Motivating Constructive Behavior: A Matter of Payoff, Markers of Progress, Doability, Consequences, and Less Attractive Alternatives

The program was funded by the city of Chester and had previously been managed by a local non-profit - rather poorly it would seem, given its dismal job placement and dropout rates. My employer - Associates for Research in Behavior - took over the city’s contract with the promise of improving outcomes by applying the principles of motivation to the business of training adult students. The main principles were: …

Housing the Chronically Homeless - Affordably! Part II: Breaking Down The Costs

Bottom line: this is doable. Rental income covers the developer’s costs and profit and the ongoing building management and rental subsidy cost per resident is just $1103 a month. A few years ago, the average cost of supportive housing in San Francisco was $17,353 a year per person. Given Bay Area inflation rates, let’s say it’s $24,000 now, or $2000 a month. The above scheme is a lot cheaper. Now if only local politics would align with my vision.

Housing the Chronically Homeless - Affordably! Part I: Some Concrete Suggestions

Straight off the street, no money, get a totally subsidized 8x10 SRO, with bathrooms down the hall. Those with at least $600 for monthly rent could get a studio. Couples with at least $600 for rent each would qualify for bigger studios or a small one-bedroom apartment. All in the same building, as an incentive for individuals to aspire for something better, something that is within reach, and with help available (e.g. completing benefit paperwork, arranging monthly rent transfers).

Conservation Measures in the Multi-Year 2018 Farm Bill

Here’s what the Audubon Society has to say about Working Lands:

“Working lands represent one of the best hopes for conservation. These parcels of forests, ranches, and farms add up to roughly a billion acres—or about half the land in the entire Lower 48 states. Audubon collaborates with landowners, land managers, government agencies, and private industry across the hemisphere to increase the quality of habitat on privately managed lands to benefit 20 flagship bird species. Audubon also helps landowners and land managers apply bird-friendly practices on their lands and develop market-based solutions to build economic incentives that have the potential to engage many more landowners.”  

Connecting the "Is" of Human Nature to the "Ought" of Politics

“With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. ... Individualism will also be unselfish and unaffected.” Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism …“…conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectibility. Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults, the conservatives know. Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created. To seek for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things. All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerable ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk. By proper attention to prudent reform, we may preserve and improve this tolerable order.” Russell Kirk, Ten Conservative Principles

Behind The Headlines: The Journal Nature Retracts Ocean Warming Study

Original Study published in Nature on November 1, 2018:  “Our result—which relies on high-precision O2 measurements dating back to 1991 —suggests that ocean warming is at the high end of previous estimates…” … Nature issues an editor's note about the errors on November 19, 2018: : We would like to alert readers that the authors have informed us of errors in the paper. An implication of the errors is that the uncertainties in ocean heat content are substantially underestimated.” …Retraction published online in Nature on September 25, 2019….

American Conservatives Could Use Some Fresh Ideas: A Few Suggestions

There is no reason conservatives can’t embrace goals like universal healthcare, affordable housing, elimination of poverty, or increased social mobility. With the above safeguards in place, they may go forth and advance bold policy initiatives without violating their core principles.

Is Moral Indignation a Necessary Emotion?

Of course, some people need to be punished as a way to deter further bad behavior and protect the rest of us. We can still savor the satisfaction of someone getting their “just desserts” without elevating what is essentially a vindictive emotion to a moral principle.

The Bipolar World of the American Left: A Chart

The inspiration for this post was Elizabeth Warren’s website, which lists her various Plans for America. I read through her introductions to each Plan and noticed certain themes that kept repeating:

The Politics of Making People Invisible

Over the next few decades, millions of hotel units disappeared. Why did the residents let the bigwigs get away with it?. Because they were invisible, by design. As explained by Paul Groth, in “Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States”:

“Because officials did not consider hotels to be permanent housing, during the official massive downtown clearances from 1950 to 1970, people living in hotels were not tallied as residents. Hence, when a city demolished an SRO [single room occupancy] building, ‘no one’ had been moved, and no dwelling units were lost in the official counts and newspaper reports. In reality, of course, hundreds of thousands of SRO people and homes were removed. Deliberate ignorance had become a cultural blind spot that made hotel residents invisible both to officials and to the public.”

Coveted Endorsements: a Key to Political Influence. Here's a List.

This post was inspired by a current events group I attend weekly. The group is composed of what’s often called in political science papers as “high-information voters”. During one gathering, a question was put to the floor: “what shortcuts do you use to decide which candidates or propositions to vote for?” The overwhelming response: endorsements in the voter’s pamphlet. And that got me to thinking….

A Possible Near-Future Climate: Like the Mid-Pliocene, But Different

The mid-Pliocene climate may be a decent proxy for the earth’s near-future climate, under the mid-range emissions scenario Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5, otherwise know as RCP4.5, The mid-Pliocene was around three million years ago. The global climate was wetter and 2-3 °C higher than today. Atmospheric CO2 and sea levels were also higher. There was much less ice in the northern hemisphere. Forests, woodland and savanna dominated the landscape.

Different Emissions Scenarios Generate Different Futures: Which Scenarios are the Most Likely?

Note the term “anomaly” means a departure from a reference value or long-term average. The above graph starts at 1°C in 2005, because by then global mean temperatures had already increased by one Celsius degree since pre-industrial times (1850-1880). Unfortunately, the  rise in global temperatures has accelerated since 2005, but it’s too early to tell if the above RCP-generated warming trajectories will need to be modified. …How about future sea levels?

What are "Business-As-Usual" Climate Change Scenarios?

Unfortunately a lot of news articles about the catastrophic effects of climate change fail to mention the assumptions these predicted effects are based on. However, if you see “business-as-usual” in these pieces, chances are they’re based on no-mitigation/little adaptation scenarios.

California's Gig-Worker Law Just Passed - to the Advantage of Some Workers and Detriment of Others

Occupations granted exemptionsd from the new law include physicians, accountants, direct sellers, real estate agents, hairstylists and barbers, aestheticians, commercial fishermen, marketing professionals, travel agents, graphic designers, grant writers, fine artists, enrolled agents, payment processing agents, repossession agents, and human resources administrators.

Occupations that were not granted an exemption include: franchise owners, owner-operator truck drivers, nurse anesthetists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, optometrists, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, radiation therapists, marriage and family therapists, clinical social workers, respiratory therapists and audiologists, language translators, janitors, youth sports coaches, construction workers, manicurists, medical technicians, nightclub strippers, and software coders.