My Faith in the Next Generation Took a Hit
To a certain extent, I understand the confusion of the next generation of my nephews and nieces; I earned 4 college degrees in politically "progressive" institutions. If I ever had a politically conservative or libertarian professor, I didn't know it. I wouldn't say that my "progressive" professors necessarily taught their ideology in classes; it was more subtle, e.g., critical comments on an assignment, course requirements (e.g., reading a multicultural author or attending an Alex Haley lecture on campus), curricula changes, so-called "student rights", faculty recruitment (e.g., recruitment of women and minorities), etc. I know certainly by the time I was a junior (nontenured) professor, it was fairly clear that expressing my emerging conservative view was politically suicidal, at least until I got tenure (which never happened, but I never went up. Typically, at least while I was in academia, you go up in your sixth year. There are exceptions of faculty going up early, not relevant in my case.)
How did I transform my political views? I think it started with a nagging doubt, and sometimes that's as a true believer. During my salad days, I convinced myself there was a problem which government needed to fix. I never really analyzed the details or assumptions of proposed fixes; I was more convinced by the name of the bill with my policy preferences. I really didn't analyze government's track record at resolving issues (although I was a deep skeptic, even as a military brat, of the Vietnam War; I was too young to be vulnerable for the draft. But while my Dad was assigned to SE Asia, one of my neighbors at a Kansas post hosting military families lost his Dad. Later in college, my dorm RA, a Vietnam veteran, had lost one of his limbs at
Hamburger Hill. Hamburger Hill had little strategic value; it simply chewed up men. My RA wasn't so much bitter over his circumstances as with the fact his limb was sacrificed over a dubious mission.)
So during my student years, it was more like, do I believe in "fair employment" policies? Of course. And if you're not for "fair employment", you surely must be vested in and benefit by "unfair employment". I really didn't question whether the legislation was necessary or might have unintended, even counterproductive effects; I didn't really question whether the purported legislation would achieve its goals or the metrics use to validate them. I didn't consider the compliance costs on employers or if there were other, less heavy-handed ways, e.g., social pressure might lead to market-competitive employers wanting to promote a "progressive" work culture/experience. In current politics, the ideological feminists want to promote equal pay. But let's point out that the empirical data don't show "apple-to-apple" discrimination. When you factor in hours, experience, skills, background, etc., the gap largely disappears. And also, men tend to be more attracted to higher-paying, physically-demanding occupations, like oil rig work or logging. Female engineers are in short supply, etc. On the other hand, women seem to be dominating lower-paying occupations like early education. The fact is, the typical university enrolls and graduates a higher proportion of women students, and higher education correlates with income. In fact, if you look at single women/those without families, they often hold their own (if not do better) than their male counterparts. Almost every study I see closes the gap from 23 cents to the male dollar to pennies when you factor other variables. A lot of issues seem to be with women who take time off or reduce hours to raise their families. That's a personal, not business decision, however worthy the mother's preference. Besides, if and when employers compete for talent, there's an immediate incentive for a competitor to arbitrage any perceived difference from the market salary for said opportunity.
So why object to the legislation? There are a variety of reasons, including compliance costs, having to deal with nuisance suits and lawsuit abuse; employers may shy away from hiring mothers with small children, etc. If companies are paying valued employees below market, they will lose them to the competition, get a bad reputation in the job market and have trouble recruiting or training replacements. I think the contract between a company and employee is voluntary; either party usually has a right to terminate the contract at will. If a female employee feels that she is being exploited, she has a right to quit, but her only real grievance is if the employer is paying below the contracted rate. If I buy a stock one day, and its price drops by 20% the next day, I may be frustrated but I can't replay the transaction arguing it should be 20% cheaper. If I accept a job at a certain salary and it turns out XYZ Corp pays 20% higher for similar work, I have no one to blame for myself for not knowing the higher market salary. It may well be XYZ was not interested in hiring me; I might ask my company for a relevant raise or put myself on the job market. My first IT job was with a well-known insurance company located out of San Antonio. There weren't (at the time) a lot of programming jobs in the market; I found that employers in Houston were willing to pay me 50% more for related work. The point is, the free market is a far better check against employer abuse than any government bureaucrat.
Going back to the "tiny doubts" concept, let me briefly discuss the construct of computer user satisfaction. In my doctoral seminars, I often had to read a number of academic articles in my field every week and write analyses. There were a few users of user satisfaction. A prominent one surfaced before the PC revolution (the Bailey-Pearson measure), which had been published in the prestigious
Management Science journal, a variation of which was published a few years later in a similarly prestigious CACM. The measure was based on a few dozen interviews (as I recall in the Arizona area), and the author made a puzzling argument of measure completeness, arguing that it was highly unlikely a salient factor failed to be captured in the process. This argument had gone past peer review, and the derivative CACM measure simply repeated the claim without challenge. I don't recall if I wrote up those concerns in my analyses at the time, but I was also very troubled by whether the assumptions of the statistical test being used were valid. [I simply didn't have the time to review the psychometric literature or thousands of articles in the applied psychology literature to judge the legitimacy of said techniques.] At one point, I ordered the dissertation through inter-library loan, hoping to see if he had published something justifying the argument and statistical test which didn't make the final article. I usually tried to do research in meticulous detail; I might cite half a dozen cases where a similar argument in a reference discipline had been made. But doubts continued to multiply; for example, it's highly unlikely that memory recall was a statistically independent event.
Now why was that important? Because I wanted to develop measures of my own, and it would have been highly convenient for me to make the argument that because Bailey and Pearson or Ives, Olson and Baroudi made the case, I could follow suit. I don't want to go into tedious detail here, but I read literally hundreds of articles on measures in reference literature and never once came across a similar argument. I developed similar concerns about other measures (e.g., Zmud's dimensionality of information article). In essence, I lost my confidence in applied MIS measures and meticulously focused on approaches from reference disciplines.
Long story short, I became more and more alarmed at fellow MIS academics using variations of Ives, Olson & Baroudi. It wasn't so much that I wanted to declare anathema on any future research, but to recognize there were methodological problems and to recognize related limitations. If there were any published criticisms of the measure, I hadn't seen them. So I wrote a paper criticizing the use of psychological measures in the MIS literature. Now I have a very high hit ratio; almost all the papers I ever wrote were accepted for publication by the targeted journals. This one was stuffed back in my face with personal insults; some were of the nature "instead of picking on someone else's measure, why don't you do something constructive of your own?". Others ridiculed that I hadn't brought anything new on psychometrics since Nunnally, Cronbach's alpha, etc. (A point I made was that reported high Cronbach's alphas were an artifact of poor questionnaire design.) I strongly suspect the editor fed the article to reviewers who had a vested interest in the measures I was criticizing. I don't have an issue with the arguments expressed above (others were nastier and more personal) but that's wasn't what the article was about; I wanted to start a conversation on applied research, one that I hadn't seen addressed in the literature. Some day I might dig it up, update it, and publish it personally, maybe in a research blog. But it's not like the methodological problems went away simply because they crapped over my paper.
So, the interested reader might want to know: what does any of this have to do with the political blog? I did a number of Facebook Corner segments over the past weekend. One of my nephews critically responded to a fairly factual clip by an Administration spokesman pointing out purported Medicaid "cuts" really amounted to reductions of planned increases (NOT baseline funding).
Now I think all of my 21 nephews and nieces are now of voting age (the youngest just graduating from high school). To be honest, I'm not sure of their politics; they probably know I have a political blog out there. I knew my middle brother's 2 kids were Obama cultists from 2008, mostly because my niece had sent my mother a blistering attack on McCain and cc'ed me (she had an invalid email address for my Mom). (It was a really odd attack based on McCain's accommodating stand on stem cell research; in fact, Obama and prior nominees had fully bought into stem cell research and promoted it.) I pushed back on the hypocrisy; she cc'ed her brother and mother in the exchange. Her mother was not exactly a "progressive", probably one of those "I don't brake for Hillary Clinton" types, but she didn't like the way I was pushing back on my niece. Keep in mind this was not a fight I instigated, but quite frankly, if you send out an unsolicited badly toned email like hers which insulted my Mom and me, be prepared for my service volley back, probably twice as hard. My nephew emailed back something to the effect "you can't stop us from voting for Obama, na, na, na, na, na, na!" (They live in Kansas; the chance of Obama winning Kansas was near zero.) My nephew and niece were both into performance arts, and the chance of them being exposed to a conservative or libertarian was near zero, so it didn't surprise me. I can't even say for sure about my younger siblings; I think most of them probably vote Republican for reasons I won't go into here (e.g., my baby brother was upset that I don't support prayer in public schools, and I objected to one of my nieces' (the oldest of my sisters) public high school graduation (on Air Force Academy grounds), one student using her speaking opportunity to testify to her faith in Jesus Christ (nobody, including my parents, agreed with my objection, although I suspected if the student were Muslim praising Mohammed they would have a different point of view). As for my middle brother, he's a more difficult read and more diplomatic, someone who avoids discussing politics. He started out like me as a liberal and implies that he supported at least one Bush election, but there are things like his sending me a link to a Gray Lady article and almost no conservative ever references the NYT. Even my mother, who definitely supports the GOP more (and whose businessman father was Republican in heavily Democratic Massachusetts) will throw a curve ball, like sending me a Paul Krugman column she finds "interesting". My Dad's best friend Oscar is an unwavering Southern Democrat (one of the few left) who loathed the Bushes with a passion and often rants in San Antonio newspapers.
A couple of nephews (baby brother) suggested they are libertarian (the old fiscal conservative, social liberal motto) and agree with me on some things but not others (unspecified). As for the nephew I started discussing above, we had never discussed politics, but his mother, my sister, has been active in local GOP activities, and his father was also a military brat. His alma mater, Texas A&M, has a well-known ROTC program, so I always assumed he had a more conservative perspective.
So, going back to the nephew discussing Medicaid: I thought after the fact (like I mentioned in a reply comment) that he may have had in mind block-granting Medicaid to the states, like Speaker Ryan has suggested on multiple occasions; I wasn't quite sure what Medicaid does if they are oversubscribed from a funding perspective: maybe elective procedures got deferred; provider reimbursements got deferred; funds were transferred from other government accounts, Congress would vote supplemental funding, etc. I was fairly confident that the projected funded reflected participant projections, COLA's, etc. My nephew was assuming Trump's reduced increases would result in prorated benefits with beneficiaries having to make up the difference out of pocket. I don't know where he got that idea, and he certainly didn't cite any source to back up his claims. I think it's likely just "progressive" fear-mongering coming straight out of Democratic talking points.
He then starts arguing the taxpayer-transferred subsidies are "good" for the economy because rich people don't spend their money (completely ignoring the importance of investing in the economy, fueling capital spending, municipal and state infrastructure bonds, etc). It's like Pelosi's ideological defense of a grossly overbuilt SNAP program, where she seems to argue having to pay for some or all of one's own food expenses makes or breaks the economy. Yeah, like the 6% we spend on food overall is more equal than the other 94%. All of this crap collapses under even minor scrutiny.
Along the thread I explicitly mention the elephant in the room: so-called income inequality. I bring out the Gini coefficient (a household-driven inequality measure) and tell him to look it up. I point out all sorts of methodological issues (changing government definitions or data collection, the deteriorating household construct, etc.) I also point out all sorts of issues with income inequality measurements (Piketty, for example, tried to combine data, ignoring nuances, say, in US vs. British data); I pointed out most studies were not longitudinal in nature; many figures used ignore non-wage compensation, including government transfers. I point out that, on an apple-to-apple basis, the Gini coefficient has remained mostly flat since the 1960's--meaning inequality has not been increasing. I later added that on wealth measures the top 1%'s percentage has remained essentially constant at just over 1/3 since the 1960's.
Oh, and when I point out virtues of the free market and the need to reduce and decentralize spending, my nephew decides to take a personal swipe, pointing out why don't I bother telling people I've worked as a government contractor (you hypocrite, you)? (In fact, I've worked for a number of private-sector companies and clients.)
I'm trying to close off the discussion when he suddenly resurrects the Gini coefficient, completely ignoring my earlier citations on the methodological issues and my stressing the need to use a normalized measure like personal income figures. He reproduces the unadjusted plots used by Piketty and others, saying effectively, why should I believe you versus these accomplished trained economists? He then starts discussing some of the issues, like the numbers don't reflect things like lump capital gains. I point out, like in the original article I cited, these things involved nominal vs. real gains that would really needed to distribute across the period of ownership, etc.
The nephew then starting nitpicking over methods of aggregated data, etc., no doubt reproducing leftist talking points, and let me tell you, I have tons of things to do and read beyond whiteboxing the detailed nuances of Gini coefficient methodology to respond to his disingenuous objections. It's like being back in my doctoral seminars, where I had only one week to analyze several articles. I didn't have to time to micro-analyze articles, which were edited accounts and left out a lot of salient details. My nephew was like an annoying Chihuahua nipping at your heels that deserves a quick kick. He doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. He probably hasn't read any of the criticisms of Piketty's research (I have). These "progressives" have no regard for the truth; they simply want to set the rules of the game, force you to respond to whatever disingenuous objection they can conceptualize. No, I'm not going to play those games. The guy who wrote the personal Gini coefficient article specifically pointed out, "Look, I have no dog in this fight. I'm a Russian analyzing this pot of accessible US data."
My nephew wrote me an email on the side, calling me an ideologue and complaining that he felt I took some personal shots at him. Talk about the kettle calling the pot black! I'll let the reader decide for themselves whether I was "unfair" in my series of comments. I thought the comments were detailed, constructive and well-written. None of his Medicaid claims were sourced and when he discussed the Gini coefficient he completely ignored my sources because they were not helpful to his left-wing perspective. He was being contrary for its own sake.
So I'm very disappointed. It's not so much the fact my nephew disagrees with me. Almost no one agrees with all my opinions. Even the two nephews via my baby brother admit they disagree with me on some things. Sure, it would be nice if I swayed other people's opinions. I'm more disappointed by his lack of due diligence, a disregard for the truth.
I Finally Dropped National Review As a Facebook Feed
I finally got fed up with everything from defenses of Trump to neo-con policies, etc. There are 2-3 writers I generally like: Jonah Goldberg, French, and Williamson, but I'm finding myself annoyed with maybe 80% of their posts.
I Reached 10,000 Tweets Today
I started tweeting regularly only about 2-3 years ago. I'm not even sure I would ever reach this milestone.
