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After two weeks in South Florida, where the interstate highways serve mainly as parking lots from 6:00 am to 8:00 pm daily (Ft. Lauderdale/Miami is a 1.5-hour, 28-mile experience; see image below for traffic parked in both the regular and the $12 “express” lanes of I-95), I’m wondering why there isn’t more discussion around U.S. infrastructure and immigration. The Interstate highway system was set up in 1956 when the U.S. population was 169 million. Due primarily to immigration (immigrants and the children of immigrants) the population has doubled since then (Pew). Consequently, we sit in traffic jams instead of working or enjoying leisure and family activities.

A naive analysis of immigration might start from the assumption that we could be better off economically any time that we could accept an immigrant who earns an above-median wage (also factor in whether kids are likelier-than-current-American-average to wage jihad? see Omar Mateen and Syed Farook, for example). But a larger population requires more infrastructure. Most of our infrastructure is inherited from 1850-1970 or so. If it costs us more today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, to build a bridge, highway, subway system, or tunnel, then we could be making ourselves worse off by adding population even if the new additions to the population earn an above-median wage. Does it cost us more? “Why California Stopped Building Freeways” is a 1993 article that describes “skyrocketing costs” through the 1980s. (See also Longfellow Bridge repairs will now take about as long as the original construction for how 2015-18 repairs will cost 4X, in inflation-adjusted dollars, what it cost to build the bridge in the early 1900s.)

Plainly there are some immigrants to Florida who boost the overall economy. A retired Wall Streeter fleeing New York income and estate taxes who buys a $10 million house and pays breathtaking property taxes will more than compensate for his or her burden on the infrastructure. But has anyone calculated the break-even point?

[Of course I realize that boosting an economy is not the only reason to welcome immigrants. However, it is an argument frequently made by advocates for continued and/or increased immigration.]

Update: Gizmodo estimates the value of current U.S. infrastructure at about $114,000 per capita. But our cost of building new/additional stuff is much higher than the value of our old stuff. So perhaps it would cost at least $250,000 for every additional American to provide infrastructure at the current level? If every immigrant who shows up results in population expansion of 6 additional people (parents via chain migration, spouse, kids), an immigrant or employer would have to pay a fee to the U.S. Treasury of $1.5 million for each new person who shows up (in order for existing American residents not to become worse off).

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I attended Sun n Fun 2017 and everything was pretty much the same as in 2014 (my post). I flew in with a friend who owns a Cirrus SR22. After about 500 hours he hasn’t mastered the Garmin G1000 panel. I also have hundreds of hours of G1000 time, including as part of a jet type rating, and I was fumbling quite a bit while trying to do something pretty simple: set up a user waypoint at a latitude/longitude and fly there. The experience reminded me that aviation is still in the “horseless carriage” mode of using computers. The FAA has some electronic processes for registering aircraft, pilots, and mechanics, but paper or plastic certificates are still required and the electronic processes closely mimic the old paper-only processes. There are tablets in the cockpit and a copy of an old paper approach plate will appear on the LCD screen. The 1950s aircraft had one switch and dial for every subsystem. The 2010s aircraft has one screen corresponding to each subsystem. The computer is not a partner in accomplishing a mission, but rather a 1:1 replacement for physical switches. It is the pilot’s job to set up each switch while the computer remains ignorant of the rationale.

Landing gear is not down and the airplane is otherwise configured to land with flaps and a slow airspeed? You’ll hear an electronic warning “horn” that replaces the old mechanical horn and, if you remember your annual training, might associate that with imminent damage to the belly. This shouldn’t be confused with the warning “tone” to tell you that the electronic trim is running away and therefore a crash from stalling might be imminent. Why can’t the $50,000 to $500,000 of onboard computers get it together to synthesize a “trim runaway” or “check landing gear” warning? That’s not how it was done in the 1950s and the point of the fancy computers is to mimic the 1950s processes.

Epic was in the same location as in 2014, with the same 6-seat turboprop and the same message: will be certified within about a year.

In the world of amphibious seaplanes, Searey was there with a track record of having delivered 700 (kits plus LSA). One of them at the show had lived on a yacht for a couple of years. The owner would periodically lower it into calm water and fly around. The company featured an Australian’s round-the-world trip in 2015 (they didn’t mention the recovery from spatial disorientation that is in the linked-to article). Icon wasn’t around (at their current production rate they have several hundred years worth of orders). An amphibian designed in Finland will be built with cheap labor in Maine (Avweb).

Diamond is threatening to shake up the helicopter world with a piston four-seater (Avweb) to compete with the Robinson R-44.

The L3 Lynx transponder-with-touch-screen was being demoed and generated a lot of excitement as a way to bring an old airplane up to date in a bunch of areas, including ADS-B. Garmin was showing their G5 attitude indicator that can be used to replace old vacuum-driven steam-gauge “artificial horizons.” Inadvertently they demonstrated the cost of regulation: $1,199 for experimental aircraft or $950 extra ($2,149 total) for the identical “certified” version that would be legal to put into a Cessna or Piper.

For pilots: the Sun n Fun NOTAM is moderately terrifying in its complexity, but most of it relates to IFR or other airports. The VFR approach is pretty straightforward and we didn’t have much company on the morning of the first day of the event. There was an epic amount of taxiing involved, but it was well-organized, and only a short wait to take off after the airshow. Things are compressed at the end of the day because the airport is closed until 5:30 pm due to the airshow and then closed after 7:30 pm, period. To avoid the rush, consider flying in and out in the morning.

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Charles Murray became a pariah for talking about how America is chock full of people with below-average IQ (and therefore way below the average in the high-IQ countries). But he did not specifically address whether or not credentialed Americans are not smart enough to work with the bell curve (Normal distribution) per se.

Thankfully, the New York Times has come along to address this question. Their best and brightest journalists and editors looked at a survey of 250 colleges and universities. The results were pretty close to a normal distribution centered around the previous mean:

39% of responding institutions reported a decline in international applications, 35% reported an increase, and 26% reported no change in applicant numbers.

How did this lack of change from the previous year get understood by the journalists and characterized by the editors? “Amid ‘Trump Effect’ Fear, 40% of Colleges See Dip in Foreign Applicants”

[Thanks, Jonathan Graehl, for this beautiful example of everyday math!]

 

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United Airlines having a paying passenger violently dragged off the plane by law enforcement officials is still dominating the news and Facebook (see Thanks, United, for making me proud to be a former Delta Airlines employee). Cicero was famous for saying “The cash that comes from selling your labour is vulgar and unacceptable for a gentleman … for wages are effectively the bonds of slavery.”

If we step back from this I think we will discover that it is waged labor that is at the root of most of the unhappiness and suffering that occurred in Chicago. The way that the bumping was set up, passengers would have missed a day of work if they had accepted United’s offer of a travel voucher and a hotel. It seems reasonable to assume that if none of the passengers had a job, at least four would have said “sure, I can hang out near O’Hare airport and play games on my phone for a day.” Certainly the doctor who was beaten up wouldn’t have been so passionate about getting to work if he didn’t have a job.

Probably the flight attendants, gate agents, and police officers were made unhappy by all of this as well. You might argue “Well, they get a fat paycheck so we shouldn’t be sympathetic if they suffer a bit to collect it.” Yet, except possibly the police officers when the value of their pensions are included, none of these folks have as much ability to consume as a non-working American who uses the means-tested government-run economy thoughtfully (e.g., $60,000/year apartment in Cambridge, New York City, or San Francisco, free health insurance via Obamacare, food stamps (SNAP) from USDA, Obamaphone for chatting with friends). Certainly none of them would have the after-tax spending power of a thoughtful child support plaintiff in Massachusetts, California, or one of the other states that offers unlimited child support. (See the Massachusetts chapter for a jobless plaintiff who out-earns her University of Pennsylvania classmates by 3.2X.)

It seems safe to say that many of the people involved in this incident were “stressed-out” at the time and are now unhappy. These bad feelings are not measured very well when looking at life choices of work versus welfare or work versus child support. Some people might try to factor in the suffering that comes from spending 50+ hours/week commuting and sitting at a desk doing tasks that one hasn’t chosen. But I don’t think that I’ve seen an analysis of the outside-of-working-hours suffering of which this United Airlines incident is an example. The incident occurred on a Sunday, theoretically a day of rest for at least most of the passengers, but plainly the stress of having a job that required attendance on Monday morning was a factor for many people.

Readers: What do you think? Given that we’ve built a society where work is option (see Book Review: The Redistribution Recession), are we adequately communicating to young people about just how miserable working is?

Related:

• “It’s Not Just Fox: Why Women Don’t Report Sexual Harassment” (nytimes, April 10, 2017) in which the special misery of women in the workforce is highlighted. The Times says that roughly 50 percent of women are sexually harassed due to their decision to enter the labor force.

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“United Passenger Dragged From Overbooked Flight” reminds us that the toughest jobs in the airline world are gate agent and flight attendant. It also makes me proud to have been a Delta Airlines employee (through the Comair subsidiary)! The crux of the matter seems to be that United wanted to get rid of four passengers to make room for four airline employees (crew needed to operate a flight starting at the destination?). An $800 voucher didn’t yield any volunteers so, rather than up the offer (Federal law 14 CFR 250.5 protects consumers(?) by limiting how much an airline can offer), the airline “randomly” selected four victims to be hauled back into the terminal. We may have had our shortcomings at Delta, but I don’t remember ever acting out Sophie’s Choice with the passengers.

My Facebook friends are expressing outrage about this. The Trumpenfuhrer is primarily to blame. A sample:

United stock is up for the day. Seems clear they knew there would be no consequence. Expect the rest of the US airlines to adopt the same policies. Now that the airlines have paid the administration to block the good airlines like Emirates why should they care about customer service?)

As I noted in “Unions and Airlines”, it is not a particular President and henchmen/women that make it illegal for Lufthansa or Ryanair to fly you from SFO to JFK, but rather laws made by and preserved by Congress:

In the absence of protectionist regulations, which prohibit foreign carriers from carrying domestic passengers, we would expect the entire U.S. air travel market to be captured by airlines owned by countries where labor laws do not facilitate the unionization of pilots. Without barriers to competition we would expect to see something like the cruise ship industry, where foreign-flagged vessels dominate. An airline might be based in the Philippines, for example, or El Salvador (like the excellent TACA, which has its own history with ALPA), and serve the U.S. with foreign-based crews.

[Separately, the flight seems to have been “United 3411” but flightaware.com shows it to be operated by Republic, a regional airline, on an Embraer E170. So the flight attendants would have been Republic employees, but the folks making the offers and the gate agents deciding on victims would likely have been United people. My job at Comair was unusual in that the regional airline was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Delta.]

Related:

• Airline losing a bag grows or shrinks the GDP? (my VIP baggage experience with United)
• My moment of airline glory and the passenger’s reaction
• My visual approach, and Asiana’s

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In Two big questions for economists today (2015) I reported that, coming away from an economics convention, one of the big questions was “Can higher education make a person more productive at his or her ultimate job?” It sure seems as though the answer for American higher education is “oftentimes no”. The New York Times today is focusing on the evils of the financial institutions profiting from Americans’ blind faith in the university system, e.g., with “Loans ‘Designed to Fail’: States Say Navient Preyed on Students”. I think the details are more interesting and the Times provides that with a separate story: “Voices of Navient’s Borrowers: ‘The Biggest Mistake of My Life’”

One 36-year-old attended two public schools in Florida and came out with what is now $83,300 in debt. She got a “B.A. in maritime history.” In the old days a young person from a wealthy family might have enjoyed four years studying maritime history (tuition would have been about $500 per year back then too). Somehow today this same experience is being marketed to the non-rich. For me the interesting question is why public universities don’t put more effort into online degrees in subjects such as these. Georgia Tech can deliver an online master’s in CS for $7,000. If learning maritime history is mostly reading books that are available in libraries or are no longer within copyright, why couldn’t a degree in the subject be earned by downloading a reading list and writing some papers? If the mission of a public university is to educate the public at a reasonable cost, why didn’t they offer this kind of degree online starting in the 1980s when personal computers became popular or the 1990s with the rise of the Web?

[Separately, if you’re a young economist and don’t like this subject, let me suggest looking at the effects of the change to no-fault divorce in the 1970s (history) and the 1990s switch to child support guidelines (in many states, these give a higher spending power to the person who has sex with a high-income partner than to the person who marries a medium-income partner; they also make it more lucrative to have sex with a high-income person than to go to college and work). See “Litigation, Alimony, and Child Support in the U.S. Economy” for an example. A group at MIT led by David Autor, for example, was referenced in the New York Times for their 2016 look at how children turn out depending on whether they are raised in two-parent or single-parent households. They didn’t have to compete for attention with a classic paper from 1960 because the government didn’t encourage single-parent households back then and there weren’t enough of them.]

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“A Modest Immigration Proposal” (Seltzer) is kind of interesting. He points out that if immigrants are actually boosting an economy then employers should be happy to pay for them. Therefore, if the goal is maximizing economic growth (or paying back $20 trillion in debt), the best way to choose non-refugee immigrants is to auction slots to the highest-bidding employers.

Seltzer heaps derision on central planners in the slightly-smarter countries:

At the moment, countries that try to restrict the inflow to the most productive applicants rely on bureaucrats to decide which skills are most needed, and assign points to applicants possessed of those skills. If recollection serves, in Australia social workers received more points than economists, a system that is clearly flawed, at least in the view of this practitioner of the dismal science.

The Canadian system, which requires bureaucrats to assign points to prospective immigrants, the system that President Trump unthinkingly holds up as a model, just doesn’t work, as the pro-immigration New York Times recently pointed out. “The formula has changed over the years, with points for training and job categories rising or falling as officials’ ideas on job readiness changed. . . . Head scratching.” Worse, one province decides it needs long-distance truck drivers, another food and beverage processors. There is no sensible way to balance regional interests to produce a permit allocation that is in the national interest.

Where I would part company with Mr. Seltzer is on his top-level “Set a limit on total immigration” procedure. He says “it can be reviewed annually, perhaps adjusted in response to changing labor-market conditions—down in periods of rising unemployment, up if tight labor market conditions threaten an inflation upsurge.” Immigrants and their children and grandchildren will determine our population size 50 or 100 years from now. It doesn’t make sense to change a 50- or 100-year goal based on immediate labor market conditions (see Should everyone be glad that judges have blocked Donald Trump’s restrictions on entry to the U.S.?).

What about temporary labor?

In the case of the temporary (e.g., seasonal) permits, the employer would post a bond, refundable upon proof that the worker had left the country when his/her visa had expired. Over time, employers would learn which workers were most efficient and might raise the bids for permits for those workers every year. We would soon learn whether agribusinesses are correct when they say that Americans simply won’t take these sorts of jobs, their alternative being to spend hard cash on temporary visas.

(I’m not holding my breath waiting for Americans currently on SSDI/Oxy to start harvesting lettuce.)

The trend in the U.S. is away from market-based approaches like this and towards central planning. However, it is kind of an interesting mental exercise nonetheless!

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One of my Facebook friends linked to this editorial from the Weather Channel about a proposed 17 percent budget cut to NOAA. Americans will die, said these Hillary supporters, if the Trumpenfuhrer’s cruel axe falls on NOAA.

One question is why would a federal agency’s work suffer from a budget cut? If NOAA is like the USDA, they could fire half of their workers without any effect on productivity. Given that Federal workers are paid roughly 2X the private sector average (higher salary plus more valuable benefits, especially pension), there could simply be a 17-percent pay cut and almost nobody would quit (since their compensation would still be higher than what is obtainable elsewhere).

Let’s assume, however, that NOAA would have to shut down the hurricane forecasts that are cited by the Weather Channel. I linked to “Are Europeans Better Than Americans at Forecasting Storms?” (Scientific American 2015), which says that the European weather nerds continuously forecast the same hurricanes and do a better job.

• me: How would you be affected if the U.S. government stopped forecasting hurricanes? What is wrong with the European forecasts that are available at no cost to U.S. taxpayers?
• Passionate Democrat 1: “National security vulnerability”
• Passionate Democrat 2: “The 2016 and 2017 budgets addressed the computing gap” (i.e., if we only had a fancier computer we would kick those European asses; it is not that they might be smarter than us regarding physics)
• me: “Why not cut NOAA back to gathering data to give to the Europeans? Where’s the national security risk? We don’t trust our allies in Europe to give us weather forecasts when we ask?”
• Passionate Democrat 1: “It’s not just trusting them to give us weather forecasts, it’s trusting their integrity protections. An attack on the US could be enabled by perhaps a one hour blackout of weather forecasts if well timed. So $ENEMY gets into their system. Ok, they could get into our system. But we could respond to that, or ensure redundancy etc, directly. Fast warfare happens in the air, so does weather.” (i.e., now that Marissa Mayer and her team at Yahoo have freed up they can show the Europeans how computer security is done)
• me: “What if we could form a military alliance with some of these efficient and capable Europeans? Maybe get something formal together with the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and other advanced economies in Europe? Do you think that it would be possible to have some kind of organization where we didn’t have to be solely responsible for everything military?” [this was apparently too oblique; nobody read this as a reference to the already-existing NATO]
• Passionate Democrat 1: “Not for something as fundamental as weather is to military operations. We might as well have them running the simulations for response deployments in the event of an attack.”
• me: “It looks like there is already a parallel military weather forecasting operation. Why would the feared cuts to NOAA prevent these military forecasters from continuing to do what you say is critical national security work?”
• Passionate Democrat 2: “It’s not just blackout, etc. It’s getting the specific information you want for your operations. We might be able to pay for that — but a major reason our forecast quality declined after 2013 is we didn’t budget money for commercial data like Tamdar. Is it really more efficient to pay someone else to do something? Doubtful — they’d have to ramp up their capabilities to provide the results we need, including buying the commercial data. … it’s not just military that has specific needs. FEMA, for example.”
• me: “How do the European countries survive then? Does each country say ‘we can’t take the security risk of relying on European weather forecasting so we’ll build our own domestic operation’? Why doesn’t a 10-year-old with a rifle take over France if France doesn’t have its own NOAA-style agency?”
• Passionate Democrat 1: ” Imagine $ENEMY changing hurricane tracking just slightly, enough that we mistakenly conclude there’s no need to secure NYC.”
• me: “Your point about NYC being unprepared is a good one, but doesn’t that suggest that we shouldn’t rely on the low reliability U.S. forecasts and should instead rely on the high reliability European ones?”

This is a selection from roughly 100 responses involving a bunch more Americans. All of them were terrified about losing something for which a free and arguably superior alternative exists on the Web.

Obviously the NOAA budget is small change and, as a pilot, certainly I would be the last person to suggest cutting it even if we do have trouble figuring out how to borrow the next $20 trillion. What I find interesting about the above is the reaction to any reduction in the Great Father in Washington’s responsibilities for us.

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Tyler Cowen says that Americans are increasingly immobile and unwilling to get off the sofa to do anything more challenging than hold up their phones to watch a movie. The FAA seems to agree. The bureaucracy’s forecast for individual flying is that it will die off at roughly the same rate as the population of currently certificated pilots: 0.8 percent annually. There will be some growth in business jet travel to compensate for this, but it might take until 2037 to exceed the number of “general aviation” (everything but airlines) hours flown in 2007. This against a backdrop of population growth from about 300 million Americans in 2007 to roughly 380 million in 2037 (Census projections).

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My standard line in response to neighbors fearful of King Donald I starting a war was “Why would a guy who owns $4 billion in real estate want to start a war?” It looks as though I was wrong. The leftovers from the inauguration festivities are still in the fridge and we lobbed $93 million of missiles into Syria.

Readers: Can you explain the point of this attack? How does it serve American interests? How does it help the average person in Syria if the effect is to weaken the government and thus prolong the civil war that they’re having? Do we now have to let in the entire population of Syria (23 million people) as refugees because they can credibly claim to be at risk from being hit by our $1.6 million missiles?

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