Student Debt is Bad for All of Us

In the Atlantic (online) Conor Clarke wrote a blog entry called "Let College Students Get Into Debt". One statement in the note really stands out.

The second problem is more specific: if the the point of credit-based consumption is to bring lifetime consumption more in line with lifetime income -- as I believe it is -- then college students more than anyone else should be getting into debt.

An interesting rebuttal can be found at
Problems With Clarke's Student Debt Post.

The practical absurdity of the Clarke's statement can be seen in the phrase "bring lifetime consumption more in line with lifetime income". Let us make the giant leap of faith that individuals and lenders are rational enough to take expected lifetime income into consideration. In order to smooth out our consumption we would have to have an accurate notion of an individual's lifetime income. This brings to mind my favorite John Kenneth Galbraith quote. "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable." It is the rare person of any age who can accurately predict their income even five years in the future.

The best information about lifetime income comes from statistics about current and past incomes for people in various occupations. This information is useless to an individual for several reasons. First, it is out of date. If the buggy whip apprentice in 1890 had access to these kind of statistics, he would feel good about borrowing money because his future was so secure. Second, it assumes an occupation. Apparently the average college student changes majors two to three times during the course of their studies. Most basically, aggregate statistics may not accurately describe the situation for any individual Averages and Actuals.

Every debt you incur and intend to pay limits future options. Suppose you are a college student anticipating a career with a relatively high income and you borrow commensurately while you are in school. When you graduate, you must quickly (usually within six months to a year) generate sufficient, steady income to service the debt. This puts lower income jobs out of reach. The problem is, many career paths demand some time at a low income. If you cannot tolerate a low income for a period of years, you may not be able to start a business of your own.

Student debt is pernicious because it limits options at a time of life where options are most important. Individuals and society gain when bright people are free to pursue their dreams. These people often give us the new ideas and new businesses that are the lifeblood of the future. One of the natural times for this adventure is the time between schooling and family. Many of our brightest and most educated end their schooling not with a clear field of opportunity, but with the almost immediate need to generate a steady income to service school debt. For many, this pushes them down the employee rather than the entrepreneur path.

Can't we all just get along?

A new coffee shop opened across the street from the office where I work. The local paper had a small article and the online version allowed readers to comment. At another location of the same shop a couple people had bad experiences and posted them. The two incidents were a pregnant woman (eight months) who was feeling ill and put her stocking feet (shoes off) up an a chair to raise them. The owner came by and asked her to take her feet off the chair. The second incident was when a couple of families had strollers that were blocking an aisle. Again, the owner told them to move the strollers. In both cases the people did not complain that they were asked to stop what they were doing. They were upset because the owner yelled at them and treated them badly. Some people called the owner "a jerk".

A second group spoke up in favor of the owner saying the original posters were unbearably rude and deserved the treatment they received. Terms used for the (ex) customers included "self-entitled yuppies", "self entitled a-holes", and "self absorbed". The vitriol was strong.

In thinking about it, I think the "self absorbed" title is probably not far off. The customers engaged in actions that I find completely innocuous, but apparently offend a fair number of people. I think "self entitled" probably better describe the group that defended the owner. Self entitled seems a perfect title for people who expect everyone around them to conform to their notion of correct public behavior. As for the owner, yelling at people probably does make him a jerk.

If something poses a danger to you or others, step in and fix things. But be aware we live in a very large world among people with vastly different upbringings and customs. What is outrageous to one group of people is ordinary to another. I am reminded of the Scandinavian nanny who was arrested in New York because she left the baby in a stroller outside and went into a store. In her home city that was ordinary and expected behavior.

Each of us is upset by different things. In the face of this, we should give each other a little slack. If you find yourself getting upset, ask yourself if your feelings are well grounded. In the case of stocking feet on a chair there is essentially no chance of harm being done to anyone. If you feel strongly about feet on chairs, have a serious discussion with a shrink about why that is. If you are irritated by strollers in the way, politely help to correct the situation, but be aware that people are pretty good at avoiding obstacles.

Also, put yourself in the other person's shoes. Almost everyone has had a crummy day and blown up over some small thing. All of us have had other things on our mind and inconvenienced those around us. Let's all sigh and smile a little more at what we perceive to be bad behavior and try to dial down the outrage. Can't we all just get along?

Josie is Gone

My dog is dead. Josie was almost fifteen. For a long time she had been in decline. First calcification of tendons in her legs and arthritis. Then she lost her hearing and her eyesight became dim. She became progressively weaker in her legs and would sometimes just fall over. Yesterday morning she had her second bout of a vestibular problem that removed her sense of balance. Her eyes jerked spasmodically and she could hardly get up. The first bout of balance problems was a couple of years ago. On the vets advice, we just let her work through it. This time, faced with all her other difficulties and obvious pain, I decided to euthanize her. She died in my arms at the vets office this afternoon. Silver was there with me and it was a good thing. I don't know how I would have handled it alone.

Josie was a border collie. She lived to please and serve. When she was a puppy I took her to an obedience class. It was difficult for her because, like many border collies, she was extremely shy. Most dogs were given treats as a reward, but Josie would not take them. A simple word of praise was all she wanted. For discipline, a disapproving glance was usually enough. When we house trained her and she would have an accident, I would look at her and say "uh oh". This became a curse word for her and for years afterward I had to be careful about muttering "uh oh" under my breath lest she think that she had done something terrible.

Border collies need something to do. Josie was a runner and a tennis ball dog. Josie was a wonder. She didn't just run, she ran full out and she ran where she was told; in and out of gates, right and left based on both verbal and visual cues. She was obsessed with tennis balls. Sometimes I work from home. One day I looked down and had seven tennis balls at my feet. Inside we would throw balls across the room or down the hall. It was so unconscious that I did it without interrupting my work. She would put a ball on my lap so that it was convenient. Outside, she vastly overestimated my strength. If I was throwing the ball, she would run out two hundred yards and look back saying "throw it to me here!". Even using a tennis racquet as an aid (which I often did), I couldn't get it that far.

Josie always tried to get visitors to play her tennis ball games. For her, the game was to see how much she could get the ball thrower to work. She would drop the ball some distance from the thrower. Many people assumed that she was shy and a dog that almost knew how to fetch. She just required a little more training to bring the ball all the way back. A few minutes would do the trick. In fact, Josie was training them to work just a little harder to get the ball. If you walked ten feet to pick up the ball, the next time she dropped it, it would be twelve feet away.

In another blog post, http://colin-quodlibet.blogspot.com/2008/07/running-dog.html,I talked about the legal trouble we got into. When I was forced to stop running Josie in the park I never forgave the city. To this day I view the city bureaucracy as malevolent and incompetent. This city and its inhabitants love order over freedom and for no reason destroyed the fun that Josie and I had in the park. Even though I have no plans to move, I do not feel at home here.

We got Josie as a family dog, and so she was. She played with and loved all of us. As is common with Border Collies though, she needed a master. I was that person. I trained her and I think it is fair to say that she was my dog. For most of her life, Josie slept on our bed. That stopped only when she got too old to jump up. Through her whole life, Josie followed me around. If she didn't see me for a while, she would come looking.

I say that I trained her, but as everyone who has a good companion dog knows, that is not true. We trained and adjusted to each other. I talk about verbal and visual signals, but that does not convey the subtlety of the communication. We had a sound and gestural system that involved known signals, but also the tilt of a head or the lilt of a word or bark. We were partners.

She was a puppy. She grew up to be a strong and proud adult, then declined in her old age. She had as good a life as we could give her. Now she is gone. My right arm is missing and I will not get it back.

Singular Memories

I have noticed a memory phenomenon that I haven't heard discussed. Memory is normally discussed in terms of persistence. There are at least three layers of memory: sensory, short term, and long term. As is often the case, wikipedia has an excellent primer on this, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory. What I have noticed is what I will call a singular memory. This is a specific long term memory where we only remember one of a series.

The quintessential example of what I call a singular memory is the combination for a lock. If you ever went to school in the United States, you undoubtedly owned a series of combination locks. Every day you unlocked the lock, perhaps several times. If you ask someone the combination of the lock they had two years ago, they probably will not remember it. It is as though there is one spot in memory for a lock combination and remembering a new one erases, or at least substantially dims the memory of the old one.

Another example is parking spots. When you park your car at a store, you remember its location for hours. This implies that the memory is long term. on the other hand, if I asked you where you parked at the same store two weeks ago, you may have no recollection at all.

Though I call this a singular memory, in fact it is not completely singular. One year at school I absent-mindedly wandered to a locker I had several years before. I was in the middle of dialing the combination I had for that locker before I realized I was in the wrong place. In the same way, if I remind you of exactly what you bought at the store two weeks ago or an incident that occurred on the way out the door, you may remember where you parked the car that day.

I believe that these singular memories may be a byproduct of the mechanism of recall. Memories are not replayed. They are reconstructed. This reconstruction is a mini re-enactment where the neurons involved in the original experience are re-activated. During this reconstruction the original memory is subject to change. I think that when we memorize a new combination for a lock, it is as though we misremembered the old combination and re-stored the new combination as the original memory. When I wandered to my old locker, I was not just trying to remember a combination, I had the entire sensory experience of an earlier year. That sensory experience triggered the original memory in context as opposed to the more abstract number whose memory was normally reinforced by a new locker location and other details.

To summarize I have proposed a new type of memory, a singular memory. I gave a couple of examples, then demolished part of my own argument by showing that the memories are not actually singular. Finally I proposed a mechanism that might explain how this type of memory, which may not exist, works.

Limits of Analytics

If you read many of my posts, you will discover that I am an analytic person. That is, I tend to look at situations from the outside and try to figure out what is actually going on through the use of observation and reason.

Despite (or perhaps because of) this natural tendency, I am well aware of the limits of this sort of analysis. There is a strong strain in my culture that believes rational analysis is the primary basis of human knowledge and that this sort of knowledge should underlie action. I think this is a pernicious view that cheapens us as humans. Our ever increasing scientific knowledge base can protect us from some of our cruel and irrational tendencies. For example, the existence of the well respected Centers for Disease Control in the United States will keep us (unlike the Egyptians) from slaughtering all our pigs because we are threatened with the "swine flu". In general though, analytic knowledge is too incomplete, too prone to error, and too slow to serve us in most situations. We have other, more effective tools to make our way through the world.

Violin construction is an excellent example of how humans actually learn and change. the golden age of violin construction occurred three or four centuries ago. To this day we do not understand why the Cremona violin construction produced what we feel to be superior instruments. In the intervening centuries we have developed mathematics and simulations that have improved our understanding of vibration and acoustics. We have used this and our knowledge of consistent manufacturing to create increasingly better musical instruments in increasingly large numbers. As with so many other things, we live in a golden age. It has never been easier or cheaper to own a fine musical instrument. That is, our analytic knowledge has raised the bar, but it has not allowed us to attain the level of mastery achieved by people without these formal analytic tools.

So how do we actually learn and progress in areas that cannot be understood by current analytic techniques. In short, trial and error. Humans rarely invent, but we have a marvelous capacity to vary what we do and to detect the effects of the variations. Most of what we call invention is really applying existing knowledge to a new area or amassing small sets of variations to achieve a shifting goal. Violin makers have rules accumulated through experimentation. These rules govern the choice of materials, their manufacture (strike here with your fingernail and if it sounds "dead" thin the material over in this area). These rules do not come from any kind of mathematical analysis and only rarely from a rigorous program of experimentation. Instead they come from the accretion of experience over generations. This experience is based on a deepening, visceral understanding of the desired end and the practical means to achieve it.

A generation ago there was much work on "expert systems" that could replace humans in various areas. The general notion was: figure out the rules people use to solve problems, encode those rules, and replace the human with a computational engine operating over the rules. The first step was to find a competent expert and extract the rules. Usually this failed. Most experts could not express the rules and those who could were often wrong. Observation of actual problem solving shows that it is a wonderfully complex and non-linear activity. People try one approach, and abandon it midway. They put down the problem altogether and work on unrelated things. They try different approaches in seemingly random order. Some approaches seem to not make much sense. They pick up abandoned work and add to it. After the problem is solved, they explain (and remember) what they did as a linear sequence that led to the solution, but that does not fit the actual activity.

There are limits to most of our analytic techniques. Many practical problems are frightfully complex and often chaotic in the mathematical sense. I have little doubt that we will continue to increase our analytic tools, but the end result may provide only statistical rather than direct guidance. For these situations we can make informed guesses, but having a ninety percent chance of success doesn't help much if you find yourself on the ten percent side.

One reasonable response to complex situations is to make them simpler. This underlies much of modern manufacturing and business. If materials used in manufacturing are not uniform, manufacturing techniques must adjust to the differences. A good solution is to improve the raw materials to eliminate the variability. On the human side, we invent personnel rules that constrain how employees are treated. This simplifies management and gives people a sense of fairness and boundaries. At the same time it depersonalizes and turns the most unique of animals into an industrial part. I was once on a conference call where someone started referring to "human capital". I told him that if he called me that I would hit him.

As biological animals we have evolved to be incredibly adept at a rapid, subconscious, and often amazingly accurate analysis. The trick is to harness this biologic capacity while using our analytic knowledge to inhibit our more destructive automatic tendencies.

Over time, analytic knowledge tends to increase faster, be more reliable, and be transmitted more easily than experiential knowledge. Serious inquiry requires rigorous analysis and careful, controlled experimentation. But in novel situations (almost every situation we encounter) and in areas where we are expanding our knowledge, purely rational techniques do not serve us well. There is some special non-analytic human capability that allows us to succeed.

Language, Dialect, Idiolect and Beliefs

Linguists have a set of words to identify variations in speech. These are language, dialect, and idiolect. A language is a set of words and the grammatical rules used to put the words together. A language enables a set of people to communicate. Even when people speak the same language there are often regional or class differences in the pronunciation, word choice, and grammatical structures. These are called dialects. For example, on the East coast of the United States many people put an extra "r" sound at the end of words, so "idea" sounds like "idear". These same people usually have pronunciation that distinguishes the words "Mary", "Marry" and "Merry". In the mid-west, those three words usually sound the same and are distinguished by context. In "standard" english the word "you" can mean either one person or a group of people. In the southern United States these are distinguished. "You" means a single person, "y'all" means a group of people, and "all y'all" means every single individual in a group. Idiolect refers to a particular person's pattern of speech. Each of us has idiosyncratic patterns of words and expressions.

The division of speech into languages, and languages into dialects is not precise and different people will argue for different lines, but there are clearly different languages and different dialects. Even people raised together in the same family differ in word choices and modes of expression.

These same sort of groupings exist in many other areas of human life. For example, Christianity is analogous to a religious belief language, Lutherans have a "dialect" of Christianity. If you question closely you will find that each individual Lutheran has a particular and distinct set of beliefs. The same is true of politics. The industrialized democracies of Western Europe and (to a lesser extent) the United states have similar structures to create and change government officials through elections. This is the political language. The dialects typically have the words "liberal" and "conservative" attached to them, though the meanings of these words is different in different times and places. Finally, there are personal differences. Even the most ardent "conservatives" will differ on basic issues.

With belief structures, it is often true that the most violent disagreements occur between groups that agree on almost everything. For example, Shiite and Sunni muslims. In Christianity there were centuries of violence between Catholics and Protestants. When someone has beliefs that are completely foreign, it seems to be easier to dismiss them as outsiders to be ignored or tolerated. If someone almost agrees with you, then the differences are stark and it is hard to understand how the other person can be so sensible on some issues but so obviously and completely wrong on others.

There is a quote attributed to various people (including Wilde and Shaw) describing the United States and Britain as "Two great nations divided by a common language". In some sense we should treat everyone this way. Be aware that words and phrases, and hence the ideas they represent, have different nuances of meaning for each speaker. It is necessary and desirable in common conversation to gloss over these differences. But, when the stakes are raised and common understanding must be achieved, be very careful about examining these differences.

The hardest social problem I know

As humans, many of our problems are social. I want to share what I consider to be one of the most difficult problems I ever encountered as a parent. If you find a person who has humanely (or even inhumanely) solved this, I think you are in the presence of true social genius. The problem:

Get a junior high or high school girl to ride a bicycle to school wearing a bike helmet.

Many of us have found a way to get the girl on the bike, but I know of no way to get a helmet on that girl. Having perfect hair is just too important.

I also believe that these same girls show us the true limits of human endurance. Go to a cold climate and observe junior high students. Beanpole girls with negative body fat will have bare legs and light jackets at twenty below. They must be part hummingbird to have a metabolism that can heat a body in those conditions.