Episodes
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Following up a prior episode on fraud in Alzheimer’s research, I look at what has happened to two of those researchers, talk about my own experience in preventing cheating in classes as well as what academic research was like as an RA (research assistant) in physics, and then look at what current research fraud prevention in the U.S. federal government looks like with some advice for future activities.
Episode Links
Alzheimer’s Research Fraud
Dan Elton post: 20 Oct 2024
Profiles:
Berislav Zlokovic
* Number of papers found with suspicious images - “dozens”
* Influential papers with fraud - Nature Medicine (2004), Stroke (2013), The Journal of Neuroscience (2013), Frontiers in Neuroscience (2022)
* Taxpayer money lost as a result - at least 30 million
* Pharma company impacts - ZZ Biotech received 30 million from the NIH to explore drug candidate 3K3A-APC for stroke recovery based on Zlokovic’s work. The drug didn’t work and there were six deaths in the active group compared to one in the placebo group. Suspect papers have been cited in 49 patents by 30 companies, universities, and foundations.
Notes: As explained in Science’s expose, Zlokovic is the top-ranked researcher in the world when it comes to Alzheimer’s and the blood-brain barrier, both in terms of number of papers (25) and number of citations (14,341). Suspect papers affect both the Alzheimer’s and stroke research fields. Two former lab members say that Zlokovic instructed them to make sure their lab notebooks were “clean”, meaning making sure they did not have data and results that challenged their paper’s conclusions.
….
Hoau-Yan Wang
* Number of papers found with suspicious images - 20
* Influential papers with fraud - The Journal of Neuroscience (2012)
* Taxpayer money lost as a result - at least $16 million, probably a lot more.
* Pharma company impacts - Cassava Biosciences based their clinical trials of Simufilam off of Wang’s work. Wang served as an advisor to the company.
Notes: The fraudster remains a professor at CUNY, despite CUNY doing a 50 page investigation that found “highly suggestive” evidence that he is culpable for 14/31 allegations. A June 2024 indictment by the Department of Justice states that he also committed fraud on grant applications between 2017 to 2021. The fraudulent applications led to $16 million in grant funding to Wang from the NIH.
Science: Top Alzheimer’s researcher goes ‘on leave’ amid misconduct concerns, 8 Nov 2024
Berislav Zlokovic, a prominent Alzheimer’s disease and stroke researcher who has long headed a major neuroscience institute at the University of Southern California (USC), is now on an indefinite leave of absence, according to a school official. USC declined to clarify a reason for the leave, but Zlokovic has faced scrutiny since a 2023 Science investigation described evidence that he had engaged in scientific misconduct for decades. Science has also learned that a planned $30 million clinical trial of a stroke drug candidate Zlokovic helped develop has been formally called off by its company sponsor, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has required that USC return nearly $2 million in funding for the trial.
USC Keck School of Medicine Dean Carolyn Meltzer announced Zlokovic’s leave in a 22 October email to USC faculty, obtained by Science. She named neuroscientist Steve Kay as acting director of the university’s Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute and its Department of Physiology & Neuroscience, both of which Zlokovic previously headed.
According to a USC professor who requested anonymity, Kay has taken over Zlokovic’s laboratory. Zlokovic also stepped down as co-director of USC’s federally funded Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, according to its website. Zlokovic could not be reached for comment on his leave.
DOJ Press Release: Professor Charged for Operating Multimillion-Dollar Grant Fraud Scheme, 28 June 2024
A federal grand jury in the District of Maryland returned an indictment yesterday charging a Pennsylvania man for defrauding the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) of approximately $16 million in federal grant funds.
According to court documents, Hoau-Yan Wang, 67, was a tenured medical professor at a public university’s medical school, as well as a paid advisor and consultant to a publicly traded Texas biopharmaceutical company. From approximately May 2015 through approximately April 2023, Wang allegedly engaged in a scheme to fabricate and falsify scientific data in grant applications made to the NIH on behalf of himself and the biopharmaceutical company. As alleged, the fraudulent grant applications to the NIH sought funding for scientific research of a potential treatment and diagnostic test for Alzheimer’s disease and resulted in the award of approximately $16 million in grants from approximately 2017 to 2021, part of which funded Wang’s laboratory work and salary.
The indictment alleges that Wang’s work under these grants was related to the early developmental phases of the proposed drug and diagnostic test, typically referred to by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as Phase 1 and Phase 2. Wang’s alleged scientific data falsification in the NIH grant applications related to how the proposed drug and diagnostic test were intended to work and the improvement of certain indicators associated with Alzheimer’s disease after treatment with the proposed drug.
Wang is charged with one count of major fraud against the United States, two counts of wire fraud, and one count of false statements. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison for the count of major fraud, 20 years in prison for each count of wire fraud, and five years in prison for the count of false statements.
NSF OIG
Semiannual Reports
Most recent report: Semiannual Report to Congress, October 1, 2023 – March 31, 2024
NSF OIG page on Research Misconduct
Research Misconduct by the Numbers
Jeremy Fox: What I learned about scientific misconduct from reading the NSF OIG’s semiannual reports, 17 Mar 2021
The National Science Foundation’s Office of the Inspector General (NSF OIG) investigates misuse of NSF funds by individuals and organizations that receive awards from or conduct business with NSF. That includes, but isn’t limited to, researchers who commit scientific misconduct in the course of NSF-funded research. The OIG reports on its activities to Congress every 6 months. The reports are public, you can read them online. As part of my ongoing efforts to educate myself about scientific misconduct, I skimmed the five most recent OIG reports. Here’s what I learned. [MPC: I am shortening this to the first sentence of each bullet, except the third, so you have the link]
* Misspending and fraud detected by NSF OIG amounts to something like ~0.1% of the NSF budget.
* Most of the misspending and fraud detected by NSF OIG does not involve scientific misconduct.
* The large majority of allegations of scientific misconduct to OIG involve plagiarism. This semi-annual report includes helpful tables (Tables 3-5) breaking down all allegations of scientific misconduct received, and investigated, by OIG from 2010-2019, and how those investigations were resolved.
* Scientific misconduct allegations to OIG have dropped a lot since 2013.
* OIG finds scientific misconduct in ~24% of the allegations it investigates.
* As allegations of scientific misconduct to OIG have dropped, a greater fraction of allegations have been substantiated.
* There’s some terrible scientific misconduct out there, and some bizarre excuses for it (even if it doesn’t cost NSF much money in the grand scheme of things).
Prior Episode:
“My” peer-reviewed paper:
(The one I could find — the other one is a summary version, I think.)
High strain rate fracture and C-chain unraveling in carbon nanotubes
B.I. Yakobson, M.P. Campbell, C.J. Brabec, J. Bernholc
Computational Materials Science
Volume 8, Issue 4, September 1997, Pages 341-348
Abstract
Nanotube behavior at high rate tensile strain (~ 1 MHz) is studied by molecular dynamics using a realistic many-body interatomic potential. The simulations performed for single- and double-walled nanotubes of different helicities, and at different temperatures, show that nanotubes have an extremely large breaking strain. It decreases somewhat with increasing temperature and smaller strain rate, while the influence of helicity is very weak. At later stages of fracture, the nanotube fragments are connected by a set of unraveling monoatomic chains. The chains ‘compete’ with each other for carbon atoms popping out of the original tube segments. The interaction between chains eventually leads to a single chain, which grows up to hundreds of atoms in length before its breakage.
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An audio introduction to my 2024 Movember fundraising: the background to Movember internationally, its focuses of prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and men’s mental health and suicide, and my personal motivation: my late husband Stu’s diagnosis with advanced prostate cancer in 2017 and his 7-year struggle with cancer.
Episode Links
My Movember fundraising links
Here are the places you can donate to the Movember Foundation, which supports men’s health, specifically focusing on prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and men’s mental health:
* Mary Pat Campbell’s MoSpace – a place to donate at Movember itself
* My Movember Facebook fundraiser – my officially linked fundraiser, if this works better for you
And here’s a QR code if that works better for you:
Movember History: Wikipedia
Seven Nightly News aired a story in 1999 including a group of young men in Adelaide, South Australia who coined the term "Movember" and the idea of growing moustaches for charity throughout the month of November.[16] In the news report, members of the Adelaide-based "Movember Committee" explained how they came up with the idea for Movember one night in the pub. The group started with 80 men from Adelaide and soon became a nationwide phenomenon. They also aimed to raise money for the RSPCA through selling T-shirts in what they termed "Growing whiskers for whiskers".[16]
In 2004, an unrelated group in Melbourne organised an event where 30 men would grow a moustache for 30 days in order to raise awareness for prostate cancer and depression in men.[17][18] Adam Garone, Travis Garone, Luke Slattery, and Justin (JC) Coughlin inspired 26 other friends with a desire to "bring back" the trend of growing moustaches, the movement was born. The next year, nearly 500 people raised over $40,000 for the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia. At the time, it was the largest donation the PCFA had ever received. This group would later become the Movember Foundation charity. Three years after starting the Movember movement, the organization was granted official charity status in Australia.
Straight Talk from ER Doc
STUMP Movember Links
1 November 2024: Movember 2024 Kickoff: In Memory of Stu
2023: Movember 2023 - Current Status and Trends
2022: Movember 2022: Men and Drug Overdoses (and Giving Tuesday!)
2021: Movember Fundraising: Men and Suicide
2019: Happy Thanksgiving! Wrapping up Movember and a Little Sumo, Books, and More
2017: Movember Campaign -- Prostate Cancer and Suicide Prevention
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Missing episodes?
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Prominent research in Alzheimer’s disease going back for decades has been found to be fraudulent, which has effects. Alzheimer’s disease has been a cause of death with an increasing age-adjusted death rate, and it’s one of the very few causes of death with a rate that’s higher for females than males (at all ages). How has this come about? And what should be done?
STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Episode Links
Dan Elton from More is Different
When "weak links" in science matter -- high profile fraud in Alzheimer's disease research
Oct 20, 2024
About a year ago I wrote a post trying to gauge how much of the peer-reviewed literature in non-predatory peer-reviewed journals has deliberate fraud. A number that often comes up is 2%. However, according to forensic metascience expert James Heathers, that number is flawed and out of date. According to a recent review article by Heathers, the true number is likely around 14%.
I find many people are either not aware of this issue, or they acknowledge the issue but wave it away as not important.An example is someone who I met recently who works at the National Science Foundation. From their vantage point, fraud is mostly being committed in China, not in the USA, which they described as having far superior systems for grant dispersal and oversight. This is largely true, but it doesn’t mean fraud from the US is not an important issue.
One example of retracted article
Original article
APP binds DR6 to trigger axon pruning and neuron death via distinct caspases
Nature, 2009 Feb 19;457(7232):981-9. doi: 10.1038/nature07767.
Abstract
Naturally occurring axonal pruning and neuronal cell death help to sculpt neuronal connections during development, but their mechanistic basis remains poorly understood. Here we report that beta-amyloid precursor protein (APP) and death receptor 6 (DR6, also known as TNFRSF21) activate a widespread caspase-dependent self-destruction program. DR6 is broadly expressed by developing neurons, and is required for normal cell body death and axonal pruning both in vivo and after trophic-factor deprivation in vitro. Unlike neuronal cell body apoptosis, which requires caspase 3, we show that axonal degeneration requires caspase 6, which is activated in a punctate pattern that parallels the pattern of axonal fragmentation. DR6 is activated locally by an inactive surface ligand(s) that is released in an active form after trophic-factor deprivation, and we identify APP as a DR6 ligand. Trophic-factor deprivation triggers the shedding of surface APP in a beta-secretase (BACE)-dependent manner. Loss- and gain-of-function studies support a model in which a cleaved amino-terminal fragment of APP (N-APP) binds DR6 and triggers degeneration. Genetic support is provided by a common neuromuscular junction phenotype in mutant mice. Our results indicate that APP and DR6 are components of a neuronal self-destruction pathway, and suggest that an extracellular fragment of APP, acting via DR6 and caspase 6, contributes to Alzheimer's disease.
Retraction notice
Retraction Note: APP binds DR6 to trigger axon pruning and neuron death via distinct caspases
The authors have retracted this article1. Our subsequent work confirmed aspects of the article, notably that DR6 and APP interact and function in a genetic pathway involving caspases to control axon pruning and neuron death2,3. However, our later research also showed that certain conclusions reached in the article were incorrect, notably the role of caspase-3, the necessity for beta-secretase enzyme activity for APP-DR6 binding, and the model for the APP-DR6 interaction2,3.
More recently, the following anomalies were identified:
* Figure 1d: the NGF-deprived +IgG panel appears to be identical to the NGF-deprived, 24h + Control IgG panel of Figure 5e.
* Supplementary information Figure 9c: the NGF-deprived + Bax inhibitor control panel appears to be identical to the + anti-NGF control panel of Supplementary information Figure 17c.
* Supplementary information Figure 6d: the fourth beta-Actin blot for Casp-3 siRNA appears to be identical to the first beta-Actin blot for Casp-6 siRNA.
* Certain biostatistical calculations underlying some figures contained errors.
We believe that these additional anomalies do not affect the conclusions presented in the affected figures. However, given the lack of original data for several of these figures due to the age of the paper, and since our subsequent research showed that certain specific claims in the original article were not correct and we reported a correction for those claims elsewhere2,3, we consider that the appropriate course of action is to retract the article. All the authors agree with this retraction.
Figure 1d:
Figure 5e:
Ben Landau-Taylor from Palladium Magazine
The Academic Culture of Fraud
August 2, 2024
In 2006, Sylvain Lesné and seven coauthors published a paper on Alzheimer’s disease, “A specific amyloid-beta protein assembly in the brain impairs memory,” in Nature, the world’s most prestigious scientific journal. This was a major paper in the development of the “amyloid hypothesis,” a proposed mechanism for how Alzheimer’s disease afflicts its victims. About 50 million people suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, more than the entire population of California, making it the world’s most common cause of dementia. This population will grow as the world’s average population gets older. There is no effective treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, and its pathology is poorly understood. Any progress in understanding this disease represents a massive humanitarian victory. Encouraged by this paper and other promising studies, funding and talent poured into investigating the amyloid hypothesis. By 2022, such research had received over $1 billion in government funds.
That year, neuroscientist Matthew Schrag discovered doctored images in this and many of Lesné’s other papers, including others purporting to provide evidence for the amyloid hypothesis. These images had been manually edited and cropped together to falsely show support for the papers’ hypotheses. Notably, these frauds all made it through the formalized “peer review” processes of Nature and six other academic journals undetected, before eventually being uncovered by unrelated channels.
Schrag’s investigation that uncovered the fraudulent papers began as a tangent from his work uncovering doctored images used in studies supporting simufilam, an experimental drug for Alzheimer’s disease. The suspicion would prove vindicated when in June 2024 Hoau-Yan Wang, a paid adviser to simufilam’s developer, was indicted by a federal grand jury for fabricating data and images in simufilam studies for which he obtained $16 million in National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants, following a 2021 petition to the Food and Drug Administration, a method of reporting research fraud which is highly unusual if not unique.
Theo Baker in The Stanford Daily
Internal review found ‘falsified data’ in Stanford President’s Alzheimer’s research, colleagues allege
Feb 17, 2023
In 2009, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, then a top executive at the biotechnology company Genentech, was the primary author of a scientific paper published in the prestigious journal Nature that claimed to have found the potential cause for brain degeneration in Alzheimer’s patients. “Because of this research,” read Genentech’s annual letter to shareholders, “we are working to develop both antibodies and small molecules that may attack Alzheimer’s from a novel entry point and help the millions of people who currently suffer from this devastating disease.”
But after several unsuccessful attempts to reproduce the research, the paper became the subject of an internal review by Genentech’s Research Review Committee (RRC), according to four high-level Genentech employees at the time; two were senior scientists and two were scientists who also served as executives. Three spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the allegations and non-disclosure agreements. The scientists, one of whom was an executive who sat on the review committee and all of whom were informed of the review’s findings at the time due to their stature at the company, said that the inquiry discovered falsification of data in the research, and that Tessier-Lavigne kept the finding from becoming public.
Tessier-Lavigne denies both allegations. Genentech said in a statement that “as part of our diligence related to these allegations, we reviewed the records from that November 2011 RRC meeting and saw no allegations of fraud or wrongdoing.” The company acknowledged that “given that these events happened many years ago … our current records may not be complete.”
After the review, which began in 2011, Genentech canceled research based on the paper’s findings. Till Maurer, a senior scientist at the company from 2009-2018 who said he was assigned to develop drugs based on the 2009 paper, told The Daily that his superior informed him that, in Maurer’s words, “the project is being canceled and it’s because they found falsified data.”
Alzheimer’s Mortality in the U.S. via the Society of Actuaries
U.S. Population Mortality Observations – Updated with 2021 Experience
Tableau dashboard:
https://tableau.soa.org/t/soa-public/views/USPop2021-Final/BySex?%3Aembed=y&%3AisGuestRedirectFromVizportal=y&%3Aorigin=card_share_link
Twixter Comments
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In looking at Kamala Harris’s 2009 book, which is rife with plagiarism (including cribbing from Wikipedia), I consider my own experiences. I’ve taught writing classes and been involved in getting a book published, in which I ran into somebody submitting material lifted wholesale from Wikipedia. However, those were years ago — we have a new problem now with generative AI creating new versions of “plagiarism”. What to do with “AI slop” being injected into people’s texts?
Episode Links
Christopher Rufo
Christopher Rufo: Kamala Harris’s Plagiarism Problem
Taken in total, there is certainly a breach of standards here. Harris and her co-author duplicated long passages nearly verbatim without proper citation and without quotation marks, which is the textbook definition of plagiarism. They not only lifted material from sources without proper attribution, but in at least one case, relied on a low-quality source, which potentially undermined the accuracy of their conclusion.
Of course, Harris, like many other public figures, may have relied entirely on a ghostwriter to draft her book. But that is not exculpatory: Harris, at the end of the day, put her name on the cover.
On that point, one might recall the title of her book: Smart on Crime. There is nothing smart about plagiarism, which is the equivalent of an academic crime. The publisher, as well as the sitting vice president, should retract the plagiarized passages and issue a correction. There should be a single standard—and Kamala Harris is falling short.
Kamala Harris's Book, Smart on Crime
Amazon Link: Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer
Two top reviews:
(I didn’t find that review very interesting)
I was one of the 4 people who found the above review to be helpful.
The Amazon listing of the co-author’s (Joan O’C. Hamilton) books - only 3, including Smart on Crime
Judgment in Moscow
Book listing at Amazon: Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity
Blurbs:
“Vladimir Bukovsky uses the Kremlin's own documents to show how the Soviet Union provided a false face to the world and how Soviet leaders used Western leaders as dupes or willing actors. Judgment in Moscow provides the written Nuremberg trial the Soviets never got when the USSR fell.” —Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History (Pulitzer Prize)
“An essential warning of the dangers of collaborating with authoritarian regimes.” — Garry Kasparov, former world chess champion and author of Winter is Coming
“The most important work to appear for decades on the Soviet empire and its aftermath.” — Edward Lucas, former senior editor of the Economist, from the introduction
Related posts:
Oct 2021: Remembering Vladimir Bukovsky, 1942 - 2019, Soviet Dissident
Oct 2022: Memorial: A Well-Deserved Nobel Peace Prize
Feb 2024: The Week in Meep, 18 Feb 2024: Navalny, Insurance Fraud, and Lent Begins
AI Slop
Futurism.com by Maggie Harrison Dupré: Wikipedia Declares War on AI Slop
As 404 Media reports, a team of Wikipedia editors has assembled to create "WikiProject AI Cleanup," which describes itself as "a collaboration to combat the increasing problem of unsourced, poorly-written AI-generated content on Wikipedia."
The group is clear that they don't wish to ban responsible AI use outright, but instead seek to eradicate instances of badly-sourced, hallucination-filled, or otherwise unhelpful AI content that erodes the overall quality of the web's decades-old information repository.
….
In some cases, the editors told 404, AI misuse is obvious. One clear sign is users of AI tools leaving well-known chatbot auto-responses behind in Wikipedia entries, such as paragraphs starting with "as an AI language model, I..." or "as of my last knowledge update." The editors also say they've learned to recognize certain prose patterns and "catchphrases," which has allowed them to spot and neutralize sloppy AI text.
"A few of us had noticed the prevalence of unnatural writing that showed clear signs of being AI-generated, and we managed to replicate similar 'styles' using ChatGPT," WikiProject AI Cleanup founding member Ilyas Lebleu told 404, adding that "discovering some common AI catchphrases allowed us to quickly spot some of the most egregious examples of generated articles."
June 2024, CNET: The New AI Buzzword Is 'Slop,' and It's Messing With You. What to Watch Out For
Fake images of former and current world leaders getting arrested. Glue as a pizza topping. AI-generated images that just can't stop adding extra fingers to hands. It's junk, and now there's a catch-all term for bad, useless or misleading artificial intelligence: "slop." The term is spreading across tech blogs, mainstream media and Reddit, where countless threads point out egregious instances of AI gone wrong.
If slop sounds familiar both as a term and in its meaning, that may be because it's a cousin of spam, which emerged way back in 1993 as a word for unwanted, often auto-generated emails that have been clogging up digital inboxes for decades.
….
One problem with bad AI, however, is that people may not be able to tell it apart from legitimate content. When AI "hallucinates," or offers up bad or out-of-context information, it's not always obvious.
Sometimes AI can be misled by satirical or purposefully misleading data pulled from websites or other sources, or it can simply be biased by the type of data it's been trained on.
It's can be hard to verify whether an image or video is faked by AI sometimes, and with text, it's not always clear how the information is being sourced. It's always worth making sure that information offered up by, say ChatGPT is current and that it's been sourced from a reputable site or set of data.
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A jokey prize ceremony has some serious points — Saul Justin Newman’s research on places with supposedly large numbers of supercentenarians won a 2024 Ig Nobel Prize for demography. I’ve covered his work before, in 2019 and this very year.
Episode Links
Ig Nobel Prizes
DEMOGRAPHY PRIZE [AUSTRALIA, UK]Saul Justin Newman, for detective work to discover that many of the people famous for having the longest lives lived in places that had lousy birth-and-death recordkeeping.REFERENCE: “Supercentenarians and the Oldest-Old Are Concentrated into Regions with No Birth Certificates and Short Lifespans,” Saul Justin Newman, BioRxiv, 704080, 2019. REFERENCE: “Supercentenarian and Remarkable Age Records Exhibit Patterns Indicative of Clerical Errors and Pension Fraud,” Saul Justin Newman, BioRxiv, 2024. WHO CAME TO THE CEREMONY: Saul Justin Newman
2024 Paper: Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud
Abstract
The observation of individuals attaining remarkable ages, and their concentration into geographic sub-regions or ‘blue zones’, has generated considerable scientific interest. Proposed drivers of remarkable longevity include high vegetable intake, strong social connections, and genetic markers. Here, we reveal new predictors of remarkable longevity and ‘supercentenarian’ status. In the United States, supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of vital registration. The state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian records. In Italy, England, and France, which have more uniform vital registration, remarkable longevity is instead predicted by poverty, low per capita incomes, shorter life expectancy, higher crime rates, worse health, higher deprivation, fewer 90+ year olds, and residence in remote, overseas, and colonial territories. In England and France, higher old-age poverty rates alone predict more than half of the regional variation in attaining a remarkable age. Only 18% of ‘exhaustively’ validated supercentenarians have a birth certificate, falling to zero percent in the USA, and supercentenarian birthdates are concentrated on days divisible by five: a pattern indicative of widespread fraud and error. Finally, the designated ‘blue zones’ of Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria corresponded to regions with low incomes, low literacy, high crime rate and short life expectancy relative to their national average. As such, relative poverty and short lifespan constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records.
The Conversation: ‘The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out’ – Ig Nobel winner Saul Justin Newman
But your work is actually incredibly serious?
I started getting interested in this topic when I debunked a couple of papers in Nature and Science about extreme ageing in the 2010s. In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly don’t stack up. I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world (the other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate.
The epitome of this is blue zones, which are regions where people supposedly reach age 100 at a remarkable rate. For almost 20 years, they have been marketed to the public. They’re the subject of tons of scientific work, a popular Netflix documentary, tons of cookbooks about things like the Mediterranean diet, and so on.
Okinawa in Japan is one of these zones. There was a Japanese government review in 2010, which found that 82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death.
The Japanese government has run one of the largest nutritional surveys in the world, dating back to 1975. From then until now, Okinawa has had the worst health in Japan. They’ve eaten the least vegetables; they’ve been extremely heavy drinkers.
What about other places?
The same goes for all the other blue zones. Eurostat keeps track of life expectancy in Sardinia, the Italian blue zone, and Ikaria in Greece. When the agency first started keeping records in 1990, Sardinia had the 51st highest old-age life expectancy in Europe out of 128 regions, and Ikaria was 109th. It’s amazing the cognitive dissonance going on. With the Greeks, by my estimates at least 72% of centenarians were dead, missing or essentially pension-fraud cases.
….
What’s your best guess about true human longevity?
Longevity is very likely tied to wealth. Rich people do lots of exercise, have low stress and eat well. I just put out a preprint analysing the last 72 years of UN data on mortality. The places consistently reaching 100 at the highest rates according to the UN are Thailand, Malawi, Western Sahara (which doesn’t have a government) and Puerto Rico, where birth certificates were cancelled completely as a legal document in 2010 because they were so full of pension fraud. This data is just rotten from the inside out.
MedRXiV: The global pattern of centenarians highlights deep problems in demography
Posted 6 Sept 2024
Abstract
Accurate age data is fundamental to medicine, social sciences, epidemiology, and good government. However, recent and heavily disputed debates on data quality have raised questions on the accuracy of demographic data at older ages. Here, we catalogue late-life survival patterns of every country in the world from 1970-2021 using comprehensive estimates of old-age populations provided by global governments and curated by the United Nations. Analysis of 236 nations or states across 51 years reveals that late-life survival data is dominated by anomalies at all scales and in all time periods. Life expectancy at age 100 and late-life survival from ages 80 to 100+, which we term centenarian attainment rate, is highest in a seemingly random assortment of states. The top 10 ‘blue zone’ regions with the best survival to ages 100+ routinely includes Thailand, Kenya and Malawi – respectively now 212th and 202nd in the world for life expectancy, the non-self-governing territory of Western Sahara, and Puerto Rico where birth certificates are so unreliable they were recently declared invalid as a legal document. These anomalous rankings are conserved across long time periods and multiple non-overlapping cohorts, and do not seem to be sampling effects. Instead these patterns suggest a persistent inability, even for nation-states or global organisations, to detect or measure error rates in human age data, with troubling implications for epidemiology, demography, and medicine.
Puerto Rico Birth Certificates Law 191 of 2009 Fact Sheet
In December 2009, the government of Puerto Rico enacted a new law (Law 191 of 2009) aimed at strengthening the issuance and usage of birth certificates to combat fraud and protect the identity and credit of all U.S. citizens born in Puerto Rico. The new law was based on collaboration with the U.S. Department of State (DOS) and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to address the fraudulent use of Puerto Rico-issued birth certificates to unlawfully obtain U.S. passports, Social Security benefits, and other federal services.
In the past, many common official and unofficial transactions in Puerto Rico unnecessarily required the submission, retention, and storage of birth certificates. As a result, hundreds of thousands of original birth certificates were stored without adequate protection, making them easy targets for theft. Subsequently, many birth certificates have been stolen from schools and other institutions, sold on the black market for prices up to $10,000 each, and used to illegally obtain passports, licenses, and other government and private sector documentation and benefits.
As a result of this growing problem, approximately 40 percent of the passport fraud cases investigated by the DOS Diplomatic Security Services in recent years involved birth certificates of people born in Puerto Rico. This left Puerto Rico-born U.S. citizens vulnerable to identity theft, ruined credit, stolen Social Security benefits, and increased “random” security checks at airports, among others.
Understanding the enormous risks to all individuals as well as the very significant homeland and national security concerns, the government of Puerto Rico took action to improve the security of all birth certificates and to better protect the public from fraud and identity theft.
Pension Fraud Stories
DiNapoli: New York City Man Charged with Stealing Over $50,000 in Pension Benefits Meant for Deceased Sister-in-Law
September 16, 2024
A 69-year-old Manhattan man, Randy Ray, was arrested today for allegedly stealing more than $50,000 in pension benefits meant for his deceased sister-in-law, New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli announced.
“Randy Ray allegedly took advantage of his sister-in-law's death to fund his lifestyle,” DiNapoli said. “I will continue to safeguard the pension system and partner with law enforcement across the state and country to prosecute those who attempt to defraud it. I thank Albany County District Attorney David Soares and the New York State Police for their partnership in bringing Ray to justice.”
The pensioner, Ray’s sister-in-law, retired on disability retirement in October 1986 from the Supreme Court, Appellate Division, where she served as a confidential legal stenographer. She retired choosing the state retirement system’s single life allowance option, meaning at the time of her death in January 2019 her monthly pension payments of $1,341.78 should have ended. Instead, the retirement system was not informed of and did not learn about her death until July 2022. Once the system discovered her death, payments were stopped, and an investigation launched.
A forensic analysis was completed on the bank account where the pension payments were being deposited, which was a joint account in the name of the pensioner and Ray. The investigation found that Ray diverted over $50,000 in pension payments made after his sister-in-law’s death and used the money to pay credit card bills, travel, and make online purchases.
Ray was arraigned on a charge of grand larceny in Albany County Court. He is due back in court on October 30.
NY Post, 2012: Mama’s boy jailed: son gets up to 41 years in ‘Psycho’ fraud
He’s not going to the Bates Motel.
A “Psycho” scammer who dressed up as his dead mom so he could collect her Social Security benefits will instead be checking into state prison for 13 2/3 to 41 years after being sentenced yesterday for the bizarre Norman Bates-like stunt.
Thomas Prusik-Parkin, 52 was convicted this month of grand larceny and mortgage fraud for posing as Irene Prusik for several years in order to pocket more than $44,000 of the dead woman’s benefits.
“It’s amazing — it’s amazing!” Justice Vincent Del Giudice said as he sentenced the frail, bearded man. “It borders on ludicrous that you expected to get away with this.”
Prusik-Parkin’s actress mom, Irene, was 73 when she died in 2003. Within days of Prusik’s death, authorities charged, her son changed her Social Security numbers and doctored other documents.
The admitted Norman Bates admirer’s kooky cross-dressing caper fell apart in 2009 when he donned the matronly getup to tell Brooklyn prosecutors he was being ripped off by a man who bought out of foreclosure the $2.2 million Park Slope building deeded to him by his mom.
Del Giudice shook his head as he recalled how the elderly “woman” claimed she had cataracts when an investigator from the Brooklyn DA’s Office asked why the lights in her apartment were dimmed.
Jurors in the trial were shown a video of Prusik-Parkin in a platinum woman’s wig, sunglasses and a dress during a visit to a Department of Motor Vehicles office.
“It just boggles the mind that you continued this plan of deceit by impersonating her and committing a fraud at the DMV,” Del Giudice said.
Prusik-Parkin, maintained that it wasn’t him in the videos.
During a rambling statement before he was sentenced, Prusik-Parkin insisted he hadn’t rejected a deal from prosecutors that could have sprung him from jail, rather than face up to 41 years in prison.
Japan Pension Fraud
July 2010, BBC News: Tokyo's 'oldest man' had been dead for 30 years
He was thought to be the oldest man in Tokyo - but when officials went to congratulate Sogen Kato on his 111th birthday, they uncovered mummified skeletal remains lying in his bed.
Mr Kato may have been dead for 30 years according to Japanese authorities.
They grew suspicious when they went to honour Mr Kato at his address in Adachi ward, but his granddaughter told them he "doesn't want to see anybody".
Police are now investigating the family on possible fraud charges.
Wikipedia: Sogen Kato, Aftermath
After the discovery of Kato's mummified corpse, other checks into elderly centenarians across Japan produced reports of missing centenarians and faulty recordkeeping. Tokyo officials attempted to find the oldest woman in the city, 113-year-old Fusa Furuya, who was registered as living with her daughter. Furuya's daughter said she had not seen her mother for over 25 years.[12] The revelations about the disappearance of Furuya and the death of Kato prompted a nationwide investigation, which concluded that police did not know if 234,354 people older than 100 were still alive.[13] More than 77,000 of these people, officials said, would have been older than 120 years old if they were still alive. Poor record keeping was blamed for many of the cases,[13] and officials said that many may have died during World War II. One register claimed a man was still alive at age 186.[14]
Following the revelations about Kato and Furuya, analysts investigated why recordkeeping by Japanese authorities was poor. Many seniors have, it has been reported, moved away from their family homes. Statistics show that divorce is becoming increasingly common among the elderly. Dementia, which afflicts more than two million Japanese, is also a contributing factor. "Many of those gone missing are men who left their hometowns to look for work in Japan's big cities during the country's pre-1990s boom years. Many of them worked obsessively long hours and never built a social network in their new homes. Others found less economic success than they'd hoped. Ashamed of that failure, they didn't feel they could return home,"[13] a Canadian newspaper reported several months after the discovery of Kato's body.[13]
August 2019: Mortality with Meep: How to Get Lots of Supercentenarians? Pension fraud!
December 2019: Can the Government Tell If You're Dead or Alive?
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I talk about three big inspirations to me: Thomas Day (a North Carolina cabinetmaker, an antebellum free Black man), Candace Wheeler (the “mother” of American interior design — for the masses!), and Julia Child (I hope you already know who she is). There is plenty of beauty to be found in the product of everyday work and living.
Episode Links
Thomas Day
Wikipedia article
Thomas Day (c. 1801–1861) was an American furniture craftsman and cabinetmaker in Milton, Caswell County, North Carolina.[1] Born into a free African-American family in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, Day moved to Milton in 1817 and became a highly successful businessman, boasting the largest and most productive workshop in the state during the 1850s.[1]: 1, 8, 21, 23 [2][3] Day catered to upper-class white clientele and was respected among his peers for his craftsmanship and work ethic.[1]: 27 [2][4] Day came from a relatively well-off family and was privately educated.[1]: 2, 5, 7 Today, Day's pieces are highly sought after and sell for high prices; his work has been heavily studied and displayed in museums such as the North Carolina Museum of History.[5][6][3][7] Day is celebrated as a highly skilled craftsman and savvy businessman, specifically in regards to the challenges his race posed to his success in the Antebellum South.[7][2]: 35, 58 [6][8]
Smithsonian: Thomas Day: Master Craftsman and Free Man of Color - includes videos and online gallery
Book (which I own): Thomas Day: Master Craftsman and Free Man of Color (Richard Hampton Jenrette Series in Architecture and the Decorative Arts)
Candace Wheeler
Wikipedia page
Candace Wheeler (née Thurber; March 24, 1827 – August 5, 1923), traditionally credited as the mother of interior design, was one of America's first woman interior and textile designers. She helped open the field of interior design to women, supported craftswomen, and promoted American design reform. A committed feminist, she intentionally employed women and encouraged their education, especially in the fine and applied arts, and fostered home industries for rural women. She also did editorial work and wrote several books and many articles, encompassing fiction, semi-fiction and non-fiction, for adults and children. She used her exceptional organizational skills to co-found both the Society of Decorative Art in New York City (1877) and the New York Exchange for Women's Work (1878); and she partnered with Louis Comfort Tiffany and others in designing interiors, specializing in textiles (1879-1883), then founded her own firm, The Associated Artists (1883-1907).[1][2][3][4]
….
Society of Decorative Art in New York
[edit]
Wheeler co-founded the Society of Decorative Art with Caroline E. Lamson (Mrs. David) Lane in New York in 1877.[30][31] She hired the recently widowed Elizabeth Bacon (Mrs. General George Armstrong) Custer as secretary: the two women became fast, life-long friends.[2][5][32] The Society was intended to help women support themselves through artistic handicrafts including needlework and other decorative arts. It served the thousands of women who were left indigent at the end of the Civil War. Wheeler called on prominent New York society matrons to support a shop in which the high-quality, custom-made goods could be sold to produce income; they had five hundred subscribers within three years.[30][32][23]
Leading artists were hired to teach or judge exhibits at the Society in New York, including Louis Comfort Tiffany and John LaFarge. Wheeler helped to start branches in Chicago, St. Louis, Hartford, Detroit, Troy, New York and Charleston, South Carolina.[29][33] Although she described resigning in a huff from the Society of Decorative Arts in 1879, she actually remained involved and supportive for the next several years.[34]
New York Exchange for Women's Work
In 1878 Wheeler helped launch the New York Exchange for Women's Work, where women could sell any product that they could manufacture at home, including baked goods and household linens.[30][34] To serve a broader range of women, no artistic ability was required. The Exchange opened in March 1878 with a consignment sale of thirty items at the home of Exchange co-founder Mary Atwater (Mrs. William) Choate. In April, the Exchange moved to a rented facility and by May it was successful enough to employ two part-time sales women. In its first year, it paid out nearly $14,000 in commissions. By 1891, there were at least 72 Exchanges across the United States.[32] The New York Exchange continued to operate until 2003.[35]
The Panic of 1873: Library of Congress
The Panic of 1873 triggered the first 'Great Depression' in the United States and abroad. Lasting from September 1873 until 1878/9, the economic downturn then became known as the Long Depression after the stock market crash of 1929. Currency in the nineteenth century was based on specie. Metal money circulated, and banks issued paper banknotes backed by the supply of gold and silver. In the United States, this system began breaking down in the face of financing the Civil War. President Lincoln authorized the printing of paper money, called "Greenbacks," to pay ballooning expenses. Widespread use of fiat External money continued into the Reconstruction Era, fueling the rapid expansion of railroads and wild speculation.
Banks, especially Jay Cooke and Co. raised millions of dollars through selling bonds to finance construction. Speculators 'bet' on the railroad, gambling on the fact that settlement and opportunities to make money would follow behind the completed railway. However, construction expenses ballooned and outpaced financing. Efforts to raise more funding failed. When they could no longer pay the bills, Jay Cooke and Co. and other banking houses folded. The collapse of the railway financiers sparked high bank withdrawals, the failure of brokerage firms, and railway construction halted. By September 20th, the New York Stock Exchange suspended trading for the first time.
Prior podcast mentioning Wheeler: Failure, Sunk Costs, and Candace Wheeler, June 2023
Julia Child
July 2022: Training Lessons from the French Chef: Being Resourceful and Making Mistakes
Julia Child on PBS YouTube Channel - the French Chef also available at Pluto TV currently
UPDATE: Prior post mentioning Julia Child: Oct 2022 - Geeking Out: Chatting with a Fellow Actuary about Writing - I often write (for free) for actuarial publications, and I like to push what I can get away with. (I’ve been inserting sumo references lately… and I’ve got an extended sumo metaphor I would love to try out in my next piece….)
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In this episode, I look at both the Democratic and Republican Party platform sections on Social Security. After all, the Trust Fund for the Old Age portion of the program is projected to run out by 2035, and the entire Baby Boom generation is Social Security eligible at this point… seems like this is something they should be addressing. The answer will surprise nobody (they don’t want to touch it at all, except perhaps to boost benefits.) The actuaries, as usual, are ignored.
Episode Links
Democratic Party Platform
Party platform page
PDF version — I know it says it’s from 2020 when you download it, but this is the document on the site, and I don’t think they’ve actually changed anything. I make no further comment about this.
Screenshots from the PDF:
Republican Party Platform
GOP about our party
PDF link
PDF screenshots:
Separate page(s):
American Academy of Actuaries on Social Security
Academy page on Social Security
9 May 2024: Committee Releases One-pager on 2024 Social Security Trustees Report
22 July 2024: An Actuarial Perspective on the 2024 Social Security Trustees Report
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With the Democratic Party VP nominee pick, some were trying to make hay over Tim Walz having no apparent stock ownership. However, between Walz and his wife, they have four traditional pensions, and these pensions do have stock (and other) financial markets exposure. In fact, I looked at one of these pensions earlier this year: the Minnesota Teachers Fund… and Walz is the chairman of the board of that fund. Let’s look at the components of their wealth and aspects of this fund.
Episode Links
WSJ: Tim Walz’s and JD Vance’s Personal Finances Couldn’t Be More Different
Tim Walz doesn’t own a home or many investments outside of pensions and a college-savings plan, according to past financial disclosures and tax returns. Getting elected vice president as Kamala Harris’s Democratic running mate—a job that pays $235,000—would mean a more than 50% pay bump.
….
Tim and Gwen Walz together earned $166,719 before taxes in 2022, according to a tax return that year. About $116,000 of that came from Tim’s salary as governor. The governor’s salary has since increased to $149,550, according to the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library.
A little over $51,000 of the couple’s income came from Gwen’s work as an educator, which she reported as a self-owned business. She has worked at Augsburg University since 2019, where she has taught education and served as a special assistant to the president.
The couple, who have two children, had a 529 plan, worth between $1,001 and $15,000 in 2019, according to a financial disclosure Walz filed for his final year as a House representative. They also held two life insurance policies totaling $30,002 to $100,000.
The couple is largely relying on pensions to fund their retirement, based on his disclosures. They have four pensions with an estimated lump sum value of between $81,000 and $215,000, as of the 2019 filing.
Survey of Consumer Finances
Survey of Consumer Finances landing page
SCF Interactive Chartbook
Before-tax family income by percentile of income
Stock holdings by percentile of income
Ed Seidle and the Minnesota Teachers Pension
4 April 2024: Minnesota Teacher Pension Forensic Investigation Invites Whistleblower, Expert And Public Participation
18 Jul 2024: Toledo Blade Exposes National Effort to Undermine Investigations Into Public Pension Wrongdoing
31 July 2024: Minnesota Governor Walz Warned Of "Many Serious Risks" Facing State Pensions Under His Watch
On March 11, 2024, Jay Stoffel, the Executive Director of the Teacher Retirement Association of Minnesota—a state pension with $28 billion in assets—blasted out an email entitled “An Important Matter” to all trustees of the TRA Board and staff. This same alarming email would, within days, be sent by him to state legislators and officials, including the offices of Governor Walz, Attorney General and Legislative Auditor. (Walz, as Governor has long been chairman of the pension board and the Attorney General is also a board member.)
A “situation” posing “many serious risks to the agency and pension fund” had arisen which they “should be aware of and concerned about,” Stoffel wrote.
The seriously risky situation Stoffel was warning Governor Walz and others about was a proposed forensic investigation into potential mismanagement or wrongdoing at the pension, conducted by a nationally-recognized expert and commissioned by educators who were participants in the pension.
That’s right, the impending “grave danger” was: State workers and retirees who contributed their hard-earned savings to the pension and whose retirement security was potentially at risk—the very same individuals for whose exclusive benefit the plan (under applicable law) is supposed to be managed—were fundraising to get a “second opinion.”
Worse still, the opinion they were seeking was that of a seasoned forensic investigator of their own choosing.
7 Aug 2024: Minnesota And Kentucky Open Government Experts Applaud Ohio Magistrate's State Teacher Pension Records Decision
10 Aug 2024, NY Post: Teachers’ Minn. pension fund under Tim Walz ‘cooking the books’ by vastly underreporting fees: ‘Madoff miracle’
A Minnesota retirement system for public school teachers under Gov. Tim Walz is “cooking the books” by vastly underreporting annual fees paid to Wall Street investment managers — and posting near-impossible gains tantamount to a “Madoff miracle,” a top pension investigator said.
The state-run Teachers Retirement Association, or TRA, has publicly disclosed less than 10% of an estimated $2.9 billion spent on fees in the past 10 years, said Edward Siedle, a former US Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer and independent pension investigator.
The TRA also posted gains claiming it beat its own custom benchmark over periods of one, five, 10, 20 and 30 years by exactly 0.2%, which Siedle called “virtually impossible.”
Teacher testimony linked from NY Post piece: dated 7 Feb 2024
My name is Katie Dickerson and I am 55 years old and have been teaching for 31 years. 28 teaching in Hopkins and 3 in NH. As I’am getting closer to retirement I realize the state never made improvements to our retirement system. Not only do we have a high contribution rate to TRA, but we don't have a rule and are forced to work many more years unless we are willing to be hit with huge penalties. This is not how I ever imagined educators would be treated.
[More at link]
Toledo Blade Editorial: 18 July 2024
STRS Minnesota meddling
A cursory look at the Minnesota Teachers Retirement Association leads to the conclusion they’re either a world class pension or they’re cooking the books. Minnesota reported investment fees on the $26.7 billion teacher pension fund of $24.1 million. The teachers fund has a $6.6 billion private equity portfolio that would be expected to pay at least $132 million a year to fund managers. Moreover, a comprehensive study of 54 public pensions from 2008 to 2023 conducted by investment expert Richard Ennis shows fees average 1 percent of assets under management. By that metric Minnesota Teachers Retirement Association would be expected to pay over a quarter billion dollars a year to fund managers.
The national response from public pension advocacy agencies reflects the crisis these incredibly noteworthy numbers create. Either Minnesota has a special deal with Wall Street paying fees 90 percent under the going rate or an investment board made up of the governor, attorney general, secretary of state, and auditor, has massively massaged the truth.
A long term look at Minnesota’s pension math is just as perplexing. The teachers retirement fund purports to beat a composite index they created by 0.2 percent measured over 1, 5, 10, 20, and 30 years. The odds of that level of consistency over each measure of time are infinitesimal.
Earlier STUMP Podcast
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In light of the ongoing anger of Ohio STRS participants over the removal of COLAs (cost-of-living adjustments) in 2017, and the plan’s fairly typical asset allocation for a public plan (though better-than-peers results), I look at two recent research papers calling into question the use of alternative assets in public pensions. I have a different point to make: that the assets are not really what is at issue. The pension promises are.
Episode Links
Ohio STRS: Public meeting notice for July 19, 2024
* Last item: Investment Committee Meeting Presentation
Slide exhibits I referenced:
Boston College Paper: How Do Public Pension Plan Returns Compare to Simple Index Investing?
June 2024, by Jean-Pierre Aubry and Yimeng Yin
Key Findings:
Public pension plans are increasingly relying on alternative investments and active management.
But how does plan performance compare to a simple 60/40 index over various periods from 2000-2023?
Over the full period, plan returns are virtually identical to the simple index strategy, but plans have done much worse since the Global Financial Crisis.
If the current approach doesn’t yield higher long-term returns, a strong argument can be made for sticking with a simple, transparent strategy.
Here are the key graphs from the report:
Richard Ennis Paper
Girard Miller: How ‘Alternative Investments’ Are Dragging Down Pension Performance
Commenting on the Ennis paper, in case you can’t download from SSRN.
SSRN Link: How Hidden Costs Undermine Public Pensions in the US
Abstract
Public pension plans in the US incur exorbitant asset management costs. Most spend a lot and get nothing for it. High cost has hindered efforts to realize their actuarial return requirement. It has resulted in poor performance pretty much across the board. And yet, very few plans provide a full accounting of the costs they incur. Some still fail to net all their investment expenses from the returns they report. High cost is the Achilles heel of the public pension system in the US. It’s time to bring costs down, way down.
Alternative Asset Allocation by Public Pensions … and Ohio STRS
The orange line shows the Ohio STRS allocation. Yes, it’s pretty much in line with the median allocation for the database.
Prior Ohio STRS Posts
6 May 2024: Public Pension Governance Drama in Ohio
10 May 2024: Ohio Pension Drama Continues: Investigation Called on "Hostile Takeover"
16 May 2024: Ohio State Teachers Pension Drama Continues! Board Turmoil!
17 May 2024: More Ohio STRS Commentary: Alternative Assets in Pensions, Anonymous Memos, and Teachers Pensions in General [corrected/updated on May 22]
1 June 2024: Corrections and Clarifications on Ohio STRS: Audits and Investments
27 June 2024: Ohio STRS Drama Continues: No Bonuses and Board Member Resigns
15 July 2024: Ohio STRS Update for 15 July 2024: More Legislative Action, Advisor Resignation(s), Research on Public Pension Asset Returns
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I love the classics. Bobby Bonilla Day has it all: deferred annuities, too-high discount rates for a present value, Bernie Madoff, trying to avoid a “tax”, credit risk… let’s look in on my favorite sports deal while it’s still paying out, this July 1.
Episode Links
Coverage of Bobby Bonilla Day
Fox Sports: What is Bobby Bonilla Day? Explaining the New York Mets' ongoing contract saga
Major League Baseball might be intertwined with July 4, but another early-July holiday holds special significance for a significant portion of baseball fans.
That day is July 1, also known as "Bobby Bonilla Day." It's the day when the New York Mets pay their annual deferred fee to former player Bobby Bonilla — who last played an MLB game in October 2001.
Bonilla was owed $5.9 million when the Mets cut the aging player in 1999 and bought out the rest of his contract. Instead of paying him the sum up front, however, then-Mets owner Fred Wilpon cut a deal with Bonilla's camp. The Mets would pay Bonilla in installments, with annual interest, every year from 2011-2035. Those installments will eventually total nearly $30 million, much more than what Bonilla was owed, according to ESPN.
But there were several upsides for the Mets to pursue this strategy as well — at least, that's the way it looked at the time. The Mets used the $5.9 million to create an annuity with a securities investor they were heavily in business with at the time that would pay them back in annual dividends. By doing so, they also freed up that money from their payroll for MLB bylaws purposes, meaning that they could use it to sign other players without adding to the total roster payroll that the league could potentially levy taxes against.
The investor with whom they created the account was known for paying back those dividends with high interest, so the Mets themselves thought they would reap the profits of millions of dollars over the course of the deal even when subtracting all the money they would pay Bonilla.
Just one problem — that investor's name was Bernie Madoff, and in 2009, Madoff was convicted of running the largest Ponzi scheme fraud in recorded history and sentenced to 150 years in prison. In other words, the profits that the Mets were counting on in their Bonilla strategy likely never came. The fallout of Madoff's crimes financially devastated the Mets, whose dealings with the corrupt money manager went far beyond their Bonilla agreement. The Mets struggled financially for the rest of Wilpon's tenure as owner until the team was sold to current owner Steve Cohen in late 2020.
(2022) ESPN: What is Bobby Bonilla Day? Explaining why the former Met gets paid $1.19M every July 1
How rare is this arrangement?
Bonilla last played for the Mets in 1999 and last played in the majors for the Cardinals in 2001, but he will be paid through 2035 (when he'll be 72).
Here are some other notable deferred-money contracts, courtesy of ESPN Stats & Information's Ryan Milowicki:
• Bobby Bonilla (again): A second deferred-contract plan with the Mets and Orioles pays him $500,000 a year for 25 years. Those payments began in 2004.
• Bret Saberhagen: Will receive $250,000 a year from the Mets for 25 years (payments also began in 2004; this was the inspiration for Bonilla's deal).
• Max Scherzer: Will receive $105 million total from the Nationals that will be paid out through 2028.
• Manny Ramírez: Will collect $24.2 million total from the Red Sox through 2026.
• Ken Griffey Jr.: Will receive $3.59 million from the Reds every year through 2024 as the deferral from his nine-year, $116 million deal signed in 2000.
• Todd Helton: Will get $1.3 million from the Rockies every year through 2023 as the result of $13 million deferred when he signed a two-year extension in 2010.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Bonilla
Bonilla signed with the New York Mets during the 1991-92 offseason, becoming the highest-paid player in the league at the time, earning more than $6 million per year. However he struggled to live up to expectations with the Mets (which made the contract the subject of much criticism)[5] and throughout the rest of his career. He played with the Baltimore Orioles from 1995-1996, reaching the American League Championship Series with the team in 1996. He earned two additional All-Star appearances and helped the Florida Marlins win the 1997 World Series.[4] After being traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers part way through the 1998 season, he signed for a second time with the New York Mets in 1999. When the Mets wanted to release him at the end of the year, he negotiated a settlement whereby the Mets would pay him $1.19 million every year from 2011 through 2035 on July 1, a date that has become known in Mets fandom as "Bobby Bonilla Day". He is also paid $500,000 by the Orioles every year from 2004 to 2028 due to them also having a deferred contract with him.[6] After two more lackluster seasons, one each with the Atlanta Braves and St. Louis Cardinals, he retired at the end of the 2001 season. Through his 16 years in professional baseball, Bonilla accumulated a .279 batting average, with a .358 on-base percentage and a .472 slugging percentage.
Mets and Bernie Madoff
Curbed, April 2021: One More Thing Bernie Madoff Helped Ruin: The Mets
When you see Bobby Bonilla’s name trending on Twitter on a day like this, as a Mets fan, do you laugh, or do you cry?
I always laugh because it’s, like, my professional requirement at this point. But you know, it starts with a cry, right? There are certain phrases in the Mets vernacular that when you see them trending your heart just sinks and you’re like, Oh, what now? So, you know, if that’s a long way of asking, did I find out that Bernie Madoff had died because of Bobby Bonilla trending — Yes, I did.
ESPN, April 2021: Bernie Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme affected New York Mets, dies at 82
NEW YORK -- Bernie Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme led to the former New York Mets owners being embroiled in a $1 billion lawsuit, has died in prison at age 82.
Madoff burned thousands of investors, outfoxed regulators and received a 150-year prison term. He died of natural causes at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina.
Among his victims were director Steven Spielberg, actor Kevin Bacon and Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. But he had ties to sports figures as well. Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax was a client. And former Mets owners Fred Wilpon, Jeff Wilpon and Saul Katz were major investors. Their involvement changed the trajectory of the franchise.
Wilpon and Katz had over 500 accounts with Madoff and were sued for $1 billion by the trustee for the victims who claimed they knew, or should have known, about the fraudulent returns from Madoff's scheme, according to The New York Times.
Mets and Bond Ratings
Feb 2010, Reuters: New York Mets stadium debt falls deeper into junk
June 2020, Forbes: New York Mets’ Citi Field Debt Is Downgraded To Below Investment Grade
It may have just gotten a little tougher for Fred Wilpon to hang on to the New York Mets.
This afternoon, credit rating agency S&P Global Ratings announced it was lowering its ratings to BB+, from BBB, on the New York City Industrial Development Agency’s series 2006 $547.4 million payment-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOT) bonds, $58.4 million installment purchase bonds, $7.1 million lease revenue bonds, and series 2009 $82.28 million PILOT bonds issued for Queens Ballpark Co. LLC (Citi Field), the baseball team’s ballpark. S&P said it was also assigning a recovery rating of 1, reflecting an expectation for very high (90-100%; rounded estimate: 95%) recovery in the event of a default.
The team made a PILOT bond payment of $44 million in 2019. The BB+ rating is the first step toward being rated below investment grade. Specifically, an insurer rated BBB has good financial security characteristics but is more likely to be affected by adverse business conditions than are higher-rated insurers while an insurer rated BB or lower is regarded as having vulnerable characteristics that may outweigh its strengths.
The Mets—owned by Sterling Equities, which is controlled by Jeff Wilpon, his son Jeff, and Saul Katz—have been on the block for a while. A deal with Steve Cohen broke down in February. Most recently, former MLB All-Star Alex Rodriguez and Jennifer Lopez were trying to raise money to buy the team, which Forbes valued at $2.4 billion in early April. In early May, I wrote that the couple had ended their attempt to buy the team because they couldn’t get sufficient funds. But it was reported five days ago that Rodriguez and Lopez are taking another shot.
Oct 2023, Fitch Ratings: Fitch Affirms Queens Ballpark Company LLC (Citi Field, NY Mets) at 'BBB'; Outlook Stable
Fitch Ratings - New York - 04 Oct 2023: Fitch Ratings has affirmed the 'BBB' rating for the New York City Industrial Development Agency's (NYCIDA) PILOT $551.5 million revenue bonds, series 2021; $6.0 million lease revenue bonds, series 2006; and $49.2 million instalment purchase revenue bonds, series 2006, all issued on behalf of Queens Ballpark Company, LLC (QBC). The Rating Outlook is Stable.
RATING RATIONALE
The rating reflects Major League Baseball's (MLB) solid league economics and the historical franchise strength of the New York Mets which play at the Citi Field stadium in Queens, New York City. The QBC retained rights revenue stream provides strong coverage of operating costs and stadium PILOT and lease obligations, although ticket and suite revenues have shown historical variations in attendance levels based on team performance. Rating case coverage of all debt averages 3.7x from 2023-2045, while net revenue coverage of PILOT payments averages 3.3x over the same period.
Older STUMP Posts/Links
Dec 2023: Let's Make a Deal! Ohtani Restructures His Pay
Google spreadsheet with the present value calculation
2023: Happy Bobby Bonilla('s Agent) Day 2023!
2022: Happy Bobby Bonilla Day for 2022!
2021: Happy Bobby Bonilla Day! In Praise of Valuable Annuities
2020: Classic STUMP: Happy Bobby Bonilla Day! And Independence Day! Make Mine a Valuable Annuity!
2018: Mornings with Meep: Happy Bobby Bonilla (and Bruce Sutter) Day!
2016: Happy Bobby Bonilla Day! and more Americana
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Whatever you call it: Campbell’s Law (no relation), Goodhart’s Law, or the cobra effect — when you use measures that are merely cheap stand-ins for a much more difficult result you want to get at, people will start gaming that measure. And you will often get a result you really don’t like.
Episode Links
Wells Fargo News
Bloomberg, Matt Levine: Wells Fargo Mouse Jigglers
In 2016, Wells Fargo & Co. got in trouble for opening fake accounts. What happened was that Wells Fargo’s senior management had decided that it wanted its branch employees to cross-sell products, to push each checking customer to open up a savings account and a credit card and sign up for online banking and maybe get a mortgage, because this would deepen the bank’s relationship with the customer and ultimately lead to more revenue. But instead of hiring and training employees who would holistically assess each customer’s needs and suggest suitable products, Wells Fargo had “strict quotas regulating the number of daily ‘solutions’ that its bankers must reach,” and its managers would “constantly hound, berate, demean and threaten employees to meet these unreachable quotas.”
….
Ahahaha come on. You want a lot of mouse movement, you get a lot of mouse movement, but in a bad way. Imagine deciding how to measure and manage the productivity and value added of your wealth and investment management employees while they are working from home. What might you measure?
….
Which of those do you think is the best proxy for, like, contributions to Wells Fargo’s return on equity? Which is the simplest to measure? Which is the simplest to game?
CNN Business: Wells Fargo fired a dozen people accused of faking keyboard strokes
See here: Wells Fargo this week disclosed that it had fired more than a dozen employees for “simulation of keyboard activity,” Bloomberg reported, citing filings to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. CNN confirmed that multiple people were let go after a review of allegations that they created an “impression of active work.”
In other words, they were faking work, perhaps with the kind of mouse jiggler that you can buy online for $20.
Those devices — which keep your screen active and move your cursor in convincingly random ways — took off during the early days of the pandemic. With employees no longer huddled together under fluorescent lighting, eating sad desk salads, bosses suddenly had to wonder whether their teams were actually working or slacking off.
Even though most workers said they were more productive from home, many executives adopted “bossware” to monitor their staff’s laptops. (And to be fair, yes — sometimes we did step away, selfishly tending to our own personal business, like walking the dog or staring out the window while contemplating our mortality. We hope you can forgive us.)
….
But firing people over mouse movers may not be the best way to foster a culture of trust and inclusion.
“Managers often assume the worst when they see someone’s away, and so they’re looking for any type of data to show that that’s true,” Herd says. “So, team members are going to innovate around that.”
Mashable: Wells Fargo reportedly fired people for alleged 'simulation of keyboard activity'
There are many ways to fake being online while working, including the use of gadgets that imitate computer activity, or "mouse jigglers." Mouse jigglers are pretty easy to get; they're selling on Amazon for under £10 right now. They're mechanical devices that physically move your mouse around to prevent your computer from going into sleep mode. TikTokkers have been recommending these devices for years, while folks on Reddit have shared horror stories of being caught by their managers using them.
It's unclear how the company actually figured out staff were allegedly undertaking "simulation of keyboard activity" at all. An increasing number of companies are surveilling employees since the COVID-19 pandemic prompted the rise of working from home. Some companies have installed keylogger software on their computers to recorded characters typed, and biometric monitoring is on the rise, despite privacy concerns and employee backlash.
A 2021 study by Express VPN found 78 percent of employers engage in remote work surveillance, with 73 percent of employers using email, calls, messages, or videos to inform performance reviews — yes, your boss can read your Gmail drafts (and that's not all) — and 46 percent using it monitor the potential formation of workers' unions.
But as Jack Morse writes for Mashable, "While your boss monitoring your every move is definitely creepy, it's perfectly legal."
Reddit: r/news Wells Fargo fired a dozen people accused of faking keyboard strokes
The Various “Laws”
Wikipedia: Goodhart’s Law
Goodhart's law is an adage often stated as, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".[1] It is named after British economist Charles Goodhart, who is credited with expressing the core idea of the adage in a 1975 article on monetary policy in the United Kingdom:[2]
Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.[3]
Campbell’s Law
The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.[1]
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In 1976, Campbell wrote: "Achievement tests may well be valuable indicators of general school achievement under conditions of normal teaching aimed at general competence. But when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways. (Similar biases of course surround the use of objective tests in courses or as entrance examinations.)"[1]
Campbell's Law: Something Every Educator Should Know
The cobra effect
The term cobra effect was coined by economist Horst Siebert based on an anecdotal occurrence in India during British rule.[2][3] The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased.[4] This story is often cited as an example of Goodhart's law or Campbell's law.[5]
Check out the talk page:
This was told by my dad, who happened to work in the central planification ministry during early socialist Czechoslovakia (until he managed to escape).
Czechoslovakian crystal glass is famous worldwide, and thus chandeliers were produced, for export to get foreign currency. Problem is, there is a limited market for luxury chandeliers, which are purchased by the unit, some of them bespoke, all of them handmade, certainly not from one single design. Thus, worker productivity (very important in socialist countries, for any kind of bonus) cannot be measured by the unit, so let's measure the total weight produced... As a result, Czech crystal chandeliers grew to be so heavy, that clients were having engineering issues when trying to install those. YamaPlos talk 23:50, 28 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Winner’s Curse
The winner's curse is a phenomenon that may occur in common value auctions, where all bidders have the same (ex post) value for an item but receive different private (ex ante) signals about this value and wherein the winner is the bidder with the most optimistic evaluation of the asset and therefore will tend to overestimate and overpay. Accordingly, the winner will be "cursed" in one of two ways: either the winning bid will exceed the value of the auctioned asset making the winner worse off in absolute terms, or the value of the asset will be less than the bidder anticipated, so the bidder may garner a net gain but will be worse off than anticipated.[1][2]
Fake Philosophy Journals
Retraction Watch: How a widely used ranking system ended up with three fake journals in its top 10 philosophy list
We checked the Scopus philosophy list and discovered three journals published by Addleton Academic Publishers – which we had never heard of – are in the top 10 of the 2023 CiteScore ranking: Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations (3rd on the list of 806 philosophy journals indexed by Scopus in 2023), Review of Contemporary Philosophy (5/806), and Analysis and Metaphysics (6/806). All three also are in the top 100 of the 2023 SJR ranking.
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How was it possible to get into the Scopus top 10 in philosophy? The trick is simple: The Addleton journals extensively cross-cite each other. For example, of 541 citations to Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations used to calculate the 2023 CiteScore, 208 come from journals published by Addleton. Additional citations come mostly from Frontiers and MDPI journals.
Predatory publishing in Scopus: Evidence on cross-country differences
Abstract:
Predatory publishing represents a major challenge to scholarly communication. This paper maps the infiltration of journals suspected of predatory practices into the citation database Scopus and examines cross-country differences in the propensity of scholars to publish in such journals. Using the names of “potential, possible, or probable” predatory journals and publishers on Beall’s lists, we derived the ISSNs of 3,293 journals from Ulrichsweb and searched Scopus with them. A total of 324 of journals that appear in both Beall’s lists and Scopus, with 164,000 articles published during 2015–2017 were identified. Analysis of data for 172 countries in four fields of research indicates that there is a remarkable heterogeneity. In the most affected countries, including Kazakhstan and Indonesia, around 17% of articles were published in the suspected predatory journals, while some other countries have no articles in this category whatsoever. Countries with large research sectors at the medium level of economic development, especially in Asia and North Africa, tend to be most susceptible to predatory publishing. Policy makers and stakeholders in these and other developing countries need to pay more attention to the quality of research evaluation.
Quantitative Science Studies (2022) 3 (3): 859–887.
https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00213
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Jumping off from a recent story on embezzlement from a Florida Catholic church, I look at past stories of massive frauds, as well as some other failures and successes. I talk about: Rita Crundwell in Dixon, Illinois. Rizzo and Bell, California. The London Whale. And a happy save for TIAA before the financial crisis in 2008.
Episode Links
The Pillar: Massive parish theft calls for more internal control, expert says
The Pillar also has been great in covering the Vatican financial problems. A few sample articles: [all articles are free — some podcasts and other items are for paid subscribers only]
November 2022:
February 2022:
Nov 2023:
Rita Crundwell and Dixon, Illinois
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Crundwell
Rita A. Crundwell (née Humphrey; born January 10, 1953) is the former Comptroller and Treasurer of Dixon, Illinois, from 1983 to 2012, and the admitted operator of what is believed to be the largest municipal fraud in U.S. history. She was fired in April 2012 after the discovery that she had embezzled $53.7 million from the city of Dixon for over 22 years to support her championship American Quarter Horse breeding operation, as well as a lavish lifestyle away from work.[1][2][3] Crundwell pleaded guilty to her crimes and was sentenced to 19 and a half years in prison.[4]
Crundwell used the stolen money to turn her Quarter Horse breeding operation, RC Quarter Horses, into one of the best-known in the country; her horses won 52 world championships and she was named the leading owner by the American Quarter Horse Association for eight consecutive years prior to her arrest.[5][6] She spent less than 8+1⁄2 years (43% of her sentence) in prison before being released in mid-2021 to serve the remainder of her sentence in home confinement at her brother's 80 acres (32 ha) farm in Dixon.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixon,_Illinois
Dixon is a city and the county seat of Lee County, Illinois, United States.[2] The population was 15,274 as of the 2020 census. The city is named after founder John Dixon, who operated a rope ferry service across the Rock River, which runs through the city.[3] The Illinois General Assembly designated Dixon as "Petunia Capital of Illinois" in 1999 and "The Catfish Capital of Illinois" in 2009.
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In April 2012, Dixon Municipal Comptroller Rita Crundwell was indicted by a Federal Grand Jury for embezzlement. She used the embezzled funds to pay for her lavish lifestyle and what became one of the nation's best-known quarter horse-breeding programs, among other things. Crundwell's crimes, thought to be the most substantial municipal theft in U.S. history,[8][9] impacted Dixon's finances severely. Federal prosecutors estimated the amount embezzled at $53 million since 1990.[10] The city sued the auditors who had failed to detect the embezzlement and the bank at which Crundwell maintained a secret account, and received $40 million in settlements.[11] In February 2013, Crundwell was sentenced to almost 20 years in prison.[9][12]
Politico: She Stole $54 Million From Her Town. Then Something Unexpected Happened.
This is a very good, in-depth article from 2023. I used this excerpt:
Another intangible change: Dixon voters didn’t just throw out their council but their form of government itself, separating the legislative role of the City Council from the executive role of the city manager (whom the council appoints). Langloss, the current city manager, said the job functions like a that of a CEO, with a code of ethics not to get involved in politics. “The council really becomes a board of directors and the staff are in charge of running the operation day to day.”
More checks and balances, yes, but still no matter the form of government, someone has to hold power, and there’s no inherent reason an appointed city manager would be immune from abusing it. (The former city manager of Bell, California, was convicted of corruption, along with six other city officials, in 2014.) Meanwhile, the city has also instituted new financial controls, separating out functions once all concentrated in the person of Rita Crundwell. And one study suggests that city manager-run governments are indeed less susceptible to corruption; for one thing, an appointed city manager does not depend on campaign contributions the way an elected mayor does. Then again, though, neither did Crundwell.
What I did not use: the mayor died within a year, from cancer, and the whistleblower who found the issues during Crundwell’s vacation, Kathe Swanson, retired soon after all this.
All this is very stressful on those exposing the wrong-doing. It’s better if the wrong-doing never happens in the first place. (This is for another time)
Bell, California
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Bell_scandal
London Whale
The Modeling Platform: April 2016
How to Keep Your Spreadsheets Out of the Headlines: A Summary
In spring 2012, a prominent trader at JPMorgan was nicknamed the “London Whale” due to the size of the trading positions he took in credit default swaps. The risk management oversight for this trading desk relied on value-at-risk (VaR) limits calculated in a spreadsheet model.
Within this spreadsheet, there was a key error. The formula in calculating the VaR limits inadvertently divided by the SUM of two numbers as opposed to their AVERAGE.1 As a result, the volatility measure being used in calculating VaR was off by a factor of two. That error led to a significant understatement of the trading risk.
This was unlikely to be the only error in the spreadsheet, though. A report released in 2013 showed there was a series of spreadsheets being used for the risk management controls on these trades that involved several manual processes. Information was copied and pasted manually from one spreadsheet to another.
The result of these errors: $6 billion in trading losses over a two-month period.
To be sure, the risk management and governance problems found in this report went well beyond spreadsheets. However, lax spreadsheet practice did contribute to the loss.
Baseline Scenario, Jame Kwak, 2013: The Importance of Excel:
The issue is described in the appendix to JPMorgan’s internal investigative task force’s report. To summarize: JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office needed a new value-at-risk (VaR) model for the synthetic credit portfolio (the one that blew up) and assigned a quantitative whiz (“a London-based quantitative expert, mathematician and model developer” who previously worked at a company that built analytical models) to create it. The new model “operated through a series of Excel spreadsheets, which had to be completed manually, by a process of copying and pasting data from one spreadsheet to another.” The internal Model Review Group identified this problem as well as a few others, but approved the model, while saying that it should be automated and another significant flaw should be fixed.** After the London Whale trade blew up, the Model Review Group discovered that the model had not been automated and found several other errors.
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This is why the JPMorgan VaR model is the rule, not the exception: manual data entry, manual copy-and-paste, and formula errors. This is another important reason why you should pause whenever you hear that banks’ quantitative experts are smarter than Einstein, or that sophisticated risk management technology can protect banks from blowing up. At the end of the day, it’s all software. While all software breaks occasionally, Excel spreadsheets break all the time. But they don’t tell you when they break: they just give you the wrong number.
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This one is dark, so you’ve been warned. In my post last week on drug overdoses, I noted the great increase in drug overdose deaths during the pandemic, and I address the issue of drug addiction and its relationship with physical pain. Sometimes, there are no good choices.
Episode Links (Updated)
Matt Bivens, M.D. piece:
Drug Overdose Death Stats
Dashboard of U.S. Population Mortality — Opioid Deaths
SOA Research page: U.S. Population Mortality Observations – Updated with 2021 Experience
Historical Items
Laudanum: is a tincture of opium containing approximately 10% powdered opium by weight (the equivalent of 1% morphine).[1] Laudanum is prepared by dissolving extracts from the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) in alcohol (ethanol).
Innumerable Victorian women were prescribed the drug for relief of menstrual cramps and vague aches. Nurses also spoon-fed laudanum to infants. The Romantic and Victorian eras were marked by the widespread use of laudanum in Europe and the United States. Mary Todd Lincoln, for example, the wife of the US president Abraham Lincoln, was a laudanum addict, as was the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was famously interrupted in the middle of an opium-induced writing session of Kubla Khan by "a person on business from Porlock".[14] Initially a working class drug, laudanum was cheaper than a bottle of gin or wine, because it was treated as a medication for legal purposes and not taxed as an alcoholic beverage.
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Ohio State Teachers Retirement System (STRS) is having some drama, as a consulting firm has resigned due to power struggles between competing interests. The plan participants, whether current teachers or retirees, are angry about STRS investment staff getting bonuses while they do not get cost-of-living adjustments for retirement benefits. All of this while in an economic environment of high inflation… they aren’t the first and will not be the last.
Episode Links
Ohio STRS media coverage
1 May 2024, Pensions & Investment: Ohio State Teachers loses Aon as consultant amid board turmoil
Ohio State Teachers’ Retirement System, Columbus, has lost Aon as a governance consultant after the firm resigned from the assignment, according to people familiar with the matter.
The $94 billion pension fund’s board recently tilted to a majority of self-proclaimed reformers who want to gut investment staff and move the pension fund to all index funds, citing a desire to restore a permanent 3% cost-of-living adjustment.
At the April 18 board meeting, Trustee Wade Steen reclaimed his seat after the 10th District Court of Appeals earlier that day ruled that Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine did not have the authority in May 2023 to remove Steen as his appointed investment expert on the STRS board before the completion of his four-year term.
5 May 2024, Toledo Blade: Editorial: STRS got fired
The State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio needs a new fiduciary governance adviser. The $92 billion retirement fund for 500,000 Ohio teachers was effectively fired by Aon Fiduciary Services over the chaos on the STRS board.
When the 10th District Court of Appeals ruled that Gov. Mike DeWine acted outside his constitutional authority in firing his appointed investment expert Wade Steen, there suddenly was a 6-5 board majority in support of reforms first advocated by Mr. Steen.
STRS Board Chairman Dale Price, a Toledo Public School teacher, abruptly ended the April 18 meeting without the procedural norms of a motion to adjourn and a vote that supports the motion. The reform majority on the STRS Board was left to sputter in outrage as Mr. Price raced out of STRS headquarters.
April 2024: Ousted STRS member makes dramatic return to board, armed with court ruling
COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) – The governor overstepped his authority when he removed a member of the state teacher pension board, a court has ruled.
Ohio’s 10th District Court of Appeals sided with ousted State Teachers Retirement System investment expert Wade Steen on Thursday, ruling that Gov. Mike DeWine did not have the constitutional authority to remove Steen from his position on the pension board. The decision cements a magistrate’s recommendation that Steen be reinstated to the board to complete his term.
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Steen’s presence on the board gave a faction of reformers a majority, allowing them to make desired changes to the state’s teacher retirement fund. But the board chairman called a sudden adjournment of the meeting and left, effectively ending it.
December 2023: Math doesn’t add up – Retired teachers denied 3% COLA increases while some STRS staff get huge bonuses
The images of smiling retired teachers on the screen painted a different picture than the reality faced by Kathy Foster, who retired after teaching 32 years in Findlay.
Despite promises from the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio, Foster said she has received only one 3% raise since retiring 10 years ago.
“I got one cost of living wage,” said Foster, who lives in Wayne.
Meanwhile, the STRS investment staff has been handsomely rewarded for their work, she said.
“They have gotten millions of dollars in bonuses,” Foster said. “They lost billions of dollars last year, and they are still getting bonuses.”
“We haven’t gotten the money we were promised. I just want the 3% that I was promised,” she said.
STRS is not being good fiduciaries, said Foster, who in retirement has taken on a part-time job at the Wayne Public Library to make ends meet. “I’m not going to be able to work forever,” she said.
“They keep asking the members and the employers for even more,” while the system is spending money on the slick public relations blitz showing teachers seemingly thrilled with their retirement benefits, Foster said, shaking her head.
Public Plans Database: Ohio Teachers
All graphs sourced from the Public Plans Database
STRS 2022 Actuarial Valuation Report
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Back in December, somebody asked me how many people alive now would be alive in 75 years. The answer: about 15% (for the U.S.). This is not a trivial question — it relates to questions of political decision-making for the long-term, such as public finance. In this episode, I look at the survivorship for 10 years, 25 years, 50 years, and 75 years, and think through what this means.
Graphs and spreadsheet below.
Episode Links, Graphs, and More
Data and Assumptions
Population Estimate
Released 11 April 2024: 2023 Population Estimates by Age and Sex
Social Security Mortality Cohort Projections
2023 Social Security Trustees Report Life Tables, Cohort by Age and Sex, based on the Alternative 2 mortality probabilities used in the 2023 Trustees Report.
Survivorship Projections
First, here are the graphs of the original population in 2023, and how many of them survive to 2033 (10 years), 2048 (25 years), 2073 (50 years), and 2098 (75 years).
This is ignoring any new immigrants or births, just focusing on the current U.S. population and projecting into the future, looking at survivorship.
You can see all the weird peaks, and especially, the steep drops in old age.
But let me simplify the survivorship understanding with this table:
While 15% of the overall population of 2023 makes it to 2098, you can see that is primarily those currently age 20 and younger.
Let’s make it even more apparent:
Again, this is just projecting the current population. In 75 years, of the current population still around, 93% will be those currently 20 and younger, 7% will be 21-40 years old now, and those of us over 40 will have been long gone.
Spreadsheet
Related Posts
May 2015: Illinois Pensions: How Did We Get Here? The 1970 Constitution
This is the relevant section of the 1970 Illinois State Constitution:
SECTION 5. PENSION AND RETIREMENT RIGHTS
Membership in any pension or retirement system of the State, any unit of local government or school district, or any agency or instrumentality thereof, shall be an enforceable contractual relationship, the benefits of which shall not be diminished or impaired.
That section has not been amended since 1970.
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I’ve got five decades on me now, and five pieces of advice/themes to share:
* Be a good animal
* The universe is stranger and more wonderful than you can imagine
* Never pay retail!
* You can try anything once OR Risk is Opportunity
* It’s not about you (or me)
Episode Links
Be a Good Animal
2015 LinkedIn: Best Advice: Be a Good Animal
Battling Cognitive Bias, reprint in 2018
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In this episode, I look at the most recent revelations re: Francesca Gino’s academia malfeasance, but other tales of academic malpractice. Such as: filling in missing values in datasets with Excel’s autofill functionality, and not sharing data in chemistry/material science or cancer research in what may be fraudulent research. How can we depend on the data and results from what is supposedly hard science research?
Episode Links
Francesca Gino
Science, 9 Apr 2024: Embattled Harvard honesty professor accused of plagiarism by Cathleen O’Grady
Harvard University honesty researcher Francesca Gino, whose work has come under fire for suspected data falsification, may also have plagiarized passages in some of her high-profile publications.
A book chapter co-authored by Gino, who was found by a 2023 Harvard Business School (HBS) investigation to have committed research misconduct, contains numerous passages of text with striking similarities to 10 earlier sources. The sources include published papers and student theses, according to an analysis shared with Science by University of Montreal psychologist Erinn Acland.
Science has confirmed Acland’s findings and identified at least 15 additional passages of borrowed text in Gino’s two books, Rebel Talent: Why it Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life and Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to the Plan. Some passages duplicate text from news reports or blogs. Others contain phrasing identical to passages from academic literature. The extent of duplication varies between passages, but all contain multiple identical phrases, as well as clear paraphrases and significant structural similarity.…Debora Weber-Wulff, a plagiarism expert at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences, says Science’s findings are “quite serious” and warrant further investigation by the publishers and universities. HBS and Harvard Business Review Press, which published Sidetracked, declined to comment. Dey Street Books, a HarperCollins imprint that published Rebel Talent, and Guilford Press, publisher of the edited book The Social Psychology of Good and Evil that includes the co-authored chapter, did not respond to a request for comment.
Acland says she decided to “poke around” into Gino’s work in September 2023, after the researcher filed a $25 million lawsuit against HBS and the data sleuths who uncovered the misconduct. Acland focused on plagiarism, rather than data issues, because of her experience detecting it in student work. She searched phrases from Gino’s work on Google Scholar to see whether they matched content from other works.
She says she found apparent plagiarism in the very first sentence of the first work she assessed, the 2016 chapter “Dishonesty explained: What leads moral people to act immorally.” The sentence—“The accounting scandals and the collapse of billion-dollar companies at the beginning of the 21st century have forever changed the business landscape”—is word for word the same as a passage in a 2010 paper by the University of Washington management researcher Elizabeth Umphress and colleagues.
I didn’t talk about the person who found the plagiarism in this case.
This is what gets me so often — the tenured profs just assume nobody will ever check.
For various reasons, perhaps all the top profs shouldn’t assume that anymore. And maybe they should start crediting all their research assistants with the real work…. but that’s for another time.
Prior Gino posts/episodes:
Material Science/Chemistry Non-Replicable Experiment
Chemistry World, 11 April 2024: Holes in the ‘holey graphyne’ story
Recently, the journal Matter published a paper describing a novel form of carbon.2 This purported allotrope, ‘holey graphyne’, is comprised mainly of cyclooctadiyne rings. Moreover, the synthesis was supposedly accomplished using a simple copper catalyst. Typically, the C–C bond-forming reactions of the kind claimed in the Matter paper require expensive palladium.
The unusual structure and the unprecedented chemistry should have raised eyebrows during peer review, and ideally before this review commenced. Eight-membered rings with even a single triple bond are highly reactive (harnessing that reactivity has brought a Nobel prize to Carolyn Bertozzi). A material containing that many two-triple-bond rings would be more energetic than TNT, and likely quite prone to rapid unscheduled disassembly. Contrary to these expectations, the paper asserted perfect stability of the ‘holey’ material up to 700°C. While the reported spectroscopy was demonstrably mismatched with the claimed structure, the authors simply declared that everything fits.
….
Our replication is now published.4 We are grateful to the editor of Matter, as I know from experience that not every editor would even acknowledge the problem.
Regrettably, this story doesn’t qualify as a decisive win for post-publication review. Following their policy, Matter allowed the authors to publish a response, which doubled down on the original dubious conclusions. For now, the ‘holey’ paper remains unretracted, though I remain hopeful.
You may have come across equally troubling papers in your field. Don’t remain silent. Share your concerns on platforms like PubPeer or social media, reach out to journal editors and inform research compliance offices. This may end up being some of your most important work.
Matter, 6 March 2024: The purported synthesis of “holey graphyne” fails replication
A recent article by Ryu, Lee, and co-workers claims synthesis of “holey graphyne,” a strained sp2/sp1 carbon lattice featuring a repeating dibenzo-1,5-cyclooctadiene-3,7-diyne motif. Here, we describe the replication of the key experiments from this article. We did not observe the formation of holey graphyne under the reported conditions. Furthermore, we show that the claimed copper-mediated sp2/sp1 cross-coupling chemistry fails even for undemanding model substrates.
The Saga of the Iffy Excel Autofill & “Just Copy the Next Country” Imputation
Retraction Watch, 5 Feb 2024: No data? No problem! Undisclosed tinkering in Excel behind economics paper
Last year, a new study on green innovations and patents in 27 countries left one reader slack-jawed. The findings were no surprise. What was baffling was how the authors, two professors of economics in Europe, had pulled off the research in the first place.
The reader, a PhD student in economics, was working with the same data described in the paper. He knew they were riddled with holes – sometimes big ones: For several countries, observations for some of the variables the study tracked were completely absent. The authors made no mention of how they dealt with this problem. On the contrary, they wrote they had “balanced panel data,” which in economic parlance means a dataset with no gaps.
“I was dumbstruck for a week,” said the student, who requested anonymity for fear of harming his career. (His identity is known to Retraction Watch.)
22 Feb 2024: Exclusive: Elsevier to retract paper by economist who failed to disclose data tinkering
A paper on green innovation that drew sharp rebuke for using questionable and undisclosed methods to replace missing data will be retracted, its publisher told Retraction Watch.
Previous work by one of the authors, a professor of economics in Sweden, is also facing scrutiny, according to another publisher.
As we reported earlier this month, Almas Heshmati of Jönköping University mended a dataset full of gaps by liberally applying Excel’s autofill function and copying data between countries – operations other experts described as “horrendous” and “beyond concern.”
21 Feb 2024, by Gary Smith: How (not) to deal with missing data: An economist’s take on a controversial study
For example, a student in my introductory statistics class once surveyed 54 classmates and was disappointed that the P-value was 0.114. This student’s creative solution was to multiply the original data by three by assuming each survey response had been given by three people instead of one: “I assumed I originally picked a perfect random sample, and that if I were to poll 3 times as many people, my data would be greater in magnitude, but still distributed in the same way.” This ingenious solution reduced the P-value to 0.011, well below Fisher’s magic threshold.
Ingenious, yes. Sensible, no. If this procedure were legitimate, every researcher could multiply their data by whatever number is necessary to get a P-value below 0.05. The only valid way to get more data is, well, to get more data. This student should have surveyed more people instead of fabricating data.
….
Joelving also found that Excel’s autofill function sometimes generated negative values, which were, in theory, impossible for some data. For example, Korea is missing R&Dinv (green R&D investments) data for 1990-1998. Heshmati and Tsionas used Excel’s autofill with three years of data (1999, 2000, and 2001) to create data for the nine missing years. The imputed values for 1990-1996 were negative, so the authors set these equal to the positive 1997 value.
Cancer Research Fraud
The Free Press, February 2024: We’re Not Curing Cancer Here, Guys
These concerns have been brewing for a while and they are reaching a tipping point. The fact that there’s been so much plagiarism at Harvard and there’s been all this image manipulation shows that the most venerable institutions are no safeguard against malfeasance.
What punishment have any of these researchers actually faced? Claudine Gay resigned, although was shuffled into a role that paid her very well. All of the authors of these disputed papers have, to my knowledge, faced no sanction. Their paper gets withdrawn, but they still get promoted. There’s no punishment.
A few years ago, there was a proposal by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors arguing that every paper published in the top journals should make the raw data available. That proposal was shot down because people were worried about their careers, and that other researchers would take their data and use it to make breakthroughs before them. Sharing is the solution. You should have to make all the data available whenever you publish medical research.
Research Fraud, etc. thread at GoActuary
Contains links to these and other stories
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Let’s look at the condition of Minnesota Teachers, Connecticut state funds, and Chicago pensions, and three different (actually more) proposals to fix what ails these systems.
While Chicago is actually in the worst situation, the proposals for Chicago sound the most realistic in terms of fixing its problems.
Edward Siedle’s links
Mar 2024: Minnesota Teachers Fundraise Forensic Audit of State Pension System
Apr 2024: Minnesota Teacher Pension Forensic Investigation Invites Whistleblower, Expert And Public Participation
Minnesota Teachers in Public Plans Database
Minnesota Teachers Retirement Association - contains two plans in the database: Duluth Teachers and Minnesota Teachers. Duluth is small in terms of participants, so I will just link Minnesota Teachers plan.
Minnesota Teachers pension plan.
Some selected graphs:
Connecticut pension links
Hartford Courant op-ed
10 Ways to reform public pension funds
Improvements in the state's historical investment underperformance can alleviate the crushing income tax burden of transferring $7.7 billion in surplus contributions from state tax revenues to pay down the pension burden, and relieve state public employees and teachers from being docked an additional 2% of their wages each year to cover the investments hole. With even average performance in the past, Connecticut's income tax might have been sliced in half or more.
Given the scale of this challenge, it is remarkable that decades of underperformance of Connecticut's pension funds escaped public notice and scrutiny for as long as it did, until last year, when we revealed in a 113-page research report how Connecticut's pension funds have had one of the worst investment track records of all 50 peer states, across all timeframes, which garnered significant attention and calls to action from across the state. Given the asset management and endowment investing expertise in Connecticut, this was a tragic paradox.
Yale Business Report
113-slide version: The Investment Challenges Facing Connecticut’s Pension Funds - Jan 2023.pdf
Shorter version: Why Connecticut’s Investments Are Underperforming
Pie charts w/ the Excel defaults:
They actually cleaned it up a little bit from the originals.
Washington Pensions
Connecticut Pensions
As you can see, there is a very salient different between the two states.
And here we go:
Chicago pension links
Press Release, 5 Apr 2024: Harris School of Public Policy Announces Policy Innovation Challenge's Winning Student-Led Pension Proposal
Op-eds from the finalists
Read each team's op-ed via the links below:
The winning team: Opinion: Here's a roadmap to financial stability with Chicago's pensions
By Syed Ahmad , Anthony Beaupre , Liam Gluck , James Karsten , Greg Rudd
Opinion: To fix Chicago's pensions, consider a change in public opinion
By Eddie Andujar , Andy Fan , Andre Oviedo , Alberto Saldarriaga
Opinion: Two paths to funding Chicago's pension future
By Anna Weiss , Purva Sarkango , Devyanshi Dubey
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That life expectancy was around 64 when Social Security was started is misleading. That is also irrelevant for making decisions for making Social Security sustainable now. The parameters involved are more complex: we need to look at life expectancy age 65, the size of the working population compared to the retired population, and how many children are coming to add to that working population. Decisions must be made within the next decade — raise taxes, cut benefits, or some combination. People will not be happy.
Episode Links
Prior STUMP posts related:
On Life Expectancy
That was the claim.
Here are the facts.
2023 OASDI Trustees Report — Table V.A4.—Period Life Expectancy: Historical Data
First, while period life expectancy from birth increased about 15-16 years from 1940 to 2019 (ignore the pandemic for now), the key life expectancy - from age 65 - didn’t extend quite so much — only 5-6 years. That’s because you have to survive to age 65 in the first place.
A chart from the American Academy of Actuaries based on the historical, plus projected, from the report:
Social Security History
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1: When did Social Security start?
A: The Social Security Act was signed by FDR on 8/14/35. Taxes were collected for the first time in January 1937 and the first one-time, lump-sum payments were made that same month. Regular ongoing monthly benefits started in January 1940.
American Academy of Actuaries
An Actuarial Perspective on the 2023 Social Security Trustees Report
Social Security Committee issue brief on 2023 Social Security Trustees Report examining the latest detailed annual assessment by the federal government of the program’s solvency.
(February 02, 2024)
Issue Brief: Reforming Social Security Sooner Rather Than Later
Social Security’s combined trust fund reserves are projected to become depleted around 2034,1 at which time its income would be able to pay only 80% of the benefits scheduled for its 80 million beneficiaries. It is important that Congress immediately focus on this issue because delay makes the solution more difficult, as it gradually limits the viable options to those relying on increasing taxes.
(October 31, 2023)
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Looking at a recent sumo world scandal, but also looking at it from the point of view of self-regulation. Can self-regulation work? Looking at professional sumo in Japan, Equitable Life Assurance Society in the UK, and actuarial practice in public pensions in the United States.
[Gyoji photo: By Eckhard Pecher (Arcimboldo) - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3381695]
Episode Links
Hokuseiho/Miyagino Bullying Scandal
BBC News: Hakuho: Top sumo champion demoted due to protege's violence
Tachiai Blog: Hokuseiho is out; Miyagino Hangs On By a Thread
Japan Times, by John Gunning: How a rethink of supervision at stables could curtail bullying in sumo
Who Will Watch the Watchmen?
Wikipedia article
... nouiconsilia et ueteres quaecumque monetis amici,"pone seram, cohibes." sed quis custodiet ipsoscustodes? qui nunc lasciuae furta puellaehac mercede silent crimen commune tacetur.
... I knowthe plan that my friends always advise me to adopt:"Bolt her in, constrain her!" But who can watchthe watchmen? They keep quiet about the girl'ssecrets and get her as their payment; everyone hushes it up.
Equitable Life Assurance Society
Wikipedia article
European Parliament document on the fiasco: REPORT on the crisis of the Equitable Life Assurance Society
Equitable Life: A Decade of Regulatory Failure
Public Pension Segment
American Academy of Actuaries Public Discipline
Notice on Jonathan Schwartz’s public discipline from the Academy
Actuarial Board for Counseling and Discipline
STUMP Nov 2018: Actuarial History... Which is Not Really History
While the “voodoo” remark pissed off a lot of actuaries (and thus many complained to the ABCD), he also got dinged for this shoddy work. FWIW, he already did what the Academy required of him as part of his discipline, and while he’s listed as officially retired in the Actuarial Directory, he’s still a member of the SOA and Academy, as far as I can tell.
….
Schwartz was there to say that defined benefit pensions aren’t obsolete, and they are affordable.
And he “persuaded” that these were affordable… by fudging the numbers. Actuarial “voodoo” if you will.
He actually undermined the DB plans by lowballing the cost. Only in the short run do those in the unions get their payouts, but if it turns out the costs (which are ongoing – people who retired at age 50 back in 2008 have a high probability of still being alive, for instance) are too high….
dun dun DUN….
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