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The Skills Mismatch Unemployment Myth

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Great article in the Atlantic by Barbara Kiviac entitled “The Big Jobs Myth: American Workers Aren’t Ready for American Jobs.”

Americans seem to have a deep hunger to regard one’s economic situation as a morality play. If you’re rich, it’s because of your drive and skill. If you’re poor, it’s because you’re dumb and lazy. This allows us to complacently let the rich stay rich and absolves us of any duty to the poor.

Kiviac goes into more detail, but this dynamic is part of what makes the jobs/skills myth so popular. She also notes that, strangely, the problem with the labor market is rarely descried as a pay mismatch. Want the skills? Pay for them. Individuals don’t acquire such skills for free.

Except the ones they do. She notes that a couple of the skills noted as lacking in employer surveys aren’t really the kinds that come from more education — particularly the types of education marketed as getting you a job:

A 2011 employer survey from the Manufacturing Institute found that the top skill deficiency among manufacturing workers was “inadequate problem-solving skills.” No. 3 on the list was “inadequate basic employability skills (attendance timeliness, work ethic, etc.).

In any case, she says, the skills mismatch trope serves many ideological masters:

As sociologist Michael Handel points out in his book Worker Skills and Job Requirements, in the skills mismatch debate, it is often not clear who is missing what skill. The term is used to talk about technical manufacturing know-how, doctoral-grade engineering talent, high-school level knowledge of reading and math, interpersonal smoothness, facility with personal computers, college credentials, problem-solving ability, and more. Depending on the conversation, the problem lies with high-school graduates, high-school drop-outs, college graduates without the right majors, college graduates without the right experience, new entrants to the labor force, older workers, or younger workers. Since the problem is hazily defined, people with vastly different agendas are able to get in on the conversation–and the solution.

The skills mismatch trope also offers a little something for everyone politically. Those on the right get to talk about taking personal responsibility for upgrading one’s skills, while those on the left get to emphasize how we must do a better job with education, that great pathway to an egalitarian society. Between the two sit the nation’s employers, who get an argument for sharing labor-training costs with government agencies, non-profits, and institutions of higher education; it would hardly be fair to expect them to bear the full burden if the American workforce itself is defective. Finally, a fast-growing industry of for-profit colleges get reassurance that their student pipeline will stay full.

7th Circuit Establishment Case: Doe v. Elmbrook School District

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The Seventh Circuit, sitting en banc decided the case of Doe v. Elmbrook School District,(pdf) concluding, by a vote of 7-3, that the school’s practice of holding graduation ceremonies in an evangelical church violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

The Court’s decision was quick to point out that the determination was a factually sensitive one, not a blanket decision that school functions could never be conducted on religious property. But, in this case, for reasons having to do with the fact that minors were involved, that graduation is such an important ceremony, and that there were elements of proselytization, the school went too far and violated the First Amendment.

Apparently, the school had been conducting graduation ceremonies in the church facility since 2000 after the student body officers of the time complained that the school gym was too hot and crowded and recommended the church. The school superintendent and the school board president were both members of that church, though there is no particular evidence that this necessarily played a role in the decision to conduct activities there.

The lobby of the Church had (as one might expect) a lot of religious symbols and literature. Perhaps more unusual was that church members were passing out religious literature in the lobby and, at least on one occasion, church members handed out graduation materials as well. In the sanctuary where the ceremony took place, a 15 foot cross dominates the wall behind the dais. The church declined a school request to cover up the cross (or other permanent fixtures) but removed or covered other religious imagery. Bibles and hymnals remain in the pews where the audience sits.

In this case, high school students and their younger siblings were exposed to graduation ceremonies that put a spiritual capstone on an otherwise-secular education. Literally and figuratively towering over the graduation proceedings in the church’s sanctuary space was a 15- to 20-foot tall Latin cross, the preeminent symbol of Christianity. That symbol “carries deeply significant meaning for those who adhere to the Christian faith.” . . . Moreover, it is a symbol that invites veneration by adherents.
. . .
Upon passing through the exterior doors of the church, attendees proceeded into a lobby that contained numerous religious materials. Those materials included pamphlets for “middle school” and “high school” ministries. The middle school ministry pamphlet stated, “We are calling students to live and love like Jesus.” As previously noted, a poster on the wall asked, “Hey Jr. Highers! Who Are Your Heroes?” and depicts pop culture icons alongside Jesus Christ.
. . .
Put simply, the environment was pervasively Christian, obviously aimed at nurturing Christian beliefs and gaining new adherents among those who set foot inside the church.

Regardless of the purpose of school administrators16 in choosing the location, the sheer religiosity of the space created a likelihood that high school students and their younger siblings would perceive a link between church and state. That is, the activity conveyed a message of endorsement. High school graduations enjoy an iconic place in American life.

It was not permissible, the court held, to force students of different or no faith to choose between endure a pervasive religious environment or not attending a school function as momentous as graduation.

Judge Hamilton has a thoughtful concurrence in which he made an observation I appreciated:

The danger, of course, is that this “reasonable, objective observer,” as in most fields of law, tends to sound a lot like the judge authoring the opinion.

Judge Hamilton responds to Judge Posner’s dissent wherein Judge Posner says that Plaintiffs are being (I’m paraphrasing) hypersensitive ninnies by asking, “would Christian majorities feel comfortable or excluded if their public school graduation ceremonies were held in synagogues, mosques, or Baha’i temples, for example?” Of course they’d complain if the tables were turned, says Judge Hamilton.

This point is not a criticism of those who would prefer not to have their ceremonies in such locations. The point is that the plaintiffs in this case, who are not adherents of the majority Christian faith in this school district, were not unreasonable, obtuse, or hypersensitive in perceiving a government endorsement of Christianity when rites of passage with the symbolic importance of public high school graduations were held in a Christian sanctuary beneath the powerful symbol of the empty cross.

Filed Under: Law

The Moon Is Not Made of Cheese, Some Say

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I hope Tom LoBianco didn’t write this headline. I really like Tom, and the article is good, but I really hate the headline: “Legislators Use Patriotic Language To Help Bills Become Law, Some Say.” Some say?!?! Of course they do.

Using measures labeled “right to work” and “freedom to work” as examples of similarly named but very different pieces of legislation using the same rhetorical trick, the article goes to Kristen Sheeler:

“The intended response is a visceral or emotional response. If you can get at someone’s emotions, then they’re going to be more likely to react,” said Kristina Sheeler, chairwoman of the Department of Communication Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

By using words like “right” and “freedom,” which call to American cultural values, politicians try to win over as many people as possible while alienating as few as possible, she said.

“The words have power because they’re strategically ambiguous,” she said. “They’re so full of meaning, but the very specific meaning is not there.”

At LSA, we used to joke about this when drafting bills. “This law may be referred to as the Puppies and Kittens are Cute Bill of 2012.” Nevermind that it’s a pro-vivisection measure.

And, I think, the “Some Say” in that headline is part of why the trick works. Journalists generally do not feel free to call b.s. on a law’s title when it’s disingenuous. They have to resort to a bland, “he said/she said” faux objectivity. “Some say puppies won’t really be cute while being cut open.”

Aurora

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The big news of the past few days while I’ve been on the road is the mass murderer in Aurora Colorado who shot up a Batman screening, killing something like 12 and injuring something like 50. I’ve only paid general attention to the details.

One place I heard some discussion was the beginning segment of the Dave Ramsey Show. His main thrust was that it wasn’t “society’s” fault and he didn’t know and wasn’t terribly interested in whether it was the parent’s fault. Crazy has always been crazy, things aren’t worse now than they were in the past, and the only thing that has changed is the intensity of media coverage.

I tend to agree with that, but I also think he was being conspicuously silent about an important variable. Crazy may have always been crazy, but crazy didn’t always have access to assault rifles. The capacity for violence has increased.

One argument I’ve heard, which I think is inane, is to the effect that more armed people in the theater would have made things safer. Cross fire in a smoky, confused theater where it’s difficult or impossible to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys would have done nothing to make things safer. Probably just would’ve gotten more people killed.

The other argument I think is suspect is that gun laws wouldn’t do a thing to make us safer. I disagree. I don’t think it’s coincidence that, compared to other countries, the U.S. has some of the laxest gun laws and some of the biggest problems with gun violence. Would passing gun laws help? Now, there I share the suspicion of the gun enthusiasts — it may well be that the genie is already out of the bottle; that guns are so pervasive culturally and physically that laws might not be of a lot of practical use. I don’t know that, but I at least appreciate skepticism on that score.

And, perhaps more importantly, whatever the most effective policy choices might be, I also think our hands might be tied by the Second Amendment in ways not applicable to countries with less gun violence.

Finally, I disagree with the notion that “now is not the time to talk about gun violence.” That it’s ghoulish political opportunism to discuss these things after people are dead. When a mine collapses and kills people, it’s an appropriate time to take a look at mine safety concerns. This is similar. Waiting until people are no longer focused on the problem doesn’t make a lot of sense.

D.C. Days 2 and 3

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Yesterday, we went to Rosa Mexicana for an outstanding lunch before heading to the International Spy Museum, Ford’s Theater, and the National Portrait Gallery/Art Museum. At the art museum they had an exhibit featuring video games over the past 30 years. Needless to say, that was a favorite for Cole, Harper, and me. In particular, it was nice to see games like Pirates! and Bard’s Tale at the Smithsonian!

Today, we took the Metro to the National Zoo. It was hot. Brings home why early American history has a lot of references to federal officials trying to get out of town during the summer. Amy was delighted to see the Panda exhibit. I liked the Amazonia exhibit quite a bit.

Mr. Masson Goes to Washington

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We’re in the midst of a family trip to Washington D.C. Yesterday, we hit some of the monuments – Jefferson, FDR, MLK, WWII, Korea, and Lincoln. I really enjoyed the FDR memorial – which I had not seen before. But, the Lincoln Memorial is still the high point for my D.C. visits. Never fails to choke me up. I was especially happy to see how incredibly stoked my son, Cole, was to see the memorial. His given first name is “Lincoln” which we shortened to “Cole” as a walking around nickname. So, he has a bit of a proprietary interest in The Railsplitter. Glad he finally got a chance to see the place.

An Insurer Is Not the Governing Body of a Political Subdivision

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The Indiana Court of Appeals issued a decision concerning the Indiana Tort Claims Act in the case of Schoettmer v. Wright (pdf). The plaintiff had been in a collision with a driver employed by the South Central Community Action Program. SCCAP is considered a political subdivision by virtue of IC 34-13-3-22.

A claim was apparently submitted to SCCAP’s insurer, but negotiations did not work out and Schoettmer filed suit. However, the suit was filed without any notice of tort claim having been filed as is required as a prerequisite to suit against a political subdivision under the Indiana Tort Claims Act. The plaintiff protested that the insurer had notice. However, IC 34-13-3-8 requires that notice be served on the governing body of the political subdivision. Putting an insurer on notice is not the same as putting the governing body on notice.

A more interesting question is what difference it might make if the injured party actually and reasonably does not know that the tortfeasor is a political subdivision. The majority hedges a bit, but essentially comes down on the side that it doesn’t make a difference. They talk a bit about how plaintiff’s counsel didn’t diligently learn that SCCAP was a political subdivision and file a notice within a “reasonable time”. But, I think it was probably too late by the time he got involved, and the majority isn’t clear on where this “reasonable time” extension might come from. The dissenting judge would be more inclined to give the injured party a pass from the application of ITCA if ignorance of the political subdivision status was actual and reasonable.

They Call Me: “Juror Number Four”

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So, a few weeks ago, I get a jury summons. First, I am a little apprehensive – I knew we were going on vacation around that time, but I wasn’t quite sure which week it was. Once I verified that there was no conflict there, I wasn’t too worried. First, a lot of trials get called off before you go. Second, there is a fair chance of not even getting to the jury box for consideration by the parties. Third, the folk wisdom about such things is that nobody wants a lawyer on their panel.

From the title, I presume you can tell that I cleared the gauntlet of 1 through 3. I called the court the night before and the recorded message told me to report the next morning. Since I work and park downtown, I had one less hassle than most jurors — parking can be a drag. Especially this week – I heard the county had three jury trials. When you report, the bailiff takes attendance and then not too long after shows a little prepared film on jury duty. (I had brought a book, prepared for a lot of downtime, but there just wasn’t much in my case.)

The dynamic in the jury room is initially a little awkward. Lots of strangers not knowing whether to talk to each other or what to say. There is sporadic small talk broken by stretches of awkward silences. Amusingly, the judge of the court we were in had actually turned up on the jury list for that day. He had reviewed the file and had to excuse himself. I wonder if the dynamic would have been different with him in there.

I think we were mostly glad for the informational video they showed us. It was informative and fairly well done, but just a little hokey for my tastes. There is a scene where your host is standing with his suit coat slung over his shoulder. What? Couldn’t find a place to put your coat for the scene?

When it was time to go into the court room, they had us line up. I was the 7th person in line. Turned out it was a criminal trial (meaning 12 jurors instead of 6), so I was in the jury box right away. Voir dire is, again, a social situation nobody really has any background for. The judge goes through some minimum requirements to serve. When that didn’t disqualify anyone, they turned it over to the lawyers.

Ostensibly, the process is to discover and eliminate bias among jurors. And, while it’s used for that, lawyers are also trying to take advantage by framing their case, making you receptive to their view of things, and, if they’re lucky, discover favorable bias. Maybe I’m not that good of a lawyer, but in my opinion, jury selection strategies are mostly voodoo. It might make you feel good thinking you are working to hedge your bets, but I don’t think there is a reliable way of using that process to get far enough into a juror’s head to know how they are going to react to the evidence that comes out in a trial.

Certainly I had a lot of my fellow jurors all wrong. Ones I thought were likely to be sympathetic probably could have been hanging judges in the wild-west, and those I thought would be eager to convict were looking high and low for reasonable doubt.

They asked me some questions. My chronic inability to see just one side of an issue must have allayed some fears. (“On the one hand . . . but on the other hand . . .”) We found out that this was a marijuana case. I allowed as how, left to my own devices, I’d probably support decriminalizing or legalizing marijuana, but on the other hand, that’s not how I saw my role in this process. The General Assembly had ruled on the legality of the action, my job was just going to be to determine whether the State had proved the elements of the crime defined by the General Assembly. In this case – possession of marijuana, dealing marijuana, and possession of amphetamine.

The potential jurors were excused while the court and lawyers discussed something and went through strikes. (Jurors can be stricken for cause and each side gets three peremptory strikes — you can get rid of someone just because you don’t like their haircut.) I was surprised to find that I had moved up from juror 7 to juror 4 and I was on the panel. They got 9 seated during the first round. Two more rounds got us to 12 jurors and an alternate. And, might I say, bless the alternate juror! This guy had opinions and very much wanted to get into the mix, but his role in the process is to watch everything and shut up. Only if one of the original 12 is dismissed can he get involved in the discussions. When the matter was concluded, he was fairly bursting with observations.

The case itself was pretty simple. I got lucky inasmuch as I always wanted to participate on a jury, but, while it is a core civic duty, it is always a big old monkey wrench in your day-to-day life. During one of the breaks on the first day, I got a text message from my wife that she’d been in a car crash. Nothing major – some guy rear ended our car while she was stopped at a stop sign. Rear vehicle damage, but everybody was ok. Being in the middle of a jury trial, I couldn’t do much more than verify that everyone was alright. I also got behind on some work – which isn’t as awful for me because I work in the system; pretty much everyone I come into contact with fully understands about having to be a juror. (I had to cancel being a pro tem judge in one of the other courts.) But down the hall, I heard that there was a murder trial, expected to go a couple of weeks. Ours lasted two days. Getting my jury experience in a two day dose was just about right for me.

Like I said, the case was relatively simple. Some officers had been called to a local apartment complex with a lot of section 8 housing. Place has a lot of problems and, consequently, the police spend a lot of time keeping an eye on the place. I don’t feel like using real names, so let’s just say that Abe had a history of domestic violence with Bea. A restraining order prohibiting Abe from being there was in place. An officer who had seen Abe get into a particular Impala the night of the domestic dispute saw that vehicle at the apartment on a different night. One officer went around to the back, the other officer knocked on the door. Carl answered. The officer around back had a view of the apartment through the back glass door. Carl had been laying on an air mattress in the living room when he got up and walked to the door. When the door opened, there was a strong smell of marijuana coming out. The trespass investigation had just turned into a drug investigation.

Carl said no one else was home. Then he changed his mind a bit and said that Bea was home. Then there was a bit of unpleasantness where Carl was either slow or reluctant to put his beer bottle down and sit on the ground. But, without any force on anyone’s part, Carl was sat down and detained with handcuffs. The officer in the back came around to the front. (These are long apartment buildings and it takes a bit to get from one side to the other.) Bea came out – it was her apartment, and the officers got her permission to search. It was just chock full of marijuana. There were tupperware containers next to the couch with something like 100+ grams, a couple of scales, and a lot of baggies of the sort used to distribute.

It didn’t end up mattering a lot to our consideration, but one of the more disturbing images was a picture of a bunch of weed out on the counter, kind of sitting askew on top of a kid’s doll. Bea had 3 kids living there. Downstairs the odor was strong. Upstairs, it was fairly weak. In a downstairs closet, there was a pair of pants with Carl’s ID. There was another pair of pants in the closet with amphetamine.

Carl’s story about why he was there didn’t really hold up. He said it was all Abe’s. Abe (who initially he had said wasn’t there) must have slipped out at the exact right time when the police weren’t watching the back door and couldn’t see him moving around the apartment.

Anyway, given evidence including the location of the marijuana at the time of the arrest, the fact that the odor was pretty strong downstairs, and the fact that no one else was downstairs and Carl had said Abe wasn’t there and that Carl’s proffered reason for being there didn’t hold up, I felt like the State got beyond reasonable doubt on the possession charge. And, while it was pretty clear someone was dealing and while I thought it was awfully likely Carl was dealing, I didn’t think the State got beyond reasonable doubt. It was at least reasonable to think maybe Carl was just using his dealer-buddy’s stuff without being a dealer himself. As for the amphetamines, I didn’t think the State had enough evidence that they were Carl’s pants. Being in a closet underneath pants with Carl’s ID made it a distinct possibility, but that was about it.

The lawyers were pretty good about keeping on track, but they digressed into Carl’s background and personal life. Didn’t make a bit of difference to me as to whether he was guilty of the charges in question, and I got the feeling that these digressions were pretty irrelevant to my fellow jurors as well.

The lawyers were a pretty good contrast in styles – you had the young deputy prosecutor using the court’s snazzy technology versus the grizzled defense lawyer using his trusty legal pads. Both had their advantages. (I was mentally taking notes about how to improve my own presentations.)

When the case was given to the jury, I knew there was a pretty good chance I was going to wind up being foreman. It’s kind of natural to stick the lawyer with the job. I sort of begged off, suggesting that I’d do it if no one else wanted the job, but saying I’d gladly defer to anyone else who had interest. No one did, so I was foreman.

First off, we had to learn each other’s names; so we sat ourselves in our juror number order and gave our names. Next, I wrote down the three charges and identified the elements in each that were in dispute. (For example, one element was that the item be in question be marijuana – but no one was suggesting that the substance was anything else.) Really what we had to determine was whether Carl possessed the marijuana and/or the amphetamines and, if he possessed the marijuana, whether he did so with intent to distribute. We went around the circle and had everyone offer their thoughts on the three counts.

There was mostly agreement on what had happened, where the gaps were in the evidence, and who was credible and who wasn’t. But, even so, we discovered that the concept of reasonable doubt is awfully slippery. The jury instructions articulate it for you, but since absolute certainty isn’t required and isn’t usually possible about anything, it’s tough to know when that glimmer of a potential doubt grows big enough to cross over to “reasonable.” Still, the jurors I worked with were diligent; no one got mad or frustrated or disagreeable.

Occasionally, we’d talk a relevant point to death – not having persuaded one another as to whether a doubt was reasonable or unreasonable, and we’d sort of stray off to interesting aspects of the case that weren’t, strictly speaking, relevant to the elements in question. (“I wonder why this or that . . . ; Oh well, guess it doesn’t matter.”) When we’d sort of looked away from a point of disagreement for awhile and then returned, we’d found that a juror or two had come around on this point or that. And so it went until we were unanimous on guilty for possession of marijuana and not guilty on the other charges.

We reported our verdict to the court, and then we were dismissed. The judge did a nice job of debriefing us a bit in his chambers after we’d been dismissed; making a point to emphasize how important the role of the juror is and to make sure the jurors knew their participation was appreciated.

I’ve written this all in one take, feeling it was maybe better to get it all out before my memory faded rather than spending much effort making it pretty or fluid. I might go back later and try to clean it up.

50 Years of Satellite Communications

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Adam Mann, writing for Wired Magazine, has an article on the 50th anniversary of Telstar-1.

Telstar, a collaboration between U.S., French, and British broadcasting agencies, was the world’s first active communication satellite, enabling TV programs to be broadcast across the Atlantic. The 3-foot-long satellite was also the first to send the television signals, telephone calls, and fax images through space.

Before Telstar was launched, microwave towers could flash TV shows and other communication information from point to point through the air, supplementing the landlines that already crisscrossed the globe. But once these signals reached the ocean, they reached their limit.

(Maybe most astounding is that we used to collaborate with the French; not mock them for their adequate health care while we fattened ourselves up on Freedom Fries.)

Anyway, satellites? How cool is that? Humanity has been on the planet for millions of years (never mind what the Biblical literalists might tell you) and only for the last 50 have we been able to put communication devices in space. And we have the privilege of living in such a time.

With that, I give you Louis CK. Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy:

IHSAA: The Lobotomy Worked; Hoosier Hysteria is Cured!

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Once Indiana had the best high school basketball tournament in the world. Now, we no longer do. We gave it away so that more people could get trophies and more athletic directors could feel good about themselves. The people who gave it away and feel good about themselves studied themselves and concluded that they are A-OK.

Current students who were, at oldest, three years old when the single-class basketball format was abandoned don’t know anything about it. They and the administrators of their schools voted heavily in favor of the current class-based system. On the other side, a self-selecting group of people who showed up at hearings on the issue voted overwhelmingly in favor of a return to the single class system. I don’t know whether there has been reliable polling of the state as a whole. Measuring attendance, it is abundantly clear that spectators like the current system much less than the old one.

All I know is that Indiana once had something special; something transcendent and state-defining. Now we don’t. Maybe it’s better for the boys playing basketball to have their end-of-year tournament normalized with the other sports and the other states rather than doing something a little different and exciting. It’s not especially good for a state that used to have a special passion for the sport. We’ve been lobotomized and our Hoosier Hysteria is cured.

Kyle Stokes has more.