The Daily Me

Nicholas Kristof has an article in today's NYT about people confronting opinions that are different than their own less and less. He says that the demise of the daily newspaper makes this more prevalent. I'm not sure that that's true, since people's dose of different views in the paper came only from the opinion pages, but not usually from the rest of the paper, unless I'm misunderstanding him. One quote I especially like:

One 12-nation study found Americans the least likely to discuss politics with people of different views, and this was particularly true of the well educated. High school dropouts had the most diverse group of discussion-mates, while college graduates managed to shelter themselves from uncomfortable perspectives.

When thinking of different cultures' attitudes towards different views, I remember in particular one Thanksgiving we spent at my friend's house. There were a Palestinian woman (mathematics grad student) and a Jewish man (law student) who spent hours of the visit arguing. It made me a bit uncomfortable to watch---polite people don't do that! but they were enjoying themselves and actually listening to each other even while they disagreed mightily. I wish in our culture we could disagree so strongly and with so much grace: nowadays, if you disagree, you're either stupid or immoral and not worth listening to, it seems.

Another thing that is interesting is the completely different universes that commentators and even news editors live in, depending on their viewpoints. Just read the NYT and the WSJ on the recovery effort from the government, for example. It's hard to see that they are commenting on the same things! In order even to have an intelligent discussion, it seems that they would need to agree on some basic definitions and facts, their viewpoints are so different. It also seems as though merely acknowledging that the other has a valid point is equated to conceeding defeat (or claiming victory, depending on which side you're on), which is very unhelpful for fruitful discussion

I always like to say that I would listen to 6 things I disagreed with before breakfast. His last quote: think of reading things that you disagree with like going to the gym, also rings true for me: I wish that the heart rate elevation I get from reading other people's opinions would translate into better cardiovascular health. Ah, well, that's why I have this blog, to calm me down again.

Who is John Galt?

Disclaimer: I have never read "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. I have read the Wikipedia article, and several summaries over the past few days. The book's standing on Amazon has apparently shot up recently. Who knows, I might even read it someday.

I read the summaries in response to seeing the suggestion that some top income earners are planning on "going John Galt," i.e., withdrawing their productivity from the economy, in response to Obama's plan to tax their income at a higher rate. At first glance, this sounds ridiculous. It's not like they're planning on taking 30 percent more of your earnings above $250,000, they're just planning on taking a few percent more. If you are earning close to the limit, the extra tax won't apply to very much money. If you earn further away from the limit, then you would have to work really hard to get your earnings down below 250,000, and although you might pay a lot more money, you have more to give.

Actually, at second glance "Going John Galt" still looks silly to me. I can't imagine anyone making over 250,000 who is working only for money. There are so many other reasons to do a good job (not being able to live with yourself if you do a shoddy job being one of the highest) that I can't imagine the money making enough difference that a person would decide to retire rather than work.

Then I realized that I have actually been doing this for years, in two ways. First, when I was a grad student, I thought about increasing the number of hours I tutored. But if I did that, then I might have earned enough to have to pay taxes, including self employment taxes, and I knew from experience as a consultant that it would take about 50% of the money I earned, maybe more. Tutoring recalcitrant students for $20 an hour was pretty good. Tutoring for less than $10 an hour was not so attractive, so I didn't increase my working. So government taxes have actually kept me from working more.

The second way I have gone "John Galt" actually has to do with the free market. The market doesn't value my skills as a teacher or tutor enough to pay for child care for 3 kids. So I don't add my productivity to society in that way. I do feel like I am being productive, but it is not worth it right now for me to go out and add to GDP, so I don't.*

Does this mean that I am only interested in working for money? Not really (I hope) but it does mean being rewarded definitely influences how I feel about how hard I'm willing to work. It's interesting to think about in light of the idea of going Galt.

*This may change when they are all in school, or old enough to take care of themselves after school.

Housing bailout

I see very well that many people need help staying in their homes. And I see the upside for me if someone gets help paying their mortgage, or a lowered principal. But I don't see the obviousness of this help. Diane Reams is especially bad: she seems to lose patience with anyone who suggests that they don't want to see their neighbors bailed out. But here is one scenario for why bailing out one's neighbors might be seen as bad.

When we bought our first house, we looked at our budget and figured out what payment we could afford. Then we went online and used a mortgage calculator to figure out what houses we could afford. Then we went to our realtor and asked her to show us houses in that range. She showed us a few houses that were more, but not many, and she stopped when we asked her to. She sent us to the mortgage broker in her business (I think we eventually went with a special "first time buyer mortgage" from a different bank) and he looked at our income and told us we could afford much bigger payments and could get a bigger house. We said "no thank you." Then he said, if we got one of these "ARMS" we could have a lower monthly payment, and the rate wouldn't be adjusted for 5 years and we would likely move by then anyway, and we said "no thank you." We got our 30 year mortgage with the slightly higher rate for what we could afford and moved into our little house.

Suppose we had neighbors who bought in to the snake oil the broker was trying to sell. They got the bigger house (which we would have liked, but we decided we couldn't afford). They got the lower payments so they could afford the nicer TV, the vacation, going out more, etc., while we had our less risky but less profitable mortgage. And now, they can't make their payments because their ARM went up. I understand that they were probably taken advantage of to some extent, but in the end, they were greedy instead of sensible. They had the upside of taking the risks. Now the government wants to make the lender lower the principal on their house so their payments go back down to something they can afford. What downside (other than sleepless nights) do they face?

Note: some truly horrible things went on in tempting people who truly should not have bought a house to get one, or in manipulating innocent uneducated buyers without giving them full information. Dishonest brokers should face the consequences of their actions (is roasting over a spit done anymore?), and the homeowners who were taken in by them should be let down as easily as possible, either by staying in their house or getting out as painlessly as they can. My problem with the bailout is with people who should have known better, but who decided to take risks in return for money. Even if they didn't understand the full extent of the risk (i.e., they didn't realize they could lose their house, or they didn't believe it would happen to them) they should see some downside from their behavior.

It may be that there is some downside, I just haven't seen it in the description of the programs.

Despite my discomfort with some of the homeowner bailout propositions, I think that the policy of allowing people who are "underwater" on their mortgages to refinance with a lower interest rate is a great one. I think it is true that most people want to keep their house, whether they are underwater temporarily or not. These people are less likely to walk away from a house if they can afford the payments than if they cannot, so it seems to me there is no increased risk. Of all the possible ways to bail out homeowners, this makes most sense to me, which is probably why it is not liked by the pundits out there...

And the bailout/stimulus package should come with mandatory personal finance education classes for every citizen of the US unless you can pass a test showing minimal competence.

Doubt

I got my PhD almost 10 years ago now. When I started out on this path, 20 years ago (when I graduated from high school) I hadn't planned on using my high fallutin' education "just to raise kids", but that is where I ended up.

This post is not about how I ended up here, but about where I want to go next. With the economy the way it is, I may not have much of a choice about where I go in the near future, and staying at home with my kids is fulfilling, involves creative sides of myself that I never knew I had, and is helping me get myself organized. And yet... Next year, Luke goes to preschool for 3 mornings a week, and I really don't want to spend the time reading blogs and cleaning the house.

The thing I would like to do most is actually mathematical research, although pure research does not pay very well---right now I am planning on using the research to spring into some other kind of work. I enjoy reading the papers and thinking about theorems and seeing what I can prove. I do not enjoy writing yet, although blogging has made me a better writer (although not up to where I was when I was writing my dissertation). Sitting in a coffee shop drinking tea and reading papers brings me right back to where I was when I was in graduate school. What I have now that I didn't in grad school is a lot of doubt.

When I was in graduate school, I knew that it was where I belonged. The work was hard but pleasant. I wasn't the brightest kid in the bunch, but I wasn't at the bottom of the barrel. It became clear that if I put the work in and got results, I would graduate. If I didn't graduate, it wouldn't be my fault, and I could move on to the next thing (since I wouldn't have been in the right place anyway). I did get to be proficient, and eventually after years of work I got my degree. I was in the right place, doing the right things, and there was no reason to worry about it.

But right now, I'm not sure I could ever get back where I was, much less move forward. I remember an older man (probably younger that I am now) going back to graduate school while trying to work at IBM and have a family, and he gave it up after a few weeks. Is my distracted attention enough to keep me from doing what I want to do?

Some of what I am feeling can be overcome, it is a result of the unfamiliarity with mathematics that I lived with intimately for so long. But some of it comes from the genuine pressure from raising kids and having 20 million (at least) things going on in my brain, all of which are tremendously important, at least to the young child who is tugging at my hand or trying to get my multiply divided attention. In the past year I have seen some studies showing that multitasking makes us stupid, the kind of reading I do is bad for concentration. This morning I heard an interview about how we make decisions, and the interviewee used the example that having to keep a telephone number in your head makes decision making less efficient---I feel like I've go 10 telephone numbers in my head all the time! Is it possible to find the peace and quiet and motivation to get back into doing mathematics?

The answer: maybe. People usually manage to get done what they really want, provided they have some resources. I have a few hours a week next year. Tonight I looked myself up on "Google Scholar" and found that my dissertation had been cited by two people! One wrote that my results were "interesting but not widely known!" This makes me a little excited, in case you are wondering. If I can take the excitement plus the desire to get out of the house and think hard, plus a few hours a week... maybe I can write the papers I need to write. And after that... who knows.

Writing this about doubt made me realize that doubt has actually been with me for a long time. When I graduated, I needed to send copies of my dissertation to lots of people, and I was too shy. I needed to send my paper to someone else after it was rejected twice, but I was too shy. I didn't believe that my results were interesting (although now they've been referenced at least twice!) and so I never could get myself to work on writing the papers. I think that while my current life is not so helpful in encouraging sustained thinking, it may be useful in giving me some confidence and perspective. 10 years off may not be entirely bad for my mathematical life.

Stem cell research

Rants:

• Many people say that "now we are basing our decisions on science rather than religion." The truth is, nothing about the science of a human embryo can tell you whether you ought to destroy it for some benefit. Only ethical guidelines (which are based on religion for many people) can tell you that.
• When people say that embryonic stem cell research does not imply cloning, they are misinformed. My friend's medical textbook explains: we don't just want any old stem cells, we want stem cells that are a genetic match for the person undergoing the treatment. Which implies that we need to create an embryo with the genetically identical stem cells. Which means we need to clone the person undergoing the treatment.
• There are many people who have diabetes, spinal cord injuries, etc. who do not want their diseases treated with embryonic stem cells. These people are never interviewed on the radio for programs about embryonic stem cells.
• The president's decree today rescinds another order of President Bush which encourages funding for non-embryonic stem cell research. This seems unnecessary, and backwards, since these stem cells have actually been useful against disease.
  
• I can't believe that the same people who are against genetically modified food are so in favor of genetically modified people. Cloned animals have a much higher rate of birth defects, for example. We really don't know what we are getting into.

More on the first objection: we really don't let scientists work on whatever looks good. For example, we have very strict laws about experimenting with human subjects. I remember a blood substitute trial that scientists wanted to run in Minneapolis: in order to show that the techniques and products they were using saved lives, they needed lives that were in danger. But the scientists couldn't run the experiment because the people whose lives were in jeopardy couldn't sign the consent form. There was some talk about getting everyone to sign a blanket consent form, but then the doctors were accused of racism since the study was being done in the city where there was a high proportion of minorities.

Was this letting religion trump science? No, it was respect for human beings and their rights. A created human embryo is a potential human being---an individual human. Does it have value? Science can't answer. For goodness sake, YOU were once an embryo.

Sigh. My friend the pathologist's objection is that there is no guarantee that we would stop at an embryo. What if a blastocyst were more useful? What about aborted fetuses? What about a 15 week old fetus? It would be much easier to get liver cells from a cloned liver. People will say that no one is arguing for this, but it is also true that the arguments in favor of ESCR have nothing to say against using more developed human babies for "parts".

There is much more to be said, but it has been mostly said well on stand to reason (str.typepad.com/blog) and thinkingchristian.net.

Prediction

The recession will help us finally kill the old health care system and replace it with something new. When so many people are out of work and thus out of health insurance, something will need to change. The optimist in me hopes that it will change for the better, but probably not...

It would be nice if the recession would also change the crazy way college educations are valued and funded...but I doubt it. Especially since the stimulus bill kept funding for more college loans instead of hinting to people that 1) maybe a college education is not the most valuable thing for you in particular, and 2) college and university presidents need to get off the treadmill of constantly increasing budgets and tuition. There has got to be a better way.