So this has been making the rounds on Facebook lately. You may have seen it yourself; I've been hit from several sides by it:
Salary of retired US Presidents ………….$180,000 FOR LIFE
Salary of House/Senate …………………..$174,000 FOR LIFE
Salary of Speaker of the House …………$223,500 FOR LIFE
Salary of Majority/Minority Leaders …… $193,400 FOR LIFE
...Average Salary of a teacher ……………. $40,065
Average Salary of Soldier DEPLOYED IN AFGHANISTAN $38,000
I think we found where the cuts should be made! If you agree… Copy and RE-POST
The sentiment expressed by this... what do we use to describe it? Chain post?... is pretty obvious: if we're going to be making budget cuts, "I think we found where the cuts should be made".
Only one problem: are those facts and figures actually accurate? We need to figure that out before we get out the torches and-- oh, screw it, you lit the torches long ago. Well, it'd be a nice thing to know regardless. We wouldn't want to have our facts wrong and look stupid, would we?
There are two main things we have to cover: first, are these salary figures accurate and where did they come from. Second, we need to settle the 'FOR LIFE' side of the equation. This, it can only be assumed, refers to the pension that those officeholders receive upon leaving their respective bodies. We need to find out if they actually get a pension equal to their active-duty salary; and if not, what the pension actually is.
First, we'll handle the President. A current President's salary, most recently revised in the administration of Bush 43, is $400,000 per year, up from $200,000 previously. He also gets a $50,000 non-taxable stipend. But current Presidents aren't on the list. We want retired Presidents. While $180,000 is a commonly-given answer, their pay- their pension- is actually not a fixed amount. It is indexed to match the salary of current Cabinet members. That salary, along with many others in the highest levels of the executive branch, is part of something called "Executive Schedule". Executive Schedule covers top-ranked Presidential appointees, sorting their salaries into five levels, given Roman numerals I-V. I is highest. Everyone at a given level gets the same salary.
Everyone in the Cabinet sits at Level I. Which means, by extension, retired Presidents also get Level I pay. The salary there, currently, is $199,700. That's actually MORE than the angry chain-post claims by $19,700.
Just for fun:
*Also at Level I are the Director of National Intelligence, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Commissioner of the Social Security Administration, and the directors of the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
*Level II salary is $179,700. Sitting here, among others, are the Joint Chiefs of Staff and deputy secretaries.
*Level III pay is $165,300. Undersecretaries sit here. Yes, that is a different thing from deputy secretaries. Also sitting here, among others, are the Solicitor General, the directors of the FBI, DEA, Peace Corps, Office of Government Ethics, and Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and chairmen for the FCC, FTC, SEC, FDIC, OSHA, Consumer Product Safety Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
*Level IV gets $155,500. Assistant Secretaries go here- yes, that's another level- along with various Inspector Generals. Also here are the heads of the Bureau of the Census, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Office of Science, Food and Drug Administration, Bureau of Prisons, and Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
*Level V gets $145,700. Among the people here are the Archivist of the United States, and heads of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, US Geological Survey, US Bureau of Mines, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, and the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History.
The other governmental figures, the members of Congress, match the figures shown here, at least, while they're actively in office. That isn't in dispute. However, the pension is not full. Nor is it immediate, or even automatic. In order to get any Congressional pension at all, members of Congress must first earn it by having served a bare minimum of five years in civil federal service. So if you serve two terms in the House and then lose out on a third term, you're out of luck unless you find some other governmental position in which to get that other year.
There are other restrictions as well. In Congress, you are not eligible for a pension until your 50th birthday, and even to get it then, you have to have served for 20 years or be part of nine Congresses. Other than that, generally speaking, you qualify either on your 62nd birthday, or upon having served for 25 years.
Your pension is figured combining your years of service with the average of the three years in which you earned the highest salary, along with factoring in (PDF file) which of two federal retirement plans you have. (They introduced a new system in 1987, the Federal Employees' Retirement System (FERS) and employees who started prior to 1984 were given the option of which plan they preferred, FERS or their current one, the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS).) However, your pension is not indexed, like former Presidents, and your initial pension amount cannot exceed 80% of your final salary. CSRS sees you max out after your 32nd year. There is no maximum under FERS, but we'll calculate at 32 years there as well for comparative purposes.
Congress currently gets an annual pay raise unless Congress votes it down. This is a different pay structure than the retired President. At no point in time do Congressional salaries and pensions of retired Presidents meet up in the way they do in the chain-post. The poster had to have gotten them from two different sources that were working on two different timeframes.
The older pension plan, CSRS, is figured as such:
High 3-year average X years of service X .025 = Annual pension
The newer plan, FERS, is figured as such:
[High 3-year average X .017 x years of service up to 20] + [High 3-year average X .01 x years of service past 20] = Annual pension
In 2006, the most recent year available, the average CSRS recipient was getting $60,972 annually. 290 people had retired under CSRS The average FERS recipient, of which there were 123, was getting $35,952 annually; this is the average newly-incoming members of Congress should look at. Individual figures are not given.
Let us assume, for theoretical purposes, the 32-year scenario for all, with three-year averages all locked at current levels:
House/Senate: $174,000
Speaker of the House: $223,500
Majority/Minority Leaders: $193,400
This means that, under CSRS, they would each get in annual pension:
House/Senate: $174,000 x 32 x .025 = $139,200 annual pension
Speaker of the House: $223,500 x 32 x .025 = $178,800 annual pension
Majority/Minority Leaders: $193,400 x 32 x .025 = $154,720 annual pension
And under FERS, there is no maximum, but it would take 66 years in Congress- which has never been done- to achieve 80%. After 32 years, it works out to 46% of that same salary:
House/Senate: [$174,000 x .017 x 20 = $59,160] + [$174,000 x .01 x 12 = $20,880] = $80,040 annual pension
Speaker of the House: [$223,500 x .017 x 20 = $75,990] + [$223,500 x .01 x 12 = $26,820] = $102,810 annual pension
Majority/Minority Leaders: [$193,400 x .017 x 20 = $65,756] + [$193,400 x .01 x 12 = $23,208] = $88,964 annual pension
Remember, those are theoretical, perfect, absolute-maximum pensions that someone could get, today, by leaving Congress. Not only is it nowhere close to the claimed amount in the chain-post, even in a perfect scenario, but the newer plan, FERS, which newly-elected members are placed into, gives them LESS money, significantly less, than the plan that the older members get. So the chain-post is way off here.
Next, we have the teachers. Their average is pegged at $40,065, but this number appears dubious. This number is overwhelmingly seen only in repostings. The most relevant things I could find that uses $40,065 as an average are here, the Elk River Public School District in Minnesota, where $40,065 is the median male income; here, Upper Little Caillou Elementary in Chauvin, Louisiana, where $40,065 is the average faculty salary in 2006-07; and here, Blanket High School in Blanket, Texas, where $40,065 is the average base salary for Blanket High's entire district. Frankly, these appear to be nothing more than lucky shots, because there are so many numbers thrown around in so many districts in so many categories that any given dollar amount is bound to match something somewhere. I shifted the average one dollar lower, to $40,064, and came up with schools in Cape Girardeau, Missouri and New Albany, Indiana. One dollar higher, $40,066, matches the average base salary for a district in Amarillo, Texas.
Blind luck.
As it happens, it's pretty hard to get a blanket figure for "teacher" if you're not really paying attention. When you look for it, you'll find they're usually parsed out by state, by experience, or by type of teacher, and while $40,065 never shows up, the numbers work out to where that comes pretty close to an average of some sort. (Although most of the groups show that $40,065 would skew a few thousand dollars low of average.) It may have been that someone took all the salaries in one of the lower-paying groups shown, smashed them together as a mean average with total disregard as to weighting, and used the result in the chain-post. However, it's almost impossible to tell what group they used.
The first Google result for 'average salary' takes us to salary.com, and the most popular search there is for teacher salaries. An average person needing to smash an average together would most likely go here to do it.
Smashing a mean average together from the 10 categories shown produces $43,934.20, a little less than $4,000 short of the given average. So that's not what the originator did, not precisely. But it is close enough to imagine that this was done somewhere or other. Just not at salary.com.
An actual average, however, is available via the National Education Association. (PDF file.) The average for all classroom teachers was estimated, for 2010-11, to be $56,069, up from $55,202 the previous year. The chain-post's number now looks fairly wildly off.
As for a soldier in Afghanistan, $38,000 matches the number given in the fourth Google result for "average annual salary troop afghanistan", something on Yahoo Answers talking about one specific rank in one specific branch- a tech sergeant in the Air Force.
The Army base pay scale is shown here; the equivalent rank is staff sergeant. $38,000 is higher than any of the figures listed; the highest is $34,088 for a staff sergeant serving for over 6 years. (Privates are started at $17,611 for the first four months.) However, that is only base pay.
An average is even more problematic to track down than that for teachers, because of the sheer number of variables and bonuses that get in the way of producing that nice, clean single average. I was never able to get that straightforward average. The three most relevant are hardship pay ($225 a month, or $2,700 a year), combat pay ($150 a month in Afghanistan, meaning $1,800 a year), and family separation allowances ($250 a month, or $3,000 a year). Combined, that's $7,500 tacked onto your base pay right there if you have any dependents, or $4,500 if you don't. There is also food allowance, clothing allowance, hazardous duty pay, and various other factors.
There is one more, fairly major oversight made by the chain-post: when in a combat zone, a soldier's pay becomes tax-exempt. That provides a substantial boost to someone's salary. It's not going to get anyone swimming in champagne, not by a longshot, but it's nothing to sneeze at either.
Suffice to say, on what has been supplied, $38,000 is certainly one possible number, but a more responsible thing to do is give a range, and while it's a rough, broad estimate, an average soldier in Afghanistan could probably expect between $30,000 and $60,000, somewhere between 'pretty bad' to 'actually fairly decent'. Were I to venture a guess of my own, I'd settle on something around $50,000, give or take. But don't take that as gospel.
So where does this all leave us? Let's revisit the chain-post:
Salary of retired US Presidents ………….$180,000 FOR LIFE
Salary of House/Senate …………………..$174,000 FOR LIFE
Salary of Speaker of the House …………$223,500 FOR LIFE
Salary of Majority/Minority Leaders …… $193,400 FOR LIFE
...Average Salary of a teacher ……………. $40,065
Average Salary of Soldier DEPLOYED IN AFGHANISTAN $38,000
And now, let's revise it to reflect the actual numbers we've found.
Salary of retired US Presidents ………….$199,700 (and rising) FOR LIFE
Salary of House/Senate …………………..$174,000, then $35,952 FOR LIFE
Salary of Speaker of the House …………$223,500
Salary of Majority/Minority Leaders …… $193,400
...Average Salary of a teacher ……………. $56,069
Average Salary of Soldier DEPLOYED IN AFGHANISTAN depends on A LOT OF THINGS but is probably between $30,000-60,000, TAX-FREE
The sentiment of the chain-post- that elected officials make much more in comparison to teachers and soldiers- is accurate. However, the exact numbers are almost completely wrong, mostly in a direction that makes the differences more stark than in reality, and the Congressional pension numbers are ridiculously off. And the tax-exempt status of the soldier in Afghanistan gives a big boost to their entire pay structure.
This chain-post is an example of the phrase 'garbage in, garbage out'. It looks to have been put together very lazily, with bad and very possibly outmoded data. Someone probably got angry, had general, predetermined ideas of what the numbers were going to be, threw together the first numbers they could come up with that looked right, and made a post out of it. As such, the numbers only have the most threadbare of resemblances to reality.
To borrow Politifact's rating scale, I rate this chain-post Mostly False.
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Petty Theft And Highway Robbery
I'm of the philosophy that a diploma doesn't tell the whole story about your education or your level of intelligence. Often, of course, they do, or else they would be functionally worthless. But they're not a be-all-end-all, either. There are people that basically buy their way into the Ivy League and the diploma within, and then pretty much sit back and wait for the world to come to them, waving the diploma around as proof of an education that they only technically have. There are people from decidedly lesser colleges that, head-to-head, will think circles around the aforementioned Ivy Leaguers. Where an underachieving Ivy Leaguer may be so overconfident in their diploma that they fail to think things through and make some astoundingly bad moves, an overachieving small-college grad can realize they have ground to make up, and make that little extra crucial bit of analysis.
And then there's the occasional story of someone who doesn't have a college degree at all but nonetheless is one of the smartest people around.
Now, part of why I bring this up is a bit of a defense of my alma mater. Let's be honest. Madison Area Technical College- or Madison College; I think they changed the name recently- isn't exactly turning away perfect SAT scores left and right. But college is done and gone. MATC can only supply knowledge, and only while I'm enrolled. It's on me to make as much of what I was taught as I possibly can. I won't sit around and wait for people to be attracted to the MATC diploma, because MATC diplomas don't have that kind of drawing power. An MATC grad has a college degree, but they still have to go out and scratch and claw their way through, and put up a ferocious fight just to have the right to take on the Ivy Leaguers.
There are, however, worse degrees to have than that of a tech school.
You could have one from a diploma mill.
In 1989, an application for accreditation by Eastern Missouri Business College came to the International Accrediting Commission in Missouri. The catalog that showed up at the IAC, among other things, listed faculty members such as Arnold Ziffel, Edward J. Haskell, M. Howard, Jerome Howard, and Lawrence Fine; the college seal read "Solum pro Avibus Est Educatio"; the motto was "Latrocina et Raptus", and the marine biology textbook (offered through the mail, along with degrees in genetic engineering and aerospace science) was "The Little Golden Book of Fishes".
For those that didn't catch on already, those faculty members were from Green Acres and the Three Stooges, and the respective translations are "Education is only for the birds" and "Everything from petty theft to highway robbery." This was not a real college. It was a teeny little office in St. Louis, staged with a little bit of fake paperwork, a whole lot of blank papers, and no accounting records or actual classrooms. (Nowadays, the lack of classrooms wouldn't be a dead giveaway, given the proliferation of online colleges, but in 1989, that was a thing worth noting.)
Any accreditor worth their salt would have busted the Fightin' Eastern Missourians in about five seconds. Any accreditor worth their salt would have been tipped off at some point over the course of the catalog, maybe passed it around the office for laughs.
Instead, the head of the IAC, George Reuter, stopped by, wandered around for half an hour and noted how impressed he was. He then went out to have a steak dinner with the head of the college. Although they would pose for a picture of the "official passing of the accreditation check", which amounted to $500.
After later indicating that accreditation would be granted, and selling Eastern Missouri Business a "fancy plaque" for another $25, the faculty of Eastern Missouri Business sprung. They were in fact working for the state attorney general, and quickly got the International Accrediting Commission shut down.
Meet Accrediting Commission International. They popped up in Arkansas shortly thereafter, a state famous for not being Missouri. The fact that the name is the same as "International Accrediting Commission" with the words rearranged is surely coincidental. Them spelling 'commission' with three M's on the topline of your window when you go visit is presumably just a test and not to be read into at all.
And ACI is adamant that you don't read into it, or any other similarities to IAC. In a page entitled 'ACI Answers To Critics', they admit that from "the older organization" (they never state "the older organization's" name outright, although they do say that "most of the stories told about the other organization are only half-truths and outright falsehood"), about 25 colleges were carried over to ACI, as opposed to all of them.
Quackwatch, however, disagrees. They charge that ACI did in fact invite all the colleges under the auspices of ICA to be automatically accredited, which numbers about 250. Go to ACI, though, and you would never know, because they don't list the colleges they've accredited. (Unlike any accreditor worth their salt-- for instance, the Higher Learning Commission, a branch of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, which will tell you that it's the one that accredited just about every college of note from West Virginia to Wyoming... including Madison Area Technical College.)
With a fair degree of legwork, though, some guys on the boards of DegreeInfo managed to track down about 100 of the places accredited by ACi. They are mostly Bible colleges. One of the ACI colleges, Wisconsin International University, is quite international indeed, because it has no campus in Wisconsin, or for that matter anywhere else in the United States.
Luckily, there is a simple way to avoid these places. In the United States, there are two institutions that approve accreditors: the Department of Education, and the Council on Higher Education Accreditation. In effect, they accredit the accreditors. If neither of those two places think an accreditor is legit, it stains any college that's approved by that accreditor, to the point where people looking to transfer to a place the DoE or CHEA do approve of may have to start their college education again from scratch.
They don't approve of ACI.
And then there's the occasional story of someone who doesn't have a college degree at all but nonetheless is one of the smartest people around.
Now, part of why I bring this up is a bit of a defense of my alma mater. Let's be honest. Madison Area Technical College- or Madison College; I think they changed the name recently- isn't exactly turning away perfect SAT scores left and right. But college is done and gone. MATC can only supply knowledge, and only while I'm enrolled. It's on me to make as much of what I was taught as I possibly can. I won't sit around and wait for people to be attracted to the MATC diploma, because MATC diplomas don't have that kind of drawing power. An MATC grad has a college degree, but they still have to go out and scratch and claw their way through, and put up a ferocious fight just to have the right to take on the Ivy Leaguers.
There are, however, worse degrees to have than that of a tech school.
You could have one from a diploma mill.
In 1989, an application for accreditation by Eastern Missouri Business College came to the International Accrediting Commission in Missouri. The catalog that showed up at the IAC, among other things, listed faculty members such as Arnold Ziffel, Edward J. Haskell, M. Howard, Jerome Howard, and Lawrence Fine; the college seal read "Solum pro Avibus Est Educatio"; the motto was "Latrocina et Raptus", and the marine biology textbook (offered through the mail, along with degrees in genetic engineering and aerospace science) was "The Little Golden Book of Fishes".
For those that didn't catch on already, those faculty members were from Green Acres and the Three Stooges, and the respective translations are "Education is only for the birds" and "Everything from petty theft to highway robbery." This was not a real college. It was a teeny little office in St. Louis, staged with a little bit of fake paperwork, a whole lot of blank papers, and no accounting records or actual classrooms. (Nowadays, the lack of classrooms wouldn't be a dead giveaway, given the proliferation of online colleges, but in 1989, that was a thing worth noting.)
Any accreditor worth their salt would have busted the Fightin' Eastern Missourians in about five seconds. Any accreditor worth their salt would have been tipped off at some point over the course of the catalog, maybe passed it around the office for laughs.
Instead, the head of the IAC, George Reuter, stopped by, wandered around for half an hour and noted how impressed he was. He then went out to have a steak dinner with the head of the college. Although they would pose for a picture of the "official passing of the accreditation check", which amounted to $500.
After later indicating that accreditation would be granted, and selling Eastern Missouri Business a "fancy plaque" for another $25, the faculty of Eastern Missouri Business sprung. They were in fact working for the state attorney general, and quickly got the International Accrediting Commission shut down.
Meet Accrediting Commission International. They popped up in Arkansas shortly thereafter, a state famous for not being Missouri. The fact that the name is the same as "International Accrediting Commission" with the words rearranged is surely coincidental. Them spelling 'commission' with three M's on the topline of your window when you go visit is presumably just a test and not to be read into at all.
And ACI is adamant that you don't read into it, or any other similarities to IAC. In a page entitled 'ACI Answers To Critics', they admit that from "the older organization" (they never state "the older organization's" name outright, although they do say that "most of the stories told about the other organization are only half-truths and outright falsehood"), about 25 colleges were carried over to ACI, as opposed to all of them.
Quackwatch, however, disagrees. They charge that ACI did in fact invite all the colleges under the auspices of ICA to be automatically accredited, which numbers about 250. Go to ACI, though, and you would never know, because they don't list the colleges they've accredited. (Unlike any accreditor worth their salt-- for instance, the Higher Learning Commission, a branch of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, which will tell you that it's the one that accredited just about every college of note from West Virginia to Wyoming... including Madison Area Technical College.)
With a fair degree of legwork, though, some guys on the boards of DegreeInfo managed to track down about 100 of the places accredited by ACi. They are mostly Bible colleges. One of the ACI colleges, Wisconsin International University, is quite international indeed, because it has no campus in Wisconsin, or for that matter anywhere else in the United States.
Luckily, there is a simple way to avoid these places. In the United States, there are two institutions that approve accreditors: the Department of Education, and the Council on Higher Education Accreditation. In effect, they accredit the accreditors. If neither of those two places think an accreditor is legit, it stains any college that's approved by that accreditor, to the point where people looking to transfer to a place the DoE or CHEA do approve of may have to start their college education again from scratch.
They don't approve of ACI.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
The Political Bee
I've been watching two things of interest on TV lately.
(But wait, there's more!)
The first was Monday's Republican Presidential debate in New Hampshire. In my reasoned and not-at-all-biased mind of a commie pinko socialist liberal who hates America, the thing was frankly a two-hour seven-car train wreck. The consensus "winner" people seem to have decided on is a bit of a split. Some call it for Michelle Bachmann for her command of people's attention. Some call it for Mitt Romney because in a two-hour debate for a nomination that at most one out of the seven people on stage can win, and with Romney the clear front-runner in New Hampshire, the other six were given every opportunity to try to beat on him to drag his numbers down and seemed to actively avoid it as if to concede New Hampshire to Romney straightaway.
Gun to my head, I fall in the Romney camp. Unless the other six are trying to be Romney's running mate, failing to attack him made absolutely no sense. But then, neither did much else on Monday night. From where I sat, everyone was acting as if the general election were a week away and that, aside from whoever happened to be speaking, Barack Obama were the only other one on stage. And also that there was no moderator; anything CNN's John King asked was almost guaranteed to be taken as a suggested topic rather than a direct question to be answered, even if King made an explicit appeal to answer the original question.
No matter what the topic eventually turned out to be, most answers would inevitably end up as either a direct attack on Obama, a proposal to privatize something or other, or both. Newt Gingrich, most bewilderingly, suggested that privatizing NASA after the moon landing in 1969 would have been preferable to what we have actually done since, claiming that if we had privatized after 1969, we would "probably have a permanent station on the moon, three or four permanent stations in space, a new generation of lift vehicles." Romney, who you'll remember I had pegged as the "winner," implied to King if not outright stated that we cannot afford to fund disaster relief efforts. Herman Cain, asked about not being comfortable with having a Muslim in his cabinet, answered that "I would not be comfortable because you have peaceful Muslims and then you have militant Muslims- those that are trying to kill us. And so when I said I wouldn't be comfortable, I was thinking about the ones who are trying to kill us."
I'll spare you the rest. Suffice to say, you wonder just how people like this have been able to penetrate the highest, most important level of debate this nation can offer. You- at this point I am of course brainwashing you to think in a way that lets this article progress smoothly- realize that, with the exception of Cain, the voters at some point allowed all of these people to hold public office at a high level. You wonder if there isn't some way to nip these people in the bud before they get this far. Perhaps one could create an easy-to-understand, generally-acceptable, and above all reliable way to tell who at least knows enough of what they're doing to where they won't completely embarrass themselves.
I have to do everything for you people, don't I?
It so happens that the second TV show of interest was the National Geography Bee, coming fairly on the heels of the National Spelling Bee. In both competitions, you have some of the smartest kids in our elementary and middle schools facing off against each other in those two respective fields until only one remains to claim a big scholarship, among other prizes. Both bees, at their national finals, are full of kids with obviously bright futures ahead of them. After all, they just proved to a nationwide audience that they're smarter than millions of their peers in their age group. That tends to look good on a resume.
So why not make a Political Bee?
A Political Bee, as I imagine it, would consist of the kind of questions that we would expect an elected official to know the answers to. You can do this without being explicitly partisan. You couldn't ask, for example, 'Which economic system is better, that of John Maynard Keynes or that of Adam Smith', but you could ask 'Which economist first described the marketplace as an 'invisible hand'?' (Smith.) The general rule is, if Alex Trebek could use the information in Jeopardy, you could use it here. Remember, this is not a debate. This is a quiz, with explicit right and wrong answers.
Among the things that would work in a Political Bee:
*Knowledge of various issues important to the catchment area of the participants (the scope of questions would be scaled up or down depending on the level of competition; more on this in a bit)
*General and political history of the catchment area
*Electoral maps of previous elections
*How specific people in a particular legislative body voted on a certain major bill in the past (this wouldn't necessarily have to be recent- don't think TARP, think the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution)
*How a particular person voted over time on a variety of bills
*The rules and procedures of the political process relevant to the catchment area
*An ethics round- various ethical dilemmas are presented, a solution provided, and the question is, do the rules say that was an appropriate solution
Questions would be scaled depending on the level of competition- at the local level, the school level (or sponsor level depending on how you conduct the preliminaries), kids would be asked local-level questions. In the written test to qualify for state, they get bumped up to county- and district-level matters. At the state level, they get asked questions about the entire state. Only in the national finals do questions about foreign policy, Congress, the Supreme Court and the Presidency come into play. Why is this? Because not every politician is going to make it to the federal level. There are state legislators, mayors and city aldermen all over the place, though. Each level of the bee would be designed to test your capability to lead at that specific level. As you progress further into the bee, you get tested for bigger and bigger offices. Ideally, the last few standing would be kids fit to run for Congress.
These kids, and all others who had any sort of a showing in the bee, could then, ideally, use their bee performance as part of a campaign resume, should they decide to pursue politics. Voters would know just how far they got, and therefore, what level we could be reasonably certain they'd be fit for. If you won at school level, you proved you would be a good local official.
This has historical precedent. As we noted here back in April, China had for 1,300 years the Imperial Examination system, in which you essentially tested into the ability to hold high-level government jobs, and could make multiple attempts at it. In fact, the more I look at it, the more the Political Bee starts to resemble the exams themselves- different levels of exams for different levels of service; the ability to just brush yourself off after failing and try again next year; the general principle that anyone from any corner of the country, provided they test well enough, can prove themselves capable of leading at the highest levels.
There were two main problems with the exam system, aside from the emphasis on rote learning, but the bee can fix them easily enough. The first was corruption and cheating- some Chinese emperors cancelled exams and simply sold the political positions- but unless students are buying answers to questions, that won't be much of a concern. (And if it does get out that a participant in a Political Bee cheated, that's the kind of problem the voters can fix in a heartbeat when that person tries to run for office later.) The second is cost- studying for the exams was sometimes so expensive that only the elite could afford to do so. In this day and age, however, that's less of a concern than ever. Anyone with access to a computer or a library or even City Hall can study for a Political Bee. The only real issue is finding schools and/or sponsors willing to host the preliminaries.
Whether the eventual products of the Political Bee eventually use those smarts to do good or harm is ultimately up to them. But at the very least, we know those smarts will exist.
(But wait, there's more!)
The first was Monday's Republican Presidential debate in New Hampshire. In my reasoned and not-at-all-biased mind of a commie pinko socialist liberal who hates America, the thing was frankly a two-hour seven-car train wreck. The consensus "winner" people seem to have decided on is a bit of a split. Some call it for Michelle Bachmann for her command of people's attention. Some call it for Mitt Romney because in a two-hour debate for a nomination that at most one out of the seven people on stage can win, and with Romney the clear front-runner in New Hampshire, the other six were given every opportunity to try to beat on him to drag his numbers down and seemed to actively avoid it as if to concede New Hampshire to Romney straightaway.
Gun to my head, I fall in the Romney camp. Unless the other six are trying to be Romney's running mate, failing to attack him made absolutely no sense. But then, neither did much else on Monday night. From where I sat, everyone was acting as if the general election were a week away and that, aside from whoever happened to be speaking, Barack Obama were the only other one on stage. And also that there was no moderator; anything CNN's John King asked was almost guaranteed to be taken as a suggested topic rather than a direct question to be answered, even if King made an explicit appeal to answer the original question.
No matter what the topic eventually turned out to be, most answers would inevitably end up as either a direct attack on Obama, a proposal to privatize something or other, or both. Newt Gingrich, most bewilderingly, suggested that privatizing NASA after the moon landing in 1969 would have been preferable to what we have actually done since, claiming that if we had privatized after 1969, we would "probably have a permanent station on the moon, three or four permanent stations in space, a new generation of lift vehicles." Romney, who you'll remember I had pegged as the "winner," implied to King if not outright stated that we cannot afford to fund disaster relief efforts. Herman Cain, asked about not being comfortable with having a Muslim in his cabinet, answered that "I would not be comfortable because you have peaceful Muslims and then you have militant Muslims- those that are trying to kill us. And so when I said I wouldn't be comfortable, I was thinking about the ones who are trying to kill us."
I'll spare you the rest. Suffice to say, you wonder just how people like this have been able to penetrate the highest, most important level of debate this nation can offer. You- at this point I am of course brainwashing you to think in a way that lets this article progress smoothly- realize that, with the exception of Cain, the voters at some point allowed all of these people to hold public office at a high level. You wonder if there isn't some way to nip these people in the bud before they get this far. Perhaps one could create an easy-to-understand, generally-acceptable, and above all reliable way to tell who at least knows enough of what they're doing to where they won't completely embarrass themselves.
I have to do everything for you people, don't I?
It so happens that the second TV show of interest was the National Geography Bee, coming fairly on the heels of the National Spelling Bee. In both competitions, you have some of the smartest kids in our elementary and middle schools facing off against each other in those two respective fields until only one remains to claim a big scholarship, among other prizes. Both bees, at their national finals, are full of kids with obviously bright futures ahead of them. After all, they just proved to a nationwide audience that they're smarter than millions of their peers in their age group. That tends to look good on a resume.
So why not make a Political Bee?
A Political Bee, as I imagine it, would consist of the kind of questions that we would expect an elected official to know the answers to. You can do this without being explicitly partisan. You couldn't ask, for example, 'Which economic system is better, that of John Maynard Keynes or that of Adam Smith', but you could ask 'Which economist first described the marketplace as an 'invisible hand'?' (Smith.) The general rule is, if Alex Trebek could use the information in Jeopardy, you could use it here. Remember, this is not a debate. This is a quiz, with explicit right and wrong answers.
Among the things that would work in a Political Bee:
*Knowledge of various issues important to the catchment area of the participants (the scope of questions would be scaled up or down depending on the level of competition; more on this in a bit)
*General and political history of the catchment area
*Electoral maps of previous elections
*How specific people in a particular legislative body voted on a certain major bill in the past (this wouldn't necessarily have to be recent- don't think TARP, think the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution)
*How a particular person voted over time on a variety of bills
*The rules and procedures of the political process relevant to the catchment area
*An ethics round- various ethical dilemmas are presented, a solution provided, and the question is, do the rules say that was an appropriate solution
Questions would be scaled depending on the level of competition- at the local level, the school level (or sponsor level depending on how you conduct the preliminaries), kids would be asked local-level questions. In the written test to qualify for state, they get bumped up to county- and district-level matters. At the state level, they get asked questions about the entire state. Only in the national finals do questions about foreign policy, Congress, the Supreme Court and the Presidency come into play. Why is this? Because not every politician is going to make it to the federal level. There are state legislators, mayors and city aldermen all over the place, though. Each level of the bee would be designed to test your capability to lead at that specific level. As you progress further into the bee, you get tested for bigger and bigger offices. Ideally, the last few standing would be kids fit to run for Congress.
These kids, and all others who had any sort of a showing in the bee, could then, ideally, use their bee performance as part of a campaign resume, should they decide to pursue politics. Voters would know just how far they got, and therefore, what level we could be reasonably certain they'd be fit for. If you won at school level, you proved you would be a good local official.
This has historical precedent. As we noted here back in April, China had for 1,300 years the Imperial Examination system, in which you essentially tested into the ability to hold high-level government jobs, and could make multiple attempts at it. In fact, the more I look at it, the more the Political Bee starts to resemble the exams themselves- different levels of exams for different levels of service; the ability to just brush yourself off after failing and try again next year; the general principle that anyone from any corner of the country, provided they test well enough, can prove themselves capable of leading at the highest levels.
There were two main problems with the exam system, aside from the emphasis on rote learning, but the bee can fix them easily enough. The first was corruption and cheating- some Chinese emperors cancelled exams and simply sold the political positions- but unless students are buying answers to questions, that won't be much of a concern. (And if it does get out that a participant in a Political Bee cheated, that's the kind of problem the voters can fix in a heartbeat when that person tries to run for office later.) The second is cost- studying for the exams was sometimes so expensive that only the elite could afford to do so. In this day and age, however, that's less of a concern than ever. Anyone with access to a computer or a library or even City Hall can study for a Political Bee. The only real issue is finding schools and/or sponsors willing to host the preliminaries.
Whether the eventual products of the Political Bee eventually use those smarts to do good or harm is ultimately up to them. But at the very least, we know those smarts will exist.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Colleges Used For Things Other Than Football
There are two major principles in the world of scientific journals, or at least, two you'll need to know today:
1) Papers cite other papers.
2) The more your paper is cited, the more important it is.
These are the principles behind a set of interactive maps you'll find through this link. The idea is to map out the most important science cities in the world, or at least the top ones in physics, chemistry and psychology.
First, the mapmakers counted up the number of papers generated by each city. That number's represented by a circle laid on top of the city; the bigger the circle, the more papers you put out.
Second, the mapmakers examined the top 10% of papers cited. Each city was scored on how many papers they put out that were in that 10%, compared to how many that they should have had considering the number of papers they put out. This scores the quality of a city's papers as opposed to quantity. Cities that tend to put out important papers show up in green. Cities that put out a bunch of junk show up in red.
So:
Big green circle = a lot of good papers.
Small green circle = not many papers, but they make them count.
Big red circle = a mountain of garbage.
Small red circle = little impact on the community.
The system isn't perfect; the direct link asks about language barriers and researchers who only cite each other, but all in all, it's more useful than useless.
A short recap:
*In the physics map, Moscow has the biggest circle in the world, but it's also one of the reddest. The Soviet bloc as a whole doesn't do very well. Some of your better performers abroad: London and Cambridge, England; Paris, France; Prague, Czech Republic; Seoul, South Korea; Hefei, China; and Munich, Karlsruhe and Garching, Germany. Within the United States, Chicago and Urbana, Illinois; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Berkeley and University, California; New York, New York; and Cambridge, Massachusetts rate highly.
*In chemistry, it's the same story with Moscow. Urbana, Berkeley and both Cambridges score big again, as well as Houston, Texas; Kyoto, Japan; Beijing, China and Singapore.
*In psychology, all the circles loaded the same size for me. But South America and the Carolinas didn't do so hot; Spain and Turkey underperformed as well.
1) Papers cite other papers.
2) The more your paper is cited, the more important it is.
These are the principles behind a set of interactive maps you'll find through this link. The idea is to map out the most important science cities in the world, or at least the top ones in physics, chemistry and psychology.
First, the mapmakers counted up the number of papers generated by each city. That number's represented by a circle laid on top of the city; the bigger the circle, the more papers you put out.
Second, the mapmakers examined the top 10% of papers cited. Each city was scored on how many papers they put out that were in that 10%, compared to how many that they should have had considering the number of papers they put out. This scores the quality of a city's papers as opposed to quantity. Cities that tend to put out important papers show up in green. Cities that put out a bunch of junk show up in red.
So:
Big green circle = a lot of good papers.
Small green circle = not many papers, but they make them count.
Big red circle = a mountain of garbage.
Small red circle = little impact on the community.
The system isn't perfect; the direct link asks about language barriers and researchers who only cite each other, but all in all, it's more useful than useless.
A short recap:
*In the physics map, Moscow has the biggest circle in the world, but it's also one of the reddest. The Soviet bloc as a whole doesn't do very well. Some of your better performers abroad: London and Cambridge, England; Paris, France; Prague, Czech Republic; Seoul, South Korea; Hefei, China; and Munich, Karlsruhe and Garching, Germany. Within the United States, Chicago and Urbana, Illinois; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Berkeley and University, California; New York, New York; and Cambridge, Massachusetts rate highly.
*In chemistry, it's the same story with Moscow. Urbana, Berkeley and both Cambridges score big again, as well as Houston, Texas; Kyoto, Japan; Beijing, China and Singapore.
*In psychology, all the circles loaded the same size for me. But South America and the Carolinas didn't do so hot; Spain and Turkey underperformed as well.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Education Placeholder
I'm working on something rather sizable; it will not get done today and will all but certainly take me deep into tomorrow. In the meantime, so you still have something to do around here, have a TED talk.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Houses Made of Diamonds: A Bad Investment
The Mega Millions jackpot has gone unclaimed for long enough that the jackpot has grown to $290 million. This is about the point where everybody and their mother buys a ticket and fantasizes about what they're going to do with $290 million; the linked article, although brief, makes sure you know about some of the larger jackpots claimed in lottery history. Not even former jackpot winners are immune from the lure of a second payday.
Far too often, these same people, after winning these gigantic jackpots, are found years later broke, miserable, and wishing they had never bought the ticket at all.
So where do so many people go astray? My theory is that a lot of the winners simply have no real-world concept of the larger jackpots. One it gets up into $290 million territory, the number... the exact number is irrelevant. The previous jackpot was $242 million, but the $48 million difference does not register. It all reads "$Texas" to some people. If this jackpot goes unclaimed, and it climbs past $300 million, it won't make much difference there either. When it's given to you in one big pile, it looks like All The Money In The World. Which as people who are actually rich for a living will tell you, it is not.
This is if you take the lump sum option, at least. If you were to split that up into 30 parts, as would happen in an annuity, it's still a lot of money, but one is much more easily able to wrap their head around the idea of $10 million as opposed to the idea of $300 million.
The problem is, despite any argument you may hear about which of the two payment options is better- the lump-sum or the annuity- when it actually comes time for the winners to choose, it turns out to be barely a debate at all. Winners almost unanimously pick the lump-sum, shown on the official Powerball website as "cash", save for the smallest of jackpots. Since 2003, Powerball records only three winners as having gone to the annuity, with the three jackpots having sat at $18.7 million, $19.8 million, and $20 million. One additional group opted for 'mixed'- which means at least one person took lump-sum and at least one person took the annuity- and this jackpot was quite large: $208.6 million. The jackpot was, however, split among 100 people, and 99 of these 100 winners chose the lump sum, leaving just over $2 million for the person who opted for the annuity. Every other winner since 2003, every single other person, has taken the lump sum.
And this costs all of these winners roughly half of their jackpot straightaway, even before taxes. What a lot of people don't realize is that the amount advertised is the amount they think you'd get if you took the annuity. The Powerball people have this misconception covered in their FAQ:
Here's the other thing. You only win that jackpot once. As earlier stated, when you first come into such a large amount of money, it's hard to wrap your head around it, and a fair amount of people get blinded by that. Sometimes they get their heads back on straight. Sometimes they don't. But with the annuity, you've got 30 attempts to figure out how to deal with the money, spread over 29 years. Eventually, with practice and a bit of smarts, you can figure out how to handle large amounts of money. That's not a guarantee that you will- some people will never get the hang of it- but you give yourself the best possible chance at success. With the lump-sum, you've only got one shot. Blow all the money in the first annuity payment, you've got 29 more coming. You've hopefully got the stupid spending out of your system. Blow all the money in the lump-sum, and that's the ballgame. You're right back to where you were, and sometimes even worse off than when you started if you can't figure out where your winnings end and your pre-existing net worth begins. And if you're the kind of person to blow hundreds of millions of dollars in one big splurge, odds are you can't. If you want more money, you're just going to have to win the lottery twice.
Good luck with that.
And that bit of smarts is a crucial factor. To see why, you need only look to another source of windfall income: professional sports. You've surely heard about the lack of emphasis in college football and college basketball on actually educating the students and the increased emphasis in finding talent for the NFL and NBA. (Ask yourself: when's the last time you saw a televised game mention a student's major?) There's little to be said about all the college kids that never make the pros. There's no windfall for them, and so there's nothing really to discuss. The players that do make the pros, however, having had such a focus on making the pros, come out of their schooling ill-prepared to handle the giant amounts of money given to them. They were steered towards the next game. They had teachers under pressure to give them good enough grades to make them academically eligible to play. Players at big-name programs are routinely funneled into specific classes regardless of what they actually want to be studying, for the purposes of having large segments of the team in the same place. Often, the students left college early. In some scattered cases in the NBA, including that of Lebron James and Kobe Bryant, they never went to college at all.
What happens when the bright lights go away? Most of them, never having gotten the kind of financial education they needed for this type of lifestyle, and in some cases having what education they did get beaten out of them on the field, quickly go broke. According to a March 2009 article from Sports Illustrated's Pablo S. Torre, 60% of all NBA players, regardless of money earned or time in the league, are broke within five years of their departure. 78% of all NFL players, regardless of money earned or length of time in the league, are broke within two years. Athletes on the financial scrapheap can be easily found regardless of the sport. The article did not show the figures for Major League Baseball, but listed the former players in similar situations as "numerous". The fourth page of the article even comes right out and says:
And it doesn't just happen in those three leagues. Here you'll find a list of 25 athletes who went broke. Just 25. In addition to the NFL, NBA and MLB, you'll also find representation from the NHL, soccer, track, boxing, tennis, the WNBA, even figure skating, represented by Dorothy Hamill. Michael Vick made the list at #4 prior to his comeback.
There's one key difference between athletes and lottery winners, though. Lottery winners choose when they get to play. High-level athletes, unless mandated otherwise, are usually pressured by the demands of any given sport to focus on it as soon as physically capable. If you wait until you've gotten your college degree to focus on it, it's too late. They're already looking at the kids coming up behind you. As a result, few athletes get the education they need to handle any sort of windfall payout, and most are dumped by the financial wayside.
Quick, how many players or managers in MLB on June 1, 2009 had a college degree of any kind? 26. That's enough to fill one team. Out of thirty.
However, it takes no skill to play a lottery. Drive down to the gas station and hand the cashier a dollar. You don't even have to pick your own numbers if you don't feel like it. And you can play whenever you want. You can get lottery tickets as birthday presents the day you turn legal. You can be 90 years old and in a wheelchair and still have enough physical capability to say "Quick Pick".
What that means is that before you play the lottery, you have all the time you need to go educate yourself on how to handle the money should you win. And even if you don't win, you can still apply the same principles to whatever smaller amounts of money you handle.
If you do win, keep your head on as straight as you can, realize that the money is finite, and really, give some thought to the annuity. Consider letting the lottery people invest that jackpot for you. They handle large amounts of money for a living. They know what they're doing.
And they'd really prefer to not have their winners become cautionary tales.
Far too often, these same people, after winning these gigantic jackpots, are found years later broke, miserable, and wishing they had never bought the ticket at all.
So where do so many people go astray? My theory is that a lot of the winners simply have no real-world concept of the larger jackpots. One it gets up into $290 million territory, the number... the exact number is irrelevant. The previous jackpot was $242 million, but the $48 million difference does not register. It all reads "$Texas" to some people. If this jackpot goes unclaimed, and it climbs past $300 million, it won't make much difference there either. When it's given to you in one big pile, it looks like All The Money In The World. Which as people who are actually rich for a living will tell you, it is not.
This is if you take the lump sum option, at least. If you were to split that up into 30 parts, as would happen in an annuity, it's still a lot of money, but one is much more easily able to wrap their head around the idea of $10 million as opposed to the idea of $300 million.
The problem is, despite any argument you may hear about which of the two payment options is better- the lump-sum or the annuity- when it actually comes time for the winners to choose, it turns out to be barely a debate at all. Winners almost unanimously pick the lump-sum, shown on the official Powerball website as "cash", save for the smallest of jackpots. Since 2003, Powerball records only three winners as having gone to the annuity, with the three jackpots having sat at $18.7 million, $19.8 million, and $20 million. One additional group opted for 'mixed'- which means at least one person took lump-sum and at least one person took the annuity- and this jackpot was quite large: $208.6 million. The jackpot was, however, split among 100 people, and 99 of these 100 winners chose the lump sum, leaving just over $2 million for the person who opted for the annuity. Every other winner since 2003, every single other person, has taken the lump sum.
And this costs all of these winners roughly half of their jackpot straightaway, even before taxes. What a lot of people don't realize is that the amount advertised is the amount they think you'd get if you took the annuity. The Powerball people have this misconception covered in their FAQ:
When we advertise a prize of $100 million paid over 29 years (30 payments), we actually have less than $50 million in cash. When someone wins the jackpot and wants cash, we give them all of the cash in the jackpot prize pool. If the winner wants the annuity, we invest the $50 million in cash to fund the annuity payments. The winner gets the cash plus the interest earned. When you see an estimated jackpot annuity prize, we are estimating both sales and what the market's prices on certain securities will be. The annuity jackpot amount and the cash jackpot amount that we announce are always estimates until sales are final and, for the annuity jackpot, until we take bids on the purchase of securities.
Federal and State Income tax apply to whatever income you actually receive in a given tax year, whether it is wages or lottery prizes. If you take the cash amount (say $50 million), then you pay income tax on $50 million). If you take the annuity (say $100 million), then you pay income tax on the money you actually receive each year. Just like your wages, a withholding amount is required to be taken out immediately. The lottery will send you a W2-G form and you figure your actual tax at tax time.
Here's the other thing. You only win that jackpot once. As earlier stated, when you first come into such a large amount of money, it's hard to wrap your head around it, and a fair amount of people get blinded by that. Sometimes they get their heads back on straight. Sometimes they don't. But with the annuity, you've got 30 attempts to figure out how to deal with the money, spread over 29 years. Eventually, with practice and a bit of smarts, you can figure out how to handle large amounts of money. That's not a guarantee that you will- some people will never get the hang of it- but you give yourself the best possible chance at success. With the lump-sum, you've only got one shot. Blow all the money in the first annuity payment, you've got 29 more coming. You've hopefully got the stupid spending out of your system. Blow all the money in the lump-sum, and that's the ballgame. You're right back to where you were, and sometimes even worse off than when you started if you can't figure out where your winnings end and your pre-existing net worth begins. And if you're the kind of person to blow hundreds of millions of dollars in one big splurge, odds are you can't. If you want more money, you're just going to have to win the lottery twice.
Good luck with that.
And that bit of smarts is a crucial factor. To see why, you need only look to another source of windfall income: professional sports. You've surely heard about the lack of emphasis in college football and college basketball on actually educating the students and the increased emphasis in finding talent for the NFL and NBA. (Ask yourself: when's the last time you saw a televised game mention a student's major?) There's little to be said about all the college kids that never make the pros. There's no windfall for them, and so there's nothing really to discuss. The players that do make the pros, however, having had such a focus on making the pros, come out of their schooling ill-prepared to handle the giant amounts of money given to them. They were steered towards the next game. They had teachers under pressure to give them good enough grades to make them academically eligible to play. Players at big-name programs are routinely funneled into specific classes regardless of what they actually want to be studying, for the purposes of having large segments of the team in the same place. Often, the students left college early. In some scattered cases in the NBA, including that of Lebron James and Kobe Bryant, they never went to college at all.
What happens when the bright lights go away? Most of them, never having gotten the kind of financial education they needed for this type of lifestyle, and in some cases having what education they did get beaten out of them on the field, quickly go broke. According to a March 2009 article from Sports Illustrated's Pablo S. Torre, 60% of all NBA players, regardless of money earned or time in the league, are broke within five years of their departure. 78% of all NFL players, regardless of money earned or length of time in the league, are broke within two years. Athletes on the financial scrapheap can be easily found regardless of the sport. The article did not show the figures for Major League Baseball, but listed the former players in similar situations as "numerous". The fourth page of the article even comes right out and says:
Salary aside, the closest analogue to a pro athlete is not a white-collar executive. It's a lottery winner—who's often in his early twenties. "With athletes, there's an extraordinary metamorphosis of financial challenge," says agent Leigh Steinberg, who has represented the NFL's No. 1 pick a record eight times. "Coming off college scholarships, they probably haven't even learned the basics of budgeting or keeping receipts." Which then triggers two fatal mistakes: hiring the wrong people as advisers, and trusting them far too much.
"That's the killer," Magic Johnson says. Johnson started out by admitting he knew nothing about business and seeking counsel from the power brokers who sat courtside at the old L.A. Forum, men such as Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz and Sony Pictures CEO Peter Guber. Now, Johnson says, he gets calls from star players "every day"—Alex Rodriguez, Shaquille O'Neal, Dwyane Wade, Plaxico Burress—and cuts them short if they propose relying on friends and family. "It won't even be a conversation," says Johnson. "They hire these people not because of expertise but because they're friends. Well, they'll fail."
And it doesn't just happen in those three leagues. Here you'll find a list of 25 athletes who went broke. Just 25. In addition to the NFL, NBA and MLB, you'll also find representation from the NHL, soccer, track, boxing, tennis, the WNBA, even figure skating, represented by Dorothy Hamill. Michael Vick made the list at #4 prior to his comeback.
There's one key difference between athletes and lottery winners, though. Lottery winners choose when they get to play. High-level athletes, unless mandated otherwise, are usually pressured by the demands of any given sport to focus on it as soon as physically capable. If you wait until you've gotten your college degree to focus on it, it's too late. They're already looking at the kids coming up behind you. As a result, few athletes get the education they need to handle any sort of windfall payout, and most are dumped by the financial wayside.
Quick, how many players or managers in MLB on June 1, 2009 had a college degree of any kind? 26. That's enough to fill one team. Out of thirty.
However, it takes no skill to play a lottery. Drive down to the gas station and hand the cashier a dollar. You don't even have to pick your own numbers if you don't feel like it. And you can play whenever you want. You can get lottery tickets as birthday presents the day you turn legal. You can be 90 years old and in a wheelchair and still have enough physical capability to say "Quick Pick".
What that means is that before you play the lottery, you have all the time you need to go educate yourself on how to handle the money should you win. And even if you don't win, you can still apply the same principles to whatever smaller amounts of money you handle.
If you do win, keep your head on as straight as you can, realize that the money is finite, and really, give some thought to the annuity. Consider letting the lottery people invest that jackpot for you. They handle large amounts of money for a living. They know what they're doing.
And they'd really prefer to not have their winners become cautionary tales.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
In Which Pete Rose Takes Up Teaching
I don't need an incentive to learn anything. Self-education is a big selling point of mine. My public schooling experience drove home the message more than a few times that if I wanted a halfway decent education, I'd have to go get it myself. Middle school in particular seemed particularly uninterested in teaching me things, greatly favoring the alternative method of placing me in close proximity with people who wanted to beat me up. (To this day, I still cover one eye when driving past it, so I don't have to look at it. Let's not discuss further.)
Had I left things purely to the schools, I'd be a hell of a lot dumber than I actually am. Besides, learning doesn't stop when school does. It goes on. After you get out of school, you need to start motivating yourself. It's one thing to learn when there's something on the line- when there's a job on the line, when there's a promotion on the line, a grade on the line, a life on the line. It's quite another to learn when there's nothing on the line except for a sense of self improvement.
Which is why this story troubles me. There is a site, Ultrinsic.com, that allows college students to bet money on them achieving a certain grade. Currently, 36 schools are part of the program. This is technically legal, as while online gambling is illegal in the United States, that applies to contests in which you have no control, and you do have control over your grades.
But there's just something seedy about it all. It's betting money on school. The student's own money. It's one thing to create an incentive program for getting good grades; lots of places do that for elementary school students. There's a video rental place in town that offers free rentals for every A on a kid's report card. Plenty of parents offer their kids money for good grades. There are two key differences between those and this:
1. The elementary school student does not have any skin in the game. If he doesn't meet the goal, he doesn't lose anything. The college student does.
2. The elementary school student has a lot fewer financial concerns on his mind than the college student. The elementary school student doesn't have any living costs; the parents provide everything. The college student has some pretty crushing student loans looming right after he gets out.
It may be more of an incentive to hit the books, but more likely, it's simply an incentive to win that bet. If a student put some fairly significant money on a grade, and is skirting the bare edge of it going into a final exam, the pressure of that bet is going to be enormous. At that point, the possibility exists that studying may take a backseat to cheating. Money gets some pretty base reactions out of people. There's going to be somebody, eventually, probably sooner rather than later, that is going to forget about studying and just focus on hitting the goal grade by any means necessary.
Which teaches a lesson school was never meant to teach.
Had I left things purely to the schools, I'd be a hell of a lot dumber than I actually am. Besides, learning doesn't stop when school does. It goes on. After you get out of school, you need to start motivating yourself. It's one thing to learn when there's something on the line- when there's a job on the line, when there's a promotion on the line, a grade on the line, a life on the line. It's quite another to learn when there's nothing on the line except for a sense of self improvement.
Which is why this story troubles me. There is a site, Ultrinsic.com, that allows college students to bet money on them achieving a certain grade. Currently, 36 schools are part of the program. This is technically legal, as while online gambling is illegal in the United States, that applies to contests in which you have no control, and you do have control over your grades.
But there's just something seedy about it all. It's betting money on school. The student's own money. It's one thing to create an incentive program for getting good grades; lots of places do that for elementary school students. There's a video rental place in town that offers free rentals for every A on a kid's report card. Plenty of parents offer their kids money for good grades. There are two key differences between those and this:
1. The elementary school student does not have any skin in the game. If he doesn't meet the goal, he doesn't lose anything. The college student does.
2. The elementary school student has a lot fewer financial concerns on his mind than the college student. The elementary school student doesn't have any living costs; the parents provide everything. The college student has some pretty crushing student loans looming right after he gets out.
It may be more of an incentive to hit the books, but more likely, it's simply an incentive to win that bet. If a student put some fairly significant money on a grade, and is skirting the bare edge of it going into a final exam, the pressure of that bet is going to be enormous. At that point, the possibility exists that studying may take a backseat to cheating. Money gets some pretty base reactions out of people. There's going to be somebody, eventually, probably sooner rather than later, that is going to forget about studying and just focus on hitting the goal grade by any means necessary.
Which teaches a lesson school was never meant to teach.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)