The plucking of low-hanging fruit

Tyler Cowen argued that some 20th Century growth was due to educational growth: in the early 20th Century, an awful lot of very smart people didn't get much education. By the 1970s, the gains from getting that pool of highly skilled labour into higher return occupations had largely already been exploited. Here's The Economist's take:

What low-hanging fruit? Educational fruit, for instance. Decades ago, the rich world was moving most of its population from very low levels of education to university educations, and was shifting lots of potential geniuses from the fields to the factories to the research labs. That was relatively easy to do and it fueled a big growth boom. These days, improvements in educational attainment are quite hard. Nearly half of all young people now go to college. Moving marginal students into college will require a lot of effort and won't yield large gains. That doesn't mean it isn't worth doing, he says. It simply means that easy gains from education are gone.

That move hadn't started in the rural Manitoba of the 1930s.

From my uncle Daniel Hacault's eulogy to my grandfather, who died 3 January aged 87:

Years ago I had talked to George Hutlet about what kind of student Dad was. George smiled and said he was always in trouble with the nuns and that he doodled a lot. Not very studious at all. Dad got his Grade 8 and left school to work on the farm, not an auspicious beginning for someones life, maybe not too smart-maybe not too bright. REALLY?

Dad was a self educated man. When we were young there were always books around that he read on algebra, welding and finance that he used to round out his education. Dad took a correspondence course in drafting and I can remember the mechanical drawings of machinery he had built or was about to build rolled up on his desk. His education was built on problem solving and common sense.

Lewis and I found a micrometer he had made when cleaning out the shop on the farm.  He probably made it in the 1950's. We measured it with a digital caliper and it is still accurate to a thousandth of an inch. It is on display in the hall.  Dad's metal lathe abilities are legendary and we still needed him to give us advice on how to center a work piece last year. Dad's self education instilled in his children a desire to learn either a trade or achieve higher education in university.

As you can see from the story, Dad was very mechanically inclined. He could fix or build almost anything. I can remember taking phone calls for the neighbors looking for “TI PAUL” to fix or build some farm machinery. I heard a story that he even built a double burner still for some of his more adventurous customers. His mechanical abilities filtered down to his sons in varying degrees. His boys followed in his inquisitive footsteps and dismantled his accordion – just to see how it worked. I think this put an end to his musical career as a polka band leader.

 I didn't know about the still. But it makes me smile.

Science Status

One way of breaking out of the Great Stagnation: raise the social status of scientists such that more folks pick science over, say, law. Here's the Forbes piece on Cowen from last year:

Raising the social status of scientists

Cowen’s only concrete recommendation to improve the great stagnation is to “raise the social status of scientists”.  He says: “I don’t want a bunch of extra science prizes given out by the White House; what I want is that most people really care about science and view scientific achievement as a pinnacle of our best qualities as leaders of Western civilization.”

Such a raise in status is devoutly to be wished, particularly the rise in the status of scientists relative to overpaid executives in the financial sector. However such a rise in status is unlikely to have any immediate impact on innovation or growth.

Innovation depends not on how many scientific ideas are out there. It depends on how quickly the already abundant ideas are implemented in the marketplace.

New Zealand columnist Rosemary McLeod also points to the problem, although without any concrete solution:

By contrast to Deen, I doubt very much that any women pant after Stephen Wolfram, the balding and totally average-looking maths genius, now middle-aged, who wrote his first book on particle physics at the age of 14 and had a PhD at 20.

I mention this because somewhere in the great system of evolution there is a definite glitch that needs to be explained in a hurry if our species is to work out how to survive in this world we currently make such a mess of.

It is the likes of Wolfram we should be aiming our simpering selves at, surely, rather than an average Joe with a single, rather common ability that requires almost no IQ.

We should be wanting to breed - if sex still has any relation to reproduction - with blokes who are not only clever, but also rich.

We should thrill to words like "cosmology" and "quantum field theory", then, for the very good reason that we haven't a clue what they mean, but guess that they may come in handy one day.

A lot of should, but no way of getting there from here. Science, alas, isn't generally seen as all that alpha in the only metric that matters in the long run.

Rugby, on the other hand, does not lack for social approbation.

On Saturday, New Zealand learned that we had lost one of our greatest minds.  Sir Paul Callaghan, the 2011 New Zealander of the Year, held many accolades including being a Principal Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.  His list of credentials are as long as they are impressive.  However, despite this, his death and ultimate loss to New Zealand was relegated to the fourth most important news item on both One News and 3 News, something I thought was worth lamenting.

Only 11 days earlier, another Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit member passed away.  His death lead both bulletins.  This of course was Jock Hobbs: former All Black and the man who has been bestowed the honor of saving New Zealand rugby and of securing the 2011 Rugby World Cup hosting rights.

On the day the Jock Hobbs died, both networks deemed the story as being more ‘important’ (i.e. higher up in the bulletin) than news of a major breach of privacy at ACC, the conflict in Syria, the Urewera 4 trial, Asia Air X ending its service to Christchurch, the Ports of Auckland strike and the Chris Cairns libel case.

Compare this to when Sir Paul Callaghan passed away, One News thought the return of a sporting event to Christchurch, the refit of a sports stadium and an incident involving a hot air balloon in which everyone was safe were more important. 3 News had the jailing of a Kiwi duped into smuggling cocaine in Argentina, the cost to rent a house in Auckland and President Obama’s statement about a killed teenager in Florida.

Re-read that list of stories again.  Is it not appalling?  Is it not disrespectful?  Could you go as far as asking if it’s fair, balanced or even reasonable?

It's lamentable, but perfectly understandable. Media plays to what the public wants in a competitive marketplace. And here they want rugby and mostly reckon scientists a bunch of tosser eggheads who should be forced to find real jobs. Not that it's particularly better anywhere else.

We'll know things have changed when scientists have groupies. I'm not betting on its ever happening. I remember stories about one socially obtuse grad student (a few years ahead of me in school, and who will remain nameless) who went around introducing himself to ladies saying "Hi! I just had this paper published! I wrote this!" He was, unsurprisingly, unsuccessful. But I'd expect an athlete of similarly poor social skills would have found more success by saying "Hi! Look at my MVP ring!"