Collared

File under: Isn't it always the same? "Students seeking blue-collar careers face sticker shock."

Sudden and rapid increases in the costs of vocational training strike me as a failure of policy. What's needed is a greater focus on not only helping people see where their best paths for the future lie, but in growing the pipelines to those futures. What's driving up prices are large numbers of people crowding into a space that doesn't have the resources to expand to accommodate them. Allowing to things to get to a point where people are beginning to panic about their futures and then hoping that the for-profit actors who enter the space will place as great an emphasis on quality education as they do on  maintaining profitability for owners and investors is a recipe for bad outcomes. Because it's not like we haven't seen this play out before. Private, for-profit schools spend heavily to market themselves to prospective students (and their parents) and that expenditure has to be made up somewhere along the way.

In the end, it's like any other gold rush. The fastest path to wealth is not to be a miner, but to sell picks and shovels to the people who expect to use those tools to better themselves. Sooner or later, presuming that it hasn't happened already, some unscrupulous operator is going to open a school and decide that actually giving the students the tools they need to succeed in a career in the skilled trades is simply too resource intensive. And it only takes one to ruin a lot of lives, perhaps irrevocably. And this is going to happen because, as a society, the United States does not value the sort of planning and oversight that it takes to prevent it. "[A]n aspiring aircraft maintenance technician must shell out $40,000 for a 14-month course in Florida," because the up-front resources to ensure that there were enough programs to keep the cost down weren't spent. Meanwhile, Governor DeSantis recently signed legislation to ban local diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and block carbon taxes in the state. And this does precisely what to increase access to (and thus lower costs for) blue collar training programs? Hell if I know. But it projects to the Republican activist class that he shares the values that are important to them.

Just like when I receive yet another political fundraising e-mail (note the last time I interacted with a political campaign was in 2004) here in Washington (the opposite corner of the lower 48); there's nothing about training people for the skilled trades, or other jobs of tomorrow. It's hyperbolic warnings of how the world will come to an end if I don't start writing checks.

And this is why there are failures of policy. Because there tends to be little or no real concern for them until people are being pulled out of the wreckage and the hunt for guilty begins. I'm constantly reminded of George Will's statement that the United States does not attempt to prevent disasters; it simply cleans up after they happen. Despite the fact it's a bad habit, it's constant enough that one can count on it.

Guess Which

Given that the presumed goal of generative automation is to render large swathes of the public unemployed, there have been a number of recent articles on whether this or that career path will be the thing that saves the economies of industrialized nations from the collapse of discretionary spending by the affluent, but not wealthy, segments of their populations.

Whether it's healthcare, services or blue-collar work like the skilled trades, news outlets are starting to run articles, centered around an individual and their story, designed to show people that there are well-paying occupations out there that people have been ignoring in their rush for soon-to-be-worthless college degrees designed to lead to knowledge work. And, of course, they're quick to note the low six-figure salaries that go along with them.

What's less apparent is what does the demand for these roles look like, especially if they're intended to be lifelines for millions of un- and/or underemployed people. Or, to be more precise, how elastic that demand is. To use a common example, take people who harvest foods. That demand is relatively inelastic... food isn't thrown away or allowed to rot by producers because there are literally no people available who could be employed to harvest it... it's that their margins don't make spending more on payroll worthwhile; the added costs needed to recover more of the produced food mean the math doesn't pencil out.

When the Wall Street Journal published an article headlined: Nursing Is the Surefire New Path to American Prosperity, the article opens with a nurse practitioner who now makes $120,000 annually and talks about how her and her husband are doing. But, being a WSJ piece, it's only available to subscribers, so I didn't read the bulk of it. But baked into that is the idea that "plentiful" jobs equals enough jobs for the people who might decide to enter the occupation. But how many nurse practitioners does the nation really need? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Employment Projections by 2034, the number of nurse practitioners is slated to rise by about 40% from 2024 numbers. And I think that this is what's driving the enthusiasm. When one looks at the data, nurse practitioners are high on the table of Fastest Growing Occupations, and they're the first occupation to crack six figures in salary. But it's worth noting that they're farther down the list when it comes to the Occupations With the Most Job Growth (the difference being percentages for Fastest Growing and raw numbers for Most Job Growth). The BLS estimates that there will be more Software Developers added than Nurse Practitioners.

And if that sounds a little off, that's the problem with taking and (or even only some) these projections as givens. If one presumes that the BLS has guessed the factors affecting occupational utilization for software developers incorrectly, where does a confidence that they've called it correctly for nurse practitioners come from?

The problem with casting any job as a "surefire" bet is that it presumes to know the choices that people will make concerning those jobs. Will it so happen that "nurse practitioners are increasingly employed in team-based models of care, taking on tasks previously performed by physicians." and "Expanding practice authority [...] support[s] employment demand further?" The BLS expects the United States labor force to grow by 3.1% by 2034, when compared to 2024 numbers. Is that going to match increases in population growth? Will their general outlook on expanding and contracting occupations bear out?

But perhaps the bigger question is whether the expected transitions, assuming they happen in the way the BLS predicts, are efficient. An old contact of mine on LinkedIn asked whether nursing was "another option for would-be or laid off engineers." Maybe, but there isn't a lot of crossover there. How much of the time spend pursuing a Computer Science degree would really be useful if one made the switch to Nursing? And how many laid-off developers could really afford to return to college full-time to get the Masters of Nursing degree needed to be an NP? And if there's a rush to enter the nursing occupations, and they become oversubscribed, what happens then?

The problem that I've always had with career planning is an inability to see the future. And that's led me to commit to things that turned out to be less than expected. If we're really going to see a seismic shakeup of the employment market in the United States, expecting everyone to figure that out for themselves, based on whichever news articles they happen to come across is a bad idea. I would expect that there needs to be a plan that helps match people with jobs when they're selecting their educational paths. This, of course, is going to be freighted... there simply isn't enough trust that the United States will actually look out for the thriving of the citizenry at large, as opposed to the people who write the biggest checks to Congressional and Presidential campaigns. Which means that it's unlikely to happen. Hopefully what comes out of it won't be wasteful enough that it becomes clear that something better was needed.

Work To Do

I was listening to the most recent episode of Malwarebytes' Lock and Code podcast, this one on the topic of "pig butchering." I find the topic of online scams and frauds interesting, but perhaps just as importantly, being in the know can be prophylactic; a lot of what makes people vulnerable to being defrauded is not knowing the red flags that the person they're communicating with isn't who they claim to be, has ulterior motives or both.

But Lock and Code tends to repeat a mantra that I'm not 100% on board with; the idea that "anybody can be scammed." This isn't something that I find to be untrue, but I think the phrasing of it can give people the wrong idea. A lot of pig butchering schemes have a distinct romantic angle, the mark believes that they've encountered someone who genuinely cares for them, and is attempting to help them out; someone who could be a life partner as well as an investment partner.

But that's not a vector that everyone is susceptible to. Some people are going to reject the idea of an attractive stranger suddenly seeming to want a relationship, and others are going to look askance at the "investment opportunity" being offered. That doesn't make such people impervious to all fraud schemes, but it does inoculate them against this one.

I think a better way of putting it is that for any given individual, there is some amount of work that would fool them. And what protects most people is that for these schemes to operate at scale, the amount of work on any initial approach tends to be fairly low. But for more targeted schemes, a fraudster may be willing to put in quite a bit more effort.

This, for me, is the value of podcasts like Lock and Code; the knowledge shared makes low-effort frauds less effective. Because the biggest risk factor for being drawn in by a supposedly misdirected text message from a random stranger is not realizing that this is a common lead-in for all sorts of schemes. Knowing may have been half the battle on the old G.I. Joe cartoons, but when it comes to online fraud schemes, 85 or 90% may be a better number.

Sure, random podcasts, blog posts and news articles are never going to make anyone absolutely impervious to trickery; anyone willing to put in the work may find a way to get to their target. But these resources increase the amount of work that needs to be done, and given the number of schemes where the initial amount of effort is really minimal, that can save a lot of people a lot of grief. 

Two Minus One

Sometimes, it seems that the lack of understanding between political factions in the United States is intentional. I was listening to "The Opinions" podcast from The New York Times; specifically their episode on "Trump, MAGA and 'toxic empathy'."

One of the points raised is that a lot of things that are not zero-sum are treated as such, and that drives much of the lack of empathy. An example was foreign students attending universities in the United States. The point was made that since these students are paying full tuition, they are subsidizing the education of poorer American students who presumably wouldn't be able to attend.

A fair point, but it misses something important; universities don't increase the number of people they admit just because they have an overseas student paying the full sticker price. 100 foreign students out of 1,000 might make it easier for low-income American students who are admitted to pay for their education, via the subsidy effect, but the top 100 American students who didn't make the cut are still locked out, because there isn't room for them. And that's the zero-sum aspect of this that a lot of people resent.

It seemed like such an obvious thing that it was conspicuous in its absence. Now, I understand that it simply didn't occur to anyone while the conversation was actually happening, but it did illustrate the divide in play... I'm pretty sure that if any of the panelists had asked someone about it, they would have been told why people see foreign students as a problem for their own children's chances. As it is, they demonstrated why so many people feel "the media" is out of touch with their concerns.

Feeding the Fire

I'm going to say right now, I'm resentful as a parent that my kids have to do more than other kids to get into certain colleges.
Asian American voters backed Trump in Nevada. Here's how they feel about him now

The central tragedy of the United States is the fact that despite often being considered the single wealthiest nation on Earth in terms of national net wealth, it has not found a way to grow the proverbial pie large enough that it's various constituencies don't feel the need to resent what others are getting. Even for something like education, which can easily be seen as as asset to the nation as a whole, scarcity pits groups of citizens against one another, not to mention immigrants. And our political system tends to cater to people's resentments, rather than find a way to obviate the need for them.

Learned

At the top of the list for highest projected total change in employment between last year and 2033 is "home health and personal care aide." According to the data compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 800,000 new home health and personal care aide jobs will be created in that timeframe. In 2023, the median salary was just over $33,500 annually. Or just under $16 an hour. I suspect that it would be more here, since it takes more than $16 an hour to get people to work in McDonald's or a local grocery store. Home health and personal care aide is near the bottom of the salary table, but it isn't alone. Of the 20 listed roles, 11 of them pay less than the current median wage in the United States.

Preventing economic inequality from growing wider is not going to be a matter of having home health and personal care aides or fast food and counter workers making substantially more money. Mainly because that's unlikely to happen. While one can always point the finger at "corporate greed" or "billionaires" (and I'm sure that people will), the fact of the matter is that the people who employ those roles, families, nursing homes, franchise owners et cetera, aren't likely to have the income of the wealth themselves to pay significantly higher salaries.

So what will need to happen is that the jobs that need to grow the fastest need to be the ones that provide greater value more broadly.

Complaining about the cost of health care has become a form of virtue signalling in the modern United States. But maybe what really needs to shift is the public discourse around education. The highest paying jobs in the United States, generally speaking, have high educational barriers to entry. If it takes a Master's degree to become a computer and information systems manager, then the overall number of them is going to be limited.

The cliché is that "education is wasted on the young." But maybe the problem that needs to be tackled now is that 12+ years of schooling is wasted on most retail jobs. Surely, with that long a period of mandatory education, it's possible to give people the skills to do more than barely get by in modern technological economy.

The Flavor Says...

The recalled 46,800 pounds of Kirkland Signature Unsalted Sweet Cream Butter and 32,400 pounds of Kirkland Signature Salted Sweet Cream Butter "list cream, but may be missing the Contains Milk statement," according to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

80,000 pounds of Costco butter recalled for lacking disclaimer about milk

To me, this sounds like 40 tons of butter going to waste for regulatory reasons, but I suspect that it's indicative of, well, progress. Of a sort, anyway. I understand why some "social media users" were of the opinion that it's just "common sense" that butter has milk in it, but there is such a thing as vegan butter  (which I was pretty sure that we used to simply call "margarine"), after all. And so it's possible that someone could pick up some Kirkland Signature butter, and, if it wasn't on the label, not realize it was made from milk. Because most people don't need to know how their food is actually made.

For people with food allergies, what's in something is important, but the trip from raw materials to whatever it is they're examining on the grocer's shelves is another story. And that is progress, at least of a sort. Modern societies are built on division or labor and specialization, and what we're seeing here is a result of that; the concern that there are people who need to avoid taking in dairy products, but don't know what foods they might occur in if it isn't there on the labels. And maybe they shouldn't have to; that frees them up to concentrate on whatever their other tasks at hand are.

I'm sure that at some point, people not understanding where their food actually comes from will bite them in the butt, for one reason or another. Maybe it's because they find out that something taboo (but not actually harmful) is in their favorite dish, or Soylent Green does turn out to be made of people. But perhaps people not needing to know things that are basically just trivia to them is a good thing in the short run.

The Wrong Mile

Much has been made of the Supreme Court of the United States recently voting that the practice of Affirmative Action, at least as implemented in giving students from certain non-White backgrounds an advantage in admissions, is in violation of the United States' Constitution and (allegedly) it's founding principles. There has also been a fair amount of discussion of the partisan split in the vote, with the six Conservative justices voting that the practice is unconstitutional, and the three Liberal justices dissenting. (Although Republican and Democrat may be more accurate. While, theoretically, the justices of the Supreme Court are non-partisan, Presidents and Congress know what they are doing well enough that only a staunch partisan has any real chance of being seated. One may was well call a bowl a bowl.)

The varied and sundry commentary tends to completely ignore, or only briefly touch on, the broader issue at hand. Part of the Conservative majority's reasoning appears to be that racial preferences were never intended to a long-term solution. While one could argue that the circumstances leading up to the fact that certain groups of people were systematically kept out of selective (and many non-selective) colleges and universities in living memory were literally centuries in the making, the majority reasoned that surely they could be fixed in a couple of generations. And maybe they could have, if the correct remedies were put in place. And this is the shortcoming of the earlier efforts at affirmative action; the problem they were solving was not the correct one.

There is a widespread and quite popular idea that the United States is a meritocracy. Some people will dispute, and quite strenuously, any statement to the contrary. But what is "merit?" In college admissions, merit was commonly defined a combination of grades and scores on certain standardized tests. (At least, when sports isn't involved.) While this is often taken to be measuring a combination of academic rigor and willingness to apply oneself to one's studies, a lot of what is actually being measured is the quality of one's education. And because of the way in which the United States tends to fund education, all schools are not created equally. Equal protection under the law, has, generally speaking, not been considered to mean "equal access to quality in public goods." So while an aggrieved White or Asian student can have their case go all the way to the Supreme Court, students of any racial background, or their parents, who understand that their schools are under-resourced, and therefore deliver sub-standard educations, have no nationwide legal remedy. For that matter, they often lack local ones.

Because schools are often funded by the communities or municipalities wherein they reside, wealthy places have better schools. And better schools lead to better outcomes. Those better outcomes lead to greater wealth. Which leads to the ability to access better schools. And the opportunity hoarding that Affirmative Action was designed to dent continues. It's also worth noting that American housing policy, especially as concerns home loans, had been (and in some ways, still is) implemented, in some cases, intentionally, in ways that locked certain groups out of higher-income neighborhoods, even when they had the income to buy into them.

Colleges and universities were given the task of determining which students, whose scores wouldn't make the cut, would have been good enough had they had the same access to quality in education as their wealthier and higher-status counterparts. The Supreme Court voted that this last-mile intervention was inappropriate. But it doesn't now, and hasn't in the past, given accountability to anyone for fixing the tangle of historical problems that selectively set so many students back starting from the first mile of their education journeys.

Uncritical

One of the books [Robin Steenman, head of the Williamson County chapter of Moms for Liberty] specifically referred to was "Ruby Bridges Goes to School," written by Ruby Bridges herself. Bridges, when she was age 6, was one of the first African American students to integrate New Orleans' all-white public school system.

Steenman said that the mention of a "large crowd of angry white people who didn't want Black children in a white school" too harshly delineated between Black and white people, and that the book didn't offer "redemption" at its end.

[...]

She said she disapproves of guidance for teachers to teach words like "injustice," "unequal," "inequality," "protest," "marching" and "segregation" in grammar lessons.
Here's what to know about the debate over 'Wit & Wisdom' curriculum in Williamson schools

This gets to what, for many Black people in the United States, the conservative anger over "Critical Race Theory" is all about; the idea that White Americans are okay with children understanding that slavery, Jim Crow and segregation were a thing (even if the details are off-limits), but that the United States should must still be presented in the way that many conservatives want the nation (or, more specifically, the White population of the nation) to be seen, as a country that had done bad things in the past, but had fully atoned for them, been redeemed and was now an objectively just and fair place, whose current inhabitants have nothing to ask forgiveness for. And "Critical Race Theory" has become a catch-all term for a way of looking at the United States that doesn't admit to this "correct" way of viewing history.

Ruby Bridges Goes to School fails, in the eyes of Ms. Steenman, because it is specifically the story of Ms. Bridges and her individual experience, rather making room for, or even being the story of, the United States and its progress towards (or achievement of) equality. And if one views Ruby Bridges Goes to School as being the sort of historical narrative that's commonly taught to grade-school children, one with clear heroes and clear villains, it's understandable how White segregationists who aren't shown as embracing Ms. Bridges at the end of story should be the villains, and that this casts "good" and "evil" along racial lines.

It's an interesting situation, because it does represent progress in its own way. After all, there was a time when the insistence would have been that the United States had never done anything warranting atonement; that slavery was an affirmative good because it took primitive people out of Africa and brought them to a first-world nation where, even as second-class citizens, they were better off than they would be otherwise. And that segregation, which kept "like with like," was a benefit to everyone.

In any event, the need for redemption points to a problem in the way people see the world. Redemption arcs are elements of fiction, not recurring themes in history. Viewing history as the stories of heroes and villains, as if they were fables or adventure stories, hides the fact that history is about normal, even if important, people. And people don't always conform to the moral roles that observers might like to place them in.

Conservative media outlets like Fox News and political bigwigs like President Trump have all hit upon the realization that the framing of American history as a narrative prompts people to view it as just another sort of fiction, and subject to many of the same tropes. And while people may like to cosplay as the evil Galactic Empire, because the bad guys are always cooler, they don't like to see themselves as actually evil. And if history is going to be a contest of Good versus Evil, if people can't start out on the right side of history, they want to be shown as having seen the error of their ways, repudiating it and ending up where they ought to be. It's one thing to want this; it's another to feel that one is entitled to it. And in the anti-"CRT" mindset, Critical Race Theory violates that entitlement to be seen as just and righteous, as living up to the promises made in the Declaration of Independence.

Where things went wrong with the Declaration, however, was not that it was a cynical statement, penned by men who had no intention of living up to its provisions. It's that living up to those provisions required more resources than they felt they had access to. And so the compromises started even before it was formally signed. But there was never a commitment to saying "here is what we will need to fulfill this promise and here is the plan to get it." Instead, the can was kicked down the road, again and again, because the costs of picking up were understood. As late as 200 years after the signing of the Declaration, there still hadn't been a genuine accounting of the price that was demanded. And it's not clear that the accounting has happened yet. People like Ms. Steenman may object to even small parts of the bill coming due, but they don't lay out a path for showing how to pay it later.

Mutliplying by Pie

The court case around Harvard University's use of race as a factor in admissions is being billed as a trial for the future of affirmative action. And that's fair enough. But I tend to think of it as a verdict over a different aspect of American culture, one which it's perhaps guilty of, even though (or perhaps because) it never really makes it into the limelight.

The whole reason why there is a lawsuit over Harvard's admissions policy is that being admitted to Harvard, or any number of other high-powered schools, is a thing of value. And the number of seats available hasn't kept up with the demand. And maybe that's what we should be looking into.

Part of the things that makes certain schools desirable is the difficulty in getting into them. I fell into that trap back when I was in high-school. I went to a nice college-prep school that not just anyone could attend. You had to pass a placement test to get in. I made it, and in my mind, this was proof that I was smarter than my junior-high classmates that didn't make it. But it was likely a certain amount of simple luck, in the end. I'm pretty sure that there were more people who made the cutoff than there were slots available, and so some number of people who would have thrived there went to other schools instead. And it's likely that some of them wound up in less-selective schools, simply because there weren't enough spaces for them to get into the places they'd applied to, since selective high-schools were kind of thin on the ground where I grew up. And, perhaps more importantly, they couldn't easily scale to demand over the short term.

And being a Black student at a college-prep high school, some of my fellow students has no qualms about saying that I was there due to affirmative action. Which was really simply a semi-oblique way of saying that I wasn't actually smarter than some of the people who didn't make it. And that I wasn't actually smart enough to be in the same school as themselves. Unfortunately, I spent a good part of that four years looking in vain for something that would shut them up.

I suspect that a lot of people go through this sort of thing, if for no other reason than as the eligible pool of applicants grows larger, the supply of seats doesn't scale to it. And this means that when some new demographic group is granted eligibility, the incumbents have less. It may not be a completely zero-sum game, but it's close enough that it may as well be, at least in the minds of participants in the game.

This, I think, is where we failed. When the United States made a social commitment to open the doors to valuable institutions to people who had been previously locked out of them, there wasn't a corresponding commitment to increase the capacity of those institutions to accommodate the greater numbers. And so without more slices of the pie, people who had previously been able to count on a slice found that others were being granted them instead. And the Harvard case is, to a degree, about getting those slices back.

To the degree that Affirmative Action is broken, this is why. It sought to even out the distribution of opportunity, but it also, at the same time, sought to even out the distribution of privation. This was, in large part, I suspect, due to the fact that while rules, regulations and guidelines can impact how college seats are apportioned, they are much less effective as increasing the number of seats, and the numbers of pipelines to those seats. And that is what we're still feeling the lack of.

Silence Bubbles

Ann Coulter was scheduled to speak at Berkeley this coming Wednesday, but university administrators have cancelled the event, citing "active security threats." The Young America's Foundation, the Republican group that was to sponsor the event, is, unsurprisingly, crying foul, especially after it appears that the university caved in to liberal students who wished to deny Ms. Coulter a venue.

Whether the university is being straightforward about their reasons for nixing the event or not, I don't know. But, let's presume for the moment that the Young America's Foundation is correct in their assertion that pressure from more liberal students lead the university to back out of the engagement. (And it's likely that at least a few anti-Coulter students and their allies will claim credit for this turn of events.) What has been gained?

Okay, so a speech by someone that many liberals consider hateful has been nixed. And that's really about it. The people who would have gone to hear what she has to say can still hear her speak - she planned to go to the campus and talk anyway, and I'm not certain that the school can prevent her from doing so. But even if she didn't go in person, she could always make the speech and post it on YouTube. Or summarize her remarks on television. She could send out the text of her speech in an e-mail to supporters and allow it to be passed around to other people who wish to read it. She could make it into an e-book or/and print-on-demand and offer it up for sale (or for free) on Amazon or another online bookseller. She could distribute it as a podcast for download.

I'm not the world's most creative thinker, and so I'm sure that there are lots of other ways that Ms. Coulter could get her words out to any and everyone who is willing to listen - and this could be a much larger audience than just the members of the Young America's Foundation. But even if the goal was to simply come between Ms. Coulter and expansive news coverage of her remarks, the coverage of her being denied the chance to speak during the formal event would seem to have rendered that moot. So... I don't really understand what has been gained here.

The only concrete effect of all of this seems to be that Ann Coulter will not be speaking at Berkeley as part of a formal event sanctioned by the University itself. And I don't really understand how that changes anything. It's not as if Berkeley formally places its stamp of approval on everyone who sepaks there or everything they say. And, as I noted above, nothing about this new situation prevents anyone from actually hearing what she has to say. About the only effect that I see is that some number of students can go about their day secure in the knowledge that speech they disapprove of is being given outside of any sort of official university channels. Which may be of some comfort to those individuals, but it doesn't seem to move the needle in any other way.

If one presumes that the things that Ms. Coulter is planning to say are legitimately a clear and present danger, that danger has not been mitigated. Her words can still reach a receptive audience, and if the fear is that those people will take those words to heart and act on them in unacceptable ways, nothing has been done to educate them in a different direction or convince them that their actions would be harmful. If the worry is that the in-person interaction carries some increased influence, little more than slight inconvenience has been added to overall situation - there are other places where the talk could take place that are easily reachable by the students who want to hear her.

And if the point is really as narrow as simply not having the talk at Berkeley, that smacks of NIMBYism, and all of its accompanying concerns. Simply preventing conservative speakers from formally coming to campus isn't going to get rid of the conservative students who attend the school. Even "safe space" arguments seem to be weak here. If the very presence of conservative speakers prompts one to feel unsafe as an 18 year-old freshman, it seems unlikely that college will do enough to defang the world that it will be safe for that same person when they graduate at 21 or so.

(As an aside, this was one of the things that I was dubious about when I worked with children. As much as I understood the goal of protecting them, or even sheltering them, from the nasty aspects of life in the broader world, without some experience in engaging them, all we were doing was delaying the day when they had to deal with them unprepared.)

I understand the appeal of closing oneself off from a world that seems to legitimize one's dehumanization. But that doesn't make that world go away. Sooner or later, the bubble will go away. And that world, warts and all, will be waiting.

In Hot Water

On LinkedIn the other day, Katy Sherman, Director of Software Engineering at Premier Inc., published an article titled: "Why We Don't Need More Women in IT." The basic points of the article were simple: Based on Ms. Sherman's own experiences, the IT industry isn't as hostile to women as it's often portrayed, women's career advancement isn't as constrained as many people think and (in keeping with the title of the piece) there isn't a need to have more girls and young women gear their education towards Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics and Information Technology.

Yesterday, Musician, Full-Stack Developer and Testing Evangelist Rachel Smyth published a rebuttal article, titled: "Why we don't need more Lobsters in IT." The long piece starts out with Ms. Smyth relating a metaphor her mother had told her when she was a child.

When I was little, my mom told me that "women are like lobsters." Which was pretty confusing since a) she said it in Spanish and my Spanish isn't that great and b) it's a pretty random metaphor. She went on to explain: lobsters in a pot claw at each other so no individual can climb over them to get out of the pot, as a result, they all stay at the same level. And boil to death.

I'm familiar with the lobster metaphor, although when I first heard it as a child, it was about crabs in a box destined for a seafood restaurant. I've heard it a number of times over the years, and the basic jist always the same. "[Insert group here] are like a group of [insert clawed crustaceans here] in [insert dangerous situation here]. Whenever one of them attempts to escape [dangerous situation] the others prevent it from doing so, and they all go to their doom. How, and why, the other crustaceans prevent anyone from escaping varies - anything from simply being too concerned with their own fates to work together to snipping off limbs with the express intent that if they can't escape, no one else will, either.

It strikes me as one of those things that one relates to children because a) it's a pretty colorful, and thus memorable, metaphor and b) children are unlikely to know any better. But it's a story that adults carry with them, because it creates a simple and easy to understand villain for failure narratives - "The reason we can't get ahead is that some of us don't want us to get ahead and so work against us."

Ms. Smyth leads with this, opening her essay with: "Based on my experience, the biggest barrier to getting more women in tech isn't men, but lobsters."

I'm going to leave aside the pot, kettle, black aspect of things for a moment, and concentrate on what strikes me as the central flaw in the metaphor - the call to orthodoxy as the key to advancement. Women, Black Americans, poor people and any number of other such groups are all fairly large. Anything approaching a unified consensus of though among all of them is highly unlikely, let alone such a singular understanding of purpose that everyone will always be pulling in the same direction. For any group of people large enough, there will be individuals whose understanding of what is in the best interests of themselves, their community or even the group as a whole will be in opposition to a more generally accepted understanding of the same. This is just the way it is in large demographics.

There may, in fact, be special places in whatever version of hell one subscribes to for members of a group who don't unconditionally support other members of a group. But if that's true, why doesn't it work both ways? As I've grown older, I've realized that where the crustacean metaphor falls down is in that there's rarely one heroic member of the group, who fails in a valiant attempt to escape certain doom. Instead everyone's so busy arguing about who has the one single plan that everyone should be behind that nothing, outside of incessant accusations of blame, is ever accomplished.

Quantum of Knowledge

Canada's Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, earned something of a standing ovation for being able to state a basic description of the difference between a classical computer and a quantum computer. In a Gizmodo article on the event, Jennifer Ouellette expressed dismay that this isn't common knowledge.

"Is there really any excuse," she asked, "not to know that light and matter have both particle and wave aspects; that the more you know about a particle’s position, the less you know about its momentum (a.k.a. the Uncertainty Principle); or the alive-and-dead superposition of states at the heart of the Schroedinger’s Cat paradox?"

Her explanation was less than charitable. "Yet the vast majority of the population can’t be bothered, avoiding most science like the plague —hard sciences like physics and math in particular."

We are better off, I think, when we understand that people do not know the things that we know because that knowledge is a luxury, rather than ascribing incurious natures to those around us. It is better that we advocate for improving people's lives such that they have the time and the resources to devote to the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake, than simply expect that knowledge that we view as being cheap or free will be perceived as such by everyone.

Ha, Ha... Ha?

As I listened to the kids hash out whom to invite, it became clear that to get work, a comic had to be at once funny—genuinely funny—and also deeply respectful of a particular set of beliefs. These beliefs included, but were in no way limited to, the following: women, as a group, should never be made to feel uncomfortable; people whose sexual orientation falls beyond the spectrum of heterosexuality must be reassured of their special value; racial injustice is best addressed in tones of bitter anguish or inspirational calls to action; Muslims are friendly helpers whom we should cherish; and belonging to any potentially “marginalized” community involves a crippling hypersensitivity that must always be respected.
Caitlin Flanagan “That’s Not Funny!”

I remember, in the late 1980s, being a college student, a possessed of what now strikes me as both a crippling hypersensitivity to issues of black-white relations and a complete insensitivity to issues that were of importance to anyone else - including race. But I was also stereotypical nerd - I played role-playing games  and read science-fiction and fantasy novels. I didn't date and didn't drink and the closest that I ever came to campus entertainment was an abortive attempt to go to a blues club that we mistakenly thought was only a few blocks away. So I can't speak to whether or not the “particular set of beliefs” straitjacketed on-campus entertainers then as it is said to now. I suspect that it did not, if only for the reason that I assume that the parents of my peers were a lot like my own parents. Had I called my parents to complain about a stand-up comedian hurting my feelings with jokes that referenced a gay man and his “sassy black friend,” I would have regretted it. Why, my parents would have wondered, was I making them pay for a long-distance telephone call for something that had nothing to do with either my schoolwork, housing arrangements or the financing thereof? My father was angry enough with me as it was, just for taking a stand on my choice of schools - there would have been no wisdom in further antagonizing him over trivialities.

Not that my parents weren't sensitive to the idea that being black would make me the butt of jokes - and thinly veiled expressions of disrespect, dismissiveness and even outright hostility described as “jokes” - but for them, part of going to college was to prepare me for a world in which there was no shelter from the malice and racism that permeated society. It might not have been the Army, but the goal was to toughen me all the same. And for the most part, my sensitivity to issues of race - a sensitivity that bordered on outright paranoia - was of little concerns to the rest of the people I went to school with. They had their own concerns to deal with, and making sure that I found everything on campus to be inoffensive was not one of them.

Of course, in the end, it wasn't anywhere nearly as bad as I would have told you it was when I was 20. Which I think was part of the central organizing principle of our parent's generation. Compared to what my parents endured when they were young, I was kicking back on East Street - I could handle the fact that my peers were occasionally unafraid to call me “nigger” to my face. Unlike the South that they’d grown up in, it was unlikely to ever go any farther than that. But in the same way that genuine First-World Problems represent actual difficulties for people, being an outsider in school came with its hurdles, and I can understand not only simply not wanting to deal with them, but not wanting anyone else to deal with them. I’d much rather than my niece not have to deal with the same antagonisms that I did - I’m simply at a loss to come up with a way for her to be prepared for the world she’ll find as an adult if she doesn’t.

In that sense, I’m more Conservative (in a political sense) than a lot of other people of my generation, who have children old enough now that they’re in, or have just graduated from, college. I don’t have any confidence that we can Newspeak our way to a better society by using a younger generation as shields. I realized that some of my schoolmates were were reticent to refer to me as “nigger” when I was in the room had no such compunctions when I exited it, and that enforcing outward obeisance merely resulted in me not knowing how people really felt about me. And while I found knives in the chest unpleasant, there were far preferable than knives in the back. Demanding obedience while cloaking it in “respect” simply encourages deception and hiding who one really is. It is when leaving behind old stereotypes and prejudices behind visibly improves one’s life that changes really begin to take hold.

Comparative America

One of the things that I was reminded of today in a conversation with a co-worker is that people often have difficulty understanding how other people believe things that they themselves do not. And how this leads to difficulties in social discourse. But rather than belabor that point, which I believe that I have made before, it occurred to me to speculate on how to solve it.

And so I wonder if there isn't room in academia for what one might call "comparative society," a course in which one takes the United States, slices it into some of it various constituencies, and teaches the students about how this or that group sees the world, and what this means for how they interact with the rest of the nation, and what lessons might be learned for interacting with them.

Margins

But the fact of the matter is that many of the students who choose to come to Spelman are coming from communities where they have clearly been in the minority. It is often surprising to the casual observer that if you talk to students, they will often say, "I was one of a handful of black kids in my school. One of the reasons I wanted to be at Spelman was because I wanted to be at the center of the educational experience, not on the margins of it the way that I felt like I was in high school."
Beverly Tatum, President of Spelman College "Why America Still Needs Historically Black Colleges"

It was odd for me to read this, because, even as an African American, I felt being at a Historically Black College in the mid-1980's to be even more marginalizing than the nearly all-white high-school that I had just graduated from the year before. So although I understand it on an intellectual level, I have trouble relating to it.

But what I started learning that year was the politics of "in-group," and it's application to race. For the suburban whites I grew up around, "in-group" was mainly a matter of appearance - in effect, being white required looking white, and that was really about it. But for the more urban black students that I spent my freshman year of college around, there was an added component - to be counted as in the "in-group" you had to look black and to "act black." And while I had the first part of that down, I failed miserably at the second, and so found myself in the "out-group," mainly, and perhaps ironically, because most of my classmates felt that I was rejecting them.

Soft Money

For me, Capitalism is merely a thing. It's not inherently good or bad. It simply is. Just, as H. L. Mencken pointed out, the trouble with Communism is the Communists and the trouble with Christianity is the Christians, the trouble with Capitalism is the Capitalists. It's hard to drum up support for a system that people feel is set up in such a way that it's impossible to win by telling them that they should be grateful for the opportunity to lose

But I suspect that what really bothers people about what passes for Capitalism in the United States is that "the 1%" (although, honestly, we're really talking more about the .01%) spend a little too much time claiming that they're being persecuted for "working their butts off," when they're really simply become very good at getting others to the heavy lifting for them. I think that they also but too much effort into blaming people who aren't like them, rather than showing people how it's done. Mark Twain noted that truly great people want to see you become great as well, and I think that we tend to lack that because our culture is driven by the (false) perception of scarcity.

In the end, it takes more than skill to be successful in America. I know plenty of people who have serious skills, but aren't regarded as successes (worst of all by themselves), because the combination of traits and circumstances that it takes is fairly complex. I think that part of the problem is the continued attempts by people to boil it down to nothing more than "skill and hard work" and then a tendency to sneer at people who aren't getting ahead and claiming it's because they're simply too dishonest to own up to their own laziness. The idea that the same traits that were venerated in small agrarian communities also cut the mustard in populous, advanced and technological societies that literally span continents sets a lot of people up for failure. But since they understand that they're doing what they were told to do, and playing by the rules as they understood them, it's no wonder that they look outside of themselves for answers - and often see conspiracies. But I think that a better solution is to have a better understanding of what the rules really are, not just what someone tells themselves to stroke their own ego.

But we don't teach economic literacy as a general skill here in the United States. It's possible to be considered well-educated, and never really have been taught the basics about how the economy that we're expected to live and function in works. Accordingly, for many of us, it's a black box. And I think that this allows for a level of economic judo - the wealthy are using the way we live our lives on a day-to-day basis against us, all the while telling us that the problem is that we aren't doing enough of what we're doing.

Unread

While it's become something of an article of faith on the American left that their fellow Americans are scientifically illiterate, I have a feeling that the problem is actually somewhat different. To me the issue seems to be a combination of economic and/or religious illiteracy. I do not claim to be either an economist or a religious scholar. The closest I've come to a formal education in economics is a sibling, and while I do have a few years of Roman Catholic theology to my name, high school was a very long time ago. Be that as it may, I have come to the conclusion that science is "under attack" in the United States because there are certain constituencies who believe (incorrectly, in my view) that in order to hold on to the economic and/or religious positions that they have staked out, they have to disprove, or at least dispute, certain items that would otherwise be considered as close to ironclad scientific fact as we currently come.

Meeting the Need

Job training programs are failing to turn out enough skilled workers to fill job openings in the U.S., a phenomenon that puzzles some European companies that expand into the U.S.
[...]
Nationwide, about 4 million job openings are going unfilled, but 10 million people are unemployed, according to Labor Department statistics.
What Germans Know Could Help Bridge U.S. Workers' Skill Gap

It seems to me that if it were important to fill those openings, then the compensation (direct and indirect) attached to them would go up. This would make it worth people's while to go into these fields and learn the skills required. I don't think that we're really looking at a skills gap. Instead, we're looking at discretionary hiring. Yes, employers want these skills, but they can do without them, and so they don't want to bear either the expense of attracting people with the skills or the expense of training for them. Instead, they're hoping that a populace desperate for "jobs" will put pressure on elected officials to have government (i.e. the public) shoulder the costs of training, and thus lower the cost of obtaining skills in two ways, employers don't have to pay for training, and common skills command lower wages.

And this is to be expected. Companies are in business to make money, and so they naturally want to reduce their costs as much as possible. And moving from a situation where employers compete for workers to one where workers compete for jobs reduces the costs of employing people, if for no other reason than it creates a distinct downward pressure on wages. The German vocational apprenticeship programs that supply skilled workers to employers there come with a three-year commitment to an employer. There were programs somewhat like that here - companies would often pay for skills training for workers, with the proviso that leaving within a certain time afterwards would require that some part of the tuition be repaid - but you had to be an employee first - which gets back to one of the basic catch-22s of the American employment market - you need work to obtain experience, yet need experience to obtain work.

We should resist the urge to buy greater employment. Rather we should let wages rise. Skilled trades are not subject to enough scalability to trigger a winner-take-all effect, and thus, needs in those areas can result in significant income transfers to labor. We should be careful about giving that up.

Uneducated Anger

This morning, NPR ran a Planet Money story positing that LeBron James is "underpaid." The basic argument was that James generates FAR more income than he receives in salary. From the standpoint of pure economics, the story relates, James should be pulling down a cool $40 million dollars a year. But he doesn't and there are a number of reasons for that, some of which, we are told benefit James.

But, this being NPR, cue the pious hand-wringing by the dutifully public-minded about how it's an obscenity that LeBron James pulls down an eight-figure salary to "run up and down a court with a ball" and "play a kids game," while teachers only made 40,000 a year. A few teachers waded into the fray to add their voices to the chorus of pious bitterness about the nations "out of whack" priorities and lack of value for what really matters. A few "free market" types waded in with (rather weak) defenses, giving the peanut gallery another set of handy targets for their sanctimony.

But lets look at things a bit differently. The NBA, regardless of what you think of it as a business, is an elite sporting league. There are a total of 30 teams, and each team may have no more than 15 members on the roster. If there were a grand total of 450 teachers in the United States, I'm pretty sure that they'd be raking it in like nobody's business. Instead, as of 2009, there were some 7.2 million teachers (from Pre-K through college) in the United States. If every player in the NBA made LeBron's salary, the combined total would only be enough to pay teachers a little less than $1,100.00 a year. If the entirety of the NBA player roster made the $40,000,000.00 a year that the article suggested is more in line with the value LeBron James brings to the Miami Heat, we could take all of their salaries and pay every teacher in the nation $2,500.00. On the other hand, if we took the combined salaries of teachers and made that the NBA's player salary pool, each and every active player who wore a team uniform would make more than 1,000,000.000.00 a year. (James' current salary utterly vanishes in the rounding error.)

Being both a bit broader and more accurate about things, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2008 there were about 16,500 professional athletes (basketball players to rodeo riders) in the United States, making an average of $79,460.00. While this does best the roughly $52,800 made by public school teachers, the fact there were roughly 3.5 million primary and secondary school teachers means that were there as many paid athletes in the United States as there were teachers, the collective salary pool of all professional sports wouldn't make for a decent part-time job. As a society, we clearly value teachers much more than we value sports. Allowing ourselves to believe otherwise because we're too busy being "outraged" to understand even the basics of the underlying economics doesn't strike me as the best way to honor education.