Forms of Inquiry: 12/7/14 Today's Inquiries

A nice slow Sunday at work.

The Links:

Goodbye to the last Southern Democrat. It seems like pretending to be a republican didn't help her win any votes anyway.

Energy firms secret alliances with state GOP officials. Of course they leave out the democrats who also kowtow to the energy industry. For example, all of Colorado.

Michael Hanlon argues that human progress has ground to a halt. Sometimes it certainly seems that way but I am skeptical. Although, the emphasis is now on making money rather than bettering the world so the noble pursuits aren't, umm, pursued.

Many of the achievements of the Golden Quarter just wouldn’t be attempted now. The assault on smallpox, spearheaded by a worldwide vaccination campaign, probably killed several thousand people, though it saved tens of millions more. In the 1960s, new medicines were rushed to market. Not all of them worked and a few (thalidomide) had disastrous consequences. But the overall result was a medical boom that brought huge benefits to millions. Today, this is impossible.

Tyler Cowen argues that technology could improve income inequality. I can't help but feel he is talking down to people here:

Another set of future gains, especially for lesser-skilled workers, may come as computers become easier to handle for people with rudimentary skill. Not everyone can work fruitfully with computers now. There is a generation gap when it comes to manipulating electronic devices, and many relevant tasks require knowledge of programming or, more ambitiously, the entrepreneurial skill of creating a start-up.

New estimates of the effects of the minimum wage.

Over the late 2000s, the average effective minimum wage rose by 30 percent across the United States. We estimate that these minimum wage increases reduced the national employment-to-population ratio by 0.7 percentage point.

Why poor people stay poor. An excerpt from Hand to Mouth which I linked last month.

It actually costs money to save money.

It is impossible to be good with money when you don’t have any. Full stop. If I’m saving my spare five bucks a week, in the best-case scenario I will have saved $260 a year. For those of you that think in quarters: $65 per quarter in savings. If you deny yourself even small luxuries, that’s the fortune you’ll amass. Of course you will never manage to actually save it; you’ll get sick at least one day and miss work and dip into it for rent. Gas will spike and you’ll need it to get to work. You’ll get a tear in your work pants that you can’t patch. Something, I guarantee you, will happen in three months.

Compare the above to this take on poverty from The Economist. Although they have largely the same conclusion, one seems far more paternalistic.

Conventional economic thinking assumes the poor will want to earn their way out of poverty. But as studies from countries as different as Ethiopia and France show, poverty makes people feel powerless and blunts their aspirations, so they may not even try to improve their lot. When they do, they face obstacles everywhere. They have no margin for error, making them risk averse. If they do not know where their next meal is coming from, saving and investing for the future is hard. George Orwell said, “Within certain limits, the less money you have the less you worry.” He was wrong.

As college costs rise, food pantries are sprouting up on college campuses. That's a long way from Let the Big Dawg Eat.

Despite the persistent lack of hyperinflation, social and political collapse, or other kinds of apocalyptic events which usually drives people toward the yellow stuff, gold-bugs are still pining for the Golden Years.

Wasting away again in our dementiaville. I see lots of dementia cases with the physicians in the ED. It's pretty sad. This article is a good,although poorly formatted, window into elder abuse. It's also a great call for restoring the humanity of the demented.

They are not. Dementia, except in the advanced stages, leaves much of the mind -- and virtually all of the character and personality -- intact. These are delightful, observant, funny and even subversive people who are starved for freedom and affection. Our warehousing of them is almost as heartless as our prison system. To their overlords at the facilities, they are little more than cash cows, which need a modicum of care and feeding -- and milking, of course. Then they are herded out to the semi-dark barn (euphemistically known as "the TV room"), where they spend one comatose day after another.