Month: June 2016

Charles Murray, (in)famous for authoring the Bell Curve, in which he pointed out that the world circa 1994 was unfriendly to those with a low IQ, has an editorial in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal: “A Guaranteed Income for Every American: Replacing the welfare state with an annual grant is the best way to cope with a radically changing U.S. jobs market—and to revitalize America’s civic culture.”

Here’s his proposal:

In my version, every American citizen age 21 and older would get a $13,000 annual grant deposited electronically into a bank account in monthly installments. Three thousand dollars must be used for health insurance (a complicated provision I won’t try to explain here), leaving every adult with $10,000 in disposable annual income for the rest of their lives. …

The UBI is to be financed by getting rid of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, housing subsidies, welfare for single women and every other kind of welfare and social-services program, as well as agricultural subsidies and corporate welfare. As of 2014, the annual cost of a UBI would have been about $200 billion cheaper than the current system. By 2020, it would be nearly a trillion dollars cheaper.

How could this work in a country with the world’s most expensive health care system? Murray says people will spend $3,000/year on health insurance. But Medicare costs more than $10,000/year per beneficiary (2009 data). Medicaid also costs more than $3,000 per year (2011 data). Consider two non-working parents with five kids. Right now they will get an array of taxpayer-funded services whose value could exceed $100,000 (housing, Medicaid, food stamps, Obamaphones, etc.). How could they survive on $26,000 per year when that wouldn’t even pay for a medical/dental policy in the private market?

Separately, Murray’s article demonstrates the depth of American political support for a government-run system that turns heterosexual sex into cash:

The unemployed guy living with his girlfriend will be told that he has to start paying part of the rent or move out, changing the dynamics of their relationship for the better. … Or consider the unemployed young man who fathers a child. Today, society is unable to make him shoulder responsibility. Under a UBI, a judge could order part of his monthly grant to be extracted for child support before he ever sees it. The lesson wouldn’t be lost on his male friends.

If Murray advocates for free enterprise, why doesn’t he support the decision of an adult “girlfriend” to pay most of the household expenses for an unemployed man? Can we not infer that he is providing her with something that she values as much or more than the space and food he consumes? Would Murray consider an unemployed woman living off the fruits of a man’s labor to be equally reprehensible?

In a country that offers on-demand abortion and for-profit abortion, Murray scolds the second example unemployed man for the birth of a child. Why isn’t his sex partner scolded for not educating herself regarding U.S. family law (see California, Florida, and Massachusetts, for example) and having children who are cashflow-positive?

The author is against more government spending but he wants to continue to assign a taxpayer-funded judge and prosecutor to determine the profitability of every out-of-wedlock birth in the U.S.?

Readers: Can this WSJ piece be read as anything other than a fantasy? Could it possibly work without cutting U.S. health care costs by more than 50 percent? And if we could do that, with almost 10 percent of additional GDP available every year to invest or spend, wouldn’t our economy then be in such great shape that we wouldn’t need to tweak our welfare system?

Could the idea be rescued with some tweaks? How about tackling the elephant in the room head-on: universal health care at a modest budgeted cost. If the U.S. had an English-style system that covers everyone to at least a basic level of care, then older Americans could live off their UBI instead of handing it over to the health care industry. Today’s Welfare parents with five kids wouldn’t be doing so great at $26,000 per year, but at least they wouldn’t spend 100 percent of that money on health care. Speaking of kids, if nobody gets a UBI until reaching age 21 it will be tough on current Welfare recipients who have produced children with the expectation that taxpayers will provide adequate housing, food, etc. On the other hand, if ownership of a children produces a $13,000-per-year revenue stream to an adult that will presumably encourage adults to have more children and fight over ownership (“custody”) just as they currently do in U.S. family court. The difference in spending for a married couple with and without a child is about $4,300 (see discussion of UCLA Professor William Comanor’s analysis in the Methodology chapter). This is in the neighborhood of maximum child support awards that are obtainable, even after having sex with a truly rich person, in many European jurisdictions. What if health care were covered and each child yielded a $3,000-per-year revenue stream for the adult owner(s)? Now the married couple with five kids gets $41,000 per year. That would put them above the poverty line for a family of 7 (source) and, of course, they could supplement that income with paid work if they wished to. Because the children wouldn’t be hugely profitable there wouldn’t be an economic incentive to have more kids (though of course people who enjoy having children around might have more kids even if profit-neutral).

I think that it would be more interesting to see an analysis of the economics of a system in which major health care costs did not come out of the UBI and in which the additional expenses of children were accounted for at least partially. The current litigation-based system of establishing private-sector adult dependency (alimony), child ownership (custody), and child profitability (child support), probably costs the economy at least $150 billion per year ($50 billion in direct expenses and at least another $100 billion in lost productivity either from people following incentives not to work or from preparing for the courtroom rather than working). If that were torn down because an alimony or child support plaintiff can now collect UBI, that would enable UBI to be bumped up by roughly $500 per American per year. Health care remains the tough one, though. We have a track record since the 1960s of crazy high costs and high growth rates in those costs, fueled by tax breaks for insurance and government spending through Medicare and Medicaid. Is it reasonable to assume that we could one day cut health care spending to only double Singapore’s, as a percentage of GDP?

Related:

• Long-term effects of short-term free cash (guaranteed minimum income experiments)

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Folks:

We have managed to push a Kindle version of Travels with Samantha out the door.

I would appreciate it if readers could download this (free if you’re a Kindle Unlimited subscriber) and tell me about any problems with the formatting.

Thanks in advance!

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A pilot friend wrote an article, accompanied by a narrated video, about the business of drying cherry trees by helicopter.

I would be interested to hear what non-pilots think!

At the very least, thank your neighborhood helicopter industry member next time that you enjoy some cherries!

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One issue in Amber Heard’s lawsuit against Johnny Depp is the authenticity of some iMessages. The Daily Mail has a story laying out both sides: “Johnny Depp’s assistant claims his text messages apologizing to Amber Heard for the actor’s actions are FAKE and have been heavily doctored.”

iPhones have all kinds of crypto. Is there a cryptographic hash on a screen shot such that if Amber Heard were to produce the original files we would be able to tell that it was an authentic screen shot from a particular date from either a particular iPhone or at least some iPhone?

What about up in the Apple server farm? iMessages are encrypted but can Apple read them all? Does Apple save them all?

If these (very convenient for a divorce plaintiff) messages are not authentic, how would Amber Heard and her legal team have gone about fabricating the depicted images? Straight up artistic work in Photoshop? Or better to engage in an exchange with a trusted associate and then use Photoshop to cut out and substitute the central portion of the screen?

Update: A friend pointed out that there are multiple web sites, e.g., www.ios7text.com, that will generate screen shots like the ones that Amber Heard may be presenting as evidence. Here’s an example that I created:

 

In fact, I wonder if this is the service that was used to create the ones offered by Amber Heard and her attorneys. My actual iPhone shows “Details” in the upper right, but ios7text.com defaults to “Contact” in the upper right, as do the screen shots displayed by the Daily Mail. My iPhone shows a microphone icon at bottom right, but ios7text.com and the displayed images show the word “Send” at the bottom right.

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I listened to Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus “Notch” Persson and the Game that Changed Everything as an audiobook (could be cut in half). I hadn’t realized that the Swedish computer game industry was so huge. The authors say that about 22 percent of computer game revenue in Europe goes to Swedish companies, mostly located in one neighborhood in Stockholm, despite the country having less than 2 percent of Europe’s population.

What do folks think accounts for this? The long winters? It doesn’t seem to be favorable tax treatment. A Swedish gaming success would be taxed at the capital gains rate of 30 percent, higher than some other European countries and the U.S. (an American would pay 20 percent federal tax, another 4 percent Obamacare tax, and then another 13 percent in California, but the average combined rate across all states is 28.6 percent).

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Folks:

My current laptops include a 2010 Thinkpad with 13″ screen and a 2012 HP 17″ notebook (heavy, but this is the one that I actually take with me because the keyboard and screen are large enough to do real writing).

I briefly tried a friend’s Dell XPS 13 and found the keyboard too cramped so I am thinking that perhaps a 15-inch notebook computer is the best option.

Who has bought one of these recently and found a keyboard with the same spacing as a standard desktop keyboard? I don’t need a numeric keypad.

This is for business use so it doesn’t have to be cheap, but on the other hand I don’t want it to be so expensive that I will cry if I drop it. My desktop is Windows 10 so, to avoid a cross-wired brain, the laptop should also run Windows 10.

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

[Separate question: A 480 GB SSD retails for less than $100 on Amazon.com. Why is that mainstream laptops from Dell and HP are still being shipped with mechanical hard drives? (Or desktop computers for that matter?) The $1,000 Dell XPS 15 ships with a “hard drive” and you need to spend $1,500 for a version with a 256 SSD. Bumping this up to the same capacity as the $100 SSDs at Amazon costs $1,829. Why would a PC vendor want to build machines that consumers will grow to hate?]

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Here’s an email that I sent to domestic senior management regarding a conversation with a 5-year-old when Mindy the Crippler was three months old:

She spilled a bowl of soup on the table. I said “how come my life now is cleaning up after kid and puppy spills?” She said “sometimes you also cook.”

Now we know how they see our lives!

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Folks:

I am going on the Royal Caribbean Serenade of the Seas around the Baltic (previous posting) from July 24-April 6 (come join me! there is still space on the ship! We’ll turn it into a photography and computer nerdism cruise.).

We dock in Rostock, Germany from 7:00 am to 9:30 pm on August 3, I believe. This is billed as a chance to see Berlin, but I’ve already been there (my story from 1993) and it is more than a 6-hour round-trip bus ride from Rostock (cruise tourists sign up for 12-hour excursions to Berlin where they spend about 6 hours actually in the city and 6+ hours on the bus).

What is there to do/see that doesn’t involve more than a one-hour drive (ideally less) from the dock?

Thanks in advance for any help!

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“Amber Heard ‘suffered through years of physical and psychological abuse’ by Johnny Depp, lawyers say” is a Washington Post article in which Ms. Heard is characterized as “a brave and financially independent woman” who is besieged because the defendant whom she sued has a “relentless army of lawyers.”

Although the only thing sought by her original lawsuit (previous posting includes a link to the Petition) is money (property division, alimony, and attorney’s fees), “none of [the plaintiff’s] actions are motivated by money.” (Amber Heard is also seeking to be divorced, of course, but California is a no-fault state (offering what scholars call “unilateral divorce”) so she is 100-percent guaranteed to win that part of her lawsuit.)

The assertion of bravery would seem to merit some examination. Though married for just one year, the headline writers at the Post apparently thought it credible that she “suffered through years of physical and psychological abuse.” Was it brave for her to marry an older person with money? (“One thing that you learn pretty quickly from listening to plaintiffs in Family Court,” said one of the lawyers that we interviewed, “is that 100 percent of rich white guys are abusers.”; see the Domestic Violence Parallel Track) Given that she now says that she was abused for years prior to the marriage, was it brave for her to proceed with the marriage, thus nobly sacrificing herself to spare other women from being beaten by this guy worth $400 million?

What about the “financially independent” angle? If she wins all of her lawsuit claims she will be living in a house that someone else paid for, receiving investment fund statements regarding money that had been earned by someone else, and, via alimony, become a man’s court-ordered lifelong adult dependent. The Feminism section of the Rationale chapter, may shed some light on this characterization:

Legislators and attorneys told us that women’s groups and people identifying themselves as “feminists” were proponents of laws favoring the award of sole custody of children to mothers and more profitable child support guidelines. Is that a recognizably feminist goal? For a woman to be at home with children living off a man’s income? Here’s how one attorney summarized 50 years of feminist progress: “In the 1960s a father might tell a daughter ‘Get pregnant with a rich guy and then marry him’ while in the 2010s a mother might tell a daughter ‘Get pregnant with a rich guy and then collect child support.'” Why is that superior from the perspective of feminism? A professor of English at Harvard said “Because the woman collecting child support is not subject to the power and control of the man.”

In other words, in Feminist terms she will be “financially independent” because she won’t have to do anything for a man in order to stay in the check-of-the-month club and no man will have any control over how she spends the money that she gets from one or more men.

Generally I don’t think that celebrity divorces are very interesting. There aren’t that many movie stars with whom a person can have profitable sex. Using American family law to tap into the earning power of a financial industry executive or a physician is a much more realistic goal for a typical resident of or visitor to the U.S. But the Amber Heard lawsuit seems to be an interesting part of the Zeitgeist.

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We get a lot of press coverage about college students drinking and having sex with each other. We also get books such as Missoula. But what is it like on campus when students are learning and discussing ideas? Here’s a video of University of Massachusetts students that sheds some light on what we’re paying for.

[the “Rationale” chapter of Real World Divorce contains some material related to the “third wave feminism” topic that pops up in the video:

Legislators and attorneys told us that women’s groups and people identifying themselves as “feminists” were proponents of laws favoring the award of sole custody of children to mothers and more profitable child support guidelines. Is that a recognizably feminist goal? For a woman to be at home with children living off a man’s income? Here’s how one attorney summarized 50 years of feminist progress: “In the 1960s a father might tell a daughter ‘Get pregnant with a rich guy and then marry him’ while in the 2010s a mother might tell a daughter ‘Get pregnant with a rich guy and then collect child support.'” Why is that superior from the perspective of feminism? A professor of English at Harvard said “Because the woman collecting child support is not subject to the power and control of the man.”

We interviewed Janice Fiamengo, a literature professor at the University of Ottawa and a scholar of modern feminism, about the apparent contradiction of feminists promoting stay-at-home motherhood. “It is a contradiction if you define feminism as being about equality and women’s autonomy,” she responded. “But feminism today can be instead about women having power and getting state support.”

Why isn’t there a rift in the sisterhood, with women who work full-time expressing resentment that women who met dermatologists in bars are relaxing at home with 2-4X the income? “[Child support profiteering] is kind of an underground economy. Most people just don’t know what is possible. We hear a lot from the media about deadbeat dads who don’t pay any child support and the poverty of single mothers. The media doesn’t cover women who are profiting from the system. The average person assumes that equal shared parenting is the norm and that, in cases where a man is ordered to pay child support, it will be a reasonable amount.”

How did we get to the divorce, custody, and child support system that prevails in Canada and in most U.S. states? “This is because of the amazing success of feminism,” answered Professor Fiamengo. “The movement has totally changed the sexual mores of society but held onto the basic perceptions that had always advantaged women, e.g., that a woman was purified through motherhood. Feminism did not throw out the foundations of the old order that it pretended to reject.”

What’s the practical implication of these perceptions? How do they influence the legislators writing the statutes and judges hearing cases? “People still think of the mother as the best parent, the essential parent,” said Professor Fiamengo. “And that a woman would never lie to obtain the financial benefits offered by the system. A woman would never try to profit from her child. We think of mothers as moral beings who care only about the welfare of their children. There’s a presumption that mothers don’t operate out of greed or self-interest despite the fact that all humans operate out of self-interest.”

But couldn’t it actually be true that women are purified by motherhood? That they wouldn’t lie to collect a few million dollars tax-free plus enjoy the company of their children? “Even pretty decent people would be tempted by the rewards handed out,” said Professor Fiamengo. “It is easy to justify if you no longer like the guy you had been with.”

“Will Single Women Transform America?” is an Atlantic magazine video that confirms this perspective. The women getting government handouts and/or court-ordered child support for the single-mother lifestyle that they have chosen are characterized as “independent, unmarried women.”]

 

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