Month: June 2015

I recently finished Aquarium, a novel by David Vann that has gotten good reviews. *** spoiler alert ***

The book has a realistic style but is set in an alternative version of the U.S. in which there is no welfare system. Thus when a teenage girl’s mother gets sick and the father abandons the family there is no Medicaid to provide a nurse for the dying mother; the teenage girl has to function as the nurse for several years and then, since there is also no financial aid for low-income college students, cannot go to college after the mother dies. (Nor in this alternative version of the world are there any of the community organizations that existing prior to the Welfare State, or even just neighbors helping neighbors. If the father leaves and mom is sick the entire burden falls on the 14-year-old girl.)

The book takes place about twenty years later. The teenage girl has grown up to become a single mother. As there is no welfare system in this version of the U.S. she doesn’t receive any assistance from the government nor does she get any child support from the father of her own daughter. (The book is set in Seattle, which, as explained in the relevant chapter of Real World Divorce, is a bad place for an adult hoping to live off a child; practical maximum child support revenue is about $20,000 per year per child.)

Life is not comfortable:

My mother drove an old Thunderbird. Apparently she had imagined a freer life before I came along. The front hood was half the length of the car. An enormous engine that galloped high and low at the curb. It could die at any moment, but it was going to finish off all the gas in the world first.

We lived in a shitty place. A shack on the highway, water dripping through the ceiling. I’m not going to say more. But next door, sharing the same dirt, we had a family from Japan. Asians are supposed to be rich, but these ones weren’t. I don’t know what went wrong. But the man dug a pit, and we thought he was going to roast a pig. We thought he might be Hawaiian. But he lined it with plastic and rocks and some plants and made a pond, and had four koi carps in there. That sounds nice, Steve said. A pearl in a toilet, my mother said. One of the koi was orange and white, the colors swirled together, and I named her Angel. And the man put an old wooden chair beside the pond so that I could sit. He never used it. He always stood. But he left this chair for me.

Everything bad in this world comes from men, my mother said. You have to know that. All violence, all fear, all slavery. Everything that crushes us.

Author Nell Zink said, “I thought what people like is race and gender—I’m gonna give them race and gender! I’m gonna give them race and gender until their heads spin!” and apparently Mr. Vann agrees. The 12-year-old protagonist is a lesbian and the reaction to this fact by other characters is either immediate 100% condemnation or immediately 100% acceptance. The girl’s 12-year-old lover is an Indian-American schoolmate from a successful family. It is never explained why the parents of the Indian girl allow their daughter to sleep over at the house of a single mother.

The action of the book comes from the grandfather trying to integrate himself into his daughter’s and granddaughter’s lives. Consistent with our “everyone can be a victim” culture, it turns out that the grandfather abandoned his wife due to PTSD from serving in the U.S. military. Now he is magically all better but his daughter won’t forgive him. Maybe it was the therapy industry that healed him because he suggests to his daughter that if she becomes a therapy industry customer she will discard 20 years of anger.

I was impressed with the writing style but a lot of the plot elements seemed unmotivated. What do readers think who read the book?

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I promised not to pay attention to any Republican Presidential candidate on the grounds that none have any chance of winning. However, friends on Facebook (i.e., not any of my actual friends!) have been linking to “Jeb Bush In 1995: Unwed Mothers Should Be Publicly Shamed” (Huff Post, June 9, 2015). The quoted passage doesn’t support the headline:

One of the reasons more young women are giving birth out of wedlock and more young men are walking away from their paternal obligations is that there is no longer a stigma attached to this behavior, no reason to feel shame. Many of these young women and young men look around and see their friends engaged in the same irresponsible conduct. Their parents and neighbors have become ineffective at attaching some sense of ridicule to this behavior. There was a time when neighbors and communities would frown on out of wedlock births and when public condemnation was enough of a stimulus for one to be careful.

In other words, the would-be King Bush III condemned both young men and women for their respective roles in generating out-of-wedlock children. Presumably the editors behind the headline thought that readers would be more shocked at a verbal attack on “single mothers” or “unwed mothers” or simply “mothers” than on young parents of both sexes.

[Note that Bush was writing in 1995, shortly after implementation of the Federal Family Support Act of 1988, which required states to codify the profit potential of obtaining custody of out-of-wedlock children via child support guideline formulae (see the “History of Divorce” chapter for how this changed Americans’ incentives).]

One reason to throw rocks at Jeb Bush for this idea is that it isn’t clear how it could be put into practice. What if the “unwed mother” is a cash-minded foreigner who reads realworlddivorce.com, comes over here as a tourist, has sex with a dentist, and takes the $2 million baby back with her to Eastern Europe (for example)? How does she become aware that the Americans who are wiring her money every week are also publicly shaming her?

Another strange angle is that Bush was governor of Florida for 8 years. According to the research that we did for http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Florida, the state offers unlimited child support profits ($17,244/year plus 5% of the target’s pre-tax income above $120,000/year). Unless Bush changed his views while in office, he was simultaneously presiding over a system to hand out billions of dollars for Behavior X while believing that people who engage in Behavior X should be publicly shamed. As noted in our chapter, a Floridian who can have children with two different co-parents, each of whom earns at least $120,000/year, can earn more from child support than from going to college and working. As noted in The Redistribution Recession, a Floridian having children with co-parents at the bottom end of the income distribution would be better off collecting welfare than working at a low-wage job. If there were any shame in the Florida single parent lifestyle it would be the kind of shame that one could take all the way to the bank.

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Tomorrow is the anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s kite-in-a-thunderstorm experiment. Ohio University (the Athens of Ohio, minus the immediate insolvency) has prepared a fancy poster showing the most exciting electrical engineering experiments of all time.

What do readers think? Will this get young Americans excited about EE?

[And, separately, why is Bruce Jenner becoming a woman more newsworthy than Bruce Jenner allegedly causing the death of a woman with his/her (his and hers?) Cadillac Escalade and trailer (helped by another California driver in a Hummer H2)?]

Personally I am excited about EE right now. This weekend a friend criticized my clunky 17″ HP laptop (with 16 GB of RAM!) and asked when I would be buying a sleek $3000 Apple MacBook so that I could have a smaller screen but more street cred. I told him that I would buy a new laptop when there was a gallium nitride-based internal power converter so that I didn’t have to lug around a power brick. (See Cambridge Electronics web site for an explanation of GaN.) And I guess I’ll buy an electric car when GaN components bring the price down and push the range up.

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The accident rate in the U.S. per 100,000 people is pretty high but I had always thought that was due to the fact that we drive so many miles per person per year. However, sorting the table in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate shows that we may simply be incompetent and/or be afflicted with poorly engineered roads. The fatality rate per billion vehicle-kilometers is 7.6 in the U.S., higher than countries that don’t have our divided highways and that have reputations for chaos in the streets. Israel, for example, is at 5.2. France at 6.3. Ireland at 3.4. Why isn’t pushing our fatality rate down to the Irish or Swedish (3.7) level an attainable goal? Is it because Google Cars will save us from ourselves soon enough?

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Folks:

Can someone explain to me why marijuana, in states where it is legal, costs so much? If it is a weed, isn’t it cheap to grow? (Maybe it is labor-intensive? As Jack Handey liked to tell children “You will never know what it’s like to work on a farm until your hands are raw, just so people can have fresh marijuana.”) This Web site says that marijuana costs $100-200 per ounce in Colorado. Why isn’t it closer to the price of spinach? I don’t think the explanation can be taxes because the Tax Foundation says that Colorado marijuana taxes are a percentage of revenue.

Second question: Is it legal for Colorado employers to screen for marijuana use and reject job applicants on that basis? Aside from jobs where federal laws require rejecting marijuana users (see my 2011 posting on FAA drug testing), why does occasional (legal) weekend marijuana use preclude a person from getting a paycheck?

Update: On June 15, 2015 the Colorado state Supreme Court ruled that an employer could fire an employee for off-duty marijuana use (WSJ). So you can enjoy recreational marijuana… as long as you don’t also want to have a paycheck from a private employer:

Colorado’s constitutional amendment that legalized recreational marijuana expressly states that employers wouldn’t be restricted from having policies that ban pot use by workers.

Some 23 states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical marijuana. Colorado and Washington state also permit recreational pot use. Legal experts, however, say it has remained unclear how such laws affect employers and whether they can fire a worker who uses the drug while off the job.

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Back in 2010 I helped get tents for 300 people down to Haiti (see “Personal Haitian Relief Operation”). This was about 10 days after the earthquake hit Port-au-Prince.

At the time I questioned the people running the tent city: “How can you guys possible make a difference when the Red Cross is here in full force?”

“How the Red Cross Raised Half a Billion Dollars for Haiti ­and Built Six Homes” provides an answer.

An interesting angle is the intense publicity around a crisis and the need for donations and then a long delay before anyone can find out how money was spent or what was accomplished.

Related:

• New Yorker piece on post-9/11 dissatisfaction with the Red Cross
• New York Times article on the Red Cross’s release of World War II-era documents (50 years later)

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Over drinks and dessert with some friends we got on the subject of skin color diversity at academic institutions. Universities say that they need to sort applicants by race because having a “diverse” class will lead to a richer educational experience for all.

We started with Stuyvesant high school, to which the only path in is via an impartially graded exam. The school is 78 percent Asian and Asian-American. The principal is named “Jie Zhang” and various other officials and coordinators are Asian as well. “When we get prerecorded phone calls from the school,” one parent said, “they start off in English then repeat the message in Chinese and then repeat it again in Korean.”

The subject of elite American schools filling their dorms with rich American kids of different skin tones came up. “That’s like establishing one’s connection to the underclass by saying ‘some of my best friends are extremely rich black people,'” I pointed out. A half-Haitian-American woman at the table said that even the richest darker-skinned Americans would bring diversity into the classroom due to their experiences of racial prejudice, including “microagression,” at the hands of white Americans. We as white people could never learn how bad this experience was because young black people would never share it with us. Suppose that we accept her account of Americans as everyday racists, how could a group of Americans, mostly with the same family income, constitute true diversity in a global economy? Wouldn’t someone from India, Burma, China, or Japan bring a more dramatically different perspective into the classroom than an American student, whatever his or her skin color happened to be? Isn’t having a 5000-year history of distinct culture more likely to result in a different perspective on the typical humanities class? The woman of partial Haitian heritage disagreed and then pointed out that it wasn’t just a better educational experience that American universities were seeking but rather “remedy” for past injustices to people with different skin colors.

What do readers think? In a world economy where the U.S. is less than 25 percent of GDP, how does it make sense to have a university claiming to be “global” where 90 percent of students are American-born (e.g., Yale)? And if students do actually learn more in the presence of diversity, can we see that in the academic performance of students at some of those schools in Europe where there is a true mixing of languages and cultures?

 

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“Connecticut Tax Boomerang” is a Wall Street Journal article on how General Electric is considering moving to a new state due to a change in the tax law:

making permanent a 20% surtax on a company’s annual tax liability—a tax on a tax—and for the first time taxing Connecticut companies on their world-wide income, rather than what they earn in the state.

Though not as lucrative for child support as Massachusetts, Connecticut is more favorable to a plaintiff than the majority of U.S. states (see the Connecticut chapter of Real World Divorce). Here are some features that other states don’t necessarily have:

• unlimited child support in theory (though in practice total revenue of more than $4 million (tax-free) from obtaining custody of a single child might be challenging)
• lifetime alimony
• an expectation that a divorce plaintiff will stay out of the workforce until the youngest child turns 18

A GE spouse could be giving up a lot of cash if he or she waits for the company to move before filing a divorce lawsuit.

Kimberly Scott v. Stuart Scott is a recent example of Connecticut law in practice. Back in 2007, Kimberly Scott got a divorce judgment against Stuart Scott for $600,000 per year in taxable alimony plus tax-free child support for two children. At roughly the same time the defendant was diagnosed with cancer. Kimberly sued her ex-husband in January 2013 seeking (a) an increase in alimony, (b) to have her legal fees paid for the new lawsuit (Ellen Pao-style), (c) an increase in child support paid to her, and (d) an order that the defendant be held in contempt of court for not paying a therapist bill.

The plaintiff emerged mostly victorious from the second lawsuit, with a March 2014 judgment (full text) by Judge John Carbonneau. She got a bump in alimony to $720,000 per year (taxable) and her remaining minor child will yield $102,000 in tax-free revenue. This latter cash stream is technically referred to as “child support” but the recipient apparently doesn’t have to pay any of the children’s expenses, notes the judgment, because the defendant pays for everything on top of the checks written to the mother. This includes private schools, extracurricular activities, 529 college savings accounts, and college tuition and fees. Dad pays for his ex-wife and her relatives to go on trips:

Plaintiff charges defendant for numerous expenses associated with the girls. Some include transportation, gas, clothing, hotel costs, gifts to teachers and counselors and trips with friends. When her mother or another family member accompanies the girls on a trip, plaintiff has included their costs and expenses for payment or reimbursement by defendant.

Plaintiff Kimberly Scott was 50 years old with a Bachelor’s degree. The defendant tried to suggest that she could earn at least $160 per week, but the judge rejected that assumption: “Neither party ascribes any current earning capacity to plaintiff.” Curiously, given that all of the money seemed to be coming from the father, the judgment reads “The court finds that both girls remain dependent on their parents for financial support even though Taelor is legally an adult.”

Judge Carbonneau noted the defendant’s terminal cancer, but found that it did not affect his ability to pay the plaintiff more money: “Defendant currently faces health challenges, but his income has not yet been significantly affected.” In case the cancer affected the defendant’s check-writing hand, the judge built in the government’s help in securing the plaintiff’s revenue stream: “All of defendant’s payments to plaintiff shall be secured by a contingent wage-withholding” (despite the fact that “There is no evidence that defendant has not paid his current alimony obligation.”).

The defendant died from his cancer (Washington Post), age 49, less than a year after this new revenue level was put in place.

[Note that typically a Connecticut court will order a divorce lawsuit loser to purchase life insurance with the winner as the beneficiary (legislative report) and therefore the defendant’s death may not have resulted in any financial loss to the plaintiff.]

What are the stakes for the spouse of a GE executive earning a multi-million dollar annual salary? The company could move to Germany, taking advantage of its manufacturing tradition and comparatively low corporate tax rates. According to the attorney in Baden-Baden whom we interviewed, the $102,000/year Connecticut child would become a $6,000/year Germany child (top of the “Düsseldorfer Tabelle”). Kimberly Scott’s 14-year marriage in Germany might have yielded a few years of alimony, but not the lifetime award that she obtained in Connecticut. The company could move to Texas, where child support is capped at $20,000 per year and alimony is capped at $60,000 per year.

Related:

• divorce law differences between New Jersey and Georgia (Mercedes move)

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Folks have been marveling at the number of Republican candidates for president. My personal opinion is that none of these people have any chance of being elected (previous posting) unless, perhaps, they simply adopt the same political positions as the Democrats. Let’s assume that there is some chance that a Republican could win. Why are there so many more during this election cycle compared to previous ones?

How about this theory: the Clintons have shown that it is possible to become among the richest people on the planet by using the American Presidency as a springboard. The job is thus perceived to have a higher rate of pay than formerly and therefore there are more people who come forward to apply for the job. No political science degree required; just Econ 101.

What do readers think?

Related:

• May 2015 posting about the Clintons’ $22 million per year in earnings
• Wikipedia page regarding Harry Truman’s post-presidency lifestyle

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“Last Task After Layoff at Disney: Train Foreign Replacements” (NYT, June 3, 2015) is an article about Disney getting rid of a bunch of older unwanted IT workers in favor of young immigrants from India. The journalist, interviewees, and reader comments express shock at Disney’s lack of sensitivity in making the displaced Americans train their Indian replacements:

“I just couldn’t believe they could fly people in to sit at our desks and take over our jobs exactly,” said one former worker, an American in his 40s who remains unemployed since his last day at Disney on Jan. 30. “It was so humiliating to train somebody else to take over your job. I still can’t grasp it.”

One former worker, a 57-year-old man with more than 10 years at Disney, displayed a list of 18 jobs within the company he had applied for. He had not had more than an initial conversation on any one, he said.

“The first 30 days was all capturing what I did,” said the American in his 40s, who worked 10 years in his Disney job. “The next 30 days they worked side by side with me, and the last 30 days they took over my job completely.” To receive his severance bonus, he said, “I had to make sure they were doing my job correctly.”

The former Disney employee who is 57 worked in project management and software development. His résumé lists a top-level skill certification and command of seven operating systems, 15 program languages and more than two dozen other applications and media.

This will perhaps not be one of the references cited next time Barack Obama or another politician advises young Americans to pursue STEM careers.

I’m not shocked at Disney’s quest to cut costs. I am shocked, however, that it was humans who came over here rather than data going over there. If the job was to sit at a computer connected to a network, why wouldn’t Disney let the Indians stay in India and invest in a fat network pipe rather than investing, indirectly through a contractor, in all of the H1-B legal work? Is it concerns over data security?

What about the age discrimination angle? Is it okay to fire all of your workers in their 40s and 50s and replace them with people aged 20-35? If the answer is “no” then is it okay to fire a large group of workers, most of whom happen to be age 45-60 and replace them with a contractor who will supply on-site workers, most of whom happen to be 20-35?

[One of my pet theories is that a lot of the reason it makes sense for an American company to move an operation over to India or China is that the result is a young workforce for that operation.]

Related:

• “MIT alumni in their 50s”

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