response 55 of 113:

Jun 30 16:06 UTC 2003

Re 54.  We have had a significant number of engineer politicians, and
I'm not sure they're really any better as a group than lawyer politicians.
Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter were engineers, no?

The upcoming new version of PoliticalGraveyard.com will have pages listing
politicians in various occupational categories.  Lawyers, physicians,
bankers, dentists, farmers, automobile dealers, florists, veterinarians,
architects, funeral directors, engineers, hardware and implement dealers,
hoteliers, and many others.

response 57 of 113:

Jun 30 17:36 UTC 2003

re 54,55 That's why Archie Bunker crooned "Mister, we need
a man like Hebert Hoover again".

response 59 of 113:

Jul 1 01:21 UTC 2003

In a lawyer's training, the final arbitrator of what is good is a jury.
If you can convince a jury that you are right, then you are right.
This is to a large extent true even for lawyers who never argue cases in
front of juries.  A contract is well-written if it would hold up in court.
And so on.  For a lawyer, an idea has merit if you can convince other
people that it has merit.

For an engineer, the final arbitator of what is good is the real world.
If have a theory or a design, then you build it, and see if it works.
An idea has merit if and only if you can make it work in the real world.

So we set them each to writing laws and setting social policy.
The engineer thinks up an idea for policy, and then she gets stuck.
She can't just send it off to manufacturing to build a prototype.
She's got to get out and convince a lot of people that her idea is
a good one before she can get it implemented in a democratic society.
To do this she needs to stop thinking like an engineer and start thinking
like a lawyer.

The lawyer hasn't got this problem.  He selects a policy that he likes
and that he thinks he can convince to the public to support.  He sells,
it and with luck gets his law passed.  He is obviously a much more
effective politician than the engineer was.  Only problem is that
once the lawyer has got his law passed, he thinks he's won his case.
He throws a victory party and moves on to the next law.

If the engineer had ever managed to get her law passed, she probably
would have remembered to stop and look to see if it actually worked
once implemented.  Maybe spent some time fine tuning it.  However,
her efforts would have been largely foiled by the fact that it is
almost impossible to meaninfully measure the effectiveness of nearly
any service that the government supplies.  Telling if a tax cut is
working is a lot harder than telling if a garage door opener is working.

So I think lawyers make much more effective politicians than engineers.
What they get done may or may not be good for anything, but that's
certainly more likely to get you re-elected than total deadlock.

There is such a thing as a one-man engineering shop, and a one-man
law firm.  If there is such a thing as a one-man government, then it
is thankfully a rare item.  In real life we don't have to pick between
lawyer mind-sets and engineer mind-sets.  There is room in government
for an awful lot of people with an awful lot of minds.  Thank Gosh.

response 61 of 113:

Jul 1 02:30 UTC 2003

Re #56 para 1:  Amen, brother.

Re #56 para 2:  Except that the politicians are writing laws about
engineering, and medicine, and all kinds of things where the study
of law confers no understanding of the various gotchas which apply.

Given a choice between an expert in the subtleties of law who
approaches, say, pollution control without subtleties, and an
expert in pollution control who approaches law in a direct fashion,
I think I'd rather have the clean air & water acts drafted by the
latter.  The points of law can be cleaned up in the courts based
on legislative intent, but if the author misses a way that someone
can shift pollution without cleaning it up (or is overly prescriptive
about how something is to be done rather than what is to be done),
the result can easily be worse than no law at all.

The dearth of broader experience (than law and/or "public service")
among our political class is a big problem for the nation.

response 63 of 113:

Jul 1 13:26 UTC 2003

Re #61: That's why politicians need advisors who understand things like
engineering, and medicine.  That's also why people who have backgrounds
in things like engineering tend to be appointed to regulatory positions.

response 65 of 113:

Jul 1 14:13 UTC 2003

For a businessman, the value of an idea is ultimately determined by whether
it makes a profit when implemented.  Success is measured in dollars.

(Yes, I know real businessmen think about other things too, just as real
lawyers and physicians and engineers are more complex that the profiles
I mention.  I'm trying to describe the distinctive thought processes needed
for success in different fields.  Considerations of ethics and social
responsibility have a place in *any* profession, and all professions have
people all over the ethical spectrum.)

Hmm...I'm having a hard time with this one.  Part of the problem is that
*everyone* is a businessman.  We all need to bring in as much or more money
than we spend.  It's a major consideration in all our lives.  We all market
our services.

Businessman tend to operate in very hierarchical structures.  The larger
supply of businessmen in the Republican party is probably why it is more
hierarchically structured.  People used to a hierarchical command structure
might get by OK in the white house (up to a point) but the legislature is
rather a different deal.

On the other hand, many businessmen are salesmen - used to going out and
talking to masses of people and trying to convince them to buy a product.
Being able to convince people to buy a product isn't that different from
being able to convince them to support an idea or a candidate.

I'm just not sure how you actually apply the idea of profit to a government.
It's a dubious fit.

response 67 of 113:

Jul 1 15:01 UTC 2003

Re #64: I always figured that the reason physicians tended to have
aircraft accidents is that they had a lot of money.  Just because you
can afford a high-performance aircraft doesn't mean you can fly one
well.  I've heard the term "Doctor Killer" used specifically to refer to
the Beech Baroness, which is a fast, roomy single-engine plane that
apparently has some unfortunate stall characteristics that can make it
tricky to fly.

Re #66: I don't know if there's more commonality of interest, or if they
just do a better job keeping everyone in line.  The Republican party
does not tolerate moderates well.

response 69 of 113:

Jul 1 18:24 UTC 2003

It's certainly true that no plane is likely to get called a "Janitor Killer".
Doctors are more likely to own airplanes than many other professions.  But
few of the doctors I've ever met had the necessarily paranoia to be safe
pilots.  They just don't *expect* things to go wrong the way engineers do.
I've known several doctors killed in plane crashes - mostly taking off and
flying in bad conditions, sure that everything will work out.

I was surprised that I wasn't very good at characterizing the mindset
encouraged by being a businessman.  I don't find educators easy either.

Educators measure their success by their ability to communicate key ideas
and methods of thought to their students.  They aren't necessarily trying
to convince their students to take any particular action, instead, they
are trying to endow people with new capabilities.

I would expect an educator-turned-politician to tend toward trying to solve
social problems by empowering people.  Give people the capability to act,
and trust them to identify and solve the problem themselves.  This kind of
thinking might fit in better in local government than in federal government.

response 71 of 113:

Jul 2 02:08 UTC 2003

Re various:  The Beechcraft Bonanza came in two models:  the V-tail
and the straight-tail (originally known as the Debonair, because the
straight tail didn't have the same cachet).

The original "straight 35" Bonanzas had a serious structural defect
in the left wing, where the end of the wing spar's shear web, the
landing light opening and a joint in the wing skin all fell at the same
place.  This amounted to a sign saying "BREAK HERE", and from what
I understand a very large fraction of those aircraft did exactly that.
(In-flight airframe failure is essentially 100% fatal.)

Even after that was fixed, the V-tail Bonanza had a problem.  Its
tail caused yaw/roll coupling ("Dutch roll"), and when the original
designer increased the tailplane area to cure another problem he
did it by making the ruddervator panels wider... but he did not
relocate the structural spar, nor add ribs to stiffen the greater
depth of the front D-tube.  The ruddervator ahead of the spar was
an empty metal tube, and sufficient force could cause it to buckle.
Once buckled, the deflection of the leading edge amounted to a huge
(and unintended) control input which caused the aircraft to go out
of control or even break up in midair due to excessive aerodynamic
forces.  Sharp wind shears, wake turbulence from other aircraft and
other factors were apparently sufficient to buckle a ruddervator.

The powers that be finally issued an Airworthiness Directive (AD)
which set forth standards for stiffening the attachment between
the ruddervator leading edges and the aircraft tailcone, and the
problem went away (though not without grumbling from people whose
fixes didn't meet the letter of the AD and had to do it over).

Re #69:  Doctors also have a tendency to neglect their recurrent
training and just hop in the machine when it suits them; when
something comes up, they often don't have the proper reactions
drilled into them.  The Bonanza is a high-performance aircraft,
and things can happen mighty fast; the pilot has to be ahead of it.

IIRC, the Mitsubishi MU-2 became essentially worthless because of a
slightly more extreme case of the same; it became nearly impossible
to get insurance for one because the required training was so
specialized and could not be neglected.  If you didn't mind flying
without insurance on your life and hull, you could pick up a really
fast twin-turbine airplane for less than some used Cherokees.

Re #65:  Actually, some business principles do appear to be at
work in the Republican platform (though not the execution).  The
idea of the Laffer curve is classic economics, finding the "sweet
spot" even if it means giving up some of your margin because the
greater volume will yield you more money.  Ditto the "flat tax",
because the simpler something is the less overhead you have and
the fewer discouraging hassles (another form of tax) there are.

What we could really use for a good tax policy is a bunch of smart
folks who don't have ideological axes to grind, nor horses of their
own in the race (and aren't in the pay of folks who do); they could
do a good job of making one.  And it'll never happen.

response 73 of 113:

Jul 2 05:54 UTC 2003

Jan, I think what you were getting at is the "god complex" of [some] doctors.

There's a dental software package that advertises that it's the only
such software designed and written by a dentist....  which of course
made it an instant hit with dentists.

response 75 of 113:

Jul 2 06:51 UTC 2003

Immediately following the dot-com crash, I knew a few people that had sort
of happened to.  They excercised somewhere around a million dollars worth of
stock options, didn't sell any of the stock, watched the stock's value decline
to near zero, and then ended up with tax bills in the hundreds of thousands
of dollars.  This was the lack of insurance scenario -- the widely repeated
rule was that seling stock quickly was bad because it would be taxed at a
higher rate, but it turned out that not selling left them not only vulnerable
to losing the entire value, but to owing taxes on money they no longer had
anyway.

response 77 of 113:

Jul 2 14:00 UTC 2003

Yeah, stock market losses are deductible. That I one reason I like to 
gamble on the market because at least when I lose money, I get to write 
it off. ;)