mathbabe

I’ve been getting lots of people writing to me recently with data science jobs that I think look like nice jobs, with nice people, but I am personally not going to apply for. Instead of forgetting about them, I’ve decided to advertise them myself.

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The first position is from Harmony Institute, a research center trying to understanding the social impact of media. They are looking for a Technical Data Analyst. Here’s their blurb:

HI is looking for a media-savvy researcher with an understanding of social science/humanities research and a passion for empowering causes for social good. The ideal candidate is interested in studying complex phenomena — such as information diffusion, media framing, and emotional responses to stories — from multiple, often indirect perspectives. You know how to hack code and wrangle data, but you’re just as concerned with big questions as big data.

In this role, you’ll be working closely with a team of social scientists to study various aspects of the social impact of media. Most projects have a critical data component, and you’ll be the go­-to person for a broad range of data tasks: identifying indicators and datasets of interest based on research questions; collecting data from available APIs, databases, and even web scraping; verifying, documenting, and sharing the processed data; and either leading or facilitating the data analysis and visualization of results. You’ll also collaborate with and get support from our product­ focused data scientists and software engineers. Fortunately, HI has built up a large code base (in Python) to help you with your work, so you’ll rarely be starting from scratch. You can look forward to improving your programming and data skills through diverse, interesting research projects; being exposed to many different perspectives among media makers, funders, and researchers; and advance the field’s understanding of media’s impact on society.

The full description is here, and they’re also looking for a data engineer.

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The second position is from Paperless Post, which you’re doubtless familiar with if you’ve ever been invited to a kid’s birthday party. They are looking for a data scientist, and here’s their blurb:

The data team at Paperless Post helps people throughout the company use data to make better business decisions. We’re a team of five people (three women, two men), and each person supports various business and product teams. We spend around three fifths of our time working on projects for teams, and two fifths working on data team projects.

We do all types of data work: data engineering, ETL, analysis, building production data systems, building visualizations, building dashboards, creating KPIs, and more. As the main data contact for a team, you get a lot of autonomy and flexibility when helping them best use data.

We’re looking to grow our team, and are looking for both junior and senior data people. Paperless Post is a great company to work for as a data person. We have a product that people enjoy and pay for, and we don’t sell our user data. We care about professional development, and are supportive of interests outside work. Within the company, the data team is viewed as a valued partner to the teams we work with.\

For questions, contact solomon@paperlesspost.com.
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If you have a data science position that is not in finance, or ad tech, and is with super nice people, I plan to do it at least one more time, so email me at the gmail address listed on my About page.

Have you guys read the recent NY Times book review of three new sex and romance books? The books are called ‘Date-Onomics,’ ‘The Sex Myth,’ and ‘Modern Romance,’ and I have very strong opinions about them – surprise, surprise! – based only on the review.

Date-Onomics is premised on finding love by crunching the numbers and by assuming that all women are looking to snag a “good man” no matter what. Simplistic, but then again there are certainly numbers to consider, and the fact that more women than men attend college is definitely at odds with the way men don’t like to marry women who earn more than they do. And yes, I framed that to be an intentionally controversial way of looking at it.

Next, in the Sex Myth, they investigate the switch from everyone being a prude a short while ago to everyone supposedly – but not actually – being a kinkmeister now, and how we’d be better off not identifying ourselves so much with our sex lives. Also simplistic, since sex is a central aspect to our human identity. It’s not as if in the past we didn’t really care about each other’s sex lives; it’s just that sex lives were way more stifled. Name a moment in human history that we didn’t obsess and gossip about who was having sex with whom. I bet you can’t. Instead, I want us to have more than just sex as identities. It’s obviously terrible to only rely on your sex appeal, especially as you age and are suddenly unfuckable.

The third book reviewed is Modern Romance, and it seems to argue that we sometimes get carried away with the numbers and the seemingly endless options we have on the dating scene and forget to appreciate the humanity in each other. Also simplistic, because if you are the only person stopping to smell the roses, you will get trampled from behind. It’s a collective action problem, and a cultural problem.

OK, on with the advice! And after you enjoy said advice, please:

ask Aunt Pythia any question at all at the bottom of the page!

By the way, if you don’t know what the hell Aunt Pythia is talking about, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia.

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

I was reading Flash Boys (I know I’m a bit late to the game!) and was wondering if you might comment a bit on its accuracy as well as how you feel about IEX? I’m very tempted to believe Lewis/Katsuyama, but after watching some videos of them together with people vehemently denying all claims in the book I have become a bit hesitant. I was hoping your insider knowledge would be helpful! Thanks for your time.

Not Smart Enough To Know

Dear NSETK,

Here’s the thing, it doesn’t really matter. For a few reasons, among them:

1. The harm that was done by that whole scam, which is totally believable, is pretty small in terms of the trillions sloshing around in the market.
2. There are plenty of other scams going on just like it. That’s what finance people do.
3. It doesn’t affect the public nearly as much as the big stuff did like the financial crisis.

Putting all that together, who cares. I mean, Lewis is a great writer, and he tells a great story, but this time I think he just kind of randomly chose the good guys and bad guys and convinced everyone something terrible was going on because it sells books, when in fact it’s business as usual in the world of high frequency trading. If we could get rid of HFT altogether, that would be great, but that’s not what seems to be happening.

My two cents.

Aunt Pythia

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

I want to apply for an assistant professor job at a particular university. This school has the overall department split into sub-departments and two of the sub-departments have openings for next year. My research could apply to either of the sub-departments, but the same person is listed as the search coordinator for both positions, so there is no way that it will not be noticed if I apply for both jobs. Is it “bad form” to apply for two jobs in the same department? Or do I have to pick just one?

Under Decision Paralysis

Dear UDP,

Hey, great news! You are qualified for not one but two jobs at the same place! Use it as an advantage. Apply for both, and in each cover letter mention that you’re applying for both, and that what this means is that your research will unite the two sub-departments and create synergies that everyone will really enjoy. Moreover, you’re sure you’d be incredibly happy taking either job. It doesn’t matter if the same people read your folders or not: assume not, but be the first person to frame the way to think of this as good news.

Aunt Pythia

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

How can we get America to not focus on the ‘hero’? I believe that this libertarian view has made the ‘winner take all’ acceptable. Those of us still employed are noticing that since only the ‘best’ are hired, there is no 2nd tier support staff, and we have to be do several jobs (thanks, computers).

Waiting For The Implosion

Dear WFTI,

Aunt Pythia hears you loud and clear. Did you hear about the new Harvard Business School report, where the alums they surveyed agreed that we should work on combatting inequality, the biggest problem of our day? Well, it might not surprised you to hear that they also said that the way to combat these problems are tax reforms and streamlined regulation, in other words stuff that will actually exacerbate it.

The answer is, I’m not sure. The way humans work is we care about individual stories. That’s why stuff got going about Syrian refugees after the picture of the little boy washed up on the beach. I guess what we need to do is make sure the individual stories we hear about are examples of larger issues important to a lot of people, rather than just aspirational hero-worshipping schlock.

Aunt Pythia

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

I am a professional woman in my mid 30s, no kids, although I don’t mind if others choose have them, preferably responsibly.

Over the past few years, I have become friends with several members of a large family where both parents are immigrants. The mother, despite circumstances, has encouraged her children and herself to become educated and start businesses. They live in a remote small town, but come to the city often for social and business events.

My question concerns their 20 year old son “Alex”. Like several of his siblings, he was home schooled, though he has yet to finish an official program or pass the GED. I’ve offered to tutor him, but he hasn’t accepted. Alex can be very motivated about some things and has lots of ideas, but he seems to dream more than do, and has not looked for a job outside of helping his parents with their ventures.

So, recently, rather than “nagging” Alex about getting a GED or job, I’ve switched tactics to asking him what he wants to do and how he plans to get there. He’s pretty receptive to ideas but rarely takes action. Last week, when I asked him what he wanted in life, he said “20 kids!” I thought he was joking, but he seems to think he can go back to his father’s country, where he will not only be entitled to a bride, but also to her sheep, goats, and house. So, now what? How can I encourage Alex to work towards a dream that helps him become independent before bringing somebody or many somebodies into the mix?

20 Questions

Dear 20 Questions,

Talk about a cultural difference! It seems like these kids haven’t entirely left their home country. Home schooling is obviously part of that, but also the fact that the he is working in the family business doesn’t help.

Even so, he’s made friends with you, and you’re concerned. I think you should continue to be his friend, and help him think through what his future might be like. Would he want to bring his wife and 20 kids to the states? How would he support them? Stuff like that, which he might not have thought about. I would guess you could help him plan, and you may have some influence on his plans by doing so, but I don’t think you can change his plans entirely. But it sounds like you’re already doing this, so I would say, keep it up!

Also, keep in mind he’s only 20, and lots of things in his life will change before he actually has 20 kids, if he ever does.

Aunt Pythia

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Readers? Aunt Pythia loves you so much. She wants to hear from you – she needs to hear from you – and then tell you what for in a most indulgent way. Will you help her do that?

Please, pleeeeease ask her a question. She will take it seriously and answer it if she can.

Click here for a form for later or just do it now:

I grew up in the Breakfast Club era, which is to say a time when every teenager had a soundtrack to their lives, depending on where they fit in the social strata of their particular high school.

We would make mixed tapes, and listen to them on constant loop on our walkmans, until they were scratchy and worn, and we would take odd jobs to pay for the monumental AA battery use. A sure sign of long-lasting and meaningful friendship would be if one teenager made a mixed tape and gave it to another teenager. That would be a deep sign, both of kinship and, of course, of musical identity.

Personally, I was a misfit. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t belong in any clique, it means, ironically, that I fit in with “the misfits,” which were their own group, proud of not getting along with any other groups, except at times we’d forge alliances with the druggies. For example, when I first got to Lexington High School – my freshman year was 1986 – there was a smoking section outside the principal’s office where the misfits and the druggies could all smoke whatever we wanted, for some reason there were really no rules, and it was a happy time. By the time I left, though, the smokers were forced very slightly off campus, which is to say about a block away on Park Drive, and the temporary misfit/druggie alliance was forever broken. We misfits retreated to the J-House lounge.

I lived on Waltham Street, and my old house is on this map.

Anyhoo, I’m getting away from myself, because I meant to talk about soundtracks, but I instead got carried away with nostalgic memories of hanging out – for a brief time – with the cool, fucked up kids.

My soundtrack was simple: Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Jethro Tull. I wore an army jacket and was deeply misunderstood, and sometimes in the summer I’d tie dye shirts and refuse to participate in things. This is me refusing to participate in the junior prom:

Isn’t my friend Karen looking gorgeous?!

Here’s why this all came up today. If I could go back in time and live high school all over again, which I tend to do without permission anyway, I’d listen nonstop to Neutral Milk Hotel’s album, In the Aeroplane Over The Sea, even though it was release in 1998 and I graduated in 1990. Hey, it’s a fantasy, and they don’t always make sense.

I dare you to tell me you don’t agree when you hear the title track (or else you already know it, in which case you already agree):

Make sure you listen to the bridge, which is the best part of any song, ever.

Today I want to share with you all two recent blog posts from nerdy young women. And who doesn’t love nerdy young women!?

The first is by Michelle G, an M.I.T. student, class of 2018, who is majoring in “14,” which is M.I.T. code for economics. She wrote a blogpost called Picture yourself as a stereotypical male, about the question of intelligence, gender, and stereotype threat. I thought I knew all about that stuff but I learned quite a bit from her post. p.s. Larry Summers, I hope you read this.

The second is by Meena Boppana, a Harvard CS major/math minor who has guest blogged here on mathbabe before. This post is called The Making of A Girl Mathlete, and it describes her experience winning math competitions, often as the only girl. Even though I personally think math contests kind of suck, I appreciate how much Meena got out of them.

Speaking of the Harvard math department, I’ll be there next Monday, on a panel with Moon Duchin talking about gender inclusivity in mathematics. It’s the first of a series. Here’s the Facebook page of the event.

Yesterday I wrote a post complaining that I didn’t know how to find an awesome job. The thing is, most advertised data science jobs either make rich people richer (finance) or make poor people poorer (ad tech) [1]

Well, I asked for advice, and you guys seriously delivered. I am so very lucky to have such amazing commenters and friends, and as a small token of my gratitude I want to compile some of the advice I got.

1. A lot of you encouraged me to try to first figure out what I want to do and then convince a company doing that to give me a job. Great idea! Someone even sent me articles with useful advice on how to do that, here and here.
2. Someone suggest I look for independent contract work by searching this list. Great idea.
3. I got a few people writing to me to encourage me to consider teaming up with the Data Science for Social Good crowd. Maybe I should start a New York chapter?
4. Someone had a friend who made a huge list her favorite toys and then wrote to the companies that made them telling them she’d be great as an employee, and it totally worked. “Toys” can be taken to be a general term, of course.
5. Someone encouraged me to consider the environment and the team I’d be working with rather than the job I’d be doing. Trouble is I tried that, it didn’t work. But it might work for someone else.
6. A bunch of people mentioned working for non-profits as data people. Non-profits have their challenges to work with but they seem to need the help. Hopefully I’ll have a guest post soon on this issue.
7. Many people wrote to me with ideas for specific jobs I should apply for. I will, thanks!
8. Also, a few people just wrote saying I’d be fine and they had hope for me. Those were really nice emails.
9. Finally, quite a few other data scientists wrote saying they, too, want to make the world a better place and are frustrated by the lack of obvious chances to do this. Obviously I’m not alone.

Anyway, thanks to everyone for their advice and encouragement. I’ll keep you updated.

1. In fact I consider it my go-to example of how “the market” fails, if you think the market is supposed to offer profitable opportunities to do stuff that is worthwhile and/or important for society. It’s kind of the opposite, but maybe – hopefully – I’m defining the market too narrowly, i.e. by searching for data science jobs on LinkedIn.

You may have noticed the long-standing tagline on my About page:

What can a non-academic mathematician do that makes the world a better place?

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot lately. I’m looking for a job nowadays since my book project is wrapping up and I have no source of income. So far my attempts at sorting through the LinkedIn “data science” jobs are leading to a huge list of finance and online advertising jobs (which I don’t apply to), and a few others which are somewhat more interesting thrown in the mix. But they typically have more than 100 people each applying to them.

Which is to say, I’ve applied to a bunch of jobs I only kind of want and haven’t heard back from almost any of them. It’s kind of depressing. Actually it’s super depressing.

So I’ve come up with another way of thinking about searching. Why don’t I start with organizations that I think are doing cool things and offer them my data science expertise? In a consulting role primarily, but also longer-term if they are interested.

I know there are places where you can sign up to be an “expert witness,” so I’m looking for something similar: an expert consultant. There must already be ways to do this, but I don’t know how. Obviously one way would be to try to get a job at IBM, but then I’d be back to working for clients in finance.

Advice would be deeply appreciated. You can comment here or send me email at the address on my About page.

When you’re writing a book for the general public’s consumption, you have to keep things pretty simple. You can’t spend a lot of time theorizing about why some stuff is going on, you have to focus on what’s happening, and how bad it is, and who’s getting screwed. Anything beyond that and you’ll be called a conspiracy theorist by some level of your editing team.

But the good thing about writing a blog is that you can actually say anything you like. That’s one reason I cling so strongly to mathbabe; I need to be able to write stuff that’s mildly conspiracy-theoretical. After all, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean nobody’s out to get you, right?

Anyhoo, I’m going to throw out a theory about big data, disparate impact, and the neoliberal mindset. First I need to set it up a bit.

Did you hear about this recent story whereby Facebook just got a patent to measure someone’s creditworthiness by looking at who their friends are and what their credit scores are? They idea is, you are more likely to be able to pay back your loans if the people you’re friends with pay back their loans.

On the one hand, it sounds possibly true: richer people tend to have richer friends, and so if there’s not very much information about someone, but that person is nevertheless inferred to be “friends with rich people,” then they might be a better bet for paying back loans.

On the other hand, it also sounds like an unfair way to distribute loans: most of us are friends with a bunch of people from high school, and if I happened to go to a high school filled with poor kids, then loans for me would be ruled out by this method.

This leads to the concept of disparate impact, which was beautifully explained in this recent article called When Big Data Becomes Bad Data (hat tip Marc Sobel). The idea is, when your process (or algorithm) favors one group of people over another, intentionally or not, it might be considered unfair and thus illegal. There’s lots of precedent for this in the courts, and recently the Supreme Court upheld it as a legitimate argument in Fair Housing Act cases.

It’s still not clear whether a “disparate impact” argument can be used in the case of algorithms, though. And there are plenty of people who work in the field of big data who dismiss this possibility altogether, and who even claim that things like the Facebook idea above are entirely legitimate. I had an argument on my Slate Money podcast last Friday about this very question.

Here’s my theory as to why it’s so hard for people to understand. They have been taken over in these matters by a neoliberal thought process, whereby every person is told to behave rationally, as an individual, and to seek maximum profit. It’s like an invisible hand on a miniature scale, acting everywhere and at all times.

Since this ideology has us acting as individuals, and ignoring group dynamics, the disparate impact argument is difficult if not impossible to understand. Why would anyone want to loan money to a poor person? That wouldn’t make economic sense. Or, more relevantly, why would anyone not distinguish between a poor person and a rich person before making a loan? That’s the absolute heart of how the big data movement operates. Changing that would be like throwing away money.

Since every interaction boils down to game theory and strategies for winning, “fairness” doesn’t come into the equation (note, the more equations the better!) of an individual’s striving for more opportunity and more money. Fairness isn’t even definable unless you give context, and context is exactly what this mindset ignores.

Here’s how I talk to someone when this subject comes up. I right away distinguish between the goal of the loaner – namely, accuracy and profit – and the goal of the public at large, namely that we have a reasonable financial system that doesn’t exacerbate the current inequalities or send people into debt spirals. This second goal has a lot to do with fairness and definitely pertains broadly to groups of people. Then, after setting that up, we can go ahead and discuss the newest big data idea, as long as we remember to look at it through both lenses.

I’m very happy to announce that the wonderful high school students that we worked with over the summer at Occupy Summer School have decided to self-organize into an after-school program at their school, the UAI, starting this fall (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, go check out our webpage or the press we got from the New Yorker written by Alex Carp).

A few of us from the Alt Banking group had a meeting with 5 of them earlier this week. Together they represent the organizing committee of their new activism group, which they named “Project Occupy.” Their plan is to hold weekly afternoon meetings, which will be topic-based, and for a given week they want material for their chosen topic in the form of a short video or an article. One of the topics they already chose for one of the first meetings is “cultural appropriation.” They then named a bunch of examples of cultural appropriation of black culture. I’m planning to send them this for reading material.

They are, as always, very sharp and observant. Teenagers are the best.

I am super proud of them and I can’t wait to see what they do. I told them how much they’ve taught us about keeping protests fun and generous, and giving away gifts of food or balloons (actually, both) to make their point well-received.

They want to eventually plan events around the topics they’ve learned about and gotten passionate about, and possibly also create podcasts or YouTube video series. Oh, and they want food at all their meetings. Gotta keep things fun.

We all know about the achievement gap, whereby poor kids don’t do as well on standardized tests as rich kids. It’s big and it’s growing. Logically speaking, we might try to solve it – to close the achievement gap – by lowering inequality. But that’s a hard thing to do, politically. It would require things like higher taxes and better minimum wages and stronger safety nets.

So instead, politicians everywhere have decided to simply assign blame to the school teachers who the last people to be seen with poor kids before they take the standardized tests.

If you watched the Republican debate, you might have seen Chris Christie emphatically suggest that the teachers’ union should be punched in the face. He’s willing to repeat that:

Speaking of getting rid of teacher unions, that’s exactly what they did in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, 10 years ago. And the results are mixed:

I googled for “new orleans charter school performance”

In Washington D.C., they hired School Chancellor Michelle Rhee to fix their ailing schools, so she came in and fired a bunch of teachers with bad scores, and then gave bonuses to a bunch of teachers and schools with good ones, and then ignored the ensuing cheating scandal. After she left scores largely went back to normal. The achievement gap is wider than it was before Rhee:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/03/12/d-c-school-systems-gaping-achievement-gaps-in-seven-graphs/

None of this particularly surprises me because, again, it’s likely not a teacher-specific problem, but rather an economic problem, and residents of New Orleans are still poor.

It’s a correlation versus causation problem, actually. We know poor kids do badly on tests compared to rich kids, and we look for something we can control that would change that story. Originally we focused on more tests, thinking that shining a light on the problem would automatically solve it. That didn’t work, so we turned our focus to teachers, again mostly as an easily available knob to turn. It’s taking a few years for the data to come out that this new method also isn’t addressing the problem.

There’s a new idea afloat on how to close the achievement gap, by way of Florida (h/t Jordan Ellenberg). Namely, to give bonuses to teachers that themselves got good SAT scores. A few details:

1. The bonus is $10,000
2. The cut-off is 80th percentile of SAT scores
3. Teachers are eligible even if they took the test 30 years ago
4. The teachers also need to be rated “highly effective” to earn their bonus
5. Except if they are first year teachers, in which case they don’t have a rating yet, so just their high SAT scores will do

It’s probably unnecessary to mention exactly how ridiculous this is, but I do want to point that teachers have no motivation whatsoever under this new scheme. They either qualify or they don’t. Not sure what it’s supposed to achieve in terms of carrots or sticks. It’s the equivalent of giving tall men extra money to buy suits.

I’m waiting for the meta-analysis that shows the achievement gap doesn’t respond to firing bad teachers, or charter schools, or even more testing, or any other easy target.

So what should we be doing? I have two suggestions, and neither of them is politically easy.

First, if we really wanted to see progress, we should stop persecuting teachers and immediately normalize the funding of school systems so poor kids have equal or more resources than rich kids. That would have some effects – at least poor districts could afford the latest books, for example.

Second, even that kind of progress would take us only so far. As long as a deep inequality of opportunities exists, and mobility is low, we can expect a lack of investment in poor people. We need to address these issues on the societal level.

I watch my share of bad commercials on TV. I don’t have cable but I have an antenna so I can receive some free TV stations, including one that is clearly meant for senior citizens called CoziTV. Cozi regularly has marathons of Murder She Wrote, Magnum P.I., Hart to Hart, and Fantasy Island, all shows that I somehow can’t stop watching, partly I think because I get so much confirmation from them about how awful my childhood was.

Anyhoo, back to the commercials. I couldn’t help notice a proliferation of ads for help with a medical condition called “transvaginal mesh injury.” Basically the ads were asking whether the viewer had such a problem, and whether they’d like to perhaps talk to a lawyer at this free phone number. Pretty much every other ad was about this condition, so it seemed like a pretty big deal, at least for the intended audience of old ladies.

Well, I didn’t pay much attention to it, until I came across this fascinating Reuters special report on corrupt medical lending practices entitled New breed of investor profits by financing surgeries for desperate women patients and written by Alison Frankel and Jessica Dye.

The article outlines the following scheme: financiers find women who need this surgery, based on a defective medical part, but don’t have the money for it and whose insurance companies won’t immediately cover it. They offer them the financing now in return for part of the eventual settlement with the company that was responsible for the faulty mesh. But then they make a deal with a surgeon to overcharge for the surgery, and they inflate the costs as well, and at the end of the whole thing they take a large part of the settlement which the woman was entitled to, and sometimes the woman even ends up owing them money.

It’s horrible, but it’s really just one example of a large industry of what is known as litigation finance, which just means the world where people with lots of money decide to bet on outcomes of court cases.

A recent Bloomberg article discussed the growing industry of litigation finance, and describes how congresspeople are starting to pay attention to all the hedge funds getting in on the act.

Of course, the financiers defend this practice by pointing out that, with money from people like them, a given side in a legal proceeding has more resources to make their case. They would also point out that they only put money behind cases that have at least some chance of winning.

However, there are two big problems with it as a concept. First, it means that there will be more money available to lawsuits in general. We’ve already seen what happened with college tuition when something that’s already too expensive gets access to loans: it gets even more expensive. It’s an arms race. According to Bloomberg, the typical client for these litigation finance firms are big companies which use corporate law firms.

Second, the justice system is already super unfair, and it’s not like hedge funds are running into this game to improve the system. Rather, they are there to exploit the system. That’s what hedge funds do. So if they have detected a bias in the system, they are going to treat it like an arbitrage situation and throw money at it for all they’re worth. The side effects of that will have nothing to do with justice.

The real reforms we need to see with the justice system is a way for money to be less of a factor, not more.

Whose fault is it when a woman gets sexually assaulted? For most people I interact with, the answer seems obvious: the assailant is at fault. Otherwise we’re blaming the victim.

In spite of that commonsense logic, though, there seems to be a sustained argument on the other side of the debate, and not only from right-wing talk radio. For example, over on the Guardian there’s quite a discussion about how The Pretenders star Chrissie Hynde blames herself for previous sexual assault, with the following excerpt pretty much summing up her position:

She said: “Technically speaking, however you want to look at it, this was all my doing and I take full responsibility. You can’t f*** about with people, especially people who wear ‘I Heart Rape’ and ‘On Your Knees’ badges … those motorcycle gangs, that’s what they do.

“You can’t paint yourself into a corner and then say whose brush is this? You have to take responsibility. I mean, I was naive.”

In Bangladesh, we similarly see arguments for why people marry their daughters off young which rely on the inevitability of sexual violence:

“I photographed the wedding of Akhi’s 13-year-old sister last year, and when I asked her mother why she was marrying her daughter off, she described not feeling comfortable to let her walk to the corner store because she would be harassed by men and boys,” Joyce said. “She also said no boy wants to marry a girl older than 18. If a girl is still single past that age people will ask too many questions. She knew it was wrong to marry very early, but they weren’t from a wealthy family, and she told her daughter’s husband to wear condoms for a few years, so it will be OK. Marriage is seen as a cover of respect and protection for women. By not going to school, it reduces the risk of being sexually active outside the house or be harassed while commuting.”

Don’t get me wrong, I think sexual violence is outrageous and wrong. The last thing I’d want to do is to suggest acquiescence in the face of it. I don’t want to blame victims or make things worse for them in any way. But we hear arguments like the above from reasonable, thoughtful people, who have plenty to lose by being wrong. They’re coming from personal experience which we should listen to. We should, in addition, examine why the “logical” argument doesn’t seem to work with them.

I have a theory. It’s about what our cultural expectations about men are. I’ll divide it into cases.

1. Men can more or less control violent urges and are not inherently sexual predators. In this worldview, women of all ages should be free to wear whatever we want and go wherever we want and expect only consensual sexual interactions. This is an ideal world, which one might call civilized. Mind you I’m not even talking about being bombarded with idealized visions of sexualized femininity on billboards (but that would be nice too). I think I more or less live in this world and that means I’m lucky.
2. Men are divided into two groups: sexual predators and “others.” Just as it would be silly to ask a lion not to kill an antelope when it’s hungry, and similarly it would be ridiculous to think that (some) men wouldn’t rape a woman if they had the chance. That’s along the lines of the worldview of Chrissie Hynde. If you really think that there just simply are men out there who are uncontrolled and uncontrollable sexual predators, then of course it’s up to the individual to steer clear of them. And it doesn’t make her wrong and us right, it just means we have different expectations of what men are like.
3. No man can be trusted, they’re all trying to take advantage of women at all times, and harassment is to be expected. This does seem to be more or less the expectation in certain situations, like in the above quote from a mother in Bangladesh as well as all the communities torn apart by war and insecurity and desperate poverty. If someone faces this kind of reality, they have to work within it, even if it means marrying off their 13-year-old daughter before she’s ready or willing. It’s a bad choice versus a worse choice.

Today I’m celebrating some good news for working-class people in this country. Namely, the definition of “employee” is changing, making it easier for employees at McDonalds and other places to complain about poor treatment. The good news comes via a National Labor Relations Board ruling yesterday.

I wrote previously about the economics of McDonalds franchises, but it comes down to this: 90% of the low-level employees at McDonalds don’t technically work for McDonalds at all; instead, they work for a local franchise owner, who in turn rents stuff, including the McDonalds brand, from the parent corporation.

In spite of the technical and legal framework, the parent corporation controlled the burger flippers at a minute level, through surveillance, customer service policy, branding requirements, and most importantly through controlling the margins of the franchise owner.

The legal separation, which was solidly working until yesterday, meant that employees couldn’t complain about bad treatment of their employer, McDonalds, but rather had to complain only about the way the local franchise owner treated them. This prevented large-scale unionization attempts among other things. The new ruling means that the workers will have the right to negotiate with McDonalds corporation as a “joint employer.” Another way of saying this is that McDonalds will have much more liability when it concerns mistreatment of franchise workers.

An example of how this is good news is the following: it used to be true that if one McDonalds unionized, and demanded and received better wages, it would have little knock-on effects and indeed it would be quite difficult to pull off, given how tight the margins are for franchisees. Now, with the new ruling, a second McDonalds location could possibly use that one example as leverage in a bargaining agreement. Moreover, as a joint employer, McDonalds corp cannot shut down a franchise just for unionizing.

The ruling extends well beyond McDonalds. In fact the original case was a company that hired contractors to do its recycling. It will likely mean that it will in general be much harder for corporations to create legal distance between itself and the people hired to do work for that company, so contractors of all varieties, as long as the parent company has a substantial amount of control over the workers.

Power is the opposite of dependency. I learned this definition from Adam Reich when he came to talk to my Occupy Summer School students this summer about sociology and the OurWalmart struggle.

It’s useful and convincing: you have power over someone if they are dependent on you.

So it makes sense that systems of tipping gives us power as consumers. Waiters, or other service people, are dependent on us for tips, which are often a large part of their overall salaries, so we have power over them.

In fact, it gives us a kick, a real but short-lived kind of status in service situations. We get to temporarily play the part of the “little lord.” Some people exploit this role, demanding too much, asking for special favors, and enjoying having someone do our bidding. Others are over-sensitive to slights; if they feel like their status is being questioned at any level, they switch from little lords to little tyrants, demanding attention and extra work from their waiters. We’ve all seen this.

When you ask an American, we like our tipping systems, and we don’t want to give them up, even though it leads to all kinds of financial problems for restaurant workers. Partly this is because, as part of the power relationship, if the waitstaff or serviceperson wants to get a good tip from us, they have to be nice to us. They have to make us feel like they like us, and, a secondary requirement, that they like their job. Surly waiters are waiters who don’t depend on tips and who make us realize that being a waiter isn’t always such a great job. Not that this entire dynamic is obvious to us every time we enter into a tipper-tippee relationship, but it’s there, lurking.

So far nothing I’ve said is at all new. Tipping has been around for a while. But there is a new kind of service economy evolving, which I call “the gig economy,” but which tellingly has been described as “the sharing economy” by some.

So, if you hire an Uber or Lyft driver to drive you somewhere, the payment has become somewhat invisible, since it happens on your credit card via the app, and instead of tipping you rate your driver (although you can tip as well). in fact the “cashless and seamless” experience of being driven by an Uber driver is one of the selling points. “Hassle-free” is a commonly heard phrase around the gig economy.

But in terms of power dynamics, replacing tipping by rating doesn’t do much, since Uber drivers are entirely dependent on their overall rating to stay employed. And you might object because riders get rated as well, but let’s face it, the worst thing that could happen to a poorly rated rider is that he gets kicked off the app and has to use another rider app, but the worst thing that can happen to a driver with a bad rating is he could lose his job.

My fear is this: the invisibility of the transaction makes us as consumers even less aware of the power dynamics than we already are. We have gone from a transactional relationship, in a restaurant, to a inequitable faux-friendship. The marketing of the “sharing economy” doesn’t help:

Why is this a problem? Some of the most important lessons I teach my children is how to be grateful, polite, and non-tyrannical to people who are serving us, at a restaurant or wherever. It’s part of learning how to be an empathetic person, and a balancing out of one-on-one human interactions which I think is super important. I want them to know that service is not servitude, and that everyone is a person just trying to do their best. Of course, this goes for any kind of transactional service, not just the tipping kind.

However, the first step in extending gratitude to people who are extending us a service is to know when that transaction is occurring. If every bill is magically and invisibly settled, then my kids won’t even recognize that it existed, and instead of gratitude for help, they might just think the person they just interacted with really liked them. Another way for my kids to learn empathy is, of course, for them to have jobs in which they experience the other side of the transaction, and I hope they do have jobs like that, although it’s getting much harder to get such a job than it used to be.

Maybe I’m being an old fuddy-duddy here. After all, when I think about the future of work, I often come to the conclusion that sooner or later, once the robots are doing lots of the grunt work and hard labor, the rest of us will be more or less in service to each other. There will be teachers, and personal trainers, and personal assistants, and life coaches, and people who hang out with old people, and nannies, and so on. Every now and then society will support people who just think – although they too will provide service in the form of essays or research – or people who just have loads of cash and just entertain themselves all the time.

So, maybe it’s old-fashioned to want balance in each relationship; instead, we can enjoy the “friendly interactions” of servicing one person and then turning around and being serviced by someone else in another realm. Maybe someday I’ll be an Uber driver, smiling at my rider, then I’ll meet up with my personal trainer who is extremely nice to me. Maybe the seamlessness and cashlessness of each future transaction will free everyone up to talk about politics, and philosophy, and what have you, instead of haggling over the bill.

Or, and here’s my pessimistic side emerging, or maybe we’re watering down the appearance of power relationships because we have redefined the word “innovation” as “ways to make rich peoples lives easier” and we call something a “disruption” if a bunch of people’s job security is weakened and they need to rely on rating systems – and need to claim to like their job and their customers – in order to scrape by.

What do you think? What are the consequences of the gig economy on power dynamics between people?

There have been a lot of great articles recently on my beat, the dark side of big data. I wanted to share some of them with you today:

1. An interview with Cynthia Dwork by Clair Cain Miller (h/t Marc Sobel). Describes how fairness is not automatic in algorithms, and the somewhat surprising fact that, in order to make sure an algorithm isn’t racist, for example, you must actually take race into consideration when testing it.
2. How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election by Robert Epstein (h/t Ernie Davis). This describes the unreasonable power of search rank in terms political trust. Namely, when a given candidate was artificially lifted in terms of rank, people started to trust them more. Google’s meaningless response: “Providing relevant answers has been the cornerstone of Google’s approach to search from the very beginning. It would undermine the people’s trust in our results and company if we were to change course.”
3. Big Data, Machine Learning, and the Social Sciences: Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency by Hannah Wallach (h/t Arnaud Sahuguet). She addresses the need for social scientists to work alongside computer scientists when working with human behavior data, as well as a prioritization on the question rather than data availability. She also promotes the idea of including a concept of uncertainty when possible.
4. How Big Data Is Unfair by Moritz Hardt. This isn’t new but it is a fantastic overview of fairness issues in big data, specifically how data mining techniques deal with minority groups.
5. How Social Bias Creeps Into Web Technology by Elizabeth Dwoskin (h/t Ernie Davis). Unfortunately behind the pay wall, this article talks about negative unintended consequences of data mining.
6. A somewhat different topic but great article, The MOOC revolution that wasn’t, by Audrey Watters (h/t Ernie Davis). This article traces the fall of the mighty MOOC ideals. Best quote in the article: “High failure rates and dropouts are features, not bugs,” Caulfield suggests, “because they represent a way to thin pools of applicants for potential employers.”

What is Comparative Advantage?

You may have heard about comparative advantage. As a concept, it’s a neat and mathematically valid argument. It goes like this, as described in wikipedia:

Say you have two countries, England and Portugal, which both make and use cloth and wine, say at time 1. Their productivity is described in this chart:

Which is to say that in England, it takes more work than in Portugal to produce one unit of either cloth or wine, maybe because of climate differences. In this sense, Portugal has an “absolute advantage” over England in both categories.

However, as I said, both England and Portugal make and use both products. So, if England needs one unit of each, it takes them 220 hours, and if Portugal wishes to consumer one unit of each, it takes them 170 hours to produce it.

Here’s where trade comes in. Starting at time 2, they decide to cooperate. Let’s say England focused on cloth, and make 2 units of cloth. That would take them 200 hours instead of 220 earlier. And let’s also assume Portugal focused on what it’s good at, namely making 2 units of wine. That would take them 160 hours, instead of 170. Then the countries could trade their extra units to each other, and both of them would have saved time and would have gotten the same amount of stuff.

Actually, there’s another way of thinking about it. Instead of working less, workers in England and Portugal could work the same number of hours and produce more stuff. They could use their extra stuff to trade for new things, and that excess would essentially be proof that this comparative advantage theory is a success.

Criticisms of Comparative Advantage

Comparative advantage is used as a reason that countries should engage whenever possible in free trade; it’s almost a religious belief for some economists. But, as you might have anticipated, there are some serious issues with comparative advantage. For example:

• When comparative advantage kicks in for a given industry, the people in that industry lose jobs. Like wine-makers in England in the above example.  Even cloth makers in England might lose jobs if the actual demand for cloth is limited. Of course, the idea is that the economy of England as a whole benefits, so a few jobs lost should somehow be absorbed.
• Also, you can’t simply expect the country that’s the best at a certain thing to be able to arbitrarily expand that industry and forget everything else. Think overfishing, or overgrazing: eventually there are diminishing returns.
• Next, technology comes into play. When one country figures out how to be incredibly productive due to technological advantages, like for example huge farming machines and equipment, then it’s essentially impossible for other countries, without access to such technology, to compete, even if they have good climates. That means most farmers in other countries cannot compete with the United States from a productivity standpoint, for example, even putting aside the ludicrous farm bill, which subsidizes American farmers and further distorts their advantage.
• Speaking of distortions, one argument against comparative advantage is that historically countries didn’t actually become powerful through exploiting comparative advantage and free trade. Instead, they imposed tariffs and such to nourish and grow internal industries.
• If a country buys into comparative advantage, by need or by choice, they often find themselves overreliant on one product, the market of which could be volatile or fail. There’s plenty of historical evidence that this monoculture approach to economics is a bad idea. For example, Ireland went through a famine when there was a blight on their potatoes, even while it was exporting huge amounts of “money crop” grains to England, and more recently Ireland focused heavily on finance and technology, only to be severely hurt by the credit crisis.
• Mostly, though, what is most troublesome about the modern worshipping of comparative advantage is that we end up using it as an excuse to exploit people. As my friend Jordan Ellenberg explained:
  

  If you apply comparative advantage to, say, the US and Bangladesh, what you get is “given existing conditions, the US should make computers, not work very hard, and be rich, Bangladesh should stitch T-shirts for Old Navy at 30 cents an hour, work really hard, and be poor.”

• Not that they don’t want jobs in Bangladesh. They do, and generally speaking trade agreements with poor countries help people in those countries. It’s just that we have to also acknowledge our moral responsibility to people and to reasonable working conditions.

How does this relate to marriage?

Well, first let’s think about how to apply the theory of comparative advantage to a marriage, which people tend to do. The idea is that, instead of splitting up the chores with your spouse half and half, which causes unending arguments about whose turn it is, as well as wasted productivity, we instead decide “who’s good at what” and divvy up the chores in a more scientific manner.

Growing up, I did almost all the household chores while my brother did very few (and the ones we kids didn’t do, my mother did). it wasn’t because my parents told me that, as a girl, I was the natural choice, but because I just “seemed better” at everything. The result was that I did everything, and slowly my “advantage” over my brother – defined here as efficiency, not actual advantage – which was at first small, became large.

Of course nowadays parents rarely ask their kids to do chores, so chores have mostly become a marital dispute. And given that women are expected to be – and have been trained to be – both better at and more willing to do housework, they tend to have more practice at multi-tasking and the dishes.

We arrive at a problem similar to the Bangladesh/ US situation above. Again, Jordan nailed it:

In the sexist soup straight couples all swim in, “don’t keep score, everybody do what you’re best at” seems to invariably end up at the equilibrium “woman does 75% of the shitwork” and what the comparative advantage crowd says is you are not even allowed to be mad about this, women, it is ratified by science, accept that like the Bangladeshis you are in your proper place in the equilibrium state.

One of the problems with applying an economic theory to a marriage is that we don’t actually keep track of how much time it takes us to do various things, and even if we did do that we’d probably do it wrong. Just imagining watching the clock during dishes or laundry sounds silly, and never mind with being in charge of the grocery list, since depending on how you measure that, it could either take no time at all or take all your time. Plus, when you find yourself being petty about small things, you end up measuring your marriage along those petty lines, and even thinking about it that way.

My advice to married couples is to ignore scientific arguments, and instead think about a system that will minimize longterm resentment, which is poison in any marriage or relationship. And that might mean using comparative advantage in part, both as a way of figuring out what people are good at and what people like to do, but it will also probably include doing stuff that you hate and you’re bad at sometimes just to understand what the other person goes through.

After all, the essential ingredients in any marriage is a sense of teamwork, the dedication to alleviating the other person’s suffering, and a promise to encouraging one another’s fulfillment. And economics doesn’t have much to say about those things.

You might have heard about “the five love languages.” They come from a ridiculously popular book by Gary Chapman by the same name, and they are purportedly the following:

1. gifts,
2. quality time,
3. words of affirmation,
4. acts of service (devotion), and
5. physical touch.

Chapman’s idea is that, in order to be happier with your loved one, you figure out how they like to receive your love, instead of just doing to them what you’d have done to yourself. So you might like hugs and physical touch the most, but they might need you to say kind things to them. So you say nice things, and then they give you hugs, and everybody’s happy.

I like this list because it really does seem like some people respond more to certain things than others. Personally I’m a touch person, and someone who likes gifts seems almost fake to me, but putting them both on a list makes me realize that maybe we’re just wired differently. It helps me understand other people a bit more and reserve judgment.

I want to do the same thing but for work instead of love. The question changes from “how to you want to receive love” to “what motivates you to work?”. I’ve come up with the following list:

1. money
2. security
3. status
4. social connection
5. making a positive contribution to the world
6. relief from boredom/ organizing framework
7. passion

Ideally an employer would offer to people what they care about. Personally I care about making a positive contribution to the world, but most employers only offer money.

I’m the freak here, I guess. Most people would say they work because they get paid. But really it’s not that simple when you think about it. Some people value money past the point of security, which is why I separated out those two. For that matter, some people care about money as status, but on the other hand academics (generally) care about status beyond money, which is why I made status a separate category too.

The next three are self-explanatory, and I think independent, and for the last category I’m including musicians and artists, people who do stuff in spite of having no reason to think it will ever pay.

Well, my list might be imperfect, but I think it’s good enough to make one point. Namely, that most of those reasons are actually pretty much independent of money after all, so maybe I’m not such a freak.

The work versus money issue matters because of the countless discussions about what might happen if we ever get to the “Star Trek economy” stage of existence, where our basic needs are met and we’re capable of doing other stuff. When we have free time and the resources and security not to worry about food or shelter, what would happen next?

Would we all just play video games 12 hours a day and eat too much? Would we feel useless and dried up and depressed?

I think the answer is, it depends on your personality. If you are the type of person who works out of passion, this new world order wouldn’t slow you down a bit; you’d have even more time to pursue your thing. If you want to contribute to the world, or create meaningful social connections, you’d find a way to do that with likeminded people. If you’re an academic who wants to be the smartest person in the world, you’ll have even more time to do that (but probably way more competition for the title).

My guess is that the only people that would be deeply disappointed are the people who now really really like money for its own sake. I don’t really think there are too many of these people, but they are the very people who might create obstructions to the Star Trek economy’s existence, because they are both powerful and rich in this setup, and potentially have the most to lose.