Binary Oasis

Louis Uchitelle’s 2006 book “The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences” is a fairly easy read, primary because he focuses on the story aspects of layoffs. Depending on the reader, that could prove to be frustrating since he doesn’t really discuss the alternatives to layoffs until the last chapter. His ultimate theme seems to be that the balance of negotiating power between workers and companies is resting too firmly with companies.

What are some of the costs of layoffs?

• Psychological stress and depression of both the laid-off workers and the workers that kept their jobs during a company’s layoff (this is perhaps the consequence that he focuses on in the book)
• Cost of lawsuits to companies (i.e. wrongful dismissal suits)
• Rising absenteeism among remaining discontented workers
• Lower productivity of workers due to lower commitment and motivation (”Why should I work so hard if my company has little commitment to me?”)

What are some of the author’s proposed alternatives or solutions to layoffs?

• Federal legislation to eliminate competition between municipalities to entice companies to locate within a particular city or state; in effect, this would be like enforced collective bargaining between local governments
• Stronger employee coalitions and unions
• Better data collection, including changes to the Bureau of Labor Statistics survey methods (with updated and more nuanced questions and with an annual survey as opposed to a biennial survey) and legislated public reporting of layoffs (and the related statistics of retirements, buoffs, temp work, and contract work) by companies
• Higher tax rates for high-income households to finance the expanded government programs related to the layoff reduction and management efforts
• Elimination of stock options and other short-term incentives to discourage layoffs as short-term profit or stock price boosters (he doesn’t clarify this point, but I feel compelled to note that layoffs, when they are done, should have a company’s long-term health in mind)
• Minimum severance packages as mandated by Congress
• Federally subsidized wages (”wage insurance”) for those taking jobs at lower pay after losing their jobs
• Elimination of “employment at will” clauses in legislation and employment agreements (I’m not positive that the author would agree with my summary of his view on “employment at will,” but I think that’s what he was saying)

Some of his “solutions” he recognizes as treating the symptoms only. For instance, his proposed reporting requirements on layoffs would serve to embarrass companies that are overly aggressive and harsh with respect to their layoffs.

He doesn’t say that layoffs are completely preventable. I’m sure he would have lost his credibility had he said so. Instead, he proposes that governments (primarily the federal government) should take a much more active role and that we need to focus on restoring a “communal society” in which we look out for each other.

The author tends to remain objective, though I’m sure that he hopes to pull on some heart strings with the stories that he relates. The book is well footnoted, though the footnotes are not referenced in the main text. You’ve have to proactively flip to the back of the book if you are looking for more background or a citation on a particular piece of text.

All in all, it is a good read with some good background on the history and underlying principles in the debates.

Don’t want to read the book? Check some recent podcasts by the News Hour, including an interview with Louis Uchitelle and an interview with Jeffrey Brown and Tom Friedman, authors of “Take This Job and Ship It” and “The World is Flat,” respectively.

With the release of Richard Dawkins new book “The God Delusion,” there is a lot of new discussion concerning the intersection of science and religion. Here are some recent developments.

Science Friday did a segment titled “Religion and Science” back in August 2006. In it, Ira Flatow interviewed two relatively prominent scientists. Francis Collins led the public effort to decode the human genome and is the author of the book “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.” Owen Gingerich is a Professor Emeritus in Astronomy and History of Science at Harvard University and is the author of the book “God’s Universe.” Both scientists are “believers.” Here are some highlights of the podcast:

* Francis Collins: “You can’t reason yourself all the way to faith; you can get there to the sense of finding that faith is more plausible than atheim–and I would argue that atheism is the least rational of all choices because it assumes that you know enough to exclude the possibility of God–but ultimately one has to make a decision about whether to believe or not.”

* Francis Collins: “I fear Intelligent Design is a ‘God of the gaps’ theory which puts God in a box and makes, in fact, ultimately over the course of time, a theory that is likely to collapse before too many years go by and in the process does no damage to science, but actually may do damage to faith.”

* Owen Gingerich draws the distinction between “efficient” and “final” causes. He gives the example of the different ways to respond to the question “Why is the water in the teapot boiling?” Science can answer with an explanation about molecules becoming excited and accounting for the relationship of temperature, air pressure, etc. On the other hand, the person boiling the tea might instead explain the “final” cause with the answer “Because I want some tea.”

* Should Intelligent Design be included in science classes that discuss the origin of life? Owen Gingerich says “You can’t replace the teaching of evolution in biology classes with intelligent design, even though at some level, both may be true.”

* Francis Collins notes that “40% of working scientists believe in a personal God to whom one may pray in expectation of an answer.” That was a really surprising statistic to me, so I did a bit of research into that. Apparently it is based on a survey in the journal Nature in 1997 (restricted access).

More recently, Science Friday interviewed Richard Dawkins. Some highlights:

* Richard Dawkins doesn’t believe that Mother Teresa was a good person. I don’t have any real context as to his perspective, but I imagine that most or all of his objections are covered in the Mother Teresa entry on Wikipedia.

* Dawkins: “If there was [sic] [a God], it would be a tremendously important fact about life and the universe.”

* He discusses the generally accepted idea that we cannot explicitly prove the existence of God. He criticizes believers with the analogy of people who believe a small teapot is revolving around the sun, but it is too small for us to see with our current scientific methods. He says, “You cannot disprove the teapot, but that doesn’t mean that you should regard the likelihood of the teapot existing as equal to the likelihood that it doesn’t exist.”

* Joe Palca (the host of this particular segment) notes that a number of “miraculous things” happen in biology, including potassium ions that flow through a cell membrane wall when the sodium ions are excluded even though the sodium ions are smaller. Another example: an entire human being is created from a fertilized egg without so many mistakes that deformed humans are consistently produced. Dawkins rejects designating these things as “miraculous,” though he does have a very interesting response: “I have made the case that [the event in the primeval soup that led to the first self-replicating molecule] could have been a very, very, very improbable event, possibly the sort of event so improbable that it occurs on only, say, one in a billion planets, and there are so many billions of planets in the universe that it has to have happened on some of them, and here we are sitting on one of them, so it had to be ours.”

The debate rages on.

It almost always bugs me when people use the word “countless” since they are usually using it to mean “a lot.”  In most cases, someone should just substitute “hundreds” or “thousands” or whatever is the best approximation of what they are trying to quantify.  Surely if we can place an upper limit on something, then it really isn’t countless.

Even worse, journalists use the word “countless” very liberally.  Just search Google News.  Argh.

I recently made it through The Teaching Company’s The Theory of Evolution: A History of Controversy.  This was a fascinating book.  Perhaps the most impressive thing about it was that it did an effective job of actually sticking to the history.  It remained objective, and I believe that both “sides” of the debate would have a difficult time finding instances of injected bias.

Here are some of the more interesting tidbits that I captured:

* “Theorizing evolution did not begin with Darwin, but he made it mainstream.”

* “Darwin’s breakthrough came in 1838 while reading Thomas Malthus’s well-known 1798 essay on population.  Malthus was a gloomy Anglican cleric who maintained that because the human population far outstripped the food supply, only the fittest can or should survive.  His social thinking was popular among rising Whig capitalists of Darwin’s class.”

* Ultimately both Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace developed their theories after reading Malthus’s essay.  It’s very interesting then that “social darwinism” in a sense came before “darwinism”.  At least we can say that the idea of social darwinism was stimulated by Thomas Malthus’s essay.  In general, the lectures lead to some fascinating branches that are rarely discussed.  We tend to think that the idea of “evolution” proceeded from the mind of Darwin without any regard to his scientific, social, historical, and philosophical environment, but that’s certainly a fallacy.

* “By 1900, natural selection had been so discredited that few scientists accepted it as the mechanism of evolution.  By all accounts, however, they all accepted the so-called ‘fact’ that species evolve.”  To understand that statement, we have to understand the other theories of the mechanism of evolution, including Lamarckism (traits gained during a species lifetime can be passed on to future generations) and neo-Darwinism (its main contribution is the application of genetics, including dominant and recessive traits).

* It’s pretty amazing that eugenics had such a foothold in the US (even deep into the 20th century), including some “negative eugenics”; also, the IQ test, while not created as a eugenics tool, was first brought to American as a eugenics tool.

* One of the most difficult issues that biological evolutionists have wrestled with is the problem of altruism.  How could this have been an evolved trait?  There are certainly some proposals, though there is lack of consensus within the scientific community.

* 50% (of Americans?) “believe God created humans in their present form within the past 10,000 years”; “40% believe the human body evolved over time with God guiding the process; and 10% opt for purely naturalistic evolution.”  For scientists, the book noted that the situation is very different, though it didn’t give the statistics or any references.

Finally, I see an interesting conundrum: perhaps it is the best scientist that will never allow for a “magical” answer (i.e. one that cannot be explained purely materialistically), though even most scientists would agree that science is not the only basis for truth.  This “best” scientist will keep looking for a materialistic answer, even when faced with difficult problems such as the stimulus (i.e. what kicked it off) for the Big Bang.