The power of small things

You do not need to change very much of a genome to make a new species.
Scientific American, May 2009, “What makes us human” by Katherine S. Pollard.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference, title of book by Malcolm Gladwell.

The Power of Small: Why Little Things Make the Difference.

The straw that broke the camel’s back. Arabic proverb

I am going to hunt down the next jerk who cuts me off and kill him dead. Life in Washington, DC.

Camps

This is the first time K1 was at sleep away camp. She returned from Camp Strawderman with the desire to go away for a month instead of 2 weeks the next summer. We’re extremely glad she got to experience the feelings of camaraderie and the joys of just being together that seems to be missing from her school life. In terms of facilities, I thought that the camp was more rustic than what was featured in this NYT article. The article may be a harbinger of things to come for summer camps in general:

The pressure is on as never before. The tight economy has made private traditional sleep-away camps like Pine Forest seem even more of a luxury, even for many upper-middle-class families who have sent their children to such programs for generations. All the usual business headaches — personnel, logistics, marketing, customer service — matter more than ever.

But beyond the slack economy is a profound change in the business of summer camp. As in just about every industry, slick, nimble upstarts are muscling in on the establishment. These newcomers hold out 21st-century promises: We can groom the modern organization kid, hone lacrosse skills, improve algebra, pad the high-school résumé.

No more the quaint summer idyll of lake and volleyball and s’mores. Today, former Brazilian pros coach soccer camp, Oscar winners officiate at film camp, computer game developers teach tech camp — all the better, the pitches go, to get Holly or Howie into Harvard, or at least to sharpen their skills.

Seriously? Outcomes-based summer camps? Certainly, if the outcome is memories. But I can commiserate with the parents especially since today’s schools are already too outcomes based to to make other offerings available. Hence, the blossoming of niche camps such as computer animation, movie making, rock camp (and other musical variants) as well as the ever present test prep “camps”.

Skill mismatch

I made a series of blog posts on skill mismatch (here, here, here, and here) which discussed whether skill is equivalent to the level of education and if not, what can be considered as skills. Here’s the closest definition of skill mismatch that I’ve come across which points to the source of skill mismatch as possibly too many college and high school graduates with very general skills and perhaps not enough of those with vocational/technical skills (emphasis mine):

Pushing all young people toward a bachelor’s degree could be misguided, some employers say, depriving certain industries of much-needed future workers. “I think there is a stigma in society that says if you don’t get a four-year degree you have not achieved,” said Matthew Edwards, manager of human resources at Machine Specialties in Whitsett, N.C., which makes precision parts for the aerospace and defense industries and is desperate to hire 10 new machinists. “And I don’t think that is true. There are not enough technical people in the workforce for us to grow.”

Others question whether the skills shortage is simply a matter of employers not paying enough for qualified workers. In fact, the skills that employers most frequently say are in shortest supply are critical thinking, the ability to work in teams and communication, not specialized training.

“Our clients tell us ‘I’ve found somebody who is an electrician or a technician, but they don’t have a global mindset or can’t work with people in different cultures,’ ” said Mara E. Swan, executive vice president for global strategy and talent at ManpowerGroup, a job placement firm. “ ‘They can’t think beyond what I tell them to do.’ ”

Even as experts debate how to teach such intangible skills, more jobs demand much higher math and reading proficiency than in the past.
…
Yet many young people are not able to compete for these jobs. Nearly two-thirds of students who enter a community college within a few years of high school graduation require remedial math and reading classes, according to the American Association of Community Colleges.

Students who have a hard time grasping academic concepts in a traditional lecture or textbook may learn better in a practical, hands-on setting.

Technology and my discontents

Or why the great stagnation is becoming the great depression. This technological rant and why “advances” are becoming annoyances are enough to turn me into a Luddite:

1. Bought a HP desktop a few months ago - on the low end of its “High Performance” computers - still way too loud. I hear the fan shrieking sometimes when it runs a windows update. It seems almost too much to expect that as a minimum chips should run cooler so that the agonizing whirr of the fan doesn’t come on. I also got the computer with a TV tuner but I had to get the antenna separately! Moreover, HDMI which is standard on the Kyros (see below) is not even so on a “high performance” machine. The basic monitor doesn’t have a basic height adjustment. So much for “affordable” technology - it’s almost as though they computer sellers have decided to use the airline model of “a la carte” pricing.
2. I also got an Android knockoff - a Coby Kyros which for the price was a lot of fun. Unfortunately, a lot of Android apps assume a constant web connection. My experience has been that many Android apps store data on a website. For instance, BizCalendar tried to retrieve data from my Google calendar but since I don’t use Google Calendar, this app is practically useless to me. In general, my thought now is that any Android device is of limited use unless it comes with a data plan which I am loathe to shell out for.
3. Constant connection - which seems to underlie Google’s approach to software and is also its overall strategy is deeply flawed. We’re planning to go to Yellowstone this summer where Internet connections will not be plentiful. How am I supposed to access my Google Docs then? Unless Internet access becomes enshrined as a basic human right and becomes a constitutional amendment, this is something I will not be buying into.
4. I have also been looking at some solar powered solutions, e.g. a Powerfilm - but I couldn’t believe that it takes a whole day just to charge two AA batteries. Unbelievably, this is considered an achievement.
5. And, why is it so hard to make a decent coffee maker these days? The fact that there as many good reviews as there are bad reviews tells me that not only is manufacturing and quality a problem, but so is design. Perhaps hand pressed coffee is better than anything technology can offer.
6. (Addition 7/20) I also purchased a netbook with Windows Starter. The OS, which I can only describe as some kind of mongrel child of Microsoft, must have been a product of a battle that was won by the marketing department. Can’t change background, can’t switch user? Even with 1GB of memory? Take me back to the the dark days of the command line, please. Even a regular phone allows you to change your background!

Structural change, jobless recoveries and job creation

Structural change has in many ways become synonymous with jobless recoveries and in a way almost a bad word (phrase?).

In an interesting 2003 article, Erica Goshen and Simon Potter ask whether structural change can be responsible for jobless recoveries. Their chart 5 shows that since the recession of the 1980s, the percentage of total employment in industries undergoing structural change has increased substantially - from 50% to 80%

This finding is only suggestive since it doesn’t really get into the root of the problem, that is: What is it about structural change that makes jobs hard to create?

Here is a plot of job openings from JOLTS data via FRED from 2000 to current which seems to indicate that rate of job openings have reached a lower plateau(s).

JOLTS data does not go far back enough for us to see if the pre-2000 era had higher job openings. An indication that this might be true can be gleaned using openings data from the Business Employment Dynamics. Prior to 2000, the openings rate (measure differently as in the JOLTS) hovered between 2.0 and 1.5 percentages points but began declining in 1999 to about 1.0 percent. Because of the large pool of people looking for work, such a small decline can have large effects on the number unemployed and the unemployment rate.

Data from Business Dynamics Statistics compiled from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Database seems to also tell the same story. The job creation rate has declined over time. The net job creation rate however seems less pessimistic. The net rate subtracts from the job creation rate, the death rate of jobs and seems to indicate that while jobs are indeed harder to create, firms have also become somewhat more resilient in keeping jobs.

Of course, none of these pictures really address why jobs have become harder to create.

Career paths

In a previous post, I said:

From where I'm sitting there are two ways to approach this [career choice]:
1. Here's what I want to do, how do I do it?
2. Here's what I want to study, what can I do with it?

I had a feeling this would come back to bite me. Thinking back to what I’ve done, this was/has/is not the way things have worked out for me. But let’s dwell on Megan McArdle instead:

Megan McArdle is the business and economics editor for The Atlantic. She has worked at three start-ups, a consulting firm, an investment bank, a disaster recovery firm at Ground Zero, and the Economist.

Megan McArdle was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and yes, she does enjoy her lattes, as well as the occasional extra dry skim milk cappuccino. Her checkered work history includes three start-ups, four years as a technology project manager for a boutique consulting firm, a summer as an associate at an investment bank, and a year spent as sort of an executive copy girl for one of the disaster recovery firms at Ground Zero . . . all before the age of 30.

While working at Ground Zero, she started Live from the WTC, a blog focused on economics, business, and cooking. She may or may not have been the first major economics blogger, depending on whether we are allowed to throw outlying variables such as Brad Delong out of the set. From there it was but a few steps down the slippery slope to freelance journalism. For the past four years she has worked in various capacities for The Economist, where she wrote about economics and oversaw the founding of Free Exchange, the magazine's economics blog. She has also maintained her own blog, Asymmetrical Information, which moved to the Atlantic Monthly, along with its owner, in August 2007.

Megan holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA from the University of Chicago. After a lifetime as a New Yorker, she now resides in northwest Washington DC, where she is still trying to figure out what one does with an apartment larger than 400 square feet.

How typical is a straight and narrow career path, i.e. a pre-med major who goes on to medical school and stays on as a doctor until retirement? Or a high-school drop-out who goes to work as a carpenter and stays in construction for the rest of his life, either in a skilled trade or construction manager?

The shape of the world to come

The Shape of the World to Come by Laurent Cohen-Tanugi was a little disappointing. I was hoping for some bold predictions but instead got some qualified ifs and perhaps. The book mainly delves into the implications of a decline in American and European influence in the geopolitical world, the rise of radical Islam, and the rising economic prowess of BRICs and how the America and Europe still has relevance. The main thrust of the book I thought was his discussion of the globalization of politics which while sounds nice is really about dealing with global issues at a multilateral level. A profile of Laurent Cohen-Tanugi is here. A presentation that he did for his book at the Carnegie Council is here. The book’s website says that “He is a regular columnist for Le Monde and Les Echos, sits on the boards of several international think tanks, and was recently appointed by the French government to reflect on the European Union's strategy in the global economy.” It’s nice to get a job whose description is to “reflect”. (only in France?)

Excerpts from his discussion at Carnegie:
What the book is really about is an analysis of the world we are entering into from a geopolitical perspective and how Americans and Europeans should prepare for it. It is really an attempt to analyze the new geopolitical paradigm that we are witnessing. In fact, it is quite surprising that less than 20 years after the end of the Cold War, the end of the bipolar world that structured international relations since 1945, we are already witnessing another change of historic significance. I think that this succession of two very major changes probably explains why there seems to still be a gap in perception that we are entering into a new world. It is precisely to try to fill this gap that I wrote this book.

… tremendous shift of economic power to non-Western countries that is happening now and will continue to happen in the next decades. What is worth noting is that this rebalancing of economic hierarchies is the product of globalization, as you were saying. That is, it is through the liberalization of international trade and investment, through the decision of India and China—China first, India ten years later—to open their borders, that these countries finally took off. That takeoff of massive importance is the origin of this transfer of wealth to the East.

What we are seeing is that globalization is no longer purely an economic and social phenomenon. It's not only about job creation or job destruction. It is also the most significant transformative force of global geopolitics. Not only that, it is a return of traditional geopolitics in the global economy.

… The main argument that the book is making in that respect is that, contrary to the liberal view of commerce as an instrument of peace and harmony among nations—which remains true, of course—the world we are entering into is, in fact, not so flat. It's not the flat world that Tom Friedman is advertising. It is much more complex than that. Liberalization is producing as much conflict as it is producing harmony, as much fragmentation as it is producing homogenization.

I found the book less interesting than the overall ideas and the book itself does little to advance these ideas.