Science, Technology & Health: January 2011 Archives
Why are men being hit harder than women by the ongoing unemployment crisis?
1. Consider the different intelligence distributions of men and women.
Men and women have very similar mean intelligence, but men tend to have greater variance. One consequence of this difference is that there are more very smart and very dumb men, whereas more women are clustered near the mean.
2. As technology continues to improve, more and more workers will be displaced by automated systems. Manufacturing won't be the only sector affected: how many tax preparation jobs have been eliminated by TurboTax? Sales jobs by Amazon?
Using intelligence as a proxy for a person's general capability to contribute to the economy, we would expect that as technology improves the people who will be affected first will be those who are working jobs that require the least capability. Let's call the red line the displacement line: it represents the minimum amount of capability a person must have in order to be able to do a job that cannot be done by an automated system.
Historically the red line has been far to the left: for most of human history even a very unintelligent person has been able to contribute meaningfully to the economy. That is no longer true.
3. Since the red displacement line has not yet reached the mean level of human intelligence, we would expect that more men than women will have been displaced from their jobs by advancing technology. This group of men is represented by the gray cloud I've drawn on the graphic below. The excess of men in this group can be seen as the vertical space between the blue line and the pink line.
As the red displacement line marches to the right with the advance of technology, more and more people will be displaced from the workforce and will be functionally unable to contribute meaningfully to the economy.
Predictions:
4. Men are disproportionally affected now, but when automated systems can displace people with average intelligence or greater it will be women who will face disproportionate pressure.
5. Even if technology advances at a linear rate, the number of people displaced from the workforce will increase faster than linearly until automated systems surpass the capabilities of the average human.
6. If Singularity proponents are right, we might be extremely fortunate to live in the small window of history that has both advanced technology and such poor automated systems that most humans can make a contribution to the world. For most of the past the red line has been far to the left, and for most of the future the red line will be far to the right.
So forget about the loss of freedom and the increased taxes and spending spearheaded by Obamacare: how many people will Obamacare supposedly help?
It’s been like giving a party to which no one comes. The Medicare program chief actuary predicted last spring that 375,000 would sign up for the new risk pool insurance in 2010. But by the end of November, only 8,000 had done so. As Amy Goldstein reports in The Washington Post, this includes 75 in Virginia, 80 in New Hampshire, 97 in Maryland and a whopping 700 in North Carolina.While a lot of people are surprised by these numbers, I am not. Here is why. Don’t you think it is a bit odd for the White House to send out an appeal to victims so they can identify themselves? That’s not normally how the political system works.
The more usual scenario is: victims unite and form interest groups; they lobby Congress, write letters, testify, etc; and eventually the pressure become so great that Congress legislates.
When have you ever heard of that entire process in reverse? When has Congress ever before decided it wants to do something and then conducted a nationwide search to find people who will benefit?
The reasons for the reversal is that this whole problem has been completely hyped and exaggerated from the get go. In this country we have made it increasingly easy for people to get health insurance after they get sick.
But Obamacare must turn out to be really cheap since so few people are using it, right? Right?
Even though they have less than 1/40th of the expected enrollment, the plans are already running out of the money.
Oh.
(HT: Megan McArdle.)
"Light bulbs" are out; "heat balls" are in.
You gotta hand it to German businessman Siegfried Rotthaeuser, who came up with a brilliant run around the European Union ban on conventional incandescent light bulbs — he rebranded them as "Heat Balls" and is importing them for sale as a "small heating device."Rotthaeuser's website is in German, but Google does a passable job of translation. First, he's clear that the Heat Ball isn't for lighting, stating (in German, the following is translated) "A HEAT BALL ® is not a lamp, but it fits in the same version!"
Further down: "The use of Heat Balls avoids the lack of heat. The intended use of heat Balls is the heating."
Someone will make a fortune selling "heat balls" in California, and by 2012 they'll take over America!
(HT: Rand Simberg and Paul Hsieh.)
