The Calico Cat

Average Joe is the latest reality TV show to hit the airwaves. The premise is that Melana, a very attractive former NFL cheerleader, will get to pick from sixteen eligible single guys. She says that personality is more important than looks, so for lying in order to sound politically correct, she gets exactly what she asked for. Sixteen guys with, we assume, good (or at least interesting) personalities, but who are lacking in the looks department. Despite the name of the show, Average Joe, these guys range from a little below average to downright ugly.

I expected to hate the show like I've hated all other reality shows I've seen. But I was surprised to discover that I actually enjoyed the show and I'm looking forward to the second episode on Monday night. What's going on here? Have my tastes in entertainment sunk to the lowest common denominator? Will I take up bowling and hunting next week?

I guess the reason I like the show is that the Average Joes have a genuine realness to them that past reality show participants lacked. In Joe Millionaire, I really didn't care the least bit which of sixteen good looking women the good looking Joe Millionaire would pick. Those people already had everything going for them, so who cared who won and who lost?

The premise of Average Joe isn't original. The concept of reality shows certainly isn't original. The concept of a bunch of loser guys winning the beautiful girls reminded me of the 1980s movie Revenge of the Nerds. Average Joe reminded me of that movie before I watched the first episode where one of the Average Joes mentions that particular movie. And that, in turn, reminds me of the scene from the 2000 movie Boiler Room where the characters reverentially watch the much better 1980s movie Wall Street.

I imagine that feminists will say the same thing about Average Joe that they said about Revenge of the Nerds. That the show tells us that it's okay for a man to be less than good looking, but that the only acceptable women must look like NFL cheerleaders. Does Average Joe create unreasonable expectations in nerdy, ugly men, that if they wait around long enough they will eventually be picked to participate in a reality TV show where they will have a chance to get the same kind of gorgeous woman that the quarterbacks usually get?

Are the guys on the show being glorified, or are they the butt of a really mean-spirited joke? I think the answer is the latter. And the basis for this conclusion is the scene where they are made to stand before the cameras with their shirts off, and we have to watch the cameras move in close, with a wide angle lens, so we can see how awful these men look. The producers of Average Joe couldn't even let them participate in the show yet still retain at least a small scrap of dignity.

Unlike Joe Millionaire, where he would chose which women he wanted to stay, Melana has to pick which men she wants to get rid of. The purpose of this is to add to the sting of rejection they have to suffer.

At least I give the show credit for exposing what women today really value in men. Hint: it's not intelligence or having a good job that they value, because the men on the show have that and they are losers with women. Melana said, when she thought the camera wasn't recording her, that "95%" of them weren't her "type". And that she'd normally pretend she had a boyfriend if someone like the Average Joes asked her out.

At the end of the first episode, I was somewhat surprised to discover that of the four guys that Melana rejected, three of them were among the better looking of the group. My thoughts here are that she didn't want to hurt the feelings of the horribly ugly and undateable by rejecting them first. And she didn't reject any of what I consider to be the nerdy group, so maybe a nerd will win again just like in the series of 1980s nerd movies. I am shamefully looking forward to the next episode.

I've created yet another blog. This one is called Online Dating Insider, and it takes a serious look at the online dating industry. In today's entry, Love, Internet Style, I comment on an op-ed piece of the same title published in today's New York Times. Check it out.

Someone who read my last entry on "pay at time of service healthcare" indignantly said "that won't work, what if you get really sick and can't afford it!"

Well that's what insurance is really supposed to be about, to cover you for things you can't afford. People can afford routine medical care, so having insurance cover that is just plain inefficient.

Health insurance with a high deductible, such as $2000 or up, is the best way to insure people in case they need more than routine medical treatment. This was implicit in my argument in favor of pay at time of service healthcare.

There's an article on the front page of today's Wall Street Journal about "pay at time of service" healthcare (see Pay-as-You-Go M.D.: The Doctor Is In, But Insurance Is Out - subscription required). The article features two doctors who got sick and tired of having to deal with insurance companies, so they stopped dealing with them altogether. Consequently, they are now able to offer the same services for less money than doctors who take insurance, because they don't have to deal with the administrative overhead of third party billing.

I don't think most people realize how incredibly wasteful our healthcare insurance system is. I used to work at a company that provided healthcare services, and we had a department of a hundred people who dealt with billing issues. Mostly they submitted claims to insurance companies and then followed up on them. At the same time, there were large numbers of employees at the insurance companies whose job it was to review claims and deny them, often for nitpicky reasons like putting the information in the wrong field on the claims form.

Even the solo-practitioner family doctor requires a staff of people to do insurance billing. One of the doctors in the WSJ article says he was able to reduce his office staff from seven to two part-timers after he stopped taking insurance money.

The article points out that paying customers, who are usually people who don't have jobs, are subsidizing the health care of those with insurance, because at most doctors' offices, the full price that the non-insured patient pays is more money than the doctor would be reimbursed by an insurance company. And that doesn't include the significant administrative expense of submitting the claim to the insurance company and following up on it.

What the article fails to mention is that doctors are usually prohibited from giving cash customers a discount. From the perspective of Medicare or an insurance company, they are being cheated if the doctor bills them more than the doctor charges non-insured patients. So the only way a doctor can offer more affordable services to the non-insured is if they completely sever their relationships with insurance companies and Medicare, like the doctors in the WSJ article did.

There are even some patients with insurance who prefer to see the non-insurance doctors:

As demonstrated by the quote above, one of the side benefits of doctors having to compete in the free market is that they also have to offer better service in addition to lower prices. Pay as you go healthcare sounds like a great idea! Why don't we have more of it?

A combination of the tax code and people's lack of understanding of basic economics locks us into the inefficient health insurance system we currently have. Health insurance benefits paid by one's employer are pre-tax. This means that if you're in a 45% tax bracket (and right now I'm too lazy to figure out what the real tax bracket is so that number is made up, but the high number is supposed to account for FICA and state taxes as well as federal income tax), this means that there is a $1,125 tax benefit when your employer pays for a $2,500 insurance plan.

With such tremendous tax incentives as demonstrated above, and with the public convinced that health insurance is their right as an employee, it is not likely that we will see many people embrace the pay at time of service model in the immediate future. For the record, I am strongly opposed to tax rules like this which distort the free market and encourage us to buy inefficient health insurance plans. I wish that Congress would have a common sense attack one day and simply eliminate all these special tax rules. Probably the health insurance lobby is hard at work making sure this doesn't happen.

I discovered a great blog today, Number 2 Pencil (on account of the fact that the blogger, Kimberly Swygert, linked to my SAT article and I noticed it in my referrals).

Kimberly is a psychometrician. Psychometrics is the mathematics of pyschological measurement. (Sadly, most people who call themselves "psychologists" have no clue when it comes to statistics or pyschometrics.) Kimberly writes in her blog about testing and education reform, and her perspective as an insider at a large testing organization is fascinating.

I highly respect the job she does. Most people think that test publishers just make up the grading scales on those tests. Few people realize that there is a whole branch of mathematics, known as Item Response Theory, which is specific to grading tests. Fewer still even understand Item Response Theory. (Unfortunately, her blog doesn't seem to say much about the mathematics of test scoring.)

Her blog is highly recommended reading.

I'm listening to a discussion on CNBC right now about Walmart. If you follow the news, you know that 300 illegal immigrant Walmart workers were arrested about two weeks ago.

The CNBC panel was pondering whether illegal immigrant issues would tarnish Walmart's all-American image and hurt their sales because of the bad publicity.

I don't think so. I think Americans just want to buy stuff as cheap as possible, and if that means holding their nose while they wade into a store that's cleaned up by illegal immigrants, then that's what they'll do to buy stuff cheap.

In my recent posting about blogs and Google, I wrote that one of the benefits of blogs is that they give readers viewpoints not seen in mainstream media, with the legalization of drugs (a libertarian position) the example I used.

Today I came across an old article at Salon about blogs and their positive influence on Google searach results (see Use the blog, Luke). The author wrote:

Well I say that's a good thing because libertarian views have been completely ignored by the mainstream media.

Steve, at the blog Deinonychus antirrhopus, also wrote about the Economist article on oil (see Bad economics from Economist.com). He mostly reaches the same conclusions that I did.

I take a break from writing about oil to write about the SAT. As you may be aware, the SAT was the subject of a cover article from Time magazine two weeks ago (yes, I know I'm a little late on this, but better late than never).

Reading this article was the first time I discovered that a new SAT is being intorduced in 2005 (link to college board page about the new SAT).

It seems to me that the old SAT was working just fine, why do we need a new one? Of course there do seem to be a lot of people out there who dislike the SAT, but their reasons have never seemed very easy to fathom. For example, the University of California has been talking about not using the SAT (see The Tech: California Colleges May Drop SAT Use).

The article in Time mentioned the University of California as one of the motivations behind the creation of the new SAT. If UC dropped the SAT, some think that this would be a pretty big blow to the SAT. I would point out, however, that Harvard Business School dropped the use of the GMAT, but then several years later HBS started using it again. This might very well have been the situation in California. Could the UC system really stop using the SAT without harming its academic reputation?

With the SAT being an important part of college admission, it shouldn't come as a surprise that upscale private schools are aiming to help their students do better on it. But surely the same will apply to the new SAT. So what's the point of changing it?

We need standardized testing, otherwise there would be no way to compare students from different high schools. If student A has a 93.4 average at high school A, student B has a 4.65 average at high school B and student C has a 3.3 average at high school C, which is the better student? There is absolutely no way of knowing. Without standardized tests, elite colleges would wind up only taking students from elite high schools that they were familiar with, and students from high schools that were unfamiliar to the elite colleges would be at a severe disadvantage. Thanks to the SAT, a kid at a mediocre public high school can demonstrate that he's as equally qualified as a kid at a private prep school.

The new SAT is going to be less of an aptitude test and more of an achievement test. The IQ-type test questions that aren't normally seen on high school tests, such as analogies and quantitative comparisons, are being eliminated. Questions covering 11th grade math and grammar are being added. A writing test is being added. The new SAT will look less like an IQ test and more like a regular high school test. But there's no evidence that this will make the test more useful for selecting college students. The elite colleges already require that students take Achievement Tests in addition to the SAT (nowadays the Achievement Tests are called SAT-II tests, but I remember what they used to be called), and these tests do cover specific course material. And the colleges also have high school grades to use to evaluate the applicant. It's not as if people with high SAT scores and no other qualifications are sneaking undeservedly into Harvard and Yale. In fact, the opposite is true. A kid with a high SAT score but nothing else going for him (no extra-curricular activities and mediocre high school grades) will probably be rejected by Harvard and Yale.

I find the graded essay to be the most worrisome part of the new SAT. Essays are much more difficult to grade than multiple choice questions. The cost of grading the SAT will increase, and the reliability will decrease. And college bound kids, instead of spending countless hours practicing analogies, will spend countless hours learning how to write in a way that the SAT graders will appreciate.

Let me share my own personal example about graded essays. If you've read my bio, you know that I went to law school. In the UCC class I took in third year of law school, I got the highest grade in the class based on an essay exam test on contract law. So I am pretty confident I know how to write an essay exam answer on contract law. Two years later I took the CPA exam, and on the law part I was delighted to see a contract law essay question. I was certain that I smoked that essay and got the highest possible score. Well it turns out, I got the lowest possible score on the essay question. The same writing style that I had learned to use in law school to get high grades actually got me the lowest possible grade on the CPA exam essay! This demonstrates how essay grading can be highly subjective. Obviously, the non-lawyer CPA exam graders were unfamiliar with the law school writing style.

Kids who want to do well on the new SAT will have to spend countless hours learning the "correct" way to write an SAT essay. I suspect that kids at non-college prep oriented high schools will be at a bigger disadvantage on the new SAT than on the old SAT. And the Time article suggests the same thing.

I suspect that the real motivation for the new SAT is the statistic that shows blacks do poorly on the SAT compared to whites. According to Time, in 2003 the average black SAT score was 857 and the average white SAT score was 1063. (The average Asian SAT score was 1083, which shows that there's nothing special about being white.)

Liberal angst over the black/white SAT score difference is probably causing the SAT to be redesigned. But there's no evidence that blacks will do any better on the new SAT. In fact, Time says that test questions involving specific knowledge learned in high school can make the gap even worse, because many blacks go to high schools with less academically challenging programs.

Time also points out that SAT scores actually overpredict the college grades of blacks. In other words, if a black student and white student both have the same SAT score, the white student will probably do a little bit better in college than the black student. This is the exact opposite of what people probably think--that the black student with the lower SAT score will do just fine in college because the SAT is biased. College grades are based mostly on tests. Black students don't do as well as whites on academically oriented tests. There are no standardized tests that I've heard about where blacks score better than whites. The SAT isn't causing the situation, it is merely reporting it. People who don't like the SAT because there is a black/white score difference are wasting their energy blaming the messenger.

Because colleges use affirmative action when making admissions decisions, black applicants aren't even being hurt by the fact that they score lower on the SAT. Most colleges seem to be adding back most of the 206 point score difference.

I feel that the proverb "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" applies to the SAT. The SAT has done a good job for many decades. Messing around with the SAT seems more likely to make things worse than to make anything better.