How People Get Smarter Over Time

From Ajah Shah's blog, a post on changes in the computer world:

In the 1980s, software came with fat manuals. Users actually sat down in training classes. A remarkable feature of the new world is how the manuals and training are gone. Software is incredibly capable but there are no manuals. Google maps or Amazon or Apple Mail are very powerful programs, but the fundamental assumption is that a reasonable person can just start tinkering with them and learn more as he goes.

The modern office worker gets no formal training in software all his life. The modern knowledge worker learns major tools (e.g. a programming language) and often puts in enormous effort for these. But for the rest, the ordinary flow of day to day life, where new software systems come up all the time, is done without formal training.

 One of the puzzles of life is the Flynn effect, which says every generation is smarter than the previous one.  Personally I think we drastically underestimate the effect of the learning which floats in the environment, which Mr. Shah's observation implies.

Cultural Transformation in FSA II

I wonder why I thought of FSA when I read this post from Chris Blattman?

The Increased Productivity of Barbers

Got a haircut today.  Spent my time musing about the increased productivity of barbers.  When I first went to the barbershop the barber used scissors almost exclusively, except for using a straight razor and warm lather to trim the areas around the ears and at the nape of the neck.  Then they got an electric razor, which first was used to cut the sideburns evenly (what's a single sideburn).  Today the barber used only a razor, even to trim my eyebrows.

Presumably the switch from scissors to razor means the haircut takes less time.  But there's another reason for increased productivity: more time between haircuts.  I think it's fair to say the universal standard for men in the 1940's was the standard haircut about once a month, except maybe for crewcuts (why doesn't the spell checker recognize "crewcut").  I'd assume these days there is no "standard" haircut.  Maybe we're more standard than in the 1970's, when long hair was prevalent, but I don't think having the standard haircut is nearly as important now as in the 1940's.  (I'll have to check the haircuts on Mad Men the next DVD we get.) So I'd argue that the average time between haircuts is longer today than it was during the 1940's, again increasing the productivity for barbers.

But declining standards for hair grooming isn't the only reason for increased productivity; there's aging.  The male population is older these days, meaning the average male has less hair to cut and is also more experienced at receiving haircuts.  I'm sure it takes longer for a barber to cut the hair of a 3-year old than a 73-year old.

"So Yesterday"?

Post has an opinion piece entitled: The Case Against Banning the Word "Retard".  It's a good discussion of changing terminology, "word fetishes", etc. But this struck me:

"The Ad Council and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network have developed a Web site, ThinkB4YouSpeak.com, that, much like R-Word.org, encourages the public to sign a pledge to cease using the phrase. (The slogan: "Saying that's so gay is so yesterday."):"

As a man of yesterday (or even the day before), I protest this term as unfair.  It stereotypes people of a certain age as out of it and no longer a full participant in society; it establishes a hierarchy of those who are with it and those who are not; it demeans those who feel affection for the norms of yesteryear.

My Mind, What's Left, Is Blown

From the NYTimes:

Vietnam, for years a bitter foe of the United States, is now a friend. The clearest evidence of how far things have changed may be the Ho Chi Minh Golf Trail, a route that connects more than a half-dozen luxury golf courses and resorts. (Like its namesake, the golf trail runs north-south, but presumably the resemblance ends there.)

Who would have thought, when the Johnson administration was debating whether to bomb the Ho Chi Minh trail, they were really debating whether to help create sand traps and water hazards for wealthy golfers?

Cavalry in Poland

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries puts up a picture of her father-in-law, a cavalry officer in the Polish Army on the eve of WWII.

The picture can stand for many things, but it reminds me how long it takes to make changes. Yes, there were cavalry fights in WWI, but very few and none significant (unless you count camel cavalry and T.E. Lawrence). But here, 21 years later, a whole generation, a sovereign nation with brains and know how is still putting cavalry in the field. (As a side note, the Poles you remember were the ones who originally figured out the German Enigma machines, enabling Ultra to become a decisive factor in beating Hitler. ) Of course, the German Wehrmacht still moved by horsepower, but I don't think they had cavalry.

Permanent Drought in Texas?

That's the pessimistic possibility from an A&M climatologist here.

One of the programs of government programs (and of private corporations, look at GM) is adapting to changed conditions. Texas farmers have eligibility for some program payments based, not on what they currently grow, but on what they grew in the past: 1990's. The last I looked the only way to lower a farm's base acres was if the total of the bases exceeded the cropland on the farm, plus historical doublecropping. So if a drought convinces a farmer to take land out of cropland status he might lose base.

The same applies for yields--they generally are fixed, with little likelihood to go lower. (Not true for crop insurance--their APH is similar to what ASCS had in the early 80's as "proven yields".)

Bureaucratic Inertia in Schools

Via Kevin Drum, a report on charter schools:

At present there appears to be an authorizing crisis in the charter school sector. For a number of reasons — many of them understandable — authorizers find it difficult to close poorly performing schools. Despite low test scores, failing charter schools often have powerful and persuasive supporters in their communities who feel strongly that shutting down this school does not serve the best interests of currently enrolled students. Evidence of financial insolvency or corrupt governance structure, less easy to dispute or defend, is much more likely to lead to school closures than poor academic performance. And yet, as this report demonstrates, the apparent reluctance of authorizers to close underperforming charters ultimately reflects poorly on charter schools as a whole. More importantly, it hurts students.

Seems to me this shows the same human tendency to value the known and keep to the familiar as we see elsewhere, whether in USDA or GM. (The report is good--done by Stanford, though not pleasant for charter supporters.)

Marian Robinson

Since the President's mother-in-law is just a tad older than I, I can sympathize with her resistance to change as reported in this NYTimes article. (I particularly identified with the plotting her children did to persuade her to move.) Nice to know she's happy.

Change Is Hard for the Post

The Washington Post recently changed their weekend format, doing away with their separate Book World, moving some reviews into their weekend opinion Outlook, etc. This weekend they had a glitch, which I failed to notice yesterday, but which was evident today. Briefly put, they printed their Sunday editorials, letters to the editor, and op-eds on Saturday, and then again today. I assume both sets of pages were in the computer and the wrong one got included in the press run. Such is the nature of change and computers.

$200 for a Bat?

We're not in the 20th century anymore. (That was a price I noted for a softball bat in a advertising circular--I assume the bat's aluminum, not the wood of my childhood.)

A Good Paragraph

John Phipps says:

What I have learned as far back as the Apple/PC beginnings is waiting for a clear winner probably isn't the best choice. If nothing else, taking the plunge generates significant practical knowledge of an emergent technology that could be a significant advantage. This happened for early personal computer users regardless of which platform they eventually ended up with.

As long as you've got some margin for error (money-wise, etc.), this works for me. Learning is always good (except when it intrudes on an old guy's routine).

Newspapers, the End of

John Kelly has a cute piece in the Post painting the scene as the last newspaper and the last newsroom closes.

Geithner and Turbo Tax--the Loss of Expertise

Jim Lindgren at Volokh tries to recapitulate Mr. Geithner's experience using Turbotax back when he was an IMF employee and failed to file properly (as self-employed). I think it's an example of the loss of expertise when we incorporate knowledge into our tools. I know when I filed my taxes on paper, I was much more aware of what I was doing than when I answer Turbotax's question. As I told my wife, it's sort of a mindless exercise now (which made her feel very good about the accuracy of our returns).

It's the same sort of thing I saw back when I worked for ASCS:

A district director took me around his district in North Carolina. He told me he tried to have his office managers (i.e., CED's) assign their best clerk to handling "reconstitutions" (i.e., the changing of farm records), because it was complex and important. Some 15-20 years later I found myself responsible for the people who were automating the process, trying (and perhaps failing) to make it simple and easy for any program assistant to handle.

Along the same lines, I remember an employee discussing the new word processor (one of the first with a CRT screen where you could actually insert and cut and paste and see the results of your action). She said it was nice, but she used to be proud of her ability to type fast with no mistakes. And now she was losing it, because the machine took away the premium on not making errors.

Just as, baling hay rendered obsolete the skill of making a good load of hay on the haywagon (i.e., defined as one where you got the maximum of hay on the wagon, placing your fork-fulls so that the hay bound together (i.e., being attentive to the direction the stalks of hay were lying on the wagon). And I suppose now the skill of stacking rectangular hay bales on the wagon or truck is obsolete, as you just use the forklift on the tractor to move the big round bales.

E-Government? Pardon My Skepticism

Those who know me know I can be easily seduced by the lure of the new, by the possibilities in the future of this or that. But I'm not entirely stupid, so I have learned over the years to have some skepticism.

Here's an example: Brownfields does a piece based on an interview with Steve Johnson, an Iowa State extension guy, talking about signup, changes in the programs, SURE and ACRE. He mentions some new forms, which the FSA county office should have in draft.

All fine, all correct. But... And it's a big But.

Under the e-government concept, FSA's forms shop has been posting FSA/CCC forms to the Internet for the last 10 years. One would think by now what Steve Johnson would have said is something like this:

"Farmers are going to have a new set of forms to fill out this year. The CCC-926 covers payment limitation information. The CCC-902 (I) and 902 (E) are also new. Now all three forms are available on FSA's forms site--click on the "forms" link off the FSA main site. You can print off copies to read, or fill them out on line..."

Steve does, in the recorded interview, mention using the Internet to research the SURE and ACRE programs. I'm probably being unfair to Steve but these are the possibilities:

• He doesn't know about the FSA forms site
• He knows about the site, but didn't think to use it
• He knows about the site, but was on vacation for the holidays and didn't check it before the interview
• He knows about the site, knew the forms were on the site, but was confident the Iowa county offices would not have pulled off the forms.
• He knew all of the above, but thought he would be more in tune with his audience if he didn't suggest they should check the FSA site, but instead should talk to the nice people in the county office.
  

My point? I don't intend to criticize Steve, who just happened to be the extension person interviewed. My point is 10 years or more after FSA started posting forms, the web of habits, norms, expectations, training, etc. by which FSA, extension, and farmers implement farm programs hasn't adjusted to the change.

Why? I don't know why. It's a reminder that people and institutions are far more resistant to change than those of us who are seduced by the new like to think.

[PS: I note the government forms site doesn't have the CCC-902 or CCC-926 forms yet, which suggests a problem in the way the site works--ideally an update to the USDA/FSA forms site should automatically update the government one.]

Oh for the Safety of the Chlorophyll Based Economy

I'm searching for a term to contrast with "carbon-based economy". But the title is tongue-in-cheek; witness this sentence quoted in today's NYTimes Book Review: "“In the New York of 1867,” he writes, “horses were killing an average of four pedestrians a week (a bit higher than today’s rate of traffic fatalities).”" (Review of the book called Traffic, which sounds interesting.)

Green Milk

No, it's not a belated St. Patrick's Day story, but a piece in the NYTimes on new milk containers, touted as more efficient and greener, because there are no milk crates to wash. The 1-gallon milk jugs must be shipped from bottler (jugger?) to grocery store in crates "because the shape of old-fashioned milk jugs prohibits stacking them atop one another. The crates take up a lot of room, they are unwieldy to move, and extra space must be left in delivery trucks to take empty ones back from stores to the dairy." And, in one bottling plant, it takes 100,000 gallons of water to wash the crates.

The article says Wal-mart and Costco are pushing it, but consumers have problems learning how to pour (if I understand, the new container is basically a box). But if I can adapt to coffee cans that are cubical plastic jobbies, consumers for the sake of the earth can learn how to pour milk from these. After all, I can remember lots of different milk containers, lots of improvements.

We used to sell (raw) milk to a couple of neighbors, who'd bring a stainless steel container, which we would fill. Other neighbors had milk delivered, in the glass quart bottles, which made interesting shapes when it was zero and the milk wasn't taken in promptly. That milk was pasteurized and homogenized and took a while for me to get used to the taste. (But my mother had TB, so you won't find me a strong defender of raw milk.) Of course, the glass bottles had a deposit and were returnable, just as the pop (soft drink) bottles were back then. When I went to college, the cafeteria I worked in dispensed milk from a machine, the milk arriving in a plastic bag within a cardboard box. The boxes were good for packing books in at the end of the term when it was time to head back to the farm. The Army may have had a similar system, but fortunately I didn't do enough KP to remember. (Youngsters ask: "KP? What's KP") Then in civilian life and married life we bought milk in the waxed cardboard cartons, then the plastic gallon jugs. (I don't remember when we switched--funny how we don't notice the small changes in our lives.)

But, as I say, there's always a tradeoff. At each step along the way the new system may be more efficient and maybe more safe, but it also requires dairy companies to invest in new equipment (rather like the old days when farmers had to get milk coolers to put their milk cans in--the next step was requiring bulk tanks). So it's also another straw on the camel's back for the dairy company that's just getting by, day-to-day, and which can't afford the new equipment to compete. People, at least those who drink milk, gain; those who work at the companies who can't compete, don't.

Surprising Factoid of the Week--Chinese Govt Worries About Customer Service

Al Gore, before he was elected President, worried a lot about the government and customer service. Apparently the Chinese (mainland, not Taiwan) do too, because Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution reports:

At the Beijing airport as the customs official questions you, you get to rate them - there is an electronic box, hidden from their view, that asks for your rating of service.

The idea of the Chinese government getting feedback from their customers boggles the mind.

Too Good for Your Own Good

Ah, for the days of planned obsolescence. My wife will mourn this loss of the unbreakable glass from France, as reported by Mr. Beauregard.

Uncle's Folly? Do College Freshmen Read?

Brad DeLong proposes to buy subscriptions for four periodicals for his nephew, who is off to college. I don't know whether to celebrate the idea that college freshmen still are familiar with printer's ink or the idea that uncles (and parents) are always out of touch with the real interests and concerns of the next generation.