Privatization and the Student Loan Crisis

Tonight, the PBS News Hour featured a piece on Why American Students are Struggling with -- and Defaulting on -- Small Debts. New research (from the New York Federal Reserve, I think--it wasn't clear in the piece) found that borrowers with the smallest balances ($5,000 or less) were the most likely to default. This is a counterintuitive result that is interesting, but I think this piece skirts the issue of why we have so much student debt in the first place. If you are studying right-wing politics, you know the answer to this question but let's just make the causal model a little more explicit.

The path diagram above (click to enlarge) shows my theory of what's going on. The model is pretty clearly on display at the University of Wisconsin (here) but also applies to Kansas (here), Arizona (here) and many other US States with Right-Wing governments. The primary driver for the model is the Neoliberal policy emphasis on privatization, that is, encouraging public universities to become private entities. Once privatized, State funding for universities can be reduced, sometimes substantially. With the reduction in State support, the funding shortfall has to be made up by increasing tuition, sometimes substantially approaching and eventually equaling the fees charged by elite private colleges. To pay the increase in tuition, students and their parents need to take out loans. When the students graduate (if they graduate) paying off the loans provides profits for the banking industry which feeds back to encourage more Privatization.

The effect of this positive feedback loop on economic performance is unclear. Students with heavy debt cannot purchases homes, purchase automobiles or otherwise invest in their future. They have no discretionary income to spend in the market place and struggle to pay food and rent. The effect on National Consumption and Gross Domestic Product has to be negative. The Neoliberal hope is that the reduction in State support for Education will reduce taxes and stimulate economic growth. In Wisconsin, Kansas and Arizona, at least, this is not happening.

Quite simply, it is very important for government to stay in public education, keep tuition costs low, keep admissions open and keep standards high. At the University of Wisconsin, prior administrations have asked for more flexibility in the application of State regulations, particularly regulations covering building construction and employee hiring. What they received from Right-Wing State government was an offer to allow privatization in exchange for reduced regulation. This is an odd offer coming from the Right-Wing and it suggests that the Right-Wing has actually made little progress in reducing State regulation. In any event, the message for the University of Wisconsin should be clear:

What you get is something that will ultimately not be in the best interests of your students (or customers, I guess, if you are privatized). If you would like to see the entire News Hour piece, the video is below:

 

Catalina State Park Romero Pools Trail Fly-over

We hiked the Catalina State Park Romero Pools Trail yesterday. This is a beautiful and somewhat challenging hike (at least for the over-sixty crowd). The map above shows our pace and elevation change. The trail goes through the controversial Desert Bighorn Sheep Reintroduction area (read more here and here). The map below shows the other trails in Catalina. 

The Romero Pools trail also allows serious hikers to go all the way to Mount Lemon (9157 feet above sea level). I would estimate that we were about one-fourth the way to Mount Lemon although my guess is that the elevation and trail get a lot more difficult (as it was, our pace per mile was pretty slow--see pictures of our many rest pauses here). 

The Google Earth Fly-over below (you might need the current web browser plugin to see this here) gives a great picture of the hike. If you look quickly at the start or at then end of video you can see the creek we had to ford before and after the walk. The creek usually has no water, but a full day of rain in Tucson last week continues to bring water down from the Catalina mountains (take an extra pair of socks and a towel if you do this hike when the creek is full).

A Solution to Driverless Car Problems

UPDATE Dec 13, 2016: The Google Self-Driving Car Project is now Waymo.  Tesla has recently recalled 362,000 self-driving vehicles because regulators found the FSD (Full Self-Driving) system increased the risk of crashes. For the present, we have to restrict AI to closed systems such as freeways. Urban driving is an open system and far too complex (see Rebooting AI by Gary Marcus).

At least since 2010, Google has been developing a self-driving car called Google Chauffeur. In 2013, news organizations were reporting (here) that Google wanted to create a fleet of driverless "robo-taxis" similar to the Johnny Cabs (pictured above) in the 1990 movie Total Recall. Needless to say, there are problems with the robo-car idea, but I have a solution (maybe).

The current generation of robo-cars have expensive laser range finders that map out the environment around the car and compare it to precisions maps, something like Google maps street views. These technical capabilities are really just extensions of technology available on current production automobiles such as collision avoidance systems and GPS navigation devices. At the current state of robo-car technology, some problems remain: (1) Not all incidents with human-operated cars can be avoided (here), and (2) The technology has limitations: heavy rain and snow cannot currently be handled; unmarked 4-way intersections must be navigated very conservatively; trash, potholes and debris in the road cannot be identified and humans signaling the car (such as a police officer) cannot be identified.

Recently, I was driving the expressways surrounding Phoenix, AZ (particularly the 101, the 202 and Hwy 60). It doesn't take more than a few hours a driving to observe all sorts of unsafe and reckless driving: speeding, swerving, unexpected lane changes, tailgating, road rage, etc. etc. The achilles heel of the US expressway system is a rush-hour accident caused by unsafe driving at high speeds. Typically, traffic grinds to a halt until the accident scene can be cleared. If you can get into the right-hand lane and get off the expressway, you will often get to your destination more quickly driving through town. As population density increases and  freeway traffic increases, the number of accidents and gridlock situations will continue to increase. Adding more lanes to the freeways or adding more freeways is not the answer: at some point land expansion is no longer possible and the expanded freeways only become congested again as traffic expands to meet the lanes available.

Here's my suggested solution to the joint problems of freeway congestion and driverless cars: restrict freeways to robo-cars only! Access to expressways would be controlled with i-Pass technology and could be combined with tolls. Robo-car (or more generally robo-vehicle, to include trucks) technology would have to control speed based on existing conditions and distance from other vehicles based on traffic congestion and speed. The robo-car control could only be over-ridden to slow the car down. There would be no mix of driverless and human-controlled cars. Destinations would be pre-programmed into the navigation system prior to entering the expressway and could not be changed (the ticket-to-ride). Traffic conditions and trip plans would be communicated over the Internet to a map server and would be freely available to humans and to robots. Expressway police patrols would not be needed. Accidents or road blocks resulting from mechanical failures would result in ticket-to-ride reprogramming either into open lanes or off the expressway where human control would take over.

Obviously, this is not a perfectly egalitarian solution. Lower income drivers might be unable to afford robo-car technology and be forced onto the city streets or on to public transportation. Honestly, this is not much different than the current system where the poorest low income commuters are forced onto public transportation and many of the high-mileage older vehicles need to be taken off the road to reduce CO2 emissions. Restricted freeways would force consideration of public transportation options and potential subsidies for robo-cars (similar to or in addition to subsidies for hybrid, high-mileage vehicles).

In any event, large cities in the US Southwest would be great testing grounds for robo-freeway restrictions. Snow and heavy rain (except in the monsoon season when freeways become flooded and should be closed) are not limitations for the technology.  As for the idea of robo-taxis, I would be a lot more skeptical since they would have to mix with human-controlled city-street traffic. In case you missed the Johnny Cab (robo-cab) scene from Total Recall, the video clip (below) will help provide an image for the future of robo-cabs.

 

Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) Wins Bimbo Bakery Award for Most Off-Topic SOTUS Response

HORSHAM, PA: Today the  Bimbo Bakery announced that Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) was selected as the 2015 winner of the prestigious SOTUS Response Award. On January 20, 2015 Ms. Ernst gave the GOP response to President Obama's State of the Union Speech (SOTUS). In her response (transcript here and video here), Ms. Ernst was able to subtly weave in a comment about "plastic bread bags". The Bimbo Bakery Award Committee was stunned by the originality and seamlessness of her rhetoric.

At first the Award Committee thought that the mention of "bread bags" was a subtle attempt to attract the attention of the Bimbo Bakery. But, on further investigation, the committee concluded that Ms. Ernst was not capable of such subtlety. The text of her full transcript that won the award was:

You see, growing up, I had only one good pair of shoes. So on rainy school days, my mom would slip plastic bread bags over them to keep them dry.

But I was never embarrassed. Because the school bus would be filled with rows and rows of young Iowans with bread bags slipped over their feet.

What any of this had to do with President Obama's SOTUS is unclear but the mention of "bread bags" was unexpected, unusual and ultimately won Ms. Ernst the award.

What Happened to the Ancient Sonoran Desert People?

Today we visited the Casa Grande ("Big House") Ruins National Monument in Coolidge, AZ. It was the first prehistoric and cultural site to be protected by the US Government in 1892. The Big House pictured above (on the left in 1880 and on the right today protected by a steel roof), marked the peak of the Ancient Sonoran Desert People's civilization. Archeological dating methods estimate that it was constructed in the 1300's. Shortly after its construction, the Sonoran Desert civilization collapsed. What happened?

During the late 1300’s and early 1400’s, the ancient Sonoran Desert people suffered a period of widespread depopulation and abandonment. Speculations as to the cause have included drought, floods, disease, invasion, earthquakes, internal strife, and salinization of farmland. Today, several American Indian groups have ancestral links to the ancient people. Their cultural traditions, together with on-going archeology and the continued interest of visitors at Casa Grande Ruins, all combine to keep the legacy of the ancient Sonoran Desert people alive to this day (from the NPS here).

There is no definitive scientific answer but a few things struck us as we visited the site:

• The ancient Sonoran Desert people constructed (using sticks, stones and human labor only) an impressive irrigation system around the Gilla River (graphic above). Digging irrigation ditches in the Sonoran Desert was no easy task since the layer of caliche below the surface soil usually takes picks, shovels and jack hammers to break up today--tools not available to the ancient Sonoran Desert people. What would have motivated a population to undertake this brutal work?
• The Big House is at least a mile from the Gilla River path today which has no year-round running water as a result of the Coolidge Dam.
• The timbers to support the four-story Big House were carried by humans from surrounding mountainous areas many miles away where trees from which 12 foot lumber could be cut were available. Hundreds of heavy timbers had to be moved hundreds of miles by hand to build the floors of the four-story building. Only a repressive mini-Empire would have been able to extract that kind of brutal labor from a desperate population.
• Prior to construction of the Big House, people lived in small, single story dugout shelters. The Big House would not have been used for human shelter but rather for the extraction and storage of surplus.

What struck us after taking all this in was that the Big House we were gawking at was the arrogant proclamation of an ancient mini-Empire that could command such an impractical and useless monument on the basis of overpopulation supported by irrigation technology. Just at the peak of their civilization, the ancient Sonoran Desert people had created a impressive but unstable civilization that was easily toppled. Whether it was toppled by drought, flood, disease, invasion, earthquakes, internal strife or salinization of irrigated farm land doesn't matter as much as how easily and quickly the civilization collapsed.

The remaining families returned to an earlier, more sustainable civilization based on tribes and small family units that became the current Native American Tribes of the Southwest. I wonder if the politicians in the State Capital (Phoenix, AZ), the current pinnacle of Southwestern US Civilization, are aware of the lessons to be learned from studying the ancient civilizations in their backyard? My guess is that they are convinced that civilizations will never collapse again because our overpopulation is supported by advanced technology.

Rhapsody in Blue -- Jodie DeSalvo

A high point for us this year was on Friday, July 11, 2014 when we heard Jodie DeSalvo play Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue at the Birch Creek Performance Center in Egg Harbor, WI. In addition to wearing a rhapsodic "Blue" evening dress for the occasion, Ms. DeSalvo attack the piece with an athletic and emotional performance not to be forgotten (we were sitting stage-left, behind Ms. DeSalvo in the wings--an unusual and interesting vantage point for the performance).

What made me recall the performance was the Diane Rehm show this morning on Public Radio  which featured an interview with jazz musician Herbie Hancock. He has a new biography out titled Possibilities. In the biography, Hancock recounts having been asked to play Rhapsody in Blue with the L. A. Philharmonic. Since the Rhapsody is a classical piece with a jazz foundation, Hancock was a natural choice (paired with the young classical pianist Lang Lang, you can see their performance on YouTube here). Hancock's response to being asked was "Are you joking...I haven't played classical music since I was 20!"

There are lots of other great details about Herbie Hancock's life in the biography and I've included Chapter One below. The excerpt echoed a quote from Miles Davis (1926-1991) which sums up what it means to play and listen to Jazz: "If you hit a wrong note, it's the next note you play that determines if it's good or bad."

To all my readers, have a great New Year's celebration tonight and may your 2015 have as many highlights as my 2014 did!

Possibilities by Herbie Hancock