HodgBlog

I spend a lot of time thinking about what I’m doing vs. what I could be doing, and what’s important in life — finding meaning in life, rather than looking for The Meaning of Life. Several books have helped draw my thoughts together, including Melissa Everett’s Making a Living While Making a Difference, which I read more than 10 years ago, and two I read more recently: the Dalai Lama’s Ethics for a New Millennium, and Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Here are some thoughts:

• Central ideas from the Dalai Lama’s book: (a) the fundamental desire of everyone is to avoid suffering and to be happy, and (b) the way to achieve true happiness and fulfillment for yourself is to help others avoid suffering and be happy.
• Central ideas from Viktor Frankl’s book: we can only be happy and satisfied in life (and mentally healthy) if we have a sense of meaning in our lives: a reason to live, a goal, a “why”. This sense of meaning can be found from three sources: action/work (doing something significant), love (caring for someone), and dignity (showing courage and hope in the face of unavoidable suffering).
• Central idea from Melissa Everett’s book: You’ll be happier with your work if it aligns with your values, which means that you need to first understand what your values are, and then think about how you can find work that fits them.
• My list of activities to concentrate on, to bring meaning, happiness, and fulfillment to my life:
  • Spending time with family and friends, and supporting them through difficult times
  • Expanding my knowledge, perspectives, and connections (reading, traveling, study, being outdoors)
  • Helping others improve their lives (volunteering, teaching)
  • Intellectual challenges (writing software, puzzles, games)
  • Creativity (crochet, sewing, cooking, making music, writing)
  • Health (eating well, exercise)

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In the United States at least, people with a post-secondary degree tend to earn more than people without one. For instance, looking at the statistics for people aged 25-34 in 2007, the median annual income for high-school graduates was about $25,000, while people with an Associates (2-year) degree earned $31,000, and those with a Bachelor’s (4-year) degree earned nearly $41,000. Since earning these degrees has such a positive affect on income, it should be good news for women that, as Mark Perry recently noted in his blog, women are now receiving more post-secondary degrees than men, even at the doctoral level.

However, if you look at the situation in more detail, using the US Department of Education statistics for the 2006-2007 graduation year (for bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees), you’ll find that higher education may not be as women-dominated as the overall statistics would indicate:

• In Computer Science, women receive only about 20% to 25% of the degrees at each level.
• In Engineering, women receive only about 15% to 20% of the degrees at each level.
• In Math, women receive about 44% of the Bachelor’s degrees, 40% of Masters degrees, and 30% of Doctoral degrees.
• In the Physical Sciences, women receive about 40% of the Bachelors and Masters degrees, and 30% of Doctoral degrees.
• Women continue to receive more degrees than men at all levels in areas they have dominated since at least the early 1970s: Ethnic and Gender Studies, Communication, Education, English Language and Literature, Foreign Languages, Liberal Arts, Public Administration, Social Services, and Visual and Performing Arts.
• There has been a shift in the area of Biological Sciences from male-dominated at all levels in the 1950s to female-dominated at all levels today.
• Women continue to dominate the Health Sciences area at the bachelors and masters degree level (this has been true since the 1970s), and are also now (since the 1980s) ahead in doctoral degrees.
• In Psychology, women surpassed men at the Bachelors degree level in the late 1970s, and at the doctoral degree level in the mid 1980s.

Looking at the income statistics for men and women separately (again, in the 25-34 age group for 2007, so as to discount any left-over problems from previous decades), we can see that the median income for all women is $27,000 per year, while for men it is about $33,500, in spite of the fact that a higher percentage of women have post-secondary degrees. In fact, men in this age group with 4-year degrees are earning about $47,000, while women earn $36,000. This is likely due to the difference in the subject area of the degrees noted above — salaries for engineers are certainly higher than those for teachers.

So, I am not sure that the fact that women are earning more college degrees than men translates into anything very meaningful.

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I recently read an interesting book by James Tooley called The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves, published by the Cato Institute.

This book describes how the governments of many countries in the developing world are failing to educate their children, because their government-run schools are basically worthless. The author described seeing many schools where only a small fraction of the teachers even arrived at the school on any given day, and an even smaller fraction were engaged in meaningful teaching activities (he also did careful studies that documented these problems, as well as poor educational outcomes); this system was made possible by wide-spread government corruption. Perhaps it is no surprise that everyone involved is apparently aware of the issues at the government schools, from the children and their parents, to government officials at all levels, to the international aid agencies and foreign governments that continue to give money for education to the government agencies that are running the schools. So of course, middle- and upper-class families living there send their children to for-profit private schools.

But the real surprise in this book was that Tooley found that many extremely poor people in these countries were also sending their children to for-profit private schools — low-cost schools run by entrepreneurs of similar backgrounds to the poor families, living in the same neighborhoods (rural areas or urban slums). And although these poor private schools tended to have dismal facilities by our standards (poor lighting, poor sanitation, etc.), this was more than balanced by much greater level of accountability than the government-run schools, as parents would immediately withdraw their children (and their tuition money) from poorly-performing schools. Tooley also documented, through careful study, that these low-cost private schools (so low in cost as to be affordable by workers at the very bottom of the social scale) had much better educational outcomes than the nearby government-run schools.

After reading this book, I was left wondering (as Tooley certainly intended) why international aid organizations and US and other governments would continue to pour money into corrupt and ineffective government-run educational programs in these countries. Tooley suggested instead that we direct our aid money in two directions that seemed worthwhile to me. First, he suggested setting up scholarship funds for poor children’s tuition in the low-cost private schools. The cost of such tuition per student is very low, in US dollars or European currencies, and the return in educational provision is high. Tooley has apparently already been involved in setting up one organization that provides such scholarships. Second, the major barrier for educational entrepreneurs in setting up or improving their schools is the lack of financing — banks will not or cannot lend to them, in spite of their financial soundness. So, the idea would be to set up micro-credit institutions dedicated to funding such educational ventures. I haven’t been able to find any projects of this nature that are in progress, but definitely the ideas of micro-credit are well developed in general, and maybe someone will start one up soon. We’ll have to wait and see.

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What is going on with California lately? Last year, they passed an initiative that banned gay marriage. This year, apparently there is going to be an initiative that would check immigration documents of the parents of any child born in the state when they try to get a birth certificate, report the parents to immigration officials if they can’t produce documents proving their legal immigration status, and then grant the child some kind of a second-class birth certificate in an attempt to deny the child citizenship (see this BBC Mundo article, in Spanish).

Our Constitution states that anyone born in the US is a citizen. Our country’s principles of civil rights are supposed to protect minority groups from laws that deny them equal protection. Why is California trying to circumvent these fundamental principles? What happened to the California that used to exist, where people stood up for the rights of others instead of trying to take them away?

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I recently read The Green Collar Economy, by Van Jones (with a forward by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.). I think President Obama must have read it too, since the ideas he’s been talking about lately for fixing the economy are basically the same as what Jones sets out in his book. This is a good thing, in my opinion. Here are the main points from this book:

• The US is spending about $1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion dollars by the US definition of “trillion”, or 1 billion by the British definition of “billion” — 1 million million either way) per year to subsidize the coal and oil industries. The book doesn’t give any documentation on how it got this number, but if it’s true, I can only ask: Why?
• Given that burning oil, natural gas, and coal contributes to global warming and other pollution problems, that the supplies of these resources is finite, and that dependence on foreign oil is a major security issue, we need to move towards not burning these fuels at all.
• We can replace the energy coming from coal and oil with geothermal, wind, and solar energy (see my previous post on energy for more on that idea), in conjunction with a move towards better efficiency and sustainable food production.
• The following public policy shifts are needed, in order to make this happen:
  • Stop subsidizing oil and coal
  • Introduce a “cap and trade” system that will cap carbon emissions in the US at current levels, decreasing the cap every year on a pre-determined schedule (so that industry can plan ahead), and set up a system for companies to trade their carbon cap credits.
  • Streamline electricity transmission rules, so that any electricity producer is guaranteed access to the local grid everywhere, while owners of transmission lines and local grids are compensated for their use (similar to the access to local telephone lines from the Telecommunications Act of 1996).
  • Modernize the electric grid, adding high-voltage long-distance trunk DC transmission lines, better control software, and battery storage facilities, so that solar and wind-generated electricity can be effectively generated when and where the sun and wind hit, and used when and where it is most needed. The estimated cost of this modernization is about the same as the 1-year oil and coal subsidy mentioned above, and as with the telecommunications modernization that led to our current Internet backbones, if access is guaranteed, private investment may pay for a significant portion of this cost.
  • Subsidize efficiency and sustainability, ranging from home and building lighting/heating/insulation improvements to mass transit to organic food production.
• Jones and Kennedy believe this will not only improve the environment, but also significantly improve the economy. They cite examples of Sweden and Iceland, which have both significantly reduced their use of oil and coal, and whose economies are booming as a result. Jones also points out that many of the “green collar” jobs generated by these programs would pay a decent wage, be attainable by people with a high-school education (with a little training), and be impossible to outsource (things like installing solar panels and weatherizing buildings have to be done here in the US).
• Jones also advocates for an approach that is based on principles of equal protection and equal opportunity: making sure that this environmental movement includes, protects, and creates jobs in lower-income areas as well as among the more affluent.

President Obama apparently wants something very much like this plan to be put into effect, and the economic stimulus plan being signed today contains at least some of these ideas. I’ll be interested to see what comes next.

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