The quality of science is not strained

Ingrid Robeyns at Crooked Timber illuminates another reason to support open access of scientific journals:

[O]pen access could, at least in the long run, contribute to closing the global inequalities in access to education. And it can also help to improve the quality of the papers being produced by scholars living and working in the South, which in turn increases their chance of being published in what we consider quality journals, which would be good not just for their careers, but also for global dialogues.

Pretend you’re a scientist in a developing country. You’re doing experiments in a lab where the electricity goes out regularly, you’re trying to stay up-to-date with other scientists’ work but you can’t afford to subscribe to the journals, and when you submit your own articles you don’t get published because your write-up doesn’t sound the right flavor of “professional.”

Open access wouldn’t solve all of your problems, but it would certainly help. Not to mention helping the rest of us, who need science to move forward based on everybody’s best thinking, not just the folks with lots of money.

Everything I need to know I learned from eavesdropping on my boss

I learned a tremendous amount from overhearing my boss’s phone conversations at my first “real” (post-college) job. Tone, style, vocabulary, phrasing. How to cold-call a researcher, how to finesse a funding relationship, how to dance backwards from committing yourself to an undesired collaboration.

All of which is to say, I’m in general agreement with Megan Hustad:

The office phone call, properly overheard, is really the cheapest, easiest way to transmit institutional knowledge.

Which is why, these days, I try to make sure my younger collegues can overhear my most important conversations. They’ll learn more from that than almost anything I can teach them directly.

In praise of journalism

What a terrific use of the bully pulpit by New York Times business columnist David Leonhardt. Recipe: Take one commonly-discussed government statistic (unemployment rate). Add one part historical background and two new data sources, and analyze. Result: A newly illuminated phenomenon.

(In this case: One new frame for thinking about the recent upswing in “non-employed” people whose existence is invisible in the regular unemployment statistics.)

Over the last few decades, there has been an enormous increase in the number of people who fall into the no man’s land of the labor market[...]. These people are not employed, but they also don’t fit the government’s definition of the unemployed — those who “do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior four weeks, and are currently available for work.”

Consider this: the average unemployment rate in this decade, just above 5 percent, has been lower than in any decade since the 1960s. Yet the percentage of prime-age men (those 25 to 54 years old) who are not working has been higher than in any decade since World War II. In January, almost 13 percent of prime-age men did not hold a job, up from 11 percent in 1998, 11 percent in 1988, 9 percent in 1978 and just 6 percent in 1968.

There are only two possible explanations for this bizarre combination of a falling employment rate and a falling unemployment rate. The first is that there has been a big increase in the number of people not working purely by their own choice. You can think of them as the self-unemployed. They include retirees, as well as stay-at-home parents, people caring for aging parents and others doing unpaid work.

If growth in this group were the reason for the confusing statistics, we wouldn’t need to worry. It would be perfectly fair to say that unemployment was historically low. [...] Instead, these nonemployed workers tend to be those who have been left behind by the economic changes of the last generation. Their jobs have been replaced by technology or have gone overseas, and they can no longer find work that pays as well.

Read the whole thing.