Category: Uncategorized

Inbound email distributed to the entire staff at a fairly large and stodgy Boston-area non-profit organization:

Hi there,

Can you please tell me if there is a person working there who attends Burning Man Festival? Maybe Deborah? Her name at the festival was Bubbles. I met her when she was serving drinks at the bar… If she still works there can you please pass on my email to her?

Many thanks,

Jennifer

My suggested response: “She probably means the Bubbles who works in Accounting.”

Related:

• my Photography at Burning Man article

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The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen paints a moderately bleak picture of Americans as screen-addicted couch potatoes:

In past generations, people moved through the physical world at ever faster speeds, whereas today traffic gets worse each year and plane travel is, if anything, slower than before.

The big practical questions for the postwar generation were about what we might place in the physical world and how that would exert its effects on us, because the physical world was viewed as a major source of inspiration. Would it be cities reaching into the heavens, underwater platforms, or colonies in outer space? All of these possibilities were embedded with futuristic architectures and also utopian ideologies, such as space travel bringing humankind together in cosmopolitan dreams of peace. Those options seemed like logical next steps for a world that had recently been transformed by railroads, automobiles, urbanization, and many other highly visible shifts in what was built, how we got around, and how things looked. But over the last few decades, the interest in those kinds of transportation-based, landscape-transforming projects largely has faded away.

We’re much more comfortable with the world of information, which is more static, can be controlled at our fingertips, and can be set to our own speed. That’s very good for some people—most of all the privileged class, which is very much at home in this world—and very bad for others. The final form of stasis has to do with how and where we place our individual bodies. Most of all, it seems we like to stay home and remove ourselves altogether from the possible changes of the external physical world.

Americans can literally have almost every possible need cared for without leaving their homes. This is a new form of American passivity, where a significant percentage of the population is happy to sit around and wait for contentment to be delivered.

only about half of the Millennial Generation bothers to get a driver’s license by age eighteen; in 1983, the share of seventeen-year-olds with a license was 69 percent.

In 1965, the most common leisure activity for American kids was outdoor play. Recent surveys suggest that the average American nine-year-old child spends fifty hours a week—by direct comparison, nearly seven hours a day—or more looking at electronic screens, which include televisions, computers, and cell phones.

We’re not doing the awesome stuff that we used to do…

One final way of thinking about progress, sometimes stressed by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, is to ask whether the era of grand projects is mostly over. In the twentieth century, American grand projects included the Manhattan Project, which was highly successful, and cemented an era of Pax Americana. Two other grand projects were winning World War II and, starting in the 1950s, construction of the interstate highway system, both examples of thinking big and changing the world permanently on a large scale. The Apollo moon program was another grand project, and although its usefulness can be questioned, its mechanical success and above all its speed of execution cannot. At its peak it consumed over 2 percent of American GDP.29 “Defeating communism” is perhaps too abstract to qualify as a specific project, but it is another major victory backed by a coordinated effort. Another potential nominee would be “construction of a social welfare state,” although parts of this are politically controversial. In any case, a lot of these grand projects succeeded, often rather spectacularly. If we look at the last twenty-five years or so, what do we have to count as grand projects? Some people might cite the environmental movement, but for all of its virtues, we are still living in a world where biodiversity is plummeting, carbon emissions are rising, and the overall human footprint on the environment, including from the United States, is increasing. So this is a possible contender for the future, but no, it hasn’t happened just yet. Reforestation and cleaner air and water are major triumphs, but those happened much earlier in the twentieth century. The most obvious and most successful grand project today is that virtually every part of the United States is wired to the internet and cell phone system. You can go to almost any inhabited part of the country and immediately access Wikipedia or make a phone call to Africa; sometimes this even works on hiking trails or in other out-of-the-way places, ensuring we are never that far away from communicating with any and all of our friends and relations or maybe business associates.

When we try to do something big, it usually turns out badly

The other potential grand project would have to be … reconstructing Iraq, making Iraq democratic, and bringing peace to the Middle East. On that project we have seen a miserable failure, and with the rise of ISIS and the collapse of Syria, the situation is becoming much worse yet. So the post-1990 era for the United States is scored at one out of two. I don’t, by the way, count Obamacare on this list of grand projects. No matter what you think of it as policy, it provided health insurance to about 10 to 15 million of America’s previously uninsured 40 million–plus population, with the exact number for new coverage still evolving. That helps many of those individuals, but it is hardly a game-changer in terms of a broader social trajectory, especially since many of those people already were receiving partial health care coverage and, furthermore, the Obamacare exchanges are experiencing some serious problems. If anything, Obamacare has locked in the basic features of the previous U.S. health care system rather than revolutionizing them.

But could it be that the world isn’t stagnating, it is just that Americans are terrible at “big systems” thinking and public infrastructure? The Chinese, for example, have built about 14,000 miles of high-speed rail out of what will eventually be a 24,000-mile system (Wikipedia). About 1.5 billion rides occur per year on a system that did not exist a decade ago. The Chinese are building airports at a frantic pace and the transportation options for middle-class Chinese citizens improve dramatically every year. Cowen is a bit of a China fan:

Even with its recent economic troubles, China has a culture of ambition and dynamism and a pace of change that hearken back to a much earlier America. China, even though it is in the midst of some rather serious economic troubles, makes today’s America seem staid and static. For all of its flaws, China is a country where every time you return, you find a different and mostly better version of what you had left the time before. Hundreds or thousands of new buildings will be in place, the old restaurants will be gone, and what were major social and economic problems a few years ago, such as unfinished roads or missing water connections, will have disappeared or been leapfrogged. That is what life is like when a country grows at about 10 percent a year for over thirty years running, as indeed China had been doing up through 2009 or so, with some years of 7 to 8 percent growth thereafter (and an unknown rate of growth today, due to lack of trust in the government’s numbers). When a country’s growth rate is 10 percent, it’s as if a new country is being built every seven years or so, because that is how long it takes for such a nation to double in economic size.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. it is often illegal to work:

Some of the decline in labor mobility may stem from the law itself, specifically the growth of occupational licensure. In the 1950s, only about 5 percent of workers required a government-issued license to do their jobs, but by 2008, that figure had risen to about 29 percent.

The data show that individuals in tightly licensed occupations demonstrate lower levels of cross-state mobility. For instance, men in heavily licensed occupations are less likely to move across state lines than men in less heavily licensed occupations, even after adjusting for demographic variables that might cause the two groups to differ. Those same men, reluctant to cross state lines and lose licensure rights, are not less reluctant to move around within their states, where they keep their licenses.

Or you’ll get sued as a result of hiring someone:

It’s also harder to fire workers than it was several decades ago, in part because of fear of lawsuits over discrimination, as American society has steadily become more litigious. This means that some employers will be less likely to hire in the first place, in order to minimize their lawsuit risks. They look more for the kind of workers they will not need to fire or not need to replace anytime soon, which also slows down the pace of job turnover.

So we sit around reading prissy Jane Austen novels (or, since we’re screen-addicted, watching movie adaptions):

Current philosophies and aesthetics mirror this shift toward the calm. The metaphysics of the big political debates of the 1960s now strike us as absurd. In the 1970s, intellectual, angst-ridden American teenagers noodled over Nietzsche, the meaning of the counterculture, and the classic Russian novels of ideas. Woody Allen satirized these books in his movie Love and Death, and it was assumed that enough of the viewers would catch the references. These days Jane Austen is the canonical classic novelist, with the Wall Street Journal even referring to “the Jane Austen industry.” And a lot of her stories are about … matching. For better or worse, these stories are less concerned with the titanic struggle of good versus evil—can you imagine Mr. Darcy shouting, as would a Dostoyevsky character, “If there is no God, then everything is permitted!”? Instead people are afraid of having their calm disturbed, so the frontier issue in many colleges and universities is whether to put “trigger warnings” on school curricula, out of fear that somebody will be offended or traumatized by what we used to welcome as radical and revisionist texts.

Cowen sounds pessimistic about the 325 million souls here in the U.S. It is tough to argue that he is wrong. A friend points out that regulatory compliance is the true religion of the U.S.: “People used to spend a huge amount of time in the Middle Ages going to church and praying. Now they spend about 40 percent of their time doing regulatory compliance so it has the same place in our society that religion had in theirs.”

But why do we need to be innovative? The Chinese are great at engineering (look at DJI!) and building infrastructure. Let them vacuum the CO2 out of the atmosphere. Singapore and Switzerland are full of rich well-educated hard-working people. They will presumably develop all kinds of new ideas for us. The Iranians and Koreans have already shown that they can make more interesting movies than Americans. The world might be a way better place in 50 years even if no American were to create anything useful between now and 2067. Do you really need Xbox to get through 99 weeks of cashing unemployment checks if you have Nintendo and PlayStation?

Cowen is optimistic about our social freedoms:

This relatively recent emphasis on security pops up in so many forms, many of them extremely beneficial for our lives. For instance, the acceptance of gay marriage has proved a big (and to me pleasant) surprise. As recently as 2008, neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton would endorse national gay marriage, and they both openly expressed reservations about the idea.

Even within the community of gay and LGBT intellectuals, the gay marriage movement was not entirely popular. Michael Warner, for instance, a leading “queer theorist,” argued that marriage was too conservative an institution and what the gay community needed instead was a radical liberation from the idea of shame. Warner wanted straights to learn from the sexual practices of gays at

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The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen shares some data about the big getting bigger:

A recent Wall Street Journal analysis of data from the University of Southern California found that, by federal antitrust standards, there is a high degree of concentration in nearly a third of all industries, compared to about a quarter of all industries in 1996. Or to cite another metric based on the same data, nearly two-thirds of publicly traded companies were selling in more concentrated markets in 2013 than earlier in 1996. Yet another measure is this: Of the more than 1,700 public companies in existence in both 1996 and 2013, 62 percent saw their share of the market go up over that same period of time.11 What is driving these developments? Most likely, some leading firms have the ability and intent to launch well-known national brands backed by extensive marketing and product development, and other, smaller firms cannot match their pace. The result is that some markets have a greater element of winner-take-all, as is suggested by the data on corporate valuations. If we look at the S&P 500 stock index in 1975, the category of “intangible assets” accounted for about 18 percent of the value of American capital. Most American capital was in physical assets, such as machines and factories, tangible items that can be purchased and replicated if need be. Today, over 80 percent of the value of the S&P 500 is due to intangible assets, including trademarks, patents, brand name reputation, consumer goodwill, and other factors. That’s a big leap upward, from below 20 percent to above 80 percent for the value of corporate intangibles.

And if you’re big you tend to be boring…

Second, many intangibles rest on reputation and image. If Google alienated most Americans with an ongoing series of offensive remarks and behavior, users would jump to Bing or to other search engines, just as many customers have left Chipotle because of its association with E. coli outbreaks. Furthermore, if Google lost its image as a cutting-edge place to work, it could lose its ability to recruit top talent. Once companies have ascended the mountain, they play it safe. They have no interest at that point in “disruption,” and they try to offend as few users, or potential employees, as possible.

In 2014, the Mozilla CEO stepped down, basically for having donated to anti–gay marriage campaigns, even though at the time most Americans did not seem to favor the legality of gay marriage. Whether or not you worry about the constraints on speech brought by such firings, it’s a sign that some kinds of risk-taking are over. We’ve also seen a lot of companies end or postpone expansions into North Carolina due to the 2016 passage in that state of a law perceived as hostile to transgender individuals. Again, the net result is that companies will obsess all the more over legal matters and public relations, sometimes at the expense of growing their business or focusing on the physical product or taking chances. We see corporate cultures stressing the law and also public relations, two inherently conservative corporate departments that are rarely sources of major innovations.12 Still further evidence for growing monopolization, and for that matter the social stasis it feeds, is what is sometimes called “the investment drought.” That is, businesses just aren’t investing as much as they used to. Net capital investment, as a share of gross domestic product, has been declining since the 1980s. An alternative measure of the value of capital services, a ten-year moving average which avoids the “noise” in the data for any single year, has been declining since the start of the millennium. It hit almost 5 percent of GDP around the turn of the millennium, but since then it has fallen steadily and is now hovering at about 2 percent of GDP. This again means that America is not replenishing its future sources of innovation, growth, and ability to pay higher wages because the future capital just won’t be there to the same extent.

If we adjust for increases in the American working-age population, the United States creates 25 percent fewer triadic patents per person than it did in 1999. (A triadic patent is one filed in the United States, Europe, and Japan, and tends to be a relatively serious patent in terms of potential scope.)

The central planners in Washington, D.C. have hugely favored higher education over the past few decades, showering them with tax dollars in the forms of student loan guarantees, grants, etc. State and local governments have been pumping more cash into K-12 education as well. What’s the result?

Two of today’s most rapidly growing sectors seem especially hostile to turnover and business dynamism, and they are not even counted in the standard business statistics. If we look at higher education, the list of top universities is barely different from what it was seventy years or even one hundred years ago, apart from having added some West Coast contenders, such as Stanford and UC Berkeley. The sociologist Kieran Healy made an explicit comparison of today’s best schools using a listing of the best schools from a 1911 report by a Mr. Kendrick Charles Babcock. For the more mature regions of the United States, it’s all a bunch of recognizable first-tier names, including Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and, well … do I need to give you the whole list?8 There has been considerable innovation in what has been taught and how universities are organized, but at the top, America’s higher education sector does not have a whole lot of turnover; nor have innovative unicorn firms or schools taken over. For primary education, of course, most school systems are municipal, and they hardly budge for decades, although there is some dynamism from a recent wave of charter schools. As mentioned, low turnover in this sector isn’t new, but education and higher education are taking on larger and more important roles in the American economy, and that represents an increase in stasis from a business point of view.

Not everyone is getting fat…

when you zero in on male wages, the picture becomes truly disconcerting. The median male wage was higher in 1969 than it is today. That’s a shocking fact, given earlier expectations of ongoing economic progress, and not many economists of that time, of any political stripe, would have predicted that to happen without a major catastrophe or global war. A big chunk of our economic gains have been driven by women getting better educations and working longer hours. That is good news for many women, but if the American economy were more dynamic, we would expect the males to have rising real wages just because so many technological advances have been dumped in their laps.

Even the most recent trends are discouraging. If we take out the gains of the top earners, take-home pay for typical American workers has been falling since the Great Recession ended in 2009, an unusual path for an economic recovery. According to one good estimate, median wages for the American economy as a whole fell 4 percent from 2009 to 2014. There are also wage declines within a lot of occupations. For instance, median pay for restaurant cooks fell by 8.9 percent, and for home health aides, the median wage fell by 6.2 percent, even though the dining and health care sectors have been relatively robust in terms of both revenue and employment.

[As with most academic economists, Cowen attributes the lack of wage growth to stagnation in productivity.]

Can we expect a peasant uprising as these median earners watch the parade of Teslas passing them by? Cowen says no.

Many of the seminal events of the civil rights movement could not happen today, most of all because society is more bureaucratized, more safety obsessed, and also less tolerant of any kind of disturbance or disruption at all. Take the Selma marchers. It would be very difficult for a Selma-style march to happen today, and that is not because all civil rights grievances have been solved. In 1965, the Selma marchers had obtained the legal right, through petition, to conduct a fifty-two-mile, five-day march down an interstate highway. Of course, that blocked the highway, and for the most part such march permissions are impossible to obtain today, no matter how popular the political movement may be. Most motorists and truckers just don’t want the highway shut down. Starting in the 1970s, the federal courts began to assert that public spaces are not automatically “fair game” for marches and demonstrations, and so local governments have sought to please users of such facilities rather than marchers.

The disputes over a neo-Nazi march in Skokie, Illinois, made it clear to local governments that an undisputed de facto right of public assembly could be very costly. In 1977, a neo-Nazi group had petitioned for the right to stage a march in the predominantly Jewish community of Skokie.

local governments felt burned, in this case and in several others. If they could not prohibit undesirable marches, they would regulate them, if not out of existence, then into the less-visible and less-focal parts of their urban and suburban spaces. A new, slow war began, this one to make sure that demonstrators could not use the physical spaces they most desired. If arbitrary or capricious restrictions on demonstrations were not to be allowed, then regular restrictions, applicable to everyone, would take their place.

Washington, DC, is in some ways even more restrictive. The National Park Service controls about 25 percent of the city, including many of the focal protest spots. For those locations, any protest of more than twenty-five people requires a permit. Furthermore, if the event is expected to be of any note, the protest organizers will be required to meet with the Park Police and possibly the Capitol Police to plan it out, accompanied by lawyers in many cases. Still further complications arise if the Secret Service is involved.16 And post 9/11, Washington, DC, protests face yet another problem: They are possible sanctuaries for terror attacks, or at least they are perceived as such. If the City Park Service or some other bureaucracy sees some possibility of a terror attack connected to a protest, or even believes that a facility or public locale may become slightly more vulnerable, it can deny permission for the event, very often with impunity.

It is by no means impossible to receive permission, but you have to work through the bureaucracy. There now exists a mini-industry of “protest planners,” comparable to wedding or convention planners, and they charge fees to boot. They will help you coordinate with the police, set up stages and sound systems in the approved manner, and clean up after the event is over. These days, a DC protest is more of a bureaucratized event than anything else, and typically it is viewed by the media as such, or in other words it is ignored unless it has massive attendance. For better or worse, this whole process is a long way removed from the older custom of shouting and gathering an angry, demanding crowd in the local town square.

[Cowen does not address the question of Donald Trump’s connection to the neo-Nazis in Skokie circa 1977.]

Cowen suggests that ultimately there will be a reckoning here in the U.S. There actually might be a peasant revolt and the election of Donald Trump is a harbinger of that, according to Cowen. But he doesn’t seem to take seriously (or work to refute) the possibility of stagnation. Britain stagnated from the end of World War II until Margaret Thatcher came along. The U.S. is more or less modeled along British lines. Why can’t we stagnate? (in January 2009 I asked the same question and we have bumbled along with sluggish economic growth in the intervening years)

More: read The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

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Readers: Samsung itself says that the S8 uses the same camera sensor as the S7. Is this where we stop reading about the new phone? Of course, that’s still a better sensor than in the iPhone 7/7S, according to DxOMark (my personal experience is consistent with the DxOMark objective tests; the S7 was a better camera than anything from Apple).

You can dock the phone to use it as a desktop computer, but the result is more like a Chromebook than like my 2005 idea of a “dock” that actually is a PC.

This review says the S8 is the best phone available, but it still might not be exciting enough to get down to the Verizon store.

Journalists who live in urban (and almost all-white!) neighborhoods aren’t going to bother testing phone call performance in the tower-free exurbs (the S7 that I tried was not as good as an iPhone 6 Plus in hanging onto a weak signal). Right now they are writing about new Samsung software bundled into the phone as though that were a good thing rather than a terrifying prospect.

Apparently it is too much to ask for a slightly thicker phone with a bigger camera sensor and corresponding higher image quality. How did we get to the point where the market is cluttered with options and they are all pretty much the same?

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The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen discusses the current complaint about the U.S. being a tougher place for upward mobility:

Since a poor Mexican household might only be earning a few thousand dollars of income a year, even a move to a “mediocre” U.S. job paying $22,000 is a lot of upward mobility.

Any country with a lot of immigration will have much more upward mobility than its published numbers indicate. And if you look at the United States today, about 13 percent of the population is foreign-born, the highest level since the 1920s. For the most part, these people came from poorer countries, and thus that is a lot of unmeasured upward mobility. So if you read a comparison between, say, the United States and Denmark claiming that intergenerational mobility is higher in Denmark, that comparison is either wrong or at the very least misleading. Denmark hasn’t elevated nearly as many immigrants, in either absolute or percentage terms, as America. At most Denmark has more income mobility for its ongoing domestic generations who are staying within the country. When it comes to international comparisons of income mobility, the United States gets a bad rap because, whether you like it or not, this country specializes in upward mobility for immigrants.

What about helping the vulnerable? Virtuous Facebookers love to cite Europe as a paradise of welfare handouts.

It’s a common view that the Western European nations have well-developed welfare states while the United States enforces a kind of cutthroat social Darwinism. That caricature is far from the truth. It is true that often the United States deploys social welfare funds wastefully or inefficiently, but the American government still spends plenty relative to Europe on protecting its citizenry against risk, or at least the American government is trying to do so, and that is unlikely to change. Consider a simple comparison: The American government spends more on Americans’ health care (per capita) than the French government spends on their entire health care system (again in per capita terms).

using some very plausible metrics, the American government is more involved in health care than is the French government.

If you just add up direct government expenditures on social programs as a percentage of GDP, the United States comes out toward the lower end of the scale, with France, Finland, Belgium, and Denmark leading the way. That fits in with the traditional picture of America being a social welfare laggard of sorts. But if we look at what are called tax expenditures, the picture shifts radically. Tax expenditures refer to the use of the tax system to induce individuals or corporations to take one set of decisions rather than another, and they include tax-favored private charity, tax-favored pensions, tax-favored health insurance, and a variety of other benefits that the American government has a large indirect hand in encouraging. Here is the bottom line, according to the OECD (again in per capita terms): “In the United States public social spending is relatively low, but total social spending is the second highest in the world.” In other words, American governments go to great lengths to make their citizens feel safe and protected; they are just more likely to use the tax system than direct expenditures. And if you add in defense spending as a kind of broader social protection, against both foreign aggression and terrorism, the American government invests in safety all the more, in this regard more than any other country in the world, including in per capita terms.

OECD says that we’re #2 in welfare state spending. Can we get to the #1 spot once the Trumpenfuhrer is replaced by someone approved by the elites? Cowen says maybe not:

Since 1970, American survey respondents show no greater preference for government redistribution. Furthermore, two notable groups show considerably weaker support for redistributive ideas and policies over time. The elderly decreased their support for redistribution by an amount that is more than half the distance between Democrats and Republicans on this question. Perhaps more surprisingly, African Americans also have decreased their support for redistribution, with almost half of this change coming from decreased support for race-based forms of government aid. This is in spite of the fact that the black-white wealth gap has been widening rather than narrowing. A lot of African Americans think race relations in America have worsened, but economic redistribution does not seem to be at the center of these concerns.

More: read The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream.

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Uber published a report on how their tech staff is 85 percent male and, generally, they hire few non-white/non-Asians within the U.S. (see, e.g., New York Times). The founder/CEO (a.k.a. “rich white guy”) says that the company has “a commitment to change.” Part of the Times coverage is based on a female site reliability engineer (new name for “syadmin”?) who wrote about her boss “looking for women to have sex with”.

[One angle I am pretty sure that the New York Times did not cover: Given the typical disparity (inequality?) in pay of a Silicon Valley startup company, in which the earlier arrivals receive stock grants or options worth 10X or 100X what later-hired folks doing the same job get, and given the California child support formula, a woman could get lot more cash for having sex with a senior/early Uber employee than by working as a junior/late-hired Uber employee.]

The message of the study and the article seems to be that Uber has done something regrettable by building a non-diverse workforce. However, given that the company is one of the most successful business enterprises ever created (see, e.g. Business Insider and this article on how Uber grew faster than Facebook), could these data be interpreted in another way? If we assume that diversity of workforce had any effect on company success, why isn’t it just as plausible that the lack of diversity was somehow helpful? One argument for diversity in tech and in management is that it impossible for white/Asian guys to understand diverse customers. Uber would seem to disprove that theory. The drivers come from all over the world and are based all over the world. The customers are similarly about as diverse as any customer base could be (essentially anyone who wants to get from Point A to Point B, has a phone, and can afford $5). Why isn’t Uber the ultimate demonstration that the market brings together people from different backgrounds? (i.e., you might not ever go to a mosque, but you’ll take a ride from a Muslim driver if he or she is the closest to you; you might not have any white/male American friends but you’ll use a service run by white/male Americans)

[Not to beat a dead horse too much, but given that the New York Times argues separately that gender is fluid and unmoored to genetics, why do they report as credible Uber’s categorization of employees into “men” and “women”? How would Uber know what the gender identification of their workers is going to be tomorrow morning, for example?]

Readers: What do you think? Does publicizing the fact that one of the world’s most rapidly successful companies is mostly white/Asian guys make other employers say “Whoa. Let’s try not to end up like those Uber founders, early-hired managers, and investors”?

Related:

• Ubernomics
• The late-night Uber driver in Ft. Lauderdale
• Massachusetts will take money from Uber and Lyft customers and give it to taxi medallion owners
• Rename Uber to Insha’Allah

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The Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 computer that I purchased demonstrated multiple failures and defects, but I am wondering if one of the annoying behaviors was normal.

Suppose that you have a Bluetooth mouse connected to a laptop. You don’t use it for a couple of minutes because you’re typing on the keyboard. You touch the mouse. Is it normal for the mouse/computer to ignore the first second of motion/input? That was sort of the best case performance of any Bluetooth mouse and the Dell (the worst-case for Bluetooth was that the machine would ignore all mouse input after a brief functional period).

Readers: Have you ever tried a Bluetooth mouse? Does it function like a wired mouse or is there a latency period if you try to point after a minute or two of idle time?

[Separately, I continue to be awed by Dell’s strategy for avoiding handling returns. If you call their return line they put you in various loops for 20-30 minutes at a time until you give up. Eventually you might connect to a human who will then say “Oh, it has been more than 30 days since your invoice was generated so we can’t process a return.” I’m not sure how they can sustain this given that the credit card chargeback time limit is 120 days. Do they just wait to see if consumers will do a chargeback for defective goods and then issue a refund rather than fight with Visa/MC/Amex?]

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A woman we know made the mistake of marrying a computer nerd. She complains of his performance as a husband mostly because he is a “workaholic.” I said “Well, the computer industry has been booming like crazy for most of the last 20 years so doesn’t it make sense for him to work hard and try to make money for your family before he hits 50 and nobody wants to deal with him anymore?”

It turned out that he was still inadequate, in her view. It wasn’t sufficient for him to contribute more than 90 percent of the family income and enable the family to live comfortably in one of the world’s most expensive real estate markets. She had a list of additional tasks and standards and he was falling short.

The question of whether or not she had a legitimate grievance was discussed among a group of friends and acquaintances here in the Boston area. One school of thought was that she was unreasonable. After years of marriage and kids you shouldn’t expect too much more than some barebones items such as “sober,” “goes to work,” “nice to the kids.” He should get credit for supporting the family financially. Against this idea were a few folks who pointed out that, by being married and taking care of the kids, under Massachusetts family law, she is already entitled to nearly all of this guy’s income going forward. Since she could get rid of the husband/father at any time and keep his money, the contribution of money to the household therefore doesn’t count and she can demand additional stuff if he wants to keep his position as husband.

Readers: What do you think?

Related:

• Why don’t I know any single men?

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The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen describes some of the same behavior as The Redistribution Recession, but explains these behavioral changes as a massive cultural shift rather than as simple responses to changed incentives. Could this be an example of the fundamental attribution error? First, let’s look at what Cowen says…

These days Americans are less likely to switch jobs, less likely to move around the country, and, on a given day, less likely to go outside the house at all. For instance, the interstate migration rate has fallen 51 percent below its 1948 to 1971 average and has been falling steadily since the mid-1980s. There has been a decline in the number of start-ups, as a percentage of business activity, since the 1990s.

Economists see migration as a kind of investment. You give up something in the short run, namely the home, job, friends, and conveniences, in the hope of achieving something different and better somewhere else.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the residents of the United States were more geographically mobile than even those of Great Britain, which at the time was considered a very mobile society due to its political unification and relatively free labor markets. Cross-country moves were made by almost two-thirds of American men older than thirty years, whereas only a quarter of British men did the same.

Or, if we look at the rate of moving between counties within a state, it fell 31 percent. The rate of moving within a county fell 38 percent. Those are pretty steep drops for a country that has not changed its fundamental economic or political systems.

[I wish that an editor had removed every occurrence of the qualifier “pretty” from this book!]

For the most part, this decline in mobility is not fundamentally about changing demographics. Long-distance moves have declined considerably for all age groups, for homeowners and renters, and also for dual-income couples, so neither aging nor the difficulty of relocating a two-earner couple explain America’s recent lack of motion, even if those factors are driving the behavior of some specific individuals.

African Americans today have become especially immobile, and to an unprecedented degree. If we look at data on the last generation, 76 percent of African American mothers gave birth in the same state that their mothers did, whereas for white women that same figure was 65 percent, circa 2010. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the best database of its kind, it is possible to trace a subset of 4,800 African American families from a cohort born between 1952 and 1982. If we consider the progression from youth to adulthood, 69 percent of that cohort remained in the same county, 82 percent remained in the same state, and 90 percent remained in the same region of the country. A generation earlier, the comparable numbers were 50, 65, and 74 percent, all lower. Adjusting for income, homeownership, and other demographic characteristics does not fundamentally eliminate this mobility gap. African Americans have gone from being an especially mobile group to an especially rooted one.

the two groups whose job mobility has dropped the most are the young workers and the less-educated workers, and thus those groups are more vulnerable and more exposed to the likelihood of a protracted spell of unemployment. Men have lost more job mobility than women have, and that too has hurt their labor market performance, especially in response to the Great Recession. Switching jobs is often one of the best ways to get a promotion or a wage boost, and if people are less likely to switch jobs, it will be that much harder for them to get ahead. Lower geographic mobility and lower or stagnant income mobility are two sides of the same broader problem, namely, excess stasis in general, at a fundamental cultural level.23 And here is a striking way to think about some of the underlying cultural shifts, given that mobility is often down the most for the less-skilled workers. In such a setting, poverty and low incomes have flipped from being reasons to move to reasons not to move, a fundamental change from earlier American attitudes. The older notion of moving to a city, by train or bus, and staying in a flophouse, or with relatives, until one finds a decent job is harder to pull off these days.

Maybe we shouldn’t be admitting male immigrants and should be trying to perfect a technology so that mostly female babies are born:

America is creating start-ups at lower rates each decade, and a smaller percentage of those start-ups is rising to prominence, as we see in more detail in chapter 4. We’re not even managing peaceful disruptions, much less violent ones, at our earlier rates. The big losers from a lot of these trends are the unskilled men, including those with the less peaceful or more violent inclinations. The contemporary world, for all of its virtues—indeed because of those virtues—is not very well built for some chunk of males. Current service jobs, coddled class time and homework-intensive schooling, a “feminized” culture allergic to many forms of conflict, postfeminist gender relations, and egalitarian semicosmopolitanism just don’t sit well with many men, most of all those who have no real chance of joining the privileged class. Whether or not it is politically correct to admit it, I believe a lot of men have tendencies toward the brutish, but in today’s America, those tendencies are suppressed.

Female median wages have been rising pretty consistently, along with female education, but the male median wage, at least as it is measured and adjusted for inflation, was higher back in 1969 than it is today.

A lot of men did better psychologically and maybe also economically in a world where America had a greater number of tough manufacturing jobs. These men thrived under brutish conditions, including a military draft to crack some of their heads into line. Those problems of permitting and also constraining masculinity are too-often forgotten, and our neglect of those issues will help ensure that today’s complacency cannot last.

Maybe it is because we’ve all found our dream jobs?

One big reason for the decline in residential moving stems from a decline in job switching. If people are less likely to change jobs, they are also, for obvious reasons, less likely to move. And if we look at job reallocation rates—a rough measure of turnover in the labor market—they have fallen more than a quarter since 1990.

To give this some concrete numbers, in 1998, 44 percent of workers had five or more years on the job, but as of 2014, this number had increased to 51 percent. The percentage of workers with less than one year on the job had fallen from 28 to 21 percent.

But Mexicans still move…

Americans are outsourcing their mobility and capacity for economic adjustment. When there is mobility in the American labor market, it comes disproportionately from Mexicans and Mexican Americans. When a negative economic shock hits some city or region in the United States, the natural response is for some labor to leave that region and move elsewhere. Of course, not everyone needs to abandon the area, but some people should want to move on. Yet, if most Americans are less mobile than before, who is going to pick up and leave? More and more we see that mobility coming from Mexicans living in America, especially those who are relatively recent arrivals. Mexican-born Mexicans are less likely to have strong regional roots in America, and furthermore a nationwide network of Mexicans—often from the same state or region of Mexico—can help with relocation.

Our money doesn’t take chances anymore either…

The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond has estimated that 61 percent of all private-sector financial liabilities are guaranteed by the federal government, either explicitly or implicitly. As recently as 1999, this figure was below 50 percent.

To look at one simple measure of both social and economic stasis, the rate at which business start-ups are forming has been declining since the 1980s. By one estimate, start-ups were 12 to 13 percent of the firms in the economy in the 1980s, but today they are only about 7 to 8 percent. That’s right; for all the talk about Silicon Valley, we are less a start-up nation than before. By the way, this overall decline in start-up frequency is true for virtually every sector and every American city, and that includes San Francisco and even the legendary tech sector. In absolute terms, the number of new tech firms (younger than five years) peaked just after 2000, and in percentage terms, new firms in the tech sector have been declining since the 1980s.

Not only are there fewer start-ups, but a smaller percentage of them are succeeding. That means young firms are a smaller part of the overall market and so American corporations are increasing in average age, just as the American people are. In the late 1980s, 18.9 percent of the employment in the American economy was at firms five years or younger. This average had fallen to 13.5 percent right before the Great Recession; in numerical terms, that is a 29 percent decline over only seventeen years, a significant and rapid drop. New firms are also down as a share of total firms and also as a share of job creation, again since the 1980s.

Time for analysis.

Cowen is a smart person so I will assume that all of his data are correct.

The tendency to stay put seems to be strongest among those with low income. But these are exactly the people who qualify for subsidized (or free) public housing, food stamps, and Medicaid or subsidized Obamacare insurance. They might get heating oil assistance or TANF-style cash payments (see Massachusetts bureaucracy gets 1 in 13 households to come in and beg). There might be a 10-year waiting list for public housing in the desired destination city. Until then, the person who had been living in a great apartment might receive nothing. Why would a person want to invest 10+ years in getting reestablished on all of these disparate state-administered welfare programs?

Cowen compares mobility before and after 1971 and says that there was a big reduction especially in the 1980s. As it happens, the 1970s were when most states adopted no-fault divorce and the percentage of children being reared by two biological parents plummeted (as noted in this chapter, from 73 percent of kids in 1960 to 46 percent today). Why might this be significant? Consider first child support and alimony. Millions of Americans collect money under court orders (see “Litigation, Alimony, and Child Support in the U.S. Economy” for the scale). They might be concerned that if they move away from the court system that put them into the check-of-the-month club it will be harder to collect or reduced in the new state’s court system gains jurisdiction. The parent who wins a custody lawsuit may yet need permission of a judge to move out of state with the kids (see “Relocation and Venue Litigation”). The biological parent who loses a custody lawsuit can move, but it may mean never seeing the former children again. The new partner of a divorced American may be similarly discouraged from moving. It is a lot easier for an intact family of four to pick up and move to the other coast than it is for someone who is an every-other-weekend parent, the stepparent of a child with a 50/50 schedule, and vicariously collecting child support.

What about corporate welfare? If you’re a small company no state is going to build you a free factory and pay your workers for a couple of years in exchange for you agreeing to set up shop. Thus the existence of corporate welfare should discourage startup formation and reduce the chance that a new company will be successful.

Regulation can be a disguised

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The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen presents some interesting data. Contrary to what you might have thought, the trend in the U.S. has been toward more segregation.

Circa 2016, you can see a black president on your television or internet screen, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to see more neighbors of a different race than you would have seen a few decades ago. Or if you do, you’re much less likely to see such individuals outside of your income class, even if they are not of your race.

Segregation by income grew dramatically over the period of 1970 to 2000, with some respite in the 1990s, but then faster yet during the period of 2000 to 2007. For instance, in 1970, only about 15 percent of families lived in neighborhoods that were unambiguously “affluent” or “poor.” By 2007, 31 percent of American families were living in such neighborhoods. At the level of school districts, segregation increased as well between students eligible for free lunch and those who were not. In other words, those students who were eligible for free lunch were more likely to be grouped together than in times past.

In the South, if we consider the variable “percentage of black students in majority-white schools,” that figure peaked in 1988 at 43.5 percent; as of 2011, it had fallen dramatically, to 23.2 percent. That is slightly lower than the integration level in 1968, a time when civil rights battles were close to their peak activity

In 1980, in Maryland, 30 percent of black students were in intensely segregated schools. That same figure is now about 53 percent. If we look at the percentage of black students in what are called intensely segregated minority schools, since 1980, in Mississippi, that number has gone up 9 percentage points; in Tennessee, it has gone up 15 percentage points; in Texas, 9 percentage points; in Georgia, 16 percentage points; in Alabama, 10 percentage points; in Florida, 17 percentage points; and in Arkansas, it is up 21 percentage points. By the phrase intensely segregated schools, the literature usually is referring to white enrollment below 10 percent.21 Unfortunately, many parts of the North are failing as well, as the northern states and also California rank among the worst for many measures of educational segregation. For instance, let’s consider the variable “% black in 90–100% Minority Schools.”22 That is a measure of levels rather than changes, and by that standard, the five most segregated states are: 1. New York 2. Illinois 3. Maryland 4. Michigan 5. New Jersey.

The future of the country looks troublingly similar on both coasts, as both New York and California perform poorly on segregation measures. In two of the three main measures of educational segregation by race, they are the worst and third-worst states in this regard, alternating those two positions. Again, the claim is not that New York and California are somehow especially racist or objectionable states but rather that segregation is being enforced by incomes, rents, home prices, building codes, how school districts are drawn, and a culture of sorting and matching.

Latinos are experiencing more significant integration problems than are African Americans. For instance, in California, only 7.8 percent of Latino students are in majority-white schools. In part that is because California has large clusters of Latinos and in part because the fanciest white neighborhoods are difficult to afford, the latter again indicating a lot of economically enforced segregation rather than racist animus. The broader data on trends in Latino segregation also are not entirely encouraging, as, for instance, in 1990 Latinos had more residential proximity with whites than they did in the period 2005 through 2009.

What if you’re a rich Silicon Valleyite paying 0 percent income tax thanks to the Qualified Small Business Stock exclusion and featuring yourself on Facebook at a Hillary Clinton fundraiser? Or maybe you’ve got tenure at a major university and therefore could keep watching those direct deposit checks flow into your checking account while you knitted a pussy hat? It turns out that you can advocate for unlimited low-skill dark-skinned immigration to the U.S. without running any risk of having one of the newcomers as a neighbor:

One implication of these measures is that the affluent and well educated in America may be especially out of touch, no matter how ostensibly progressive their politics. A high-income family, for instance, is less likely to live in a mixed-income neighborhood than is a poor family.

Florida and Mellander also find that racial segregation is positively correlated with areas that have a lot of high-tech industry, with those that have a preponderance of people in the so-called creative class, who hold jobs requiring creative skills, and with those heavily populated by college graduates. Segregation also tends to be found in places with relatively high percentages of gay and foreign-born populations—think of San Francisco as having a fair share of both, but also a lot of neighborhoods with mostly white people. Median rent in San Francisco just passed $5,000 per month for a two-bedroom apartment, and so most people, even in the upper-middle classes, feel that residence in the city involves too much financial hardship.

If we look at all metropolitan areas, rather than just the large ones, Durham–Chapel Hill, Bloomington, and Ann Arbor—all college towns—climb into the top five for segregation of the working class away from the non–working class.

many of America’s trendiest cities, including cities with quality universities, are among the most extreme for segregation by socioeconomic class.

For the folks who put up a “no matter where you’re from we’re glad you’re our neighbor” sign in Arabic and Spanish, their most likely readers are Saudi diplomats and Cemex executives.

More: Read The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream.

Related:

• Sanctimony Cities

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