Isaac Laquedem

A Measure 37 epigram catches my eye

Mitchell Hartman, editor of the magazine Oregon Business, offered a pithy comment on Measure 37 in his December 2004 column, which is akin to my views on why the measure passed.  Mr. Hartman wrote, "[The passage of Measure 37] clearly expresses a frustration with land use rules and the government agents who enforce them.  The easiest way to turn a landowner against planning is for some government bureaucrat to say 'no' repeatedly to a legitimate and seemingly harmless improvement -- stopping someone from building a shed next to their streamside home in Lake Oswego, or banning a Yamhill County farm family from building a house for their kids to live in."

PERS needs G. Harrold Carswell

A letter to the editor in the February 24 Oregonian, from a Portlander named Bill Chalmers, makes a point that had perplexed me when I read a February 19 story about PERS.  The February 19 story, by James Mayer, said that PERS rates are going up for three reasons: 

1.  Investment losses for 2000, 2001, and 2002 are being spread out over time.

2.  The public payroll is smaller than expected because many people retired in 2003 and some local governments have frozen wages.

3.  PERS enjoyed better-than-expected stock market gains in 2003, which increased the future liabilities of PERS by increasing the benefits that it will owe its participants.

Why does this put me in mind of G. Harrold Carswell?  When President Nixon nominated Judge Carswell for a seat on the Supreme Court almost 35 years ago, critics said that the judge was a mediocre candidate.  Senator Roman Hruska stood up for the mediocre judge, famously saying, "Even if he is mediocre there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers.  They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance?  We can't have all Brandeises, Cardozos, and Frankfurters, and stuff like that there." 

My friends assure me that PERS goes to a lot of trouble when it chooses outside investment managers, putting them through a rigorous selection process to get those most likely to produce superior returns.  But if those managers, by producing superior returns, are simply pushing the system further into the red, then PERS shouldn't be hiring them.  (Wouldn't it be something if PERS promised to fire any manager who achieved better than an 8% return?)  If Mr. Mayer's article is correct, then the public agencies that pay the PERS premiums should be pressing the agency to fire those money managers that outperform the averages.

Hercules has a lesson for Superintendent Phillips

At a public event last night, the master of ceremonies recognized Vicki Phillips, the Portland Public Schools superintendent, who was sitting at a table in the audience.  The crowd gave her a vigorous round of applause.  Today the newspapers report that she's hiring friends from Pennsylvania to help her with PPS's communications with schools, teachers, parents, and the public.  I detect a subtext with a very small frisson of criticism, implying that she's a practitioner of cronyism. 

My sense is that the public will give her a free pass, for a while, on hiring cronies to do this work.  Her job at PPS is akin to that of Hercules in cleaning the Augean stables, and her eventual solution (if she finds one) is not to grab a shovel and move the detritus a scoop at a time, but (like Hercules) to divert a river through the PPS stable to clean it out wholesale.  The public's going to excuse her hiring her friends to divert the river, as long as the stable's clean when they finish.

How to raise taxes

An invitation resulted in my attending a short talk yesterday by Randall Edwards, our state treasurer.  His basic thesis was that the voters of the state, by adopting Measures 5 and 50 (property tax limits and state school finance) and Measure 11 (mandatory minimum sentences) required the state to spend more money without providing the funds.  He did not make the comparison, but the idea came to mind that the state is being squeezed by unfunded mandates both from the federal government and from the voters.

The inevitable question came up in his talk and in the discussion at dinner: should Oregon adopt a sales tax?  Mr. Edwards did not express a strong opinion, but he called our current state funding system "a one-legged stool" that relies on the volatile income tax often enough to imply that he would not oppose a sales tax if the voters chose to adopt one.  (The metaphor is taken from the public finance concept that a state's funding should be like a three-legged stool, supported by income, property, and sales taxes.  The sales tax question has often been called the third rail of Oregon politics, the one that kills you if you touch it, and it's not likely to become the third leg of the funding stool anytime soon.)

Curiously, no one suggested imposing a statewide property tax to support public education, an idea which if dangerous to incumbent legislators is at least not instantly fatal to their chances of re-election.  Every county already has a mechanism in place to collect property taxes, so unlike a sales tax a statewide property tax requires almost no new staffing to administer.  And real property is easier to tax than are incomes (which move with their owners from state to state) or sales (which likewise can move between states, though not as readily as incomes).  Let's look again to property to fund the schools, not to a sales tax.

Jack joins the club

Neither the Mausoleum Club nor the Drones Club, but another once-exclusive club that's becoming more plebean every year has admitted Jack Bog to membership.  And he's starting by complaining about the dues, just as Mrs. Laquedem and I did.  Welcome!

A professor wishes for less ruly students

Paul Nadler, a professor emeritus of business at Rutgers University, writes a column for The Secured Lender, a magazine published by the Commercial Finance Association and directed at the asset-based lending industry.  Most of his columns deal with questions of interest to asset-based lenders, such as acquiring and keeping collateral and detecting deadbeat debtors early, but once or twice a year he tells war stories.  He started this year with "Tales from the Classroom," including this perception of how college students have changed.  He writes:

College classrooms are not the fun they used to be.  Students have become too docile.  It used to be that I would say, "My name is Paul Nadler," and the students would chant,"Prove it."  Now when I say my name is Paul Nadler, they respond, "Do I have to know this for the final?"

Lawrence Summers should run this problem by Marilyn vos Savant

Mrs. Laquedem asked me, with a dangerous glint in her eye, what I thought of the January 15 remarks of Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard College, to the NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce.

More bravely than sagely, I told her what I thought.  After the resulting discussion [omitted here purely for the sake of brevity] I read his actual remarks, available here.  A few things stand out.  First, Mr. Summers said that he was speaking to provoke discussion and not to report on what Harvard is doing to address gender equality in the sciences.  Second is that he described his specific topic as "women's representation in tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions," not as a general survey of women and mathematics.

Top universities don't have a lot of women holding tenured positions in science and engineering.  The question is why.  Mr. Summers described three competing theories: (1) the "high-powered job hypothesis," that men are more willing than women to work at 80-hour-per-week jobs, (2) innate biological differences, the theory that got him into trouble, and (3) discrimination and socialization. 

If you read his remarks (and I hope that you will), you may notice something interesting about how he described theory no. 2.  He said that possibly men and women have different standard deviations (not means) in their aptitude for science, and that this results in more men than women at the extremes. 

For example, suppose that science ability can be measured on a IQ-like scale, with 100 as the mean, and that a science quotient (SQ) of (say) 130 is required to achieve tenure at Harvard.  If men and women have a mean SQ of 100 (that is, the same average ability), but men have a standard deviation of 15 and women have a standard deviation of 10 and both are normally distributed, then about 2.5% of the men will have an SQ above 130, but only 0.25% of the women will have an SQ above 130, even though the average abilities of men and women are identical.  So even though the two populations have identical average abilities, at the high end men will outnumber women by about 10 to 1.  (If this is true, then men will outnumber women at the low end by 10 to 1 also.)

The controversy that he stirred up (which he said was his goal in giving the speech) brought to mind another story of women and mathematics, this one involving Marilyn vos Savant, who claims to have the highest IQ of any living person and who writes a column in Parade magazine called "Ask Marilyn."  In her September 9, 1990 column, she included a brain-teaser that's now called the "Monty Hall problem," after the original host of Let's Make a Deal.  You must choose among three doors.  Behind one door is a car; behind the other two are goats.  You choose one door.  Before the door is opened, Mr. Hall opens a second door to reveal a goat, and then asks if you want to swap the door you picked for the third door.  The question is whether you should switch.  Ms. vos Savant said that you should switch: you have a 1/3 chance of winning the car if you stick with your original choice, and a 2/3 chance of winning the car if you switch.

Professional mathematicians (all men) were outraged. . .

Another valentine for Vicki Phillips

It's no secret that the Portland Public School system has been losing enrollment.  The district enrolled 56,000 students in 1998 and has only 48,000 this school year, a drop of 15% in six years.  This is consistent with other demographic data in Portland; though the city's population is much higher than it was 50 years ago, this is the result of annexation more than of new housing.  Earl Blumenauer once told me (and I'm sure many others) the odd fact that Portland had 373,000 residents in 1950 and about the same (372,676 according to the census) in 1960.  The 1990 population, he said, was 420,000, but between 1960 and 1990 the city had annexed swaths of mid-Multnomah County and smaller portions of the west side, which is why the population increased so much; in 1990 the area within the 1950 city limits had only 320,000 people, a loss of more than 50,000 people.

Vicki Phillips, the superintendent (I would hate to misspell that word in an essay about public education) of PPS, announced that she wants to respond to the declining enrollment by closing six schools.    Parents at those schools are understandably upset and at some of the six schools (most notably Smith Elementary, in southwest Portland) are organizing to fight to keep their neighborhood schools open.

They're fighting a losing battle.  Portland once had more than 80,000 students in public schools.  (See this post from BlueOregon by Leslie Carlson and Wendy Radmacher-Willis.)  The recent enrollment peak was 56,000 students in 1996.  (A school district report, in PDF format, is here.)  A district with 48,000 students doesn't need as many schools as one with 70,000 students.  Basic math suggests that PPS should close 40% of the schools it had at its maximum, because it's lost 40% of its students.  (I recognize that it's closed several elementary and high schools already.)  And the school buildings are old: the high school buildings are 70 years old on average, and the grade schools 61 years old.  The last building boom was in the 1950s and early 1960s when the district built Bridlemile Elementary and Jackson High School.

This situation is uncannily parallel to the struggles to close unneeded military bases.  Each domestic military base was in someone's congressional district.  The military was reluctant to offend Congress by proposing to close specific bases, and eventually Congress, recognizing that some bases should be closed, ordered the military to prepare a single omnibus report on which Congress would then vote up or down, without amendment.  Any committee of parents that includes representatives from all parts of the district will likewise be unable to agree unanimously that a particular school should be closed; just like the military bases, each school is in someone's district.  Congratulations to Superintendent Phillips for making the decision.

Plus ca change: Panhandlers, Inc. and the London Market

Willamette Week chose the title "Panhandlers, Inc." for its cover story this week, a piece by Dave Fitzpatrick that described the author's experience when he grew stubble, made a cardboard sign, and stood on a streetcorner.  Some people gave him money.  Others -- other people with their own cardboard signs -- told him that others had already claimed his corner, and he had better leave promptly.

Mr. Fitzpatrick talked to other streetcorner people -- he uses the terms "signers" and "flaggers" interchangeably to describe them -- and at one corner found a man named Ted Sheppard, who said that his particular corner was controlled by a cartel of signers.  "We organized this like a business," Mr. Sheppard said, with three people taking turns occupying the corner on Northeast 43rd Avenue.

This sent me to the Laquedem Library in search of Henry Mayhew's work from 1849-1951, London Labour and the London Poor.  Alas, I have only an abridged edition (the complete work is four volumes of about 500 pages each), but I found the passage I had in mind, a portion of volume two that describes the crossing-sweepers of London: people who stood with brooms at street-crossings to sweep the crossing in front of pedestrians in the hopes of receiving a coin or two.  Mr. Mayhew wrote, "The irregular sweepers mostly consist of boys and girls who have formed themselves into a kind of company, and come to an agreement to work together on the same crossings."  He describes how the sweepers who have claimed a particular crossing fend off newcomers, in basically the same manner as the signers who have claimed Northeast 43rd Avenue.

Fred Meyer

Today being not only the birthday of Middle Sister (happy birthday to you!) but also the 162nd anniversary of the birth of Montgomery Ward, founder of the retail chain of the same name, brought to mind Portland's own long retail history.  Unlike many of the other cities in Oregon, Portland didn't start life as a logging camp, a mining town, or a fishing village, but as the commercial center supporting and living off of those activities.  One of the three or four most creative merchants our town has known was the late Fred G. Meyer (1886-1978).  Stories about him are legion.  One that sticks with me is his venture into market research, long before market research had picked up its current veneer of science and mathematics. 

Mr. Meyer opened a store downtown in the 1920s.  It did well.  It did so well that he wanted to open a second store.  To decide where to locate his second store, he ran a promotion at his downtown store.  Any shopper who received an overtime parking ticket while shopping at Mr. Meyer's store could bring the ticket and the receipt to the store, and the store would pay the ticket.  For each ticket he paid, he learned the customer's name and address and how much the customer spent on that trip.  (Because in the 1920s many households didn't have cars, this also meant that he learned the addresses of his more prosperous customers.)

After doing this for a few months, he mapped the customers' addresses and found a cluster of shoppers in the Hollywood district, near 42nd and Northeast Sandy.  And that's where he opened store no. 2.

Later in his long life he started to buy real estate in the path of growth.  He bought the land for the Beaverton Town Center Fred Meyer long before Highway 217 was built.  I think he owned it as early as the middle 1960s.  One of his acquaintances saw him standing next to the vacant field back then, with his car and driver waiting, while he looked over the site.  The acquaintance stopped, said hello, and asked Mr. Meyer when he was going to build a store there.  "Not until interest rates get back down to four percent," replied Mr. Meyer.