Whenever I worry about the quality of my science, I always say to myself: at least I’m not a fucking sociologist. Study debunked here. I would point out that the “measurement” they make is about one Dave Kingman. If he’d been named Dave Queenman, their study would have been more quickly revealed for the nonsense that it is.
I note that one of these pinheads is from the Yale School of Management. And you wonder why we’re in a recession.
Rabbits. You know that statistic that college adds $1 million to your lifetime earnings? Not so fast.
Substituting some of his own assumptions for those used by the board — including six years of tuition costs (and hence two fewer years of work), private college tuition instead of in-state public tuition, etc. — Miller calculates his own college premium. “[P]roperly using the present value of the lifetime earnings, adjusted for the cost of going to college and the difference in the number of working years, and excluding those graduates with advanced degrees, calculated at the three percent discount rate used in the report,” he wrote, “produces a lifetime earnings differential of only $279,893 for a bachelor’s degree versus a high school degree!”
He writes: “With clearly questionable assumptions in the analysis traditionally used to prove that ‘education pays,’ with the reality of continually increasing costs of college above average inflation, with weak income growth in general, and with the reality of a very narrow economic benefit to the individual with a college education, it is reasonable to conclude that a college degree is not as valuable as has been claimed.”
This sounds a lot more reasonable that the $1 million figure. Especially as I presently have seven letters after my name and will be working for free on May 1.
Moreover, the “broad education” stuff doesn’t wash with me. I am well-read. But almost all of that came after college. My blogging buddy at RTLC, Lee, does not have a college degree. He also has a great job, makes lots of money and is extremely well-read.
I still think college is worth it — $300 grand is a lot of money and college was one of the best times of my life and enabled me to pursue the career I wanted. But there’s no need to shovel bullshit onto the public. There’s more than one way to succeed in this country.
Over the objections of a few anti-slavery stalwarts in the Justice Department, the House of Representatives passed a bill in December that expands the current anti-trafficking legislation to cover most forms of prostitution, coerced or not. If approved in its current form by the Senate and signed by the president, the law will no longer address slavery exclusively and will instead become a federal mandate to fight prostitution on a broad scale.
Prostitution is always degrading, and it is often brutal — but it is not always slavery. Equating the scourge of slavery with run-of-the-mill, non-coerced prostitution is not only misleading, it will weaken the world’s efforts to end real forced labor and human trafficking.
One of Sully’s readers:
Why is astrology any less respectable than religious belief? Believers in both suspend reason to help explain the randomness of human existence.
The reason that astrology is less respectable than faith is that astrology is not a religion and doesn’t claim to be. Astrologers claim that what they do is science. They have charts. The look at planets. They claim to make predictions based on the positions of heavenly objects. They claim that someone’s personality is determined by what time of the year he is born (never mind that they have not corrected for the precession of the equinoxes and so all their astrological signs are one month off). But in the end, it is a sham. Astrologers either make prognostications that are deliberately vague. Or, for personal readings, they perform what amounts to a cold reading.
It possible, in fact very easy, to disprove astrology. It’s so easy, in fact, that Penn and Teller have yet to devote an episode to it. Faith is far more difficult. It is wrapped in the general and possibly unknowable mystery of who we are and why we are here. Faith attempts to answer those questions but — with the exception of deluded ID people — it doesn’t claim to have scientific proof. It asks for belief.
There is also, I would add, more evidence supporting the tenets of Judeo-Christian faith than astrology. There was a nation of Israel. Many traditions described within are supported by contemporaneous external accounts. There is ample evidence that there was such a person as Jesus Christ. That the history of the region was determined by God, that Jesus was the Messiah, that there is an afterlife — these are matters of faith and belief.
There has never been, in 2000 years, any evidence that astrology is based on anything other than shamanism.
Boortz was going off today about how global warmers can’t see the big picture (the permalink on his Nuze is busted). Seems he found an article about how plate tectonics will drop the ocean levels by about 500 feet over the next 80 million years. So there’s nothing to fear from ocean level rise!
Um, yeah, Neal. I’m sure the 200th of an inch drop in the next century will more than counter the 4-30 inches of ocean rise IPCC is predicting.
The site was done for a while due to wordpress problems. My baby brother fixed it and everything is copacetic. So a long delayed LINKORAMA is due.
I want to thank you for twice giving me the chance to serve as president. The 1990s were a time of prosperity. We created more than 22 million new jobs, moved eight million people out of poverty, and turned our economy around.
It’s time for another comeback, time to make America great again. I know Hillary’s the one that can do it.
Translation: do you want a third term of me? Please, Democrats. Please say “no”.
From TMQ today:
Usually, stars change position in the night sky more rapidly than planets, a reason our primordial ancestors began to wonder whether the lights now known to be planets were different from the other lights.
Um, it’s the exact opposite, Gregg. Planets change positions. This is why they were named planets.
Being a scientist, I hear an endless stream of nonsense about how anti-science the Republicans are and how much they slash and burn science funding to pay for their wars and corporate interests. It’s bullshit, of course. One of the principle opponents of the space program was Walter Mondale — a democrat. The superconducting super-collider was killed by Bill Clinton — a Democrat. And it is mainly liberals and progressives, notably Gregg Easterbrook, who demand that all of NASA’s work be practical. I told everyone that science funding would be hurt with the Dems in power.
I hate being right all the time.
In short, this omnibus spending bill is at best disappointing, and at worst a total disaster, for science funding in the US. Overall, the research agencies all received a meager increase in their budgets (roughly 1% for NIH, 2% for NSF, 3% for NASA, and 2% for the DOE). That’s disappointing because these increases don’t keep up with inflation, are far, far short of the Administration’s request and the American Competitiveness Initiative, and won’t support all the scientific projects in the pipeline.
Oh, it gets better. The Democrats are ending our participation in ITER, the foremost nuclear fusion project. Nuclear fusion, which has just passed breakeven, has the potential to replace all of our fossil fuels and nuclear fission plants with clean safe nuclear energy. But the “we love the environment and hate global warming” Democrats aren’t interested.
Of course, everyone is blaming Bush for this (and specifically, the war funding). But the Dems came in under the President’s request. This was one of the few areas were they controlled spending.
Yes, I have a personal stake in this (for now, at least). At some point, I’ll put up my post on that subject. But you just have to savor the irony. The anti-intellectual Bush is more interested in funding science than the super-enlightened Democrats.