Becoming A Fossil

Because this post got so long, I made a Google Docs version which might be easier to read. Also, it can be downloaded as a PDF file or in other file formats.

Han Solo:
Where did you dig up that old fossil?

Luke:
Ben is a great man.

Han Solo:
Yeah, great at getting us into trouble.

I will make no comparisons between me and Obi-Wan Kenobi in this post, though it's true that in the past few years I've taken to wearing a hoodie during the winter months. Rather, the quote leads off this piece because it conveys the intended meaning of fossil that is in the post title.   

While I do want to consider a few examples of my drift toward being a fossil, what I really want to do is juxtapose these with questions about the labor market, to try to illuminate potential issues that are being batted around now. In particular, there have been many pieces as of late on the aging of society in America, overall low population growth, and labor market shortages.  The immediate thought is that senior citizens working some, even after they've reached the retirement age, would become a normal thing.  Some senior citizens do that now, President Biden for example.  Perhaps better examples come from the guy who makes deliveries for our florist and the guys who run the shuttle service for the car dealer.  I suspect they do this work to amplify their income and because it is do-able and not too stressful for them.  So it happens already, but perhaps not at the scale that it needs to happen in the not too distant future.  What things would need to be put into place in the not too distant future for it to happen at the appropriate scale?  Or is that even possible?

My Drift Toward Becoming A Fossil

My first example of becoming a fossil is my blogging, which I began back in 2005, partly because I found the listservs I was on then inadequate for sharing my ideas and partly because I didn't have a colleague in the know to have a coffee with on a daily basis and I needed some way to express my formative thinking.  Before too long I became part of the .edu blog community, which meant reading and commenting on other blogs in this community as well as writing my own. I developed a reputation for writing long and complex posts.  At the time there was a slow blogging movement whose members' inclination was to write in a manner contrary to the general drift of writing online.  Indeed, Barbara Ganley, who appears in the photo that leads off this piece became a friend and colleague for me till about summer of 2010, when I retired.  

I do want to note that I was different from the other .edu bloggers in the job I held at the time.  At the start I was Assistant CIO for Educational Technologies at Illinois, a very large research university.  That was a fairly high level administrative position.  Most of the other .edu bloggers had mid level positions and weren't part of IT management on their respective campuses.  So, part of the audience for my blog was vendors who wanted insight into the thinking of upper IT management on the various campuses.  Virtually none of my peers job-wise wrote a blog.  Consequently, the vendors glommed onto what I wrote.  Likewise, on more than one occasion I wrote on politically contentious ed tech issues that non-IT administrators on my campus would read.  For example, after the fact, I learned that this post caused some consternation.  But I heard that from a friend, not from the people who were upset with the post in campus administration.  I learned to write in a style of reasoned argument, which meant I wasn't a cheerleader for a particular cause, and tried to be evenhanded in the posts, asking questions that others didn't seem to be asking and making conjectures about possible answers but not giving definitive solutions.  Reasoned argument, formative thinking, conjectures about answers to puzzling questions, and slow blogging go hand in hand.

After I retired, in summer 2010, I continued to blog but there were changes in how I went about it.  I wrote on more varied topics, sometimes nostalgic posts about childhood, other times about national politics and/or economics.  The posts that were about undergraduate education, still the core of what I wrote, were based more on my own teaching.  I would teach one class a year during the fall semester.  Those experiences informed what I wrote about.  On the other hand, I stopped reading other .edu blogs for the most part. While I did read Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education some, much of their stuff that is written by staff is arms length. And with their opinion pieces that are typically contributed by some faculty member, you have little sense of the author ahead of reading the piece. So it is unlike reading someone's blog who writes regularly and whose voice thus becomes familiar.  I'm an introvert by inclination.  But I value exchanging ideas in a social setting with colleagues.  The upshot is that for me there was much less of this sort of social interaction and much more of me simply working through my arguments in my head.  My introvert tendencies were amplified as a result.

Two consequences of this are first that my frequency in posting went down.  When I started I was making a post almost every day.  After retirement, that went down to about a post a week.  Then it lowered even more.  Over the past six months or so it has been one or two posts per month.  And the second consequence is that posts have gotten much longer, so that even after I go to the keyboard it usually takes two or three days and possibly a week to complete the thing.  This combination of low frequency and very lengthy posts cuts against current trends in informal online writing.  My audience has fallen accordingly.  While I regret that, I'm writing this stuff now as therapy for me, to help me understand things.  Making sense of things is what keeps me going, so I intend to stick with doing the blog writing that way. Later in the piece I will discuss that there may be some hidden benefits from this approach, which are not so fossil-like.

Let me turn to the next example.  This is about being a mentor for Illinois Promise, a scholarship program on campus for students who come from poor families.  Early on in the program it was found that students who had mentors had higher retention rates than those who did not.  So, thereafter the program tried to encourage mentoring, although it remains opt-in for both the mentors and the mentees.  I became a mentor the year after I retired and have done it most years since.  I didn't try to be a mentor in 2018-19 for health reasons, nor in the following year because I was teaching in fall 2019 and I thought that was enough for me.  But I wasn't teaching in fall 2020 and even with the pandemic, I thought I could mentor fine online, using Zoom fairly frequently for interactions with the mentee and/or writing online asynchronously in whatever application the mentee preferred.  (I seem to recall that WhatsApp was mentioned in this context but of that I'm not sure.)  Given the circumstances, the program was okay with totally online mentoring.  I did go through the mentor training and had some further interactions with the person who was in charge of matching students to mentors.  All of that seemed to go reasonably well.  Yet I wasn't matched with a mentee, the first time that's ever happened.  

In the grand scheme of things this is not a big deal.  But it's precisely because it's not a big deal that I want to analyze the situation, to come up with plausible reasons for this outcome without, I hope, ruffling any feathers. In this analysis I will introduce the usual economic jargon, which is helpful in considering the overall labor market issues, and some non-economic factors as well that otherwise may not come up in the discussion.  

Mentors can be retirees like me, or current faculty or staff, or current students, particularly those who are also in Illinois Promise, and I believe members of the community who are not otherwise affiliated with the university can also serve as mentors.  Who should the student want to be their mentor?  Let's try to tackle that question first.  

If you conceive of the mentoring as mainly about academic issues, with the student life component relevant only insofar as it impacts the academic side, then the students should be looking for expertise on the academic side from the mentor.  Expertise in the academic side should be related to the formal education the mentor has and, more importantly, the research the mentor has been engaged in, which might be listed on the bio document that students get to peruse, as well as time on campus to understand how things work at the university.  The place is big and bureaucratic and sometimes to cut through that and get answers to questions requires understanding of the system.  In both cases you'd refer to the expertise as human capital.  In a coarse way, human capital can be measured.  In this dimension, retired faculty and current faculty have more human capital than current students.  

But it may be that even on the academic side of things there is a student perspective that eludes most faculty and staff.  Other students on campus would have an advantage in understanding the student side of things.  This is an example of specific human capital, the type that comes from direct experience with a specific organization.  Juniors and seniors in Illinois Promise who started as first-year students will "know the ropes." Recalling their own trajectory on campus, they might be better able to get a new first-year student up to speed.

Then, let me turn briefly to student life issues.  It may be that the mentee is more concerned about being lonely, coming from a high school that doesn't send many students to the U of I, than about anything else.  A student mentor might then solve this problem by introducing the mentee to other students on campus who are in Illinois Promise and want to be their friends.  In some ideal, perhaps, the Illinois Promise student would become friends with students on campus from a diverse set of backgrounds and circumstances.  Maybe that is possible, particularly for a very outgoing student.  But for the shy student, loneliness is surely a concern.  If mentoring might be a path out of that, that's the path the student will select.  

Let's return to the academic issues but consider this from a different angle.  In the late 1990s I experienced this "natural experiment" in the class I was teaching then, a very large intermediate microeconomics class, my SCALE project.  A significant part of the innovation in that class was to use undergraduates who had previously taken the course and done well in it as TAs, who would have online office hours during the evening. (Intermediate micro typically did not have graduate student TAs at that time.)  While this proved to be quite popular with the students, some of the students requested that these TAs also hold face-to-face office hours.  I accommodated that request.  By a scheduling glitch, those TA office hours overlapped some with my office hours.  The TA would be sitting in an office just across the hall from me and students who went to the TA office hours had to walk past my office, so I could see them do that. On quite a few occasions, students would opt for the TA rather than see me, though I was available for them at the time.  This experience offers something of a puzzle. 

On human capital grounds, regarding understanding economics and how the course was designed, I had much more human capital than my TAs.  That much is indisputable.  Evidently, the students who went to office hours and went to see the student TA when I was available didn't base that decision on human capital considerations. It seems to me a psychological explanation better explains the student choice.  Going to office hours can be psychologically uncomfortable, because the student is showing that they don't understand something which they feel they should be getting.  This is tantamount to admitting they are stupid.  It's hard to admit you're stupid in front of an authority figure.  (Indeed, some students are uncomfortable when in front of an authority figure without the not understanding something an issue at all.)  It's easier to open up about not understanding with a peer.  Doing so seems less consequential.  

So, I conjecture this issue matters in the mentoring as well, even if the mentoring does focus on the academic side of things.  The mentees may simply be more comfortable with student mentors.  

Thus, getting back to the question of who the student should want as a mentor, the analysis shows it can cut either way.  There isn't one right answer.  

Now let me further embellish my recent experience with not being matched to a mentee.  I'm quite sure that at the training I attended (in Zoom) I was the only retiree in the session.  And in my interactions with the person who was running the matching, a former Illinois Promise student herself, I was told there are only a few retirees now wanting to serve as mentors.  When I started as a mentor there were quite a few retirees doing it.  What has happened in the interim to effect this change?  There are two factors that are evident to me.  One is the pandemic.  The other is change in the leadership of Illinois Promise.  That the pandemic matters here seems sensible, as the pandemic has mattered for all our ways of going about things.  But how and why it matters is less obvious to me.  So I'll mention it only and move on.  Regarding leadership in the program, when I started the Director's spouse was a dean on campus of a small college.  This would seem to bias her views about mentors in favor of current and retired faculty.  The current leadership, as I've already suggested, may be biased in favor of mentors who are current Illinois Promise students.

It is tempting for me to think of this change as generational and an example of what happens more broadly in society.  When the younger generation takes over, the privilege of the older generation is then transferred to the younger generation.  This may be too broad strokes for serious consideration, but I will use it nonetheless to talk about ageism and what may be a significant issue with redeploying retirees into other lines of work.  I think the issue is not so much a person's chronological age.  Rather it is continuity or not with the work environment and the confirmation bias (which we all have) about those who lack such continuity.  In other words, the person can seem a fossil, quite apart from the person's capabilities, because others who are younger perceive it that way.   And, if that's right, to re-employ retirees in large numbers it would require some way to combat those perceptions or to find areas of work where those perceptions don't matter.

Let me give one more quick example before turning to the labor market issues.  With some irony, I did not teach in fall 2020.  I was asked to teach then, but I told the Econ department that we planned to be in a warmer climate after Thanksgiving, so I would only be able to teach if near the end of the semester I could move the course online.  This was before the pandemic and the department refused to make that accommodation - all undergraduate courses were to be taught face-to-face.  The department went through a change of leadership soon thereafter and nobody tried to reverse this decision after the pandemic made it clear that most instruction would move online.  

As a consequence, I don't know the attitudes of students who went through this experience via my own teaching.  There has certainly been a lot written about it, but I tend to put a lot of stock in my own teaching experience and learning from that.  Now I am lacking that way.  Does that make it impractical for me to teach again in the near future?  In other words, does the lack of experience from not teaching last fall trump all the prior experience I do have, because the ground has moved under our feet and things are truly different now?  I don't know. I simply want to note this might be an example of a third way to become a fossil - missing out on a big common experience that significantly impacted the mindset of others. 

There are other ways where my mindset and experience is different from my sons, both who are in their late 20s.  I don't play video games, having stopped doing that in 1999.  Other than reading the Harry Potter books aloud to them when they were kids, I don't read fantasy fiction.  I don't listen to hip hop music.  I don't participate in fantasy football.  And, mainly, I don't watch current movies.  All of this creates some distance between me and people of their generation.  In itself, it doesn't make me a fossil.  But taken together with those factors described above, it contributes to that perception.

* * * * *

Retirees and the Labor Market

The above can be thought of as background material for what will be argued in the rest of the piece.  The underlying questions I want to address are these.  If there is a chronic labor market shortage because of demographic factors, should retirees who are fossils or are near to becoming fossils re-enter the labor market to increase supply and ameliorate the shortage?  If so, how might that happen? 

Let me make some caveats before addressing the questions.  First, labor market shortages that are evident at present might be fully attributable to consequences of the pandemic, particularly that parents with young children had to reduce their labor supply or withdraw from the labor market completely.  This shortage is no doubt real, but it is near term.  If we get past the pandemic and return to something we call normal, this shortage will fix itself, at least one might hope that to be the case.  Here we're focused on a more long term issue.  With low population growth and the aging of the population overall, the fraction of the population working full time is likely to shrink.  That will produce its own shortage, or so the thinking goes.  

Second, there are some factors cutting the other way, notably the increasing importance of artificial intelligence as well as the ongoing automation of many work tasks.  These factors reduce labor demand.  As a result, the above mentioned labor shortage may never manifest.  Nonetheless, there are apt to be substantial issues of timing as innovation will be implemented unevenly in the future.  Moreover, there might very well be increased challenges regarding income distribution, further skewing an already unequal economy where the 1% capture far too large a share of income for that to be healthy.  Indeed, the income distribution issues may swamp the issues of overall growth of the economy due to labor shortage.

Third, the population of retirees should be partitioned into at least three components.  Component A consists of those people who are incapable of working, either face-to-face or at-a-distance, because of disability that is physical or mental.  Component B consists of people who are retired involuntarily. They lost their previous job for whatever reason, were unable to find a new job, and then left the labor market.  They may then refer to themselves as retirees because of their age and for the dignity in the name, although their income and/or health care are inadequate in retirement. Component C consists of those people who retired voluntarily and, absent any large unanticipated expenditures since retirement, have adequate income and health benefits.   With mandatory retirement ending 35 years ago, these categories are sufficient when considering the retiree population.  General human capital is likely to be concentrated among retirees in component  C, even after accounting for vintage effects and human capital depreciation.  This means labor demand will be higher for those people in component C.  Conversely, due to the income differentials, labor supply will be higher for people in component B.  Both of these factors taken together present challenges in coming up with a meaningful approach or set of approaches to get greater labor force participation from retirees. 

Fourth, the labor market is segmented and it may be better to consider each segment on a case by case basis.  Labor shortage may impact some segments chronically, while other segments remain entirely unaffected.  So it might be better to imagine segment specific strategies than one grand strategy for the entire market.  

Last, the pandemic has given legitimacy to working online at a distance.  That certainly was happening before the pandemic, but it was more exception than rule.  In the new normal it might become a co-equal to performing work face-to-face at the workplace.  For many retirees, in particular, this offers an avenue to participate in the labor market where otherwise they might not participate at all. 

With the above questions and the various caveats, I think I've done a reasonable job of problem definition. Good luck to any and all who aim to provide a general solution.  In what follows I have a far more modest aim.  I will focus on my own writing and experiences that speak to the issues, which I hope will illuminate further questions that need answers.  I know my preferences and capabilities may not generalize to the larger population (I'm a member of component C) but how they played out in my case might help in considering the broader issues.

About fifteen years ago I wrote a post, Second Careers and K-12. At the time I was 51 years old, with almost 10 years as an ed tech administrator in various positions on campus, and 16 years before that as a regular faculty member.  The first 6 years as an ed tech administrator were terrific, though I confess that at first I thought I was under qualified, lacking prior administrative experience and not well educated in how people learn.  I was able to make up for those shortcomings rather quickly and I learned the job suited my temperament and my talents. Further, most of the faculty who embraced ed tech then, the innovators and early adopters, did so by making clever adaptations of the technology in the courses they taught. I thought the real magic was in those adaptations rather than in the technology itself.  And the small units I ran were able to help these faculty members do the experiments with technology that they wanted to pull off.  Even after our mission changed, to bring these benefits to majority faculty members, we were able to encourage them to rethink their teaching in light of the technology, which is how I hoped adoption would occur.  But that didn't last. 

As usage increased there was a need to move to an "enterprise approach" and with that the small unit I ran became part of the larger technology organization.  On the back end (servers, network, security, etc.) that was all for the good.  But the culture of the larger organization focused on the technology itself and my unit, accordingly, became the tech support for the learning management system as its core activity.  I had more visibility and was being paid more after the merger, but my heart wasn't in the work any more.  So, in fact, when I wrote that piece about K-12 I had already arranged to take another position in the College of Business, to see if I could find what had attracted me to the work at the outset, as they were just getting going then in implementing ed tech in a strategic way.  (They are going gangbusters now.) But I also realized that might not happen, in which case I would need to look for something else, ergo a second career. One thought then was that teaching in high school might rejuvenate me.  Another thought was that public school education, in general, is an area where there is a chronic shortage of qualified teachers.  Turnover is extremely high.  Finding alternative sources for hiring new teachers seemed an imperative.  The post then explored the nexus of my personal needs and the social need. It was a think aloud, as most of my posts are.  It was not meant as a game plan for the rest of my career. 

What I write in the following might be taken as a sequel to that post, regarding what I learned since I retired back in summer 2010, four years after I became an Associate Dean in the College of Business. I was slated to retire early, given that the job in the Business School only partially rejuvenated me work-wise.  But the retirement itself was expedited by the budget crunch the university experienced after the burst of the housing bubble in 2008 and eventually the voluntary separation program that was instituted so the university could reduce the size of its payroll. 

A good deal of this is what motivates a retiree particularly, what distinguishes work from play, and then further, what is the difference between work for pay versus work as a volunteer activity?  These questions have answers that are different for a retiree than they are for someone in their 20s who is just starting out or someone in their late 30s or early 40s who is in mid-career.  Here are some of the factors that matter for why the answers are different. 

Personal Health

In the 1980s and early 1990s (before my older son was born) I played quite a bit of golf and developed "the bug" for it. I still have my bag and clubs from then and more recently would entertain myself by going to the driving range and hitting a bucket of balls.  But, now I have pretty bad lower back pain from arthritis and bone spurs.  The last time I went out to hit a small bucket (I think this was in summer 2019, but of that I'm not sure) I couldn't make it through even half of the balls.  My back was really hurting and I had to stop.  This is the sort of thing that keeps one from doing the activity.  If I didn't experience pain like this, surely I would spend a lot of my leisure time playing golf. 

Likewise, in the 1980s and through the 1990s I would go jogging, for the aerobic benefit and as a way to manage my weight.  But near the end of the 1990s I started to have knee pain and around 9/11 I gave it up entirely.  Foolish me, I didn't take up walking as a serious activity till many years later.  As a result and as compensation for the stress I was feeling at work, my weight ballooned. Eventually I did take up walking.  It didn't provide the aerobic benefit as far as I know, but it was regular exercise and gave good body motion. In the winter months, I rode the stationary bike in our exercise room.  But that was far less satisfying.  Eventually, we got rid of it and replaced it with both a treadmill and an elliptical.  I discovered that with either of them, my arms would bear some of my weight so there was less pressure on my back and I didn't feel pain there.  Eventually, the walking brought about the back pain and I made the switch to the treadmill, even in the warmer months. The elliptical was always a challenge for me, fodder for one of my rhymes but not something I could stick with for a long stretch of time. We do have a TV in the exercise room so I can watch (with subtitles) while I'm walking and break up the routine now and then by lifting light weights.  I've found I can stick with this as long as I'm not hurting too much elsewhere, but doing it is more obligation than passion. The upshot is that I needed something else to really occupy me.

The Creative Attitude

About a year ago I wrote a post called, Is Now an Apt Time for College Students to Embrace The Creative Attitude?  The paragraph below is from that post

The Creative Attitude is an essay by Maslow, well worth the read, and perhaps multiple reads.  (I made a Word version of the article because the PDF version which is available from Proquest has a very light font that's hard to read.)  I am going to appropriate Maslow's meaning for my own purposes. (I have sketched my own path toward the creative attitude in this post.)  First, it means being completely absorbed in the present activity, so much so that everything else fades into the background.  Second, this absorption is active, not passive.  Being hypnotized is not what we're talking about here, nor is vegging out.  Third, the creative attitude becomes a part of one's personal philosophy, so it is something to strive for in as many situations as possible.  Most people can describe some circumstance that produces complete absorption for them.  But then it is the particular environment, it would seem, that induces the state of absorption.  (For many college students, playing video games achieves this effect.)  Armed with the creative attitude, the individual can become absorbed in many different environments and it is the individual's fascination with the environment that drives the absorption.  Fourth, this becomes something that the individual wants to do, in advance.   Experiences of complete absorption are enjoyable, in retrospect, though while going through them the complete absorption precludes making a determination then and there of whether it is enjoyable.  It is this retrospective preference for experiences of complete absorption, that provides the motive for embracing the creative attitude.

One of the reasons I liked to read Maslow is that he seemed to have found what makes me tick.  Sometimes, writing blog posts like this is a way for me to embrace the creative attitude.  Other times, it would happen when making a learning object in Excel that I would use in my teaching.  Most instructors wouldn't think to do this sort of thing and would rather use publisher-supplied materials.  I liked making my own as there was challenge and art in doing so and it engaged me totally, most of the time.  Of course, nothing is ever so pure and the sense of full engagement is lost when I get stuck, such as what I wrote about here in making a homework assignment in Excel on the economics of bargaining, having experienced getting past the being stuck stage and doing so on multiple occasions.  I do look forward to these episodes of complete absorption and have been able to make it my raison d'être. Sometimes reading provides this feeling.  That happens more with fiction, though in the last few years I've noticed that it takes quite a while for me to get into the book.  

I do also want to make a bow to James Thurber's Walter Mitty.  While it's true that when I first started to write a blog I had so much backlogged experience to write about that it felt as if the words just flowed out of me with no effort whatsoever, nowadays that is no longer true.  Prewriting is necessary.  And for me, prewriting is a lot like daydreaming; maybe they are one and the same. There is a bit of a puzzle here.  You have to be doing something when you're prewriting.  I noticed as a teenager that I liked to wash the dishes (though I was inherently lazy about housework) because the activity was sufficiently autonomous that I could do my imagining simultaneously.  (I wasn't writing then, but I was being like Walter Mitty.)  Now I apparently waste a lot of time on the computer screen (mainly solitaire but some Sudoku as well) where there is likewise enough autonomy in that to allow the prewriting to happen.  But the reality is I'm also stuck with some regularity and then I'm prone to procrastinate.  I waste time then that is purely dissipative.  Nothing comes from it at all.  And sometimes I can't tell which I'm doing.  This is more for writing the blog posts than doing work which is externally imposed and may have a deadline.  I get down to business then more quickly, the obligation to others does provide an effective incentive. Yet there are limits to that.

Play Or Work, Which Is It?

I like this quote:

You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play.
Warren Beatty 

 

The last time I taught a class, fall 2019, I showed this quote to my students. They asked: who is Warren Beatty?  (Maybe it's not that I'm a fossil but rather that the current generation of college students is under-educated.)  In any event, I think this quote continues to apply in retirement, though one needs to expand the notion of what may count as work.  The critical issue is not whether you're paid for doing it.  What matters is whether others benefit from your effort. 

Anything posted on the open Web is a public good in an economics sense.  This means it's non-excludable; one person's consumption of the good doesn't block the consumption of other people.  In contrast, private goods are fully excludable.   Of course, not all public goods are valuable.  Those that have value create a great deal of benefit for a few of those who access it or create a modest benefit for the many who access it.  In this way of thinking, it's mainly play in the making if the finished piece generates hardly any benefit, while it's mainly work if the finished piece creates a good deal of benefit for others.  Yet during the process of creation, when you are not already a well regarded author you can't know what the ultimate benefit will be.  You can form an expectation ahead of time, based on how your other works have been received.  With blog posts, you can measure that reception imperfectly, by the number of hits the post gets, whether those hits are first time readers or regular readers, any comments the post receives, trackbacks and pingbacks, and perhaps by having your entire blog syndicated on some other uber blogging site. You might prefer the expression "making a contribution" rather than refer to the writing as work, but that's more a linguistic preference than anything else. 

I do want to make another point that I think is more important.  There is an ego reward in writing a post that gets an unusually large number of hits and/or gets some comments that commend the author on a job well done. If the writer can treat these ego rewards as something in the background, nothing more than that, it's fine.  After all, the writer can't control what others will say or do.  But if those ego rewards start to become part of the prime motivation for writing new blog posts, that's the road to perdition.  A bad case of writer's block will develop.  The creative attitude will be lost, as will any sense of play.  I wish I could provide some advice for how to avoid this from happening, but all I can do is issue the warning. 

Volunteer Or Work For Money

My attitudes about this have evolved.  In retirement I receive a pension from the State University Retirement System (SURS).  At the time I retired the pension was substantially less than the salary I received during the tail end of my working for the university.  In 2010, that discrepancy was more than offset by the separation payment I received.  But starting in 2011 there was a substantial discrepancy and my focus was on working to make up that difference.   At that time one of our kids had just started at the U of I and the other was still in high school.  If he too went to the U of I, which is ultimately what happened, that would be quite manageable financially.  But if he went to a private university, such as Northwestern or U. Chicago, that would be quite a financial bite.  Further, I had a thought that I'd be doing some consulting,  on which these income expectations were based.  That ultimately did not pan out.  The overall economy was still pretty shaky at the time and consulting opportunities were less available than I had anticipated.  In retrospect that may have been for the best.  Giving people reasoned advice I can do.  Selling them a bill of goods cuts against my nature.  I'm afraid that too much consulting ends up being the latter. 

In spring 2011 I taught two courses for the Economics Department, Intermediate Microeconomics and Behavioral Economics.  That was the only time I taught two courses in a semester since I've retired. This more or less made up the income gap between my prior salary and my current pension.  But that was a one and done thing.  Indeed starting in fall 2012, I would only teach one course a year on the Economics of Organizations.  At or around that time I did some one-off volunteer work, for example, producing a training document for another university, where I knew the head learning technologist there from my earlier administrative work. I made a brief but ultimately aborted effort to get involved with teaching in the local high schools.  And I schmoozed online quite a bit with a former colleague about possibly consulting with him, though nothing ever came of it. 

In the meantime, my wife got a promotion at work and with that a good pay increase.  Paying for the kids' college no longer looked like it would create a strain, and the reality of our day to day spending was that it seemed entirely unchanged by me being retired.  Consequently, the salary at the time of retirement stopped being a reference point for me regarding current income.  It's also true that there is a 3% COLA on SURS pensions while for a good part of the 2010s decade salary increases at the university were rare and modest when they did happen.  So there was some sense of catching up income-wise, purely from the pension, and less of a felt need to generate additional income.

My desire to keep teaching came from a different place.  I had spent 14 years as an ed tech administrator and undergraduate education was my focus.  I was totally wrapped up in it all those years.  Even after I stopped working I couldn't let go in thinking about undergraduate education.  Teaching was a way to enable continued involvement, albeit from a different perspective.  I would be able to have substantial and ongoing contact with students and learn from them.  And I would be able to have teaching experiments to see what might pique their interest and engage them further.  This is why I continued to teach after it was clear that the income needs really weren't there. 

There are some unpleasant aspects to college teaching, much of which surrounds assigning grades and the various ancillary consequences, cheating on exams for example, though those consequences go well beyond cheating. I'm also no fan of the process where students can add or drop a course freely during the first two weeks of the semester. And while I understand that seniors need to go to job interviews, that this has become a legitimate reason for missing class I find disturbing.  So I've come to view the payment I do get from teaching as a compensating differential, to offset these various sources of unpleasantness.  Indeed, I'd be willing to teach as a volunteer activity, if all this unpleasantness would go away.  To illustrate the point, in my recent project that I called The Non-Course, I conceived of my coaching of students as a purely volunteer activity.  

Let me turn to my real and significant volunteer work, which began in fall 2015 and has continued since, for a human rights organization in Uganda now called Universal Love Alliance (ULA). I will detail some of my involvement in the next section, which will focus on how volunteer work should be structured if it is to attract people like me.  Here I will content myself with discussing my motivation for participating, which has evolved over time. Some of these factors will generalize to others, but then some of them will be specific to me. 

At the start I knew nothing about the work that ULA does nor about the issues in Uganda that would encourage the work. So, at first it really was a stab in the dark.  I tried it only because the teaching wasn't going well and I had told myself that I needed to find something else to occupy my time.  ULA came along then and they wanted me to participate.  If the teaching had been going well I would have declined the invitation and that would have been that.  In other words, that much was serendipity. 

While the initial group that I was part of failed and indeed a couple of the group's members were running a scam so they were eventually forced out of the group, the experience enabled me to have a direct conversation (via Facebook Messenger) with the Executive Director of of ULA, Turinawe Samson.  We soon became friends and informally I became his mentor.  This wasn't planned; it just happened.  What allowed it to happen is the trust that quickly developed between us.  I value collegial relationships greatly, as I wrote about in this post called Affection.  I soon had similar friendship/trust relationships with others at ULA in leadership positions. 

At the outset I didn't know what I could contribute to the effort.  I found that some of the technology ideas I was trying to advance in my teaching could be modified and then used in ULA work. And my experience as an administrator was helpful in the mentoring with Samson.  So while the work that ULA does is quite different from anything I had experienced earlier while working at the university, I found that I had relevant skills to do this work. It wasn't like I was starting at square one. 

Over time I became quite knowledgeable about what ULA does and how it contributes to making Uganda a better place for all.  And I became aware that the people who worked at ULA were perhaps the most genuinely good people I had ever met.  They put their hearts and souls into helping marginalized people.  Their dedication to the work impressed me a great deal.  And as I became their friends, I did not want to see them fail.  That is why I stick with it.

What readers might find surprising is that it is not ULA's mission which drives me.  I certainly believe that all people should be treated with common decency, so my views are in accord with the ULA mission.  But I have never been an activist and apart from undergraduate education have never been driven in my own efforts to fulfill some grand vision. Having a means of self-expression was always more important to me.  Back in 2012, immediately after Halloween, I spent 5 days in the hospital because of an infection in my shoulder, where I had rotator cuff repair about 6 weeks earlier.  I spent some time then thinking about the motivation of nurses, whom I saw much more frequently than doctors.  Nurses are close to being egoless, surrendering themselves to the needs of the patients. At least the good nurses are like that.  This may be the image most people have of the dedicated volunteer.  But it is not me.  While I support ULA strongly, I still find a way for self-expression in the work, at least some of the work.  It is true that there is less novelty for me now than there was at the beginning.  Some of the work just has to get done and I do it out of obligation. But if that were the entirety of things, I think I'd give up and look to do something else.

How Volunteer Work Should Be Structured For Someone Like Me

Much of what I do for ULA is ghostwriting/copy editing.  I wrote about this in a post from a few years ago. ULA is a non-profit and it needs revenues to operate.  One of the ways it secures revenues is through grants that are awarded competitively.  That means a grant proposal needs to be submitted.  Writing such a proposal takes some skill, one that is not there among the ULA staff in Uganda.  The ghostwriting fills in this gap in capability.  But the ghostwriting is not limited to just writing grant proposals.  ULA does workshops on contentious topics that require the attendees to suspend their own prior judgements and reach new conclusions based on the information provided at the workshops.  Part of the workshops involves giving the attendees written training materials.  The quality of the writing in those documents matters for the effectiveness of the workshops.  Well written materials are more persuasive.  Then there is a lot of correspondence that occurs between ULA and potentially important connections with people outside the organization.  These are possible donors, or leaders of other organizations who can provide very useful advice, or administrators in organizations that have provided grants to ULA already, where it would be good to establish a personal connection to enable the grants to recur.  So, the emails and related documents also need to be well written.  

My authoring or editing of this writing is highly visible within ULA and within its sister organization ULAF (a foundation that does fundraising on behalf of ULA) where all Board members are volunteers.  But mainly it is invisible to the recipients of the writing who might very well infer, incorrectly, that the document(s) were written and edited by ULA staff.  Ghostwriters of books get paid for their efforts.  I want to explain why this still can work with the volunteer work.  The main point is that I've already had my career and had previously developed some reputation, both as a writer and as a thoughtful member of the ed tech profession.  I really don't need further recognition now.  What I need is to know that the writing does advance the ULA cause.  I have gotten feedback to that effect.  That is enough.  

 

Let me briefly connect the ghostwriting to my blog writing.   If writing were like riding a bicycle, there wouldn't be a connection.  Having once learned how to write you can then write on demand thereafter.  Alas, I don't think it works this way.  I think you need to keep practicing to maintain proficiency.  But if the ghostwriting itself happens sporadically, then some other means of practice is necessary.  I will posit here that writing these blog posts has the indirect benefit for me to serve as the needed practice for ghostwriting.  In coming up with that idea I thought of Bill "Spaceman" Lee, a major league pitcher who played for the Red Sox during much of the 1970s.  He had an unusual form of warmup, throwing to his catcher from much further away than the distance from the pitcher's mound to home plate.  This loosened him up so he was relaxed when he started the game.  Likewise, the blog post is a kind of warmup activity for writing that is more constrained, following the rules that others provide. It's really the prewriting part that is key. The blog posts require a lot of prewriting.  So I'm ready to perform the necessary prewriting when working on stuff for ULA.

Members of the ULAF Board play the role of an advisory group for ULA, rightly or wrongly.  (We have been told by at least one potential funder that an active Board of Directors in Uganda that ULA relies on is important to them in assessing the organization.  ULA does have such a Board of Directors, but circumstances make it quite difficult for that Board to meet with regularity.)  The ULAF Board sometimes has back and forth with each other without including the ULA leadership from Uganda, just to work through our own thinking, and then has follow up conversation with the ULA leadership included.  Also, individual ULAF Board members might have an extended one-on-one thread with Samson.  I do that quite regularly.  There are a host of issues to work through and talking about them helps to come to a sensible resolution. 

 

So I find myself part of a team of volunteers who both together and individually have the back of ULA.  We know each other quite well and interact in a friendly manner, even if on occasion there is disagreement in how we should proceed.   We have a chronic need to increase the donor support that ULAF tries to elicit and to make ULA more visible to potential friends and donors.  This may ultimately necessitate changes in the composition of the ULAF Board.  In that case I hope that the tone and style of interaction we currently have can be retained.  I believe those factors sustain each and everyone of us. 

 

I want to note one other thing here, which is about the intensity of the effort.  Episodically, it is a full time job, when there is an urgent need to get work done.  Mostly however, it is a couple of hours a day only, or less.  But that time is not prespecified.   As I'm usually online a good chunk of the day, connections can be made at any time and work can follow after a connection is made.  I would say that on average it is somewhere between 15 and 20 hours a week, which is about what I want it to be.  I don't want to be working full time now.

 

Let me now briefly speculate on how such a volunteer effort might be brought into assisting in K-12 education. In the earlier piece I mentioned on second careers the thought was that I'd become a teacher and get paid for the effort.  I'd be a substitute (in the economics sense) for current teachers.  Instead, imagine a team of volunteers, perhaps with retirees or current college students or anyone else who is interested in doing this sort of thing and has some capability that would be useful, that operates in the background to help teachers.  This might mean helping them respond to student writing, making learning objects for them to deploy, serving as mentors so teachers can talk out their issues with an interested listener, and possibly many other activities that can be tried based on the expressed needs of teachers and the capabilities of the volunteers.  This volunteer group would serve as a complement (in the economics sense) for current teachers.  I think this has a much better chance of working than what I wrote about 15 years ago.  And if it is a group that provides this background support, rather than a single individual, it might be able to manage turnover and bring in new members to the group without too much disruption.  At least, that would be the hope.

* * * * * 

Wrap Up

If the logic argued in the previous section makes sense and we wanted to generalize from it further, it may be that certain segments of the labor market where there are shortages try to attract retirees via volunteer activities while other segments with shortages try to attract retirees by having them come out of retirement and paying them for the work they do (and perhaps giving them the necessary training so they can succeed in doing that work).  For this to succeed, the component C retirees would have to opt for the volunteer activity or not participate at all, while the component B retirees would have to opt for the paid work or not participate at all.  Achieving this would produce what economists call a separating equilibrium.  We'd then be interested in such equilibria where a sizable number of retirees do participate. 

 

Getting from here to there will take quite some doing.  I hope this piece illuminates those things that will need to be done to make it happen.  That's the full picture in a nutshell.