Month: November 2019

Possible explanation for media enthusiasm for middle class welfare

by philg

American newspapers are tireless advocates for what are essentially middle class welfare programs: affordable housing, Medicare for all, etc. These proposals won’t help the poor, all of whom are already eligible for taxpayer-funded housing, taxpayer-funded health care (Medicaid), taxpayer-funded food (SNAP), and a taxpayer-funded smartphone.

This union-authored study of pay at the Washington Post may provide some insight:

For the 290 salaried male newsroom employees working at The Post, the median salary is $116,065. For the 284 salaried female newsroom employees, it is $95,595.

(Separate question: if women are less expensive to employ and work just as effectively, why does a profit-oriented guy like Jeff Bezos hire any men at all?)

In other words, it turns out that the folks who author the news in D.C. are earning close to the income limit for affordable housing for a family of 4 in D.C. If they get a pay raise they end up in the slavery zone for an American: not rich enough to afford a decent apartment in a nice area, not poor enough to qualify for any subsidies. The result is an apartment in Rockville or a house in Frederick and 2-3 hours of daily commuting.

So it is possible that they advocate for a planned economy and lavish middle-class handouts for purely altruistic reasons, but this advocacy is also consistent with their personal situation.

Related:

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Liberal arts colleges running out of woke white men?

by philg

The financial struggles of New England liberal arts colleges have been in the news lately. “Marlboro planning to give campus and endowment to Emerson College” describes the end of 73 years of operation in Southern Vermont. “Can small liberal arts colleges survive the next decade?” (Christian Science Monitor)

A friend who has worked at the highest levels of college governance said that these bastions of righteousness in which white males are blamed for most things are having difficulty recruiting white males. Why does that matter? “Once the men stop attending,” he noted, “then women don’t want to enroll.”

Marlboro has a 56-percent female student population (US News), which is right at the national average (“Why Men Are the New College Minority” (Atlantic)). Hampshire College, whose stress is profiled in the CS Monitor, is at 62 percent female (collegefactual.com).

A teacher at Marlboro:

He brings an intersectional lens grounded in social justice praxis to the classroom and is passionate about racial, gender and LGBTQ justice and issues of representation in film. Brad believes that the Western film canon is essentially a survey of what bell hooks calls “the imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” Any creative work that we do must reckon with this history of oppression, extract from it what serves us, and dismantle and discard what does not.

Hampshire College’s Commitment to Diversity:

At Hampshire diversity encompasses multiple and intersecting identities including but not limited to race, class, ethnicity, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, religious expression, physical and mental abilities, military and veteran status, and political expression.

We aspire to foster an inclusive community of individuals who share a commitment to all forms of anti-oppression, social justice, respectful discourse, and engagement.

It doesn’t sound as though a white male wearing an MAGA hat would be considered welcome (“respectful”) diversity! Thus, these schools are fighting over the handful of young men who are (a) rich enough to pay tuition for a non-vocational degree, (b) sympathetic to the idea that they are perpetrating abuse of women, minorities, etc.

One could argue that a liberal arts college whose male-female ratio is right at the national average of 44-56 should be doing fine. However, consider the female customer. Why should she pay 3-4X the price of a state school if the gender ID ratio is no better (from her point of view) at the expensive liberal arts college?

Related:

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Self-made rich bastards: don’t leave all your money to charity

by philg

One self-made moderately rich friend (lawyer/entrepreneur) related that he’d told his daughters that their expenses would be paid through college, but after that they were on their own. He and his (nurse) wife would be spending all of the money that they’d earned on luxury consumption, extra leisure time, etc. They expected their daughters to achieve comparable levels of success to what the parents had achieved.

Another self-made rich guy (specialist physician/health care business executive that the plaintiffs of Massachusetts neglected to mine out) said that he was going to leave all of his money to a charitable foundation that he’d set up and was passionate about. “My daughter is 28, lives in an apartment with her boyfriend, and says that she doesn’t want to have children or own a house or car.”

To the doctor, I wrote the following:

Pew talks about the trend toward later births, but constant total fertility (i.e., American women have the same number of kids as before, but later in their lives). If your daughter does have kids, she will need an inheritance!

Due to population growth, it costs a minimum of $1 million to live in a decent neighborhood anywhere in the U.S. and surely this price will rise as the population trends toward 400 million (via immigration, if not high fertility). Young people today are extremely unlikely to have the kind of success that you and I had. I was Class of ’82 at MIT. 50% of applicants got in. When I was growing up, any dentist who worked full time could afford a house on the beach near a big city (e.g., Cape Cod if he or she lived in MA). Now the lot alone would be $3 million. Hardly anyone in crowded societies, e.g., Europe or China, can afford a comfortable lifestyle without a big input from parents.

See this nytimes article. Young folks today are living in what were garages to hold the cars of people our age.

His response:

I was also admitted to MIT in 1980 and it didn’t seem that difficult to get in. I bought my first house in 1984 and always had career possibilities that exceeded the cost of living. It’s definitely a different world.

Readers: What do you think? Is it reasonable to tell children “You have to make it on your own because I did”? A friend who is active in the MIT alumni organization told me that he learned that the current average applicant to MIT is as qualified as the average admitted student for his class (1999). If not, how much money should one leave a child in order to put them in the same relative position in U.S. society that those of us born in the 1960s have enjoyed?

(Separately, if you do leave children money, make sure that it is in a discretionary trust that is difficult for a child support or alimony predator to attack. Otherwise, there is at least a 50 percent chance that the money put aside for your children will end up in the hands of a plaintiff stranger.)

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Baseball fans throng an art museum

by philg

I happened to be in downtown Washington, D.C. on the same day as somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million Nationals fans gathered to celebrate the recent World Series victory. The parade ended with a bunch of activities right next to the National Gallery of Art, which was my intended destination. I was fearful that the museum (free admission) would close early to avoid being overwhelmed, but the guards told me that they would be open the usual hours.

The sculpture garden was closed against the mob:

Maybe fans would want to come into the museum, use the luxurious restrooms, and see the Rembrandts before the parade started?

Vermeer proved equally popular:

Also a special exhibition:

Maybe the crowd outside wasn’t as big as expected, a Trump inauguration tempest situation?

My favorite part: a 2-year-old throwing, batting, and running bases.

What else were they avoiding? An interesting show on pastels, whose rising popularity in the 18th century turns out to have been driven by a technical innovation (plate glass) and globalization (English traveling to Italy):

The museum features a painting related to the latest news about older guys paying young women to have sex:

The painting is from 1520.

Speaking of current events, Matisse weighs in the Gillette v. Dorco shaving question:

While waiting for the crowds on the Metro to abate, I also ducked into the National Museum of American History. From the professional historians at the Smithsonian and the images that they selected I learned that war is primarily a female endeavor:

The path to peace, therefore, would be to persuade Americans who identify as “women” to give up the warpath.

For fans of CRTs:

If you miss the San Francisco scenery:

Or yearn for the American Dream:

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Coastal elite hatred of Trump voters explained…

by philg

… by a member of the coastal elite.

On a recent trip to Washington, D.C., we had lunch with a highly educated highly paid person who expressed hatred of Donald Trump and the kind of people who would vote for him. She has a law degree and works for a government agency managing a team of attorneys who process “civil rights complaints” against the agency. What constitutes a civil rights complaint? “It is almost always an employee suing the agency for race, sex, or some other kind of discrimination,” she explained. “I don’t do any of the litigation myself, but only manage the attorneys who do. It isn’t fulfilling or meaningful, but it lets me attend all of my kids’ school events.”

One thing that she hated about Trump was his withdrawal from the Paris agreement (the same Wikipedia article notes that none of the big countries that have agreed to the agreement have actually delivered on their pledges). She described her own practice of trying to reuse plastic wrap and belief that if everyone did that it would result in a significant reduction in fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions. (She lives in the suburbs and drives everywhere in a private gasoline-powered vehicle, consistent with “study finds climate change skeptics are more likely to behave in eco-friendly ways than those who are highly concerned about the issue”.)

She was yet more passionate on the subject of immigration. Trump was obstructing her ability to hire immigrants, e.g., to maintain her suburban yard. “They’re doing jobs that Americans won’t do,” she pointed out.

Her lobbyist husband had dangerous libertarian tendencies that she had tolerated thus far. However, she believed that he would vote for Donald Trump if Elizabeth Warren were to be nominated by the Democrats. “I would have to divorce him,” she noted seriously and without mentioning that the well-being of her two young children was being factored into her decision.

(As the lower earning spouse, she would likely come out as the winner of the winner-take-all contest set up by Maryland family law, so divorce for her would mean little change in spending power and she’d have significant blocks of time completely free for Tindering among the righteous while the Warren-resisting father cared for the children.)

I tried to gently point out that a lot of the people who voted for Democrats happened to be those who benefited from a larger government. Thus, they might be said to be voting their pocketbook just as they accused Trump voters of doing. She replied that, when voting, she thought only of her children and the future of the planet rather than herself.

After the lunch party broke up, a fellow attendee (also a senior government worker and a voter for Democrats) and I discussed this woman’s perspective. We agreed that she simply did not like having to share the U.S. with the kind of fellow citizen who would vote for Donald Trump. Her beef was not actually with Trump, whom she agreed is merely doing what he promised to do, but rather with her fellow citizens who were and are Trump supporters.

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Pilot shortage partly due to ADHD diagnosis epidemic?

by philg

One of my students recently was a 30-year-old who struggled for 14 years before getting an FAA medical certificate. He’d been diagnosed with ADHD as a young teenager (like 13 percent of young people who identify as “boys”), this diagnosis had to be disclosed by law to the FAA Aviation Medical Examiner, and the FAA wasn’t ready to see him serve as a required crewmember.

ADHD diagnoses are up dramatically. Obviously this can’t account for all of the pilot “shortage” (from the perspective of employers; any time salaries have to be raised is an emergency situation), but I wonder if it accounts for at least some of it.

[The ADHD diagnosis rate for girls is not relevant statistically since pilots who identify as “women” are only about 6 percent of the total population. Various explanations for this, but certainly it is not necessary for a woman to work as an airline pilot to have the spending power of an airline pilot. From the Real World Divorce Massachusetts chapter:

“There are a lot of women collecting child support from more than one man,” Nissenbaum noted. “I remember one enterprising young lady who worked as a waitress at Boston’s Logan airport. She targeted three airline pilots, had a child by each of them, and back then was collecting $25,000 in tax-free child support from each pilot. Of course, instead of serving food and beverages, she did have to care for those children.”

Perhaps just as compelling is that a mother who works as an airline pilot may lose custody of what had been her children in the event of a separation from the father(s). A lot of U.S. states award custody based on the “historical primary caregiver” standard and an airline pilot, like a deployed member of the U.S. military, is an almost automatic loser of the war to be seen as “historical primary caregiver”.]

Another area where a lot of potential pilots might be disqualified is drunk driving. The bjs.gov site shows 840,000 arrests of “males” for DUI (278,000 for “females”) in 2014, the most recent year available. A friend of a friend was arrested for DUI after a college party and it was practically impossible for him to get his FAA medical back. He’d actually been in a professional pilot training program. He most certainly was not an alcoholic, but unless he went into all kinds of treatment programs for alcoholics, he was never going to be able to fly. He gave up.

Maybe the DUI problem will sort itself out in a few more years when the glorious age of self-driving is upon us. But ADHD as an effective disqualification for a pilot is worrisome because the condition is vague and subjective and the chance of being diagnosed with ADHD varies by school and state. From “Are Schools Driving ADHD Diagnoses?”:

As the ranks of kids diagnosed with ADHD in this country continue to swell—to 12% of school-age children and as many as 20% of teenage boys, according to the CDC’s latest count—it becomes more and more urgent to look at what forces might be driving this phenomenon. … a child in Kentucky is three times as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD as a child in Nevada. And a child in Louisiana is five times as likely to take medication for ADHD as a child in Nevada. Most of the states with the highest rates of diagnosis and prescriptions for medication are in the South, with some in the Midwest; most of the states with the lowest rates are in the West or Northeast.

Specifically, Drs. Hinshaw and Scheffler’s team found a correlation between the states with the highest rates of ADHD diagnosis and laws that penalize school districts when students fail. … What the team found is that in states that enacted these measures early, within a couple of years rates of ADHD diagnoses started going up, especially for kids near the poverty line.

When I interviewed for a job at a Delta Airlines subsidiary we were given a “cognitive skills” test that measured the ability to multi-task and handle challenges in the face of distraction. Maybe the FAA could authorize some testing centers to bless would-be pilots who had been tarred with the ADHD brush rather than relying on physicians to sound the all clear.

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Billionaire Raj: only a bigger government can address the inequality create by a big government

by philg

I’m listening to the Billionaire Raj on Audible. For those of us who live in a U.S.-centric bubble, there is a lot of interesting modern history regarding India’s most successful people and enterprises, including Mukesh Ambani who lives in a $2 billion house in Mumbai and was rich enough to spend $30 billion building a from-scratch mobile operator called Jio. Some of the success seems to come from rapid growth in an immature economy, which therefore offers niches that don’t exist in Germany, Japan, or the U.S. (what start-up could realistically compete with Verizon, for example?). The author attributes most of the success, however, to cronyism. Current Indian billionaires were those who got early licenses and permits from paid-off friends in politics and government. Maybe they don’t need to bother with bribes now because they have huge market share and momentum.

The author, James Crabtree, makes righteous-sounding statements about the dramatic income and wealth inequality that prevails in India today. Implicit in his decrying of the current situation is that the Indian government needs to grow in size and capacity until money can be taken away from the undeserving billionaires and distributed to the worthy poor. He draws dozens of comparisons between India’s current crop of billionaires and the robber barons that grew rich in the late 19th century United States.

The book itself contradicts this comparison. Crabtree paints India pre-1990 as having a centrally planned economy with at least as many restrictions as the Soviet Union. Nobody could buy or sell anything without approval from a government bureaucrat. Nobody could get on a plane and leave the country without government permission. The Indian government, even in its stripped-down post-1990 form, is vastly larger and more powerful than the U.S. government was in the 1800s.

There are some good sections on the infrastructure of corruption. Most people don’t know how to bribe government officials and wouldn’t want to learn how. Thus, a corrupt society encourages the development of a layer of middlemen agents who obtain the required permits from government officials. If they’re paying bribes, the customer of the agent never need know.

Ever wonder why the folks calling with credit card refinancing scams all have Indian accents? There are plenty of people worldwide who speak English and quite a few are willing to work at low wages. Crabtree makes the case that India has the world’s richest and deepest tradition of corruption.

The author studied government and public policy and his proposal for India is essentially that government be “reformed” so that bribery and inefficiency are eliminated in favor of enlightened technocracy. Once that is done, presumably, then an Elizabeth Warren-style sanding down of the billionaires will take place to address the scourge of inequality.

Yet it is unclear how this glorious reform is to be achieved. The author describes Indian politics as driven by castes competing for victimhood status and parties promising to dole out government jobs and other government-controlled resources to victim castes. All party activities are fueled by cash from successful businesses and business owners. (Corrupt politicians are punished, however; after 18 years of prosecution and procedure, J. Jayalalithaa was sentenced to 4 years in prison (she served one month before returning to office).)

Ultimately the book is unconvincing regarding the source of wealth of current Indian billionaires. The book describes some of them going bust after making investments that were a bit too daring. The book describes Ambani being unable to get the government to approve helicopter operations off the roof of his $2 billion house. If he’s a government crony, why can’t he get his helipad? GE was able to get their cronies in the City of Boston to approve a helipad in South Boston that nobody else had been able to get (a condition of GE moving its HQ to Massachusetts). Certainly it seems that the Indian billionaires gambled big and won big as the economy continued to grow. And probably they faced a less competitive environment than in some countries with smaller governments and markets closer to the Econ 101 ideal.

Despite the logical contradictions and absurd dreams of hyper-efficient and hyper-honest government in a country that has a multi-century tradition of the opposite, the Billionaire Raj is useful for shaking the American reader out of the notion that the U.S. and China are the only places where big business happens.

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Donald Trump is making a huge financial sacrifice by serving as president?

by philg

In my review of the Trump Hotel, D.C.:

Given that the intensity of Trump hatred among Democrats is much stronger than the intensity of Trump love among Republicans, I wonder if the narrative that Trump hotels are getting a boost in business from his presidency is false. Maybe there are some folks who think it is fun to be a Trump customer and perhaps there are some foreigners who think that Trump will do their bidding if they are regular guests. But these have to be outweighed by those who want to demonstrate their virtue by never setting foot in a Trump-named enterprise again.

The same journalists who previously attacked Trump for getting rich off the Presidency are now gleefully reporting that his hotels are suffering losses are a result of his political prominence, e.g., “Trump Tower Chicago Hotel is Losing Money Hand Over Fist” (Vanity Fair):

In addition to the Chicago property, business at Trump Doral in Miami is also reportedly in “steep decline,” which a tax consultant hired by the Trump Organization attributed to the “negative connotation…associated with the brand.” The company has also lost contracts with hotels in Manhattan and Toronto. And in a sign that even people inside the family business know the name is dragging down profits, virtually every mention of “Trump” has been stripped from two Central Park ice rinks. Earlier this year, the Trump Organization, which declined to comment on its financial woes, attempted to blame the money situation in the Windy City on “the perceived threat of gun violence,” despite the fact that no other competitors have suffered a similar decline. “Among the hotel community in Chicago, everyone is aware of the relative underperformance of the Trump hotel over the last two to three years,” analyst Michael Bellisario told the Post at the time.

Will it turn out that the Trump family was actually the most altruistic ever to go into American politics?

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Lesson from India: Buy gold before Elizabeth Warren is elected

by philg

I’m listening to the Billionaire Raj on Audible. The author says that intensive government regulation (the Licence Raj) and high income tax rates motivated Indians to operate a “black money” economy in which transactions were carried out with cash, gold and savings were stashed in real estate and gold, and the slow-moving wheels of government bureaucracy were lubricated with confidential payments in gold. In fact, it is possible that the massive size of the Indian economy and this massive unexpected need for gold is what has been keeping the price of gold so high over the last 20-30 years.

What if Elizabeth Warren were to be elected in 2020? She proposes more intensive government regulation and dramatically higher tax rates. Might this lead to increased demand from Americans for gold, as the same policies did in India?

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U.S. Air Force as an employee welfare enterprise

by philg

“Barrett Sworn In As Secretary Of The Air Force” (AVweb):

As Secretary of the Air Force, Barrett is responsible for Department of the Air Force affairs including “organizing, training, equipping and providing for the welfare of 685,000 active duty, Guard, Reserve and civilian Airmen and their families,” along with overseeing the Air Force’s $205 billion annual budget, directing strategy and policy development, risk management, weapons acquisition, technology investments and human resource management. “The Airmen who wear our nation’s uniform are our greatest asset and treasure,” she said in her remarks following the swearing-in. “We have no greater charge than to develop and care for them and their families.”

Just as on the Air Force base where our flight school operates, there is no message about defeating our enemies. It is all about the employees!

What about the previous Air Force Secretary? Here’s an interview with Heather Wilson:

Wilson said her responsibilities as SecAF were broader than those of any other executive position she held…she was obligated to the welfare of 685,000 Total Force Airmen and their families, and the oversight of a $138 billion annual budget.

(Separately, if Donald Trump is hostile to Americans who identify as “women”, as his opponents claim, why did he nominate two such individuals in succession to this job?)

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