3/30/15 Today's Inquiries

Just be glad you're not here when the crazy man goes missing.


The Links:

Ben Bernanke, former head of the Fed, is blogging!

Arnold Kling has a good series of posts about major "conservitarian" dilemmas. The first is immigration. The second is Social Issues. The third, which  didn't expect, is Israel and foreign policy in general. Since I'm always interested in the whole conservative/libertarian strange-bedfellow alliance, I enjoyed reading each.

26 states saw unemployment rates decrease in Feb.

What do you do when your occupation is poverty? And how poor are the poor anyway?

A quarter of America’s workers are working full-time, year-round in occupations where they cannot expect to earn enough to keep a family of four above poverty.

I also highly recommend reading Taxation by Citation. Here's a short version from John Oliver:


Did air conditioning cause the rise of the South? Did the decline of high seas pirates cause global warming? More here.

So air conditioning cannot be an important story over this time. It may have contributed, along with the other factors listed above, to the the initial takeoff of the American South, but not so in recent decades. The rise of the South is a far more complicated story.

It's difficult for anyone without millions in income to live in NYC anymore. Which makes it tough for me to want Lisa to do her residency there. Chicago on the other hand...

An unfortunate cover for the course catalogue at UNG. Run whitey, run!

Quality trumps quantity when it comes to spending time with your children.

Are Hospitals to blame for the hugs costs associated with healthcare? Yes. Pretty much yes.

Oddly, doctors who, you know, actually care about their patients are better physicians.

Economics and the misallocation of water in CA.

At the same time as farmers are watering their almonds, San Diego is investing in an energy-intensive billion-dollar desalination plant which will produce water at a much higher cost than the price the farmer are paying.  That is a massive and costly misallocation of water.

In short, we are spending thousands of dollars worth of water to grow hundreds of dollars worth of almonds and that is truly nuts.

A brief history of the Yemen clusterf*ck.

How to be a Russian Troll. I prefer my trolls Norse but Russian will do in a pinch.

You're welcome:

3/25/15 Today's Inquiries

I make no guarantee that I will post "today's" links prior to tomorrow. Also, let's trend nerdy tonight. Skip to the bottom for trailers!


The Links:

This has been making the rounds for the past few days and is excellent:


Feminist Thor is beating old man Thor. My god has a hammer. Well my god has a hammer and ovaries and therefore best embodies both the beginning and end of life.

A comic about skin tone and coloring in comic books.

Every woman in every disney movie has the same face.

Oh look, another woman in tech is suing her employer for discrimination.

In 100 years, what will our descendants think we've done wrong? Apparently, we will still celebrate Christmas.

It will be an offence to eat any life-form. Once the sophistication, not only of other animals, but also of plants has been recognised, we will be obliged to accept the validity of their striving for life. Most of our food will be synthetic, although the consumption of fruit – ie, those parts of plants that they willingly offer up to be eaten – will be permitted on special occasions: a birthday banana, a Christmas pear.

Andrew Sullivan gets hounded by TNC for being the editor of super racist The New Republic.

Millionaires have a sad because they're not rich enough to buy elections anymore.

“They are only going to people who are multi-multi-millionaires and billionaires and raising big money first,” said Neese, who founded a successful employment agency. “Most of the people I talk to are kind of rolling their eyes and saying, ‘You know, we just don’t count anymore.’ ”

Let us, once again, debunk the myth of the job stealing immigrant.

California is beating texas in job growth. So Walker and Cruz can't claim to be from states with the best economic growth policies.

Is it really that hard to hire qualified workers?

Moving forward, employers are likely to adjust to the developing labor market conditions by either lowering their skill requirements across occupations or by raising wages. It is most likely that employers will do both. At the same time, as the labor market gets tighter, the average time to fill a position may continue to grow even higher.

So much for the reemergence of American manufacturing.

When even the WSJ thinks you're a scam, you're a scam.

Where will Hillary fall on education? Where the money is, obviously.

A linguistic analysis of how the World Bank "speaks" about the developing world.

Levelling the playing field on global issues: no one will ever object to these words (although, of course, no one will ever be able to say what they really mean, either).

Oh good, climate proof beans.

Of course, they'll need good soil for growing things. That's actually going to be a problem going forward. We're so royally fucked:

Landowners around the world are now engaged in an orgy of soil destruction so intense that, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, the world on average has just 60 more years of growing crops. Even in Britain, which is spared the tropical downpours that so quickly strip exposed soil from the land, Farmers Weekly reports, we have “only 100 harvests left”.

It's all okay though because Bill Gates and the World Bank are on the case with their big meeting this month about the future of seeds and farming in Africa. Only, they're not inviting any farmers or farming associations or anyone from Africa.

Trailers:

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3/24/15 Today's Inquiries

Good morning. Or, maybe afternoon by the time I write this. 

The Links:

Let's all stop for a moment and imagine a Ted Cruz presidency. More imagining here. 

Cruz likes to compare himself to Ronald Reagan, but by the time Reagan won the presidency, he had been a two-term governor of California who had shown himself capable of compromising with a legislature. Cruz hasn't shown much talent at that, or even much interest in it. Nor is it obvious Cruz could substitute executive power for legislative authority — his arguments against Obama have, at least until this point, suggested a limited view of presidential authority.

The Onion headline is fantastic. Ted Cruz Boldly Declares Nation not Deserving of Better Candidate.

Poor Scott Walker, unannounced frontrunner just a week ago, is now languishing in incompetence and self-immolation. 

So as far as I can tell, the story around Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker going from “interesting 2016 dark horse” to “steaming pile of horse manure” happened in about 72 hours, and involved tweeting.

Speaking of Scott Walker, Wisconsin's job creation rank drops to 38th. 

On the other side of the coin, it's always nice to have a hedge fund in the family. Vote Clinton, CEO-in-Chief! Wall St.'s president indeed. 

The investors include hedge fund managers like Marc Lasry and James Leitner; an overseas money management firm connected to the Rothschild family; and people from Goldman Sachs, including the chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein. Some of the investors in Eaglevale have contributed campaign money to the former president and Mrs. Clinton, who is widely expected to run for president again in 2016. Some have also contributed to the family’s foundation.

Get used to a lot more scenes like this one if we have a Clinton presidency:

Bowden called the asset management business — which falls within the SEC’s jurisdiction — “the greatest business you could possibly be in. You’re helping your clients.” He continued on the subject of the private equity business, “where we have seen some misconduct and things like that, ’cause I always think like, to my simple mind, that the people in private equity, they’re the greatest, they’re actually adding value to their clients, they’re getting paid really really well, you know, if I was in that position, the one thing I would think to myself as I skipped to work was like just ‘Let’s not mess it up. You know, this is the greatest thing there, I’m helping people, I’m doing OK myself.'”

Then he said: “I tell my son, I have a teenaged son, I tell him, ‘Cole, you want to be in private equity. That’s where to go, that’s a great business, that’s a really good business. That’ll be good for you.”

At that point a questioner interrupted to say: “I’d love to hire your son, by the way. That’s a deal.”

Three scenarios for what happens when the US finally raises interest rates. 

Wages haven't been this important to the economy in 50 years. 

The link between earnings and consumer spending has been tighter in this expansion than in any other since records began in the 1960s

Smart words on "affordable housing."

The "affordable housing" conversation is dominated by the problems facing poor families. But poor people don't really face an affordable housing problem, they face an "affordable everything" problem. They are, in other words, poor.

The changing geography of US employment. Why are all the jobs in places without any water? Why are all the jobs in places which won't be habitable in 50 years? The article is long and full of charts but an excellent read. 

Evan Soltas thinks we need to empirically test the Rent Seeking hypothesis. I agree. 

Thomas Piketty on student loan debt. Links a video which I can't embed. 

Tax cuts still don't pay for themselves. 

The Moral Hazard of Big Data. 

Pasquale writes that “a surprising proportion of digital marketing is about finding marks for dubious loans, pharmaceutical products, and fly-by-night for-profit educators.” Gambling scammers target lists of recovering addicts, and, of course, there are the penis enlargement ads. Whether or not it's in our interests, we are constantly telling computers the best ways to wring money and time (which is also money) out of us. We inform on ourselves, and we collectively provide the mass of data necessary for them to guess about people like us. It’s the “know your enemy” school of marketing, and we’re the enemy.

A Sucker is Optimized Every Minute. It took a while, and it never quite goes Godwin, but I knew where this going when I read the headline. Starts with the silliness and shallowness of a data driven life and moves to totalitarianism. 

Take the gulag, the greatest example, and achievement, of Soviet optimization. The lords of the gulag had charts and charts re: minimum food intake and maximum work output.”

Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Umm, yeah, that might be the dream but how's that working out in reality? These poor fools think common human decency will overcome the profit motive. 

Bastani and fellow luxury communists believe that this era of rapid change is an opportunity to realise a post-work society, where machines do the heavy lifting not for profit but for the people.

Half of Ferguson's young black men are missing. 

An important but unreported indicator of Ferguson’s dilemma is that half of young African American men are missing from the community.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, while there are 1,182 African American women between the ages of 25 and 34 living in Ferguson, there are only 577 African American men in this age group.  In other words there are more than two young black women for each young black man in Ferguson.  The problem of missing black men extends to other age groups.  More than 40% of black men in both the 20 to 24 and 35 to 54 age groups in Ferguson are missing.

It is worth noting that there are approximately equal numbers of African American boys and girls, under the age of 20, in Ferguson (2,332 boys and 2,341 girls). 

An argument that Gamergate is basically a reaction of the privileged to being colonized by the rest of humanity. I'm happy that the author seems to understand colonialism well and turns this idea on it's head about half way through the analysis. 

Colonialism historically removed power from minority groups, stripping them of their homes and cultures. But no matter how many thinkpieces on gender and race and sexuality in games get written, there will be a new Call of Duty every year. For every Twine game, there are thousands of bros who will buy the next hot AAA release without reading a single review.

Costa Rica's electrical grid hasn't used any fossil fuels in 75 days. 

If I'm reading this correctly, we've invented the T-virus from Resident Evil. 

What may have been missed was that this process doesn't stop once those two copies are modified. Instead, it happens in the next generation as well, and then the generation after that. In fact, the modified genes could spread throughout an entire species in a chain reaction, a fact that has raised ethical and safety concerns about the work.

Don't give doctors your SSN. I agree. I deal with medical paperwork all day and every patient is assigned a unique ID anyway. There's no need for an SSN.

Why sacrificial moral dilemmas tell us little or nothing about utilitarian judgement. 

People ask Google some strange things. How much does __ cost in each state. 

Quote of the day:

It's hard to find good numbers on how much force it takes to tear off a person's arm.

3/17/15 Today's Inquiries

Harumph


The Links:

Low social mobility hurts low-income children most.

It ends up being cheaper to give homeless people housing than leaving them on the streets.

Health care deductibles are climbing out of reach. I always thought this was a bog gap in the ACA. Plans might be "affordable" but having a $2k deductible is an expense most Americans can't afford.

The minimum wage debate in the UK is driven by facts. In the US, not so much.

In a recent lecture at the London School of Economics, Prof. Alan Manning, a British economist who has done extensive research on the impact of the national minimum wage in the United Kingdom, said something that caught my ear. Manning was closely involved with the launch of the national minimum in 1999, and in reflecting on the debate at the time, he pointed out that once research about the positive impact of the minimum began to show that it raised low wages without leading to many job losses, “scare stories” about how the increase would kill “millions of jobs” lost credibility.

At least one conservative is starting to understand how to approach Ferguson and problems like it.

So Wolf went through the 102-page report on Ferguson police, focusing on the evidence and documentation provided by the Ferguson Police Department — to avoid any possible bias from the Justice Department and the people it interviewed. He is unrelenting in his conclusions that the Ferguson Police Department was racially biased and focused far too much on raising revenue through fines and court fees:

Still more on Ferguson.

It found the county’s 90 municipalities, despite being home to just 11% of Missouri’s population, took in 34% of all court fines and fees in the state in 2013. Better Together also showed that in Ferguson, as assessed property values plummeted during the recession, court fines and fees skyrocketed, up 84% 2010-2013.

Hard at work making out souther border resemble the wall between Israel and Gaza.

How knowing abut the surveillance state changes people's privacy habits. Honestly, I didn't expect this much of a reaction since technology is hard. Although a lot of the results are a combination of actions and considering actions.

How the FBI created a terrorist. This is pretty much the Potemkin village of national security.

But if Osmakac was a terrorist, he was only one in his troubled mind and in the minds of ambitious federal agents. The government could not provide any evidence that he had connections to international terrorists. He didn’t have his own weapons. He didn’t even have enough money to replace the dead battery in his beat-up, green 1994 Honda Accord.

Looking through the Jeb Bush emails reveals that large political "donations" to his campaigns were really more like "purchases." Which is exactly how it works for every politician, including Hildabeast.

NJ pension finds were safe in the hands of Chris Christie. Well, in the hands of his close personal friend whose fund was given all the pension contracts.

How'd that whole Super PAC to end the influence of money on politics thing work out?

Yet the election was a bust. We had picked hard races, except for one. Beyond that one, we won just one. 

Next up in the "grifter's gotta grift" department, Mike Huckabee is selling his followers miracle cures for cancer.

One ad arriving in January in the inboxes of Huckabee supporters, who signed up for his political commentaries at MikeHuckabee.com, claims there is a miracle cure for cancer hidden in the Bible. The ad links to a lengthy Internet video, which offers a booklet about the so-called Matthew 4 Protocol. It is “free” with a $72 subscription to a health newsletter.

Good thing you didn't buy all that gold Fox News was asking you to gold.

Wealth and Power played more of a role in early human society than survival of the fittest. I think "the fittest" may be very widely open to interpretation. I think we'd be better off saying that humans have been altering their own selective pressures for a long time.

Thought on the genetic origins of economic development.

Put me on record as saying that peer to peer lending is a scam. While that's not the point of the article, there's a reason random people don't just go around loaning money to every person who needs it: they won't get their money back. With banks and official lending, that risk is managed. With peer to peer lending, not so much. Why no borrow money from faith-based institutions instead?

I've read that these pictures of Tibet and its watershed are some of the most important for the next 50 years.

Google executive makes an ass out of himself at SXSW by constantly interrupting the woman on the diversity panel. Debbie, the men are talking.

The founder of 4chan walked away from the job. Why? Here's a hint it was about ethics in video game journalism.

More evidence that tardigrades are aliens. We should go ahead and start seeding them throughout the cosmos. Just put 'em in some rockets and shoot them where we think there may be a chance for life.

3/15/15 Today's Inquiries

Ah the ides of March. Here's a list of 6 things which we get wrong about March and killing Caesar. 

The Links:

The Dollar is strong again. Here's some posts discussing what that means. Krugman. Justin Fox. 

More on "Obama's" trade deal. It's important that the TPP gets labeled at Obama's deal in case Hillary has to be against it in 2016. 

The Billion Prices Project thinks inflation may be coming back. Which is good because having a nearly 0 interest rate and almost no inflation is kinda bad for the economy. 

Do larger firms cause more inequality?

But the paper shows that the benefits of scale are not shared equally among all workers. Using data on wages at British firms, they divide workers into nine groups according to how skilled they are. Over time, they find that the proportional difference in wages between the groups grows as firms get bigger. This trend is driven entirely by a rising gap between wages at the top compared with the middle and bottom of the distribution. As the authors note, this is very similar to the trend in income inequality in America and Britain as a whole since the 1990s, when pay for low and median earners began to stagnate (see chart).

At this rate, there are 5 states that won't close the gender wage gap this century. 

One of our major newspapers says: What the hell, why not start another unwinnable war?

Selma, Obama, and the colonization of the Black Resistance. 

Genetic data gives a window onto the slave trade. 

 One of the men seemed to come from the Bamoun, a Bantu-speaking group in northern Cameroon, and the other two slaves came from non-Bantu speaking groups in the region of Nigeria and Ghana.

New Tommy Wiseau!

For those Dr. Who fans out there: 

3/14/15 Today's Inquiries

Well if it isn't Pi day!

The Links:

I'm shocked:

The evidence strongly suggests that Ferguson is not even the worst civil rights offender in St. Louis County and that adjacent towns are also systematically targeting poor and minority citizens for street and traffic stops to rake in fines, criminalizing entire communities in the process

Smart words about health care inequality, among a great many other things.

you should take into consideration the possibility that medicine in the 21st century will be elitist, and that you will see growing gaps because of that, biological gaps between rich and poor and between different countries. And you cannot just trust a process of trickling down to solve this problem.

Chicago is more segregated than at any time since the 1940s. At that time it became more segregated than Richmond Va, the capital of the confederacy, or any other Southern city.

Jeremy Clarkson as a central bank.

In all that's been written about Jeremy Clarkson, nobody has pointed out that there's a close analogy between him and central banks.

Mr Clarkson's critics seem to believe that he should have followed the rule "don't punch people." They are wrong. If he'd obeyed this rule, he would not have twattedPiers Morgan. There would therefore have been a sub-optimal amount of twatting.

Thinking about impacts of the TPP.

First, one of the issues raised by many TPP opponents is that it will almost certainly have nothing on currency. This mean that it will not make it any easier, and could well make it more difficult, for the United States to address the trade deficit that results from having an over-valued dollar. Whether or not that ends up being the case is of course speculative, but this could be a very big deal.

The US government is the reason we have more inequality than Sweden.

Does public tolerance of inequality increase as inequality increases?

The conundrum of corporation and nation.

What’s the answer to this basic conundrum? Either we lessen the dominance of big American corporations over American politics. Or we increase their allegiance and responsibility to America.

It has to be one or the other. Americans can’t thrive within a political system run largely by big American corporations — organized to boost their share prices but not boost America. 

The truth about entitlements.

1. The “nation of takers” stuff is deeply misleading. Until the economic crisis, income security had no trend at all. The only way to make it seem as if means-tested programs were exploding is to include Medicaid, which has gone up in part because of rising costs, in part because of a major expansion to cover children (all those 11-year-old bums on welfare, you know).

2. When people claimed that spending was exploding under Obama, the only thing actually happening was a surge in income-support programs at a time of genuine distress. People smirked knowingly and declared that everyone knew that the bump in spending would become permanent; it didn’t.

3. If there is a long-run spending problem, it’s overwhelmingly about health care. And we have lately been making remarkable progress on that front.

Indeed, our nation has probably never needed social security more! The median retirement savings in the US is $2500.

Nearly 40 million working-age households don't have any retirement accounts, the report says. 

An autopsy of the American Dream. Galleries of lovely abandoned places throughout the US.

Houston vs California. The post mostly comments on housing. Actually, it comments on owning homes not on housing. As I've said before, being able to buy a home (well, a mortgage, really) isn't the pathway to wealth that it used to be. As development and wealth shifts to city centers, living in the ex-urbs of cities like Houston or Atlanta will become less and less desirable. Although this statistic is surprising:

Unlike most other big cities in America, Houston has no zoning code, so it is quick to respond to demand for housing and office space. Last year authorities in the Houston metropolitan area, with a population of 6.2m, issued permits to build 64,000 homes. The entire state of California, with a population of 39m, issued just 83,000. 

Let's all reminisce about the time when a summer job could pay your tuition.

Just to put this in perspective, say that a full-time student works 40 hours per week for 12 weeks of summer vacation, and then 10 hours per week for 30 weeks during the school year--while taking a break during vacations and finals. That schedule would total 780 hours per year. Back in the late 1970s, even being paid the minimum wage, this work schedule easily covered tuition. By the early 1990s, it no longer covered tuition. According to the OECD, the average annual hours worked by a US worker was 1,788 in 2013. At the minimum wage, that's now just enough to cover tuition--although it doesn't leave much space for being a full-time student.

Education and Social Mobility in the US.

 We find that a modest but gradual increase in social class mobility can nearly exclusively be ascribed to an interaction known as the compositional effect, according to which the direct influence of social class backgrounds on social class destinations is lower among the growing number of individuals attaining higher levels of education.

Can online learning solve the US's teacher shortage? Glad to see the myth of a teacher shortage is alive and well. Even after the recession saw swathes of teachers laid off and given pink slips, we're still letting people tell us that there aren't enough teachers.

A new study shows no statistical impact for Teach for America's recent multi-million dollar expansion above the 3rd grade. So the Null Hypothesis is pretty much still standing. But it fails to take into account the cost savings schools get from contracting out to TFA.

Key Findings:

• First- and second-year Teach For America (TFA) corps members recruited and trained during the Investing in Innovation scale-up were as effective as other teachers in the same high-poverty schools in teaching both reading and math.
• TFA teachers in lower elementary grades (prekindergarten through grade 2) had a positive, statistically significant effect on students’ reading achievement of 0.12 standard deviations, or about 1.3 additional months of learning for the average student in these grades nationwide.
• We did not find statistically significant impacts for other subgroups of TFA teachers that we examined.

The NYPD is sanitizing Wikipedia of any bad police brutality. Nothing to see here citizen. Move along.

Year 4 of California's drought. Ah, California, where the unsustainable meets the unavoidable. Will they start rationing now?

Melting sea ice will probably impact the US worse than anywhere else. Well, maybe in terms of the value of real estate being submerged in NYC, Miami, Boston, and elsewhere but in terms of human cost, I'd argue that we're gonna be okay.

A post-modern scientist thinking about political science.

The CIA really wants to hack Apple devices. This is a good sales point for privacy conscious individuals. One would assume that if it were compromised, we wouldn't be reading about all these failed attempts. However, I makes it clear that more attempts will be made.

Where is Vladimir Putin? Also, the Carmen San Diego song is strangely applicable in this situation.

RIP Terry Pratchett.

Age profile of men and women drinkers. It looks like I just hit my peak.

3/9/15 Today's Inquiries

Watching Doctors teach medical students can be very difficult. Some of them just love to hear themselves talk. Got some good links today but mostly long reads.


The Links:

Jeb Bush championed and co-founded the Liberty Charter School in Miami. He's on the campaign trail saying it was a great success. The truth is, it went out of business and is now a ruin baking in the sun.

Some interesting thoughts on how online education is actually utilized.

There are two models of online education:

1. Preparatory knowledge, in the form of course-based video-delivered teachings: Coursera, Udacity, Thinkful, etc.
2. On demand knowledge: Wikipedia, StackOverflow, Genius, etc.

Of the two, the latter has been much more widely spread and far more influential.

David Brooks argues that we should be focusing on education funding rather than outright redistribution schemes. Similar arguments here but more of the "just give people money" route.

No redistributionist measure will have the same long-term effect as good early-childhood education and better community colleges, or increasing the share of men capable of joining the labor force.

Megan McArdle has a pretty good essay about the changes in standard of living. I reach a different conclusion, though, because a return to 1950s healthcare, although cheap, would hardly be effective for the problems facing Americans today. Still, the sheer volume of SoL improvements is staggering.

Some empirical analysis of Right to Work laws.

I find that raw differential in wages at the aggregate state level are 15.7% lower (log terms) in right to work states, as found in a cross section regression of log wage on a right to work dummy. Adding in a continuous variable for manufacturing share of GSP in 2014 makes the gap -13.7% (statistically significant at 1% MSL, using heteroskedastic robust standard errors).

America's prime working age population is growing again. That's a good thing, in case you were worried. A youthful and productive workforce means that our economy is more flexible and our welfare state more solvent. Assuming, of course, we continue adding jobs. Here's some graphs and stuff on unemployment. 

Elizabeth Warren; Let the NRLB do its job.

At every turn, organized labor has been there, fighting on behalf of the American people. 

Countering the prevailing notion that robots and technology are destroying our jobs. I suppose I am somewhat persuaded by the idea that any distortions in the labor force are attributable to the recession rather than technological change. That doesn't mean future challenges aren't goin to crop up as we automate more and more of our work.

There’s no evidence that we are having a technology renaissance right now, or that technology has contributed in a major way to the weak recovery, or that a skills gap or other educational factor is holding back employment, or that highly skilled workers are having a great time in the labor market. 

Alex Tabarrock has an excellent post about the DOJ's recent report on Ferguson. It's pretty much what I've be saying about the disturbing trends in police work nation wide. Once again, the libertarian right has a strong case to make for policing reform which would be widely embraced by minorities and "liberaltarians" yet I don't see much coming from the Rand Paul camp or anyone on the right wing election circuit. Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses the report here.

You don’t get $321 in fines and fees and 3 warrants per household from an about-average crime rate. You get numbers like this from bullshit arrests for jaywalking and constant “low level harassment involving traffic stops, court appearances, high fines, and the threat of jail for failure to pay...

The worst abuses of government happen when an invading gang conquer people of a different race, religion and culture. What happened in Ferguson was similar only the rulers stayed the same and the population of the ruled changed. In 1990 Ferguson was 74% white and 25% black. Just 20 years later the percentages had nearly inverted, 29% white and 67% black. The population of rulers, however, changed more slowly so white rulers found themselves overlording a population that was foreign to them. As a result, democracy broke down and government as usual, banditry and abuse, broke out. 

Another dead black teen.

States with new voting restrictions since 2010.

Owning a home while black.

Your electric company (you know, the gov't permitted monopoly) is waging a war agains rooftop solar panels.

Operation Rent Seeking: How the War on Terror became a Business Model.

 His new book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, is a chronicle of fascinating and heretofore secret stories in America’s war on terrorism. The book has a simple and arresting thesis: the longest war in America’s history is pure nirvana for the greedy and unscrupulous. Whatever the architects of the war on terrorism thought they were doing, the Iraq War’s purpose rapidly evolved within the iron cage of the Washington public-private ecology into a rent-seeking opportunity for contractors and bureaucratic empire building for government employees. Its real, as opposed to ostensible, purpose seems to be endless, low-level war. The rote appeals to patriotism are just another way of mau-mauing critics. With a theme that attacks the underlying bipartisan consensus on terrorism of the last dozen years, it is no wonder the Justice Department once contemplated heaving Risen into federal prison.

Were late medieval and early modern rates of execution responsible for declines in murder? The argument is actually that they were conducting a kind of eugenics and killing off those predisposed to killing others.

Through its monopoly on violence, the State tends to pacify social relations. 

Hillary is still in hot water over the emails she hid from the public and from congress. NYT runs stuff from Feinstein saying she needs to come out and address it directly.

Europe has figured out that hormone altering chemicals are bad for us.

Exposure to hormone-disrupting chemicals is likely leading to an increased risk of serious health problems costing at least $175 billion (U.S.) per year in Europe alone, according to a study published Thursday.

A step-by-step guide for starting your own feminist back channel. A possible option for women with an online presence who are considering quitting social media. The sad thing is that this has to be considered at all.

If you’re a feminist with an online presence, you know how hard it is to have a public conversation with your friends without some rando sea-lioning in to the middle of your discussion with his very important man-sights.

Political scientists vs House of Cards.

What happens when you crack your knuckles.

Drinking doesn't make you fat. Cheers!

The Art of War Visualized.

3/4/15 Today's Inquiries

Rain is surprisingly bad at melting snow but great at flooding the city.


The Links:

If you like Republicans, eat more Pizza. Also, best "pie" chart ever.

Hillary is in pretty big trouble over this whole email thing. It's not so much that they'll find anything. Chance are they won't. The impression of wrongdoing, however, is enough to cause serious harm. I mean, Jeb made all his email public. Plus, ya know, Benghazi. Also, didn't George Bush do this same thing in 2007?

Superintendent of Philadelphia schools: “I recommended the approval of more than 30 charter schools because I thought it would improve educational opportunity for our 215,000 students. The last 20 years make it clear I was wrong”

Digital Natives my ass!

U.S. millennials, defined as people 16 to 34 years old, were supposed to be different. They’re digital natives. They get it. High achievement is part of their makeup. But the ETS study found signs of trouble, with its authors warning that the nation was at a crossroads: “We can decide to accept the current levels of mediocrity and inequality or we can decide to address the skills challenge head on.”

My youngest cousin started college last August at Sweet Briar College, a 114 year old all female liberal arts college. On Monday it surprised everybody by announcing it would close at the end of this semester. What's really wild is the college has a $94 million endowment! Don't get me wrong, SBC was super expensive (like $47k a semester) and it's enrollment has been in decline for many years but apparently they even accepted students for next year. They're really messing with these students' futures. More here.

How higher education perpetuates income inequality.

Part of the mythology of US higher education is that it offers a meritocracy, along with a lot of second chances, so that smart and hard-working students of all background have a genuine chance to succeed--no matter their family income. But the data certainly seems to suggest that family income has a lot to do with whether a student will attend college in the first place, and even more to do with whether a student will obtain a four-year college degree.

Americans aren't saving enough for retirement but maybe restructuring the compensation of their advisers would improve things. Requiring people to invest in purely passive managed funds is fine but is no guarantee of profit. Look, I'm as big a Wall St. critic as you'll find but legislating that advisers and fund managers have to turn a profit is stupid. Nobody makes a profit all the time and even the smartest managers have bad years. It reminds me of NCLB.

See also: straightening the deck chairs during the retirement crisis. And: Passive management vs Saving more.

Moreover, it's the public pensions which are being looted by state official everywhere. Take a look at New Jersey under Christie.

Under Chris Christie, the New Jersey pension system paid more than $600 million in fees to financial firms in 2014 -- 50 percent more than a year ago, and a higher rate than almost any other state reports paying for pension management.

Where is the American manufacturing renaissance? Largely, cities.

INDIANA is a state of economic contrasts. Indianapolis, its biggest city, is dominated by thriving high-tech industries such as aerospace and chemical manufacturing. Its third Congressional district has the highest proportion of the workforce employed in manufacturing of any district in the country. A few hours’ drive away, though, lies Gary. Since the collapse of its steel industry in the 1980s, the city's economy has imploded. The poverty rate is extremely high. On a Sunday afternoon, Gary's main street was nearly deserted; most of the shops were boarded up.

So, after Justice Kennedy said some supportive things about Obamacare, hospital stocks surged. Why is that? I thought Obamacare was the worst thing since Super AIDS? How come investors think it is good for hospitals? Maybe because they won't be covering costs for quite so many uninsured people? Yep:

The Affordable Care Act will hand out $22 billion in credits to help people buy insurance this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. So far, 11.4 million Americans have signed up for 2015 coverage, giving insurers and hospitals more paying customers and cutting the number who show up in the emergency room to get care without paying.

The very puzzling political economy of King v Burwell.

It is from a political-economy standpoint very strange. "We bring home free money from the feds for our state" is not a losing argument for any state-level politician.

Maybe you could argue against accepting free money from the feds if it all went to "moochers". But insurance companies and doctors are not usually thought of as core Democratic Party constituencies.

Yet the fallout from King v. Burwell may well ultimately make them so...

Mother calls police to help get schizophrenic son to the hospital. They shoot him. To be fair, he was black and did have a broomstick handle. I'm sure they shouted "look out he's coming right for us" or something.

Another failed libertarian paradise: Honduras.

Does playing video games make you smarter?

Coffee linked to cleaner arteries. Wow, I must be the very picture of health.

3/2/15 Today's Inquiries

Grumble grumble first Monday of the month in the ER grumble grumble


Today's links:

There's no morality in exercise: I'm a fat person and I made a successful fitness app. I hate being fat. Just not enough to not be fat. At at last that what everyone thinks about me. Until we change the way we think about obesity away from a "blame the obese/obesity is a moral failure" model, we'll continue to ruin lives.

You’re not a better person for working out, or a worse person for not, no matter what magazines or gyms tell you.

 “the story I got told about what it meant to have a fat body, that it must mean that I sat around all day eating deep-fried stuffed-crust pizza and watching TV—that story just wasn’t true. 

Tackling the ethics of driverless cars. Well, it's the driverless trolle's I'm worried about.

Great but non-embeddable infographic about how Millennials are changing the economy.

Retirement planning for Millennials. Slightly better than usual advice from, say, Lifehacker, which focuses on how to save but not what to do with savings or how much money will really be worth in the future.

At the standard 4% withdrawal rate Frank would have an annual income of $36,000 if he’s able to reach his $900,000 goal by age 40. But $900,000 in 17 years is not the same thing as $900,000 today. At a 2% annual inflation rate that $900,000 will only be worth close to $643,000 or just over $25,000 in annual spending. If inflation is 3% per year, it would only be worth $545,000 or just shy of $22,000 with a 4% withdrawal rate (and these numbers are before taxes are taken into account).

How different Millennials are from their parents. This is bad news for auto sellers, realtors, and upscale retail although there's no guarantee these feelings won't change. I also find a lot of class implications here. I think many Millennials feel like they'll never be able to have the hallmarks of boomer-era success so they're already dismissing those desires.

DON'T WANT: A house

Yes, many Millennials will still want to own a home of their own one day. But for a majority, it's just not that important. Indeed, 30 percent of Millennials say they don't feel strongly about it, and another 30 percent say they either never plan to buy one or don't plan to do so in the near future.

While the headlines are all about how Asians are poised to overtake Whites in average income, I find the disparities with Blacks to be the most important finding of the recent Fed. report.

...blacks' median wealth reached $11,184...

 ...$134,008 for whites...

Here's what Americans define as being rich:

Early interventions work! A proper controlled longitudinal study of children who received a variety of services and interventions shows the interventions worked. 

Scott Walker is not cutting funding for college rape reporting. The second major story about him to be retracted this week!

It appears that a very small circle of economists from MIT have an inordinate impact on economic policy and discourse in the US. So, yeah, oligarchy? Not quite, but is this the elite we want?

a remarkable number of the professional economists who either play important roles in making policy or appear to have influence on the discussion got their Ph.Ds from MIT in the second half of the 1970s. An incomplete list, with dates of degree:

Ben Bernanke 1979
Olivier Blanchard 1977
Mario Draghi 1976
Paul Krugman 1977
Maurice Obstfeld 1979
Kenneth Rogoff 1980

Larry Summers was at Harvard during the same period, but he was an MIT undergrad and very much part of that intellectual circle. Also, just about everyone on the list studied with Stan Fischer, who remains very much in the middle of policy-making.

More smart words from Arnold Kling about the housing crisis. He points out that most coverage focuses on debt-to-income ratios when debt-to-equity ratios are probably more important. This is a point I argued less eloquently in part 3 here.

Personal income increased slightly in January. Good news!

White people are ex-pats. Everyone else is an immigrant.

Oh yeah, Putin assassinated an opposition rival. I thought this was a good point to make:

Whoever they were, the killers must have assumed that police would not try to pursue them. If these were common murderers they would probably have chosen another venue, such as Nemtsov’s home, where he was heading at the time of the shooting. The way he was killed suggests that certain people high up in the regime were directly involved in his murder.

Here's Nemtsov's last interview.

People see what this crazy politics led to, they see widespread corruption, they have firsthand experience with the inadequacy of the state. But they still believe in the leader because for the past several years, the leader was doing one thing very well: He was brainwashing the Russians. He implanted them with a virus of inferiority complex towards the West, the belief that the only thing we can do to amaze the world is use force, violence and aggression. [Putin] programmed my countrymen to hate strangers.

The canal China is funding in Nicaragua is pretty much a giant fiasco.

A 20 year old military weather satellite exploded in orbit. So, StarWars? Did the Russians shoot it down?