Author: jlolds

Native Angeleno, professor of Neuroscience and Public Policy at George Mason University

Social networks and power (we are all flexians now)….

Terrific long piece on my Mason colleague, Janine Wedel in Pacific Standard, here. Krasnow Institute money quote:

Maciej Latek, a tall, Polish-born computational social scientist whose day job is creating risk models for contentious environments like international borders, stands at one end of the table in a pressed oxford shirt and tapered blue jeans. He projects a diagram, or what anthropologists call a network map, of dots and lines onto the wall. The map depicts all transfers exceeding $50 million that occurred between 2009 and 2012 from pension funds to hedge funds, showing the origins, destinations, and size of the transactions. 

Maciej is of course one of our own here at the Krasnow Institute’s Center for Social Complexity.

The collapse of the public sector under Obama…

From Derek Thompson at The Atlantic, here. There are two charts and they tell pretty much the whole story: this administration has presided over a very large collapse in public sector jobs. Much of that of course is the result of how the Great Recession played out in the states and localities, but it’s also reflecting a macro-change towards smaller government supported by a distinctly libertarian streak that seems to be growing here in America.

How that will play out long-term here in the Washington DC metropolitan area should be interesting…

Recovery? What recovery?

Tyler nails it in today’s NYT’s column. Young people are taking it on the chin. Here’s the relevant blogpost and chart from Marginal Revolution.

For those of us involved in higher education, these data are really disturbing. Tyler talks about some young folks “breaking out of the trap” through entrepreneurship (i.e. startups). Unfortunately, on a population basis, that doesn’t build a middle class. Harvard Business School’s Shikhar Gosh points out that 3 out 4 startups that take on venture capital fail (and those are the lucky ones that actually get funded). And with student debt at astronomical levels, new graduates can’t exactly max out their credit cards to get a business going.

From today’s Guardian: Looks like a sagittal section of a mouse brain?

Stem cell scientists at Edinburgh and the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna grew this organoid, or tiny ‘brain’, which measures just 4mm across. Photograph: Madeline A Lancaster/PA

The Guardian story is here. The original paper was just published in Nature and…like the NYT… it’s not available right now, odd target for a denial of service attack, but there you go.

Non-discretionary personal spending…

Apparently we’re just like the federal government, our personal budgets are being squeezed by what amounts to non-discretionary outlays: health care and education. Patrick Appel in Andrew Sullivan’s Dish, here.

My own analogy with the non-discretionary side of the federal budget stems from two facts: health care is central to both and the mandatory expenditure nature squeezes cuts onto what’s left. In the case of the feds that includes R&D (like NIH and NSF). In the case of Mom and Pop, probably they are doing less retail shopping…and in fact that fits the latest data.

Public Intellectuals….

Carnegie Mellon’s Jeffrey Williams has an excellent piece on public intellectuals and Stefan Collini in particular, here. The context is the current higher education debate in the UK (also taking place here in the States).

The money quote:

It was a historically unique situation, he noted: “I’m lucky in my generation. If I had been born 15 or 20 years earlier, from my social background I certainly wouldn’t have had most of the opportunities that I have had.” And, given the cuts enacted in the Thatcher era, “if I’d been born 15 or 20 years later, certainly in Britain, I think the road would have been much rockier in the lack of jobs and declining working conditions in universities.”

Seniors (not the 22 year old kind) and academic tenure…

From George Mason’s provost, Peter Stearns, here. His points on academic freedom are well taken. I also salute his concerns about productivity and salary distortions.

Now let’s look at the data:

De facto, tenure may be going the way of the dinosaurs. Specifically, institutions are using non-tenured faculty to handle increasing amounts of the teaching load. In fact, I would argue that as tenure faculty retire, they are being replaced by adjuncts or contract faculty members.

Where does this all lead?

The data show here suggest a low asymptote, where tenure is part of the compensation package for superstars while the bulk of the teaching will be increasingly handled by others.