Archive
Who here reads Dutch? (#OWS)
Hey I was interviewed last week by the Belgian newspaper De Tijd about Occupy Wall Street and the Alternative Banking group. Here are pdf versions of the first page and the second page, but I wanted to show the picture too, event though this jpeg version isn’t good enough to read:
The muppets strike back
No time this morning but you gotta see this video (hat tip Nathan T. and Michael C.).
What is innovation?
I’ve come to pretty much despise the word “innovation.”
First of all, it’s painfully overused, whether you work in finance or a start-up.
In finance, when people complain that banks and hedge funds should be regulated because they take dangerous risks that they don’t understand and that taxpayers have to backstop, the response, typically from a chorus of business professors and economists, is “don’t over-regulate, you might stifle innovation!”
Never mind that if you dig down to what is meant by financial innovation, it usually consists of creating weird mathematical instruments or contracts that require a complicated computer algorithm to price. So, pretty much the stuff that gets us into weird messes in the first place.
If I needed to write a sign to sum this up, it would read something like “Please stifle financial innovation!”. Actually, Volcker said it best: “the only useful banking innovation was the invention of the ATM.”
As it’s used in start-ups, the word “innovation” is also mostly painful to experience. For the most part it’s baldly used as a buzzword, by someone with a spiffy presentation who is clearly not himself (or herself, don’t want to be sexist) planning to be innovative.
In such a buzzword context, innovation becomes meaningless. At best, it’s their attempt to encourage and cajole the people around them to be innovative, and then perhaps take credit for such innovation. At worst, they fetishize Steve Jobs, which usually means channeling his perfectionist asshole side, thinking that may spur extra innovation.
What’s particularly sad about the abuse of this word is that it is inherently meaningful, and that I see and read about true innovation every day, mostly gone unnoticed by the spin doctors. Maybe that’s because most of it is too technical for business guys to get their heads around.
Another thing I’ve noticed, is that usually the most innovative people are also the most high maintenance pain-in-the-ass people to work with. Sometimes (often) downright hostile in fact.
I’ve come to enjoy this phase of “creative hostility” as a way of getting through skeptical or openly suspicious questioning incredibly efficiently. If I propose something and my most innovative, hostile critics immediately jump down my throat, that’s a sign my idea was a good one. I know that sounds weird but it’s true.
Actually maybe it’s not so weird. I watched this TED talk by Brene Brown where she talks about shame, vulnerability, and innovation. You should watch it, it’s only 20 minutes and it’s good.
Specifically, she talks about how, in order to be innovative, one must make oneself vulnerable. Even though she didn’t have time to really argue this, it resonates with me. The most innovative moments I’ve experienced are when everyone involved is willing to be wrong (vulnerable) and to smell each other’s bullshit (skeptical). Opening yourself up to other people’s skepticism takes courage.
She also describes how cultural norms can come into play at moments of shame or vulnerability or courage. In particular, this thing where men cannot be seen as weak. I think it explains why, when I see innovation, I also tend to see overt displays of macho behavior.
I wouldn’t have it any other way. I say that because I’m pretty sure the alternative is passivity and indifference, which is totally unappealing.
Here’s what I think. Real innovation is a mess and brings up all sorts of things that people don’t actually want to talk about. That’s why we only hear about some watered-down a posteriori description of it.
Parents: don’t put your kid on a diet
Yesterday I read this article about a mother, Dara-Lynn, who put her daughter Bea on a diet, tiger-mom style, and then triumphantly wrote about it in Vogue, and more recently got a book deal. This brings up lots of stuff for me personally, and I think it’s time for me to write about it.
First of all, I would like to address the issue of why people care so much about parenting issues in the first place. I mean, I guess if you aren’t a parent and don’t plan to be one, this doesn’t matter quite as much (even though you of course were yourself parented, so it should still be somewhat relevant).
My message is basically, don’t dismiss parenting discussions- they expose who we are and what we aspire to be as human beings. Questions of how we parent and what values we choose to impose on our children, who are of course vulnerable to such things, are question of how we individually form and inform culture, creating a tiny piece of the larger culture inside our homes. As parents we want to both affect that culture and prepare our children for the larger world, and it’s a tricky balance.
So given that, what values are we imposing on our kids when we put them on a diet? I can infer that somewhat from the article but I can also speak from personal experience, because my parents put me on a diet when I was 10. My parents set up system whereby I’d be punished (by losing my allowance) if I didn’t lose at least a certain amount of weight each week. They also explained to me how calories worked. That’s it. They let me loose with that information and ultimatum. (ooh, just remembered: the reward for losing 5 pounds was, ironically, a candy bar.)
It was a little strange, in retrospect, for a few reasons. First, I had been chubby since soon after birth. My parents are both and were both chubby. My grandmother lived with us off and on and constantly hoarded bags of candy and fed them to us constantly while watching soap operas. My older brother was also somewhat chubby. In spite of this, I was the only person on this regimen, and nothing else about our eating habits changed besides that I was expected to keep track of the calories I ate- the food itself was still hamburgers, boiled vegatables, and spaghetti with butter.
I guess this may have been my first experience dealing first-hand with a misleading, pseudo-quantitative model. I was told by my parents that losing weight was a simple concept of calories in and calories out, and thus must be simple to deal with. I was honestly too young to question this, and to also question why they hadn’t achieved their perfect weights if it was so simple.
Now, to the question of values. From my perspective as a kid, the values I learned were the following:
- I am terrible at following simple directions, because I can’t seem to control my eating,
- I don’t look good to other people, and
- it’s really important to look good to other people.
All in all, a pretty nasty set of values that I carried around with me like a sin for years, until something else happened, which I will get back to soon.
You might say that the article with Dara-Lynn and Bea is completely different, because first of all the mother wasn’t offhand in planning her daughter’s diet: she lived and breathed the control that she thought was required to get her daughter to lose weight. Also, it was a “success,” in that Bea lost the weight her mother set out for her. Even so, I see parallels for Bea’s received wisdom from her mother:
- You have to submit entirely to someone else (me, your mother) because you can’t be trusted to follow your instincts,
- You didn’t look good to other people, and
- it’s really important to look good to other people.
But I do feel sorry for her on top of what I went through, because now her mom is not only in a national magazine bragging about her control over her kids, she’s also gotten a book deal to go into the details of this control freakiness. Because it’s all about how a mother can foster good eating habits in her kid. I guess.
If there was any justice in the world, it would be Bea getting the book deal, in advance, to describe what it’s like to live with such a control freak mother. I honestly wish her luck.
A few concluding remarks. First of all, if you were wondering when the nerdy stuff was coming, here it is: there’s enormous selection bias going on. For every mother you hear about who drags their kids kicking and screaming through a diet, there are hundreds of poor kids who ended up like me, with failed enforced diets and incredibly guilty consciences (but at least no pictures in Vogue of their shame). We don’t hear about them, of course, because nobody wants to.
Next, although Bea is a “success story” now, I’m pretty well versed in statistics on teenage dieting and I’m anticipating lots of terrible experiences for the daughters of the women who will buy this book. A generation of girls who are ashamed and self-conscious.
Finally, how I got over my shame. It was mostly a coping mechanism. I went into a hospital when I was in 10th grade, with deep feelings of depression, and missed a few weeks of school. It was a critical moment for me, and I knew it. I had to decide whether to be depressed and passive for the rest of my life or whether to try to live life on my own terms. I basically decided to take on the following “anti-values” in order to obviate the terrible self-image I harbored at that time. I came up with these three anti-values, which I still live by:
- I forgive myself for not being good at controlling myself, because I love my body, even parts of it that confound me,
- I look good to myself, and
- it’s not that important to look good to other people.
Probably not stuff for a book deal, but at least it’s kept me from giving my kids eating disorders.
Vote with your wallet
Today we have a guest post from Elizabeth Friedrich, with whom I work on the Credit Union Findr webapp I blogged about here. Cross posted from Beyond the Bailout.
In 2008, America was in shock seeing the stock market crash, the housing market collapse, and a $12.8 trillion-dollar bailout of financial institutions many felt were responsible for the economic crash. We were paralyzed, unable to see past the madness and despair. At first, our national response was minimal. Americans had lost their homes, jobs, everything, and the anger was evident in the national mood. However, from that desperation and pain-came action and movement! People began to organize in order to decide their own fate, not leave it up to the 1% and/or a complacent government. Action came in many forms, marches in streets, letter-writing and media campaigns, peaceful occupation of public spaces, and of course “Move Your Money.”
The Move Your Money Project actually started several years ago, but had not gained significant momentum until last year, when consumers began to voice their anger and outrage at the very largest for-profit financial institutions, who had been bailed-out with billions in tax-payer dollars, and rather than using those funds to expand credit to communities in need, instead sat on this cheap money and tightened their lending standards. With historic low interest rates set and held by the Federal Reserve system, profit margins became slimmer and many banks responded by increasing their fees across the board, much to the ire of many fed-up consumers. This action was a catalyst to finally moved people to question the role of their so-called trusted financial institutions and on November 5 2011, over 600,000 people moved their money totaling $80 million dollars out of traditional banking institutions into credit unions and community banks across the country. In addition to that single day of action, over the last few years, over 4 million accounts have moved from the nation’s largest Wall Street banks according to Moebs Services, an economic research firm in Lake Bluff, IL. They also project an additional 12 million people will do the same in the next two years.
This mass-exodus from the big banks is by no means accidental and shows the overwhelming, yet untapped energy of the American people who have grown discouraged with a government that was unwilling or unable to enact true, meaningful financial reform. Many of their reasons for this are clear: consumers are looking for ethical practices, re-investment in local communities, fewer fees and more service, and the end of “Too Big to Fail” financial oligopolies. Naturally, people began focusing on credit unions and community development banks, institutions that have the public interest in mind and seek to strengthen local communities. At these community-focused institutions you actually know where you money goes and what is used for.
Convenience over accountability…
Our culture has taught us that convenience is primary tool when making decisions as opposed to accountability and fairness. Just as we make other choices; purchasing food, clothing, and transportation. Convenience is often the factor that carries the most weight in our decisions rather than ethics. This comes with many consequences – often at the expense of the environment and disadvantaged communities. Hopefully, in the future accountability and transparency will be a primary motivation for consumers when making financial decisions.
What to do?
Today we have a choice whether we know it or not. There is a parallel financial industry functioning on the fringe: Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs), a national network community development banks, loan funds, and community development credit unions (CDCUs). These are institutions with a primary mission to strengthen vulnerable communities and invest locally. Banks and credit unions are regulated depository institutions; banks by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and credit unions by the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA). Credit unions offer many of the same services as banks: mortgages, car loans, personal loans, small dollar loans, credit cards, savings/checking accounts, international money transfers, Individual Development Accounts (matched-savings accounts), retirement planning, financial literacy education and budgeting, affordable savings and checking accounts, and credit and debit cards with low minimum balances and flexible terms. They are not-for-profit financial institutions created to serve their local communities and members first. Unlike banks, which can serve any customer that walks in the door, credit unions are restricted to specific fields of membership.
This means that consumers have more options than ever with respect to their primary financial institutions, and a major selling-point for many is that the money they deposit in their credit union stays local within the specific field of membership. Rather than profiting shareholders, income earned at a credit union, dividends are returned in different forms from free services to better interest rates or to expand services in the community.
Making the choice to bank at a credit union or a community development bank creates a multiplier effect for the local communities being served, and ultimately in the entire the financial system. When you invest in a community development financial institution you are investing in job creation, building schools, developing housing and financing small businesses.
Some banks may be “too big to fail,” but consumers are waking up and realizing they have a choice where they put their money, and the impact that choice can have in their own communities. Rather than letting too big to fail institutions gamble away their hard-earned cash, people are choosing to exercise their power as consumers and speak with their wallet. In banking this means find the smart, responsible alternative for you, your family and your community, and community development banks and community development credit unions are a logical choice.
What’s Mahout?
Mahout is an Apache project, which means it’s open source software.
Specifically, Mahout consists of machine learning algorithms that are (typically) map-reducable, and implemented in a map-reduce framework (Hadoop), which means you can either use them on the cloud or on your own personal distributed cluster of machines.
So in other words, if you have a massive amount of data up in the cloud, and you want to apply some machine-learning algorithm to your data, then you may want to consider using Mahout.
Yesterday I learned about a recommendation algorithm and how to map-reduce it (i.e. make it as fast as I want by distributing the work on many machines) by reading Mahout in Action. And the cool thing is that it’s already implemented and optimized, which is good because there’s a big difference between thinking I know how to map-reduce something and making it fast.
So if Netflix ever fails, but their data is miraculously left intact, they can send me and a few other nerds in as a kind of data scientist rescue squad and we can help figure out how to reassemble the recommendations of new movies based on what people have already watched and rated.
If that ever really happens, I hope we’d get t-shirts that say “data scientist rescue squad” on the back.
Update: a mahout is also someone who drives an elephant. And Mahout drives Hadoop, which is the name of Doug Cutting‘s son’s toy elephant. Doug is the guy who started Hadoop at Yahoo! but now he’s at Cloudera.
How informed does an opinion have to be before it’s taken seriously?
How informed should an opinion have to be before it’s taken seriously?
I’m kind of on one end of the spectrum here. I would argue that you only need to know enough to get it right.
The original power of Occupy for me is in the following sentiment: you don’t need to understand the system’s insides and outs in order to know the system is screwing you. Of course it’s a different thing to fix something, but let’s leave that aside for the moment.
So, if you are a student with $80,000 in loans, a degree, and no job prospects, and all your friends are in the same or similar situations, then you can fairly say that the system is broken. And you’d have a powerful argument. The beauty of this argument, in fact, is that you and your friends provides living examples of how the system is broken, and defies all expert opinion to the contrary.
And one thing that we have had enough of lately is expert opinion.
This question came up at a recent Occupy Wall Street Alternative Banking group meeting, and not for the first time. The context was the collapse of MF Global, and we were talking about tri-party repos, which have intermediaries, and (maybe) fiduciary duties, and various questions arose over the legal issues as well as the question of whether Corzine et al had yet been asked these questions by Congress.
The details don’t matter. The point is, it’s complicated, and the question came up whether we had to know absolutely everything in order to be seen as asking an informed opinion and in order to be taken seriously.
Now, it’s a good idea for us to know the basics: the parties involved, their relationship to each other, and especially their individual incentives. But on the question of knowing if a specific question has been asked before, I think that doesn’t really matter. The truth is, we are some of the wonkier people in financial matters, and if we don’t know about it, then probably most people don’t.
And moreover, since we are trying to figure out how to represent the average person in such situations, that’s a good enough test. In fact, even if a question has been asked, if it hasn’t been adequately answered for the sake of the 99%, it’s still fine to ask and ask again until we have a satisfactory answer.
I’m all for being informed myself, and I like informed debates, but I don’t want to get stuck in some “cult of expertise”, where I think nobody is allowed to have an opinion unless they are incredibly well versed in something, especially when the underlying issue is actually one of ethics and justice.
Think about it: such thinking gives experts an incentive to make things more complicated in order to exclude non-experts. In fact I’d argue that such a “cult of expertise” incentive does in fact exist, has existed for some time, and the result is our financial system, tax system, and legal system.
It’s bullshit. We need to allow people who know enough to get it right, and have skin in the game, to enter the debate, and be heard, even if they don’t know the intricacies of the legal issues etc.. Those intricacies, likelier than not, have been partially put in there to confuse the very people the system was putatively set up to serve.
On NPR’s Morning Edition (#OWS)
The Alternative Banking group was on NPR’s Morning Edition with Margot Adler today.
Here’s a recording of the piece.
Bloomberg joins Occupy Wall Street
Yesterday I was astounded to read this article in Bloomberg, explaining how the debt collectors hired by the Department of Education have been illegally screwing people to the ground on their debt. This could have come straight out of an #OWS Alternative Banking meeting. From the article:
Under Education Department contracts, collection companies “rehabilitate” a defaulted loan by getting a borrower to make nine payments in 10 months. If they succeed, they reap a jackpot: a commission equal to as much as 16 percent of the entire loan amount, or $3,200 on a $20,000 loan.
Incentive Pressure
These companies receive that fee only if borrowers make a minimum payment of 0.75 percent to 1.25 percent of the loan each month, depending on its size. For example, a $20,000 loan would require payments of about $200 a month. If the payment falls below that figure, the collector receives an administrative fee of $150.
That differential provides an incentive for collectors to insist on the minimum payment and fail to reveal when borrowers are eligible for a more affordable schedule, according to Loonin, the attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, which is representing borrowers in the Washington talks with the Education Department
Here’s a closeup of Pioneer Credit Recovery, one of the debt collection agencies in contract with the U.S. Education Department. From the Bloomberg article:
Pioneer maintained a “boiler room” environment, with high turnover among those who didn’t perform, said Joshua Kehoe, a former collector. Kehoe worked in Batavia, New York, from July 2006 through October 2008 after managing a pizza stand at a theme park.
Pioneer rewarded collectors with $100 restaurant gift cards, a $500 mahogany jewelry box, televisions and a trip to the Dominican Republic, according to Kehoe, who said he earned $9.60 an hour before the incentives.
It would be “a cold day in Hades” before collectors would tell borrowers about options with lower payments, according to Kehoe, who said “rehab cash was king.” The company pushed collectors to sign borrowers up for the rehabilitation plans, which often required payments equal to 1.25 percent of their loan amount monthly, he said.
Just in case you think student debt is someone else’s problem, read this post from ZeroHedge from a couple of days ago. In it, Tyler Durden throws down two statistics we might want to keep in mind:
- … of the $1 trillion + in student debt outstanding, “as many as 27% of all student loan borrowers are more than 30 days past due.” In other words at least $270 billion in student loans are no longer current, and
- … the unemployment for 18-24 year olds is 46%. Yup: 46%.
When you throw in that student debt cannot be expelled through bankruptcy, you have a major problem for young people. And that means a major problem for all of us.
Random stuff, some good some bad
- In case you didn’t hear, Obama didn’t nominate Larry Summers to head the World Bank. This goes in the category of good news in the sense that expectations were so low that this seems like a close call. But I guess it’s bad news that expectations have gotten so low.
- Am I the only person who always thinks of tapioca when I hear the word “mediocre”?
- There are lots of actions going on in Occupy Wall Street, part of the Spring Resistance. It’s going to be an exciting May Day, what are you plans?
- Did you hear that New Jersey was somehow calculated to be the country’s least corrupt state? This Bloomberg article convincingly blows away the methodology that came to that conclusion. In particular, as part of the methodology they asked questions about levels of transparency and other things to people working in New Jersey League of Municipalities (NJLM). A bit of googling brings up this article from nj.com, exposing that NJLM clearly have incentives to want the state government to look good: it consists of “… more than 13,000 elected and appointed municipal officials — including 560 mayors — as members… its 17 employees are members of the Public Employees’ Retirement System, and 16 percent of its budget comes from taxpayer funds in the form of dues from each municipality.” Guess what NJLM said? That New Jersey is wonderfully transparent. And guess what else? The resulting report is front and center on their webpage. By the way, NJLM was sued by Fair Share Housing to open up their documents to the public, and they lost. So they have a thing about transparency. And just to be clear, the questions for deciding whether a given state is corrupt could have been along the lines whether the accounting methods for the state pension funds are available on the web and searchable on the state government’s website.
- If you know of examples of so-called quantitative models that are fundamentally flawed and/or politically motivated like this, please tell me about them! I enjoy tearing apart such models.
- The Dallas Fed has called for an end to too-big-to-fail banks. Mmmhmmm. I love it when someone uses the phrase, “Aspiring politicians in this audience do not have to be part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, or be advocates for the Tea Party, to recognize that government-assisted bailouts of reckless financial institutions are sociologically and politically offensive”.
- Volcker says more reforms are needed in finance and government. Can we start listening to this guy now that we broke up with Summers? Please?
I regret nothing
There are a few parts of my brain that are missing. I know this not because I used to have them, because I didn’t, but because of how other people refer to their own feelings and thoughts, which I simply can’t relate to or sometimes even decipher.
One of them is the part of the brain that enjoys art. I already explained how I don’t like or understand paintings. I just don’t get why people look at art. The closest I can get to enjoying art is photography, and then usually I only like naked photos. But at that point I don’t think it’s liking it for the artistic part exactly.
Here’s another confession. I don’t have a regret center in my brain. I am someone who regrets nothing. I mean, every now and then I certainly realize I made a mistake, and I do experience an “oh shit!” feeling that I made that mistake. Like, I’ll get in the wrong line at a check-out counter and the other line will go faster (“oh shit!”). But that doesn’t seem to compare with other people’s concept of regret.
Here’s how I argue that nobody should experience regret. Let’s assume you a regret decision you’ve made, that you later believe you should have made differently. But when you’re faced with a choice, there are things you can control and things you can’t. There are things you know and things you don’t. There are consequences that you can measure and those you can’t. You do the best you can with the information you have when you make your decision. Then it’s done. What’s to regret? If you went back to that place and that time, knowing what you knew then, and being that person you were then, you’d do the same thing. It’s kind of a tautology, but it’s convincing to me.
Maybe you are mourning for not being a person who could have made a different, better choice? Even so, (I’d suggest), don’t be regretful about that, but rather try now to become someone who would make the right decision next time.
What is the utility of a regret? Does it help us do better next time? I’m all for learning from mistakes, but I don’t see why it should be such a negative process. Maybe I learn more slowly from my mistakes because I don’t have regretful feelings.
On the other hand, from my observation of this alien emotion, I’d argue that the fear of having future regrets is more of a problem than the possible mistakes people actually make. That fear seems pretty unpleasant and it seems to cloud people’s decisions: they end up experimenting less and taking fewer risks.
Am I missing something? Since I can’t understand regretting, I probable am, so please explain it to me.
The Market Price of Privacy
I recently got annoyed by this New York Times “Bitz” blog, written by Somini Sengupta, about paying for privacy. It correctly pointed out that we get services on the web that seem `free’ to us, but there is an actual price which we pay, namely we are targets of ads and are sometimes forced to hand over personal information. Moreover, when we use `free’ services such as sending invitations to a party, we are subjecting all of our friends to advertising as well. From the post:
It was a perfect microcosm of the bargain we make with the Web every day. Send me ads based on what you know about me (bachelorette party vs. child’s birthday party) or take my money to keep my screen free of ads. That bargain was the topic of a fascinating study that asked how much we are willing to pay to keep our personal data to ourselves.
The article then explained the recent study. Namely, it seems that Germans aren’t willing to pay an extra 50 Euro cents for movie tickets to avoid giving out their cells numbers, but they do claim to care about personal information gathering. If there was no price difference they wanted the less intrusive version. The author seemed to think this is a paradox.
What? That’s kind of like me saying, I like better quality chocolate, but I’m not willing to pay $400 per serving for better chocolate, and then you say I’m a hypocrite and must not like chocolate.
The fact is, it’s all about the price. It’s always all about the price. There is no way, absolutely no way, that a cell phone number, reluctantly given in a situation such as for buying movie tickets, is worth 50 Euro cents to the company collecting the number. Therefore there’s no way you should have to pay that much to avoid giving it.
Here’s another example the blog gave, when explaining sending out a dozen web-based invitations to a party:
Faced with the choice of paying an extra $10 to keep my invitation advertisement-free, I dithered. It would be easy and inexpensive, I thought, to follow Wikipedia’s lead on this (the online encyclopedia is stubbornly ad-free). But then I thought about that little risk that accompanies the ease of digital consumption: Would my credit card information be safe with this online greeting card company? The worrywart in me won out. I did not pay the extra $10. I chose to lob advertisements at my friends.
I’m in internet advertising, and I can tell you right now that a very generous estimate of how much each opportunity to advertise for your guests on an invitation, and presumably the original email and anything you’d click on in receiving the invitation, could be worth up to 10 cents, max. That is to say, the offer of keeping your invitations advertisement free for $10 is an approximately 10x markup, and you’d be a fool to pay that much for something worth so little on the open market.
So here’s what drives me crazy. It’s not that people aren’t willing to pay for privacy. They are. They’re just not willing to overpay by an outrageous amount for privacy. Far from seeming like a paradox, this seems like good intuition for a market price. If there is a web-based company that offers to send out advertisement-free invitations for a dime per guest, I think about my friends and I say, yeah they’re worth a dime each (but actually I just send them an email to come to my party).
Consumers don’t (yet) actually have access to the market price of privacy- that market is dominated for now by large-scale institutional collectors of information, which is why we’re seeing outrageous markups like these for individuals. It will be interesting to see how that changes.
Today is Sonia Kovalevsky Day
Sometimes I imagine what my life would have been life if I’d been born way earlier, like in 1850. Knowing how difficult it was back then to be a female mathematician, and not wanting to assume some special property like I was born royalty or otherwise incredibly rich, I usually settle on something like a farmer’s life, with 7 kids and a butter churn, Little-House-on-the-Prairie style. To satisfy my nerdy urges I imagine myself knitting difficult patterns and formally organizing the community’s crop rotations.
I really don’t have much insight into what it must have been like back then, but even a short thought experiment like this helps me appreciate the story of Sofia Kovalevskaya, who was indeed born in Moscow in 1850 and unbelievably contributed majorly to mathematics, even though (hat tip Robert Lipshitz):
- it was illegal to go to university in Russia at the time so she had a faux marriage in order to get permission from her husband to go abroad to study,
- got a Ph.D. in Berlin studying under some famous men (Helmholtz, Kirchhoff and Bunsen in Heidelberg, Weirstrass), becoming the first woman in Europe to ever get hold the degree,
- after which time nobody in Germany would let her work so she did various jobs including installing streetlamps,
- and finally managed to get some kind of weird position in Sweden (here‘s a more complete bio).
Did I mention that she eventually had a kid with her husband and then died at the age of 41 from the flu?
I’d really love to go back in time for a day, find Sweden, and buy that amazing woman a drink (and I’d try to arrange to slip some antibiotics into said drink).
Today we are celebrating Sonia at Barnard College (here’s the schedule), where for the nth time (where n is at least 5) we’re having a Sonia Kovalevsky Day with a crowd of young women mathematicians, 9th graders from the Urban Assembly Institute of Math & Science for Young Women, will come and enjoy math talks from Barnard and Columbia professors and then engage in a team competition (with their teachers, which is my favorite part) to see who will win incredibly small prizes but for which they will all scream their heads off for 2 hours. It’s fun!
I started this tradition when I was a Barnard math professor back in 2006 with my friend Kiri Soares who runs the UA Institute, and that fact that it’s still going makes me very happy. Every time I go I try to teach the students how to solve the Rubiks cube using a few tricks which stem from group theory. It’s fun to do and they all get to take home their cubes, along with other math toys and goodies. Mmmm… math toys.
The higher education bubble
Yesterday there was a Bloomberg article that explained how badly students understand their student debt. It occurred to me reading this, and not for the first time, that students are really the perfect choice of victim for the educational financing machine: they are typically naive about money, and a combination of incredibly hopeful and incredibly thoughtless about their futures – if they think about the future at all, they project themselves to be as successful as some chosen role model, against all odds. I was lucky enough to go to a state school which my parents could afford and were willing to pay for, graduating in 1994, but looking back I would have signed away on whatever dotted lines if I’d been asked.
Students don’t think to shop around for a better deal, or even bother to understand the deal they’re in. What’s the incentive for good deals in these circumstances?
More generally, the existence and price of college itself is a perfect trap for students. It’s been a growing assumption in the past few decades that one needs a college education to get a good job, and certainly in a poor job market like the one right now that is certainly true. And yet, the student debt load is increasing faster than the opportunities higher education provides.
We are just now finally seeing a “market reaction” to the outrageous costs and relatively meager returns on law school education. For example see this recent New York Times article, which I found through Naked Capitalism (and which also gave me the title for this post).
My mother and I were recently talking about Occupy Wall Street protesters and student debt. She’s been a professor in computer science for more than 40 years, and explained how she sees it:
Academia expands for students and gets subsidized by all the loans to them, without regard to what the society actually can accommodate.
So not only are students fed the line that they have to go to college, no matter the cost, and whatever the resulting debt, but they then go to college and end up with majors and/or knowledge that is actually not needed or useful to them or anybody else when they graduate.
In a given individual situation, you can always sort of blame the choice someone makes- why did you major in that at that over-priced college with that outrageous private loan? Did you really think you’d be a hot item on the job market?
But when you step back and look at this system, it’s maddening. We are essentially forcing, as a rite of passage to adulthood, each generation of our young people to go through a process which leaves them with ever more questionable skills and saddles them with an ever-increasing debt burden. When you add to this that fewer and fewer jobs are willing to train people while paying them, the advantage that a wealthy young person gets from having no debt and being able to intern for free means this system is also increasing inequality.
I understand that professors don’t like to think of their departments as businesses, and I am not someone who wants to corporatize academics in the sense of wanting departments to prove their business models by producing revenue streams or winning grants just to stay alive. But at the same time we’ve got to do a better job with this overall and help give our younger people a better chance.
Update: apropos article from Bloomberg just published here.
Supply side economics and human nature
The original goal of my blog, or at least one of them, was to expose the inner workings of modeling, so that more people could use these powerful techniques for stuff other than trying to skim money off of pension funds.
Sometimes models are really complicated and seem almost like magic, so part of my blog is devoted to demystifying modeling, and explaining the underlying methods and reasoning. Even simple sounding models, like seasonal adjustments (see my posts here and here), can involve modeling choices that are tricky and can lead you to be mightily confused.
On the other hand, sometimes there are “models” which are actually fraudulent, in that they are not based on data or mathematics or statistics at all- they are pure politics. Supply-side economics is a good example of this.
First, the alleged model. Then, why I think it’s actually a poser model. Then, why I think it’s still alive. Finally, conclusions.
Supply-side economics
At its most basic level, supply-side economics is the theory that raising taxes will stifle growth so much that the tax hike will be counterproductive. To be fair, the underlying theory just says that, once tax rates are sufficiently high, the previous sentence is valid. But the people who actually refer to supply-side economics always assume we are already well withing this range.
To phrase it another way, the argument is that tax cuts will “pay for themselves” by freeing up money to go towards growth rather than the government. That extra growth will then result in more taxes taken in, albeit at the lower rate.
Now, as we’ve states this above, it does sound like a model. In other words, if we could model our tax system and economy well enough, and then change the tax rate by epsilon, we could see whether growth grows sufficiently that our tax revenue, i.e. the amount of money that the government takes in with the lower tax rate, is actually bigger. The problem is, both our tax system and economy are way too complicated to directly model.
Let’s talk abstractly, if it’s the best we can do. If tax rates (which are assumed flat, so not progressive) are at either 0% or at 100%, the government isn’t collecting any money: none at 0% because in that case the government isn’t even trying to collect money, and none at 100% because at that level nobody would bother to work (which is an assumption in itself).
On the other hand, at 35% we clearly do collect some money. Therefore, assuming continuity, there’s some point between 0% and 100% which maximizes revenue (note the reference to the Extreme Value Theorem from calculus). Let’s call this the critical point. This is illustrated using something called the Laffer Curve. Now assume we’re above that critical point. Then raising taxes actually decreases revenue, or conversely lowering taxes pays for itself.
Supply-side economics is not a model
Let me introduce some problems with this theory:
- We don’t have flat taxes. In fact our taxes are progressive. This is really important and the theory simply doesn’t address it.
- The idea of a 100% tax rate is mathematically flawed, because it may well be a singular point. We should instead consider how people would behave as we approach 100% taxation from below. For example, I can imagine that at 90% taxation, people would be perfectly happy to work hard, especially if their healthcare, education, housing, and food were taken care of for them. Same for 99% taxation. I do think people want some power over their money, so it makes more sense to think about taxation approaching 100% than it does to imagine it at 100%. Another way of saying this is that the critical point may be at 97%, and the just plummets after that or does something crazy.
- It of course does depend on what the government is doing with all that money. If it’s just a series of Congressional bickering sessions, then nobody wants to pay for that.
- The real problem is that we just don’t know where the critical point is, and it is essentially impossible to figure out given our progressive tax system and the enormous number of tax loopholes that exist and all the idiosyncratic economic noise going on everywhere all the time.
- The best we can do is try to figure out whether a given tax increase or decrease had a positive revenue effect or not on different subpopulations that for some reason are or are not left out, so what’s called a natural experiment. This New York Time article written by Christina Romer explains one such study and the conclusion is that raising taxes also raises revenue. From the article:
Where does this leave us? I can’t say marginal rates don’t matter at all. They have some impact on reported income, and it’s possible they have other effects through subtle channels not captured in the studies I’ve described. But the strong conclusion from available evidence is that their effects are small. This means policy makers should spend a lot less time worrying about the incentive effects of marginal rates and a lot more worrying about other tax issues.
- There are plenty of ways that natural experiments are biased (namely the subpopulations that are left out of tax hikes are always chosen very carefully by politicians), so I wouldn’t necessarily take these studies at face value either.
Supply-side economics is a political model, not a statistical model
In this recent Economix blog in the New York Times, Bruce Bartlett explains the history of supply-side economics and the real reason this flawed model is so popular. He explains an old essay of Jude Wanniski’s entitled “Taxes and a Two-Santa Theory,” which if you read it is an political, idiosyncratic argument for supply-side economics. Bartlett describes Wanniski’s essay thus:
Instead of worrying about the deficit, he (Wanniski) said, Republicans should just cut taxes and push for faster growth, which would make the debt more bearable.
Mr. Kristol, who was very well connected to Republican leaders, quickly saw the political virtue in Mr. Wanniski’s theory. In the introduction to his 1995 book, “Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea,” Mr. Kristol explained how it affected his thinking:
I was not certain of its economic merits but quickly saw its political possibilities. To refocus Republican conservative thought on the economics of growth rather than simply on the economics of stability seemed to me very promising. Republican economics was then in truth a dismal science, explaining to the populace, parent-like, why the good things in life that they wanted were all too expensive.
The Kristol quoted above is Irving Kristol, the “godfather of neoconservatism”. So he went on record saying that whatever the statistical merits of the supply-side theory were, it was awesome politics.
Conclusions
First, my conclusion is that Christina Romer should be ahead of Larry Summers on the short list to be the head of the World Bank. I mean, at least she’s trying to use actual data to figure this stuff out.
Second, I think there’s some lessons here to be learned about how people think and how they want to be convinced things work. When confronted with something they don’t like, like taxes, they are happy to believe a secondary effect, namely stifled growth, actually dominates a primary effect, namely tax revenue. It’s wishful thinking but it’s human nature.
My first question is, can Democrats come up with something along those lines too, which uses wishful thinking and fuzzy math to get what they want done? How about they come up with an economic model for how getting rid of big banker bonuses and terrible corporate governance will improve the economy, with a reference to a calculus theorem thrown in for authentification purposes?
My second question is, can we get to the point where people can figure out they are being manipulated by wishful thinking and fuzzy math with unnecessary references to calculus theorems? I know, wishful thinking.
Which muppet are you?
I’m kind of into Greg Smith telling us that those guys at Goldman Sachs consider us all muppets, because the muppets fucking rock.
Depending on my mood, I’m either Miss Piggy or one of those guys in the balcony complaining about stuff.
Recruiting against Goldman Sachs
I’m back from Amsterdam. Can I hear a “fuck yeah” for my guest blogger Becky while I was gone?
FUCK YEAH!!
Lots of things to talk about, sausage wall-related and otherwise, but here’s what’s first.
After reading Karen Ho’s book Liquidated, which I blogged about here, it’s impossible not to understand Goldman Sachs and other investment banks recruitment plans as not coincidental but absolutely central to their overall business strategy of seeming elite and smart. That’s one reason Greg Smith’s resignation letter is so awesome: it erodes the brand of GS, and perhaps keeps young people from joining, cutting them off at the source.
This recent article from the New York Times discusses this issue and quotes both Karen Ho and my friend Chris Wiggins, which is cool because Chris told me about Karen’s book. From the article:
“Everything from Occupy Wall Street to larger critical discourses of ‘fat cats,’ all of that has had some trickle-down effect” to young people, said Karen Ho, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, who has studied the culture of Wall Street.
The decline in the finance industry’s allure has been accelerated by the explosion of the technology industry. A 2011 survey of 6,700 young professionals by the consulting firm Universum ranked Google, Apple and Facebook as the most coveted workplaces; JPMorgan Chase, the highest-ranking bank on the survey, was 41st.
This doesn’t really tell us much since i-banks only recruit at certain colleges, and we don’t know where the survey took place. Also, I’m hearing disappointingly large numbers of kids are currently planning to go into investment banking. However, I’m guessing that the numbers of students going into investment banking from Princeton and Harvard are going to go down about two or three years after Occupy started – these older students had already been brainwashed by the time Occupy got to them. More of the article:
At this year’s SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Tex., a panel called “Keeping Kids off the Street: Wall St. vs. Start-ups” was convened to address questions including whether the finance industry was to blame for what organizers called a “failure to nurture a culture of innovation” in New York. Chris Wiggins, an associate professor of applied math at Columbia University who sat on the panel, said he was seeing students shy away from Wall Street and veer toward industries where they could work and profit without bringing their morality under the microscope.
“The claim of investment banking that it serves a social purpose by ‘lubricating capitalism’ has eroded,” Professor Wiggins said. “It’s simply very difficult for young people to believe that they’re serving any social purpose now.”
First of all, great quote from Chris.
Next, I have no problem trying to talk young people out of going into investment banking and into internet start-ups, because one industry is just too big and the other is enjoying explosive growth. But on the other hand, there’s plenty of reason to worry about the idea that ones morality isn’t under the microscope if one is engaged in highly scalable modeling that affects people’s lives. In fact that’s exactly what I’m worried about right nowadays.
By the way, I’ll be talking about the job of the quant in these two industries, as well as my related concerns, tonight at Emanuel Derman’s Financial Engineering Practitioner’s Seminar at 6pm at Columbia.
Why Larry Summers lost the presidency of Harvard
Some people still think Larry Summers got fired from being the president of Harvard because of the ridiculous comments he made about women in math (see my post about this here) or because of the comments he made about Cornel West. Actually, the truth is something worse, and for which he should actually be in jail. It’s also something that makes Harvard look bad, so maybe that’s why it’s less known.
The subtitle of this post is: Why Larry Summers shouldn’t be made head of the World Bank.
I was inspired to write this by being disgusted at continued rumors that he could get yet another prestigious job. It’s like this guy can’t fail spectacularly enough! Let’s give him another chance!
Let’s set the record straight: Summers was directly involved with defrauding the U.S. Government (see below) and Russia. He admitted to not understand conflict of interest issues (see below). It is particularly appalling, knowing these things, that he would be considered for the World Bank head, which presumably requires nuanced understanding of such issues.
I’m using this article, entitled “How Harvard Lost Russia,” and written in 2006 in Institutional Insider (II), as a reference. More on that article and how it led to getting Summers fired below. And by the way, I’m not claiming this story is completely unkown: see this wikipedia article for a quick overview, for example, in addition to the II article. I just think it needs reviving at this crucial moment, before Summers gets more toys to play with.
Shleifer
So why did Summers lose his job at Harvard? It was because of his protecting a buddy, a fellow economist at Harvard named Andrei Shleifer.
Andrei Shleifer managed to get put in charge of helping Russia privatize stuff in the mid 1990’s. His mission was to make things more useful and transparent to the infant capitalist system. Through his wife and friends, Shleifer instead orchestrated a boondoggle on Russia. He invested money through his wife and helped his friend Jonathan Hay and his lover and friends invest theirs, and set up the very first mutual fund as well as thwarting the efforts of other people to set up their own funds. All of these things were strictly against the conflict of interest policy they were working under.
Shleifer got in trouble, and the U.S Government sued and won against Harvard and Shleifer. From the article:
The judge determined that Shleifer and Hay were subject to the conflict-of-interest rules and had tried to circumvent them; that Shleifer engaged in apparent self-dealing; that Hay attempted to “launder” $400,000 through his father and girlfriend; that Hay knew the claims he caused to be submitted to AID were false; and that Shleifer and Hay conspired to defraud the U.S. government by submitting false claims.
On August 3, 2005, the parties announced a settlement under which Harvard was required to pay $26.5 million to the U.S. government, Shleifer $2 million and Hay between $1 million and $2 million, depending on his earnings over the next decade. Shleifer was barred from participating in any AID project for two years and Hay for five years. Shleifer and Zimmerman were required by terms of the settlement to take out a $2 million mortgage on their Newton house. None of the defendants acknowledged any liability under the settlement. (Forum Financial also settled its lawsuit against Harvard, Shleifer and Hay under undisclosed terms.
Summers and Shleifer
Summers was good friends with this criminal, and used his position to protect him. From the article:
Shleifer remained close to his friend and mentor Summers; they talked to and saw each other frequently and continued vacationing together in the summer on the Cape. Then it became known in early 2001 that Summers was on the short list of candidates to succeed Neil Rudenstine as the president of Harvard University. Shleifer and Zimmerman began campaigning for Summers to get the Harvard post, giving meet-and-greet parties for him at their home. Summers stayed with them when he visited Harvard.
In March 2001, Summers was named president of Harvard. Shleifer, who had been courted by New York University’s Stern School of Business, decided to stay put.
Having his close friend as his boss would turn out to be quite helpful to Shleifer. Summers asserted in his deposition that he recused himself from any involvement in the university’s handling of the Shleifer matter, but the new president stayed involved anyway. Early in his presidency he told the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, Jeremy Knowles, to keep Shleifer at Harvard.
“I expressed to Dean Knowles,” Summers testified in a deposition in 2002, “. . . that I was concerned to make sure that Professor Shleifer remained at Harvard because I felt that he made a great contribution to the economics department . . . and expressed the hope that Dean Knowles would be attentive to that. . . . I think he recognized and shared the concern.”
“Conflict of interest issues should be left to the lawyers” says Summers
This is the testimony that says to me, in no uncertain terms, that Summers cannot be put in charge of something politically sensitive:
Summers said conflict-of-interest “issues,” in his Washington experience, were “left to the lawyers.” He said he was sensitive to “ethics rules,” but testified that “in Washington I wasn’t ever smart enough to predict them . . . things that seemed very ethical to me were thought of as problematic and things that seemed quite problematic to me were thought of as perfectly fine. . . .”
More intervention on behalf of Shleifer
Maybe you’d think that getting sued by the US Government and losing $40 million might lose your job as a Harvard Professor. But you’d be wrong:
Knowles tells Institutional Investor that he does not remember Summers’ approaching him about Shleifer. “I don’t recall this particular conversation, but the president and I shared the goal of recruiting and retaining the best faculty, so it would have been perfectly natural for us to mention to each other the names of people that we certainly wouldn’t want to lose.” However, not long after Summers says he intervened on the professor’s behalf, Knowles promoted Shleifer from professor of economics to a named chair, the Whipple V.N. Jones professorship.
Shleifer’s legal position changed on June 28, 2004, when Judge Woodlock ruled that he and Hay had conspired to defraud the U.S. government and had violated conflict-of-interest regulations. Still, there was no indication that the Summers administration had initiated disciplinary proceedings. To the contrary, efforts were seemingly made to divert attention from the growing scandal. The message from the top at Harvard was, “No problem — Andrei Shleifer is a star,” says one senior Harvard figure.
The Summers-Shleifer friendship flourished. They spoke on the phone more than once a day, on average. Two months after the court ruling against Shleifer, he hosted Summers at a break-the-fast dinner on Yom Kippur.
One instance was a meeting early in the academic year that began in September 2004, less than two months after the federal court formally adjudicated Shleifer’s liability for conspiring to defraud the U.S. government. A faculty member asked Kirby why Harvard should defend a professor who had been found liable for conspiring to commit fraud. The second confrontation came early in the current academic year when another professor asked Kirby why Harvard should pay a settlement of $26.5 million and legal fees estimated at between $10 million and $15 million for legal violations by a single professor and his employee, about which it was unaware. On both occasions Kirby is said to have turned red in the face and angrily cut off discussion.
On at least one other occasion, Summers himself told members of the faculty of arts and sciences that the millions of dollars that Harvard paid in damages did not come from the budget of the faculty of arts and sciences, but didn’t say where the money came from. Those listening inferred he meant that the matter shouldn’t be of concern to the faculty and that they shouldn’t raise it, a curious notion, given that Shleifer was one of their own.
A spokesman for Summers said he was “unable to schedule” an interview with Summers for II in December, when this article was being prepared. As the lawsuit was against the university, not just the faculty of arts and sciences, the settlement came from “university funds available for these purposes,” the spokesman added.
…
Shleifer has never acknowledged doing anything wrong. Summers has said nothing. And so far as is known, there has been no internal investigation or sanction. “An observer trying to make sense of the University’s position on Shleifer, Ogletree and Tribe is driven to an unhappy conclusion. Defiance seems to be a better way to escape institutional opprobrium than confession and apology. . . . And most of all being a close personal friend of the president probably does one no harm.”
The article gets Summers fired
An anonymous person got a bunch of copies of the II article and stuck one in every Harvard faculty’s mailbox the morning of the no-confidence vote that got Summers ousted.
And just in case you’re wondering, here’s the website of Sheifer, still on faculty of Harvard.
VAM versus what?
A few astute readers pointed out to me that in the past few days I both slammed the Value-added teacher’s model (VAM) and complained about people who reject something without providing an alternative. Good point, and today I’d like to start that discussion.
What should we be doing instead of VAM?
First of all, I do think that not rating teachers at all is better than the current system. So my “compare the the status quo” argument goes through in this instance. Namely, VAM is actively discouraging teachers whereas leaving them alone entirely would neither discourage or encourage anyone. So better than this.
At the same time, I am a realist, and I think there should be, ultimately, a system of evaluating teachers, just as there is a system for evaluating me at work. The difference between my workplace, of 45 people, and the NYC public schools is scale. It makes sense to have a very large and consistent evaluation system in the NYC public schools, whereas my job can have an ad hoc inconsistent system without it being a problem.
There’s another problem which is nearly impossible to tease from this discussion. Namely, the fact that what’s going on in NYC is a disingenuous political game between Bloomberg and the teacher’s union. Just to emphasize how important that fight is, let’s keep in mind that as of now, although the union is much weaker than it historically has been, it still has the tenure system. So any model, VAM or not, of evaluation is somewhat irrelevant for “removing bad teachers” given that they have tenure and tenure still means something.
Probably the best way to decouple the “Bloomberg vs. union/tenure” issue (a massive one here in NYC) from the “VAM versus other” question is to think nationally rather than citywide.
The truth is, the VAM is being tried out all over the country (although I don’t have hard numbers on this) and the momentum is for it to be used more and more. I predict within 10 years it will be done systematically everywhere in the country.
And, sadly, that’s kind of my prediction whether or not the underlying model is any good or not! The truth is, there is a large contingent of technocrats who want control over the evaluation system and believe in the models, whether or not they are producing pure noise or not. In other words, they believe in “data driven decisioning” as a holy grail even though there’s scant evidence that this will work in schools. And they also don’t want to back down now, even though the model sucks, because they feel like they’ll be losing momentum on the overall data-driven approach.
One thing I know for sure is that we should continue to be aware of how badly the current models are, and I want to set up an open source version of the models (see this post to get an idea how it could work) to exhibit that. In other words, even if we don’t turn off the models altogether, can’t we at least minimize their importance while their quality is bad? The first step is to plainly exhibit how bad they are.
It’s hard for me to decide what to do next, though. I’m essentially a modeler who is hugely skeptical of models. In fact, I don’t think using purely quantitative models to evaluate teachers is the right thing to do, period. Yet I feel like if it’s definitely going to happen, better for people like me to be in the middle of it, pointing out how bad the proposed (or in use) models are actually performing, and improving them.
One thing I know I’d do if I were to be put in charge of creating a better model: I’d train on data where the teacher is actually rated as a good teacher or not. In other words, I wouldn’t proxy “good teacher” by “if your students scored better than expected on tests”. A good model would be trained on data where there would be an expert teacher scorer, who would go into 500 classrooms and carefully evaluate the actual teachers, based on things like whether the teacher asked questions, or got the kids engaged, or talked too much or too little, or imposed too much busy work, etc. Then the model would be trying to mimic this expert.
Of course there are lots of really complicated issues to sort out- and they are *totally unavoidable*. This is why I’m so skeptical of models, by the way: people think you can simplify stuff when you actually can’t. There’s nothing simple about teaching and whether someone’s a good teacher. It’s just plain complex. A simple model will be losing too much information.
Here’s one. Different people think good teaching is different. A possible solution: maybe we could have 5 different “expert models” based on different people’s definitions of good teaching, and every teacher could be evaluated based on every model. Still need to find those 5 experts that teachers trust.
Here’s another. The kind of teacher-specific attributes collected for this test would be different from the VAM- things that happen inside a classroom (like percentage of time teacher talks vs. student, the tone of the discussion, the number and percentage of kids involved in the discussion, etc,) and are harder to capture accurately. These are technological hurdles that are hard.
I think one of the most important questions is whether we can come up with an evaluation system that would be sufficiently reasonable and transparent that the teachers themselves would get on board.
I’d to hear more ideas.
Sausage Wall
I’m getting ready to go to Amsterdam this Sunday (get ready for an exciting guest blogger while I’m gone!).
I’ve been to Amsterdam a bunch of times since hooking up with my big-nosed Dutch husband, and I enjoy our visits to his family very much.
But it’s not what you’re thinking. I’m allergic to that stuff (I have very funny, inappropriate stories about that which you’ll have to ask me in person), plus I’m traveling with our 3 sons, so it’s all about bikes, canals, and food. I’m also allergic to art, so the museum scene is kind of irrelevant too. I know that’s blasphemous, but there you go, I just don’t get paintings.
So, about the food. I’ve got street food tastes, and much to the chagrin of my in-law family, I consider true Dutch delicacies to be the stuff you find in carts along the side of the main road between the train station and the place with all the pigeons. Mostly loompjes loompjas (skinny little spring rolls), ollieballen (donuts without holes, literally translated as “balls of oil”), and poffertjes (tiny pancakes). Mmmm… poffertjes.
Anyhoo, what I really wanted to discuss today is the sausage wall, which I dearly dearly love. It’s near the Central Train Station, and I never know exactly where it is but I always find it like a fucking homing device. I’m the pigeon, the sausage wall is my coop.
What is a sausage wall, you ask? It’s a tiny little hole in the wall fast-food restaurant where you put coins into slots, like a vending machine, and you get to open these tiny little doors, inside of which are these delicious sausage sandwiches and other strange things. So, weird little fried things, mostly in buns but sometimes not, of all descriptions, except you never know exactly what anything is made of.
Is it delicious, you may ask? Oh yes, it is. It is, for reals, but my guess is that the crucial ingredient that makes everything so good is that you have about 40,000 high people very nearby getting the munchies, and the result of this is unbelievable turnover.
I have never been to the sausage wall when there are fewer than 15 other people vying for the best sausage windows. On the supply side, there’s an army of Dutch people on the other side of the wall feverishly preparing fresh fried sausages (if that even makes sense). Thank God for those people, and who is the genius I can thank for coming up with this brilliant idea in the first place?
I can’t wait to get to Amsterdam, folks, the sausage wall is calling me and I can hear its cry.
mathbabe 