September 30, 2013

Finnish-oriented content: the decline of Nokia

Unemployment Rates
Three big economic success stories of the era up through 2007 were Spain, Ireland, and Finland. All three use the Euro as currency. 

The Finnish economy was driven more by a single company (Nokia) than perhaps any other advanced economy in the world. Not too surprisingly, Nokia's dominance of one of the world's most competitive industries -- cellphones -- didn't last. Competitors sprung up at the low end, while Apple's introduction of the iPhone in June 2007 increasingly absorbed huge dollops of profit out of the high end.

Finland's economy recovered only moderately from the 2008 global crash, and is in trouble again today.
With Nokia's rise during 1990s, Finland rapidly recovered from deep recession and become one of the foremost knowledge economies in the world, said a report published by ETLA in March. 
During Nokia's prime years 1998-2007, the company contributed a quarter of the growth of the Finnish economy. It created nearly a fifth of Finland's exports and paid as much as 23% of all Finnish corporation tax revenue. 
However, its descent since 2008 has devastated Finland's economy. Nearly one-third of the over 8% drop in the Finnish GDP in 2009 was attributable to Nokia, and now the company's share of contribution in Finland's GDP has fallen to virtually zero, said the report.

It's kind of like if your national economy were built around Blackberry. 

All three countries were hammered hard in 2008 with unemployment hitting 8.7% in Finland by January 2010, versus 13.1% in Ireland and 19.2% in Spain. ( (All figures from a graph offered by Google from Eurostat data. Warning: unemployment can be defined differently in different countries.)

As of May 2013, unemployment in Finland was 8.4% and rising; in Ireland 13.6%; in Spain 26.9%. Each country's situation is unique and complex, but it's worth considering degree of enthusiasm for immigration during the 2000s bubble. 

Back then, Spain was celebrated for its rapid influx of immigrants, as, to perhaps a lesser extent, was Ireland. Finland, although it has a gigantic border with a much poorer country, tended to lag the rest of Western Europe in immigration. It's cold, dark in winter, far away, speaks an unusual language, has a militarized border, and enforces work permit laws efficiently.

This may have something to do with how much more stable Finland's unemployment rate has been despite the decline of Nokia.

Daily Mail v. NYT smackdown on gypsies in France

It would be interesting to compare coverage of gypsies (a.k.a. Roma) in the New York Times versus the Daily Mail. My impression is that you could come up with an equally accurate awareness from both, but that, even though New York Times readers average better reading skills, the average Daily Mail reader winds up better informed because the Daily Mail articles are structured to communicate the key information, while the NYT articles are structured to bury it. 

For example, in summer's NYT article "Treatment Still Harsh for Roma in France" by Steven Erlanger, the first five paragraphs are boilerplate about how everybody is mean to the gypsies, but then you get to this, which I'll ellipse like crazy to get the key point across lucidly:
Small, thin, often wearing bright clothing like green pants or a pink scarf, the men are prostitutes, looking for work or waiting for prearranged rendezvous. ... Some are as young as 14, though they insist they are older; some are 16 and married, sometimes with children. ... He and his friends, like Bogdan, 17, and Gutsa, 17, whose wife is pregnant, “do business” at the station, he said; 

Homosexual prostitution and heterosexual baby boom all rolled into one!

NYT reporters tend to be bright and they'd prefer not to be boring, but they have to respect the world view of their readers: everything bad is the fault of some majority. So, you start with five paragraphs about how bad the majority treats the minority to imply that the juicy details you finally get to reveal about how hilariously awful is Roma culture must be the fault of the French for trying not to get their pockets picked by gypsies.

In contrast, the Daily Mail structures its articles to put the fun stuff first. From today's Daily Mail:
Roma gypsy gang sold their women for stealing skills and children were used like conscripts in a criminal army, French court told at start trial  
Young wives with good looks and stealing skills were traded for £170,000 
Police discovered the 'criminal army' through phone tapping 
Defendants argue it was illegal intrusion into normal Roma dowry system 

The scary word is "normal."
27 people charged are accused of committing 100 robberies in 2011 alone 
Offences were carried out in France, Belgium and parts of Germany  
Suspected gang leader, a 66-year-old woman to be tried separately 
By PETER ALLEN IN PARIS 
Children as young as 10 were part of a ‘criminal army’ of Roma immigrants which included 13-year-old wives ‘bought’ for up to 170,000 pounds each, a court heard today.  
Details of the sinister network emerged during the trial of 27 men and women aged between 19 and 55 in Nancy, eastern France. 
All face up to 10 years in prison after being accused of a wide range of crimes, ranging from robbery to people trafficking. 
The case began on the day that France's foreign minister Laurent Fabius declared Romania and Bulgaria should not be allowed into the passport-free Schengen zone due to security fears. 
Ultimately run by a 66-year-old woman, the network expected boys and girls to bring in at least 4000 pounds a month through robbing people in the street or in their homes. 
It comes as Britain braces itself for an influx of Roma from Bulgaria and Romania when EU labour restrictions are eased next year. 
Gilles Weintz, the detective who led the enquiry into the France-based ring, said all those involved were Roma originally from Croatia. 
... Male leaders ‘bought young wives’ for the cash equivalent of up to £170,000 each from other families in Croatia, and selected them especially for their stealing skills.

‘The better they were at stealing, the higher the price was,’ said Mr Weintz.  
‘Young looking women also commanded higher prices because they had a better chance of passing themselves off as minors. 
‘The burglaries were carried out daily all over Europe,’ he added. ‘They never stopped - for the children it was like a form of military service.’  
Those running the ring were monitored via tapped phones which revealed a ‘mafia style’ network, with those in charge using their stolen money to buy upmarket properties in Slavonski Brod in Croatia. 
... The officer cited the case of a woman identified as Nathalie who had been bought but failed to live up to expectations by bringing in 'only' 200,000 euros over two years. ... 
Her family was allegedly ordered to pay back 100,000 euros but the amount was finally reduced to 55,000 to take into account the sexual abuse she had suffered. ...
All argue that their complicated financial transactions were based on traditional Roma dowry arrangements, and that the phone tapping was illegal. 

And now we finally get to the boring NYT lede-type stuff:
Defence lawyer Alain Behr also said the current anti-Roma feeling in France meant they could not get a fair trial.  
‘I hope there will not be a judicial stigmatisation as there is currently a political stigmatisation,’ said Mr Behr. 
Speaking on France Inter radio today, foreign minister Laurent Fabius said France is not in favour of allowing Romania and Bulgaria into Europe's passport-free Schengen zone for now due to concerns about border security. 
He said: 'If there is not a change in conditions, we won't be in favour.' ...
Romanian and Bulgarian citizens currently have the right to travel with a passport throughout the Schengen zone, which removes border controls among most EU countries as well as non-members such as Switzerland and Norway. ...

Fabius fears lax immigration laws in those countries could mean any nationality could gain French access.


... Last week, Interior Minister Manuel Valls caused uproar in the left-wing governing coalition by saying most immigrant Roma could not be integrated into society and should go home. 
The far-right National Front has made the issue a top campaign theme for March's municipal elections, warning of a new influx of immigrants if Romanian and Bulgarian citizens are allowed to travel freely without passports in the Schengen zone. 

Spain: Test case for mass immigration

From Bloomberg BusinessWeek in 2007:
Spain: Immigrants Welcome 
May 20, 2007
     
Imagine what would happen if a prosperous Western nation threw open its borders, allowing immigrants to flood in virtually unchecked. Soaring unemployment, overstretched social services, rising crime, even rioting in the streets? Not in Spain. 
Over the past decade, the traditionally homogeneous country has become a sort of open-door laboratory on immigration. Spain has absorbed more than 3 million foreigners from places as diverse as Romania, Morocco, and South America. More than 11% of the country's 44 million residents are now foreign-born, one of the highest proportions in Europe. With hundreds of thousands more arriving each year, Spain could soon reach the U.S. rate of 12.9%. 
And it doesn't seem to have hurt much. Spain is Europe's best-performing major economy, with growth averaging 3.1% over the past five years. Since 2002, the country has created half the new jobs in the euro zone. Unemployment has plummeted from more than 20% in the 1990s to 8.6%, within shooting distance of the 7.2% euro zone average. The government attributes more than half this stellar performance to immigration.  ...
Immigrants are weaving vitality into Spanish society, too. Stroll through Tetu??n, a vibrant multiethnic neighborhood in north central Madrid, and you'll find an Ecuadoran bakery, a Moroccan furniture shop, and an everything-for-1-euro store called Los Chinos because its owners are Chinese. 

As we all know, massive immigration is Good for the Economy, so 2013 reports that the current unemployment rate in Spain is 27% are obviously falsehoods made up by evil nativists. Obviously, Spain's economic problem must be a lack of immigration. Immigration hasn't failed in Spain, it just hasn't been tried enough!

September 29, 2013

The past is a semi-foreign country; they do some things differently there, others not so much

One of my recurrent shticks is to try to compare the dominant assumptions of the moment to those of the past. That's because people have a hard time remembering the past, even the parts they lived through.

So, to try to present some objective evidence on what the past was like, here are the national high school debate topics from age 13-17:
1972-73   Resolved: That governmental financial support for all public and secondary education in the United States be provided exclusively by the federal government. 

This is when I first read up on the social science work of Coleman, Jencks, Jensen, and others.
1973-74   Resolved: That the federal government should guarantee a minimum annual income to each family unit. 

A similar topic with much overlap in social sciences. Both of these debate topics reflect specific panaceas of the era that have fallen out of fashion, but the general topics haven't changed much at all in four decades. Obviously, they were both deeply entwined with race. And still are.

Thus, when I complain about how little has changed in thinking about race, education, and poverty, and how the latest fads tend to be rehashes of old ideas, I have a 1972-74 baseline in mind.
1974-75   Resolved: That the United States should significantly change the method of selection of presidential and vice-presidential candidates. 

In contrast, there's relatively little interest in this topic anymore. It's tied into the kind of Good Government reformist progressivism that has declined in popularity with the rise of identity politics. Thus, the post-2000 effort to improve voting machines quickly got boring. The Republicans haven't been able to dig up phony voting scandals with much traction, although the Democrats have had lots of luck getting elderly black people worked up that their votes are being taken away.

But, in general, there not much interest today in procedural reforms -- technocratic improvements are of little interest these days compared to identity politics squabbles.
1975-76   Resolved: That the development and allocation of scarce world resources should be controlled by an international organization.

Today, this one sounds like it's from Mars: Instead of nationalizing the means of production, should we internationalize the means of production? I mean, why not?

When I try to point out how much less suspicion there is of big business today than in the 1970s, this is a good example of what I'm talking about.

Could anybody have imagined a black man becoming President?

For example, how often have you heard it said when Obama was elected, "Nobody could ever have imagined a black man becoming President!"? On the other hand, I can recall lots of paperback copies sitting around when I was a kid of Irving Wallace's 1964 bestseller The Man about a first black President. Wallace was a non-literary, meat and potatoes novelist who liked researching facts and writing about interesting topics. The Man was made into a movie in 1972 starring James Earl Jones.

For this and other reasons, a black President always seemed highly imaginable to me.

On the other other hand, there are all sorts of emotional-related things about my past that I have only the vaguest recollection of. For example, from watching Steven Spielberg movies such as Hook I've learned that there's nothing more emotionally crucial in one's life than whether or not your parents went to your Little League baseball games. But I don't actually remember feeling any strong emotions about my parents not attending my Little League baseball games other than thinking to myself "That seems reasonable" when they announced their policy on baseball: I couldn't join Little League because Little League parents are crazy, but I could play in the league at the park because it was more low key; but they'd never walk the block to the park to see my park league games because that would "put too much pressure on me."

So, I've always been interested in policy to a weird extent.

Chabris on Gladwell in the WSJ

In the Wall Street Journal, psychometrician Chris Chabris dumps on Malcolm Gladwell in a review of Gladwell's latest book.
Book Review: 'David and Goliath' by Malcolm Gladwell 
Malcolm Gladwell too often presents as proven laws what are just intriguing possibilities and musings about human behavior. 
By CHRISTOPHER F. CHABRIS 
... The idea that difficulty is good when it helps you and bad when it doesn't is no great insight.
In a recent interview, Mr. Gladwell suggested that the hidden weakness of "Goliath" enterprises is their tendency to assume that the strategy that made them great will keep them great. But there are prominent examples of companies that failed after not changing direction (Blockbuster and Kodak) as well as ones that succeeded (Apple deciding to stick with a proprietary operating system rather than shift to Windows). There is no prospective way to know which is right, despite what legions of business gurus say. Sticking with what has worked is far from irrational; indeed, it is the perfect strategy right up until it isn't.
One thing "David and Goliath" shows is that Mr. Gladwell has not changed his own strategy, despite serious criticism of his prior work. What he presents are mostly just intriguing possibilities and musings about human behavior, but what his publisher sells them as, and what his readers may incorrectly take them for, are lawful, causal rules that explain how the world really works. Mr. Gladwell should acknowledge when he is speculating or working with thin evidentiary soup. Yet far from abandoning his hand or even standing pat, Mr. Gladwell has doubled down. This will surely bring more success to a Goliath of nonfiction writing, but not to his readers. 

Interestingly, Gladwell revives Thomas Sowell's 1970s critique of the tendency of affirmative action to mismatch students. (I wonder if Gladwell left out the affirmative action part.) Chabris writes:
This is an entertaining book. But it teaches little of general import, for the morals of the stories it tells lack solid foundations in evidence and logic.
One of the longest chapters addresses the question of how high-school students choose colleges. The protagonist is a woman with the pseudonym of Caroline Sacks, who was at the top of her class in high school and had loved science ever since she drew pictures of insects as a child. She was admitted to Brown University and the University of Maryland; she went to Brown, her first choice of all the colleges she visited, with the goal of a science degree. 
Ms. Sacks ran into trouble early on in her science courses and hit a wall in organic chemistry. There were students in her classes who seemed to effortlessly grasp concepts she struggled with, and she got discouragingly low grades. She switched her major and looks back with regret, saying that if she'd gone to Maryland, "I'd still be in science." 

Is Brown really a Caltech-style sink or swim school? It may well be in the harder subjects, but I just don't know.
In this conclusion she may be right. Mr. Gladwell reports data showing that, no matter what kind of college students attend, those who start a science major in the top third of the ability range of students at their own college (judged by their SAT scores) are much more likely to graduate with a science degree than those in the bottom third—the odds are about 55% versus 15%. 

I used to be a 100% true believer in Sowell's argument, but now I can also see a lot of advantages of going to an elite rich school if you can get in. A lot of state flagship schools are sink or swim in the STEM fields, while rich private schools (Brown is the least rich Ivy) have more hand-holding resources.

How big can the global auto parts market be?

I'm interested in the topic of cartels and price-fixing, in large part because nobody else seems to be interested in them, which reflects a massive change from as recently as the 1970s. For example, here's an NYT news story from last week about a federal $740 million fine of Japanese car parts makers for rigging the car parts market. 
In an expanding global antitrust investigation, nine Japanese automotive suppliers, along with two former executives, have agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy and pay more than $740 million in criminal fines for fixing the price of auto parts sold in the United States and abroad, the Justice Department said Thursday. 
The pleas were the latest in what the Justice Department said was its largest criminal antitrust investigation, one that has involved the authorities from Asia to North America to Europe and has now resulted in $1.6 billion in fines since 2011. 
More than a dozen separate conspiracies involving more than 30 kinds of parts affected sales to Chrysler, Ford and General Motors, as well as the American subsidiaries of Honda, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Subaru and Toyota. 
“These international price-fixing conspiracies affected more than $5 billion in automobile parts sold to U.S. car manufacturers,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement. “In total, more than 25 million cars purchased by American consumers were affected by the illegal conduct.” 
Hitachi Automotive Systems and Mitsubishi Electric paid the biggest fines, $195 million and $190 million. The Justice Department said the two companies’ price-fixing schemes lasted from at least January 2000 through February 2010. 
The parts included seat belts, radiators, windshield wipers and air-conditioning systems, Mr. Holder said. The Justice Department said that while the price fixing increased the cost of cars for consumers, there was no way to determine exactly how much.

What is is striking is how little of a splash this made in the blogosphere. Now it could be that the still hidden conspiracies in other markets out there don't really add up to a hill of beans. Or it could be that if we knew everything that was going on, we'd be shocked by the magnitude. I don't know. It seems like an interesting question, but evidently it's not.

Back in the 1970s, it would have been a hot topic. Being a part of the free market avant-garde (complete with my Adam Smith and Milton Friedman t-shirts I bought in 1976), all this hubbub in the press and on talk radio about monopolies and price-fixing struck me as mostly dope smokers' paranoia. 

And, I'm sure that the conventional wisdom was overblown back then. 

On this issue, my teenage self turned out to be a big winner. Everybody who is anybody seems to assume that cartels and anti-trust are some Teddy Roosevelt-era obsession and it can't be a problem anymore because of, you know, Moore's Law or the Fall of the Berlin Wall or something. 

Granted, there's a fair amount of interest in the obvious fact that Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are all plotting to monopolize as much of the digital world as possible because that's cutting edge. But many would complain that I'm using "monopolize" like it's a bad thing. It's good for your stock holdings in whichever company wins, so what's not to like?

Still, price-fixing in boring industries like auto parts is boring squared (Who ever needs auto parts? Surely, the global auto parts industry can't compare in economic importance to Twitter's IPO?).

When I took Economics of Antitrust back in 1978 from a free marketeer professor who thought the worries about cartels were hugely overstated, I was out ahead of the curve. But there's another important concept in economics: diminishing marginal returns. It's cool that 35 years ago I was on what turned out to be the winning side, but now I'm worried that my side won in too big of a rout that's gone on too long.

In terms of intellectual fashions, people don't seem to pay much attention to the potential for diminishing marginal returns. Instead, the bandwagon effect seems stronger. If we had success in the past by recommending policy X, then the only thing to do is X times 2.

September 28, 2013

Gladwell on Gladwell

From The Telegraph, an interview in which Malcolm Gladwell (promoting his new book) says some reasonable things about himself.
Malcolm Gladwell interview 
Conventional wisdom says Malcolm Gladwell is a zany brainbox whose books challenge our assumptions and revolutionise our lives. But, asks Gaby Wood, is that another misconception? 
By Gaby Wood12:00PM BST 28 Sep 2013 
Malcolm Gladwell says he never knows what people will take from his books. 
“It’s never what I think it’s going to be,” he shrugs. “Parts that you think are going to make this big impact are ignored, and parts that you wrote in a day are like the 10,000 hours stuff – I thought no one would ever mention that again. And it is, in fact, all people talk about. Who knew?” 
... And most of the time he synthesises zanily sourced evidence with such alchemy that you can’t work out if it was obvious all along, or if it only seems obvious now that it has passed through Gladwell’s hands. That is his trick. He’d say he is just telling stories, which makes him a Scheherazade for our time, stringing out tales about the power within us, talking to keep us going and make us think. 
His new book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants, is his most accessible.

Hopefully, he's lost from his new David and Goliath book his original 2009 "How David Beats Goliath" New Yorker article, which spectacularly highlighted his worst trait: his inability to do reality checks on ideas that strike his fancy. In it, he argued that undertalented basketball teams should run the full court press against their Goliath rivals: Flummox the big boys by changing all the rules!

Except that the full court press notoriously is the overtalented overdog's weapon of choice: UCLA under John Wooden, Bill Russell's Celtics, Showtime Lakers (Kareem, Magic, Worthy, Nixon, and Cooper), and the 1996 Kentucky Wildcats (an example of an underdog, according to Malcolm, even though the five starters averaged over 10 years in the NBA each!).
Some would say it's too accessible ... 
In a footnote – many of Gladwell’s jokes are in the footnotes – he offers up a self-mocking anecdote in which his father accuses him of oversimplifying things. Well, since he’s brought it up, I ask. “I get that all the time,” Gladwell replies, undefensively. “But it’s this impossible thing: you have a continuum – at one end is academic writing, at the other end a book for a 10-year-old. You try to figure out where you want to be on the continuum. But you don’t always get it right.” 
The book takes some very well-known stories – the biblical tale of the title, the Blitz, the Impressionists, Northern Ireland, the Civil Rights movement, the French Resistance – and sets them up as fables that will be elucidated or expanded by stirring examples taken from the lives of unknown people. The gist is that those things we think of as disadvantages – the death of a parent, dyslexia, trauma – can be advantages in themselves. 
David looked to be small and unarmed but he was in fact a champion slinger. Goliath seemed the stronger party but his gigantism actually impaired his vision. It’s a rousing theory, an Asterix-like view of the world, full of insurgents and resisters, indomitable spirits prepared to do battle against the big guys. 
But it can also be infuriating, because nothing is proven. An alternative title for the book might have been “Six of One, Half a Dozen of the Other”. 
Statistics suggest that if you lose a parent you could be prime minister. Or you could end up in jail. What to do with that information? 
“It’s not supposed to be prescriptive,” Gladwell replies. “It’s just supposed to be a musing on the nature of advantage. And as I’ve written more books I’ve realised there are certain things that writers and critics prize, and readers don’t. So we’re obsessed with things like coherence, consistency, neatness of argument. Readers are indifferent to those things. My books have contradictions, all the time – and people are fine with that. 
“They understand that you can simultaneously hold two positions. Blink was the same way: we have this faculty – it’s good sometimes, it’s bad sometimes. That’s what the book was about.” He chuckles boyishly. “But it’s still really interesting! It’s just, I can’t resolve it – what am I, Sigmund Freud?”

Hegel's thesis, antithesis, synthesis is a helpful bumpersticker for how to thinker better. Examine the contradictions and look for an underlying pattern that will explain more of the outcomes than either theory alone. The full court press works in some circumstances,
... Education, and middle-class fretting over it, is one of Gladwell’s hobbyhorses. If you hit back with the observation that he himself has no children, he smiles and says that would only cloud his judgment. 
But the truth is, he doesn’t go all that far. There’s something troublingly palatable about the new book. In the endnotes to one of the chapters on education, for instance, Gladwell has much stronger views than he expresses in the text itself. “So what should we do? We should be firing bad teachers,” he suggests. But he has buried that stuff at the back. “Yeah. It’s true. That’s absolutely the case,” he admits when I put this to him. 
Far from being a purveyor of self-evidence, I suspect Gladwell is much more radical than he lets on. Why hide it? 
“The problem is, in America, there are all these landmines,” he says. “Like, I wanted to do a chapter on terrorism, and the question is, which example do I use? The example you cannot use is Israel – not because there aren’t a ton of fascinating lessons to be learnt in how Israel has navigated these issues in the course of its history. But it would have gotten politicised – no one would read your book anymore.” So he chose Northern Ireland, because it was “safer”, and because “the willingness to be self-critical in England is much greater than the willingness to be self-critical in America”. 
But if he has things to say about Israel, why doesn’t he want to say them? 
“I actually don’t even know if I do,” he says. “I just worried too much. I didn’t want the book to be put in a pigeonhole. And I don’t know if I’m smart enough.

Gladwell does not have a gigantic ego. He sees himself as a sort of super-publicist for all these brilliant but overlooked publicists and consultants. The problem with his ego is that he doesn't go the next step and hire a research assistant smarter than him who can figure out the landmines in the latest brilliant idea that some publicist has dropped on his desk. Compare Gladwell to David Brooks, who has employed assistants of the caliber of Reihan Salam and Cynthia Allen.
"What’s interesting with Israel is that in some contexts they’re always David, and in some contexts they have become Goliath. 
“Depending on your perspective. If I were to write another chapter to this book I’d love to write about that tension – because lots of people wear two hats. Companies do this all the time – they start out as Davids and become Goliaths.” 
Is it that he needs things to be nice – does he fear coming across as disagreeable? 
“Well, I’m not disagreeable. I’m so insanely agreeable on so many levels,” he replies, sounding, if anything, a little disappointed.

I think that's true. He has a positive upbeat staff guy personality -- I'm just throwing this idea out there, you executives who hired me to give this talk are the decisionmakers, not me -- that I can identify with.
“But it depends what you want. I want people to listen to what I have to say. I think you can challenge people’s core assumptions only so many times, and you can offend them only so many times, and you can threaten them only so many times. If you do it too often, they’ll throw the book aside. In this book I want people to understand – it’s a really corny lesson – that something good comes even out of the most horrible of things. Which I think is a profoundly comforting and meaningful message. That’s all. That’s what I want.” 
For the most part, Gladwell says, he doesn’t “personalise this stuff”. He’s quick to tell me that “there is not a shred of underdog in any aspect of my life”, though he didn’t grow up with a sense of entitlement. The son of a Jamaican psychotherapist and a mathematician from Sevenoaks, he was raised in rural Canada, in a town mostly populated by Mennonites and a family of evangelical Christians. 
In the course of writing this book he has “drifted back”, and become, as he puts it, “much more open and oriented towards faith than I was”. His race, he says, “hasn’t impacted negatively on my life, it’s just made my life more interesting. By virtue of my own background I’ve been put in the middle of that conversation – I wouldn’t have thought about West Indians or African Americans or slavery in the same way.” 
As for Englishness – well, I assume he doesn’t feel any particular affinity with his father’s country. 
“Actually, I do feel English,” he says. “I think my character is quite English – you know, emotionally withholding, unreasonably stoic, unnecessarily ascetic.” He smiles. “I could go on.” Gladwell lives alone on the top two floors of a west Village brownstone – not luxuriously, but not especially bohemian-ly either. In fact, when I arrive, some of his things are in boxes – he used to live just on one floor, and has only recently taken over the next. To journalists, Gladwell’s personal life has always been a bit of an enigma – but to others, apparently, not ostentatiously so. He has had many girlfriends, he is sociable but hard-working.

Right. He's not gay. My readers have run into him several times in restaurants with nice looking ladies across the table.
When I ask if any of his research has led him to live his own life differently, he replies that “the only book that sort of tripped me up was Blink, which made it impossible for me to make a decision. It was very sobering to know how insidious unconscious biases are – I just assumed that everything I was doing was hopelessly corrupted. And I changed the way I hired assistants after that book. I became convinced that I had to absent myself from the process: basically, my assistants hire their own replacements because I would bring too many biases to the table."

Uh-oh.
"I actually think most jobs should be like that – you should never meet people. You get swayed by their charm or how tall or well-dressed they are – all these things that are not relevant.” One of the ironies of Gladwell’s career – or perhaps it’s just a natural evolution – is that some of the academics whose ideas he set out to popularise have become accessible writers themselves. The rise of Daniel Kahneman, for example, whose book Thinking, Fast and Slow has become an international bestseller, suggests that Gladwell’s interpretations may no longer be necessary – in other words, that he may have made himself extinct. 
Gladwell counters that scientists who write accessibly are not a new breed – he cites Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins. “But if I were to be self-serving, I would like to take some small degree of credit for the success of Danny Kahneman’s book,” he adds. It sounds like the preamble to some arrogant swagger – but no. Just the opposite. 
“What I’ve always thought my books were doing was whetting people’s appetite for the real thing,” he explains. “The mistake is to think these books are ends in themselves. My books are gateway drugs – they lead you to the hard stuff.” 

The 3,000 most important toddlers in the world

I'm sure it bores most people, but I can never get enough of New York Times articles about the Wechsler I.Q. tests that the 3,000 most important four-year-olds in the world (or at least in Manhattan and the better parts of Brooklyn) take each year so their parents can pay $40,000 per year for them to attend kindergarten with some of the other 2,999 most important small children in the world. Pay no attention to that IQ test behind the curtain!
Your 4-Year-Old Scored a 95? Better Luck Next Time 
Abandoning E.R.B. Test May Also Put End to a Status Symbol
By WINNIE HU and KYLE SPENCER

When other preschool parents bragged that their children had aced the admission test for New York City private schools with a top score of 99 in every section, Justine Oddo stayed quiet. Her twin boys had not done as well.

“It seemed like everyone got 99s,” recalled Ms. Oddo as her sons, now 7, scampered around a playground near Fifth Avenue. “Kids you thought weren’t that smart got 99s. It was demoralizing. It made me think my kids are not as smart as the rest of the kids.” 
Her sons’ scores? Between them, they had one 99 and the rest 95s, which would still put them in the top 5 percent of all children nationwide.

Cough Losers Cough
A decision last week by a group of private schools to move away from the test, commonly known as the E.R.B., will spare many 4- and 5-year-olds from a rite of New York childhood that dates back half a century. But it could also bring an end to a particular New York status symbol — a child with knockout scores — and to the uncomfortable conversations that occur each year when results start rolling in. 

Not likely. Whatever magically non-competitive test replaces the Wechsler IQ test for NYC kindergarten admissions will instantly become the most gamed status symbol this side of Seoul.
From the Upper East Side to Brooklyn, score-dropping in playdates and parks is common, with high marks flaunted by the parents of children who excel with 99s and anguished over by those who have to explain anything less. 
... On urbanbaby.com, the Web site where parents chat about their children, the ubiquitous 99s prompted one person to question whether that score was really special since “they seem to be a dime a dozen.” In response came complaints of rampant test-prepping and outright lying. 
At the other end of the scale, some parents are quick to offer excuses for a relatively low score: their child was sick, tired or having a bad year.

I had a bad decade or five.
Amanda Uhry, founder of Manhattan Private School Advisors, said that one mother tried to explain away her daughter’s 68 by saying she had been bullied in preschool. “Whether it’s the E.R.B. or sports, parents see their kids as an extension of themselves,” Ms. Uhry said.

Kids actually are an extension of their parents.
“It reflects on them. They think, ‘What did I do wrong?'” 
All this has led many private schools to try to discourage parents from comparing E.R.B. scores. Some have even likened it to one’s salary — the less said, the better. At the Mandell School, which has a preschool and kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school on the Upper West Side, administrators suspected that a few parents were actually inflating numbers in conversation. ... 
Last week the Independent Schools Admissions Association of Greater New York, which represents more than 140 private schools, cited concerns that scores had been inflated by widespread test preparation and thus was no longer an accurate measure of ability. It said that it would stop recommending its members use the test as an entry requirement after next year, though a new assessment is expected to be developed in its place. Most schools in the group are expected to follow the recommendation. 
The test, a version of an exam known as the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, consists of two sections: verbal (which includes vocabulary and comprehension) and performance (picture concepts and block design, among other skills). Students receive three percentile scores, one for each section and a combined mark; a proud parent might let it be known that their child was a “99 x 3” or simply a “99.” 
The name E.R.B. is actually a misnomer; the test’s actual name is the Early Childhood Admission Assessment. E.R.B. stands for the Educational Records Bureau, which administers the test. 
The bureau issued a report defending the test, saying that while scores had increased, they had done so only gradually over time. But the report also acknowledged “the alarming number of children” who score in the highest percentiles: in each of the past few years between 62 and 70 percent of the applicants to the independent schools represented by the association reached the 90th percentile, meaning they were in the top 10th of a national norm of students who took a version of the Wechsler test, and between 18 and 29 percent scored at the 98th percentile. However, the report said the average E.R.B. child was, statistically speaking, a higher performer than the average American child and that “this is not a new trend.” 

Here's the E.R.B. report. The sore thumb sticking out is that the percent scoring at the 98th or 99th percentiles went from 17.8% in the middle of the last decade to 29.2% in the most recent year.
Still, among parents the coaching issue has become the preschool version of steroids in baseball, with any chart-busting score arousing suspicion. Debra Mesnick, a pediatrician whose children took the E.R.B., said she knew parents who were prepping their children even though they acted as though they were not. “There were the names of $200-an-hour tutors floating around, but people didn’t admit to using them,” she said.
... Jae Chun, a lawyer, said he would try to discreetly change the subject. “When someone told you their child scored an 80 percent, it was very awkward to say your child scored a 99,” he said. Another parent, Marie Bishko, said that parents became stressed because the E.R.B. “divides children into two piles” — the 99s, and everyone else. ...
Still, Ms. Oddo said she never talked about her sons’ scores at the time. And she was not the only one, she noted. Other than 99s, the only scores she heard were in the 70s and 80s, which were so low as to be credibly attributed to a lack of focus or just a bad day. 
“People who had 80s, they always had justification,” she said. “Nobody talks about it if it’s in the 90s.”

Somebody asked me what all the super-elite kindergartens for networking toddlers are in Los Angeles, and how do they admit their students. I have no idea. (It took me years to figure out the convoluted system for getting into a good public magnet school.) I'm sure there some, but I can't imagine they try that hard to pretend they're open to any child with a high IQ (and $40,000 or whatever per year). 

Los Angeles just isn't as IQ obsessed as New York is. It's a who-you-know culture, and if you don't know anybody, why would they let your child in to their kindergarten for the children of cool parents? Maybe if you are extremely good looking, they'd make an exception. But if you are ugly and unpopular, who cares what your kid's I.Q. is?

In general, no place in America emphasizes smartness like New York. (Definitely not L.A.) And it's not just the Manhattanites. The Outer Boroughs types have what Tom Wolfe called Big League Syndrome. I had a cabdriver in 1984, a black American guy, who was a Big League Cabbie. The city had just recently started synchronizing the lights, so he had experiment with and memorized the exact speed to drive to catch all the green lights on every major avenue in NYC. Third Avenue's ideal speed was 36.2 mph, he said. And he was right. He got me from Midtown Manhattan to La Guardia in 18 minutes, catching dozens of green lights in a row. While he was doing it, he had me quiz him on random locations in New York. (The street numbers on Manhattan's avenues are not in sync, so it's a challenge to figure out what the cross-street is from its number.) He got the half-dozen or so addresses I threw at him absolutely right, all the while maintaining a rock-solid 36.2 mph. A Big League Taxi Driver!

September 27, 2013

L.A. schools' billion dollar iPad contract

From an editorial in the L.A. Times:
EDITORIAL 
L.A. Unified's iPad plan doesn't compute 
The district's failure to resolve questions about theft, breakage and Web security is troubling. 
By The Times editorial board 
September 27, 2013 
It has been a year since Los Angeles Unified schools Supt. John Deasy proposed putting a tablet computer in the hands of every student in the district. At that time, there were numerous questions about how and whether this would work. Could first-graders really take care of such expensive equipment? Who would be held responsible if one of the devices was stolen, lost or broken, or if apple juice was dripped into the circuitry? How would the district keep high-schoolers off porn sites? And how much would all this cost? 
Deasy said these details would be worked out before any decisions were made. But all we know for sure a year later is the price tag: a whopping $1 billion to provide more than 600,000 students and their teachers with top-of-the-line, software-equipped iPads at $678 each, plus the necessary Wi-Fi in the schools. 
The district has forged ahead — 47,000 students have received iPads already, with a much bigger purchase planned soon — yet vital issues remain inadequately addressed. 
Still unclear, for example, is who pays for accidental loss or damage to the iPads. Under the district's contract, Apple will replace up to 5% of the devices for free. After that, the district is on its own. Parents at different schools have been given different information about whether they would have to cover the cost, and Deasy said he's still trying to figure this out. Isn't this something he should have done before any iPads were purchased? 
The district also is coming to terms with how quickly its students disabled the firewall on their tablets to gain broad access to the Internet when they're not on campus. There are potential liability and safety issues at stake — if, for example, a student were to make contact with a sexual predator on a school-issued iPad. 
While it tries to figure that out, the district has decreed that students may not take the tablets home, which seriously limits their usefulness as tools for integrating their class studies and homework. ... 
There's also the matter of keyboards. Apparently the district hadn't foreseen that it might need to purchase them as well, at a so-far unknown cost. 
Access to iPads and other high-tech devices could be of tremendous benefit to L.A. Unified students, many of whom have few digital resources at home.But at this point, the district should be well beyond the "we're figuring this out" phase. It has spent some $30 million already, and in November, Deasy is scheduled to ask for close to $200 million more to provide iPads for an additional 300,000 students by the end of the school year. Given the many easily foreseen questions that have not been resolved, the board should require a more gradual rollout so that problems can be identified and addressed before it is too late to change course.

It's worthwhile to compare the evident quality of management at LAUSD vs the quality of management at Apple, which made $6.9 billion in profit last quarter. Who do you think got taken advantage of in this negotiation? One problem with education leadership these days is that the cynical bastards who can anticipate problems tend to get screened out by the ideological emphasis on Closing the Gap. You wind up with inspirational True Believers who fall in love with whatever the latest fad is.

Personally, if I were buying a billion dollars worth of stuff from one of the best run companies in the world, I would present them with a list of a dozen things that could go wrong and ask them how they were going to keep me from looking like a fool. And then I'd ask Apple for two dozen more things that could go wrong that I didn't put on my list and how they were going to prevent them.

Holder after another liberal city fire department

From the Associated Press:
EEOC: Austin fire dept. discriminated when hiring

AUSTIN, Texas — The Austin Fire Department discriminated against some minority job applicants, a federal review has found. 
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which looked at the department's hiring practices since 2012, notified city officials in a letter received Monday, the Austin American-Statesman reported (http://bit.ly/1bqW7fb ). 
City officials learned of the review in April and said they welcomed the objective oversight. 
The EEOC found that some black applicants were discriminated against because of their race and some Hispanics faced discrimination due to their national origins. 
"The letter does not say that the city intended to discriminate against any individual or group, but rather that the difference in pass rates between African-Americans and whites was the unintended effect of a neutral testing process," the city contends in a news release. 
Fire Chief Rhoda Mae Kerr said in a memo Tuesday to department personnel that the city will not debate the decision. The city has decided not to hire additional personnel from the 2012 candidate list as a result of the EEOC determination, according to Kerr. So far, 96 firefighters from the list have been hired. 
The Justice Department did not detail what prompted the investigation that led to the EEOC finding that nearly 40 percent of black candidates passed the cognitive written exam to become a cadet, compared with 68 percent of nonblack candidates.

A shocking differential in pass rates never seen before in the history of the world.

That the full weight of the federal government can be brought down, seemingly arbitrarily, upon any of countless institutions where the usual white-black gap in cognitive performance exists is hard to reconcile with the rule of law. Everybody who tries to hire objectively is guilty, so the government can crush whomever they happen to feel like. So, don't get the government mad at you. Especially, don't speak up about it.
One black candidate was hired from the approximately 736 black applicants, according to the federal review. 
Kerr, in her memo, said that 636 black candidates completed applications in 2012, not the 736 stated in the EEOC letter, and that only 328 of those candidates actually took the test. Three of those candidates were placed on the hiring list, she said.

Not many details seem to be available on either the EEOC letter or today's Justice Dept. letter announcing a federal lawsuit against the Austin Fire Department. Presumably, they are hiring from the top down among applicants. So, while lots of blacks "passed" the test, few scored at the top.

Firemen these days tend to be overpaid and underworked, so the quantity and quality of applicants is high. At least as of 2008, Austin paid firemen 20% more then other big cities in Texas, so being a fireman in Austin is a pretty sweet gig. So top-down hiring won't come up with many blacks.

I found this 2008 editorial in the Austin Statesman saying:
The department is facing a significant drain of its minority firefighters who are eligible for retirement, and it should be pushing for greater diversity to replenish those ranks. 

In other words, the Austin FD had become substantially integrated following a court order 36 years ago.

It's interesting (to me, not necessarily to anybody else) how the concept of disparate impact just doesn't seem to apply to in some industries (e.g., movie and TV film crews) while being a near-obsessive concern to the feds in other occupations, such as firefighting. Hollywood tends to have nepotistic or who-you-know hiring, while fire departments generally use objective tests designed by testing/diversity consultants to wring out all bias.

It would probably make the most sense to hire objectively, while just having a quota for African-Americans. But, how does that work as 50 million legally privileged Hispanics turn into 100 million?

Could Obama go the full Hitler-Stalin Pact and dump Israel for Iran?

We've been reading for decades about how Iran is a massive military threat while Israel is a tiny, existentially vulnerable outpost. Logically, that would imply that -- from a pure realpolitik / national interest standpoint -- it would make sense for Barack Obama, who just became the first President since Jimmy Carter to talk on the phone to the head guy in Tehran, to do an August 23, 1939-style flip and ally with Iran at the expense of Israel. 

It's an interesting thought experiment because listing why that it would be a very bad idea (which, of course, it would) makes reality clearer. Who would you less like to be the enemy of: Iran or Israel?

First, Iran is not much of a military threat. It's hasn't invaded anybody in at least a half-dozen generations. Overall, despite the advantages of oil and a more advanced Persian civilization compared to the Arab states, it remains a shambolic country, alternately prone to extremism and lassitude.

In contrast, Israel has demonstrated impressive will and resources over the decades at getting what it wants.

And, while Israel, contrary to what you hear on Fox, might not be quite the best friend America has ever had, you sure wouldn't want to have Israel for an enemy.

Crops Rotting in the Fields, Part MLXXVII

From the AP via Huffington Post, and it's not anywhere near as dumb as CRitF Parts I through MLXXVI. Unlike almost all the annual Harvest Crisis articles of the past, Gosia Wozniacka's article seems to imply that stoop laborers being paid more is, when you stop and think about it, a good thing, not a bad thing. Perhaps there is hope for less credulous journalism on immigration-related matters?
Farmers Face Labor Shortages As Workers Find Other Jobs 
By GOSIA WOZNIACKA 09/26/13 02:10 PM ET EDT AP 
FRESNO, Calif. -- With the harvest in full swing on the West Coast, farmers in California and other states say they can't find enough people to pick high value crops such as grapes, peppers, apples and pears. 
In some cases, workers have walked off fields in the middle of harvest, lured by offers of better pay or easier work elsewhere. 
The shortage and competition for workers means labor expenses have climbed, harvests are getting delayed and less fruit and vegetable products are being picked, prompting some growers to say their income is suffering. Experts say, however, the shortage is not expected to affect prices for consumers. 

Wow, that's different. Usually, we are prodded to worry that a head of iceberg lettuce will soon cost $5 unless we have massively more guest workers.
But farmworkers, whose incomes are some of the lowest in the nation, have benefited, their wages jumping in California to $2 to $3 over the $8 hourly minimum wage and even more for those working piece rate. 
The shortage – driven by a struggling U.S. economy, more jobs in Mexico, and bigger hurdles to illegal border crossings – has led some farmers to offer unusual incentives: they're buying meals for their workers, paying for transportation to and from fields, even giving bonuses to those who stay for the whole season.
And a few have stationed foremen near their crews to prevent other farmers from wooing away their workers. 
"In the past, we were overrun with farmworkers. But not anymore," said labor contractor Jesus Mateo, whose crews saw a 20 percent pay increase. "Employers have to do something to attract them. The fastest workers can now earn more than $1,000 per week."... 
In some cases, farmers are being paid below market prices, because their produce is past its prime, having stayed on the branch or vine for too long. Hardest hit are small farmers, who can't afford to pay more for labor, Pegg said. 

This is where most CRitF articles, using Clean Your Plate, There Are Starving Children in China-style logic, imply that starvation or damnation or something threatens if there isn't a stoop laborer standing by to pluck every single bit of produce at its moment of peak ripeness. In reality, the tremendous variability of harvests (due to weather, etc.) means that any economically rational system will leave some fraction of some crops in the fields.
Farmers say immigration reform, which would legalize their current workforce and create a guest worker program to legally bring farmworkers from other countries, could solve the labor shortage problem. Immigration reform, however, has stalled in Congress. 
Farmers in other states are also facing shortages. In Washington, apple growers are having a hard time finding enough workers in time for peak harvest in October. And in Oregon, pear growers – whose crop is very big this year – are facing the same problem. 
"They are really struggling to get that crop off the trees," said Barry Bushue, president of the Oregon Farm Bureau. "These growers have decades of investment into plant stock, they can't just transition overnight to be less labor-intensive." 
For years, farmers throughout the U.S. had access to an abundant, cheap, mostly unauthorized labor force streaming in from Mexico. Workers say they often had to beg growers for even a few hours of work and their wages were low. 
As the U.S. plunged into a recession and Mexico's economy improved, some seasonal migrant workers chose to remain home. 
Increased border security and drug cartel violence made crossings more dangerous and expensive, deterring workers. A sharp drop in Mexico's fertility rate further decreased the number of young men crossing into the U.S. to work in the fields. 
The trend appears long-lasting, spelling trouble for farmers, according to a new report by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center. While the recession is over, the report finds, mass migration from Mexico has not resumed. 

Or, Pew reported the total number of illegal immigrants was back up in 2012.

But, whatever. This is, overall, a much better article than almost all I've read in this genre. A few years back, some of the multitudinous journalistic Carneys, John Carney and  Timothy P. Carney, took up scoffing at the numerous articles that were just rewrites of Growers Associations talking point memos. Perhaps they are having an influence. So, say not the struggle naught availeth.
"This year, it has become even more challenging to find agricultural employees, and it's going to get worse in the next few years," said Noe Cisneros Jr. of Freedom AG, a Kern County labor contractor who manages a crew of up to 300 workers. 
On a recent September morning in an endless stretch of San Joaquin Valley vineyards, workers lifted paper trays filled with raisins and heaped them onto a trailer – the final step in an exceptionally profitable raisin harvest for the workers. 

This might be the first time in one of these CRitF articles that I've ever seen reference to how much the growers are making.

Still, while this article is much less biased in favor of growers than most, mere neutrality isn't going to undo decades of propaganda. Why not some self-criticism by the press about how they ignored the basics of economics to promote more profits for a special interests in the name of diversity and more immigration?

And why not some self-criticism among economists? As usual the obscure economists who are specialists in an area, such as UC Davis agricultural economist Philip Martin, make sense. Unfortunately, the big name economists shamefully ignore criticizing a whole genre of economically illiterate articles.
With farmworkers in such high demand, many said they shun remote locations and choose fields closer to home; they pick crops that pay better; they also prefer lighter work instead of tougher jobs that require being bent over all day. More women are also in the fields. 
Because most workers now have smartphones, they text each other information about pay and working conditions – and some switch employers mid-way through harvest if better opportunities arise. 
As a result, labor contractors and growers must work harder to fill and retain work crews. Cisneros said he even trained and hired high school students this summer to pick grapes – something he was not willing to do in the past. 

If you are new to all this, I outlined the basics of Cropsrottinginthefieldsonomics here in 2006.

September 26, 2013

A $1,185.00 book on "The Philosophy of Race"

Tyler Cowen pointed out this book reprinting 73 academics papers on the Philosophy of Race for the low, low price of $1,185. How much of it sounds of value? 

I looked over the 73 titles and then read with interest the Philip Kitcher article from 2007, "Does Race Have a Future?" [link improved] in which this very bright guy, the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia, offers his mea culpa for previously proposing a definition of race rather like mine, because everybody -- except what Kitcher calls "ogre naturalists" such as JP Rushton -- knows that race doesn't exist. But Kitcher also slips in a few Eppur si muoves. In that kind of intellectual atmosphere, where even a heavyweight like Kitcher gets browbeaten, how much good work can get done?
The Philosophy of Race 
Edited by Paul Taylor 
Routledge – 2012 – 1,584 pages 
Series: Critical Concepts in Philosophy 
Hardback: $1,185.00 
December 14th 2011 
Volume I: HISTORY 
Part 1: Philosophical Historiography 
1. Cornel West, ‘A Genealogy of Modern Racism’, Prophesy Deliverance! Towards an Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Westminster Press, 1982), pp. 47–68. 
2. Robert Bernasconi, ‘Race, Culture, History’ (plenary lecture at Sodertorn University, 28 May 2009), pp. 11–46. 
3. David Theo Goldberg, ‘The End(s) of Race’, Postcolonial Studies, 2004, 7, 2, 211–30. 
Part 2: Early Figures and Moments 
4. Harry Bracken, ‘Philosophy and Racism’, Philosophia, 1978, 8, 2–3, 241–60.
5. Richard Popkin, ‘Hume’s Racism Reconsidered’, The Third Force in Seventeenth-Century Thought (Brill, 1992), pp. 64–75. 
6. Meg Armstrong, ‘"The Effects of Blackness": Gender, Race, and the Sublime in Aesthetic Theories of Burke and Kant’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1996, 54, 3, 213–36. 

NYT: Immigrants are "flocking to Mexico" with its "rapidly growing" economy

NYT caption: "At the U.S.-Mexico border,
which nation is a “land of opportunity?"
From the NYT:
Ambitious immigrants from around the world are flocking to Mexico, where a rapidly growing economy is seen as creating opportunities for those who work hard to do well. People used to say that about the United States. 
Can a developed economy like the U.S. provide similar opportunities for people to move up the economic ladder, or is rapid growth essential to upward mobility?

This a meme that the prestige press has been promoting to bolster Schumer-Rubio propaganda: Handing out the Path to Citizenship now won't lure in future Undocumented Workers, because America doesn't have to worry about illegal immigration ever again! Alternative interpretations would include: "Wow, look at that picture: What a crap border fence compared to the fences that a serious country like Israel has. There's no barb wire and then it just ends ..." Or, "So, everything's peachy in Mexico, so illegal aliens are unlikely to starve if they have to go home." 

But those interpretations won't come up because all that counts is winning and the easiest way to win is to hold the Megaphone.

But, in reality, is Mexico's economy "rapidly growing" and are immigrants "flocking to Mexico"?

From International Business Times:
Mexico Cuts 2013 GDP Growth Forecast To 1.8% After Disappointing Q2By Patricia Rey Mallén
on August 21 2013 4:09 PM

The Mexican government's original GDP growth forecast for 2013 might have been a little too enthusiastic. The 3.1 percent increase forecast for this year fell to 1.8 percent recently after the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (National Institute of Statistics and Geography, or Inegi) calculated that the economy's growth for the second quarter was just 1 percent.

The plummeting GDP forecast doesn't come as a total surprise, however. In May, the Minister of Finance reduced the forecast from 3.5 percent to 3.1 percent after first-quarter GDP growth slowed to 0.8 percent. Banco de México also lowered its forecast, originally 3 percent to 4 percent, to 2 percent to 3 percent growth. ... 
The news corresponds with a report by Moody’s that points to Mexico's growth as its "unfinished homework." Mauro Leos, Moody’s Mexico director, said that from 2003 to 2012, the average annual growth rate for Mexico, the second-largest economy in Latin America after Brazil, was 2.5 percent, much lower than the average Latin American growth rate during the same period. 
Nevertheless, in the last three years, the rate of growth had climbed up to 4.4 percent. Despite that, “things always go back to normal,” he said.

Ways to measure GDP per capita are complicated, so I won't proclaim this graph provided by Google from World Bank data as the ultimate way to measure changes in GDP per capita, but it's worth looking at, if only to say: Wow, look at Canada!
GDP per capita (from Google)
The NYT Editors believe their own hype from this article:
For Migrants, New Land of Opportunity Is Mexico

By DAMIEN CAVE 
Published: September 21, 2013  
MEXICO CITY — Mexico, whose economic woes have pushed millions of people north, is increasingly becoming an immigrant destination. The country’s documented foreign-born population nearly doubled between 2000 and 2010, and officials now say the pace is accelerating as broad changes in the global economy create new dynamics of migration.

The accompany graphs, however, show just how few immigrants there are in Mexico (or at least have been counted).

There are a total of 961,121 foreign-born people living in Mexico. Wow, that's almost a million! But, here's a question: What's the total population of Mexico? The latest estimate is 116,000,000. So that's under 1.0%.

In contrast, the foreign born population of the United States is over 40,000,000, versus about 270,000,000 natives, or about 15% of the native population.

And Mexico gives out a grand total of 301,795 work visas, out of a working age population approaching 70 million.

In the long run, Mexico should have more foreigners, especially American retirees, residing there. It attracted lots of immigrants in the past, such as the ancestors of Carlos Slim, Vicente Fox, Salma Hayek, Frida Kahlo, Anthony Quinn, and so forth. Former foreign secretary Jorge Castaneda (whose mother is from the Soviet Union and his eminence grise brother was born there) outlined in 2011 a number of reforms to make Mexico better both for American retirees and for Mexicans, such as more traffic lights. Most importantly, he felt, was for Mexicans to stop referring to Americans using ethnic slurs.

The latest government of Mexico has suggested a number of hopeful-sounding reforms devoted to cracking down on monopoly power in Mexico (Carlos Slim, Pemex, and the teachers' union that has turned many teaching jobs into hereditary sinecures). These are problems not impossible to overcome, and I wish Mexicans well in fixing their country.

New horizon in Chinese birth tourism: surrogacy

Via Marginal Revolution, the story of how Chinese families have taken birth tourism to a new level: don't even bother holing up in America for a month or two have your baby on American soil, just pay to have it implanted in a woman in America. 

The family still gets all eight anchor baby benefits outlined in this ad for old-fashioned Chinese birth tourism, without the inconvenience of even coming to America.

September 25, 2013

Tough question

From the Smithsonian:
Why is Albert Camus Still a Stranger in His Native Algeria? 
On the 100th anniversary of the birth of the famed novelist, our reporter searches the north African nation for signs of his legacy

What's Calatrava's architectural secret? Don't sweat the small stuff

Calatrava's Puente del Alamillo in Seville
Eye-shaped planetarium, Valencia
Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava has designed many of the cooler-looking structures of recent decades. 

With some other starchitects, such as Thom Mayne, you have to know a lot of theory to understand why the buildings aren't as ugly as they look, or at least why ugly buildings are Good for You. 

Opera house in Canary Islands
With Calatrava, in contrast, you get buildings built to look like natural objects (eyes, crescent moons, birds, human bodies) or resemble finely engineered objects (e.g., harps, suspension bridges). His work carries on the tradition of the Finnish architect Eeno Saarinen who designed TWA's terminal at JFK in the late 1950s to look like a soaring bird.

His subway station under construction at Ground Zero in Manhattan will cost $4 billion and be six years late, at last notice. 

Rendering of WTC station
So, how is Calatrava so creative (leaving out that he makes everything white)?

An article in the New York Times explains his secret for being so productive: not worrying about details like how to keep his buildings from flooding, how to keep people from falling down and breaking their hips on his beautiful but slippery glass bridge, and how to keep his buildings from starting to fall apart after a decade or less:
As for Valencia’s cost overruns, the politician Mr. Blanco said in a recent interview that one contributing issue might be that Mr. Calatrava’s designs appear to include few details. “Other architects, they know exactly the door handles they want, and where to buy and at what cost,” Mr. Blanco said. “But Calatrava is the opposite. His projects do not have this degree of precision. If you look at the files on the aquarium, which was built by someone else, they are fat. But there are just a couple of pages on the Calatrava projects.”

School Daze, Stomp the Yard, Good Hair

From the AP:
SCHOOLS CRITICIZED FOR BANS ON DREADLOCKS, AFROS 
BY LEANNE ITALIE

"Why are you so sad?" a TV reporter asked the little girl with a bright pink bow in her hair. 
"Because they didn't like my dreads," she sobbed, wiping her tears. "I think that they should let me have my dreads." 
With those words, second-grader Tiana Parker of Tulsa, Okla., found herself, at age 7, at the center of decades of debate over standards of black beauty, cultural pride and freedom of expression. 
It was no isolated incident at the predominantly black Deborah Brown Community School, which in the face of outrage in late August apologized and rescinded language banning dreadlocks, Afros, mohawks and other "faddish" hairstyles it had called unacceptable and potential health hazards. 
A few weeks earlier, another charter school, the Horizon Science Academy in Lorain, Ohio, sent a draft policy home to parents that proposed a ban on "Afro-puffs and small twisted braids." It, too, quickly apologized and withdrew the wording. 
But at historically black Hampton University in Hampton, Va., the dean of the business school has defended and left in place a 12-year-old prohibition on dreadlocks and cornrows for male students in a leadership seminar for MBA candidates, saying the look is not businesslike.

There's an interesting radical v. bourgeois division at all-black colleges like Hampton, which can be seen in Spike Lee's 1988 movie School Daze about his experiences at Morehouse. (Spike's a 3rd generation Morehouse man). Some students go to black colleges to live out the black radical dream (e.g., Spike), others to be as bourgeois as they wanna be without feeling like they are Acting White (there's an aspect of that in Spike, too). The movie Stomp the Yard, about an inner city black kid who gets a scholarship to an expensive black college where he learns to appreciate middle class norms, is one of the few approving portraits of fraternity life to appear in movies in recent decades.

As for black hair styles, I'd point out the male v. female division. Most cultures in the world, other than, say, Masai and Rastafarian, endorse longer hair on women than on men. I read back in the 1990s that white women's hair will grow, on average, 12 inches longer than white men's hair before falling out, which makes long hair a sex-linked trait. (I haven't seen that since, so don't take it on faith. Anybody know for sure?) Among blacks, however, hair grows so short overall that the sex difference (if it exists) is small in an absolute sense. 

So, black women have substantial problems with their hair competing in integrated countries with longer haired women for men. This leads to African-American women spending a huge amount of money and time on their hair (see Chris Rock's documentary Good Hair, and above is the "Good & Bad Hair" musical number from School Daze.)

So, I sympathize with black women who try to come up with a look for their hair that doesn't involve scary chemicals (and especially for those who try to keep weird hair-straightening potions away from their little girls' scalps).

In contrast, black men may have fewer hair issues than white men. Michael Jordan started going bald so he shaved his head. Perhaps he would have been even more popular with a full head of hair, but, if I recall correctly, he was fairly popular as is. So, it seems perfectly reasonable for Hampton's B-School to enforce professional-looking hair norms for their male students. I mean if Harvard Business School polices how its students dress on Halloween in the name of feminism, why can't Hampton Business School police how its male students wear their hair in the name of getting a job?

Kids these days

Kevin Helliker writes in the Wall Street Journal:
Saying I finished in the top 15% of my age group in last month's Chicago Triathlon is like bragging that I could outrun your grandpa. My age group was 50 to 54. 
But against the entire sprint-distance field, I finished in the top 11%. That's right: Team Geriatric outperformed the field. 
I'd love to report that this reflects the age-defying effects of triathlon. But my hair is gray, my hearing is dull and my per-mile pace is slower than it used to be, even at shorter distances. 
Rather, this old-timer triumph is attributable to something that fogies throughout the ages have lamented: kids these days. 
They're just not very fast. "There's not as many super-competitive athletes today as when the baby boomers were in their 20s and 30s," said Ryan Lamppa, spokesman for Running USA, an industry-funded research group. While noting the health benefits that endurance racing confers regardless of pace, Lamppa—a 54-year-old competitive runner—said, "Many new runners come from a mind-set where everyone gets a medal and it's good enough just to finish."

The last time I checked a few years ago, marathoning continued to grow in popularity but average speeds of finishers were slowing sharply.

Half Sigma likes to report on deaths during the New York City marathon to imply that marathoning is kind of crazy, which, at 42k, it sort of is. Top professional marathoners from East Africa often skip the Olympic marathon because they can only perform at their best about every six months, so they hit a paying marathon in the spring and another in the fall and skip running in the summer for free at the Olympics. In contrast, top 10k runners typically run every weekend during the high season for track meets.

So, maybe it's not such a bad thing that kids these days aren't that into driving themselves into cardiac arrest at marathons.

Changing demographics also matter. I looked at the backgrounds of the 185 top male high school cross-country runners in 2006:

Non-Hispanic White 82%
East African 9%
Spanish Surname 5%
Black American 2%
American Indian 1%
East Asian 0.7%
South Asian 0.3%

So, all non-Hispanic whites other than the tiny East African population (and maybe American Indians) aren't excelling at cross country.

September 24, 2013

"The Graduate"

In Taki's Magazine, I'm continuing my intermittent series reinterpreting well-known but not necessarily well-understood episodes in American history. Was the landmark movie The Graduate, which was a vast box office success in 1968, really about the Generation Gap? Or was it actually about the Ethnic Gap?
Director Mike Nichols likes to claim that he hadn’t realized what The Graduate was actually about until he saw it parodied in a juvenile humor magazine in October 1968: 
"It took me years before I got what I had been doing all along — that I had been turning Benjamin into a Jew. I didn’t get it until I saw this hilarious issue of MAD magazine after the movie came out, in which the caricature of Dustin [Hoffman] says to the caricature of Elizabeth Wilson, ‘Mom, how come I’m Jewish and you and Dad aren’t?’"

Read the whole thing there.

I thought low wages were good for the economy?

From the NYT:
ECONOMIC SCENE
To Address Gender Gap, Is It Enough to Lean In?
By EDUARDO PORTER
The gender gap in pay and work force participation harms not only women, but the economy as well.

In general, appeals to something being good for or bad for The Economy have become increasingly divorced from logic and mostly say, hooray for our side.

Stephen Jay Gould was always complaining about reification of IQ. Isn't it time to think about reification of The Economy?