Another underground video is now available. It was a sting, of course, but the length of the video pretty much explains itself.
Here is NPR. No explanation is necessary.
Yes, it is quite clear what they believe.
Archive for the ‘education’ Category
No explanation is necessary
Tuesday, March 8th, 2011The Stand at Madison
Friday, February 18th, 2011
This week has seen the most amazing events unfold in Madison Wisconsin. Most of us have considered Wisconsin sort of a lost cause. The Progressive Party began there with the La Follette family and Robert La Follette who broke with Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 and later ran for president on a Progressive ticket in 1924. His family dominated Wisconsin politics, although Senator Joe McCarthy showed the odd character of their politics, too. The German socialism that influenced the Progressives has waned but the shock of the first real stand against the public employee unions has highlighted the recent changes in Wisconsin.
The Republicans swept the state as part of the 2010 electoral route of Democrats and the political left. Governor Scott Walker is not well known but his stand against the unions will make him a national figure by this weekend. The legislation he has introduced will limit the unions to bargaining for salary only. Benefits will not be subject to collective bargaining. In addition, teachers and other state employees, except those in police or firefighter unions, will be required to contribute small amounts to their pension and health care plans. My brother-in-law is a retired policeman in Chicago. My sister tells me that they have always had to contribute to his pension and the health plan. In Wisconsin, up to date, none of these employees have been required to contribute anything. Zip ! Zero !
The Republicans took over the majority in the state Senate 19 to 14. Apparently, Wisconsin law requires a super quorum including at least one member of each party to vote on legislation affecting the budget or funding state programs. As a result, the Wisconsin Senate Democrats, all 14 of them, fled the state. It turns out their hideaway was spectacular and they have announced that they may stay away for weeks.
President Obama has intervened by saying “Wisconsin is conducting an assault on unions.” In addition, his “Organizing for America” group, which has become part of the DNC, is now helping organize the demonstrations in Madison.
The state Capitol is occupied by union demonstrators who apparently plan to shut down the government. They are carrying outrageous signs and there may be violence not far below the surface. Where will this lead ?
Here is an estimate of what is at stake and the stakes are high.
It has long been understood that the 2010 elections were just the beginning of the struggle to reverse America’s current decline. It will take at least two or three election cycles to correct decades of bad policy choices. We aren’t staring into the fiscal abyss because of any single policy or event, but rather the cumulative effect of dozens, if not hundreds, of flawed decisions made by fickle politicians who capitalized on the fact that the American public was largely disengaged. In the end, these decisions created a vast political class who live off the fruits of others’ labors.
When a business wants to increase its future earnings, it has to find new markets and sell more of its product. For the political class its the same, only their markets and products are government services. As a result, every year, public sector unions spend tens of millions of dollars lobbying for bigger government and filling the campaign coffers of the politicians who acquiesce to their demands. In addition to bigger government, they’ve won pay packages higher than the private sector, almost 100% job security and the ability to retire in their fifties with lifetime retirement income and health benefits. All paid for by us. Unlike private sector unions, every dollar funding government employees’ pay, pension and benefits comes out of our paychecks.
The moral hazard of public employee unions was known to Franklin Roosevelt who opposed them. John Kennedy permitted government workers to unionize by executive order. Ironically, Wisconsin, in its Progressive era, was the origin of the largest public employee union.
If there is any doubt how important the fight in Wisconsin is, look no further than the left’s reaction to it. Governor Walker’s proposal calls on public employees to pay more into their retirement fund and pay around 12% of their health insurance premiums. It also ends collective bargaining for most public employees, which mostly affects union bosses rather than rank and file members and is an important measure to forestall a future fiscal crisis.
Actually, as I understand it, the collective bargaining is still permitted for salary but not benefits.
For this, tens of thousands of public school teachers called in ’sick.’ So many, in fact, that hundreds of schools across Wisconsin have been closed for days. They pressed school children into service as fellow protesters, most not understanding the issue at hand. They drew up signs comparing the governor to Hitler and called the GOP Nazis. Several GOP Senators have faced multiple death threats. When all of this wasn’t enough to stop the proposal, their allies in the Senate simply fled the state to prevent a vote from happening.
The rest of the nation is starting to notice.
Among key provisions of Mr. Walker’s plan: limiting collective bargaining for most state and local government employees to the issue of wages (instead of an array of issues, like health coverage or vacations); requiring government workers to contribute 5.8 percent of their pay to their pensions, much more than now; and requiring state employees to pay at least 12.6 percent of health care premiums (most pay about 6 percent now) …
In an unusual move, he would require secret-ballot votes each year at every public-sector union to determine whether a majority of workers still want to be unionized. He would require public-employee unions to negotiate new contracts every year, an often lengthy process.
The result has resembled Cairo and the demonstrations seem to be building up into a national showdown with public employee unions. Scott Walker is under enormous pressure but a large part of the nation is behind him. The union tactics may well alienate an even larger share of the public.
The Hitler meme is as common as it was with George W Bush. Democrats seem to have limited imagination.
The Wall Street Journal sees the riots as a European phenomenon brought here.
For Americans who don’t think the welfare state riots of France or Greece can happen here, we recommend a look at the union and Democratic Party spectacle now unfolding in Wisconsin. Over the past few days, thousands have swarmed the state capital and airwaves to intimidate lawmakers and disrupt Governor Scott Walker’s plan to level the playing field between taxpayers and government unions.
Mr. Walker’s very modest proposal would take away the ability of most government employees to collectively bargain for benefits. They could still bargain for higher wages, but future wage increases would be capped at the federal Consumer Price Index, unless otherwise specified by a voter referendum. The bill would also require union members to contribute 5.8% of salary toward their pensions and chip in 12.6% of the cost of their health insurance premiums.
If those numbers don’t sound outrageous, you probably work in the private economy.
This looks to be building up to a national showdown with public employee unions. I hope Scott Walker is safe and keeps his courage in spite of demonstrations on the front lawn of his and other legislators homes. He looks like he is not weakening.
More to come.
UPDATES:
1. John Fund adds some background to the story with an explanation of the issues behind the furious union response.
2. Here is a rebuttal to a false story the Democrats are circulating to the effect there was no deficit until Walker “ginned one up.”
We re-read the fiscal bureau memo, talked to Lang, consulted reporter Jason Stein of the Journal Sentinel’s Madison Bureau, read various news accounts and examined the issue in detail.
Our conclusion: Maddow and the others are wrong.
There is, indeed, a projected deficit that required attention, and Walker and GOP lawmakers did not create it.
More on that second point in a bit.
The confusion, it appears, stems from a section in Lang’s memo that — read on its own — does project a $121 million surplus in the state’s general fund as of June 30, 2011.
But the remainder of the routine memo — consider it the fine print — outlines $258 million in unpaid bills or expected shortfalls in programs such as Medicaid services for the needy ($174 million alone), the public defender’s office and corrections. Additionally, the state owes Minnesota $58.7 million under a discontinued tax reciprocity deal.
The result, by our math and Lang’s, is the $137 million shortfall.
Sorry folks, the head-in-the-sand version is not true. The only state with a surplus is North Dakota.
3. Now, we have a doctor (or a fake) handing out excuse slips for the teachers that called in sick. This is illegal and apparently there are multiple folks in white coats handing out these slips with his name. This is practice of medicine without a license and treating (for him) patients without a good faith exam. How does he know they are or were sick ? Digging deeper and violating the first rule of holes.
4. Here is a new blog reporting on the antics of the runaway Democrat Senators.
5. Here is a video of one of the physicians committing fraud.
She doesn’t seem concerned. I sure hope Walker sets the medical board on them.
6. Here are more local accounts of the standoff. I like this sentence.
The Governor stands firm. I understand that there are strategies in place for next steps which will shake up the stalemate….I have known him for at least 15 years, but he is different now. He is a man who has met his time and his place, and he seems to know it.
Here is a very important comment from a Newsbusters thread on the Wisconsin situation.
Would someone please note that Unions make the great lion’s share of their $ from negotiating “benefits”, not salaries… or collection of dues.
This is why the decoupling of the Salaries and Benefits so important to Unions in Wisconsin. And why the Union’s have countered the way they have. They’ll give up Salary and Jobs for Teachers in a second, but they will fight to death for Benefit negotiation position. In another life as an executive in CA, I used to do administration for two Teamster’s “Health and Welfare” benefit packages. Do your research, but you’ll find I’m correct about motivation of Unions. I also believe that the amount of money kept by Unions will be very interesting to both your viewers, and the tax payers of the US of A. The way it works is that the Unions negotiate with the “Employer” regarding how much money per member/per month they will need to support the benefit options required in Union contract. In the case of WI, they negotiate with each of the 77 counties. Then the Unions negotiate the terms of benefits with “providers”/Ins Co’s, etc. They make the lion’s share of their money off of what is called the “breakage” created by Employees choosing between plan options, and the administration of the programs.
Let me explain with an example: A Union begins by negotiating with the Employer/State. They’ll claim their buying leverage will afford Employer significant savings. They’ll end up with a 3-tiered cost structure which allows the Union a profit even with the highest benefit option available as Union already has a very good idea about what Providers will be charging. But it gets even more lucrative for Unions at this point. Let’s say high-end Blue Cross PPO coverage costs $400 for the Family tier. What a Union will do is require $425 from Employer, plus a loaded in admin fee, as a charge for all Families in the employer group. So far, so fair? But, the Union will also offer a few other plans for Employees to choose from. The Union will also have developed relationships with a few cheaper HMO plans, and lesser PPO benefit structure plans that charge, as an example, $325 and $375, respectively.
At an Open House, employees will choose what fits their needs and the Union is in line for the “breakage“. The left over breakage is then, to my experience, placed in a fund where only the Union has the checkbook. Cars, Vacations and Condo’s, oh my. The Union also makes a “commission” off of things like Pre Legal, Dental and Term Life. As another profit source, the Union also leans on the Administrator for favors I’d rather not list, but usually involving idiocy like buying thousands of dollars of “raffle tickets” and leasing cars for the Union’s Business Agents, not entirely above board. Of course I am relating my experience, and what little I know of others who also did Union administration. I’d expect any simple research by an actual reporter would open up a Pandora’s box of Slush in the Badger State.
Very revealing comment. This is why “benefits” is such a life and death issue for the unions.
Here is more on the lefty physicians writing fake “sick leave” notes for demonstrating teachers. The comments are very interesting and have more on applicable Wisconsin laws.
The education bubble and science
Sunday, January 2nd, 2011I like George Will’s writing and his insight. I watch the ABC Sunday news commentary show to see him make pithy comments containing more wisdom that the rest of the commentary combined. His column this week is an example of his insights.
Deborah Wince-Smith of the Council on Competitiveness says: “Talent will be the oil of the 21st century.” And the talent that matters most is the cream of the elite. The late Nobel laureate Julius Axelrod said, “Ninety-nine percent of the discoveries are made by 1 percent of the scientists.”
With populism rampant, this is not a propitious moment to defend elites, even scientific ones. Nevertheless, the nation depends on nourishing them and the institutions that sustain them.
U.S. undergraduate institutions award 16 percent of their degrees in the natural sciences or engineering; South Korea and China award 38 percent and 47 percent, respectively. America ranks 27th among developed nations in the proportion of students receiving undergraduate degrees in science or engineering.
He goes on to recommend support of the “elite universities,” by which I suppose the Ivy League. I think there is another point of view that should be considered.
There’s a lot of work ahead to enable the United States to meet the coming challenges. I’m reasonably confident that we remain the best placed large society on earth to make the right moves. Our culture of enterprise and risk-taking is still strong; a critical mass of Americans still have the values and the characteristics that helped us overcome the challenges of the last two hundred years.
But when I look at the problems we face, I worry. It’s not just that some of our cultural strengths are eroding as both the financial and intellectual elites rush to shed many of the values that made the country great. And it’s not the deficit: we can and will deal with that if we get our policies and politics right. And it’s certainly not the international competition: our geopolitical advantages remain overwhelming and China, India and the EU all face challenges even more daunting than ours and they lack our long tradition of successful, radical but peaceful reform and renewal.
No, what worries me most today is the state of the people who should be the natural leaders of the next American transformation: our intellectuals and professionals. Not all of them, I hasten to say: the United States is still rich in great scholars and daring thinkers. A few of them even blog.
The number of hard science and engineering students at major and/or “elite” universities is a small fraction of the total enrollment. Harvard, for example, only recently revised its engineering curriculum.
The A.B. in engineering degree teaches students how to solve problems and builds confidence doing so, explains Cherry Murray, dean of Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The degree is a good bridge to further education such as business, law, government, architecture, and medical schools, she says, and draws people who might not normally be interested in more narrow engineering subjects. Another benefit of the broader curriculum: Murray says 38% of the A.B. enrollees at Harvard are women, almost double the national average in regular engineering programs.”
I’m sorry to say that doesn’t sound like a rigorous engineering program. What about MIT ? The list of majors is reassuring, although I don’t know why anyone would major in Theater Arts at MIT.
My own personal favorite is Cal Tech. In 1956 I was accepted and even had my dorm room assigned but my father refused to provide any financial information so I was not able to get a scholarship and there were very few loans in those days. It’s one of two missed chances that I cannot forget. Cal Tech is serious science and engineering education. I’m sorry to have missed it.
There are many excellent state university engineering programs so the emphasis on “elite” universities is an example of provincialism on Will’s part. Stanford is considered elite these days and has excellent engineering programs. The University of Southern California, where I was a student, has good engineering programs, especially chemical and petroleum engineering. In the days I attended it was an inferior program but I had a scholarship so that’s where I went. I eventually switched to medicine and that was excellent for the times.
The biggest problem, and one hinted at by critics of the “Education Bubble,” is the plethora of weak majors, like the “studies” programs, which enroll students with weak scholarly skills and produce graduates with large student loans who cannot find a job. A recent book by Charles Murray, of Bell Curve fame, makes the point that too many students are attending college today under the fallacious impression that all are equally entitled to a college degree. His theory is that there is a minimum IQ below which a college education is probably a poor choice. There are many trades that can provide a good stable income and real pleasure in performing tasks that suit one’s ability. The role of vocational education has been minimized the past 40 years and there are few vocational high schools anymore that teach the basics of manual trades. This may suggest that the smaller number of male college students, compared to female, may in fact be the result of better choices on the part of the young men.
Women fill the classes in weak majors like Women’s Studies and Sociology. Many undergraduates in big universities are expected to digest a steady diet of leftist politics before they can get to the serious part of their major field of study.
There is something to be said for limiting student loans to certain fields of study. Engineering and hard science should be eligible for loans without restriction. For other majors, especially the weak ones, the loans should be limited to those with high grades. If a student wants to continue in a weak major, they or their parents should be responsible. Limits on student loans might even bring tuition inflation under control.
The crisis of the intellectual
Saturday, December 11th, 2010I was directed to an excellent post by Walter Russell Mead today. It is on the subject of the American social model and the coming era of tumultuous social unrest as the old welfare state model collapses. Europe is already seeing this collapse as nations like Greece face bankruptcy and England deals with the consequences of severe cutbacks in social spending to avoid it.
The US is facing similar economic consequences if the level of spending is not addressed soon. The 2010 elections show that the people recognize the crisis but the “political class” seems less concerned.
“It’s telling to note that while 65% of mainstream voters believe cutting spending is more important, 72% of the Political Class say the primary emphasis should be on deficit reduction,” Rasmussen said.
“Deficit reduction” is code for raising taxes. Spending is heavily embedded in the culture of the political class.
Mead is concerned that the intellectual demographic, those with advanced degrees and careers denominated by thinking rather than doing, is unable to cope with the new situation.
There’s a lot of work ahead to enable the United States to meet the coming challenges. I’m reasonably confident that we remain the best placed large society on earth to make the right moves. Our culture of enterprise and risk-taking is still strong; a critical mass of Americans still have the values and the characteristics that helped us overcome the challenges of the last two hundred years.
But when I look at the problems we face, I worry. It’s not just that some of our cultural strengths are eroding as both the financial and intellectual elites rush to shed many of the values that made the country great. And it’s not the deficit: we can and will deal with that if we get our policies and politics right. And it’s certainly not the international competition: our geopolitical advantages remain overwhelming and China, India and the EU all face challenges even more daunting than ours and they lack our long tradition of successful, radical but peaceful reform and renewal.
No, what worries me most today is the state of the people who should be the natural leaders of the next American transformation: our intellectuals and professionals. Not all of them, I hasten to say: the United States is still rich in great scholars and daring thinkers. A few of them even blog.
His concern is that the intellectuals seem caught in a mind set that goes back to the 19th century and the Progressive Era.
Since the late nineteenth century most intellectuals have identified progress with the advance of the bureaucratic, redistributionist and administrative state. The government, guided by credentialed intellectuals with scientific training and values, would lead society through the economic and political perils of the day. An ever more powerful state would play an ever larger role in achieving ever greater degrees of affluence and stability for the population at large, redistributing wealth to provide basic sustenance and justice to the poor. The social mission of intellectuals was to build political support for the development of the new order, to provide enlightened guidance based on rational and scientific thought to policymakers, to administer the state through a merit based civil service, and to train new generations of managers and administrators.
It’s interesting that one of the comments, a lengthy one, exactly restates this issue but supports this model and argues with Mead that it is still superior.
Second, there are the related questions of interest and class. Most intellectuals today still live in a guild economy. The learned professions – lawyers, doctors, university professors, the clergy of most mainline denominations, and (aspirationally anyway) school teachers and journalists – are organized in modern day versions of the medieval guilds. Membership in the guilds is restricted, and the self-regulated guilds do their best to uphold an ideal of service and fairness and also to defend the economic interests of the members. The culture and structure of the learned professions shape the world view of most American intellectuals today, but high on the list of necessary changes our society must make is the restructuring and in many cases the destruction of the guilds. Just as the industrial revolution broke up the manufacturing guilds, the information revolution today is breaking up the knowledge guilds.
He goes on to criticize medicine as a guild but I think he is unaware of the rapid changes going on in medicine today. The image of the family GP is quickly shifting to the multispecialty group with primary care provided by nurse practitioners and physician assistants. Those who want a personal relationship with a primary care physician, or even a favored specialist, will increasingly be required to pay cash for the privilege as many doctors who want to continue this model of practice are dropping out of insurance and Medicare contracts because of the micromanagement and poor reimbursement.
In most of our learned professions and knowledge guilds today, promotion is linked to the needs and aspirations of the guild rather than to society at large. Promotion in the academy is almost universally linked to the production of ever more specialized, theory-rich (and, outside the natural sciences, too often application-poor) texts, pulling the discourse in one discipline after another into increasingly self-referential black holes. We suffer from ‘runaway guilds’: costs skyrocket in medicine, the civil service, education and the law in part because the imperatives of the guilds and the interests of their members too often triumph over the needs and interests of the wider society.
Almost everywhere one looks in American intellectual institutions there is a hypertrophy of the theoretical, galloping credentialism and a withering of the real. In literature, critics and theoreticians erect increasingly complex structures of interpretation and reflection – while the general audience for good literature diminishes from year to year. We are moving towards a society in which a tiny but very well credentialed minority obsessively produces arcane and self referential (but carefully peer reviewed) theory about texts that nobody reads.
Once again, costs in medicine are a subject by themselves but the solution does not lie in controlling doctors incomes. With respect to the academic institutions, I have personal experience here and will describe some of it. The Humanities have been hollowed out by a trend to both politicize and to leave the subject behind as “critical thinking” goes on to analysis that has little to do with it. The Sokol Hoax is but one example.
The Sokal affair (also known as Sokal’s hoax) was a publishing hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the magazine’s intellectual rigor and, specifically, to learn if such a journal would “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if it (a) sounded good and (b) flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.”[1]
The hoax precipitated a furor but did not result in much improvement in such publications. My daughter had personal experience when her freshman courses in English Composition and American History Since 1877 both contained numerous examples of political and “social justice” alteration of the subject matter. For example, she was taught that the pioneers in the west survived by “learning to live like the Native Americans.” The fact is that the pioneers were mostly farmers and ranchers and the Native American tribes of the southwest were hunter gatherer societies who did not use agriculture or animal husbandry. She was also taught that the “Silent Majority” of the 1960s were white people who rejected the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Thus they were racists. Even Wikipedia, no conservative source, disagrees:
The term was popularized (though not first used) by U.S. President Richard Nixon in a November 3, 1969, speech in which he said, “And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support.”[1] In this usage it referred to those Americans who did not join in the large demonstrations against the Vietnam War at the time, who did not join in the counterculture, and who did not participate in public discourse. Nixon along with many others saw this group as being overshadowed in the media by the more vocal minority.
She has since transferred to another college.
The foundational assumptions of American intellectuals as a group are firmly based on the assumptions of the progressive state and the Blue Social Model. Those who run our government agencies, our universities, our foundations, our mainstream media outlets and other key institutions cannot at this point look the future in the face. The world is moving in ways so opposed to their most hallowed assumptions that they simply cannot make sense of it. They resist blindly and uncreatively and, unable to appreciate the extraordinary prospects for human liberation that this change can bring, they are incapable of creative and innovative response.
I think this is the source of the “media bias” so prominently referred to by the Right and by many who are not politically focused. This is why talk radio and Fox News have been such huge successes to the consternation of the political class and their supporters. Charles Krauthammer famously said, “Rupert Murdoch (owner of Fox News) found a niche market that contained 50% of the population.”
The Tea Parties are another manifestation of the frustration of the general population with the political class but also with the intellectual class that seems to be wedded to the first. The university community is, at least in the non-science segment of it, to be increasingly isolated from the concerns of the society that supports them. CalTech has for many years had a Humanities program to expose science and engineering students to culture. Unfortunately, a student in a large university will find much less culture and much more politics in Humanities departments these days.
A couple of other blog posts are worth reading on this subject. One is here and the other is here. They are both worth reading in full.
Getting into medical school.
Tuesday, September 14th, 2010This has been moved to a page.
The Education Bubble.
Monday, September 6th, 2010There has been quite a bit of discussion on various blogs about the rising cost and declining utility of a college education, especially outside the “hard sciences.” Even the left is beginning to notice some of the problems.
And if colleges are ever going to bend the cost curve, to borrow jargon from the health care debate, it might well be time to think about vetoing Olympic-quality athletic facilities and trimming the ranks of administrators. At Williams, a small liberal arts college renowned for teaching, 70 percent of employees do something other than teach.
Complaints about athletics are old news in leftist publications but that number for non-teaching employees is an eye opener.
Tuition is part of the problem.
No one can look at that curve and miss the magnitude of the problem. Roger Kimball has a nice summary of the problem and the comments are almost as interesting as his post.
I went through college and medical school mostly on scholarship. I did lose my scholarship one year through the effects of too much extracurricular activity. I was taking a calculus course from this little Indian professor. He was difficult to understand but I thought we had an agreement. If I got an A on the final, I would get a B in the course. I had been delinquent in turning in homework assignments but had finally seen the light. The final exam came and, since I had finally begun to study systematically, I got the A. All my life, I had gotten by with minimal study. I was finally motivated enough to do the work necessary instead of just enough to “get by.”
Well, I went over to the Math office (In those days a small bungalow painted a dreary sunshine yellow as all the temporary university buildings were.) and the posted grades were up. I had gotten a C. I needed that B to keep a B average and my scholarship. I was doomed. I made an appointment to talk to the professor. He didn’t show up. I made another with the same result. A couple of days later, I was walking down University Avenue when I saw him across the street. I called to him and started to cross. He saw me, his eyes bulged and he started to run the other direction. I didn’t think I would improve my grade by chasing him so that was it.
In those days, there were no student loans except some private funds that I knew nothing about. My father had left high school at the age of 15 to join the Navy in World War I. I have a picture of him in his uniform. When the war ended, he wanted out of the Navy so he told them he was only 15. He never went back to school, which is a shame because he was a very bright man and could have been a very good engineer. As it was, he did pretty well in the middle years of his life and disdained education. I never saw him open a book.
My mother had graduated from high school (In 1915) and from “Business College,” which taught her to type fast enough to be a legal secretary. She could type my high school papers as I dictated them at normal speaking speed. She encouraged me to study and to think about college but nobody knew how you went about it. I knew I wanted to be an engineer and I knew I wanted to go to Cal Tech, to me the pinnacle of engineering (I still think so).
I can’t believe how naive I was about getting funding but I just didn’t know anything. My father declared himself early. He took me down to his basement bar and recreation area and had a serious talk with me. “Son, I want you to get this idea of going to college out of your head.” He wanted me to be a golf pro. One of his standard greetings to me was “Get your nose out of that book !” so this was no surprise. I had never counted on him, anyway. I didn’t know at the time that he would have one more blow to administer to my hopes.
That year, 1956, was the first year a new national scholarship program was in effect. It was called The National Merit Scholarship Program and that became my chief goal. Of course, I didn’t realize there were only 100 scholarships that year. It began with the SAT. There were no SAT prep courses then. We were lined up one day and marched into the study hall, a classroom that was unique in that it had theater style seating. We took the exam and about a month later, I was notified that I was a finalist for the National Merit Scholarship.
What I didn’t know was that a packet was sent to the parents of finalists. One item in the packet was a statement of income, although the scholarship was not based on need, apparently that was one criterion. My father refused to fill it out. It was no one’s business how much money he made, which wasn’t very much by that time. His prosperous career was pretty much behind him. A few months later, I got a letter congratulating me, and informing me that, since I did not need financial aid, I was getting a certificate of achievement. In the meantime, I had been interviewed by a Cal Tech professor who traveled to Chicago, my dorm room had been assigned and I was ready to go except for the lack of ability to pay the tuition. I look back in wonder at my own naivete in not contacting the school after my mother told me about the uncompleted financial statement. Maybe they would have helped. I just didn’t know enough.
A month or so later, I was contacted by the Chicago group of USC alumni. I was vaguely familiar with the University of Southern California and, since my prospects were otherwise dim, I accepted. I was interviewed by Robert Brooker, then a vice-president of Sears, and was awarded a full scholarship plus a $500 stipend for living expenses. My high school’s unfamiliarity with my new university was exhibited by the fact that they sent my records to UC, Berkley. I got a letter from Berkley accepting me for admission and asking me to submit an application. We finally got that straightened out and I arrived in Los Angeles about two weeks before classes began to find a place to live.
I eventually, settled in a fraternity house, Phi Gamma Delta, because, in those days at least, fraternity houses were the cheapest place to live and, of course, the fact that they asked me. I had been staying there at the request of my local sponsor, a UCLA Phi Gam alum, while I looked for an apartment. USC in those days had almost no dorms for men, unless they were football players. When I was asked to pledge, I accepted. It was a good decision in many ways (I needed socialization) but it didn’t help studying. I often wonder how I would have turned out if I had made it to Cal Tech.
Engineering at USC was a weak department but I did not take sufficient advantage of what was there. When I lost the scholarship, I was somewhat at sea. What was I to do ? The tuition was $17 a unit, about $272 a semester. I didn’t have it but, at that time, it wasn’t out of reach like it is now. I got a job. I went to work for Douglas Aircraft at what was called a Mathematician I. This was a junior engineer. I had a couple of fraternity brothers who were working there, working their way through the last year of engineering school. In those days, and the point of this stream of consciousness, is that you could work your way through school in those days, even a private university.
My job was in the wind tunnel facility. I spent most of the day with a Marchant desk calculator and the rest programming an IBM 650 computer. This was about the era when the term “bug” was first used for computer malfunctions. We were told that it derived from the fact that one of the COBOL programmers had spent weeks trying to solve a programming error only to find that a moth had gotten into the machine and was contacting random connections.
After six months at this job, I decided to go back to school at night. I was lying on the beach at Playa Del Rey (now under the take-off zone of LAX) in January talking with my roommates about my future. They were both pre-med majors. I had begun thinking about it several years before, even before dropping out of school. John Paxton, whose father was a surgeon, suggested I take a basic biology course (My high school had zero biology) and another advanced course called “Comparative Anatomy.” The latter was a junior level course and maybe too tough for me but, he said, it would be the closest thing to medical school I would find in undergraduate.
I signed up for both courses, paying the $119 tuition myself. It was a good decision. That was January 1960. A year later, I had been accepted to medical school.
Now, there is no way I could do that and the alternative would be thousands of dollars in debt.
Working with tools.
Sunday, June 27th, 2010UPDATE: It now appears that a plumber in Kansas has provided a major design improvement to the BP oil well cap. He designed a cap using a flange arrangement similar to that used in high pressure hotel sewage lines. Once again, American ingenuity to the rescue as the tool user saves all the PhDs from their mishap.
I have previously posted my concern about the low status of manual arts in the educational and vocational fields in this country. This also applies to science but to a lesser degree. That previous post was obviously prior to the encounter between Barack Obama and Joe the Plumber.
One major point is the fact that Joe is making $250,000 a year at that point. How many law school graduates made that much in 2008?
Even in the field of innovation, it does not require a PhD to innovate in design or manufacturing. The basic problem, to me, seems to be the lack of manual skills with tools. People who make things, or can fix things, are the bedrock of a society that needs to design and manufacture quality objects. There is even a connection to the ability to do science. I wonder how many engineers cannot take apart and reassemble the things they design or work on. The same applies to surgery. Manual dexterity should be a basic requirement for the surgeon.
Today, there are a lot of unemployed people with useless degrees who would be better off learning plumbing or auto repair. In World War II, we benefited from the technical skills of the American soldiers who had learned to work with tools and many of whom could fix cars. The solution to the hedgerows of Normandy was an American army sergeant who devised a hedgerow cutter for the front of the Sherman tank. His name was Curtis G Culin and he was one of the heroes of World War II.
Dwight D. Eisenhower as President of the United States, in a January 10, 1961, speech to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers:
“ There was a little sergeant. His name was Culin, and he had an idea. And his idea was that we could fasten knives, great big steel knives in front of these tanks, and as they came along they would cut off these banks right at ground level – they would go through on the level keel – would carry with themselves a little bit of camouflage for a while. And this idea was brought to the captain, to the major, to the colonel, and it got high enough that somebody did something about it — and that was General Bradley — and he did it very quickly. Because this seemed like a crazy idea, they did not even go to the engineers very fast, because they were afraid of the technical advice, and then someone did have a big questions, “Where are you going to find the steel for all this thing?” Well now, happily the Germans tried to keep us from going on the beaches with great steel “chevaux de fries” – big crosses, there were all big bars of steel down on the beach where the Germans left it. And he got it – got these things sharpened up – and it worked fine. The biggest and happiest group I suppose in all the Allied Armies that night were those that knew that this thing worked. And it worked beautifully.
One of the reasons I like Neville Shute’s novels is because he has that theme in several of them. One, titled “Round the Bend” has as its theme the development of a new religion among men who work on airplanes. It is set in Asia and concerns the religions of Asia such as Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. The chief character is an airplane mechanic who teaches other mechanics that to do a careful, flawless job in working on an airplane is the same as praying. His interpretation of Islam (The novel was written in 1951) becomes extremely popular in the Persian Gulf region as the imams see this as a new view of religion that attracts the young men who have become interested in mechanics and science and have drifted away from traditional life. His new creed is equally popular with Buddhists and Hundus, all of them aircraft mechanics and pilots. The resulting increase in quality of the work is appreciated by the airlines and he becomes a cult figure.
Like many of Shute’s novels, the engineer, even without a degree, is the hero. I wish we had more of this. Shute knew what he was writing about as he was a successful aeronautical engineer who had owned his own company. I titled my other post, The Manual LIfe. I wish it was more appreciated.
Progressive taxes
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010UPDATE: There is more on this from National Review Online, including a letter complaining that Republicans are stupid because they don’t count FICA as “paying taxes.”
There is an argument made, even by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, that the FICA payroll tax is regressive. The bottom 50% of American workers pay no income tax. The left then responds that the payroll tax is still paid by that segment of society and that negates the argument of the right. Let’s look at how that plays out in real life.
As you see, the lowest quintile of income group pays a net minus 27% tax rate in the payroll tax. That is, they get 27% more than they pay in during a lifetime of work. Of course, the beneficiaries of the Social Security system have to wait until they are 67 or disabled to collect those benefits. That is a form of forced saving and would work out if Congress had not spent the Social Security Trust Fund on other matters, leaving only IOUs behind to pay the benefits.
The Anglo-Saxon society was built on the Protestant Ethic of deferred gratification. That is why those who endure poverty and hard work to get an education (a real education) or to complete an apprenticeship for a trade, are rewarded later while those who chose big screen TVs and flashy cars often never get ahead. The plan for a satisfying life does not include winning the lottery. This can be difficult to explain to those who have not had a decent introduction to life from caring parents. Even so, some still figure it out. Some of them use the military to get an education when other avenues are closed. Ambition and intelligence will often emerge from unlikely places.
You would think a Nobel laureate could figure this out.