Clayton Christensen: How MBA-driven Profit focus is Killing the U.S. Economy - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/18/clayton-christensen-how-pursuit-of-profits-kills-innovation-and-the-us-economy/ <comment><USER2> The Keynes quote made me think of something. We have in the U.S. what is probably best described as an ethical system based on profit. It's literally pervasive. "The only purpose of corporations is to maximize shareholder profit." "We should have economic policies that grow the pie." All of these statements are couched in a normative principle: that the singular pursuit of profit will lead to maximization of the pie, and thus the greatest overall welfare.

This normative principle was defensible in the 18th century, though Adam Smith never took it to quite the extremes that we have today, but is pretty solidly indefensible based on what we know about economics in 2011. And that's something I don't think even most economists would dispute today.

Yet, our ethical system is beholden to that principle, though we know it is based on assumptions we know to be wrong.

What MBA programs need to teach, and I think it is happening recently to some extent, is that "social responsibility" is not a dirty word. Considering the social impact of business decisions, something that is considered irrelevant under the current ethic because of the premise that profit-maximization == welfare maximization, is not only not a bad thing, it is an indispensable obligation of doing business in civilized society.

<comment><USER3> The ethics of private property aren't based on profit, they're based on the self-evident fact that one owns his own will and is responsible for his own actions, and consequently the fruits of his labor.

Social responsibility isn't a dirty word, it's a completely meaningless and dangerous word used by ideologues of all types to serve their personal vision of the world. It means something different to everyone you ask.

I don't have responsibilities to obligations I never made.

<comment><USER2> If you read Adam Smith, his argument is that pursuit of individual gain produces social good. "By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it." The rhetoric we use today "a rising tide lifts all boats" and the like is thoroughly rooted in that thinking.

The fact of that matter is that we know this premise to be false. That knowledge is indeed irrelevant if you conceive of the profit-maximizing principle as being entirely rooted in an "every man is an island" hyper- libertarian conceptualization, but that is a relatively modern phenomenon and a wholly inaccurate description of the underpinnings of modern American ethics.

As a practical matter, only a few crazies actually believe that people have no social obligations. A large majority have some social conscience, but because they fully buy in to Smith's normative principle, they believe that their business decisions need not be guided by considerations other than profit. To the extent that this principle is invalid, their behavior is inconsistent with fostering desirable outcomes.

<comment><USER3> _"By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it." [..] The fact of that matter is that we know this premise to be false._

I disagree. If someone doesn't pursue their own interests then by logical necessity they are pursueing interests imposed on them. "Social interest" is merely a euphamism for State interests. Killing the Jews in gas chambers was a social interest. Of course, by disagreeing with that you would prove my point that "social responsibility" is anything but a completely subjective term that varies (greatly) by each individual, and only has power in the context of the State.

 _As a practical matter, only a few crazies actually believe that people have no social obligations._

But what does social obligation mean? If you didn't obligate yourself, then social obligation really means obligation by force, obligation to the State and whatever the State deems an obligation. Obligation to a small group's whim instead of obligation to your own actions, interests, and responsiblities.

<comment><USER4> You've got to the Godwin point at impressive speed, kudos.

> _If someone doesn't pursue their own interests then by logical necessity > they are pursueing interests imposed on them._

You fall for the fallacy that you actually _could_ be free of social influence anyway. This isn't the case; see you've been Ayn-Randed to the bones, for instance. That makes you believe mad things that work against your own interest in the long term. See?

> _But what does social obligation mean?_

You're born to some family, speaking some language, walking some road, sheltering under some roof someone built, lighten by some power that was brought to you, etc. Are you pretending you don't need anybody else?

<comment><USER3> > You fall for the fallacy that you actually could be free of social influence > anyway.

No, I never implied that I was free from the forceful influence of the State. Social obligation in the context of the post I was responding to is (I thought) referring to regulation and taxes, the social contract.

> You're born to some family, speaking some language, walking some road, > sheltering under some roof someone built, lighten by some power that was > brought to you, etc. Are you pretending you don't need anybody else?

I'm not pretending that I don't need anybody else. I just don't find moral legitimacy in being compelled to do things by force without my consent.

Private roads aren't allowed to exist, I pay for my own shelter presumably built by people who were already paid to build it, I pay for my power by the company that provides it, and language I acquired by picking it up from others at who provided it freely.

<comment><USER4> > _I just don't find moral legitimacy in being compelled to do things by force > without my consent._

By force? Were you subject to violence? You're free to head into the wilderness, live from your hunting and start your own civilisation on your own, perfectly free; others did. However it proves more cumbersome and less pleasant than simply living in our oppressive society.

I'm perfectly happy with paying taxes, and having roads, policemen, garbage collectors and street lights. What's the opposite stance?

> _Private roads aren't allowed to exist_

How so? The path going across my terrain is as private as possible. However private roads aren't really practical. It's commonly known that infrastructure work in general is less efficient when not a monopoly, and so far the only working monopoly is the state (monopoly of violence most saliently).

<comment><USER5> Private roads are very, very difficult to build in modern America. The biggest issue is that people traveling on a private road are not allowed by the government to sign away their right to sue, and the liability for the private road operator is enormous.

Other issues are the thicket of regional planning regulations. There's really not truly private property any more, roadbuilding of any type is subject to the state and local political process.

<comment><USER4> I'm afraid you're confusing a symptom (the over-complexity of our society) with a cause. My advice : read the always fresh and mind-blowing Joseph A. Tainter's "Collapse of complex societies".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The root cause of the problem is the separation of ownership from control. This lead to the rise of the class of "professional managers", whose interests are intrinsically short-term. In the times when American wealth was created, the owners called the companies with their own names: Boeing, Ford, and MBAs did not exist. Their interests were to pass the earned wealth to their children. The historical mission of the MBAs and the professional managers is to dismantle the salvageable assets and sell them to more vibrant economies.

<comment><USER7> The separation of ownership from control began with the East India Company, the first known corporate entity. In 1600, the Queen granted a Royal Charter to EIT for pursuing trade with India. Professional managers have existed just as long.

The problem is not the managers, or people with MBAs. The problem is that the Delaware chancery courts, where most American corporations are incorporated, long ago ruled that the duty of the Board of Directors is to manage the company to maximize the returns of its shareholders' investments. _They can, and frequently do, get sued if they do not do this._

<comment><USER8> Yet the timeline upon which they are to do this is unclear. Investors want to maximize for a decade, temporary holders want to maximize the quarter. The point Christensen makes is that short term maximization does not always lead to long term maximization. One thus must blame the shareholders themselves for not acting as investors, but rather as speculators, frequently not even participating in board elections, allowing the CEO to pack the board with allies, just waiting for a bump in the share price so that they can exit their position.

<comment><USER9> > temporary holders want to maximize the quarter

Serious question. Did the quarter system come from the agrarian economy? If not, where did the emphasis on three-month increments come from?

<comment><USER10> I don't know, but quarters also match the seasons, and for most of history manufacturing was directly tied to which season it was.

And a lot still is today. Homes, cars, clothing, [specific] food, it's all tired to the season.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The Keynes quote is funny, giving the number of people that define their selves as Keynesians, and being Keynes dead long ago.

As some people had already stated, MBAs are not the problem, if you go to a good MBA you will have good teachers, and those people have very clear in their mind all those economic fallacies and more.

Ethics are the problem.

The problem is the fact that somebody could enter a company, increase the short term benefits, but destroy the company long term, and get out rich, and nobody going after them. HP(last CEO got at least 5Million) , GM(what are 50 Billion these days anyway?, nobody lost their seat), Golmand Sachs, buying bankrupt states CDS(enormously profitable while it does not break, the bill is payed by taxpayers when it breaks)...

E.g if Google decides to "monetize" all the info they have over me overnight they will increase their profit a lot (x5 or x10), but I will start looking after other companies search. As everything I use uses their services it will have to be a slow, progressive change, while the genius MBA graduate could declare victory and retire rich at 30, but it will make people spit at hearing the word Google.

Another example, there was a time in witch SCO was a serious software company, but some guy decided to make himself rich while destroying the company, and now the name have a different meaning.

<comment><USER12> "there was a time in witch SCO was a serious software company"

I'm pretty sure the current SCO isn't even the same company as the original Unix Santa Cruz Operation - they are really what was Caldera who bought part of SCO (including the rights to UNIX) and then ended up calling themselves SCO, now TSG.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group>

<comment><USER13> There was also a time in which Caldera was a serious open source company. I remember using their Linux offering in the 90s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wouldn't say that the problem is "maximizing profits" per se. The problem is the focus on "maximizing profits in the short term".

Which brings us to another problem: that predicting the effects of a business decision on profits in the short term is easy enough, while predicting it in the long term is much more difficult (even impossible, depending on how you define "predicting").

Simplifying, for the long term you need vision, leadership and entrepreneurs. For the short term you need formulas, management and MBAs. Quite often the two needs clash with each other.

A century ago there was a lack of management skills and applying them brought big results. Now we are probably (well) past the point of diminishing returns - even negative returns in the long run, and what is missing is vision, both at the corporate AND at the political level.

</comment><comment><USER15> This article was a bit odd. My b-school experience was almost the opposite. IRR was presented as inferior because it could put you in situations where you are giving up a lot of profit in dollar terms for a smaller dollar profit that had a higher rate of return.

In the end, one metric was not used as the be all and end all. Using multiple metrics to help inform an investment decision was the ultimate goal. The problems with American business are multiple and complex; it's not a matter of a simple financial metric.

<comment><USER16> My MBA is circa 1997, and I shared your experience. A friend with a much "better" MBA than me (his from Harvard) once remarked, "Modeling is a great way to determine if a business idea is awful, but it's not going to tell you if you have a good one." I might argue even further that modeling can lead one to dismiss profound ideas through the erroneous presumption of a static future. It was said that the original business justification for Xerox counted the number of typists in America and multiplied by the number of mimeograph copies produced from each document. Obviously, the copy machine found many more purposes once introduced into offices -- a much more dynamic effect than most could even imagine.

Perhaps Dell's artificially static future was the presumption that shipping a laptop or desktop with a pre-installed OS would continue to be a viable business model? What if Steve Jobs had been forced at gunpoint fifteen years ago to lead Dell? What would the outcome have been? He likely would have spoken harshly about the elephant in the room -- Dell produces a commodity, and its future depends on Microsoft's continued prowess. With such an admission out in the open, what actions could have been taken which would have been nearly impossible to quantify via traditional B-School modeling techniques?

<comment><USER17> _What if Steve Jobs had been forced at gunpoint fifteen years ago to lead Dell? What would the outcome have been? He likely would have spoken harshly about the elephant in the room -- Dell produces a commodity, and its future depends on Microsoft's continued prowess._

What if Michael Dell had been forced at gunpoint fifteen years ago to lead Apple (and not liquidate it)? What would the outcome have been? He likely would have spoken harshly about the elephant in the room -- Apple produces bespoke designs to compete against commodities with bigger economies of scale and network effects, and its future depends on its (arguably not then demonstrated) ability to, by itself, out innovate both a larger software provider _and_ several hundred hardware vendors.

(Which is a slightly artificial way to make the point, but I don't for one minute think Apple's past - or indeed future - success was even slightly guaranteed. Their position is remarkably precarious, IMHO.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Professor Christensen gave this talk (or one very similar) at Business of Software this year. He was phenomenal.

One thing I like a lot about the culture in younger companies, especially in tech, is that while we are conscious of the appropriate financial ratios, we're not _driven_ by them. For example, Fog Creek, while profitable, isn't driven _only_ by profit, and happens to be passionate about giving developers a great place to work and helping developers create better software (among other things).

<comment><USER16> "isn't driven only by profit"

I will argue that establishing such a reputation, even at the expense of short-term profits, likely is profit maximizing. So, you are profit driven -- just in a way which also happens ot feel good ;)

<comment><USER19> That is mixing up causality. Just because significant profit comes your way does not mean you are in any way driven by it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Its unbelievable how business (school) buzzwords and tactics tend to overlook the most important aspects of a particular industry / problem / scenario that are non-financial in nature. There is an important strategic perspective(s) which cannot be accounted for in IRR, RONA or any of the other hundred such terms. Loved the quote from the founder of TSMC.

It is also surprising to see that most Asian conglomerates ( in India, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China etc.) seem to have strong vertically integrated businesses where are they continuing to build and expand expertise in the core areas, while letting the west become their marketing managers.

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't know, the general theory of "Companies outsourcing themselves to death" sounds fine, but somehow the examples are never convincing. I mean if you compare the development of Dell vs. Asustek in GoogleFinance, it really doesn't seem that Asustek is better off. Is it really such a tragedy if Dell isn't in the dying pc-manufacturing business anymore?

<comment><USER22> Exactly. How many Dell-like companies have we seen die off over the last fifteen years because they were stuck in their ways. The PC companies that have survived are those that made it in to services work - HP, IBM, Dell. Oracle has worked hard to get into the sector. Plenty of names that come to mind for great-computer companies who got squashed - Compaq, Digital, Gateway, Olivetti, Sun, SGI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Not really sure in how far this is a new insight. Based on Drucker's old mantra _Business has only two basic functions - marketing and innovation_ it is pretty obvious that in production based industries manufacturing and innovation are stronger related.

But it is great to see that influential business academics like him increasingly promote the fact that business success is not (only) about juggling numbers. Or to quote from my favorite paper by Christensen:

 _And all data are subjective. Each form of data is a higher-level abstraction from a much more complex reality_

(2004 Carlile & Christensen - The Cycles of Theory Building in Management Research)

</comment><comment><USER24> Financial metrics are great to measure the health of a company, but I don't think anyone ever intended companies to be run by financial metrics. This isn't just happening in business though, these ideas were also brought into the public sector, police forces and military. Each are an ongoing disaster. John Raulston Saul has written many great books on the subject including Voltaire's Bastards, and The Unconscious Civilization.

</comment><comment><USER25> I really like this quote: "The way we measure profitability is in 'tons of money'."

I couldn't help but hear a loud 'cha-ching' in my head when reading this. I makes sense though, having a lot of money in the bank enables a business to make bold moves. I think its a delicate balance between making more sums of money and being more profitable.

Silly side note and stupid metaphor warning - if someone is right-handed, they never think to cut off their left hand just because they get less return or use out of it. Only when someone if forced to choose between the hands would they ever say, ok cut off my left hand and save my dominate hand. Thats like an extreme situation!

But in business, these companies make extreme moves like this, exiting whole biz sectors/markets, eliminating depts, segmentation etc. Add to this, that the bar is continuously raised, so if the factory quota for last year was x this year its x + 10. Thus 5-10 years later the exec's are surprised when the factory is not meeting "quota" and shutter it in the name of profitability.

Profitability is one issue, but I think the trend toward over optimization and greater year-over-year ROI is also to blame.

</comment><comment><USER26> The same thing has been going on in European countries for several decades. Manufacturing is cheaper in Asia where the workers can be forced to do their job for low salaries and no healthcare. The solution is to massively increase VAT (and lower income tax). The other possibility is that our (average) living standard will drop until we are able to compete again.

</comment><comment><USER27> I see this as a complement to a recent Planet Money podcast "How Money Got Weird"... about the rise of financialization in america.

[http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/09/30/140954343/the- frid...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/09/30/140954343/the-friday- podcast-how-money-got-weird)

The validity of a particular metric is irrelevant. The point is, on a broad scale, we're collectively worshiping on an altar of financial indicators instead of managing businesses.

I've worked at a bunch of places where people who are utterly clueless about the business make really lousy decisions by applying magic formulas. Sometimes they are MBAs, other times they are wannabes that read Deloitte magazine on an airplane. In either case, because they are clueless, they have no way of assessing the validity of the metrics they are using to run the business. The right formula with the wrong inputs yields the wrong answer.

<comment><USER28> From my experience it is often a mixed bag. People use those metrics that support their subjective ideas/gut feelings. If these turn out wrong they can always fall back to some "its all the numbers fault" or "Deloitte said so" explanation.

In my opinion the whole Consulting industry strives substantially on the fact, that they provide management with a third external authority. This is an ideal constellation for a manager since first the consulting firm's suggestions don't have to be implemented if they are not representing his/her interest. But if they are in line with the personal view, they give additional weight to that position. Moreover afterwards if the project is a success the manager can still take the credit for for the project but if it fails it was all the consulting firm's fault.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> What killed the economy is lack of demand, what killed lack-of-demand is a bleak outlook on future and lack of funds, and what has produced this is _efficiency_ itself...

We are now at a time where technology and domain knowledge are stripping existing jobs while creating only a few new jobs.

Welcome to the new world people. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm a little disappointed by the fact that the Op needed to change the title, perhaps to artificially drum up more attention. It doesn't take an MBA to know that businesses seek profits. Also, NPS (Net Promoter Score), which the author argues for over IRR & RONA, also <shock> gets taught in business school. It's up to the individual student to apply his/her craft correctly. If industry is demanding a certain way of thinking, it would seem pretty straightforward that business schools would like to incorporate that into its ciriculum so students can be prepared to work at those companies.

A business focused on profits? It is a business after all. Product development, R&D, and long-term profits are nice, but only when you can at least get through the short-term. Just my perspective on the situation.

<comment><USER31> Well, given that this title is a pretty decent summary of the first sentence of the article, I think it's not really artificially drumming up more attention so much as accurately characterizing the content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Multiples of Money is actually another way of saying IRR - it's just adding the dimension of time.

Christensen is ripping on the slaving devotion to single metrics that some firms follow. This is very true. Any individual metric can be gamed. If you focus on IRR only, people will game it. Same with NPV. Same even with the Net Promoter Score that the article pushes. (Easier to delight customers if you aren't worried about profit.)

The challenge of management is balancing these measurements, and minimizing sub-optimization. In short term there are conflicts between them, but firms with a longer term focus find profitability goes hand in hand with net promoter score. But in many ways it's long term versus short.

</comment><comment><USER33> The key point of this article is that when you make decisions that are meant to optimize profits and lower costs, you're mortgaging your future. The money quote is that companies forget about the knowledge that's lost forever which prevents companies from further innovations in the future. But the argument can be made that companies can re-use the savings and re-invest in innovation. Look at Apple: they manufacture where it's cheap (China), but they keep design and innovation in the US.

</comment><comment><USER34> I think that's a fair article, but it doesn't really say a whole lot that isn't already taught in a lot of MBA programs.

I think the key here is to realize that IRR, NPV are imperfect measures of profitability. In addition, the impact of decisions on factors that can't be measured: R&D productivity, ability to respond to technological changes, can have serious consequences.

I think the article makes some excellent points, but very few people in business aren't aware of them.

</comment><comment><USER35> I find it difficult to believe that this isn't taught in a proper MBA course.

Hell we were taught in 2nd year undergrad that IRR sucks for decision making, but if you absolutely must then at least use the modified IRR. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_internal_rate_of_retur...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_internal_rate_of_return)

</comment><comment><USER36> The first section of the article seems like a good argument for why firms should focus primarily on absolute long-term profit. Then the author ignores this and starts talking about "customer delight", without any justification for its importance.

<comment><USER37> Yes, I noticed that semi-dichotomy too.

It is like this Forbes author "Steve Denning" is trying to piggy-back his own ideas on Clayton Christensen's central thesis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> What Clayton says about the focus on "learning about your customer" seems very similar to Eric Ries term "Innovation Accounting" in "The Lean Startup".

Have we been steering our companies using the wrong metrics for the last century?

<comment><USER39> Gary Vaynerchuk also calls this "relationship capital":

 _"In the future, companies with tremendous "relationship capital" will be the ones to succeed. Society is creating an ecosystem that rewards good manners, high touch, honesty, and integrity. Ten years from now, every company will have a Chief Culture Officer on staff, and if big enough, a team dedicated to scaling one-to-one relationships."_ [1]

[1] - [http://www.amazon.com/Thank-You-Economy-Gary- Vaynerchuk/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Thank-You-Economy-Gary- Vaynerchuk/dp/0061914185/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321783548&sr=8-1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is similar logic to PE and VC funds who actually look at Multiples of Money rather than IRRs. At the end of the day, turning $100mm into $700mm is meaningful even if timelines differ by a couple years.

</comment><comment><USER41> >> "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt

>> from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of

>> some defunct economist."

>> John Maynard Keynes

Oh, the irony.

</comment><comment><USER42> I don't get it. The Chinese guy says they measure "tonnes of money". But if I have an OI of 30%, it will take 100 of sales to make 30 of profit. If I have an OI of 10%, it will take 300 of sales to make 30 of profit.

It looks like the Chinese have problem in making good investments. And I understand that, somebody should always remember that the Chinese is an extremely controlled economy. Maybe that's why they are happy with low ROIs, maybe that's the only thing they can do.

Apparently, my hairdresser understand finance better than those guys.

<comment><USER43> You missed the essence of his quote. He said don't just emphasize on the ratio, "Americans measure profitability by a ratio." The basis (tons of money) that the ratio is measuring is more important.

Your hairdresser could have a fantastic ROI of 50%, but 50% of $1000/year is miniscule when compared to 10% ROI of a company making $100M/year revenue. If you pursue just the ROI in spite of everything else, your great ROI economy is only $1000, while the other lower ROI economy is $100M.

It's the same question of a small percentage of a big pie vs a big percentage of a small pie. Apparently they like a big pie better despite having a lower ROI. May be it has to do with more people are benefited with a big pie.

<comment><USER42> Yes, but still it doesn't make sense. If you invest money, you try to get as much as possible from it. Only reason not to do it is State control.

Also, you apparently didn't read my example, which is quite the reason why measuring the percentage is also (also) important.

I still think you guys are missing the point.

<comment><USER43> I really don't want to go into a piss contest with you, but:

\- What you advocate is the problem Clayton's article tries to address. Your approach will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

\- You emphasize the wrong thing, the return ratio, while other people prefer to measure it in the amount of money returned. That's what get the U.S. auto industry in trouble, as one executive put it clearly: "we spent all the efforts in the bottom line in cost cutting but ignored the top line revenue expansion. It got good ROI in the short term but destroyed the industry in the long term."

\- You also missed his other quote, "use the return on assets ratio if cash is scarce. But if there is actually a lot of cash, ... economize on something that is abundant." Think about that for a moment in how to grow a business and why founders raise VC money in return for a lower return rate on their part.

\- I am not their guys, as you implied in "you guys."

\- Your fascination with State control system has no bearing in this discussion since the Chinese companies in discussion are in Taiwan. If your intent is to prove the Chinese economic system is inferior, you are barking up the wrong tree.

\- Even U.S. has government managed economy - the Fed manages the economy via various monetary policies. And the Fed's mandate is not highest ROI. It's to have a robust economy that provides good employment.

\- I read your example aplenty. What you don't understand is there're many ways to make money. Having the highest ROI is not the one rule to rules them all. Supermarkets have terrible ROI with razor thin margin yet they make lots of money for their owners. From your rational, everyone should become a hairdresser for its high ROI but no one would create the supermarket business.

Anyway, I've spent more than enough time on this and that's the end of my part of the discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Key characteristics of _Anglo-American capitalism_ , i.e. capitalism created and mainly employed by American and British companies, is built around an "unholy alliance" of three things:

1\. Professional manager class.

2\. Principle of "shareholder value maximisation", mainly benefitting free- floating shareholders (including professional managers).

3\. Leverage.

The primary industrial consequence of this triangle of factors is _reduced corporate investment_.

Other key consequences are:

a. a _feedback loop_ occurs between the factors, i.e. they are inherently destablizing, particularly so in the face of ever increasing financial capital market efficiency;

b. the erosion of capital creates a system _prone to shocks_ , both internal and external, and from the real economy or the financial economy;

c. _productivity improvements are capped_ due to merely reducing headline numbers and making minimum incremental improvements to infrastructure and technology. No incentive for workers or employers to invest in company- specific skills or retraining;

d. gross increase in use of "excess" capital for _share buybacks_ and other financial equity maximising techniques instead of investment or holding, even during boom times;

e. makes _central bankers management of monetary supply harder_ due to the additional leverage use and other factors acting as a strong accelerator during cyclical upturns and a strong decelerator during cyclical downturns;

f. strong social impacts:

f.i. increasing _wealth inequality_ between those who can benefit from the alliance and those who cannot. This is both from the asset side (shares) and liability side (borrowing);

f.ii. the easiest way to maximise profit today is to _reduce expenditure_ instead of increasing revenues, so jobs are cut, wages and wage growth is minimised, work intensity and hours rise resulting in more errors, worker tiredness, forced imbalance of work/life.

When combined with globalisation, the efficiency of the global capital markets with its own problems (Too Big To Fail entities), tax and regulatory arbitrage, and capital flight, the above factors can be devastating to any economy no matter how advanced and results in global inefficiencies that produce sub-par growth and high instability.

These and other historical reasons are why most advanced countries outside of the Anglo-American world reduce the influence of free-floating shareholders and maintain a group of long-term stakeholders (including some shareholders) through formal and informal means. In addition, _corporate_ leverage is usually more difficult to obtain.

What I find especially interesting is that a select few of the most globally successful American companies are well known for NOT partaking in this Unholy Alliance, specifically Apple, Google and to a lesser extent Microsoft are incredibly cash-rich companies! Other companies should learn something from these leaders.

Finally, there's a reason why Jack Welch, the long-time chairman of General Electric (GE), who is often credited with creating the term "shareholder value" in a speech in 1981 also denounced it in 2009 as probably the " _dumbest idea in the world_ ".

</comment><comment><USER44> These easy definitions always bother me. "The only purpose of corporations is to maximize shareholder profit." Really? The only purpose? Shareholder profit or value is a side effect of producing products or services that people want. The purpose of a corporation is to focus on what it does and do it well. Shareholders benefit from this activity.

Anyone who starts or runs a company and says "My only purpose is to increase shareholder profit" is probably going to fail to deliver.

The other one is this issue of "corporate greed" or this idea of outsourcing to lower cost manufacturing centers in order to make more money. As someone who has the scars to show for it, I can tell you that "greed" is never a part of it.

Imagine, if you will. That you are making widget A in the US or Europe. You are doing well. Everything is manufactured in house or locally. Profits are good.

Now, imagine that a competitor decides that they can beat you at your own game and make widget A for less money if they outsource their manufacturing to, say, China.

Their list price is now lower than yours by a bunch. You don't want to loose market share, so you lower your list price. Only to discover that now your profits can't support your US-based operations. Just can't do it.

What are your choices? You can't automate your way out of the problem because you are already as efficient as you can be. You could leave the market altogether and move on. Lay off everyone in that division and lick your wounds.

Or, as it is more often the case than not, you can follow-suit and find your own manufacturing solution in China. Now you can lower your prices to match or improve upon your competitors's pricing and you've restored balance to the force.

Or so you thought. At this point nobody is making as much money as they used to. But, a race to the bottom ensues. Very soon Asian manufacturers enter the fray. Not only are they the beneficiaries of low-cost manufacturing, they also benefit from a far lower regulatory burden as well as not having to deal with progress-killing unionized labor and their ridiculous rules and costs.

The race to be bottom continues. Only that you and your local competitors are now at a serious disadvantage with respect to your Asian competitors.

What to do? Well, again, you could leave the segment, fire everyone and move on. Maybe you license IP and life is grand. Or, you could take it a step further and become a brand behind a product that you barely touch. Sure, you have to slim down the ranks but the business continues to exist in some form.

At no point in this slippery-slope is anyone thinking about getting rich. In fact, the effect can be quite the opposite. Profits become thin and the business suffers for it. You've taught your competitors how to make your products and have very little more than a brand to use as an advantage over them. You can't make anything any more and simply don't have the equipment, facilities, process, skill-set, network and people to even attempt to compete with anyone.

And life goes on.

To say that these corporations are "greedy" and that their "only purpose" is to provide shareholder value is, in my never-humble opinion, to be utterly ignorant of the day-to-day realities they have to face.

The reality of the situation is that, over the last 50 years, we have collectively opened Pandora's box. Consumers have voted with their buying power to overwhelmingly favor product that can only be manufactured in places like China due to cost structures. Given this, closing Pandora's box is as close to impossible as you can get.

MBA's and corporations cannot force consumers to behave altruistically and support locally made --higher cost-- product when they can drive over to Walmart and overdose on product at much lower price points and, yes, very good quality in most cases.

There's that scene the "Outsourced" movie that kind of encapsulates the whole phenomenon: A caller wants to buy a bald eagle statue but complains that it is made in China. The operator indicates that they have US-made versions and she'd be happy to sell him one. Only that the US-made version is over $200 when the Chinese version is $20. The caller goes with the Chinese version.

Attention Walmart shoppers: You reap what you sow.

</comment><comment><USER45> You could argue that unlike in earlier generations, MBA's have less or even no skin in the game.

If it is more or less a given that they will move from company to company to company in the course of their career, why should they care if a particular firm does not survive _long-term_? If the shareholders want short-term results, then they are just doing their job to deliver them.

If they can improve things for a company in the short-term, their job is done. They themselves can lead "successful" careers and live comfortable lives with that approach. And leave wealth to their heirs. No long-term survival of the company is necessary.</comment>


Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/ai-is-making-it-extremely-easy-for-students-to-cheat/ <comment><USER2> When I was 18, back in 1999, I had an internship at WRI (Wolfram Research) in Illinois. I'd applied armed only with a library copy of the Mathematica book, so they sent me a CD with Mathematica on it. I made some demo things and got a slot, and flew to Champaign.

I worked on polyhedra for a summer, writing code that could unroll a polyhedral model to its 2D net. Find the volume, the number of faces and all kinds of stuff. I met a bunch of interesting people and it was a blast.

I also fell asleep at my keyboard more than once. It was a beautiful summer, biking to work and working with what I still think is one of, if not the, best language ever.

Here's why all this is relevant - I came back to real life to study CompSci on these old Sparc machines. And it was like, here's the power button. What's an object in Java? What's a compiler? All reasonable stuff.

But: Wolfram Research and Mathematica had, in a sense, ruined my undergraduate life before it started. Why were we using all these bizarre tools? Can't we do this a million times faster? Why are we learning all these bizarre integrals?

It was similar to being denied graphing calculators in A-Level Mathematics (in the UK, think high school). I get it - we need to learn 'the basics' and survive without tools to some degree. But, it would have been nice to use them in some contexts and not just deny their existence.

There's an anecdote I think about Milton Friedman being shown people building a dam with shovels and not digging machines, to keep people employed in some God-forsaken country. He asked, why don't you use spoons instead? Then, more people would be employed.

Mathematica and Alpha are wonderful tools, and I highly recommend applying for an internship if you're of the right age or whatever the requirements are today.

<comment><USER3> To add another point, my A-Level teacher always said anything the calculator can do, you can do, and just as fast.

And then she chose a question from the book, had one of us start typing, and she started at the board solving the same thing.

She finished first. Not by much, and obviously the calculator is the faster choice more often, but she finished first.

<comment><USER4> Reminds me of the story of Feynman vs the Abacus. [1]

Though, as a story, the conclusion he draws is pretty self-congratulatory and bothers me a bit. The substrate on which you implement an algorithm like arithmetic doesn't really speak to whether you "know numbers." It's like the high schooler thinking being very good at computing integrals makes you good at math.

[1] [http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html](http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html)

<comment><USER5> Being powerful, ie good in something, is a function of Work over Time, so if you are good _without much effort_ , that implies some sort of talent I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You may cheat all you want on your homework, but if calculus tests are like they were when I was in college, taking your exam with no notes or calculator, if you've only cut and pasted from Wolfram Alpha all semester is going to lead you to getting an F in the course.

<comment><USER7> Too right; it may help being able to just provide the answers, but homework made up a small percentage compared to the actual exams, which of course were done without any notes and were simple enough not to need a calculator.

It may be difficult trying to teach these kids how to perform the math itself when they can show the homework, but ultimately they are failing themselves when it comes down to needing a fundamental understanding on the process itself.

This reminds me more of teachers scoffing at calculators being a crutch. It comes down to the students' willingness to learn, not how to thwart cheating on homework.

<comment><USER8> My impression is that the article is about highschool students, where homework tends to be on the order of 75% of your grade simply because you get so much of it.

If someone were really serious about abusing the service they could pull out a C in the class even with hard failures of the tests.

<comment><USER9> > where homework tends to be on the order of 75% of your grade

I think I found the problem.

<comment><USER8> It's hard to balance when you have an hour of homework assigned every day, but only get tested about once a month. So you have 20 hours of homework vs. a 30 minute test.

The difference in magnitude ends up being too much. Either each homework assignment is worth almost nothing or they outweigh tests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It is not cheating. It is leveling the playing field.

Some students will inevitably have access to tutors or parents who can give them the full answer. With wolfram|Alpha all students have access to this.

What this really show is that homework isn't the best tool for gauging student prowess.

<comment><USER11> Homework's largely supposed to be about reinforcing the lesson for math courses. For other courses it's largely about reading which shouldn't be done in class. Tests/essays are for assessment.

<comment><USER12> Then why should homework be factored into grades at all?

<comment><USER13> Incentive to do it.

<comment><USER14> And propping up the grades of compliant students.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In my two semesters of college math, I've gathered that the faculty has something of a phobia to, if not wolfram in particular, students' access to help outside of the department.

Homework problems were oftentimes deliberately difficult, and attending tutoring/office hours was almost certainly necessary for most students to master the material.

I got my hands on an instructor's manual of the textbook, and it was a tremendous boon for my mastery of the topics. By having immediate access to the solutions of difficult problems, I was able to comprehend how to approach problems of that type, and therefore could solve more difficult but similar examples in the future. The cycle of attempt/fail/check-solution/repeat was really effective. Waiting for the instructor's office hours or the availability of tutors would have made this process, if not impossible, incredibly inefficient.

Do any math educators have any insight to this? Is this math department clinging to an antiquated curriculum in which faculty is something of a gate- keeper to knowledge? Is there a good reason for their distaste for 'going around' them?

<comment><USER16> > the faculty has something of a phobia to ... students' access to help > outside of the department.

Math professor here. I am most certainly happy if my students get help outside the department, and I think my attitude is quite typical.

We can be a little bit wary of some kinds of help. Too much math teaching consists of "If you see a problem that looks exactly like X, here are the steps you should memorize to solve it."

But we don't care _per se_ if you can solve problems of the shape X, Y, or Z. We want you to develop your skills to the point that all of these lie naturally within your skill set, that you could do them even if you've never seen one exactly like that before. As such, some kinds of tutoring can be counterproductive.

But most aren't. In my opinion your professors' attitude was quite foolish. Kudos to you for seizing the initiative and figuring out for yourself how to best learn the material.

<comment><USER17> > Too much math teaching consists of "If you see a problem that looks exactly > like X, here are the steps you should memorize to solve it."

A significant amount of math testing is basically checking if you've memorized some theorem (and then can solve it), so is that surprising?

<comment><USER16> > is that surprising?

No. It's a difficult problem to mitigate.

There are always going to be some students who want to learn the minimum possible to pass the exam, and who will never work with the material again. Although I do my best to be respectful of such students (indeed, in some circumstances this can be a perfectly rational point of view), my pedagogy is aimed at the student who sees my class as something more than a meaningless hoop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I fail to see the problem here. In a curriculum that takes the joy out of math and attempts to reduce the student's mind to a calculation machines, students employed a calculation machine.

I understand the arguement that math is important, but the way it's taught in America, even at the AP level, is criminal. It boils down to "if you see this pattern, apply these steps" without any effort at going beyond. We teach "how" but not "why", which I think is a common refrain when talking about the American education system, or any test driven education system. Math is a means, not an end.

<comment><USER19> This drives me crazy in my mathematics courses. Sometimes I just do not recognize the pattern, and tools like Mathway or Wolfram Alpha can say "right here dummy" and give me the first step. It is not always about cheating, but seeing the steps for solving the problem logically outlined. I often back myself into a corner working out a difficult problem and need a lifeline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Playing the world's saddest song on the world's smallest violin there Denise Garcia. How about maybe updating your curriculum for the 3rd millennium. Nah, that would be to much work, complaining in wired is much more productive.

The best part is that people in the school administration might do something like blacklisting Wolfram Alpha on computers in the school library and feel like they've dealt successfully with the problem.

<comment><USER21> Have you tried teaching calculus where everyone gets to use Wolfram Alpha and/or Mathematica? I did for three years.

I discovered that the students really don't understand the concepts and more importantly don't want to. They just want to mimic problem types. They don't want to understand the why. Plug and chug is their true desire.

Using the computer exposes right away if a student understands the concepts. You can't get started on a problem if you don't know what to tell the computer to do or why. I went back to the old paradigm. A few students got it but most never understood.

<comment><USER20> > I discovered that the students really don't understand the concepts and more > importantly don't want to.

The problem is that you are forcing people who don't care about it to learn it. Ofc they'll take shortcuts.

> Plug and chug is their true desire.

I mean, most tests are very plug and chug so it's no surprise.

Also note that it might be unreasonable to expect students who never used these tools to use them for the right purpose. Mathematica is a complex tool but I can't imagine that much class time is dedicated to the tool itself.

<comment><USER21> Actually it's not a complicated tool with the free form input, integration with Wolfam Alpha, and templates for the commands used. Also during every test I would correct any command that didn't execute properly.

Your point originally was that it requires too much work on the part of teachers/administration to update the curriculum for 21st century. I'm pointing out that this view while true in some cases may not be true in the present situation. It's easy to ascribe to laziness why things are done in education the way they are to someone not involved in teaching.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wolfram Alpha isn't the issue. The issue is that we're grading students on an arbitrary and meaningless metric, instead of the end result.

As an employer, if I hire you to do a task, let's say build a toaster, I couldn't care less about how you achieved that - as long as I've got my toaster and it can help me grow my toast-making business I'm happy. Education should work the same.

<comment><USER23> Plug and chug with Wolfram Alpha is very similar to plug and chug Stack Exchange answers in your code base.

<comment><USER22> Math and programming are a bit different though - to my knowledge in math you're not dealing with malicious users trying to give you incorrect input in hopes of exploiting bugs in your algorithm.

Edit: but to be honest if you needed to give the result Z for a set of inputs X and Y _without_ worrying about invalid/malicious input, then a Stack Exchange copy/paste is totally fine by me.

<comment><USER24> > Math and programming are a bit different though - to my knowledge in math > you're not dealing with malicious users trying to give you incorrect input > in hopes of exploiting bugs in your algorithm.

But in fact you _are_! Actually it's even worse; in programming, you are just up against the ingenuity of actual human (or at least humanly programmed) users, whereas, in mathematics, you are up against the whole of 'reality' (in a Platonic sense). A whole tower of consequences will be built upon one mathematician's work, and, even if no human can spot the flaw in that work, if it is there then 'reality' will find it, and somewhere in the chain of consequences there will be an error that will bring the whole thing crashing down.

<comment><USER22> The thing is, if no humans can spot the flaw, then what difference does it make if they cheated in school? Either way they'll do flawed calculations if we assume your logic.

However, I wasn't really talking about people wanting to become actual mathematicians - those probably wouldn't use Wolfram just because they actually love crunching those numbers manually. The people who we're talking about here just see math as a roadblock they need to get through to do whatever they really want to do (programming, etc), and in this case this "cheating" is totally fine by me.

<comment><USER24> > The thing is, if no humans can spot the flaw, then what difference does it > make if they cheated in school? Either way they'll do flawed calculations if > we assume your logic.

I don't think that my logic allows us to conclude that. The idea of mathematics is that it is possible for humans to create and apply a system whose correct application makes the genesis of errors, howsoever subtle or undetectable, impossible.

Given this, and the likelihood that a mathematical error (of the conceptual type "any convergent sequences of continuous functions converges to a continuous function", rather than of the computational type "1 + 1 = 1") will _not_ be found, it is especially important that practitioners of mathematics know how to apply their tools correctly, which they probably will not have learned by cheating in school; and, if they are able to apply those tools correctly, then they will not create errors.

(I grant that the weasel word 'correct' and its derivatives risks making this argument circular. I grant that human mathematicians collectively make an awful lot of errors, although I hope that we make fewer professional errors than many other professionals.)

> However, I wasn't really talking about people wanting to become actual > mathematicians - those probably wouldn't use Wolfram just because they > actually love crunching those numbers manually.

This comment seems to suggest to me the source of our disagreement in the first paragraph. As a mathematician, I don't crunch numbers professionally, and, when I have to do so outside of my profession, don't love crunching them manually. I suspect most mathematicians are in the same boat.

<comment><USER22> I definitely agree that someone using tools should know how to use them right - however in this case maybe the curriculum should be tweaked to point out mistakes when using a tool? Ie, instead of assuming that someone would do it by hand, assume they'd do everything they can to cheat their way out of doing the work and trick them as much as possible so the tools would only work if you use them right. Instead of focusing on teaching them how to do it by hand (which they would never do in the real-world given the time constraints), teach them which tools to use and how to use them properly.

My point about crunching numbers manually or not was more about the fact that a lot of people taking those math tests do so because it's required by X policy and not because they are genuinely interested in math, and IMO that's fine - not everyone aims for a job that involves mission-critical math. Some for example might just want to develop games, where a screw-up could at worst result in a graphical glitch.

<comment><USER24> > I definitely agree that someone using tools should know how to use them > right - however in this case maybe the curriculum should be tweaked to point > out mistakes when using a tool?

I totally agree! I structure my classes to point out both common classes of mistakes that everyone makes, and uncommon classes of mistakes that are subtle and difficult to catch. I even have a special way of presenting it (I switch to a colour I only use for discussing mistakes).

Students hate it. One of the two comments that I consistently get on my evaluations is "stop telling us how _not_ to do it." (The other is that my tests are too hard, precisely because they don't involve just rote computations.) I've been told by classroom observers that many students literally ignore it, ceasing to take notes while I discuss mistakes and resuming only afterwards.

I keep doing it anyway, and I make a point of _why_ I'm doing it, but it can't all be me; some of the onus has to be on the students to be willing to think about understanding failure modes as being as important as success.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > "Stephen Wolfram, the mind behind Wolfram|Alpha, can't do long division..."

What the heck kind of article is this...? I can't read it seriously.

<comment><USER22> Even if this was true, what's the problem? He built a successful business that many people find useful, and that's good enough for me.

<comment><USER25> I respect the abilities and accomplishments of Wolfram. My problem with the statement I quoted from the article is that I suspect it is bullshit; I think Stephen can do long division, and much much more...

<comment><USER26> "I never learned long division, and look at me." \-- Stephen Wolfram

[http://www.stephenwolfram.com/media/meet-inventor-who- makes-...](http://www.stephenwolfram.com/media/meet-inventor-who-makes- complex-calculus-simple/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Am I the only one here that would program their TI-83 in high school to run equations for me so I didn't have to solve them by hand?

I wasn't even that dev-savvy (and still am not), but it was super easy and was a huge time-saver on timed tests.

I obviously had to learn the concept in order to program the equation, but once I did - why should I have to go through everything manually every single time?

<comment><USER28> We had the calculators force reset before every test.

<comment><USER29> A friend of mine had a graphing CASIO calculator (we sat our exams in 1999) and he figured out a way of making text files persist across resets. This was the very epitome of unfair competitive advantage, but I figured that if he put in the effort to find the work-around, he deserved to benefit from it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I felt extremely fortunate that Wolfram Alpha was available when I took calculus in college during summer '09\. Wolfram Alpha was amazingly convenient and helpful in getting through tricky problem sets when there was a queue at the tutoring center. It didn't really allow me to cheat at the problem sets because it didn't give the intermediate steps, just the final answer. And of course it's useless on exams. At least regarding calculus, it seems to me almost 100% a helpful learning tool and 0% a contributor to cheating problems.

</comment><comment><USER31> There's a simple solution to this, which also has the advantage of creating better educational outcomes: have students do the reading at home, and the work in class.

Dry lectures aren't the best way to learn something: hand-on work is. Listening to a teacher read a powerpoint is a waste of time, because you could just read (or watch a video) on your own.

But having an expert on the material standing over your shoulder, helping you through tough spots while you're working through it? _That 's_ valuable.

</comment><comment><USER32> The problem is that not all math problems are worth doing. For instance, when I took Calculus 2/3, some of the homework problems weren't usually hard per se, they were just arduously long. And honestly not really worth doing by hand. If I misplaced a single number and didn't realize it immediately, I would spend the next 10 minutes solving an integral that had no use, plugging it into Webassign for it to tell me I'm wrong, backtrack until I find my issue, and solve the corrected integral. I would usually do this at least once per problem (but usually more like two or three times).

So by the end of the course, I would just figure out the integral (or rather, the triple integral), plug it into Wolfram, plug the outputted answer into Webassign, and if the answer was wrong I'd backtrack until eventually the answer that Wolfram outputs is correct. At which point I'd solve the integral by hand.

\---

There was one time when the homework problem asked me to find the intercept of this obscenely complex trigonometric equation. I tried for a solid half hour and couldn't solve it, so I went to the math help room to ask the TAs for help. I ended up stumping three of the TAs. A few days later, I went back to see if they had figured it out. Turns out they hadn't. They said we should just use Wolfram to get the answer.

</comment><comment><USER33> Recalling the first-year university math analysis course, our professor himself told us about Wolfram Alpha. Which followed by a whole year of equations and integrals the site could solve only numerically.

The high enough level of the tasks beats any cheating attempts.

</comment><comment><USER8> Or they could cheat by doing their homework, then checking the results on Wolfram Alpha to make sure they always get 100%.

<comment><USER34> I think we should encourage that. If students can catch their mistakes early and learn from them, I think they should.

What we should discourage is students using Wolfram Alpha to just get the answers without any initial work. That robs students of the chance to learn and would definitely be cheating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I find it an awesome tool to advance knowledge. I recently had to take calc again after 10 years, and it helped me get back up to speed super fast. I would do the work, check the answer in the back of the book, and if I got it wrong, I would use Wolfram Alpha to do step by step to see where I got it wrong.

I can see some people saying that is cheating, but it is a learning tool to me. The class was 90% tests/ quizes. HW was a participation grade. Meaning a tool like that gives no one an advantage. Unless they are using it during the test.

</comment><comment><USER36> Teach and test for understanding _why_ and _how_ the answer comes to be, not _what_ the answer is. Maths education, in my experience, relies too much on testing of the arithmetic rather than the logic. This just results in plug and chug because it's lazy testing and students apply lazy solutions.

Good examiners will ask students questions that make them think about why and how, not what the answer is. These often don't even need algebra or arithmetic because it assumes students know the equations and instead goes a level deeper to test understanding of why those equations are the way they are.

I had the gamut in uni. I found that engineering more often successfully tested understanding as I describe above. Some didn't; my thermo was a case of 'learn how the equations work, then read the right graphs and go' but particularly some of my fluid and aerospace courses were great at asking questions that really tested deep understanding of the theories.

One good example of this that I came across more recently is some of the edX courses that used to exist featuring Walter Lewin (before his sexual harassment came to light). He was very successfully able to question his students on the why and how, not just the what. This actually proved even more important in the MOOC environment, where you can't as tightly control the environment in which students undertake examination.

It's hard, it requires good lecturers really spending a bit of time devising questions as well as supporting their tutors as they teach the students, but it's possible.

</comment><comment><USER37> My dad said to me that knowledge isn't what you remember, it's what you can remember or look up relatively quickly.

</comment><comment><USER38> There's a significant point a lot of people are missing. In e.g. physics and chemistry, the math is not the point. Using e.g. Wolfram Alpha is great if it allows students to solve larger and more complex problems, without sitting there solving integrals over and over (for instance).

</comment><comment><USER39> A few issues:

1) applications rest on the shoulders of giants, it isn't efficient to learn too much more than you need to. If you only need to "understand" at a high level, you should just use tools that "do it for you" at lower levels - It's just a shame there are not better FLOSS competitors to Mathematica.

2) It should be clear what the "understanding dependencies" are - i.e. when some knowledge of the foundations can inform the higher levels, and when they don't. If I understand what 'sorted' means, I don't need to know the details of any specific sorting implementation to use it.

3) The way mathematics is split up into a million small, set-theoretically- abstract lemmas etc makes it so much harder to understand. It makes even familiar concepts hard.

</comment><comment><USER40> The are many things which are difficult to measure directly, and thus people tend to use indirect measurements instead; school-learned math is full of such things. Consider a fairly simple example: "What is the factorial of a number?"

Determining whether a student knows this is going to take a bit of work (particularly if they lack a formal way to specify it e.g. Pi notation or even a programming language), but we might approximate it by instead asking "What is the factorial of 5?" Now obviously this is not a perfect measure of what we're _actually_ looking for even in the absence of calculators (e.g. someone might memorize 5! = 120), but it's easy to evaluate and is probably a _decent_ proxy in the absence of calculators.

</comment><comment><USER41> They may let you cheat (just like SparkNotes I guess), but these tools also let people like me who haven't had advanced calculus survive when we otherwise wouldn't. If you pay for the WA service (I don't remember what it's called), you can type complex math in and it will break down how to solve it out. This was invaluable to me in some CS classes where I knew how to implement the algorithms once the math had been detangled, but the mathematical notation was so opaque to me at the time that I would've had no hope of figuring it out.

Obviously, I learned a lot from having it broken down like that so I wouldn't be as dependent on the tool now, but at the time, it was a huge learning aid.

</comment><comment><USER42> Anyone who thinks using wolfram alpha for math is cheating has never tried using it for non-trivial calculations. Yeah, it will save you the time of looking up an integral from a table, but it's worthless if the integral isn't in a standard table. It will save you time on looking up the equation for the area of a dodecagon, but it won't prove that equation. It will save you time figuring out the units of the final answer, but it won't tell you if those units are logical. Wolfram alpha only saves people from the tedious busywork of basic arithmetic and algebra, the user still needs to do all the math.

</comment><comment><USER43> Since when has wolfram alpha an AI? I always thought it was simply calls to Mathematica.

Maybe when you ask general questions it uses an AI, but with functions and maths I think it only uses Mathematica.

<comment><USER44> AI gets clicks in 2017: a story about students giving an artificial intelligence their homework to finish sells better as a story than talking about students punching formulas into a web-based calculator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Using a search engine is not cheating. There is nothing wrong in making use of all available resources in assignments and this is just another resource at their disposal. My $0.02

</comment><comment><USER46> This isn't new... I had a TI-89 in college that could solve for calculus equations. As someone else pointed out... we couldn't use it on tests though.

<comment><USER47> Had a TI-92+ myself. Best money I ever spent

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> If a computer can easily answer the question, it is not worth asking it to a human (this also applies in the real sense that it won't be valued by the marketplace and translate to higher wages).

How about challenging students with problems that are difficult even when modern technology is used to its fullest extend? Or teaching students how to build tools that solve their homework?

<comment><USER44> > teaching students how to build tools that solve their homework?

This would give them not only a thorough understanding of the problem they are solving, but teach them a very valuable life skill of finding ways to automate your work, and finding ways to package your expertise into software that can be run by a person without your expertise.

This would amazing!

<comment><USER49> Basically, in most college courses the problems are either 1) easy enough that implementing a program to solve them isn't super insightful, or 2) difficult enough that complete automation would mean "do research".

I'll limit myself to Math since that's the topic of this article:

Calculus sequence: CS 1 is not a pre-req. And there's not enough time to teach both CS 1 and Calc 1/2/3 in a single course. "Implement it" works well for derivatives but not integrals. You're not gonna teach Risch, and implementing integration tricks isn't particularly insightful IMO. The cost/benefit ratio explodes in Calc 3, and the physical intuitions become as important as than the calculations.

Everything past that is proof-based and now you're kind of in "your homework is an open research problem in combining NLP with theorem proving" territory. Maybe with the exception of particularly bad Linear Algebra courses and a bit of the early stuff in Algebra.

From a "pragmatic skills" perspective, this approach is _still_ highly suspect. E.g. no one's going to invent their way to Risch by implementing integration tricks.

Point is, _every_ field teaches useful life skills / knowledge, and programming gets in the way as often or more often than it helps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I work training and cheating professionals. I used to be a project in chief (the guy that hired, fired and evaluated new personal).

I encourage to my students to do the, so called, cheat, because its what the people in the real world do, people don't need to memorize a lot of topics and people use calculator, computer and excel. Sheesh with the old and rust model of learning.

</comment><comment><USER51> I am deeply grateful that something like WolframAlpha existed when I was taking calculus classes. It helped me soo much. I could make up integrals, solve them and see if I was right, just like that. It even has a function to show step by step solutions of integrals and series. All extremely useful tools to deepen understanding, not to cheat.

</comment><comment><USER52> Students cheat because our society values diplomas more than knowledge.

It's a true problem, but the consequences are not visible yet.

</comment><comment><USER53> SymPy is in the same ballpark as Wolfram for calculus, and not rate-limited: [http://www.sympy.org/en/index.html](http://www.sympy.org/en/index.html)

It doesn't include the databases of structured information or the NLP-like interface though.

</comment><comment><USER54> The "problem" is that the students have moved to [https://www.computerbasedmath.org/](https://www.computerbasedmath.org/) but the curriculum hasn't (yet). Just fix the curriculum.

</comment><comment><USER55> Its not just high school students. I had some classmates in grad school using it to breeze through feedback theory homework. The tool is as powerful as students are lazy.

</comment><comment><USER56> Today I learned you can cheat on homework. So apparently giving up and having the wrong answers (or no answers at all) is what professors would prefer. Cool :)

<comment><USER49> _> So apparently giving up and having the wrong answers (or no answers at all) is what professors would prefer. Cool :)_

It's much easier to correct known unknowns than unknown unknowns.

The best advice I was ever given as a student was "Pretend like you'll get an automatic A on your report card and treat your grades as a feedback mechanism for figuring out what you do and do not understand. Just focus on learning." As a simple corollary, cheating is kinda silly.

<comment><USER57> >It's much easier to correct known unknowns than unknown unknowns.

This assumes you'll get any kind of personalized feedback and instruction in a lower division maths course. Good luck with that at a public university.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I have a Master's degree in physics and Wolphram|Alpha would not have been out of place in the acknowledgements section of my theses.

</comment><comment><USER59> "Difficult to trace"? If it generates the same output for any given input, then you can just compare the students' submitted papers with it, no?

</comment><comment><USER60> Sounds like Wolfram Alpha could be very helpful for anyone doing self-study, from math textbooks that don't put answers in the back.

</comment><comment><USER61> "while a few were still using it at their jobs as engineers or quantitative analysts"

Er... which is a good thing, surely?

</comment><comment><USER62> The big issue to me is things that matter take effort.

So many things (like math answers) are made so available with no effort.

</comment><comment><USER63> we need to learn 'the basics' and survive without tools to some degree.

</comment><comment><USER64> I found symbolab.com much better at this.. It also has much better user interface.

</comment><comment><USER63> I think we should learn

</comment><comment><USER65> So the test is rewarding students with the skills to perform well in real life, instead of only those who have submitted blindly to the outdated traditions taught by those who cannot do.

There is of cause a level where you cannot just copy solutions but those tend to be badly covered by "facts centered" written exams anyway so why not build your exams around the reality that modern tools exist and will be used, instead of testing as if the world had not changed since the teachers left school.</comment>