Category: The News

I saw a few headlines in print yesterday about some large quantity of people applying to colonize Mars.  I was out for most of the day, and off the Twitter for much of that, so I never actually read the articles, and if I went to find a link to one or two of them, well, that’d just slow down the whole writing process, wouldn’t it?  Possibly through the application of actual facts.

But the premise is pretty easy to grasp.  There are a lot of people who claim they want to move to Mars, and we’re not at a point where you can just wake up and say “hey honey, pack a bag, I think we’re moving” (I think we’re still at a point where that conversation is dangerous even with the destination still being on Earth, and even with that conversation being about a new breakfast location.)  So there’s an application process, which means that someone, or probably a group of people, will have to judge the applicants.

And that’s where things will start to fall apart.  I’m going to make a few guesses here.  The people making the decisions will be attached in some way to the Mars program, and even if they’re not super-uber-geeks, they were brought onto a team of literal, actual, non-figurative rocket scientists, so there had to be some affinity there.

And if I was a rocket scientist, I would have had to have some extensive training, probably more than a home study kit of 7 DVDs, and I would have had to make sacrifices to get to where I was, and some choices about social interaction would have been made.

I’m also assuming, for no real reason, that the people making the decision won’t be going to Mars.  Because if they were, it breaks my whole theory, but also, because I need a real reason to hide that transparency I just shared with you, let’s say that they need to heroically stay on Earth to keep judging applications.  You can’t telecommute for that job, seriously.  Have you been to the Starbucks on Mars?  The wifi sucks.

SO, winding this up, if you had the job of choosing a group of people who you’d never see again, what would you do?  Would you pick the ones who were more like you, who you think you’d get along with?  Or would you choose to send the people you really didn’t like off to another planet?

Yeah, me too.

Britain sent a lot of their prisoners to Australian penal colonies once upon a time, but despite what you may have heard, that continent actually had more immigrants than prisoners move in over that period. And 150 years later everything turned out OK, despite the fact that I recently learned pumpkin pie isn’t really a thing there.  I’m not sure how long it’ll take Mars to settle out with my population projections.

Photo: NASA

Spotted on the way to an appointment in the PATH on one of those newsfeed/ad TV serving things: “Study: degrees in some fields have more value than others” (roughly paraphrased because I don’t have a degree in memory.) And by value, they mean income potential, of course. Because news cycle.

My first reaction was the incredible hope that the study was from academia and was funded by some government agency or another, because what kind of field day could I have with that?  (Answer: a great big one.) But no, after tracking it down [PDF] I found out it was from CIBC World Markets.  Oddly, they didn’t position it as a recruiting tool with economics being the most valuable field of study of them all (that nod went to engineering.)

The overall theme is something like “these darned kids will never learn, they keep going into fields where there aren’t hot job markets” and they wait until the second last paragraph to ponder why that might be:

[quote]Differences in intrinsic traits such as ability and motivation could be a driver. As well, the joy of learning a less-technical subject, rather than a focus on potential future earnings, could be driving the continual increase in students of relatively low-paying fields of  study.[/quote]

Imagine that: it’s possible, just maybe, that not everyone can do engineering, and some people actually don’t want to in the first place!

Not that I’m one to talk.  Despite taking an economics course in my undergrad and doing not-terrible at it (by my definition at the time, which was not failing,) I had a joke I used with my business student friends at the time who were baffled that the computer guy was doing better than some of them (my, what low standards we had for ourselves!) and that was this: to pass economics 101, when unsure of the answer one should pick the option that made the least sense.  And I wasn’t really kidding.

So kudos to the economics team at CIBC, and on those days where you’re sitting in your cubicle thinking about how you’d give it all up to learn pottery, if only it wasn’t too late, remember this: you make way better charts and graphs than I do.

Anyway, it’s a bit of a bummer that the ultimate problem identified in the paper is the lack of skilled workers for many of the jobs requiring higher-income fields of study (because not enough arts students are switching majors) and not the lack of opportunities for people who opt for “less lucrative” courseloads.  Students, regardless of their chosen specialty, really need to get better at marketing themselves, and if we can improve those job prospects, working with the skills we have, the overall economy is bound to improve.  Or maybe not – that’s just the options that makes sense to me.