Whose Turn Is It to Lead?

There is that great line about while Fred Astaire was a fantastic dancer, we should all remember that Ginger Rogers did everything he did, but backwards while wearing high heels.  

It’s a famous quote, but contrary to popular opinion, neither Astaire nor Rogers originated the line—that honor belongs to Bob Thaves, the artist of the 1982 Frank and Ernest comic strip.  In a later interview, Rogers even admitted that the quote belonged to Thaves.

Note.  To those readers born after the sixties, those white things on the top of Fred Astaire’s shoes are called ‘spats’, short for spatterdashes.  The sole purpose of these things was to make it look like you were AWOL from the French Army.

Fred and Ginger came to mind this week after I was channel hopping during the evening news.  The difference in how one story was reported (and misreported) by the various flavors of journalism would almost have you believe that the talking heads on television were reporting about completely different countries.  Of particular note were the stories that repeated every few years and how the two political parties reacted to them.  Within a very few years, both parties seem to completely reverse their reactions depending upon who occupies the White House.

Obviously, it is the other party’s time to lead and the other, other party’s time to wear high heels and dance backwards.

Here are a few examples:

Since it is that time of year, let’s start with the Christmas Trees.  Back in 2018, Melania Trump lined the White House Halls with 40 dark red Christmas Trees, which the Washington Post immediately labeled as hideous blood-red atrocities.  The Republican party, predictably, adored the decorations. This year, Jill Biden lined those halls with green trees heavily festooned with white decorations.  Immediately, the Washington Post praised Jill’s style while the Republicans called the decorations ugly.

Ignoring the fact that even during a pandemic with the worst inflation the country has seen in thirty years, the country can still focus on how a set of halls that almost none of us will actually see is still important enough to show up on the editorial pages of the most important newspapers in the country, actually the two sets of decorations had more commonalities than differences.  Something almost no one reported was that neither Melania’s red trees nor Jill’s green and white trees were what the official indoor Christmas tree actually looked like.  In both cases, their trees on the second floor, in the family’s residence were traditionally decorated, and Melania’s and Jill’s looked almost identical.  (For what it’s worth, I thought both decorations were okay.)

When Donald Trump was president, everything he did to lessen the impact of the Covid pandemic was deemed by his own party as inspired genius.  The Democrats, of course, viewed every action as pure evil.  As a candidate, Joe Biden promised swift, decisive action and tactical moves that would all but eliminate the pandemic from our shores, as opposed to the inaction of President Trump.

Now that Joe Biden is president, however, I’m hard pressed to think of anything he has done to fight Covid that is substantially different than what we were doing last year.  That, of course, hasn’t kept the Republican Party from denouncing everything Biden has done.  I’m not, mind you, saying that either is necessarily wrong—I can’t think of anything different to do, either.

When President Trump withdrew troops from Syria, candidate Biden was aghast.  How could America American abandon its allies?  Just twelve months later, former president Trump was horrified when Biden pulled our troops out of Afghanistan and protested vehemently.  Trump’s protests, however, never included the fact that he had been talked out of doing the same thing by his own military advisors.  

Inflation is caused by too many dollars chasing too few goods.  Our current inflation is caused by many factors: the government pumping out stimulus checks, the supply lines backing up because of Covid, the shortage of workers forcing employers to raise salary offerings…but it is easy to see that most of these factors started in early 2020.  If you listen to the two political parties, however…if you listen to either of the political parties…inflation was caused by the evil, intentional, and diabolical plot of the wicked opposition.  

On January 31, 2020, President Donald Trump issued a Level 4 travel ban on non-Americans coming into the country from China.  Almost immediately, several Democrats, including then-candidate Joe Biden, denounced the move as both xenophobic and racist.  Last week, when President Biden banned travel from Africa…well, the best part of it was watching Jen Psaki, Biden’s press secretary, trying to explain the difference while she talked herself around three sides of the barn, looking for the horse whose reins were in her hand.  

All of us should be extremely angry at this performance.  The dancers are clumsy and out of step with the music.  The act is old and desperately needs to be brought in line with something the viewers could appreciate.  The chief problem with virtue signaling is that it doesn’t take long before the signaling is more important than the virtue.

Obviously, it doesn’t really matter who is leading and who is loudly denouncing each and every move: if we just wait a few years, the two dancers will switch places and do it all over again.  Backwards and in high heels.

Masks and Minecraft

Is anyone else tired of wearing a mask?  I’m certainly not an expert on the subject, but those who are—including The Doc—assure me that my wearing them is important, so I comply.  I wear my mask while attending classes and shopping.  I wear one, but I am really sick and tired of it.

 Part of the problem is that I have no patience for fake kabuki shows.  Crap like the phony airport security that is designed to be more pretense than reality infuriates me.  If you feel reassured that your flight will be safe because of the actions of TSA, you are probably traveling with your first name written on a gummed label firmly attached to your shirt and sitting up front where a stewardess can keep an eye on you.

 

I should probably confess that this week’s blog is being cowritten by three of my grandkids, the children of  What’s-His-Name.  Between marathon bouts of the four of us playing Minecraft on the PlayStation, they have been plying me with questions and incredibly helpful suggestions.   

Regardless of whether wearing a face mask actually works or not, most of the rest of the Covid policy seems to be designed more for show than for reality.  I’m supposed to believe that the state department of health is diligently tracking covid cases around the state, but since they send me daily reminders to get the second vaccination shot—which I received months ago—it is a little hard for me to continue to believe in their efficiency.   I have written them several times to correct this clerical error, but they always promptly write back and tell me the benefits of receiving the second vaccination.

 

“Grandpa Mark?  Have you ever had a job?”

 

“No, I’m a retired government employee.”

 

“Grandpa Mark?  Did you know that there are more fake flamingos in the world than real ones?”

 

The Covid policy at Enema U is equally rigorous.  Students and faculty alike are required to wear masks at all times, and yet, if you look around any classroom, you will discover that although most people actually are wearing masks, about half of them have their masks below their noses, and most of the others have taken them off to drink their coffee.  Other than muffling the voices of the instructors, I can’t see how masks in the classroom are accomplishing anything.

 

“Grandpa Mark, are you writing about masks?,” says the munchkin looking over my shoulder as I write.  

 

“Yes.”

 

“You should tell them to wear their masks above their noses.”

 

“Yes.  ‘Cause wearing a mask below your nose is about as effective as wearing a condom over your nuts.”

 

“What are nuts?” 

 

“Ask your grandmother.”

 

Evidently, I don’t need to worry, as the head squirrels at Enema U have officially decided and have posted online, that you can’t catch Covid in a classroom.  Really! They actually said that.  The university has had hundreds of cases, but the official policy is that no one has yet transmitted the virus by contact in a classroom.   This, of course, officially absolves the university from any legal responsibility for someone who actually catches the virus, and eliminates the burden of tracking the people potentially exposed in classrooms.  It also begs the inevitable question:  If we can’t catch the virus in a classroom, why are we still required to wear masks there?

 

“Grandpa Mark?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“When you write this blog, who reads it?”

 

“People all over the world read it, hate what I’ve written, and write me angry letters.”

 

“Then why do you write it?”

 

Recently, a student who sits next to me in an economics course and begs a daily copy of my notes, called me on the phone to tell me he had tested positive.  While I was very grateful for the warning (and even more grateful that retesting eventually proved the first test was a false positive), I thought it odd that no one at the university ever warned me that I had been exposed to the virus.  Of course, this was before I learned that the virus could not be transmitted from one person to another inside a classroom.  Evidently, you can catch it from dirty toilet seats or something.

 

“Grandpa Mark?  Is the A-word a bad word?”

 

“What A-word?  Audit?”

 

“You know, the A-word.  What you sit on.”

 

“There is nothing wrong with the word ‘ass’. Some of my favorite administrators are asses.  What is obscene is saying such damn fool things as ‘A-word’.”

 

Have you noticed that the state seems to have stopped shutting down businesses where employees have contracted the virus?  A year ago, the newspaper published a daily listing of businesses that were shuttered for weeks at a time.  My local grocery store was shuttered twice within a space of two months.  While there are just as many—and possibly more—Covid cases compared to a year ago, we no longer hear about stores being closed.  Possibly, the state stopped doing this because the governor is in a tough reelection bid?  Or maybe it is just as hard to catch Covid in a store as in a classroom?

 

“Grandpa Mark?  When our Daddy was a little boy, did he tell lies?”

 

“Of course.  Everybody tells lies, especially the people who say they don’t tell lies.”

 

“Who tells the most lies?”

 

“Politicians and preachers.”

 

“What about grandfathers?”

 

“Grandfathers always tell the truth.   Give or take a lie or two.”

 

“What does that mean?”

 

“Ask your grandmother.”

 

Obviously, the university has the amazing ability to pick and choose exactly when and where Covid can be passed from one person to another.  You are safe in a football stadium, but libraries are such death traps that they have to be shuttered for months at a time.  Fraternity houses are safe, but everyone should avoid the campus post office.  And for some reason, you have to wear a mask as you walk into a cafeteria, but you can safely take the mask off as soon as you sit down.  It must be very confusing for the virus to have to remember where it can and cannot go.

 

“Grandpa Mark?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“When you are done writing, will you play Minecraft again?”

 

“As you wish.”

 

The mask un-policy will eventually fade away.   While I am sure that writing the rules and regulations for wearing the damn fool things is profoundly pleasing to the administration of Enema U, eventually we will all have to stop wearing the things, if for no other reason than, at least occasionally, a student may actually want to accurately hear what his professor has to say. 

 

You’ll have to excuse me, I have to go right now to learn how to use red stone to power the mine cart in Minecraft.  I have good teachers. 

This is What Committees Do

Periodically, and for no apparent logical reason, the head squirrels at Enema U required every academic department to rewrite their mission statement.  Perhaps this was an attempt to sidetrack the faculty from noticing that the number of useless bureaucrats in the administration were multiplying more rapidly than rats in a sewer.

At the inevitable faculty meeting to discuss drafting the new mission statement, my suggestion that the department just resubmit the existing statement was immediately rejected.  When I offered $50 to anyone who could recite the existing statement, no one accepted my offer.  When I suggested that the new mission statement be the simple statement of “Teach”, I was ignored.  Well, to be honest, one of my colleagues—someone who also believed that such meetings were a waste of time—suggested that such a statement was too brief and should be amended to “Teach well”.  We were both ignored.

Eventually, after a long and pointless discussion, the department adopted a new lengthy (and still meaningless) mission statement, and promptly forgot about it.  Six months later, if I had repeated my offer of $50 to anyone who could recite the passage, the money would have remained safely in my wallet.

I am reminded of this by a story in the local newspaper about the city’s airport producing a new Strategic Plan.  I will warn you in advance that all of the following is based upon my own sketchy memory, a notoriously and increasingly leaky vessel.  There is no longer any supporting documentation as I gleefully burned all my notes several years ago.  As I have said before:  Everything in this blog is the absolute truth—give or take a lie or two.

My community is blessed with two very nice airports:  one that is maintained by the city and a slightly smaller one that belongs to the county government.  Since my community is not large enough to attract regularly scheduled flights from commercial airlines, neither airport sees the kind of commercial activity found at large airports.  Still, both airports were well managed and properly run.  As a private pilot, I have flown in and out of both of them without any complaints.  Please understand that I have no complaints about how either airport was managed nor am I aware of such complaints from other pilots.

At the recommendation of the manager of the county’s airport, I was appointed to a two-year term on the county’s Airport Advisory Committee.  For two years, I was part of a committee that periodically met, discussed various issues, and then reported to the County Commissioners who never actually listened to us nor cared in any meaningful way about what was happening at the airport.  The most frequent question from any of the commissioners was for clarification on which of the two airports the county government owned and operated.  Seriously, one commissioner asked me that same damn question four times in a single year.

The airport was due to renew its Strategic Plan, which is something the FAA suggests be done every five years, and the county actually did so every eight to ten years—a schedule that is not bad for New Mexico.  And there were a few improvements that would have been welcome at the airport.  The availability of internet, for example, would have meant that pilots would be able to check weather reports and would have meant that the airport manager didn’t have that daily drive of half an hour to turn in reports to the county government.  Some of the tenants were behind in their rent, airport lighting could always be upgraded and so forth.  Like any large ongoing concern, there were periodic problems to be fixed and upgrades to be considered.

Those were not, however, the kinds of things that got reported in the airport’s strategic plan.  I quickly learned that the county contracted the task of preparing the plan out to a large consulting firm, which would take months to eventually draft a professional report outlining the future of the airport.  Since the previous plans were still on file, I was astonished to learn that the airport’s true potential was to become a highly industrialized hub of air freight.  According to the previous plans, the airport was about to become an incredible source of tax revenue because of the rapid expansion of freight operations.

This was rather astonishing, since eight years after the most recent plan, the only evidence of air freight at the airport was an aging DC-3 parked on the tarmac while an engine was being replaced.  The two previously prepared plans had both stressed that the airport would inevitably become a busy hub of air freight—something that not only had not happened, but seemed extremely unlikely to ever occur.

After a little research, I was able to discover a few facts:

• The same consulting company that had prepared the two previous plans were likely to receive the county contract to prepare the new report.  Since the cost of such a report was six figures, the company was extremely active in lobbying the county commissioners for the new contract.  
• The majority of air freight travels on regularly scheduled airline flights.  Since no airline flights landed at the airport, there was absolutely no interest by the airlines in using the airport.
• The airport in El Paso, less than thirty miles away, had recently spent over $2 million dollars constructing new state of the art freight handling facilities.
• No airline company owned any land at the country airport.  Neither UPS nor FedEx was interested in pursuing even an option on land at the county airport.  Both companies had large existing hangars at the El Paso airport.
• No one at the county airport could ever remember any freight hauling company making any inquiries about leasing space at the county airport.

It became obvious that the consulting company was going to be awarded the contract, be paid large sums of taxpayer money to prepare it, and that the report would tell the county commissioners exactly what they wanted to hear:  that the county was about to rake in large amounts of taxes from the soon-to-be-realized booming freight company.

I tried.  I took a county commissioner to lunch at the Faculty Dining Room, and we discussed the proposed contract.  I produced the two previous reports, each of which were demonstrably incredibly inaccurate, and predicted that if the consulting company was successful in securing the upcoming contract, they would, like any well-paid prostitute, tell the customer exactly what he wanted to hear.

“I understand,” the politician answered.  “You know what the airport needs to do?  You should hold some kind a celebration, maybe an airport birthday party.  We can call in the press, and I’ll show up and make a speech.  Which airport is it, anyway?”

The contract was, of course, given to the same consulting company.  The resulting report predicted an imminent growth of air cargo, producing a flood of tax revenue.  The county commissioners published the plan as proof of their effective leadership.  Most importantly, according to Google Earth, the DC-3 is still parked on the tarmac.

The Supply Chain is Made of Weak Links

This week, the President of the United States correctly said that Americans do not understand the supply chain.  Everyone in the country seems to be focused on the still growing number of ships stranded off the coast of California.

There is more to our supply chain problem than just how fast those ships can be unloaded, and most of the solutions being reported in the news are actually little more than noise.  The real solutions to our problem are going to take far more time than what our politicians are promising.  Yes, the supply chain problem will be fixed by Christmas, but it won’t be this year’s Christmas…And it might not be next year’s, either.

While this is not even close to a comprehensive list of the problems hindering the timely delivery of goods to our neighborhoods, these are a few glitches that I am not seeing reported in news. 

Factories the world over now use the Just-In-Time manufacturing system to eliminate excess inventory.  Usually attributed to Taiichi Ohno, the head of post-war Toyota, the real roots of this lean manufacturing system can be traced back to Henry Ford’s first production line.  While this system definitely cuts costs and speeds up both innovation and market adaptation, it depends on reliable and predictable suppliers.  

This all fell apart when the COVID pandemic shut down factories around the world, hitting particularly hard in industrialized Viet Nam.  Factories that shipped parts to other factories stopped production for months, and caused a cascade of missed delivery dates around the world.  The most critical part for most manufacturing is the worldwide shortage of computer chips.  Since auto manufacturers, for example, had to scale back production of cars due to the shortage of chips, they have largely stopped buying the other parts necessary to produce new cars.  

Shipping that backlog of parts is going to be a problem, too.  While shipping rates prior to the pandemic had been steadily dropping due to a glut of large capacity container ships—suddenly those ships are spending significantly more time waiting at ports to be unloaded than they spend actually traveling to the ports.  Ships that are waiting just offshore are not earning any money, dramatically cutting down the number of trips they can make a year.  This expense, in turn, is dramatically raising all shipping costs, and means a growing number of manufactured goods waiting at distribution centers are waiting to be loaded on those ships that are idling at anchor, waiting weeks at a time to be unloaded.  Of course, the warehousing of goods waiting to be shipped adds to the shipping costs.  

Eventually, these rising costs will diminish demand and the backlog will clear.  The only solution to this problem is time and clearing up this backlog is going to be as slow as a hippo passing through a python.  (That analogy is brilliantly apropos.)  

Here in the United States, a lot of the supply chain problems can be traced back to two Southern California ports:  Long Beach (right) and Los Angeles.  The problems here are far too complicated to be fixed by simply extending the hours of operation to 24 hours a day and 7 days a week—a move that the unions say will take months to accomplish.  First, there is a tremendous shortage of trucks and drivers to move those containers off the docks.  

Part of the truck shortage can be attributed to shipping companies’ unwillingness to have trucks and drivers waiting long times for containers to be loaded.  Drivers are not paid for this time, nor can trucking companies collect for the delivery time.  The state of California makes it relatively difficult for non-union drivers to pick up loads at the ports, and if you couple this with the state’s passing environmental laws that make it harder for trucks manufactured before 2011 to be licensed, you begin to see why there might be a shortage of trucks.  If you consider that California has both high income taxes and high fuel costs, as well as a statewide speed limit of 55 mph for trucks and a host of truck-only legislation…you begin to wonder why California has any operating rigs on the road at all.

The California regulations concerning old trucks and limiting owner/operator rigs are known as AB 5 and the 2008 Truck and Bus Regulation.  The provisions of both bills have been vastly overstated on public media, usually claiming outright bans on old trucks and a total elimination of owner operated rigs.  Neither is true, but the measures have discouraged both new drivers and the purchase of new rigs.  Exactly how much this has added to the trucking problem is impossible to measure, however.

Trucking companies are reluctant to buy new diesel trucks because the state has already mandated that all trucks on the road must be electric by 2035.  Unfortunately, new electric trucks are not yet commercially available.

Couldn’t the containers be warehoused until they could be shipped to their destinations?  Theoretically, yes, but practically speaking, it is highly unlikely.  Ignoring the price of real estate in Southern California, both environmental concerns and California’s high property taxes on inventory make building new warehouses unlikely.  Considering existing warehouses, California currently has a vacancy rate of less than 2%.   Hell, the International Space Station has more free space than that.

As one owner of a warehouse recently said, “I’m not going to build a new warehouse just because of this emergency.  You don’t build a church because Easter is coming, you build a church to handle the attendance you get every Sunday.”

The most difficult problem to solve at these ports, however, is that they are old, inefficient, and out of date.  Even compared to ports found in third world countries, the two busiest ports in California do not measure up.  In a recent World Bank ranking of ports across the globe, Los Angeles came in 328 out of 352.  As bad as that is, it still beat out Long Beach, which came in at 331.  The two container ports came in just lower than ports in Tanzania, Kenya, and Turkey.  Since you are probably wondering, the five most efficient and modern ports can be found in Yokohama, Saudi Arabia, Chiwan, Guangzhou, and the Koshiung Port in Taiwan.

Yokohama’s port, the most modern and efficient in the world, was destroyed by American bombing during World War II.  What little remained was damaged by an earthquake.  Since then, Japan has consistently modernized and automated the port.  (I wonder if bombing Los Angeles would help?  Probably not.)

In California, automation has consistently been delayed by strict environmental laws so that even compliant new facilities are delayed by years.  Equally harmful have been the politically powerful unions that have successfully blocked several attempts at automation.  As a result, most ports in the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia rank higher in efficiency than the two California ports.  The only four American ports to rank in the top 100 are on the East Coast.  No American port was in the top 50.

Well, that’s enough listing of the problems.  There are possible solutions, but they will not be found by throwing more government money at longshoremen, by politicians promising to fix what they don’t understand, or by bureaucrats more concerned with whether a bridge can be racist than with how to improve aging infrastructure.  Instead, I’ll make a prediction:  If America does solve the supply chain distribution problem, we will do it by turning to an organization famous for handling impossible supply problems, an organization with dozens of experts in Boydian Philosophy. (If you don’t know, look it up.)…By almost any measure, the premier American experts in solving logistical problems.

If you want real solutions, call the experts:  The United State Marines.  

Who said That?

Years ago, exasperated by Facebook click bait masquerading as history quizzes that were so ridiculously easy that even Congressmen could pass them, I published my own extremely difficult version of a history trivia quiz.  I doubt that anyone passed it.  

Lately, I’ve seen a new trend on Facebook—people misquoting famous people to support their own conclusions.  Evidently, you can post damn near anything and just attribute it to either Mark Twain or Winston Churchill and be believed.  

Below is a list of actual quotations by famous politicians and authors, all concerning either reading or writing books.  As a hint, I will tell you that no person is used more than once, no matter how many times Mark Twain shows up in the answers.  Can you match the person with their quote?

1.  “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

a.  Carl Sagan

b.  Isaac Asimov

c.  Marshall McLuhan

d.  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

2.   "I cannot live without books."

a.  Abraham Lincoln

b.  Umberto Eco

c.  Thomas Jefferson

d.  Ian Ballantine

3. “The reader always wants to know what happens next, whether he's reading The Brothers Karamazov, David Copperfield or Hemingway. If what happens next is purely physical, then you've got Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer shooting his initials in somebody's midsection.  If what happens is spiritual, maybe you’re reading biblical chapters to find out what happened with Moses and the Red Sea. If it’s intellectual, you’re reading to find out maybe whether they are going to discover a cure for herpes. What happens next is the thing that keeps people reading, and the more important the next [thing is], then the more important the work is.”

a.  John D. MacDonald

b.  Lawrence Block

c.  John Sandford

d.  Lee Child

4. “If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.”

a.  John D. MacDonald

b.  Lawrence Block

c.  John Sandford

d.  Lee Child

5. "I find reading a great comfort. People often say to me that they do not see how I find time for it, to which I answer them (much more truthfully than they believe) that to me it is a dissipation, which I have sometimes to try to avoid, instead of an irksome duty."

a.  Abraham Lincoln

b.  Winston Churchill

c.  Andrew Carnegie

d.  Theodore Roosevelt

6. “Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.”

a.  Mark Twain

b.  Oprah Winfrey

c.  P. J. O’Rourke

d.  Dave Chappelle

7. “In politics I am growing indifferent - I would like it, if I could now return to my planting and books at home”

a.  Harry Truman

b.  Ulysses Grant

c.  Abraham Lincoln

d.  Thomas Jefferson

8. “The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.”

a.  Abraham Lincoln

b.  Ulysses Grant

c.  Will Rogers

d.  Henry Ford

9. “If you cannot read all your books… fondle them — peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are.

a.  J. K. Rowling

b.  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

c.  Winston Churchill

d.  Lewis Carroll

10. “When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives.”

a.  Robert Heinlein

b.  Ayn Rand

c.  John Ford

d.  Rex Stout

11. “Home is where the books are.”

a.  Theodore Roosevelt

b.  Franklin D. Roosevelt

c.  Laura Ingalls Wilder

d.  Sir Richard Francis Burton

12. “Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.”

a.  Hubert Humphrey

b.  Ronald Reagan

c.  Adlai Stevenson

d.  Richard Nixon

13. “Not all readers become leaders, but all leaders must be readers.”  

a.  Harry Truman

b.  John F. Kennedy

c.  Jimmy Carter

d.  Dwight Eisenhower

14. “Whether I'm at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I'm looking forward to reading.”

a.  Tom Hanks

b.  Bruce Willis

c.  Bill Gates

d.  Elon Musk

15. “I read books and talked to people. I mean that’s kind of how one learns anything. There’s lots of great books out there and lots of smart people.”

a.  Tom Hanks

b.  Bruce Willis

c.  Bill Gates

d.  Elon Musk

16. “l just sit in my office and read all day.”

a.  Janet Yellen

b.  Joe Biden

c.  Warren Buffett

d.  Kamala Harris 

17. “It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.”

a.  Agatha Christie

b.  J. K. Rowling

c.  Pamela L. Travers

d.  G. K. Chesterton

18. “Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.”

a.  George Bernard Shaw

b.  Oliver Wendell Holmes

c.  Dorothy Parker

d.  J. M. Barrie

19. “Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”

a.  Robin Williams

b.  Groucho Marx

c.  Charlie Chaplin

d.  Red Skelton

20. “Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.”

a.  Dave Barry

b.  WC Fields

c.  P.J. O’Rourke

d.  George Burns

21. “I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.”

a.  Woody Allen

b.  Dave Barry

c.  George Burns

d.  Steve Allen

22. “A room without books is like a body without a soul.”

a.  Mark Twain

b.  Cicero

c.  Thomas Jefferson

d.  John Glenn

23. “The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.”

a.  J.K. Rowling

b.  Agatha Christie

c.  Isabel Allende

d.  Mary Shelley

24. “One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.”

a.  Carl Sagan

b.  Robert Heinlein

c.  Neil deGrasse Tyson

d.  Theodore Sturgeon

25. “There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.”

a.  Walt Disney

b.  Robert Louis Stevenson

c.  Jack London

d.  Johnny Depp

Well, how did you do?  Frankly, I’d be surprised if you passed.  I just took that history quiz from four years ago and just barely passed and I wrote the damn thing.  Four years from now, I doubt that I can pass this damn thing.  Still, there are a lot of nice quotes about books.

Answers: 1-b.  2-c.  Though in conversations with Ian Ballantine, he did say something similar.  3-a.  4-b.  If you have never read Block’s book on writing, I recommend it.  5-d.  6-a.  I never said Twain wasn’t the right answer to one of these.    7-b.  Unfortunately, Grant spent the last weeks of his life writing his autobiography while he slowly died of cancer.  He finished the manuscript just days before he died. 8-a.  9-c.  10-a.  11-d.  No, not the movie star, but the explorer.  12-b.  13-a.  14-c.  15-d.  16-c.  17-a.  18-a.  19-b.  20-c.  21-a.  22-b.  23-c.  24-a.  25-a.

The Prisoners’ Dilemma and Congress

As I write this, our Congress is locked in an argument, unable to reach an agreement over an infrastructure bill.  Since the Democratic Party has a majority in both chambers, this would seem to be a fairly simple objective, but the failure of the party to do so reminds me of a classic example of game theory:  The Prisoners’ Dilemma.

Note.  I usually try—most likely unsuccessfully—to keep my own political opinions out of this blog.  While I have strong, and probably strange, political opinions, I have never thought my beliefs were neither terribly interesting nor any of the readers’ business.  Strangely, I routinely receive letters from people across the political spectrum who have somehow managed to read between the lines and discover my “hidden” support of everything from the Masons to the Flat Earth Society.   Sorry, but I’m not Lawrence Block’s Evan Tanner, and most people would find my real political opinions rather boring.

In the Prisoners' Dilemma, imagine that the sheriff has arrested two men for a suspected bank robbery.  When he searched their car, while he discovered no evidence of the robbery, he did find two stolen handguns.  Though the sheriff cannot arrest them on the bank robbery, he can prosecute each for the stolen handgun.  

The sheriff is crafty and unwilling to let settle for just charging the two suspects with the firearms charge, so he separates the two men where they cannot communicate with each other, and makes each the same offer.

“All right, scumbag,” says the sheriff.  “We both know that you and your partner robbed the bank, but I can’t prove it.  So, here’s the deal I’m offering both of you.  If you confess and give evidence against your partner, I’ll let you go and your partner gets ten years in jail.  If he confesses, I’ll let him go and you can rot in jail for ten years.  If you both confess, I’ll prosecute both of you, and you can spend the next decade in jail together.  But if neither of you talks, I’ll prosecute both of you for the stolen firearm and you’ll both spend a year in jail.”

Clearly, the best possible outcome for the two criminals is each man to keep his mouth shut, hope that “honor among thieves” is not a myth and that his partner will also keep quiet so that each man will only spend a single year in jail.  Game theorists have a name for this, the Coase Theorem, that states that if two parties are allowed to trade freely, and in this case, it is information that they are trading, they will eventually reach an efficient outcome.

Our two criminals (let’s call them A and B since that’s easier to label on a graph) can’t communicate, and without information, each has to develop his own optimum output.  Put more simply, each man has two choices, either to talk or to remain silent, and there are only four possible outcomes, as shown on the chart to the right.  The best outcome for each man is for him to talk and hope his partner does not, and while spending only a single year in jail is better than being jailed for ten years, there is no ‘good’ outcome if he remains silent.

Since each of the two men is likely to calculate his outcomes the same way, and since the only possibility of escaping jail time is to talk, it is most likely that both men will accept the sheriff’s offer and talk, triggering the worst possible outcome for each:  serving ten years in jail.

This is exactly what is happening right now in Washington concerning the president’s new infrastructure plan (the exact details of which change almost hourly).  Since the Democratic margin in both houses is very thin, the only possibility of the bill’s being passed is for several special interest groups within the party to work together and reach a compromise.  

Theoretically, since the Democrats have a majority, all that would be necessary to pass legislation is to use Coase Theorem, negotiate among themselves, and reach an efficient outcome.  Our elected officials, unlike the two prisoners, are allowed to actually talk among themselves, and reach a compromise.   In reality, however, both parties are made up of small special interest groups, each interested more in securing legislation favorable to their group than in passing a compromise bill.  And since a large part of the communication is being done by press releases and publicized sound bites, it is not really a negotiation.

Because of the upcoming election, there is the added element of the Democrats’ desiring a legislative victory before voting begins.  The closer we get to the election, the more power this gives to a group demanding amendments to the proposed bill, and each such amendment makes the bill more unpalatable to the party as a whole.  Since there is a thin margin in both houses, the defection of even a few members negates the possibility of passing any legislation.

Unlike the Prisoners’ Dilemma, Congress has multiple participants, each seeking his own optimum efficient outcome.  There are powerful incentives against cooperation even within a party.  Opposition brings the reward of increased press exposure, the opportunity to attract more voters interested in the special interests you represent, and the very real likelihood that your party will offer you more economic carveouts for your constituents.  

You can test this yourself.  I’m fairly sure that most of us can name Democrats opposed to the proposed legislation.  Other than congressional leadership, can you name any of Democrats who have supported the legislation?  You probably cannot, and with each additional player, game theory says it is even more unlikely that any large spending bill can be passed.  If you ignore the press announcements, and just focus on game theory, the chances of Congress passing any large infrastructure bill seem remote.

Teaching 101

In one of his many wonderful books, Robert Heinlein posited a theory that if you could somehow travel back in time and scoop up a very bright caveman and transport him into a future where you dropped him into the control room and left him to observe the operation for a few years, that the caveman would never understand what was going on.  As the years passed, the caveman would figure out where the employee cafeteria was located and to be wary about a few of the warning signs, but the caveman was far more likely to concoct some bizarre religious meaning to his surroundings than to grasp even the fundamental principles of nuclear fission.   

Perhaps a better analogy would be Mako Iwamatsu, in the movie, The Sand Pebbles.  No matter how carefully Steve McQueen explained the workings of the ship’s engine room, Po-han still understood it only as “strong stim” and “sleepy stim all dead”.

I offer the above as a warning—I’m about to make some suggestions about improving the quality of teaching at a university.  Like the caveman, I have spent a little time wandering academic halls, trying to figure out the meanings of signs.   I mean that literally, for I remember a carefully drawn diagram in a hall at Enema U that would direct you to the fire exit roughly five feet from the bulletin board.  If you are fleeing a burning building and stop five feet from the safety of an exit that consists of a clear glass door to the outside, in order to read a bulletin board, you are either an occupant of the Administration Building or an education major.  

All told, I have close to four decades of university experience at various colleges and universities.  As a student, a graduate student, an instructor, a professor, and now, once again as a student, I’ve figured out how to find the cafeterias, the closest parking spaces, and the best places in the library to quietly read.  And most important, I have learned a few things about teaching and have some suggestions for the university to implement to improve the quality of teaching.

None of my suggestions has anything to do with any particular professor, (certainly not any of my current professors who have quite graciously allowed me to enroll in their classes).  Many of my ideas come from discussions with other students or from my experiences on other campuses.  

Last week, I mentioned that while you need a degree in education and a teaching certificate to teach an eighteen-year-old senior at a high school, all that is needed to teach that same student a year later at a university is a master’s degree in the subject.  Neither experience nor even basic instruction in how to actually teach is required to teach at most universities.  In my case (which is similar to that of many others), I learned by trial and error, with heavy emphasis on the latter.  

High school education would benefit tremendously by simply requiring a content degree to teach a subject and if you coupled that with schools making the outrageous decision to spend as much on math and science as they do on football, most of our problems with public education would vanish.  And while I think that the College of Education should be burned to the ground while its professors are having a faculty meeting inside, I do believe that new faculty members would benefit from a day or two of instruction.  Call it a “boot camp”.

This is far from an exhaustive discussion, but there are several areas where new professors have noticeable problems getting started.  How do you write a good lecture?  How do you prepare your PowerPoint slides to go with a lecture?  While it’s unlikely that any two professors do it exactly the same way, anyone just starting out could use a little help.

How do you time a lecture?  By this, I mean how does someone starting out know how to fit the material they have to teach within the time limits of a class period?  There is nothing more painful than seeing the panic on a new professor’s face when halfway through a class period they suddenly realize they have run out of prepared material.  And what do you do when the screen won’t come down, or the projector blows a bulb, or the instructor’s computer seems to be broken?

I’m sure there are several ways to handle such situations, but in my case, I used to include optional material in my lecture notes, printed in italics, just in case I needed it.  And I always included a list of possible discussion questions.  And most important, all the electronics in a room are there to help an instructor, not as instructor replacements.  The one time I wrote a lecture that absolutely depended on my being able to show slides was, of course, the day I arrived to find that the projector had been stolen.

If you have never been the lecturer in a large room, there are a few things you need to know and most of those are things you can only find out by spending a little time in the classroom before classes start.  How big do you have to write on the whiteboard so someone in the back row can read it?  How large does the print on your PowerPoint have to be to be legible?  How loud do you have to talk so someone in the back row can hear you?  Classroom thermostats are nearly always locked, so what do you have to do to break the lock so you can change the setting?  Depending on the setting, a classroom large enough to hold a hundred people is either going to be stiflingly warm when it is full or uncomfortably cold when your class of thirty students is scheduled into it.

New faculty never seem to know that the university furnishes neither the markers for a whiteboard nor chalk for the few remaining blackboards.  An instructor not only needs to bring their own, but needs to realize that any color other than blue, black, or red won’t be legible under the fluorescent lights for anyone sitting more than ten feet away.  

All universities have a small department of designated faculty whose only job is to help new professors learn how to teach…And new professors need to avoid these people like the plague, as they were not chosen for that position for their ability to teach, but for their ability to please the administration that selected them.  Every year, the university hands out awards to the faculty for whom the students have voted and declared to be outstanding faculty.  These are the people that new faculty need to hear from, but since these people are far too busy actually teaching, you are unlikely to find them at the Learning Center, the Teaching Academy, The Department of Academic Circle Jerks, or whatever cute name your university uses for the aging cheerleaders who couldn’t teach ducks to swim.

Since the university won’t help you find these people, do what most of your students do: consult Ratemyprofessor.com.  Students are far more likely to give honest evaluations to a third-party anonymous online service than they do with the evaluation forms they are given by the university.  Frankly, students don’t trust those evaluations to be either honest or confidential, so they are overly kind and circumspect in those official evaluations.  (And just between the two of us—yeah, those official evaluations are about as honest as elections in Venezuela.)

If you are a new professor, go online and look up the other faculty in your department, read the evaluations the students wrote.  Then seek out the ones with the best reviews and ask their advice.  Anyone the students like is probably a nice enough person to be happy to help you.  And anyone the students really dislike….  Well, the students are always better judges of character than the administration.  

Teaching isn’t necessarily hard and the administration could do a lot to help the new faculty do it well, but since the administration only pretends to care about the quality of teaching, it won’t and new faculty will have to do it for themselves.