Quick takes and random stuff, February 29, 2024
Sinking east coast, gender pay gap, my sideism, genetics and race, transmission lines and more
Graph of the week
This one comes from Slowly but surely: Exposure of communities and infrastructure to subsidence on the US east coast (1/2/2024). It turns out that much of the east coast is sinking, and this graph provides a summary.
Both sides are irrational
This chart is from the Gallup article Political, Economic Indicators Not Promising for Biden. (2/16/2024) If your party has the White House, then you are better off come re-election time; otherwise, you aren’t. The pattern is the same for both parties. It is hard to find compromise when both sides are so dug in. Call this my sideism. Note that Gallup messed up the text along the x-axis.
Apprenticeships grants
I’ve questioned the value of higher education, and so I thought I should note this from the BLS (2/21/2024). I’m guessing it won’t get much press.
The U.S. Department of Labor today announced the availability of nearly $200 million in grants to continue to support public-private partnerships that expand, diversify and strengthen Registered Apprenticeship. The funding opportunity includes $95 million of competitive grants through the second round of the Apprenticeship Building America Grant Program and $100 million in the second round of State Apprenticeship Expansion Formula Grants.
The gender wage gap
The Census Bureau has a nicely done summary of the gender wage gap, but what I saw as important isn’t reflected in the title, Is the Gender Wage Gap the Same at Different Education Levels? (2/22/2024) In this study, women made about 71% of what men made, or a gap of 29%. The common belief here is that it is all, or at least mostly, due to sexism. Here is one of their graphs that breaks the data into with and without children as well as education.
It's important to note how much of the gap hours worked and occupation account for. In fact, for those with a postsecondary certificate and no children, these two variables explain the entire gap. In all cases, hours worked is a factor, which is essentially men putting in more time. Now, if men are consistently putting in more time at work, wouldn’t this translate into higher pay over the years due to the experience gained with extra work?
In an earlier graph, they had a fourth factor, which was field of study, and with that included both groups, bachelor’s degree and postsecondary certificate, only 1/3 of the pay gap was unexplained. In other words, sexism isn’t a main factor and is at most 1/3 of the explanation. Yet, here is how the article ends:
The results paint a more complex portrait of the gender pay gap, found to exist at every level. College graduates and policymakers can use this more detailed information to better understand and dismantle contemporary barriers to gender equality.
Based on their own graphs, the results really aren’t that complicated, as they have identified the main factors that contribute to the gap. Worse, they can’t bring themselves to say that most of the gap is due to interests and choices, and very little needs to be dismantled. For example, a third of the gap for those with a degree and children is due to hours worked. Does that need to be dismantled somehow?
Relatedly, I’ll note that one of my policy changes would be to credit a person’s social security account as if they were being paid a living wage while they are home taking care of kids.
Transmission lines
In order to move all of our energy to electricity, there seems to be good evidence that we need to invest a whole lot of money into transmission lines. We aren’t doing enough right now, so this is a limitation for wind and solar. Robert Bryce is worth reading, and he goes into detail on this issue.
Here is an excerpt from this post:
The math here is so simple even a Ph.D. could do it. Jenkins claims the U.S. must build 75,000 miles of transmission in 10 years, or 7,500 miles per year. But there’s no precedent — none — for adding that much capacity. Indeed, constructing that much new transmission would require a four-fold increase in the average number of line miles built annually since 2008. Furthermore, that pace of new capacity would have to be sustained for a decade.
The hard truth about the alt-energy/net-zero/energy transition hype is that almost no one — including Doerr, DOE, Jenkins, reporters at big media outlets, pundits, and others — has bothered to do the math. They did not calculate how much transmission we are building every year or how long it may take to achieve significant expansions of the power grid. In other words, it’s easy to talk about adding transmission capacity. But building high-power lines is hard. Really hard. And the cost of building them is soaring.
Always remember that reality doesn’t care much about one’s beliefs. Electrifying everything isn’t happening any time soon or possibly ever, no matter how much the media hypes electric cars or the last wind installment.
Race isn’t just a social construct
This image from Genomic data in the All of Us Research Program (2/19/2024) shows that there are differences in DNA by race and ethnicity. The math and data work is also really interesting.
I first saw this on Kevin Drum’s post Sorry, but population groups are real (2/27/2024), where he had this to say:
Still, the differences exist, and we don't yet know what all of them are. And while we may or may not like everything we eventually discover, arguing over the minutiae of different mapping algorithms will get us nowhere. We can't allow ourselves to be hamstrung by a few creepy race extremist who are going to believe what they believe regardless. Just do the science and let the chips fall where they may.
He is responding to a Nature article ‘All of Us’ genetics chart stirs unease over controversial depiction of race (2/23/2024) that I ran into separately after reading his post, even though he did link to it. Anyway, here is the lead paragraph
Some geneticists have expressed their unease about a figure in a high-profile Nature paper that was published earlier this week 1 , noting that it could be misinterpreted as reinforcing racist beliefs. The figure has reignited a long-standing debate among geneticists about how best to discuss and depict race, ethnicity and genomic ancestry, given how these terms can be misinterpreted and weaponized by extremists .
This is frustrating on a number of levels. First, this “we can’t study race and genetics viewpoint” does have a chilling effect on scientists. If you are an untenured faculty member, you are likely to avoid studying anything that might be considered controversial. Second, are we really going to let the minority of people in society who hold true racist beliefs dictate science? Does anyone really think anything will change those viewpoints one way or another? Of course, some researchers called for a retraction of the paper, and I have to wonder if any of those quoted even read the report. For instance, here is a ramification of the research noted in the paper:
The potential medical implications of these known and new variants with respect to variant pathogenicity by ancestry are highlighted in a companion paper17. In particular, we find that the European ancestry subset has the highest rate of pathogenic variation (2.1%), which was twice the rate of pathogenic variation in individuals of East Asian ancestry17 .
This seems like it is worth knowing. For example, should we not know that African Americans have a higher rate of sickle cell anemia? I’m with Drum: “Just do the science and let the chips fall where they may.” At the same time, stop with the virtue signaling and discouraging scientists by intimidating them away from “controversial” subjects.
The spinning CD
Think of this as traditional Irish, but more upbeat with the added drums.
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Disagreeing and using comments
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