Some cause happiness wherever they go,
others whenever they go.
Oscar Wilde
You Don't Say...
(HT AEI's James Pethokoukis) from the Treasury Dept.:
As of September 30, 2012, the Government held about $2.7 trillion in assets, The $18.8 trillion in total liabilities is comprised mostly of: (1) $11.3 trillion in Federal debt securities held by the public and accrued interest and (2) $6.3 trillion in Federal employee and veteran benefits payable. The Government also reports about $4.9 trillion of intragovernmental debt [e.g., senior entitlement reserves outstanding.] As of September 30, 2012, the Government’s total debt outstanding subject to the debt limit was $16.027 trillion, $367 billion below the current limit. As budget deficits continue to occur, the Government will have to borrow more from the public. Instances where the debt held by the public increases faster than the economy for extended periods can pose additional challenges.So the Treasury has about net $16T in liabilities, NOT including over $2.5T in senior entitlement reserves (which do count in the debt ceiling) or estimates of up to or over $80T in unfunded senior entitlement liabilities. And only about $2.5T in annual revenues. Folks, even Bernie Madoff realized that he was living on borrowed time. Obama refuses to admit that he has a spending problem...
Buying Obama's Higher Education Hype?
Still Believe in the College Loan Bubble at Taxpayer Expense?
To a certain extent I was blessed compared to other PhD's because MIS was an emerging discipline in business schools (instead of focusing on areas like programming languages, and operating systems of computer science, we focused on the management, design and use of application systems and databases). Business schools were booming in the eighties, and the MBA was one of the "hottest" degrees. I was working as a programmer/analyst in the niche APL programming industry; APL is an interpetive (vs. compiled), concise, very powerful computer language developed by IBM, ideal for rapid application development. The companies I worked with made money by selling premium-priced mainframe computer time running value-added APL applications; a number of our Houston customers, primarily corporate headquarters for major energy companies, used us as a workaround to backlogged computing division bureaucracies. The emerging PC industry undermined the business model, and I believe the local branch offices vanished while I was in the doctoral program. I had decided, for career advancement, to pursue an MBA (I also hoped that my dating prospects would improve; they did, but I was far more successful in my academic endeavors).
I discovered UH had an MIS doctoral program and applied for admisison before completing my MBA. The MIS discipline was young, with the first major program emerging from the University of Minnesota. Business school accreditation (AACSB) requirements drove demand for faculty from accredited doctoral programs; by the time I graduated there were few openings I knew about at Tier One/land grant universities, but my phone rang off the hook with interview requests from smaller branch universities (the fact that I was one of 2 prospects selected for both the DSI and ICIS consortia during my graduation year probably helped; I actually talked over the phone to a Dartmouth recruiter impressed by that, but there was no follow-up). Little could I have guessed my academic career would end 5 years later in a nonrenewable visiting professor contract during the GHW Bush recession. To help meet faculty demand, Indiana University, headed by a key Minnesota alumnus, had set up a summer institute to retrain PhD's from other disciplines; with schools also cracking down on ABD's, threatening to make them requalify for candidacy after 5 years (in my field, married spouses, after finishing a required low-paid resident requirement, could make a lot more money by working full-time), slowing enrollments, and even computer science graduates (whom often had contempt for business schools) eyeing openings, I had a difficult time, even with 8 years of teaching (5 as a professor) and an above-average publication record.
The tables had turned; I was competing for interview slots. One telling example: one school had concurrent interviews going on in the same hotel suite living area when I arrived.
Gary North (HT for the source of the below embedded image) has previously written about the doctoral glut. I can identify with what North was saying; as an undergraduate I was a double major in philosophy (my first love) and math. At least 2 or 3 people had "the talk" with me against pursuing a philosophy doctorate: I was warned my best chance for getting a faculty spot was if a tenured professor on faculty died or retired. As for math, around the time I was admitted, Texas had decided to do something about the nationwide glut of mathematicians (I recall a new PhD had finally landed a position at an obscure Missouri state college), and required passing 6 area qualifying exams for ABD status. I still remember one married couple where the wife made it but her husband finished one exam short.
I never even made it to the exams because I lost my graduate support. I ran into a political problem with an East European immigrant visiting professor. I was set up by the other class TA, JL--we didn't lecture but led calculus problem solving sections; the professor (with heavily accented English--"nature-al numbers" and "recip(e)-rocals") was idiosyncratic--he would sometimes lose himself after scribbling 7 boards with equations and look at me through his thick glasses and ask, "What was it I was trying to do?" He also required a prospective A student to pass an oral exam. I got caught in the middle; I remember the best student in the class was so upset by one of his exams (we had no clue what he would put on an exam--I think if you got one right, a C; 2, a B; 3 an A), she literally threw her completed exam at and hit my face.
JL. on his initiative, suggested that we have an intervention with the professor. So he had me start off; the professor was quite upset by my description of student conplaints and turned to Jeff and said, "Is this true?" JL said, "I've heard a few complaints, but only from those whom are chronic complainers and would complain no matter who taught the class." To this day, I don't know what motivated JL to lie or backstab me. But the professor was now paranoid and even tailed me going into my graduate real analysis class to bitch about me to the professor. I later got summoned (already convicted by allegation) to a meeting in the department chair's office where I got read the riot act and was made to feel my place in the world was below that of a subatomic particle.
Later next semester I learned that my TA contract would not be renewed. I completed my thesis on a topic in ring theory (abstract algebra); I'll never forget once buying a book on group theory, and the salesgirl asked me what psychology class I was taking (trust me: mathematicians everywhere will think that's funny). I had to get a bridge loan from my reluctant maternal grandfather to pay a $500 fee to get my thesis typed, copied and bound (this was before PC soft fonts in writing math equations/expressions). I intended to join the Air Force (to be trained as a meteorologist). But I was passed over twice in officer selection pools, making me ineligible for 6 months. I tried to get a job teaching at a community college; no luck. I was unsuccessful finding other work. I was living cheaply off campus--my folks of modest means had given me a small money gift after graduation, but moving home was not an option. The economy was in a recession; as the fall semester approached, I looked into going back to UT to pick up high school math teaching certification, but needed a financial aid package. Since my folks had claimed me as a dependent the prior calendar year, I had to get a financial statement from them. They refused. I pointed out to the college my little brother was enrolled, and the college bureaucrat, with a straight face, claimed use of my parents' financial statement for my brother would violate my brother's data privacy.
There's something that going through several months without a job does to a confident young man. Sure, people told me I should minor in computer science, not philosophy, for my Master's. But it never really occurred to me that someone who had graduated summa cum laude with majors in two intellectually demanding disciplines, a first-rate thinker, problem solver and communicator, would have problems trying to find an entry-level job. Gary North may have known, but he's an economist.
Incidentally the following image does not apply to me. But I found the PhD was more of a liability than an asset; when I tried to restart my professional career, I was advised by professional recruiters to drop the PhD from the resume. A number of employers made it clear just what they thought of "ivory-tower" academicians whom can't function in the "real world"; almost all gave no credit for computing experience in academia: I was treated as having been unemployed for the previous 8 years, and my no-longer-in-demand APL skills were suspect as well, judged likely obsolete or degraded. Several companies told me that I would have to compete against former students for entry-level positions, self-righteously proud of the fact they promoted from within for higher-level positions, and almost all of them had no interest in hiring an academician riding out the recession at their expense until hiring in academia improved.
But you still have to make ends meet. And that's how PhD's can sometimes end up in low-skill/low-paid occupations as described below. There but for the grace of God...
An Unconscionable Violation of Privacy
By a Politically Motivated Press
Two handguns and two pistol permits were stolen from the New City home of a man whose name and address are listed on the website of a local newspaper as possessing gun permits, police said.
The thieves ransacked the house Wednesday night, breaking into two safes on the home's third floor and stealing a third safe. The guns were in the stolen safe, police said.
Clarkstown police said they had no evidence the burglary was connected to the controversial map.The concept of privacy has, unfortunately, been coopted by those whom believe that a pregnant woman has an unrestricted right, for any or no reason, to commit or authorize violence against her preborn child. But we understand intuitively that there are some expectations to be left alone by the government or other people: in our homes, when we are in the bathroom, enter the voting booth, our health details, etc.
There are only a few cases I can think of where the public has a right to know about personal details and even then I would exercise prudence: for example, if a pro-gun control politician turns out to own a machine gun.
But public disclosure of details could undermine the home's tight to self-defense, expose a citizen to harassment or endangerment or serve to undermine public policy objectives like registration. For example, people's registered guns could be the target of others whom are restricted from gun ownership (e.g., former felons or mentally ill people).
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
The Stylistics, "Break Up to Make Up"
