Via The Onion, Alternative Spring Break Devolves Into Real Spring Break:

“We owe a debt to these students for providing my family with a home, but I was expecting glass in the windows and a ground floor,” said Mavis Riggs, whose original house was completely destroyed. “Converting the new septic tank into a hot tub was inventive, but we really won’t get a lot of use out of it. Or the barbecue pit, which I think was meant to form part of the foundation.”

The article gets bonus points for the shout out to my Alma Mater in the second paragraph. An AnonymousSister reported back from her Alternative Spring Break in an AnonymousLatinAmericanCountry with a similar experience.

Why pay professional house builders to build houses when we can spend twice as much to do it ourselves, party while we’re at it, and feel good along the way?

Categories: Funny, Philanthropy
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My favorite JewBlog, Not Chosen, Just Posin, written by a gentile at a Jewish magazine, has gone of the air.  It was the only blog I read regularly in what passes itself off as the Jewish blogosphere, which probably says something.  For some good laughs, read through the archives while they’re still there.

Categories: Jewishness
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I sit on the couch and stare at that rustic path and those big old maple trees. By now I know the name of this particular wallpaper or background or whatever it is: Autumn. Moving to the desk and gazing more closely, I see a vague, dark, summoning something at the end of the path. A cabin? A covered bridge? A barn? I want to be there, for real, on that path, under those maples, moving slowly toward that dark, summoning something.

He’s talking about the windows background with the trees and bright orange leaves, and he actually tracked down where it’s from.

Categories: Funny, Photos
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I underestimated how much having a “real job” would cut into my blogging time, and thus, posts have been slow. More than that, though, I underestimated how addicted I would get to Yahoo Answers. It’s more than just the desire to earn more points. It lets me fulfill my secret desire to be an advice columnist, and I think my 10% best answer ratio indicates I’d be pretty good at it. Most of my best answers are in the realm of dating/relationship issues and financial advice, but my friends could have told you that.

What’s my incentive to contribute? Is it the otherwise meaningless points? The thrill of answering questions? The social reward of participating and helping people? Or is it just a way for me to channel my inner Dear Abby? Lets just say that if you like my answers, and you want to give me a column at a major newspaper or alternative weekly, you know how to find me.

Categories: Dating, Incentive Centered Design, Information Markets, Social Software, Technology
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From Nick Corcodilos:

Offering to solve problems without being asked would pay off for me again and again throughout my life. It also earned me friends in higher places. But when I first tried it, I was lowlier than anyone reading this blog. The trouble with normal is it only gets worse.

Categories: Business and Economics, Careers
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The not-so-weekly Equation of the Week returns with a formula for determining whether or not a person will engage in prostitution:

[(δU/δL) / (δU/δC) | Sp=0] ≤ w - [(δU/δr) / (δU/δC) | S = 0]

Where U=utility, L=leisure, C=goods and services consumed, S=quantity of prostitution sold, w=wage for prostitutes, and r=your reputation.

In other words:

An individual will start to sell prostitution if the price for selling the first amount of prostitution, minus the costs of a worsened reputation for doing so, exceeds the shadow price of leisure evaluated at zero prostitution sold.

Reputation, or more broadly social costs, may be one thing that individuals consider when selecting a profession, but to say it’s the only thing?

The full paper is here, via this Improbable Research Column.

Categories: Business and Economics, Careers, Dating, Equation of the Week, Funny, Incentive Centered Design, Matching Mechanisms
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After an experience at a restaurant, the Evil HR Lady says:

We don’t train our managers correctly. We don’t teach them what they, as the manager, should fix and what their employees should fix. Managers are scared to let employees have any power–for fear they’ll make the wrong decision. If your employees are poor decision makers, you should not have hired them in the first place. Hire good employees and let them do their work.

Customers want the person they’re dealing with to be able to fix their problems, not have to pawn it off on someone else. If your employees need to get management approval to improve customer experience, they’re wasting everyone’s time. Better to hire talented people, focus them on the customer, and trust them to make the right choices. Let managers manage, and trust the employees who handle your most precious asset, your customers, to make the right decisions, because if you don’t, your customers will leave for a company that does.

Categories: Business and Economics, Careers, Customer Engagement, Employee Engagement, Governance, Managing, Marketing
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A discussion of Millenials in the Christian Science Monitor:

But Twenge and others are wildly mistaken about the Millennial generation – those born since the early 1980s. No matter what teens say on surveys, there is scant evidence that they act more selfishly. In fact, the trends in youth behavior support the opposite conclusion – that Millennials have much greater regard for one another, their parents, and the community than Generation Xers or baby boomers had at the same phase of life.

Some notes:

• This is an important lesson about surveys and revealed preferences. Survey questions only work if you have reason to believe people will respond honestly (why questions about race don’t work) and the questions you’re asking actually measure what you want (which is much more frequent). The crime data shows how people are actually behaving, not how they answer silly questions about their personality.
• Why are there always sky-is-falling predictions about the next generation, especially when in general, things keep getting better? Cut the kids some slack, as much as you try to say that you were different, you were just like them when you were young.
• More specifically, whats with the boomers and trying to put all the negative attributes of their generation (selfishness, antipathy towards parents, sex and drug use) onto the newest generation, despite the fact that all the evidence says Millenials are totally unlike the boomers (similar to how boomers weren’t like their parents).

Categories: America, Community, Polling
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Also, if faculty governance actually means something, then faculty unionization makes no sense. You’re either management or labor; not both. If you really run the place, then you’re management. If you claim to run the place and you unionize to negotiate against it, I’d call that ’self-dealing.’ It’s a flagrant ethical violation, and of dubious legality. You can’t have it both ways.

From this blog that I just discovered, featuring the musings of an Anonymous Community College Dean

Categories: Careers, Education, Governance, Law, The Academy
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Wow, talk about feeling good about helping rather than actually helping. Some data on Bono’s Red Campaign:

• Total spent on making Bono more famous = $100million.
• Total spent on drugs for Africans = $18million.

How self serving is it that celebrities would rather spend millions of dollars promoting how much they than make the large scale donations or encourage the structural reforms that can make an impact?

Categories: Marketing, Philanthropy
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When I interviewed 1,000 people for What Should I Do With My Life?, it was plainly apparent that so many of our smartest college students from our best schools are actually very risk averse. Coming out of college, they took jobs where the “track to success” was spelled out and clear. Wall Street, law school, corporate America - there was no imagination or creativity in these choices. And nothing daring about it. Ten years later, many of them were unhappy and unfulfilled. But quitting - even though they had lots of money in the bank - was absolutely terrifying to them. The loss of status scared them; the idea of jumping off a track and freestyling their career was frightening. They didn’t want to look not smart. They were afraid of taking a job that didn’t broadcast to the world how smart they must be to have that job.

Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman’s blog has some great posts about self esteem (start with that one, then look more recent) and the insane science and practice around promoting it.

I’m also shocked with the risk aversion among my peers, but it gets worse than Po sees. So many people graduate college and skip the job search because they fear getting rejected, or don’t apply to graduate school because they think they need more experience. The worst thing that happens - they say no and you try again in a few years. What I worry about the most, though, is the tendency for people not to pursue a career because they might not like it, so instead they languish in jobs they already know they don’t like. The best way to find out if you like a job? Try it! It’s OK to quit and try something else, but they are so afraid of success, or of leaving, they don’t even give real employment a chance.

Categories: Careers, Education, Graduate School, Matching Mechanisms
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From the dumbest column I’ve ever read in Slate (which I normally read before anything else):

Suppose the national defense of the United States were relegated to the private sector. Instead of the publicly funded Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, the country would be defended by private militias funded mainly by insurance companies. In the event of foreign attack on U.S. soil, the militias would defend those citizens in the affected areas who’d paid defense insurance premiums through their places of work (or, if self-employed, as individuals).

The best-armed troops would defend the wealthiest and most hawkish segments of the population, who would have paid the highest premiums.

The premise of the article is that we should nationalize health care because it’s like the military, and look how good a nationalized military is. Wow, lets go through all the ways this is flawed.

1. National Defense is a public good, health care is not. You may think that health care is a right, or something everyone is entitled to, and those are philosophical positions, but health care doesn’t fit the definition of a public good in the economic sense. First of all, it isn’t non-rival, which means that if I consume some health care, you can’t consume that same amount. If I take a pill, or use a X-Ray machine, you can’t take that same pill or use the machine at the same time. In contrast, an army that protects the United States offers the same amount of protection, whether or not you add more people to it. Second, health care is excludable. I can stop you from taking a pill or getting that X-Ray if you don’t pay for it. But with national defense, if you don’t pay your taxes, the army still protects you. There are fundamental characteristics between them that make them different.
2. In general, everyone in the country shares the same risk if the country is attacked. Granted, people in high-risk areas may suffer a greater risk due to terrorism, and that is actually reflected most of the time in higher local tax rates to support police counter-terrorism, or insurance premiums for potential targets. In general, though, if there is a large scale attack against the United States or its allies, the risk to all of us is the same. When it comes to health care, we all have different amounts of risk, and only minimal information about that risk. Well planned insurance lets us pool this risk to reduce the cost to individuals and overcome some of this information problem. Nationalized health care has nothing to do with risk pooling, and it effectively involves the health and low-risk subsidizing the unhealthy and high-risk.
3. National defense is a pretty bad example. There’s definitely consensus on the left, and I think among some people on the right that we spend way too much on national defense. It costs the Defense Department orders of magnitude more to procure technology that is available cheaply in the private sector. Defense technology research involves massive outlays relative to the returns. The military is a sprawling and inefficient bureaucracy with a sprawling and inefficient supplier network supporting it. Do we really want to take our relatively dynamic biomedical research sector and make it part of a government supplier complex? Is this really a way to reduce costs?

I later found that Arnold Kling took a briefer, though probably more economically informed shot at the column as well.

Categories: America, Business and Economics, Distribution, Governance, Incentive Centered Design, Information Economics, Politics
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From the Donor Power Blog:

You can’t go wrong if you think of your donors as your owners. They’ve invested in you, and demand some kind of return for their investment. Not money, but a better world. It’s something you need to deliver — and clearly let them know you’ve delivered.

I’d go one further - think of your donors as shareholders. They have lots of choices about where they can invest their donations, and they’ve chosen to invest it with you. That means you have to treat them like you would shareholders by delivering results, measuring them, and communicating information about your organization. At the same time, your service recipients are your customers, and you need to treat them as such by providing value for them, because that’s what your shareholders demand of you.

If you’re going to be responsive to your donors as shareholders, you need to run like a business, by determining what your objectives are, measuring performance and outcomes, and then communicating that information to your donors so they’re motivated to invest in you again.

Update: Duh! If I had read further in the post, I would have noticed he already advocated Donors as Shareholders. Donor Power Blog, you are so empowering!

Categories: Business and Economics, Marketing, Metrics, Philanthropy, Strategy
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The Winter of Dave is officially over.  While I’ve got no stories from my time in Florida - I just laid by the pool - there are a few more Winter of Dave posts coming up, some cool articles, the last Reading Recap, and maybe a final rundown.  Now that I’m back to work full time, normal posting will resume.  Or slow down.  We’ll see.

Categories: Ephemera, Winter of Dave
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Just another gem from Sonia’s blog:

I think that’s the thing I like about America most. Here, the sense of community is a lot more cohesive but no one gets a choice in the matter. The men have to be the providers so they have to study engineering or medicine, etc. The women are expected to be housewives so they can’t really work if they want to. And the kids have to study SO HARD, and that too, the subjects their parents want, not necessarily what they want. In the U.S. maybe the individualism is too pronounced at times, but I really appreciate the opportunity to decide who I am and how I function in the world.

There are others there, and I don’t even think she realizes most of them.

Categories: America, Community
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