I strongly disagree with the June 14 editorial arguing that companies shouldn’t have to pay interns minimum wage. It is incorrect that “No one forces [students] to accept internships.” The reason “many companies are besieged by students who want them” is that many degree programs require an internship or practicum to graduate. Not only are the students spending a summer working for free—when most need to be making money to pay for school—they may have to pay the university for credit hours earned by working an internship. I’ll say that again: Interns are often paying to do productive work that benefits the company they were working for, as well as paying the cost of living for the time they are doing the internship. When I did my practicum several years ago, most students found one that paid somewhere between minimum wage and ten dollars an hour. When my brother did his two years ago, only a few students in his class were able to find paying internships. This is completely unreasonable. Since the employer is directly benefiting from the work of the interns, they should be required to at least pay enough to cover the student’s basic living expenses during the time they are interning. It is one thing for a non-profit or volunteer organization to have unpaid internships, but it exploitation when a for-profit company does not pay its interns.

This is much higher than I expected, so I decided to check the numbers myself. I found the data on the CDC website and plotted it along with moving averages to define ‘generation’:

Huh. That’s much higher than I expected. I’d figured it would be around a tenth that rate, and at most up to half that rate. These higher than expected numbers mean that one-quarter is a reasonable estimate. Depending on how ‘my generation’ is defined, the one-quarter figure may be a little high, but it is at minimum one-fifth. Under any reasonable definition, there is no way I’d consider 1/5 to be ‘rare.’ It’s a stretch to call one-tenth rare. I’d hesitate to call 1/36—the probability of rolling snake eyes—rare. I’d consider a general definition of rare to start around 1/500, approximately the probability of drawing a flush in poker. For diseases, the NIH uses a definition somewhere around 1/1500. Even if the abortion rate in the USA is lowered to one sixth the current level, it still wouldn’t fit in the loosest of these definitions of rare. This means that, even for a generous definition, we have a long way to go before abortion could be considered ‘rare.’ It’s worth noting that the pro-abortion politicians mostly stopped using the ‘rare’ statement a couple years ago, showing that they were probably never serious about it.

Note: Data are from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC MMWR abortion reports are released at the end of November with a three year lag. ‘Fetal loss’ other than induced abortion is excluded from the data I used in the plots. The numbers include both surgical and medical (non-surgical) abortions. Data is abortion rate per 1000 live births, I converted it to a fraction to clarify the plots. The full report is worth a look. Since it is split between two tables in the report, here is a plot of when during a pregnancy abortions are performed:

Sources:

• CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Surveillance Summaries, Abortion Surveillance — United States, 2006, November 28, 2008 / Vol. 57 / No. SS-13
• CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Surveillance Summaries, Abortion Surveillance — United States, 2006, November 27, 2009 / Vol. 58 / No. SS-8
• The 2004 Democratic National Platform for America. Includes ‘Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.’
• The 2004 Democratic National Platform. Uses ‘safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay.’

This doesn’t match the distribution I expected. After looking at the House, I examined the results for the Senate:

This looks a little broader than the House, but still not quite as biased toward long times in office as I had expected. To be a little more thorough, I calculated basic summary statistics:

It turns out that careerism isn’t nearly as bad as I thought. Of course, the summary stats don’t quite give the true answer, because they don’t take into account that this is the time served so far by those currently sitting in congress. What I really want to see is the total time served by all those now in congress, after they have retired or lost an election. Basically, I’d expect this to show a result slightly lower than the true average.

A little reading shows that the average reelection rate is about 84% (for 1982 to 1994, I don’t have more recent data). Using this number with some simple statistics gives a theoretical mean time in the House almost identical to the average of those currently serving. However, the measured variance is significantly larger than the expected variance.

Now that I have a more accurate view of the makeup of congress, I can look at the reasons behind my previous misconception. The first reason is the number of times I have heard politicians and others talk about the need for term limits. The exaggerated view of careerism is reinforced by the fact that much of the congressional leadership has been in office for years. Since they are the ranking members, they appear to be disproportionately represented in national news stories. The fact that Indiana has only had three senators since I have lived here, and my House district has been misrepresented by Mark Souder since 1995, contribute to the appearance of a permanent congress.

This leads to the question of what should be done. The problem clearly isn’t as bad as I originally expected, but is it really a problem? A year or two ago, I realized that overly strict term limits for the Senate would undermine the purpose of having a bicameral legislature. But what about the House? There is evidence that strict term limits can create new problems. For now, I think that term limits in the Senate are unimportant, and I am undecided about the House. I’ll stick to my general rule of voting against incumbents that aren’t significantly better than their opponent. One final point to remember:

The founding fathers, by the way, did give us the best system of term limits there is. If you don’t like what they do, vote ’em out.
–Jack Lessenberry

Suggested reading:

• Throw All The Bums Out? Bad Idea by Tom Schaller on FiveThirtyEight
• The Entrenching of Incumbency: Reelections in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1790-1994 by Stephen C. Erickson in the Cato Journal. Being a Cato Institute publication, this talks about time in office tending to corrupt, but ignores other sources of corruption. Erickson writes about politicians bowing to special interests to be reelected, but ignores the role of special interests in getting them elected in the first place.
• Legislators and Administrators: Complex Relationships Complicated by Term Limits by Sarbaugh-Thompson et alli. Legislative Studies Quarterly isn’t open access, but a number of stories report on this paper.
• What ‘Permanent Congress’? by Mickey Edwards (R-OK) in the NYTimes. It is interesting how opinions shift according to which party has a majority.
• Reelection rates of incumbents By David C. Huckabee. This is where I found the reelection rate.

Future problems:

• Look at the age of representatives during their first term. A large portion of the drop off could be from retirement.
• Look at the careers of legislators before and after their time in congress.
• Look at how being chosen for appointed offices (e.g. the Cabinet) change the numbers.

Unfortunately, they neglect a critical fact:

I’ll leave the conclusions to the reader, but it should be noted that at some point these two lines cross (and may already have done so).

To avoid a collision between the two, we are left with this graph:

Nota bene: The first graph can be interpreted in various ways. The most common way, which I am addressing here, is to conflate the economy with resource consumption. This connection isn’t inherent.

Since there are already so many loopholes, this ruling may not make much of a practical difference. But, still, it is a dangerous continuation of ‘corporate personhood’ toward corporate sovereignty.

Suggested reading:

• Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute)
• Supreme Court Rips Up Campaign Finance Laws (NPR)
• What Is the First Amendment For? by Stanley Fish (NYTimes)
• Paul Szep
• Slowpoke

The story is based on press release from the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion advocacy group, originally a division of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. I have no reason to doubt the published numbers, but the press release makes the mistake of over-interpreting the data to agree with predetermined conclusions. The annual change in the numbers from 2005 to 2006 isn’t large enough to draw a conclusion, yet the press release attributes the change to policies they oppose. This is what Darrell Huff would call playing up numbers, and the wording could be considered cherry-picking. This is exactly the same kind of mistake I see every slightly cool day during the summer when someone (often in the news) claims that it disproves anthropogenic global warming. While it is possible that the Guttmacher Institute’s conclusion is correct, the evidence is not yet strong enough to make a conclusion. The Guttmacher Institute’s press release presents an explanation for 1995 through 2006, leaving out an explanation of the data from 1986 to 1995. This is a problem because there is a larger unexplained peak in 1988 and the decline begins in 1989, not 1995. At the present time, without presenting stronger evidence, an equally plausible explanation is that the 2005 to 2006 change merely represents the expected annual fluctuations around a steady state, and that the slow in the decline is simply due to approaching the steady state. To make their conclusions will require a longer trend, and to explain the prior changes, not just assume the change is due to policies they oppose. It is important to remember to actually look at data and to know that the world is more complex than advocacy groups pretend.

Update 2010-02-02: A new study published in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine provides evidence that the Guttmacher Institute’s attribution of the changes in the abortion rate is likely incorrect. Unlike the Guttmacher Institute’s conclusion, this is published in a peer-reviewed journal. (Found through a story in the Washington Post.)

The world population is currently around 6 700 000 000. In the next four decades, it is expected to reach 9 500 000 000. The US population is around 306 000 000, and is expected to be around 440 000 000 by 2050. So if we assume we are using all land available for food production, the efficiency of the land usage must be increased by a bit over 1.4 times to feed everyone in 2050. This makes the generous assumption that the land is currently being used sustainably. In reality, the food production efficiency must be increased faster to balance the resources lost to non-sustainable land use practices. The results in other categories are similar.

I am particularly interested in energy usage and transportation efficiency. For example, cars and trucks in the US. The current CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards dictate that the average fuel economy for all new cars and trucks in the US is around 24 miles per gallon. The true average of all cars on the road is lower. Accounting for population growth in the US, this combined average must be over 35 miles per gallon by 2050 to maintain current fuel usage. To return to 1990 petroleum usage in 2050, the CAFE standard must be increased to almost 49 miles per gallon.

These efficiency gains merely maintain current standards of living. This is especially important for food. Increases that merely match population growth still leave the same percentage of people without food or clean water. As can be seen in India and China, more people are moving up from extremely poor to poor and middle class. They then eat more and use more of other resources. This increase in living standards necessitates a concomitant increase in the efficiency of resource usage. But even these efficiency increases aren’t enough.

In transportation, food, and water, we are using resources faster than they are replenished. As the population is increasing, the resources available are decreasing. This must stop at some point. All reasonable people agree that it is necessary to move to completely sustainable use of resources. Until we reach sustainable resource usage, we must increase efficiency significantly faster than required by population growth. Gains below this rate merely delay an inevitable disaster. Improvements at this rate–or better–save the world. Do we have a critical mass of reasonable people?

From an EFF post:

Again, the gulf between Candidate Obama and President Obama is striking. As a candidate, Obama ran promising a new era of government transparency and accountability, an end to the Bush DOJ’s radical theories of executive power, and reform of the PATRIOT Act. But, this week, Obama’s own Department Of Justice has argued that, under the PATRIOT Act, the government shall be entirely unaccountable for surveilling Americans in violation of its own laws.

This isn’t change we can believe in. This is change for the worse.

We need a government that isn’t constantly trying to get around the Constitution.

Update 2009-04-09

The number of miles driven in a year decreases with the age of a car:

I combined these two equations to find the percentage of all miles driven in a year for cars by age. The combination of these two factors decreases more rapidly than either alone:

Even in the period where most cars for a model year are on the road, the number of miles the older cars are driven decreases. This means the average fuel economy for all cars on the road has very little hysteresis for changes in the average economy of new cars. Basically, the average fuel economy of all cars on the road will be close to the fuel economy of the current model year. The numbers for light trucks (all pickups and most SUVs) are similar. This means that any changes to fuel economy standards, or the popularity of SUVs versus cars, will quickly change the total gasoline consumption for the country.

UPDATE (20090129): What this directly shows is the percent of total distance for a model year driven by car age. If the same number of cars are built each year, the results also work for all cars on the road. If fewer cars than average are built, the delay will be a little longer. If more are built, the delay will be shorter.

(Anyone who doesn’t believe technology has advanced to the point where 35 mpg car CAFE by 2016 is a trivial goal had better be reading this on gopher using a terminal dialed into a VAX over a 1200 baud modem.)