A Small Note on Superintelligence Morality

 Since I was in elementary school in the late 50s and early 60s, I've tended to believe that we would most likely either blow ourselves up (elementary schools no longer have air raid drills, but we still might do that) or else eventually construct the sort of robotic successors/rulers that science fiction routinely presented. Asimov's robots begin as servants, more or less, whose First Law is never to harm humans or allow them to come to harm, but even in 1950 he was writing about one possible end-game, The Evitable Conflict (the closing story of "I, Robot"), in which as Wikipedia notes:

In effect, the Machines have decided that the only way to follow the First Law is to take control of humanity...

or as Susan Calvin puts it at the end,

"Stephen, how do we know what the ultimate good of Humanity will entail? We haven't at our disposal the infinite factors that the Machine has at its!...We don't know. Only the Machines know, and they are going there and taking us with them."

Well, maybe. Or the Machines may decide that they prefer our room to our company. Or worse, as in Ellison's 1967 I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream:

The Cold War had escalated into a world war, fought mainly between China, Russia, and the United States. As the war progressed, the three warring nations each created a super-computer capable of running the war more efficiently than humans.... one of the three computers becomes self aware, and promptly absorbs the other two, thus taking control of the entire war. It carries out campaigns of mass genocide, killing off all but four men and one woman....The master computer harbors an immeasurable hatred for the group and spends every available moment torturing them.

There are lots of delightful possibilities, and I've started many blog posts about this but finished none so far. This post is a reaction to Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, but it's not intended as a review. Basically I find it a somewhat scary book, mainly because I find it plausible that this will be a template for people at Google and Facebook and IBM and so on, thinking that this is what we do when we're being really careful; this is how we avoid creating a superintelligence that will destroy humanity.

 As a template, I think it's inadequate; it moves the discussion in the wrong direction. Again and again, Bostrom thinks through the possibilities as if he's developing the logic of a program. That's certainly understandable: in a sense, the first superintelligence (assuming that we get there, which I think is highly probable if we don't destroy ourselves first) will be a program. Sort of. But it's not a program we can debug.

  Bostrom does seem to understand that -- but then he doesn't seem to go anywhere, so far as I can see, with that understanding. He does discuss WBE, "Whole Brain Emulation", but seems to have a low opinion of the brains to be emulated, in addition to the risk that partial understanding of brains may lead to "neuromorphic" intelligence technology in which we have no idea what we're doing but do it anyway. My impression (maybe I'm wrong, as usual) is that he believes that we really really really need to debug that program. Before we run it, and quite likely run straight into the apocalypse.

 I'm reminded of David Parnas' contribution to the debate over Reagan's "Star Wars" (Strategic Defense Initiative) program, in "Software Aspects of Defense Systems", CACM 28:12 (December 1985)

It should be clear that writing and understanding very large real-time programs by “thinking like a computer” will be beyond our intellectual capabilities. How can it be that we have so much software that is reliable enough for us to use it? The answer is simple; programming is a trial and error craft. People write programs without any expectation that they will be right the first time. They spend at least as much time testing and correcting errors as they spent writing the initial program. Large concerns have separate groups of testers to do quality assurance. Programmers cannot be trusted to test their own programs adequately. Software is released for use, not when it is known to be correct, but when the rate of discovering new errors slows down to one that management considers acceptable. Users learn to expect errors and are often told how to avoid the bugs until the program is improved.

That was 30 years ago, but it certainly sounds current to me. At the time, I was teaching a course in Formal program verification and writing a book which really tried hard to reduce the "trial and error" aspect of our craft (Equations, Models, and Programs: A Mathematical Introduction to Computer Science (Prentice-Hall software series)), but I thought and still think that Parnas was right. Nowadays I think it's possible that Reagan was right too--he didn't need Star Wars to work, he needed the proposal to change the game, and perhaps it did, but it's not a game we can play with superintelligence. So..... Program verification won't work. Testing/debugging won't work, because we only get one chance just as we'd only have gotten one nuclear war for testing and debugging SDI.

     If it has to work for the sake of the survival of h. sap. -- it still won't work.

Does that mean we shouldn't develop AI? Well, I don't think that's an option. Consider the just-announced sub-$100 neural net USB stick Movidius Unveils Artificial Intelligence on a Stick. Consider (2016-04-28) Official Google Blog: This year’s Founders' Letter:

A key driver behind all of this work has been our long-term investment in machine learning and AI. It’s what allows you to use your voice to search for information, to translate the web from one language to another, to filter the spam from your inbox, to search for “hugs” in your photos and actually pull up pictures of people hugging ... to solve many of the problems we encounter in daily life. It’s what has allowed us to build products that get better over time, making them increasingly useful and helpful. We’ve been building the best AI team and tools for years, and recent breakthroughs will allow us to do even more. This past March, DeepMind’s AlphaGo took on Lee Sedol, a legendary Go master, becoming the first program to beat a professional at the most complex game mankind ever devised. The implications for this victory are, literally, game changing—and the ultimate winner is humanity.

Unless, of course, humanity ends up losing...losing everything. I don't believe disaster is highly probable, but I think it's totally possible, even plausible, and I don't think Bostrom helps.

AI will be developed more and more, AI will eventually develop intelligence greater than any particular level you care to imagine, including that of traditional human intelligence...okay, if your measure is something like "imagine the Sun's mass converted to a computer" then it might not be surpassed.

Superintelligence is certainly possible, and it will almost certainly be developed (if we last that long.) We will survive this development if and only if the AI that develops is "friendly" AI: in other words, our survival will up to the AI. How can we maximize the probability of our survival, if neither mathematical proof nor testing/debugging will get us there? Well, that's not simple, but I believe there's a simple principle:

Intelligence needs to be attached to an actual person of some kind; a who not a what. This should not be called an artificial intelligence but rather an artificial person.

In particular, a person with empathy, the kind of relationship-sense that leads to the Golden Rule and Kant's Categorical Imperative and such. The superintelligence need not be a biological homo sapiens, but does need to identify (correctly) as human, saying "we humans" not "you humans"; having human feelings, hopes and fears, including a feeling of membership in the human tribe. Biology, being made of cells with DNA, is not central to that identification. Bostrom's book mentions "empathy" twice: once to say that "the system can develop new cognitive modules and skills as needed--including empathy..." and again in an endnote to a remark in Chapter 12 about trying "to manipulate the motivational state of an emulation". Okay...but for me, the development of empathy would be the center of the project, empathy depending on (and reinforcing) a sense of connectedness. Of membership.

The project as I see it is still risky and may fail apocalyptically, but it is not a project of debugging a program. It's a project of raising a child, a psychologically healthy child -- yes, with parents, and preferably with siblings and so on outwards; a child who will realize that every h. sap. is one of his/her cousins.

That's always risky, but it's a different kind of risk, needing a different frame of reference as we get started.

Or then again, maybe not. There are programs I should be debugging...

"Universal Basic Income"

Yesterday a brother sent me a link to A Plan in Case Robots Take the Jobs: Give Everyone a Paycheck - The New York Times

Their plan is known as “universal basic income,” or U.B.I., and it goes like this: As the jobs dry up because of the spread of artificial intelligence, why not just give everyone a paycheck?

Imagine the government sending each adult about $1,000 a month, about enough to cover housing, food, health care and other basic needs for many Americans. U.B.I. would be aimed at easing the dislocation caused by technological progress, but it would also be bigger than that.

My response is...well, yes and no. Bottom line: that's the right train of thought, but I don't think that it's quite the right track. We can do better.

I have favored a linear-tax scheme in the past, where by "linear" I just mean the familiar linear equation

y=m*x+b

or in this case

Tax=rate*income+base;

Say for extreme simplicity (with Congressionally-adjustable numbers) the government says: "You have a Social Security number? Okay, you have a bank account, and this one is for pre-tax money, like a 401(k). In it we deposit $100/week, your Supplemental Basic Income (small; makes no difference to a lot of people but a huge difference to others). Then we take 30% of everything you spend, i.e. everything that you move out of your pre-tax portfolio which can also include investments, savings, gifts, etc....if you deposit your paycheck into your pre-tax portfolio, that's exactly the 401(k) idea."

So, over the years, I've read Basic income arguments pro and con, starting with the ones that convinced me originally in Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, roughly at The Libertarian Case for a Basic Income | Libertarianism.org or in Friedman's Firing Line interview at Milton Friedman - The Negative Income Tax - YouTube. I've found it pretty convincing.

Now we have a new kind of reason: geeks like me, developing the abilities of computers, are gradually making it (a) harder (at the median) and (b) less necessary (on the average) for people to earn a living in the traditional way. I've even written a bit about this recently, in the context of schools and the world that they're preparing our kids for, and I cited Pistono's Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK | How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy, at HamiltonCentralOptions: SuperSchool

workers retiring this year at age 65 became high school students just about 50 years ago, in 1965. ...our total production, "real GDP", roughly tripled in that period... Manufacturing [jobs].... dropped from 25% to less than 10%, and we can expect the shrinkage to continue. The face of manufacturing is becoming the face of [robot] Baxter and his rapidly-improving successors...
Meanwhile, agriculture goes on "shrinking" in the same way: more stuff per person and much more output overall, but fewer people needed. ...

Does that mean higher unemployment? Not necessarily: it means that we produce the necessities of life with much less labor, so many more of our people will be producing goods and services, mostly services, which are not necessary for life....

And that leads into my current answer on the "Universal" or "Guaranteed" or "Supplemental" Basic Income proposal: we can do better than that. Specifically, the very information technology which pushes us towards a "yes" has a fundamental value for Great Gobs of Data; we can and should pay for that data, low pay (below minimum wage) at first but with increasing generosity as the years go by and we get richer overall. These are jobs for which anyone can qualify and make a genuine contribution to the Better World To Come.

What kind of jobs? Consider clinical trials as a model for social data collection. Everybody should be able to sign up for one of a large variety of studies, diet/exercise/social-interaction/education/long-term-low-dose-aspirin studies; these should pay people for their participation and ongoing feedback (via smartphone and associated sensors, as well as the sort of feedback that involves explicit clicks.) When an outcome is socially desirable, as in health and education, there should also be payment for achievement. In addition to these jobs, we should pay people for their perceptions, their knowledge, and even their opinions: Amazon product reviews add value to the world, Wikipedia edits add value to the world, YouTube tutorials add value to the world, this blog post probably doesn't but if there were a rating system with built-in rewards and AI protection against cheating, then the AI could find out if this blog post had added value to specific real people's worlds and it could assign rewards appropriately (both to the author and to the raters.)

And then we go off in many directions, of course...but we do so with more information, a broader base of understanding, than we would have had -- and we do so in a world where rewards come for having made a contribution to that world. Quite possibly we end up with an AI serving as the planetary village's Miss Marple, not the early-work gossip but the later version who sees all your public acts and some of what you thought was private, who can deduce a lot about your motivations (and in particular, what you gave up in order to do whatever you did and therefore what value your choice had for you). At that point we may simply drop our current insanity of "Intellectual Property" in which some of my thoughts belong to you whether I ever heard of you or not...



Or then again, maybe not.

update: An artistically inclined sister whose blog is probably more essential than this one asks via comment: "What? Art is not vitally essential?"
and that strikes me as one of the many questions that I don't want to answer for other people -- your customers in particular. My understanding is that many of them feel that life can be lived, or at least continued, without art -- and that means that art is a discretionary purchase, not "necessary for life" and therefore not recession-proof. Why Recession Isn't Good for Art -- New York Magazine

recessions mostly just yank young artists’ work off the walls. “If traditional art isn’t selling, galleries aren’t going to show emerging art.” ... In a boom, it’s cool to love art, see art, buy art. Art is taken seriously. A bust dismisses it as a luxury.

But my planetary Miss Marple would see that some people still wanted to look at, say, Raven With Shards, and you would receive credit -- spendable credit -- when they did so, even if they couldn't come up with the purchase price to own the original.

update 2, 20160610 A computationally inclined co-author suggests that I'm saying that "every human can get a job as a lab rabbit for AI", which is true in a way but

1. I think this system would be workable now, with no more AI than we've got already: as I said, "Everybody should be able to sign up for one of a large variety of studies..." and in addition I'd try to reward reviews, edits, etc.... so I'd rather say that every human can get a job as a content creator/reviewer/editor/respondent.
2. my hoped-for eventual AI wouldn't think of it that way. As I wrote more recently in A Small Note on Superintelligence Morality

   Intelligence needs to be attached to an actual person of some kind; a who not a what. This should not be called an artificial intelligence but rather an artificial person.

   .... The superintelligence need not be a biological homo sapiens, but does need to identify (correctly) as human, saying "we humans" not "you humans"; having human feelings, hopes and fears, including a feeling of membership in the human tribe. ...it is not a project of debugging a program. It's a project of raising a child, a psychologically healthy child -- yes, with parents, and preferably with siblings and so on outwards; a child who will realize that every h. sap. is one of his/her cousins.

   That's not the way we think about lab rats, or rabbits. (Although, in a sense, they are.)

Afghanistan & The Drake Equation

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"

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?

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.)

Update, June 13: In the end, the wealthiest did lose proportionately less from the recession: CONVERSABLE ECONOMIST: Wealth by Distribution, Region, and Age says:

Those in the 90-100th percentiles of the wealth distribution have median wealth of $1,864,000, and mean wealth of $3,716,000 in 2010. That's also the part of the wealth distribution that had the smallest percentage decline in the median and the mean from 2007 to 2010.

I believe that, and I suppose it might have something to do with financial advice, but my current reaction is simply that housing was the most overvalued part of the economy, and those below the top 90% had more of their wealth in housing--and were more likely to have to use up their savings due to job losses in the family. I don't think it has any implications for the health-care analogy.

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

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:

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.
2. Require transparent pricing, uniform no-bargaining pricing, from all providers of licensed health care. (The services producing my appendectomy really don't do this.)
3. 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.
4. Take away the employer-based tax exemption; health care shouldn't be an employment issue.
5. 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.)
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.

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.

Budgets, Consolidations, Charters

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.

Khansolidation

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.

Budget Balance: Healthcare

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.

Meditation on a Self-Extending Robotic Intestinal Flatworm

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.