Demand Dobbs vs. Matloff Debate!

Date: Friday, February 18, 2005 1:04 AM

JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER

by Rob Sanchez
February 18, 2005 No. 1200

Lou Dobbs and his crew have gone way overboard pushing the education
button and there is only one way to straighten them out. We must demand
that Dobbs debate Dr. Norm Matloff about the education issue. I have
credible evidence that Dobbs has been trying to evade Matloff, so to
make this debate happen all of us must contact CNN and demand that
Dobbs face the music once and for all.

WE NEED A DEBATE - AND SOON!

Don't expect Dobbs to agree to this debate without a lot of public
pressure. I suspect he still remembers his show where Matloff turned
Harris Miller into a quivering bowl of liver flavored jello. Miller
might be a tough-boy for the robber barons, but he had nothing to say
when Norm attacked him with facts, and in this case Dobbs will suffer
the same fate. Lou Dobbs will be way over his head if he takes Matloff
on, and that will be fun to watch.

Contact the Lou Dobbs show and demand a debate.

The Lou Dobbs contact page is at:
http://www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form5.html?9

Email him at: LouDobbs@cnn.com

And just so Dobbs can't hide from the CNN execs, you can send comments
to them on this page:
http://www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form1.html?35

I haven't asked you guys to do much in terms of activism for awhile. I
hope you come through on this one.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Norm Matloff [mailto:matloff@cs.ucdavis.edu]
> Sent: Friday, February 18, 2005 12:02 AM
> To: Norm Matloff
> Subject: another poor Dobbs show

Last night I reported on a shockingly bad Lou Dobbs Show broadcast that
evening. My posting is at

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/DobbsDropsTheBall.txt

I was then flooded with e-mail messages in response, asking me whether
Dobbs had sold out or lost his sanity or both.

I'm sorry to report that Dobbs ran an equally bad, if less blatant,
segment today. He apparently has a new theme for the future, judging
from last night's and tonight's shows: Instead of all that offshoring
being due to American firms' quest for cheap labor, which Dobbs used to
claim, his new claim seesm to be that the American educational system
is in a shambles, and the only educated workers available are in India.

In last night's show, Dobbs claimed to have a "two-fer." He
highlighted a school which has, literally, offshored its tutoring to
workers in India. He gets two points out of this: First, American
schools are so bad that outside tutors are needed, and second, American
schools are so bad that they aren't producing adults who are capable of
tutoring! Dobbs seems to think that all those laid-off engineers he
used to sympathize with are incapable of tutoring fifth-graders; well,
then, hey, NO WONDER those engineers lost their jobs to offshore
workers. :-)
Dobbs also failed to mention that the "poster school" Dobbs showed
consisted mostly of impoverished immigrant kids designated as English
Learners by the state. Viewers were led to believe that this school
typified the American educational system. The whole thing was
Orwellian or Kafkaesque.

Tonight, he continued his theme that American schools are drek. He
even had a slick lead-in, with his interview with Sen. Kennedy on new
bankruptcy legislation. Kennedy ends by saying, what are we going to
do about globalization, which allows Dobbs to lead in to his next
subject, the alleged poor state of American education. The message is
apparently that Kennedy won't be able to protect Americans regarding
globalization unless Americans establish a decent educational system.

Here is Dobbs' first "witness":

JIM SIMONS, PRESIDENT, MATH FOR AMERICA: I can't find Americans.
That is, the majority of the people that I've hired in the last
seven or eight years, high-quality research people, are not
U.S. people. They're not born in America, and they weren't educated
in America.

First, a bit of explanation. Math for America is just Simons'
sideline. His company is Renaissance Technologies, which as alluded to
below, does hedge fund analysis. The researchers he refers to are
mathematical modelers of investment instruments. This kind of activity
became popular on Wall Street perhaps 15 years ago. The models are
typically inspired by mathematical models in physics, so often PhDs in
physics are hired for this kind of work, in addition to PhDs in math.

(Ironically, one former U.S. native mathematician who was a big critic
of the H-1B program wound up doing this kind of work.)

Basically, these people are hired for their pure mathematical
intellect. They don't need specialized knowledge of the financial
industry, and in fact Simons has said such knowledge would be a
disadvantage. (See http://www.turtletrader.com/trader-simons.html)

In other words, sharp PhD in math and physics would be a candidate for
such jobs. In fact, within 10 seconds, with almost no effort, I came
up with three names of Americans I know whom I believe would do a great
job. So how come all Simons' hires are foreign-born? And, judging
from my quick Google search, most or all of them seem to be from
Russia.Simons would appear to have some pipeline going, with him
relying on that rather than trying to find Americans to hire. And I'll
bet rubles to peroshki that he only hires the young ones.

Now, why would Simons want to hire H-1Bs? Recall that I've always
cited TWO reasons for hiring H-1Bs: (a) They're cheap, and (b) they're
essentially immobile (if they are being sponsored for a green card).
Let's look at these in Simons' case:

First of all, Simons does hire quite a few H-1Bs, as seen on Rob
Sanchez's and the Dept. of Labor's H-1B databases. Simons' researchers
are in such a niche field that it's hard to tell whether he is paying
them fairly or not. But he's hiring a lot more than just researchers;
he's got a lot of H-1B system analysts, accountants and so on. Does he
really expect us to believe he can't find system analysts in the U.S.?
I think it is very clear that something is wrong here.

My guess is that his main interest is the immobility of the H-1Bs. He
doesn't want them taking his secret recipe for fried certificates of
deposit, roasted arbitrage and pureed derivatives to some rival hedge
fund. Note, by the way, that when he says,

the majority of the people that I've hired in the last seven or

eight

years, high-quality research people, are not U.S. people

that roughly coincides with the era of high H-1B quotas.

Before I go on to the other points made on Dobbs' show tonight, one
more thing about Simons: The surname "Simons" is common enough, but I
couldn't help wondering if he was any relation to Barbara Simons.
Here's why:

Dr. Barbara Simons is a computer science researcher at IBM in San Jose.
In 1998, the height of the dot com fever and the year that the industry
lobbyists got Congress to enact a huge increase in the H-1B program,
she was president of the Association for Computing Machinery, the main
computer science professional organization. A colleague of mine who
was a classmate of Barbara Simons said that she and I ought to talk, as
she was very concerned about age discrimination in the computer
industry. That year I had published an op-ed in the New York Times on
that topic.

But when I contacted her and we discussed the matter, she came to a
screeching halt when I mentioned that one of the main reasons that the
industry was able to get away with shunning older Americans--again,
this was at a time when the industry claimed to be "desperate" to
hire--was that they had all these young H-1Bs available. She said that
for both professional and personal reasons she was unwilling to touch
anything which would reduce immigration. She added that she felt that
IEEE-USA had made a big mistake in its lobbying against the expansion
of the H-1B
program, and would make sure ACM didn't do the same.

For seven years now I've wondered what Dr. Simons meant by "personal
reasons." Well, I suppose I should say that I stll haven't solved the
mystery, but it certainly is interesting that it turns out that Jim
Simons is indeed her former husband. (See her bio at
http://www.butler.edu/cs/women-in-it/bsimons.shtml which actually is
pretty inspirational.) I have a feeling there's something there, and
that her ex-husband's mass hiring of H-1Bs is no coincidence (does she
have a share of her ex-husband's company?), but well, it's at least
interesting.

OK, back to Dobbs. Consider this:

DOBBS: Tonight, in our special report "Culture in Decline,"
this country is losing its edge in mathematics and science. The
number of American students now studying math, science and
engineering is on the decline, and, over the past 20 years,
the number of students graduating from American colleges with
engineering degrees is down almost 25 percent.

Let's check this out. I went to the Digest of Educational Statistics,
2003 at http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d03/ch_3.asp and looked at
Table 252, which shows data from 1970 to 2002. I looked at computer
science in particular, since the industry lobbyists' battle cry in 1998
was that CS enrollment was way down since the 1980s, that American
young people weren't smart enough to study CS, etc. Well, it turns out
that the number of CS students in 2002, was 47,299, a 32-year record
high!

But what did that give those CS students? Answer: A lousy job market,
due in large part to H-1Bs and offshoring, which those same lobbyists
have promoted. Since 2002, of course, CS enrollment has plummeted as a
result. In fact, as I've pointed out before, CS enrollment has risen
and fallen exactly with the job market (with a lag), and each period of
falling enrollment has coincided with high levels of H-1B hiring.
Since James Simons seems to like applied math, let me point out that
this is a nonconvergent dynamical system, whose lack of convergence is
due in
large part to the program he seems to like so much, H-1B.

It is true that the above Web page also shows a drop in math majors
over that period of time. And there should be! My PhD is in math, and
I still think it's a wonderful subject to study, but there are no jobs
in math. No, Simons' firm and the others like it don't count, as they
are simply a tiny niche, nothing more. There would be no economic
justification for increasing the number of math PhDs attained by
Americans, given the minuscule chance of being hired in that niche.That
of course is especially true given the apparent refusal of Simons to
even consider hiring Americans. As numerous studies have shown, it is
pure folly for Americans to pursue a PhD in math or physics in the
expectation of getting a job in the field. For Simons to ignore the
huge numbers of surplus PhDs we already have is just criminal.

So, THAT is what is wrong with Dobbs' statements, folks (which, as
Rob's newsletter has pointed out, bear an eerie resemblance to those
made by the industry lobbyists): THE ENROLLMENT NUMBERS ARE
MEANINGLESS, BECAUSE WE'RE NOT USING THE PEOPLE WE ALREADY HAVE. I've
been making this statement repeatedly since 1997.

For Dobbs to say we should be producing even more engineers, after
stating so many times that there are tons of laid-off engineers who
can't get work in the field, is baffling and in fact offensive.

He also brings up the fact that about half the PhDs in science and
engineering in the U.S. go to foreign students. I've answered this
point until I'm blue in the face (including, I believe, to Dobbs'
staff), but to no avail. Once again, here is the short form: Even in
a field like CS where there ARE jobs for PhDs (as opposed to math and
physics; see above), it simply doesn't pay to pursue a PhD. In the
five years it typically takes, that's five years of forgoing
industry-level pay, a loss one never makes up for later on. Meanwhile,
foreign students have a nonmonetary incentive in the form of a
potential green card. See all the details in my previous postings,
e.g.

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/ProposedMSPhDExemption.txt

As to China graduating hordes of engineers, that's way more than China
needs too. The vast majority are NOT doing real engineering work.
It's a totally misleading statistic. For the record, U.S. has the
second-highest per-capita number of engineers in the world, second only
to Israel. (Michael Hiltzik, Israel's High Tech Shifts Into High Gear,
Los Angeles Times, August 13, 2000.) So, the implicit claim that
"Johnny Can't Do Engineering" is way off base. If only those engineers
had some engineering work available to them...

Norm

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