other hand, you want to say that their actions and announcements show them to be trustworthy bubble-crash handlers; in that case I disagree much more strongly and much less tentatively.

Bubbles will happen, but this is how I would limit the next housing bubble: I would define a "standard mortgage", a low-risk mortgage, as requiring the traditional 20% down, and also requiring that the originating bank (or whoever) has contracted to retain a minimum 20% of the mortgage value. Then I would say that Federal financing can't be used to support any non-standard mortgages.

That doesn't rule out 0% down mortgages as totally private transactions, and anyway you could still borrow the 20% down from your parents (or your credit card if you're totally insane). I would just make it a constraint on Federal (or agency) action, e.g. FDIC insurance can only apply to banks which apply these constraints to any mortgages or MBSs or loans to mortgage-holders they may have; similarly, Fannie and Freddie (if they continue to exist) can't touch mortgages which don't have those properties; similarly, the Federal Reserve can only buy mortgage-backed securities based on mortgages respecting these constraints, and so on. It's all about incentives and risk and leverage -- and speculation. Liar loans would be harder because the originating bank would have to hold on to a significant chunk of each. Prices would not rise as fast or as far; we would no longer see mortgages used as rent-with-option-to-buy-if-the-price-goes-up, or at least the taxpayer would not be on the hook for losses if we did. That way, even when a future Greenspan or Bernanke (or Frank, as legislator) makes the stupidly optimistic bubble-encouraging remarks that the past Greenspan and Bernanke and Frank did make, there will be limits on the damage that people can do by following them. And even in a downturn few houses would be underwater, so labor mobility would not be much damaged.

I would do other things too, personally: I would say Fannie and Freddie can't take new business, I would say that no new mortgages shall have interest-deductibility, I would get the government out of the business of having those who own a home subsidized by those who don't, I would stop pushing home-ownership on those who really can't afford it. (I don't think subprime mortgage push does any favors for the recipients.) And so on. But all that is secondary; I would start with the "standard mortgage".

I claim this would work (unless I'm wrong, as usual); I also claim this won't happen because it's more profitable for political contributors to have a complex set of relationships with regulators where the regulators have lots of discretion so that regulatory capture will gradually set in, and then the taxpayers will bail them out on a case-by-case basis because Too Big To Fail is embedded in the legislation. It seems to me that that's what we're getting. The guys who brought us the bubble and crash have won, and we lost.

Groundhog

2010-06-08T13:12:00.000-07:00

A year ago I sent sibling email saying

I had had no idea that groundhogs climbed trees. In fact I believe this to be a juvenile groundhog, much smaller than the one that waddles around all year though its body is still more than a foot long plus tail, and there were two of them in two different small trees around the den at the base of our yard and the other one startled me -- and Rosie -- considerably by zooming down the tree and safe into the hole as we trotted by. But this one stayed put while I took a fair number of really bad pictures and a few only moderately bad pictures, of which this is, umm, of which this is one. Note tail color. Did you know groundhogs climbed trees?

So brother Phil, who had left the picture in his email for a year, has posted it at the UMich AnimalDiversity web site:

Date Taken: June 7, 2009
Location: Hamilton, New York
Caption: groundhog in tree
Contributors: Dr. Tom Myers (photographer, copyright holder)

This is mildly amusing, and interesting in a this-is-how-Web-content-happens sort of way. My daughter comments "Daddy, it's a groundhog in a tree. Why do you want a copyright for that?" Well, it's a creative commons copyright, and I approve of them. Besides, Phil suggested it. Hmm....

Pumping Heat -- Back and Forth

2010-06-01T13:14:00.000-07:00

In January, I wrote about pumping heat from well-water to house which was finally in place, after I'd been talking about it for about twenty years. I did note one problem: the pumps for the compressors were less than 70 feet down in a 208-foot well, which meant that the water level dropped below the upper one when both pumps were running. After the weather moderated, Bagnall Electric came back and reinstalled their pumps on longer hoses, supposedly 10% up from the bottom. After that there was no problem running both compressors at once, and I test-run the oil burner one night per month through heating season, with PRI-D Complete Diesel Treatment supposedly increasing the life of the fuel oil in the tank because a tank will last several years that way. Maybe it will be okay; the idea is that if there's a long power outage in winter, then the (propane) backup generator can make enough electricity to run the oil burner and keep us from freezing for a few weeks.

It so happens that for more than twenty years I've been cooling this house, for part of each summer, by running whole-house fans in the night and closing up during the day, amusing my wife by opening and shutting doors and windows to make air-paths so that everything gets cooled off. Last year that didn't work quite as well because one of the fans went away and the attic into which they had vented was sealed with foam insulation, but it still sort of worked: even last night with a series of thunderstorms, I could open some windows so that air flowed, well, mainly into the east porch, through the sitting room and living room to the kitchen and then dining room and up the back stairs and into the remaining fan and up into the attic and down the new pull-down ladder and out through the window of an unused bedroom. And that worked, except when the bedroom was not unused, or when the night wasn't cool enough, or simply because my thirteen-year-old insists on her right to take a shower in the afternoon and often a bath as well, which heated things up.

Now it doesn't matter. One compressor gets heat from the well-water and does almost all of the work of providing her hot water. Part of the heat naturally goes into the air. The other compressor receives the heat from the air and puts it back into the well-water. It's not free, but it is less electricity (water-heating plus that part of the air-cooling) than the water-heating alone would have been in previous years. Recycling!

Or maybe not.

Meditation on a Self-Extending Robotic Intestinal Flatworm

2010-05-25T13:22:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to think about healthcare innovation generally, but I'm a detail person...

The ultimate goal for surgery, of course, is not to need it in the first place. In the case of my own appendectomy, for example, a high-fiber diet might have made it less likely. Hmmm..should high-fiber food be mandatory? I don't think so. I do support a supportive role for government, when externalities are involved: labeling, of course, but also massive data collection. Government could help provide the infrastructure for personal choice. In MyersWorld it would be easy at any time (and more common in a recession) for anybody to make a little extra money by signing up for a public health randomization study -- we really don't know what diet/exercise patterns work for whom and how well, and what testable/predictable/controllable (genetic? psychological? cultural? behavioral cues?) factors are involved. If I knew that the handful of nuts I just ate was bad for me, and in what way, I might or might not eat them anyway... I like nuts. For whom does Seth Roberts' weird Shangri-La diet work, in which of its primary variations (sugar, oil, nose-clipping, crazy-spicing...)? Such information would, I suspect, make a substantial difference to obesity and probably other healthcare factors, and it's something that could be done right now, but probably won't be. Well, the internet factor is helpful, I suspect (even though, when I mentioned having printed out a web page on appendicitis symptoms, the E.R. doc did say that ought to be illegal.)

At the other end of the spectrum, a true Singularitarian might insist on pointing out that once I get uploaded into a virtual universe, I will not only think faster and have more ways to have sex but will be completely immune to cell-based ailments 'cos I won't have any cells, and I'll be copied to multiple locations so that even if a black hole whacks the Sun some of me will be fine. But frankly I'm not sure which of me will actually be me at that point, if any of you see what some of me mean, and I'm not a true Singularitarian. I'm not even terribly interested in whether or not one or more entities a million years from now have a memory of having been me; I hope we can have better goals than that.

Still, I do expect something at least as good as my stemcell cyborg notion, if I happen to live long enough to see it.

And in between? Well, I'm really quite grateful for laparoscopic surgery; various people have expressed surprise at my being not only up and active but doing routine gardening stuff and such, but I feel fine. I'd like the principle of minimally-invasive surgery to go even further; I'd like to see an appendectomy or the like become an outpatient procedure, done at a local robotic clinic which may not even have a local G.P., just an R.N. (and it might be a room in the R.N.'s house, or then again inside Wal-Mart.) The R.N. has no specialized knowledge, but when you checked in to Google Health Searches with your Android phone, you checked off your symptoms and showed yourself to the camera in front of somebody who sent you to your local clinic. She will now get you passed via telepresence to a specialist in India, let's say, to a specialist in Costa Rica, then to a real expert in your condition who happens to be in Singapore, and then the initial incision is handled by a technician in Miami who passes it on to the actual surgeon who comes in from her Greek-island beach, puts a towel on the chair to avoid getting it wet, and starts supervising the robotic equipment. (Meanwhile, the R.N. keeps track of your case, and is your agent, as well as being the intermediary between you and geek-speak where needed.)

So what is that robotic equipment that's being supervised? Well, it's even less invasive than a current-generation laparoscopic setup, of course. And it's more general: it can go more or less anywhere in your body. How?

In laparascopic abdominal surgery, it seems you mostly put in three or even four holes, inflate the abdomen with carbon dioxide to get an almost-reasonable field of view, and push tools in on rigid arms ("trocars"). My self-extending robotic intestinal flatworms need only one hole and there's nothing rigid to push in except for the head(s); they grow into you via a version of 3d printing, replace the bad piece with a model of itself, and then the non-biodegradable parts are withdrawn. Then you sit quietly for a little bit and then somebody drives you home.

Details? Sure, but as with most not-yet-solved problems there are multiple solutions on the horizon; you can't tell which will actually arrive. The Self-Extending Robotic Intestinal Flatworm as I'm imagining it is part sensor and part Roto-Rooter. It has a flat beak, a flat head, a flat neck, and a long flexible flat tail with a row of flexible tubes, being an output tube for ground-up roto-rooted gunk, two input tubes for hydrogel components, and one or perhaps two optical fibers for laser use; the surgical cutting laser may have to be separate from the scanning laser, which does its scanning with a vibrating mirror in the head, like that of the Cornell pocket projector

The key to the technology is a small mirror, about half a millimeter across, suspended by carbon fibers. According to the Review, the fibers amplify the vibrations of a piezoelectric motor to move the mirror, which deflects a laser at different angles, causing it to sweep back and forth across a surface.

So the flatworm has a really good view of whatever it's about to cut; it can probably leave the scanner-laser inside the head, but might sometimes push it out in a transparent globe at the end of an eyestalk. Appetizing? Mostly, though, the flatworm gets its head to where it needs to be, slices through tissue and small blood vessels but plugs larger vessels with hydrogel before slicing the plugs, and butters that which it's going to remove with a layer of hydrogel (a relatively hard, tough hydrogel, now used for tissue engineering) before it starts a grind-slurp-replace cycle in which it extrudes about a cubic centimeter of hydrogel for each cubic centimeter it removes; sometimes the hydrogel input will be mixed with a stem-cell suspension.

And how does the flatworm get to the objective, e.g. from belly-button to appendix? Well, my suspicion is that at least part of the motive power can be managed if we form the tail by extruding hydrogel out a ring of little holes around the neck, forming rings: if you're turning right, you don't push as much out the right side, and so on. The tail material thus is automatically the right shape, and it never moves inside the body, although it is stretched just a bit at the end of the process when the cables and head are pulled out, leaving the hydrogel behind along with any sensors, effectors, and engineered tissue that may be the result of the surgery.

And do I really think this would work? Well, I've deleted a number of alternative approaches for the S-E RIF; even if I were an actual expert, I'd be sure to have deleted (or not thought of) some of the right ones. So I'm sure that the minimally-invasive surgery of ten (or, after healthcare reform, maybe twenty) years hence will be quite different from this image, different in detail. But it will be as good. We are getting good at sensors, getting good at micromachinery, getting good at biomimetics and tissue engineering with and without stemcells. There is no reason to think that we'll stop at this month's AnchorPort Single Incision Laparoscopy Kit. And the main takeaway here is in any case that the surgeon is not looking at the appendix, not cutting free-hand with a scalpel: he's looking at a screen, and manipulating controls for a waldo; probably just a couple of joysticks. Right there, that enables telepresence, and it already works. This in turn enables the specialization-economics of Adam Smith's pin factory. We could improve our healthcare outcomes at reduced cost, just by that. That could be done now, this year, with a steadily-increasing scale of operations over the next decade. As a later extension, the surgeon should not be viewing endoscopic imagery; he or she should be viewing a 3D model based on data from

prior CT scan and sonography
very-short-range optics
sonography
maybe teraherz radiation, capable of penetrating a bit into not-too-wet-tissue.

That would replace the field-of-view problem with a different, often-solvable problem. It couldn't be done this year, but it could be done soon.

Oh, well...then again, maybe not.

update: Maybe this is happening even faster than I thought: the NYT has produced an article on Healing by 2-Way Video - The Rise of Telemedicine.

update 2: Self-assembly from within might be better than self-extension from an external incision, and an Italian group is making progress according to Ingestible Surgical Robots—Hard To Swallow Concept? | Singularity Hub :

The ARES robot was designed to self-assemble inside the body after patients swallow up to 15 parts. Using a modular approach, each of these parts would have its own role to play—image control, communications, structural functions and diagnostics, among others—while forming whatever the structure needed to carry out a particular operation. Weighing in at 5.6g, each module is 15.4 mm in diameter and 36.5 mm in length, and each represents a single pill to be ingested by the patient.

Faster, please.

Health Care: personal experience

2010-05-17T12:06:00.000-07:00

Given the extent to which I've blathered about healthcare lately, perhaps it was inevitable...

Well, today (Monday May 17th) I'm going off "clear liquids" and on to soft solids, but I probably shouldn't resume my exercises quite yet. I was doing three sets each morning at five minute intervals, and increasing some kinds of them fairly steadily; Monday was 60-then-50-then-40 pushups, more than I can remember doing, with some slower full-extension pushups in the afternoon. Tuesday was run-up-and-down-stairs-ten-times in each set...after which, the dental hygienist told me my blood pressure at 107/68 (or was it 108/67?) was the best it had ever been, but I need to clean behind my left rear molar better. Wednesday was 50-50-50 situps, with leg lifts in the afternoon. Thursday was 26-21-16 pullups, with 26-21-16 chinups in the afternoon. Friday I set the cross-trainer in the basement to fairly-steep-uphill to sprint 30 seconds in each set. And I thought I was doing fine on this schedule with a whey "protein shake" after each session, even though I know I could easily stand to lose ten pounds, or even twelve which would get me back to skinny-college-kid weight. Some people stay there all their lives; good for them.

And then it got to Friday lunchtime, and I didn't feel like lunch at all; my belly didn't hurt, didn't feel nauseated, but felt pressurized from inside. I had some dry toast with my vitamin pills, couldn't concentrate on work, took a bath and a two-mile walk, felt mildly worse. Went to bed with a microwaved hot-pad, realized about 3:30AM that pressure on the lower right was painful whereas pressure on the lower left was not. Waited for my wife to wake up, asked Google for "appendicitis symptoms", found webmd.com saying

Many people who have had appendicitis say the pain is hard to describe. It may not feel like any pain you have had before. It may not even be a very bad pain, but you may feel like something is wrong. If you have moderate belly pain that does not go away after 4 hours, call your doctor. If you have severe belly pain, call your doctor right away.

Well, I wasn't sure I would describe my general discomfort as "pain" at all, and it was quite moderate even being pushed. I wasn't sure. My wife had a very simple response: "Get in the car." It is interesting to think that if she'd joined her brother at our niece's graduation as once planned, I wouldn't have gone to the emergency room until it was an emergency. Hmm.

At the emergency room, I assured various people that I would be quite happy to be told I shouldn't be there; I imagine they'd heard that before. The ER doctor is Michael Jastremski , M.D.. A good guy, slow and careful, a listener; years ago he sewed up our hockey-son. He said that it was rather odd but we'd get a fairly-definitive result from a CT scan, and Bernie the ER nurse put an IV in my elbow in the belief that this would hurt less than one in the back of the hand (probably true, and I'm a coward), and I lay there in mildly-increased discomfort trying to remember late-1970s computer science lectures on tomographic reconstruction but couldn't recall much. Then Dr. Jastremski said yup, I had appendicitis, he'd call the surgeon to let him know.

When Dr. Martin Ernits showed up, he was less confident, saying in clear but not-native English (he's Estonian) that my symptoms were not typical and the scan was not 100% definitive, nothing is that good, but there was certainly some inflammation there and he couldn't think of a better explanation so he should go in, accepting that he wasn't sure what he would find. Actually I found this reassuring, maybe because it's my own attitude towards almost everything. So Christie and Kristen (I think), the OR nurses, took over, and my wife was most amused at my commenting that this "barium" drink had been salty and was it barium chloride or barium sulfate or what, and they didn't know but wikipedia thinks it probably does. Maybe so. Then we talked with Dr. Bhalodia, the anesthesiologist, except that there are two Drs. Bhalodia and they're semi-retired, with one on duty at any given moment, and they are the parents of one of my hockey-son's friends; this was Usha, Ravi's mom, and we briefly talked kids -- Ravi doesn't play hockey anymore, he's following his parents' footsteps and will probably be an anesthesiologist; his big brother works for Goldman Sachs. Small-town medicine is probably not typical American medicine, but everybody kept asking my date of birth and what I was there for; when Christie and Kristen said I had to tell them what I thought the surgeon was going to do, I replied "take me to pieces and put most of the pieces back together" and one of them said "but you have to say which piece he'll leave out." So I asked "You mean I have to say 'appendix'?" and was told "That'll do."

The next thing I knew, my wife was repeating what I had heard and already forgotten, namely that this had been a longer-than-normal operation because my appendix was a mess, "rotting" inside a "sac of adhesions" that was connecting it to all kinds of stuff it should have been floating free from, and it had certainly started at least a year before, probably several years. Very odd. Okay, I believe it. (Consider the complexities in the medscape descriptions, and even this PubMed claim that "Spontaneously resolving appendicitis occurs in at least one in 13 cases of appendicitis and has an overall recurrence rate of 38%, with the majority of cases recurring within 1 year." I suppose I'm a recurrence...people who've heard me talk would mostly agree.)

From Bernie to Christie/Kristen to Amanda (who wouldn't give me my Tylenol until I admitted my name and birthdate; I tried "John Hancock, sometime in the 1700s" but she wasn't having any) -- I won't pretend that I enjoyed the experience, but I do have a lot to be grateful for. Dr. Ernits stopped by to quiz me on the puzzling lack-of-prior symptoms, but I don't remember anything helpful; of course he also covered post-op instructions and the option of staying an extra night. He did comment that I shouldn't worry about nutrition for a few days, I could live on my belly padding okay. This is true, and it seems like an excellent excuse for not getting rid of my belly padding...not that I needed an excuse. He's a high-intensity sort of guy; are surgeons mostly that way? Ivan Gowan (the surgeon who kept putting my hockey-son back together) certainly is. Ramesh stopped by to explain that his and Usha's semi-retirement is more informal than I'd imagined: when the call for a Saturday surgery came in, she told him to go on mowing their (very large) lawn, and that's how she came to be my anesthesiologist.

My IV woke me up when the bag emptied and when the battery was dying, but mostly I dozed. My wife mostly stayed with me and the 13-year-old worked on her Latin Day movie project in iMovie; I'd converted the video files for iMovie import, but there were mistakes which she had to edit out or at least de-emphasize ("Aphrodite" was Greek, not Roman) if only via voice-overs, and then construct a bloopers reel. It was an extremely low-budget movie and Latin Day is today... (I'm raising a geek! Yay!)

So...I'm home; I had oatmeal for lunch; I have some delightfully gruesome pictures whereby to remember my appendix. Has any of this changed any of my opinions of US health care? No, I don't think so. Many parts of the system are in many ways awful, but it worked very well for me this past weekend.

And could have been better? Well, sure. And it will be, as Moore's Law spreads its way through robotics. In the near term, laparoscopy will of course get better, with a short-term emphasis on telepresence, in part as laparoscopy itself shades into telesurgery so that an atypical appendicitis is always handled by somebody, somewhere on earth, who does them by the dozen every day; that telepresence will be supported by diagnostic telepresence robotics. And the endoscopic-camera view will gradually be supplanted by a view of a computer model which is being continually updated by various sensors, including at first endoscopic cameras. Then we'll get more interesting robotics, for diagnosis and therapy--tiny gadgets that crawl around inside you. In the very long (not-quite-Singularity) term, I think we'll get what I years ago called stemcell cyborg technology unless of course we get something better instead. And in a case like mine, some microbot would go out with a stemcell and come back with a disease-affected cell being replaced, or even a bacterium, and the infection would probably be detected by, umm, very roughly the end of the first day in which 1000 cells had been affected, or the first hour in which 24000 had been affected. (Am I sure of that? Absolutely not.) And what I called the "stem cell center for cyborg operations" would send out a few thousand more, see what came back, and either say "we can handle this" or "heeeelp!" long before the enclosing human felt anything at all.

And as I've said, I think we just cut the resources available for innovation -- mandated care is intrinsically less experimental. But there's still a lot of innovation on the way. Maybe enough.

Update: Tuesday, third day after laparoscopic surgery and I haven't needed any of my Percocet, just ibuprofen as anti-inflammatory. I took a shower last night, after taking off the outer bandaging, and I can have solid food today; I made French toast for my daughter's breakfast but it doesn't tempt me. I really do have much to be grateful for.

upd Saturday again, finally thought to see how much reduction I'd achieved: down almost to 177, i.e. three pounds. This is clearly not an ideal diet program. Well, there's still a (very) little bit of discomfort, he says after walking a couple of miles and pounding fence-edging in to discourage the groundhog that lives between us and the golf course...I suppose there's still some swelling, so it might be a tiny bit more than three pounds. Still not a recommended diet program.

Penultimate Update: Monday, May 24th; walked the half-mile from home to Dr. Ernits' office which had no record of any appointment for me, but acknowledged that there should should have been one, must have been one, and if I said my wife said that it was today at 9AM then that's what it would be. I didn't even wait terribly long. He said the appendix had been "suppurating", which is a nice word, and that I should put Desitin on the incision-spots until they were fully healed: "If you are a grandfather, you will be familiar." Well, yes, I have applied a lot of Desitin in my time, but never before on myself. I can be moderately active now (good, 'cos I thought that was okay already) and start exercising again in a week or so. Okay. Now I await the really painful part: the bill. :-)

One Hundred Trillion Dollars

2010-04-19T09:53:00.000-07:00

Q: Was the health care bill better or worse than doing nothing? What do you think?

A: Worse. It does some good and some harm, but I think the harm predominates. If we're very lucky, maybe it won't predominate by much.

Q: What good does it do, and what harm?

A: Well, just after the bill passed in March I wrote a long rumination-with-links, including links back to a February rumination-with-links about what is and isn't wrong with our current system and a January rumination-with-links about what I'd really like, and what worries me, and all that---

Q: No. I don't want a long rumination-with-links, and certainly not three of them. Can't you summarize? What good will the bill do, and what harm?

A: I'll try.

The bill helps more people get health care services, at other people's expense; that, of course, is what the bill is for, and I expect that several million people will be happier for a while because they don't have to worry as much about price, they can just ask and it shall be given. Yay!
The direct bad part then splits into two:
- the people receiving services will worry less about price, which will make prices go up even faster than they have been. (The bill says there will be people authorized to save money, but they're not authorized to say "no" which is the only way they could save money.) And then,
- the people providing the money will no longer have the money that has been taken from them.

Q: So it saves lives and costs money. Why is that a bad trade-off?

A: Actually, no, I don't expect it to save lives in the long run. Even in the short run, the evidence that expanded health-care coverage saves lives on net, at the current margin, is astonishingly weak. (Making people happier is important, but it's not the same as saving lives.) I hope our age-adjusted mortality rates will continue declining under the new system, but they will not drop as fast as they would have even under the old system because the incentives and resources for innovation are reduced. In the longer run the new system will cost lives, partly because it will cost money and money fuels innovation which saves lives, and partly because it is an addition to a collection of promises that will not be kept -- cannot be kept.

Q: What promises, and why can't they be kept?

A: Did you notice the title of this blog post? "One Hundred Trillion Dollars".

Q: You can't mean that's the cost of the bill -- can you?

A: Nope. That's the context of the bill. That's what we already owed -- more precisely, it's what we had already promised to pay apart from what we "owed."

Q: Huh?

A: We have a GDP, sort of a sum-of-all-incomes, of about 14 trillion dollars each year, which grows at a few percent each year (partly from population growth, partly from productivity growth.) We have an overall or "gross" debt of almost 13 trillion dollars. That includes government borrowing from Social Security payments and things like that; without those it's getting close to 9 trillion or so. That's a lot, but it's easy to imagine growing out of those debts, unless we spend so much money now that growth is slowed down even more than predicted. But...well, here's the one real link of this post, the Word from the Dallas Fed two years ago:

Add together the unfunded liabilities from Medicare and Social Security, and it comes to $99.2 trillion over the infinite horizon. Traditional Medicare composes about 69 percent, the new drug benefit roughly 17 percent and Social Security the remaining 14 percent. ... all we would have to do to fully fund our nation’s entitlement programs would be to cut discretionary spending by 97 percent....defense and national security, education, the environment ... All of them [forever]... No combination of tax hikes and spending cuts, though, will change the total burden borne by current and future generations. For the existing unfunded liabilities to be covered in the end, someone must pay $99.2 trillion more or receive $99.2 trillion less than they have been currently promised. This is a cold, hard fact. The decision we must make is whether to shoulder a substantial portion of that burden today or compel future generations to bear its full weight.

These are not "debts", and they are particularly not part of the federal debt. They are merely, ah, how shall I say this? They are merely "legally binding promises to pay".

Now, think about the health care bill in that context. We came up to that decision about what to do with the unmanageable burden of entitlements, and we decided, umm, to expand the entitlements. We, mainly my own Baby Boomer generation, have promised each other that our kids will pay for the care that we wish we deserved. These promises are actually expanding promises: if improved productivity raises wages then the Social Security promise expands, while if improved medical tech provides more expensive ways to treat whatever ails us then the Medicare promise expands. So far as I can see, these promises will not be kept. If we're very lucky, improved technology will let us say "we're not keeping the promises, but you're very well off anyway." On the other hand, extra promises like this bill make it likely that the breakage will start before technology can improve that much.

Q: But I thought that the CBO said the health care bill actually reduces the deficit. Doesn't it?

A: In a way -- but not in a way that helps much, even if the assumptions turn out right. The bill is "paid for" in the sense that Congress has named funding sources for its parts. Medicare payments are to be cut -- well, Congress has made that promise before, and broken it repeatedly: maybe they mean it this time. If they don't, it's bad. If they do, we are not only using up the flexibility we needed to pay for the promises we already made, but also discouraging doctors (some of whom already turn away Medicare patients as money-losers. And discouraging doctors of course tends to raise prices.) It's bad either way. Corporations will have to pay, which reduces employment (and growth). States have to take on extra Medicaid expenses; that's not part of the federal deficit scoring, and the states can't afford their existing entitlement programs, but so it goes. My kids will have to pay premiums adjusted to subsidize my premiums (realistic age-based premium ratios are not allowed.) There will be extra Social Security taxes, which help pay for this bill but by existing law they add to the unfunded Social Security liability. It's a mess, but it's a mess which has been carefully set up so that if you accept the assumptions then the officially budgeted part of the federal deficit is not expanded. Individual costs rise, corporate costs rise, state costs rise and unfunded liabilities rise -- we're using resources which we need. That cuts growth (and innovation.)

Q: But you're always saying that exponentially improving technology is going to make us all rich, immortal, smart -- all that good stuff. Are you taking that back?

A: Not yet, but this bill makes me less confident of it. When you look at good trends and bad trends, it always seems like a race to see whether we end up in Heaven or Hell. Here we have trends towards a productivity-spike with health and wealth and longevity for all, and there we have trends towards a financial collapse which leads to a collapse of the health system, environmental everything, etc. This bill slows what I want to speed, speeds what I want to slow. But maybe in the end it won't hurt too much.

Q: I'm still having a hard time with the doesn't-save-lives bit. Are you sure of that?

A: It's very odd and surprising, but the evidence that increases in healthcare delivery lead to increased lifespans at the margin is extremely weak. Remember that emergency care is already available, that poor people are mostly entitled to Medicaid, and that the main lifespan issues are not healthcare anyway: there's a lifestyle battle between declining smoking rates and rising obesity. The bill will certainly extend some lives and shorten others -- about 100,000 people per year die from medical errors as it is. Intuition tells me that it's gotta be a net positive at first, but I'm not sure. I am reasonably confident that it will cost lives in the end, and it adds a bit to the chance that the U.S. will eventually play Greece, with nobody to bail us out.

Or then again, maybe not. I hope not, anyway. There are times when I'm happy to think how often I've been wrong, and this is one of them.

Word of the Day: Bayonet

2010-04-14T09:44:00.000-07:00

I subscribe to a "word of the day" blog; today's entry would not normally be of much interest:

A.Word.A.Day --bayonet (BAY-uh-nit, -net, bay-uh-NET)
 
MEANING:
noun: A blade attached to the muzzle of a gun, used in close combat.
verb: To fight or kill with bayonet.
 
ETYMOLOGY:
After Bayonne, a town in southwest France, where the weapon originated
or was first used in early 17th century. You'd think with modern high-tech
gadgetry, a 17th century weapon would now be now obsolete, but the
bayonet is still taken seriously.

But it just happens that we're going through some boxes which have been in rented storage, and the kitchen table has Grandpa Myers' WWI bayonet on it. My wife googled the "RIA 1907" on the scabbard and the first match is an auction

 http://www.gunbroker.com/Auction/ViewItem.aspx?Item=160079862
 Springfield 16" RIA 1907 Bayonet : Bayonets at GunBroker.com

and indeed it's a 16" bayonet. (The "SA 1912" on the metal is presumably http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_Armory ?) Whatever. And there's the June/July 1978 _American Heritage (V.29 #4) with pp 56-61 being http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Catton 's "The Day the Civil War Ended: Gettysburg, Fifty Years After" (I wonder if that was Catton's last article--he died that August. But of course he'd have submitted this well before.). It's about the Gettysburg commemoration in which

............................................."Several thousand veterans showed up. So did the tourists, who came in swarms, along with the people who make a living by going where tourists are. Among these latter were photographers -- what tourist could fail to buy on the spot pictures of the old-timers, especially when he himself could get into the scene? -- and to our good fortune one of these cameramen hired as an assistant an eighteen-year-old college man-on-vacation named Philip Myers. Not long ago Mr. Myers wrote down his recollections of the great event. ..."

and the rest of it is quotes from, rephrasings of, and miscellaneous comments on Grandpa's "I Remember" article from the Baltimore Sun's Sunday magazine, which I guess had come out not long before and which might or might not turn up any box now. (well, I think it's in one of the boxes that didn't go to storage.)

Union veterans on Cemetery Ridge, Southern veterans on Seminary Ridge to the west. Out of the woods came the Southerners, just as before -- well, in some ways just as before. They came out more slowly this time, and Mr. Myers saw a dramatic difference. "We could see, not rifles and bayonets, but canes and crutches. We soon could distinguish the more agile ones aiding those less able to maintain their places in the ranks." .... So "Pickett's men" came on, getting close at last, throwing that defiant yell up at the stone wall and the clump of trees and the ghosts of the past. "It was then," wrote Mr. Myers, "that the Yankees, unable to restrain themselves longer, burst from behind the stone wall, and flung themselves upon their former enemies... Now they fell upon each other -- not in mortal combat, but re-united in brotherly love and affection." The Civil War was over.

I actually went back and re-read his I Soldiered With Charlie:

Charlie and I first met under the most informal conditions imaginable—we were both stark naked. We were not alone in this, for with hundreds of others we were taking a physical examination for acceptance in the first officers’ training camp at Fort Myer, Virginia. The date was May 16, 1917.

Hey, I shouldn't be doing this. So it's a mistake, so it belongs on the blog, right?

Then again, maybe not.

Political Psychoanalysis

2010-03-30T07:19:00.000-07:00

I mostly try to ignore articles and blog posts dedicated to the proposition that "my opponents may or may not know it, but their real motivation is ____." Mostly it's ugly, mostly it's unconvincing, mostly it presupposes that the writer has only one kind of opponent. So I mostly skipped Rich's The Rage Is Not About Health Care saying that health-care opposition is really all about racism, sexism, and evilism in general:

the laughs evaporated soon enough. There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. ...the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964. ... The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play.

Well, I assumed that Rich had in fact watched "goons hurl venomous slurs at ... John Lewis", and I thought that was sad but unsurprising; there are nasty people in the world, and I expect some of them to use protests as excuses for being nasty; I also expect that other people in the protest will try to prevent or at least disassociate themselves from bad behavior, and it's hard to get an overall sense of any given group because any given group contains lots of different kinds of people.

So my reaction to Rich's "facts" was a sigh, and my reaction to his "analysis" was...well..... Meh. Skip it, no comment; I don't think I finished scanning it, and didn't click his links.

But then I got a link to Rich's op-ed from someone I care about. Hmm...should I take Rich seriously? Better look for news reports, see if there were protest organizers who commented, look for The Other Side.

I clicked on one of Rich's links, to the Washington Post's 'Tea party' protesters accused of spitting on lawmaker, using slurs:

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus said that racial epithets were hurled at them Saturday by angry protesters who had gathered at the Capitol to protest health-care legislation, and one congressman said he was spit upon.

Apparently that's what Rich thought it wasn't entertaining to watch. Okay, I'd agree. And is The Other Side making excuses? No, it seems the Other Side is in denial.

The key claim -- and cash offer -- seems to be at Big Journalism:

the Congressional Black Caucus claimed the N-word was hurled 15 times. YouTube video shows that at least two of the men in the procession were carrying video cameras and holding them above the crowd. They have not come forth with evidence to show that even one person hurled the vile racist epithet. ... Is it really possible that in 2010, in a crowd of 30 or 40 thousand people — at the center of a once-in-a-lifetime media circus — not one person’s flipphone, Blackberry, video recorder or a network feed caught a single incident? ... the Democrats need a racist Tea Party moment. To stop it in its tracks. That’s why on Saturday they used the Congressional Black Caucus to try to manufacture the false appearance of one. And when they didn’t get it, they did what they always do: they lied..... It’s time for the allegedly pristine character of Rep. John Lewis to put up or shut up. Therefore, I am offering $10,000 of my own money to provide hard evidence that the N- word was hurled at him not 15 times, as his colleague reported, but just once. Surely one of those two cameras wielded by members of his entourage will prove his point.

Breitbart later said he was UPPING THE STAKES

$100K to UnitedNegroCollegeFund if Rep Lewis shows evidence N-Word yelled at CBC at last weeks Capitol #HCR protest.

Well, he has a point. There were of course a whole lot of video gadgets at the scene. If one of them caught the supposedly shouted slurs, then why isn't somebody claiming Breitbart's money? If none of them did...well, this is a problem. I don't think Breitbart's psychoanalysis is any better than Rich's (nor is it obviously any worse), but I am right now not expecting that video to be produced.

Slightly more interesting psychoanalysis at Gay Patriot

While I agree with the general thrust of [Will Collier's] argument, I do have a slight quibble with his recreation of what went on in the Democrats’ strategy meeting. ... They thought that by staging this bit of political theater, it was certain to elicit racist reaction because they really, truly believe that Republicans, especially their most zealous supporters, hate people of color (and sexual minorities). Hence the cameras. If a group of black people walked through a crowd of Tea Party protesters, they were bound to hear a racial epithet. (And when they didn’t find what they expected, they still rushed to the media with the accusations they were prepared to have leveled when they encountered the racism they were certain to find–but didn’t encounter.)

Well, maybe. Or maybe not. I'll add my own psychoanalysis: I think that we all, you and me included, have a strong tendency to adjust our perceptions of the world to fit our preconceptions: it's all about Reconstructive memory: Confabulating the past, simulating the future

The term ‘Rashomon effect’ is often used by psychologists in situations where observers give different accounts of the same event,and describes the effect of subjective perceptions on recollection.

I think it's entirely likely that the people saying they heard the N-word "15 times" are not lying: that's what they remember hearing. We live in worlds of our own creation, to a considerable extent. I'm simply not expecting to see the video.

Update: Perhaps I should note that my original views are not too far from David Kuhn, whoever that is:

Recently, in an ugly scene near the Capitol, some Tea Party protesters reportedly hurled racist epithets at members of the Congressional Black Caucus (including civil rights hero John Lewis). But it's the generalizations that are absurd and self-defeating....

But now I'm not even going that far.

Magic Dragons, Magic Ponies: Thoughts on Health Care

2010-03-22T12:10:00.000-07:00

Pre-Obama: It seemed to me that GW Bush had a Magic Dragon approach to funding the stuff that he, as a rightwards big-government guy, wanted to do. Go ahead, borrow the money -- the Magic Dragon will pay the bill when it comes due. No details needed. So it's fine to cut taxes, it's fine to add a huge Medicare (Part D) entitlement, it's very fine to have a war. The Dragon will pay; just bring him "strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff" and there's really no problem. Well, I didn't approve (I did and do approve of the war, but not the way he handled -- and funded -- it), but nobody asked me nohow. The Magic Dragon approach is not completely utterly 100% insane, of course: the dragon is growth, and if growth is sufficient then those debts are affordable. Even borrowing (at low interest) to enable a tax cut (which does stimulate growth) can be sort of sane, just as borrowing to invest in the stock market can be sane. I too had a credit line long ago, and closing it (and paying off my mortgage, tax-subsidized by renters, but why?) was less of a solid financial decision than a question of Puritan ancestors whispering at night. But it's risky because the Dragon might not come. In any case borrowing to finance growth in current consumption is not sane, and we've been doing a lot of that.

Early Obama: I was not enthusiastic about Barack Obama, to put it mildly. I could not vote for the guy whose preferred SCOTUS justices were in the majority on Kelo (and the minority on Heller), but I did approve of his economic team and I did think that they represented sanity and I did think that he, as a Great Communicator of Reaganesque stature, might get their sanity to reign. I now think I was wrong; I trusted them and him too much.

Summary-Now: The health care bill we passed last night is not a Magic Dragon bill; it's "paid for"; it's "deficit-neutral" or even "deficit-improving." The CBO says so, and assuming their assumptions I believe their results. Do I assume their assumptions? Not really, and even the assumptions that work for me are sleight-of-hand assumptions, shifting individual costs to where they are not visible to CBO scoring rather than actually reducing cost. Not a Magic Dragon bill, no. It's a Many Magic Ponies bill, instead. I think we're worse off than we were yesterday:

The US is slightly less financially stable (slightly more liable to a double-dip recession and to prolonged growth reduction), because we have taken specific resources that we needed to pay for the entitlements coming due, and we have allocated these for a new entitlement. It's as if you let your household budget get wildly out of control for years, figuring that you'll find specific money to pay your debts Someday Later. Then you want to give some money to your local school, and you decide you'll fund that by giving up the habit of eating out every night. That's great, but you just reduced your options for paying off the boat and the jetski and the credit cards. Your problems are worse.
I think that our age-adjusted mortality rates as of, say, 2020, will probably be higher than they would have been without the bill, because part of the bill is being paid with money that I believe would have fueled innovation. I don't think the mortality rates will be as high as they are now -- there will still, I hope and expect, be innovations and even increases in the rates of innovation -- but I think the trend just got less good than it was. (I wish I could make a concrete falsifiable prediction, and be reassured when it turns out wrong, but I can't think of one.)
And as an extra added bonus, we are very slightly less free than we were.

So anyway, here are some of the things I hope to find that I'm wrong about.

(Some of) The Ponies: Let's start with the "doc fix". The idea is that Congress has been promising for years to cut what doctors are paid by Medicare, so now we say we really really mean it and we'll cut by 21% and then cut a little further each year as time goes on. The money saved because we really really mean it this time is Magic Pony money, we can spend it on whatever we like. And we know that doctors won't increasingly turn away patients even though they already have been:

Dr. Edward Kornel, a neurosurgeon based in White Plains, N.Y., stopped seeing Medicare patients two years ago. Two colleagues in his group practice have joined him in dropping Medicare patients over the past six months.... The American Association of Neurological Surgeons, to which Kornel belongs,...found that 65% of its 3,400 members said they are referring their Medicare patients to other doctors. About 60% said they were reducing the number of Medicare patients in their practice.

This has been going on for a while; in summer 2002 we had NUMBER OF PHYSICIANS TURNING AWAY NEW MEDICARE PATIENTS JUMPS 28 PERCENT. Still we know that the problem will not increase, we know that the reduced payment system will work, because this is a Magic Pony. An assumption, which should not be questioned. Has Walgreens already decided to follow some other drugstores and stop participating in (Washington State) Medicaid because reimbursements are already too low? Never mind, there are still participant drugstores. So far. Hmm...my feeling is that this particular Magic Pony has very low credibility: either Congress will again refuse to reduce the payments, or we will get a substantial increase in Medicare refusals. Neither prong looks good.

Are there more Magic Ponies? Of course. There's a Magic Pony list by Douglas Holtz-Eakin and a vituperative partial rebuttal by Brad DeLong; I believe part of the partial rebuttal, but as DeLong says most of the gimmicks are minor, and that

What does deserve attention is:
[T]the legislation proposes to trim $463 billion from Medicare spending and use it to finance insurance subsidies. But Medicare is already bleeding red ink, and the health care bill has no reforms that would enable the program to operate more cheaply in the future. Instead, Congress is likely to continue to regularly override scheduled cuts in payments to Medicare doctors and other providers...
As somebody-or-other said, this is budget nihilism: if we assume that congress will reverse all actions it takes to reduce the deficit and yet require that congress only pass bills that reduce the deficit nevertheless, we are asking that congress pass nothing at all. But if that is his argument, he should make it--and back it up.

But DeLong is generalizing in a way that Holtz-Eakin is not: Holtz-Eakin is saying that Congress has a specific credibility problem generated by repeated specific behavior, and that he sees no reason to expect Lucy to stop pulling the football away as she's done seven times before. DeLong presumably either believes that Lucy will stop this specific repeated behavior (for some reason not stated), or that this specific bill should be passed even in the expectation that the Magic Pony won't show up. It is not clear to me which he believes. My own concern is that the outcome looks bad to me, either way.

There's the initial-decade trick, of balancing six years' expenses against ten years' income. Hmm. We accept that taxes on "Cadillac" insurance plans are too unpopular to pass now, but we promise to do it later, in 2018 after the current administration is definitely out of office. We really mean it, too. Hmm. And we are going to apply Social Security taxes to upper incomes, which will then be at least partially paid back because the people who've paid them are then eligible for higher benefits, but the full amount will have been included on a Magic Pony. And spent. (Holtz-Eakin seems to assume that this is 100% fake, DeLong points out that it's only partially fake. Bystanders like me wonder -- but doesn't the repayment depend on how long these contributors live? If they live long enough, with benefits growing faster than inflation, isn't it more than 100% fake? Well, with a Magic Pony perhaps it doesn't matter. And DeLong is right that this isn't one of the big ones.

Some of the sleight-of-hoof comes by sliding the bills over to the states, as Medicaid sharing (after 2016). Hmmm...Arizona just cut 310,000 people off Medicaid, and More than half the states are reducing Medicaid services and payments to health care providers this year as the recession propelled enrollments to record levels and sapped money from treasuries. Sure, things ought to be better by 2016, but then again a lot of state budgets from NY to California with quite a few in between are having increasing budget problems, e.g. with their own pension funds. But this Magic Pony will increase their deficits, not the federal deficit, so it's not CBO-scored, and if states have to raise their taxes then it will not be a federal problem, and if the federal government winds up bailing out states that will be a completely separate transaction. And of course we slide costs to private industry: Caterpillar: Health care bill would cost it $100M. Caterpillar (like all those other companies) is in the business of using money to pay employees and suppliers and stockholders, making money grow. Whatever prediction you would have made yesterday about how much money is available to pay employees and suppliers and them what reinvests -- you should make it a teensy bit smaller, today. (Except that this is not a surprise.)

Am I arguing that the government should stay out of healthcare? Absotively posilutely not. Our government is good at raising money, and should traditionally step in in case of disasters whether regional or individual, and I would support a quite expensive plan like the one I proposed here. Especially if we shifted to growth-oriented taxation, mainly a consumption tax (whether VAT or just let everyone take income into a list of accounts and investments such that it doesn't get taxed until it leaves). To this I would add Pigovian taxes, employed cautiously, and progressive estate/gift taxes on, say, the top 1% of wealth and up, making it flatly impossible to inherit (or receive as gift) your way into the top 0.01% of wealth. I'm not exactly a libertarian when it comes to that sort of thing, but there's an envelope on the kitchen counter with a small check for Radley Balko because I really feel like we need more libertarian thinking around here. I'm not at the point of contributing to the Tea Party; the one Tea Party organizer I've talked with is a nice guy and very sincere but I am skeptical of his economic understanding, even compared with mine.

And freedom? I did mention at the beginning that I think that we're "very slightly less free than we were." Why? Well, this morning I did 50 pushups (pulse 117) and five minutes later managed only 36 (pulse 111) and five minutes later only 25 (pulse still 111; rest pulse is 58). Definitely not an athlete, just a reasonably healthy aging geek who has lost two pounds (183.8 to 181.6) in the last six weeks, which projects forward to, umm, weight zero in ten years? About that. And of course you shouldn't care, just as I shouldn't care if you do or don't exercise or eat your vegetables or smoke (as long as it's not upwind) or drink (as long as you don't drive drunk while my 13-year-old is crossing the street). And so on. We shouldn't have to care. But as I was saying recently, our biggest "health care" problems seem to include issues of obesity and of smoking history. Smoking's getting better (less) in this country, and congratulations to all you ex-smokers! Obesity's getting worse: I do sympathize. But if I'm paying the resulting health care bills...hmmm. Bloomberg-style nannyism becomes an issue of national solvency. Put down that doughnut, sir, and step away with your hands up. Exaggeration? Sure...but the issue is very real, and Bloomberg actually exists. Your right to make your own choices is already limited when others pay the cost, and that has just gotten very slightly worse. You cannot even choose to depend on alternative medicine anymore, unless you can pay your mandated payments for politically approved care and pay for whatever alternative you actually prefer. Liberty is slightly less. The rewards for those who decide what is politically approved are slightly greater. The FDA is slightly more of a political football than it was. Regulatory capture increases, crony capitalism strengthens.

Personally, I think it's a Bad Thing. But then again, maybe not. And this is one time that I really hope I'm really wrong.

[footnote: this post is an extended rumination around a walk-around-the-golf-course-between-our-back-yards with Sasha, who would of course much rather hear that I'd spent the time on code. Oh, well.]

update 3/23: I should have noted the CBO "direct spending and revenue" estimates at (CBO) March 20, 2010 Preliminary estimate of the direct spending and revenues effects estimate for proposed reconciliation legislation combined with H.R. 3590 as...; note that after it gets going, we seem to be headed towards $200 billion per year in addition to the money that isn't actually collected and spent by the Federal government, which is naturally not scored by the CBO...ulp. Whatever. Anyway, I would concur with most of Megan McArdle's remarks at 8 Predictions for Health Care:

The people wondering why I was so upset should contemplate that first, I think you people just screwed up both our health care system, and our fiscal system (even further), and that if I'm right, that's not really funny.... So now, onto predictions!

And I'd also point to her follow-up post, More on Health Care Predictions. But mainly, I would currently expect that

the net number of lives saved as we transition from current trends, while plausibly not zero, will not rise above statistical noise (and might be zero)
the number of lives lost long-run, mainly due to a decrease in the rate of increase of innovation but also because of misaligned incentives causing misdirected resources, will be very substantial
curve-bending won't work as described.
Many people will be happier, with lowered stress
Many people will be less happy, with fewer choices -- and less money, and longer waits, and so on.

But I still have Hope for Change of the mainly technological kind; I just think we bent the curve the wrong way.

and more...So many good things said; I liked Zakaria's remarks that

There's more in here about cost controls than in any previous expansion of health care since the creation of Medicare. But objectively you'd have to say there isn't a lot. What there is takes one of two forms. ... the theory that Congress then would have the political courage to do what it now doesn't have political courage to do, which is an interesting theory. The second is ...the the kind of rationing board that I was describing -- nobody will call it such because it will be politically unpopular -- but in fact that's what it will do. . But if you then read some of the language instituting the commission, it says oh, it won't deny services to anyone, basically language to the effect it won't in any way curtail any kind of services or ration care. But of course, if you're not rationing care, how would you bring costs down?

And Sumner, my favorite commenter on at least monetary policy,weighs in on a Krugman commentary on the Holtz-Eakin item referenced above:

To summarize, all 7 of DHE assertions are correct. Krugman tries to change the subject by looking at different issues, like whether the front-loaded revenue is, by itself, enough to turn a deficit into a surplus. It’s not, but DHE never claimed it was. Then Krugman switches the subject from the 10 year to the 20 year forecast, and relies on incredibly rose-tinted assumptions. And after all this, he doesn’t lay a glove on DHE.

Well, maybe it won't do too much harm. Maybe. It does improve labor mobility. Not as much as my sort of plan, I think, but it is an improvement.

2010-03-04T06:10:00.000-08:00

I can be sillier than you can, nyah-nyah

This sonnet is Shakespearean enough.
Five iambs set in each of fourteen lines,
Three quatrains and a couplet -- that's the stuff.
We follow form, and polish till it shines.

But do I have a subject? Do I care?
My words reflect each other in the dark.
The fun-house fills, as their collective stare
forms fractal mirrors in the empty park.

"The structure properly includes itself,"
as Cantor showed, defines infinity.
Self-referential paradox; the shelf
within the book, includes divinity.

And once we put infinity in verse,
Why, Shakespeare's there. For better or for worse.

2010-02-04T14:42:00.000-08:00

Thinking about Healthcare

I do think about health care fairly often, but I don't pull my thoughts together all that well. Last September my bird-brother Pete emailed a YouTube video link:

Here is a little song celebrating our position at #37 in the world in healthcare.

And I thought it was moderately funny...it's clearly a reference to the World Health Organization Assesses the World's Health Systems report saying, as of 2000, that

The U.S. health system spends a higher portion of its gross domestic product than any other country but ranks 37 out of 191 countries according to its performance...

Well, okay then. Or maybe not. Many people have pointed out that the measures of performance are a bit odd; consider PolitiFact's quote of Glenn Whitman:

"Suppose, for instance, that Country A has health responsiveness that is 'excellent' for most citizens but merely 'good' for some disadvantaged groups, while Country B has responsiveness that is uniformly 'poor' for everyone," he writes. "Country B would score higher than Country A in terms of responsiveness distribution, despite country A having better responsiveness than Country B for even its worst-off citizens."

That's pretty odd. But what measure should we look for? Life expectancy is surely relevant, and that is one of the measures; more specifically they used Disability-adjusted life expectancy, defined as

The number of healthy years of life that can be expected on average in a given population. It is generally calculated at birth, but estimates can also be prepared at other ages. Healthy life expectancy has the advantage of capturing all causes of disability across a population and relating them to life expectancy defined by mortality.

Well, I guess. But what does this actually tell us about our health care system? We have high homicide rates for some groups, high accident for some groups...There are also less dramatic factors, mainly smoking and obesity as in

In those who were moderately obese (BMI 30 to 35, which is now common), the lifespan was reduced by 3 years. Severe obesity (BMI 40 to 50, which is still uncommon) reduced life expectancy by about 10 years; this is similar to the effect of lifelong smoking. Although severe obesity is more common in North America than in Europe, in both places it is much less common than moderate obesity, which has only a third of the effect on lifespan that smoking does.

We have summary studies such as ScholarlyCommons - Samuel H. Preston and Jessica Y. Ho: Low Life Expectancy in the United States: Is the Health Care System at Fault? saying that

We conclude that the low longevity ranking of the United States is not likely to be a result of a poorly functioning health care system.

It really doesn't seem particularly controversial. As Tierney of the NYT put it, talking about that study and others,

Americans are more ethnically diverse. They eat different food. They are fatter. Perhaps most important, they used to be exceptionally heavy smokers.

So we have more high-risk people (becoming lower-risk with time, as smoking has declined) as input to the health care system. The more I look at the WHO rankings, the less useful I find them. I'm confident that US health care is terrible, in many ways; I'm not confident about comparing it with anything else.

I'd like to have a comparison for remaining life expectancy (or healthy life expectancy, or just mortality rate) for not-too-unfit geeky-boring 57-year-olds who have never smoked, never been drunk, never been significantly overweight, and who eat the kind of food I eat.

Of course, what I really want is to compare it with the future and say how much worse things are now than they will be. Maybe so: Next Big Future points out US Life Expectancy at Record High:

Age-adjusted death rates in 2007 decreased significantly from 2006 for 8 of the 15 leading causes of death...

That's progress, and it is part of a long-term trend. Back in 2002, the AAAS Science magazine described the Broken Limits to Life Expectancy:

For 160 years, best-performance life expectancy has steadily increased by a quarter of a year per year, an extraordinary constancy of human achievement. Mortality experts have repeatedly asserted that life expectancy is close to an ultimate ceiling; these experts have repeatedly been proven wrong.

Citing that article, I see economist Bryan Caplan saying that

in their most recent population projections, the UN has given up the assumption of a maximum life expectancy and assumes continuing improvements...

I do think it's likely that Kurzweil, de Grey etc are right in presenting The Methuselah Manifesto, whether or not its specific timescale is accurately presented by

“We are very close to the tipping point in human longevity,” asserted Kurzweil to the conferees. “We are about 15 years away from adding more than one year of longevity per year to remaining life expectancy.” This has been labeled by summiteer and life-extension guru Aubrey de Grey as longevity escape velocity.

That won't stop me from falling downstairs or being hit by a meteorite tomorrow morning, but it's interesting. I guess I haven't really changed my views much since writing Stemcell Cyborgs back in fall 2009, and so my primary concern with healthcare "reform" has to be the issue of innovation.

And personally, of course, with the effort to last long enough for innovations to work. My grandparents lived into their 80s, which sort of suggests a possible thirty years; if the "quarter of a year per year" linear improvement applied, that would stretch to forty; if Kurzweil is right, that's more than double what would be needed to make my will irrelevant. Ha. Well, anyway, I get bored with one exercise program and adjust it somewhat; three years ago I wrote on Exercise, Diet, and Self-Experimentation that

three times a week I do forty sit-ups, forty pushups, twenty minutes trotting up and downstairs for a total of 900-something feet up and the same down, and then twenty chin-ups or pull-ups on a doorway chinning bar.

Since then I've found that a long gap doesn't greatly affect the number of sit-ups etc that I can do, and there really doesn't seem to be any difference (from a maintenance point of view) between every-other-day and once-a-week, so this morning I did twenty chin-ups, then fifteen more a few minutes later, then ten more a few minutes after that; I'll get back to chin-ups (or pull-ups) next week. Tomorrow I'll be going up and down stairs in a similar fairly-high-intensity ten times per set, three sets separated by a few minutes. Maybe I'll be carrying weights for one of the sets.

Or on the other hand, maybe not.

2010-01-30T09:58:00.000-08:00

Pumping Heat

For about twenty years, I've been talking about someday having geothermal heat instead of the oil I was burning in the basement. A few years ago, we (Peter Darby as contractor, and I as customer) applied for the appropriate permit for an open loop system and the Village of Hamilton declared a moratorium on well-drilling in the village. After they debugged the new permit process on us, we went ahead, and a week ago we started the heat pumps. Day before yesterday the household hot water started coming through a preheater (fed by the heat pump's desuperheater).

Well, the temperature yesterday at 7PM was 9F, and this morning at 7AM it was -15F. (My wire-through-the-wall thermometer didn't believe that, but the three thermometers that are not in contact with the house did. So I guess I do.) In that time range, the old oil furnace was on three times, for a total of 2.1 hours, meaning that the heat pump couldn't cope and the sitting-room temperature was dropping well below its target of 69F. Usually the target is 65, but I don't think it made much difference.

Actually we have two heat pumps, each of which will extract 9 to 10F from 12 gallons per minute from our well (one gallon weighs 8.34 pounds, so one degree-gpm is 60*8.34=500 BTUs/hr, so this is about 54K BTUs/hr for one heat pump, plus the waste heat of compression and circulation, total about 70K BTUs/hr.). Unfortunately we can only run one heat pump at a time for now; the pumps are about 75 feet down in a 208-foot pipe, and more than 14 gpm evidently brings the water level down below them. When the weather moderates, we'll pull the pumps and put them down deeper, so this probably won't happen. In fact the burner started again at 10:30AM, with outside thermometers 7F in bright sun; one of the timers on the system said that the thermostat had been requesting the second heat pump for 84 minutes at that time.

Overnight, the heat pumps more or less alternated. I generated a time-lapse movie of the readouts with an ASUS 901's webcam under Ubuntu running

vlc -I dummy v4l2:// -V image --image-out-width 450 --image-out-height 338 --image-out-ratio 288 --run-time 129600 --image-out-prefix img vlc://quit 2>/dev/null

This collects the images, about one every minute and a half, and then I put them into a movie with

mencoder mf://*.png -mf w=450:h=338:fps=4:type=png -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg -oac copy -o output.avi

I got this from How to create a time lapse video with Ubuntu at Code Blip and googled to find hints for a couple of error messages; the main thing was to change the vcodec but I did have to say

ln -sv /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf*a/Vera.ttf ~/.mplayer/subfont.ttf

(I don't remember where I got that one.)

It works well enough, and I see that last night the left heat pump turned on at 7:43PM, the right turned on this morning at 7:40AM, and in between we saw

Left+	Left-	Right+	Right-	on	off
7:43P	8:36			53	37
9:13	12:54A			221	16
		1:12	2:21	69	13
		2:35	2:58	23	25
		3:23	4:58	95	17
5:15	7:22			127	18

That's a total of 588 minutes on and 126 off: only 82% on, even while it was asking the burner for two hours of help. When the thermostat calls on the boiler, the heat pump keeps going; in fact the heat pump is just trying to bring a storage tank to temperature, and then it's up to circulators to get that heat through the new highly-insulated carriage house and the old re-insulated house, both of which are pretty large.

It works! Future oil usage will be pretty low.

Or then again, maybe not.

2010-01-28T04:12:00.000-08:00

Painting the Future

A paint-focussed sister, indeed a sister who long ago handed her ten-year-old brother (or was I eleven? or am I misremembering altogether?) a copy of Clarke's Tales from the White Hart, adds a comment to my paint-focussed previous post:

When we were children we devoured science fiction. Among the many books or stories that we read there was one about one's social obligation to use things, so that people could go on making things. I suppose that the painters who are displaced by robots could find meaningful employ assembling robots but I suspect that in your world the robots are self replicating.¿Que no?

Indeed there were some like that; I'm vaguely remembering a guy who is born to a middle-class family meaning that he has to consume rather heavily, but invents or adapts robots to do the consumption which is a crime until he shows that the adaptation involves getting the robots to enjoy consumption in a controllable way, so he gets to be a hero and live in a sparsely-furnished apartment...something like that. I took this as ironic let's-invert-everything rather than serious world-building; Clarke himself commented somewhere that in a wealthy world (long before "post-Singularitarian" was a phrase) people would do art, science, literature, mathematics... I think he left out sports. I really don't think there's a problem here: for a couple of centuries we have developed an ethos of job-identity, which has been key to making the Industrial Revolution work, but humans of a few hundred centuries back had nothing of the kind and I don't believe humans of a century hence will either. We'll have better things to do.

Of course, we're not nearly smart enough to appreciate most of the math and science that have yet to be invented, or even much of what has been, but we can take care of that. As Charlie Kam's fairly famous song, I Am The Very Model of a Singularitarian, puts it (about 50 seconds in), we'll expand our mental faculties by merging with technology. Consider a few of the links here.

Or just think about the past, when we first encountered the future, in the school of, well, José Azueta:

José Azueta, hero of the act of April 21, 1914 in the Port of Veracruz, who, together with a handful of men from the town and students of the Heroic Military Naval Academy, defended the national dignity and sovereignty with his blood, was the son of Commodore Manuel Azueta Perillos and Josefa Abad. He was born in the Port of Acapulco, Gro. on May 2, 1895. When his father was sent to the port of Veracruz due to the service, the family established its residence in that site of the gulf. José studied his elementary instruction in the Municipal School of Veracruz, José Miguel Macías, where he had a very good behavior, a distinguished performance and a notorious learning in all his courses.

He had a notorious learning in all his courses. I tried (and I remember being rather unhappy when Dad explained that the Mexican-War history I was getting in Mexican public school was probably less slanted than the version in Calvert Correspondence school), but I don't think I managed notorious learning in Mexican elementary school. Maybe you did.

The past was very interesting, but if we can survive a reasonable ways into the future, I expect to like it better.

Or then again, maybe not.

Update: perhaps I should have mentioned that I recently got your elder niece to read Tales from the White Hart -- as a neuroscience graduate student, she ought to be familiar with his 1950's insights into what she's trying to do now. And just a moment ago, your younger niece went off to the orthodontist (missing school for the appointment) and I noticed that she was taking a copy of The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke.

2010-01-27T11:45:00.000-08:00

Rating Birds and Birders

In early December, my brother Pete sent a link to a Birder's World article about BirdsEye, his new iPhone app. Well, his along with a few collaborators. I Googled a bit and found that Kenn Kauffman, who wrote the guide, said in a Birder's World interview that

I got involved because one of the principal people doing this project is an old friend of mine. Pete Myers was one of the three guys running the project. He’s been a friend of mine since the mid-1980s. We were both working for the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia at the same time, and then he went on to National Audubon. There was a period when I was the associate editor of American Birds magazine, back when Audubon was publishing that, and Pete was the Vice President for Science at Audubon. So I got to go out in the field with him frequently. He’s one of these scary intelligent people. [Laughs] Sort of existing at a higher plane and, you know, just frighteningly intelligent but also a really nice guy, fun and down to earth....

I have not yet found what crimes Kenn Kaufman has committed that Pete must be using for blackmail, but I'm working on it. Meanwhile, Pete just sent a Macworld review (4.5 out of 5 mice), which is nice, and he says they're working on an extension of BirdsEye that will allow birders to submit data as well as using the existing database. And I was thinking about that, and urging him to make it all available as RDF, e.g. via Triplify, and also to try to make sure that failure is tracked as well as success...just generally filling the role of Aggravating Younger Brother. But seriously it would be really neat to be able to say "species S seems to be disappearing from location L" simply because usually-successful searchers clicked to say they were searching, clicked (or closed the app, or just left location L) to say they were giving up, but didn't click to indicate success. And I was driving to the DMV to return some license plates, and spent a little time thinking. So, here is what I would try to do.

Version 0: let's say that the competence of a birder is measured as sightings per hour, and the difficulty of a species (in a given location) is measured as hours per sighting. Each of these are roughly normally distributed, I hope, so we can convert them into IQ-style scores (multiply by 15/stdev, then add 100-mean; you now have a mean of 100, stdev of 15 for competence(birder) and for difficulty(species,loc), respectively.) It's effectively a normalized score in a game of hide-and-seek, where birders seek and birds hide.

Now you can say that sightings and searchers are not all the same. Version 1: a normalized sighting is ranked higher if it's a hard bird to spot, lower if it's easy; just multiply the base value by difficulty/100. A normalized hour of search is ranked higher if it's a competent birder, lower if it's me: multiply the base value by competence/100. Now we can say that the competence of a birder is measured as normalized sightings per actual hour (you get more credit for harder birds), and the difficulty of a species in a given location is measured as normalized hours per sighting (you get more credit for being sought by more skilled birders). Put this in an equation-solver, maybe hand-coded 'cos it's too big for a spreadsheet but probably there's a package out there that will iterate to a solution.

What sort of data is needed? For each search (that's while the app is running in a particular location) you have a searchID, and you remember who the user is, where it is, how long it is, and what species are being sought--and found. That's a basic event. The rest follows. Maybe.

This is indubitably a Bad Idea, but maybe a version 2 or 3 or more could have actual value.

Or then again, maybe not.

Update: (Jun 3) Notes on the Immense Importance of this, at Count your chickens (and robins and pigeons ...), urge researchers:

Dr Elizabeth Boakes, lead author of the study from the Division of Life Sciences at Imperial College London, said: "The lack of recent data on common species and areas of low biodiversity is extremely concerning -- we need people's help to record the birds they see, however commonplace, on bird-watching websites. We think this kind of citizen science will be key to future conservation research. "People may not think that they are helping much by recording the date they saw a pigeon in central London, say, but actually it could make a big difference as we do not know what threats species might encounter in the future. We also urge websites to standardise data entries, for example asking that sightings are directly plotted onto an online map -- it takes a long time to read through people's personal blogs!

2010-01-25T11:23:00.000-08:00

Health Care, Insurance, Insulation, Innovation

My primary concern about reform proposals is that I want innovation, profit-fueled innovation which bankrupts current stakeholders because they're making buggy whips, except when they move fast and make painful choices. I want more innovation than all the innovation we've seen so far. I want robotic nurses to take care of me. I want stem cells to fix my aging joints. I want painless dentistry. I want tiny robots inside my body -- among other things, to deliver the stem cells. Frankly, I want to over-consume health care like most of my fellow-Americans. The more government regulation handles things, the more the people with seats at the table will be guaranteed their "fair" share; that inhibits creative destruction. It also inhibits me from getting the health care insurance I want; I live in New York State, which as Reason Magazine says is Exhibit A in the case against programs like our proposed health care insurance "reform".

Okay, I also have secondary and tertiary concerns, mostly about politics and regulatory capture and crony capitalism and politics, and I'm not sure about any of this, and I keep meaning to note down all my current notions to see which if any survive the year. But mainly, it's about innovation, and if something resembling the current plans gets through then I agree with Megan McArdle that

We've just increased substantially the supply of unrepealable, unsustainable entitlements. We've also, in my opinion, put ourselves on a road that leads eventually to less healthcare innovation, less healthcare improvement, and more dead people in the long run.

(I don't think she actually means "more dead people", but rather "higher age-adjusted mortality rates".)

I like Will Wilkinson's analysis in Will Health-Care Innovation Survive Obamacare?, where I tend to think the answer is "yes, but at a seriously diminished rate." Or maybe not.

Provisionally, I'll just note down what I would now support, until the minute that I actually realize how silly these provisions are:

Require transparent pricing, uniform no-bargaining pricing, from all licensed health care providers.
Allow unlicensed health care, wherever it's clearly labeled as such; it won't get public support but people can choose it.
Take away the employer-based tax exemption; health care shouldn't be an employment issue.
Add a universal tax-funded "insurance" policy: if your expenditures for "proven procedures" from licensed health care providers exceed the overall 16% (of GDP) average, then the taxpayers contribute. In particular if your cost is 16--32%, say 30%, then the taxpayers kick in (30-16)/2=7%, half of the overage, and the maximum you can pay is 24% of your income whether that's $0/year or $10M/year. Or something of that general magnitude; I wouldn't fuss about adjustments to these figures. The point is to combine protection from catastrophe (but not necessarily from financial pain) with making sure that market prices are set by people or groups who are actually bargaining in that market, i.e. the better-off people for whom procedure X will not be covered.
If you want "unproven procedures" and you can pay for them, that's fine too; the licensed health care providers should have a strong motive to come up with new stuff and document/publish that it works. The FDA should not be able to keep you from paying for weird medicines, but it should keep you from charging it to the rest of us. If procedure X has no accepted studies supporting it, then it's up to you to pay for it.
Whatever additional insurance you want to buy for proven or unproven procedures is just fine, and can be bought across state lines. It's your problem. You want to save your money in a special bank account? Feel free.
Any care that has been paid or partly paid by public funds goes into an anonymized public database. (Yes, that's hard, but I am more willing to risk failures in privacy than failures to learn about what does and doesn't work.)

And that's my plan, as of today. I'm sure it would be perfect.

Or then again, maybe not.

2010-01-23T04:34:00.001-08:00

Blowing Bubbles: everybody's wrong except me

Back in September I posted some of my Bubble Thoughts about the housing bubble pop which I had anticipated and the "resulting" crash which I had not, saying

Personally, I did see the bubble as such, earlier than some...I sent a message titled "Housing bubble warning" on June 5, 2003. Was I prescient? No, I was just quoting the Economist of that time...

I didn't mention (last September) that I'd become a semi-Sumnerite, a believer in much of the theorizing of Scott Sumner at The Money Illusion, who claims that

even a major misallocation of resources such as the housing boom of 2003-06 does not cause a big enough misallocation to create a recession. That’s why the initial downturn in housing was handled well, with only a minor bump in unemployment between mid-2006 and mid-2008. The big jump in unemployment more recently was caused by a sharp fall in NGDP, i.e. tight money.

I've come to believe him about that, to a large extent, so I owe both of them an intellectual debt of sorts. But today I think they're both wrong...well, also they're both right, and I think they both exaggerate the real differences between them. Sumner is saying in reference to the same article (I think) that I quoted,

Back in May 2003 The Economist said that many countries were in the midst of a housing bubble:

and that

in all 6 countries their predictions were wildly inaccurate for the 4 year time window they specified.

He really doesn't believe in bubbles. Or does he? As quoted above, he does believe in "a major misallocation of resources such as the housing boom." The Economist rebuts that they were giving "Good housing market advice", and that

the story The Economist was telling about what was happening was fundamentally correct

My current view is that the Economist was and is praiseworthily right to call "bubble", but the Economist of 2003 was mildly blameworthy in making the specific predictions it made (I didn't even take these seriously, remembering how "irrational exuberance" had gone on for years) and is mildly blameworthy now to evade the flat admission that anybody who believed those specific predictions and invested accordingly would have lost money. The 2010 Economist sounds like an astrologer or psychic claiming credit for being almost right, which is another way of saying wrong. But that doesn't mean bubbles don't exist; it just means that when markets are irrational it's really hard to outguess them (The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.) I mostly like Bill Woolsey's response:

I believe bubbles exist. Vernon Smith's experiments provide enough evidence for me. The basic problem is "momentum" traders. They buy into a rising market and sell into a falling market. They have naive expectations, projecting past price changes into the future.

Like Woolsey, I do think bubbles are real, like the Economist I think bubble-probability is worth thinking about from an investment standpoint.

I think Sumner could respond (and maybe has responded) that if you can detect this, then you're free to make money from it -- but I don't think that's an adequate response. I didn't and don't know any good way to bet that "I think this asset is priced above trend" apart from staying away from it: selling short doesn't work unless you have a time-frame in mind. I didn't believe the Economist's specific predictions, but I do think the Economist helped me (and my son) avoid losing money. We avoided investing in stuff which the Economist (and then Shiller) had suggested was risky. Shiller does better, trying to invent financial instruments which I've interpreted as ways in which to make money from such information, so that the markets will in fact become more efficient. But they're far from perfect, and always will be.

Or maybe not?

2010-01-04T08:15:00.001-08:00

Paint

I was just talking with Seth Rochford, busy putting paint and polyurethane in our not-quite-complete carriage-house. I mentioned some of my longer-range thoughts about the geo-exchange heating system (which may finally be turned on this week, yay!) and he replied that no matter what happened with that kind of technology, he figured he'd still be using brushes, slapping chemicals on walls. I disagreed.

Start from the fact that the surfaces will all be recorded in 3D modeling programs; I tend to take this for granted. That's easy. So the "painter" will stand with the customer in a virtual space, using graphics better than today's best, choosing colors/textures that will go with each other under various lighting conditions. At the end of this process there will be no more decisions to be made.

We now have a robotic framework which translates the virtual coordinates into physical locations; this can range from a robotic ladder which moves itself along, to a self-driving rented truck which drives to the indicated address and unfolds itself into a framework which covers the building (whether outside or inside). In either case, the framework has tracks. Now look at the inside of your printer, where the print-head rides on rails. (A variety of design options is available here; consider the series-of-2D-printings method for achieving 3D printing, as in Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories' CandyFab: "The X and Y axis motion control systems are based on belt drives and quadrature-encoded motors recycled from two old HP plotters, a large one and a small one".) In any case, for each point in the chosen virtual surface, there is some time-range within which that point can be reached by a robotically wielded "brush". The rest is software.

An alternative to the physical framework is a swarm of mini-robots which crawl or fly over the surface, printing as they go. An even more radical alternative would be mini-(or micro-, or nano-)bots which are the right color/texture, or can change, and which simply go to the right place and form a skin. Suppose that the nano-technology used for this is the nanotech getting most funding right now, namely human DNA: if your paint is made of modified human cells, and if it has a neural component to guide self-repair or calls for replacement, will it have rights?

2010-01-01T09:23:00.000-08:00

Avatar

Long ago I spent a lot of time doing 3D presentations on computer screens and projection screens (and Colgate invested in a fairly-portable non-depolarizing projection screen in large part so that I could give 3D talks where I'd pass out polarized glasses, showing both slides with a pair of matched slide projectors and simple animations with a pair of 286 PCs where I synchronized the Turbo Pascal programs with 2400-baud serial port connection code); it's mildly amusing that I've seen Avatar twice, but not yet as 3D because my wife doesn't care for 3D glasses.

(Spoiler?) It's a profoundly silly movie, which I think is fun -- in part because I like to think, after watching a movie or sometimes after reading a book, about how I would fix it. For example, the central combat scenes are poorly motivated: we want the high-tech space-traveling bad guys to attack the Soul Tree of the low-tech aboriginal inhabitants and get ambushed, but we don't get a real reason why they should put troops on the ground or even in the air. After all, they ought to be able to send a missile to a known location, or hit it from a satellite. So why expose themselves? The answer could be that all high-altitude stuff (and missiles) are managed by Earth's Space Navy, which may be mildly corrupt and subject to restrictive rules of engagement; they are happy to provide satellite-based mapping data and they are unwilling to defend the good guys from the bad guys but they are not willing to let the bad guys use ICBMs or kinetic strikes. Easy...with obvious directions to go in from there. (This would add some consistency to the "bad press" remarks; if the Company controlled everything, there would be no press apart from press releases.)

To make star travel work, you need one of the backgrounds that make it work: a few years of cryo-suspension will not get a substantial ship from one stellar system to another without either a really major advance in physics, which we magically label "warp drive", or a civilization that can collect most of a star's output. Either of these would then involve some changes. Hmm. Borrow from the Honorverse, which may not always be coherent but does have a worked-out theory, sort of.

There are other things, which I won't go into here, but I will mention my hope that future movies in the franchise make full use of the fact that Eywa, a superhuman (planetary) intelligence who has presumably thousands or millions years of experience but never had a reason to develop the notion of science, has absorbed Grace's memories. Hmmmm.

update:Well, I'll add two others, just in case I come back and re-read this a few years hence.

when I saw the bad guys approaching on the ground my first thought was, as mentioned above, "why would they do anything so silly?" but my second was "they can't possibly keep up with even very slow-moving fliers overhead." I've been in a jungle; you don't move fast. So I imagined jungle troop carriers for them. Start with a New York City bus, one that swivels in the middle so it can go around fairly tight corners. Now make it even longer but narrower and give it a bunch of swivel-points; one per passenger. Okay, it is now a snake, a series of pods, that could go between trees, but it still can't cope with ups and downs. That's solvable too: just look at the exoskeletons that some of the solders use, apparently brought over by Sigourney Weaver from the Aliens set. Put one of these in front; it can plausibly walk much faster than a human, without getting bitten by whatever's in the bushes. Fine, now each pod gets a set of robotic legs, with which it echoes the motions of the pod ahead of it (or of the lead exoskeleton, if it's the front pod). We now have a giant centipede which is fairly easy to generate with CGI and will look really cool and can drive through the jungle with soldiers inside, but is still possible for the Na'vi to ambush; if the fliers are going slowly, then having centipedes keep up with them won't look so ridiculous.
The Na'vi are much larger than humans so their hunting arrows are a threat to the exoskeletons and fliers, but not much of one. I'd have them (or one of the "good" humans use a library of antique military equipment; I'm trying to remember if The various and ingenious machines of Agostino Ramelli (1588) has super-crossbows -- I think it does). So you come up with a simple crossbow that not even a Na'vi can cock by hand, but their horses (under direct neural control) can. One warrior on a horse, one on foot, two huge crossbows being passed back and forth, and you might be able to really damage an exoskeleton, a flier, the shuttle, or of course one of my centipedes.

This is really, really silly. But it's part of why I like reading/watching things like this.

2010-01-01T09:07:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year

I have (almost) always tried to post serious things, so I hereby remark that this is 2*3*5*67 which is the product of 2 by an odd number, and is therefore not the difference of any two whole-number squares. In contrast, last year was 7*7*41 which is 45^2-4^2 as well as being 147^2-140^2 (and one easier pair, left as an exercise for the reader). Next year? Well, there's a whole year to think about it.

2009-09-14T15:50:00.000-07:00

Bubble Thoughts

I haven't posted for a long time, but it's not that I haven't made any mistakes. Indeed, I've participated to some extent in one of the biggest mistakes of my lifetime -- the market crash of 2008.

Personally, I did see the bubble as such, earlier than some...I sent a message titled "Housing bubble warning" on June 5, 2003. Was I prescient? No, I was just quoting the Economist of that time:

 http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1794873

 This survey will conclude that the latest housing boom has inflated
 bubbles in several countries, notably America, Australia, Britain,
 Ireland, the Netherlands and Spain. Within the next year or so those
 bubbles are likely to burst, .... ... ... Significant numbers of
 owners may be left with homes worth less than their mortgages...

After the quote, I closed that message saying

 And of course if houses are worth less than their mortgages, there
 might be bunches of trouble of various kinds. "Within the next year or so".

 Tom of-course,with-stocks-irrational-exuberance-kept-going-for-years Myers

And I went on talking about it for the next few years, as I had talked about the original "irrational exuberance" starting around 1997, and I sold some real estate and urged people to read Shiller's second edition when it came out, and urged my son not to buy real estate (and he didn't), but I didn't foresee the crash. I didn't realize that the global financial system was betting trillions that Shiller was wrong.

It doesn't worry me that I didn't foresee the timing of the pop; I never expected to be able to do so, so I did not even think about betting against the market myself. ("The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.") It does bother me that neither I nor the experts foresaw the disaster it has become. If you'd told me in 2006 that we'd be having a banking crisis, I'd have said something like

"of course we have a real estate bubble, and when it pops we'll have a wealth-effect problem, perhaps a small recession, but people who run banks or investment firms know what Shiller has been saying and they know they've got to hedge against his being right, even if they don't believe him. I read a bunch of economists' blogs; they talk about the housing bubble, they're not talking about a crash."

In other words, I depended upon experts. There were some who kept on predicting one disaster or another, most notably Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini. They seem to have gained credibility from the meltdown and recession, but they both predicted a dramatic fall in the dollar as part of the meltdown they predicted. Krugman, it seems, has been predicting a dramatic fall in the dollar since the mid-1980s. Understandable, of course, but that doesn't count heavily as a prediction. As to Roubini, it doesn't really bother me that he "was one of those who predicted 10 crises out of three", but it does bother me that, like Krugman, "In 2004, he predicted that the oncoming recession would precipitate the crash of the dollar. The crisis has mainly buoyed it."

Of course the dollar still might fall -- it seems to me I put something about that in class notes (computer science, looking around for random examples of numerical stuff to model) of the late 1980s, and I may have been reading Krugman back then. For me it went along with a comparison of the savings rates of Americans vs. Japanese, as now it would go along with thoughts about our suddenly increased Federal debt, with the prospect of continuing increases. But the dollar didn't fall as part of the crash we're talking about, so the crash we're talking about is not the one Krugman and Roubini predicted. Or so it seems to me.

To a disturbing extent, I think expertise in (macro)economics has been discredited. I don't believe this is adequately answered by Greg Mankiw's

It is fair to say that this crisis caught most economists flat-footed.
In the eyes of some people, this forecasting failure is an indictment
of the profession.

But that is the wrong interpretation. In one way, the current downturn
is typical: Most economic slumps take us by surprise. Fluctuations
in economic activity are largely unpredictable....

Likewise, students should understand that a good course in economics
will not equip them with a crystal ball. Instead, it will allow them
to assess the risks and to be ready for surprises.

Yes, but macroeconomists did not assess the risks, at least not correctly, and were not ready for surprises. We were all clueless. The academics, the legislators, the regulators, the raters, the financial moguls, investment advisors, ordinary investors... clueless. That's not good. So, do I have a theory? Sure. Lots of overlapping theories, and I think that each of them is probably somewhat true. More later.

Or then again, maybe not.

2007-12-31T15:08:00.000-08:00

Ignorance of Blisks

(On the Requirement of Manual Production for Aerospace Engineering Tools) In June, I spent some hours with my rocket-scientist little brother, and we talked about my own near-Singularitarianism. I may well have over-emphasized my liking for the idea of 3D printing, which I found esthetically appealing in the late 80s--still do, and now I do expect it to get to be important. Then in July in the mail I found a clipping from "Aviation Week and Space Technology" about the difficulties of manufacturing the machines that manufacture "blisks". There was a note attached; the note said that

this article reminds me of why I'm skeptical of "printable machines" in the next 10-20 years.

Umm..well, okay, Roger. I'm not even sure I disagree with you, in the sense that I'm not sure we'll see printed blisk-making machines within 20 years. (We might, or we might instead see "printed" blisks, or neither, and Hofstadter's Law applies as to the production of this note.) But when I'm not sure, I get even more verbose than when I am sure, and that's what I propose to do now -- and in any case, I am pretty sure that the article is wrong, whether or not your conclusion from it is correct. I was totally ignorant of blisks. My conclusions, introductions, and everything in betwen are therefore based on bliskful ignorance. Read at your own risk.

Oh, yeah? The magazine sets up the problem in paragraph 5: blisk-making needs

a machine tool whose cutting head can follow the digitally encoded design to within about 12 microns.

Okay, 12 microns is pretty small in today's world of practical machinery. However, I think the crucial statement in your magazine is in paragraph 6: this tool "must be built by hand" because, he claims,

No machine can make another as precise as itself.

If the author (Bradley Perrett) says that's true of the relevant machines at this moment, I have no reason to doubt him. If he says it as a statement of principle, or even as something that will reliably hold for any particular machines over the next 10-20 years (your chosen timeframe), I don't believe it at all. In general, I would say that we have machines of high precision because they have been built, with much difficulty, by machines of lesser precision -- under direction which has been human but which could be robotic. As a special case, I believe that it's perfectly possible for a machine to be built which builds a copy of itself, to exactly the same tolerances. Indeed, my sense of where the future is going, as well as my sense of the past few billion years of evolution, is based on that belief. So...

Replication and Precision: principle Some (especially analog) methods of replication will always diminish precision (which can be recovered in some cases by tactics such as grinding and polishing), whereas other (digital, including DNA) methods may or may not diminish precision (which can be recovered in some cases by error-correcting codes or simply by selection, as long as we can generate enough variants that some of them are okay, and the rest can be rejected.) In essence, I think Perrett is confusing the standard-meter problem:

if you define the meter as a metal stick and try to make analog copies (even with a digitally-controlled tool) then you will lose some precision with each generation of copies. This has been going on for a while; a friend who's an archaeologist at Colgate (Rebecca Ammerman) has written about ancient terracotta goddess statues made from molds made from statues made from molds...(and about tracking the sequence via imperfections and size change.) I believe that's what Perrett is getting at with his "No machine can..." claim.
If, however, you define the meter as a multiple of some reproducible wavelength, say a carbon-dioxide laser's 9.6 microns which I pick because it's close to the stated 12 microns, or a TEA laser's 337.1 nm, then the problem of measurement-reproducibility becomes solvable...not at all easy, but solvable.

Lasers are not crucial in principle, but they're conveniently well-defined, and the meter definition is already implemented via helium-neon lasers:

...actual laboratory realisations of the metre are still delineated by counting the required number of wavelengths of light along the distance.

And as you probably know, commercial laser interferometrics can provide pretty fair accuracy in a fairly large space:

With regard to the lineal control of the laser interferometer, the resolution is 0.16 microns; the repeatability is 1 micron +1 micron/meter; and the accuracy for radial distance is 10 microns +0.8 microns/meter.

I don't claim that this magically makes it easy to make blisks or blisk-makers, but the point of interferometry is that you're using precision that comes from the light-waves themselves -- and the effective precision can and does improve without any magical manual touch. I think of the improvements as a Moore's Law instance, but it may be that Moore's Law thinking is irrelevant here; after all, in 1991 we already had, in principle, a Laser interferometric system such that

This method achieved (i) sub-nanometer resolution (0.6 nm/LSB), (ii) high stability (2.5 nm/day), (iii) high linearity (less than 1 LSB), and (iv) high following speed (more than 1000mm s-1).

Well, maybe. I expect that some future CNC systems, including but not limited to 3D printers, will use a well-defined 3D grid which will, if that's desirable, be based on counting off wavelengths one way or another. And later, maybe we'll be counting off specific (crystallized?) molecules. And later, maybe we'll be counting off spaces in a graphene grid, six carbon atoms around each hexagonal tile. And then maybe we'll have to stop, but 12 microns will not seem small. Twelve microns will seem, will be, huge.

And so? Somehow, Roger, I doubt that you'll consider that to be an adequate response. Maybe it isn't, but anyway you won't think so. Hmm...

Outline: I want to bloviate on our respective professional-geek biases (why you won't take this seriously), and then on my most fundamental caveats (why you shouldn't take this seriously), and then on what I am "predicting", to the extent that I'm predicting anything, and why. You can then decide whether you actually disagree, and whether any comment you might make could possibly lighten my hopeless ignorance.

Biases: In general, we judge and misjudge by supposing that the future will look like X, X being something we think we've learned from in the past, yes? Think back long before our respective PhuDs to the time of the moon landing, with us both in Colegio Nueva Granada -- high school for me, first grade (second?) for you. (Okay, maybe you don't remember it that clearly, but a high-school classmate named Al Borrero got in touch recently, I guess we'd both gotten in touch with "legendary guitarist" and anthro prof Hector Qirko who'd just been interviewed by instapundit, and Al remembers you and Magi as "very very bright." You were there, you were aware.) At that time, Moore's Law was four years old: two doublings since its proposal. It has gone on pretty well since, with some wobbles as to what was doubling. If your tools had improved the way mine have improved, I suppose we'd all be commuting to the moon, and we certainly wouldn't have to wait ten years to see if your itty-bitty rockets work when they get to Pluto. Your tools have not improved that much; in some respects they haven't improved fundamentally at all. It's natural for my model of improvement to be more dramatic than yours.

My well-grounded lack of confidence: That doesn't mean that Moore's Law is (or is not) now an appropriate model for your subject or mine. Back when I ended my PhuD work in 1980, I remember I believed predictions that we were nearing physical limits that would stop it cold. After that, we would depend on massive parallelism (remember the Connection Machine?) and so I was one of the throng doing proofs about parallel programs, functional programming, algebras of parallel-reducible expressions and automatic parallel scheduling of the evaluation of recursively-defined arrays...but Moore's Law kept on going, sequential machines were good enough to support the "desktop revolution" (say 1975 to 1990, though it continues) and then the "connectivity revolution" (say 1990 to 2005, though it continues). Anyway, Moore's Law kept on going: I wuz wrong. I still expect the original circuit-size Moore's Law (and the directly-associated variations, e.g. disk drive capacity per square inch) to hit a limit, and I still expect growth of effective computer capacity to continue for a while via massive parallelism, and I still even expect functional languages (e.g., within Erlang?) to play a larger role, but I don't have much of a track record for any predictions in any direction.

My basic "prediction": What I think I'm starting to see now, something I haven't seen before, is a robotics revolution to follow the connectivity revolution of WWW and cell phones. A Moore's Law progression beginning in robotics, 3D printing, and associated (CNC, mostly) technologies. Back in the 80s, I thought 3D printers might get real someday; now I mostly think that today's toys of that general category will be twice as good in a couple of years, and will similarly go on doubling their overall goodness (which I have no intention of trying to define) at roughly Moore's Law rates for the next decade or three.

Am I sure? Nah. What I see now might not continue. On the other hand, we might see growth (or size/cost shrinkage) a whole lot faster than Moore's Law, because lots of technologies for working at very small scales have already been developed.

Why am I talking this way? Basically, I look at reports of progress, of robotics in medical and military and pure-research and just for fun, of 3D printers and "fab labs" mostly in the last two categories, and the progress of productivity in random places: a robotics summary last year claimed that

Prices of industrial robots, expressed in constant 1990 US dollars, have fallen from an index 100 to 54 in the period 1990-2005, without taking into account that robots installed in 2005 had a much higher performance than those installed in 1990. When taking into account quality changes, it was estimated that the index would have fallen to 22.
In the same period (1990-2005), the index of labour compensation in the American business sector increased from 100 to 179. This implies that the relative prices of robots fell from 100 in 1990 to 23 in 2005 without quality adjustment, and to 10 when taking into account quality improvements in robots.

I find that plausible; I expect it to continue; if it does continue, I expect to see the production and manipulation of objects revolutionized in much the same way that we've seen in the production and manipulation of data. I don't see why blisks should be an exception.

Of course, if robotic production of blisks (and of other things) does well enough, there will be correspondingly less incentive to speed the improvement of 3D printing. I expect 3D printing to improve at roughly Moore's Law rates also, I expect 3D printing to dominate robotic production for a large class of consumer goods within your chosen time-frame, but high-precision stuff that's tough enough for aerospace will be hard. It is possible that it won't work well enough until we can do atomic-level assembly (not just putting an atom in the right place, but putting it in the right place with the right bonds); that's hard. No, not impossible. Just hard--much harder than the industrial-robot approach for almost any individual problem (e.g., blisks.) . Consider Robot Sales Up 33% in North America in First Nine Months of 2007 - Robotics Online:

Among the best performing non-automotive markets this year are life sciences/pharmaceutical/ biomedical/medical devices (up 20%), food & consumer goods (up 15%) and plastics and rubber (up eight percent).

Of course those are sales, which as they admit are driven by cycles as well as by fundamental change; I expect many of those numbers to drop over the coming year, even if the actual-recession trade price is still under 50%. In the longer run, though, increasing required precision will force less manual processing, not more: Perrett is quite fundamentally wrong. I think. Your blisks will be produced automatically -- probably within your rocketry career (You don't personally get involved with blisks, do you?) Never mind, the point is increasingly automatic production, especially of the means of (increasingly automatic) production. Even though I did give my youngest a soldering kit for Christmas, and I'm hoping to get her to use it.

On the other hand, I think you're surer of what you're sure of than I am sure of what I'm sure of, and you may be right.

Or then again (and again and again), maybe not. Happy New Year!

2007-12-03T07:46:00.000-08:00

Maximal Meaningful DNA: 25 Megabytes?

At Overcoming Bias, Eliezer Yudkowsky asserts that:

There's an upper bound, a speed limit to evolution: If Nature kills off a grand total of half the children, then the gene pool of the next generation can acquire a grand total of 1 bit of information.

and that's very cool. In a sense it's obvious; selection is pushing you down a tree of choices, rather like the tree of choices involved in sorting where we tediously show students how sorting can't be better than O(N*log(N)). We think of evolution as answering a series of yes/no questions, going from a breeding population of a zillion with no answer for question Q, to a population of two zillion young'uns of whom half try out "yes", half "no", and then to a surviving next-generation breeding population of a zillion who have survived by choosing the right answer. I like it. Yudkowsky continues:

I am informed that this speed limit holds even with semi-isolated breeding subpopulations, sexual reproduction, chromosomal linkages, and other complications.

Yeah, I think I can believe that. I think. It's very plausible, and I don't see a way to attack it -- if somebody challenged me with an attack I would not say it's a priori ridiculous to try, especially if there's a way to isolate subsystems of questions which are separately answered by subpopulations, but I would expect them to fail -- I don't think you can know which subsystems to isolate until after you have the answer. He then goes on with:

Let's repeat that. It's worth repeating. A mammalian gene pool can acquire at most 1 bit of information per generation.

and this is clearly dependent on the assumption (slightly discussed) that the selection of DNA sequences starts with a pool of roughly twice the surviving size, i.e. about four offspring per pair. For mammals, that sounds right, yes? And if so, we can go on with

Among mammals, the rate of DNA copying errors is roughly 10^-8 per base per generation.

and if we build up to 100,000,000 base pairs, then we can add one and lose one per generation so we've hit the maximum and that's two base-pairs per byte so we get 25 megabytes for the maximum meaningful mammalian DNA.

This strikes me as extremely cool, but actually my current opinion is that it's wrong for a very simple reason: http://www.google.com/search?q=viable.sperm yields over 62,000 hits, while http://www.google.com/search?q=viable.ova yields over 500. In other words, some of the DNA selection occurs before we see the offspring. How much? Well, as Simon Levay put it:

as anyone who has watched the Discovery Channel knows, a maverick sperm takes a flood of its buddies along for the ride — between one hundred million and seven hundred million tail-snapping semen-surfing spermatozoa in each ejaculation.

Of course that number can be a lot less and still have reproductive success, but clearly there is selection of sperm (and ova, to some extent) going on.

As a programmer, I'm thinking of sperm-selection and ovum-selection as module testing; the miscarriages that then take out at least some pregnancies serve as initial system-integration testing; and then we get the approximately one bit added from post-birth selection.

One major caveat: the external environment is not necessarily involved (it may be involved, since some environmental stimuli do clearly get through). So pre-birth selection is not equivalent to post-birth selection; in particular, it may have an extremely limited ability to select bits relating to the external environment. However, a whole lot of the environment, for any given gene's expressed proteins, consists of other genes' expressed proteins and their consequences.

So, how much meaningful DNA can be supported? Each doubling in offspring corresponds to an extra bit to be selected; a hundred-million-fold increase is more than 26 doublings. In fact using Scott Aaronson's summary

we’ll never find any organism in evolutionary equilibrium, with mutation rate ε and K offspring per mated pair, with more than (log2(K)-1)/(8388608ε) MB of functional DNA.

we're talking about a possibly 26-fold increase in log2(K); a few hundred megabytes, instead of just 25.

And ova? Well, it seems to me that if the ovum's genetic expression is largely independent (doing different things, expressing and testing different genes than sperm) then whatever expansion there is for ova should be a multiplier; if we form an embryo by choosing from 1E8 sperm and, say, 100 ova, then actually we're selecting from 1E10 potential embryos -- that would give us a basis for maintenance of all our DNA as non-junk. In this kind of consideration, the redundancy of the genes from parents is obviously relevant, and I'm not at all sure how to handle it; but we are able to use the zillions of sperm to get right answers to roughly log2(1E8) questions. Whether the actual reproductive process does so, and whether there really is a more than 25MB (or thereabouts) package of data, is an experimental issue, but I'm not sold on Yudkowsky's belief that this line of reasoning predicts the junkiness of junk DNA.

The principle, though, is clearly convincing.

A random thought, while updating: the error rate has to be non-negligible in order to accumulate information, but perhaps it could be a variable if there's a way of detecting "we're near a local optimum" (with better-than-random success) and stepping up error correction if so. In particular, consider the fact of variation at equilibrium; it's a little hard to think about this in the current context, where I've been supposing that each DNA locus has a single "right" answer, but a species in or near equilibrium, a "successful" species, doesn't generally consist of clones ... for a variety of reasons. I hereby conjecture that if you're a member of a species under stress, one far from equilibrium because it's "losing", then it's relatively more likely that your parents will both have had the same value for gene G, for any given G. (For example, a habitat changes temperature and only the least or most heat-sensitive survive.) If so, your error-correction algorithm should look at the genes it is copying and say "hmm...too many of these are identical. Better not try so hard." The effective mutation rate will therefore rise. I have no idea whether or not any real systems work this way, but they might.

Or then again, maybe not.

2007-11-04T05:29:00.001-08:00

Solar Balloon Progress?

In July 2006 I sketched a solar-energy balloon notion: build a balloon which is roughly half transparent and half (inside) reflective, put a solar collector (I was thinking of solar Stirling engines) around the focal point, give it a supply of water to split into hydrogen, let it fly. I thought of this as part of our semi-Singularitarian notion of the Spike, by which human labor costs become a hyperbolically diminished factor in a world of self-reproducing machines. But maybe it's easier than that, and will come sooner. EcoGeek reports on "Inflatable Solar Arrays" being developed now:

The device uses very little actual photovoltaic material, and everything else is dirt cheap. The installation of something like this could even be several hundred feet off the ground, if one didn't want to disturb habitat.

How about several miles off the ground, to be above the weather? They'll last longer, and be more reliable as power sources. Is flight control really that hard? I don't think so: consider YouTube - solar airship:

This vehicle runs on sunlight, and thus can fly as long as the sun shines (which, of course, it always does above the clouds). You can see the panels inside (see hyperblimp.com for more info).

That assumes a human with a remote control, but we do have people working on solar-powered airships to stay up for "a week or more", as in Danger Room's Commandos Get Hydrogen-Powered Drone

Global Observer, powered by hydrogen fuel cells, will fly at 55,000 to 65,000 feet, serving as a communications' relay for commandos -- and keeping watching over the ground below.

That's a plan, but already we have Slashdot's report of Solar Craft Flies Through Two Nights:

A solar-powered, unmanned craft has flown for 54 hours,

and open-source UAV flight-control is coming right along at Chris Anderson's Do-it-yourself drones. I'm feeling optimistic. This morning they announce the winner(s) of the robot car "race":

The three other cars that were out on the DARPA Urban Challenge course when the three front runners came in have now crossed the finish line. That makes 6 cars that completed the 60-mile course, out of 11 starters.

Their task was immensely harder than getting a solar-powered blimp to lift off, ride the upper winds for a day, and land -- but even that's not needed, if we leave the power stations to fly gradually around and around the world, with manned airships to tend them, supply more water, collect more hydrogen...(or whatever fuel turns out to be the best way to transport the solar energy.)

Faster, please.

2007-10-31T13:02:00.000-07:00

Financial Times on Torture

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal says

Tyler Cowen (where does he ever find the time?) alerts me that the extremely sharp, thoughtful, and witty Clive Crook now has a weblog.

Generally, when something is agreed upon by DeLong and Cowen, I'm likely to find it of value, and so I've tentatively subscribed to CrookBlog. Okay...but in reading a few entries, I find myself stuck on FT.com | Clive Crook's blog: It depends what you mean by "torture":

If anything is torture, simulated drowning is torture. If you need to remind yourself what waterboarding entails, read how the Khmer Rouge did it...Which principled defence of "aggressive questioning" permits simulated drowning but prohibits thumb-screws or the rack?

But I don't need to read how the Khmer Rouge did it. I can watch it performed the way that the Americans do it, as done to a Fox News guy named Steve Harrigan.

So okay, I know what it is. Is it "torture"? Well, gee. Yes, it depends on what you mean by "torture", and some people -- knowing what waterboarding is -- will include waterboarding within "torture", and others won't. What I'm looking at, though, is Crook's If anything is torture, simulating drowning is torture.

This strikes me as fundamentally unserious. Waterboarding is an unpleasant experience which some not-obviously-insane people volunteer for, and don't seem to regret afterwards. (So far as I know, this line excludes both thumbscrews and rack.) We can draw the "torture" line to exclude such things; in that case waterboarding won't be torture, and yet I think we'll have a quite intellectually and morally coherent view of what torture is (and why, in a morality which tries to pay some attention to the Golden Rule, we don't torture.)

I imagine we can also have an intellectually and morally coherent view of torture which does include waterboarding, which we therefore don't do. Maybe we can have an actual discussion of it. However, the post I'm linking does not seem to rise above the "if anything is torture" level. So I have to start my reading of CrookBlog with a down-check on credibility within some domain of discourse whose scope is yet to be determined. That's okay; there are major places where I down-check DeLong, and yet he's still worth reading. But still, it's not a good start, and I read too many blogs.

or maybe not? hmmm..

2007-10-29T13:15:00.000-07:00

On Legitimacy

I see that Randy Barnett is recapitulating his Lost Constitution book as a response to Leiter on Originalism:

(1) In Restoring, I begin by denying that the legitimacy of a constitution of the sort that governs a territory like the United States could ever be grounded on the "consent of the governed" because such consent is and must always be a fiction. If such a constitution is ever legitimate at all (and perhaps none can be), it must be because it is warranted in imposing its commands on nonconsenting members of the public.

It's funny how much of his later argument I find convincing, after totally rejecting this starting point. I don't believe that either consent or legitimacy are binary values.

No government is totally consensual or non-consensual, no government is totally legitimate or illegitimate.

Considering that the whole point of government is that it requires that you change your behavior, "the consent of the governed" is never 100%, but that doesn't make it a fiction: consent is not always additive because we consent to different things. Every government, even a thugocracy, is somewhat consensual. In the absence of Madison's angels, no real-world government can be fully consensual -- and if we had such angels as citizens, then Madison correctly points out that no government would be needed. A maximally legitimate government is one for which any change would make it even less legitimate -- less consensual -- than it is. Anarchy is pretty much the least consensual form of "government" for the simple reason that practically nobody consents to it; government by (consent of) "We the People" (via representatives picking metarules by which to pick rules) is necessarily far from perfect, but it's probably better -- more consensual -- than any of the alternatives.

And that's why we should pick it. (So am I ready to define "more consensual"? Absobloominglutelynot. I know it when I see it, except when I'm not sure, or when I'm wrong. But consent is weighted, in some sense: if you come up and hit me in the nose, to which you consent and I do not, then that's a whole lot less consensual than if the nice policeman stops you, to which I consent and you do not. If you claim that you don't believe this, I am skeptical about your disbelief.)

And yet Barnett goes on to derive presumptions of liberty and all kinds of good stuff which I also find to follow from my very different premises. This may indicate that I'm being convinced, and perhaps even that he's being convinced, by something other than the ostensible basis of argument.

Or then again, maybe not.

update: Barnett now points to Solum on Leiter (and Me) on Originalism:

The truth of semantic originalism, by itself, has no normative implications. Even if the semantic content of the constitution is the original public meaning, it could be the case that constitutional practice should deviate from that meaning. For example, one might argue that precedent should trump the original public meaning. Or one might argue that the difficulty of constitutional amendment so undermines the democratic legitimacy of the Constitution that the political branches are justified in “amending constructions” that give the text new and different semantic content. Or one might believe that the constitution is so undesirable or unjust ...

As a simple-minded geek, I think that Solum is using the same oversimplification that Barnett does: I would say that semantic originalism (original public meaning) has no normative implications in a predicate-calculus prove-true-or-false sense, but that it has normative weight in that the original public meaning is what was agreed/consented to at the time, and times, of the agreement and its subsequent amendments. That's where consensuality comes in. Other issues (including justice, not always separate from consensuality) come in too, of course. I would like to disagree with Solum (and Barnett, I think) about constitutional underspecification, especially vagueness, in that if the original public meaning is vague, then surely (I wish) it does not constrain, so anything goes within the range of vagueness. Unfortunately, I can't do that, because the clear non-vague original public meaning of the 9th Amendment says that there are "rights" -- constraints on Congress -- as a part of this stuff that we're consenting to, that are not enumerated. The resolution of this underspecification in particular, and perhaps vagueness-underspecification as well, is clearly not being left to Congress and presumably not to the Executive either; it's gotta be a judicial function. I really don't like that, but maybe it was the best available option and, gee, what can I say? It's what they consented to, and I have no clarifying amendments to suggest.

2007-10-25T06:27:00.000-07:00

Self-experimentation, dental care, health-care policy

As I mentioned in a self-experimentation post, I've been following Seth Robert's recommendation of flaxseed oil for calorie management (because the diet was so strange, but explained so plausibly, that I wanted to try it despite not being actually overweight, and I did lose weight) and I was interested in his series of gum inflammation (and other omega-3 factors) posts. I don't have a major problem there either, but I have had a problem in the past -- a root canal thirty years ago which had to be redone, with gum surgery, fifteen years ago, leaving a plastic-on-gold-on-tungsten implant. It kept getting moderately inflamed, then less, then more; a common discussion topic after tooth-cleaning. Lately it hasn't been a problem; today I was very conscious that there just wasn't a problem. And my eldest son, who has had a problem, recently wrote that his "one gum, which was the only one that bled regularly with flossing, has almost completely stopped. i don't know if it's the flaxseed oil, but it sure could be. the big test will be the next dentist appt...".

Systematic self-experimentation does not appeal to me; I'm just not sufficiently obsessive about data collection. But I'm very glad there are people like Seth Roberts in the universe, and I'm hoping that improved technology will gradually increase their number and effectiveness. If I were In Charge, there would be basic health-care vouchers for everyone, and expanded vouchers for everyone willing to sign up for data-collection services, and big cash prizes for donations of patents (to an open-innovation patent protection fund) to make that collection easier. I would like to have lots of us live long enough to outlive the whole idea of "aging".

2007-10-20T08:34:00.000-07:00

Rodrik on Development

I've been reading Dani Rodrik's blog and now his current book, One Economics, Many Recipes. He is lots more enthusiastic about government than I am, and mostly I feel battered in that he is mostly making a good case for stuff that I'd rather not believe: sometimes interventionist government works better than minimalist government. This makes my worldview more complicated than -- as a laygeek interested in economics and specifically in development economics -- I want it to be. I see in Arnold Kling's review that he (albeit not a laygeek) feels more or less the same way, which is not a big surprise -- my views often overlap with his.

However, I'm still feeling bothered by the book's start, right on page 1 of the Introduction:

ON A VISIT to a small Latin American country a few years back, my colleagues and I paid a courtesy visit to the minister of finance...a detailed PowerPoint presentation on his economy's recent progress...listed all the reforms...Trade barriers had been removed, price controls had been lifted, and all public enterprises had been privatized. Fiscal policy was tight, public debt levels low, and inflation nonexistent. Labor markets were as flexible as they come. There were no exchange or capital controls, and the economy was open to foreign investments of all kind. [sic] "We have done all the first-generation reforms, all the second-generation reforms, and are now embarking on...
...Alas...The economy was scarcely growing, private investment remained depressed...poverty and inequality were on the rise. What had gone wrong?

This opening created, for me, a tension for which I have not yet seen a resolution in the book; I'm not nearly done, but I don't see it indicated in Kling's review either, or when I follow up the obvious terms -- "corruption", "transparency", "bureaucracy" -- in the index. It sounds to me as if Rodrik is reporting that the minister of finance told him they'd done all the reforms...except for reform.

[[personal background: I grew up largely in Latin America, with a dad who was trying to assist businesses large and small, from the early 60s when he ran the Veracruz shipyard for Baltimore Shipbuilding and Drydock, the mid-60s lumber mill in Nicaragua, the late 60s and 70s as a "project engineer" for dams and road and shipyards for the Interamerican Development Bank in Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, and so on to his death in the late 80s; he was always trying on the side to help little businesses get going. (This was his peculiar version of Quakerism.) He kept saying he was going to write a book about Latin America's failures, but I think in the end it would have been a less abstract, more dramatized version of parts of De Soto's Mystery of Capital but without de Soto's central real-estate insight; it was all about corruption, lack of transparency, and bureaucracy.]]

I look at Transparency International's corruption perceptions map and wonder which Latin American country Rodrik could be talking about: Chile is pretty good and Uruguay is not bad, but Chile's been growing pretty fast (and is pretty big, anyway) and Uruguay isn't privatized, so I guess by my standards (especially in the light of Uruguay's poor commercial (small-biz) characteristics) their respective growth patterns, and those of their neighbors, are not terribly surprising.

I remember Dad talking in 1970 about helping somebody set up a small export (leatherwork) business in Montevideo; the basic forms took more than a year, stopping at several dozen desks, even with him pushing them along as if the IDB (or BID, if you speak Spanish) thought they were important. Without that help they would have simply failed -- not necessarily from corruption, but from bureaucracy.

That's been my model of Latin American government all my life: any given government will have a lot of honest people in it, but the net effect will usually range from actively predatory down to parasitic, with the exception of Chile. (Mexico is not an exception, but has benefited and suffered in various ways from proximity to the US -- I'm thinking of legal immigration, illegal immigration, and the drug trade as well as legal trade and a few invasions.)

I'm not saying that government has to be a baleful influence. In the US, my plumber is a business, the carpenter is a business... -- I'm a business and a half (half of a partnership) duly registered for small fees with the county clerk. The Small Business Administration and Federation of Small Businesses are not perfect, but my feeling is that they are actually pretty good. The US overall has a pro-growth government, in many ways, and I'm fairly comfortable with that kind of interventionism -- but mostly that's a kind of interventionism that has to do with constantly adjusting the regulatory barriers that keep businesses from getting too predatory, rather than assisting them (and bureaucrats) in being predatory. I do get muchly less comfortable when it tries to intervene in favor of specific industries, areas, companies, people -- there you get massively harmful rent-seeking as with our agricultural subsidies. Still, there are some government interventions which may make sense, and Rodrik argues effectively. Mostly.

However, I'm not comfortable with Rodrik's starting point; it struck me as pretty strange.

(Well, maybe not.)

2007-10-16T07:54:00.000-07:00

Stemcell cyborgs

Yesterday morning I thought about the fact that I hadn't been doing exercises at all consistently since going to Greece for my eldest son's wedding in July. July? Ulp. So I did my forty pushups and forty situps and walked steadily (instead of trotted) up and down the front stairs for half an hour and did twenty pullups and weighed myself, at 180.8 pounds. Not good, not terrible. But while I walked, I thought about Aubrey de Grey's Ending Aging which I'd just read over the weekend. Hmmm...

Suppose that my exercise and not-too-terrible diet and ordinary medical care manage to keep me going into my mid-eighties, thirty years from now; all four grandparents lasted that long, although my parents did not. de Grey thinks that by then, we'll have found therapies for each of the major categories of aging-damage, so that I may feel no older than I do now... He concedes that some problems will be harder than others, and that we will still be headed downhill, but he thinks that the early treatments are likely to give us enough extra years of (active healthy) life that we can afford to wait for the solutions to the harder problems; lasting another thirty years may thus be good enough for "eternal youth."

Okay, I can see the pattern, and I can see some plausibility in each of his SENS solutions, but yesterday as I walked, I was thinking about alternatives.

de Grey's view of what I should be, several decades from now, seems to involve switching off all cell replication (as the one sure way to stop cancer) and then to introduce controlled cell replacement via embryonic stem cells every ten years or so, plus when you want to generate a baby; he goes on a bit about the inferiority of adult stem cells for the general problem. I think this is a bit of a problem in that the current embryonic cells naturally have the DNA of the embryo:

After receiving umbilical cord stem cells to replace bone marrow as treatment for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, Greg Graves temporarily had three different sets of DNA.

I'm skeptical about gradually replacing my cells with all kinds of DNA. de Grey has possible solutions, but I don't think they're necessary: as of last June,

Three teams of scientists said yesterday they had coaxed ordinary mouse skin cells to become what are effectively embryonic stem cells without creating or destroying embryos in the process.

So it ought to be possible to generate stem cells for me that are really my stem cells, and stem cells for you that are really yours. How (and when) to replace bad cells with good ones? de Grey's program is not impossible, but I would rather think of four levels of replacement: cell-at-a-time, tissue, organ, and whole-body.

The whole-body replacement is what you see in Scalzi's science-fiction novel Old Man's War: you grow a new body and "upload" your consciousness to it. (This is also seen in some science fiction of the 60's or earlier; see Ben Bova's "Call Me Joe.) It's not impossible, and if we upload to higher-speed processing we may find lots of amusing changes, as in Accelerating Future's claim:

Mind uploading will make space travel useless. If my mind is running at a million times human speed, then the Moon, Mars, and Proxima Centauri look far more distant than they were previously. It becomes pointless to visit them.

Well, I think that I think that that's an implausible view of what uploading will amount to, based on an essentialist view of what a mind is, but in any case it's not an issue here: if we get that kind of uploading, then aging is irrelevant.

Organ replacement is possible for everything except the brain; cell-at-a-time or tissue replacement is possible for any tissue (with the caveat that cell-at-a-time replacement may need extension to handle intercellular connections and debris). If you replace old bad stuff with new good stuff, and find/destroy cancers as well as bacteria and virus invasions, then you can last indefinitely. I believe Current stem-cell treatments are of the cell-at-a-time variety, but tissues and organs can be grown on spider-silk scaffolding or, eventually, simply printed in 3D.

My belief is that continuous maintenance will work better than occasional updates, because a continuous-maintenance system can also help handle infections and injury repair. Imagine a microbot, about the size of a cell, with a few fixed functions. It carries a squished stem cell to the targeted tissue, through your circulatory system (or through tubes made of spider-silk or woven nanotube fibers which run alongside your circulatory system, forming a scaffolding through your whole body which turns you into a sort of a cyborg, though perhaps not very --how cyborgy you are depends on whether that scaffolding is dynamic, and how much information it carries, and what wavelengths it picks up wifi on, and so forth). The microbot drops its cargo as it collects a cell for disposal, and goes on back for more -- I'd propose that the stem-cell center for cyborg operations should be right around the heart, for obvious reasons. Selection is pretty random: about a tenth of one percent of your cells get replaced each day, giving each cell about a 693-day half-life. If a cancer starts to grow, or if an infection goes beyond the capacities of your regular immune system, or even if you get a bruise... then there will be a whole lot of bad or damaged cells in one place: some microbot will detect them very early, and you'll know what and where they are; cyborg healing should be pretty quick.

Or then again, maybe not.

upd: fixed half-life to be ln(2)/0.001 days; 1.001^693 =approx 2.

2007-10-14T12:48:00.000-07:00

Wind Power

I do mostly expect over-the-rainbow solar power (whether stratospheric, as I've suggested before, or space-based in the High Frontier tradition) to become a dominant power source, but in the early stages I see lots of room for wind. Today I see a vibration-based wind generator :

a magnet mounted on a vibrating membrane simply oscillates between wire coils.

Looks good, and reminds me that a few months back, while reading about thermoacoustic Stirling cycles, I remembered a science-fiction story I read forty years ago. The story is about an archaeological expedition studying a long-lost alien civilization on a windy desert planet, and the expedition ends up being saved (spoiler alert) by the discovery that the millions of noisy wind harps that are driving everybody crazy are actually piezoelectric generators, producing electricity from the vibrations.

So I'm imagining a sun/wind combination on your roof: as long as the sun is out, we have thermoacoustic vibrations to generate power (with potentially pretty good efficiency), but when a storm blows on by, we get the same vibration frequency from an array of Aeolian harp-strings.

Or then again, maybe not.

2007-09-05T08:49:00.000-07:00

Development-in-a-Box; SysAdmin generally

Tom Barnett's Explaining Development-in-a-Box™ says

Since the centerpiece of the approach is adapting internationally recognized standards and best practices to local conditions to jump start development, we couldn’t find another name that emphasized both development and standardization as well as the term Development-in-a-Box.

The post is a bit of a disappointment in that I've been hoping that he'd actually give me a good way to think about what DiB actually is, whereas he doesn't really detail what he just said -- he explains why that's a good thing. Yeah, I believe it's a good thing, and I know he has a detailed model, but I guess I'll have to wait for the next book. My own sysadmin notion is that

every person, place or thing has a RESTful URL,
each contractual relationship (loan form, invoice, business license) has a document template and instances which are also RESTful, people are linked in a FOAF-style web...everybody gets a cell phone for financial transactions.
The "Box" for development is actually a collection of interlinked templates describing an economically functional village... valley... harbor... country... and so on. Oh, well.

2007-09-05T08:00:00.000-07:00

Mathematics, Economics -- and Bias

Dani Rodrik invites us to:

call me naive, but I also think that Mugabe would not have pursued his policies for this long if he had a better grasp of debt dynamics.

The idea that Mugabe's problem is a lack of mathematical sophistication does, indeed, strike me as naive, and makes me very slightly less inclined to take Rodrik seriously.

In fact, I take Mugabe to be merely an extreme case of the general dictum that the problem with government is that it attracts people who think they should be in charge, including and especially people who love power; this is not a left-vs-right problem, it's why I tend to towards a (leftish, bleeding-heart, centrist) libertarianism (sometimes almost reaching it) on tests of such things, as I've noted before. The fact that Rodrik's mental model of Mugabe pops out with "insufficient math, that's his trouble!" is quite seriously a reason to question Rodrik's mental-model formation.

Update: Tyler Cowen remarks that

By writing "...call me naive" Rodrik is showing a level of self-awareness which seems to be signaling he is not naive.

I would rather say that he is showing a level of critic-awareness which signals that he knows some will label this as "naive", but he is not going to answer them -- he just feels that Mugabe's problem is insufficient math. Rodrik is in general somebody I can't ignore, but (in my model of the world) his credibility is very slightly lower than it was. And this, of course, interests no one but me, but it does interest me...as the long-ago author of Equations, Models, and Programs: A Mathematical Introduction to Computer Science I feel as if I ought to be maximally sympathetic to the math-modeling-in-all-things view...

Then again, maybe not.

2007-02-27T16:12:00.000-08:00

Productivity--but not mine, of course

Over a year ago, I see, I was writing stuff that I've said for years: that "productivity growth is a process of learning how to produce goods and services with less labor." And that's a question of

increasingly automatic production of the means of (increasingly automatic) production.

There's an obvious natural limit to that, namely 100% automatic production of the means of 100% automatic production, i.e. self-reproducing factories. This is my limited version of Kurzweil's Singularity. He goes far beyond that, he mingles it with nano-this and artificial-intelligence-that and general transhumanism in a most entertaining way. He may well be right, but for productivity concerns it doesn't much matter if the self-reproducing factories are the size of cells or the size of aircraft carriers. (It does make a difference in the sort of dangers you have to face and the sort of society you create, but not for productivity as such.)

And this past fall, there was a Scientific American 50-years-ago item that had an image which I remembered from childhood; it was an image of self-reproducing machines, aquatic ones. Hmm...I was four; I don't suppose I read Scientific American then, but it's likely that I came across that issue some years later. Or perhaps I read some science fiction based on it. I dunno, but I guess I've always assumed that productivity, in the sense of output value per input labor for a large range of kinds of output value, was headed towards infinity within my lifetime (except that, as I've said, I didn't actually expect the human race to last as long as it has.)

At any rate, though as a PhuDdy geek myself I have talked a lot about Moore's Law, maybe that's sloppy: what I might call the productivity-singularity doesn't necessarily even stay down with Moore's Law because it's more hyperbolic than exponential. I'm sure this is not an original thought, but I don't remember reading it anywhere; so it's probably wrong. But I don't see why. If you think of the productivity growth rate as the rate at which we learn to produce stuff automatically, then that's a rate at which we solve the remaining problems. Of course we can always think up new problems, and maybe we will, but hey, think about food, clothing, shelter, communication, transportation, energy. You may come up with wonderful improvements in food ad infinitum, you may enjoy putting your own labor into cooking, but some of us will be happy with "Tea, Earl Grey, hot!" from the replicator -- or the self-reproducing robot. Any given production problem will be solved, and once it is solved by relf-reproducing robots then it stays solved. (Until they take over, of course, and decide whether to keep us or not, but that's another thread altogether, where Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil can argue forever.)

So I expect self-reproducing factories, whether desktops or submarines, to handle most of our production problems and I suppose I expect self-reproducing factories that produce solar-engine balloons (or something better) to indirectly supply our energy, and quite possibly extract carbon from the atmosphere, and so on. And I worry that all these productivities will also supply the opportunities for terrorism; I'm worried about too much "empowerment", not about too little.

Every few months, it seems that the RepRap project is significantly closer to a replicator; and this month I see Cornell has an Open-source Replicator project:

The Altair 8800, introduced in the early 1970s, was the first computer you could build at home from a kit. It was crude, didn't do much, but many historians would say that it launched the desktop computer revolution. Hod Lipson, Cornell assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, thinks a little machine he calls a Fab@Home may have the same impact.

Well, I think he might be right. (And the Altair was a bit more than twenty doublings ago. But maybe I should stop thinking in Moore's Law terms.)

But the economics profession is still doing its productivity-growth projections, as I noted in the aforecited post a year back, in a linear way. That does make productivity exponential, doubling in a couple of generations, assuming that some magical productivity-growth pixie-dust parameter will keep it growing at the average rate it's been growing at. And this doesn't make sense at all.

Just for the fun of it, I go back to my grandfather's Economics text (Shorey Peterson of the University of Michigan, publishers Henry Holt and Co., NY, 1949.) And he does talk about technology, but it is not so much an information structure for him: he's thinking about increasing specialization on the one hand and increasing capital goods on the other, but he's certainly not thinking about factories reproducing themselves. Well, actually he's concerned throughout with Capitalism and Collectivism;

With respect to the development of productive power and its efficient use, socialists have their arguments, but it is here that the defenders of capitalism can be most emphatic. The sensational progress in production of the last two centuries has been achieved through a private capitalism that, broadly, has been competitive and free of government restraint. It remains to be seen whether state industry, as in Russia, will be more than imitative in its development of methods...

and so on. Yes, it's fun, and I wish he were still around, but I think that the arguments he laid out for undergraduate consumption in 1949 have mostly been settled. And I should probably produce some code.