When college isn't hard enough

I.
Something seems backwards about the signalling effect of colleges to employers. Ideally, colleges want two things: a low admission rate and a high graduation rate, especially the former.

It is very difficult for employers to project how a potential employee will perform, so they use college degrees as a signalling method. If it's really hard to get into Harvard, they must be exceptional.

However, this tells us exactly nothing about the quality of a Harvard education. 86% of freshman will graduate in four years. What about Oglala Lakota College, which has a 2% graduation rate? How exceptional do those handful of students have to be? It's hard to tell since it has a 100% acceptance rate.

Either way, isn't a low graduation rate a better signal of how difficult the experience is?

II.
For those who can't get into a low acceptance rate college, a better way to signal to employers might be to do something else that most people cannot do. Design your own app or website. Successfully run a small business. Build a combustion engine. Hell, ace a few MOOCs at Ivy League schools.

Imagine you're an employer with a stack of job applications for an entry-level position. They all have young graduates who went to the same schools, were president of the same clubs, and volunteered their spring breaks in the same third world countries. They also lack the hard skills to do the job, but that's fine since it's entry-level and you'll teach them anyway.

Then one resume comes from a student without any of those credentials. They graduated high school, then trained for a year before successfully climbing Mount Everest. They pledge to apply the same grit and determination to learning to crunch numbers for your firm. You don't know much about the other graduates' college experiences, but you know how few people have climbed Mount Everest. Is this a better candidate?

Maybe all the traditional signals—SATs, GPA, volunteering, extracurriculars, class ranking, internships—are becoming anti inductive; everyone does them now so you no longer stand out.

What if we told kids to do something demonstrably difficult, that most of your peers cannot/will not do, and it makes you stand out? Isn't that a better signal?

Social Signaling and Why Drugs are Cool

There is a scene in Swingers in which Jon Favreau is explaining to Ron Livingston the nature of Los Angeles clubs. From memory:

"For some reason all the cool bars in LA have no signs. It's like a speakeasy-sort-of thing. You tell a girl you went somewhere, it's like you're bragging you had to find it."

I think about this when I think about young people using drugs and alcohol. Sure, some people just enjoy being high. But I think something else is going on.

Evolutionary psychology posits that the thing women find most attractive in men is access to resources (this is a better description than money, since money didn't always exist.) Since most young people are unable to work enough to really signal how much money they have, they must find other ways to distinguish themselves.

In our society, access to resources comes in the way of being able to navigate one's social circle. In order to find drugs and alcohol, you have to know whom to ask. You have to know where the keg party is on Saturday. You have to know someone old enough to buy you beer.

The harder the resource is to find, the stronger your signal will be.

Telling a girl you bought the best bud in town, it's like you're bragging you had to find it.

My theory is that drugs are popular among young people because they signal one's access to resources. The best way to keep kids away from drugs is to replace their social signaling system with a new, less harmful one.

The Stop & Shop strike

The Stop & Shop grocery stores around me have been striking, asking for higher pay. Inspired by a Vox story, which wondered what would happen if Walmart's CEO gave his entire salary to his employees, I decided to do something similar.

First, I Googled "CEO of Stop and Shop" and found a dude named Kevin Holt who is CEO of Ahold Delhaize USA, which manages several grocery chains, including Stop & Shop, Giant Food, Food Lion, Hannaford, and others.

So I went bigger. Ahold Delhaize a Dutch company owned by president and CEO Frans Muller. According to Bloomberg, his net worth is €4,989,000. Acoording to Google's currency converter, that is $5,585,335.

Then I found Ahold Delhaize's total employees, which is 375,000 associates across 11 countries. So if we split Muller's entire salary among all his employees, that would give them each a whopping ... $14. (I found another site that puts Muller's total compensation at around $9 million, which seems more accurate. That would give each employee $24.)

According to this statement from their union rep, there are 31,000 Stop and Shop employees in New England. What if Holt, who manages these specific workers, split his total compensation of $4,025,500 among just those employees, ignoring the fact that the other grocery chains he oversees would probably not be happy with that? That would net each Stop and Shop worker ... $129.95.

Okay, so let's ignore CEO compensation and just look at profits. According to the union rep, Ahold Delhaize had profits of $2 billion last year.

Where does that money go? Someone on Quora used Walmart as an example. Of their $14.694 billion in net income (revenue minus expenses), $6.294 billion was returned to shareholders. That's 42%. Assuming Ahold Delhaize uses the same ratio, that would return $840 million to its shareholders, leaving $1.16 billion. If they took half of that it, $580 million, divided it by their 375,000 employees worldwide, it would equal $1,546 per employee, or an extra $128 a month.

Maybe they decide to be super progressive and split all of the $1.16 billion in net profits that don't go to shareholders among their 375,000 employees. That would equal $3,093 per employee, or $275 a month.

Can we figure out how to just address Stop & Shop employees? The 31,000 workers represent 8.26% of Ahold's 375,000 total work force. So what if we take 8.26% of the leftover $1.16 billion and divide that by the 31,000 employees? $3090 per employee, not much different than our figure above.

Not a bad raise, especially for someone on minimum wage, which is about $25,000 a year in Massachusetts (about a 12% increase). But I don't know if it's enough to cover increased wages, benefits, and a pension that the union demanded. Not to mention that this assumes every single profit not returned to shareholders goes to employees.

So who's paying for the increased compensation? Probably the consumers, many of whom are poor and minorities. That is, until robots who can stack shelves and check out items for a cheaper cost and replace all those jobs. Might as well fight for your wages now while you can.

Asymmetric Virtue Points

Here would be an interesting study. You get an email from someone you don't know. In their signature you see the following: "Responds to she/her." Knowing nothing more than that she lists her preferred pronouns, do you now like them more, less, or the same?

My guess is that progressives would like them more, conservatives less, and most people the same.

Here's the thing about calling people by their preferred pronoun: the incentives to do so aren't the same for each person. In fact, they are heavily favored toward progressives. When done in a public setting, progressives have the added benefit of accruing virtue points from their ingroup. "Look how progressive I am. I'm creating a safe space for trans folks!"

Conservatives get no such benefit and, in fact, might be ostracized by their ingroup. (As I'm typing this, I'm realizing that this is actually an argument for making it a law to call someone by their preferred pronoun since some people are incentivized not to do so. *shudders.)

One of the best things that progressives can to do advocate for trans folks would be to create an incentive for their outgroup to use use people's preferred pronouns. I have no idea what that would look like, I just know the current system is not designed to be helpful to anyone.

What James Damore got wrong

James Damore, author of the Google Memo, got fired for writing a screed about why he thought gender disparities in tech was due to biology. That's the short version anyway.

The intention of the memo was a response to Google asking employees for feedback based on some diversity training. It was not an attempt to change minds, But if it was, here are my thoughts on how it could have been more impactful.

Don't Bring a Knife to an Identity Politics Fight

As a stated libertarian, Damore's outgroup to persuade is progressives. Their telos is advocacy for victims. So if you're a white, straight, cis gendered man; playing the victim card immediately disqualifies your credibility. So I would leave out the part about being discriminated against by Google, even if it's true.

Validation

Second, he should have spent more time validating the harassment women experience. He did talk about how implicit bias couldn't explain everything. But I think he could have spent more time talking about the harassment and discrimination that exists, before talking about how eliminating it won't be enough to close the gender gap since it is caused by multiple factors, including biology.

Be careful with language

Calling someone "neurotic" and saying one sex has "high levels of neuroticism in the aggregate" are not the same thing. But unless someone is well-versed in the big five personality traits, they are not going to know the difference and will assume you are patronizing them.

Damore should have anticipated this. The one critique I read the most was people accusing Damore of being a misogynist by claiming all women were neurotic. Neuroticism is a scientific term that most people misinterpret. Even if the term and science are valid, it's not useful in terms of persuasion.

Likewise, when he writes about how women are more prone to anxiety, he misses a chance to engage with his outgroup (progressives). Even though his intention was to improve the work environment to be more conducive to women and uses science as the foundation for his belief, he only managed to ostracize progressives.

He could have written "women report higher levels of stress at work. Here is how we can provide a more supportive environment for them." This allows people to draw their own conclusions about the source of the stress and anxiety and actually listen to what Damore has to say. When he attributes the anxiety to women's biology, it's insulting to all those who experience discrimination and harassment that causes their anxiety.

Focus on outcomes we all agree on

Damore makes a good suggestion about offering more part-time work to attract more female employees. But he should have left out his perceived reason for what causes this. Instead of linking to a study about how women seek more work-life balance than men, he should have engaged the reason progressives offer for that disparity.

In addition to more part time work, he could have suggested onsite daycare and longer paid maternal leave so women don't have to choose to stay home.