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.