Ladder of Inference

I mentioned that I was making two Facebook posts tonight on analyzing political compaign messages.  I realized that for my second post, on the Ladder of Inference, there were several decent articles to share.  Therefore, instead of making several new FB posts or nesting articles, I am listing the three articles in one WordPress note.

http://www.strategyworks.co.za/2004/11/05/the-ladder-of-inference/

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMC_91.htm

http://leadershipdiamond.blogspot.com/2009/04/ladder-of-inference.html

When reading, or listening, to political messages, are biases leading one to filtering out reality and truth and instead substituting falsehoods that match preconceived notions?

Useful

It is amazing how many workbooks I have had to crack lately. This sub is incredibly useful.

http://www.mcgimpsey.com/excel/removepwords.html

Jobs and Freeloading Scum

After reading this article, I started thinking about why there is so much hate for taxes, beyond the obvious. Of course people like more money. Duh!!

But besides that, tea party advocates reek of the impression that taxes on the rich are a robin-hood style of wealth distribution to lazy morons that sit and collect welfare (e.g. this loser). As my libertarian professor proclaimed to an individual in class that rode the light-rail, “Freeloading Scum!!!”

However, if bills need to be paid, then who is going to pay them?

In 2004, the wealthiest 25% of US households owned 87% ($43.6 trillion) of the country’s wealth, while the bottom quartile held no net wealth at all.^[3] The middle 50% of the country held 13% or $6.5 trillion of the total household net wealth.^{[3] (}Wealth Inequality and Class, Wealth in the United States, Wikipedia)

Now, before all my conservative readers get their unmentionables in a twist, I am not advocating returning taxes on the wealthy to the absurd levels of pre-1980. In fact, I haven’t advocated anything at all yet. I just know you reactionary folks out there…

But, conservatives are correct in the view that tax dollars are not used effectively. This is not their argument about central planners. However, unemployment insurance (UI) is good example of waste. This program boils down to paying people to tokenly submit applications every week. Sure, those applications are likely sincere at the outset. But time wears on, negative responses weigh on the unemployed, and depression sets in. I get it.

So, if people are unemployed and people, according the Philly mayor in the first article, want a job, then put them to work.

How?

Being one that has been out of work for a year, the job search process is frantic for the first several months, but then becomes depressing. My experience was apply, apply, apply, and interview. For every interview I asked for my outlook in landing the job. The answer often was, we like you, you interviewed well, but we have interviewed others with more experience.

That line, you know the one often heard out of school, “we need someone with [more] experience” (emphasis added for my story) is so cliche.

After 6 months or so, even finding a job at a restaurant, or other meaningless job was a dead-end. These meaningless job employers knew I would still be looking for a way to a job in my career path and possibly considered me a training-money sink. Sure, I understand, because I would leave at my first opportunity. I even started asking firms to work for free for experience, but firms would not touch it because of some kind of liability. That is when I started preparing for my current schooling.

However, for a year I found no work whatsoever. It was depressing. I finally did land a job, somewhat in my career path, almost exactly a year to the day I had been laid off.

Yet, many have had it much worse than I and better than I. It was not that I didn’t want to work,  wasn’t willing to get out of a desired career path in order to work, or wasn’t open to working for free for experience, the opportunities were just not there.

What I would have liked would have been a system were an employer was more open to hiring me, at least for contract work, but kept the employer from being exposed to sunk costs in training, at least to some extent. It would have given me something to do to feel engaged. It would have provided me with some experience.

How?

Well, instead of having bums, like Stanley, collecting welfare for doing nothing, put people to work. While there are probably several kinks to work out, here is my framework*. Government pays unemployment insurance (UI) for a limited time for the person to seek gainful employment in their career path. After some limited time, the government opens a bid for the person to any registered employer where the registration process weeds out slave-trading types of firms and their ilk.

In this bidding process, firms would have access to the person’s resume on file with the unemployment department and bid to hire the person. The bid would be payable to the government and offset, but not increase, the amount of UI paid to the person. So a person with $200 a week in UI that was offered a bid of $40 would still only receive $200, but $40 of that money was coming from the firm.

The person would have an option to decline, but would have to provide a reason that would have to show that employment with the firm was financially a loss or another very good, good reason. If the employment required moving to another city, but the person’s spouse had a job in their current town would be an example of financial loss. If the previous firm had fired or laid off the person (could be too much ill will between parties with undue influence on the person). There are too many possible poor reasons to list.

Hopefully, the process matches up employer with a valued employee because a firm has to put some money into it, has to compete with other firms for the employee, and decreased exposure to sunk cost on a transient employee (i.e. the government may be footing a big part of the bill).

For the newly employed, it gets them engaged, provides experience, and builds employment networks.

For the government, it allows costs to be reduced by getting private enterprise engaged in employing employable people. For the proclaimers of “Freeloading Scum”, it doesn’t do much. They will never change their opinion. But is would certainly be a better use of taxes to get people to work than current programs. This helps businesses become partners with the government in employing people rather than throwing money down, what seems to some, a bottomless abyss.

Are there problems with this system? Oh yeah. Here are some questions off the top of my head:

• How long should the government sponsor the arrangement before requiring the employer to step up as a full employer?
• How should firms be prevented from laying off people just to pick them back up later under the UI plan with the government footing the bill of their employment game?
• Related, how could a program such as this work in a union shop?
• What are justifiable reasons for a person being able to decline an offer and still stay on UI?
• What involvement can the employee have in narrowing the industry or careers of the employment opportunities being offered through the bids?
• What happens to the UI if the person loses the job (fired, laid off, quits)?
• How might this apply to those on welfare outside of UI.

As I said before, I believe this is a framework to get people from doing nothing on UI and into jobs. Certainly, details need to be worked out. But if bipartisan mayors can have an honest dialogue on how to address the economy, I am sure there is room for bipartisan engagement in getting people into temporary work leading to long-term jobs.

*Note: I say mine because it came to me today. I do not assume that others have not already thought of it also. I have not done any research into an established plans, so if you came up with it before me, well a feather in your cap.

Excel VBA Progress Bar

A recent work project led me to investigate the use of a progress bar while executing VBA code in Excel. I thought I would share what I came up with. I ended up dropping it as a work interest since the workbooks I am executing at work can take several hours. A progress bar in this instance would just bug me; like watching water boil.

First, in order to use the progress bar shown, the progressbar control must be added to form controls. Right click on the Controls Toolbox in VBA (need to have a userform as the active window). Select add controls, then find Microsoft Progress Bar, and add it. This will add Microsoft Common Controls to your References (Tools -> References).

Then make a form with a progress bar and label.

My form is named frmProgress. The progress bar and label are named pbrPro and lblPro, respectively.

Here is the code in the form:

Private Sub UserForm_Activate()
   lblPro.Caption = ""
   pbrPro.Value = pbrPro.min
End Sub

Public Sub SetRange(myMin As Integer, myMax As Integer)
   pbrPro.min = myMin
   pbrPro.max = myMax
End Sub

Public Sub SetProgress(myValue As Integer, _
   Optional myText As String = "")

   pbrPro.Value = myValue
   lblPro.Caption = myText
   ' Allow CPU time to redraw before allowing 
   ' call execution to continue.
   DoEvents
End Sub

I used the following code in a module in the same workbook:

Sub ControlMyProgressBar()
   Dim myMin As Integer
   Dim myMax As Integer
   Dim myNumOfUpdates As Integer
   Dim tempx As Integer
   myMin = 0
   myMax = 15
   myNumOfUpdates = 8

   ' Allows execution to continue after showing form
   Call frmProgress.Show(vbModeless)

   'Sets range of values on the progress bar.
   Call frmProgress.SetRange(myMin, myMax) 

   For x = myMin To myMax
      'Here is where normal execution code would loop 
      'while updating the progress bar intermitently.

      ' Arbitrary wait
      Call Application.Wait(Now + TimeSerial(0, 0, 1))
      If x Mod (myMax / myNumOfUpdates) = 0 _
         Or x = myMax Then

         tempx = x

         'Update the progress bar and status message
         Call frmProgress.SetProgress(tempx, _
            x & " out of " & myMax & " completed.")
      End If
   Next x
   ' Arbitrary Wait to show completion
   Call Application.Wait(Now + TimeSerial(0, 0, 2))
   Call Unload(frmProgress)
End Sub

Here is an image of the progress bar:

Ties

As mentioned a couple of days ago, I have been reading Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee and been inspired to get onto Facebook and WordPress (well, blogging in general; I just settled on WP). I am reading the book as part of the course requirement for my CIS class in the W. P. Carey MBA program. However, I find many of his points to be intriguing from a personal aspect in addition to his points on addressing issues inside a firm. For me, the important theme is Ties.

No, not this tie.

*

Ties, as in the bond between people. Those that know me know I am very introverted. It takes a lot of energy for me to be around others. I generally also feel very uncomfortable in social settings. Its is not that I don’t care or that I am uninterested, but that is saps the energy out of me.

McAfee discusses research on social ties has indicated a correlation between the size of an animal’s neocortex and the number of social ties it can manage successfully. For humans, this number is around 165 +- 65.

Also, these ties have different strengths and serve different purposes. Those that are in our “inner” circle are our strong ties. Being strong, there is no need for bridges to keep the tie close.

There are also weak ties.  These are aquintances or formerly strong ties. These ties can be difficult to maintain due to many factors that contribute to them not being strong ties. Distance, time, and introversion, as well as many others, are a couple factors that keep these ties from becoming strong. Facebook helps people maintain those weak ties through status updates and broadly distributed messaging.

Next, there are potential ties. These ties span a “structural hole”. There exists some cause that needs a bridge in order to span across. Structural holes can be spanned by individuals within both non-intersecting networks.In addition, potential ties can become strong or weak ties through mutual interest via Web 2.0 applications, such as blogging. Viewed another way, when people search for information on the internet, they will find lots of information, but how valuable is it? But, if people search for other people who have information, then ties are created and the information possessed can be tailored to the searcher’s need.

For me, these simple principles have helped me to see how Web 2.0 applications, such as Facebook and blogging, can help me maintain my strong and weak ties, bridge the structural holes that pop up (due in no small part to my introversion) and build new ties that lead to mutual benefit. That I am a technology buff and enjoy the non-social aspects of these applications is icing on the cake.

*(Wal-Mart reserves all rights to this image in accordance with their Terms of Use)

Rationality

Several weeks ago, my economics professor described his view on rationality in the context of Keynesian vs. Austrian economics. Rationality, he said, meant that individuals use the information they posses to make decisions. Because individuals makes decisions in their self-interest, all decisions are rational. He contrasted that stance with Keynesian view that people do not make rational decisions, and thus, someone would know what is best for someone else.

The discussion on rationality is important when discussing the role in government intervention in our lives through tax, fiscal, and regulatory policy. The championed analogy is the broken window fallacy. For the baker, fixing the window is not the best use of his/her money. Yet, the baker is now forced to spend this money to fix the store window. Therefore, even though his/her friends console the baker that the spent money will do good for the community (the “seen” effect), they do not realize what better purposes the baker could have put that money (the “unseen” effect).

This is applied to government intervention in lives where taxation and regulations are forced upon the governed dictating how money is spent. This is the “seen” effect. Further, the government must be taking the arrogant stance that they, or most likely a small, but powerful lobby, know best how we should spend our money. 

The support for this view of rationality is based on the perceived arrogant view of the opposing view of rationality; that someone could know what is best for someone else. Austrians dismiss the Keynesian view of rationality and take the opposing stance. All decisions are rational ex ante. Viewing the results of the decision and weighing rationality ex post adds information not available at the time the decision was made. Therefore, this additional information is irrelevant to making the decision.

It so happened that this discussion occurred a couple of days after the shooting in Tuscon. The question: Was the shooting rational?

Yes, according to my professor. The shooter had information available to him and made a decision that the best use of his money was to buy a gun with some ammunition and then shoot others. Any evaluation of his decision ex post is just Monday-morning-quarterbacking.

Beyond this definition though is the implication that the information used to make the decision is not necessarily relevant to the choice. Making a choice vs. making a different choice is solely a decision on the best allocation of resources according to the individual making the choice. Since any amount of information may be discarded due to individual biases, the additional information gained ex post is not necessarily used to make the next decision ex ante.

Thus, the view of rationality in Austrian economics is boiled down to biases. The view of rationality in Keynesian economics is boiled down to arrogance. Which one is right?

Do I tell my kid how he should be making certain choices or not? Do I know better than him, or not? Are some people more knowledgable or wise than others? I certainly think that Austrian view is far too passive. Similarly, the Keynesian view is probably too extreme. I expect that on very narrow and clearly defined decisions, a central authority could specify decisions. For example, “Thou shall not murder.”

New to Blog

After resisting blogging for so long, I have come to realize how blogging helps to build bridges with individuals we might not otherwise be able to connect with.

This insight was a result of reading Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee. I have not completed it, but the information thus far flows well. While I do not agree with all points, I agree with the underlying premise the social networking is not just for extracurricular communication that I tend to shy away from.

Let us see how useful it is to me!