Author: philg

Boston has a lot of historical and natural advantages, e.g., all of the colleges and universities that set up shop over the past 375+ years. This study, however, ranks us 56/78 in terms of public spending efficiency. Typically I would question a study such as this, but Washington, D.C. ranks dead last, which squares with common sense and direct personal experience. California cities buried under pension debt also rank pretty low, which makes sense due to the fact that they’ll soon be spending most of their budget on paying former employees. The authors of the study try to adjust for how challenging it is to run a public school:

To control for major cross-city differences in economic status among cities, we adjusted education spending levels by two key economic factors: poverty rate and median household income. Moreover, given that education spending is further affected by the percentage of children in single-parent families and the percentage of households that do not speak English as their first language, we adjusted expenditures on these two measures as well.

[Note that a Massachusetts resident who sets up what the authors describe as a “single-parent family” by having sex with a dermatologist, dentist, or other higher-income resident or visitor should be able to get $1-3 million tax-free under the Massachusetts child support guidelines and may have wage income on top of child support profits. So a “single-parent family” may well have a spending power that is above the median household income for the state, unlike in some other states where child support revenue is capped (e.g., Minnesota). Thus the authors might need to work with finer-grained data to sort out children with just one parent on food stamps from children with just one parent in a Beacon Hill townhouse next to John Kerry‘s. On the third hand, due to the higher financial stakes and winner-take-all outcomes, Massachusetts has much more intensive custody, and child support litigation than other states, which tends to result in children who are psychologically damaged and harder to educate even if the winner parent becomes fairly rich.]

And also for how tough it is to keep citizens from attacking each other:

To control for major cross-city differences in the economic status of cities, we adjusted police-spending levels by three key economic factors: poverty rate, unemployment rate and median household income. The adjusted “Per-Capita Police Spending” measure assumes all cities have an average for each of the three factors. This allowed us to compare return on investment (ROI) of police spending net of cross-city differences in these key economic indicators.

Under some of these adjustments Boston’s economic success, most of which is probably accounted for by stuff that happened 100+ years ago, works against us.

The same folks ranked Boston 52/65 in 2015’s Best & Worst Run Cities.

Readers: Based on your experience in other cities that are featured in the study, what do you think?

Related:

• Despite high levels of income and wealth, Massachusetts ranks 30/50 for happiness.
• “Why Have Democrats Failed in the State Where They’re Most Likely to Succeed?” (The Nation), describes Boston as ” the spiritual homeland of the professional class and a place where the ideology of modern liberalism has been permitted to grow and flourish without challenge or restraint” and then notes that Massachusetts “has the eighth-worst rate of income inequality among the states; by another metric it ranks fourth.”
• Now I get to pay some of GE’s bills (Massachusetts and Boston taxpayers fund GE’s new urban lifestyle)

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Opponents of Donald Trump suggest that his supporters are motivated by racism, e.g., Trump’s proposal to favor non-Muslim immigrants and to attempt to restrict illegal immigration.

Why couldn’t Trump supporters be motivated instead by a desire to see a President who wasn’t looking to cash in on the back-end?

Let’s consider the Clintons. They presided over an immensely powerful government whose actions benefited some private citizens and corporations more than others (see the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, for example). It seems that some private citizens and corporations have seen fit to give the Clintons more than $100 million in speaking fees in the years since they left public office.

How about Barack Obama? Over the years, Obamacare should add literally hundreds of billions of dollars to the revenue of insurance companies and health care providers (for what other industry is it illegal for a consumer to decline to purchase the product?). Following his departure from office, could Obama make hundreds of millions of dollars giving talks to medical associations, hospital executives, and insurance companies? If so, doesn’t that function as a payoff for services rendered?

A vote for Trump may be many things but why can’t it be a vote to shut this system down? Though he seems to have inflated his wealth to some extent he is unarguably at least a moderately rich bastard. Thus a typical voter might hope that he wouldn’t want to sell out his fellow citizens in order to benefit a corporate or individual from whom he in turns hopes to get cash post-Presidency.

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At least in Syria, the Russians were able to show up to a conflict zone, achieve their desired military results, and pack up and leave. We Americans, on the other hand, seem to spend 10+ years in places without even figuring out what our goals might be. “The Bidding War” is a March 7, 2016 New Yorker article that sheds some light on the subject:

America’s war in Afghanistan, which is now in its fifteenth year, presents a mystery: how could so much money, power, and good will have achieved so little? Congress has appropriated almost eight hundred billion dollars for military operations in Afghanistan; a hundred and thirteen billion has gone to reconstruction, more than was spent on the Marshall Plan, in postwar Europe.

One result has been forms of corruption so extreme that the military has, in some cases, funded its own enemy. When a House committee investigated the trucking system that supplied American forces, it found that the system had “fueled a vast protection racket run by a shadowy network of warlords, strongmen, commanders, corrupt Afghan officials, and perhaps others.” Its report concluded that “protection payments for safe passage are a significant potential source of funding for the Taliban.”

The system has also made a few individuals very rich. Hikmatullah Shadman, an Afghan trucking-company owner [in his late 20s], earned more than a hundred and sixty million dollars while contracting for the United States military;

Related:

• Who finances the Taliban and Al-Qaeda? We do. (a 2009 posting where I asked “Who has been financing these guys for eight years? What if the answer is ‘us’?”)

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My #1 reason to carry a phone is to have access to emails and atttachments, #2 is to make phone calls, and #3 is to take pictures. Thus last Wednesday I decided to switch from an iPhone 6 Plus, which has a good-for-a-smartphone camera, to a Samsung Galaxy S7, which supposedly has a great-for-a-smartphone camera (DxOMark; my results so far).

Samsung disfigures the Android operating system to some extent, but not quite as ruinously as on my old Note 3. The Contacts manager by default seems to sync only with those contacts for which Google has a phone number. (See this posting for how it used to work and especially the link to this demo video.) Samsung cannot seem to leave alone the list of roughly 100,000 people with whom I have ever corresponded by email. If I type “Just” on the keyboard in the Memo app, for example, or anywhere else that the Samsung keyboard is in use, the keyboard offers me a completion option of an email address that starts with “Justin.” This is extremely annoying and there does not seem to be a way of disabling the brain-damaged idea of suggesting random email addresses while leaving the reasonable idea of suggesting English words. Nor does the “dictate with Google voice recognition” icon show up on the Samsung keyboard. Fortunately this can be fixed by downloading and installing the Google keyboard, which has a configurable “suggest contact names” option that is much more reasonable (names of actual contacts, not 100,000 once-contacted email addresses).

The physical design of the device is sort of attractive. Unfortunately, the last time that you will see the device as designed is in the Verizon store. Presumably there are some dexterous folks over in Korea who can use this device in its naked state. If you’re a stupid white man with fat clumsy fingers, however, the bezel of the phone is so thin that the fingers you’re using to grip the phone are perceived as touching the glass, thus rendering the interface unusable. I wrapped the phone in a Tech 21 case partly for protection but mostly so that holding the phone didn’t put in commands. The Samsung Edge is presumably even more of a user interface disaster and the Verizon store employees did not recommend it. The “edge” control is smart up against the on/off button so you’d have to be truly nimble to use it as designed. Plainly the Edge idea can’t work if the phone is wrapped in a truly protective case.

At night it is nice that the phone shows the time, date, and battery charge level continuously on a portion of the OLED screen. The OLED screen is beautiful, but at the default brightness setting of “max brightness” the battery life seems inferior to the iPhone’s. You’ll want a car charger and an office charger! So far I am not missing the larger, but lower-resolution, screen of the iPhone 6 Plus, even when using the Kindle app to read books. (The S7 screen specs are “1440 x 2560 pixels (~577 ppi pixel density)” compared to “1080 x 1920 pixels (~401 ppi pixel density)” on the iPhone 6 Plus according to gsmarena.com.)

The home button is not recessed, unlike the iPhone’s. This led to a lot of inadvertent “device on” time with my Note 3. Instead of fixing the physical design, Samsung has added complexity to the interface with a buried-under-display-and-wallpaper setting called “Keep screen turned off” that says “Prevent the screen from turning on accidentally while the phone is in a dark place such as a pocket or bag.” The home button, if double-tapped, does instantly get to the camera app, even if the phone is otherwise locked. This is easier and quicker than the swipe access on iOS.

The waterproof nature of the device is game-changing if you ever get near swimming pools and/or have kids. You can take a picture while standing in a pool. You can receive a phone call while lying on a pool float. You don’t have to be fearful that a child will knock the phone into water.

The device is easier to use as a flashlight than is an iPhone. You can allocate one of the “quick swipe” buttons to the flashlight on/off button. The device is also easier to use to check the weather. Instead of having to touch the “weather” icon to see the current outside air temperature, it appears in the upper right corner of the home screen, along with a sun/cloud/rain icon. The home screen also lets you say “Ok, Google” and start asking for assistance. It seems to work a lot better than Siri. Samsung Pay supposedly works a lot better than Apple Pay or Android Pay (comparison), but curiously was not included with the phone in the box. Supposedly the Samsung Pay system doesn’t require that the merchant have any special hardware. It simulates the magnetic strip on a physical credit card. It took about two minutes to set up with a Chase Visa card and then worked at Walgreens. The fingerprint reader works better than the one on the iPhone.

Speaking of electromagnetic magic… being able to charge the phone at night by placing it on a little stand is great! (Unfortunately you have to pay $70 extra for the Samsung wireless charger, though it does hold the phone at a good angle for checking the time from almost anywhere in a room.)

If you hate to check voicemail you’ll be pleased to see that the Phone app and the Voicemail app are almost completely separate. If the phone actually did see a call so that it shows up in “Recent” and there was a voicemail message left there will be a subtle tape recorder icon that appears (what do those two reels mean to a Millennial? Why not an icon of a Poulsen wire recorder?).

Samsung’s health tracking app seems to have become less user-friendly compared to what came installed on the Note 3. However, it is still better than Apple’s pathetic effort. You can enter your weight on various days (and/or have a compatible scale push them into the phone) and also a weight goal, but it doesn’t offer the option of the Steve Ward diet.

What about the camera? So far it does seem to be almost as great as everyone says. It is responsive, the autofocus is accurate and fast, and the indoor image quality is far better than the iPhone 6 Plus’s. It is easier to adjust settings than with Apple’s software, though personally I think that the camera on a phone should do the job in Auto mode 99.9% of the time. The camera position on the back of the phone seems more prone to capturing the owner’s fingers than did the iPhone’s camera. Results so far are on Google Photos (which has no ability to caption images; one can type a description but it is deeply buried; I wonder if the team that built Gmail contacts has moved on to the Photos group…).

I’m living with Android right now rather than loving it. iOS has grown in complexity but remains simpler than Android or at least Android+Samsung. The Galaxy S7 seems to have much faster and more powerful hardware than did the iPhone 6 Plus so most stuff happens nearly instantly. On the other hand, oftentimes it is stuff that I didn’t want to happen. On the third hand, there does seem to be an amazing world of capability available to those who have the patience to learn all of the extra features and settings. (Example: if you turn on “Send SOS messages” and press the power key three times it will send a message, including pictures or an audio recording if desired, to emergency contacts.) The device does have an “Easy Mode” that hides most of the complexity. I hadn’t expected to be ready for “Easy Mode” at my current age but I am tempted…

Summary: The whole is slightly less than the sum of the parts, but the sum of the parts is vastly greater than what you can get from Apple right now. Samsung needs to rethink its user interface testing procedures so that testing is accomplished with real Google accounts (e.g., ones that do have 10,000+ email-only “contacts”). Samsung should probably kill more than half of its projects that modify stock Android. Perhaps they need to hire Marie Kondo for a corporate kumbaya session where people can ask if there is anyone on Planet Earth for whom an individual OS tweak could conceivably spark joy.

[Anyone have a good idea for what to do with my old iPhone 6 Plus? It is a 64 GB Verizon version that I don’t think it is locked. I paid $900 for it about nine months ago, supposedly unlocked at a BestBuy, and then activated it on the Verizon network. gazelle.com says that it is now worth $255. Can it be used on a network other than Verizon’s?]

Wishlist:

• I can buy a nearly indestructible $20 flashlight with a rubberized exterior. Why can’t Samsung repackage this phone so that it comes from the factory essentially with the same physical dimensions and feel as the current phone in the Tech 21 case?
• The camera should be twice as thick to accommodate (a) an all-day battery, and (b) a larger camera sensor and lens

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Raymond Moore lost his job running a big tennis tournament for saying that female professional tennis players “ride on the coattails of the men.” (CBS News)

I attended the March 31, 2016 Miami Open and explored the issue a little.

Here are photographs of the stadium during the final set of a women’s singles match and a men’s singles match. The women’s match was a more important semifinal event while the men’s match was just a quarterfinal. On the other hand the men’s match was slightly later in the day so could be attended by people who were stuck at work later. (On the third hand, tickets were kind of expensive and it seemed that nearly everyone with a 1 pm “day ticket” showed up pretty close to 1 pm and was at least somewhere within the grounds (there are multiple courts as well as restaurants, shops, etc..))

Here are photographs of the stadium during the women’s and men’s matches. Readers with great eyesight can try to estimate which match was better attended.

I then queried the folks sitting around me (Section 423, which gets afternoon shade!). An extended family had come from Mexico and was staying at the J.W. Marriott downtown for the entire event. Both sexes within the family preferred to watch the men’s game, would have come to a male-only tournament and would not have invested the time and money to come to a female-only tournament. On my left was a family from Guatemala with a 10-year-old tennis-playing son. They were staying in a different Marriott on the beach. The wife was an expert tennis player and said that she preferred watching the men’s game. The Guatemalans said that they wouldn’t have come to see an all-female tournament but would come to watch only men. Behind me was a Japanese national who had come to see Kei Nishikori.

A financial executive friend says that women are on average paid more than men in practice because (a) women get maternity leave while men generally don’t (or don’t take it), and (b) women get the right to sue their employer for discrimination and that right has a cash value even if only a fraction of women actually do sue and/or get paid (see Ellen Pao).

Readers: What do you think about women tennis players getting paid the same in cash compensation as men? Plainly in this day-and-age they are not going to suffer a pay cut. Is this disgraced Moore guy right, though, that they should at least be a little grateful that the men show up to the same tournaments?

[Separately, as my co-spectators were from countries that are often characterized as “corrupt” by American media, I asked them what they thought about U.S. politics versus Mexican and Guatemalan politics. The consensus among the Latin Americans was that local politics in the U.S. is cleaner, but that national politics is at least as corrupt. “When the Clintons can get money from private companies and foreign governments after leaving office and before taking office again, that’s as corrupt as anything anywhere in the world.” (One of my Millennial Facebook friends, who might be expected to support Hillary due to holding a government job (schoolteacher), recently wrote “I’m just gonna say it: You have to be pretty ignorant to vote for Hillary. Who cares if she would be the first woman president, she’s a corrupt bitch, only in it for power and money.”)]

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Just when you think that nothing worse can happen in a Robinson R22 than flying with a student… “Marooned Among the Polar Bears” chronicles a 50-year-old Russian pilot’s rescue following an autorotation through IMC into the Arctic Ocean.

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We flew to Boise and drove to Sun Valley, Idaho earlier this month because the standard instrument approach into the nearby Hailey, Idaho airport (KSUN) requires better-than-vfr 1800′ ceilings. There is an RNP approach for jets equipped with the most sophisticated equipment and whose operators have obtained specific authorization, but even that requires 1000′ ceilings rather than the standard 200′ ceilings for a regular approach. On the afternoon of our arrival the clouds were generally 800′ or 900′ above the runway and therefore in theory the scheduled airlines wouldn’t be able to land. An attempt to land that is aborted into a “missed approach” requires pilots to thread the plane through the mountains on a GPS-guided path, which is a higher workload than “add power and climb out straight ahead”. If an engine quits during part of this process a yet higher level of pilot technique is required to avoid contact with mountains.

As we drove through a wide flat valley of alfalfa farms we wondered “Why didn’t they just put the airport here, an extra 15 minutes away from the ski resort? It would be an idiot-proof standard procedure for a tired regional jet crew to follow. Why subject passengers to the risk of a $19/hour first officer not being his or her sharpest at the end of a 5-day trip?”

[There are practical problems with this airport as well as safety problems. Regional jets must land north and depart south. If the wind is blowing at all, a maximum tailwind limitation will be exceeded for one part of the “turn” and therefore the flight must be diverted to Twin Falls, Idaho and passengers put on a two-hour bus ride. Locals say that they’ve come to expect landing in Twin Falls (“Twin”) rather than in Hailey.]

It turns out that we were not the first to ponder these questions. From a 2009 USA Today article, “Feds say Sun Valley-area airport doesn’t pass ‘hazard test'”:

Officials with the Federal Aviation Administration say the airport in the central Idaho town of Hailey must eventually be closed and replaced because it doesn’t pass the “hazard test.”

Jason Pitts, manager of the 12-state FAA Northwestern region’s flight procedures office, said ridgelines that surround Friedman Memorial Airport mean aircraft that abort landings can’t meet FAA standards of 2,000 feet above the highest terrain as they climb to higher airspace to make another approach.

Pitts said they’ve looked at approaches from every angle, and “sorry, the answer is no” to any technologies that would change the FAA decision. He spoke to the airport’s governing board — the Friedman Memorial Airport Authority — earlier this week.

Officials are considering three sites south of the current airport to build a new one. The FAA plans a preliminary decision in November 2011 on the possible location of a new airport.

We could have picked a vastly safer airport location in about an hour by looking at an aeronautical chart and knocking on some farmers’ doors to ask who would be willing to sell. Yet after seven years passengers continue to be subject to a level of risk that is more like what you’d expect for an air traveler to a remote corner of Nepal.

What has the combination of federal and local government accomplished? Instead of buying out a farmer and laying down a 1.5-mile strip of asphalt, in 2015 the government spent $34 million in tax dollars on improvements to the airport declared fundamentally unsafe in 2009 (source).

If we assume that the typical visitor to Sun Valley is paying 40 percent of his or her income in taxes (federal income, state income, local income (e.g., New York City), property, sales, gas, etc.), why don’t the governments in question demonstrate at least some interest in keeping these people alive?

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“Helicopters Are Unlikely Victim of Oil Downturn” (WSJ) has some mournful tidings:

Industry executives said a fifth of the 1,900 helicopters serving the oil-and-gas industry world-wide are idle or underemployed, and expect this overcapacity to worsen before it improves.

Helicopters used by the oil-and-gas sector account for 26% of the global commercial fleet, according to AgustaWestland, a unit of Finmeccanica SpA.

Mr. Mannion said the industry will have to look—for the first time—at options for storing unsold helicopters. Manufacturers said limited indoor storage facilities in hangars had created a need for alternative solutions. Mr. Mannion said the alternatives included shrink-wrapping or Heli-Cells—inflatable climate-controlled canopies originally developed to protect expensive classic cars.

Market leader CHC, which went public two years ago, has seen its market value wiped out after peaking at $1.3 billion, and the company was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange in January.

Lockheed Martin, which paid $9 billion for Sikorsky last year, expects the unit’s commercial sales to slide to $375 million this year from a peak of $1.5 billion in 2013.

Related:

• Lockheed Martin buys Sikorsky for 1.1X revenue

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This New Yorker magazine article on the sex offender registry gives some insight into how adult Americans can profit financially when teenagers have sex (and not through the typical path of “Child Support Litigation without a Marriage”). Here are some excerpts:

[Anthony] Metts [unwisely agreeing to be interviewed without an attorney present] told [police] that when he was eighteen he dated a girl who was three years younger. And he’d also had a brief sexual relationship with a girl more than three years younger, whom he met during his junior year of high school, when she was a freshman.

When the officers turned the information over to the Midland District Attorney’s Office, the D.A. filed two felony indictments for sexual assault of a child, based on the age-of-consent laws in Texas at the time.

He decided to take a plea deal: a suspended sentence and ten years of probation.

Metts, who was twenty-one by then, read the terms of his post-plea life. For the next decade, he’d be barred from alcohol and the Internet; from entering the vicinity of schools, parks, bus stops, malls, and movie theatres; and from living within a thousand feet of a “child-safety zone.” A mugshot of his curly-haired, round-cheeked face would appear for life on the Texas sex-offender registry, beside the phrase “Sexual Assault of a Child.” And he would have to start sex-offender treatment.

The treatment plan was extensive. He was told to write up a detailed sexual history, and then to discuss it with a room full of adults, some of whom had repeatedly committed child assaults. … To graduate, he would have to narrate his “assaults” in detail: “How many buttons on her shirt did you unbutton?”

The plan also included a monthly polygraph (a hundred and fifty dollars) and a computerized test that measured how long his eyes lingered on deviant imagery (three hundred and twenty-five dollars). He would also have to submit to a “penile plethysmograph,” or PPG. According to documents produced by the state of Texas, the PPG—known jokingly to some patients as a “peter meter”—is “a sophisticated computerized instrument capable of measuring slight changes in the circumference of the penis.” A gauge is wrapped around the shaft of the penis, with wires hooked up to a laptop, while a client is presented with “sexually inappropriate” imagery and, often, “deviant” sexual audio. Metts would be billed around two hundred dollars per test.

The PPG was invented in the nineteen-fifties by a sexologist from Czechoslovakia, and used by the Czech military to expose soldiers suspected of pretending to be gay in order to avoid service.

When Metts balked at what felt to him like technological invasions—not least the prospect of having a stranger measure his penis—he was jailed for ten days. A new round of weekly therapy sessions (thirty dollars for group, and fifty dollars for one-on-one) then commenced.

Eventually, he agreed to acknowledge how he’d “groomed” his “victims”: in one case, they’d gone to dinner, a movie, and—for a Halloween date—to a local haunted house.

Metts settled into his new life in the oil fields, reluctantly accommodating an array of strictures that he regarded as pointless. Each Halloween, for instance, he reported to the county probation office with dozens of other local sex offenders, and was held from 6 to 10 P.M. and shown movies like “Iron Man 2,” until trick-or-treating was over. “If someone’s that dangerous that they need to be locked up, what about all of the other three hundred and sixty-four days of the year?” he asked me.

In 2006, he fell in love with a deputy sheriff’s daughter. One night, he took her out to his favorite Italian place in Odessa, ordered two steaks with risotto, and arranged for the waiter to bring out a dessert menu that read, among the à-la-carte selections, “Will you marry me?” She said yes, and a baby girl soon followed. “My daughter was a blessing and a miracle to me,” Metts told me. But it also introduced him to a troubling new aspect of his life on the registry.

Metts, then twenty-four, learned that he wouldn’t be allowed to see his daughter. His status banned him from living with her, and thus with his wife.

One night, a former classmate saw Metts buying a sandwich at Walmart and shouted a slur at him; she’d seen his face on the registry for “Sexual Assault of a Child.” Rattled, he went to Buffalo Wild Wings to down a beer, and got busted. Metts had a record of technical violations, so a judge ordered him to wear an electronic ankle bracelet, administered by a private monitoring company that charged several hundred dollars a month. The device would notify the authorities of any infractions—stepping too close to a mall, park, bar, or church, or leaving the county without permission.

In the eighth year of his ten-year probation term, Metts decided to reënter the world.

He’d failed to charge his ankle bracelet properly, and the battery died at around 5 P.M. Shortly before midnight, his probation officer arrived at his door: she’d be filing to revoke his probation. A few weeks later, Metts was led into a courtroom in hand-cuffs, leg cuffs, and a chain around his waist connecting them. “I looked like Hannibal Lecter without the mask,” he told me. The judge’s name sounded familiar: she had helped prosecute his original case. … The judge took some time to think it over. The next morning, she sentenced Metts to ten years in prison.

This past July, I drove around Midland, Texas, trying to find the girls—now women—who were involved in Anthony Metts’s case. Having no luck with doorbells, I left notes, and two days later I got a call from one of them. “I never wanted Anthony to be prosecuted,” she told me. “It was a consensual relationship—the kind when you’re young and you’re stupid. My mom knew about it. We’d go on dates, drive around, hang out.” She was shocked to learn of Metts’s fate: his nine-plus years of probation, his current decade of incarceration. “I told [law enforcement] that I didn’t feel like he should have to be prosecuted,” she said.

Obviously life in the U.S. hasn’t work out well for Mr. Metts (nor for any of the other people profiled in the article who got onto a sex offender registry; the registry idea plus the Internet plus the fact that sex with a 15-year-old may be described in the same way as sex with a 3-year-old means that holding a job is generally impossible). But the groups of adults who profited financially from the two teenagers having sex includes at least the following: (1) police officers, (2) prosecutors, (3) defense lawyers, (3) judges, (4) court officials, (5) prison guards and managers, (6) probation officers, (7) therapists, (8) polygraph technicians, (9) penis testing technicians, (10) electronic bracelet vendors, (11) electronic bracelet monitoring technicians.

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The Wall Street Journal says that most European countries are insolvent if you account for current Social Security and other government pension promises. Excerpts from a recent article:

State-funded pensions are at the heart of Europe’s social-welfare model, insulating people from extreme poverty in old age. Most European countries have set aside almost nothing to pay these benefits, simply funding them each year out of tax revenue. Now, European countries face a demographic tsunami, in the form of a growing mismatch between low birthrates and high longevity, for which few are prepared.

Europe’s population of pensioners, already the largest in the world, continues to grow. Looking at Europeans 65 or older who aren’t working, there are 42 for every 100 workers, and this will rise to 65 per 100 by 2060, the European Union’s data agency says. By comparison, the U.S. has 24 nonworking people 65 or over per 100 workers, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which doesn’t have a projection for 2060.

The pension squeeze doesn’t follow the familiar battle lines of the eurozone crisis, which pits Europe’s more prosperous north against a higher-spending, deeply indebted south. Some of the governments facing the toughest demographic challenges, such as Austria and Slovenia, have been among those most critical of Greece.

While a few countries—including Norway, the U.K. and the Netherlands—have considerable savings in public funds or employer-sponsored pension plans, many others have little.

Across Europe, the birthrate has fallen 40% since the 1960s to around 1.5 children per woman, according to the United Nations. In that time, life expectancies have risen to roughly 80 from 69.

In Poland, birthrates are even lower, and here the demographic disconnect is compounded by emigration. Taking advantage of the EU’s freedom of movement, many Polish youth of working age flock to the West, especially London, in search of higher pay. A paper published by the country’s central bank forecasts that by 2030, a quarter of Polish women and a fifth of Polish men will be 70 or older.

With their berry sales, the two [married Polish retirees] have a combined posttax income equal to $6,400, about 60% of Poland’s median for two people. … Her first daughter, 46-year-old Anna Mazurek, lives across the lane in Zaraszów. She teaches school—earning about $1,375 a month—cares for two children and spends many hours minding a shop she and her husband built. … Once a year, the pension plan sends her an estimate of her benefits when she retires. The most recent was about $138 a month. A spokesman for the plan said it would provide at least $224 before taxes, a legal minimum the calculator doesn’t take into account.

An hour’s drive away in Lublin, a picturesque medieval town close to the Ukrainian border, her sister, Małgorazata Olechowska, works as an office manager for an EU-funded nonprofit for about $1,600 a month. She pays at least a third of her income in taxes, including 9.76% that is earmarked for retiree pensions. Her employer chips in an equal amount. The government pays all of that straight out to current pensioners, supplementing it with other tax revenue.

Could this be what causes the EU to fall apart? Unlike the U.S., European countries don’t tax citizens who live elsewhere. So if a high-income Polish citizen moves to London, the Polish government stops getting any taxes from that person. In a world where income is increasingly concentrated in the most successful cities, countries without a London, Paris, or Amsterdam could be hard-pressed to meet unfunded pension liabilities. Those countries that have saved up, such as Holland and the UK, may be reluctant to share the pain when the EU recognizes that EU-wide taxes are necessary to bail out the various countries.

Readers: What do you think? If Europeans thought about their forthcoming day of financial reckoning would the financially soundest countries try to get out?

[Separately, the income numbers for the Polish women profiled are interesting. The sister who works in Lublin makes about $1000 after taxes. What if she read “Child Support Litigation without a Marriage,” came to the U.S. on vacation, had sex with an American, and went home pregnant? If she had sex with an American earning $250,000/year in Massachusetts, for example, she would get a tax-free $3,333/month wired to her in Poland, thus enjoying 4.3X the spending power compared to her current situation. If she saved up all 23 years of Massachusetts child support, minus $250/month for actual child-related expenses, that would be a nest egg of approximately $850,000. If such a nest egg earned a 2 percent real return starting at age 30, the result would be a $1.7 million fund at age 65. Applying the conventional “spend 4 percent per year” rule, the sister would be able to spend $68,000/year (in today’s dollars) from her nest egg starting at age 65. Thus the trip to Boston or Martha’s Vineyard at age 20 would result in a healthy child (we hope) and at least a 10X improvement in old age pension. Note that the child, once reared to adulthood and working, would improve the dependency ratio in Europe.]

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