The United States of America is a enemy of injustice, tyranny, and oppression.
Memorial Day.
Month: May 2011
Maybe… Higher Ed is selling social opportunity, too
Tremendous Noise! about the amount of money and students going into the Higher Education Bubble.
Most of these analyses focus on the economic aspects of going to college–the student loans, the opportunity costs of going to a four-year school, the value returned in learning versus the credential as a signal to prospective employers, and so on.
However, many of these studies do focus exclusively on those economic aspects. I submit that there is another dynamic at work here that adds significant value to the 4+-year college experience, which is contributing to the higher-ed bubble as well as decreasing 4-year graduation rates.
American life has become increasingly fragmented over the last century. We’ve witnessed a significant deterioration in traditional geographically-based communities. Marriage has been significantly impacted by social trends, contraception, and the geographical mobility tied to an ever-quickening technological stream which causes labor to shift around very quickly (think of the impacts of the Internet on the information-sharing which leads to more efficient distribution of people to jobs–e.g., Monster.com). Consequently, people move around quite often–changing careers 5-7 times, and moving around frequently even within careers. Anecdotally, I’ve seen folks in corporate settings moving around every 18-24 months, and in government jobs moving at a similar rate. That sort of movement is not at all conducive to meeting enough people to find a good mate–in fact, it makes it downright f’in difficult. Although today’s kids still value marriage, it’s become an increasingly elusive pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
So, where does college play into this? Well, it’s a place where young people are in a static environment for a period of time–4 years, and frequently more. There is a high frequent level of social interaction. The social interaction is with similarly acculturated people of a similar cognitive set. This setting serves as an aggregator of similar people of both sexes, which means that it’s a great place to meet other folks. This is probably not adequately assessed in lamentations of college cost.
We know that who you pair with is determined by who you’re around more than who you want to be with. Since we in the US don’t really do arranged marriages and leave mating choices to individuals, it makes sense that the individuals would try to take advantage of a socially accepted institution that positions them to make the most of the mating choices on the market.
Despite all the screwing around on campus, college is the best opportunity to meet suitable-for-marriage members of the opposite sex that people have after high school. This would also explain some of the premium associated with more prestigious colleges (higher quality average people). The high levels of movement and limited social interaction that occurs in a career field are extremely limiting factors on finding “ideal” or even “suitable” marriage material after college.
I’d love to see a study that winnows out that aspect of the value added–the opportunity to find a suitable marriage partner– from the usually assessed costs of going to college or graduate school. This is probably significant and should not be ignored in purely economic assessments.
Against The World: GMAT-based MBA Admissions Analysis
Since MBAs are becoming overwhelmingly popular as the post-grad degree of choice in today’s job market, being a Swiss-Army-tool-like credential for folks who don’t know what they want to do when they grow up, I decided to look at admissions rates with the goal of telling an aspiring MBA what his chances of getting into a prestigious school are. I focus on prestigious schools because they are most worth the investment of time and money, and analysis like this doesn’t cut it.
For this example, I have to make some assumptions, and I hope to list all of them. If some sharp cookie out there who knows stats or better information spots an error, please let me know. I am an amateur at this sort of thing.
There were 264000 GMAT takers in 2010. 78% of the score reports were sent to schools in the United States (page 8). The Graduate Management Admissions Council says that 2/3 (67%) of test takers score between 400 and 600. In a perfect normally distributed world, we’d take this to mean that the average score was 500, but that conflicts with this report of a mean of 540. We’ll use the 540 figure here, and assume a Standard Deviation of 100 points for the general population. I did not find hard data on that Standard Dev, but the calcs are pretty easy to adjust for and I recalled seeing that as a figure somewhere.
So, accordingly, about 83% of all GMAT takers have scores at 640 or below.
That leaves ~17% of takers with scores over 640. See the following table for concrete numbers of GMAT takers by each possible test score fit to a normal distribution with a mean of 540 and SD of 100. For instance, there are 6707 people who scored a 640 on the GMAT, worldwide, based on the number of people taking the test and the mean/SD information.
High-profile business schools (think Harvard, Stanford, MIT-Sloan, Wharton) typically admit between 7-15% of their applicants and have GMAT means of around 720-730. There is an average class size among the top 10 schools of 500 students, leading to a total of ~5000 top school slots available every year. The table above shows that if schools admitted students solely on GMAT score, by order of school rank, we’d see something like Harvard snapping up ALL of the 800 and 790 scores, Stanford getting half of the 780s, Booth getting the 780s and some 770s, etc, down the line. But that’s not exactly how it plays out, due to score distributions.
Those schools provide some helpful data on their websites about their GMAT score distributions. Harvard, for instance, has an admit profile with a median GMAT score of 730 and overall scores between 550 and 790.
Given the total number of GMAT test-takers and after doing a little statistics work in MathCad, we see that the overlaid normal distributions of the general GMAT population (of 264000) and top 10 B-schools indicate that a higher GMAT score correlates with a much higher percentage of admissions. We assume here that the mean score for the top 10 is 730 and the SD is 40 points–not unreasonable, but the actual mean is probably around 710-ish. The following graph shows what the overlaid distributions are. It’s immediately apparent that odds of admissions any of the 5000 available top-10 B-school slots (red line divided by blue line at a X-value) go very much higher at higher GMATs. News flash, right?
For the following calculations, we’re going to look at probability of admissions based SOLELY on GMAT scores, and ONLY to Harvard Business School with a class size of 924, a mean GMAT of 730, and a SD of 40 points. Additionally, we’re going to assume that EVERY GMAT TAKER in the WORLD is applying to Harvard, because it’s a damn fine school.
For real world applications, you could take these calcs and adjust for the ~5000 class slots in the top 10 business schools in the US (or worldwide), and figure out the odds of admissions accordingly by rank order.
Here are the findings of probability of admissions to HBS by test score:
I normalized test scores to a curve with a mean of 730 and SD of 40, and then broke the distribution down to find out how many admits per score range there would be for a class size of 924. The cumulative probability rank column on the far right is mean to account for rank-ordering scores–so that a score of 750 has all the likelihood of a score of 720 of getting in, plus the marginal improvement afforded by those 30 extra points on the test.
A few very important notes for any prospective MBA candidate: These numbers include all GMAT takers in the world for a single year. You would need to scale these figures to 1) the number of likely applicants to your school(s) and the mean/SD of your school’s score distribution. Running these trials gave a much higher percentage chance of admissions to a prestigious school. For instance, adjusting the class size to 5000 (to model the top 10 business schools) gave a much higher probability of admissions–on order of 50% for a 700 GMAT applicant to a class of 5000 with a mean of 710 and SD of 50.
If you have scores on the lower end of the spectrum (e.g. more than 1 SD below your school average), then you’d better be very truly exceptional to get into the school. Otherwise, I’d recommend saving yourself the time, money, and trouble of applying just to boost the school’s US News and World Report exclusivity rankings.
For an even better estimate, schools could provide the score distributions of their applicant pools. However, I suspect we won’t ever see those–“trade secrets”, I’m sure.
Additionally, these numbers of course do not take into account any qualitative application factors, and are based on the less-than-perfect GMAT info that is publicly available (or that I found.)
But, that said: For applying to HBS, knowing that you have a 30% chance of admissions based on GMAT alone at a score of 750 is encouraging–especially because you’re applying against the world in this case. And your odds get better as you refine your applicant pool sample for size and score distribution.
Given that testing strongly correlates to school performance, a reasonable assumption is that the undergrad performance of these test-takers corresponds roughly to their undergrad performance, adjusted for degree difficulty.
The moral of the story is this: If you want to go to Business School, assess yourself. Assess the costs and benefits of going. Then figure out what your actual chances of getting in are by running some numbers. Then– do well on the standardized test.
And those 10-15% admit rates don’t have to be as scary as they look, because most of that scary percentage is coming from people lower on the score curve.
Cutting Edge Analysis of Women in Combat
From Your Humble Author, of course. I ran across this article by MAJ Jane Blair in the Washington Post, a revelatory article about myths that We All Have about Women in Combat.
First we shall engage in a little Good Ol’ Fashioned Ad Hominem to correctly contextualize the article. Then we shall address the article’s points.
MAJ Jane Blair, first and foremost, is female. (I rarely see men writing these articles, which should tell you something. A career male officer who could increase military performance by integrating women would probably jump all over that.) She is also, by virtue of being a Major in the Marine Corps, a career officer–hence looking for advancement. She is a career member of an entrenched bureaucracy that, when its useful arm is not fighting wars, is looking for succor at Washington’s teat. Therefore, writing an article like this, which caters to a number of perceptual biases in the politic-aware, is a great career move for her. I mean, it’s not exactly daring to write about how women are put-upon in the military, and marks her as a progressive thinker to be promoted faster or as someone who can be reliably inserted into a commentator or DC think-tank role after federal service.
So let’s look at the piece.
1)
During my service in Iraq as a Marine officer, I, like many other military women, found myself fighting on the front lines of America’s wars — yet was unacknowledged for doing so [Ed: what did you want? A Silver Star? Men don’t get special acknowledgment either.]. Women are dying in combat, but Congress still officially bans us from serving in combat units that engage the enemy with deliberate, offensive action.
This antiquated policy may be seeing its final days. Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.) has prepared an amendment to the defense budget bill that would end the the ban. On Memorial Day weekend, let’s also end some revered stereotypes purporting to explain why women couldn’t possibly succeed in combat.
Ah yes, the call to end revered stereotypes. Unfortunately, as a matter of empirical fact, stereotypes tend to be true, or else they wouldn’t be stereotypes. They are ways of arranging a variety of information to be quickly and easily cogitated over, with exceptions to be noted and marked in the brain. As a side note, MAJ Blair seems to be a Democratic legislation advocate. MAJ Blair, as a professional officer, aren’t you supposed to be apolitical?
Also, a quick fallacious reasoning note: MAJ Blair calls the policy “antiquated.” Ever wonder why the policy has survived to become “antiquated,” MAJ Blair? Maybe because it works. Intellectual types are always so quick to define the status quo as bad just because it’s the status quo (a non-argument), and they have to stir something up to get promoted.
But to the substance: Straw man alert! I’ve never heard anyone “purporting to explain why women couldn’t possibly succeed in combat.” I know a lot of folks who think full integration of women into combat units is a bad idea, for a number of reasons. I also know women who could succeed in combat, but putting them there doesn’t make it a good idea as a matter of policy.
Before we go further, let’s explore the Official Position: Changes to the military should be evaluated on the basis of whether they increase overall military effectiveness.
Therefore, women can be in the military if it makes sense that they improve overall capability. However, this doesn’t automatically meant that they should be everywhere, and it’s reasonable to expect proponents of such a change to offer arguments about why full integration would increase the overall ability of the military to fight and win wars. Such arguments have not, to my knowledge, been at all forthcoming.
2.) The Myths
A. Women are Too Emotionally Fragile for Combat.
I don’t know what too emotionally fragile for combat means. Please define. Do you mean the female cadets I saw crying when they couldn’t climb over a wall on an obstacle course?
MAJ Blair cites PTSD as happening to everyone. Well, let’s use this as a testable proxy for your claim that women are not (compared to men) too emotionally fragile for combat. Please cite some actual evidence to back this up. If your PTSD numbers are comparable between sexes without women being in combat roles, please show that we won’t be traumatizing mass amounts of women when we make this policy change. She cites a study from an Advisory Committee on Women in the Services stating that there’s no effect on unit cohesion. Maybe not. I disagree, personally, and did not see that information in the report.
Apart from that being a biased report from a committee on a mission to prove a point, Jane, you didn’t look at the survey, did you? The respondents were 70% female (in a military that’s between 15-20% female), and the majority received either no combat contact or irregular hostile fire–such that a rocket attack counts. Well, hell, Jane, you should know better than to make generalizations off of this infomation. A rocket attack, or having your convoy hit an IED, is not the same as storming fucking Fallujah.
Also, Dear Reader, please read the survey blurbs. You’ll find a lot of opinion in there that MAJ Blair did not mention, much from male service members. And remember, 70% of the survey respondents were female. I do not know how the respondents were chosen, which could also well be a source of bias in the results.
As a corollary to the Official Position, low-level commanders should be able to do what they have to do in order to maintain good order and discipline in a unit. Unfortunately, in today’s climate, this is an untenable prospect because there’s no way in Hell a commander would ever relieve or fire a woman for being emotionally fragile–he’d get his ass chewed up and spit out on the altar of PC. If there was a way he could do this (for males and females), I’d say that there was a workable solution to this circumstance.
B. Women are too physically weak for the battlefield.
Please also see the article by Katie Petronio on this, which pretty much proves this point, or this piece by another marine combat vet. Women are weaker and more injury prone than men, and putting them in combat roles will exacerbate any difficulties they face.
There’s a reason that PT tests are scaled by sex. It’s not the right reason– PT test results should be scaled by job specialty, not by sex–but the fact of the matter is that men are stronger and faster than women. Do I need to cite any sources here? When they cannot as a group do what combat soldiers (read: Infantry) do, then we need to seriously and objectively determine whether allowing women in a job increases military performance, or just increases MAJ Blair’s performance report.
Here, again, I defer to my default position that if a woman can meet ALL requirements that a man can, then, tautologically, she’s qualified to perform physically on the battlefield. The policy danger here is that by issuing a blanket policy allowing women to go into combat arms, we will be lessening the standards required to get into those positions. In fact, this will inevitably happen, because the percentage of women qualified physically for these roles is very low compared to the general female population, inviting much ado about discrimination, hence leading to too many unqualified women in combat roles such as infantry. This makes handy reading in a DACOWITS report, but is death on the battlefield.
PS. Since MAJ Blair employs anecdotal evidence when talking about big guys on road marches, I will employ more anecdotal evidence of women constantly going to guys to get physical things done on deployments. So there! And don’t even bring up the toilet accommodations issue.
C. The presence of women causes sexual tension in training and battle.
Major General Tony Cucolo thought so, at least until the PC harpies and pressure from higher forced him to rescind the measure he took to maintain good order and discipline in a combat zone. And he’s a Major General, way above Major Blair. Does he know something she doesn’t?
Men and women want to fuck, even in combat zones. I’m surprised that MAJ Blair discounts this. She asks why gender integration hasn’t undermined the performance of integrated units. News flash: It has! Male-female units are notoriously (within the military, anyway) prone to a whole rash of male/female relations problems that all-male units do not have, popularly termed “drama”. Now, the net gain from allowing women (i.e. 50% of the US population) into the military and making that population pool’s talents available to the military outweighs the problems, but I am extremely surprised that this argument is even here.
Scratch that. I’m not surprised at all. This is a pie-in-the-sky mass ignoring of human nature and interpersonal dynamics.
Oh yeah, I almost missed this–what about all the rapes? Do those count as sexual tension, or just more discrimination?
D. Male troops will become distracted from their missions in order to protect female comrades.
Absolutely true. Men defer to help women in a variety of circumstances, not least of which is helping females who can’t or won’t do something themselves. MAJ Blair puts up a straw man– the capture-the-flag scenario where the man spies the wounded woman or whatever and goes to help instead of finishing the job.
This does not capture the nuance of the battlefield. This sort of scenario is rarely the case. What is more likely is that instead of pushing forward in an assault or such, a man might stay in a position to provide cover or perform some less-than-absolute-deadly function for the gal. Or help her along. Or ensure that she’s not going to be kidnapped and raped. By the way, most of the press coverage of this incident was focused on the woman. Hell, most people didn’t know other male soldiers had been taken as well. Perhaps MAJ Blair doesn’t recognize the fact that such an assault and recovery effort represented a case of “male troops becoming distracted from the mission” OF IRAQ but there it is– Big Bold Real-Life Example.
She then says that soldiers save soldiers, blah blah, and tellingly at the end states that “And if a woman, or a man for that matter, can’t carry the wounded, the corpsman or another soldier will be close behind to help.”
Well, MAJ Blair, statistically speaking (see physical strength above), the woman is more likely to not be able to carry the wounded, who are often heavy as shit bricks. Now we have to take another body to do the job that a man could probably do. Not so good for your argument, is it?
E. Women can’t lead men effectively.
From MAJ Blair:
“Army Gen. Ann E. Dunwoody proved a few years ago, when she received her fourth star, that women can achieve high leadership roles in the military — yet she is not the norm. Leaders such as Dunwoody prove that women have what it takes. They just need the opportunity.”
Selective bias. MAJ Blair does not cite this female officer who also achieved a high leadership role (brigadier general!) in the military as proof that women can lead. This one certainly had the opportunity. Heck, this is a great example of sexism in the military–any male Colonel who had shoplifted would probably be fired, but a woman up-and-coming Colonel gets away with it.
MAJ Blair, getting a star is just part of the suck-up-marathon contest, in which I suspect being female is a plus. Don’t look to rank as a validation of leadership ability. That is an appeal to authority, and I’ve met enough dumbass ranking officers to know better.
However, despite my quibble with MAJ Blair’s example, I agree with her here. Women can lead men, I guess– I mean, I typically don’t have a problem with it, as long as the person is competent. I’d be more worried about women leading other women. I’m sure there’s some study out there on how men are more comfortable in a directly hierarchical environment, but I didn’t find it.
MAJ Blair demonstrates a consistent and willful ignorance of soldiering and human behavior. The proper approach is to acknowledge female strengths and weaknesses on the battlefield, and make conscious, rational decisions about the gains and drawbacks of placing female troops in various occupational specialties. She offered no net positives to making this change in policy, other than to address some “myths.” If after a hard examination of the facts, with corresponding logic, we decide to put females in combat roles, then let’s do it. But let’s not ignore truth when it’s staring us in the face. That will cost lives, and probably the lives of women who have been told that they can and want to do something that they don’t want to do and aren’t suited for.
*********Bonus zing/philosophy lesson: MAJ Blair cites Plato, saying “If men and women are expected to do the same work, we must teach them the same things.”
And she forgets that this quite logically led to this little blurb: “The law, I said, which is the sequel of this and of all that has preceded, is to the following effect, –‘that the wives of our guardians are to be common, and their children are to be common, and no parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent.”
Not the system MAJ Blair would ever be caught advocating, and yet she cites the foundation of it.
Be careful of what you quote, because you’re assuming the context of the rest of the work.
Oh no! Sexism! Get the smelling salts!
The Village Voice, not known for its particularly insightful analyses as much as its constant spewing of left-wing pseudo-thought, has inadvertently stumbled onto a fact of male-female ability differences.
Meet Peter Thiel’s Fellows: a handsome selection of the finest innovators under 20 years old. And by handsome, we mean 18 of them are boys, two of them are girls. But is anyone really that surprised of the ratio? Probably not. (Back to that later). Thiel’s 20 Under 20 were selected based on a rigorous criteria, and while there were over 400 applicants to Thiel’s program, which debuted earlier this year, only 20 of them made the final cut, winning $100,000 and a two-year tenure with the foundation’s network of masterminds. In exchange, of course, for their resignation from Harvard, MIT, Yale, and the rest of the Ivy League brigade…
We might not have matriculated to MIT when we were 14 or broken the sound barrier just after exiting the womb like some of the winners have, but we know bullshit when we see it: Two girls out of 20 just isn’t enough.
These folks obviously haven’t read their La Griffe Du Lion, much less their Roissy.
I feel obligated to point out that privately-funded and executed scholarships can be done any damn way that the founder wants to do them. If Thiel wanted to fund only mentally disabled black welfare mothers, would we be reading any complaints from the Village Voice? No, we would not, because that would be fashionable and socially acceptable.
However, when in an essentially merit-based competitive scholarship program, the ratio of men:women conforms with what we see at the far tails of ability distribution curves (if women aren’t in fact overrepresented here) the Village Voice cries Bullshit. We don’t hear these cries about female-only scholarships out there, do we? No, only when a successful businessman (because we never hear about how discriminatory woman-oriented scholarships are) decides to start and fund a scholarship to encourage exceptional performance, we get bitching about gender equality. Averie, please let us know how many women Peter Thiel should be picking to conform to your ideas of “enough women.”
I don’t know what the entire applicant pool looked like, but I suspect two things:
1) More men than women applied, probably by a large margin
2) The men had better experience and resumes
If those things were true–and I’d bet a Frappuccino that they are–I don’t see the Village voice having any sort of valid complaint. And even if they weren’t–if Thiel’s committee selected the only 18 boys that applied for the scholarship–there would still be no valid complaint, because it’s a damn private foundation’s scholarship. If the VV doesn’t complain about Black, Asian, Indian, and Women’s scholarships, then don’t complain about this one either because it doesn’t fit your notions of what should be, instead of what actually is.
But I will give credit where credit is due: The Village Voice didn’t gripe about the overrepresentation of Asians and Whites on this selection list. Or maybe that’s because the author, a white female Averie Timm, is, by her own logic, racist!
Hoist by her own petard.
Economic ignorance: Painful to read.
First, a little good ol’ fashioned ad-hominem argument: Jared Bernstein has never done a productive thing in his life. Music, Double-bass, social work, and progressive policy as a labor and low-income-earner advocate. Never done anything business related. He is a credentialed philosopher, musician, and social worker, which is exactly the type of experience we need to find our way forward from the current economic morass.
Now, we see him inveighing on Keynesian economics, which is not only far out of his expertise but about which there is considerable debate among people much smarter (or at least more relevantly educated and experienced) than he.
Getting a PhD in social welfare is a contra-indicator of an ability to make reasoned intellectual judgments anyway.
I’ve been pretty aghast to hear claims that large cuts would immediately generate job growth (and Irwin should have at least quoted someone with that view in the piece) when the opposite is almost surely the case. You can make this a lot more complicated, but when you’re as far below capacity as we are — when so many people are unemployed, e.g. — it’s really quite simple arithmetic. Government spending feeds right into GDP growth and cuts subtract from it.
Now, when you’re at full capacity, it’s different. At that point you’re pouring water into a glass that’s already full so you’re just wasting water. And you’re going to need some paper towels to clean it up (that’s inflation in this example — sorry, it’s early and I’m only partially caffeinated).
Well, I’ll agree with one thing: the government spending money does, well, spend money. Good work! Now let’s review comparative advantage of government versus private spending–which one gets more bang for the buck? As you read, keep these points in mind: 1) If private enterprise isn’t spending, why is that? 2) Even if government and private enterprise are equally prolific at spending cash, shouldn’t–as a matter of principle–private enterprise be allowed to do that over government? If not, doesn’t that imply that you know better what other people are supposed to do than they do, an explicitly socialist point of view? And 3) Private spending does indeed get more bang for the buck than government spending does. Government’s responsibility is to set the rules for trade and contract enforcement, not be an economic actor. Government spending waste is constantly and well-documented on all sides of the political spectrum, which should give anybody advocating more of it pause before he presses for more.
But here’s the question: Where does that money come from, and where does it go? Well, there are essentially five sources of funding. Chief among these are Taxes and Borrowing. Taxes are taken directly from citizens now; Borrowing comes from citizens later. Both come out of the pockets of citizens, who would spend the cash on other things and “[feed] right into GDP”, in a way that subsidies to government agencies do not.
When the government takes the money and spends it, the money is no longer available–now or in the future–for citizens (i.e. us) to spend. Instead, the cash goes into a bureaucratic meat-grinder that disperses it to such excellent causes as… well, everyone’s got their own favorite examples of wasteful government spending, but there are a lot of government agencies, foreign funding, etc., that take up money.
A lot of those do not spend money in economically generative ways, such as investment. The capital is not allocated efficiently. So, per Milton Friedman, the Keynesian multiplier effect that Jared is relying upon to make his argument valid is not always going to be what Jared wants it to be.
But what about his claim, that spending cuts do not generate job growth?
Well, think about it this way: If you cut spending and quit sucking cash out of the economy (out of the most productive citizens, by the way, and not the folks who don’t earn/produce enough to pay taxes on) to spend on social programs and agencies, et cetera, then you’ll leave it in the hands of those productive citizens and companies. Who will invest. Which will create jobs through growth, as opposed to spending cash on government programs that are objectively less productive than private enterprise.
The key to this program is cutting spending and associated levels of taxation on a predictable, long-term plane.
I also don’t think Jared can define, let alone recognize, “full capacity” solely based on the fact that our economic capacity now is radically different than the capacity 1, 3, 5, or 15 years ago based on technology alone, so that part of his statement is crap, too. He’d just advocate government spending into infinity on principle.
Now, if we cut spending today, we might not see those jobs appear tomorrow–but over the next year, with a lot of government spending reductions, I think we’d see significant economic gains–not to mention the benefits of keeping the government out of private enterprise arenas. Crowding out is a whole other discussion.
Insidious coverage.
Here’s the angle: Soldiers are valiant heroes, sure, but a lot of them end up on CNN.com as scarred nutcases, too. Or, that’s what we’re told. I mean, that last one is part 2/3 and is the front page of CNN today.
Hypothesis: media coverage of veterans is based on projected pity in order to displace guilt and disagreement with the conflict. Kind of like White Guilt is the underlying foundation of a lot of our national conversation/coverage of race.
Method of determination: Let’s see if Veterans are really as messed up as coverage makes them out to be. If so, then maybe we need to be worried about it. If not, then the media is doing something wrong. More to follow.
Problem: This is an unhealthy relationship for a nation to have with its military–when it views its soldiers as a psychologically unsound, emotionally-apart “other” entity. The increasing dissociation with the military makes wars more likely, as soldiers become “Someone Else or Someone Else’s Children.” Worse, this kind of reporting is wrapped in the sheep’s clothing of concern and empathy–so it looks like we’re doing the Vet a favor by raising awareness of his problems. Where’s the positive coverage of the soldier as doing something right?
And allow me a question–do you want your family problems on the front page of CNN, or do you just prefer to treat them?
Rates of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) seem to be about 6% for returning Iraq vets, or up to 14% (if you can find the actual DoD stats, let me know). The percentage of military in combat arms branches–such as Infantry (grunts), Armor (tankers), Field Artillery (gun-bunnies), and so on–is, according to this highly-authoritative-yet-ballpark-accurate figure, about 25-35% depending on who you include. Those are the people most likely to be exposed to combat, and so there’s perhaps a quarter-to-a-half of combat troops experiencing problems–although, anecdotally, I didn’t see anything near that incidence of problems in my units.
Mental illness problems for the general population include:
6.7% for major depressive disorders
3.5% for general population PTSD
18.1% for any anxiety disorder
9.1% for any personality disorder
Well, holy crap. All of those can be diagnosed as PTSD symptoms. All of a sudden, I begin to wonder where all the articles on civilians ending up as scarred nutcases are, as these numbers are just about as scary, and are likely underreported compared with the military numbers. Reporting on mental health in the military is over-reported compared to the general population sample, based on the continuous mental health surveys inflicted on servicemembers. Regular civilians go in when they know there’s a problem, or when there’s external evidence of an issue, such as an arrest. Servicemembers are practically told that they have problems as they come back from deployments.
Now, this is not to talk down combat service. I have nontrivial experience in the area myself, and fully understand, respect, and value what servicemembers actually do. I believe that genuine problems arise from exposure to intense combat, and should be treated. But I have a huge problem with civilians pitying veterans due to the supposition that they’re messed up, and the consequent view of soldiers as freaks–which is exactly the point of view that the CNN article propounds.
Solution? Let’s have more truly positive coverage of what we’re doing. We don’t have to necessarily always agree with the wars, or their execution–but let’s look for the positive effects of our efforts. National pride wouldn’t be out of place, either.
We need more of this.
I may be shallow–actually, heck, let’s get this out of the way: I am shallow– but I definitely enjoy the smoldering sultriness -nay, the class– that Ms. Green brought to the silver screen, and is lacking in many of today’s movies. It’s a lost art, I tell you.
And Danny Craig played a real man in this one, too. Couldn’t have had the one without the other.
Worker shortage? How about Economic Literacy Shortage?
Here’s an article from the literati at CNN/Fortune that utterly astounds me in its ignorance of basic free-market-economy principles and the implicit bias in the reporting. Now, I sympathize for the underpaid, indoctrinated, barely-out-of-undergrad journalism major who wrote it, but that’s no excuse for the pro-government pablum on display here. It states that:
“With the job market inching toward recovery, most of America’s collective attention is set squarely on there here and now. But signs of a coming shortage of skilled American workers have begun to draw concern from leaders in the public and private sectors, and for good reason
So dire are the predictions about the unprepared American worker that a group of executives from major companies appealed directly to state governors earlier this month, urging them to set higher standards for student proficiency in science and mathematics.
The group of executives, called Change the Equation, notes that only one fifth of today’s 8th graders are proficient or advanced in math, citing figures from national educational assessments… “ blah blah blah.
It also claims that the US will be short some 3 million high-skills workers by 2018, and a major shortfall is knowing what education to get, finding the education, paying for it, and getting youngsters to want to do it.
So let’s look at this. A group is predicting that the United States is going to be short on workers skilled in such things as math based on 8th grade proficiency rates, and is petitioning–nay, begging!–the government to set higher standards to avoid a talent crunch further down the line, when those Indians and Chinese people will obviously overtake us somehow.
By the numbers:
1) There will be no worker shortfall, at least as long as we avoid wage and price controls. This handy idea will help our friends at Fortune/CNN figure out why– but in short, as the demand for skilled workers goes up, there will be more skilled workers available. It’s a distribution of scarce resources problem. See Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, et al. What the article really says is that at current wage rates, we’d have a shortage in 10 years or however long. This is no problem if there are no wage controls, as companies will start paying more for the talent they want, and the talent they want will be attracted to that additional incentive. The short-sighted thinking in this article has already been covered elsewhere, and the principles are the same.
2) The article explains how the answer to this proposed shortage is higher standards for youngsters in school. However, that won’t matter. Assuming a minimum standard of g needed to accomplish “skilled worker” tasks in STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering, Math) jobs, there are only a limited number of people who can meet that standard regardless of what arbitrary lines Government chooses to draw on standardized tests. Having “Higher standards” will not make students smarter. And while there’s debate about exactly what ability level is needed to succeed in STEM jobs, the fact is that forcing Johnny to earn a certain score on a test to advance a grade doesn’t make him smarter.
Now, you may say “well, we’re just making sure that the kids are properly educated to get to the point where the marketplace can use them.” That will happen on its own without tying kids to test performance. Testing has its pros and cons, and reasonable people can disagree about how it should be used–but it should not be used as a knee-jerk proxy to ensure a more skilled workforce.
What bothers me here is the framing of the article–the reflexive thinking that Government is the solution to the problem. It is not. The nebulous labor problems presented here cannot be solved through central mandate any more than food prices or gas or anything else–the market is too strong. The article sort of mentions outsourcing, but doesn’t really touch on immigration, or other ways that the US can tap into brainpower as needed. Forcing youngsters into fields they don’t want to be in will be counterproductive. There are too many variables for the Government to handle, but we’ve become used to looking to Big Sugar for the answers to the problems that will either take care of themselves, or that we the people can deal with.
The redeeming feature of the article is that the authors do–however unintentionally–make a convincing argument for more mandatory applied economics classes in secondary and post-secondary education. The country needs that more than math testing.
If you’re going to be a racist, do it right.
Satoshi, do it right. You knew that by publishing something titled “Why are black women less physically attractive than other women?”, you’d be inviting a crapload of criticism. And instead of making it a serious effort to explain a phenomenon, you did it, as apparently you do a lot of things, for the shock value. What a waste of an opportunity to inspire some serious discussion.
Now, it looks like most of the criticism of this research is because it touched on something near and dear to everyone, racial differences.
If Kanazawa’d been researching other matters “objectively”–such as whether short men were subject to discrimination in the workplace or had a decreased likelihood of career and mating success–i.e., were less attractive–there would have been much less outcry, and in fact be taken as a fact of life. So I have to conclude that most of the noise generated is based on his dealing with race, and less on the fact that he purported to have a method of objectively assessing beauty.
But because he was dealing with race, he should have been much more thorough in his methodology and explanations. Then neither he nor Psychology Today would be having to retract or distance themselves from his findings.
Now, assessing beauty is a whole other post. There are commonly accepted metrics of beauty, but there is also a subjective component as well. We’re not concerned with beauty right now. We’re concerned with this study and its consequences.
So, the article describes the methodology as:
Add Health [link added by me. You could have at least linked to your data, for all those dunderheads who can’t or won’t look it up themselves. It’s actually a good dataset] measures the physical attractiveness of its respondents both objectively and subjectively. At the end of each interview, the interviewer rates the physical attractiveness of the respondent objectively on the following five-point scale: 1 = very unattractive, 2 = unattractive, 3 = about average, 4 = attractive, 5 = very attractive. The physical attractiveness of each Add Health respondent is measured three times by three different interviewers over seven years.
For the set of conclusions in this article, I would have liked to see the following laid out:
1) The survey pool, broken down by age, sex, race, nationality, and socioeconomic status. From what I’ve read, this would be the breakdown of the interviewers in the study.
2) The survey results controlled for the above, to verify that the results are not weighted, or to show how they’re weighted.
3) Multiple trials, for veracity. After all, the key to Kanazawa’s results is that little blurb in the above excerpt– “the interviewer rates the physical attractiveness… objectively…”. We need to know how that Objective scale is arrived at, since while there are some universal beauty standards, there’s a good amount of gray area as well.
Including this information would have been very helpful in defusing claims of racism and flawed methodology. It would have allowed other researchers to confirm or deny his results. Then we would have Science in the form of a reproducible experiment instead of an ungrounded claim of Objective research.
Now that we’ve tackled methodology let’s move on.
To back up claims about testosterone being the determinant factor in attractiveness, he should have cited sources verifying the relative levels of testosterone present in women of different races, and attempted to correlate that to his survey results. If correct, there would be an inverse relationship between the amount of average testosterone present in the women of the races surveyed and their relative attractiveness.
Another way to test this theory would have been to test the women being screened (i.e. the women whose photos were shown) for relative testosterone levels, and correlating that to their rated attractiveness by the interviewers.
Then Kanazawa’s story would have been “Testosterone levels inversely related to female attractiveness” instead of the deliberately provocative “Black Women are Objectively Less Beautiful.” From a purely scientific point of view, this would have been preferable to putting a veneer of respectability on a slipshod piece of work.
Then, if the results were the same…well, critics would still be vociferous in their insistence that beauty is subjective, that inner beauty is what matters, etc., but everyone else would be able to move on to discussing the effects of the findings in real life–like whether attractiveness is a key component in the discrimination usually referred to as “racism.”
Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints 