The Job Market as Your Therapist

I have a friend who once told me that everyone, everyone, should have a therapist. If nothing else, he said, it's someone to unload all of your shit on so you don't unload it on your family.

I've written ad nauseam about the death of the community and what this means for how people interact with the market. But the problem keeps staring me in the face. 

Case in point, I'm in a webinar about Gen Z and I'm told that they want a job that is meaningful. For my generation and older, this sounds like "I want a job where it feels like I'm having some positive impact on the world." But for Gen Z, it means they want the values of the employer to reflect their values.

This is new. 

People used to belong to churches or civic organizations or other moral communities that reflected their values, but Gen Z does not. As such, they unload all their shit on their employer.

This will massively change how our country looks. It will result in ideological sorting in the market. In the state, it will either swing back and forth with each election or lead to divorce.

Vampire Perks

I wish I believed there was a path for the community to arise as a place for people to unload their need for meaning. The common thing for people in my situation is to bemoan the morally bankrupt values of this younger generation and fight against it. But I am reminded of the Vampire Problem.

Most people--given the option to have an undead creature bite their neck, suck their blood, and transform them into a creature of the night that can only subsist on hunting and killing the living--would say "No, thanks." Even though every single vampire, who used to be human, loves being a vampire. They prefer it to their old life as a mortal human. So who's to say I wouldn't like being a vampire even if it's not my choice?

This is the Vampire Problem. Just because I don't like living in a world in which moral communities shift from the community to the employer, doesn't mean my children's generation won't prefer it that way. If this shift happens in my lifetime, I might even find myself liking it better.

Full Circle

I'm also encouraged by The Third Pillar. Reading it made me realize the long, surviving legacy of the community. As a bayesian who is partial to base rates, I have to ask myself, what is more likely: a change in society completely destroys the community as we know it, never to return? Or it finds a way to survive and push back against the state and the market, just as it always has.

What if this trend of transparently-politicized businesses continues and every employer explicitly states their political and moral values and employees self select into jobs that match their values? Reducing your pool of potential employees in half is going to make you weaker, just like any employer that only hired blonde-haired candidates would be weaker.

The first employer to defect (ie be open to job candidates of all ideologies) is going to outcompete all the other businesses that only hire social justice advocates or nationalists or whatever. The defections to becoming apolitical and to prioritizing the best employees over those who match your values will increase and the ideologically-minded companies will start to go out of business.

But the ideological businesses won't go away completely! People will have become so attached to having that tight moral community that they will continue to meet regularly. The old ideological businesses will just become the new churches and the community will return back where it belongs.

There, I galaxy-brained myself into it. I feel better now. I guess I don't need a therapist after all.

Why the rent is too damn high but the TVs are not

You should be able to raise a family on one single income. But @shoe0nhead is right to ask — how do we get there? First, let’s talk about making more money. And later this week we’ll answer the next question: how do we get costs down so that your money has value? https://t.co/YT4deiJfYy pic.twitter.com/04MTDkrt1O

— Blake Masters (@bgmasters) January 31, 2022

I can’t believe this moron is running for office and will probably win. But is he wrong? Isn’t it true that many Americans could survive on one income and that’s no longer the case? The neoliberals insist everything keeps getting better but it doesn’t feel that way.

So I guess I need to do some research to find what is true. And it starts with the graphic:

This blog post explains how author Agatha Christie could afford a maid and a nanny, but not a car. Today, for most people, the opposite is true; they can afford a car but not a maid. Some things have gotten cheaper and some have gotten more expensive.

Life seems better in the 1950s for most middle-class families, but they had fewer and crappier clothes, electronics, toys, and cars. What was actually better was the cost of education, mortgages, and healthcare. Something “bring back American jobs” will have no impact on.

Housing is tricky. The chart shows almost no change but that’s because it looks at all US homes and gives an average. Wages are better, but they require degrees. And to find the jobs that pay those wages you need to move to parts of the country where housing is scarce, making it more expensive and often requiring two-income households. (I'd also guess the decrease in married households makes the cost of living look much worse compared to the good old days.)

Read this report from the Brookings Institute and you'll see that St. Louis has more houses that households, making housing cheap. San Francisco is the opposite, more households than housing, making housing expensive. And you can’t just pick up vacant homes and move them to where people live.

The rate of housing has not kept up with population growth, which is why you need two incomes to raise a family. I don’t see how an America First strategy is going to result in more housing to drive down prices so families will only need one income.

So if your plan to fix America's problem is to look back at how good we had it, you are going to trade off a lot of things that many Americans currently like (cheap electronics, cars, toys, and clothes). Unless you can clearly articulate a way to drive down the cost of education, healthcare, and housing, you're just another charlatan.

The Well-Intentioned Abuse of "Equity"

 From an Inside Higher Ed story:

“And in 2020, an important report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce supplied contemporary and comparative evidence that general education helps “tame” authoritarian inclinations and thus protects democracy….

Policy and higher education leaders must become bold in making the case that democracy is the foundation of everything else we hold dear….”

Cool. I love democracy, and loathe authoritarianism. Tell me more.

"At most institutions, participation in civic and democracy learning remains optional rather than part of the degree-requirement fabric."

Sigh. So we're going to promote democracy and erode authoritarianism in students by taking away their freedom to choose what classes to take and requiring them to enroll in what we want. Great.

My hope is that the case for democracy teaches students how to lose with grace. How to, as Sebastian Junger put it, prefer a fair system in which you have no power to an unfair system in which you have all the power.

I think this also means separating how we fight against things we don’t like; choosing between legislation and social pressure/persuasion. I don’t like the CRT bans that remove from school libraries harmless and important books about Ruby Bridges. But those bans, although illiberal, were achieved through a democratic process that I have to agree to respect. 

Will examples like these be taught to students? Or is it just going to be about voter ID laws and all the bad things Republicans do.

But that’s not even my biggest gripe with the article. It's this:

“And we need to set equity goals and markers so that the civic learning movement becomes inclusive rather than, as it is today, often marked by deep disparities between who participates and who does not…

“the students least likely to “do optional” are America’s low-income, first-generation students and students from historically underserved communities.

"The result is deeply inequitable participation in college-level civic learning.”

My gripe is aimed at this obsession with equity, a term that is often a noble goal that is too often shoehorned into strategies without a thought of its usefulness.

Managing Risk

According to The Big Short, the mortgage backed securities that led to the Great Recession were once a popular investment tool. Once you pooled a bunch of mortgages together, you got a really safe investment with pretty good returns. The problem is that, as demand for them surged, investors began to run out of mortgages to fill them with. This led to taking on riskier and riskier mortgages.

I think something similar is happening in higher education. About 80 years ago the number of US colleges took off in response to increasing demand, fueled by the GI bill, draft dodgers, and the rise of most people’s standard of living, making affording college a possibility. The latter part is what I am interested in and will return to. 

Since we haven’t done much to expand immigration (numbers improved, but not as a share of the population) and coupled with infertility and rising tuition, there is a shortage of demand and colleges are starting to look like 2007-era mortgage backed securities, with more students enrolling who are likely to drop out.

Does that mean low-income students should be discouraged from pursuing higher education? No, but I think both students and colleges need to be more transparent about what they are looking for.

Life Examined

Baby Boomers went to college to get a better job AND become a better citizen. The latter part is what comes from a life of relative privilege. You care about citizenship once your basic needs are met. For Boomers of that era who did not pursue college, it wasn’t always because of costs. A lot of times there was enough good-paying, low-skilled manufacturing jobs that didn’t require a degree.

Let’s be honest, this push to teach citizenship and the value of democracy is something you only care about when your hierarchy of basic needs have been met. You have to be privileged to even be thinking about it.

So close to getting it

The sad thing is that the Inside Higher Ed's author is so close to getting it.

“Faced with such disparities, educators point out that community college students (and many four-year college students) often live very complex lives, balancing college study with work and family and frequently facing searing societal disparities as well.”

The first generation, low income community college student who we’re trying to force, in the name of equity, to pass a course about citizenship and the value of democracy, isn’t in college because he wants to have a broad-based liberal arts education. He wants to get a job so he doesn’t have to worry about his heat being shut off, how to afford his son’s baby formula, or how to take care of his ailing mother. And there isn’t a manufacturing job that pays enough so this is his only chance.

He is in school so he can make more money! That is it! And now you’re going to force him to take some class that isn’t going to make him more valuable in the workplace? 

You want equity? Let’s start with making it easier for low income people to find good paying jobs. Anything that isn’t doing that is just making their lives harder.

The End of (Believing in) Hate

 I no longer believe in hate as some type of motivational principle. Slogans like "End hate" always sounded so silly to me and I think the reason is: I never believed in hate. Such slogans are attempts to treat the symptom rather than the cause.

I believe that hate is the manifestation of the former of the "fight or flight" reflex. And I believe that reflex is ignited by fear. So you could say that I just believe that hate is a response to fear.

One of my idealist beliefs is that we all share certain human emotions. And when someone acts in a way that seems stupid or evil, you should look for the common human emotion that causes it rather than lazily relying on something banal like hate, racism, or power--things that only bad guys do. If the motives you attribute to someone's behavior are not motives that play out in your life, then they probably aren't their motives either.

I believe that the alt-right's nationalistic, anti immigrant sentiment isn't about hatred and racism. I think it's about fear. I think that what they call "patriotism" is the feeling that America is a sense of their identity and they fear that they are losing that sense of identity. It's probably a good place to explain to them how black people feel about cultural appropriation. 

When black progressives talk about “code switching” and “white spaces”, I think they are talking about the fear of losing their identity. I think it is the same fear nationalists have toward immigrants; they worry outside cultures are entering their spaces and threatening to erode their identity. Either people's behavior is rooted in the same human emotions, or we start to believe something that sounds like race science.

I don't think AOC's "Tax the Rich" sentiment is born our of a hatred of billionaires or jealousy of their success. I think she fears that people won't be able to escape poverty without help and that the 1 percent are sitting on piles of help that could change the lives of those living in poverty.

If you diagnose hate, you treat it with censorship. Which never works. If you diagnose fear, you treat it with understanding. Which is harder work than censorship, but it's win-win in the end.

File Under: Journalism working hard to earn our mistrust

I wrote a Facebook post about our biggest covid challenge right now: full capacity hospitals, filled with unvaccinated patients, having to turn away anyone needing emergency care. I used this as a basis for vaccine mandates being the least bad option. Someone responded that we should instead look for ways to increase the supply of hospital staff to meet this increased demand.

So imagine my surprise when I see this story on the homepage of the New York Times titled, “We Know the Real Cause of the Crisis in Our Hospitals. It’s Greed.”

I watch the video and it’s mostly interviews with nurses talking about the stress of being understaffed. Part of the segment explains how some states have tried to pass laws that require minimum nurse-to-patient ratios and then it shows a commercial from a lobbyist group that helped kill the bill. 

But as I zoomed out, I realized that I’m basically watching a commercial from a lobbyist group representing a nursing union. More depressing, nothing in the piece tried to fact check whether the “real cause” is, in fact, hospitals making money hand over fist by not hiring more nurses.

Knowing I have a full time job and a family, and lacking the highly-selective aptitude of a New York Times journalist, I decided to wing it and see what my very limited sleuth skills could uncover. 

After spending 15 seconds googling “hospital profit margins” I find this Moody’s report.

“nonprofit hospitals' profits declined significantly amid the pandemic. Specifically, nonprofit hospitals had a median operating margin of 0.5% in fiscal year (FY) 2020, down from 2.4% in FY 2019, and an operating flow margin of 6.7%, down from 8.4% in FY 2019…

“Moody's also found that nonprofit hospitals' expenses grew in FY2020 at a 4.7% rate—lower than the rate of expense growth in 2019 (5.9%), but still outpacing revenue growth, which was 3%.” 

From something called Becker’s Hospital Review:

“The steep decline resulted from a "tumultuous 2020," according to Kaufman Hall. For hospitals, financial stress in 2020 came from growing COVID-19 hospitalization rates, escalating expenses, declining elective care volumes and reduced outpatient revenue.”

Oh, so the reason hospitals aren’t spending more to hire more nurses isn’t because their CEOs like swimming in pools of all that fat profit, isn’t because they have no profit because of COVID-19.

Look, I don’t think this is an example of the MAINSTREAM MEDIA carrying water for the Democrats. But I think it’s lazy journalism and an example of why people are losing trust in institutions.

There are so many sources of disinformation out there. But there are also so many people choosing to listen to these sources over more credible ones and I feel like that is the part we don't talk about enough.

— Darkwater O'Scanlonski (@bayesianfox) January 16, 2022

You can blame people for choosing Joe Rogan interviewing a disgraced doctor peddling conspiracy theories rather than reading the New York Times. But at a certain point, legacy media needs to take a look in the mirror and ask themselves what they've done to drive so many people away.

Updating my Priors: Short Takes Part V

Short takes are supposed to be about new information I've read that confirms or disconfirms my prior beliefs. Lately I feel they have been doing too much confirming so I want to focus and things I've read that make me less confident in my beliefs. 

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I've complained about a lot of things that schools are doing under the Critical Race Theory umbrella. Because of the writing of Matt Yglesias, I now am a big supporter of culturally relevant pedagogy, which has empirical support in reducing inequity. If this makes me a social justice warrior then slap some pronouns in my bio and call me an ally.

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Although I've never directly criticized The 1619 Project on its merits, I haven't framed it in the most flattering terms. At the urging of another Yglesias post, I read Hannah-Jones' lead essay and was struck by how patriotic it was. Even if some of the foundations for the argument are shaky, if reading this causes African Americans to have warmer feelings about their country I think that is a good thing. 

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I've also become slightly less confident in coalition building. Antiwokes, like James Lindsay, and conservative Christians, like Chris Rufo, have worked together to ban CRT in certain school districts. Now some of these school districts using these laws to stamp out books in a very Moral Majority-era, Pro Christianity way. This downgrades my priors on coalition building always being a good thing. It also upgrades my prior on classical liberalism being the proper solution; ie all banning is bad. This is also an opportunity for an anti-illiberalism coalition to stand up, as evidenced by this op-ed by Kmele Foster (libertarian), David French (conservative), Jason Stanley (progressive), and Thomas Chatterton Williams (center left).

I still believe in coalition building. It's just a reminder to me to be aware of the motivations of the people you partner with. Moderates like me want everyone to have access to healthcare and a higher minimum wage. But I don't want to partner with the DSA because I worry they will use their power to destroy private businesses. Likewise, I wouldn't partner with an anti-woke organization if they are comfortable using illiberalism to get their way.

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I've become obsessed w/a new investing thesis: products that let people exit or circumvent broken systems. A key freedom -- especially these days.

Examples:
fiat -> #Bitcoin
college degrees -> Lambda School
credit scores -> @wetradeup, @nova_credit
weak K-12 schools -> @Primer

— Leo Polovets (@lpolovets) November 24, 2021

This tweet reminds me of my credential free capitalism post, particularly the part about credit scores. I also need to do a deeper dive into this study on cash flow data, which is supposed to do a better job of predicting default than credit scores. I think its better for people on the margins to pursue new systems that allow them to circumvent traditional systems, rather than to force them into those traditional systems.

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On the Jordan Peterson podcast, Jonathan Haidt said he was speaking to someone who said the authoritarianism aspect of Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory should actually be called something like "protectionism." It wasn't that conservatives necessarily like authoritarianism, just that they are comfortable invoking it when they feel protection is necessary.

This makes more sense and fits in with my dam metaphor. Instead of labeling things as right authoritarianism or left authoritarianism, it's better to think of things as "situations in which this group finds authoritarianism acceptable." 

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So tired of hearing people say "divisive." Utterly useless term.

— RIP CHARLES MILLS 🐐 (@deonteleologist) November 11, 2021

I don't care much for the above tweeter, but I think this post explains something I write about a lot. I think "divisive" is a very important term, but that's because I am an Enlightenment liberal, so I see tribalism as humanity's default setting and liberalism as the dam holding back the flood of civil war. This guy is a progressive, so he doesn't give a shit about civility or actions that turn up the tribalism dial. He sees the world through an oppressor vs. oppressed lens, and "divisiveness" is no reason to stop fighting the oppressors or advocating for the oppressed.

I am totally comfortable acknowledging my bias and that it's not necessarily "better" than anyone else's bias. The thing that chaps my ass is when members of the credential class fail to recognize their own bias and conflate it with truth. To them, it's not a moral disagreement. It's: "I'm smarter than you. I have the facts. You are wrong."

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The drastic increases recorded in this poll are mind-blowing and provide strong empirical support for the claim that as oppression recedes, sensitivity to injury and indignity actually increases https://t.co/DgF43c0OpU pic.twitter.com/fUnJYIVVrZ

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) November 11, 2021

Now we're entering the Confirmation Bias portion of Short Takes. This poll above made me think of my post about purple dots. If the lens you view the world is to look for oppression, you will fail to notice progress and broaden your definition of oppression.

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If I'm an editor at Scientific American, one of a small subset of mainstream publications devoted solely to, well, science, I definitely want to jump in with an aggressive take on each and every culture-war controversy. Very very good for the brand.https://t.co/CZAF4I6AbR

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) November 10, 2021

This thread made me think of my post about bottomfeeders.  I wrote "Let's say CNN had a 60% liberal bias in 1996, and that meant that of the stories they did not report, 80% of the time it was false and the other 20% was because it had a conservative angle they did not consider because they were too orthodox."

But I never gave a good example of the bolded section. The Scientific American is what I mean. If you read the full thread, Singal notes the authors makes it sound like this ant-CRT bill will ban all these books. Singal points out that a link in the story "points not to the bill itself, but to testimony from a state rep who argues the terms in question *potentially* violate the bill." In fact, the bill is publicly available for anyone to read. The journalists and editor just didn't bother to do so.

Other than laziness or intentional disinformation, I think the more likely story is a liberal bias that confirmed their priors. They didn't feel a need to follow up. A more conservative staff member would have smelled bullshit and searched for a reason to confirm his prior that this wasn't true, and probably found it. This is the value of intellectual diversity.

Credential-Blind Capitalism

My general understanding of African American history was that everything was awful for them, then the Civil Rights Act was passed. Things gradually got better but there is still a lot of ground to make up.

One of the most interesting things I learned from reading Robert Putnam's The Upswing, is that some things actually got worse shortly after the 1960s, most notably the racial wage gap.

Starting around the 1920s, the racial wage gap got smaller each year, peaking in the 1960s. Since then it has gotten worse each year. One of the main explanations for the initial narrowing of the black-white wage gap is that African Americans were moving out of the Jim Crow south and into booming industrial cities in the Rust Belt where the only color that mattered was green. 

(There is even survey data that suggests a stronger bias against white southerners than against blacks in these cities, noting "When poor whites from the south moved north for work, ‘occasionally a white southerner would find that a flat or a furnished room had ‘just been rented’ when the landlord heard his southern accent.’”)

Along with white laborers, African-Americans enjoyed strong unions and friendly civic associations. They increasingly had access to the same opportunities as white Americans, and that was reflected in their wages.

The DSA doesn't want to admit it, but this colorblind capitalism did way more for African Americans than Affirmative Action and Civil Rights Legislation, at least in terms of wages. (This isn't an argument against government intervention; I'm just pointing out that the state and the market have a role to play in reducing inequity.) 

Part of the explanation for the widening of the gap since the '60s is the disappearance of many of these factory jobs (and civic associations) and their replacement with new jobs in the tech sector that require a degree. So it used to be as simple as moving to a city with a lot of jobs. Now it's getting your children into college from a school system whose funding has been hallowed out by white flight.

This explains the Antiracism push to change admission policies so that more black Americans can get those degrees and go after their jobs. 

But I think there might be a better way.

Credential-Blind Capitalism

I don't think the answer is more college degrees. If the previous solution to reducing the racial wage gap was colorblind capitalism, the contemporary solution will be credential-blind capitalism.

Why fancy restaurants in places with significant numbers of startups tend not to have dress codes. pic.twitter.com/68tmSyFkyv

— Paul Graham (@paulg) July 28, 2021

There is something to the above tweet. Or Mark Zuckerberg and the zip-up hoodie or him showing up to meetings in a bathrobe. Steve Jobs in his dad jeans and turtleneck. 

The tech industry draws people who don't feel the need to impress you with their looks because they know they have high-demand skills. And what is a college degree if not a way of impressing you with a look? It doesn't do anything to signify high-demand skills, just a way of saying "I look like the type of person you want to hire."

 The capitalism of the tech industry not only doesn't care what color your skin is, they don't care about your credentials. And they are starting to find ways around them.

At the basic level, you have places like Google and Apple dropping the college requirement. At the more aggressive level, you have Peter Theil paying people to not go to college and to work for him. Here is someone so disenchanted with higher education that he is literally paying you to forego it. He could just wait four years to hire you but actually believes it is a waste of your time.

Another innovative approach is Austen Allred's Lambda School. They are so confident in their ability to find you a good paying tech job that you don't have to pay tuition until you are hired.

Michael Lind followed this line of thinking in an anti-university rant:

"Why not just break up Big U? Why not apply the logic of antitrust to the bloated, wasteful nonprofit academic sector? Let corporations do their own vocational training, like McDonald’s with Hamburger University, or contract with free-standing trade and professional schools. Let research be done by independent science and engineering institutes, with apprenticeships for young scientists and engineers. Let gender and ethnic studies departments be left-wing nonprofits; there will be plenty of liberal and leftist donor money for them. Let the former college sports teams go professional and let their professional players unionize."

While the Gettin's Good

If this direction 1. is a more direct path to good paying jobs, and 2. leaves you with much less debt than a traditional degree, than it seems like a smarter path than lowering admission criteria so colleges can admit more BIPOC students into a system that churns out an increasingly weaker signal to employers.

If you are privileged enough to proclaim that "The enexamied life is not worth living," then by all means pursue a traditional liberal arts education. If you are concerned with finding a good paying job, then find a career that disregards credentials. You can worry about examining your life once you have a down payment on your new house.