climate change activist and science communicator; photographer; mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
Matters of money
Maybe the idea that you should seek a career doing what you really care about is flawed. Doing anything for money tends to involve many compromises and sacrifices of principle or aesthetics.
Perhaps it is wiser to earn your money in a field that you don’t really care about at all, so that you can be able to act freely in the areas that are really important to you.
For those struggling in today’s super competitive job market, The Economist suggests becoming a butler:
The time-poor new rich are generating demand for household staff, and this sort of work can be very well paid. A private secretary and general factotum can earn up to $150,000 a year nowadays. Salaries for standard butlers range from $60,000 to $125,000 and a head butler can make as much as $250,000, according to the website of the Butler Bureau.
You already help out the rich by absorbing their pollution, giving sweetheart loans to their companies, and bailing out their high-risk schemes when they fail. Why not make them breakfast Bloody Marys to combat post-party hangovers as well?
People sometimes describe lotteries as a tax on those who are bad at math. The tickets are worth less than their face value, given the size of the payout and your odds of winning.
That is all true enough. At the same time, it bears remembering that we each get to live a single very finite life. Used well, the winnings from a lottery could improve that one and only life a lot – particularly if the money is used to advance a particular cause that is important to you, rather than used hedonistically.
Losing the cost of a bunch of lottery tickets is irrational if your aim is to maximize how much money you are likely to have in your life. At the same time, betting on a long shot can be rational in the sense that there is a large amount of upside that you have no hope whatsoever of capturing if you do not play.
Expressed another way, the problem with lotteries is that you basically pay $5 for a one-in-a-million shot of winning $1,000,000. The ticket is overpriced and the money is probably wasted. At the same time, there is probably no other way in which you are going to get $1,000,000. At least playing the lottery gives you some chance, however infinitesimal.
The logic is similar to that of buying insurance against your house burning down. If you had a huge number of houses, you would be better off not paying premiums and just dealing with the cost of fires yourself. Because you only have one house, however, you overpay on premiums in order to avoid a catastrophic outcome.
All that said, and as I have argued before, I don’t think lotteries and casinos should be allowed to advertise. It is better for the state to keep gambling legal and regulated, rather than allowing it to become one more racket for organized crime along with drugs and prostitution. At the same time, neither the state nor private companies should be permitted to take advantage of the weak understanding of probability in the general public through advertising a profoundly false promise that winning is likely. Casinos also should not be allowed to serve alcohol.
To sum up, winning the lottery is an extreme long shot, but when you only have a single chance to try something it can be a rational strategy to accept a set risk (the near certainty that the money spent on a ticket is wasted) in exchange for a chance at a large benefit.
Previously, I wrote about why photography may make a better hobby than a career. I still think the points made there are valid, but I have been finding myself thinking about my options for the future and trying my hand at commercial photography and photojournalism is an option that is not entirely lacking in appeal.
It seems plausible that there will be a demand for photographers for the foreseeable future, even if the world becomes significantly poorer and less stable for whatever reason. Even as high-definition video capabilities proliferate, photos continue to have relevance and importance.
Indeed, the ability of photography to contribute to the social and political evolution of society is one of the more intriguing and appealing things about it. Photographs have power, in that they change how people think about things. Standing in the media pen in Washington DC, surrounded by police officers with guns, I made a mental note about how the still and video cameras in the hands of the journalists present were actually the more powerful tools that day – they actually had some effect on what happened, and the consequences that arose from it.
As a photographer, it would be necessary to hustle and market myself quite a bit in order to get enough work to live tolerably. There is also the requirement that you satisfy the preferences of clients rather than your own aesthetic preferences. Still, it is a possibility that could allow for significant personal freedom, which would be welcome.
All day tomorrow, September 14th 2011, Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project will be broadcasting a multinational, multilingual attempt to inform people about climate change and what ought to be done about it.
Hopefully, this will help to recapture the attention of the public and policy-makers. It has drifted a lot in the last few years, partly because those opposed to acting on climate change have been so effective at confusing people and shifting the terms of the public debate in their favour.
Apparently, attending a top-tier law school is more useful if you want to become a professor at a top-tier school than if you want to work for a top-tier firm. Quite plausibly, academics are impressed by people who have attended institutions they themselves respect, while law firms may be more focused on a person’s actual performance than the name at the top of their diploma.
I wonder if something like that is true about academia generally: that a doctorate from Harvard is more impressive to the hiring boards of universities than to the governance boards of major non- and inter-governmental organizations, charities, think tanks, governments, etc.
Previously:
Data roaming with Fido is ruinously expensive – about a dollar a meg – so I will be foregoing cellular network access while in the U.S. I will probably find WiFi from time to time and thus be able to update my blog, post to Twitter, and upload photos to Flickr.
The meticulous documentation of my somewhat absurd journey will become punctuated rather than continuous.
Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight has an interesting post about sovereign public debt default ratings from Standard & Poor’s. He argues that their ratings from five years ago did not reflect the risks that arose with the financial crisis.
Despite their potentially misleading character, the financial system relies on such ratings to be a proxy for probability of default. A bondholder with a good rating should be less likely to default than one with a poor rating, and a highly rated security should be a safe investment, If the ratings produced by rating agencies are not a good proxy for risk, it may be a mistake to continue to give them such an important role within the financial system and financial regulation.
Of course, that raises the question of what to use as a superior indicator for risk.
There is a lot I miss about Vancouver. There are the obvious things, like all the friends and family I have in that city. There are also more esoteric things, like riding the stretch of the Skytrain between Chinatown and the wild outer reaches of New Westminster, walking across the False Creek bridges in the middle of the night, or trekking between North Vancouver coffee shops by means of wild parks with dangerous rivers in them.
Moving to Toronto, I am sure I will find things to appreciate about the city. On the basis of all the trips I have made there since 2007, I certainly have an awareness of the virtues of the city, from the active arts community to the sheer wonderful anonymous size. I look forward to disappearing into the mass.
One day it seems likely that I will find a way to live in Vancouver again, at least temporarily. It is probably a city with long-term economic vitality. At least until all the soil is depleted, British Columbia will remain a massive engine for producing wood demanded in other places. Vancouver has an excellent harbour, and doesn’t seem to be too vulnerable to sea level rise (aside from the unfortunate suburbs kept dry by levees). There will be a gigantic earthquake one day, but the city will survive – particularly the buildings with wooden or steel frames. British Columbia has lots of hydroelectric power and a reasonable amount of arable land.
For someone who avoids flying, getting back to Vancouver from the Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto zone is quite an undertaking. The bus journey is a long and unpleasant one, and the train is both much more expensive and much less environmentally sustainable. Flying, of course, is the ‘nice for me, too bad for people in future generations’ option.
Still, as long as the visit is going to be a fairly extended one, it is worth putting in the time and carbon to get back to the west coast. To be in Vancouver with a decent job and a good place to live would be an enviable situation. It may also be a decent option for doing a doctorate, if I decide to pursue that strategy. Walking around the UBC campus while it is milling with new undergrads would surely be a bit strange. I wonder what the first-year version of me would think of the version from ten years later. I have certainly grown a great deal more pessimistic about the future of the world, and probably more realistic about my ability to alter it.