Daily Archives: 22 February 2021

“Working Off” Student Debt

Posted on by
Reply

A letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Tuesday Letters section posited an alternative to student debt: trade it for community service.

I would readily support loan forgiveness if the beneficiary were required to do community service for the forgiven debt.

Only so long as the community service work is low-skill, low-education work, with the student debt scofflaw—because that’s what he still would be—working directly under the controlling supervision of a low-skill, low-education person who’s had that job for a while.

Let the scofflaw see who he’s displacing with his preciousness and his debt-ducking.

Let him see the college student, during the school year, trying to earn some night shift money with which to pay for some college without “borrowing” money.

Let him see the high schooler trying to earn some summer job money and to obtain some initial, entry-level work experience for his future use in working his way up the employment and economic ladders.

On that last, especially, I employed a high school sophomore last summer to mow my lawn, edge it, and clean the sidewalk of the mowing and edging detritus. I ordinarily do my own yard work, but this enterprising young man, by his enterprise, earned the job. A student debt scofflaw would get this sort of work from me only if he worked under the hiring and firing authority of my high school sophomore contractor. Which would give the sophomore some valuable supervisory experience, too.

Which supervisory experience also would benefit those other low-skill, low-education workers for whom the community service debtors would be working.

Anti-Nobel Prize

Posted on by
Reply

Frank Wilczek, himself a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, wants one, not for himself in particular, but for seemingly brilliant work that doesn’t work out.

For instance:

In the heady days of the late 1970s and early 1980s, many physicists—including me—thought they were on the cusp of achieving a unified theory of the fundamental forces. A striking prediction to emerge from this circle of ideas is that protons are unstable and will eventually decay, just as many radioactive nuclei do. It was widely hoped that experimenters would find ways to verify the prediction.
Sure enough, they did. Unfortunately, subsequent work revealed that the claimed observations of proton decay could not be correct, though the nature of the experiments’ flaws was never clarified completely. This story is not unique: In recent years a number of exotic physical phenomena—including magnetic monopoles, cosmological dark matter, axions and supersymmetric particles—have reportedly been detected, only for later, more sensitive experiments to come up empty.

Wilczek’s concept would work like this:

An anti-Nobel would be awarded for incorrect work that, had it been correct, would have merited a Nobel Prize. It would be awarded secretly, so no one need be embarrassed. The anti-Nobel prize would only come into play if the recipient did subsequent Prize-worthy work, in which case, the two would cancel each other out.

Cancel each other like matter-antimatter collisions.

We have, however, a similar prize already extant. It doesn’t directly address work that would be Nobel-worthy but for its failure, but it gets at the concept.

That prize is the Ig Noble Prize, awarded for work that gets its accolade from the monumental foolishness of the work.