Month: July 2024

Some time ago I became fatally suspicious of the word trope. Technically there's nothing wrong with it, but in practice it's used exclusively to imply someone has said something vaguely offensive without having the receipts. Here's the latest:

Three Columbia University administrators have been removed from their posts after sending text messages that “disturbingly touched on ancient antisemitic tropes” during a forum about Jewish issues in May, according to a letter sent by Columbia officials to the university community on Monday.

Touched on! And not just tropes, but ancient tropes! Needless to say, these alleged tropes go undefined.

I took a look at these text messages a couple of weeks ago and came away believing there wasn't much there. Since then the entire text conversation has been released, but it doesn't change things. During a panel discussion about antisemitism, the three deans in question shared private texts that you could fairly describe as snarky or irreverent. But that's about it.

To the Columbia administration, however, which was under siege from outraged alumni demanding that the three deans (plus a fourth) be fired immediately, the texts conveyed "a lack of seriousness about the concerns and the experiences of members of our Jewish community."

This is precisely backward. What the deans did was fail to show unconditional earnestness and obeisance toward every last grievance lodged by a particular community, no matter how ridiculous or overstated. This is apparently the price of admission to progressive society these days.

This whole thing is bonkers. The grievances of specific communities deserve to be given fair consideration, but they don't automatically demand absolute deference. In this case, the deans privately exhibited moderate skepticism toward a few of the claims from the panelists, some of it expressed a little bit caustically. None of it could reasonably be called antisemitic, and at most they deserve a verbal reprimand. Instead they're all out of jobs.

A few weeks ago there was a story about a senior citizens center that had won a grant for a new elevator. Great! But on Twitter it was an object of scorn: Why were we so delighted about a $365,000 elevator that would have cost half that in Europe and been installed twice as fast?

I couldn't confirm any of that, so I skipped past without writing about it. But on my recent vacation I did notice that Austria seemed to have an awful lot of elevators and they all had an odd sameness of appearance. It turns out I wasn't mistaken. There are a lot of elevators in Europe and they are pretty standardized. Stephen Smith explains:

A basic four-stop elevator costs about $158,000 in New York City, compared with about $36,000 in Switzerland. A six-stop model will set you back more than three times as much in Pennsylvania as in Belgium. Maintenance, repairs, and inspections all cost more in America too.

The first thing to notice about our elevators is that, like many things in America, they are huge. New elevators outside the U.S. are typically sized to accommodate a person in a large wheelchair plus somebody standing behind them. American elevators have ballooned to about twice that size, driven by a drip-drip-drip of regulations, each motivated by a slightly different concern — first accessibility, then accommodation for ambulance stretchers, then even bigger stretchers.

The U.S. and Canada have also marooned themselves on a regulatory island for elevator parts and designs.... Not only do we have our own elevator code, but individual U.S. jurisdictions modify it further. More accurate and efficient electronic testing practices, for example, are still mostly viewed with suspicion by the nearly 100 separate boards and jurisdictions that regulate elevator safety in North America (the exact number in the regulatory patchwork is hard to nail down exactly).

....Architects have dreamed of modular construction for decades, where entire rooms are built in factories and then shipped on flatbed trucks to sites, for lower costs and greater precision. But we can’t even put elevators together in factories in America, because the elevator union’s contract forbids even basic forms of preassembly and prefabrication that have become standard in elevators in the rest of the world. The union and manufacturers bicker over which holes can be drilled in a factory and which must be drilled (or redrilled) on site.

So there you have it. Elevators are cheap and standardized in Europe, so they're everywhere. They're expensive and customized in America, so we have fewer of them. Apparently the ADA doesn't require elevators in low-rise apartment buildings, and a lot of them go without because it's too expensive and too much of a hassle.

Is this a metaphor for American construction in general? I'm not sure I'd go that far. But you could talk me into it.

Historically, the Black unemployment rate has always been higher than the white unemployment rate—and the difference spikes during recessions as Black workers are the first to be let go. However, the gap has steadily declined over the years. After peaking in 1983 at above 10%, it's come down to just over 2% more recently. If this keeps up, the difference will be zero in another decade or two.

Hum de hum. You may know that a number of studies have demonstrated that higher intelligence is correlated with left-wing political beliefs. And that might be so. But I've always been a bit skeptical because (a) it seems unlikely, and (b) maybe what's really going on is that smart people tend to go to college and it's actually college education that's correlated with lefty beliefs.

A new study from a grad student at the University of Minnesota tries to tease this apart. Here's the basic result:

This chart shows how much political beliefs shift leftward in response to an IQ increase of one standard deviation (15 points). The raw result is 0.54, which is—a lot? A little? It's hard to say because the paper doesn't explain the scale they use to measure political orientation.¹ In any case, if you control for income and education about a third of the effect goes away: the new result is 0.38 and is no longer statistically significant.

Now let's take a look at a different table:

This is the correlation between political beliefs and educational attainment (EA). The raw result is 0.176, which is about a third of the raw effect of IQ. That fits with the first result.

I have no idea if the authors' methods are reliable. For technical reasons, their measures of intelligence and educational attainment are based on clusters of genetic markers from other studies: One cluster is associated with intelligence and the other is associated with education. So a big part of the correlations depends on whether these genetic clusters are reliable in the first place.

There's also the fact that once you control for education you (barely) lose statistical significance for the effect of IQ. This may not be a big deal, but it's not especially promising either.

In any case, if the genetic clusters are reliable and the methodology is sound, it suggests that intelligence really does have an impact on political beliefs regardless of educational level. Which I still find odd. I know that we lefties want to say "Duh, of course smart people are more liberal," but that's really not persuasive. It's very hard to conceive of why a high IQ should make you more likely to support abortion or social welfare or a smaller defense budget. But maybe that's just a failure of imagination on my part.

¹Their scale is a "summed composite" of five other scales, which I'd guess are each scales of 0-1. That makes the composite a scale of 0-5, so an increase of 0.54 is about 10%. However, this is just a wild guess on my part. I have no clue why the authors present a bunch of numbers without explaining what they mean.

This is just a coincidence, but I happened to run across two similar stories today. The first is about a guy who had to replace his credit card due to fraudulent charges and therefore wanted to make sure that all his auto-payments weren't automatically updated:

He said Bank of America told him his credit-card account couldn’t be removed from the card updater program.... Bank of America said automatically updating card information is a customer convenience, and it works with customers to resolve issues. A spokesman told The Wall Street Journal that it has now removed Evans’s credit-card account from the updater program.

The second story is about a guy in Chicago whose property taxes suddenly skyrocketed because his $200,000 house had been newly assessed at over a million dollars:

Lloyd initially attempted to resolve the issue with the Cook County Tax Assessor's Office, but wasn’t taken seriously. “I told them that I had a substantial increase, and they were like, ‘everybody's taxes increase,’" he recounted.

However, after Lloyd got in touch with FOX 32 Chicago, it contacted the Assessor's Office and discovered the exorbitant tax bill was indeed an error, as Lloyd had claimed. "This property was given an incorrect assessment due to a permit that was unintentionally applied to the property,” a representative from the office stated.

One of these examples is a private company and the other is a public agency. Both unfolded the same way. The initial response was, basically, "bugger off," but when the press got involved it suddenly turned out that impossible things were possible after all.

But why? Why is it so hard to get "customer service" organizations to even take queries seriously in the first place? It's one thing to make a mistake, or for a poorly trained rep to have a hard time solving a problem. But that doesn't excuse the frequency with which people are simply told to take it or leave it without the problem even being looked at.

In the retail biz it's pretty common for customer service to be not just good, but maybe even more forgiving than it should be. It's considered to be a minimum requirement for a giant, faceless chain trying to gain customer trust. So why is it so uncommon everywhere else? Less competition, I suppose, along with higher switching costs. Still, I find it surprising that so few non-retailers even try to attract business with legitimately generous customer service. Everyone claims to have great customer service, of course, but almost no one does. Why?

Marine Le Pen's right-wing populists appear to have won barely more than 20% of the vote in France's election today. This was a dismal showing for a party that was finally expected to win after years of rebranding and makeovers. But voters weren't fooled: a strong turnout unexpectedly powered an alliance of the left to the biggest share of the vote. Going forward, parliament will almost certainly be controlled by some kind of coalition of the left and center.

Meanwhile, Britain's right wing got crushed in Thursday's election; the right-wing candidate for president lost in Iran; and last month the far-right party in Belgium failed to make its predicted gains, with the usual messy coalition of center-left and center-right remaining in control. In India, Narendra Modi's religious nationalists were shocked by the success of a secular leftist coalition; and in Mexico left populists cemented their control.

Can we please get a few stories now about how the left is ascendant around the world while the forces of right-wing nationalism are in disarray because they're still consistently unable to appeal to more than a small fraction of the electorate? Thanks, much appreciated.

Are there things you firmly believe even though you know they aren't true? I'll start: I get way more red lights than I should.

Do not bother arguing about this. Your so-called "facts" mean nothing to me.

News from Britain:

Perhaps you don't know what this is all about. It's been a big deal in Britain for the past couple of years but I first heard of it only about a month ago. I was so gobsmacked that I had to read two or three articles before I convinced myself it wasn't some sort of late April Fool's joke.

It wasn't. Rishi Sunak seriously had a plan to cut down on illegal immigration by shipping migrants off to Rwanda. He had hundreds of millions of pounds budgeted for this, partly to bribe the Rwandan government and partly to pay for airfare and housing in Kigali.

In the end, something like two migrants were flown to Rwanda and the housing there mostly sits empty. Now it always will.

This whole scheme sounded like one of those Donald Trump fever dreams that he'd blather about but never actually follow through on. That's the danger of a future Trump who's more competent. He might really try to put Trump's dumbest ideas into practice.

I was stargazing last night and mostly out of cell phone reach, so I didn't see the big interview with Joe Biden until I got home this morning. Now I have, and it seems like a big meh.

Biden was OK. He had plenty of facts and figures at his command. He denied he was in big trouble and denied Trump was ahead, but that had nothing to do with him being in denial. That's how all politicians act when they're behind in the polls.

But I doubt the interview did much to change any minds. Biden said six times that he just had a "bad night" during the debate, but that's not enough. It was way more than just a bad night, and the almost unanimous claim of the insiders who have commented about Biden over the past few days is that his performance is highly variable and getting worse. So one acceptable-ish interview won't set any minds at ease. He needs to do this over and over to prove the insiders wrong.

I don't get the impression he plans to do that.

The Wall Street Journal writes today about Joe Biden's difficulties among union workers, but it's pretty much the same story as it's been since Reagan Democrats started defecting 40 years ago. Lots of working class voters are more concerned about immigration, trade deals, and culture war issues than they are about support for unions. For example:

Ford employee James Benson Jr., a UAW member, bought a house in Canton, Mich.,—roughly 20 miles west of Detroit—in 2017 because he planned to send his daughter to its highly-rated public schools.

In late 2020, however, the Plymouth-Canton school board, which is nonpartisan, overhauled its policies to protect transgender students from discrimination. Among other changes, the new policy prohibits school staff from disclosing that a student is transgender—including to the parents or legal guardian—unless required by law or authorized by the student.

“So obviously our kid goes to a private school now just to avoid that,” Benson said. He said the decision, which he made because of his Christian faith, is a hit to his family’s finances on top of sharply higher prices. “It’s like, what planet are you from?”

Put aside for a moment the wisdom of schools concealing transgender inclinations from parents. It's easy to argue either side of that. What I wonder is what Benson is afraid of. Is it:

Fear that his own kid will become transgender and he won't be told?

Fear that the school is encouraging students to become transgender, and he doesn't want his kid exposed to that kind of environment (bathrooms etc.)?

No real fear, just objection at an abstract level—and he's willing to pay $10,000 a year to register his protest?

Regardless of my own beliefs, it's not hard to understand that lots of working class folks have a traditional view that boys are boys and girls are girls. But what precisely bothers them the most? Merely being around trans kids? Sharing bathrooms, locker rooms, and so forth? $10,000 is a lot of money over a new school board policy.