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?