Month: September 2014

The New York Times has been running a series of stories about surrogate mothers (latest). In a July 6, 2014 article the Times says that the expected compensation for the woman who carries the baby for 9 months is about $25,000 (range from $20-30,000). Meanwhile the agency that carries a filing cabinet and a Web site around gets $20,000 and the lawyers who carry a PDF or two get $10,000. So the surrogate mom who does all the work gets paid less than the bureaucracy of surrogacy.

Per month of pregnancy the surrogate mother is receiving about $2800. Yet, according to attorneys interviewed recently for a book project the typical price received from a potential child support defendant in Massachusetts for an abortion is $250,000 after two or three months of pregnancy (the profitability of a pregnancy and abortion varies from state to state depending on each state’s child support guidelines and the extent to which obtaining custody of a living child will be profitable). So the woman who seeks to get paid for having an abortion gets paid at least $83,333 per month of pregnancy, 30X as much as the woman who gets paid for having a baby. Add in the fact that surrogacy fees are income and therefore taxable while abortion fees are potential tax-free if considered to be payment for physical damage and/or a pre-payment of tax-free child support (see this Forbes article), the abortion retailer may actually be netting 50X per month of pregnancy compared to the incubation retailer.

I can’t figure out if these discrepancies are a sign of an immature or a mature market…

Related:

• Selling a human egg versus selling an abortion

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I’m still working through The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America’s First Subway,which has some good facts but pretty much no rivalry, much less an “incredible rivalry” as promised by the title. I’m thinking that the author called this book “Some notes on the history of a couple of American subway systems” and a marketing person at Macmillan decided that wouldn’t sell very well.

One thing that is interesting about the book are the prices from around 1900. Here are some excerpts:

The news that New York was about to build a subway spread fast. Two dollars a day for eight hours of work was good money for a laborer. Engineers, axmen, levelers, steelworkers, inspectors, cement mixers, masonry men, accountants, stenographers, diggers, and even messengers were all suddenly needed. At the Municipal Lodging House on First Avenue at Twenty-third Street, skilled and unskilled laborers from around the country began to flock in day after day in search of a cot to sleep on and a penny to earn. There would be thousands of men within a few days. A three-room apartment in New York, which rented for eight dollars a month, could be divided among three, four, or as many as six workers to reduce the cost. A dozen eggs was going for twenty-five cents, about the same for three tins of sardines, while a dozen pints of beer could be had for a dollar fifty. At the saloons, drafts were five cents, whisky shots ten cents. With those basics, a group of immigrant workers could be quite content, as long as they had paychecks to purchase them.

they would earn two dollars a day for ten hours of work, gouging a trench into the ground by swinging axes, picks, shovels, and hammers,

At Sherry’s on Forty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, the Carte du Jour offered Little Neck clams for twenty-five cents, filet of sole for forty cents, filet mignon for sixty-five cents, roast lamb for seventy, venison in a port-wine sauce for a dollar, and, the real splurge, chicken partridge for two dollars and fifty cents.

One thing that hasn’t changed is that some people prefer to pay whatever prices prevail with money that others have earned…

And it took barely a minute of operation for the first theft on the subway to be reported, when a West Side resident named Henry Barrett told police that he took the first train at 7:02 P.M. and that one minute later his $500 horseshoe pin with fifteen diamonds on it was gone.

Let’s see what kind of inflation rate we can get from the above numbers. Employers circa 1900 paid no benefits so the $2 per day/20 cents per hour rate is comparable to today’s full loaded cost for a worker. The New York Times in 2011 said that an unskilled construction worker was getting $58 per hour in total compensation (source). http://www.westegg.com/inflation/ says that 20 cents from 1900 would be equivalent to $5.32 in 2011. So real wages have risen by 10X for unskilled construction workers in Manhattan, consistent with the findings in A Farewell to Alms about economic growth hugely benefiting the unskilled (though in this case they also got a boost from unionization).

The filet mignon that was 65 cents back then is perhaps $50 now. The Westegg calculator says that official government inflation numbers would result in a rise up to about $18 over the same period. How about rent? It was $8 per month for a three-room apartment. That’s $221 in today’s money, supposedly, not enough for one night’s rent of a single room in Manhattan! Another way to look at it is that a three-room apartment could be rented with 40 hours of monthly labor (there were no income taxes back then so the arithmetic is simple). Today the three-room apartment would cost at least $3000 per month? And an after-tax wage for an unskilled worker might be $10-$40 per hour? So now it costs between 75 and 300 hours of monthly work?

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Folks:

The new house that I’m setting up doesn’t have space for floor-standing speakers or even, in most rooms, bookshelf speakers. That means we need to try to recover unused space in the walls with in-wall speakers. What do folks like? When I last updated http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/whole-house-music I concluded that B&W speakers were the best choice. Is there anything else worth considering in the in-wall world? Some of the Monoprice speakers were okay, and they are certainly cheap, but they don’t justify cutting open walls.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

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Consumer electronics nuts:

I’m about to dive back into the world of being a cable TV subscriber. The plan is to put a television on the wall and feed it with Verizon FiOS. But what’s the point of a slick wall-mounted television if one needs to have an ugly set top box on a nearby shelf? The CableCARD idea doesn’t seem to have taken off and does not provide full FiOS services. How about remotely locating the set-top box? Put it back in the closet where the main Verizon FiOS service comes into the house. Then run HDMI cable through the wall to the television (or somehow push the HDMI signal through CAT5 wire as Wikipedia suggests). Then run some sort of infrared repeater back from a sensor in the wall to the set-top box in the closet?

Comcast seems to have thought about this (reference).

I don’t want to get too experimental. Watching TV is already too complicated. What’s practical?

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A friend of a friend just cited (in an email) the U2 rock band for having “social consciousness.” As noted in this February 2007 posting, referencing a New York Times article on the subject, the U2 folks had never paid any income tax and decided to invert themselves into an offshore Netherlands trust when the Irish tax man was coming for a piece of their pie.

If U2 is beloved despite minimizing their tax bill down to basically zero while U.S. companies are excoriated for trying to cut theirs to about 25 percent (see this Forbes article on Walgreen’s, for example, where the company was trying to cut from 36 percent as a U.S. company to “the high 20% range”), wouldn’t it make sense for these companies first to merge with a popular band and then do the foreign inversion?

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A year ago I tried out what I call the “Samsung Geek Watch” (Galaxy Gear; see this posting). I eventually gave up on it. What (useful things) does the new Apple watch do that the Samsung watch could not do? At first glance it looks like a pretty similar array of stuff. Of course, this might not necessarily render the Apple Watch uninteresting. The iPhone operating system and the Samsung Note 3 operating system mostly perform the same functions, but the Samsung implementation is comically bad in critical areas, e.g., in searching for a contact to call the phone gives priority to contacts without associated phone numbers.

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A friend pointed me to a long New York Times article on yet another top-down idea for improving American schools. This is exactly the opposite approach taken by the country with the most effective schools (see my postings on The Smartest Kids in the World, including this one on Finland). To me the most interesting thing about the article is that the author, Andrew Ross Sorkin (“a financial columnist”!), writes toward the end “Teachers are not normal economic actors; almost all of them work for less money than they might fetch in some other industry”. A quick Google search brings up this reasonably thorough study, which comes to the conclusion that public school teachers are paid more than comparable workers in private jobs (a conclusion consistent with the fact that there are many more people who want to be teachers and have the qualifications than there are jobs). The fact-checkers (if there are any at the NYT) wouldn’t even have needed to search the Web but could have poked around in their own archives for stories such as “Still Doing the Math, but for $100K a Year” from 2009 (about teachers getting as much as $130,000 per year, plus benefits and pensions, in the economic wasteland of Rochester, New York).

Wikipedia says that Sorkin went to an expensively funded public high school (Scarsdale) and then an expensive college (Cornell). So his analytical skills are presumably about as good as what an American of his generation can develop.

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From a friend’s Facebook status…

Our [8-year-old] drama queen caused an e-mail to be sent to all the parents regarding bringing nut-derived foods to school.

• Mama, so I noticed that this girl was eating a sandwich with Nutella today…
• Really, the school doesn’t allow nuts!
• See, Mama, good, you are paying attention. Then, I came up to her, licked her sandwich and started choking, popping my eyes, and making weird noises with a red face… I do not have an allergy, but everybody freaked out!

[This Huffington Post article says that roughly 11 Americans die annually from food allergies.]

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Harvey Silverglate wrote an article for WGBH where he describes his attempt, as a parent and taxpayer, to see what was going on with the City of Cambridge’s negotiation with its teacher’s union. Background: The city spends about $27,000 per year per student but that doesn’t include capital costs, so the total cost is probably closer to $40,000 per year per student.

Here are some excerpts:

I obtained the necessary permissions and showed up to the first negotiating session. When the head of the union saw me, she announced that the union would not bargain while I was in the room. The teachers’ negotiating team walked out. My letters from two School Committee members were soon revoked, and the contract negotiations proceeded comfortably in private.

It was at that moment that I became an opponent of public sector unions. Why? Because, it suddenly occurred to me, the public interest was not represented at the contract negotiations. The teachers were arguing for their own self-interest in terms of work conditions and compensation, as was to be expected, but the School Committee and school administrators were dealing with the taxpayers’ money, not their own. And it was in the pols’ political interests for there to be labor peace. The children and their parents figured very little in the whole enterprise. And so an outrageous number of provisions found their way into the contract year after year, seemingly all of them more protective of the teachers’ wallets and comfortable work-schedules – and the School Committee members’ elective prospects – than of the educational interests of public school students.

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Folks:

Google Chrome on my Windows 7 machine has suddenly gone whacky with fonts. Almost everything in Gmail shows up in italics. A lot of stuff on various Web sites shows up as bold and italics. Microsoft Internet Explorer still works fine, so I don’t think that it is the machine.

My first thought was to play around with font substitution but I can’t find anything in the settings that is strange. Then I figured I would uninstall Google Chrome and reinstall it, but even on a freshly booted machine Windows says that it can’t uninstall the program until I “close all Chrome windows” (none had been opened subsequent to the reboot).

Any brilliant ideas from the community would be welcome!

Thanks,

Philip

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