Scenario building

Via MR Clive Crook and some are wondering the following:

From the start of this calamity I have wanted to know, “What is the worst that can happen at these nuclear sites? Suppose everything that could go wrong does go wrong: what then?” I still don’t know the answer. In what I have read so far–dozens of articles–nobody who knows what he is talking about has spelt this out carefully.

I felt that this was the case during the subprime meltdown as well. The only scenario that was offered from a high level Treasury official was "God help us all". Interestingly, the only direct assistance toward the nuclear meltdown the supposed advanced industrial nations such as the United States and France have offered is to airlift its citizens out of the country.

Administrative versus survey data

Low response rates to surveys (with technologies such as Caller ID, etc.) have made the jobs of government agencies such as Census and BLS much harder. The alternative to surveys are administrative data such as wage and unemployment insurance records. However, these records are usually administered at the state level - making it difficult to coordinate. One example of successful coordination has been the LEHD. While the micro-data is not available for public access in the way that the American Community Survey and the CPS is, the aggregate data is available via On The Map.

Even though it is a useful data set for exploring issues such as worker flows, it cannot answer basic questions such as what is the unemployment rate? In order to answer such a question, data linking would have to be made to social security records to identify workers and non-workers (via wages received). Even here, it is unable to distinguish between those who are unemployed versus those who are not in the labor force.

Another useful source of linkage would be from workers to the 4-and 2-year colleges, technical and vocational schools, and graduate and high schools. This education data could provide a wealth of information on the returns to education as well as give a more accurate picture of which colleges have graduates who go on to have higher earnings. One modest project that has been underway for some time is the Texas Schools Project.

While extremely useful, privacy concerns will prevent an expansion and convergence of such two systems.

Is college the new high school?

According to Payscale.com, the following are the most popular jobs for BA holders:

Elementary School Teacher $32,678 - $49,637
High School Teacher $37,553 - $51,654
Retail Store Manager $39,012 - $58,845
Graphic Artist / Designer $32,533 - $46,762
Administrative Assistant $29,622 - $42,212
Executive Assistant $35,234 - $53,442
General / Operations Manager $48,293 - $84,060

Individuals Reporting: 6,208

Except for the teaching educations and the general manager position, it is hard to imagine why a high schools cannot teach the skills required for the other jobs.

Comparing recessions: Hirings

The above chart shows hiring levels from JOLTS data for the past two recessions. Except for the transportation and leisure industries, hiring levels appear to be fairly similar. Here are the same charts again with each recession appearing separately.



The hiring rates show a similar pattern, including the possibility that hiring rates in construction have recovered.


Again, the charts for the separate recessions appear below:

Is college really worth it

The current recession has generated a slew of articles questioning whether with the rising costs of a college education and grade inflation, is it really worth it to go to college (and get that degree)? Here are some top links that I came across just googling "what's a college degree worth":

1. NYT asks whether those who go and don't finish are better off not going at all: A small but influential group of economists and educators is pushing another pathway: for some students, no college at all. It’s time, they say, to develop credible alternatives for students unlikely to be successful pursuing a higher degree, or who may not be ready to do so. (See also David Leonhardt's rebuttal and a counter by Floyd Norris.) A similar vein at the New Yorker.

2. The WSJ asks what's it really worth? The arguments are about specific numbers and the convetional wisdom has been that it has been around $1 million in life time earnings. Current thinking is that it's probably around half of that in present value terms. Coupled with the college costs of $30,000 a year, the returns are looking rather slim.

3. A nice list of links are also at College Stats.

If we assume that the returns to college follow some kind of distribution and compared it to the distribution of just having a high school degree, is a college degree vastly superior (in terms of dominance of the distribution). Expected returns (means) are definitely higher (see the Leonhard post above) - but is the mean of college graduates so far to the right of the distribution that they are guaranteed to make more than high school graduates.

Below are smoothed plots showing the actual weighted earnings of high school graduates versus bachelor degree holders (ages 25-54) from the 2010 Current Population Survey (March Supplement):



Update: The mean of HS graduates is low relative to Bachelor degree holders mainly because there are many more HS graduates than there are Bachelor degree holders. The peaks of the earnings distribution however, seem to be indicate that the median earnings are not that much different - but they are: $34,000 versus $53,000.

Where the jobs are

Census has been touting its web site On the Map for some time now and so I decided to take a look based on some blog posts by Sirinya Tritipeskul, particularly this one that looks at jobs along a proposed subway route in Century City, Los Angeles. What was impressive was the ability to map job density all the way along the proposed route.

I was more interested in other aspects of the data - for instance, can it answer the following questions:
1. What has happened to employment in the brewery industry in Milwaukee in the past 3 years (the data is only from 2007-2009)?
2. What would happen to commuting patterns if Montgomery County's largest employer moved to Prince George's County?

Sadly, the data does not allow for such fine grain analysis. Industries only go down to major groups. What would be awesome would be to be able to click on the major industries and drill down to maybe the top 5 of the smaller industries the are part of the major group. Then clicking on the finer category of industries would give the names of the top 3 employers in that geographic region.

The use of maps to present the data is interesting only because it would not have been the first thing I would have thought of as a way to deliver the data.

Incentive effects of prizes on children

This is in K2's primary school. The classroom that collects the most boxtops gets a prize. Along the course of the year, the teachers realized that kids were starting to steal box tops from one classroom and claim them for their own classroom. Zip lock bags used to be taped to the door of their classrooms so that parents can just drop them off whenever was convenient. Now, the box tops are kept by the teachers and submitted by the kids.