This Kitchen is Only for Those who can Stand the Heat

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Oh sinful generation ...

It appears that there is no place for caution in today's world.  In a world that is ruled by economics (and not very rational economics, at that), the moment that growth stops, or even slows, everyone begins to panic.

It is reasonable and proper that those who are without work should panic.  But the approach furiously advocated by Big Business and its friends: unloose the fetters on Big Business!!! --and reduce government spending-- simply makes every little locality desperate to grab at any economic opportunity it sees.

In our little town, for instance, since we're close to the center of all this --highly destructive-- shale gas exploration, there is a great deal of bustling around, meetings everywhere, promotions, interviews, big shots from Texas coming in to gloat, big shots from Washington and Harrisburg hovering anxiously.  There is a scarcity of hotel space; not a single room is available some weeks.  Four new hotels have been put up recently, now competing with the grand old hotels of yesteryear.  The new hotels, of course, are essentially all plasterboard and steel girders; that's why they can be put up so fast.  Everyone in the hospitality industry is crazy about build, build build.

But all this frantic busy activity will peter out within a couple of years.  Once the gas companies bludgeon the local authorities into coming to terms with the pollution that simply cannot be alleviated, and once the local authorities begin to come under pressure from locals who benefit (alas, only temporarily) by the boom, the necessity for bigwigs from anywhere coming to our little town will cease, and the hotels will lie empty once again.

It would seem that all the gas will be extracted within five years.  At that point, even the low-level gas-rig jockeys will leave town, and only the blighted gas fields will be left.  But, on the bright side, there will be a lot of really cheap rooms for Little League families.  I suspect that the hotels will be very poorly maintained, since there will be no money in it.

Nobody wants to listen to any voice that suggests that furious building will be wasteful.  The voices of the nay-sayers are ignored, or worse, the pessimists are shunned.  Nobody can stand anyone who "isn't part of the solution," because, of course, they're part of the problem.

The Better Mousetrap, and Other Myths we may Need to Jettison.

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When America first hit the stands as the biggest thing since paved roads, it was Henry Ford's assembly line that headlined the news.  The better mousetrap became essentially sidelined, and the fabulous economies of scale took over the thinking of economists and businessmen.

Industries had been around for a long time; craftsmen were, for instance, making dresses for wealthy customers back in the time of King Arthur and Queen Betty Lou.  The sweat shop that makes dresses so inexpensive that even I can afford one were a recent invention.  Horse carriages, likewise, were being turned out in factories all over Britain and the USA.  The assembly lines of Detroit made them a lot cheaper.

Books were hard to find in the Middle Ages.  Gutenberg's  invention made them affordable to everyone (and ultimately created the new occupation of the Bible-thumper, surely a good thing, eh?).  So we're all hung up on mass-producing things for good reason.  Small farms are disappearing, and instead we have these giant businesses which, if they produce anything, will only produce a million of them.

We in America, in particular, have a tendency to equate progress with growth.  A new breed of "geniuses" has come into existence: the kind that will take a good idea to make something useful, and increase your profits by (1) marketing them to people you never thought could use the bloody things, and (2) help you make far more of the things than you can easily sell.  At this point (3) you need them to find new and better ways of making money out of the things, e.g. use them as toys for pit-bulls, for instance.  Infuse them with bone essence, and here you go: a toy for Rover.  (Never mind that it was supposed to be a nail-clipper.)

Our brave new world is now filled with a number of millionaires (apparently most Congressmen are), but also trillions of flavor-infused nail-clippers that nobody wants.  So, in my humble opinion, this breed of genius must die.  Actually, we have choices: we can fill the planet with surplus products, or we can change the advice these geniuses give the idiot entrepreneurs.  It's time we pursued a more imaginative way of being productive than that of simply mass-producing everything, and persuading those who aren't interested in a product that they should purchase one anyway, and give it a temporary home on the way to the landfill, ---that is to say, the Planet--- which will be its final resting-place.

But for many reasons, we're going to have to abandon this view of the world.  There is not scope for endlessly expanding everything, just as everyone cannot be above average, and just as the population cannot expand without limit.  Today, landfills are wild places in which nobody, supposedly, wants to live.  Tomorrow, these will be the places where the poor will have to build their homes.  The more landfills expand, the greater the proportion of real-estate that will be "converted" blighted land.

In the future, not everything that expands is bad: information and technology will continue to improve and spread wider.  Living conditions should improve.  An increasingly larger proportion of the population should have access to medical resources.  But once education was identified as something that was suitable for economies of scale, we lost a great deal.  Certainly, education is important for the citizen to fit him- or herself into society in the most effective way.  But we cannot make education into an assembly-line process, though it is very tempting to do so.

When the armies of production-line jockeys entered the planning of academia, we outsourced the business of publicity, admissions, raising money, etc, to a large number of well-meaning folks (a.k.a. "production-line jockeys") with wives, and children with teeth that needed straightening, and jets that needed fuel, and weekend getaways in the flood plains ... you get the idea.  Soon, students were paying for a lot more than instruction.  (They had to bankroll the very means whereby they were being exploited.  I say this even though some of my best buddies are recruitment specialists.)  College was costing more, the Government had to subsidize it, and now Congressmen could get up on their hind-legs and demand that colleges prove that they were effective.

On the one hand, it is as well that teachers at all levels keep an eye on just how well they're doing.  But there has to be a fine balance between using Assessment as a useful feedback device, and pushing this fad of assessment as a way some idiot politicians can convince his electorate that once they get to Washington, your kids are going to do better in school, taxes are going to get lower, jobs are going to be more plentiful, and America is going to whip the pants off those pesky Asian teenagers at math and science.  I doubt that teachers at any level respond well to the whip.  Teaching is not something that can be delivered to order.  If you turn the screws on teachers, you will get kids who are screwed up in complicated and invisible ways, which will only emerge down the road.  It's a little like waterboarding.

The time may have come for us to go back to being a bunch of impecunious gurus holed out in a commune somewhere, where students can come to learn whatever we're interested in teaching.  No accreditation, no student loans, no federal aid.  We may have to scale down our lifestyles, but those of us who think we need 5-figure salaries (in constant 2011 dollars) are probably not happy teaching, anyway.  All this preoccupation about whether students are actually learning what we're certifying them to have learned is due to the fact that it costs so damn much.  The phrase "economies of scale" only means that there's a lot of cash for expenses that have to do with education and learning only very tangentially, such as football.  Sure, some kids won't come to a school that doesn't have football.  So much the better.

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Testing and Assessment: What is Happening in Education?

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When the results of the "Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)" came out, US politicians and bureaucrats were appalled at the implied inferiority of US students, and by further implication, the inferiority of US teachers, and US Education generally.  (This is typical of the culture: the well-known fact that American kids were coming out of school not knowing very much did not alarm people until it was demonstrated that Japanese kids were showing our kids up in international tests.)

In the early years of this century, following some excitement in the nineties, politicians began clamoring for the hides of school teachers.  A heap of tests of students at various grade levels was mandated by the States and by the Federal Government.  Obviously, these tests were indirectly tests of the teachers.

This same culture of trying to get data of education outcomes has been gaining ground in colleges as well.  Are students really learning what the colleges claim they're learning?  So now in colleges, too, we have furious testing going on, with a view to estimating the efficiency of professors (and, to be honest, the overall curriculum, and how it is connected together).

Honestly, it is a sort of Consumer's Reports approach to education that was inevitable; it was bound to happen.  The Government will now step in and say that unless colleges can prove that they're successful at teaching students what they need to know, they will have to re-think student financial aid, the non-profit status of colleges, and soon we will be hounding college professors as much as we hound schoolteachers.

In my (oft-repeated) humble opinion, hounding teachers does not have a good result.  Teachers will tend to teach less and less, and teach it more carefully.  Students will start doing better and better in a narrower set of skills (e.g. "I can really do addition and multiplication and spelling good, but grammar and subtraction I can't do at all.")

On one hand, it seems unreasonable to give teachers carte blanche on what and how to teach.  On the other hand, interfering with the teaching process does lead to contradictions that are impossible to resolve.

Let's agree on one thing: teachers always do brilliantly with highly motivated, intelligent students.  As long as we stay with students who are interested in a particular subject, teachers and students make progress like a couple of houses on fire.  But when universal education enters the picture, the trouble starts.  The Public want teachers to teach all students a little of everything, despite the fact that the vast majority of teachers are reluctant to teach a large class of reluctant students.  Make no mistake: I am not in favor of reserving the highest wisdom for the deserving few.  There is a subtle difference between elitism, and recognition that without motivation, learning and teaching is impossibly difficult.  Today teachers are required to motivate the unmotivatable student, which even the gods cannot do with 100% success.

So we have a problem.  The public feels that it has a right to information about how successful a teacher (or a school, or a program) is, but the very act of obtaining that information interferes with the very thing it is measuring.  There is a sort of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle operating here.

Note:
A consumer approach to education is what resulted in all these Online Courses and For Profit Universities all over the country, with designer majors.  The majors advertized were on the lines of Engineering of Video Games, Fashion Swimsuit Design, etc.  Unfortunately, many of these schools have found that their graduates do not do well in the employment marketplace, and are unable to pay their student loans.

Why is this?  Young people who refuse to entertain the possibility of taking any course unless it is directly required in his or her major are likely to be impatient with a large number of skills and requirements that make them generally useful as employees.  In a depressed economy where one might not be able to find a job that fits one's (possibly very narrow) interests, it is necessary that one has a broader training that allows one to keep body and soul together doing something that is remunerative, but possibly not very inspiring.

But these broad skills are provided by traditional Liberal Arts schools.  Once these schools are pushed through the wringer of accountability, few of them will survive, and the boutique-major schools will have to take up the slack with education that most students will not be able to use.

But that's free enterprise.  Someone will surely provide a good education for reasonable cost, right?  Surely it is a niche market that someone could fill?  Sure.  Just until you assess the crap out of the place.

Tomorrow: Answers!  Just kidding; I have no answers.

The Right Attitude for the Times

For a hundred years, our school has been giving thousands of students a variety of skills and attitudes.  Our faculty have been telling them about the wisdom of the ancients, the opinions of sages and cranks (not always making clear which is which), a variety of procedures for doing things, analytical tools, insights, and occasionally, prejudices!  When they graduate, students are often grateful to their school, and later in life, respond with generosity.

The generosity of alumni and well-wishers gives our school a slightly greater degree of permanence.  The permanence of their alma mater is valuable to alumni, but it is desperately important to those of us who work here.  College faculty are understandably preoccupied with generosity for this reason.

Thinking of generosity, one associates it with earlier times: the industrialists of the golden age of America, names associated with steel, coal and oil.  But in these difficult times, it seems as if purse-strings are being tightened with great determination; doors are firmly bolted at night, as we peer anxiously through cracks in the shutters at what seems an inhospitable, even a hostile world.  But others are hurting far more than we are.  Soon it could be time for food banks, for soup kitchens, for free clinics, and homeless shelters.  The need for generosity does not wait on convenience.

But generosity is learned, not born with.  It is here, in college, that the young people see examples of going the extra mile, staying that extra hour, giving that extra review, and summoning up that one last smile when you would really rather not.  Generosity goes hand in hand with education.  Education, on the face of it, is enlightened self-interest, spiced with generosity.  In reality, it is generosity of spirit, masquerading as self-interest!

How the Government Decides on a Major Expense

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Well, if you thought you were confused about whether you could afford a major purchase, imagine the quandary in which Lawmakers find themselves!

For instance, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives has been asking itself whether it can afford to have various gasoline companies from Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Florida, etc, develop the so-called Marcellus Shale Gas deposits.  Can we afford the ruined roads, the polluted rivers, the destroyed property values?  Well, sure, provided these companies hire people locally.  That would ensure that the grateful newly-employed workers will vote for their representatives who pimped for the gas companies, giving them a free ride without additional taxation or any sort of excise burden.  Unfortunately, it is the unemployed workers from Texas and Arkansas, etc, etc, who are getting employed; the local kids just get the least well-paid, most dangerous jobs.  On the plus side, bars and brothels are doing a great business, but on the whole, the total infusion into the economy of Pennsylvania is miniscule; the State still hurts for revenue, and education funding has been severely cut.

When the Federal Government decides on a particular project, it is with great difficulty, because the true cost of the project is difficult to estimate.  Why is this?  Because it is essentially paid for with credit, by floating bond issues, or printing paper money.  When the government decides on lowering taxes, again they do not know the exact value of the loss of revenue, because the true value of these taxes (which technically have not even been levied yet) is impossible to estimate.  You can state it exactly in dollars and cents, but you're using a unit whose value, in turn, is uncertain.

Many economists will ask me right back: what do you mean by the "true value" of anything?  And, quite honestly, I don't know myself!  The word "value" has almost no meaning as it is, though the economists will insist that it has exactly as much meaning today as it ever did, namely a subjective quantity that each person must decide for themselves, but about which there can be some consensus by averaging over a large population.

After MortgageGate, however, in the eyes of many observers and mine, the process of arriving at an averaged figure for an aggregate risk for a large collection of risky ventures has tainted the whole idea of aggregation of values.

The ability of an individual to assess whether he or she can afford a purchase is compromised by the constant use of personal credit.  Similarly, the Government --though its resources are far greater then those of an individual-- nevertheless finds it difficult, or even impossible, to assess the affordability of such steps as lowering or increasing specific taxes, or providing or ceasing to provide a particular benefit.

Despite all this, however, I presently believe that the Government should spend whatever is necessary to increase employment.  This would normally involve creating government jobs, but the current political climate makes expanding the public sector repugnant to the top income portion of the population, those few hundred souls who earn most of the money in the USA.  So the administration has to resort to leaving it in the hands of Small Business to hire new workers, and giving the businesses tax incentives for doing so.

But the hiring of a new worker is a huge risk for a small business.  Even if it thinks it could use a new worker, the conservative lobby has persuaded it that the hire means huge expenses in Health Insurance and unemployment insurance, and all the sorts of costs the Business Lobby keeps working to eliminate.  Business would like the hiring of a worker to be a trivial thing: hire today, fire tomorrow.  But society has an interest in making the firing of a worker something that is done with due caution and consideration, and not lightly.  So liberal politicians (and liberals, generally) would like there to be a certain amount of inertia in the process of hiring and firing, to reduce uncertainty in employment among the smallest-income sector of society.

So, as President Obama pointed out in his Jobs speech, there is no point in reducing taxes across the board for all businesses, and expect them to go into a hiring frenzy.  Instead, it is better to offer tax reductions precisely to those businesses that actually hire unemployed workers.  The Republican opposition will certainly find something objectionable in that plan.

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How to decide on a major purchase

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Oh what a terrible world we live in!

I have blogged before on this issue: how can we make decisions on the quality of a product before we buy?

The economists say that the value of a product is how much the public is willing to pay for it.  More accurately, the value of a product to a particular person is precisely how much money he or she is willing to part with to procure it.  This simple view, initially perpetrated on us by some economic fathead in the late eighteenth century no doubt, is beginning to lose any residual validity it might have had.

Firstly, the money anyone is willing to pay for anything depends entirely on his or her credit situation.  We pay for silly things that are really not worth very much simply because we're not thinking very hard, and we pay with a credit-card.  Impulse purchases dilute the strength of the "value-willingness to pay" paradigm because it would suggest that very similar people with different credit situations will respond differently to the same product---indeed, the same person would respond differently--- other things being equal.  So the value of a product becomes entirely a matter of psychology and financial liquidity.  Economics is based on this value paradigm, and their insistence that the value of a class of things averages out over the market into something that is objective is hard to accept in a post-October-2009 world (or whenever the hell the economy of the USA went south, and stayed south, and don't give me any crap about how great it is today).

Secondly, Manufacturers have stumbled onto the trick of making every product a new product.  Even an automobile model that was assessed as being a great value in July could be altered in December, to use inferior parts, assemble it in a less reliable location with poorly paid workers, so that the half-year model is significantly different from the model you thought you had inspected carefully, and about whose worth you were satisfied in the Summer.  Shoes, cameras, computers, printers, paper, everything is an untried and untested product.  Bait-and-switch is built-in into the system.  Services.  TV sets.  Music Records; DVDs.  Two identically labeled items might be quite different when you open up the packages.

In short, we really have no objective basis on which to base our assessment of value.

The manufacturer might be reputable.  But over the years there have been numerous instances of reputable manufacturers who have compromised quality at some point, leaving a vast number of consumers owning a worthless product for which they had high hopes.  Toyota.  Drug companies.  Credit card companies.  Mortgages.  Phones.

Consumer's Union tests products, and their members read the reports to decide which products to buy.  But manufacturers discontinue the products the minute they get a bad rating, and market the identical product under either a different product label, or a different model number.  "Model x15 was discontinued; there were some design errors.  Model y53 is completely different!  Try it!  It has fabric softner, and makes you smell nice, too!  And it comes in this handy toxic bottle!"

The same kind of thing, of course, happens with service companies.  Vice President X comes up with a fabulous plan for earning the company millions of dollars at the expense of the customers.  (The upper management pretends to be completely ignorant of what X is doing.)  As soon as customers stumble onto the deception, X is fired with much noise (though, of course, his contract gives him a fabulous golden parachute), and a new face, Y, is hired to replace him.  The kindly face of the company president assures the public that the company is now completely worthy of trust, and will uphold its high standards once more.

But my original topic was: how to decide on a major purchase.  Do I have a method I can recommend?

Well, nothing really novel.  You have to research the product twice as hard as you would have some years ago.  You must learn where the product is actually manufactured; for instance, a Toyota might actually be manufactured by Ford, or an Oster product actually manufactured by Black & Decker.  You must read all the consumer information (including Consumer Reports, or similarly reliable publication, as well as reviews on Amazon, and on the Internet generally, bearing in mind that Internet reviews are often planted by the manufacturers themselves, and cannot always be trusted).  You must ask around your friends and colleagues, but be careful to measure their recommendations against what you know of their reliability and good judgment as well as how different their use patterns might be from yours.  For instance, a backyard chef might label product A as poor, while an occasional barbecuer might consider product A quite reasonable.  Your mileage, clearly, will vary.

Don't be shy about asking a question on FaceBook, or on your personal network.  (On the down side, Facebook will inundate you with advertisements for the product in question.)  Finally, ask the salesman candidly, when his or her supervisor isn't watching, and study their expression carefully.

Getting Sick and Tired of Government?

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It appears that there are only cynics and megalomaniacs running for office throughout the world.  Let's face it: Barack Obama seemed just the ticket four years ago; why can't he keep up?  Answer: Government is just too big for anyone to steer.

We used to think that the bureaucracy was too big, and Reagan began the first wave of outsourcing back in the eighties (or 80s, if you prefer, or even 80's).  This is basically what privatizing government services is: you outsource it to private companies.

What does this entail?  You send home (i.e. fire) a whole enormous office of inefficient pencil-pushers who are paid by the taxpayer, and over whom you have some slight control.  Instead, you employ a private company, which then hires a whole heap of employees ---over whom you have absolutely no control, and about whom you frankly do not care---and they, in turn, hire smaller private companies to do menial work (like make the coffee, fill the water coolers, replace the toilet paper, send out the mail, etc, etc), and each of these companies are, in turn farming out the work to several other smaller companies.

All this provides a lot of very low level employment for a lot of disgruntled people.  But you have no control over the way the job is done, just over the final product.

What control do you have?

If you don't like what they come back with, you can fire them.  It is not easy to fire government employees, but you can fire outsourced work.

So far, there is a lot of dissatisfaction about outsourced government work.  Work for the Armed Services outsourced to private companies have been unpopular (the private workers have been poorly behaved, and supplied some poor quality services ---I can't remember the exact complaints--- and have been a public relations problem for the Services specifically, and for the country as a whole).  Security work ---for instance at air terminals etc--- have come under fire for various reasons (dissatisfaction with the public relations of the security agents, i.e. rude security people; allowing countries other than the US to handle American security, e.g. companies based in the Gulf, which happen to have shares in American airport terminals, etc.  NASA, for instance,  has outsourced its services to other companies for decades; the shuttles, for instance, were built by private companies.

Does outsourcing reduce the size of government?  Yes, and no.

Don't forget the large proportion of services that are the responsibility of the individual states.  The States administer a large proportion ---if not all--- of the welfare services, the housing, medical insurance control, education.  Additional opportunities for adding bureaucrats arise when each department of each State has to interface with the corresponding department of the Federal Government.  Remember the Baby Bells?  That was initially a Good Thing.  Then Washington decided (under the supervision of a Democrat president, I do think I remember) to allow the Baby Bells to offer services across the nation, and now we have Verizon and AT&T (the largest Baby, and Ma Bell) set to become so big that they can legally proceed to fix prices, once they become effectively a Monopoly.  However, when government services are outsourced, it seems to me that they become still harder to keep track of; like herding cats.

We (my wife and I) were just talking over the seven large Government agencies that between them provide all the services: HUD, HEW, Justice, State, and so on.  How many of the Secretaries of these do we know by name?  Hilary Clinton is one of the few that springs to mind; many of the others are anonymous figures about whom we know very little.  President Obama, of course, must know them all, and consult with them regularly.  These agencies are staffed, by and large, with people who are in the Government game for the long run, and are expected to take responsibility for the success and or failure of each aspect of their charges.

The legislative branch, meanwhile, seems to bumble along, with most congressmen more anxious to be noticed than to support good legislation.  Why is this?  They get re-elected for those things that they claimed to have done than for the things they actually achieved.  This great democratic nation has a bunch of voters who don't really know what actually took place on Capitol Hill, but rather what their favorite news sources say took place on Capitol Hill.
Congressman: Vote for me!  Any questions?  Yes, from that intelligent-looking gent over there ... ?
Voter 1: Hey, man, you guys did not pass a decent Health Care Reform bill.  You suck.
Favorite News Source: No, actually, the Congressman saved you from a bill that would have cost millionaires a lot of money.  And everybody would have been forced to get insurance.
Voter 1: Well, I have insurance.
Favorite News Source: Sure, as long as you have a job.  What happens when you get laid off?
Voter 2: I got laid off!!!  I would have to get insurance?
Favorite News Source:  Sure would.  These Health Reform bills are bad for poor people and for millionaires.
Voter 3:  Is that really true?
Congressman: Yes!  It was terrible!  I didn't vote for it very much at all, really!  I was totally thinking of my electorate.
Voters:  I guess you don't suck.

Great.  All's well that ends well.  The poor congressman doesn't really see any of the money that the Party bigwigs get from the Insurance Industry lobbyists.  But Congressmen are not elected for their intelligence anyway.