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University Bloat

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, Government. No Comments on University Bloat

The Wall Street Journal had a mostly-nothingburger of a story in it on Christmas Eve titled ‘Elite Colleges Have a Looming Money Problem’. This is about Harvard, Yale, Princeton and that lot, and I will suggest that the headline is b.s. Nothing in the article suggests those places have any financial issues looming. Princeton, leader of the pack in this dimension, has an endowment that is equal to $3.8million per student. That means that at a shitty 3% net return, they can generate almost $110,000 in revenue per year per enrolled student, and never touch the assets in said endowment. They could cut their tuition by half and still make ends meet. I think they’re going to be ok.

Harvard has a mere $2million per student, but I think they’re ok, too. If any institution should worry according to this article, it is the U of Texas, which has the highest per student endowment of any public university, but that is only some $250,000/student. And, the Texas legislature could (and probably has) cut funding to U of T over the years, and could also forbid them from raising tuition. Ontario has done that for years to its universities. So, Texas might have something to worry about. Princeton and Harvard, not really. The only solid thing the article seems to point out is that these places have been getting below-market returns on their massive endowments. Tsk-tsk.

That all being said, I did learn some surprising things from the article. Here’s an interesting quote:

“Despite a booming stock market, Harvard said alumni donations fell by 15% last fiscal year amid outrage over the university’s handling of campus antisemitism. Fellow Ivies Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania experienced even steeper drops.”

Apparently, having your Prez look bad in front of Congress is hard on donations. Whodathought?

The article also says this about Harvard:

“Last year the university relied on the endowment for 37% of its budget, up from about a fifth of the budget 20 years ago and far higher than the average across private, not-for-profit colleges. “

The change from 20% to 37% is certainly a notable increase. It is not clear that this involved actually selling assets in which the endowment is invested, and I rather doubt that it did. Still, maybe Harvard is feeling a little less bullet-proof.

The other interesting things all came from a policy paper written by Paul Weinstein Jr for The Progressive Policy Institute. There was a link to it in the WSJ article, and you can read it here if you like. The paper is titled ‘’How to Cut Administrative Bloat at US Colleges’, and I don’t see that it offers much useful or novel advice in that regard, but it does provide some careful documentation of said bloat. Weinstein provides data on 50 US universities, so he goes well beyond the ‘elite’, all of it gathered from the universities themselves. It turns out that 21st century universities have almost as many employees as students, and in some cases they have more, and the majority of their employees are not faculty.

Think about that in comparison to other service providers. Can you think of any other such org, a full service hotel, a hospital, a police department, in which that is the case? One needs to be careful about such comparisons, a hospital might have nearly as many employees working in at as it has patients at times, and a police or fire service has as ‘customers’ an entire city, but they rarely all need service at once.

Anyway, I plan to think about reasonable comparisons some more, but here are some of the numbers for universities .

Princeton has 6300 employees, only 1285 of which are faculty, and 8705 students.

Duke University has 3,983 faculty members, 25,873 non-faculty employees (that is not a typo) and 17,155 students. Yes, Duke has more non-faculty employees than students (all student numbers include both grad and undergrad).

Notre Dame, on the other hand, is a relatively lean machine, having 1,243 faculty, 4,467 non-faculty employees, and 12,809 students. Still, more than twice as many non-faculty as faculty employees.

The University of Texas at Austin has only 3,519 faculty and 11,645 non-faculty employees to deal with 52,384 students. I don’t know how they handle the strain…..

The Weinstein paper says without hesitation that the increase in the cost of university education is the result of administrative bloat, but to make that case we would need to see the same numbers for the same universities from 20 or more years ago. Those are not provided, and good luck getting them. I believe it is true that university non-academic staff have grown faster than faculty or student numbers over the last 20 years, based on my time as a professor, but what I believe is insufficient to make that case.

None the less, Weinstein is happy to give a recommendation for how to fix this, and his idea is pretty much what one expects from an academic; have the government fix it. I can do no better than quote from the paper:

“The federal government should shift its focus from increasing financial aid to using its significant leverage to encourage colleges and universities to reduce costs and cut the price of earning a degree. To do this, the government should be given the authority to negotiate the cost of tuition and fees with any post-secondary institution that accepts students who have received grants, loans, or tax incentives from the federal government. Schools could opt-out, but by doing so would not be allowed to enroll students who need to pay a portion of their tuition with federal aid or loans. Schools found in violation of this policy would be subject to fines in an amount equivalent to the aid provided by the government.”

Can you just imagine the size of the bureaucracy – both in universities and in government – needed to insure that all universities and students were playing by these new rules? And….negotiations between The US Federal Government and billion dollar universities over tuition? What could possibly go wrong?

Yes, a solution that only an academic could embrace. Or a budding, university-trained government bureaucrat, I suppose.

Coda

This all made me curious as to how my former employer stacks up against these 50 US universities on these dimensions, so I went to the UWO data book to find out. I cannot be sure that these numbers are calculated in exactly the same way as in the US schools, but then it is not clear that all the US schools calculate them the same way, either.

So, Western says it has 37,875 full-time students enrolled during this current academic year, under-grad and grad. It also employs 1,338 regular full-time faculty and 2,789 full-time staff. That puts it right up there with Notre Dame as a lean machine, although it does have more than twice as many staff as faculty.

The student-to-faculty ratio, one (highly imperfect) way rating orgs measure the quality of education in a post-secondary institution, is an eye-popping 28.3 to 1. Exactly one of the 50 US places in the Weinstein paper is higher than that – Georgia Tech at 37.3 to one. The paper claims GT has gone big-time into online education, which may explain that number partly. U of Texas, as huge as it is, has a student/faculty ratio of only 13.3, and U of Wisconsin, which is about the same size as UWO, is at 8.9.

PSE in Ontario is cheap, and you get what you pay for.

My Stock       

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, Education. No Comments on My Stock       

After I posted my Learning Like Shakeespeare article a regular reader asked what was in my stock, meaning what are the books I have read. Hmmmm….

This got me thinking about that, so at the risk of boring some of you, here is Al’s History of Reading, in so far as Al (you have to remember that I’m old) can remember.

I was an avid reader from the time I could read at all, walking regularly to the local public library to take out several books at a time. My grandaughter has been the same way all her life, my grandson not so much – I have no idea how that happens, people are just different. The first books I can remember reading were in a series called Cowboy Sam, and after that I graduated to a lot of sports hero stories. Warren Spahn, Roy Campanella, Johnny Unitas all come to mind, but there were others.

I also read comic books by the ton. DC comics to start, because they came first, then Marvel when it came along, and Mad Magazine. The guys I grew up with loved Mad, and this brings me to my reading in school. I was reading a copy of Mad as an elementary student, during an appropriate free reading time, and one of the nuns took it away from me and said I should have my parents come see her. She asked my parents if they knew the kind of garbage I was reading, to which my Dad said he responded – ‘He’s reading, I think that’s what’s important’.

I don’t know if Dad knew how right he was, as Mad was a great way to learn about the adult world, not to mention to learn skepticism about it.

Then came high school, and while everything else about those four years is fuzzy, I was lucky enough to have a first-rate sophomore English teacher – Mary Smith. I know, probably an alias. She had us read Shakespeare, and then do readings of the plays, each student assigned a part. Same with Twelve Angry Men. And, we had to write, write reviews of what we read, write a lot. I remember clearly being given one particular writing assignment, thinking ‘ah, that’s easy, I can knock that off in an evening’ and then getting it back with an F on it. An F!! I didn’t get Fs, dammit. That was an eye-opener, garbage in, garbage out.

I don’t actually remember if it was Ms Smith who assigned this stuff, but I remember reading Austen, Twain, Willa Cather, The Good Earth, Thoreau, others. Not entire books, necessarily, but essays, short stories and excerpts.

Once I went off to University I was no longer required to take literature, but I had gotten interested in sci-fi so I read a lot of that, and took a bird course in that type of literature, where we were required to read Frank Herbert’s Dune. I still think that’s a great book, and I wrote a short story for that class that was published in some student journal. My only foray into writing fiction. I also read a lot of Hermann Hesse then; Steppenwolf, Narcissus and Goldmund, The Glass Bead Game. My romantic period. Still have those books, but they don’t stand up well when I open them back up.

In grad school I remember reading nothing, although I probably did, and somewhere along the way through adulthood I became very interested in reading two things: history and Robertson Davies. I have by now read every one of Davies’ 11 novels, and a few other things by him, and my shelves are full of books on history. A lot of military history (a lot of that by John Keegan, the best of the best if you ask me) but a lot of other history, too. Catherine the Great, the Victorian era of the British Empire, a history of the Arab-Zionist conflict (eye-opening), Churchill’s memoirs, the Roman empire, a history of Prohibition, the Ottoman Empire, and two or three histories of Canada. Military history, particularly in the hands of a master like Keegan (and to some extent, Churchill) is about so much more than battles and generals and weapons. One of Keegan’s overriding ideas is that the way nations go to war, the way they train their soldiers, the weapons they use, are determined by their culture. And, the military is the ultimate LBO; I have learned much about individual and organizational behavior from military history.

I do read fiction, too, including all three of Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels, and the most beautifully written novel I’ve read in years was A Soldier in The Great War by Mark Helprin. He writes better than Davies, even, and trust me that it is about so much more than war. I was in a book club – co-led it, actually – for a number of years, where we read a variety of things, including a lot of contemporary fiction: All the Light We Cannot See and Bel Canto come to mind

But coming back to the original impetus for this essay, what is in my stock? Precious little Great Literature, at least since high school. I have copies of Fielding’s Tom Jones (said to be the first English novel), Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Dickens’ Great Expectations on my many bookshelves here at home. I have started in reading all four of those more than once. I never seem able to stick with them for long. I did read Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus through, but his Magic Mountain sits on a shelf with a bookmark half way in.

I also have a large stock of books claiming to explain modern physics to lay people. Can never get far into those, either.

So, I think perhaps Scott Newstok would be disappointed in me. Never mind ol’ Will himself. On the other hand, I ain’t dead yet.

Safety Rules  

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Safety. No Comments on Safety Rules  

….over everything.

The Globe and Mail published an editorial on January 9 titled ‘How cities can protect crowds against the threat of vehicle-ramming attacks’

Notice those three words ‘the threat of’. They are not providing advice for protecting crowds against such attacks, rather from the threat of them. What do you suppose that means? I think it means that few journalists know how to write with any kind of precision, a sad state of affairs, but somewhat tangential to my main point.

The editorial opens with a brief ‘oh my god it was unimaginable’ re-telling of what happened on Bourbon Street in New Orleans on Jan 1. Then they write this –

“At the same time, it was not unimaginable at all. It was horribly predictable. Attackers using vehicles have targeted a Bastille Day celebration in France, a bike and pedestrian path in New York, a busy sidewalk in North Toronto and a Christmas market in Germany.”

Thus, we have a list of four previous incidents of vehicles being driven into crowds killing people. Hyperlinks are provided so you can go read about them, and if you do, you will find that they happened, corresponding to the order given above, in Nice, France on July 14, 2016, New York, NY on October 31, 2017, Toronto, April 23, 2018 and Magdeburg, Germany, on Dec 20, 2024.

Four instances of vehicles being driven into crowds across the whole world over a period of eight years are cited as the basis for saying that the incident in New Orleans was ‘horribly predictable’.

Let’s think about this a bit more. In how many cities across the world do you suppose there were significant gatherings of people on – just to pick a random single day – Dec 31, 2024?

Tens of thousands of cities would be a conservative guess, no? More likely hundreds of thousands.

And, how many of those gatherings resulted in a vehicle being driven into the assembled crowds? Assuming that had that happened, 21st century media could not possibly have failed to publicize it, the answer is – zero.

But the one that happened in New Orleans the next day, that was horribly predictable.

The lesson from the Globe Editors’ deep statistical analysis is clear. It is predictable that crowds in cities everywhere are going to face crazed vehicular murderers constantly from now on, so steps must be taken.

Yes, the august G&M editors are not just great statisticians, they are intrepid urban engineers, and they know what must be done to prevent the inevitable looming carnage.

Their recommendations are preceded by this:

“Whether it’s commuters pouring out of a subway station or people lingering at a popular busker spot, crowds are the essence of city life. People living their lives in public is part of what makes cities vibrant and desirable.”

This brief paean to  vibrant city life doesn’t end up carrying much weight.

To quote again:

“The risk is heightened by the super-sizing of SUVs into vehicles that strike with more force. The weapon used in New Orleans, an F-150 pickup truck, is the most popular vehicle in the United States. It has evolved to have a high hood that is more likely to kill pedestrians by hitting them in the chest. It may be time for a conversation about regulations forcing design changes to make vehicles less dangerous. But any such changes would take years to make a meaningful difference on the road. Solutions are needed now.”

What must be done while we wait for the evil automotive manufacturers to get their acts together? Well, it’s clear to the editors.

“Luckily, one is clear: barriers that separate people from vehicles. These can take the form of permanent installations around areas that consistently have lots of pedestrians. In occasionally busy spots, say, outside a concert venue or a New Year’s gathering, large vehicles can be positioned to block malign actors. Think transit buses or garbage trucks.”

I can think of few things that would add more to the vibrancy of city life than a ring of parked garbage trucks outside every concert venue before and after each performance.

The editors hasten to add that what will simply not do is ‘security theatre’.  They note –

“An illusion of safety was present in New Orleans in the form of a police vehicle placed across Bourbon Street to protect people on New Year’s Eve.”

And then –

“Post-9/11 rules requiring airlines to lock and reinforce the cockpit door, making it impossible for hijackers to take the controls, demonstrate that simple security fixes can save lives.”

A couple of comments here. One, I was in Nashville some years back and they did the same thing in that city every Saturday night (perhaps Friday, too, I’m not sure). They parked fire vehicles across the main street. This was not to provide an ‘illusion of safety’ but to make it clear to law-abiding drivers that the street was closed to vehicular traffic, thereby preventing what is sometime called ‘an accident’. That was undoubtedly the point of the police vehicle in NOLA on New Year’s Day.

Two, the accurate terminology in the second quote would be ‘more difficult’ rather than ‘impossible’, but in any case, what is this evidence that locking and reinforcing cockpit doors has saved lives? If there has been news of hijacking attempts foiled by this device, I admit that I’ve missed it.

To be fair to the editors, this is 21st century thinking, although it is thinking that I think is very much propagated by 21st century journalism. When any bad thing happens, it is abundantly clear to activists, advocates, journalists and the Twitterverse (is that still a thing? TikTokverse?) that no cost is too great to pay to do everything one can think of to prevent that one bad thing from happening again. This is the thinking that has billions of people removing their shoes and belts before getting on an airplane. It is the thinking that gives rise to ‘calling out’ politicians for complacency every time a pedestrian is hit by a car, or the calls for new fire codes after every fatal fire.

Nothing bad must ever happen. When it does (and dammit, it always does) , blame must be assessed and spending billions to prevent that particular bad thing from ever happening again is always worth it.

As the editors say in their final line –

“Soft targets need a hard shell around them.”

Indeed. So, as soft as human beings are, clearly we need to require body armour (think RoboCop) as mandatory apparel for all civilians walking in areas where crowds tend to gather. This will also protect them against those constantly rampaging across our cities with AK-47s or machetes in hand. Bonus, right? Permanent concrete bollards are useless against bullets and blades, after all.

It’s true that ‘…any such changes would take years to make a meaningful difference…’ as body armour production can’t be ramped up on a moment’s notice, but I assert with complete confidence that it will take less time than re-designing trucks so that they can carry heavy loads but are of no danger to pedestrians.

Releasing the Pressure A Little

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, Standards. 1 Comment on Releasing the Pressure A Little

Canadian politics rose to the top of the news in Canada today, a relatively rare occurrence, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced, during a press conference outside his residence, that he intends to resign as Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Party.

You know that already. You also likely know what that verb ‘intends’ means. A quote from his speech, taken from the Globe and Mail:

“I intend to resign as party leader and as prime minister after the party selects its next leader through a robust, nationwide competitive process. Last night, I asked the president of the Liberal Party to begin that process,” Mr. Trudeau said.

So, to be clear, this is an announcement of an intention to resign from those two offices, an intention with no date set for its fulfillment. There is one date that has been set, as the Globe also reports that The Puppet….er, Governor General of Canada, Mary Simon, has granted the Prime Minister’s request to prorogue Parliament until March 24.

Thus, the Parliament of Canada will not meet, and Mr. Trudeau will not face the people’s elected representatives, until two months after the new US presidential administration has taken office. I note – just in passing – that the 119th Congress of the US, the one that was elected into office last November 5, began its session on January 3. Congress will not meet every day until the next Congressional elections in 2026. Each house of Congress meets only on the days determined by – wait for it – Congress.

Why am I bothering to write and post all these things you can read/hear about in a million places?

Good question.

I think it is a hope that if I type it all out I will be sufficiently less pissed off about Trudeau’s Latest Folly that I can get on with my day.

“When one is in office one has no idea how damnable things can feel to the ordinary rank and file of the public.” – W. Churchill, 1948

Addendum: After posting this I found myself thinking more about Churchill. (Evidence, perhaps, that writing the above got my mind off that other PM.)

At no time during Churchill’s term as Prime Minister in World War II was the British Parliament prorogued. It met, and Churchill gave notable speeches, on days that German bombs fell on London. He did face a vote of no confidence on 2 July, 1942, prompted by the fact that the Brits were getting their asses kicked right across the globe. In simple terms, the British people’s representatives questioned his government’s handling of the war. He won that vote. Handily. One can read an entire transcript of the debate in Parliament that preceded that vote here. It’s remarkable, with extensive and highly detailed questions and remarks from a variety of MPs, as well as statements from military officers, concluding with a long speech by the PM. Truly remarkable. Democracy.

Thinking – And Learning – Like Shakespeare  

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, Education, Standards. 1 Comment on Thinking – And Learning – Like Shakespeare  

I’ve just finished reading a book titled ‘How to Think Like Shakespeare’, which I first learned of on Gelman’s statistics blog, of all places. Having mentioned it to my sweetheart, she kindly gave me a copy as a Christmas gift. It’s very interesting, not long at 170 pages, but also very dense. Lots of quotations, from ol’ Will and many others, and a lot to think about. I will surely read it at least one more time in an attempt to do it justice.

What it is really, as its author Scott Newstok writes, is an argument for adopting many of the principles that underlie the Renaissance education that Shakespeare would have received into our contemporary educational system. On the face of it, this is nuts, as Newstok admits. Up at 7am to translate Latin for 12 hours, corporal punishment, exclusion of girls – really?

Well, no, not that, but he argues that there was much in the way youngsters were educated back then that would be highly valuable to contemporary students facing a world of information overload and the looming spectre of AI. A sub-text is that these practices would be valuable to all of us.

As I note above, I cannot claim to have digested all the book’s claims and arguments, but a couple of things seem immediately very worthwhile to me. Needless to say, they are not compatible with what Newstok calls ‘…our own student-centered, present-focused, STEM-driven schools’.

Idea 1.

He notes that in Erasmus’s Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style is recommended an exercise of writing out the thought ‘Your letter has pleased me greatly’ in 15 different ways.

So –

Your letter mightily pleased me.

Your affectionate letter brought me great joy.

Your brief note refreshed my spirits

My heart was gladdened by your kind note.

And so on…..

The point Erasmus is making is that to have an abundant style, one which is both precise and a pleasure to read, it is necessary to not use the same words and phrases over and over. To avoid doing that, one must practice. The value of ‘practicing’ runs throughout the book, in fact.

The ignorance of this principle of the value in variety is an aspect of contemporary journalism which causes me no end of despair. Every so-called journalist describes things using the same ‘correct’ words and phrases. It might as well all be written by the same person (and with the advent of AI, perhaps it soon will be, sans the ‘person’).

For example, it is not currently possible for any journalist to write about anyone famous without using some form of the word ‘icon’. Jimmy Carter, Beyonce, Leadbelly and Susan Sarandon – all ‘icons’, and the things they did were ‘iconic’.

People no longer criticize or object or excoriate or castigate – they ‘call out’.

No one tells or says or declares or states or claims, they ‘share’, or if in public, ‘speak out’.

Do copy editors shut down attempts by journalists to use different phraseology, or do said journalist simply not know of any way to write beyond the most common? Either way, it is a sad situation.

Idea 2.

In all student essay writing, whatever point the essayist wishes to make, half the essay must be devoted to arguing against that same point.

Revolutionary, but the idea is not simply to induce students to see that issues always have (at least) two sides, but also to help them develop empathy. In the non-Shakespearean phrase, to ‘walk a mile in another man’s moccasins’. The ability to see things from another person’s point of view is fundamental to functioning in society. And, Newstok argues, the ability to inhabit, and to get playgoers to inhabit, the lives of other people, was Shakespeare’s greatest talent.

This development of empathy lies behind another recommendation that pervades the book. That is, that students – not to mention the rest of us – must read. Read widely, and especially read what was written by authors of the past. What they wrote is the ‘stock’ society must use to move forward, and one cannot contribute to improving that stock unless one understands what is already in it.

As I said, much to think about in this book. I’m quite sure I don’t buy everything Newstok says – ‘twould be shocking if I did. But there seems to me much of value in it. Not that anyone in the contemporary educational establishment will have any sympathy with it. I can just imagine what the so-called Teaching and Learning Centre at my former employer would think about having university students read Erasmus or Ralph Waldo Emerson, or write an essay that includes arguments against immigration, the adoption of indigenous ways of knowing or democracy or any other current piety. Acts of oppression, I expect.

On Sin

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, Education, Health Care, Popular attitudes, Standards. No Comments on On Sin

I recently did a post about disability accommodations at Canadian Universities, in which ADHD diagnoses played a prominent role. ADHD is far from the only non-physical disability whose presence in universities has increased greatly, but it is up there. After writing that, I was reading a post in a blog which I have come to find very interesting, called On the Contrary, written by a fellow named Simon Sobo. He bills himself as ‘81 year old unheralded, frustrated, but serious writer’.

The particular post I read was titled ‘ADHD and Other Sins of Our Children, Part 2’, and you can read it here. Free. (There is a Part 1, which I have not yet read, and which opens with the remark that Part 2 has been read five times as often as Part 1. Hmmm…..)

The post is quite long, and the first section of it is sub-titled A Memory. It’s an interesting account of how his Jewish parents raised him, and his attempts to behave as they wished him to, especially during a long sermon by the Rabbi in his synagogue. My own Catholic upbringing was not dissimilar. The penultimate section of the article is subtitled ‘Sin and ADHD’ and starts with this sentence:

“First a few interesting statistics about adults diagnosed with ADHD and their sense of moral responsibility.”

It makes for fascinating reading, although the academic in me wishes Sobo had done a better job of providing citations for those stats. (There is a set of serious references at the end of the article, which I intend to pursue).

Anyway, I found it thought-provoking, and think you might, also.

Enlightenment Follows Confusion

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, Standards. 1 Comment on Enlightenment Follows Confusion

It happens, as I hope to show you, but I was quite confused at first.

The Globe on Christmas Eve ran a story titled ‘Border measures announced as part of Canada’s response to Trump’s tariff threat begin to take effect’

One measure taking effect that the story focuses on is to eliminate ‘flagpoling’. What is that, you ask. The story says this –

“Immigration measures announced as part of Canada’s border response to president-elect Donald Trump’s 25 per cent tariff threat are starting to be implemented, beginning with a ban on what’s known as “flagpoling.”

This is when someone who was in Canada on a temporary visa leaves for the U.S. then quickly re-enters Canada to access immigration services at a port of entry.

The restriction on providing work and study permits to flagpolers takes effect today.

Last week, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said that going forward temporary visa holders will have to apply online to extend their stay in Canada.”

This prompted a Question From Confused Al –

Ignoring the US President-Elect for the moment, why would Canada want to ban this? More basically, why did anyone holding a temporary visa do this in the first place? If you are holding a temporary visa to be in Canada, and you are in Canada, the obvious way to try to extend it would be to do that in Canada before your current visa expires. Why were people leaving Canada (to go to the US or anywhere else) and doing it from outside the country? Does this involve some kind of attempt to hoodwink Canadian immigration authorities? I can’t see how. If you hold a temporary visa and you try to extend it, from anywhere, the authorities are going to know all about you and proceed accordingly.

Well, then, it must be that the reason Canada is now banning flagpoling is precisely to mollify the President-Elect, right? (I am on record as saying that we should not do that, but….)

Except I can think of no reason for Donald Trump to give a fig about holders of temporary Canadian visas going to the US to renew them from there. The whole point is to get one’s visa to stay in Canada renewed, and hence to go back to Canada. Unless there is evidence that these flagpolers are engaging in drug-dealing or bank-robbing while in the US, what concern of this is anyone in the US, including Donald Trump? People enter the US for brief periods in the millions every year, these flagpolers must, like anyone else, have to talk to the nice US border people when they go into the US to flagpole in order to gain entry, so – what’s the big deal?

Trump is not a man for details, so I doubt he’s heard of flagpoling, but if someone he trusted explained it to him, I cannot see any reason for its banning to impress him regarding Canada’s efforts to keep bad people from crossing into the US from Canada. Flagpolers don’t sound to me like bad people, unless, as I say, they get up to no good during their time in the US. Were that frequently the case, I would have expected the G&M article to mention it.

So I was quite confused as to how banning flagpoling has anything to do with Trump’s tariff threat.

That is, until I went back and read an earlier G&M article from Dec 17, titled ‘Ottawa’s plan to secure border includes more dogs, drones and action to combat fentanyl trade’

Here this flagpoling is explained in more detail. The key sentences:

“He also said Canada intends to put an end to an irritant with the U.S. known as flagpoling.

The ruse, where foreign nationals already in Canada cross the border without going further into the United States, and then immediately return here, takes up lots of resources and distracts border officers from enforcement, he said.

Foreign nationals do this to speed up the renewal of study or work permits or to complete the process of obtaining permanent residence, applying at the border rather than applying online in Canada, which can take weeks or months.”

Now I get it. Flagpolers talk to the nice US border guards at, say, the Ambassador Bridge, but do not even go into Detroit, they immediately turn around, right on the bridge, and go see the nice Canadian border guards, and there they apply to have their Canadian visas renewed.

Why do they do this? Because the Canadian government has in place an immigration system in which applying for visa renewal from inside Canada takes weeks or months, but if you flagpole you get to apply immediately, in person, and you are done. It is not the US for which this practice is an ‘irritant’ it is an irritant for the Canadian border people. They don’t just do the usual border check with flagpolers, they have to help them fill out the visa renewal form. What Donald Trump thinks about banning flagpoling is irrelevant, banning it is better for Canada – or at least for it’s CBSA workers.

Having now read the entire earlier G&M article in detail, I think I see a trend, and I think I like it. I think all Canadians should.

The article also says Canada is stepping up border surveillance. So, to quote again:

“RCMP Commissioner Michael Duheme, who was at the launch of the plan in Ottawa, said the Mounties are hoping to use more helicopters very swiftly and may rent them at first for a speedy deployment. He has also been speaking to government departments about their inventories to see whether there is equipment the RCMP could use to enhance the work of their border detachments, such as Valleyfield in Quebec.

The RCMP’s new Aerial Intelligence Task Force, which will include the use of mobile watchtowers, will provide round-the-clock surveillance of parts of the border between official ports of entry.”

So, leaving aside the sad fact that the RCMP is going to lower-level police forces to scrounge up more helicopters, and also setting aside the fact that I cannot even imagine what a ‘mobile watchtower’ is, what this says is that Canada’s police force(s) is going to be keeping a closer eye on the parts of Canada near the US border but between points of entry.

No doubt Team Canada will spin this to the President-Elect as an effort to keep bad things and people from going into the US from Canada, but any adult knows that those guys in the choppers will be investigating anyone suspicious they see in those areas, whether they are walking towards or away from the border.

Again, a good thing for Canadians, if indeed weapons and drugs are being smuggled into Canada from the US, as we so often are told.

There’s more good news for Canadians. Quoting again:

“Under the plan, the Canada Border Services Agency will also train and deploy more dog teams to sniff out illegal drugs. And CBSA officers will have access to new chemical detection tools capable of detecting the precursor chemicals used to make synthetic opioids such as fentanyl as they come into Canada.”

Again, this sniffing and detecting will all happen in Canada. I don’t know if Trump will be impressed, I don’t care, these are good things for those of us who live here if they are effective.

More:

“Changes designed to streamline the asylum system “to deal quickly with illegitimate claims” are also being prepared, Mr. Miller said.

The government said it would also impose restrictions on countries that do not facilitate the rapid return of citizens who are subject to a removal order in Canada, or who came here fraudulently.”

Again, getting fraudsters and other bad actors out of the country and back to from wherever they came – good things for Canadians.

Now, I have no idea if any of this will be effective, this is still the government that can’t shoot straight, but the idea behind all these measure is to make it harder for bad people and bad things to get into and stay in Canada. If that means they are less likely to go from Canada to the US and that impresses Mr. Trump, fine.

This is the pattern I see. A Canadian government that has generally not shown much interest or ability in carrying out the basics of government has apparently been induced to finally do so in at least one dimension by the blustering of an incoming US President. I don’t know if this is any part of what Trump cares about, and I don’t care. Maybe Canadians are going to have to learn to appreciate Mr Trump a bit more, even though he has no visible appreciation for us. Don’t look a gift Trump in the mouth, eh? He’s got our government doing its job – at least a little.

Epilogue: After writing a draft of this I came across a long article in the Free Press by Niall Ferguson, the eminent British historian. He does go on, but that being said, he’s a smart guy and a good writer, and he makes a much broader version of my points above about Trump’s impact across the globe. It’s an interesting read.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Disability, Inc.

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, Health Care, Standards. 1 Comment on Disability, Inc.

‘You don’t ask a barber whether you need a haircut’.

I have no idea from where or who that bit of wisdom comes, but I also have no doubt of its wisdom.

A story in the Dec 27 Globe and Mail is titled ‘As demand for disability accommodations in universities grows, professors contend with how to handle students’ requests’

Not far into the piece one sees the graph which I have reproduced below:

 

A more than two-fold increase in the percentage of individuals in any sub-category of any population is notable. When something changes that dramatically there is something going on. Maybe more than one thing, but something, almost surely.

An important aspect of the phenomenon is depicted in the following graph, also from the article:

It is clear that the number of students with physical disabilities has not changed much over the depicted 5-year period, as the purple region’s upper boundary is nearly flat. However, the number of students registered with non-physical disabilities has increased by some 20,000 over the same period. Non-physical disabilities refer to things like test-taking anxiety, ADHD, difficulty with concentration, etc.

It is thus unavoidable that the source of the steep increase in students with registered disabilities is to be found in the source of the steep increase in non-physical disabilities. Importantly, these disabilities are not objectively verifiable. If a student claims to be blind or deaf or unable to walk, this can be verified by a doctor. More pointedly, if a test (like the PSA, for example) is used to diagnose prostate cancer, it is possible to determine how accurate the PSA test is. That is, it is possible to determine what percentage of false positives and false negatives arise in any population in which the test is used diagnostically. That is because surgeries and autopsies of individuals who are diagnosed in this way can determine whether they actually had prostate cancer.

There is no analog to surgery for test-taking anxiety or ADHD. There are tests, of a sort, and questionnaires, and criteria, for sure, but all of these have been developed by the ‘experts’ who are doing the diagnosis, and again – there is no way to objectively verify their results. One has ADHD if an expert on ADHD – whoever that may be – says so. That expert perhaps went through some process in determining that diagnosis but there is no device outside that ring of experts which can tell us how accurate are their diagnoses of ADHD. Determining ‘accuracy’ is impossible without the ability to determine what is true in a way that does not depend on who is doing the determining.

You can go to this link to get, for example, a pdf containing the DSM-5 Diagnostic Criteria for ADHD in children. You will find it a series of statements about observed behavior, such as ‘Lacks ability to complete schoolwork and other assignments or to follow instructions’ and ‘Incapable of staying seated in class’. The reality is that none of these observations are actually likely to be done by the ‘expert’, but come from the expert interviewing the parents and perhaps a teacher or two. The point is that this set of ‘criteria’ is all there is. An MD or psychologist talks to the parents and/or teachers, maybe the kid for a bit, consults this checklist, and then ‘decides’ ADHD, yes or no. One can go to another expert then, who might or might not agree, but one cannot get verification. It is not possible.

It is known, for example, that the PSA test produces ‘false positives’ at a high rate. This results in urologists generally requiring more evidence than a high PSA test value before they do anything invasive to a guy whose test showed such a high value. There is no way to talk about a ‘false positive rate’ for an ADHD diagnosis. Different experts might do the interviews, go through the checklist, then come to different answers, but there is no such thing as a ‘false positive’. If some expert says you have ADHD, the law and the university treat that as a certainty.

In my latter teaching career, when the explosion in disability exemptions among students was well underway, I was told that most university students with a disability diagnosis went into their first year with it already in place from their high school, if not earlier. The universities just carried on with accommodating them. The ‘advisors’ at Queens mentioned in the article don’t diagnose these conditions, they just decree what accommodation the student must be given for having them.

The psychology and psychiatric professions have been devoted to expanding the range of disabilities for decades now. Pretty much every kind of behavior has been given a spot as a ‘disorder’ in the DSM, including ‘oppositional defiant disorder’. Type that into google and see what comes up. I’m not an expert, but I’m quite sure I suffered from a bout of it at one point in high school.

These are barbers setting the rules for when someone must get a haircut. To be sure, not all members of all health care professions buy into the medicalization and amelioration of life. There is a reader comment at the end of the GM article from a health care worker who notes that when she pushed back against providing a ‘sick note’ for a student, the parent threatened to report her to her professional college.

Professional colleges in ‘regulated professions’ have become great agents for the enforcement of conformity. And the counsellors who set the accommodations for these diagnostic students, cannot be argued with, either. Certainly not by the likes of lowly faculty. It is worth noting that there is no science whatever behind the ‘accommodation’ business. That is to say, there are no scientific studies of the effects of giving vs not giving various ‘accommodations’ to students with registered disabilities. The standard two accommodations given are to allow more time to complete things, or to take tests in an environment separate from other students. Note that these are things that would likely allow any student to get a higher mark.

So, the disability accommodation system in Canadian education has become a system in which professionals with an interest in seeing disabilities and accommodations grow are in a position to help it do so, and in which the accommodations are such that every student would find them beneficial.

I would timidly suggest we may have found a cause for the pattern shown in the second figure above.

Predictably, this Globe article generated plenty of outrage in the comments sections, as well as some suggestions for what would or should happen now. I will close by dealing with a few of these.

  1. Universities should indicate on degree certificates or transcripts when a student has received accommodation in earning their credential. That’s a non-starter under both privacy and discrimination law. That it would improve the information available to society is quite beside the point, this cannot be done under current law, even if universities were willing.
  2. These accommodated students will be unable to compete or hold a job once they get out into the real work world. I fear this is false. The various Disabilities Acts in federal and provincial law – not to mention the Canadian Charter – pretty much insist that accommodation be given once someone is expertly diagnosed. I expect this will apply no less to workplaces than it does to educational institutions, so those accommodated students are likely to move into the workforce and insist on – and receive – similar special treatment from their employers. It is likely just a matter of time before most firms of any size have ‘disability counsellors’, just as they have HR and DEI people now.
  3. Once people start dying on operating tables and bridges start falling down, society will see that these accommodations are granting credentials to incompetent people and this will have to stop. This point is also often made with regard to DEI (now EDIDA at my old employer – guess what that stands for, gwan) policies, as well.

I actually think there is something to this, as some very undeserving and – honestly, ignorant – people have been receiving both high marks and degrees at my former place of employment for some time, and I have no problem believing their general ignorance, coupled with a sense of entitlement, will have costs down the road. Costs to others, I mean.

But neither the existence of EDIDA nor of disability accommodation means that all university graduates are ignorant and entitled; only that too many are. After all, universities have always given credentials to some who were undeserving. However, it is likely to take a loooong time for the impact of that increase in the undeserving to be visible out in the world, and an even longer time for it to be sufficiently obvious to enough people that the will to do something about it takes hold in society in general.

I would not hold my breath. Actually, I won’t be able to, as I expect to be long gone before it happens.

Climate Change…..Again?

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, Standards. No Comments on Climate Change…..Again?

More like weather change, I guess.

I am putting together here things I have recently read in a couple of places, because it seems to have led to something interesting. Our story starts in Germany, but trust me….it will end up back in good old Ontario.

First, from a story I read today in Watts Up With That, which I have mentioned before.

You can read it too, free, here.

The jist – in two recent periods, Germany faced a problem supplying itself with energy. To quote the article:

“From November 2 to November 8 and from December 10 to December 13, Germany’s electricity supply from renewable energies collapsed as a typical winter weather situation with a lull in the wind and minimal solar irradiation led to supply shortages, high electricity imports and skyrocketing electricity prices.

At times, over 20,000 MW, more than a quarter of Germany’s electricity requirements, had to be imported. Electricity prices rose tenfold (93.6 €ct/kWh).”

Germany has been the most aggressive European country in pursuing ‘green’ energy, the article noting that it shut down 19 nuclear power plants, and that 15 coal-fired power plants were taken off the grid on April 1, 2023 alone.

The claim is that during the periods mentioned some 25+% of Germany’s electricity demand had to be supplied by importing from neighboring countries during this period, and they are not entirely happy about this, as it drives up electricity prices in their own countries. Quoting again from the article….

“Norway’s energy minister in the center-left government, Terja Aasland, wants to cut the power cable to Denmark and renegotiate the electricity contracts with Germany. He is thus responding to the demands of the right-wing Progress Party, which has been calling for this for a long time and will probably win the next elections. According to the Progress Party, the price infection from the south must be stopped.

Swedish Energy Minister Ebba Busch was even clearer: “It is difficult for an industrial economy to rely on the benevolence of the weather gods for its prosperity.” And directly to Habeck’s green policy: “No political will is strong enough to override the laws of physics – not even Mr. Habeck’s.”

(Robert Habeck has been serving as Vice Chancellor of Germany, Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action in the cabinet of Chancellor Olaf Scholz. That government recently collapsed, and Scholz has said he will call a confidence vote on January 15, which will presumably result in an election if it fails. )

That sounds bad, right? Germany has pushed hard on green energy, and this has led to periods in which the weather (ironically, one might say) has led to their being unable to supply their citizens and companies with sufficient electricity. It appears this is pissing off their neighbors, but a second-level thought comes to me immediately – what would have happened if Germany’s neighbouring countries had all gone as gung-ho on green energy as Germany?

However, after reading this I kept internet-meandering, as I do, and came upon another site, called Climate Etc where the second article posted was titled ‘The climate case of the century’.

The opening paragraph of this article is:

“On the 12th of November, the Hague Court of Appeal ruled in the “climate case of the century” that Milieudefensie (“FoE”) filed against Shell in 2019. FoE demands that Shell reduce emissions throughout the entire chain by at least 45% by 2030. The foundation “Man & Environment” (M&E) joined the case to represent the interests of Dutch citizens.”

It gets long and complicated at that point, as does anything involving lawyers, but the article suggests that although the plaintiff was largely shut down by the Hague Court of Appeals, that court bought into the claim that there is indeed a ‘climate emergency’. Here’s just one excerpt from the article:

“A case in point, the Court arrives at the alarmist conclusion that “the climate problem is the biggest problem of our time” and that the danger of climate change is great and even “life-threatening”. Based on the non-factual findings of fact and obligatory references to the Paris climate agreement, the Urgenda judgment and the Klimaseniorinnen ruling of the European Court of Human Rights, the Court confirmed a right to protection against “dangerous climate change.”

“Protection against dangerous climate change,” the Court says, “is a human right,” without any caveats or qualifications.”

The Ontario connection. A commenter on this second article notes that there is currently a similar case winding its way through the Ontario court system, a suit brought by a group of minors (one expects said minors have had some help from….majors). The defendant in the case is the Government of Ontario, accused of setting a target for decarbonization that is too low.

The commenter claims that the trial court, which denied the claim on constitutional grounds but then had it sent back by an Appeal court, was ‘impressed by the arguments in the Hague case’.

I am thus led to wonder – what happens if the Ontario courts system, with all its deference to scientists determining what is ‘right’ for us, finds in favour of the plaintiffs?

Dougie Ford better play nice with those electricity producers in New York and elsewhere, eh?

Addendum: The Watts Up post that got me started on this also makes another interesting point. Namely, that wind turbines that have no wind use electricity. To quote:

“This is because all technical components (oil pumps, fans, control systems, etc.) must remain in operation even when they are still. Vestas specifies an electricity consumption of 55,000 kWh per year for a 4.2 MW turbine at standstill. During production times, the turbine supplies itself with electricity. But it is virtually idle 120 days a year.”

I have no idea if this is true, but it seems plausible, and if it is….talk about Catch-22.

The Universe is a strange and wonderful place, no?

 

Silence is Golden – So Shut Up     

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, Language, Safety, Secrecy, Standards. No Comments on Silence is Golden – So Shut Up     

This is about the City of London Council, whose members’ behaviour and policies often irritates me deeply. In this case it has made a decision that is reflective of a much wider problem in 21st century government – the culture of Shut Up Already.

Susan Stevenson is the 1st-term city councillor representing the Ward that contains Old East Village in London, the area that has seen the most serious depredations by lawless individuals. Last time I was there was with friends going to a bar, and we walked down its main street Dundas to get there, having to pass at one point a ‘Mission’ outside of which some 20 people were injecting drugs, nodding off, presumably from having just injected drugs, and generally lying about on the sidewalk. It was what I would term a shit show.

A group of OEV merchants showed up at a recent Council meeting at which was discussed issues related to homeless encampments. The merchants made it clear they were fed up with what was being allowed to happen in their part of the city, that it was hurting their business and their lives.

Ms Stevenson’s job is to represent those people, and the City Council has just voted to dock her 30 days pay (just over $5,000) for the way she has done that. This is not the first time she has run afoul of the Council, as  she was previously taken to task (but not fined) for posting photos on social media of the sort of scene I described above from her Ward.

Her sin this time is that she put up a post featuring quotes from a city bureaucrat about homeless encampments. The charges against her adopted favoured 21st century words – ‘bullying’, ‘targeting’ and ‘harassment’ of this staff person. The step of docking her pay was recommended in – get this – a ‘report from Principles Integrity, the firm hired by the city to act as its integrity commissioner’, according to a London Free Press story.

Those terms for Stevenson’s behavior also come from that report. Council then voted to carry out the recommendation of 30 days loss of pay, after a debate, in an 8-6 vote.

I think this paragraph from the same LFP story is key:

“The report found Stevenson editorialized the quote with “provocative emojis,” unnecessarily identified Dickins, and appeared to suggest he was responsible for homeless encampments in the city, leaving him vulnerable to attacks from the public.”

I cannot read that without getting angry.

As I noted, I have walked through the shit show on Dundas East that is the very direct result of City Council policies, and more than once. People who live and work in OEV must do this on a daily basis, and that is by no means the only part of the Ward where such shit-shows reign.

I will also say that I did not actually fear for my physical safety on said walk, as I think the people starring in those shit shows are pathetic rather than dangerous. That walk is highly unpleasant, and it makes me despair for my city.

But this ‘Integrity Commissioner’ thinks that this city bureaucrat should not be subjected to ‘provocative emojis’ on a social media post. And, Stevenson ‘appeared to suggest’ something? What does that even mean? I read the guilty post, I saw no such suggestion in it, and I don’t know if a case could be made. But the more basic question is: why should Stevenson not suggest he is responsible for the situation if she believes that to be the case? Because he might be subject to ‘attacks from the public’? Why should he not be attacked by the public if they think he is responsible? If you are in a job in city government and you go out and get yourself quoted about city issues, then why on earth should you not be called to account for what you say by councillors and/or the public?

This is the utter disconnect of our current governmental bodies. Nothing wrong with people shooting drugs on a city street in broad daylight, no councillor should have their pay docked for that happening, but suggest that a highly paid city staffer’s quote is problematic and a $5k fine is the result. And, of course, 8 fellow councillors voted for Stevenson to be penalized.

City politicians and bureaucrats should never be made to feel ‘unsafe’, no matter how silly the supposed reason for that feeling – provocative emojis, indeed. But London residents – you’re on your own, folks.

Yea, it enrages me every time I read about it.

The Freeps and CBC London stories on this – there are many – include many quotes from Stevenson and her council colleagues. I’ll discuss those in a separate post, so stay tuned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dumb Epilogue

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media, Standards. No Comments on Dumb Epilogue

In this post just last week I took the Canadian Press to task for not asking questions about the possibility that Doug Ford might cut off electricity to three US States in response to Trump’s threatened tariffs on Canadian imports to the US.

The questions were not revolutionary: Can Ford do this? Are there legal contracts in place?

Well, an organization called The Globe and Mail thought those were good questions, and put someone on the job of finding answers to them. You can read the resulting article here if you’re a subscriber. If you’re not, why not? I don’t work for them, but the G&M seems to be the only org in Canada that still tries to do some reporting.

The gist of this ‘Explainer’ article is that there are no actual contracts under which Ontario supplies power to the US. Rather, the electric grid in the Northeast and Northern Midwest of the US is highly intertwined with that of Ontario.

Here are three key paragraphs from the piece.

“Before 2005, Ontario had a relatively balanced electricity swapping arrangement with its American neighbours. It subsequently became a substantial net exporter, but its international transfers peaked around 2015 and have been on a gradual downward trend since then.

The Ford government places little value in those exports. Ontario’s nuclear power plants and hydro dams often produce more power than the province needs, typically overnight during the spring and fall. This forces the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) to export some of that surplus power, typically at low or even negative prices.

“The former government set up a process where we do a lot of exporting at a loss,” Mr. Lecce said last week.”

Well, now. It turns out Ontario is selling that power to the US at a loss, sometimes even paying the US to take the electricity (that’s what is meant by a negative price) because Ontario is producing more than it can use.

What to make then of Ford’s threat to ‘stop selling electricity to the US’??

More ‘I’ll shoot my puppy’ threats from Ford, it would seem. No, Ontario does not make a profit on these sales generally, in fact they seem to often sell at a loss, which might seem to indicate that Ontario is not hurting itself if it cuts this electricity to the US off.

But, but, but – it’s not that simple. One cannot forget that Ontario is doing this as the currently easiest way to deal with its own over-production during certain times. So, what’s it gonna do if it does not send this unneeded-in-Ontario power to the US at bargain rates? Light up Queens Park? Send it to Mexico instead?

The electricity exports from Ontario to the US are the easiest way for Ontario’s hydro producers to get rid of excess production, which happens because they cannot shut nuclear and hydro-electric generation facilities down quickly. Or, rather, it is highly costly to do so, so they send the extra power to the US. Even if they have to pay the US users to take it, this is less expensive than the alternative of shutting down production.

More puppy-shooting threats by Ford, then, but a tip of my hat to the Globe for digging into this. Nice to see journalists being journalists rather than click-baiters.

I admit that I do wonder, though: why do those US states want Ontario’s excess electricity if it is available overnight in Spring and Fall? What’s their story?

Well, not our problem, and one cannot answer every question in a single post.

You Should Read This  

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, Popular attitudes. No Comments on You Should Read This  

Really.

….assuming, that is, that you have not already read enough post-mortems about the recent US election.

I came across this post in my meandering around the internet:

A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives

(click on the title to go there, no paywall)

It’s one post on a blog called Symbolic Capital(ism), written by a sociologist named Mussa Al-Gharbi.

Disclaimer: It is very long, and full of data, much of it from exit polls and surveys, the reliability of which we all know is iffy, and I am not saying it is brilliant or fundamentally correct, as I have not (yet) taken the time to dig into it deeply. And…I usually have little use for sociologists. And, a lot of the analysis comes from a book Al-Gharbi just published, which he plugs shamelessly at the end. Hey, we all gotta make a living.

But, man, it is comprehensive, and well-written, and definitely not the usual bullshit. It has given me enough things to think hard about to last a long time. And I might have to buy his damned book.

Kudos, Ms. Freeland

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, Standards. No Comments on Kudos, Ms. Freeland

Like many Canadians, I read with some surprise today that Chrystia Freeland had resigned from the Liberal Cabinet. (Maybe you saw it coming, I was surprised.) I have never been a fan, but I should admit that was based on two somewhat superficial aspects of her.

One, in any public statements I saw her make, she conveyed an attitude of lecturing to lesser mortals who did not understand the subtleties of governing. Two, she seemed to be a(nother) toady to Justin Trudeau, speaking only in bureaucratic language designed to make shit smell like roses.

Neither of those things is all that damning, the first being perhaps just a deficiency in her communication skills, and the second being widely shared by her peers in government.

However, I want to say in this post that I read her entire resignation letter, and it raised her in my estimation considerably. This is largely due to her writing the following, which I quote in full:

“Our country today faces a grave challenge. The incoming administration in the United States is pursuing a policy of aggressive economic nationalism, including a threat of 25% tariffs.

We need to take that threat extremely seriously. That means keeping our fiscal powder dry, so we have the reserves we may need for a coming tariff war. That means eschewing costly political gimmicks which we can ill afford and which make Canadians doubt that we recognize the gravity of the moment.”

The implied economic analysis in that quote does not impress me. I am on record as being doubtful that the 25% tariff threat is all that grave a matter at this point, and I don’t see why Canada needs to keep its fiscal powder dry for a tariff war, as that will happen only if the Canadian government behaves as stupidly as Trump is promising to behave. Even then it will cost Canadian citizens rather than our government.

But the ‘costly political gimmicks which we can ill afford’ do indeed make this Canadian doubt the government’s seriousness. That Freeland seems to see that, and that she was willing to put it in writing impresses me. Not such a toady as I once thought. She has principles.

And, I give her high marks for two other aspects of her resignation. In the letter she explicitly states that she will again run for her seat in Parliament in the next election – she could have, but did not, add ‘good luck in your riding, Mr. Prime Minister’. And, she resigned on the morning that she would have otherwise had to deliver the Fall Economic Statement, in which she would have had to say that the government of which she was a part had blown by its own fiscal deficit promise by more than 50%. Yes, goodonya Chrystia for forcing your former boss to find some other toady to deliver those numbers.

Epilogue: I have now posted applause for a politician twice on this blog. I’m a little worried…..

Dumb and Dumber

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media, Standards. 1 Comment on Dumb and Dumber

It’s impossible to live in North America and not read about President-elect Trump’s various blusters about the US’s relations with Canada and Mexico. Living in the former naturally causes me to focus on it, but my impression so far is that the government in Mexico is doing a much better job of dealing with said bluster. Mexico’s president hasn’t said much, and what she did say was pretty clear.

A major kerfuffle up here in the Great White North is Trump’s threat to impose a 25% tariff on all goods imported into the US from either country. His ‘reason’ to do this is to get Canada to stop the flow of drugs and illegal immigrants into the US.

Let’s start there. If one knows anything about international relations, one knows that it is the duty of each country to police its own borders. Specifically, if the US or Uganda or Sweden wants to keep something from coming into the country – whether animal, vegetable, mineral or people – then it is responsible for doing that. This is why, when Canadians travel to the US, they do not find themselves talking to a Canadian Border Agent about where they’re going, how long they plan to stay, and what they might be bringing with them. They get to talk to a very nice US border guard about all those things. If there are Canadian border guards patrolling the Great Lakes in boats, they are there to stop things and people from entering Canada, not from entering the US.

There are and have been countries in which citizens leaving the country have to talk to a border guard working for their own government. Citizens of good ol’ East Germany and the Soviet Union had to do that, back  in the day, and they could be sure they would be turned around and sent back home – if not arrested – if they did not have documented high-level permission to leave. We don’t live in countries like that. Thankfully.

I had to answer an hour’s worth  of questions from Israeli border security agents when I left their country after my one visit there in the 90s. We don’t live in a country in Israel’s precarious position of constant war, either. Thankfully, again.

For a while in the aftermath of 9-11, US border officials (in combat fatigues, no less) would lurk on the US roads that run from the US onto the Ambassador Bridge, randomly stopping cars that were heading to Canada. I don’t know what they would have asked me had I been stopped, I was always waved on, but I viewed it as one more step toward Big Brother when I saw it. Maybe they’re still doing it, I don’t know, I have not crossed that bridge in a long time.

So, if Mr Trump is proposing we start doing that to people leaving Canada for the US, the appropriate Canadian governmental response would be – ‘We’re not that kind of country. What enters your country is your responsibility.’

This has not been the response of Canadian government(s). They have instead looked like the proverbial chickens running around with their heads cut off, because not only the PM and his ministers have responded to this tariff threat, but so have a number of provincial premiers.

I will consider these responses in a bit, but first we have to be clear about the nature of Trump’s threat. The President-elect has said he will punish Canada for ‘letting bad things and people into the US’ by imposing a 25% tariff on all goods the US imports from Canada.

So, he is proposing to raise the prices of a large set of goods purchased by Americans and US -based companies, as a way to punish Canada, presumably until it stops those bad things from going to the US. To be sure, these tariffs, if enacted, will not be good for Canadian companies that export to the US, or their workers. The rise in prices in the US that the tariff will surely cause will reduce US demand for those products and that will mean lower sales and presumably lower profits for those Canadian companies. It is not impossible that some companies in Canada will be driven out of business by this.

So, definitely bad for (some) Canadians for sure. But also bad for most American consumers, and many American companies. Higher prices are not good if you are a buyer.

In other words, Trump is saying  ‘Do what I want or I will kill this puppy.  Yea, I know it’s my puppy, but dammit, I’ll shoot it, and you’ll be sorry.’

He is proposing to get what he wants by punishing his own citizens and companies. Waytago, Donald.

Not to be outdone, various Canadian officials in various governments have proposed to retaliate in much the same spirit. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has suggested his government will stop selling hydro-electricity to three US states in which, according to this Canadian Press story Ontario sells enough electricity to power 1.5 million homes. The three states involved are apparently New York, Michigan and Minnesota.

What will this cost Ontario and its taxpayers? Anyone? The answer hinges on what will happen if Ontario does stop exporting that electricity to the US. If it just means Ontario produces less electricity, then the question becomes whether Ontario was making a profit on those exports. If so, then we are foregoing those profits, and once again a government is punishing its own citizens to retaliate against a government leader who is punishing his citizens. If, on the other hand, the Ontario suppliers were not making a profit on that electricity then….well, why not?

Ford’s other idea is to stop the LCBO from importing US-produced alcoholic beverages, so….Bourbon, wine, and – one can hope – their crappy beer.

Bad for Jim Beam, Jack Daniels and California wine producers, I guess, as the LCBO does buy a lot of booze, but once again, it’s gonna be us Canadian consumers who also pay, through less choices in booze.

The province apparently (the CP story gives no source for this) is also considering restricting exports of minerals to the US that are used in battery production. It’s not clear to me that a province has any ability under the Canadian constitution to restrict what Canadian companies export, but once again, if they can, this is punishing the companies in Ontario that would otherwise be making a profit and employing Canadians by selling these minerals. I mean, c’mon, folks. Trumps says he will tax something we sell to the US and Ontario’s response is well, then we won’t sell it at all? That’s all you got? We’ll shoot our own puppy?

Now, not every Canadian premier is clueless. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is quoted in the article as saying “Under no circumstances will Alberta agree to cut off oil and gas exports,” she said. “Our approach is one of diplomacy, not threats.”

And, we are not going to cut our own throats, she might have added.

Another quote from the CP article:

Michael Sabia, president and CEO of Hydro-Québec, said “it’s not our current intention” to cut off Quebec’s exports to Massachusetts or New York state, but he conceded it might be possible.

“Our intention is to respect those contracts, both because they’re legally binding, but also because it’s part of, in our view, a sound relationship with the United States,” he said. “It’s a questionable instrument to use in a trade conflict.”

Okay, then if these contracts are legally binding, what about the contracts Ontario has with US states for providing electricity? Are they not legally binding? Did any journalist think to ask Ontario’s officials about that? And, given what Sabia says in that last paragraph, did the writer of the article mean to write that Sabia ‘….conceded that it might be impossible’ (to cut off electricity to the US). Y’know, beecause they have legally binding contracts. (Sorry, I have zero faith that journalists get things right any more….)

Another quote from the Ontario Premier in the CP article.

“We’re sending a message to the U.S. (that if) you come and attack Ontario, you attack livelihoods of people in Ontario and Canadians, we are going to use every tool in our tool box to defend Ontarians and Canadians. Let’s hope it never comes to that.”

Give a 21st century politician any excuse to use combat metaphors and they can’t stop themselves. Trump is attacking Ontarians and Canadians. I imagine that’s how Trump sees it, too, but what in fact he is doing, if we’re going to stick with the combat rhetoric, is attacking us in a way that guarantees his own people get hit with friendly fire. And, of course, our own ‘generals’ are threatening to ‘defend’ us by responding in kind.

I say keep your head down for awhile, none of these leaders can shoot – or think – straight.

Oh, yea, and just to make sure there is something completely ridiculous in this post, there’s the ‘Canada as 51st state with Governor Trudeau’ jab from Trump. It says a lot about 21st century journalism that journalists write intentionally serious stories about Canada becoming a US state, and their employers print/post them. There remain few grownups in the room anymore. Any room.

Endnotes

1, I was talking to someone the morning before I wrote this article and she told me she’d heard that Trump was going to stop selling US booze to Canada. I just said ‘That sounds implausible’ and of course it isn’t true, but it shows that people watching all this happen often have no idea about how things work. Who can do what, who is actually doing what, what are its impacts; none of this is obvious to most people. This makes it all more of a shame that the media is so bloody bad at explaining anything.

2. More beating up on CP. They deserve it. This note appears at the bottom of the CP article I quote above:

“Note to readers: This is a corrected story. A previous version stated that Ontario exported enough energy to power 1.5 million homes in three states in 2013.”

Um….that’s still what the story says, and in addition, it names three specific states, but doesn’t give the year. So……just what was wrong about that original story? Is it that you are now saying you don’t know what bloody year those numbers apply to? Or…..you know the year but you’re not going to tell us? But, you’re sticking to the 1.5 million homes number?

You know things are bad when you can’t tell what mistake a correction is correcting.

 

Motivational Workshops are Good For You. Really. Stanford Says So

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Health Care, Research, Standards. No Comments on Motivational Workshops are Good For You. Really. Stanford Says So

I mentioned in my last post I had been reading about academic fraud, and I was. I do. Frequently. I didn’t post anything on it, but after posting my last piece I came upon some material I had dug up a while back on a case that is, well, improbable. Not fraud, or so say the experts who know more than I, but research that makes you wonder ‘What were these people thinking?’

The story starts with an improbable figure: Tony Robbins. You may remember him, motivational speaker, was all over TV at one point, good looking guy, great teeth. This guy:

He was on OWN for a while, wrote several books, like Unlimited Power: The New Science of Personal Achievement (1986) and several others. He also went through some rough times, accused of sexual misconduct in Buzzfeed in 2019. I don’t know what came of that, and it is quite separate from his role in our current story.

A group of researchers, some from Stanford’s Genetics Department and its Stanford Health Innovation Lab (SHIL) undertook some research projects in which Robbins’s seminars figured. I don’t know how many projects there were in total, or how many papers they got published on them, here I will focus on two I do know about:

Non-traditional immersive seminar enhances learning by promoting greater physiological and psychological engagement compared to a traditional lecture format  

This was published in the journal Physiology and Behavior in 2021, and you can read it here if you like. I’ll refer to this as the learning paper. The other is

Effects of an immersive psychosocial training program on depression and well-being: A randomized clinical trial

Published in The Journal of Psychiatric Research in 2022, you can read it here. I’ll refer to this as the depression paper.

Each paper lists 9 separate author-researchers, five of whom appear as authors on both papers. Michael Snyder, the Director of SHIL, is listed only on the depression paper, but other authors on the learning paper are from the Stanford Dept of Genetics.

The learning paper’s abstract starts with this sentence:

“The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of an immersive seminar, which included moderate intensities of physical activity, on learning when compared to traditional lecture format.”

In fact the researchers observed 26 people, 13 in an ‘immersive treatment’ group and 13 in a control group, all 26 of whom went through a two-day seminar. The difference in the two groups is described as follows:

“For the IMS group, participants were provided with a hard copy of lecture material which was presented at UPW with a combination of state elevation sessions (jumping, shouting, fist pumping, and high five behaviors) which were conducted approximately once every hour to raise arousal and to interrupt sedentary behavior, as well as mindfulness mediation[sic] that focused on a wide variety of awareness, affective states, thoughts and images [35] that were conducted once at the end of each day.”

The control group got the same seminar and hard copy of material, but without the meditation and ‘elevation sessions’.

What does this have to do with Tony Robbins? You will find his name in the paper, sort of, at the very end –

Funding

This study financially supported by Robbins Research International Inc.

What this does not mention is that the ‘lectures’ the research subjects attended were in fact a two-day Robbins seminar, one of those things one pays a lot for.

Still, nothing wrong that I can see with someone like Robbins sponsoring research to see if one of two different approaches leads to better learning outcomes in his seminars. However, because all the subjects are people who paid a lot to be in this environment, one can’t really claim they are representative of the general population, so one has no reason to think that the results of this study tell us much about the impact of such ‘immersive’ learning in other situations.

Beyond that, there are only 13 research subjects in each group. That is a rather small number,  which makes one wonder whether the results mean much. Here’s what the researchers say they found:

            “The primary findings of this study were that learning was greater in the IMS compared to the CON as the increased performance on the exam was sustained 30- days post event when compared to CON, which decreased 30-days post event.”

Ok, but the question that comes to me at this point is – why did these well-placed researchers bother with this? The paper’s Conclusion section actually notes that “Previous studies have shown that physical activity can promote learning in traditional classrooms [2,3].” They then go on to note that those previous studies utilized different types of exercise. Whoop-de-do. I would think researchers at this high level would be interested in research that could move the needle more than that. I get that Robbins (maybe only partly) funded the work, but I doubt these people are hard up for research funding. So, in the end my only question is really: why and how did these researchers get involved with Robbins at all, and on such a mediocre project?

Hang on. I came upon this in Gelman’s statistics blog, which I read regularly and mention here often. He didn’t take these guys on, all he did was reprint some material from an article in The San Francisco Chronicle which, based on the bits I’ve been able to read (paywall) was really hard on these researchers and this research.

As I noted, Robbins had been in the news not long ago for bad behavior, so if the learning paper was the extent of this Robbins/researchers interaction, I would likely chalk this up to no more than a newspaper thinking it can score points by embarrassing some Stanford researchers for their association with Robbins, and take another strip off Robbins himself in the process. Nothing (much) to see here.

But then there’s the depression paper.

Again, Robbins’ name appears only once, at the end of the paper, like this:

“This study was not funded by Robbins Research International; however, they did allow participants to participate in the DWD program at no charge. They also provided housing for two research coordinators who stayed on site during the trial.”.

DWD here refers to Date With Destiny, which is a Tony Robbins seminar that the paper describes as follows:

“…a six-day immersive training program that includes a subsequent 30-day daily psychosocial exercise follow-up period. DWD is popular with thousands of people using this intervention annually. The program combines a variety of lifestyle and psychological approaches that seek to improve well-being, including cognitive reframing, guided meditation and visualization, neurolinguistic programming, gratitude, goal setting, guided hypnosis, community belonging and engagement, and exercise. Although components of the program such as exercise, gratitude, and cognitive reframing have independently been found to improve mental health and wellness (Goyalet al., 2014; Kvam et al., 2016; Mikkelsen et al., 2017; Schuch et al., 2016), the effectiveness of the DWD program has not been investigated.”

No mention anywhere of the fact that this is an ongoing Tony Robbins (money-making) seminar series for which people (although not the subjects of this study) pay big bucks to attend, although people familiar with the Robbins operation would recognize the DWD name. Here’s what the Robbins website says about DWD:

Create life according to your terms

Dive deep into the patterns that are holding you back, ignite your motivation, and build momentum toward the life of your dreams.

I guess that’s kinda ‘mental health and wellness’, right?

The researchers describe their experiment as follows:

            “A randomized clinical trial was conducted in which 45 participants were randomized at 1:1 ratio to DWD (n = 23) or a gratitude journaling control group (n = 22) (Fig. 1). Depressed individuals (n = 27), as assessed by the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9; see below), and those without depression (n = 18) were recruited by email, flyers, and physician referral in the U.S.

At least there are more subjects this time, right? Ah, no. In fact there were 14 depressed subjects assigned to the Seminar and 13 assigned to the ‘gratitude journaling’ control group. The other 18 subjects, 9 in each group, were not designated as depressed according to their own original responses on the above-mentioned PHQ-9 questionnaire, and as we shall see, it is the originally depressed subjects who are the star of the show.

That’s because the big question that is being asked here is: does attending a Tony Robbins six-day DWD event reduce depression?

Can anyone guess what answer Mr. Robbins would like to hear to that question?

And indeed, that is the answer we get – in spades. Here’s the payoff, from the paper’s Abstract:

“Seventy-nine percent (11/14) of depressed participants in the intervention condition were in remission (PHQ-9 ≤ 4) by week one and 100% (14/14) were in remission at week six.”

In remission here means that on that self-reported questionnaire, the scores generated by their answers were below the threshold at which they are considered depressed. In other words, the Tony Robbins DWD seminar has a 100% cure rate for depression.

One need not even ask how the control group did, my god, all the depressed people were cured by the treatment. Huzzah!

More times than I could count, I have written in this blog, ‘If it seems too good to be true, it ain’t true’.

Reasons for skepticism are many and varied.

In clinical trials of anti-depressants, typically something like half of participants report ‘feeling better’ after six to eight weeks. A paper in the Lancet I dug up said that 62% of adults reported ‘improvement’ in depression after psychotherapy, at varying time frames.

But DWD – 100% cure rate. Go, Tony.

There is once again the small sample issue here, just as in the learning paper, but to this under-educated economist, the subjects themselves are the big question mark. These are people who self-reported being depressed, went to a DWD seminar for six days for free and then were asked again afterward about how they felt. Ya think maybe they were inclined to believe in the power of DWD?

The bits of the SF Chronicle article that are quoted on Gelman’s blog suggests that some of the SHIL researchers knew and were fans of Robbins before the research started. I can’t say anything about that, and I don’t think you need to know that to wonder about the results in the depression paper.

A final note. If you do go to download the depression paper, you will find that the journal in 2024 also published a Corrigendum about the original 2022 paper, and this corrigendum has the same original nine authors on it. These corrigenda are published by a journal when a mistake is found in a published paper, but is thought not so egregious as to warrant retracting the paper completely. It notes that there was an error in calculating the post-treatment PHQ-9 score for one of the treatment subjects, and as a result, the cure rate was ‘really’ only 93%.

Most interesting in this corrigendum, all two pages of it, is the following paragraph, which I quote:

“Finally, we note that after the article was first made available online on March 9th, 2022, Dr. Snyder became a co-founder of a startup, Marble Therapeutics, on July 12th, 2022. Mr. Robbins later invested in Marble Therapeutics on September 26th, 2022, three months after the final version of the article was published. We do not believe there was a conflict at the time this work was done, but nevertheless wish to note this relationship.”

There’s that other thing I often write: can’t make this shit up.

Why is Al Writing About Climate Change?

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Uncategorized. No Comments on Why is Al Writing About Climate Change?

Quick answer – I was getting sick of politics and politicians.

Admittedly, I also came across some interesting things on a very good website I visit occasionally, Watt’s Up With That? You can read it too, at https://wattsupwiththat.com/ and it’s quite free.

And, full disclosure, I had first tried to lift the depression induced by reading about politics by reading about academic fraud. Didn’t work, don’t know why not.

Anyway, this is actually mostly about weather, and everyone likes talking about that.

So, a few items of interest (I think) from Watts Up.

1. A recent and most-read post on the site is very short and titled ‘Michael E. Mann’s Forecast Fiasco’. Mann is the fellow who way back in 2001 made famous – or perhaps infamous – the ‘hockey stick graph’ purporting to show the very recent and very dramatic increase in global temperatures relative to the last thousand-plus years. It created a lot of controversy at the time, still not resolved (although you wouldn’t know that reading Wikipedia’s entry on Mann).

Anyway, Mann, who is a prof at U Penn in Philadelphia, sent out a tweet last April predicting a ‘record-breaking 33 named storms for the North Atlantic hurricane season.’

Now, before I give you the punch line, let me just say that no one claiming to be a serious scientist should ever write something as stupid as that. I don’t know how anyone who understands even a little about statistics or weather or bloody anything thinks that they can predict a number that specific. And, not about something moderately predictable even, but about weather fergodsakes.

Well, reality eventually happened and there were 18 named storms this past season. 4 more than the average. Definitely not record-breaking. Definitely not 33.

I no more believe this will stop Mann from making future predictions about weather than I believe that ‘The President Whisperer’ will shut up after predicting a Harris electoral triumph in November.

2. Sticking with storms, what about all those scary tornadoes? There’s an article about this, too. Note that this is all about the US, but that country is the world leader in tornadoes, after all. A first quote from the article:

“While there have been no long-term trends in the frequency of tornadoes, there have been changes in tornado patterns in recent years. Research has shown that there are fewer days with at least one tornado but more days with over thirty, even as the total number of tornadoes per year has remained relatively stable. In other words, tornado events are becoming more clustered.

There is also evidence to suggest that tornado patterns have shifted geographically. The number of tornadoes in the states that make up Tornado Alley are falling, while tornado events have been on the rise in the states of Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky.”

That quote is from an article in National Geographic, by the way, hardly a bastion of climate-change denial. Here’s another quote:

“There is no real evidence that tornadoes are happening more often. A lot more are being recorded now than in 1950, but a closer look at the data shows the increase is only in the weakest category, EF0. There’s been no increase in stronger twisters, and maybe even a slight decrease in EF4s and EF5s.

That suggests we’re just spotting more of the weak and short-lived tornadoes than we did back when the country was emptier (the United States population in 1950 was less than half what it is now), we didn’t have Doppler radar, and Oklahoma highways weren’t jammed with storm-chasers.”

We can be sure that the next time a tornado happens here in Ontario, that is not the story we will hear from whatever academic or Environment Canada type they interview about it. And, we can also be sure that a team of investigators will have to be sent out first to verify that whatever happened was actually a tornado. That doesn’t happen in Oklahoma. EF0 here, mostly. You don’t quite need a microscope to see ’em, but….

And, here’s a graph from the WUWT article to illustrate that last point (I like graphs….):

3. Back to hurricanes

There’s a full article about these storms, also, and despite living in an all-but-hurricane-free part of the world, we hear about them in the media every season. Their paths are tracked on the news, even though said paths are thousands of miles away, and the papers are full of stories of damage, death and apocalypse. Well, here’s another graph showing the global frequency of tropical storms and hurricanes since 1970.

The obvious thing to see here is that there is no upward trend since 1970, but the other thing you might think a supposed scientist like Mann would notice is how bloody variable is the number of these storms from year-to-year. I’d expect that would dissuade anyone from thinking they can hope to accurately predict the number that will occur in a coming season. At least, anyone who’s not a tool.

4. I do recommend the website, it’s a bit geeky but highly sane.

Pardon My Principles         

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, Standards. No Comments on Pardon My Principles         

As the dreary, disappointing, never-ending US Presidential election campaign wound its way through the early summer months, I did my best to ignore it. I posted nothing here about it, other than this post about some ignorant (post-Biden/Trump debate) statements by a former Mayor of Atlanta. My one constant comment when the topic arose, as it too often did, was to say ‘Neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump should ever be allowed within 1000 yards of The Oval Office’

In July, however, I changed my tune, to ‘Neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump should  ever be allowed within 1000 yards of The Oval Office’.

Now that Joltin’ Joe has issued a Presidential pardon to his son Hunter, I must once again change my tune, to ‘We’re sure gonna miss Biden once that unprincipled asshole Trump is inaugurated, eh?’.

Coda: the news-reader on CBC Radio One at noon today actually said that Biden’s justification for the pardon ‘almost sounded like something Donald Trump would say’.

One really can’t make this shit up.

Canadian Health Care System Goes in for an Exam

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Health Care, Standards. 3 Comments on Canadian Health Care System Goes in for an Exam

My title is a bit inaccurate, maybe even a lot, because even though people write and talk a lot about the ‘Canadian’ health care system, in fact health care is a provincial responsibility. The Canada Health Act is intended to promote some level of commonality across the provincial systems, but I have little doubt that there is a good deal of variation in the quality and timeliness of the provision of health care services across the provinces.

Still, folks do talk as though we have a ‘Canadian system’, and the report by my favourite Canadian think tank, the Fraser Institute, that prompted this article is no exception.

Before I tell you about that, here’s a different report regarding what Canadians think about the health care system. In a poll done in August of ’23, Angus Reid asked a sample of Canadians a variety of questions about health care. Some highlights (you can read the entire AR report here):

– two-thirds of Canadians (66%) think there are structural problems within health care that will not be solved with more funding.

– 19% reported not having a family doctor, and 29% reported that they have one but find it difficult to get in to see them.

– 68% did not expect to see improvement in health care system in two years, and 56% did not expect to see improvement in five years.

– 68% report they think their province is doing a poor or terrible job measuring health care system performance, and 69% think that performance would improve if key health care indicators were made public.

Now this is an interesting snapshot of what a sample of Canadians think about the health care system under which they live, but it prompts a lot of questions. What health care indicators do the people surveyed have in mind? What do they mean when they tick the box ‘there are structural problems in health care that money won’t fix’?

Still, the survey suggests a lot of folks aren’t happy with the system, and my own circle of friends and acquaintances echoes that, although I will add that, in my experience, there is also a not-insignificant set of people who get angry at the suggestion that Canada has anything less than one of the best health care systems in the world.

Which leads one to wonder – at least it leads me to wonder – just how good is it?

Well, the good ol’ Fraser Institute wondered that too, and the result of that wondering is a new report from them titled ‘Comparing Performance of Universal Health Care Countries, 2024’, which you can download and read here. Really, all 66 pages, no paywall.

Suspecting that not all my readers are as enthusiastic about 66 pages of numbers, graphs and tables as am I, I valiantly dug in to see what I could learn and then report on here.

One thing to note right off is that Fraser decided to look only at OECD countries with relatively high incomes, and only those with universal health care systems. That tossed the USA out of the comparison right off, as well as low income countries  like Mexico, Costa Rica and Poland. This left 31 countries that met the Fraser criteria, and it includes all the countries you would expect: Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Australia and New Zealand, even Israel and Slovenia.

There’s a lot in the report obviously, and the first key comparison is – how much does Canada spend on its health care system relative to these other countries? The next comparison will be, of course – what we get for that spending.

The first question is answered in two ways. First converting all monetary amounts into US dollars (despite its absence from the list) at purchasing power parity exchange rates (don’t ask) it does two international comparisons. One looking at expenditures as a percentage of GDP, and a second looking at expenditures per capita.

Canada is the fourth highest spending country on the first measure, spending 11.5% of its GDP on health care, trailing only Germany, Switzerland and New Zealand. On a per-capita basis, Canada comes in 9th of 31 countries, spending $US7035/person, the leader of the pack being Switzerland at $US9218/person.

So, Canada’s system is not inexpensive. We spend a bigger chunk of our national income on health care than all but three other rich countries and are in the top half of countries ranked by spending per person.

So now, what do we get for this?

This is much harder to measure in any credible way than are expenditures, so Fraser measures a lot of different things to try and get a handle on what and how well the system delivers. An imperfect place to start is to measure inputs. How well does the system do in providing the labour and capital (cuz that’s what it is, folks) that is needed to deliver health care services?

The answers are varied.

Canada ranks 28/31 in the number of physicians per capita, but a better 13/31 in the number of nurses per capita. However we slip to 25/31 in the number of each of overnight-stay and psychiatric hospital beds per capita. We are 27th in MRI units per capita and 28th in CT scanners. We are a surprising 3rd in Gamma scanners per capita, a device that detects gamma radiation emitted by radioisotopes. (I had to look that up.)

Canada doesn’t look good on this dimension outside that gamma scanner thing, but the report notes quite reasonably that what matters is not inputs but output. When these people and equipment go to work, what results do they get?

This is even harder to measure (it’s relatively easy to count people and pieces of equipment).

So….

Step 1: How well are the people and equipment utilized?

Two countries were left out of this part of the report for lack of data, but

Canada ranks 17/29 in doctor consultations per capita, 22/27 in MRI exams per capita, 13/27 in CT scans per capita.

We squeaked into the top half on that last one, but Canada also ranked dead-last in ‘curative-care discharge rates’ from hospitals, which are basically instances per thousand population of a patient being admitted to a hospital for treatment of an illness or injury (so, not maternity stays, for example) and then being discharged.

So, last in just going to the hospital to be treated and released. Hard to give that a positive spin, I think. (Thinking about it, that number could be low either because we have a hard time getting into the hospital to be treated, or because when we are, we tend to die rather than be discharged. Or both.)

And now, everybody’s favourite….ok, my favourite, waiting to be treated.

The set of countries in this ranking is even smaller, and I’m not sure why. The countries included are Netherlands, New Zealand, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Australia, France, Sweden and Switzerland.

– 65% of Canadians reported waiting more than one month for an appointment with a specialist, placing Canada 8th out of 9. [France was even higher. Sacre bleu.]

– 58% waited more than two months for elective surgery, placing Canada 9/9.

Based on the stories I hear from my (admittedly mostly not-young) friends, I find it amazing that 42% of Canadians apparently got elective surgery of any kind in less than two months. I will add the cautionary note that this is based on patient self-reports, which are never the most accurate stats. Ideally one would like administrative data on wait times.

Anyway, on to –

Step 2: what happens to people who do get into the system?

There are a number of measures of how well the system actually does in making people better. I won’t go through them all, but here are a few so you can see what sorts of things are involved and how we did. Not all the 31 countries are included in each measure, data again.

a. The rate of diabetes-related lower extremity amputations was not statistically different from the 23-country average.

b. Canada ranked 8th (out of 26) for performance on the indicator measuring 30-day mortality after admission to hospital for acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) which was statistically better than the average.

c. 11th (out of 26) for performance on the indicator measuring 30-day mortality after admission to hospital for a hemorrhagic stroke, which is not statistically different from the average, and

d. 15th (out of 26) for performance on the indicator measuring 30-day mortality after admission to hospital for an ischemic stroke, which is also not statistically different from the average.

Wait, there’s more….

e. Canada ranks 5th (out of 28) on the indicator measuring the rate of 5-year survival after treatment for breast cancer (statistically better than average),

f. 11th (out of 28) for the rate of 5-year survival after treatment for cervical cancer (not statistically different from the average),

g. 8th (out of 28) for the rate of 5-year survival after treatment for colon cancer (statistically better than average),

h. 6th (out of 28) for the rate of 5-year survival after treatment for rectal cancer (statistically better than average)

Clearly, Canada does okay on these measures overall, so I will take a paragraph here to note what I think is ironic The most terrible thing you can suggest to most Canadians is that we make our health care system more like that of the US. In fact, no one reasonable ever suggests that, but Canadians seem to be terrified of the very idea of the US system, which they think leaves people dying on the sidewalk, unless they can afford the Cadillac-level health care available to those with money and/or good jobs.

But what this report suggests is that Canadians have a terrible time getting access to health care, yet if they do, the system does a good job of treating them. So, in the US access is difficult unless you have money, but you get good care if you get in, while in Canada access is difficult because governments won’t spend the necessary money, but again, if you get in, you get good care.

Not what I would have expected before reading this report.

There’s a lot more in it, including comparisons of longevity and mortality and such. I don’t think those things tell us anything much about our health care system, as they depend on too many other things, so I will pass on reporting them, but you can read the report if you’re interested. The one exception is ‘treatable mortality’, which, as its name suggests, is mortality from causes that a health care system can ameliorate. On that measure, Canada is 20/31, not terrible, consistent with the numbers we just saw.

My bottom line is what it has been for a long time regarding the Canadian Health Care System. Despite it’s acronym, OHIP is not an Insurance Program. It may have been at the start, based on what I have read about its origins. Now, it has morphed into an all-encompassing bureaucratic nightmare in which too many decisions are made at too high a level. The politicians and high-level bureaucrats in Ontario try to ‘run’ the system from Queens Park, and if the Soviet Union was not sufficient demonstration that that doesn’t work I don’t know what could be. In addition, politicians are unwilling to commit the spending to the system needed to reduce wait times and ameliorate other access issues, because doing so would make it much harder for them to do the things they believe will get them re-elected: subsidies to manufacturing plants, sending cheques to taxpayers and the like.

I have seen the enemy of good health care, and it ain’t us, it’s the people we vote into office. All of them.

 

 

 

 

 

AI and the End of Thinking

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Language, Popular attitudes, Standards. 1 Comment on AI and the End of Thinking

I hypothesize that the topic that comes in second after the US election in the news is AI. So, this post is about me….cuz in most fonts, Al and AI are indistinguishable.

This was prompted by a long article in last Saturday’s Globe and Mail Opinion section, titled

The Automation of Writing is Almost Here

Followed by the tag line:

‘But what will happen to us, Michael Harris asks, if we cede our written language to AI?’

It is a long article, and Harris makes a number of points, all of which I basically agree with.

As to what is wrong with AI writing, he says “There is the shape of meaning and yet nothing solid.”

I would only add that this can also be said about most bureaucratic writing from universities, government, corporations. Indeed, AI makes all writing sound bureaucratic – only the shape of meaning.

He typifies the coming of AI as the third great revolution in communication, the first being writing itself, the second the invention of the printing press.

Another quote: “Passing around pre-fabricated blocks of text is efficient, to be sure, but it also makes a mockery of the word ‘communicate’….”

Again, I cannot disagree, except perhaps to wonder at what ‘efficient’ means in that context. It is easy, yes, but efficient?

As someone who taught a lot of what my employer deigned to call ‘Essay courses’ (simply meaning student grades were determined by my evaluation of a minimum number of their written words), I said to those students often that ‘writing is thinking’. I meant it, even though most of them didn’t like what that implied. Thinking is hard, so writing well is also hard. Students….no, humans….are pretty ingenious at avoiding things that are hard. That’s not necessarily a moral failing. Well, it is when it gets people hurt or killed, but it is also probably part of our evolutionary heritage. Struggling along on the savannah, smaller. slower and weaker than most of what we wanted to eat, our ancestors absolutely had to conserve their energy in any way they could, so as to have a hope of winning a battle against a tougher, stronger and faster opposing animal.

The instinct to conserve energy seems to have survived, the need to best superior predators, not so much.

There is another vein of thought about AI and language that I have read about but which Harris ignores. So far as I understand it, it is that AI generated language is destined to turn into meaningless mush, eventually. It has something to do with the fact that AI will increasingly find itself training itself on a mountain of verbiage out there on the web which it has increasingly generated itself, and this process is inherently unstable. Here’s two sentences from the Abstract of a paper about this, titled ‘The Curse of Recursion’

“What will happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute much of the language found online? We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, where tails of the original content distribution disappear.”

It doesn’t say what those ‘irreversible defects’ are but some simple examples in the paper suggest that as a LLM (Large Language Model) is trained successively on text that it generated itself, the output it produces becomes what we would now call gibberish.

Given what I write below, I would call that good news.

My own concern with these LLMs follows from what I see their owners selling them for already. It is an extension of the same concern I had the few times students used AI for their writing in the last years of my career. I came upon these recent AI sales pitches because I watch sports online, and the commercials are mostly those that are broadcast on US TV. The ones I am going to talk about below are all, so far as I can remember, from Apple Intelligence, the cleverly named AI wing of Apple.

I recall three such TV ads.

  1. A guy enters a business meeting, sits down, and quickly realizes he has no idea what is going on. He quietly scoots his wheeled chair out the door, checks on his phone for what I assume was the original emailed materials for the meeting, and hits the ‘AI’ button on his program. The algorithm immediately gives him a ‘summary’ of said material. He smiles, slides himself slowly back into the meeting, and says ‘OK, let’s get into the prospectus’.

Lesson: You don’t have to prepare for anything, and you certainly don’t have to study. AI will prepare you in seconds.

  1. A guy is sitting at his desk, thinking out loud about something that is never clearly described. He speaks some garbled thoughts into his phone, hits the AI button, and his gibberish is turned into a paragraph of clear prose, which he sends to someone (his boss, it appears). Boss reads it, looks up and says something like ‘This is from Gibberish-guy?’.

Lesson: You don’t have to write or even think clearly, just say something, anything, and AI will make it brilliant.

  1. A guy (natch) is incensed about someone stealing his pudding cup from the office fridge, and he is writing an inflammatory email to the entire office, castigating whoever was asshole enough to steal it, and promising dire consequences if it is not returned. Before hitting Send he looks at the Teddy Bear sitting across the office from him (No, there were no teddy bears in the office when I worked, either) and hits the ‘Kindness’ button on his AI program. The email is duly transformed, he sends it, and a young lady walks over to his desk, says ‘Such beautiful words.’ and returns his stolen pudding cup.

Lesson: You don’t have to emotionally regulate or understand proportionality, AI will make you seem like a nice (and articulate) person.

If AI is going to self-referentially crash some day, I say bravo. I fear however that the message to most of my fellow humans prior to that is that it will eliminate the need for them to think, be articulate, prepared, or an adult, and that will be too attractive to resist. However, I will have to interact with those people in situations in which they cannot rely on AI. In line at the grocery store, out for a walk, sitting at the bar. Doing so will be extremely unpleasant, because without their AI they will be ignorant, inarticulate and angry.  Unless they let their phone do their talking for them.

That’ll be great.

 

 

Dammit, This is Important!

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, Language, News Media, Popular attitudes. No Comments on Dammit, This is Important!

This is going to be a rant – unusual for me, I know – but a short one. I am working on a much longer rant for the coming days, so you’ve been warned.

I refer you to The London Free Press, November 21, Letters to the Editor. One letter is headed Timing Offensive.

The author is offended that the Freeps published an article headlined ‘We don’t want to know about abused men’ on Nov 9. I quote from the outraged letter:

“You have 11 other months of the year to publish that article, and yet you chose to run it in the one month dedicated to the Shine The Light on Women Abuse campaign.

Are the editor and editor-in-chief that insensitive, or worse, misogynistic?”

Misogynistic, clearly. I mean, it’s obvious, right?

I surmise that it was the publishing of an article about abuse of males during a month when someone decreed that we should focus on abuse of females that drew the writer’s ire. Would an article about the Movember prostate cancer thing have been equally offensive? I surmise not, as I suspect there were articles in the Freeps about Movember that did not outrage the letter-writer. No, I haven’t looked…..

More fundamentally, what is the actual nature of the offense, here? As far as one can tell from the letter, most of which I have reproduced above, as it was not long, the offense is thinking about, writing about, and publishing an article about, other types of abuse. So, our attention must not stray from the abuse of women during November, not even for the length of time it takes to read that offensive article.  And apparently, if the Freeps had published the article on Dec 1 the author would not have been upset, December presumably falling under the ’11 other months’ designation.

However, it is also true that someone somewhere, I know not who or how, did designate November as a month to support/discuss/sympathize with (I really don’t know what we’re supposed to do beyond growing a moustache) men who have prostate cancer. Should I then be offended if the Freeps publishes an article on breast cancer this month? What about skin cancer? I won’t be, but is that lack of outrage a moral failing on my part?

Sadly, this is pretty much how many people see things. They have a cause. The war in Gaza, misogyny, racism, cruelty to animals. This then becomes the most important thing there is to think and talk about, not just for oneself, but for everyone.  One then patrols their chosen territory assiduously, outraged by any and all perceived actions by anyone anywhere that might suggest that one’s favourite issue is not supremely important. (There are also people for whom this is a job description. They’re called ‘advocates’, they get tons of media attention, and are a topic for another post someday.)

Students camp out on the concrete beach (ok, how many were actually UWO students is not clear) and harass passersby and graduates because nothing is more important than their stand on the war in Gaza. Not your fellow students, not the ability of other people to live their lives without being shouted at, and never mind that your silly encampment and juvenile harassment has zero chance of having any impact on what happens in Gaza. This issue is important to me, to the exclusion of all else – including going to class or earning a living – and so it must be equally important to all right-thinking people. Any person who does not see the paramount importance of my issue, well – they must be a, a, a….misogynist.

So it is with this offended letter writer. It does not occur to her that if the appearance of that story in the Freeps (of all places) actually had any detrimental impact on the Shine the Light campaign, maybe said campaign is doomed.

 

Elections for Sale? Campaign Ad Spending in the USA and Arms Races

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media. No Comments on Elections for Sale? Campaign Ad Spending in the USA and Arms Races

I. Some numbers

I read a series of letters to the Editor of The Globe and Mail this morning, all on the results of the US election, which continues to feature prominently in Canadian media, and certainly in the G&M. One letter-writer fumed that democracy had not triumphed in the recent US election, and went on to cite a number of reasons for believing that, including that ‘….the US Supreme Court has flooded US elections with corporate and special interest money.’

It seems to be a common belief among Canadians that because US elections involve the spending of so much more money than what is spent here in Canada on a federal election campaign, that winning elections in the US is all about outspending your opponent. That was certainly the attitude among the Canadians in the US Election discussion group I joined recently. A consequence of that need to outspend your opponent is the need to raise a lot of money, hence the belief that it is money, and those who have it, that matters to the outcome.

This prompted me to try to find out just how much was spent in this last US election, and by whom. The obvious place to go for such data is to the FEC, the US’s Federal Election Commission, as all spending by candidates, parties and political action committees (PACs) is supposed to be reported to this body. The FEC says that between Jan 1 of 2023 and Oct 31 of 2024, candidates for President and Congress spent $3.1B, the Party Committees together spent another $1.5B while PACs spent $7.3B, which adds up to just under $12B in total spending by all groups for US federal positions. That’s a lot of clams, and of course the good ol’ rule of 10 says that if Canadian spending is anything like in the same league, total spending in the next Canadian federal election (some time in 2025) will come to $US1.19B. Anyone care to bet it will be that high?

So far as I can tell, the FEC site doesn’t provide a breakdown of spending by party or candidate for the entire campaign. I found some tables that compiled spending up to June 30, 2024, but that ends well before the big spending spree just before Election Day. Which is not to say there isn’t a lot of info on the site. You can go in and find out that Nikki Haley for President, Inc, spent $49.58 on an Uber, date of the ‘disbursement’ being 12/31/2024, which is more than a month into the future, so…..I dunno what that means. Anyway, the site claims to have over 130 million records in its ‘disbursements’ database, all of which you can see, but I didn’t think I had the time to go through and add them up, and as a retiree I no longer have research assistants so I looked for another source.

A report from NBC news, dated Nov 8, reports on spending on advertising by the various parties and candidates, saying it is using data gathered by AdImpact. NBC reports that AdImpact reports as follows on the Presidential election:

“Overall, the Democratic campaign and pro-Democratic outside groups spent almost $1.8 billion, while the Trump campaign and pro-Republican outside groups spent $1.4 billion.”

So, the Dems outspent the Reps on this Presidential campaign by some $400million, and Harris lost. The story is similar in Congress, quoting again from the NBC story –

“The campaign for the Senate, which will be controlled by Republicans at the start of next year, drew about $2.6 billion in spending — $1.4 billion from Democratic candidates and outside groups and $1.2 billion from Republican candidates and pro-Republican groups.”

And……

“House races drew $1.7 billion in ad spending — $940 million from Democrats and $760 million from Republicans…”

It now appears the Republicans will have a slim majority in the House, also.

It leads me to wonder how evil all that money really is if it is not actually effective in winning elections. The Dems outspent the Reps on ads in all three cases, and lost. Of course, campaigns also spend on other things; the so-called ‘ground game’ of getting supporters to the polls, one way or the other. But I don’t think folks who worry about US elections being ‘bought’ worry about that. Helping folks get in their ballot is seen as virtuous spending, it’s all that ‘misinformation’ on TV and social media, financed by the evil rich, that is evil.

There is a substantial body of research showing that political contributions to Senators and Congressmen do not correlate with how they vote on legislation. That is, there seems to be no evidence that contributions from, say, the AFL-CIO or UAW to a legislator results in their voting more favourably on labour legislation, etc. One response to this is to note quite correctly that ‘no evidence’ does not mean that there is no effect. Finding good evidence that x has an effect on y, which is what most social science research tries to do, is difficult, and ‘no evidence found’ is a very common result of such research. (Research that finds ‘no evidence’ doesn’t often get published, which is why all you read about in the media are stories that include a sentence that starts ‘ a new study shows that….’. What those studies ‘show’ is very often baloney, but that’s a topic for another post.)

Another response to this particular ‘no evidence’ finding is that this is because what political contributions actually do is determine who ends up being elected to be a legislator in the first place. The 2024 election says maybe not so much, or at minimum, not always. The Dems outspent the Reps at every turn and ended up with a Republican president and Republican-controlled Congress. Their majorities in the latter are both very slim, and could be reversed in the 2026 mid-term elections, of course.

It will be interesting to see what happens in 2026. Who ends up controlling the House and Senate after those elections will be of interest, but also how the campaign fundraising and spending go. Will the Dems be able to again outspend the Reps, and will it get them control of Congress if they do?

Just for fun, I went back and checked on the last Canadian federal election in 2021, and discovered that the limits set by Elections Canada on spending by the various federal parties were set at $30Cmillion or less, depending on how many candidates each party ran, so that came to an overall ceiling of just under $150Cmillion in spending by all the federal parties combined. Canada doesn’t have PACs, but third parties do spend money in Canadian election campaigns. I could not find any figures for spending by such groups, but Canadian legislation prevents them from spending more than $150,000 in any one election, so their spending cannot add up to much, it would seem. In short, there is no way total campaign spending in the next Canadian federal election is going to get anywhere near $US1.19B, as that would translate into about $C1.6B.

Does that lower spending mean we get better electoral outcomes in Canada? What do you think? Electoral campaigns are certainly much shorter in Canada, a fact for which I know I am very grateful. But – would it be better or worse for all if parties and candidates were allowed to spend more? I’m betting no one reading this thinks it would be better….

II. A Hypothesis

One way to understand this high level of US campaign spending is to view it as an arms race, much like the one that Pepsi and Coke are involved in. That is, no one in North America can possibly be ignorant of the existence of, or the taste of, either Pepsi or Coke. Yet in 2019 Coca Cola spent $154million advertising just its Classic and Lite brands in the US, while PepsiCo spent $118million advertising just its Pepsi brand in the same year. Why so much for a product everyone already knows about? Answer: it’s an example of an arms race, like what happened in Europe before WWI.

The key characteristic for a strategic situation to be an arms race is that each party believes that it’s chance of winning is greater the greater is their own spending and the less is their opponents’ spending. Winning a war in 1914 was more likely the more a country spent on arms and the less its potential opponents spent. Check. The more Pepsi spends on advertising Pepsi the greater will be Pepsi’s sales, the more Coke spends on advertising, the less will be Pepsi’s sales, and conversely. Check. The more Trump spent on political ads, the more likely he was to win the election, but the more Harris spent the less likely he was to win, and conversely. Check. This all leads to each side in an arms race trying to outspend their opponent, and means that the more your opponent raises/spends, the more you feel you must raise and spend. Hence, ever-increasing fundraising and spending.

The logic of this all leads to the conclusion that both parties would be better off if a third party could come in and impose an outside limit on their spending. In the political case, that would mean a law limiting contributions or spending or both, such as Canada has. It is also the impetus, at least partially, for arms control agreements and treaties in the warfare example – although Hitler in the 30s showed that there is an enforcement problem with those. In the case of Coke and Pepsi, there is no third party, and if those companies sat down together and agreed to mutually limit their own ad spending, they would almost certainly get in trouble with US anti-trust authorities. That is illegal collusion, man.

A case in commerce where a third party did more or less impose an ad spending limit was in the early 70s, when cigarette ads were banned from TV by the US government.

This was done for health reasons, not to help out the tobacco companies, but I have heard that tobacco company stock prices rose after that ban, which would be outstanding evidence that they were in an arms race up until then. I haven’t been able to find any credible evidence of that rise – it happened back in 1970 – although it does seem to be true that overall industry spending on advertising dropped after the ban on TV ads. If anyone out there can point me at evidence about those tobacco stock prices, please do. I won’t hold my breath…..

Anyway, the analogy with political campaign advertising is pretty clear. There was no possibility that anyone in the US who might possibly vote was ignorant of the looming election or of either of the two candidates. The media provides unending streams of information about it all independently of any advertising by the two candidates and parties. Do all those campaign ads induce people to vote who otherwise would not, or is each campaign just worried about losing vote share to the other side if they don’t advertise? If so, then maybe Canada’s campaign spending limits regime is superior – at least for the political parties, and maybe for the voters. On the other hand, no one claims that the media were made better off by that 1970s TV advertising ban on cigarettes.

An attempt to limit campaign spending in the US would likely not get past the first amendment, but I’m betting the media would be at the front lines of trying to stop any such effort in any case. To them, after all, that $7.5B in ad spending was revenue.

Gonna Get Geeky – and Long

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government. No Comments on Gonna Get Geeky – and Long

Hey, let’s not think about the recent US election for a bit, ok? I want to write about something much more exciting – economics!! Even better – debt!!

Writing about government debt immediately tends to get pretty political, so I’m going to write about something less political, I hope – consumer credit card debt. This was prompted by a brief story in the Globe on Saturday that led off with the graph below. It shows what has happened to credit card balances in both the US and Canada since 2019, indicating that they are 30%+ higher this year than they were in 2019.

I will note, as a minor aside, that the good ol’ rule of 10 holds here, once again. That is, that since the US has about 10 times Canada’s population, most national statistics in the US are 10 times bigger than in Canada. Here, it holds for the actual amount of recent credit card debt: $1.17trillion in the US to $109.5billion in Canada (I’m assuming here the Canadian number has been translated into US dollars, otherwise the Rule of 10 is rather in doubt.)

The US numbers come from a recent report by the New York Fed , and you can read the entire report here – https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc

It’s a vast and fascinating (if you’re a geek) cornucopia of charts and graphs, which is useful, because the commentary by readers attached to the Globe article raises a number of questions that do seem important. The theme of the article itself is that the chart above indicates that the US economy, or more accurately, the typical US consumer, whoever that is, is not in such great shape. However, various commenters point out that this one statistic doesn’t tell us much about that, we need to know some other numbers, like how consumer debt compares to consumer income over time, as well as what proportion of these credit card balances are earning interest. That is, is most of this representing balances that are paid off each month, or are they balances that are being carried month to month and thus drawing interest at over 20% per year? Also, are the charges that make up these balances payments for basics like groceries and utilities, or are they for ‘discretionary’ expenditures?

Even more critically, how much of this debt is in delinquency, representing cc balances on which required payments are not being made?

First, a chart on p.3 of the Fed report (which is actually several pages into the report itself) consists of a chart that shows the proportion of total consumer debt in the US of all forms, and this makes it clear that cc debt is pretty tiny. The single biggest source of consumer debt is in mortgages, which made up 70% of consumer debt in 2024Q3. This was followed by student loans and auto loans, each making up only 9% of the total, and cc debt being only 6%. (A later graph shows that there are many more cc accounts than mortgages, some 600million versus only 80million mortgages, but of course the mortgages are for much larger amounts. That 600million number  also tells us that most folks have more than one credit card, btw.)

Now, one might say that cc debt is what moves around the quickest in response to changing economic conditions, and so is still important as the proverbial canary in the coal mine, even if it is a small part of overall debt. Fair enough, so what is going on over time with cc debt in the US?

One interesting stat, make of it what you will, is that while cc balances in 2024 in the US were indeed just over a trillion dollars, credit card limits were over 5 trillion dollars, so on average, people carry balances that are only 20% of their credit limit. In addition, the same chart shows that credit limits have increased much more than credit card balances over the last two or three years. Both those things seem like an indication that not many consumers are running up balances to their limits, but of course they could also simply indicate that issuers are very willing to increase credit card limits when asked.

What would seem a very clear indicator of consumer distress is the percentage of cc accounts that are delinquent, with payments being 30, 60, or up to 120+ days late. The Fed report tracks this, too, and it shows (p. 11) that overall delinquencies of all lengths hit a high of 12% of accounts in 2010, right after the financial crisis. No surprise there. Since then, the delinquency rates have all trended down nicely, hitting a low of around 3% sometime last year. The percentages have been ticking upward slightly since then, hitting a total of just under 4% being in some level of delinquency in Q3 of 2024. Not a good recent trend, but maybe not yet alarming.

Looking across categories of debt, a graph on p. 12 shows that the rate of loans being 90+ days delinquent has continued to trend downward for mortgages, revolving debt, and student loans. That last has crashed since 2021, no doubt due to Joltin’ Joe Biden’s ongoing attempts to forgive many student loans. Only auto loans and credit cards have seen a recent uptick in their delinquency rates.

Some final general stats to finish up the US story. Foreclosures and bankruptcies hit long-time lows in about 2022, and have been ticking up very very slowly since then (p. 17), and although the percent of cc accounts in third party collection (a very bad place to be) has declined a lot since 2016, and continues to do so, the amount in collection per account in collection has jumped up precipitously. So fewer cc accounts are in collection, but the amount those accounts are in arears appears to have increased by some 40% since late in 2022. I don’t honestly know what to attribute that to.

Now, it would be useful to compare all this to what is happening in Canada, and as usual comparable stats are much harder to find here. Say what you will about the US, they devote a lot more resources to producing useful stats about themselves than do we. Almost the only org in Canada that does that sort of thing is StatsCan. What follows is some useful, if not directly comparable data from that source.

First, and I admit this surprised me, Canada has the highest ratio of consumer debt to disposable income among the rich G7 countries, as shown below:

Just as surprising to me is that Italy has the lowest ratio. Hmmm…..

Some of the commenters on the original G&M article point out, quite correctly, that the numbers on that first chart are national averages, and so say nothing about the possibility that some segments of the population might be in particular trouble on the debt front. This is of course likely to be those at the bottom of the income distribution, and that very sensible point can be made about every US statistic I quote above. Below is a disaggregated stat that speaks directly to that issue for Canada, again from StatsCan.

Even in 2020, when the folks at the bottom of the income distribution were getting reasonably big pandemic transfers from the Canadian government, they were on average spending more than they earned. (To be honest, I cannot tell if this table’s figures include those government transfers as part of income. I’ve tried….) Moreover, the trend has been negative for those in the bottom three income quintiles since the pandemic. That is, their net saving has decreased – become even more negative – from 2020 to 2023. Only for the top two income quintiles has net saving been positive throughout this period, although it has fallen slightly since 2020 even for the fourth and fifth quintiles.

That says that overall, the folks in the bottom three quintiles have been borrowing (or drawing down any savings they had) more, and those in the top quintiles have been saving less. That doesn’t say ‘healthy consumers’ however you slice it.

A final Canadian graphic from StatsCan which says a lot, I think:

Note that this is a graph of the cumulative increase in prices of goods and services in selected components of the CPI from ’21 to ‘24. What it shows is that the three components in which prices went up the most in that three-year-plus period were shelter, food and transportation, three things that everybody spends on. However, it is beyond doubt that those at the bottom of the income distribution spend a greater proportion of their disposable incomes on these three things than do those at the top.

Nothing healthy about that, either, particularly for those at the bottom. If one really (still) wonders at the reason for the unpopularity of the federal Liberals and their glorious leader these days, maybe the key is right there.

 

Not Political  

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media, Standards. No Comments on Not Political  

Hey, Kids!

This is going to be an article about the recent US election that is not about politics. I’m sure you’re all relieved – I know I am.

One staple of any US (or Canadian) election is pre-election polling. Media organizations do it, the parties and candidates do it if they can afford it, and movements in those polls are written about endlessly in the months leading up to the election. It might even be true that they matter for the outcome, because they affect people’s beliefs about the eventual likely outcome, and there is credible evidence that the expected closeness of an election affects people’s decisions to vote. Why bother if you expect a landslide?

This last US election was predicted by almost all polls to be close at every moment, but there were differences, and one notable difference was in the predictions made by traditional polls relative to those made by prediction markets. These market platforms, like Polymarket, allow people to make real-money bets on who will win the election. The price of betting on a Trump win is set on this market platform, based on what bets are being made, and varies between .01$ and 1$. Paying the going price at any moment gives you one ‘share’ in a Trump victory, which means that if he wins, as he did, you collect $1 for each share you bought. Similarly for shares in Harris, which trades on its own separate market (although prices on the two markets are obviously linked). Thus, if a share in Trump costs 40cents, that suggests that in this market the general belief is that Trump is more likely to lose than win, while if his shares are going for 65cents, as they were at various times a week or so before the election on Polymarket, that suggests the general view is that he is more likely to win. Those who bought Trump shares when the price hit $0.65 (see below) made $0.35 for each share they bought.

Polls, on the other hand, do not directly predict the winner, but rather try to predict the share of votes each candidate will get, both nationally and in each state, based on surveys of likely voters. Those state vote predictions then have implications for the Electoral College vote count, which can of course be used to generate a prediction about who will win.

Below is the plaform Fivethirtyeight‘s final poll from Election Day.

Well, here are some facts (so far as I can tell) about all these predictions and polls in this election.

1, All the polls I know about got the national popular vote wrong. Not by a lot, maybe, but the ones that I know about predicted that however the Electoral College turned out, Harris would win the popular vote. They’re still counting votes in California for some reason, but it looks like Trump’s national vote total will exceed Harris’s by maybe 3 or 4 million.

2. None of the polls I saw at any point predicted that Trump would sweep the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin.

3. If this makes you want to thumb your nose at polls generally, you should probably pick on the one that appears in – wait for it – The Economist. On Election Day – yes, you read that right – it posted an update to its prediction about the winner, giving Harris a 56 percent probability of victory.

Gonna be hard to live that one down……

4, There is plenty of chatter out there in the mainstream media now that the polls, like those in The Economist, are done for, having had their collective asses kicked by the political betting markets. That’s unwarranted, for sure. If you want to go full geek you can read a blog post here by statistician Andrew Gelman as to why that is an unwarranted conclusion, but know that Gelman was involved in putting together the prediction model used by The Economist. (I don’t believe he is involved in its day-to-day operation, so is likely innocent of any involvement in that big Harris jump on Election Day.)

However, I think I will back Gelman on this. First of all, it is worth noting that the betting markets back in 2016 were predicting a Clinton victory right up to election night, by which I mean a Clinton share cost more than $0.50 and a Trump share cost less than that. Beyond that, it is important to note that all US presidential elections in this century have been quite close, some of them really really close. It has become a 50/50 country at the national level politically, so predicting election outcomes is always going to be done with a great deal of uncertainty. That’s what makes sporting contests between equally capable teams fun, right? Whether that fun translates into politics you can judge for yourself.

All of which brings me to one particular prediction market in which something a bit unusual happened this year. I think it’s an interesting story in its own right. A couple of weeks before the election, the prediction market Polymarket, which had been selling Trump and Harris shares for prices not far from $0.50 for some time, suddenly saw the price of a Trump share vault into the middle 0.60s.

It turned out, and Polymarket was pretty up front about this, that the price had increased so markedly because a large buyer – later know as ‘The Trump Whale’ – had jumped in and bought a lot, as in millions of dollars worth, of Trump shares. It’s called a market because that’s what it is, that’s how it’s designed, so his big buy pushed the price of a Trump share up markedly.

It is still not known who this is, and Polymarket sure isn’t going to say, but The Wall Street Journal has featured a couple of stories on him, in which he has said he has no political agenda, but rather that he had a ‘hunch’ that Trump was going to win, that the polls were missing something. [It appears now to be common knowledge that he is a wealthy Frenchman who goes by the alias ‘Theo’. The WSJ claims he is set to rake in some $50 million from his election bets.] He bet not only that Trump would win the presidency, but also that he would win the national popular vote, something no poll got right.

The latest version of his story is that he believed that the polls were once again missing a ‘shy-Trump-voter’ effect, as they did in 2016 and 2020. That is, people who are going to vote for Trump, but won’t tell a pollster that, or just don’t respond to polls.  The WSJ story continues as follows –

To solve this problem, Théo argued that pollsters should use what are known as neighbor polls that ask respondents which candidates they expect their neighbors to support. The idea is that people might not want to reveal their own preferences, but will indirectly reveal them when asked to guess who their neighbors plan to vote for.

Théo cited a handful of publicly released polls conducted in September using the neighbor method alongside the traditional method. These polls showed Harris’s support was several percentage points lower when respondents were asked who their neighbors would vote for, compared with the result that came from directly asking which candidate they supported.

Well, now – that’s an interesting idea. If you think so, too, Gelman has an entire post devoted to it, not completely geeky, but very long, which you can read here. Bottom line: he also thinks ‘ask about your neighbors’ polling is an interesting (although not entirely new) idea, but needs more research. Of course he does, Gelman’s an academic, remember.

It is by now well-recognized by pollsters themselves that getting truly representative samples of people to survey has become more difficult with the demise of the universal use of landline telephones. What that all means for the polling business going forward remains to be seen, for sure, but it seems at least true that after three Trump-involved elections, US pollsters have still not figured out how to stop underestimating his support.

 

I Can’t Stop Myself

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media. No Comments on I Can’t Stop Myself

…..writing about the US election. There’s just so much silliness.

Sometimes the best thing I can do in this blog is point my readers to other sources at which they can find things really really worth reading. One such is The Free Press https://www.thefp.com/  a website founded by former NYTimes staffer Bari Weiss. I subscribe, but you can read much of its content for free, and it consistently features commentary that I find both educational and stimulating. And, best of all, at least from my perspective, it is not just a mindless conservative/right-wing/Republican mouthpiece. In the long article that I quote below the author spends two paragraphs explaining how the Republicans’ likely control of both the executive and legislative branches of the US Federal government is not going to be a good thing and then explains what a fool is Tucker Carlson.

I quote below from a weekly Free Press column titled TGIF, written by Nellie Bowles . You should go here to read the entire thing, it is quite long but almost uniformly awesome. I am repeating here just what she writes about how the leftish US media intelligentsia is writing about Harris’s loss to Trump.

→ Our campaign was perfect: In the wake of their staggering defeat, Democrats have figured out what went wrong. It’s simple: The voters are bad. Americans are bigots. Case closed.

“I mean, this really was a historic, flawlessly run campaign,” said MSNBC’s Joy Reid. “She had—Queen Latifah never endorses anyone. She came out and endorsed her. You know, I mean, she had every prominent celebrity voice. She had the Taylor Swift—she had the Swifties, she had the Beyhive. You could not have run a better campaign in that short period of time.”

You’re telling me Queen Latifah didn’t move the needle for Kamala? I need to sit down.

Or there’s Emma Vigeland, a host of the influential progressive radio show Majority Report, who said: “Can’t believe I actually had faith in other white women to choose our collective reproductive rights over their own whiteness. Naive and dumb.”

B-b-b-but, the Swifties are white!

Here’s Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart on PBS: “I can’t help but wonder if the American people have given up on democracy.” USA Today columnist Michael Stern slammed a piece that dared ask the question of where Harris went wrong: “Nope, I won’t read it. Harris ran a great campaign. The story should be titled ‘where the American people went wrong.’ ”

Frankly, the American people should have had to earn Kamala’s vote.

How, one might ask, could voters fail such a simple test? As Reid summed it up: “One side stands for freedom while the other meets the textbook definition of fascism: namely, a far-right dictatorial regime like Hitler’s Germany or Franco’s Spain or Mussolini’s Italy. But also, white-ruled South Africa before Mandela and the black majority took control. Or Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, or Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela today.”

All of those places in one, that’s America today. They took Hitler’s Germany, Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s Italy, and apartheid South Africa and rolled them all up into a dictator burrito and ate it for breakfast. They saw Putin’s Russia and said I’ll take three, thanks. Americans drained the swamp and then reconstituted it with Orbán’s Hungary. That’s what voters did.

You might take all of these shifts and think: Wow, American voters rejected Democrats in this cycle. Or you could have The New York Times’ take on it, which is that we have been conquered.

Never before seen in our 248-year history? He was president four years ago.

As I often write: you can’t make this shit up. There’s plenty more in the article worth reading, including where Bowles notes that Instagram took down a post by Piers Morgan (remember him?) in which he congratulates Trump for his win, the Instagram nannies having determined the post constituted ‘hate speech’.  https://twitter.com/piersmorgan/status/1854273724327059936

A parting shot. The exit poll info below was also in the article, but is in fact originally from The Financial Times. It shows, subject to the usual caveats about exit polling, how all-encompassing was the vote shift away from the Democrats relative to 2020.

Can’t make that up either, Dems.

Post-Apocalypse Post

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media. 2 Comments on Post-Apocalypse Post

I may or may not post more on the just-completed US federal election in the future, but here on the day after I want to write a few things that occurred to me today or in the course of the campaign.

1. Mainstream Media. A couple of months ago, just after Harris magically became the Democratic nominee, I was sitting in my living room writing a blog post, as I do. I was also listening to the CBC’s Tempo program, in which CBC plays classical music from 9am to noon. Tempo also features a four-minute newscast at the top of each hour. CBC thought a good use of some of that four minutes was to inform me every hour that Taylor Swift had endorsed Kamala Harris for president. My tax dollars at work.

2. Charlatans. Every US Presidential election season, shallow media outlets like the New York Times and NPR drag out historian Alan Lichtman, proclaiming him as ‘The Prophet of Presidential Elections’. If you want to know why this moniker is balderdash, you can read statistician Andrew Gelman’s blog articles about it here and here. One can hope that Lichtman won’t get the usual media coverage in four years, given he predicted a Harris win this time – but I would not bet on it.

3. Snowflakes. In the run-up to said election, it appears that the School of Public Policy at Georgetown University felt that their students were so stressed by this looming election that special services had to be set up for them. You can read about it all here, but to give you the idea, here’s a brief quote from the article, written by Free Press (No, not the London one) columnist Frannie Block:

Here’s the agenda (and no, you can’t make this up):

10:00 a.m.-11:00 a.m.: Tea, Cocoa, and Self-Care

11:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.: Legos Station

12:00 p.m.-1:00 p.m.: Healthy Treats and Healthy Habits

1:00 p.m.-2:00 p.m.: Coloring and Mindfulness Exercises

2:00 p.m.-3:00 p.m.: Milk and Cookies

4:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m.: Legos and Coloring

5:00 p.m.-6:00 p.m.: Snacks and Self-Guided Meditation

I wanted to ask Clevenger [the school’s director of student engagement’] why college and graduate students needed milk and cookies to recover from their stress—and how being coddled in college might someday affect American diplomacy—but she didn’t respond to my calls or emails.

I am very much looking forward to reading about what Georgetown are doing for their students now to help them deal with an election win by The Anti-Christ. Stay tuned for updates.

4. Apocalypse. To finish up, I quote here a paragraph from the article by Andrew Coyne that appeared in today’s Globe and Mail. I plan to save the entire article for future reference, but I am posting this much here so we can all revisit Andrew’s predictions in a few months.

“There is no sense in understating the depth of the disaster. This is a crisis like no other in our lifetimes. The government of the United States has been delivered into the hands of a gangster, whose sole purpose in running, besides staying out of jail, is to seek revenge on his enemies. The damage Donald Trump and his nihilist cronies can do – to America, but also to its democratic allies, and to the peace and security of the world – is incalculable. We are living in the time of Nero.”

Yikes. Gotta find my Lego set.

 

Grade Inflation Two – Local

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, LBOs, Standards. No Comments on Grade Inflation Two – Local

There are times when this blog writes itself. No sooner did my last piece on Harvard’s grading practices get posted than I acquired – by various means – documents that reveal what is going on in my old department regarding undergraduate marking.

First, a memo was sent around (including to me, for some reason) about new grading standards to be followed within the Dept. Instructors in the first year introductory courses and in the second year core theory courses (which almost all students take) have been informed that they should plan to give an average course mark of 75% (a middle B) and to award As and Bs to 60% of their students. Now, this is nowhere near Harvardesque, as that fine institution of higher learning is, as noted, giving As and A minuses to nearly 80% of its students. Even the Econ Dept-inclusive Faculty of Social Science at Harvard is giving out A-range marks to 65% of its students, much more generous than the new UWO Econ guideline, which in any case only applies to first and second-year courses.

None the less, this is a much higher grading expectation for UWO Econ students than reigned in my day, and the reasons for this are illustrative of what goes on in much of higher ed these days.  A separate report to the Department’s Committee on Academic Policy (also sent to me) notes that Economics tends to award fewer As and Bs than other Departments in courses of all levels. This is bad for enrollment in Econ courses, and enrollment in courses is what Departments live on in the 21st century. This is no doubt why the new grading guidelines have been struck.

Further, other information I have seen indicates that enrollment in all UWO Econ programs is on the decline, precipitously so, in some cases. For example, in UWO Econ’s once world-class Econ Honours undergrad program, enrollment in non-required courses has dropped 60% in five years. The PhD program took in 8 new students last year, when it used to take in 15-20 not long ago, when I was still employed. Even the new and previously successful Master’s program in Financial Economics has only 16 new entrants, where it used to have nearly 30.

The reasons for this are many and varied, as is always true, but for the undergrad Honors program, one cause is abundantly clear. Some 20 years back, when the Ivey Business School’s MBA program crashed and burned, Ivey had to find a new way to generate revenue. It chose to massively expand its undergrad HBA program, which students enroll in for only their last two years. Tuition for Ontario students in this program is for this year $25,200/year, so $50K for the program ($60K/year for foreign students). Ivey’s intake into the first year of this program has, since the 2000s, gone from less than 200 to 765 students in 23/24, according to its own website.

Not many programs at UWO have grown like that, although another one that has is also relevant, and its name is MOS. That stands for Management and Organizational Studies, and is a program within the Faculty of Social Science that – so far as I can tell – has also grown massively over the same period. The Faculty of Social Science is the largest at UWO, with nearly 8.000 students, and when I left my position two years ago, half of those Social Science students were said to be MOS students. (I note in passing that MOS now likes to be referred to as DAN Management, as entrepreneur Aubrey Dan left it a couple of large donations, and got the program and Department re-named in his honour some years back.)

Anyway, this quasi-business school’s growth, coupled with that of the older Ivey undergrad program has left UWO as The Business School of Western Ontario, and done much to reduce enrollment in Econ, as well as other non-Bus programs, I expect. The fact that Econ courses are hard, and, as noted last week, Econ profs are not much inclined to be easy markers, has helped feed the recent precipitous decline in Econ enrollment, and the resulting attempt to reverse this downward trend by awarding higher marks. This illustrates one of the forces militating against having grading standards that are difficult for students to meet. Another one can be seen in a document sent to me by one of my not-yet-retired colleagues in Econ. Said document is a product of what UWO calls its ‘Teaching and Learning Centre’ or TLC. It is headed:

Professional Development Workshop

Grading and Assignments

Under the heading ‘Assignment Design’ in the document is included this advice:

‘Cut down on the stuff they have to think about (and perhaps reduce cheating).’

Well yea, less reason to cheat – or study – if you aren’t expected to think about very much. I mean – who comes to university expecting to think about a lot of stuff, right?

The bureaucrats, who are really in charge now at Western, do not want faculty messing things up by making students thinkhard, or – heaven forbid – giving them low marks. It’s very bad for business and business, with a  Capital B – or maybe Capital I – is what BSWO is all about.

Learning, thinking – not so much.

I add an epilogue to further demonstrate what has happened in 40 years to Ontario universities. When I arrived at Western in 1980 I was absolutely floored by how well-prepared, smart and hard-working were UWO undergrads compared to the US undergrads I had taught during my graduate training. When I first was given an Intro Econ course to teach, I was sternly told that the Dept’s undergrad grading guidelines were to give about 1/3 of students an A or B, 1/3 a C, and 1/3 a D or F. Easy to remember, eh? 1/3, 1/3, 1/3.

So, 33% As and Bs versus 60% now, or 79% As, as at Harvard. You do the math. It’s a good bet UWO undergrads can’t. Math requires thinking about many things.

Grade inflation, Harvard Edition  

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, Standards. 1 Comment on Grade inflation, Harvard Edition  

I sometimes write posts for this blog and then file them without posting, either thinking I will get back to them later and improve/shorten them, or just deciding that the post isn’t up to snuff. I have a looong one sitting in limbo right now on grade inflation, specifically in US universities. I think it’s an issue in Canadian universities (and secondary schools) also, but there is better data on it for the US.

Anyway, I may post that still-simmering article at some point, as it is a topic about which I care, but the Harvard Crimson, that august institution’s student paper, has published an article about grade inflation at Harvard that provides a nice introduction to the topic – and a shorter post.

Kurt Vonnegut is reported to have said ‘Most kids can’t afford to go to Harvard to be misinformed.’, and he wrote that long before Harvard’s most recent troubles – in 1987, in fact. It turns out that if a kid can afford it, he is at least all but assured of getting an A while being misinformed.

   or……….  

The Crimson article is from 2023, and titled ‘Harvard Report Shows 79% A-Range Grades Awarded in 2020-21, Sparking Faculty Discussion’

The Crimson has no paywall, so you can find the article and read it yourself, I expect, but here’s the graph that it opens with.

So, nearly 80% of the course grades awarded in 2020/1 were As or A minuses. Wow, is all I can say. I thought we gave marks that were too high at UWO back in the day, but I don’t think we ever approached 70+% As.

As is always the case, the percentage of As awarded varies by discipline. Here’s another graph from the Crimson report, which also goes further back into Harvard history.

SEAS is the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and I have to admit that I am surprised that Social Science profs were just as tough graders as were those in Science. (Economists, almost always housed in Social Science, are typically tough graders, but this is normally more than made up for by the Sociologists, Psychologists, Political Scientists, etc. Not at Harvard, apparently.) That the A & H faculty were the easiest graders should surprise no one. They would almost certainly look tough compared to the faculty in the Faculty of Education – if Harvard has one. And, of course, I am using ‘tough’ here ironically. The 60% A marks handed out in SEAS is anything but ‘tough’.

Yet the truly remarkable thing here is that the percentage of A grades awarded has more than doubled in 20 years in all faculties.

Now why do you think that happened?

I can tell you that there were administrators at Western in my day who attributed the ever-rising admission average to get into the Faculty of Social Science to the fact that ‘Western is just attracting better and better students.’ Secondary School grade inflation? – oh, no, certainly not.

The Crimson has some quotes from various administrators at Harvard about this, one of them from Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh:

In the meeting, Claybaugh said that the “report establishes we have a problem — or rather, we have two: the intertwined problems of grade inflation and compression.”

By ‘grade compression’ academics mean the fact that all grades awarded are concentrated on a few possibilities, making it hard to distinguish really outstanding students from others. I find it encouraging – remarkable, even, given my own interactions with administrators – that the Dean thinks this is a problem. She is later quoted again:

“There is a sense that giving a wider range of grades would give students better information about their performance, and it would give us better information about where they are ranked against other students,” Claybaugh said in an interview after the meeting.

Claybaugh said that the evidence for the existence of grade inflation was less clear, as many student grades are well-deserved and faculty have increasingly focused on learning objectives.

Yea, that sounds more like an administrator – these grades are well-deserved. At least, ‘many’ of them are.

The next quote actually makes me grumpy. Well, grumpier…..

Nonetheless, she said it seems, as one faculty member put it, external “market forces” are influencing grading, particularly as faculty rely on positive course evaluations from students for professional advancement, she said in the interview.

Ok, I’m an economist, I am used to the fact that everyone wants to blame those awful ‘market forces’ when things go bad, but c’mon, unnamed faculty member. If faculty are giving high marks to get higher student evaluations there is nothing ‘market’ about that, it is an internal Harvard decision to use those (almost entirely uninformative, imho) student evaluations for ‘professional advancement’. You could stop doing that, you know. I’m talking to you, Harvard.

Here’ my favourite quote:

Claybaugh said she would defer to the full faculty to decide whether or not to implement concrete reforms to Harvard’s grading policies, but said she would be “interested in exploring” changes “that put more information on the transcript that put the grade in context.”

The Crimson then mentions some of the things that ‘the full faculty’ considered in their meeting. Someone from A&H (natch) suggested grading simply be abolished, but in the end nothing was decided. Shocking. A faculty meeting in which nothing was decided.

Here’s a fact, from my time in the trenches, that is never mentioned in the article. Giving grades that use the entire grading range, from F to A at Harvard, from 0 to 100 at Western, is hard. It is hard for faculty to give students low marks, partly because they will come to your office and bitch and moan and plead, and their parents may call you (yes, they do) and plead on their behalf, but also because it is not fun. It is not pleasant. Few faculty are sadists, few want to be known as The Grim Reaper of Harvard – or Western.

But the thing is, it is part of the job. That is, it is part of the job to give accurate information to students about their learning, and giving almost everyone an A is not doing that. It is also part of the job to inform the world outside academia how good a student is. Giving almost everyone an A is not doing that, either.

This is, if you ask me – and I know you didn’t, but it’s my damn blog – the fundamental reason why over the last twenty years marks in secondary and post-secondary institutions all over North America have gone up and up and up. Instructors (most of them) don’t want to do that part of their job. And, since they don’t have to, they don’t. Giving lots of As is waaaaay easier on everyone, so that is what happens.

It is the ultimate slogan of the 21st century. ‘Easy is best.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just Don’t Say It

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, Language. No Comments on Just Don’t Say It

I read a story in the Sept 27 print segment of the National Post that comes inserted into my London FreePress that had an odd headline. Well, it was odd if you think it was supposed to be a news story.

“Survivors….deserve to heal.”

The first sentence of the story:

“An NDP MP tabled a bill Thursday seeking to change the Criminal Code to criminalize downplaying, denying or condoning the harms of residential schools in Canada.”

The bill is C-413, a private members bill, and the article goes on to note that such bills ‘rarely pass’ but does not specify what ‘rarely’ means, numerically. Not ‘never’, I would guess.

The article goes on to note that  ‘…several years earlier the Liberal government passed an amendment to its 2022 budget implementation bill that added a criminal provision against making public statements that promote antisemitism “by condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust’.”

That got me thinking, and remembering, and that got me digging, which is why this post is just being put on the blog now.

I remember Trudeau’s government doing that, and remember thinking at the time that it was a terrible idea, and I also remember that more than one Jewish organization lobbied against including that in the budget bill at the time. (Other Jewish organizations supported it, to be sure.)

My reasons for being distressed back then at this clearly non-budgetary matter being passed into law is precisely captured by this recent private member’s bill. Once you establish the precedent of passing laws criminalizing what people say or write about any public matter, there is no going back. It just becomes a matter of what things people say might catch the disapproving notice of some MP or – more alarmingly – some government.

Since I don’t trust 21st century media to report facts accurately, I went to the Parliamentary website to find the exact text of this bill.

That text includes the following:

2.2) Everyone who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, wilfully promotes hatred against Indigenous peoples by condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying the Indian residential school system in Canada or by misrepresenting facts relating to it

(a) is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or

(b) is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.

The bill also states what can be a defense against this charge. It states:

Defences — subsection (2.2)

(3.2) No person shall be convicted of an offence under subsection (2.2)

(a) if they establish that the statements communicated were true;

(b) if, in good faith, they expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text;

(c) if the statements were relevant to any subject of public interest, the discussion of which was for the public benefit, and if on reasonable grounds they believed them to be true; or

(d) if, in good faith, they intended to point out, for the purpose of removal, matters producing or tending to produce feelings of hatred toward Indigenous peoples.

Confining myself to (a), note that this states that ‘truth’ is a defense against being convicted of this new crime, but it also is written to say that ‘they’ – the person charged with the offence – has to establish that the statements communicated were true. So, I will start by noting that this shifts the burden of proof from where it usually resides – with the prosecution – to the defendant.

Beyond that not-small matter, let me offer a hypothetical example of how a case brought under this new criminal statute, were it to be enacted, could go. Suppose I write to a First Nations leader, or a member of parliament, and ask the following question – or I just post this question on my blog:

“In how many of the claimed residential school gravesites have verified human remains actually been found?”

I have no doubt that my doing this would generate outrage in many circles. The question is, would it subject me to arrest and prosecution if this bill were to pass?

Note that I have asked a question in this scenario, but a question which might be interpreted by some as an attempt at ‘downplaying the Indian residential school system in Canada’.

And there is no statement whose truth could be verified so as to defend myself if I were arrested. I would be asking a question. Questions are not true or false, they are….questions.

Suppose I wrote in my blog that ‘Surely the residential school system benefited many of the children in it in many ways. Nothing is all bad or all good.’

Again, no facts to be verified, just a statement about how the world generally seems to me to work. Am I subject to prosecution, and if I am prosecuted, how might my lawyers defend me?

There are other reasons for being worried about this ‘truth as a defense’ aspect of the bill.

You can read a related story here on the Vancouver is Awesome website. I confess to being unaware of this site until recently, and I deplore the fact that it does not put actual dates on its stories (‘one day ago’ is not a date).

However, it chronicles an argument at the annual meeting of the Law Society of BC about the language to be used in a training program. Two members of the society put forward a motion questioning the language used because to date no human remains had been found at the Kamloops Residential School site. All that had been established was the existence of ground radar ‘anomalies’, a fact which the First Nation had acknowledged by changing the word ‘remains’ to ‘anomalies’ on its own website.

Other lawyers argued passionately against changing the language in the training course. One of them, described as ‘family lawyer Andrea Glen’, is quoted as follows:

“So in light of this significant body of evidence across the country, to quibble over the language of whether something is a burial site at a particular location, or a possible burial site or a probable burial site, obviously completely misses the point, and it’s just so hurtful to quibble over the language used for one particular area when we have a huge body of evidence that this happened across the country,” said Glen.

So, would lawyer Glen then say that, since there is ‘a significant body of evidence that non-indigenous individuals murder indigenous people across the country’ one should not in a particular trial be able to question whether non-indigenous person John Brown actually murdered indigenous person Joseph Alsop, as stipulated in the indictment?

Another lawyer and Society member, Adrienne Smith, is quoted as follows:

Smith added that Heller and Berry’s resolution is “part of a distressing trend in courts to try to inappropriately put a referendum about the needs of equity-denied groups improperly before courts and tribunals.”

Given the chance, I would say to Ms Smith that the resolution seems to me to be an attempt to put a question about certain facts before your society. It is not about anybody’s needs. But this is part of my concern. The law is increasingly concerned with what certain groups ‘deserve’, to quote the article’s headline, or what they ‘need’, as Ms Smith puts it. Not facts, not truth.

Given that, I am exceedingly dubious regarding the idea that Canadian lawyers, a group which, keep in mind, includes Canadian judges, all of whom are lawyers, will give any serious consideration to the question of ‘truth’ in any trial that arises from Bill C-413 if it becomes law. Why would it not be, as 21st century language often puts it, the ‘lived truth of Indigenous Peoples’, or at least the court’s interpretation of that truth, which would rule the day in most Canadian courtrooms in which a case brought under Bill C-413 was brought? It is increasingly common today to assert that everyone has their own truth. If my truth about residential schools in Canada conflicts with the truth of some Indigenous person, whose ‘truth’ will the court use in determining whether I have a valid defense against a charge of violating the terms of Bill C-413?

To put it simply, I doubt that the ‘truth’ defense will actually be any defense at all.  And, if truth is not a defense, Bill C-413 becomes a device for shutting certain people up, and thereby for stopping any meaningful discussion of residential schools. The law of the land should never serve that purpose in a free society. Never.

I see other issues here. The bill includes the qualification ‘other than in private conversation’. So, if I say something like ‘the residential schools weren’t all bad’  while talking to a friend in a pub, and someone overhears me – is that private conversation? Could a constable who overheard me say that, or a constable who took a sworn statement from someone that I did say that, arrest me for violating C-413?

I would bet they can, by the same legal logic that allows governments at all levels to pass laws that regulate so much of what happens in that pub.

It is by such devices that we get closer to the old Soviet dictum – ‘You can think anything you want, just don’t say it.’

‘Slippery slopes’ are not taken seriously these days, I know. However, Bill C-413 seems to me like a second step on such a slope, following on the first step that was included in the Liberal budget implementation bill of 2022. Bill C-413 will almost certainly not end up as law, if for no other reason than that the Liberal government is on its last legs. But some day, not too far off, I do fear that some government will take step two, about whatever statements it finds objectionable. Then, inevitably, the steps get closer together once you get moving along the slippery slope.

 

Bought and Paid For – and Scared

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media. No Comments on Bought and Paid For – and Scared

I open with a tip of my hat to Andrew Coyne, whose op-ed piece in the Oct 4 Globe, titled ‘Nice little news network you got there. Pity if anything should happen to it’ inspired this post. [I will add – that’s a good headline for the article, not something I say often.]

A word about Coyne. I have been reading him since he was The National Post’s token liberal commentator, and continue to do so now that he is the Globe’s token conservative. I also watch him on CBC’s At Issue panel on Thursdays, but in truth I watch that mostly to hear what the redoubtable Chantal Hebert has to say about Canadian politics. Chantal is awesome.

Andrew has a few things that he write about regularly, from which I infer they matter to him a lot. Here are three of them, which I’m bothering to list here because they matter to me, also.

  1. First-past-the-post (otherwise known as plurality rule) electoral systems, as are used in Canada, England and in US congressional elections, are bad, and should be replaced by proportional representation systems.
  2. Much of what is wrong with current Canadian politics and governments arises because it is now necessary to have the approval of the Party leader to be nominated to run in any riding as the candidate for that Party.
  3. It was wrong and will lead to a diminishment of Canadian democracy for the federal government to set up a system for subsidizing (selected) news media outlets.

Full disclosure – I disagree completely with Mr Coyne about issue 1, but agree with him almost entirely with regard to issues 2 and 3. I am going to say nothing here about 1, it is a complex subject, one I spent a good bit of my professional career thinking and teaching about. Someday I may write a long post or three about it, but not now.

I agree with Coyne about 2, and I will at this point say only this about it. If you wonder why MPs from the Liberal Party of Canada did not long ago force their highly unpopular PM and party leader to step down, you have only to note issue 2. Those MPs rely on the leader of the party to sign off on their nomination if they are to have even the chance to run for office in their riding in the next election. They are not about to piss JT off. I say no more at this point, even though there is much more to be said.

On to 3, the topic of this post. To his credit, from the moment the idea of having ‘approved’ news media organizations receive financial subsidies from the federal government was suggested, Coyne has written piece after piece saying ‘this is a terrible idea’. The press cannot, must not, be seen to be in the debt of the federal government if they are to play their role of holding government ministers and bureaucrats accountable for their decisions. Full Stop.

That argument is unassailably correct, as far as I am concerned, but of course those subsidies are now in place anyway. The first big problem with this system is  – which orgs get such a subsidy and how much does each get? That the CBC gets a subsidy in the current regime, on top of the more than $1Billion they get directly from taxpayers, should tell you immediately that the subsidy-receivers are going to be tilted toward BIG establishment news outlets. According to CTV news (a CBC competitor, to be sure), CBC got $1.4B in the most recent federal budget, an increase of about $90million from the year before. How much of this is the ongoing subsidy they receive every year and how much is from this new, broader subsidy regime, is not clear.

Coyne’s Oct 10 piece above simply points out two more emerging consequences of the existence of this subsidy regime. One is Pierre Poilevre’s recent attack on CTV News, which included forbidding Conservative MPs from speaking to reporters from that org. He did this in response to two CTV employees splicing together some video of Poilevre so as to make him seem to say something he did not actually say.

I agree with Coyne that what those CTV employees did was flat out wrong, but Coyne’s point is that CTV was over-the-top apologetic about it, issuing two separate apologies, firing the two employees, and that CTV did that – in Coyne’s view – because they know they have pissed off a likely future PM, who is going to soon be in a position to influence their subsidy.

The larger point is: how can news org’s claim to be ‘independent watchdogs’ of the government  of the day – you know, the vaunted ‘fourth estate’ – while receiving a subsidy from that government? Coyne goes on to say that political abuse of the system is already a bi-partisan matter, citing a tweet on X in which a Liberal MP says to a National Post reporter “Your paper wouldn’t be in business were it not for the subsidies that the government that you hate put in place – the same subsidies your Trump – adjacent foreign hedge fund owners gladly take to pay your salary.”

In other words – ‘what are you doing criticizing my party, you ungrateful cur. You would not have a job without the subsidies my Liberal-party-led government pays your employer’.

This is a terrible situation news orgs have put themselves in, and it’s only going to get worse. The Conservatives have for decades been unhappy with what they see as a CBC that is Liberal-sympathetic and antagonistic to them. I think the Conservatives are not wrong about that bias, but the point is that they will find a way to reduce its subsidy if they form a majority government. I will not be terribly unhappy if they do, but that is not the point – one must ask, will every change in government now result in a list of previous subsidy recipients being taken off the news media gravy train and replaced by others? Is that the kind of ‘free press’ Canadians want?

Coyne is right, government subsidized journalism is a terrible idea. That implies that the CBC was a terrible idea before this added subsidy regime was born, but widening the subsidies to take in more organizations makes a bad idea worse. A press that relies on government subsidies to stay in business is not, in any relevant sense, a free press.

I understand that the claimed reason for this is the inarguable fact that the news business is in bad financial shape. Few media orgs are able to make any profit in our brave new internet world, and almost no local news orgs can do so. Local radio stations and newspapers and even TV stations are closing their doors on a regular basis. However, Coyne’s concern – which I share – is that this subsidy regime represents a cure that is worse than the disease that spawned it. A better way to support local news media needs to be found.

Occasional Dining Review #2 – The Mockingbird Cocktail Bar and Lounge

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Dining out, London. No Comments on Occasional Dining Review #2 – The Mockingbird Cocktail Bar and Lounge

For a second time since I started this blog, my intrepid Dynamic Dining group (only three of us, actually – the three most intrepid) went out to a new place for dinner of an evening, and I was so impressed by it that I feel the urge to write a post about it.

The establishment in question is called The Mockingbird Cocktail Bar and Lounge, located at 760 Dundas, and yes, that’s East of Adelaide. It’s been in business for at least a couple of years. In fact, another friend and I went to try it out some while back, but it was in a smaller space then. Having recently expanded into a vacated area in front of it, it now can hold a fair number of patrons – I would guess 40 or so, but that is only a guess.

This place is all about cocktails, the staff we talked to looove to make and talk about cocktails. Each of us had one that we thought was just excellent (ok, I had two, both very good). The great thing is that we just told the bartender what kind of cocktails we generally drink, and they suggested something we might like, and in each case they shot and they scored.

As to food, the menu is not extensive, but they do a great job on what they prepare. I had a meat-lovers pizza that was so good I ate the entire thing. My two dining companions each ordered the prosciutto grilled cheese sandwich, and they each raved about it, and finished them, also. (Ok, M gave me a taste of hers, it was indeed very good….).

It’s a funky little space, the interior doesn’t look like any other dining room in London, and we Diners think that is a very good thing. Really, though the best thing about the place was the staff. They were so intent on making sure we enjoyed ourselves, and so keen to talk about their passion, it was just a pleasure to be there.

Some other notes about the place. It is not, to be frank, in a good location. It is not far from the Ark Aid Mission on Dundas, and that place is simply scary to walk past, with people sprawled out on the sidewalk out front, some out of it, some in the process of injecting themselves or one another. I note a story on today’s (Oct 1) CBC-London website saying the general manager of the Old East Village Business Improvement Area is protesting Ark Aid getting another big pile of money from the city. Good for him, he is doing this on behalf of the business owners he represents in OEV, no doubt including Mockingbird, and they have every reason to be upset at what goes on in front of that organization. I do not buy the idea that those people cannot be made to stop doing drugs in front of the establishment. That is not helping them at all, and it is hard on local residents and businesses to have this going on constantly in their neighborhood. You know you would be deeply upset if this shit was happening down the street from your home or business. It is simply wrong. Here’s the first sentence from the CBC article:

“The head of London’s Old East Village (OEV) business district is pushing back against one of [sic] city’s largest shelter’s request for additional year-round funding as open drug use, garbage on the streets and crime is pushing customers away.”

However, you should not let this sad fact about our city deter you from being a patron of Mockingbird. It certainly will not deter us from going back. First, to not go there because of what those people are being allowed to do on Dundas Street (and elsewhere) is to let the clueless assholes who run London win, and we should not allow that. Second, the Mockingbird has plenty of good parking out back, as we discovered, so you can park there, or in a municipal lot that is practically next door, and in either case avoid having to walk through the tragedy that occurs daily out on Dundas street in front of Ark Aid.

The other thing to note about Mockingbird is that we arrived about 6pm, and were the only patrons. Other customers arrived later, and I say with pride that we were the entire time the oldest (but most intrepid) customers in the place. It’s how we Diners roll, but it became clear that folks tend to arrive late at The Mockingbird. Indeed, as we were getting ready to leave, a young woman with an electric guitar was setting up to provide some musical entertainment to the young(er) crowd that was now gathering. She said she played mostly her own compositions, and good for her. We did not leave because of that, we had just had our fill by then, and plan to go back later some night to have a listen. I applaud any restaurant or bar that is willing to give space and time to live music – good for the Mockingbird.

In summary, we had a great time at the Mockingbird, it opens at 6pm every night but Monday, is located at 760 Dundas Street, on the corner of English Street, and you can check it out here https://www.themockingbird.ca/. If cocktails and a passionate, attentive staff are your thing, you’ll have a great time.

It is now on the list of Dynamic Diners recommended venues; I can pay it no higher compliment, folks.

I Couldn’t Not Write About This

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Standards. No Comments on I Couldn’t Not Write About This

By now I’m sure you have all seen headlines or read something about this on a newsfeed, but I’ll paste in here the first paragraph of the story that was in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday afternoon, Sept 17.

BEIRUT—Pagers carried by thousands of Hezbollah operatives exploded at about the same time Tuesday afternoon in what appeared to be an unprecedented attack that authorities said injured more than 2,700 and killed eight across Lebanon.

Pagers. Exploding pagers, and not a few of them, more than 2,700 of them, exploding simultaneously. This is James Bond stuff, no, it’s not really, Ian Fleming would not have tried to sell such an outrageous idea as plausible, and even in the 007 movies, this would be a stretch. It’s more like Maxwell Smart stuff, except that in Smart’s case the pagers wouldn’t explode and the remote control that was supposed to detonate them all would blow up in Smart’s face, and 99 would have to rescue poor Max from his own folly.

How the hell does one pull this off? How does one get exploding pagers into the hands – or, I suppose, onto the belts – of 2800 of your enemies and then set them off? And, if eight people were killed by these things, they are not just devices that go bang, they are potentially lethal.

Hezbollah immediately blamed Israel, and of course they would, because 1) Israel and Hezbollah are long-time enemies, and 2) there is no other organization or state on the planet who anyone  could imagine being capable of pulling this off. The CIA, MI6, Canada’s CSIS – not a chance, especially that last one, and the CIA repeatedly failed to assassinate just one Caribbean dictator.  Supposedly with an exploding cigar, as I recall. Russia’s FSB might be good at basic murder, poison umbrella tips to kill one man, but not something as complex and audacious as this. I don’t know much about China’s Ministry of State Security, I suspect no one does, and while they may have the technical chops for this, you still have to put your money on Mossad.

Later, like the next day, radios and walkie-talkies started blowing up, even more lethally. One can easily imagine Hezbollah operatives having the fridges and washing machines removed from their homes.

Sorry, I have nothing intelligent or insightful to say about this other than – you really don’t want Israel as an enemy.

 

Union Postures, CBC Reports It – Updated

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, LBOs, News Media, Safety. No Comments on Union Postures, CBC Reports It – Updated

[Note: I posted this first on Sept 26, after which another article (read it here) about this appeared on the CBC website. This caused me to update/amend various bits of the post on Sept 28, which you will see below. ]

A union, any union, is just another LBO, and so those in charge do what those in charge of any LBO do – stop behaving like sensible human beings. They become organization people, whose primary mission is the maintenance of the LBO and hence, of course, their own positions.

The faculty at The University of Western Ontario are ‘represented’ by UWOFA, a local union not directly affiliated with the Teamsters or CUPE or any other national labour organization, as are some unions at Western. I think it is affiliated with CAUT, the Canadian Association of University Teachers, and I think some of one’s union dues to UWOFA get shoveled up to CAUT. This faculty unionization at Western happened in the oughts, I voted against it back then, but having seen it happen anyway, was sure that it meant the end of good working conditions at Western. In fact, it took awhile for that expected deterioration in things to happen, in large part because there were enough reasonable faculty (including a couple of my Econ Dept colleagues) who were willing to serve in important union positions (like negotiating and salary committees) to keep things from going entirely off the rails immediately.

All those reasonable folks eventually got old and retired, like me, so the Union was becoming more and more unreasonable by the time I retired. A story on the Sept 26 CBC-London website (read it here) makes it clear that UWOFA has moved into full LBO posturing mode.

If you didn’t already know, CUPE local 2361, which includes caretakers, groundskeepers and many other folks tasked with keeping UWO running, walked off the job on Aug. 30 after contract negotiations with the university broke down.  They remain on strike as I write this.

The Sept 26 story headline and sub-headline from CBC was as follows:

Western faculty flag ‘critical safety violations’ amid strike, launches complaint to province

Infractions include: Eyewash stations, safety equipment not being tested and asbestos found in old buildings

If you had read this CBC story early enough, the first thing you would have seen was the photograph below, with the caption below that:

“Some students at Western University say they have seen full garbage and recycling bins on campus since facilities employees walked off the job on Aug. 30. It’s prompted the university’s faculty association to launch a complaint with the province. (Kendra Seguin/CBC)”

So, ‘some students’ have said they have seen full trash bins, but apparently the intrepid CBC reporting team, including photographer Seguin, couldn’t find a trash bin that was actually full, so they took and published the photo above. That doesn’t look staged at all, does it?

A picture is worth a thousand words – just maybe not the words intended.

If you wondered ever if the CBC thinks we’re all fools, their publishing that photo and caption perhaps provides some evidence. However, eventually someone must have pointed out to someone at the CBC that this photo and caption was rather  embarrassing, journalistically speaking, and it is no longer part of the story if you go read it now.

There are other photos, which I will get to in a minute.

The article’s sub-title raised some questions for me, as follows –

1.How do UWOFA people know that things have not been inspected or tested? Are they going around and checking? Interesting work for faculty to be doing, if so, but even if they are, how does a professor of Sociology know if a fire extinguisher or eyewash station has been inspected or tested?

2. Who ‘found’ this asbestos in old buildings? Are UWO faculty also going around buildings removing drywall and checking for asbestos? I mean, if there is asbestos in old buildings (and there certainly is in some, including the building in which I used to work) it has been there since the building was constructed. It all was certainly there before the CUPE strike, so just what does it have to do with said strike?

Well, as to 1, there are new photos in the story, taken apparently by UWOFA members, so yes, faculty really are spending their time on this – or UWOFA is paying someone else to take them, I suppose. Here’s one below, showing a station behind a glass case that holds a fire hose and fire extinguisher.

The point being that there are initials on the red sticker dated up to July, but not August or September. So what we can infer is that no one has come by and put their initials there. What does that certify? Well, that no one has come by to check that the equipment hasn’t disappeared. You don’t ‘test’ a fire extinguisher or fire hose, right? In the case of the extinguisher, that renders it useless, and in the case of the fire hose, it makes one hell of a mess.

Here’s another photo from the new and improved CBC story:

Well, someone wearing jeans and sneakers is apparently putting a new plastic liner in a plastic garbage can. I don’t know how UWO faculty can possibly concentrate on their work knowing such things are going on, possibly in the same building in which they are working.

But wait, there’s more –

So, there is indeed an eye wash and safety shower which may have not been tested since the 16th of August. That doesn’t mean the station doesn’t work, of course, but no one has put an initial on that card since then.

[Amendment: The more recent CBC story includes the following statement from the UWO administration:

A spokesperson for the university said weekly checks of eyewash stations inside labs are the responsibility of lab staff, not CUPE 2361 employees. 

Thus, if indeed these stations are not being checked and tested, it has nothing to do with the CUPE strike. I wonder who UWOFA may have gotten into hot water over this photo?]

But wait, there’s still more. Another quote from the story:

The faculty union also said HVAC systems in student residences are malfunctioning and replacement workers aren’t wearing adequate personal protective equipment.

How does the faculty union know what is happening in student residences, and who among these dedicated faculty guardians of safety is aware of what ppe is required by workers in any particular situation?

Here are two clarifying quotes from UWOFA’s stalwart president:

“For a replacement worker, the difference between a sneaker and a safety shoe is very significant when a heavy or sharp object falls on their foot,” said UWOFA president Johanna Weststar.

Ah, of course, this is about UWOFA’s concern for the replacement workers.

She is further quoted –

“A malfunctioning eye wash station could mean blindness for faculty, staff or students who work with hazardous substances. Western works because CUPE workers do. We need them back now.”

It could, indeed. Here’s a crazy idea, but stay with me on this. Suppose UWOFA members who go into a room or lab in which there is an eye wash station or shower check to see if it is working before they begin their class or lab work. You know, turn it on, and see what happens. Now, I know that would be doing the work of a member of another union, a definite Solidarity No-No, but….it would prevent, you know, blindness from happening.

That crazy idea aside, this last quote does kinda indicate what is really going on – UWOFA is trying to put pressure on the Administration to settle with the striking CUPE members. More precisely, they are trying to get a provincial minstry to put pressure on UWO to settle. I have no doubt having CUPE on strike is a pain in the ass for faculty, but it is of course never going to happen that UWOFA tries to put pressure on the strikers themselves, or good ol’ CUPE, to settle. Solidarity, right?

So, this is posturing by UWOFA to try to get something they want – the Admin to settle with the CUPE workers. I am no friend of the UWO Admin, I think the place was and continues to be incredibly badly run, but I think UWOFA is just as badly run, and does not in any sense operate in the interests of most faculty members. It was a tossup in my last years working whether it was the Admin or UWOFA that did the most to make my working life unpleasant.

I will close with one last bit of the CBC story. Another quote attributed to UWOFA:

The faculty union said it’s “alarmed by the potential for asbestos exposure in older buildings, where water and steam leaks occur frequently and require special precautions that may not have been properly communicated to replacement contractors.”

Ah, so those ‘special precautions’ that are required ‘may not have been properly communicated to replacement contractors’. Indeed, they may not have been. Or, maybe they were, it doesn’t sound as though UWOFA actually knows, does it?

But, being fair to UWOFA, it is unlikely anyone within UWOFA actually claimed to have ‘found’ asbestos in old buildings. That wording at the beginning of the story is almost surely pure CBC, devoted as ever to accurate reporting.

[Amendment: The later CBC story includes this quote from the UWO Admin:

“There is no reason to suggest that asbestos-related hazards have increased during the current strike – and the University is not aware of any contracted employees exposed to any hazardous conditions,” said Ledgley.

As I wrote, asbestos has been known to be in some UWO buildings for years – this has nothing to do with the present CUPE strike.

Again from the UWO Admin, quoted by CBC:

“In the unusual circumstance that asbestos abatement work was necessary, it would be conducted by individuals properly trained in asbestos work with proper personal protective equipment and the worker would be monitored by Workplace Health.”]

I suspect none of this posturing by UWOFA’s leaders is going to have an impact on the Provincial Ministry of Labour, and thus on the duration of the strike, but I suppose one shouldn’t blame an LBO for trying.

[Amendment: I was just wrong on this. The more recent CBC story includes this:

The ministry told CBC News on Thursday that it received two health and safety complaints from the university on Sept. 24, and has assigned an inspector to investigate.

“The ministry prioritizes worker health and safety, enforcing the Occupational Health and Safety Act to ensure compliance. While the investigation is in progress, we cannot provide further details,” a spokesperson told CBC News in an email.

The ministry is indeed investigating. I look forward to what happens next, and whether this has any impact on the duration of the strike. I suppose I should say ‘Well played, UWOFA’, but I’ll wait to see what actually comes of all this.]

 

 

 

A Tip of My Hat to Jagmeet Singh

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, Language, Standards. 1 Comment on A Tip of My Hat to Jagmeet Singh

Canadians will know that Jagmeet Singh is the leader of the Federal New Democratic Party, and they can probably guess that I have nothing good to say about any of the policies espoused by him or his party.

However, I want to here and now give him a public tip of my hat for something I saw him do in a video on the CBC website, which you can also view here (you’ll have to scroll to the bottom of the page for the ‘Featured Videos’, and I don’t know how long it will stay posted).

Singh is walking near Parliament with a staffer when two dudes come up behind him, filming him with their phones, and Dude 1 says out loud ‘Would you vote a non-confidence today if it came up?”

Singh ignores him and keeps walking.

Then Dude 1 can easily be heard to say “Corrupted bastard.”

At that Singh turns around and walks back toward Dude 1, saying “Wanna say something?”

Dude 1: “What?”

Singh: “Wanna say something to me?”

Dude 1: “I didn’t say nothing.”

And it goes on like that, with Dude 1, in the manner of confronted cowards everywhere, denying that he said anything, while his buddy, Dude 2, continues to film.

Security officers were right there the whole time, but I here tip my hat to Mr Singh for turning around and calling out the asshole who was only willing to insult him while Singh’s back was turned. Bravo, Mr Singh. Had Singh smacked the guy up side the head, no jury of real people would convict him of anything. The asshole asked for it.

 

No, a Canadian Federal Election is Not Imminent

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media. No Comments on No, a Canadian Federal Election is Not Imminent

I was going to title this post ‘Arithmetic Matters’.

Canadian politics has actually become somewhat interesting of late, which is saying something, given that Canadians – and Canadian media – generally pay more attention to US politics than to the domestic variety. However, Jagmeet Singh’s recent decision to renege on the NDP’s Supply and Confidence agreement with Trudeau’s Liberals, plus the occurrence of two by-elections on Monday, September 16 has given the chattering classes in Canada something domestic to write about.

In that vein, John Ibbitson has an op-ed in the Sept 17 Globe (read it here) with the headline With the Liberals Losing Once Safe Seats, an Election Can’t be Far Off and that title pretty much says what is the point of the column. The Liberals have indeed now lost safe seats in both Toronto and Montreal in recent months, and the NDP yesterday hung on – barely – to a once-safe seat in Winnipeg. Ibbitson thus predicts an imminent dissolution of the House of Commons and election.

Ibbitson is just wrong about this. Two facts say that is so. One, the Liberals need only one of the Bloc, The Conservatives or the NDP to support any legislation in Parliament that is a matter of confidence, to prevent the dissolution of the House. Just one.

Two, if you look at the website 338 Canada and take into account all you like the fickleness and inexactitude of polling in the 21st century, you are still left with the following numbers.

Current stated support for the major parties is as follows:

Liberals 24%

Conservatives 43%

NDP 16%

Bloc 8%

Because of the way support for these parties is distributed around the country (a key matter for the Bloc in particular), 338Canada projects that if an election were called today, the parties would win seats in the following ranges (current seats held are in () )–

Liberals 49-95 (154)

Conservatives 189-240 (119)

NDP 9-25 (25)

Bloc 31-44 (33)

Thus, even in the best possible scenario, the NDP will find itself in third place in number of seats held in a Conservative majority government, and very possibly a distant fourth, after an election held right now.

I’m sorry, Mr. Ibbitson, but while the Bloc and Conservatives might happily bring down the government tomorrow if given the chance, the Liberals need only the NDP to keep that from happening, and the NDP can read the 338Canada website, too, and so has no reason to want an immediate election, their close win in Winnipeg notwithstanding.

Happy to bet Mr. Ibbitson – or anyone else – a cold beer on this: No Canadian federal election in 2024. You read it here first, folks. Ok, maybe not first……

Two Harris-Trump Debate Related Posts

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media. 2 Comments on Two Harris-Trump Debate Related Posts

These two articles both arose from that damnable US Presidential debate, which, against my better judgement, I did watch for the first half-hour.  I have nothing useful to add to the gazillion words that have been written about the debate itself, other than to say that I switched back to watching a baseball game after 30 minutes because I was getting depressed.

Other than arising from that one event, these posts have nothing in common.

I. The BBC and the Election

The BBC website for the US and Canada is one I check regularly, despite my belief that the BBC, once among the most reliable and fact-oriented of all news-reporting institutions, is now no better than any other, and worse than some.

On Sept 12, I found the following story posted on the US and Canada BBC News website.

What the world thought of US debate

The first showdown between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump was closely watched not only in the US but around the world.

The debate in Philadelphia featured some tense exchanges on foreign policy between the two presidential candidates.

From Beijing to Budapest, here’s how the debate went down, according to BBC foreign correspondents.

…..

What then follows are brief segments from BBC reporters stationed around the world, purporting to reveal reactions to the debate from people in the countries/regions where they are stationed. In fact, there is almost nothing, beyond one cryptic quote from Ukrainian president Zelensky and two sentences from two media outlets in Hungary, that tells you what anyone around the world, be they leader, media organization or citizen, thought of the debate. It is all what the BBC correspondents think such people thought of the debate, which makes it not reporting but yet another opportunity for said correspondents to write what they wish. Not a fact to be seen anywhere. Gathering facts, going out and interviewing foreign individuals or leaders, that takes effort, and resources, and that clearly didn’t happen. So, the piece offers the reader no reporting or news-gathering, just more reporters saying things.

More sadly, one part of the piece is much worse than that, as one correspondent takes a dip into conspiracy theory. Here is one entire section of this report, nominally about the Middle East.

White House race keenly watched in Middle East

By Paul Adams, international correspondent, Jerusalem

The two candidates did not stray much from their previously stated positions last night, even if Trump did add, with characteristic hyperbole, that Israel wouldn’t exist in two years if his opponent becomes president.

Here in the Middle East, the race for the White House is being keenly watched.

With the war in Gaza raging and a ceasefire deal still elusive, some of Benjamin Netanyahu’s critics suspect that Israel’s prime minister is deliberately stalling until after the election, in the hope that Trump will be more sympathetic to Israel than Harris.

There’s a whiff of history perhaps being about to repeat itself.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan’s campaign team was suspected of urging Iran not to release American hostages held in Tehran until after he had beaten President Jimmy Carter, saying Reagan would give Iran a better deal.

Could something similar be afoot now? Certainly Netanyahu’s opponents believe he is now the chief obstacle to a ceasefire deal.

That’s Mr. Adams entire contribution, and all I can say is – Oh, my god. As I wrote, he talked to no one, quotes no one who live in the Middle East, but then – A whiff of history? The BBC’s intrepid correspondent in Jerusalem tells readers nothing about what anyone in the Middle East actually said about the debate, and then does not mention that this suspicion (he does at least use that word) about the Reagan campaign’s interactions with the Iranian government in 1980 was investigated by two separate US Congressional committees, who found no credible evidence of its truth. Indeed, the Chairman of the House task force, a bloody Democrat, went to the trouble of publishing an editorial in the NYTimes in 1993, shortly after his investigative committee published its findings, saying there was no credible evidence to support the claims of Reagan campaign efforts to delay the hostage release, and most of the people who testified that it had occurred could not be believed. No mention of any of that in the BBC story. You can actually read the report of the Congressional Task Force here – all 998 pages of it. Yea, I know, not likely – I’m betting Mr. Adams hasn’t read it, either, but there’s no need to if your only intent is to find another bad thing to attach to Netanyahu, if only by implication.

As I said, how the mighty have fallen. A BBC correspondent reviving what can only be seen as a (rather old) conspiracy theory, in the guise of reporting on an ongoing US presidential campaign.

II. The Debate’s Impact on Two Prediction Markets

I got this idea from a blog I follow by Rajiv Sethi, called Imperfect Information. He is very interested in prediction markets, and this post is about how two such markets reacted after the debate. If you want to read his (more techy and detailed) take on this, it’s freely available here.

For those who don’t know, a prediction market refers to a platform on which you can buy a ‘share’ in the outcome of some future event. In this case, you can either buy a share that Kamala Harris will be elected president, or buy a share that Donald Trump will be elected president. This is really placing a bet, because what buying a share in, say, Kamala Harris gets you is a payment of a dollar if Harris wins, and nothing if she loses. The terms of that bet then depend on what you paid for that share. In the graph below, which I reproduced from Sethi’s blog post, the prices at which one could buy a Harris share on two different prediction markets is displayed, during the hours just before and just after the debate.

Note that on PredictIt a Harris share was priced at 50cents four hours

before the debate. That means that betting on Harris by buying a share was an even bet; you pay 50cents and get a dollar back if she wins and lose your 50cents if she loses. Someone who thinks she has better than an even chance at winning might therefore buy a share, and someone who thinks she is more likely to lose would not. On the Polymarket site, a Harris share cost only 47cents four hours before, so that would be a good bet perhaps even for someone who thought she had only a 49% chance of winning. [It’s actually a bit more complicated than this, as Sethi explains in his long post, because Harris and Trump contracts are traded separately. What I write above is close enough for a basic understanding of these markets.]

As you can easily see, the price of a Harris contract jumped on both markets right after the debate, even though they continued to be different.

Sethi’s post delves into how these two sites can offer different prices on a Harris contract at the same moment in time, and the possibilities of making money by betting on both markets when this is true. I am writing about it here just to note that both markets saw the price of a Harris share (contract) jump immediately after the debate, reflecting the fact that people trading on those markets in general thought her chances of winning went up, and this was reflected immediately in the price of a Harris share. It would also be reflected in a drop in the price of Trump shares, which are not depicted here.

This contrasts with the fact that so far, none of the opinion polls that have updated since the debate, so far as I know, have seen any change in the ‘intend to vote for’ numbers for the two candidates. This is a big difference in how prediction markets and polls, both of which can be said to ‘predict’ the electoral outcome, operate. Markets are always open, so right after the debate, or even while it was ongoing, people can go and buy and sell shares if they think what is happening has changed the probability of a Harris win. Polls have to wait until a new survey is done and compiled before they can reflect the effect of an event like the debate.

However, along with the fact that markets react more quickly to events than do polls, there is the fact that they can offer different predictions. As I say, no poll of which I am aware thinks the debate changed either candidate’s support, whereas the two markets above reflect considerable movement. I admit I don’t know what has happened since the time frame depicted on the graph, prices can change constantly on these markets.

Now, whether polls do a better job than markets in predicting outcomes is – so far as I can see – undecidable. With an event like this election, one candidate wins, and all either a poll or market tells us any time prior to that is a probability. If the market says the probability of a Harris win is 0.55 at some point in time, and Harris eventually loses, there is no verifiable sense in which the market was ‘wrong’. There was, after all, a probability of 0.45 that Harris would lose at that same point in time. Unless a poll or market states a probability is either 0 or 1, it cannot be wrong. One can of course just declare that if the prediction of something happening is greater than 0.5 and that something does not happen, then the prediction is ‘wrong’, but I think that is based on a misunderstanding of the concept of probability. Similarly, if a poll says Harris has a 50% chance of winning and at the same time a market says it is 55%, and she wins, does that mean the market prediction was ‘better’? One can declare that to be so, but again, it’s not clear to me what that really means, since both allowed that her losing was a legitimate possibility.

None the less, one can easily find people who will argue for the superiority of one over the other. Folks do like to argue.

Interestingly, it is very difficult to operate a prediction market devoted to the US Presidential election in the US itself. The SEC and other US regulators have come down hard on the ones that did exist (one of the first was built by economist George Neumann at the University of Iowa) as being unregulated trading platforms, which forced them to shut down or leave the US. PredictIt is based at The Victoria University of Wellington in Australia, and Polymarket operates on crypto currency only, and although it now seems to be operating legally in the US, it was fined $1.2million in 2022 by The Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Wikipedia (not my favourite source for credible info) claims over $700million has been wagered on the presidential election on Polymarket.

Speeding Rich People

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, Research. No Comments on Speeding Rich People

This post is about something interesting that I just read about in an academic paper (which you can also read here). It’s titled ‘How Do People React to Income-Based Fines? Evidence from Speeding Tickets Discontinuities’ and I know, ‘interesting’ and ‘academic paper’ are not supposed to show up in the same sentence…..

It turns out that in Finland, according to the author of this paper, the fine one pays if caught driving at more than 20km/h over the posted limit depends on your income. If your income is below a set cut-off, you pay a set fine, but if it is above that cut-off, then the size of the fine increases with your income. The paper includes the following sentence – ‘For example, in 2019, the Police assigned NHL ice hockey player Rasmus Ristolainen an income-based speeding ticket equal to approximately 120,000 euros.’

Ouch, eh? I do wonder if it was the police who set that fine or a magistrate, but either way, that’s a big speeding ticket.

One question to ask here is why Finland does that. The obvious – but still perhaps wrong – answer would be that Finland’s government operates under a pretty egalitarian ethic, which might be seen to imply that rich folks should pay more; for everything, including breaking the law. However, these economists are interested in this system not for that reason, but because a well-known theory of crime deterrence, due to now-dead economist Gary Becker, would predict that with this speeding fine structure, one should find that a lot of speeders are caught doing 19km/h or less over the limit. That is, if you bar-graphed the number of tickets given for being 1km/h, 2km/h……15km/h…..19km/h, 20km/h, 21km/h…..30km/h etc, over the limit, then the bars at 18 and 19 should be noticeably higher than the other bars. Put simply, no one wants to get dinged for doing 20 or 21 over when one could incur a much smaller fine by slowing down just a little.

Unfortunately for Becker, not that he cares now, this does not turn out to be the case, according to these researchers. One might instantly say that maybe that’s because most speeders have incomes below that cut-off, and hence don’t face that steep increase in fine if they do 20km/h+ over, but in fact these guys have really good data, including about the speeders’ incomes, so they can tell that the bunching does not happen even among drivers with incomes above the cut-off.

What they do find is that the higher income drivers who get pinched with the higher fine tend to slow down afterwards. Quoting from the paper:

“Those assigned, on average, a 200 euro larger fine are approximately 2-3 percentage points less likely to commit another traffic crime in the following 4-8 months. Compared to the average speeding behavior of the speeders who receive a smaller fixed fine, this estimate implies a 15-20 percent reduction in recidivism.”

I should stress that this is a research paper that has not yet been peer-reviewed, and I am not about to vouch for how well the statistical and data work was done.

I will, however, suggest that the Becker prediction of bunching would not be expected to hold in this instance – at least not by me – given that those who pay the higher fines are, by definition, folks with higher incomes, who therefore might be expected to be willing to pay higher fines. It is basic to economic theory that people with higher incomes have – other things being equal – a higher willingness to pay for most things, including driving fast. Indeed, one might expect that higher-income people put a higher value on their own time, which they can ‘save’ by driving fast. The author does not seem to consider this, as his behavioral model assumes that drivers may value speeding differently, but that any differences are purely idiosyncratic, and so not related to their income.

In fact, it occurs to me that all this really has nothing to do with the fines in Finland being based on income for richer folks, although that is what originally caught my eye. What Becker’s theory says is that people react to an increased fine by being less likely to speed. Since the fines for going above 20km/h over the limits are higher than for going less fast than that, people will go 19km/h over rather than 20 or 21. It doesn’t really matter that the amount of the fine is based on income, what matters is that it goes up at the 20km/h threshold.

Given that,  one could do a cleaner test of Becker’s theory in Ontario, where speeding fines are as follows:

Less than 20 km/h over: $3.00 per km/h over .

20 to less than 30 km/h over: $4.50 per km/h over.

30 to less than 50 km/h over: $7.00 km/h over.

Above 50km/h over: $9.75 per kh/h over.

(One also gets ‘demerit points’ added to one’s driving record for speeding. Those have consequences too, and the number of demerits you get depend on how fast you go – but the thresholds, for some reason, are different than for the fines. Go figure.)

Thus Ontario speeding fines depend on how fast you go, but not on your income, and there are three thresholds where the fines jump. Becker’s theory would predict bunching below 20, 30 and 50km/h over in response to this fine structure. And, doing more than 50km/h will get you charged with a second offense, ‘stunt driving’, which involves a whole additional set of penalties, including a fine of $2k to $10k (set by a judge, not your income, because if you go that fast, you have to go to court). Another reason for Becker’s theory to predict bunching under 50km/h.

Thus one could test Becker’s deterrence theory in Canada without any need for data on the incomes of the speeders. (You’d have to take into account the effect of the demerit point thresholds, too. Complicated.) Which would be good for anyone who set out to do this, because I’m pretty sure that, unlike in Finland, such data does not exist. The Finns (and the Danes, I think) seem to be happy with their government collecting all kinds of data on them, whether they speed or not. Canadians and Americans, not so much.

So far as I know, Becker’s theory has not generally done all that well when confronted with data about actual criminal behavior. A couple of economists did a review in 2014 of the empirical (that is, data-driven) research on criminal deterrence, and this is from the Abstract of the paper they wrote about what they found in their review (which you can download here):

“While there is considerable evidence that crime is responsive to police and to the existence of attractive legitimate labor market opportunities, there is far less evidence that crime responds to the severity of criminal sanctions.”

That response is central to Becker’s theory, and a theory that predicts behavior that does not seem to occur out in the world is what is known as a bad theory. That does not prevent it from being quite famous, however – among economists, at least.

 

Loose Ends and Random Bits

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Uncategorized. 2 Comments on Loose Ends and Random Bits

Since starting this blog, I find myself saving all kinds of things that I come across in my actual and virtual travels, storing them in my ‘blog material’ file, saying to myself ‘I bet I can use that in a future post’.

Herein a collection of such things which seem(ed) to me to be interesting or amusing and which have not been used in any previous posts.

* I walk about in my neighborhood a lot, and regularly walk past a yard that has this sign attached to the surrounding fence.

 * I was looking online for restaurants in a particular town and came upon this on a restaurant’s website:

 

 

 

* I did not keep a record of where I found this online, but…..

This just in –

Anthropologists have found what they believe to be Jimmy Buffett’s lost shaker of salt. It was declared missing in 1977, and some folks claim there’s a woman to blame.

 

* Here is an actual headline from a Wall Street Journal article of some while ago. I put it in my ‘can’t make this shit up’ file:

Migrants Entering U.S. Illegally Complain About Government’s Border App

 

* It does nothing good for one’s opinion of the human race to read the comments people write about articles in online newspapers like The Globe and Mail or The Wall Street Journal. Yet, sometimes I do….

This is from a comment on an article that Gary Mason of the Globe wrote about COP28, the UN climate change gathering that was held in Dubai 30 November to 13 December 2023:

By 2027, Thwaites (the “doomsday glacier”) will have buckled and the oceans will start rising by 2 to 9 feet. Coastal cities will drown. Millions of people will die or be displaced.

 

* Another piece of wisdom I picked up online, the provenance of which I did not record:

When seconds count, the government is only minutes away

 

* From one of my credit card bills –

At your current rates of interest, if you only make your Minimum Payment by its due date each month, it will take approximately 39 year(s) and 2 month(s) to repay the account balance shown on this statement.

 

* A headline from an article in Popular Mechanics (yea, that’s right….)

Humans Will Soon Go Extinct Unless We Can Find 5 More Earths

We’re basically in the days of the dinosaurs, according to Stanford scientists

 

* Finally, another one from my ‘can’t make this shit up’ file. This is a headline from an article in Vice:

Scientists Find Link Between Wolf Attacks and Far Right Politics

The reemergence of wolves to Germany “has been accompanied by electoral gains for far-right parties,” a new study reports

And that’s a wrap, until I accumulate another pile of these.

Municipal and Hospital Spending – At Your Service?

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, LBOs, London. No Comments on Municipal and Hospital Spending – At Your Service?

This article was triggered by my reading a story in the Aug 12 Freeps that had the following sub-headline:

Two city politicians want their colleagues to pull $3 million from municipal savings to slightly reduce the relatively large tax increases that will hit Londoners over the next three years

In the story itself one then finds the following:

“The new motion proposes pulling $1 million from a city reserve fund each year from 2025-27. This amount would cut next year’s property tax increase by 0.13 per cent (from 8.7 to below 8.6), which [Councillor] Pribil acknowledges isn’t much.”

No, Jerry – not much, but I know we ratepayers appreciate the gesture.

In case any of you Londoners haven’t been paying attention, the current and future property tax increases in the multi-year city budget are:

  • 2024: 8.7 per cent
  • 2025: 8.7 per cent
  • 2026: 5.7 per cent
  • 2027: 6.7 per cent

The two years at 8.7% represent greater increases than I can remember seeing in my 40+ years of living here. I do wonder how they arranged things so that the percentage increase in every year was x.7. Someone at City Hall believes in lucky 7?

However, we Londoners are not alone. A report from the Fraser Institute called Municipal Dollars in Ontario – Where did the Money Go?, dated April 2024, reports the following:

“Municipal budget season in Ontario recently ended and the evidence reveals some fairly substantial tax increases around the province. For example, Waterloo Region approved a property tax increase of 6.9 per cent while Toronto passed an increase of 9.5 per cent. Hamilton ultimately saw an increase of 5.8 per cent after fears of a double-digit tax increase were unveiled in the fall while Kingston saw one of the lower increases coming in at 3.5 per cent.”

Note that London’s 2024 increase came in second to only that of Toronto, at least in this group.

What I found most interesting in the report was the discussion of how the increased tax revenues are being spent. Again quoting from the report:

“So, pulling everything together, here’s the story that emerges. Municipal operating expenditures in Ontario over the period 2000 to 2022 have grown 2.5 times faster than general inflation and double that of population. They have also grown a bit faster than the province’s output.”

“The increase in spending is driven by spending on wages and salaries but not in the manner one might think. Average salaries in the municipal sector for those making more than $100,000 annually since 2000 have grown by only 8 per cent but the number of individuals making those salaries has grown in the thousands of per cent. Within the broader public sector, in 2000 municipal employees accounted for 6 per cent of individuals on the salary disclosure list whereas by 2022 they accounted for 23 per cent.”

So municipalities are not necessarily employing very many more people, as one might think they must to serve increasing populations, but rather they are paying the people they employ much better.

Now, to be fair, this could be because they are employing people with different sets of skills than they did in the past. More folks with university degrees or highly specialized (and highly remunerated) training. Another factor left out of the report is the extent to which Ontario municipalities have shifted from having services provided by city employees to having them provided by private firms that bid for the city contracts. To the extent this happens, it will reduce the number of city employees, and – I suspect – reduce most the number of relatively low-paid employees. A municipal sanitation division is going to employ a lot of low-wage workers and a few managers, so if you contract out garbage pickup to a private contractor, that takes a lot of low-wage jobs off the city books, but only a few better-paid managerial positions. The cost of the contract with the private provider then does not come under the heading of ‘employee compensation’, but rather ‘payments for goods and services’. I suspect that has happened a good bit over the last 20 years, but can’t find any data on it: the Fraser report is silent on this possibility.

If you’re wondering how much of municipal spending goes to employee compensation (and you know you are) the Fraser folks have the answer for you:

“The composition of major expenditures is revealing: 37% of operating expenses are in employee compensation, another 28% are from the purchase of goods and services to run municipal operations, and 20% are expenses associated with fixed capital-consumption costs.”

So, yea – employee wages are kinda driving the expenditure bus, but as noted above, not because municipalities are employing more people to serve you better; they’re just paying the people they employ better. Or, putting it another way, they’re just employing more people who are better-paid.

I’d guess that will not surprise anyone who has tried to get any kind of service out of London City Hall. So far as I and those around me can tell, no London City employee ever answers their phone if they know (and they do) the call is coming from outside the building. ‘Your call is very important to us, please leave a message.’

Well-Paid Bureaucrats

We live in the Age of The Well-Paid Bureaucrat. This is not just a government phenomenon. I would suggest that all LBOs (Large Bureaucratic Organizations), whether government, non-profit or for-profit, see over time an increase in the proportion of their employees who are highly paid; say $150k+.  As an org grows, it tends to increase its employment of senior management types faster than its general increase in employees. (This is absolutely inarguable for universities….) Why? Wish I knew……

An illustration of this general principle shows up in another article published in the Freeps over the weekend. London Health Sciences Centre, the administrative monster that is now being run by an ‘interim chief executive’ brought in to reorganize it (and deal with a looming $150 million deficit), has let go two of its senior administrators. According to the Freeps, the administrators are

  • Brad Campbell, corporate hospital administration executive, was in charge of overseeing the presidents of University Hospital, Children’s Hospital and Victoria Hospital
  • Sandra Smith, who was regional vice-president for the southwest regional cancer program at LHSC

The title ‘corporate hospital administration executive’ is suitably vague, and his job was ‘overseeing three presidents’. Well, that clarifies his duties, right?

For this he was paid, according to the Freeps again –  ‘$475,423 in 2023, a significant raise over the $217,007 he made in 2022’. Significant raise, indeed, but what the heck did he do to earn such a salary? What does ‘overseeing presidents’ entail, exactly? (Smith made a modest $244k in 2023. I don’t know what a regional VP does, either.)

Sadly, as high as those salaries are, eliminating them from the LHSC budget is no more than a drop in the $150 million bucket.

Of course, LHSC is not a City of London operation, and I suspect (but don’t know) that there is no one in the London City administration making the lofty salary that Mr. Campbell did in 2023 – at least I hope not. But the general principle remains. As amalgamation turned three hospitals into one giant org, the number of senior administrators – and the salaries they earn – went up, and just kept going up. It takes a lot of highly paid people to run a LBO – just ask those highly paid people, they’ll tell you its true.

A worthy research project, if one could get the data – and I bet one could not – would be to look at a large set of LBOs of all types and see how the number of highly paid senior administrators has changed relative to total employment over, say, 20 years. My hypothesis obviously is that proportion has gone up over time, but I wonder in which type of org it has gone up the most. Non-profits, universities,  for-profit corporations, government bureaucracies? It would be interesting to see if there is any discernible pattern. My money would be on universities as the leaders, but that’s probably because I saw it happen in one of those first hand over the last 20 years.

But I betcha $100 no LBOs of any type would give one the data one would need to find out.

PostScript

Just as I was about to post this, a story popped up on the CBC-London website, saying that LHSC had just fired 5 more senior administrators. To quote the CBC story:

“Five executives with a combined tenure of over 20 years, and a combined 2023 salary of over $1.6 million, are no longer with the organization, Musyj said. They are:

  • Abhi Mukherjee, CFO, who joined LHSC in September 2022

  • John French, clinical diagnostic executive, who joined LHSC in September 2022

  • CJ Curran, corporate health disciplines executive, who joined LHSC in September 2022

  • Dipesh Patel, capital redevelopment and environmental operations executive, who joined LHSC in July 2013

  • Jatinder Bains, corporate academic executive, who joined LHSC in April 2021

‘….combined tenure of over 20 years’? C’mon, CBC, only one of them has been around more than three years, the other four are all very recent hires. CBC did not give their salaries (I suspect the public broadcaster is a little sensitive about executive salaries these days), but you could look them up on the sunshine list. I think I know what a CFO does, but the other titles? Like, ‘corporate academic executive’? Surely they just made that up.

Let me quote once more from the article.

“Dr. Jackie Schleifer Taylor, the former CEO, left this past spring after a seven month medical leave. Her salary in 2023 was almost $804,000. ”

“During Dr. Schleifer Taylor’s tenure, president positions were created, one at each Victoria, University and Children’s, replacing the former structure which had just one one[sic] president for the entire hospital system.”

So, now we know what the afore-mentioned Brad Campbell did to earn his big salary. When Schleifer Taylor created three presidential positions where there had previously been only one, she of course had to create a fourth position – held by Campbell – to oversee those three. Now that is bureaucratic thinking par excellence.

What Does a 226% Improvement Smell Like?

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Research, Standards. 4 Comments on What Does a 2264 Improvement Smell Like?

Let me first express my thanks to Andrew Gelman of Columbia whose blog (see above) first brought this to my attention, so I can bring it to yours.

This is another of those ‘if it seems too good to be true it probably is’ research papers that I so love. The paper is titled ‘Overnight olfactory enrichment using an odorant diffuser improves memory and modifies the uncinate fasciculus in older adults’ and it was published in Frontiers in Neuroscience in July of 2023.

It reports on a study in which participants – all elderly, like me – were given scent diffusers to take home and use for two hours each night, starting when they went to bed – the diffusers automatically shut off two hours after they were started. The participants were given cognition tests and a functional MRI (that’s where the uncinate fasciculus bit in the title comes from) before they started the experiment and again six months later, after they had used the diffusers for that period of time.

The ‘treatment group’ got a set of 7 genuine essential oils to use in their diffusers, while the control group got ‘de minimis amounts of odorant’ according to the researchers. (Do you suppose those in the Control Group noticed that their diffusers produced no scent? But I digress.)

In the end there were a total of 43 participants in the two groups, and the headline result of this research was, quoting the paper,

“ A statistically significant 226% improvement was observed in the enriched group compared to the control group on the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test….”

Pretty impressive, eh? Six months of smelling essential oils for two hours/night at bedtime, that’s all it took to get that huge improvement in Auditory Verbal Learning.

Anyone smell anything?

Here are some facts about this ‘controlled’ experiment. First, 43 participants? A bit more than 20 in each group? That is what statisticians call a small sample. But wait, there’s more. If you look at the flow chart of how they recruited and screened participants for this study, you find that 132 subjects passed the initial screening. Of these, only 68 were included in the Control and Treatment groups that were used in the statistical analysis of the results, and of those 68, 25 dropped out during the study. That leaves the 43 whose results are reported on, of the 132 who passed the screen.

Smell anything yet? Why did those 25 people drop out? That’s 36% of the 68 whose results were analyzed and reported. What does that drop out rate imply for the credibility of the results? People don’t drop out randomly, they do it for reasons.

And, as one of the readers of the Gelman blog pointed out, that 226% improvement claim comes from the control group scoring on average 0.73 points worse post-treatment than pre-treatment on a particular test, while the treatment group scored 0.92 points better on average. So you have a difference of 1.65 points in the two groups’ average ‘improvement’ on the test, and 1.65 is 2.26 times 0.73.

Interesting arithmetic. I think Gelman’s reader is right, as that 226% number doesn’t come up anywhere else in the paper. However, note that 1.65 being 2.26 times 0.73 is not the same as 1.65 being a 226% ‘improvement’ over 0.73. The latter would mean that it was more than three times greater, and it is not. Neuroscientists don’t do a lot of basic arithmetic, I guess. That detail aside, just looking at the difference in average scores for the two groups – what does a ‘point’ mean in this context, anyway? Is it big? How ‘big’ is a 1.65 point improvement on this test? What does that actually translate into, memory-wise? The researchers do not say.

One last thing. At the end of the paper there is a section called Funding, under which is written ‘This research was sponsored by Procter and Gamble.’

There, now you smell it, eh?

I know nothing about the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience, but if their editors did not stop and wonder about that 226% claim, well, I don’t think I’ll subscribe. Actually, it’s an open access journal so I can read it for free, as I did this smelly article. But I won’t. Read the journal, I mean. Unless maybe I’m looking for something else to write about here.

What the Google Just Happened?

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, LBOs, News Media. 1 Comment on What the Google Just Happened?

Much of the material I write about in this blog is taken from the news media, obviously, but sometimes I write about the story or issue that the media piece is covering, while other times I am writing about the media piece itself. This article is going to be of the second type.

You have likely read or heard that the US Department of Justice brought an antitrust case against Google (four years ago, actually), and that the judge presiding over this case has just recently found against Google. Most headlines say something like ‘Google found guilty of being a monopolist’. This is an oversimplification. The DoJ accused Google of violating a rather specific US antitrust statute, and the judge found that it did. In this case (you can read the judge’s decision here) it was Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, and here is what the judge himself had to say about that statute in his decision:

“Section 2 of the Sherman Act makes it unlawful for a firm to ‘monopolize.’ ….The offense of monopolization requires proof of two elements: (1) the possession of monopoly power in the relevant market and (2) the willful acquisition or maintenance of that power as distinguished from growth or development as a consequence of a superior product, business acumen, or historic accident.”

Thus, it is indeed true that the DoJ had to show that Google has ‘monopoly power’ in the search engine market (arguing that aspect of the case is where a bunch of economists made big consulting fees, you can bet). However, it also has to show that Google did something willful to acquire or maintain that monopoly power. Being a monopoly due to, say, selling a superior product, implies no harm, no litigation.

From what I have read, it is Google’s agreements with other companies – like Apple – to make Google the default search engine on the devices they sell in return for a payment from Google that were found to violate part (2) above. For example, Google paid Apple $20B (yea, that’s a B) for making Google the default search engine on every iPhone’s Safari browser.

A lot has been written about the consequences of this decision for average Joes and Jills like you and I. How, if at all, will it change what happens on the internet, particularly in searching the web?

I haven’t read everything written about this, and there has been a lot, but I did come across an article on the National Post website, posted on August 9, written by one Matt Stoller, with the title:

Landmark decision means Google’s control of the web is ending

Wow. I am aware that Mr. Stoller almost certainly did not write that headline for his article, but a note to whoever did – this case was about Google’s search engine only, and if you know anything about Google, you know they have plenty of other operations on ‘the web’ (the parent company, Alphabet, owns Youtube, just to name one). In any case, it is a bit much to talk about Google’s ‘control of the web’. (If any firm could be said to ‘control the web’ my money would be on Microsoft, but that’s a blog for another day).

However, the rest of the article I have to credit to Mr Stoller, and he has some remarkable things to say about this just-issued decision. For example, he writes: ‘So there we go, Google’s control of the web is ending.’

Ah. So, maybe he did write that headline.

Then there’s this –

‘The implications of this decision will have ripple effects across the internet, the law, and big business for generations.’

Generations. One senses a taste for hyperbole in Mr. Stoller’s writing, no?

Here are two facts about this case that seem relevant to understanding how important it will turn out to be for average internet users.

  1. Google has already said it will appeal the judge’s ruling.
  2. The judge’s decision is the final step in what is only the first stage of this trial, which is called the ‘liability’ phase. What now follows is the ‘remedy’ phase.

Regarding point 1, some of you may recall that in the early 2000s the US brought a case based on the same Section 2 of the Sherman Act against good ol’ Microsoft, accusing it of monopolizing the market for personal computer operating systems. The government won that case too, but it was then overturned by the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. So, it’s a bit too soon to be counting any chickens, and the judicial appeal process could drag on for some time.

Stoller ignores my point 1 in his article, but not point 2, since he writes the following:

“This part of the trial was what is called the liability phase, which is to determine whether Google broke the law. Judge Mehta found that it did. The next stage is called the remedy phase, during which the court will hear arguments about what to do to address the bad conduct.”

What to do, indeed. A company the size of Google, even just its search engine division, is an incredibly complex organization. It is fair to say that no one working in Google’s search engine division – including the person at the top – is aware of everything that happens within it. It’s just too big and complicated. So, what do you suppose are the chances that the DoJ and the judge, who agree that Google has behaved badly, but know approximately nothing about running a tech company, can figure out what remedy is needed to force Google to behave better in the future?

They can, presumably, do the obvious thing of declaring illegal Google’s contracts with Apple and others regarding the Google search engine’s status as the default search engine on their installed browsers. But it will still be true that Apple et al are going to choose some search engine to be available on the devices they sell. Do we really believe that Google can find no other way to persuade those companies that Google’s search engine is the one they should have as the default on their installed browsers? Given that (according to the Financial Times) Google currently handles more than 90 per cent of online queries  and that ‘google’ has become a synonym for ‘search for’, why indeed would all the companies with whom Google currently has agreements not leave it as their default search engine? It’s already the one most people use. What can the learned judge and assorted lawyers and economists working for the DoJ possibly come up with to change that simple fact?

Finally, a comment on the Stoller article’s most hyperbolic paragraph:

“What about the rest of business? Well, this decision means monopolization law is back. Exclusive contracts and arrangements are pervasive in American commerce, and until recently, executives could reliably exploit such deals without fearing that they might face any legal liability. But that era is over. This case is in the headlines, which means every single competent executive in America in any firm with market power is going to get a memo from their antitrust or general counsel on what they can and can’t do going forward. And they will likely begin changing their behaviour to avoid being brought to court for monopolization.”

So Stoller thinks the case will trigger memos from counsel all across the corporate universe. Well, maybe not. Even if this Google decision is not reversed on appeal, and even if the DoJ and judge come up with some way to actually reduce Google’s ongoing share of the search market, it is simply not true that any Google executives are going to face ‘legal liability’. Google might have to pay a fine, and it might be a whopper. However, for any person within Google to face a legal sanction, the DoJ would have had to bring a criminal case against Google (and its executives) under Section 2 of the Sherman Act. The DoJ can do this, but they did not in the Google case, and in fact they almost never do. What they did was sue Google, a very different matter. The reason for this is simple; the DoJ can only win a criminal case against Google or any of its executives if it proves its allegations beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s a much higher standard than the standard of proving one’s case by a preponderance of the evidence, which is what is required in a civil lawsuit. The DoJ wanted to win this case and change Google’s business practices, so they filed a lawsuit, not a criminal case. Google executives might get fired by their company, but legal liability is not on the table.

The only antitrust violations that are typically prosecuted as criminal cases in the US (Canadian law and practice are similar in this regard)  are those of price-fixing or bid-rigging, which violate  Section 1 of the Sherman Act. In such criminal cases executives can indeed be fined or even imprisoned if the government wins the case, but again, this is not what happened in the US vs Google case.

Going forward, there is perhaps some reason to think executives of other companies need to worry about ‘legal liability’ for entering into exclusive contracts that violate Section 2, but only because in 2022 the DoJ announced that they would start pursuing more criminal cases under Section 2 of the Sherman Act. The Department has in fact filed two Sherman section 2 criminal cases in the last 50 years, one in 2022 and the most recent in 2024. However, they didn’t pursue a criminal case against Google, and the two recent cases in which criminal charges were brought were against executives of relatively small companies.  So, if other executives have reason to be worried about legal liability, it does not arise from the judge’s decision in phase one of this case against Google.

If executives in other companies got memos about what to do or not do from their legal counsel, it would have happened after the DoJ’s 2022 announcement, not after judge Mehta’s recent decision in this case. And….did those memos cause executives in other companies to change their behavior? No way to know, really, until and unless more criminal Section 2 cases actually are brought – and maybe not then.

So maybe ‘….monopolization law is back’ is a bit premature. However, it is not fair to be too hard on the enthusiastic Mr. Stoller. If you go to the Financial Times article on this case, available here, you will find other worthies waxing equally hyperbolic about the meaning and significance of this still-incomplete case.

Peeps are gonna believe what peeps wanna believe.

 

 

An Ex-Mayor and an Editor Walk into a Bar

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media, Standards. No Comments on An Ex-Mayor and an Editor Walk into a Bar

A tip of the hat to The Wall Street Journal for putting this in their Notable and Quotable column. The Journal’s Editors don’t comment on whatever appears in this column, they just publish it for their readers to see. Having seen it, I have a comment or two.

As background, Keisha Lance Bottoms is a former mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, a city with a population of about 500,000, which is the centre of a metropolitan area of some 6 million. Not a small job.

Ms. Bottoms has a different job now, something in the commentariat business. After the Biden-Trump debate, she was interviewed on MSNBC, and here is the WSJ’s report of part of that conversation –

Former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms speaks with MSNBC host Chris Jansing, July 1:

Ms. Jansing: Your hometown paper the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is among those saying it’s time for President Biden to pass the torch. The editorial board wrote, “This wasn’t a bad night. It was confirmation of the worst fears of some of Biden’s most ardent supporters.” . . .

Ms. Bottoms: Let me just say I was very disappointed with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. We have talked about making sure we’re protecting elections and making sure there’s no undue influence. This was undue influence by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution or an attempt to influence. I think voters should be able to make decisions the same way they did in the primaries.

Ms. Jansing: But isn’t that what editorial boards are supposed to do?

Ms. Bottoms: Editorial boards are supposed to honor fair elections. I don’t think it’s fair when an editorial board with 10 people sitting in a room are trying to influence an election.

– There you have Ms. Bottoms’ take on the role of newspapers in the 21st century.

I’ll first just say that this is a good example of the tendency for supposedly knowledgeable people to say things that would have – even 20 years ago – been considered laughable.

Note the use by Ms. Bottoms of the terms ‘undue influence’, ‘protecting elections’, and ‘honor fair elections’. This is typical cant for most members of what passes for an intelligentsia in the 21st century. There is a list of unquestionable and unpardonable sins, like colonialism and oppression, ready and waiting to be attached to anything one is against. ‘Election influencing’ is another such sin – although I suspect only when practiced by the wrong people to influence elections in the wrong way.

Beyond that – what is it about the ‘10 people sitting in a room’ that is unfair? Would 5 people be fair, or would a thousand be more fair? Is it the fact they are sitting in a room at all that makes it unfair? Would it be fair if they were standing, or – kneeling?

And the sentence ‘I think voters should be able to make decisions the same way they did in the primaries.’ is beyond the pale. Does Ms. Bottoms believe that The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Editorial Board did not publish any commentary on the candidates in the primaries when those were being held? Or, perhaps they did not write those when sitting in a room.

It has become the sole job of virtually all political operatives, be they candidates, office-holders, advocates, activists or spin doctors, to quote talking points. Never mind a reasoned analysis, god forbid you should explain why you disagree with the Editorial Board’s position. Just get in your words – ‘honor fair elections’ – and retreat from the field claiming a score.

As I say, someone 20 years ago who said what Ms. Bottoms said above would have been laughed at. Today, I’m sure she has been favourably quoted by other, similar, political operatives.

Young and Rogan, Again

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, London, Popular attitudes. No Comments on Young and Rogan, Again

London, Ontario has a number of outdoor musical events each summer, one of which is known as Rock the Park. When the line-up for this festival was announced a long time ago, it was regarded as quite the coup to have scored Neil Young and Crazy Horse as a headline performer. I’m not sure booking any 78-year-old rocker should be regarded as a major coup, but what brought this all to mind was the very recent announcement, just weeks before the event is to occur, that Young and the band have cancelled their appearance.

I wrote a post awhile back about Neil Young’s recent return to Spotify, thereby abandoning his principled position that what was being said on Joe Rogan’s podcast (streamed on Spotify) was false and harmful.

My focus there was on the fact that Young had shown, in my view, a meaningful commitment to a principle by taking an income hit as a result of pulling his music from Spotify, but that he had, in the light of Rogan’s new, wider streaming contract decided that he would not pay an even higher price by pulling his music from other platforms.

There is another, separate issue this raises, which I want to write about here. Why did Young do what he did back in 2022, rather than other things he could have done in response to what he saw as Rogan’s spread of false information? As I noted in my previous post, pulling his music from Spotify was undoubtedly costly to Young, but it seems likely it cost Spotify very little, if anything. I just don’t imagine that many people dropped their Spotify subscriptions in response to Young’s 2022 departure. But even if a significant number did, why do that?

One could imagine that Young anticipated that his departure from Spotify would indeed lead to the cancellation of many Spotify subscriptions, and that, seeing this, Spotify would in turn terminate their contract with Rogan. I really don’t believe Young anticipated that, but suppose he did. That would mean that Young’s purpose was to eliminate Rogan’s platform for disseminating ideas that Young disliked – that, to quote him, “I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines—potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them.” (I’m taking this quote from the original WSJ article, so am assuming it is accurate.)

This seems to me a very 21st century instinct. If someone is saying/writing things to which one objects, one should do what one can to shut them up. Stop them from saying those objectionable things. Now, the Young quote goes on to assert that if people hear these objectionable things and believe them, they could potentially die.

Certainly, preventing people from dying is a noble goal, but that is not what Young’s move would have done, had it been successful in getting Rogan off Spotify. It would have stopped people from hearing what was said there (ignoring for the moment possible other platforms), but I don’t see how one can really assert that would have saved lives. That only follows if one views exposure to what is said on Rogan’s podcasts as a disease itself, which kills people. In fact, what happens, is that people listen to it, they think about it – or not – then they take what they heard, along with all the other things they have ever heard that they think might be relevant, and they go on with their lives. They make decisions, including, presumably, whether or not to get vaccinated. Even if someone who goes through all this decides not to get vaccinated, it does not follow even probabilistically that they will die.

This is not an unusual line of thinking, however. A similar perspective leads most auto commercials these days to have written in fine print on the bottom of the TV screen the words “Trained driver on a closed course. Do not try this yourself.” Just seeing a driver put his Nisan Rogue into a four wheel drift on TV is like a drug, and viewers who are exposed to this commercial will thus be induced to drive to a spot where they can do the same, if they are not warned away from this.

What seems odd about this to me, even on its own terms, is the belief that people are not clever enough to realize that putting their Rogue into a high-risk manoeuvre might get them hurt, but that they are clever enough to pay attention to the warning in tiny letters at the bottom of the screen not to do that. What fundamentally lies underneath this is a view that people will do foolish things unless they are instructed appropriately – by, you know, us smart folks. Or Neil Young. [I am also well aware that this is to some extent driven by lawyers, trying to prevent their employers from getting sued successfully.]

The attitude is that people who roll their Nissan Rogue over doing four-wheel drifts and get injured or die have been inescapably driven to do that by seeing a commercial, just as people who listen to Rogan’s podcasts are driven to not get vaccinated and thus will die.

It’s a very 21st century perspective on human behavior, and I have no use for it. People have, and deserve to be given, agency. They gotta decide how to live their lives, and if they decide to go out and roll their Rogue over, that’s on them.

Here’s a different thing Young could have done. He could have mounted an info campaign to counter the ‘fake information’ that he felt Rogan was disseminating, in an effort to keep people from being swayed by it. His quote suggests he is quite confident that said information is ‘fake’ so he is presumably in a good position to explain to listeners what is fake about it, and, as the WSJ article says, he had 2.4 million followers on Spotify in ’22 before he left. That’s a decent audience. Of course, Young might well think his followers were not the audience that needed to have Rogan’s info countered, but as a famous rocker with plenty of resources (i.e., wealth), Young could surely have come up with many other ways of reaching people. Hell, tell Rogan you want to come on his podcast and have it out with him and his dangerous views. I suspect Rogan would have jumped at that opportunity if Young had offered it.

So, if it was true that Young was hoping to get Spotify to drop Rogan, then my point is that seems childish to me. Stand up and confront the guy if he’s so dangerous. That’s a response to perceived misinformation I could support.

That all being said, I don’t really believe that was Young’s motivation. According to the WSJ article

“Rogan’s show has been Spotify’s most listened to podcast for the last four years, according to the company.”

Young’s no fool, he didn’t expect to get Rogan’s podcast terminated, but if not that, what? What was Young trying to do?

People in the 21st century often talk of ‘taking a stand’, which I take to mean stating in public that they find something odious…or admirable, as the case may be. An overwhelming example of this can be found in all the demonstrations going on regularly around Canada about the Israel-Hamas war. The people who are engaged in these on both sides do not, I hope, think for a minute that their shouting and carrying signs around in Canada will have any impact on the decisions being made by the leaders of Hamas or Israel. And, if they think they can influence the government of Canada to change its position on the conflict in some way, then I again hope they don’t think any change in Canada’s official position on the war will influence anyone in Gaza or Tel-Aviv.

But, they clearly think it important to ‘make their voices heard’, to ‘call out____’ or ‘show their support/outrage’. Such declarations are another 21st-century fixation, one I suspect is facilitated by the existence in wealthy societies like those of Canada and the US of too many people with too much time on their hands. I mean, do the people in the UWO campground really believe they have moved forward some good cause by chanting in the face of a class of Ivy grads? Really? People like that could do some actual good in the world. London is chock full of people who are struggling, with poverty, addiction, poor health. If any of those campers were to sign up to work for Meals on Wheels, or volunteer to drive seniors who live alone to their medical and other appointments, they would make the world – locally – a better place in a clear and concrete way. But no, they find it a more valuable use of their time and energy to camp out and chant slogans about something that is happening thousands of miles away.

Coming back to Young, whichever of these two motivations might have lay behind Young’s 2022 move, neither seems one an adult should follow. If he thought to shut Joe up, I find that an admission of contempt for one’s fellow humans’ thinking. If you think Joe is full of shit, do something to convince folks of that. If, on the other hand Young just wanted to ‘call out Joe (or Spotify)’, to say ‘That is wrong’, then ok, I guess. It’s your time and energy (and money) to use as you like, Neil, but I can in turn think of no reason to change what I think about anything because you did that. As I said in my first post on this, the fact that Young took a financial and artistic hit to make that statement does convince me that he is sincere about it. And so what? Many people have sincere beliefs about many things.

Nonsense

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, Language. 1 Comment on Nonsense

There are certain phrases one hears over and over again, and that are never challenged, despite the fact that they are clearly nonsense.

A minor instance of this is the expression: ‘That’s the exception that proves the rule.’ To say that an exception to a rule proves the validity or truth of that rule is just nonsense. If there is an exception to a rule, then it is not a rule. It is a rule with exceptions – i.e., it ain’t really a rule. Now, I have read that in fact the original statement of this was ‘That’s the exception that preuves the rule.’ The word preuves (a word I have not seen elsewhere) means ‘tests’. I have no idea if that was indeed the original statement, but that an exception might test a rule is at least not nonsense.

However the phrase of this sort that has set my teeth on edge for eons is of arguably more import in the contemporary world. I read it most recently in the following quote from an opinion piece in The Harvard Crimson by Lawrence Bobo, Harvard’s Dean of Social Science.

“The truth is that free speech has limits — it’s why you can’t escape sanction for shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.”

That is simply wrong. That you cannot escape sanction for shouting fire in a crowded theatre is only true if in fact there is no fire. If there is a fire, you damn well better shout it, and pull the alarm while you’re at it. This is a sanction against lying, or causing needless panic. It has nothing to do with free speech or limits on it.

I suppose it is too much to expect the Dean of Social Science at Harvard to understand this.

 

People Can Disappoint You; Bureaucrats, Almost Always

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, LBOs. No Comments on People Can Disappoint You; Bureaucrats, Almost Always

In my post of June 2, ‘People can Surprise You’ I had a number of complimentary things to  say about a statement put out by the University of Western Ontario’s president, Alan Shepherd, regarding the protest encampment on the university campus. I said at the end of my post that I would wait with hope to see if the university would actually put into action the principles put forward in that statement.

I expected to be disappointed, frankly, and I am.

First, included in the President’s statement was this:

“These commitments – to the extent that they are new and not already in place – are contingent upon organizers agreeing to dismantle the encampment and not return, and to not disrupt Western’s convocation ceremonies out of respect for their fellow students.”

And this:

“What’s more, individuals participating in the encampment have several times crossed the line. They are intimidating visitors including high-school students on campus tours. They are harassing our campus community members, including students and caretaking staff. They are committing acts of vandalism. And some have even engaged in assaultive behaviour towards our staff.

This is unacceptable and cannot go on.”

UWO’s convocation ceremonies are about to wrap up, and the encampment remains. I suppose that all the first quote above requires is that whatever ‘new commitments’ the University had made might now not be honored.

Further, there was a photo (no story) in the  June 21 London Free Press with the following caption:

“GRADUATES FACE PROTEST: Western University graduates are met by about 200 loudly chanting pro-Palestinian protesters in front of the Ivey school of business during convocation ceremonies Thursday afternoon.”

The photo shows two security personnel walking from the left side of the picture toward the right, where the protestors can be seen chanting into the faces of the graduates walking along in their graduation gowns.

As I said, there is no story beyond the quoted caption in the Freeps, and I do wonder why not.

So, here on June 21, the encampment remains, graduates – and I expect others – are being harassed, the Free Press appears to have no interest in reporting this beyond a photo caption. I fully expect that next week the encampment will remain and people on campus will continue to be shouted at by the campers.

I have to conclude that all of this is in fact perfectly acceptable to the UWO Admin, despite their noble words.

I am disappointed, but not surprised.

 

Smiling – and Paying – for the Camera

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, London, News Media, Safety. No Comments on Smiling – and Paying – for the Camera

A short article by Scott Kitching appeared on the June 11 London News Today website letting us know that London City Council has authorized adding another 15 redlight cameras to the 10 that are already operating around the city. Our illustrious Mayor was quoted:

“More Red Light Cameras help limit dangerous driving behaviours at more locations in our City, and address a widespread community concern,” Mayor Josh Morgan said in a statement released by the city.

This statement can of course be used to justify putting a red light camera at every intersection in London, so stay tuned, folks.

Kitching also included some ‘statistics’ – reportedly provided by ‘the city’. That’s all the detail regarding the source of said stats we get. Quoting from the article:

“Since the red light camera program began in 2017, the number of collisions at intersections with signals has fallen by between eight and 11 per cent, according to the city. The number of collisions involving injury or death is down by 40 per cent over the same time period.”

Ok, the first stat seems like it is perhaps relevant to understanding the impact, if any, of the 10 existing redlight camera set-ups. Nothing is said about controlling that 8 to 11 percent drop for changes in the volume of traffic through intersections with signals, but there is a more important issue with it. That is an 8 to 11 percent drop ‘at intersections with signals’. Not  at intersections with red-light cameras, but rather all signaled intersections.

So; does this mean there has been a general trend down in collisions at signaled intersections? If so, that cannot possibly be attributed to the 10 (out of hundreds) of intersections that have the cameras. What we need to know here is what has been the trend in collisions at the camera intersections compared to the trend over the same time frame at all the other (non-camera) signaled intersections. The stat as quoted tells us precisely nothing about the impact of the cameras on collisions at signaled intersections.

As to the second sentence in the quote, I have no idea what that tells us. The number of collisions involving injury and death is down 40% – is that throughout the city overall? At signaled intersections generally? At signaled intersections with cameras only?

That second stat as stated tells us nothing about anything related to the impact of existing or planned red light cameras on traffic injuries or fatalities in London.

Ah, but who needs evidence, really? According to a CBC.ca London article on this City initiative, these cameras make money (for the city, not you fine folks). CBC London quoted London’s Director of Transportation and Mobility, Doug MacRae, thusly:

The cost of operating the new red light cameras for one year is approximately $1 million, MacRae said, but notes that they pay for themselves through the fines issued.

Per Inspector Brackenreid: Follow the money, Murdoch.

The impact of strip clubs on sex crimes

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, Research, Standards. No Comments on The impact of strip clubs on sex crimes

I ended a post back on April 25 with the following question:

Does the presence of bricks-and-mortar adult entertainment establishments have a positive, negative, or no effect on the commission of sex crimes in the surrounding neighborhood?

I then asked you to consider what sort of data would be required to provide credible evidence as to what is the correct answer to that question.

Fair warning, this is going to be a longish article, but I would suggest that a credible answer to the first question above has some social value. And, full disclosure, this post is part of my ‘Studies show’ inoculation campaign.

‘Swat I do.

I do think the answer to this question is of more than passing interest.

If the presence of adult entertainment establishments (aee’s, henceforth) like strip clubs and such could be shown to reduce the incidence of sex-crimes like sexual assault and rape, this might be counted as a reason to allow them to operate. If, on the other hand, they are associated with an increase in such crimes, then that is a reason to ban them entirely. The ban/allow decision for aees is of course complex, and other factors may also be important (e.g., links to organized crime, drug use). Still, the answer could be a significant input into city policy-setting on such places.

More disclosure, this is not a very original post. I got wind of all this reading Andrew Gelman’s Statistical Inference blog back when. However, he didn’t dig into the details much.  I have, and I think it is another nice illustration of an important principle: if it sounds really good, be skeptical.

Ok, then – our story begins with a paper by two economists titled “THE EFFECT OF ADULT ENTERTAINMENT ESTABLISHMENTS ON SEX CRIME: EVIDENCE FROM NEW YORK CITY”,

which was written by Riccardo Ciacci and Maria Micaela Sviatschi and published in 2021, in The Economic Journal, a well-respected outlet in my old discipline.

The following sentence from the Abstract of their paper lays out what they find –

“We find that these businesses decrease sex crime by 13% per police precinct one week after the opening, and have no effect on other types of crime. The results suggest that the reduction is mostly driven by potential sex offenders frequenting these establishments rather than committing crimes.”

Trust me, if true, that’s a big deal. A 13% reduction on average, and in the first week after the aees open.

Social scientists rarely find effects of that size attributable to any single thing. That’s huge. One might even venture to say – unbelievable.

It is not surprising that The Economic Journal was happy to give space in its pages to publish these results. And, coming back to what I wrote above, what city politician could ignore the possibility that licensing aees in their jurisdiction might reduce sex crimes by 13%?

To dig deeper we return to the ‘extra credit’ question I posed on that post of April 25 – what kind of data would one need to answer the question?

Well, you need to be able to make a comparison of sex crime numbers between areas where aees operate, and areas where they do not. An obvious possibility is to find two political jurisdictions such that one contains aees, and the other, perhaps due to different laws, does not. Then you can compare the incidence of sex crimes in those two jurisdictions and get your answer.

That approach is just fraught with difficulties, all following from the fact that the two jurisdictions are bound to be different from one another in a whole host of ways, any one of which might be the reason for any sex-crime difference you find. Demographics, incomes, legal framework, policing differences, the list goes on and on. You can try to account for all that, but it’s very difficult, you need all kinds of extra data, and you can never be certain that any difference you find can actually be attributed to the presence/absence of aees.

The alternative is to look at a single jurisdiction, like NYC, and find data on where aees operate and where they do not. Now NYC is a highly heterogeneous place – it’s huge, and its neighborhoods differ a lot, so it sort of seems like we’re back to the same problem.

However, suppose you can get data on when and where aees open and close in NYC. Then, you have before and after data for each establishment and its neighborhood. If an aee started operating in neighborhood X on June 23, 2012, you can then look at sex crime data in that area before and after the opening date. You still want to assure yourself that nothing else important in that neighborhood changed around that same time, but that seems like a doable thing.

This is pretty much what our economists did, as we will see, but there is still another issue; data on sex crimes.

All data on criminal activity carries with it certain problems. Data on arrests and convictions for crimes is generally pretty reliable, but crimes are committed all the time for which no arrests are made and/or no convictions occur. Still, the crimes occur, and for the purposes of this question, you want data on the occurrence of sex crimes, not on arrests for them.

We’ll come back to the crime data below, but I’ll start with the data on aees.

The authors note that if you are going to open a strip club in NYC there is a bureaucratic process to go through, and the first thing a potential operator of such has to do is register the business with a government bureau.

To quote directly from the paper:

“We construct a new data set on adult entertainment establishments that includes the names and addresses of the establishments, providing precise geographic information. We complement this with information on establishment registration dates from the New York Department of State and Yellow Pages, which we use to define when an establishment opened.”

So, the researchers know where each aee opened, and they know when, but do note for later, that for the ‘when’ bit they use the date of registration with the NY Department of State.

The location that they get from the Dept and the Yellow pages then allows the researchers to determine in which NYPD precinct the aee is located, and that is going to allow them to associate each aee, once it opens, with crime data from that precinct.

So, what crime data do they use? As I’ve noted, such data always has issues.

Here’s one thing the economist say about their crime data.

“The crime data include hourly information on crimes observed by the police, including sex crimes. The data set covers the period from 1 January 2004 to 29 June 2012. Since these crimes are reported by the police, it minimises the biases associated with self-reported data on sex crime.”

Ok, hold on. ‘Crimes observed by police’? What does that mean? How many of the people arrested for or even suspected of a crime by the police had that crime observed by the police? Speeders, stop-sign ignorers, perhaps? But burglars, murderers, and – the point here – sexual assault or rape? How often are those crimes observed by police?

The vast majority of crimes come to light and are investigated by police on the basis of a report by a private citizen. In the case of sex crimes, most often a victim is found somewhere or comes to the police after the crime has occurred, inducing police to begin an investigation.

This sentence from the paper clears things up….a bit.

“We categorise adult entertainment establishments by New York Police Department (NYPD) precincts to match crime data from the ‘stop-and-frisk’ program.”

Ah. You may remember NYC’s (in)famous ‘stop and frisk’ program of several years (and mayors) ago. NYPD officers would stop folks on the street and – chat them up. Ask questions of various kinds, and then fill out and turn in a card that recorded various aspects of the encounter. As we will see below, virtually none of these s-a-f encounters resulted in a report of a crime or an arrest.

So….’crime data’? From stop and frisk encounters? Need to know a lot more about how that data was used.

And we shall, but let’s go back to the other key bit of data – where and when aees opened in NYC. The date used for the aees ‘opening’ is, according to the quote above, the date on which each establishment was registered  with the NY Dept of State.

Can you think of any establishment that needs a city or health or any other license to operate, that actually starts serving customers the day after it files the licensing paperwork?

To be sure, I have never operated a business, but I don’t think that can possibly be how it works. For one thing, how many different licenses do you suppose a strip club needs to operate at all? A health inspection, a liquor license, a fire inspection, building safety certificate….?

This is not a detail, because the BIG Headline this paper starts with is that a strip club reduces the number of sex crimes in the precinct in which it is located in the first week of operation. If the researchers are using the date of registration to determine when was that first week – there’s a problem.

 Ok, time to let the rest of the cats out of the proverbial bag. I mentioned above that I came on this research through a post on Gelman’s blog in which some folks expressed considerable skepticism about the economists’ findings. Those skeptics are, to give credit where due:

Brandon del Pozo, PhD, MPA, MA (corresponding author); Division of General Internal Medicine, Rhode Island Hospital/The Warren Alpert Medical School

Peter Moskos, PhD; Department of Law, Police Science, and Criminal Justice Administration, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York

John K. Donohue, JD, MBA; Center on Policing, Rutgers University

John Hall, MPA, MS ; Crime Control Strategies, New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority Police Department

They lay out their issues with the paper in considerable detail in a paper of their own titled:

Registering a proposed business reduces police stops of innocent people? Reconsidering the effects of strip clubs on sex crimes found in Ciacci & Sviatschi’s study of New York City

which was published in Police Practice and Research, 2024-05-03.

This post is already quite long, so I am going to just give you the two most salient (in my opinion) points that are made by the skeptics in their paper.

First, as to the economists’ ‘sex crime’ data:

“The study uses New York City Police Department stop, question and frisk (SQF) report data to measure what it asserts are police-observed sex crimes, and uses changes in the frequency of the reports to assert the effect of opening an adult entertainment establishment on these sex crimes. These reports document forcible police stops of people based on less than probable cause, not crimes. Affirmatively referring to the SQF incidents included in the study as ‘sex crimes,’ which the paper does throughout (see p. 2 and p. 6, for example), is a category error. Over 94% of the analytic sample used in the study records a finding that there was insufficient cause to believe the person stopped had committed a crime….In other words, 94% of the reports are records of people who were legally innocent of the crime the police stopped them to investigate.”

And then, for the data on the openings of aees:

“This brings us back to using the date a business is registered with New York State as a proxy for its opening date, considering it provides a discrete date memorialized by a formal process between the government and a business. However, the date of registration is not an opening date, and has no predictable relationship to it, regardless of the type of business, or whether it requires the extra reviews necessary for a liquor license. New York City’s guidance to aspiring business owners reinforces the point that registration occurs well before opening.”

I close with the following. It turns out our four skeptics sent a comment to The Economic Journal laying out all their concerns about the original research, the Journal duly sent said commentary on to the authors, Ciacci and Sviatschi, and those authors responded that they did not think these concerns affected the important points in their paper. So, the journal not only did not retract the paper, it declined to publish a Commentary on its findings by the four skeptics. (Econ Journals do publish such Comments from time to time. Not this time.)

I mean, that would just make the original authors – and the Journal – look bad, no? The skeptics did, as we saw, eventually get their concerns into the public domain via a different publication – one read by pretty much nobody who reads The Economic Journal, I’m thinking.

Again – if it seems too good to be true…Objects in mirror may be smaller than they appear.

People can surprise you

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, LBOs. 3 Comments on People can surprise you

Those not living in a hermitage over the last several months will be aware of the protests and – in many cases – encampments that have occurred on university campuses across North America. So far as I can tell, all of these have been generated by people – students or otherwise – who wish to support the Palestinians in Gaza in what has become known as the Israel-Gaza [see addendum below]*war. They have called for the universities in question to do a variety of things, from divestment of university endowments in weapons manufacturers to the ending of all academic or other relationships the university has with Israel, Israeli universities, or in some cases, any organization that is thought (by the protesters) to be linked to Zionism, however they define that.

Universities have responded to these protests in a variety of ways, and while I cannot claim to have investigated every such occurrence, my impression is that universities have only rarely been willing to refuse to accede to the demands of the protesters, and have even less often been willing to use law enforcement to remove encampments that are, by any reasonable definition, illegal. At minimum, these encampments entail trespassing on university property, and in some cases, according to reports, the people in the encampments have been seen to be harassing members of the university community going about their daily business.

Many of the university responses – such as at U of Toronto – have featured the setting of repeated deadlines to abandon an encampment, deadlines that have been moved forward in time each time the previous one is violated. Here are the opening lines of a Globe and Mail article of June 2 about the U of T encampment:

“Convocation ceremonies for graduating University of Toronto students begin Monday against the backdrop of a pro-Palestinian encampment that has remained on campus for weeks despite a trespass notice and looming legal action.

More than 30 ceremonies are scheduled to take place through June 21 and the university says all events will proceed as planned with ‘extra precautions.’”

This particular encampment has been in place since May 2, and U of T has gone to court seeking an injunction order to clear it. Stay tuned….

Not surprisingly, the UWO campus is also home to an encampment located near what has always been referred to as ‘the concrete beach’ just outside the University Community Centre; a high people-traffic area. There have been ongoing discussions/negotiations between representatives of those in the encampment and UWO’s senior administration regarding the dismantling of said encampment, which has been there at least since May 3. (That was the last time I was on campus, and it was there on that date.)

I am writing this blog about the UWO situation because I got an email in which the administration of my former employer set out their response to the situation. You can read this at this link. – it’s public. However, going to that url will confront you with a whole series of dated updates and statements, and what I want to call your attention to is the one titled:

“Responding to calls from the Western Divestment Coalition – May 29, 2024”

I am about as far from being a fan of UWO’s current senior administration as you will find on planet earth, but I am writing this post because I read the above statement, and was pleasantly surprised by (most of) its content.

In particular, I direct you to the following statements in this response:

“There are also roles we do not – and should not – play.

For instance, with few exceptions throughout history, universities do not take unilateral stances on political or social issues. Why? Because by our very nature, universities do not speak with one voice. To do so would be antithetical to our mission as a place where all are welcome and where diverse ideas can be openly and respectfully debated and explored.

With this mission in mind, universities have historically not taken up wholesale calls for boycott, divestment, and sanctions – and Western University is no different.”

To be sure, there is wiggle room in the last sentence in particular. They write that universities have ‘historically not taken up’ calls for boycott, rather than ‘Western will not take up a call for boycott, divestment and sanctions”. Only time will tell whether what UWO does varies from what they say universities have done ‘historically’.

Later in the administration response one reads:

“But the larger point is that, as an institution of higher learning, our role is to make room for the broadest range of views.

With that in mind, our investment policy is driven not by political motives or any institutional position on particular global affairs, but by a fiduciary duty to ensure the University is financially equipped to carry out its mission in support of all students, faculty and staff – today and well into the future.”

Later on there is this:

“Our goal is to end this unlawful encampment safely and soon. We are seeking a peaceful resolution, and we hope to continue engaging with our students to do so.

“Students should not fear repercussions simply by speaking with us and negotiating on behalf of their peers.

That said, any individual who chooses not to respect the bounds of peaceful and lawful protest cannot be guaranteed amnesty.”

And, as my final quote from the Admin response, there is this:

“These commitments – to the extent that they are new and not already in place – are contingent upon organizers agreeing to dismantle the encampment and not return, and to not disrupt Western’s convocation ceremonies out of respect for their fellow students.

The protracted occupation of the popular gathering place outside the University Community Centre is not only unsafe and unlawful but is making it impossible for Western to fulfil our promise of creating inclusive spaces across our campus for all our community members.

What’s more, individuals participating in the encampment have several times crossed the line. They are intimidating visitors including high-school students on campus tours. They are harassing our campus community members, including students and caretaking staff. They are committing acts of vandalism. And some have even engaged in assaultive behaviour towards our staff.

This is unacceptable and cannot go on.”

Once again I note that there is a rather large hole in this quote, through which one could drive almost anything. The last sentence says nothing definite about what will happen if this ‘unacceptable’ situation does go on until convocation. More negotiation, more statements, another deadline….? I do not want to see a confrontation between the protesters and law enforcement on the UWO campus. But I agree that what is described as happening there is ‘unacceptable’, and that word has no meaning without a willingness to bring it to an end.

Still, I write here not to bury the UWO Admin but to praise them. I am not happy with every word in the UWO Admin’s response – I should not expect to be – but the quoted statements lay out principles that align with my own principles regarding the mission of a university, and the bounds of what is acceptable behavior within them. That is not something I have said often about statements coming from that source, so I am tipping my hat to them, for one of the few times in my life.

What remains to be seen is the extent to which said Administrators are willing to take what will be  unpopular (with some) actions in order to uphold these principles. I wait to see what happens with admitted doubt in my heart, but hope in my soul.

*In fact, it is more often referred to in the media as ‘the war in Gaza’ or ‘the Israel-Hamas war’. My bad.

Debt, Taxes and Tails Wagging Dogs

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government. No Comments on Debt, Taxes and Tails Wagging Dogs

A short, non-path-breaking post today –

I am more than old enough to remember when Canada’s GST was born, a great (or not) new source of revenue to fund government programs. A fact about Canada that it shares with the US but no European advanced economies is that Canada’s federal government gets almost exactly half of its revenues from the personal income tax. Same for the US, but the Europeans get much less than that, relying more on consumption taxes and VAT.

Well, the most recent Liberal government budget breaks some new ground, apparently. From The Hub –

For the first time in 12 years, government debt costs will surpass GST revenue

  • Projections from budget 2024 now show both revenues from the GST and public debt charges match each other at $54.1 billion.
  • The federal government could spend as much as $64 billion on charges for public debt by the end of the decade.
  • In future years, the government estimates GST revenues won’t cover its public debt charges. In 2028-29, the GST is projected to generate $61 billion in revenue. Meanwhile, public debt charges will reach $64 billion.

In case you’re not familiar with government-speak on budgets, ‘public debt charges’ refers to the amount the government pays out in interest on what it has previously borrowed. So, know that when you pay the GST on anything you buy, those dollars are going to people (or banks, more likely) who bought Canadian government bonds at some point in the past.

It is not at all fashionable in most Western countries these days to worry about government deficits. Government borrowing is thought to be a perfectly sensible means of providing important government programs that do good things for people. However, the above figures point out that there is one eventual consequence of this policy. Continuing deficits add to the total amount of government bonds outstanding, bonds which must be redeemed or rolled over down the road and the interest on them paid out, also using government funds. Thus, ‘servicing the public debt’ becomes a larger and larger line item in total government spending, until, as noted, one must raise increasing amounts of revenue (or further increase borrowing) in order to pay off the previous borrowing. Eventually the spending on servicing that debt can become the tail that wags the dog of government spending. It necessarily makes it harder to spend on other government programs.

Pipers must be paid, either with more borrowing, higher taxes, or reductions in other spending. …or, governments can always print money, but that’s a topic for another day.

It’s Getting Hot Out: The Efficacy of Heat Warnings

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, Health Care, Research. No Comments on It’s Getting Hot Out: The Efficacy of Heat Warnings

 

Summer’s about here, and we can look forward to more of that Environment Canada staple – The Heat Warning. You know, the alerts about high temps and humidity you see on your favourite source for weather info.

I never think much about them, figuring people are pretty good at understaning when it’s hot out and what to do about it. It turns out some local researchers got to wondering if these alerts did any measurable good.

Their work was written up in the Freeps some while back, in an article headlined:

Do hot-weather alerts help? No, not really: London researchers

– published on Aug 22, 2022.

The tag line below the title reads “Those heat alerts telling us to be careful when temperatures spike? Turns out they do little to keep people overcome by heat out of hospital, say London researchers calling for changes to make the warnings more effective.”

The Freeps reporter has the research right in this case. In the research article you will find the following two paragraphs –

“The researchers compiled data on patients with heat-related illnesses who showed up in emergency rooms from 2012-18 and looked at whether their numbers dropped after the harmonized heat warnings kicked in.”

Then later –

“While there did appear to be a slight drop in heat-related emergency room visits after the provincial warning system was introduced, particularly in children and adults with chronic conditions, the results were not statistically significant, Clemens said.”

I went and read the research paper, published in The Canadian Journal of Public Health in 2022 (I’m a geek; you can read it too, here, although you will have to get past the paywall). That is indeed what the researchers say in the paper.

This research paper strikes me as reporting on potentially useful research. The Freeps article notes that “In southern Ontario, heat alerts are issued amid daytime highs hit 31 C or higher, lows of 20 C or when the humidex reaches 40.” You want to put off digging that garden to another, cooler, day. Old coots like me are particularly aware of this.

But setting aside my own instincts, I am all in favor of research to determine whether government initiatives are having their hoped-for effect. My unease about the research arose from the following lines in the Freeps article, in which the lead researcher is quoted –

“This research points to the need to raise awareness of heat-related illness. I’d like to see this translate into more education and physician-level awareness . . . ,” Clemens said. “As an endocrinologist, (I) could help inform or prepare my complex patients to better protect themselves.”

Huh? Exactly how does this research point to that? These research findings say the current warning system had no impact on heat-related emergency-room visits. What is the logic leading from that useful finding to the first sentence in the quote above? And as to the second quoted sentence, by all means, go ahead and inform and prepare your patients, but what does “this research” have to do with that?

Then, at the very end of the paper, we find this:

What are the key implications for public health interventions, policy or practice?

  1. More heat alerts were triggered in Ontario between 2013 and 2018, and many cities spent more days under heat warnings. The implementation of a harmonized HWIS appeared to reduce rates of ED visits for heat-related illness in some subpopulations, but at a provincial level, the change was not statistically significant.

 

  1. Given HWPs are a main policy tool to protect populations against heat, we suggest ongoing efforts to support effective HWP in our communities, with a particular focus on at-risk groups.

 

The journal itself probably has a requirement – since it is a public health journal – to include in any published paper a final statement on the public health implications of the research. However, point 1 is not an implication of the research findings. It is just a restatement of the fact that the research found the warnings had no impact. However it is entirely misleading to say that the HWIS ‘appeared to reduce rates of ED visits…’ and then immediately say ‘the change was not statistically significant’. All social science research operates with the knowledge that there is a lot going on in the world that we can’t identify, or even know about, and so any difference we see in data (like differences in ER visits) might be due to random chance. Researcher can’t just say something ‘appeared’ to be different when in fact the difference was statistically insignificant.

So, why cling to the ‘ we found this, but it wasn’t significant’ language? Why not just say ‘we found no impact’? That is a useful thing to find, indeed, and researchers should expect to find exactly nothing much of the time. Finding nothing advances our knowledge about the world, it is very useful to learn ‘well, that doesn’t seem to have any impact’.

Then, in implication 2 above, they write “…we suggest ongoing efforts to support effective HWP in our communities….”

C’mon folks, you just found that HWPs are ineffective in reducing ER visits, so in what way is an implication of that finding that we should support effective HWPs? Particularly since nothing in your research tells anyone what an effective HWP might look like.

Having hung around with social science researchers nearly all my adult life, I will bravely put forward a hypothesis about motivations, here: there is nothing that would have induced the researchers to write, instead of the two misguided points above, this implication of their research: –

Our research suggests that the HWIS program and its associated HWPs be ended, and the resources involved be directed toward programs for which there is evidence of effectiveness.

That sentence never stood a chance of appearing in their paper.

 

 

Immigrant Discrimination and the Freeps

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in London, News Media, Research. No Comments on Immigrant Discrimination and the Freeps

The media these days like to publish stories about academic research but as a rule, they do a bad job of it, and that is particularly true of my hometown paper, The Freeps.

An article published in the Freeps on July 31, 2023, headlined:

‘Alarming’: Study reveals hostility toward immigrants in London, region’

illustrates well what I mean.

The line under that headline read: “The study, funded by the London and Middlesex Local Immigration Partnership, surveyed the experiences of 30 London and Middlesex County immigrant and racialized people.”

Now, hold on. What can one possibly conclude about anything that might be happening in London-Middlesex after talking to 30 people? The immigrant population in the areas is, according to Stats Can figures reported in the actual study (more on it below) was around 90,000 in 2016, no doubt higher than that now. 30 is a laughably small sample of that population. However, reading on, the article goes on to say that this was ‘….a followup to a survey conducted by the same team that found about 60 per cent of those who identified as immigrants in Southwestern Ontario said they experienced some level of discrimination or racism in the last three years.’

Ok, so this suggests that at least two studies were done, a survey plus interviews of 30 local immigrants. The writer for the Freeps claims that 60% of immigrants reported discrimination in that survey. I determined to go find the actual studies to sort all this out, partly due to my reading this sentence further down in the article:

“A group of Western University researchers led by Esses heard newcomers say they were overlooked for promotion and their work was underappreciated.”

Ok, how many of your peers report being overlooked for promotion,  or underappreciated at their job? Maybe everyone? What makes that discrimination?

My curiosity fully aroused, I found the two studies on the website of the sponsoring organization mentioned above. You can, too, at this link

The first study, which surveyed 829 L-M residents in March of 2021, is written up in the paper dated August 2021. The second is indeed a report on interviews with 30 immigrants from the L-M region, and is dated March, 2023. This is the study mentioned in the tag line, and it is worth noting that all of the 30 people interviewed for that study reported being immigrants  and reported experiencing discrimination. Anyone who did not report those two things when first contacted to be interviewed, was not in fact interviewed. So the rate of reported discrimination among the interviewed group was 100%, by design.  That’s not what the article’s tag line would have you think but…ah, details.

As to the first, much larger survey, that’s where the Freeps reporting gets worse and the research gets, well, interesting. The 829 respondents to the survey were contacted by a hired polling company that used random-telephone-number dialing to collect its sample of respondents. Those who were actually given the survey to respond to were put into three groups, which the researchers titled Immigrants and Visible Minorities, Indigenous Peoples, and White Non-Immigrants.

Now, if one is trying to understand discrimination experienced by immigrants living in London-Middlesex, it seems very odd to include Indigenous Peoples in the survey. If anyone is 180 degrees different from being an immigrant, that would be indigenous folks.

On the other hand, including a set of White Non-immigrants in the survey makes sense. Whatever you learn about discrimination among immigrants is pretty meaningless without a point of comparison: the White Non-Immigrants can be considered the analog to a Control Group in a drug study. It’s like if someone tells you that The Bismarck displaced 41,000 tons when it was built, that doesn’t tell you it was one huge battleship unless you also know how big were other ships of the era.

Below are the self-reported rates of discrimination of these three groups – that is, the percentage of survey-takers in each group who reported being discriminated against – you can find these numbers on p.20 of the 2021 report:

Immigrants and Visible Minorities: 36.7%

Indigenous Peoples: 61.6%

White Non-immigrants: 44.4%

Which brings us back to the Freeps writing that “…60 per cent of those who identified as immigrants in Southwestern Ontario said they experienced some level of discrimination or racism in the last three years.”

Clearly that’s just wrong. Inaccurate. (See why I love the Freeps?) Indigenous peoples most certainly do not identify as immigrants. Count on it. The self-reported rate of discrimination among the immigrant group was 36.7%, which is way less than 60 in anyone’s arithmetic.

So the Freeps got the facts wrong, and they erred in the direction in which the Freeps always errs, in my experience. The Freeps has become The London Alarmist, always making things seem as bad as possible, so here they report the biggest, baddest number, even if it’s the wrong number.

However, I cannot let the researchers off free on this one, either. The word ‘Alarming’ in the headline is accurate, in that researcher Vicki Esses did use that adjective in describing the stories they heard in the interview study. But, of course, in the 2023 interview study the interviewees were pre-selected for saying they had been discriminated against. The earlier 2021 survey study could then be viewed as an attempt to understand how representative those stories are of the general experience of immigrants in the area.

But here’s the thing, which you alert readers likely have already noticed. White non-immigrants reported being discriminated against at a higher rate than the immigrants. As my foul-tongued friend Hugo might say – WTF?

The Freeps reporter did not question Esses about this finding from the survey, and I would bet a buck said reporter did not read either report. I mean, who has time to learn about the things one writes about? I would bet a lot more than a buck that had Ms. Rivers turned in a story to her editor headlined ‘Immigrants less discriminated against locally than white non-immigrants’ she would not have gotten her byline into The Alarmist.

A final note on the research, specifically the survey report. As the researchers write on p. 51 of the 2021 report – “Nonetheless, because participation was voluntary, it is likely that interest in the topic had some influence on whether or not eligible individuals participated, leading to some inevitable potential biasing of the samples.”

Yea. Likely, indeed. They note that the use of random-phone-dialing to get initial respondents helps work against bias, and that is only partly true. The researchers don’t tell us much about that respondent recruiting process, and were this study being presented in a seminar, here are just a few of the questions I would ask:

Did the phone-calling include cell phone numbers or just land-lines?

Was there a set text the callers used to screen potential survey-takers, and if so, what did it say?

Given that the survey involves unconfirmed self-reporting (the results from which should always be taken with a grain of salt) what reason is there for confidence that the reports of discrimination correspond to actual discrimination?

The reasoning behind the first two questions is simple: if only land-lines were called, as used to be the case, a whole swath of Canadians, mostly younger, who have no landlines anymore, is left out of the pool of potential survey-takers. How that might bias the results I cannot say, but it seems it must to some extent, so this is important for understanding the survey results.

And, if the callers doing the recruiting let out the fact- or even the possibility – that they were asking people to participate in a survey on discrimination, then my Spidey sense goes into full vibration mode. This will attract people who feel discriminated against disproportionately, and renders the ‘% experiencing discrimination’ statistic unrepresentative of what happens in the general L-M population. It is not reassuring that the researchers say so little about the respondent recruiting process.

The third question is prompted by the fact that White non-immigrants reported more discrimination than Immigrants. This makes it very difficult for me to believe that these responses tell us much about discrimination against immigrants.

To go back to the Random-Controlled Drug Trial analogy above, if the group you gave the drug to (the white non-immigrants) is more likely to get the disease the drug is supposed to cure than the group that did not get it (the immigrants), your drug does not work; indeed, it’s bloody dangerous.

That finding should have the researchers questioning just what the survey responses actually tell them, if anything. Do they believe that white non-immigrants are actually more likely to experience discrimination than immigrants? If so, are they seeking research funding to look into discrimination against white non-immigrants? I rather doubt the answer to either question is yes, but that’s the implication of their survey results if they want to insist that the survey responses tell us something about actual discrimination.  And that ‘Alarming’ thing kinda suggests they do.

 

 

Boycotting Loblaw’s

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Popular attitudes. No Comments on Boycotting Loblaw’s

A friend of mine mentioned in an email that there was a boycott of Loblaw’s going on. News to me, but hey, there’s that internet thing, so I started searching, and sure enough, there is. A Reddit group called r/loblawsisoutofcontrol is pushing a boycott of all Loblaw’s owned retail outlets in May.

Here’s the statement on the Reddit site:

“Our community has taken the time to organize a movement which aims to boycott Loblaw stores until prices can be reduced.

Since it’s founding, our community has seen hundreds of ridiculously priced goods, dumb deals, rotten produce and more. Loblaw, and other major grocers in Canada enjoy the benefits of a monopoly on an essential service, and force us to pay utterly ridiculous prices. Canadians are facing a cost of living crisis, and grocers are a major contributor to this. Vunerable populations such as seniors, persons with disabilities, and those on fixed incomes are left further behind. Food banks across the country are seeing a drastic increase in demand.

In response, our team has organized a boycott of Loblaw stores and demand action in order to provide relief to Canadians.”

The first thing I wondered about this was – why Loblaw’s, and not, say Metro or Sobey’s? If the group believes that prices are generally higher at Loblaw’s outlets than at those other places, then a campaign to buy from the other places rather than Loblaw’s is what used to be called ‘shopping’. Buy low is a good strategy, I reckon, not a movement in need of a reddit group.

On the other hand, the statement also says “Loblaw, and other major grocers in Canada enjoy the benefits of a monopoly on an essential service, and force us to pay utterly ridiculous prices.”

If there is more than one grocer, then nobody has a monopoly on anything, but it is true that the grocery industry in Canada is pretty concentrated, by which I mean that a few corporations sell most of the goods.

Below, courtesy of CBC, is a look at how revenues in the grocery industry in Canada are distributed. What that graphic doesn’t make clear is whether the Loblaw’s share of 29%, the largest, included sales of all the outlets the company owns. That is, are grocery sales from Shoppers and The Real Canadian Superstore, etc, included in the Loblaws number, or are those sales in the Other category.

Anyway, even if the ‘other’ category really is other, it seems that Loblaw’s, Metro, Costco and Sobey’s are the four big guns, and an industry in which the four largest sellers earn 72% of all sales revenue is pretty damn concentrated. An oligopoly, for sure. This is, btw, a problem in many industries in Canada, and one that has been commented on constantly by smarter people than me. Banking, airlines and other industries are also highly concentrated in Canada, and more importantly, perhaps, they have been becoming more so in the last decade or so. This trend toward higher concentration extends to our neighbours to the south, also.

Economists say many complicated things about competition, but on the ground it is about choices. If you, as a consumer, have a lot of choices as to where to buy something, that market is competitive, and so the more concentrated is an industry, the less competitive it is, on that measure. By the same measure, it was surely a mistake for the Canadian Competition Bureau to let Loblaw’s buy up most of Shopper’s Drug Mart back in the day, and more recently for Sobey’s to be allowed to buy Farmboy, just as it was a mistake to let ScotiaBank buy up Ing bank and turn it into Tangerine.

Of course, the grocery business could be worse: there isn’t actually a monopoly seller.  If Loblaw’s were that, no boycott would be possible and a monopoly Loblaw’s really would have control of an essential service.

There is also no doubt that grocery prices have risen faster than prices in many sectors in the recent inflationary period – that you can look up. One explanation for this could be as follows. We got inflation in Canada (as in the US and other countries) from 2022 forward in part because the Government threw piles of money at people during the pandemic, but there wasn’t a lot to spend it on during lockdowns. Once those were lifted, folks had lots of savings they wanted to spend, and firms’ attempts to meet this increased demand were somewhat stymied by supply-chain difficulties. So, you get good-old demand-pull inflation. The supply chain issues by now are mostly gone, but it is still true that increasing the supply of food in response to increasing demand can’t happen fast: crops, produce and cattle don’t come to market in a day, so there are still demand-pull issues in groceries. So, grocery prices are still rising faster than other prices.

I wouldn’t stake a million bucks on that explanation, but it’s not implausible, either.

Which returns me to the Loblaw’s boycott and my original question: why them? Is it a fact that prices have gone up more at Loblaw’s than at Sobey’s or Metro? If so, then we are back to ‘shopping’ and I’m not going to argue against shopping for lower prices. But if not, if prices have risen over the last two years about the same amount at all the major grocery stores, then I will hypothesize that Loblaw’s is the target largely because Galen Weston is so much in the news. Galen maybe needs to keep a lower profile.

A final note. Crack economist Jagmeet Singh was quoted recently in The National Post as follows: “We know the major driver that is driving up the cost of living is corporate greed….” (ellipsis in the original NP article).

Based on Singh’s deeply insightful analysis, reducing inflation in Canada shold not be hard. Just replace all our corporation heads with the ones that were on the job before 2022, as those folks were clearly not greedy – inflation in all sectors was microscopic back in those good-old days.

Don’t you love simple answers?

 

Fast-food pricing I can’t explain   

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Dining out, London. No Comments on Fast-food pricing I can’t explain   

Time to talk burgers again, folks.

Two facts to start with: One, I almost never eat at fast-food restaurants, and two, I used to teach two different econ courses – Managerial Economics and Industrial Organization – in which I tried to teach students the underlying motivation for a host of different pricing strategies by sellers. The basic lesson was easy: pricing strategies are implemented because they result in higher profits. The interesting part is figuring out why the various pricing strategies could, despite surface appearances, increase a seller’s profits.

A week or so ago I went into the old building to attend a workshop in my old Department from noon to 1, and afterwards, having not managed any breakfast, I was hungry. The student centre just next door has a variety of fast-foody outlets, so, knowing I planned to be around until 5pm to attend another event, I figured I should break my usual no-fast-food habit and go get a burger.

There is an outlet there called The Fixx that sells burgers, poutine and side dishes. I went to their counter and ordered a burger and some fries to take back to my office. I was asked if I wanted a beverage, I said no. When I went to pay, the nice cashier lady looked at my slip and said ‘this is going to cost you more than if you ordered a drink, too, and made it a combo. Do you want to go back and get a drink?’

I said no thanks, seeing no good reason to be induced into consuming things I don’t want. However, assuming the cashier was correct, and she should know, I am struggling to explain this pricing by The Fixx.

I am aware that fast-food outlets love combo pricing, but I assumed that meant that if I ordered the drink with my burger and fries, combo pricing meant that the drink added less to the cost of my meal than the stand-alone price of the same drink. So long as the seller makes any revenue above the cost to them of the drink, this adds to their profits.  Fine, easy-peasy. I get it.

However, the cashier’s statement says that The Fixx makes more money from me if I don’t add the drink to my order: they get more revenue from me, and they save the cost of providing the drink.

How does this combo pricing increase their profits? That is, why do they want to induce me to add a drink to my order with a pricing scheme that earns them more profit if I don’t buy the drink?

One possibility is that this strategy is actually designed to induce me to add an order of fries to a drink-and-burger-only order. I don’t know that the price of a burger and drink is higher than the ‘combo’ price of burger, drink and fries. If not, then the combo pricing may just be targeted at burger-and-drink buyers, and if there are few burger-and-fries buyers like me, that could perhaps still be profitable for the Fixx.

Another possibility lies in the fact that, unlike many of the outlets in the Student Centre food area (e.g. Subway, Starbucks) The Fixx is a UWO-developed food outlet. According to this report from 2018,

“A concept developed in-house, The FIXX prepares burgers made from 100-per-cent Canadian seasoned ground beef – gluten-free and with no fillers, additives or hormones. Located where Harvey’s had been for 21 years, The FIXX is where customers can choose from a variety of toppings including guacamole, pico de gallo, caramelized onions, sautéed mushrooms or even a fried egg.”

So, perhaps the simple explanation is that Hospitality Services at UWO is not interested in profits; rather, they badly want people to drink more fluids. I kinda doubt that, but I have no evidence that it’s not true.

However, if profit-making fast-food outlets do the same kind of combo pricing I experienced at The Fixx, I am back to Square One in looking for an explanation. If anyone can tell me if that is so out there in the wider burger-franchise world, I would appreciate it; as I said, I don’t eat at fast-food restaurants much.

I certainly do not plan to go over to The Fixx again and order just a burger and drink to find out if my first explanation is plausible, either –  which brings me to the second thing I (re)-learned on my burger mission.

Staffing and quality

As the above-quoted Western Snooze piece notes, the burger predecessor to The Fixx in the Student Centre was a franchise outlet of Harvey’s. It, along with the other franchise operations on campus are not like the off-campus franchises in (at least) one important way. They use the company logos and offer (mostly) the same menu as off-campus outlets of each company, but are not staffed by pimply-faced young folk being paid the minimum wage.

When UWO decided many years ago to get rid of most of their own food preparation services and instead have franchises provide food in the Student Centre, they made a deal with the union that represented their own food operations workers. Specifically, that its union members would staff those franchise outlets that opened up on-campus.

So, I presume Harvey’s was paid some percentage of the profits or revenues of the on-campus outlet, along with perhaps an annual fixed fee. However, my long experience on campus indicates that staffing by relatively higher-paid union members results in lower quality food and service than one gets in an off-campus outlet of the same company. The burgers  put out by the Harvey’s on campus were lukewarm and chewy, as were the fries. The reason for this is clear – they cooked the burgers most of the way through, let them sit around in a warming pan, then threw them back on the grill briefly when you ordered one. Similarly, fries were mostly cooked, left lying about, and then thrown back into the fryer when ordered. (My first-ever job was at McDonald’s a hundred years ago, I know how this shit works.) This results in shorter wait times for your order, the need for fewer workers (important), and low-quality food.

This always raised for me the following question: was Harvey’s getting paid sufficiently by the university to compensate it for the bad press it was getting from the crappy food being sold in its student centre operation? These food outlets on campus have a local near monopoly – ‘near’ because there is The Wave, an undergrad restaurant and The Grad Club, which both sell somewhat better (non-franchise) food. However, students, faculty and staff do go out to eat with their families off-campus, and those people could not have a good impression of Harvey’s if they ever get food from the on-campus outlet. That’s like 30,000 opportunities for bad publicity for Harvey’s due to this low-quality on-campus franchise.

The explanation here may simply be that the people who might – unlike me – get a meal at an off-campus Harvey’s location understand that their experience at the on-campus location is not a reliable predictor of what it will be like to eat at an off-campus location. If so, there perhaps isn’t much of a bad reputational effect for the off-campus Harvey’s outlets, but in a market (i.e., franchised restaurants) in which it is said ‘uniformity across outlets’ is all-important, this is still a bit surprising to me.

What is not at all surprising to me is that the burger and fries I got from the in-house The Fixx last week were just as lukewarm and chewy as Harvey’s used to put out. I recognized the woman behind the grill who was mistreating my burger as having performed the same service for the Harvey’s outlet back in the day. No worry about off-campus reputational effects here, there are no off-campus Fixx outlets.

So, same poor-quality food at The Fixx as at its predecessor Harvey’s,  but only The Fixx is willing to pay me to drink pop. I think.

 

Sample-based bullshit

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, Standards. No Comments on Sample-based bullshit

Standards in general, and in academia in particular, are a keen concern of mine, and I will be writing about them frequently here. This post is about an open letter written by a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Regina to the Head of the Department, a letter which he shared in a publication to which I subscribe.

The letter concerns an email sent to all CS students and faculty at UR on August 30, 2023, in which the following sentence appears – “In an effort to provide timely feedback on student work, some of our courses will be moving to a sample-based marking approach.”

The email goes on to explain what that means – that when a student turns in an assignment or test, not all of it will be marked. The parts to be marked will not be revealed until after the marked work has been returned to the students, and their grade will be determined only by that which is marked. So if a test consists of 6 problems, perhaps only three will be marked and feedback provided; the same three for all students.

The reason given for this is the increase in the size of CS classes, driven in turn by an increase in the number of CS majors, said to be nearly 1000 in the email.

The faculty member wrote his open letter to the Head of his Department (Computer Science) decrying this new grading approach, and explaining why he thought it would lead to a decline in academic standards.

I will first just record here that ‘sample-based marking’ as described, is in itself a reduction in academic standards. When I taught at University my assignments and tests were conceived as a whole, different parts of it designed to test different parts of the material, but also different abilities. Some questions could not be answered well without having the ability to write clearly and concisely about something complex, while other questions were designed to test one’s ability to deal with more formal logical or technical issues. To mark or provide feedback on only some aspects of the work is to ignore some part of what the course is about.

I understand well that the idea behind this is that, because the students don’t know up-front which parts of their work will be marked, they still have an incentive to work hard learning all of it. This does not change the fact they will get no feedback on some of their work, a primary point of marking. But in addition, anyone who knows students knows this will lead to a cottage industry in figuring out which parts of work any given instructor is likely to mark, which is not in any way part of what higher education is supposed to teach students.

This policy is, in the end, a further piece of evidence as to what University administrators’ goal is. Get as many students through to a degree as possible, at as low a cost as possible. So far as I can tell, their political masters in Canada are perfectly in agreement with this goal.

This is why sample-based marking is being implemented, rather than the solution suggested by the CS faculty member who objected to it; hiring more faculty to accommodate the growing number of students. Faculty are expensive. And, note that the letter did not indicate that CS students would be seeing a discount on their tuition bill to accompany this sample-based marking initiative.

Imagine a McDonald’s franchise-holder, or local restauranteur, who found themselves with a (delightful) increase in patronage, and responded by filling only part of all food orders, rather than hiring more workers, while charging for everything ordered.

One final note. The original email laying out how this scheme is envisioned working at UR also says that the parts of any student work that are not marked will none the less have solutions posted for the non-marked parts, or they will be gone over in class so as to provide students with the correct solutions. So, there’s your all-around feedback, eh?

Right. In a university atmosphere in which students feel free – indeed, are encouraged – to argue for higher marks for most any reason they can think up, this will open up a whole new area of student appeals. To wit: “ I got the parts of the exam you did not mark nearly perfect, according to your own solution key, so I deserve much more than the 63 I received, which is based solely on the parts you did mark.”…followed by the ever-popular ‘This isn’t fair.’

 

 

Ask Yourself: Do I Feel Lucky? Well, do you…..?

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in News Media, Research. No Comments on Ask Yourself: Do I Feel Lucky? Well, do you…..?

 

Bad luck and trouble, two of my best friends – Sam (Lightnin’) Hopkins/Mack McCormick

You can spend a lot of time reading about things that seem social sciencey, but are in fact pure politics. One example of what I’m talking about is the following non-question: what matters more in life, luck or talent?

It’s not a scientific question because 1) luck is impossible to measure, 2) talent is only measured approximately, at best, and 3) there is no scale on which one can put a life to decide the ‘more’ part of the question.

However, political types, by which I mean politicians, advocates, activists and ‘experts’ are happy to go on and on about which matters more, and they are all quite sure they know the answer.

An Opinion piece showed up in the Feb 21 Report on Business section of the Globe on this non-question, titled Rich and successful? It’s likely you’re just lucky. Written by Mark Rank, said to be a Professor of Social Welfare at Washington University in St Louis, the piece is labelled as being ‘Special to the Globe and Mail’, which I think just means that Rank is not on the staff of the Globe.

It was a very annoying article.

Let me explain.

In his piece Rank weighs in on the side of luck in this debate, and I’m not writing to argue against that position; as I wrote, it’s a pointless argument. I’m writing because Rank badly mis-characterizes a piece of academic research in supporting his position. He writes:

“Take the case of who becomes wealthy and who experiences poverty. It turns out that the random factor is very much in play. In a fascinating research article titled Talent Versus Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure, mathematical physicist Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues were able to empirically quantify the relative importance of talent versus luck in terms of acquiring great wealth over a 40-year working-age lifespan. What they found was that the most talented people almost never reached the peaks of economic success – rather, the ones most likely to achieve the pinnacle of wealth were those with more average talents but who happened to catch a couple of lucky breaks.”

Before I explain what is wrong here, I doff my hat to Professor Rank for apparently citing some actual research, and for including in his article a link to the paper he is citing. That happens all too rarely.

The above paragraph makes the research of Pluchino and colleagues seem like it is about real people, living ’40-year working-age lifespan(s)’, right? And, it seems that for these ‘people’ it turned out that the ‘most talented people’ were not generally the ones to achieve ‘the pinnacle of wealth’. Rather it was those people with good luck who did well.

That could hardly be further from the truth of what the Puchino article does.

To start with, his statement that Pluchino and colleagues “…were able to empirically quantify the relative importance of talent versus luck…” is flat out wrong. The adjective ‘empirically’ says that they observed people and recorded what they observed to support their ‘luck matters more than talent’ claim. [Merriam Webster – empiric: capable of being verified or disproved by observation or experiment; originating in or based on observation or experience.] They observed no one, they gathered no data about anybody.

In fact, what the Pluchino et al paper does is report on the construction of a mathematical model, in which the authors interpret their purely mathematical result as demonstrating that luck matters more than talent.

However, none of this ‘talent’ they write about is embodied or observed in actual people, nor do they observe the amount of good or bad luck that any real people experience.

Puchino and friends build a model in which the ‘people’ are theoretical entities who do nothing. In the model they are assigned varying levels of theoretical talent by the researchers, and then they are bombarded with theoretical good or bad luck. They do not respond to what happens to them in any way. In fact, in the model, they are not allowed to make any decisions or take any actions – they are automatons. The researchers give these automatons varying levels of ‘talent’, but the same ‘wealth’ (also theoretical) to start out with, then run them through forty fictitious instances of good or bad luck. Having performed those mathematical operations, they observe how much wealth each automaton ends up with. (These forty hits of theoretical good or bad luck is what Rank refers to as a ’40-year working life span’. No one works in the model, either – good or bad things just happen to them. 40 times.)

In addition to this, there is no interaction between the various fictitious automatons. What happens to automaton no. 12 has no influence on, nor is it influenced by, what happens to any other automaton. You know, just like in the real world, where people go through their lives in perfect isolation.

I repeat, there is no actual data about anything collected or observed by these researchers. Thus, there is nothing whatsoever ‘empirical’ about this research, and I leave it to you to consider what this fictitious world of automatons might tell us about luck vs talent out in the real (empirical) world. (Note that because the automatons don’t do anything, the role of diligence, effort, or good decision-making doesn’t have even a theoretical place in this research.)

Puchino and company do discuss other research papers they say provide evidence that luck matters more than other things. These other papers are duly referenced, and the interested reader can go read them and judge for themselves how convincing any of them are. I have not done so, and there is no indication Rank has, either.

The point here is that Puchino and his colleagues provide no empirical evidence that luck matters more than talent, only that it does in their theoretical model, and Rank is wrong to say they do. Professor Rank has mis-used their research in trying to support his own view on this matter in his op-ed column. As a Professor of Social Welfare, I am not surprised that Rank believes luck matters more than talent, but there is no evidence in his article or the Puchino paper to support that view.

Sadly, academics tend to believe that any press is good press, so I doubt Puchino and friends are upset by Rank’s complete misrepresentation of their research in his article.

I was.

 

That Unfriendly Law Thing

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, LBOs. No Comments on That Unfriendly Law Thing

Over lunch one day, a friend of mine said to another friend of mine – ‘The law is not your friend’. I am not always in agreement with Friend 1, but in this case I could only say ‘Amen’.

But never mind what I say, the Globe and Mail featured a story on April 12 titled:

 ‘Foreign landlord fails to pay taxes, CRA goes after tenant’

that is eloquent as hell on this very topic.

The story is as appalling as it is instructive. A tenant in Montreal had a landlord who was an Italian resident for tax purposes, and that landlord did not pay the Canadian income taxes owed on the rents he received from said tenant. If ya earned it in Canada, ya gets taxed in Canada. The CRA, noble institution that it is, told the tenant he was on the hook for the unpaid taxes, because he was supposed to withhold 25% of his rent for that purpose. You know, just like you do when you pay those Swedes at Ikea for that sofa you purchased, or pay for that pack of Slim Jims at Mr Kim’s Convenience.

The tenant took the CRA to court over this – Tax Court, natch – and lost.

Here’s my favourite part. Really. Quoting directly from the Globe article, now –

The judge acknowledged “the harsh consequences,” in her decision, but still held the “resident payer,” or renter, liable.

The tenant’s lawyer pointed out that there was no reasonable way for the tenant to even know his landlord was not a Canadian resident for tax purposes. That, of course, was deemed to be no excuse.

My second favourite part is the last line of the G&M piece on this:

The CRA did not respond to requests to comment.

Really? No comment?

However, I am not kidding about my ‘favourite part’, as the judge’s attitude is a perfect illustration of The Central Fact about Large Bureaucratic Organizations (LBOs) – and our legal system is one Really Large BO. Those who are in such an org can always justify to themselves and to the world treating people in any way that is consistent with The Rules of the Org, however inhumane such treatment may be.

The judge could acknowledge harshness, could even shed a tear, perhaps, but, ya know – the law is the law. And, as my friend said, it is not your friend.

 

Following the Hot Hand of Science

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Research, Standards. No Comments on Following the Hot Hand of Science

Anyone vaguely familiar with basketball has heard of the ‘hot hand’ phenomenon. Someone on the team gets a hot shooting streak going, they can’t seem to miss, and their teammates start looking to get the hot-handed player the ball. I played backyard hoops a lot in my youth, and there were (very few) times when it happened to me; every shot I threw up seemed to go in – briefly.

Well, academics got wind of this long ago also, and decided to investigate whether there was anything to it. Yea, sure, players talk about experiencing it, or seeing it, but it could easily be just a matter of perception, something that would disappear into the ether once subjected to hard-nosed observation and statistical analysis.

The canonical paper to do this analysis was published in 1985 in Cognitive Psychology, authored by Gilovich, Tallone and Tversky. The last of this trio, Amos Tversky, was a sufficiently notable scholar that young economists like me were told to read some of his work back in the day. He died young, age 59, in 1996, six years before his frequent co-researcher, Daniel Kahnemann, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. The work the Nobel committee cited in awarding the prize to Kahnemann was mostly done with Tversky, so there is little doubt Tversky would have shared the prize had he lived long enough, but Nobels are, by rule, not given to the dead.

Now, as a research question, looking for a basketball hot hand is in many ways ideal: the trio used data on shots made and missed by players in the NBA, which tracks such data very carefully, and beyond that, they did their own controlled experiment, putting the Cornell basketball teams to work taking shots, and recording the results. Good data is everything in social science, and the data doesn’t get much better than that. Well, bear with me here, this is most of the Abstract of that 1985 paper:

“Basketball players and fans alike tend to believe that a player’s chance of hitting a shot are greater following a hit than following a miss on the previous shot. However, detailed analyses of the shooting records of the Philadelphia 76ers provided no evidence for a positive correlation between the outcomes of successive shots. The same conclusions emerged from free-throw records of the Boston Celtics, and from a controlled shooting experiment with the men and women of Cornell’s varsity teams. The outcomes of previous shots influenced Cornell players’ predictions but not their performance. The belief in the hot hand and the “detection” of streaks in random sequences is attributed to a general misconception of chance according to which even short random sequences are thought to be highly representative of their generating process.”

That is, a player who hits a shot expects he is likely to hit the next one, too. When he does, he files this away as ‘having a hot hand’, but the actual frequency with which he hits the second shot is not actually higher than when he had missed his previous shot. Standard ‘cognitive bias’ causes the player – and fans – to see it that way, that’s all. They remember when the second shot is made more than they remember it being missed.

Damn scientists are always messing with our hopes and dreams, right? No Easter Bunny, no extra-terrestrials in Mississauga, and no hot hand. Is nothing sacred?  Other researchers went looking for evidence of a hot hand over the ensuing years, but it became known in academic circles as ‘the hot hand fallacy’, the general consensus being that it did not exist in the real world of basketball.

33 years later

But wait, it’s now 2018 and a paper by Miller and Sanjurjo appears in Econometrica, the premier journal for economic analysis involving probability and/or statistics. It’s title is “Surprised by the hot-hand fallacy? A truth in the law of small numbers”

Here’s some of what their Abstract says:

We prove that a subtle but substantial bias exists in a common measure of the conditional dependence of present outcomes on streaks of past outcomes in sequential data…. We observe that the canonical study [that is, Gilovich, Tallone and Tversky] in the influential hot hand fallacy literature, along with replications, are vulnerable to the bias. Upon correcting for the bias, we find that the longstanding conclusions of the canonical study are reversed.

It took over 30 years for two economists to figure out that ‘the canonical study’ of the hot hand did its ciphering wrong, and that once this is corrected, it’s findings are not just no longer true, they are reversed. The data collected in 1985 do provide evidence of the existence of a hot hand.

Think about this. In 1985 some very clever academics showed there was no such thing as a hot hand in the real world of basketball, and the academics who peer-reviewed their work agreed with them. Thirty-plus years later, some other clever academics realized that first set had gotten something wrong, and that fixing it reversed the previous findings – and the academics who peer-reviewed their work agreed with them.

Ain’t social science wonderful? A question for which there is excellent data, a situation rarer than hen’s teeth in social science, is investigated and a conclusive answer arrived at, and thirty years later that answer is shown to be not just wrong but backwards.

No one did anything shady here. There was no messing with data, the 2018 guys used the same data used in 1985. A mistake, a subtle but significant mistake, accounts for the turnaround, and it took 33 years to discover it. One can hardly blame the 1985 researchers for not seeing the mistake, given that no one else did for such a long time.

The Lesson?

So, in case my point is not yet obvious, science is not a set of settled facts. Those do exist – sort of – but anyone who understands the process of science even a little understands that settled facts are settled only until they are overturned. And if that is true for such a clean research question as an investigation of a basketball hot hand, think about a more typical social science question in which two things are almost always true. One, the data is not at all what the researchers need, so they make do with what they can actually gather. Two, the right way to analyze that data – among endless possibilities – is a matter of disagreement among respectable social scientists. Following that kinda science will make you dizzy, my friends.

A teaser: think about this social scientific question. It is arguably of more importance than basketball shooting.

Does the availability of bricks-and-mortar adult entertainment establishments have a positive, negative, or no effect on the commission of sex crimes in the surrounding neighborhood?

Whaddya think is the right answer?

For extra credit: what kind of data would a researcher need to gather to answer that question?

Now that’s real (i.e., messy) social science.

Stay tuned, because a couple of economists set out to investigate the question above, and I’ll have a go at what they did and their findings in a future post.

 

 

Streaming service warnings, or…..huh?

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, Language, Standards. No Comments on Streaming service warnings, or…..huh?

A pervasive feature of the 21st century in North America is the deterioration in the quality of written language. Words with a quite precise meanings, like ‘phone’, ‘mail’, ‘email’ and ‘text’ get replaced with the coverall ‘reach out’.

I have access to exactly one internet streaming service, and it provides one of the more amusing examples of language abuse in the warnings it attaches to the previews of the films that one can watch on it.

Now, some of these warnings are easily understandable: Nudity, Sex, Violence – the Classics. Attaching any of these to the preview of a film is particularly useful to any teens or pre-teens who live in the household. I have experience from an earlier era. In my pre-teen years my good Polish Catholic parents subscribed to The Catholic Chronicle, a weekly paper put out by the local diocese. This featured a lot of boring stuff I never read, but it also provided ratings of all the movies that would be shown that week on the 5 or 6 TV stations available in our town. Those ratings told me which channel to put on when I stayed up past my parents’ bedtime on Friday or Saturday night. I was most grateful to the Bishop for this service, even though nothing on TV in that era was actually all that scandalous. It doesn’t really take much to get a 12-year-old boy excited.

However, contemporary warning words beyond that Big Three are rather more mysterious to me.

One warning is Language. Not Profanity, not Cussin’, not even Bad Language, just – Language. That seems to suggest that the characters in the film are going to talk, but there is also another warning of Pervasive Language. I suppose it is useful for some people to know there will be a lot of talking, so they should pause the stream if they have to go to the bathroom.

There is also a warning for Smoking, which I presume is due to our enlightened age realizing that all it takes is for some young’n to see someone smoking in a film to provoke them to go out and steal some smokes and try it themselves.

However, there is also a distinct warning about Historical Smoking. Clearly this would be attached to a film set in the past in which people smoke. What is not clear to me is whether the distinction is made because seeing past smoking is more or less harmful than seeing current smoking. Whichever way it is, why is there not then a warning about Historical Nudity (Adam and Eve?) or Historical Violence (Conan the Barbarian?) or, really – Historical Sex; you know, before people knew how to do it right like we do.

Undoubtedly, the biggest mystery to me is when a film preview comes with this warning:

Some Thematic Elements

Whatever in the hell does that mean? I can’t even make a joke about it.

One might think that, whatever the environment, posting a warning whose meaning is unclear would be a terrible idea. Do we want Environment Canada putting out Alerts that say Something Might be Coming? [I admit, EnvCan’s Special Weather Statements are pretty close to that.]

However, here in the 21st century, when offence lurks around every corner, it may be that posting a warning on a film the meaning of which no one understands has value.

Consider this scenario – a subscriber phones up or texts the customer service dept of the service.

Subscriber: “Hey that movie had a blonde-haired woman chasing a blue aardvark around with a flyswatter, that was appalling, I had no idea me and the kids  would be exposed to that. What is wrong with you people?”

Customer Service: “Ah, but Madam, we did make it clear the movie contained Some Thematic Elements.”

Who needs experts – and who needs Al?

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in News Media, Research. No Comments on Who needs experts – and who needs Al?

I had planned to follow up my post on the Freeps printing a ‘news’ article in which the only news was a set of comments by one person (link), with one on the use of ‘experts’ in media more generally. Before I could, a regular reader pointed me at a piece in a site called The Hub that covered the same ground. Having read Howard Anglin’s piece carefully, and enjoyed it much, I’ve decided the best thing for me to do is just provide my own readers with a link to it (link).

I can’t see me writing anything better than he did….at least not yet.

Op-Eds in News Clothing

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in London, News Media. 1 Comment on Op-Eds in News Clothing

In the mainstream news media, it has long been common practice to distinguish between articles that are reporting news and opinion pieces. However, something that I see turning up with increasing frequency in news outlets are articles that are not labelled as Opinion, but are in fact mostly that. An example of this came up last year in the local London Free Press (aka The Freeps).

The article is titled “Western accused of trying to push aside women’s hockey concerns”, which appeared on page A2 of the Nov 11, 2023 paper edition of the Freeps that landed on my porch that morning. The byline is Jane Sims, a regular reporter for the Freeps.

The story out there in the world that this article refers to is the fact that the UWO women’s hockey team went through a kerfuffle involving the University’s strength-training coach (who worked with all the university’s athletes, apparently) and the team’s own coach. There was an investigation which resulted in the strength coach being dismissed but the coach of the hockey team staying on. Reports in previous editions of the Freeps indicated that not all of the hockey team players were happy with this outcome. This article of Nov 11 occupies 24 column-inches in this edition of the Freeps, making it the longest article in the paper’s Section A not covering some aspect of Remembrance Day. There is some re-stating of what had happened previously in the matter, some other material (e.g., that about 20 players were on the ice for the last practice) that may be new to readers, but what is undoubtedly new in the article is a series of quotes from Garrett Holmes, who is said to be the founder of The Canadian Student-Athlete Association. The website for this organization states the following:

The Canadian Student-Athlete Association is a non profit unincorporated association founded by Western University student-athlete Garrett Holmes on July 20, 2020.   

It serves as the only independent voice for Canadian university and college athletes. 

The article notes that Holmes had written two letters to the UWO president criticizing the university’s handling of this matter, and quotes him repeatedly.

I am citing this article not because I find what Holmes has to say about all this objectionable, but because the article is presented as news, when in fact it is to all intents and purposes an opinion piece that presents the opinions of one person regarding this matter – Garrett Holmes. There is nothing in the article to suggest that Holmes has any more information about what happened than would anyone else who had been reading about it in the Freeps. He has not interviewed anyone at Western so far as we know, nor has he any inside information not available to others. He has an opinion about what happened, as might you, but you didn’t get quoted in the Freeps. The Freeps simply inserts his opinions – and no one else’s – into what is supposed to be a news article. Indeed, the article headline – not typically written by the reporter – suggests that Mr. Holmes’ views about what happened are the entire point of the story.

So I ask, why Mr Holmes’ views, and his views only? Did Ms Sims contact anyone else to get their, possibly differing, views? Did she contact the UWO Prez, or John Doerksen, or the coach herself, or any players? Is there something about Mr. Holmes that makes him uniquely qualified to have his views aired in London’s only newspaper?  He is indeed the founder of the CSAA, and you can visit that org’s website here (link). It lists Mr Holmes as founder, has some info about him, and you can also read there its two-page constitution, and note that it’s Board of Directors is ‘coming soon’ – just as it has been since the Freeps article appeared last year. The constitution’s last line is “This constitution may only be amended by a unanimous vote of the Board.”

There is a larger point here, that ‘news’ articles in many outlets include a lot of what is said or written by ‘advocates’, ‘activists’ and ‘experts’ . If Mr Holmes is an ‘expert’, the standards for that designation by the Freeps seem kinda low to me.

Moreover, if a media outlet is going to quote such people, the outlet has to choose which of the many available ‘experts’ to quote, and doing so necessarily inserts what are most typically no more than opinions into a news article.

By the usual conventions, this article is news rather than opinion because it does not include the opinions of Ms Sims, or anyone else who works for the Freeps, such as the Editorial Board. But quoting one and only one other person’s opinions moves the article into opinion none the less, in my view. Consider that if she wanted, Ms Sims could insert her opinions into any article just by finding an ‘expert’ or ‘advocate’ whose opinions she shares and quoting only them. I’m not saying this is what happened here, but still, this news story is really mostly opinion, because it mostly ‘reports’ the comments of one person.

One response to this might be – ‘Really, all you’re complaining about is the Freeps being a bit hazy about the line between news and opinion? People can tell the difference between the facts reported in the article and Holmes’ opinions. No big deal, get over it.’

I think it’s a deal. Why did the Freep do this? Why did they not just report on the latest developments in the matter, and leave any comments from Mr Holmes or others to the Op-Ed page? There are always many motives that can be dreamt up to explain any behavior you might observe, but I will hypothesize a particular one in this case.

News media outlets, and the Freeps in particular, want controversy in their news stories, they want to report that people are upset, outraged, deeply concerned, that they are ‘calling out’ other people. Mr Holmes’ comments got in the article, on my hypothesis, because he accuses the university of treating the athletes badly. He is quoted ‘I think it’s clear that some players, if not all, don’t feel it’s a safe environment….’(ellipsis in the original)*.  Mr Holmes cites safety concerns, and that is the great contemporary trigger – there is nothing worse you can accuse a person of in the 21st century than being unconcerned about safety. However Ms Sims came to know about Mr. Holmes and his views, I’m betting that he would have found himself ignored and un-quoted had he commended the UWO admin for its actions in this matter.

*(pseudo-footnote): I would never let my students back in the day get away with a sentence that starts with ‘I think it’s clear that….’ – a topic for another post.

 

Surge Pricing Burgers and the Importance of Reading the Whole Post

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, News Media. No Comments on Surge Pricing Burgers and the Importance of Reading the Whole Post

Wendy, Wendy what went wrong? – Brian Wilson and Mike Love

Some weeks back a news story made the rounds that Wendy’s CEO had announced in a call with investors that the company was planning to institute ‘surge pricing’ in its restaurants. You can read a somewhat outraged story about it in the NY Post here, if you missed it. Surge pricing in this case would mean that what you pay for items on their menu would vary with the time of day, as does the amount of business at Wendy’s – busy times would see higher prices. The technology to do this is the installation of menu boards at the drive-thrus on which prices could be changed electronically whenever desired. Presumably the same would be true for the in-store menu boards, also.

Anyway, this generated a mostly predictable amount of outrage from mostly predictable quarters, but I am writing about this not because of the pricing itself, or the outrage, but rather about what happened next. On February 28 the Globe ran an Associated Press article with the headline “Wendy’s says it has no plans to raise prices at busiest times at its restaurants”. Similarly, CNN’s website (a place I rarely go) ran an article on Feb 28 titled “Wendy’s says it won’t use surge pricing’.

To its credit, CNN also provided a link to the blog post in which Wendy’s supposedly backtracked from its CEO’s original statement to investors about this. You can read that post here also, if you like.

However, what convinced me this was worth writing about myself, was an Opinion article that appeared in my print edition of The Globe and was headed up thusly:

Surge pricing for burgers? Wendy’s was wise to reject it

Woonghee Tim Huh and Steven Shechter

Special to The Globe and Mail – Feb 29, 2024

Woonghee Tim Huh is professor and chair of the operations and logistics division at the UBC Sauder School of Business and the Canada Research Chair in operations excellence and business analytics.

Steven Shechter is a professor in the operations and logistics division at the UBC Sauder School of Business and the WJ VanDusen Professor of business administration.

****

You can read the online version of this Globe article here. In it, the UBC guys explain, sort-of, why it was wise of Wendy’s to back off from their original surge pricing plan.

No doubt Bus School profs have superior insight into firm pricing than do I, but it seems to me that it behooves all of us to read what the firm in question has to say about what they are doing before analysing what they are doing. Professors Huh and Shechter do quote from Wendy’s ‘backtracking’ blog post, in the paragraph below, quoted directly from the Profs’ G&M article:

So, on Wednesday, Wendy’s said its dynamic pricing plan would not raise prices during busy times. The plan, the company said, would only “allow us to change the menu offerings at different times of day and offer discounts and value offers.”

Point one: learn to use ellipsis if you only quote part of a sentence. Here is the full sentence from the actual Wendy’s blog from which the good Professors’ partial quote is taken:

“Digital menuboards could allow us to change the menu offerings at different times of day and offer discounts and value offers to our customers more easily, particularly in the slower times of day.”

Point two: everything that is important about the actual sentence posted by Wendy’s is the underlined part of it at the end which the Professors left out of their own quote. Had they included it, they might have felt compelled to explain how ‘raising prices during peak times’ differs from ‘offering discounts during slower times of day’, and that would be a truly difficult task, because there is no difference.

Back when I taught price discrimination strategies in my Managerial Econ class, I would start with something familiar to everyone – Seniors pricing. You know, you walk into the movie theatre and find something that looks like this:

Admission: $15.00

Seniors (55+): $12.00

(Sidebar: I would ask my students why so many businesses offer lower prices to seniors, and get lots of responses about corporate altruism and Seniors being on fixed incomes. It was fun then to show them that this pricing increased profits for the firms, no altruism needed.)

But I digress.

My point is that one does not see this sign in a theatre:

Admission: $12.00

Under 55: $15.00

There is no bloody difference in the price anyone pays for a theatre ticket with the two different signs, but the second one just seems so mean, while the first one seems nice.

Well, it’s the same with Wendy’s pricing: offering discounts at slow times seems nice, adding a premium when it’s busy, well that’s just mean, and Wendy’s would never do that. They said so, after all.

Minor point: If Wendy’s actually had, in some alternate universe, backtracked from surge pricing, I can’t say there is anything in the Sauder School authored Globe article that convinced me that backtracking would have been wise, the headline notwithstanding. However, since Wendy’s did not backtrack, that point seems not worth pursuing.

Not so minor point: Since it is clear from their own blog post that Wendy’s is going to install these quick-price-change menu boards, the following scenario becomes possible. The drive-thrus already have cameras focused on the cars in the queue, so it would be easy to build a data base of licence plate numbers at each store, or even across stores, so the store could determine, for example, how regular a customer they were serving. If Wendy’s corporate strategists have kept up with what goes on at insurance companies, they could then program their menu boards to show higher prices to frequent drive-thru-diners.

I used to teach students about that sort of ‘disloyalty pricing’, too, because insurance companies do employ it – they call it ‘price optimization’, and last I read, some US States were trying to ban it.

Shattering illusions, that was always my mission.

Coda: Before this post went to press, the WSJ published another article on surge pricing and other restaurant strategies. A quote from that article:

While some consumers tend to resent surge pricing, as Wendy’s discovered last month, they like happy-hour discounts and other deals at slow times, industry consultants said.

Whatever would the world do without industry consultants?

 

Attitudes on Peace, Order and Citizens’ Rights

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media, Popular attitudes. No Comments on Attitudes on Peace, Order and Citizens’ Rights

At this point I have lived 63% of my life in Canada (nearly 81% of my adult life), but I was born in the US of A. It is common among my friends – wherever they were born – to argue about the differences, or lack thereof, between Americans and Canadians. Like all general comparisons, they are at best approximations, and not very precise ones, at that. Still, it’s a generally amusing exercise, and it gives us all something to argue about over beer.

However, sometimes things pop up on my radar that seem like they might reveal something useful about such differences. One example appeared in a letter to the Editor of the Globe and Mail just after the Federal court ruling that the Liberal Government of the time was not justified in invoking the Emergencies Act during the trucker convoy protest in Ottawa. It’s hardly surprising that this decision prompted a lot of folks to write to the G&M, but the letter below caught my attention –

Letter to the Editor, G&M print edition, Jan 25, 2024

Re: “Invoking Emergencies Act wasn’t justified and infringed on Charter rights, Federal Court rules” (Jan 24).

Really? What is wrong with this country?

We watched as a collection of bullies occupied Ottawa, breaking parking and noise bylaws and generally being inconsiderate to the local inhabitants. The federal government is now being censured for its decision, which solved the problem with no blood spilled.

We as polite Canadians seem to be at the mercy of individuals who claim that their right to cause mayhem trumps our right to peace, order and good government.

Signed, etc.

—

I immediately wrote a (sarcastic, I admit) reply to this letter and sent it to the G&M Editors, which of course they did not print. I mean, really – the three sins of the protesters you can name are breaking parking and noise by-laws and being inconsiderate, and that to you is sufficient grounds for the government to invoke the Emergencies Act and start demanding banks turn over account information? Really?

I suspect if you asked 100 Canadians and 100 Americans whether they agreed with the letter-writer’s position, you would get a higher percentage agreeing among the Canadians than among Americans, but I’m not confident that the difference would be all that large. My suspicion is that 21st-century citizens of all the advanced democracies are on average more concerned with peace and order than with any threat to their rights as citizens. That is, to be sure, no more than a hunch, based on being on the planet a long time. If anyone knows of good research on Can-Am differences in attitudes about such matters, I would love to get references.

Young, Rogan and the Cost of Principles

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Popular attitudes, Standards. No Comments on Young, Rogan and the Cost of Principles

Came across an article in the Wall Street Journal last month headlined as:

Neil Young Will Return to Spotify After Two-Year Boycott Over Joe Rogan

Singer-songwriter says he had no choice but to return to streaming platform due to wider distribution of Rogan’s podcast

March 13, 2024 Gareth Vipers

For you non-WSJ subscribers who may have forgotten what this is all about, here’s a quote from the WSJ piece:

Young penned an open letter to his manager and label in 2022 asking them to remove his music from the platform, saying it was spreading fake information about Covid-19 vaccines through Rogan’s show.

The article explains that in fact, “…Young’s label legally has control over how and where his music is distributed…” but Vipers claims that they had reason to honor his request. The piece does not say if they actually did, and if they did not, then this would seem to have been a rather empty gesture on ol’ Neil’s part.

Anyway, the point of this piece was that Rogan had since 2022 made a very lucrative deal to have his podcast more widely streamed, including on Apple and Amazon, and in light of that, Young was going to start letting his musical recordings be distributed on Spotify again. [I am inferring from that piece of info that Warner Bros did indeed pull his stuff from Spotify in ’22.]

I am a fan of Young’s music. Hearing Cinnamon Girl blasting out of a pair of car speakers was one of the great thrills of my youth, and one of the few truly wonderful musical moments on the old Saturday Night Live show was when Young and Crazy Horse brought down the house with a searing version of Rockin’ in The Free World. The man was a serious rocker, and he wrote some great songs.

One of my favourite Neil Young moments was in 1988, when he put out an album titled This Note’s for You. It was a blast at other musicians who allow their music to be used to sell shit. One of my (admittedly costless to hold) convictions is that musicians (or actors or other performers) who have made serious money in their career and then allow their output or their selves to be used to sell shit – any shit – are putzes who I wouldn’t trust if I ever ran into them.

As one example, I was depressed a couple of years ago to hear the Who’s Eminence Front – one of their best recordings – being used to sell Nissans. From the movies we have Samuel L Jackson, Danny DeVito, Rob Lowe, Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner and on and on….one sees them more often in ads than in movies.

[I would like to think there is a special place in hell for celebs who accept money to promote online gambling sites – Gretzky, McDavid, Matthews, Jamie Foxx, etc. But I’m sure there’s not.]

These people are not needy. I’m an economist, I get it, no one thinks they have enough money, but I happen to think there ought to be some things one will not do for more. And no, I am not saying that celebrities or people with more wealth than some specified number should be prohibited from selling other people’s shit. They all have a perfect right to do what they are doing. I’m really only saying I think less of them for doing it –  which troubles them not the least, I know.

So back to ol’ Neil. His original move to pull his music from Spotify had two characteristics. One, it harmed Spotify – maybe. Spotify operates a subscription model in which folks pay a monthly fee for the right to listen to music from its catalog, including Young’s. So, it would appear that Young’s move hurt Spotify only to the extent to which people cancelled their Spotify plans, either out of sympathy with Young, or simply because they would no longer be able to listen to his tunes on the platform. I don’t know if that happened (though I rather doubt it), but more important to me is the second characteristic, which is that Young paid a price himself for doing that. He lost his share of that revenue, too, and about that there is no doubt. To me, that speaks to a level of integrity in Young. I don’t mean to say I agree with Young’s apparent position that Rogan is evil. I’ve never listened to one of Rogan’s podcasts, and don’t know what was said on them that upset Young. My point is only that incurring a cost yourself over a principle signals integrity. Anyone can run around bashing others, imposing costs on others, people can do that just for amusement. Taking a hit yourself says something, it says you mean it. Similarly, Young’s apparent past refusal to let his music be used to sell shit cost him real $. Someone would surely have paid him to use his music to sell cinnamon or something, back in the day.

Of course, the corollary to all this is that Neil could have reacted to the recent news of the now-wider distribution of Rogan’s podcast by asking Warner Bros to pull his music from Amazon and Apple, too. That would be even more costly to Young, and would leave me even more impressed with his integrity and commitment. What he has actually done by, according to the article, allowing his music back on Spotify (along with leaving it on the other platforms) says to this observer that Young was not willing to pay that high a price for his principles.

And, to be clear, in ‘price’ I am not pointing only to the money he would lose from streaming payments. He’s a musician, composer and performer, and having people hear his music has been his life’s work. Losing that is a serious price to pay, even were no cash involved.

I judge Neil Young not, and I still thank him for putting out the This Note’s for You album and writing and recording Cinnamon Girl. I merely point out that everything has a price, and we all have to decide which prices we will pay and which we will not, and I continue to believe that those who pay a price to adhere to a principle deserve my respect, if not necessarily my agreement. And – those who have made millions, become famous and then go on to accept money to sell other people’s shit deserve my contempt.

Btw, if I’m right that Young’s original move in 2022 cost Spotify nothing, it raises another question: what was ol ‘Neil trying to accomplish? Topic for another post, perhaps.

 

Sci-fi in aid of Science

Written by Editorial Team on . Posted in Education, Research, Standards. 1 Comment on Sci-fi in aid of Science

I was a pretty big fan of science fiction in my younger days, and still read some from time to time. I think Frank Herbert’s  Dune is a great novel (the sequels not so much), enjoyed reading works by Heinlein, Le Guin and Asimov.. 

One of the genre’s leading lights back then was Arthur C Clarke, who wrote the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey (in 1982) [not true, see below] on which the film was based. I was not a Clarke fan, don’t remember that I read any of his stuff. However, he made an interesting contribution to the culture beyond his books themselves, when he formulated three ‘laws’ regarding technology that have come to be known as Clarke’s Laws. He didn’t proclaim these all at once, and in any case it is the third law that is most cited, which so far as I can determine first appeared in a letter he wrote to Science in 1968. [If anyone has better info on the third law’s original appearance and antecedents I’d love to hear it.]

Clarke’s Third Law is: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’

That strikes me – and many others, apparently – as a perceptive statement. Think of how someone living in 1682 anywhere in the world would regard television or radio. 

As with any perceptive and oft-repeated assertion,  this prompted others to lay down similar edicts, such as Grey’s Law: “Any sufficiently egregious incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”

[I cannot trace Grey’s law back to anyone named Grey – if you can, let me know.]

Note that there is a difference, as Clarke’s law speaks to how something will be perceived, whereas Grey’s points at the consequences of incompetence vs malice. If you are denied a mortgage by a bank despite your stellar credit rating, the impact on you of that decision does not depend on whether it is attributable to the credit officer’s incompetence or dislike of you. 

On to Science, then, and what I will call Gelman’s Law (although Gelman himself does not refer to it that way). 

Most non-academics I know view academics and their research with a somewhat rosy glow. If someone with letters after their name writes something, and particularly if they write it in an academic journal, they believe it. 

It does nothing to increase my popularity with my friends to repeatedly tell them: it ain’t so. There is a lot of crappy (a technical academic term, I will elaborate in future posts) research being done, and a lot of crappy research being published, even in peer-reviewed journals. What is worse is that as far as I can tell, the credible research is almost never the stuff that gets written up in the media. Some version of Gresham’s Law [‘bad money drives out good money’] seems to be at work here. 

A blog that I read regularly is titled Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference and Social Science (gripping title, eh?), written by Andrew Gelman, a Political Science and Stats prof at Columbia U. I recommend it to you, but warn that you better have your geek hard-hat on for many of the posts. 

Although I often disagree with Gelman, he generally writes well and I have learned tons from his blog. One of the things that has endeared it to me is his ongoing campaign against academic fraud and incompetent research. 

He has formulated a Law of his own, which he modestly attributes to Clarke, but which I will here dub Gelman’s Third Law: 

“Any sufficiently crappy research is indistinguishable from fraud.”

I think this law combines the insights of Clarke’s and Grey’s. The consequences of believing the results from crappy research do not differ from the consequences of believing the results from fraudulent research, as with Grey. However, it is also true that there is no reason to see the two things as different. If you are so incompetent at research as to produce crap, then you should be seen as a fraud, as with Clarke. 

I will be writing about crappy/fraudulent research often here, in hopes of convincing readers that they should be very skeptical the next time they read those deadly words: “Studies show…”

I will close this by referring you, for your reading pleasure, to a post by Gelman titled:    

 It’s bezzle time: The Dean of Engineering at the University of Nevada gets paid $372,127 a year and wrote a paper that’s so bad, you can’t believe it.

It’s a long post, but non-geeky, and quite illuminating. (Aside: I interviewed for an academic position at U of Nevada in Reno a hundred years ago. They put me up in a casino during my visit. Didn’t gamble, didn’t get a job offer.) You can read more about this intrepid and highly paid Dean here. His story is really making the (academic) rounds these days. 

You’re welcome, and stay tuned. I got a million of ‘em….

p.s. Discovered this since I wrote the above, but before posting. One of many reasons this stuff matters, from Nevada Today

University receives largest individual gift in its history to create the George W. Gillemot Aerospace Engineering Department 

The $36 million gift is the largest individual cash gift the University has received in its 149-year history 

Anyone care to bet on whether this Dean gets canned?

 Corrigendum: An alert reader has pointed out that Clarke’s novel was not written in 1982 – indeed, the film came out in 1968. In fact the 2001 film was based largely on one of Clarke’s short stories from 1951: The Sentinel. Clarke did write a novel called 2010: Odyssey Two, in 1982, and a not-so-successful movie was based on that, in 1984.

 

Uses and Abuses of Statistics – MLB Edition

Written by Editorial Team on . Posted in Culture, News Media. No Comments on Uses and Abuses of Statistics – MLB Edition

If you watch a lot of sports as I do, you cannot fail to be aware of the so-called ‘Analytics Revolution’, a phenomenon that has wormed its way into sports broadcasting. Whatever professional teams may be doing with the reams of game and performance data they now collect, one cannot miss how much sportscasters talk about it, before, during and after each broadcast. 

As someone whose happiness would greatly increase if said sportscasters would just shut up, I cannot say all this statistic-centric chattering is welcome, but sometimes it is interesting. A frequent use of stats in a broadcast is when one of the commentators cites a statistic that they think is directly relevant to what is happening in the game. For example –  

Hockey team x scores the first goal of the game, and the commentator says ‘The team that scores first wins the game z% of the time.’

Baseball team y goes into the 6th inning trailing by 2 runs and the commentator says ‘Teams that trail by 2 or more runs in the second half of a game have only a Z% chance of winning.’

Now, there is no mystery as to where these statements come from. For the first one, you just look at the last 10 years (say) of all NHL games and see which team scored first and which team won. The percentage of the games in which it is the same team gives you z in the statement. 

A particular example of this occurred during the second round of last season’s MLB playoffs, when two teams were playing the third game of a best-of-five series, tied at one win each. The commentator said ‘The team that wins the third game in this situation goes on to win the series 70% of the time.’

Once again, it’s clear this statement comes from looking back at previous MLB best-of-five series in which the teams split the first two games, but in this case I had an immediate reaction to this stat: that seems too low. 

My immediate no-pencil-and-paper reaction was not that he was quoting a mistaken actual statistic, but rather that I thought the 3rd-game-winning-team would win the series more  often than that. I got out my pad and pen, and here is what I came up with. 

What would simple probability calculations predict for the probability in question? Imagine team A has won the third game against team B, so it is leading the series 2 to 1 with two possible games to go. Assume also, just as a starting point, that because this is the playoffs, these are two evenly matched teams. Thus, absent any specific information about each team in each game (who is pitching, injuries, weather, etc) one would expect the probability that either team wins is ½. 

Given that, you can calculate the probability of team A going on to win the series (having won game three) by noting that the series after game three can go only one of three ways:

  1. A wins game four and the series
  2. A loses game four but wins game five and the series
  3. A loses both games four and five and loses the series. 

This is the whole universe of possibilities, and it is easy to calculate the probability of each one.

  1. The probability is ½ under our assumption that 1/2 is the probability A wins any single game
  2. The probability A loses game four is ½ and the probability A wins game five is also ½, so the probability of those two events happening is ½ times ½ which is ¼. (The probability-aware out there will note that I have assumed that the probability of winning in each game is independent of what happens in the other game. I will come back to that below.)
  3. The probability A loses each game is again ½, so again the probability it loses both is ¼. 

Note that these three probabilities do add up to 1, so we have covered everything, but we have also found that the probability that either i or ii happens – the two cases in which A wins the series – add up to ¾, or 75%. 

So, on this account, my instincts were right, 70% is lower than 75%. 

However, when a calculation comes out differently than an actual number from the world, it is the calculation that must be re-thought. My first thought along those lines was the following: if A wins game three, then it has won two of three games against B, and although that is a small sample, it does point to the possibility that maybe team A is somewhat better than B, and that should be taken into account. 

For example, maybe in this scenario the probability A wins either of games four or five should be 0.55 and the probability B wins only 0.45. 

This is not helpful in reconciling the data with the calculations, however, as if one re-does the calculations for the probability of each of the three outcomes above, one now gets:

  1. 0.55
  2. 0.45 x 0.55 = 0.2475
  3. 0.45 x 0.45 = 0.2025

and the predicted probability of A winning the series is now up to 79.75%, even further away from the empirical 70%. 

Huh. 

So, one has to look at something else, and my preferred culprit would be the assumption built into all these calculations that the outcome of each game is independent of what happened in previous games. In particular, I suspect that a team that has won two of the three first games takes it a little easy in the fourth game. Not just that Team A’s players might ‘relax’ a bit, but also that team A’s manager might save his best pitcher for game five if he is needed, hoping that if they win game four his ace will be available for game one of the next round. In that scenario, the probability team A wins game four is less than 0.5, not more. You all can probably think of other explanations. 

In any case, it was clear that what the sportscaster who said this last autumn wanted us fans to think is ‘whoa, winning game three is really important’, when in fact there is something more interesting to be said: why don’t winners of game three do better than they do in a five-game series?