My Airplane Repo Episode

At one time in my life I did a lot of flying. Not commercially. Just winging it for kicks.

So naturally I get a special satisfaction out of Discovery Channel's Airplane Repo show.

I suppose it comes as a welcome surprise to many of that show's viewers to know that Learjet owners sometimes fall behind on their payments. But yeah, it happens. And the big toys get repo'd all the time, just like the little toys.

The Piper Seminole.

Watching Airplane Repo, I can't help but think back on the one time I played a small role in an airplane repo escapade myself (for real; not for TV). This was years ago, when I was a member of a flying club in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The club had a dozen or so planes, mostly Pipers. I was partial to one of the club's planes in particular, a Piper PA-44-180 Seminole, a small twin-engine four-seater that rented to club members for $100 an hour dry (meaning, fuel is extra). I suppose in today's dollars that'd be more like $250 an hour. I loved that little Seminole and took every opportunity to fly it. Flew it solo to Los Angeles on a lark once, in fact, stopping every 600 miles for gas, overnighting in Albuquerque, blasting into the smog-filled L.A. basin around lunchtime of Day Two. But I digress.

One Sunday afternoon, I was hanging out in the club lounge at Bridgeport when a short, stout, fortyish fellow wandered in wearing one of those Ahmadinejad-style Members Only jackets. He started chatting with Tony, the president of the club.

Before I knew it, Tony was motioning me over with elaborate hand gestures.

"So," Tony said. "You doing anything this afternoon?"

"No. What's up?"

"How would you like to get in a little Seminole time for free?"

My feculent grin told the story.

"This gentleman needs a ride to Groton."

The man in the Members Only jacket smiled and extended his hand. "Rich O'Malley."

I grasped his hand and introduced myself. (I don't remember what country Tony was from, but it was one where social ineptitude is highly prized, to the extent that you don't formally introduce people to each other unless it is absolutely necessary, such as after an exchange of goats.)

"I only need to be in Groton a few minutes," O'Malley explained. "Then we'll turn around and come right back. I'll pay the plane rental."

"Are you ready now?" I asked.

"Sure."

"Then let's go."

I grabbed the plane's keys and clipboard off the wall and we burst out onto the flight line, walking swiftly in the gusty October wind. There were some low cumulus clouds hugging the coast but it was obvious weather wouldn't be a factor for our short (60 nautical miles) flight.

"So," I said. "What's in Groton?"

"A Gulfstream Two. Hopefully. It might be there or it might not. Need to find out for sure."

A G-II is a 15-passenger bizjet, definitely what you call heavy iron, crew of two mandatory; a long-range jet but a huge fuel-guzzler; worth several million dollars in poor condition, $10 million or more in good condition (used).

As I did a preflight inspection of the Seminole, O'Malley fed me a few more details. He told me he was working for G.E. Credit and that he was type-rated in various jets, flew all kinds of equipment all the time; his specialty was bizjet repo. The plane we were after was some corporate board's playtoy. The note was in default and there was reason to believe the G-II was being moved around, airport to airport, to avoid falling into the hands of you-know-who.

Our goal this particular Sunday was not to take possession of the aircraft but merely to document its whereabouts so its proper confiscation could be planned out in detail, imminently.

Within a few minutes, we were wheels-up, banking east-northeast over Long Island Sound, the Seminole's 360-cubic-inch Lycomings roaring. I brought the power knobs back and we levelled off at 500 feet. Sailboats disappeared under our wings as we paralleled the Connecticut coast. On our right,  we could see all of Long Island, clear to Montauk.

After twenty minutes we had the Groton Airport at our eleven o'clock. I called the tower and got permssion for a straight-in approach to runway five.

O'Malley knew just where to park, and told me to stay with the plane for a few minutes while he went off to make some discreet inquiries.

He returned about ten minutes later, holding his camera up, saying: "Got it."

By this time, O'Malley and I had become quite chummy. Just as we were about to board the Seminole, he surprised me by asking if he could fly PIC (pilot-in-command) on the return trip. I quickly processed everything I knew about the guy—and said "Sure." (There were dual controls. Worst case, I could fly the plane from the right side.)

O'Malley seemed to know where everything was; he looked comfortable at the controls (always a good sign); asked the right questions; knew how to use a checklist; knew how to talk to the tower. Soon we were tracking the stripe, knobs cobbed.

"Mind if we fly low?" O'Malley asked.

In uncontrolled airspace (which we would be in, once we were over Long Island Sound), Federal Aviation Regulations require only that you maintain 500 feet of separation from any persons or property on the surface. It just meant we'd have to give pleasure boats a wide berth. Otherwise, we could fly as low as we dared.

And this guy wanted low. As in, 50 feet. Right on the deck.

Soon we were screaming over the water at 160 knots, the Manhattan skyline barely visible on the hazy horizon. It reminded me of the 1944 film 30 Seconds over Tokyo, about the Doolittle raid. Every whitecap was visible. They zoomed by in a blur. It was hypnotizing, exhilarating.

We slalomed around the occasional pleasure craft, staying just far enough away that no boat owner could read our tail number and report us to FAA.

And it was a delightful 15-minute trip back (with a ten-knot tailwind the whole way), until I saw a grey-white object—a bird—dart up and down, then up again, and KBANNGGG! I flinched instinctively, ducking down and to the left. Fortunately, the bird hadn't broken through the Plexiglas (which could've ruined my whole day). But there were entrails all over my side of the windshield. O'Malley and I looked at each other. Then burst out laughing.

"That's one gull that will never play the cello again," O'Malley said.

We were on the ground at BDR a couple minutes later, coasting into our parking space. A lineman came out with a fuel truck. We were exiting the plane when the young lineman, seeing the awful accumulation of blood and guts on the windshield of the Seminole, asked: "What the heck happened?"

Deadpan, I shrugged and said: "We hit a really big bug."

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

How to Avoid Defaultmageddon: Randomize ObamaCare

ObamaCare for some, 

miniature American flags for others

Things in Washington are getting pretty tense. On October 1st, the ObamaCare healthcare exchanges are set to go live. October 1st is also the date on which, unless the Congress can pass a continuing resolution for appropriations, the government will go into shutdown. Also looming on the horizon is another debt ceiling fight.

The confluence of these events has led to a substantial amount of political brinksmanship, with some Republicans demanding that ObamaCare be defunded or delayed in exchange for agreeing to a CR and/or debt ceiling increase. For their part, both Obama and most Congressional Democrats have stated that they will not negotiate over the debt ceiling, and that implementation of ObamaCare should go forward as planned.

The two sides seem irreconcilable. But as it turns out, there is a way for both sides to claim victory. Are you ready? Here it it:

Congress should delay ObamaCare AND allow it to go forward.

More specifically, Republicans and Democrats should agree to randomly split the states into two halves. In the first group, ObamaCare will go forward as planned; for the second, implementation will be delayed indefinitely.

It's important to note here that the two groupings must be truly random. I'm not proposing that ObamaCare go into effect in blue states but not in red states. It's quite possible that ObamaCare would go into effect in Mississippi but not in Minnesota. In fact, you would want a mix of red and blue states in both groups.

Randomizing implementation of ObamaCare would have several key advantages.

First, it would help us learn more about the true effects of the law. Right now, many conservatives are convinced that ObamaCare will make the healthcare system worse, whereas many liberals think it will be beneficial. You might think that, once the law does go into effect, this debate will be settled. But as the continuing debate over the effectiveness of the ARRA shows, this is not necessarily the case. If the implementation of ObamaCare is followed by higher prices, a decline in healthcare quality, or plagues of locust, those on the left can (and probably will) claim that these bad things would have happened anyway, and in fact would have been worse if not for the ACA. If prices fall, quality improves, and research reveals that eating banana splits cures cancer, then those on the right can (and probably will) claim that these good things would have happened anyway, and in fact would have been better if not for the new law.

Turning ObamaCare into the world's largest randomized controlled trial solves this problem. Instead of having to guess counterfactually about what would have happened if ObamaCare either had or hadn't been enacted, we could just compare the changes in healthcare in states with ObamaCare to those without.

Because of this, randomizing ObamaCare ought to be an acceptable compromise to both sides of this particular argument. Granted, supporters of ObamaCare will at first only get to see it enacted in half the states. But if the law turns out to be as beneficial as they claim, then the popular opposition to the law will fade, and the electorate will soon demand that the law be extended to all fifty states. Likewise, if, as conservatives claim, ObamaCare is a disaster waiting to happen, then it won't be long before those suffering under the law look at how much better their non-ObamaCare neighbors are doing, and will demand full repeal. The more certain each side is about the effects of the law, the more willing they should be to go along with this compromise.

UPDATE: In the comments, "Waffles" suggests that denying ObamaCare to half the country would be unethical: 

[I]t's pretty undeniable that the subsidies provided by the law are going to be a huge help to Americans who aren't as well off as yourself. There's a reason that there are pretty high ethical standards for human experimentation in the social and medical sciences, and your suggestion is way, way, way beyond that ethical line.

Of course, RCT's routinely do precisely what Waffles says is way over the line, that is, giving potentially life-saving subsidies to one group while denying them to another. The Rand Health Insurance Experiment, for example, did this, as did the more recent Oregon Medicaid RCT. In fact, one can read entire books recounting the results of this type of experiment (incidentally, my wife's job used to be doing compliance for human experimentation, and she confirmed that Waffles' comments were off base).

But while Waffles' objection is factually wrong, his/her objection to the ethics of RCTs is hardly unique. I'm reminded here of an old anecdote from Dr. E.E. Peacock, which I'll pass along via Marginal Revolution: 

One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction.

At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, “Do you have any controls?” Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, “Do you mean did I not operate on half the patients?” The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, “Yes, that’s what I had in mind.” Then the visitor’s fist really came down as he thundered, “Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death.” 

God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, “Which half?” 

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

The Dark Side of Antioxidants

Note: This story, which I wrote back in April 2013, originally appeared in a slightly shorter form at BigThink.com. I'm reproducing it here because I strongly feel the story needs to get out to as many people as possible.

The story of the dark side of antioxidant research isn't well known outside of medical circles. It's an unseemly story, profoundly unsettling; a story that refuses to be made pretty or happy or uplifting no matter how hard you try to duct-tape a silver lining around it. It doesn't fit the "antioxidants are good for you" mantra that sells billions of dollars per year of blueberry- and pomegranate-fortified granola bars and tocopherol-enrichened cereals, acai-berry Jell-O mixes, juices and yogurts with added vitamins, organic baby foods, and so forth, not to mention the billions of dollars of nutritional supplements sold each year (to say nothing of the sub-industry of books and magazines devoted to nutrition).

Still, it's a story that needs to be told. And some of us know where the bodies are buried.

For decades, mainstream medicine pooh-poohed the possibility that vitamins or supplements could "move the needle" on major diseases. Two-time Nobel laureate Linus Pauling was harshly criticized in the 1970s and 80s for suggesting a role for Vitamin C in prevention and treatment of cancer. Even so, laboratory workers had known for years that changes to diet could influence the rate of tumor appearance in lab animals. By the early 1980s, case-control studies and epidemiological evidence from a variety of sources had begun to accumulate, showing that persons who routinely ate large quantities of fresh fruits and vegetables consistently did better with regard to cardiovascular disease (and other diseases) than most people.

In 1981, Sir Richard Peto and colleagues published a paper in Nature that dared asked the simple question: "Can dietary beta-carotene materially reduce human cancer rates?" (Nature, 290:201-208) Shortly thereafter, the National Cancer Institute (whose Chemoprevention branch was headed by Dr. Michael B. Sporn, one of the coauthors of the Nature article) decided to green-light two large intervention-based studies of the cancer-preventing effects of nutritional supplements: a study in Finland involving beta-carotene and alpha-tocopherol (Vitamin E), and a U.S.-based study involving retinol (a form of Vitamin A) and beta-carotene.

The Finnish study (conducted by Finland's National Institute for Health and Welfare) was initially designed to encompass 18,000 male smokers between the ages of 50 and 69. Why just smokers? And why male, and 50+ years old? Lung cancer is ten times more likely to affect smokers; hence a cancer study limited to smokers would need only a tenth as many participants as a study involving the general population. Based on what was known about the age-specific rates of lung cancer among Finnish men, study designers calculated that the desired effect size (a hoped-for 25% decrease in cancer incidence over a period of 6 years) would be measurable with the required level of statistical relevance if 18,000 older male smokers made up the study group. As it turned out, the age distribution of actual volunteers didn't match the demographics of the eligibility group (volunteers tended to be toward the young end of the eligibility range), and as a result the study's enrollment target had to be reset to 27,000 in order to get good statistical relevance.

Full-scale recruitment of subjects into the ATBC (Alpha-Tocopherol Beta-Carotene) Lung Cancer Prevention Study began in April 1985 and continued until a final enrollment of 29,246 men occurred in June 1988. Enrollees were randomized into one of four equal-sized groups, receiving either 50 mg/day (about 6 times the RDA) of alpha-tocopherol, or 20 mg/day of beta-carotene (equivalent to around 3 times the RDA of Vitamin A), or AT and BT together, or placebo only.

At the same time, which is to say starting in 1985 (after some very small, very brief pilot studies to validate recruitment mechanics), the Carotene and Retinol Efficacy Trial (CARET) started enrolling volunteers in the U.S. Unlike Finland's ATBC study, volunteers for CARET were both male and female and were heavy smokers or came from asbestos-exposed workplace environments. They ranged in age from 45 to 69 and were divided initially into four groups (30 mg/day beta carotene only, 25,000 IU retinol-only, carotene plus retinol, or placebo), but in 1988 the treatment groups were consolidated into one group taking both beta-carotene and retinol. The study design called for continuing the vitamin regimen through 1997, with reporting of results to occur in 1998.

Alas, things went horribly awry, and CARET never got that far.

When the Finns reported results from the ATBC study in April 1994, it sent shock waves through the medical world. Not only had alpha-tocopherol and beta-carotene not provided the expected protective effect against lung cancer; the supplement-treated groups actually experienced more cancer than the placebo group—18% more, in fact. 

This was an astonishing result, utterly bewildering, as it contradicted numerous prior animal studies that had shown Vitamin E and beta-carotene to be promising cancer preventatives. Surely an error had occurred. Something had to have gone wrong. One thing it couldn't be was chance variation: with almost 30,000 participants (three quarters of them in treatment groups), this was not a small study. The results couldn't be a statistical fluke.

As it turns out, the Finnish investigators had actually done a meticulous job from start to finish. In analyzing their data, they had looked for possible confounding factors. The only confounder they found was that heavy drinkers in the treatment group got cancer more often than light drinkers.

Two weeks before the Finnish study hit, the National Cancer Institute was awash in conference calls. Accounts vary as to who knew what, when, but CARET's lead investigator, who had seen the Finnish group's data prior to publication, knew that NCI now had a serious problem on its hands. CARET was doing essentially the same experiment the Finns had done, except it was giving even bigger doses of supplements to its U.S. participants, and the study was due to run for another three and a half years. What if CARET's treatment group was also experiencing elevated cancer rates? Participants might be dying needlessly.

And indeed they were.

When statisticians presented interim results to CARET's Safety Endpoint Monitoring Committee in August 1994, four months after the Finnish study appeared in print, it became clear that CARET participants were, if anything, faring considerably worse than their counterparts in the ATBC study. Even so, the safety committee found itself deadlocked on whether to call a premature halt to CARET. The study's formal stopping criteria (as given by something called the O’Brien–Fleming early-stopping boundary) had not been met. Ultimately a decision was made to continue to accumulate more data. There were those on the safety committee who simply didn't believe the results. The data were aberrant; they had to be. When additional numbers could be gathered they would surely show the early numbers to have been wrong.

A second interim statistical analysis was presented to CARET's safety committee in September 1995, one year after the first analysis. According to the committee:

At that time it was clear that the excess of lung cancer had continued to accumulate in the intervention regimen at about the same rate during the time since the first interim analysis. Further, the cardiovascular disease excess persisted. The conditional power calculations showed that it was extremely unlikely that the trial could show a beneficial effect of the intervention, even if the adverse effect ceased to occur and a delayed protective effect began to appear. Therefore the SEMC voted unanimously to recommend to NCI that the trial regimen should be stopped but the follow-up should continue.

The study was halted—but not until January 1996, nearly two years after final publication of the Finnish results. (Even then, CARET participants were contacted by snail mail to let them know of the study's early termination and the reasons for it.)

CARET's results were published in The New England Journal of Medicine in May 1996. Once again, shock waves reverberated throughout the medical world. Participants who had taken beta-carotene and Vitamin A supplements had shown a 28% higher rate of lung cancer. They also fared 26% worse for cardiovascular-related mortality, and 17% worse for all-cause mortality.

There was great reluctance in the medical community to believe the results. Perhaps the even-worse results of the CARET study (relative to the Finnish experiment) had to do with the decision to include 2,044 asbestos-exposed individuals in the treatment group of 9,241 persons? Not so, it turns out. Intensive segment analysis of the asbestos group's data relative to the heavy-smoker group showed that "There was no statistical evidence of heterogeneity of the relative risk among these subgroups."

What the CARET study had, in fact, done was not just replicate the ATBC results but provide the beginnings of a dose-response curve. The Finns had used 20 mg/day of beta-carotene; CARET employed a 50% higher dose. The result had been 50% more cancer.

It was hard to understand the results of the ATBC and CARET studies in light of the fact that another large trial involving beta-carotene, the Physicians' Health Study, had reported neither harm nor benefit from 50 mg of beta carotene taken every other day for 12 years. However, the Physicians' Health Study population was younger and healthier than ATBC or CARET study groups and was predominantly (89%) made up of non-smokers. This turned out to be quite important. (Read on.)

It's been almost 20 years since the ATBC and CARET results were reported. (And to this day, most clinicians are not aware of the results of either study, at least in the U.S.) What have we learned in that time?

In 2007, Bjelakovic et al. undertook a systematic review of existing literature on antioxidant studies covering the time frame 1977 to 2006. The systematic review procedure was conducted using the well-regarded methodology of the Cochrane Collaboration, a group that specializes in (and is known for) high-quality meta-analyses. In analyzing the 47 most rigorously designed studies of supplement effectiveness, Bjelakovic et al. found that 15,366 study subjects (out of a total treatment population of 99,095 persons) died while taking antioxidants, whereas 9,131 placebo-takers, in control groups totalling 81,843 persons, died in those same studies. (This is not including ATBC or CARET results.) The studies in question used beta-carotene, Vitamin E, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, and/or selenium.

In a separate meta-analysis, Miller et al. found a dose-dependent relationship of Vitamin E with all-cause mortality for 135,967 participants in 19 clinical trials. At daily doses below about 150 International Units, Vitamin E appears to be helpful; above that, harmful. Miller et al. concluded:

In view of the increased mortality associated with high dosages of beta -carotene and now vitamin E, use of any high-dosage vitamin supplements should be discouraged until evidence of efficacy is documented from appropriately designed clinical trials.

How are we to make sense of these results? Why have so many studies shown a harmful effect for antioxidants when so many other studies (particularly those carried out in animals, but also those carried out in predominantly healthy human populations) have shown a clear benefit?

The answer may have to do with something called apoptosis, otherwise known as programmed cell death. The body has ways of determining when cells have become dysfunctional to the point of needing to be told to shut down. When cells reach this point, their mitochondria kick off a cascade of reactions (involving caspases and other enzymes) designed to terminate the cells. Most cancer therapies exert their effect by inducing apoptosis, and it's fairly well accepted that in normal, healthy individuals, precancerous cells are constantly being formed, then destroyed through apoptosis. (In a normal healthy adult, as many as 50 billion cells a day, most of them non-cancerous, are destroyed this way.) Antioxidants are known to interfere with apoptosis. In essence, they promote the survival of normal cells as well as cells that shouldn't be allowed to live.

If you're a young non-smoker in good health, the level of cell turnover (from apoptosis) in your body is nowhere near as high as the level of turnover in an older person, or someone at high risk of cancer. Therefore, antioxidants are apt to do more good than harm in a young, healthy person. But if your body is harboring cancer cells, you don't want anitoxidants to encourage the growth of neoplastic cells by interfering with their apoptosis. This is the real lesson of antioxidant research.

The food industry and the people who make nutritional supplements have no interest in telling you any of the things you've read here. But now that you know the story of the dark side of antioxidants (a story made possible by thousands of ordinary people who died in the name of science), you owe it to yourself to take the story to heart. If you're a smoker or at high risk for heart disease or cancer, consider scaling back your use of lipid-soluble antioxidant supplements (particularly vitamins A and E); it could save your life. (There is no need to scale back vitamin D, however, which has potent anti-cancer effects.) And please, if you found any of this information helpful, share it with family, friends, Facebook and Twitter followers, and others. The story needs to get out. The cancer industry isn't going to tell it to you. They haven't so far. There's too much money to be made selling you $70,000-a-year chemotherapies. No one's going to look out for your health but you.


You Might Also Like
Aspirin for cancer prevention (at BigThink.com): An enormous body of evidence points to vast reductions in cancer rates, for a wide variety of cancers, for those who take NSAIDs like iburofen and aspirin daily.

When Vitamins Turn Deadly: More on the CARET disaster and why it took so long to terminate the study when investigators knew full well that people were dying unnecessarily.

Who Needs Antioxidants? Why the free-radical theory of aging is just plain wrong.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

The World's Longest (and Best) Paragraph

In May 1951, Jack Kerouac wrote his friend Neal Cassady to tell him about the road-trip novel he'd just finished. In the letter, Kerouac talked of how he had typed the entire manuscript between April 2 and April 22, on a single 120-foot roll of teletype paper, single-spaced, "just rolled it through typewriter and in fact no paragraphs . . . rolled it out on floor and it looks like a road."

Kerouac's famous scroll manuscript for On the Road.

Six years later, an edited, vastly shortened version of the manuscript (with the characters' real names changed to fictional ones) was published by Viking Penguin ("in mutilated form," Allen Ginsburg once said). In 2007, to mark the book's 50th anniversary, Viking Penguin published the original single-paragraph "scroll version" of On the Road, complete with creative spellings (and containing the sex scenes that had earlier been deemed too controversial), with original character names intact and no attempt to "correct" anything other than the most obvious typos. (The original scroll is today owned by sports magnate Jim Irsay, who paid $2.43 million for it in 2001.)

The 2007 scroll version is the edition I just finished reading, and it's the only edition of On the Road anyone should ever read, because the single-long-paragraph nature of the book and the use of real names for real people are crucial elements of the work, in my opinion.

Like Jack himself (both in the story and in the writing of the manuscript), I got off to a bad start with the book, reading the first 40 pages in one sitting, then making the mistake of letting it go cold for several days. In a book with no plot that's told completely experientially, that's printed as a single 300-page paragraph with no breaks, you have no structural reference points to hold onto, whether typographically or in the story line, which means that if you walk away from it, you forget where you were almost instantly. In my case, I found myself starting again at page one after the first false attempt. And I made damn sure to keep moving from that point on, stopping only to eat, bathe, attend to bodily needs, etc. before resuming the trip.

I got through the book with difficulty. Kerouac's language is suitably mellifluous and inventive, his reportage sincere and seemingly accurate. But the nonstop parade of nonsensical events, leavened by the tragicomic personal-life misadventures of the womanizing Neal Cassady, is ultimately tiresome. Happily, after 135 pages or so, the travelers arrive at the Burroughs ranch in Algiers, Louisiana, and the writing style pivots ever so slightly as Kerouac launches into a loving, carefully crafted portrait of the enigmatic Bill Burroughs. From there, it's back to a meandering series of road trips to New York and San Francisco (always by way of Denver), with various side trips thrown in.

The Great Depression had long since ended, of course (this was 1949), but you couldn't tell it from the indigence of the characters. Jack's monthly $18 checks from the Veterans' Administration seldom went far, what with Neal Cassady's constant need for booze, cigarettes, gasoline, weed, and bail money. What they couldn't afford to buy, they often stole. (In Cassady's case, that sometimes included cars.)

At one point in the story, Kerouac inexplicably comes into a sizable (for those days) sum of cash: $1,000. It's never explained that this was, in fact, the advance for Kerouac's first novel, The Town and The City. He uses it to move his mother from Long Island to Denver. The woman finds Denver not to her liking and moves back to New York. Money gone, Jack hits the road again.

The story accelerates and acquires an almost Hunter Thompson-like feel in Book Three (the "book" breakpoints are unceremoniously noted inline in the text, without indents or spacing) when Cassady and Kerouac agree to deliver a two-year-old Cadillac limousine from Denver to Chicago. They put over 1,000 miles on the car in 23 hours, breaking the speedometer cable after exceeding 110 mph. Along the way, they suffer various mishaps and end up turning the car over to the owner in ramshackle condition. Miraculously, the owner never sends the police after them.

Arguably the best storytelling comes in Book Four, when Cassady and Kerouac, having exhausted America's highway system, head to Mexico. The writing is vivid, piquant, engaging, endearing—unforgettable.

Of course, there is never any hint of a plot, dramatic structure, etc., and that's exactly the point of the book (and of life); the journey is itself the point. It's also why On the Road couldn't possibly find a major publisher (as it did in 1957) if it were written today. It doesn't check the checkboxes of agents' and publishers' "minimum requirements" for a novel. In fact, it quite deliberately gives the finger to all such requirements. Which is why On the Road stands virtually alone among bestselling novels of the past 70 years as being truly experimental yet also truly a quintessential piece of Americana and American literature. It would be fun to submit the book, in manuscript form (as a single paragraph) under a pseudonym, to agents and publishers, just to collect the rejection slips generated by the legions of interns and editorial assistants and self-appointed arbiters of the literary status quo who would never dare take a chance on anything as proto-gonzo as a plotless, one-paragraph, 125,000-word road diary centered around an itinerant womanizer/con-man and his urbane college-dropout buddy. Noo noo nooo, we shan't have any of this.

Today, Kerouac (if he were starting anew) would have to put out his own print-on-demand and e-book editions of his work and then go about the grim business of gaming the Amazon rating system, maintaining a blog (and Facebook page and Twitter account), and doing all the other must-do activities of writers who want to rise above the background noise of what today passes for literature, all without a hope of ever getting a review in The New York Times (much less the kind of review On the Road got from Gilbert Millstein in 1957).

We should all be glad that Kerouac and On the Road came along when they did, at a time when a quiet, humdrum, thoroughly racist, excruciatingly conformist America needed the kind of wake-up call Kerouac provided, and the kind a New York City publishing establishment was still able to give. Those days are over, of course. We're on a different kind of road now.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

This blog post cost $0

Based on data collected by Ritchie King, Ben Walsh tries to calculate the opportunity cost of the cronut and iPhone lines. Ben estimates the amount of time spent in the line, converts a $80,326 median/average (huh? go read the original article!) income in the area to $40.16 an hour, and performs some multiplication. He arrives at an opportunity cost of $95.37 for the cronut line and $359.65 for the iPhone 5s line.

The first problem with this calculation is that most people don’t have a marginal wage: they won’t be paid any more if they work an extra hour between 5am and 9am. Or maybe they do—perhaps through the mechanism of facetime with the boss leading to raises in the future—but the marginal cost of taking a very early morning off once a year is not very high even for that group of workers.

Some of the people waiting in the cronut or iPhone 5s lines may be unemployed or underemployed. If cronuts and iPhones existed in the 1990s when there was full employment in the United States, you could perhaps have argued that everyone in line could have worked an extra hour, and that’s the opportunity cost of waiting in line.

Even workers who are paid by the hour do not always have a marginal wage because the work schedule is set by the employer in advance. If you happen to work during cronut line hours and plan in advance, you might be able to get time off during to stand in line, and the lost wages would be an opportunity cost. But I would guess that only a small fraction of cronutters fall into this category.

I decided to use the Current Population Survey (CPS) data to see exactly how this breaks down in the New York area. There are 1,642 employed people (unweighted) in the sample for the New York–Northern New Jersey–Long Island metropolitan area; the unemployment rate in the city is 8.3%.

Of the employed people, 43% are paid by the hour, and 57% are not paid by the hour. For those who are paid by the hour, the average hourly wage is only $10.59, a lot less than the $40.16 Ben assumes. The annual wage income of those paid by the hour is $34,798, while it is $63,007 for those who are not paid by the hour. The overall average is $50,775.

Those who are paid by the hour work an average of 34.4 hours a week, while those who are not paid by the hour work 40.4 hours.

All this means that if you assume everyone in line is actually paid by the hour and the population of line standers reflects the general population of workers in the New York metro area, the opportunity cost is less than Ben has calculated.

I am only counting wages here: some income is investment income, which is typically not “earned” at 5am. Even if you are a hedge fund manager and have a ton of carried interest that should be counted as wage income, taking an hour off before the market opens on a day of your choice probably won’t affect it too much.

Of course the opportunity cost of the cronut line may not be zero, but I think most of the cost is non-economic.

What if I told you that you had to get up at 5am, on a morning of your choice, and stand in line for 3 hours in SoHo. How much would you pay to avoid that? I probably wouldn’t pay more than $20, so that’s my opportunity cost.

Alternatively, we could assume that you have to go to bed 3 hours earlier the night before. If you were forced to do that on an evening of your choice this summer, how much would you pay to avoid that? For me, personally, the standing in line for 3 hours part is much worse than the lack of sleep. If you gave me a chair, or even better, a motorized wheelchair, my opportunity cost would fall a lot.

Whatever that figure is (should we commission a survey?), averaged over all the line standers, forms the bulk of the opportunity cost of the cronut and iPhone lines.

One thing that could mess up my argument, especially as applied to the iPhone line, is if many of the standers are self-employed consultants who are not only paid by the hour, but who could actually be working and earning marginal income at 5am.

Disclosure: I own Apple stock. I do not own any Dominique Ansel Bakery or Ben Walsh stock. Please send cronut donations care of Noah. Also, the underlined word was added a few minutes after I first posted this.

Update: Ben reminds me that he did partially address the concerns about marginal wage. Consider this post an expansion on his.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

The Complete Guide to Getting Into an Economics PhD Program (with Miles Kimball)

Below is the full text of my column with Miles Kimball, "The Complete Guide to Getting into an Economics PhD Program", published on 8/16/2013. 

If you want to mirror the content of this post on another site, that is possible for a limited time if you read the legal notice at this link and include both a link to the original Quartz column and the following copyright notice:

© August 16, 2013: Miles Kimball and Noah Smith, as first published on Quartz. Used by permission according to a temporary nonexclusive license expiring June 30, 2014. All rights reserved.

Miles has agreed to give permission on the same terms as I do. 

See also the follow-up posts by Jeff Smith and Bruce Bartlett.

* * *

Back in May, Noah wrote about the amazingly good deal that is the PhD in economics. Why? Because:

1. You get a job.
2. You get autonomy.
3. You get intellectual fulfillment.
4. The risk is low.
5. Unlike an MBA, law, or medical degree, you don’t have to worry about paying the sticker price for an econ PhD:  After the first year, most schools will give you teaching assistant positions that will pay for the next several years of graduate study, and some schools will take care of your tuition and expenses even in the first year. (See what is written at the end of this post, after the column proper, for more about costs of graduate study and how econ PhD’s future earnings makes it worthwhile, even if you can’t get a full ride.)

Of course, such a good deal won’t last long now that the story is out, so you need to act fast! Since he wrote his post, Noah has received a large number of emails asking the obvious follow-up question: “How do I get into an econ PhD program?” And Miles has been asked the same thing many times by undergraduates and other students at the University of Michigan. So here, we present together our guide for how to break into the academic Elysium called Econ PhD Land:

(Note: This guide is mainly directed toward native English speakers, or those from countries whose graduate students are typically fluent in English, such as India and most European countries. Almost all highly-ranked graduate programs teach economics in English, and we find that students learn the subtle non-mathematical skills in economics better if English is second nature. If your nationality will make admissions committees wonder about your English skills, you can either get your bachelor’s degree at a—possibly foreign—college or university where almost all classes are taught in English, or you will have to compensate by being better on other dimensions. On the bright side, if you are a native English speaker, or from a country whose graduate students are typically fluent in English, you are already ahead in your quest to get into an economics PhD.)

Here is the not-very-surprising list of things that will help you get into a good econ PhD program:

• good grades, especially in whatever math and economics classes you take,
• a good score on the math GRE,
• some math classes and a statistics class on your transcript,
• research experience, and definitely at least one letter of recommendation from a researcher,
• a demonstrable interest in the field of economics.

Chances are, if you’re asking for advice, you probably feel unprepared in one of two ways. Either you don’t have a sterling math background, or you have quantitative skills but are new to the field of econ. Fortunately, we have advice for both types of applicant.

If you’re weak in math…

Fortunately, if you’re weak in math, we have good news: Math is something you can learn. That may sound like a crazy claim to most Americans, who are raised to believe that math ability is in the genes. It may even sound like arrogance coming from two people who have never had to struggle with math. But we’ve both taught people math for many years, and we really believe that it’s true. Genes help a bit, but math is like a foreign language or a sport: effort will result in skill.

Here are the math classes you absolutely should take to get into a good econ program:

• Linear algebra
• Multivariable calculus
• Statistics

Here are the classes you should take, but can probably get away with studying on your own:

• Ordinary differential equations
• Real analysis

Linear algebra (matrices, vectors, and all that) is something that you’ll use all the time in econ, especially when doing work on a computer. Multivariable calculus also will be used a lot. And stats of course is absolutely key to almost everything economists do. Differential equations are something you will use once in a while. And real analysis—by far the hardest subject of the five—is something that you will probably never use in real econ research, but which the economics field has decided to use as a sort of general intelligence signaling device.

If you took some math classes but didn’t do very well, don’t worry. Retake the classes. If you are worried about how that will look on your transcript, take the class the first time “off the books” at a different college (many community colleges have calculus classes) or online. Or if you have already gotten a bad grade, take it a second time off the books and then a third time for your transcript. If you work hard, every time you take the class you’ll do better. You will learn the math and be able to prove it by the grade you get. Not only will this help you get into an econ PhD program, once you get in, you’ll breeze through parts of grad school that would otherwise be agony.

Here’s another useful tip: Get a book and study math on your own before taking the corresponding class for a grade. Reading math on your own is something you’re going to have to get used to doing in grad school anyway (especially during your dissertation!), so it’s good to get used to it now. Beyond course-related books, you can either pick up a subject-specific book (Miles learned much of his math from studying books in the Schaum’s outline series), or get a “math for economists” book; regarding the latter, Miles recommends Mathematics for Economists by Simon and Blume, while Noah swears by Mathematical Methods and Models for Economists by de la Fuente. When you study on your own, the most important thing is to work through a bunch of problems. That will give you practice for test-taking, and will be more interesting than just reading through derivations.

This will take some time, of course. That’s OK. That’s what summer is for (right?). If you’re late in your college career, you can always take a fifth year, do a gap year, etc.

When you get to grad school, you will have to take an intensive math course called “math camp” that will take up a good part of your summer. For how to get through math camp itself, see this guide by Jérémie Cohen-Setton.

One more piece of advice for the math-challenged: Be a research assistant on something non-mathy. There are lots of economists doing relatively simple empirical work that requires only some basic statistics knowledge and the ability to use software like Stata. There are more and more experimental economists around, who are always looking for research assistants. Go find a prof and get involved! (If you are still in high school or otherwise haven’t yet chosen a college, you might want to choose one where some of the professors do experiments and so need research assistants—something that is easy to figure out by studying professors’ websites carefully, or by asking about it when you visit the college.)

If you’re new to econ…

If you’re a disillusioned physicist, a bored biostatistician, or a neuroscientist looking to escape that evil  Principal Investigator, don’t worry: An econ background is not necessary. A lot of the best economists started out in other fields, while a lot of undergrad econ majors are headed for MBAs or jobs in banks. Econ PhD programs know this. They will probably not mind if you have never taken an econ class.

That said, you may still want to take an econ class, just to verify that you actually like the subject, to start thinking about econ, and to prepare yourself for the concepts you’ll encounter. If you feel like doing this, you can probably skip Econ 101 and 102, and head straight for an Intermediate Micro or Intermediate Macro class.

Another good thing is to read through an econ textbook. Although economics at the PhD level is mostly about the math and statistics and computer modeling (hopefully getting back to the real world somewhere along the way when you do your own research), you may also want to get the flavor of the less mathy parts of economics from one of the well-written lower-level textbooks (either one by Paul Krugman and Robin Wells, Greg Mankiw, or Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok) and maybe one at a bit higher level as well, such as David Weil’s excellent book on economic growth) or Varian’s Intermediate Microeconomics.

Remember to take a statistics class, if you haven’t already. Some technical fields don’t require statistics, so you may have missed this one. But to econ PhD programs, this will be a gaping hole in your resume. Go take stats!

One more thing you can do is research with an economist. Fortunately, economists are generally extremely welcoming to undergrad RAs from outside econ, who often bring extra skills. You’ll get great experience working with data if you don’t have it already. It’ll help you come up with some research ideas to put in your application essays. And of course you’ll get another all-important letter of recommendation.

And now for…

General tips for everyone

Here is the most important tip for everyone: Don’t just apply to “top” schools. For some degrees—an MBA for example—people question whether it’s worthwhile to go to a non-top school. But for econ departments, there’s no question. Both Miles and Noah have marveled at the number of smart people working at non-top schools. That includes some well-known bloggers, by the way—Tyler Cowen teaches at George Mason University (ranked 64th), Mark Thoma teaches at the University of Oregon (ranked 56th), and Scott Sumner teaches at Bentley, for example. Additionally, a flood of new international students is expanding the supply of quality students. That means that the number of high-quality schools is increasing; tomorrow’s top 20 will be like today’s top 10, and tomorrow’s top 100 will be like today’s top 50.

Apply to schools outside of the top 20—any school in the top 100 is worth considering, especially if it is strong in areas you are interested in. If your classmates aren’t as elite as you would like, that just means that you will get more attention from the professors, who almost all came out of top programs themselves. When Noah said in his earlier post that econ PhD students are virtually guaranteed to get jobs in an econ-related field, that applied to schools far down in the ranking. Everyone participates in the legendary centrally managed econ job market. Very few people ever fall through the cracks.

Next—and this should go without saying—don’t be afraid to retake the GRE. If you want to get into a top 10 school, you probably need a perfect or near-perfect score on the math portion of the GRE. For schools lower down the rankings, a good GRE math score is still important. Fortunately, the GRE math section is relatively simple to study for—there are only a finite number of topics covered, and with a little work you can “overlearn” all of them, so you can do them even under time pressure and when you are nervous. In any case, you can keep retaking the test until you get a good score (especially if the early tries are practice tests from the GRE prep books and prep software), and then you’re OK!

Here’s one thing that may surprise you: Getting an econ master’s degree alone won’t help. Although master’s degrees in economics are common among international students who apply to econ PhD programs, American applicants do just fine without a master’s degree on their record. If you want that extra diploma, realize that once you are in a PhD program, you will get a master’s degree automatically after two years. And if you end up dropping out of the PhD program, that master’s degree will be worth more than a stand-alone master’s would. The one reason to get a master’s degree is if it can help you remedy a big deficiency in your record, say not having taken enough math or stats classes, not having taken any econ classes, or not having been able to get anyone whose name admissions committees would recognize to write you a letter of recommendation.

For getting into grad school, much more valuable than a master’s is a stint as a research assistant in the Federal Reserve System or at a think tank—though these days, such positions can often be as hard to get into as a PhD program!

Finally—and if you’re reading this, chances are you’re already doing this—read some econ blogs. (See Miles’s speculations about the future of the econ blogosphere here.) Econ blogs are no substitute for econ classes, but they’re a great complement. Blogs are good for picking up the lingo of academic economists, and learning to think like an economist. Don’t be afraid to write a blog either, even if no one ever reads it (you don’t have to be writing at the same level as Evan Soltas orYichuan Wang);  you can still put it on your CV, or just practice writing down your thoughts. And when you write your dissertation, and do research later on in your career, you are going to have to think for yourself outside the context of a class. One way to practice thinking critically is by critiquing others’ blog posts, at least in your head.

Anyway, if you want to have intellectual stimulation and good work-life balance, and a near-guarantee of a well-paying job in your field of interest, an econ PhD could be just the thing for you. Don’t be scared of the math and the jargon. We’d love to have you.

***

Miles also added the following comments on his own blog:

In case you are curious, let me say a little about the financial costs and benefits of an economics PhD.  At Michigan and other top places, PhD students are fully funded. Here, that means that the first year’s tuition and costs are covered (including a stipend for your living expenses). In years 2 through 5 (which is enough time to finish your PhD if you work hard to stay on track), as long as you are in good standing in the program, the costs of a PhD are just the work you do as a teaching assistant. So there are no out-of-pocket costs as long as you finish within five years, which is tough but doable if you work hard to stay on track. Tuition is relatively low in year 6 (and 7) if you can’t finish in 5 years. Plus, graduate students in economics who have had that much teaching experience often find they can make about as much money by tutoring struggling undergraduates as they could have by being a teaching assistant. 

When a school can’t manage full funding, the first place it adds a charge is in charging the bottom-half of the applicant pool for the first year, when a student can’t realistically teach because the courses the grad students are taking are too heavy. That might add up to a one-time expense of $40,000 or so in tuition, plus living expenses.

On pay, the market price for a brand-new assistant professor at a top department seems to be at least $115,000 for 9 months, with the opportunity to earn more during the summer months. If you don’t quite make it to that level, University of Michigan PhD’s I have asked seem to get at least $80,000 starting salary, and Louis Johnston tweets that below-top liberal arts colleges pay a starting salary in the $55,000 to $60,000 range. But remember that all of these numbers are for 9-month salaries that allow for the possibility (though not the regularity) of earning more in the summer. Government jobs tend to pay 12-month salaries that are about 12/9 of 9-month academic salaries at a comparable level.

There is definitely the possibility of being paid very well in academic economics, though not as well as the upside potential if you go to Wall Street. For example, with summer pay included, quite a few of the full economics professors at the University of Michigan make more than $250,000 a year. (Because we are at a state university, our salaries are public.)

The bottom line is that the financial returns are good enough that you should have no hesitation begging or borrowing to finance your Economics PhD. (Please don’t steal to finance it.)

     

What about the costs of the extra year it might take to study math the way we recommend? If you have been developing self-discipline like a champion, but are short on money and summers aren’t enough, you could spend a gap year right after high school just studying math, living in your parents’ house at very low cost; most colleges will let you defer admission for a year after they have let you in.    

reade more... Résuméabuiyad